All of this, of course, runs counter to the reigning paradigm of the New York group show, which seeks to elevate the staid offerings of gallery backbenchers by smuggling in a few elder or late statesmen on consignment (a different, more optimistic type of never-never). A Harun Farocki video here, a Karen Kilimnik painting there, maybe a minor piece by Andrea Fraser or even Peter Hujar, and suddenly the inherent vacuity of the commercial group show is absolved, or at least optimised for dissemination online. Such conditions seem ripe for a moment to reconsider Josef Strau’s essay “The Non-productive Attitude,” 2006, exemplified to some degree by many of the artists on view, alongside other models of artistic “badness” more broadly. What could it be like, conceivably, to revisit these strategies today, for the Tenko generation? “So embarrassing,” Strau preemptively concludes, although this show gently suggests otherwise.

For the rollicking Hollywood Superstar Review, I wrote about On the Never-Never, a group show curated by Tenko Presents at Reena Spaulings. Read it here.

My short review of Craig Jun Li’s exhibition I Want to Love with No Fear at Chapter NY is out in the March issue of ArtReview:

Why analogue photography now? One response might be that conspicuously rematerializing the image – printing on unconventional materials, or capturing the projector’s immaterial light – restores some of photography’s indexical function, its ‘trace of the real,’ that has been lost since the advent of digital media. Another could be that film photography provides an approachable model, as it does in Flusser’s writings, to begin considering the far more confounding ‘black boxes’ structuring contemporary life. Flusser’s metaphor of the camera is just that, a metaphor, and so is Li’s – it scales.

You can read the rest here.

JEFF KOONS: PORCELAIN SERIES (GAGOSIAN, NEW YORK)

It is now the year of the Horse, but also the year of some blank mystic – the Cloud Dancer, a personified Color of the Year. Last year, it was the year of Mocha Mousse, the Pantone shade of slam poetry and the Iraq War comedown, the warm retro hue of Bright Eyes and muted protest. This year, k-pop Vanilla Sky, wired EarPods, sleepy dancing at the edge of the world. A sandman prophet dressed in all white GU. Don’t trust him. BBC News Pidgin warns even the Horse might not be strong enough to resist the charms of this beguiling Dancer: “Horse fit get speed but if e no get di endurance of Camel e no go fit cross desert.” A great proverb, let’s not forget it.

At the galleries, slower sales encourage fewer, longer exhibitions. In Tribeca, a show might now stay open for two months. In Chelsea, a Louise Bourgeois show lasts nearly six. You can visit it right now, or maybe you already saw it before …

Read more

LUTZ BACHER: BURNING THE DAYS (ASTRUP FEARNLEY MUSEET, OSLO)

Just look at the promotional images. Images drawn from Lutz Bacher’s photographic suite Jackie & Me, 1989, refashioned as museum advertisements. Plastered around Oslo, on the trams as well as the city’s distinctive nedstigningstårn, or otherwise printed on gift shop postcards and tote bags, they announce the first comprehensive Lutz Bacher retrospective following the artist’s death in 2019. Characteristic of Bacher’s work in general, Jackie & Me is both completely straightforward and dizzyingly complex: the series comprises seven pages lifted and enlarged, without further alteration, from Jacqueline, a 1974 monograph on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Ron Galella, Andy Warhol’s favorite paparazzo. The images depict Kennedy Onassis, atypically clad in jeans and a t-shirt, running through Central Park, given chase by the camera’s gaze. We never catch the photographed woman’s face; if not for the signature hairstyle, a glimpse of the oversized sunglasses, we might wonder if the subject is indeed the real Jackie Kennedy. As in Bacher’s other appropriation works, the images’ accompanying texts are left intact, retaining the gleefully exploitative tenor of Galella’s book captions. (“A woman gave me that ‘get lost’ look––and then I saw Jackie right in front of me!”) Tabloid images complicated by their transfiguration into contemporary art: now they are about something other or larger or broader than bargain bin titillation, although they are still about that, too. Placed in exhibition, successively arrayed as a short narrative sequence, the images form an art-historical riposte – a row of seven evasive Jackies to Warhol’s iconic grid of Nine.


At Astrup Fearnley, the fugitive Jackie also becomes a somewhat obvious stand-in for Bacher herself. From the mid-1970s, Bacher worked pseudonymously, and from the mid-1990s on, she began to eschew the regular demands of publicity required of artists in an age of fax announcements and magazine features. Basic details of her life were concealed, media photos became scarce or obscured, interviews rare, press releases increasingly opaque. Dismayed by a newspaper review that seemed to respond to an accompanying exhibition text rather than to the exhibition itself, Bacher initially set these parameters to encourage a more direct encounter with her work, one unfettered by biographical interpretation or diminished by a reductive application of critical theory. Yet in the absence of an operative public narrative, the act of withholding or obfuscating extratextual information became her paratextual frame, and she toyed with that notion, as well. In one piece on view, Bingo (Or the Year I Was Born), 2008, a large electronic display board is programmed to illuminate numbers at random – all possibilities for the artist’s birth year, retracted from the gallery CV. For another, Do You Love Me?, 1994, relegated to the museum’s website, Bacher compiled a twelve-hour video from interviews with friends and family, artists and art professionals. The subject of the interview footage is invariably Lutz Bacher, yet her on-camera respondents remain undifferentiated, anonymous except to those who knew Bacher personally, or who were well-acquainted with her social milieu. We hear Bacher’s voice, but do not catch her likeness.

While Bacher’s resistance to the celebrity principle of late twentieth-century artistic production might be overstated, in the current literature if not the present exhibition, it could have been interesting had Burning the Days followed this line of inquiry. What distinguishes Bacher from an art world dropout like Lee Lozano, or, for that matter, an intermittent recluse like Cady Noland? Answering the question would require grappling with a number of contradictions. Bacher did not retreat from public view so much as she attempted to exert control over her public narrative, reinscribing it, obliquely, within her work. Two of her earliest pieces – Auto Interview and The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview, both 1976, both transcripts of Bacher talking to herself – set the terms for a form of art in which the artist is somehow simultaneously present and absent, on-stage and off. Toggling between two voices, both Bacher’s, they anticipate a closed discursive system the artist realized more fully in the second half of her career. Yet, from the beginning, Bacher also appeared in front of the camera, in The Milk Video, 1976, for instance, unseen in this exhibition, as well as in the only film-strip piece on view, Smoke, from the same year. Only two years before Do You Love Me?, she made Are You Experienced?, 1992, not on view, a video in which she figures herself as a guitar-smashing rock star. And what does Do Your Love Me? actually do, after all, if not wryly propose Bacher as a proper media subject, someone everyone should talk about endlessly, all the time? If not quite paradigmatic of mid- to late-career Bacher, Do You Love Me? is at least instructive: the deluge of information, the grain of digital media, the positioning of the artist’s limited subjectivity as cultural cipher, the construction of a dialectic Bacher herself referred to as one of “intimacy and distance.” Too much information as its own distancing effect. Information as a form of intimacy. It is difficult to think of an artist who did more to turn her practice into a game of inside baseball, wholly legible only to those who spent copious amounts of time among its recursive evocations, only to those who knew it (and therefore her) best.


