Alex Kitnick

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  print October 2022

  MAKE LIFE BEAUTIFUL

  WOLFGANG TILLMANS HAS CREATED an image of contemporary Europe that a lot of people carry around in their heads. Not the Colosseum or the Arc de Triomphe or even the Eiffel Tower, but easyJet, English, Berghain. These keywords are both the technologies and the coordinates of Tillmans’s practice, the atmosphere and infrastructure that support his work, though they are not necessarily visible in his pictures. And yet he has created images—indeed, icons—that are somehow correlates for them, that use these things as scaffolding. I know this is a big claim to make about an artist, given that the

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  print May 2022

  GROUP THINK

  THE GESAMTKUNSTWERK is one of modernism’s most telling inventions. Built from dance, music, theater, and poetry, it sought to stanch the crisis of modernity with a multisensory experience: If life was breaking up—split between public and private, work and leisure—the “total work of art” promised to bind disciplines and audience together to create something like community. Beginning in 1876 under the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Richard Wagner launched a festival to stage his epic operas in Bayreuth, Germany, inspiring a devoted, at times fascistic, cult as well as fierce critics (

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  passages April 2022

  DAN GRAHAM (1942–2022)

  I DIDN'T KNOW Dan Graham well. I met him a handful of times in the mid-2000s when I was a graduate student at Princeton University. I wanted to write my dissertation on Dan, but I was too young and too terrified to do it. Once, when I met him in his loft on New York’s Spring Street, he threw a fit because I didn’t know the work of the Japanese architect Itsuko Hasegawa. I was wet behind the ears and couldn’t find my angle—I was too sympathetic to his position, which was at once ardent, skeptical, and laced with wry humor. With Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, we took an architectural tour of

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  print March 2022

  OPENINGS: JASON HIRATA

  WHEN ARTISTS SPACE REOPENED on New York’s Cortlandt Alley in 2019, the building’s entrance moved and a beautiful basement carved out and cubed, there were water bottles (Dasani, Snapple, Poland Spring) spread out across the floor full of urine of different hues. Dazzled by the newness of the space, my eyes, somewhat annoyingly, kept shifting downward to look at these funky things (in part to avoid tripping over them), only to be hit by a wave of repulsion and embarrassment. Here I was, a grown and credentialed man—a critic!—staring at piss, leisurely scratching my chin. If you walk around New

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  print January 2022

  FLATWARE

  I ALWAYS ASSUMED that Jasper Johns painted In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara, 1961, to memorialize the poet whose name is stenciled at the bottom of the canvas and whose poem lends the painting its granite title. But after seeing the work again at the recent Johns exhibition, I checked the dates and realized that the artist finished it five years before O’Hara died. I couldn’t quite believe it at first—so many of the meanings I’d projected onto the work were thrown back at me—and then I had to start scraping off interpretations and understanding the painting according to a new set of terms.This

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  print Summer 2021

  REQUIEM FOR A DREAM

  THE IDEA OF AN AVANT-GARDE MUSEUM has something of the head-scratching quality of the oxymoron to it—because didn’t the avant-garde turn its back on institutions in hopes of engaging directly with life? (That said, why people consider institutions anathema to life has always been another head-scratcher for me.) In his 1909 Futurist Manifesto, F. T. Marinetti promised to destroy museums and other dusty sites of knowledge (“libraries, academies of every kind”) in order to make space for speed and dynamism. But ten years later, over in Russia, Kazimir Malevich used language similar to Marinetti’s

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  April 21, 2021

  “INFORMATION (Today)”

  Curated by Elena Filipovic

  Over the last number of years, curators have plumbed archives and restaged key postwar exhibitions in hopes of grasping the present. One of the more promising efforts in this vein is Elena Filipovic’s forthcoming reimagination of Kynaston McShine’s “Information,” presented in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “INFORMATION (Today)” will demonstrate how the technologies and systems-thinking that took hold of art practices worldwide in the late 1960s continue to fascinate us. But the occasion is not simply a golden anniversary (the show was originally scheduled

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  books March 2021

  Style Counsel

  The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London, 1957–1969, by Thomas Crow. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 200 pages.

  THOMAS CROW’S NEW VOLUME, The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London, 1957–1969, is a meticulous account of the imbrications between artmaking and stylemaking in postwar London, flanked by a jeremiad against what its author perceives as received ideas in contemporary art history. Indeed, Crow’s street-level method—we are treated to a litany of place names, hairstyles, and vivid descriptions of magazines—is part and parcel of his complaint: If art is to be meaningful, Crow seems to insist,

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  slant January/February 2021

  Point of No Return

  “WHEN DISCONTENT WITH MUSEUMS is strong enough to provoke the attempt to exhibit paintings in their original surroundings or in ones similar, in baroque or rococo castles, for instance, the result is even more distressing than when the works are wrenched from their original surroundings and then brought together.” This is Theodor Adorno in his great essay “Valéry Proust Museum,” first published in German in 1955, a moment of reckoning and reconstruction. Though Adorno doesn’t specify why the attempt to return and repatriate is more upsetting than the original rift and reassembling of modernity,

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  print July/August 2020

  CROSSED PATHS

  THE MUSEUEMS ARE CLOSED but the sculptures are still there. Memorials and monuments, too. If you’re in Lower Manhattan, you can ramble along the Irish Hunger Memorial’s serpentine path, a rugged simulacrum of peat and stone. I’ve never been to Ireland, but I take it that parts of it look like this. The strangeness of the work is its location in Battery Park City, where since 2002 it has sat like a souvenir between corporate towers, with the Hudson River stretching out to the west. Robert Smithson called certain of his sculptures “nonsites” to denote their difference from the sites whence they

• previews January 2018

  “Danh Vo: Take my breath away”

  In the Christian tradition, the “laying on of hands” is a way of transporting a spirit from one body to another. Danh Vo made a similar technique integral to his art. Starting with an array of scavenged objects, ranging from grand chandeliers to presidential pens, Vo alters them—in ways that are undetectable to the human eye—by imbuing them with an affective charge. At times, he cuts these items into pieces, as he did with Roman sculptures and, more metaphorically, the Statue of Liberty. And then there are the cardboard boxes that he

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  print November 2017

  Louise Lawler

  IN THE VIDEO The Public Life of Art: The Museum, 1988–89, Andrea Fraser guides the viewer through the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Wearing a gray business suit, she twirls past paintings by Matisse and Kline as she breathlessly enumerates the benefits museums bring to their home cities, including business talent and tourist dollars. Her script is ironic and incisive, to say the least, but the way she is framed by the camera—beside brochures and under works of art—is also striking. In one shot, a fragment of a Roy Lichtenstein painting and a burnished metal trash can form a tense