Art
BUFFALO — Many published interviews with the contemporary artist Mark Bradford focus on his youth and the geography of Los Angeles, but not his conversation with Abstract Expressionism.
Art
The dream embedded in the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” is rest — a cessation of struggle, labor, drudgery.
Art
The title of artist Brian Dettmer's Dodo Data Dada, showing at PPOW, sounds like cute alliterative nonsense until you realize it's a clever description of the work on view: Sculptures made of old encyclopedias, a medium nearing extinction, with their pages of data carved into intricate photomontages
Art
I Approve This Message: Decoding Political Ads is dedicated to the granular dissection of the visual semiotics and rhetorical stylings of political advertising.
Books
“Information is increasing while direct contacts are in decline. Relations are becoming more numerous while their intensity and authenticity are diminishing,” wrote Henri Lefebvre in 1961, and by 1981 he understood that this would entail “a solitude all the more profound for being overwhelmed by mes
Art
Gary Petersen’s skewed geometric paintings call forth analogies to music and architecture, a realm of vertical intervals and diagonal supports spliced into a precarious balance.
Art
The Austrian painter Tillman Kaiser does something unexpected and frankly welcome. Rather than accept that painting is used up or on life support, Kaiser opens up the discourse through the use of egg tempera (a medium dating back to Egyptian mummy portraits) on photograms (a 20th-century invention)
Art
Drawings 1982-96 is a modestly titled but very revealing exhibition of drawings by Carroll Dunham, the bulk of which had been owned by Illeana Sonnabend, the artist’s New York gallerist from 1988 to 1994.
Music
Faced with the choice between genuine American pop music and the perfect facsimiles crafted by foreign scientist-geniuses running computer algorithms on said pop music (you think I’m exaggerating; read John Seabrook), I’d still pick the American stuff.
Art
As a lifelong resident of the South who often has cause to talk to people from elsewhere, I find that my accent is a recurring topic of conversation. Someone will wonder why I don’t have one, and seem astonished. Someone else will retort, “What are you talking about? He totally has one!” and seem am
Art
Fred Sandback could be considered, and not without reason, as the purest and most unsparingly geometric member of a rigorously formalist generation, a cohort that included Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, and Sol LeWitt.
Art
While waiting in line to pee in “America,” a toilet cast in 18-karat gold and installed in a Guggenheim Museum bathroom, I ran into my friend Fritz Mead, who lives in a shack he built himself out of scrap wood in a backyard next to a skate bowl he also built himself.