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Marina Abramovic and Ulay, “Relation in Time,” 1977. Still from 16mm film transferred to video. (Photo: Marina Abramovic, Sean Kelly Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
Caught in the ambient glow of overhead light fixtures, two figures sit staring at each other across a table. One of the figures is dressed in a long, flowing red gown reminiscent of clerical wear. The other is weeping inconsolably. For a moment, the world is theatrically halted, slowed to the pulse of dual heartbeats. Looking away quickly from the reverie on display, one acknowledges the frame: the cameras and the awaiting queue to the shrine in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, where Marina Abramovic is sitting for 716 hours and 30 minutes for her new durational work, The Artist is Present, as members of the public take turns courting her — and challenging her — with their gaze.
The already notorious performance is part of the first full-scale retrospective of a performance artist ever organized at MoMA, spanning four decades of Abramovic’s prolific and demanding practice, from her early ‘70s conceptual and sometimes death-defying “Rhythm” works through her collaborations with former partner and lover Ulay to Seven Easy Pieces, her 2005 Guggenheim restaging of seminal performance works by Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, and herself. Interspersed throughout the exhibit are reproduced versions of Abramovic’s key works, presented by a host of often naked people she has trained to perform her work.
Mark Beasley
ArtInfo
Since reopening in 2007, the New Museum has raised a lot of hackles. At every level of the art world, people express chagrin and frustration with the place. Complaints always start with the terrible exhibition spaces in the new building and usually proceed from there to the idea that the museum is playing a zero-sum game of Art World Survivor: trying to outthink, outplay, and outdo other local museums. The common conception is that the institution is more about strategy than vision. I love the place, but there are problems.
Jerry Saltz
New York Magazine
“Loddie,” by Michael Williams, 2007
Few modern myths about art have been as persistent or as annoying as the so-called death of painting. Unless, of course, it is the belief that abstract and representational painting are oil and water, never to meet as one.
The two notions are related. The Modernist insistence on the separation of representation and abstraction robbed painting of essential vitality. Both notions have their well-known advocates. And both, in my mind seem, well, very 20th century.
Pictorial communication — signs, symbols, images and colors on a flat surface — is one of the oldest and richest of human inventions, like writing or music. It started on rocks and the surfaces of clay pots and in the woven threads of textiles, then moved to walls, wood panels, copper and canvas. It now includes plasma screens, Photoshop and graphic novels. Even so, paint on a portable surface remains one of the most efficient and intimate means of self-expression.
Roberta Smith
New York Times
Jessie Hemmons works on a Rittenhouse Square tree with boyfriend Jerry Kaba’s help. (Photo: Sharon Gekoski-Kimmel)
The magnolia tree on the north side of Rittenhouse Square looks as if it were plucked from a Dr. Seuss book. Its split trunk is wrapped in a whimsical sweater of pinks, blues, purples, and oranges.
The tree cozy is the work of Jessie Hemmons, 23, a graduate student in psychology at Chestnut Hill College and census worker – and a graffiti artist with a soft side.
Hemmons is part of a growing trend of rogue knitters who have taken their “yarnbombing” to the street to brighten the cityscape. She ties crocheted flowers to lampposts, wraps bike racks with rainbow-colored covers, and gave the Rocky statue a scarf.
Her motivation is simple.
“Times are tough,” Hemmons said. “People want to see something bright and pretty.”
Yesterday morning she put up her largest installation yet. Passersby stopped to watch and snap pictures as Hemmons began stitching about 15 feet of knitting – a 30-hour project – to a tree near 19th and Walnut Streets.
The yarnbombing trend made headlines this month when three women in West Cape May, known only by their tag name, Salty Knits, began putting up knitting under the cover of night in the borough’s Wilbraham Park and outside private businesses.
Chelsea Conaboy
Philadelphia Inquirer
A computer rendering of Jean Nouvel’s design for the National Museum of Qatar. The tilting plates that form the walls will create peekaboo views from one gallery to another, pulling you along. (Photo: Jean Nouvel)
Few architects have invested more time trying to bridge the gap between the high-tech aesthetics of the West and the traditions of the Middle East than Jean Nouvel.
His design for the Arab World Institute in Paris in 1987 was dominated by mechanical, light-regulating apertures arranged in a pattern that evoked Islamic motifs. A planned branch of the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi will be shaded by a gigantic dome that turns its grounds into a kind of oasis. And workers are putting the final touches on an office tower in Doha, Qatar, that is sheathed in aluminum latticework and capped by a filigreed, mosquelike dome.
Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
Art handlers compete in the static hold event, in which they held framed pieces of lead (at 50 or 60 pounds) against a wall while a “curator” barked orders (Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times)
The explosive growth of the art world during the last decade has been fueled by rich new collectors, shiny new galleries and sprawling new museum wings. But the gears and the grease that keep this big machine humming are people who can be generally described with less glamorous adjectives: underpaid, uninsured, overworked and sweaty (not to mention often heavily tattooed, bearded, hung over and painfully burdened by loan payments for their M.F.A. degrees).
These are the art handlers, an often-invisible international underclass of blue-collar workers, most of them aspiring artists trying to pay the bills. But on Sunday afternoon at a bare-bones gallery on the Lower East Side, a group of them finally got a chance to grab a little glory. And even better, they got a raucous public forum in which to mock gallery owners, curators, collectors, critics, fellow artists and just about everyone in the art world, not excluding themselves.
