Tag Archives: review_s

Enslaved and Pallbearer at the Bowery Ballroom

It was the last night of their North American tour and Enslaved, the Norwegian black metal band, did not seem tired in the least. Coming off a stretch of shows to promote their new album RIITIIR, Enslaved toured the states with fellow bands Pallbearer, Ancient VVisdom and Royal Thunder. The Bowery Ballroom was sold out and most in attendance chose to stay in the main room, shirking the basement bar in order to hear the bands. Each performance brought with it a different sound from folk-metal (Ancient VVisdom) and southern doom rock (Royal Thunder) to Pallbearers brand of old-school doom and finally the prog-black metal that Enslaved have refined over the past 22 years.

Exhibit Review: Dan Flavin and Donald Judd

The nine grand Dan Flavin works and one big five-unit Donald Judd aluminum cube installation, now collectively up at the David Zwirner gallery on 20th Street will serve as a slap in the back of the head for anyone who thinks they’ve had enough of minimalist art.

And, as much as I want “to get” the elevating art historical language that dust-devils around these works, and American minimalism in general, the best response I have come across to date and the one most appropriate to describe this show, is Kirk Varnedoe’s clear-eyed description from his 2003 A.W. Mellon Lectures delivered at the National Gallery. In the process of debunking the theory that the CIA actively promoted American abstract expressionism to highlight “the freedom of the individual” against Communism, Varnedoe described minimalism as follows –

Luc Tuymans : The Summer is Over

To stand in front of a painting by Luc Tuymans means accepting that while you can “get” what it’s about you can never really say you fully understand it. This later point stings in that his paintings calmly stand as a rebuke that so much of what we think we have independently earned in terms of knowledge or sophisticated understanding is really just second hand.

What makes it uncomfortable at times to look at Tuymans’s paintings for an extended period is the sickening feeling that comes out of the inability to engage the paintings using our own eyes and wits.  The paintings lay bare, in the here and now, our intellectual impotence to create meaning from them without inside knowledge.

And then it kind of dawns on you, maybe that impotence shadows you in some form or other wherever you go. Maybe, to a large extent, you are only as good as your information.

Fall Books, Part 1 | In Case You Missed the Show…

To think of Christopher Wool only as a painter is to deprive oneself enjoyment of his accomplishments as a bookmaker and photographer. For three decades now Wool has brought to bear his trademark attention to detail, professionalism, intelligence and disquieting use of copy and re-presentation to over 30 books. While some were published in miniscule edition that would be rough to come by now, the admirable thing about Wool is that each of his book projects – regardless of price — is produced with the care normally reserved for more valuable and marketable works of art. In this regard, a book by Wool is part and parcel of his artistic practice.

Rather than merely document and reproduce his works — as art books traditionally do –the design of each publication pushes further the questions his paintings raise about authorship, the original, the copy, gesture, mechanical reproduction (silkscreen,, photography, Xerox), seriality, reading (of books, of paintings), and the glitch versus the mark.