By BLAIR SCHULMAN
The critic Phillip Yenawine said in a quote I have taken to heart in everything visual, “Art is supposed to operate as a medium of communication … but if television states the obvious, art probes the mysterious.”An exhibition of mostly single channel video, Extra/Ordinary: Video Art from Asia, utilizes one of modern society's most potent forms of communication and lays it at our feet like an evening of basic cable. Although it was easy to maneuver from one darkened installation to another, the content however, was like flipping channels. One kept looking for an “Aha” moment, or at least the exciting conclusion when the murderer is finally revealed. This exhibition’s intention “investigates new ways of transforming familiar experiences and daily routines into moments of expanded meaning, contemplation and humorous reflection.” On the surface this appears to “uncover the potential of daily experience and explore the material stuff of the world as mutable and laden with potential.”

Extra/Ordinary >>

Jung Yeondoo, still from Handmade Memories series, Legend, 2008.

  

Spirited Away, 2001, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, distributed by Disney.

By STEVE SHAPIRO
In the kind of irony that Cruella de Vil would find divine, the new Walt Disney Family Museum is on the grounds of San Francisco’s Presidio, a former military compound. If a children’s animation center seems antipodean to a history of troop training and deployment, well, Mickey and Donald did not draw themselves. For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney Studio’s first full-length animated feature premièring in 1937, the five-year process to finish the picture involved 600 employees; 150 girls auditioned for the voice of Snow White; the multiplane camera was invented (to get the depth of illusion most animated cartoons still lack); some quarter-million drawings were made — and Walt cut six months of finished footage. Walt Disney was in charge in ways that would parallel Churchill. He smoked, overworked, was short with employees, vague about decisions, fidgety with his wife, grandiose in schemes like Disneyland, prejudicial in his social views and recessive in his political beliefs.

Walt Disney Family Museum >>

By LEANNE GOEBEL
On a recent weekend the annual celebration of Donald Judd and lectures about his re-opened works in concrete were live-streamed from the Chinati website.  Marfa, a remote town, with a rundown former Army base and old Army barracks, is where Judd installed 100 sculptures in aluminum and 15 works in concrete. He transformed Fort Marfa into a seminal location to display his own art and building-sized installations by friends and admired peers including Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, Ingolfur Arnarsson, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, David Rabinowitch and John Wesley. For Judd, art emulated the existence of all things by creating space and time. His large concrete objects placed in the grasslands beyond the hangars that house his 100 aluminum boxes are a perfect example of that. They create their own space and time. They are not architecture; they are not placed for any purpose or reason other than to be art. They have been exposed to the elements, the wind, the rain, and have deteriorated over time. In the past years these object have undergone extensive conservation by the Chinati Foundation, which oversees the art and was open to the public for the first time the weekend of October 9-11, 2009.

Donald Judd >>

Donald Judd, 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980-1984, Chinati Foundation.

  

Tim Burton. (American, b. 1958), Untitled (The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories). 1998. Pen and ink, watercolor on paper, Overall: 11 x 14", Private collection., © 2009 Tim Burton.

Tim Burton, a major retrospective explores the full scale of Tim Burton’s career, both as a director and concept artist for live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer. The exhibition brings together over 700 examples of sketchbooks, concept art, drawings, paintings, photographs, and a selection of his amateur films, and is the Museum’s most comprehensive monographic exhibition devoted to a filmmaker. An extensive film retrospective spanning Burton’s 27-year career runs throughout the exhibition, along with a related series of films that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton as a filmmaker. The exhibition is on view throughout the Museum: the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor features hundreds of drawings, paintings, sculptures, sketchbooks, and moving image works. MoMA’s exhibition draws extensively from the artist’s personal archive, as well as from studio archives and the private collections of Burton’s collaborators.

Tim Burton >>