print December 2019

Joe Massey

In his essay for the catalogue accompanying Lynne Cooke’s recent exhibition “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the scholar Darby English unpacks the complicated relationship between the avant-garde and the work of self-taught makers. “Outsider art,” he writes, “has served modernist culture as a bastion of artlike activity symbolic of urges still more anarchic than the vanguard’s best revolutionary impulses.” Whatever their material conditions, style, or content, these expressions vibrate with difference, and this otherness clearly rhymed in

print October 2019

Mrinalini Mukherjee

The retrospective at the Met Breuer of the late Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) was also the first solo presentation of her art in the United States. Aptly titled “Phenomenal Nature,” the show—featuring nearly sixty objects, including her signature fiber sculptures and works in ceramic and bronze produced during the latter part of her career—was an overdue introduction to a formally audacious and technically exquisite oeuvre that defies easy art-historical and ethnographic classification. Although her engagement with textiles came in the wake of related midcentury investigations

print September 2019

Harry Dodge

Poised in a sweet spot between ugly and beautiful, kind of dumb and rather brilliant, Harry Dodge’s dense, idea-rich show at Callicoon Fine Arts proposed incongruity and indeterminacy as a tonic for worn-out subjectivities. “User” was Dodge’s first exhibition with the gallery and included a range of formats typically deployed by the artist: sculptural bricolage for the tabletop or floor; lo-fi video in the service of hi-fi philosophical queries; and works on paper, especially his Raymond Pettibon in the Land of Ooo–style drawings, which often contain wry, heady commentary by sentient inanimate

print Summer 2019

Isaac Julien

“It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features,” Frederick Douglass wrote in 1849. “And the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons, have adopted a theory respecting the distinctive features of Negro physiognomy.” Douglass, an escaped slave turned abolitionist writer and orator, understood all too well how the racist image-repertoire of white America structured its relationship with its black citizens, and the ways in which the literal dehumanization of people of color not only impelled

print May 2019

Luke Stettner

Rich in damaged detail, formally austere, and affecting in often unpredictable ways, Luke Stettner’s exhibition at Kate Werble Gallery demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of language as a conjurer of personal and historical memory. The show’s stuttering title, “ri ve rr hy me sw it hb lo od,” sent an oblique signal about its organizing principles: incompleteness, misprision, false starts, and missed connections. Perhaps best seen as a kind of fraught, makeshift whole rather than a series of discrete works, the project argued that obliqueness should be understood as the default

print April 2019

Jane Dickson

In 1978, the Chicago-born painter Jane Dickson was a few years out of college and looking for a job in New York. She answered a newspaper ad for artists “willing to learn computers,” and soon found herself on the night shift, designing animations for the first digital light board in Manhattan’s Times Square. Although she disdained what she called the “commercial propaganda” being broadcast on the Spectacolor screen, Dickson did manage to make the display work in her favor. First, she talked her boss into letting her commandeer it briefly to advertise the “Times Square Show,” the legendary 1980

print January 2019

Banks Violette

When he effectively withdrew from the art world more than half a decade ago, Banks Violette left behind a pair of entwined legacies: as the prolific creator of persuasively ominous sculptures, paintings, and installations, and as a classic cautionary tale for early success and its excesses. His glamorously dark work of the early 2000s, which gave the then-trending thread of abjection an infusion of black-metal mordancy, was icy and slickly sullen. Meanwhile, his oft-recounted personal history—he was a richly tatted high-school dropout who’d kicked a meth habit, earned a studio-art MFA at

previews January 2019

“NEGATIVE SPACE”

In a 1988 interview, Bruce Nauman expressed his sculptural interest in negative space by quoting a statement he attributed to Willem de Kooning: “When you paint a chair, you should paint the space between the rungs, not the chair itself.” Over the past hundred-odd years, artists have sought to recalibrate the balance between the traditional foundations of sculptural forms—mass and volume, the body—and the spaces they occupy and thereby produce. This sprawling exhibition argues that such reconsiderations have been fundamental to the trajectory of sculptural

print December 2018

Hannes Schmid

The seventy-two-year-old Swiss artist Hannes Schmid—the subject of a compact, fascinating show at Mitchell Algus Gallery—is not a household name, but he can lay claim to a pair of intriguing distinctions in the postwar-image canon. First, he was among a select group of commercial photographers responsible for the pictures of handsomely weather-beaten cowboys in wide-open spaces in the iconic Marlboro Man ads, a campaign that turned a languishing brand originally pitched to women into the echt embodiment of consumerist masculinity and, not coincidentally, the best-selling cigarette in

print November 2018

Fred Wilson

Intelligent, expansive, and elegantly trenchant, Fred Wilson’s exhibition at Pace was a clarion announcement of conceptual sophistication during the dog days of the summer gallery season. “Afro Kismet,” a sprawling collection of objects, images, paintings, and text, was shown in New York after being presented in slightly different forms at both the 2017 Istanbul Biennial (where it originated) and Pace’s London outpost earlier this year. The innovative strategies of research-based reappropriation and museological critique that Wilson employed in “Mining the Museum”—his landmark 1992 intervention

