Are We Being Preached To? Adrian Piper’s Prompts at the MoMA
Adrian Piper’s artistic statements reject a moralizing approach. “I try for simplicity, not simplification. I don’t want to make prescriptions about what people should…
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Nick Mauss’s Continental Divide
Nick Mauss is a fan of verre eglomisé, or “distressed hand-gilded mirror,” a phrase that sounds very European, and very gay. The artist takes…
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Irreligious Icons: Superficial Heresy at the Met
Three days before the opening of the Met Costume Institute’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, the Museum held its annual gala. Those…
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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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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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New Forms for New Crises: The Need for a New Ecological Representation
In his recent polemic Against the Anthropocene, art historian T. J. Demos calls for a shift in the language we use to think through…
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Embarrassed Celebrity: Laurie Simmons’s Feature Debut
Celebrity is truly the public health crisis we deserve. I recently watched a clip of pop star Katy Perry on a Japanese game show,…
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The Trouble with Occupying Others: Althea Thauberger Confronts the Violence of the Archive
Gazing out from a large photograph on the second floor of Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto, Althea Thauberger wears a yellow dress, pearl earrings,…
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Painting “From Here”: Susanna Heller at Olga Korper
Whatever specificity of place can be found in Susanna Heller’s paintings at Olga Korper Gallery shimmers with Wallace Stevens’s line, “Description is revelation. It…
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Naming “Where is Here”: Ed Zelenak at Christopher Cutts
One of the pleasures of Ed Zelenak’s decades-long practice is its resistance to easy narrative. And yet, as John Bentley Mays wrote in 2015,…
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