Arts Journal: The Daily Digest of Arts, Culture & Ideas

ArtsJournal is a weekday digest of some of the best arts and cultural journalism in the English-speaking world. Each day ArtsJournal combs through more than 200 English-language newspapers, magazines and publications featuring writing about arts and culture.

Direct links to the most interesting or important stories are posted every weekday beginning at 5 AM PT on the ArtsJournal news pages. Stories from sites that charge for access are excluded. If you encounter a registration screen after clicking an ArtsJournal link, try logging in as either 'ajreader' or 'ajreader@artsjournal.com' with the password 'access'.

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May 15 , 2006

Whitney Biennial 2006

Begun in 1932, by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Whitney Biennial is a world-renowned showcase for recent American art, typically by young and lesser known artists. The Whitney show is generally regarded as one of the leading shows in the art world, often setting or leading trends in contemporary art.

Whitney Biennial 2006 Online
Peace tower 2006 by Mark Di Suvero online
Main Whitney website

May 7 , 2006

Klee in America at Neue Gallerie in New York city, March 9 - May 22, 2006. Paul Klee (December 18, 1879 – June 29, 1940) was a Swiss painter. Klee worked with many different types of media – oil paint, watercolor, ink, and more. He often combined them into one work. He has been variously associated with expressionism, cubism and surrealism but his pictures are difficult to classify. They often have a fragile child-like quality to them, and are usually on a small scale.

Neue Gallerie online

March 27 , 2006

David Smith Retrospective

David Smith, Guggenheim, New York, February 3 though May 14, 2006

Widely considered the greatest sculptor of his generation, David Smith (1906–1965) created some of the most iconic works of the 20th century. Marked by the use of industrial materials, especially welded metals, and the integration of open space, Smith’s three-dimensional version of Abstract Expressionism revolutionized the art of sculpture in the U.S. and around the world. Organized on the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth, David Smith: A Centennial presents over 120 of his greatest sculptures, as well as a selection of his drawings and sketchbooks, from his entire 33-year career as a sculptor.

Guggenheim Museum, David Smith overview online

February 25, 2006

Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller was born in Erlangen, Germany in 1964. He studied at Bayerische Staatslehranstalt Photographie in Munich, Germany before moving to London in the early 1980s. In England, Teller was introduced to the world of fashion photography and used his assignments at i-D, The Face, Index and W magazines as resources from which he could nurture his own photographic sensibility. His work is the subject of monographs by Taschen and Scalo and he has had solo exhibitions at the Mnchner Fotomuseum, Museum Folkwang, Essen, and Galleria d'Arte Moderna, among others, and has been included in exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London and Programa Centro de Arte in Mexico. This year, Teller received the Citibank Photography Prize. Juergen Teller continues to live and work in London.

Lehmann Maupin gallery online
Foundation Cartier current show

March 20 , 2006

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 20, 2005–April 2, 2006, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, 2nd floor

This exhibition is a comprehensive survey of the highly inventive body of work that Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) terms "combines." Among the 67 works in the show are a number that have not been shown publicly before, as well as some of the artist's best-known objects, such as Canyon and Monogram. With these mixed-media works of art, Rauschenberg reinvented collage, changing it from a medium that presses commonplace materials to serve illusion into something very different: a process that undermines both illusion and the idea that a work of art has a unitary meaning. Appearing as either wall-hung works or as freestanding objects, the combines are composed as syncopated grids that draw on materials from everyday life and the history of art.

The Met Online

February 1, 2006

Born July 27, 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee. William Eggleston is widely considered one of the most important color photographers in America. It was in the 1960s, in an effort to more accurately portray the tactile qualities of life in the rural south that Eggleston abandoned black and white photography to experiment with new color technology. Though sometimes the result of manipulation, Eggleston’s use of color is never pretty or functionless. It exists in his photographs because it exists in his world. That is not to say that all color is natural. The alien green glow which tints the light spewing from the window of the ambiguous structure in Untitled, 1992 seems most unnatural in fact. The seemingly careless method of cropping Untitled is typical of much of Eggleston’s work. With a casualness reminiscent of a snapshot, he portrays such idiosyncratic subject matter as parked cars, dogs lapping water from puddles and ceiling fixtures. But despite their apparent banality, Eggleston’s images are defiantly intelligent. Stripped of pretension and reduced to the facts, they are convincing substitutes for all that they endeavor to record.

William Eggleston Online

January 14, 2006

Sarah Sze

Born 1969, Boston, MA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Known for her intricate site–specific installations combining natural and artificial plant life with the miscellany of everyday life, Sarah Sze creates a fantastical urban garden and her whimsical arrangements, comprising thousands of objects, become imaginary miniature ecosystems that borrow from the visual vocabularies of archaeological digs, construction sites, and pastoral oases. At once architectural and organic, intimate and epic, her installation suggests complex strata of an imagined ecosystem lying just below street level, which might be revealed if the walls of the space were peeled away.

