Category Archives: Reviews

A sort of antic incrementalism, in which the sheer number of accumulated found objects stuns the viewer into submission, clogging their visual arteries, presently constitutes an academy in itself. How do we know? Art schools and project rooms across the nation are filled to the brim with such compilations. And indeed it is hard to [...]

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 [...]

No sooner uncoiled from the sock in the gut delivered by Susan Unterberg’s powerful new portrait photos—with their contorted features, hair literally standing on end, they are horrific, hilarious, inscrutable—no sooner recovered than the viewer is almost immediately besieged by a teeming mass of unswerving allusions, as difficult to shake as a mob of pursuing [...]

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 [...]

Texting reigns but word of mouth is alive and well. This exquisite show, the kind easily overlooked by the art media, was widely praised with a happy sense of discovery by artists on the street.  Extremely understated, Carlson’s installation yields outsized results, a plenitude of echoes and connections. Epic subject matter is presented through sleight [...]

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 [...]

There are artists who while professing pursuit of certain goals, such as an institutional critique or a formalist strategy of truth to materials, or an ecologically pointed realism, are also and perhaps primarily obsessed with another issue, say aesthetics for the social critic or brute power for the purist or fears of personal mortality for [...]

There are two very interesting aspects to “Talk Show,” a group exhibition of painting.  One is that the six participants are women.  The works are representational and often figurative, the figure being always female.  Yet the press release makes absolutely nothing of these facts. Nor should it. There is, happily, no point to make. There [...]