Robert Slifkin
Robert Slifkin is the Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of the Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His most recent book is Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare's Photographic Work (Mack, 2022).
No signs of warfare are evident in the compelling and complex multiple-exposure color photograph and black-and-white photo collages that the artist Gesche Würfel has created for her show at New York University’s Deutsches Haus. But the work’s central—if notably absent—subject, the Berlin Wall, summons one of the longest and arguably least spectacular wars of the past century: the so-called Cold War.
When James Welling gets deeply involved in a project, he sees the subjects he’s interested in everywhere. His current body of work, Thought Objects, emphasizes textured surfaces. Some of his subjects include flowers, Brutalist architecture, a blue door in Paris, a sculpture table in Guilford, but his photographs do much more than convey subject matter, they open out into fields of metaphor and analogy.
Hammons’s Day’s End, which was officially opened last month, resembles a three-dimensional architectural diagram, the scaffolding for a construction site, or the internal bracing of an unfinished building.
Riffing on Valerie Solanas’s 1967 feminist broadside announcing “the society for cutting up men” (SCUM), Kurland’s project adds a silent B to indicate that, here, it is men’s books that are being cut up.
Ari Marcopoulos has understood photography’s singular capacity to apprehend and comprehend the world. And as an artist who has produced around 250 books and zines as well as a number of short films, Marcopoulos is also sensitive to the archival time contained in the photographic medium, and he grasps the fact that this temporality often resonates both backwards and forwards.
