Art

Much has been written about the traveling exhibition The Americans, but here’s a recap: Swiss photographer Robert Frank won a Guggenheim fellowship and drove around the United States in 1955-56 taking pictures. His book The Americans, with a forward by Jack Kerouac, was published in 1959, and met with acclaim and controversy. Some people didn’t like the America that Frank saw. On the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, the entire series has been shown at several U.S. venues, and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From images of a funeral in South Carolina to a wedding chapel in Reno, Frank revealed a nation that looked burdened, anxious, and lost.

I joined Hyperallergic editor and fellow street art enthusiast, Hrag Vartanian, to discuss the recent film by the Antagonist Art Movement titled “This is Berlin Not New York.” The very indie film is directed by Ethan H. Minsker and follows the adventures of the New York-based art group as they travel to Berlin to participate in an exhibition and explore one of the world’s hot spots of contemporary art.

An edited transcript of our conversation is below but make up your own mind this Saturday night (Oct. 17) as the film is being screened at Anthology Film Archives during the Royal Flush Festival.

For Alex Bag’s current solo show, Reality Tunnel Vision, the front room of Elizabeth Dee gallery is wrapped with forest-patterned wallpaper on one side (curling off the wall at the far end), dead plants hanging from the wall, some dead bamboo sticking out of dirt on the gallery floor, an old barbeque, and a few drawings. The drawings, sketched in a cartoony crudeness, depict some of the despicable characters currently swarming our cable channel reality TV shows, such as puffy-lipped Barbie-women with impossibly huge breasts, or the muscled, faux-hawked, tattooed men who compete on national television for a chance at “true love,” money, or their own spin-off show.

Quirky, clever and crafty are words that immediately come to mind when describing the work of Andy Yoder. His brand of conceptual sculpture easily manipulates scale, surfaces and materials to create fetishistic objects that are familiar and alienating.

In his latest solo show titled Man Cave at Winkleman in Chelsea, Yoder continues looking at the banal objects of our culture (a garage door, a bowling pin, hub caps, a lifesaver) but transforms them in ways that seem to comment on our societal need to covet material possessions, no matter how ridiculous.

In the International Center of Photography’s (ICP) third global survey of photography and video, known as the Triennial, the focus is on fashion and “its relationship to art and other cultural and social phenomena.”

Titled “Dress Codes,” the exhibition is an ambitious look at fashion, which is interpreted to include everything from issues of identity, corporate consumption and politics.