Dumb Material and Animate Belief: Sadie Benning Plays (with) God
Occasionally, a show hits the sweet spot so squarely, that critical faculties seem to evaporate on the tip of one’s tongue. In the case…
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The Renewed Focus and Acrid Targeting of Rachel Harrison at MoMA and Greene Naftali
Rachel Harrison’s acidic colors, faux-finish surfaces, and otherwise unseemly media screech like saboteurs of good taste. Unlike a certain nascent presidential candidate, however, they…
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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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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 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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The “Fuck Em” Sex and Class Reversals of Alicia Gibson
A blind date is unfolding at Canada Gallery, in Alicia Gibson’s painting My Mom Set Me Up With a Redneck (2016). If, like me,…
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“As a Relief from Language”: Hilton Als, as Artist
To read White Girls, Hilton Als’s 2013 collection of upending essays, is to feel calcified assumptions about sexual and racial identification dissolve. A chain of…
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Does the Right Hand Cover for the Left?: The Case of the Remai Modern and Its Errant Board
I take no pleasure in realizing the unpleasant aspects of something I’d otherwise be very proud of. In this case, the object of pride…
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Mary Heilmann and David Reed’s “Two By Two” at the Hamburger Bahnhof Floats Towards Americana
Once a train station, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum now facilitates transportive experiences. There in a large hall, forty-five paintings currently hang in pairs, one…
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The Deadening Gaze of Tal R
Most things, if and when they return from the dead, are dried-out and stiff. However when several outmoded artistic styles turn up in the…
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