“The impetus for Spaghetti Blockchain came from looking at YouTube for endless hours. Also, I’ve been considering different definitions of materialism—as a philosophical term, what it means in capitalism, and how we are composed of matter.”
September/October 2019
September/October 2019
Ghost Stories: A Conversation with Michael Rakowitz
Over the course of six days in 2003 during the American invasion of Iraq, more than 3,000 artifacts on display at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad were looted or destroyed. For Michael Rakowitz, an American artist of Jewish-Iraqi heritage, the desecration was personal, and it inspired an ambitious sculptural project.
Unpredictable Beauty: A Conversation with Coleen Sterritt
Sterritt’s work prods insistently at the gaps between natural and manufactured, anonymity and authorship, between art, craft, and mass production.
No Fear: A Conversation with Elmgreen & Dragset
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset employ performance, installation, design, and corrupted advertising to subvert collective sensibilities. They come at the objects and assumptions that rationalize our lives with an adolescent energy, protesting against the moroseness of maturity and refusing to surrender to the status quo.
Critical Aspirations: A Conversation with Ilana Harris-Babou
Ilana Harris-Babou is often considered a video artist, but her practice fluidly negotiates sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and online platforms like Instagram.
Christopher Miles
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA College of Creative Studies Gallery, University of California, Santa Barbara The nine dramatic structures constituting “In Form” so agitate their surroundings that they create a distinct atmosphere independent of the space itself. Animated, highly detailed, penetrated with holes, tube-like parts, glossy excrescences, and contrasts between interior and exterior, they demand an engaged, committed process of examination.
Hans Op de Beeck
NEW YORK Marianne Boesky Gallery The uncanny quality of the show stemmed from the exacting observation that Op de Beeck applies to his matte-gray human figures and their interior settings, which appear as if frozen in time.
Ruth Asawa
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI Pulitzer Arts Foundation While “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” did not present her life experience idealistically, her creative, ethical response to her experience and her tenacious devotion to labor became almost transcendent models of work-arounds for obstruction.
Francis Upritchard
LONDON Barbican Centre Referencing an Iron Age burial site in the north of England, Francis Upritchard’s impressive exhibition, “Wetwang Slack,” announced from the outset that archaeology would be an underlying theme. But this was no dry, bleached-out display of indistinguishable artifacts such as have tried the patience of school children for generations.
In Public and In Color: A Conversation with Leonardo Drew
Drew recently unveiled City in the Grass, a monumental commission for Madison Square Park in New York City, which remains on view through December 15, 2019. An eponymously titled solo show at his New York gallery, Galerie Lelong & Co., is on view through August 2.
