The Easel

8th April 2025

Bruce Nauman’s pensive Conceptual art from the 1970s seems timely again

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 7th April 2025

Nauman moved to Los Angeles in 1969 seeking inspiration. He took contemporary art seriously, especially Duchamp and his pun-laden works. One Nauman work from 1968 was a weighty steel slab titled “Dark”. Did that mean it was dark under the slab? Was the title written under the slab, as the artist claimed? The writer describes this work as “a compact of faith … a contract between strangers,”. That was a significant thing is turbulent 1968 and it is still a significant thing today.

In a New Exhibition at The Met, Chinoiserie Gets a Feminist Framing

Lisa Wong Macabasco | Vogue | 31st March 2025

When fine Chinese porcelain first arrived in 16th century Europe, its translucence, white colour and blue designs ignited a “Chinoiserie” craze. Europeans saw China as “exotic” and extended this fantasy to Chinese women – “goddesses, mothers, monsters, and performers”. Porcelain also became a metaphor for European womanhood – “fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken”. Porcelain was not culturally neutral as has been assumed. It embodied a “language” about how women were shown.

At Yale, a David Goldblatt retrospective bears eloquent witness to apartheid-era South Africa and beyond

Mark Feeney | Boston Globe | 3rd April 2025

Goldblatt photographed apartheid-era South African society. In doing so, he “bore witness” with distinction. His interest was in the commonplace – churches, mines, people at home and in the street – where “nothing ‘happened and yet all was contained”. Combining a humanist outlook with “visual simplicity”, he articulated the moral dilemmas that attended daily life under apartheid. Goldblatt’s images, says the writer, are “eloquence of a very high order”. Gushes another, his work is “magisterial”.

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