March 5 through April 11, 2015
512 W 19th St (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

Remember Ebola? The outbreak of the disease was the biggest news story of 2014, with no issue receiving more media coverage or search engine hits, proving that there’s still a great sensitivity to the idea of contagion in the country. This fear is often exploited in the name of branding, be it in the form of big-budget Sci-Fi movies or flu-shot sales.

Anicka Yi believes the same thing can be said about the general public’s idea of female networks. And in the dank and dimly lit gallery of her new exhibition, “You Can Call Me F,” at the Kitchen, she compares the two, pitting the public’s fear of pathogens with its fear of female networks as a threat to our patriarchal paradigms. For the show, Yi gathered biological samples (read: collected swabs) from 100 women in her professional network — artists, curators and friends. Most of these women are named, some of them recognizable art-world personalities; others remain anonymous. These samples are alive and on display in the gallery. And they’re growing.

The Kitchen’s second-floor gallery space is divided into two parts. The first is a small room with the show’s central work, Grabbing At Newer Vegetables (2015) — a rectangular and backlit Plexiglas box that is essentially a large petri dish. You can look at it closely, overhead, and are drawn to do so, it being the only source of light and activity in the gallery’s entrance. In it Yi has painted the words “YOU CAN CALL ME F,” using both the biological samples and agar, a substance derived from algae with a long tradition of being used to culture bacteria. This text, once big and blocky like that found on billboards or storefront signage, is now all but obscured by the organisms that have been growing around it since the show’s opening in March.

Simultaneously expanding and disappearing, “Grabbing At Newer Vegetables” cleverly subverts conventional notions of ephemerality and objecthood in visual art. It’s also an interesting take on using feminine fluids as material, a typical trope of the feminist art movement. And it doesn’t necessarily stop there: Yi, who has worked closely with the biology department at MIT, where she is currently in residency, has suggested she might even use the still-growing bacterium in future projects.

The second half of the gallery looks like the aftermath of a viral outbreak. It features five tent-like constructions meant to mimic quarantine units. But these units, roughly constructed from steel pipe and suspended vinyl, are actually open and thus not protective at all, the implication being that the concept of quarantining — extinction through isolation — is a flawed one. Inside the tents are various artifacts, all of which add the show’s themes to some extant: DVDs, calling attention to the Hollywoodization of viral disease; seaweed and dried shrimp, examples of simple organisms used for food; jars of kombucha, serving as a reminder of bacteria’s benefits, to name a few.

Most notably, in three of the tents are individual motorcycle helmets rotating slowly atop black rods, their visors slightly open like the larger encasement in which the sculptures sit. The helmets diffuse a unique scent that Yi developed specifically for the show. The scent is a hybrid of two other, distinct odors: one was obtained from the female samples; the second is the scent of the Gagosian Gallery, which Yi gathered using a device that takes and reproduces an air reading. She then worked with the “scent fabrication company” Air Variable to synthesize these two odors into her own fragrance.

The smell, though, is innocuous. It’s doubtful the gallery-goer would be conscious of it — not to mention the derivations thereof — were they not told about its peculiarity. And at first it seems that these works could be more effective if the smell were stronger, easier to detect: it would makes sense that a show comparing the insidiousness of deep-seated patriarchal systems to the threat of viral pathogens might benefit from establishing an equally visceral experience, forcing its audience to confront both.

Yet this same subtlety is the point. Smell, while the most redolent of the senses, is also the most elusive — we are only cognizant of it when something smells particularly good or particularly terrible; because we are rarely aware of smell, despite the fact that it is fundamental to our experiential relationship to a place, especially in memory, its power lies in its subtlety. That the scent of the Gagosian Gallery (which Yi suggests is the biggest perpetrator of art-world patriarchy) is hardly a scent at all reinforces the institution’s inequities. There’s also an implicit critique of the idea of the gallery as sterile white cube.

