ESSAYS
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CONVERSATIONS
Ephemeral Building Structures: Michelle Lopez at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
It always felt like a failure on my part that I was continuing to make images. I didn’t want to replicate those images or even think about forms or bodies, because they were already becoming so throwaway in a sense—not as powerful.
ESSAYS
A World without Angles: Larry Bell
As with Bell’s friend Donald Judd, who settled in Marfa, Texas, and James Turrell, who works in Flagstaff, in the Arizona desert, Bell feels a connection to the land and the horizon line, and the reflection and refraction of light, that is specific to the West.
Mousse 71
Artist as Editor: Pati Hill
Through Xerox works featuring everyday items such as a comb, a carefully folded pair of men’s trousers, a child’s toy, or a handful of breakfast cereal, Hill undertook a programmatic development of a visual language of domestic labor, reclaiming the interior, private realm of women’s housework for public viewing.
ESSAYS
The Sleeping Beauty Concept Works
Like Lord Alfred Tennyson, might we imagine the Briar Rose as perfect form, not for the sake of objectifying a sex, but for the details that adorn her enchanted sleep? Could we too be tricked into slumber for a hundred summers, where for lack of a “conscious” self, surface might be allowed to reign? In “The Day-Dream” (1842), Sleeping Beauty awaits her kiss within a Baroque tableau: she is recumbent on her chaise above a “purple coverlet,” body contoured beneath a “silk star-broider’d coverlid,” “gold-fringed pillow lightly prest.”1 In all this dazzle and wicked texture, Tennyson is asking us to daydream not only of the Sleeping Beauty, but of the beauty of her sleep’s circumstances: its artifice, tactility, and transformations.
