Articles
NO REALER THAN OTHER THINGS Focusing on the Positive at This Year's Whitney Biennial
The 2024 Whitney Biennial—“Even Better Than the Real Thing”—features artworks, films and performances by 71 artists and collectives. Within the show’s title is an obvious allusion to AI, but the Whitney suggests that it also raises the possibility of other ideas of...
(BITTER) SWEET VIRGINIA Navigating Monuments in the Cradle of the Confederacy
In March, an invitation to view ceramic work by New York–based artist Patrice Renee Washington brought me to Richmond, Virginia, for the very first time. A midsize Southern city often referred to being as far north as one can get until one is in the North, Richmond’s...
LESSONS TO BE UNLEARNED The 60th Venice Biennale is Less Art World and More Real World
This year’s 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa from Brazil, takes an in-depth look at the work of more than 300 artists and collectives who have experienced exile and colonialism. Pedrosa’s thoughtful...
CALIFORNIA GOLD Hilbert Museum Expands its Space and Collection
Millard Sheets’ glass mural Pleasures Along the Beach (1969) adorns the façade of the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Its brightly colored California scene, portraying sunbathers, birds and sailboats, beckons visitors to the newly...
POEMS "Receipt" and "The World"
Receipt Bus stops are one full breath apart Is why men drink in them. Their poor slow hearts, Their poor slow blood. Leant on elbows on knees they Hawk up galaxies. The car becomes a well when you Cry there. 24h carpark. —Without my Marrow and the wind blows I’m a...
COMICS Having a Wonderful Time!
DYSTOPIAN FILTERS Ethel Lilienfeld Considers the Nuances of our Virtual Selves
Technology cannot be separated from the world we live in today. Indeed, post-pandemic, we are experiencing even more of our daily lives virtually. This phenomenon lies at the core of French multidisciplinary artist Ethel Lilienfeld’s work. Using video, installation...
SHATTERED Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme Find Meaning in Remembrance and Resistance
In the 18th century, when the Iranian elite heard rumors of the grand mirrored halls of Europe, they sent merchants to procure as many sheets of brilliant reflective glass as their boats could carry. Still, the mirrors cracked in their elaborate frames somewhere...
AS THE WORLD TURNS Deborah Stratman Gazes Into the Abyss of Time
“I’m not sure satisfaction is a thing I feel while making art. I get satisfied from stuff like getting my laundry done or digging a trench or putting away my books,” mused director Deborah Stratman in a recent interview with Documentary magazine. Perhaps this...
REALM OF THE SENSES Jónsi’s “VOX” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Jónsi, artist and frontman of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, masterfully crafted a recent show titled “Vox” which challenges the definitions of visual, sonic and olfactory art, merging the mediums to form a multi-sensory exhibition that plays on the viewer’s mind...
LOST IN SPACE The New Restoration of Franco Rossi's "Smog"
Franco Rossi’s restored Smog plays like a Nouvelle Vague travelogue, with protagonists seemingly lost in an urban landscape that amplifies their inner malaise. That backdrop is Los Angeles and the long-lost 1962 film (now finally available in a pristine 4K restoration...
FIELD REPORT Art For All: The Gilbert & George Centre, London
Gilbert & George, the quintessentially British pioneering queer artist-duo have staked a clear position within the milieu in which they operate. They have scant tolerance for art-world conventions, yet it is precisely that peevishness and their enduring, long-term...
POEMS "Chalk Poem" and "The Lugubrious Game"
Chalk Poem The long cool freedom pure as a stick of chalk powdering against the edge of jealousy hard and green, also cool a tongue in your mouth an equation in your mind about where purity goes as it’s clapped against a tree trunk, the side of a building leaving...
COMICS Sinbad's Voyage
STAYING INSIDE THE LINES Painting AI's Possible Future
Many consider the AARON project the earliest use of AI in artwork. If AI is the most recent and advanced example of humans using automated processes to make art, then its history goes back much further. So why all the fuss now? Is AI so different than John Cage...
FURIOUSLY JUMPED UP Poor Things Delivers Visceral and Cerebral Thrills
"And when we know the world, the world is ours.” —Bella Baxter What is it exactly that makes a being human?” Is it the presence of a human body or a human mind? Or is it some incommensurable, uncanny union between the two? For the philosopher Descartes, the answer was...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Welcome, Year of the Dragon
It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them. For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce...
POEMS "What's Available for Happy Hour" and "Cowardly New World"
What's Available for Happy Hour? “Nothing, happy hour is from four till five.” “Really?” “It’s a literal hour.” “So, by extension all other hours are unhappy?” “Not necessarily. There are sad hours, bored hours, angry hours, even ecstatic hours, though some forms of...
COMICS Puppets on Strike!
“If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision” at Brand Library and Art Center Q&A with Aline Smithson
Aline Smithson’s conceptual works begin where photographic materials and processes encounter lost and found moments. She has been exploring our complicated relationships with our memories and the devices we use to capture them, our self-presentation and surrounding,...