Wendy Vogel
WENDY VOGEL is a critic, editor, and independent curator based in New York. She has contributed to Artforum.com, Art Lies, Flash Art International, and Modern Painters, among other publications. She was a Critical Fellow in the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
A critic’s stance evolves out of a personal worldview marked by trauma; the personal is political, as second-wave feminism tells us. As a feminist, my understanding of the movement cannot be separated from my lived female experience.
Although I’ve heard the term “fourth wave feminism” referenced in casual conversation, its contours remain fuzzy as a movement. A quick Google search reveals that the term has been bandied about for at least the last four years.
Brooklyn-based writer Ben Davis sat down with Art Books contributor Wendy Vogel on a Sunday morning at the Rail Headquarters to discuss his book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket, 2013)
Over the past two decades, Chris Kraus has channeled the clichéd advice to “write what you know” into high formal and philosophical stakes: a radical subjectivity that jettisons the fiction of critical distance to embody the feminist ethos “the personal is the political.”
By Wendy Vogel
In their 1968 essay “The Dematerialization of Art,” John Chandler and Lucy R. Lippard argued that the developments of Conceptualism would transform art criticism. “If the object becomes obsolete, objective distance becomes obsolete,” they wrote.
Organisms ranging from the mundane to the fantastical—bats, cats, and neon rabbits to GMOs, avatars, and cyborgs—fill the pages of Nature, the latest volume in Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series.
Some critics accuse contemporary art since the 1990s of producing no definable movements. If pressed, they might concede that relational aesthetics represents one trend.