Carlos Cruz-Diez in conversation with/en conversación con Ariel Jiménez distills over three decades of wide-ranging conversations between preeminent Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez and then FC/CPPC Chief Curator Ariel Jiménez. A pioneer in color theory and perception, Cruz-Diez and such artists as Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto launched the abstract movements that placed Venezuelan art among the international avant-garde during the 1950s. Born in Venezuela in 1923, Cruz-Diez traveled in Western Europe throughout the 1950s, absorbing Bauhaus color theory and trends in geometric abstraction. He returned to Venezuela in 1957 to help initiate a massive wave of experimentation in Abstract, Concrete, ...

There is a certain plasticity of meaning inherent in any use of language. If that weren’t the case, poetry and literature would not exist. There would only be contracts, scientific formulas, shopping lists, and so forth. Journalism would be properly factual—there would be no fake news or disinformation. All utterances would document isolated events, never evoking larger patterns or tapping into hidden desires. But then the question arises: Even if language could be cleansed of all ambiguity and spin, what role would images play? If language is the problem, images can only be worse. Against a backdrop where postmodern slippages in ...

On November 7, 1929, the Museum of Modern Art “opened in a five-room rented space with an ‘historical’ exhibition of (European) Post-Impressionist art, titled ‘The First Loan Exhibition: Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh.’” MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, had the idea that modern works that passed a test called “Torpedo in Time” would, after some fifty years, be considered historical and transfer to the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the time, Gertrude Stein also famously quipped that the very idea of a museum of the modern was an oxymoron. In short, MoMA was more of a kunsthalle ...

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a “global” art world began to form. Sure, there were already a number of world’s fairs and established international biennials, but this would be different. From the 1990s onward, national boundaries would dissolve, centers and peripheries would level out, and the internet would host worldwide cultural exchange. In many ways this really did happen, but some other things also happened. As people and ideas began to move across borders, money did too. Faced with an unmanageable planetary scale, capital became a more efficient regulator of flows than laws or nations. Suddenly, capital rose ...

As the novel coronavirus pandemic spreads, we—the people of planet earth—are faced with a dizzying variety of responses: quarantine, containment, vigilant self-quarantine, paranoid self-isolation, and in some cases escape from the above. Suddenly, it is as if circulation itself has turned against us, making healthy freedom of movement in the world a dealer of death. So your flight is cancelled. Your trip is over. We are staying in place for the foreseeable future. Exhibitions, symposia, gatherings of all kinds are postponed. But not sporting events. Those will go on, but without any supporters in the stands. The players will play ...

It’s yet uncertain what the lasting legacy of 2020 will be. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us,” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, “that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” We already know that in the US, the summer of 2020 will be remembered for its sustained state of emergency, when we emerged from stratified isolation and convened, in the millions, in the streets to affirm that black lives matter, that black breath is stolen at an overwhelmingly higher scale by the pandemic and by the largely extralegal military organization known ...

On episode 13 of Hidden Noise, hosts Abby Sandler and Rebecca Siegel visit the Met Breuer for this week’s Go See: “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300-now).” Then the hosts are joined by Peter Russo, director of Triple Canopy for the Even 8.

Lagos: Search, Research Research always makes life complicated. We might end up knowing too much, getting lost in accumulated information, stories, details, in between perspectives that all fall apart. How do we begin such a process and how do we navigate it, how do we move within? How do we set the premises? What do we do next? What to do with a discovery we don’t want to make? Which form, format should it take? All these questions will stay with us and transform through issue 2 of the Women on Aeroplanes Inflight Magazine. And yes, as many an- swers turn ...

My life is a collage, with time cutting and ar- ranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting, wrote Eileen Agar, photographer and painter, associated with the Surrealist movement who, like Colette Omogbai, attended the Slade School of Fine Art—almost exactly 40 years earlier, be- tween 1925 and 1926. The repetition of a certain phrasing in connection with Colette Omogbai, a pioneering Nigerian painter, “who identified as a Surrealist,” sent us looking into histories of surrealisms. The plural here is important, be- cause there are indeed many invocations and ...

Why does it matter that a building looks one way and not another way? Architectural historian Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgments in shaping the way that society acts.

Jac Leirner in conversation with/en conversación con Adele Nelson presents an extended dialogue between the Brazilian conceptual artist, Jac Leirner (b. 1961), and writer and art historian Adele Nelson, with an introductory essay by Robert Storr. Leirner’s meticulously constructed works carve out a place for commonplace objects, from cigarette packs and plastic shopping bags to cutlery and currency. In this, the first in-depth study of Leirner’s creative process, Nelson interviews the artist about more than two decades of production. Jac Leirner, born in 1961 in São Paulo, emerged in the early 1990s at the forefront of a new transnational generation of ...

Jesús Soto in conversation with/en conversación con Ariel Jiménez, the fourth title in the Conversaciones/Conversations series, records the dialogues between the renowned Venezuelan kinetic artist Jesús Soto (1923–2005), and art historian Ariel Jiménez. Based on Conversaciones con Jesús Soto, originally published by the Fundación Cisneros in 2001 and 2005, this book has been expanded and revised with the inclusion of illustrations of key artworks by the artist. The product of nine years of interviews, these conversations offer an insight into the fascinating career of Jesús Soto. Jesús Soto was born in Venezuela in 1923 and is well-known for his participation in ...