Gallery // Current TV

A Photo-Series: The Busily Diligent Texters

In the photo-series “Texters,” street photographer Joseph Holmes captures... more

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Ai Weiwei’s Interlacing: A Chinese Activist’s Photographs and Videos

“Interlacing” is the first major exhibition of collected works by China’s renowned dissident artist Ai Weiwei, currently on display at Zurich’s Fotomuseum Winterthur. The collection consists of an extensive selection of photographs, videos and explanatory essays that present the interweaving artist as a network, company, activist, political voice, social container and agent provocateur.

Ai Weiwei is a generalist, conceptual, socially critical artist dedicated to creating friction with/and forming reality. As an architect, conceptual artist, sculptor, photographer, blogger, Twitterer, interview artist, and cultural critic, he is a sensitive observer of current topics and social problems: a great communicator and networker who brings life into art and art into life. Ai Weiwei deliberately confronts social conditions in China and in the world in ways that have captured an international audience.

In 2003, Ai Weiwei played a major role, together with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, in the construction of the Olympic stadium, the so-called “Bird’s Nest.” Subsequently, he publicly repudiated the project and the whole Olympic buildup as a preposterous fraud to put on a “good face” for the international community. In 2007, 1001 Chinese visitors traveled, at his instigation, to “Documenta 12” (Fairytale) in Kassel, Germany. In 2010, the world marveled at his large, yet formally minimal carpet of millions of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern.

Chinese officials announced in May, 2011, that the authorities were investigating Ai Weiwei on suspicion of tax evasion, after police officers had taken him from the main Beijing airport on April 3rd as he prepared to board a flight to Hong Kong. A global outcry went out, blasting the Chinese government for what was deemed a politically motivated move, claiming that the tax inquiry was a pretext to silence one of the most vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese legal authorities finally released Ai Weiwei on June 22nd, after a three-month detention, apparently ending a prosecution that had become a focal point of criticism of China’s eroding human rights record. Nevertheless, the terms of his release may silence him for months or even years.

This piece includes a number of photographs, a photo-gallery and three documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/ai-weiweis-interlacing-a-chinese-activists-photographs-and-videos/“Interlacing” is the first major exhibition of collected works by... more

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Cy Twombly: Scratching and Scribbling to the Heights of Abstract Expressionism

Cy Twombly (1928-2011), whose spare, delicate scratching and scribbling, odd marks, raw smudges, and gorgeous visceral color with intimations of myth, narrative and poetic engagement with antiquity left him often ignored by the movements of postwar American art, even as he eventually became one of the era’s most significant painters, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 83.

His artistic career roguishly subverted Abstract Expressionism, dipped briefly into Minimalism, barely acknowledged Pop art, but anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a polarizing figure in the art world almost from the beginning. His work has been described by one important art curator as “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.”

Twombly left New York City and moved permanently to southern Italy in 1957 and paid little heed to his many critics, who constantly questioned whether his work really deserved a place at the forefront of 20th century abstraction. The low point for Twombly probably came after a widely panned 1964 exhibition in New York, which one critic described as a blatant fiasco. However, he lived long enough to see his work receive new-found attention and a degree of critical favor he had never enjoyed before. By the 1990s, he had become highly sought after not only by European museums and collectors, who had appreciated his work early on, but also by those back in the United States who had not known what to make of him two decades before.

During the final decade of his life, Twombly surpassed his earlier body of work, making tremendous late abstract works telling tales of ancient armies, otherworldly invasions of burning suns and radiating chrysanthemums. His works from this later period invoked twelfth-century dynasties, exoduses, love, loss and longing. He had launched upon a creative journey to some artistic place where the deepest of feelings, experiences, expectations, dreams, and love become one.

