New York artists Barbara Lubliner, Bernard Klavickas, Shari Mendelson, Janet Nolan, Olivia Kaufman-Rovira, Ilene Sunshine and Tyrome Tripoli are upcyclers. They turn garbage into art. Upcycling, according to Wikipedia, is “the process of converting waste materials…into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value.” The term is on everyone’s lips these days—and why not? With increasing numbers of shopping bags flapping in trees and plastic six-pack yokes skittering down streets, it shouldn’t surprise us that environmental detritus would get funneled through the creative process as often as the recycling plant. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Exhibition’ Category
The Transformers
Posted in Check out..., Design, Exhibition, garbage, Installation, Old Media, Popular Culture, Recycling on January 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Etsy: Art for You! And You! And You!
Posted in Art or Commerce?, Authorship, Exhibition, Internet, New Media, Old Media, Photography, Popular Culture, tagged art world, artists, commerce, creativity, Design, Etsy, Etsy.com, galleries, Popular Culture, selling on December 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Happy news! Artists and the people who love them meet at last, on mutual ground. No more stark, unfriendly gallery spaces where some intern behind the front desk refuses to acknowledge your arrival. No more standing around at openings with a plastic cup of lousy wine in one hand and a gussied-up Ritz cracker in the other, hoping for a chance to speak with the artist. No more stratospheric prices that make you feel like a dwarf star in the vast art world universe. Really? Really! (more…)
Cupcake Cutie.
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Art or Commerce?, Exhibition, Installation, Popular Culture on February 6, 2009| Leave a Comment »
A commercial display of baked goods is an art form built on the strategic use of separation.
Example: We step from the mean streets of our little town or big city into a store scented with vanilla, cinnamon and coffee, pull a tiny paper ticket from a stingy red dispenser and read the number that tells us… nothing, really, except that we must be patient. We are. We take our place among the many suitors craning to see the confectionery vision laid before us. Glittering gustatorial gems are staged in Busby Berkeley arrangements on gold foil laminated cardboard platters and white paper doilies.
When we finally reach the front of the line we bend down to peer through the glass encasement—the border fence, the high wall between us and our object of desire. Trays and rows of frosted, sprinkled, drizzled, confettied, and powdered morsels tease our eye and our pallet. (more…)
Diner Semiotics.
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Design, Exhibition, Installation, Photography, Popular Culture, Theater on February 4, 2009| Leave a Comment »
I took this photograph with my cell phone a couple of months ago, at a local Staten Island diner. It is not an unusual scene in a diner. The monster cookies. I was enamored of their inflated forms piled high on a metal pedestal. Who eats these cookies? Does anyone? Does anyone eat the lemon meringue pies with the fake egg white swirl that’s higher than Elvis’ hair? I’ve never seen a person eat a slice from one of those pies. Do the same cookies and pies stay in their respective spots, uneaten, forever? Are they immortal props that complete the “authentic” diner experience? Maybe they were bought 25 years ago when the diner first opened and have stuck around ever since — dusted occasionally — along with the framed first fiver over the cashier’s counter. (more…)
American Flag, Redux.
Posted in Beyond Borders, Check out..., Design, Exhibition, Installation on February 1, 2009| Leave a Comment »
I’m planning my first visit to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, so I checked out their web site. Happily, the museum is featuring one of Dave Cole’s American flags. Cole is a conceptual artist whose work is as strong on social and political commentary as it is on celebrating the physical side of art making. He is best known for his startling reinventions of the American flag. For instance, “Memorial Flag (Toy Soldiers)” is made entirely from red, white and blue “troops”; a bristling thicket of tiny soldiers that turn the American flag’s design into manufactured postures of war.
The Aldrich will be displaying Cole’s “Flags of the World.” “Flags of the World” is zigzag stitched from the red, white and blue scraps cut from 192 flags that represent the countries who are United Nations members. (more…)
Let’s inaugurate universal health care…
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Design, Exhibition, Old Media, politics, Popular Culture, tagged Air and Simple Gifts, Praise Song for Day, Yo-Yo Ma on January 21, 2009| 6 Comments »
President Obama brings out the best in everybody! (Well, almost everybody.) This is especially evident in the creative community. It’s no secret that visual artists have been particularly captivated by Obama’s message and visage. But they are not alone. It seems that writers, poets, composers and musicians have been inspired as well.