In this sense, the prominence granted here to Jackie & Me is again telling, in so far as it suggests its author/subject (mediator?) remains, for this curatorial team, an unapproachable enigma. Deviating from chronological arrangement, the retrospective is instead organized around a number of  “associative encounters,” as the gallery guide refers to them, pairing Horse Painting with Horse/Shadow, both 2010, or coupling Pink out of a Corner (to Jasper Johns) 1963, 1991, with The Pink Body, 2017. In one far-off room, the show recycles an installation strategy devised by Bacher for her mid-career surveys MY SECRET LIFE and Spill, recreating those exhibitions’ salon-style intermingling of three discrete series. Such decisions honor Bacher’s delightfully off-kilter (one might say antagonistic) approach to institutional architecture, but they also reveal an aversion toward commenting, in any way, on the work at hand. Likewise, a dearth of supplementary material – whether in the form of wall texts or the artist’s test pieces, preparatory notes, and ephemera – allows the work to stand on its own, but also evinces an unwillingness to provide any sort of historical or social context. Another sign of willful silence is telegraphed by the exhibition title itself, Burning the Days, which refers to an artist’s book Bacher left unfinished before her death, a sequel of sorts to her chronological catalogue Snow, published in 2014. The unpublished manuscript may be viewed at the Betty Center, the artist’s archive slash designated artwork, in New York. Its absence here strangely emphasizes the retrospective’s own hollow center.


What else is missing? Well, all of the artist’s books, nearly every work in video and video installation. The artist’s website, also designated as an artwork, as well as the web-based project Modules, 2017-2019. A few major pieces, including Sex with Strangers, 1986, and Snow, 1999, alongside helpful minor works, like James Dean, 1986, and The Baby, 2012. Without constructing an entirely different exhibition, bringing in some of this material would have introduced a better understanding of Bacher’s distinct visual grammar, the indefinable syntax of which has made her work more influential now than in her own time. (Also conspicuously absent: a sense of Bacher’s habit of retooling old ideas, revisiting certain preoccupations, and restaging past projects, all of which other recent presentations – I’m thinking particularly of the historicizing Lee Harvey Oswald Interview at Galerie Buchholz, from 2022 – deftly elucidated.) As it stands, Burning the Days focuses predominantly on the found objects, sculptural readymades Bacher presented with increasing frequency after 2000. Seen collectively, these objects do further elucidate Bacher’s obsessive fascination with postwar American culture, her prolonged investigation into the quiet reverberations of kitsch and cultural refuse, the secret life of things removed from circulation. There are a few instances in which the associative logic snaps into place. One would not immediately think to pair the stuttering panorama Men at War, 1975, with Bison, 2012, a grouping of sculptures assembled from burlap, wood, and chicken wire. Yet together they tell a story, a darkly American story, of westward expansion and its burlap-thin veneer of moral certitude.

Are such moments of lucidity, however, really enough? Whatever Burning the Days tells us, Bacher did not emerge from nowhere. First submitting a photographic piece indebted to Duchamp, she was initially exhibited in a group show called Photography & Language, held in San Francisco in 1976. She may not have been fully shaped by the group that emerged from Photography & Language, which also included artists like Lew Thomas, Donna-Lee Phillips, and Hal Fischer, yet the early association did enable her passage from photography to conceptual practice. In Berkeley – outside New York, apart from the CalArts mafia – she constructed her own form of post-conceptualism, her own understanding of appropriation. More so than most of her contemporaries, she contended with the shifting position of the photographic image within culture, from tabloid pulp and television to YouTube and content aggregation; she did so for nearly a half-century. Counter many of the Pictures artists, she recognized early on that mass culture, engendered by television and print media, and, later, by the internet, is not solely a one-way street, a top-down system of dissemination. (The series Jokes, 1985-88, for instance, is already an appropriation of a consumer-generated appropriation.) After Derrida, but before Mark Fisher, she came up with an elegiac mode of making, centered around technological breakdown and historical lament, that anticipated, in video, the concept of “hauntology.” She made art that at first appeared slacker-ish, self-centered, or otherwise too easy, but, in actuality, was deeply conversant with histories of modern art, visuality, and the broader culture; she made art finely attuned to the particular textures of contemporary life. It would have been nice had Burning the Days been a little more about that.

Everyone agrees that Peder Lund’s Oslo gallery space, in Tjuvholmen, serves as a brick-and-mortar excuse for a business that actually operates elsewhere, on the global fair circuit. Among the fifty artists and estates represented by the gallery, only a few are from Norway. Gallery assistants hide behind pocket doors, hoping viewers will find the QR-code checklist for themselves. “They don’t even announce their openings!,” one friend admonished. Sometimes these semi-private openings even end earlier than scheduled, the better to limit interaction with the general public. Yet I was happy to visit this strangely personless space, which contributed an unsettling aura to the gallery’s exhibition of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ Flowers and Mushrooms, 1997-2006. First presented at Tate Modern in 2006, the 45-minute film anthologizes a large series of photographs taken through double expo…

Read more

JMW TURNER: ROMANCE & REALITY (YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, NEW HAVEN, CT)

People may have flocked to see Caspar David Friedrich at the Met, but this smaller exhibition of works by William Turner at Yale demonstrated institutions may probe newfound interests in Romanticism within a more resonant framework. Turner once placed the viewer in the position of Regulus, the Roman statesman forcibly blinded by the sun (Jonathan Crary wrote a great essay about this); at another time, he daubed a “perfect” canvas with a spot of bright red, so as to not be shown up by his rival-admirer John Constable. His Slave Ship, 1840, remains one of the most devastating paintings of the nineteenth century. Which is to say, for all of Turner’s sublimity, his paintings always seem to remain tethered to the constraints of his form, to material reality and its discontents.

