Performance
I didn't know what to expect from Einat Amir's "Our Best Intentions," a work premiering in New York as part of Performa 13. I had seen the trailer, which suggests a fairly emotional experience. I had read the description on the Performa site, which says the participatory piece blends "psychotherapy,
Art
After the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima was called the “Japanese Godard” for what must have been the umpteenth time, he wittily replied by calling Godard “the French Oshima.” I thought of Oshima’s response once more when I went to Nasreen Mohamedi: Becoming One at the Talwar Gallery (September 13–November
Art
For the past twenty years Jake Berthot has painted his vision of the Catskill Mountains, where he has lived since 1994, after living in Manhattan, much of it on the Bowery, for thirty years. A painter of what he calls “small sensations,” Berthot has included fourteen paintings and six drawings compl
Books
The Romanian-born, German-speaking Paul Celan is one of the most translated poets in recent decades, and we’re still not through with him.
Art
What is most important to us — as writers, thinkers, makers, and believers in the arts? What happens when the world we live in no longer feels like the one we knew? In a culture of disappointment, what do we need to continue making work? To continue believing in the work that we make?
Art
Fabienne Lasserre makes objects she calls sculptures, but they could very well be paintings. They could also be remnants from a demolition site or detritus from a car bomb explosion.
Performance
Jérôme Bel’s new piece, Disabled Theater, now at New York Live Arts as part of Performa 13, has gotten a fair amount of positive press and reviews, but it felt complicated to me, and not always in good ways.
Books
It seems like every few decades there is a mainstream revival for the occult and esoteric. Not that it ever fades away, but there is a periodic surge in fascination with the unknowable, the rites, rituals, and art that make up its history.
Art
“One point of art is that it’s forming something we don’t have the language for yet,” observes Jake Yuzna, Director of Public Programs at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), in discussing the FUN Conference on Nightlife as Social Practice.
Performance
Experiencing "The Humans" does require some stamina, as it's a three-hour long play that often dips into follies that can drag a bit long. Yet if you're interested in theater, the influences of art's obsession with forms, Shakespeare, Wodehouse, and scatological humor wrapped around a frame of the G
Performance
It's difficult to create art about white privilege. Though one can easily enough declare that white privilege is bad, distilling all its paradoxes into a poignant artistic image is challenging. And when an artist succeeds, it commands attention.
Art
As the 100th anniversary year of the 1913 Armory Show winds down, it's worth taking a look at an exhibition in Texas that may not directly corral together the scandalous and shocking art of that first burst of modernism into the Americas, but just as strongly shows how the waves of Cubism, Futurism,