Art
The Beauty of Absent Bodies
Whoever thought that Carl Andre’s joyless, hug-the-floor sculpture was the logical culmination of Brancusi got it wrong. This kind of thinking strikes me as macho, competitive, and prescriptive.
Weekend
Art
Hurricane Frank: Rhetorical Abstraction in the Age of the Incidental Viewer
If Frank Stella’s ambition and insatiable visual voracity were exhilarating at first, the paintings’ often overbearing size and physicality also left the viewer, time and again, with the unsettling feeling of being wrestled to the ground.
Art
Kenji Fujita's Vernacular of Accumulation
Binary oppositions get slammed a lot in our “rhizome”-besotted era, sometimes with interesting results.
Performance
Downtown Tyrant: Romeo Castellucci's Julius Caesar in New York
Long a darling of the European festival circuit, Romeo Castellucci and his Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio have since the 1980s presented a visually driven, philosophical theater, often with classical references and the provocative presence of animals and the animality of humans.
Art
What We Are Asked to See
We may choose to partake of the comfort that Sarah McEneaney’s scenes of domestic tranquility have to offer. Or we may choose to probe deeper.
Art
The Eternal Returns of Richard Pousette-Dart
In a socially boisterous art world inspired by Existentialism, jazz, and booze, Richard Pousette-Dart preferred introversion, secular spiritualism, and depth psychology.
Art
Yoko Ono’s Art in Remote Japan: Traveling Far to See the Sky
In a woodsy patch of a park tucked next to a stream, one of Yoko Ono’s most unusual creations can be found in what is, for any artist’s work, a most unexpected setting.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Trump at ArtPrize, the photo collection at the African American museum, a poignant review of new Hitler book, Portlandia has overstayed their welcome, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Throne
"A throne is only a bench covered with velvet."
Books
Reader’s Diary: Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Critique of Everyday Life’ (Conclusion)
Encore un effort on Lefebvre. My first go was nothing but objections. Round two started out with admiration but I soon found myself airing further criticism — almost against my will...
Books
Alice Notley's Crystal City of In-betweenness
Alice Notley's recent book, Benediction, an epic written in ragged grammatical form, further concretizes her work to repossess the historically male-dominated epic poem as a feminist genre.
Art
Archaic Futurism
In an interview that appeared in The Brooklyn Rail (May 2014), Joyce Robins explained that the title of her early painting “The Vly” (1975) is the Dutch word for swamp.