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November 23, 2004
The weekend that was
Feeling a little MoMA-exhausted (BTW, I've updated the print reviews list), a friend of mine and I tracked down a weekend e-saver to Buffalo and Toronto for the weekend. As crazy as this sounds, well, it's probably as crazy as it sounds. The highlights:
The Albright-Knox, In Focus: Themes in Photography: Permanent collection shows are huge in the last year or two. (See the Gugg, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, MOCA, and on and on) This one, of photography in the A-K's collection, is awfully darn good.
Chelsea-ites will well-remember Jennifer Steinkamp's Dervish from her last show at Lehmann Maupin. (Check out that link -- it's QuickTime video from LM.) It was one of the best gallery shows I saw this year. The A-K bought it, and it's on view now. Dervish features an animated tree, projected on to a wall. It swings, it sways, it breathes, it's a ballet.
The A-K wasn't crowded on Saturday but there were a few people around. Two of them were a young woman and her mentally disabled elderly mother. They weren't exactly moving through the museum quietly -- the mother was raising a pretty good racket, but there wasn't a whole lot anyone could say, of course. Eventually, they got to the Steinkamp room.
They walked in pretty loudly, the mother complaining that her daughter had kicked her. But when she sat down and started watching Dervish, she turned silent. Almost immediately she began breathing in rhythm with the piece, picking up more quickly than I had that the tree's swinging movements were just about in time with slow (human) breathing. After leaving Dervish, the woman and her daughter continued to walk through the galleries. No more rackets.
The other highlight of the exhibit was a gallery of 14 of Cathy Opie's surfers-in-the-water photos. I've seen these photos in Opie's studio and in two galleries. In the A-K's old, long, narrow galleries, they looked transcendent, their color reminiscent of the glaze on old Asian ceramics.
University of Buffalo Art Gallery, Shutters: Let's see, the home university of the FBI's favorite artist, Steve Kurtz doing a show about surveillance... yup, that fits. The strongest work was by Philly artist James Johnson, discussed here by MANpal Roberta Fallon, and by Niels Bonde, who finds childish fun in surveillance cameras.
Art Gallery of Ontario, Modigliani: When I saw this show at the Jewish Museum, I thought it was about a C-minus. But at the AGO it has room to breathe, a few paintings have been added and all in all it's a much more pleasant show, even quite a good one. Still, a Modigliani retro sans sculpture? Hmmm.
Posted November 23, 2004 7:40 AM
