Victorian time travelers McDermott & McGough fast-forward to 1967 in new exhibition:
McDermott & McGough, the artmaking duo who made their name by living and documenting their lives as Victorian dandies, are now mining the imagery of a more recent past: 1960s Hollywood.
Bio: Yevgeniya Traps is a doctoral candidate in English. She lives in Brooklyn.
All those moments, taken from film and television, are now on view in Suspicious of rooms without music or atmosphere, the duo's latest exhibition at the Cheim and Read gallery in Chelsea. That exhibition title—theatrical, even melodramatic, a little sad and quite funny—tells you a great deal about McDermott and McGough’s work, which is, in its latest incarnation, a superrealist assemblage of juxtaposed '60s movie stills. (“Suspicious” brings together scenes from several films released in 1967.) Even before they trained their exacting eye on the cinema, the pair’s work has been cinematic, in the sense of immersive, sweeping mythmaking. More
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on January 18th, 2013 5:05pmIn Walker’s handling, “tell me what you’ve bought, and I’ll tell you who are” is less accusation, more intellectual puzzle, an investigation into the various ways the marketplace of products is also a marketplace of selves: “Branded material culture is something we tend to take for granted and don't think about very seriously,” Walker explained in an email exchange on the eve of the show’s opening. “And it's a pretty constant goal of everything I do to try to prod people to see something new in what's previously been overlooked.” More
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on November 29th, 2012 12:12pmThat deceptively simple origin story leaves out what it might mean to have your work from The New Yorker collected in a hardcover book of some 170 pages. Aside from those ten covers, Tomine has been contributing various illustrations, many for book and film reviews, since 1999. New York Drawings solidifies his status as one of the magazine’s go-to illustrators, as an artist whose aesthetic—mordantly observant, a little sad, poignantly attuned to life’s small pleasures, indignities, and absurdities, and ever-so-slightly neurotic—has become a part of The New Yorker’s visual identity in the first decade of the 21st century. More
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on November 15th, 2012 11:15amThe show—known simply as Richard Artschwager! (and up through Feb. 3, 2013)—is surprising and exciting and sincere and beautiful. And it even features its own exclamation point, a five-and-a-half-foot tall one, in stunning chartreuse no less, consisting of plastic bristles attached to a mahogany core and presented as a kind of gleeful surprise. More
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on October 26th, 2012 12:51pm“Islam at our house stopped at ‘no swine,’” Rushdie said. Once out of that house, while at Cambridge as a student, he finally broke that single rule with a ham sandwich. He was nut struck down by a thunderbolt. “That was the moment,” he deadpanned, “I realized god did not exist.” More
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on October 10th, 2012 3:41pmIn these senses, at least, New Photography is a misnomer, or maybe an old habit. The feel is more of an intimate salon than an aggressive survey of those testing the outer limits of the artform. Sobriety, seriousness, and craft take precedence over boisterousness and wild creativity. This has its drawbacks, but all the artists represented are consistently engaging, and if the show implies that there is not much new under the sun, it also affirms that the view need not be any worse for that. More
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on October 9th, 2012 5:10pmWhat then ultimately brought her back to fiction, she was asked. “There are little sparks of something like actual life,” she said after a deliberative pause, “and I don’t think an essay could ever create that friction, that feeling of being alive. And when you’re a kid, that’s why you read, and some people forget that, but for me that feeling of the fake-real, the almost-real, I get pleasure from thinking I could do that.” More
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on October 2nd, 2012 2:37pmRoth knew that if he “wrote the story of The Scientists as a novel, people would just say ‘oh there he goes pretentiously imitating Proust or Virginia Woolf,’ when the point is to show that, hey, my life and my family's life really did have this improbable time scheme, and to show that a lot of people's lives aren't linear narratives or made for TV plotlines.” What’s more, Roth noted, there are “valuable things that non-fiction can do, and memoir especially, [which is to] live up to its billing as a category that's explicitly ‘not.’ Unfortunately, too often, what sells non-fiction is a story that would be ‘too unbelievable’ for fiction. More
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on September 20th, 2012 4:47pmAll of which is to say that, in aggregate, Regarding Warhol seems more like a celebration of what we already know about Warhol's legacy than an investigation of what we might not have considered. Many of the individual pieces in the show, including many by Warhol himself—the well-known but rarely-screened Empire State, say, or the Birmingham Race Riot screenprint, or IDiamond Dust Joseph Beuys—are not only fascinating to look at but have the potential to seriously impact the viewer. But they are rarely given the chance. More
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on September 19th, 2012 11:33amWhen I asked Amis how he typically settles on a subject for a new book, he suggested that what might interest him as a starting point for a novel is not necessarily what interests him in other areas of his life. “You think of an idea, and you immediately identify your next novel. And it may not really affect you in other ways, you just know that it’s your next novel," he said, referring to “what has been described by Nabokov as ‘broth.’” More
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on August 21st, 2012 10:27am
