Lynda Benglis first came to prominence in the late 1960s for her poured latex or polyurethane foam floor sculptures that recall Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Soon after she also began employing lead, aluminum, and bronze to create works that capture the effects of gravity. Presenting lumps of material built up in time, those sculptures evoke enormous mounds of excrement or exotic wings of hardened lava. Countering Minimalism’s emphasis on seriality and the grid, she opened new ideas about the ways an object can not only represent the process of its own creation, but also its interdependency on its materials and environmental conditions.

Then, in the early 1970s Benglis moved into what I call her “glitter poop” era. Often wall-bound, these twisted lumps of chicken wire or other types of metal mesh are covered with plaster or handmade paper and are finished with metallic paints or encrusted with gold leaf, cast sparkles, or glitter. They look like, well, glittery poop, or sometimes, sparkly tapeworms, and several examples are on view here (among more recent works). This new direction was, and still is, both singular and vulgar—a flamboyant joining of the intestinal with the girly—almost pornographic. By betraying the industrial aesthetic of Minimalism and Postminimalism, the sculptures also reveal another, neglected (in art) set of manufactured materials: the glitter and sparkles marketed to girls, drag queens, and Mardi Gras crews. Avoided for their “tackiness,” her plastic and aluminum sparkles are merely a glammed-out version of the same materials used by other Postminimalists, and they are prescient given the amount of flash evident in contemporary sculpture. —Eva Díaz

Among the most enigmatic seconds of cinema are the instances in Chris Marker’s 1962 science fiction film La Jetée that interrupt the photomontage structure of the film: the two brief moments when the woman the male protagonist has fallen in love with moves her mouth, and then, a few seconds later, blinks her eyes. The fraught relationship between stasis and movement in the film, which visualizes the technological progression of still photography into moving pictures, is also emblematic of the film’s narrative conceit. For in contrast to the woman’s animation, the man’s life, shown exclusively in still frames, is arrested: he will witness his own death in a paradox of time travel.

Carrie Schneider has latched onto this snippet of Marker’s work to produce a meditation on time and media, affect and representation. Divided between two venues, in the Venice Biennale and at David Peter Francis Gallery in New York, her work First Living Woman (2026) doggedly returns to these brief moments. To produce the one-kilometer-long photographic scroll on view at the Biennale’s Arsenale venue, she used her phone camera to photograph every moving frame in Marker’s film in which the woman, played by French translator and actress Hélène Châtelain, appears. Schneider then folded each image into a vast sequence of pleats across the exhibition hall. In the New York iteration of the work, Schneider rephotographed each frame of the Venice spool using 16-mm film. The three-minute work has Châtelain at its center, framed by Schneider’s hand arranging the photographs. The care Schneider demonstrates in magnifying Châtelain’s role refocuses Marker’s project to the woman’s gaze. For as is the case for all subjects of photographic media, she too is a time traveler, an emissary of the past preserved on film. —Eva Díaz

It is routinely asserted that Marcel Duchamp is the most influential artist of the last 100 years. I’m not here to adjudicate that claim, though I can’t disagree with it. I mention his great significance because the absorbing but somewhat stodgy Duchamp retrospective at MoMA would have been that much better if it gave viewers a sense of the monumental impact of his career on his many, many admirers. The absence of the Duchamplitude (oof punning is contagious in le monde Duchamp) is especially notable given that several of his key works were either not available to travel from the Philadelphia Museum of Art—The Large Glass (1915-23), Étant donnés (1966)—or were not re-created for the MoMA show, like the coal bags Duchamp suspended at the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, or the twine maze he created for the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism show in New York. Wouldn’t Sturtevant’s recreation of the 1,200 coal bags installation be wonderful here? Or Joseph Cornell’s Marcel Duchamp Dossier, a boxed work riffing on Duchamp’s mini-retrospective Boîte-en-valise, the latter represented at MoMA somewhat compulsively as a vast room of vitrines filled with dozens of nearly identical versions? Or nearly anything by 1950s-era Robert Rauschenberg, paired with Duchamp’s groundbreaking 1918 “last” painting, the assemblage Tu m’? Or Bruce Nauman’s 1967 From Hand to Mouth, so obviously a homage to Duchamp’s 1959 With My Tongue in Cheek?

Duchamp essentially invented the role of the ironic artist, one whose insouciance, wry humor, and mischievous evasions were catalytic for the twentieth century’s fascination with what I will call the trickster critique: the recognition that producing art under capitalism means uneasily straddling roles of both insider and outsider. The implications of that semi-autonomy in the history of art have been seismic, and demand a follow-up investigation.

Titled Duchamplitude. You’re welcome. —Eva Díaz

Sascha Braunig’s paintings have an S&M meets mid-twentieth century design vibe; her seemingly infinite repetitions of sleek and slender shapes are like a kinked-out Olivetti ad featuring kick lines of dancing typewriter hammers, with the keys doing little staccato hip shimmies. Cauldron, her latest show at Magenta Plains, is itself motivated by a mise-en-abyme of reiterations. At least some of her forms are based on ones described in the 2004 book My Death by Lisa Tuttle, whose plot circles around an oddly sexualized landscape painting that the novel’s protagonist obsesses over.

The vulva at the center of My Death appears again and again in Braunig’s show, at the crossings of vertical rows of slim hybridized forms which combine elements of stockinged legs, begloved arms, toothy columns of bullets, and strings of neon-like tubing. Braunig’s palette is as garish as a Vegas nightclub’s facade—cobalt blues meeting lurid accents like bright orange and fuchsia—and the vagina dentatas depicted in these hues are often cinched with colorful caliper-like rods and cords. Waists as genitals, arms as legs, ammunition as tampons; in Braunigland, the endless mutability of form is yet another opportunity to untether representation from certainty, and desire from its satisfaction in the co-mingling of plausible sexual organs. And yet there is immense delight in the variability of this weird admixture. The ersatz showgirl parts Braunig paints offer viewers the fetish of ever so glamorous body fragments that multiply endlessly, parts that may in fact surpass the sexiness of any one whole body. —Eva Díaz

Six years after Lotty Rosenfeld’s death at age 77, documentation of performances, video work, and artifacts from the activist and collaborative practices of the Chilean artist have been gathered in a mini retrospective by curators Julia Bryan-Wilson and Natalia Brizuela. Rosenfeld is perhaps best known for her 1979 street action Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement), in which she glued white fabric bandages perpendicularly onto existing traffic lines in various locations throughout Santiago, Chile, during Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing dictatorship, making the chains of minus signs into a string of plus marks.

Rosenfeld’s concern with converting the restrictions and anti-left violence of the military regime into positive gestures recurs in her work with the group Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) in the 1980s, in which they graffitied “No+” in public spaces in Chile, using it as the watchword of their activism. Videos Rosenfeld made in the 1980s and ’90s with poet Diamela Eltit underscore their attention to vulnerable populations, focusing on sex workers, drug users, the sexually exploited, and the primarily female loved ones of those “disappeared” during and after the 1973 coup against democratically-elected Salvador Allende that brought Pinochet to power. Seen through the lens of Rosenfeld’s increasing involvement with feminism, No+ can be understood as both “no more,” but also “no and”; a rejection of Pinochet’s cruelty, but also a means to insert subordinated voices into public discourse. —Eva Díaz