Richard Serra at MoMA
August 24, 2007
One of the preeminent sculptors of our era, Richard Serra (American, b. 1939) has long been acclaimed for his challenging and innovative work, which emphasizes materiality and an engagement between the viewer, the site, and the work. In the early 1960s, Serra and the Minimalist artists of his generation turned to unconventional, industrial materials and began to accentuate the physical properties of their art. Over the years, Serra has expanded his spatial and temporal approach to sculpture and has focused primarily on large-scale work, including many site-specific works that engage with a particular architectural, urban, or landscape setting. This exhibition presents the artist’s forty-year career, from his early experiments with materials such as rubber, neon, and lead to monumental late-career pieces, including Intersection II (1992) and Torqued Ellipse IV (1999), along with three new works that have never been exhibited before. With works on view throughout the Museum and in The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years displays the extraordinary vision of this formidable artist, who has radicalized and extended the definition of sculpture. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
view the online exhibition MoMA website
Edward HOPPER at the MFA
July 12, 2007
http://www.mfa.org/hopper/artist.html
“Edward Hopper” features nearly 100 of the artist’s most celebrated paintings, watercolors, and prints. It is the first comprehensive exhibition of Hopper’s work to be held at the MFA in more than fifty years, and is a fitting tribute to an artist that critics called “the master whose poetry is realism.”
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) produced some of the most enduringly popular images in American art. His diners, movie palaces, and middle-class buildings reflect American life between the world wars; his light-filled watercolors of Gloucester, Maine, and Cape Cod evoke the austere beauty of those places. And his quiet, yet riveting, pictures of people in their apartments, offices, and hotel rooms express both a sense of urban isolation and the bittersweet comfort of being alone.
“Edward Hopper” includes paintings now considered icons of twentieth-century art, among them Nighthawks, Early Sunday Morning, and Automat.
The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington; and The Art Institute of Chicago.
“The church of art is very conservative,” according to George Fifield, the founder and director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, the showcase for computer-related art that opens its fifth season on Friday (see bostoncyberarts.org). As for the Boston scene, Fifield, when I visited him at his Jamaica Plain home, summed it up thus: “Even now, you don’t find digital art in the MFA.”
Despite the city’s prevailing high-art tastes, Fifield launched the festival here in 1999 because, he says, he had discovered another side to Boston, a “radical hidden history of artists coming here to work on new technology.” Fifield is inspired, for example, by the close collaboration between the photographer Ansel Adams and Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid Corporation. Starting in 1948, Adams helped Land perfect the technology for instant photography, and, through his own much-admired Polaroid photographs, enabled Land, Fifield told me, “to make the case that the camera was a tool for art, as opposed to just a toy.”
to read the rest of the Article here
Walking into the Brookline Arts Center, visitors could easily pass by the gallery’s most recent exhibit. And some did. The show features six 24-by-24-inch square prints in muted hues of sepia, yellow and gray. Its title is as stripped down as the art on display: “backs of photographs.”Photographer Chandra Meesig was present at her show’s opening last Friday. She chatted with visitors as they admired her work and nibbled on shrimp and tortilla chips. The pixie-haired artist admitted that her idea for the series was born out of artistic frustration.
“I started taking all of my photographs and turning them backwards,” said Meesig, her cherubic face splitting with a sly grin. What she saw sparked her latest innovation.
Focusing on the backs of photographs seemed counterintuitive to most people, Meesig said, because pictures are used to tell people’s stories. The 30-year-old Ohio native said her purpose was to bring photography into the realm of higher art, where critics regularly discussed such aspects as materials and techniques in painting.
“I believe art should sort of ask questions and not provide all the answers,” Meesig said.
But one question she gets frequently from viewers proves they’ve missed her point.
“[People ask] what was on the other side,’” Meesig said. Her reaction: “I just grin and walk away.”
… to read the rest of the article: Brookline TAB
The New Institute of Contemporary Art ~ Boston
December 9, 2006
Ceci N’est Pas Magritte, but His Outlook Is Compatibly Surreal
November 20, 2006
November 19, 2006
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
John Baldessari in the gallery he designed for a Magritte show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Above, the famous pipe is behind him. At left, he stands between a Magritte painting and a Vija Celmins sculpture.
By JORI FINKEL
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/arts/design/19fink.html
LOS ANGELES
EVERYONE who knows John Baldessari knows that he likes a good joke. He likes to hear them, and he likes to tell them. So it’s not surprising that his immediate reaction when spotting one of the most famous one-liners in the history of painting was to riff on it.
“Today it wouldn’t make sense to say, ‘This is not a pipe,’ ” he said. “Nobody smokes pipes anymore, do they? Do college professors out East? Today it would be: This is not a cigarette. Or maybe: This is not a cigar.”
