Chicago Art Criticism

An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus

James Moskovic
Question: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think that is?
Answer: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some…people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like [...]

Gradients

Bret Schneider
A cursory flip through the many websites featuring new media online often shows a widespread use of the gradient.  Taking many forms – from multimedia collage, to Adobe Illustrator-style drawing, to plexiglass sculpture, photographic tableau, and many more – the gradient is a common material choice in a vast sum of new work.  At [...]

Carsten Nicolai at Pace

Bret Schneider
Carsten Nicolai is at least equally renowned for his sound work as he is for visual work.  Making minimalist digital music under the moniker Alva Noto, Nicolai has been a central figure in electronic music’s shift from dance music towards glitchy computer-based sound art.  In the mid 90’s he started the Raster-Noton label with [...]

What is Formal? – or – Against Meaning

Bret Schneider
‘Formal’ has transfigured into a pejorative term when used to describe an art work today.  Amidst the proliferation of social art,  post-conceptual research projects, identity politic art, and general obsessions with trying to communicate meaning to the viewer, a purely ‘formal’ art work is often perceived as a relic interest of the past.  Traditionally [...]

We Are All Presidents of Manifestos!; Chris Mansour in Conversation With Mary Ann Caws

Mary Ann Caws is distinguished professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of CUNY, and editor of the book Manifestos: A Century of Isms that surveys literary manifestos of the twentieth century. When prompted for her favorite quote from any manifesto, she replied, “We are all presidents of Dada,” because it [...]

Writings On Glass

Bret Schneider
For some reason it is common among films portraying genius to aestheticize their intellectual process by showing the protagonist writing on glass, mirror, or other reflective surfaces.  In Good Will Hunting the film opens with the solitary genius writing abstract mathematical formulae on mirror, with few other objects in sight.  A man and his [...]

On Drone Music

originally published in the Platypus Review, Issue 16, 2009
Bret Schneider
THE AESTHETIC experience of drone music is not just aesthetically defined, but socially and historically located. The significance of this location is especially intriguing when concealed in a music legacy that aims exclusively at the purely metaphysical presentation of sound – a music intent upon expelling [...]

Persian Electronic Music, Yesterday & Today 1966-2006

Persian Electronic Music, Yesterday & Today 1966-2006
Sub Rosa
Bret Schneider
The double-disc Persian Electronic Music; Yesterday and Today 1966-2006 is yet another unearthing from the prolific archives of electronic music from the latter half of the 20th century.  As such, these excavations often interrogate the developments of avant-garde music as it developed within a particular [...]

An Avant-Garde For The World; Xenakis At The Worlds Fair

Bret Schneider

The reconstitution of the avant-garde in the postwar era was fraught with confusion over purpose, and guilt with picking up avant-gardism after the Holocaust.  When Theodor Adorno suggested that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, he was speaking for an entire generation of artists, writers, and composers who felt the same paralysis, [...]