Julia Bryan-Wilson
IN A 2002 press briefing about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld issued his now-infamous series of statements about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Covert Operations: Investigating the Known Unknowns, which documents an exhibition held at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale, Arizona), takes its subtitle from Rumsfeld’s intentionally mystifying phrases. What methods of artistic response might speak to such a dizzying—and ultimately deathly—epistemological formulation? Sarah Sze, Triple Point (Pendulum), 2013, salt, water, stone, string, projector, video, pendulum, and mixed media, dimensions variable. IN A 2010 episode of the reality TV show Hoarders, a woman named Julie justifies her compulsive collecting by insisting that her scraps of fabric, empty bottles, discarded knickknacks, and other Dumpster-dive finds are materials for future […] Agnes Martin and Arne Glimcher in her new truck in Galisteo, New Mexico, 1979. AGNES MARTIN’S CANVASES OF CAREFUL parallel lines and pale washes made her one of the most influential and celebrated artists of our time. Heralded as a pivotal figure for both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, she died in 2004 at the age […] In 1971, Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler announced his intention to “photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive, in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled.” His Variable Piece #70 was, unsurprisingly, never completed, but Huebler’s comprehensive cataloguing impulse is telling: It speaks of a desire to map the contours of civilization, to capture and behold the mass of humanity. What do we, collectively, look like? And how do we depict ourselves to ourselves? Courtesy George and Betty Woodman. IN THE THIRTY YEARS since artist Francesca Woodman committed suicide, her reputation as a photographer has steadily grown alongside her mythic status as a kind of tragic heroine. Her self-portraits are widely imitated by young female art students eager to insert their own bodies into elusive narratives. The somewhat extravagant […] Yayoi Kusama with Accumulation No. 1 and Egg Carton Relief No. B, 3 (both 1962), New York. In her newly translated 2002 autobiography, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama describes her dense all-over paintings as “white nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness.” Such a mystic, existential idea of art […]