Marcus Civin

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  picks March 09, 2017

  Antoni Muntadas

  Spanish artist and retired MIT professor Antoni Muntadas’s show, “Activating Artifacts,” includes two three-channel video projections, About Academia I, 2011, and About Academia II, 2017, that index the conditions of higher education in the United States through quotations from educational theorists, snippets of interviews conducted in 2011 and 2017 with liberal professors and students, and looping scenes of campus life—lecture halls full of empty chairs, a closed door with a sign that reads “Computational Materials Meditation Room,” and students in sweatshirts walking to class in the rain. A

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  picks November 14, 2016

  Ragnar Kjartansson

  Ragnar Kjartansson’s mid-career survey is on tour. Following a first showing at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, this US venue adds to the mix Woman in E, 2016, a daily performance originally conceived for a different show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The titular woman wears a gold dress and stands on a round gold platform and rotates slowly, repeatedly strumming melancholic chords on an electric guitar. At the opening of the exhibit, the performer looked regal but stiff, constrained by her dress and pedestal that seemed to send up American triumphalism and mourn the continuing

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  diary October 28, 2016

  Balcony Scene

  TAKING A LATE FLIGHT from Baltimore to Canada, I read an English translation of Jean Genet’s 1956 play Le Balcon (The Balcony). I read Carmen recalling one of her clients’ infatuation with the color blue: “I was a Madonna to whom a Spaniard might have prayed and sworn an oath. He hymned me, fusing me with his beloved color, and when he carried me to bed, it was into the blue that he penetrated.”

  I read of sex workers and clients performing elaborate fantasies, playing within a play, pretending to be religious and political figures. I read the revolutionary upheaval that interrupted them.

  The next

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  picks October 23, 2016

  Ann Hamilton

  Ann Hamilton’s Philadelphia miniretrospective was accompanied by a here-and-then-gone waterfront installation of pulley- and wind-activated Tyvek curtains, but the crux of the matter is on the eighth floor of this museum—a materialization of the nerve center from which springs Hamilton’s tender and spectacular whimsy. On the right side of the gallery, twenty-four steel carts function as museum cases. They look like four-post bed frames from an infirmary; instead of mattresses, though, they hold sample books overstuffed with all manner of swatches, from goat hair to lace. There, too, are

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  picks June 08, 2016

  Hasan Elahi

  In 2002, Hasan Elahi became the subject of an FBI investigation. After six months, he was cleared. Since then, he has continued to share his activities with the FBI as well as the public, ostensibly working through the trauma of the investigation while, in the process, creating a continuous alibi and a prolonged satire of surveillance. In this solo exhibition, titled “Datamine,” tens of thousands of photographs document and abstract his choices of food and diet beverages; the toilets he’s used and the planes he’s boarded; the stairs he’s climbed and the plazas he’s visited. And so many photographed

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  picks March 21, 2016

  Xavier Cha

  In Xavier Cha’s film abduct, 2015, the footage follows, frames, and cuts together close-ups of actors performing an unsentimental, discordant series of engrossing gestures and facial expressions. Seven slick-muscled virtuosos in stylish white underwear and undershirts appear interchangeably one at a time in front of the kind of plastic curtain used in places such as slaughterhouses to modulate temperature or block noxious sprays. Heavy static and intermittent droning vibrations fill the room. The actors perform apparently purposeless but ultimately unnerving wide-eyed stares. They’re like aliens

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  slant December 11, 2015

  On the Ground: Baltimore

  THE PAST SIX MONTHS IN BALTIMORE have been traumatic. Last April and May saw top-down violence from police and destruction by citizens amid simultaneously peaceful protest. Addressing the uprising that began after city police officers murdered Freddie Gray—an innocent twenty-five-year-old black man—Baltimore columnist D. Watkins wrote in the New York Times, “Some people might ask, ‘Why Baltimore?’ But the real question is, ‘Why did it take so long?’” Many, particularly those in East and West Baltimore, suffer from brutal policing, a school-to-prison pipeline, massive incarceration rates, crumbling

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  interviews October 27, 2015

  Shana Lutker

  Los Angeles–based artist and 2014 Smithsonian artist research fellow Shana Lutker here speaks about “Le ‘NEW’ Monocle: Chapters 1–3,” her exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, which runs from October 29, 2015, to February 15, 2016. The show includes a performance, The Average Mysterious and the Shirt off Its Back, 2015, on Thursday, October 29, at 6:30 PM.

  OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS I’ve been creating a body of work titled Le “NEW” Monocle. There will be eight chapters when it is complete. At the Hirshhorn, chapters one to three will be on view. The subject of

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  picks July 13, 2015

  “Something Else Entirely”

  An image from a promotional photo shoot for Ray Johnson’s book The Paper Snake (1965) shows the famed artist blithely holding up the real thing. It’s a compelling portrait in this exhibition, which shares a wealth of Johnson’s original and related materials for the project; throughout, the snake is a master of riddles and a phallic symbol.

  Fluxus pioneer Dick Higgins divined The Paper Snake from Johnson’s assorted mailings and in 1965 printed the fifty-page book in cyans, browns, and brick reds for his fledgling Something Else Press. The volume includes rubbings that suggest snakes slithering,

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  picks January 22, 2015

  Dario Robleto

  Looking like a cabinet of sea curiosities and feeling like a ballad, Dario Robleto’s exhibition reveals a burning heart. The packed gallery displays photographs, collages, and sculptural amalgamations made with materials like black swan vertebrae, glitter, semiprecious stones, and whale ear fossils. One of these works, Melancholy Matters Because of You, 2012, is composed of three cast and carved hands that resemble bones but are actually a mingling of bone calcium, resin, dust, pigment, and melted vinyl record collections that belonged to three generations of Robleto’s family.

  For Setlists for

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  picks December 29, 2014

  “In __ We Trust: Art and Money”

  “In We Trust: Art and Money” is a sprawling survey, resonant where the collective spirit of the work is a churning mishmash of the absurd, earnest, sharp, and self-defeating. Curator Tyler Cann includes twenty-six artists and collectives. Leaving a blank space in the exhibition title where the word God might appear, Cann doesn’t so much criticize belief in God as show money godless and unbridled. The collective Claire Fontaine’s Gateway to Freedom, 2005, for example, makes common currency into pocket weaponry; two US quarters come equipped with small scythe blades, looking like somber militia