The Easel

8th October 2024

Mike Kelley, Ghost and Spirit review: American artist’s conceptual art was trashy, visceral and hilarious

Mark Hudson | The Independant | 1st October 2024

When looking at Kelley’s work, says the writer, just “[go] with the flow”. A product of working class Detroit, Kelley adopted the persona of the disgruntled adolescent.  His influential conceptual art is diverse – performance to video, sculpture to drawing, sewing and stuffed toys – full of ideas and, at times, “wilful crassness”.  “Whether he was a perverse genius or a slightly creepy provocateur (likely both) this show has incredible energy, a sense of the mess and confusion of real life blasting through it.”

Robert Longo with Amanda Gluibizzi

Amanda Gluibizzi | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st October 2024

Longo was one of the 1980’s Picture Generation. Immersed in the new “image storm”, those artists developed the idea that identity is not innate but constructed socially and expressed via the mass media. That idea still runs through Longi’s work, notably his renowned charcoal drawings. He is “making pictures of pictures” but they are not just “representational images. Art is a form of understanding and [the viewer] is not experiencing that image; they’re experiencing this human energy of making it.”

Riots, disasters and cries for justice: the art show charting India’s wildest decades of political pandemonium

Cleo Roberts-Komireddi | The Guardian | 3rd October 2024

Few would be aware of India’s internal turbulence prior to 1998. That period gave rise to vivid art, described by a critic as “uniquely Indian art dealing with an entirely unique set of Indian circumstances”. So, is this art of general interest? India’s “national metamorphosis” is a particular story, but other themes are more universal– home as a place of safety, tradition versus modernity, human dignity. We recognise these stories in any language. Images are here.

Irving Penn + Issey Miyake: Design Meets Photography

Cawaii Factory | Fine Art Museums San Francisco | 9th May 2024

In 1983, Irving Penn photographed two Miyake creations for Vogue. Startled by how differently Penn saw his clothes, Miyake asked him to photograph an entire collection. Thus began a collaboration that lasted 13 years. Miyake never attended the shoots or sent instructions. Penn never attended Miyake’s shows and sent his images back to Miyake without editing. “Miyake always waited with nervous anticipation for the photographs to arrive, like a student fretting over an exam score.” A book of Penn’s images is here

Confederate and Colonialist Monuments Are Finally Being Toppled, But Few Can Agree on What Goes in Their Place

Emily Watlington | Art in America | 2nd October 2024

Debate about the purpose of public art has yielded little consensus. What then of the many statues commemorating leaders of the US Confederacy? Their removal has been difficult, but so too is deciding what replaces them. A celebration of abolitionist leaders? A commemoration of slavery’s victims?  Something apologetic? There is a view that “history needs new monuments” and that artworks “allow more people in”. Yet “spectacle is not repair.”

“The Avant-Gardists; Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935”

Mario Naves | Too Much Art | 2nd October 2024

When the Romanovs fell, Russia’s avant garde artists were filled with “a giddy sense of possibility”. They had all spent time in Paris. Yet Russia, barely started on its industralisation, was not so responsive to Parisian theories of combining life and art. In any case, the Bolsheviks had other plans for Russian society. Combining the petty rivalries amongst its “brilliant, talented crackpots” with their “almost unutterable naivete “, the artistic revolt was short lived and officially extinguished in 1932.

1st October 2024

Monet and London review: This will never happen again – don’t miss it

Florence Hallett | iNews | 26th September 2024

These days London’s air is clean but Monet’s affection for the city formed when it was dirty. In three separate visits, he painted the “delicious” winter fogs that, when combined with the “billowing filth” of industry, produced irresistibly beautiful light, His studies of central London and the Thames were finished back in Giverny and “clearly relate” to his famous waterlilies. These paintings are “a revelation beyond exaggeration” and a testament to the “elastic nature of [Monet’s] mind”.

Is Robert Frank’s late work worth viewing?

Arthur Lubow | ArtDaily | 14th September 2024

Frank’s first photobook The Americans was published in 1958, and it made him famous. He “hated” that and moved away from street photography. Despite doing things like touring with rock stars, Frank’s landscapes and studio images from this time don’t impress this writer. He also went into filmmaking, a form where his “genius” as a photographer seemed not to reach. Weary of facing huge expectations, Frank said “you see photography everywhere, it’s like bricks, you know.””

10 things about bronze

Staff | Rijksmuseum | 28th September 2024

The Rijksmuseum blockbuster show of Asian bronzes exemplifies the challenges of cross-cultural art. These are great sculptures, objects of beauty that include figurines, bells, mirrors and ceremonial objects. Besides flaunting the skill of their makers, they loudly proclaim their spiritual stories. For contemporary Westerners, though, it’s difficult to go beyond a superficial appreciation. What is clear is the depth and relatedness of Asian cultures and the eternal quality of bronze. An in-depth piece is here.

Uncanny Returns: Trevor Paglen and the Hallucinatory Domain of Generative AI

Anthony Downey | MIT Press Reader | 23rd September 2024

In the world before ChatGPT, Paglen thought image generating models would be unimaginative. Now he is concerned about the opposite – that is, AI models can “hallucinate”. He warns that models can be biased when classifying images and that users put too much faith in “machine realism”. Of course, awareness of these issues has skyrocketed with the emergence of ChatGPT. Builders of these models are trying to ensure “non-toxic” outputs, a category they may define differently to Paglen.

Michael Craig-Martin review – sorry, but these lamps and filing cabinets just aren’t that interesting

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 17th September 2024

The tradition of “object-art“ goes back at least to Magritte and his pipe that was “not a pipe”. Craig-Martin started there in 1973 with a glass of water that, he said, represented an oak tree. For decades, though, he has produced cheerfully coloured line drawings of everyday objects. “Perfectly pretty, and perfectly vacant” says one critic. The writer agrees. “If things are just things, how interesting can they be? It’s more like the dry irony of someone who’s forgotten what he’s being ironic about”.

Seeking the Silk Roads: An extraordinary story of the power of connections

Sue Brunning and Luk Yu-ping | The Past | 19th September 2024

Today’s world is global – and it’s been heading that way for longer than we think. The silk road was a network of routes on land and sea. Many high value goods were carried but religion, knowledge, diseases and slaves travelled too. The strongest evidence of these interconnections is the art, including pieces dug up in far-flung places that originated in nations we scarcely remember. One writer thinks the show is “almost too ambitious” but not so a noted historian: “Its epic”. Images are here.

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