Jonas Mekas, Jonas Mekas (Installation View), Via Serpentine Gallery

Lithuanian-American artist Jonas Mekas has worn many hats over his sixty-plus year career. Emigrating to the United States after his imprisonment in labor camps during World War II, Mekas began creating films that embraced a diaristic approach to documenting the events of his own life, but were informed by his active participation in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1950’s. (more…)

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, French Horns, Unwound and Entwined (2005), via PKM Gallery

Since they began working together in 1971, Claes Oldenburg and his late wife Coosje van Bruggen have created a dense body of work melding together their creative approaches in a variety of large-scale public installations and gallery works.  Appropriating the form of conventional, commonplace objects and recasting them at enormous proportions, the couple’s art simultaneously plays at the viewer’s perceptions of reality and the irony of the subject matter on view. (more…)

Peter Campus, Three Transitions (1973) via Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

Peter Campus has been working with video art and photography since the 1960s as a major contributor to the burgeoning New York-based video art scene. Throughout the span of his career, Campus has put forth a dynamic and diverse oeuvre, which was showcased last month at now and then, a major retrospective of his work at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York.  We had a chance to sit down with the artist in December and ask him a few questions, included here.

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German fashion and art photographer Juergen Teller recently sat down with The Guardian to discuss his career, his life in Germany and the United Kingdom, and his upcoming retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.  “You feel like he’s capturing the speed of life and the speed of light,” says frequent collaborator Charlotte Rampling. “I think he brings out a particular side of people and that’s what photography is to me. However he gets there doesn’t really matter technically, but what he sees is the Juergen Teller view on something.”    (more…)

Jack Goldstein – Where Is Jack Goldstein? (Installation View), courtesy Venus Over Manhattan

A member of the first graduating class of CalArts in 1972, Jack Goldstein made enormous and immediate contributions to the fine arts landscape in the 1970s and 1980s before vanishing from the public eye and tragically ending his own life in 2003.  Now, almost ten years after Goldstein’s death, collector Adam Lindemann is hosting an ambitious retrospective of Goldstein’s early work at his Venus Over Manhattan Gallery, pulling from Goldstein’s practice in painting, photography, poetry and film, including a recreation of Goldstein’s influential performance piece, Two Fencers. (more…)

John Cage – Dereau (#11) (1982), courtesy The National Academy Museum

Over the course of his lifetime, composer, writer and theorist John Cage made immense and lasting contributions to modernist and post-modernist avant-garde thought, challenging traditional conceptions of music, sound, noise and arrangement, and blazing a path for young composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  However, the artist also was a prolific painter, creating a vast body of watercolors, prints and drawings, and ultimately influcing, and collaborating with, many artists in the 50s and 60s.  These works are the focus of a new exhibition at the National Academy Museum in New York City, celebrating what would be Cage’s 100th birthday.

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Diane Arbus – A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. (1966), Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum

In partnership with Jeu de Paume, Paris, The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, The Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum is hosting a major retrospective of the work of American Photographer Diane Arbus, including a number of previously unseen pieces.

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‬In the midst of a major mid-career retrospective at Tate Modern, Damien Hirst is profiled by Forbes magazine. Considering the boundaries of a contemporary art market, the article suggests “nobody seems to misunderstand his genius more than Damien Hirst himself.”

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Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water (2002) – Whitney Museum

Multi-media artist Yayoi Kusama has been creating immersive, otherworldly paintings, video, sculpture and large-scale installation environments for over 50 years, both in the United States and her home country of Japan.  Now, the Whitney Museum in New York is exhibiting a retrospective selection of works spanning her career as a preeminent voice in Japanese contemporary art.

Yayoi Kusama, A Flower (1952)- Whitney Museum

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A Carl Andre interview regarding “Things in Their Elements” and upcoming retrospective by Dia:Beacon in 2013 [AO Newslink]

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