Joan Danziger’s uncanny sculptures do not fit into today’s fashionable art scene. Conjuring mythic, almost romantic worlds, they are the exception that proves the rule of the spiritual crisis that Donald Kuspit sees in contemporary art.1 Robert Rosenblum’s argument in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (1975) also comes to mind.2 In his alternative
The Daimler Art Collection: A Conversation with Renate Wiehager
Originally formed in 1977, the Daimler Art Collection includes about 1,800 works by approximately 600 German and international artists, focusing on abstract and geometrical painting. In the 1980s, the collection also began acquiring sculpture by internationally recognized modern and contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons, Heinz Mack, Keith Haring, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark
Stephen Antonakos: Complex Simplicity
The new Benaki Museum Annex, re-designed by architects Maria Kokkinou and Andreas Kourkoulas and situated in an industrial section of Athens, hosted a retrospective of the work of Stephen Antonakos last year. Although the building’s stone façade seems formidable, it wraps around a courtyard that offered a protective intimacy for Antonakos’s neon chapel.
Seizing the Chaos of Life: A Conversation with Peter Buggenhout
Peter Buggenhout’s large, abstract sculptures force us to re-think the nature of art. They engage with the abject, with formlessness and chaos, preferring a jumbled reality to the order of symbolic systems. Covered with sometimes disturbing organic materials or dust, his works grow from a process of accretion; they are about transformation and, elliptically, about
Building New Topias: A Conversation with Pedro Reyes
The methods employed by an artist in producing a body of work are often made up of intricate and personal associations that may confound the way a viewer assimilates knowledge. Pedro Reyes, architect, cultural agent, and artist, employs simple means: objects and casual scenarios that blend the realms of utopia, psychology, function, individual fantasies, and
Reality Check: When Appropriation Becomes Copyright Infringement
In this day and age, what does an artist really need to know about copyright? What exactly can legally and ethically be claimed as one’s copyright—and as copyright infringement? And how to make sense of news reports in December 2008 of a demand sent to a 16-year-old collage artist in London for appropriating a photo
Catherine Burgess: Eloquent Enigmas
“Austere, elegant. Uncompromising, ambiguous. Stern, seductive. Lucid, mysterious. Lean, sumptuous.” This stream of adjectives comes from notes that I took on my most recent visit to Catherine Burgess’s studio in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The inherent contradictions in this list are not indications of indecisiveness on my part or that of the artist.
Suspending Frictions: A Conversation with Cornelia Parker
When Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) erupted onto the art scene, it defined Cornelia Parker as an artist remarkable for her uncompromising ideas. Using British Army personnel to blow up a garden shed, she then suspended the scorched remains to create an explosion held in mid-air, immortalized in all its fractured drama.
Euphoric Sculpture: A Conversation with Franz West
A delightful court jester in an art world that often takes itself too seriously, Franz West straddles the line between the solemn and the absurd. His poignant forms—maladroit groupings of furniture; eccentric, misshapen, polychrome lumps of papier-mâché and plaster in bright outlandish colors; ambiguous organic shapes; and complex collages with sexual undertones—are permeated by a
Excavating Destiny: A Conversation with Shawn Skabelund
Since his first installation, A Line, Issued Out of the Ground (1994), which traced the ties connecting dam construction and Chinook salmon deaths in the Columbia River Basin, Flagstaff-based Shawn Skabelund has been creating large-scale, site-specific, socio-political works that explore what Wendell Berry calls the “unsettling of America,” namely, the effects, marks, and changes that humans make
