Ralph Lemon

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  print September 2022

  THE ART WE LOVE

  ROSALIND E. KRAUSS

  One of the first assignments Phil Leider gave me as an Artforum staff writer was the February 1966 Donald Judd show at Leo Castelli’s Seventy-Seventh Street gallery (a walk down memory lane!). It was my first encounter with Minimalism, and I was totally unprepared for it. I was also ignorant of the truculent embargo Judd had placed on the pictorial: “Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture,” he declared in “Specific Objects” (Arts Yearbook, 1965). And he added, “The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular

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  print Summer 2021

  NOTES ON NONPROFIT

  WHEN ARTFORUM generously invited me to contribute to the present issue considering the state of museums today, I suggested, as an alternative, a series of notes written from my perspective as director of the Kitchen, New York, a smaller nonprofit organization. While all arts institutions provide useful windows onto society more broadly—figured as they are within the latter’s contradictions, both economic and cultural—smaller institutions often embody such qualities in living proximity. Certainly, many prescient questions about how institutions may be oriented differently, and with an eye toward

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  books December 2018

  Ralph Lemon

  In early 2018, I read three books at the same time, all of them propositions for freedom, all contemplating its seeming impossibility and the inspired labor of working toward the impossible—of believing.

  From J. Krishnamurti’s On Freedom (1991): “Freedom is not from something. It is an ending [of knowledge]. Do you follow?” No, not quite. But since I was eighteen I’ve trusted, without submitting to, most of what Krishnamurti has written. (I fashion that I am an innocent.) Angela Y. Davis’s Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2016) is

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  previews May 2018

  Kevin Beasley

  I met Kevin Beasley in 2011; he was a graduate student at Yale University and I was a visiting critic. In his studio I remember amorphous objects and pieces of clothing subsumed in foam and resin, scattered about the floor and mounted to the walls. Tucked into one corner on a cluttered plywood table were two Technics SL-1200 turntables. I asked about them. He played a file called “I Want My Spot Back”—a haunting composition sampling a cappella recordings from late hip-hop artists such as Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Big L, and Guru.

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  print December 2016

  the best of 2016

  TO TAKE STOCK OF THE PAST YEAR, ARTFORUM ASKED AN INTERNATIONAL GROUP OF ARTISTS TO SELECT A SINGLE IMAGE, EXHIBITION, OR EVENT THAT MOST MEMORABLY CAPTURED THEIR EYE IN 2016.

  ALEX HUBBARD

  Rodin’s The Thinker, 1880–81, after a bomb planted by the Weather Underground exploded on March 24, 1970, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Photo: C. D. Moore.

  ANNE COLLIER

  Portrait of Hilton Als by Catherine Opie, wrapped in bubble plastic, as it appeared in “James Baldwin/Jim Brown and the Children,” curated by Als for the Artist’s Institute, New York, June 14.

  SLAVS AND TATARS

  A disposable, self-administering