Sunday, July 10, 2011

Whitney: color me happy

I headed uptown to the Whitney on Saturday. I saw the Lyonel Feininger and Cory Archangel shows. Unfortunately, I could only take pictures on the Cory floor so I had to troll the internet for the Feininger images.

Cory Archangel's work is about digital, internet, and video game culture. I would compare him to Warhol, Christian Marclay, and Tim Hawkinson. This is a giant video game piece about bowling and he has programed the game to throw gutter balls.


 I love the robotic display stands which he programmed to dance (a la Hawkinson)
 Big, shiny, colorful--- my favorite. These pieces were very nice. He gives all the coordinates so you could make them yourself in Photoshop.   The questioning of originality of the artist (a la Warhol) is very interesting.
 The rainbow one was speaking to me....
He also did a mash-up (a la Marclay) from YouTube guitar tutorials. I love the DIY spirit of the piece however the musical quality wasn't as elegant as Marclay's mash-ups. I guess that is the difference between YouTube as your source material and movie scores.
 The Lyonel Feininger show was on the 3rd floor. Feininger was an American who moved to Germany in his teens but came back to the US in the late 1930s. He was the painting professor at the Bauhaus. My favorite works were his early Die Brucke paintings. His use of color is fantastic- it looks so fresh. I am not a fan of his analytical cubist phase but I love the lyrical and expressive quality of his first paintings.


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