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?
Jan Fabre at the Louvre
Context determines meaning. When artworks are placed in unusual situations and combined in unexpected ways, new patterns emerge from the juxtaposition. Contrasts of type, size, shape, material, composition, motif, texture, color, content, and meaning restructure information and introduce new dialogues.
Vincenzo Vela: The Politics of the Figure
Every day thousands of people pass by one of the most historically and aesthetically significant monuments of 19th-century sculpture without any knowledge of its existence. Even among art-interested people, few if any have heard of Vincenzo Vela, the artist responsible for Victims of Labor, this curiously invisible monument, which stands at the southern entrance to
Rune Olsen: Revising Natural and Sculptural History
Rune Olsen’s beautifully composed, often shocking, masking tape-covered sculptures are some of the most visually seductive and physically intriguing figurative works being produced today. His three-dimensional tableaux, representing man and beast in various positions of sexual dominance and compliance, interweave personal narrative with mind-expanding revelations about natural science.
Robert Arneson in the ’60s
The early sculpture of Robert Arneson was the very essence of Funk, a term disdained by most of the artists. But the maker of these irreverent, sarcastic ceramics was indeed the King of Funk. Funk has been compared to Dada, but Dada assaulted traditional art by attacking hypocritical bourgeois values, whereas Funk was not engaged
Making Everything: A Conversation with Ai Weiwei
In 2007, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei brought 1,001 of his compatriots to Documenta for a city-wide performance called Fairytale, and Template, a 39-foot-tall structure made of doors and windows salvaged from houses destroyed during China’s recent building boom, was a highlight of Skulptur Projekte Münster – despite its collapse in a violent storm at the
Carlo Borer: Peculiar Geometries
Carlo Borer’s recent steel sculptures stand in the landscape, or in exhibition spaces, like messengers from another reality. Their strangeness is not overbearing, but the longer you look at them the more you surmise that their forms stubbornly deny comparison.
