Early in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1941), we are told to get out: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” Part of Eliot’s poem makes up a small fraction of the voiceover narration to Sara Cwynar’s six-channel video installation Glass Life (2021), a maximalist meditation on living amongst ever-accumulating and constantly moving images. Glass Life is as dense audially as it is visually. The images are accompanied by two voices reading a sequence of largely unattributed quotes culled from texts and speeches by Anne Boyer, Margaret Thatcher, and William Shakespeare, among many others. But this line seems to offer a particularly apt cipher for a work that is about a life lived in and through an excess of images and text—a life whose reality is always in question, where the distinction between activity and documentation collapses, and representation precedes its object. What is the internet but a massive archive? And what is an archive but an institution, as Jacques Derrida noted in the mid-1990s, obsessed with cheating death? “The archiving,” Cwynar’s two narrators say, “makes the self seem richer and more substantial even as it becomes more tenuous.” The internet is a space …

Michael Wang’s recent one-week exhibition, “Carbon Copies,” had nothing to do with those antiquated, inky sheets necessary before the advent of more efficient means of reproduction. For one thing, Wang’s work was nowhere near as messy. A trained architect, he used his first solo exhibition to “copy” twenty contemporary artworks from the perspective of their environmental impact. The show was tightly focused, neatly presented, grounded in persuasive research, and—in some way—entirely superfluous to his project’s stated aims. His setup was straightforward, if obsessively predetermined: Wang had crafted small cubes representing well-known artworks from the past two decades. Each was sized according to the carbon emissions released in the process of the original artwork’s making. They ranged from the expected culprits (Richard Serra’s steel works, Damien Hirst’s diamonds) to surprise calculations (Marina Abramovic’s lighting, Chris Ofili’s air travel). The cubes themselves looked deliberately handmade, some shaded or textured in delicate graphite, others cast in a material resembling the original (a transparent Roni Horn, a waxy Matthew Barney). They were placed in neat rows, alphabetically by artist’s last name, and the accompanying certificates were placed away from the cubes on shelves along the walls, perhaps to allow for an initial encounter with objects …