Installation view of “Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection,” at the Hirshhorn Museum (Photo: Lee Stalsworth) I have been a fan of sculptor Anne Truitt’s writing since I read her book Daybook many years ago. First published in 1982, Daybook is Truitt’s personal journal while working at Yaddo, and her insights into the squirrely nature of […]
Aesthetics
Robert Irwin, Part 2
If you take the cubist idea and really press it…what you have is what I was now being forced to deal with…In other words, the marriage of figure and ground—which is how they always term the cubist achievement—of necessity leads to the marriage between painting and environment; essentially they are the same thing, just taking […]
Robert Irwin at the MFA
Robert Irwin is doing a two-night gig at the MFA in Boston. Last night was the first installment of Irwin’s rapid-fire, wisdom-spewing, wait, wait, I can’t write all of this down fast enough, boundary-breaking delivery. With his baseball cap firmly on his head (which, he advised us coyly, was to protect his eyes from direct […]
Seeking Some Silence
Damien Hirst with his diamond-encrusted skull. Photograph: HO/Reuters Jonathan Jones writes for the UK-based Guardian, and more often than not I find safe harbor in his point of view. He’s not a complexifier or a critic caught in the po-mo net of obfuscation (my exhaustion with that gamey approach to art is showing, isn’t it?) […]
- Aesthetics
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Read Me My Mirandas
Thank you Regina Hackett at Another Bouncing Ball for highlighting the latest from quirky dry-humored phenom Miranda July. Her films (Me and You and Everyone We Know) and writing (No One Belongs Here More Than You) dance me into a conceptual space that is reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s installation art in its smooth side swipe […]
More on Abstraction and Nature
Rock and fungi, Tasmania, 2007 Two of the comments to my earlier post, Threading through Abstraction, Micro and Macro, came in from Down Under. Both of these writers offered a thoughtful expansion of the discussion I began in my post. My experience is that this issue of nature and abstraction has particular significance in the […]
- Aesthetics
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Threading Through Abstraction, Micro and Macro
In 1968 two of mid-century’s most influential designers, Charles and Ray Eames, made a short film called Powers of Ten. In just ten minutes they explored the universe from one end of the scale to the other. A book based on that film was published some years later and had a lasting impression on me. […]
Hesse in the Beyond
Eva Hesse. She’s one of those artists in the Influencer Pantheon who just keeps giving. Her work lights up my dashboard again and again. And how I wish I were going to be in Edinburgh in October rather than November—50 works by Hess, never before seen in public, are being featured in a show as […]
Cooper-Hewitt Update
Palace, by Janice Arnold (All photos courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt Museum) At the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, two excellent exhibits: Fashioning Felt, a show that is much more than fashion, fabric or costuming the body. Wool felt is the earliest textile fabric known, and some samples found date back to the Bronze […]
From a High Small Place
Self Portrait with Masks, James Ensor It is easy for someone like me, who has been studying art for a lifetime, to convince myself that I have an accurate measure of the dimensions of a particular artist’s operative domain. But gratefully that conceit has not resulted in a callow disregard, and I love when my […]