Jeff Koons sculptures irk many, perhaps because their “badness is a foregone conclusion”. This writer pushes back on such views. “He has changed sculpture… reviving it with different materials … brought color into sculpture with a new fierceness and complexity. The beauty of even his best works elicits a visceral, embarrassing object lust. Liking them can feel creepy.”
The obituaries might have one think Pei’s success was inevitable. Not so – modernism was not always an easy sell. His great skill was to find an accommodation between elegant design and local context. Of his Louvre entrance – “there’s more than one way to show deference to history. Instead of competing with the surrounding buildings, the diaphanous pyramid accentuated their age and beauty.”
Vermeer made six “letter” paintings, each showing a girl reading or writing at a desk. Without an explicit narrative, they all have a contemplative, “innate tranquility”. Restoration has now uncovered a prominent Cupid image in one, providing a narrative – “a commentary on an amorous relationship.” Is the painting diminished now it has lost its alluring silence? A video (2 min) is here.
The Biennale is big – very big. Most of the art is in the national pavilions, of which there are 90 or so. For the first time exactly half the artists represented are women. Lithuania won the gong for best pavillion with its tableaux of actors lying on a re-created beach, singing songs. Ghana, a first time participant, is a standout. Common themes are climate change and the plight of refugees.
It seems we are having a cyborg moment, in fashion and art. The cyborg idea goes back at least to the Dadaists but is newly relevant because of AI and machine learning. Some women artists see in it a potent metaphor for outmoded ideas about submissive femininity. “The cyborg and its utopian fluidity and possibilities posit the most suitable regalia for rising above the [current] dystopia.”
Winning the Deutsche Börse prize confirms Susan Meiselas as a great documentary photographer. She is well aware that her images of war raise ethical issues. Are they a “monument to the victims of war” or exploiting those victims’ suffering? This writer opts for the positive: “to look is to familiarise oneself with an ‘other’, that to familiarise is to empathise.”
An interesting issue, even if the prose is not exactly lively. Aesthetic practices outside conventional art – graffiti, body art, sand sculptures and more – are still a part of Art. “Any artifact whatsoever can enter the art world”. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of such “wild art”, we should be aware that it is “already a part of our thinking, and how much better off we are for it.”
After internment in Texas, Burri returned to an Italy impoverished by war. These straightened circumstances suited his interest in unconventional materials – burlap, tar, plastics. His radical idea was to present “material as the subject matter itself”. Rauschenberg and Johns were just two of many disciples. “Brutally gorgeous paintings” says the writer. Images are here.
Its easy to see why Spero got angry. The 1960’s New York art scene was ruled by male abstractionists unimpressed by female artists and hostile to figuration. Undeterred, she developed a delicate frieze-like style that has deeply influenced today’s design vernacular. Spero illuminated how the world looks from a female perspective and depicted “woman as protagonist”.
A persuasive, uncomfortable argument. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are called out for “Eurocentric” descriptions of African artifacts. Marketing descriptions tend to be “ahistorical … suspended in some imaginary, pure realm.” These works thus acquire edited biographies, without “messiness [meaning] in many cases, the very people who created the object. Perhaps this is what sells.”
In the 1990’s Ward made art using stuff found on the streets of his Harlem neighbourhood. His acclaimed work embodied “the accidental aesthetics of street life” and was, of course, political. Harlem is now gentrifying. Ward’s work is perhaps also changing, less immediately political, more aimed at where “politics and poetics find common purpose”.
Winogrand, “the all time champion of street photography” captured telling moments in real life. Wall, and others from the next generation, mostly use actors and props to create staged images. What accounts for this shift? Even though society is awash with personal data the writer thinks it is about privacy: society no longer tolerates the “impugnity” of the street photographer.
The marginalizing of indigenous art is all too familiar. But sometimes an artist uses contemporary art tools to tell indigenous stories afresh. Cannon is one such case. Notably, he discarded aesthetically conservative Native imagery, instead using garish, Pop-like colours. All the better, presumably, to show the complexities of native American identity, “people getting by in the modern world”.
A seemingly quotidian piece about contemporary artists who are coming to prominence. Behind the diverse individual stories are recurring themes: use of the internet – and Instagram in particular – to build a profile; growing international interest; and a positive view of their own cultures. A background piece on the Kenyan photojournalist Brian Otieno is here.