Lord knows I’m not a Joel Shapiro fan. I find his post-minimalist sculptures downright offensive. His anthropomorphized geometries appropriate the “look” of minimalism without retaining any of a good minimal sculpture’s finest attributes: aloofness, mystery, and ambiguity. Shapiro’s sculptures are too immediately accessible, too easily read. And all within the visual framework of a movement [...]
This Friday and Saturday is FLUXCONCERT 20080925-27, an instruction-based performance that I wrote and directed.
Check out a show full of smart-looking work curated by my friend Jeanne Gerrity: Creative Cartographies at Brooklyn Arts Council. From the release: “Influenced by the organization inherent in cartography, the twelve Brooklyn-based artists in BAC Gallery’s latest exhibition, Creative Cartographies, present viewpoints both personal and political, mapping their own thoughts, journeys, and observations. Collectively, [...]
The SFMOMA’s two massive Sol LeWitt atrium wall drawings – the last works still up from his retrospective in 2000 – are being painted over to make room for an upcoming Martin Puryear installation.
It doesn’t sadden me that they’re no longer on view. Because the instruction set is the kernel of the work and can lead to infinite authentic resurrections, the piece is simply in one less place. What’s more poignant to me is that after eight years the exhibition that changed the course of my personal, artistic, and professional life has finally concluded.
Regular readers will know I’m simply mad about painter Kristine Moran. Here’s a painting she made on view at a group show she is in at Anna Kustera Gallery. Terrific, terrific.
John McCracken will be talking and signing books at David Zwirner in New York at 11AM this Saturday, September 13.
Mass MoCA has launched a minisite in advance of Sol LeWitt’s 25 year wall drawing retrospective opening there in November. Don’t look too hard or it will give away the surprise!
The history of art shouldn’t take such an artist-focused perspective. While it makes constructing a historical narrative easier (the “Great Man” theory of history), it overlooks the importance of the artist’s vast retinue of supporters that made his/her achievements even possible. For nearly every “important” artist there has been the supportive gallerist (Daniel Kahnweiler, Virginia [...]
