Geoff Wichert has degrees in critical writing and creative nonfiction. He writes about art to settle the arguments going on in his head.
“By the Sea,” the characteristically collectible catalog Susan Meyer put together for her annual presentation of Brian Kershisnik’s new directions for 2019, includes a challenge from the artist to everyone who’s ever written, or even thought about, his art: The heavy symbolic weight of books in my […]
“The artist Guy Dill has carved out a unique niche for himself on the borderline between abstract and figurative sculpture.” That’s the metaphor that first comes to mind, but the thing is, it doesn’t really work, because he doesn’t carve. They’re assembled in that distinctly American geometric style, […]
With so much political art being made and shown these days, it would be easy enough to conclude that social criticism and satire are about the only ways art can help in troubling times. Yet however much contemporary art’s moralizing encourages its fan base, it’s far from being […]
“I want to take a viewer somewhere”—Roland Thompson There’s something that in theory can happen to any artist, but is particularly wonderful when it happens to one who has chosen an arduous path: one that imposes some external standards of its own on the craft of art making. […]
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. —Ansel Adams In a decade shy of 200 years—since its invention by British artists seeking a faster, easier way to draw from life—photography has joined those two great clichés of human invention, fire and the wheel, as […]
From time to time, artists redirect the trajectory of art. Sometimes they make huge changes: ones that large parts of the art world then follow. At other times, subtle, self-contained discoveries stand alone, changing the way we think about art more than the way it’s done. And while […]
At the opening of Line Paintings, I noticed a tall man standing by one of the works, seeming to dance with a young girl. He looked at her, then pirouetted with one hand out, asking with his eyes if she understood. And I knew, without seeing it, which […]
For all intents and purposes, statuary was invented in ancient Egypt. These earliest figures, meant to provide a home for the soul in case the body was lost after death, took the cautious form of virtually indestructible cubes of stone. The Greeks took over the idea and, using […]
When confronted by a broadly-brushed lampoon such as Kelsey Harrison’s New Luxury Art Show in Downtown Salt Lake City, it’s tempting to sustain the illusion, play along, which in this case would be writing an ironic review: one that used the same hyperbolic, vacant language, touched on the […]
One of the most compelling breakthroughs in modern linguistics, and a necessary step on the way to proving that language has become genetically programmed in humans, was the realization that all people everywhere speak essentially the same language. Made up of words and rules for combining them, it […]
When the towers—there were more than two—of the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, emergency medical personnel anticipated an avalanche of critical injuries. While the survivors on that day were never counted, responders knew from experience what to expect: eight years before, when a bomb exploded beneath one […]
A sometimes helpful way to conceptualize Modern Art is “old wine in new bottles.” James Joyce, the essential modernist, took a 2,500-year-old epic poem, the “Odyssey,” and repackaged it as a novel—a literary form only a couple of centuries old—that he called “Ulysses,” after the poem’s protagonist, even […]
