159 102 101MB
English Pages [200] Year 2023
YVE-ALAIN BOIS ON THE REINA SOFÍA
CLAIRE BISHOP ON INFORMATION OVERLOAD
SUNG TIEU JOSH KLINE APRIL 2023
I
N
T
E
R
N
A
T
I
O
N
A
L
KUDZANAI-VIOLET HWAMI A MAKING OF GHOSTS 14 APR I L–13 MAY 2023 · VICTOR IA M I RO · LON DON
Victoria Miro
Image courtesy Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
ON VIEW IN APRIL NEW YORK
LOS ANGELES
LONDON
GENEVA
SEOUL
HONG KONG
Tyler Hobbs Hermann Nitsch Kenneth Noland Richard Tuttle Leo Villareal Louise Nevelson Gideon Appah Kylie Manning Liu Jianhua Saul Steinberg Zhang Xiaogang
pacegallery.com
m a r i a n g o odm a n g a l l e r y paris
ne w y o r k
D’ICI À L’INFINI
DAN GR AHAM
Giovanni Anselmo, Lothar Baumgarten, Marisa Merz, Ettore Spalletti
Is There Life After Breakfast? Curated by Peter Fischli
10 March – 29 April 2023
15 March – 29 April 2023
CRISTINA IGLESIAS Monotypes on Copper and Paper 6 April – 13 May 2023
museum exhibitions
TONY CR AGG
GIUSEPPE PENONE
The Twist, Kistefos Museum Jevnaker, Norway
Gesti universali Galleria Borghese Roma, Italy
28 April – 15 October 2023
14 March – 28 May 2023
TACITA DEAN Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection Paris, France 24 May – 11 September 2023
CRISTINA IGLESIAS
NIELE TORONI 864 empreintes de pinçeau No.50 Fondation CAB Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France 22 March – 29 October 2023
Under and In Between Frederik Meijer Garden & Sculpture Park Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA 28 April – 24 September 2023
ANNETTE MESSAGER ARoS Aarhus, Denmark 27 May – 22 October 2023
ADRÍAN VILLAR ROJAS With Mariana Telleria El fin de la imaginación The Bass Miami, USA 27 November 2022 – 14 May 2023
APRIL 2023 COLUMNS
FEATURES
VIDEO Erika Balsom on Aria Dean’s Abattoir, U.S.A.!
29
SOUND Evan Moffitt on Tarek Atoui
35
ON SITE Skye Arundhati Thomas on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale
41
PERFORMANCE Moze Halperin on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
122
INFORMATION OVERLOAD: THE SUPERABUNDANCE OF RESEARCH-BASED ART Claire Bishop
132
ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS: SUNG TIEU AND THE ART OF DERIVATIVE CRITIQUE Catherine Quan Damman
140
CULTURES: THE ART OF JOSH KLINE Colby Chamberlain
152
REQUIRED VIEWING: MANUEL BORJA-VILLEL’S TENURE AT THE REINA SOFÍA Yve-Alain Bois
158
TO DIE FOR: THE ART OF SCOTT COVERT Alex Jovanovich
49
TOP TEN Rick Silva
55
BACK OF THE NAPKIN Agnieszka Kurant
191
29
REVIEWS 164
140
132
Cover: View of “Josh Kline: Antibodies,” 2020, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo. From left: Productivity Gains (Brandon/Accountant), 2016; MAO Inhibitors Can’t Fix This (Elizabeth/Administrative Assistant), 2016. Photo: Christian Øen. (See page 140.) From top: Aria Dean, Abattoir, U.S.A.!, 2023, HD video, color, sound, 10 minutes 50 seconds. Josh Kline, Forever 27, 2013, HD video, color, sound, 14 minutes 39 seconds. Sung Tieu, No Gods, No Masters, 2017, HD video, color, sound, 19 minutes 13 seconds. Lex Niarchos, Scott Covert: Up Until Now, ca. 1990–2022, video and digital video, color, sound, 22 minutes 21 seconds.
158
From New York, Stony Brook, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, São Paulo, London, Hastings, Wakefield, Paris, Palma, Turin, Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, Stockholm, Helsinki, Istanbul, New Delhi, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, and Melbourne
CONTRIBUTORS
SKYE ARUNDHATI THOMAS
CLAIRE BISHOP
YVE-ALAIN BOIS
COLBY CHAMBERLAIN
CATHERINE QUAN DAMMAN
EVAN MOFFITT
4
ARTFORUM
SKYE ARUNDHATI THOMAS is a writer and editor based in Goa, India. Their first book, Remember the Details, on viral images, courtrooms, and a brief history of a protest movement, is out now from Floating Opera Press. Their second, cowritten with Izabella Scott, on constitutional law, military occupation, and communications blackouts, is forthcoming in 2023 from Mack Books. In this issue, Thomas reviews the fifth edition of the KochiMuziris Biennale, curated by the artist Shubigi Rao. CLAIRE BISHOP is Presidential Professor in the Ph.D. program in art history at cuny Graduate Center. She is the author of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012) and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art (Cornerhouse Publications, 2013). In this issue, Bishop examines the history of researchbased art in an excerpt from her next book, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, forthcoming from Verso. photo: nikki columbus YVE-ALAIN BOIS is an art historian, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and an editor of the journal October. He has curated or cocurated numerous exhibitions and written extensively on twentieth-century art. He is currently working on a catalogue raisonné of the paintings, reliefs, and sculpture of Ellsworth Kelly, two volumes of which have already appeared (Cahiers d’Art, 2015 and 2021). His most recent book, An Oblique Autobiography (noplacepress, 2022), a collection of essays dating from 1976 to the present, retraces his intellectual formation from his early meeting with the artist Lygia Clark, to his study with Roland Barthes and Hubert Damisch, to the founding of the journal Macula. In this issue, Bois discusses the legacy of Manuel Borja-Villel following the Spanish curator’s departure as director of Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. COLBY CHAMBERLAIN is a faculty-in-residence and incoming assistant professor of art history at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Previously, he taught at the Cooper
Union, the City College of New York, and Columbia University; he has held editorial positions at Triple Canopy and Cabinet. His scholarship has appeared in publications including Art Journal, ARTMargins, caa.reviews, Grey Room, and October. For Artforum, Chamberlain has profiled artists including Adelita HusniBey, Alison Knowles, Jill Magid, Park McArthur, and Dave McKenzie. His book Fluxus Administration (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press) recently received a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant from the College Art Association. In these pages, Chamberlain examines the interdisciplinary practice of Josh Kline in light of the artist’s first US museum survey, “Project for a New American Century,” opening this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. CATHERINE QUAN DAMMAN is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she teaches and advises on graduate work on feminist and queer approaches to global modern and contemporary art. This year, she is completing her first monograph, Performance: A Deceptive History, with the support of a 2022–23 ACLS Fellowship. In this issue, Quan Damman discusses the practice of Sung Tieu ahead of the artist’s first solo exhibitions in the US, at the Amant Foundation and MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. EVAN MOFFITT is a writer, critic, and investigative journalist based in New York. His work has appeared in 4 Columns, Aperture, Artforum, Art in America, Art Review, the New York Times, the White Review, and Frieze, where he was formerly senior editor. He was a lead reporter on an investigation into a fifty-year antiquities-trafficking network, the story of which was released in March as Dynamite Doug, a documentary podcast produced by PRX and Project Brazen. For this issue, Moffitt writes on recent sound installations and performances by Tarek Atoui ahead of the artist’s latest site-specifi c commission, debuting this month at the Gwangju Biennale.
Stanley Whitney There Will Be Song 20 Grosvenor Hill London
GAGOSIAN
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN FIVE DECADES + APRIL 20 – JUNE 10, 2023
M N U C H I N G A L L E RY 45 E A S T 7 8 T H S T R E E T
N E W YO R K , N Y 1 00 7 5
T: + 1 2 1 2 8 6 1 0 0 2 0
M N U C H I N G A L L E RY. C O M
John Chamberlain, Yellow Nunn, 1975, painted and chromium-plated steel, 45 × 64 × 40 inches (114.5 × 162.5 × 101.5 cm) © 2023 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
ARTFORUM Media, LLC, is owned and published by Penske Media Corporation
Editor David Velasco Managing Editor Jeff Gibson Executive Editors Elizabeth Schambelan, Lloyd Wise Reviews Editor Alex Jovanovich Senior Editors, Artforum.com Zack Hatfield, Chloe Wyma Associate Editor, International Kate Sutton Assistant Editor Julia Ribeiro International Reviews Barry Schwabsky Research Madeline Casteel, Mika Lee Design Director Alex Lesy Photo Director Chandra Glick Photo Editor Jessica Butler Associate Producer, Digital Brian J. Green Engagement Editor Emma Weinman News Desk/Copy Chief Polly Watson Copy Editors James Camp, Mike Laws, Thaddeus Rutkowski Artforum.com.cn Associate Publisher Sirui Zhang Editor Du Keke Senior Editor Guo Juan Marketing Associate Ruishi Ge Contributing Editors Lee Ambrozy
, Yang Beichen
, Zhang Hanlu
Publisher Emeritus Anthony Korner Production Managers Sophie Fox, Tica B. H. Tran Production Assistant Tatum Phillips Digital Projects Manager Jashin Friedrich Web Development Daniel Burckhardt, Maegan Dolan Circulation and Administrative Director Melissa Mudry Circulation Associates Kiara Alvarado, Courtney Garvin Business Manager Kanduu Ashley-Minott Business Associate Mary Raap New York Editorial and Business Offices 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Tel (212) 475 4000 Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Artforum International @Artforum @Artforum
China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Singapore Sirui Zhang Tel +86 155 2297 6971 Email: [email protected] Ruishi Ge Tel +86 155 4119 1668 Email: [email protected] France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria Melanie Facchetti Tel +33 (0)6 84 03 08 99 Email: [email protected] 8
ARTFORUM
SARLINA SEE Chief Accounting Officer CRAIG PERREAULT Chief Digital Officer TODD GREENE EVP, Business Affairs and Chief Legal Officer
JENNY CONNELLY EVP, Product & Engineering DEBASHISH GHOSH Managing Director, International Markets DAN OWEN EVP, GM of Strategic Industry Group
ELLEN DEALLY VP, Audience Marketing & Special Projects FRANK McCALLICK Vice President, Global Tax GABRIEL KOEN Vice President, Technology JAMIE MILES Vice President, eCommerce JENNIFER GARBER Head of Industry, Travel JERRY RUIZ Vice President, Acquisitions and Operations JONI ANTONACCI Vice President, Production Operations KAREN REED Vice President, Finance KATRINA BARLOW Vice President, Business Development KAY SWIFT Vice President, Information Technology KEIR McMULLEN Vice President, Human Resources
DAVID ROBERSON Senior Vice President, Subscriptions
MARQUETTA MOORE Head of Talent
JESSICA KADDEN Senior Vice President, Programmatic Sales
MATTHEW CLINE Head of Automotive Industry
JUDITH R. MARGOLIN Senior Vice President, Deputy General Counsel
MIKE YE Vice President, Strategic Planning & Acquisitions
KEN DELALCAZAR Senior Vice President, Finance
NICI CATTON Vice President, Product Delivery
LAUREN UTECHT Senior Vice President, Human Resources
NOEMI LAZO Vice President, Customer Experience and Marketing Operations
MARISSA O’HARE Senior Vice President, Business Development
SONAL JAIN Vice President, Associate General Counsel
NELSON ANDERSON Senior Vice President, Creative
ADVERTISING
Canada Kate Fox Tel (212) 475 4000 Email: [email protected]
GEORGE GROBAR Chief Operating Officer
TOM FINN EVP, Operations & Finance
Publisher Danielle McConnell Associate Publisher Kate Koza
West Coast, Southwest, US Shannon Timms Tel (323) 633 1972 Email: [email protected]
GERRY BYRNE Vice Chairman
PAUL RAINEY EVP, Operations & Finance
Editor at Large Jack Bankowsky Contributing Editors Jan Avgikos, Daniel Birnbaum, Claire Bishop, Yve-Alain Bois, Dennis Cooper, Huey Copeland, Thomas Crow, Johanna Fateman, David Frankel, Tim Griffin, Bruce Hainley, Joan Kee, John Kelsey, Donald Kuspit, Rhonda Lieberman, Greil Marcus, James Meyer, Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ida Panicelli, John Rajchman, David Rimanelli, Katy Siegel, Amy Taubin, Philip Tinari, Anne M. Wagner
Senior Advertising Executive Kate Fox Advertising Manager/Production Marta Sharapova Digital Advertising Associate Serena Warren
JAY PENSKE Chairman & CEO
Germany, Poland Jessica Aimufua Tel +49 (0)1 768 0444 007 Email: [email protected]
RACHEL TERRACE Senior Vice President, Licensing & Brand Development
India, Middle East, Turkey Gayatri Uppal Tel +91 9810182153 Email: [email protected]
ADRIAN WHITE Vice President, Associate General Counsel
Italy, Switzerland, Greece Georgia Cadenazzi Tel and Fax +39 (02) 545 75 01 Cell: +39 338 621 3851 Email: [email protected] Latin America, Spain, Portugal Ana Castella Tel +52 55 2729 5732 Email: [email protected] United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand Louise O’Kelly Tel +44 (0)79 177 44 209 Email: [email protected]
ANNE DOYLE Vice President, Human Resources BRIAN LEVINE Vice President, Revenue Operations BRIAN VRABEL Head of Industry, CPG and Health BROOKE JAFFE Vice President, Public Affairs & Strategy CASSY HOUGH Head of Industry, Technology CONSTANCE EJUMA Vice President, SEO DAN FEINBERG Vice President, Associate General Counsel DOUG BANDES Head of Live Event Partnerships
LOS ANGELES OFFICE 11175 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90025 310.321.5000
NEW YORK OFFICE 475 Fifth Avenue NEW YORK, NY 10017 212.213.1900
Galerie Galerie Max Max Hetzler Hetzler Berlin Berlin || Paris Paris || London London
Katharina Katharina Grosse Grosse SPECTRUM SPECTRUM WITHOUT WITHOUT TRACES TRACES
Untitled, Untitled,2022, 2022,acrylic acrylicon oncanvas, canvas, 148 148x x121 121cm cm/ /58 581/14/4x x47 475/58/8inches. inches.Photo: Photo:Jens JensZiehe; Ziehe;©©Katharina KatharinaGrosse Grosseand andVG VGBild-Kunst, Bild-Kunst,Bonn, Bonn,2023 2023
March March17 17––April April30, 30,2023 2023 Potsdamer PotsdamerStrasse Strasse77– 77–87 87 10785 10785Berlin Berlin maxhetzler.com maxhetzler.com
Antony Gormley, Implicate III, 2022 6 mm Corten steel, 188.3 x 261.7 x 272.8 cm Photo: Stephen White & Co. © the artist
Antony Gormley Umwelt
Salzburg April—May 2023
LOS ANGELES
Carmen Herrera, Thursday, 1975, Acrylic on Canvas, 66 x 42 in
Carmen Herrera
Opening April 15 1037 N. Sycamore Avenue
ALEX HUBBARD EMERGENCY ENTRANCE APRIL 22 – MAY 20, 2023
REGEN PROJECTS
6750 SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES CA 90038
TEL 1 310 276 5424
FAX 1 310 276 7430
WWW.REGENPROJECTS.COM
ANDREA ZITTEL
A-Z PERSONAL UNIFORMS: THIRD DECADE
APRIL 22 – MAY 20, 2023 REGEN PROJECTS
6750 SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES CA 90038
TEL 1 310 276 5424
FAX 1 310 276 7430
WWW.REGENPROJECTS.COM
BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS MYSELF WHEN I AM REAL
Barkley L. Hendricks, Untitled, 1991
APRIL 13 – MAY 26
JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY
513 W 20TH STREET
AT BROADWAY & WALKER
SYLVIA PLIMACK MANGOLD April 14 – June 3 125newbury.com
14 April - 14 June 2023
SABRINA MEZZAQUI GIOVANNI OZZOLA ANA MARIA TAVARES GALLERIA CONTINUA / PARIS 87 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris—France Tuesday—Saturday, 11am—7pm and by appointment galleriacontinua.com
SOPHIE REINHOLD
GALERIE NORDENHAKE Berlin
28 April–1 July 2023
Gallery Weekend Berlin 28 April–30 April 2022
+ @
PH. LEANDRO IANNIELLO
KATE SHEPHERD SOMETHING ABOUT SHAPES 7 APRIL – 19 MAY 2023
Anthony Meier 21 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley, CA 94941 1.415.351.1400 • anthonymeier.com
KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE BERLIN
PALOMA VARGA WEISZ 28 April - 29 July 2023
stanley brouwn 28 April - 29 July 2023
CLEARING NEW LOCATION 260 BOWERY, NEW YORK, NY 10012 GRAND OPENING / MARCH 29, 2023
MAIDEN VOYAGE Gabrielė Adomaitytė, Adam Alessi, Harold Ancart, Jean-Marie Appriou, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Javier Barrios, Meriem Bennani, Huma Bhabha, Sebastian Black, Matt Copson, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Sara Flores, Ryan Foerster, Aaron Garber-Maikovska, Hugh Hayden, Marguerite Humeau, Zak Kitnick, Calvin Marcus, Shota Nakamura, Marina Pinsky, Loïc Raguénès, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Daisy Sheff.
Lisa Lyon, 1980. Silver gelatin print, 20 × 16 inches. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
Robert Mapplethorpe
Shadows and Light
17 March – 16 April
Baldwin Gallery
209 S Galena St Aspen CO 81611 Tel 970.920.9797 baldwingallery.com
KEHINDE WILEY: HAVANA
APRIL 28 - JUNE 10, 2023 NEW YORK
VIDEO
THE COW QUESTION Erika Balsom on Aria Dean’s Abattoir, U.S.A.!
This slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory. One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.
UPTON SINCLAIR’S 1906 NOVEL The Jungle details the brutal working conditions at the Chicago stockyards. Written as part of a broader campaign for social reform, it scrutinizes the slaughterhouse as a real space of exploitation. But in this passage, the killing floor slips for a moment into something else: The noises of the animals become metaphorical, a kind of cosmic caterwauling. In Aria Dean’s Abattoir, U.S.A.!, a moving-image installation that premiered this past February at Chicago’s Renaissance Society, there are no hogs present to protest their fate and no workers either. This digital rendering of an empty slaughterhouse is devoid of the muckraking granularity that dominates Sinclair’s book, untethered from any practice of documentation. Instead, Dean seizes on what Sinclair only hints at: the immense power of the abattoir as a space of figural possibility. In this hallucinatory work, on display in a city that was the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades, the slaughterhouse becomes a paradigm through which to confront the heterological outside of liberal humanism. Abattoir, U.S.A.! was made using the Unreal Engine, a 3D-computer-graphics game engine that Dean deploys in a manner worthy of its name. The point of view it adopts would typically be called first person, but in this instance that wording rings acutely false. No human— no living being, for that matter—could be the agent of this gaze. At times, the virtual camera seems to mimic the movements of a body, only to pan mechanically, float spectrally, or spin out rapidly into the air, fluidly combining different modalities of vision into a resolutely simulated view. The space it moves through is no less synthetic. Dean defies Euclidean geometry, using computer animation to create an impossible architecture of death that eerily approaches photorealism. The absence of montage only augments the disorienting feeling of
Aria Dean, Abattoir, U.S.A.!, 2023, HD video, color, sound, 10 minutes 50 seconds. Installation view, Renaissance Society, Chicago. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
spatial incoherence, with elements of various building styles combining seamlessly in a single trajectory: Functionally indeterminate glass-and-steel structures are followed by Richard Serra–esque corridors, which in turn segue into gleaming tracks of automated hooks. Midway through the roughly eleven-minute loop, there is a significant interruption to this parcours, when the virtual camera moves into a small pen and the frame is overtaken by blurs and flares of black and gold. The crisp interior of the abattoir gives way to an interlude resembling the entoptic psychedelia of closed-eye vision. When it has passed, a new and different space appears, initially seen askew, as if one’s head were positioned on a floor shimmering with blood. The entity whose perspective we share then robotically rights itself and continues on— resurrected, undead. What does not live cannot be killed. In a short text from 1929, Georges Bataille describes the slaughterhouse, a modern invention, as “cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship.” Those “with an unhealthy need of cleanliness” endorse this partition, gladly exiled to a “flabby world in which nothing fearful remains.” They feel affirmed in their lofty propriety by casting out the base carnality of animal slaughter. Bataille, by contrast, was pulled toward its bassesse. In this, he was not alone: A fascination with the abattoir bleeds across the fringes of Surrealism, into Eli Lotar’s
Dean defies Euclidean geometry, using computer animation to create an impossible architecture of death.
photographs of the Parisian slaughterhouse La Villette and Georges Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949), a poetic film that draws subtle links between the slaughterhouse and the Holocaust. Even though she declines to picture gushing innards and twitching carcasses as Franju does, Dean works within this lineage, approaching the abattoir as an exemplary site of industrial modernity, one at which the instability of the human/inhuman distinction shows itself. Nowhere in her video is a Surrealist twinge more palpable than when meat hooks sway in unison to the slow, lyricless rendition of “I Think We’re Alone Now” that forms part of Evan Zierk’s labile score. Recalling Franju’s ironic use of Charles Trenet’s whimsical song “La mer,” this moment evokes a mass ornament à la Busby Berkeley, only to invert its logic: Whereas Berkeley arranged bodies in rational patterns reminiscent of the assembly line, here all flesh has vanished. We are alone now with machines that are animated by an uncanny vitality. The virtual camera glides through an array of metal “legs,” all moving in time with music that has been stripped of language. Abattoir, U.S.A.! appropriates a formulation that invokes American typicality (“Anytown, U.S.A.”) and remakes it as a scene of routinized death. Is the exclamation mark Dean adds suggestive of sardonic humor, or is it an earnest warning? The video’s shifting tone keeps both possibilities in play. This title joins forces with the groundless images of CGI to lift the abattoir out of concrete particularity and into the realm of allegory— APRIL 2023 29
specifically, into a national allegory of racial capitalism. Dean, a writer as well as an artist, has expressed her interest in how Bataille’s “descriptions of base matter resonate strongly with descriptions of Blackness from recent developments in Afropessimist theory.” Just as Bataille’s exiles in the flabby world are constituted in their cleanliness by the bloody outside they disavow, so, too, according to theorists such as Frank B. Wilderson III, is the category of “the human” constituted by the exclusion of Blackness. In his 2020 book Afropessimism, Wilderson makes a bold claim: “Blacks are not Human subjects but are instead structurally inert props.” He is insistent that no other subaltern occupies this position; it is the abject place of Blackness alone. Yet in a 2003 article, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?,” Wilderson makes a rare foray into analogy. Here, he argues that Blackness destabilizes the traditional categories of Marxist analysis; when considering the Fordist organization of the slaughterhouse, for instance, the Black subject cannot be understood
simply as an exploited worker among workers. Instead, Blackness provokes what he calls “the cow question”: “We must ask, what about the cows? The cows are not being exploited, they are being accumulated and, if need be, killed. The desiring machine of capital and white supremacy manifest in society two dreams, imbricated but, I would argue, distinct: the dream of worker exploitation and the dream of black accumulation and death.” In the abattoir, a space Dean renders with oneiric intensity, both dreams meet in a nightmarish condensation. Her abattoir is not just the abattoir of the Surrealists; as a space of fungibility and disposability, it also echoes the management of Black life—and Black death—in the United States. The worker protagonist of The Jungle, the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, suffers and toils, killing pigs day in and day out. Still, he is thankful for something: “I’m glad I’m not a hog!” he exclaims, happy to be on the side of the butchers. Not Dean. Abattoir, U.S.A.! rejects anthropomorphic perspective, dispenses with
Four stills from Aria Dean’s Abattoir, U.S.A.!, 2023, HD video, color, sound, 10 minutes 50 seconds.
30 ARTFORUM
language, and endows machines with liveliness. It is fabricated by video-game algorithms, distant from any touch of the hand. This is all to say that it takes formal flight from humanism, leaving behind the realm that Wilderson deems antithetical to Blackness. The presence of glass architecture in its opening minutes brings to mind the misguided optimism of Paul McCartney’s famous statement: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” In fact, everyone knows very well what takes place inside the abattoir—literally, metaphorically. Everyone sees its horrors, whether they want to or not, reproduced without end on the internet. Images of pain circulate widely, and the killing continues nevertheless. Perhaps this is why Dean leaves her slaughterhouse hauntingly empty: There is no need to render a carnage with which we are already intimately familiar. Death is what feeds the country. Listen to the hog-squeal of the universe and you will hear the unheeded crime of whiteness. n ERIKA BALSOM IS A READER IN FILM STUDIES AT KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON.
Victor Pasmore
Victor Pasmore, Abstract in Black, White and Umber (detail), 1960; collage and photostat; 503/8 × 983/8 in. / 127.9 × 249.9
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 marlboroughnewyork.com
The Final Decades March 16 – May 6
Red Grooms
Ninth Street Women meet The Irascibles March 16 – May 6
Red Grooms, Ninth Street Women meet The Irascibles, 2020; acrylic on canvas; 961/4 × 1441/4 in. / 244.5 × 366.4 cm
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 marlboroughnewyork.com
© 2023 Red Grooms, member, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
FICRE GHEBREYESUS I Believe We Are Lost March 30 – May 6, 2023
GALERIE GALERIE LELONG LELONG & & Co Co.. New York | galerielelong.com Image: Ficre Ghebreyesus, I Believe We Are Lost (detail), c. 2002.
