We must be careful about romanticizing the fire.
Here are the facts: on May 3, 2013, an act of arson nearly destroyed one of the iconic components of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, an outdoor installation spanning multiple blocks on Detroit’s east side. Located on Heidelberg Street and vicinity, the installation consists of houses (some occupied, others abandoned), vacant lots, trees, sidewalks, and streets transformed with layers of bright paint and assemblages of salvaged objects.
Read MoreThe album cover for 2 Live Crew's rap LP, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, shows four black women on the beach. Their backs to the camera, their profiles obscured by loose hair, the women's most noticeable features are their asses, revealed by thong bathing-bottoms. Under the triangles of the women's legs the members of 2 Live Crew sprout fully formed. They beam at the viewer from the hillside below, their black shirts offsetting multiple gold chains. The composition strikes one as though the women's asses are their faces, as if, in a curious perspectival reverse they are holding up the back row in a class picture shot from behind, with 2 Live Crew sitting up front.
Read MorePattern and Decoration has been called the last modernist movement and the first postmodern, a final hurrah in the chapters of avant-garde rebellion and a new front in the pluralist free-for-all of the 1970s. Certainly the movement was multiple, divergent, even contradictory in its manifestations: under its umbrella it gathered abstraction, figurative flourishes, gridded designs, riotous arabesques.
Read MoreDecaying remnants of Roman civilization appear in imaginary, quasi post-apocalyptic landscapes in Dennis Congdon's recent large-scale paintings. Recalling the Surrealist works of de Chirico or the Neoclassical period of Picasso, columns, capitals and busts abound in simplified settings where the history of art survives but humans don't appear to.
Read MoreIt is hard to imagine the Yale-trained photographer Soi Park sharing tequila with strangers at a day labor pick-up location in Connecticut. Yet that is how she became acquainted with the workers, and subsequently their families, who figure throughout her latest body of work. While she was riding on the Metro North commuter line in August of 2010, the train stopped briefly outside Stamford, giving Park a view of men loitering in a nearby lot. As the train started up again, she watched them run toward an arriving van. The anomaly of the men's urgency within the nondescript setting led her to return to the site with a camera.
Read MoreMarcel Duchamp explained that in the midst of creation "the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions." Once the artist is done, it is the spectator who brings it in "contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." That is, the viewer, along with the artist, is responsible for art's success.
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