Curated by studio artist / writer / DJ Dennis Kane
Robert Moskowitz
Minimal Conceptions
Swimmer, 1984. Whitney Museum of American Art.
Robert Moskowitz’s work is minimal and bears some associations to Pop and new image painting, but inhabits a unique territory, reduced signs hover in a blank field, the dynamic of the images presentation putting a pause on easy absorption, both sign and reading of it are pushed into a new theater, like encountering Samuel Becket’s clipped repeated text, we examine both the thing and our mechanics of perceiving it.-Dennis Kane
“Moskowitz’s spaces are unmodulated for the most part. He was able to lock himself into a room conceived with the solidity of acrylic paint. He built interior spaces with right angles and the illusion of corners and elevations. The surfaces can appear close to seamless. It’s ultimately Moskowitz’s own architectural domain nestled in his mind: warm, embracing, and claustrophobic.” - Barbara A. MacAdam
Untitled (Chain), 1991
Pastel on paper
115 x 74 in (292.1 x 188 cm)
MacAdam, Barbara A. “Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings From Four Decades | the Brooklyn Rail.” The Brooklyn Rail, 30 Apr. 2024, brooklynrail.org/2024/05/artseen/Robert-Moskowitz-Paintings-and-Drawings-from-Four-Decades.
“Robert Moskowitz.” Whitney Museum of American Art, whitney.org/artists/922.
“Works — Robert Moskowitz.” Robert Moskowitz, www.robertmoskowitz.org/works.
Adam Pendleton
re contextualizing language and history
Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021, Silkscreen ink on canvas
This week’s art selection features the work of Adam Pendleton. Adam’s work uses text and images to examine the glut of codes we negotiate and the hierarchies of power embedded in them.
“Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist (whose) work centers on an engagement with language, in both the figurative and literal senses, and the recontextualization of history through appropriated imagery to establish alternative interpretations of the present and, as the artist has explained, “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist.””
Photo Credit:
Pace Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together
Elephant Art, Pope L. and Adam Pendleton, Art Can Mobilize Your Body
Idea Stream, Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” at MOCA
Art Forum, The Parallax View: The Art of Adam Pendleton
Moma, History Is Never Finished: An Interview with Adam Pendleton
Galerie Eva Prenhauser, Adam Pendleton
Portrait Credit: New York Times, Adam Pendleton is Rethinking the Museum
Christian Boltanski
meditations on memory
This week’s art post features the work of French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021). Boltanski’s work has a contemplative, poetic, ethnological quality. Absence, the remains and impact of war, the silenced subject, and the power of memory all are investigated, as is a quiet celebration of the dignity and poetics inherent in the mundane.
“His work was rich in visual and aural impact, and open-ended in its invitation to the viewer to contemplate the past and partake in the present moment — for what has been lost and what endures.”
Photo Credit:
MetaLocus, BOLTANSKI AT IVAM: DÉPART - ARRIVÉE
Jupiter Art, CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI:THEATRE D'OMBRES
Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski
Art Review, The Spectres of Christian Boltanski
Nowness Asia, Everyone and No One, The Art of Christian Boltanski
Merrian Goodman Gallery, Depart-Arrive
Merrian Goodman Gallery, Christian Boltanski Selected Works
Portrait Credit: Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski
Shirin Aliabadi
iranian subversion
This week’s art post features the work of Shirin Aliabadi (1973-2018). Aliabadi’s work focused on Iranian women and their unique relationship to Western culture. Not singularly a critique of Western capitalism, the work explores secular transgression, body image and female identity under a repressive religious regime.
“Shirin will always be remembered for her kind soul, the depth of her work and the mark she left on the world. The female protagonists of her best-known series presented themselves as a radical counter-design to the officially propagated image of women, and displayed a young generation’s ways of breaking free from regulations.””
Photo Credit:
Universes Art, Operation Supermarket
Phillips.com, Shirin Aliabadi
Art Fund, Shirin Aliabadi
Aperture, She captured the modern face of Iran
Portrait: The Art Newspaper, Shirin Aliabadi, known for depicting rebellious Iranian women, has died
Annette Lemieux
ideological minimalism
This week’s art post features the great work of Annette Lemieux. She works in a variety of media and works in a theater of memory, examining aporias in accepted, dominant narratives. Check her work at her website.
“She’s looked at archetypical images from art — 20th century art history, but also film — and edited them and tweaked them to give them new meaning, whether that’s cheeky or critical, She’s always taking something from the world and turning it on its head to give it new meaning.”
Photo Credit:
Mitchell Inns & Nash, Annette Lemieux
Whitney Museum, Annette Lemieux
Quote and Portrait Credit: WBUR, Annette Lemieux, Whose Art Addresses History And Politics, Wins MFA’s $10K Prize
Jean Luc Godard
french new wave master
This week’s art post is selected stills from film’s by the great Jean Luc Godard who passed this year at age 91. It is an understatement to say Godard was a giant, he profoundly impacted cinema and modern thinking several times over. His work was always advancing, changing form and challenging the status quo. He was always morally outrages and always willing to stay on the margins. He understood life’s cruelty and saw art as a tool for resistance. He celebrated the defiance of beauty, the grace of charity, and the aunthenticity of being a moral enemy of the state.
Je vous salue JLG!
Charles Gaines
aesthetics, politics and philosophy
This week’s art selection features the work on noted conceptual artist and teacher Charles Gaines. Gainses’s work engages formulas that interrogate relationships between objective and subjective realms. Using many forms - photography, musical composition, sculpture, video, etc. - Gaines examines identity and power and the fault lines of capital’s utopia. His is some of the most engaged and ambitious work being made today.
