Andy Campbell

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  picks March 13, 2017

  Anna Craycroft

  What does it take to listen? Like looking and seeing, the difference between hearing and listening is significant—the former is a rote sensory activity, the latter a cognitive and affective process of absorption and integration. Listening, and the architectural conditions that might support it, is the focus of Anna Craycroft’s Tuning the Room in Variable Frequencies and Tuning the Room in Constant Amplitudes, both 2017, which make up her site-specific installation. Of the two contrasting spaces, the first is light and airy—metallic vinyl-tape murals of abstract sound waves line the walls, and

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  picks March 01, 2017

  Dave Hardy

  Dave Hardy’s polyurethane-foam constructions have important historical precursors ranging from the fairly well known—John Chamberlain’s hog-tied foam bundles of the late 1960s—to the more obscure—Claude van Lingen’s “Flexibles” series of the 1970s. Even so, Hardy’s deployment of his material is singular; he soaks his foam in concrete and then twists and folds it into improbable switchbacks and fleshlike extensions. During the curing process Hardy adds pencils, pretzels, panes of glass, vertical blinds, and simple wood constructions, pressing these materials into the slowly ossifying form. Thus,

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  picks February 17, 2017

  Allan Sekula

  Near the beginning of this exhibition of Allan Sekula’s early work is one of the artist’s many collaborations with the theorist Noël Burch, Reagan Tape, 1981. Intercutting Ronald Reagan’s first speech after his inauguration with clips from films he starred in prior to his political career, the question seems to be how to take a man seriously who attempted to teach a chimpanzee English at the dinner table in Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). And yet there he is, a political animal trained in theater, prodding his viewers to vacillate between alarm and reassurance, saying, “Can we who man the ship of

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  picks February 10, 2017

  Supports/Surfaces

  In 2014, this gallery held their first exhibition of artists aligned with the 1960s and 1970s French movement Supports/Surfaces, titled “Supports/Surfaces is Alive and Well,” and made an argument for the continuing vitality of these painters’ practices via the inclusion of two younger Los Angeles–based painters, Jennifer Boysen and Noam Rappaport. This time around, the venue takes a somewhat different tack. While most of the work here is from the group’s formative period, five pieces trace a career arc for one member in particular, Claude Viallat, posing an important question that would require

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  picks February 04, 2017

  Danielle Dean

  It all begins at the end, with a shoe—Nike True Red Vamps, released in 2003, so named for its striking red-and-black colorway, and for the well-worn mythological association of vampires with darkness and blood. In the hands of Danielle Dean, whose previous work is as well versed in the languages of advertising and pop culture as it is in political-economic philosophy (keep in mind the myth-rending quote from Marx: “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks”), the shoe is the starting point for a suite of videos,

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  print February 2017

  Kandis Williams

  In his signal 1982 study of the Parisian asylum Salpêtrière, where in the late nineteenth century a women’s clinic headed by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot treated female patients thought to be suffering from hysteria, philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman argues that the photographic tableaux authorized by Charcot, in which hysterics enacted their particular ailments, were not just of interest as disturbing curios but in fact helped lay the groundwork for the then nascent field of psychoanalysis.

  For her recent solo exhibition “Soft Colony” (its title a reference to a conversation between the artist

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  picks January 26, 2017

  Theaster Gates

  On a neat horizontal row of matte-black-bound Jet magazines, Theaster Gates has inscribed his own poetry in gold. Ever the pedagogue, the artist writes in rhythmic repetition on one segment of West Side Story, 2017, “Glissant is trying to say listen / to the water and the page / listen to the water and the page / listen to the fucking water-page / our boats are open / my boat is open / m(w)y boat / we boat.” Here he refers to Édouard Glissant, the Martinican poet and philosopher, who wrote movingly about African diasporas formed in the violent and dynamic “abyss” of the Middle Passage.

  Although

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  picks January 23, 2017

  Lari Pittman

  Lari Pittman is counting the ways. With titles such as 9 Apparitions During Times of Anxiety and Distress and 12 Verified Occurrences During a Full Moon (all works 2015), the six large-format, unique volumes (cradled lovingly in a rhythmic display designed by architect Michael Maltzan) that make up this show are books of hours for our uncertain times. Unlike those medieval illuminated manuscripts, though, these are large and unwieldy things, heavy and insistent, and yet within the context of Pittman’s oeuvre of densely layered monumental paintings, they are nevertheless intimate and beguiling.

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  picks January 16, 2017

  Stefan Burnett

  The black borders of many of the painted images in Stefan Burnett’s current solo exhibition (all works Untitled and undated) suggest an artist engaged in the process of rearticulating and reframing appropriated source images, which appear to have been photographs. Indeed, a photograph posted to Facebook in 2013 of Burnett, who also makes music, under the moniker MC Ride and as part of the band Death Grips, shows the artist seated, carefully applying paint to a dark canvas, a photograph hanging on the wall above, a cat perched on his back, cigarette butts gathered into a neat pile on a silver

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  picks December 16, 2016

  Jay DeFeo

  If a certain mythos around Jay DeFeo circulates, it is due to the perceived centrality of her long-in-development, bombastic painting The Rose, 1958–66. With this piece often presented as an obdurate but nevertheless heroic and career-defining project, many of DeFeo’s other efforts fall tragically by the wayside. This installation of the artist’s “Samurai” series, 1986–87, begins to redress this narrative, as many of these large-format paintings on paper refute the notion of a singularly careful and slow-working painter. Instead, most of these pieces show the artist’s improvisatorial hand, as

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  picks December 08, 2016

  Betye Saar

  Bird, hand, globe, eye, ship; cage, hold, fan, mirror, compute. Betye Saar’s dense cosmology of signs and gestures is at the center of this pair of exhibitions, giving viewers opportunity to take in over half a century of this Los Angeles–based artist’s output. The works here are organized into two conceptually connected yet spatially distinct exhibitions: “Blend” and “Black White.”

  The first gathers together a sequence of assemblages, works on paper, and a large techno-voodoo altar, Mojotech, 1987, which is still gloriously weird nearly thirty years on. The four antique cages that dot the room

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  picks December 05, 2016

  Kathryn Andrews

  Get close—such is the suggestion of Kathryn Andrews’s two sculptures (both titled, fittingly, Stormtrooper [all works cited, 2016]) as to the most suitable way to view her latest series of works. In each, a replica storm trooper costume is attached to a large steel cylinder, its feet just inches off the ground. Because each figure is so close to its bulky support, its reflection is hardly distorted at all, and we only share in its condition when we are likewise situated.

  This intimacy between object (cylinder) and subject (storm trooper) models how a viewer is meant to encounter the other wall-based