He paused, perhaps for effect. “Do kids today even recognize a pipe? It should be: This is not a PlayStation.”
Mr. Baldessari has been thinking about the history of tobacco because he has been thinking about René Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist who famously painted the sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” beneath an image that, by all artistic conventions, is clearly a pipe.
That 1929 painting, “The Treachery of Images,” is probably the most famous work at the Los Angles County Museum of Art, which acquired it at Sotheby’s in 1978 for a mere $115,000. It is also the cornerstone for an exhibition opening there on Sunday, “Magritte and Contemporary Art,” which brings together 68 works by that painter, 68 works by contemporary artists and an exhibition design by Mr. Baldessari.
Mr. Baldessari, a popular California artist, has carpeted the floors with images of white clouds against a blue sky and wallpapered the ceiling with repeating images of intersecting Los Angeles freeways. (He left the walls a muted color, for fear of distracting from the artwork and running over budget.) He also asked the guards to wear bowler hats à la the suited men in Magritte’s paintings, and they rather generously agreed.
The show’s curator, Stephanie Barron, had from the start tapped Mr. Baldessari as one of the contemporary figures in the show, along with such mixed company as Marcel Broodthaers, Barbara Kruger and Philip Guston. But it wasn’t until April that the museum’s new director, Michael Govan, had an idea. “It’s hard to make an impact on a museum when you first get there because exhibitions are programmed so far in the future,” he said. “So I began thinking: Wouldn’t it be interesting to bring an artist into this context?”
He and Ms. Barron invited Mr. Baldessari, who Mr. Govan said has “the same twisted perspective as Magritte,” to do the exhibition design. It didn’t hurt that Mr. Baldessari has a reputation for being easy to work with.
“John is not a young, crazy artist,” Mr. Govan said. “He’s crazy in a good sense, but he is also one of the most experienced professionals in the field.”
The only catch was that Mr. Baldessari, now 75, had been enjoying a critical and commercial resurgence, and was quite busy. In the spring he was preparing for his current show (through Saturday) at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and was in the final stages of organizing the exhibition now on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. The Hirshhorn had invited him to fill the lower-level galleries with any number of its 2,000 works in storage.
“I couldn’t say yes to Lacma until I finished curating for the Hirshhorn,” Mr. Baldessari said. “It’s like a woman not knowing if she wants a second child until she has her first.”
But soon the novelty of the Los Angeles proposal won him over. “Magritte makes Surrealism digestible for a broader audience, and he’s had such a great influence on advertising that we don’t even see it anymore,” Mr. Baldessari said. “I saw it as a chance to do something I haven’t done before.”
Extending himself in new directions has been a hallmark of Mr. Baldessari’s work since the late 1960s, when he cremated all of his early paintings. That’s one reason he gets labeled a conceptual artist: he is equally at home making paintings, photographs, prints, books, films, videos or performance art, and most comfortable of all blurring the distinctions among these categories — by taking found photographs, say, and painting colored dots over the faces.
Speaking of conceptual art, his work as an exhibition designer is not far from Duchamp’s notion of an “assisted readymade,” which involves tweaking a found, or readymade, object. Only in this case, it’s the museum space itself.
Along with rethinking the floors and ceiling, Mr. Baldessari planted a few other Magritte motifs throughout the show. He had a huge ghost-like hole carved into an oversize entrance door and a scrim printed with a photograph of the Manhattan skyline at night hung over a window facing Wilshire Boulevard.
“L.A. is always compared to New York, and always loses,” he said. “I thought it would be interesting to give a view of New York where you can see the outlines of L.A. buildings behind it. It’s like the New York skyline you see on Letterman, where you don’t know if it’s a stage set or a photograph.”
As for the clouds you can walk on, he stole that idea from himself. He had originally cooked up the plan for clouds below and freeways above five years ago, as part of a joint proposal with the architect Rem Koolhaas for the Los Angeles headquarters of Caltrans, the government agency in charge of freeways. The architect Thom Mayne ultimately won the competition, but Mr. Baldessari walked away with his feet in the clouds.
So he began playing with pictures of clouds for the museum. “I looked at lots of shots of clouds on the Internet, but couldn’t find a view looking straight down at the clouds,” he said. “I thought about hiring a painter to do them, then realized we could get them from Magritte. We just had to do some rearranging digitally.”
Magritte often used clouds to set up bold day-versus-night juxtapositions. In one series he used clouds to signal daytime in the top half of the painting, while the bottom shows a house artificially lighted at night, a scene borrowed for the cover of Jackson Browne’s album “Late for the Sky.”
Mr. Baldessari too is known for quick cuts. “I get accused a lot of jamming things together that don’t go together,” he said, “which is something Magritte does all the time. So I think we share that tendency. The whole idea is to get people to look at things more closely.”
