El Anatsui

Installation views of El Anatsui at Jack Shainman Gallery It’s hard to not find El Anatsui’s work beguiling. The first piece I experienced was at the De Young Museum in San Francisco before El Anatsui’s break out into international fame at the last Venice Biennale. I was knocked out by the tactility of his tapestry […]

Women and Wilderness

View of the wilderness in New Mexico from my friend Anne’s remote home Women Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going down under […]

Left Coast, North and South

Matthew Barney leaves his mark, Drawing Restraint, inside SFMOMA Follow up on an earlier post: Chloe Veltman has written a very good piece in the Times highlighting the two shows I reviewed here (Reporting on the Other Coast) currently on view at MOCA Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I am […]

Analytical vs Creative: Pick One

According to the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, sexual fantasizing improves analytical skills. But daydreaming about love impacts your creativity. This sounds downright Jill Bolte Taylor-esque. Left hemisphere versus right. Melinda Wenner of Scientific American goes into more depth. Previous research suggests that our problem-solving abilities change depending on our states of mind and that […]

A Week’s Worth of Responses to Smith’s “Post-Minimal to the Max”

Terry Winters, Freeunion (Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery) Winters was highlighted as one of Carol Diehl’s favorite “overlooked” artists. He’s on my list too. Over the week since Roberta Smith published her article, Post-Minimal to the Max in the Sunday Times (I wrote about it here) the floodgates opened. Do a search and you will find […]

Spellbound

My friend Thalassa recently lent me her copy of Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, translated from the German. Our tastes are highly confluent, so I was ready and primed for something delicious. And indeed it is. This book cast a spell on me. I don’t know what other language I could use to […]