Carlton Turner is an inmate on death row in Huntsville, Texas. In 2006 he is contacted by Norwegian artist Kjersti Andvig: Will he collaborate with her? They correspond. Carlton finds Kjersti intellectually stimulating. Together, they design an installation, a prison cell decorated with knitting. Carlton chooses gang symbols for the walls. Kjersti visits Carlton a number of times, and he discovers that Kjersti is very pretty. Kjersti wants Carlton to love her. Somewhere along the line, video artist Lars Laumann hears of their collaboration and starts to investigate it. Kjersti talks. She visits

On a window ledge at the Approach sat a pair of drinking glasses, one a bit larger than the other, touching each other. They might have been left by a couple of patrons of the downstairs pub who’d wandered upstairs to the gallery, except they looked quite clean and dry. A glance at the gallery checklist showed nothing made of glasses, but I thought I’d better ask: Yes, despite lacking a title, date, and list of materials—which I thought every artwork had to have these days—this was Alice Channer’s work, if not, perhaps, a work.

As a viewer, you’ve got to be willing to sweat such details if you

For this exhibition Robert Holyhead showed ten small to medium-size abstract paintings, each titled Untitled and dated 2009. All but one of the paintings feature white and a single other color, although this additional color is present both as a highly saturated hue and as a paler, washier one—in other words, they use white, a color, and that color mixed with white through its having been applied to the white ground and then wiped away. (In the one exception, the second-largest of the paintings on view, about which more later, the colored parts of the painting appear as an uneven mix of two

To begin, a small digression: Back in 1999, the first Liverpool Biennial included ten works by Doris Salcedo. Made from old wooden wardrobes and plaster, each individual piece combined two or three wardrobes into a single block, the smaller objects partially disappearing into the plaster-filled depths of the larger ones as if into the fog of the past. Displayed in the Anglican Cathedral, the works were lauded as affecting memorials to the “disappeared” victims of oppressive regimes. Yet this posed questions: Why make a series? Wouldn’t a single work, in the manner of the Unknown Soldier, have