I just published my NYC Psych ER illustrated alphabet via blurb.com and on Amazon.com.
Take a look and hope you enjoy the look into an illustrated urban ABCs with a bit of dark sense of humor.
Buy it on Amazon.com!
It’s now available on Amazon.com!
And on http://www.blurb.com (with glossy paper).
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I played this Great Gatsby Game for the first time at an MIT exhibit in their library… you can try it out online! I haven’t ever gotten past the eyeglasses, but maybe you will.
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Photo: M.H.Wei
The performative exhibition tour based on the current Gutai exhibition at the Guggenheim was most memorable for two elements: the beautiful constructed paper “capes” created by Amy Sillman and the playfulness of the white balloon-banners performance. The Gutai collective was founded Japanese artist Yoshihara Jirō in 1954 in the postwar era and became a forefront avant-garde collective that experimented with new art forms combining performance, painting, and interactive environments. The tour succeeded most in areas where playfulness and interactive were heightened and lines blurred (either by accident or intentionally– for that is the unique nature of play) and lagged most when the tour became divided into traditional lines of audience vs. performer (e.g., comedy duo performance).
Photo: M.H.Wei
As Amy Sillman placed the taped and painted colorful capes over our heads in an inclusive ritualistic manner (recalling moments like the white coat ceremony for doctors, armor for knights and so on), she cautioned us to allow her to take them off at the end of the hour-long performance, due to their fragility (and the practical need for the second performance). And right she was to worry about her works’ fragility, as throughout the tour, at least one was torn and another trampled over. The capes allowed the audience to transform into participants and transformed a ragtag bunch of visitors into a collective. The capes were constructed from Gutai brochure essays, taped in blue, and painted with black and orange dots and strokes resembling characters. This made our walking crowd look like a dispersed colorful font winding its way up the Guggenheim’s spiral inner staircase. Gathering the tour group into a silver-lined freight elevator became a delightful experience of herding commas and dots into a freight elevator, with tour leaders asking us to pack as tightly together as possible to fit everyone much like a teacher shepherds their classroom children.
Photo: M.H. Wei
We traversed the layers of the Guggenheim to retrieve clear banners at the top and on our way down sat and watched a pre-audio-recorded comedy performance about “Frenemies” which was neither poignant or coherent with the theme (for a better conversation on Frenemies see NPR’s This American Life). The redeeming section of that piece was the “shape-shifting” portion where for 30 seconds the male and female performers created shapes with their bodies. The finale performance was indeed the most successful and beautiful, with clear banners tied to large white balloons and released into the air while people shook coffee cans (filled with beans?) and members clinked toy red and yellow xylophones.
Photo: M.H.Wei
Recounting the experience with the friend afterwards over dinner, he remarked “Everyone loves balloons.” And while I wanted to think that it wasn’t so simple, I realized that there was truth to the universal playfulness of balloons in resonance with the Gutai manifesto to lift our spirits: ”Keeping the life of the material alive also means bringing the spirit alive, and lifting up the spirit means leading the material up to the height of the spirit.” (December 1956)
Performers of this tour included Ei Arakawa, Shinsuke Aso, Kerstin Brästch, Gabriel Feliciano, Eileen Quinlan, and Amy Sillman.
Filed under Art Buzz, Art Reviews
The four artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize this year were announced this morning at Tate Britain.
Laure Prouvost, Tino Sehgal, David Shrigley and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
David Shrigley
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Saturday, April 20th, 2013
Rhizome Seven on Seven Conference pairs seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenges them to develop something new—be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine—over the course of a single day.
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Is a time capsule concept enough to make an art exhibition interesting? That is the question that NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star at the New Museum (until 5/26/13) sidesteps with its articulated goal as putting forth a cross-section of art of 1993. The difficulty is same as with time capsules– that remnants of a period do not equate into conveying the emotional and lived experience of that era. Some pieces of art inevitably fare better than others when reexamined in a new context. And as Russian philosophy Mikhail Bakhtain emphasizes “the primacy of context” generates the meaning– even if it is a new context as in 2013 in which we read 1993 pieces. In this case, the sum was less than the individual parts. This was in striking difference compared to an earlier New Museum exhibit centered around futurism and 1960s (Ghost in the Machine).
Most of the viewers at this particular time appears to be Millenials, or some slightly older as in Generation X, or however one wants to label the age groups. One can’t help but wonder how they synthesized and approached the broad nature of the exhibition. The strength of prior exhibitions at the New Museum have been how pieces will speak to each other, enhance and flow together as a whole. Did the cross-sectional curating undermine some of the individual pieces to make them appear more as time capsule, unburied archaic objects rather than works that are alive today? Why is it that some pieces appear to survive and engage still today while others appear less relevant or not daring enough? Does it speak to what we expect now in this decade to engage us? It was as if the awkward lure and dazzle of the 1990s had lost its voice and not aged very well at the same time.
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Side B: 41 at Jennie Richee are lost in the wilderness in the storms darkness, detail, c. 1940-50, watercolor, carbon transfer and pencil on pieced paper, (double-sided), 19 x 71 in.
– For a quintessential representative of Outsider Art, Henry Darger at Ricco Maresca gallery suggests questions of gender identity and the vulnerability of children, with his detailed and prolific drawings of young girls with male parts.
Stefanie Gutheil: Die Beobachter
– Stefanie Gutheil amuses and amazes again at Mike Weiss gallery with a brilliant collection of playful pieces filled with colorfully distorted creatures and cats that you will want to welcome into your home immediately. Sculptural frames are welcome details. How Gutheil manages to combine so many vibrant features into one piece and make each part essential and balanced (and never overwrought) is a delightful wonder.
– Trisha Baga’s installation at Greene Naftali gallery skillfully featured fragmented narratives in the most unexpected places with a combination of video, sculptural, and animated pieces.
Picasso and Frederick’s of Hollywood, 1990Handprinted collage on paper2 parts: 17.25 x 109.625 inches (43.8 x 278.4 cm) each
– Nancy Spero’s printmaking genius and political/feminist perspective on display at Galerie Lelong
ED RUSCHA
Fanned Book, 2012
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 64 1/8 x 71 1/8 x 1 5/8 inches (162.9 x 180.7 x 4.1 cm) Photo by Paul Ruscha
– Ed Ruscha at the Gagosian Gallery leaves a trail of open books and a few unanswered questions of meaning, reproduction, and representation.
David LaChapelle
Still Life: Michael Jackson 02, 2009-2012
chromogenic print
72 x 68 inches
182.9 x 172.7 cm
Edition of 3, 2 AP
– Questions of death, preservation, and legacy are inevitably raised by the broken disfigured wax figures in David LaChapelle at the Paul Kasmin gallery. A horror-filled version of Madame Tussauds meets Great Expectations.
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