Art in America articles from September 2004

Art in America archives from September 2004

Makarevitsch's communal deaths.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... To the Editors: In her recent article on the Berlin-Moscow exchange show [A.i.A., June/July '04], Amei Wallach says that the "motley crew" depicted in Igor Makarevitsch's Corpses of Communism may be taken as "parodies of Soviet heroes,"...

Virginia Dwan: for the record.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... To the Editors: It was such a satisfaction to see Suzaan Boettger's long and enthusiastic article about my former projects [A.i.A., Apr. '04]. I felt honored. Unfortunately, there were several unintended but significant factual errors that...

Two Fishermen.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... To the Editors: I read the last paragraph of Raphael Rubinstein's article on John Currin [A.i.A., June/July '04] with special interest, in that his recent painting, Fishermen (2002), surely owes a debt to Winslow Homer's The Herring...

Turmoil at the Reina Sofia.(Front Page)
September 1, 2004... Once again, a change in leadership at Madrid's Reina Sofia has been marked by bitter controversy. Recalling the abrupt firings of former directors Tomas Llorens (1991) and Maria Corral (1994), director Juan Manuel Bonet resigned in a huff on...

Artist ensnared by Patriot Act.(Front Page)
September 1, 2004... Since May, Buffalo artist Steve Kurtz has been the subject of a highly publicized federal investigation involving his possession of bacterial agents and lab equipment. The trouble began on May 11, when the artist awoke to find that his wife,...

New Jersey's 9/11 Memorial.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Governor James McGreevey of New Jersey recently announced that a proposal by architect Frederic Schwartz has won the state's September 11th Memorial Competition. Titled Empty Sky, the project is a tribute to the nearly 700 New Jersey residents...

Biennale set for Shanghai.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Following a year in which official taste was resurgent in Chinese institutions but ever more confidently flouted in independent venues [see "Focus: China," A.i.A., June/July '04], critical anticipation is now building for the fifth Shanghai...

Supreme Court rules for Klimt Claimant.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... On June 7, the US. Supreme Court ruled in a 6 to 3 decision that Maria Altmann, an 88-year-old Los Angeles resident, has the right to sue the Austrian government for the recovery of six important paintings by Gustav Klimt. The decision upheld...

Auction houses in full boom.(Front Page)
September 1, 2004... This past spring and summer, art auction totals went through the roof at sales in the U.S. and abroad. New York's important evening auctions of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art at the city's two biggest houses, Christie's and...

Cornell outside the box.
September 1, 2004... Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay... Eterniday, essays by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Richard Vine, Robert Lehrman and Walter Hopps, New York, Thames & Hudson, 2003; 272 pages, plus DVD-ROM, $60. Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams, by Diane Waldman, New...

Hamilton's multiplex: Richard Hamilton has long avoided a singular "look" in his prints. A recent show demonstrated their unusually complex technical and thematic range.(Prints)
September 1, 2004... "We resist the kind of activity which is primarily concerned with the creation of style," wrote Richard Hamilton and Lawrence Alloway in a joint statement for the 1956 exhibition "This Is Tomorrow," the benchmark show of the independent Group....

The objects of war: an exhibition of propaganda posters and household furnishings bore timely lessons about the ways that bellicose messages can infiltrate everyday life.(Report From Miami)
September 1, 2004... Even when we know history, we're doomed to repeat it. That's the lesson of the strong and timely exhibition "Weapons of Mass Dissemination: The Propaganda of War," mounted recently at the Wolfsonian-FIU. The items on display were drawn from the...

Korean Crossing: a recent multi-themed exhibition at nine venues around Hawaii presented a broad range of contemporary art from Korea.(Report From Hawaii)
September 1, 2004... The 1988 Winter Olympics in Seoul served as an international coming-out party for Korean culture and contemporary art. In the years since, Korean artists have become a highly visible force in the contemporary art scene, both at home and abroad....

Big brash borough: at the freshened-up Brooklyn Museum, a large, crowded exhibition showed the borough's art scene growing in scale, diversity and ambition.
September 1, 2004... I'd like to begin with full disclosure. I've lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, since 1987, and the Brooklyn ethos--whatever that is--has enormously influenced and inspired me. Long before I began writing about contemporary art, I spent countless...

Five (not so easy) pieces: Joan Jonas recently brought her dance, music, sound, film, videos and installations to the Queens Museum in a selected survey reaching back 35 years; a related performance at The Kitchen was her first in New York in a decade.(Cover Story)
September 1, 2004... Mirrors, masks and video cameras have long been Joan Jonas trademarks. Also characteristic of her work is the combination of multiple mediums, including dance, music, sound, film, live closed circuit videos and prerecorded tapes, props and...

