For the past forty years, Charles Gaines has employed system-based methodologies to his artmaking in order to critique subjective expression within art. Influenced by Tantric Buddhist diagrams in the late 1960s, his photographs, drawings, and works on paper investigate how rule-based procedures construct order and meaning. Gaines is also a highly regarded educator at the California Institute of the Arts. He received his MFA from the Rochester[…..]
#institutions #race #conceptualism #access #appropriation A recent performance at Brown University by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith has resurrected what had seemed to be a long-ago-settled debate. Goldsmith, whose poetic practice is based on appropriation, presented an adaptation of the autopsy report of Ferguson, Missouri, police shooting victim Michael Brown as a poetic reading during the Interrupt 3 arts festival in mid-March. The subsequent commentary has largely taken Goldsmith to task for what many perceive to have[…..]
Two shows at Paula Cooper—Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawing 564 and Charles Gaines: Notes on Social Justice—knowingly nod at each other from their respective spaces across West Twenty-First Street. Wall Drawing 564: Complex forms with color ink washes superimposed (1988) holds court in Cooper’s large, dramatic exhibition hall surrounded by roughly contemporaneous structures and works on paper, and the immersive drawing exhibits LeWitt’s sustained interest in the grid[…..]
