No matter what medium she is working in, artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda’s gift has always been for bringing to light the story that exists in the margins, previously unseen. Considered one of the foundational directors of French New Wave, she began her career in the early 1950s as a photographer before moving on to make such iconic films as Chloe from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I. For the past fifteen years or so, she has focused her interest on art.

While it is too small to properly be considered a retrospective, Varda’s first New York exhibition at Blum & Poe spans all the decades of her career. It begins with 18 vintage black-and-white photographs from her personal archives, which she first showed in the courtyard of her house in Paris (where she still lives) in 1954. These stylized images demonstrate that from the beginning Varda possessed an acute eye towards framing, placing her firmly within the pantheon of 20th-century photography. One can see the influences of earlier photographers like Edward Weston, Josef Sudek, and Henri Cartier-Bresson just as clearly as one can see those whom she, in turn, has influenced. Mardi gras (1953), for instance, depicting three children wearing unnerving facemasks, seems to foretell the career of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

This insight into Varda’s earliest work sets the tone for the remainder of the show. Each image tells a visual short story, or perhaps more to the point, each one gives just enough information that individual viewers can’t help but imagine a story for what they see before them. The impulse towards narrative throbs.

Such allowances for viewer interpretation are arguably most evident in her interactive work, Le Triptyque de Nourmoutier (2004-2005). A three-channel video tableau, inspired by Baroque Flemish painting, unfolds on hinged wall panels. An old woman, a younger woman, and a middle-aged man sit in silence around a country kitchen table. Each is absorbed in an activity: the old woman untangles a ball of twine; the younger works her way through a heap of potatoes, meticulously peeling and chopping; and all the while the man steadily downs a glass of beer. On the left-hand panel, a sea licks the sandy shore as two children emerge and disappear from the frame, playing and digging on the beach. On the right-hand panel, a well-stocked dishware cupboard, seemingly in an anteroom to the central kitchen, sits in wait. The methodical undertakings in the kitchen are interrupted by various comings-and-goings of the three adults (who as a result sometimes enter into the tableaux of the side panels), but never by their voices. Though they are silent their actions unveil singular personalities. But lest the viewer become too complacent with these characterizations, Varda has incorporated another component on the work. The audience is welcomed to close one or both of the hinged side panels at will, which necessarily redirects the onscreen action, changing the perceived story and shifting its tensions at whim. The work plays with that most human of binaries: the need to know a story and the need to interject oneself as a participant.

Shrewd as it may be for Varda to point this binary out to her audience, she is equally willing to turn the notion upon her own imagination. In Les gens de la terrasse (2012) she attempts to recreate her 1956 photograph, La terrasse du Corbusier, Marseille, using a set designed to look like le Corbusier’s terrace and actors portraying the unknown figures of the original image. Acknowledging that she always wondered about the back story of the people she captured in the older photo, Varda stages on film a mini-play (with sound, which gallery visitors can listen to through headsets) imagining a family setting up for a photograph of new parents and their baby in this picturesque spot. Alongside the video short hangs a copy of the original black-and-white image.

Which of these renders as more accurate, one might wonder? But this question begs another: can any experience ever be distilled to a baseline truth once it has been filtered through human perception? A rejoinder to both queries comes implicitly in the form of three self-portraits dating from different points in her life—at 20, 40, and 80—that preside over the entire show. Each is radically different, so much so one could be forgiven for thinking the photographs were of three distinct artists, except that each one is also incontrovertibly Agnès Varda. Truths are always subjective, Varda seems to imply, the “truth” being a constant evolution even within our own selves.

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June 3 to July 17, 2016
56 Bogart Street (between Harrison and Grattan streets)
Brooklyn, 212 967 9818

“A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.” –bell hooks

I went to see “With Passion,” the current group show on view at Slag Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, prepared to be absorbed in something other than headlines. The despairing news cycle had been unfolding that a male Stanford University student, recently convicted of raping an unconscious female behind a campus dumpster, had been spared his recommended prison sentence by the presiding judge. The white, former star athlete Brock Turner was instead sentenced to only six months in the county jail, a slap on the wrist for the degradation of a woman’s body.

Passion and compassion are twinned themes and philosophical conceits — emotions that, living in this strange and crestfallen moment, seem especially worthy of contemplation. The Latin root of both words is pati, meaning “to suffer,” which suggests that by choosing to plumb these emotions, we can better understand personal and collective grief, and use it in the service of activating meaningful change in the face of injustice. In “With Passion,” five international artists probe what it is to be ardent, how that fervor stimulates a response in viewers, and the ethics, on the part of the audience, of taking that response out into the world.

Six drawings by Erika Bagylas, selected from a larger series entitled Don’t Become a Statistic! (2013–2014) open the show. Bagylas hails from Hungary; existence during the nation’s three-decade, Soviet-supported Kádár era is often the subject of her interrogation. She refers to the extreme censorship experienced by Hungarians during the period as “social trauma as life situation.” Bagylas frequently incorporates performance into her practice, which is reflected even in the static works on view here. Some are theatrical, as in The Circus Belongs to Everyone (2014) where two figures walk on stilts and juggle, respectively. Others exhibit a more mournful quality. In The Supporters (2014), one woman rests her hand on the back of another, who in turn rests her hand on a larger figure, covered with a sheet like a ghost. Perpetrators (2014) depicts two bodies each standing on a box, facing each other and pointing their fingers at one another like guns in a chilling intimation of violence. In each drawing the human forms are drawn in delicate crosshatching on black paper with white ink, with an empty space where the body’s head should be. Those blank heads seem indicative of individuals from whom something primal has been stolen. Whether that comes at the hands of a totalitarian regime, or a lone perpetrator, the pain is evident and it transcends Hungary’s political history, resonating universally.