Even the details in Sarah Sze’s sculptures have details. All her installations are extraordinarily ambitious and are constructed with fastidious precision, consequently, her output is relatively small compared with many other artists. Sze’s model-making methodology is both practical and structural. She makes sections in her studio, combines prefabricated parts on-site according to exact specifications, and supplements these with elements sourced on location, like a film director looking for props. Her works are carefully crated, tagged and marked for reassembly.

Sarah Sze online links:
Marianne Boesky Gallery
The Summer Villain Muses
Anal-Retentive Warrior Princess by Jerry Saltz

December 31, 2005

Loretta Lux makes pictures of children that are as charming as they are creepy—a sweet-and-sour combo that proves surprisingly hard to resist, even if you suspect the work is little more than kitsch of the most sophisticated and unnerving sort. Like Rineke Dijkstra crossed with Margaret Keane, Lux turns ordinary children into alluring aliens—icons of innocence so tainted by experience (or maybe just curdled nostalgia) they already feel antique. Because the work is strangely unmoored in place or time—drifting off into the idyllic past while hinting at a vacuous, sci-fi future—it manages to conflate memory and dread, sweetness and blight, in a dreamscape whose specificity reads as utterly imaginary.

Read more on Lorettalux.de

December 30, 2005

Bill Viola (b.1951) is widely recognized as one of the leading video artists on the international scene. For over 30 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. His single channel videotapes have been broadcast and presented cinematically around the world, while his writings have been published and anthologized for international readers. Read more here: Bill Viola

SFMOMA

December 20, 2005

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1948, and lives and works in New York and Tokyo. His interest in art began early. Central to Sugimoto’s work is the idea that photography is a time machine, a method of preserving and picturing memory and time. This theme provides the defining principle of his ongoing series including, among others, "Dioramas" (1976-); "Theaters" (1978-); and "Seascapes" (1980-). Sugimoto sees with the eye of the sculptor, painter, architect, and philosopher. He uses his camera in a myriad of ways to create images that seem to convey his subjects’ essence, whether architectural, sculptural, painterly, or of the natural world. He places extraordinary value on craftsmanship, printing his photographs with meticulous attention and a keen understanding of the nuances of silver-print making and its potential for tonal richness in his seemingly infinite palette of blacks, whites, and grays.

Sugimoto’s portrait series
Hiroshi Sugimoto online
Represented by Sonnabend Gallery
Cinema Screen Series
Interview
PBS Documentary

December 12, 2005

Miranda July makes movies, performances, recordings and combinations of these things. Her short movies ( Haysha Royko, The Amateurist, Nest of Tens, Getting Stronger Every Day) have been screened internationally at sites such as the Moma and the Guggenheim Museum. Nest of Tens and a sound installation, The Drifters, were presented in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. July participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with learningtoloveyoumore.com, created with support from the Creative Capital foundation and in collaboration with artist Harrell Fletcher. July's multi-media performances (Love Diamond, The Swan Tool, How I Learned to Draw) have been presented at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and The Kitchen in New York. July's stories can be read in The Paris Review and The Harvard Review and her radio performances can be heard regularly on NPR's The Next Big Thing. July's first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (IFC Films / FilmFour) premiered in January 2005 at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received a special jury prize for originality of vision. It debuted internationally at the Cannes Film Festival where it was awarded with four prizes, including the Camera d'Or. The movie and will be released theatrically in Summer 2005. See full bio and work samples on: Miranda July

December 10, 2005

British, born London, England, 1963. Since the late 1980s, Rachel Whiteread has used resin, rubber and, as in Untitled (Library), dental plaster to cast overlooked domestic spaces. Like earlier works by Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys, Whiteread presents the cast of the negative space defined by an object as the final artwork, rather than replicating the object itself. Her simplified, abstract transformations of familiar forms, including bathtubs, chairs, and mattresses, often recall Minimalist sculpture.

See & read more online at:
Artnet.com

December 9, 2005

In February 1995, The Menil Collection, in collaboration with the artist Cy Twombly and Dia Center for the Arts, opened the Cy Twombly Gallery, in Houston, Texas. The gallery, designed by Renzo Piano, has a sophisticated roofing system that allows for an even diffusion of natural light. The building houses more than thirty of Twombly’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, dating from 1953 to 1994. Among these are a number of his key, large-scale masterworks such as The Age of Alexander, 1959–60, Triumph of Galatea, 1961, and the monumental painting Untitled (Say Goodbye Catallus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 1994. Twombly‘s painting combines elements of gestural abstraction, drawing, and writing in a very personal expression.

