Picasso and Arianna, Kröner and Bernstein, Sifton and Art, etc. [Collected]

Sam Falls, Untitled, 2011. Digital C-print and collage, 31 x 24 in., in "Out of Practice," curated by Nudashank, at Art Blog Art Blog, New York, through June 18, 2011.

• "The Picasso Wars": Arianna Huffington and her "portrait of the artist as a bad man." A "dog of a book," says Robert Hughes, in 1988. [New York on Google Books]

• Sharon Butler on career advice for artists and "Reverie," a group show curated by artist Stephen Westfall at Galerie Zürcher that includes Shirley Jaffe, Stanley Whitney, Patricia Treib, Westfall, and others. "Yeah — it's OK to include your own work if you're curating the show," Butler writes. [Two Coats of Paint]

• "A Complete Guide to Seinfeld's Sneaker." [Complex via @Cory_Arcangel]

• Magdalena Kröner interviews Judith Bernstein: Kröner: "Why does the subject matter of your work continue to be controversial?" Bernstein: "The connection between screw and phallus, present in much of my work, touches upon many sensitive aspects that exist in the subconscious. Men especially can feel intimidated by the scale of a work... [ART BLOG ART BLOG]

• "Invitations are style statements in a minor key, ancillary artworks of a collective sort. Designed by artists, by graphic designers, by art dealers and museum curators — usually a combination of the above — they are the advance guard for the real thing. Their merit is judged in the very act of reading one's mail." — Roberta Smith, "Art Invitations as Small Scraps of History," the New York Times, May 16, 1993

• The Class of 2011: Curator and writer Jamillah James posts highlights from recent New York MFA exhibitions. [Frontiers]

• "Tom Harris ... cooks lamb sweetbreads with butter beans and wild garlic that can set off an episode of synesthesia if you are so inclined: a Constable landscape of flavors and textures, of menacing clouds and plump trees and soft grass for the lamb, Britain on a plate." New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton's art references are growing deeper and richer and continuing to flow. [16 Miles]

• June 4: "Leverage," with Sonja Engelhardt, Luke Stettner, Gustabo Velazquez, and Claudia Weber, opens at Jo-ey Tang's Notary Public space on the Upper East Side. [TNP via ROLU]

• June 4: In SoHo, Los Angeles–based artist Wu Tsang unveils his New York solo debut, which includes a video about a 15-year-old Salvadorian refugee who arrives in L.A. in 1985 and is befriended by trans women at a local bar. [Clifton Benevento]

• June 5: "A+" — a three-day group show at Bushwick's ARCH Production & Design NYC Studio with work by Ivin Ballen, Evan Collier, Meghan Petras, Adriana Santiago, and more — closes. Curated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne, the exhibition includes "allusions to dome culture, inflatable architecture, minimalism, kitsch, the surf and skate subcultures, abstract expressionism, mid-century modern design and obsolete technology." [Bushwick Open Studios]

• June 6: The Museum of Modern Art's "Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914," the most entrancing museum show of the New York season, closes. It feels like it only just arrived. [MoMA]

"NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED" at the Queens Museum of Art

Installation view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED," curated by Jamillah James, at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

When you next visit the Queens Museum of Art, head straight to the second floor. If you have some time to spare, take the ramp that steadily rises up and around the Panorama of the City of New York, as I did on Sunday afternoon, arriving to find a reception filled with artists and their supporters enjoying a majestic aerial view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED," a 16-artist exhibition curated by QMA fellow Jamillah James on the first floor. Even without that crowd, it is a thrilling place to begin. You can spot one of Brendan Fowler's multi-frame works from up there, all fluorescent pink flowers and lush green leaves, and a shelf of Jean Shin's altered trophies. There are more mysterious works, too: an empty display case, a pedestal bearing a dirt–covered shirt, and a collage assembled with just a handful of clippings, all things you will immediately want to see up close.


Left to right: Jean Shin, Altered Trophies (Everyday Monuments), 2009. Altered trophies, painted and cast resin. Dave Murray, 85% of the Art I Made Turned into a Diamond. 0.29-carat diamond. Brendan Fowler, Fall 2009 (2 Screen Flower Print, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 2, Flowers in Terry/Cindy's Garden 1), 2009. Digital C-prints, silkscreen ink and enamel on paper, frames, and Plexiglas.


Brendan Fowler, Fall 2009 (2 Screen Flower Print, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 2, Flowers in Terry/Cindy's Garden 1), 2009. Digital C-prints, silkscreen ink and enamel on paper, frames, and Plexiglas.

