Wresting the Work of Straub and Huillet from the Annals of Academia and Art History
How much homework should we expect to slog through, en route to art? One could surmise “A lot,” according to Jean Marie Straub and…
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From a Safe Distance: Guy Maddin Stills His Lens with Collage
Guy Maddin’s latest exhibition finds the artist in a splendid mood, if preoccupied by the subtle, inescapable persistence of his loneliness. Maddin and his…
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Battle Hymn of the Republic: The Measure of Kehinde Wiley in the American South
Though history is said to have been written by the victors, one might be forgiven for casting doubt on this particular adage in Richmond,…
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The Photograph is a Hinge: Taca Sui Traces a Cultural Slippage
But when men do not forget what can be forgotten, but forget what cannot be forgotten—that may be called true forgetting. – Zhuangzi A…
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The Politics of Color in Kristine Moran
It’s tempting to consider Kristine Moran’s most recent work as a pivot-point in an ascendency from abstraction to figuration. Figures, indeed, are emerging from…
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Emerging Artist Neil Beloufa Turns Smug at MoMA
As subject matter, the debased utopia is low-hanging fruit. Every continent has a few, and they emanate intoxicating aromas of corrupted idealism. In making…
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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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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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