Zoe Strauss

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
January 14–April 22

Zoe Strauss, Daddy Tattoo, Philadelphia, 2004
, ink-jet print, 
12 x 16".

The anonymous voice who previewed this show last November in the New York Times intoned that the subject of Zoe Strauss’s photography is “poor people.” The word choice belies the radical politics at the heart of Strauss’s project on view in this anarchic retrospective. Consisting of a selection of images made over the last decade, “Zoe Strauss: Ten Years” was organized by the Philadelphia Museum as a sprawling survey that spills out into the city itself.
Strauss is known in her hometown of Philadelphia for staging annual exhibitions of her photographs (with prints available for five dollars each) under a section of Interstate 95 in South Philadelphia since 2002. On view are 170 of these images, picturing people, urban scenes, and landscapes that Strauss has encountered in her everyday life. In her attention to the material realities of her surroundings, Strauss taps into the rich legacy of documentary photography from Walker Evans to Allan Sekula. The salon-style hanging encourages viewers to make connections and hints at the vast production behind this careful edit; three slide shows running side by side present even more pictures and also foreground the artist’s interest in time and sequence.
Strauss’s stated ambition as an artist is “to create an epic narrative about the beauty and struggle of everyday life,” and the much-abused word epic truly animates this project, invoking Homer but also modernist echoes such as James Joyce and Bertolt Brecht. The artist is keenly attuned to the production of dialogue: The exhibition includes a library and reading room (designed by Strauss’s friends in the Philadelphia collective Megawords) where visitors can hang out and talk; an extensive series of public programs (including a lecture by Strauss on Bruce Springsteen); and “office hours” during which the artist meets with visitors (appointments can be scheduled online). The show also extends out into the city: Fifty-four billboards are currently displaying Strauss photographs, carefully selected by the artist according to location, orientation, and surroundings. In one, a woman known only as Antoinette looks down magisterially, her face framed by sky, and the I-95 project has been radically inverted: Instead of physically bringing viewers down into the unseen spaces of the city, the billboards make us look up at Strauss’s world, newly elevated into the sky.

-Megan Heuer

[Lifted from ArtForum as a note to self]

Mel Bochner

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue, NW
November 6–April 29

Mel Bochner,
Master of the Universe, 2010, oil and acrylic on two canvases, 100 x 75".

The latest “In the Tower” exhibition, part of an ongoing series highlighting individual artists of the postwar period, teems with words. This is not altogether surprising: Language has been central to Mel Bochner’s art since the mid-1960s, and here a selection of his early works pairs with his more recent thesaurus paintings of 2003–11. The show, curated by James Meyer, examines Bochner’s interest in linguistic systems, focusing on his use of the thesaurus as a generative compositional tool. “The thesaurus,” according to Bochner, “presents each word as an endlessly branching tree of family resemblances, planted in a neighborhood where meanings overlap.” Indeed, such overlaps—and related fissures—are on full view in distinct moments in Bochner’s work.
A smaller gallery collects early text-based drawings from 1966–68, including restrained portraits of Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd, in addition to numerous works on paper related to the larger thesaurus canvases. Bochner’s Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966, composed of expanding rings of synonyms for the word wrap, figures on both walls, as he remade the work in charcoal in 2001, sparking a return to the strategy of synonymy. Even in black and white, Bochner’s recent work appears looser, his 2008 and 2009 lists peppered with bubbles and arrows containing additional terms and phrases nestled into his word studies.
The canvases in the main gallery methodically parse individual words and phrases, with language often sliding into colloquial speech by the lower portion of the compositions. Bochner’s use of color, however, complicates straightforward reading. With increasing chromatic variety, to the point of distinct hues chosen for each individual hand-painted letter in his 2010 and 2011 pieces, text itself becomes an all-over composition. This coloristic variation and semantic doubling pry language apart twice over, and Bochner’s words pulse with everyday meanings tumbling beyond them.

-Edward Vazquez

[Lifted from ArtForum as a note to self]

Andrea Galvani
(via)

Gonjasufi - The Blame from Neil Krug on Vimeo.

"Required Reading: The Image Object Post-Internet," by Artie Vierkant

This PDF is to serve as an extended statement of artistic purpose and critique of our contemporary relation to objects and images in Post-Internet culture. More than anything, it poses a survey of contemplations and open questions on contemporary art and culture after the Internet. “Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in the critical blog “Post Internet” during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh's definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as 'Post Internet'–when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps ... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'–or when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” There are also several references to the idea of “post-net culture” in the writings of Lev Manovich as early as 2001. Specifically within the context of this PDF, Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials. Post-Internet also serves as an important semantic distinction from the two historical artistic modes with which it is most often associated: New Media Art and Conceptualism. New Media is here denounced as a mode too narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies, rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore be seen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image, context, or instruction. Post-Internet art instead exists somewhere between these two poles. Post-Internet objects and images are developed with concern to their particular materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination. It is important to also note that “being Post-Internet” is a distinction which carries ramifications beyond the art context as a societal condition at large, and that it would be antithetical to attempt to pinpoint any discrete moment at which the Post-Internet period begins. Any cultural production which has been influenced by a network ideology falls under the rubric of Post-Internet. The term is therefore not discretely tied to a certain event, though it could be argued that the bulk of the cultural shifts described herein come with the introduction of privately-run commercial Internet service providers and the availability of personal computers. My homework for this week

Tim Noble and Sue Webster, 'Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)', 1998

PICA'S TBA 2011 Line Up!

OMG every year I get dizzy with excitement at the mere mention of PICA's Time Based Art Festival. Like, kid in a candy shop excited. Although I am never able to see each and every performance, show, or exhibit I put on my list, this year I am determined to come closer to achieving that goal. For 2011, the theme is "Evidence of Bricks: The building up, but mostly tearing down, of institutions, societies, structures, and ideas." Sounds good to me, dudes.

via PORT

kate gilmore, higher horse, 2008, video still

megan mcisaac

RIP TRON

brandon jan blommaert

casey oney

party monster

death wish

dustin kilgore

x818

rik lee

me in ten

me at six

me in alpha chi omega

me and rob on a date

me in school

megazord