Upon entering CalArts’ REDCAT Gallery (which is in reality a large room off the foyer of the REDCAT theater), I see nine pieces of comically oversized Neoclassic furniture. Two armoires, two chairs, two dressers, a huge central cabinet, an obelisk, and what appears to be an urn face each other on pedestals. Their construction is at a level I would describe as “professional shoddy,” with[…..]
Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here: http://bit.ly/132VchD. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED Arts. I am not trained as a visual artist—I hold my graduate degree in dance choreography, and before grad school I worked primarily in live theatrical[…..]
#access #institutions #race #class #performance #intersectionality Two major New York exhibitions this winter have raised the question of access to contemporary art and museums in important and divergent ways. Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Studio Museum in Harlem continues reframing the historical narrative to include African Americans, as begun in Part 1 at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. Mike Kelley’s sprawling retrospective[…..]
Critical distance can be an ambitious aspiration for an artist, particularly if her practice strives to directly engage complex economic, environmental, or social-justice issues. How can traditionally partisan discourses be avoided? Can a political viewpoint be communicated without merely contributing to a staunchly divisive cultural dialogue that is easy to tune out? There is no one strategy or formula for this challenge. Coco Fusco’s recent[…..]
Rachel Debuque works with myriad subjects and forms. In her work, installation, performance, video, and sculpture collide with themes of domesticity, the still life, and the eccentricities of both individual personalities and physical spaces. Through all of this, her oeuvre coheres around a central concern: the visual re-codification and conveyance of memory through spatial sensitivity. Debuque’s Cacti-Smash (2013) is an installation-based performance that features two[…..]
Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, John Zarobell reviews Water City Berkeley at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California. Why celebrate when the world is going to hell? Kim Anno’s ambitious effort to envision the future[…..]
Peggy Phelan said it best: “Performance’s only life is in the present.”[1] Slippery in designation and impermanent by nature, a performance is not the same as the video of a performance. The viewer must be present for not only the sights and sounds of the performer, but also the smell, the temperature, the crowd, the fidgeting in a folding chair, or standing on a concrete[…..]