SOUND
HIGHER FREQUENCIES Evan Moffitt on Tarek Atoui HIS HANDS SWAY back and forth as if he is conducting an invisible orchestra. They rarely touch his instruments, which spill across the limestone floor in a tangle of wires and electronic panels; activated by motion sensors, their ethereal sounds echo through the hall. Tarek Atoui is mesmerizing to watch, unusually so for an artist who began his career as a DJ almost three decades ago, and as the sun finally sets behind the vaulted clerestory windows of Luxembourg’s Musée d’Art Moderne GrandDuc Jean—a cathedral-like space designed by I. M. Pei— his performance crescendoes to a rumbling climax. Stranger than Atoui’s movements, however, are the wired-up resonators and amplifying devices for his ongoing work Waters’ Witness, 2020–, which he activated at mudam on October 8, 2022. Piles of steel I beams, hunks of unpolished marble, and pieces of found wood conceal speakers or link up to them externally. Beneath a glass dome, a lever drags a sharp rock across another rock in steady circles, like a Stone Age turntable. Drops of water fall from a beaker into a shallow pool. Most of these materials were sourced from the ports of cities around the world, including Beirut, where Atoui was born and raised. Audio samples recorded at noisy docksides were channeled through each material in order to elicit their unique vibrational frequencies. The resulting soundscape is hauntingly indistinct, like a concerto submerged in amniotic fluid—an effect heightened by the fact that our own bodies are composed mostly of water. If the harbor is the heart of economic activity, Waters’ Witness is the sound of its pulse. Twenty years ago, Atoui had just completed his studies in electronic music at the French National Conservatory in Reims when he began playing what he describes as “tribal, almost hardcore, angry techno” at countryside raves in Brittany. As any raver can tell you, techno is felt as much as heard. Good bass will shake you to the bone. When you listen to techno at 180 beats per minute—the speed at which Atoui was playing most of his music— the heart quickens, causing blood to rush through the body in sublime agitation. He sensed there was a physicality to techno, even if he didn’t fully understand its implications at the time. In 2005, Atoui returned to Beirut to record his first album. The city, then in the throes of Lebanon’s war with Israel, reverberated with bombs. When he wasn’t in the studio, he found himself in the streets recording the destruction with a handheld video camera. He had no real plans for the footage, but that mattered little to
View of “Tarek Atoui: Waters’ Witness,” 2022–23, MUDAM Luxembourg. Photo: Eike Walkenhorst.
the Hezbollah agents who arrested him one afternoon on suspicion of espionage. Tied up, blindfolded, tortured, and locked in a dark cell, Atoui wondered if he would hear the news that he was going to die. When he was released two days later, he had gone partially deaf in his left ear. But if a sound wasn’t fully audible, he could still pick up its vibrations. Atoui became aware of his body’s capacity to act as an acoustic resonator. Back at his decks, he found the small, deft movements of DJing insufficiently physical to express what he was feeling. While a guest director at Amsterdam’s Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, he developed the midi controller he later used in Waters’ Witness, which can be played without touch, like a
Every architectural space has its own unique frequency, and Atoui tweaks his installations to better pluck it from the air.
theremin. It allowed his movements to become more fluid, liberating him from the muscle memory of his imprisonment. “After this arrest, I was looking to build something that really allowed for physical expression, and the midi controller I developed was a way to claim back this movement, release my energy and frustration,” Atoui told me recently on the phone from the United Arab Emirates, where he was attending the opening of Sharjah Biennial 15. It was in Sharjah that he first put his invention to the test, in a 2009 piece he called Un-drum/strategies of surviving noise. While preparing for the performance, Atoui began working with the Al Amal School for the Deaf to develop instruments—including deeply grooved wooden boxes that amplify the sounds of struck coils and metal bars that look like tuning forks— for those who are hard of hearing. These objects typically act as resonating chambers, their frequencies readily perceptible through touch. “It was meant to APRIL 2023 35
Clockwise, from top left: Tarek Atoui, Dahlem Sessions, 2013–. Performance view, Museen Dahlem—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, May 2014. From the Eighth Berlin Biennale. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Tarek Atoui, Organ Within, 2019. Performance view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 27, 2019. Photo: Enid B. Alvarez. Tarek Atoui, The Reverse Collection, 2016. Performance view, Tate Modern, London, September 16, 2016. Photo: Thierry Bal.
break this psychological barrier that some deaf people have that ‘music is not our thing,’” he says. “The act of listening is much broader and wider than just channeling sound through the ear. If we start to pay attention to other ways of listening, a whole horizon of building instruments, of working together, of occupying space, becomes possible.” Collaboration has since become a central part of Atoui’s practice. He often activates his acoustic installations in live, improvisatory duets with musicians such as Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Pauline Oliveros, and C. Spencer Yeh. Each collaborator brings a different intuitive understanding of how sound might travel through an instrument they’ve never played before. Atoui records each performance, sampling them in future sets, creating an iterative composition that builds and swells as it lives on in the world. His method connects Atoui to Minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, while also allowing him to conceive his music more physically. “On a compositional level, I started to work with subtractive methods, triggering a lot of dense sounds and then taking things out, like a mass of noise I was sculpting and carving,” he says, describing a conceptual process literalized by his motion-sensor midi controller. This is one reason Atoui prefers to work in arts institutions, where the longer duration of exhibitions—in contrast to one-off concerts or performance 36 ARTFORUM
festivals—enables music to gradually change over time. Every architectural space has its own unique frequency, and Atoui tweaks his installations to better pluck it from the air. Rendering it equally audible to audiences of different hearing abilities is a considerable challenge, however, and means that he must often amplify his performances through counterintuitive means. “Sometimes the best acoustic situation is the worst in terms of performance, or visibility, or accessibility,” he notes. For Organ Within, 2019, an event that unfolded in the rotunda of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Atoui countered the echo in the Frank Lloyd Wright edifice by placing his speakers at the very top of its coiled structure. His sets are always brightly illuminated, allowing deaf audiences to see how he creates the sounds they feel. In recent years, Atoui has been studying historical instruments and, in some cases, reverse-engineering them. For the 2014 Berlin Biennale, he recorded musicians playing folk instruments that hadn’t been touched in decades inside Museen Dahlem, and in The Reverse Collection, 2016, presented at London’s Tate Modern, he asked instrument makers to blind-build what they thought had made the sounds he captured for the Biennale. Atoui was less interested in the production of accurate re-creations than in giving physical expression to different ears. His constructed archive testifies to the
fact that music is just as variable as the bodies that perceive it. Days before we spoke, Atoui was in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa playing drums with a Berber tribe. He has been investigating different forms of percussion in preparation for a project on Korean drumming that will open at the Gwangju Biennale on April 7. All the instruments that will be used for the event—woodwinds, strings, brass—are capable of percussion, and because drums vibrate at lower frequencies, they’re singularly perceptible to deaf listeners. The project has taken him back to his days as a DJ: “I got these huge drums that are super bassy and almost play hard techno, even though they’re seventy years old!” Atoui’s exploration of traditional instruments is an extension of his efforts to bridge differences of culture, age, and ability by amplifying them. Each drum, each body, each space has a particular sound that, when felt deep within the body, links us by our most fundamental senses. “What I strive for is to give value to things by listening to them,” he says. “And, by listening to them, better understanding the value of an object, the importance of a phenomenon, the reality of a place.” Listen not just with your ears but with your whole body, and you’ll hear past the noise. n EVAN MOFFITT IS A WRITER, CRITIC, AND INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST BASED IN NEW YORK. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
Dorian FitzGerald
Fitzcarraldo
Mar 23 - May 13, 2023
In collaboration with Clint Roenisch Gallery
Sabrina Ratté Reality-Settings
Sept 23 - Nov 6, 2022
214 Bowery, New York
+1 212 658 0017
www.arsenalcontemporary.com
JASON MCCOY G ALLERY 41 East 57th Street New York, NY 10022 t: 212-319-1996 www.jasonmccoyinc.com
As the longtime representative of The Estate of Frederick Kiesler, Jason McCoy is pleased to announce the publication of this new monograph by Dr. Stephanie Buhmann
F R E D ER IC K K IES LER : G A LA X IES and the recent acquisition of two major architectural models by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Frederick Kiesler: Galaxies The Green Box, 2023 ISBN 978-3962160166 Available online and at bookstores world-wide
SPENCER FINCH
La Grande Jatte
HERBERT BRANDL
MUSIC FOR TREES AND MOUNTAINS
08.04–26.05.2023
Ohne Titel, 2022; acryl on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, HB22SOH (detail); photograph © Markus Wörgötter
PEDRO BARATEIRO
POEMS FOR TOURISTS
27.05 –29.07.2023
Cowboy, 2022; metal object, metal tube, ceramic glass, mirror, spray paint; variable dimensions; unique; photograph © Aurélien Mole
Rua da Manutenção-80 | 1900-321 Lisbon/Portugal T. +351 218624122/3 | [email protected] www.gfilomenasoares.com
ON SITE
WEATHER PERMITTING Skye Arundhati Thomas on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale
IN THE MODERNIST IMAGINARY, a viewer’s encounter with an art object should be pure and unencumbered, free from any distraction that might interrupt the aesthetic experience. For an institution, this means erasing any sign of the contingencies—the physical labor, the mundane bureaucracy—that must contribute to an exhibition’s production. What would it mean, for art and for its viewers, to shatter this illusion? What would it mean to remind audiences of art’s invisible work—that of the installers and exhibition designers, the painters and electricians, the forklift operators and audiovisual experts— and, in turn, to consider the ways in which labor, land, and local working-class lives converge in the context of events designed for a gallery-going public? Such questions are thrown into sharp relief by the fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, a presentation that, while beset by delays and mired in controversy and challenges, invites penetrating inquiry into the infrastructure that maintains all that is demanded of large-scale contemporary art exhibitions. Since the Biennale’s inception twelve years ago, a complex called Aspinwall House has served as its main venue. Built in the nineteenth century by the British East India Company, the seaside compound includes offices, a bungalow, even a yard for shipbuilding. For several years, the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board, a fund that operates under the aegis of the Kerala government, has sought to purchase the site, which is presently co-owned by the New Delhi–based developer DLF with the aim of transforming the complex into a permanent home for cultural events. In July 2022, these longrunning negotiations stalled. The Biennale team (led by Shubigi Rao, a Singapore-based artist and writer) did not gain access to Aspinwall House until early November, a little more than a month before the show’s opening, where they discovered near-total ruin. Overgrowth had ruptured the walls and rain had soaked the roofs. Rooms
CAMP, Bombay Tilts Down, 2022, seven-channel digital video, color, sound, 13 minutes 14 seconds. Installation view, Aspinwall House, Kochi, India.
had flooded and were covered in mold. The interior had last been used for a South Indian horror film, and remnants of the shoot littered the scene, including a fullscale replica of a velociraptor skeleton still swinging from the ceiling, plastic bones clinking in the breeze. The Biennale team has learned, over the years, to expect some level of disarray before each edition, but this was of a different order. Just as repairs were set to begin, negotiations with DLF stalled a second time, and the developer bolted the gates again. In the end, it wasn’t until December that the Biennale team was able to begin its work, less than two weeks before the show’s scheduled opening. The venue’s rooms still needed to be whitewashed, dried, and, in parts, rebuilt. The compound lacked steady power and required extensive rewiring. This was not the only crisis. Kochi Biennale Foundation founder Bose Krishnamachari told The Week that the organization had begun this edition 4.9 crore rupees—roughly $600,000—in debt. Then an additional spanner appeared in the works: New customs regulations were holding up artworks at the border. As of 2021, an importer of a foreign artwork to India must guarantee 25 to 30 percent of its cost, an amount that is
If previous editions of the KMB felt ambitious or celebratory, Rao’s approach is quieter.
only returned once the object has been shipped back. According to Krishnamachari, this totaled $550,500, requiring additional loans. As the opening date drew closer, many works remained locked in warehouses. Bureaucracy, said Krishnamachari, “can kill your energy,” and by early December the Biennale team was running on its last reserves. At 3 pm on the day before the opening, the foundation called together all participating artists present in Kochi for an emergency meeting. The decision was made to postpone the opening—news many visitors did not receive until their planes touched down on the tarmac in Kerala. Meanwhile, the third and most intense storm of the 2022 cyclone season, Cyclone Mandous, rolled in from Tamil Nadu. Visitors— marooned in the city with no show to see—lamented the mud, wet shoes, and humid weather, made worse by poor Wi-Fi. Participating artists drafted an open letter: They would stand in support of the curatorial team while demanding a revision of the foundation’s structure and its procedures for conceiving of and mounting exhibitions. The foundation requested an additional $370,000 loan from the Kerala government. Finally, on December 23, the show opened. Rao and Krishnamachari hoisted a flag and thanked participants and the curatorial team. I SAW THE EXHIBITION two weeks later, in early January. By then, Aspinwall House was freshly painted and fully APRIL 2023 41
Above: Aspinwall House, Kochi, India, 2022. Right: Treibor Mawlong, The Transformer, 2022, woodcut, 14 1⁄8 × 18 1⁄8".
installed, its courtyards humming with visitors—students, tourists, locals. Despite the swirl of bad press that preceded the opening, the show itself is thoughtful and understated. If previous editions of the Biennale felt ambitious or celebratory—poetry and artwork spilled onto the streets in Sudarshan Shetty’s 2016 edition— Rao’s approach is quieter. She has a keen interest in practices that are slow and meditative, that flow from the artists’ command of history. Taking in the eighty-seven participants spread across four venues (Cabral Yard, Pepper House, and Anand Warehouse, in addition to Aspinwall House), visitors found an emphasis on film and archival research and a strong presence from those whose work engages the histories of the Indian Ocean. Thao Nguyen-Phan’s First Rain, Brise Soleil, 2021–, is a case in point. The initial work on view at Aspinwall House, the roughly sixteen-minute video fits neatly into a single room alongside the artist’s watercolor-andacrylic paintings on silk. Nguyen-Phan sensitively intersperses shots of the banks of the Mekong River, which snakes 2,700 miles from the Tibetan plateau to the South China Sea, with footage of the modernist Preah Suramarit National Theatre in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The link between these scenes is loaded: Built in 1968, when the country was on the brink of independence, the theater features latticed windowpanes derived from the traditional Khmer architecture—an effort to codify a postcolonial “national” style. At the time, however, that architecture was vanishing, thanks to the encroachment of sand mining along the Mekong, which displaced the Khmer people living by its banks—many of whom, in turn, worked as laborers building the theater. Modernism had slipped into the postcolonial consciousness of many 42 ARTFORUM
nation-states with ease. It became dominant, its austerity crystallizing the aim of many decolonial projects: to found new nations on the ruins of empires scarred by violence. Yet fresh violence occurred in turn, and Nguyen-Phan’s meditative film, drawing links between labor and nation-building, underscores the ironies and tragedies of progress. Nguyen-Phan’s work sets the tone for a show whose most powerful moments of critical inflection emerge in its handling of labor, land, money, and working-class lives. Meghalaya artist Treibor Mawlong’s 2022 woodcuts, also at Aspinwall House, portray scenes from Mawbri, a village on the Indian border with Bangladesh that is inhabited by just over fifty families. In these images, villagers labor in a variety of ways. They work on plantations that roll down steep inclines, planting betel and bay leaves, areca nuts, oranges, and long peppers. They fell trees in darkly shaded groves, sundering their sturdy trunks. They sort vegetables and cook (Mawlong treats domestic labor no differently from any other kind of work). The artist’s proficient chiaroscuro brings intimacy to the woodcuts despite the magnitude of what they depict. Generations have tilled the same lands and built their lives on the same plateaus. Their work, their labor, is akin to a shared oral history, an inheritance. The idea of oral history, and of inheritance, surfaces elsewhere in the show, most directly in Goan artist Sahil Naik’s raw installation portraying a submerged village, All is water and to water we must return, 2021–22, and in Tenzing Dakpa’s beautifully intimate familial portrait Relations, 2019. Yet it is the voice—the voice of the working class, specifically—that is perhaps most clarion
throughout. Mumbai-based studio CAMP’s Bombay Tilts Down, 2022, consists of a display of six video screens, each giving a distinct view from a CCTV camera placed atop a thirty-five-story building in south central Mumbai. Slowly, the camera lowers its lens, shifting its cool gaze from the city’s rainy, foggy skies to the thundering Arabian Sea. In the voice-over that accompanies the imagery, working-class poets express their displeasure with punchy humor: This is a city “of nylon, georgette, and hand-spun sprees,” says one, “of a pair of shoes and a pile of books . . . but it breeds unreal crooks!” As the camera moves, we see flashes of hard hats and neon high-vis vests, reams of blue tarp, cloth laid out on hot cement roofs that shimmer silver in the noontime light. “From bricks we made palaces that now touch the sky . . . we gave them pleasure and peace,” goes the song, “but our housing still remains in question; bamboo and tin is expensive.” No artwork can be divorced from the circumstances in which it is shown, especially not the crisis-ridden context of this Biennale. Yet as Rao writes in her curatorial note, “a biennale can be so much more than a mere accumulation of coincidental collisions.” This is true of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, whose visitor numbers increase with each edition, and whose attendees include not only those who frequent the contemporary art circuit but the broader public. The Biennale is a unique lodestar in the cultural landscape of the Indian subcontinent, and the revelations of its precarious position only underscore how necessary it is that its constituents come together to ensure its survival. n SKYE ARUNDHATI THOMAS IS A WRITER AND EDITOR BASED IN GOA, INDIA. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
AUCTION NEW YORK 16–19 MAY EXHIBITION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 6–16 MAY
The New York Sales at Sotheby’s this May present a series of auctions showcasing masterworks spanning over a century of artistic production. The sales showcase the major artistic movements of the 20th and 21st century from the innovations of the Impressionists to the groundbreaking works by young and emerging artists working today.
1334 YORK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10021 [email protected] SOTHEBYS.COM #SOTHEBYS © SOTHEBY’S, INC. 2023
© 2023 THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION/ ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
© 2023 JEAN DUBUFFET
DOWNLOAD SOTHEBY’S APP FOLLOW US @SOTHEBYS
Denmark ARKEN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
COPENHAGEN CONTEMPORARY
Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj Tel: +45 43 54 02 22 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.arken.dk Wed. – Sun. 11–5, Thurs. 11–9
Refshalevej 173 A, 1432 København K Tel: +45 29 89 80 87 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.copenhagencontemporary.org Wed. – Sun. 11–6, Thu. 11–9
Until August 27 Refik Anadol: Nature Dreams Until December 31 Various artists: BUTTERFLY! – Arken’s Collection, curated by Esben Weile Kjær May 6 – September 10 Eva Steen Christensen July 1 – December 3 Susan Philipsz
Until April 10 Francis Alÿs: Children’s Games Until May 14 Doug Wheeler: LC 71 NY DZ 13 DW Until September 3 Beautiful Repair: Mending in Art and Fashion Until December 30 James Turrell: Aftershock
AROS AARHUS ART MUSEUM
DEN FRIE CENTRE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Aros Allé 2, 8000 Aarhus C Tel: +45 87 30 66 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.aros.dk Tues. – Fri. 10–9, Sat. – Sun. 10–5, Mon. closed
Until April 16 Chiharu Shiota: Invisible Lines Until June 5 Cindy Sherman: Tapestries April 1 – September 3 Erró: The Power of Images May 27 – October 22 Annette Messager: Désirs désordonnés
MARTIN ASBÆK GALLERY Bredgade 23, 1260 Copenhagen K Tel: +45 33 15 40 45 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.martinasbaek.com Tues. – Fri. 11–6, Sat. 11–4
Please contact gallery for information.
GALLERI BO BJERGGAARD Flæsketorvet 85 A, 1711 Copenhagen V Tel: +45 33 93 42 21 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.bjerggaard.com Tues. – Fri. 1–6, Sat. 11–4
Until May 17
Ivan Andersen: Nothing Comes From Something
KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG Kongens Nytorv 1, 1050 Copenhagen K Tel: +45 33 74 46 39 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk Tues. – Fri. 12–8, Sat. – Sun. 11–5
Until August 6 Jeremy Deller: Welcome to the Shitshow! April 21 – May 21 MFA Degree Show 2023 June 10 – August 6 Alexander Tovborg: The Church
Oslo Plads 1, 2100 Copenhagen K Tel: +45 33 12 28 03 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.denfrie.dk Tues. – Sun. 10–6, Thurs. 12–9, Mon. closed
Until March 12 Oda Knudsen: Kredit i flammer Until April 16 Høst – En kontrafaktisk udstilling: Asger Jorn, Astrid Svangren, Benedikte Bjerre, Carl-Henning Petersen, Claus Hugo Nielsen, Else Alfelt, Ernest Mancoba, Henry Heerup, Kasper Akhøj, Maria Wæhrens, Mette Rasmussen, Morten Knudsen, Saskia Te Nicklin, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, and Søren Andreasen Until April 16 Labyss April 22 – May 29 Den Frie artists members: Free Hands
LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Gl. Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk Tel: +45 49 19 07 19 Fax: +45 49 19 35 05 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.louisiana.dk Tues. – Fri. 11–10, Sat. – Sun. and holidays 11–6, Mon. closed
Until April 10 Gauri Gill Until May 7 Richard Prince: Louisiana on Paper Until June 11 Dana Schutz May 4 – August 20 Niko Pirosmani June 9 – October 22 Ragnar Kjartansson June 29 – November 26 Cave_bureau
GALLERI SUSANNE OTTESEN Gothersgade 49, 1123 Copenhagen K Tel: +45 33 15 52 44 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.susanneottesen.dk Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–4, Mon. closed
Until April 15 Pablo Jansana: Rododendro April 26 – June 3 Jiri Georg Dokoupil
FRANK GEHRY AT GEMINI G.E.L. 10 new editions based upon Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
GEMINI G.E.L.LLC 8365 MELROSE AVENUE LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 323.651.0513 [email protected] GEMINIGEL.COM R E P R E S E N T E D I N N E W YO R K B Y :
GEMINI G.E.L. AT JONI MOISANT WEYL 535 WEST 24TH STREET, 3RD FLOOR
NEW YORK 10011 212.249.3324 [email protected] JONIWEYL.COM
Wishful Thinking, 2022 28 x 48 ½" (71.7 x 123.2 cm) Multi-color screenprint/collage with leafed elements and portraits by Alejandro Gehry Edition of 50
GERMANY BERLIN GALERIE BUCHHOLZ
Fasanenstraße 30, 10719 Tel: +49 30 8862 4056 galeriebuchholz.de [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Until April 15 Alain Guiraudie April 28 – June 17 Samuel Hindolo
CAPITAIN PETZEL
Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Tel: +49 30 240 88 130 capitainpetzel.de [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Until April 15 Eddie Martinez: Supernature April 28 – June 10 Malcolm Morley: Sensations
CRONE BERLIN
Fasanenstraße 29, 10719 Tel: +49 30 6293 9995 galeriecrone.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 12–6 Please contact gallery for information.
GALERIE EIGEN + ART
Auguststraße 26, 10117 Tel: +49 30 280 6605 eigen-art.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Please contact gallery for information.
EIGEN + ART LAB
Torstraße 220, 10115 Tel: +49 30 3087 7940 eigen-art-lab.com [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 2–6, Sat. 11–6 Until April 8
KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE
SPRÜTH MAGERS
Neue Grünstraße 12, 10179 Tel: +49 30 5059 6820 konradfischergalerie.de [email protected] Wed. – Mon. 11-7, Thurs. 11-9
Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Tel: +49 30 2888 4030 spruethmagers.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6
Until April 15
April 28 – August 19
Candida Höfer: Berlin und Anderswo
KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART Auguststraße 69, 10117 Tel: +49 30 243 4590 kw-berlin.de [email protected] Wed. – Mon. 11–7; Tues. closed; Thurs. 11–9, free admission 6–9 Until May 14 Until May 14 Until May 14
Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief Win McCarthy: Innenportrait Karen Lamassonne: Ruido / Noise
GALERIE MAX HETZLER Bleibtreustraße 45, 10623 Bleibtreustraße 15/16, 10623 Goethestraße 2/3, 10623 Potsdamer Straße 77-87, 10785 Tel: +49 303 464 978 50 maxhetzler.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Until April 15 André Butzer: Kirschmichel (Goethestraße 2/3) Until April 15 Jinn Bronwen Lee and André Butzer (Bleibtreustraße 15/16) Until April 15 Thomas Struth: Unbewusste Orte (Unconscious Places) (Bleibtreustraße 45) Until April 30 Katharina Grosse: Spectrum without Traces (Potsdamer Straße 77–87) April 27 – May 27 Raphaela Simon: Nighthawks (Goethestraße 2/3) April 27 – June 10 In Defense of Symbolic Value: Artistic Procedures in the Resort, curated by Isabelle Graw (Bleibtreustraße 45 and Bleibtreustraße 15/16)
Talya Feldman
JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION Leipziger Straße 60 (entrance: Jerusalemer Straße), 10117 Tel: +49 309 2106 2460 jsc.art [email protected] Sat. – Sun. 12–6
Until July 30 Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation
KLEMM’S
GALERIE NORDENHAKE Lindenstraße 34, 10969 Tel: +49 30 206 1483 nordenhake.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Until April 22 Marjetica Potrcˇ: On Coexistence, Rivers and Stories April 29 – July 1 Sophie Reinhold
SETAREH BERLIN
Prinzessinnenstraße 29, 10969 Tel. +49 30 4050 4953 klemms-berlin.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6
Schöneberger Ufer 71, 10785 Tel: +49 30 2300 5133 setareh.com [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–6
Until April 15 Ulrich Gebert: Eigenface April 28 – June 10 Renaud Regnery: What Power Art Thou?
Until April 15 Yang Jiechang: Hundred Layers of Ink April 28 – June 3 Cybèle Varela
Cao Fei: Duotopia
TANYA LEIGHTON Kurfürstenstrasse 24/25, 10785 Tel: +49 30 2197 2220 tanyaleighton.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Until April 15 Dan Rees April 29 – June 24 Jonas Lipps
ZILBERMAN Goethestraße 82, 10623 Schlüterstraße 45, 10707 Tel: +49 30 3180 9900 zilbermangallery.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 ˙ Until April 15 Fatos¸ Irwen: Sûr (Goethestraße 82) April 28 – July 29 Itamar Gov: Chemistry and Physics in the Household (Goethestraße 82) April 30 – July 29 Transit: Yane Calovski & Hristina Ivanoska, Antje Engelmann, Memed Erdener, Hanna Frenzel, Itamar ˙ Gov, Fatos¸ Irwen, Iz Öztat, Judith Raum, Sim Chi Yin, and Annette Weisser; curated by Lotte Laub and Susanne Weiß (Schlüterstraße 45)
COLOGNE GALERIE BUCHHOLZ Neven-DuMont-Straße 17, 50667 Tel: +49 221 257 4946 galeriebuchholz.de [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 11–6, Sat. 11–4 Until April 8 Tony Conrad April 21 – June 24 Tomma Abts
GALERIE JAN KAPS Lindenstraße 20, 50674 Tel: +49 221 828 202 12 jan-kaps.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Until April 8 13 for Luck: Thea Gvetadze, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Amol K. Patil, Mark von Schlegell, Minh Lan Tran, and Ang Ziqi Zhang Until May 27 Alan Michael: Friendly Street
DÜSSELDORF
FRANKFURT
LEIPZIG
ANNA LAUDEL DÜSSELDORF
GALERIE BÄRBEL GRÄSSLIN
GALERIE EIGEN + ART
Mühlenstraße 1, 40213 Tel: +49 211 902 269 62 annalaudel.gallery [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 12–6, Sat. 11–3
Schäfergasse 46 B, 60313 Tel: +49 69 2992 4670 galerie-graesslin.de [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 10–2
˙ Until April 5 Hayal Incedog ˘ an: The Century of Loneliness – Volume I April 22 – July 1 Cem Sonel: Binary
Until April 15 Stefan Müller: Moderner Anstrich April 22 – May 27 Secundino Hernández June 3 – July 1 Markus Oehlen
KUNSTHALLE DÜSSELDORF
FILIALE
Grabbeplatz 4, 40213 Tel: +49 21 1899 6243 kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de Tues. – Sun. 11–6
[email protected]
Until May 21 Peter Piller: there are a couple of things that bother me June 8 – August 13 Die unhintergehbare Verflechtung aller Leben: Keltie Ferris, Ilse Henin, Hayv Kahraman, Gisela McDaniel, Soraya Sharghi, and Emma Talbot
KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE Platanenstraße 7, 40233 Tel: +49 21 1685 908 konradfischergalerie.de [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 11–6, Sat. 11–2 Until May 5 Until May 5 Sand On The Until May 5
Stephen Kaltenbach: Deep Time Zon Ito: Drawing On The Sand, Drawing Yuji Takeoka: Selected Works
JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION Schanzenstraße 54, 40549 Tel: +49 21 1585 8840 jsc.art [email protected] Sun. 11–6 Until December 10 Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age
SETAREH Königsallee 27-31, 40212 Tel: +49 21 1828 27171 setareh.com [email protected] Mon. – Fri. 10–7, Sat. 10–6 April 1 – May 6. Figur auf Grund: Katharina Hohmann, Maike Illes, Christian Megert, Robert Rota, Memphis Schulze, and Corin Sworn
SETAREH X Hohe Straße 53, 40213 Tel: +49 211 8681 7272 setareh-x.com [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 10–5 Until December 23
Maike Illies: subkutan
Stiftstraße 14, 60313 Tel: +49 69 2992 4670 galerie-filiale.de [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 2–6, Sat. 11–3
Spinnereistraße 7, Halle 5, 04179 Tel: +49 34 1960 7886 eigen-art.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Until April 22
Stef Heidhues, Igor Hosnedl
MÜNSTER LWL-MUSEUM FÜR KUNST UND KULTUR
Until April 29 Sebastian Volz: Stoffwechsel May 6 – June 10 Robin Stretz
Domplatz 10, 48143 Tel: +49 251 5907 201 lwl-museum-kunst-kultur.de [email protected] Tues. – Sun. 10–6, open until midnight on the second Friday of each month
MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST
Until May 7 Transition: Cultural Understanding, Integrity and Democracy in Ukraine and Beyond May 5 – September 3 Summer of Modernism
Domstraße 10, 60311 Tel: +49 69 212 30447 mmk.art [email protected] Tues. 11–6, Wed. 11–7, Thurs. – Sun. 11–6 Until June 18 Rosemarie Trockel Until October 15 Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i Until May 29, 2025 Cyprien Gaillard: Frankfurter Schacht April 1 – July 30 The Critics Company: One Can Only Hope and Wonder
HAMBURG SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY Admiralitätstraße 71, 20459 Tel: +49 40 3751 9940 sfeir-semler.com [email protected] Mon. – Fri. 11–7, Sat. 11–4 Until April 6 Rabih Mroué: My life always comes back to me like a lame dog April 20 – August 19 Mounira Al Solh
KASSEL FRIDERICIANUM Friedrichsplatz 18, 34117 Tel: +49 56 1707 2720 fridericianum.org [email protected] Tues. – Sun. & public holidays 11–6, Thu. 11–8 Until May 29 Roberto Cuoghi Until February 2027 Kerstin Brätsch Summer Tauba Auerbach
MUNICH HAUS DER KUNST
Prinzregentenstraße 1, 80538 Tel: +49 89 2112 7113 hausderkunst.de [email protected] Mon. & Wed. 10–8, Tues. closed, Thurs. 10–10, Fri. – Sun. 10–8 Until April 30 Tune – Performance Series: Ihor Okuniev Until July 30 Karrabing Film Collective: Wonderland Until July 23 Hamid Zénati: All-Over Until September 10 Katalin Ladik: Ooooooooo-pus April 14 – July 23 Trace. Formations of Likeness May 5 – July 9 Holy. Energy. Masters. ars viva 2023
LENBACHHAUS
Luisenstraße 33, 80333 Tel: +49 89 2339 6933 lenbachhaus.de [email protected] Wed. – Sun. 10–6, Thurs. 10–8 Until April 16 Art and Life 1918 to 1955 Until May 21 The Remains of 100 Days: documenta & Lenbachhaus Until September 10 Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theater? May 23 – October 8 Natascha Sadr Haghighian
PULPO GALLERY
Obermarkt 51, 82418 Murnau am Staffelsee Tel: +49 17 1177 8796 pulpogallery.com [email protected] Wed. - Fri. 10–4, Sat. 10–2 Until April 22 Nathan Ritterpusch: Meet me at Marcel’s May 6 – June 17 Rhiannon Inman-Simpson: A slow pulse
Pat Adams L A R G E PA I N T I N G S on view at 291 Grand Street
291 Grand Street New York 10002 25 East 73rd Street New York 10021 212.755.2828
www.alexandregallery.com
Naming, 1978 (detail) oil, isobutyl methacrylate, mica, egg shell, graphite, wax crayon and pastel on canvas, 76 x 61 inches
PERFORMANCE
VILLAGE VANGUARD Moze Halperin on The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window A CRAMPED LIVING ROOM appears like a diorama of 1960s Greenwich Village bohemia, afloat in the engulfing expanse of the Harvey Theater’s stage. It contains all the warmth and ire and humanity that get bottled up in a typical New York apartment: a whole world unfolding with nowhere to go. The chasmic darkness of America waits just outside its cozily art-covered walls. Incendiary optimism, depicted as a necessity in life and politics, suffuses Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), staged this past February and March by Anne Kauffman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in its first major New York revival. (It wasn’t until 2016, in Kauffman’s earlier production at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, that Hansberry’s second and final play received widespread attention, having closed prematurely on Broadway on January 10, 1965— two days before its author died of pancreatic cancer at age thirty-four.) The play, as her collaborator and exhusband, Robert Nemiroff, wrote, sought to “realistically affirm the species.” It decries apathy and inaction even as it depicts this country as a network of Faustian bargains, swarming with reasons for succumbing to the absurd— and rebukes the theater that does. Hansberry’s radical bona fides were plenty: She was a civil rights activist, a card-carrying Communist, and an anti-imperialist who advocated “every single means of struggle” for Black liberation—“legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and nonviolent.” Hansbury had her own FBI dossier and at the age of twenty-two had her passport confiscated by the State Department; she protested the murder of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on the eve of her wedding; and her version of “real girls’ talk,” per her friend Nina Simone, was discussing “Marx, Lenin, and revolution.” When she was ten years old, Hansberry’s father purchased a property in a white neighborhood of Chicago—leading to a battle against a racially restrictive covenant that escalated into the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. This experience with housing discrimination became the foundation of the canonized A Raisin in the Sun (1959)—the first play written by a Black woman to appear on Broadway. Amiri Baraka praised the drama as an act of “political agitation . . . dealing with the very same issues of democratic rights and equality that were being aired in the streets . . . not as abstractions” but “crafted meticulously from living social material.” Indeed, Hansberry was a proponent of materialist theater, giving no quarter, in particular, to the midcentury avant-garde’s derealized visions of emptiness and “vogue of unmodified despair,” which she saw as antithetical to vital political engagement. She lambasted Jean Genet for his essentialism and fetishism of the oppressed, wrote Les Blancs (The Whites) in response
to his The Blacks (as well as an unpublished parody of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot called The Arrival of Mr. Todog), and subtitled an earlier draft of Brustein’s Window “Up Yours, Ed Albee.” Perhaps it was the assuredness of her political convictions, in her organizing and polemicizing, that gave Hansberry room to make Brustein’s Window so fascinatingly murky and searching—even engaging in a brief dalliance with absurdism before a nascent call to action emerges from the void. Despite mounting a defense of theatrical realism and adhering to its domestic trappings, Brustein’s Window was liberated from the nuclear-familial topos of the previous decade’s mainstream—much like the downtown New York intelligentsia it blithely vivisects. (Brustein’s Window came to life after Hansberry and Nemiroff had, for no lack of love, divorced; she was no longer, in her own words, a “heterosexually married lesbian.”) With its uncoded portrayals of pre-Stonewall queerness, racial acrimony and coalition, sex work, and depleted postMcCarthy pinko pride, the play tested the boundaries of Broadway audiences, even within its relatively traditional container. It feels just as surprising today, however, for the ways it eschews the pedagogic moralism that characterizes so much of contemporary performance.
