Wire and String: Olga Balema’s Sinewy Abjection
What does it mean when the most meaningful thing is damn near nothing at all? Not the antiseptic nothing of Marie Kondo’s puritan minimalism,…
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The Erotics of Liberty: Dorothy Iannone’s Cultivated Bohemia
Whatever else they do in this world or the next, gods take up space. Consider Dorothy Iannone’s recent exhibition Lady Liberty Meets Her Match…
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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’s Wrong with a Fairly Good Biennial?
What’s not to like about good art, hung well – not too packed, not too sparse – across venues of many scales and vintages,…
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Worrying the Note: A German Stage for Arthur Jafa’s Black-American Chorus
Arthur Jafa’s exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Collection exceeds the oft-recited cliché that “context matters.” In Berlin, it forms an imagistic phenomena, like some luminescent…
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What is to be Learned, What is to be Done? Thomas Hirschhorn at the Remai Modern
Three months ago, I bought a CD of poetry from Johnny Marceland, a sixty-year-old Dene man who lives in my hometown of Saskatoon. Throughout…
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“More Than Those Who Despised Her”: Unforgetting on the Prairies
How can – how should – the ghosts of our brutalized bodies be ushered into public space? This was the enigma posed by Gregory…
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Dubious Icons: Godheads, Messiahs, and the Artist as Celebrity
Perhaps it’s an unfair caricature of MFA students, that each appears to inhabit their own personalized reality TV show. Perhaps. But having been one…
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Crocodile Tears: Ed Atkins and the Crisis of Pathetic Masculinity
Type “Ed Atkins” into Google, and you’ll shortly come face to face with an asshole: not the artist himself – though his smiling visage…
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Palpable Urgency and Understated Ecology: Latvia’s “Survival Kit 9”
Remember that chunk of the Antarctic that fell into the sea, earlier this year? How big was it? Three trillion tons? Three hundred miles?…
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