Considering all there is to see in the show, it’s surprising its most potent aspect lies in the olfactory experience, or lack thereof, it provides. This might be both the show’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness. The conceptual implications behind it are dense, though there remains a disconnect between this element and the rest of the ideas in the show. Too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.

The post Viral Feminism: Anicka Yi at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

Spencer Finch is well known for installations that reflect and alter perceptions of light and color. Typically they are installed in glass atriums or windows, and consist of colored gels or panels that act as intermediaries between external and internal chromatic effects. Finch often employs a scientific approach, gathering information on the intensity of color that is absorbed by a site, the movement of sunlight throughout a space, or the refractive qualities of water or clouds, translating the data into vibrant, kinetic works that immerse the viewer in kaleidoscopic silhouettes.

His current installation, “A Certain Slant of Light,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, consists of hundreds of square film panels affixed on all sides throughout the four-story glass walls of the Morgan’s Gilbert Court. As sunlight moves around the space each day, and during the seasons, it filters through the panels, sometimes casting intensely colored beams. Suspended from the ceiling, 12 clear glass panels turn slowly, transmitting further migratory reflections.

The piece takes its conceptual framework from books of hours — popular from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance — of which the Morgan holds the country’s most extensive collection. These were often lavishly illustrated prayer books containing several parts including, most importantly, the Hours of the Virgin, from which books of hours derive their name. This was a series of prayers to be recited throughout the day to the mother of Christ, who was regarded as an intercessor between humanity and God. They can be regarded as the iPhones of their day: religiously venerated, checked multiple times a day, directing life by the hour, and providing essential texts. A calendar was also a standard feature, not defined by 365 numerical dates as we would use, but structured around the feast days of saints, and events in the life of Jesus. The most important of these liturgical dates throughout each 12-month cycle were written in red, hence the origin of the term “red letter day.”

“A Certain Slant of Light” is intended to operate as a calendar of sorts, as well as an optical feast. When calendars in books of hours were illustrated, they depicted the traditional labors of each month, with color palettes varying according to those seasonal tasks. Finch has allocated a season to each side of Gilbert Court and varied the palette of his panels accordingly. The north wall is winter, the east is spring, the south is summer, and west, autumn. Throughout are intensely hued red panels, in reference to the most vital of dates in books of hours, only here they represent secular instances that Finch finds compelling — such as Isaac Newton’s birthday — and that were planned to align at noon with the sun’s trajectory on those dates.

The conceptual panoply upon which this project rests is magnificent: it spans centuries, draws directly from among the greatest canonical manuscripts, gleans motifs from the crowning events of religious history, while utilizing astronomy and the photonic power of our home star to ignite it. Even the press release conjures the sublime; though it is perhaps this illustrious framing that causes a sense of deficiency to come to light.

On a sunny day the visual allure of the piece is enjoyable, and it can be appreciated for this alone, but while many visitors may be only peripherally aware of the culture surrounding books of hours, the more one understands of them, the more derivative the installation becomes. The paralleling of colors, seasons and calendars istight and clever, but predictably, superficially so, as thin conceptualism often is when employed to imbue contemporary art with meaning and a patina of relevance. Here, it is insufficient to grant the piece its own authority or self-confidence when set against the mystical historicism surrounding Finch’s source material.

Despite the artist’s meticulous approach, there are practical incongruities that undermine the conceptual integrity. Knowledge of the work’s lofty inspiration doesn’t prevent its visual proximity to the kind of empty decorative design found in shopping malls — something Gilbert Court’s architecture convincingly emulates — where coloring vast glass swathes is an easy solution to transform bland environments. Furthermore, on overcast days the work is rendered disappointingly dormant.

