Kevin Bewersdorf, Installation view

Unfortunately, I had far more to say about Kevin Bewersdorf’s Monuments to the INFOspirit than the 250 word count at Time Out allows.  But this is why I have a blog.  An open thread after the clip.

Could V&A, a gallery that shares its location with an acupuncture center, travel agency and sketchy gambling club, be better suited for Kevin Bewersdorf’s creepy corporate cult and mental discipline? Even the space’s ceiling, complete with industrial tiles, seems custom-made for the exhibition’s awkwardly arranged objects: a trophy inscribed with the show title, boxes of pamphlets and an overhead banner, as well as a tantric, blingy animation of the artist meditating at his computer.

On the far wall, four different flyers explain the basic principles behind Bewersdorf’s spiritual practice of embracing mediocrity, which he calls Maximum Sorrow. According to the text provided, the Marketplace is empty of everything but products; you are the Product, and therefore contribute to the market; Info is the free-flowing energy generated by your production and consumption. The INFOspirit, which encompasses all of these concepts, is both the state between the knowable and unknown, and mediocrity in its purist form. None of these teachings make perfect sense, but they don’t have to.

To read the full review click here.

Dulce Pinzon, Cecilia

This week’s issue of Time Out NY, includes my feature on How Soon Is Now at the Bronx Museum which I’m republishing a portion of here. Naturally, I encourage you all to purchase the issue because there are all kinds of listings and reviews you can only find in the print version.

In its 28th year, Artist in the Marketplace (AIM), the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ career-building program for emerging artists, is sending off its latest class with an exhibition titled “How Soon Is Now?” AIM enrolls 36 students a year, just six percent of those who apply. Most arrive with art degrees, and this unusual postgraduate night school tutors them in the practicalities of copyright law, taxes and marketing.

Like any cyclical program, AIM varies from class to class. There’s something uniquely exciting about the evaluation of a season’s latest trends (curator Erin Riley-Lopez is this edition’s arbiter). But a weak show can replace that exuberance with lethargy and cynicism, and this one is a true buzzkill. “How Soon Is Now?” is a plethora of flimsy Conceptual pieces dominating a space that has often seen better.

AIM is always uneven, but this year a critical mass of the work looks undeveloped and even amateurish. Negar Ahkami presents the only large-scale painting, The Birth of Pattern, but it’s a poorly executed mash-up—Frida Kahlo meets Judy Chicago in Persia. The video Sing-A-Long #1 (when a man and a woman listen to “when a man loves a woman” and they don’t know each other) by Rä di Martino unfolds exactly as described, with no more intellectual grist than its title provides. Two futuristic installations, Kelli Miller’s The True Believer (stacks of silver televisions on green carpet) and Si Jae Byun’s Catch (an inflated plastic environment encasing a monitor) lean so powerfully on art-school clichés that they stymie the success of promising videos. (The Bronx Museum makes matters worse for artists who use sound, providing headphones so poor that they compromise the work the institution wishes to promote.)

The few highlights stand out. Brendan Carroll’s wall of type-inscribed Polaroids is flecked with short texts that declare their independence from the images to which they’re attached. On a photograph of a brick wall, a couch and two odd lights resembling eyes, he’s typed, HE WROTE TO DO LISTS, AND SURFED THE NET FOR JAPANESE PORNO. HIS MOTHER CALLED; on another, a close-up of an advertisement, I HAVE GIRL HANDS­—TINY, DELICATE, SMOOTH. I STARTED THERAPY FOR THE TWENTIETH TIME TODAY. As in the photo pages of a biography, every caption suggests a narrative continued elsewhere.

To read the full piece click here.

In addition to my posting notice, my review of the Ideal Cloud at the ISE Cultural Foundation can be read at Time Out this week. An excerpt below.

In contrast to the compact pieces in Andrea Rosen’s “1950s–1960s Kinetic Abstraction” exhibit last summer, the works offered by three contemporary artists in “The Ideal Cloud” are sprawling, mechanized sculptures. These pieces depart from the formalist foundations of art and technology by engaging with sentimentality. Ordinarily this would spell trouble, but whatever maudlin qualities the show might have had are offset by either the materials employed or the opportunity for audience participation.

For example, Emcee C.M., Master of None’s project inviting viewers to express their thoughts on a typewriter sitting alongside a small projected film, evokes a little too much nostalgia for the medium. However, the messages—observations ranging from PAVEMENT IS A GOOD BAND to I DIDN’T WANT TO BE A CHEERLEADER FOR ART, NOW I CHEER FOR MYSELF—add a surprising layer of unpredictability to the piece.

Ian Burns and Miguel Palma demand less interaction from the audience. The delicate perfection of Burns’s live video feed of a tiny nondescript flag flying against a rotating salad bowl reveals a pride of ownership and a sense of national identity imposed on common objects.

To continue reading click here.