The Art Book Review

Using descriptions of historic outsiders he paints a fairyland of anachronistic character—until the arrival of marriage. At which time the array dims, inverted from a dynamic state of refusal, to a reflection in polished obsidian.

The politics of Yael Bartana’s work, as discussed in Short Memory, are difficult; she refuses the straightforward moral imperatives that characterize most political rhetoric, in art and elsewhere. But this refusal doesn’t add up to a disengaged cynicism, or a lack of conviction. 

Pink is a protest a rejection a confrontation with decadence. It’s a big middle finger to everyone who has batted their eyelashes and fanned themselves with faux genteel hands. Pink is a drunken slut that doesn’t give a shit if you blackmail it with naked selfies. It was hoping you would.

Economy of words is the hallmark of the SMS form. Delicately framed in its surrounding negative space, each message is a work of literary art. These are petite poems with fortune cookie message satisfaction. I love how much I can get out of so little.

The landscape is unresponsive, apathetic, or if it does respond it does so obliquely, to be interpreted. We might think it’s all a joke, but the landscape is the stand-in which allows the conversation to happen, through which issues may be explored in ways that are more about the difficulties of being, or about the translating of experiences from source to receiver, and less about any specifics of the artist’s personal grievances, anxieties, or loves.

SNEAK PEEK! Scenes from the Great American Non-Site, by Chad Rutter. 2011. Mystery Spot Books. 

NEW! Material, Issues 1, 2, 3, a Los Angeles-based journal of texts by visual artists, edited by Kim Schoen and Ginny Cook. 

Rather, Why Art Photography? is an explicit and mind-numbingly comprehensive checklist that lays down a barrage of academic prerequisites for making and apperceiving art photography. “The art world today assumes a fairly high level of academic training in artists as well as critics,” writes Soutter, (27) and “the ideas that circulate around art photography are both necessary for interpretation and yet frequently difficult to access.” (17) I feel a bit like I am getting tips on how to join a cult.

We learn that the voyeuristic quality of these works was intrinsic: “Of course the person who loved watching these films the most, and who did so over and over, while the rest of us ran to the other end of the factory, was Warhol.” He made films so he could watch them, a busman’s holiday for a voyeur. And Woronov satisfies our inner voyeur with curt, charming and dynamic details.

From the review by Merridawn Duckler of Mary Woronov, Eyewitness to Warhol, (Victoria Dailey Publisher, 2002)

SNEAK PEEK: Scenes from a Verdant Place by Adler Guerrier. NAME Publications. 2013. 

For most of these artists, New Jersey wasn’t a point of arrival. Rather, they quite directly saw it as a space of change, inspired by these tectonic forces at work, exporting these observational strategies and practices to the vast, open spaces of the American West and beyond.

SNEAK PEEK: Fright Catalog by Joseph Mosconi. Insert Blanc Press, 2013. 100 p.

We are still limited by whether we know how to ask the right questions. Some information is forced on us, and some is buried in the feed. Presentation is intentional. This information is online, it’s there, but what brings it here, what is the push needed to make us seek it out?

But for that exploded moment after a collapse, what seemed previously impossible is suddenly possible. Remarkable things grow in the rifts and fissures of our lost confidence in the stability of established reality.