Opus of excess: the Dieter Roth retrospective at MOMA and P.S. 1 showed how this irascible polymath rode roughshod over convention while radically reformulating historical genres.
September 1, 2004... The recent New York installation of the sweeping Dieter Roth retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and at P.S. 1 provided Americans with an opportunity to become more familiar with Roth's dramatically varied output and to reflect upon how...

From tortured youth to enchanted sage: since the late 1950s, Lucas Samaras has been obsessively portraying himself in a variety of mediums. The artist's myriad auto-transformations were on view in a recent Whitney Museum survey and a concurrent gallery show of new work.
September 1, 2004... Among the razor blades, nails, knives, needles, fishhooks, pins and tacks that bristle and menace in the art of Lucas Samaras, scissors flash with double-edged significance. They are both aggressive weapon and creative tool, as when Samaras...

The underside of innocence: in works whose overtones of menace are tempered with a melancholy, often chilly elegance, sculptor Not Vital provokes us to contemplate things only incompletely known.
September 1, 2004... Sixteen silver spheres, each 9 inches in diameter, were lined up in an evenly spaced row on the floor of an otherwise empty room at Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York. Like bails in a pinball machine, they seemed ready to spring into action....

Los Carpinteros at Anthony Grant.
September 1, 2004... Despite the departure of one of its three founding members, the Havana-based artist collective known as Los Carpinteros continues to produce objects that blur the lines between art and craft, practicality and uselessness. As in the past, their...

Jorge Pardo at Friedrich Petzel.
September 1, 2004... In the gallery space of Jorge Pardo's recent show, visitors confronted four sets of vibrant red, yellow and orange double-hung doors. Created out of medium- density fiberboard and machine-shaped to produce a high-relief texture of drapery-like...

Lynda Benglis at Cheim & Read.
September 1, 2004... A pioneer of Post-Minimalism, Lynda Benglis remains best known for her poured sculptures of the late 1960s. Several of these groundbreaking works were displayed in this concise survey of her career, which presented 19 sculptures in various...

Jane South at Spencer Brownstone.
September 1, 2004... With its opposed laser-cut louvers set into a 35-inch circle in an 8-by-8-foot partition wall at the gallery entrance, Untitled (double cut wall) permitted a limited view into Jane South's world of paper constructions just beyond. Her...

Marc Quinn at Mary Boone.
September 1, 2004... Ever since Marc Quinn made Self (1991), a cast of his own head that used nine pints of his blood, frozen and contained in a refrigerated vitrine, his efforts to redefine figurative sculpture have often sparked intense controversy. This...

Nayland Blake at Matthew Marks.
September 1, 2004... Bunnies and extreme physical ordeals--the two main ingredients of Nayland Blake's work--turned up again in his latest show, "Reel Around." The recent offerings also found the artist treading, typically, between the sinister and the hilarious,...

Stacey Neff at Neuhoff.
September 1, 2004... It is perhaps inevitable that the biomorphic work of Santa Fe-based sculptor and glassblower, Stacey Neff, on view in "GEO-time," her recent show, would be compared to the vegetal eroticism in paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe. But in sculptures...

Alan Saret at James Cohan.
September 1, 2004... Although his distinctive wire sculptures helped define the essential attributes of process-based art, Alan Saret drifted into semi-obscurity after the 1970s. Deservedly, a recent exhibition of eight sculptures and 13 drawings raised Saret's...

William T. Wiley at Charles Cowles.
September 1, 2004... Throughout this rollicking, politically arcane but savvy show, William T. Wiley targets the representation of some comic beast as it slouches toward Bethlehem. On his own timetable, Wiley reads the future, and the news isn't so good. Wiley...

June Leaf at Edward Thorp.
September 1, 2004... Spanning more than 50 years, this survey of June Leaf's drawings, plus a few sculptures, was a kind of visual epic. But sweeping narrative is not Leaf's style; instead, she represents incisive moments, many of them funny, some harrowing, and...

Mary Neumuth Mito at Gerald Peters.
September 1, 2004... Mary Neumuth Mito lives and works near Santa Fe. Her first exhibition in New York in 20 years included drawings, lithographs and paintings in which the illusionism can be awe-inspiring. Fraught with intricate detail, these works are meant to...

Robert Longo at Metro Pictures.
September 1, 2004... If memory serves, back in the bombastic 1980s, an article about the hot artists of the moment--Robert Longo, David Salle, Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel--ran under the title "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." While that appellation dripped...

