Some months ago I was reading a Los Angeles art magazine’s review about an artist’s painting that had as its theme the terror attacks of 9/11. The reviewer made the following comment about the artwork: “the artist managed to de-politicize the work and therefore make its impact that much more dramatic.” The reviewer’s assertion reveals a pathological aversion to politics…
Stuart Jeffries writing for the UK Guardian, conducted a fawning interview with Jeremy Deller, winner of the esteemed Turner Prize. When the reporter asked, “You can’t draw, you can’t paint – how do you get the nerve to call yourself an artist?”, Deller replied, “The thing is – the world has moved on. You’re not writing with quills on parchment….
Jeremy Deller has won Britain’s most prestigious art award for his short film about Texas, Memory Bucket. The movie documents his travels through the US state, featuring encounters with locals and a visit to George W. Bush’s favorite burger bar near the “Western White House.” The Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize honors Deller’s knack for filmmaking by bestowing upon him a…
I’ve been studying Aztec art for decades. Many artists active in or familiar with the Chicano arts movement of America’s Southwestern states have appreciated the blunt figurative style and bold colors of the Aztecs. As African art influenced European artists to establish cubism, so too has Aztec art given inspiration to Mexican-American painters and print makers from the late 60’s…
On December 6th the British Tate Gallery will be announcing its winners for this years celebrated Turner Award. Of the artists on the short list to fame and monetary reward (around $48,000 US), not a single painter appears. Most of the postmodern conceptualists in the running have entered video installations. We’re told that politics abounds in the entries… as with…
“The spectacle… in ideology, art and culture, turns the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. ln this area, however, consumer society performs a…
German Expressionist artists like Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, George Grosz, and Max Pechstein had a profound influence on me over the years. In 1918 Pechstein wrote, “Art will no longer be considered, as it has been in the past, an interesting and genteel occupation for the sons of wealthy loafers. On the contrary, the sons of common people…
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp called a porcelain urinal art and entered it in a New York exhibit. He signed his “ready made” artwork, R. Mutt (a pun using the German word for poverty, “armut”). Eighty seven years later Duchamp is acknowledged as the spiritual father of today’s postmodern conceptualist artists… with one important distinction. Duchamp loathed the bourgeois art establishment…
