Artopia

Fritz Haeg: Animal Estates (detail) Quantifications Don't believe everything you read; the Whitney Biennial isn't all bad. In fact, as a crystal ball, it is cause for hope. But before we start reading tea leaves, we can indulge in quantifications. Some of us tally women. There are 28 out of 81 artists by my count. On the other hand, some search out artists of color. Some list painters. And there are legions who quantify regions: 29 from the West Coast. In regard to regions, do artists who have … [Read more...]

Carolee Schneemann: Portrait Partials What Feminism Was "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" is a chance to take a look at the pioneering days of feminism in art, from 1965 to 1980. This huge survey originated at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and is now at P.S. 1 - MoMA, Long Island City, to May 12. Capturing the raucous, contentious, feminist diversity, Connie Butler (who in '05 moved from MOCA to MoMA, where she is now curator of drawings) demonstrates that much of the art by … [Read more...]

Other Worlds The art world can too easily be seen as monolithic. What is bought and sold as art and makes a profit is the definition of art. Until quite recently, linear, evolutionary lineups were routinely used in exhibition catalogs and critical writings to provide a cursory justification of assumed historical outcomes. This reverse engineering was applied not only to formalist abstraction -- where the ploy was coined -- but could be jiggered for other styles, even the Dada/Surrealist one: … [Read more...]

Francis Alÿs, Fabiola (detail) . Divorce in Art First multiple Santas in the last Artopia posting and now multiple Fabiolas! But multiplicity wasn't invented yesterday, nor by Andy Warhol when he multiplied his Campbell's soup cans, Marilyns, and Jackies. Think instead of the myriad figures in a Tibetan tanka. Or those dying genres, photo-booth samples and sheets of postage stamps. Admittedly the photo-booth samples are usually images of many different grimacing customers or one-off strips … [Read more...]

Santa Babies One Saturday before Christmas after my merry rounds uptown, searching here and there in galleries for art rather than looking at art, I was on my way back to my East Village lair, when.... I was treated to the spectacle of multiple Santas. They were hanging out on historic St. Mark's Place. This uncomely but vital boulevard, once the home of the Dom and Andy Warhol's Plastic Floating Inevitable, is now a battleground between bustling tattoo parlors (Whatever Tattoo, Dots NY, et … [Read more...]

As Far As The Mind Can See While sauntering through the fourth floor of the Whitney ("Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE," 945 Madison Avenue, through February 10), I was jotting down words in my notebook. The person I was with said: I can tell which ones you like by where you stop and write down the titles. You like the early pieces that involve something physical. Right. My favorite: A 36" x 36" removal to the lathing of support wall or plaster or wallboard from a wall (1968); closely … [Read more...]

Right of Spring Drawing on a wide range of source material for movement and gestures -- from the BBC's dramatization Riot at the Rite, to Sarah Bernhardt, Robin Williams, Groucho Marx, and Yvonne Rainer -- this dance attempts to invoke the passion and furor that accompanied the premiere of the original at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Paris, May 29, 1913. -- 'RoS Indexical' program notes Yvonne Rainer's new dance piece, RoS Indexical --- RoS is short for Rite of Spring --- was at the Hudson … [Read more...]

..............REVIEWS OF MARTIN PURYEAR, ALAN SHIELDS, MORIKO MORI, AND ALAN SARET..... Martin Puryear, Old Mole, 1985. Lumber Art The Martin Puryear retrospective at MoMA (11 West 53rd St., to Jan. 14, 2008) presents a panoply of engaging sculptures. The large-scale pieces in the second-floor atrium conquer that unfriendly, gigantic-broom-closet space. If you look up, you normally feel you need to avoid bird-droppings; if you look down from the sixth-floor walkway, you want to jump. … [Read more...]

Will there be a rebirth of the experimental film? Or will historical avant-garde devices merely continue to be assimilated toward narrative ends? In any case, we need some history. Most film writing is limited to promoting the latest blockbusters; most works about underground films are out of print; film-hip fans are over the hill or work as clerks in video stores. But while we await free downloads of the universal movie library, here come the DVDs. You are the projectionist. The film is a book. … [Read more...]

Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1989. One of two Ektacolor prints. Sold for $1,248,000.00 at a Christie's auction in 2005. Someday My Prints Will Come Sometimes the best work of even a very good artist needs to be underlined, leaving the uninspired trials and repetitions off to one side. Many careers would profit from pruning. But by whom? We like to think that artists know best, but this has not always proven to be the case. Just listen to what artists say about other artists, whom they … [Read more...]