On Pharmaceutical Conceptualism

May 30, 2011 To my nearly-non-existent collection of avant-garde and contemporary art has been added a small conceptualist gem: a single translucent red pill inside a plastic bag labeled: Speak, write and read perfect German "inmiatly" (sic). It's by the excellent painter and documentary photo- and video-grapher Adriana Bustos, from Cordoba, Argentina, who happened to be classmate of mine in language study. I can only assume that her lengthy studies in psychopharmacology and neu.. read more...

Does the Avant-Garde Need Marx?

May 30, 2011 It's official: Marx is back. At least that seems to be an increasingly acceptable veiwpoint within mainstream, English-speaking intellectual circles that would've not so long ago viewed the great 19th Century economic and political thinker as no more than a passe obsession of the Cold War era, a fetish of sheltered English departments in the ivoriest of ivory towers (about as relevant to contemporary economics as Freud is to cognitive psychology), or a dubious authority to be.. read more...

Weston’s Aesthetic Vision Poses Alternate Modernist Path

May 29, 2011 "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges," (probably) wrote Beatrice Wood, an American modern artist and lover of Duchamp, defending the signed urinal he had submitted to the Salon des Independants in 1917. The legacy of the urinal is often understood to be Conceptualism on the one hand -- a paradigm where ideas and gestures resonate over and above the technical skill of the artist -- and on the other, Avant-Garde (anti)-.. read more...

The Importance of Drinking and Smashing Innumerable Bottles on a Giant Pile of Beer, until It’s Gone that Is

May 26, 2011 It's not an out and out characteristic, or quite a trend, but in the German capital they do seem to love heaps. Perhaps it's because the 350-mile-city itself is so devlishly flat. One of the tallest mountains around is Teufelberg or "Satan's Hill," the tremendous aggregation of wartime rubble just north of West Berlin's lush Grunewald forest. The word, I believe, is still out on whether one of Hitler's secret bunkers is still buried at the core. Thus far it.. read more...

De la Mora and the Fragile Object

May 23, 2011 40 year old Mexican artist, Gabriel de la Mora, has shocked, humored, and helmed the Central American conceptual art scene for a number of years now. His pieces are composed from an astonishing amount of different media and materials ranging from 'drawings' composed from human hair strands or alphabet soup to 'sculptures' made from post-it notes: de la Mora describes himself as "an artist who works [particularly] with ideas, possibilities and concept.. read more...

Reappraising Rodin’s Work at the Musee Rodin

May 18, 2011 About a week ago an exhibit on modernist French sculptor Auguste Rodin opened at the eponymous Musee Rodin in Paris. As beautiful and monumental as Rodin's work may be, the appeal of the show lies as much in the fresh approach its curators have undertaken to shed a new critical light on the artist's legacy as it does in its scope: the Musee's press release cites their mission as being a "reappraisal" that "stems from the work of critics, art hist.. read more...

And the Avant-Garde Gesture of the Micro-Epoch Belongs to: You?

May 16, 2011 When I think back on the past several years, as to whether there was any artist who came forward with a move that resonated in that the-world-before-and-after, you-can-only-do-it-once sort of way (like say, Duchamp's submission of a urinal to the Salon Des Independants): well, the only thing that really jumps to mind is Urs Fischer's excavation of the entire floor of the Gavin Brown Enterprise gallery. The massive crater he produced out of a piece of pricey NY real estate (an.. read more...

Fluxus, the Sprightly Godchild of Duchamp, Retrospectivized at Dartmouth

May 15, 2011 Fluxus, the sprightly Godchild of Duchamp, has endless quantities of material around that will keep scholars and enthusiasts of conceptualism, antics, hijinks, and the general dada spirit busy for many years to come. A new exhibit at Dartmouth's Hood Museum: "Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life," presents a fair swath of the witty, irreverent output of this 1960's and '70's neo-Avant-Garde. Fluxus works are like philosophic miniatures: very small pieces of.. read more...

Markopoulos, Late Doyen of Avant-Garde Film To Have Final “Tenemos”

May 14, 2011 In Paul Auster's novel, the Book of Illusions, a silent movie star pulls a disappearing act after a terrible personal tragedy, and ends up at a secret location making genre-bending, rule-breaking films (which he would subsequently order burned Kafkaesquely). Later, a grief-struck scholar gets pulled into an obsessive quest to unearth the truth of the actor's life. Subtract some of the truly soap-operatic drama and the silent bit, and Auster's narrative has definite paralle.. read more...