Friedel Dzubas at Jacobson Howard.
September 1, 2004... Born in Berlin in 1915, Friedel Dzubas fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in New York in the late 1940s, joining a coterie of leading young painters that included Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler (with whom he shared a studio). He...

Lothar Baumgarten at Marian Goodman.
September 1, 2004... One possible subject of this exhibition by Lothar Baumgarten may have been the politics of color or, perhaps, the color of politics. The installation titled Imago Mundi (1988) is based on two ostensibly unrelated systems: one is a color...

Ernst Caramelle at Lawrence Markey.
September 1, 2004... In this season of war and rumors of war, it's a relief to find art that reminds us how the world can still contain simplicity, order and a kind of amiable beauty. That's the feeling one had, at any rate, at the Lawrence Markey Gallery this...

Mark Rothko at PaceWildenstein.
September 1, 2004... This was an outstanding instance of a private commercial gallery mounting a museum-quality exhibition of a great modernist artist. The show of Picasso's classical period at C&M Arts last fall, the Cezanne watercolors at Acquavella, the...

McKendree Robbins Long at Luise Ross.(Obituary)
September 1, 2004... Reverend McKendree Robbins Long's life (1888-1976) began and ended in Statesville, N.C. The son of a North Carolina Supreme Court justice, he spent three years at the Art Students League in New York before winning an award in 1911 to study for...

Lois Dodd at Alexandre and the New York Studio School.
September 1, 2004... In her show at Alexandre--several dozen small landscapes done on masonite panels or plywood over the past 12 years--Lois Dodd made the art of painting seem easy, as natural as telling a friend about something surprising you have noticed on a...

Jim Nutt at Nolan/Eckman.
September 1, 2004... For the past decade or so, Jim Nutt has concentrated on painting schematic heads of imaginary women, which he refers to as "portraits." While perusing this wonderful exhibition of three recent, medium-size acrylic paintings and a dozen related...

Peter Ruta at the Museum of the City of New York.
September 1, 2004... "Picturing New York: The Paintings of Peter Ruta" is the first in the Museum of the City of New York's new series of exhibitions devoted to local urban imagery. Featured are 29 oils, including two diptychs (the largest being 66 by 108 inches),...

John Waters at the New Museum.
September 1, 2004... John Waters began his moviemaking career in the bedroom of his parents' home in Baltimore in the late 1960s, and 30 years later, he started making art in similarly humble circumstances, albeit as an already established, internationally known...

"Dreamland Artist Club" at Coney Island.
September 1, 2004... For "The Dreamland Artist Club," a public-art intervention funded by Creative Time at Coney Island, graffiti artist Steve Powers selected 33 artists whom he saw as bringing something like street culture to the art world. Yet his dream team--a...

Howardena Pindell at Sragow.
September 1, 2004... Howardena Pindell's first show in New York in a decade included nearly three dozen small works on paper or papyrus--collages, prints and drawings--ranging in date from 1968 to the present, with more than half from the past several years. Most...

Alex Bag at Elizabeth Dee.
September 1, 2004... Seriously engaged with grudges to bare, Alex Bag conjured the multifaceted installation "Coven Services for Consumer Mesmerism, Product Sorcery, and the Necromantic Reimagination of Consumption," a fantasy PR firm in the service of big science,...

Helen Altman at DCKT.
September 1, 2004... For her first New York solo show, "Smoke Signal," Fort Worth-based artist Helen Altman presented a small selection of her unusual works--12 "torch drawings" and three quilted "moving blankets." To make the former pieces, Altman soaks sheets of...

Jason Clay Lewis at 31 Grand.
September 1, 2004... The centerpiece of Jason Clay Lewis's multimedia installation "The Black Death" was a full-size suit of armor straddling a taxidermist's plastic model of a horse (all works 2003). The visor was lifted to reveal a video loop of flames. Conjuring...

Paul Etienne Lincoln at Alexander and Bonin.
September 1, 2004... The Wunderkammer, as a historical format for demonstrating erudition through the collection and juxtaposition of unlike and esoteric things, generally figures in contemporary art as part of a critique of rationalist ordering systems. Paul...

Steven Montgomery at O.K. Harris.
September 1, 2004... Part of the pleasure on seeing Steven Montgomery's ceramic sculptures comes from knowing that they are not what they seem. A tour de force of simulation, the works can also convey the impression that they are relics of an act of destruction. In...

Sol'Sax at Kenny Schachter.
September 1, 2004... Passionately engaged with African spirituality and diasporan history, Brooklyn-based artist Sol'Sax makes works that are grounded in the cosmic minutiae of traditional religious belief. They are also rich in the rough, lyric sensibility of the...

