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Blush is the Court

ignotum per ignotius: imitation is nonesuch.

On the heels of a cursory aesthetic
on a tiny island.
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Who is Will Brown?

Will Brown is something of an anomaly in the art world. The brainchild of artists Lindsey White, Jordan Stein, and David Kazprzak, Will Brown is difficult to define, which is one of the things that makes the collaborative project so appealing. The enigmatic space opened in January with an inaugural exhibition on illegitimacy in art and has since continued to serve up nonpareil shows and events that are not easily classified under the usual rubric of exhibition, gallery show, performance, action, or installation. A combination of these might best capture what Will Brown is all about, though it would be impossible to really pigeonhole this collective. The ongoing project currently takes the form of an experimental exhibition space in San Francisco’s Mission District, and its twitter feed has a life of its own. I talked shop with Will Brown on micro-institution curatorial practices, obsolete art collectives, illegitimate inventories, and comedy drawing schools.…Read the interview here.

Valerie Hegarty: Altered States.

The sublime has something of the hyperbolic about it; ecstatic superlatives usually do. And, as Elias Canetti once noted, “there emanates from superlatives a destructive force.” A similar sentiment underscores the multi-media oeuvre of Valerie Hegarty, the New York-based artist who recently took over the second floor of Chelsea’s Marlborough Gallery with a solo show entitled ‘Altered States’.  

         

Constructed from scratch primarily of foam core and papier-mâché, Hegarty’s trompe l’oeil installations transformed the space into something resembling a period room at a museum or an historic site that had been consumed by disaster, decay and detritus. The aggregate of the installation gave the impression of a collective wake for the neglected, shipwrecked and spoiled. Poised somewhere between artifact and anecdote, Hegarty had created ad hoc monuments to entropy which rest somewhere between relic and ruin. Spilling out of the walls and onto the gallery floor were the vestiges of fictional portraits and ornate decorative furnishings constructed and subsequently deconstructed by Hegarty in a manner that transcends the traditional boundaries between sculpture and painting. Hegarty told me on a recent gallery visit that she is “interested most in playing with figurative painting so as to make the realism of painting more sculptural and the relationship between the two media more fluid, almost in an animated way.” Read More Here on Artwrit.

Improbable Conversation: Schiaparelli & Prada at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

              

              

The French surrealist artist André Breton once wrote “beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” This year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute exhibition, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, (on view through August 19) appears to be drawing on the dictum of Schiaparelli’s friend and sometime collaborator. If last year’s blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibition, Savage Beauty, examined that designer’s reinvention of fashion through the lens of conflating traditional assumptions about beauty with the grotesque, pushing the limits of clothing design outside the wearable, this time around the appeal is more toward sentiment, juxtaposing the work of two pioneering Italian-born designers with an eye toward how they refigured fashion while still focused on wearability. Although they were born more than half a century apart—Elsa Schiaparelli in Rome in 1890, Miuccia Prada in Milan in 1949—the exhibition suggests common resonances in their very different approaches to and disdain for received notions of beauty, taste, femininity, and aesthetics. On view is an impressive survey of the two women’s creations, intermingling and pairing their designs rather than concentrating on the evolution of their individual ateliers.  Read more here.

              

Last Night’s Opening of the inaugural exhibition in the Museum of the City of New York’s new Puffin Foundation Gallery entitled “Activist New York”. Delighted to have had the opportunity to help create this fantastic exhibition over the past two years. Activist New York explores the drama of social activism in New York City from the 17th century right up to the present. In a town renowned for its in-your-face persona, citizens of the city have banded together on issues as diverse as historic preservation, civil rights, wages, sexual orientation, and religious freedom. Using artifacts, photographs, audio and visual presentations, as well as interactive components that seek to tell the entire story of activism in the five boroughs, Activist New York presents the passions and conflicts that underlie the city’s history of agitation.  

Last Night’s Opening of the inaugural exhibition in the Museum of the City of New York’s new Puffin Foundation Gallery entitled “Activist New York”. Delighted to have had the opportunity to help create this fantastic exhibition over the past two years.

Activist New York explores the drama of social activism in New York City from the 17th century right up to the present. In a town renowned for its in-your-face persona, citizens of the city have banded together on issues as diverse as historic preservation, civil rights, wages, sexual orientation, and religious freedom. Using artifacts, photographs, audio and visual presentations, as well as interactive components that seek to tell the entire story of activism in the five boroughs, Activist New York presents the passions and conflicts that underlie the city’s history of agitation.  

The People’s Biennial: Resisting the Monoculture of Consumption.

                    Bob Newland.  ”Keepin’ kids off drugs in South Dakota”, 1983. 

The second interview in a series exploring the current state of major survey exhibitions, People’s Biennial curators Jens Hoffmann and Harrell Fletcher discuss their search for new talent in an effort to create a more democratic biennial. Check back for a new interview each day this week, and read the previous interview with the the deCordova Biennial curators here.

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Canceled: Alternative Manifestations & Productive Failures at the Center for Book Arts.

                        

This exhibition presents cancelled or otherwise prohibited exhibitions that now exist as publications or in other formats. These publications document the process and politics of cancelation, exist as an alternative manifestation of the exhibit, act as a critique of the forces that called for its cancelation, or they may be an admission and exposition of an ultimately productive failure. In the context of the Center for Book Arts, Canceled highlights the book form as a crucial means of disseminating documentation and information on a wide and accessible scale, potentially in ways that are more historically stable, and more effective, than the original exhibition would have been. Through utilizing printed matter, these artists and curators have found alternative routes by which the politics surrounding the presentation and creation of art become at least as relevant as the work itself.

“Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures” on view 18th April through 30th June, 2012 at the Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor, New York. The full text of the above booklet can be found here and may be purchased for $2 here.