05/31/2016

Kurt Ankeny Comics; Blank City; Saltz-on-Guston; Louise Bourgeois; Rokudenashiko; Kartalopoulos-on-Manouch; Robyn Chapman/Paper Rocket; Pigeon Anarchy; Spectacle of the Situation
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CW continues its look this week at Kurt Ankeny’s In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home.

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Wei Shao’s Blank City via Socks Studio

Being built is no limit to the multi-dimensional world, everything is a standardized city. Space is normalized into a single cube, the cube is given the function, the function must comply with the specification. Life has been standardized in size cubes, they are given the same rhythm of life, follow the simple life, with all copied. Supreme goal, everyone in the “right space” to do “the right thing.”  –(Hazardous translation by g.translate from Japanese original)

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Philip Guston Hauser & Worth Review

Guston must have known the return to figuration couldn’t be denied any more. And still he refused. He was in a battle of wills with his art. It must have been nightmarish. So much so that he stopped painting altogether for three years after the last canvas in this show. He didn’t show his work again until 1970. Critics had slammed that work  as “displeasingly raw”; the canvases were said to have “unpleasant texture.” His colleagues were shocked, suspicious, and thought he was trying to hop on the Pop bandwagon; one painter friend asked why he had “to go and ruin everything.” Lee Krasner was said to find the work “embarrassing.” New York Times critic Hilton Kramer lambasted Guston as “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum,” dismissing the work as “cartoon anecdotage … funky, clumsy and demotic,” and concluding “We are asked to take seriously his new persona as an urban primitive … and this is asking too much.” But the die was cast. While Pollock was the first to truly break through to pure non-objective painting, it was Guston who was the first to break out. And yet nobody seemed to understand. He’d risked everything and lost.
– Via Dan Nadel at TCJ

 

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Louise Bourgeois at Hiram Butler Gallery

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Rokudenashiko

And, lucky for her, the police and media continue to give Rokudenashiko a platform on which to promote her art. “I mean it when I say I am grateful to the police,” she said. Without them, she knows not nearly as many people would have seen her work. “Kind of ironically, they had to take all of these pictures of my art for their case. The prosecution had like a $90,000 camera to take these really specific pictures of my work from every imaginable angle, 16 slides per piece. I wouldn’t have ever been able to pay for any of that on my own, so now I have these amazing gelatin prints of my work. They’ve performed an act of art themselves.”
– Dayna Evans at NY Mag

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Ilan Manouch: Defamiliarizing Comics with Bill Kartalopoulos

But “l’affaire Katz” was not quite over. In 2011 Spiegelman had published MetaMaus, a book about the making of Maus. Manouach and his publisher burned the shredded remnants of Katz and had the ashes mixed into printer’s ink that was then used to publish MetaKatz, a 2013 book about the brief life and destruction of Katz and the issues raised by the experience, including contributions from a variety of artists and critics. MetaKatz “had a lot to say about different things such as resampling in comics, or the history of rip-offs in comics, or the problem of using animal metaphors,” said Manouach. “I think this for me is the prototype of a book form. It’s a book that creates discussion, that creates polemics, and another book that responds to these polemics. I think it’s a perfect example of how I imagine dialectics to be.”
-via Bill Kartalopoulos at World Literature Today

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Robyn Chapman & Paper Rocket Comics

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Katie Fricas Comics

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Tino Sehgal at Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin
His eponymous show at Martin-Gropius-Bau is beyond a doubt entertaining and spectacular, but it is neither radical nor subversive. These situations that entertain the crowds and are sold for substantial profit would make Guy Debord turn in his grave. On the surface, the lack of objects in combination with politically infused content make his work look novel and insurgent. But Sehgal is only formally employing devices of the radical practice of the avant-garde, and he is using them with very different intentions. His brand of “immaterial art” is not about the dematerialization sought by those who coined the idea and wanted to oppose the creation of commodities in a capitalist system. With his version of immaterialism, he has managed to create a new type of commodity that is highly sought after in the art market and, by doing so, has apparently filled a void.

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