DIGITAL EDITION
Current Issue
March/April 2023
Table of Contents
From Mortar To Metaverse CONTEMPORARY COMMERCE
Eth, bit, sol, meta, block chain, bored apes, crypto punks, kitty litter squad, non-fungible, minting, mining, tokenizing, gas fee, hot wallet, cold wallet, generative NFT, destructive NFT, candy machines, early adopters—yes this is English—just not the English of our...
Pioneering Petra Cortright NFTs Are a No-Brainer
Petra Cortright’s URL, www.petracortright.com, could be considered a work of net art. Practitioners of net art (beginning in the mid-1990s) often used the internet as their medium, sometimes populating their pages with images and data from other websites. Cortright’s...
Nancy Baker Cahill Challenges the Limits of Perception Seeing the World Anew
In 2017, my friend—artist/curator Nancy Baker Cahill—invited me to see the art she was creating using virtual reality technology. Until that point, I knew Nancy to make ambitious drawings and otherworldly videos depicting abject, flesh-like topologies; works...
A Conversation with Casey Kauffmann Hot Girl Sh*t
Casey Kauffmann is a hoarder of cyber content. Her image archive is a black hole of digital debris, infinitely consuming, tearing apart, and spitting out images—a spaghettification of visual culture. Kauffmann is known for her digital collages that populate her...
Tabita Rezaire and the Materiality of The Digital COMPLEX INTERACTION
The digital is an arbitrary category. In everyday speech, it is sometimes used as an opposition to the material: a digital copy, artwork or exhibition versus a material one. The digital is presented as something existing outside of the material realm and the history...
It’s All About Meme
A meme is unit of cultural information, such as an idea or belief, transmitted from one person to another. The word is an alteration of the Greek mimeme, meaning something that is imitated, not duplicated. The difference is important, as each iteration of a meme...
Laurie Anderson at the Hirshhorn Museum Unnervingly Prescient
“Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the largest US exhibition of Anderson’s work to date. At 74, Anderson continues to be immensely creative as multimedia artist, performer, musician and writer—the show includes more than a...
Jeff Koons: The Appropriation Artist Art Brief
Superstar artist Jeff Koons has been sued for appropriating the work of others—again. The latest lawsuit, Hayden v. Koons, was filed last December in federal court. It concerns a series of works, “Made in Heaven,” that depict the sexual exploits of Koons and his...
Responsible and Irresponsible Art Decoder
The art-bureaucrat class is currently in a state of great anxiety over the differences between responsible and irresponsible art. The artists aren’t, but these categories aren’t up to them. Whether she wants to be or not, Kara Walker will—for the foreseeable future—be...
The Digital Mob Bunker Vision
It’s a familiar story these days: somebody is killed in broad daylight in front of witnesses. After the lawyers (and judges) perform their machinations, the killer walks. A new round of comments and editorials appear about how there are two justice systems. The...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Superbowl Sunday at the Geffen Contemporary; “Das Zimmer” (The Room) in Pipilotti Rist Exhibition, Los Angeles, 2022
SHOPTALK: LA Art News Art Fairs, Gallery Movement, and more
Frieze 2022 The art fairs have returned, and with such a burst of optimistic energy! Maybe they’re signaling the lifting of the curse of COVID—or our fervent hope for its end. And maybe artists, during all the imposed quarantines and self-isolations, have devoted...
René Magritte and the First Art Gang Book Review of "Magritte: A Life"
Magritte: A Life By Alex Danchev 439 pages, illustrated Pantheon Books When an artist achieves the kind of iconic status where they are known outside of the Art World, there can often be a tendency to codify their myth into something that might pass the Elevator Pitch...
ASK BABS But Is It Exploitive?
Dear Babs, I recently saw a gallery show where an artist staged photographs of a person experiencing extreme poverty, collaborating with them to execute the pictures. The photos were moving, but they left me feeling kinda gross. Am I guilty of unethical voyeurism?...
Poems "Kiefer Lights a Big Cigar" by Klipschutz; "The Poet’s Garden" by John Tottenham
Kiefer Lights a Big Cigar & waves the heavy machinery into place He rearranges the rubble speaking whichever language suits the occasion He & Tony saunter through a tunnel in the South of France “It’s my gesture” is what he says about his art His use of...
COMICS Joseph Wright of Derby
CODE ORANGE March-April 2022 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner Laurie Gwen Shapiro and our finalists, Laurie Gwen's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the March/April 2022 online edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to...
No Humans Involved Hammer Museum
The landmark exhibition “No Humans Involved” was remarkably compact, filling a single gallery at the Hammer with installations by only seven artists. Its impact, however, was seismic and sustained. Its title alone was enough to take viewers aback—and that was part of...
Mary Brøgger RoseGallery
After remaining indoors for over a year, it’s refreshing to be confronted with the idea of the natural passage of time in the outside world—how life consciously accumulates and mutates, even when we aren’t there to watch it happen. Mary Brøgger’s retrospective...
Eric Croes Richard Heller Gallery
Towering more than six-feet high, three large glazed ceramic totems confront viewers who enter the gallery space. These works—Fakir’s Foot, Philosof’s Foot and Fantomas’ Foot, (all 2021–22)—by Brussels-based sculptor Eric Croes, function as the introduction to his...
Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror Vellum LA
This thoughtful, surprising, eclectic yet focused group bridges the gap between an elevated gallery presentation and the untamed wilds of the cryptoart space. “Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror” is organized around the theme of architecture. Displayed on high-res...
PORTALS Angels Gate Cultural Center
Thresholds—with their curious balancing act between two places, spaces or states—have always exercised a tremendous pull upon human imagination. It is, without even working at it, a naturally apt analogy for multiple types of transformation. The number of commonly...
Noelia Towers de boer
Noelia Towers’ new collection of works, “Opening an Umbrella Indoors” (all works 2021), presents a world of dichotomies: pleasure/pain, soft/hard, natural/synthetic, obscured/vulnerable. The collection of paintings is consistent in its motifs of both overt and covert...
Raymond Logan George Billis Gallery
From George Washington’s celebrated portrait to Frank Sinatra’s mug shot, Raymond Logan paints a wide range of subjects with exquisite depth and color. His layered palette resembles sculpture, crafted of hue and shadow. While each portrait in his current exhibition is...
Richard Wyatt Jr. Steve Turner
Capturing human dignity through drawing requires commitment not only to clearly see but to deeply observe. Current works by Richard Wyatt Jr. at Steve Turner gallery encapsulates such an act. As a muralist in the tradition of such predecessors as Charles White, John...
Miles Regis Von Lintel Gallery
Trinidadian artist Miles Regis searches for hope and meaning in the ugly and chaotic. An astute social commentator drawing from his experience as a Black man who emigrated to America 31 years ago, Regis imbues each canvas with a rich visual narrative dealing with...
Karla Knight The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
Karla Knight is sending us a message. With maps, symbols and UFOs, there are mysteries in every piece. Four decades worth of paintings, tapestries and drawings are on view in Knight’s first institutional solo show, “Navigator,” at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum...