New Sy Hersh in this week's New Yorker, along with a thorough, fair-minded Peter Schjeldahl review of the Jeff Wall shows currently up at NY MOMA and Marian Goodman:

Hersh: "'We are not planning for a war with Iran,' Robert Gates, the new Defense Secretary, announced on February 2nd, and yet the atmosphere of confrontation has deepened. According to current and former American intelligence and military officials, secret operations in Lebanon have been accompanied by clandestine operations targeting Iran. American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq."

Schjeldahl: "The prevailing style is realist, but it is regularly beset by mixed, toilsome aims: Wall has harbored enough motives to impel several artists, and they have tended to get in the way of one another. There is the righteous Wall, who lodges complaints on behalf of racial minorities and the poor: in Mimic (1982), a bearded lout makes an insulting gesture to an Asian man on a city street; An Eviction (1988, reworked in 2004) is an aerial view of a neighborhood in which a violent dispossession takes place. The erudite Wall imports art-historical and ideological arcana with motifs from Manet, Hokusai, or Walker Evans here and a redolence of German or French critical theory there; Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), among other strenuous texts, influenced Wall’s adoption of commercial signage techniques, in a spirit of criticizing mass culture. Wall the director deploys Brechtian alienation effects, to a fault, in his use of models and actors: in The Goat (1989), the stilted postures of four boys bullying a fifth quash any possible drama. Finally, there is Wall the lurking suitor of beauty in landscape, cityscape, interior, and still-life. He’s my favorite, and, lately, the most prominent. The retrospective and a concurrent show of notably strong new pictures at the Marian Goodman gallery give a strange impression of development in reverse: an artist doing his relatively uncomplicated early work last."
- posted by cjb @ 9:30 PM