LIKE SO MUCH ART of the present, the work of Sung Tieu necessitates a fair amount of explanatory text. Reading the growing body of writing about Tieu (the artist will open her first US solo exhibitions “Infra-Specter” at Brooklyn’s Amant on March 30, “Civic Floor” at Cambridge’s MIT List Visual Arts Center on April 4 nearly concurrently), I was struck by the frequency with which the Cold War surfaced as a referent. The term rightly identifies the period about which much of the artist’s research is conducted, but also slyly tethers her object of study to her own artistic operations. The Cold War
William Graham Anthony, an artist’s artist known for his satirical paintings and drawings, died tragically on December 24, 2022 at the age of 88. His death was caused by complications after rushing into a fire that engulfed his ninth-floor apartment at Westbeth Artists Housing in New York City. It is likely, friends agree, that he rushed into the blazing apartment to save his artwork, which lined the walls of the studio he shared with his wife Norma (née Neuman) for forty years.
“The privilege of confronting the Demoiselles as the work of a living man has been rescinded,” rued the art historian Leo Steinberg upon Pablo Picasso’s death at age ninety-one on April 8, 1973. The subsequent issue of Artforum included an essay by Theodore Reff on Eros and Thanatos in the Spaniard’s early work, from the enigmatic elegies of his Blue Period; to the harlequins, jesters, and saltimbanques of his Rose era; to the famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which Reff links to the trope of the memento mori. Vanitas also haunts the issue’s cover, where the artist holds his pet owl (an injured
POSTCARDS, FAXES, AND EMAIL PRINTOUTS lie wanly in a vitrine. A plywood shelving unit holds rows of informational leaflets. One gallery wall is plastered with graphs and charts. Another is covered in hundreds of seemingly identical photographs. On a bank of video monitors, talking heads are explaining something. In a darkened corner, a slide projector clunks slowly through a carousel of images. Nearby, a 16-mm film whirs alongside a soporific voice-over. An illuminated table is covered in papers and newspaper clippings marked up with Post-its. Every object on display is accompanied by a lengthy