For just over a month (November 1–December 15, 2008), Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum acquired a new art chapel, an almost pitch-black, 30-square-meter room housing Damien Hirst’s spotlighted skull, For the Love of God (2007). I entered the space after taking part in what was almost a procession.
Josh Garber: Intuitive Strategies
The relationship between artists and their work is always peculiar: it inhabits a territory formed of equal parts magic act, charades, and the ventriloquism of influence. Josh Garber’s sources and end points are firmly located within this three-part territory.
Cris Bruch: Beyond the Street
A rejection of politicized subject matter in favor of abstract, autonomous, and independent-object sculpture is the key to unlocking the art of Seattle-based sculptor Cris Bruch. In 1991, Bruch made a clean break with his performance-based installations and object-conglomerations addressing social issues.
Humor, Sex, and Philosophy: A Conversation with Rachel Feinstein
Rachel Feinstein’s quirky humor and aesthetic playfulness made her recent show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York a great change of pace. Humor is often the most direct way to confront the artist’s favorite issues, which include sex and religion.
Models of Things: A Conversation with Chris Burden
For over a decade, Chris Burden has been making sculptures that study the relationship between reality and imagination, exploring the nexus between the factual and its artistic twin, the fictive. With the unveiling in New York of his colossal skyscraper sculpture, What My Dad Gave Me (2008), Burden presents, for a second time, an artwork that literally
Consuming Beauty: A Conversation with Amie Dicke
Amie Dicke has been the subject of countless articles in the fashion press since she began to exhibit in her native Amsterdam. Ironically, her work is not, as many art critics argue, a traditional feminist denunciation of Western beauty standards.
Steinunn Thorarinsdottir: A Lyric Isolation
Today, with a few notable exceptions, the craft and scope of figuration have been overrun by other kinds of art: conceptual work, high-tech videos, photo-based images. The humanist concerns typically addressed through realism have also been pushed aside, if not rejected outright.
Sigalit Landau: Surviving in a Hostile Environment
“My art is not meant to be provocative. It is simply a quest for some truth, justice, and order in a chaotic world,” says Sigalit Landau, an Israeli artist whose socially themed installations, performances, and video works have attracted international interest.1 In 1994, when installation art was still regarded with suspicion in Landau’s home country,
Will the Economic Turmoil Affect Public Art Programs?
Karin Wulf had some good news to report: a proposal made by a member of the Board of Estimates in early October to eliminate the City of Madison’s (Wisconsin) $30,000 expenditure on public art, part of an effort to trim the municipal budget, was soundly defeated.
Waltz of the Apparitions: A Conversation with Saint Clair Cemin
Saint Clair Cemin’s sculpture is often imponderable. Because the works are rarely wholly abstract, they seem to want to mean something, to hint at allegory—but do they really have to be something other than what they are as things, as untainted lyric?
