Archives for January 2017
Lost Horizon – (Dis)location And Identity In Contemporary Tibetan Art (Sarah Magnatta)
In 2011, artist Tenzing Rigdol surreptitiously moved over 20,000 kilograms of dirt from Tibet into the exile community of Dharamsala, India for an installation titled Our Land, Our People. Thousands of Tibetans in the area came to view and touch the land, some with memories of a Tibetan landscape…
Art And Madness (Iwo Zmyślony)
The following is the first of a two-part series. How can we enter someone else’s head? How can we get inside? How can we break through our own, invariably too constricting horizon to reach out to another human being? How can we look at reality from the perspective of…
Querying And Queering The Virgin – Sacred Iconography And Profane Iconoclasm In The Art Of Frida Kahlo (Tina Kinsella)
A contemporary icon of those on the periphery and for those who are dispossessed, Frida Kahlo’s paintings draw on her mestizaje inheritance and personal experience of marginality ― political, cultural, sexual, gendered ― to produce an iconoclastic iconography that contests the supposedly centred subject of modernity. As with many female…
But Is It Art? – Searching For Simple, Practical, And Illuminating Answers, Part 2 (Jakob Zaaiman)
The following is a second installment of a two-part series. The first part can be found here. The question then arises, how does the “theatrical pretense” – and its invitation to a theatrical narrative – relate to inanimate crafted objects such as paintings, or sculptures? The answer is that, in the…
But Is It Art? – Searching For Simple, Practical, And Illuminating Answers (Jakob Zaaiman)
The following is the first installment of a two-part series. “Art” desperately needs a handy, practical definition, not of the scholarly conceptual variety, but rather of the plain and simple sort that you can usefully take with you into a gallery, and apply directly to what you see. You want…