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Published by Paula Burleigh
Art Journal , 2022
Review of The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale (2022)
The Dream of Ulysses , 2022
Explores exhibitions-as-labyrinths in art of the 1960s, essay for The Dream of Ulysses, organized... more Explores exhibitions-as-labyrinths in art of the 1960s, essay for The Dream of Ulysses, organized by Fondation Carmignac and curated by Francesco Stocchi, 2022.
Artforum.com, 2020
Zoom and the modernist grid
Art Journal, 2019
review of the 57th edition of the Carnegie International
Exhibiting Architecture, A Paradox?, 2015
With the boundaries between artist and curator ever porous, it's no surprise that the locus of me... more With the boundaries between artist and curator ever porous, it's no surprise that the locus of meaning in Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos is as much in the exhibition's organization as in the works. What's refreshing is that while the overall exhibition framework is essential to the show's conceit, it's not privileged over the art: the viewer will delight in individually compelling objects as well as the relationships among them.
I look around me and imagine that I have the wild look of a person who has five minutes to pack h... more I look around me and imagine that I have the wild look of a person who has five minutes to pack her things and flee," the narrator recounts in Andrea Scrima's provocative novel, A Lesser Day. Rendered in segments circumscribed by places in which she has lived, in a narrative that is not linear, but rather flows back and forth in time, Scrima's intricately wrought story follows the life of a young woman suspended between past and present and uncertain about who she has become.
Interview with Suzanne Hudson about her recent book Painting Now
Une Danse des Bouffons (or A Jester's Dance), a roughly 35-minute-long silent film by Canadianbor... more Une Danse des Bouffons (or A Jester's Dance), a roughly 35-minute-long silent film by Canadianborn artist Marcel Dzama, is an absurdist drama featuring one woman's attempt to rescue her lover, the artist Marcel Duchamp, who is being held captive and tortured while made to recite chess moves. The film's protagonist is based on Maria Martins, the Brazilian sculptor with whom Duchamp had an affair, who is here tasked with saving the captive Duchamp. Une Danse des Bouffons starts and ends with "Étant Donnés" (1946 -66), Duchamp's enigmatic final work featuring a nude splayed out on a bed of twigs and fallen leaves, visible through two peep holes. The danger in relying so heavily on historical borrowings is that the weight of the references will crush the work, rendering it esoteric and legible to a select group of art-world insiders. Fortunately, Dzama avoids this trap, but the sheer amount of art and film history allusions is dizzying: aside from Duchamp, artworks by Oskar Schlemmer and Francis Picabia are re-animated, the specters of Joseph Beuys, James Ensor, and Francisco de Goya are there too, with nods to film directors including David Cronenberg and Busby Berkeley. It's tempting to label all of these borrowings as appropriation, but they're not: the latter suggests ironic over-turning, and there's no subversion to be found in Dzama's relationships with his precursors. He celebrates rather than critiques. And while there's nothing new about an artist paying tribute to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, Dzama's not giving lip service to the famous readymade, but to the much quirkier "Étant Donnés" and the forbidden romance that fueled its inception (supposedly, the installation's nude was based on Maria Martins). The only irony to be found is that Duchamp, whose invention of the readymade paved the way for the cool, slick, heady appropriations that came to define the 1980s, becomes the protagonist of a plot-driven, romantic thriller.
Papers by Paula Burleigh
Art Journal, Apr 3, 2019
The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsy... more The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has two salient dates of birth: 1896 and 1991. Held every four to five years, the International adopted its current form in 1991, when the museum invited outside curators Lynne Cooke and Mark Francis to co-organize the exhibition. This model of the independent or outside curator overseeing large-scale, international exhibitions became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, concurrent with the rise of curators from anonymous museum staff members to their current status as legitimate art stars. The decade marked the beginning of an explosive proliferation of biennials and triennials, creating a globalized art world traversed by nomadic artists and curators.1 At times, mega-exhibitions fell into the trap of supplanting cultural specificity with a monolithic global art-world elite—the same artists and curators on a seemingly endless world tour, creating what the scholar of curatorial practice Paul O’Neill has described as a “global white cube.”2 Yet some mega-exhibitions did real work to dismantle traditional hierarchies that privileged Western art, without romanticizing or fetishizing art practice in developing countries. Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002) was exemplary in this regard: taking place beyond Kassel, throughout five international “research platforms,” it built the groundwork for a truly postcolonial politics of curation. While the current format of the International is rooted in the relatively recent expansion and so-called biennialization of the art world, as an event the exhibition is much older. With its first iteration in 1896, the International—then simply called the Annual Exhibition—is the oldest recurring survey of contemporary art in the United States, and second in the world only to the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895. One year after the Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institute—a museum
Stedelijk Studies Journal, 2018
Dylaby (1962), an exhibition organized by Stedelijk director Willem Sandberg in collaboration wit... more Dylaby (1962), an exhibition organized by Stedelijk director Willem Sandberg in collaboration with the artist Jean Tinguely, transformed the museum into an immersive labyrinth. At times dark and disorienting, the participating artists—Tinguely with Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Per Olof Ultvedt, and Robert Rauschenberg—cluttered the galleries with physical obstacles that required visitors to navigate raised platforms, climbing structures, and false stairways amidst a cacophony of noise. A celebratory atmosphere likely tempered any frustration generated by the deliberate lack of clarity in the exhibition layout, as visitors gleefully fired BB guns and danced in a sea of floating balloons. Scholars have noted that Dylaby anticipated major trends that defined art of the 1960s and beyond: active participation supplanted passive spectatorship, and both experience and environment took precedence over the autonomous art object.[1] Less frequently discussed, however, is the actual s...
