by Paddy Johnson on October 7, 2015
The number of artists who make art from found imagery and objects is now too many to count. Tumblrs and blogs are full of it and so too are the annals of art history. From Surf Clubs and The Jogging to Haim Steinbach, Robert Rauschenberg and Llyn Foulkes there’s a near bottomless reservoir of work that was made in one world and plunked into a fine art context.
I thought about this as I walked around the New Museum, mostly in awe of Jim Shaw’s three floor survey exhibition The End is Here. It’s basically two stories of art stuff produced and assembled from 1973 on—paintings, and drawings on the second floor; other people’s paintings, drawings, pamphlets, t-shirts and religious banners on the third floor. The museum reserved the fourth for Shaw’s massive cut-out theatre sets and sculptures.
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by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on October 5, 2015
Plan to spend at least part of your time at major exhibition openings in New York this week. This Wednesday the New Museum opens their Jim Shaw exhibition, an artist who has been referred to as the posterboy for “junk shop sublime”. (He incorporates a lot of second hand work into his sculptures and installations.) Come Sunday the quinquennial survey show everyone loves to hate—Greater New York—opens at MoMA PS1. No artist list has been released, but we’re sure this show will be better than the last if for no other reason than the bar was set so low. Critic Christian Viveros-Faune, when complaining of the pains the 2010 show took to be politically correct hilariously concluded, “No matter—black Jesus floating down from on high with a strap-on would not improve this disaster of an assembly one iota.” We’re hoping an artist has made that work for this exhibition.
The rest of the week’s events include a talk by artist, writer, lawyer and teacher Sergio Munoz Sarmiento which will focus on property through the lens of the law and art and Taner Ceylan’s opening of hyper-realistic borderline gay porn paintings. The most promising opening, though, is a solo show of work by Brigid Berlin, a Warhol Superstar who once boasted about a daily routine that involved throwing her coat off on the floor, dropping her pants and pissing. Can’t wait to see what’s in that show!
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