“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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Risking Pop-Solipsism, Moyra Davey Gets Earnest in Berlin
A few weeks back, as autumn arrived to Berlin, I listened to a thirty year-old curator explain that she was leaving art to study…
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Performance Art Blows Open the Prairies, in “Stages”
Midway through the rooftop opening for Stages: Drawing the Curtain – a show of public art at Winnipeg’s Plug-In Centre – I look through…
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Wu Tsang, Eileen Myles, and Me: Reading Zoe Leonard’s “I Want a President”
Recent art writing has been marked by a compulsion to cast every subject against an unfolding political crisis. Press releases, reviews, and essays implore…
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A Parasitic ‘joie de vivre’ in “Viva Arte Viva”
When a curator chooses a title as desperately bubbly as Viva Arte Viva, something is clearly amiss. “Live art live!” – the 57th Venice…
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The Enduring Popularity of Fictional Critic “Madame Realism”
Even self-assured egos have their sensitive spots. This was certainly true of Madame Realism, a fictional critic who, from 1984 until 2007, analyzed art…
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Stay on It: Maintaining Julius Eastman’s Radical Desire
For months, a Times article about Julius Eastman accrued dust in my New Jersey apartment. It sat dormant within an increasingly oppressive stack of back issues,…
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