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May 2010
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Night Fishing at Thierry Goldberg
by Laila Pedro May 26, 2010
This is intelligent, sensitive, multi-layered painting, and it follows itself to its logical conclusion: the painting literally comes out of its frame, tumbling from the severed lines of wood out onto the gallery floor. The use of abstraction leads the painting to the unknowable spaces, where it must, necessarily, transcend the fixed space of painting by literally falling from its frame
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Limited Editions: Shep Fairey at Deitch
by Alice Gregory May 22, 2010
Usually, if something disseminates to a mainsteam audience, it’s actually just really good.
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Bringing Out the Dead at the New York Historical Society
by Margaret Eby May 20, 2010
The New York Historical Society initially seems like an odd place to commemorate the achievements of the Grateful Dead, rubbing shoulders with artifacts of the American Revolution and John James Audubon’s watercolors. But browsing through the Society’s exhibit of items from the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, it begins to make sense. The Dead’s roving entourage included a number of graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and filmmakers that rode along with the equipment crew, effectively creating a mobile artists commune.
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Apologies, Concessions, and Wild Gander at BRIC Arts
by Lauren DiGiulio May 18, 2010
What happens when we confront certain unavoidable aspects of history? How does our relationship to the past impact the way we negotiate the complexities of trans-cultural identity? Two shows at BRIC Arts Media search for reconciliation among the shifting landscapes of compromise and cultural dislocation.
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Show Queen: The Musical Sublimation of Gay Romance
by Sam Biederman May 14, 2010
The musicians and lyricists behind some of the greatest works of musical theater were often gay men who wrote their own repression into their work. Using heterosexual characters, they expressed an experience of love that was interrupted or destroyed by prejudice. Three cornerstones of the genre, Show Boat (1927), South Pacific (1949), and West Side Story (1957), all turn on interracial romances, which were still subject to public debate when the pieces were written. West Side Story’s climactic “Somewhere,” in which Bernstein’s star-crossed lovers imagine that “there’s a place for us” must have reverberated beyond the theater for the gay men in his audience.
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Materialism and Art-criticism: A Response to Ben Davis’ “9.5 Theses on Art and Class”
by Greg Afinogenov May 13, 2010
Were Engels to read Ben Davis’s “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” written and circulated in early 2010, he would no doubt be shocked out of his complacency. He would immediately recognize, of course, the phrases that he and Marx had coined so long ago: “working class,” “relations of production,” “class interests.” Something of the style would also seem faintly like his own. Indeed, to Engels’s undead eyes the strangest expression would probably be “middle-class,” used by Davis, it seems, in place of “petty bourgeois.” Almost everything would be familiar—and yet everything would be strange.
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The Aura of Literature in the Age of Its Virtual Dissemination
by Daniel Pearce May 11, 2010
Walter Benjamin’s essay has supplied the e-book-averse with the cryptic core of their relative Ludditism.
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Today in New Orleans
by Jessica Loudis May 10, 2010
While the word “Katrina” is rarely, if ever, mentioned in Today, the storm’s fallout is so deeply embedded in the lives of the protagonists that it hardly merits reference.
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Allyson Vieira at Laurel Gitlen
by Peter J. Russo May 7, 2010
The centerpiece of Ozymandias—the ancient Greek name for Ramesses II—is If I was a…but then again, a one-ton, set of eighteen white slabs, each humanly scaled and evenly distributed throughout the main gallery. Vieira’s work invites quick assumptions about its rough-hewn construction. Passing through this formerly unified mass allows the viewer a closer inspection of each monolith’s variously poured, sawed, and incised surfaces, a record of their own making.
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What Matter’s Most at Exit Art
by Laila Pedro May 5, 2010
“Political” art, tends, for me, to violate an essential philosophical principle, eloquently articulated by the French literary theorist and poet Édouard Glissant: “dire, sans dire, tout en disant,” “to say, without saying, while saying.” That is to say, the best works of art are allusive rather than explicit; they suggest rather than indicating.
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