Rodney Ascher’s Room 237

FILM

March 2013

BY SO MANY MEASURES, Room 237 is a diminutive film. Directed by Rodney Ascher (reputed for his 2010 short, S from Hell), it is restricted in scope to the interwoven commentaries of five devotees of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic, The Shining,… READ ON

IN PRINT March 2013 [TOC]

Tim Griffin

December 2012

WRITING DURING A VERY DIFFERENT MOMENT IN ART, scholar and critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, seeking to construct a genealogy for contemporary conceptual practices, famously asserted that the artist Robert Morris irrevocably altered the reflexive… READ ON

IN PRINT December 2012 [TOC]

Tim Griffin on art and artifical life

September 2012

CLASSIC WITHIN THE GENRE of science fiction is the figure of the replicant, or android—a wholly synthetic being who is nevertheless, for all immediate intents and purposes, distinctly human, possessing the capacity for emotion and memory, … READ ON

IN PRINT September 2012 [TOC]

Tim Griffin

December 2011

THE TEMPORALITY OF ART’S DISPLAY has always been in dialogue with that of the surrounding culture, and, more acutely, with that of commerce and its cycles of production and consumption. If, for example, during the workers’ reform movements… READ ON

IN PRINT December 2011 [TOC]

TIM GRIFFIN

September 2011

AMONG THE MORE PUZZLING PREOCCUPATIONS of dialogues around art during the past five years has been “the contemporary,” a seemingly self-evident description that, to date, has operated largely in reverse—that has been put forward, in … READ ON

IN PRINT September 2011 [TOC]

Matt Mullican

May 2011

While other artists during the 1970s were busy exploring how media imagery marks our distance from the world, Matt Mullican was considering the ways such representations are inevitably part of it. … READ ON

PREVIEWS

William Leavitt

May 2011

IT MUST HAVE BEEN A THRILL when poststructuralism hit the scene in Los Angeles in the early 1970s: Hardly a picture, it seems, could pass through an artist’s studio without a new kind of caption being affixed, totally altering that image… READ ON

IN PRINT May 2011 [TOC]

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams

FILM

April 2011

WHAT WOULD TRON LOOK LIKE in a carbon-dioxide-filled IMAX theater, with a digitized Jeff Bridges hovering above the steep vertebrae of seats buried in ancient snowfalls of calcified crystal? The question is never asked outright in Werner … READ ON

IN PRINT April 2011 [TOC]

the 29th São Paulo Bienal

December 2010

SOME THREE DECADES AGO, writing in the context of Transavanguardia’s emergence on the global scene, Jean-François Lyotard famously railed against a “period of slackening” in art typified by what he deemed a kind of realism: work that… READ ON

IN PRINT December 2010 [TOC]

“Today I Made Nothing”

December 2010

For the past decade and a half, increasing numbers of artists have devoted themselves to considering the radically altered relationship between work and leisure in contemporary society, which makes a great deal of sense, given that art occupies… READ ON

IN PRINT December 2010 [TOC]