Understanding Lina Bo Bardi’s Unending Popularity (and Misuse)
Imagine the ghost of Lina Bo Bardi banging the ceiling with a broomstick to annoy whomever’s making a ruckus upstairs. Now imagine it’s not…
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You Are Still Here: The Present Tense and Present Threat of Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum’s Grater Divide (2002) is a cheese-grater nearly seven feet high. On the one hand, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. On the other, it’s lethal. It…
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The Tug of the Earth and the Tug of the Sky: The Writhing Stillness of Agnes Martin
Ask yourself, What kind of happiness do I feel with this music or this picture? – Agnes Martin, “Beauty is the Mystery of Life”…
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Abigail DeVille Unburies Bodies at The Contemporary
What happens to history in a black hole? Abigail DeVille’s exhibition Only When It’s Dark Enough Can You See the Stars is a dense,…
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Art and Architecture’s DIY Practices and “Folk Politics”: Radical or Picking Up the Social Tab?
A young architect in Berlin recently argued to me that working with refugees on a design-build project could lend it more credibility and political…
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Printmaking in the Anthropocene: Sean Caulfield’s Uncannily-Timed “Firedamp” Burns Darkly
Beneath a cloudless, 180-degree sky, the prairie landscape is littered with alien, industrial objects. This is the backdrop of Sean Caulfield’s childhood in rural…
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The Unspecific (But Straining) Politics of Joan Jonas
Long an idiosyncratic priestess of the limbo between myth and art, Joan Jonas has moved into pagan revivalism. They Come to Us Without a…
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Evasion and Euphemism: The Guggenheim Underintellectualizes and Depoliticizes László Moholy-Nagy
In 1921, the Hungarian expat László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), then in Berlin, signed a “Call for Elementarist Art,” alongside Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, and…
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“Please Hold Your Questions”: A Culture of Asking Questions as Criticism and Authority
At the dinner table, my father asked the priest if he could pour him a warm Coke. The priest, a distant family relative and…
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In the Skin of a Gallery: Sylvie Bélanger’s Challenge to Photography
The image disputes the presence of the thing. In the image, the thing is not content simply to be; the image shows that the…
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