criticism

“an art work is neither a physical thing nor a viewer’s mental image of it but something in between, created in attentive space”

The Battle for Attention

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/the-battle-for-attention

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“the making of them doesn’t appear to be anything special. There are no secrets or mysteries as to what the objects are; the puzzle is in confronting such simple but unusual objects and in trying to understand what about them seems so strange. This is the contrast in Hesse’s work that most interests me: the contrast between simultaneous obviousness... See more

“I WILL REFER TO THE KIND of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. * When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that make... See more

“works of art can sensitize us to the amount and kind of labor, of human time and effort, stored in everything we use and think we want”

SOME EXERCISES IN SLOW PERCEPTION

https://www.artforum.com/features/some-exercises-in-slow-perception-212529/

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“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”
-Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”

“the problem was to base art making on something other than arrangements of forms according to taste.”

Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making

https://www.artforum.com/print/197004/some-notes-on-the-phenomenology-of-making-34191

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“they exemplify a kind of ethical resignation. Their use of very limited, repeated operations may be taken to express a suspicion of the meaning of any activity that cannot be undertaken with the relaxed concentration they embody. Such works discover a freedom in the unforeseeable effects of repetitive, deliberate activity, although they seem also ... See more

“there is also something flat-out funny about Wilke’s sculptural work, an attitude shared with a number of works made by Hesse, Bourgeois, and others, although it is an aspect of their work that tends to get overlooked—too awkward, a bit embarrassing to an artworld for whom “funny” is often a dirty word”

Wilke - Acquavella Galleries - Hesse / Wilke

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“There is no considering the labor stored in things without thinking about the social relations that brought about their production.”
-Kenneth Baker, “Some Exercises in Slow Perception”