Anyone who’s ever temped in an office or published a zine knows the marvelous idiosyncrasies of the Xerox machine: the sliding, illuminated beam that scans the images; the warm stacks of copies identical enough to be called “exact” yet often full of bleeding letters; shiny black-hole shadows and flecks of who-knows-what from the machine itself. In Run Off, now on view at MacArthur B Arthur[…..]
The world doesn’t need any more films. The world doesn’t need any more video art. So if you’re going to bring an image into the world, you have to think it through. –Kodwo Eshun After 50 years of production, distinct periods are appearing in the history of video art. Not distinct ism’s or manifesto driven bubbles, but separate works that seem palpably similar. As the[…..]
With the work of over forty artists, History in Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow is a sizeable exhibition; but its scale is not only warranted, it is necessary. If the internet age ushered in a global culture of multiplicity, then History in Art demonstrates the contemporary attitude toward the formation of a historical record: individual voices make up a flexible, imaginative[…..]
Modernity—in all its West-centric incarnations—has been debated, deliberated and disputed since the last feudal lord packed it in. Baudelaire lambasted the arbitrary parameters that dictate “advanced” civilization; Machiavelli’s antecedents celebrated them. The very notion of a “modern” world results in a perpetual discourse on the factors that prescribe it. Within the walls of Ambach & Rice‘s new Los Angeles gallery, the dialogue persists with Alon[…..]
For the moment, the beating heart of Los Angeles’s Pacific Standard Time is Betye Saar’s installation Red Time, 2011, at Roberts and Tilton. Saar has transformed the middle room of the gallery into a shrine for past, present, and future, painting Roberts and Tilton’s interior room a bright red and allowing a variety of her customary assemblage works to act as friends and neighbors to[…..]
Dwarves, videos, homemade t-shirts and cardboard tanks: this is what you’ll find in Happenings Against Communism by the Orange Alternative at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury in Krakow. It’s a multi-roomed tour of Polish protest in the 1980s, the retrospective of a social practice movement that swept an entire country. Although the tone of the exhibition is playfully iconoclastic—that’s the whole point—I often found myself[…..]
Across the San Francisco Bay, Oakland can often seem like entirely different world compared to “The City.” There is a general air of anything goes, as you wander down the streets filled with people from all walks of life. Punks, hipsters, young, cool professionals who used to be vegan anarchists before they had kids and got a real job, all contribute to the truly unique[…..]
