Kent Shaw's Blog, page 13
March 17, 2014
How come California seems to know so much about...
How come California seems to know so much about spring??
Bouquets to Art 2014 opens tomorrow, March 18 at the de Young. This is the 30th anniversary of the annual floral show inspired by our permanent collection, and it promises to be the best year yet!
And just a reminder that PHOTOGRAPHY IS ALLOWED in our permanent collection galleries. We want to see this incredible event through your eyes, so make sure to tag your pictures @deyoungmuseum #bouquetstoart. Enjoy!
March 16, 2014
Sixth Finch - Winter 2014 - MRB Chelko - NEXT BE
This MRB Chelko has some fun going on. If you think it’s fun to make non-sentence phrase things that fit together like BRIO train cars with magnet couplings at each end, but here Chelko has taken to some slangy dip slang kind of non-sentence, but still very momentum sentence type things. Fun. FUN!
Sixth Finch - Winter 2014 - MRB Chelko - NEXT BE
March 13, 2014
The Whitney tumbled Donna Stonecipher’s poem...
The Whitney tumbled Donna Stonecipher’s poem today!!
THE DAILY PIC, Whitney Biennial edition: Biennial artist Paul Druecke collaborated with poet Donna Stonecipher on this wall work, which sits by the little bridge that links the Whitney Museum to the rest of New York. It captures the language of commemorative plaques that we place here and there across most of our cities, as we testify to the histories that we live among and that risk being lost to us. (I recognize the “falconer” line from the plaque on a Victorian statue that I jog by in Central Park, and the “somber, heavy, and even brutal” passage is boilerplate that refers to the Whitney itself.) By providing a mash-up of so many separate commemorations, Druecke and Stonecipher distill out a poignant, generalized sense of our efforts to preserve memories. When we put up any plaque, they seem to be saying, the act of erecting it matters as much as the information it bears. This Whitney work, you could say, is a plaque that commemorates all our other plaques. (Photo by Lucy Hogg)
The Daily Pic also appears at blogs.artinfo.com/the-daily-pic. For a full inventory of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
March 12, 2014
On Ghosts by Elizabeth Robinson
One of the things I really don’t feel I adequately covered in this review is its hybrid form. There really is a creative non-fiction element to the book, with its use of anecdote, its proposed argument, that I think softens what is normally a conceptual edge in Robinson’s poems. But I guess I wanted this review to think about the book on this conceptual ground.
Kent Shaw reviews Elizabeth Robinson’s On Ghosts today in Rumpus Poetry.
March 9, 2014
Jesus Christ. Armory 2014 looks like Las Vegas. I really love...
Jesus Christ. Armory 2014 looks like Las Vegas. I really love those little friezes at the top and bottom of the frame. They look like woodcuts. It feels like they stretch the whole piece way past the framed-in part.
View Ashley Bickerton's ”Eyeball Painting 1,” (2013), at the Armory Show (Booth 1000). This ‘landscape’ features handmade resin ‘eyeballs’, incorporating a range of images, from postcards to artistic masterpieces.
February 25, 2014
"But here, he has created a rich, intricately networked...
"But here, he has created a rich, intricately networked ecosystem in which frantic busywork staves off entropy and decline. In that, he may have even stumbled on an allegory for the art world." from The New York Times brief on his exhibit.
David Altmejd is just on top of on top. I can’t believe he brought the werewolves back, and he put them in those damn boxes. It’s like all that organic energy that was coming out of those sculptures, that was subsequently parsed out and under control, like some Agnes Martin painting that’s done using earrings, all of everything is coming into these sculptures. I want to be eaten by these sculptures.
February 24, 2014
Lesley Yalen: Four Poems from BETTER, issue four
To my mind, young love is a dangerous topic for poetry. It’s explosive. It’s foolish. And it’s immature. That makes two out of three reasons you should write about young love. But if that third reason takes up too much space, and it’s not aware of how silly immaturity can be, then it can truly sabotage everything else in the poem. Yalen’s first poem, “Goodnight Again” risks all that young love. Of course, in this case, it’s not really a risk. Yalen’s speaker is fascinating. She is explosive and foolish. She is so imaginative. But down-to-earth and nostalgic, too. “My family was still / asleep when I returned and the apartment / quivered like a feather on a grave.” appears in the same poem (“The Air Force Plans for Peace”) as “There was a military plane inexplicably / hovering over me and I hid from it.”
I got asked once at a one-night workshop what criteria I use when accepting a poem. It would be very easy if there was some single silver bullet that made a poem “Yes!” versus “Um. No.” Yalen’s poems felt like Yes! echoing in my brain. And for me it’s something about how the imaginative part percolates from among that down-to-earth-ness. It’s two different registers I’m not sure I expected to see.
February 23, 2014
tracydimond:
Amanda Fucking Palmer
I can’t help but pair...
Amanda Fucking Palmer
I can’t help but pair this with Jonathan Lethem’s “essay,” “The Ecstasy of Influence.” In particular, I think about the unstoppable spread of culture. No matter how high Disney raises their walls around Mickey, Mickey is going to appear in non-Disney situations. It is sad to think of how protective Disney is of that fact. Fortunately, culture is bigger than Disney. And I understand that a writer like Lewis Hyde has to start his argument from the property side of intellectual property, because everything about the copyright law in the United States is about private ownership.
But what I see Amanda Palmer speaking of here is culture as humans exchanging something that is not easily monetized. And I like that her assumptions do not start from the who-really-own-what side, but more the I am seeing real people in front of me. I live among real people. I live a radically open life with all these people who want to share that life with me. There is something in that gesture, in that quality of her personality, that feels like the definition of art.
February 22, 2014
"I like cutting in these paper birds. And then figuring out how...
"I like cutting in these paper birds. And then figuring out how to believe in it." Art 21’s video about Ellen Gallagher is not just fascinating from a craft standpoint. Meaning, I can’t get enough of her commentary on discovering her art while she’s making it. But I’m also fascinated at the art pieces themselves. Like organic charged up. Or cinched up, so that all the layers just feel as though they have so surprisingly fit together.
February 10, 2014
pacegallery:
Museum Monday: ”Chuck Close: Works on Paper,” an...
Museum Monday: ”Chuck Close: Works on Paper,” an exhibition at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, showcases Close works from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation. Don’t miss out—the show is on view through this Sunday, February 16.
Photograph by Austian Kennedy, courtesy Pace Prints.
Oklahoma City!!
