Recently Published Reviews

David Lowenthal contends that the heritage conservation movement came about largely as a result of “a sense of loss,” as humans saw their built environment vanish at alarming rates during the last century (David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). In the United Kingdom, an island nation, the loss of each historic building often seems to be magnified by longstanding introspection, as the British worry over every facet of their culture like aged librarians. When that building is a great country house, it can seem as if the sky is falling. … Full Review

The catalogue accompanying Walid Raad’s eponymous survey at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a beautiful volume with extensive documentation of the artist’s oeuvre from the 1990s to today; it will undoubtedly serve as the go-to resource on the artist for years to come. Ironically, it is also colored by a set of historiographic problems that Raad himself vigorously works over in his artistic production. What does it mean that alongside a contribution by the exhibition’s curator, Eva Respini, MoMA commissioned a historian of Islamic art, Finbarr Barry Flood, to write the second catalogue essay? What is the significance… Full Review

In the earliest works featured in her mid-career survey at the Hammer Museum, Frances Stark traces excerpts from classic works of literature on carbon paper, investigating the intimate relationship forged between writer and reader, artist and viewer. Painstakingly, she has copied the serif font of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) by hand, as well as the scrawled, and at times inscrutable, marginalia found in a secondhand copy of the poem. These annotations do not illuminate Eliot’s text so much as they gesture to the interiority and intellectual life of the anonymous reader, who scribbles… Full Review

How do we know the world exists? This question, which precedes Martin Heidegger’s examination of the meaning of Being itself in Being and Time (trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), brings Heidegger quickly to the terms by which we can “know” the material world. His argument singles out “useless things” as key to the process by which the world discloses itself to us, for these disturb the instrumental order of everyday existence, opening an awareness of the “totality.” The sense of yielding that Heidegger evokes here with the term “disclosure” is important, and he singles it out… Full Review

Picasso Sculpture, curated by Ann Temkin and Anne Umland at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, is the first in-depth survey of Pablo Picasso’s sculptural production since the exhibitions held in London and New York City in 1967. In the preceding years, Picasso’s sculptures were barely seen, even in reproduction, as the artist—with what I take to be his animist inclinations—held onto many of the works for dear life. The three-dimensional bodies kept Picasso company in ways stacks of paintings and drawings could not, and they nurtured his imagination in ways he needed. The… Full Review

In 1977, when she was 57 years old, artist Lygia Clark decided to abandon art. For thirty-odd years she had been working through a series of questions concerning space, time, ontological perception, and experience, slowly refining each in a quest to “unite art and life” (Lygia Clark, “Lecture at the Escola Nacional de Arquitetura, Belo Horizonte, Fall 1956,” quoted in the exhibition catalogue, 54). Although not the first, or the last, avant-garde artist to arrive at this conclusion, Clark seems to have legitimately reached this decision after three decades of systematic research, in which she believed she had exhausted all… Full Review

Curated by the prominent John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) scholar Richard Ormond, the exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents ninety-two works that depict members of the artist’s vast social circle. Spread across five rooms and organized chronologically by Sargent’s location, these images chart the ways in which the artist’s personal relationships and growing prestige afforded him substantial access to creative personalities who would influence his understanding of the arts. The Met’s display included a further gallery of immensely candid watercolors and drawings from their collections. These additional images productively served to highlight both… Full Review

Introduction Design is a rich word. Its core meaning is a plan, so it refers by extension to evidence of the activity of planning, such as blueprints, technical drawings, and sketches on the backs of envelopes. However, it is also used to refer to the products of the activity of designing, such as designed objects, systems, and behaviors. Design history encompasses the study of design in order to find out about the past, and the study of the past in order to better understand design. Here I will briefly sketch the development of design history for those unfamiliar… Full Review

In the early 1970s, a new trend emerged among the members of the Union of Artists of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Diverse groups of painters from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and the Russian urban centers of Moscow and Leningrad began to demonstrate a keen interest in photo-realism, producing large-scale canvases that mimicked the formal properties of photography, film, television, and other forms of mass visual media. Despite their prevalence, most of these works were not widely seen during the late Soviet period. As good standing members of the Union of Artists, the photo-realist painters received… Full Review

Much contemporary political art, however strong in conviction, feels resigned to an inability to affect the conditions it addresses: Ai Weiwei on the migrant crisis, Laura Poitras on surveillance, and Olafur Eliasson on global warming are proximate in 2016. Conversely, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia at the Walker Art Center remembers a moment when people believed that art could radically alter society. Hippie Modernism is filled with over two hundred and fifty objects—posters, paintings, a geodesic dome, ephemera, inflatables, film, a pink PVC bodysuit. A great strength of the exhibition is that it makes palpable a sense of urgency… Full Review

Before viewing any of the artworks in the exhibition, visitors to Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) encounter a wall-sized, vertically oriented black-and-white photograph of a denim-clad Jackson Pollock, hammer in his back pocket, leaning closely to inspect the surface of one of his black enamel paintings. The painting he scrutinizes, Number 22, 1951, hangs in bright sunlight on the exterior wall of a wood-shingled barn. His forehead seems almost to touch the canvas as his body casts a gray shadow over the majority of its surface. A reproduction of this previously unpublished photograph… Full Review

Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, a group exhibition curated by Alison Gingeras for the Dallas Contemporary that consists of works made mostly in the 1970s by Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins, and Cosey Fanni Tutti, is prefaced by stanchion signs warning that the show “contains strong adult content” and that “parental guidance + viewer discretion is advised.” After checking in at the front desk, I was told that due to the sexually graphic nature of the show none of the works on exhibit could be photographed. This is proof enough that the artworks on display… Full Review

Stella Nair’s excellent new study of the Inca royal estate at Chinchero, Peru, At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero, examines the experiential aspects of this site in relation to indigenous ideologies of space and the built environment. The book is divided into chapters that consider Inca ideas of place and time; specific architectural features; the community that built Chinchero under the direction of the tenth Inca king, Topa Inca; and that same community in the shadow of conquest. The volume’s aim, as stated in the introduction, is the “philosophical and archaeological inquiry into… Full Review

The exhibition Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television offered objects and images meant to rise above the proverbial ambient static of TV—here figured literally as a wallpaper background—in an effort to argue for the formative influence of avant-garde art on the medium’s look and content in its early years. To be sure, the selections of television clips, furniture, artwork, and ephemera beguile and entertain, introducing young visitors to a bygone age of television and sending older visitors on a journey back to a Sunday night gathered with family around the modern hearth to watch… Full Review

Visual artist Seth Price’s Fuck Seth Price declares itself a novel. It claims this clearly on the cover: A Novel—with a capital “N.” While Fuck Seth Price is the artist’s fourth book, it is his first self-declared novel, though its qualifications to this identity begin to disintegrate even before one flips open the small volume’s die-cut cover. What readers find in the relatively short span of the book’s 122 pages is not a novel in any recognizable sense (though it makes minimal, perhaps token, gestures toward the narrative form), but rather a somewhat schizophrenic deluge of thoughts on art—and particularly… Full Review