March 28, 2012
Yes, we now have Doug Aitken, which might help, and there's an After Hours party every quarter, but the Hirshhorn's outdoor space has always struck me as one of the most potentially interesting and under-utilized public spaces for contemporary...
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Posted by greg at
9:06 PM
March 20, 2012
The DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities is organizing the 5x5 Project, a temporary public art festival? exhibition? program? that coincides with the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Last night at a panel discussion at the Corcoran, the DCCAH Project...
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Posted by greg at
9:29 PM
January 18, 2012
I've been using and working on the Internet for almost twenty years now. I've done start-ups and IPOs. I've worked for huge companies. I worked for Disney when they didn't know the web from a CD-ROM. I have been...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 AM
December 12, 2011
I don't know what, if anything, these mean, but these two stories last week made me wonder about the relationship of art and politics and Washington DC as viewed from a political/media perspective. First up, and most disturbing, was the...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 PM
Here is a PBS Newshour Q&A with Steven Tepper, discussing his research into why art--or the arts, really, since he looks at theater, libraries, music, too--triggers protests in some communities at some times and not others. He found that...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 AM
December 6, 2011
We took the family to Hillwood over the holidays. It's Marjorie Merriweather Post's house-turned-house museum, and it's kind of bizarre, frankly. Not seriously wack, but just a low-grade oddness which, who knows, maybe the passage of time and the accretion...
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Posted by greg at
11:17 PM
November 27, 2011
One of the startling images Alan Taylor included from the EPA's DOCUMERICA collection is by Bruce McAllister. The caption:A train on the Southern Pacific Railroad passes a five-acre pond, which was used as a dump site by area commercial...
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Posted by greg at
1:21 PM
November 26, 2011
Following on from the multiple installments of archival World War II images on hisphotoblog In Focus, Alan Taylor has assembled selections from another remarkable public photo archive, this time from the Environmental Protection Agency. In the early 1970s, the newly...
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Posted by greg at
5:41 PM
November 23, 2011
(K-2-28) This is the first of our United States, Department of Commerce, Trade Fair domes. It was erected in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1957. The U.S. Department of Commerce came to me in an emergency and with a very small...
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Posted by greg at
9:37 PM
November 16, 2011
There are so many fascinating things about the Gene Davis Giveaway, I almost don't know where to start. And I'm embarrassed to not have known about it sooner. Gene Davis Giveaway, or Give Away, or as it was called...
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Posted by greg at
7:27 AM
November 14, 2011
How Ya Like Me Now?, a large painting of a white Jesse Jackson by David Hammons, was one of seven outdoor works in "The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism," an ambitious exhibition organized in the Fall of 1989...
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Posted by greg at
12:39 PM
November 1, 2011
Just this morning, while I was watching Sarah Sze's 2010 lecture at the Smtihsonian American Art Museum, and she was showing videos of her installations for the first time [borrowed, with permission, she said, from various YouTube users, which is...
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Posted by greg at
1:49 PM
September 30, 2011
Well, let's just get this out of the way: if you can only see one Warhol exhibition in Washington this year, see Shadows. The Warhol Headlines show is very slight. It's hard to call it a highlight, but a series...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
September 2, 2011
Between 1981 and 1985, Paul Tschinkel and Marc H. Miller produced 17 episodes of ART/newyork, a subscription-based video magazine about contemporary art for use, incredibly, in public schools and libraries. Their 1982 interview with Richard Serra, a Yale classmate of...
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Posted by greg at
1:30 PM
August 19, 2011
The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security on the government's deployment of body scanner technology on streets and in roving vans. These are the three pages of the...
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Posted by greg at
8:50 AM
July 29, 2011
In the early Cold War of the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union countered American condemnation of its repressive actions in East Germany and Hungary with criticism of the US's internal policies of segregation and racial discrimination. Planners of the US...
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Posted by greg at
12:19 AM
July 27, 2011
What's the opposite of writer's block, the thing where you have so much damn good stuff to write about, you're paralyzed into inaction? Because that's what I've got, and August vacation voids or not, I just can't help it;...
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Posted by greg at
10:33 PM
June 18, 2011
Away | Out, 2010, Seth Adeslberger via Seth Adelsberger's evocation of Erased de Kooning Drawing in this work on found paper manages to be both calculated and offhand. It was one of my favorites in "Out of Practice," Baltimore...