Some of the strongest works in the show are those that directly counteract suffering. Socially engaged artist Jody Wood’s video work In the Black Box (Looking Out) (2016) and its corresponding photographic series, Client Abstraction (2016), present here, are derived from a project she completed earlier this year. In Choreographing Care (2016), Wood ran a workshop where a theater troupe taught social and care workers to make use of warm up and cool down techniques actors use in preparation to play characters in agonizing situations. Workers in these therapeutic professions experience a high degree of “secondary trauma” as a result of the constant support they give to others enduring extreme circumstances. In the two-channel video, actors demonstrate these methods on one screen while on the second Dionisio Cruz and Jan Cohen-Cruz, a married couple who are a therapist and a drama professor respectively, discuss secondary trauma as it relates to each of their professions. Hearing them relay their personal experiences while simultaneously watching the actors demonstrate the exercises is stirring. One actress, lying supine, has her hair stroked by another while a third gently caresses her legs and feet with a soft cloth. The love and mindfulness put into these efforts is plain, and underscored by the Cruz couple’s intimate discussion of the significance of emotional release. Soon, the woman to whom these ministrations are being applied is sobbing cathartic tears.

Elsewhere, the work of Masha Zusman, one of two Israeli artists featured, proves restorative. In her labor-intensive process Zusman makes engravings with a mechanical pen, and draws meticulously in ballpoint on found wood. While she might be best known for her works completed on immense, wooden packing crates, a selection of her smaller pieces on discarded wood panels is showcased here. To her materials she has added Hammerite, paint intended to be applied directly to metals. The decision to use this substance, which is not readily available in the United States, is inspired, as the color it achieves on wood is lush and sensuous. In Untitled (2015), gold Hammerite flows across the wood panel in creamy hills and valleys. It is tactile, almost three-dimensional, and I had the distinct sensation of wanting to run my hands over it. Zusman has engraved the top half of the panel with an intricate design reminiscent of a William Morris textile pattern, which she then colored completely with brick-red ballpoint. The work is fervid, even erotic in its juxtaposition of color and texture. In an exhibition that demands much sober contemplation, Zusman’s work is a welcome reminder of the tangible, the carnal, and the wonder that exists in the world.

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.” Co-curators Naomi Lev and Jovana Stokic open their curatorial statement with Simone Weil’s timely words. When I sat down to begin writing this after a couple days of reflection, I opened my computer to discover that overnight a gunman had entered a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, shot dead 49 people and wounded another 53. It was the worst shooting massacre in modern American history and I am despondent, marinating in the reinforced knowledge that so many different kinds of bodies can be so easily and callously disposed of in this country. I cannot separate this from the experience of seeing “With Passion.” To be passionate is to be moved by strong feelings or beliefs; to be compassionate is to be compelled to act because of the suffering of others. This small show in its small space is nonetheless a booming visual manifesto that calls not only for empathy, but also for revolutionary, loving action in defiance of the hatred and cruelty that have become familiar cultural markers. May it resonate.

The post Live Fully and Well: Art at Slag Gallery in a Time of Trauma appeared first on artcritical.

March 19 to September 5, 2016
11 West 53rd Street (between 6th and 7th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400

In 2000, a miracle occurred in the blue-collar town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. On a window of Ramona and Marcelino Collado’s second floor apartment at 103 Washington Street, the Virgin Mary appeared. As news of her advent spread through the neighborhood, scores of the Catholic faithful lined up outside the little house with peeling vinyl siding in order to troop up the stairs and pay homage. At the time, artist Rachel Harrison caught wind of the event and traveled to Perth Amboy with her camera to document the worshippers. Seeing is believing.

The photographs resulting from this pilgrimage currently line the walls of the Museum of Modern Art’s second-floor Dunn Gallery, a component of Harrison’s larger installation Perth Amboy (2001), marking the first time MoMA has displayed the work since acquiring it in 2011. Large sheets of corrugated cardboard form a winding labyrinth throughout the room, and a guard controls entry to the gallery. (To have such a respite from MoMA’s infamous crowds is reason alone to spend time with the work. The relative quiet fosters meditation and augments the contemplative quality of Perth Amboy.) Because freestanding cardboard is intrinsically precarious, the viewer is especially aware of her body as she moves through the space, taking extra care not to accidentally brush up against the boards, lest one tips and sends the whole thing toppling like dominoes. Rounding the corner of a cardboard sheet she might be surprised by another body on the opposite side. The installation choreographs these chance encounters, where a stranger is obliged, even if fleetingly, to regard another.

“People see what they want to see,” Harrison has said of her own work, and here, it’s the act of looking itself that is being plumbed. In a neat metaphysical sleight of hand, Harrison sets up moments throughout the installation where the very action the viewer performs is also what she is challenged to consider. Upon carefully placed pedestals interspersed within the maze are coupled objects: in each case one half of the pair is distinctly figurative while the other represents a “work of art.” On one pedestal, a “Becky, Friend of Barbie” doll, sitting in a wheelchair and with a camera around her neck, gazes upon a chromogenic print tacked up on the wall before her. Elsewhere, situated on a mirrored base that reflects the lower half of a viewer’s body, a cheap figurine family of Dalmatian dogs stares up collectively at a common cardboard mailer, which has been bent so that it stands upright. A plaster bust of Marilyn Monroe — plunked into a Stor-All box and perched on a small, wheeled platform that has been shoved into a cardboard corner of the labyrinth — is unexpectedly moving. The objects themselves are garish and sometimes tawdry but in each instance Harrison investigates the visceral experience of looking at something, really stopping to consider it. This “something” might be anything: a work of art, celebrity culture, the Divine. Suddenly the kitschy objects are suffused with a more profound resonance—like Marilyn, the classic icon of fashion and Hollywood who epitomizes what it is to be seen, slung low to the ground and sliding towards the informe on a warehouse dolly.

And then there are the photographs. Taken from a vantage point somewhere across the street from the Collado family’s anointed window, most of the images capture believers who have come to witness the Blessed Virgin. Depending on the angle of light, their faces are not always visible through the glass; most often we see only hands pressed against the pane. The images evoke another biblical reference: the tale of Doubting Thomas. According to the story, after Jesus rose from the dead, he appeared to all the disciples but Thomas. When the others informed him of Christ’s return, Thomas replied he couldn’t believe it until he saw for himself. It’s from this story that the common idiom “seeing is believing” originally derives, and which proves especially prescient to Perth Amboy.

