The ATW Feed

A place for the Art This Week team to post all things art: news, events, exhibitions, intrigues, and curiosities.

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manpodcast:

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Ann Hamilton. Her installation the event of a thread is on view at the Park Avenue Armory in New York through Jan. 6, 2013. 

The piece pictured here is at hand (2001), which is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. I think it’s the best Hamilton in a museum collection: It’s simple — it releases paper from a little machine and encourages us to watch it float to earth as an audio track plays. It’s hypnotic. It slows time. 

Hamilton is one of America’s most-honored artists. She is the recipient of a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, a United States Artists fellowship and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. In 1999 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Today, a decade after the Hirshhorn acquired at hand, she sits on the museum’s board. Images and video of many of her installations and objects are available at her website.

Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the show.

In this episode, Francis Bagley walks us through her studio. She discusses two in progress works and her work Oklahoma (2008). This studio visit with Francis was made possible through a collaboration with The MAC PAC, The MAC Professionals + Artists Collective. For more information on the organization and their upcoming events, check The MAC’s website, the-mac.org.

Janet Tyson on Dave Hickey: Some Last Words

Glasstire’s Janet Tyson responds to the very public exodus from the art world executed by critic Dave Hickey a few weeks ago. Do his closing statements hold muster with his lifetime’s worth of opinions, writing, and criticism? Tyson seems to think not.

Click the link and check it out! What do you think?

Frontrow on Eva Rothschild at the Nasher

Frontrow Dallas brings us a piece exploring Eva Rothschild’s current show at the Nasher, where her interventions and hand-painted tu ing.highlight oft-overlooked areas of the museum.

Have any of you been to see it yet?

girljanitor: Petition Calls Out NYT Art Critic for Racist and Sexist Framing A new petition is demanding the New York Times “acknowledge and address” a Times art critic’s recent reviews that have compared women and black artists to white male artists, “only to find them lacking.” An excerpt of the open letter is below: Open Letter to The New York Times: The recent writing of art critic Ken Johnson troubles us. His October 25th review of “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” and his November 8th preview of “The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World,” present ill-informed arguments. Using irresponsible generalities, Johnson compares women and African-American artists to white male artists, only to find them lacking. In his review of “Now Dig This!” Mr. Johnson starts with the claim that “Black artists didn’t invent assemblage.” Instead, he states that black artists appropriated the form from white artists who developed it. Both these statements attack a straw man; no historian, artist or curator has ever made a claim that anyone, black or white, “invented” assemblage. In fact, assemblage has roots in many cultures and it is well documented that European and American Modernist artists borrowed heavily from African art in their use of the form. Mr. Johnson organizes his review around an oversimplified opposition between the apolitical, “deracinated” work of white artists and the political, “parochial” work of black artists. He claims that white European artists, such as those of Cubism, Surrealism and Dada, who “were as free as anyone could be,” were only playfully messing around with aesthetic conventions. The aesthetic play of assemblage “took on a different complexion,” to use Mr. Johnson’s unfortunate turn of phrase, when black artists politicized the form. But he ignores both the extreme political unrest in Europe at the time and the ideological motivations of these artistic movements. What was DaDa if not a response to the social psychosis and industrialized mass murder of WWI? The open letter goes on to point out Johnson also compares women to white male artists, and again, “only to find them lacking.” Mr. Johnson frames “The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World” in similar terms: “The day that any woman earns the big bucks that men like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst rake in is still a long way off. Sexism is probably a good enough explanation for inequities in the market. But might it also have something to do with the nature of the art that women tend to make?” His text brackets the real impact of sexism and leaves us only with an insinuating question. There is no explanation of “the nature of the art that women tend to make.” The reader is only left with the sense that women’s art is a problem, somehow. via colorlines Have y’all been following the Net York Times art criticism fiasco?

girljanitor:

Petition Calls Out NYT Art Critic for Racist and Sexist Framing


A new petition is demanding the New York Times “acknowledge and address” a Times art critic’s recent reviews that have compared women and black artists to white male artists, “only to find them lacking.”

An excerpt of the open letter is below:

Open Letter to The New York Times:

The recent writing of art critic Ken Johnson troubles us. His October 25th review of “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” and his November 8th preview of “The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World,” present ill-informed arguments. Using irresponsible generalities, Johnson compares women and African-American artists to white male artists, only to find them lacking.

