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Reviews
Laura Owens was on view at Matthew Marks Gallery from February 14 to April 19, 2025.
Laura Owens has long held an interest in the possibilities of installation. But what did she do with that here?
Joyspace by Adam Rolston. Pacific, 112 pp., $35.
This is diet Debord, a sort of scrollable Situationism delivered through Canva slides with the nasty political economy taken off.
CECOT, El Salvador’s mega-prison, opened in January 2023.
The image of CECOT tempts critique only to anesthetize it.
The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York by Peter Trachtenberg. Black Sparrow Press, 344 pp., $30.
The Westbethians will turn the lights off on Village bohemia.
The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross. Verso, 320 pp., $30.
The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross. Verso, 144 pp., $20.
Shifting her focus away from the French capital, Kristin Ross dares her readers to look anew at the capital-E Event we tropify as May ’68.
The MTA redesigned subway map was released in April. It is adapted from the Unimark map (1972) by Massimo Vignelli, Bob Noorda, the Unimark International Corporation, et al., and the Weekender digital map (2011) by Vignelli, Beatriz Cifuentes, and Yoshiki Waterhouse.
Somewhere in the MTA, someone was listening.
Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880–1935 by Alexander Wood. University of Chicago Press, 496 pp., $35.
Wood’s wall-to-wall chronicle of New York’s building booms exposes the limits of an architectural history focused solely on architects.
Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space by Julian Rose. Princeton Architectural Press, 368 pp., $35.
According to Julian Rose, art museums today “effectively enjoy a monopoly on aura.”
If we want to understand today’s prevailing ideas in design, we should look, not up at buildings, but down at our feet.
An Anarchitectural Body of Work: Suzanne Harris and the Downtown New York Artists’ Community in the 1970s by Friederike Schäfer. De Gruyter, 400 pp. $76.
Sifting through the spoofable pedantry of An Anarchitectural Body of Work reveals Suzanne Harris, intrepid multipotentialite.
Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior by Olga Touloumi. University of Minnesota Press, 312 pp., $35.
Sensitive to the subtle interplay of sound and space, Olga Touloumi’s self-consciously novel study of the United Nations offers an unintended material history of internationalism’s hollow performance.
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy was on view at The Shed from November 20, 2024, to March 16 in Hudson Yards.
Audiences expected the Drake-sired respawn of Luna Luna to be fun. In fact, it was a memorial to fun.
Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC by Owen Hatherley. Repeater, 218 pp., $17.
An attack on New York’s city planning orthodoxy, in the guise of a guidebook
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks,” curated Sarah Kelly Oehler and Annelise K. Madsen, was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from June 2 to September 22, 2024.
O’Keeffe’s New Yorks did not exist in an artistic vacuum; they live within an entire tradition of experimental art about modern architecture.
Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem. Ecco Press, 384 pp., $15.
Jonathan Lethem’s historical autofiction from below
Yes, Chef, curated by Zoe Lukov, and its affiliated restaurant concept, Black Caesar, are open at Water Street Projects through December 15.
Yes, Chef. Hail Caesar. Eat me. Incubate me.