Firing Blanks: Hito Steyerl and the Voiding of Research Art
We’ve all heard the statistics. That in America, there is a mass shooting every day, that one hundred Americans die from gun violence daily,…
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The Totemic Quotidian in Roula Partheniou
At a time when contemporary art production is dominated by forces outside its control, pulling and pushing against commercial and cultural contexts; when media…
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Can a Lobby Be Subversive? Jenny Holzer’s Comcast Capitulation
At 60 stories and 1,121 feet, the new Comcast Technology Center is the tallest building in Philadelphia, a glaringly optimistic slice of the city’s…
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Free Your Mind, or Else: “Acid Communism” and Contemporary Art’s Futurism
Along with the blog posts, articles, reviews, and interviews collected in K-Punk, last year’s voluminous anthology of writings by the late British cultural theorist…
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The Faces That You Meet: Huma Bhabha’s Close Encounters
The works of Huma Bhabha affect a strange pareidolia: they lure, and then repel, dissipating the familiarity they promise. The Karachi-born artist mines the…
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From a Cabin in the Woods: Dieter Roelstraete’s “HUTOPIA” and the Shelters of Thought
I harbor fantasies of retreating for stretches of time to a simple cabin in the countryside. My place, spare but tasteful, would feature a…
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Grafting the Baroque: The Scaled-Up Frames of David Armstrong Six
“Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical…
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“This Reductive Brave New World”: Andrea Dworkin’s Painful Relevance
When I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s, Andrea Dworkin’s “anti-sex” writing was anathema to the prevailing discourse of feminism. The cultural moment…
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One Hundred Years of Ambivalence: The Many Legacies of the Bauhaus
It’s been a hundred years of bent chrome furniture, and Germany is taking stock. On the centennial of the Bauhaus art school, new permanent…
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The Erotics of Liberty: Dorothy Iannone’s Cultivated Bohemia
Whatever else they do in this world or the next, gods take up space. Consider Dorothy Iannone’s recent exhibition Lady Liberty Meets Her Match…
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