Two of the four sides of the court are glass curtain walls with expansive connection to the sky beyond, effective backdrops for Finch’s panels. But the winter season is located on an internal glass wall that fronts offices. These panels are duller and, if the blinds are up, people can distractingly be seen working at their desks. Hopefully this isn’t explained as being passable because winter is a darker time. Autumn fares even worse, diminished and fragmented by the architecture where there are no substantial areas of glass, presenting an unwelcome contrast with how well the two external walls function.

Perhaps it was by necessity of having to fit in 365 panels, but placing them on the glass elevator seems excessive. Considering the sun’s stately influence and the sedate movement of light and color around the room, witnessing the elevator panels comparatively racing up and down is corrupting to almost comical effect. They are literally taken out of context. The work could be in place for a year and maintenance on such a long-term installation is important — peeling, bubbled panels cheapen the impression dreadfully. These points may seem like trifles, but collectively they undermine the work’s coherence and precision, separating it from the immense detail and quality that epitomize the artifacts from which Finch draws.

A larger question here is whether or not it is advisable in every instance for modern artists to reference as they please from art history just because they can or a site lends itself to it. When done with wit or social perspicacity it can initiate progressive dialog and render art valuable beyond economic worth elevating it into the canon. Grayson Perry, Kehinde Wiley, and Francis Bacon all engaged with art of the past to make fascinating cultural commentary. Alternatively, the Chapman Brothers’ smug, petulant vandalism of a series of Goya prints serves only to highlight their own vacuous posturing and artistic bankruptcy.

In selecting to operate between past and present, don’t contemporary artists have a responsibility to themselves, and their audience, to forge a meaningful relationship between eras, and excavate significant reason for doing so, or risk exposing their efforts as lackluster and flimsy in the face of the reverence bestowed upon art that has withstood the mercurial tastes of ages? Technical and visual execution must also uphold the artist’s intent.

Finch’s installation lacks the emotive capacity to fuel as much interest or controversy as some of the above-mentioned artists did, and while he was not trying to recreate an extant book of hours, that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility to the vast gravity of his source. “A Certain Slant of Light” siphons the language and culture of the masters who created such tomes, and that it draws any lineage with those treasures is to its grievous detriment.

The post Lite Installation: Spencer Finch at The Morgan appeared first on artcritical.

The painting and drawing practices of Alexander Ross, always in fundamental opposition, have increasingly been cross-pollinating. The paintings create photorealist illusions, and are thus, to a high degree, preordained. They are mappings of a kind, in which, in Caroll Dunham’s appreciative phrase, Ross “systematizes rendering as a conflation of sonar and paint-by-numbers.” The images they map are purpose-made glossy digital photo-collages of Plasticine sculptures, built in turn upon ideas in the drawings. As for the drawings themselves, they are pure inventions. They grow before our eyes. And if the synthetic atmosphere of the paintings can seem anaerobic (yet so viscously seductive that one willingly forswears oxygen), the drawings are earthy and florid, drawn as if by an ecstatic 19th-century Dr. Seuss looking through a microscope and reporting back from the microbial frontier. Simultaneous gallery shows in 2008 at David Nolan and Marianne Boesky showcased Ross’s drawings in relation to his then better-known paintings, emphatically revealing their opposition, but also their mediated interdependence as stages along a continuum. Think of Ross’s linkage of methods — drawing, painting, photography, digital manipulation, sculpture, and collage — as a fan belt designed to keep his mad-scientist ideas from overheating, to the point, as has often been noted, of post-human chilliness. But a thaw was evident as far back as those twin exhibitions of 2008. Hybrid drawing-photo works, graphically outlined paintings, and color-banded pencil illusions showed that Ross was in fact beginning to put drawing and painting procedures into direct contact, step by Gregor Mendel-like step.

