A Very Real American Place: The Suburban Unconscious in Mike Kelley
The suburb of Westland, Michigan, where Mike Kelley grew up, may be one of the only cities in the US renamed after a mall….
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Marfa’s Two-Step: The Uneasy Landscape of Minimalist Heaven
I was lured by the promise of a sepia-tinged ideal: west Texas golden hours and wide-open spaces. A visit to Marfa had long been…
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Ceramics in the Expanded Field: The Art World, the Clay World, and the Case for John Mason
Let’s suppose that ceramic art, done by artists who were clay handlers before anything else, got accepted as sculpture proper – that and nothing…
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Ana Mendieta’s Death is Not a Metaphor
Let the art come first. This must have been the axiom behind Covered in Time and History, Martin-Gropius-Bau’s 2018 exhibition of twenty-three films and…
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What to Do About Klaus: How Arts Communities Assert Their Agency
As first impressions go, it wasn’t ideal. On the week he was announced as MOCA Los Angeles’s new director, Klaus Biesenbach managed to alienate…
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Think of Harald’s Position: Weighing Szeemann’s Obsessions in L.A.
Harald Szeemann organized a show called Friends and Their Friends in 1969, his last year as chief curator at the Kunsthalle Bern. Selected artists…
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Worst-Case Scenarios: Contemporary Art’s #Metoo Handwringing
Like most grassroots movements borne of slow-simmering anger and long-standing frustration, #MeToo is both overdue and messy as hell. Its faint whiff of anarchy…
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Cohering His Compulsions: Ken Nicol Advances at Olga Korper
Over five years, from 1992 to 1997, Tom Friedman produced 1000 Hours of Staring, a work of pure intention and immaculate material. A blank…
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