By Barry Schwabsky
“Each writer creates his precursor,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future”(365). Likewise with painters. And one reason why Melvin Martínez counts as a painter is that he is showing us, in a new way, why Jackson Pollock still matters. [...]
For over a decade, The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) have been engaged in an extended campaign
Nowadays political art is a fashionable label, and many practices want to present themselves as such. Art becomes a space for protest, but at the same time any critical power that it may have is co-opted in a kind of protective environment where everything can be said, but where everything is tightly controlled.
By [...]
Behind the Paris-based collective Société Réaliste, founded in 2004
By Paco Barragán
I remember reading Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes sometime toward the end of the 90s.1 It’s still a very valid working title with an interesting perspective on American society by a still well-known Australian arts writer-his interviews on YouTube with Ronald Lauder and the Mugravi are a must see.
Witty, ironic, [...]
* All images are courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lausberg, Düsseldorf-Toronto-Miami.
Regine Schumann’s installations are much more than concrete art. Conceptualized as emotive spaces, Schumann’s color-filled light rooms provoke intense feelings of something otherworldly. A minimalist style affects everything from her choice of materials to the way she plays with form [...]
By Paco Barragán
Culture in general, and the arts in particular, are suffering, paraphrasing Chris Hedges, author of acclaimed The Empire of Illusion, because of “the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization.” Unlike in the United States, where most museums and contemporary art centers are primarily privately funded or have just a small [...]
By Michele Robecchi
The local community - that unpredictable, unquantifiable, factor whose feedback has dominated the activity of every museum or contemporary art institution ever since their policy of decentralization started taking place in the early 1990s. There is always something slightly manipulating in the idea of educating the public to interact with the [...]
Bill Viola is a well-known new media artist, but above all a great painter. The Japan Art Association shares the same opinion: they awarded him recently one of the 2011 Praemium Imperiale Art Awards under the category of painting. On the occasion of the publication of the book When a Painting Moves… Something Must Be Rotten! [...]
