Last week’s New Yorker (3/12) covers the Whitney Biennial. One passage that caught my eye:

“See, for instance, Gisèle Vienne’s mechanized boy mannequin wielding a hand puppet, with a chilling soundtrack by the Los Angeles poet and novelist Dennis Cooper. ‘I’m not dead,’ the boy muses, ‘unless this is death.’ The sinister-voiced, twitching puppet comments on things that the boy imagines, in what sounds like a game of exquisite cadaver: ‘decapitated head upon severed arms upon mutilated trunk-like logs and branches in a fireplace.’

‘Because I said so is the fairly witless way most images get you to look at them,’ the poet and performer Ariana Reines writes in an essay that complements, rather than addresses, the grotesque montage photographs and assemblages, satirizing high fashion, by the artist who styles herself K8 Hardy.”