Gordon Matta Clark @ The Bronx Museum

*updated* 

       Philip Johnson once said that architecture is the art of how to waste space. Gordon Matta-Clark has quite obviously mastered such art, with his signature site-specific cuts and slices through abandoned buildings. The conical holes in a pre-bulldozed 17th-century Parisian townhouse and the rectangular cutouts through floors of many Bronx buildings are best examples of such artistic talent. Many people question whether or not he is an architect. I believe that he is more of a protest artist: like the title of the show "Anarchitect", he is a rebel that uses buildings as a medium for the expression of his political views. Visible on his floor plans and perspectives are remarks of protests against political corruption, goodwill for homelessness and defend against injustice to low-income households. 

        Matta-Clark's works are difficult to display in a museum due to their ephemeral and site-specific nature. The modestly sized Bronx museum underplayed the retrospective as it tries to incorporate too many works in its limited floor plan. However, the museum's close proximity to the sites of some of Gordon’s most prominent works in the Bronx adds immediacy to the exhibition. Walking through the 3 or 4 rooms, we can luckily see partial remedies of the actual artwork displayed. A chunk of wood from his Bronx Floors piece is displayed under photos of the work. Placed on a black pedestal, the chunk of blue wall-papered wood with sections of substrate still attached stands firmly against museum’s polished floor, and the juxtaposition calls for a displacement of time and space, adding another layer of meaning to the original intent. 

         The last room of the exhibition highlights two of Gordon’s most influential works- the Conical Intersect of 1974 in Paris and Day’s End of 1975 in Chelsea. The absence of the original work asks for a more well-rounded display of the piece through other mediums, such as videos, photographs, and paintings. As we understand that the original works do not exist anymore, the exhibition attempts to reconstruct the memory. Then the act of walking through the Bronx museum ultimately becomes a reconstruction of the destruction. 

Met Breuer Like Life Marco Lorenzetti

Met Breuer
Like Life
Marco Lorenzetti - New version #2



After walking down from the astounding review of Leon Golub, slightly in a daze from the monumentality of his work, I arrived at the entrance of “Like-Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body". The show is a broad scope of how the body was used and rendered throughout history in different mediums, stylistic approaches and applications of color. It was the clash of so many different genres and figurative artworks created, spanning from the 13th century to contemporary works that made such an impact on me. Interesting pairings allowed for conceptual and visual connections to be made. In the first room to the left was Koon's Michael Jackson with pet monkey piece next to highly elaborate Rococo porcelain scene of a bucolic pasture, painted to an extraneous degree. These two pieces offered interesting commentaries on excess and lavishness, orbiting embracing these morals and also poking fun at the irony it plays within our own culture currently.
Each room was labeled in regards of an overall theme that tied the pieces in the space together there were eight different sections. A jarring and spectacular room titled "Color" included works that dealt with the self portrait or face mask created throughout history in different media. The piece by Marc Quinn was striking. A frozen face mask in silicon created from 8 pints of his own blood. Exiting the show through the last room I was confronted by the most bizarre pieces I believe to have been included in the show. Among them was Maurizo Cattelan's wax John F. Kennedy in a casket. In its entirety it truly is a show that cannot be missed. I do hope you do see it before it closes.

Danh Vo “Take My Breath Away” at the Guggenheim

Danh Vo “Take My Breath Away”- #3

This show did indeed take my breath away. It stuck with me for awhile afterword’s. It’s the idea of framing an idea in such a way, an orchestration of context that was so impactful to me. Vo does it in many ways. Often it is the nature of the contrasting elements within his work, re-contextualizing objects and perhaps changing or broadening their meaning. A piece like “Your mother sucks cocks in hell, 2015”. A line taken from the film The Exorcist. After watching many talks with Mr. Vo, I couldn’t help to be further affected by the level of detail but also and air of something magical, like pieces or ideas at times would fall into his lap. I recall a video of him recounting how he obtained a large amount of whale bones. His childhood was a tumultuous one, strewn with the presences of war and having to abandon one’s home and find a new one at a young age. The work wasn’t boisterous, loud, or in your face. My personal favorites were the combine sculptures, where specific works from history were dissected and made anew. I think the Guggenheim museum is a space that many artists find their work looking or reflected upon disagreeably because of the architecture of the space. This is due to the slanted nature of the building and the ascending or descending effect of how you travel through the museum. Because Vo did not overfill the space, there were vacancies of space between each work that were extremely important. I would highly recommend the show.

Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away

The thing that strikes me in the exhibition and Vo’s work is the continuity of his work through in his art career. He is extremely sensitive and able to extract, collect, and select ready-made objects, as well as familiar objects that contain symbolic meanings, representations, and even historical meanings from different places and time periods. Danh Vo's philosophy is not "creating" an object to make art but presenting something already powerful but sometimes hard to noticed or easily ignored without his manipulating.