Manolo Millares at the Chelsea Art Museum.
September 1, 2004... This exhibition, titled "Eastern and Western Grief," was a rare U.S. show of paintings and works on paper by Manolo Millares, a leading figure in Spanish post-Civil War art. Millares, who died in 1972, is well known in his homeland as the...

Mark Bradford at Lombard-Freid.
September 1, 2004... A Los Angeles-based hairdresser and self-described "beauty operator" who also earned his MFA from Cal Arts, Mark Bradford garnered quick fame for his alluring collages on canvas of singed hair-permanent endpapers (the small rectangles of...

Robert Taplin at Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University.
September 1, 2004... Robert Taplin's sculpture installation, The Five Outer Planets, is a work both beautiful and affecting. Entering the long, darkened main room of the Zilkha Gallery, one encountered five pairs of sculpted male nudes suspended from the ceiling,...

Stephen Hendee at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Stephen Hendee's latest site-specific installation, titled Iron Skies, was another of his walk-in environments that straddle the worlds of art and technology. The installation consisted of two adjacent cavernlike corridors constructed with...

Sarah McEneaney at the ICA.(Institute of Contemporary Art)
September 1, 2004... To look at a Sarah McEneaney painting is to enter her world as she experiences it, with all its details and intimacy. Ingenuous at first glance, like a Grandma Moses narrative in primary colors and uncertain perspective, McEneaney transforms...

Carter Potter at Numark.
September 1, 2004... As a medium firmly entrenched in contemporary art, film can be time-scrambled by Douglas Gordon, metro-sexed by Matthew Barney, or stilled to compelling enigma by John Baldessari. Carter Potter has another approach. A hometown movieland boy...

Doris Cross at Charlotte Jackson.
September 1, 2004... A student of Hans Hofmann in the 1920s and '30s, Doris Cross became a suburban housewife who made art on the side, showing occasionally at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 1972 she left New York for Santa Fe, where she became a salty doyenne in...

Wes Mills at Richard Levy.
September 1, 2004... Adjectives habitually associated with Wes Mills's work--doodly, intuitive, reticent, lyrical, hesitant, Zen-like, evanescent--applied to this show of some 50 hand-sized drawings (3 to 8 inches square) spanning most of the artist's series over...

Bruce Helander at Don O'Melveny.
September 1, 2004... Since the mid-1970s, Bruce Helander has been producing collages of printed papers. His semiabstract compositions often feature images of pinup models, housewives, domestic scenes and household products, mostly taken from U.S. periodicals of the...

Kerry Tribe at L.A.C.E.(Los Angeles Contemporary Editions)
September 1, 2004... L.A.-based artist Kerry Tribe often uses the conventions of the film documentary to critically engage commonly held assumptions about what constitutes ethnographic knowledge and historical understanding. Tribe's recent installation at Los...

Deborah Oropallo at Stephen Wirtz.
September 1, 2004... "Replica" is the apt title given by Deborah Oropallo to her new series (2003) of 16 digital print/painting hybrids (each in an edition of three). Common to almost all of these multigenerational works are images of mass-produced toys that the...

Linda Hutchins at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University.
September 1, 2004... From murals woven of plastic caution tape, Linda Hutchins has moved to a smaller scale and another form of linear text: typewriting. With the delicate drawings in "Reiterations" (all 2003), she compares typing to traditionally feminine tasks...

Xavier Noiret-Thome at Philippe Casini.
September 1, 2004... In every industrialized city there are streets in transitional areas where graffiti collects, metallic paint covers jutting pipes and temporary dwellings appear, often constructed with packing materials. At times in his epiphanic abstractions,...

Eduardo Arroyo at Carles Tache.
September 1, 2004... This exhibition featured a dozen recent paintings and a series of charcoal and mixed-medium drawings by Eduardo Arroyo, a prolific, talented 67-year-old Spanish artist and set designer. Although he is not well known in the U.S., Arroyo has...

Jens Liebchen at Paul-Lobe-Haus.
September 1, 2004... The new seat of the German government was built in the abandoned fields surrounding the Reichstag and not far from the razed Berlin Wall. This complex includes the Paul-Lobe-Haus, a parliamentary office building completed in 2001 by the...

Art services directory.(Directory)
September 1, 2004... ADVERTISING DESIGN PRINTING Dynacolor Graphics Inc. P.O. Box 699037, Miami, FL 33269-9037 800.624.8840 ext. 322 Web: www.dynacolor.com Dynacolor Graphics is one of the fine art industry's leading printers of full Ruler...

Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.(Awards & Grants)
September 1, 2004... The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation has announced 12 recipients of its 2004 grants, worth $25,000 each. They are Francisco Alvarado-Juarez, Charles Burwell, Stefan Eins, Ira Joel Haber, Willy Heeks, Tracy Heneberger, Min Kuei Jan Chang,...

Nancy Graves Foundation.(Awards & Grants)
September 1, 2004... The Nancy Graves Foundation has presented its 2004 grants, worth $25,000 each, to Xenobia Bailey, Mel Chin end Erik Levine.

Terrie Sultan, director of the University of Houston's Blaffer Gallery.(Awards & Grants)
September 1, 2004... Terrie Sultan, director of the University of Houston's Blaffer Gallery, Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, Philippe Vergne, senior curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Robert M....

Viola Frey, 1933-2004.(Art World)
September 1, 2004... The sculptor Viola Fray, a pioneer of California ceramics known for her colossal clay figures, died on July 26 in Oakland, age 70. Born in the farming town of Lodi, Calif., Fray received her BFA in 1956 from the California College of Arts and...

The Maison Rouge, a new venue for contemporary art, recently debuted in Paris.(Museum News)
September 1, 2004... The Maison Rouge, a new venue for contemporary art, recently debuted in Paris. Located at the Port de l'Arsenal in the Bastille district, in a 22,000-square-foot building renovated by architect Jean-Yves Clement, the space is home to the...

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation recently selected New York's Drawing Center to relocate to the World Trade Center site as part of a new cultural hub planned for the area.(Museum News)
September 1, 2004... The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation recently selected New York's Drawing Center to relocate to the World Trade Center site as part of a new cultural hub planned for the area. The Drawing Center's program, submitted by director Catherine...

Whitney Museum of American Art.(Museum News)
September 1, 2004... The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York recently selected architect Renzo Piano to design a new addition to its Marcel Breuer building. Piano was chosen from a group of 12 architects. Details of the plan and a model have yet to be made...

Guggenheim Museum.(Museum News)
September 1, 2004... New York's Guggenheim Museum recently announced that its Frank Lloyd Wright building will undergo major renovation, pending approval by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The museum will remain open during the two-year,...

Obituaries.(Art World)(Obituary)
September 1, 2004... Lygia Pape, 77, prominent Brazilian avant-gardist, died May 3 in Rio de Janeiro of myelodysplasia, a blood disease. She worked in a variety of mediums, including artist's books, painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation and dance. In the...

A retirement plan for artists.(Art World)
September 1, 2004... A new trust has been established with the aim of providing emerging and midcareer artists with a nest egg for their later years. Called the Artist Pension Trust, the scheme is the brainchild of Israeli entrepreneur Moti Shniberg. It was...

Huge losses in Brit art inferno.(Art World)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The latest estimate of damages from the devastating fire at Momart, an upscale art storage facility in London, is $109 million, according to insurers working on the case. Hundreds of works were lost in the May 24 blaze, including more than 100...

Changes at the Metropolitan.(Art World)
September 1, 2004... In June, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a major curatorial restructuring and the creation of a new and expanded department encompassing 19th-century, modern and contemporary art. Gary Tinterow, curator of 19th-century European...

Artists track the G.O.P.(Art World)(Advertisement)
September 1, 2004... An ad hoc collective of New York artists and writers has published The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention, a 33-by-22-inch full-color map, folded to look like those issued by New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to...

Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.(People)
September 1, 2004... Linda Shearer was recently named director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. She had been director of the Williams College Museum of Art for the past 15 years. She succeeds Charles Desmarais, who headed the museum for nine years and...

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.(People)
September 1, 2004... Former art dealer Tom Healy is the new president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, replacing Liz Thompson, who stepped down to focus on other projects.

Krannert Art Museum.(People)
September 1, 2004... Kathleen Harleman has been named director of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois. She formerly served as executive director of the Bellevue Art Museum (2001-2003). She succeeds Josef Helfenstein, who is now head of the Menil...

Asian and Asian-American.(People)
September 1, 2004... Melissa Chiu, curator for contemporary Asian and Asian-American art at the museum of the Asia Society in New York, has been promoted to museum director. She succeeds Vishakha N. Desai, who is now president of the Society.

Whitney Museum.(People)
September 1, 2004... Debra Singer, associate curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum for the past seven years and co-curator of the recent Biennial, is the new executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen, an interdisciplinary nonprofit space in...

Japan Art Association.(Awards & Grants)
September 1, 2004... The Japan Art Association recently presented its Praemium Imperiale awards to five individuals in the arts. Each receives approximately $135,000. Among the winners are Georg Baselitz (painting), Bruce Nauman (sculpture) and Oscar Niemeyer...