“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to… Read More Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) as Countermonument

In an essay on ‘The Allegories of Love,’ T.J. Clark observes that one of the great achievements of Veronese is a “unique completeness of empathy with the figures he paints, so that one feels him almost physically entering into them, male or female, and deploying their weight and balance as if from the inside” (London… Read More The Artist’s Memory: Xavier Le Roy’s Retrospective at MoMA PS1

There is no outside to which we can consign wildness, no door to slam shut against the inevitability of otherness. Picasso’s three figures materialize from the shards of a room whose surfaces disrupt them, their joined hands uniting them in a circle that drives the viewer’s eye in a tangled continuum. As they participate in… Read More Animality & Tragic Affirmation in Picasso’s ‘The Three Dancers’

Those seeking an answer to the question, “who am I?” often brush up against the question, “who am I not?” The self finds its place in the order of things by setting itself apart from the other; this is an age-old comparison, and one of the many that Farocki utilizes in his quest to illuminate… Read More Harun Farocki’s In Comparison

Disembodied whispers circle MoMA’s atrium and land on one of the nine suspended screens, murmuring: “all dreams are not your dreams. All desires are not your desires.” Isaac Julien’s piece is an immersive sound and image constellation, aptly entitled Ten Thousand Waves; inspired by the desolate beach that tragically swallowed twenty Chinese migrant cockleshell pickers… Read More Ten Thousand Waves: Isaac Julien at MoMA

Performance artist Marina Abramovic’s retrospective, entitled “The Artist is Present,” appeared at the MoMA in the Spring of 2010. In addition to a re-staging of many of her older works, Abramovic debuted what the museum called a new solo performance—though the term “solo” fails to encompass the breadth of the work, and “performance” also does… Read More Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present

I recently went with a friend to see Deborah Hay’s As Holy Sites Go/duet, which is part of Danspace Project’s Judson Now Platform 2012, and features dancers/choreographers Jeanine Durning and Ros Warby. According to the program, “the dancers are practicing a continuity of discontinuity within their separate and unique experiences of the choreography—thus engaging the… Read More Deborah Hay’s As Holy Sites Go/duet

          Laurence Louppe writes in her essay “Imperfections in the Paper” of the growing necessity and yet undeniable difficulty of documenting the act of dance—improvisational acts in particular. She writes: “Though it may be analyzed or qualified, it can never coalesce from a determined stock of lexical elements which would furnish its… Read More Traces of Dance: Inscribing the Impermanent

                An archive is traditionally considered to be a collection of materials and documents providing historical information about given events, people, or establishments. But could this information and these documents be contained within something much more organic—a receptacle as alive as the human body? Julie Tolentino defies the… Read More The Bodily Archive