Non-believers may scoff at Virgin Mary sightings in unusual places, and the gullibility of those who are certain of their truth. But Harrison’s unexpectedly beautiful photographs reveal the poignancy of religious pareidolia, and the believers who are heartened by the perceived emanation. Faith is an intense, sometimes overwhelming emotion, and the sense of sight is often its most powerful incubator, regardless of whether the idol is religious, political, celebrity, aesthetic, or something else entirely. With Perth Amboy Harrison interrogates the unequivocal, and in so doing challenges viewers to examine their own dogmatic beliefs whatever they might be. What aspects of our own convictions might only be mirages on a pane of glass?

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March 15 to May 27 2016
45 East 78th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

The fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place.

Have you seen their faces?

–Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

“Prankster” is a word that comes up repeatedly in discussions of artist David Hammons and his work. Much has been made of his evasiveness, of the fact that he has spent his career flouting the art world’s propriety: his continual refusal to settle on a dealer; the propensity to make himself unavailable to curators even in the midst of show preparations; to stage exhibitions, performances, and installations with no prior announcement. Then there are the works themselves, from alluring abstract canvases you will never really see, as they’ve been shrouded with trashed vinyl tarps, to sculptures that cull beauty from empty bottles of $1.99 wine. But to seize and insist upon the perceived jokey qualities of Hammons’s art and persona resists the deeper significance of his output over the past 50 years. “David Hammons: Five Decades,” currently on view at Mnuchin Gallery, offers a corrective to this narrative. Comprised of 35 works spanning from the late 1960s to the present, it’s a crystalline show that helps to elucidate the long view of an artist who has made a career of otherwise obfuscating it.

This is the third show of Hammons’s work presented by Mnuchin (formerly L&M Arts), and though much care has been taken to note that the gallery does not strictly represent the artist, it seems clear that Hammons finds satisfaction in the contrast of having his work — frequently made from lowbrow or dilapidated materials — showcased in the refined and august premises of the Upper East Side townhouse. It also eschews the sterility of the White Cube, of which Hammons has in the past proclaimed his disdain. Notably, just prior to this exhibition’s opening, Hammons arrived unexpectedly at Mnuchin and upended the nearly complete installation: rearranging, removing several works, and adding new ones. The entirety of this show at Mnuchin, as organized by Hammons, becomes its own distinct work of art, a complete whole made from its heterogenous parts.

Shrouds abound in the exhibition. Two large paintings, both untitled (2008–14 and 2015, respectively) are almost entirely obscured by ragged tarps that dangle across their faces. With two large sculptural works, also both untitled (2013 and 2014, respectively), Hammons has concealed ornate, gilded floor-to-ceiling wall mirrors, one with a black cloth and one with large sheets of galvanized steel. Aside from the more apparent association of this shrouding as a manifestation of Hammons’s own mystique, it also brings to mind the Jewish tradition of covering the mirrors in a house after the death of a beloved. One wonders whether these works, all made within the last few years, are indicative of an artist reflecting on his legacy in his elder years.

With the inclusion of the diminutive but potent In the Hood (1993), a shroud of another sort takes on a more politically foreboding tone. The work consists simply of the hood of a sweatshirt severed from the shirt itself, and hung on one wall. The dark void at the center of the hood, where a head should be, conjures the familiar image of the Grim Reaper, and when considering its high placement on the wall one can’t help but be reminded of the deplorable chronicle which pollutes American history — that of the scores of African-Americans lynched at the hands of whites through the decades. And at nearly a quarter-century old, In the Hood seems remarkably prescient as an object, anticipating the outsize symbolism of racial inequity in American culture that the “hoodie” has taken on — especially acute in recent years.

So loaded has that article of clothing become that poet Claudia Rankine selected In the Hood as the cover image of her award-winning 2014 book of prose poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, which reflects on black life and systemic injustice in the United States and whose pages are peppered with reproductions of artworks by prominent black artists. It also includes a passage dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager shot and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012. Zimmerman claimed Martin was suspicious in part because of the dark hoodie he wore as he walked down the street of a private community. The point is underscored by several black-and-white prints from the late 1960s and early 1970s Hammons has hung in the same gallery, whereby the artist pressed his own body to the page and then added charged imagery like the American flag, or the spades of a playing card.

Robert Storr says of Hammons, in an essay included in the exhibition’s catalogue, “From the very start it is plain that he has set his higher goals as high as they come. Specifically that has meant escaping the sorry fate of ghettoization while slipping the noose of becoming a token ‘black’ artist in a predominantly ‘white’ art world.” Considering Hammons’s work solely through the lens of race runs the risk of reducing his conceptual athleticism to a single note. As an object, In the Hood is a descendant of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), down to the conscious, unexpected placement of the work. The viewer garners a solid sense of the roots Hammons shares with artists like Piero Manzoni or Joseph Kosuth, who were thumbing their noses at artistic conventions in the early 1960s. By being able to see the long trajectory of Hammons’s output gathered together in this mini-retrospective, we can also understand how the disparate parts align.

In the last gallery, a taxidermied cat curls up on a wooden drum stool. Called Standing Room Only (1996), it has been placed in the corner, the cat’s sleeping face pointed towards the window instead of towards the center of the room. A creature known for its cunning and detachment, the cat might be Hammons’s spirit animal. Aloof and mysterious, with his back to the world, we revere the cat for what he is able to pull off — living freely, and purely on his own terms.

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31 October – 5 December 2015
525 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 627 6000

There is no such thing as easing yourself into the sculpture of Alina Szapocznikow. From the moment you step into the eponymously titled show of her work, currently up at Andrea Rosen Gallery, you will be deeply provoked, moved, and unsettled. Szapocznikow’s Piotr (1972), a six-foot tall sculpture of the artist’s son, confronts the viewer upon entry. Made when he was 18 and Szapocznikow was suffering from breast cancer, to which she would succumb the following year at age 47, the work is a resin cast of her only child’s nude adolescent body. Formed in a vertiginous pitch, the sculpture cannot stand on its own and must be supported by a Plexiglas brace in order to be displayed. The emptiness of the space behind Piotr suggests a void, like a pieta with the mother figure subtracted, the son left dangling in space.

Even before her cancer diagnosis, Szapocznikow spent good deal of her life enduring profound trauma. Born in 1926, when she was a teenager the Nazis confined her for years to the Jewish ghettos in Poland before she was imprisoned in a series of concentration camps during the Second World War. She managed to persevere through all of it. Several years after the war’s end, Szapocznikow contracted tuberculosis, from which she languished for months, nearly dying. Survival came at a cost to her fertility — she was unable to bear children afterwards (she and her first husband adopted Piotr Stanislawski).

