Speaking with Ryan McNamara

by Danny Kopel, June 2011 Thursday, June 9, 2011. 2pm: Artwrit met with Ryan McNamara at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York to relate the ins and outs of performance art, the delicate matter of documenting live work and his fool-proof technique for overcoming stage fright. Audio + transcript below.  Ryan McNamara: Hi, my name is Ryan McNamara, and…

Francis Alÿs at MoMA, New York

by Carla Sakamoto, June 2011 Currently on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception has a title that gives one pause for thought. What is the deception? Who is being deceived? And is the “story” one of fact or fiction? With no overtly apparent through-line of aesthetic style,…

Hardware: On Recent Work by Hilary Lloyd

by Ian Wallace, June 2011 An attitude towards contemporary art that veers toward a formal approach to materials, one that would have seemed so old-fashioned a few decades ago, seems to be undergoing a certain resurgence, and particularly in the most immaterial media. Left to art historians are such grand narratives as Martha Rosler’s image…

Anish Kapoor at Le Grand Palais, Paris

by Peter Krasz, June 2011 Each year, MONUMENTA invites a prominent contemporary artist to appropriate the 13,500m2 of the Grand Palais nave with a site specific work. For 2011, they have commissioned Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor to create Leviathan, an aesthetic and sensorial playground, which explores concepts so vast and ranging as space, corporality and memory.…

Questions for Joel Mesler of Greater LA

by Heather Corcoran, June 2011 The elevator opens onto a stretch of the California Freeway, the side of the road. Ruben Ochoa’s shape-shifting Lenticular print is the opening image of Greater LA, a survey of contemporary art from Los Angeles, an exhibition located—curiously—in the heart of SoHo. His highway is an iconic image of a city…

Artspeech at MoMA, New York

by Michelle Millar Fisher, June 2011 What is “art speech” and how does it function and change across contexts, as art practice, interpretive gesture, vehicle of critique or connoisseurial, canonical voice? Is the spoken word just a lesser afterimage of text or is art speech always more compelling in person? Part of the annual Contemporary Art Forum…

Fred Sandback at Whitechapel, London

by Echo Hopkins, June 2011 Using only acrylic yarn and an occasional bit of wire, the Fred Sandback retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery transforms the room where it’s housed into a geometric minimalist landscape. The collection of work showcased spans almost four decades, and is comprised of two large works, specifically remade to fit the space,…

In Conversation with Ken Gonzales-Day

by Avram Finkelstein, June 2011 Most societal notions sit on a constantly shifting plain, repositioning over time. Since its rise during the Enlightenment, Physiognomy—the study of human character based on outward appearance—has advanced and receded in social credibility. As our cultural conscience, art is meant to illuminate how theories such as this become agents of…