A collection show organized around a fake anni…

Read more

FLORIAN FUCHS, CIVIC STORYTELLING: THE RISE OF SHORT FORMS AND THE AGENCY OF LITERATURE (ZONE BOOKS, 2023)

As criticism grows longer and stranger and increasingly shapeless, or otherwise gets talkier and more marginal and moves closer to the comments section, it might be a good idea to think about how forms dictate writing. Florian Fuchs’ dense study of short literary forms – the novella, proverb, fable, fairy tale, and so on – begins with the ars topica of Aristotle and somehow lands on the video work of Hito Steyerl. In between, examples drawn from Kleist, Hölderlin, Goethe, Keller, Flaubert, Joyce, and Benjamin, among others, keep the text from dissipating into theoretical abstraction. What is perhaps central here is Fuchs’ differentiation of the novel, which simulates its own reality, from the novella, which he claims inserts itself into our pre-existing experience. A seemingly minor distinction at first, but one which gat…

Read more

This conversation, with the London-based artist Jeremy Glogan, emerged from a rather dumb idea: wouldn’t it be funny to do “Jeremy Glogan by Jeremy Gloster”? An interview playing on the similarity of our names, but also gently mocking the naming conventions of other, more self-serious interviews, not to mention self-aggrandizing memoir titles (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, for instance, or the fictive Tár on Tár)? During this process, I discovered that Glogan had already riffed on this particular joke before – six years ago, he published a fanzine called Jeremy Glogan by Jeremy Glogan as part of Victor Boullet’s series for Antenne Publishing – but by then a stronger sense of his oeuvre had already taken hold.

Since the 1990s, Glogan has developed an idiosyncratic, reflexive, and sometimes prescient approach to painting, obscuring the potentially false binary of abstraction and figuration, and, in shifting stylistically from one exhibition to the next, unsettling, maybe, set expectations surrounding individual authorship. Perhaps relating to the latter inclination, there has also been much nominative play – a 2012 exhibition, for example, was titled The Jeremy Hunt for Culture, alluding to the conservative British MP, and another, earlier show, called GLOGAN, included a promotional flyer in which the artist’s name was set, brand-like, against a collage of fashion photography. Yet starting around 2019, Glogan’s work has become markedly consistent, documenting a post-Brexit, post-pandemic social landscape filtered through a series of digital and analog procedures. Although by turns irreverent, sentimental, and humorous, this work has also felt urgent, leaning into to the textures of contemporary life at a moment in which younger artists, specifically painters, have more often chosen to retreat into historicist or post-postconceptual modes of production. Almost notoriously, Gen X artists, or at least the ones we enjoy, have been characterized by a sense of withholding – by both a resistance to historicization and an unwillingness to engage with whatever may come after them – and for this reason Glogan’s participation in spaces like Jenny’s or Le Bourgeois appears conspicuously generous. It’s a form of generosity that extends to this wide-ranging conversation, as well. Over Google Docs, we discussed Glogan’s recent work, the mediational capacities of painting, his position vis à vis a number of tendencies, and his sustained engagement with Lyotard’s sublime. Aside from some light copyediting, the text below remains unedited and unabridged.

JEREMY GLOSTER

Maybe we could start by discussing Leanings, your current exhibition at Jenny’s in New York. This show, in a sense, strikes me as a continuation of your past two solo exhibitions, both in London – While My Paintbrush Gently Weeps at Leech, and The New Distortion at Le Bourgeois. Each predominantly features human figures, a high-contrast color scheme, and seems to arrive at the finished work through similar strategies. But I also wonder if my assessment is wrong – if the stylistic continuity across these three shows, which hasn’t always been a given in your practice, occludes important differences among them. I know, for instance, that this body of paintings took some time to come together, which might suggest that it is, in fact, distinct – that there was a relation to be worked out among the paintings on view. Or it might only suggest that these works are time-consuming to execute, which is certainly true for many artists, and for many painters in particular. Perhaps you could speak to this a little bit, and also to the concerns of this show specifically.

JEREMY GLOGAN

It does represent a continuation of the last two shows. There’s been a formal development within the painted detail led somewhat arbitrarily by better lights in the studio, smaller brushes and remembering to wear my glasses whilst working.

The process to create the work for all three shows involves finding appropriate images and manipulating them – both digitally and through painting. By “appropriate” I mean either in terms of a content that fits together through either the fabric of the original content in the photo or merely by the way it becomes manipulated. The original image content in Leanings may have come from the domestic environment – however for me this represents just a strand within the work.

In relation to stylistic and strategic continuity I have found myself adhering to a similar working strategy for the last 5 or 6 years now – as you point out something that hasn’t often happened in my work previously. There was a moment in 2019 when I manipulated an image and the result genuinely surprised me. This moment is still proving to be consequential.

GLOSTER

And what about the title, Leanings? I actually find this to be one of your more opaque show titles, and the titles seem integral to the exhibitions – sometimes they are straightforward descriptions (Trees by Jeremy Glogan, for instance), yet more often they offer a lens through which to view the work.

GLOGAN

Titles are always lenses. Leanings is a word that suggests to me slight or perhaps insignificant movements or intentions. Leanings can be the result of often instinctive, perhaps not fully considered urges or impulses. The resultant effect of Leanings either in politics or within any creative, economic or social project can have much bigger consequences. I suppose it depends on the angle and trajectory of the lean – how far one leans and in which direction.

GLOSTER

One more question before we really get going. Could you explain your process for these works – how do they come together? I could be wrong here as well, but my inclination is to say it’s almost a parallel activity to this conversation: in a sort of piecemeal way, we’re building toward the image of an interview, an image that likely differs for each of us, and in doing so, we’re necessarily producing all sorts of glitches, misrepresentations, and gaps in understanding. In both cases, it’s not a simple matter of transcription.

GLOGAN

I locate what feels like a pertinent image, manipulate it digitally looking for appropriate often unexpected results, if an image gets past this stage then I paint it. The painting stage appears as the closest step to transcription but of course the brush introduces irregularity. Glitches, gaps and misrepresentations certainly occur throughout the process, and generally are to be encouraged.

GLOSTER

At the same time, the effect of the paintings is not entirely one of pictorial construction, but also of mediation. I was happy to see this word in Daniel Neofetou’s exhibition text for Leanings, because it confirmed my initial impression. It’s almost as if there’s something situated between us, as viewers, and the interior space of the painting, some source of interference occurring at the picture plane. And I think certain works of yours would suggest this reading, as well. The Glass, 2021, for instance, features a subject looking at his hand through a glass of water, and that struck me as a sort of interpretive key. It suggests that we, too, are looking through the glass, at least allegorically. I’d like to perhaps place this idea into contention with Neofetou’s statement from the Leanings text that, “The conditions of possibility for painting are always a series of mediations. These mediations are a successive series of nows.” We’ll get to now-ness later, so maybe we could stick with mediation for the moment. I’m curious as to why you would choose, particularly over the past five or so years, to emphasize the fact that painting is always a mediated encounter. Why insist, on the level of form, that what we’re seeing is, fundamentally, mediated by the artist?

