previews January 2009

Dan Graham

Since 1965, when he began producing the diagrams and photo-text magazine pieces that would become landmarks of Conceptual art, Dan Graham has made a series of swerves in his practice through video and film and performance to the architectural pavilions of the 1980s and beyond.

Since 1965, when he began producing the diagrams and photo-text magazine pieces that would become landmarks of Conceptual art, Dan Graham has made a series of swerves in his practice through video and film and performance to the architectural pavilions of the 1980s and beyond. This body of work—along with his early stint as a gallerist showing art by friends such as Carl Andre and Robert Smithson, and his energetic activities as a critic and speaker—has earned him near-legendary status. Artists today find a potent model in Graham’s integration of the

previews January 2009

Lawrence Weiner

In the mid-1960s, Lawrence Weiner famously turned from painting and sculpture to words. But it was not until his 2007 retrospective, “As Far as the Eye Can See,” that a wide audience became acquainted with his practice.

In the mid-1960s, Lawrence Weiner famously turned from painting and sculpture to words. But it was not until his 2007 retrospective, “As Far as the Eye Can See,” that a wide audience became acquainted with his practice. This latest exhibition presents a body of new work united as a single project—part of which will appear on the Power Plant’s smokestack, rising fifty feet over Lake Ontario—and promises, cryptically, to explore “the non-metaphorical use of a cul-de-sac as a sculptural material.” No such dead-end streets actually exist on the institution’s grounds, so we

performance December 1993

the Five Lesbian Brothers

Bitter jealousy, glorious revenge, corrupted innocence—these are the tropes of an emerging pulp lesbian sensibility that traffics in the tawdry castoffs of ’50s and ’60s American pop culture. The territory of fanzines, girl bands, and a host of recent artists and writers, this self-consciously downbeat vision salvages its images from a mélange of bad plays, pop psych, and supermarket novels from Ann Bannon to Jacqueline Susann. Trashy, melodramatic, and trading on irony, its seductions collide with more familiar aims of gay cultural politics: countering the stereotype, fighting misrepresentation,

print October 1993

OPENINGS: NICOLE EISENMAN

Nicole Eisenman’s figures cavort across page and wall with raunchy perversity. In her stream of recent drawings, gouaches, quick cartoons, and large-scale murals, diverse genres and art-historical references collide with ferocious energy: comic books, history painting, Ash Can School, Pablo Picasso, linear perspective, Saturday-morning cartoons, the hybrid musings of Saul Steinberg. These deadpan samplings populate a Rabelaisian dystopia of the comic, the grotesque, and the orgiastically violent. Yet this fancifully excessive sensibility veers from gritty urban realism to bubblegum. The exuberance

print May 1993

Liz Kotz

IN A WELCOME EFFORT TO redress the backseat status of time-based media like video in the market-driven art world, this year’s Biennial includes eight “video installations” and two extra video screening rooms in the main exhibition galleries. Presumably, the intention is to produce a critical interaction between work in the visual and media arts; unfortunately, the results are dispiriting.

While the incidental use of TV monitors in room-sized installations by Renée Green, Daniel J. Martinez, and Fred Wilson may be a healthy sign—video is now a tool like any other—the superficial engagement with

print November 1992

THE BODY YOU WANT: AN INTEVIEW WITH JUDITH BUTLER

BOYS AS AWKWARD AND GLAMOROUS GIRLS, girls as macho and very swishy boys, black boys in whiteface in girls’ clothes: “identity bending,” a key Modernist trope since at least Marcel Duchamp (and a perennial staple of the cabaret and performance scenes), seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts in the gallery world. From Matthew Barney’s bride stripped bare to reveal a gym-pumped, decidedly “male” physique, to Chuck Nanney’s less-than-vigilant self-transformations (he looks like a Rocky Mountain logger in a shift from Sears), to Lyle Ashton Harris’ seductive gender/race drag, to the decidedly

print September 1992

SEX WITH STRANGERS: LUTZ BACHER

LUTZ BACHER’S WORK inhabits a messy, ambiguous zone where pathology meets pleasure, where what we most fear is what we most desire. Like much of the most powerful art exploring sexuality and the body today, her work refuses the clarity and distance of a more avowedly critical art; indeed, her ambivalent attraction to problematic materials flies in the face of more conventional feminist approaches. Though pornography, with its highly charged narratives of subjugation and entrapment, constitutes a key site of her investigation, the strategies she employs could not be further from those of antiporn