Posted
on October 21, 2011, 2:26 AM,
by jfriedman,
under Paul McCarthy.
Glen Baxter, We don’t hold with no site specific works, colored pencil & ink on paper, 30 1/4″ x 22 1/4″
HDTS 2011 was held this past weekend October 15 & 16 in the Morongo Valley towns of Joshua Tree, Pioneertown, Yucca Valley, 29 Palms and Wonder Valley. This year’s event was guest curated by the McCarthy family (Paul, Karen, Mara, Damon), Robert Stone and Brooks Hudson Thomas, and co-directed by Andrea Zittel and Aurora Tang. Spread amongst eight separate venues, the event featured site-specific installations, performances and exhibitions. A few of the pieces were large scale productions, others a bit more makeshift. Still, the main attraction was the desert itself.
For better images and more accurate information please go to the event website.
Here is a link to my review of J.-P. Gaultier’s he multi-media retrospective I have seen at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on a recent conference trip. After it closes in Montreal at the beginning of October the show will travel to San Francisco and Houston.
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I am posting the first of two reviews I wrote after visiting the openings at the 54th Venice Biennial.
The Venice in Venice show is the first event of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980—a cluster of exhibitions and related cultural events scheduled to run at over sixty venues throughout Southern California starting this fall. If you are heading to Venice and do not want to wait until October to see the “finish fetish” and Light and Space artworks, this teaser exhibition will be on view through the end of July. Co-curated by Tim Nye and Jacqueline Miró.
Posted
on July 1, 2011, 4:38 PM,
by jfriedman,
under Yamomoto Gendai.
The upcoming show at the Yamamoto Gendai gallery follows suit of Chim↑Pom’s response to the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclearplant (see previous posting). What follows is the gallery’s press-release.
Atom Suit Project: Antenna of the Earth is an installation of a life-size figure of the artist himself in a radiation detecting Atom Suit equipped with Geiger counters, appropriating the well-known statue of Kuuya Shounin, a monk chanting a sutra which is represented by the miniature images of Buddha coming out of his mouth.
Yanobe created this piece based on the experiences from his visit to Chernobyl in 1997, which delivers the strong will of the artist to become like an “antenna” of diverse occurrences of the world after the crisis. Prior to this project, the artist created the radiation protective Yellow Suit in response to the threat of the Mihama nuclear power plant accident in 1991. Ever since Geiger counters have become essential elements in his works.
For 20 years up until now, Yanobe has been concerned with powers and phenomena which are out of human control, not limited to nuclear powers and radioactivity, and engaged in the themes of Survival/Revival.
After 10 years since its creation, we believe that the significance of Antenna of the Earth is ever more broadening.We hope this exhibition will be an opportunity to examine the practice of Kenji Yanobe and to introduce new perspectives on the reality in which we are living now.
The show opens this Saturday, July 2, reception is 18:00–20:00.
Posted
on July 1, 2011, 2:48 AM,
by jfriedman,
under Chim Pom.
This posting is long overdue since the related exhibition took place over one month ago, in late May, but I left Tokyo three days after the earthquake, one day after I learned about the radiation leak, and in the time that followed I never got a chance to write about this remarkable show.
At the base of what became the Real Times exhibition is the collective’s visit to the stricken nuclear plant—the daredevils embarked on their trip, as volunteers, when the rest of the traffic around the reactors was outbound.
Chim↑Pom returned to Tokyo with a collection of videos and a resolve to show the significance of the events in the north. The infamous “Shibuya mural” episode was reported in the BBC, although without naming the group. In a move that would make Banksy himself look tame, the Chim↑Pom amended (or defaced, depending on one’s point of view) the giant Taro Okamoto mural located in the middle of Shibuya Station. The well-known eerie representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings was given an “update” on nuclear dangers with a pasted image that embedded the crippled plant into the mural. Needless to say Tokyo police did not allow the update to stay up for long. Here is the video of the mural, the Chim↑Pom addition is at the lower right, next to the escalators:
Following this, the Mujin-to productions, Chim↑Pom’s managing gallery, produced an unusual show that lasted only five days (May 20th through 25), but was was attended by over 3000(!) people. My friends who stayed in Tokyo and attended the show unanimously hailed it as one of the best they have seen.
To be fair, Chim↑Pom were not the only artist group to engage the Fukushima disaster, the New-Methodists, another collective consisting of Takahiro Hirama, Shogo Baba and Hideki Nakazawa also applied for a disaster volunteer program, but they made a point of doing it in a capacity of citizens, not artists. Still, given the attention garnered by Real Times and the immediacy of the Chim↑Pom’s response it might find a place in history as a real-time creative hallmark.
Posted
on June 7, 2011, 4:12 AM,
by jfriedman,
under Paul Kos.
Kinetic Ice Flow, 1969, Ink on Chrome coat paper
10” x 8 1/2” (paper) 18” x 16” (framed). Image courtesy of the gallery.
San Francisco’s Gallery Paule Anglim is showing Paul Kos’s latest creations—video projections on canvas—along with some works that date back to the 1960s. You can find my review of the exhibition in Critics’ Picks section on ARTFORUM website.
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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
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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.