In his review of “Now Dig This!” Mr. Johnson starts with the claim that “Black artists didn’t invent assemblage.” Instead, he states that black artists appropriated the form from white artists who developed it. Both these statements attack a straw man; no historian, artist or curator has ever made a claim that anyone, black or white, “invented” assemblage. In fact, assemblage has roots in many cultures and it is well documented that European and American Modernist artists borrowed heavily from African art in their use of the form.

Mr. Johnson organizes his review around an oversimplified opposition between the apolitical, “deracinated” work of white artists and the political, “parochial” work of black artists. He claims that white European artists, such as those of Cubism, Surrealism and Dada, who “were as free as anyone could be,” were only playfully messing around with aesthetic conventions. The aesthetic play of assemblage “took on a different complexion,” to use Mr. Johnson’s unfortunate turn of phrase, when black artists politicized the form. But he ignores both the extreme political unrest in Europe at the time and the ideological motivations of these artistic movements. What was DaDa if not a response to the social psychosis and industrialized mass murder of WWI?

The open letter goes on to point out Johnson also compares women to white male artists, and again, “only to find them lacking.”

Mr. Johnson frames “The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World” in similar terms: “The day that any woman earns the big bucks that men like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst rake in is still a long way off. Sexism is probably a good enough explanation for inequities in the market. But might it also have something to do with the nature of the art that women tend to make?” His text brackets the real impact of sexism and leaves us only with an insinuating question. There is no explanation of “the nature of the art that women tend to make.” The reader is only left with the sense that women’s art is a problem, somehow.

via colorlines

Have y’all been following the Net York Times art criticism fiasco?

creativetime: Want to learn more about the artist behind “The Last Pictures” Trevor Paglen? Here are some facts: Trevor Paglen is killing it on social media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. Paglen grew up around top-secret projects. His father was an Air Force doctor who treated spy-plane pilots. “One day we drove a friend’s dad to work. We drove him to the middle of a cornfield, he got out and walked into the corn,” Paglen recalls. A common theme in a lot of Paglen’s work is the military’s “black world,” a $27 billion top-secret industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11. Paglen spent the better part of the 1990s playing bass and sampler in an avant-garde band called Noisegate, and recieved an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2008, Paglen appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss his new book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed By Me.  The book is compiled of images of military patches worn by classified or top secret officers. Our favorite code name from a patch comes from the Pentagon’s secret operations that was titled NOYFB: None Of Your Fucking Business. On a solo expedition in the desert, Paglen once got stuck in quicksand for two days. Works Paglen has displayed in art galleries include images of classified air bases, code names of active military programs, signatures from non-existent people created by the CIA as “sterile identities,” and patches from Pentagon black-ops units. Love this artist bio breakdown!

creativetime:

Want to learn more about the artist behind “The Last Pictures” Trevor Paglen? Here are some facts:

  • Trevor Paglen is killing it on social media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr.
  • Paglen grew up around top-secret projects. His father was an Air Force doctor who treated spy-plane pilots. “One day we drove a friend’s dad to work. We drove him to the middle of a cornfield, he got out and walked into the corn,” Paglen recalls.
  • A common theme in a lot of Paglen’s work is the military’s “black world,” a $27 billion top-secret industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11.
  • Paglen spent the better part of the 1990s playing bass and sampler in an avant-garde band called Noisegate, and recieved an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
  • In 2008, Paglen appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss his new book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed By Me.  The book is compiled of images of military patches worn by classified or top secret officers. Our favorite code name from a patch comes from the Pentagon’s secret operations that was titled NOYFB: None Of Your Fucking Business.
  • On a solo expedition in the desert, Paglen once got stuck in quicksand for two days.
  • Works Paglen has displayed in art galleries include images of classified air bases, code names of active military programs, signatures from non-existent people created by the CIA as “sterile identities,” and patches from Pentagon black-ops units.

Love this artist bio breakdown!

Romans in London!

Museum of London blog issues images from one of London’s most productive finds - an archaeological dig site dating back to the Romans. You’ll never guess the foul-smelling location of this treasure trove, either. Definitely was not found under a pile of daisies!

Originally recorded in June 2012 at Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York.

In this episode of Art This Week, we continue our series of interviews with artists that have New York/DFW connections. Here, LauraLee speaks with New York based artist, Annabel Daou, shortly after two solo exhibitions ended: “come back to the war” at Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (January 21 - March 3, 2012) and “you say I want a revolution” at Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (March 1 - April 21, 2012). She spent several years in Dallas as an artist and teacher (at SMU), and she is represented by Conduit Gallery in Dallas. Here, we speak with her about her work in these two recent shows. 

We want to thank Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York for letting us film there. 

We also want to thank Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden for letting us film in the garden.