August 23, 2012
I'm done waiting. This Europera 1 & 2 post is apparently not going to write itself. The Ruhr Triennial opened last weekend with what is only the third [production and fourth -ed.] staging of John Cage's grandest1composition, the 1987 Europeras...
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12:50 PM
July 9, 2012
I fell for the first one ever saw, which was CNN, but in 2002 Thomas Hirschhorn started a whole series of gigantic, bling-inspired sculptures out of his signature, cheap-ass materials: foil, cardboard, mylar, and packing tape. CNN was an...
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5:15 PM
OK, people, who has not been telling me about this? In Transmission LA, the very important exhibition Mike D just curated at MOCA, sponsored by Mercedes Benz? Fortunately, Tyler Green used flickr user Eli Carrico's image, above, for a...
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10:46 AM
April 15, 2012
I've liked this explanation Gerhard Richter gave in 1972 to Rolf Schön about the relationship in his work between photography and painting for a long time, but it's been particularly awesome lately:RS: How do you stand in relation to illusion?...
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7:51 PM
March 7, 2012
[image via artinfo] A little Anastasi, a little Lawler, a little Shore, a little Fischer, a little Albenda. I wonder what color Michael Riedel's awesome photomural in Zwirner's booth will be by the time I get to the Armory...
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7:44 PM
January 5, 2012
Oh, man, just last night I was goof-tweeting about this, and it turns out it's already a thing. Registration for The Complete Spot Challenge starts tomorrow:Visit all eleven Gagosian Gallery locations during the exhibition Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot...
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10:55 PM
December 6, 2011
A little while ago, I got an email from LA-based artist Kim Schoenstadt, asking if it was alright to reference some photos I took a few years ago of unusually awesome modernist houses in Salt Lake City. She planned...
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9:53 PM
November 29, 2011
Sebastian Errazuriz came up with the idea for his coke slab when he saw friends scratching out lines on a coffee table. The indentations make it so easy, a child could do it! It's so functional and brilliant, I'm...
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5:13 PM
November 12, 2011
At the invitation of Jeffrey Deitch, Yvonne Rainer has seen a rehearsal of Marina Abramovic's performance art project for this year's MoCA Los Angeles gala. And in a new letter to Deitch, she has refined and reiterated her condemnation of...
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3:36 PM
October 3, 2011
This interior shot of Fuller/Sadao's US Pavilion at Expo67 almost has it all: installation view of the giant paintings Lichtenstein, Newman, Warhol and Johns made for Alan Solomon's American Painting Now; plus a giant photomural of the moon, perfect...
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8:42 AM
September 2, 2011
I am aware of the work of Pablo Neruda Gerhard Richter. I have not been reading Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007 straight through, of course, but it's been with me a lot lately. And it's kind of annoyed me that there...
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10:30 AM
August 14, 2011
I've had Michelle Kuo's interview with Robert Breer [artforum, nov 2010] open in my browser tabs for months now, ever since Steve Roden posted about his incredible little toy Float, which was sold at MoMA's gift shop in 1970,...
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7:41 PM
July 5, 2011
Add Jonathan Monk to the list of artist Enzo Mari fans. For the Brussels gallery D&A Lab's show at Design Miami Basel Miami Wynwood Art Week Whatever Fair last month, Monk created Mari Thirteen, an edition of Mari's autoprogettazione...
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9:24 PM
June 26, 2011
The near-universal consensus from the VIP opening was that the Italian Pavilion exhibition curated by art critic/Berlusconi apparatchik Vittorio Sgarbi was an unalloyed, over-politicized disaster. Yet so far, I have seen very little substantive criticism or engagement with it. Rome-based...
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2:41 PM
June 22, 2011
Robert Rauschenberg's massive 1970 silk screen edition, Currents sure is hard to miss. And not just because it's 18 meters long. MoMA's copy from the edition [of just six] has been wrapped around the corner of the second floor galleries...
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10:36 PM
June 6, 2011
So everyone dutifully reproduced the press release about Craig Robins putting Buckminster Fuller's 24-foot version of the Fly's Eye Dome through a "historic restoration" by boat fabricator Goetz Composites, yet no one seems to have followed through with picture...
