Jeffrey Kastner

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  print October 2021

  Neil Megson, Genesis P-Orridge, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

  A cheerfully ferocious “wrecker of civilization”—kin to Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, to Fluxus and Viennese Actionism—Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (1950–2020) occupied a crucial position at the nexus of interrelated postwar artistic streams for nearly a half century. “TIME=EMIT,” a recent show of the shape-shifting provocateur’s work at No Gallery, was billed with fitting impertinence as “a three-person solo exhibition,” revealing a sliver of the object-based strand of the polymath’s sprawling career via he/r tripartite personal and artistic identity.

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  print September 2021

  Dan Graham

  Despite his unimpeachable position in the postwar canon, Dan Graham has always seemed a little like a man without a country in the contemporary art world—his half century worth of media-agnostic Conceptualism has never fully aligned, for better or worse, with any single methodological or stylistic framework. Even the glass-and-metal pavilions that have been his central focus for the past several decades elude attempts at neat categorization. They’re in dialogue with modernist architecture and post-Minimalist sculpture, but hold both at arm’s length; they impersonate forms of functional decor

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  print Summer 2021

  Lucas Blalock

  Over the past decade, Lucas Blalock’s darkly funny eye and knack for discomfiting Photoshop magick have made clear his ambivalent perspective, not just on the integrity of the image world, but also on the fundamental coherence of the world itself. With this show, the artist also provided a crucial bit of backstory to the development of his convincingly off-kilter take on things. The exhibition, “Florida, 1989,” was so named because it was there and then that the ten-year-old Blalock was involved in an accident on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. It resulted in his right thumb

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  print May 2021

  Bat-Ami Rivlin

  “No Can Do,” Bat-Ami Rivlin’s cannily spartan solo debut at M 2 3, mined the rich terrain of ontological weirdness that lies between functionality and uselessness, proposing a kind of conceptual junkyard where incapacitated things reveal themselves—and the larger networks of economic and social organization to which they belong—in ways they never could have while operational. Well acquainted with the informal economy of the New York City curb, au fait with both the lightly used castoff and the straight-up piece of junk, Rivlin makes meticulously impoverished bricolage that’s always attentive to

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  print March 2021

  Eleonore Koch

  A German-born Brazilian who developed her signature aesthetic while living in London for two decades, Eleonore Koch (1926–2018) is a vibrant outlier in the global history of postwar painting. Her enigmatically spare, jewel-toned canvases conjure a cosmopolitan network of artistic kinship, a way of thinking about objects in space that owes something to the depopulated metaphysical vistas of Giorgio de Chirico and the lambent stillness of Giorgio Morandi—but also to a certain strain of British Pop art that wends its way from Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney to Michael Craig-Martin—all set

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  print January/February 2021

  Justin Sterling

  The multivalent figure of the broken window—emblem of both thoughtless neglect and mindful disobedience, of a certain species of policing and righteous resistance to it—presided over “Orange Chapel,” Justin Sterling’s stirring solo show at Cathouse Proper in Brooklyn. Provocative and contemplative in equal measure, and shot through with rough melancholic beauty, the artist’s intervention into the Court Street space consisted of three sculptural scenarios placed around the gallery, whose six large windows had been replaced by his signature injured ones. Sterling first shatters and then reassembles

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  print October/November 2020

  Serena Stevens

  If the various isolative protocols necessitated by the recent lockdown have changed our relationship with the wider world, they have just as surely reshaped the ways we perceive and inhabit our own personal spaces. The altered rhythms of these pandemic days have made us suddenly aware of the heretofore unfamiliar: a pet’s midday routines, for instance, or a graceful slant of afternoon light that has always been present in our absence. These attentional shifts can have the effect of making captivating, and even profound, what had previously seemed like inconsequential minutiae. In the work of

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  print September 2020

  Rachel Libeskind

  In her classic 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler inhabits a character she has described as “an anti-Julia Child” who “replaces the domesticated ‘meaning’ of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration.” Reciting a deadpan domestic abecedarium—apron, bowl, chopper, dish—as she stares into the camera and proffers the inventoried items to her audience from behind a countertop, Rosler reappropriates the setting and accoutrements of food preparation to stage a personal rebellion against the drudgery of that odiously limiting category of gendered labor, “women’s work.” Rachel

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  print July/August 2020

  Alison Rossiter

  “Every photograph is a certificate of presence,” wrote Roland Barthes in his 1980 book Camera Lucida, the final and most personal of his many engagements with the medium. The presences Barthes had in mind—an ancient house, a table set for dinner, strangers and loved ones—were at once corporeal and temporal, representing specific moments of physical tangibility fixed precisely in time by light and chemistry. The elegant, conceptually expansive work of Alison Rossiter also conjures extraordinary ordinary presences, but of a very different kind. Since 2007, the artist has been collecting expired

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  print May/June 2020

  Maximilian Schubert

  The spirit of Felix Gonzalez-Torres presides over Maximilian Schubert’s show “Doubles” at Off Paradise, not in any easily identifiable formal way, but rather as a kind of genius loci—a sense of refined, melancholy simplicity and intelligence that suffuses the eleven works on view. The presence of Gonzalez-Torres, now nearly twenty-five years gone, is not unbidden. As he began to produce the works for the show, Schubert and Natacha Polaert, the gallery’s founder and director, made a request to the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation for the loan of one of the late artist’s pieces, to be included in

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  print April 2020

  Gladys Nilsson

  “Honk! Fifty Years of Painting,” an energizing, deeply satisfying pair of shows devoted to the work of Gladys Nilsson that occupied both Matthew Marks’s Twenty-Fourth Street space, where it remains on view through April 18, and Garth Greenan Gallery, took its title from one of the earliest works on display: Honk, 1964, a tiny, Technicolor street scene in acrylic that focuses on a pair of elderly couples, which the Imagist made two years out of art school. The men, bearded and stooped, lean on canes, while the women sport dark sunglasses beneath their blue-and-chartreuse beehives. They are boxed

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  print March 2020

  Quay Quinn Wolf

  Like a tastefully styled crime scene, Quay Quinn Wolf’s show at Jack Barrett greeted viewers with bits of twisted metal dressed in scraps of fur and set on a floor freshly painted in lavender, a vaguely sickly tang hanging in the air above them. As is characteristic of Wolf’s work, the exhibition was a strategically coordinated series of sculptural scenarios composed from poetically repurposed found materials. The artist has often juxtaposed “soft” domestic objects—such as articles of clothing and other textiles, as well as flowers and plant pigments—with infrastructural flotsam, including latex