Gutke’s artworks place two ways of understanding analogue projection technology side by side: Exploded View examines what a projector is; Lighthouse demonstrates what a projector does.

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of its Artist in the Marketplace program, the Bronx Museum has published Taking AIM: The Business of Being an Artist Today. In my text, I use reviews of the annual Artist in the Marketplace exhibitions published in the New York Times to trace recent developments in art and the art world, including the fluctuations of the market, the ethnic diversity of artists, and the rise of the MFA program.

Published in Aperture 202, Spring 2011. Sara VanDerBeek’s contribution to the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2009 exhibition was A Composition for Detroit, a quartet of photographs made that year. Like the photographs she had been exhibiting for the previous half decade, it is made up of images of images: each panel depicts a [...]

Tauba Auerbach has expanded her range of inquiry from an early focus on the semiotics of written language; now she frequently devises small-scale experiments in unpredictability to be carried out in the studio. She carefully designs criteria for these operations, disciplines the variables under her control (most of which are identified with artistic subjectivity), and then carries her investigations to their logical conclusions. That the resultant artworks do not always match up to the expected results—what should be truly random often in fact follows chaotic patterns—raises fascinating questions about chance, circumstance, and intention.

My essay “New York: Branching Out” is included in The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Catalogue Raisonné, published recently by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It focuses on developments in the New York art world from 2003 to 2005, the years in which the drawings collection was being compiled, and begins this way [...]

Published as “The Storyteller” in the exhibition catalogue accompanying Ryan Gander’s exhibition “Heralded as the New Black.” The exhibition premiered at the IKON Gallery, Brimingham, and traveled to the South London Gallery and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. For more information, click here. “I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to [...]

Published in Fillip issue six, summer 2007. A problem: The Crisis of Criticism, edited by Maurice Berger; the 2002 October roundtable on “The Crisis in Criticism”; Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice, edited by Raphael Rubinstein; and, in truth, this essay. What is to be made of contemporary writers—myself included—who lament [...]

Essay for the book Matias Faldbakken: Not Made Visible (JRP Ringier, 2007). You can draw a zigzag line across history and the arts, highlighting negation as a force of change by connecting, for example, Martin Luther to Bartleby the Scrivener to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing to Lee Lozano to the World Social Forum. [...]

The Uncertain States of America Reader, published by Sternberg Press in late 2006, is an anthology of essays about and of interest to contemporary artists. The book was published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, which was presented at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, the Center for Curatorial Studies [...]

Published in Parkett issue 75. No work in Brooklyn-based painter Dana Schutz’s first three exhibitions could have prepared viewers for Presentation (2005), which was first exhibited earlier this year in “Greater New York 2005″ at P.S. 1. (It is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the museum was so eager [...]

Published in Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (Phaidon), 2005. “The most important thing about the work is that it is destroyed,” says Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright about his gouache wall paintings, improvised on site and covered over at the end of each exhibition. His mostly abstract works, which often occupy very little of the [...]

Published in Afterall issue 11. The forward thrust of modernist ambition, which despite many counter- and cross-currents, birthed a more-or-less linear progression of artistic movements during much of the twentieth century — Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism, Conceptual art, Post-Minimalism, to name a few — finally began to give way in the [...]

Published in the catalogue accompanying the short-lived exhibition “Terminal Five.” To read more about the exhibition, click here and here. From a billboard detergent advertisement to the weather forecast on the morning radio, from the menu at a favorite restaurant to snippets of conversation overheard in line at the DMV, we constantly process, sort, and [...]

Published in the catalogue accompanying the short-lived exhibition “Terminal Five.” To read more about the exhibition, click here and here. Mark Handforth possesses the increasingly rare ability to make sculptures that engage the eye, the body, and the mind. With an incisive wit and visual sophistication, the Miami-based artist pairs the handmade with appropriated everyday [...]

Published in issue one of Work magazine, fall 2004. It’s by design that Brooklyn-based Christine Hill is seated behind a desk in the accompanying photo. An unusual theme among contemporary artists, “work” is both subject and object of Hill’s multifaceted practice. Over the past dozen years, she has assumed the role of receptionist, shopkeeper, rock [...]

Published in a brochure accompanying the artist’s solo exhibition in the Hammer Projects series at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. For more information and images, click here. Milwaukee-based Argentinean artist Santiago Cucullu chooses historically marginalized figures and events (often from his homeland’s anarchist movement) as the subject of his works, which include large wall drawings [...]

Published in Flash Art, May 2004. New York artist David Altmejd’s grotesque sculptures, usually comprised of heads or other fragments of monster bodies, directly engage the repressed underside of our imagination and incongruously mix the things we dare not consciously consider with a certain sense of cheap glamour. His recent works, accumulations of small, sparkling [...]

Published in English and Japanese in Paper Sky issue 11. For the past twelve years, Los Angeles-based Doug Aitken, now in his mid-30s, has made a string of seductively beautiful single- and multi-channel video installations along with films, installations, photographs, sound works, collages, and artist’s books. The varied output is indicative of his complete comfort [...]

Published in the 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibition catalogue. New York artist Aïda Ruilova creates short format videos inspired by the collage aesthetic of avant-garde cinema and the tensions that horror films elicit. Maximizing the power of both sound and image, Ruilova’s meticulously edited works compress cinema’s narrative conventions to highlight physical and psychic conflicts. Her [...]

Published in the 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibition catalogue. Lecia Dole-Recio creates variously scaled artworks that can simultaneously be considered paintings, drawings, collages, or wall-based sculptures. Using a wide array of materials including cardboard, paper, tape, a knife, graphite, and glue in addition to paint, her hybrid works employ a language of handmade geometric abstraction to [...]

Published as “Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland,” a one-off photocopied fanzine, in an edition of 250 copies. SETTING THE STAGE Written in 1987 and presented in Atlanta at an academic conference on evil, Cady Noland’s Towards a Metalanguage of Evil outlines in detail the power politics inherent to the relationship between a psychopath [...]