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10:41 AM
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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9:11 PM
April 26, 2011
I ♥ the fact that Switzerland had Thomas Hirschhorn make a series of stamps to mark his involvemente in the 2011 Venice Biennale almost as much as I ♥ Thomas Hirschhorn's stamps. Stamp | Crystal of Resistance [crystalofresistance.com]...
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9:44 AM
March 8, 2011
Warm nostalgia apparently equals d-bag public access video + time. Reading Andrew's report from the Dependent Art Fair, I kept flashing back to the Gramercy, and all the art in the bathrooms, and on the beds, and the insanely crowded...
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12:03 AM
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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9:12 PM
February 18, 2011
Frieze has been around 20 years? That's crazy. I feel so old. I'm really liking the dips into the archives by invited Big Thinkers. Jens Hoffmann's picks focus on biennials and such. My favorite has to be Jenny Liu's firsthand...
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9:14 PM
February 16, 2011
I cannot believe this has under 1,000 views. I'm only about 8:00 into this YouTube video, and already, Viktor Pinchuk is my hero. While anyone with a yacht or a palazzo could assemble a tranche of the art world...
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10:43 AM
January 23, 2011
In 2002, as I was still trying on various kinds of public writing, I tried to capture the transformative experience of listening to--no, experience is the better word--On Kawara's One Million Years. That post was even titled like a...
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11:29 PM
November 28, 2010
It's less than a week away, and I can't believe I haven't hyped it yet: I'm giving a presentation this Friday in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach titled, "Relational Aesthetics For The Rich, Or A Brief History Of The...
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12:18 AM
November 13, 2010
Christoph Brech is the master of the meaningful tight shot. In Sea Force One, he focuses in on a pair of workers in a small boat who are scrubbing the hull of Francois Pinault's black yacht in front of Punta...
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11:55 AM
October 19, 2010
Worlds Fairs turned out to be the perfect venue for photomurals--they were catchy, usually didactic, packed a visual punch, and got the point across to the shuffling masses. And at least in the 1930s, they looked like the future....
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Posted by greg at
11:16 AM
October 18, 2010
image: vintage silver gelatin print, signed, Ezra Stoller, 1939, via morehousegallery Do turning back another chapter or two in the history of enlarged pictures, photomurals, and photomontages, where do they turn up the most [besides/before the Museum of Modern...
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10:36 PM
September 20, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Hal Laessig, a Newark architect, developer, and artist who was a graduate student of Daniel Libeskind's at Cranbrook, and who came back to build three fantastical, fantasy machines for LIbeskind's...
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7:41 PM
September 18, 2010
God bless the Internet and all who surf upon her. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I thought was an esoteric topic, even for greg.org: the fantastical lost machines from "Three Lessons of Architecture," Daniel Libeskind's exhibition...
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9:08 PM
September 11, 2010
"My cover would go right here." [image via] Just like the Wallace Sayre quip about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so low, maybe the hubris and self-regard are so extraordinary because it's the Venice Architecture...
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11:05 AM
September 3, 2010
via la_biennale So Venice is not a total bust. Raumlaborberlin have installed their 2006 mobile inflatospace sculpture, „Das Küchenmonument," in the Giardini. And next to it is The Generator, an on-site workshop for knocking together "sedia veneziana," which are...
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7:32 AM
September 2, 2010
via tsaaby Yeah, so I'd been poking around flickr for a while, looking to see how MOS's project for the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale turned out. Because well, because. via Erika-Milite And hmm. What is it...
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11:23 PM
August 24, 2010
And in other Venice Biennale of Architecture exhibition news: cityLAB, Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman's architecture think tank at UCLA, is also in the US Pavilion show, Workshopping. One of the projects they're apparently showing is called Duck &...
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Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
MOS, of the PS1's woolly mammoth carcass MOSes, is one of seven architecture firms and collaboratives included in "Workshopping: an American Model for Architectural Practice," at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibit is curated by Michael Rooks of the...
