Word: visualizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although the present Biennial avoids making a synthetic statement, the exhibition provides a great excuse to display an assortment of excellent new art. Given the diversity of contemporary visual practice and the widely accepted premise that all curating is somehow biased, it's no wonder that co-curators Lisa Phillips and Louise Neri staunchly resist labeling their exhibition a "survey." Even though the show feels more like a survey than any of the recent Biennials, in their catalog essay Phillips and Neri write that they tried to avoid making a "sampler" and instead looked for certain "millenial tendencies...
...poles or the floor, on to which he projects video images of talking heads. They stare at the viewer and blankly recite children's variations of songs commonly heard in school yards: "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead; we barbecued her head." Yet monotone delivery and eerie visual presentation transform these rhymes into disturbing alien utterances. We watch both mesmerized and repulsed, while the sculptures dare us to pull their plugs...
...tiny scale transforms dried oranges, spotted seed pods, a papier mache mold of a sock, and a tower of Yardley soap boxes into intimate marvels. These laconic sculptures demand (and deserve) our thought and time, as do Orozco's elegant photographs which reveal his sensitivity to natural mysteries and visual puns, like a cluster of sleeping sheep in Common Dream, or a languid hose seeping water on the floor in Hose (Manguera Dormida). His small, subtle observations play beautifully off Vija Celmins' meticulous renderings of expansive night skies and the late Felix Gonzalez Torres' monumental billboard of transient footprints...
...Barnaby Keeney, a medievalist and the president of Brown University, wanted a humanities foundation, and in those days the humanities had a much bigger following around the country than the arts. I wanted the endowment to be for the visual arts, and Jack Javits wanted it for the performing arts. So we compromised, and that's how we got the two endowments and later the Institute of Museum and Library Services...
...Pretty much everything. Digital signals' startling improvements in visual detail and color produce a picture that looks almost 3-D compared to analog. For programming suited to a wide screen--movies and sports in particular--the leap from analog to digital could well be as striking as that from black and white to color...