Thursday, November 01, 2012

Modular Abstraction: A Q&A with Judy Rushin



Modular Abstraction: A Q&A with Judy Rushin on the New American Paintings/Blog

Art for the female expat: "site-specific works that can travel well"...[and]..."reflect our own untethered geographies."

World's Narrowest House


Keret House

World's Narrowest House by Jakub Szczesny

"The house is located between two buildings from two historical epochs. “The first is a brick building on Zelazna Street – a fragment of the pre-world war II city, almost no longer existing. The second – a cooperative concrete apartment building, an element of an “imposed structure”, which was aimed at negating the previous city landscape."

Sunday, October 28, 2012

John Yau on Wade Guyton

http://hyperallergic.com/59288/hidden-in-plain-sight-wade-guytons-dirty-pictures/


Wade Guyton, “Untitled” (2006). Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen; 90 × 53 in. (228.6 × 134.6 cm). Collection of Mark Grotjahn and Jennifer Guidi. ©Wade Guyton. Photograph by Lamay Photo.

Reverence, citation, mimicry, the absence of the hand, and a destructive impulse — all familiar postmodern positions — coexist in Guyton’s inkjet paintings...his incredibly productive lack of creativity fits right into the by now familiar and even petrified art historical narrative that claims that de-skilling, appropriation, and post-Duchampian/post-studio practice are the only games in town, that everything else is a failure not worth considering.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Documenta 13 Review


Some photos from our excursion at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany

Top 5

1. Cardiff / Miller at the train station
2. Theaster Gates at the Hugenot House
3. William Kentridge (not pictured below)
4. Michael Rakowitz
5. Geoffrey Farmer

Oh and our project at Temporary home. More at http://joelledietrick.com/site/packet_switching

Cardiff / Miller iPod tour at the main train station...


Listen to the narrator guide you around the station, while strange performances happen on the screen

























Other people with their tours



















Theaster Gates, 12 Ballads for the Hugenot House

























Michael Rakowitz installation containing fragments of structures demolished by efforts on the part of fundamentalist religions.

























Geoffrey Farmer’s hallway long piece Leaves of Grass cut from five decades of Life Magazine




















Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Rita Ackermann, Expat But Not

Rita Ackermann, We Mastered the Art of Doing Nothing, 1994















From Gean Moreno on Rita Ackermann in the July / August 2012 issue of Art Papers, regarding nuanced variations on expat artists...

A few people who have written about Ackermann have pointed out, mostly in passing or in attempting a clever turn, that she is Hungarian and works in exile. I have never understood what they mean by this. When I read this, I imagine working in one place—although not being there at all—while thinking of another. It has to do with investing energy in territory one has been banished from. I think it was Mary McCarthy who proposed that exiles are people whose entire being is spent in waiting—waiting for something to change back home, for news from family and other dissidents, for attacks from hostile quarters, for opportunities to explain things to the world. I don't see this in Ackermann. I wouldn't even call her an expat. She embodies a different condition, something closer to being a runaway. It's a different kind of subjectivity, shaped by other investments and anxieties. It has little to do with being concerned with what is happening back home and much more to do with figuring out how to make one's inevitably accented work and foreign body whittle a slot—its own slot—in the homogenous field of local expression. A field that, by the very impulse to reproduce that underscores it, is inherently hostile to anything that comes in from the outside. Ackermann's work has to do with arriving. And it concerns itself with this because it's only after arriving, and right before adaptation or acclimation begin their stultifying processes, that one can take flight again, exercising continuous displacement as a way of developing a body of heterogenous but coherent work.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Alighiero Boetti Retrospective at Museum of Modern Art


Most pleasant surprises:

'For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the ultimate in beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short, I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing' (A. Boetti quoted in Alberto Boatto, Alighiero & Boetti, Ravenna 1984, p. 122).

Link to NYTimes Review

And in Chelsea

1) Leo Koenig, Julika Rudelius, http://www.rudelius.org/
2) "Everyday Abstract--Abstract Everyday," James Cohan, Gabriel Pionkowski is amazing

Saturday, July 07, 2012

RCA Architecture



New Royal College of Art dean of architecture Alex de Rijke will steer students away from proposing unrealisable “paper architecture” and instead focus on how their ideas could be built.

 In an interview with Dezeen at the RCA Show 2012 last month, de Rijke said: “Historically [at the RCA] there’s always been a very strong agenda on paper architecture – the speculative, the work that is provocative but not necessarily make-able.”

 In future, “Students will be encouraged to speculate not just about future uses or programmes or places, but actually speculate about how they will be built,” de Rijke says. “Material experiment will very much become part of the course.”

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Nate Page - House Beautiful


Suburban Reflecting Pool, 2012
Exhibition in a 1956 ranch style home on a cul-de-sac in the San Gabriel Valley. Above Nate Page's intervention with a mirror.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

DODGE Gallery: Twisted Sisters

Looks promising. Good roster. Hopefully will make it to NYC before it ends.
Twisted Sister at DODGE gallery, May 19–June 23, 2012.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Elisabeth Condon


Enjoy my friend Elisabeth Condon's blog, especially in anticipation of her upcoming exhibition at Dorsh Gallery, Miami. Opens May 11. http://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/

Breathtaking recent work above...

Monday, April 30, 2012

Keystone Habit Transformed Housing Color

I'm listening to the audiobook The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg, and he talks about how Alcoa's focus one simple change, improvement of their safety record, transformed the company into a efficient profit-making machine. An unexpected result, flexibility in the coloring of manufactured aluminum siding for houses, helped to reduce waste, lift profits, and exemplified better communication patterns.

Review of the book on Huffington Post
Charles Duhigg: How 'Keystone Habits' Transformed a Corporation

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Director Amanda Pope

Quote of the day from director Amanda Pope:

"You need to develop your ability to go and do the most difficult thing in front of you because it’s a more interesting way to live."

From a panel on women in the film biz from the 2010 Santa Barbara Independent Film Festival.

Friday, April 06, 2012

Monday, March 19, 2012

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Fuck Yeah Brutalism

Famous example of brutalism just north of New York City in Orange County, New York, about to be replace with unoriginal colonial-wannabee structure that looks like the architectural equivalent of clipart.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The Searchers II



Sasha Bezzubov & Jessica Sucher
American Sikh with portrait of Guru
Gobind Singh, at an international Sikh
boarding school (Amritsar, India)
2006
40 x 50"