by Jon Lackman | 30 April 2009 | Awards
Grant-hunting season has re-opened at The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. The “Arts Writers Grant Program supports individual writers whose work addresses contemporary visual art through grants ranging from 3,000 to 50,000 USD. Writers who meet the program’s eligibility requirements are invited to apply in the following categories: articles, blogs, books, new and alternative media, short-form writing.”
Apply by June 8, 2009.
Last year’s winners were:
C. Carr
Some Kind of Grace: A Biography of David Wojnarowicz (Book)Jessica Chalmers
Update on the Transgression Economy (Article)Darby English
“Abstracts of Intimacy” (Book)Michèle Faguet
“Pornomiseria”: Origins and Recontextualization of a Critical Term (Article)Mia Fineman
Phoning It In (Article)Joseph Grigely
HUO [Hans Ulrich Obrist] (Book)Mark Harris
Publico: Five Years (Article)Kathryn Hixson
Particular: Essays from the Middle States (Short-Form Writing)Paddy Johnson
Art Fag City (Blog/New Media)Branden Joseph
Lee Lozano: Grass Piece (Book)Douglas Kahn
Arts of the Spectrum: In the Nature of Electromagnetism (Book)Jonathan Katz
Art, Eros, and the Sixties (Book)Judith Russi Kirshner
Voices and Images of Italian Feminism (Article)Christy Lange
Exhibition Reviews of Emerging Female Photographers (Short-Form Writing)Annette Leddy
Robert Watts’s Space Age Home (Article)Julian Myers and Edgar Arceneaux
Mirror-Travel in the Motor City (Book)Frances Negrón-Muntaner
The Art Came From Her (Article)Viet Nguyen
An Eye for an Eye: The Vietnam War in Contemporary Art (Article)Peter Plagens
Bruce Nauman—The Venice Projects (Article)Lyle Rexer
Sights Unseen: the Rise of Abstraction in Contemporary Photography (Book)Joan Rothfuss
Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (Book)Alix Rule
Back to School: Learning Communities in Contemporary Art (Short-Form Writing)Anjali Srinivasan and Yuka Otani
Post-Glass Artists: Glass Guerillas (Blog/New Media)Judith Stein
“The Eye of the Sixties”: A Biography of Richard Bellamy (Book)Roberto Tejada
Mexico City Specific (Book)Lori Waxman
60 Wrd/Min Art Critic (Short-Form Writing)Jonathan Weinberg
Pier Groups: Art Along the Manhattan Waterfront (Book)
by Jon Lackman | 29 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Taipei Times interviews Pompidou chief curator Didier Ottinger about Arcadie, his exhibition of modern art whose “main theme investigates Arcadia, a region in central Greece that has taken on mythological resonance as a utopian land of abundance. Each of the exhibit¡on’s 10 sub-themes addresses a detail of The Arcadian Shepherds by Renaissance painter Nicolas Poussin”:
Taipei Times: You originally developed the idea for Arcadie after the Seoul Museum of Art invited you to create an exhibit of modern art based on the Pompidou’s permanent collection.
Didier Ottinger: … It is the fruits of my reflection on modern art. We used to say that modern art starts with this famous painting by Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) … because this is the destruction of the subject in painting, the narrative and so on. And I said, “Why can’t we consider the other side, that this particular painting introduced in modern times a kind of nostalgia for what we have lost in modern times, which is contact with nature?” …
TT: Nicolas Poussin is a Renaissance painter who is generally considered by art historians to be working in a tradition different than the modern artists represented in the exhibit Arcadie … What are the differences between the pictorial experiments taking place during the Renaissance and the modernist experiments taking place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
DO: I think we’ve emphasized for too long that there is a big difference. I’m not sure that there is that difference. You can use different vocabulary, but in fact you are saying the same old story. And the Renaissance is not a single way of practicing painting. If you compare Poussin to Caravaggio, there is probably more difference between Poussin and Caravaggio than Poussin and Matisse, I think. It was a dramatization of history to say that modernity is the negation of the past, that it is the radical idea of innovation …
TT: What has been the response to your theory?
DO: It’s not very well known in France because the show has only been shown in Seoul and the catalogue was mostly sold in Korea.