In great part because of what she suffered, Szapocznikow had an uncommon fearlessness about the body (both hers and others’), and strove to leave a physical imprint of it, as well as the memories it contained, embedded in her work. Though she occasionally used the bodies of others, Szapocznikow most often applied the casting process to herself. Her breasts, lips, and legs recur in her sculptures. Disembodied from the whole, they serve as relics from the body of a person who seemed to preternaturally intuit the brevity of her life. This stunning show, exquisitely installed, offers a great breadth of Szapocznikow’s objects and the secrets they reveal when spent in contemplation of them. Each work on view here is wisely given ample space to breathe, and the act of scrupulous looking will yield generous, intimate fruit.

In Stèle (Stele) (1968) a bubble of black, polyurethane foam encases a set of resin-cast lips and knees. The lips are colored black and the knees are bent, protruding from the foam, so that it appears like a crouched human figure mainly hidden from view. Beneath this form, laid perpendicular to the knees, is a set of diminutive legs, cast in the black foam. A full circle around the work reveals another set of the same small legs adhering to the sculpture’s verso, while across the tops of the resin-cast knees a fetal shape, also of foam, is splayed. It’s so subtle that it is easy to miss, but the realization of this amorphous form drives straight to the gut — Stèle (Stele) is a mourning totem.

The informe that is alluded to in Stèle (Stele) is made fully manifest elsewhere, as in Sous la Coupole (Under the Cupola) (1970), a sculpture devastating in its total and contained abjection. Two nebulous blobs of polyurethane foam, in different shades of dismal brown, squat across from each other on the floor like competing piles of shit. A nylon pantyhose stretches between the two, each end of the stocking submerged into each pile. Szapocznikow routinely sunk personal items of clothing or other objects into her sculpture, often so deeply that they are rendered nearly unrecognizable. You can almost smell disintegration emanating from the two heaps while the intestinal stocking is meanwhile an activated life force, valiantly resisting the decay that is pulling it in both directions.

If the sorrow that unfolds seems too much to bear, the back room of the gallery, given over to Szapocznikow’s “sculpture-lamps,” offers some literal and metaphorical relief. She was known for a mordant wit, and the sculpture-lamps, while still being potent vessels of physical memory, are of a lighter tenor. Illuminowana [L’illuminée] [Illuminated Woman] (1966-1967), a plaster body with glowing breasts of sugary pink, and a seashell of blue resin, impressed with Szapocznikow’s lips where the head should be, stands like a warrior at the entrance to the room. Elsewhere, small, table-sized lamps of lips and breasts sit atop pink, phallic columns. One’s eyes are drawn to the corner, from where the large Kaprys-Monstre [Caprice – Monstre] [Caprice – Monster] (1967) radiates. The sculpture, a central element from which spring forth four long, thick, tube-like protuberances, glows a deep blood red, lighter at its core. It appears at once both slimy and inviting, and the viewer is compelled to examine it closely, pondering the folds and crevices of its aortic pipelines. Kaprys-Monstre is suffused with a defiant vitality; it pulsates with life. Her pus and blood have long drained away, but Alina Szapocznikow, flouting death, is still present.

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JESSICA HOLMES: Tell me about Melilla.

CARLOS VEGA: I grew up in this little place in North Africa. It’s been a Spanish city since 1497. In order to safeguard the coast of Spain, Queen Isabelle and King Ferdinand took this little piece of land on the Moroccan coast that is next to a natural harbor. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, it became a hub for mining in the Atlas Mountains, and suddenly became a prosperous place with a multicultural community. A lot of the Sephardim from Morocco and Turkey, who had left 400 years prior, came back to do business, and there was a very wealthy Indian community and of course a very large Muslim community. And I lived there for my first 20 years.

And it’s always been Spanish?

It’s been Spanish for 500 years, and my family has been living there for 100-plus years. Growing up, I had friends who were Muslims, who were Jews, who were Christians, and in a funny way I was not aware of how unique this was because that was my reality. When you come to New York, you find that’s common in American metropolises, but it’s very unusual in a city of 60,000 people.

Can you talk about the historical moment that inspired this body of work?

While studying the history of Spain I learned about the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was a theologian, a doctor, an astronomer, a religious mystic—

He was radical in his time, wasn’t he?

Today he is a pillar of Judaism, but in his time his own people persecuted him. Then there was Averroes, to whom we owe the proliferation of Aristotelian thinking, and the idea of achieving the knowledge of God through reason. Then, King Alphonse the Wise had the idea of creating this encyclopedic compendium of all the knowledge of the world. It was a time of prosperity, and they all got along together more or less, though there is a lot of myth about that. This opening lasted only briefly and then the world collapsed from within. Feudal mentality allowed that you were only as powerful as your land holdings were big, and how much you had inherited. Today, it feels like we are in the same crossroads — what to do with our future.

Your materials even seem to have a historical bent. How did you come to use lead in so much of your work?

I think that we humans have been in love with lead for thousands of years because it’s soft, easy to melt, easy to carve.

Lead has such a specific feel to it. 

Doesn’t it? It has that coolness, that pliability. I think the idea of alchemy still plays on lead. By applying color to it, by puncturing it, it’s an act of enriching the lead, in a metaphorical way. I find it very satisfying. There is that contemporary wariness about lead because of danger of poison but growing up I used to melt lead pellets with my brother and then pour the liquid in a sink filled with water and watch the beautiful flowers and explosions erupt.

How long does one of your lead-based works take to complete?

I approach like an engraver. Because although you can fix your first imprint, once you subtract material you’ve already done injury to the virgin lead plate. Sometimes things are very fluid or very organic, but because of this profound idea of permanence or precision it takes time for me to find the courage to begin. I have worked on pieces for up to two years. I don’t have a large production; I don’t do more than 15 to 20 pieces a year. And with the best of my abilities I try to impregnate those works with a whisper to the viewer, to make them a vessel for thought.

What has drawn you to using postage stamps?

