Martha Wilson Sourcebook; 40 years of reconsidering performance, feminism, alternative spaces, Martha Wilson, ed. (Independent Curators Inc., 2011) ISBN 978-0-916365-85-1 Martha Wilson’s sourcebook is filled primarily with the writing of others, through which Wilson traces important influences on her life and art, and documents the New York alternative art scene since the 1970s. She has [...]

Mel Bochner; In the Tower at the National Gallery of Art  (NGA,  through April 29, 2012) includes thirty works on paper from the 1960s, most from the group known as Thesaurus portraits, and a room full of recent, large, colorful canvases for which the artist returned to the thesaurus as a starting-point.  The use of [...]

I finished reading the collected writings of Suzanne Lacy  (see below) on the plane to the 100th Annual Meeting of the  College Art Association (CAA) , held from Feb. 22-25 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I was excited that I would finally see the artist in action.  Lacy is a pioneer of what has come [...]

This exhibition inaugurated Sue Spaid’s directorship at the Contemporary with a bang and a guffaw (and quite a few chuckles). LOL; A decade of antic art was a tightly-packed survey of artists or collaboratives whose work during the past decade involved satire, parody and pranks which ranged from engaged political seriousness to everyday fun. The [...]

Films about artists tend to focus on the unruly details of their lives, which is no great surprise, since showing them painting is about as interesting as … well, you know the old saw about watching paint dry. The Mill and the Cross is a rare film about an artist that includes neither angst, intrigue, [...]

Carlo McCormack in collaboration with Wooster Collective’s Marc and Sara Schiller, Trespass; A history of uncommissioned public art (Cologne: Taschen, 2010) ISBN978-3-8365-0964-0 Urban Interventions; Personal projects in public spaces, Robert Klanten and Matthias Hübner, eds. (Berlin: Gestalten Verlag, 2010) ISBN 978-3-89955-291-1 Both of these large, profusely-illustrated books address the same general phenomenon: artists’ uninvited interventions [...]

The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, through July 17 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is perhaps most interesting for emphasizing that the Pre-Raphaelites set out to make their living space a Gesamptkunstwerk, complete with paintings, furniture, wallpaper, decorative objects and artistically-clad women, who clearly were part of the decoration; hence the [...]

During a week spent visiting buildings of Le Corbusier in France, one of the happiest surprises was the number of artists who have been invited to produce work in French monuments and sites. We began at the Villa Savoye in Poissy,  just outside Paris.  As we circumnavigated the building to reach the entrance (designed for [...]

I love Amsterdam and have been visiting a close friend there regularly since 1998, but if you’ve never been to the city, this is not a good time to go. Much of the city is torn up because of large construction projects: at the train station (whose entrance is entirely obscured behind hoardings, below, and [...]

Conservators from around the country and beyond will gather in Philadelphia to discuss ethical principles and critical thinking in art conservation at the  Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Artistic and Historic Works (AIC).  How do economic, environmental and cultural changes impact conservation decisions? While a number of the sessions will discuss [...]

It’s hard to imagine another exhibition that would be of equal interest to members of the AIA (Archaeological Institute of America) and the NRA (National Rifle Association), to subscribers of Hali (the leading publication in the world for carpets, textiles and Islamic art) and readers of Soldier of Fortune (the mercenaries’ monthly).  Battleground: War Rugs [...]

Possible Cities; Africa in Photography and Video at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery through April 29, 2011 was organized by Ruti Talmor, Mellon Postdoctoral fellow, around two considerations: that contemporary Africa is largely urban, and that the work  should counter the fact that most images that circulate internationally represent the continent either as a vast nature preserve [...]

Hans Haacke made me aware of the following situation which I’m passing along to Artblog readers: More than 130 international artists, curators, writers and others have signed a boycott to end all cooperation with the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and are demanding that the Guggenheim Foundation and its Abu Dhabi partner take immediate and meaningful steps to safeguard [...]

Yinka Shonibare MBE (Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2008) ISBN 978-3-7913-4123-1 Yinka Shonibare is a contemporary of the Young British Artists and while he exhibited with them, he has never been considered one of the group. Unlike them, he creates work of unapologetic beauty.  Shonibare uses beauty as a hook; it draws audiences for his manipulated, historicist [...]

In connection with the Exhibition, Possible Cities; Africa in photography and video at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery March 18 – April 29, 2011, a symposium, Imaging Africa will be held on Saturday,  March 19, 10:45am-3:15 pm. bringing together leading curators, filmmakers, critics, and scholars to discuss the current status of African visual culture. The [...]

Stargazers; Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation with 21 Contemporary Artists, on view at the Bronx Museum of Art through May 29, 2011, exhibits forty of Catlett’s sculptures and graphic works juxtaposed with work by two younger generations of artists who share her concerns with the roles and images of African-Americans, particularly African-American women, and with broader [...]

Picasso Guitars 1912-1914, on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through June 6, 2011, is an intense and thrilling experience for anyone concerned with art and visual thinking in the early 20th Century. What it reveals, at least to someone who has worked and thought in three dimensions, are Picasso’s first, profound experiments [...]

The Making of Art (Buchhandlung Walther Koenig: Cologne, 2009) ISBN 978-3-86560-586-3 Target Practice; Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (Seattle Art Museum, 2009) ISBN 978-0-932216-64-9 Those of us involved in the art world never seem to tire of looking critically at the way that world works. Self reflection has been the basis of a number of exhibitions [...]

High Society at the Wellcome Collection through February 27 is a fascinating look at the cultural history of  mind-altering drugs as used by a broad range of societies; its approach is remarkably non-judgmental. The introductory text explains Every society on Earth is a high society. Very few people live their lives without using some sort [...]

The epitath for Clemens von Wedemeyer‘s The Fourth Wall, through Jan. 29, 2011 at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, might be Anthropologist, heed thyself. The three-channel installation, supported by a printed guide, explores story-telling, the search for human origins, the credibility of film, the responsibility of anthropology and our tendency to view the world through expectations [...]