The title character, played by a formidable Oscar Isaac, proves to be a cringingly timeless depiction of the expiring hipster. We meet the lapsed Communist turned entrepreneurial hobby-hopper in the midst of an extended third-life crisis, flailing around the Village after the collapse of his latest passion project—a folk-music club called Walden Pond. The play centers on his crumbling marriage to Iris (acted first by Rita Moreno on Broadway and here by The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan), a politically aloof, perpetually aspiring actress exasperated by her life in the graveyard of Sidney’s half-finished endeavors. Until a last-minute genre switch—from shaggy, ahead-of-its-time hangout play to more strained tragedy in its final half hour—Brustein’s Window is driven less by plot than by a parade of characters representing the variegated ideologies commingling in their rarefied milieu. Each leaves spiritual and political impressions on our two protagonists with every visit to their apartment. We meet Sidney’s friend and would-be brother-inlaw, Alton (Julian De Niro), a white-passing Black man whose revolutionary élan hasn’t shriveled like Sidney’s; Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a local reform politician whose roots may be less grassy than he lets on; Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), an artist who’s
Lorraine Hansberry, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, 1964, in a production directed by Anne Kauffman, 2023. Rehearsal view, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, February 3, 2023. Iris Parodus Brustein (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney Brustein (Oscar Isaac). Photo: Julieta Cervantes. APRIL 2023 49
Lorraine Hansberry, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, 1964, in a production directed by Anne Kauffman, 2023. Rehearsal view, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, February 3, 2023. Gloria Parodus (Gus Birney) and Sidney Brustein (Oscar Isaac). Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
designed a LeWitt-ish, illegible cover for Sidney’s alternative newspaper, his latest unsound business venture; David (Glenn Fitzgerald), a gay absurdist playwright whose newest work takes place in a refrigerator and who represents the lure of nihilism; Mavis (Miriam Silverman, reprising the role she played in the Chicago production), Iris’s normie uptown sister who spews racism and antiSemitism between bouts of eviscerating wisdom; and, eventually, Iris’s younger sister Gloria (Gus Birney), a “high fashion whore” in an otherwise “anti-sex society.” Sidney tells Alton that he has “lost the pretensions of the campus revolutionary”; he no longer has “the energy, the purity or the comprehension to ‘save the world’” and vows his newspaper will be wholly apolitical. The many times his causes had been thwarted or fizzled out have led him to internalize the world’s anguish in the form of a chronic gastric ailment, rather than project it outward as action. “To get real big about it, I no longer even believe that ‘Spring’ must necessarily come at all,” he confesses. “Or that, if it does, it will bring forth anything more poetic or insurgent than—the winter’s dormant ulcers.” Sidney’s ambivalence parallels his position as a Jew in 1960s New York, vulnerable to ambient anti-Semitism but more or less welcomed into the blinkered ease of whiteness. But Alton and Wally—and the prospect of resuscitating his sense of purpose with a new project— start to re-radicalize him. Sidney endorses Wally in his paper, displays his campaign sign in the play’s titular window, and eventually turns the home, much to Iris’s chagrin, into a “canvassing headquarters.” Like the pile of cups from his shuttered Thoreauvian honky-tonk, 50 ARTFORUM
signs and phone calls from Sidney’s latest enterprise begin to close in on her. Iris’s career has taken a back seat to her husband’s whims. She has existed within their relationship as, in part, a fetish object of backwoods authenticity, an embodiment of the rural idyll that ensorcelled young, romantically alienated urbanites like Sidney during the American folk-music revival (and the millennial revival of that revival, before imploding, courtesy of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, with the bathetic coup de grâce “Alabama, Arkansas, I do love my ma and pa”). Sidney pleads with her to wear her hair down and calls her “mountain girl” (despite her being from the famously flat Oklahoma) as he plucks his banjo at her. Tired of cosplaying herself, she proclaims, “All right, Sid, one of these days you’ve got to decide who you want—Margaret Mead or Barbry Allen [or, in the bam production, Joan Baez]. I won’t play both!” Isaac’s powerhouse performance captured his character’s contradictions, mining Sidney’s bigheartedness and soulful earnestness without softening his jaded acerbity and casual cruelty toward his wife (cruel enough, at moments, to elicit gasps from the audience). Brosnahan, in a more interior and less magnetic turn, lucidly portrayed Iris’s burnout in a world where she’s more imagined than seen. And with acute comic timing, a spectacular Silverman brought out Mavis’s fetid admixture of bigotry and moxie while eerily portending, in the character’s contempt for the “smugness” and insularity of bohemia, the contemporary Right’s rhetorical claims on free expression and the concerns of “ordinary people.”
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window requires a volcanic chemistry between the performers playing Sidney and Iris, despite their fatigue with each other; its dramatic arc hinges on our investment in them as a unit. Isaac and Brosnahan—neither far, here, from the demimondes graced by the outsize fictional talents of Llewyn Davis and Miriam “Midge” Maisel—were captivating and comfortable in their roles, but their connection sometimes felt too much like “good theater,” as though they were performing intimacy more than inhabiting it. Two cast members, De Niro and Birney, struggled to find the gravity and grounding necessary for characters whose doomed romance overtakes the drama in act 3. Hansberry’s freewheeling and discursive script demands looseness, but there was a stagy formality to Kauffman’s production: When characters began to dance or sing, it often felt like the director had pressed the “fun” or “debauchery” button. The set design, with its stark contrast of contained human clutter against stretching negative space, presented something of a catch-22: While adding metaphorical depth, the apartment’s literal shallowness offered little room for actors to exist without seeming smooshed against the fourth wall, magnifying any slips into mannerism. At one point, Kauffman had Iris, Mavis, and Alton break away from the set, plop folding chairs at the front of the stage, and spectate passively as the play’s third-act tragedy unfolded. The choice, chillingly reminiscent of Mavis’s earlier gut-punch line about her family as a Greek chorus—“always there, commenting, watching . . . at the edge of life—not changing anything”—came at the cost of distracting from a crucial moment’s flow and action with allegorical gesture. Yet these issues weren’t enough to stifle this play’s vitality, or its affirmation of Hansberry’s belief that “virtually every human being is dramatically interesting.” Kauffman certainly got Hansberry’s generosity, even at her most bitingly satirical, right. The playwright seldom feels the need to flatten even her more repellent characters into symbols. Or when they do become symbols, a single line suddenly returns them to flesh and complexity. Hansberry is more concerned with the depiction of what happens to radical energy, even when it fails—and how to sustain it thereafter—than she is with her characters’ affirming her impassioned strain of Marxist humanism. Even the absurdist chimera David—part Albee, part Genet—makes persuasive arguments for a theater that fights the “stranglehold of Ibsenesque naturalism.” In a scene Hansberry once referred to as an “absurdist orgy,” embraced to the point of silliness by Kauffman, three intoxicated characters in an evening careening toward tragedy chant, “Oh, who’s afraid of Absurdity! Absurdity! Absurdity! Who’s afraid of Absurdity! Not we!”—as though possessed by Albee’s 1962 Broadway hit. But in the aftermath, Hansberry returns to a message of galvanization despite, and through, devastation. No longer a dance with emptiness, this commitment to political action, and to life, is represented in the embrace of another person. n MOZE HALPERIN IS A BROOKLYN-BASED CRITIC AND PLAYWRIGHT.
Azita Moradkhani Jane LOMBARD Gallery 5 8 W h i t e S t r e e t , N e w Yo r k , N Y
The Real Beneath April 28 - June 10, 2023
CHICAGO ALAN KOPPEL GALLERY 806 North Dearborn St, Chicago, IL 60610 Tel: 312 640 0730 Mon. – Fri. 10–5:30, Sat. by appointment ALAN KOPPEL GALLERY – GLENCOE 342 Park Ave, Glencoe, IL 60022 Tel: 312 375 6096 Sat. 11–5 and by appointment E-mail: [email protected] Web: alankoppel.com
Until April 30 Modern Design (Glencoe) April 7 – June 30 Gregory Crewdson: Eveningside (Chicago)
THE ARTS CLUB OF CHICAGO 201 East Ontario St, Chicago, IL 60611 Tel: 312 787 3997 Fax: 312 787 8664 E-mail: [email protected] Web: artsclubchicago.org Instagram: @artsclubchicago Tues. – Fri. 10–1, 2–6; Sat. 11–3
Until April 15 Andrea Carlson: The Waves May Break Here Still Until May 20 Jessi Reaves: All possessive lusts dispelled May 1 – October 7 Garden Project: Yasmin Spiro – Groundation
BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle, Evanston, IL 60208 Tel: 847 491 4000 E-mail: [email protected] Web: blockmuseum.northwestern.edu Instagram: @nublockmuseum Wed. – Fri. 12–8, Sat. & Sun. 12–5, Mon. – Tues. closed
Until July 9 The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto Until July 9 The Living Image of Sound: Notes on Jazz and Protest at Northwestern University
CARRIE SECRIST GALLERY 1637 West Hubbard Street, Suite 1A, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 610 3821 E-mail: [email protected] Web: secristgallery.com Instagram: @carriesecristgallery Tues. – Fri. 10:30–6:30, Sat. 11–5
April 13–16
EXPO Chicago
CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY 2156 West Fulton St, Chicago, IL 60612 Tel: 773 278 1664 E-mail: [email protected] Web: corbettvsdempsey.com Tues. – Sat. 10–5
Until April 29 Until April 29
Sam Gilliam: Driftless Jimmy Wright: Down Home
DOCUMENT 1709 West Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 535 4555 E-mail: [email protected] Web: documentspace.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6
Until April 22 Meg Lipke April 28 – June 17 Anya Kielar
GALLERY 400 at University of Illinois at Chicago 400 South Peoria St, Chicago, IL 60607 Tel: 312 996 6114 E-mail: [email protected] Web: gallery400.uic.edu Tues. – Fri. 10–5, Sat. 12–5
Until April 8 a series of encounters: UIC MFA Thesis Exhibition I Until April 11–22 CTRL + histories: UIC MFA Thesis Exhibition II May 19 – August 5 Derrick Woods-Morrow: Gravity Pleasure Switchback
GOLDFINCH 319 North Albany Ave, Chicago, IL 60612 Tel: 708 714 0937 E-mail: [email protected] Web: goldfinch-gallery.com Instagram: @goldfinch_gallery_chicago Fri. 12–4, Sat. 12–4, and by appointment
Until April 15 Until April 15 Until April 15 April 22 – June April 22 – June Bernblum
Irene Wa: Crisálida de Sal A Flatfiles Show Sarah Leuchtner: Sequential Escapes 3 Iris Bernblum: Various Pleasures 3 Lovesick on the Floor, a group show curated by Iris
GRAHAM FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN THE FINE ARTS 4 West Burton Pl, Chicago, IL 60610 Tel: 312 787 4071 E-mail: [email protected] Web: grahamfoundation.org Visit our website for gallery and bookshop hours and information. Follow us on social media: @GrahamFoundation
Until June 10 Katherine Simóne Reynolds: A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing
HYDE PARK ART CENTER 5020 South Cornell Ave, Chicago, IL 60615 Tel: 773 324 5520 Fax: 773 324 6641 E-mail: [email protected] Web: hydeparkart.org Mon. – Thurs. 10–7, Fri. 10–4:30, Sat. 10–4, Sun. 10–1:30
Until July 9 SURVIVING THE LONG WARS: Unlikely Entanglements April 13–16 EXPO Chicago: LandFORMS (Booth #453) April 22 – August 6 Edra Soto: Destination/El Destino – a decade of GRAFT
KAVI GUPTA 835 West Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607 219 North Elizabeth St, Chicago, IL 60607 Tel: 312 432 0708 Fax: 312 432 0709 E-mail: [email protected] Web: kavigupta.com Instagram: @kavigupta Tues. – Fri. 11–5, Sat. 12–5 Open by appointment. Please email [email protected] to schedule your visit or book through our website.
April 14 April 14
Allana Clarke (835 West Washington Blvd, Floor 1) Esmaa Mohamoud (219 North Elizabeth St, Floor 1)
LOGAN CENTER EXHIBITIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts 915 East 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773 834 8377 E-mail: [email protected] Web: loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu Please check the gallery’s website for details on hours and procedures for visiting.
at The University of Chicago 5811 South Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773 702 8670 E-mail: [email protected] Web: renaissancesociety.org Wed., Thurs., Sat., Sun. 12–6, Fri. 1–7
Until April 16 Ducks in a Pond: 2023 BA Thesis Exhibition May 5 – June 11 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition
MARIANE IBRAHIM 437 North Paulina St, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 877 5436 E-mail: [email protected] Web: marianeibrahim.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6
April 12 – May 17 Patrick Eugène: 50 LBS May 27 – July 8 Carmen Neely: sometimes a painting is a prayer
MONIQUEMELOCHE 451 North Paulina St, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 243 2129 E-mail: [email protected] Web: moniquemeloche.com Instagram: @moniquemeloche Facebook: MoniqueMelocheGallery Tues. – Sat. 11–6
April 1 – May 26 Maia Cruz Palileo: Days Later, Down River April 13–16 EXPO Chicago
Until April 16 Aria Dean: Abattoir, U.S.A.! April 22–23 INTERMISSIONS: Özgür Kar May 13 – July 2 Shahryar Nashat
RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY 1711 West Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 455 1990 E-mail: [email protected] Web: rhoffmangallery.com Tues. – Fri. 10–5, Sat. 11–5
April 7 – May 13 Spencer Finch: La Grande Jatte May 19 – July 24 Julia Fish: Hermitage Threshold/s — scores + bricks
SMART MUSEUM OF ART at The University of Chicago 5550 South Greenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773 702 0200 E-mail: [email protected] Web: smartmuseum.uchicago.edu Tues. – Sun. 10–5, Thurs. 10–8, Mon. closed
Until June 4 not all realisms: Photography, Africa, and the Long 1960s Until July 9 The Metropol Drama Until February 4, 2024 Calling on the Past: Selections from the Collection
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY at Columbia College Chicago 600 South Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605 Tel: 312 663 5554 E-mail: [email protected] Web: mocp.org Mon. – Sat. 10–5, Thurs. 10–8, Sun. 12–5
Until April 2 Until April 2
Shannon Bool: 1:1 Refracting Histories
VOLUME GALLERY 1709 West Chicago Ave, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 666 7954 E-mail: [email protected] Web: wvvolumes.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6
Until April 22 Barbara Stauffacher Solomon April 28 – June 17 Tanya Aguiñiga
NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY
WRIGHTWOOD 659
at The University of Chicago 5701 South Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 E-mail: [email protected] Web: neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu Mon. – Fri. 9–4
659 West Wrightwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60614 Tel: 773 437 6601 E-mail: [email protected] Web: wrightwood659.org Instagram: @wrightwood659 Thurs. 1–8, Fri. 12–7, Sat. 10–5
Until June 11
The Chicago Cli-Fi Library
PATRON 1612 West Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 846 1500 E-mail: [email protected] Web: patrongallery.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6, and by appointment
April 1 – May 27 April 1 – May 27
Mika Horibuchi Kay Hoffman
April 14 – July 15 April 14 – July 15 April 14 – July 15
Kongkee: Warring States Cyberpunk Shahidul Alam: Singed But Not Burnt Patric McCoy: Take My Picture
ZOLLA/LIEBERMAN GALLERY 325 West Huron St, Chicago, IL 60654 Tel: 312 944 1990 Fax: 312 944 8967 E-mail: [email protected] Web: zollaliebermangallery.com Tues. – Fri. 10–5:30, Sat. 11–5:30
Until April 29 Shai Azoulay: Me & Us (Main Gallery) Until April 29 Rhonda Gates: Measured Ground (South Gallery) Until April 29 Derek Walter: Earth & Ice (Office Gallery) May 19 – June 30 Igor & Marina (Main Gallery) May 19 – June 30 Jay Strommen (South Gallery) May 19 – June 30 Maria Tomasula, Ruth Poor, James Ostrander (Office Gallery)
MARK ROTHKO and WILLIAM SCOTT
Continuing the Dialogue APRIL 26 - JUNE 3, 2023
APRIL 26 OPENING RECEPTION MAY 9 DISCUSSION WITH CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO, KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL, AND JAMES SCOTT
ANITA ROGERS GALLERY 494 Greenwich Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10013 www.anitarogersgallery.com Left: Mark Rothko, Seagram mural study, c. 1958, Tempera on paper, 29 1/2” x 21 3/4” © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko Right: William Scott, Blue East, 1964, Oil on canvas, 73” x 48” © Copyright William Scott Estate
TOP TEN
RICK SILVA Rick Silva is an artist and professor who was born in Brazil and is currently based in Eugene, Oregon. His videos, websites, and installations explore virtuality, futurology, and speculative ecologies. A selection of Silva’s work is currently being featured in “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen” at the Modern in Fort Worth, where it is up through the end of this month. His newest piece, LIQUID CRYSTAL, 2023, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, will debut on the institution’s website on April 11.
1
1. Solar eclipse, Spray, OR, August 21, 2017. Photo: Zack Dougherty. 2. Still from Mia Munselle’s 2014 YouTube video of a camera falling from an airplane and landing in a pigpen. 3. Still from Björk’s 1997 video for “Jóga,” directed by Michel Gondry. 4. Film strip from Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, 1963, 16 mm, color, silent, 3 minutes 13 seconds.
4
3
1
TOTAL ECLIPSES Being in the path of totality during the North American solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, was like experiencing the largest Light and Space installation ever. There is an anticipation and cosmic weirdness to it all that is reminiscent of taking psychedelics. I now understand why people travel the world chasing them. The next total solar eclipse in North America will take place on April 8, 2024, and after that, one will not occur until 2044.
2
CAMERA FALLS FROM AIRPLANE AND LANDS IN PIGPEN, 2014 While the title of this YouTube video gives away the ending, the events that unfold are still incredible to watch. As amped-up skydivers prepare to jump from an airplane, a GoPro camera flies off one of their helmets, gets sucked out the door, and then tumbles down to Earth. The camera spins faster and faster until the horizon turns into an abstract pattern. The object lands facing the sun, and within seconds a pig walks into the frame and tries to eat it. Watching this roughly one-minute video feels like you’re taking in a condensed timeline of the entire history of Western art.
3 2
MUSIC VIDEO FOR BJÖRK’S “JÓGA” (1997), DIRECTED BY MICHEL GONDRY I’ve watched this video more than any other in my life, and you can see its influence reflected in my artwork. There is a mix of aerial landscape photos mapped onto 3D surfaces; the animation effects look like they were lifted from an old science film about plate tectonics. It ends with the camera circling Björk standing on top of a mountain, and then moving into her body to reveal an island. This end scene reminds me of something Agnès Varda once said: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”
4
STAN BRAKHAGE, MOTHLIGHT, 1963 Brakhage made this legendary work of experimental film by gathering moth wings, plants, and other organic materials found near his Colorado cabin and fixing them between layers of 16-mm Mylar editing tape. He described this flickering film as “what a moth might see from birth to death if black were white.” When I was an undergrad film student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I was fortunate enough to take several classes taught by Brakhage. His lessons on art and his expansive approach to the moving image have been incredibly influential. APRIL 2023 55
6
7
5 6
5
SNOWBOARDING Making big turns on a powder day is often what I visualize as I fall asleep at night.
MUTEK This annual electronic-music-and-digital-art festival, which began in Montreal, has been going strong for more than two decades. I’ve attended only the 2009 and 2010 editions, but in those years I saw many amazing musicians perform, such as Actress, Ben Frost, Gas, Ryoji Ikeda, Nicolas Jaar, DJ Koze, and SND. I plan to go again this August.
8
7
PHILLIPE QUESNE, LA MÉLANCOLIE DES DRAGONS (THE MELANCHOLY OF DRAGONS, 2008) A play about seven friendly metalheads creating an amusement park in the snowy woods, featuring plenty of fog machines and large inflatable sculptures. In 2015, I was handed a last-minute ticket to see a performance, and I had no idea what I was getting into, which made this quietly beautiful and hilariously touching work that much better.
8
OLIA LIALINA, SUMMER, 2013 Lialina’s Net-art piece, which has been called “the most fragile gif on the WWW,” is a twenty-one-frame loop of her on a swing that looks as if it’s attached to the browser bar. As she moves back and forth, you notice that with each new frame, the URL changes, and it’s soon evident that she is swinging between twenty-one unique artists’ servers. The animation speed is dependent on the speed of the network, and if even one site is offline, the loop will break.
9
10
56 ARTFORUM
5. Josh Dirksen snowboarding in Three Sisters Wilderness, Oregon, 2015. Photo: Tyler Roemer. 6. France Jobin and Markus Heckmann performing at MUTEK Montreal, Cinquième salle de la Place des Arts, August 26, 2021, Photo: Bruno Destombes. 7. Philippe Quesne, La mélancolie des dragons (The Melancholy of Dragons), 2008. Rehearsal view, Thèatre Nanterre-Amandiers, France, January 6, 2015. Photo: Martin Argyroglo. 8. Olia Lialina, Summer, 2013, website GIF. 10. Still from ContraPoints’s 2019 YouTube video Opulence. Natalie Wynn.
9
FOUR TET’S SPOTIFY PLAYLIST DJ and musician Four Tet’s playlist, at the time of this writing, is clocking in at 160-plus hours and 1,969 songs. A few times a month, he adds new tracks and gives the playlist a new emoji-laden title. The songs span nearly every genre but lean toward electronic music. This playlist is often the soundtrack in my studio.