He makes work by reconstructing, deconstructing, and presenting ready-made objects. In his work, We the People (detail) (2011–16), Vo disassembles a one-to-one replica of the Statue of Liberty, regarded as the symbol of America. The reproduction of the Statue of Liberty is not a ready-made object but does have meaning, as the Statue of Liberty

Some works evoke history museums instead of art museums. For example, A Group of 4 Presidential Signing Pens (2013) simply shows four pen heads that were used to sign a bill that affected the Vietnam war. Evidence of a significant event, it raises a question to the viewer: "The pen heads are here but where are the people who used them?" Vo’s work Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Room Chairs (2013) shows exactly what the title indicates. These two chairs may have historical value like objects in museums, but Vo collects them and presents them as his own artwork. I think one fascinating thing in the show is that you can stand in front of something that has been through important moments in history. These objects help you visualize and connect back to these moments. Vo's exhibition creates a space in-between a history museum and an art museum asking whether it can be both of them at the same time.  

Sympathizing with Computers at Gavin Brown Enterprise

Avery Singer subtly challenges traditional notions of painting in her show “Days of the Weak (Computer Pain)" at Gavin Brown Enterprise. Set against a backdrop of blue grids, her crude 3D renderings clearly draw attention to the digitality of the works. In a medium that reveres the demonstration of the hand of the artist, Singer removes all signs of her own workmanship in her paintings by modeling them digitally, then carefully recreating the models through airbrushing.

The first painting one sees upon walking into the gallery is Calder (Saturday Night), which I thought was interesting because it was the most unlike the other pieces. Calder is Singer’s only painting in the show that has a collaged look in addition to appearing airbrushed, and only painting that features a recognizably human figure smoking a joint and staring at a light in his hand, as if in a trance. The painting feels voyeuristic, as if the viewer is intruding in. The color of the wall is a sickly green and a foreboding shadow casts over the figure from the direction of the viewer.

This ominous tone is repeated in Kundry, named after a mythological figure but depicted as a pink humanoid sitting in a gridded room. The way the figure fills the frame, its complete lack of headroom, and the harsh contrast of light and dark are evocative of a prison cell. Many of Singer’s paintings, including Kundry, have a claustrophobic quality to them that is elevated in the open, high-ceilinged galleries at Gavin Brown. Because parameters such as foreground, background, and walls are clearly defined, the paintings feel even more confined to their own spaces.

While Calder evokes a feeling of simultaneously being captivated and held captive by technology; the computer demon in Kundry hangs its head low, as if in sympathy or defeat. These paradoxes in human and humanoid behavior pose an interesting question of whether the “pain” described in the title of the show is referring to the pain of computers, or pain caused by computers to humans.
Singer’s work speaks to today’s digital world, but feels oddly dated. Her airbrushed painting technique reminds me of the '90s computer game Kid Pix, and the neon blue grid feels like an overused science fiction trope. One of the Untitled pieces, a painting of a giant earring on a background of blue skies and green grass, resembles a Windows XP Background. These elements of the show feel representative of the difficulties in making art about today’s technology, which evolves so fast that using styles from the '90s already feels nostalgic.

Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body at Met Breuer

       Nothing is better than walking around and inspecting these vivid sculptures in the lifelike show. It is really an excited and surprising exhibition which shows figurative sculptures made by artists from 1300 to the present and it includes more than 120 sculptures. In addition to the sculptures themselves, most of figures accompanied with clothes and property or set in a specific scene and that makes these works more vivid and authentic. 

       Each sculpture is paying great attention to texture, such skin, hair and fabric. These elements are made to life through the use of various materials and different sculpting skills. When the warm spotlights lighting on the these sculptures, they made me feel like I was looking at oil paintings because they are too realistic. Meanwhile it is so different because these works are built in three dimensions. Compare with the individual art piece, the concept of whole exhibition seems much more meaningful to me. It is not just a collection of sculptures with superb sculpting skills and great likeness. These works are roughly arranged chronologically. I would like to consider this arrangement as an overview of the history of figurative sculptures. It contains the evolution of sculptures and art in many aspects, such as the style of sculpture, the choice of materials, etc. From the first classical marble sculpture to last modern mixed media one, the materials and items that artists used, the contents of their works, and the classes they concerned are totally different. The purpose of creating sculptures is completely different because artists from different ages are affected by different social environments. Some of them intended to express emotions and personal ideas, some were recording people and events as well as others were doing experimentations and research. And all of them are in a hyper-realistic style. That is why these sculptures have diverse styles and topics. That is the reason why this exhibition is so mind-blowing and impressing.