Stupidity is a tricky thing. It’s omnipresent, but usually hidden. It can be the place where things begin—first drafts, new ideas—but it’s also a final judgment. As philosopher Avital Ronell points out, stupidity has its own nature and contours, yet we rarely take time to explore it. We tell children...
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The wool of a black sheep, I was surprised to learn, isn’t black at all—it comes in numerous subtle variations of dark brown. Helen Mirra’s recent exhibition “Waulked,” offers several such lessons; seemingly random observations about organic materials, traditional crafts, and what could be called “more grounded” ways of being...
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I puzzled over the word “euqinimod” in the exhibition’s title for some time, until I figured out that it’s the artist’s name spelled backwards. And for viewers familiar with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s work of the past two decades, the show does seem like an inversion of her typical approach, and an...
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“It’s like watching paint dry,” you might say of something unreasonably boring. Watching an ice cube melt suggests the same thing. And a melting ice cube was the only thing happening onstage, for about an hour, during Florian Hecker’s commission for this year’s Performa Biennial. Luckily for the audience, C.D....
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For over two decades, British artists (and sisters) Jane and Louise Wilson have meticulously documented the architectural ruins of twentieth-century modernity. In specific, their focus has been directed towards the dire fate of obsolete military-industrial constellations. Like many artists coming of age after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, their...
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MY DEAR J—, when you did me the honor of asking for an analysis of the Armory Show, you said, “Be brief; do not write a review, but a general impression, something like the account of a rapid philosophical walk through the galleries, an overview of a century of art...
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