Ronald Jones

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  print Summer 2015

  Frederick Kiesler

  The Frederick Kiesler exhibition at Tensta Konsthall was a testing ground for Sweden’s dedication to progressive democracy, and in this spirit, the exhibition sang the anthem of social reform, of things going from foul to fair. The venue is nested in Tensta, a suburban complex of nearly six thousand apartments, which sprang up as a direct result of Sweden’s 1965–74 Miljonprogrammet, or Million Program, an initiative to create a level playing field by giving those living on the social margins a middle-class home, and therefore a meaningful place to live. The konsthall opened in 1998, when Stockholm

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  print May 2015

  Lisa Tan

  Ethnographers and anthropologists often occupy an in-between state known as “liminality.” Their dual roles—of participant and observer—become irresolvable. Something similar can happen with works of art. Think of Jasper Johns’s flags, endlessly asking, Is this a “painting” of a flag or a “flag” in place of a painting? They stand at a threshold. Denouement deferred. This suspension drags on in Bruce Nauman’s anguished Clown Torture, 1987, crushing you under its repeating silliness, an obsessive ritual: The fishbowl slips from the broom every time; the clown, the fool, never learns. The

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  print September 2014

  Nils Dardel

  The January 1917 inaugural edition of flamman (The Flame), the Swedish art magazine founded by Georg Pauli, featured some of the artists who were by then already established as quintessential modernists, from Picasso to Kandinsky. Yet there were fresh names, too, including the Swedish painter Nils Dardel; among his better-known peers in the issue, Picabia is the one to whom he seems closest. And just as Dardel bumped up against Picabia’s style, the French artist seems to have caught Dardel fever in later works such as The Idol, 1940–41. “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that

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  print April 2013

  Mika Rottenberg

  Mika Rottenberg is a serial absurdist, as amply demonstrated by her recent exhibition “Sneeze to Squeeze,” which encompasses more than a decade of work. Take her most recent video, Sneeze, 2012. It’s a send-up, and simplicity itself: Three men in business suits, each with a farcically misshapen, pink-tinted nose, sneeze irrepressibly. These are men who have lost control, not only of their bodily reflexes but of the very substances their bodies expel. Each sneezing fit produces another unpredictable discharge: “Achoo!” and a bunny spews out; “Achoo!” and a steak emerges; “Achoo!” and a lightbulb

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  print December 2012

  Spencer Finch

  Emily Dickinson sought the sacred in nature rather than in church. In one buoyant but sacrilegious poem, she “détourned” the Trinitarian blessing, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” making it: “In the name of the bee / And of the butterfly / And of the breeze, amen!” American artist Spencer Finch shares this spiritual reverence for nature, endlessly attempting to capture those ethereal moments in which nature overawes. Embracing paradox, his titles grasp at literal descriptions of ineffable natural experiences. He describes The Moment When Three Dimensions Become

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  picks June 18, 2012

  Jason Yates

  The barrel vaults in the room containing Jason Yates’s installation “Master and Servant” serve him well. Visitors enter the room through a large door, across from which Yates has set the work A Garden Where Nothing Grows (all works 2012) beneath the facing vault. Slits in this gray triptych allow slivers of daylight from a window behind the work to pierce the center section. The walls beneath the other three vaults are covered with wallpaper, in a squared-off pattern of black and white crosshatching, titled Sunset Since Sunrise. Finally, four tables, Black Monk Tables, are symmetrically arranged

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  print Summer 2012

  Miriam Bäckström

  A revelatory moment in Miriam Bäckström’s impressive retrospective “The Opposite of Me Is I” was her documentary-style video Rebecka, 2004, in which she shifts between interrogating and directing the actress Rebecka Hemse. Hemse is an accomplished performer with a beguiling range of subtle expressions; in this case, they are charged with enigmatic allure by the ambiguity of her character. But when is this actress not performing? Is she ever being herself? “If I consider fiction to be more authentic,” she wonders, “why leave it at all?” Moments later, Bäckström asks pointedly, “When are you most

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  print May 2012

  Will Kwan

  With all the current international economic woes from Ireland to Greece, from Japan to the United States, Hong Kong holds an exceptional position. Largely autonomous since the UK handed it back to China in 1997, the city has accumulated a surplus equal to eighteen months’ government spending. Statistics tell the story: The Hong Kong economy grew 5 percent last year; spending on education will increase 7 percent this year; retail sales grew 23 percent in the past year; and, even as the government predicts economic growth will slow down because of the sluggish world economy, the city’s budget

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  print February 2012

  “De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde”

  In its highest form, cultural detective work yields spectacular deductions—equal parts tease and persuasion—permitting you to freely take a leap of faith just to see what happens were the speculation to be true. This was the case for “De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde” (Of or by Marcel Duchamp by Ulf Linde), an extravaganza of an exhibition organized by Jan Åman and Daniel Birnbaum with Henrik Samuelsson and Susanna Slöör, centering on Linde’s sixty years of sleuthing around Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre. Linde, once an acolyte of Duchamp and now an authority on his work, proposes that

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  print December 2011

  Andrea Zittel

  If you’re still drinking the Kool-Aid and believe in the lone genius maker of masterpieces—like Kirk Douglas’s van Gogh in Lust for Life—you get your kicks when the artist looks up wide-eyed as inspiration knocks on his back door. Eureka! And there it is, another new idea in the long succession of new ideas. But is that really the way creativity happens? Neuroscientists agree with philosophers: not really. Creativity and innovation are not single events but complex networks of many ideas and influences that take time to gestate. Ideas just seem to pop up out of the blue. Andrea Zittel’s

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  print May 2011

  Helga Hansdóttir and Magnús Pálsson

  In 2008, Dr. Helga Hansdóttir and Dr. Sigríður Halldórsdóttir published a research paper titled “Dialogues on Death: A Phenomenological Study on Views of the Elderly Toward Life and Death and End-of-Life Treatments” in the medical journal Open Longevity Science. The two geriatricians sought to document attitudes of the elderly toward life, death, and the kind of end-of-life treatment they preferred, in order to better understand how they had arrived at their beliefs. They carried out dialogues with men and women age seventy-two to ninety-one, and, in brief, discovered a common acceptance among

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  print April 2011

  Anna Barham

  Using anagrams, Anna Barham has created a seemingly endless language network that riffs off the enigmatic words “Return to Leptis Magna”; the resulting phrases trail off into the nonsensical—“Repaint Lost Argument”—or just as often produce still enigmatic yet more resonant mutterings: “Interrupt Tonal Games,” for example. Occasionally there are phrases that appear to reflect on the network itself, e.g., “Patrol Strange Muttering.” Barham’s approach is an elastic hybrid of Sol LeWitt’s 1974 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes and the playful nonsense poetry Hugo Ball performed at the