In Roger Ballen’s “Boarding House” there are few actual subjects with which to identify. The already claustrophobic, airless interiors of the building have been further flattened by Ballen’s bright flash, and in the shallow compositional field that results one finds not whole bodies but parts.

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.

As evidenced in this exhibition, poetry most often takes precedence over science for Dodge. That was the show’s chief strength and its primary liability. Yet the strongest artwork included here proved the value of Dodge’s explorations at the edge of sentimentality.

The editors of Frieze magazine invited me to write about some of my favorite books published this year. My response, posted here, was paired with that of Amit Chaudhuri and is published in issue 128 (January-February 2010).

Epstein began with a straightforward if ambitious premise—to depict our nation’s varied energy infrastructure—but quickly expanded his remit to include several notions of power that course through American society as invisibly as does electricity through the national grid. Cooling towers and reactors factor in many of the images, yet each kind of power—not only literal, but also political, economic, and the power of nature—impacts upon the others.

8 Natural Handstands (1969) is emblematic of the small but potent body of sculptures, photographs, and performances Kinmont created in the late 1960s and early ’70s, many of which were also on view in this exhibition, his first solo show in thirty-eight years.

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 first [...]

My interview with Luc Sante, about his new book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930 (Yeti/Verse Chorus Press), has just been published on Artforum.com. Click through not only to read his ruminations on this early-twentieth-century phenomenon, but also to see a slide show of additional images from the book. In the course of our [...]

Ranging idiosyncratically across the last two centuries, art historian Charlotte Klonk examines the influence of colour theorists, psychologists, businessmen and artists on the design decisions undertaken by museum directors in Europe and the USA. Klonk shows how changing theories of perception and individuality, as well as evolving attitudes toward gallery visitors, were at the centre of some surprisingly intense debates about how to present art.

Published on Artforum.com on September 25, 2009. To see the review in context, click here. The exhibition remains on view at Matthew Marks Gallery until October 24, 2009.
Some of the pictures in this exhibition were published a decade ago in Doubletake magazine; most have never been exhibited. They were made from 1956 to 1958, while [...]

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 on Artforum.com on September 23, 2009. To see the review in context, click here. Troy Brauntuch’s exhibition remains on view at Friedrich Petzel Gallery until October 17.

This exhibition presents a three-decade sampling of Troy Brauntuch’s art, including a preponderance of small sketches, notes, and other source materials for his larger paintings and drawings. A [...]

This idiosyncratic and entertaining history uses five paintings by Johannes Vermeer and two additional artifacts to explore nascent global trade. Small details in the canvases—the officer’s hat in Officer and Laughing Girl, the globe resting on a cabinet in the background of The Geographer, the silver coins about to be weighed in Woman Holding a Balance—act as “doors,” in Brook’s phrasing, that open onto the seventeenth century.

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.

Since 1996, German artist Florian Slotawa has created “Besitzarbeiten” (Property Works), a series of sculptural installations comprising various functional objects removed from his Berlin apartment and meticulously arranged in a gallery setting. The newest, Besitzarbeit XII, 2009, is the sole artwork in this exhibition, Slotawa’s first solo outing in New York…

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 in Artforum, summer 2009.
Los Angeles artist Ry Rocklen’s fascination with the “soul residue” of discarded objects leads him to create sculptures that, while not anthropomorphic, possess many human qualities: tenderness, a complicated history, resilience despite apparent fragility. “Good Heavens,” the artist’s first exhibition in New York since the 2008 Whitney Biennial, emphasized that the [...]