Paige K. Bradley

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  diary May 16, 2019

  As the World Turns

  PREVIOUSLY ON Days of Our Outrage, the Whitney Biennial was a political disaster in medias res. (And the first takes made it all look so hunky dory.) In the lead-up to the current edition (the seventy-ninth!), there was controversy over stunning revelations that extremely wealthy people—maybe the only ones who would buy your elaborate video installations and enormous paintings—don’t tend to come by their riches by doing good. #Notsurprised, I suppose? Taking an ethical position these days seems to be like picking and choosing from an entirely rotten buffet—it’d be lovely not to have a tumbler

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  picks May 13, 2019

  Doreen Garner

  In her 1975 mission statement “A Letter to Women Artists,” Hannah Wilke laid out some terms of engagement for her work: “Feel the folds . . . expressive precise gestural symbols.” Doreen Garner’s tumid sculptures of affecting and undeniably vaginal forms can be read along similar lines. Though reminiscent of the uncanny valley à la Paul Thek, the trompe l’oeil corporeality on view here chiefly addresses the threats that black women are uniquely vulnerable to—take the 2015 arrest of Sandra Bland, which led to her untimely death in a jail cell. An audio recording of the traffic stop that instigated

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  picks May 01, 2019

  “Surrealism in Mexico”

  Whether they were seeking a new context and inspiration for their art or fleeing from strife in Europe, many in the twentieth-century avant-garde long held a fascination with Mexico. Overlapping with the last few weeks of a Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, this show brings together three paintings by Kahlo—including the modestly sized yet famous La Venadita (The Little Deer), 1946, and an unusual oil-on-metal composition framed in Oaxacan tin titled The Survivor, 1938—with pieces from a whole circle of lesser-known Surrealists who came to live and work in the country during and

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  previews May 2019

  “SILICONE: SCULPTURE AND SELF IN THE AGE OF COMPUTER GENERATED IMAGERY”

  Curated by Chen Tamir

  Like heat-seeking creatures drawn to a flame, artists have a tough time resisting the surreal allure of the online universe. This survey of more than twenty works of the post-internet genre will consider how visual art is shaped by digital technology. But post-internet, like the silicone of the show’s title, is a euphemism, one that has become useful for critics describing performative representation that utilizes computerized means. Since a number of the artists in the show (Lu Yang, Jacolby Satterwhite) appear obsessed less with being on the Web than with repurposing its

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  film March 21, 2019

  All the Young Dudes

  BRITAIN’S NATIONAL IDENTITY CRISIS! Angry young white men! The depraved, authority-huffing upper class! The stifling production line of corrupt Western educational institutions! And don’t forget a side of gun violence. If…, Lindsay Anderson’s tale of British boarding school bedlam, was released at the end of 1968 but seems primed to punch the buttons of today’s audiences, which hardly need to set a Google Alert to be inundated with horrific happenings related to the aforementioned topics. Then again, this is a film from a country where more than 90 percent of police officers don’t carry guns.

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  print February 2019

  Lee Kit

  Lee Kit’s exhibition “‘We used to be more sensitive.’” turned most of the rooms of this 1930s-era building into a temporary home for feather-light interventions. While painting in Lee’s practice can certainly refer to the process of applying paint to a substrate, it is just as likely to refer to that of articulating light through the utterly utilitarian but thoroughly contemporary means of a video projector. What is most thrilling is when he throws footage of flapping fabric, or that of a painter in a studio adjusting a work in progress, onto plain or painted planes in a kind of trompe l’oeil

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  print September 2018

  OPENINGS: FLANNERY SILVA

  FLANNERY SILVA MAKES COVERS. That is, she takes already-extant cultural works, whether they be songs or signifiers, and adapts these pieces of media into cover versions—music, sculptures, digital-print collages, or labyrinthine websites that bear hazy traces of a beloved original. The act of creating a cover is different from appropriation. While appropriation is a crisp or violent steal, a repurposed excision or theft from a culture, a cover can oscillate wildly. It may be the poor performance—made degraded and lossy through a translation of one personal expression into another—or

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  previews September 2018

  “REE MORTON: THE PLANT THAT HEALS MAY ALSO POISON”

  The first major US retrospective in nearly forty years of the sculptor, painter, and installation maven Ree Morton is upon us—praise be! When a car crash tragically cut her life short in 1977, Morton was forty and just hitting her stride. Riffing on the ascetic forms of her Minimalist peers, she incorporated markers of more quotidian affairs: The recurring dotted lines in her work bear a similarity to craft-project instructions. Then there are the flouncy, poetic, banner-like sculptures, one of which serves as the namesake of the exhibition: The Plant That Heals May Also

• previews September 2018

  LILY VAN DER STOKKER

  Bubbly fonts, floral doodles, medicinal pinks, buttercup yellows, and rolls of toilet paper: These are motifs and hues one might expect to find decorating a day care or in a supply closet. Lily van der Stokker liberated such unassuming forms and scoff-worthy aesthetics long ago, fluffing her conceptualist gestures with the pathos of the pooh-poohed. This survey of the Dutch artist’s work, focusing on her output from the late 1980s to the present, will include drawings and wall paintings, such as the proudly declarative I am an artwork and I am 3 years old, 2004; the

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  interviews May 18, 2018

  Amalia Ulman

  Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, 2014, a durational performance that took place on her Instagram account, featured the artist playing a young ingénue with the kinds of finely calibrated displays of taste we’ve come to recognize as typical of the pageantry of aspiration many people gamely engage in across social media platforms. By virtue of the work's placement on Instagram, the artist garnered attention for being a person she wasn’t, just as the rest of us do all the time. The posts, along with public comments, were published earlier this month in a book by Prestel that also includes

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  film February 02, 2018

  Dear You

  HOW LUXURIOUS TO BE ALONE in a theater for a double-bill screening of two love-rhymes-with-hideous-car-wreck films at Spectacle Theater. French director and actor Emmanuelle Bercot’s Backstage (2005) and German director and writer Eckhart Schmidt’s Der Fan (1982) suggest that fandom, like a diamond, is forever. In each, the center of gravity is a younger girl pining for an older pop star, seeing her idol as the physical embodiment of the love that she longs for—at least as a one-way ticket out of banality.

  Horror makes a major of the minor, an opera out of suggestion, and treats fantasy as

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  diary November 21, 2017

  Welcome to (ようこそ) the Jungle

  “THERE WERE SIGNS.” A small Totoro charm hanging off a mini Fjallraven just so, spotted on the Q train; the Shoto Aizawa from My Hero Academia button on a backpack moving along Thirty-Fourth Street. Clearly something was afoot.

  ’Twas an anime convention, dear reader, the inaugural edition of a gathering of weebs in New York: AnimeNYC. Held for three days last weekend at Hillary Clinton’s Waterloo (though most around these parts just call it the Javits Center), it marked a terrific opportunity for Midtown councilman Ben Kallos (D) to hail the money and tax dollars that this fan base would bring