Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

You may ask yourself…

Here are some questions and thoughts I had in advance of and in response to a roundtable of arts writers on Eva Lake’s Art Focus show on KBOO. You can listen to the conversation here.…

Through a Kaleidoscope, Darkly

“For his 1920 Dada sculpture, ‘Nature Morte: Portrait of Cézanne/Portrait of Renoir/Portrait of Rembrandt,’ Picabia attached a stuffed monkey to a wooden board and crudely painted the title around it. Painting is old-fashioned and silly, he seemed to be saying. Yet he kept painting.”
Harry Swartz-Turfle, “Francis Picabia’s Style Problem”*

FREE: Digital Space as Public Space

by Linda Wysong

Free is a fascinating exhibition at the New Museum in New York that looks at digital space as public space and explores how artists are using the virtual town square. It is an expansive group show that brings together a broad cross section of artists and approaches. The point of departure is “Dispersion,” an essay by artist Seth Price, in which he notes, “Collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion.”

Review: Anna Von Mertens

Anna Von Mertens’s Portraits reflect a desire to research and incorporate modes of knowledge (i.e. the pseudoscience of the aura) into an art historical context in a way that makes canonical knowledge and this pseudoscientific knowledge seem equally absurd and oddly co-dependent. …

Carlos Gonzalez: 4More

Carlos Gonzalez’ compelling performance 4More at Appendix Space last night was about proximity and distance both literally and metaphorically. In four acts, Gonzalez silently drew a capacity audience into (again both literally and metaphorically) a strong performance work that addressed shared experience, the distance(s) between us, public and private space (how we carve it out and how we use it), and an aspect of the artist’s identity at an oblique angle.