Recognition and Reckoning: Montreal’s Alternative Art Spaces at the Crossroads
On a sunny weekend in June, a multigenerational crowd of artists and art enthusiasts flocked to a series of vacant storefronts and office spaces…
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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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Abjection Without Splendor: Günter Brus and Transgression’s Diminishing Returns
It must also be said that the painter is not hysterical, in the sense of a negation in negative theology. Abjection becomes splendor, the…
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Traumatizing the Museum: An Interview with Joshua Schwebel
Joshua Schwebel is a Berlin-based artist whose work engages in conceptual and performative strategies of subterfuge. While a number of his projects have employed…
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Courting Exhaustion: Manifesta’s Dog Days
On the second day of Manifesta I’m flat on a bench amidst the splendor of Palermo’s Botanical Garden, head resting on my biennial tote…
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Chinese Futures for American Eyes at the Guggenheim
In a 1998 New York Times book review, American historian Stephen Greenblatt recalled gazing, as a youth, at the landscapes on the Chinese wallpaper…
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Behind the Curtain: Beatriz González’s Political-Decorative Art
A familiar scene: two dandies basking in a casual lunch on the grass, immersed in delightful parlay, accompanied by a completely naked woman in…
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Cruising for Sex in the Garden of Eden: Architecture and Desire in Venice
One of the major thoroughfares in the Venetian lagoon, the Bacino di San Marco, is host to a swelling, seasonal parade of cruise ships…
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Me For You: The Modest Directives of Ho Tam and Rainer Ganahl
Remember the “long tail”? It was the theory that digital technology would redistribute demand for cultural products, away from a few empowered hit-makers and…
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The Manner of Their Dying
I think of them often. I knew Felix best. Jorge I never knew well. I feared and admired AA’s bite and sophistication. But I…
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