“His work belongs to a branch of conceptual art concerned with processes and systems. The aim was to remove subjectivity from art by following self-determined rules and procedures. His breakthrough came in 1973, with his “Regression” series, in which he wrote sequential numbers in the squares of a hand-drawn grid to generate an amorphous form that grows from drawing to drawing, each generating the next. ‘One of the joys was the fact that I could experience things that I couldn’t predict, that I couldn’t anticipate.’”
Photo Credit:
Colossal,Through Monumental Sculpture of Moving Chains, Artist Charles Gaines Confronts the Enduring Legacy of American Slavery
Paula Cooper Gallery, Charles Gaines
ARTFORUM, Differing Equations: The Art of Charles Gaines
LA Times, How the dense grids of artist Charles Gaines took the ego out of art, Carolina A. Miranda
Jonathon Griffin, Charles Gaines
Wade Guyton
digital inkjet abstractions
This week’s art selection features the untitled works of Wade Guyton. Guyton uses an inkjet printer for his large paintings, letting the printers mistakes and inconsistencies arise. Initially his work was geometric, minimal and abstract; more recent offerings focus on the mundane: his studio, the daily paper, the incidental, juxtapositions of the everyday. Printed out in variations, a feedback loop that frames the process of absorbing images into the mind, examining what constitutes “representation” in our digital reality.
“Digital technology and indistinct copy-right laws have set off avalanches of artistic appropriation. But amongst bouts of nostalgia, bland remakes, reenactments, and reconstructions that mindlessly rehash old formulas and found objects, Guyton’s work stands out as a subtle reminder of the complexities and uncertainties of our time.”
Photo Credit:
Matthew Marks Gallery, Wade Guyton
Artnet, Wade Guyton
Emergent Mag, Reena Spaulings, New York City
Whitney Museum of American Art, Wade Guyton, New York City
Warwick Collection, Wade Guyton
Zabludowicz Collection, Wade Guyton
Ignant Magazine, The Work Of Art In The Age Of Compulsive Reproduction: Two Decades In The Oeuvre Of Wade Guyton, Thomas Pirot, Anna Sinofzik
Jennifer Bolande
post conceptual objects and images
For our Wednesday art post, Dennis Kane features one of his favorite artists Jennifer Bolande. Her work uses photography/ sculpture to create quietly arresting moments that examine instances around the periphery of thought. She indexes and points to fault lines of power and ideological habit. Check more of her work at her website.
“Coincident with Bolande’s conscious deployment of dichotomies is an intense concentration on the meeting places between objects, the points where two differences border and thus define themselves.
Bolande pays an almost surrealist attention to loci of simultaneous meeting and division as sites for potential transformation”
Photo Credit: jbolande.com
Quotation Credit: Art Forum, Something to Do with Jennifer Bolande, January 1989
Portrait Credit: Jennifer Bolande, Chambre D'amis
Sam Durant
Public Protest
This week’s art post features the work of Sam Durant. Durant is a multi media artist whose works focus on hierarchies of power, referencing historical moments and social acts of resistance or response. Durant’s works are often made for public display outside of art institutions and attempt a larger public discourse.
Sam Durant, Untitled (drone), 2016-2021
Sam Durant, Proposal for Public Fountain, 2021, Sadie Coles HQ, London
Sam Durant, Like, Man, I’m Tired (of Waiting), 2021
“Since the 1990s, Sam Durant has developed a research-driven artistic practice in which he dissects and reframes both dominant historical narratives and forgotten facets of our collective past...
(L)ight boxes are based on hand-drawn protest signs that the artist found in photos of street protests. By giving the personal phrases and slogans from protest movements an existence as a colourful light box, Sam Durant emphasises their necessity, and often also the humorous or utopian character of the messages.”
Photo Sources:
ArtNet, Unit London
Mousse Magazine, Sam Durant, Proposal for Public Fountain, Sadie Coles HQ, London
Unframed, Sam Durant, Like Man I’m Tired of Waiting, LACMA
ArtLead, Billboard Series #21, Sam Durant and the Art of Dialogue
Toward Freedom, Untitled (Drone), 2021
Matias Faldbakken
creative vandalism
This week’s art post features the work of Matias Faldbakken. Faldbakken’s sculptures/ combines have an absurdity to them, a dark comic theatricality and resonant gestalt. He is represented by Standard Oslo. In addition to his visual art he has written several novels and a collection of short stories.
“Faldbakken... (has an) ability to bite his own tail by making works that unite vandalism and creativity, while both celebrating and lamenting the constant commodification of rebellious acts.
More than anyone, he understands that frontal critique only reinforces the classic master-slave dialectic, and that true radicality consists of infiltrating and perverting the system from within. ”
Photo credits:
Simon Lee Gallery, London, Hong Kong
Occula, Gallery Chant Grousel, Paris
Renaissance Society, “Fear of Property” Installation, University of Chicago
Mousse Magazine, Museum Boijmans, Rotterdam
kunstkritikk, Nordic Art Review, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo
Erica Baum
photograph poetry
For the first Wednesday art post, Kane has selected the photo collage work of Erica Baum. Erica is represented by the New York gallery Bureau. Baum’s work is a quiet but intensely resonate examination of looking, fragments, slices, folds, traces. Dynamics of power enfolded in the mundane. A sly challenge to the habits and presumptions of form.
Untitled (Simbolismo), 1994, (Blackboards), gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York.
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
“Erica Baum’s photographs examine the ways we use language to classify, index, and assert knowledge. Working primarily with obsolescent media from the twentieth century—card catalogs, player piano rolls, sewing patterns—Baum isolates serendipitous interactions among fragments of text and the surrounding visual field. Her carefully disorienting framing, as well as her more active interventions, grant a poetic charge to these encounters. ”
Photo Credit: Bureau NYC
Artviewer, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf, Germany
Quote Credit: Rajesh Parameswaran, BOMB Magazine