The art world seems to be waking up to the idea that the greatest Abstract Expressionist of both generations may not have been a man, let alone “one of the boys,” but was Joan Mitchell.

Horvath does not provide answers to this ghoulish line of comedic horror. With hyper-hallucinatory night trips to other galaxies, she leaves us wondering, guided by dreamy intuition and menacing charm.

When I got bored of YouTubing Eagles and Chicago hits, I switched over to Eagles and Chicago NFL films. A subconscious link.

I received this moving e-mail from someone at Andrea Rosen Gallery. It starts like this...

On the occasion of the poet’s new book, The Importance of Being Iceland, Eileen Myles welcomed fellow poet Jeremy Sigler to her East Village home, where she has been since 1972, to talk about her new work and more.

While Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings represent an undeniable achievement—coming to the fore during the recession of the early 1990s, staying on top over the course of several successive market bubbles, and now, at the onset of the current global crisis, tucked snuggly behind blue chip lines—there’s something about them that makes me question the importance of the show now on view at the New Museum.

By now we’re all versed in the complexities of the “performance document.” While a single photograph can refer back to a primary action, it can never quite recreate the reality of that moment. It cannot bring a dead thing back to life.

I went to Agnes Martin’s drawing show at Peter Blum Gallery not so much to see a comprehensive museum-quality retrospective of Martin on paper (which it most definitely is), but to satisfy my curiosity after receiving the show’s announcement card, which pictured a single, 3-inch doodle. Not only was the curvy drawing entirely uncharacteristic of Martin’s mature style, but, more sensationally, the announcement claimed it was the last drawing the artist ever made prior to her death in 2004.

I first came upon Lawrence Weiner’s striking, sans-serif text-pieces when I wandered into his “Displacement” project at the old West 22^nd Street Dia building in 1992.

In his “Theatre of Cruelty” manifesto, Antonin Artaud spoke of his desire for theater to be brutal, passionate, and to express a “convulsive conception of life”—an “extreme condensation of scenic elements.”

Last summer I introduced my one-year-old daughter to a new bin of art supplies and, within minutes, she was putting out a steady stream of fantastic assemblages, which I immediately pinned up around the room.

Even a non-reader knows that books stack up quickly and ravenously consume space. Once they’ve taken the bookcase proper, they spread onto the secondary bookshelves: the desk, the dresser, the kitchen table, the back of the toilet, the car seat…

Dana Schutz has a way of making every painting work, and work for her. In her latest, highly anticipated show at Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea, there are big and very big cartoon-figurative paintings, smaller ones that are more like studies, a couple of abstractions, and even a few paintings hidden near the back of the gallery with shaped voids cut into the canvas.

Am I attracted to Gillian Carnegie’s paintings, which were on view last month at Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea, because I like paintings of trees?

In 1966, when Brian Wilson titled his album SMiLE, he probably wasn’t attempting to give directions to his listeners, but rather to himself—a soothing whisper in his own head, reminding him to lighten up, cheer up, get it together. But for a guy who then spent five years morbidly depressed, more or less in bed, a quick, cheerful mood adjustment may have been an impossibly tall order. Anyone who has listened to Wilson’s tortured masterpiece knows immediately that behind this beachy, boyish auteur has always lurked the soul of a haunted artist—very bad vibrations, essentially.

John Sonsini’s paintings make me think like a Racist Pig—the same way de Kooning’s Women make me think like a Sexist Pig, or at least a very interested little Dutch boy who’s taken a “wrong” turn somewhere in Amsterdam’s red light district… But anyway, back to The Racist.

Even when he was living, the maverick American Realist painter Neil Welliver (1929-2005) could have been considered an absentee artist. Absent from New York gallery openings, absent from the painting department that he chaired at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1989, absent from the discourse of generational rivals such as Alex Katz, and, in a way, hauntingly absent even from his own paintings.

With a flush/and a rush of/nocturnal swirl,/apes gape through…

How much does
a barking
tree overhear

All the roads rush to one

In order for everything to run on schedule, it was important for me to be numbed seconds before the surgeon arrived.