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Posted by greg at
1:38 PM
November 14, 2009
I can't say how I feel about Francesco Vezzoli's work; that's not how my mama raised me. I will grant though, that he's extremely smart and astute and has successfully identified an elemental dynamic of the art world and makes...
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Posted by greg at
5:45 PM
June 9, 2009
Francesco Bonami, director of the 2003 Venice Biennale, writing for the NY Times' blog, The Moment:...the sculptor Bruce Nauman, the Sam Shepherd of Contemporary Art, was awarded the Gold Lion for best national pavilion. (A sign that the Obama effect...
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9:42 AM
June 6, 2009
But enough about muscly, young, naked performance art hustlers in Venice staging homoerotically charged events for attention and acclaim for a moment. My friends Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset just won a Special Mention Award at the Biennale for their...
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7:09 PM
May 31, 2009
In 1972, the Austrian architecture collective Haus-Rucker installed Oasis Nr 7 at Documenta 5. A steel pipe structure was cantilevered out the window of the Friedericianum, and a platform, two palm trees, and a hammock were installed. The entire...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 PM
April 5, 2009
Last September was the first anniversary of what's now called the Saffron Rebellion, where Burmese monks took to the streets to protest the military government. As a commemoration of that movement, the Stedelijk Museum showed the first of three...
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1:47 PM
March 31, 2004
She slept through the almost the whole thing*. Until we walked into the Cecily Brown gallery, when she started screaming at the top of her lungs. On this advice, we cut our visit short, leaving via the elevator so as...
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Posted by greg at
1:23 AM
June 16, 2003
The Venice Biennale is finally over open, and not a day too soon. For a bunch of whiny Americans, anyway. In the Times, Carol Vogel complains about having to see art "amid relentless heat intensified by the power needed for...
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Posted by greg at
11:16 AM
June 11, 2003
Utopia Station is a project opening at the Venice Biennale, curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. In Venice, there's a space, a Station, designed by Tiravanija and Liam Gillick, which will host a series of...
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1:41 AM
May 15, 2003
Last year, I wrote about the utterly moving experience of On Kawara's work, One Million Years (Past) at Documenta XI. Now, I find the brilliant art site, ubu has put out a 73-minute excerpt of One Million Years (Future)...
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1:37 AM
July 2, 2002
It may be a little overwrought ("So let's receive this Documenta as the proclamation of a state of emergency."), but Kim Levin's Village Voice review of Documenta 11 is pretty right on. I mean, she generally agrees with me, reinforcing...
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4:41 AM
June 24, 2002
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Documenta 11 in this week's New Yorker. He snidely and wearily compliments the show for its "robust, mature...festivalism," which I take to mean they figured out how to show video-based works. But he at least notices two...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 AM
June 18, 2002
Still in Kassel, at least mentally. The bad news first: Michael Kimmelman's embarassing writeup of Documenta 11 in todays NYTimes is not only self-contradictory, but almost every complaint or criticism he makes of the show can be refuted by the...
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Posted by greg at
1:43 AM
June 17, 2002
Setting: Fredericianum, Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany The voice of a woman reading from within a freestanding glass booth echos through the gallery: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and twelve. B.C. You watch, slightly amused. A set of black...
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Posted by greg at
8:35 AM
June 16, 2002
Report from Kassel: Got back Saturday, after an ultimately successful and fulfilling trip, but with entirely too much driving. Friday afternoon, the Documenta technical office installed a new monitor in the Ashkin piece, calibrated the timing of the three monitors,...
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4:36 AM
June 13, 2002
KASSEL - A mammoth contemporary art exhibition. First things first: Documenta 11 is at least an order of magnitude better than last year's Venice Bienale, and not just because it's not so freakin' hot. While pursuing some gratuitous VIP ego-stroking...
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Posted by greg at
11:16 AM
June 12, 2002
BASEL - A mammoth contemporary art fair. A pleasant scattering of familiar faces and new (and old) work by favorite artists. And tons of work by artists I don't really care for. A surprise DJ/friend from NYC turning up at...
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Posted by greg at
3:52 AM