GLOGAN

I was talking to Daniel about the text for the show and that I wouldn’t want any description of the figurative content within the work. Daniel agreed and proposed a text on the “conditions of possibility” for painting. When he says “the conditions of possibility for painting are always a series of mediations,” this suggests that the necessary frameworks for both the production and reception of painting will always necessitate intermediary influences or “mediations.” Within both production and reception these influences will be various and profuse within all conceptual and formal aspects of the painting. Perhaps this is self-evident, but this idea of mediation or the notion that things are not self-contained and have to exist in relation to or through something else seems infinitely simple and I think infinitely useful.

Incidentally, as the figurative content of the work exists in its mediated pictorial form I think it would be thrown off balance by any verbal description.

GLOSTER

The first paintings of yours I saw in person were those included in Sex is [Censored] Part 3: Le Pissoir du La Perle, which was a sort of crazy group exhibition curated by Zac Segbedzi, again at Jenny’s. I remember being taken by this work, a relatively small painting in the show, titled The Gherkin, 2010. It’s a painting of the London skyline, or the skyline of London’s financial district, with your face reflected in the Gherkin, which is, of course, one of London’s most recognizable skyscrapers. You essentially become the Gherkin. And I’ve tried to articulate why I’m drawn to this painting – it certainly encompasses some of my preoccupations with the functions of architecture and photography, mirrors or mirroring, perhaps even the hyper-financialization of art, and there’s a certain cultural acuity at play for you to have thought to make this painting in 2010. But my reasoning falls flat; it feels like explaining a joke. There’s a sense that all of these complex ideas are being compressed into this deceptively simple, maybe even deceptively stupid, image. I really like when art does that. But, to get back on track, you seem to insert yourself into your work fairly often, and often in ways that seem more conceptually driven than, say, a conventional self-portrait, and I wonder where that impulse comes from?

GLOGAN

I’m not totally sure where the impulse comes from, however the “stupid” and the “dumb” can be great if used well. I remember having the idea for the Gherkin painting and thinking that it was so ridiculous that it might just work. It was post-crash, I wanted it to appear as if, yes, I actually was the Gherkin – within the city – looking distinctly displeased. It did feel edgy to play with an actual self-portrait like this in 2010, because it was so silly. This was just prior to selfie culture really taking off and I think just as perhaps Jana Euler or Amelie von Wulffen started to play with anthropomorphised themes.

GLOSTER

Another instance where architecture enters your work is Building, 2021, and it’s also a feat of compression. It depicts Eros House in south London, a Brutalist building designed by Rodney Gordon and Owen Luder, and Brutalism is always a charged form in the UK – it’s almost a spectral presence. It points temporally in two directions: to the past, because its emergence as a style of postwar reconstruction is inseparable from the ravages of war, and also to an unrealized future, because it embodies the failures of both social policy and modernism. But then, to add another layer, Eros House isn’t wholly of your own choosing, either. It comes almost as a ready-made subject, because you’re painting the building where the gallery Le Bourgeois is located and where the painting will later be shown. So there’s a telescoping effect here – from general to highly specific – that I think becomes synecdochal to the larger project. You paint people you know, but these subjects are embedded in a set of social conditions that might lead us outward, toward other cultural associations and reverberations. In an ambient kind of way, for example, I’m often put in mind of Mike Leigh films like High Hopes or Meantime, which might suggest a certain tonal resonance. So I’m interested in how this decision to assert this sense of sociality – or, perhaps, to reassert it, because you also certainly painted people you know in your earlier work – plays out? It doesn’t feel aligned with other modes of social painting like “hypersentimental portraiture” or “network painting,” although perhaps it may operate similarly – the closer we are to you or your particular social context, the more we recognize in your work.

GLOGAN

Eros House is quite a difficult site. It’s situated in the middle of a gyratory system around which fairly heavy traffic continues day and night. It’s in a tougher part of South East London that has resisted gentrification. The once quite handsome Brutalist building was insensitively re-clad in the 80s and I believe that Owen Luder then disowned it. It was optimistically named “Eros” after the Edwardian theatre and cinema that once stood on the site. Catherine Osterberg and Jacques Rogers established and ran the project space and gallery Le Bourgeois in a former restaurant unit on the ground floor from 2016 through to 2023 and staged around 30 great shows there. My studio was in the back room. There was a good social scene attached to it. Some members of this scene including, as you say, the building itself, became part of the content for my work in The New Distortion in October 2021.

I don’t think that the inclusion of specific people and subjects who I know has ever really been a conscious strategy, more that in the search for content the more familiar subjects seem to have the most appeal simply because I am more closely acquainted with them. I think that the distance created by the mediation within the work enables more intimate content to be presented.

GLOSTER

In Kari Rittenbach’s review of The New Distortion, she lands on this indelible turn of phrase: “‘bad painting’ finally meets ‘bad utopia.’” There’s actually much happening in that concise formulation, so I’ll structure this as a two-part question – we’ll once more separate bad from bad. I’ll start with “bad painting”: certainly this term carries meaning for many artists with whom you are either close or have collaborated in some capacity over the years, but your own relationship to this lineage – which we might consider, for this conversation, as a lineage after Kippenberger – is less clear to me. I’m tempted to cite your earlier exhibition The Paintings I Did Before the Exhibition, at Galerie Bleich-Rossi in 2008, as a particular moment of “bad painting,” indicated by the deadpan title and the relative sparseness of the compositions, but I’m not sure you would see it that way.

Relatedly, there’s the notion of “ugly painting,” which was more recently coined by Rachel Wetzler in describing the work of Jana Euler, and which Wetzler expressly distinguishes from “bad painting.” For context, I’ll quote from her essay: “Bad painting approaches the medium as something that can only be pursued ironically, through a posture of carelessness, haste, and disregard. Its ugliness is of the second order, an effect of its ostentatious repudiation of proficiency… ugliness here is a choice, and a deliberate one… self-evidently labored over, made slowly and precisely. Their features may be repellent, but there is no mistaking them for slapdash accidents.” Your paintings have been associated more closely, I think, with this tendency – you were, for instance, included in the group exhibition Ugly Painting, organized by Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick, at Nahmad Contemporary in 2023. But I wonder how these ideas intersect or correspond with one another for you? Or if you would reject this framework entirely?

