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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]