My feeling is that we are better people than our parents, our grandparents, and our great-grandparents. We are more compassionate and more accepting of difference. I use the stamps as a reference because stamps make a quotation between today and the 175 years since they first came into use. You can see how the stamps evolve from Queen Victoria, kaisers and kings to social ideas and aspirations, humanitarian causes, popular culture, the arts. And although they are so humble, stamps are really ambassadors of our aspirations and hopes; and at the same time they are becoming extinct.

I think they are beautiful time capsules, and it sounds funny but I spend hours in front of them just trying to make connections. I find them in the flea market, on eBay, or friends give them to me. I rarely pursue them in a scholarly way. I think it would take away some of the ludic act of the collage, putting one next to the other, playing with color, playing with genders, playing with random association of ideas. I want to leave that story untold, so the viewer has that act of discovery.

How much do you plan out a work, or is it an intuitive process?

When I approach something representational normally it’s very meditative. I need to gather courage, or do a bunch of studies and transfer the drawings to the lead. I’m still learning how to attack, and am trying to be looser and more spontaneous because sometimes it places me in a very uncomfortable psychological place. The act of creation sometimes makes me question everything. In a funny way, this exhibition is one where I feel that I am freer and more accepting of my limitations, embracing accidents and playing with chance. I think what’s happening in this show is a large step forward because there is not only lead, and the stamps, there is work on paper, there is canvas, there are freestanding pieces. It’s been a year and a half of personal growth and planning what I want to be when I grow up, as an artist. How much suffering I want to do, and I want to stop suffering.

I don’t blame you for that. When you are working on a piece for so long, how do you know when it’s finished? Or do you know?

That’s where the suffering comes in!

[laughs]

Has spending time with, and meditating on this intersection of Alphonse, Averroes and Maimonides influenced your own spirituality? 

I think that now I’m at a point where the big question is the survival of consciousness, of awareness. It’s an important part of what I’m searching for in my dialogue through art. How can it be done without being preachy? Are we done when we die or does the soul, our self inside of us, survive? But I think that’s the ultimate, eternal question — the last frontier.

The post The Eternal Question: Carlos Vega on the ecumenical sources of his new work appeared first on artcritical.

“Texts were invented in the second millennium BC in order to take the magic out of images, even if their inventor may not have been aware of this; the photograph, the first technical image, was invented in the nineteenth century in order to put texts back under a magic spell, even if its inventors may not have been aware of this. The invention of the photograph is a historical event as equally decisive as the invention of writing.” –Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983)

An impression: of the young woman staring with watchful eyes, lips pursed and short, tousled hair, a viewer is inclined to read circumspection and doubt, maybe distrust. This image of a young Diane Arbus, taken by her husband Allan around 1949, was projected onto an onstage screen through nearly the entire reading by Hilton Als of his new, unpublished essay “Diane Arbus in Manhattan” at the New Museum on September 15, as part of the annual Stuart Regen Visionaries Series. But as he read, his words constructed an alternative estimation of the legendary 20th century photographer, one that depicted her as open, inquisitive, skittish and all-embracing; in short, the consummate New Yorker. She lived her entire life in Manhattan, moving from apartment to apartment, sometimes uptown and sometimes downtown, on both the Eastside and the West. “You devoured the island of your birth and gave it back to itself,” Als read from the epistolary essay, “re-imagined but not reconfigured.”

Arbus did not fear what was different from herself, he argued, because New York was her small town, and the “freaks” (as her subjects were commonly referred to in mid-20th century parlance) that she photographed — drag queens, dwarves, the mentally disabled, interracial couples — were her neighbors, the people she lived among and with whom she not only empathized, but felt compassion for. “No artist worth their salt, pain, humor, steeliness, selfishness, generosity, love, ruthlessness, or plain interest in other people and things can turn away,” said Als, in what sounded like a direct rejoinder to Susan Sontag’s classic but truculent “Freak Show” (1973), an analysis of Arbus’s work in which she accused the photographer of giving nothing of herself in return for the portraits of vulnerability she regularly captured on film. But Als had a different tack. “You were in conversation with your sitters, a social exchange resulting in a kind of emotional documentary that became metaphysical as that terrible and beautiful alchemy took place; which is to say the sitter, you looking at the sitter, the cameras click, and sometimes flash.”

In many ways Arbus is a natural fit as a subject for Als’s writing. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker — he began publishing in the magazine in 1989, was made a staff writer in 1992, and has been the Chief Theater Critic for the past 13 years — Als has also published two ruminative books of essays, The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013) that are an audacious master class on the transcendence of race, gender, and physical difference. In both books, the classic profile narrative of one subject is most often turned on its head, becoming a mash-up of portrait, autobiography, gossip, and journalism. The writing is difficult: frequently opaque, occasionally navel-gazing, and once in a while outright caustic. But Als, like Arbus, tackles subjects that have either been marginalized, or else quite publicly “othered.” (Michael Jackson; Dorothy Dean, the doyenne of gay New York social life in the 1950s and 1960s; and Malcolm X’s mother have all been subjects of his scrutiny.)

A photograph is always subjective. Though the viewer might want for it to speak the truth, for it to be objective and documentary evidence, no photograph is ever absolutely honest. Decisions are always made by the one who presses the shutter button — what remains in the frame and what is omitted, what is brought into crisp focus, what is left to the shadows. “You weren’t treating the image as a kind of journalism but the record of a fantasy of magic ground through the glass of the real,” he said.  And so it goes with writing. “Diane Arbus in Manhattan” is Als’s textual photograph of the artist, an image of her that may not be empirical truth, but is perhaps even more genuine than the black-and-white photograph he addressed directly that evening. As he said, “Shaping metaphors out of the real is the work of an artist, or those artists who know there is something better on the other side of daydreaming.”

For those who missed Als’s talk, complete video of it can be seen here: http://livestream.com/newmuseum/events/4338723

The post Crisp Focus: Hilton Als Talks Diane Arbus at the New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

JESSICA HOLMES: Can you tell me something about the body of work in this show? Is there anything viewers might find surprising? 

BILLY CHILDISH: The paintings have been made over the last six months, so they’re very current. They are of subjects that have presented themselves and that I’ve worked through, or am still working through. People tend to have quite a lot of expectation, based on whether they are familiar with an artist or if they have ideas based on various misinformations that are available. Some people are surprised that I would work with the nudes. I painted nudes a great deal in the 1980s and 1990s and I haven’t painted them for the last five years or so — I think surprises are all down to expectations and knowledge.

