Tamra Davis’ new Basquiat documentary offers a surprising wealth of first-hand footage of the artist. Tracing his chaotic rise to wealth, fame and exploitation, the film is centered around a 1985 interview at the L’Hermitage Hotel in Los Angeles – a city to which Basquiat would retreat in order to escape the drugs and leaching [...]
Author Archives: Asher Ross
The Wright at the Guggenheim
December 10, 2009 – 8:00 am
Tuesday night the Guggenheim opened it’s new restaurant, The Wright, for a press preview. Andre Kikoski’s design takes its form from the mother structure, draping the 1,600-sq-foot room in clean layered curves. Enlivening this is a sculpture of mod-colored aluminum bars by Liam Gillick, which gives a vivid, linear counterpoint to the swerving walls. Gillick’s [...]
The Quietest Tyrant: Sokurov’s The Sun
November 18, 2009 – 12:26 pm
Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun envisions the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, a putative descendant of the Sun God who renounced his divinity in the wake of nuclear devastation, as an obscure man of captivatingly delicate temperament. As bombs rain down on Tokyo, he dissects a hermit crab, composes mediocre haiku, and paces his lab-turned-bunker with the fumbling [...]
Sante on the Postcard
November 14, 2009 – 11:47 am
Photography sage/sleuth Luc Sante has published a new book, Folk Photography, collecting 122 postcards which purport to document the United States “in all its messiness, sprawl, disaster, homely comfort, hard labor, pageantry, violence, optimism, piety, ignorance, hubris, imaginative flight, orderliness, grandeur, chaos, and pastoral quiet.” The pictures come with an essay, and Sante’s essays are [...]
Chris Jordan: The Midway Atoll
November 12, 2009 – 3:32 am
This is not an assemblage, it is an albatross that died after eating debris its parents mistook for food. The phenomenon is common in the garbage-choked Midway Atoll where thousands of such corpses appear yearly. The photographer, Chris Jordan, captured these transfixing images just as he found them. See more on the NYRblog, or read [...]
Review: David Ellis / Prefuse 73 @ (Le) Poisson Rouge
November 11, 2009 – 6:53 pm
David Ellis’ exhibition at (Le) Poisson Rouge is a misnomer. It consists of a handful of sculptures wrought from records (and their sleeves) that are neat bits of ornamental design but that don’t invite any kind of reflection. The same is true of his “movement sculpture”, which comes off like a sneaker commercial. Perhaps noticing [...]
Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse
November 4, 2009 – 5:07 pm
La Danse, Frederick Wiseman’s 38th film, is a masterpiece. In it the 79-year-old director has set aside the epic, ongoing film of America’s institutional fabric that has been his life’s work in order to take up a subject that seems nearer to his personal affections – the Paris Opera Ballet. If, like me, you know [...]
Till The Kingdom Comes
September 15, 2009 – 3:03 am
Simen Johan has returned to Yossi Milo Gallery with an update of his ongoing series Until the Kingdom Comes. The new pictures are just as disquieting as those in the 2006 exhibition – if not more so – and they demonstrate a clear refinement of both technique and concept. Johan has earned his name as [...]
A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows
May 19, 2009 – 1:18 pm
A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows, Francesco Clemente’s new work at Deitch Projects, is more of a chapel than an exhibition. This effect is partially due to the watercolor medium, which on such a grand scale implies the cloudy translucence of stained glass. The piece consists of three sets of five enormous panels [...]
It Takes Two
April 23, 2009 – 4:08 pm
Conceptual minimalist Ceal Floyer is back stateside at 303 Gallery, proving once again just how little you can put into a big room. Taking up just two of the walls, Scale and Ink on Paper are an agoraphobe’s nightmare. For the rest of us, the show provides the airy calm for which so many spaces [...]
