Installation

Art in Limbo

It’s true.  The state of Utah now owns Spiral Jetty.  For the last decade, the Dia Foundation has paid Utah’s Department of Natural Resources $250 a year to maintain the 20-year lease on the land surrounding the earthwork.  In February, the Dia received and paid its annual invoice, only to have the payment returned in June with a note that the lease had expired—a fact[…..]

Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the[…..]

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters…

As a child I remember my father covering the walls of our home office with genealogy documents that mapped out centuries of our family history. There was something about knowing exactly where we came from that was significant for him and he dedicated much time and energy tracing our family origins. From this, I came to believe at a very young age that your relatives[…..]

Berliner Culture and The Kidney Bean Burrito

allens-600x324

The natural tendency, when attending a show that promises to give you a sampling of a locale, is to define that culture through the exhibition’s cohesion. With everyone in Berlin identifying as an artist (a little hyperbolic), the saturation leads to a lot of “bad” art and “good” art, however you personally define it, making pinning down what is vital in the art world here[…..]

Castaneda/Reiman at Baer Ridgway

In Still Life Landscape at Baer Ridgway, the artist team of Castaneda/Reiman works with two overlapping strategies: the appropriation and transformation of the customary depiction of terrain, and the invention of new landscapes by purely formal means. They apply these methods to the well-worn convention of the painted vista in search of the core or essence of landscape.  The result is a large group of[…..]

Art is Pretty Interesting, Isn’t It?

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “It’s best to turn people on. The hippies were always talking about being turned on,” said artist Dan Graham, speaking on a panel at the Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, his co-panelists, had been his downstairs neighbors before they became Sonic Youth. They’d introduced him[…..]

Venice Biennale: Thomas Hirschhorn at the Swiss Pavilion

Navigating through Venice in the off season can be challenging, but trying to move through hot, narrow streets and massive crowds of people during the Venice Biennale is completely dizzying. Illuminations, the 54th Venice Biennale, was the largest and most comprehensive to date with 89 national participants alongside 37 collateral events arranged by international organizations and institutions.  As usual, the exhibition spread liberally over Venice’s[…..]