GLOGAN

Of the various strands of “bad painting” the one I was more aware of is the German one originating, I'd actually say, from the 1960s onwards. At art school in the late 80s I started to pick up on the Oehlen brothers, Kippenberger, Walter Dahn, Dokoupil, Schnabel and maybe even Steven Campbell at the same time as the earlier generation including Baselitz, Immendorff and Polke. I enjoyed the irreverence, wit and satire alongside the painterly physicality. Merlin [Carpenter] and Krebber’s approaches (for example) went on to diversify and create further nuance within the lexicon and, as I knew them personally, I was able to witness some stuff at first hand. So I think that in my approach there has always been something of the irreverent attitude of “bad painting” and I see this as much in the “figurative” work as the “abstract.”

It’s amusing this notion of Ugly vs. Bad painting and the question of which order the “ugliness” is presented within. I know what she’s implying but the discussion for me is not so interesting. Good painting rarely depends on how it looks in terms of a discussion of bad or ugly. Good painting will always be beautiful!

GLOSTER

That’s really funny, and I think you’re right – many of the works in that group show may have actually encouraged us to reach that conclusion. But, to address the first part of your response, what was the reception to these artists like at art school in the UK? Were professors supportive or was it sort of a provocation to engage with them this early on?

GLOGAN

Just as we were starting our first year at Camberwell I remember a tutor, Ian McKeever telling us that the big Julian Schnabel show that had opened that week at the Whitechapel was the most important thing we could see. McKeever, who had spent time in Germany went on to tell me about Mulheimer Freiheit of which Dokoupil and Dahn were part of and, I think, Kippenberger and the Oehlens. Alongside my interest in Steven Campbell – the best and “baddest” of the new Glasgow figurative painters this provided me with food for thought. So yes, I happened to have a supportive tutor. Friends who’d been at St Martin’s including Merlin were so interested in Cologne that on leaving art school they went straight out there to live and mix with the scene.

As a student deciding to engage with this emerging language I suppose could have been somewhat provocative by default. Although the “New Spirit in Painting” was hovering throughout the 80s and the “bad painters” began to emerge from the mid 80s, perhaps the nuanced language of “bad painting” wasn’t yet fully born – at least more internationally – until the early to mid 90s. I think somehow Gilbert and George, although not painters, always offered a UK contextualisation of a “bad painting” attitude in terms of wit and irreverence and perhaps scale of project. Interestingly they’ve always been able to take the position of rebel at the same time being fully accepted by the establishment.

GLOSTER

And then “bad utopia,” which might return us to the question of mediation. I’m not quite sure what Kari meant by this, although it is rather evocative. She may have been thinking of this line from Terry Eagleton, which does hold some resonance: “‘Bad’ utopia persuades us to desire the unfeasible, and so, like the neurotic, to fall ill of longing; whereas the only authentic image of the future is, in the end, the failure of the present.” So it might be closely related to Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” and, in your work, to the cruel optimism of the social world you’re representing or mapping. I’m interested in what you’d make of that.

GLOGAN

Yes, I like the way it’s not entirely clear what Kari means. I feel perhaps she is referring to the mood of the pandemic and the fact that the show happened to coincide with that and, yes, become mediated by it. There was the posited utopia enabled by societal shutdown which was in fact “bad” in terms of ill health and the manifesting of further social imbalance.

GLOSTER

Yet I would think the recent paintings have more in common with the anti-utopian, at least as it’s framed by Linda Nochlin in The Politics of Vision. I think of Nochlin’s claim that “if Seurat rather than Cézanne had been positioned as the paradigmatic Modernist painter, the face of twentieth-century art would have been vastly different.” What Nochlin suggests is that if artists had received Seurat’s message – the “anti-utopian allegory” of Pointillism, in which the faux-industrial pictorial construction appears to comment on the depicted scene, as in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – art would have been different. This strikes me as a strand of the modernist project you take up, at least recently. It’s not about placing a machine or device between the artist and the canvas – as many artists over the past sixty years, from Warhol and Jack Whitten to Rosemarie Trockel and Wade Guyton have done – but rather about embedding a sort of machine vision allegorically within the work. I’m reminded – in paintings such as Seasons, 2024, and Buggy, 2020 – of digital editing processes like image-stitching, or, like, that strange stuttering effect that can happen when one tries to make a panoramic image on an iPhone. There’s an even more frequent rendering effect reminiscent of pixelation, but it almost seems to derive from digital video, rather than low-res imagery. Elsewhere, I think of the figural malformations sometimes produced by text-to-image generators. So I’ll ask – and I’ll actually ask a question this time – how do you perceive distortion to operate within your work? Is it about inhabiting a kind of technologically-mediated position or is it more of a painterly means to reconcile abstraction and figuration? Is it related to digital imaging or does it emerge from someplace else?

GLOGAN

It is interesting to compare Seurat and Cézanne in this way. As a painting process Pointillism was certainly less dynamic, a bit more considered than Cézanne’s application. If you compare La Grande Jatte to say Les Grandes Baigneuses they’re equally experimental within their respective discourses. Cézanne is much rougher at the edges in terms of finish. I think that Seurat became obsessed with his application, preciseness of composition and the utilisation of his scientifically informed colour knowledge. Cézanne obsessed about looking, looking again and interpreting. In terms of Manet – as precursor to both – and his formal leanings toward the acausal, perhaps Seurat was more prepared to both absorb Manet’s radicalism but then reject him formally while Cézanne enthusiastically ran with him and attempted to go beyond. I had never considered the utopian implications of Pointillism, but that’s an interesting idea.

Considering the distortion in my work. As I said there was a moment in 2019 when I digitally manipulated an image and the result genuinely surprised me, this became the 2019 painting Beard. It created a point of reference from where I’ve continued to work. Looking at the Seurat again, it is interesting to think about the picture’s considered construction together with his interest in scientifically informed colour theory. Unlike Cézanne there is a much more measured, I think you could say “technologically mediated” process taking place on the canvas. I would say however that Seurat’s dots are surely not actually “atomic” as Nochlin suggests – they surely have to rely on other relations/mediations.

There’s nothing conscious for me about reconciling abstraction and figuration, it’s very much about remaining in the painted zone and the mediation of the digital enables that.

GLOSTER

It would be good to discuss some ideas or arguments that have informed your practice, as well. And you’ve told me that one such argument comes from Jean-Francois Lyotard’s essay “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde,” which was originally published by Artforum in 1984, and it’s also something Daniel Neofetou engaged with while writing the exhibition text for Leanings, as well. There’s much to unpack here, but I thought I would give you the chance to speak first. Why have you, as you say, held onto this text for so long?

