Jacob Proctor

• 

  print February 2020

  Thea Djordjadze

  Notions of provisionality and contingency have long been leitmotifs of the work of the Berlin-based Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze. Objects both found and fabricated coalesce in a particular configuration for the duration of an exhibition and are then dispersed back into their constituent parts. Djordjadze arranges elements paratactically; new resonances emerge as the physical relationship between individual objects—between, say, an angular metal sculpture, a Berber carpet, and a lumpy ceramic vessel—is reconfigured. And just as she adapts her works to the spaces in which they are installed,

• 

  print December 2019

  Diamond Stingily

  For Diamond Stingily’s first solo institutional exhibition in Europe—and the association’s first show under the direction of Maurin Dietrich—Kunstverein München offered visitors a mini survey of the Brooklyn-based artist’s recent works, providing a valuable introduction to Stingily’s incisive explorations of identity and social class in contemporary America. The exhibition opened, appropriately enough, with five sequentially numbered works titled Entryways (all works cited, 2019). Five battered wooden doors stood in a solemn row, held upright a few feet from the wall with metal poles. A used

• 

  print Summer 2019

  Alejandro Cesarco

  Alejandro Cesarco’s exhibition “These Days” centered on two recent videos, Learning the Language (Present Continuous I) and Learning the Language (Present Continuous II) (all works cited, 2018), installed as rear projections in the two alcove-like side galleries in the larger of Tanya Leighton’s two Berlin spaces. Each video was accompanied by a photograph, respectively Margarita’s Music Book (Spes Vitae) and Untitled (Double). Problems of language and translation, citation and repetition, have long been central to Cesarco’s work. As suggested by their titles, both videos are concerned with

• 

  print May 2019

  Stan Brakhage and David Kamp

  There was an Ouroboros-like quality to “The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes,” an exhibition curated by the artist Ed Atkins, pairing Stan Brakhage’s 1971 film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes with a new work by the Berlin-based composer, sound designer, and sound artist David Kamp. Shot over the course of three or four days on a variety of different film stocks, Brakhage’s 16-mm silent film documents the activities of the coroner and staff of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County morgue as they perform autopsies on a number of human bodies (the film’s title is derived from the etymology of Greek

• 

  print Summer 2017

  Robert Grosvenor

  In a gutsy move for both artist and institution, Robert Grosvenor’s first museum exhibition in more than a decade consisted of a single work—and one created almost thirty years ago. Entering the exhibition space through a small vestibule, one immediately came face-to-face with Untitled, 1989–90, an enigmatic construction sitting, sphinxlike, in the Renaissance Society’s dramatically vaulted gallery. Two parallel walls of silver-painted cinder blocks, each six units high, were positioned directly on the gallery’s mottled gray linoleum floor. Extending from the leftward end of each wall was

• 

  print Summer 2017

  Néstor Sanmiguel Diest

  Although he has been an active force in the Spanish art world since the late 1970s, Néstor Sanmiguel Diest has only recently begun to garner critical attention outside his home country. His recent paintings and works on paper are dense, palimpsestic constructions, built up of layer upon layer of found photographic and textual materials intermingled with passages of graphite, ink, and paint. In their obsessive detail and complex interplay of text, image, and geometric pattern—often across multiple panels—Sanmiguel Diest’s recent works enforce a temporal or durational experience akin to

• 

  print September 2016

  Glasgow International

  Spread across more than seventy-five locations and fifty live performances, featuring work by 220 artists from thirty-three countries, the seventh edition of the Glasgow International—the second helmed by Sarah McCrory—lived up to its name as a biennial that is at once both deeply local and ambitiously international. This year’s commissioned Director’s Programme was organized around what McCrory described as “the legacy of industry and the relationship artists have to making, production, and craft.” Given Glasgow’s historical transformation from industrial powerhouse to postindustrial

• 

  print May 2016

  “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s”

  LONG MARGINALIZED in histories of both postwar art and experimental music, Charlotte Moorman has finally begun to receive the scholarly attention she deserves. In musicologist Benjamin Piekut’s Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (2011), Moorman figures alongside John Cage, Henry Flynt, and members of the Jazz Composers Guild as a prominent figure in the city’s flourishing mid-1960s music scene. Moorman moved from ensemble player to leading lady in former Walker Art Center curator Joan Rothfuss’s meticulously researched and engagingly narrated 2014 biography Topless

• previews September 2015

  Shannon Ebner

  For more than a decade, Shannon Ebner has explored the shifting relationship between topographic and typographic form. Found patterns become accidental glyphs or pictographic systems, highlighting the simultaneity of seeing and reading, while homemade alphabets fashioned of cinder blocks or cardboard and wood probe the line separating sculpture from the written word. Ebner’s exhibition at the ICA will focus on the ongoing series “Black Box Collision A,” begun in 2013—thirty-one large-scale photographs, each depicting the letter A—shown all together here for

• 

  print Summer 2015

  Than Hussein Clark

  It’s generally sound advice: Young artists should avoid curating themselves into group shows. Than Hussein Clark turned this adage on its head in “The Violet Crab at DRAF,” a presentation of seventy-six works by forty-one other artists—most from the David Roberts Collection—and one lab-grown alum crystal on loan from the University College London Geology Collection, along with forty-two of Clark’s own pieces. Under the tripartite rubric of “deviance, extravagance, and ventriloquism,” Clark mobilized the history of cabaret as a physical place and as a set of aesthetic practices. His

• interviews May 2015

  1000 WORDS: SIMON DENNY

  THE TED TALK, the Meetup, the tech convention, the encrypted network: Alongside the emergence of new technology in the public sphere, we find the proliferation of novel spaces and cultures that facilitate that technology’s production and distribution. In recent years, these nebulous, venture-capital-saturated zones have been the focus of Simon Denny’s art. Such an emphasis marks a shift from the New Zealand–born artist’s earlier work, which tended to zero in on changes in technology itself, as in his early exhibitions that reflected on the evolution of television and video. Denny’s new, more

• 

  print April 2015

  Jaime Davidovich

  Comprising eleven videos spread across three thematically organized screening programs, and curated for Threewalls by art historian and Artforum contributor Daniel Quiles, “Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 1974–1984” provided a welcome point of entry into the Argentinean-born, New York–based artist’s pioneering work in video and cable-access television. Additionally on view were a re-creation of the 1970 tape installation Yellow Wall, a selection of early works on paper and television-related ephemera, and, in a nod to Davidovich’s historical role as a presenter of others’ work alongside his own, a