Modou Dieng presents an interactive collaboration with Devon A. VanHouten-Maldonado at Linfield Gallery in Portland, drawing inspiration from a history of heroes and antiheroes in Mexico and Senegal and examines the way that history is represented in the information age amidst a clash of digital and analog cultures and a resulting hybrid aesthetic of history and ethnicity. The artists will also be talking about their work on February 27 and the show is up through March 13.
Painter Miguel Osuna opens his studio — down the street from the future Ace LA — to Downtown wanderers during this Valentine’s Day’s Art Walk for SPIN — an open house of in-progress works with oil on canvas depicting the well-loved highways and arteries of California and beyond. Maybe we’ll see you on the beat.
Marvels envisioned by outlanders we witnessed at the Outsider Art Fair. A brush with art brut by Swiss photographer Mario Del Curto. A locomobile by Parisian found materials rehabilitator Gérard Cambon. A pair of synchronized swimmers by self-taught Bahamian painter Amos Ferguson. A tapestry from Tsunao Okumura’s The Night Watch Embroidering series completed on the night shift as a security guard in Tokyo office towers. Necromancy from the world of Erika Wanenmacher’s “alchemy of objects.”
Our neighbors on West 29th, the Coates Wyllie gallery, are hosting an opening party for their latest show, Character Saturation, which includes a few friends. If you’re in the neighborhood check it out — let them know you’re coming here.
In its review of the 1913 Armory Show, entitled Lawless Art, the magazine Art and Progress decried the work displayed by “extremists” who, had their work “been excluded, this exhibition would have attracted no more notice than the hundred and one other exhibitions that are successively held in New York.” About this they were right. The reviewer personifies these quieter exhibitions as “a comely woman modestly gowned” that “can pass through any crowded thoroughfare without attracting attention, but let her bedeck herself gayly and improperly and every head will be turned in her direction.”
In actuality 1913 did more than turn heads, it spun them on there axes Exorcist style, as revolutionary artists unleashed battalions of esthetic floozies improperly bedecked in Cubist, Post-Impressionist and Dadaist dress on unready publics from the rioters at the Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to the reviewers of the much-scorned exhibition of art at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York.
Around the corner from our New York home at his tiny 291 gallery — where many of the most controversial European artists had first been show in America — Alfred Stieglitz resolved to build on the new momentum brought to insurgent art, at 291 and in his art journal by the same name. In Mental Reactions, poet Agnes Ernst Meyer contemplates the dangers of a life lived silently as her words cleave themselves into phrase-shapes interlaced with the jagged forms of artist Marius de Zayas. We’re celebrating the centennial of the pivotal moment when the compass of art descended a staircase and the world irrevocably lost its bearings at this year’s Armory Show and all year long — on the blog and in the streets.
We started to have a talk about Minor and Ansel, and she began to tell stories about these younger friends of hers, who in her opinion couldn’t properly take care of their health — she was 91 at the time. Then she began to gossip about Ansel and what a prude and tight-ass he was. “He’s always showing off,” she said.
Ansel had done an advertising campaign for Yuban coffee, and they used one of his Yosemite pictures on the outside of the can. Ansel sent a five-pound can to Imogen, and the coffee was excellent, and she figured, “Well, I now have to pay him back.” So she put a bunch of earth in the can and some seeds and sent it down to Carmel with the directions, “Just add water, Ansel. Here are some beautiful plants for you.” He did as she directed, and the plant came up strong and healthy. And then one day his buddy the sheriff came to visit in his home and looked at it and said, “Ansel, what are you doing growing dope? You know I can arrest you for this.” Needless to say, Ansel then got on the phone to cuss her out. She just thought it was hilarious.
Photographer Abe Frajndlich on his first meeting with prankster and photography legend Imogen Cunningham, and her punking of Ansel Adams, in his book Penelope’s Hungry Eyes. Imogen’s spiritual kinship with painter Georgie O’Keefe is the subject of one lens in the Seattle Art Museum’s Elles exhibition — a look at work by seminal female artists, up through February 17. If you need a place to stay while you’re here, let us know.
All photos by Alan Ross
Working in video and performance, Japanese video and performance artist Meiro Koizumi has built a compelling body of work that deals with power dynamics on scales from the familial to the national, and examines questions of political and psychological control. Implicating himself, his performers and the viewer through choreographed emotional manipulations, Koizumi creates works that straddle the uncomfortable and indefinable line between cruelty and comedy.
His first solo museum installation in the US, Projects 99, at MoMA includes a selection of earlier projects, as well as Defect in Vision, Meiro’s most ambitious and accomplished project to date. Probing the idea of blindness—both philosophical and physical—the piece is projected on two sides of a single screen, preventing the viewer from taking in both views at once. The action follows two blind performers who repeatedly enact a domestic scene set during World War II — the last meal they will ever eat together. While staged in the historical past, the scene’s portent of impending catastrophe has taken on a new relevance following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in a work that is incisive, thought-provoking, and visually lush. The show is up through May 6 in New York.
