If the Venice Biennale is the United Nations of contemporary art, then the Giardini is its Security Council. The park’s stately pavilions belong to the (mostly European) nations that were best situated to claim them in the early- to mid-twentieth century. National pavilions are organized by state entities and can be counted on to present a government-sanctioned view of art, which tends toward the conceptually[…..]
In Long Ago and Not True Anyway at Waterside Contemporary, curator Pierre d’Alancaisez explores a kind of history that exists beyond the dry material of archives, records, and established national narratives. Instead, in this small London gallery nearly hidden around a corner among Islington’s high-density residential buildings, this exhibition’s artists and artworks blur the borders between uncertain subjective experience and the history it inhabits. Taking[…..]
Today we bring you a video of artist Tim Lee in conversation with Joseph del Pesco, director of Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. Lee, who is based in Vancouver, discusses his thoughts and processes as he re-creates a Warhol photograph from 1980: “It’s always…how can I articulate my artistic identity through others…what are some of the dissonances and what are some of the continuities?”
Walking into the large, darkened space of Yang Fudong’s The Fifth Night (Rehearsal) (2010) at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013, the viewer is greeted by seven large black-and-white projections on three walls. In each projection, characters perform simple actions: two men carry suitcases down the street; a woman in a floral dress wanders pensively, her silk scarf fluttering. Superimposed on[…..]
The title of El Museo del Barrio’s biennial exhibit Here Is Where We Jump refers to one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Braggart.” In the tale, a man boasts of an extraordinary jump he once made in Rhodes. He claims witnesses will attest to the jump if the listeners ever visit his home country. Eventually, someone challenges the man to reproduce the jump, saying, “Jump here, jump now.[…..]
The still life is an artistic form that has captured the interest of Pieter Aertsen, Pieter Claesz, Diego Velázquez, Eugène Delacroix, and Giorgio Morandi, to name just a few. Boston-based artist Tara Sellios has also delved deeply into the construction of the still life and the ideas often associated with it—life, death, the question of permanence, and the intricate use of symbolism. What makes Sellios’s[…..]
Though I can’t remember the first time I saw Liz Magic Laser‘s work (and yes, it’s her given name), I was entranced by this video of her commission for the 2013 Armory Show in New York. So much artwork these days looks like it was made by committee, so why not explicitly use the methodology of a focus group to create the work for the commission? It’s[…..]
