Art House at the Jones Center, a contemporary art space in Austin, just reopened in a brand new building designed by New York based architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis. By far the most stunning of its six inaugural shows is Cities of Gold and Mirrors, a film by the young French artist and recent recipient of the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Cyprien Gaillard. Cities of Gold and Mirrors is[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “What I advocate is threatening,” said Peter Berlin in 2004, talking to Butt magazine about his fondness for wearing nylons under tight, tight white shorts. The artist/porn star, who emerged in the 70s sporting a blond-ish pageboy haircut, explained he’s always running from police who claim he’s wearing only underwear. What does[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When Marsha Norman began her play ‘Night Mother, she gave her protagonist Jesse one ominous line of dialogue: “We got any old towels?” It sounds utilitarian, but it actually dives right into the core of play’s tragedy. As playwriting instructor Richard Toscan has pointed out, if Norman let all the implications of[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Alberto Burri spent life rejecting—rejecting roles, rules, materials, explanations, nationalities, natural trajectories. The Italian artist went to Africa as a doctor in the 1940s, but ended up a prisoner of war in Texas. He abandoned medicine, took up painting, and returned to Rome upon his release, becoming an Arte Povera practitioner before[…..]
Flooded McDonald’s, by art collective Superflex, is currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. For this recent film, Superflex painstakingly created a life-sized replica of a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant. Their deliberate choice to employ one of the most recognizable brands in the world offers a familiar point-of-departure for the viewer, while also evoking related issues of consumerism and corporate[…..]
What makes an art exhibition political? The 2010 São Paulo Bienal, There is always a cup of sea to sail in, uses Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima’s line as a metaphorical container to address the ambitious theme of art and politics. The head curators Agnaldo Farias and Moacir dos Anjos see the title as an expression of the essential aspiration of the exhibition, “to affirm[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Irving Penn’s Still Life with Triangle and Red Eraser (1985) currently hangs in a small maroon room in the basement of the Getty Museum’s West Pavilion. It’s part of the In Focus: Still Life exhibition, a charming but uneventful “best of” survey of the Getty’s images of objects. The print is a[…..]
