Articles and Essays

A Fosso Walk

by Emmanuel Iduma

January 12, 2015

In the early 1970s, when he was only a teenager, the Cameroonian photographer Samuel Fosso had embarked on an almost-2,000 kilometer trip from Edda, a southeastern Nigerian town, to Bangui, a prominent city in Central African Republic. The trip must have been by car. But if you were to travel on foot, it would take 19 days of nonstop walking

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Intent and Response

by Liz Sultzer

October 27, 2014

Images can be anything–mental or physical, fact or fiction, abstract or representational, and all cracks in between. The only things they cannot encompass are three-dimensional space and fourth dimensional time...

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Exaggerated Perspective: Some Thoughts on Wayne White

by J.F. Lynch

October 20, 2014

Entering the gallery, there are two adjacent walls of landscape paintings filled with three-dimensional text. Eye-catching phrases invade serene pastoral images: a thrift store lithograph featuring a straw-hatted youth à la Huckleberry Finn is unknowingly introduced as "The Cruel Sissy"...

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Speak Softly, but Carry a Big (Candy) Stick: Writing Sillman

by Eric Sutphin

September 5, 2014

For this essay, I opted to write about Sillman’s career (25 years of which is tidily presented at the Hessel) by looking at a variety of texts that have been written by and about her since 2006 (the point at which Sillman took the stage as a major figure in contemporary abstract painting.) I began to cross examine Sillman and her interlocutors...

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The Serious Banalities of Exchange: Reflections on Anouk Kruitof's

"Pixel Stress"

by Sabrina Mandanici

September 5, 2014

During my last year of kindergarten everybody was obsessed with collecting stickers. There were stickers of all kinds and colors. Girls collected mostly horses, rainbows, suns and princesses whereas boys gravitated obviously toward sports-related stickers. . These tiny images were kept...

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Futurism at the Guggenheim

by Noah Dillon

August 5, 2014

This is not a new account of Futurist history.

There’s a common assumption that art is or represents the zenith of humanity’s highest cultural aspirations, values, and fulfillment. Art and culture are believed to be inherently good for people, and the more the better. Simone Weil wrote, “Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”....

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The Phantom Apparatus

by Amelia Rina

August 5, 2014

In his 1983 text, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser wrote that the value of photographs “does not lie in the thing but in the information on their surface”. He continues to explain how the photographic object lost its significance with the advent of mechanical printing, subsequently functioning in the same way as a flyer: infinitely reproducible and worthless beyond its purpose of delivering information. Flusser believed that the photographic apparatus had become so integrated in humans’ interaction with the world—a mechanical prosthetic—that the camera users had become “functionaries” of the apparatus’ operations and simulations of thought.......

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