10
NATALIE WYNN’S “CONTRAPOINTS” SERIES, 2017– Wynn is a critical theorist who creates elaborate self-produced YouTube and Patreon video essays dedicated to topics like envy, opulence, and cringe. Smart and funny deep dives into timely issues. n
LIVING ROOM AT ARCHIVIO CONZ
OPENING DURING BERLIN GALLERY WEEKEND APRIL 28—30
Archivio Conz
Edizioni Conz
Lise-Meitner Str. 7–9 10589, Berlin
www.archivioconz.com
UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES
ACKLAND ART MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL 101 South Columbia Street, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514 Tel: 919 966 5736 Web: ackland.org Wed. – Sat. 10–5, Sun. 1–5, second Fri. of every month 10–9
Until April 2 Good Object / Bad Object Until April 2 Laurel Nakadate: Ten Performances from “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears” Until April 30 Focus on the Peck Collection: Water in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Until May 28 Ghost of a Dream: Aligned by the Sun (through the revolution) Until May 28 American Art from the Art Bridges Collection Loan Partnership Until June 11 Lotus Moon and Nandina Staff: The Art of Rengetsu and Nantenbo Until July 30 Various Artists: Beyond Wood – Works from the Collection of Rhonda Morgan Wilkerson ’86 (Ph.D.) Until December 31 Various Artists: Permanent Collection Galleries Until July 7, 2024 pARC by The Urban Conga April 21 – July 2 Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South
BATES COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell Street, Lewiston, Maine 04240 Tel: 207 786 6158 Web: bates.edu/museum Mon. and Wed. 10–7:30, Tues. and Thurs. – Sat. 10–5
April 14 – May 27 Senior Thesis Exhibition 2023 April 14 – October 7 Selections from the Synergy Fund Diversify the Collection Program, 2015–2023 June 9 – October 7 Who Are They? Who Am I? – Portraits of Artists & Artist Self-Portraits from the Permanent Collection
DEPAUL ART MUSEUM 935 West Fullerton, Chicago, Illinois 60614 Tel: 773 325 7506 Web: artmuseum.depaul.edu Wed. – Thurs. 11–7, Fri. – Sun. 11–5
Until August 6 Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities
FRANCES LEHMAN LOEB ART CENTER, VASSAR COLLEGE 124 Raymond Avenue, Box 703, Poughkeepsie, New York 12604 Tel: 845 437 5237 Web: vassar.edu/theloeb Tues. – Sun. 10–5, Thurs. 10–9
Until April 9 In the Spotlight – Surface Tension: Displacement, Archaeology, and Artistry of Urban Water Until June 4 Apocalypse Sky: Art, AIDS, and Activism in New York City, 1982–1992 Until September 10 What Now? (Or Not Yet)
HENRY ART GALLERY, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 15th Avenue NE + NE 41st Street, Seattle, Washington 98195 Tel: 206 543 2280 Web: henryart.org Thurs. 10–7, Fri. – Sun. 10–5
Until May 7 Thick as Mud: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Diedrick Brackens, Ali Cherri, Candice Lin, Christine Howard Sandoval, Rose B. Simpson, Eve Tagny, and Sasha Wortzel Until August 31 Chloë Bass: Soft Services (Henry OffSite) April 1 – August 27 Sarah Cain: Day after day on this beautiful stage April 1 – September 30 Taking Care: Collection Support Studio
HESSEL MUSEUM OF ART, BARD COLLEGE 33 Garden Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 Tel: 845 758 7598 Web: ccs.bard.edu Wed. – Sun. 11–5
April 1 – May 28 Rising and Sinking Again: CCS Bard Class of 2023 Graduate Exhibitions June 24 – October 15 Erika Verzutti: Oil Moon June 24 – November 26 Indian Theater
GEORGIA MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA 90 Carlton Street, Athens, Georgia 30602 Tel: 706 542 4662 Web: georgiamuseum.org Tues. – Wed. 10–5, Thurs. 10–9, Fri. – Sat. 10–5, Sun. 1–5
Until May 14 Selections from the Princeton University Art Museum – Object Lessons in American Art: Mary Cassatt, John Singleton Copley, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Minor White, and Henry Inman Until July 2 Art is a form of freedom: Whitworth Women Select Works from the Collection Until July 3 Decade of Tradition – Highlights from the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Collection: Hartwell Yeargans, Moe Brooker, Joseph Delaney, Joyce Wellman, Jack H. White, Louis Delsarte, and David Clyde Driskel Until September 24 Sky Hopinka: Lore Until November 27, 2024 Power and Piety in 17th-Century Spanish Art: Pedro Orrente, Francisco de Herrera, the Elder, Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and José Antolínez June 17 – December 10 Southern/Modern June 22 – October 8 Jim Fiscus: Where Shadows Cross
MEADOWS MUSEUM, SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY 5900 Bishop Boulevard, Dallas, Texas 75205 Tel: 214 768 2516 Web: meadowsmuseumdallas.org Tues. – Sat. 10–5, Thurs. 10–9, Sun. 1–5
Until June 18 In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art
SAMUEL DORSKY MUSEUM OF ART STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT NEW PALTZ 1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz, New York 12561 Tel: 845 257 3844 Web: newpaltz.edu/museum Wed. – Sun. 11–5, BFA thesis exhibitions open Fri – Tues
Until April 16 Hudson Valley Artists 2023: Homespun Until July 23 Be Who You Are: Portraits of Woodstock Artists by Harriett Tannin Until July 23 The Historic Woodstock Art Colony: The Arthur A. Anderson Collection April 28 – May 2 BFA Thesis Exhibition I May 5–9 BFA Thesis Exhibition II May 12 MFA Thesis Exhibition I June 17 – November 12 Notes for Tomorrow, curated by Independent Curators International (Alice and Horace Chandler and North Galleries)
YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511 Tel: 203 432 0600 Web: artgallery.yale.edu Free and open to the public Tue. – Fri. 10–5, Thurs. 10–8, Sat. – Sun. 11–5
Until July 23 Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale Until June 25 Crafting Worldviews: Art and Science in Europe, 1500–1800 Until December 3 In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art
MA LI N GAL L E RY 515 West 29th Street, New York
ANGELA CHINA Girl on the Grass Through May 20, 2023
Canada | East Hampton
HARPER’S East Hampton
98 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 212 925 4631 [email protected] www.canadanewyork.com Thursday – Sunday 12–5
87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937
April Gery Ferguson
Tel: 631 324 1131 [email protected] www.harpersbooks.com Thursday – Saturday 10–6
Until May 6 Sauntering Days: John Joseph Mitchell, Ellen Siebers, and Elisa Soliven
David Lewis 53 The Circle, East Hampton, NY 11937 [email protected] www.davidlewisgallery.com
Hauser & Wirth | Southampton
Please contact gallery for information.
9 Main Street, Southampton, NY 11968 Tel: 631 609 6331 [email protected] www.hauserwirth.com
Dia Bridgehampton 23 Corwith Avenue, Bridgehampton, NY 11932 Tel: 631 537 1476 [email protected] www.diaart.org Thursday – Sunday 12–6
June 23 Tony Cokes
Please contact gallery for information.
Parrish Art Museum 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, NY 11976 Tel: 631 283 2118 [email protected] www.parrishart.org
The Drawing Room 55 Main Street, 2nd Floor, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 631 324 5016 [email protected] www.drawingroom-gallery.com Friday – Monday 11–5, and by appointment mid-week
April 1 – May 15 Saul Steinberg
Monday and Thursday 11–5, Friday 11–8, Saturday and Sunday 11–5
April 16 – August 6 Artists Choose Parrish: Part I May – September JR: Les Enfants D’Ouranos
Pollock-Krasner House 830 Springs-Fireplace Road, East Hampton, NY 11937
Eric Firestone Gallery 4 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 62 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 631 604 2386 [email protected] www.ericfirestonegallery.com Monday – Sunday 10–6
Please contact gallery for information.
Halsey McKay Gallery 79a Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 631 604 5770 [email protected] www.halseymckay.com
Until April 30 An Hoang Until April 30 Upstairs: Studio Lenca
Tel: 631 324 4929 www.pkhouse.org Open May – October. Guided tours and virtual reality tours by reservation Thursday – Sunday. Reserve on our website. Check our online calendar for lectures, workshops, and special events.
May 4 – July 30 Various artists: Creative Exchanges
The Ranch 8 Old Montauk Highway, Montauk, NY 11954 [email protected] www.theranch.art Guided tours by reservation.
Please contact gallery for information.
Tripoli Gallery 26 Ardsley Road, Wainscott, NY 11975
Hamptons
(Cross Street: East Gate Road from Montauk Highway) Tel: 631 377 3715 [email protected] www.tripoligallery.com Wednesday – Saturday 10–6, Sunday 12–5, closed Tuesday
Until April 30 Lauren West: Artist In Residency April 1 – May 1 Jonathan Beer: Pictures of the Floating World May 6 – June 5 Laith McGregor: Pace & Space
Untitled, 2022, Oil on canvas, 167 x 242 cm / 66 x 95 1/4 inches, © Farid Kia
FARID KIA
‘UNVEILED'
Opening April 15, 2023 5-9pm Through May 6
hamzianpour
& kia
5225 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 212, Los Angeles hamzianpourandkia.com/faridkia [email protected] @hamzianpourandkia
Sweden BONNIERS KONSTHALL
Torsgatan 19, 113 90 Stockholm Tel: 46 87 36 42 55 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.bonnierskonsthall.se
Until April 2 Peter Geschwind: After Image April 26 – June 18 Tarik Kiswanson
BORÅS KONSTMUSEUM
Kulturhuset P. A. Halls Terrass, 504 56 Borås Tel: 46 73 432 73 86 E-mail: [email protected] Web: boraskonstmuseum.se
April 15 – September 24 Charlotta Hammar: Sound of Sirens April 15 – September 24 Max Gustafson: Contemporary psychosis!
CECILIA HILLSTRÖM GALLERY
Hudiksvallsgatan 8, 113 30 Stockholm E-mail: [email protected] Web: chgallery.se
Until May 6 Leif Engström: En vagn i skogen Until May 6 Salad Hilowle: Somalitown
MAGASIN III Museum for Contemporary Art Frihamnsgatan 28, 11556 Stockholm Tel: 46 8 545 680 40 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.magasin3.com
Until June 17 Maya Attoun: Solar Mountains & Broken Hearts Until June 17 James Lee Byars: The Path of Luck Until June 17 Focus: Lawrence Weiner Until June 17 In the Eye of the Beholder: Lotta Antonsson, Maya Attoun, Eitan Ben Moshe, Christian Boltanski, Adam Broomberg, John Coplans, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Tom Friedman, Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff, Kyung-Me, Santiago Sierra, Miroslav Tichý, and Danh Vo April 1 Meriç Algün: A Glossary of Distance and Desire
MAGASIN III JAFFA Olei Zion 34, 68 13131 Tel Aviv-Yafo E-mail: [email protected]
Until April 14 David Adika: Of David. A psalm
MODERNA MUSEET DUNKERS KULTURHUS
Kungsgatan 11, 252 21 Helsingborg Tel: 46 42 10 74 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.dunkerskulturhus.se
Until April 30 Ralph Nykvist: Fotografernas fotograf (The Photographer – one of a kind) April 22 – September 24 Havsresan – ett magiskt familjeäventyr June 10 – December 31 Korsettkriget June 26 – October 1 Jorden runt på 80 souvenirer
Box 16382, 10327 Stockholm Visiting Address: Skeppsholmen Tel: 46 85 202 35 00 Web: www.modernamuseet.se
Until April 9 Korakrit Arunanondchai: From dying to living Until August 27 Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide): Four Months, Four Million Light Years Until January 14, 2024 Group Show: Sleepless Nights – From the 1980s in the Moderna Museet collection April 1 – September 3 Laurie Anderson: Looking into a Mirror Sideways May 13 – October 18 Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother
GALLERI MAGNUS KARLSSON
Fredsgatan 12, 11152 Stockholm Tel: 46 86 60 43 53 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com
Until April 5 Tommy Hilding: New Paintings April 15 – May 13 Thomas Broomé: New Works
GALERIE NORDENHAKE
Hudiksvallsgatan 8, 11330 Stockholm Tel: 46 82 11 892 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.nordenhake.com
Until May 6 Akeem Smith May 13 – June 22 Sarah Crowner
LOYAL
Odengatan 3, 11424 Stockholm Tel: 46 86 80 77 11 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.loyalgallery.com
MODERNA MUSEET MALMÖ Ola Billgrens Plats 2–4, 21129 Malmö Tel: 46 40 685 79 37 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.modernamuseet.se
Until April 9 Twilight Land
NEVVEN Molinsgatan 11, 411 33 Gothenburg Tel: 46 76 086 73 05 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.nevvengallery.com
Until April 15 Kyvèli Zoi: Spectators April 27 – June 3 Sigve Knutson
WETTERLING GALLERY
Please contact gallery for information
Kungsträdgården 3, 111 47 Stockholm Tel: 46 81 01 00 9 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.wetterlinggallery.com
LUNDS KONSTHALL
April 20 – May 20 Frank Stella
Mårtenstorget 3, 22351 Lund Tel: 46 46 35 52 95 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.lundskonsthall.se
Until May 7 spelling slipping ellipsis: Burcu Sahin, Erik Thörnqvist, Ester Fleckner, Fathia Mohidin, Frédéric Gies, Linda Lamignan, Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, and Sixten Hatfield May 20 – August 27 Anna Ling: The Traces Between
Maia Cruz Palileo, Clouds Over the Río, 2022, oil on canvas, 36 x 96 in.
Maia Cruz Palileo Days Later, Down River April 1-May 26 451 N Paulina St Chicago
VIENNA
G A L L E R I E S Galerie Kandlhofer Brucknerstrasse 4, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 503 1167 [email protected] kandlhofer.com
April 20–23 Art Brussels April 29 – May 5 Marc Henry April 29 – May 5 Alicia Viebrock April 29 – May 5 Focus On: Davide Bernardis, curated by Carmen Lael Hines May 11 – June 17 Maximilian Prüfer May 11 – June 17 Focus On: Irena Posner
Georg Kargl Fine Arts Schleifmühlgasse 5, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 585 4199 [email protected] georgkargl.com
GEORG KARGL FINE ARTS
Until April 15 Nadim Vardag: Condition April 27 – June 17 Denisa Lehocká May 26–28 ARCOlisboa
GEORG KARGL BOX
Until April 29 Rafał Bujnowski: Dangerous Woman May – June Mercedes Mangrané
GEORG KARGL PERMANENT Schleifmühlgasse 17, 1040 Vienna
Please contact gallery for information.
Christine König Galerie Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 585 7474 [email protected] christinekoeniggalerie.com
Until April 29 Andreas Duscha: Geplante Obsoleszenz I May 9 – July 30 Joseph Kosuth June 15 – July 30 Payer Gabriel Liam Gillick, Factories in the Snow. Courtesy MEYER*KAINER, Vienna.
Charim Galerie
CHARIM FACTORY
Dorotheergasse 12, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 512 0915 [email protected] charimgalerie.at
Absberggasse 27/9/3, 1100 Vienna
Until April 2 Art Düsseldorf: Alwin Lay Until April 15 Paul Riedmüller April 22 – June 10 Rimma Arslanov
Galerie Krinzinger Galerie Crone Wien
CHARIM SCHLEIFMÜHLGASSE
Getreidemarkt 14, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 581 3164 [email protected] galeriecrone.com
Please contact gallery for information.
Margaretenstraße 5, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 585 7474 [email protected] koenig2.at
Until April 30 Pusha Petrov
Until April 29 Judith Eisler: Fault Lines May 2–27 Edgar Honetschläger: Tarquinia
Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1040 Vienna
KOENIG2 BY_ROBBYGREIF
Until April 15 Clemens Krauss April 21 – June 10 Emmanuel Bornstein
Seilerstätte 16, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 513 3006 [email protected] galerie-krinzinger.at
Until April 2 Art Düsseldorf Until May 13 Martin Walde: When the Elements will lie Until May 13 Meret Oppenheim (Showroom) May 26 – July 29 Marina Abramović
KRINZINGER SCHOTTENFELD Schottenfeldgasse 45, 1070 Vienna
Until April 29 AIR
Julia Haugeneder, Idylle, blau, 2021, exhibition view at Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck2021. Photo: © Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman / WEST.Fotostudio.
MEYER*KAINER Eschenbachgasse 9, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 585 7277 [email protected] meyerkainer.com
Until April 1 Ulrike Müller April – May Liam Gillick
BOLTENSTERN.RAUM
Eschenbachgasse 9, 1st floor
Until April 1 Michèle Pagel
Layr Singerstraße 27, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 967 7432 [email protected] emanuellayr.com
Until May 20 Anna Andreeva Until May 20 Lisa Holzer May 24 – June Gaylen Gerber
Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder
Grünangergasse 1, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 512 1266 [email protected] schwarzwaelder.at
Until May 13 Isa Melsheimer May 25 – June 24 Herbert Brandl
DOMGASSE 6
Domgasse 6, 1010 Vienna
April 20 – June Ignasi Aballí
Gabriele Senn Galerie
Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 585 2580 [email protected] galeriesenn.at
Until April 29 Hank Schmidt in der Beek: Guten Aaabend! – Der Mainzelmännchen-Effekt bei Hannah Höch und Victor Vasarely
Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Seilerstätte 7, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 512 0840 [email protected] galeriethoman.com
Until April 2 Art Düsseldorf Until May 26 Julia Haugeneder May 18 – July 1 [tart vienna] Devin Kenny, curated by Pia Remmers May 26–28 ARCOlisboa
Galerie Hubert Winter Breite Gasse 17, 1070 Vienna T: +43 1 524 0976 [email protected] galeriewinter.at
April Marcia Hafif April 14–16 miart
A P R I L
CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY UCR ARTS
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY (MOCP)
3824 Main Street, Riverside, CA 92501 [email protected] www.ucrarts.ucr.edu Thurs. – Fri. 12–5, Sat. – Sun. 11–5
Columbia College Chicago 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605 312 663 5554 [email protected] www.mocp.org Mon. – Sat. 10–5, Thurs. 10–8, Sun. 12–5
Until April 2 Tierra Entre Medio: Christina Fernandez, Arlene Mejorado, Lizette Olivas, and Aydinaneth Ortiz Until July 2 Fauxtography: Lying with Photographs, An Analytical Framework Until August 6 KD Ganaway: From Butler to ‘Race Photographer’ Until August 6 CMP at 50 Follow @ucrarts on social media for up-to-date information and more engagement with our exhibitions and collections.
DEBORAH BELL PHOTOGRAPHS 526 West 26th Street, Room 411, New York, NY 10001 212 249 9400 [email protected] www.deborahbellphotographs.com Thurs. – Sat. 11–5, and by appointment
April 15 – June 29 Gösta Peterson: Photographs 1960s – 1980s
Until April 2 Shannon Bool: 1:1 Until April 2 Refracting Histories April 13 – August 6 Shift – Music, Meaning, Context: Bani Abidi, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Tony Cokes, Jeremy Deller, Hassan Hajjaj, Sven Johne, Andre Lützen, Cecil McDonald Jr., Emeka Ogboh, and Taryn Simon
PERSONS PROJECTS Lindenstraße 34-35, 10969 Berlin, Germany 49 177 5018190 49 30 2888 3370 [email protected] www.personsprojects.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6
Until April 22 Katarzyna Kozyra: Fressen Until April 22 A Veneer of Happiness: Ulla Jokisalo, Katarzyna Kozyra, KwieKulik, Dominik Lejman, and Santeri Tuori
FRAENKEL GALLERY 49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108 415 981 2661 [email protected] www.fraenkelgallery.com Tues. – Fri. 10:30–5:30, Sat. 11–5, and by appointment
Until April 29 Nan Goldin
ROBERT MORAT GALERIE Linienstraße 107, 10115 Berlin, Germany 49 30 2520 9358 [email protected] www.robertmorat.de Tues. – Sat. 12–6
Until May 13 Bill Jacobson: when is a place
GALLERY LUISOTTI at Royale Projects 432 South Alameda Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013 (entrance on Seaton Street) 310 600 1277 [email protected] www.galleryluisotti.com Thurs. – Sat. 11–5, and by appointment
Until April 8 Five Southern California Views: John Divola, Christina Fernandez, CJ Heyliger, Ron Jude, and Mark Ruwedel
STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY 1356 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M6J 1Y2, Canada 416 504 0575 [email protected] www.bulgergallery.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6
Until April 22 Joseph Hartman: Parry Sound 33
Nan Goldin, Thora on my black bed, Brooklyn, NY, 2020, dye sublimation print on aluminum, image and sheet: 30 × 40", framed: 31 × 41". © Nan Goldin. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Marian Goodman Gallery.
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
YOSSI MILO
525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 646 230 9610 [email protected] www.yanceyrichardson.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6
245 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10001 212 414 0370 [email protected] www.yossimilo.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6
Until April 8 Larry Sultan: Pictures from Home Until April 8 Mitch Epstein: Recreation April 13 Jitka Hanzlová
Until May 6 Markus Brunetti: FACADES III
LapiS Lazuli: CALL FOR EMERGING ARTISTS | VENICE 2024 to participate in an artist-in-residence program & group exhibition fo r m o r e i n fo r m a t i o n p l e a s e v i s i t www.lapislaz.com
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SOUND ART & VISUAL ARTS MFA THESIS (2023) EXHIBITION
Sound Artists Gladstone Butler, Char Jeré, Merry Sun
For more information visit vaexhibitions.arts.columbia.edu lenfest.arts.columbia.edu wallach.columbia.edu
Visual Artists Garrett Ball, Ray Barsante, Cecilia Caldiera, Kevin Cobb, Conor Dowdle, Nick Farhi, Elisheva Gavra, Jeffrey Halstead, Calvin Kim, Sangmin Lee, Kat Lowish, Meaghan Elyse Lueck, Anna Ting Möller, Amadeo Morelos Favela, Levi Nelson, Alison Nguyen, Paul Rho, Robbie Rogers, Albert Samreth, Cal Siegel, Jairo Sosa, Motohiro Takeda, Christopher Michel Torres, Vivian Vivas, Li Wang, Ming Wang, Shuai Yang Curator: Jasmine Wahi
APRIL 22–MAY 21
Wallach Art Gallery | Lenfest Center for the Arts | 615 W 129th Street
©Cauleen Smith, Remote Viewing (2011)
Old Wounds, Dark Dreams Carrie Mae Weems | Cauleen Smith Rodney McMillian | Charles Gaines
February 8th May 19th, 2023
Art Galleries at Black Studies
galleriesatut.org
University of Texas at Austin
Art Galleries at Black Studies 4.23.indd 1
3/8/23 9:50 PM
STYLE CONGO Heritage & Heresy
17.03.23—03.09.23
C I.II.III.IV. A
Culture — Architecture
É. R. / V. U. : Jeremy Uhr, CIVA, rue de l’Ermitage 55 Kluisstraat, 1050 Brussels | image © Ayoh Kré Duchâtelet | Design: Pierre Smeets
www.civa.brussels Rue de l’Ermitage 55 Kluisstraat 1050 Brussels
PETER BLUM EDITION
CIRRUS GALLERY AND CIRRUS EDITIONS, LTD
176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013 Tel: 212 244 6055 Fax: 212 244 6054 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.peterblumgallery.com Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–6
2011 South Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90021 Tel: 213 680 3473 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.cirrusgallery.com Tues. – Sat. 10–5
Recent publications include, Kamrooz Aram, hardcover, 2022; Rebecca Ward, before and after, hardcover, 2022; Nicholas Galanin, Never Forget, artist book, hardcover with slipcase, 2021; Nathaniel Dorsky, ECLOGUES: Letters and Correspondence, limited edition artist book, hardcover, 2020; Nicholas Galanin, Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces, hardcover, second edition, 2020 Publications include John Beech, Huma Bhabha, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Enzo Cucchi, Helmut Federle, Eric Fischl, Herzog & de Meuron, Roni Horn, Michael Day Jackson, Alex Katz, Esther Kläs, Brice Marden, Chris Marker, David Rabinowitch, Thomas Ruff, Robert Ryman, Anselm Stalder, Philip Taafe, Su-Mei Tse, James Turrell, Robert Zandvliet, and John Zurier Print editions by John Baldessari, Huma Bhabha, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Sandrio Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Tacita Dean, Martin Disler, Helmut Federle, Eric Fischl, Simon Frost, General Idea, Alfredo Jaar, Matthew Day Jackson, Alex Katz, Kimsooja, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Brice Marden, Chris Marker, Josef Felix Müller, Adrian Paci, A. R. Penck, David Rabinowitch, Thomas Ruff, Ansel, Stalder, Rosemarie Trockel, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Rolf Winnewisser, Terry Winters, Yukinori Yanagi, and Robert Zandvliet
PRINTS + EDITIONS
BRODSKY CENTER AT PAFA
Until July 16 “Signifier” prints by Barbara T. Smith on view in “The Way To Be” at The Getty Center Available editions by Lita Albuquerque, Farah Atassi, John Baldessari, Mark Bradford, Derek Boshier, Matthew Brannon, Judy Chicago, Fred Eversley, Eamon Ore-Giron, Joe Goode, Grant Levy-Lucero Bruce Nauman, Simphiwe Ndzube, Ed Ruscha Barbara T. Smith, Mary Weatherford, and Jonas Wood, among others
CROWN POINT PRESS 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: 415 974 6273 Fax: 415 495 4220 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.crownpoint.com Mon. – Fri. 9–5
New editions by Odili Donald Odita and Ed Ruscha Editions by Tomma Abts, Darren Almond, Robert Bechtle, John Chiara, Leonardo Drew, Marcel Dzama, Mary Heilmann, Jacqueline Humphries, Matt Mullican, Alyson Shotz, Charline von Heyl, Catherine Wagner, and John Zurier
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 128 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102 Tel: 215 391 4809 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.brodskycenter.com Open by appointment
EDIZIONI CONZ
New editions by Zoë Charlton and Nell Painter Forthcoming editions by Dyani White Hawk, Kukuli Velarde, and Wilmer Wilson IV Available editions and selected work by Pacita Abad, Emma Amos, Laura Anderson Barbata, Rick Bartow, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Elizabeth Catlett, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Liz Collins, Melvin Edwards, Parastou Forouhar, Chitra Ganesh, Leon Golub, Harmony Hammond, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Sharon Hayes, Barkley L. Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks, Isaac Julien, Matsumi Kanemitsu, William Kentridge, Byron Kim, James Lavadour, Glenn Ligon, Hew Locke, Sarah McEneaney, Pepón Osorio, Ben Patterson, Faith Ringgold, Juan Sanchez, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Semmel, Sylvia Sleigh, Kiki Smith with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Pat Steir with Anne Waldman, May Stevens, Richard Tuttle with John Yau, Didier William, and Sue Williamson, among others
Editions from Francesco Conz Editions by Robert Ashley, Philip Corner, Sari Dienes, Jean Dupuy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Eugen Gomringer, Françoise Janicot, Joe Jones, Juan Hidalgo, Isidore Isou, Milan Knížák, Alison Knowles, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Gerhard Rühm, Jacques Spacagna, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and more
CENTER STREET STUDIO PO Box 870171, Milton Village, MA 02187 Tel: 617 821 5458 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.centerstreetstudio.com By appointment
Until May 13 Center Street Studio – Translations in Print: Prints published by Center Street Studio and primary works by the artists that inspired them (University Hall Gallery, University of Massachusetts Boston) May 9–14 Matthew Carter’s a-z portfolio and Cyrus Highsmith’s Crow Suite on view during ATypI International Type Conference, Paris, at Atelier Michael Woolworth New edition by Bill Thompson New watercolor monotypes by Markus Linnenbrink, Emilio Perez, and Laurel Sparks New large scale oil based monotypes by Markus Linnenbrink New editions by George Whitman, William Steiger, and Jeff Perrott Portfolio of twenty-six aquatints by type designer Matthew Carter
Lise-Meitner Strasse 7-9, 10589 Berlin, Germany Tel: 49 30 34 50 50 55 Email: [email protected] Web: www.archivioconz.com Mon. – Fri. 10–6, by appointment
FLYING HORSE EDITIONS University of Central Florida, 380 W. Amelia Street, Orlando, FL 32801 Tel: 407 235 3619 Web: www.flyinghorseeditions.com Mon. – Fri. by appointment
New editions by Chakaia Booker, Will Cotton, Holly Coulis, Tomory Dodge, Alex Dodge, Amze Emmons, Sarah Faux, Inka Essenhigh, David Humphrey, Mark Fox, Mark Thomas Gibson, Joshua Marsh, Eddie Martinez, Suzanne McClelland, Ryan McGinness, Linn Meyers, Jiha Moon, Odili Donald Odita, Kelly Reemtsen, James Siena, and others
FOREHANDPRESS 14518 Hempstead Road, Suite 3F, Houston, TX 77040 Tel: 713 922 6872 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.forehandpress.com Mon. – Fri. by appointment
New lithography editions by Peter Bradley Current editions by Stanley Whitney and Robert Moskowitz
PRINTS + EDITIONS
Sarah McEneaney, Mango Mango, 2021, pigmented and cast handmade paper with cotton pulp painting, 21 1⁄2 × 26 × 4 1⁄2". Edition of 10 unique variants. Published by the Brodsky Center at PAFA, Philadelphia.