I’d say that your paintings are deceptive because at first glance they are very straightforward, but there is great mystery once you really start looking. You frequently paint the natural world.

The natural world is a vibrating mystery of continual becoming and unbecoming. Within my paintings the bits that interest me are the abstracted parts. If I went round these pictures I’d say, “I like that bit.” It’s a love, an expression of my love of nature and an intense relationship with matter — vibrating, distorting matter, which is timeless and unable to be fixed in time.

I was going to ask you, since your work is so personal, how you feel when it’s released into the world, but maybe this is something that allows you to let it go.

My relationship with the art is making the picture and once that’s done, I don’t have much of a relationship afterwards. I’m not necessarily happy with my paintings when they’re finished. People hear my disregard for art and artists and they think I’m very satisfied with what I do. Not necessarily.

Does an idea ever morph into something else? Do you ever think you are going to make a painting and it becomes a poem, for example?

No, I know what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I paint on particular days of the week and I write poems in my notebook. I was in a British art show in the 1990s and they had some poems of mine painted on a wall, which is not something I would do, or which I considered to be art. And I said, “Well, I know what they are. They’re poems written on a wall.” I don’t see breaking down in categories as a freedom, I see it more as nonsense. There is nothing wrong with a poem being a poem. It doesn’t need to become a painting. I like all of my courses separate, so I don’t put my custard in with the roast beef. Not because I don’t like custard or I don’t like roast beef but because I do like custard and I do like roast beef.

Do you prefer painting to the other media?

Yes, it’s my natural ground. I’ve got works existing from when I was four or five, and I painted a great deal starting from when I was 12. I couldn’t really read and write until I was 14 [because of undiagnosed dyslexia], and I wasn’t involved with music until I was 17. Of all the other things, painting is the one where I don’t have those on/off buttons. I paint every Monday and Sunday, so I know what I am meant to be doing when I’m doing it. I had to discipline myself after I was expelled from art school, which fits my nature quite nicely. Going to art school doesn’t suit creative types.

Since you brought up your art school experience, which from what I understand was terrible, what would you say to somebody thinking of going to art school today, when there is so much emphasis placed on receiving an MFA?

When I went to art school, it wasn’t like the pressure now. Art schools these days seem to be there to try and create artists quickly, whereas I think an art school’s job is to give people stuff for their tool kit. I see it as much more craft-based or space-based. You’ve got to have quite a lot of self-will not to be run all over, or have them get rid of your real primal interests and send you on the course to being an Identi-Kit conceptual artist. What you need are the tools to actualize your vision. I’d say it might be better to be wary, ask questions, maybe not be like I was, and rather keep a bit of a low profile. I just fought with them.

What were some of the things you were made to do at St. Martin’s?

I had not been taught the type of obedience that they thought they should receive from someone as lowly as a student. I was required to take history of art and I found the person who taught it dull. You had to say things about canvas, or about art, using “art speak.” I told them I wouldn’t go, and they said I could sleep in that class if I wanted to, but I must attend it. I also refused to paint pictures at the college; I painted at home instead. I told them I didn’t want to become contaminated. I got into a lot trouble for writing what they called obscene poetry. I was talented and charismatic, which caused me more problems than if I hadn’t been. I was a good target.

You’ve stuck remarkably with your vision. How has that been beneficial, and how has it hindered you?

I think it’s in line with my nature, and it’s not an effort. I paint the pictures and, after the event, find out what psychological drive might be in there, which is far more interesting than having a prescriptive one. I just let it happen and then people can work out what fruitcake I am afterwards.

Or not!

Or not! Thank you!

[Laughter]

The thing is, there’s not many great thinkers in art. You have a few people like Picasso who always said smart stuff but you’re not going to get much intellectual stimulation from talking to artists. You can see how popular that opinion will make me! A curator asked me yesterday what I thought art was about, and I came up with a quote, and we wrote it down because I got the giggles. It was, “art is pornography and comfort food for the spiritually inept.” That doesn’t mean that’s true; that was yesterday’s definition!

Right! And what did she say?

She was in stitches!

[Laughter] 

Over the years you’ve used different names and pseudonyms. Do they represent different personalities?

In 1977, when I was 17, I was a punk rocker. I got the moniker Billy Childish from a friend of mine, which I used in bands. I didn’t like using that name in other areas so I always painted — and still paint — under my family name, William Hamper. When I was doing early exhibitions in German cooperatives, they knew I played music as Billy Childish, and it was forced onto me as a painter. Billy Childish has never made any paintings. Well, very rarely. When I was making films, I would use William Loveday. I was trying to compartmentalize so that I couldn’t be accused of trading off Billy Childish, a musician who now paints. It was self-preservation to stop people from categorizing me, but it didn’t work at all. 

I would love to hear you talk about your philosophy of Radical Traditionalism.

With Radical Tradition what I was trying to get across is that tradition, which I really like, is freeing because it is something you don’t have to invent. There’s this literal relationship with a history of painting, which used to be recognized and respected by artists as obvious. 

It’s a connection with antiquity in a way, right?

Yes. Nothing is as dated as the contemporary. Modern people want to lift the ego, but the ego is a block to creativity. Tradition is a way of subjugating the ego and allowing the thing to flow. Great artists, like Van Gogh for instance, wear their hearts on their sleeves. Van Gogh says whom he loves, and you can see whom he loves in his paintings. There’s no desperation for authorship. Really great art has got a timeless quality and it’s not narrow. You look at Van Gogh’s work, it looks contemporary, and it doesn’t look like it’s made in a mechanized age, either. When you are trying to be contemporary or relevant, to show us who we are, it’s like a rupture in time whereas if you give yourself to a tradition you dissolve time. With my music, we used to be pawned off as revivalists in the 1980s for playing guitar music and rock-‘n’-roll. Now people listen and say, “Your music doesn’t sound like any time at all.” That is what you want, for that thing to have a continued, timeless presence.

It’s got a life force.

Yeah. There’s still fight to it.

The post “The natural world is a vibrating mystery”: Billy Childish with Jessica Holmes appeared first on artcritical.

JESSICA HOLMES: What are you working on at Centrale Fies?

