January 18, 2022

Seeing Through the Museum
On Dave McKenzie
All articles by this author
January 18, 2022
On Dave McKenzie
July 18, 2018
On Adrian Piper
In an essay from 1988 called “The Joy of Marginality” Piper made explicit the scope and purpose of her own political and socially-critical art. “My work is an act of communication that politically catalyzes its viewers into reflecting on their own deep impulses and responses to racism and xenophobia, relative to a target or stance that I depict,” she wrote. To achieve this goal (or any goal of effecting psychological change through art), Piper thought it was essential to engage the viewer in what she called the “indexical present” of the work of art: a here-and-now created in the transaction between artist and audience. (Conversely, she expressed skepticism about the efficacy of “global political art” that attempts to educate or persuade the viewer concerning a situation represented as being external to the viewer’s own experience). In another text, “Performance: The Problematic Solution,” Piper championed the didactic and the confrontational as central aspects, or modes, of this form of artist–viewer engagement.
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January 29, 2018
The philosophy of David Hockney
In the central gallery housing Hockney’s drawings is a crayon portrait from 1974 of Andy Warhol, looking frail and a little lonely on a stuffed green chair in Paris. A comparison between the two artists, who were friends, is instructive. The parallels are clear: both gay, blond icons of Pop art, both protégés of Henry Geldzahler, both sons of working class parents, both prolific and witty writers. But here the similarities end, and the two artists begin to seem like inversions of each other. After the initial erotic frenzy of his work from the 1960s, the sexuality in Hockney’s art largely retreated behind discreet visual conventions; sex in Warhol was comparatively hardcore, particularly in his films. Likewise, the theme of death is explicit in Warhol and circumspect in Hockney. Warhol’s narrative voice is arch and elusive, willfully blank; Hockney’s direct and incisive, and at times, almost doggedly earnest. But the most striking zone of commonality and difference has to do with the way the two artists treated the issue of mechanical reproduction.
May 28, 2013
Guyton is making sure/ photographers will always finish second place/ by using their technology and exploiting it/ better than them
November 4, 2011
When we ask ourselves, What is missing from today’s art criticism? the answer is pretty obvious: visuals.
July 27, 2009
The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should function in the manner of a dialectic.
The first joke we made, after taking a lap around the fourth floor, was to call it the Whitney Beige-ennial.
July 11, 2006
While neither sentimental nor old-fashioned, Marvin Gates’s paintings are decidedly engaged with tradition.
December 13, 2005
My job was to tape plastic stencils to the glasses, each with the logo of a hotel or casino.
June 16, 2005
Greater New York is more boyish than girlish. There is carving, hunting, and barbecuing.