Entering Lucy Mackenzie’s exhibition at Nancy Hoffman, simply (and aptly) titled “Still, the viewer espies a channel of postcard-sized still lifes lining the gallery walls. If one is not familiar with Mackenzie’s work, they might be forgiven for mistaking her paintings for photographs.
Furniture is a loud presence in Fine Gråbøl’s debut novel, What Kingdom. For the unnamed narrator, furnishings witness and respond to her: “I’m especially absorbed by the chairs; the way they receive me and others in the room, the light on them in the mornings.”
I was riding up the elevator in the Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building in the spring of 1977, “minding my own business” as it were, and unaware of a forthcoming shock, when the large elevator doors opened. I was stunned and thrown backwards by a John Cage-type experience of nothing. At first, I timidly stood still, but then with the danger of a closing elevator door, I stepped out onto the fourth floor of the museum where I encountered Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977) by Robert Irwin.
I remember on several occasions, either when you came over for a studio visit, or when you were in attendance at an exhibition of mine, you told me, “I hate you,” which was your manner of delivering a compliment. I knew what you really meant was that you saw something recognizably good in the work, and that you found it to be particularly challenging.