“I feel a vague nausea stroking and tapping the lining of my stomach,” writes David Wojnarowicz in his essay “In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins.” I don’t think I ever quite understood the feeling of David’s nausea until this past week. It took everything in me not … Continue reading
One of the last works on view in the winding, labyrinth-like galleries of the Whitney Museum’s long awaited David Wojnarowicz retrospective History Keeps Me Awake At Night features a hand, presumably the artist’s own, holding a tiny, adorable frog. Just one example of Wojnarowicz’s lifelong affinity for creepy-crawly things–bugs, frogs, snakes, etc., this tender and … Continue reading
Underneath the 1980s nostalgia of Netflix’s drama Stranger Things, the sleepy Midwestern town of Hawkins, Indiana becomes a porous portal into an alternate dimension that the kids on the show call “The Upside Down.” Continue reading
Betty Tompkins’s solo exhibition Virgins at P.P.O.W. Gallery arrives at an apt time of increasing mainstream attention to whiteness as a distinctive ethnicity. Currently, there lacks critical attention to the whiteness of imagery that Tompkins depicts, instead framing Tompkins’s represented sexual liberation in the context of all women. Continue reading
“Taste is style, and to know bad taste, of course, you have to have been taught the rules of the tyranny of good taste so you can yearn to break them,” says our preeminent filth elder John Waters. John knows a thing or two about good taste, but then so do we. By we, I … Continue reading
What would happen if we looked back–past the contemporary Western civilization that we know? Past governments that try to regulate use of bathrooms depending on the biological sex written on birth certificates? Past governmental restrictions on who can be served at what establishment? Past rigidly constructed sexual and gender identities based on science, law and religion? Past, as Foucault described, biopower and biopolitics? What would happen if we looked back to cultures where there were no identities only acts? Continue reading
“My films exist only to remind audiences the absolute certainty that they do not live in the best of all possible worlds,” once said Luis Buñuel, whose exuberant lens bore some of the most buoyant and triggering representations of 20th century. Anthony Iacono’s Crudités at Sunset, on view at PPOW Gallery through August 7th, imbues … Continue reading