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artists

By Andrew Russeth 3/05 5:46pm

artists

Installation view of 'Curator's Office,' 2013, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery)

Explorers’ Club: Mark Dion Has Turned Globe-Trotting Natural Science Into an Art Form

The artist Mark Dion’s C.V. begins normally enough, but it has a quirk. “Born in 1961 in Bedford, Massachusetts,” it reads, and then, “lives in New York and works worldwide.”

“As much as I live in New York, until I came back, I’d only been here for six days for all of January and half of February,” Mr. Dion told The Observer over coffee at Cookshop in Chelsea last month. His appearance and bearing are those of a polished university professor; he’s a little quiet at first, but loquacious once he gets going. “I really am on the road all the time,” he said. He had recently been to Dallas and Minneapolis, and had just returned from a three-week expedition in Naples, researching the urbane 18th-century British ambassador Sir William Hamilton for an upcoming show in the city. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 3/05 11:36am

artists

5 Photos

Merely a Mistake II No. 6, 2009–11

‘I Wanted to Get Rid of Style’: Liu Wei on His Show at Lehmann Maupin

Last Wednesday afternoon, the day before his solo show opened at Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea space, Chinese artist Liu Wei could be found darting about the gallery, carefully examining his tall sculptures. He has a perfectly shaved head, and was wearing smart glasses, a sweater and a thin gold necklace. He looked a bit like a globetrotting architect as he held a black marker, signing the pieces.

Though Mr. Liu is widely acclaimed on the international art circuit, this is his first one-person show in the United States. “We decided to do more of an introductory exhibition that will let people get to know my work,” he told me through his translator, Jesse Coffino, who works regularly with the artist Xu Bing in Beijing. Read More

By Michael H. Miller 2/20 3:51pm

artists

mcall

Shine On: Anthony McCall Dusts Off His Career and Heads Back to the Spotlight

Last Friday, a few hours before the opening of his new exhibition, the artist Anthony McCall was standing on a large pile of crumpled newspaper pages that covered the floor of a small room inside Sean Kelly Gallery on 10th Avenue. In the center of the room was a screen that was playing old footage of a group of people standing on a large pile of crumpled newspaper pages that covered the entire floor of a small room, taking one another’s photographs. You could tell the footage was old because everyone in it wore bell-bottoms and had feathery, shoulder-length hair. There was no sound in the film itself, but there were speakers playing—uncomfortably loudly—the various sounds made by the exact types of cameras seen in it. There were mirrors on opposite sides of the room, as well as in the room in the footage, so that the reflection of the screen repeated. A young Mr. McCall appears in the film, his hair brushed out of his eyes across his forehead, wearing one of those skin-tight mucus-colored shirts that seem to have only been manufactured in the 1970s; his presence in the room at Sean Kelly, older now, looking almost stately, with thinning gray hair cropped tight to his scalp, only made the echo chamber of the installation stranger. Read More

By Dan Duray 2/05 7:23pm

artists

Zero Dark Thirty.

Point Break: As Oscar Calls, a Look at Kathryn Bigelow’s Decade in the NYC Art World

Lawrence Weiner met Kathryn Bigelow at a party at Gordon Matta-Clark’s house in Soho in the early 1970s, when she was around 22. She was, in the words of a boyfriend from that time, “the most beautiful woman on God’s green Earth,” and Mr. Weiner, well, he was 10 years older. He was also already an artist of some note, and though he’d seen Ms. Bigelow around, he’d never spoken with her. He thought they might work together. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 2/05 6:29pm

artists

Fend harvesting algae for biofuel in New Zealand. (Courtesy the artist)

Brother, Can You Spare $2 Billion?: Is Artist Peter Fend an Autodidactic Genius or a Globetrotting Gadfly?

Who is Peter Fend?

“The Buckminster Fuller of the New Wave,” art critic Alan Jones suggested in an article 20 years ago.

“The Lawrence of Arabia of the art world,” Mr. Fend’s old collaborator, the artist Richard Prince, opined in the same article.

“He’s really Tristram Shandy,” Maxwell Graham, his art dealer, told The Observer.

Last week Mr. Fend wrote an email to The Observer. “Here is what I would like to discuss,” he said. “How to translate art exhibition into material-culture and territorial proposition. From image to plan. I believe this was intended in cave art. They were showing how to throw a spear, or how to kill the buffalo, with intention of getting that job done.” Read More

By Michael H. Miller 2/05 4:35pm

artists

Ellie Ga, "The Fortunetellers." (Courtesy New Museum)

Art of Darkness: Ellie Ga’s North Pole Tell-All

World travel for most New York-based artists born during the Ford administration consists predominantly of trips to Venice, London, Paris, Berlin and maybe Sharjah or Hong Kong for a residency or a biennial. Not so for Ellie Ga, whose work in the last few years has focused on archival material gathered during a five-month expedition to, of all places, the North Pole—about as far away from the art world, not to mention civilization, as one can hope to get. In September 2007, Ms. Ga took a Twin Otter plane from Svalbard, an archipelago (pop. 2,394) halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and joined a small crew aboard the Tara, a 90-foot-long ship that was shaped like an olive pit and was drifting in the Arctic ice. Its rudders had been removed and the engines shut off, so that the boat and its crew were left at the mercy of wherever the frozen ocean took them. Last week, as part of the monthlong group exhibition “Walking Drifting Dragging” at the New Museum, Ms. Ga presented a performance piece about the expedition called The Fortunetellers, a kind of roving lecture series/vacation slide show combining overhead projections, photographs, maps, charts and sound installations—mostly the sound of the Tara scraping against the ice and, in Ms. Ga’s words, “the slow swell of the ocean.” Read More