The Easel

9th June 2020

“So Many Glaring Absences That Were Very Loud to Me”: An Interview with Titus Kaphar

Terence Trouillot | Momus | 27th March 2019

This #blacklivesmatter moment is rippling into art, with Time placing a Kaphar work on its cover. The linked piece is a backgrounder on the rapidly rising Kaphar. On the removal of confederacy statues: “if the conversation is binary then my opinion is to take them down, but I don’t think it has to be binary. If we engage artists on this subject … we would be getting a different set of answers”.

Tate Modern anniversary: 20 years of wow

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 8th June 2020

Tate Modern is the world’s most visited modern art museum. Lacking the huge permanent art collection of MoMA, Tate has instead innovated with exhibitions that follow a theme rather than a chronology. Its 660ft Turbine Hall has reshaped thinking about the showing of art. Overall impact? MoMA has recently rehung its collection to de-emphasise chronology. And urban power stations are now viewed with a new sense of possibility.

How John Constable got masterpiece after masterpiece out of a tiny corner of rural Suffolk

Martin Gayford | The Spectator | 6th June 2020

The critic Robert Hughes said Constable was “the great example of the Englishness of English art”. Unlike his contemporary, Turner, Constable was a “stay-at-home”, painting local, seemingly unexceptional landscapes. He filled them with the familiar – “willows, old rotten planks, brickwork”. Like Monet with his water lilies, Constable found “how much interest the art, when in perfection, can give to the most ordinary subjects.’

Marie Denise Villers

Alexander Nagel | 4Columns | 8th June 2020

Another nice example of how to understand a painting. “Two female artists are in the process of observing each other as they work. But this situation – one woman drawing another woman drawing her – in studios recently reclaimed from a royal palace … none of it is traditional. To be here, to be doing this, was to be shaping new social identities into existence.”

A History of Architects Mistaking Design for Politics

Emily Watlington | Art in America | 7th June 2020

A bucket of cold water over architecture’s more ambitious exponents. How often do grandiose projects actually provide solutions to social problems? Preordained ideas about design that are imposed on a community often become “projects of domination”. Architecture needs to propose buildings that “reflect the values of the cultures in which they are created.”

Open access to collections is a no-brainer – it’s a clear-cut extension of any museum’s mission

Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace | Apollo | 1st June 2020

The dry topic of copyright gets a dust-off. Museums under lockdown are seeing increased online traffic, renewing the long-standing debate about publicly releasing digital images of their collections. Such moves, which are “becoming mainstream” have been shown to boost scholarship and public engagement. Image licensing is costly to administer, yields little revenue and now “looks like a losing hand”.

What Was British Surrealism?

Thomas McMullan | Frieze | 27th February 2020

Surrealism was essentially a French movement. An attempt to show there is an equivalent distinct strand of thinking in English art seems to fall short. Still, the English have an interest in strange imaginings and the eerie – “the threshold between the garden and the woods the tamed and the wild … the violence beneath the politeness”. As the surrealists were fond of saying “surrealism has existed always and everywhere.”

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”.

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