Julia Friedman :: JuliaFriedman.org

Happy New Year! Top Tokyo Exhibitions of 2010

Posted on December 31, 2010, 7:21 PM, by jfriedman, under Julia Friedman, Miwa Yanagi, Mori Art Museum, Rat Hole Gallery, SHIBUHOUSE.

To celebrate the glorious end of Tokyo’s 2010 exhibition year I put together the list of three of my favorite shows of the year. For the sake of even distribution I picked one show by an emerging gallery, one show by an established gallery and one museum show.

Venue: TANA Bookshelf Gallery

Exhibition: SHIBUHAUSE installation

Why: TANA was my most exciting discovery of the year. This new gallery unhinged itself from the constrictions brought on by commercial pressures without compromising its creative ambitions. Great new addition to the Tokyo art world.

Venue: Rat Hole Gallery

Exhibition: Miwa Yanagi “Lullaby”

Lullaby, 2009, 12 minutes, edition of 5, image courtesy of the gallery

Why: This show cleverly combined the works from an older photographic series Fairy Tales (2004–2006) and Yanagi’s new video work Lullaby (2009), using the images in the photographs as a poetic key to unlock symbolic cache of the video. I reviewed this exhibition for May 2010 issue of Artforum.

Venue: Mori Art Museum

Exhibition: Roppongi Crossing: Can there be Art?

KAMI & friends scateboarding performance, photo Joji Shimamoto

Why: Mori Museum’s super-sized exhibition, for all the faults other reviewers noticed, definitely succeeded in showing the multifarious character of contemporary Japanese art.

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Peter Yeoh vs. Julia Friedman

Posted on December 29, 2010, 3:20 PM, by jfriedman, under Contemporary Art Tokyo, Taka Ishii.

Peter Yeoh, the editor of London-based Glass magazine chose a black Rei Kawakubo pant skirt for a Taka Ishii gallery (Tokyo) event. The Contemporary Art Tokyo blogger, Julia Friedman, wore the Russian version by the designer Liudmila Mezentseva.

Who Wore It Best? Click here to cast your vote!

Tags: Comme des garcons, Contemporary Art Tokyo, Glass magazine, Julia Friedman, Peter Yeoh, Rei Kawakubo, Taka Ishii
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Leo Rubinfein at Taka Ishii

Posted on December 29, 2010, 2:20 PM, by jfriedman, under Taka Ishii.

Taka Ishii (left) with Leo Runinfien

The last opening of 2010 was for Leo Rubinfien’s show at the Taka Ishii gallery. Rubinfien, who was raised in Tokyo but now lives in New York, came to prominence in the 1980s as a proponent of color photography. The photographs (ink jet prints) on view in the current show were taken over the period of some twenty years in locations all over the world. Taka Ishii is now closed for the holidays and will reopen January 6th, the show will be on through January 29th.

Tags: Contemporary Art Tokyo, Julia Friedman, Leo Rubinfein, photography, Taka Ishii
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TANA Gallery Bookshelf

Posted on December 28, 2010, 3:03 PM, by jfriedman, under Chim Pom, SHIBUHOUSE, TANA Gallery Bookshelf.

One of Tokyo’s newest and hippest gallery spaces TANA Gallery Bookshelf finished up their first year in style with an artist talk by Ryuta Ushiro of Chim↑Pom and a one-day show of SHIBUYA=SHIBUHOUSE, a collective of young artists (the core of the group are students at the likes of Geidai and Musashino Art University), and frequently rotating “non-artists.” Because of the direct correlation between the amount of gallery space and risk aversion TANA—a gallery in a bookshelf, literally—can afford to show risky works and artists and to remain outside of Tokyo’s commercial artrace.

SIBUHOUSE exhibition installation view

Julia Friedman with TANA’S founder Tamura Masamichi

TANA displays and archives the most cutting edge works produced in the city, filling the niche between commercial galleries that choose their art, for the most part, on the promise of sales and international recognition, and the weekly-rental underworld in which many young artists are forced to operate. Its criteria for choosing exhibitions is the quality of the projects themselves, with no consideration given to financial consequences of the shows. Yet, TANA is not a fringe pro bono gallery. The tongue-in-cheek statement under the heading “Non Non-commercial” posted on the gallery’s website tags it as : “an independent gallery indifferent to commercialism,” that welcomes “commerce … without commercialism.” This model of operation where art supersedes money is refreshing but not at all utopian—TANA more than deserves to be on Tokyo’s main gallery-hopping route.