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Posted by greg at
8:56 AM
June 6, 2011
US Pavilion at Jeshyn Fair, 1956, photo by James Cudney In the Spring of 1956, as the Jeshyn Fair celebrating Afghan independence approached, and the Soviets were well along in constructing a massive pavilion, US diplomats in Kabul thought...
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Posted by greg at
7:33 AM
May 16, 2011
Richard Serra, The American Flag is not an object of worship, 1989, 288 x 376 cm One of the artworks ImClone CEO Sam Waksal bought from Gagosian but didn't pay sales tax on in 2000 was a huge, $350,000...
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Posted by greg at
10:54 AM
May 4, 2011
Tom McCormack's lengthy look at the contentious, suspicious history of US government support for the arts is worth reading for itself. But it also got me off my butt to write something that's been bugging me since attending the Smithsonian's...
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Posted by greg at
11:22 PM
May 2, 2011
I'm getting pretty comfortable with my love affair/obsession with the US Pavilion at the Expo 67 in Montreal. I mean, it's got Buckminster Fuller; Alan Solomon curating gigantic paintings; photomurals; and satelloons, what's not to love, right? So seeing...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 PM
May 1, 2011
I've written before about the "clean and presumptively powerful" design of various government letterheads I've come across in my recent archive diving. And I must not be doing it right, because my searches for the expansive survey of the history...
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Posted by greg at
8:50 PM
April 25, 2011
Oh, RO/LU, you are so awesome for posting this. 9 Artists/ 9 Spaces was a public art exhibit organized in 1970 for the Minnesota States Art Council, while the Walker Art Center's new building was under construction. The concept of...
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Posted by greg at
11:34 PM
April 24, 2011
Thomas Lawson's 2010 interview with Andrea Bowers is like five kinds of great. It concerns the works in her show at Susan Vielmetter in Los Angeles, "The Political Landscape." Bowers' story of making a video piece about activist and Bush-era...
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Posted by greg at
10:53 PM
April 22, 2011
You stumble upon something that Google doesn't know anything about, and you post about it, and then a while later, the other handful of people wondering about the same thing eventually email you, and you try to figure this...
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Posted by greg at
12:26 PM
April 15, 2011
I know what it is, and what it's for, and where it is, and what what. But still. In a year when politicians' considerations of art have had considerable impact on art, artists, and the art world, it is fascinating...
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Posted by greg at
8:37 PM
March 9, 2011
What's that, dear? Oh, nothing, just some legendary but unknown drafts for the first film adaptation of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, by veteran Hollywood screenwriter Benjamin Hecht. After reading various references to the early 60s script, Jeremy Duns decided to...
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Posted by greg at
5:43 PM
Is there a tumblr for awkward Twitterstream juxtapositions? Because there oughta be....
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Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
February 19, 2011
I order so many random books, usually from random independent or used booksellers on Abebooks, that don't arrive with anything like the robotic precision and up-to-the-minute email notification of Amazon, that I never know what's come in the mail until...
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Posted by greg at
9:12 PM
February 14, 2011
During some recent archive dives, I've come across a ton of different letterheads. Apparently, people used to write letters to each other all the time, can you imagine? Must've taken forEVER. Anyway, one I particularly ilke is the United States...
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Posted by greg at
10:26 PM
February 12, 2011
A couple of weeks ago, while stopping by the symposium attached to the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" exhibition, I saw a huge, intriguing Robert Rauschenberg work, Visual Autobiography, in the lobby of the Patent Building auditorium. I noticed it...
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Posted by greg at
4:21 PM
January 29, 2011
After dropping in on the National Portrait Gallery's daylong symposium [it's still going on, in fact] connected to Hide/Seek just now, and though I only saw two presentations, whoa--I feel like a cigarette. Jonathan Katz, co-curator of Hide/Seek, titled his...
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Posted by greg at
5:50 PM
January 27, 2011
John Powers just retweeted it now in parts, and he included it in his epic Star Wars Modern piece at Triple Canopy last year, but this quote from "American Painting During the Cold War," Max Kozloff's 1973 Artforum article, is...
