At the Dog and Pony Show, installation by N. Sean Glover
March 15, 2010Deborah Kass’ Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times
March 13, 2010I’m liking these big dumb paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery a lot. Don’t fret, I think any artist whose names her show “Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times” would have a sense of humor about it.
Color, typography, unrestrained exuberance. Totally my cup of tea.
Curator Chus Martinez might characterize it, like one of her other projects at her recent lecture at CCA, as “Idiocy. But intellectual idiocy.”
What Defines the Bay Area Visual Arts Community? | Art Practical
March 10, 2010The art world blogosphere is abuzz in self-examination of late. Curator Renny Pritikin set off a surprisingly large discussion when he suggested quantifying which artists leave the Bay Area on SFMOMA’s Open Space Blog last month.
Equally interesting is Art Practical Editor Patricia Maloney’s characterization of the Bay Area art scene. This was posed by artist and curator Joseph del Pesco on the Open Space Blog, and summed up by Hope Dabov in What Defines the Bay Area Visual Arts Community? on Art Practical.
Maloney’s last three observations seem especially astute:
- Artists embrace progressive stances around social and political issues, but many still use traditional media to articulate those stances.
- Ephemeral and social practices are encouraged, as are documenting and capturing traces of these practices.
- Material-based practices tend to dominate conceptual ones.”
signs without words
March 9, 2010
Kevin Schmidt, Wild Signals, 2007, courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery Vancouver
Source: Unfinished Business exhibition at WatersideProjectSpace.org.
Loving this preview image. Wish I got to see this exhibition that just closed in East London. It sounds fantastic:
Something is missing in this exhibition: it lacks a punchline. The works extend aesthetic and semiotic gestures – we feel that something is being given to us, but ultimately notice the messages are blanks, signs without words.
The unattributed triumphs, the non-events, the bleak outlooks and the empty poetry all create expectations which we want to see fulfilled. The promises are seductive, and we find ourselves going along with them – and are led to make our own resolutions.
Exhibition curated by Pierre d’Alancasiez
MDR, Balloons, Exuberance
March 9, 2010MONSTER DRAWING RALLY PHOTOS & VIDEO. Check out this slideshow of the Monster Drawing Rally by Hanna Quevedo on SFWeekly.com! There’s also a short video on VidSF.com.
—–
BALLOONS. Thinking about them lately, and came across this awesome photo sequence of a sculpture made of balloons by Hans Hemmert on thepigments.com. Sweet.
—–
IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE. This economics term, coined by Alan Greenspan, shook markets worldwide in the 1990s. What a paradox. I’ve been thinking about pleasure and its crucial role in the formation of happiness since I started studying positive psychology last year. I’ve also been using unabashedly exuberant typefaces, especially high-contrast Didot faces, despised in their day and seen as both high-class and slightly cheap today. The idea that exuberance is irrational to be equally ludicrous as the idea of exuberance should be rational. It’s a delicious paradox.
Zeitgeists, LA art, Mysteries
March 7, 2010
Frieze, January-February 2010. Source: Frieze.com.
Even critics who hate contemporary art reckon on [the zeitgeist]—it allows them to use a small handful of particularly loathed examples in order to damn an entire system.
—Dan Fox, “Spirit Guide: The Many Uses o f the Zeitgeist,” Frieze, January-February 2010.
If I had a nickel for every time someone cited Damien Hirst’s diamond-covered skull as everything that’s wrong with contemporary art….
There are certain sectors of the art world that crave a useful social role for art. Other see art as an activity making important contributions to intellectual discourse. Many look to art for pleasure. And then there are those who appreciate all of this seriousness, but crave the trappings of the entertainment industry too—fame, power, money, glamour, hierarchies, cultural parochialism. One year the art world is interested in this, the next year it’s interested in that. It wants to party, it wants to be scholarly. Markets go up, markets go down. … Everything changes and nothing changes…
—Fox, cont.
Fox’s tone might be interpreted as weary, or maybe even cynical. But I like to think that this passage is the art critic’s equivalent of the maxim, This too shall pass. Chasing the next trend in contemporary art, and comiserating about contradictions in the art world’s collective behavior, isn’t worth the time. Paradox happens.
—
Glimpse a tiny peek at the massive (9×14′ and up) photographs in Andreas Gursky’s new exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills in “Andreas Gursky makes a long-distance connection” by Suzanne Muchnic, LA Times (March 6, 2010). They’re really a sight to behold.
—
Gary-Ross Pastrana, rule of thumb. Source: LATimes.com
Check out another great LA Times art review—this one of Minimum Yields Maximum, a group exhibition curated by Gina Osterloh and written by Leah Ollman.
—
Laura Collins-Hughes inaugurates a new series on alternative arts spaces with a profile of the very artist-friendly non-profit Southern Exposure for ARTicles, the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program.
I had a great time at SoEx’s Monster Drawing Rally, and was really pleased with the result of my hour (OK, 70 minutes) of cutting and collaging. Photos are forthcoming.
Brice Bischoff, Bronson Caves, 2010. Source: SoEx.org
Alchemy, SoEx’s next exhibition, looks like it’s gonna be killer. Curated by Sarah Smith, the artists include Ellen Babcock, Brice Bischoff, Michelle Blade, John Chiara, Randy Colosky, Adam Hathaway, Christopher Sicat, Lindsey White. I suspect there will be many nicely executed photographs about magic in the mundane, and some unabashedly transcendentalist paintings and works on paper. A few years ago, I found San Francisco’s glut of dreamy, semi-ironic, new-age-y paintings terribly insincere and pretentious in their faux-naïveté. I’m still averse to woo-woo-for-woo-woo’s-sake, and laziness regardless of how it’s stylized. Alchemy presents highly capable artists and I’m looking forward to this show. Maybe I’ve sipped the Kool-Aid and it tasted great…. Drink it all in at the opening, Friday, March 12, 7-9pm, concurrent with the opening of Alison Pebworth’s Beautiful Possibility.
—
Image: Michelle Blade. Source: basebasebase.com
…Along those same lines, Michelle Blade’s work can exhibit an earnestness that is anachronistically un-ironic, but I really loved every minute of viewing Blow as Deep as You Want to Blow, her solo exhibition at Triple Base Gallery (through March 21). [Full disclosure: she's a collaborator of mine; I constructed the lightbox in the show.] She’s turned her high attention to materials and craftsmanship towards transcendence, patterned rugs and metaphysical books. Deploying opalescent paints and vellum marked on both sides, she’s created physical experiences of radiance. It’s Romanticism for 2010. Go see it in person. The front room is great, and if the back room, filled with accomplished works on paper, is not enough, there’s even more works on paper spilling over in a portfolio on the flat files. Inspirational work ethic and spirit-informing content matter.
—
Perhaps that’s why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it’s the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It’s a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours….
The point is, we should never underestimate process. The experience of the doing really is everything. The ending should be the end of that experience, not the experience itself.
—J.J. Abrams, “J.J. Abrams on the Magic of Mystery,” Wired Magazine, 17.05, April 20, 2009.
