Sarah Nicole Prickett

• 

  picks June 12, 2015

  Mary Corse

  For the astrophile, it is a source of perpetual frustration that the moon looks like shit on an iPhone. For the moon, it is a source of power. The whitish stripes in Mary Corse’s minimal paintings, twelve of which comprise her second show at Lehmann Maupin, exert a similar pull: There is no one angle from which you can fix in your perception the experience of looking at a canvas and feeling it change. One moment the stripe is blank; in another moment it’s mark-ridden, dirty; in another still it’s almost silver. This whitish magic, achieved by mixing acrylic paint with the shiny glass beads used

• 

  picks May 22, 2015

  Torbjørn Rødland

  Bodies in bad form make up Torbjørn Rødland’s second solo show at Algus Greenspon. There is the belly in Drunken Man, 2014–15, wine-splashed and birthmarked and fat. There are the hands in The Photographer, 2015, or rather, the fetal stumps. There is The Geller Effect, 2014, a deathly still life in which bent and broken utensils lie with blond wisps of hair, and there is a green-looking foot hooked into the waist of a man’s pants in Red Pump, 2014–15. The ten photos in “Corpus Dubium” are lit in ways that can only be described as wrong: from behind or below, lending subjects or objects a silvery,

• 

  diary May 14, 2015

  All Apologies

  AT THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL HOME on Second Avenue, on Monday night at 8:25 PM, guests of Artists Space filled the four-foot band between the entrance to the room and the dinner tables. Staffers scrambled to sort the handwritten name tags that matched the attendees to their seats. “Just when you thought there was no more drama to be had,” a woman was saying to her companion. The dinner was in honor of Nan Goldin, so she could have been referring to anything: the seating arrangements, a photograph, a recently surfaced affair.

  A third of the guests had just come back from the Venice Biennale, and

• 

  picks May 01, 2015

  Lisa Yuskavage

  When the 1963 negative for Le Bonheur (1965) lost most of its colors, Agnes Varda had a new one created to look more original than the first. The name given to things more original is artifice, but Varda has said that the film’s palette was exactly as she found it in nature, a truth that applies itself well to the realaesthetik of painter Lisa Yuskavage.

  Opening with the green-on-green oil-on-linen Bonfire, which is split in two panels of equal, familiar brilliance, the exhibition unreels into a series of canvases obscured in shades of fog, letting iridescence win over her signature scale-tipping

• 

  picks April 24, 2015

  Jamian Juliano-Villani

  Jamian Juliano-Villani’s new canvases are huge, bulging, and flat. They panel up the walls and leave almost no empty space. In addition to seeming unmannered, they’re rude. Fly Kama Sutra (all works 2015) swipes through frames of at least three different, disjointed, and frankly unhinged scenarios. To see it in its entirety, you have to step outside the doors and look in through glass. Have you ever been to a tiny, shitty apartment with no real furniture, no food in the cupboards, but then a seventy-two-inch brand-name TV? Juliano-Villani’s third solo exhibition feels a lot like that, inviting

• 

  diary December 07, 2014

  Truth or Dare

  ON WEDNESDAY, a man with a plan was talking into a banana, walking down Lincoln Road. Two wives, fidgeting with rings and bracelets, prepared to step into a large inflatable concept—TRUTH—while the husbands stood a few paces back. At a bar made of sand, a woman wearing a pure white silicone alligator, clipped like a bib around her neck, told me I could buy one for $85, and I wondered if anyone had ever told her she had only to make it six times the size to sell it for two hundred times the price. Outside the Miami Beach convention center a man in a ten-dollar suit was handing out cards that

• 

  diary December 03, 2014

  Excite Strategy

  I SWEAR THE AIR in Miami is cut with tourist-grade cocaine, making sleep uneasy, sunshine itchy, each nighttime destination like being still stuck in the acid-lit caterpillar traffic. At a Monday evening preview of Kris Knight’s wonderful exquisite-realist paintings, hosted by Gucci and Spinello Projects, the mood was already restless. When, having forgotten how to do my job, I asked Knight what he was excited to see this week, he looked around nervously. Art people don’t get excited; we find things exciting. Behind me a man in white said the quality was high, but it was simply too early to

• 

  print December 2014

  Sarah Nicole Prickett

  RIHANNA wore a mammoth fur stole emblazoned with the four-letter word FEAR to Paris Fashion Week this past spring, and no one was confused about whether it was Rihanna or the rest of us who should be afraid. A new phase of radical invulnerability was announced. Also announced: the career of the stole’s designer, twenty-seven-year-old Hyein Seo. At the annual CFDA Fashion Awards in New York, where RiRi accepted the 2014 Fashion Icon Award, host John Waters unveiled his plan to make aging happen: “Go ahead—be daring,” said the sexagenarian director. “Draw on liver spots and wow ’em on your

• 

  diary November 24, 2014

  Sleep No More

  CREATIVE TIME is a venerable nonprofit arts organization that is literally forty-one years old, so if Friday night’s Fall Ball sleepover felt like a Sweet Sixteen party planned by an overanxious momma, we’re not being mean, just insensitive. We arrived at Neuehouse a little before 10 PM, or two hours after start time. The party would go until 8 the next morning. Dinner was over and beginning again; salmon and salad and wild rice, exactly right for the art world’s pre–South Beach diet, were served in quantities larger than the crowd. Yet around the corner, a line was winding up for red beans and

• 

  diary October 01, 2014

  Head of the Class

  THAT UNFAMILIAR FRESHMAN FEELING sets in annually at the New York Art Book Fair, where, in the corridors of MoMA PS1, it feels as crowded and disorienting as school again. The summer is long in retrospect, and everyone looks older under the lights. “Do you know Dorothy Iannone?” says a girl in a purple backpack to another in Illesteva shades as they survey the octogenarian eroticist’s reprinted oeuvre in the Dome. “No,” says the girl in Illesteva, “but I think we’re like friends on Facebook.”

  Downstairs the radio station Know-Wave is airing live-to-Net all weekend, and I’m on Cheap Talk with

• 

  print Summer 2014

  OPENINGS: SANDY KIM

  SANDY KIM takes her notorious photos by never not taking photos. Her process is a blur, and even her camera is a question mark. In a recent talk at the Aperture Foundation in New York, Kim described her tool in highly untechnical terms as a low-budget Yashica; Matthew Schnipper’s introduction to the 2009 monograph Sandy Kim (Unpiano Books) has it that she’s often lost said Yashica and used a disposable instead. Back then, in the aughts, when Kim was living in San Francisco and shooting shows, street scenes, and wasted adventurings with the band Girls, you could have landed in any major city and

• 

  film March 14, 2014

  Jigsaw Youth

  “TEEN” IS NOT AN AGE, or if it were, the Western adolescing could be neither an identity nor an interest group. Yet in nation-places from the US to Russia, the figure of “teenager,” putatively anyone aged thirteen to nineteen, didn’t exist until World War I, at which point those who matched the description were rendered virtual immigrants. Invented, they were promptly feared. And rationally so: What monster has the body of an adult, the mind of a child, and the heart of an animal? From 1920-ish to 1945, teenagers were Othered, vilified, sent to camps (Boy Scouts in America; Hitler Youth in