The 60 wpm review by Lori Waxman

During my scheduled 20 minute time slot, Lori Waxman looked at 10 pieces of artwork, then sat down at her laptop to write. The review was projected behind her as she wrote and when she was done, an assistant posted a printed version on the wall.

Feel free to review this review in comments or e-mail me.

Here it is:

Clint Fulkerson draws and paints and prints geometric abstractions. That sounds simple enough. Yet his works are anything but. Imagine Bucky Fuller’s geodesic domes as if they were viral structures gone wild. Picture a sprawling city seen from above, at night, dotted with glowing centers and crisscrossed by the lines of endless roadways. Fulkerson’s forms cluster and spread, multiply and divide, pop an recede. They’re organic and mathematical, precise but improvised, flowing but utterly tight. In all these contrasts, his forms prove themselves as complex and dualistic as living things—despite looking, at first, superficial glance, to be the repetitive doodles of a scientific hand. Which they may be, in part, but what, after all, isn’t worth at least a second glance? That’s one lesson of these works, though it’s not the pleasure of them. That should never be a lesson, but rather an experience to have, for oneself, thanks to the generous nature of artists like Fulkerson who put such strange, surprising work out for the looking.

-Lori Waxman

You can read All 30 reviews written during the 3 day performance at the Portland Phoenix Website.

60 Word per Minute Art Critic

I have an appointment to have my artwork critiqued at this event tonight at 6pm during the First Friday Art Walk at Space Gallery:

Lori Waxman is a Chicago-based critic and art historian whose reviews and articles have been published by The Chicago Tribune, Artforum, Modern Painters, Gastronomica, Parkett, Tema Celeste, as well as the sadly defunct Parachute.

In her three-day performances as the 60 wrd/min art critic, Waxman makes herself available on a first-come-first-serve basis to local artists seeking succinct and opinionated reviews of their work. While a receptionist processes each artist’s submission, Waxman churns out one review every twenty minutes, the texts of which are displayed live on a nearby monitor for artists and observers to read. As each one- to two-hundred word review is finished, the receptionist will “publish” a physical copy to a nearby wall. Eventually all or some of the reviews are published in a magazine or newspaper.

The format of the 60 wrd/min art critic brings artist, artwork and review into the same space simultaneously. The performance raises questions about the interaction of critic and artist, the value of on-demand criticism, and the effect of a solitary writer working in public. What emerges from the experiment is a literal and comical grappling with the idea that there are too many artists and galleries, and not enough critical venues to cover them all.

While the reviews aren’t guaranteed to be positive, Waxman insists they are thoughtful, critical and informative. For artists who have been reviewed carelessly, who have never been reviewed, or live in a city where there is little local criticism, the performance presents an opportunity for honest, informed criticism at the same time it questions the role of criticism itself.