The Easel

23rd November 2021

Arthur Jafa

Aruna D’Souza | 4Columns | 19th November 2021

Jafa’s 2016 video essays have made him a global sensation. His new work, AGHDRA, is quiet, comprising imagery of a lumpy surface of “stuff”, with waves going out to a distant horizon. This “supreme mass” is “terribly beautiful—beautiful despite the terror, terrible despite the beauty.” Jafa calls it an attempt to “embody black experience in non-narrative terms”. The piece has no conclusion, “just endless, gut-wrenching, but still gorgeous churning.”

Annie Leibovitz: “A lot can be told in those moments in between the main moments”

Nathalie Dassa | Blind | 12th November 2021

Leibovitz is having a moment with multiple shows and a book. The reviews reveal a photographer of disparate parts. Her fashion images often indulge in fantasy, evoking narratives from history or literature as much as they showcase clothing. Her portraiture is about realism, perhaps reflecting her photojournalism roots at Rolling Stone. For Leibovitz, though, everything is a performance, with “both the photographer and [subjects as] contributors to cultural moments.”

Remembering Dave Hickey, brilliant art critic and renegade Texan

Daniel Oppenheimer | Texas Monthly | 20th November 2021

Hickey has been called “the philosopher king of American art criticism”. His reputation rested especially on two 1990’s books that contain “some of the best writing on art and culture that any American has ever done”. A critic described him as “a resolutely nonsystematic thinker …  a critic who constructs no rules, but instead rhapsodizes about what he loves, aiming not to convince you of its worthiness but to demonstrate that such love is possible.”

22nd November 2021

In Jeff Wall’s photographs, it’s all about the details. But are they important?

Michael Kimmelman | The Washington Post | 10th November 2021

Wall is credited with helping photography transcend its status as “a problematic subset of art.” Intrigued by artifice, he decided to create tableaux – near-documentary re-creations. These images have little details seemingly incongruent with the ‘face-value’ story. Once this is noticed, the “documentary value” of the image “collapses like a house of cards … [unlike a movie] Wall’s photographs seem stolen from a narrative timeline with no backstory, or denouement in the offing.”

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