Many people know that David Wojnarowicz was an excellent artist, but fewer probably know that he was also an excellent writer. 7 Miles a Second, originally put out by DC Comics in 1996 and recently republished by Fantagraphics Books, is a memoir comprised of personal stories mixed with dreams, hallucinatory images, and social commentary.
Reviews
Posted inArt
Patrick Strzelec’s Sculptures Are in the Middle of an Improbable Thought
In drawing, a line need not become a contour or an image. In sculpture, this resistance to becoming is harder to pull off. For all their insistence on pure abstraction, Donald Judd makes boxes and Richard Serra makes steel fortresses. The problem is that this kind of sculpture smacks of signature shapes and branding, an efficient form of production.
It is a problem that Patrick Strzelec, who is having his first show at Gary Snyder Gallery (June 20–July 26, 2013), which is his first in New York in more than a decade, both addresses and exposes by having no two sculptures look alike.
Posted inArt
Single Point Perspective: Munk and Me
In Loren Munk’s painting “An Attempted Documentation of Williamsburg, 1981-2008” (2008-2011), I recognized a slice of my own history in a place I had known well. After a lifetime of looking at paintings, this experience was oddly new to me.
Posted inMusic
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (July 2013, Part 2)
It’s Alternarock Week at Critical Catalogue Headquarters with reviews of the Yo La Tengo, My Bloody Valentine, Adult, and Laura Marling.
Posted inArt
Great Outdoors: The Biennial of the Americas in Denver
In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard envisions the house as a “vertical being,” with two symbolic poles: the irrationality of the cellar and the rational consciousness of the roof. “Up near the roof, all our thoughts are clear … Here we participate in the carpenter’s solid geometry.” The same can be said of Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen’s “Mine Pavilion,” a radiant wooden structure constructed in downtown Denver, which recalls the mining settlements erected when gold prospectors flocked to what would become Denver City.
Posted inArt
A Midsummer Group Show Dream
CHICAGO — As we settle into midway-through-summer mode here in the city that does sleep sometimes, we spend more time hanging at the beach, BBQing with friends and generally chillaxing. With this slowing down of general movement comes the proliferation of — wait for it! — the summer group show.
Posted inArt
Sculpture that Just Wants to Play
Some curious creatures have arrived in City Hall Park, although they look pretty miserable about it. Olaf Breuning’s “The Humans,” with its loop of anthropomorphic figures showing a story of humans evolving from fish to fisher king, has each whimsical figure sporting a deep frown upon their marble faces. While they’re definitely the most charming highlight of the new Lightness of Being Public Art Fund sculpture exhibition, there are 11 artists with playful art to discover elsewhere around the park.
Posted inArt
The Inner Life of a Museum
Jem Cohen’s new feature film, Museum Hours, unfolds like a series of postcards from a lonely traveler, fresh with the pressure of on-site writing while calculating that the memory will be received miles and days away. Shooting primarily in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cohen’s foreign camera seeks the familiar: the stony wrinkles around ancient Roman eyes, a clean white egg inside a still life, a child’s ill-fitting hat in one of Bruegel’s noisy marketplaces. Art, Cohen seems to say, is a refuge for the outsider.
Posted inArt
Two British Painters Use Style as Substance
Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005) and Gary Hume (born 1962) have 34 years between them, and yet their work is similar and compelling enough to warrant a twin retrospective at Tate Britain. Because the Tate has prudently divided the artists — “offering visitors the chance to see the work of two complementary British artists from different generations,” as the exhibition leaflet explains — the viewer experiences Caulfield and Hume individually. And because there are no descriptive captions alongside the artworks — only an accompanying pamphlet, which focuses on one work per room — the viewer is left to discover the connections between the artists herself.
Posted inArt
The Slippery Slope of Perspective
CHICAGO — Are you a viewer, voyeur, or just a wallflower? These interchangeable labels provide a curious starting point for ways to think about the relationship between the subject and the (art) object in Slippery Slope, a group exhibition at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago.
Posted inArt
Trying to Make Galleries Relevant, One JPEG at a Time
Send Me the JPEG at Winkleman Gallery is not a show about art, but about the art world. Its title derives from a new phenomenon wherein collectors forgo viewing art firsthand and instead buy works based on digital photographs alone. Those who still love encountering new art in person worry to what extent the online market will eat up art sales and, consequently, whether brick-and-mortar galleries can survive. In March, critic Jerry Saltz movingly voiced his concern about their demise: “The beloved linchpin of my viewing life is playing a diminished role in the life of art.”
Posted inFilm
Ghost in the (Chess) Machine
Set sometime in the ’80s, mumblecore maven Andrew Bujalski’s fourth feature, Computer Chess, is an adventurous and peculiar period piece. Chronicling a tournament of computers competing in chess and the programmers who code them, the film endearingly evokes the nascent and heady era before smart phones, laptops, and the internet.