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Posted by greg at
9:38 AM
January 22, 2011
A little Saturday stenography. Alan Solomon wrote "The New Art," a catalogue essay for "The Popular Image," one of the first museum exhibitions of Pop Art, organized by Alice Denney in the spring of 1963 at the fledgling Washington Gallery...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 AM
January 17, 2011
Huh, so I'm poking around online for info on the Saarinens' unrealized design for a Smithsonian Gallery of Art [above is a SI photo of the model, built in 1939 by Ray and Charles Eames, of all people, perched...
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Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
You know what, it's been too long since we had a good, old-fashioned photomuralin' around these parts. And one that combines a bit of Google Maps-ready, roof-as-facade architecture? And camo? Even better. I only go to the Museum of the...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 PM
January 4, 2011
I'm still trying to figure out quite what he said, but whatever it is, Doug Ashford said the hell out of it. Forget speaking or writing like this, I wish I could even think like this. Brains back on, people!...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
December 19, 2010
You know, some things have just been bugging me about this Blake Gopnik/Washington Post situation. I deeply don't care about Gopnik in a gossipy way. I suppose if I were pressed, I'd be generically glad for him now that it...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 PM
December 15, 2010
I've been deep in the commercial letterpress lately, and neglecting my Ant Farm. Fortunately, Mondo Blogo is there to bring me back in line, with this awesome poster the Farmers made for 20:20 Vision, their show at CAMH. 20:20...
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Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
December 11, 2010
I'm trying to imagine this happening today, or this century--or last, for that matter--and I just can't. The best account of it I've found is from Calvin Tomkins' 1964 New Yorker profile of Rauschenberg, so I'll just quote him:[Rauschenberg and...
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Posted by greg at
8:11 PM
November 24, 2010
Alright, the search is on; I'm working to trace the history of Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 combine Short Circuit and especially to figure out what happened to Jasper Johns' flag painting, and when and how Sturtevant's flag painting got in...
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Posted by greg at
10:15 PM
November 21, 2010
An interesting curatorial pairing where you'd least expect it: deep in the middle a random, Sunday afternoon print sale at Phillips de Pury. Lot 327: Washington Monument, is an unnumbered edition sliced up from a wallpaper Andy Warhol made...
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Posted by greg at
4:19 PM
November 1, 2010
I'm feeling more serious about turning Richard Neutra's Cyclorama building at Gettysburg into an educational monument to the wounded and a wheelchair-accessible battlefield observation platform. War becomes history, reduced to its most basic contours, a date, a bodycount, and a...
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Posted by greg at
7:45 AM
October 20, 2010
One of the most incredible works of visionary art in Washington DC is James Hampton's The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly. Hampton, an African American WWII veteran and janitor at the General Services...
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Posted by greg at
6:13 PM
October 16, 2010
So yes, I've got a million other things to do, but thanks to this Mies thing being auctioned, and Michael Lobel's article on the the photography and scale--and by implication, photography and painting, pace Chevrier's forme tableau--I'm become slightly...
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Posted by greg at
8:29 PM
October 13, 2010
The other weekend, I pigeonholed former Washington Post art critic Paul Richard after his talk, titled "What I Saw," at the National Gallery of Art. I said that I'd been interested to hear his take on public art over his...
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Posted by greg at
12:55 PM
October 7, 2010
What if they decided to put Tilted Arc back? What if the General Services Administration, and the Jacob Javits Federal Building folks called up Richard Serra and said, "You know what this Federal Plaza needs after all is a...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
October 3, 2010
I just got back from hearing longtime Washington Post art critic Paul Richard speak at the National Gallery of Art. Richard is an excellent speaker and an alluring storyteller. His lecture, titled "What I Saw," began with his move from...
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Posted by greg at
5:25 PM
August 14, 2010
While wandering through the National Air and Space Museum [family's in town], I stumbled across James Keeler's lantern slides of spiral nebulae, taken at the Lick Observatory outside San Jose beginning in 1888. Keeler was a pioneering astronomer at...
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Posted by greg at
9:34 PM
August 10, 2010
John Emerson saw an "I [HEART] NY" flyer in Arabic posted in the East Village a few days after September 11, 2001. He posted a large, printable graphic version on his blog a year later. A few months after...
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Posted by greg at
1:32 PM
July 12, 2010
I was talking shop with Tyler Green this weekend, and he told me that the Washington Post's art critic Blake Gopnik actually did devote more than a paragraph in a review of two unrelated shows at a different museum to...
