CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/26/2015

Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld

In Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld—published to accompany the late artist's retrospective on view now at the New Museum—Hal Foster writes, "Ambiguity is everything in postmodernist art, and so it is with the work of Sarah Charlesworth: she liked to turn the received ideas of visual culture into productive paradoxes, questioning other clichés in the process, such as the notion that critical art is always didactic or obviously political." He goes on to list seven of the categories of paradox that Charlesworth put into play, including photography as a problem; subtraction as addition; aura lost and regained; the sex appeal of the inorganic; the question of whether alienation can be desired; critique through complicity; and paradox in art that "looks great and hurts a little." Featured image is "Carnival Ball" (2012).