News Art Blog

 The forgotten aspects of art history will always be the most intriguing. Digging up the dead storylines of art history, whether in the distant or the recent past, will never end, mostly thanks to forces that buried the facts, if not the bodies, for whatever agenda. Artists and Prophets: A Secret History of Modern Art 1872-1972 at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt resurrects German visionaries and Jesus wannabes from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to look at how their exploits and artistic creations helped shape the course of German and European modern art. It also shines light on how the impact of those figures fell into obscurity as another casualty of the ideological war waged by that most unfortunately unforgettable of German messianic aspirants — Adolf Hitler. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Vision Loss: The Forgotten German Prophets Secretly Behind Modern Art."

“War is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means,” Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his famous book on battle strategy, On War. Many misquote that saying more pithily as “War is politics by other means,” but the idea that politics plays out on different battlefields remains true. Several recent performance pieces responding to political issues in America make a case for performance art as politics by other means, too. From Dread Scott's performance On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide (shown above) tackling the long history and sad continuation of racism in America to Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight challenging America, especially American colleges, to address the issue of rape, performance artists are creating powerfully direct pieces that visualize and humanize sometimes faceless and forgotten issues. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Performance Art and Modern Political Protest."

According to a Pew Research study, if you count people who change from one type of Protestantism to another, “44% of American adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.” This “very competitive religious marketplace” promises to only get more competitive, as percentages of young people either unaffiliated with a faith or totally unaffiliated being even higher. Why are these people taking their faith to the marketplace? What are they looking for? Is it some kind of different or higher experience? With the stir surrounding Marina Abramović’s current performance art piece, Marina Abramović: 512 Hours at the Serpentine Gallery in London, England, being described frequently as a “religious experience,” is it possible that performance art—the most often ridiculed, poorly understood, but perhaps most vibrant art form today—could be the new religion? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is Performance Art the New Religion?"

On October 17^th, 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the persona “Stephen Colbert” on the first episode of The Colbert Report by also introducing to the world the concept of “Truthiness.” That bit (the full video’s here) not only resulted in “truthiness” becoming Merriam-Webster’s 2006 Word of the Year, but also introduced the “truthiness” of performance art to a mainstream American audience. What began as a broad caricature of a Bill O’Reilly-esque conservative TV pundit evolved over 9 years into a multidimensional character with elements of the real wit, charm, warmth, and unyielding mental sharpness of the real man. With news that Colbert will be leaving The Colbert Report at the end of 2014 to replace David Letterman as the host of the Late Show on CBS in 2015 comes great sadness on seeing “Stephen Colbert” the character come to an end, but we’ll still have the rest of the year to celebrate, appreciate, and understand what Stephen Colbert the performance artist truly accomplished. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Stephen Colbert and the End of 'Stephen Colbert.'"

Murder, they wrote. The suspect? Media mogul, sports agent, and rapper Jay-Z. The victim? Performance art. The accomplices? Performance artists!? When Jay-Z decided to shoot the video for his song “Picasso Baby” from his recently released album Magna Carta... Holy Grail at the Pace Gallery in New York City, not only did he include an artistic venue, but he included an actual artist, Marina Abramović, reigning queen of performance artists and self-appointed guardian of performance art itself. Judging just from the sneak peek of the final video, Abramović plays a significant role in the video, making it one of the rare cases of popular culture crashing into the world of high art. For many people, performance art’s already moldering in the grave, but for those who hold out hope for the genre, “Picasso Baby” might be the coup de grace.  Did Jay-Z just kill performance art? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Did Jay-Z Just Kill Performance Art?"

Like many Americans of a certain age, for me, Andy Kaufman (shown above) was first, and in some ways forever, Latka Gravas, the lovable garage mechanic with the endearing misuse of English and disturbing multiple personality disorder on the award-winning sitcom Taxi. Kaufman overruled his instinctual dislike and distrust of the sitcom format in hopes of wider success, which he soon enjoyed, but at the price of typecasting, which he forever fought against. On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman, an exhibition running through February 16^th at Maccarone in New York City, tries to rewrite the reality of the Latka-izing of Kaufman by presenting Andy’s full oeuvre in a manner as individual, unconventional, and perhaps cringe-inducing as the man himself, whose claim to genius beyond comedy seems to be finally catching up with him nearly 30 years after his death. With this exhibition, perhaps it’s time to ask whether Andy Kaufman was America’s greatest performance artist. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Andy Kaufman: Greatest American PerformanceArtist?"

Performance art and film art have always been the afterthoughts of museums—the new kids on the block with no room of their own in the big culture houses. Institutions designed to house paintings and sculpture usually need to find some temporary corner to stage a performance or screen a film, implying to the viewer, however subconsciously and unintentionally, that those media don’t rank a room of their own. With the opening of the Tate Tanks at the Tate Modernin London, England, performance art and film finally have a big stage all of their own—one that not only celebrates those media but can, in return, inspire practitioners to create knowing where they’ll be working. With such a significant venue for significant pieces, will the Tate Tanks finally bring performance art into the mainstream? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Will the Tate Tanks Bring Performance Art intothe Mainstream?"


 
[Many thanks to the Tate Modernfor the image above and other press materials related to the opening of the Tate Tanks with the Art in Action program from July 18 through October 28, 2012.]