GEMINI G.E.L. 8365 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90069 Tel: 323 651 0513 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.geminigel.com Mon. – Fri. 9–5
New releases by Frank Gehry, Julie Mehretu, and Richard Serra Recent releases by Tacita Dean and Toba Khedoori Additional work by John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Philip Guston, Ann Hamilton, Michael Heizer, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Ken Price, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Susan Rothenberg, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, and others
GRAPHICSTUDIO
University of South Florida 3702 Spectrum Boulevard, Suite 100, Tampa, FL 33612 Tel: 813 974 3503 Fax: 813 974 2579 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.graphicstudio.usf.edu Mon. – Fri. 10–5
Recent Editions by Diana Al-Hadid, Sebastiaan Bremer, E.V. Day, Mark Dion, Alex Katz, Duke Riley, Bosco Sodi, and Rodrigo Valenzuela Works available by Judy Chicago, Chuck Close, Lesley Dill, Rochelle Feinstein, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Arturo Herrera, Los Carpinteros, Robert Mapplethorpe, Christian Marclay, Jason Middlebrook, Vik Muniz, Robyn O’Neil, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Kenny Scharf, Kiki Smith, Richard Tuttle, and William Villalongo, among others
HIGHPOINT EDITIONS
912 West Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408 Tel: 612 871 1326 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.highpointprintmaking.org Mon. – Fri. 9–5, Sat. 12–4, or by appointment
New editions by Julie Mehretu, Jim Hodges, Brad Kahlhamer, Delita Martin, and Rico Gatson Editions coming soon by Njideka Akunyili Crosby Additional work by Dyani White Hawk, Julie Buffalohead, Carlos Amorales, Andrea Carlson, Carter, Willie Cole, Santiago Cucullu, Mary Esch, Rob Fischer, Adam Helms, Joel Janowitz, Michael Kareken, Cameron Martin, Clarence Morgan, Lisa Nankivil, Todd Norsten, Chloe Piene, Jessica Rankin, David Rathman, Aaron Spangler, Do Ho Suh, and Mungo Thomson
I.C. EDITIONS, INC./SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY 522 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 Tel: 212 647 9111 Fax: 212 647 9333 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.iceditions.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6
Until April 15 Robert Kobayashi April 19 – June 3 Maren Hassinger Editions by Barbara Bloom, Bruce Conner, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Jessica Diamond, Marcel Dzama, Anna Gaskell, George Herms, Barbara Kruger, Annette Lemieux, Sol LeWitt, Allan McCollum, Paul Noble, Claes Oldenburg, Robyn O’Neil, Catherine Opie, Raymond Pettibon, Rona Pondick, Richard Prince, Erika Rothenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, Dana Schutz, Simone Shubuck, Aaron Spangler, Jessica Stockholder, Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, Lawrence Weiner, Terry Winters, and Andrea Zittel
JUNGLE PRESS EDITIONS
PRINTS + EDITIONS
232 Third Street, Suite B302, Brooklyn, NY 11215 Tel: 718 222 9122 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.junglepresspress.com Mon. – Sat. by appointment
New Editions by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ellen Berkenblit, Jacqueline Humphries, Jennifer Mack-Watkins, Jennifer Marshall, Sam Messer, Jill Moser, and Mark Di Suvero Available editions by Joan Snyder, Richard Baker, Laura Battle, Ken Buhler, Diana Cooper, Nicole Eisenman, Gabrielle Evertz, Jane Fine, Mary Frank, Jane Freilicher, Yoshishige Furukawa, Mary Louise Geering, Julie Heffernan, Peter Hutchinson, Robert Kushner, Rene Lynch, Michael Mazur, Melissa Meyer, Andrew Mockler, Alexander Oleksyn, Richard Ryan, Katia Santibañez, Elena Sisto, William Steiger, Billy Sullivan, Chuck Webster, Stephen Westfall, Brian Wood, and more
KRAKOW WITKIN GALLERY
10 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 Tel: 617 262 4490 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.krakowwitkingallery.com Tues. – Sat. 10–5:30
Until April 22 Donald Judd, Gego, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, and Ad Reinhardt Until April 22 Cindy Sherman: 1975–1980 Until April 22 Lines in Four Directions over 450 Years Recent and historic editions by Josef Albers, Richard Artschwager, Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, Daniel Buren, Sarah Charlesworth, Tara Donovan, Peter Downsbrough, León Ferrari, Joseph Grigely, Jenny Holzer, Ellsworth Kelly, William Kentridge, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Allan McCollum, Abelardo Morell, Julian Opie, Giulio Paolini, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Liliana Porter, Martin Puryear, Kay Rosen, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Kate Shepherd, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, and Fred Wilson Publisher of the Sol LeWitt Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (www.sollewittprints.org) and of the Mel Bochner Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (www.melbochnerprints.org)
DAVID KRUT PROJECTS, NEW YORK AND JOHANNESBURG New York Gallery: 526 West 26 Street, Suite 816, New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212 255 3094 E-mail: [email protected] Tues. – Thurs. by appointment, Fri. 11–6 Johannesburg Gallery: 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg, South Africa 2094 Tues. – Sat. 10–2, or by appointment Johannesburg Gallery and Archive: 151 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg, South Africa 2094 Mon. – Fri. 9–5, Sat. 9–4 David Krut Workshop: Arts on Main, 264 Fox Street, Johannesburg, South Africa 2094 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.davidkrutprojects.com | www.davidkrutportal.com
Until April 15 Nina Torr: Marginalia (151 Jan Smuts Avenue) Until May 13 Lynda Ballen: Ex Terra Etcetera (151 Jan Smuts Avenue) April – May Editions from the David Krut Workshop (526 West 26 Street) May 20 – June Anna van der Ploeg (151 Jan Smuts Avenue) Recent and historic editions by William Kentridge, Maaike Bakker, Vusi Beauchamp, Deborah Bell, Olivia Botha, Heidi Fourie, Stephen Hobbs, Lebogang Mabusela, Maja Maljević, João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga, Lindo Sobekwa, Mikhael Subotzky, Nina Torr, Mbali Tshabalala, Anna van der Ploeg, Adele van Heerden, Diane Victor, and Zhi Zulu David Krut Workshop was recently profiled in the new book Prints and Their Makers by Phil Sanders
LELONG EDITIONS 13 rue de Téhéran, 75008 Paris, France Tel: 33 1 45 63 38 62 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.lelongeditions.com Tues. – Fri. 10:30–6, Sat. 2–6:30
Until April 29 Pierre Alechinsky May 10 – July 13 Arnulf Rainer Editions available by Etel Adnan, Pierre Alechinsky, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Chillida, Marc Desgrandchamps, Jean Dubuffet, Simone Fattal, Barry Flanagan, Günther Förg, Alberto Giacometti, David Hockney, Konrad Klapheck, Jannis Kounellis, Nalini Malani, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, David Nash, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Jaume Plensa, Arnulf Rainer, Paula Rego, Robert Ryman, Alison Saar, Sean Scully, Richard Serra, Kate Shepherd, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Antoni Tàpies, Barthélémy Toguo, and Fabienne Verdier
MARLBOROUGH GRAPHICS 545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212 541 4900 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.marlboroughgraphicsnewyork.com
Until May 6 Red Grooms: Ninth Street Women meet The Irascibles (The Monotypes) Featuring prints by Tauba Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Herbert Bayer, Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud, Adolph Gottlieb, Maggi Hambling, Red Grooms, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, R. B. Kitaj, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Michele Oka Doner, Pablo Picasso, Jesús Rafael Soto, Rufino Tamayo, Neil Welliver, Zao Wou-Ki, and others
PRINTS + EDITIONS
Arnulf Rainer, Meereswoge, 1990–2023, engraving, 25 5⁄8 × 20 7⁄8". Edition of 25. Courtesy Arnulf Rainer Studio and Galerie Lelong & Co.
MIXOGRAFIA®
CAROLINA NITSCH
1419 East Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90011 Tel: 323 232 1158 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mixografia.com Mon. – Fri. 9–5, or by appointment
101 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212 463 0610 Cell: 646 251 3804 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.carolinanitsch.com Tues. – Fri. 10–6 by appointment
Recent and historic editions by Arman, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Burri, Sonya Clark, KwanYoung Chun, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Dario Escobar, Gajin Fujita, Helen Frankenthaler, Francesca Gabbiani, Joe Goode, Robert Graham, Peter Halley, Jacob Hashimoto, Alex Israel, Kcho, Donald Lipski, Jason Martin, Richard Meier, Henry Moore, Kenneth Noland, Mimmo Paladino, Jorge Pardo, Larry Rivers, Ed Ruscha, Alison Saar, Analia Saban, Julião Sarmento, George Segal, Kiki Smith, Pierre Soulages, Frank Stella, Donald Sultan, Rufino Tamayo, William Tillyer, Manolo Valdés, Tom Wesselmann, Rachel Whiteread, Terry Winters, and Jonas Wood
Editions by Faith Ringold, Kiki Smith, Elmgreen & Dragset, Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Firelei Baez, Mary Heilman, Ebony G. Patterson, Urs Fischer, Kaari Upson, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, Vera Lutter, Thomas Schuette, Franz West, Gunther Foerg, Raymond Pettibon, Barry LeVa, Derrick Adams, and others Previously sold-out editions from Parkett Publishers, please inquire
Ana Benaroya, Kiss of Fire, 2022, twenty-seven color silkscreen with glitter pigment, 20 × 24". Edition of 30.
PRINTS + EDITIONS
PAULSON FONTAINE PRESS
TANDEM PRESS
2390 C Fourth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 Tel: 510 559 2088 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.paulsonfontainepress.com Tues. – Fri. 10–4 by appointment
University of Wisconsin-Madison 1743 Commercial Avenue, Madison, WI 53704 Tel: 608 263 3437 Fax: 608 265 2356 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.tandempress.wisc.edu Mon. – Fri. 9–5
New editions by Caroline Kent Editions by Tauba Auerbach, Hernan Bas, McArthur Binion, Woody De Othello, Kota Ezawa, Spencer Finch, Charles Gaines, Gee’s Bend Quilters, Lonnie Holley, David Huffman, Chris Johanson, Samuel Levi Jones, Kerry James Marshall, Alicia McCarthy, Martin Puryear, and Gary Simmons
New and upcoming editions by Derrick Adams, Lesley Dill, Jeffrey Gibson, and Cameron Martin Available editions by Richard Bosman, Andy Burgess, Suzanne Caporael, Squeak Carnwath, Robert Cottingham, Jim Dine, Benjamin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Michelle Grabner, GRONK, Richard Haas, Al Held, Manabu Ikeda, Robert Kelly, José Lerma, Nicola López, David Lynch, Maser, Judy Pfaff, Sam Richardson, Alison Saar, David Shapiro, T.L. Solien, Robert Stackhouse, Swoon, and Mickalene Thomas
SCHELLMANN ART Ainmillerstrasse 25, 80801 München, Germany Tel: 49 89 3866 6080 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.schellmannart.com
New editions coming soon by Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, Joseph Kosuth, and Thomas Ruff Schellmann Art has been a publisher of fine art editions since 1969 and recently founded an online compendium of fine art editions, documenting the artworks and related catalogues of around 400 of the most significant contemporary artists. Now online: www.arspublicata.com
TWO PALMS
38 Crosby Street, 3rd Fl., New York, NY 10013 Tel: 212 965 8598 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.twopalms.us Mon. – Fri. by appointment
Featuring new works on paper by Marina Adams, Ana Benaroya, Mel Bochner, Titus Kaphar, Chris Ofili, and Tschabalala Self Works available by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Matthew Barney, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Carroll Dunham, Nona Faustine, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, David Row, Dana Schutz, Stanley Whitney, and Terry Winters
01.02.2023 —
tamara alves — laurent marthaler contemporary
30.04.2023
gallery and residency montreux — switzerland www.laurentmarthaler.com
© Julien Gremaud
Alexander Gray Associates Ricardo Brey
Lorraine O’Grady
Teresa Burga
Betty Parsons
Luis Camnitzer
Ronny Quevedo
Bethany Collins
Joan Semmel
Melvin Edwards
Hassan Sharif
Coco Fusco
Regina Silveira
Harmony Hammond
Valeska Soares
Jennie C. Jones
Hugh Steers
Steve Locke
New York 510 West 26 Street New York NY 10001
Germantown 224 Main Street, Garden Level Germantown NY 12526
Tel: +1 212 399 2636 www.alexandergray.com
Tel: +1 518 537 2100
JACK BALAS .com
Postcard to Putin
S. R. Jimmy
Jack Balas, 2022; THE JUMPING CASTLE, HONOLULU (#2295); ink, oil on paper, 22"x 30" Text: These boys were in Kapiolani hammering stakes for a blow-up jumping castle. When they saw me taking a photo, one ran over with a business card. I said "I'm taking you guys to the art museum." They laughed, "US?" (Bird says: "Castles are a matter of opinion.")
İSTANBUL ANNA LAUDEL
Gümüşsuyu Mahallesi, Kazancı Yokuşu No: 45, Beyoğlu 34437 İstanbul +90 212 243 3257 [email protected] annalaudel.gallery Tue – Sat 12–7, Sun 12–6 Until May 7 Bilal Hakan Karakaya: Invisible Cities
ARTER
founded by the Vehbi Koç Foundation Irmak Caddesi No: 13, Beyoğlu 34435 İstanbul +90 212 708 5800 [email protected] arter.org.tr Instagram: @arteristanbul Tue – Sun 11–7, Thu 11–8 Until April 23 ThisPlay, curated by Emre Baykal Until September 24 Cengiz Çeki: I Am Still Alive, curated by Eda Berkmen Until August 27 Eva Koťátkova: I Sometimes Imagine I’m a Fish with Legs, curated by Eda Berkmen Until August 27 Elina Brotherus: Large de Vue
BORUSAN CONTEMPORARY
Perili Köşk, Rumelihisarı, Baltalimanı Hisar Caddesi No: 5, Sarıyer 34470 İstanbul +90 212 393 5200 [email protected] borusancontemporary.com Instagram: @borusancontemporary blog.borusancontemporary.com Sat – Sun 10–7 Until August 27 Edge of Chaos, curated by Julia Kaganskiy Until August 27 Hybrid Spaces, curated by Dr. Necmi Sonmez
DIRIMART | DOLAPDERE
Hacıahmet Mahallesi, Irmak Cad. 1-9, Dolapdere 34440 İstanbul +90 212 232 66 66 [email protected] dirimart.com Instagram: @dirimart Tue – Sat 10–7, Sun 12–7 Until May 7 Group Exhibition
DIRIMART | PERA
Meşrutiyet cad. No:99 Kat -1, Beyoğlu 34430 İstanbul +90 212 232 66 66 [email protected] dirimart.com Instagram: @dirimart Tue – Sat 10–7, Sun 12–7 Until May 7 Çağla Ulusoy
THE PILL®
Ayvansaray Mahallesi, Mürselpaşa Caddesi No: 181, Fatih 34087 Istanbul +90 212 533 1000 [email protected] thepill.co Instagram: @thepillofficial Tue – Sun 10-6, Mon by appointment Until May 20 Eva Nielsen: Intarsia III
SEVIL DOLMACI ART GALLERY
Cihannüma Mahallesi, Çömezler Sokağı, No: 16, Beşiktaş 34353, İstanbul +90 212 258 9585 [email protected] sevildolmaci.com Instagram: sevildolmaciartgallery Mon – Sat 11–6 Until April 23 Cody Choi: The Soul of the Silk Road
ZILBERMAN ISTANBUL
Café / Bar / Restaurant Terrace Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner 246 Tenth Avenue New York bottinonyc.com
İstiklal Caddesi, Mısır Apartmanı, No: 163 K.2 & 3 D.5 & 10, Beyoğlu 34433 İstanbul Zilberman Selected | Istanbul: İstiklal Mahallesi, Piyalepaşa Bulvarı, No: 32C, Beyoğlu 34440 İstanbul +90 212 251 1214 [email protected] zilbermangallery.com Instagram: @zilbermangallery Spotify: ZilbermanGallery Tue – Sat 11–7 Until April 26 Fatoş İrwen: A Highlight of ‘Sûr’ (Zilberman Projects Space) Until April 26 İz Öztat: Under Belly (Zilberman | Istanbul) Until May 13 Vision, Mission, Values: Neriman Polat, Sena Başöz, Memed Erdener, Guy Ben-Ner, Pilvi Takala, Burak Delier; curated by T. Melis Golar (Zilberman Selected | Istanbul)
PORTUGAL LISBOA GALERIA 111
SANTA MONICA AUCTIONS Bergamot Station Arts Center
est.1984
SPRING TWO-DAY AUCTION
Rua Dr. João Soares, 5B, 1600-060 Tel: (+351) 217 977 418 E-mail: [email protected] Website: 111.pt/en/ Tuesday – Saturday 10–7
Until April 29 João Jacinto: Baixo elétrico
3+1 ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA
Largo Hintze Ribeiro, 2E – F Tel: (+351) 210 170 765 E-mail: [email protected] Website: 3m1arte.com Tuesday – Friday 2–8, Saturday 11–4
Until April 29 Tito Mouraz: Farleigh
GALERIA BRUNO MÚRIAS
Rua Capitão Leitão, 10–16, Marvila Tel: (+351) 218 680 241 E-mail: [email protected] Website: brunomurias.com Tuesday – Saturday 2–7 or by appointment
Until May 6 Bruno Cidra: Lunch Inside the Horse’s Belly May 20 – July 29 Luana Vitra: To live and die by the mouth
DOCUMENT
Avenida António Augusto de Aguiar, 11 – 3º Esquerdo Tel: (+351) 918 888 689 E-mail: [email protected] Website: documentspace.com Wednesday – Friday 12–5, Saturday 1–7
Until May 20 John Opera: Blue Dream May 25 – July 29 Kiah Celeste
GALERIA FILOMENA SOARES
Rua da Manutenção, 80 Tel: (+351) 218 624 122 E-mail: [email protected] Website: gfilomenasoares.com Tuesday – Saturday 10–7
April 8 – May 26 Herbert Brandl May 27 – July 30 Pedro Barateiro
Above Image: ANDY WARHOL (1928) Example of 2 of the 66 original Polaroid photographs made into 15 photo collages plus 1 individual Polaroid Framed in 4 separate frames Frames: 24 3/4 x 26 3/4 inches Untitled From: Instant Warhol 1974 Playboy Commission Estimate: $400,000 - $500,000
Always Considering Consignments
FRANCISCO FINO
Rua Capitão Leitão, 76 Tel: (+351) 215 842 211 E-mail: [email protected] Website: franciscofino.com Tuesday – Friday 12–7, Saturday 2–7
Until May 6 Priscila Rooxo
LUMIAR CITÉ
Rua Tomás del Negro, 8A Tel: (+351) 217 551 570 E-mail: [email protected] Website: maumaus.org Wednesday – Sunday 3–7, or by appointment
April 15 – July 23 Cosima von Bonin
MADRAGOA
Rua Machadinho, 41 – 45 Rua dos Navegantes 53 A Tel: (+351) 213 901 699 E-mail: [email protected] Website: galeriamadragoa.pt Wednesday – Saturday 11–7
Until May 13 Shuang Li / Tadáskía (Rua Machadinho) May 24 – July 29 Sarah Benslimane (Rua dos Navegantes)
GALERIA DAS SALGADEIRAS
Rua da Atalaia, 12 – 16 Tel: (+351) 213 460 881 E-mail: [email protected] Web: salgadeiras.com Wednesday – Saturday 3–8
Until May 6 Augusto Brázio: Seco
Above Image: MARY CORSE (1945) Untitled (White, Black, Red), 2000 Micro glass spheres and acrylic on paper 16 1/4 x 27 1/2 inches Signed and dated on verso Estimate: $15,000 - $25,000
Saturday May 6, 2023 Sunday May 7, 2023 Starting at 1pm PST Starting at 1pm PST Photography Modern & Contemporary Art
smauctions.com 2525 Michigan Ave A5, Santa Monica CA 90404 • 310.315.1937 • [email protected] • Bond #69339314
3A GALLERY
DEREK ELLER GALLERY
179 Canal Street, #5A 3agallery.com [email protected]
300 Broome Street derekeller.com [email protected] 212 206 6411 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6
Until May 6 Dan Graham: Dan Graham’s Schema, 1966-1975; curated by Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow
ARSENAL CONTEMPORARY ART NEW YORK 214 Bowery arsenalcontemporary.com [email protected] 212 658 0017 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6
Until May 13 Dorian Fitzgerald: Fitzcarraldo
Until April 22 Zachary Leener: Clock, go inside a stone Until April 22 Project Room: Areum Yang April 26 – May 27 Melissa Brown: Windows and Bars
FOXY PRODUCTION 2 East Broadway, #200 foxyproduction.com [email protected] 212 239 2758 Wednesday – Sunday 11–6
Until April 30 Travess Smalley
BAXTER ST AT CCNY 126 & 128 Baxter Street baxterst.org [email protected] 212 260 9927 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6
FRIDMAN GALLERY
Please contact gallery for information.
169 Bowery fridmangallery.com [email protected] 646 345 9831 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6
BRIDGET DONAHUE
Until April 29 Lesia Khomenko May 10 – June 24 Wura-Natasha Ogunji
99 Bowery, 2nd Floor bridgetdonahue.nyc [email protected] 646 896 1368 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6
Until April 8 Mark van Yetter: The Politics of Charm April 27 – June 22 Ragen Moss: What Is a Deprivation?
HASHIMOTO CONTEMPORARY
54 Ludlow Street hashimotocontemporary.com [email protected] Tuesday – Saturday 10–6
Until April 8 Room With a View April 15 – May 6 David Heo: Mythos
COMPANY GALLERY 145 Elizabeth Street companygallery.us [email protected] 646 756 4547 Wednesday – Saturday 12–6
Until April 22 Jeanette Mundt: Batshit
KARMA 172 & 188 East 2nd Street 22 East 2nd Street karmakarma.org [email protected] 212 390 8290 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6
Until April 22 Paul Mogensen (188 & 172 East 2nd Street) Until April 22 Thaddeus Mosley: Recent Sculpture (22 East 2nd Street)
KI SMITH GALLERY 170 Forsyth Street kismithgallery.com [email protected] 212 677 5131 Wednesday – Sunday 11–7
DOWNTOWN NYC
Until April 9 Sono Kuwayama: Land(e)scapes (The Geography of Impermanence) Until April 9 Further Geographies of Impermanence: Day Gleeson, Tasha Depp, and Carolanne Patterson April 19 – May 21 Sasha Feldman and William J. O’Brien: Clayjà Vu April 19 – May 21 Shabez Jamal and Ambrose Rhapsody Murray: Violet Marrow
Lesia Khomenko, Unidentified Figure 4, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 58 × 82". Courtesy the artist and Fridman Gallery.
MAGENTA PLAINS
MIGUEL ABREU
149 Canal Street
88 Eldridge Street
magentaplains.com [email protected] 917 388 2464
36 Orchard Street miguelabreugallery.com [email protected]
Tuesday – Saturday 11–6
212 995 1774
Until April 22 William Wegman: A Number of Problems Until April 22 Barbara Ess: Inside Out Until April 22 Bill Saylor: Low Level High
Until May 4 Rey Akdogan: subtractions (36 Orchard Street) Until May 7 Eileen Quinlan: The Waves (88 Eldridge Street)
Tuesday – Saturday 10–6
THE MILTON RESNICK AND PAT PASSLOF FOUNDATION 87 Eldridge Street resnickpasslof.org [email protected] 646 559 2513 Thursday – Saturday 11–6
Until July 15 Milton Resnick: Insignias Until July 15 The Feminine in Abstract Painting, curated by Andrea Belag and Jennifer Samet
REENA SPAULINGS FINE ART | NEW YORK 165 East Broadway, 2nd Floor 212 477 5006 reenaspaulings.com [email protected] Thursday – Sunday 12–6
April Patricia L. Boyd
SARGENT’S DAUGHTERS 179 East Broadway sargentsdaughters.com [email protected]
NATHALIE KARG 291 Grand Street, 4th Floor nathaliekarg.com [email protected] 212 563 7821 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6
Until April 15 Tim Wilson: Pictures Aside April 25 – May 27 Katja Strunz: Restored Spalls
917 463 3901 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6
April 7 – May 20 Wendy Red Star: Our Side
SPENCER BROWNSTONE 170-A Suffolk Street spencerbrownstonegallery.com [email protected] 212 334 3455 Wednesday – Sunday 10–6
PARTICIPANT INC Opening soon at 116 Elizabeth Street, Ground Floor participantinc.org [email protected] 212 254 4334 Online programming at participantafterdark.art
Until April 23 Johanna Constantine: The Protector April 30 – June 11 Beaut: Her Blood Ran Cold (The Silent Lizards)
Until April 29 Carly Burnell: changeling
SPERONE WESTWATER 257 Bowery speronewestwater.com [email protected] 212 999 7337 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6
PERROTIN 130 Orchard Street perrotin.com [email protected] 212 812 2902 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6
Until April 15 Nikki Maloof: Skunk Hour Until April 15 Sophia Narrett: Carried By Wonder Until April 15 JR: Les Enfants d’Ouranos
Until April 22 Amy Lincoln: Radiant Spectrum
TARA DOWNS 424 Broadway, 3rd Floor taradowns.com [email protected] 646 468 7190 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6
Until April 29 Annabell Häfner: A Place to Be Until April 29 Justin Chance: Live
RAMIKEN 389 Grand Street ramiken.biz [email protected] 917 434 4245 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6
Until April 15 John Hodgkinson April 26 – May 27 Omari Douglin
THIERRY GOLDBERG GALLERY 109 Norfolk Street thierrygoldberg.com [email protected] 212 228 7569 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6
Until April 29 Jennifer O’Connell: The Doll Chronicles
Katja Strunz, Are we enfolding or going to unfold?, 2022, 79 5⁄8 × 27 5⁄8 × 7 7⁄8". Courtesy Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin. Photo: Nick Ash.
TOTAH
TROTTER&SHOLER
183 Stanton Street davidtotah.com [email protected] 212 582 6111 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6
168 Suffolk Street trotterandsholer.com [email protected] 646 684 9304 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6
Until May 13 Brian Wills
Until April 8 Ezra Cohen: Home
MEXICO TRAVESÍA CUATRO Avenida de la Paz 2207, Colonia Americana, 44140, Guadalajara travesiacuatro.com [email protected] +52 33 3615 2694 Tue – Fri 10–6, Sat 12–3
Until May 13 Until May 13
Alvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Part I Project Room: Guga Szabzon
MEXICO CITY KURIMANZUTTO Gob. Rafael Rebollar 94, Col. San Miguel Chapultepec, 11850, Mexico City kurimanzutto.com [email protected] +52 55 5256 2408 Tue – Thu 11–6, Fri – Sat 11–4
Until May 20
Paulina Olowska: Resonance
LABOR Gral. F. Ramirez 5, Daniel Garza, Del. Miguel Hidalgo, 11830, Mexico City labor.org.mx [email protected] +52 55 6304 8755 Mon – Thu 11–6, Fri – Sat 11–3
April 20 – June 24 inembargable Keltie Ferris, TBT, 2023, oil on canvas in artist’s frame, 75 × 75 × 2 1⁄2". Photo: Mark Woods.
Daniel de Paula: Inalienable, imprescriptible e
GALERIA HILARIO GALGUERA Francisco Pimentel 3, Colonia San Rafael, 06470, Mexico City galeriahilariogalguera.com [email protected] +44 78 1809 0392 Tue – Sat 11–5
Until April 14 Perla Krauze: La tierra y su reflejo April 20 – June 9 Gabriel O’Shea: Preludio
GUADALAJARA CERÁMICA SURO Calle 5 #1016, Col. Industrial, 44940, Guadalajara [email protected] +52 33 1991 0034 Mon – Fri 11–6
Until April 16 Erika Verzutti: Tantra (Museo del Eco, Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City)
CURRO Andrés Terán 726, Col. Santa Teresita, 44600, Guadalajara galeriacurro.com [email protected] +52 33 1516 3714 Mon – Fri 10–6
Until April Alejandro Almanza Pereda: El triunfo de la derrota
GALERIA MASCOTA Valladolid 33, Colonia Roma Norte, 06700, Mexico City galeriamascota.com [email protected] +52 55 4143 8380 Tue – Thu 12–6, Fri – Sat 12–4
Until April 29
Michael Ross: Time Repair / Maxwell Mustardo
GALERIE NORDENHAKE MEXICO CITY Monterrey 65, Colonia Roma Norte, 06700, Mexico City nordenhake.com [email protected] +52 55 7414 9776 Mon – Thu 10–6, Fri – Sat 11–4
April – June
Frida Orupabo
GALERÍA RGR Gral. Antonio León 48, Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec, 11850, Mexico City rgrart.com [email protected] +52 1 55 8434 7759 Mon – Thu 10:30–6:30, Fri 10:30–4:30, Sat 11–4:30
Until April 29
Jesús Rafael Soto: La inestabilidad de lo real
PEANA Tlaxcala 103, Roma Sur, Cuauhtémoc, 06760, Mexico City peana.co
[email protected]
+52 55 9039 6247
Mon – Thu 11–6, Fri 11–4, Sat 11–3
April 20 – May 20
Em Rooney: Double Portrait
PROYECTOS MONCLOVA Lamartine 415, Polanco, Polanco V Secc, Miguel Hidalgo, 11560, Mexico City proyectosmonclova.com + 52 55 5525 9715
April
[email protected]
Mon – Fri 10–6, Sat 11–4
Gallery closed for installation
PROYECTO PARALELO Varsovia 33, Col. Juárez, 06600, Mexico City proyectoparalelo.mx
[email protected]
+52 55 5286 0046
Tue – Fri 11–5, Sat 11–3
Until April
Ignasi Aballí
TRAVESÍA CUATRO Valladolid 35, Colonia Roma Norte, 06700, Mexico City travesiacuatro.com
[email protected]
+52 55 5206 3617 Alicja Kwade, Silent Matter (detail), 2022. Courtesy the artist and OMR, Mexico City. Photo: © Ramiro Chaves.
MARIANE IBRAHIM
Until April 22
Tue – Thu 10–6, Fri 10–4, Sat 11–3
Alvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Part II
MONTERREY
Río Pánuco 36 col. Renacimiento, Cuauhtémoc, 06500, Mexico City marianeibrahim.com [email protected] Tue – Sat 11–6
Until April
Clotilde Jiménez: La Memoria del Agua
MORÁN MORÁN
COLECTOR ORIENTE Distrito Armida L-16, Circuito Frida Kahlo 303, Valle Oriente, 66269, SPGG, Monterrey
Horacio 1022, Polanco, Miguel Hidalgo, 11550, Mexico City moranmorangallery.com [email protected] Tue – Fri 10–6, Sat 11–6
colector.gallery
Until May 13
April 24 – June 23
Keltie Ferris
[email protected]
+52 81 1769 8300
Mon – Fri 10–6
Ash Keating: Perceptual Fields
OMR
COLECTOR PONIENTE
Córdoba 100, Colonia Roma, 06700, Mexico City omr.art [email protected] +52 55 5511 1179 Tue – Thu 10–7, Fri 10–4, Sat 11–4
Lázaro Garza Ayala Pte 436, Casco Urbano, 66230, SPGG, Monterrey
Until April 11
Alicja Kwade: Silent Matter
LAGO ALGO Lago Mayor, 2a Sección, Bosque de Chapultepec, 11560, Mexico City lago.com.mx [email protected] +52 66 9265 0039 Wed – Sun 10–6
Until July Desert Flood: Claudia Comte, Gabriel Rico, and SUPERFLEX
colector.gallery
[email protected]
+52 81 1769 8300
Until May 12
Tue – Fri 10–6, by appointment only
Amor Muñoz: Tactile Translation
PEANA Via Clodia 169, 66220, Monterrey peana.co
[email protected]
+52 81 2315 9150
Until April 31
Mon – Fri 10–6
Sol Oosel: A quien le canta el viento
m1
4– 16
i ap
m
ril
m
a
i
i nt
ern
a at i o
nal
mo
i m
m 0 2 m
23
m
n a il
i
m
i
der
na
t r a
nd
con
te m
a
ia
t
r
t
t r a
por
a
am
i
i
r
ary
art
fa i r
r 2
partner
t
r rt 1 r
main partner
under the patronage of
3 2 0
m
n a il
sponsor
6 1 4–
a
il r p
t
t
THE ART MARKET 2023 A report by Art Basel & UBS. Launching April 4.
