A Family Finds Entertainment
Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) initially came to the attention of the art world in an article by Dennis Cooper as one of the emerging artist picks in Artforum complete with the backstory of how video artist Sue de Beer discovered the work while on tour when someone showed her an excerpt on […]
Andy Warhol Screen Tests
This is my contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door. In thinking of the closeup, I almost invariably gravitate to the films of Andy Warhol, largely because so many of his films privilege this particular framing. In his extended screen test, Henry Geldzahler (1964), the then twenty-nine-year-old Metropolitan Museum of Art curator, […]
New York Top Ten Art Shows
1. What is Painting? (MoMA). Curator Anne Umland's feminist-inflected exhibit provides an alternate reading of the challenges to painting’s authority over the past forty years. It begins with an assassination attempt, Vija Celmin’s "Gun With a Hand" (1964), and takes us step by step into the present, as represented Wade Guyton’s Warhol-inspired "Untitled" (2006) and […]
Film and Video at the 52nd Venice Biennale
Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine art critic, whose columns also appear on artnet, apparently boycotted the openings of Documenta and Venice this year. In his most recent column he suggests that these large international exhibitions are “outmoded," arguing that biennial culture leads to “copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking." […]
Film and Video at Documenta 12
The confluence of the Venice Biennale and Documenta – the two largest and most important international art exhibitions in the world – occurs only every ten years, making it possible to compare the two major simultaneously-held events. Having attended Francesco Bonami’s “Dreams and Conflicts" Venice Biennale four years ago and Documenta 11 five years ago, […]