print September 2009

Cheyney Thompson

At first glance, the paintings in “Robert Macaire Chromachromes,” Cheyney Thompson’s fourth solo show at Andrew Kreps Gallery, seemed a stock conceptual prank: thirteen linen canvases offering the painstakingly hand-rendered image, in color, of an enlarged section of their underlying fabric. A second look, however, expanded this seemingly superficial tautology. Having divided the gallery into three rooms in a way that brought to mind the spatial logic of a museum, Thompson presented a succession of historical canvas formats, each painting or diptych taking the shape and dimensions of a different

print May 2009

Erica Baum

For about a decade Erica Baum has quietly been making work, intimate black-and-white photographs that, in their selective focus and cropping, isolate uncanny textual coincidences in card-catalogue drawers and book indexes. The result is a kind of found concrete poetry, as in her “Index” series from 2000, one piece in which reads: NIAGARA FALLS, 207 / NICOTINE, 260 / NIGHT AIR, 302 / NIGHTMARES, 298 / NINETY-NINE, 379.

In the recent body of work she exhibited at Dispatch, a small storefront gallery on Henry Street, Baum continues to frame strategically. The photographs’ titles, such as Shampoo,

print April 2009

Lucy Stein

Mounted in the office of Broadway 1602 during Lucy Stein’s show was a small drawing made in ink on the kind of informational flyer found in college infirmaries—this one detailing the bodily dangers of bulimia. The drawing depicts a liberated Gibson Girl, with a hand, presumably of a man, reaching between her legs and approximately aligning with a medical illustration, printed on the flyer, of the digestive tract. Penned in fluid cursive at the top is a statement: STAND UP AND BE YOUR OWN CLICHÉ.

For the past several years, market critique has run through certain veins of painting. In such works,

Melanie Gilligan, Prison for Objects, 2008. Performance view, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, 2008.

previews January 2009

“The Space of the Work and the Place of the Object”

For SculptureCenter’s winter show, eight artists take the secondary forces of production—presentation, circulation, and market relations—as their primary interest, if not the very determinants of color, shape, and size.

For SculptureCenter’s winter show, eight artists take the secondary forces of production—presentation, circulation, and market relations—as their primary interest, if not the very determinants of color, shape, and size. Karin Schneider, for example, will extend the reception desk into the space of the exhibition, encase it in Plexiglas, and claim all material passing through the structure (including press releases, phone calls, and the receptionist) as part of her piece—seeking, in effect, to diagram the institution’s flows of information. Mary Ceruti’s curatorial conceit,

print January 2009

Henrik Oleson

Although he has spent the past few years generating an Aby Warburg–type atlas of “faggy gestures” found throughout art history, Berlin-based, Danish artist Henrik Olesen took, for his first solo show in the United States, only one man as muse: mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954). A cult figure to many, Turing is credited with both breaking Germany’s World War II Enigma code and developing the first modern computer. He was also gay; charged as such under British law, he chose to accept state-administered “corrective” hormone therapy over incarceration. A few years after his trial, Turing, biting

print December 2008

Caroline Busta

I REMEMBER SEEING THE FIRST LOT scattered around the city’s sidewalks at the very beginning of the year, when it was still cold enough to snow: thousands of television sets, quietly abandoned here and there by renters and homeowners in every borough, left on corners beside discarded pizza boxes and empty bottles, making New York seem less an actual city than the setting for John Carpenter’s 1988 dystopian thriller, They Live—the avenues littered with electronic tombstones, intimating unseen forces that lurk under the surface of everyday life. Thinking back to this bizarre scene today, one

print October 2008

Frederick Kiesler

Having contributed to Dada, Surrealism, and later De Stijl, Ukraine-born, Viennese-American architect Frederick Kiesler offered a biomorphic conception of space that became a counterpoint to the rectilinear forms of architectural high modernism. Kiesler is perhaps best known for his interest in the “correlations” between artwork, individual, and environment, a theory he termed “Correalism,” and for his oft-revisited, yet never-built, Endless House, 1947–61. To look at this work now is not only to encounter a playful psychedelic consideration of architecture’s bearing on perception but also to

previews September 2008

Matt Mullican

In this survey, of some one hundred videos, drawings, bulletin boards, notebooks, and rubbings from 1970 to the present, the Drawing Center charts Matt Mullican's ongoing efforts to lend form to the ineffable.

For several decades, Matt Mullican has operated at the edge of the symbolic, that interstitial zone where our perceptual capacity splits from language's ability to classify and describe. Throughout his multifarious attempts to reveal that psychic realm, the artiast has employed the medium of drawing—whether mapping imaginary cities, devised to schematize unconscious thought; constructing cosmological models proposing new psychogeographic coordinates; or staging performances under hypnosis during which, brush and ink in hand, he surrenders to involuntary logorrhea. In this

print Summer 2008

Louis Camnitzer

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has made public the last words of all death row inmates executed since 1982. The statements are published, with a chilling evocation of social networking sites, in the online profile of each offender. Generally, they are brief, emphasizing love for family members and forgiveness for executioners, and offering testimonials to the innocence of fellow death row inmates. To read them is to be a voyeur in the first degree—albeit one that humanizes an otherwise unseen other. It is this apparently paradoxical duality that informs Louis Camnitzer’s most compelling

print May 2008

Albrecht Fuchs

Albrecht Fuchs often works as a commercial (editorial) photographer, a capacity in which he is valued for his deadpan but meticulously lit and tightly composed images. In “Portraits,” Fuchs, who is based in Cologne, presented thirty-seven color photographs shot between 1995 and 2007. The exhibition coincided with the release of his eponymous monograph, but while the book contains a selection of figures, mostly recognizable (Iggy Pop), though at times less so (industrial designer Dieter Rams), the exhibition included only portraits of contemporary artists—and of those, only the most established

performance February 2008

Ei Arakawa

TO GET A SENSE of Ei Arakawa’s BYOF—Bring Your Own Flowers, a collaboration with painter Amy Sillman that took place last November at New York’s Japan Society, as part of Performa 07, one would do well to look back to Peter Handke’s 1966 play Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience). As the curtain rises, four actors appear onstage and announce that there will be no production. They explain that they are not acting, noting that those seated are doing an excellent job performing the role of the audience. By the time this information is delivered, it’s less a shock than a confirmation: The

print December 2007

Merlin Carpenter

Merlin Carpenter is a tactician, skilled in exploiting the critical leverage points of artistic production—fabrication, exhibition, publication, administration, reception, exchange. However, his is not a historical critique of institutions. Rather, presuming no institutional resistance and citing the lack of commonly held criteria for understanding a work of art, Carpenter fabricates exhibition structures in order to operate. Traditional sites of display such as galleries and kunsthalles are treated as sites of primary production—theatrical stages with players, props, and gestures