In Friedrich Kunath’s painting It’s Friedrich (all works cited, 2015), the handwritten title phrase emerges from an old-fashioned, corkscrew-cord telephone held out by an anthropomorphic cartoon tree. The latter—a black-lined overlay, like David Salle for tots—sits on a landscape that runs Romanticism through an Athena-poster filter: above, an empurpled sky full of clouds that themselves resemble craggy mountains; below, aquamarine river water hammering rocks, upon which the tree—smiling—stands. By this point, several suavely vulgarized landscapes into the German-born, Los

“A politics to come,” Giorgio Agamben recently asserted, demands a conception of “a way of life that is not based on deeds or on property, but on use.” I read his interview with Die Zeit the same week I saw Sofia Hultén’s recent exhibition “Truckin’.” Its titular video (all works cited, 2015) shows the artist walking through Berlin, swapping her sneakers for others she finds on the street. There are surprisingly many of these lying around, and she carefully places each discarded pair in the same position as the new pair—one of which is caught in a bush next to a brick wall. The shoes all