Who doesn’t love to receive art books around the holidays? Full of inspiration and far more special than your average paperback, the following books will warm the hearts of all the members in your immediate circle of friends and family. They’re also all available at Domy Books in Austin. Remember guys, shop local! 1) [...]
If not completely exhausting, the end of each semester can be pretty gratifying. The students are relieved to be finished, turning in their last papers and tests, sometimes telling you they enjoyed the class and sometimes dropping anonymous notes on your desk. I teach art history at Texas State and at the closing of each [...]
By the time this is published the new curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton Museum may have been announced. I was told last week that an offer has been accepted. I don’t know who the new curator will be, but the director of the Blanton, Simone Wicha, has assured me that, “Curators [...]
I’ve long thought of clay as a very specific medium. By “medium specific” I’m recalling the critic Clement Greenberg’s term as he defined it in his 1961 essay Modernist Painting. According to Greenberg, what defined modernist abstract painting was its ability to criticize itself, therefore “to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” [...]
I ran around E.A.S.T. Sunday afternoon, the last day of the annual Austin arts festival. It was a sunny and beautiful day–perfect for wandering about and looking at local art. E.A.S.T. is chock full of work and I only just barely scratched the surface. I love how inclusive the show is and yet, next year [...]
I ended my weekend by going to see the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie The Master. The film is broadly about a Scientology-like group in post-war America who believe, through processing, that one can uncover past lives thereby healing deep-seated pains. It’s essentially a story about control—who has it and who doesn’t. Anderson illustrates this [...]
1. New York in the fall is ridiculously seductive. I visited this past weekend and the weather was perfect–blue skies, cool breezes. I walked all around, looking at art, meeting friends for studio visits, and basically falling in love with the city all over again. It’s hard (even for me) to be a cynic in [...]
There’s been a lot of writing on John Cage in the last week in preparation for today, what would have been his 100th birthday. You can read about his influence in the New Yorker blog here, or you can read about his bohemian life in LA in the LA Times here, and here NPR discusses [...]
With the changing of the seasons comes too the changing of the art climate. In the past year in Austin we’ve seen a flourishing of house and apartment galleries from Tiny Park to Red Space to Forus. Perhaps these spaces are filling gaps other institutions in Austin are missing, or maybe it just shows that [...]
Mikaylah Bowman‘s recent series of photographs reminds me of the 17th century Dutch still-life tradition, paintings that depict neatly arranged flowers, their edges crisp with decay. Something sweet and slightly sinister. Flowers are a prominent theme in Bowman’s work, perhaps pointing to the very clichés they so often engender–female fragility, soft scents, forgiveness. In one [...]
Manscape: Man as Subject and Object opened last night at Lora Reynolds Gallery. The group photography and video show is curated by Christopher Eamon and purports to be about “the subjectivity of contemporary male identity.” The work, largely by young women artists, casts the male gaze back on the male, a kind of meta-male gaze [...]
The surfaces of Ben Brandt‘s sculptures are covered in gray. The objects look like they’re a thousand years old, as if they’d just been pulled from some long-ago construction site, waiting to be carefully brushed off and examined. His process of covering things with cement mixture, or in the case of his Co-Lab show that [...]
A friend and I used to have an ongoing joke about writing a blog titled Double Feature. In this fantasy blog we’d review films that seemingly had nothing in common with one another. Odd pairings might include Precious and The Jerk or as it so happened one weekend in New York, Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. [...]
Disambiguation/Red Space Gallery/Closes February 12th Happened There are a lot of great images in Disambiguation, an exhibition currently on display at Red Space Gallery in Austin (the show closes on Feb. 12th). Max Marshall and Andrea Nguyen collaborated to create a suite of photos inspired by images that illustrate scientific processes and that the [...]
End of year lists allow a critic to consider the past year and tally up the most exciting cultural moments. I decided to take a less introspective approach and gave myself just five minutes to come up with a quick list of art exhibitions that I found especially affecting (or, at the very least, memorable). [...]
When we were driving to Marfa there was a shift in the landscape. We entered the desert. “It’s like we’re on Mars,” I said and my friend stretched out his arms and let out loud a sigh. The sky was huge. Scale matters. In my last post on the interventionist and site specific exhibition, Nothing [...]
A couple of weeks ago, two friends and I traveled to West Texas to look at art. I was once an intern at the Chinati Foundation so I’m familiar with Donald Judd and his vision in the desert town of Marfa, Texas. On our first day we went on the Chinati tour. Looking at Judd’s [...]
Christmas has never been my bag. Growing up, my Jewish stepmother would look out the window on Christmas morning and in mock desdain remark, “I hope the goyum got their white Christmas.” We’d laugh and then make plans for a matinee and Chinese food after. So I’ve felt strange lately finding myself longing for some [...]
I went home to Iowa for Thanksgiving and between eating amazing food (my Dad is the most terrific cook ever), meeting old friends’ new babies, and writing bits of my dissertation, I did a studio visit with local fiber artist, Priscilla Sage. In the chapter I’m writing currently, I’m focusing on the 1970s multi-channel video [...]
The E.A.S.T Austin studio tour is a vast and sprawling affair that extends all over the east side (just check out the crazy map). I only barely touched the surface this past weekend but plan to bike around Saturday to check-in on many more sites and report back soon. Here are a few notes: 1) [...]
