Browse Recent Reviews

The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is, quite appropriately, a mix. And, like any good mix, the exhibition includes perennial hits, lesser-known works by familiar artists, and more than a few unknown gems. Drawing upon vinyl records as “metaphor, archive, icon, portrait or transcendent medium” (as described in a wall text), the exhibition offers a wide-ranging view of how this single object has remained a catalyst for visual artists over the past forty-five years and, as all exhibitions should seek to do, merges a rigorous curatorial program with an almost guilt-inducing… Full Review

John M. MacKenzie’s Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities is a hugely detailed exploration of colonial museums that narrates their establishment during the nineteenth century in Canada, South Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, while at the same time interrogating their purposes in communicating the messages and global reach of the power of the British Empire. The book also points to the changes in political influence and organization that the museum institution reflected and was subject to during the shift and ultimate demise of British colonial power that stretched into the twentieth century. MacKenzie’s… Full Review

Pat Steir is perhaps best known for her large-scale paintings of waves and waterfalls, but a recent exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design focused solely on Steir’s drawings. Organized by Jan Howard, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Museum, and Susan Harris, an independent curator, the exhibition reveals Steir’s abiding interest in the nature of line in both drawing and writing. Drawing and writing are each symbol systems based on line from which the viewer, bringing layers of references to bear, constructs meaning. Steir’s perception that writing and drawing are essentially the same enterprise remains the… Full Review

The Social Work of Museums offers exactly what the title implies: a comprehensive survey of museums as a social work context. Lois Silverman, who is trained as both a social worker and museum scholar, undertook this work because, “it is long past time for museums to survey, organize, and integrate systematically from a theoretically grounded social work perspective the growing body of museum knowledge and practice currently scattered around the globe” (39). The result is no dry encyclopedia but a sympathetic call to action. Silverman artfully weaves together a number of seemingly disparate threads: international case studies of practice, including… Full Review

In 2005 the National Museum of Cambodia opened its metal conservation laboratory after having received training and support from experts at the Freer and Sackler galleries of the Smithsonian Institution and the Getty Conservation Institute. That laboratory was the first of its kind to be built in Cambodia after the devastation of the preceding decades and has trained a generation of specialists in the treatment and preservation of ancient metalwork. For the past five years the conservation laboratory has been fulfilling its mission of maintaining the cultural legacy of the Cambodian people, and this exhibition originated as a way to… Full Review

Few readers, I imagine, were surprised to discover that Yvonne Rainer’s stunning 2006 memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)—a sprawling book intertwining the artist’s early personal and artistic developments, rendering them inseparable—would conclude with an epilogue. Such a coda typically affords authors an opportunity to wrap up their ideas and cast a retrospective gaze over the whole of a book once its myriad elements have settled into shape. Rainer’s conclusion would seem only to follow protocol, in a sense. And yet this particular postscript, like so much of her production, effectively displaces expectations around such conventions… Full Review

From the time of its invention, photography has caused trouble for art. Now, in a belated stroke of reciprocity, art is causing trouble for photography. Early signs included photography’s absorption into museum collections and its embrace by the art market. Then came art historians, fueled by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, arguing that photography had eclipsed painting and sculpture to become art’s medium ne plus ultra. One of the most recent and influential contributions to this line of argument, Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) (click… Full Review

Widely celebrated in the United States during the 1950s, Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915–1995) was subsequently forgotten. Forgotten by U.S. institutions, at least, as the nation solidified its claim as the cultural center in the era of Pop. Not so in Italy, where his place in the twentieth century as a key, postwar artist is now firmly established. In Rome, there is no shortage of catalogues to consult and exhibitions to visit. But in Los Angeles (or in English), many have never heard of him. Combustione: Alberto Burri and America, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, sought to… Full Review

To begin with, I confess that I have some difficulties accommodating myself to wide art-historical surveys such as Alessia Trivellone’s L’Hérétique imaginé, which covers a span of six centuries with the aim of tracing a coherent development of a sole subject, the heretic. I am not stating that my skepticism will diminish if the survey is chronologically narrower or comprehending more subjects; the point is, rather, that I find serious problems with every sort of “coherent development.” The division of the volume into four sections corresponds more or less with what Trivellone maintains to be a coherent… Full Review

These two books, which describe how painters made a living in seventeenth-century Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Naples, synthesize the work of many dedicated scholars, including some by the authors themselves. As Patrizia Cavazzini notes in her introduction, most research on Italian painting has favored major painters and their patrons, neglecting the large supporting cast who also made a living as painters and decorators in Rome and elsewhere. Some worked assisting painters charged with covering extensive wall surfaces with religious or mythological scenes, providing illusionistic architectural frameworks [quadratura], or adding generic landscape vistas or patches of al antica… Full Review