Curatorial Flow Patterns
Rerouting curatorial ‘flow patterns’ away from conventional art practices presents a ‘watershed’ opportunity for curators to promote art’s engagement with the environment and its role in establishing ‘curative’ relationships with habitat.
To Life! – An Ecological Evaluation of Land-Art
"To Life!" is a phrase that resounds at gatherings of well-wishers and grievers the world over. But when ecologists utter it they refer not only to human life but the lives of microbes and plants and animals, and also the water, air, earth, and sun. This essay examines art's Land-art movement and its relationship to ecology through use of a single acknowledge masterwork from this arena: Walter de Maria's "Lightening Field."
Alexis Rockman’s Manifest Destiny
Alexis Rockman’s mural-sized painting "Manifest Destiny" (2004) Rockman depicted Brooklyn in the year 5,000 following the complete demise of Brooklyn’s infrastructure. The forty-one years old artist has been honored as a visionary for conveying an urgent social warning, but he has also been criticized for exploiting people’s insecurities.
The Poster Child (Andy Goldsworthy) vs L’Enfant Terrible (Damien Hirst)
Two artists are both renowned figures in contemporary art world. A consensus of opinion clusters around each, yet they attract opposite reactions. Goldsworthy is honored for pursuing a noble cause and offering an uplifting vision. Hirst is accused of being a blatant opportunist whose works are calculated for shock value.
The Maximal Implications of the Minimal Line
A straight line, the single most elementary visual unit, is the formal denominator that unites the surprisingly diverse work of fifty-eight artists from the 1960-1980s. They dramatize that the extreme reduction that characterizes the aesthetic code of Minimalism inspired intense creativity and enabled artists to convey concepts related to gender, nature, and industry with wit, humor, elegance, and/or banality.
Process and Product: The Making of Eight Contemporary Masterworks
Gathering evidence of artists’ working methods and thought processes is often conducted by art historians long after an artist died. Louise Bourgeois, Robert Longo, Alex Katz, and Leon Golub are among the eight distinguished artists who participated in the generation of such records. These artists disclose fascinating narratives of their internal and external creative processes.
Janine Antoni: To Draw a Line
In a sculpture entitled, To Draw a Line, the line is formed by a rope across which Antoni walked and balanced until she fell. Each instant of equilibrium was unique, temporary, and precarious. In her preparations, equal effort was expended to master the laws of balance as to obey the laws of gravity. She comments, “As I mature as an artist I become more comfortable being out of balance. That is the place where beauty is found. It is a tenuous, fragile place.”
Damien Hirst: ‘A Many Splendored Thing’
The market economy has amassed a great arsenal of weapons intended to fight signs of the passage of time because so many people resist decay. Hirst celebrates life by tracking it to its source in the trajectory from age or disease, to death, and then to decay. Often he packages these unsettling reminders of our mortality in cool formalism and appealing colors.
Anish Kapoor: Ethereal Recitals
Anish Kapoor exploits the inherent aesthetic qualities of the earth’s varied substances such as translucent alabaster, reflective stainless steel, opaque fiberglass, clear resin, and absorbent pigment to achieve his non-material goal. Over the course of his thirty-year long career, he has prodded these tangible substances to relinquish their material identities.