GLOGAN

It’s a good question! The text could be seen as somewhat anachronistic and sometimes open to interpretation. A good friend once introduced me to it. I’ve kept it with me as it does continue to throw up interesting ideas. By chance Daniel Neofetou had been considering some of Lyotard’s thought and when discussing the text for the show it became clear that some reference could be made to this.

Lyotard was aware of Barnett Newman’s concern with “a sensation of time” within his work. A concern with time beyond even image or space. Lyotard speaks of a contemporary sublime linked to this “sensation of time” within the otherwise “inexpressible event” that is a painting. I like how this creates an idea of painting as a process linked specifically to time and that somehow liberates it as an activity. The act of painting in itself could represent this sublime feeling that Lyotard claims to be potentially radical. Lyotard takes the idea of “now” as the ungraspable moment or occurrence that exists only in the future or in the past but can be formulated, he suggests, as “a question mark,” the question mark of the “is it happening?” He talks of the search only being possible if there still exists something that hasn’t yet been determined – “the indeterminate.” He also suggests that this event or occurrence, the “now” can only be “approached through a state of privation…that which we call thought must be disarmed.” Crucially he takes this potential and imagines it in a position of resistance against an “over-capitalised” society. He seems to suggest that this contemporary notion of the sublime offers a space of resistance to capitalist modernity which is enforced by a total control of knowledge. Newman’s moment embodies an evasive state. In resisting that which can be known there is a possibility of resistance to this form of knowledge as regime.

I think that the “nows” as mediations in Daniel’s text are analogous to Newman and Lyotard’s “nows.”

GLOSTER

I was actually thinking while reading it that it’s one of those texts that seems useful to return to repeatedly because I can see how some passage, or even a single sentence, that may have not seemed so important before suddenly feels relevant to what you’re working on in the moment; its sort of “openness” is actually a strength in that sense. And I actually don’t think it’s entirely anachronistic, either; Peter Osborne has often been influential for me, particularly in his theorization of the contemporary, and I realized Osborne is drawing on Lyotard’s notion of the present as an indeterminate conjunction of past and future. And I think that sense of indeterminacy, which may be something like “historical mediation,” really comes through in the work; in different terms, it was one of the first things I wrote down in my preliminary notes. But I’m curious about this idea of the act of painting itself as perhaps a liberatory or transcendent activity. Is it not labor? Or does it really feel more like this heightened state or “sensation of time”?

GLOGAN

I don’t mean transcendent. And I don’t mean the time or effort taken to make the painting. Lyotard is at pains to stress that Newman’s “now” or question mark of the “is it happening?” is “not a major event…not even a small event. Just an occurrence.”

It’s to do with the idea that Newman implies and Lyotard develops that the act of painting itself could possess radical potential. When I first encountered this text in the late 90s I was interested by the idea that transcendent imagery like mountains need no longer be involved here – painting just had to happen and Newman’s paintings with their bands and areas of colour somehow confirmed this. And I certainly don’t mean that painting is liberated from its necessarily mediated position but that the act of painting, as a fully mediated process, is potentially liberated.

GLOSTER

We might be running out of time to write back and forth, but I thought maybe we could end somewhere else. Your social context seems like it has always been integral to your work, even when it hasn’t been the explicit subject of your paintings, and I think that may form part of its appeal, as well – that it doesn’t pretend to exist in a vacuum and that it’s unequivocally in conversation with other artists that you know. At least since Brexit, one regularly hears this lament that London is no longer the art capital of Europe, but, at the same time, I think London is often romanticized, in New York particularly, as one of the few remaining places where this kind of sociality still unfolds organically. To that point, you also ran a project space in London between 1997 and 2001 called The Top Room, which staged exhibitions by artists like Josephine Pryde, Merlin Carpenter, Nils Norman, and Michael Krebber, among others. Of course, 1997 is a charged year, marked by the ascendance of New Labour and its attendant, if fleeting, sense of cultural renewal. What was the original impetus for The Top Room? Were you trying to fill a specific void or did it come about more spontaneously? And – perhaps more nebulously, although you may have thoughts on this – do you sense any correlations or distinctions between that moment and our current one?

GLOGAN

Certainly if the majority of your friends are artists it’s hard to separate your friends from your work. In terms of the sociality of London it’s hard to be objective as I’ve only ever lived in London, however it’s true that over time social groups and networks continue to exist and flourish.

The Top Room emerged through necessity. I was inspired by Poster Studio, the radical space in a squatted building in Central London run by Dan Mitchell, Josephine Pryde, Merlin Carpenter and Nils Norman in the mid 90s. They created an unprecedented and challenging programme of events and shows. In turn they had been inspired by Stephan Dillemuth and Josef Strau’s Friesenwall 120 in Cologne.

My partner and I live in a building that was part of an old primary school. The top room was the old library, fairly modest proportions; I gradually realised that I had to start a project space there. From 1997 until 2001 we put on a few shows, nearly all friends including Merlin (1998), Nils (2000) and Krebber (2001). We also did a sizeable group show in 2000 (21st Gear) and in 2005 we did a show at Chelsea Space which included a presentation by Mel Bochner.

In relation to ’97 and now – which is 28 years – the world obviously feels a lot less stable now.

The breaking down of the rules-based order and the rise of far-right nationalism are such profound phenomena that were difficult to imagine back then and much harder to imagine in the 70s and 80s, yet the groundwork was being laid throughout that time. Also, it goes without saying, that the internet has changed everything. In 1997, I neither owned a computer or had an email address.

• You haven’t heard from me in so long because I’ve been writing (belatedly) an endless (one might say immersive) review of Anne Imhof’s performance DOOM, which I promise will be better than all of the other DOOM reviews you’ve already read. In the meantime, here’s a short reading list.

• Some suggested essays after DOOM: Laura McLean-Ferris’ “Declarations of Dependence,” Arlene Croce’s “Discussing the Undiscussable,” Benjamin Buchloh’s “Rock Paper Scissors,” and Annette Michelson’s “Where is Your Rupture?: Mass Culture and Gesamtkunstwerk.”

• Near the end of her life, Annette Michelson told Artforum that one of her great regrets was never writing about the filmmaker Robert Breer. I, too, wish she had written about Breer, because there’s a dearth of material on his work, and he’s a great artist to look at on a rainy day. Here’s what she said: “He was a painter, and thus had a very sophisticated visual sense. He had also grown up with a feeling f…

Read more

• According to an old dictum, fifty years counts as history, twenty years is vintage. I don’t think that necessarily holds anymore, but because it feels like 2005 in America again, let’s suspend our disbelief and look at the vintage. (Thanks to “consignment specialist” Anna Feigenbaum for some of these correlations.)

• What looks good today may not look good tomorrow: both the text of Michel Majerus’ best-known painting, from 2000, and the title of a recent symposium that has since been published as a book. Majerus predicted the aesthetics of the aughts and then died in a plane crash in 2002. Everyone loves this work now, but no one can tell you why. A Capri-Sun-soaked madeleine or “painting in the expanded field”? The little book from Sternberg Press is decent, but I’d recommend reading everything Daniel Birnbaum wrote about Majerus first.

• Scooped: compelled by the conspicuous abscence of aughts-era artworks from the once widely-discussed New York Times article “The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age,” I had intended to propose a tentative canon of art in the 2000s. The aughts are almost notoriously hard to pin down – blandly pluralistic and intentionally naïve, but also hyperconnecte d, jetset, post-studio, social, and collaborative (or collusive, most prominently with the fashion industry). Perhaps for this reason, the Times’ list passes from Lutz Bacher’s Closed Circuit, 1997-2000, to Michael Asher’s architectural intervention at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2008, with nothing in between. But it’s a new day, and there’s a new list. This time from Artnews, “The 100 Best Artworks of the 21st Century,” which includes a seemingly unending number of noughties entries. From their list, mine also included: Isa Genzken’s Fuck the Bauhaus, 2000; Christopher Williams’ Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide © 1968 Eastman Kodak Company, 1968 (Meiko laughing), Vancouver, B.C., April 6, 2005, 2005; and Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine I, 2001. Others become a little boring cumulatively, but make sense: Luc Tuymans’ The Secretary of State, 2005; Paul Chan’s 1st Light, 2005; Cao Fei’s RMB City, 2009; Mark Bradford’s Bread and Circuses, 2007; Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds, 2002; Steve McQueen’s Static, 2009; Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From, 2001–03; Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3, 2002; Andrea Fraser’s Little Frank and His Carp, 2001; and David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue, 2002. I never would have thought of Louise Lawler’s Big (adjusted to fit), 2002/03/16, but Lawler’s scalable image of Marian Goodman’s booth at the first edition of Miami Art Basel, depicting half-installed works by Thomas Struth and Maurizio Cattelan, is sort of a perfect document of its time. On the whole, “The 100 Best Artworks” is a somewhat sad, unadventurous anthology; it’s dominating energy is that of an exhibition at, like, a second-tier museum. No accounting for (collectively arbitrated) taste, although I would prefer to see more art reflective of the moment in which it was produced, like the Lawler image, rather than this collection of works slouching toward contemporary relevance. We all agree we’re living in bad art times, so why turn to the recent past to show us how we got here? (In that regard, a better list might include the bad objects.) A number of lifetime achievement awards and bizarre selections scattered throughout, as well...

• There are, of course, many points of contention with this format, but that’s also what makes it fun. My provisional list for the aughts became too long to publish here, and I realized this was becoming a long-term project, so I turned it into a spreadsheet on Google Docs. If you wish, contribute your own choices, just add your initials so I know they’re not mine. Democracy in action… For whimsy, I’ve included Jawed Karim’s Me at the zoo, 2005, the first video posted on Youtube. As evinced by many of my initial selections, it was a great decade for video, right at the precipice of video overtaking everyday life.

• The 2000s were also the last decade before digital became the film industry standard. A few years ago, I watched Michael Haneke’s Caché, 2005, back to back with Haneke’s earlier Benny’s Video, 1992 – not an experience I would necessarily recommend! But the distinct treatment of the intertextual videos in each – the elaborate framing of VHS tapes in Benny’s against the seamless integration of camcorder footage in the digitally-shot Caché – got me interested in the specificity of digital video. Around the same time, BFI’s Sight and Sound (of poll fame) did a piece on early digital cinema(tography), featuring interviews with a number of major directors, and also Miranda July. Yet what happened to the long list of films accompanying the article, which included everything from Godard’s Éloge de l'amour to Adam Sandler’s Click? Luckily, I have it archived on my Letterboxd.

• Revisit Dot Dot Dot (2000-2010), the magazine founded by graphic designers Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey and Peter Bil’ak. Some highlights: Howard Singerman’s essay on Mike Kelley and Alfred Barr; David Crowley on the applied fantastic; Robert Garnett’s feature on the art collective BANK; Paulina Olowska’s Bauhaus Yoga; and Mike Figgis on his first digital film Timecode. So many other things, too – articles on early AI text generators, twentieth-century pianists, postmodern graphic design, the aesthetics of protest posters, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Dutch magazines from the 70s… really makes you yearn for a lost world of experimental print media. (It also makes you appreciate smaller publications that are still extant, like May Revue – please support them!) It can be difficult to find physical copies, but I’ve generously compiled PDFs of each issue here.

• Another charitable act: fellow reformed gallerina (current DJ) Spencer Hinson suggests looking at the fashion photographer Steven Meisel’s archive (1993-2014), which he assembled, and which, helpfully, he sent me. I agree things come into a sort of delirious focus around 2005, and the cultural commentary broadens: send-ups of WAGs and tabloid-baiting celebrities, shoots inspired by Sin City and In The Mood For Love, photos interspersed with boho-chic illustrations, no more riffing on Deborah Turbeville. The craziest (complimentary) is definitely the seventy-some page “Makeover Madness” for Vogue Italia, which centers around Meisel muse Linda Evangelista as she undergoes various cosmetic procedures while talking on her flip phone or smoking a cigarette; elsewhere, we witness her recovery in a luxury hotel suite. There are other models, too, who are all subjected to darkly humorous before-and-after pics. (In each “before,” the model dons gawky square-framed specs, like the kind Ben Gibbard used to wear.) If you want to download the entire archive, it’s 2.1GB of data, and you have seven days.

