Month: December 2022
Fuego Nuevo —Sergio Suárez
Through a combination of printmaking, ceramics, and installation, Sergio Suárez uses distinct traditional techniques to assemble a visual language, one that examines the fusion, impermanence, and consistency of objects, images, and structures. The exhibition is framed by the Meso-American, post-classical-period ceremony Fuego Nuevo (New Fire)—a ritual enacted every 52 years to ensure that the sun would return, thus staving off the end of the world.
End of Year Letter: 2022 —> 2023
Binge Watch—On Performances of Excessive Eating
“The act of binging is one of abjection. It demonstrates the power of something inanimate, or no longer animate, over human beings—in this case, food. The abject manifests viscerally as squirming, belching, or vomiting. Such images threaten the common belief that eating is pleasurable, a notion that begins in infancy.”
Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive
Hito Steyerl is one of the most important artists of her generation, a landmark thinker of the image and its status under late capitalist accelerationism. Yet her recent retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, I Will Survive, was marked by a semiotic complexity that did not coincide with what had been happening to the body in the past two years—my body, but also the body in a broader philosophical sense.
Gone But Not Disrespected
On the last Sunday in June 2022, a particularly hot day in Philadelphia, about 100 of us gathered in front of Saint Luke’s landing for the culmination of an experimental AIDS memorial called Gone and for Ever, a community-informed spectacle of sight, sound, and grief—part of Remembrance, a project of the William Way LGBT Community Center and funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage—to grapple with the question of how to memorialize amid the ongoing crisis.
Office Landscaping—A Genealogy of Corporate Critique
Ultimately, corporate critique has a genealogy, one that is cyclical and resilient, and that allows artists to engage aesthetics of control, desire, and regulation which corporate capitalist structures aim to produce.