Here and Elsewhere, the New Museum’s colossal survey of contemporary art from the Arab world, sets for itself an impossible task. The curatorial strategy, as stated in the exhibition’s press release, is to work “against the notion of the Arab world as a homogenous or cohesive entity.” Though able to present a range of Arab identities, regionalisms, and geographies, the sprawling installation self-organizes and familiar tropes[…..]
In Made by Whites for Whites, Nick Cave’s new show at Jack Shainman Gallery, the artist continues to exhibit works characteristic of his making process, in which the reclamation of found objects functions as a catalyst. “It’s always the object that provides me the impulse,” he said in a recent talk at the gallery. “It’s always one thing that sort of sets it up. It[…..]
Roger Hiorns’ current solo exhibition at Luhring Augustine—the British artist’s first in New York City—presents viewers with two inscrutable situations: In one, a quantity of gray powder has been deposited, apparently by hand, over a large, rectangular area occupying the better part of the main gallery; in another, a nude male model loiters about a massive, faceted stone object and a low table, the surface[…..]
Strong Language, currently on view at the Jewish Museum, chronicles Mel Bochner’s longstanding dedication to the critique of language. The exhibition features over seventy text pieces the artist made between 1966 and 2013. While linguistic examination remains the common thread throughout the forty-plus years of work on display, the exhibition also evidences a recent turn by Bochner toward creating more conventional and easily commercialized fine-art[…..]
Recurrence, a five-artist exhibition curated by Luisa Aguilar Solis and Georgia Horn now at Fridman Gallery, takes its name from Italo Calvino’s 1968 novel, Daughters of the Moon. Calvino imagines a world in which capitalist society’s obsession with consumption and novelty, and the cycle of obsolescence that inevitably follows, reaches a fever pitch: People decide that the moon, cratered as it is, is past its[…..]
As Wojciech Kosma burst into a spontaneous fit of tears on the concrete floor of INTERSTATE, his performance partner, Sjoerd Dijk, stroked the artist’s hair and waited for their performance to end. Where did these tears come from? And why didn’t I believe them? The–family, of which Kosma and Dijk are a part, is a performance collective that stages highly physical, improvised conversations that attempt[…..]
Self-Taught Genius seeks to frame the collection of the American Folk Art Museum as an archive of the culture of self-education in the United States. The exhibition’s organizers draw their interpretation of the word “genius” from roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, embracing a definition that underscores the potential in all human beings for exceptional creativity, intuition, and insight. The use of the term “self-taught” embeds[…..]
