The Brooklyn Rail

General Idea in Perspective

By Mark Bloch

The Estate of General Idea (1969-1994) had their first exhibition with the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery on view in Chelsea through January 13, featuring several “ziggurat” paintings from the late 1960s, alongside works on paper, photographs and ephemera that highlight the central importance of the ziggurat form in the rich practice of General Idea.

In Conversation

CECILY BROWN
with Jason Rosenfeld

“I like my space to be very aggressive, I think, that I play a lot with something—just as you think something is a long way away, it comes right up in your face again.”

In Conversation

IRVING PETLIN
with Elyse Benenson

Irving Petlin is the world’s premier living pastel artist. He is currently an expatriate, living in Paris, France. We sat down at the National Arts Club to discuss his current exhibition there, and his history as an activist and artist.

In Conversation

RAHA RAISSNIA
with Charles Schultz

Raha Raissnia’s first solo exhibition in a museum, Alluvius, opened in early December at the Drawing Center. Organized by the museum’s Assistant Curator, Amber Harper, the exhibition highlights Raissnia’s mixed media work on paper as a central element of her multivalent practice, which encompasses film, photography, and performance.

In Conversation

L.A. KAUFFMAN with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

I contacted L.A. Kauffman in the summer of 2017 when I was first hired as the BR senior art editor. Although her book is not about art, it is about direct action and the history of American radicalism since the 70s, and I wanted to talk to her about action in the vile climate of 45.

In Conversation

DONNA HARAWAY
with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

It is 1989. I am enrolled in a graduate seminar called “Science Fiction and the Fictions of Science” taught by Donna Haraway in the History of Consciousness program in Santa Cruz, California, while also acting as her teaching assistant for an undergraduate course, “Science Fiction as Political Theory.” She receives a call from Artforum (edited at that time by Ida Panicelli) asking her to contribute to their special summer issue on “Wonder.” She says she doesn’t have anything but suggests the name of one of her graduate students.

In Conversation

LUCY LIPPARD
with Jarrett Earnest

I was called an “art critic” but I always just called myself a writer. Now it’s interesting because they call us “art writers”—they don’t say critics as much anymore.

THE HELD ESSAYS ON VISUAL ART
Dorine, Barbara, Kathy

By Karen Archey

Before working at a large art institution, like many people I thought of museums as slow-moving machines that are slightly out of place in history; anachronistic titans that are too big to fail.

In Conversation

RONA PONDICK & ROBERT FEINTUCH with Phong Bui

A particular depiction of form can generate the way the viewer sees the image, and it strikes me that somehow everything about that seems to pertain to, or evokes references to, perception and psychology. One cannot exist independent of the other and vice versa.

In Conversation

KATHY HIGH
with Sadie Rebecca Starnes

“Our understanding of the agency of non-human creatures, be they animals, plants, bacteria, fungi, whole organisms, or cells, needs to be stretched and nurtured. Rats laugh, bacteria can be happy. We need to consider our connections in so many ways.”

In Conversation

ANN MAGNUSON
with Katherine Dieckmann

“We weren’t hustling those things, we did it for each other, and we enjoyed it, and then we were on to the next thing the next day. That kind of spontaneity and being in the moment doesn’t have a price tag on it. It’s a spiritual practice, in a way.”

In Conversation

CARROLL DUNHAM & DAVID SALLE with Cornelius Tittel

Last June two celebrated painters, David Salle and Carroll Dunham, sat down at Salle’s kitchen table to talk with Cornelius Tittle, editor of Blau Magazine (where this conversation appeared in German earlier this year), to discuss the challenges of writing about art, the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, and the weird place in which painting currently finds itself.