Over a lifetime of visiting museums, you learn that all souvenirs have a price point, from the dollar-fifty commemorative postcard to the pieces in the collection itself. These prized mementos, selected, brought home, catalogued and displayed, represent the collector’s forays to classical or far-flung sites. My favorite disruption to this cycle is a hall of life-sized plaster casts of classical Greek and Roman architecture at[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Sometimes, an artist strikes a chord with his contemporaries, and affection for him ripples through culture more distinctly and effusively than anything he’s actually made. Paul Thek was that kind of artist, perhaps better suited to being a muse than to having one. Homages began coming his way before he’d cleared thirty-five[…..]
With freedom of speech, artistic censorship and human rights at the centre of global concern with the arrest of Ai Weiwei, Huang Yong Ping’s show at Nottingham Contemporary, a young, highly influential contemporary art space run by Alex Farquharson just north of London, could not have come at a more pressing or pertinent time. Huang has been the target of protested censorship in the past,[…..]
A storehouse like no other, a museum summons objects and concerns from both past and present. The unfortunate reality is that, once collected, it doesn’t matter if the objects are important or trivial. Once bought or donated, the objects are catalogued and placed in the storehouse, rarely seeing the light of day. It’s a sad, lonely life for most of the museum’s collection. The only[…..]
‘Neue Alte Welt’ (New Old World), an exhibition of Ulla von Brandenburg’s recent works, is on view at The Common Guild, Glasgow till 21 May 2011. Presented across two levels, the exhibition proceeds as a journey where one seems to travel from the perspective of an audience and performer, before entering the backstage. The first room features Chorspiel, a black and white film set in[…..]
Last week the Open Engagement Conference gathered artists, critics, curators and one museum director to discuss an emergent field, Art and Social Practice. It was organized by Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice faculty Jen Delos Reyes and Harrell Fletcher along with their MFA students. This is the third iteration of the conference and it featured Julie Ault, Fritz Haeg, and Pablo Helguera – all[…..]
How does meanwhile effect an artwork? British artist Anthony McCall’s exhibition at Luciana Brito in São Paulo suggests a retrospective of an artist who returned to art-making in the last decade after an over-20 year hiatus. McCall’s reemergence is marked by revisiting and further developing what began as his “solid light” films made in the early 1970s: installations of hazy, darkened rooms with slow-moving beams[…..]
