Archives for 2009

Joseph Goldberg

Andrew Keating

Seattle’s Aurora Avenue and other gateways to marginalized blight have their own poet. Kristen T. Ramirez makes these no-exit avenues of cheap dreams new again. She mines the noisy collision of mid-20th Century textures, colors, styles and cultural contrasts found in America. Ranch-style gas stations, the curving arrows beckoning you in, the birds on phone wires, the invitations to eat cheap, sleep in easy reach of a TV and buy a beater car become a survivalist’s manual for a people’s art form.

Her collages are her signature, but not her only one. Advertising in other contexts becomes less benign.

Incised into bottles are messages pulled from the country’s vast stash of cliches: Up and at ’em.

Ramirez’s Ghosts of Commerce Past is at Grey Gallery through Dec. 5.

The fluidity in Warren Dykeman‘s paintings does not come from his figures. They are stationary; the footwork belongs to the field. His paintings are about breath. Hanging in the colored air in front of men in hats and horses frozen mid-gallop, breath does not take the form of a comic-book thought bubble or speech. It is an exhale on the beat.

[Read more…] about Warren Dykeman’s bad boy boogaloo

If you want to be surprised by the plot of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark from 1938, skip the first two sentences.

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

Art is not plot. (Image via)

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, with powder on my nose and makeup to hide my 4 o’clock shadow…

Joe Johnson, from Mega Churches, via

Tract homes in America are cookie cut, but slums in the Third World are hand made.

Kader Attia’s installation Kasbah is in Los de Arriba y Los de Abajo at Sala de Arte Publico Siqeiros in Mexico City, through Jan. 10.

Attia’s piece reminds me of what David Hammons called negritude architecture.

I JUST LOVE THE HOUSES IN THE SOUTH, THE WAY THEY BUILT THEM. THAT NEGRITUDE ARCHITECTURE. I REALLY LOVE TO WATCH THE WAY BLACK PEOPLE MAKE THINGS, HOUSES OR MAGAZINE STANDS IN HARLEM, FOR INSTANCE. JUST THE WAY WE USE CARPENTRY. NOTHING FITS, BUT EVERYTHING WORKS. THE DOOR CLOSES, IT KEEPS THINGS FROM COMING THROUGH. BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE THAT NEATNESS ABOUT IT, THE WAY WHITE PEOPLE PUT THINGS TOGETHER; EVERYTHING IS A THIRTY-SECOND OF AN INCH OFF. (more)

Best of 3 has the best take on the news that Shaquille O’Neale will co-curate a show titled, Size Does Matter:

It would be so easy to just poke fun, or dismiss this as a publicity stunt. But you know what? The sun’s shining, I’m feeling generous, and I’m going to say that maybe Shaquille O’Neale has a genuine interest in art and his co-curation of a show for the Flag Art Foundation is a mutually enjoyable and beneficial enterprise.

Titled ‘Size Does Matter’,
the show has a line up of artists who I wouldn’t kick out of the
gallery for eating crackers, including Maurizio Cattelan, Chuck Close,
Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons and – of course – a big naked guy from Ron
Mueck (on loan from the Hirshhorn). In an icing-on-the-PR-cake move, the catalogue features an essay by (in)famous author James Frey.

It is a stretch to think O’Neale would find anything to admire in a man who cowers in a corner. (Image via Hirshhorn) Museum publicity stunt? These are desperate times, Mrs. Lovett.

Carol Diehl has a roundup on her blog, which is suitably titled Art Vent, of critics going sexist-berserk.  I’ve been reading on other blogs various snippets from Blake Gopnik’s Washington Post review of Anne Truit Truitt, all making him sound goofy. But when Diehl called his piece “the most scathing and sexist writing I’ve ever encountered about an artist,” I finally clicked over to the Post to read it.

Sexist? Not even a little bit. It’s jaunty, and jaunty doesn’t work if a few pushing-the-edge sentences are plucked from the whole. I found it insightful, especially this part:

When Jasper Johns and others had found the abstract in the ordinary, Truitt
seems to find the everyday in the abstract — a much stranger thing to
do.

Knocking Blake Gopnik is the art bloggers’ national sport. He has written a few things that made my eyes pop (Exhibit A here), but he startles not because he’s a fool but because he’s trying to enliven what his editors might well feel is the stale form of the art review.

Editors at newspapers rarely appreciate reviews. Gopnik is working to interest them in his, them and presumably other people who do not think of themselves as part of the art world. Anyone pushing a boundary is going to fail on occasion, but he does not fail Truitt.

As for Charlie Finch, whom Diehl also hangs in her gallery-of-shame for his sexist post on Triutt, also no. He’s Truitt’s son-in-law. (We know this because he titled his piece, “Mother-in-Law.”) His point of view is personal and affectionate, ending with:

The Hirshhorn retrospective should vault her into a special pantheon of
her own, one which she occupied in privacy during her own life and in
public now that her work belongs to the world.

What a canine. Did Gloria Steinem march in vain? Women artists can’t get a break. His fellow dog, Blake Gopnik, called Truitt a genius. It’s a wonder women don’t riot in the streets.

[Read more…] about Friday links – slam-dunk curation

Sean Flood, 3 Deka, oil/canvas. With relatives living on all three floors and holy water in the parlor. I was born in Boston. Were it not for the restless mobility (and dread) of my parents, I might be there still, as I tend to bloom where I’m planted.

has her own light. (Via)

Kenny and rives travel to ask a single question: What do you want to do before you die? They ask participants to write the answers on a Polaroid portrait, which they post on their Web site. (via)