print January/February 2021

Celestial Body

“I DANCED MYSELF out of the womb . . . I danced myself into the tomb,” quavers Marc Bolan in the 1971 T. Rex song from which “Cosmic Dancer,” a retrospective marking the fifteen-year anniversary of Michael Clark Company’s residence at London’s Barbican, takes its title. Cosmic suggests earthly transcension—not needing to be grounded—and indeed, the tension between flight and anchorage is what lent this survey its off-kilter coherence, providing room for reflection on what Clark, both a blazing provocateur and an imperially laureled institution of British dance, can and cannot offer audiences

interviews September 30, 2020

Jesse Darling

After months of working under lockdown in Berlin, Jesse Darling recently traveled by train to Kunstverein Freiburg, in southwest Germany, to install Gravity Road, a “dysfunctional roller coaster” that consists of a suspended horizontal track, a ladder twisting to nowhere. Like the artist’s previous experiments in steel—such as The Veterans and Wounded Door 1, both 2014—the work’s anthropometric scale and distorted form suggest both vulnerability and potential. The exhibition opened on September 19 and runs through November 1, 2020. Here, Darling talks about the work’s genesis and installation,

slant July 31, 2020

Tate Awakening

“SHAME ON TATE.” This chant reverberated at a protest organized by dozens of staffers with PCS Tate United and PCS Culture Group on Monday, ensuring that no visitor to London’s Tate Modern—newly reopened after four months due to the pandemic—could think it accepted or normal for the institution to threaten 334 employees of its commercial arm, Tate Enterprises, with redundancy. The decimation of jobs is completely preventable, workers argue, and political. Ultimately, Tate’s board decides on resource allocations, and the Prime Minister appoints thirteen out of fourteen members. Monday’s protest

film May 11, 2020

Good Measure

PLEASE BELIEVE THESE DAYS WILL PASS. Amid a massive collective reckoning with sickness and death, these words are emblazoned on billboards across ten UK cities, oblivious to anger and grief. Carolyn Lazard’s work offers a markedly different perspective on temporality, putting store in indeterminacy. How will disparate feelings around what could have been, and what is now, affect what happens in the future? The Philadelphia-based artist’s first UK solo show, “Safe Space,” originally scheduled to open on April 2 at Cell Project Space in London, is indefinitely postponed. An April screening of

print December 2019

Maria Pininska-Beres

“A window view is not the real thing,” Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931–1999) wrote in 1994, at a time when she was prevented by illness from “actively communing” with the outdoors. In the same text, she remembers one summer when she “escaped from the ‘cage’ of the garden” and “pressed herself into the moss, wallowing in it, moaning in ecstasy.” These reflections find more immediately accessible form in two works chronologically bookending “Living Pink,” the first presentation of the artist’s work outside her native Poland. The show comprised a total of nine pieces spanning mixed-media performance

picks November 27, 2019

Sable Elyse Smith

A car burns red at night by a deserted sidewalk, then explodes. Sable Elyse Smith’s installation of this silently looping, shaky footage, Untitled (all works 2019), on a flatscreen suspended in the corner, suggests a courtroom monitor. Gallerygoers, ordinarily judging artworks, may in other circumstances find themselves serving as witnesses, legal workers, jury members, defendants, or prison visitors. The speech bubble of a large cartoon bird addresses viewers in a nearby silk-screen and oil-stick work on paper: “Thanks for visiting!”

On the floor, Riot I and Pivot II resemble playground equipment

print November 2019

Olga Jevrić

In a selection of works dated 1955 to 2001, several poised, boulder-like works by the Serbian artist Olga Jevrić (1922–2014) absorbed light into heavy gray, brown, and orange surfaces derived from ferric oxide, iron, cement, terra-cotta, and bronze. The ensemble had a grounding quality that was also uplifting. Invested with movement, certain constructions driven through with iron rods appeared to have forced themselves out of the earth. Inspired by the twelfth- to sixteenth-century stećci, or medieval tombstones, found in vast numbers in cemeteries across the borders of southeast Europe, Jevrić

picks August 07, 2019

“Unorganised Response”

In Christelle Oyiri’s Collective Amnesia (Call and Response), 2019, a woman dances in a museum, taking viscous, gliding steps as the marble floor beneath her gains a transparent layer of archival riot footage. Cars burn and lights flash, suggesting the resurfacing of exultant scenes long repressed. The video reflects, from a Parisian context, on the recent uptake of Logobi, a fast-paced Ivorian dance, by black working-class banlieusards. From its soundtrack emerge recognizable elements of “Just Because This Is a Funeral Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Rave,” from Oyiri’s 2018 album Mere Noises, released

picks March 03, 2019

Morag Keil

Controllers, 2019, installed in the upper galleries of “Moarg Kiel,” is a bile-green door jammed shut. Its peephole affords a glimpse of Alexa’s blue halo, as if to propose the Amazon bot—feminized, confined—as an update of Duchamp’s Étant donnés. Another door opens onto Shopping, 2011/19, where tendril-like wires hang from the ceiling. The wires connect a system of speakers nestled into washing-up bowls from which audio spills, clashing advertising and video-game samples to give the bare room a homely, mall-like atmosphere. Art’s technological support structures become a site of consumption

picks December 26, 2018

Josephine Pryde

In Josephine Pryde’s exhibition “In Case My Mind Is Changing,” four 3D-printed sculptures resemble icebergs. Titled Time and the Tampon 1–4 (all works 2018), they are opaque, white, and scaled to fit with plenty of space around them, placed atop three thin black mats. It becomes hard to dissociate these mats from yoga after reading “Constable,” a short text contributed by Pryde to Anarchic sexual desires of plain unmarried schoolteachers (2015), in which the artist describes how practicing yoga generates various landscapes in her mind. “I make no effort to summon them as memories,” she writes.

Lizzie Homersham