View of “The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery & American Fine Arts, Co. There is inspiration in every breath he takeschallenge in every exhalation.
His performance was more psychedelic than the best Pink Floyd and more transcendent than Tibetan thighbone trumpets. We also saw him play self-composed organ pieces at the gallery. Nitsch remains a colossus of roads less traveled but nevertheless essential to knowledge. Travel through a physical plane into entropy, chaos, and transformation. At Marc Straus, Nitsch’s huge, bloodred, animist canvases are portals into pagan dimensions.
His rejection of hypocrisy, control through fear, and our societal alienation from body, flesh, blood, and ecstasy is more vitally relevant than ever. Intense and uncompromising in his time-based Das Orgien Mysterien Theater celebrations, yet whenever we meet we want to cuddle and love him. Hermann Nitsch (Marc Straus, New York) Nitsch is the most beauty-full of contradictions. Hermann Nitsch, Schüttbild (75th Painting Action), 2017, acrylic and shirt on canvas, 79 × 59". The show is beautiful, emotionally generous, and refreshing for its total lack of curatorial BS.
Through a series of workshops organized by curators Eddie Cheung Wai Sum and Wendy Wo, the eight artists in “Collections of Tom, Debbie and Harry” got to collaborate closely with several extraordinary senior citizens and their collections of donated personal items: Ivy Ma blended news clippings into monochrome canvases, while Joe Yiu Miu Lai arranged cherished objects into cabinets of curiosities. But what King conjures is really a first-world pathology: In other parts of the world, under less affluent circumstances, accumulation is a survival instinct. “Collections of Tom, Debbie and Harry” (Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, on view through January 4, 2019) In his 2008 memoir, Collections of Nothing, William Davies King posits a romantic image of the collector: Collecting is “filling, completing, and mastering a universe,” he writes. Lee Kai Chung, Can’t Live With or Without You, 2018, turntables, tape deck, oscilloscope, slide viewer, board, speakers, microphones, ink-jet prints. These structures are awesome (an overused word but one that is in this case apt) in the way they simultaneously promise a just future and flirt with a monstrous materiality and scale that is darkly haunting. The overall effect of the country's built environment is one of the solidity of gray: the concretion (literally) of the potential for a better life through well-designed space, zany futurology, and poignant memorialization. If that’s the case, Yugoslavia’s “Concrete Utopia” is a nudist colony. The Congolese artist has said that a building without color is like a naked person. Photo: Valentin Jeck.īodys Isek Kingelez and “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980” (Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view through January 1 and January 13, 2019, respectively) Kingelez’s “City Dreams” is all dazzling skill and deep style: a jammy urbanity emblazoned with invented corporate and government logos that speak to both the hope for a peaceful world and the seductions of global capital. Miodrag Živković, Monument to the Battle of the Sutjeska, 1965–71, Tjentište, Bosnia and Herzegovina.