print March 1999

Alison Saar

At the entrance to the museum, viewers were greeted to the exhibition by a sculpture of a larger-than-life black male figure hanging upside down. Executed in bronze and attached to the ceiling by a chain, Alison Saar’s Traveling Light, 1999, functions on one level as a bell, emitting a deep-toned chime when visitors pull a cord at the center of its back. But it is also a representation of a lynching, the violence of the act held at bay while the dignity of the figure shines through. The funereal yet heroic sculpture possesses a determined quality, a resistance to violation that seems to cast a

print November 1998

James Drake

Somewhere around 423 BC, Socrates said, “If we had neither voice nor tongue, and yet wished to manifest things to one another, should we not . . . endeavor to signify our meaning by the hands, head, and other parts of the body?” “Tongue-Cut Spanows,” a suite of works by James Drake simultaneously on view at ArtPace in San Antonio and the Pamela Auchincloss Projects space in New York City, was a powerful and elegant expression of that observation. The impetus for the project came from a daily event that occurs in the artist’s home of El Paso: groups of women gather outside the county jail for

print September 1998

Nan Goldin

Nothing redeems like beauty. It redeems even Nan Goldin’s subject matter. The experience of confronting her recent show in Los Angeles, which gathered older photos together with some newer ones, was like being trapped in the combustion chamber of an engine: instead of air and fuel igniting under pressure,. the volatile mixture was the repulsion of intimate lives on quasi-voyeuristic display and the attraction of the awesome beauty with which Goldin captured them.

The most powerful of the artist’s diaristic pictures—of guys and girls drinking beer at an impromptu party, zoned out in the Bowery

print Summer 1998

Larry Johnson

Critics have described Larry Johnson’s work as ironic, witty, and cool, seeing it as “a deliberate provocation, a mocking . . . perpetuation of (coy, cruel, twisted) defense mechanisms” or “user-friendly, if slightly bitchy art—bereft of interiority . . . and custom tailored to intensify those pleasures of the text that Roland Barthes extols.” These quotes are from writers I like and admire, and they get at the heart of some of Johnson’s earlier efforts. But what I saw in the artist’s new works, all from 1998, was only an attitude of cool, a facade of bitchy wit, and an appearance of impersonal,

print May 1998

Sarah Perry

In the desert where I live, rusty junk—spent bullet cartridges, empty beer cans, abandoned cars and trucks, decrepit appliances—is as much a part of the environment as cacti and Joshua trees. I don’t know why, but all that junk scattered around is strangely reasoning, comforting almost. Perhaps that is because it represents a trace of humanity in a landscape that can seem immeasurably hostile. Or perhaps there’s something else: a feeling that these things falling apart in the sun have their own spirits, afterlives of their usefulness waiting to be revealed.

Viewing Sarah Perry’s exhibition “Seeing

print April 1998

William Kentridge

The story of South Africa in the twentieth century is the story of apartheid. The political turmoil and tragic consequences of that oppressive system haunt the work of South African artist William Kentridge. “I have never tried,” the artist has said, “to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake.” Kentridge’s art entails submitting a handful of his sensuous, black-and-white charcoal drawings (usually twenty or so) to a succession of erasures and additions, altering and transforming each work multiple

print March 1998

Peter Shelton

A reverent stillness permeates Peter Shelton’s recent sculptural installation Sixtyslippers, 1997. The work consists of sixty cast-iron cones of varying diameters suspended from the ceiling with wire cable, hovering roughly a quarter-inch above the floor in no particular pattern. The cones fill the gallery space while allowing the viewer to move around and through them.

Like many of his peers who began making sculptural installations in the ’80s, Shelton’s work combines Minimalism’s geometric reductions with post-Minimalism’s allusions to human and organic forms. There has also been a marked

print October 1997

Wallace Berman

Many artists and critics continue to identify Wallace Berman as the leading luminary of the assemblage movement that swept California four decades back. Though it’s difficult to distinguish myth from fact in this respect—Bruce Conner, Edward Kienholz, Jess, and George Herms have all at one time or another disputed this characterization of Berman—his impact on the era remains clear. During his time spent living in LA, his home in Topanga Canyon became a haven for artists, musicians, and poets alike, providing them with a sense of community as well as a place to exchange ideas and information

print February 1996

Michael Zwack

Michael Zwack’s paintings, which originate in photographs, render the familiar uncanny. Zwack sometimes projects a slide onto canvas then rubs, wipes away, and builds up layers of paint to blur the outlines of the image and alter the colors so that the whole seems to have been culled from the depths of the imagination. Though the landscapes and buildings he depicts look as if they ought to be identifiable, they have a timeless, almost universal quality about them.

Part of a generation of artists in the early ’80s who appropriated mass media imagery, Zwack reconsiders the impact of the photographic

print February 1996

Lynn Foulkes

The recent retrospective exhibition of Llyn Foulkes’ work, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” demonstrated that though the form and subject matter of his work have varied widely over the years—from semiabstract assemblages, to the rocky landscapes of the ’60s, to the bloodied self-portraits of the ’70s, to the satirical paintings of the last two decades—the complexity and passion of Foulkes’ vision has scarcely faltered. Occupying a territory somewhere between the horrific, hallucinatory world of Philip K. Dick and the cartoons of Walt Disney, his art constantly grapples with what has infected

print Summer 1995

“Narcissistic Disturbances”

America has become a society obsessed with its obsessions; a tribe of people for whom 12-Step Programs are themselves the addiction. Any predilection for altered states automatically makes you a substance abuser in denial about your dependency. Slowly but inexorably, we are sanitizing our minds and bodies, transforming them into hollow sanctuaries dedicated to “normalcy.” A recent exhibition “Narcissistic Disturbances,” curated by Michael Cohen, takes our self-obsession and reinvests it with its neurotic edge. In the curator’s eyes, the work of the 16 artists shown here challenges the notion

print Summer 1995

David Levinthal

David Levinthal’s strange, ambiguous narrative scenes—photographs of miniature dolls (toy soldiers, female pinups, cowboys, Roman gladiators, etc.) arranged in suggestive tableaux-hover somewhere between fact and fiction. In his series of photographs entitled “Modern Romance,” 1984–86—miniature scenes of city streets, hotels, and seedy characters in questionable environments—Edward Hopper meets film noir. Blurred and deliberately out of focus, these images seem almost real, as if they had been captured on a surveillance camera.

In his most recent show, he presented two bodies of work whose subject

Rosetta Brooks