The most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, a charity benefit at Gagosian, and participatory art were among the stories in the week’s news. Read on for ArtWeLove’s news digest, now also available in email form—bringing a comprehensive roundup of the week’s art developments to your digital doorstep. If you aren’t signed up, click here. As always, we welcome your feedback at editorial@artwelove.com.
The New York Guitar Festival closed its 10th anniversary season at the Merkin Concert Hall last Thursday with the last in its Silent Films/Live Guitar series: two early Charlie Chaplin films, Pay Day (1921) and The Idle Class (1922), accompanied by the Brooklyn-based band, Chicha Libre. For the past four years, the Silent Films/Live Guitar series has featured some of New York’s most acclaimed artists presenting an especially commissioned score to early silent shorts. But does it work?
Catie Rosemurgy’s second poetry collection, The Stranger Manual (Graywolf Press 2009), is a heady, yet playful romp through the American psyche. Through her main character, Miss Peach, Rosemurgy questions gender roles in the tradition of PJ Harvey and Liz Phair. Her setting for many of the poems is a somewhat fictitious place Gold River, a sort of Anytown, USA. Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Sexton, Rosemurgy’s precise, restrained language prods into the darkness behind the seemingly mundane nature of her characters and places.
Kiki Smith’s exhibition “Sojourn” opens this Friday up on the Brooklyn Museum’s 4th floor, running until September 12 before traveling onward to Nürnberg and Barcelona. Don’t miss author and poet Victoria Redel’s intimate reading this Wednesday night at Village Zendo in Soho, from 7:15-9pm. Click through for more…
On the last weekend of January, the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair (ALAC) stamped an impressive footprint on the second floor of the Pacific Design Center (PDC). The PDC, aka “The Blue Whale” beached up on West Hollywood in 1975. Measuring about 1.2M square feet, it is an imposing piece of architecture at best, and a colossal eyesore to its neighbors at worst. Normally the PDC is utilized by the design community for showroom space but it has also provided comfortable accommodations for all sorts of events. In this case, and not without a hint of irony, the PDC hosted an Art Fair.
The first track on Yeasayer’s sophomore album, Odd Blood, sounds like infant robots schlepping around in a steel mill, humming work tunes. “Ambling Alp,” the album’s single, has a harmonized climax that feels like baby aliens crawling into your ears, not to mention a video that will make you highly uncomfortable—either with its excessive use of flapping nude bodies or its floating, tri-color faces. “I Remember” takes an orbital route and “O.N.E” and “Love Me Girl” sound like space glam-pop. There seems to be a pattern here.
There are two aspects that make a festival particular to India as a country: the presence of several Bollywood celebrities and the post-colonial conversations about the works themselves. Floods of Indians gaze adoringly at their favorite actor or actress, and I came to realize that India was a country very much star-struck, autograph-driven. I began watching four particular writers with this same star-struck attentiveness, and found myself seeking their ‘real selves’ in their ‘book selves’.
Everyone is sad for X Initiative’s one year art attack on Chelsea come to an end. But if we had to see ‘em go, it was sure nice to see ‘em go out with a bang. Their final challenge? Inviting anyone and everyone to Bring Your Own Art between 11am February 3rd and 11am February 4th, and install it wherever they could find an inch of free wall or floor space. That’s it. No rules, no curators, no mercy. The ensuing joyous bedlam represented a 24-hour condensed version of the X Initiave’s bold efforts to bring some much-needed excitement and optimism to Chelsea.
How to consider the space captured in a photograph, and what can we consider truth within an image? In a photograph my image exists outside of my physical body but does my body still live in a photograph? When applied to the photography of dead bodies, specifically crime scene photography, these questions take an interesting turn.
It is about the articulation of the literary and physical voice that I write about here, after having seen David Greenspan’s sublimely written and performed The Myopia, produced by The Foundry Theater and closing this weekend, on February 7. Greenspan’s voice and its voicings star in The Myopia, re-awakening in me a sense of awe at the voice’s astounding plasticity.
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