After wandering around, three of us flopped onto a couch in the Armory's vast entry hall. Huddling together for warmth we stayed nearly an hour, while I got up every so often to look at the one of the few completed pieces, Swiss artist Olaf Breuning’s army of thirty blinking, shining, noisy teapot/robot “soldiers” laid out on the floor in the room across from us. At once playful and pompous, it’s a baroque piece for a baroque setting, one that seamlessly marries 2008--or even the future--with the archaic ornamentation of the building. As with musical covers and appropriation (see the post below), it’s the inspired merging of similarities and opposites that makes an art installation succeed in a given space, as Breuning’s does here. Perhaps it’s helpful to think of the use of space with installation as yet another form of appropriation—or better yet, distant collaboration.
And I like what Breuning said in a video interview, that he "finds creativity through pleasure," a fairly radical statement for an artist these days. I know all too well that there are horrid things going on in the world, but we also need something to live for.
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Reviews of the Whitney Biennial:
Holland Cotter in the New York Times
Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker
Jerry Saltz in New York
those were so trippy. i really dug 'em.
ReplyDeleteGreat Biennial piece. I would love to hear your analysis of the various reviews of the Biennial as well.
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