A wall of photographs greets you down below, an installation of Jason Lazarus's Too Hard to Keep Archive (2010–), which consists of images that fit the work's title, donated by people in the process of purging. (This is an increasingly rare privilege, as whole lives are archived online, digital photos never quite going away.) There are photos of a woman with a black eye, people kissing, and landscapes. A whole wedding album sits high on a shelf. If, in Bas Jan Ader's I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971), we watch the effects of private grief, we here see its myriad sources, though we're equally cut off from the details. Viewing these mute objects triggers our own associations, perhaps even our own pains, a process that recurs throughout the exhibition, which is filled with works that offer various glimpses of personal lives, though never complete confessions.


Installation view of Faten Kanaan, The Reader, 2011. Mixed media.


Detail view of Faten Kanaan, The Reader, 2011. Mixed media.


Zak Kitnick, The People Behind Our Products (Silver), 2009. Die-cut tin sheet, LDF, and other media.



That admixture of display and reticence is also present in Zak Kitnick's The People Behind Our Products (Silver), a row of three wall-hung white boxes, each fit with an aluminum radiator cover, which shields and obscures different types of product packaging, castoff material that takes on a sinister, eerie presence when blocked by the die-cut metal. Lauren Luloff's Striped also looks similarly uncomfortable and vaguely elegaic in this context. A red, white, and blue striped sheet wrapped messily around a green board, it is propped against a wall like an abject, abandoned record of a domestic dispute, some unknowable trauma. Luloff also has a piece on view at the Bronx River Art Center right now, a frame strung with wild bands of colored fabric: it is a raucous party, and this is the brutal morning after. Such fanciful readings aside, it is also a visual treat, a Buren come unhinged and folded in on itself. When I first read the checklist, I thought its title was Stripped. That would fit too.


Lauren Luloff, Striped, 2010. Bed sheet, acrylic, rabbit skin glue, and wood.


Bryan Zanisnik, video stills from Preserve, 2009. Two-channel video, 5 min., 15 sec.


Taylor Baldwin, Martyr Me a Little, 2008. Extinct heart pine¹, white high-density polyethylene², yellow HDPE³, black HDPE⁴, drywall screws⁵, fluorescent green acrylic⁶, fluorescent pink acrylic⁷, epoxy resin⁸, black resin dye⁹, aluminum¹⁰, brass screws¹¹, paint mixing stick¹², sticky wax¹³, graphite and colored pencil¹⁴ on newsprint¹⁵.


Wall label and footnotes for Taylor Baldwin, Martyr Me a Little, 2008.

Taylor Baldwin opts for extreme disclosure, or at least the appearance of it, in the wall placard that accompanies his intricate and finely polished assemblage Martyr Me a Little (2008). It lists, in a lengthy series of footnotes, the provenance for each of the materials he used to build the work. The black resin dye? "Bought from Woodcraft for too much money and felt guilty over." Those brass screws? " "Salvaged from the VDOT warehouse liquidation." The accumulated series becomes a kind of contemporary update of Richard Serra's Verb List Compilation (1967–68), with acquisition methods — given, retrieved, donated, traded, bought, found, bartered, swiped, salvaged, made from, stolen, borrowed — replacing actions. Of course, that surplus of information says nothing about the content of the skull–adorned monument. We are once again only given a sliver of a reveal.


Agathe Snow, Paper General, 2007. Mixed media assemblage.

The empty box you spotted from up above turns out to actually contain one tiny object when you inspect it more closely: a minute diamond forged from the cremated remains of Dave Murray's art. Its title is 85% of the Art I Made Turned into a Diamond, and it has the unique glory of twisting John Baldessari's famous cremation episode into something new, witty (it weighs in at a modest 0.29 carats), absurd (why only 85% of his work?), and laced with ambiguity (why do this at all?). Agathe Snow takes a more impersonal route, scavenging castoff materials from downtown Manhattan for her sculpture Paper General (2007), a slick black collared shirt and white paint mask caked with thick mud. Divorced from their original owners and combined in this new context, these objects become non-sites for Snow's neighborhood and free-floating signifiers for our own thoughts, our own memories.


Installation view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED"

On first reading, the title "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED" suggested to me the surprise one feels upon returning to a once-familiar place or being confronted by a once-familiar object: "That is not the way I remembered it being." But it could also denote a shift in the process of remembering, a rewiring of the way we process or access memory, a Barthesian prick, or even a loss of control: "I didn't want to remember that, I don't like to think about those things." There is that strange, spare collage still to see — a work by Amanda Ross-Ho, it turns out. She's affixed to a rectangle of Sheetrock a snapshot from Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, a photo of a wildly colored pillow, and a section of a page sliced from a party-supply catalogue. There is also a lone earring. What will you make of this?