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...
NARCISSISM MAY BE AT THE CORE OF SOME ARTISTIC PRACTICE, but rarely is it flaunted so grandly as in the work of Cindy Sherman. She has denied that her photographs are self-portraiture, but despite her assumption of various guises—sometimes so laden with prosthetics and wigs and costumes that she is unrecognizable—we know it is Cindy Sherman underneath because that is her modus operandi. And we...
Laura London often channels celebrities through her photography, but not necessarily in ways that you’d expect. She doesn’t document musicians, models or actors onstage or off, or portray them in surreal situations like say, Annie Liebovitz does. Instead, she asks teens and young adults she knows to perform for the camera. By photographing them preening and vamping as an exploration of idealized...
A quivering grid of afternoon sunlight shifts across the polished hardwood floor of a long narrow room. But for the drowsy hum of the air conditioner, all is silence and stillness, an ambience ideally conducive to the reception and refinement of clear thought. Immersed in scholarly retreat, an owlish old man with a malodorous rucksack occupies an armchair. Students stretch out on sofas; others...
Nights CAN BE long in Moscow. But come spring, as the light fades ever more slowly, the evenings get off to a late start. Which may be why I inadvertently kept a driver waiting on the evening of April 3rd to ferry me and another journalist to the sprawling Artplay Design Center in the Kurskaya district of Moscow for the Seventh Annual Innovation Prize award ceremonies. In lieu of the press...
More than 30 venues—166 international artists within a few square miles—a forum for ideas rather than conspicuous consumption: it’s Documenta 13! Held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, an art professor and designer from Kassel, this is the world’s most important and enduring contemporary art show. Depending on the curatorial vision of the exhibition...
I’ve been warned that Llyn Foulkes is preparing furiously for “Documenta 13” and as I get in touch to arrange a meeting, I’m wary, in part, due to his reputation for fractious soliloquies regarding fellow artists, critics, art magazines, and in general, the art world cliques that hold him at arm’s length. By his own account, Foulkes has been an outsider, a talented iconoclast shunned by the...
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...
The existence of an “edge,” a precipice, an ever-deepening chasm, a transitional space from one reality into the next—be it from spring to summer, enslavement to freedom, life to death—involves a commitment to a new beginning, an awakening of sorts into an alternate...
Adam Pendleton’s first solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery unfolds across three exhibition spaces and invites viewers to engage with the different aspects of his unusual and critical practice. Large black-and-white paintings with the repeated phrase “WE ARE...
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...
A point of reference for Renée Petropoulos' compelling and thought-provoking exhibition "Like a Street full of Friends: Studies for Speculative Monuments" at as-is.la is her 2014 public artwork installed in downtown Santa Monica: Bouquet (Between Egypt, India, Iraq,...
The works that make up Glen Wilson's exhibition "Slim Margins" are striking and unique. Wilson has an uncanny sense of materials and a keen ability to juxtapose incongruous elements to create the unexpected. Wilson sites the influence of documentary photographers like...
In 1839, the very first portrait photograph was captured of (and by) Robert Cornelius. It must have been a difficult – albeit likely humorous – process, as Cornelius set up his camera before hurriedly running to sit motionless in front of it, arms crossed and hair...