I will do a separate posting shortly on the SHIBUHOUSE activities; this was my first encounter with the group and I look forward to learning (and reporting) and their gonzo activities.

Tags: ChimPom, Contemporary Art Tokyo, Julia Friedman, SHIBUHOUSE, TANA Gallery Bookshelf, Tokyo Gallery Guide
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Save the Date(s): Aki Sasamoto at Take Ninagawa

Posted on December 26, 2010, 8:03 PM, by jfriedman, under Take Ninagawa.

Aki Sasamoto’s first solo show in Japan is a homecoming of sorts. Sasamoto, who was born in Yokohama, received her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and had made New York her home since. The current show at Take Ninagawa gallery is based on the project commissioned to the artist for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, but now it addresses a new set of contextual variables—geographical and cultural. The exhibition was inaugurated with a performance on December 18, and I have posted here the pictures I took during the one she held December 26. More performances are coming on December 29 and January 9, 16, 29. All start at 16:00. Attendance is free, but it is a good idea to contact the gallery as spaces are limited.

Tags: Aki Sasamoto, Contemporary Art Tokyo, Julia Friedman, performance, Strange Attractors, Take Ninagawa
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Jean-Michel Basquait: The Radiant Child

Posted on December 25, 2010, 10:13 PM, by jfriedman, under Basquait.

Sent from my iPhone

Tags: Basquait, movie, Tamra Davis
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Interfaces (Image, Texte, Language): Artists’ Words & Writers’ Images

Posted on December 25, 2010, 11:30 AM, by jfriedman, under Alexei Remizov.

Photo courtesy of Pat Greer

The new volume of the interdisciplinary journal Interfaces published collaboratively by the College of the Holy Cross and Université Paris Diderot is finally out! You can see the table of contents here. Among the papers is my essay “Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act.” Please click here for stunning two color reproductions from Remizov’s 1937 illustrated album Récits de la quatrième dimention (sic).