JUSTIN THOMPSON: I’m working on a big performance, “Mi Daran Tomba…e Pace…Forse [They will give me a grave…and peace…maybe],” which is a dialogue about Leontyne Price, the first African-American opera singer to sing a lead role at La Scala, in Milan. In the 1960s, she performed the lead in Aida. This piece is a way of thinking about the layers and implications of this woman in Italy, singing the aria “O Patria Mia,” about how she’ll never see her country again, and the politics that allowed her to step into the main role of an Ethiopian princess. I created a triumphal arch out of scaffolding that’ll have musical instruments attached, and I’ve got a local marching band, the Banda Sociale Dro e Ceniga, who will perform the instruments. We’re also pulling from Price’s farewell to opera, where after she sang she just stood there while people applauded. She didn’t move for 10 minutes; she didn’t break her pose, she didn’t do anything. I’ve sort of expanded upon the idea of controlling the audience, not allowing that release. We’re playing with this kind of anticlimax.

Many of your works, including “Moldy Figs,” involve collaboration, most often with your brother, saxophonist Jason Thompson, and the artist and filmmaker Bradly Dever Treadaway. Can you talk about how the three of you work together?

The collaboration with both of them was born as an undergrad at the University of Tennessee. I’ve played music with Jason since we were kids, but in college I took a filmmaking class where I had to create movement and gestures. There was performance involved, and I had to create sound for it. I first collaborated with my then-classmate Bradly on his films, and he’d collaborate with me on mine. Jason also performed in those films and was involved with the sound explorations.

Unlike Jason, I’m not a musician. If I have to do something vocally, or with my guitar, I can, but working with Jason has opened up a world of collaboration with musicians. Generally, I’ll provide a driving concept of the piece, reference points that I want to touch on, and usually some sort of feel — awkwardness, or whatever it is that I’m interested in — and he has free reign to interpret that. Sometimes he’s really literal, sometimes not at all; and we’re able to discover things together. I trust him 100% with whatever he comes up with, and most of the time I don’t hear it till we’re going live.

With Bradly, we have two different branches of how we collaborate. He works with me to develop video, which creates a new experience that is not the same as the live performance. The other branch of our work is going head to head, which we first initiated when he got a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 2005-2006. We show up in a space with our own tasks to do and we just make it happen. I’m making his stuff, he’s making my stuff, and it’s completely fluid and interchangeable. We’re able to push each other in a way that I haven’t been able to do with other artists. I always find it amazing how different we are in our language. He often pulls from an idea of identity that is much more rooted in specific lineage, images and archive, while I think of my work as much more abstract, a collective identity. A visual clash happens that makes me uncomfortable and I thrive on that. I enjoy more and more what happens when I’m not in control. There are often things I absolutely would have never put in a piece that are in the piece. But I appreciate the way it wakes me up.

When I went to see “Moldy Figs,” the painstaking, homespun effort of the many assembled parts impressed me. Tell me about your process.

For every show I make the centerpiece; everything else is stuff I’ve made over time. In “Moldy Figs” there are some pieces that date back even six years. No individual object took all that long: I sewed the hundred pairs of shoes in a month. The five shoeshine boxes I did over a period of a couple weeks. The pieces I developed onsite were the centerpiece — the merry-go-round, which I just built out of wood, and the DJ booth. That was a more abstract thing that I initiated while I was in the space. I think a lot about the ways in which doing things by hand creates a sense of ritual through repetition.

The concept of labor pervaded “Moldy Figs.” I participated in the performance held during Bushwick Open Studios. While sitting on the merry-go-round and having my boots gilded, a significant part of the experience was watching your crew perform physical labor: pushing the machine, stopping, doing the shoe work, then pushing again.

Labor has been at the root of social unrest forever. Black history in the US is frequently a dialogue about labor, and the social roles that are assigned through that. Gold-leafing shoes is one of my longer-standing projects. It’s had the most iterations, and each time I’m trying to find new ways to engage with it, and allow the old layers to show up and be represented. The gold-leafing is based on this minstrel song “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” which was included in an anthology of poems my mom gave me when I was about eight. It’s followed me till now, this song, which talks about putting your best things away on a shelf, awaiting judgment. It’s a wonderful metaphor of preparation for freedom/death. Because of the class and racial associations linked to shoe shining, it made a lot of sense to think about what happened if it’s the shoe shiner that’s providing redemption. With the “Moldy Figs” crew, I assigned them each a very simple task. I said to them for example, “The only thing I want you to do is spray this on the shoe. That’s it! That’s the whole gig. But own it.” So the task is refined in the hands of whoever is doing it.

A lot of the gold-leaf work is also about creating a dialogue about fictional elegance. It’s striking and lush, but also really, really low-class. You see the gold-leafed shoes and think, “Is that falling apart?” I really love the ways in which this superficially elegant thing actually gains importance by context. When I was initially researching shoeshine stands I came across a newspaper article from the 1930s that showed a shoeshine merry-go-round. The poet Melvin B. Tolson wrote in the 1940s about his philosophy of hierarchies, the merry-go-round of history versus the Ferris wheel of history. In terms of the Ferris wheel, he spoke about conquerors going up, and then inevitably coming down, whereas on a merry-go-round everything is on equal planes but just keeps moving and shifting in space. He equated that to democracy. I really like how inadequate that metaphor is.

A lot of your work deals with history, most often African and African-American history. How do you see it situated in the contemporary moment, which, especially in the US, is so volatile? Is that something you’re thinking about?

I think that looking to elements of African-American history has always been something ingrained in me. My grandfather first instilled in me an interest in history, specifically African-American history, and literature, poetry, and art. Living in Italy, you begin to understand kinds of continuums, and that feeds me. I don’t think of my work as being about race, but about class and the hierarchies involved. In Italy, so much art-historical iconography is rooted in classism. I like to think about how to unsettle some of the traditional associations we have about class regarding work and folk culture, and the distinctions we make between those humble traditions and the more elitist sphere. I like when those things mix, completely contaminate each other, and perhaps become the same. Culturally, I miss the US. Living here and trying to remain connected to my American roots, it always feels good to arrive in the US. You feel you’re still in touch somehow and what you’re doing still has relevance. You’re not a foreigner.

