take it or leave it, chump
A current exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology, is a deft rebuttal of Institutional Critique that mashes a variety of well-known works by well-known IC artists together in a confused jumble of brands intelligible only if viewed in the same spirit as one views a shoe rack at a department store. The message, delivered through the cunning mess organized by curators Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, and Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum, seems to be: Institutional Critique, and by extension most current critical art, is irrelevant. Take it or leave it. I am tempted to agree.
MAINTENANCE #6
The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium. – Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! Last May, when I wrote MAINTENANCE #1, I quoted the...
MAINTENANCE #5
The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium. – Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! Here are five books I read this month, and pictures of...
The “Celluloid Self” and Spaces of Feminine Performativity
The Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, located surprisingly in a nondescript complex of galleries and antique shops in Buckhead, a north-side neighborhood of Atlanta, curated a show focusing on feminism, performativity, and photography. The works in the show by the artists...
Chicago Art in Pictures: Best of 2012 – Year in Review
A historical piece which points towards exceptional moments observed directly by the writer, in Chicago, over the course of the previous calendar year. Alternative, NFP, and commercial galleries, as well as art centers, museums, and public spaces, were visited...
