Sarah Braman, Friend, 2010
Sarah Braman, at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, through 12/18.
Windsoft, 2010
Wrong Painting (July), 2010
looks like Wrong Painting (July) is a re-working of the above Wrong Thing, 2009... from the show at Museum 52 with Joe Bradley.
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Sarah Braman, in Apartment Show at Artist's Space, 2/28/09
Sarah Braman, at the Armory, on anaba 3/6/09
Sarah Braman, in Apartment Show XOXO, on anaba 3/18/09
Sarah Braman, at Museum 52, on anaba 5/28/09
Sarah Braman, in Upstate NY, on anaba 8/5/09
18 comments:
This type of work is starting to look old already.
Yes, the taking furniture turning it upside down thing, adding some abject plank, some paint, preferably spray paint, wake me when its over...
Hey, hold on a sec! Didn't you see the instituional power and strength of this work? It would look awesome in some pretentious collectors front entry.
" Oh that, that's a statement work, it means this is art, becasue it sucks; it transforms your awareness of things... don't you see?"
Hey Martin, you've posted quite a lot on Braman's work in the past, so there is obviously something you are attracted to about the work. I have to say taht I don't really get it, so if you could shed light on the work, I would appreciate it. As it stands, the work seems weak, pretentious and pathetically contrived, they lack both heart and intellect (at least im my eyes).
Sarah Braman's work IS in the home of a fancy collector...the De La Cruz collection in miami. Just saw it down there. The juries still out for me on her work...the piece there had some content to it, but that content seemed light as a tissue, and jokey, after leaving that area to see a whole room of Ana Mendieta. and why is everyone posting anonymously?
obviously i like sarah braman's work but i'm not feeling very smart or analytical lately and am not in the mood to try to 'explain' anything, even if i could.
emily - i am A-OK with zero content, light-as-a-tissue, and jokey.
anonymous comments are fine! some of the best comments are anonymous... and create debate, so much better than consensus... people say what they really think. this blog used to rock with anonymous comments.
sigh,,I guess you're right Martin. About anonymous-ness. Dunno about Braman, I love her color sense, but there is an unresolvedness to alot of what she seems to do? Compared to a master of put/place/upend, Rachel Harrison. there is someone who has considered how each part becomes a whole, which leaves tantalizing relationships for the viewer to puzzle out. There is some "there" there, if you know what I mean.
but keep em coming! I rely on your blog for finding out about some of the most interesting work in the NYC area, with fantastically shot images. You do great stuff here.
huh. i disagree completely. rachel harrison is stiflingly CLEVER... one liners, cutely arranged. very cerebral but ultimately kind of soulless in their smartypantsness.
so '90s.
sarah braman puts it all out there, flaws included (and exploited to great effect). her work at the museum 52 booth at NADA was amazing.
hm. Well, I didn't get to the Nada show, but I'd like to ask...to what effect is she (Braman) exposing the flaws in her work? How did it affect you, the viewer?
re RH, I might have agreed with you before I saw Consider the Lobster at CCS Bard. There is a soul, especially,in her room sized piece, Perth Amboy, that got me thinking about how we look at art, how we experience faith (what we have faith in) when we look at art and, also when we go about our day to day lives. She makes characters in her installations that you can identify with. Her work doesn't always get there, but when it does, it is moving and dare I say, human.
Sorry to say, but both Harrison and Braman are product's of Saatchi. It's pure institutional nonesne. Apart from a large white cube this work has nothing to stand upon. If it was lost destroyed or otherwise violently disfugured it wouldn't matter it's all just a cheap game that has somehow beocme rather high end and chic. Total upper class art snob collector garbage...It's definitely art, but it's appallingly bad art. I guess it's cool to like stupid pointless things, how utterly nihlistic.
i like the work! go braman
what about richard tuttle? or gedi sib
i mean there is a long tradition of junky, blase assemblage, and the best of it seems to me to have a refinement. it's a flaneur art, salon art
more than nothing but not michelangeltoven bombast
Gedi (Sibony) and Tuttle are in a whole other dimension from Braman and Harrison. There is a different kind of weight to Sibony and Tuttle, the work is much more considered and loaded with meaning and it rewards you for your engagemetn with it.
I don't get nearly the same effect from this recent Braman work.
Harrison's work just makes a joke of itself in its corny gamesmanship. Braman seems so hit and miss (becasue some of here work is really pretty strong), but this recent stuff is barely worth a comment...it's hardly worth a a thought a glance or any amount of attention, it doesn't even make me angry it just seems so pathetic, which is one thing you can't seriouly say about Sibony or Tuttle.
I would argue that Seboni's work is loaded with rhetoric, not meaning. Personally I'm tired of people assuming that if an artist bullshits enough about their work, and curators buy into it, that it is smarter and more important. Seboni's work is boring with a capital "B." Home Depot Modernism.
Tuttle shouldn't even factor into this conversation. He is no longer relevant as anything but a peripheral influence. Ever hear him speak? Captain Bullshit.
Braman doesn't conjure up a bunch of crap to spoon feed to her viewers, and she's a woman -- two reasons why people tend to write her off. Lame and unjustified.
You could make a case for any of these artist's, but the real problem is that this type of work doesn't even make a valid case for its own existence. All of this ant-aesthetic art about art BS has no significant content to offer. It just continually plays with the played out idea of the limits of art....which at this point in time is merely a matter of convinvng the curatorial gatekeeper. Anything can be called art, but that certainly doesn't make it good or worthy of attention.
I see Braman's best as not anti aesthetic but very formal, and in this case, beautiful:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YAeYrhr_g8Q/Sh9GRYDrw8I/AAAAAAAADGg/OGr4NtqSjug/s1600-h/Braman_Mitchell.jpg
But I like geometry.
I'm not quite able to dismiss the tilted ersatz modernist chair with the plank. It may read as a tired dead horse flog against class and taste, but surely she can't be that dense to not know that her own work is classy and tasteful. So I think it's something more. The tilting ( a frequent formal strategy with her) makes it read as more than just symbol, like we find with a lot of recent assemblage (symbol symbol sym - symbol - bol) but instead an actual sculptural experience in the oldschool Sugarman idiom, But then it becomes a chair again.
This is all very funny, all of these accusations. Do you think work this low key and emotive is a product of the institution? There is no intellectual masturbation going on here folks. Braman makes works that cater to nostalgia. Trying to place criticism on this type of work is just fucking bogus and ignorant. This work works if you are a human being with feelings, and if you like it.. It made me laugh when i read the comment that this work was made to appease the institution LOL. Sarah is a mom doing what she loves. She has a family, she is settled in. I dont think she's leaping for anything.. i think she is just passionate. She is one of the names I can stand behind for a show all honest type of artist. Stop hating dick weedz. Anti art is a bogus idealogy. There can not be an anti art.
i like her work a lot which should be evident from the amount of time i have spent seeking it out and posting it.
BUT, what a fake. once i was visiting the gallery (canada), there was another guy there too, and she was chatting with both of us being super nice and friendly as always. the other guy left and i was alone in the other room and i heard her co-worker ask "who was that?" to which she responded "i don't know, some weirdo".
not sure if she was talking about me or the other guy but FU sarah braman!
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