Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Dear John” – Lina McGinn’s absorbing and ostensibly playful solo show of sculptures at the expansive Europa Gallery in the Two Bridges neighborhood – manifests fine technique and a conceptual sensibility deeper than it might first appear. Using fiberglass resin and polymerized gypsum to isolate and fix discarded and distressed cardboard boxes in a range of anthropomorphic poses, she achieves something quite familiar in art – the personification of inanimate objects – in a singularly inventive way.
Tag: Salvador Dali
Call it Orphism
Contributed by Adam Simon / At a Four Walls event in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, Erik Oppenheim, at that time a young artist, stood up and said, “I’m starting an art movement. Anyone who wants to join, meet me in the back after the show.” It was a hilarious and audacious gesture, in part because no one joins an art movement on a whim, like a list-serve or an exercise class, but also because there hadn’t been any artist-initiated movements for a very long time. They proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the advent of Impressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dada, and enjoyed something of a resurgence in the 1960s with Fluxus in the United States, Supports/Surfaces and Zero in Europe, and the Gutai Group in Japan. Most of what we consider movements were proclaimed by an outside observer, usually a critic or curator, looking to group artists who had similar concerns and made work that fit the designation. For the artists themselves to rally around a specific cause, even an aesthetic one, was not required.
The Wild Art of Barbara Westman
Contributed by David Carrier / Just to the left of my writing desk is a painting of a magnificent tree with bright orange blossoms. Below it is a now faded postcard of a drawing of Barbara Westman, who died earlier this year at age 95, and her husband Arthur Danto sitting on a sofa with their dogs Charlotte and Emilia. To the right, a work on paper shows Danto taking the dogs for a walk in Manhattan. These Westman pieces more than hold their own against the prints of old European master works, Japanese woodcut, and Bill Anthony drawings that surround them. Anytime I feel discouraged by the slow progress of my work or the political news, I need only look at them to be cheerful again.