Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:34:47 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss David Grosz :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/David+Grosz istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/wide-open-spaces-confined-to-small-rooms/52289/ Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST If much of 20th-century art was an attempt to return to the primitive origins of art-making, those who chose light as their medium may have come closest. Long before humans learned to paint on cave walls or carve flutes and spearheads, they built fires and rolled boulders from the mouths of caves, allowing daylight to flood away darkness. And the subtle changes in light that they saw daily — from the flicker of a campfire to the first rays of sun escaping over the horizon — were full-blown... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/conflict-in-high-resolution/50536/ Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Two conflicts lie at the heart of "Dateline Israel," a compelling, but uneven exhibition of new photography and video art at the Jewish Museum. The first, which you might call Israel's internal, existential crisis, concerns the tension between the past and the present. The second, Israel's external, political crisis, relates to the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. These are both major issues in the Jewish state, so it is hardly remarkable to see artists take them on. What is surprising... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/art-in-brief-2007-03-01/49561/ Thu, 1 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST KIM KEEVER Kinz, Tillou + Feigen Magic and art share a fascination with the marvelous. The difference between the two is that art (good art, that is) becomes no less mysterious when you understand its "trick." In fact, a certain type of conceptual art becomes surprising only when the audience is in on it. Take the work of Kim Keever. At first glance, his seven new pieces at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen look like the sort of grandiose evocations of the sublime in nature that we associate with the... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/talking-blobs-a-melting-gun/49605/ Thu, 1 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST In Tony Oursler's new work at Lehmann Maupin, splatters of paint seem to come alive. Seven monochrome splotches, frozen in place and blown up to near-human proportions, hang from the walls. In each, a small slit is cut away and the space filled by a close-up video of a fragment of a body — usually an eye or mouth — with the surrounding skin painted the same color as the color blob. Imagine the yellow smiley face on psychedelic drugs, and you'll have some idea what these strange, animated works... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/discoveries-around-every-corner/49062/ Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST It may be a short subway ride to Long Island City from Manhattan, but P.S.1, the nation's oldest nonprofit art space, can seem a world apart from Chelsea and Museum Mile. What begins as a difference of architecture — P.S.1's converted former schoolhouse feels at once more intimate and haphazard than the rigid spaces of whitecube galleries and mega-museums — quickly becomes one of attitude. If the contemporary art scene in Manhattan often seems either dauntingly inaccessible or patronizing in... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/allure-of-plenty/48249/ Thu, 8 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST The word copia is Latin for "abundance," and Brian Ulrich's show of that title explores the profusion of consumer goods in American (and in one case, British) retail outlets. Each of these 10 large-scale color photographs is set in the familiar confines of a middlebrow store: in supermarkets, toyshops, department stores, and shoe stores. The locations are so recognizable that your imagination begins to supply details excluded by the frame. Spend a few minutes among these lively images, and you... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/class-and-race-pictures/47332/ Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Throughout most of art history, there was little concern about the politics of portraiture. Whether the sitter was a paying client or a paid (or unpaid) model, the arrangement with the artist was thought to be straightforward and mutually beneficial. But with modernism, new critical ideas about artistic subjectivity and increased sensitivity to issues of exploitation and objectification significantly complicated this oncesimple genre. As a result, artists today sometimes go to great conceptual... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/art-in-a-young-city/46947/ Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST "It used to be that you couldn't figure out where the center of the L.A. art scene was," the New York–based art dealer R. Peter Miller said recently. "There wasn't a core, there wasn't an identity." But around 2001, Mr. Miller, who lived periodically in Los Angeles between 1994 and 2003, noticed that things began to change. "You've seen a bunch of gallerists grow up there," he said. An art scene that for many years boasted few galleries of international prominence now has several important... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/walls-of-wings-stone/46453/ Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Using paper, bamboo, acrylic, nylon, and cotton, Jacob Hashimoto's new work at Mary Boone Gallery evokes nature's most delicate forms: butterfly wings, flower petals, blades of grass, and ripples of a cloud. At times, the art seems almost weightless, as if it aspires to the ethereal condition of air and light. The basic building block of Mr. Hashimoto's pieces — five wall-mounted reliefs and a gallery-filling installation —is a sort of Japanese kite, formed with bamboo twigs and a translucent... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/sculpting-skin-bones-in-forms-great-small/45575/ Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST There is little mystery to the dramatic first impression of Ron Mueck's art. His fiberglass and silicone nude sculptures startle with their verisimilitude to actual human bodies, describing in exquisite detail physical minutiae like nose hair, toenails, veins, stubble, and the soft pink flesh of nipples and lips. Mr. Mueck's realism is so tactile that it arrests viewers, forces them to look closely, and often elicits audible gasps of recognition. This visceral reaction is heightened by an... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/light-shapes-enough-for-everyone/45136/ Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST On May 25, 1963, Dan Flavin installed an 8-foot fluorescent fixture at a 45-degree angle on the wall of his studio. With this simple gesture, he defined the terms of his subsequent artistic career and also inaugurated one of the signature icons of 1960s Minimalism. When first exhibited, Flavin's light sculptures were part of a radical turn in art away from traditional mediums, such as painting and cast sculpture, toward an aesthetic of industrial massproduction and a more deliberate engagement... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/unfinished-business-2006-12-07/44759/ Thu, 7 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST As of Monday, "Burgeoning Geometries" at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria was an exhibition far from completion. Artists Diane Cooper, Jason Rogenes, and Phoebe Washburn were in the gallery space still adding to their installations. Ms. Cooper, aided by a few assistants, was cutting paper, felt, and foamcore to create new elements for her vinelike wall growth "Emerger" (2005–06). Mr. Rogenes was lifting his 38-foot-tall totem pole of found Styrofoam and flourescent light, "Locus"... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/art-in-brief-2006-11-16/43683/ Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST RAY JOHNSON: EN RAPPORT Feigen Contemporary Ray Johnson's suicide in 1995 brought a macabre twist to the avant-garde quest to close the gap between art and life. The date he jumped from a Sag Harbor bridge was January 13, the artist was then 67 years old, and the previous night he had stayed in hotel room 247 — the number 13 (6 + 7 and 2 + 4 + 7 =13) was stamped all over the circumstances of his death. Johnson has come down in legend for a series of clever stunts — chopping the bottom quarter... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/back-from-the-dead-2006-11-03/42885/ Fri, 3 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST In the plains of La Mancha, it is said, the strong winds can drive you crazy. In this sleepy province of the Spanish heartland, women invariably outlive their husbands, and widows lovingly tend to their deceased spouses' tombstones. It is a superstitious practice born from a belief that loved ones never die, which in the world of Pedro Almodóvar's magical new film, "Volver," may not be so crazy at all. "Volver" means "to return," and the recurrence of the past is the film's major theme. In the... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/getting-real-looking-back/42744/ Thu, 2 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST Aprimary challenge for representational painting today is creating work that does not feel anachronistic. Modernism rewrote the rules of art, and if you're not careful, realistic illusionism can be dismissed as old-fashioned. Some artists are self-consciously traditionalist. But those who want to be part of the contemporary discourse have been forced to adopt various "modernizing" strategies: They may add conceptual layers to their painting, strive for photo-realism, incorporate the lessons of... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/butterflies-by-a-graphite-stained-hand/42293/ Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Los Angeles-based artist Mark Grotjahn's new abstract works at the Whitney Museum, eight large-scale colored-pencil drawings from a series of 12, use a similar pattern to produce a variety of effects and impressions. The basic design is something like two open hand fans placed back to back, so that an array of bands radiates outward from two closely placed central points. At their most brilliant, the drawings evoke celestial explosions, a pinwheel of shooting beams of light. But there is also a... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/equal-parts-intuition-doubt/41843/ Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Twenty years ago, Brice Marden's painting shifted in style so dramatically that the change remains the dominant critical issue in discussions of his work. For the artist, however, it is not that complicated. "It was a survival move," he said earlier this week. "I had this thing going. I could have kept on doing it, but that isn't what I became a painter for.You're always searching for something more." Starting in the mid-1960s, Mr. Marden — whose 40-year retrospective comprising 56 paintings... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/miracle-of-turning-stone-into-light/40544/ Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST By the time Sean Scully (b. 1945) began his career in the 1960s, two generations of the avant-garde had already established the legitimacy of nonrepresentational art. Pure abstraction was no longer revolutionary, nor was part of its mission an assertion of its right to exist.For many painters, this newfound acceptance was interpreted as a license to create undisciplined or merely decorative abstractions. Not so for Mr. Scully, whose art has consistently been rigorous, challenging, and... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/genuine-splendor-from-a-master-of-junk/40118/ Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST From afar, the new work by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz currently at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. looks quite disappointing. Mr. Muniz has photographed installations of re-created Old Master paintings of characters from ancient mythology, and the images seem to lack the clarity and grandeur of the original Titians and Rubens. Step up close to the photographs, however, and a strange transformation occurs. As in impressionist paintings, a complete, recognizable image dissolves into a cacophony of... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/final-kiss-before-growing-up/39774/ Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST About halfway through "The Last Kiss," a remake of the 2001 Italian movie "L'Ultimo Bacio," the action comes to a head. As friends gather following the death of one of their fathers, Jenna (Jacinda Barrett) is surprised to find Chris (Casey Affleck) but not her boyfriend, Michael (Zach Braff), since the two were supposedly out together. Until then, Jenna has seemed easygoing and unflappable; however, being pregnant and unmarried, she is more vulnerable than she lets on. As Chris stumbles to... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/appeal-of-circular-logic/39206/ Thu, 7 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST Familiar distinctions between order and randomness and representation and abstraction break down in the new paintings by Jim Long on view at the CUE Art Foundation. At the center of this conceptually rich, but ultimately underwhelming show are four circular canvases, each 10 1/2 feet in diameter, titled "For Jagannatha," after the Hindu god. In each, a dense latticework of gray-brown lines spreads over the tawny beige surface of the unprimed canvas, creating an intricate pattern reminiscent of... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/depicting-an-ugly-america/38449/ Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST From 1991 to 1998, with the permission of local authorities, Lucinda Devlin took photographs at 20 penitentiaries across America. The resulting group of 30 images, called "The Omega Suites" after the final letter in the Greek alphabet, is a powerful architectural portrait of death row, depicting final holding cells, witness viewing rooms, and, most alarmingly, the instruments of death themselves: gas chambers, electric chairs, gallows, and lethal injection tables. The images lack all signs of... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/straight-story-and-a-messy-one/37704/ Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST The Marian Goodman Gallery's "Freeing the Line" is a smart, attractive exhibition that gathers two disparate bodies of work and connects them — like two dots into a line — in a single narrative. An offshoot of Minimalist sculpture known as "drawings without paper" is linked to contemporary installations whose formal and conceptual freedom, the show suggests, is only possible because of the pioneering example of the earlier work. Richard Tuttle's "Untitled" (1972) floats six lengths of wire... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/haunted-by-ghosts-and-by-the-art-world/37259/ Thu, 3 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST "This is a photography show about magic," declares the press release for "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," on display at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. This attractive exhibition spans nearly 150 years of the medium's history and presents a diverse array of techniques and approaches. Collectively, its 41 images are meant to "propose a history of photography which emphasizes the spiritual over the rational." As in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2005 exhibition "The Perfect Medium: Photography and... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/two-exercises-in-stretching/36804/ Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST One of the highlights thus far of the 2006 gallery season has been Tara Donovan's "Untitled (Plastic Cups)," an unforgettable installation that filled PaceWildenstein's 22nd Street space in March and April. This brilliantly original work used nearly 3 million plastic cups to fashion a sprawling landscape of jagged hills and deep craters. As challenging as it was spectacular, the piece also presented a series of conceptual tensions — between its mundane material and its magisterial grandeur... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/revolution-of-the-daughters/36412/ Thu, 20 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST In a summer season of slapdash gallery exhibitions in which a thin conceit attempts to unite work by basically unrelated artists, Francis M. Naumann's "Daughters of New York Dada" is a delightful exception. This properly curated affair is elegant, insightful, and lots of fun. Dada was less a unified movement than a catchall term for several loosely connected avant-garde practices that arose amid the tension of World War I and its immediate aftermath in art centers on both sides of the Atlantic... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/taking-abstraction-to-its-logical-extreme/35967/ Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST The Chelsea Museum's "It's Not a Photo" is an eccentric exhibition that presents a curiosity chest of photographic possibilities.The artists on display carry the notion of photographic abstraction to its logical extreme. Not only are their images nonobjective; many were made without a camera, using only light, photographic paper, and darkroom chemicals. The results of such experiments can be surprisingly decorative. Wolfgang Tillmanns, the most famous artist in the show, is best known for... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/from-streets-to-studios/35524/ Thu, 6 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST With their comicbook motifs, big block letters, and pixel dots, the paintings of John Matos (a.k.a. Crash) look like classic works of Pop art. But what distinguishes the artist's "Aeroplane 1" (1983) - an image of a propeller spinning in a white circle, before an abstract background of red, orange, and yellow - is that it was made with aerosol spray-paint, not oils or acrylics.The word "crash" may look like a comic-book sound bite, but it is actually this graffiti artist's signature, his "tag."... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/easygoing-summer-fun/34870/ Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST Don't be surprised if you do a double take upon entering Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery. For his New York solo debut, the installation artist Justin Lowe has transformed the gallery's front room into a realistic facsimile of a corner bodega. Here are shelves gaudily cluttered with cheap toys, food, and household products, placed upon a dirty blueand-red checkered floor. A refrigerator holds the usual assortment of beer, malt liquor, and fruit juice, as well as a smattering of less-than-appetizing... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/uneasy-marriage-of-words-images/34474/ Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST An exhibition devoted to a critic is an unusual enterprise. The particular curatorial challenge of this conceit is on display in the Metropolitan Museum's "On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag," which places some 40 photographs from the museum's permanent collection alongside selected quotations from the late author's thoughts on the medium. First, the good news: The show is well worth a visit. Almost every image is a subtle and alluring masterpiece, and the excerpts from Sontag's writings... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/illustrating-the-transience-of-individual-identity/34479/ Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST Atta Kim's photograph "ON-AIR Project: Monologue of Ice, 25 Hours" (2004) presents the audience with a visual paradox. Depicting a brilliant band of light with yellow sparks shooting in all directions, the image looks like a flash of fire, but its subject is actually a block of ice slowly melting over the course of a 25-hour exposure. Here is ice as its own undoing: the hard, solid object reduced to a self-destructive molten core. Mr. Kim is best known for "The Museum Project" (1995-2002), a... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/gazing-at-the-heavens-in-africa-america/34075/ Thu, 8 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST In the 1980 film "The Gods Must Be Crazy," a new technology is introduced to the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in the form of a Coke bottle tossed from the window of a passing airplane. Unsure what to make of the strange glass object, the tribesmen interpret it as a gift from the heavens. A generation later, the artist Marco Boggio Sella has provoked a similar sense of spiritual unrest by telling a different African population that the heavens are very different than local mythology predicts... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/charming-prince-of-the-avant-garde/33663/ Thu, 1 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST During his 40-year career, Detroit native James Lee Byars (1932-97) created a varied body of work that fused elements of minimalism, conceptualism, and performance with an Eastern sensibility developed during his formative years as an artist in Japan. Byars is generally viewed as an important though peripheral figure of the 1960s and '70s art scene, but recent years have witnessed a posthumous resurgence of interest in his work. A 2004 exhibition at the Whitney examined his influence on recent... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/bureaucratic-revisions-big-bang-visions/33358/ Thu, 25 May 2006 00:00:00 EST Since Monday, Jenny Holzer's latest site-specific LED installation has hovered above the reception desk at the newly reopened 7 World Trade Center. The work consists of 36 hours of scrolling text by nearly 30 authors - luminaries such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and E.B. White, each testifying to New York's spirit and courage. Those familiar with Ms. Holzer's career will not be surprised by this latest creation. Her work, whether provocative truisms affixed to posters or largescale light... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/rejecting-modernisms-pieties/32542/ Thu, 11 May 2006 00:00:00 EST Since emigrating from the Soviet Union in 1987, the dissident artist Ilya Kabakov, together with his wife Emilia, has dazzled Western audiences with a series of fascinatingly complex installations whose intelligence, scope, and ambition recall epic Russian novels. Mr. Kabakov's current exhibition at the Sean Kelly Gallery feels minor in comparison, but it is only a small part of a larger project - no less, it turns out, than a sweeping revisionist history of Soviet art. In the fashion of such... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-conceptual-art-owes-to-psychoanalysis/32127/ Thu, 4 May 2006 00:00:00 EST At the center of Franz West's "Liege" (1989) stands a 5-footlong iron couch whose smooth, gently sloping surface culminates in the upward curve of a headrest. The work, one of 13 from the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna currently on view at the Austrian Cultural Forum, contains two other elements: the white pedestal supporting the sculpture, which both establishes it as art and distances it from the viewer, and a piece of paper whose single German sentence contradicts the pedestal, declaring... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/hard-lines-and-gentle-curves/31743/ Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST Yto Barrada's "Girl in Red" (1999) depicts a young girl in a floral dress standing before a tiled wall whose kaleidoscopic motifs radiate color like exploding fireworks.Her back to us, the girl is anonymous and faceless, and her colorful robe disappears into the wall's intricate design, not unlike a butterfly camouflaged among vibrant flowers. Unfortunately, the accomplishment of this striking image, at once beautiful and subtly troubling, is rarely equaled in the rest of the Moroccan-French... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/gallery-going-2004-09-09/1498/ Thu, 9 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST Allan McCollum's "Perpetual Photos" (1982-90) appear to be little more than grainy, unfocused abstractions, the sort of enigmatic blobs used to prove the existence of dubious phenomena like UFOs or the Loch Ness Monster. But while these suggestive shapes look like they were discovered serendipitously, Mr. McCollum's method is deliberate and specific. Fascinated by the out-of-focus framed images that appear in the background of television stills, he photographed the screen, isolated the framed... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/gallery-going-2004-09-02/1243/ Thu, 2 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST Painter George Schneeman's image-and-word collaborations with his poet friends were not made to hang on gallery walls. Nearly all of the 19 works gathered at Tibor de Nagy Gallery come from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Mr. Schneeman hosted frequent dinner parties in his East Village apartment. His guests included poets from the New York School like Anne Waldman, Peter Schjeldahl, Ron Padgett, and Larry Fagin, and many of these images were made during such gatherings. Though these... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/gallery-going-2004-08-26/882/ Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:00:00 EST In Jessica Craig-Martin's "Russian Tea Room" (1999), a waiter's jacket and the stack of napkins and plate of strawberries he carries are transformed into a black sea and a few white islands. This remarkable photograph, in which the photographer used heavy contrast to turn recognizable forms into an abstract investigation of presence and absence, is but one way to interpret "Black and White," the title of a group show currently on display at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery. As in many summer group... DAVID GROSZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/gallery-going-2004-08-19/529/ Thu, 19 Aug 2004 00:00:00 EST Humid August has settled in, and all through the city the body is on display. Even the art world has joined the exhibitionist spirit, with two notable photography exhibitions about hands and hairdos. At its best, the Guggenheim Museum's "Speaking with Hands: Photographs from the Buhl Collection" is a fun, quirky show containing many outstanding images. Unfortunately, it is also a poorly edited sprawl that is sometimes too single-minded about its subject matter. Many uninteresting photographs...