Embedded Files
A few years ago I started collecting reviews of what I call Art Absurdities. Below are some examples -- some pictured, some described.
The Emperor Visits An Art Dealer
NY Times, Jan. 2014 . . . Ms. Ono’s book “Grapefruit” is open to a page containing “Kitchen Piece,” dating from the winter of 1960. “Hang a canvas on a wall,” she writes. “Throw all the leftovers you have in the kitchen that day on the canvas. You may prepare special food for the piece.”
NY Times -- Feb 2012
A museum in Queens has shut down an online art installation by the actor Shia LaBeouf, calling it a “serious and ongoing public safety hazard” after Mr. LaBeouf was arrested and the exhibit became a target for threats of violence.
The participatory exhibit, “He Will Not Divide Us,” was a collaboration between Mr. LaBeouf and the artists Luke Turner and Nastja Sade Ronkko. Intended as a rebuke to President Trump, the exhibit hinged on a video camera mounted on the outside of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, into which passers-by were invited to repeat the phrase “he will not divide us.”
The aim was to stream online images of people repeating those words throughout Mr. Trump’s time in office. NY Times Feb. 2017
Koons has gone further, however. In his new show at the Gagosian gallery in New York, the artist has taken 35 masterpieces, including Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait Wearing a Hat, had them repainted in oil on canvas, and added a little shelf, painted as if it had sprouted directly from the image.
On each of these shelves, Koons has placed a large, blue glass bauble, or “gazing ball”, popularised by King Ludwig II of Bavaria and now more often used as garden ornaments. These baubles were specially hand-blown in Pennsylvania – Koons commissioned 350 and picked the best 35. “Each one’s unique,” he says.
Though they appear to be perfectly balanced, the globes are attached to the shelves with a rod reaching into the hollow bauble. “I engineered this and I feel really good about it, because all these things are somewhat an engineering feat,” said Koons.
"Going Down" (my suggested title)
NY Times: In August, the shark in formaldehyde — Damien Hirst’s signature work — will come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on loan from Steven A. Cohen, a hedge fund trader and art collector. Mr. Hirst’s shark, whose proper name is “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” is usually called a piece of conceptual art.
NY Times: Near the beginning, in the “Destruction” section, hangs “Archeological Find #21,” a glowering wall relief that is actually a violently flattened sofa from 1961 by Raphael Montañez Ortiz" . . . Near Mr. Ortiz’s flattened couch, violence becomes more real, or at least more referential, in photographs of Artur Barrio’s “Bloody Bundles” sculptures, parts of butchered animals tied in sheets.
NY Times – August 2012 Nakedness In Dance:
At the end of “Crotch”, a 2009-10 solo show by the performance artist Keith Hennessy, he sat naked but with his groin covered in lard. He gathered us, the audience, around him onstage. Pushing a needle with blood-red thread through scars in his own flesh, he sewed the thread through the clothing of the three people in the audience seated nearest him. He then gave lingeringly searching gazes into our eyes.
This June, at the climactic moment of “Pâquerette,” an hourlong duet at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn (part of the Queer New York Festival), Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud, after removing what few garments they had been wearing, inserted dildos up their backsides and kept them there for perhaps 10 minutes. The only dance moment of note occurred when, side by side, each held a balance on one foot while using the sole of the raised foot to hold the dildo in place.
NY Times: “Unskill” is one of the words in the show’s useful glossary . . . and nearly all of it looks on first glance like junk or detritus. . . . The main idea here seems to be to make art that looks like art only on careful examination, guided by the assumption that everything, every detail, is intentional and meaningful. . . And yet there’s Abraham Cruzvillegas’s wonderfully buoyant “Matière Brute,” a balancing act of two scraps of lumber and red-surfaced sandpaper that updates Calder.
NY Times: The show consists primarily of cryptic yet suggestive phrases in large letters, splayed across walls, ceiling beams and occasionally floors, that conjure up various physical situations but often leave to your imagination the objects or the scale involved.
“Encased By + Reduced to Rust” evokes a crumbling object, but it could also be a soul or an artist’s talent. (And there is that twist of “rust” where you expect “dust.”) . . . Exhibit A is “A Wall Cratered by a Single Shotgun Blast” (carried out at very close range), as well as “Two Minutes of Spray Paint Directly Upon the Floor From a Standard Aerosol Spray Can,” exceptionally beautiful in hot pink.
