James Casebere at Sean Kelley
James Casebere has for a long time worked by producing photographs that are in close enough proximity to a photograph of the thing modeled, i.e. not the model itself, that we the viewer are left a-pause toggling back and forth between recognition and misconception. This is, by his own acknowledgement, that canonical modernist device of […]
Karl Wirsum at Derek Eller
There is some hard to pinpoint quality to Karl Wirsum’s drawings currently on show at Derek Eller. I think it must be in the ballpoint pen palling around with pencil, ink and color pencil on paper. All of the above, it seems sure, palled around too with a healthy (sic) waft of marijuana. The loopy, […]
ACT UP NEW YORK: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987 – 1993,
Lest we forget the Gran Fury was not just a car. It was also the name of the propaganda ministry for ACT–UP. It was Gran Fury, having stolen the name of the standard issue cop car of the day, the Plymouth Gran Fury, that coined the phrases, designed the logos and generally set the rhetorical […]
Bonnie Rychlak at The Viewing Room
There are artists who while professing pursuit of certain goals, such as an institutional critique or a formalist strategy of truth to materials, or an ecologically pointed realism, are also and perhaps primarily obsessed with another issue, say aesthetics for the social critic or brute power for the purist or fears of personal mortality for […]
Talk Show at Edward Thorpe Gallery
There are two very interesting aspects to “Talk Show,” a group exhibition of painting. One is that the six participants are women. The works are representational and often figurative, the figure being always female. Yet the press release makes absolutely nothing of these facts. Nor should it. There is, happily, no point to make. There […]
Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone
The partyline was : pay no attention to mortality. It’s a piece of pessimistic individualistic humanist self-indulgence. Which, of course, it is, in one sense. But now as the hardliners age implacable turns a placable cheek, as if the confrontation with personal extinction had finally leveled the playing field. In Barbara Kruger’s video installation, “The […]
Burt Barr at Sikkema Jenkins
As Jonas Mekas tells of the premiere of Warhol’s film Empire –a single static shot of the Empire state building held for eight hours without camera movement or cut–the crowds were at a near riot. “We want our money back, we came to see a movie. This movie doesn’t move”. And this was at the […]
Matt Saunders at Harris Lieberman
Matt Saunders has installed a multiplex of sorts at Harris Lieberman on Vandam Street and therein he is screening a restored homage to the lost cities of Weimar Germany. The geography of the gallery, as organized by Saunders, elicits the notion of the trawling, mobile spectator: partitions, columns, low podia, interior windows as screens doubling […]
Jim Nutt “Trim” and Other Works
Jim Nutt’s current show of paintings and drawings at David Nolan resembles nothing so much as portraits, from observation, of the artist Orlan. I suspect this observation will not be distressing to either of the artists in question. Nutt has been torquing the represented body for a little longer than Orlan has been using representations […]
She: Marina Abromovic at the Atrium of the Museum of Modern Art ( The Artist is Present )
Well it might be a stretch. She must think those people standing and walking around are looking. She’s kind of still there. All those people thinking she’s got something — just looking straight ahead. That long dress. That little plinth she’s standing on. That kind of white greasepaint. That pharaoh getup. Wait a minute. No […]