10 A.M. ART
MAAB GALLERY
Corso San Gottardo, 5 Tel: 02 9288 9164 [email protected] www.10amart.it Tues. – Fri. 10–12:30, 2–6
Via Nerino 3 Tel: 02 8928 1179 [email protected] www.maabgallery.com Mon. – Fri. 10:30–6
Until April 28 Rediscovering HELGA PHILIPP: Op Art in Austria
April – May SUSANNE KUTTER: I Must Sleep Please!
MONICA DE CARDENAS GALLERIA CHRISTIAN STEIN Corso Monforte 23 Tel: 39 0276393301 Fax: 02 7600 7114 Mon. – Sat. 10–7 Via Vincenzo Monti 46, Pero Tel: 02 3810 0316 Fax: 02 3391 6176 By appointment only [email protected] April – May MIMMO PALADINO (Corso Monforte 23)
DEP ART GALLERY Via Comelico 40 Tel: 02 3653 5620 [email protected] www.depart.it Tues. – Sat. 10:30–7
Via Viganò 4 Tel: 02 2901 0068 Fax: 02 2900 5784 [email protected] www.monicadecardenas.com Tues. – Sat. 3–7 April – May 13 GEORGINA GRATRIX
MONICA DE CARDENAS ZUOZ – ST. MORITZ April -May 13 SUTE WITTNER, MICHAEL VAN OFEN, SLAWOMIR ELSNER
MONICA DE CARDENAS LUGANO Please contact gallery for information.
April – May WOLFRAM ULLRICH: Works 1987–2023
GALLERIA RAFFAELLA CORTESE KAUFMANN REPETTO Via di Porta Tenaglia 7 Tel: 02 7209 4331 Fax: 02 7209 6873 [email protected] www.kaufmannrepetto.com Tues. – Fri. 11:30–7:30, Sat. 3:30–7:30 Until April 8 Re-Materialized: The Stuff That Matters April 12 – May LATIFA ECHAKHCH: Ricordi di Campo
LORENZELLI ARTE Corso Buenos Aires 2 Tel: 02 201914 www.lorenzelliarte.com Tues. – Sat. 10–1, 3–7 Until April 30 Light and Sound – PIERO FOGLIATI’s Utopia
MILANO
Via A. Stradella 1, 4, & 7 Tel: 02 204 3555 Fax: 02 2953 3590 [email protected] www.galleriaraffaellacortese.com Tues. – Sat. 10–1, 3–7:30 April – May 18 SIMONE FORTI: Distant Lands (Via Stradella 7) April – May 18 JOAN JONAS: Drawn on the Wind (Via Stradella 1) April – May 18 KIKI SMITH: The Cat Himself Knows (Via Stradella 4)
WWW.GALLERY-WEEKEND-BERLIN.DE #GALLERYWEEKENDBERLIN
our complete editorial archive available online from 1962 to now artforum.com/subscribe
ENGLAND AL M I N E REC H Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House, London W1K 3JH Tel: +44 20 7287 3644 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.alminerech.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6
Until Until April April
April 6 Mehdi Ghadyanloo: The Untold Stories April 6 Paul de Flers: Black Island 20 – May 20 Dr. Esther Mahlangu 20 – May 20 Tomokazu Matsuyama: Episodes Far From Home
AN N E LY JU DA F I NE A RT 23 Dering Street, 4th Floor, London W1S 1AW Tel: +44 20 7629 7578 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk Mon. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–5
Until May 6
Caro and Music
B E L M ACZ 45 Davies Street, London W1K 4LX Tel: +44 20 7629 7863 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.belmacz.com Instagram: @belmaczlondon Mon. – Fri. 10–6
Until April 6 Gernot Wieland: Halb Nackt April 21 – June 30 Flower in the Wind: Hawazin Alotaibi, Bassam Al-Sabah, Georgina Hill, Camilla Løw, Vladimir Nikolic, Niamh O’Malley, Simon Popper, and Olu Ogunnaike
DAVID Z WIR NER 24 Grafton Street, London W1S 4EZ Tel: +44 20 3538 3165 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.davidzwirner.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6
Until April 15 Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants Until April 15 Black Mountain College: The Experimenters April 20 – May 26 So let us all be citizens too
F R IT H STR EET GA LLERY 17–18 Golden Square, London W1F 9JJ 60 Frith Street, Soho Square, London W1D 3JJ Tel: +44 20 7494 1550 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.frithstreetgallery.com Tues. – Fri. 11–6, Sat. 11–5
Until May 5 Polly Apfelbaum: These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ (Golden Square) May 19 – July 1 Callum Innes: New Works (Golden Square)
GA GOSIA N GA LLER Y 6–24 Britannia Street, London WC1X 9JD Tel: +44 20 7841 9960 17–19 Davies Street, London W1K 3DE Tel: +44 20 7493 3020 20 Grosvenor Hill, London W1K 3QD Tel: +44 20 7495 1500 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gagosian.com Mon. – Sat. 10–6 by appointment
Until April 29 Rites of Passage (Britannia Street) Until May 13 Stanley Whitney: There Will Be Song (Grosvenor Hill) Until May 13 Richard Wright (Davies Street)
CE L L PRO J E C T S PA C E 258 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA Tel: +44 20 8981 6336 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.cellprojects.org Thurs. – Sun. 12–6
Until June 4
Felix Melia: Money for Nothing
CO RVI - M O R A 1A Kempsford Road, (off Wincott Street) London SE11 4NU Tel: +44 20 7840 9111 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.corvi-mora.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6
Until April 22 Alison Britton: Plattering April 27 – June 4 Che Lovelace
H A U SER & WIR TH LON D O N 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET Tel: +44 20 7287 2300 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hauserwirth.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6
Until April 29 Günther Förg May 26 – July 29 Gary Simmons: This Must Be the Place HAUSER & WIRTH SOMERSET Durslade Farm, Dropping Lane, Bruton, Somerset BA10 0NL Tel: +44 1749 814 060 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hauserwirth.com Tues. – Sun. 10–5 Until May 8 Until May 8
Rodney Graham: Getting it Together in the Country The New Bend
L O N D O N MI T H R A E U M B L OOM B E R G SPA C E
PIPPY H OU LDSWORT H G ALLERY
12 Walbrook, London EC4N 8AA E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.londonmithraeum.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6, Sun. 12–5
6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT Tel: +44 20 7734 7760 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.houldsworth.co.uk Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–6
Until July 15
Oliver Beer: Albion Waves
M AURE E N P A L E Y 60 Three Colts Lane, London E2 6GQ Tel: +44 20 7729 4112 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.maureenpaley.com Instagram: @maureenpaley Wed. – Sun. 11–6
Until April 23 Michael Queenland: Rudy’s Ramp of Remainders Redux April 28 – May 28 Maaike Schoorel STUDIO M Rochelle School, 7 Playground Gardens, London E2 7FA Wed. – Sun. 11–6
Until April 29 Angela Heisch: Low Speed Highs Until April 29 Mai-Thu Perret: The Box May 5 – June 3 Qualeasha Wood
SER PENT INE Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Tel: +44 20 7402 6075 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.serpentinegalleries.org By appointment only
Until April 23 Dirk Stewen: PAPER MOONS April 28 – May 28 Maaike Schoorel
Until April 10 Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds Until September 3 Maria Lassnig Prize 2021 Mural: Atta Kwami Spring Gabriel Massan, Third World: The Bottom Dimension – Game Launch (Online, with exhibition at Serpentine North in Summer) Ongoing Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: Pollinator Pathmaker
MORENA DI LUNA 3 Adelaide Crescent, Hove BN3 2JD Sat. – Sun. 12–6 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.maureenpaley.com
SIMON LEE
Until June 18
Group Exhibition: outer view, inner world
M AZZO L E NI 15 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4AX Tel: +44 20 7495 8805 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mazzoleniart.com Mon. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. by appointment
April 26 – June 4
Toscani Chez Mazzoleni
M O T HE R’ S T A NK S T A T I O N 58-64 Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, London E2 6 GP Tel: +44 74 1258 1803 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.motherstankstation.com Thurs. – Sat. 12–6, and by appointment
April 13 – May 20
Mairead O’hEocha: The Pane Fly’s Tune
PACE G AL LE RY 5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ Tel: +44 20 3206 7600 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.pacegallery.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6
Until April 15 Gideon Appah: How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights April 28 – May 25 Keith Coventry: City Racing April 28 – May 25 Nathalie Du Pasquier: LE CORBEAU ET LE RENARD
12 Berkeley Street, London WIJ 8DT Tel: +44 20 7491 0100 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.simonleegallery.com Mon. – Fri. 9:30–6, Sat. 10–6
Until April 15 Until April 15
Serge Attukwei Clottey: Crossroads Helena Foster: To See Beyond Seeing
SPR OVIER I 23 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BQ Tel: +44 20 7734 2066 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.sprovieri.com Mon. – Fri. 10–6
Until May 26
Mario Dellavedova: Sense Exercises / Sans Exercice
SPR Ü TH MA GER S 7A Grafton Street, London W1S 4EJ Tel: +44 20 7408 1613 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.spruethmagers.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6
April 14 – May 20 April 14 – May 20
Andreas Schulze: Land’s End Craig Kauffman: Constructed Paintings 1973–1976
W HI T E CUB E 144–152 Bermondsey Street, Bermondsey, London SE1 3TQ Bermondsey: Tues. – Sat. 10–6, Sun. 12–6 25–26 Mason’s Yard, London SW1Y 6BU Mason’s Yard: Tues. – Sat. 10–6 Tel: +44 20 7930 5373 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.whitecube.com
Until Until Until Until Until
April 21 May 14 May 14 May 14 May 20
Patrick Martinez (Online) Marguerite Humeau: Meys (Bermondsey) Inside the White Cube: Mimi Lauter – Ruach (Bermondsey) Inside the White Cube: Samuel Ross – LAND (Bermondsey) Gilbert & George: CORPSING PICTURES (Mason’s Yard)
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND H U GH LA NE GA LLERY Charlemont House, Parnell Square North, Dublin 1 Tel: +353 1222 5564 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hughlane.ie Tues. – Thurs. 10–6, Fri. – Sat. 10–5, Sun. 11–5
Until August 6 John Beattie: Reconstructing Mondrian Until August 20 Richard Gorman: Living through paint(ing) Ongoing Recent Acquisitions
NORTHERN IRELAND M AC 10 Exchange Street West, Belfast BT1 2NJ Tel: +44 28 9023 5053 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.themaclive.com Tues. – Sun. 11–5 Follow us on social media: @TheMACBelfast
April 6 – July 2 Various: At the Table April 6 – August 13 Sharon Kelly April 6 – August 13 Louise Wallace: Midnight Feast
IMMA – IR ISH MU SEUM O F MO D ERN ART Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8 Tel: +353 1612 9900 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.imma.ie Tues. – Sat. 10–5:30, Wed. 11:30–5:30, Sun. 12–5:30; booking essential at imma.ie
Until May 21 Patricia Hurl: Irish Gothic Until July 30 Navine G. Dossos: Kind Words Can Never Die Until September 3 Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth
K ER LIN GA LLER Y Anne’s Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2 Tel: +353 1670 9093 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.kerlin.ie Tues. – Fri. 10–5:30, Sat. 11–4:30
Until April 8 Brian Maguire: The Clock Winds Down April 14 – May 20 Aleana Egan: Repeating Song
SCOTLAND I N G L E B Y G A L L E RY 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh EH3 6NX Tel: +44 131 556 4441 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.inglebygallery.com Wed. – Sat. 11–5
Until April 1 Twenty Five, a celebration of the gallery’s 25th birthday April 15 – May 10 David Austen: The boys – an adventure
MOTH ER ’S TA NK ST A TIO N 41–43 Watling Street, Usher’s Island, Dublin D08 NP48 Tel: +353 1671 7654 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.motherstankstation.com Thurs. – Sat. 12–6
March 2 – April 29
Alan Doyle: Dog Runner
1 mira madrid Carmen Calvo, La palanqueta, 2023, mixed media. 27 1⁄2 × 27 1⁄2". Courtesy Luis Adelantado Gallery, Valencia.
Argumosa 16, 28012 Madrid Tel: +34 912 40 05 04 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.1miramadrid.com
Until May 27 Ana Teresa Ortega & Clemente Bernad: Parte 1 – Ocurrió a la vista de todos, 1936; Parte 2 – Pero se hizo un silencio que llega hasta hoy, 2023 April 14–16 miart April 20–23 Art Brussels
albarrán bourdais Barquillo 13, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 611 55 56 93 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.albarran-bourdais.com
Until April 22 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Farmacias Distantes
galería elba benítez San Lorenzo 11, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 913 08 04 68 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.elbabenitez.com Instagram: @galeriaelbabenitez
Until April 1 Alejandro Cesarco: Subtitled / Subtitulado April 15 – May 29 The Citrus Project: Artistas en apoyo de la Todolí Citrus Foundation
galería elvira gonzález Hermanos Álvarez Quintero 1, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 913 19 59 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriaelviragonzalez.com Instagram: @galeriaelviragonzalez
Until May Juan Asensio May – July Jorge Macchi: Las islas vírgenes
galería helga de alvear Doctor Fourquet 12, 28012 Madrid Tel: +34 914 68 05 06 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.helgadealvear.com Instagram: @galeriahelgadealvear
Until April 29 Adrian Sauer: Colour and Space May 5 – June 15 Axel Hütte: Flowers and Rooms
galería hilario galguera Doctor Fourquet 12, 28012 Madrid Tel: +34 635 97 53 34 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriahilariogalguera.com
Until May 6
Martin Eder: No Hell
juana de aizpuru Calle del Barquillo, 44, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 91 310 55 61 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.juanadeaizpuru.es
Until April
Montserrat Soto: Fin de tramo
luis adelantado | valencia Bonaire, 6, 46003 Valencia Tel: +34 963 51 01 79 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.luisadelantadovlc.com
Until May 23 Carmen Calvo: La habitación de al lado Until May 23 Julie C. Fortier: Saliva Until May 23 Virginia Herrera: Alguien me acarició la espalda, me desperté antes de que pudiera mirarle a los ojos (Boiler room) April 20–23 Art Brussels
mayoral Consell de Cent 286, 08007 Barcelona Tel: +34 934 88 02 83 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriamayoral.com Instagram: @galeriamayoral
Until April 2 Art Paris April 13 – June 6 Postwar Spanish Artists
noguerasblanchard Beneficencia 18B, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 915 06 34 84 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.noguerasblanchard.com Instagram: @noguerasblanchard
Until April 5 Cross Section 1987–2009 April 15 – May 27 Wilfredo Prieto Isaac Peral 7, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, 08902 Barcelona Tel: +34 934 63 63 13
Until April 15 Elena Asins: Canons April 20–23 Art Brussels April 27 – June Tiago Baptista
spain
travesía cuatro Calle San Mateo 16, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 91 310 00 98 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.travesiacuatro.com Instagram: @travesiacuatro
Until April 22
Jose Dávila: Balance frágil
Josh Kline Project for a New American Century Whitney Museum of American Art
Josh Kline, Insomnia Drip (detail), 2013/2020. IV bag, red wine, NyQuil, Xanax, Ambien, melatonin, vodka, magnesium, Benadryl, CBD, and light-box column: plexiglass, LEDs, and wood. Photo: Christian Øen.
47 CANAL
TEXAS AUSTIN
FORT WORTH
BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART
KIMBELL ART MUSEUM
200 East Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Austin TX 78712 512 471 7324 www.blantonmuseum.org [email protected]
3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth TX 76107 817 332 8451 www.kimbellart.org
Until July 9 Medieval X Modern Until July 9 Las Hermanas Iglesias (Lisa and Janelle Iglesias) Until July 23 Day Jobs: Emma Amos, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Jeffrey Gibson, Jay Lynn Gomez, Tishan Hsu, VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery), Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Robert Ryman, and Fred Wilson August 27 – January 7, 2024 Forces of Nature: Ancient Maya Art from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Until October
The Kimbell at 50
MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH 3200 Darnell Street, Fort Worth TX 76107 817 738 9215 www.themodern.org [email protected]
Until April 30
I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen
LANDMARKS, THE PUBLIC ART PROGRAM OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
HOUSTON
2616 Wichita Street, A7100, BWY 3rd Floor, Austin TX 78712 512 495 4315 www.landmarksut.org [email protected]
McCLAIN GALLERY
Opening April 27
Eamon Ore-Giron: Tras los ojos
NORTHERN–SOUTHERN 411 Brazos Street # 105, Austin TX 78701 (entrance on E 5th Street, between Brazos and San Jacinto) www.northern-southern.com [email protected]
Until April 30 Michelle Marchesseault: Green Eyes April 12–16 Prem Krishnamurthy: Department of Transformation, part of Fusebox 2023
DALLAS CONDUIT GALLERY 1626 C Hi Line Drive, Dallas TX 75207 214 939 0064 www.conduitgallery.com [email protected]
Please contact gallery for information.
BARRY WHISTLER GALLERY 315 Cole Street, Suite 120, Dallas TX 75207 214 939 0242 www.barrywhistlergallery.com [email protected]
April 15 – May 27
Collage: Joseph Glasco, Dan Rizzie, and Danny Williams
GREEN FAMILY ART FOUNDATION 2111 Flora Street, Suite 110, Dallas TX 75201 214 274 5656 www.greenfamilyartfoundation.org [email protected]
Until May 21 Until May 21
The Cabin LA Presents: A Curated Flashback Considering Female Abstractions
2242 Richmond Avenue, Houston TX 77098 713 520 9988 www.mcclaingallery.com [email protected]
Until April 29 Jane Allensworth April 20–23 Dallas Art Fair 2023
GALLERY SONJA ROESCH 2309 Caroline Street, Houston TX 77004 713 659 5424 www.gallerysonjaroesch.com [email protected]
Until May 13
Mariana Copello: Intangible Space
MARFA BALLROOM MARFA 108 East San Antonio Street, Marfa TX 79843 432 729 3600 www.ballroommarfa.org [email protected]
Until May 7 Ecstatic Land: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, Teresa Baker, Christie Blizard, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Nancy Holt, Katherine Hubbard, Benny Merris, Alan Michelson, Laura Ortman, Elle Pérez, Sondra Perry, David Benjamin Sherry, and IsumaTV Until May 7 Kenneth Tam: Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory May 24 – September 16 Li(sa) E. Harris May 24 – September 16 Group Exhibition: Tongues of Fire
THE CHINATI FOUNDATION / LA FUNDACÍON CHINATI 1 Cavalry Row, P.O. Box 1135, Marfa TX 79843 432 729 4362 x220 www.chinati.org [email protected]
Visit chinati.org for more information.
JUDD FOUNDATION 104 South Highland Avenue, Marfa TX 79843 432 729 4406 www.juddfoundation.org [email protected]
Visit juddfoundation.org for more information.
Opening May 2023, Collins Gallery | mysticseaport.org
Southwest CHARLOTTE JACKSON FINE ART
554 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 charlottejackson.com [email protected] Instagram: @charlottejacksonfineart 505 989 8688
Until April 22 Spring Group Exhibition
GERALD PETERS CONTEMPORARY
1011 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 gpgallery.com [email protected] Instagram: @geraldpeterscontemporary 505 954 5800
April 13–16 EXPO Chicago: Patrick Dean Hubbell
KIMBALL ART CENTER
1251 Kearns Blvd, Park City, UT 84060 kimballartcenter.org [email protected] Instagram: @kimballartcenter 435 649 8882
Until April 9 Between Life and Land – Material: Collin Bradford, David Brooks, Nancy Holt, Patrick Dean Hubbell, Sara Lynne Lindsay, Stefan Lesueur, Colour Maisch, Mary Mattingly, Robert Smithson, and Rodrigo Valenzuela April 21 – July 9 Between Life and Land – Identity: Lani Asuncion, Ann Böttcher, Blue Curry, Daniel George, Levi Jackson, and Richard Misrach, among others
KOURI + CORRAO GALLERY
PHOENIX ART MUSEUM
Until May 6 Jeff Krueger: Details From The Swan’s Garden May 12 – June 17 Jack Craft: What Once Was The Sea Is Now A Desert
Until May 14 Sama Alshaibi: Generation After Generation, and the 2021 Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards Until November 19 Princely States of the Punjab: Sikh Art and Heritage Until July 23 MOVE: The Modern Cut of Geoffrey Beene Until November 12 Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression Until November 12 Princely States of the Punjab: Sikh Art and History Until January 1, 2025 Yayoi Kusama: You Who are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies Until December 31, 2025 Philip C. and the Landscapes of Arizona May 6 – September 17 Juan Francisco Elso: Por América May 6 – September 17 Lo que es, es lo que ha sido / What It Is, Is What Has Been: Selections from the ASU Art Museum’s Cuban Art Collection June 17, 2023 – June 30, 2024 William Herbert “Buck” Dunton: A Mainer Goes West
3213 Calle Marie, Santa Fe, NM 87507 kouricorrao.com [email protected] Instagram: @kouricorrao 505 820 1888
MOCA TUCSON
265 South Church Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85701 moca-tucson.org [email protected] Instagram: @mocatucson 520 624 5019
Until September 17 Cecilia Vicuña: Sonoran Quipu Until October 22 Raven Chacon: While hissing Until October 22 Na Mira: Subrosa
OGDEN CONTEMPORARY ARTS 455 25th Street, Ogden, UT 84401 ogdencontemporaryarts.org [email protected] Instagram: @ogdencontemporaryarts 801 810 2898
Until April 15 Tamara Kostianovsky: Mesmerizing Flesh
1625 North Central Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85004 phxart.org [email protected] Instagram: @phxart 602 257 1880
SITE SANTA FE
1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 sitesantafe.org [email protected] Instagram: @sitesantafe 505 989 1199
Until May 8 Pedro Reyes: DIRECT ACTION
ZANE BENNETT CONTEMPORARY ART
435 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 zanebennettgallery.com [email protected] Instagram: @zanebennettgallery 505 982 8111
Until May 6 Arrivals 2023 Until May 6 Robert Ebendorf & Friends
MIAMI DOT FIFTYONE GALLERY
MINDY SOLOMON GALLERY
Until May 10 Graciela Hasper: The Resonance Of Dreams
Until April 22 Osamu Kobayashi: Foreign Relations Until April 22 Jamie Hayon: Carate April 30 – June 10 Hand over Hand – Textiles Today: Malaika Temba, Coulter Fussell, Basil Kincaid, Nan Chainkua Reindorf, Eric Medell, Moises Salazar, Hayley Sheldon, Paolo Arao, Joseph Awuah-Darko, Brandon Opalka, Frances Trombly, Gina Jestrow, Kerri Phillips, Loraine Lynn, Mr. Star City, Gonzalo Hernandez, Elena Herzog, Melissa Joseph, Daniela Gomez-Paz, Vadis Turner, and Samantha Bittman
7275 NE 4th Avenue, Unit 101, Miami, 33138 dotfiftyone.com [email protected] Instagram: @dotfiftyone.gallery 305 573 9994
EMERSON DORSCH
5900 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, 33127 emersondorsch.com [email protected] Instagram: @emersondorsch 305 576 1278
Until April 15 Jen Clay April 30 – June 3 Beverly Acha, Benjamin Herndon
JUPITER CONTEMPORARY
1217 71st Street, Miami, 33141 jupitercontemporary.com [email protected] Instagram: @jupitercontemporary 786 238 7299
April 2 – May 5 Lizzy Lunday: Public Displays of Affectation
KDR305
1322 SW 11th Street, Miami, 33135 By appointment only kdr305.com [email protected] Instagram: @kdr305 305 282 7177
Until April 23 Isabella Cuglievan April 30 – June 4 Michael Berryhill, Matt Kleberg, JJ Manford
LnS GALLERY
2610 SW 28 Lane, Miami, 33133 lnsgallery.com [email protected] Instagram: @lns_gallery 305 987 5642
Until April 8 Michael Loveland: One Way April 22 – July 1 William Osorio: Only Silence Hears
848 NW 22nd Street, Miami, 33127 mindysolomon.com [email protected] Instagram: @mindysolomongallery 786 953 6917
PAN AMERICAN ART
274 NE 67th Street, Miami, 33138 panamericanart.com [email protected] Instagram: @panamericanartprojects 305 751 2550
Until April 1 Leon Ferrari: The Architecture of Madness Until April 1 Carolina Sardi: Microcosms April 15 – June 10 Marlon Portales: Poems of Nature
PIERO ATCHUGARRY GALLERY 5520 NE 4th Avenue Miami, 33137 pieroatchugarry.com [email protected] Instagram: @pieroatchugarrygallery 305 639 8247
April 15 – July 29 Artur Lescher: Celeste Esculturas April 15 – July 29 Chris Soal: Finds taken for wonders
PUBLISHERS MONET / MITCHELL Painting the French Landscape Ed. Simon Kelly 96 pages, 60 illustrations 9 1⁄2 × 11 1⁄2 in., hardcover HIRMER PREMIUM: Fold-outs $40.00 Exhibition: Saint Louis | Saint Louis Art Museum A SPLENDID L AND Paintings from Royal Udaipur Eds. Debra Diamond, Dipti Khera 400 pages, 270 illustrations 10 × 11 1⁄2 in., hardcover HIRMER PREMIUM: High quality paper, linen binding, dust jacket $60.00 Exhibitions: Washington D.C. | Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art Cleveland | Cleveland Museum of Art
MAGYAR MODERN Hungarian Art in Berlin 1910–1933 Eds. Ralf Burmeister, András Zwickl 272 pages, 220 illustrations 8 1⁄2 × 11 in., hardcover $60.00 Exhibition: Berlin | Berlinische Galerie
KINSHIP Eds. Dorothy Moss, Leslie Ureña 120 pages, 77 illustrations 7 × 9 in., hardcover $25.00 Exhibition: Washington | National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
www.hirmerpublishers.com
CHAKAIA BOOKER The Observance Eds. Alex Gartenfeld, Stephanie Seidel 192 pages, 105 illustrations 9 1⁄2 × 13 in., cloth HIRMER PREMIUM: Linen binding, various high quality art paper, structured endpapers $50.00 Exhibiton: Miami | Institute of Contemporary Art
OLGA COSTA Dialogues with Mexican Modernism Eds. Sabine Hoffmann, Stefan Weppelmann 256 pages, 147 illustrations 9 × 10 3⁄4 in., hardcover $48.00 Exhibition: Leipzig | Museum der bildenden Künste
FUNK YOU TOO! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture Ed. Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy 112 pages, 86 illustrations 9 × 12 in., hardcover $40.00 Exhibition: New York | Museum of Arts and Design ETEL ADNAN Eds. Sébastien Delot, Susanne Gaensheimer, Matthias Mühling 208 pages, 194 illustrations 7 1⁄2 × 9 1⁄2 in., softcover HIRMER PREMIUM: Structured paper cover, premium quality art paper stock $46.00 Exhibitions: Lenbachhaus | Munich Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen | Düsseldorf
find us on facebook and instagram
CANADA CALGARY
Esker Foundation
1011 9th Avenue SE, Fourth Floor, Calgary, Alberta T2G 0H7 Tel: 403 930 2490 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.eskerfoundation.art | www.permanentcollection.eskerfoundation.com Instagram/Facebook/Twitter: @EskerFoundation
Until April 30 Margaux Williamson: Interiors Until April 30 Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors Until June 11 Morgan Melenka: A provisional vista Until April 16 Cut + Paste: Inside Out – May GN and youth artists from across Calgary May 27 – August 27 Mel O’Callaghan: Pulse of the Planet
HALIFAX
The Blue Building Gallery
2482 Maynard Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3K 3V4 Tel: 902 429 0134 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.thebluebuilding.ca Instagram: @thebluebuildinggallery
Until April 15 Amanda Rhodenizer: Love Boat
MONTRÉAL
Blouin Division
2020 William Street, Montréal, Québec H3J 1R8 Tel: 514 938 3863 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.blouin-division.com
Until May 13 Karel Funk, Nicolas Lachance, Jeffrey Melo May 20 – June 30 Simon Bertrand, Émilie Régnier, Mike Bayne
Fonderie Darling
745 rue Ottawa, Montréal, Québec H3C 1R8 Tel: 514 392 1554 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.fonderiedarling.org
Until May 17 Amelie Laurence Fortin: Récits d’une courte nuit Until May 14 Sandra Volny: Fossiles sonores
Patel Brown | Montreal
372 Saint-Catherine Street West, Suite 412, Montreal, Quebec H3B 1A2 E-mail: [email protected] Web: patelbrown.com Instagram: @patelbrowngallery
April 6 – May 20 Vanessa Brown
Patrick Mikhail Gallery
4815 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montréal, Québec H2T 1R6 Tel: 514 439 2790 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.patrickmikhailgallery.com
April 20–23 Plural Art Fair, Montreal May 10–13 Future Fair, New York
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
1380 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1J5 Tel: 514 285 1600 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mbam.qc.ca
Until May 28 Parall(elles): A History of Women in Design Until July 2 Views of Within: Picturing the Spaces We Inhabit – Sorel Cohen, Pierre Dorion, Natalie Reis, Stan Douglas, Joanne Tod, Ian Wallace, and Oreka James Until August 20 Nalini Malani: Crossing Boundaries
PHI Foundation For Contemporary Art
451 & 465 Saint-Jean Street, Montreal, Québec H2Y 2R5 Tel: 514 849 3742 E-mail: [email protected] Web: foundation.phi.ca Instagram/Facebook/Twitter: @fondationphi
Until July 9 Terms of Use: Dara Birnbaum, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Mara Eagle, Brendan Fernandes, Francisco González-Rosas, Ilana Yacine Harris-Babou, Helena Martin Franco, Nation to Nation, Skawennati, Shanie Tomassini, Wu Tsang, VahMirè aka Ludmila Steckelberg, Quentin VerCetty, and Nico Williams
Galerie Robertson Arès
1490 rue Sherbrooke O., Montréal, Québec H3G 1L3 Tel: 514 657 1221 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerierobertsonares.com Instagram: @robertsonaresgallery
Until April 1 Andrée-Anne Mercier: Ciel digital et blind spot du quotidien April 7–29 Sébastien Gaudette: Party May 5–27 Karine Léger: D’un lieu à l’autre June 3 – July 15 Group exhibition: Hors-série June 21 – August 12 Duo exhibition: Sophie Alexia De Lotbinière and Grégòr Belibi Minya
SASKATOON
Remai Modern
102 Spadina Crescent East, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 3L6 Tel: 306 975 7610 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.remaimodern.org
Until May 22 Storied Objects – Métis Art in Relation: Jason Baerg, Christi Belcourt, Bob Boyer, Daphne Boyer, Katherine Boyer, Amy Briley, Wilfred Burton, David Garneau, Grandmother Artists, David Heinrichs, Brenda Hrycuik, Jennine Krauchi, Lynette La Fontaine, Rosalie LaPlante LaRoque, Maria-Margaretta, and others Until June 4 Pablo Picasso: Functional Picasso Until June 4 Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 April 15 – September 4 Denyse Thomasos: just beyond
Kang Seung Lee: The Heart of A Hand March 25 – July 22, 2023
Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College Image: Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (Fort Road Beach), 2023, Antique 24k gold thread, Sambe, dried seeds and plants from Fort Road Beach in Singapore, pearls, silver wire, pebbles from Derek Jarman's garden, wood, brass nails. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City. Photo by Paul Salveson.