TT: So the Taipei exhibit has not been seen at the Pompidou.
DO: No. No. No. No. No. No.
TT: Will it be seen at there?
DO: I’m not sure it would be that easy because … (we both laugh) It’s something quite experimental in a way. I don’t know.
by Jon Lackman | 28 April 2009 | Awards
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences inducts “leaders in the sciences, the humanities and the arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector.” Since 2006 (the last time we checked in on the academy), it has elected the following art historians:
Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard)
John (Jas) Elsner (Oxford)
Benjamin Buchloh (Harvard)
Gülru Necipoglu (Harvard)
Debora Leah Silverman (UCLA)
Madeline H. Caviness (Tufts)
Thomas W. Lentz (Harvard)
Nicholas Penny (now at National Gallery, London)
Wu Hung (Chicago)
by Jon Lackman | 27 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Collaboration, among artists as well as between artists and audiences, has interested numerous artists and art historians in recent years.
In the February 2006 Artforum article, “Social Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Claire Bishop wrote:
Artists are increasingly judged by their working process—the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration … There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art.
This occasioned a long response in the following issue from Grant Kester. In 2007, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette edited the volume Collectivism after Modernism: the art of social imagination after 1945. In their preface, they describe their book as the continuation of a project that began with a 2004 letter to Artforum by Sholette, who upbraided certain contemporary proponents of collaboration for attempting to “revamp the political rebelliousness of group artistic practice.”
Last October, the Guggenheim mounted the widely-reviewed exhibition theanyspacewhatever, a “a collaborative venture among ten artists … tempering the authority of a singular artistic vision.”
And Holly Crawford has recently edited a book Artistic bedfellows: histories, theories and conversations in collaborative art practices, which includes articles by scholars as well as short texts by artists (and an interview with Bishop). It concludes with emails from the four-person Austrian collaborative Gelitin:
We met on a bus which was going on the only highway we then had in Austria. At a gasstop where all we kids went for a piss, we locked ourself into a toilet and did our first performance “fake sex.” We played a long time and the bus left without us. Since then we have been together.
by Jon Lackman | 26 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Seventy of van Gogh’s landscapes from the late 1880s are on view through September in Basel’s Kunstmuseum, in an exhibition billing itself as “the most important European art event in 2009″ and expecting a half-million visitors…
by Jon Lackman | 25 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Wrestling with the towering yet ambiguous figure of Rodin, sculptors tried for a newly austere, concise synthesis in the years leading up to the Great War — the subject of a thoughtful exhibition by Catherine Chevillot at the Musée d’Orsay.
Reviews are by Philippe Dagen in Le Monde (“Picasso is missing…Lehmbruck is the leading figure”), Béatrice de Rochebouët in Le Figaro, Annick Colonna-Césari in L’Express, Oliver Cena in Télérama, AFP/Expatica, and kulturport.hu.
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by Jon Lackman | 24 April 2009 | Books, Photography
In Slate, Barron H. Lerner reviews Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880-1930:
The photographs in the remarkable new book Dissection shocked me, even though I spent a year in anatomy class during medical school. Dissection includes dozens of images of late-19th- and early-20th-century medical students posing, often in comedic manners, with cadavers and skeletons—scenes that, from our modern eye, appear disrespectful and unprofessional. Most disturbing of all are photographs, bearing racist inscriptions, of white medical students dissecting African-American cadavers.
Dissection‘s compilers, John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson, a historian of medicine and a museum curator, respectively, strive to place the often-jarring images in their proper historical context. Still, one has to wonder if some type of apology to these unwitting participants is in order …
Warner believes that dissection was a “communal rite of passage” for medical students at the turn of the 20th century and the images served as a “professional coming-of-age narrative” … Although the photographs may appear inappropriate to us, Warner argues, they commemorate a bonding experience between student and cadaver.
