Art
Pavel Pepperstein's Obsession with a Utopian Apocalypse
In these works, the present moment remains altogether elusive.
Reviews
Art
At the Shanghai Biennale, a Desire to Disrupt the Status Quo
At this year's Shanghai Biennale, curated by the Raqs Media Collective, artists question and disrupt the status quo in multiple ways, presenting the world with new possibilities.
Books
Reader’s Diary: The Importance of Being a Simile
Although the poetry in Geoffrey Nutter’s Cities at Dawn is almost always calmly descriptive, whatever it describes is somehow something else and not itself.
Books
The Omni American Author: An Albert Murray Collection
Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs opens with a seminal piece, The Omni-Americans. In 1970, Murray took on black protest writers and defied establishment thinking with his claims of “a folklore of white supremacy and a fakelore of black pathology.”
Music
A Tribe Called Quest's Communal Monument
A communal monument to one rapper that also celebrates community in the context of political horror (they didn’t predict the election either). Phife, inevitably, becomes a symbol. So does the whole Tribe.
Art
The Nocturnal Worlds of Katherine Bradford
In this exhibition, it struck me that what Katherine Bradford keeps getting better at is incoherence: she can meld divergent details without coming across as contrived or arbitrary.
Art
Progress Report: Marina Adams’s Recent Paintings and Gouaches
This is Marina Adams’ breakthrough show. There is nothing formulaic about her use of color, line or shape. The paintings are eccentric, but do not feel willfully so.
Performance
Theater of Machines: Rimini Protokoll and CVRTAIN
Two of this year's performance offerings, perhaps inadvertently, highlighted the sometimes awkward and asocial embrace of technology.
Art
Exceeding Capacity
Tiger Strikes Asteroid doesn’t necessarily offer a new way to see art, but the work by Danielle Cartier, Kasey Toomey, Alex Snowden, and Christopher Richard shows the promise of this through collective activity.
Art
The Desire for the Unattainable: Myron Stout’s Paintings and Drawings
Myron Stout, who was born in Denton, Texas, in 1908, made an early decision to be a painter but didn’t hit his stride until the late 1940s, after he had served in World War II.
Art
A Floating Noise and Drag Club Celebrates San Francisco’s Lost Underground
The club was concocted by Constance Hockaday and The Lab in conjunction with — and as a subtle resistance to — the first Untitled art fair in San Francisco.
Art
A Play About Metalheads and Metal Hearts
La Mélancolie des dragons is a magical play from director Philippe Quesne and Vivarium Studio about a crew of inventive metalheads.