CANADA TORONTO
Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) 4700 Keele Street, Accolade East Building, York University, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Tel: 416 736 5169 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.agyu.art Instagram: @a_g_y_u
Until June 10 Meleko Mokgosi: Imaging Imaginations
Art Gallery of Ontario
317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1G4 Tel: 416 979 6648 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ago.ca Instagram: @agotoronto
Until June 11 You Look Beautiful Like That: Studio Photography in West and Central Africa Until June 25 Radical Remembrance: The Sculptures of David Ruben Piqtoukun Until August 7 Jónsi: Hrafntinna (Obsidian) April 7 – October 1 Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear May 6, 2023 – May 2024 Feels Like HOME June 3 – September 4 Building Icons: Arnold Newman’s Magazine World, 1938–2000 June 3 – September 4 Cassatt – McNicoll: Impressionists Between Worlds
Art Museum at the University of Toronto 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H3 Tel: 416 978 1838 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.artmuseum.utoronto.ca Instagram: @artmuseumuoft
Please contact museum for information.
Patel Brown | Toronto
21 Wade Avenue, Unit 2, Toronto, Ontario M6H 1P4 E-mail: [email protected] Web: patelbrown.com Instagram: @patelbrowngallery
Until April 22 Surface Temperature: Ibrahim Abusitta, Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich, Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Shirin Fathi, Shannon Garden-Smith, Alexa Hatanaka, Lindsay Montgomery, Winnie Truong, and Shellie Zhang Until April 22 Nicolas Fleming: More of A Mudroom May 4 – June 17 Rajni Perera
Blouin Division
45 Ernest Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6P 3M7 Tel: 647 346 9082 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.blouin-division.com
Please contact gallery for information.
Corkin Gallery
7 Tank House Lane, Toronto, Ontario M5A 3C4 Tel: 416 979 1980 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.corkingallery.com
Until May 20 Traces of Abstraction 1958–2020: Young Il-Ahn, Yves Gaucher, Jean McEwen, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Leopold Plotek, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Gina Rorai, Dana Schutz, Françoise Sullivan, and David Urban April 29 – May 20 George Platt Lynes: Intimate Circle June 7 – July 8 Hana Elmasry: Alchemizing the Self June 7 – July 8 Nigel Scott: Conversations with Blue II
Daniel Faria Gallery
188 Saint Helens Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6H 4A1 Tel: 416 538 1880 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.danielfariagallery.com Instagram: @dfariagallery
Until April 22 Derek Liddington: Marbled Bodies, Softened Earth April 29 – June 3 June Clark: Photographs
Olga Korper Gallery
17 Morrow Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2H9 Tel: 416 538 8220 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.olgakorpergallery.com
Until April 22 Robert Mapplethorpe: Physical April 29 – May 27 Lynne Cohen: Severance June 3 – July 8 50th Anniversary Group Show
Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art 1286 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M6H 1N9 Tel: 416 536 1519 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mercerunion.org Instagram: @mercerunion
Until April 15 Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili May 6 – July 22 Aziz Hazara: Bow Echo
CANADA TORONTO
VANCOUVER
MKG127
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
1445 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario M6J 1Y7 Tel: 647 435 7682 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mkg127.com Instagram: @mkg127
Until April 22 Micah Adams: A tangent line gently touching coins April 29 – May 27 Jayce Salloum: not the way things oughta be
Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto 158 Sterling Road, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2B2 Tel: 416 530 5125 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.moca.ca
Until April 30 Serkan Özkaya: ni4ni Until April 30 Athena Papadopoulos: The New Alphabet Until April 30 Susan For Susan: Trade Show Until July 23 Kapwani Kiwanga: Remediation
Paul Petro Contemporary Art
980 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario M6J 1H1 Tel: 416 979 7874 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.paulpetro.com | www.multiplesandsmallworks.com Instagram: @paulpetrocanada | @multiplesandsmallworks Twitter: @paulpetrocanada Facebook: @paulpetrocontemporaryart
Until April 1 Editions Part Two: Stephen Andrews, Donald Baechler, Ross Bleckner, Amy Bowles, Jane Buyers, Wendy Coburn, Marlene Creates, Gary Evans, FASTWÜRMS, Zachari Logan, Henry Moore, Mélanie Rocan, Su Rynard, Ho Tam, Andy Warhol, and Natalie Wood April 7 – May 13 Stephen Andrews: et cetera April 7 – May 13 Marlene Creates: Between the Earth and the Firmament – Variations on a Theme, Newfoundland 2015–2022 May 19 – June 24 FASTWÜRMS: #VOLCANO_LOV3R May 19 - June 24 Michel Dumont: Mukwa Dodem (I am bear clan)
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
231 Queens Quay West, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8 Tel: 416 973 4949 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.thepowerplant.org Instagram: @thepowerplantto Facebook: @thepowerplantto Twitter: @thepowerplantto
Until May 14 Amartey Golding Until May 14 Brenda Draney: Drink from the river Until May 14 in parallel: Rouzbeh Akhbari, Joi T. Arcand, Aylan Couchie, Simon Fuh, Anique Jordan, and Julia Rose Sutherland
1825 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2 Tel: 604 822 2759 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.belkin.ubc.ca
Until April 16 The Willful Plot: Gabi Dao, Derek Jarman, Glenn Lewis, Rehab Nazzal, Dana Qaddah, and others May 5 – June 4 Things that do not come by the road: Reggie Harrold, Sarv Iraji, Ramneet Kaur, Alejandra Morales, and Kitt Peacock
Griffin Art Projects
1174 Welch Street, North Vancouver, British Columbia V7P 1B2 Tel: 604 985 0136 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.griffinartprojects.ca
Until May 7 Alibaba Conundrum May 27 – August 27 Per Diem Part II: The Gerd Metzdorff Collection
Libby Leshgold Gallery
Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 1A7 Tel: 604 844 3809 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.libby.ecuad.ca Instagram: @libbyleshgoldgallery
Please contact gallery for information.
Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H7 Tel: 604 662 4700 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.vanartgallery.bc.ca
Until April 16 Guud san glans Robert Davidson: A Line that Bends But Does Not Break Until April 16 NEXT – Provisional Structures – Carmen Papalia with Co-Conspirators: Rebel Fayola Rose, Sharona Ranklin, Catherine Frazee and Gabrielle Peters, Heather Kai Smith, and the Curiosity Paradox Until June 4 Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me Until June 4 Hard-Edge
WINNIPEG Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art
1–460 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3C 0E8 Tel: 204 942 1043 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.plugin.org Instagram: @pluginica
Please contact gallery for information.
Hudson Valley
Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
State University of New York at New Paltz, 1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz, NY 12561 [email protected] 845 257 3844 newpaltz.edu/dorskymuseum Wed – Sun 11–5, BFA thesis exhibitions open Fri – Tues Until April 16 Hudson Valley Artists 2023: Homespun Until July 23 Be Who You Are: Portraits of Woodstock Artists by Harriett Tannin Until July 23 The Historic Woodstock Art Colony: The Arthur A. Anderson Collection April 28 – May 2 BFA Thesis Exhibition I May 5–9 BFA Thesis Exhibition II May 12 MFA Thesis Exhibition I
MIDDLE Analog Diary 1154 North Avenue, Beacon, NY 12508 [email protected] analogdiary.art Sat – Sun 11–5
VISITOR CENTER
Until May 7 Steve Keister: BATZ Until May 7 Tony DeLap: Late Paintings
233 Liberty Street, Newburgh, NY 12550 [email protected] 917 703 9262 visitorcenter.space Fri 4–6, Sat 1–5, weekdays by appointment
Dia Beacon
April 15 – June 3 PROVENANCE: Sophia De JesusSabella, Soull Ogun, Patricia Orpilla, Sagarika Sundaram, and Mia Wright-Ross; curated by Marissa Passi
3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY 12508 [email protected] 845 440 0100 diaart.org Fri – Mon 10–5, reservation required Ongoing Senga Nengudi
Bill Arning Exhibitions | Hudson Valley
Elijah Wheat Showroom 195 Front St, Newburgh, NY 12550 [email protected] Fri – Sun 12–6
UPPER 17 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 12106 [email protected] 617 359 9643
elijahwheatshowroom.com
Until April 26 Marton Nemes: Amplifier
Geary 34 Main Street, Millerton, NY 12546 [email protected] 518 592 1503 geary.nyc Fri – Sun 11–5
Until May 13 Notational: Robin Kahn, John Hatfield, and Paula Hayes May 20 – July 2 Daniela Dooling and Mike Glier: Nature’s Thought Palaces
Jack Shainman Gallery | The School 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 12106 [email protected] 518 758 1628 Sat 11–6
April 15 – May 28 Sun You: New You
Upcoming Michael Snow
Headstone Gallery
Opus40
28 Hurley Ave, Kingston, NY 12401 [email protected] headstonegalleryny.com Fri – Sun 12–5
jackshainman.com
356 George Sickle Road, Saugerties, NY 12477 [email protected] 845 246 3400 opus40.org
April 1–30 Corwyn Lund: Gridlock
See https://opus40.org/events/ for information about live performances, gallery exhibits, workshops, nature walks, and more.
Hessel Museum of Art | CCS Bard Galleries
SEPTEMBER
33 Garden Road, Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504 [email protected] 845 758 7598 ccs.bard.edu Wed – Mon 12–6 April 1 – May 28 Rising and Sinking Again: CCS Bard Class of 2023 Graduate Exhibitions
Magazzino Italian Art 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, NY 10516 [email protected] 845 666 7202 Thurs – Mon 11–5
magazzino.art
April 1 Casting the Past: Arte Povera and Classical Sculpture April 15 Arte Povera and the Baroque: The Evolution of National Identity April 30 Between Cultural Diplomacy and Counterculture: Eugenio Battisti, Alan Solomon, and the exhibition Young Italians in 1968 Ongoing Arte Povera
4 Hudson Street, 3rd Floor, Kinderhook, NY 12106 [email protected] septembergallery.com Thurs – Sun 11–5 April 1 – May 28 Freaky Flowers: Nicole Basilone, Annie Bielski, Han Cao, Jennifer Dierdorf, Sheila Gallagher, Valerie Hammond, Allison Hester, Melinda Kiefer Santiago, Melora Kuhn, Judith Linhares, Becca Mann, Katie Minford, Sarah Alice Moran, Taylor Morgan, Donna Moylan, Jo Nigoghossian, Alison Owen, Amy Ross, Sonia Corina Ruscoe, Allison Schulnik, Ellen Siebers, Eleni Smolen, Caitlan Rose Sweet, Becca Van K, Julia Von Eichel, and Darren Waterston
Thomas Cole National Historic Site 218 Spring Street, Catskill, NY 12414 [email protected] 518 943 7465 @thomascolesite Ticketed
thomascole.org
May 6 – October 29 Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle / Contemporary Practices
AIR DE PARIS
GAGOSIAN
43, rue de la Commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville Tel: 01 87 66 44 06 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.airdeparis.com
9, rue de Castiglione, 75001 Paris 4, rue de Ponthieu, 75008 Paris 26, avenue de l'Europe, 93350 Le Bourget Tel: 01 75 00 05 92 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gagosian.com
Until April 29 Sadie Benning April 1–29 Ben Kinmont May 11–14 Independent New York May 26 – July 22 Trisha Donnelly
Until May 20 Carsten Höller (rue de Castiglione and rue de Ponthieu) Until May 27 Rudolf Stingel (rue de Ponthieu)
GALERIE CHRISTOPHE GAILLARD APPLICAT-PRAZAN Rive gauche, 16, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris Rive droite, 14, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: 01 43 25 39 24 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.applicat-prazan.com
Until May 31 Post-War School of Paris: new accrochage (Rive gauche and Rive droite) May 12–16 TEFAF, New York
5, rue Chapon, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 42 78 49 16 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerie-gaillard.com
Until April 29 Anita Molinero: Les larmes de Louise (Main Space) Until April 29 Leo Orta : Être vivants (Front Space) May 6 – June 17 Georges Noël (Main Space) May 13 – June 17 Marina Gadonneix (Front Space)
GALERIE MARIAN GOODMAN ART : CONCEPT 4, passage Sainte-Avoye, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 53 60 90 30 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerieartconcept.com
April 1 – May 6 Aks Misyuta May 13 – July 23 Nina Childress
66 & 79, rue du Temple, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 48 04 70 52 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mariangoodman.com
Until April 1 William Kentridge: Estampes et Affiches (66 rue du Temple) Until April 29 Group Show: D’ici à l’infini (79 rue du Temple) April 6– May Cristina Iglesias (66 rue du Temple) May 10 – July 1 Michaela Eichwald (79 rue du Temple) June 15–18 Art Basel
CEYSSON & BÉNÉTIÈRE 23, rue du Renard, 75004 Paris Tel: 01 42 77 08 22 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ceyssonbenetiere.com
Until May 6 Antwan Horfee: Cosmogol April 20–23 Art Brussels May 11 – June 24 Frank Stella
GALERIE MAX HETZLER 57 & 46, rue du Temple, 75004 Paris Tel: 01 57 40 60 80 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.maxhetzler.com
Until April 15 William Copley: Autoeroticism – Paintings from 1984 and related works April 22 – June 3 Walton Ford June – July Toby Ziegler
GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL 10, rue Charlot, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 42 77 38 87 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.crousel.com
April 1 – May 30 Heimo Zobernig May 12–16 TEFAF, New York May 27 – July Wade Guyton June 15–18 Art Basel
GALERIE DVIR 13, rue des Arquebusiers, 75003 Paris Tel: 09 81 07 44 08 | 06 03 57 07 45 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.dvirgallery.com
Until May 6 Naama Tsabar April 14–16 miart May 11 – July 6 Bri Williams May 26–28 Paris Gallery Weekend
HUSSENOT 5 bis, rue des Haudriettes, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 48 87 60 81 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriehussenot.com
Until April 22 Claudio Coltorti: Bryter Layter April 27 – June 3 Greetings: Getulio Alviani, Costanza Candeloro, Doriana Chiarini, Gina Fischli, Bernhard Hegglin, Lorenza Longhi, Bruno Marabini, Emanuele Marcuccio, Daniele Milvio, Aldo Mondino, Angelo Savelli, and Jan Vorisek, curated by Antonio De Martino and Edoardo Marabini
Above: Pacita Abad, L.A. Liberty, 1992. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2022; courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate and Spike Island, Bristol; photo: Max McClure. Left: Photograph of the artist, 1980; courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate and Living Magazine. Right: Pacita Abad, European Mask, 1990 (detail). Tate: Purchased with funds provided by the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee 2019; courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate, MCAD Manila, and Tate; photo: At Maculangan/Pioneer Studios.
April 15–September 3, 2023
Major support is provided by Martha and Bruce Atwater and the Martin and Brown Foundation. Additional support is provided by James Amberson, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Robert and Rebecca Pohlad, and Annette and John Whaley. Media partner Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. The exhibition catalogue is generously supported by Tina Kim Gallery, Silverlens Gallery, and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of Walker Art Center publications.
©2023 Walker Art Center
Pacita Abad is organized by the Walker Art Center, with lead support provided by the Henry Luce Foundation; Rosemary and Kevin McNeely, Manitou Fund; and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
MARIANE IBRAHIM
GALERIE MITTERRAND
18, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: 01 81 72 24 60 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.marianeibrahim.com
79, rue du Temple, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 43 26 12 05 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriemitterrand.com
Until June 3 Zohra Opoku: I Have Arisen . . . Part 2
Until April 2 Art Paris Until May 20 Katja Schenker Until May 20 Francisco Sobrino: Espaces Virtuels
GALERIE JOUSSE ENTREPRISE 18, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris 6, rue Saint-Claude, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 53 82 13 60 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.jousse-entreprise.com
Until May 6 Simon Martin (rue Saint-Claude) April – May Mobilier d’architectes du milieu du XXème siècle: Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Mathieu Matégot, Georges Jouve, André Borderie, Serge Mouille, Jean Royère, Maria Pergay, Pierre Paulin, Gino Sarfatti, Philippe Starck, Kristin McKirdy, and Emmanuel Boos (rue de Seine) May 13 – July 1 Jennifer Caubet (rue Saint-Claude)
GALERIE LELONG & CO. 13, rue de Téhéran, 75008 Paris 38, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: 01 45 63 13 19 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerie-lelong.com
Until April 2 Art Paris Until April 29 Pierre Alechinsky: Dernières nouvelles (rue de Téhéran) Until April 29 Barry Flanagan: When Barry meets Jarry (avenue Matignon) April 14–16 miart April 20–23 Art Brussels May 10 – July 13 Mildred Thompson (rue de Téhéran) May 10 – July 13 Christine Safa (avenue Matignon)
GALERIE LOEVENBRUCK 6, rue Jacques Callot, 75006 Paris Tel: 01 53 10 85 68 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.loevenbruck.com
Until April 2 Art Paris Until April 8 Virginie Barré April 14 – May 20 Le noir est une couleur: Jean Dupuy, Jean Degottex, Philippe Mayaux, Michel Parmentier, Steven Parrino, and Alina Szapocznikow
MAYORAL 36, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: 01 42 99 61 79 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriamayoral.com
Until April 2 Art Paris Until May 28 Dalí: Ultralocal / Ultraglobal May 12–16 TEFAF, New York
GALERIE NATHALIE OBADIA 3, rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, 75004 Paris 91, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris Tel: 01 42 74 67 68 Web: www.nathalieobadia.com
Until April 2 Art Paris Until April 24 Josep Grau-Garriga (rue du Cloître St-Merri) Until May 6 Sculpture Group Show (rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré) Until May 15 Jason Saager (rue du Cloître St-Merri, galerie II) April 20–23 Art Brussels April 27 – June 18 Seydou Keita (rue du Cloître St-Merri) May 12–16 TEFAF, New York May 23 – July 22 Robert Kushner (rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré)
PERROTIN 76, rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris 2bis & 8, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: 01 42 16 79 79 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.perrotin.com
Until April 2 Art Paris Until April 15 Susumu Kamijo: The Sun Inside (rue de Turenne) Until April 15 Bernar Venet (rue de Turenne) Until April 22 Bernar Venet (Matignon 8) April 13–16 miart April 20 – May 27 Bernard Frize (rue de Turenne) April 20 – May 27 Claude Rutault: Ici Mieux Qu’en Face (Matignon 2bis) April 20 – May 27 Josh Sperling (rue de Turenne) May 11–16 TEFAF, New York May 17–21 Frieze New York
GALERIE PRAZ DELAVALLADE 5, rue des Haudriettes, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 45 86 20 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.praz-delavallade.com
Until April 2 Art Paris Until April 22 Chris Hood April 20–23 Art Brussels May 4 – June 10 Soufiane Ababri
ALMINE RECH
GALERIE SUZANNE TARASIEVE
64, rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris 18, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: 01 45 83 71 90 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.alminerech.com
7, rue Pastourelle, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 42 71 76 54 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.suzanne-tarasieve.com
Until April 1 Ha Chong-Hyun (avenue Matignon) Until April 2 Art Paris Until April 8 Hiba Schahbaz and Philippe Segond (rue de Turenne) April 15 – June 3 Jorge Galindo and Dr. Esther Mahlangu (rue de Turenne, Showroom) April 13 – May 20 Jean-Baptiste Bernadet (rue de Turenne, front space) April 13 – May 27 Gregor Hildebrandt (avenue Matignon)
MICHEL REIN 42, rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 42 72 68 13 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.michelrein.com
Until May 6 Ariane Loze: Nos Amours Froides April 13–16 miart April 20–23 Art Brussels May 20 – July 22 Dora Garcia
GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC 7, rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris 69, avenue du Général Leclerc, 93500 Pantin Tel: 01 42 72 99 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ropac.net
Until April 22 Wolfgang Laib: City of Silence Until April 22 Megan Rooney: Flyer and the Seed Until May 27 Georg Baselitz: La boussole indique le nord (av du Général Leclerc, 93500 Pantin) April 26 – June 3 Liza Lou: i see you April 26 – June 3 Imran Qureshi May 5–7 Art Busan May 12–16 TEFAF, New York May 17–21 Frieze New York
SKARSTEDT GALLERY 2 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: 01 88 88 48 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.skarstedt.com
Until April 22 KAWS: Time Off May – June Joan Miró: Sculptures May 11–16 TEFAF, New York June 15–18 Art Basel
Until April 2 Art Paris Until May 6 Nina Mae Fowler April 20–23 Art Brussels May 13 – June Recycle Group
TEMPLON 30, rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris 28, rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 42 72 14 10 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.templon.com
Until April 2 Art Paris Until May 13 François Rouan: Odalisques et Pavanes 2009–2020 (rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare) Until May 20 Jan Van Imschoot: Les nocturnes des bonnes vivantes (rue Beaubourg) April 20–23 Art Brussels May 12–16 TEFAF, New York May 24 – July 22 Will Cotton (rue Beaubourg) May 24 – July 22 Chiharu Shiota (rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare)
GALERIE GEORGES-PHILIPPE & NATHALIE VALLOIS 33 & 36, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris Tel: 01 46 34 61 07 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerie-vallois.com
Until May 13 Tomi Ungerer: Tomi l’Alchimiste – Le Grand Œuvre (33 & 36 rue de Seine) May 12–16 TEFAF, New York
ZIDOUN BOSSUYT GALLERY 51, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris Tel: 01 87 44 78 81 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.zidoun-bossuyt.com
Until May 13 YoYo Lander Until May 13 Nate Lewis
DAVID ZWIRNER 108, rue Vieille du Temple, 75003 Paris Tel: 01 85 09 43 21 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.davidzwirner.com
Until April 13 Franz West April 20 – May Sherrie Levine
A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration March 3 – June 25, 2023 Above: Allison Janae Hamilton (born Lexington, Kentucky, 1984; based in New York, New York). Still from A House Called Florida, 2022. Three-channel film installation (color, sound): 34 min., 46 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen
A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration is coorganized by the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition is co-curated by Ryan N. Dennis, Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the Center for Art and Public Exchange, Mississippi Museum of Art, and Jessica Bell Brown, Curator and Department Head for Contemporary Art, Baltimore Museum of Art. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is organized by Kimberli Gant, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, with Indira A. Abiskaroon, Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. Generous support is provided by the Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Teiger Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Akea Brionne Mark Bradford Zoë Charlton Larry W. Cook Torkwase Dyson Theaster Gates Jr. Allison Janae Hamilton Leslie Hewitt Steffani Jemison Robert Pruitt Jamea Richmond-Edwards Carrie Mae Weems
Generous support for the Brooklyn Museum presentation is provided by the Arnold Lehman Exhibition Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maurer Family Foundation, and the Teiger Foundation.
