Few artists have been so closely associated with transitive “doing” as Richard Serra. The “Verb List” he compiled over 1967-68 (“to roll/to crease/to fold,” etc.) became a banner for his generation, deferring the materials of sculpture to primary processes. So the realization, which comes slowly, that the massive steel plates of his Torqued Ellipses series…

The early seventeenth century in Russia was the era of the False Dimitry (the Impostor). Sots-art emerged 370 years later (in the early 1970s) as a bastard child of socialist realism, its self-styled heir, or, in Adorno’s terminology, the “secret thelos” of its visual identity. Sots-art is a hole in this identity, a gap which…