Critical Theory

Open floor plans are less open than we think—and ripe for intervention. Oppenheimer’s latest effort is on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
This fall, Max Galyon, at my invitation, mounted an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures in my studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The show was intended to create a setting for spontaneous conversations between artists outside of any commercial context, and was open to the public on certain days.

Hovering far below any conceivable radar, Fred Dewey’s The School of Public Life ought to be the cause of more than some disturbance.

“Some people are happy calling me an artist, others a Conceptual or post-Conceptual artist, others say sculptor, and others use a string of modifiers. Someone suggested once that I was simply performing these categories, which I like.”

The title Surround Audience evokes the ceaseless ambient noise of the digital age: not only social media but the Internet at large as the general virtualization and modification of human experience, physical bodies, and social interactions.

Renée Green’s collection, Other Planes of There, which spans over twenty years of the artist’s career, holds an alluring sense of return for me, offering a kind of fossil record of an evolving debate among progressive artists and cultural critics.

Agnieszka Kurant’s interests include various forms of surplus, invisible entities, and the phantoms haunting capitalist production. Some of her projects involve crowdsourcing, others outsourcing to nonhuman species: think colonies of termites.

Prior to Burn the Diaries, her exhibition at the ICA Philadelphia this fall, Davey exchanged thoughts with Paris-based writer Lebovici on autobiographical writing, the formal potential of aerograms, and scatological confessionalism.

Navigating the concentric interiors of the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, the building unfolds along a serpentine walkway. Through the museum’s glass walls, the view opens uninterrupted.

We are not all Pierre Guyotat, writing of our capture and interrogation in Algerian solitary in 1962, our words and acts subject to violent retaliation, but maybe we’ve seen our own soul’s bifurcation.

Pythagoras taught behind a veil to avoid distracting his students with his bodily appearance, which he considered an impediment to their pursuit of pure knowledge. His voice was an acousmatic one—its origin could not be identified.

Stan Allen’s seminal essay, “Field Conditions,” written almost 15 years ago, still resonates among architects. He confers with Nader Tehrani on landscape urbanism as well as building and teaching “from a position of uncertainty.”
This is a two-part Artists on Artists. Lieberman responds to Nic Guagnini in the second half of this article.