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Posted by greg at
10:00 AM
April 20, 2010
While researching the National Gallery of Art's Barkley L. Hendricks paintings, which were purchased by J. Carter Brown with money from Michael Whitney Straight, I came across one of the crazier space-meets-art moments in the history of exhibition design: Art...
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Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
April 19, 2010
Oh, I take it all back. The Washington Post does support a vibrant local art scene. If they didn't, would they be "looking to discover the Washington Region's newest talents" with their "Real Art D.C." Art Contest? I didn't think...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
April 6, 2010
It's hard to say where the momentous awesomeness of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's 1963 Pop Art Festival first overwhelmed me. When I learned that noted Pop Artist John Cage performed on opening night? When I found out that...
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Posted by greg at
7:39 AM
March 31, 2010
I've already mentioned the May 3, 1963 Time Magazine article about the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's Pop Art Festival; it's really not much, but it contains the most extensive contemporary account of Claes Oldenburg's 1963 Happening, Stars. Here's how...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 PM
March 30, 2010
In her 1998 biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Nina Burleigh used Stars, Claes Oldenburg's Happening at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art's 1963 Pop Art Festival, as a bellwether for sophisticated Georgetown/Washington's temperament towards contemporary art. Here's how Burleigh described...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
March 25, 2010
Domes, inflatables, World Expos, Buckminster Fuller, every once in a while around here, it feels like I'm just blogging about whatever artist Steve Roden blogged about three years ago. The Antioch Bubble is one of those times. [Though, to...
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Posted by greg at
5:07 PM
The week before The Pop Art Festival in Washington DC, Art Buchwald had lunch with Claes Oldenburg, WGMA Assistant Director Alice Denney, and publicist John Mecklin. The topic was Oldenburg's upcoming Happening, Stars. Buchwald wrote (in the first person...
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Posted by greg at
3:09 PM
March 23, 2010
It's been a few months, and now I've been researching it so many places, I can't remember exactly where I first discovered that Claes Oldenburg did a Happening in Washington DC. And an early one, too. He was invited...
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Posted by greg at
3:42 PM
March 21, 2010
A great post on language & progress, Claude Levi-Strauss & TIno Sehgal. Some of the most interesting commentary I've read on discerning the actual structure and contours of Sehgal's This Progress, too. [futureofthebook.org via @briansholis] Which makes me wonder: do...
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Posted by greg at
3:28 PM
March 16, 2010
You remember how, a couple of months ago, I could find next to nothing online about Vern Blosum, the mysterious artist whose crisp, deadpan paintings of parking meters were featured in one of the very first museum exhibitions of Pop...
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Posted by greg at
10:18 PM
March 15, 2010
Can I just suggest that, when you buy an article from the New York Times Archive, you go ahead and buy a 10-pack? In addition to supporting your local paper in their time of financial distress and dire need [ahem],...
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Posted by greg at
11:09 AM
March 8, 2010
In 1961, Hazleton Laboratories, a pioneering biological sciences testing company based in Falls Church, Virginia, was growing rapidly. For one of their expansions, executives and scientists were given allocations to buy cutting edge abstract art for their offices. Which...
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Posted by greg at
9:31 AM
March 6, 2010
I just bought this incredible poster at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in DC. It's for "Hier ist die Future," an exhibition held last year at the library by British artist...
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Posted by greg at
2:25 PM
January 30, 2010
The nightly LED show on the facade of the new Motor City Casino in Detroit [via sweet juniper] Multiverse a now-permanent installation by Leo Villareal at the National Gallery of Art: I think it's clear that when it comes to...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 AM
January 29, 2010
So I went to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian this morning to do a little research on the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Unfortunately, most of the WGMA's archives are still at the Corcoran, which merged...
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Posted by greg at
12:32 PM
January 23, 2010
When DC art lecturer and blogger John Anderson emailed to ask if I'd heard about the scandal surrounding the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and the Tom Wesselmann, I was like, "Tom Wesselmann scandal? Do tell!" He pointed me...
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Posted by greg at
7:00 PM
January 22, 2010
I've been poking around to find examples of the artwork of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the Washington DC painter who was connected romantically to both Ken Noland and JFK. When her work is discussed at all, she's generally been associated...
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Posted by greg at
1:19 PM
January 21, 2010
You start pulling on a thread, and you never quite know what starts to come out. For some great stories about the Washington Gallery for Modern Art and "The Popular Image Exhibition," reader JA suggested, I should really check out...