The new work on view at David Nolan, a decade into these controlled experiments, exhibits full chromosomal exchange: the drawings are now essentially photorealistic, while the paintings invite graphic ideas into isolated Plasticene nodules and their increasingly open-ended backgrounds. Even more, the untitled paintings denoted (AR5072), (AR5073) and (AR5075) let drawing in from the beginning, where it lays down the law. Opting out of Ross’s previously inviolable figure/ground, sky/horizon convention, these unprecedented canvases offer soft frontal grids that can be carved into. This relief space is a revival of an established drawing motif, a vertical slice through cellular gray matter that exposes visceral pockets and interrupted ducts — rendered with Ross’s familiar low-bandwidth slime-o-realism. Yet, despite the sense of hidden rot or infestation thereby exposed, the tissue wall is soft and rounded, not a wound but a specimen cultured against laboratory glass, its graphic undulations blending smoothly, almost spongily, into photorealist punctures and cavities.

Normally at such border zones Ross lays it on thick, as in another hybrid canvas, (AR5232), which places a red trompe l’oeil fungal stalk abruptly against a backdrop version of the cell-wall motif, this one scrawled by oil stick into wet ground. In the context of Ross’s slow-boat methodology this loose sgrafitto is wildly Mattissean. But even so, it’s just another map-able asset, like the piled-up ridges of his fully photoreal passages. There, his meticulous sculpting of illusion owes equal amounts to the shifty self-consciousness of Gerhard Richter and the atelier positivism of Chuck Close. Or, going wide angle, we might take bearings on the viscid leafage of Thomas Cole and the encaustic hatchings on the maps and flags of Jasper Johns — the granddaddy and the grand Dada of American landscape. In that suspiciously empty wilderness, Ross may be our best contemporary guide.

The untitled paintings denoted (AR5233), (AR5234), and (AR5235) are far more typical of Ross’s exhaustive survey of a brave new world. They adhere to his longstanding if ceaselessly tweaked convention, mentioned above, of placing foreground figures against distant looming skies. Within this controlled environment he has been cataloguing “plastic life forms,” as he calls them, for some 20 years, as well as their degree of digital chunkiness, edge conditions, focal quality, and color spread. The startling twist in these new landscapes is that… well, actually, they aren’t landscapes at all, but faces. Or at any rate, Archimboldo-esque coagulations that insist on being read as faces. A couple of them sport genuinely fleshy tongues, though whether the tongues are human or amphibian or functionally attached is up for grabs. A half-dozen drawings on view also look back at the viewer, either as masks or dimly sentient beings, or maybe phantasms of a troubled mind. Some sport tongues that, as with those in the paintings, seem to have been ripped wriggling and wet from a higher life form. These new drawings closely follow Ross’s photorealistic painting procedures, though more atmospherically, by means of delicate, interfering layers of crayon color. At this moment the fan belt seems to be turning in reverse, as the paintings are driving the drawings.

As for the in-your-face faces: pareidoliac forms have always hovered a small step from cognition in the work, but here Ross takes a giant leap into the grotesque. No longer the objective bio-lab technician, the artist stands revealed as Victor Frankenstein. But will the stitched-together features in the new work come to life? Do they imply an embryonic — maybe even hostile ­­— intelligence?

From the evidence of the strangely goofy visages, there is little to worry about thus far. The Pugsley-and-Wednesday tongues notwithstanding, a preschool Jeff Koons might have Play-Dohed the blobbier ones among them. On the other hand, the most refined of the drawings, (AR5238), is creepily humanoid, its Plasticine skull sharpened to a Neolithic spear point. Protuberant horns and blades can be found in the face-conjuring paintings too, but here the heroic landscape scale evokes distant mountaintops as much as lethal body armor. (At 90 inches tall, one canvas is, I believe, Ross’s largest ever.) Still, the sense of scale is unsettled, and unsettling: the sharp peaks are preternaturally clear, and the over-exposed highlights glare forensically.

The more you look, the more pathogenic the paintings begin to feel, as if they might be dumb, deadly parasites whose incipient facial mimicry is evolving to penetrate the defenses of host organisms. If these repulsively seductive paintings feel unhealthy to view, that is no small accomplishment, and lesser artists would stop there. Ross, on the other hand, has just opened a Pandora’s Box of drawing ideas — new spaces, new structures — that the paintings now must pay attention to. Expect further mutations.

