The idea of the outsider is fascinating in photography. On one hand, the audience for photography loves a surprise story, one that challenges the canon and one that appears to materialize out of nowhere, without precedent, and shaped from the margins of conventions. What is fascinating is the tendency to think such things are less […]
To you, Beni Bischof may be a monster. To others, he is an unofficial unsyndicated scribe for the madness of the last half-century of consumer hell that we wade through. They drew first Blood; it wasn’t me. To give context to Bishof’s sprawling and prolific practice from the outside would be an exercise in deep-fried […]
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 […]
Toxic typology or cultural analysis of Swiss Agro-society, you be the judges. Either way, these little uns gunna smoke these here heaters until the cows come home. There is an amazing history of smoking in photography that Lucy Sante first cottoned onto sometime in the early 2000s with her book No Smoking. Several other smoking […]
Mycellium and fungus in general have been a renewed interest as of late. Some of this is undoubtedly narrowed or zoomed in by the current fear of ecocide most of us are experiencing as we watch wildfires decimate geographies familiar and unfamiliar, as we are forced to watch data centers spring up around natural aquifiers- […]
In these days of irreversible rancor and decimation, one cannot help but look backward through the lens of a type in fogged nostalgia for the second half of the Twentieth Century, in the years prior to 2001, also embedded fairly as a time of grave uncertainty. Notwithstanding, this was a time when the travails of […]
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 […]
This is the second book from MACK offering a look into the theme of contact sheets presented over the past year. The first was David Armstrong’s book Contacts (I mean, how else should you call these, Sheets?), published last October, which similarly examined a brilliant tranche of Armstrong’s work through the diminutive, if plentiful, images on his […]
Throughout the 1990s, there was a distinct emphasis on the body and its decline. Work produced during the 90s, whether from the aids crisis or the ideological shift away from the Catholic church toward an atheistic and bodily autonomy, signaled a visceral approach to photography. The documentary Vile Bodies (1999), produced by Chris Townsend and […]
There are still true eccentrics with exceptional ability out in this world, navigating the trenches of culture, unashamed to live life as art, and art as life. These characters are often characterized by a performative lifestyle that echoes the bohemian notions of 20th-century living. I revel when I stumble across their work, find innumerable reasons […]
The life of Sarah Schumann should be much better known to the world. As a proponent of the New Women’s Movement, a talented painter, collagist, designer, and all-around life of post-war intrigue suggests a profound tie to the German movements of the mid-century, and yet, like many artists, particularly female artists of the Twentieth Century, […]
Agony in the Garden. Parables. Metaphors. Incisive mythology within the realms of the contemporary political landscape of Europe in the 2020s. To reduce Lua Ribeira’s work to any single motif is an exercise in futility. Instead, the analysis must stem from the aggregate means of its parts. Of course, one cannot simply resign the work […]