ArtSeen
A Note on Boteros Abu Ghraib
By Robert C. MorganIn his book, The Rebel, Albert Camus asked the question of how it is possible to live in a world in which we know that women and children are being tortured. His question was unrelated to taking sides. It was not about which military regime was better or more moral than the other. Instead Camus was asking how can we face the human condition in our everyday lives knowing that such atrocities exist.
Report from London
By Sherman SamRepresentation and narrative seem to be the pervasive components of our current visual culture. Yet the idea of describing reality and telling its stories can take many forms, from painting to printmaking, that have served story-telling very well in the past. And now with installation, a form whose verisimilitude can reach greater heights of realism than most, we seem to have attained a state of hyperreality.
In Conversation
Mike Womack with Ben La Rocco
On the occasion of Mike Womacks first one-person exhibition at ZieherSmith Gallery on West 25th Street in Chelsea, the Brooklyn Rails Ben La Rocco visited the artist in his Clinton Hill studio to discuss his work.
Joyce Robins & Harry Roseman
By John YauJoyce Robins ceramic abstractions and Harry Rosemans simulations of drapery, curtains and napkins can be said to occupy the historical category of bas-relief.
Slater Bradley: The Abandonments
By Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle and Miyuki TsushimaHow many home movies do we need of some wide-eyed wannabes pilgrimage to Jim Morrisons Pére Lachaise grave? In _The Abandonments, six new, regrettable, fortunately forgettable, video shorts looking like unclaimed footage flooding a tourists fast photo developers bin, Slater Bradley brings his butter knife to a gunfight.
Ray Johnson En Rapport
By Valery OisteanuThree things happened that year, recalled Ray Johnson of 1968. I was involved in a street fight, muggers tried to stab me in the back, and Andy Warhol was shot. The city suddenly seemed to be a disaster, and I decided to move out. So came the impetus for Ray to resettle in Long Island, as recalled in The Locust Valleyer, Lightworks magazine, no. 22, 2000.
MEGA ZINES
By Jonah Owen LambDrew Barrymore stared up at me, saying nothing. She looked elegant, her hair up in a bun, her eyes glowing behind dark mascara. She was perfect, except that her head was about the size of a giant pumpkin.
George Ortman
By Jim LongIf you weight a piece of string and submerge it in a glass of water saturated with dissolved sugar, over a period of hours youll see crystals, rock candy, start to form on the string. In the late 1940s, American artists adopted, at least metaphorically, a similar approach to making art.
Pierre Klossowski and Hans Bellmer
By David MarkusPierre Klossowski and Hans Bellmer are two twentieth century figures whose controversial artistic production has limited their acceptance by the general public especially when compared with the international reputations of their immediate contemporaries. Paradoxically, Klossowski (1905-2001) was the consummate insider.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila
By Thomas MicchelliEija-Liisa Ahtilas The Wind (2006), a 14-minute, three-screen installation at the Museum of Modern Art, is a disappointment. Not so much for its filmmaking craft but for the tantalizing possibilities it raises yet falls short of realizing.
Keith Mayerson
By Roger WhiteKeith Mayerson got noticed quickly for an early drawing suite, winningly titled Pinocchio the Big Fag, as well as for his collaboration with author Dennis Cooper on the graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
By Hrag VartanianHiroshi Sugimotos seems at the brink of a brave new world in his latest exhibition, Colors of Shadow, which is also his first foray into color photographythough looking at these virtually monochromic images youd hardly know it. What he presents in this show shoots straight to the origins of art and hints at a new direction for the artist.
SCOTT MALBARUN White Light
By Craig OlsonOne of the revitalizing shots to abstract painting has been the continual critique of its legitimacy by practitioners within the field of painting itself. This dialogue has created a healthy and necessary antagonism that has pushed abstraction well into the twenty-first century, despite the many claims of its imminent death.
Nancy Rubins
By Jill ConnerSet nearby the warehouse waterfront of Queens that is slowly being transformed into new urban developments, the SculptureCenter presents two exhibitions of equally grand scale that address pointed critiques of our postindustrial era. A monumental sculptural installation by Nancy Rubins and a large group exhibition titled Denial Is A River explore our collective iconography as it has been built up by the mass market throughout the last decade through physical and intellectual deconstruction, while suggesting new meanings with wit and cynicism.
Eric Guzman
By James KalmThe objects produced by Erik Guzman leave this viewer in a conundrum. Are they machines that want to be sculptures or sculptures that want to be machines? The Futurists theorized about sculpture that would incorporate mechanical motion and celebrate modern life.
Paul Kolker
By Lynn LoveFlu season is upon useven in Chelsea, where the exhibition H5n1 flu over the cuckoos nest at Atelier Paul Kolker pokes fun at our annual free-ranging, collective fear of avian influenza, the notorious, but not-yet-transmissible-among-humans, virus that could spark a global epidemic larger than that of 1918,
Marietta Hoferer
By Jennifer RileyDont let the initial charms of the quiet, reductive logic of Marietta Hoferers drawings fool you. This artist may be a maximalist in a minimalist guise.
Barry Le Va
By Ben La RoccoBarry Le Va’s current show at Mary Boone is restrained to the point of discomfort. Large chunks of cast resin and rectilinear segments of aluminum are positioned around the gallery according to an impenetrable logic laid out in drawings on view in the gallery’s small rear office. Telltale signs of pointed decision-making are everywhere apparent but the show is obstinate in its refusal to reveal the reasons for those decisions.
Neil Welliver: The Absent Painter
By Jeremy SiglerEven when he was living, the maverick American Realist painter Neil Welliver (1929-2005) could have been considered an absentee artist. Absent from New York gallery openings, absent from the painting department that he chaired at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1989, absent from the discourse of generational rivals such as Alex Katz, and, in a way, hauntingly absent even from his own paintings.
Bix Lye & Jan Mulder
By Shane McAdamsIn an ambitious and unlikely collaboration between the Williamsburg galleries Sideshow and Holland Tunnel, artists Jan Mulder and Bix Lye initially seem as oddly paired as the hosting galleries themselves. Lyes smooth, streamlined sculptures stand in stark contrast to Mulders atmospheric, washy landscape-inspired abstract paintings. Likewise, Holland Tunnels famously intimate space is an almost comical partner to Sideshows spacious interior.
Lost Gravity the Photographs and Performances of Li Wei
By Ellen PearlmanLi Wei, a short and stocky man, clambered up a metal ladder ten feet, sticking his head deep into a hole in the wall. Two somber assistants using wire pulleys clipped mountaineering carabiners to his waist and feet, causing him to dangle horizontally, his hovering body a metaphor for pre-Olympic Chinaheadless, suspended, and hurtling towards an unknown future.