Art Journal, 2019
The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsy... more The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has two salient dates of birth: 1896 and 1991. Held every four to five years, the International adopted its current form in 1991, when the museum invited outside curators Lynne Cooke and Mark Francis to co-organize the exhibition. This model of the independent or outside curator overseeing large-scale, international exhibitions became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, concurrent with the rise of curators from anonymous museum staff members to their current status as legitimate art stars. The decade marked the beginning of an explosive proliferation of biennials and triennials, creating a globalized art world traversed by nomadic artists and curators.1 At times, mega-exhibitions fell into the trap of supplanting cultural specificity with a monolithic global art-world elite—the same artists and curators on a seemingly endless world tour, creating what the scholar of curatorial practice Paul O’Neill has described as a “global white cube.”2 Yet some mega-exhibitions did real work to dismantle traditional hierarchies that privileged Western art, without romanticizing or fetishizing art practice in developing countries. Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002) was exemplary in this regard: taking place beyond Kassel, throughout five international “research platforms,” it built the groundwork for a truly postcolonial politics of curation. While the current format of the International is rooted in the relatively recent expansion and so-called biennialization of the art world, as an event the exhibition is much older. With its first iteration in 1896, the International—then simply called the Annual Exhibition—is the oldest recurring survey of contemporary art in the United States, and second in the world only to the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895. One year after the Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institute—a museum
Art Journal , 2022
Review of The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale (2022)
The Dream of Ulysses , 2022
Explores exhibitions-as-labyrinths in art of the 1960s, essay for The Dream of Ulysses, organized... more Explores exhibitions-as-labyrinths in art of the 1960s, essay for The Dream of Ulysses, organized by Fondation Carmignac and curated by Francesco Stocchi, 2022.
Artforum.com, 2020
Zoom and the modernist grid
Art Journal, 2019
review of the 57th edition of the Carnegie International
Exhibiting Architecture, A Paradox?, 2015
With the boundaries between artist and curator ever porous, it's no surprise that the locus of me... more With the boundaries between artist and curator ever porous, it's no surprise that the locus of meaning in Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos is as much in the exhibition's organization as in the works. What's refreshing is that while the overall exhibition framework is essential to the show's conceit, it's not privileged over the art: the viewer will delight in individually compelling objects as well as the relationships among them.
I look around me and imagine that I have the wild look of a person who has five minutes to pack h... more I look around me and imagine that I have the wild look of a person who has five minutes to pack her things and flee," the narrator recounts in Andrea Scrima's provocative novel, A Lesser Day. Rendered in segments circumscribed by places in which she has lived, in a narrative that is not linear, but rather flows back and forth in time, Scrima's intricately wrought story follows the life of a young woman suspended between past and present and uncertain about who she has become.
