Author Archives: Fintan Boyle

The most beautiful photograph I ever saw? I have described it here before. An exhibition of Sam Wagstaff’s photography collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut: the usual canonized suspects are all there.  Then, unannounced, at a distance across the room, scratching at the corner of ones eye, a small –4×6 maybe– black and [...]

White Columns allows itself the luxury –or the, delirium– of putting on shows with zero economic potential that graze in relatively obscure intellectual pastures. Pages from a Magazine: CAMERAWORK is the current wonderful example of this formula. CAMERAWORK was one of a number of left wing journals engaged (very much so) in the critical revaluation [...]

Auden went to the Arctic. Iceland, 1936. He was much taken with the Northern desolation of nature. He was young still. Searching, as they say, for ideals. For the right politics, the right sexuality, the right turn of poetry. (It was of course the last that came easiest to him). While there Auden penned a [...]

Something has to be done about the acreage of camouflage fabric loose in this country. Thankfully Ann Shostrum has taken a shot at it in her current show at Elizabeth Harris. It is true –yes, yes, yes it is true– that, beyond the camouflage, there is much in Shostrum’s work that employs and highlights the [...]

James Casebere has for a long time worked by producing photographs that are in close enough proximity to a photograph of the thing modeled, i.e. not the model itself, that we the viewer are left a-pause toggling back and forth between recognition and misconception. This is, by his own acknowledgement, that canonical modernist device of [...]

There is some hard to pinpoint quality to Karl Wirsum’s drawings currently on show at Derek Eller. I think it must be in the ballpoint pen palling around with pencil, ink and color pencil on paper.  All of the above, it seems sure, palled around too with a healthy (sic) waft of marijuana. The loopy, [...]

Lest we forget the Gran Fury was not just a car. It was also the name of the propaganda ministry for ACT–UP. It was Gran Fury, having stolen the name of the standard issue cop car of the day, the Plymouth Gran Fury, that coined the phrases, designed the logos and generally set the rhetorical [...]

As Jonas Mekas tells of the premiere of Warhol’s film Empire –a single static shot of the Empire state building held for eight hours without camera movement or cut–the crowds were at a near riot. “We want our money back, we came to see a movie. This movie doesn’t move”. And this was at the [...]

Matt Saunders has installed a multiplex of sorts at Harris Lieberman on Vandam Street and therein he is screening a restored homage to the lost cities of Weimar Germany. The geography of the gallery, as organized by Saunders, elicits the notion of the trawling, mobile spectator: partitions, columns, low podia, interior windows as screens doubling [...]

Jim Nutt’s current show of paintings and drawings at David Nolan resembles nothing so much as portraits, from observation, of the artist Orlan. I suspect this observation will not be distressing to either of the artists in question. Nutt has been torquing the represented body for a little longer than Orlan has been using representations [...]