Evan Moffitt

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  print April 2023

  HIGHER FREQUENCIES

  HIS HANDS SWAY back and forth as if he is conducting an invisible orchestra. They rarely touch his instruments, which spill across the limestone floor in a tangle of wires and electronic panels; activated by motion sensors, their ethereal sounds echo through the hall. Tarek Atoui is mesmerizing to watch, unusually so for an artist who began his career as a DJ almost three decades ago, and as the sun finally sets behind the vaulted clerestory windows of Luxembourg’s Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean—a cathedral-like space designed by I. M. Pei—his performance crescendoes to a rumbling climax.

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  print April 2023

  Ravi Jackson

  There she was, either crouched seductively on a polar bear–skin rug or posing in a red bikini with a Beretta at her crotch, simultaneously taunting us and turning us on: Lil’ Kim, the Queen Bitch and multiplatinum rapper, who was the surprise star of “Hardcore,” Ravi Jackson’s first solo exhibition in New York. The show was named after Lil’ Kim’s 1996 debut album and was filled with smeary, low-res pictures of her, which Jackson printed from the internet and pasted to sculptures bearing hinged wooden panels, as though she were the deflowered Madonna on an altarpiece. If many gay men worship Lil’

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  print November 2022

  William E. Jones

  Where are they now? I wonder of the pimply young men in William E. Jones’s seminal video, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, 1998. Perhaps at a rally for Fidesz, the far-right Hungarian party, or guarding the dacha of Vladimir Putin. Recalling the making of that breakthrough work in his new novel-cum-memoir, I Should Have Known Better (2021), Jones notes the “atmosphere of coercion” that pervades the gay-for-pay tapes—at the time, freshly imported from Eastern Europe and rented from a Los Angeles video store where he worked—on which he found his subjects. “When poor white people

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  diary February 18, 2022

  Roma Holiday

  BODIES SURGED toward the front doors of LAGO, whose opening bash had just reached capacity. The crowd pleaded desperately to security guards for entry. Someone began pushing and faces flattened against glass. Everyone was on the list, but no one could get in. The more intrepid guests circled around the back of the pavilion, toward the dark, brackish lake. Security guards rushed to pull us off planters. Through the windows, a golden pendulum by Artur Lescher and a James Turrell window, radiating neon pink, seemed unperturbed by the invading horde—or, for that matter, the steady throb of Tulum

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  print January 2022

  Manuel Solano

  Manuel Solano’s earliest childhood memories of Heliplaza, a shopping mall on the outskirts of Mexico City, are mostly about light and texture: the way the sun cascaded through its geodesic dome and sparkled in the fountain in the atrium, the brilliance of its smooth white tile and curving parapet accented in cream and yellow, the glass bricks that shone like diamonds in a tiara. This was in the early 1990s, ten years after Heliplaza was erected in Ciudad Satélite, a suburb of tract homes and roundabouts that by then had lost some of its midcentury glamour. But for Solano, the mall offered a

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  print December 2021

  “Our North Is the South”

  Just to the right of the entrance to Bergamin & Gomide hangs a small fresco on burlap by Joaquín Torres García. Constructivo América, 1942, distills the aesthetic principles that the modernist painter developed following his return to Uruguay from Europe in 1934. Ideograms of life in the Americas, from dugout canoes to skyscrapers, appear in an uneven and nonhierarchical grid, above which a sun, modeled after the Inca god Inti, shines its benevolent rays. The work is a perfect starting point for “Nosso norte é o sul”  (Our North Is the South), a compact yet ambitious exhibition that takes its