Various venues, Portland, Oregon
In the April issue of frieze, Dan Fox prefaced his review of the 2013 Carnegie International with some observations about the perplexing lack of consensus around what, today, a biennial is actually for. ‘Portland2014’ is the third in this current formulation (the Oregon Biennial ran from 1949 until 2006) but its agenda and format are still, evidently, very much up for grabs. Read the rest of this entry »
Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles
John Tweddle is one of those artists who never really fitted into any scene he found himself in. The astonishing, eccentric body of work that he has produced during his lifetime may be both the cause and effect of this condition. Born in 1938, he left rural Kentucky to go to art school in Kansas City and Atlanta, then moved to New York at the end of the 1960s. A decade later, appalled by the commercial art world, he turned his back on the city and moved back South. Today he lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which seems about right for an artist of his bent. Read the rest of this entry »
Marc Foxx, Los Angeles
About three years ago, something unexpected happened in Frances Stark’s art. After two decades of making work about herself––about her anxieties and obsessions, her identity crises and motivational struggles––she started making work about other people. Stranger still, her subjects became, in most instances, young men of color. Read the rest of this entry »
Aran Cravey, Los Angeles
Artie Vierkant, Air filter and method of constructing same 18, 2013, US Patent 8118919 B1, aluminum, charcoal fiberglass mesh, organza, 68 x 32 in
Any post-Postmodernists who dared hope that contemporary art had become ‘post-movement’ must have been dispirited, in recent years, to see the tag ‘post-Internet’ growing in ubiquity. Art magazines have done their best to nail down a definition of this vague field, in some cases recruiting the same curators who are bold enough to try to identify its principal characteristics and exponents in group exhibitions. Read the rest of this entry »
Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
Math Bass was known, until recently, principally as a performance artist, although she has long made sculptures and drawings. Her performances – which, I admit, belong to a genre that I find rather pretentious – often combine solemnly delivered poetry or song with passages of improvised group activity. Dogs and Fog, an event Bass presented at Overduin & Kite in 2011, convened dry ice machines, cinder blocks and 20 or so dogs who padded amongst the crowd. A circle of singers, the artist among them, intoned in harmony a song written by the artist. The dogs seemed uninterested. Read the rest of this entry »
François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles
Joel Kyack is an artist not naturally given to subtlety. His last, maniacally overhung exhibition at François Ghebaly Gallery, in 2011, was titled Escape to Shit Mountain, and it included a large banner painted with the words ‘Kill all endings’. Old Sailors Never Die, his latest outing and only the second exhibition to take on Ghebaly’s new and enormous gallery space, reveals some remarkable and uncharacteristic moments of restraint. Read the rest of this entry »
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Large-scale historical shows, when done in a certain way, can be intellectual steamrollers. A museum exhibition is a powerful rhetorical device; gallery after gallery of judiciously selected aesthetic material beside didactic wall texts can make a particular hypothesis or observation seem indisputable, or a historical moment appear satisfyingly coherent.
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Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Some art works are so porous towards meaning, so sensitive to atmospheric conditions and the fingerprints of discourse, that we must be careful what words we use on them. Language can indelibly tarnish objects. Liz Larner’s best sculptures have always been hard to talk about with sufficient delicacy, none more so than the ceramic tablets which dominated her seventh solo exhibition at Regen Projects since 1989. Read the rest of this entry »
Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles
There are two opposing critical interpretations of the aerial panorama. Looking at the earth from above is, on the one hand, a way to see patterns, systems or gestalts not visible at close quarters – the behaviour of crowds, for instance, or the geological growth of cities. This distanced perspective might also, conversely, be considered generalising, flattening and simplifying. From afar, everyone looks the same. People move like water or gas, and the built environment appears biological. Do these similes point to profound universal truths, or are they delusions? Personally, I lean towards the latter view. Read the rest of this entry »
by Ilsa Colsell
At first, the staff of the Islington Public Library rather looked forward to the discovery of another book, turned in by a confused patron who had realised, too late, that something was terribly wrong with its cover or flyleaf blurb. On the front of The Great Tudors, Henry VIII’s face had been mysteriously replaced by that of a chimpanzee. The plot synopsis inside the jacket of Dorothy L. Sayers’ potboiler Clouds of Witness concludes by suggesting that the reader “have a good shit”. When, in late 1961, complaints began to increase in frequency and fervour, the chief librarian decided that something must be done. Read the rest of this entry »