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Posted by greg at
10:52 PM
January 20, 2010
As I've been digging into the history of modernism and contemporary art in Washington DC, one of the most prominent events I keep coming back to is "The Popular Image" and its performance companion, the "Pop Art Festival." Organized Alice...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 PM
January 12, 2010
I've had a research question simmering on the back burner for a while, trying to figure out what the history of modernism and contemporary art have been in Washington DC. Partly, it was the dearth of good modernist architecture that...
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Posted by greg at
4:41 PM
January 10, 2010
Recently I've been researching the postwar history of contemporary art and architecture in Washington DC. This article sounds like it could have been written last week:The Art Game in Washington Amid a growing art boom, local artists feel they are...
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Posted by greg at
4:43 PM
January 5, 2010
Last night on very short notice, I went to "Running for Cover(age), A panel discussion on arts criticism in the DC area," organized by the Washington Project for the Arts. Here are the impetus and content of the discussion in...
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Posted by greg at
9:58 AM
December 17, 2009
At the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, more than a dozen New York architects came dressed as their buildings: [l to r] A. Stewart Walker [Fuller Building], Leonard Schultze [Waldorf-Astoria], Ely Jaques Kahn [Squibb Building], William Van Alen [Chrysler Building,...
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Posted by greg at
7:48 AM
December 15, 2009
Sweet. The Hirshhorn Museum is floating the idea to turn its central plaza into a 4-story event space by filling it with a giant temporary balloon pavilion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The $5 million pavilion would be put...
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Posted by greg at
7:47 AM
November 13, 2009
Thaddeus S. C. Lowe was once one of the country's most famous aeronauts. His grand plan to fly a balloon across the Atlantic was shelved by the outbreak of the Civil War. He preferred to be called Professor. On...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 AM
November 5, 2009
So now that the White House has returned Alma Thomas's 1968 painting, Watusi (Hard Edge) to the Hirshhorn amid a flurry of interest in its making and in the artist herself, I assume the museum will quickly put it...
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Posted by greg at
2:05 PM
November 4, 2009
I guess I can understand if the White House saw the rightwing faux-controversy over Alma Thomas's Watusi (Hard Edge) as an unhelpful distraction, and it's not like the country elected Obama to be curator-in-chief, but that doesn't mean their...
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Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
October 27, 2009
How to account for my dogged fascination with the temporary/permanent, futuristic/historic paradoxes of Expo art and architecture? Buckminster Fuller's 20-story Biosphere was far and away his greatest single success and the hit of the most successful modernist world's fair,...
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Posted by greg at
12:17 PM
October 10, 2009
I guess it doesn't matter anymore that I don't see why the White House's art borrowing is news now, when almost the entire list was already published and discussed four months ago [and many weeks before that, too]. Because...
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Posted by greg at
1:23 PM
I'll have more to say about the incredible work of Anne Truitt in the Hirshhorn's retrospective, thoughtfully curated by Kristen Hileman. Whether on canvas, paper or sculpture-like wooden armatures, Truitt's exhaustively spare paintings induce, by design, a lot of...
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Posted by greg at
6:47 AM
September 14, 2009
It's got shiny spheres, and science re-creations, and DC artists and quotes from curator and museum director friends. But it's been a few weeks now, and the only thing I can say about Blake Gopnik's mind-numbing/blowing article on Jim Sanborn...
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Posted by greg at
1:58 PM
September 6, 2009
While we contemplate the Colombian Heart Attack that has befallen Washington DC, it might be worthwhile to remember the good old days, such as they were, when the National Mall was the site of ambitious public art projects. Projects...
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Posted by greg at
1:48 PM
September 3, 2009
Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time, originally uploaded by id. As Antoni helpfully pointed out in an email, Canadian artist Brian Jungen has created a work wherein he carves a design into the gallery wall with a router,...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
August 28, 2009
If I'm reading John Cage's first book Silence: Lectures and Writings correctly, this is a quote from "Where are we going? And what are we doing?" a lecture/text/performance piece he first performed at Pratt in 1960:I was driving out to...
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Posted by greg at
8:37 PM
June 9, 2009
Aviary, originally uploaded by AmosTheWonderPig. There's not much of it, and it has some rather determined enemies, so when modernism happens or survives in Washington DC, it feels like somewhere between a happy accident and a miracle. Or maybe...
