Hermes Knauer, Part I

by Michelle Millar Fisher, August 2012. This month our Oral History Initiative features Hermes Knauer, armorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Part I, Knauer talks to Michelle Jubin about growing up in New York City, the comfort provided by the familiarity of a museum and the importance of Armistice Day in his own…

dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel

by Jonathan Beer, August 2012 dOCUMENTA’s best product is not art, but belief: in the integrity of art, its creation and the cultural foundations that support the process. The hundred-day exhibition is different from the increasing number of art fairs that have come to demarcate each passing art season. Not only does it stand independently…

The Weight of Our Decisions: Collaborative Exhibition Making

by Anthony Romero, August 2012 “I can take any empty space and call it a stage.”– Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 1968 In contemporary performance there is very often a negotiation between the wants of the individual and the collective decision-making potential of the group. In what could be described as a side effect of the…

Tomàs Saraceno at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

by Sam Jablon, August 2012 Tomàs Saraceno, whose work spans a cross-disciplinary practice that includes sculpture, installation, architecture, biology and astrophysics is showing Cloud City on the Metropolitan Museum’s rooftop, and concurrently at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City, an exhibition titled Air-Port-City/Cloud Cities. Based on the artist’s interdisciplinary practice, these two exhibits propose models for a floating…

London in Ruins: Olympics as Archaeology, Archaeology as Art

by Steven Thomson, August 2012 As the London 2012 Olympic Games come to a close, the city is keeping a keen eye on East London’s urban revitalization legacy, whose promise of prosperity was a driving factor in the city’s being awarded the Games in 2005. In contrast to this consensus-led urge towards development, artists such…

Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata at the Prada Foundation, Venice

by Sandra Orellana Sears, August 2012 Reproducibility is a concept we have grown far too accustomed to. The development of digital media has allowed for the limitless reproduction and dissemination of the finest masterpieces, providing intimate, instantaneous access to the once inaccessible. This also goes for less revered works of art, which with the onset…

Yoko Ono at the Serpentine Gallery, London

by Matthew Steinbrecher, August 2012 Now in her eighties, Yoko Ono creates work that remains as quietly forceful as ever. While many of her works responded to the disputed politics of Vietnam War-era America, others were deeply embedded in the biography of the artist. At Ono’s new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde…