Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s seventh novel, follows so quickly on the heels of his sixth, the massive Against the Day (2006), that the teams of specialists who go over the fuselage of every Pynchon text as if it were a spy plane forced down by mechanical difficulties, identifying the probable origin and function of each part, writing up the results in Pynchon Notes or on the Internet, must be gnashing their teeth with weariness. The red telephone again? Aw, sheesh. If only there were some way to persuade them not to worry! Inherent Vice is by far the least puzzling Pynchon book to enter our airspace: a goof on the Los Angeles noir, starring a chronically stoned PI with a psychedelic wardrobe and a hankering for pizza. At fewer than four hundred pages, it’s also the shortest Pynchon novel to appear since Vineland (1990); you could almost recommend it to your boo... Read more »

The large segment of the Haitian population that is unable to read or write inhabits an oral history culture, which produces, when looking into the past, a curious foreshortening. First comes the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, the only successful slave revolution in history and an event with whose fundamentals practically all Haitians are reasonably conversant. Then there's a compressed, indeterminate period of confused and repetitious instability, ending with President Woodrow Wilson's decision in 1915 to use the collection of outstanding American and French loans as a pretext for installing Marines in Haiti to prevent the election of an anti-American president. Following the close of the US occupation in 1934 is another indeterminate period of confusion, ending with the erection of the Duvalier dictatorship, a père et fils monolith that, in its iron duration f... Read more »

When I was a little girl, my mom—consummate feminist and literary mother par excellence—gave me Tatterhood and Other Tales, an anthology of feminist folk tales whose cover sported a soot-cheeked minx gamely beating back a gang of trolls with a wooden spoon. Published by the Feminist Press in 1978, Tatterhood was one of a slew of anthologies that emerged in the wake of the women’s rights movement to combat the patriarchal Brothers Grimm and Disney party line. But employing fairy tales for activist means was nothing new. In Weimer Germany, fairy-tale collections like the pungently titled Proletarischer Kindergarten (1921) were published by communists to critique the country’s turbulent capitalist ethos (and to recruit little comrades, no doubt). Such prominent Weimer artists as George Grosz often illustrated the books, but some, like Kurt Schwitters, also took to wr... Read more »

The hard gone soft, the raw cooked: This is the Claes Oldenburg we know and love, the Oldenburg of Soft Toilet, 1966, and Giant BLT (Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich), 1963—shiny and tasty American wares fallen victim to gravity and deflation. But beginning in 1976, the artist’s collaborations with the late Coosje van Bruggen seemed to reverse course, stiffening into polished monumentality. While the Guggenheim and the National Gallery’s shared 1995 Oldenburg retrospective struggled to tie together these bodies of work, this survey leaves things largely bifurcated. Its first half, which includes rarely seen films, focuses on Oldenburg’s protean investigations of production, from The Store to soft sculptures to mid-’60s Happenings. Its second features his and van Bruggen’s little-known group of Brobdingnagian musical instruments, quite another take on collaboration ... Read more »

James Ensor (1860–1949), the Belgian Symbolist and proto-Expressionist, is a perennial favorite among people with the right taste. One of the very tippy-top paintings in any American collection is his—Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888, at the Getty. Sadly, that work will not travel here, although the show does feature the Museum of Modern Art’s no less iconic Masks Mocking Death, made the same year. Skeletons, masks, and puppets are mainstays of Ensorworld iconography, and yet for all his trafficking in lurid mayhem and morbidity, Ensor nevertheless suspires an air of transcendence. So we can thank MoMA for mounting this large-scale, thematically organized exhibition of approximately ninety paintings, drawings, and prints and for publishing a hefty, scholarly catalogue. At last, the heart sings, something worth looking at.

Since 1965, when he began producing the diagrams and photo-text magazine pieces that would become landmarks of Conceptual art, Dan Graham has made a series of swerves in his practice through video and film and performance to the architectural pavilions of the 1980s and beyond. This body of work—along with his early stint as a gallerist showing art by friends such as Carl Andre and Robert Smithson, and his energetic activities as a critic and speaker—has earned him near-legendary status. Artists today find a potent model in Graham’s integration of the conditions of exhibition and media reception into his own work; in his shape-shifting modus operandi; in his omnivorous cultural appetites. (His long-standing obsession with rock ’n’ roll, for instance, has given rise to extensive writings and the videos Minor Threat, 1983, and Rock My Religion, 1984.) And yet, due to... Read more »

The atomic age is fading on its grainy analog newsreels, so it’s high time for the twenty-first century to place Buckminster Fuller in a romantically tinted retrospective. He’s quite an appealing figure, the space-age Thoreau, puffing like a summer breeze through the cold war.

Until his thirties, Fuller was a gabby, overbright college dropout, a sometime meatpacker and sheet-metal worker with a Yankee tinker’s streak. Then bankruptcy and the death of a child provoked a mystical experience, a Whitmanesque self-reinvention in which “R. Buckminster Fuller” suddenly appeared in a Greenwich Village café as an autodidactic, self-appointed expert on everything.

The danger signs of classic crankhood glow all over Fuller—for instance, he creates a tetrahedral “Dymaxion” geometry no one else can grasp—yet his mental breakthrough taps an awesome core of creative ener... Read more »

Over the years, Cy Twombly has received few important museum exhibitions in the United States. New work has largely been seen only at Gagosian Gallery in New York, where it is shown for a month before disappearing into blue-chip private collections. So this exhibition of pieces made between 2000 and 2007, organized by James Rondeau with Twombly’s cooperation, marks a rare opportunity. It will include thirty-two works: photographs, drawings, sculptures, and large-scale paintings, all thematically related through subjects from nature. What should we expect to find? Having long since abandoned the many transgressions of his earlier work, Twombly—from the evidence we do have—is now conjuring paradise; the sheer luxuriance of his recent paintings surpasses even that of late Matisse. Of course, in these times, that may well prove to be the biggest transgression of all.

Known for his distinctively mischievous sense of humor as well as his incisive reconsideration of photography’s critical possibilities, Larry Johnson combines text, drawing, painting, graphic design, and animation within a photographic framework characterized by visual clarity, economy, and sharp focus. In Warholian fashion, Johnson often imbues his work with queer desire and dry melancholy as he mines lowbrow registers of American culture, resituating material drawn from such sources as People magazine, pulp fiction, celebrity auto-biographies, Hollywood histories, and advertisements. Sixty photographs made since 1982 feature in the Los Angeles–based artist’s first major survey exhibition in the United States, which is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by curator Russell Ferguson, Lee Edelman, and Esther Leslie, along with a reprint of a 1990 interview by Davi... Read more »

Organized by LACMA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea” features installations, sculptures, videos, computer animations, and Web-based work by artists born in South Korea between 1957 and 1972 and raised during a period of sustained political upheaval. Intended to redress what cocurator Lynn Zelevansky calls Korea’s “virtual absence from the Western imagination,” the show is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Zelevansky, cocurator Christine Starkman, and art historian Joan Kee, as well as interviews with the artists and an informative time line of Korean art and politics from 1945 to the present.