by Jon Lackman | 23 April 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
For a few years in the 1620s, Utrecht (among other places) saw the flourishing of painting in the manner of Caravaggio. The Utrecht Caravaggisti, including Hendrick Terbruggen, Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, who used the style for scenes of earthy Dutch tavern life, are the subject of a show organized by Jochen Sander at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, following recent shows in London and Berlin. This one concentrates on a perennially appealing theme: portraiture of musicians. Reviews are in the Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Rundschau (“awakens the Sherlock Holmes within”), and the FAZ (“the exuberant, often frivolous pictures must have been especially popular in Calvinist Holland”).
by Jon Lackman | 22 April 2009 | Books, Conservation
We belatedly note the 2007 translation by conservator Helen Glanville of Alessandro Conti’s History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art (which Conti first published in Italian in 1973 at the age of 26 or 27, then re-issued in an expanded and revised edition in 1988). In her introduction, Glanville writes:
There never seems to have been a time when restoration has not been the stuff of controversy … Anglo-Saxon and Italian approaches have, since the cleaning controversies of the 1960s, been especially at odds, to the extent that Conti and [Cesare] Brandi – both authors of seminal works … have only just been translated into English. They fact that they have, is, I hope, an indication of a change of climate within the field of restoration … The original impetus for this translation was my increasing despondency at the fact that over the past twenty years, I have had fewer and fewer students with anything other than their maternal tongue.
In 2005, Cynthia Rockwell published the first full English translation of Brandi’s Theory of Restoration (written in 1963), which is now out of print.
by Jon Lackman | 21 April 2009 | Islamic
In caa.reviews, Bernard O’Kane considers Jonathan M. Bloom’s Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt:
Jonathan Bloom can rightfully be considered the foremost authority on Fatimid art and architecture, having produced a steady stream of articles on the subject over the past twenty-five years. He is thus in a perfect position to produce a synthesis, and this is indeed an excellent survey of the material. Time and again he is able to cut through conflicting bodies of opinion and produce authoritative interpretations or offer new insights into problematic material.
The book discusses art and architecture, organizing it both chronologically and by material in a way that is appropriate and easy to follow. The writing style is aimed at the general reader, but for the specialist there is a suitable scholarly apparatus of footnotes. It is published in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, which in an anonymous note at the beginning disclaims official sanction of the author’s views. It is to Bloom’s credit that he makes no concessions to his patrons in discussing the murky origins of the Isma‘ili movement …
I should emphasize that the areas of scholarly controversy mentioned above do not detract from the author’s achievement. To cover a range of two and a half centuries of art and architecture from Tunisia to Cairo and beyond in a balanced format that judiciously selects some for detailed treatment and with broad sweeps fills in the big picture elsewhere is an extremely impressive achievement. We are fortunate that this gap in scholarship has been authoritatively filled.
by Jon Lackman | 20 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Pierre Bonnard’s late interiors, recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, attracted a number of approving reviews…
by Jon Lackman | 19 April 2009 | Medieval, Museums
At the Guardian, Jonathan Jones encounters Konrad Witz’s 15th-century Saint Christopher in Basel, and offers an appreciation:
Witz must surely be responding imaginatively to the inward-looking religious movements of the later middle ages, finding a visual equivalent for new mysticisms that stressed the soul’s quest for God. The poetic solitude of this painting is as startling as the precocity of its style.
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by Jon Lackman | 17 April 2009 | Museums
In the November 2008 Third Text (pp. 794-96), Amna Malik reviews the Tate Britain exhibition “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting”:
The return to orientalism as a curatorial strategy at Tate Britain appears somewhat puzzling, if not completely insensitive … Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, seems all the more pressing now, after the events that have unfolded in the Middle East, and yet the upsurge in the art market in that part of the world, a new Christie’s in Dubai for example, the new Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, or the frenzied art collecting of David Khallil in Britain, has inflated the art market to an extent that might financially support an exhibition of this kind and justify its overturning of Said’s writings. This overturning is conducted on two fronts: first with the support of ‘Islamic’ commentators such as Yasmin Alibhai Brown whose trivial responses to individual paintings are dotted throughout the exhibition as a legitimisation of the curators’ strategies, and second by recourse to the rather simplistic assertion of the primacy of the aesthetic object … an old modernist assumption: that the art object can somehow ‘speak’ unaided, a position that continues to fuel a rather romantic view of contemporary art … One has to acknowledge that despite some key examples of important works of art, most of the paintings in this exhibition can only be justified on the basis of the rubric ‘Oriental’, but are otherwise mediocre, kitsch in form and banal in content. What seems to be contested is a rather worn idea to do with ‘the politics of representation’, symptomatic of art historical scholarship in the early 1980s when postcolonialism and feminist discourses first made themselves felt, and which is precisely the initial basis for the impact of Said’s Orientalism. This rather misguided attempt to address that discursive framework from within the terms of self and other, without acknowledging the power relations that informed them, is precisely the reason why postcolonial critiques were first formulated … The emergence of cross-cultural scholarship in recent years in art historical scholarship was urgently needed to rupture Eurocentric art history by examining the aesthetic conditions that brought about the emergence of art and artists beyond the Euro-American context. However, it seems that in this exhibition it has been taken up to justify the same centre-periphery relationships, the European view of the ‘East’, and to underpin an apolitical and weak scholarly position.
