As promised, more from the New York mu-see-um scene:
• Charles LeDray: Workworkworkworkwork at the Whitney
An amazingly ingenious and inexhaustible survey of LeDray’s handiwork. From the Whitney’s website:
Over the past twenty years, New York-based sculptor Charles LeDray (b. 1960, Seattle) has created a highly distinctive and powerful body of work using such materials as sewn cloth, carved human bone, and glazed ceramics. This major survey, which includes works from the 1980s to the present, celebrates both the artist’s virtuosity with materials and his uncanny manipulation of scale to create seemingly familiar objects that engage the collective memory. His techniques of sewing, carving bone, and throwing clay pots find precedents in the traditions of folk art and visionary art, yet rise to a level of unprecedented virtuosity and artistic invention.
Exhibit A:
And that’s just a small sample.
• The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
From the Met’s website:
This is a small, scholarly focused exhibition of about fifty pieces of the distinctive “artistic furniture” and related objects produced by the workshop of Charles Rohlfs(American, 1853–1936) in Buffalo, New York. His unusually inventive forms and imaginative carving combined many influences, from the abstract naturalism of Art Nouveau to the bold forms of the Arts and Crafts movement. The exhibition explores Rohlfs’s work in the context of new research that reveals his success in Europe as well as in America, and traces his influence on other twentieth-century furniture designers.
Exhibit A:
Have a seat.
• John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at the Met
“Pioneer of conceptual art” John Baldessari had a clever idea to start out: Use the art world to mock art.
But eventually Baldessari’s art became an exercise in selling himself.
Exhibit A: His video “I Am Making Art,” in which every small gesture he makes is accompanied by his intoning, “I am making art.”
It’s crazy-making.
• From Pace MacGill’s Irving Penn Archaeology exhibit of bone/skull/metal still-lifes:
Marvel among yourselves.
