NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — There’s a big, funny, emotional, and political exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). The exhibition, entitled Entertaining Doubts, presents a massive retrospective of the Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw.
The Psychological Depth of Jim Shaw’s Pop Culture Dreamscapes
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The Bibliotecaphilia exhibition opening at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art(Mass MoCA) this week features filmmaker Clayton Cubitt’s provocative Hysterical Literature video series, which depicts women reading literature aloud and orgasming. The show, which integrates the work of six artists, examines the role of the library in the digital age, probing the relationship between the physicality of traditional libraries and books and the immateriality of textual content. Hysterical Literature will appear alongside Jonathan Gitelson’s “Marginalia,” which invites viewers to peruse shelves of annotated books, and Jenna Priebe’s elaborate book sculptures, along with other works.
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Nearly eight years ago I wrote a review leading off with the question, “What is it about Anselm Kiefer’s art that inhibits unfettered admiration?”
The article was about a set of big, brawny Kiefers from the collection of Andrew and Christine Hall of Fairfield, Connecticut, installed in two large galleries of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. While these sprawling works spoke to the depth and freedom of Kiefer’s imagination, I felt the same “abrading kernel of doubt” about them as I did with much of his art, which is often afflicted with bombast and “a queasily ingratiating antiquarianism.”
Remembering Jim Shaw’s “The Issue of My Loins” (2013) at @massmoca
(via Nick Cave on the Artist’s Responsibility)
“I began thinking more about myself as an artist with a civic responsibility,” said artist Nick Cave to Mass MoCA curator Denise Markonish during a conversation last Friday evening at Jack Shainman Gallery. Realizing that he was bored with his past work, he decided he needed to find another means of challenging himself. “I didn’t want to hide behind the Soundsuits anymore.”
The title of Jim Shaw’s current retrospective at the New Museum, The End is Here, comes from the title of his first zine made in 1978, displayed in a vitrine on the first floor of the exhibition. Gathered in the museum’s theater last month, curator Massimiliano Gioni and Jim Shaw discussed the artist’s range of influences for his early graphic work and the thinking behind the development of the exhibition. The iconography and formal properties of comics, magazine illustrations, and books feature prominently in Shaw’s work and make up a significant portion of the show.
Learning to Love Your Image: Fan Art Meets Contemporary Art
Eric Doeringer, “www.CremasterFanatic.com” (2004–13), website (courtesy the artist)
Anyone who has…
Life-size knit body suits mingle with painted metal lawn chairs, plastic purses, and rows of zines and ephemera in the summer show at Matthew Marks Gallery, What Nerve!, which gathers the work of four outlying postwar art groups — the Hairy Who, the Funk artists,Destroy All Monsters, and Forcefield — in an attempt to tell an alternative narrative of figurative art from the 1960s onwards in the United States. (The exhibition debuted at the RISD Museum last fall.) What Nerve! sets out to demonstrate that these groups share more than just their geographic distance from New York and Los Angeles, where the canon of art history grounds this time period.
Plastic Purses and Comic-Book Catalogues: American Postwar Art at the Margins
A Tale of Two Phoenixes
Phoenix at MASS MoCA (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)
First…
Hot Links, Upside-Down Christmas Tree Edition by Kyle Chayka
Christmas blues got you down? Have I got the solution for you! Check out a hot fresh batch of links for the lead-up to Christmas and all that other stuff, sure to delight, entertain, educate and amaze. I guarantee there is no Wojnarowicz or Blu content to be found. Above, I’ve switched out Natalie Jeremijenko’s upside-down trees at Mass MoCA for Christmas evergreens. How festive! READ MORE.