The post Hybrids, Mutants: Alexander Ross at David Nolan appeared first on artcritical.

In the beginning was the Word; but after that came a whole lot of little tiny carefully cut-out-and-collaged pictures. Josh Dorman’s work, and his most recent cycle of paintings/collages in his solo exhibition, “Whorled” at Ryan Lee, seem initially to be about dainty narratives set up on some kind of floating Pollock’s Toy Theatre stage, but his fantasies are more about moving words: typologies, taxonomies and nuance. Because of this, Dorman has bridged the gap between the Word made flesh — via the excised bits of numerous catalogs, dictionaries and manuals — and evolution in all its forms: natural evolution, as well as industrial and architectural, though perhaps the point here is there is little difference. In the background of all the paintings (save one) Dorman has laminated the monotonous and regular, yet ever-changing pattern of a player piano roll, a visual metaphor of the flexible inclusiveness of his visual framework.

Scouring antique books to appropriate their diagrams and illustrations, Dorman tricks the viewer into thinking that his work is about images, but the proof is in the democratic way in which he weighs the individual collaged entities in expansive, landscape-format paintings, such as Memento Mori (all 2014). The collage depicts a wide variety of apes and monkeys frolic on the shores of a lake with a similarly variegated collection of architectural diagrams. There is the all around equanimity of man and nature that marks a Bierstadt-like sensibility, despite the gross-disparities if scale and rendering techniques.

In Memento Mori there are also machine parts such as cams and cogs. The unit within these paintings is not the organism, but the cut-out. Much like a Joseph Cornell box, Dorman creates his drama via an assortment of things. The artist reminds us of the origin of his search by including several entries from a dictionary: “myrrh,” “myrtle,” “myself,” “mysterious.” Past all the smoke and mirrors of feathers, antlers, gears and spots, all of this mess neatly falls into the space between A and Z — the fundamental logic of why everything is there in the first place is irrefutable. Though he flirts between the almighty and Darwin, Dorman plays it safe as a something of a technocrat, or perhaps an encyclopédiste.

He is definitely partial to images of the natural world and this is echoed in the themes of the pieces Unintelligible Design and Natural Selection. But there is a latent criticism of the human need to find a narrative direction in scientific law: the climax, so to speak, of Unitelligible Design is a de-railed locomotive in mid-air over a body of water. The march forward, which begins on the left side of the painting with a horse, ends in a steam-powered disaster. Similarly, in Memento Mori an otherwise innocent-looking primate is munching on the bloody wing of an unfortunate avian. The images are meticulously sliced from the yellowed pages of old books and prints — they are inky and decisive, crosshatched and precisely detailed in the way that only an etching can be. Dorman places his cutouts with fantastical natural backgrounds or dystopian urban/industrial nightmares of elevated bridges and walkways — within a stage set too wild to be real, ironically enough his characters/actors take on an increased individuality, often heightened with touches of color.

Book of Hours is the most didactic and ambitious of the pieces, where Dorman posits a narrative on par with his method. The triptych relies heavily on a series of painting tropes to get a message across of the inevitability of ruin; anthropocentric or otherwise. The first panel depicts a Hicks-like Peaceable Kingdom; in the middle, he pauses for breath in an inky and etched purgatory of a Piranesian Carceri; and comes to rest with a Pieter Breughel-like hell. Predictability is not an issue here; as a painter, Dorman has free access to use many of the time-worn images that his predecessors have used again and again, but is more concerned with contemporary questions of what these tropes mean for us now, and do they still mean at all? More poignant is the video piece Sometimes We Find a Broken Cup. As with Book of Hours it has a message, but similar to several of the collages, it moves in a circular motion, presenting good and bad within the context of the natural world where such moral and aesthetic judgments do not apply. It bears a lovely similarity to Tacita Dean’s gorgeous, nihilistic 2010 film The Friar’s Doodle, and in fact, paired with Dorman’s folded Chinese book A Clawfoot Lamp, the video shows his thoughtful drawing technique to great advantage.

