In writing about art, it's hard to avoid the cliché of the "visual feast." For some reason, there was a lot of eating with the eyes this week (only a few examples included here). Best variation was by Michael Glover of the London Times, who writes of François Boucher and Jean-Siméon Chardin that they are "as different from each other as a wedge of Dover chalk from a slice of good, creamy Camembert." More creative food analogies. And please pass the Picasso!
Heavy Light: Japanese Photography and Video at the ICP (-Sept. 6)
"...just average, or a little less, by the center’s own standards. ...feels a bit phoned in. ...the first large museum survey of Japanese photography in this country in decades. It contains some names that are new and worth knowing and others that are familiar and worth remembering. And when all else fails, it provides, at times inadvertently, some valuable glimpses of Japanese life and culture today, including a tendency to prolong adolescence." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes
Heavy Light and Bill Wood’s Business at the ICP (-Sept. 7)
"Taken together, though, the two shows demonstrate how photography can survey society in ways that are at once panoramic and telescopic. ... The smaller but more fascinating Bill Wood’s Business... Wood’s pictures aren’t critical, artistic or even remotely expressive, yet they sum up a peculiar moment in the US, when unparalleled prosperity and nuclear nightmares coexisted with the unchanging rituals of birthdays, weddings and funerals. ... This is the same country that Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand observed in their caustic images of smug provincialism and alienation. Wood’s version is irony-free. ...the dirty secret of slice-of-life photography is that when life is sliced with too blunt a knife, the banal transcends its time and place. A cliché is for ever." - Ariella Budick/Financial Times
Eminent Domain at the New York Public Library (-Aug 29)
"...about the photographer’s proprietary claim to the urban landscape. ...highlights recent work by five New York artists. None of them are street photographers in the conventional sense. Broadly speaking, “Eminent Domain” is a series of responses to change in the city (the source of which might be anything from gentrification to globalization). ... Day by day or block by block, the artists in “Eminent Domain” seize their own pieces of the city. The Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library, soon to be renamed for the financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, is the perfect site for this meditation on the nature of public and private urban space." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s at the SculptureCenter (-July 28)
"To judge from the museum calendars of the last few seasons, the ’70s were segregated by gender: large surveys of Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney and Richard Serra at the Museum of Modern Art; equally hefty exhibitions of feminist art across the river at P.S. 1 and the Brooklyn Museum. What’s missing is a sense of the decade as radical for male and female sculptors alike. ...highlights female artists who overlapped with the movements of Land Art and Post-Minimalism. ...50 works by 10 artists... There’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of any of them (with the possible exceptions of Nancy Holt, who was married to and often collaborated with Smithson, and Lynda Benglis, who exhibits regularly in Chelsea). ... Presenting Land Art in a gallery is always a problem. (A catalog would have helped.) ...suggests that the ’70s are far from exhausted, especially where works by women are concerned. An exhibition that placed Ms. Holt side by side with Smithson, or united Ms. Aycock with her mentor Robert Morris, would go even further." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
183rd Annual at the National Academy Museum (-Sept. 7)
"There's a whole lot of small stuff out there, and that has been increasingly true in recent years. Out of the 130 artists chosen for this show (from more than 400 nominations, all nonmembers, selected by a seven-person panel of academicians), at least one-third present work not much bigger than Steve Novick's toy-like woodblock sculptures, which are about the size of a Thomas the Tank Engine accessory. There are tiny train-set-like dioramas (by Donna Dennis), itsy-bitsy Arp-like abstractions (by Elizabeth Marran), and Tinkertoy sculptures extrapolated from maps (by Matthew Northridge). ...the Academy has taken great pains this year to foreground contemporary artists, which are the rage." - Dan Bischoff/Newark Star-Ledger
Eloquent Vistas: The Art of Nineteenth Century American Landscape Photography at the Montclair Art Museum (-Sept 14)
"... some 60 photographs taken by everybody from early motion-shooter Eadweard Muybridge to the first snapshot enthusiasts (George Eastman started selling cameras for amateurs in 1888, less than 50 years after photography was invented). The unifying theme of this show is the American landscape -- but we might just as well say it is awe. Without the shock, of course. Or, maybe, with it, since many of the images collected by the Eastman company, which put this traveling show together, were a shocking update of the small coterie of paintings by New Jersey Intimist George Inness and Western painter Thomas Moran from Montclair's permanent collection that accompany this show." - Dan Bischoff/Newark Star-Ledger
Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum (-Sept. 21)
"The plot could almost recap West Side Story. In the first room the stars of the rival gangs show off. ...one can see Greenberg as extending Cubism but disdaining its identification with nature. Rosenberg's action takes up the spontaneity of Surrealism without its mysticism... ... The show begins in 1940, with Gorky's Garden of Sochi, and it ends with Guston's 1976 conversion to a claustrophobic realism, two year's before Rosenberg's death (although Greenberg lived into the 1990s). ... In the years since, the divisions have only multiplied, into pluralism. Maybe history has not been kind to Rosenberg. Yet his anxious catholicity looks downright prescient. The installations in the 2008 Whitney Biennial really do abandon painting for the problems. ...the critics and the art they so admired look better than ever. They can hardly help it. The museum has borrowed classics not often seen in New York, such as four paintings from the Albright-Knox in Buffalo and three of Gorky's greatest." - John Haber
