It's been said, by Duchamp among others, that artworks have a "life" of their own, but that goes double for certain local sculptures that have seemingly become almost nomadic of late. It all began a year ago when Ernest Trova's PROFILE CANTO, which once graced the grounds of the New Orleans Museum of Art, was loaned to Jefferson Parish to try to make Veterans Blvd. look civilized.
With this game of sculptural musical chairs in full swing, the fact that Louise Bourgeois' great EYE BENCHES piece, another SFNO installation, is staying put for at least another year in Lafayette Square, is welcome news indeed.
also suggest those bamboo sticks tossed randomly to form the hexagrams used in traditional Asian interpretations of the I Ching. To me this is what his works at Bienvenu suggest. Others will have their own interpretation, part of Henry's somewhat protean modus, and an example of what philosopher Eric Hopper, in discussing Western culture, once called "the mysterious Occident." ~D. Eric Bookhardt
Traer Scott, Galaxy
Susan Hayre Thelwell, I Do
You could call it an "alumni show," but it's really more momentous than that. HxWxD marks the 30th anniversary of the University of New Orleans' Masters of Fine Arts program and is also part of UNO's 50th anniversary celebration. Once a desolate former military base, UNO is now a cultural and economic engine with influence that extends far and wide. Because the 18 artists in this show span several decades, it's an expo that also traces the UNO school's stylistic evolution from its earlier pop abstraction and imagism to the playfully polemical postmodernism for which it is known today.
But a pivot between pop abstraction and polemical postmodernism appears in the work of Peter Halley, left, whose recent paper studies hew closely to the grid-like schematics that he employed during his neo-geo insurgency in New York in the late 1980s, an art historical milestone that, with his thoughtful published writings, make him something of a philosopher king among painters.
postmodernism and imagism appears in Jessica Goldfinch's anatomically anomalous shrinky-dink holy cards such as ST. MARIAM WITH CHILD, right, as well as in Daphne Loney's CANDY DREAMS, above, part of her ongoing inquiry into the psychic correspondence between religious icons and animal trophies expressed in steel and Lucite.
Lawn Jockey's Revenge
Oysters and Hot Sauce
flat white ceramic vessels that, wrapped in white cord, radiate a frisson of contradictions. Villere's pristinely post-minimal works suggest those unspoken mysteries that express themselves in so many extraordinarily ordinary ways.
STORM SONG VARIATIONS: Recent Drawings and Sculpture by W. Steve Rucker
The NOLA Photo Alliance's Ann Marie Popko interviews Los Angeles based photographer Susan Burnstine. The 2008 PhotoNOLA Review Prize winner illustrates that the movement toward surreal, atmospheric photo-pictorialism extends far beyond the Gulf South, where a number of the leading practitioners of the idiom are based.
Peter Saul is the neglected clown prince of Pop, the problem child of an American art movement eternally synonymous with Andy Warhol. Along with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Saul was one of its pioneers, but he ended up more of a cult figure. His talent is flamboyantly self-evident, yet now in his mid-70s, he is getting his first major survey exhibition in two decades, thanks to curator Dan Cameron.
Above: Les Origines by Odilon Redon & Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds, by Martin Johnson Heade, from Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts at Yale University. Read All About It:
Lisa Yuskavage: A Lecture
It can be argued that there are really two kinds of history. The first, written by journalists and historians, appears in books recounting the events that shaped our view of the world. The second, by artists, reveals how the world looked and felt at those times. Perhaps because this nation dominated the latter-century art world, the American art from the first half of the 20th century has been overshadowed. A time profoundly shaped by world wars and the Great Depression, that America could seem remote—until recently. Now that bank failures and vanished fortunes are making the era of Hoover and FDR seem familiar once again, much of this Recording of America expo of 60 works on paper from the Herbert D. Halpern collection, can seem eerily resonant.
Of course, Manhattan always had its bright lights. In 2 A.M Saturday Night by Martin Lewis, it is 1932 and three post-flapper women are crossing Broadway as a street cleaner hoses it down, and while nothing much is happening, the buoyancy of the women amid the gloom of the street conveys a sense of the times. Less sanguine is Claire Leighton’s contemporaneous Bread Line, New York, a stark view of an endless queue of men huddled against the cold under jagged skyscrapers.
Derelict Banana Men, New Orleans, pictured, a view of ragged workers hauling produce in a scene that recalls some of Goya’s darker ruminations. Howard Cook’s stark Southern Pioneers etching of an Arkansas couple hints at Grant Wood and the great WPA photographers, but Raphael Soyer takes us back to Manhattan in his evocative, circa 1936, Dancers Resting litho, top, where the subjects are urbane, but the feel is no less austere, harking to Edward Hopper’s silences amid the cacophony. Here legendary artists such as Reginald Marsh, John Steuart Curry, George Bellows, John Sloan and Mable Dwight, among others, captured the spirit of their time no less than Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg decades later. –D. Eric BookhardtThrough March 26
Diboll Art Gallery, Loyola University, 861-5456; www.loyno.edu/dibollgallery
~~~
Like Charles Saatchi in London, the Mugrabi's in New York buy and sell art like commodity traders trying to control the market in Warhols, Basquiats and Hirsts--a morbidly fascinating account of how the big time art market really works. Read it Here:
