In 2014, Florent Rousseau transformed Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1988 Whitney Museum catalogue into a masterpiece of bookbinding.
See: bibliotheque-gay.blogspot.com/robert-mapplethorpe-habille-par-florent
TRANSMISSIONS, an exhibition by Nick Mauss “exploring the relationship between modernist ballet and the avant-garde visual arts in New York from the 1930s through ’50s” is up at the Whitney through mid-May.*
Works by Mauss—as well as archival photographs, drawings, sculptures, paintings, film, and video—are supplemented by daily dance performances in conversation with the show’s display.
Through May 14.
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street, New York City.
Top: Paul Cadmus, Reflections, 1944.
Above: George Platt Lynes, Tex Smutney, 1941.
Below: George Platt Lynes, Frederick Ashton with Maxwell Baird, Floyd Miller, and Billie Smith for Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934.
Image credit for Lynes photographs: George Platt Lynes Estate, Kinsey Institute, Indiana University.
Just a year after her first solo show—And a Wheel on the Track, at Mier Gallery in West Hollywood—Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s watercolors, gouaches, and oils are part of an exceptionally strong painting component at the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER—2017 WHITNEY BIENNIAL, through June 11.
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York City.
See Clare Hurley’s recent conversation with Dupuy-Spencer:
wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/25/inte-m25.html
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Asher and Miro, watercolor and gouache on paper, 2015. Image credit: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer and the Mier Gallery.
For the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Frances Stark created a series of paintings depicting enlarged pages of underlined passages from the title essay of CensorshipNow!!, by Ian Svenonius:
“Censor the news. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other media liberties have become a grotesque and deadly parody of their promise….
“Censor the technology. Technological innovations determine much of what becomes art, media, communication, and therefore life. We must manacle these mediums for the sake of expression itself….Flat-screen television transforms every room and space into an outhouse….”
Last weekend at the Whitney, many viewers stood before Stark’s work enthralled. Others cherry-picked paragraphs out of context—reading Svenonius’ rhetorical examples of past misdeeds as endorsements—and missed one of Svenonius’ points: The dangers of making false comparisons between the past and the present to excuse what we do in the future.
FRANCES STARK—2017 WHITNEY BIENNIAL, through June 11.
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York City.
See Daniel Brockton’s Vanyaland interview with Svenonius:
Frances Stark, Ian F. Svenonius’s “Censorship Now” for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Spread 3 of 8 (pp. 16-17) (the state, like a rampaging mob boss), 2017.
Image credit: Frances Stark and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.
AN–MY LÊ’s photographs are one of the highlights of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks. and now in its last weeks.
AN–MY LÊ—2017 WHITNEY BIENNIAL, through June 11.
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York City.
whitney.org/Exhibitions/2017Biennial
An-My Lê, November 9, Graffiti, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2016
Image credit: Hyperallergic
