Berfrois

Colin Raff proceeds into the biotic sculpture room

Colin Raff proceeds into the biotic sculpture room

Nearing the south entrance, we come upon the Salon’s indisputable main attraction...

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Robyn Ferrell: Evaded Commodification is Passé

Robyn Ferrell: Evaded Commodification is Passé

Some classics re-emerged. Baldessari re-interpreted his 1977 video event of ‘Six Colourful Inside Jobs’ that paid homage to a legendary art origin in Sol Le Witt’s work by paying painters to repaint the room continuously in a changing palette of colours. In the Abramovic room, her 1997 classic performance...

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Daniel Bosch: High

Daniel Bosch: High

Against a black background, part of the face of a fair-skinned woman. The tone and texture of her skin. The curve of her lips. Especially the black of her eyes — as if we could look through her. All these exceed not only what we expect to see when...

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Nicholas Rombes: 70

Nicholas Rombes: 70

As we move deeper into the twenty-first century our world seems evermore bifurcated between the known and the hidden, and this visible divide characterizes our own psychotic state. On the one hand, as the Snowden documents show, we are all of us watched by groups whose names we don't...

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James Glickman: Whedon’s Shakespeare

James Glickman: Whedon’s Shakespeare

Joss Whedon’s recent Much Ado About Nothing embodies the question: can movies made from Shakespeare still find a wide audience? It has been a long trajectory since 1948 when Laurence Olivier's Hamlet got seven nominations and three Academy awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, to the late ‘90s...

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Restoration Revamped

Restoration Revamped

In the Land of the Head Hunters, Edward S. Curtis, 1914 by Oliver Farry In the Land of the Head Hunters, dir. Edward S. Curtis, 65 minutes One of the best films of 2013 was released in 1914. Edward S. Curtis, well known for his documentary photographs of the...

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Downtown hipsters headed to the video dungeon below…

Downtown hipsters headed to the video dungeon below…

Narcissister is You, Narcissister, 2012. Photograph by Emily Colucci. Via From Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion: Saturday afternoon, I took the train from Astoria to Prince Street. Navigating East, through the brick wall to brick wall Soho throng, I crossed that little cement slab of park...

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Presenting Art by Patricia Emison

Presenting Art by Patricia Emison

I came to John Berger's Ways of Seeing through the back door. About a decade after the four-part series on the BBC (1972) had excited attention as a scrappy response to Kenneth Clark's staid Civilisation (1969), I read the book because the title was so often cited. I confess...

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“Property” (intended in a pejorative sense)

“Property” (intended in a pejorative sense)

12 Years a Slave, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013 From The New York Review of Books: The film is unflinching in its portrayal of brutality. Noosed, strung up, and choking with just his toes touching the dirt in punishment for attacking the overseer Tibeats, Northup seems to hang forever, as...

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