interviews March 03, 2020

Rivane Neuenschwander

Fitting that this conversation was made possible through translation: The Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander’s oeuvre, spanning some thirty years, is dotted with experiments in the misuse, repurposing, and dislocation of language. Our interview was anchored by the words carta, residue, and fear. Echoing the approach of her room-size installation Work of Days, 1998, which was recently on view in “Surrounds” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this text gathers some of the threads and effects of pieces she has recently shown and plots them against the grid of her career.

THE FIRST WORK I

print March 2020

Luis Camnitzer

An unsettling presence pervades Luis Camnitzer’s El mirador (The Observatory), 1996, a room-within-a-room whose components—including a stained pillow, an enamel plate, a few magazines, and a (mostly) empty bottle of wine—suggest an inhabitant. Have they died or, in some mysterious way, just disappeared? The sliding metal gate above a shelf built into the installation’s inaccessible door—through which that dish might be slid back and forth, full or empty of food—likens these quarters to a prison cell. Surveillance could be facilitated by the fist-size horizontal gap running at eye level along

books February 2020

LEAVES OF GRASS

SCROLL WAS FIRST USED AS A VERB in the 1600s to describe a particular method of writing. Its current definition, having more to do with the navigation of text than with its creation, was introduced in the early 1970s, at the same time that Michelle Stuart finished her first banner-like frottage of a patch of ground—in this case, in Woodstock, New York. In the contemporary context, scrolling is so effortless—requiring just the touch of a finger to touch pad or screen—that it hardly seems to qualify as an action. But centuries ago, it might have involved slowly unwinding yards of parchment from

interviews September 10, 2019

Mona Hatoum

Many of Mona Hatoum’s installations employ just one or two materials (barbed wire, cement and rebar, steel, hair) to transform recognizable symbols and forms (maps, globes, spheres, cubes) into portentous iterations. The results can be seen as succinct metaphors for the world as it is—or as models of the future. In an exhibition at White Cube in London titled “Remains to be Seen,” on view from September 11 to November 3, 2019, Hatoum is debuting several pieces that move further in the latter direction, bringing together images of the world lit up by fire, a shattered map of floating continents,

previews September 2019

KAARI UPSON

Curated by Elena Filipovic (Basel)

Curated by Kathleen Rahn (Hannover)

Kaari Upson’s disquieting new video for her Kunsthalle Basel exhibition transports viewers to the dusty lot of her childhood home in San Bernardino, California. The sound of a giant pine being sawed to bits overwhelms the nighttime scene. Upson appears in the frame, spotlit, wringing her hands, attempting to speak over the noise of the machinery. Despair and confusion characterize the best of Upson’s oeuvre, which will be surveyed in a nearly concurrent show at Kunstverein Hannover. This dual presentation is fitting for an

print September 2019

Olga Balema

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 . . . The integers titling Olga Balema’s thirteen works, all produced this year, descended unsteadily in a clockwise direction from Bridget Donahue’s entrance. Each number corresponded to a diagrammatic composition of thin elastic strips, some of which were stretched out in lengths of up to forty-five feet, raised slightly above the floor by the nails and staples that held them in place. In some areas the strands were split in two or glued together to create intersections, mostly at right angles; elsewhere, extraneous bands curled underfoot, like crimped ribbons or dried flora,

picks July 10, 2019

Rachel Libeskind and Carmen Winant

The announcement for Rachel Libeskind and Carmen Winant’s show tells us that the artists “practice feminism and motherhood,” as if these were optional items on a menu of exercise regimens. Yet both of them do attempt to grapple with the historic packaging and narrativization of women’s bodies and psyches.

Winant’s memorable installation at the Museum of Modern Art last year, My Birth, 2018, required the viewer to pass through a long hallway plastered with pictures of newborns, pregnancies, and women in labor. Here, her collages focus on found material about “embodied treatments”—such as dance or

print May 2019

Sonya Blesofsky

After Sonya Blesofsky’s show at Spencer Brownstone Gallery closed, the gallery’s walls had to be reconstructed. The bricks, concrete blocks, two-by-fours, heating ducts, electrical outlets, and insulation that had been temporarily revealed through cutouts in the Sheetrock and scraped-away paint were entombed once more. In 1933, the current site of the gallery was just a yard appended to the address of 172 Suffolk Street and zoned for commercial use: “monumental works and showroom,” according to a legal certificate. In 1945, the lot’s use was clarified for the “display and sales of monumental

print May 2019

Liz Magor

A gesture that recurs in Liz Magor’s recent work is the needy and desperate embrace—the full-bodied attachment of a subject to an object of comfort. In her 2017–18 show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, the hybrid stuffed animals of Oilmen’s Bonspiel (a kitty-faced monkey) and Pembina (a pig-headed teddy bear), both 2017, each hugged a heavy knit sweater around the waist. More recently, at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, a creature the size of a Beanie Baby grasped the tails of a soft coat in Closet (fur), 2018, while silicone casts of larger plush beasties held

picks March 28, 2019

Aki Sasamoto

The trio of spherical glass volumes in Aki Sasamoto’s installation here are reminders of all that is circular in her work: the wall drawings in performances such as Strange Attractors, 2010; the toilet paper rolls of Under/Over, 2015; the rotating washing machines of Delicate Cycle, 2016; the doughnuts in her newest video (on view here), Do Nut Diagram, 2018; and even the suggestive displacement of “Past in a future tense,” the title of this exhibition.

A loud whirring sound emanates from three centrifugal fans; the wind is channeled through coiling HVAC ducts that are connected to three large

interviews March 26, 2019

Nina Katchadourian

The categories of work listed on Nina Katchadourian’s website include “uninvited collaborations with nature,” “charts and systems,” and “language/translation.” Stemming from these topics, the artist’s highly structured experiments often begin with found objects and absurd situations that she disentangles, only to find that they are part of the larger webs of identity and relationships. Her current exhibition at Fridman Gallery in New York, “Ification,” includes several of her best-known pieces in addition to The Recarcassing Ceremony, 2016, a video that revisits an old recording of a childhood

print February 2019

Marcel Storr

One can imagine self-taught artist Marcel Storr (1911–1976) in 1964, his head bent low over the Paris streets he was employed to sweep, as he studied the staggered patterns of the cobblestones. Back at his home in the ninth arrondissement, not far from the ornate Église de la Sainte-Trinité and the historic Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, he would dream up his own extraordinary ecclesiastical sites through a series of graphite and colored-ink drawings, roughly sixty-four in total, that he produced over the course of his lifetime. Though the significant gap in information about Storr’s life prohibits a

Mira Dayal