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Posted by greg at
12:22 AM
June 6, 2009
In 1973, Chris Burden bought a month worth of late-night ad time on a local TV station in Los Angeles, and aired a 10-second film clip of Through the Night Softly, a performance where Burden, clad only in bikini...
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Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
May 26, 2009
According to the very slowly reported story [1] in the Wall Street Journal, the Obamas have been selecting modern and contemporary art for the White House from among pieces in national and museum collections. The artists they requested includes...
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Posted by greg at
4:10 PM
May 9, 2009
Hans Ulrich Obrist - My last question, Olafur, is one I've asked you many times before: what is your favorite unrealized project? Olafur Eliasson - I would like to build a museum--to reevaluate the nature of a museum and build...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 PM
March 13, 2009
I've been all 'round this great big world, and I've seen all kinds of Turrells, so I couldn't wait to get to the Hirshhorn last night for the sweetest Turrell lecture in the world. What a horrible opening. Turrell...
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Posted by greg at
8:58 AM
January 15, 2009
LIFE Magazine's digitized photo archives includes a few sweet pictures by Gjon Mili from the opening party at the Hirshhorn Museum in 1974. [here's a great shot of a whole gallery full of Giacomettis. Do they still have all...
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Posted by greg at
12:28 AM
December 17, 2008
I've been searching for more critical acknowledgment of Fischli & Weiss's Der Lauf der Dinge as an edited construct instead of the miraculous documentation it's normally perceived/presented to be. Though he's talking about another Fischli & Weiss piece [above],...
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Posted by greg at
4:08 PM
December 13, 2008
Artforum reports that Fischli & Weiss's 1987 film, Der Lauf der Dinge, (The Way Things Go), [1] was recently sold at Christie's in Zurich for 1.02 million Swiss francs. Which is awesome [2], I first thought, since I have...
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Posted by greg at
11:26 AM
August 28, 2008
I've had some intense conversations with people who wanted to know what the US presidential candidates thought about the arts, who is advising them, and what their policy statements were on the matter. Frankly, I couldn't have cared less at...
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Posted by greg at
12:54 AM
April 8, 2007
By which she means, I assume, that only in DC could virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell perform at a subway station during rush hour and be recognized by only one of the six people who stopped for more than a moment...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
March 30, 2006
Hiroshi Sugimoto created a stage for a Noh performance at Dia; unfortunately, it was in October 2001, not a real hot time for cultural diversions in downtown New York City. Missed it. The Noh stage was reinstalled at the Mori...
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Posted by greg at
3:08 AM
February 16, 2006
I've been a big fan and collector of Hiroshi Sugimoto's work for over 13 years now [wow. Typing that just now makes me hyperaware of the passage of time, which is par for the course for Sugimoto.] So when I...
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Posted by greg at
11:53 AM
January 19, 2005
Another cover from Life"the lunar surface photographed by the Apollo astronauts in 1969" yields a comparison to Smithson's cover for Artforum published just a month later: a distribution of mirrors across a square of parched earth, one of a number...
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Posted by greg at
8:41 AM
July 30, 2004
Last Sunday at the Hirshhorn, I saw a great documentary about one of my favorite artists. Juan Carlos Martin followed Gabriel Orozco around the world for three years, filming and taping the meandering artist's creative process, his installations, and the...
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Posted by greg at
10:51 AM
June 15, 2004
Gabriel Orozco usually installs his photos interspersed with other works--drawings, collages, and sculpture. The Hirshhorn show which opened last week is the first time they've been shown alone. The show felt instantly familiar, and not because I've been a follower,...
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1:45 AM
June 11, 2004
Rob Storr interviewed Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 1995. Felix identified Helen Frankenthaler as the most successful political artist alive, and then told about the invitation he received in 1989 to participate in the State Department's Art for Embassies Program:It has this...
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11:02 AM
July 11, 2003
When our DC neighbors' rather inconsiderately left their wireless networks turned off this morning, I ran over to the Hirshhorn to see their new, temporary installation of the permanent collection. It's pretty fresh, with room to breathe. A lot of...
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6:21 AM
June 23, 2002
At the Hirshhorn Museum yesterday (originally to see the Ernesto Neto installaion before it closed), I kind of fixated on the work of Anne Truitt, which is in the "Minimalism and its Legacy" installation on the lower floor. I wasn't...
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Posted by greg at
4:20 AM