NY Times: At the turn of the present millennium, with the art market bubbling up and the vogue for identity politics on the wane, William Pope.L — the self-described “friendliest black artist in America” — belly-crawled his way up Broadway, the Great White Way, in a Superman outfit, and ate copies of The Wall Street Journal (He smiles as he inches up the street on all fours; he uncomplainingly devours news of money he’ll never have. He paints murals with peanut butter and makes sculpture from Pop-Tarts)
Washington Post -- Four years at Yale costs $180,000. Here is how senior Aliza Shvarts planned to conclude hers: The art major would repeatedly artificially inseminate herself, then induce miscarriages, which she would record on video. She would build a four-foot-wide plastic cube and wrap it in layers of plastic. Between the layers would be Vaseline mixed with blood from the miscarriages. She would hang the cube at an exhibition and project video of the miscarriages onto four of its sides.
"This piece," Shvarts wrote in the Yale Daily News, "is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. . . . It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership
NY Times -- Annie Gosfield composes music often inspired by “non-musical” sounds. Her most recent CD, “Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites,” features satellite transmissions, factory noises and a string quartet. She has held the Darius Milhaud chair of composition at Mills College, taught at Princeton University and California Institute of the Arts and was guest composer at The Eastman School. Her current projects include a new CD for Tzadik, a piece based on the radio transmissions of the Danish resistance, and a cello concerto.
NY Times: If you’ve ever wanted to see the interior of the
Guggenheim Museum in its pristine state, now’s the time. For the solo show of the young European artist Tino Sehgal, the great spiraling rotunda, recently ablaze with Kandinskys, has been cleared out. There isn’t a painting in sight. Yet the space isn’t empty. On the rotunda’s ground floor, a man and woman entwine in a changing, slow-motion amorous embrace. On the ramps above, people walk and talk in pairs or clusters at a leisurely pace, with new participants periodically joining conversations as others drop away.
NY Times: Ms. Hanford is part of the gallery’s latest exhibit by Brian Reed. She stands fully naked under a suspended web made of various objects including shark eggs and teeth, beads and clay pipes. Her nakedness is essential, Mr. Reed explained, “so she can be fully at the center of that connectivity” of energy.
NY Times – MOMA -- Yet a day spent watching people watch the show — naked performers re-enacting some of Ms. Abramovic’s most audacious pieces of the last 40 years; the artist herself in an epic endurance performance in the museum’s atrium; videos of Ms. Abramovic slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade and standing for several minutes with an arrow in a drawn bow aimed at her heart — shows that it takes quite a bit to shake up most museumgoers these days. . . He stared into a large room where a highly illuminated naked woman was on display high on a wall, perched on a small bicycle seat with transparent blocks beneath her feet to support her, a re-creation of a 1997 work called “Luminosity.”
NY Times -- Kienholz’s wrenching, incendiary “Five-Car Stud” made from 1969 to ’72. The stark nighttime tableau of life-size figures and real cars, which depicts the castration of a black man by six white men while Delta blues plays on the radio of the victim’s pickup truck and, inside it, his white female companion looks on in horror.
(re John Cage's "4 min 33 sec of silence" bullshit)
(re John Cage's "4 min 33 sec of silence" bullshit)
MoMA’s ‘There Will Never Be Silence,’ About John Cage -- NY Times Jan. 2014
MoMA’s ‘There Will Never Be Silence,’ About John Cage -- NY Times Jan. 2014
At that first performance of “4’33” ,” Cage later recalled, the audience was presented with “what they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen.” In fact, the rendition was “full of accidental sounds.”
“ You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement,” he continued. “During the second, raindrops began pattering on the roof, and during the third, people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked and walked out.”
The original score, which used traditional musical notation to mark three “movements” of extended rests, does not survive. The one on display at the museum uses proportional notation, with a series of vertical lines on blank paper that mark the duration of each silence, pulling together spatial and temporal measurements. . . The final nudge toward Cage’s silent work came from Robert Rauschenberg, whom he met in 1951, while the artist was working on his white paintings. These smooth, monochrome canvases went a step further than Barnett Newman’s “The Voice,” which is also part of the show. That painting is almost entirely white, too, but the variations in brush strokes and a subtly vertical line running down one side like a scar give the viewer’s eye plenty to engage with. . . “Cage recognized that what Rauschenberg had done was remove all the elements of ‘art,’ ” he said. “And that if you put up a painting like that in a room, it’s going to interact with the light and dust particles in the air.”
World-renowned sculptor Richard Serra adds some finishing paint to his MOMA-bound
4,000-pound solid lead cheeseburger. (not really Serra)
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