I’ll wager that no one reading this essay knows (or perhaps wants to know) the author of the ridiculous sentence in its title. Since the publication of Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” 40 years ago, many readers have acquired a seasoned skepticism about the authority and dependability of the authorial voice.
Creighton Michael and the Origins of Marking
Throughout the history of art—no matter what period of time or in what part of the world—artists have placed considerable emphasis on their ability to draw. Drawing functions as a tool, a primary attribute for making art.
Chicago: Sculpture Town
Carl Sandburg’s “city of the big shoulders” has established itself as a city of big art, and it maintains a passionate, occasionally contentious, and fondly attentive relationship with its sculpture. In 1967, Chicago dedicated one of the first—if not the first—contemporary, monumental, non-memorial public sculptures in the United States in its city hall plaza, a
Ross Knight: Sculptural Moments
Ross Knight came to New York City in 1989 after completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He had been accepted at Cal Arts and was ready to go, but he had also gotten into the studio program at P.S.1.
Hüseyin Alptekin: Enigmas that Don’t Explain and Don’t Complain
Hüseyin Alptekin promised to explain his enigmatic works to me, including Don’t Complain, the installation he produced as Turkey’s representative to the 2007 Venice Biennale. We began to correspond (he was pleased by my attempts at a Foucauldian archaeology of his work), and we seemed about to uncover the quintessential stratum that would explain all the
Richard Hunt: Voyage Through Modernism
Richard Hunt was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2009. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Richard Hunt’s sculptural journey began in the 1950s with his startling achievements as a prodigy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Liza Lou: Fragile Security
“I moved to South Africa in order to find another way of working, one which can make a substantial difference to other people’s lives,” Liza Lou says. Her recent barbed-wire-topped cages and disintegrating prayer rug reliefs have glistening glass surfaces that draw attention to borders and skin.
The Labyrinth in the Tower: A Conversation with Diana Al-Hadid
Syrian-born Diana Al-Hadid lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her first New York solo exhibition, “Reverse Collider,” takes its title from sources that range from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s historical vision of The Tower of Babel (1563) to the futuristic-looking Large Hadron Collider or particle accelerator at CERN, in Geneva, which seeks to find “the god
Brave New Art: The Sculpture of Anselm Reyle
Anselm Reyle has enjoyed one of the swiftest art scene careers in recent years. His works are in famous private collections, appear in the best galleries, achieve record prices at auctions, and feature in important exhibitions like the critically acclaimed “Unmonumental” at the New Museum in New York.
More Famous than John Dillinger: A Conversation with Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana didn’t invent love, but he did make the word synonymous with the pot-smoking, love-making, anti-war counterculture of the ’60s, which morphed into the museum-going, art-buying public of the ’80s. Today, Indiana’s LOVE sculpture—in English, Hebrew, and other languages, in varied scales, and in finishes from burnished Cor-ten steel to mirrored, polished stainless steel to bright
