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☆ Off the Board Game, Onto the Digital Canvas
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-06 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The capricious churn of internet-charged culture is producing more main characters, apocrypha and relics than we can handle. Simon Denny, an artist working in Berlin, creates sculptures, installations, videos and prints inspired by the aesthetics of tech companies. In two concurrent shows in Manhattan he has seized on omens like the blade to explore the sociopolitical fallout of the technology industry’s taste for medieval lore. In Denny’s telling, dreams of wizards and blacksmiths, dark forests and dank castles shape the newest digital realms. The sculpture is plugged into a power strip that Denny sourced from a liquidation sale at Twitter during its Musk-mandated transition to X.

Persons: Grimes —, Elon Musk —, Simon Denny, ”, Denny Organizations: Twitter Locations: Canadian, Berlin, Manhattan, New York, Grimes

☆ Frame by Frame, an Artist Distills What Sports Cameras Blur
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-03 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

What would a basketball game be like without the ebb and flow of two teams, without the roar of the crowd? Like Paul Pfeiffer’s videos. In “Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon),” from 1999, the Charlotte Hornets’ star power forward Larry Johnson rocks back and forth, alone on the court, screaming in victory or agony. In “Race Riot,” hands reach in to brace a fallen Michael Jordan — his iconic jersey, number 23, is blank. They’re small, they’re silent — and they’re just for you, an intimate confrontation with extravaganzas meant for millions.

Persons: Paul Pfeiffer’s, Francis Bacon, Larry Johnson, Michael Jordan —, ” Pfeiffer, aren’t, extravaganzas Organizations: Museum of Contemporary Art, Charlotte Hornets Locations: United States, Los Angeles, East Harlem, Mexican

☆ For Thomas Hirschhorn, Handmade Art Keeps Us Human
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-01 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Gladstone Gallery looks like a war zone, the aftermath of a Call of Duty gaming session gone bad, the virtual gunmen downing Red Bull and chain smoking over their keyboards, until a bomb came through the roof. Energy drink cans made of tinfoil and mounds of cigarettes fashioned from plastic foam litter the paper desktops. The cardboard monitors, many of them spiderwebbed with cuts, sport color printouts of screenshots from first-person shooters and photos of unnamed but real war-torn cities. The installation, “Fake It, Fake It — Till You Fake It,” features plenty of charming, even funny details, like a box of plastic foam pizza slices or a couple of “I Heart NY” mugs. Hirschhorn warns of the weaponization of artificial intelligence and social media, represented by virtual forms of war — news feeds and games alike.

Persons: Gladstone, Thomas Hirschhorn Organizations: Red Bull, Energy Locations: Swiss

☆ At White Columns Annual, Outsiders Mix With Insiders
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-24 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

It’s pleasantly disorienting to enter the White Columns Annual in New York in 2024 and see so much work that could have been, and was, made any time in the last half century. There’s not a screen, QR code or 3-D print in sight. The Annual has one constraint. The curator must have seen the included work in New York City in the previous year. In this grass-roots way, the show offers a (very subjective, and therefore narrow) group portrait of an increasingly unwieldy scene.

Persons: It’s Locations: New York, New York City

☆ A Meteoric Career, Cut Short, Still Burns Bright
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-31 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A heavy irony hangs over Michael Richards’s work: The artist known for images of pilots, airplanes, wings and targets died, age 38, in the Sept. 11 attacks. He had spent the night in his studio on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower. But it’s likely that, had he lived, we would still be discussing Richards’s sculpture. In his handful of active years, he was beloved by curators and peers, and found consistent institutional support. Dread Scott, an artist and friend of Richards’s, recalled their conversations ranging over “W.E.B.

