The Importance of Drinking and Smashing Innumerable Bottles on a Giant Pile of Beer, until It’s Gone that Is

May 26, 2011 It's not an out and out characteristic, or quite a trend, but in the German capital they do seem to love heaps. Perhaps it's because the 350-mile-city itself is so devlishly flat. One of the tallest mountains around is Teufelberg or "Satan's Hill," the tremendous aggregation of wartime rubble just north of West Berlin's lush Grunewald forest. The word, I believe, is still out on whether one of Hitler's secret bunkers is still buried at the core. Thus far it.. read more...

De la Mora and the Fragile Object

May 23, 2011 40 year old Mexican artist, Gabriel de la Mora, has shocked, humored, and helmed the Central American conceptual art scene for a number of years now. His pieces are composed from an astonishing amount of different media and materials ranging from 'drawings' composed from human hair strands or alphabet soup to 'sculptures' made from post-it notes: de la Mora describes himself as "an artist who works [particularly] with ideas, possibilities and concept.. read more...

Reappraising Rodin’s Work at the Musee Rodin

May 18, 2011 About a week ago an exhibit on modernist French sculptor Auguste Rodin opened at the eponymous Musee Rodin in Paris. As beautiful and monumental as Rodin's work may be, the appeal of the show lies as much in the fresh approach its curators have undertaken to shed a new critical light on the artist's legacy as it does in its scope: the Musee's press release cites their mission as being a "reappraisal" that "stems from the work of critics, art hist.. read more...

And the Avant-Garde Gesture of the Micro-Epoch Belongs to: You?

May 16, 2011 When I think back on the past several years, as to whether there was any artist who came forward with a move that resonated in that the-world-before-and-after, you-can-only-do-it-once sort of way (like say, Duchamp's submission of a urinal to the Salon Des Independants): well, the only thing that really jumps to mind is Urs Fischer's excavation of the entire floor of the Gavin Brown Enterprise gallery. The massive crater he produced out of a piece of pricey NY real estate (an.. read more...

Fluxus, the Sprightly Godchild of Duchamp, Retrospectivized at Dartmouth

May 15, 2011 Fluxus, the sprightly Godchild of Duchamp, has endless quantities of material around that will keep scholars and enthusiasts of conceptualism, antics, hijinks, and the general dada spirit busy for many years to come. A new exhibit at Dartmouth's Hood Museum: "Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life," presents a fair swath of the witty, irreverent output of this 1960's and '70's neo-Avant-Garde. Fluxus works are like philosophic miniatures: very small pieces of.. read more...

Markopoulos, Late Doyen of Avant-Garde Film To Have Final “Tenemos”

May 14, 2011 In Paul Auster's novel, the Book of Illusions, a silent movie star pulls a disappearing act after a terrible personal tragedy, and ends up at a secret location making genre-bending, rule-breaking films (which he would subsequently order burned Kafkaesquely). Later, a grief-struck scholar gets pulled into an obsessive quest to unearth the truth of the actor's life. Subtract some of the truly soap-operatic drama and the silent bit, and Auster's narrative has definite paralle.. read more...

In Defense of the Sharjah Art Biennial

May 13, 2011 The Sharjah Biennial, the oldest and most respected biennial in the Middle East hosted by the eponymous Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, is about to close its doors this Sunday, May 16. It remained opened for two months, and has, in that brief time, also become the focus of a whirlwind scandal concerning the contention between the contrarian secularism of modern art and the devout religiosity of the region's general population. The situation tha.. read more...

Revitalized and Analyzed: Elisofon’s Duchamp Descends a Staircase

May 8, 2011 WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- Allison Pappas, the 2010-2011 Judith M. Lenett fellow in Williams College’s Graduate Program in the History of Art will speak about her efforts in restoring three early twentieth-century prints at this spring’s Judith M. Lenett Memorial Lecture.  Pappas will discuss the interface of photojournalistic prints and museum art, and the her on-going restoration treatment, taxed with art historical research, in mending the work of Lewis H.. read more...

How Man Ray Took on Lautreamount

May 3, 2011 In a recent post I compared Duchamp's assemblage of the bicycle wheel atop the stool to the Comte de Lautreamont (aka Isidore Ducasse)'s notorious saying: "as beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a table." The latter, I argued, was radically disjunctive in a way that the bicycle wheel was not and furthermore that Lautreamont's image really only makes sense in language. Recently however, I was proven somewhat (I emphasize somewhat.. read more...