by Jon Lackman | 16 April 2009 | Contemporary
In the Brooklyn Rail, Irving Sandler interviews critic Roberta Smith:
I was born in New York City. My father was finishing his PhD in geography at Columbia University. By the time I was five weeks old, we had moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he had a job teaching at the University of Kansas … I went to Grinnell [College in Grinnell, Iowa] … there was a brief moment when it looked like art might be the default mode. But my studio courses were all downhill after that so I concentrated on what little art history was available. [Did you think about becoming an art historian?] I didn’t have the grades for graduate school and I also couldn’t stand the idea of being in school anymore … What really saved my college career was an art professor named Richard Cervene who kept up with all things New York, from Broadway plays to museum and gallery shows, etc. He also knew about Whitney’s ISP (Independent Study Program) when it first started and insisted that I apply, which I did, and I got in … [Later] I was living in a little loft on Broome Street with the painter Dona Nelson that first year and Judd had just bought his building on Spring Street, so I would see him quite frequently. I said to him, “Wouldn’t it be great if your writing existed in one place?” And he said, “Yes.” So I began to type all of his reviews that appeared in Arts Magazine—generally between 1959 and 1964—when he was most acute about new art. By the time I was done I had a manuscript of 150 single-spaced pages and I had completely inhaled Judd—his thinking, his style, his vocabulary … [How did you actually decide to be a critic?] Basically as an over-reaction. Robert Pincus-Witten wrote an article about Judd in Artforum, and it may me feel furiously territorial. I talked about it to Jennifer Licht, my boss at the Modern: “This is a terrible article comparing Judd to Russian Constructivism, of all things,” and so on. And she said, “Why don’t you write a letter to the editor?” So I started a letter that grew to ten pages. When I showed it to Jenny she said, “You know, you could be a critic.”
by Jon Lackman | 15 April 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
On view in Arezzo: “The Della Robbia Family: The Dialogue Among the Arts In the Renaissance.” Three generations of the family were known for raising the status of glazed terracotta to a par with painting and sculpture; Alberti credited patriarch Luca with “inventing” the technique. The show has been reviewed by Goffredo Silvestri (“The most spectacular room of the exhibition is the one devoted to Andrea”), Rodolfo Vasari (“A triumph of light and color”), Thomas Migge, and Eva Clausen (“Sculptures of light”). The exhibition and catalog is by Giancarlo Gentilini.
by Jon Lackman | 15 April 2009 | Books
The Times of London excerpts a new book, The Lost Mona Lisa:
Picasso and poet Appollinaire were prime suspects when Leonardo da Vinci’s best known painting was stolen from the Louvre … In the seven years from 1905 to 1911, the genesis story of modern art was being written. Pablo Picasso was its genius; Guillaume Apollinaire was its impresario. A flamboyant poet and cultural provocateur, Apollinaire enunciated the modernist creed, adopting the Marquis de Sade’s maxim, “In art, one has to kill one’s father”. Urging the destruction of all museums “because they paralyse the imagination”, he championed Picasso “as a young god who wants to remake the world”. Apollinaire and the artist were leaders of a group loosely known as la bande de Picasso. Familiar from Montmartre to Manhattan as the “Wild Men of Paris”, Picasso’s gang of painters and poets were the outlaws of traditional art. Young, brilliant and ruthlessly ambitious, they strutted through the cobblestone streets of Montmartre and filled the cheap cafes, defining themselves as well as a new creative idiom, breaking the rules to free art from art history … Seizing the Mona Lisa was an insolent act in what Apollinaire called “the endless quarrel between Order and Adventure”. It was a declaration of independence … Painter and poet were so nervous that in their confusion and desperation to assert their own innocence, truth and friendship were forgotten. They contradicted themselves and each other … Both men wept and begged for forgiveness and freedom.
