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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Svenja Deininger’s current show at Marianne Boesky Gallery has a quietness to it, an air of minding its own business that can be initially disarming. From a distance, the geometric abstractions look as pristine and empty as the gallery’s walls: no external references, no critical provocations, nor expressive painterly effects—nothing,...
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When Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa was unveiled in the Paris salon of 1819, there were gasps of horror (and low whistles of admiration) at its political audacity. The painting depicted a public scandal of just three years prior, the tale of a slave ship stranded at sea...
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Mounir Fatmi’s invocation of that evocative term “oriental” for his second US solo exhibition is no accident. The Paris-based Moroccan artist frequently draws on charged references—linguistic, political, and historical—to deepen the critical bite of his work. The artworks themselves, however, are usually juxtapositions of found objects that produce conceptual one-liners...
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Michael Wang’s recent one-week exhibition, “Carbon Copies,” had nothing to do with those antiquated, inky sheets necessary before the advent of more efficient means of reproduction. For one thing, Wang’s work was nowhere near as messy. A trained architect, he used his first solo exhibition to “copy” twenty contemporary artworks...
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“Am I going haywire? Seriously. Am I going to finish the goddamn thing?” Hollis Frampton was frequently anxious about his monumental Magellan film project. “If you don’t finish an epic poem it is a more or less magnificent ruin,” he said. “This I probably have got to finish or I...
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