Interview with Suzanne Hudson about her recent book Painting Now
Une Danse des Bouffons (or A Jester's Dance), a roughly 35-minute-long silent film by Canadianbor... more Une Danse des Bouffons (or A Jester's Dance), a roughly 35-minute-long silent film by Canadianborn artist Marcel Dzama, is an absurdist drama featuring one woman's attempt to rescue her lover, the artist Marcel Duchamp, who is being held captive and tortured while made to recite chess moves. The film's protagonist is based on Maria Martins, the Brazilian sculptor with whom Duchamp had an affair, who is here tasked with saving the captive Duchamp. Une Danse des Bouffons starts and ends with "Étant Donnés" (1946 -66), Duchamp's enigmatic final work featuring a nude splayed out on a bed of twigs and fallen leaves, visible through two peep holes. The danger in relying so heavily on historical borrowings is that the weight of the references will crush the work, rendering it esoteric and legible to a select group of art-world insiders. Fortunately, Dzama avoids this trap, but the sheer amount of art and film history allusions is dizzying: aside from Duchamp, artworks by Oskar Schlemmer and Francis Picabia are re-animated, the specters of Joseph Beuys, James Ensor, and Francisco de Goya are there too, with nods to film directors including David Cronenberg and Busby Berkeley. It's tempting to label all of these borrowings as appropriation, but they're not: the latter suggests ironic over-turning, and there's no subversion to be found in Dzama's relationships with his precursors. He celebrates rather than critiques. And while there's nothing new about an artist paying tribute to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, Dzama's not giving lip service to the famous readymade, but to the much quirkier "Étant Donnés" and the forbidden romance that fueled its inception (supposedly, the installation's nude was based on Maria Martins). The only irony to be found is that Duchamp, whose invention of the readymade paved the way for the cool, slick, heady appropriations that came to define the 1980s, becomes the protagonist of a plot-driven, romantic thriller.
Art Journal, Apr 3, 2019
The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsy... more The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has two salient dates of birth: 1896 and 1991. Held every four to five years, the International adopted its current form in 1991, when the museum invited outside curators Lynne Cooke and Mark Francis to co-organize the exhibition. This model of the independent or outside curator overseeing large-scale, international exhibitions became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, concurrent with the rise of curators from anonymous museum staff members to their current status as legitimate art stars. The decade marked the beginning of an explosive proliferation of biennials and triennials, creating a globalized art world traversed by nomadic artists and curators.1 At times, mega-exhibitions fell into the trap of supplanting cultural specificity with a monolithic global art-world elite—the same artists and curators on a seemingly endless world tour, creating what the scholar of curatorial practice Paul O’Neill has described as a “global white cube.”2 Yet some mega-exhibitions did real work to dismantle traditional hierarchies that privileged Western art, without romanticizing or fetishizing art practice in developing countries. Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002) was exemplary in this regard: taking place beyond Kassel, throughout five international “research platforms,” it built the groundwork for a truly postcolonial politics of curation. While the current format of the International is rooted in the relatively recent expansion and so-called biennialization of the art world, as an event the exhibition is much older. With its first iteration in 1896, the International—then simply called the Annual Exhibition—is the oldest recurring survey of contemporary art in the United States, and second in the world only to the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895. One year after the Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institute—a museum
Stedelijk Studies Journal, 2018
Dylaby (1962), an exhibition organized by Stedelijk director Willem Sandberg in collaboration wit... more Dylaby (1962), an exhibition organized by Stedelijk director Willem Sandberg in collaboration with the artist Jean Tinguely, transformed the museum into an immersive labyrinth. At times dark and disorienting, the participating artists—Tinguely with Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Per Olof Ultvedt, and Robert Rauschenberg—cluttered the galleries with physical obstacles that required visitors to navigate raised platforms, climbing structures, and false stairways amidst a cacophony of noise. A celebratory atmosphere likely tempered any frustration generated by the deliberate lack of clarity in the exhibition layout, as visitors gleefully fired BB guns and danced in a sea of floating balloons. Scholars have noted that Dylaby anticipated major trends that defined art of the 1960s and beyond: active participation supplanted passive spectatorship, and both experience and environment took precedence over the autonomous art object.[1] Less frequently discussed, however, is the actual s...
Art Journal, 2019
The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsy... more The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has two salient dates of birth: 1896 and 1991. Held every four to five years, the International adopted its current form in 1991, when the museum invited outside curators Lynne Cooke and Mark Francis to co-organize the exhibition. This model of the independent or outside curator overseeing large-scale, international exhibitions became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, concurrent with the rise of curators from anonymous museum staff members to their current status as legitimate art stars. The decade marked the beginning of an explosive proliferation of biennials and triennials, creating a globalized art world traversed by nomadic artists and curators.1 At times, mega-exhibitions fell into the trap of supplanting cultural specificity with a monolithic global art-world elite—the same artists and curators on a seemingly endless world tour, creating what the scholar of curatorial practice Paul O’Neill has described as a “global white cube.”2 Yet some mega-exhibitions did real work to dismantle traditional hierarchies that privileged Western art, without romanticizing or fetishizing art practice in developing countries. Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002) was exemplary in this regard: taking place beyond Kassel, throughout five international “research platforms,” it built the groundwork for a truly postcolonial politics of curation. While the current format of the International is rooted in the relatively recent expansion and so-called biennialization of the art world, as an event the exhibition is much older. With its first iteration in 1896, the International—then simply called the Annual Exhibition—is the oldest recurring survey of contemporary art in the United States, and second in the world only to the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895. One year after the Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institute—a museum