People seem to have an inherent need to label others automatically: what “are” you? Why do you think that is?

I think about it a lot. In the visual arts, in particular, we’re not comfortable with simply experiencing something. We’re on a quest to understand. There are certain keys you can put in artwork that allow people to check a box that says, “I get it,” and that makes it much more comfortable. For example: most of the time people read it as a giveaway that I sing. I once titled one of my sound pieces based on the four–word critique a guy in Italy gave me: “Molto soul, molto black!” Once, after a layered, involved project I did in Spain, the first comment I got afterwards was a guy walking up to me and saying, “Oh, you do have a little Negro in you.” One of the reasons I don’t like to define my work through the lens of race is because I think it assists people in reading stuff in a way that is not constructive. The point of entry is there for everyone.

The post Justin Randolph Thompson in Conversation with Jessica Holmes appeared first on artcritical.

June Leaf: Recent Works at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 23 to June 13, 2015
210 11th Avenue #601 (at West 25th Street)
New York, 212 691 6565

Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades at Alexander Gray Associates
April 2 to May 21, 2015
510 West 26^th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

The human body is incumbent in the work of artists June Leaf and Joan Semmel, who are subjects of recent shows in Chelsea at Edward Thorp Gallery and Alexander Gray Associates, respectively. Walking into “June Leaf: Recent Works” feels like stumbling upon a secret. Leaf, who has been practicing since the late 1940s, has frequently likened her working process to dance, and something of her physical body indeed feels present in the objects and paintings.

Much of the work included here examines the act of creation. As making anything is an individual experience for each person, perhaps it is not surprising that Leaf’s work puts vulnerability on open display. You can feel it as soon as you walk into the gallery, and are faced with Woman Drawing Man (2014), a sculpture that sets the tone for the remainder of the show. A concave piece of sheet metal stands atop a second piece, forming a sort of proscenium. On the vertical, a painted, nude, male figure stands with his arms outstretched. Kneeling before him and clutching a paintbrush, a female figure, also nude, applies paint to his body. Unlike the two-dimensional man, the woman is a true body in space, made from scraps of sheet metal stitched together with wire. The naturalistic position of her body — one leg cocked back for support, the outstretched arm — conveys a powerful sense of surrender. Of course, a woman’s surrender before a man is uneasy, because it is always loaded with a more disquieting significance. That Leaf’s work is deliberately primitive adds to the sense that this gesture of female subjugation is a timeless quandary.

A meditation on this link between work and submission continues throughout the show. In Figure Running on the Seam (2014) Leaf has appropriated the skeleton of an old sewing machine stand, suspending a curled wire encased in mesh between the two vertical spindles. At the end of the wire is the eponymous figure, which looks as if she is not so much running as she is collapsed from exhaustion. Beside it hangs a canvas, Making #1 (2013-2014), which depicts the sculpture in an incomplete state. The colors consist mostly of muted browns and grays, except for an emanation of crimson that seems to drip from the table of the base into a shocking puddle at the center right of the canvas. It’s a physical manifestation of the blood that is involved, figuratively or metaphorically, with putting oneself fully into a piece of work. The object is made from the remnants of a machine traditionally relegated to a woman’s domain, and a sly, feminist subtext is once again at play here, as the viewer is asked to confront what it means to have a sagging body caught between its gears.

Elsewhere, Leaf grapples with work and the surrender of the body as it relates to the most private realms. In acrylic painted on tin, Woman Carrying Child Up the Stairs (2011) depicts the female figure ascending a staircase, with a child slumped over her shoulder in deep sleep, while in Turning Pages (2012-2015), done in the same medium, an abstracted couple is caught in the act of intercourse. The woman lays facedown, an arm and a leg trail off in quivery wakes of paint that melt into the background and she offers no struggle, while the male figure kneels atop and astride her body. Both paintings afford the viewer a voyeuristic perspective — as though we are peeping through a doorway undetected, spying upon these private moments between intimates and witnessing their momentarily exposed vulnerabilities. In her ability to lay bare these fraught moments of humanity, one is hard pressed to think of a braver artist that June Leaf.

As Leaf’s work is quiet, and slowly unfolds its meaning, Joan Semmel’s paintings are explicit and confrontational. “Across Five Decades,” her recent career survey at Alexander Gray Associates, made clear that Semmel more definitively embraced the tenets of second-wave feminism. However, like Leaf, Semmel has made a priority of the female body. As she has said of her work, “I wanted to find an erotic visual language that would speak to women. I was convinced that the repression of women began in the sexual arena, and this would need to be addressed at the source.” This desire is unmistakable in her paintings from the 1970s, like the knockout Erotic Yellow (1973). In a vibrant palette of yellows, greens, and pinks, Semmel captures a nude and entwined couple in the middle of vigorous foreplay. Both of their faces are obscured by the man’s arm, and between his spread legs the woman has one hand clamped firmly beneath his balls.

This is especially pertinent in some of the later paintings, where the artist makes herself the subject. In Centered (2002) Semmel has rendered herself nude before a mirror, sitting in a relaxed pose with one arm curled casually around her bent knee, neither obviously flaunting nor hiding her middle-aged body. With her other hand, she holds a camera up to her eye; like in Erotic Yellow (and several other paintings in the show), the face is obscured. The obstruction of her face is not only arch however, but also emancipating. While she purports to an examination of the self, Semmel simultaneously subverts the viewer’s gaze by turning it back upon them with the use of the camera and mirror. The energy of Semmel’s work is triumphal and celebratory. Where Leaf plumbs feminine experience for its ambivalence, Semmel embraces its power.

June Leaf and Joan Semmel hail from a generation that was peculiar for female artists. Leaf, who was born in 1929 and Semmel, born three years later, came of age when work by women artists infrequently garnered attention, but who both nonetheless established steady working practices which saw them into the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960s and beyond. Is it too hopeful to believe that the work of these two veterans, who anticipated later twentieth century feminism, now entering the dialogue, is a harbinger of a shift away from that tired, long-established prejudice towards women’s art? For through their heightened sense of the corporeal, both Leaf and Semmel in different ways are unflinching in their ability to strip bare fragilities shared by all humankind. Looking at their work, we realize we have all been exposed.

The post Exposed: Shows by June Leaf and Joan Semmel appeared first on artcritical.