Suspended over the Abyss: Seeing Calvino at the Cincinnati Public Library
Stationed inside the Cincinnati Public Library’s downtown branch, in the International Fiction alcove, is an archipelago of funky institutional wooden tables topped with glass rectangular boxes. Inside the glass boxes are 55 illustrations by three artists depicting the cities Italo Calvino poetically maps in Invisible Cities, the shapely novel/epic-poem/dialogue that has an effortlessly epic quality […]
Across the Ocean and Down the Street: “Envelope” at Visionaries + Voices
“Envelope,” the show currently up at the Visionaries + Voices (V+V) Gallery in Northside (through November 14, 2014), is a beautiful display of twittering, delicate art from all over the world created solely for the purpose of being mailed back and forth. That simple “back and forth” premise somehow allows the drawings and doodles and […]
Cluster-Funk: The 2014 Whitney Biennial
by Keith Banner A few months back I went to see the Mike Kelley retrospective at the New York City Museum of Modern Art PS 1 space, and I was floored. More than floored actually – more like cosmically overwhelmed. The show was exhaustive and high-style and punk and stupid and hyper-intelligent and mean-spirited and […]
Artificial Intelligence: Charles Woodman at Weston Art Gallery
by Keith Banner The basement space at the Weston Art Gallery has always felt claustrophobic and a little spooky to me, like a staged scene in a really serious movie about abduction, no matter what art goes on the walls. It’s the ceiling that does it, kind of looming over the whole area like a […]
Wave of Mutilation: Hollis Hammonds’ “Worthless Matter” at Dorothy W. and C. Lawson Reed, Jr. Gallery, DAAP
by Keith Banner Hollis Hammonds has close encounters of the terrestrial kind in her new show at DAAP Galleries called “Worthless Matter.” A stockpile and survey of her recent work, the show displays Hammonds’ skills at drawing and lets us in on a consciousness that is both vividly sedate to the point of entrancement, and […]
Radical without a Cause: “Matisse: A Life in Color”
Radical without a Cause: “Matisse: A Life in Color” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art By Keith Banner A docent was giving a tour of “Matisse: A Life in Color” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art when I was strolling through. I overheard her say, “Matisse didn’t have any social causes in his work. He […]
You Know What I Mean: Joey Versoza and JR at the Contemporary Arts Center
You Know What I Mean: Joey Versoza and JR at the Contemporary Arts Center By Keith Banner Joey Versoza’s “Is This It,” at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) through February 2, 2014, offers continual clues to a mystery that’s disintegrating while you stand inside its contexts and riddles. Versoza uses video, found objects, photography, […]
The Fetish Line: “Andy Warhol: Athletes” and “The Art of Sport”
The Fetish Line: “Andy Warhol: Athletes” and “The Art of Sport” at the Dayton Art Institute By Keith Banner “He’s SO beautiful,” Andy Warhol swoons in quoted text next to his Day-Glo portrait of O.J. Simpson in “Andy Warhol: Athletes,” a show of commissioned pieces Warhol did in 1977 installed on aqua walls at the […]
Stone-Cold Ineffable: Ai Weiwei’s “According to What?”
Stone-Cold Ineffable: Ai Weiwei’s “According to What?” By Keith Banner Ai Weiwei’s “According to What?” (currently at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through July 17, 2013) is pure perfection. An Apple-Store consumerist clarity defines and propels the whole enterprise, a clean, polished fetishism that somehow becomes spiritual in its carefulness. Weiwei is obviously a purist, […]
Super Cooper: Art without Words
Super Cooper: Art without Words By Keith Banner In a New York Magazine article about the recent opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s exhibit “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” Nitsuh Abebe writes: “In music, punk remains what the critic Frank Kogan calls a ‘Superword,’ a term whose main purpose is for people to […]