Zack Hatfield

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  print December 2018

  Jeff Whetstone

  If Jeff Whetstone’s recent photographs of the American South call to mind other kinds of light writing, it may be because the region’s literature, like Whetstone, reveals light to be history’s medium. William Faulkner observed that Mississippi rays seem to arrive “not from just today but from back in the old classic times.” Even California native Joan Didion mused that the air of New Orleans “never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence.” Whetstone’s pictures channel the anomalousness of time and radiance in the South, how the land remains at a

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  picks November 09, 2018

  Denise Scott Brown

  Vegas was her idea. In 1968, architects Denise Scott Brown and her husband, the late Robert Venturi, chaperoned thirteen Yale students—nine of them studying architecture—to the city for a field trip. Four years later came Learning from Las Vegas—their landmark, somewhat trollish retort to the fusty grade of International Style then ascendant. That treatise’s so-called populist championing of vernacular modes and classical allusions remains relevant and divisive, though Scott Brown’s immense legacy still often serves as a footnote to Venturi’s. This small exhibition of research photographs—and

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  interviews November 05, 2018

  Jeffrey Gibson

  For nearly two decades, Jeffrey Gibson has sought to complicate ideas of identity and heritage through multiform work rooted in modernist abstraction, indigenous traditions, and queerness. His art is currently on display in a retrospective at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson; a survey at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York; the inaugural exhibition at the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery at Georgetown University in Washington, DC; and a solo show of new paintings at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York City, which is on view through November 27, 2018.  

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  diary October 10, 2018

  Picture People

  A COLLECTOR OF FAMILY PORTRAITURE was telling me that these days nobody wants to prove Mark Twain right. “You do know the Twain quote, don’t you?” It was Sunday morning, and the nonchurchgoing milled about the Mercantile—Cincinnati’s toniest library—waiting for Teju Cole to begin a talk. The collector of family portraiture and I were discussing the city’s ascendency as a cultural hub. I said yes (“Of course!”) but I had sort of forgotten. Later, I Googled the full quote: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times.”

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  picks October 01, 2018

  Sam Anderson

  “Does anybody need my love?” one of New York’s nine million strangers murmured on the street as I walked to this exhibition. His inquiry felt out-of-nowhere, gentle but rather threatening: descriptors that also apply to the show in question, Sam Anderson’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.” Here, other lovesome/lonesome things—a harp, an outsize cake-topper bride, a grinning tube of sunscreen—become stripped-down monuments to withheld affection. Anderson’s fragile, frugal sculptures often appear hurried to the point of incompleteness, as if to stress that her work is not a product of impassioned

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  print October 2018

  Roy Newell

  Roy Newell taught himself how to paint at the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street in Manhattan, working day after day for ten years in the 1930s and ’40s. During this period, he met Willem de Kooning by chance in the library’s art reference room—a popular haunt for many artists at the time. Not long after, Newell was swept into the orbit of soon-to-be AbEx stars including Franz Kline and Arshile Gorky. When they scaled up their canvases and gestures, so did he. Then, in what would remain his most dramatic creative act, Newell destroyed everything he had ever made. Afterward, he

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  print September 2018

  Julia Phillips

  Blinder, Intruder, Distancer, Muter, Aborter: Julia Phillips titles each of her sculptures after its purpose. Who carries out these functions? Ambiguity menaces the German-born, New York-based artist’s work, in which intimacy, race, and power are interrogated—to use one of art criticism’s most trite verbs, but one that aptly captures the spirit of Phillips’s first museum solo exhibition, “Failure Detection,” whose austere rooms conjure both torture chambers and medical facilities.

  Ceramic utensils meant to sunder and separate flesh lie grimly on a hospital trolley with white handle grips in

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  interviews August 27, 2018

  Jennifer Steinkamp

  The Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Steinkamp’s Blind Eye, 1, 2018, a roughly three-minute-long animated loop, depicts a life-size grove of birch trees cycling through the seasons, their ocular scars delivering an uncanny, plural gaze. The video is included in a survey of the artist’s work at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, titled “Blind Eye,” which comprises the first video installations shown at the museum and is on view through October 8, 2018. Here, Steinkamp talks about inspirations for “Blind Eye,” the limitations of vision, and learning to decide.

  THERE’S A FEELING

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  film August 15, 2018

  Lost and Found

  NOT LONG AFTER HER HUSBAND, the philosopher and Resistance leader Robert Antelme, was ambushed by the Gestapo in Paris in 1944 and deported to Buchenwald, Marguerite Duras logged the ensuing period of uncertainty in a diary that would spend the next four decades yellowing in a cupboard, supposedly forgotten. In 1985—one year after Duras enthralled the world with The Lover, a slim, fathomless autofiction of scarring desires too often misread as one of brave romance—the journal was finally published, alongside other memoir-like vignettes and two fictions, as La Douleur (Pain). The word is euphemistic.

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  diary July 21, 2018

  Down in Front

  BEFORE THE CUYAHOGA RIVER CAUGHT FIRE, searing into the public’s imagination an unfair but dogged metaphor for a Cleveland in decline, Tennessee Williams is rumored to have delivered a sicker burn: “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” The claim isn’t entirely without truth. In 2018, Cleveland—with its deindustrialization, police violence, segregation, and purple politics—is a microcosm for “The American City,” which is in fact the subtitle of the inaugural edition of FRONT, a multimillion-dollar international triennial that

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  picks March 23, 2018

  Amelie von Wulffen

  Those in search of art’s foulest perversions and most ruthless cruelties must turn to the fairy tale. Amelie von Wulffen knows this. In the dozen paintings here, the German artist takes on many a grim matter—including childhood repression and national remorse—by casting foxes, goblins, damsels, and other creatures in folkloric vignettes of unexplained distress. Neglected children lie on the floor as monsters romp nearby; siblings neck before a rapturous bouquet; Bavarian exteriors are imbued with eerie stillness. One doesn’t know whether to pity or dread the misfits that haunt these paintings,

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  picks January 26, 2018

  Terry Adkins

  The words “alternate history” evoke hypothetical extremes, such as unfought wars and imagined technologies infused with the possibility of global havoc. But the phrase might also describe subtler narratives forgotten, effaced, or thwarted by the vicious authors of history. Consider Terry Adkins a chronicler of alternate pasts. The late artist’s performances and sculptures, steeped in the power of music and the music of power, send echoes into the chasms of black history—and so, at first, it feels mildly disappointing that for its debut exhibition of Adkins’s work, this gallery has, in lieu of