If you are in New York this weekend, check out the photo show at Lost Weekend. It features the art work of talented local photographer, Tommy Colla.
Where: Lost Weekend: 45 Orchard St, New York, NY.
When: April 11th, 7PM-10PM
More info here.
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Photo Show: Lost Weekend NYC
Rockaway SHORE Relief Restaurant
An excellent way to get involved with (or continue to work on) Sandy recovery efforts in Rockaway is to join this Kickstarter campaign for an environmentally sustainable, pay-as-you-can community kitchen providing access to healthy, local food. Check it out! Only 24 more days left to help!
National Geographic Found
To celebrate their 125 years of existence, National Geographic have launched an official Tumblr dedicated exclusively to showing off a wide array of photographs from their historic archives, many of which have until now been unpublished. The result is equal parts journey back in time and inspiration for preserving and cultivating our cultures and environments. Quite possibly the most interesting thing about the collection is the unlikely sight of animals and nature amidst everyday life that seems sorely missing today. From a woman sitting atop an emu, to another hitching up a horse to a parking meter, the blog is sure to make you yearn for a little more wild in your life.
Italian Art of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s in New York
New Yorkers have recently benefitted from exhibitions of little-known (on these shores, at least) Italian artists whose work from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s is quite spectacular. First there was an exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery of folded and graphically treated paintings by Giorgio Griffa. (That’s one of them above.) Then there was the work in multiple mediums by Gianni Colombo, which was on view until the end of March at Greene Naftali. You can see pictures of that exhibition by clicking here.
For-ev-ah Young
Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is ostensibly a beach movie, thus earning a place on the Harmony blog, right? I hope so, as it gives me an excuse to post my favorite review of the film thus far, by Amy Taubin for Artforum.com. A sample:
When the camera has its fill of gravity-defying boobs, it switches to buttocks, and then to hot-pink-tinted lips fellating red, white, ’n’ blue popsicles, then back again, over and over until you might wonder when the story is going to begin or if this giddy, tawdry, MTV-on-ecstasy spectacle is all there is—a visual ground for the movie’s genius ambient sound track that punctuates Cliff Martinez’s anxiety-driven electronica with Skrillex’s dub-step riffs and intermittent backbeats of assault rifles cocked or fired. Close your eyes and make up your own pictures. Because some of those on the screen, their dazzling mix of pop excess and stringent form notwithstanding (even Warhol stuck to halftones for the “Death and Disaster” paintings), are just too ugly. And I’m not referring only to the glimpse of the kid passed out or maybe dead on the floor beside a stopped-up toilet. Did she OD on Skittles? Can a movie be too colorful to swallow?
To read the rest, click here.
Suzan Frecon, cathedral series, variation 10
Suzan Frecon, cathedral series, variation 10, 2012, oil on wood panel, 12 x 9 3/4 inches
Rail: Do you think of your paintings as being derived from nature?
Frecon: Oh, I think nature is a given. It’s impossible to say we aren’t from nature. To me, nature is everything and I don’t put it in those terms where you say they derive from nature but—I was always trying to figure out—I know how important the environment is to me, and I am always so angry against the environmental terrorists, i.e. the Bush administration who seems hell-bent on destroying it! I can never explain how important it is to art. One way is the experience of looking, walking in the woods, looking at a sunset, is comparable to the experience of looking at art or listening to music. It’s just so much a part of the soul of humanity. When you are looking at the Cézanne for example, or a Pomo basket, you just feel strongly about this captured feeling. I would love it if I could aspire to capture something comparable in my paintings.
Rail: You mean something fleeting that’s at the same time completely structured?
Frecon: It’s just innate. One painting that I am working on, actually I think the beginning came from that I grew up on an orchard and I was eating plums, and the colors were so intense in the summertime, inherent in plums, that I said I’ve got to do a painting finding something of these colors.
Fracking and Earthquakes
Though the links between earthquakes and human activity have long been discussed, evidence is gathering that strongly correlates the use of fracking to obtain fuels from the earth to these natural disasters. Mother Jones recently published Michael Behar’s account of an unlikely 5.7 quake in Oklahoma in 2011, and the manmade circumstances that appear to have led to it.
The piece is an interesting read, not just for the single case study, but for the very idea that we as people can indirectly cause a massive shift in our environment. In this case, it may not matter to what extent we are to blame for certain disasters, but we may want to take it as a caution to do whatever we can to avoid setting certain fates into motion.
Jerry Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show
Are changes in the art market rendering the gallery show obsolete? Jerry Saltz thinks this may be the case, and that it might have profound repercussions:
The clustering of hundreds of galleries in several neighborhoods has meant that a huge swath of the art world is continually being presented at our doorstep. That is changing, and changing fast. These days, the art world is large and spread out, happening everywhere at once. A shrinking fraction of galleries’ business is done when collectors come to a show. Selling happens year-round, at art fairs, auctions, biennials, and big exhibitions, as well as online via JPEG files and even via collector apps. Gallery shows are now just another cog in the global wheel. Many dealers admit that some of their collectors never set foot in their actual physical spaces.
The beloved linchpin of my viewing life is playing a diminished role in the life of art. And I fear that my knowledge of art—and along with it the self-knowledge that comes from looking at art—is shrinking.
Click through to read more.
