Articles
Book Review: Criminal Culture Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
Portrait of a Thief By Grace D. Li 369 pages Tiny Reparations Books The thorny issues of restitution and museums’ complicity in retaining looted artwork do not tend to make for light summer reading. But a breezy new novel turns these issues into the basis of a high-stakes heist. Grace D. Li’s, Portrait of a Thief, manages to be both portrait and landscape—a portrait of college students on the cusp of adulthood set in the landscape of contemporary museums. First, you’ll have to accept the wild premise that a billionaire is offering a group of college students $50 million to steal (or return) five bronze sculptures, looted from the Old Summer...
Book Review: Burden of Dreams Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden
Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden Contributors: Donatien Grau, Yayoi Shionoiri, Sydney Stutterheim, Andie Trainer 284 pages Gagosian It’s impossible to think of the Los Angeles art scene without considering Chris Burden, an incisive social commentator who approached artmaking with both childlike wonder and fearless abandon. His now-legendary performance-art pieces from the early 1970s and subsequent 40-year practice in sculpture, installation, video and mixed-media projects have become canonized as some of the most daring, and outright phantastic, innovations in the history of art. A lavish new book from Gagosian—Poetic...
Book Review: Ballerina Looks Back in Style Serenade: A Balanchine Story by Toni Bentley
Serenade: A Balanchine Story By Toni Bentley 320 Pages Pantheon As a thin, athletic girl with a springy jump and “not-so-great feet,” Toni Bentley was 11 when she entered the School of American Ballet; she was invited into the New York City Ballet company by George Balanchine at 17, and she performed with them for 10 years, until a hip injury cut her career short. With her prolonged devotion to Balanchine as the backdrop, it is their shared passion for the art form that drives the plot of her new book, Serenade. Balanchine arrived in America at the behest of eventual NYCB co-founder Lincoln Kirstein, then a visionary and well-connected...
FORT WORTH, TEXAS: Hector A. Ramirez SENSE AND NONSENSE
I was thoroughly bewildered when I first saw Hector A. Ramirez’ work as a member of his MFA committee at Texas Christian University in 2017. He handed me Carpet Shoes, a worn pair of men’s brown leather shoes with rectangles of yellowish carpet glued to their soles such that their footprints would be made by the carpet’s fibers. This simple juxtaposition of two familiar objects creates an irreconcilable absurdity. Art-historically, the distinction between Dada and surrealist assemblage is illuminating; Duchamp’s bicycle wheel attached to the seat of a wooden stool resists narrative closure and remains absurd while Man Ray’s Cadeau (1921),...
CHICAGO: Paola Cabal THE WORK OF ATTENTION
It is 3:02 p.m. on February 26, and we are looking intently at the north wall of Paola Cabal’s studio while the Midwestern afternoon light streams in through her unobstructed west windows. Cabal is rapidly leafing through a Benjamin Moore paint-chip book, holding the color chips up to a patch of sunlight on her wall to identify the color she might use to replicate the light. “There it is: 212570.” Cabal is describing the process by which she creates installations that document the light in a space. Her process is exacting in the extreme. She “maps” the effects of the light within the given space at a specific time on a particular day and...
