“Contemporary art: one, us: zero,” quipped a friend as we mistakenly toured what appeared to be the off-limits back room of Marian Goodman’s booth at Frieze New York. We were looking for Tino Sehgal’s performance Ann Lee. Aware of the nature of Sehgal’s work probing social boundaries through real life...
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For nearly five decades, Daniel Buren has used 8.7-centimeter stripes to highlight the lack of phenomenological neutrality of the exhibition space, his ubiquitous colored bands appearing everywhere from institutions such as Paris’s Grand Palais and the Centre Georges Pompidou to the hallowed escalators of Art Basel. (1) Not soon forgotten...
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It’s a cruel fact of art writing that when political work is positioned under weighty rhetoric, its vim and potency become threatened. The press release for Zoe Leonard’s exhibition at Murray Guy wavers on doing just that, suggesting that the show waxes philosophical on the nature of photography by asking...
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Superflex, the Danish trio who famously installed a life-sized replica of JP Morgan Chase’s bathroom in a dumpy Lower East Side diner, has opened a comparatively sober exhibition at Peter Blum, stringing banners emblazoned with the logos of bankrupt banks throughout the gallery’s Chelsea location. Appropriately titled “Bankrupt Banks,” the...
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As in Keren Cytter’s previous work, “Video Art Manual” strings together clichéd, Freudian-tinged narratives with a bad case of ADHD. Comprising four videos and a series of peripheral drawings, “Video Art Manual” is the stuff masochistic art critics live for: as soon as one eye rolling-worthy moment passes, such as...
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Something uncanny this way comes at Hauser and Wirth London: for Christoph Büchel’s latest feat in politically-charged trompe l’oeil, the Swiss artist dropped a well-used community center straight onto Piccadilly. Though it only opened a couple weeks ago, the gallery’s usual parquet is covered by worn linoleum, and each successive...
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