The Modernist Is On Pause (0)

4/01/11 •

That’s right. We’re on hiatus. All of The Modernist’s busy bees have become too busy to be sitting around at their computers. But we’ll be back . . . someday . . . somewhere. In the meantime, feel free to poke around here, or if you wanna go old school, visit the previous version of [...]

Irma and Scott, A Love Story (1)

10/24/10 •

My wife’s grandmother just turned 77. Irma bears some of the requisite wrinkles and has to sleep with oxygen, but her presence is one of youth and awe. She stays over at our house a few nights each month to help out with our son, Elias, and join us for a bottle or two of [...]

Oscar Tuazon – SEX (2)

10/19/10 •

Oscar Tuazon’s solo exhibition Sex contains a body of work that re-purposes the functionality of once operational objects into, well, something else. In some ways the work is destroyed, its original intention thwarted. But mainly, Tuazon’s intervention and de-construction of things like his bed, a mirror, and photographs establish a new meaning for these objects. [...]

‘Move: Choreographing You’ (2)

10/14/10 •

The Hayward Gallery’s Move: Choreographing You delivers exactly what the title promises – the audience becomes the players, moving in, on, around, and through a myriad of (mostly) participatory artworks. The traditional relationship between the performers and the audience completely collapses as our hands-on experience not only takes center stage but also quite literally activates [...]

Made in China: Ai Weiwei at Tate Modern (1)

10/12/10 •

The week of art insanity that invariably surrounds the Frieze Art Fair began by walking through a sea of sunflower seeds for Tate Modern’s latest commission in The Unilever Series, Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds. The millions (seemingly billions) of individually hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds that have been poured into Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall nicely counteract [...]

The Architectural Interventions of Sinta Werner (1)

9/23/10 •

German artist Sinta Werner renders the purposeful functionality of architecture moot. Like predecessors Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta Clark, she uses buildings and landscapes as a material object to de-construct and, by doing so, re-constructs familiarity. She provides a post-modern reflection on contemporary environments providing a doubling and re-imagining of existing structures. Through her work [...]

On a Clear Day You Can See Manhattan (0)

9/10/10 •

Do we really have two Blake Schwarzenbach posts in a row? Yes, we do. Blake just posted a thoughtful essay on the Forgetters blog about the now annual 9/11 “Tribute in Light” and one of the most divisive Septembers in recent memory. Now look, I would actually prefer the soft jolt of this nighttime beacon [...]