COLUMNS

  • Sasha Stiles

    Transcending digital dualism through networked poetry

    Over the past year, Kalmyk American poet Sasha Stiles has become the public face of the burgeoning world of poetry NFTs, which circulate and monetize poems outside of poetry books and magazines. She cofounded theVERSEverse, a “poetry NFT gallery,” in 2021, has sold her own tokenized poems through platforms like Christie’s and SuperRare, and has spoken widely about the commercial and even aesthetic potential of NFTs for poetry. Inspired by the idea of “ars poetica” and by text-based visual art, the homepage of theVERSEverse boldly declares “poem = work of art.” The 2021 exhibition “Computational

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  • Tommy Kha

    A son’s fractured view of the immigrant experience

    Tommy Kha’s mother is a recurring subject in his photography, but he didn’t realize until five years into their collaboration that she was an imagemaker herself. In 2016, she gifted Kha a photo album of pictures she made when she first arrived in Canada from Vietnam in the 1980s, before she eventually settled in Memphis, where Kha was born. In his debut monograph, Half, Full, Quarter (Aperture), and accompanying solo exhibition—“Ghost Bites,” at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York through March 22—Kha’s layered portraits, still lifes, and landscapes exist alongside his mother’s own photographs.

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  • Margaret Raspé

    Margaret Raspé on automatism and the art of attention

    Margaret Raspé has explored and upended structures of perception in an oeuvre that spans five decades and encompasses film, performance, photography, and large-scale installation. She is perhaps best known for her “camera helmet,” with which she made a number of radically self-reflexive films in the 1970s and ’80s. Here, Raspé recalls the initial breakthrough that led to those early works and spurred her enduring interest in forms of automatic action in both art and everyday contexts. Her first retrospective, “Automatik,” is on view through May 29 at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, where the Wrocław-born

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  • Bassam Al-Sabah

    The seduction of CGI and the limits of the self

    Bassam Al-Sabah queers gaming culture and its fetish of the armoured male body in his solo exhibition “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS,” currently on view at The Douglas Hyde through March 5. Below, Al-Sabah discusses the psychic and physical disintegration his character undergoes in the show’s eponymous CGI video—a hyperreal dreamscape that probes the limits of masculinity, subjectivity, and representation.

    AS A CHILD, I played a lot of video games. I didn’t go many places beyond my house, my school, and my grandad’s house, so my interaction with landscape really came from video games.

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  • Nick Irvin

    Gentle Wind Project and the art of alternative healing

    The New Age hucksters and/or healers at I Ching Systems aren’t exactly who you’d expect to find at the intersection of art and technology. Yet there’s an undeniable technical magnetism to their so-called instruments: wooden and plastic contraptions overlaid with patterns resembling organelles, circuitry, and hexagrams. Founded in 1983, I Ching Systems, formerly known as the Gentle Wind Project, is a research center that promotes an alternative wellness methodology synthesizing elements of Chinese medicine, particle physics, and color theory; the group has been indicted by the Maine Attorney

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  • Roxy Paine

    On deep time and material poetics

    For over three decades, Roxy Paine has created virtuosic sculptures that examine how technological mediation processes and reformulates nature. His most recent work takes the shape of painted grids of extruded epoxy that transpose immaterial pixels into sculpted cubes in relief. The resulting image is often at odds with its surface, recalling the process of serigraphy or the painstaking pointillism Georges Seurat. These recent paintings and dioramas form the core of Paine’s exhibition “Sedimentary Lens,” on view at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, through January 23.

    GEOLOGY DREW ME

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  • Martha Rosler

    Martha Rosler on the changing face of feminism

    In the mid-1960s, Martha Rosler began creating photomontages exploring women’s material and psychic subjugation, manipulating popular advertisements from news, fashion, and home magazines to unearth their nefarious ideological operations. Rosler made this body of work, “Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain,” (1966–72) alongside painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, stitching together a variable array of Conceptual art practices attuned to feminist politics. This set of critical tools informs “martha rosler: changing the subject…in the company of others,” a survey of the

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  • Himali Singh Soin

    The quantum entanglement of all mountains

    “Static Range,” Himali Singh Soin’s solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, invites viewers into a toxic, lovelorn nuclear landscape. The show draws its inspiration from a tragically absurd episode in Cold War history involving a four-pound plutonium device that the CIA and Indian Intelligence Bureau misplaced in the Himalayas. Building on a long-term project that counters official history by animating the nonhuman subjectivities at its margins, Soin utilizes poetry, music, animation, an artists’ book, textiles, and ceramics to speculate on ecological grief and climate catastrophe, as

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  • James Little

    Fear and transcendence in abstract painting

    Poised and self-assured, James Little stands beside a pair of buckets, each filled with a different shade of black paint, in the Brooklyn studio where the artist has worked for three decades. The Memphis-born painter of absorbing abstractions—whether hallucinatory monochromes or variegated, potpourri-like surfaces—has been making all-black paintings for a decade, committing to each canvas for three or four months. In these works, contained geometries explode with nocturnal luminosity in concert with the viewer’s sways, and tightly orchestrated stripes play silent recitals of light, form, and

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  • Henrike Naumann

    The conspiracy in your living room

    Growing up in a newly reunified Germany, Henrike Naumann witnessed widespread transformations in visual culture, from popular television programming to the seating from which that programming was consumed. Working with furniture and video, the Zwickau-born, Berlin-based artist considers how seemingly innocuous aesthetic sensibilities align with and promulgate a host of political ideologies. Her first US solo exhibition, “Re-Education,” on view from September 22 to February 27 at SculptureCenter in New York, parses parallels between reactionary movements in the United States and Germany as it

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  • Christian Marclay

    A follow-up to The Clock, twelve years later

    Christian Marclay likes to play with doors. His early sculpture Armoire, 1988; the door slamming in Video Quartet, 2002; and his series of screen prints Door (The Electric Chair), 2006, are just a few examples. Here, he speaks about his latest work, Doors, 2022, a video made of snippets from various movies, and his difficulties editing it. Door after door, room after room, the 54-minute loop runs on like a rhyming game. Placed near the exit of his survey at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (curated by Jean-Pierre Criqui, through February 27), it sends us on our way while holding us back. At every

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  • Vince Aletti

    A photography critic’s life in images

    One of what seems like only a handful of working photography critics today, Vince Aletti is also a prolific collector of print ephemera, much of it archived within a single massive filing cabinet in his longtime East Village apartment. Below, Aletti talks about his new photobook, The Drawer, which shuffles this matter into alluring, Warburgian juxtapositions of high and low, iconic and unknown. Mapped out over the course of a single afternoon, the book is a meditation on how images shape desire, a remedy to the cold calculations of the algorithm, and the wordless memoir of a great and grateful

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