print December 2010

Mike Kelley

In Detroit, it is difficult to use an architecture-based vocabulary in a civic context without striking a topical note. The city—which since the 1960s, when white flight triggered a slow, decisive economic decline, has shrunk to less than half its peak size—wears the ravages of urban blight on its sleeve. Woodward Avenue, the metropolis’s most populated artery, and home to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (mocad), doubles as a colorful architectural barometer of socioeconomically stratified decay. At one end, downtown, the center of big business and home to convention centers, hotels, and

print November 2010

Ryan Trecartin

The agitated camera work, gaudy palette, complete disavowal of intelligible narrative, emphasis on slippery models of beauty, desire, gender, and sexuality, and strategic use of lo-fi graphics evident in the seven videos on view in Ryan Trecartin’s recent solo exhibition “Any Ever” are by now standard fare for the artist. But where previous viewing “environments”—for instance, Sibling Topics (Section A), 2009, seen at New York’s New Museum—recall the work of predecessors such as Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy in their emphasis on materiality, the installations in this show are far sparer and

print November 2010

André Ethier

Described in the press release accompanying this exhibition as “self-portraits of his own adolescent subconscious,” André Ethier’s new paintings are every inch the exercises in creative onanism that this boldly unfashionable characterization might suggest. Self-consciously brooding and superficially melancholy, each modestly scaled, putridly colored oil-on-Masonite picture in “ACTUALIZED, and it feels so good” convincingly channels the imaginings of a disaffected young man with a spotty understanding of art history and a healthy investment in the lifestyle and aesthetics of psychedelia, metal,

print October 2010

Marilyn Minter

Can a high-definition video, shot from under a glass plate, that shows an ample set of fleshy lips and a playfully roving tongue spitting, slurping, and licking a Technicolor array of cake decorations suspended in vodka, be said to make a feminist statement in 2010? Your response to that loaded question is likely to be roughly congruent with your position on the ubiquitous Lady Gaga and her hyperbolic, sometimes eccentric, expressions of female sexuality. If you are among those who believe that today’s unofficially anointed queen of pop is an icon of female empowerment, chances are that Marilyn

print May 2010

Cecil Balmond

A renowned structural engineer, Cecil Balmond has over the past three decades played an instrumental role in the work of architects such as Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind. His unconventional approaches to engineering problems and structural geometry have aided those figures in realizing some of their most daring ideas and, in the process, radically expanded the realm of possibilities in architecture. Though also—and increasingly—an architect in his own right with notable projects to his credit, Balmond will likely remain best known as the engineer whose structural ingenuity

print April 2010

Brian Jungen

In a gallery adjacent to Canadian artist Brian Jungen’s survey “Strange Comfort” is a show called simply “Our Lives.” In this exhibition, to quote the introductory text, “members of eight communities describe how they work to remain Native in an ever-changing world”—a powerful condensation of the museum’s charter. The National Museum of the American Indian recognizes expressions of native cultures not as strictly historical phenomena, preserved in and understood through dusty artifacts and aging fables, but rather as mutable and alive, with the potential for being creatively perpetuated in

print February 2010

Jennifer Steinkamp

Jennifer Steinkamp’s installations frequently induce a level of immersion that is unusual, the familiar act of looking shading quickly into something more like swimming. The four works in her series “Orbit,” 2008–, for instance, are each like a fall in zero gravity. The matrices of branchlike tendrils and fluorescent leaves that make up the video projections blow, swirl, and rotate across two expansive perpendicular walls. But also, and very deliberately, the projections wash legibly across the body of the viewer, physically absorbing him or her into the installations. The spectator, then,

print December 2009

Julian Stanczak

One of the leading exponents of Op art even before a 1964 review by Donald Judd gave the movement its name, eighty-one-year-old Julian Stanczak has maintained a dogged commitment to that manner of painting, which highbrow critics almost immediately dismissed as cheap, regressive, and populist. Though Op is often seen as a period trend, in years hence a few of the movement’s other founding figures, including Bridget Riley and François Morellet, have, like Stanczak, found ways to expand the implications and applications of Op’s manipulations of perception.

But Stanczak’s ongoing engagement with Op

print October 2009

Ann Lislegaard

Science fiction as a literary and filmic genre is distinguished in large part by its exponents’ appetite for extreme conjecture, and by the need for writers and directors working in this domain to elaborate those conjectures into fantastical worlds that answer not to natural law or existent social structures, but to decrees set forth and imposed by the creator. In this sense, science fiction also supports a model of overstated authorship that presumes facets of a narrative cannot be borrowed from the observed world, but must instead emanate from the author’s mind.

Though each of the works in Ann

print September 2009

Keith Tyson

Given the critical antagonism that still faces painting—a sense of abstraction’s diminishing returns, the apparent anachronism of representation, and the assumption of market complicity—the decision to work in the medium today cannot be an easy one to make. Though cautionary notes have, since the 1980s, been repeated to the point of banality, they still represent hurdles to be negotiated before many viewers are willing even to consider what else the artist in question might be up to. Some artists operate with a fierce, perhaps reactionary disregard for such critical touchstones, while others

print May 2009

Jennifer West

For half a century, artists have been negotiating the vexed relationship between abstraction and representation. Los Angeles–based artist Jennifer West’s sexy, whimsical, painting-scale DVD projections walk that elusive line between pictorial modes with deftness, wit, and airy originality.

While West’s work slyly nods to past heroic modernist gestures, her subjects are rarely, if ever, grand or heroic, and her engagement with canonical narratives of abstraction are often oblique and irreverent. Sophomoric urban myths, harmless shenanigans, and the free-love legacy of 1970s psychedelia provide

print February 2009

Nathalie Djurberg

Stop-motion animation is generally associated with fairy-tale naïveté, due to its being used, most famously, for kids’ classics like Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), but, as Nathalie Djurberg shows, this quality is not intrinsic to the medium. In Djurberg’s hands, clay depicts but also distorts, representing the human form for a few seconds before slipping into a series of abject deformations. In such instances, the body seems purely incidental and mimesis beside the point, both of them subordinate to the will of an unruly medium. In fact, the low-tech crudity of stop-motion—its defective

Christopher Bedford