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August 2010
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Reflections on the Evolution in Russia
by Greg Afinogenov August 31, 2010
In early August, as the fires were taking on truly catastrophic proportions, a Russian LiveJournal user groused about how his village’s fire-protection system, set up under the Soviets, was dismantled by the “democrats” and replaced with a non-working telephone. The general editor of “Ekho Moskvy,” a well-known liberal radio station, forwarded the post to Putin. The prime minister posted a comment in response:
Dear User,
Today, at the end of the working day, breathing, like all Muscovites, the smoke from the fires burning around Moscow, I was very pleased to read your evaluation of the situation with the forest fires in Central Russia. […] You are, of course, a wonderfully sincere and direct person. You’re just great. And you are, unquestionably, a gifted author. If you were to earn your living by writing, you could live, like V. I. Lenin’s favorite author—A. M. Gorky—on Capri. But even there you could not feel yourself secure. Because both in Europe and the USA natural cataclysms on the same scale are being confronted. […] Despite all the problems and difficulties, I hope that you and I will be able to get to retirement successfully. -
Art Sprawl with Chickens: On the Berlin Biennale
by Jessica Loudis August 25, 2010
For my money, the Biennale’s most impressive—and subtle—works were sculptural, and among these, interventions into the vast exhibition spaces. In Klub Europa German artist Hans Schabus placed a wooly mammoth and decapitated stegosaurus in the middle of the Oranienplatz’s narrow courtyard, making it difficult for viewers to catch the entirety of the visual joke without leaning out the window to see it. With Das Haus Bleibt Still (the house stays still) Adrian Lohmüller set up a Chinese-water-torture piping system that slowly dripped onto a salt block, creating crystal formations that melted into a nearby bed.
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Art and Pedgogy: Interview with Pablo Helguera
by Idiom August 24, 2010
I believe that institutions are nothing but collections of individuals. If you would agree with that, then you would need to agree that because one can be critical with oneself, of course there could be criticality within institutions too. It’s true that one lacks perspective, but at the same time internal debate is key to informing our decisions–which also applies to individuals and institutions. Otherwise we would just behave erratically being told what to do by a wide random group of opinions.
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Imaging Sculpture: The Orginal Copy at MoMA
by Laila Pedro August 16, 2010
There are areas of the exhibition dedicated to giants of the form, notably Rodin and Brancusi. Curiously, these works seem to be more about explicitly celebrating sculptors than photographers. The photographs of Rodin’s work are astonishing. Though not taken by the sculptor himself they are carefully staged and controlled, framing the light hitting the bodies in a way that seem to breathe an uncanny whiff of life into the bronze figures. Counterintuitively, the mechanical process of photography seems to bring Rodin’s human figures closer to us, to humanize them through some uncanny visual alchemy.
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Good Old-Fashioned Sex: Gay Little Magazines
by Sam Biederman August 10, 2010
Indeed, the physicality of the magazines—that you can buy them, hold them, and keep them—creates a closer relationship between reader and content. When I was preparing to write this piece, I found myself walking out of St. Mark’s Bookstore holding a plain brown-paper bag full of gay rags. At that moment I felt connected to a gay past that I had never experienced: the formerly common experience of sliding a few bills across the cover of a dirty magazine and then scurrying home.
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Hard Data and Hindsight: Interview with R. Luke DuBois
by Idiom August 5, 2010
By training, I’m a composer, and so I have a different understanding of how information, technology, and politics intersect. Music is the original ‘information art’, in that at its essence music is a stream of abstract information ‘sonified’ through performance. Similarly, unless you’re singing music you’ve improvised, a capella, unamplified, and outdoors, you’re using technology to make music. Notation is literacy, spaces are architecture, instrument design, amplification, recording, broadcast: all are technology. And music, in its traditional role as a ubiquitous, ancillary art form (you usually appreciate music as an accompaniment to something else), is inherently political, as the tasks to which music are coupled infuse it with a contextual agency and subtext that you really can’t avoid.
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Politics and Other Ghosts: Sharon Hayes spins “Haunted”
by Jessica Loudis August 3, 2010
Hayes’ set was part of the Guggenheim’s Haunted show—an examination of how photography and video have responded to new forms of documentation over the past half century. Assuming viewers walk straight up the spiral, the show opens on Warhol and closes on Tacita Dean, with a scattered theoretical survey of post-‘60s art in the middle. Focusing on photography—the imperfect marriage of ghost and machine—the curators posit that in the 21st century media landscape, images negotiate the collective experience of history and memory, and for better or worse, can be remade at the artist or viewer’s volition.
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Margot Wade’s Cabinet of Curiosities
by Margaret Eby August 2, 2010
But how do you construct a museum without the attendant effects of museumification? Birmingham-based artist Margot Wade discovered an elegant solution to this paradox: Keep living in the art. Wade, a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke, is turning her grandparents’ house into a museum, one that’s partially dedicated to her grandparents’ impressive art collection and partially a monument to her family history.
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