Smith’s curatorial effort, drawn largely from his museum’s collection, was a meditation on the role photographs play in granting us access to pasts no longer extant. Though both life and death appear in its title, the general drift of this exhibition was toward ends, toward ruins.

An excerpt from and link to my review of “Weegee: Murder Is My Business,” an exhibition at the International Center of Photography.

An excerpt from my review of “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” on view at the Museum of the City of New York.

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.

An excerpt from and link to my appreciation of the Los Angeles–based art critic Bruce Hainley, which has appeared at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

This is the fourth edition of the triennale, and the first to make the Yokohama Museum of Art its primary venue. Titled “Our Magic Hour,” the show focused upon an ability to see the wonderful in the everyday that has long been popularly ascribed to artists. The magic invoked is not one of mysticism, but rather of the temporary suspension of disbelief: artists see things differently than you and me and can show us what that seeing feels like.

The mushroom cloud is the icon of the nuclear age. It is much harder, however, to picture what the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like. This is not for lack of visual evidence. The presentation at the International Center of Photography of several dozen photographs from the USSBS archive is therefore a chance to become better acquainted with the fearsome power at human disposal.

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 [...]

Brands’s briskly paced, accessible book features the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Pierpont Morgan, American Colossus is not a fine-grained history of the business revolution they wrought or its effects on American workers. It is instead a broad survey of the period that uses “the triumph of capitalism” as a loose interpretive framework.

Published in Aperture 199, Summer 2010. “Joe Deal: New Work” was presented at the RISD Museum of Art, Providence, September 4, 2009–January 3, 2010. A version of the show is on view at Robert Mann Gallery, New York, until May 8, and will then travel to the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, June 5–August 1, [...]

A two-hour visit to “Dance with Camera” neither exhausts a viewer’s patience nor leaves one with the sinking feeling of having missed great swaths of what was on offer. The exhibition successfully presents dance as a profitable frame of reference through which to understand anew collaboration, narrative propulsion, the body, and other topics artists wrestle with today.

Published in Aperture 197 (Winter 2009). Seen one at a time, Jochen Lempert’s black-and-white photographs of the natural world and its inhabitants do not make great claims upon a viewer. Some have artless compositions; others seem out of focus or to have no subject at all. Encountered in aggregate, however, as in Field Work, the [...]

My copies of Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited and introduced by Steven Henry Madoff, arrived with today’s mail. Madoff invited me to formulate a questionnaire concerning art education and circulate it among prominent artists. The respondents, who discuss their experiences as both students and teachers, are Ann Hamilton, Dana Schutz, Fred Wilson, Guillermo Kuitca, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Matthew Higgs, Mike Kelley, Paul Chan, Paul Ramírez-Jonas, Piero Golia, Shirin Neshat, and Thomas Bayrle. Madoff_art_school_coverMy introduction and a selection of the artists’ answers are below.

Published in Paper Monument issue one, September 2007. There is no establishing shot. Kodak begins with an image of four elegantly curved metal ducts, from which extend cables sheathed in accordion-fold sleeves. The film unfurls from there. Ribbons of semitransparent blue film stock scroll left-to-right, fluttering like small waves or sheaves of wheat buffeted by [...]

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 [...]

In the 60s, as art historian James Meyer points out in the introduction to a newly published collection of Andre’s writings, artists increasingly picked up the pen—to contextualize their work and to refute the claims of an ever-growing cadre of professional critics, whether overly literary or dryly theoretical. They often wrote, paradoxically, to insist on the primacy of the art viewing experience. Foremost among these artist-writers was Donald Judd [...]

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 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 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 [...]

Published in the first issue of Ten Verses, a now-defunct online magazine I edited in 2002–2003. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have collaborated since 1995. Their art fuses the legacy of 1960s and 1970s institutional critique with sexual and identity politics. In their Powerless Structures, often taking the form of sculptural installations, the “white cube” [...]