Art
Hans Haacke’s Sharp Metaphors and Maps of Power
Exposing systems of injustice and how they operate is Haacke’s great skill. At the New Museum, the artist draws the connections, and we follow along, wondering what our role is in this circuit.
Review
Film
Seeing How Experimental Documentary Film Can Get
The Paradocs program at the 2019 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam toys with the very structural components of cinema.
Books
Penelope Rosemont's Essays Expand the Surrealist Canon
Threaded through this collection is an optimistic belief in Surrealism as a world-changing political and poetic practice.
Art
Lucian Freud’s Shadow Self
As a displaced refugee, Freud knew he would always be something of a stranger to himself, but how much would he ever wish to know of himself?
Art
Seeing Ourselves in a Chimpanzee's Art
Seeing works by Congo the chimp takes us from wild aesthetic conjectures to sobering ethical dilemmas around animal agency, art ownership, and basic rights of living creatures.
Art
Meleko Mokgosi's Discursive Art
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.
Art
Pastel Then, Pastel Now
The Swiss artist Nicolas Party is both the subject and curator of Pastel, an extraordinary exhibition examining the under-appreciated, fugitive medium and its history.
Art
Painting on a Knife’s Edge
With ATOMIC, her new body of work, Patricia Satterlee pitches us into abstract apparitions of heaven and hell before pulling us back to earth.
Art
Portrait of an Invisible Portraitist
I cannot think of another person who has given us such intimate portraits of everyone from Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and Jasper Johns to Eartha Kitt, Toni Morrison, and Patti Smith.
Art
Philip Taaffe, Symbolist and Naturalist
Taaffe is able to bring the exterior, visible world as well as the interior imagined world into his paintings. To me, this is what distinguishes him from his contemporaries.
Film
A Hidden Life Is a Passionate, Damning Meditation on Faith and Fascism
Terrence Malick’s latest film makes me feel the way church never did, capturing an essence of the divine through aesthetic sublimity.
Art
Abraham Cruzvillegas's Sculptures Echo the Precariousness of Place
Cruzvillegas’s forms embody the precariousness and hope, if not the danger, of contemporary notions of borders, and the forces at work that make them porous or impenetrable.