The Easel

2nd June 2020

Christo, 1935-2020

Hans Ulrich Obrist | Surface | 31st May 2020

Christo said of his monumental works “We borrow space and create gentle disturbances for a few days”. He saw them as “unbelievably useless, totally unnecessary”. Christo and his wife completed 23 such projects, many taking decades to organize, in the process changing perceptions of public art. Few carried any explanation beyond Christo’s desire to express “joy and beauty”. This writer adds “hey, who doesn’t want to witness a miracle?”

Getting to Noh: Myths of Japanese Minimalism

Glenn Adamson | Hyperallergic

Japan has absorbed the influence of ornate Chinese aesthetics without forfeiting its simpler vernacular tradition. To Japanese eyes the two do not conflict – for example, a simple teahouse in an elaborate palace garden. Occupying forces after WW2 liked the unfussy aesthetic and suddenly Japan was the home of minimalism. Not really. “There is no real Japanese minimalism. If there were, then there’d be no Marie Kondo”.

Love and death in Vienna

Nigel Jones | The Critic | 21st May 2020

A story that will be familiar to some but is nicely told. By 1900, Hapsburg Vienna could sense its salad days were ending. Klimt and Schiele captured this zeitgeist perfectly in “nervy” works that explored “the marriage between love and death”. A young Hitler lived locally, fruitlessly seeking a career in art. Things turned out badly – WW1, loss of empire, the Spanish flu pandemic and other doors opening for Hitler.

Zhang Peili

Heather | Asian Art Newspaper | 29th May 2020

After starting off in painting Peili made his name creating what is regarded as China’s first video work. A central theme, then and since, is monotony, “the aesthetics of boredom” and the passing of time. Characteristically his videos have a closely cropped image of a banal, repeated activity, like washing a chicken. Peili won’t supply a narrative for his work, suggesting viewers “have their own understanding”. Assuming, that is, they are still watching.

Landscapes, languor and limbs: the other side of Dorothea Lange

Sean O’Hagan | The Guardian | 15th February 2020

Can an artist’s best work become a kind of prison? Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 image Migrant Mother has pidgeonholed her as a Depression era documentarian. An extensive exploration of her archive shows a far more diverse output. Lange sought ways to “convey intimacy … gestures … subjects resting or sleeping … her own world of small things. A surprisingly contemporary image-maker …”

Peter Alexander, who created ethereal worlds out of resin, dies at 81

Carolina Miranda | LA Times | 28th May 2020

Alexander studied architecture but wasn’t convinced. Art proved a better fit and, almost immediately, he began making coloured resin sculptures. These works were small and luminous, perfectly suited to “connecting light and space”. Pristine these works may have been, but Alexander saw little commonality with the austere minimalism then prevailing on the US East Coast. Minimalism, he said, is “a crock”.

26th May 2020

Don McCullin on the stories behind his most personally significant pictures

Don McCullin | AnOther | 5th April 2020

McCullin grew up in grinding poverty, in working class London. That experience influenced his subjects of choice – wars and social injustice – in an acclaimed career in photography. “Photography is like climbing Everest without oxygen and the weight you’re carrying is a moral, mental weight … [You think] God, I’m having such an exciting, wonderful life,’ but if you think it’s free of charge, it’s not. It’s loaded with penalty.”

The Provocations of Kent Monkman

Nick Martin | The New Republic | 22nd May 2020

Kent Monkman, a Cree Nation / Canadian citizen, has had two of his paintings hung in New York’s Met. Good, one might think – recognition of an artist and of the terrible treatment of indigenous peoples. Some think otherwise, worrying that mainstream artworld success compromises art advocacy of indigenous causes. Frets this writer, can indigenous art avoid being “overwhelmed by the historical context”?

The Ricotta Eaters by Vincenzo Campi

Waldemar Januszczuk | Waldemar.tv | 11th May 2020

One of art criticism’s many forms is the forensic scrutiny of a single work. This essay is a nice example. “Campi’s peasants … guzzle their ricotta with open mouths and happily signal their base origins with their teeth. The old boy second from the right is … darker than the rest. That makes him the poorest. And if you look at the big lump of ricotta in front … it forms the shape of a skull. The mad ricotta eating has brought death to the table.”

Susan Rothenberg’s Rugged Paintings Made Her One of Today’s Most Fearless Artists

Andrew Russeth | ARTnews | 22nd May 2020

For her first show in 1975 Rothenberg produced figurative works … of horses. It caused a sensation in abstraction–obsessed New York and launched her career. But why horses? They didn’t come from an art theory idea, just her intuition. A reviewer of Rothenberg’s just-finished show comments that her horses are like cave art, “fundamentally ambiguous”. Ascribing meaning is the viewer’s task and as Rothenberg noted, “they getcha or they don’t.”

Why the Association of Art Museum Directors’s move on deaccessioning matters so much

Mark Gold and Stefanie Jandl | The Art Newspaper | 18th May 2020

Should museums sell (deaccession) artworks to fund operations? Some see this as a museum neglecting its duty of care toward its collection. Now an American museum body has dropped its long-standing opposition to the practice because many museums are in financial crisis. No-one seems ready to lay down arms on this debate; the writers pointedly suggesting that museum professionals “put down their cups of Kool-Aid”.

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