Tags: Alexei Remizov, Interfaces, Julia Friedman
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I Don't Understand with William Shatner: What makes something art?
Netflix Documentary "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed" (2021). Directed by Joshua Rofé.
UCLA Hammer Museum: in conversation with Dave Hickey 05.11.16.
Dave Hickey & Julia Friedman from Hammer Museum on Vimeo.
Site Santa Fe: in conversation with Dave Hickey 04.15.16.
The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. (more) Northwestern University Press 7 x 10, 300 pgs, Trade Cloth ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 / $69.95
Skira Editore Milano just published a monograph on British-Iranian artist Reza Aramesh. In addition to several texts, and an interview with the artist, ACTION: BY NUMBER contains a catalogue raisonné of his work from 2002 onwards, including Aramesh’s recent marble sculpture. I discuss the art-historical genesis and cultural meaning of these spectacular and frightening works in my essay “The Meta of Marble.” (pp.124–129). SKIRA Editore Milano Hardcover. 248 pages, 153 ill., size 24x28cm ISBN 978-88-572-5285-8
Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of "dunces" and "pricks." Paperback, 586 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 1517287103
Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from a vast digital discourse that took place in Dave Hickey’s social media space between June 2014 and March 2015. During that time Hickey posted almost 3,000 comments, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes and skeptics. Wasted Words, the resulting volume, is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Paperback, 124 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 152327266X
Over the past seven years Wayne Thiebaud has made dozens of paintings, drawings, and etchings of clowns. Like much of his work, this latest series is in a sense autobiographical. During his boyhood in Long Beach he looked forward to the visits of a traveling Ringling Brothers circus and sometimes helped out behind the scenes in exchange for tickets. The costumes, faces, and antics of the clowns were the beginning of a lifelong fascination for him. The clown series is its culmination, in which the now 100-year-old artist revisits those early memories. In December 2019 Wayne Thiebaud unveiled a selection from his clown series at the San Francisco gallery founded by his son, Paul Thiebaud. The Laguna Art Museum exhibition will be a version of the Paul Thiebaud Gallery exhibition, featuring more than forty works. Fully illustrated with 56 artwork reproductions. Essay by Dr. Julia Friedman. Interview with the artist by Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hardcover: 100 pages; ISBN-10: 0578798573ISBN-13: 978-0578798578
Celebrating the 100th birthday of one of America's most respected and beloved artists, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings honors a lifetime of extraordinary achievements across many genres. Best known for his tantalizing paintings of desserts, Thiebaud has long been affiliated with Pop Art, though his body of work is far more expansive, continuing to grow as the artist approaches his milestone birthday. Across the decades, Thiebaud has explored various details of American life through his art from urban views and rural landscapes to clowns and household items all the time continuing to explore the food subjects that made him famous. Wayne Thiebaud 100 accompanies an exhibition of the same name, organized by the Crocker Art Museum. In addition to the 100 paintings, prints, and drawings featured in the exhibition, this publication includes numerous other contextual paintings by Thiebaud, art by the masters who inspired him, and photographs of the artist with family and friends, taken over the course of his extraordinary career. Hardcover : 212 pages ISBN-10 : 1087501172 Dimensions : 9.8 x 0.9 x 11.3 inches ISBN-13 : 978-1087501178
Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev Adele Marie Barker (Editor), Eliot Borenstein (Contributor), Julia Friedman (Contributor), Adam Weiner (Contributor), Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky (Contributor), Robert Edelman (Contributor) With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors... (more) Paperback: 488 pages Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 10, 1999) Language: English ISBN-10: 0822323133 ISBN-13: 978-0822323136
“A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance as Life-Writing” by Julia Friedman In Symbolism, its Origins and Consequences. Edited by Rosina Neginsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010 Hardcover: 665 pages Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing New edition edition (October 1, 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 1443823929 ISBN-13: 978-1443823920
“The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov,” by Julia Friedman "Elective affinities" - a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry - here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal... In In Elective Affinities: Word & Image Interactions 6, 2008 Edited by Catriona McLeod, Véronique Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Paperback: 422 pages Publisher: Rodopi (June 20, 2009) Language: English ISBN-10: 9042026189 ISBN-13: 978-9042026186
“Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act,” by Julia Friedman. Edited by Maurice Geracht and Frédéric Ogée. In Interfaces: Image Text Language, vol. 29, 2010
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Julia Friedman
- Monuments we deserve December 22, 2025
  In this essay, I look beyond the familiar arguments for preservation or removal to ask what these objects actually do in civic life. Monuments compress history into visible form, but they also expose the tensions between reverence and critique. At a moment when public memory is deeply contested, monuments become mirrors, reflecting contemporary values as […]
  jfriedman
- Wayne Thiebaud’s Figure Paintings December 17, 2025
  Rejecting sentimental or anecdotal portraiture, Thiebaud cultivates a suspended psychological charge, inviting viewers into the role of Wollheim’s “unrepresented spectator.” His sitters—poised before or after action—occupy pared-down spaces where gesture is displaced by the quiet gravity of presence. Through this deliberate withholding, Thiebaud reanimates classical problems of painting, aligning himself with Velázquez and Manet while […]
  jfriedman
- The art of demolition November 2, 2025
  The notorious 19th-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who proclaimed that “the urge for destruction is also a creative urge,” has found an unlikely disciple in Trump. Considered together, the 1980 and 2025 episodes teach the lesson that destruction can be a form of authorship. Once the reliefs were gone, their loss defined both the building and […]
  jfriedman
- Posthumanism, memes, and the end of the real September 26, 2025
  Walter Benjamin called the twentieth century “the age of mechanical reproduction,” but his contemporaries were still capable of distinguishing between a celebrity’s real personality and her image. The twenty-first century is the age of digital reproduction, and it forces us to ask whether the general public still possesses the capacity to recognize such a distinction. […]
  jfriedman
- Svetlana Alpers on Art and Art History July 19, 2025
  Perhaps this is why Alpers is befuddled by today’s disciplinary confusion in which art, the master, is subjugated by art history, supposedly its emissary. Consider the following remark she made in a 2022 follow-up to the earlier conversation with Ziegler: “I agree with my great, late art historian friend Michael Podro, who said that painting […]
  jfriedman
- Wayne Thiebaud at the Legion of Honor July 19, 2025
  “Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art,” which opened at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco on March 22, is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curated by Timothy Anglin Burgard. Its premise, spelled out in the title, is straight forward enough and firmly based on the […]
  jfriedman
- Decorating Our Decline May 26, 2025
  When British sculptor Thomas J Price explains that his “strategy of inclusion” will counter the “endless stream of limiting tropes and identities for Black people,” he is inadvertently mimicking totalitarian injunctions.
  jfriedman

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