Feature Artist

Featured Artist: Alexandre Guillaume (New York)

Alexandre Guillaume posses passionate memories of his childhood in a village in Northern France. His travels, his background, his migrations constitute the basis of so many events of his life. These scenes removed with vivacity are some notes that will serve as basis in the calm of his studio to compose and build his art. He creates a linear effect with a powerful tension between its black and gray background colors helping him to fossilize the creative act. His paintings are usually medium to large in size and have been increasing in size over time. A large format emphasizes speed of movement and the echoes sharpen the existence of the person viewing the canvas. The speed and impatience of everyday life inform his work. more...

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The Authentic Women and Girls of Balthus

Victoria Z. Alexander

Georgette is about thirteen years old. She is arranged by the painter in a most confident pose illuminated by baroque sunlight. This painting is, as much as any other, the kind that is often selected to label its maker Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rolla, 1908-2001), a pedophile at worst, or a pornographer at best. There is no evidence to suggest that Balthus was a pedophile or acted as a predator towards young women. Such thoughts inhabit only the imaginations of people who look at young girls very differently than did Balthus. more...

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Casino Confidential

Patrick Burton

On occasion I have cause to wonder just why I threw away some thirty thousand dollars on a seemingly innocuous mid-week UEFA Cup qualifying tie between Standard Liege and Everton, amidst the footnotes of the European summer, probably or potentially or possibly, some two thousand and eight years after Jesus Christ had hedged on one cross with three nails to be four given. One could be 'forgiven' for placing an order with their moral vocabulary, and being promptly presented with an adjectival platter consisting of materialistic greed, callous self indulgence, and obsessive compulsivity marinated in a low quotient of intelligence, all served on Lebanese bread generously spread with lashings of hubris. more...

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Form, Function, and Context: Frank Gehry

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Frank Gehry is the most important, imaginative, and obsessed architect since Louis I. Kahn. Many of Gehry’s buildings have pushed our understanding of what architecture can be to the limit. In a world where we pass by thousands of buildings noticing only a few, Gehry’s work frequently seizes our attention. The architect and his associates produce breathtaking exteriors which capture a good deal of public, critical and media attention. However, we must look beyond form when judging the work of an architect to a building’s functionality (does it work for what it was designed for?), and its contribution to its context. more...

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Architecture and the Appropriation of Space – The Subject in the Hypermarket

Jake Nabasny

One can’t speak of hyperreality without also implicitly discussing the issue of space. More so than the logic of Capital, the media, or consumer culture, space is the main vehicle through which the hyperreal is able to survive. Jean Baudrillard adopts Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Exactitude of Science” to show that the precession of simulacra is spatial. This spatial simulacrum is always already working within cities as cities. It becomes the architecture: advertisements painted on buildings, mass produced fast food chains, and endless parking lots. The promotion of graffiti by Baudrillard is therefore a suggestion of how to revolt against colonized space. more...

Video

Laurie Anderson – Gravity’s Angel

Duration: 7:42 min

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American experimental performance artist and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance-art activities. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. more...

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Joseph Beuys – Filz TV & I Like America and America Likes Me…

Duration:10:15 min.

Joseph Beuys ( May 12, 1921, Krefeld – January 23, 1986, Düsseldorf) was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art. His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate, but he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. more...

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Ann Hamilton – Acoustic Tower

Duration: 15:04 min.

She is a contemporary American artist best known for her installations, textile art, and sculptures, but is also active in the fields of photography, printmaking, video, and video installation. She trained in textile design at the University of Kansas and later received an MFA from Yale University in sculpture. She taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1985 to 1991 and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. In 1999, Hamilton was the American representative to the Venice Biennale with an installation of walls embossed with Braille, which caught a red powder as it slid down from above. more...

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Viral Venture – Digital Art Projection by Joseph Nechvatel

Duration: 2:47

He is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.This is a small extract from the Viral Venture project from 2009 for demonstration purposes. Viral Venture is a digital art projection (and/or ongoing installation) by the artist Joseph Nechvatal with a musical score by the composer Rhys Chatham. The Viral Venture projection consists of Nechvatals most recent artificial-life computer virus attacking his digital images. It acts in real time as modeled on the biological viral mode as programmed by Stephane Sikora in C++. more...

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Robert Rauschenberg – A Conversation with Charlie Rose (1998)

Duration:

Charles Peete "Charlie" Rose, Jr. (born January 5, 1942) is an American television talk show host and journalist. Since 1991, he has hosted Charlie Rose, an interview show distributed nationally by PBS since 1993. He was concurrently a correspondent for 60 Minutes II from its inception in January 1999 until its cancellation in September 2005, and was later named a correspondent on 60 Minutes. Rose worked for CBS News (1984–1990) as the anchor of CBS News Nightwatch, the network's first late-night news broadcast.The Nightwatch broadcast of Rose's interview with Charles Manson won an Emmy Award in 1987. more...

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Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland), I'm a victim of this song (1995)

Duration: 5:10 min.

Elisabeth Charlotte Rist (born June 21, 1962 in Grabs, Sankt Gallen, Switzerland) is a well-known video artist. She lives and works in Zurich and Los Angeles.Elisabeth Charlotte Rist was born in 1962 in Grabs, Sankt Gallen, in Switzerland. Since her childhood she has been nicknamed Pipilotti. The name refers to the novel Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren.Rist studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Vienna, through 1986. She later studied video at the School of Design (Schule für Gestaltung) in Basel, Switzerland. In 1997 her work was first featured in the Venice Biennial, where she was awarded the Premio 2000 Prize. more...

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Roadsworth, Crossing the line

Duration: 6:58

Crossing the Line details a Montreal stencil artist’s clandestine campaign to make his mark on the city streets. Hailed as an "artist's artist" by Wooster Collective, Roadsworth began to play with the language of the streets, overlaying city asphalt markings with his own images: a crosswalk becames a giant boot print, vines choked up traffic dividers, and electrical plugs filled parking spots. Each piece begged the question, Who owns public space? As he is prosecuted at home and celebrated abroad, Roadsworth struggles to defend his work, define himself as an artist and address difficult questions about art and freedom of expression. more...

art agenda

A Surreal Kiss Goodbye: Exhibitions We Won't Be Seeing in 2010

Victoria Z. Alexander

Twice in the history of capitalism the virtual market and the real market have come into contact ñ 1929 and today. Art and capital have had a long and sometimes tendentious relationship. The current economic crisis brought on by bankers and investors (who were apparently unable to take anything from the speculative collapse of 1929), will take its toll on museums over the next year and perhaps longer more...

art agenda

Futurism's Ambivalent Present

Dr. Gerry Coulter

During the summer of 2009 (June ñ September) the Tate Modern in London partially reenacted the first Futurist exhibition of 1909. Attendance was acceptable but the critical response tended toward ìwhy bother?î. The Tate show included 18 of the 35 canvas on display in 1909 and many other painted after that first Futurist show. Why has so much ambivalence been stirred by this exhibition? more...

art agenda

A Retrospective of Yüksel Arslan

santralistanbul, İstanbul, Turkey, 13.09.2009 - 21.03.2010

The first retrospective exhibition of Yüksel Arslan, one of the world’s most exceptional 20th Century artists, opens at santralistanbul in September with the main sponsorship of Garanti Bank. The exhibition presenting over five hundred of the artist’s works compiled from collections around the world and Turkey, along with supporting texts, photographs and records that explicate the aspects which shape his world of thought, imagination and painting, is curated by Levent Yılmaz with the main sponsorship of Garanti Bank. The exhibition will be open for viewing at santralistanbul for seven months from September 13, 2009 through March 21, 2010. more...