Media theorist Marshall McLuhan's claim "that the 'content' of any medium is always another medium" finds new resonance in the printed publication's migration to digital media, an idea which informs much of the work in the "The "New Photography 2009" show at MoMA, Mused about last week with reference to Sterling Ruby's work. The idea is engaged, perhaps to greatest effect, in Carter Mull's 2009 c-print Eleven (courtesy of Marc Foxx), a manipulated image of the front page of the Los Angeles Times, which becomes an alien artifact. In the same show, Leslie Hewitt's Riffs on Real Time engages similar ideas with old issues of Ebony. Kelley Walker's King magazine scans such as Aquafresh plus Crest with Whitening Expressions (Regina Hall) come to mind, as does a work to be featured in the upcoming vol. 13, Matthew Day Jackson's LIFE, June 12, 1944. Print might not be quite dead, but the printed periodical is clearly shifting from medium to content.
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November 12, 2009

Valerie Hegarty's painting has just been installed on The High Line at 20th St. Her ongoing exploration of the American landscape, decrepitude, and the strangeness of the medium-distant past finds a natural pairing in this outdoor installation among the weeds of the elevated tracks. The show was curated by Lauren Ross, whose interview with Matthew Day Jackson will run in the next issue of Museo.
November 11, 2009

Diana Al-Hadid, Built From Our Tallest Tales, 2008 (detail) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House Lobby as part of the Next Wave Art program.
A conglomerate of wood, metal, polystyrene, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, plastic, concrete, and paint, this assemblage comes from an artist who has previously engaged the idea of the axis mundi in Towers of Babel and Stairways to Heaven. In the mass of honeycomb rubble, she now alludes to the architecture of nature itself.
(Courtesy of Diana Al-Hadid and Perry Rubenstein Gallery. Photograph by Mariano C. Peuser).
November 10, 2009

Addendum to Nickelback Artaud: a bit of Sterling Ruby's ancestry, phallic abjections and all, in this 1908 Lewis Hine photograph of a Virginia mine.
November 10, 2009

Sterling Ruby in MoMA's "New Photography 2009" show. Also includes Carter Mull and Sara VanDerBeek.
November 9, 2009


This Wednesday night at 7pm, there will be two performances by artists recently featured in Museo, Omer Fast's "Broken Telephone" at the Henry Street Settlement's Abron Arts Center and Shana Moulton's in "Erratic Anthropologies" at Art in General.
November 5, 2009


Exhibited in Lawrence Rinder's 2002 Whitney Biennial (which also featured the curiously tautological subshow of "Net Art"), Fort Thunder collective Forcefield introduced a prescient fusion of neo-primitivist shamanism and self-consciously digital artificiality that would look forward to key currents of the naughties. Bottom pic is Douglas Oliver's Sepik River mask collection.











