Mann is from the US South and its history shows in her work – family, mortality, racism. Images of her young children naked brought both acclaim and controversy, the latter seemingly a 1990’s over-reaction. “[Her work] looks caught up in some warped romance with the past, which nonetheless looks greater than almost everything around it.” More images are here.
Houston has its Rothko chapel; now Austin has an Ellsworth Kelly equivalent. As one might expect from this artist the focus of the chapel’s unornamented design is the play of light through stained glass windows. Hopeful about its impact on the local art scene, the curator muses “Truly, this changes the narrative.”
Part profile of the artist Pope.L, part defence of performance art. “[E]verything the artist touches is imbued with elements of theatre“– crawling Manhattan’s streets, sitting atop a tower eating the Wall St Journal, chaining himself to an ATM using a string of sausages. While only on “the periphery of fame, [Pope.L is] the most significant performance artist of our time”.
In 1991 the internet was just text and hyperlinks. Now it is so all-encompassing it influences our sense of ourselves, our sense of the truth. The art that it inspires has “alternative narratives”, suggesting experimentation more than consensus. “In many places, the exhibition is hard-going. The wall labels, inevitably, are Proustian — in length if not in spirit.”
Did Castle make furniture or sculpture? He didn’t think there was any difference. His vision of “sculptural furniture” started with creations in laminated wood but blossomed with a move into bright plastics. His signature creations were sinuous, biomorphic chairs and tables. In the view of one commentator “the most important post-war American furniture designer by a long shot.”
The New Museum Triennial disappoints different critics in different ways. One grumbles that it “keeps its voice low”. Another says the show is “a glass one-quarter full”. A source of this irritation is its belaboured politics. It is “easy listening art … letting us bask in feel-good consensus.” Overall, there are too few works that “are satisfied to be artworks, not instigations.”
‘Outsider art’ is a slippery concept. As the writer suggests, it mostly refers to artists who, because of poverty or institutionalisation, are at the margins of the art world. More important, though, is what our eyes see: “exemplars of vitality, ingenuity, sincerity, and a bracing lack of polish … It’s inconceivable the significance of outsider art will ever recede from view.” Multiple images are here.