Fritz Haeg doesn’t like to make objects. He is a mover and shaker who parachutes into a locale and shows people what’s possible: “Working with local people, I’m a catalyst for something to happen.” He admits that his role isn’t clear.
Jaehyo Lee: The Possibilities of Nature
For a Western audience, Jaehyo Lee is easy to place; he makes good sense among sculptors who work closely with natural materials, such as David Nash and Andy Goldsworthy. At the same time, Lee’s extraordinary gift with sanded wood, as well as his penchant for charred wood covered with bent nails, seems oriented toward a
The Romance of Objects: A Conversation with Carol Bove
Carol Bove’s first installations, beginning around 2003, were hailed as resonant exhumations of the culture of the 1960s, filled with objects evocative of that era—books that helped define the zeitgeist, fragile drawings of pop icons like Twiggy and Mia Farrow, and artifacts that showed a preference for cottage-industry crafts over mass-produced goods.
Ernest Daetwyler: Bubbles and Bombs
For one busy week in August 2008, the Swiss/Canadian artist Ernest Daetwyler collected used furniture from all over Darmstadt, a German city famous for its Art Deco Buildings and the impressive Beuys Block. Darmstadt is also home to Ute Ritschel, a very active curator who organizes many community projects, among them “Vogelfrei,” international exhibitions in
Please Give Norbert Weiner Some Naughty Schnauzers (And Other Curious Developments in the Work of Janet Zweig)
I’ll wager that no one reading this essay knows (or perhaps wants to know) the author of the ridiculous sentence in its title. Since the publication of Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” 40 years ago, many readers have acquired a seasoned skepticism about the authority and dependability of the authorial voice.
Creighton Michael and the Origins of Marking
Throughout the history of art—no matter what period of time or in what part of the world—artists have placed considerable emphasis on their ability to draw. Drawing functions as a tool, a primary attribute for making art.
Chicago: Sculpture Town
Carl Sandburg’s “city of the big shoulders” has established itself as a city of big art, and it maintains a passionate, occasionally contentious, and fondly attentive relationship with its sculpture. In 1967, Chicago dedicated one of the first—if not the first—contemporary, monumental, non-memorial public sculptures in the United States in its city hall plaza, a
Ross Knight: Sculptural Moments
Ross Knight came to New York City in 1989 after completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He had been accepted at Cal Arts and was ready to go, but he had also gotten into the studio program at P.S.1.
Hüseyin Alptekin: Enigmas that Don’t Explain and Don’t Complain
Hüseyin Alptekin promised to explain his enigmatic works to me, including Don’t Complain, the installation he produced as Turkey’s representative to the 2007 Venice Biennale. We began to correspond (he was pleased by my attempts at a Foucauldian archaeology of his work), and we seemed about to uncover the quintessential stratum that would explain all the
Richard Hunt: Voyage Through Modernism
Richard Hunt was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2009. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Richard Hunt’s sculptural journey began in the 1950s with his startling achievements as a prodigy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
