Who are Jay & Q? And what have they been doing these past ten years? Nylon flags decorated the walls, each featuring a drawing of two horse heads sporting matching hats, and bearing the same rough script—10 YEARS OF JAY & Q. The gallery floor was comparatively empty, punctuated by three monitors on pedestals and the gallery’s two preexisting structural columns. Via the few artworks physically present, we were encouraged to interpret the show through the artists’ biography, which has spanned so far from their first collaboration (begun in 2002, while they were still students at the Städelschule

Since the summer of 2007, Monte Vista Projects has operated as an artist-run cooperative space in Los Angeles’s Highland Park neighborhood. The venue’s commitment to communal programming made it an apt location for London-based artist Patrick Staff to bring together a selection of his collectively produced projects. Though the three works on view in this show, represented in as many videos, involved different participants and sites, the practice of “collective authorship” was central to all. For each piece, Staff had orchestrated a group encounter, which was then recorded on video in a workaday

#image #

Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), 1866, was staged to great effect in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2008 retrospective, where a protective wall, rather than secreting it away, none too subtly called attention to the infamous painting of a crotch splayed open. Mickalene Thomas’s rejoinder—the crux of her first solo museum exhibition, “Origin of the Universe,” which opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum—is rooted in this retrospective, and the physical fact of confronting the panel seems key to what she