GARY KUEHN: IN SITU (CANTOR FITZGERALD GALLERY, HAVERFORD COLLEGE, HAVERFORD, PA)

Is it unfair to beat up on a college art gallery for what they’ve done? Small, early sculptures arrayed on a shelf like tchotchkes; definitive works, best viewed in-the-round, shoved against the walls or crammed in a corner; a video interview with the artist, Gary Kuehn, readily available on YouTube, projected onto one of the space’s few remaining surfaces, the volume cranked up so loud as to become a sort of bleating sound installation. Navigating the compact gallery’s complex floor plan, I felt as though I had been locked inside a hoarder’s labyrinth, even though the cluttering objects (obstacles?) themselves were relatively sparse: rectangular prisms of wood, lacquered with enamel, and conspicuously bolted together; a length of aluminum fastened to a metal form with c-clamps; twisted ro…

Read more

• Yesterday’s news – how late is too late to wish someone happy birthday? To memorialize the dead? To recommend a book, an essay, a video on Youtube? Is timeliness the real hobgoblin of little minds? As you know, I didn’t post a Reading List last week, so now I’m stuck confronting such questions. But I do think it’s still worth sharing Mel Bochner’s 1967 foundational essay “The Serial Attitude,” even though I’ve seen it posted and discussed elsewhere by now. (Bochner died earlier this month.) Beyond the essay’s historical significance, I think it remains an instructive text for placing contemporary practice in context, while also expanding the vocabulary surrounding it. “The Serial Attitude” was occasioned by the exhibition Art in Series, curated by Elayne Varian, which included many of the artists mentioned in Bochner’s essay, alongside Bochner himself. Not …

Read more

• Reporting from Detroit: I’m here for a few weeks, so I thought it would be fun to do a little digging. Time to dredge up some local history!

• The period of art history people here most like to exhume is the one surrounding the Cass Corridor, “Detroit’s version of Greenwich Village in the 40s and 50s,” but twenty years later, per Jay Belloli. Urbanity and industrial grit, AbEx and assemblage – some Cass Corridor artists include Gordon Newton, Brenda Goodman, John Egner, Ann Mikolowski, and Michael Luchs. Mary Ann Aitken, potentially a more familiar name, was younger, but sort of second generation. For an overview, check out the 1980 exhibition catalogue for the Detroit Institute of Art’s regrettably titled Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor, 1963–1977, curated by Belloli and Mary Jane Jacob. I haven’t had a chance to look at the catalogue for Subverting Modern…

Read more

• A “cool and possibly evil scene”: the supposed “cultural ascendency of the new, young right” has produced a novel resurgence of the cringe Dimes Square discourse. Although I think it’s fundamentally good to argue about all things at all times, I’ve lived here, at the circus, for five years and I hate reading anything too closely related to my own life. I could only stomach the grim realism of Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square and Other Plays because I happened to find a copy while I was out of town, at my favorite bookstore in Stratford, Ontario. After reading, I could not bring myself to bring it back home with me, so I left it at the lake house…

• Notes from the garret: following last week’s post concerning issues everybody used to talk about compulsively, but no longer really mention – artists’ complicity in gentrification! Sharon Zukin’s Loft Living is the primary text, alongside Martha Rosler’s Culture…

Read more

• Writers writing about Substack on Substack – a new thing to complain about! I mostly agree. I do wish these people would reflect upon vintage forms of blogging, or, like, the modernist kleine Form instead. For my part, I’ll say that I’m enjoying the platform’s bloggier capacities, and so will continue to post these Reading Lists at least weekly, alongside more considered pieces of writing, hopefully every other week.

• What was post-internet art? The question on many lips, because not everyone was an art student in Chicago the year seapunk broke. The definition appears to expand or contract at will: does the term refer to a clique of artists centered around The Jogging or a dominant paradigm prior to 2017? A series of net art projects, indebted to genealogies of new media art, or an attempt to bring the internet’s particular vernacular into the IRL space of the gallery? A random assortment of pe…

Read more

• In the dead of winter, induced by SAD, I always buy big novels I don’t actually read: a hardcover copy of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the Arion Press edition of Moby Dick, the 1918 version of Wyndham Lewis’ Tarr. A nice idea, though, right?

• Seasonal depression and thinking about re-reading Moby Dick are both good excuses to get into Albert Pinkham Ryder.

• After Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey, a (woefully incomplete) syllabus for the great art restitution debates. Because it’s easy to get lost in the weeds here, you might first have to read this UNESCO 1970 Convention treaty, drafted in a dull, repetitive language familiar to former participants of Model UN. Then it’s time for two legal articles by art law founder John Henry Merryman: “The Retention of Cultural Property” and “Two Ways of Thinking about Cultural Property,” both from the 1980s. Merryman also edited Imperialism, Art and Restitution, …

Read more

The notion of “stuck culture” is by now so general its attendant malaise has infected the upper echelons of political discourse. Do we even need to explain it? “We’ve seen that movie before,” Obama said before the Democratic National Convention last summer, referring, of course, to the first Trump term, “and the sequel is usually worse.” A good line from a strange speech, which went on to compare Trump to “the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day.” Weird image, right? And then even odder, the waffling punchline, no doubt the product of some harried last-minute rewrite: “From a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous.” I really think, personal feelings aside, one should make a rhetorical distinction between the annoying neighbor and the aspiring despot. Yet something of this image, of the leaf blower whirring day in and day out, “ev…

Read more

A LITTLE NOTE FILLED WITH MANY RHETORICAL QUESTIONS

We are always being told that now is not the time. Or, if now is the time, then it’s a bad time. Since starting this newsletter, I’ve wanted to produce a more regular column to appear alongside the longform pieces I’ve written either specifically for Bad Objects or shared from elsewhere. But it’s always been a bad time. Personally, of course, but also broadly, ambiently. The first of many questions: has there ever been a better time for criticism, but a worse time for art criticism? You might blame the drably regressive character of so much contemporary art, but isn’t it still gratifying to read someone like Joanna Biggs on Sally Rooney, or A.S. Hamrah on Deadpool & Wolverine? Both writers are, in some sense, workaday or regular critics, supported by established publications, not major stars, yet their incisive grappling with the mediocrities of their own chosen forms – the novel or the movies – knows no particular analogue in visual …

Read more

The following essay appears as the introductory text for Speedburn, a new publication by the artist Sofia Sinibaldi, out this month from Seven Press. You can find more information, and purchase a copy, here.

Read more

The first part of this essay concluded by elucidating a gradual turn in the reflective public works of Anish Kapoor from a strategy of displacement, in the sense of Smithson’s Mirror Displacements, which uses the mirror to reorder its surroundings, to one of capture, which instead deploys the mirror to stage a functional relationship between the work and its observer; the second part will consider the reverberations of this turn more generally. To distinguish these terms further, we might say that displacement, which precludes the viewer, in some sense requires photographic documentation to complete its reorganization of the pre-existing image, embedding one image (sky) into another (ground). As the critic Craig Owens wrote in the essay “Photography en abyme,” regarding Smithson, “the photograph,” not merely evidence of the artist’s temporary intervention in the landscape, “is the work.” (Emphasis Owens’.) The notion of captur…

Read more