FIRST PRESENTED IN 1960 at the Reuben Gallery in New York, Robert Whitman’s Happening The American Moon was restaged in January at Pace Gallery’s small 508 West Twenty-Fifth Street space. Viewers were catapulted into a temporal rabbit hole. The work, now simply titled American Moon, encompassed five live performances; the prop-strewn set where the restaging had “happened,” viewable throughout the exhibition’s three weeks; a series of drawings from 1960 that had functioned as notations for the Reuben staging; a bulbous, exuberantly reconstructed fabric wall; and three unique, “generative” NFTs,

LAST SUNDAY NIGHT, the eve of Frieze Week in Los Angeles, people spilled out of the gallery Gattopardo into a strip mall parking lot for a reading celebrating a new collection of writings by Giovanni Intra, published by Semiotext(e). The late artist and writer was one of the founders of the gallery China Art Objects, which in the late ’90s was crucial in putting LA back on the art-world map. He died at the age of thirty-four of an overdose and a certain scene dissolved with him. Those in attendance, some who had slept with him, done drugs with him, or worked for him, hadn’t gathered in a while.

FICTIONS OF EMPIRE abound in adventure, heroism, spectacle. Swashbuckling swordsmen. Precocious war correspondents. Worldly white men clad in Indigenous garb. Out there, in those wild lands, the promise of transcendence beckons. She is a femme fatale, thrilling you with her darkness. With its postcardlike images of Tahiti, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction offers exotic reveries of its own: pastel-dipped cabanas and bamboo chaises straight out of Emmanuelle; tan natives, seductively deshabille in headdresses and straw skirts of the kind seen in later Gauguins. Yet even as he renders these imperial

Margaret Raspé has explored and upended structures of perception in an oeuvre that spans five decades and encompasses film, performance, photography, and large-scale installation. She is perhaps best known for her “camera helmet,” with which she made a number of radically self-reflexive films in the 1970s and ’80s. Here, Raspé recalls the initial breakthrough that led to those early works and spurred her enduring interest in forms of automatic action in both art and everyday contexts. Her first retrospective, “Automatik,” is on view through May 29 at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, where the Wrocław-born

THE FIRST IMAGE of the first movie I watched at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam set the mood: a woman splayed out on a pile of trash next to a kitschy painting of a sad clown. The remainder of Winnie Cheung’s acid-washed pseudo-documentary Residency—made during a “lockdown” residency at Brooklyn’s Locker Room studio—follows suit, tracking Cheung’s crew of cloistered creatives as they work, party, shoot the shit, space out. Forget what’s real and what’s not. The chaotic DIY setting, deliriously rendered in abstracting close-ups and ruby-red atmospherics, resurrects the collective

Bassam Al-Sabah queers gaming culture and its fetish of the armoured male body in his solo exhibition “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS,” currently on view at The Douglas Hyde through March 5. Below, Al-Sabah discusses the psychic and physical disintegration his character undergoes in the show’s eponymous CGI video—a hyperreal dreamscape that probes the limits of masculinity, subjectivity, and representation.

AS A CHILD, I played a lot of video games. I didn’t go many places beyond my house, my school, and my grandad’s house, so my interaction with landscape really came from video games.

GODLAND HAS TWO TITLE CARDS: one in Icelandic, the other in Danish. Hlynur Pálmason’s new film exists in the tension between these two languages, which are really two worlds: one wild and unforgiving, the other cramped, rationalistic, “modern.” The film follows Lucas (Elliot Crosset Hove), a Lutheran priest dispatched from Copenhagen to build a church in a remote settlement on the Icelandic coast. It is the nineteenth century, and Iceland is still ruled from abroad, and everything about Lucas sets him at odds with the land to which he has been sent. The priest does not speak Icelandic, and cannot

THE SWISS INSTITUTE opening for Ser Serpas and Alfatih took place one day after January 24, which a friend told me had officially been declared the most depressing day of the year. I shared this with gallerist Maxwell Graham, who immediately brightened up. “That makes so much sense!” he beamed. I had the same reaction. After weeks of January melancholia, I felt a fever break last Wednesday. Others seemed to feel it too: Despite a torrential downpour, the Swiss Institute was packed—a reassuring affirmation that we do live in bodies, after all, and that these bodies live in a social body with a

AS AN ARTIST and a person, Jean-Marie Straub embodied the dialectic.

Rooted but stateless, he was born in re-Frenchified Alsace-Lorraine, grew up under Nazi occupation, fled liberated France to avoid serving in Algeria, touched down in Germany, settled in Italy, and died in Switzerland—a consummate European.

Central yet marginal, Straub came of age with the cineastes of the French New Wave and, with his life partner, Danièle Huillet, made his—or should we say their—earliest films in Munich, adjacent to the German Neue Kino. Their fantastically elliptical first feature, adapted from Billiards at

Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History, by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2022. 696 pages.

AT TIMES, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh seems to loathe the subject of his latest tome, Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History. Artist and critic disagree vehemently, their dialogue “confrontational enough to have made enemies under other circumstances.” Moments of outright antagonism punctuate their periodic interviews. Richter mourns the loss of painting’s artisanal quality; Buchloh responds, “You can’t be serious.”¹ Richter states that exploitation is basic to

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the fictional city-state Ravicka, as well as three collections of drawings: Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in BOMB, e-flux, Granta, Harper’s, n+1, Paris Review, and POETRY. Gladman has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies

The New Age hucksters and/or healers at I Ching Systems aren’t exactly who you’d expect to find at the intersection of art and technology. Yet there’s an undeniable technical magnetism to their so-called instruments: wooden and plastic contraptions overlaid with patterns resembling organelles, circuitry, and hexagrams. Founded in 1983, I Ching Systems, formerly known as the Gentle Wind Project, is a research center that promotes an alternative wellness methodology synthesizing elements of Chinese medicine, particle physics, and color theory; the group has been indicted by the Maine Attorney