and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
These twinned solo shows by Taiwanese artists born in the eighties, co-curated by Sarah Caillet and Martin Guinard, present mirror images of the perception-altering effects of technology. Li Yi-Fan’s “Last Warning,” which brings together recent videos and installations rooted in online culture and cutting-edge gaming software, is marked by its frenetic pace and unsettling imagery. […] If this memorably disturbing show feels designed to unsettle and provoke, then Chang Yung-Ta’s “Echoes of Silence” has a contrastingly soothing, even balm-like quality.
It’s not exactly that the quality of photography in the magazine declined over its first two decades (the magazine first closed in 2004) nor that the fashion world it covered was no longer capable of astonishments. See, for example, Ellen von Unwerth’s grainy 1994 end-of-shoot study of Naomi Campbell in only sneakers and knickers, or Knight’s 1998 portrait of a devilish Alexander McQueen. But what is missing here is much sense that a style or fashion magazine—its mood, its community, its sphere of influence—is not reducible to the seductions or surprises of its photographs as photographs.
It is a curious fact that mediocre exhibitions are much easier to write about than good ones. The dim light cast by second-rate works of art is sufficient only to illuminate their immediate surroundings, which is to say the conventional ideas and economies on which they depend for their value. Great works, by contrast, are sometimes so blinding that it can be impossible, on first encounter, to make out clearly what they signify. The history of criticism is strewn with the corpses of writers unfortunate enough to have been commissioned to review the debut of a masterpiece.
Maybury and McKenzie’s theme is power, figured not so much as an external infrastructure as the authority to dictate what is right and wrong: a privilege that art can perform, dissolve, or refuse. That “perversion” is their means to these ends is instructive: unlike its more orderly etymological cousins, the word carries the implication of a desire that cannot be subordinated to any ethical framework. This is both more troubling and more transformative. “Discomfort,” says Maybury, “can become an arena for change.”
Alvarez grew up as a child of Puerto Rican immigrants in Brooklyn and spent her formative years as an artist in the city, before leaving to pursue educational and teaching opportunities in Connecticut and Chicago. Although most often described as a painter, Alvarez has consistently resisted a signature technique or style, freely absorbing influences and strategies throughout her career and repurposing them to create mixed-media works that reflect her experiences as a Puerto Rican woman, mother, and artist.
Raven is compelled by spectacles of ruination. Demolition of a Wall takes its title from the Lumière brothers’ 1896 film, which was originally screened forwards and then backwards, with audiences marveling at its illusionistic reconstruction. Viewers of Murderers Bar experience a similar jouissance, but one solely of destruction. It is notable that the trilogy is largely depopulated. In one scene in Murderers Bar, the small aperture of a tunnel floats in an otherwise black screen, while men in orange vests load explosives into the dam’s subterranean walls.
As Alumni, Faculty, and Friends of the Whitney Independent Study Program, we unequivocally support the 2024–25 ISP cohort who were censored when presenting work in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian freedom. We uplift their efforts to create and debate art while reckoning with political violence and institutional coercion, and affirm our shared solidarity against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
