Carol Armstrong

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  previews May 2016

  “Diane Arbus: In the Beginning”

  We know Diane Arbus for her square-format photographs of “freaks” and “normals,” taken in the 1960s, with which she created an inimitable style of personal confrontation with her subjects, markedly different from that of her “new-document,” street-photographing contemporaries. What we know less about are her beginnings, after she worked as a stylist for her fashion-photographer husband Allan Arbus, who gave her a camera when she was just eighteen. More than one hundred of the photographs she took with a 35-mm camera between 1956—when she numbered a roll of such

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  print September 2013

  Carlito Carvalhosa’s Waiting Room

  AT FIRST GLANCE, it looked as if something terrible had happened: an environmental disaster, a result of global discombobulation. As if a whole forest of trees had been uprooted by the force of winds and dropped pell-mell into the newly renovated building, which would therefore require another round of reconstruction. As if Mother Nature, in her fury, had submitted Father Culture to the wrecking ball, delivering a reply to arrogant Architecture thus: If you model the columns of your hall on the trees of my forest, I will use those trees against you and level your hall with them; if you think

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  previews October 2012

  “Adriana Varejão: Histories at the Margins”

  The first major survey of Adriana Varejão’s career will encompass some forty works made between 1991 and the present, including a new large-scale polyptych.

  The first major survey of Adriana Varejão’s career will encompass some forty works made between 1991 and the present, including a new large-scale polyptych. The modernist and the neo-Baroque, the wavering of boundaries and the fluidity of ostensibly categorical distinctions, the erotics of an alternate femininity, the history of colonialism from the perspective of the colonized, the backstory and continental drift of globalization: These are the themes that intertwine within Varejão’s paintings and multimedia installations, a body of work that has made her one of the

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  print January 2012

  FLUID DYNAMICS: THE ART OF ADRIANA VAREJÃO

  THE CHURCH OF SÃO FRANCISCO in Salvador, the capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia, beautifully exemplifies both the early globalism and the warped chronology of the Brazilian Baroque. Its eighteenth-century interior is a classic example of the entirely gilt igreja dourada, or “golden church,” which sings its Gloria Dei in a profusion of swirling columns, irrational volutes, angels, birds, clouds, and other bulging, swelling, inverting, and extroverting folds and protuberances, all in exaggerated sync with the high Jesuit moment of the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Baroque. The facade of

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  previews September 2011

  Diane Arbus

  Now that the years have passed and photography has become something else, it is time that Arbus’s peculiar, uncomfortable genius be recognized in France.

  She died too young, she lived too off-kilter, and her work was too sensationalized. From the beginning, Diane Arbus (1923–1971) made images that became as well known for what they depicted as for the controversy her acts of depiction inspired—debates about the “ethics” of photographing others so apparently other. But why shouldn’t we take interest in others, and they in us? Why not stare in wonderment, as Arbus did, at the human freak show by which we’re surrounded, indeed that also includes us? Now that the years have passed and photography has become something

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  slant Summer 2011

  Paul Cézanne

  BACK IN 1990, in an essay for the Oxford Art Journal, Griselda Pollock asked the question “What Can We Say About Cézanne These Days?” Her answers—regarding the contributions that could be made through socio-historical, psychoanalytic, and feminist interventions—were rather more generous than that given in the London Review of Books this past December by T. J. Clark. In the opening of his review of the Courtauld Gallery in London’s recent exhibition dedicated to the artist’s “Card Players” series, 1890–96, Clark flatly declared: “Cézanne . . . cannot be written about any more.” When

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  print February 2011

  “On Line”

  WHAT IS A LINE? I used to think that a “line” was a pure mathematical concept, something that did not exist in nature. I also used to think about line in terms of its meaning within a linked series of oppositions: the linear versus the coloristic, the draftsmanly versus the painterly, the “essence” versus the “difference,” the “masculine” versus the “feminine” of pictorial art. And of course, there is linear versus nonlinear thought. But now, having seen the fabulous exhibition “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Catherine de Zegher

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  print October 2008

  Craigie Horsfield and Tapestry

  LOCATED JUST OUTSIDE GHENT in Belgium, oil painting’s Northern Renaissance site of origin and, coincidentally, one of the prime centers of modern machine-made carpet production, there is a place called Flanders Tapestries that specializes in weaving jacquard tapestries from photographs: scanning ambitious photographs by contemporary artists and creating digital files that guide the weaving of large modern wall hangings that are then exhibited as artworks in galleries or museums, rather as medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque tapestries used to adorn palace walls, combining the function of

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  slant September 2007

  Identity Aesthetics

  CAN ELEGANCE COEXIST WITH CRITIQUE? Aesthetics with politics? Material and formal intensiveness with sociocultural inquiry? My own answer would be a resounding “Yes.” But much contemporary art seems to answer “No.” Indeed, some recent shows appear to be wedded to the idea that intensive aesthetic labor undermines political intent—especially in work by minorities. The Brooklyn Museum’s recent exhibition “Global Feminisms,” for example, foregrounded contemporary work by women artists of all colors, ethnicities, and nationalities that emphasizes the reductive, the dystopian, the aesthetically

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  print May 2007

  “Global Feminisms” and “WACK!”

  WHY ARE WOMEN so angry? What do women want? Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Can a man be a feminist? Why have there been no great women artists? Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? What is feminism? What is art? Is feminist art “art”? Is feminist art great art? Is art by women artists feminist art? Is feminist art women’s art? How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Do feminists have a sense of humor? Can women be funny? (No, but we can be hysterical.) Do we have permanent PMS? Is a woman born, or is she made? Is she nature, or is she culture? Is she a victim of the species

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  previews January 2007

  “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution”

  On both coasts of the nation this March, there is to be a revival of the category of feminist art.

  On both coasts of the nation this March, there is to be a revival of the category of feminist art. At the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles there will be an exhibition titled “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” organized by Connie Butler (formerly a curator at MoCA and now with the Museum of Modern Art in New York). At the Brooklyn Museum, timed to coincide with the institution’s inauguration of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, there will be an international survey of contemporary art called “Global Feminisms,”

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  previews January 2007

  “Global Feminisms”

  On both coasts of the nation this March, there is to be a revival of the category of feminist art.

  On both coasts of the nation this March, there is to be a revival of the category of feminist art. At the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles there will be an exhibition titled “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” organized by Connie Butler (formerly a curator at MoCA and now with the Museum of Modern Art in New York). At the Brooklyn Museum, timed to coincide with the institution’s inauguration of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, there will be an international survey of contemporary art called “Global