As you approach the entrance to the gallery, you can hear Law & Order: Crimes Scenes before you can see anything. It is only after you enter the gallery from the hallway that you immediately encounter six television screens, each continuously playing and replaying the teasers for six different episodes. A couple walks down the […]
Art
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It looks like art, but is it?
Recently opened at the George Eastman House are two new exhibitions that, although not intended to be viewed together, offer interesting insights into thequagmire of contemporary art. Law & Order: Crime Scenes is a cross-examination of crime-scene photography from TV; it investigates perceptions of illusion and reality (see next week’s review of that exhibit). The […]
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Burying and resurrecting visual pleasure
Ever since the invention of photography, the “death” of painting (and by association, drawing) has been proclaimed. Every time new forms of representation are announced, the death of old technologies is reiterated. Painting should have been buried a long time ago. Of course, painting has survived, although not in the service of “objective” representation but […]
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Desiring the everyday
“The Ceramics Program is vital because at its center are dynamic faculty who embody the integrity and core values we associate with expertly handcrafted objects,” writes Michael Rogers, chair of the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology. The faculty Rogers refers to are Rick Hirsch and Julia Galloway, whose work is the […]
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Visit the documentary buffet
With 22 television monitors relaying images at once, More than Moore, a video installation at Visual Studies Workshop, instills a feeling of sensory saturation, even though the TV sets are all silent. (Headphones are provided.) VSW Associate Gallery Director-Acting Gallery Manager Bleu Cease is trying to make independent political documentaries more accessible to the public. […]
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Convulsive anatomies
In 1992 Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, curated the infamous Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990’s. In his catalogue essay Schimmel equated the anxiety at the end of the 19th century and the work of the Symbolists — which was imbued with an obsessive fear that […]
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We’re not quite in Arcadia anymore
Some time in 1988 I learned one of my biggest lessons in aesthetics. I was living in the Los Angeles area and went to a movie theater in Century City to see Terry Gilliam’s film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I walked away enthralled, excited, and inspired. The next night, wanting to share my enthusiasm […]
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The Bridges between film and photography
An intimate exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Jeff Bridges opened at the George Eastman House in July. Whether entirely intentional or not, the exhibit is a subtle companion to Site Seeing: Photographic Excursions in Tourism. It continues to foster our ongoing romance with photographs, and perhaps more importantly, with photographic memory. Pictures is a […]
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Never before seen in Italy
The Venice Biennale, which goes back to 1895, is the granddaddy of all biennials. To that august artistic pantheon, others have been added, like the Whitney Biennial in 1932 — which focuses on American art — and in 1962 the Sao Paulo Biennial debuted in Brazil (although its roots go back another 40 years to […]
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Bodies taking up space
Our bodies are our obsessions. We feed them, bathe them, decorate them. When our bodies break down we fix them. We project our bodies into and through space literally as well as through a variety of media. As Andy Warhol once said, “before media… there used to be a physical limit on how much space […]
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Sewing stories
We don’t often get to experience the stunned awareness in realizing that what stands (or hangs) before us isn’t really what it seems. Recently, for us, it was realizing that what looked like an actual dress stretched out and pinned to the wall was, in fact, a digital photograph — complete with all the requisite […]
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A promise of post-partum diversity
Group shows are rarely just about the artwork. They’re mostly about some overarching idea that the work helps to illustrate. Of course, the work itself plays a role as viewers decide what they like or what they don’t like. There is also the matter of how objects work together as a cohesive whole. Is […]
