Atlas – 124 – Yoko and Summer wrapup
It’s June now, and I will be reducing Atlas to a bi-weekly affair until the fall. I want to cover a few topics briefly and let you all go on your way to the warm and beachy places.
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What is it about looking at museums full of sheets of paper with words on them that gives me the sense of collaborative transgression? Yoko Ono, On Kawara and the MoMA John Cage inspired show “There Will Never Be Silence.” all relied on this type of documentation. Paper shows it’s age, bluntly and without presumption. Posters, poems and record sleeves all wear and age. I love what paper tells you just by looking like sand or light coffee.
Woven into the Ono show is a sense of purposeful perversion. You are there, 50 years after the fact in many instances, seeing the product of an art project built on the tip of a pyramid, unbalanced. Maybe without balance and in search of the place in which it all goes tumbling earthwards. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that Ono is the real deal. And I am glad this show doesn’t try and make a case, it just presents the art in it’s proper context.
I want to experience this show again. I didn’t turn off my mind, relax and float downstream. I will need to see it more to get a real sense of it’s scope. I certainly recommend it.
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Regarding the recently closed FOLD @ Planthouse – I want to extend my thanks to Katie Michel and Brad Ewing and Elle and Hollis and everyone at Planthouse for making Fold a success. The show would have been nothing without the artists Anders Bergstrom, Martha Lewis, Matt Magee or Rachel Ostrow. Thank you all for your trust and hard work. Rachel Gladfelter, my co-curator, spent a year putting up with me trying to make Fold a reality. Thanks Rach!
If you didn’t get a chance to see FOLD, it’s all beautifully documented on the Planthouse site here.
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I will be announcing my June Atlas Discussion artist soon. Stay Tuned for a few more discussions this summer.
– Jeff Bergman June 2015
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