Philip Mueller: Last Days of Soft Machine

By Nadine Khalil

DEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen

As Mueller’s world is captured in a drunken disarray, the sense of an aftermath emerges—that still-raging afterparty.

Jordan Castro: The Novelist

By Scott Cheshire

JUNE 2022 | Books

For any computer user the opening sentence in Jordan Castro’s compact, brilliant, and very funny debut novel The Novelist is determinedly accurate and not a little uncanny: “I opened my laptop, still waiting for my morning tea to steep, and tried to type my password three times rapidly before getting it right, my waking fingers clicking with the determination of a machine.“ It is those “clicking” fingers and that particular “machine” I find slightly unsettling, a quiet but bracing nudge that a user might be as “machine” as its computer.

Laurie Anderson with Paul D. Miller

JUNE 2022 | Art

On the occasion of Laurie Anderson’s exhibition, The Weather, at the Hirshhorn Museum, Editor-at-Large, Paul Miller spoke with Anderson on episode #483 of the New Social Environment. Their discussion touches upon Anderson’s attraction to the taboo, her desire to make a “walk-in comic book filled with words,” and her fascinating collaboration with a supercomputer at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.

Richard Prince: Hoods

By Tom McGlynn

JUNE 2022 | ArtSeen

Richard Prince’s body shop of horrors here, a deconstruction of the American vehicle, is an elegantly orchestrated grand guignol of stock and customized hood forms as stand-ins for paintings with a few minimalist asides of free-standing parts and whole muscle car carcasses. And is there any American dream machine more representative of the restless substance of “American Spirituality” than the Fordist automobile? A pure product of the assembly line gone mad, the American car is the perfect prima materia from which Prince can ignite innumerable false starts.