In the late 1960s in Belgrade, Marina Abramović began thinking up rebellious unrealizable performances for public spaces, just as President Tito began thinking he would ease social restrictions by turning a former police station into a cultural center for student demonstrators to make art in. I turned 10 in 1970 and the dissonance of the times was (briefly) lost on me. In 1975 in Amsterdam Marina met Ulay (on their More …
James Cameron has been making Avatar for 15 years, longer than the US has spent in Iraq. Thats proved enough time to construct a movie cosmology with a clash of cultures at its core. But isnt Pandora a fools paradise? Avatar, James Camerons latest moviemaking extravaganza, is a romantic hymn to an anti-corporate, anti-colonial insurgency on a green planet, Pandora, thats about to be strip-mined for greed and profit. Its More …
“Confluencias: Arte Cubano Contemporaneo,” at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, assembles what organizers are calling the largest group show of contemporary Cuban art to occur in the United States, since Alfred Barr in 1944 mounted “Modern Painters of Cuba” at MoMa. “Confluencias” offers some 90 paintings, drawings, video, photography, mixed media, and sculpture, by a group of roughly 40 artists all of whom live and work in Cuba. More …
Provoke, was the Japanese magazine and collective founded in November 1968 by a group of photographers and critics including Koji Taki, Takahiko Okada, and Takuma Nakahira (b. 1938), joined by Daido Moriyama in the second issue. The magazine folded in August 1969 after only three issues. With a radical, leftist bent, it aimed to counter established viewpoints, publishing blurry, gritty photo-essays and critical new ideas. The history and demise of More …
The Denver Biennial of the Americas has some awesome growing pains. Denver artists and art dealers are getting nervous. So are conference planners, hotel bookers and purveyors of the creative economy in Mile High City. The Biennial of the Americas, scheduled June 24-August 12, 2010 is a scant 9 months away. It has been characterized by rumors of its pre-term demise, a hide-and-seek between the city and potential exhibitors about More …
Forbes, the magazine that loves to categorize things, came out with a new ranking August 20th – The top 10 American cities for cultural tourism. The results. Not surprising? New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC are the consecutive top 5. This report based its results on numbers of overnight visits to these cities in 2008, and the number of cultural institutions AOL City Guides lists for each More …
Artist Jay De Feo was for the duration of her life associated with the Bay Area, and sometimes mistaken, by her name, for a man (some speculate that being named Jay helped her win the 1951 UC Berkeley fellowship that took her, after graduation, to Europe and North Africa for a year and a half, Florence for six months of that). However, her work is that of a brilliant changeling More …
“We hardly ever have a real experience.” So the post-gesturalist Hadi Tabatabai, an Iranian artist living in Berkeley, and a Pollock-Krasner award winner, commented to Richard Whitaker in an interview. Tabatabai showed this spring at inde/jacobs gallery in Marfa. His work uses thread, or grout, or wax for “painting,” that at first and last glance call to mind the ineradicable influence of Agnes Martin. Evidently, as Tabatabai tells Whitaker, the More …
Not many festivals that are conferences and shows of new computer graphics and virtual interactivities have jukeboxes. SIGGRAPH does. Here is a short preview of whats coming to New Orleans August 3-7. SIGGRAPH is the spot for all things new in digital animation, intersections of art and science, and far out hybrids for the coming robotics, visual music and interdisciplinary interactions the rocket scientists dream up. It starts on a More …
Summer is classical music festival season in Colorado. No matter the destination one is sure to find some of the finest musicians and vocalists performing in gorgeous alpine and bucolic settings. Even as Aspen Music Festival was rumored in July to have sustained a recession-induced cut of personnel and some music students, the atmosphere of summer music festivals throughout Colorado is like a vacation for the musicians that also builds More …
The naysayers of Colorados Arkansas River valley surely do not mark the first time in the career of Christo and Jeanne-Claude that public opposition has stalled or even threatened to completely derail a project. The artists famous for wrapping Berlins Reichstag, for bringing the undulating orange “Gates” to Central Park, for installing yellow umbrellas and a “running fence” along coastal California, even for wrapping an island, are not shy when More …
It must have been poetic justice that Conrad and I sat in the very back of the bus. It made a good vantage from which to photograph the first roadcut that angled upward from Frijoles Canyon to the New Mexico Ranch School, which the government annexed in 1942 for the Manhattan Project. (The Ranch School educated Gore Vidal, William S. Burroughs, as well as other notables who had been sickly More …