by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on October 5, 2015
Plan to spend at least part of your time at major exhibition openings in New York this week. This Wednesday the New Museum opens their Jim Shaw exhibition, an artist who has been referred to as the posterboy for “junk shop sublime”. (He incorporates a lot of second hand work into his sculptures and installations.) Come Sunday the quinquennial survey show everyone loves to hate—Greater New York—opens at MoMA PS1. No artist list has been released, but we’re sure this show will be better than the last if for no other reason than the bar was set so low. Critic Christian Viveros-Faune, when complaining of the pains the 2010 show took to be politically correct hilariously concluded, “No matter—black Jesus floating down from on high with a strap-on would not improve this disaster of an assembly one iota.” We’re hoping an artist has made that work for this exhibition.
The rest of the week’s events include a talk by artist, writer, lawyer and teacher Sergio Munoz Sarmiento which will focus on property through the lens of the law and art and Taner Ceylan’s opening of hyper-realistic borderline gay porn paintings. The most promising opening, though, is a solo show of work by Brigid Berlin, a Warhol Superstar who once boasted about a daily routine that involved throwing her coat off on the floor, dropping her pants and pissing. Can’t wait to see what’s in that show!
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by Michael Anthony Farley on August 28, 2015
Ben Schumacher originally posted this tribute to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Perfect Lovers on the blog shu and joe in 2009. The original Perfect Lovers was created in 1991, shortly after Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ partner Ross Laycock was diagnosed with AIDS, which ultimately claimed the lives of both men. The two readymade clocks ticked in unison, presumably until one or the other died. It was a powerful allegory for the limited time the artist knew he had left with Laycock.
Schumacher’s homage is also a readymade of sorts—the artist found a link for the above GIF of a clock face and inserted it twice into his page. His Perfect Lovers also come with an expiration date—the clocks will disappear when the original host eventually deletes the file. Here, though, we’ve archived the GIF on the Art F City servers, so it will be keep ticking for as long as we do.
And the legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres is as vital as ever. Tomorrow afternoon from 3:00 to 5:00, Visual AIDS is hosting the Last Address tribute walk, which will lead a group to various sites in Manhattan where artists who died in the AIDS epidemic lived their final years. The event kicks off with a screening of Ira Sachs’ short film Last Address at the SVA Theater and includes visits to the homes of Gonxalez-Torres, Vito Russo, Assotto Saint, Tseng Kwong Chi, Hugh Steers, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Chloe Dzubilo. More information is available here.
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