Articles
John Kilduff: Kilduff’s Cavern
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Diane Arbus
Audrey Wollen’s Feminist Instagram World
One of Los Angeles–based artist Audrey Wollen’s Instagram posts features an undated 1890s painting in which a nude woman reclines, examining herself in a mirror she is holding up to her face. Red beads are wrapped around the woman’s neck and ankle, bringing to mind...
Todd Gray’s Framing of Identity
“I’ve been going the wrong way for a long time … it’s sort of a reverse commute.” This is said by Todd Gray at the start of his 2010 performance, Caliban in the Mirror. This seemingly autobiographical, storytelling piece has Gray on stage with a few props—a camera, a...
The Science of Seeing
Two hundred years ago, the hierarchy of subjects taught to academic painters placed history and mythology at the top, with landscape and still life at the bottom. This ranking followed the scala naturae, the ladder or scale of nature derived from Plato: God, followed...
The Analog Revolution
The first to grow up in an image-centric world where the mass-dissemination of images via film, print and television started to infiltrate American culture on scales never before seen, those of the Pictures Generation found themselves grappling with notions concerning...
Amy Elkins’ Male Protagonists
Inside American prisons, thousands of men sequestered in tiny, dim rooms spend their lives waiting to die. Outside, this marginal population is hardly considered, except as a seamy abstraction. SoCal-based artist Amy Elkins finds inspiration in prisoners’ hermetic...
Lost At Sea
As soon as I entered the recent exhibition “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), things took a turn for the worse. Or anyway, I did. Because it was the last day of the “New Photography” show that MoMA does every two years,...
Deep Dreams
Jeremy Couillard says that the pleasure of working with virtual reality (VR) is that he can move away from “a deceitful world I deeply wish did not exist. I need to create an alternative to that universe so I don’t go insane.” A video and installation artist, and...
FOTOFEST 2016 BIENNIAL
The world of contemporary popular culture has largely left the biosphere behind, for a world of limitless extraterrestrial space. It is not so different from the contemporary avant-garde, which remains a cerebral, intramural phenomenon. It takes an extraordinary,...
TWO VIEWS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANSEL ADAMS AND LEONARD FRANK
Liberty Cabbage. Freedom Fries. Whenever a reactionary quorum congregates one can be certain no good can come of it. While our senate stages a work stoppage on judicial appointments, and a viable presidential candidate—best known for his government shutdown...
THE DEATH THAT WON’T DIE
I recently overheard somebody make the observation that David Bowie’s death has “staying power.” It sounded like an idiotic remark at first but in this case it seems accurate. Sure, Bowie was one of the greats, an unfading star who provided an exhilarating soundtrack...
Art of the Prank; NOTFILM
Ross Lipman, the legendary film restorationist responsible for preserving the cinematic legacies of Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, and a cluster of forgotten American neorealist gems including Killer of Sheep and The Exiles, has turned his attention to...
Alex Israel/Bret Easton Ellis
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Barbara Hepworth & Henry Moore
The Thing
The “death of painting” is frequently traced to the work and writing of Donald Judd. In 1965's “Specific Objects,” the same essay in which Judd outlined painting’s limitations—above all, its inherent illusionism—he even more forcefully predicted the death of...
FILM: Troublemakers
Land Art, also known as Earth Art, emerged in the period that was, with hindsight, clearly one of the most radical, innovative, experimental and groundbreaking periods in the history of art. The genre is part of a much wider trend that falls under the umbrella of...
Mud Gets Off the Ground
Ceramics is again making a major splash in the world of fine arts. Way back in the 1950s Peter Voulkos pushed ceramics into that realm, with his Abstract Expressionist pieces of cut and contorted clay slabs, followed by the works of his students (among them, John...
Fueled by Youth
The sculptures of Sergio Garcia contain an otherworldly essence. Like relics from an alternate dimension created by Salvador Dali, Henry Darger and Kaz Oshiro, Garcia’s surreal concoctions teeter on the brink of absurdity and play with the experience of living and...
Alternate Empires
As a student, seeking respite from the relatively hidebound painting department, I often retreated to the sculpture studios. There, the critical gaze of teachers seemed less intense; sculpture students did as they pleased. Around that time about a decade ago, I took...