Jen Schwarting
Dan Graham: Beyond
By Jen SchwartingLast summer, thousands of hipsters turned out to hear Sonic Youth close down McCarren Park Pool, playing the Williamsburg venue's final show. This summer, guitarist Thurston Moore is lending his indie rock cult-status to longtime collaborator Dan Graham, appearing in interviews and promotions for the 67-year-old artist's career retrospective.
STUART SHERMAN: Nothing Up My Sleeve
By Jen SchwartingStuart Sherman was an under-recognized, New York-based artist who experimented in film, video, and performance for three decades until his death in 2001.
RODNEY MCMILLIAN Prospect Ave.
By Jen SchwartingA supple sheathe of heavy, black vinyl covers the entrance to Rodney McMillian’s solo exhibition at Maccarone. Visitors step into a darkened cavity covered by a continuous patchwork of hand-sewn material framing the gallery’s front vestibule.
Women’s Fiction
By Jen SchwartingThough the title, Chick Lit elicits a literary genre limited to saccharine storylines and prescribed female roles, it hardly indicates the range of serious conceptual and intertextual strategies that many of the contributing artists employ in this show.
Progress
By Jen SchwartingProgress is an excellent exhibition of work from the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection. Hot on the heels of Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, Progress only mildly concerns itself with the technological advancements considered synonymous with the term and integral to Fuller’s utopian designs.
ELAINE CAMERON-WEIR Not Known To Be Used By Any Form Of Life
By Jen SchwartingIn their materiality and seriality, the cast metal slabs lining the wall of Elaine Cameron-Weir’s current solo show evoke the processes and principles of 1960s post-minimalism.
David and Chie Hammons
By Jen SchwartingDavid Hammons, a New York artist of considerable influence, has not had an exhibition of new work since 2002. His three-decade career has sustained a radical conceptual practice, proliferated through street performance, public installation, sculpture and beyond.
Olga Chernysheva: Isle Of Sparks
By Jen SchwartingIn Olga Chernysheva’s photograph The Anabiosis (2000), a bloated plastic bag sits frozen on a field of snow. Icy footprints surround the specimen, its dark contents obscured by a fog of precipitation. What could be any amorphous object dropped or discarded is in fact a Russian fisherman, who has sealed himself inside a body-sized bag to withstand the brutal cold.
![Olga Chernysheva, <i>On Duty</i> [series] (2007). Optical silver gelatin fiber print. 53 Ã?½” x 35 Ã?½”.](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/1549/SCHWARTING_Chernysheva.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
Aleksandra Mir Newsroom 1986-2000
By Jen SchwartingFive years ago, on September 11th, Aleksandra Mir circulated copies of a self-published, mock-issue of the New York Daily News. The front-page headline of her 46-page newspaper exclaimed “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” on the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on lower Manhattan.
Shana Moulton Whispering Pines
By Jen SchwartingShana Moulton doesn’t seem to be feeling well. Her wrists and neck ache from too much time on the computer. Her migraines are so painful she vomits on the floor.
Under Destruction II
By Jen SchwartingJean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York” was performed in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden on an icy winter evening in March, 1960. The sprawling, scaffold-like kinetic sculpture was built onsite, and both the inclement weather and outsized scope of production were likely factors in the failure of the mechanized structure to fully operate and self-destruct as planned.
Lucas Ajemian and Julien Bismuth: Les Lettres Tristes
By Jen SchwartingCombining their individual practices and shared interests in performance and narrative, Lucas Ajemian and Julien Bismuth’s collaboration, Les Lettres Tristes, was a thoughtful exposition on the art of distraction.
Perfect Man Show
By Jen SchwartingFor an artist born with such enviable pedigree, Kiki Smith earned her reputation through downtown nouveau. Playing a seminal role in activist/artist collectives in the 1980s, Smith should be considered the venerable godmother of the downtown art scene, currently resurging in the Lower East Side.
The Talent Show
By Jen SchwartingAccording to Nielsen research statistics, American TV-viewing has sharply increased over the past two years, as the economic downturn has forced people to spend more of their free time at home. Many artists I know now openly admit to sprees of TV-watching, marathon evenings with the boys of Mad Men.
