Josephine Meckseper, Scene VI (Installation View), via Art Observed

Few artists have continued to explore the overlapping languages of commerce, visual art and the attendant formats of culture that lay somewhere between the two in the same manner as Josephine Meckseper.  Frequently incorporating the languages of commercial display in conjunction with references to film and painting, her works are confounding arrangements of both corporeal bodies and abstracted agents, each contending for the viewer’s attention in strange, often foreign ways. For her current show, on view at Timothy Taylor in New York, the artist brings a set from her own film, PELLEA[S]. (more…)

Situated within the western reaches of Times Square, between an advertisement for Jesus Christ Superstar, a multistory parking lot, and the Playwright Pub, stands New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper’s Manhattan Oil Project. The work, supported by the Art Production Fund and Sotheby’s, is the second installation in The Last Lot project space, an initiative sponsored by The Shubert Organization for the Times Square Alliance’s public art program. Occupying one of the few remaining vacant lots in this seat of American commercial culture since Monday, the two hulking red and black structures rhythmically swing up and down, reaching 25 feet at their highest points. Meckseper explains, “The critical placement of the pumps is a conceptual gesture that raises questions about business and capital; land use and resources; wealth and decay; decadence and dependence.”

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Move over vaporetti — there’s a new barge in town. Slated to gracing the banks of the Grand Canal in Venice over the past five days was a project by The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, entitled “Commercial Break.” The exhibition is organized by Neville Wakefield, a contemporary art writer prolific curator globally. Powered by POST Magazine, “Commercial Break” considers itself to be a provocative architectural intervention in a city where no advertising is traditionally displayed. Unfortunately, as Artinfo reported, the city pulled permits a few days before and the videos were instead screened at the project’s Bauer Hotel party. The woman behind the “GCCC” is Dasha Zukhova, girlfriend of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich; it is the institution’s second project in Venice.  All videos are now viewable on the exhibition’s website.

Among videos featured is one by  Richard Phillips, starring Lindsey Lohan.

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Strange Attractors, Aki Sasmoto – all photographs by Oskar Proctor for Art Observed.

This week the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York opened its doors for the 75th edition if its defining exhibition: The Biennial. Simply titled, 2010, the show rejects an organizational theme and instead uses time as its marker in a matter-of-fact cross-section of American art today. The show is one of the smallest in the Biennial’s history – works by only 55 artists and collaborative teams are displayed on four floors of the museum’s ‘Breur Building’ in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This year the entire third floor of the building has been taken dedicated video installation – first exhibited at the Biennial in 1975 – a sure sign that video work has now reached maturity, worthy of recognition as an independent art form. In addition, the museum’s fifth floor is devoted to artists in the Whitney’s permanent collection who have shown in past Biennials.

Francesco Bonami, Curator of Whitney Biennial 2010

Whitney Biennial 2010 – Interview with curator Francesco Bonami via VernissageTV

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