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March 2010
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Unspecific Specificities: Objects at Thierry Goldberg
by Joseph Akel March 30, 2010
Judd first coined the term “specific objects” in reference to structures that were neither paintings nor sculptures, but rather objects that existed liminally between the two. In the 1965 essay bearing Judd’s neologism as its title, we find a desire to transform the art-object into a self-sufficient creation and also to eliminate any factor interfering with the physical qualities of the art-object’s composite materials. Judd himself would claim, “[a] shape, a volume, a surface is something in itself.” Radically rethinking the Hegelian concept of artistic origination, Judd in essence argued for a new creative paradigm in which the artistic-object was created not through the alteration and synthesis of material, but in its temporal and spatial reinterpretation.
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Who’s Afraid of Robert Moses?
by Margaret Eby March 29, 2010
Moses emerges as a kind of urban-studies super-villain, the tyrannical, automobile-friendly Goliath to Jacobs’ pedestrian-defending David. This is Disney movie stuff: the scrappy, bespectacled community advocate versus the big-government, cigar-chomping transportation boss. His policies are to blame for the city’s decline into near-bankruptcy; his eventual defeat by bands of Jacobs-inspired grassroots planners the reason for New York’s revival since the 1970s.
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Post-Soviet Traumas: Interview with Yevgeniy Fiks
by Idiom March 25, 2010
The big next project is on Alisa Zinov’evna Rosenbaum, who is better known in the US as Ayn Rand. I’m attempting to illustrate her novels using images from Stalin’s Socialist Realism. Rand’s imagery is hyper-romantic, monumental and heroic. Very similar to the Socialist Realist formula, if you think about it. The difference is of course that while in Socialist Realism, it’s the Worker who is heroic, while in Rand’s texts it’s the Industrialist. Aside from that it’s uncanny how similar the two styles are.
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Art, Theft, History: The Art of the Steal
by Alice Gregory March 23, 2010
The partisanship surely lends the film urgency, but it also prevents a fair discussion of the political rubric, which here seems particularly hypocritical. Mr. Barnes purchased his art according to his own set of aesthetic sensibilities, which were undeniably passionate. But one also walks away with the nagging suspicion that his connoisseurship was inflected with healthy doses of greed and revenge – he bought this art so that his enemies could not. Indeed, ostentation and competition always have and always will determine much of the purchasing of major collectors – just attend the contemporary art auctions in May to see hedge fund managers dueling it out with Russian oligarchs. It can’t really be all about the art.
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Easily Assimilated: Jann Wenner, David Geffen, and the Capitalism of the Closet
by Sam Biederman March 19, 2010
So, twenty years on, is there a significance to the shared sexuality of these captains of media, or is it just biography? I don’t know if gayness can ever just be background. In our overheated culture, sexual preference is central to personality—particularly when it’s so closely guarded. Successful people who choose to remain in the closet are necessarily excellent adapters. The closet is a hothouse specially designed to chameleons. It creates extreme extroversion, which allowed both men to be so flexible, and so eager to be a part of what was happening next. Wenner and Geffen had a choice between being in with the in crowd or being out of the closet.
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Ecstatic at St. Ceilia’s
by Daniel Pearce March 17, 2010
Janos Stone’s I Never Thought I Would Meet Someone Like You, located at the other end of the hallway, explores an ecstasy patently prohibited in a convent, and was among my favorite pieces in the show. Relegated to a small closet is a sculpture of a nude male, almost three feet tall, Herculean, anonymous, well-endowed, with a wispy tangle of pubic hair made from hot glue. Three discrete sets of images are projected upon different regions of this tabula rasa, resulting in a sort of “exquisite corpse” by way of Tony Oursler.
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A Portrait of Bureaucracy in Twelve Parts; Seventeen Moments
by Greg Afinogenov March 12, 2010
Viewed in this way, the film’s notion of bureaucracy and institutional structure appears quite unconventional. In the classic Weberian model, bureaucracy is characterized by meritocratic values, impersonal legal norms, and a particular kind of instrumental rationality; according to popular stereotype, bureaucracies are staffed by faceless functionaries and prize process over results. Yet here, the bureaucracy is defined precisely by the personal relationships that subsist between its employees. Its fault is not that it is too abstract or too by-the-book. Quite the opposite: bureaucratic politics in Seventeen Moments of Spring is quintessentially narrow-minded and myopic. It sins, in short, by refusing engagement with abstract questions.
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Eclectic Armory
by Jessica Loudis March 8, 2010
Among these, a personal favorite was John Reynold’s “1001 Nights,” a DIY-style staircase whose 1,001 cardboard cubes featured lines from the Scheherazade collection on one side, and excerpts from Robert Fisk’s “The Great War for Civilisation” on the other. (One block read “The land of the Persians” on one side, and “The Green Zone” on the other). In an inadvertent act of irony, the piece was only several booths away from Reed Seifer’s “Spray to Forget”: a performance-cum-design project that hawked “a beneficial editor for one’s consciousness” at the unbeatable price of $25 a bottle. Surprisingly, “Spray to Forget” wasn’t the exhibition’s lone conceptual work, either: at Cape Town’s Michael Stevenson gallery, free manicures were offered to anybody in need; and later in the afternoon, a small brass band took up residency next to the aforementioned cow.
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This Better Be Decent: Interview with Ann Liv Young
by Idiom March 5, 2010
Even when I was little I can even remember doing somewhat provocative things. One episode comes to mind that certainly wasn’t filmed but was definitely a performance, though I guess a more site-specific, ephemeral one. My 8th grade class went on a field trip to an alligator river to go canoeing and I found a way to jump or fall into the water. I’m still not really sure which it was. I think it was pretend to fall but jump. There were alligators – not sure why 8th graders were canoeing in water with alligators but whatever – and it was such a big to-do. I then inspired many other people to jump into the water and it was mayhem. I don’t remember exactly what happened. It was like the work spread and on different field trips everyone was jumping out of their canoe.
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Hypochondria and Other Pleasantries
by Idiom March 2, 2010
The modern sensitive genius is not preoccupied with his physical health, but rather with his mental health. These are the ones quick to self-diagnose (I’m so OCD, I’m so ADD), and turn quickly to therapy, or, more often, pharmaceuticals – occasionally for good reason, though often not. Contemporary literature, while lacking in bedridden misanthropes, is full of headcases.
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