Lightning is a natural phenomenon that claims: a science (fulminology), an official fear (astraphobia), persistent metaphors (enlightenment, eureka), one of the best examples of concision in English literature (“picnic, lightning,” Nabokov’s explanation of a death in Lolita), and a false maxim (“Lightning never strikes the same place twice”).
When you sit down to read a review, as you are doing right now (unless you are standing—in which case, please sit down and take a minute), you rarely have a sense of where the critic is writing from: what time of day it is, what she has eaten, what else she has just read or seen, what’s on her mind. But all of this factors into the work, just as wherever you are as a reader, and how you are feeling, will, too. The pleasure of a critical essay can often be the escape it grants from diachronic time;
In Charles R. Rushton’s 1991 black-and-white portrait, Agnes Martin (1912–2004) sits in a wooden rocking chair in the left third of the frame, beside the white cement wall of her New Mexico studio. One of her canonical six-by-six-feet canvases hangs low to the ground next to her, its horizontal pencil-edge bands running out of the picture to the right. She’s dressed like a plainclothes nun, in comfortable white sneakers, flannel pants, and a collared shirt under a dark cardigan buttoned to the neck. Her hands are seton each armrest with a square assurance that recalls Gertrude Stein, and the photo’s
INTO A contemporary landscape of data mining and information fracking comes Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces, a beautifully absurd accumulation of useless numbers and gravid blankness. This slip of a book—written in French in 2004 and published this year as one of twenty-two volumes in conjunction with the Whitney Biennial—inventories artworks that “are either unfinished, lost, forgotten, destroyed, or that were never even made” in fragments culled (without footnotes) from ghostly references in biographies, newspapers, and the like. What are we to do with the fact that “ninety percent of the bronzes of Greek antiquity have been lost” or that—allegedly—only
Isa Genzken, Disco Soon (Ground Zero), 2008, cardboard, plastic, mirror, spray paint, synthetic polymer, metal, fabric, light ropes, foil, paper, fiberboard, casters, 86 1/2 x 80 3/4 x 65″. THE TITLE OF ISA GENZKEN’S 1992 midcareer survey, “Everybody needs at least one window,” alluded to one of her sculpture series, as well as to the […]
Eva Hesse, Top Spot, 1965, tempera, enamel, cord, found objects (metal, plastic, porcelain), particleboard, wood, 82 x 21 1/4 x 12 3/4″ (variable). WHAT DOES A CREATIVE BREAKTHROUGH look like? Can it be something that “abounds with nonsense”? Eva Hesse 1965 attempts to answer this question with a focused, if at times repetitious, study of […]
Salvatore Scarpitta, Sun Dial for Racing, 1962, resin, canvas, aluminum paper, and flex tubing, 89 1/4 x 72 1/2 x 5 1/2″. THAT THE RACE CAR is at the center of Salvatore Scarpitta’s art is hardly surprising, since in life he was perpetually in motion: He was born in New York but grew up in […]
William Eggleston’s Democratic Forest begins with a single tree. Then, across ten volumes and more than a thousand photographs, we see a collective landscape, a vision that sweeps around the United States and overseas, through city centers and to the most forlorn edges of forest on a country road. But in the opening images, we are squarely in the American South, with an open ruin of a building, a gray storm waiting at the end of a road’s curve, the shell of a formal plantation house whose grand arcade has been overtaken by branches, neat crops stretching to a vanishing
TO REVISE OR REVOLT? That’s often the question when reviewing the Western canon’s historic gender troubles. A recent spate of exhibitions and books seeks to rectify the situation—or at least recover women’s place—via the opposite extreme of including only female artists. Even the arrangement of the work in the Abstract Expressionism room at the new Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) now privileges women. And yet curator Gwen F. Chanzit’s claim, in the introduction to this Denver Art Museum exhibition catalogue, that “art histories . . . continue the gender bias” doesn’t feel like much of a stretch, particularly
