Art at the Border: Cutting for Signs in Pace Gallery’s “Border Cantos”
The phrase “cutting for sign” means searching a landscape for clues. This might refer to the search for a lost herd of cattle or…
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Mourning Jimmie Durham
In April, I wrote a review of an exhibition at the Hammer Museum at UCLA: “Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World.” I…
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That’s the Way to Do It!: The Fairy Tale Life of Ydessa Hendeles
Let’s start with the premise that Ydessa Hendeles is an artist. And why shouldn’t we? Is it the fact that she started as a…
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Hélio Oiticica’s Journey From Art Visionary to Coke Dealer and Back Again
Hélio Oiticica, one of the most famous figures of Brazil’s mid-century surge of experimental art, once said that his goal was to strike “a…
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The Intimate Dangers of Reading Georgia O’Keeffe Through a Blouse
Any description of the new traveling Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit Living Modern must start with a blouse. On a hanger in the middle of the…
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“Made in Germany”: Can the Artworld Have a Nation?
Like exotic flowers, international art exhibitions bloom in Berlin, Kassel, and Münster every two, five, or ten years, helping to establish Germany, alongside Venice,…
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Courting Crisis: Condescension, Disaster Tourism, and “Learning from Athens”
The pedagogical framework espoused by the title of this year’s two-city, quinquennial documenta – Learning from Athens – preemptively suggests an ethnographic or neocolonial…
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White Space, Black Spectacle at MASS MoCA
On May 28, 2017, MASS MoCA inaugurated its new Building 6, doubling its existing gallery space and turning the 16-acre complex of abandoned, 19th-century…
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Nonsense! She Said: Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Pantomimes Politics in Paris
The bad news is Brexit. The good news (other than the recent British election) is that British humor, of the nonsense variety, is alive…
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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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