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Stephen Squibb
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Signs Taken for Wonders
by Stephen Squibb November 6, 2009
The last method is graffiti, venerable and true. Graffiti has the advantage of puncturing the surface of the ad, while preserving the democratic immanence of the response: everybody usually has a pen. Significant is that both the second and third methods frequently focus on facial mutilation: cutting out eyes or filling them in, adding mustaches, freckles and the like, or otherwise revealing the inherent monstrosity of the image. This disfiguration has as its target the very performance of humanity that lies at the heart of print advertising. Take out the eyes, soil the mouth and the truth of the image suddenly coincides with its appearance.
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Paul McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth
by Stephen Squibb November 4, 2009
This misrecognition is especially striking in the documentary images of his performances; here the mind, confronting one his signature tableau, immediately leaps to the most breathtaking and unsavory conclusions. For a moment, we find ourselves looking at an image of unimaginable horror, but then the slow reconstruction of what one is actually seeing. No, that is not a person, it’s a doll, and that is not some terrible mixture of fluid and excrement, but mustard and chocolate. And on and on until we can actually see both images at once, the one we thought we were looking at and the one we actually are. Who, we ask ourselves, taught us to see such things?
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Fall at PS 1
by Stephen Squibb October 26, 2009
1969, by dint of its aforementioned, almost emotional, coherence, does provide for the most successful aspect of all the fall programming taken together, namely the contrast with Between Spaces, the first floor presentation of emerging contemporary sculpture. Professional to the point of self-consciousness, Between Spaces is an almost surgical presentation of eleven sculptors working across a variety of media. Deploying a highly polished conceptual dexterity with a subtlety that borders on self-effacement, the show couldn’t be more different from the messy, arrogant and, it must said, decidedly endearing ruckus perpetrated by the aging hippies on the second floor.
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Yes Men at Film Forum
by Stephen Squibb October 19, 2009
So it came to pass that Andy Bichlbaum, performing under some deliciously ridiculous name, alerted the world that Dow Chemical was taking full responsibility for the tragic legacy of its recently purchased subsidiary, Union Carbide, by liquidating it and paying full restitution to its victims. This news, and it was actual news for about an hour, caused the citizens of Bhopal to rejoice and Dow to lose a breathtaking two billion dollars off its stock price. If you can imagine a more spectacular demonstration of moral bankruptcy, I would love to hear it.
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Max Carlos Martinez at Christopher Henry
by Stephen Squibb October 12, 2009
Two large, black-on-white tracings of multiple figures further rehearse this feeling of isolation. Each character seems almost to be floating in space, unrelated and unaware of the others, except when their action seems directed towards one of them as if by chance, as when a miner seems about to bring down his axe on a fallen cowboy. The works themselves seem formal echoes of an adolescent’s sketchbook or a sheet of stickers, with figures finding themselves in proximity to one another by dint of a haphazard necessity.
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YSL Manifesto at Bedford Avenue
by Stephen Squibb September 22, 2009
Still, there is likely a more subtle relationship at work here, and maybe fashion week bears the same relationship to merchandise as does the Whitney Biennial. In that case the immediate temptation — to recount, yet again, the slow mummification of a once meaningful format, the manifesto, in this case, via its diffusion among the lesser and inevitably more popular arts — should probably be resisted.
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YTJ at The New Museum
by Stephen Squibb August 28, 2009
Even the obsession with describing the millenials by referencing any number of online/networking apps feels like a top-down operation. What’s more likely to stand out to an old grappling with the intricacies of Twitter than the young’s casual fluency?
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