Tyler Green on Bruce Nauman and the reality of torture, here. In the future, if we manage to climb back up the cliff we fell off during the Bush years, people will look to art for evidence that we grasped the horror of our situation. Green’s writing serves as an affirmative:
Nauman’s sculptures were not about the United States. In 1981 Nauman
couldn’t have had any idea that America would become a kind of
modern-day post-colonial force in two occupied states, Iraq and
Afghanistan. He couldn’t know that 20 years on America would become a
nation that engaged in extra-legal detention, a country that stuffed
detainees into private jets so as to whisk them around the world to
places where they could be brutally confined, tortured and, in several
cases, killed. In 1981 Nauman’s sculptures were about what happened to
other people, people such as the Trinidadians, Argentinans, or
Uruguayans in Naipaul and Timmerman. Today I look at Nauman’s two 1981
artworks and I think about what the United States did in its fanatical,
unprincipled pursuit of terrorism suspects and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the things that makes art imperative is this: During its
lifetime it can jump beyond its inspiration to become about us.
911 Media Arts Center moves in with Jack Straw Productions, story Jen Graves. Money quote:
It’s becoming more cloud-like.
911 and Jack Straw have a lot in common. Both are multi-media populist with aesthetic ambition. What they won’t have is any room (or good location or parking). 911’s Steven Vroom, who with Jonh Schwartz constitutes the only 911 Media staff left, has a down-not-out message on his site, here.
Bravo casting call for artists: Here’s the opening paragraph from application instructions:
How do you go from struggling, emerging or even semi-established artist
to selling a complete show for $198 million? It’s a big art world out
there, but maybe this is one place to start!
Far be it from me to piss on anyone’s parade, but people, read those sentences again. Sharon Butler at Two Coats of Paint has the best response:
I’m urging older artists, particularly mothers, to take a shot at it. Bring the kids to the audition, change a diaper or two while waiting in line, and show the dirty ones as work samples. Seriously. At the very least, document the whole experience, upload it to YouTube, and don’t forget to send Two Coats a link.
Good Target Practice: Reviews from Emily Pothast, Jen Graves, Art Knowledge News, e-bourne and Publicola.
From Graves:
(Curator Michael) Darling is not restating a
canon, he’s refining it, bringing together artists from several
continents and pairing lesser-knowns with household names. The arch
sensibility of Pop, the communalism and performance of Brazilian art of
the period, the sunny California renegades, the anarchic Viennese
Actionists, Japanese postatomic hysteria and despair, the quotational
impulse of the pre-Pictures generation, hippie-style madness, the
chilly conceptualists, the early feminists, highly codified and
organized German pain–all these come together in a grouping
that’s different from the classic (and overly cerebral) New
York-centric story of minimalism-and-after. This version of the
story is deliberately visceral.
Choice, but I don’t agree with what followed in the same review:
The first two galleries feel crowded and awkward; the last few, plodding. By the end, at Warhol’s sidelined Oxidation (piss) Painting and Lynda Benglis’s poured-paint piece (did it have to be mounted on a pedestal rather than lying on the floor?), the exhibition has run out of energy.
That’s what diversity of critical voices is all about. Not long ago, Seattle exhibits would be lucky to see one review. If there were two, they either failed to spark discussion or there was no place to air it. As an arts editor at the former Seattle PI once told me, responding is beneath your dignity. (That version of dignity remains in place for most critics who still have jobs at newspapers.)
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