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A collection of essays offers a peephole glimpse into the art critic’s career
\n\n\n\nA good art critic can be hard to find. That’s certainly true of Bruce Hainley, one of the most big-brained, stylish and principled practitioners of the discipline to emerge – and, it appears, withdraw – over the last three decades. In the previous collection of his writings, the (also) small-press Pep Talk 5: Bruce Hainley Pep Talk (2011), its editor notes that said volume was her idea, not his, desirous as she was to have a clutch of the American critic/poet’s writings in one pocketable place. Correctomundo, which is being published by a German gallery, concludes with Hainley’s acknowledgement that gallery owner ‘Yvo Cho asked for this book and without him it would not exist’. Related, perhaps: interviewed in Bruce Hainley Pep Talk, Hainley notes that he pivoted towards academia because he didn’t want to support himself writing about art he didn’t like. As time has gone on, Hainley has apparently found less and less art to like and the artworld that surrounds it increasingly dismal. His output, unless I’m missing something, has shrunk, while not infrequently focusing on figures who are elusive or at least tricky themselves: see his last book-length statement, 2014’s vivacious experimental monograph for Semiotext(e), Under the Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant’s Volte-Face.
\n\n\n\nBut now there’s Correctomundo, a suite of 15 scattered essays from the last quarter-century, evidence of Hainley’s aslant, rangy take on what might broadly pass as art crit, or crowbar the discipline open. The opener, ‘In a Year of 13 Moons’ (2024), orbits around the eponymous Rainer Werner Fassbinder movie in a dense, prosodic, allusion scattering way that feels written for the handful of people who’ll get it. 2016’s ‘Dear Vince,’ (assumedly American sculptor Vincent Fecteau) is an epistle-as-essay that floats towards the latter’s art practice on a cloud of shared references, from interior design to gay bars to, perhaps more formally, ‘the sleazy potential of tubes and holes’. So no, you’re not going to miss that Hainley has long literalised Susan Sontag’s call for an erotics of art: he regularly views art through the prismatic of the male body, twisting artistic practices kaleidoscopically. ‘Urine Sample’ (2002) is a quietly polemical essay about Andy Warhol’s Oxidation paintings (1977–78) that, neatly interspersing sections from the artist’s Diaries, pushes back on sombre October-style readings of Warhol’s art as death-fixated to focus on flowing life, to read piss as the vital body in absentia (‘urine is rich in DNA’), gold transmuted: ‘Warhol spent his whole life figuring out how to represent it, the body there and not there, his own, others. Gang bang vs. come on the Ultrasuede’.
\n\n\n\nOccasionally, perched on his high-wire, Hainley wobbles a bit. 2001’s ‘Imitations of Life’ concerns itself with ‘all Richard Prince’s gay pictures’ and implicitly queers the ostensibly straight artist’s work. It extends the notions of imitation and appropriation that concerned the Pictures Generation to Douglas Sirk’s movies (including the Lana Turner-starring one that gives the essay its title) and Warhol: Hainley, here, makes all kinds of neat links, not least involving publicity photos, but by the time he’s reversing Lana Turner’s name to ‘Anal Turner’, the conceit is creaking. Elsewhere, though, Hainley’s absolute determination to own his takes pays off handsomely: ‘One Artillery’, an essay on Trisha Donnelly from 2005, entirely rescues the artist from gendered critical clichés about ‘witchiness’, situating her instead as a ‘warrior’, combatively applying martial strategies to art, in whose practice ‘a medium is being taken apart before [the viewer’s] very eyes and taking them with it’.
\n\n\n\nYet consider this a peephole glimpse, because Hainley’s writing doesn’t really lend itself to extraction. It at once effervesces and asks to be taken in slowly, sometimes even decoded. Sentences depend strongly on those around them and on the conspiratorial, refusing-to-pander way his essays flow. (So, look some up online.) The creators he hymns in Correctomundo have that resistant integrity too, whether quietly, as in Maureen Gallace’s beautifully stubborn landscapes and obscurant facades of houses, or loudly, in an elegy for the writer Gary Indiana. That slipperiness makes sense, because Hainley is that rare art scribe who often appears not to be looking up at his subjects but across at them: the critic, so Oscar Wilde had it, as artist.
\n\n\n\nCorrectomundo: Selected Writings 2001–2026 by Bruce Hainley. Clementin Seedorf & CTMS, €38 (hardcover)
\n\n\n\nFrom the April & May 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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