COLUMNS

  • Autumn Knight

    Autumn Knight on the sweetness and terror of doing nothing

    On a recent Friday night, Performance Space New York transformed from a theater to a club: a DJ played disco and R&B, drinks were flowing, and people chatted under neon lights as a feeling of electricity and potential lingered in the air. This was the setting for NOTHING #122: a bar, the first performance in Autumn Knight’s residency at the East Village arts space. Knight and a cameraperson captured interactions between herself and audience members, inviting them to talk about themselves, feed each other food and drink, and act out various scenes––such as tying one another to a chair or mimicking

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  • Robert Russell

    Reclaiming the monstrous kitsch of Dachau

    At first glance, “Porzellan Manufaktur Allach,” Robert Russell’s current solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles (on through April 22), is a close study of cuteness. But after spending more time with his large, auratic paintings of porcelain animals—and learning their backstory—the glossy fawns, bunnies, lambs, and puppies reveal a dark underbelly. All of these objets d’art were made during the Nazi regime by forced laborers in the Dachau concentration camp. Heinrich Himmler, among the principal architects of the Holocaust, oversaw their production, calling porcelain “one of the few

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  • Anohni

    A shadow archive of New York’s queer underground

    Feted by what she calls the “daylight culture”—winner of the Mercury Prize in 2005, Oscar nominee eleven years later—Anohni is doubling back to her days (nights, really) as a performance artist in early-’90s New York. Anohni’s quarantine project was culling from her “threadbare” archive, making thousands of stills from videos of her theater collective, the Blacklips Performance Cult, which rose from Manhattan’s queer underground between the summer of ’92 and spring of ’95. The results are presented in the book Blacklips: Her Life and Her Many, Many Deaths (Anthology Editions), coedited by Marti

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  • Matt Mullican

    Matt Mullican’s adventures in Slumberland

    To his own surprise, Matt Mullican’s new body of work is vibrantly colorful. A departure and liberation of sorts, it is also his most labor-intensive work yet. Made in his Berlin studio, “Sunday, August 9, 1908” consists of very large paintings involving rubbing, a technique he’s been using since the early ’80s. A first rubbing transfers the image to be painted; a second rubbing draws outlines around the painted areas with an oil stick. Below, the artist describes his painstaking process, how the project came about, and how it fits into his work as a whole. “Sunday, August 9, 1908” remains on

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  • 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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