UPDATES TO BLOG POSTS:
Dispatch from Venice – Ai Weiwei’s Biennale Knockout (Posted 6/1/ 2013)
8/23/2015 How did this project come about? Here is a video of a conversation between Ai Wei Wei and Tim Marlowe, head of exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London in which Ai described his struggles to convey emotions he felt upon seeing the aftermath of the earthquake. He found words inadequate.
Paul Schimmel and Sanford Biggers – Experience or Interpretation? (Posted 7/11/2012)
5/15//2015 Explanatory wall text in museums has always been controversial. Some think it clutters the wall—so photographer Christopher Williams did without—for his The Production Line of Happiness, a survey show (4/29 – 6/21/2015) at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. As an artist whose work questions many aspects of modern life, its commercial and artistic collisions, even looking into the working mechanism of a camera… his decision to go without explanation is a curious one (See video of walk thru by curator). One feels excluded from an insider story. An ‘intellectual’ show of largely small format photos installed just below sight line perhaps rightly invited almost universal negative reviews. The New York critics are a lot kinder than those in London:
The Guardian: “An exercise in fastidious cogitation…[It needs the] accompanying catalog to have any sustaining significance for the eye or mind – it does not thrive on its own.”
New Yorker: “Profiting an elite and trickling down, maybe to less privileged folks…Requires hours of study…”
The Telegraph: “…Is calibrated to ensure maximum irritation… Pretension and sterility [for those] without prior knowledge…”
New York Times: “Probably more than you want to know…”
Le Cabanon le Corbusier – Relevant Today? (Posted 9/18/
5/2/2015 The Pompidou Centre in Paris just opened a retrospective of Corbusier (Swiss French, 1887 – 1965), covering his entire oeuvre: architecture, painting, urban planning, design, and theory. Le Corbusier: The Measure of Man (4/29/2015 – 8/3/2015) emphasizes the primacy of the human body as his starting and ending point: the production and perception of art and architecture. The exhibition opens with Corbusier’s le modulor (1944).
