Anthony Easton's Twelve Events 2010:
1. The weird fleshy exuberance of Gustave Caillebotte's dead pigs, esp in a room full of late renoirs.
photo by Jerry
2. Rachel McRae's difficult absorption and wrestling with the
aesthetic and social potential of the
monumental.
Rachel McRae, I Always Arrive At These Things Too Late, at Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects
3. Pae White's delicate balance between the traditional and the digial,
in how she attempts to eff the ineffable, esp her witty and meta wall
hanging wall hanging and the hauntingly moving smoke tapestry.
4.The graphic design of 70s gay porn, esp. Honcho and Drummer at the National Leather Archives
5. Johns' Catenary series (From the Lagoon, 2003). ( Often this series is talked about formally or even mathematically, and it does bring of elements out of the
formal plane. But the catenary is also the muscle that raises the
testicles, and in this late work, the limpness has a pathos,
compounded by the grey tones and the funerary seriousness. In a
post-Viagra age they are oddly brave. (The one I saw in Philly was in
a room of about 7 Johns, and it was a very small room. Next to the
piece was Painting with Two Balls. That said, Philly had more than its
fair share of cock art)
6. Jeff Thomas and Shelley Niro, contemporary 6 Nations artists who
respond to the history of colonial portraiture, in a show about the
politics of representation—v funny and v smart. It was part of the
National Portrait Gallery, and this proves how much of a loss that
gallery was.
7. This
8. The collapsing of homo-social and homosexual boundaries, as a broad chest pushes against white cotton—in this painting by Eakins:
9. Super Cross!
10. El Antusi's Peak Mountain: at ROM. first thing--why this show isn't at
the ago, and the ethnographic history of that is a problem, but this
one peice, a group of mountains constructed out of the gold lids of
peak canned milk, has everything. it is beautiful, and it is
redemptive, and it is easy enough for a five yr old to say shiny (&
one did), but it is also about how Ghana was once an empire of gold,
and ghana was the place where gold was made from slaves--the push and
pull of commerce, acculmated into carefully constructed piles of
detritus, has an intensity that rises and falls, like an undertow,
never breaking the surface.
11. Ryman at Beacon, an entire 6 rooms of them, but my favorite was a
set of creamy grey white works on paper in a room of dusky grey lite.
12. Will Munro: his show at Paul Petro was vital, his show at the AGO
was perfunctory, but the night he died, as facebook and email fired up
I wrote this in an email a week after he died: “i went to his
impromptu memorial a few days ago, and will go to the dancing party
next Wednesday the memorial was profoundly moving, because it was
unstructured... there was talking, and hugging, chatting, and
casualness--fireworks were lit, there were candles and flowers--the
touching that occurred came from our collective mourning, the
collection of bodies emerged from a deep and profound
feeling....happens...
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1. The weird fleshy exuberance of Gustave Caillebotte's dead pigs, esp in a room full of late renoirs.
photo by Jerry
2. Rachel McRae's difficult absorption and wrestling with the aesthetic and social potential of the monumental.
Rachel McRae, I Always Arrive At These Things Too Late, at Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects
3. Pae White's delicate balance between the traditional and the digial, in how she attempts to eff the ineffable, esp her witty and meta wall hanging wall hanging and the hauntingly moving smoke tapestry.
4.The graphic design of 70s gay porn, esp. Honcho and Drummer at the National Leather Archives
5. Johns' Catenary series (From the Lagoon, 2003). ( Often this series is talked about formally or even mathematically, and it does bring of elements out of the formal plane. But the catenary is also the muscle that raises the testicles, and in this late work, the limpness has a pathos, compounded by the grey tones and the funerary seriousness. In a post-Viagra age they are oddly brave. (The one I saw in Philly was in a room of about 7 Johns, and it was a very small room. Next to the piece was Painting with Two Balls. That said, Philly had more than its fair share of cock art)
6. Jeff Thomas and Shelley Niro, contemporary 6 Nations artists who respond to the history of colonial portraiture, in a show about the politics of representation—v funny and v smart. It was part of the National Portrait Gallery, and this proves how much of a loss that gallery was.
7. This
8. The collapsing of homo-social and homosexual boundaries, as a broad chest pushes against white cotton—in this painting by Eakins:
9. Super Cross!
10. El Antusi's Peak Mountain: at ROM. first thing--why this show isn't at the ago, and the ethnographic history of that is a problem, but this one peice, a group of mountains constructed out of the gold lids of peak canned milk, has everything. it is beautiful, and it is redemptive, and it is easy enough for a five yr old to say shiny (& one did), but it is also about how Ghana was once an empire of gold, and ghana was the place where gold was made from slaves--the push and pull of commerce, acculmated into carefully constructed piles of detritus, has an intensity that rises and falls, like an undertow, never breaking the surface.
11. Ryman at Beacon, an entire 6 rooms of them, but my favorite was a set of creamy grey white works on paper in a room of dusky grey lite.
12. Will Munro: his show at Paul Petro was vital, his show at the AGO was perfunctory, but the night he died, as facebook and email fired up I wrote this in an email a week after he died: “i went to his impromptu memorial a few days ago, and will go to the dancing party next Wednesday the memorial was profoundly moving, because it was unstructured... there was talking, and hugging, chatting, and casualness--fireworks were lit, there were candles and flowers--the touching that occurred came from our collective mourning, the collection of bodies emerged from a deep and profound feeling....happens...
- sally mckay 12-15-2010 4:22 pm