print September 2018

Peter Roehr

A fascinating—and, at least as far as the conventional canon goes, mostly missing—link between Pop art and Minimalism, Peter Roehr’s work identified a vein of astringent poetry in the image world of an emergent global consumer culture. An exhibition at Ortuzar Projects provided a bracing overview of the five-year career of the German Conceptualist, who died of cancer in 1968, only weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday. Focused on his rigorously ordered photomontages, and featuring a revelatory suite of film montages, the show presented a practice very much in dialogue with the dominant conceptual

previews September 2018

57TH CARNEGIE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION

Five years after its previous iteration, America’s oldest international contemporary art survey—inaugurated in 1896 by industrialist Andrew Carnegie to acquire, as he put it, “the old masters of tomorrow”—opens its fifty-seventh edition, this time under the curatorship of the innovative Ingrid Schaffner. Organized in collaboration with a group of five international curatorial “companions,” who traveled with Schaffner, a Pittsburgh native, to far-flung locales, the show was conceived as a sprawling, multivocal research project. It features thirty-two artists and

previews September 2018

“ENRICO DAVID: GRADATIONS OF SLOW RELEASE”

Across the past two decades, the provocatively ecumenical Italian-born, London-based artist Enrico David has forged a singular practice that proceeds from drawing to a dizzying array of other media. The human body is almost always present—whether considered in works on paper, paintings, tapestries, installations, or the difficult-to-pigeonhole sculptures for which the artist is perhaps best known—but his figural forms inevitably gesture as much to the psychological as to the corporeal. This major survey will include some fifty works showcasing both David’s mastery of

print Summer 2018

Mariko Mori

The indelible avatars for which Mariko Mori gained fame in the early years of her shape-shifting practice—cyborg teenybopper, anime ingenue, extraterrestrial geisha, digital mermaid, 3-D empress—were, despite the outsize way they figure into most accountings of her career, actually a fairly short-lived aspect of her conceptual program. Mori’s celebrated masquerades gave way after only a half decade or so, following which she withdrew as a subject of her own work and redirected her pursuit of extravagant otherworldly hybridities into seamlessly finished structures and sculptures. The

print May 2018

Alex Da Corte

Over the past dozen years, Alex Da Corte has developed a highly distinctive practice, one focused primarily on fashioning (and/or refashioning) overripe bits of commodity culture and then putting conceptual pressure on them until whatever uncanniness they contain starts leaking out. Da Corte is both a maker of boldly strange objects and a designer of the psychically disorienting immersive settings in which he presents them. He’s also crazily prolific: In the past half decade, he’s mounted some twenty solo shows featuring sculpture, video, and installations for which he created the lighting and

interviews March 2018

YINKA SHONIBARE MBE

IN A 2005 INTERVIEW, British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE reflected on the questions around the fluid nature of identity—racial, national, cultural—that dominate his practice. “What I do is create a kind of mongrel,” he said. “In reality most people’s cultures have evolved out of this mongrelization, but people don’t acknowledge that.” The word may initially seem an inapt one for Shonibare’s sumptuous, baroquely elegant sculptures, videos, and installations, but it does conjure the fraught conditions of postcolonial identity, increasingly defined by discourses of globalization,

print March 2018

Survival Research Laboratories

It was a brutally frigid Saturday afternoon in early January, but a few hundred people were nevertheless gathered on a blocked-off stretch of West Twenty-Fifth Street in New York’s Chelsea. They were huddled against the cold in front of Marlborough Contemporary’s story-high garage door like a class at recess ringing a pair of schoolyard combatants, their focus on a gaggle of jerry-rigged machines that had been let loose to brawl between the dirty curbside snowbanks. The contraptions—including a tall wheeled carriage with a swinging articulated arm that terminated in a grasping claw and a

print February 2018

Gerard Byrne

Gerard Byrne’s brilliantly imagined and rendered film In Our Time proceeds from a concept that is, in its basic shape, so simple and straightforward that it almost eludes description. Set in a commercial radio station, the film—originally commissioned for Skulptur Projekte Münster in Germany in 2017—focuses on a DJ with a graying goatee and a magnificently fugly cardigan performing his duties in a cozily cluttered control room: introducing pop songs, cuing commercials, reading news and traffic reports. Meanwhile, on the other side of a soundproof window, a few men and women fiddle with

print January 2018

Omer Fast

In the autumn of 2016, Omer Fast had a solo exhibition in his adopted hometown of Berlin. Mounted by the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the show included a number of the elegantly perplexing, serious-minded video and film works the artist has made across his fifteen-year practice, including his newest, August, 2016, an impressionistic elegy for the early-twentieth-century German portrait photographer August Sander. In something of a departure for Fast, the show also featured a series of spatial interventions, with three of the show’s seven works set in installation environments meant to simulate transitional

previews January 2018

“Artaud 1936”

“I came to Mexico to look for a new idea of man,” wrote Antonin Artaud in the summer of 1936, a few months into his year-and-a-half-long sojourn in the Americas. Financially strapped and strung out, the poète maudit had arrived from Paris on a grant; while in the country, he wrote prolifically, gave lectures, and lived for a time in the mountains with the Tarahumara, witnessing their rituals and experimenting with peyote. As was the case for so much of his short life, Artaud’s time in Mexico was framed by his search for ecstatic authenticity and revolutionary potentiality.

Jeffrey Kastner