Category Archives: art

General arts and culture posts

Formal Comparison: Isa Genzken and Vasa-Velizar Mehic

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I think you could also categorize this as: “things you find in the library when you should be working on your thesis.” That aside, I thought this was a striking formal comparison between Genzken’s and Mehic’s work, although certainly serendipitous rather than evidence of a connection between the contemporary German artist and the older Yugoslavian aartist. Having recently seen the Genzken show at MoMA though,  it popped out at me.

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Isa Genzken’s building representing Berlin’s buildings made by leaning colored glass panes at MoMA’s current Isa Genzken: Retrospective. Part of her 2004 series “New Buildings for Berlin.”

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Vasa-Velizar Mehic’s Bouquet (1970) in the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, found in a book in the library called The Museums of Yugoslavia, which dates it pretty clearly.

Last Days for Chris Burden at New Museum

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The Chris Burden retrospective at the New Museum ends January 12, so if you’ve been meaning to go see it, now is the time. The documentation of his painful, well-known 1970s performances, like when he had someone shoot him, are well done and fill a void in purposefully little documented events. Rather flat, almost terse voiceovers by the artist looking back and describing these past performances feel particularly intimate as they play over footage of Burden inching over broken glass or setting out to sea in a canoe with a gallon of water that would save his life. However, most of the museum (which you can make your way down from the top in a less elegant version of the Guggenheim spiral) is devoted to large, show-stopping works.

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Case in point: All the Submarines of the United States of America is a gallery-sized installation of 625 suspended cardboard submarines. A wall of the gallery (seen here) names each of the submarines represented in the exhibition. Without the voiceovers, or other direction, you are left to sift through the possible political meanings of the work. (The submarines have been very popular on Instagram lately.)

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Sharing the gallery with the submarines, A Tale of Two Cities is a miniature reconstruction of two city-states at war with each other. Made out of thousands of toys, the details of the installation can only be seen through he binoculars set up along the perimeter. Or, was the case when I was there, perhaps through a camera lens.

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Mike Kelley at PS1

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The Mike Kelley show at PS1, up through February 2,  is a big show. As Holland Cotter notes in his New York Times review, it easily fills all four floors at MoMA’s Queens outpost. Over a long and prolific career Kelley, who committed suicide in 2012, produced work more united by the thematic of Americana kitsch pop culture attacked with wierdness and dark humor in a colorful, uneasy aesthetic unrestrained by medium. All of which promises a fun viewing experience, yet my own felt uneasy, claustrophobic.

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Kelley’s uncharacteristically glossy later works called the Kandor Project begin the exhibition, which examine Superman’s birthplace and which Kelly recreated in sculpture after sculpture. These sleek and fancy forms obsessively explore childhood interests, and were quite appealing even if the glut of them left me feeling the theme had been exhausted.

While I found some of it amusing, like the video pieces above, the pop culture manipulations really didn’t move me for the most part. That said, there were some great works in the show, like the massive installation of Day Is Done, an unfinished multichannel video and performance piece. It presents Kelley’s work at its best: overwhelming, disorienting, and disturbing.

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