Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Robin Jaffee Frank, ed.
Exh. cat. Hartford and New Haven: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2015. 304 pp.; 228 color ills.; 44 b/w ills. Hardcover $50.00 (9780300189902)
Exhibition schedule: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, January 31–May 31, 2015; San Diego Museum of Art, July 11–October 13, 2015; Brooklyn Museum, November 20, 2015–March 13, 2016; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, May 11–September 11, 2016
As I walked through the Wadsworth Atheneum’s recent large-scale exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008, I could not help but ask: Did we really need a show on Coney Island? What does it bring to the intellectual and aesthetic table, so to speak, that would be important or crucial now? In theory, there are a number of compelling reasons to mount this show: a Coney Island exhibition would span a broad historical period; pull from a diversity of objects and media, thus expanding museum dialogues; and provide a platform for confronting race, class, gender, sexuality, and… Full Review
December 3, 2015
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Kathryn Kanjo, Robert Storr, and Quincy Troupe
Exh. cat. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2015. 204 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780934418744)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, September 20, 2014–January 4, 2015; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, May 16, 2015–Aug 2, 2015; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, September 12, 2015–January 24, 2016
When the artist Jack Whitten (b. 1939) refers to his studio as a laboratory, he is speaking literally, not metaphorically. Fridges and industrial freezers are stocked with muffin tins, pans, and molds of all kinds filled with acrylic paint. Covering the walls are tools of every shape and size—many of which are homemade concoctions. Whitten even looks the part of a scientist; his studio uniform consists of a paint-splattered white lab coat and sneakers he spray-painted silver. Although Whitten frequently acknowledges his debt to Abstract Expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Norman Lewis—artists he… Full Review
November 27, 2015
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Los Angeles: MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles, January 21–March 29, 2015
In her recently published Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, artist Renée Green describes her 1999 exhibition Partially Buried in Three Parts as an exploration “of genealogical traces,” where overlapping investigations examine the ways people reinterpret their past to their “contemporary relations to a natal patria” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, 275–276). The exhibition, for Green, was also a meditation on what site-specificity might mean when the concept of location is increasingly “affected for many by circuit relations, meaning that a sense of place and time can depend largely on where one’s computer screen is and when memory is… Full Review
November 19, 2015
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Lawrence Weschler
Exh. cat. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2015. 159 pp.; 85 color ills. Cloth $49.95 (9783791349145)
Exhibition schedule: James Cohan Gallery, New York, May 1–June 14, 2014 (under the title Fred Tomaselli: Current Events); University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, October 2, 2014–January 25, 2015; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, February 15–May 24, 2015
Fred Tomaselli’s solo exhibition The Times at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is the New York-based artist’s first West Coast show. The exhibition is also a homecoming for the artist, who grew up in the neighboring city of Santa Ana. Before traveling to Orange County, The Times spent four months at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The idea for these two exhibitions came from James Cohan Gallery’s debut spring 2014 show, entitled Fred Tomaselli: Current Events. As the artist’s gallery representation, James Cohan dedicated Current Events to exploratory artworks that Tomaselli colloquially calls capriccetti… Full Review
November 12, 2015
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Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, December 12, 2014–April 5, 2015
Allora and Calzadilla: Intervals brings together new and recent work by the Puerto Rico-based artists whose interdisciplinary practice addresses the ethical and affective dimensions of political resistance. Working collaboratively since meeting as art students in 1995, the Philadelphia-born Jennifer Allora and Havana-born Guillermo Calzadilla are perhaps most widely known for their exhibition Gloria at the American Pavilion during the 2011 Venice Biennale. That exhibition’s memorably monumental pieces—an ATM machine built into a pipe organ or a treadmill on top of an inverted army tank—packed a spectacular visual punch, mordantly satirizing capitalism, religion, the military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism without necessarily… Full Review
November 12, 2015
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Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman, and Nicholas Serota, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. 298 pp.; 244 color ills.; 82 b/w ills. Paper $45.00 (9780870709487)
Exhibition schedule: Tate Modern, London, April 17–September 7, 2014; Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 25, 2014–February 10, 2015
Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, executed during the last twenty years of the artist’s life, have been taken to exemplify the concept of “late style”—the culmination of a career achieved through intensified abstraction, luminosity, and spiritual expression. Yet, as the recent exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) reveals, the series might be better understood as a continuation of the artist’s lifelong interest in the emotional appeal of color; simplified, synthetic line; and the interplay of decorative surfaces, borders, and frames. Despite repeated references to Matisse’s illness and old age in the exhibition catalogue, documentary photographs, and… Full Review
November 12, 2015
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Salt Lake City: Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: February 13–April 18, 2015
Sophie Calle’s thirty-minute video Unfinished (2005), on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), narrates the artist’s troubled fifteen-year investigation of money. The video moves chronologically from Calle’s receipt, in 1988, of seven stills from the security cameras of an American bank, to her acquisition of three full tapes of ATM security footage in 1990, through another thirteen years of her frustrated attempts to use this footage to make sense or art out of money. Taken alone, Unfinished is concerned primarily with its paired investigations of artistic process and the function of money as a mediator between individual… Full Review
November 5, 2015
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Sarah J. Montross, ed.
Exh. cat. Brunswick, ME and Cambridge, MA: Bowdoin College Museum of Art and MIT Press, 2015. 136 pp. Cloth $29.95 (9780262029025)
Exhibition schedule: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, March 5–June 7, 2015
Science fiction and space travel are only one facet of this unusual and ambitious exhibition, which brings together an array of disparate artworks addressing multiple intertwined subjects ranging from the cosmic and geologic to the technological, social, political, and environmental. Curator Sarah Montross proposes four broad themes for organizing the multiplicity of works: the “new man” of the technological future; space travel and its depiction through visual technologies; American landscapes and time travel; and utopian/dystopian futures. The layout of the exhibition largely corresponds to these topics, and simultaneously creates marked divisions between work by artists from the United States and… Full Review
November 5, 2015
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Ann Temkin
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. 264 pp. Cloth $45.00 (9780870709463)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 4, 2014–January 18, 2015
Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not A Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a collaborative project between Robert Gober; Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture; and Paulina Pobocha, assistant curator. The exhibition, at its heart, reflects Gober’s curatorial practice. This role is not a new one for the artist. In 2009, Gober organized Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, with Cynthia Burlingham, at the Hammer Museum of Art; and for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, he curated a selection of Forrest Bess’s work. Indeed, as MoMA Director Glenn Lowry notes in… Full Review
October 29, 2015
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Laura Hoptman
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. 176 pp.; 135 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780870709128)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World is the rather ominous title of a sprawling exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The title alone almost seems to threaten the very existence of any and all future endeavors in painting. Seventeen artists from just three countries (nine women and eight men), all born after 1954, make up the group selected by Laura Hoptman, curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, to carry the banner of painting into the future and, perhaps, back into the past. The term “atemporality” was coined by science fiction writer… Full Review
October 22, 2015
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