Features
Trenton Doyle Hancock: Prayer Warrior
By David Humphrey
If you tell yourself to do something, commandingly, can there be a good reason to resist? Are there advantages to having an unharmonious self? Trenton Doyle Hancock makes materially imposing artworks that stage a model of the self as a questionably disciplined collective. He uses cross-purposed behavior productively, both as a [...]
Painting Pros and Cons. A Conversation between Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens
Peter Plagens is a painter who also writes art criticism for The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Laurie Fendrich is a painter and professor of fine arts at Hofstra University who writes frequently about art and other matters for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Peter Plagens - I’m interested in the disjunction [...]
From Studio PhDs to the Kantian Sublime. A Discussion with James Elkins
James Elkins was on tour when we first caught up with him for this e-mail discussion. He is one of the most celebrated and sought-after lecturers in the fine arts today. We discussed his research concerning the international advance of the studio PhD in the arts, and then we mulled over his recent [...]
Dystopian Abstraction
By David Pagel
Abstract painting has been linked to so many virtuous virtues that it’s hard to see it as being an especially effective vehicle for taking a walk on the dark side of life. Its ongoing association with moral improvement, heightened perception and progressive development has left it in sorry shape for diving, [...]
Pattern and Deregulation: Beauty and Non-Order in Contemporary Painting
By Jason Hoelscher
“All true feeling is in reality untranslatable…That is why an image, an allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal has more significance for the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics. This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of [...]
Revisiting History: A Conversation with Meira Marrero and José Angel Toirac
Meira Marrero (Havana, 1969) and José Angel Toirac (Guantánamo, 1966) (M&T) have been working together for a couple of decades. They rely on controversial historic material and create their works from a discourse similar to the codes of official historiography. Their works feature plenty of symbols and citations that refer to specific moments [...]
Yesterday’s Present and Today’s Past
By Michele Robecchi
Twenty years ago this coming February, Derek Jarman succumbed to a fatal illness he bravely fought for almost a decade. Unlike many of his peers, Jarman never refrained from telling the world what got to him until the very last minute, and neither did he rely on the palliative of swapping [...]
Push to Flush: The Post-Reality Axiom (Or Why Nobody Cares About Osama Bin Laden’s Death)
By Paco Barragán
“Tell from time to time the truth, so they will believe you when you lie,” French playwright Jérôme Touzalin once said. This strong statement deals not only with truth and lies, but it also invokes, in a particular manner, concepts like reality and representation, veracity and fiction, veridicality and plausibility; in [...]
Kettle’s Whistle: Manchester, England
By Michele Robecchi
On June 15, 1996, the Irish Republican Army detonated the biggest bomb ever inflicted upon the U.K. during peacetime, this time in Manchester. Placed in a Ford Cargo parked on Corporation Street, police first became aware of the explosive after an anonymous phone call to the local TV station Granada, giving [...]
