Just before New Year 1932, Walker Evans (1903-1975), the iconic American photographer, set sail to Tahiti on a luxury schooner called the Cressida. Walker Evans Portrait of a Woman, Tahiti 1932, silver print, ca. 1930s, 6 1/2 x 9 1/4. www.leegallery.com In letters sent from there, and on his return a few months later, Evans recounts […]
It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every other cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other circumstances of the age in which its creators live… …realistic space cracks and splinters into flat planes which come forward, parallel to the plane surface… Clement Greenberg ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (1940) It is all well […]
A two-part exhibition opened yesterday in Frankfurt called Jeff Koons: The Painter & The Sculptor – the former in the Schirn Kunsthalle and the latter in the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, until September 23rd. In both exhibitions, Koons offers his most sustained engagement with Classical Art to date with the his most recent work: the three-part Antiquity […]
A few weeks ago I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art and, although I had been there recently – in January for an event I organized based on the Fifty Days at Iliam (1978) series by Cy Twombly (below) -, on this visit, I had more time and so I finally had a chance to […]
I have recently returned from a whirlwind trip to Marfa, Texas – the home of the Chinati Foundation created by Donald Judd as a permanent site for his own work and that of, among others, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, David Rabinowitch and Ilya Kabakov. I am currently writing my next post about my visit, but […]
For today, a post disguised as a question: What is the connection between Ovid’s Medea and Richard Prince’s The Comedy Dungeon? Answers on a postcard. For more about Richard Prince, visit: http://www.richardprince.com/
American artist and activist Paul Chan’s Phaedrus Pron, a ‘hyper-translation’ of Plato’s Phaedrus, is worth looking at. Here are thirteen ways you can get into it: 1. You can watch the trailer (yes, this book has a trailer): ****Viewer Discretion Is Advised**** 2. You can listen to Chan reading an excerpt for you and here […]
Yesterday I went to a great talk by James Meyer, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001) and Minimalism (2010) for Phaidon’s ‘Themes and Movements’ series. (The latter volume has a lot to answer for […]
A few Sundays back (04/22/12), I visited the exhibition of Columbus-based artist, Tom Kelly called the greatest thing on the black earth – comprising of the artist’s most recent work to engage with the poetry of the Archaic Greek poet, Sappho. (Previous exhibitions on this theme include his museum debut at the Southern Ohio Museum […]
To be avant-garde now is to be old fashioned This catch-phrase is taken from the article ‘Minus Plato’ by Brian O’Doherty, originally published in Art and Artists in 1966, and republished in Gregory Battock’s influential Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology two years later. O’Doherty describes the emergent art of this time, later to […]