Quinn Latimer

• previews May 2015

  Kiki Kogelnik

  Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik understood the female body as a kind of technology, both operated by and producing femininity, female desire, and feminist militancy. Kogelnik (1935–1997), traveling between New York and Vienna, created a prescient and brazen body of work that expertly underlines gender as a scientific process as well as an aesthetic. See her articulate series of silhouettes cut from colored vinyl, as slick and synthetic as the modern anxiety they betrayed. See, too, her Tongue Operation, 1970, in which a mouth is propped luridly open with scissors. Late this

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  print April 2015

  OPENINGS: OLGA BALEMA

  AN ARM STRETCHES across a concrete floor, a Lonely Arm, 2013. Salmon-colored, latex, it is not, in fact, an arm; it is a glove. Still, the allusion to an arm animates it, narrates its—what—well, technically material loneliness. In another white cube, another city, painted-metal and foam-and-latex biomorphic shapes—“Her Curves,” the exhibition’s title tells us, wittily—are leaned and loosed, approximating a brilliant, laconic apparatus, almost ergonomic. Matte and pastel or high gloss and jewel tone, the discrete sculptures shape and are shaped by the room. Like garments or

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  diary February 04, 2014

  Poets’ Problems

  “POETRY AS DRIFT, as presentation, not representation,” notes Norma Cole in a series of letters addressing the work of the exacting, exemplary French poet Emmanuel Hocquard. I was rereading Cole’s epistolary essay, titled “ ‘A Formal Type Of Work’: Rereading Emmanuel Hocquard,” recently on a train in Switzerland, which seemed right. Dérive, détournement, draft, etc. And something about this observation of a poetics of presentation, which Cole tersely ascribes as a practice of “assembling fragments, phrases. Arrange together equals syntax,” came back to me last week in Zurich, during the

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  print February 2014

  Thomas Julier

  We increasingly look to screens for our views of our world rather than to the world itself. Light, the occasion for our sight, reaches our eyes from laptop, phone, camera—any of our interchangeable monitors. It glows as evenly as an infinity pool or refracts into rainbow effects and sunspots, each with its own emotional field and index of meaning. The Swiss artist Thomas Julier is uniquely preoccupied with this phenomenon. His photographic, moving-image, and sculptural works, concerned with both analog and digital light processing, adjust seamlessly to our present condition, like an eye

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  print December 2013

  Viktor Korol

  Refusal and withdrawal are familiar themes in contemporary art; their traces and spectral shadows stretch everywhere, touching each medium. Beyond all the examples catalogued by Susan Sontag in her 1967 essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” consider Lee Lozano’s infamous boycott projects (withdrawing from the New York art world, refusing to speak to women) or, more generally, the many artists and writers who have renounced honors on political grounds: Jean-Paul Sartre refusing the Nobel Prize in Literature, Asger Jorn refusing the Guggenheim International Award, Adrienne Rich refusing the National

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  print September 2013

  Paulina Olowska

  STYLE NEVER REALLY GOES OUT OF STYLE. Paulina Olowska knows this. She also knows resurrection—its rules and its rust—which she uses as a speculative tool, invoking a litany of historical, elegant forebears, mostly women (finally and thank God). But in order to resurrect something, a stage must be set, a room prepared and fixed. And the rooms in which we make our way and our work—bars, studies, studios, theaters, parlors—have long occupied the Polish artist (or she has occupied them). Take her 2004 exhibition “She Had to Discard the Idea of the House as a Metaphor,” at

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  previews September 2013

  Javier Téllez

  Rarely does a pedagogical practice rooted in a deeply ethical consciousness produce such incandescent work—and if said practice primarily concerns “madness,” the architectonics of confinement, and structural film, its lack of ponderousness is all the more remarkable. Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez is uniquely gifted in this regard. In his moving-image works, often made in collaboration with psychiatric inpatients, Téllez employs simultaneously lucid and hallucinatory admixtures of fact and fantasia to rework accepted ideologies of mental health and artistic production.

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  print May 2013

  Nicola Martini, Virginia Overton, Magali Reus

  “Shiftings, displacings . . . sets of membranes, one inside the other, dense bodies, soft, thin, rigid.” Nicola Martini’s recent artist statement evokes an undeniable corporality, though no figures occur overtly in his work. The Italian sculptor is thus both naming the specter that hovers above his abstract practice (and those of so many of his contemporaries) and personifying his works so that the inanimate materials he uses—tangible sheets of sandstone and wax, among them—suddenly take on human attributes. After all, there is a certain ambiguity to adjectives such as soft, thin, and

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  print April 2013

  Dunja Herzog and G. Küng

  Materials and their metamorphoses might have been the casual thesis of “Under a hunch,” organized by Rahel Schelker. This subtle yet convincing exhibition of works by Dunja Herzog and G. Küng (with a singular assist by an elder, Terry Fox, and his classic 1974 video Children’s Tapes) explored Minimalism, both as a movement and as a more general tendency. The artists produced the disparate objects shown by exploring the consequences of bringing basic, even elemental, materials into formal or alchemical proximity. In parallel to this material simplicity, the show asserted a diminutive scale, both

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  print January 2013

  Akram Zaatari

  “THERE’S A CAMEL IN THE PICTURE,” a woman’s voice intones with dry precision in the first lines of Akram Zaatari’s magisterial feature-length video This Day, 2003, which stands at the center of the artist’s affecting survey at Le Magasin, “Aujourd’hui à 10 ans” (This Day at Ten). She is describing a black-and-white image taken in the 1950s by the Syrian historian Jibrail S. Jabbur and the Lebanese photographer Manoug (the two worked together, with Jabbur often proposing subjects for Manoug to shoot). Details of the photograph fill the screen while the woman continues: “The picture is a perfect

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  print January 2013

  Heike-Karin Föll

  “Now, / About what to put in your poem-painting,” John Ashbery suggested, in a neighborly fashion, in an old poem: “Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.”And so he gave Elaine Scarry part of the subtitle, if not the seed, for her ravishing essay “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium).” I found a photocopy of the essay underneath a window in an exhibition of Heike-Karin Föll’s subtle, disarming works at the (aptly named) Elaine project space in Basel. Across the room from numerous spotlit white tables carefully laden with the Berlin-based artist’s open handmade

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  print January 2013

  Keiichi Tanaami

  In 1975, Keiichi Tanaami—having designed record covers for the Monkees and Jefferson Airplane, worked with Robert Rauschenberg, and visited Warhol’s Factory—became the first art director of Japanese Playboy. But Tanaami, born in Tokyo in 1936, as Japan battled in Manchuria and prepared for its forthcoming Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany, is more than just an illustrator. The psychedelic pleasures called forth by his multifarious work—graphic design, animation, painting, film, and sculpture—belie its dark and restive content. The industries of sex and war are the parallel