Seven Miami returned for its second year at Basel. You can really feel a fresh and young energy in the new artfair. I made my way to Wynwood during their opening day / relaxed BBQ. There were extra walls this year that gave the opportunity to showcase more emerging talent, while maintaining the openness that I remembered from its inaugural year. Compared to your normal dog and pony formula, Seven breaks the ‘booth’ barrier in it’s artist’s presentation. The space is open, engaging and has the polished curatorial thought process of a large museum while sustaining a humble DIY project space kind of feel. Seven’s clearly a professional fair with a touch of grass roots, so to say. I’m excited to see what new projects they bring in 2012.
Seven is a collective project organized by the following galleries: BravinLee programs, Hales Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, Postmasters, P.P.O.W., Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and Winkleman Gallery.
Tracey Emin, Artist, London
Jerry Gorovoy, Louise Bourgeois’s longtime assistant, New York
Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Moderator | Ulf Küster, Curator, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
It Pays My Way and it Corrodes My Soul, 2011, Performance by Stephen Cornford(UK) and Paul Whitty
Last Saturday LEAP, the Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance, launched a new bi-monthly series called Body Controlled, presenting artists dedicated to performance art and exploring sound using electronics and other art forms. For its first installment titled, Other Spaces, the artists used the dynamic of preexisting architecture and virtual spaces as a point of departure for work on display through December 2, 2011. Highlights of Saturday’s inaugural event included Robert Henke’s twelve-hour installation/performance, Microsphere. Well known within both academics and club culture Henke has been involved in negotiating the evolution of computer based music for decades and helped pioneer today’s standard software for live performance, Ableton Live. While I only stayed for the first two hours of his set visitors were welcome to pass by until mid-morning the next day, breakfast was apparently served in the final hours. During the time I was present I took notice of Henke’s peaceful performance demeanor, the invisible anxiety that permeates most was non-existent. His expert execution allowed sounds to develop within the space breaking down typical audience-performer barriers. Focus returned to the audience and the space as Henke took short smoking breaks and even ate some grapes while he played at what looked like a recording station from the future. Massive cabling protruded from the back of a desk that was under lit by a florescent red tube and a carefully rigged computer screen floated, suspended from the ceiling. Fluctuating between listening to the development of sound, Henke added various traditional and non-traditional instruments to the mix and their play back became part of a developing new sound and spatial atmosphere. Continue Reading More »
Single-handedly, Scopophilia, the 25-minute slideshow and centerpiece of Nan Goldin’s show at the Matthew Marks Gallery show generates empathy for Goldin’s subjects, those demi-monde friends appearing in alternating states of intimacy and quiet dysfunction. For about half an hour, the transgressive vulgarisms associated with her work are forgotten. Instead, viewers experience a pastiche accompanied by a liberating soundtrack and the juxtaposition of images typical of her aesthetic with ethereal masterpieces depicting eternal devotion, love and tenderness.
Once when I was a kid, I decided to rub two magnets along the surface of my mother’s computer. The technological myth proved true and her hard drive was wiped completely. In similar form, McKeever Donovan’s New Work explores the affective capacities of seemingly empty decorative archetypes. Donovan utilizes this space to provide the simultaneous conception and exploration of a blank slate from which his compositions emerge.
The on-paper layout of the show is as modest as the aesthetic of its comprising works. Small magnets float on the surface of three framed monochromes. A sculpture comprised of metal tubing rests on the floor atop two bath mats. The color options are equally basic. Khaki, indigo, grey, primary blue and red; a dominant presence of utilitarian décor reinforces an investment in aesthetic accountability. Donovan’s this-and-not-that approach to material selection provides a grounds for divorce from the immediate ready-made coding of the hardware store vocabulary, enabling closer engagement with the virtual-rendering capacities of its signified(s). Monochromes and bath mats serve as ground for the material gestures of magnets and tubing. These gestures mark identity and form within their respective decorative grounds, wresting affective impact from formal composition. Continue Reading More »
Catch Me If You Can: A cluster of greyhounds surging into the foreground, muzzled, wearing numbers, chasing a hastily rendered pair of rabbits through roughly sketched grass. On a muted grocery bag or faded newspaper backdrop are other creatures and, in the center, obscured by washes of pale blue, an indistinct crowd. Powerfully narrative, but hazed by the manner of its construction, this image is fugitive. The characters resist any simple one-to-one relation with the viewer who’s personage spreads out piecemeal across the image. There is a spectacle here, echoed in the other collages on display. Continue Reading More »
At the heart of the interdisciplinary, experimental approach to art making documented in “Black Mountain College and Its Legacy” at the Loretta Howard Gallery, is a human ethology that emphasizes cooperation and interdependence. What happened at Black Mountain College is as nostalgic as it is antithetical to western society’s preoccupation with the importance of the individual over the group, most recently highlighted with the passing of Apple’s visionary icon earlier this month. Continue Reading More »
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