Category Archives: Reviews

  — so foul a sky clears not without a storm (Shakespeare) Preparations: Take a walk in the common space of Olmsted’s horticultural park, central to Manhattan island geography. Linger for a moment at Willowdell Arch to appreciate the  stone voussoirs that line the arcade and support the rusticated underpass; and then allow a few [...]

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Brian Gaman once tried to make eyeglass lenses by casting the glass himself.  They cracked; he left them unpolished.  He kept the bridge and arms off the frame, leaving just two black-rimmed circles.   And oh yes, did I mention, he made them nearly two feet high each? They lean casually against the wall. You would [...]

Thoughts on seeing Fitting At Metro Pictures — Louise Lawler’s show of pictures of installed and stored artworks — straight ones and others run through Photoshop so that they match the proportions of the walls they are affixed to height to height and width to width.  One — odd maybe — why not change the [...]

The two main shows up now at the Guggenheim, a Lee Ufan retrospective and Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Hugo Boss Prize show, are quite worth seeing.  Hans-Peter Feldmann’s work in particular seemed to give museum-goers pleasure, as I noticed many of them rubbing up against the walls of money and posing for pictures in front of it.  [...]

  Pae White’s Restless Rainbow has taken over a terrace on the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing, with an outpouring of bright colors printed on opaque vinyl along the glass walls.  Why this terrace is where it is, what’s so striking about it and why part of it hosts [...]

Video artist Ryan Trecartin, a veteran of Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum and the 2006 Whitney Biennial, inaugural winner of the monumental Jack Wolgin prize, RISD graduate, and 30-year old, is showing his very ambitious new piece Any Ever at PS1 this summer, marking his triumphant return to that museum for the first [...]

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 [...]

In one sense, Liz Larner’s new installation is held together oxymoronically, by lacunae. The spaces between are a large part of the power of this impressively laconic exhibition. Moreover, the items on display not only bear their paucity proudly but are each idiosyncratic, different from the next object, except for a shared allegiance to abstraction. [...]