The event, the first-ever Art Handling Olympics — a combination roast, “Jackass”-style stunt extravaganza and excuse to drink a lot — drew about 200 people at its height who came to the Ramiken Crucible gallery to watch a dozen four-man teams (art handlers are, by and large, male, and, by and large, large) go head-to-head, demonstrating their skills with a lot of fake art and untold amounts of Bubble Wrap.
Randy Kennedy
New York Times
The beep is an ingenious creation. Like the railroad toot but unlike an old telephone ring, beeps have both a distinct start and finish, marked by the twin plosives “b” and “p,” and an elastic center that can generously expand and contract like an accordion: beeeeeeeep. You can create Morse code in beeps. Beeeep beep beep beep. Beep. Beep. Beep beeeep beeeep beep.
“The beep is a purely human-made, electrical sound,” Jonathan Sterne, a professor of communication studies at McGill University, told me by e-mail. Plants don’t beep, nor weather, nor animals. (The beep-beeping Road Runner of Warner Brothers is an exception.) If you hear a beep, you know that a person, or more likely his artifact, is signaling. There’s no wondering, Is that a beep or a nightingale? Is that a beep or a tornado? Beeps are also not voices or music.
Virginia Heffernan
New York Times
Photograph: Richard Hendy/Spike Japan
Outside Tokyo and its other metropolises, Japan is dying a strange death. It’s due to demographics. First: advances in medicine and a diet high in raw squid have helped to make Japan the oldest society that has ever existed in the long history of human societies. Second, because of its ridiculously low birth rate and frosty attitude to immigrants, Japan is now the first large industrialised country to experience a population decrease as a result of natural causes. In short, as its oldsters get even older, and its youngsters spend all their time commuting on packed trains in identical black suits instead of having wild unprotected sex, Japan’s population is shrinking. Very rapidly, in fact. In 2008, it lost 79,000 people. If such trends continue, the Japanese child and working-age population will decrease by almost half in the coming 50 years, while the ranks of the elderly will swell.
What does this mean? To Richard Hendy, whose ongoing online essay Spike Japan is some of the funniest and saddest writing on contemporary Japan today – and to whom I am in debt for the statistics in the preceding paragraph – it means rust. Lots and lots of beautiful rust.
A self-proclaimed “luster after rust”, Hendy travels the Japanese hinterland taking photos of crumbling architecture and shuttered buildings. He goes to the remote, and not-so-remote, places from which the population is disappearing. He tracks abandoned railway lines. He takes pictures of deserted schools. He wanders through silent factories. And he revels, if that’s the right word, in the melancholy beauty of his adopted country’s air of neglect. He says things such as “What a patchwork quilt of corrugation” or “Look how delicately the embers of rust lick up and down the ridges and furrows; how the windows shed tears, grow beards of rust”. Meanwhile, he unspools a wry and uniquely informed commentary on Japan’s twin woes: economic (aka “the malodorous pall of the Bubble”) and demographic. Together, these two demons have all but utterly consumed hundreds of towns, thousands of villages. Hendy is determined, in his odd way, to honour them.
Chris Michael
Guardian
The sculpture gallery at Palazzo Grimani (Photo: Dino Chinellato/MiBac)
The Renaissance rediscovery of ancient art and architecture also led to the revival of another Greek and Roman concept — the museum.
That Venice was a leader in the refounding of these institutions was primarily thanks to two patrician Venetian collectors, Domenico Grimani and his nephew Giovanni, who in the 16th century gave the city two pioneering museums.
In 1596, Domenico and Giovanni’s legacies of Greek and Roman antiquities inaugurated the Public Statuary in the vestibule of the Library in Piazza San Marco, designed by the Florentine Jacopo Sansovino. Enriched by further donations over the centuries, the Public Statuary later became the Archeological Museum.
Less well known is that Giovanni Grimani was also the founder of a private museum at Palazzo Grimani off Campo Santa Maria Formosa, a few minutes’ walk from Piazza San Marco. Palazzo Grimani was once one of the most famous residence-museums in Europe. Early visitors, who came as much to marvel at its astonishing marbled, stuccoed, gilded and frescoed interiors as at its numerous treasures, included King Henry III of France in 1573. It became an essential landmark on the Grand Tour between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Roderick Conway Morris
New York Times
Tinie Tempah will be rapping about Chris Ofili’s latest work. (Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/PR/Guardian)
The art world thrives on the reactions of critics. Sensationalist work damned as “gratuitous” or “pretentious” is what makes the Turner prize so exciting. The most media-worthy pieces of the last 10 years have been the work of the YBAs: an unmade bed, a light flashing on and off, a black Mary. Opinions may differ on works such as these, but one thing remains constant: the views belong to white, middle-class (mostly) male critics. Certainly academics are seen as credible authorities, but what of those outside the artistic elite?
It seems like the Tate has realised the importance of having diverse voices to challenge and criticise the way art is seen. Over the next two Sundays, Tate Britain will be inviting urban acts, producers and poets to show the art world a new side to criticism. Each artist – including the current UK No 1 Tinie Tempah – will use the space to present individual responses to artwork by Chris Ofili (in this particular instance Tinie will be spitting 32 bars about one of Ofili’s paintings).
Guardian