Persons: Michael Richards’s, Nari, Kerry James Marshall, Dread Scott, Richards’s, Du Bois, Wu Tang Clan, Richards, Rodney King Organizations: Trade, Bronx Museum, Arts, Jan Locations: Nari Ward, Brazil

☆ New Red Order: Artists With a Call to ‘Give It Back’
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-19 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The New Red Order named themselves after the Improved Order of Red Men, a largely white fraternal organization fond of Native regalia. It’s easy to mock grown men playing Indigenous dress-up, but the New Red Order see something deeper: the way American national identity has defined itself in terms of an idealized Native authenticity and freedom. “Even Indians play Indian. Indian people want to appear to be more traditionally Native American.”Over the past five years, Indigenous artists have gained global prominence. Land acknowledgments, which name specific tribes forced to leave an area, may seem to be a kind of progress — but the New Red Order say visibility is not the end, and could even hurt Indigenous artists, if people decide organizations have done enough.

Persons: Warren Harding, Franklin D, Roosevelt, Theodore, ” Zack Khalil, “, Jeffrey Gibson, Smith Organizations: Red, Liberty, Boston Tea Party, The Mississippi Choctaw, Cherokee, Whitney Museum, NRO Locations: Waco , Texas, The, United States, Venice, Kootenai Nation

☆ Land Art Today, Beyond Cowboys With Bulldozers
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-04 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I’m standing in a fallow field on the edge of the San Luis Valley, in south-central Colorado. To the east, beyond a windbreak of tough old trees, the Great Sand Dunes rise against the mountains, where for millenniums this same wind has piled up this same sandy soil. Its creator, the French artist Marguerite Humeau, 36, thinks a lot about extinction. They clack and whistle in the stronger gusts. But the land itself is the work.

Persons: Marguerite Humeau, “, ” Locations: San Luis Valley, Colorado, Denver, French

☆ Ed Ruscha’s ‘Chocolate Room’ Still Tantalizes
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-01 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A rich perfume wafts through the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, where the installation of Ed Ruscha’s full-dress survey “Now Then” is underway. You sense it before you see it: a room where the white walls are turning velvety brown. A chocolate room. “Chocolate Room” is an oddity in Ruscha’s influential oeuvre. Of the 85-year-old Nebraska native’s hundreds of projects — paintings, prints, and photo books; dry eulogies of Americana like SPAM cans and Mobil stations and two-lane blacktop — “Chocolate Room” is his only installation.

Persons: Ed Ruscha’s, McPherson, Daniel, whisks, Robyn, Lynda, Kayla, It’s Organizations: Museum of Modern Art, La Paloma Fine Arts company, Mobil Locations: Nebraska, New York

In order to face either one head on, you must stand on a small, uneven platform of homemade adobe bricks. This is a message from the artist: He’s not interested in a seamless viewing experience. It recalls his contribution to the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where he created a room of adobe bricks. Here, a winding path of bricks connects life-size portraits of members of esparza’s largely queer community. The paintings are also on adobe, referencing his Mexican heritage and accentuating his subjects’ brown skin.

Persons: rafa esparza’s, He’s, JILLIAN STEINHAUER Organizations: Art Basel Miami Beach, Biennial Locations: Los Angeles, New York

In important ways the New York contemporary art world was a much bigger place three decades ago than it is today, not in size but in its thinking. The first institutional solo show of the artist Edgar Calel, titled “B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone),” is a reminder of this. Obliquely, poetically, Calel refers to Mayan views of the earth as a dynamic, responsive, sacred being. (Sections of molded soil spell out the syllable “tik,” the sound he remembers his grandmother making to call wild birds for feeding.) The resulting SculptureCenter piece, beautiful to see, isn’t a “religious” work in any narrow sense.

Persons: Edgar Calel, Calel, HOLLAND COTTER Locations: York, Guatemala

☆ Mimicking the 19th Century in the Age of A.I.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Travis Diehl | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Five of his 11 paintings on view at Petzel incorporate A.I.-generated imagery, mostly buried in abstract spills and smears. Indeed, Price conjured the pictures using A.I., printed them “wet” on plastic, then smeared the ink with his fingers, adding an inimitable human touch. This is the distinctive garbled diction of image-generators, which imitate the look of words but not necessarily their meaning. It sure looks like a vintage photo, though: a black and white, worn-looking picture of two women, one hunching enigmatically behind the other. Human anatomy, like words, can be tricky for image-generating A.I.’s.)

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