One way both artists do this is through displacement. A leafy green apple replaces a man’s face in a Magritte painting in much the same way that a big, painted red dot covers a chunk of a Baldessari found photograph. “What you leave out,” Mr. Baldessari is known to say, “is more important than what you leave in.”
Both artists also play with scale. One of Magritte’s favorite tricks was to blow up one element of a painting out of proportion to the rest. A bulging green apple fills a room, floor to ceiling. An egg takes over an empty bird cage. A giant comb commands a bedroom. You can see the same basic technique in Charles Ray’s larger-than-life (but otherwise realistic) 1992 sculpture of a woman in a fuchsia skirt suit, which stands near Magritte’s famous pipe in the Los Angeles show. Or in Mr. Baldessari’s billboard-size text painting “Terms Most Useful in Describing Creative Works of Art,” from 1966-68, which is comically large given its mock-pedagogical vocabulary-lesson content.
Scale also became an issue in the exhibition itself, as Magritte’s paintings are small compared to contemporary work in the show. “If you think you know Magritte’s paintings from reproduction, you will be surprised,” the museum’s Ms. Barron said. “They read as large because they have a huge impact and we live in a big world, but when you actually confront them in person, you discover that they are easel paintings. They have an intimacy that makes them more haunting and seductive.”
Mr. Baldessari singled out the issue of competing sizes as one of the challenges in designing the show. But he was not daunted. “I have a lot of experience looking at art,” he said. “So I can look at the whole show as one big painting and be tasteful. I can see that one painting doesn’t fit here, or needs to be moved there.”
And that was his final and not entirely expected contribution to the show: grouping and sequencing, in consultation with Ms. Barron, many of the paintings she had chosen. He made some obvious pairings, like Magritte’s 1952 painting of the giant comb and Vija Celmins’s 1970 sculpture of a giant comb, but he also created an unlikely corner filled with boating images by Magritte, Ed Ruscha and Jeff Koons.
“I did not want a room filled with pipes,” he said. “I was walking a tightrope between making the obvious connections and trying to do something more subtle.”
So does he think of the show as one big Baldessari collage? “Well, not really,” he replied, “because the works were chosen before I got involved.”
“But designing is like making art,” he added. “I don’t think there is such a thing as art and nonart. When you go to a buffet dinner and pick out your peas, carrots, mashed potatoes, it’s not just because you’re hungry. You are also composing, with colors, shapes, textures. You are making what chefs today call a plating.”
Later, walking along the museum plaza, he stopped before two posters. On the right: a bold ad for the Magritte exhibition featuring only a pipe, without text, floating against a bright blue background, a color that Mr. Baldessari handpicked. On the left: a poster for an Anna Magnani film program at the museum, featuring a still of that Italian actress covering her face with her hands.
Mr. Baldessari looked at the Magnani picture and said: “See, that’s what I mean: there’s no such thing as an accident. You can tell that the woman doesn’t like the smell of the pipe.”
And what about Magritte? Would he like the feel of this exhibition? “I have been asking myself that,” Mr. Baldessari said. “If I ever meet Magritte in that big art gallery in the sky, is he going to smack me?”
He paused, perhaps for effect. “I don’t think so. I think he would like this.”
Faculty ART Show
Art Faculty from Cape Cod Community College and the Museum School at PAAM
October 12 – November 9, 2006
SCOTT ANDERSON / Mixed Media, BOB BAILEY Painting, HEATHER BLUME / Sculpture, JIM BOWEN / Mosaic, SUE CAREY / Painting, ANNE FLASH / Works on Paper BETTY CARROLL FULLER / Mixed Media, ALFIE GLOVER / Sculpture, FRANNY GOLDEN / Painting, JANE HEYERDAHL / Watercolor, GINNY JUST / Graphic Design, JIM PETERS / Painting, PHILIPPE LEJEUNE / Multimedia, SUSAN LYMAN / Sculpture, SARA RINGLER / Encaustic DOUG RITTER / Painting, MEG SHIELDS / Painting, VICKY TOMAYKO / Printmaking, JAMES WARREN / Mixed Media
Reception: Friday, October 20, 5 -7 pm
Artist Talk: Monday, October 16, 12-1
Postcard image: Shadow Disorders / James Warren / Mixed Media
“Picasso and American Art” at the Whitney Museum
September 29, 2006
Visual Arts :: Guerrilla Art
September 8, 2006
A bench-like object went from being guerilla art to earning Boston City Hall’s stamp of approval.
by Andrea Shea
JAMAICA PLAIN, Mass. – August 30, 2006 – “Guerrilla art” has been described as an insidious way of leaving anonymous art work in public places. It’s unsanctioned and often unwelcome. But in Jamaica Plain a guerrilla sculpture that was removed by the city is experiencing an unlikely resurrection….
to learn more… http://www.wbur.org/arts/2006/60500_20060830.asp
