Worker’s Meeting (or “Mitin Obrero”), was a two-story mural painted by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Created on an outside wall of the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles, it depicted a militant union organizer addressing a multi-ethnic crowd on a LA street corner. The mural was revolutionary in more ways than one. It was the first time anyone…
I first became aware of the works of Christo in 1972 while reading, Towards Revolutionary Art (TRA), a small left-wing arts journal from San Francisco. TRA had published a caustic attack upon Christo for his Valley Curtain project (pictured above), a huge barrier of orange nylon fabric hung in Rifle Gap, Colorado. TRA’s fierce diatribe savaged Christo for his “$700,000…
It is a sin and a shame when fellow artists and others who should know better, say that “painting is dead.” The first artistic impulse of Paleolithic humans was to paint realistic images of animals on cave walls. There are such paintings in Lascaux France believed to be over 17,000 years old, and up to the very present humans continue…
In Artnet Magazine’s year end report, The 2004 Revue, editor Walter Robinson unconsciously laid bare everything that’s wrong with the art world. The first remark he made that raised my hackles was, “we don’t have art movements any more, we have market movements.” And in what part of the 20th century have artists not been buffeted and controlled by market…
Starting this January 6th, the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles is holding an exhibit of photos by Tseng Kwong Chi, and reading from the press release the show presents “tongue-in-cheek images of the artist posing as a Chinese Communist dignitary or ‘Ambiguous Ambassador’ in a world utterly alien to his persona, complete with the classic Mao suit, dark glasses…
In 1848 the young French painter Gustave Courbet and a circle of dissident artists and intellectuals regularly met at a Parisian café called the Brasserie Andler. It was there after many lively discussions that the term “Realism” was first used to describe the style of art and literature the mavericks were striving for. The art establishment richly rewarded those who…
What is Neoism? Just another permutation of postmodern entropy. An incomprehensible and pointless muddle posturing as the latest avant-garde art movement. Best summed up by its founder, Istvan Kantor, when he stated, “We are the Neoists, do not listen to us.” German police arrested Kantor last November on charges of property damage. He had splashed a container of his own…
In September of 2004, Battleship Potemkin, the revolutionary film by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, was shown in an open air screening in London’s Trafalgar Square. Some 40,000 people gathered to see the film. Today it was announced that a newly restored print of Eisentein’s 1925 classic will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival this coming February. The new print…
