COLUMNS

  • Fred Eversley

    A West Coast pioneer’s overview effect

    Fred Eversley has dedicated his five-decade career to abstract sculptural meditations on energy. Working in Venice Beach since the early 1970s, Eversley drew upon his experience as an engineer and elements of the Light and Space movement prevalent in Southern California at the time to develop the lens-like parabolic objects for which he is best known. The survey exhibition “Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World),” on view through January 15, 2023, at the Orange County Museum of Art, provides an occasion to reflect on the work of the octogenarian artist, who recently relocated to New York

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  • David Hartt

    Digging up modernist myths at the Glass House

    Last spring, David Hartt unveiled “A Colored Garden,” a dense circle of blooms in the lower meadow of Philip Johnson’s Glass House planted with flowers found in still lifes by a Black nineteenth-century artist named Charles Ethan Porter. This year, the blooms are back, accompanied by a neo-mythological film in Johnson’s self-glorifying gatehouse-cum-visitor’s-center and, down the hill, an installation of Porters in Johnson’s personal trefoil painting gallery. It’s still the house modernism built—the architect’s taste for Arcadia sits next to his Nazi sympathies—but, says Hartt, Johnson’s aren’t

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  • Rasheed Araeen

    A Minimalist pioneer’s reflections on Islam and modernity

    Throughout his nearly six-decade career as an artist, curator, writer, and publisher, the Karachi-born, London-based Rasheed Araeen has shaped the trajectory of modern art from the margins. Curating pathbreaking exhibitions such as “The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Postwar Britain” (1989) and establishing the critical journals<em> Black Phoenix (1978–79) and Third Text (1987–), Araeen helped build the groundwork for a more robust, global vision of art history. More recently, he has examined the contributions of Islamic philosophy on the development of modernism. On occasion of his new

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  • Oliver Ressler

    How can artists confront the climate crisis?

    For twenty years, Oliver Ressler has been making videos on topics such as capitalism, democracy, racism, and ecology. Below, he discusses “Barricading the Ice Sheets,” curated by Corina L. Apostol at Tallinn Art Hall as part of the artist’s wider research project involving six exhibitions across Europe that focus on the climate movement. On view through November 6, the Tallinn show features the six-channel video installation Everything’s coming together while everything is falling apart, 2016–2020, which follows environmental activists as they plan and carry out blockades and demonstrations in

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  • Kelly Akashi

    On eternity, internment, and the memory of touch

    “Formations,” Kelly Akashi’s ongoing exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, surveys the past eight years of the Los Angeles–based artist’s practice, mounting a menagerie of bronze-cast, hand-blown glass, carved-stone, and 3-D–printed sculptures in addition to an array of chromogenic photograms, Cibachrome crystallographs, and silver gelatin prints (not to mention the occasional accoutrement of family heirlooms and human hair). Amid all this processual prowess, attention is also paid to the more mysterious operations of memory, time, the human body, and their mutual imprint on one another.

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  • Baldwin Lee

    Beginning and ending a prodigious career in photography

    Working as Walker Evans’s darkroom assistant while at Yale’s MFA program, Baldwin Lee handled and printed negatives from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Although the families photographed in Alabama’s Hale County in the 1930s never received a copy of that book, Lee would be sure to mail prints to those who posed for his own 4-by-5-inch view camera. Raised in New York as a child of Chinese immigrants, Lee embarked on extensive drives from 1983 to 1990 to photograph his new home of Tennessee, unexpectedly gravitating toward the lives of Black Americans in the post–Jim Crow South. With a new monograph

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  • Julia Phillips

    Giving form to the attachment and ambivalence of motherhood

    While Julia Phillips’s visual language remains informed by functional tools and ceramic body casts that serve as metaphors for social and psychological experiences, recent motherhood has complicated and expanded her visual and emotional arsenal. Her exhibition “ Me, Ourself & You” is on view now at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York through October 29. Below, the German-born, Chicago-based artist discusses her recent work in the context of the longer arc of her practice.

    MY WORK OFTEN STARTS with a title that describes a relation, a role, a person, a function all at once. My first language is

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  • Puppet Master

    The art world according to Jayson Musson

    THIS JULY, after more than a year of working quietly as the artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Jayson Musson finally revealed His History of Art, a raucous multimedia installation featuring three episodes of a sidesplitting sitcom starring Musson as Jay, a pontifical art collector in a corduroy suit, and his unlikely roommate Ollie, a permastoned puppet rabbit. Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and the Venus of Willendorf make cameos, the latter inspiring an orgy. Produced and filmed inside the museum, His History’s sets and props—which alternately needle, salute,

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  • Hack the Planet

    Hans Ulrich Obrist talks with Pak

    From December 2–4 of last year, an NFT fetched the world record for a public sale of an artwork by a living artist. In forty-eight hours on the platform NiftyGateway, 28,983 collectors spent $91,806,519 to purchase a total of 312,686 units, which were then combined in a single collection called “Merge.” In July, Artforum contributing editor Hans Ulrich Obrist spoke over email with Pak, the anonymous creator behind “Merge” and a leading force in digital art and NFTs.

    Hans Ulrich Obrist: You have pioneered design “at the nexus of beauty and technology,” as you put it, for two decades. What were

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  • Clara Ianni

    The ongoing legacy of Disney diplomacy in Brazil

    At the root of Clara Ianni’s latest exhibition lies a thorny, overlapping network of powerful actors central to the history of twentieth-century art in the Americas: New York’s Museum of Modern Art, its former chair (and former US vice president) Nelson Rockefeller, The Walt Disney Company, the United States government, and the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. Titled “Education by Night” and on view at Brooklyn’s Amant through September 4, the show revisits 1940s-era cultural programs intended to encourage US investment and deter Nazi influence in Latin America. The São Paulo–based artist pursues

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  • Nick Drnaso

    Drawing from the performance of everyday life

    For fifteen years, cartoonist Nick Drnaso has been drawing chromatically flat, eerily domestic graphic novels. Following his debut publication, Beverly (2016), a dark collection of interconnected vignettes, Drnaso’s full-length thriller Sabrina (2018) became the first graphic novel to be nominated for a Man Booker Prize. With Acting Class, out today with Drawn & Quarterly, he presents an assortment of strangers who voluntarily disrupt their daily monotony to meet with a mysteriously merit-less acting instructor. Below, the Chicago-based Drnaso reveals his latest story’s origins, considers the

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  • Jesse Stecklow

    Jesse Stecklow entwines biography and biometrics in “Terminal”

    Jesse Stecklow says he began planning “Terminal” at Mumok in Vienna in 2018. You could also say he started making it in 2014, the year he first installed an air sampling tube in an aluminum filter casing and called it a sculpture. This first Air Sampler work returns at Mumok, as do several subsequent versions, their passive analysis of the art-space atmosphere housed in clocks and freestanding vents. Stecklow was part of The Jogging (2009–2014), an influential post-net collective founded on the associative logic of the endless scroll—no surprise, then, that his most complete survey to date, on

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