Paul Chan at the New Museum (-June 29)
"When Kara Walker visibly manipulates silhouettes, she makes her art an act of violence, but Chan brings the soothing charm of the handmade. ... I still do not know for sure how to react to Chan's insouciance, and yet I wandered in fascination through the pools of light on a museum floor. The artist lightens disaster to the point of trivializing it, but he also invites a wider circle of empathy. ... In blog-speak, a more truthful statement would follow the strikeout, and here nothing follows. Perhaps the title has no word after the strikeout because only darkness follows or only a spot of light." - John Haber
Olafur Eliasson at MoMA and P.S. 1 (-June 30)
"...Eliasson dwells on time and space, but not on history. ...Eliasson has found a way to update a high-toned Minimalism for an era of museum blockbusters and mass entertainment, without simply landing on either side of the equation. ... Eliasson's breadth of interests, then, makes him easy to know but hard to pin down. ... In the end, his interdisciplinary flair makes him worthwhile, even when he skims a little too quickly over one discipline after another." - John Haber
"...instructs the viewer to stay a little longer with the work, probably to make sure it isn’t mistaken as a collection of expensive party lights and other favors. ...successful are the works that speak to our natural desire to see forms line up nicely, or the palpable anticipation a person feels watching color and shape shift and transform a room... We engage in these works not only because they transform the way we see a room but because our bodies are physically implicated in a work that often demands little interaction." - Paddy Johnson/L Magazine
Illuminating the Medieval Hunt at The Morgan Library (-Aug. 10)
"If ever one wanted to know how to flay and dismember a stag, one had better seize the day. After conservation, the Morgan will rebind one of its great treasures, and one will never see so many of its pages again. ...this art shows the stirrings of a more secular age. The very fact of a hunting treatise rather than a prayer book says something." - John Haber
Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum (-July 13)
"...might have done better with the more than 90 works on view had the entry point of the show been better put together. With an initial explosion of Vuitton logos on canvas, jellyfish screens, slick commercial animations and transformer anime characters, the context given to the work certainly runs closer to commerce than it does fine art. ...standouts include the sparkling Vuitton logo-heavy painting Eye Love Superflat, evocative of Andy Warhol’s diamond dust paintings, along with his manga-esque collectible toy figures, which call to mind Marcel Duchamp’s green box filled with miniature replicas of his work. ...blurs the difference between the art objects and the architectural forms they’re situated within. This, much more than any synergy among art, pop culture and commerce, is where the real innovation lies." - Paddy Johnson/L Magazine
Alexis Rockman at the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA) (-July 27)
Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space at the M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center (Boston) (-July 6)
"Chantal Akerman is a hero of the avant-garde cinema. ... Now a traveling exhibition at M.I.T.’s List Visual Arts Center offers a good opportunity to assess what she has been up to over the last decade. ...two films and three multichannel video installations... ...demands a lot of her viewers. At least three hours are needed to take in the exhibition fully, and the time does not fly by. With their excruciatingly long, mostly silent scenes and minimalist storytelling, her films can feel like exercises in deprivation. On the whole, it is worth the effort. Not just a formalist, Ms. Akerman also takes on hot-button themes like racism in the American South, illegal immigration in the Southwest and a terrorism in the Mideast. As a political artist she can be heavy-handedly predictable or unexpectedly illuminating." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes
Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle at the San Diego Museum of Art (-Sept. 28)
"Long before Hillary, there was Georgia -- another woman of formidable talents whose charismatic, powerful husband afforded her substantial opportunities, even as he influenced the shaping of her public identity. ... With 27 paintings and drawings by O'Keeffe among more than 50 works by others, the show is a feast for fans of the artist as well as an abbreviated but still provocative art history lesson. ... If O'Keeffe's initial reception owed heavily to Stieglitz's interventions, her work endures because of its integrity and elemental purity. This stirring show allows truths about both Georgia and Alfred to come forth." - Leah Ollman/LA Times
"...beautifully presented retrospective... It's not only the unflinching sincerity of Frida's pictures that makes them appealing today but the sense they give en bloc of a self defined by multiple, perpetually conflicting loyalties, passions, needs and sufferings. We recognize, at least emotionally, something of our own historical position as individuals." - Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle
Boucher and Chardin at the Wallace Collection (London) (-Sept. 7)
"Sometimes two painters can look at the same scene and find in it two quite different realities. This is the case with the genre paintings of François Boucher and Jean-Siméon Chardin, two of the greatest artists of 18th-century France. This week a new show opens at the Wallace Collection in London that documents the development of genre painting in France... In many respects, Boucher and Chardin are as different from each other as a wedge of Dover chalk from a slice of good, creamy Camembert." -
The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain (London) (-Aug. 31)
"...more than 100 paintings and drawings of the Ottoman empire by British artists and ranges them by theme (religion, gender and genre, portraits). The pictures range from the eye-rolling to the outstanding, but it's a visual feast and the lure is much in evidence: harems, bazaars, camels, mosques and turbans abound. ...this is the period when British artists began to record their own responses to the Ottoman world; earlier painters had merely plundered the dressing-up box." -
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