Paige K. Bradley

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  slant August 27, 2016

  War Lorde

  MUSIC VIDEOS ARE BACK—even the New York Times thinks so. But one of the year’s best won’t be anywhere near this weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards. The montage for “A World Alone,” the closing track of producer Airport’s cassette-tape album Lorde Playlist, released earlier this spring by label Afternoonsmodeling, marries an amateur cover by American teenager Claire Maisto of the New Zealand pop artist’s closing track to her 2013 album Pure Heroine with combat footage, tragic accident replays, and other stumblings and sheddings of sovereignty. Some clips are branded with the name “War Clashes,”

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  interviews June 28, 2016

  Jibade-Khalil Huffman

  Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist working fluidly across poetry, video, photography, and installation. Fence Books has published most of his poetry—including the collections Sleeper Hold (2015) and 19 Names for Our Band (2008). Currently an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he will present recent works in the group show “Tenses,” which is on view there from July 14 through October 30, 2016. Huffman is also opening a solo show in Los Angeles of a newly commissioned series of works. Titled “Verse, Chorus, Verse,” this exhibition is on view at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

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  interviews May 31, 2016

  DIS

  DIS are a collective whose activities flirt across many spheres of contemporary culture—art, fashion, publishing, and now curating, in which their first major outing is the ninth edition of the Berlin Biennale, “The Present in Drag.” The show opens on June 4 in various venues across the city and runs through September 18, 2016. Here the members of DIS discuss their new curatorial role, the process of putting together the exhibition, and a few projects one can expect to see.

  THIS IS OUR FIRST AND ONLY BIENNIAL, and in a sense it is a materialization of concepts, themes, and aesthetic interests

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  diary May 03, 2016

  My So-Called Weekend

  I WAS EXPECTING A WARM WELCOME in Berlin. But instead, the schizophrenic weather beckoned me into more of a winter formal for the city’s twelfth annual Gallery Weekend. Carly Fiorina was announced as Ted Cruz’s running mate for the GOP nomination—meanwhile I entered into the running for Most Precocious Chickadee on the Berlin art-world circuit.

  Run by Maike Cruse, formerly of the Art Basel Circus Circus Incorporated, Gallery Weekend is meant to promote the vitality and diversity of Berlin’s gallery scene, with openings and happenings across the city’s best Bergs “bringing people back into the

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  picks April 29, 2016

  Ed Atkins

  A video, an empty stage, and you: These are the things that make Ed Atkins’s show go. For this sparest of installations—which feels radical next to the overbearing clusterfuck exhibitions so au courant these days (Mike Kelley they ain’t)—the artist puts the sprawl where his mouth is and delivers a rollicking, multipronged poem. The video, titled Performance Capture, 2015–16, is a CGI anthology of more than one hundred people tag-teaming parts of a sharply enunciated monologue delivered by a single head and a pair of detached forearms, all floating against a white background. Ostensibly male,

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  interviews March 23, 2016

  Wu Tsang

  Wu Tsang’s installations, performances, sculptures, and videos move fluidly among documentary, activism, and fiction. Her 2012 film Wildness premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, and her work was also featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in “The Ungovernables,” the second New Museum Triennial. Here the Los Angeles–based artist discusses her latest video installation, Duilian. This installation forms the focal point of her current exhibition at Spring Workshop in Hong Kong, which runs through May 22, 2016.

  DUILIAN IS INSPIRED by the Chinese poet Qiu Jin, a famous revolutionary martyr from

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  interviews February 16, 2016

  Matmos

  The music of Matmos, a partnership between the composers M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel, often elides boundaries between musical genres and acoustic and electronic sounds. The duo’s latest album, Ultimate Care II, will be released on Thrill Jockey on February 19, 2016, and is a single long-playing track that the musicians, made entirely by sampling the sounds of the washing machine at their home in Baltimore. The appliance’s model name lends the album its title. Though the machine’s manufacturer, Whirlpool, declined to sponsor Matmos’s tour, the duo will nevertheless embark on a short

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  diary February 03, 2016

  Ooh LA LA

  COMING HOT ON THE HEELS of Mercury’s retrograde, here we are with three art fairs—out of the frying pan and into the fire! Los Angeles is, after all, known for spontaneously combusting every few months or so.

  I arrived at the first one, Art Los Angeles Contemporary at Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar, on Thursday night after the usual crosstown crawl that is demanded to get to most anywhere. One does not just book it to an art fair here—one crawls (crawl worm!). ALAC, one letter away from goosing you for insurance, is in its seventh year and this time around featured seventy-four galleries and nine

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  picks January 01, 2016

  Jean Baudrillard

  What did Jean Baudrillard like looking at? Based on this exhibition of his own photography, to say nothing of his authoring an essay called “The Conspiracy of Art” (1996), it certainly wasn’t art. If anything, this group of fourteen giclée prints from the late 1980s to the early aughts, featuring quotidian scenes of urban graffiti, torn posters, wrinkled facades, drapery, broken statues, and humdrum oddities seems like an ironically artistic attempt at shoring up that treatise’s proposition that contemporary aesthetic activity “truly is null.” The images displayed here, taken throughout a good

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  diary November 06, 2015

  Young at Art

  “IS THERE A MEMBERS’ area we can go to?” quoth two blandly handsome suits Wednesday at the bar of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s annual Young Collectors’ Council preparty gala (try saying it three times fast). At $350 per head to benefit the museum and sponsored by Christian Dior Couture, the naive might think we were already in exclusive territory, but I guess like any addiction the velvet-rope habit is about committing to going deep. While I was absorbed by my white linen napkin square (complimentary, like the champagne), a gaggle of plainclothed New York City Ballet dancers bustled

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  picks October 30, 2015

  Jacky Connolly and Flannery Silva

  The scene is twilight, the leaves are turning, and a girl logs practice time on her acoustic guitar in an animated world shot within the 2009 PC game The Sims 3. Tear-like droplets ambiguously fall from characters’ limbs throughout. Living in a house upstate with a smaller, surlier missy in Jack Skellington logo apparel, no one speaks, but they do bake calzones in their living room and have an ice-skating rink in the picturesque backyard. Jacky Connolly’s two videos—articulating this rustique mise-en-scène of lonely utopia—Hudson Valley Rock Chick and Forever Alone Calzone (all works 2015),

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  diary October 12, 2015

  Days of Future Past

  “GREATER NEW YORK,” MoMA PS1’s signature “quinquennial,” seems more like a Hunger Games Quarter Quell. A broad cross-section of artists is reunited to present an image of just what New York’s whole deal is these days. Judgments are made, and maybe by the end someone will make it out alive. This kind of survey show was once designed to take the temperature of a scene. Well, you don’t check your temperature unless you feel ill, and anyone who lives in New York knows all is not well in the state of us (especially if you made the grave mistake of going to college while poor in the past decade…).

  It’s