Books
fromThe New Yorker
6 days agoDaniyal Mueenuddin on the Uses, and Abuses, of Real Life
The line between inspiration and appropriation in storytelling is complex and often controversial.
My mind, though enfeebled by New Year's celebrations, was fine; I'd traveled to Queens to see Jeffrey Joyal's "my Life Underground" at Gandt. For this exhibition, the gallery left its longtime home in a basement for a column-laden miniature ballroom in a clinic up the block, complete with a wrought-iron chandelier and ghostly portrait hanging above the crown molding. Walking through the lobby to the exhibition room, I passed by an empty suggestion box entreating patients to "rate their therapist."
Framed between two decisive historical thresholds-the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster- Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989-2010 re-examines two transformative decades in Japanese art. The exhibition challenges the idea of "Japan" as a fixed national entity, instead situating artistic practice within the fluid global exchanges of late capitalism.
PRELUDIO follows the line begun with the Vestigio series, in which the artist Aryz - Octavi Arrizabalaga (2x cover artist) engages in a dialogue with some of the creators who have influenced him throughout his career. On this occasion, he presents a series of large-format oil paintings conceived as small visual dialogues with the great masters of painting. Each work is a tribute to the classical pictorial tradition and some of its fundamental themes.