In the end, Dorman’s message seems to be both anarchic and deeply rational, much like the expanse of ideology he encompasses in the work. The paintings are chaotic; streams of illustrations and diagrams act as stand-ins for a series of historical and art historical pantomimes, but there is such a profusion of actors that it almost seems the director has lost control of his set. The joy in looking at the works is getting lost in the detail — but as with evolution itself, the detail is so multitudinous that missing links are hard to find and it can all seem very haphazard and miraculous even. But here is where the methodology brings comfort even if it doesn’t make sense of the disorder (which it does not). Process at least allows the viewer some comfort — Dorman’s alliterative categorical practice reminds us that no matter what scene these actors are playing or how they overlap or distract from each other, they are merely taking a brief vacation from the pages from which they were liberated, and one merely needs to pull a book from the shelf, or google a few letters of their name in order to return them to their epistemological safe haven.

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1. The New York Times, “Working or Playing Indoors, New Yorkers Face an Unabated Roar,” by Cara Buckley, July 19, 2012 — Yeah, most of the places you can go to socialize in New York are way too loud. Maybe I’m just getting old and I’ve blown out my ear canals with too much loud, bad music. But if we go out somewhere, I’d like to be able to hear you talking to me from across the table — not just the person I’m rubbing shoulders with. I’ve got an agenda to share with people and I want to be able to hear them when they tell me why I’m mistaken about something. I can’t learn anything if all I hear is a dull mix of some sentimental and ironic pop songs from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s blared at me at 120 db.

2. 3AM Magazine, “romanticism, punk rock, and the importance of rim jobs,” Andrew Stevens in conversation with Brandon Stosuy, March 4, 2007 — Brandon Stosuy is pretty rad. I like the way he writes a lot. There’s a bunch of cultural flotsam from the 1980s that’s in the process of being rediscovered, saved, found, or retained. That stuff is really important since there was a lot of artistic and cultural development going on then that we’re just now trying to think about a little more clearly. (Koons is an OK example of this, though there are also far, far better ones, like Jack Goldstein, Louise Lawler and Richard Prince). Stosuy has shown a pretty cool dedication to that excavation work. So thanks, Brandon Stosuy, for helping with that whole thing.

3. Vice Magazine, “KOMP-LAINT DEPT.: TRUST NEVER SLEEPS,” by Bob Nickas, February 5, 2014 — I’d read anything Bob Nickas writes, whether it’s an essay on art and culture or a grocery list, or some graffiti he scrawled on the wall of a public toilet. He wouldn’t do that, maybe. He writes a column for Vice and I feel like he’s doing some of the best writing of his long, totally illustrious career. I also haven’t read this or his current essay yet, but I would strongly suggest everyone read and re-read and re-read “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, Part II,” “To be Read (Once Every Two Years),” and “Why. I Hate. Graffiti.”

4. sweettomb.com — This is the website of Trinie Dalton, who (full disclosure) was my thesis advisor. She’s absolutely awesome and makes really cool zines. Pick up MYTHTYM, Baby Geisha, and Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is.

5. seanjosephpatrickcarney.com — After reading Walter Benjamin and other cultural criticism-type stuff for a long time, SJPC and his Social Malpractice project finally explained that stuff in a way that made way more sense than a grad school seminar discussion and was also more entertaining than a grad school seminar discussion.

6. skeptoid.com — I volunteer copyediting services to Skeptoid’s blog. I like the science and skepticism community’s encouragement of questioning, thinking about rhetoric, doubting and thinking systematically. I do better when I’m suspicious of my own preconceptions and assumptions. Plus also science is very, very cool.

