For the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to choose a retrospective of Mike Kelley‘s work for their first international exhibition since the reopening was, to say the least, symbolic. The Stedelijk opened its newly refurbished and expanded premises in September last year, after years (and years) of highly controversial and heavily debated refurbishments. The enormous white bath tub that is now hovering in front of the institution’s old[…..]
Any 20th century art history course worth its salt will have surely shown a slide of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and prompted students to commit to memory the work’s revolutionary scale and site specificity. From Smithson to Christo and Jeanne Claude, the history of environmental art is by now long and celebrated. However, after all these years, it is ripe for reevaluation by artists less[…..]
As a part of our ongoing partnership with Art Practical, today we bring you a feature from writer Bean Gilsdorf on UC Berkeley Art Museum‘s Silence exhibition. In Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta, the main character tells his young acolyte, “Silence is a fragile thing. One loud noise and it’s gone.” On my way to the UC Berkeley Art Museum’s Silence exhibition, I had a related thought:[…..]
For both Walt Disney and Llyn Foulkes, it all started with a mouse. Mickey, to be precise, accompanied both men throughout their respective careers—Disney in a manner of lucrative iconography, and Foulkes in a manner of psychological distress. To most, the cartoon rodent was the paragon of jubilant youth, but through Foulkes’ lens, Mickey was a sanitized, furtive representative of the rats infesting the politics,[…..]
Central to Doug Aitken’s “100 YRS” exhibition at 303 Gallery is a new “Sonic Fountain,” in which water drips from 5 rods suspended from the ceiling, falling into a concrete crater dug out of the gallery floor. The flow of water itself is controlled so as to create specific rhythmic patterns that will morph, collapse and overlap in shifting combinations of speed and volume, lending the physical phenomenon the[…..]
“Clairefontaine is famous for its exceptionally white and ultra smooth paper.” This ad for the French brand of stationary has little more to do with Paris-based collective artist Claire Fontaine than the name. Fontaine appropriated her “stage name” from the paper brand and declared herself a ready-made artist. She works internationally creating conceptual art and has just completed her installation in San Francisco. Her most[…..]
Imagine: you walk into a white room. One you can only enter wearing some of those sexy, plastic blue shoe protectors. An oversized flatscreen beams bright flickering light at the opposite wall. You sit down in front of the screen. The brightness is of an almost suffocating magnitude – there is so much light your eyes can’t cope. Instead of seeing light you start to[…..]
