By Anne Swartz
American Joan Jonas’ art is a subtle and complex interplay of images arranged like words in sentences and paragraphs engaging with the simultaneous denotative and connotative meanings of language. She has used video and sound, installation and performance to showcase the essence of social, lived experience, first exploring gender, then visuality, [...]
By Briana Gervat
For his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland (April 11 - Sept. 7, 2014), Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar paid homage to the late American poet Adrienne Rich by choosing as his epitaph: “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve.” That these words, written by a poet who dedicated [...]
By Robin van den Akker
In March 2015, Oscar Santillan hiked to the top of England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike, and removed its tip. The tip was the focal point of the installation The Intruder (2015) that was on display in Santillan’s first U.K. solo exhibition at the Copperfield Gallery, London1. It is a [...]
By Donald Kuspit
Now I challenge anyone to explain the diabolic and diverting farrago of Bruegel the Droll otherwise than by a kind of special, Satanic grace. For the words ‘special grace’ substitute, if you wish, the words ‘madness’ or ‘hallucination’; but the mystery will remain almost as dark….and I cannot restrain myself from [...]
By John Valentine
Let me begin by confessing considerable agnosticism about the essence and/or definition of art and beauty. I shall not attempt to deal with that issue in this essay. Rather, I want to look at some of the nets or narrative stories about art and beauty experiences that some scientists and some [...]
In the national conversation on racial inequity, one group is continuously left on the sideline-those who were here first. Given that Native Americans precedently inhabited America, one would think their inalienable rights should at least match those of any settlers. But as history demonstrates, they don’t.
Of the many atrocities against Native Americans, the [...]
Philosopher Sylvère Lotringer talks with Jason Hoelscher about networks of networks, art worlds, meaning, and whether resistance is still possible.
Sylvère Lotringer is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, and Professor of Ethico-Aesthetics at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Founder of Semiotext(e) and organizer of the seminal Schizo-Culture Conference that introduced [...]
By Michele Robecchi
According to Luc Tuymans, photographer Katrijn Van Giel accusing him of plagiarism started when he received a phone call from the Belgian center-right tabloid De Standaard. The paper, on the trail of a story, announced that they knew Tuymans’ painting of populist politician Jean-Marie Dedecker was based on a photograph shot [...]
Julie Heffernan’s “image streaming” paintings show that intelligent, relevant and critically aware iconography is alive and well despite the fact that iconography, sadly, has long been a bête noire of postmodern semiotics. Her very personal, even grand paintings deliver Bonnardian multitudes of color and objects while they also recall Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque [...]
The oeuvre of Chicago-born artist Rashid Johnson (born in 1977, lives and works in New York) is abundant in references to African-American culture: Shea butter, African animal skins and icons of African-American literature and music are the subjects that appear in ever-changing constellations. Often they are combined with objects that make a [...]
