Steve McQueen “Sunshine State” Pirelli HangarBicocca / Milan
It could be that film is the medium of death, even more so than the photograph, whose stasis in a…
William J. Simmons
Barbara Kruger “THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.” LACMA / Los Angeles
One is a critic because one has never felt affirmed (Barbara Kruger never speaks in the third person). There is…
Ellen Berkenblit “Other Shapes at Night” Vielmetter / Los Angeles
I didn’t know just what to do So I whispered “I love you” And he said that he loved me…
Free My Mind, Artpop: You Make My Heart Stop (For Lady Gaga)
It’s been a long time since I came around Been a long time but I’m back in town This time…
Roe Ethridge
I do not know that Roe Ethridge’s work is ironic, because I don’t know that I am. This is not…
Promising Young Woman: A Dialogue
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” — Margaret Atwood…
Love Song: On Lana Del Rey’s Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass
In “How to Disappear,” a song from her last album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana Del Rey leads us to expect…
Cindy Sherman: Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird; or, A Cage of Gold
“It’s almost an impression of how the character sees her environment, not how we would see it — or if…
Deborah Kass: Teenage Dream
“Regarding Glee I would say two things: 1. It’s not like my work. It is my work; and 2. I…
Love and the Paraliterary: On Barbara Kruger’s Picture/Readings
Barbara Kruger’s work has come to represent a host of negative affects for art historians and critics, and it is…
Too Old to Die Young
In her 1975 poem “Liebestod,” Gwen Head writes of a girl on a beach who sunbathes with a glittering gun…
A Certain Inevitability
Movie Night is a column exploring film semiotics and thoughts about moviegoing in general. Oigo el llorido del mar, el…
Somebody Wants It
“Thus, one of the things that anyone’s character or personality is is a record of the highly individual histories by…
Narrative Excess: Judy Chicago's Work in Text
“I feel as though I’m still not writing. I foresee and want a way of speaking that’s more fanciful, more…
Betty Tompkins
In 1969, Betty Tompkins (b. 1945, USA; lives in New York and Mount Pleasant, PA) began her series of “Fuck…