In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, scholar Elaine Scarry describes the inability of language to interpret and express physical pain: “By its very nature, pain resists, even destroys the language that grapples with it.” But what of the capacity of visual art to interpret and translate this bodily experience? “For a Long Time”, on view now at Roberts &[…..]
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[…..]
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[…..]
What happens at the moment when energy becomes material, and how can we even dream of documenting it? The question has wide-ranging implications, from the memories stored in everyday objects to the effects of prayer. Ranu Mukherjee’s solo exhibition at Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern, Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous, takes up these issues. A former painter who now works mostly with photography and[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “I believe we were born dead,” said motorcyclist-daredevil Evel Knievel, rambling to Sports Illustrated in 1968. He’d just cleared 16 cars in Gardena, CA, before crashing over the fountains at Cesare’s Palace, and was romanticizing about future stunts. “I have accepted the fact that dying is a part of living,” he continued.[…..]
Like a newspaper in its matter of fact presentation of content, Cady Noland / Santiago Sierra at KOW Berlin, curated by Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber, appears purposefully removed of emotion. We never make eye contact with other humans, backs are often turned, or we find ourselves averting our eyes for our own protection. We stand on the outside looking in. No one makes a[…..]
The title for Takeshi Murata’s current show—Get Your Ass To Mars—is a command, stolen from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hauser/Quaid character in Total Recall, based on Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” For the Hauser/Quaid character, what awaits him on Mars is textbook Dick: a conspiracy based on money and greed; instability in memory and identity, or in discerning reality; plus our own[…..]
