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June 2010
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Strange Fruit: Civil Rights and Visual Culture at ICP
by Laila Pedro June 30, 2010
Photos documenting suffering, lynchings, protests, and so on silently and powerfully condemn the abuses; they engage the viewer in an emotional response. In a parallel sense, other visual media can depict, intentionally or not, the same underlying social structures that create injustice. For this reason, this show’s juxtaposition of racist advertisements with direct photographic documentation of actual events effectively illustrates the complex network of imagery operating in the socio-visual history of the civil rights movement.
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Charlotte Posenenske at Artists Space
by Alice Gregory June 29, 2010
Seemingly readymade, these “square tubes,” were designed to Posenenske’s specifications and sold only for the cost of fabrication. By avoiding a gallery presentation and dispersing her unlimited, unsigned work for cost, Posenseske simultaneously refused and exaggerated her authority as an artist. Despite the simplicity of her forms, Posenenske’s career offers no precedent for the mass-produced, hyper-salable art of the past two-odd decades. Though her work is not at all dated, few vestiges of her artistic democracy persist today.
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Multiple Transgressions: Eichhorn and Bajevic at TEAM
by Laila Pedro June 24, 2010
The subject’s sex is again blurred out by the glimmering edge, so that even as the viewer’s power is refused, the object protects its autonomy, even, bizarrely and wonderfully, its privacy. In outsourcing the activity of authorship, to customs officials, no less, Eichorn reactivates the implications of this unconsummated desire. Mapplethorpe’s images become poignant, achieving, for a second time, a prescience of the looming AIDS epidemic.
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Voyeur Eyes Only: On Glass Houses and Art Committees
by Raphael Ruttenberg June 18, 2010
The object of the sculpture garden is not seclusion, but the presentation of private possessions to the outside world.
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A History of Excellence: Women Photographers at MoMA
by Alice Gregory June 15, 2010
In the January 1971 issue of ArtNews, Linda Nochlin published her now-canonical essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? She must not have been talking about photography.
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The Portrait of a Lawyer
by Sam Biederman June 10, 2010
Judging from my father’s response to ‘Barefoot Attorney’, I’d say that the subject-artwork relationship is child-to-parent.
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Finance for Beginners: Michael Lewis on Wall Street
by Jessica Loudis June 8, 2010
As a financial wonk and Berkeley liberal, Lewis’ books have the rare quality of appealing to two audiences at once: bankers and people who consider reading financial journalism on par with a trip to the dentist. (I fall into the latter camp). In Liar’s Poker, passages about mortgage-backed bonds and credit default swaps—boiled down to their most digestible essentials—are interspersed with accounts of the self-described “Big Swinging Dicks” that ran the show, casting doubt on any theories that statistical failures were entirely to blame for looming financial troubles.
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The Poverty of Privacy: Google, Facebook, and the New Jeffersonians
by Greg Afinogenov June 4, 2010
It suffices most of the time to accuse someone of collecting information (search data, shopping patterns, demographics) for all the toxic bubbles of suspicion to float to the surface. Surely you’re not in the business of making money off of information? Why would you need so much information anyway? And can you really not tell if it’s me buying the Hello Kitty vibrators?
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Greg Afinogenov Is Wrong About Everything
by Ben Davis June 3, 2010
In anything further that he chooses to write about my text, I would like Afinogenov to at least acknowledge what a shoddy job he has done in summarizing what I actually wrote. He seems to obsess about issues of terminology, but hasn’t read my piece very carefully. Afinogenov imputes to me opinions that I do not have, and that I specifically reject in my text. He says I ignore things that I actually write about. He accuses me of being ahistorical, but even within the confines of the aphoristic style that I chose to present this material in there is more history than in his response. I would think that Harvard would expect a higher degree of intellectual rigor from its graduate students.
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