In 1979 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, American avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton gave a lecture devoted to the origins of film and the utility of defunct technologies. Toward the end, Frampton paused to vaguely describe a work of art composed of the accumulating detritus, by-products, and disparate actions piling up in his studio, which he called A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without[…..]

Retrospectives are tricky things—despite the often incomplete, reductive, and forced nature of the form, it is the curatorial genre put into action the most, and the one that most easily conforms to the logic of the museum and the market through its presentation of the individual artist’s career as linear and progressive. Audiences love them, art historians and critics love to complain about them, and[…..]

Sitting just inside the Great Hall and squeezed between two major retrospective exhibitions of wedding dresses and fashion photographs at the Victoria & Albert in London sits Disobedient Objects, a small but powerful show examining the materials, methods, and inventions of political dissent across the world since the late 1970s. Rich and diverse in its choice of objects, the one-room gallery places a strong emphasis[…..]