Art
LONDON — Two things are true: Martine Syms likes both purple and words. As with her website and her publishing imprint Dominica, Syms’s exhibition Fact & Trouble at the Institute of Contemporary Arts is awash in the color purple: Royal purple C-stands, royal purple television monitors, and royal pur
Art
LOS ANGELES — A Shape That Stands Up at Art + Practice (A+P) gallery, in partnership with the Hammer Museum, claims to “[examine] the space between figuration and abstraction” — a great starting point unless you have the sneaking suspicion that this space disappeared decades ago.
Art
Tucked into the corner of Marlborough Chelsea’s huge space sits Viewing Room, an exhibition of Stephen Kaltenbach’s work that expresses, in a variety of media, a very personal sort of art world pique.
Books
A few years ago I was covering a panel discussion for Hyperallergic featuring members of Gran Fury, an ACT UP affinity group focused primarily on producing what group members themselves called “propaganda” against a government hellbent on isolating, vilifying, and smugly looking on as tens of thousa
Art
A rock-climbing wall is covered with penises at the New Museum.
Art
Someone once said to me that for him, one of the famous modernists, I think it was Paul Klee, represented the values of serious play. That idea lingered in cobwebbed corners of my mind until I walked into the Lehmann Maupin's downtown gallery to see Adriana Varejão’s Kindred Spirits when it flashed
Art
I wait around in the Center for Italian Modern Art’s kitchen before the tour of the Giorgio Morandi exhibition begins.
Books
What happens when you cross the perfervid emotionalism of Edna St. Vincent Millay, she of the candle burning at both ends, with Charles Olson’s idea, distilled out of William Carlos Williams, of a projective verse imbued with “the breathing of the man who writes” (and I suppose it is very emphatical
Books
Being a poet in America is like being a submarine: you might be seen when you pop up, and, as a rule, people don’t go looking for you.
Art
The work of Lee Mullican and others, including his friend Gordon Onslow Ford, shatters the myth that the only radical art being made in America in the 1940s and ’50s was by the Abstract Expressionists.
Art
The still life photographs of Lakshmi Luthra, currently showing in Poly at Sushi Bar Gallery in Brooklyn with the work of Jonathan Bruce Williams, could have been shot on the floor of an abandoned department store, somewhere on the border between the Intimates and Electronics departments.
Music
I keep listening because I want to grasp it, and so the music generates the very frustrated desire it addresses.