Category: contemporary art

Two Ways of Avoiding Clement Greenberg: Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ “Art Czar: the Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg” and Robert Storr’s “No Joy in Mudville: Greenberg’s Modernism Then and Now”

By admin on Jul 23, 2010 in book reviews, contemporary art, featured

Max E. Katz
On July 22nd, the carcass of a lion’s mane jellyfish washed ashore a New Hampshire beach. The jellyfish’s detached tentacles still managed to sting swimmers, evacuating the beach and sending four to the emergency room. The dead thing stings.

Clement Greenberg died sixteen years ago, already a relic. But death does not deter Greenberg’s [...]

Gradients

By admin on Jul 07, 2010 in contemporary art, featured, missed conceptions

Bret Schneider
A cursory flip through the many websites featuring new media online often shows a widespread use of the gradient. Taking many forms – from multimedia collage, to Adobe Illustrator-style drawing, to plexiglass sculpture, photographic tableau, and many more – the gradient is a common material choice in a vast sum of new work. At [...]

Carsten Nicolai at Pace

By admin on Jun 24, 2010 in contemporary art, featured

Bret Schneider
Carsten Nicolai is at least equally renowned for his sound work as he is for visual work. Making minimalist digital music under the moniker Alva Noto, Nicolai has been a central figure in electronic music’s shift from dance music towards glitchy computer-based sound art. In the mid 90’s he started the Raster-Noton label with [...]

What is Formal? – or – Against Meaning

By admin on Jun 17, 2010 in contemporary art, featured

Bret Schneider
‘Formal’ has transfigured into a pejorative term when used to describe an art work today. Amidst the proliferation of social art, post-conceptual research projects, identity politic art, and general obsessions with trying to communicate meaning to the viewer, a purely ‘formal’ art work is often perceived as a relic interest of the past. Traditionally [...]

We Are All Presidents of Manifestos!; Chris Mansour in Conversation With Mary Ann Caws

By admin on Jun 16, 2010 in contemporary art, featured

Mary Ann Caws is distinguished professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of CUNY, and editor of the book Manifestos: A Century of Isms that surveys literary manifestos of the twentieth century. When prompted for her favorite quote from any manifesto, she replied, “We are all presidents of Dada,” because it [...]

The Seductiveness of the Interval at The Renaissance Society

By admin on May 24, 2010 in contemporary art, featured

Jamie Keesling

The Seductiveness of the Interval, on view at the Renaissance Society through June, is among a category of works that attempt to conjure an alternative to the typical gallery experience within the confines of the gallery itself. Instead of placing themselves in a setting ostensibly outside the reach of traditional art institutions, like so [...]

(Mis)translations; Chris Mansour in Conversation With Tatiana Istomina

By admin on May 20, 2010 in contemporary art, featured

Born and raised in Russia, Tatiana Istomina makes paintings and two-dimensional works in response to the historical memory of the early Soviet Union. Whether they are personal pictures of Lenin throughout his life, or architectural snapshots in city squares, her paintings reference archaic photographs from the time period circa 1910s-1930s. Her aesthetic is reminiscent of [...]

Trisha Donnelly’s Negation of Identity

By admin on May 16, 2010 in contemporary art, featured

Bret Schneider

“now that is some opaque contemporary art”, remarked a friend when I asked her about a Trisha Donnelly exhibition. My interest piqued even more than it already was. Viewers and critics alike consistently have pleasurable difficulty in comprehending the contourless domain of Donnelly’s mercurial praxis. The incomprehensibility of her work drove Bruce Hainley away [...]

Book Review: Hanne Darboven • Cultural History 1880-1983

By admin on May 05, 2010 in book reviews, contemporary art, featured

by Bret Schneider
book review:
Dan Adler
Hanne Darboven, Cultural History 1880-1983
Published by Afterall

What ever happened to bureaucratic art? For one anti-magical moment in the 1960’s a handful of artists seemed obsessed with mimicking the most banal aspects of everyday life. Sol Lewitt, Mel Bochner, Seth Siegelaub, and Robert Smithson each embraced from time to time generic [...]

The Grotto – or – Withdrawal in Artist-Run Spaces

By admin on Apr 19, 2010 in contemporary art

J. Kepler
8 rooms in a house, transformed from a residence to a complex installation. Sharp angles and geometric abstractions multiply to form a penetrable architecture with countless corners, shapes, and walls that absorb the participant. Within the architecture are seamlessly buried fragments of found objects, some stolen from friends, others from trash. A home [...]

Deterioration, They Said; The Contemporary Rite of Passage

By admin on Apr 13, 2010 in book reviews, contemporary art, featured

Bret Schneider
(Review of Deterioration, They Said; a catalog from the exhibition at the Migros Museum. Published by JRP Ringier.)

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art”
Theodor Adorno
I don’t trust anyone who says they like Ryan Trecartin’s videos. Trecartin tenders a postmodern world rupturing into arbitrary ritual, capable of any [...]

Interview: Hal Foster

By admin on Apr 02, 2010 in contemporary art, featured

– On the one hand, it is a moment to insist again on the semi-autonomy of art as a basis of critique, and to find, in art making, models of subjectivity and sociality that are blotted out elsewhere in the culture. That seems crucial to me: there are sensuous and cognitive experiences that art still allows and that screen culture does not. On that score, then, art now and art forever…

The Malaise of The Critical Artist

By admin on Mar 22, 2010 in contemporary art, featured

Bret Schneider
The dominant order of the ‘critical artist’ in contemporary art, emanating from Duchamp’s intellectualism has digressed from transformative social critique to affirmative idealism. Contemporary art’s compulsion towards post-conceptual, immaterial, critical practices evidences the problematic success of the neo-avant-garde’s ideological support of the critical artist, as opposed to its failure. Marcel Broodthaers’s forecast of art [...]

Book Review: Individual Methodology – Harald Szeemann

By admin on Mar 11, 2010 in book reviews, contemporary art, featured

Complete with copied documents, rare photographs, interviews with personal acquaintances and Szeemann himself, and much other ephemera, Individual Methodology compiles a comprehensive documentative survey of a man who contributed more to our confused contemporary situation today than perhaps anyone.