You might want to spare a whole day, or better yet two, to get through the overload of video works currently on view at the New Museum. For the museum’s main event, Lynn Hershman Leeson, pioneer of cybernetic personae, has at long last been dignified with a retrospective, Twisted, which for some may conjure memories … Continue reading
Remember that subaquatic ‘eye of fire’ boiling like a cauldron in the Gulf of Mexico a few weeks ago? Another chapter in our woeful history of blowouts, releasing millions of gallons of crude oil into the open sea, presenting us with mortifying images of dead and near-dead oil-slicked marine creatures gasping for air. Continue reading
As one of those annoying and agendaless hangers-on at the Outsider Art Fair these last few years, I couldn’t resist the additional prospect of artist/socialite Takashi Murakami making time between his mass-market endeavors to oversee a large-scale group exhibition of around two hundred sculptural works by approximately 60 visionary and vernacular folk artists from around … Continue reading
The inventor Nikola Tesla had a proclivity to give himself electrotherapeutic shocks. According to biographer Richard Munson, Tesla suffered debilitating depression, and it was not unusual at the time to deploy mild shocks to treat such an ailment. Each morning he would disrobe and stand naked upon his “vitality booster,” gradually administering higher doses. Michael … Continue reading
The Brooklyn Museum’s latest offering Studio 54: Night Magic, curated and designed by Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture, could, for some discerning spectators, be alternately called Studio 54: Lite. The curatorial focus is, of course, on fashion and design, so adjust your expectations as such. It’s about meticulous attention to lavish … Continue reading
Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, forthcoming from Verso Books, describes “glitch” as both an error, a “failure to function,” and thus an area of opportunity as well as an undoing. In this conversation, we attempt to flesh out parts of the whole for Filthy Dreams… Jessica Caroline: Your first chapter GLITCH REFUSES begins with … Continue reading
“Doing things, similar things…” These are the vague yet salient words extracted from Trump’s predictably maladroit national emergency address, unwittingly evoking the bracingly confrontational and unnerving self-portraiture of our inadvertent queen of self-quarantine: Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja. As we bunker down in our contaminated cities, fantasizing about remote escapes, and “cancel culture” takes on a … Continue reading
When we think of the world, we tend to think of it in terms of endings and deaths rather than beginnings. Only a very select few could make the case that they have the capitalism they want and yet, as writer/teacher/influence-peddler McKenzie Wark has continued to wager over the years since A Hacker Manifesto, Molecular … Continue reading
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon of perusing exhibitions around the Lower East Side, and somewhat of a synchronistic moment to meet the artist Martin Wilner in midst of his current exhibition The Case Histories at Pierogi. Wilner invited each of the gallery’s artists to produce their own “responsa” to his dialogue with them, each … Continue reading
I don’t mind today but the everyday makes me barf. There’s no such thing. Puking would put something on the sidewalk of the everyday so it might begin to be now. —Eileen Myles, Sorry, Tree, 2007. I continue to find this statement perplexing, even after a day that finished hurling on the pavement of an … Continue reading