The late Bruce Conner's ecstatic experience of film editing makes his decades-long exploration of it a slow motion spiritual revelation. And so, seeing Conner's major films together at the Museum of M…
The painting Z VIII (1924) by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), is a schematic representation of intersecting transparent planes. It is a dictionary of Bauhaus formalism, and would come off as generic…
I used to associate Jonathan Lasker's impasto loops with the singer Regina's twisty hair wraps in the music video for her 1986 hit single, "Baby Love." Lasker's 1980s paintings, like Elizabeth…
Since his death, a cult has grown up around the figure of Robert Smithson (1938–73), one that surrounds the artist and his work with an aura of purism. This is too bad, because what is most vital…
It's generally accepted that improvisation signifies humanness and, conversely, that perfectionism signifies its repression. But perfectionism is all too human. Perfectionism carries with it the…
Mark Manders's work makes a good argument for banishing the term "contemporary." It's a silly term. Unlike "modern," which projected futures for a range of now-failed ideologies and left its own…
The "First Papers Of Surrealism" exhibition, a collaboration between Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, was held in New York City in 1942. It was a visual manifesto for the European-born movement, and…
Virginia Woolf called George Eliot's Middlemarch, "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Sometimes I apply this to paintings. I look at a painting show and ask myself, "Is this…
There was a moment in the late '80s and early '90s when artists started appearing in Gap ads and fashion spreads. Somewhere there is a photo of me in L’Uomo Vogue holding my Cairn terrier, Rascal…
If I had a spirit animal, it would probably be a toaster. So the cloud of spiritual incense that floats around in Stephen Mueller's paintings has always prevented me from enjoying them. My mind…
