Ars longa, divorce brutale.
I rode the subway. To see Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection that is. To have stepped onto the curb at Acquavella gallery, 59th just off 5th, and paid a cab fare would have been, well, tasteless. The Sculls have long been positioned as the Ur collectors of contemporary art in New York. […]
Jennifer Cohen at Salon 94
JENNIFER COHEN at Salon 94 Apparently, ballet originated as a dance interpretation of fencing. And Jennifer Cohen’s clever merging of ballet imagery (she has a background in dance) and sculptural tropes is indeed a series of feints and parries. At first glance, this body of work seems simply to valorize and memorialize, with “souvenirs” such […]
Lean at Nicole Klagsbrun.
In the end Bas Jan Ader is most remembered for disappearing. Before that it was falling. Off a roof or into a canal, from Los Angeles to London to Amsterdam he would fall. It all had a Buster Keaton hapless, sad sack quality to it. And indeed one of my favorite of his video pieces […]
The Armory Show
Top of the wish list? That the Armory show would just go away. Alas, you dreamer it will not. At 12 years of age it is a snotty adolescent poised to outlive many of us. Indeed with 243 galleries and many thousands of art works smeared over two piers (with an asthma inducing climb from […]
Clarie Fontaine at Reena Spaulings
Foot hits floor. The whoosh of a vacuum cleaner startles. The vacuum is hooked up to the gallery gas meter. Writ large, “Greve humaine” or “human strike” is spelled out with over 50,000 unburned matches. The matches are coated with flame retardant. Checkmate. Alarming possibility of gas explosion is deflected by the reassuring deferral of […]
John Miller at Metro Pictures
“Middle of the Day” is a long-term project. John Miller has been taking pictures of the middle of the day since 1994. They document Miller’s location between the hours of noon and two –wherever he may be as a typically nomadic professional artist. These hours were apparently chosen as the “down time” of our contemporary […]
Doug Biggert at White Columns
The romance of the road has been an American cultural staple for much of the last century. In its romantic coinage it has been less young frontiersman going west to settle the for spacious land and more drifter, beatnik or hippie aimlessly ricocheting from place to place. In this latter guise the road has also […]
Adverse Possession: NEVER CAN SAY GOODBYE at the former Tower Records
“Gonna ring a few bells in your ear / ring a few bells / oh yeah right now / baby don’t you know it’s in your ear” Jessie Hill, “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” While back and forth is ongoing around the advance of digital media and connected issues around authorship and ownership — copyright very […]
Helio Oiticica at Galerie Lelong
Helio Oiticica is said to have announced that we should ignore his work from the 1950’s. He was speaking from a heady place. The late 1960’s, where his oeuvre had a retrospective contour shaped by the Bolides –boxes that were a sort of hybrid of Cornell and Fluxus– robes and coats for performances (Parangoles), and […]
Primary Atmospheres at David Zwirner
No smog here, at David Zwirner’s current show that is: “Primary Atmospheres: work from California 1960-1970”. The show itself is a kind of two-for dovetailing as it does with the preceding show of Dan Flavin’s work, who even though he was not a California artist always seemed as though he could have been. The gallery […]
