Visiting With Richard Artschwager

by Ian Wallace, Winter 2012 Richard Artshwager and his wife, Ann, are trying to sell their converted church in Hudson, New York. The house is of the type that seems to abound in the area, with high, paneled ceilings and a large stained glass window. It is, perhaps, a little too nice; they’re having trouble drumming up…

Our Daily Bread: Consumption and Religiosity in the Work of Koons and Hirst

by Lucy Cantwell, Winter 2012 The opening last month of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings at all eleven of Larry Gagosian’s galleries brought to mind other partnerships bent on world domination—the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and the artists they employed at their most hegemonic. As Hirst transforms simple materials and references (pills, butterflies, metal and dead…

Tactile Vision in the Lewis Chessmen

by Michelle Millar Fisher, Winter 2012 How do experiments in modern psychiatry and neuroaesthetics suggest new paradigms for discourse on centuries-old objects? The current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters, The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen from the Isle of Lewis, showcases the most famous chess pieces in the world, the Lewis Chessmen.…

Lux Vivens: Entoptic Phenomena, Preternatural Light and Phenomenological Unity as Experienced Through Dan Flavin’s Untitled Barrier Piece at DIA:Beacon

by Ben Rose, Winter 2012 For decades, scholars have described minimalist art as an exploration in phenomenology that is essentially devoid of higher “spiritual” meaning. A major artist of the movement himself, Robert Morris, described the style as an exercise in establishing “relationships” between the viewer and the piece, as one “apprehends the object from…

Mike Kelley: Laughing at Deadlines

by Tom McGlynn, Winter 2012 The first image I ever saw attributed to Mike Kelley, in the early 1980s, was his appropriation of a well copied and circulated office joke in which a sequentially animated character bounces up and down with laughter with the punch line, “ You want it when?” At the time I…

A Letter from the Editor

by Danny Kopel, Winter 2012 Loyal Reader, Our ninth quarterly digest of essays has arrived. We hope you’ll cozy up to these five essays until warmer times are upon us… In this edition, our writers turned their attention to the physical experience of art, as in Michelle Jubin’s take on “sight as a tactile, physical, multi-sensory experience”…