A slate of concrete with blue Skittles scattered across it is illuminated by a clamp light in Full Haus' current outdoor exhibition: "Andy Robert: Heavy Rain and Lightning." Titled Dream Deferred (Skittles on Concrete), this simply executed sculpture seems commonplace...
Rebecca Campbell believes in paying it forward as her most recent exhibition entitled You Are Here at LA Louver so elegantly demonstrates. Each of these eighteen portraits represents an image of a woman artist whom Campbell knows and admires, but more importantly...
“If we can sparkle, he may land tonight….”David Bowie, “Starman”(from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972)Those readers who have followed this blog since it launched in 2007 may recall that it was originally a somewhat diaristic...
David Bowie released his envoi-like album, Blackstar, on his birthday, and so a lightness of being seems to shine through his final week on earth. His lightness might be his general M.O., considering he made pop music out of lyrics about “sailors fighting in a dance...
New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections has acquired the papers of writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus, who rose to fame for “I Love Dick” (1997) and “Aliens & Anorexia” (2000), among other written works combining autobiography, theory, and...
Dear Readers,Film and art just go together. If you’re into art, you’re most likely a film buff (and film snob), and if you’re into film, well... maybe, actually, it doesn’t go the other way around. So let’s stick to the first theory. This is a contemporary art...
Not all films about artists and the art world are silly, but most of them are. To paraphrase a Mark Twain quote, “There are lies, damned lies, and films about artists and the art world.” (Twain linked “statistics” with lies and damned lies.) From such films as the...
In an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Louis CK takes Seinfeld out on his boat on the Hudson River. Looking across the water and admiring the skyline, Louis says, “New York makes me crazy. I love New York City. I love the different brick...
Seeming to arise from the video music world this past summer to land at MOCA, the path of “Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience” may seem roundabout if one only follows the trails of his dreamlike images. Digging a bit deeper unearths multiple contemporary art...
We live in interesting times—possibly the end of time, or at least the end of history as humans have conceived it over the last few millennia (an irony Francis Fukuyama never considered in the dislocated thesis for his 1989 essay and 1992 book, nor for that matter...
Octavio Paz wrote, “this hour has the shape of a pause.” Adriana Salazar’s videos situate us inside such a pause, places where we are in nature while watching human artifacts become nature. I met Salazar in Mexico City this past November, though I knew of her work...
In the late ‘70s, I would carry the Sony Portapak for my artist stepmother, Rabyn Blake, across muddy fields in Southern France as she filmed a shepherdess whose name sounded like “leg of lamb” in French, or shot shimmering vistas of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire....
Ten years ago, when I learned of the existence of a film called Trona, shot in the desert hellhole of the same name, I feared the worst, especially when I learned that it was a thesis film by a CalArts graduate. It was hard to imagine anybody associated with that...
Anwar Congo is a stone-cold killer.He is also a petty gangster, a wealthy if somewhat eccentric paterfamilias, something of a dandy (never wear white to an interrogation or a political execution), a local celebrity with connections to an abysmally corrupt government,...
To find a curatorial through-line for the wildly varied career of Frank Stella must be an enormous challenge. Hanging opposite the elevators on the new Whitney’s fifth floor, as a kind of preamble to “Frank Stella: A Retrospective,” are Pratfall (1974), a precise...
Laurie Anderson fairly disappeared in the gaping vastness of the darkened Park Avenue Armory. Standing, violin in hand, next to a Lincoln Memorial–sized plaster sculpture of an armchair, she told the story of Mohammed el Gharani.El Gharani—or rather his shimmering...
The sculptures and videos in Same Rock are based on a “little Switzerland” in Appalachia, founded on the promise of its similarity to the Alps, and explore myths of universality, aesthetic deception, and the politics and economics of mountains. Please Enjoy… offers...
Part journey of self-discovery, part family history, part window into an artist’s oeuvre, Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still is simply wonderful, sharing that same combination of hauntingly beautiful lyricism and truth that are the hallmarks of her photographs.For most...
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