I was fortunate enough to interview Steven Shearer a few years ago for his exhibition at the Brant Foundation. Their publicity team had reached out to ASX, and I was perplexed that they found us, given how most of our reviewing happens predominantly within the realm of photography, with some emphasis on painting and video […]
If you grew up in a certain period, some of your first experiences with counterculture were inspired by the genius cover artwork of albums by various punk bands, notably Black Flag, by what appeared to be a deranged cartoon columnist. I vividly remember ducking in and out of head/record shops in the Midwest growing up […]
Art School is a process. It is one of those experiences in life that feels uncertain, tempting, and usually administered to those who wander, who are trying to fidn their footing in life, unashamed to be creative, yet unaware of what it will take to make a career in the arts feasible should they continue. […]
Victor Man’s painting presents a miasmic world in which death is presided over by the elegant souls of the living, and the living, in turn, are reminded of their duty as constant eulogizers of what has been lost. Playing technically off a nod to the kitsch black velvet paintings of the 1960s and to the […]
Jonathan Meese is one of those artists compelled by an unseen, yet pernicious, towering force that many of us cannot recognize as anything else but a steam engine powered by Satan and maybe curry wurst, lager, and a cartoonish desire to paint the times as a disgraceful embodiment of human spirit, causality, scum, and victory. […]
First published in 1975, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology has become a classic between categories of production. First and foremost, it is an essential book of photographs that typologically investigates the remnants of Second World War bunker armaments mostly along France’s Western coastline. These heavy structures, though short and squat, are impressive concrete-and-rebar boulders that sit […]
I was sent this lovely book about the choreography and performance art of Hermann Heisig by Spector Books, one of Germany’s finest publishers, at the suggestion of their team. I tend to value suggestions like these from a publisher known for a wide output, as they offer a thoughtful dialogue between parties. I get to […]
Daan Paan’s Floating Signifiers, published by The Eriskay Connection is a fascinating study of a type of aesthetic evolutionary morphology as evidenced through several case studies concerning image typology from trees, hinting at ecological questions through fantasy-driven tropes such as the Panta Rhei birthing figure, executed from popular culture, culled from Stephen Spielberg’s Indiana Jones […]
There is a small number of essential photobooks that explore the concept of artistic process/practice and performance. Most recently, I have found myself thumbing through Joseph Beuys: Coyote, by Caroline Tisdall (Schirmer/Mosel, 1976), which features photographs of Beuys’ legendary 1974 performance, I Like America and America Likes Me. The performance, arguably Beuys’ most well-known, next to How to […]
What appears as fok or “primitive” in the handling of Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s exceptional sculpture is illusory. Instead, what the work relies on is a consistent production of cultural comic and cartoon icons ad infinitum, their forms shaped not by Frimkess’s vision of a new form but by the replication (at volume) of these cultural […]
Motel 42 (Leaf, 2024) is another testament to the never-ending slew of American road trip books. However, in Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon’s book, you can’t see much of America outside of the cigarette-stained roadside motel rooms she and her lover Adrien have occupied. You can read about the places they visited in the back of the book, […]
How long should mourning last? Could you tell me the prescribed timeframe for a loved one’s passing to be followed by a resolution? The fallacy of the human condition regarding loss suggests that one can move on from a significant loss, when in reality, as the metric is difficult to ascertain, mourning, from my perspective […]