Observer
‘Liquid Reality’ at MoMA Explores the Intersections of Shigeko Kubota
(12/03/2021)
Fluxus is everything we’re interested in now: mixed media, beyond categorization, collaborative processes. But Fluxus isn’t the first thing we talk about; it isn’t the toast of the table, or the footnote on the opening page. Fluxus is too many mediums, too many people, and we need heroes with superpowers. To sell Wheaties and paintings and records and newspapers and search histories and all the junkola we need to be heroes to ourselves—like brand new Cadillacs, and Hermes belts, and Dr. Squatch soap.
The problem of Shigeko Kubota is the problem of collaborative artists. The collaborative spirit isn’t how we move product or entertainment; it doesn’t feed our marketplace or nourish our narcissism. Kubota was integral to Fluxus and the works of the Fluxus artists we talk about—Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, John Cage, Nam June Paik, etc. To present her without that context is to tear meaning from the work, but to isolate her within Fluxus is to diminish her work’s importance and dollar value.
In “Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality,” the Museum of Modern Art assembles six of the artist’s sculpture and video installation hybrids …
Wong Ping’s Work Reflects on Primitive Instinct, the Internet, and Desire
(10/04/2021)
Hong Kong. After the day job, Wong Ping went back to his apartment and worked on weirdo, not very technically sophisticated animations. For friends and maybe a few other eccentric, erotic neurotics of the internet. Repressed political statement? Sure. But not when nobody was paying attention. Ten years of the brazen menagerie of proto-animals and distended body parts, and Ping has emerged as a legitimate artist with an international status. The New Museum’s “Wong Ping: Your Silent Neighbor,” (which closed yesterday) gathered six videos and one work on vinyl for the artist’s first “American survey.” …
Outsider No More, Niki de Saint Phalle’s First NYC Exhibition at MoMA PS1 Dazzles
(05/06/2021)
“The worst part of all serious disease is the anxiety it causes in those who are sick to those who love them. We must overcome our fear. When someone has AIDS, it’s safe to be friendly. Laugh with them. Cry with them. … AIDS is everyone’s problem and no one’s fault.If each one of us takes care and is responsible AIDS will be under control. Until then, we must learn to live with AIDS.”
Everything about Niki de Saint Phalle’s AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands, seemed impossible: the childlike treatment of the total horror; an artist seeking humanity from a global community; an aesthetic that balanced downtown NYC, Upper East Side lux and Parisian illo…
Isamu Noguchi’s Quest for the Perfect Ashtray
(01/25/2021)
Isamu Noguchi is the beautiful youth, part Dionysus, part future of mankind: curly-headed, bare-armed, enthralling and cosmopolitan. Sidewalk cafes, cigarettes and haloes of cirrus smoke. He is the acolyte: at the altar of Constantin Brâncuși in the expatriate days of Paris; and, in prewar China and Japan, still propelled by a 1925 Guggenheim award, a student of traditional Japanese forms—brush drawing with Qi Baishi, and ceramics with Jinmatsu Uno. Then, he is the master himself, and then the fading divinity, alongside Martha Graham and John Cage and luminaries of mid-century avant-gardism, summering through The Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy.
Noguchi, born in 1904, was of a generation that endured the Spanish Flu, decades of global economic depressions, and two world wars. As an American, Noguchi came of age when the nation was alit with the Red Summer race riots of 1919, and the Suffragette movement, which gained the right to vote for women in 1920. If Noguchi’s generation was necessarily constrained by the armatures and mores of the nineteenth century, they were also wildly progressive, and sexually promiscuous by even today’s standards. They were the contradictions of rapid change: the roaring twenties, prohibition, economic catastrophe, and empire in decline. ..