Art
All the Art That's Fit to Print
It’s not clear who scooped whom, but there are two gallery shows now on view in New York that examine the relationship between art and the newspaper.
Review
Books
Geography Lesson: Lytle Shaw’s Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics
Lytle Shaw’s Fieldworks is a big and ambitious study that is a welcome addition to the dense, unruly, and relatively unmapped field called “postwar poetics.”
Art
Rainbows to No Place: Société Réaliste and the Ayn Rand Apocalypse
The 1949 King Vidor film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead centers on a headstrong New York architect named Howard Roark, who, at grave risk to his architectural practice, spends his days proffering sleek modernist designs to a society mired in its taste for tawdry neoclassicism. When, early
Art
Leaving Home: René Magritte in Brussels and Paris
In his dismissal of Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 — the recently opened retrospective of René Magritte (1898-1967) at the Museum of Modern Art — the New York Times’ Holland Cotter cites the ubiquity of the Belgian surrealist’s images and the relative paucity of insight to be glean
Performance
A Digital Artist Goes Analogue, but the Message Is Fuzzy
Sitting in the audience for the performance of Ann Hirsch’s "Playground" at the New Museum last week, two things came to mind: one, that Hirsch had managed to trick a bunch of art school kids and fans of her often web-based art into coming to a very conventional theater production; and two, that the
Art
Zombies and Pop Stars
Josh Kline’s work takes the viewer into the uncanny valley. The two centerpieces of his exhibition QUALITY OF LIFE at 47 Canal show actors playing Kurt Cobain and Whitney Houston, interviewed as if they were alive today.
Art
Evading Detection in the Digital Panopticon
BOSTON — A six-foot-tall sculpture of a figure wearing a ghillie suit, a collaborative work by artists George Heintz and Victoria Duffee, hides in the corner of the windowless Distillery Gallery. The way the figure is installed, he stares curiously at a photograph printed on Tri Poplin of a tropical
Art
Animating the Archive: Black Performance Art's Radical Presence
Radical Presence gives a great taste of some of the work done by black artists working in performance over the past five decades. And one of the best things about it is that it’s not just a static archive.
Art
A Performance Artist's Grotesque Femininity
My memory finally caught up with the ephemera of a familiar artist when I went to go see Katya Grokhovsky’s show Bodybeautiful at Galerie Protégé.
Art
The Medium Is the Poem: Micropoetry on Twitter
OAKLAND, Calif. — A few weeks ago, I wrote about Heyku, a new app that takes an Instagram approach to poetry. One of our readers, Luke Agbaimoni, wrote in about his site, micropoetry.com, which features some of the existing practices of poets online.
Art
The Many Faces of Abstraction
Recently I was talking to a sculptor friend and made a flippant remark that it seemed to me as if “abstract painting is back.” A seasoned 65 to my slight 27, he smiled as he asked: “Again?”
Art
Systems That Set You Free: Current Work by Steve Roden
At last, New York is getting to see a broad range of work by Steve Roden, an L.A.-based artist who makes paintings, drawings, sculptures, sound compositions and sound installations determined by self-invented systems.