I was happy to hear “Praise Song for Day” read by poet Elizabeth Alexander during the inaugural ceremony yesterday. It wasn’t the strongest poem I’ve ever heard but she did take up the limitations of language itself — a worthy topic for any self-respecting poet. It certainly was stronger and more well-crafted than Maya Angelou’s poem for President Bill Clinton. (more…)
Notorious Design
Posted in Border Violations, Conflicts of Interest, Design, Exhibition, Installation, Multimedia, Popular Culture, surveillance, Theater, tagged Darfur, Design, Hugh Grant, interior design, Janjaweed, Roland Emmerich, Starck on August 14, 2008| 1 Comment »
Roland Emmerich. He’s the big-budget director of “Independence Day,” “Universal Soldier” and “Eight-Legged Freaks.” I came across an article on Emmerich and his design aesthetic in the New York Times’ August 7, 2008 Home section.
The Times devoted two whole pages and thirteen photos to the redesign of Emmerich’s townhouse in the “buttoned-up” Knightsbridge section of London. Apparently he redesigned the place primarily to shock his neighbors. It’s not a townhouse anymore; it’s a fun house of cultural and pop-cultural references: Mao Tse-Tung, Pope John Paul II, pseudo Renaissance paintings, Barbie dolls and Philippe Starck chairs… If it shocks the neighbors, he’s happy. Whatever…
But what about the miniaturized diorama tables in the living room? The ones that Emmerich commissioned from his movie prop department. The ones that depict, in the Times’ words, “notorious events”? (more…)
Bill Henson and Susanna and the Elders
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Art or Commerce?, Check out..., Conflicts of Interest, Exhibition, tagged Artemisia Gentileschi, Las Meninas, Lorenzo Lotto, Rembrandt on May 24, 2008| Leave a Comment »
They say that there is no bad publicity in the art world, and well here we go round the mulberry bush yet again with Bill Henson’s latest at Roslyn Oxley9 in Sydney. The truncated sound bytes we are hearing across the media waves say much less than there is to say and take us nowhere; Its art, tis not, tis, etc echoing the characters of another artist by the name of Henson, with Miss Piggy landing a good purse wallop through the moral majority and the shock jock media while Kermits’ and other Muppets mount a strident arm waving and lame high pitched art for arts sake, defense.
Now I have not followed the career of Bill Henson closely but I believe those who have the power to dispense titles or deal in superlatives have added him to the list of Australia’s greatest artists. But in my humble opinion Henson is just an artist who over the years has achieved a technical competence and a recognizable subject oeuvre that has given him an audience, some good opportunities and a fairly regular paycheck. (more…)
Four ways to avoid incontinence…
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Border Violations, Comedy, Exhibition, Installation, Performance, Popular Culture, Television, Theater, tagged Bad Art, Barak Obama, Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton on May 20, 2008| 1 Comment »
A. Culture-Jamming:
Stop watching the SNL Obama / Clinton split “campaign ad.” (Then you won’t laugh so hard you pee yourself.)
B. Performance Art:
Stop watching the Chris Matthews grilling of right-winger Kevin James, who hasn’t got a clue who Neville Chamberlain is. (Then you won’t laugh so hard you wet your pants.)
C. Theater of the Absurd:
Stop thinking about Hillary Clinton’s continuing “campaign” for the presidency. After all, she deserves the nomination, right? Besides, she’s the only one who’s reaching white people. (Really. Stop thinking about it. It’ll just piss you off.)
D. Art Exhibition:
Forget about politics and check out some really good bad art. It ain’t bad when it’s this good. (Besides, it’s hung near the bathroom.)
Above: Running Mates by Anonymous, acrylic on canvas. (I made that up.)
Shocking Art
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Check out..., Exhibition, Old Media, tagged Chris Ofili, Mapplethorpe, Poussin, Venus on May 17, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not easily scandalized by art or performance. And I certainly don’t think I’m prudish. After all, I’m one of those New Yorkers who thinks he has seen it all. Yes, I’ve raised an eyebrow when I watched Karen Finley penetrate herself with yams in her installation at the club Area in the early 90s. Okay, I was startled when HIV-positive Ron Athey dripped blood over the audience (not his blood) at P.S. 122 in ‘94. But I’ve wondered what the big deal was when I saw Chris Ofili’s painting “Holy Virgin Mary” at the Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 1998–the painting that caused such an uproar in the Giuliani years in part because it was painted with dung. (more…)
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