7. The “Egyptian hieroglyphs” entry on Wikipedia — I like hanging out in the Egyptian wing at the Met. And the history of how this stuff was used and later decoded is really cool. Maya hieroglyphics is also incredibly interesting and weird, and prizes inventiveness.

8. Slate Magazine, “Why Joseph is my Hero,” by David Plotz, June 1, 2006 — I tried again to read the whole Bible. I got into Exodus. It can just be so boring. I’m reading another novel right now and will possibly return to the Bible when I’m done. David Plotz, the former editor at Slate, wrote a blog about his thoughts, reactions, and curiosities while reading the Bible. He’s an atheist, but he takes the book earnestly and generously, and his insights are very cool.

9. The “Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District” entry on Wikipedia — This was a landmark lawsuit about the teaching of evolution in schools. My cousin works at a non-profit, the NCSE, that consulted with the plaintiffs and provided some of the best arguments for the difference between intelligent design as a conceit and evolution as a theory that’s scientifically demonstrable. In the arts we tend to abuse the word “theory.” What we usually mean by that word is a hypothesis or a proposition or a description. What it means in the hard sciences is very different. Here’s a good definition, from Wikipedia: “A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. A scientific theory is differentiated from a hypothesis in that a theory must explain actual observations.” Also, as you might be able to tell from this list, I use Wikipedia all the time and hope to someday be able to state unequivocally that it rivals the achievement of the Library of Alexandria. Fingers crossed.

10. Common Spark Collective, FAQ — I’m sad to say that I’ll likely never contribute to this project, even though I find it really intriguing. These people are mapping “the shared national and cultural resources we inherit and pass around.” That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. It’s an enormous project. I’d like to see what they do with it. The commons is one of the best assets we have in a free society, and recognizing what they are (both as cultural products and as shared spaces) is one step towards thinking about what we can do with them, how we relate to one another, and what our socio-cultural environment is. I found out about this project from a bumper sticker.

11. SolveForX, “Power from Nuclear Waste,” by Leslie Dewan, February 10, 2014 — Most of what we call nuclear waste and store in places like Yucca Mountain, where it will remain dangerous and toxic for thousands of years, is actually unused nuclear fuel. About 90% of the available material in nuclear fuel goes unused, so then it just gets dumped in the middle of nowhere. So, but, Dewan says that technology that allows for more complete consumption of the available fuel in the uranium pellets that nuclear power plants use has existed since the 1950s or so. It’s safer, produces a much shorter half-life (hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands), and is more energy efficient. Plus it requires smaller installations that can exist at current nuclear plants or that can be set up all over the place, which means that any given site is much less dangerous than something like Fukushima (which was a very old and more dangerous model than the ones currently being built). Look: nuclear power is kind of scary, I get that. But the accidents that we’ve seen have all been preventable and aren’t very likely with the current nuclear power facilities that can be built. It’s a way, way, way, way better source of energy than gas, oil, or coal (which, coal, by the way, dumps enormously larger amounts of radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power ever will).

There are also some cool articles from Slate that explain the attempts by various committees to figure out how to warn future generations how horrifically dangerous nuclear waste will remain. It’s a really hard project, since we have no idea what people will be like thousands of years from now. We don’t know what language they’ll speak or what various signs will mean to them. It’s like trying to figure out how to make a Rosetta stone that will retain its communicative clarity easily and effectively for dozens of centuries.

12. Giacometti: A Biography, by James Lord — Lord quoted Giacometti as saying, “In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.” Amen, man. That cat is better for people than any painting. And despite their flaws, this and Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait are amazing depictions of the artist.

13. The Bloggess, “Women Who Are Ambivalent about Women Who Are Against Women Against Feminism,” by Jenny Lawson, July 21, 2014 — Jenny Lawson’s a good writer and I really dig this essay on the difficulty that reactionary forces have imposed on disrupting structural inequalities and outright bigotry.

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