New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opens Richard Serra’s first drawing retrospective to the public today — and quite the eye-opening, austere exhibition it is for the Met. Serra expands the definition of modern drawing by using drawing as a system of thinking, while focusing on process, gravity, and weight rather than representation and figuration. The radical exhibition, which runs through August 28 and then travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Menil Collection in Houston, features some 50 dynamic drawings — many of them monumental in scale — and a selection of sketchbooks from the past 40 years. We spoke with the artist at the Met to gain a deeper understanding of his groundbreaking work, to get his opinion on why young people prefer figurative work, and to capture his realistic thoughts on TV and the internet.
Vibrantly documenting six years of sensational art projects, assume vivid astro focus’ first monograph captures the psychedelic spirit of an outrageous artist collective.
Celebrated for their chaotic mashups of Brazilian carnival, 1970s disco, gay porn, and street graffiti, assume vivid astro focus combines multimedia installations with performance art to achieve an out of this world experience. Spread across the folds of the book, their kaleidoscopic projects virtually jump off the visually packed pages to penetrate the mind.
New Mexico-based multimedia artist Chad Person creates beautifully crafted, ironic indictments of society’s most dangerous flaws.
In TaxCut, Person shreds US currency and fashions meticulous collage-based renderings of military weaponry. Along the way, he tallies the money “spent” and deducts it from his taxes — and thus from the defense budget. Recess, meanwhile, documents the construction and concealment of a post-apocalypse shelter under his home; his upcoming show, Surviving the End of Your World at LA’s Mark Moore Gallery, includes a streaming video of a live performance at the remote location.
Art and objects made from strands of hair: yes, somewhat creepy, but also riveting and intricate and, as it turns out, we can’t tear our eyes away. Like a good ghost story, hair art is both compelling and repellent; just imagine the feel of one silky strand skittering across exposed skin… PSYCH! After the jump, we present a selection of artists who deal in the delicate, with hair art in the form of sculpture, drawing, and photography.
Just in case you thought we were finished with the lists (ha! never), here we go again with one that’s a little more forward thinking, a little less retrograde. After debating public art, defending the New Museum, speculating about Dia, and worshiping Jerry Saltz, wethinks ’tis time to set our lovingly-etched crosshairs on what’s coming in 2010 and the following decade. Not as flippant as Charlie Finch (who teasingly predicts that Damien Hirst will “come out of the closet” and marry Banksy) or as cut-and-dry as TimeOut New York (Matisse and the Whitney Biennial, revolutionary), we like to think our crystal ball is attuned to the frequency of the art world at large. Weigh in after the jump.
Employing themes of functionality and repetition, Michael Johansson subverts everyday objects into neatly packaged contemporary art.
Most of Johansson’s work pokes at the tension between what the artist calls the “now-familiar” and the “now-unknown,” finding a happy medium in an exaggerated form of regularity. Taking apart commonplace objects (suitcases, mattress springs, hairdryers), he both highlights and renders useless their original functions.
Another art installation filed under “Things That Look Awesome That We’d Hate to Clean Up After.” Mexican artist Ivan Puig created this magical milky environment titled Hasta Las Narices using just water, pigment, glass, and PVC to suspend a Volkswagen sedan. Simple yet complex, and pretty freaking brilliant. More shots after the jump.
A scaled-down city that covers 400 square feet: installation art. A human-size cardboard monster that decimates said city in one fell swoop: performance art. California-based artist P. Williams‘s mixed media mashup “The Finishing Touch” was put on at Huntington Beach Art Center in front of a crowd of onlookers who didn’t quite realize they were in for a crafty rendition of Godzilla’s best scene. A narrative in pictures, after the jump.
For anyone who’s ever fantasized about smashing a plate against the wall, have we got a treat for you. Artist Zeger Reyers’s “Rotating Kitchen,” an installation on view at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany, revolves continuously on an axis, destroying everything in the vignette that isn’t nailed down. The Gordon-Matta-Clark-meets-Dieter-Roth piece is part of the exhibition Eating the Universe, whose name is taken from Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art movement. Sounds good to us.
Artist Jeanne-Claude (née Denat de Guillebo) died in New York Wednesday evening of complications from a brain aneurysm. Along with her husband and artistic partner Christo, whom she met in 1958, she undertook an international series of large-scale outdoor installations, modifying landscapes with industrial strength cloth ballooned, wrapped, and tied. In a tale that legends are made of, the pair were born on the same date, the 13th of June in 1935, and allegedly in the same hour. Of note is the fact that all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects are self-financed — meaning a pretty significant initial outlay for, say, 1.076 million square feet of aluminum-coated fabric to cover the entire façade of the Reichstag in Berlin. In honor of Jeanne-Claude’s legacy in the realm of environmental art, we’ve compiled a visual primer of the duo’s oeuvre after the jump. Read More »
