May 20, 2010
Like Images… but, you know, ending with “-ry” instead of “-s”
When we think of still lifes, we think of paintings that have a certain atmosphere or ambience. My still life paintings have none of those qualities, they just have pictures of certain things that are in a still life, like lemons and grapefruits and so forth. It’s not meant to have the usual still life meaning.
–Roy Lichtenstein.
Roy Lichtenstein
Still Lifes
Gagosian
555 W 24th St (at 11th)
New York NY 10011 [map]
212 / 741-1111
May 8, 2010 – July 30, 2010
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May 4, 2010
More on the Images (below), as well as several new ones; as always, too much, too much. But seriously, how often do you see something like this.
Hyères, France, 1932 / Magnum
First of all, the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at MoMA is really quite remarkable, and I echo Kottke’s rave review (he mentions the image above, which was the first of many that caught my eye).
What he excelled at was seeing things in a different way from most other people.
–A Father of Modern Photography: A Hunter and His Prey, The Economist, April 15 2010
The retrospective has a personal resonance on several levels: I’ve become increasingly interested in photography, journalism and photojournalism in the past couple years; his photographs of early and mid-century China are vaguely nostalgic (probably because I recently spent a couple months living in Beijing with my grandparents, who lived through it); and I recognized HCB’s portrait of Sartre from a book cover.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Discovered while eating a turkey hoagie and contemplating the meaning of life at a roadside stand. Also, admit it: he’s cute as a goddamn bug!
–Mike Sacks, Famous Philosophers and How They Were First Discovered,
McSweeney’s, May 2010
(More on HCB at Vanity Fair via 3qd.)
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Liu Bolin at Eli Klein: an excellent show despite the blue-chippy crowd at the opening. It might be more of the same and it probably has a certain loaded cultural content that can only be appreciated as someone who has recently spent time in China, but I would still say that the pieces in On Fire are visually compelling even without the political subtext.
His works have been communicated via emails, blogs, magazines and journals on a massive scale.
Liu Bolin’s earlier Hiding in the City photography series, in which he paints himself into the urban landscape, was inspired by the Chinese government’s demolition of the Suo Jiacun Artist Village in Beijing in 2006. He drew attention to great landmarks in China, both old and modern, while highlighting the lack of recognition which was paid to the citizens that built them. He portrayed the tragedy of the increasing insignificance of the individual in China as the government focused on presenting a modern commercial and industrial image. Rather than trying to fight, people attempted to hide and adapt to these forced changes.
–Liu Bolin’s On Fire press release & additional images via Eli Klein.
Click images for larger versions.
索家村 – Suo Jiacun [Artist's Village] (apparently, Liu Bolin reps it); 中国当代 – Contemporary China
折 – fold, discount, break, bend, snap, lose, roll over, convert, rebate, twist, double up, be convinced, turn back, turn over, lose money in business, change direction, be filled with admiration, suffer losses (Google Translate)
Dude's shirt (bottom right) matches the photograph...
Liu Bolin
On Fire
Eli Klein Fine Art
462 West Broadway (near Houston)
New York NY 10012 [map]
212 / 255-4388
April 30, 2010 – June 4, 2010
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I didn’t make it to the Scott Campbell opening, but it made it into other “emails, blogs, magazines and journals on a massive scale”: TBWE has a nice gallery of the work and the opening; OC has a gallery of the work itself; HB recap; Interview studio visit via HB; Terry stays relevant.
I did make it to Faile & BAST’s DELUXX FLUXX NYC opening (after stopping by Liu Bolin), but my photos didn’t turn out so well. Again, you can find more/better coverage elsewhere.
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Keith W. Bentley – “Cauda Equina” (1995-2007)
The New York Times has an interesting article on the kind of organic art that is currently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design.
Jan Fabre – "Skull" (2001); Fabián Peña – "The Impossibility of Storage for the Soul I (Self-Portrait)" (2007)
Of course, people have always used natural materials to make their art, for the simple reason that until recently nature was all they had, said Ellen Dissanayake, a scholar on the evolution of art [who notes that] from the beginning, art demanded transformation. “Even in hunter-gatherer societies, they tend to make their stuff look not organic,” she said. “When they’re painting, they’ll use geometric shapes, make a row of triangles or circles, as though to show humans are more than nature.”
…
As Ms. Dissanayake sees it, when people make art, or “artify,” they follow several “aesthetic principles,” whether they know it or not. “They simplify, repeat, exaggerate, elaborate and manipulate expectations,” she said.
–Natalie Angier, Of Compost, Molecules and Insects, Art Is Born,
The New York Times, May 3 2010
Billie Grace Lynn – "Mad Cow Motorcycle" (2008)
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I didn’t particularly regret missing the Shepard Fairey opening until I saw this:
Classic.
Animal / TWBE
More Shepard Fairey and many more after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »
April 29, 2010
Henri Cartier-Bresson's portrait of Sartre is currently on view in his retrospective at MoMA
As with his entire body of work, Sartre’s theory of imagination refers to—and, naturally, affirms—his ontology, in which he explores Husserl’s tenet that “all consciousness is consciousness of something” in the context of the ‘detotalized totality’ of being-in-itself / being-for-itself dualism. Sartre postulates an admittedly underdeveloped notion of image consciousness in his early work The Imaginary (1940), though these writings are largely eclipsed by his later political [viz. Marxist] proclivities; nevertheless, his theory of imagination is a sufficient foundation of a phenomenological aesthetics.
Notably, Sartre implies that the imaginary (or ‘irreal’) has the same ontological import as the real: if the real is never beautiful, it is simply because beauty is, by definition, imaginary, where imagination is a permanent possibility of consciousness. A painting, photograph, film, song, performance, etc., necessarily transcends perception—i.e. consciousness of oil on canvas, ink on paper, a projection, an actor, etc.—as an object of image consciousness, which overflows with the meaning of the portrait (etc.): a particular arrangement of brushstrokes or sounds immediately presents itself to consciousness as an image or melody. The abstract, then, is that which escapes us in experience qua perception; colors transcend pigment to conjure mood or geometry.
Hence, Images (in no particular order):
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January 8, 2010
I’ve been following Tomokazu Matsuyama for almost a year now, ever since he was featured on the cover of Antenna magazine (PDF) in anticipation of a solo show at Joshua Liner Gallery last March. He’s back on the radar for a group show at the same gallery (opening this Saturday), as well as an upcoming solo show at San Francisco’s Frey Norris Gallery in February.
Matsuyama fuses an overtly traditional Japanese style with a contemporary graffiti- and comic-inspired aesthetic, featuring highly stylized figures rendered as flattened forms filled with seemingly arbitrary patterns. He has appropriated the color field to constitute pseudo-woodcut figures (or perhaps vice versa) in a supersaturated patchwork, recklessly cutting and pasting fauvist and abstract expressionist tropes into interlocking shapes. The result is visually stunning with obvious reference points while remaining accessible, if not altogether pop—his arsenal of patterns includes ben-day dots, stripes (à la Stella and jungle cats alike), and plaid, not to mention organic splatters—which belies the autobiographical subtext of confusion over cultural identity and the sense of displacement.
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December 12, 2009
Tonight at Jonathan LeVine Gallery
A notable double bill opening in Chelsea tonight. I’ll have to check it out when I get back to NYC.
Audrey Kawasaki
Hajimari—A Prelude
&
James Marshall
And There Was War in Heaven
Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10011
December 12, 2009–January 9, 2010
Opening reception 7-9PM
Source: Jonathan LeVine Gallery via Arrested Motion
