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July 2010
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Favorite Sun: Basquiat as “The Radiant Child”
by Alice Gregory July 30, 2010
It’s unclear whether Davis has edited her archival footage so as to exaggerate Basquiat’s charisma or whether Basquiat’s charisma is potent enough to redeem even most throwaway of reels. Regardless, you half-expect his charms to subsume his talent. To locate Basquiat’s genius in that paradox of personality would be a misstep though, and one that he would hate. In 1981, when Annina Nosei offered him a room underneath her SoHo gallery to use as a workspace, Basquiat’s career transitioned from street to studio. He takes deep offense, however, to an interviewer who jokingly refers to him as an artist “locked in a basement.” Basquiat, without a moment’s hesitation, responds that if he were white, he would be called an “artist in residence.”
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Other Halves, Lived: Lush Life on the Lower East Side
by Daniel Pearce July 29, 2010
Using a novel as a way of organizing artwork activates two curatorial impulses, both of which undergird much of the work on view here. The first is to focus on atmosphere, to address the novel’s setting and thematic index without offering any chunky narrative bits; conversely, there is an impulse to invoke plot points overtly, and to intimate the book’s arc for the viewers able to discern it. This balancing act isn’t easy, but it’s pursued by Lopez-Chahoud and Evans with remarkable grace.
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Experimental Geography at iCI
by Persis Singh July 23, 2010
The installation chronicles the journey of two people between almost identical latitudinal points; the only difference being that one holds an Israeli passport, while the other is a Palestinian citizen. Through meandering documentary footage and texts, which are split onto separate video projections and monitors, Multiplicity’s spatial experiment calls attention to the systems of control that create starkly different experiences based on constructs such as nationality, ethnicity and race.
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The Blues is Dead, Long Live the Blues: The Most Southern Weekend on Earth
by Margaret Eby July 22, 2010
Which is why The Oxford American, a Southern literary journal based in Arkansas, chose Clarksdale as the site for their weekend-long shindig, a convention/festival/editorial vacation on July 9th and 10th entitled “The Most Southern Weekend on Earth.” The hundred or so intrepid festival-goers who descended on downtown Clarksdale managed to book out all the hotels and swamp the afterhours juke joints. Most of the Southern Weekend events were staged at Ground Zero, a newer blues club with a carefully curated rundown look opened by Clarksdale native Morgan Freeman—most of the locals refer to it simply as “Morgan Freeman’s place.” Along with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Freeman has been instrumental in the marketing of Clarksdale as a Southern tourist spot—a piece of authentic blues history, still kicking, still accepting donations.
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Who’s Bad? The Kitsch Pop Surrealism of David LaChapelle
by Laila Pedro July 20, 2010
Once we start down the path of visual referents though, everything becomes tangled—If Michael is the Son and the bird the Holy Spirit, where is the third part of the Trinity, the Father? Is LaChapelle just messing around? Picking references at random? Is the impact of the Sacred Heart and Michael’s figure enough that the image doesn’t need to formalize its symbolism any further? This last option is, I think, the most palatable, because it acknowledges the preeminence of the pop in his photography. The other symbols are used, referenced, and cast aside— while the real power comes from top 40 Radio, not the Old Masters
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Shelf Life: Berlin at the End of History
by Greg Afinogenov July 16, 2010
These buildings, of course, no longer exist in their old context. Today, they function as tourist destinations, as members of a long list of “sights”—from concentration camps to dance clubs—that visitors to Berlin are expected to see. Yet something in them remains unsettled: as the Roter Saal reminds us, they exist as spaces out of joint with their time, subsisting uneasily as links to moments that are not simply outdated but, in effect, unassimilable. They provide us with an opportunity to question not only how the city copes with such irruptions of anachronism, but also the conditions of their apparent necessity. We need these places, but we don’t know why.
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Unguarded Affect: Leon Levinstein at the Met
by Jessica Loudis July 15, 2010
Levinstein’s photos recall the vibrancy of Robert Frank’s urban scenes and the unselfconsciousness of Walker Evans’ hidden-camera subway shots, but with elements of levity and the grotesque. He’s happy to trade unguarded expressions for the instant of surprise, to capture the shock of recognition when making eye contact with a stranger. As a result, Hipsters has the democratic feel of surfing the crowds during a New York summer.
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Art, #class: Interview with William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton
by Idiom July 13, 2010
I quickly realized they wanted my persona; drunk, coke-sniffing, womanizing douchebag, or some variation on that. I spoke to a few people who agreed it’d have been fun to watch me on the show, but none of them would do it themselves or think it would be beneficial for my art career. I also felt that they were undermining the ‘reality’ of the show by inviting artists to cut the line of the open call. In the end, I decided that D-list celebrity status was probably not going to do much for my art and that I am not smart enough to outwit a Bravo reality show crew or the producers. Plus, the Belgian actor I would’ve sent in my place for the audition was out of town that week.
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Memories and Images: Art and Documentary in Two Photography Shows
by Sam Biederman July 9, 2010
But as the show goes on and the subjects age, it becomes clear that some essential insight is missing here. The snapshots have very little to say that’s not beneath the surface. There’s no comment in their compositions, and no deeper personalities betrayed in the candid shots. These are, in fact, the pictures Ginsburg would have taken with his iPhone, had he had one, and he seems to know it. Like a Facebook user, he supplements the early photos with exuberant, handwritten comments in the margins as if to provide meaning that’s not apparent in the image. Just because these photos were taken by an artist doesn’t make them art. These are documentary images of the lives of great artists, artifacts better suited for display at the Library of Congress than at the National Gallery.
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Parallel Lives: Ayn Rand in Illustration at Winkleman
by Yulia Tikhonova July 7, 2010
Fiks brings together excerpts from Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and images found in Soviet texts printed in the 1930s. Attempting to draw a parallel between the monumental style of Socialist Realism and Rand’s aesthetics of Objectivism, both of which blossomed in the same decade, Ayn Rand in Illustrations suggests an unexpected resonance between her ideas and Stalinist doctrine, or at least between their respective popular expressions.
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