Mokgosi is as interested in the discourse around the figures in his paintings as in their representation — not that the two could ever exist separately.
Alan Gilbert
Alan Gilbert is the author of two books of poetry, The Treatment of Monuments and Late in the Antenna Fields, as well as a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight. He lives in Brooklyn.
Posted inArt
Sarah Sze’s Gleaming, Ephemeral Universe
Sze’s dynamic sculptures aim to capture relationships and their gaps, the solidity of objects and their discarding.
Posted inArt
Racism and Erasure in Fred Wilson’s Unearthed Histories
Wilson’s explicit reference to Africa expands the global network through which both cultural influences and African bodies were transmitted.
Posted inBooks
Good Vibrations: Prose Poetry as Stand-Up Comedy
In Jeremy Sigler’s My Vibe offers refreshing honesty about failure within the system of calculation and profit.
Posted inBooks
Taking His Chance: John Cage’s Diary
One of the minor ironies of the postwar avant-garde is that an artist so resolutely against personal expression and the myth of the inspired genius should become the focus of a cult of personality.
Posted inPoetry
Adrift in the Blue Yonder: Peter Gizzi’s Selected Poems
After steadily increasing for much of the twentieth century, and especially after World War II, real wages for the average worker in the United States have remained stagnant since around 1978, if in fact they haven’t slightly declined. At the time of this economic shift, Peter Gizzi was somewhere between high school and college.
Posted inArt
Documenta 13’s Art Laboratory
There’s been much talk in the art world during the past decade about the rise of the curator as artist, a figure who in her or his most overweening moments seeks to render artist and artwork secondary to the vision — or, at worst, predetermined program — for a particular exhibition. MFAs in curatorial studies are proliferating, and celebrity curators have become as powerful, influential, and famous as artists always have been, as collectors have become, and as critics once were. However fashionable of late, the curator as artist existed decades earlier in the figure of Harald Szeemann, partly as a result of his radical approach to Documenta 5 in 1972, where he initiated a multi- and inter-disciplinary format that continues to this day.
