In "The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York," illustrator Matteo Pericoli asks well-known New Yorkers to describe what they see from their windows. This is the view of David Byrne, the musician and artist. "I think of my view as pretty typical for a New Yorker. We look out our windows at other windows. That, in a way, mirrors our lives here -- we are constantly looking at each other, millions of us, on the streets and elsewhere."
Films without end have been made about the heroes of sport, but who speaks for the fans, the fervent admirers and supporters no team can exist without? Who especially speaks not for the weekend dabbler but for the hard-core fanatic, the zealot who devotes an entire life to a team with the single-minded intensity of a monk meditating in a cave? "Big Fan" does, and it does it exceptionally well.
Written and directed by Robert Siegel and starring an ideally cast Patton Oswalt in the title role, "Big Fan" is a poignant, dead-on character study, an examination of a crisis in the life of the most die-hard of die-hard New York Giants football fans. Its situations can be outrageous, its dialogue is often scabrous, but its sense of the core reality it describes is impeccable.
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Permanence is not Urs Fischer’s game.
In recent years, the Swiss-born artist has built a full-scale chalet from crumbling loaves of crusty bread, placed a collapsing brick wall on a pile of rotting vegetables and produced life-size female nudes as burning candles. Gaping holes loom just as large.
In 2007, for example, he jackhammered a yawning, dirt-filled crater into the floor of his Manhattan gallery (above). For his first solo American museum show, opening Oct. 28 at the New Museum, Fischer has constructed a hallucinatory labyrinth of mirrored boxes based on a Manhattan streetscape, imprinting them with hundreds of images of familiar sights.
With the addition of massive cast-aluminum sculptures that suggest human torsos, the building-wide ‘‘introspective,’’ says the curator Massimiliano Gioni, ‘‘is like taking a walk through Fischer’s mind.’’ Or perhaps like seeing in the dark.
"Fashion at the Time of Fascism," out later this month from Damiani, struck me right away. Its pages are a collage of women framed in soft focus, elegantly attired and wistfully posed, all cigarettes and silhouettes. The refined furs and extravagant draperies are enough to make the glancing reader nostalgic for the reign of Mussolini.
The Third Triennial will mark the closing cycle of ICP's 2009 Year of Fashion,
A series of projects that critically examine fashion and its relationship to art and other cultural and social phenomena.
The theme of fashion encompasses a diverse range of practices and ideas, including explorations of identity and affiliation; the production, distribution, and consumption of images and goods; contemporaneity; age; gender; and global industry.
The themes of the Triennial express the exuberance, wit, and astute social observation taking place within contemporary image-making. These artists variously explore fashion—whether in everyday dress, haute couture, street fashion, or uniforms—as a celebration of individuality, personal identity, and self-expression, and as cultural, religious, social, and political statements.
As China marks the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, Katie Hill, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Art at the University of Westminster in London, looks at how art has moved from the realm of propaganda to the international marketplace.
via: BBC
Artists’ self-portraits hold an enduring fascination for the viewer. When confronting an artist’s self-image, we not only feed our curiosity about the creator’s appearance, but we also witness the maker in an act of self-encounter and are invited, at least ostensibly, to gain insight into his or her nature. In addition, we may be granted a glimpse into the private realms of the studio, the home, or the psyche. As it has developed in Western art over the last six hundred years, self-portraiture has served a variety of purposes for the artist—to practice and advertise one’s skill, to convey status and self-aggrandize, to indulge in fantasy and narcissistic impulse, or simply to document and impart private information publicly. The expediency of the genre is obvious—the subject is always conveniently at hand. For the artist, the mirror is an indispensable tool for recording his or her own image; the camera has served this purpose in myriad ways since photography’s invention.
The Lens and the Mirror: Self-Portraits from the Met Collection, 1957–2007
Now through December 6, 2009
