Passport reviews Trickling...or maybe Ebbing in.

I've been hoping to get some kind of review from someone who attended the performance of Robert Whitman's Passport in Beacon and Montclair, NY on Apr 17 and have heard nary a peep from anyone other than a few museum employees.
Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City was there.  Today, she posted some images from the scene to the website, saying that she's still weighing her reaction to the work...

.....I just found one review of the performance on artreview.com by Jonathan T.D. Neil.

Last weekend to see Huber, Smith and Zansky at Van Brunt Gallery

Monday March 31 is the final day to check out Van Brunt's current exhibits by Thomas Huber, Ed Smith and Michael Zansky.
Below is a review of Thomas Huber's work by Dawn-Michelle Baude.

Thomas Huber at Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon
Informed art-goers won't want to miss Thomas Huber's show at the Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon. Who, after all, would want to pass up a chance to experience work that testifies to an emergent cultural moment? It's not, after all, an easy time-either on the planet or in the art world. But as the agendas of postmodernism slip further and further into the background, some qualified form of optimism is literally taking shape in visual arts. We don't have any choice, really, except to go forward. And although the data isn't all in yet, it's clear that Thomas Huber is among the artists riding the new wave.
Huber's show features small-to-medium format mixed-media paintings. The picture planes of the major pieces are dense, but their warm, collaged surfaces are openly seductive. Huber wants texture, the matt and the rough, so that the physicality of the work moves more than the eye. Unschooled viewers might glance at the canvas, register an emotion, and move on. Pity. Huber's works open slowly, layer by layer-moving from abstract to representational, expressionistic to voyeuristic, beautiful to weird.
One of the most gripping pieces in the show, a medium-format diptych entitled "Orchard," appears almost decorative at first glance. Painted in creams and whites with some touches of Granny Smith, the surface layer is sensuous, inviting. Elliptical forms seem to loll on a floating plane, perhaps enacting a kind of lazy cell division. New worlds are forming-or morphing-in these paintings. And they are curious worlds, indeed. A lady's purse dangles from a missing arm. Some sort of urn pours liquid underneath a bubble. Is that a Petri dish inside the cloud? Is it a Petri dish? Is it a cloud? And what about all those pots and pans?
Huber is fascinated with receptacles of all kinds-they lodge in the various layers of his palimpsests, ready to catch and hold attention as liquids swirl over, under, around and through the image. These ready receptacles favor sexual interpretation-the cosmic soup that gave rise to life on our planet as well as to our more intimate and habitual transfer of liquids. The receptacle metaphor extends even to the writing, since the words on Huber's canvas are referential vehicles of content. In "Orchard," a little scribble of text is talking about… an orchard? The titles of Huber's paintings slyly recline within layers of transparency, a "Where's Waldo" of discovery.
To achieve suggestive viscosity, Huber uses various inks and oils, plaster and paints, waxes and varnishes, drawings and transfers, so that the layers flow into one another, and in and out of images. The figuration always seems on the verge of a potential announcement-of recognizable environments, of life itself. With all this liquidity of image and material, and commitment to life sciences and ecology, it's not surprising that Huber's work shuns slick and mechanistic, highly controlled surfaces in favor of something a little more gestural and messy. Like many of the works in the current 2008 Whitney Biennial, Huber's exhibition attests to a nascent creative moment that requires just that.

A time to reflect

Maykr's previous posts act as a surrogate memory bank, as the one I was born with fades so easily these days.

So, this is the year kicked off with the Beacon School District having resumed management of the old Beacon High School, and in January held a community forum regarding future use and fate of the building. I understand it now, from passing words, there seem to be a couple of parties interested in the building.

As far as galleries in 2007 go, TenTents went dormant, although I believe it still retains the space at 502 Main. Of course a fresh crop of spaces opened up this year, beginning with Freshman Fine Art in January, which made it through October before expiring. Fovea Exhibitions Beacon Gallery opened in May; Open Space, MJ Art and Mount Beacon Fine Art in September, and Hermitage in December, adding a broader variety and depth to what we can see close to home.

Windows on Main St went off without any notable controveries in 2007, and Collaborative Concepts has settled into it's new niche with the annual Saunder's Farm exhibit in Garrison.

The best in-Beacon-exhibits on my list?
William Crow and Joel Holub at Go North in February.
Our War at Fovea Exhibitions, haunting and still in my mind.

Exhibitions that made an impact on me further afield in 2007:
Richard Tuttle at Sperone Westwater in NYC.
Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read, NYC.
Andrea Zittel at MOCA in LA.

I think the show I'd most like to forget was also at LA MOCA. Whack! Art and the Feminist Revolution was an endeavor of sappy nostalgia. The encyclopedic exhibition's organization, though edifying from a sociological standpoint, succeeded in degrading the potency some otherwise powerful work.

I invite you to comment on the most memorable exhibits and the real stinkers you saw this year. Really, I want to know.

Van Brunt reviewed at Culture Catch.com

Van Brunt Gallery's April exhibit featuring work by Stanford Kay, Steven Nicholls and D.Dominick Lombardi is the subject of a review by Elizabeth Stevens published last week at CultureCatch.com.

Angelika Rinnhofer on Jonas' performance at Dia:Beacon

Joan Jonas

The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things

A performance based on the writings of Aby Warburg
at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries

Have you ever imagined what you could do with the fantastic space in the basement of Dia:Beacon? A lot of visitors of the museum ask themselves this question when they see the cavernous, hypostyle hall. Joan Jonas’s answer is to turn it into a performance stage with the depth of a football field, the acoustics of a concert hall, with projection screens moving between massive columns, to the sound of live piano music. Jonas’s The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things incorporates Dia:Beacon’s environment into a performance piece that introduces the viewer to German art historian Aby Warburg’s writings. Jonas, inspired by the Hopi Snake Dance, which she witnessed some 40 years ago, works with Warburg’s words about his experience with the Native American people. She fuses theater, dance, music, video, photography, costume design, and noise into a Gesamtkunstwerk that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Only two more performances are scheduled, Saturday, Oct. 22, and Sunday, Oct., 23 at 2PM.

Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY 12508
845.440.0100

Angelika Rinnhofer