I am Prehistory

By Rémi Labrusse

JUL-AUG 2020 | Critics Page

You’re standing in front of a prehistoric work of art: or at least, you’re being told that it’s a “work of art,” and you’re also being told that it’s “prehistoric”—let’s say roughly 25 or 35 thousand years old. It’s a group of animals drawn in charcoal across a cave wall, for instance, or perhaps it’s a small faceless female figure with visible genitalia that’s engraved onto a fragment of a mammoth’s ivory tusk. All these facts were provided by experts to you in just a few minutes.

Trading Velvet Seats for Couch Viewing

By Hannah Foster

MAY 2020 | Dance

Moviegoers have been opting for home viewing before it was forced upon them. Some called the release of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman on Netflix the canary in the coalmine for the end of movie theaters. COVID-19 was the sooner-than-expected cave-in. Can streaming be a sustainable business model for ballet?

Alberto Alejandro Rodríguez: Destruktion

By Robert R. Shane

JUNE 2020 | ArtSeen

The exhibition title, a term used by Heidegger, made its way to Alejandro Rodríguez via the writings of Derrida, whose famed attention to the play of binary oppositions plays a role in the artwork: here, we find such an oscillation between absence and presence. Above all, Alejandro Rodríguez’s project is invested in the imagination of ruin, exploring how images of destruction are constructed.

Susan Rothenberg

By Alfred Mac Adam

FEB 2020 | ArtSeen

As in all her works, the key element is creative destruction, the hands that destroy are also the hands that make. This may bring us closer to Rothenberg’s artistic essence: no creation takes place without destruction. Wherever we look in Sperone Westwater’s gallery, we find disjecta membra, the fragments of an aesthetic cataclysm.