Earlier this year Martha Rosler took over the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium with her Meta-Monumental Garage Sale. He work is back at MoMA now in “Performing Histories (1),” an exhibition that features an even more pointed work by Rosler: She Sees in Herself a New Woman Everyday (1976). The piece is made up of 12 color photographs of a woman’s shoes and legs arranged in a grid on the floor. (A detail from one of the 12 is above.) The piece includes sound of a woman having a talk with her own mother. The piece raises questions about gender and how gender-related identity is constructed.
Rosler was the guest on Episode No. 27 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, a program that was taped in front of a live audience at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe via iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. See images of art Rosler and I discussed.
This screen-capture from the live webcam in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium reveals that Wolfgang Laib’s Pollen from Hazelnut is just about installed! It opens to the public on Wednesday. At 18-by-21 feet, it will be the largest pollen field Laib has made.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Laib, who is installing not one but two major works in the U.S. this season. The second will be at The Phillips Collection, which will open the Laib Wax Room, a new permanent installation, on March 2. It will be the first permanent installation at the Phillips since the museum opened its Rothko Room in 1960.
Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program.
This is the first week Martha Rosler’s “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art. The garage sale — yes, it really is a garage sale! — is open for business in the museum’s cavernous atrium through November 30.
MoMA has put up a fun website for the show, complete with a webcam of commerce in action. And don’t miss Rosler’s ‘artist’s newspaper’ for the show!
Rosler was the guest on Episode No. 27 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, an episode that was taped in front of a live audience at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe via iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. See images of art Rosler and I discussed.
Image: Martha Rosler’s Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA.
The second guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is curator/historian Mia Fineman, who talks about her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
The show goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here, or you will be able to once the Met’s website is back online. In the wake of Sandy, it’s down.) The exhibition is accompanied by one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
A common use of manipulated photography — almost from the start — has been propaganda such as this. Mikhail Rozulevich used over 300 pictures in the Soviet state archive to make this image, which was installed in trains throughout Leningrad.
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Image: Mikhail Rozulevich, The Reality of Our Plan is Active People (detail), 1858. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The first guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is one of the world’s top abstract expressionism scholars: David Anfam. In recent years Anfam has been working with the new Clyfford Still Museum on its collections and installations. The CSM is currently showing selections from its collection alongside “Vincent/Clyfford,” an installation that demonstrates how Still looked closely at van Gogh. The museum has also just published “Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum,” which features a major essay by Anfam on Still’s life and work. (Amazon offers the book for $25 off.)
If you think you’ve seen this 1944 Still (shown above in a detail) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you sorta have. Still sometimes painted multiple versions of similar compositions, but there may be a little more than that to why there are two versions of this composition. Here’s the version Still kept for himself, and here’s the version he sold to MoMA, which Still said he made “willfully of indifferent quality.” I tell the full Still vs. MoMA story here.
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Image: Clyfford Still, 1944-N No. 1 (detail), 1944. Collection of the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Stephanie Barron, the curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s major retrospective of Ken Price. The exhibition is on view through Jan. 6, 2013.
Better yet!: It’s not just LACMA that’s celebrating Ken Price: In New York, the Museum of Modern Art has installed a gallery of Prices from its collection. It includes the piece above, Troy Decuto (detail, 2003), the marvelously androgynous Slenderella (2003), Redneck (2002), Pacific (2000) and Flatso (1999) as well as works on paper such as the whimsical Double Frog Cup (1968).
Price is a sculptor who worked with clay, paint and forms rooted in whimsy, erotics and the history of sculpture across many cultures. He died in February at age 77.
Barron is LACMA’s senior curator of modern art. Her exhibition credits include co-curating with Maurice Tuchman a retrospective of David Hockney, an exhibition of Hockney’s portraits and a series of landmark exhibitions on German modern and contemporary art.
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Image: Ken Price, Troy Decuto (detail), 2000. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Alexander Calder, Elephant Chair with Lamp, 1928. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Sue Coe, Woman Walks into Bar — Is Raped by Four Men on the Pool Table — While 20 Watch, 1983. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Cross-posted from Modern Art Notes: Yesterday Missouri GOP Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin said that victims of “legitimate rape” do not get pregnant and that women have a biological defense that prevents them from becoming pregnant if raped. According to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 32,000 American women become pregnant each year after being raped. Last year presumptive GOP vice-presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan tried to re-define rape to require “force,” whatever that means. Presumably this counts?
You should read what Coe said about this painting here. It’s pretty astonishing.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features a rare interview with Robert Adams.
Among the topics Adams and I discuss is the quality of light in Colorado and how Adams has tried to capture it in his work. Pictured here is a slight cropping of one of Adams’s best pictures, Sunday school class, Colorado Springs, Colorado (click to see the whole picture), from the 1968-71 series “The New West.” On this week’s show, Adams and I discuss the light in this picture — and the hidden-in-plain-sight secret embedded in it. (Hint: That mountain in the background is mighty famous…)
Adams may be the greatest living American photographer. In the 1960s and 1970s he brought a new sensibility to photographing the most classic subject in American art, the land. By emphasizing man’s impact on Colorado and its suburbs in series such as “The New West” and “What We Bought,” Adams helped pioneer art that addressed our impact on the landscape and on the Earth.
A major retrospective of his 46-year career is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. Titled “The Place We Live,” it’s on view through October 28.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. View images of artworks discussed on the show.
Image: Robert Adams, Sunday school class, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast travels to Arcadia with Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Joseph Rishel and Kimbell Art Museum deputy director George Shackelford. Rishel is the curator of “Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia,” a major exhibition that opens today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Shackelford, who was the head of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston before decamping for the Kimbell, contributed a catalogue essay on the MFAB’s great Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98).
Rishel is the senior curator of European painting before 1900 at the PMA. His previous exhibitions include a major 1996 Cezanne retrospective and 2009’s “Cezanne and Beyond,” which surveyed Cezanne’s influence on generations of painters.
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Image: Pablo Picasso, Five Nudes (study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), 1907. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Click on the image to expand.)
This is Drowning Girl (1963), one of Roy Lichtenstein’s first comic-strip-referencing paintings. Lichtenstein, a fan and student of art history, said that the painting was inspired by Hokusai’s famed woodcut The Great Wave Off of Kanagawa (1829-32).
The painting is included in the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features the exhibition’s curator, James Rondeau, the head of the contemporary art department at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition is the first career-length survey of Lichtenstein’s art and the first retrospective of the artist in 18 years.
To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. Click here to see images of art discussed on the show.
Image: Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features one of the greatest living artists, Robert Irwin. A exhibition of Irwin’s newest work is on view now at The Pace Gallery in New York, where Irwin and I taped this week’s show.
The piece pictured here is one of Irwin’s first pieces made out of scrim, a thin, ephemeral, synthetic material that Irwin used to great effect starting in the 1970s. On this week’s show, Irwin talks about how he ‘discovered’ scrim and about how he used it in his studio starting in 1969, first exhibited a scrim piece guerilla-style at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and then did this major piece at the Walker Art Center in 1971. Don’t miss the Walker’s fascinating blog post about Irwin’s 1971 installation. There are some great pictures there too. That untitled work is in the Walker’s collection; the museum has installed it four times.
To download the program directly to your mobile device/PC, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. To see images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Robert Irwin, Untitled, (1971). Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
The art: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Echo of a Scream, 1937.
The news: “Fresh violence rages in Libya,” Al Jazeera English.
The source: Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