by Jon Lackman | 15 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Dave Hickey’s indispensable essay collection The Invisible Dragon is finally back in print. From the press release:
The Invisible Dragon, originally published in 1993, is often regarded as art critic Dave Hickey’s seminal work. Hailed by artists, the book made a forceful case for beauty in a time when the notion was completely dismissed by theory-obsessed critics. In four influential essays that amounted to a manifesto, Hickey assailed the hyper-institutionalism that in his view drowned out the real pleasures that attract people to art. Long out of print and difficult to find, this beloved little book is now back in a revised and expanded edition. A new introduction provides a context for what Hickey now calls his “intellectual temper tantrums”; and a new essay, “American Beauty,” concludes the volume with a stirring tribute to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.
by Jon Lackman | 14 April 2009 | Africa, Americas, Conferences
Later this week the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art turns 20:
The 2009 Porter Colloquium presents new research, new interpretations, and new subjectivities that inform scholarly practice and promote fresh ways of thinking and writing about African American art and other art in the African Diaspora. This year’s theme, Trajectories … The trajectories that are being explored in Porter Colloquium sessions this year include demographics, the movement of people and ideas over large parts of the world and particularly their immigration to the United States and to major art centers around the world … Over the last three decades the production, the presentation, the reception of African American art has expanded virtually exponentially. African American art, like the art of the contemporary world, has responded to modernist, to postmodernist issues and has reflected the changes in technologies, more extensive contact and collaboration across ethnic, cultural and continental boundaries … This year we are pleased to honor the pioneering achievements of scholar Sharon Patton, former executive director, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and art historian Judith Wilson … Admission to all sessions is free and open to the general public.
by Jon Lackman | 14 April 2009 | Books
We recently discovered the annual Bookfinder.com Report, which exists to “track demand trends for a wide range of out-print titles.” Examining the last report, in the category of “Arts and Music,” the third-most-searched-for book was a work of art history, Paul Smith’s Dutch Flower Painting, 1600-1720. Last we searched, the cheapest available copy on Amazon.com cost $338.67. Ironically, the book’s 1995 Library Journal review doubted it would appeal widely: “Because much of the book concentrates on fairly narrow interpretive issues, however, it will be of primary interest to scholars and students of the period.”
by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times:
David W. Scott, an artist and art historian who served as founding director of the National Museum of American Art, played a key role in expanding the National Gallery of Art and shepherded the Corcoran Gallery of Art through a difficult time after a controversial exhibit, died of multiple organ failure March 30 at a hospice in Austin, Texas. He was 92.
Scott joined the Smithsonian Institution’s staff in 1963 as assistant director of what was then known as the National Collection of Fine Arts after teaching art history at Scripps College in Claremont. At the time, the National Collection was such a staid, conservative institution that he was warned he would lose his job if he didn’t take down abstract works from the walls of his own home — works he had painted.
Sophy Burnham, author of “The Art Crowd” (1973), a muckraking inquiry into the New York and Washington art worlds, wrote that Scott discovered that the National Collection included only two pictures painted after World War II. One was of a U.S. Navy vessel that remained because the staff worried that its removal would be construed as destruction of government property.
“Scott determined to build the NCFA into a museum of consequence,” Burnham wrote. “He wanted it to be the equivalent of the Whitney or the Tate — vital, vibrant, fashionable, discussed, a force in the art world” …
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The “Transpedagogy” panel at MoMA next week seems relevant as it includes both Bishop and Kester: http://moma.org/visit/calendar/events/1724