CityLAB's Duck & Cover

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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How To Make A Biennale Pavilion Architectural Intervention

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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The Player

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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Wait, Which "Ban" Was That Again?

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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Elmgreen & Dragset & The Collectors

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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Oasis 7, Haus-Rucker, Documenta 5

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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Amar Kanwar's The Torn First Pages

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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A 4 week-old baby reviews the Whitney Biennial

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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Venice: Vidi, Bitchy

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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Utopia Station

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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One Million Years (Future), on MP3

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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How the Village Voice agrees with me (generally) on Documenta 11

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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Peter Schjeldahl reviews Documenta 11

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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Still in Kassel, at

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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Setting: Fredericianum, Documenta 11, Kassel,

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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Report from Kassel: Got back

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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KASSEL - A mammoth contemporary

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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BASEL - A mammoth contemporary

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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