The entry point to Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012)—if you’re lucky enough to see the beginning of the looping one-hour, nine-channel video—is like awakening each day in a house full of people who were up all night while you slept. Slightly disorienting, the sound, light, and being start streaming into the gallery as each of the screens lights up. The camera is impartial: The shots[…..]
The Part in the Story Where a Part Becomes a Part of Something Else is an exhibition that covers a lot of ground. The Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art brings together over fifty artists with multifaceted disciplines, but despite the large scale, the show can be distilled to a few threads that highlight the potential for art to create constructed moments. This underlying[…..]
Today from our archives we bring you Kelly Nosari’s assessment of Whose Map Is It? at the Institute of International Visual Arts in London. Considering the wars currently being waged over land in Palestine, the Ukraine, Syria, and South Sudan (to name just a few), it is interesting to note how artists approach the representation of territory. This article was originally published on July 8,[…..]
Before the Enlightenment elevated empiricism and introduced the notion of “pseudoscience” as its foil, religion, magic, and science coexisted on a relatively level plane. Today, art remains one of few arenas that have been able to sidestep Enlightenment mandates; here, the exploration of ideas is not confined to the reproducibility of empirical data, allowing for a more unconstrained examination of the nature of things. The[…..]
Today we bring you Machine Project’s video documentation of Odyssey Odyssey, a play by artist and writer Johanna Kozma. Odyssey Odyssey is a contemporary take on Homer’s Odyssey, performed for an audience of two in a Honda Odyssey. This work was included in The Machine Project Field Guide to L.A. Architecture, as part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., and originally performed from July 10–22, 2013.
When asked why she had sculpted such pronounced, sugar-coated labia on A Subtlety, the mammy-sphinx recently on view at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, Kara Walker answered, “[It’s about] ownership of the voluptuousness of an ass”; “a 10-foot vagina…is not something that happens in art often enough”; and “[It was] a fuck-you, I’m gonna do that because this is what I have…there are enough phallic[…..]
In celebration of American Independence Day, today we bring you a video from our friends at Machine Project in Los Angeles. In 2012, Machine Project teamed up with Southern Exposure—another great independent art space—to program a series of performances and events throughout the city. Artist Josh Greene made this museum-style audio tour for the home of Maria Mortati & Mark Glusker, allowing visitors intimate access to[…..]