This piece includes a number of colorful pictures, a gallery and two documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/cy-twombly-scratching-and-scribbling-to-the-heights-of-abstract-expressionism/Cy Twombly (1928-2011), whose spare, delicate scratching and scribbling, odd marks,... more

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A Home Full of Art: A Consumerist Nightmare

“Oakridge Road” is a series of paintings by Jessica Rohrer, which is... more

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The Sad Ghost of an Abandoned New Orleans Amusement Park

This is the Fourth of July Weekend, and while many people might be taking advantage of... more

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Tribute to René: Playing with Reality and Illusion

“Tribute to René” is a two-minute animated short art film, a... more

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Series of Photographic Portraits: A Century of Photographs

“Series of Portraits: A Century of Photographs” is an exhibtion of 20th... more

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American Dreams: Iconic Images of 20th Century Life

“American Dreams” is a wonderful exhibition that provides a survey of the... more

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Chinese Sentiment: A Poetic and Intimate View of China

Shanghai-born photographer Shen Wei has developed an international reputation, with... more

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Arnold Gets Cheeky: Pumping Iron to Funky Disco Tunes!!

Hey, look who it is! It’s Arnold and he’s back, and with more energy! This... more

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Almost Naked: Portraits of Self and Identity

Shanghai-born photographer Shen Wei has developed an international reputation, with... more

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Those Crazy Coney Island Dayze: The Naughty Mermaid Parade

The 2011 Mermaid Parade took place on Saturday, June 18th in New York City’s... more

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The Americans: A Brooklyn Summer, 1974

“A Brooklyn Summer, 1974” is a beautiful collection of vintage photos of... more

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Iké Udé: Photographic Portraits and Sartorial Anarchy

“Self: Photographic Portraits and Sartorial Anarchy” is a collection of... more

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The Ghosts of British Shoe: A Narrative of Modern-Day Industrial Ruins

“The Ghosts Of British Shoe” is a four-minute documentary short film by... more

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The Sketchbook Party

In the video I miss spelled Sacred Gallery. Sorry for that. The Sketchbook Party... more

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Catharine Lyons-studio tour

Catharine Lyons-studio tour video by Ethan H. Minsker

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Helios: The Pioneering Photography of Eadweard Muybridge

“Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change” is an exhibition at the... more

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Case History: Behold the Anonymous Homeless, Downtrodden, Insulted and Injured

“Case History” is a study of the homeless, a collection of photographs of homeless people in the Ukraine by Mikhailov, one of the leading photographers from the former Soviet Union. Mr. Mikhailov began making photographs in the 1960s, but he was arrested and interrogated twice by the K.G.B. In 1996, five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began making portraits of people who had been disenfranchised and left homeless by the rise of a new capitalist oligarchy in his hometown of Kharkov, Ukraine. He published 400 of them in his book “Case History,” from which the photographs here were selected.

Mikhailov’s raw images of the homeless are sometimes intensely painful and not for the squeamish; they are hard to look at, but also hard to look away from and hard to forget. The photographs from “Case History” are currently on exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the first in-depth presentation of Mikhailov’s seminal series (1997-98) at an American museum. The photographs portray people who are far from conventionally attractive in grungy rooms or in wintry outdoor sites, naked or pulling aside their clothes to expose parts of their bodies ordinarily hidden from view.

What does it mean to present images like these as art in a museum? In one respect, they carry on the tradition of picturing the downtrodden exemplified in photographs by countless artists from Walker Evans to Andres Serrano. Works like those tell us that, whatever their outward appearances and circumstances, the poor have souls that are worthy of respect. However, Mr. Mikhailov’s photographs are not so ennobling. They render their subjects as exotic and even demonic. Like specimens in a freak show, they elicit sympathy, revulsion or amazement, but not admiration or empathy.

In “Case History,” the subjects are, above all, actors who function mainly as allegorical symbols. They stand as expressions for the underbelly of society, and their challenging revelations of their own usually hidden body parts is a metaphor for the whole project of exposing what polite society would prefer to keep under wraps. To the extent that they appear everywhere around the world, including in New York City, they are universal signs of capitalism’s failure to care for the less fortunate.

This piece includes a number of color photographs, a photo-gallery and a documentary short film.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/case-history-behold-the-anonymous-homeless-downtrodden-insulted-and-injured/“Case History” is a study of the homeless, a collection of photographs of... more

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Garry Winogrand: Women are Beautiful

“Women are Beautiful” is a collection of photographs by Garry Winogrand... more

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