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-->   Saturday, FEBRUARY 15th, 2014 @ 2 PM

 

Helen Frankenthaler’s Obituaries

 

by Mike Cloud


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The theoretical language of the self and the inner-life are rare in our contemporary art discourse, dominated by the social language of Pop and Postmodernism.

 

In life we think of an artist in terms of what she is able to extract from the world around her:  love, respect, travel, wealth, fame and so on. In death this changes, we no longer celebrate the celebrity’s wealth or beauty, we now focus on her charity, kindness, sacrifice, and courage: things she has taken from inside herself.

 

This shift in language, from the language of envy to the language of admiration, is not surprising. We often admire dead people, but we seldom envy them. From an early age we think of death as an existential crisis: what the world loses when an artist dies is not her wealth or her body. What is lost to us, and what is mourned is her “self”.

 

Through a group reading of artists’ obituaries, in the style of an artists salon, the critical language of these art writings will be discussed and used to make a theoretical account of random art culled from the advertisements in Art Forum.

 


 

Mike Cloud is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at P.S.1, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovak Republic; Good Children Gallery, LA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, NB; White Columns, NY; Max Protetch, NY; Apexart, NY. Cloud’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art Review and featured in the publication Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas, published by Phaidon Press. Cloud received his MFA from Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor at Brooklyn College/ CUNY in New York.

 

 

Photos from events:

 

 

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