ART
Experience the Wait: Carsten Holler
Bradford Nordeen
12.15.11
Here's an idea: art is about access to an imagined experience. Half Seward Street slide and half Escaliers de Montmarte, Carsten Höller's Untitled (Slide), 2011 is the centerpiece/centrifuge of his New Museum installation Experience, running from October 26 through January 15, 2012. Bradford Nordeen takes a trip through the funhouse of Höller's making and sends back reports on the waiting front. Here's the slide, here's your ticket ro ride.
"I make (myself): envoi": Nancy Spero's Contemporary Poetics
David Berridge
08.02.11
The exhibition Nancy Spero - initiated at the Centre Pompidou, Paris last fall and adapted for Serpentine Gallery, London this past spring - was the first major retrospective of Spero since the artist’s death in 2009. Wandering between the two, in a landscape populated by feminine bodies, hieroglyphics, and Antonin Artaud, David Berridge explores the dialogue that exists between Spero, artists of the past, poetics of the present, and artistic politics yet to be born.
Welcome to the Predatorium (or Kim Dorland's Creepy Copse)
Derek McCormack
04.25.11
Author Derek McCormack writes of artist Kim Dorland that his “ideas of nature come from horror movies. More than that: it’s like they come from watching horror movies on a VCR in a rec-room in Alberta in the 1970s...Look at his use of rhinestone eyes for owls: very macramé. Look at use of nails and string for the wolves’ teeth and drool: very string art. Look at the trees: they’re painted on wood, so that grain is visible beneath." Fanzine gets the goods, an essay from very limited edition catalogue based on a show at Mike Weiss, NY. P.S. - look for work from McCormack’s publishing house Book Bakery in the near future. All Images here courtesy of Angell Gallery, Toronto.
Fanzine Does New York Art Week 2011 (day 4 finale)
Bradford Nordeen
03.06.11
Bradford Nordeen traipses through his last day of NYC art fair coverage at Pulse, gets mired in the "absolute purity of vision" of the “bro” art at Scope (even if it's coiffed dudes making rim job jokes). He finds solace in Beka Goedde’s abstract paintings at Christina Ray, and a carnival-essence at Microscope Gallery, with Nick Zed fanzines, Cindy Sherman’s visage as ex-wife on someone’s balls...later there was the "exciting retort to the Independent" group called - guess? The Dependent. Read on. Collapse. Get ready for another fair in some other cultured metropolis in this smaller & smaller world.
Fanzine Does New York Art Week 2011 (3)
Bradford Nordeen
03.04.11
Day 3 sees Bradford Nordeen at Volta, The Independent and The Moving Image Fair. Standouts include Elisabeth Subrin's film and stills at Volta amidst a lot of synchronistically not-very-original international critiques of American foreign policy, filmmaker great George Kuchar in snap shots from all over the place, and a Jack Hanley presents Martin Kaltwasser "Thunderdome-like" Saab 900, wrecked of course. I predict tomorrow Bradford writes a book at this rate. Check in again.