Chicago, Jun. 2013: Wafaa Bilal recently visited Chicago to give the opening night lecture and present Technoviking (2013) at Rapid Pulse, an international performance art festival hosted by DEFIBRILLATOR gallery in June 2013. I know Bilal from his days in Chicago as a hardworking graduate student in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We caught up after his lecture at Rapid Pulse, and, appropriately enough to his work, we conducted this interview on video... [more]
Berlin, Jun. 2013: Elle Muliarchyk understands the aphorism that “nothing changes if nothing changes.” For all of us, the process of productively parsing the superficial and profound demarcations between age and maturity can be difficult, or even impossible, without a change of scene. Elle needed to turn her car into a cocoon and drive across America.
Elle’s first transformative pilgrimage took place after she was named a finalist for Miss Czech Republic at age fourteen. The Belarus-born... [more]
London, May 2013: London-born Shezad Dawood is an artist whose work deals, variously, with notions of cultural interplay, narrative histories, Otherness and cross-collaboration; his most recent work, which launches June 7 at the ICA, is the full-length science fiction film Piercing Brightness, which imagines a parallel between the typically filmic Close Encounter, and the themes of migration and visitation, and of societal integration. Film (in particular, the style of the B-movie and of the art... [more]
Chicago, May, 2013: I first met Tania Bruguera when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago six years ago. We have remained in touch since, most recently crossing paths at the Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Art last August in Austria. Over the last few months I conducted an interview with Bruguera via email asking her about the role teaching plays in her work, her ideas about formalism, and the awkward demographic known as “artist”. Her responses reveal a thoughtful and holist... [more]
Beijing, May, 2013: Li Ran is a Chinese artist working with performance and video to create “mockumentaries” around fictional (or part-fictional) characters. Over the last year Li has had solo shows at Beijing’s Magician Space and Shanghai’s Aike Dellarco Gallery, and was included in the Shenzhen and Gwangju Biennales. Li took part in curator Biljana Ciric’s “Alternatives to Ritual” exhibition at the Goethe Institute Open Space in Shanghai, and ON/OFF, a major survey of young Chinese artists i... [more]
San Francisco, May 2013: I met Jason Kalogiros at Building 11, an old warehouse-type structure at Pier 70, near the Port of San Francisco. Surrounded by an assortment of functional and non-functional factories, fences and loading docks, it was built in the early ‘40s by the government to support wartime production and now houses studio space for a selection of artists.
We first travel to the back of the studio so Jason can show me his Agfa Repromaster 310 from the late ‘70s. It's an old proc... [more]
Chicago, Apr. 2013: Guy Ben-Ner began with an idea. He wanted to divorce a soundtrack from a film, then make a new film that accommodated the appropriated soundtrack. The idea provided a mechanism, defining the rules of a game which would yield Ben-Ner’s latest work, Soundtrack. He decided to appropriate eleven minutes of sound from Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. In Ben-Ner’s version the world is not ending exactly, rather his kitchen erupts into chaos. The sound of rain in the Spie... [more]
Berlin, Apr. 2013: Ironically, Billy Childish always uses language in a way to slip out of being lesser than life and adhering to “Art”. (He is clearly not the formaldehyde fanatic/stuckist!) There is constant referencing to (fixed) figures from the past, fictional and real. The un-amended, unresolved, whirling and self-involved world of a dictum of questioning by Dostoyevsky or other romantic lone figures.
One might think, and especially in reading around Childish and reading his poetry (and... [more]
Brussels, Apr. 2013: Han Hoogerbrugge, in the tradition of Ron English, Molly Crabapple and Bill Plympton, takes his playful yet politically charged art to the masses. For Art Brussels, the masses will be those gathered for Belgium’s established art fair.
At other times, the Dutch artist, illustrator and animator predominantly works with widely accessible forums online. His introspective Modern Living/Neurotica series ran on its own website from 1998-2001, followed by Nails (2002-2007), Hotel... [more]
Beijing, Apr. 2013: At first glance, Pomegranate, Liang Yuanwei’s solo show which opened recently at Beijing Commune, appears to be a rather radical departure from this artist’s previous solo show in the same space in 2010 (Golden Notes). Golden Notes amassed a group of paintings of a similar format – canvases with floral patterns picked out from an overall gradation of coloured paint. Pomegranate, however, seems to present a rather more experimental proposition, and rationalisation of Liang... [more]
Mexico City, Mar. 2013: In the history of Western Art, religious and sacred themes have been the predominant subject matter since time immemorial. However, somewhere along the lines of the last 200 years, following suit with historical precedents outside of the realm of art, religious themed art, and an emphasis on the sacred or even the sublime has lost its importance and for many contemporary artists and viewers seems outdated. So much so that today, in an era of conceptualism and post-conceptu... [more]
New York, Mar. 2013: Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist who lives in New York. Bee is represented by Accola Griefen Gallery, New York, where she will have a solo show of new paintings from May 23 to June 29, 2013. Criss Cross: New Paintings will be accompanied by a catalog with an essay by art critic and poet, Raphael Rubinstein.
Susan Bee, Criss Cross, 2012, 24 X 30 in., oil, enamel and sand on canvas; Courtesy of the artist.
Bradley Rubenstein: Susan, I just saw this piece by R... [more]
New York, Mar. 2013: Nicola Tyson's photographs document the early days of the Blitz Kids and the beginnings of the New Romantic movement—late seventies, post-Punk London. "Bowie Nights at Billy's Club" was a weekly event in a small Soho venue, the brainchild of a young Steve Strange and Rusty Egan. The event quickly became the beating heart of a brand-new scene—a refuge for disillusioned punks; suburban art school students; androgynous, subversive, creative kids; and (most importantly) Bowie... [more]
London, Mar. 2013: Known as Paris' most prolific graf artist, you'll find it hard to walk a street in the French capital where Horfee hasn't been. And all the better for his insane, pyschotropic paintings and drawings on walls and paper, with their talismanic energy. His works live and breathe independently; they are fizzing with the kinetic enthusiasm Horfee evidently has for making art. One of many reasons that he has received such a great positive reaction, especially among his fellow illega... [more]
New York, Mar. 2013: Saya Woolfalk’s work in painting and drawing, video, media, and fiber arts demands that a viewer be open to suspending disbelief to image what’s possible. Her alter world—a future vision of the future—asks that we re-consider what it means to be human and how we co-exist with other life forms in the world. Through a fantastical narrative logic of science fiction, genetics, metaphysics, semiotics, and anthropology, among other subjects, Woolfalk’s work challenges us to... [more]
Ulan Bator, Feb. 2013: Temuulen Batmunkh, aka “TML”, is a digital and graffiti artist hailing from Ulan Bator. The twenty-three-year-old sees himself as part of a new wave of urban culture in Mongolia, where migration from the countryside to the capital city – which until recently had a population of under 1 million – is causing new youth culture to develop. As a street artist and through using digital media, TML aims to create work with an identity that is at once distinctly Mongolian an... [more]
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