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From Robert Whitman’s Passport, Riverfront Park, Beacon, NY, April 17, 2011

Some days I could do without the cultivation of chance. I certainly could have done without it on Sunday. As my wife and I drove north towards Beacon, New York, to see Passport, a new multimedia performance by Robert Whitman set simultaneously outdoors on the banks of the Hudson River and in a theatre at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, it began to rain. Sunday’s showing was the second run. The prior night’s performance had been cancelled due to weather, and Dia: Beacon’s website had been updated to say that Saturday’s tickets would be honoured the next evening. Dia was doubling down, and the bet did not look like it was going to pay off.

Read the rest at ArtReview.com.

By the time you read this, Fenway Bergamot may or may not have announced that he is running for president of the United States. That is inconsequential. Not that Bergamot may or may not run for president of the United States. Well, actually, yes, that is inconsequential too, because it is only repeating what was inconsequential about the statement before, which is that Bergamot may run for president or he may not, and that is pretty much the same as saying that you may or may not run for president, or that I may or may not run for president. Really, this is simply a way of saying that Fenway Bergamot exists, and saying that he may or may not run for president is also simply a way of proposing two potential worlds, one where Bergamot runs for president, and one where he does not. The interesting thing is that those two worlds simply describe one world, this world, the current world, in its entirety, which is the world in which Fenway Bergamot may or may not run for president of the United States – on the Republican ticket, by the way.

Fenway Bergamot is Laurie Anderson. This is consequential, though also not wholly accurate. Fenway Bergamot is the name recently given by Lou Reed (Anderson’s partner of 20 years, and husband for the past two) to the voice that Anderson has used throughout her career at moments when she needed to give voice to one other than her own. Some have called Bergamot Anderson’s alter ego, a character that she invented for her performances; but it is important to remember that Bergamot is first and foremost a voice, one that embodies a distinct kind of American authority, our big Other as philosophical talking head, a ventriloquist for the invisible hand of the market, a voice of power plugged into an AC circuit (Anderson has a thing for Nikola Tesla) – or as Anderson would probably say, a blowhard.

So to say that Bergamot is Anderson’s alter ego is to go too far, because with Anderson’s work, it’s not ego, it’s voice. Fenway Bergamot and Laurie Anderson share the same voice, as they do, for example, on Another Day in America, a track from Anderson’s celebrated studio album Homeland (2010; that’s Fenway’s smug mug on the cover). Yet even this is not accurate, because their two voices could not be more distinct, even in their identity…

Read the rest in the April Issue of ArtReview or online at ArtReview Digital.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project, 2009-11;
Installation View, Galerie Lelong, New York, 2011

Painting has long given up the ghost on the Renaissance metaphor of acting as a window onto some other world; it now has to battle it out as just one more screen among many.  Yet it is surprising how few of those screens have taken up this metaphor for themselves.  Of course Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) made the case for cinema as voyeurism, and along less mainstream lines, both Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and Richard Serra’s Frame (1969) probed the limits of fenestrated filmic perception and cognition.  To my knowledge, however, no practitioner of the camera arts has equated the screen with the window, has literalized this metaphoric relationship, quite as effectively as Krzysztof Wodiczko…

Read the rest in the forthcoming May issue of ArtReview or on ArtReview Digital.

E’wao Kagoshima, Monkey Smoking, 2007; image from Algus Greenspon

Is the difference between eclecticism and pastiche simply a function of framing?  When an artist works in many different styles, let alone mediums, and the results are gathered together in one place, the outcome we regard as a kind of willed eclecticism.  When those styles all appear in a single work, or when their allusions to other works of art, or artists’ styles, are so strong as to be quickly recognizable, it’s pastiche.  But what happens when the frame that keeps eclecticism distinct from pastiche begins to slip, when we find ourselves caught in the midst of a search (for a style) and a comment (on “style” itself) without knowing which is which, or even if the question itself is valid (after all, who would think to talk about “style” anymore)? Valid or not, it is a question that will confront any viewer of E’wao Kagoshima’s output since 1976, which is when the artist arrived in New York and began the various artistic campaigns that are well represented at Mitchell Algus’s (and business partner Amy Greenspon’s) newest enterprise…

Read the rest in the forthcoming April issue of ArtReview or on ArtReview Digital.

Lori Waselchuk, Slippery When Wet, 2008; Planet of Slums, Third Streaming, NY

Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums hit the neoliberal consensus in 2006 like an earthquake hits a favela.  There it was, in Davis’s flamethrower prose, with numbers to boot: more humans around the globe now dwell in cities than not, and they do so increasingly in slums, not because of some inherent degeneracy or collective lack of will to better their lives, but because economic liberalization—deregulation, privatization, tariff elimination, etc., oft administered by the IMF and WTO’s Structural Adjustment Programmes—put them there.  “How the other half lives” has of course been of interest to activists and reformers since industrialization put slums on the map.  And mapping those slums, that is, making them visible, has been a central strategy of progressive social agendas ever since.  But how those slums are made visible—in reports, pictures, documentaries, fictions—is the founding question in the politics of representation, to which any exhibition that would take Davis’s title for its own must answer…

Read the rest at ArtReview Digital

Image: Monika Sosnowska, 2010 (installation view), photo: Thomas Mueller. Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth London, New York, & Zurich.

My review of Monika Sosnowska’s first solo at Hauser & Wirth, NY, is up at artreviewdigitial.com (requires registration).

Check it out here.

The one thing I don’t mention or address explicitly there, which I will here, is that the VIP Art Fair’s capacity problems–slow loads and delays, choppiness, etc.–are both a mystery and not.  I’m not a tech guy, so I could be wrong, but can’t one estimate usage and buy capacity to handle it?  If so, the mystery is why VIP was not overly cautious with its estimates–i.e. why did it not buy more capacity at the outset?  This simply can’t–I hope–boil down to a money issue.

Juanli Carrión, ogon-seki, 2010. C-Print on dibond. Image courtesy of the artist.

Juanli Carrión just dropped off a pair of beautiful looking catalogues from his project, Kei-Seki, which was part of the Biennial Fotográfica 10 – Espai d’Art La Llotgeta, in Valencia, Spain.  I wrote a short essay—”The Currency of Kitsch”—for the book (the texts of which are available on Juanli’s website) and I’m told that there will be a launch party for it before the end of February; so more on that soon.

The Boyd Level pocket guide to the art fairs in Miami is now available for download at boydlevel.com.

My write up of Tony Cox’s show from back in October now up at artreviewdigital.com (requires registration), along with the rest of the December issue.  PDFs of this and other recent writing will be updated soon.