The Cy Twombly Gallery is a joint project of The Menil Collection, Dia Center for the Arts, and the artist. Currently Cy Twombly lives in the US and has a show up at Gagosian Madison Avcnue, New York until December 23rd, 2005.

December 6, 2005

Pipilotti Rist was born in Rheintal, Switzerland. She studied at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna and the School of Design in Basel. Her work was exhibited at the Louisiana Museum for Modern Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1996; Venice Biennial, Kwangju Biennial, SITE Santa Fe and Kunsthalle, Vienna in 1997; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kunstwerke Berlin in 1998; Museum Ludwig and Musee d'Art Moderne de la Vile de Paris in 1999; ZKM Karlsruhe, Hirshhorn Museum, Istanbul Biennial and Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2000; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst and Luhring Augustine in 2001.

Represented by:
Hauser & Wirth in London
Luhring Augustine in New York

PipilottiRist.com

December 3, 2005

Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation

The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati is a contemporary art museum based upon the ideas of its founder, Donald Judd. The specific intention of Chinati is to preserve and present to the public permanent large-scale installations by a limited number of artists located in Marfa, Texas. The emphasis is on works in which art and the surrounding landscape are inextricably linked. As Judd wrote in the foundation’s catalogue:

It takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again. Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum­iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.

The Chinati Foundation is located on 340 acres of land on the site of former Fort D.A. Russell in Marfa, Texas. Construction and installation at the site began in 1979 with initial assistance from the Dia Art Foundation in New York. The Chinati Foundation opened to the public in 1986 as an independent, non–profit, publicly funded institution. Chinati was originally conceived to exhibit the work of Donald Judd, John Chamberlain and Dan Flavin. The collection has since been expanded to include work by a limited number of other artists. Today the collection on permanent view consists of 15 outdoor concrete works by Donald Judd, 100 aluminum works by Judd housed in two converted artillery sheds, 25 sculptures by John Chamberlain, and an installation by Dan Flavin occupying six former army barracks. Also on view are pieces by Carl Andre, Ingólfur Arnarsson, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, David Rabinowitch, and John Wesley. Each artist’s work is installed in a separate building on the museum’s grounds. Temporary exhibitions feature modern and contemporary art of diverse media.

The Chinati Foundation Online
Artnet.com – Donald Judd

Nov 29, 2005

Egon Schiele at Neue

On view Oct 21, 2005 through Feb 20, 2006
Egon Schiele was born June 12, 1890, in Tulln, Austria. After attending school in Krems and Klosterneuburg, he enrolled in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1906. Here he studied painting and drawing but was frustrated by the school’s conservatism. In 1907, he met Gustav Klimt, who encouraged him and influenced his work. Schiele left the Akademie in 1909 and founded the Neukunstgruppe with other dissatisfied students. Upon Klimt’s invitation, Schiele exhibited at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toroop, Vincent van Gogh, and others. On the occasion of the first exhibition of the Neukunstgruppe in 1909 at the Piska Salon, Vienna, Schiele met the art critic and writer Arthur Roessler, who befriended him and wrote admiringly of his work. In 1910, he began a long friendship with the collector Heinrich Benesch. By this time, Schiele had developed a personal expressionist portrait and landscape style and was receiving a number of portrait commissions from the Viennese intelligentsia.

Seeking isolation, Schiele left Vienna in 1911 to live in several small villages; he concentrated increasingly on self-portraits and allegories of life, death, and sex and produced erotic watercolors. In 1912, he was arrested for “immortality” and “seduction”; during his 24-day imprisonment, he executed a number of poignant watercolors and drawings. Schiele participated in various group exhibitions, including those of the Neukunstgruppe in Prague in 1910 and Budapest in 1912; the Sonderbund, Cologne, in 1912; and several Secession shows in Munich, beginning in 1911. In 1913, the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, mounted Schiele’s first solo show. A solo exhibition of his work took place in Paris in 1914. The following year, Schiele married Edith Harms and was drafted into the Austrian army. He painted prolifically and continued to exhibit during his military service. His solo show at the Vienna Secession of 1918 brought him critical acclaim and financial success. He died several months later in Vienna, at age 28, on October 31, 1918, a victim of influenza, which had claimed his wife three days earlier.

Neue Galerie

Nov 26, 2005

On view Nov 10, 2005 through Feb 05, 2006 at the Whitney Museum in New York City

The Art of Richard Tuttle is the first full-scale museum retrospective spanning the nearly forty-year career of this leading American artist of the post-minimalist generation. Respecting Tuttle’s practice of working in series, the exhibition covers some fifteen bodies of work from the mid-1960s to the present that both blur and enhance the categories of sculpture, installation, painting, works on paper, and artist books.

The exhibition was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A national tour will include stops in major American cities through the summer of 2007.

Whitney Museum
Sperone Westwater
San Francisco Musuem of Modern Art – Tuttle preview

Nov 23, 2005