Love, longing and performance art are best experienced in their natural habitats of dark venues on the edges of civilization. “UNTOUCHABLE,” curated by Italian performance artist Franko B, proved just that in November at The Flying Dutchman pub in Camberwell, London with an evening of performances on the 17th. The event doubled as a fundraiser for the Southwark LGBT Network and a platform for...
For a man who had just won the grand prize at the Rome film festival last month, Larry Clark was in a cranky mood. As he took to the stage to receive the Best Film award for Marfa Girl, his acceptance speech veered into a rant: “I’ve been fucked by everybody in Hollywood,” Clark announced to the bejeweled closing gala audience. “In Hollywood things don’t always work out” translated the...
The downtown art scene in New York City has a long and illustrious history that can hardly be contained in any one exhibition. Yet the New Museum’s “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery 1969–1989” makes it possible to say a great many things. Organized by Ethan Swan, “Come Closer” is about the many individual forms of expression that included the active and sometimes volatile downtown New York...
YOU CAN TELL A GOOD DEAL ABOUT AN ARTIST FROM his studio. After I arrive at Mark Wallinger's, in the buzzing heart of London's Soho district, he pops out to buy a couple of cappuccinos before we settle down to do the interview, giving me a chance to nose around. His bookshelves contain an erudite mix, with the poems of John Ashbery wedged between James Joyce's Ulyssesand Jonathan...
IF ANY OUTLIER SLEEPER CELLS OF AL QAEDA need further evidential motivation to make another terrorist strike against the decadent West, they need look no further than Bravo's new so-called reality series Gallery Girls. In a desperate ploy to further capitalize on the machinations of the New York art world—as they did with their earlier Work of Art—Bravo and LA-based production company Magical...
Beauty is all around us. This thought feels simplistic, and given the past year, even wrong. Stuck in our homes, away from family and friends, a city as large and vibrant as Los Angeles becomes terribly claustrophobic. And even for those fortunate enough not to be...
Peter Hujar's square format black-and-white photographs are a reminder of the beauty of film and the power of a well-composed, carefully lit, and patiently observed image. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 44 and left behind an exceptional body of work that...
Art, at its most essential level, attempts to fix in space the experiences that pass like sand in an hourglass. On the whole, reality is almost always more complex than can be accurately represented, and meaning is missed in the variety of expression. But Shiyuan Liu...
Ben Sander’s latest body of work, "Poppies," centers on the opium poppy flower. The show is separated into two rooms, the main gallery floor featuring acrylic and airbrush paintings on wood panels and the lower loft room exhibiting the artist’s colored pencil and ink...
Nothing is just one thing. This is a sentiment that many of us here in the United States, particularly those of us with privilege, are coming to terms with in an entirely new way. From recognizing that many workers who previously went unseen are in fact essential, to...