EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! ART STAR STOPS MAKING ART! That was going to be my headline after hearing the remark Mike Kelley made at the close of our interview. I was wrapping up our conversation, all ready to ask the final question, like Barbara Walters: "What's next, Mike?" But before I could, Kelley preempted me: "I've been working nonstop for years and years, and now I'm not in the mood...
The mid-afternoon New York City traffic is uncharacteristically brisk on my way to interview performance artist Kalup Linzy. I arrive in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, half an hour early, with my photographer. Linzy greets us at his unmarked live-in work-space basement studio wearing a shiny dark gray satin shirt, white boxer shorts with orange and brown hibiscus flowers and a pair of rubber...
It is difficult to imagine John Currin’s work adorning walls more modest than those of the uptown Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan. Currin’s subjects have become progressively more well-heeled as his career has advanced. His signature subjects of yore—the ludicrously big-titted women and the frail women in bed and the nymphettes clinging adoringly to wilting bearded aesthetes—are a thing of the...
I was urged electronically to go see Dutch theater company Wunderbaum on its last night in LA at the REDCAT with no details other than superlatives (which, however, managed to get a bunch of us on that contact list out). I knew it had something to do with LA artist Paul McCarthy’s work, and the troupe was pegged as “raw” and “political.” They had been developing the work as artists in residence...
Though the annual festival known as Burning Man has received the occasional serious sniff from the art world, my overall anecdotal accounting of the festival rep in what one might call the high-end international art world has been one of mild disgust and pity. In general, art worlders like nothing better than to sneer at the post-hippie amateurs, as urbane Parisian aristocrats might sneer at...
"Figuratively Speaking" is a 25-year retrospective on the female figure as studied by the artist, Haleh Mashian. Haleh is an Iranian-born artist, who opened Mash Gallery in 2018. Since the works are presented undated, it is unclear exactly what Mashian’s “early work”...
Lou Andreas-Salomé, the psychoanalyst, writer and infamous lover, defined eroticism as “what ruptures the ego.” To enter into an erotic encounter is to break apart our neatly constructed selves, to invite destruction; it is also a chance for a volcanic eruption of...
The profoundly moving installation Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, and Then There Were Nine) (1991), positioned to be the first work encountered in Parrasch Heijnen’s career-spanning survey of Mildred Howard, imparts a sense of the Oakland-based...
Mark Steven Greenfield’s latest paintings are expansive fields of gold leaf inset with depictions of Black Madonnas and other religious figures. They shimmer and radiate. Though some are adaptations of iconic Madonnas from art...
Intertextual play between the external world of nature and the internal world within the human psyche reigns supreme in Heather Day’s exhibition “Ricochet” at Diane Rosenstien Gallery. The large-scale abstract mixed-media works are delightfully fresh, with swaths of...