NORWAY VI, VII Operagata 75A, 0194 Oslo Tel: +47 90 27 98 62 [email protected] www.vivii.no Tues – Fri 11–5, Sat – Sun 12–4
Until April 23 Tobias Kaspar: Personal Shopper & The Complete Interview Magazine, Issue 529, Winter 19 (Restaged)
ASTRUP FEARNLEY MUSEET Strandpromenaden 2, 0252 Oslo Tel: +47 22 93 60 60 [email protected] www.afmuseet.no Tues – Fri 12–5, Thurs 12–7, Sat – Sun 11–5
Until May 28 Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: An echo buried deep deep down but calling still June 22 – October 1 Before Tomorrow: Thirty Years of Astrup Fearnley Museet
BERGEN KUNSTHALL Rasmus Meyers allé 5, N-5015 Bergen Tel: +47 94 01 50 50 [email protected] www.kunsthall.no Tues – Sun 11–5, Thurs 11–8
Until April 11 On Self-Defense: A Cassandra Press Reader in Action Until April 11 Oscar Tuazon: Water School May 25 – August 20 Camille Norment: Festival Exhibition 2023
GALLERI K Bjørn Farmanns gate 4, 0271 Oslo Tel: +47 22 55 35 88 [email protected] www.gallerik.com Tues – Fri 11–5, Sat 11–4, Sun 12–4
Until April 30 Nina Roos: The Image is Collapsed Into the Body May 5 – June 11 Christian Messel: What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done May 10–14 Photo London: Else Marie Hagen and Mikkel McAlinden
KUNSTNERNES HUS
Wergelandsveien 17, 0167 Oslo Tel: +47 22 85 34 10 [email protected] www.kunstnerneshus.no Instagram: @kunstnerneshus Tues – Sun 11–5, Thurs 11–7
Until April 16 Ahmed Umar: Glowing Phalanges April 14 – May 14 Sara Eliassen: Images – and Talking Back to Them April 27 – May 14 MFA Degree Show 2023: Academy of Fine Arts Oslo June 2 – August 6 Gunvor Nervold Antonsen June 2 – August 6 Aura Satz
KUNSTHALL STAVANGER Madlaveien 33, 4009 Stavanger Tel: +47 51 56 41 20 [email protected] www.kunsthallstavanger.no Instagram: @kunsthall_stavanger Wed – Sun 11–4
Until April 30 Tiril Hasselknippe: Play Until May 7 Olivia Douglass: Ordinary Dreams
OSL CONTEMPORARY Haxthausens gate 3, 0263 Oslo Tel: +47 23 27 06 76 [email protected] www.oslcontemporary.com Tues – Fri 12–5, Sat 12–4
Until April 15 Marie Bovo: La luz o la sombra April 21 – May 20 Ask Bjørlo & Britta Marakatt-Labba May 26 – August 12 Ane Graff
PEDER LUND Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo Tel: +47 22 01 55 55 [email protected] www.pederlund.no Wed – Sat 12–4
April 1 – June 3 Robert Irwin
HENIE ONSTAD KUNSTSENTER Sonja Henies vei 31, 1311 Høvikodden Tel: +47 67 80 48 80 [email protected] www.hok.no Tues – Sun 11–5, Thurs 11–9
Until June 18 Marc Chagall: World in Turmoil April 14 – September 17 New Visions: The Henie Onstad Triennal for Photography and New Media April 27, 2023 – December 31, 2024 Merz! Flux! Pop!: New installation Permanent installation Yayoi Kusama: Hymn of Life Until April 30 The Henie Onstad Collection: An Exhilarating Experience for a Young Mind Until April 30 Inghild Karlsen: Our Inner Beasts
Jochen Klein - After The Light
17 March – 27 August 2023
Curated by Luca Lo Pinto and Wolfgang Tillmans with additional works by Julie Ault, Thomas Eggerer, Ull Hohn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Amelie von Wulffen MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome Free entry museomacro.it
ATLANTA
COLUMBUS
MIAMI
SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film
Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University
The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse
1600 Peachtree St NW, Atlanta, GA 30309 Tel: 404 253 3132 Web: www.scadfash.org Instagram: @scadfash
Until April 16 Horst P. Horst: Essence of the Times Until June 30 Madame Grés: The Art of Draping
ASPEN Aspen Art Museum 637 E Hyman Ave, Aspen, CO 81611 Tel: 970 925 8050 Web: www.aspenartmuseum.org
Until April 2 Sanya Kantarovsky: A Solid House Until April 2 Mungo Thomson: Sculptures Until April 2 Shadow Tracer: Works on Paper Until November 5 Jeffrey Gibson: THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING
BOSTON deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
1871 North High St, Columbus, OH 43210 Tel: 614 292 3535 Web: www.wexarts.org
Until July 9 A.K. Burns: Of space we are . . . Until July 9 Sa’dia Rehman: the river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors / have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air Until July 9 Anna Tsouhlarakis: A Native Guide Project, Columbus Until July 9 Meditation Ocean Constellation: Meditation Ocean
Walker Art Center
DALLAS Dallas Contemporary 161 Glass St, Dallas, TX 75207 Tel: 214 821 2522 Web: www.dallascontemporary.org Instagram: @dallascontemporary
Until May 8 Melvin Edwards: Brighter Days Until August Apariciones/Apparitions Until August Downstream
CAMBRIDGE
FORT WORTH
MIT List Visual Arts Center
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
20 Ames St, Cambridge, MA 02139 Tel: 617 253 4680 Web: listart.mit.edu
Until June 26 List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen April 4 – July 30 Lex Brown: Carnelian April 4 – July 30 Sung Tieu: Civic Floor
COLD SPRING Magazzino Italian Art Foundation
Until April 29 The Italians Until April 29 The Bitter Years Photography Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans Until April 29 New European and American Painters and Sculptors Until April 29 Selections from the Elizabeth Margulies Collection
MINNEAPOLIS
Until July 23 Shepard Fairey: Backward Forward April 20 – August 27 Eduardo Sarabia: This Must Be The Place April 20 – December 31 Cerámica Suro: A Story of Collaboration, Production, and Collecting in the Contemporary Arts
51 Sandy Pond Rd, Lincoln, MA 01773 Tel: 781 259 8355 Web: www.thetrustees.org/decordova
591 NW 27th St, Miami, FL 33127 Tel: 305 576 1051 Web: www.margulieswarehouse.com
3200 Darnell St, Fort Worth, TX 76107 Tel: 817 738 9215 Web: www.themodern.org
Until April 30
I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen
HOUSTON Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, NY 10516 Tel: 845 666 7202 Web: www.magazzino.art
5216 Montrose Blvd, Houston, TX 77006 Tel: 713 284 8250 Web: www.camh.org
April 1 Casting the Past: Arte Povera and Classical Sculpture April 15 Arte Povera and the Baroque: The Evolution of National Identity April 30 Between Cultural Diplomacy and Counterculture: Eugenio Battisti, Alan Solomon, and the exhibition Young Italians in 1968 Ongoing Arte Povera
Until July 2 Teen Council-Curated 13th Biennial Exhibition: Where Do We Go From Here?
725 Vineland Pl, Minneapolis, MN 55403 Tel: 612 375 7600 Web: www.walkerart.org
Until April 23 Sarah Michelson: /\ March 2020 (4pb) Until July 16 Paul Chan: Breathers Until November 19 Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection Until November 19 Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection Until January 21, 2024 Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present April 15 – September 3 Pacita Abad
NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014 Tel: 212 570 3600 Web: www.whitney.org
Until April 2 Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side Until April 23 no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria April 19 – August Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map April 19 – August Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century Ongoing The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965
Contemporary Art in U.S. Museums
PHILADELPHIA
RENO
SCOTTSDALE
The Fabric Workshop and Museum
Nevada Museum of Art
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
1214 Arch St, Philadelphia, PA 19107 Tel: 215 561 8888 Web: www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org
Donald W. Reynolds Center for the Visual Arts, E. L. Wiegand Gallery 160 West Liberty St, Reno, NV 89501 Tel: 775 329 3333 Web: www.nevadaart.org
7374 East 2nd St, Scottsdale, AZ 85251 Tel: 480 874 4666 Web: www.smoca.org
Until April 23 In Focus: Isaac Julien Until May 7 Rose B. Simpson: Dream House Until July 23 Henry Taylor: Nothing Change, Nothing Strange
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania 118 South 36th St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Tel: 215 898 7108 Web: www.icaphila.org Instagram: @ICAPhiladelphia
Until July 9 Until July 9
Terence Nance: Swarm Carolyn Lazard: Long Take
Until July 23 Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II Until September 10 Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity
VIRGINIA BEACH
ST. LOUIS
Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 3750 Washington Blvd, St Louis, MO 63108 Tel: 314 535 4660 Web: www.camstl.org
Until August 13 on the Earth
Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming
Philadelphia Museum of Art Benjamin Franklin Pkwy & 26th St, Philadelphia, PA 19130 Tel: 215 763 8100 Web: www.philamuseum.org
Until April 23 Rhythms of Nature: The Art & Design of DRIFT Until May 29 Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi— A Marvellous Entanglement Until July 3 Zoe Leonard: Strange Fruit Until January 1, 2024 Rodin’s Hands (Rodin Museum) April 24 – August 6 Judith Joy Ross
April – May William Schwedler: Against the Grain
The University of the Arts Philadelphia Art Alliance 251 S 18th St, Philadelphia, PA 19103 Tel: 215 545 4302
April – May Ariadne’s Thread: Caroline Achaintre, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Sophie Stone, and Margo Wolowiec
2200 Parks Ave, Virginia Beach, VA 23451 Tel: 757 425 0000 Web: www.virginiamoca.org Instagram: @virginiamoca
Until June 11 Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation Until June 11 LaToya M. Hobbs: Flourish Until June 11 Atrium Artists in Residence: Amber Pierce, Poetry Jackson, and Nadd Harvin
SAN DIEGO Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) 700 Prospect St, La Jolla, CA 92037 (MCASD) 1100 Kettner Blvd, San Diego CA 92101 (MCASD Downtown) Tel: 858 454 3541 Web: www.mcasd.org
Until August 13 Celia Álvarez Muñoz (MCASD) Until August 13 Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido (MCASD) Ongoing Inaugural Collection Installation (MCASD) MCASD Downtown is temporarily closed through April.
The University of the Arts Rosenwald Wolf Gallery 333 South Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19102 Tel: 215 717 6480
Until April 30 Inside Job: Staff Selections from the SMoCA Collection Until August 6 Phillip K. Smith III: Three Parallels Until August 27 Language in Times of Miscommunication
SAVANNAH SCAD Museum of Art 601 Turner Blvd, Savannah, GA 31401 Tel: 912 525 7191 Web: www.scadmoa.org Instagram: @scadmoa
Until April 23 Patrick Dougherty: Making the Birds Proud Until May 15 Gyun Hur: There is Peace Like a River Until June 5 Josh Sperling: What a Relief Until July 2 Jorge Pardo: JP@SCAD Until July 3 Rachel Feinstein: Façade Until July 3 Hassan Hajjaj: 1444 Until July 3 Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong: Museum of the Lost (Strangers at Home) Until July 17 Ann Craven: Twelve Moons Until July 17 Chase Hall: The Close of Day Until July 24 Mika Rottenberg: Cosmic Generator
WILMINGTON The Delaware Contemporary 200 South Madison St, Wilmington, DE 19801 Tel: 302 656 6466 Web: www.decontemporary.org
Until April 23 Group Exhibition: Artifact Until April 23 Dana Sherwood and Beth Galton: Setting the Table Until May 28 Zoe Scruggs: Double Sky Until May 28 How Can A Space Be Nourishing?: Collaborative Installation between West Chester University students and Delaware Urban Greens Until May 28 Group Exhibition: More Than A Woman? Until May 28 Federico Uribe: Plastic Reef Until May 28 Adrian L. Burrell: The Saints Step in Congo Time Until May 31 Leanna Bacani: Outside In Until August 27 Kibaate Aloysius Ssalongo and Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine: The Platform Gallery Until April 30 Rich Lopez and Richard Remenick: Horizons May 4–28 Roberta Tucci: Second Nature
Contemporary Art in U.S. Museums
WHITNEY
Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street
April 19–August 2023 Become a member today to join us for previews on April 13–17
JAUNE QUICK-TOSEE SMITH MEMORY MAP
whitney.org @whitneymuseum #whitneymuseum
Generous support for Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map is provided by
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Homeland, 2017. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in. (121.9 x 182.9 cm). Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; bequest of John Mortimer Schiff by exchange. ©️ Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Photograph by Tom Loonan and Brenda Bieger for Buffalo AKG Art Museum
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Opposite page: Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992–93, mixed media, metal shelf structure, books, magazines, newspapers, ephemera, BETA video cases, twenty-five hours of digitized video, two monitors, one video projection, cassette cases, sound, acrylic signs, four wooden structures, acrylic signs on four shelves, four cassette players, thirty wooden plaques with rubber-stamped text. Installation view, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, 1992. Photo: Andrea Stappert.
CLAIRE BISHOP ON THE SUPERABUNDANCE OF RESEARCH-BASED ART
POSTCARDS, FAXES, AND EMAIL PRINTOUTS lie wanly in a vitrine. A plywood shelving unit holds rows of informational leaflets. One gallery wall is plastered with graphs and charts. Another is covered in hundreds of seemingly identical photographs. On a bank of video monitors, talking heads are explaining something. In a darkened corner, a slide projector clunks slowly through a carousel of images. Nearby, a 16-mm film whirs alongside a soporific voice-over. An illuminated table is covered in papers and newspaper clippings marked up with Post-its. Every object on display is accompanied by a lengthy explanatory caption written by the artist, also available as a pamphlet. If any of this sounds familiar, you’ve been in the presence of research-based art. Although the elements vary, the genre is characterized by a reliance on text and discourse to support an abundance of materials, distributed spatially. The horizontal axis (vitrines, tables) tends to be privileged over the vertical, and the overall structure is additive rather than distilled, obeying a logic of more is more. Whenever I encounter one of these installations, I start to experience a feeling of mild panic: How much time is it going to take to wade through this? Rarely do I experience surprise. Today, research-based art is nothing novel; its presence is almost mandatory in any serious exhibition. But it has never been clearly defined—or, for that matter, critiqued. It has much in common with other trends that have arisen since the 1990s, such as the artist-curated exhibition and the “archival turn,” but it is not fully congruent with either.1 The chief antecedents of research-based art are not difficult to identify: photodocumentary captioning in the tradition of Lewis Hine; the film essay as defined by Hans Richter and practiced by auteurs ranging from Chris Marker to Harun Farocki; and the interdisciplinary Conceptualism of artists like Mary Kelly, Susan Hiller, and Hans Haacke (who in the ’70s engaged with psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology, respectively). That said, changes in art education have arguably been a more decisive influence than any of these forebears. Although research-based art is a global phenomenon, it is inseparable from the rise of doctoral programs for artists in the West, specifically in Europe, in the early ’90s. According to a 2012 survey conducted by art historian James Elkins, seventy-three institutions in Europe offered Ph.D.s in studio art, forty-two of which were in the UK alone—striking statistics when compared with the five in Canada, seven in the US, and four in Brazil.2 Unlike master-of-fine-arts degrees (the usual highereducation qualification for artists), doctoral programs generally expect that artistic practice be supplemented by written research—either as a separate but related dissertation or made legible within the artwork itself. While some of the artists I discuss later were born outside the West, they have all passed through art schools in Europe or North America. Even if they don’t have doctorates, the intellectual milieu of these programs informs their work, along with the broader conscription of education to neoliberal systems of value (such as “return on investment” and “measurable impact”).
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the Ph.D.-in-fine-art boom. One is that it exacerbates hierarchies of economic privilege already endemic to art education. Another is that art, under the pressure of academicization, becomes tame, systematic, and professional. For artist Hito Steyerl, “artistic research” has even become a new discipline, one that normalizes, regulates, and ensures the repetition of protocols.3 Yet as Elkins points out, very few influential texts or manifestos by artists of the past would ever have earned their writers a doctorate, because some of the best writing by artists has been dogmatic and impulsive rather than laboriously researched and peer-reviewed. My own focus is not on the neoliberal university context, since this has been much discussed already, along with the attempt to analyze artistic research—a broader historical category of which I take research-based art to be a recent subset— in terms of knowledge production and epistemology.4 Nor do I want to recap the longer history of postwar art education—the shift, identified by art historian Howard Singerman, from artisanal training in technical skills to more discursive forms of practice.5 Nor do I look at moving-image work (whose lineage has been well charted by Steyerl), even though it shares many of the same concerns as the practices discussed in this essay. Instead, my goal is to analyze the forms that artistic research takes, the type of knowledge that artists produce, and how the viewer attends to the information that has been assembled. My point is that research-based installation art—its techniques of display, its accumulation and spatialization of information, its model of research, its construction of a viewing subject, and its relationship to knowledge and truth—cannot be understood in isolation from contemporaneous developments in digital technology. RENÉE GREEN’S INSTALLATION Import/Export Funk Office, 1992–93, exemplifies the introduction of research-based art as a new hybrid category in the early ’90s.6 Thematically, it explores African diasporic culture, bohemia, and subculture. Formally, it comprises metal shelving units filled with books, magazines, and photographs borrowed from the German critic Diedrich Diederichsen, who was also extensively interviewed for the project. Green’s video recordings total more than twenty-six hours and can be consulted by viewers, as can her audio recordings and reading materials. Import/Export marks a rupture with preceding modes of artistic research by inviting the viewer to be a user, someone who can explore the fragments, synthesize them, and potentially even mobilize the material for his or her own research (or at least perform that role—notice the white gloves placed on top of a box marked data). In 1995, Green launched a version of the work as a cd-rom, arguing that her research could be more easily consumed via digital hyperlinks than in a gallery where viewers never seem to have enough time. Created before use of the internet was widespread, Import/Export points to a distributed model of knowledge that has since become the norm. Rather than APRIL 2023 123
Above: Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office (detail), 1992–93, mised media, metal shelf structure, books, magazines, newspapers, ephemera, BETA video cases, twenty-five hours of digitized video, two monitors, one video projection, cassette cases, sound, acrylic signs, four wooden structures, acrylic signs on four shelves, four cassette players, thirty wooden plaques with rubberstamped text. Installation view, Migros Museum, Zurich, 2022. Photo: Stefan Altenburger.
Opposite page: Mario García Torres, ¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer? (Have You Ever Seen the Snow?), 2010, eighty-nine 35-mm slides transferred to HD video, color, sound, 56 minutes. Installation view, Fridericianum, Kassel, 2012. From Documenta 13. Photo: Roman März.
deploying an authorial voice to publicize information (as had Haacke), Green suggests that knowledge is networked, collaborative, and in process. Significantly, her model is not the internet but hypertext: a form of nonsequential writing based on links between verbal and visual information that went on to become the key structural protocol of the internet. Permitting readers to navigate their own paths through masses of information, hypertext was heralded by literary critics like George Landow as a realization of poststructuralist theories of authorship, a virtual instantiation of Deleuze and Guattari’s centerless rhizome.7 In an essay reflecting on the Import/Export cd-rom, Green approvingly quotes Landow: “Quantity removes mastery and authority, for one can only sample, not master, a text.”8 Back in 1993, Green described her strategy as deliberately avoiding a simple takeaway: The installation “mocks didacticism,” she wrote, and demonstrates “the complexity of things” rather than making “any one kind of authoritative statement about the way things are.”9 124 ARTFORUM
In addition to Green, other pioneers of research-based art include interdisciplinary collectives like the Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles, formed in 1994), MAP Office (Hong Kong, 1996), and Multiplicity (Milan, 2000) and a previous generation of artists such as Antoni Muntadas (Spain, born in 1942). These first-phase artists undertook their own primary investigations of various topics, often in the form of interviews, critical mapping, or digital archives. Treating research as a public resource, they disseminated their fieldwork on new media interfaces including interactive monitors and websites, transposing materials from walls to shelves and tables, where they could be read in any order, creating multidirectional audiovisual environments that pointedly refrained from directing readers along a particular path or providing an overarching narrative.10 It’s important to stress that for Green and her generation, this aversion to authorial mastery was a response not just to poststructuralism but also to feminist and postcolonial theory, which variously critiqued linear history as evolutionary, univocal, masculinist, and imperial. To a degree, this rejection of mastery can be seen as a particularly North American response to French theory: In academia and art schools, poststructuralist antifoundationalism (including the “death of the author”) was shifted onto the category of identity as the new basis for critique. The situatedness of the authorial subject, manifest as a sensitivity for stating the artist’s own “positionality,” came to assume a new importance. The Whitney Independent Study Program became the leading incubator of such work, exposing students to seminars that fused aspects of Derridean différance and Lyotard’s end of grand narratives with Frankfurt School critical theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism. When the rejection of linear argumentation and an authorial voice converged with a restructuring of information and the promise of a collectivized knowledge through new digital technologies, a decisive reorganization of artistic form was accomplished. Spatialized and networked, information floated free of the seriality that had dominated art of the ’60s and ’70s. Consciously or unconsciously, these new theoretical horizons led to a post-hermeneutic position—in other words, to hesitation over forceful interpretation. A project was said to “ask questions about” or “draw attention to” a topic, without any obligation to formulate conclusions or provide an easily digestible message. With hindsight, we can see that the nonlinearity of digital hypertext and poststructuralism cut two ways: On the one hand, it helped to dismantle master narratives; on the other, it produced an excess of information that was difficult, if not impossible, to meaningfully grasp. THE SECOND PHASE of research-based art overlaps chronologically with the first but is characterized by an inverse relationship to new technology, a rejection of digital media, and a fascination with the obsolete and the analog: 35-mm slides, celluloid film, record players, and the like. The turn to dead tech in the mid-to-late ’90s was accompanied by another unexpected regression—toward narrative. In works by this cohort—Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Mario García Torres, Danh Vo, and others—information confronts the viewer in fragmentary arrays, but the rhizomatic structure is reined in by a more conventional mode of storytelling that, while often highly elliptical and subjective, does not invite viewers to choose their own adventure. Instead, elements are presented in particular sequences (a row of captioned images, a series of slides, a film with a narrated soundtrack). The seriality that dominated the art of the ’60s and ’70s stages a partial return. A theoretically informed refusal of master narratives is replaced by a desire to show the multiple ways in which individual micronarratives— sometimes fictional, as in many of García Torres’s works—jostle and intersect with history.11 The self becomes a glue that enables the debris of the past to stick together, at least temporarily. Art historian Hal Foster took a psychoanalytic approach to this tendency in a 2004 essay, describing research-based art as having an “archival impulse”: The
For fabulation to have critical currency, it matters which histories are being retrieved and why. artist demonstrates a will to “connect what cannot be connected,” akin to the paranoiac’s ability to make connections among disparate points, always with him- or herself at the center.12 Foster refers to the internet, but primarily to oppose its interface to the tactility of archival art; he doesn’t mention that, in fact, the internet is the technological enabler of this art’s connectionist mentality. I would thus revise Foster’s argument: The links made by artists are less the result of an unconscious pathological response to social conditions (in Foster’s telling, a will to relate in a time of disconnected social order) than an effect of internalizing the apparatus through which their research is increasingly conducted. The attitude can be glimpsed in the following observations by García Torres: Obviously [the internet] is always my first point of contact with a subject and many times it leads me to investigate things in a less methodological way, a richer way. It situates normal people, everyday people, at the same level as books and official sources. [The] internet is present all the time, and I don’t blame it for often being wrong. I like it. What better way to divert an investigation towards something contradictory or further from the truth. It is there that one finds relations that potentially become something interesting.13
In other words, the internet liberates the artist-researcher from academic protocols, and a different type of research becomes possible and validated—a line of thinking governed by drift rather than depth, creative inaccuracy rather than expertise, and accessibility rather than the ivory tower. Nicolas Bourriaud’s term semionaut might be the best description of this approach: Drifting from signifier to signifier, the artist invents meandering trajectories between cultural signs.14 In contrast to the first phase, which used a digital logic (the hyperlink) to structure the presentation of primary research, in this second phase a digital dérive is presented as an analog display. The cold uniformity of the plasma screen is discarded in favor of a more auratic interface and array of objects. Foster’s will to “connect what cannot be connected” is less a paranoiac symptom than a definition of surfing, updating a trajectory of chance encounters that can be traced from the nineteenthcentury flaneur to Surrealism to the Situationists—but now with a technological substrate in place of the unconscious. The second phase of research-based art pries open a gap between research and truth: Rather than being grounded in social themes (migration, translation, female labor, environmental damage), the artwork pulls disparate strands together APRIL 2023 125
through fiction and subjective speculation. García Torres has made such “subjective” works about artists including Vito Acconci, Martin Kippenberger, and Robert Rauschenberg. Similar pantheons can be found in the work of Sam Durant (in pieces referencing Robert Smithson and the Case Study Houses) and Jonathan Monk (who has built a career out of recasting canonical male artists from the ’60s onward). Here, artistic research opens avenues overlooked by hegemonic historical narratives but tends to shore up a canon of white male protagonists, effectively consolidating received history rather than contesting it. Compare this with the most powerful and radical engagement with micronarrative during the same period, Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation.” Her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts” wrestles with the necessity of invention, and the ethical obligations of the researcher, in the face of an archive’s limitations, exclusions, and deletions.15 The gap, in her case, concerns the lives of two young women who did not survive the Middle Passage, and the fraught question of how to grant them historical visibility. For fabulation to have critical currency, it matters which histories are being retrieved and why. THE THIRD PHASE of research-based art can be characterized as fully post-internet, by which I mean not an embrace of or a reaction to but a complete inhabitation of digital logic. It abandons the desire to find connections among links, turning instead toward what art historian David Joselit has described as “aggregation”: the selection and configuration of relatively autonomous elements that may signify disparate values or epistemologies.16 Joselit argues that aggregation captures the asynchrony of globalization while also reflecting an “epistemology of search”:
126 ARTFORUM
In his words, “What matters more in our contemporary digital world is not making content, but configuring it, searching for it, finding what you need and making meaning from it.”17 Artists no longer undertake their own research but download, assemble, and recontextualize existing materials in a desultory updating of appropriation and the readymade. What results is a conflation: Search becomes research. The difference is subtle but important. Searching is the preliminary stage of looking for something via a search engine, “Googling.” Research proper involves analysis, evaluation, and a new way of approaching a problem. Search involves the adaptation of one’s ideas to the language of “search terms”—preexisting concepts most likely to throw up results—whereas research (both online and offline) involves asking fresh questions and elaborating new terminologies yet to be recognized by the algorithm. One manifestation of aggregative search-as-research is the propensity to show preexisting image archives, as in Akram Zaatari’s re-presentation of Hashem el Madani’s studio portraiture (Objects of Study/Studio Practices, 2007) or Taryn Simon’s photographs of folders from the New York Public Library (“The Color of a Flea’s Eye: The Picture Collection,” 2013). Other artists aggregate particular types of images: Zoe Leonard’s collection of several thousand postcards of Niagara Falls (You see I am here after all, 2008), or Maryam Jafri’s ongoing compilation of photographs of postcolonial celebration (Independence Day 1934–1975, 2009–), both of which are arranged upon the wall in grids that evoke a half-loaded page of image-search results. It’s rare to find artists who impose an original framework onto aggregation. Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists Relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born
between c. 1300–1870, 2007, by Danish artist Henrik Olesen, is one refreshing example. Olesen (mis)reads art history through a blatantly anachronistic queer lens, organizing digital copies of paintings and prints and excerpts of preexisting scholarship into themes like “Lesbian Visibility,” “Some Faggy Gestures,” and “Anal Sex in England.” The result is a romp through art history that uses accumulation and juxtaposition to reread works like Gustave Caillebotte’s plein air paintings of men, now slyly recategorized as “cruising.” More typical, however, is the open-ended aggregation of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Truth Study Center,” 2005–. The installation changes from exhibition to exhibition but always consists of slim wooden tables (originally twenty-four, sometimes as many as thirty-seven) on which are displayed articles, ephemera, the occasional photo by Tillmans, and texts that locate the present moment in relation to a historical event (e.g., “Now 1993 is as long ago as the Civil Rights Act was in 1993”). An online visualizer of a 2017 version of one table is hosted on the Tate website, which enables the viewer to zoom in and peruse its content.18 Cuttings from newspapers—primarily liberal-left ones like The Guardian—and scientific journals sit next to photographs of nature, abstract forms made by running a blank sheet through a printer, and an empty packet of potato chips. In an earnest voice-over, Tillmans elucidates connections among the items that would otherwise be difficult to grasp and makes the oft-repeated point that nowadays we can pick news sources that tell us what we want to hear. In a telling shift from research installations of the early ’90s, Tillmans’s commentary invokes research as a matter of “authority” and “truth.” The poststructuralist project to dismantle these terms was completely blindsided by the rise of
Below: Henrik Olesen, Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists relevant to Homo-Social Culture V/ American Male Bodies/English Lads/Melancholy, 2007, collage, ink-jet prints on board, 4' 7 1⁄8" × 19' 8 1⁄4".
Above: Taryn Simon, Folder: Broken Objects, 2012, ink-jet print, framed 47 × 62". From the series “The Color of a Flea’s Eye: The Picture Collection,” 2013.
APRIL 2023 127
truthiness and fake news. Accordingly, the “free library” aesthetic of the first phase of research-based art has been replaced by a more careful, even precious approach to composition. In “Truth Study Center,” we can only read the information through glass, not handle it. The formalism of the artist’s arrangement implies that there are connections to grasp among the materials—that the truth is out there. But because the arrangements aren’t linear, taxonomic, or particularly distinctive, the materials in each vitrine form the visual analogue of a word cloud, conveying a general impression rather than a set of specific relationships.19 In a 2022 review of Tillmans’s installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Peter Schjeldahl confessed to “only quickly scanning the complicated table works, which smartly anticipated today’s torrent of information via institutional and social media—and its numbing effect.”20 “Truth Study Center” reflects on post-truth and the end of an authoritative news media but equally seems to be a symptom of this demise. Each table is effectively a material reformatting of an internet search: The links among the items on display seem to be a conflation of subjective curiosity and the algorithmic. The sheer quantity of tables, each containing twenty or so items, promotes a type of rapid reading familiar to us from online browsing. Because of this, and the work’s instability of content—“refreshed” for every exhibition—“Truth Study Center” seems to inhabit a post-internet consciousness. EACH PHASE of research-based art presents a different understanding of what constitutes knowledge and a different approach to spectatorial labor. In the first phase, the artist invites the viewer to piece together parts from the materials provided to form their own historical narrative and to experience in their bodies and minds the complexity of a given (usually counterhegemonic) topic. Knowledge aspires to be new knowledge. In the second phase, the viewer listens to or reads a narrative crafted by the artist. Facts may be partly fictionalized, but there remains a sense of correcting or enhancing history, often through a counter- or micronarrative. The third phase returns the viewer to sifting through information, albeit now in a formal, less interactive mode. Knowledge is the aggregation of preexisting data, and the work accordingly invites meta-reflection on the production of knowledge as truth. In each case, though, despite creating the look or atmosphere
128 ARTFORUM
Many of these pieces convey a sense of being immersed—even lost—in data.
of research, artists are reluctant to draw conclusions. Many of these pieces convey a sense of being immersed—even lost—in data. The trajectory of research-based art thus tracks and illuminates a subtle restructuring of what constitutes knowledge and how we should attend to it. As audience members, we have felt the difficulty of seeing ever larger exhibitions since the biennial boom of the ’90s. The need for attention triage in such exhibitions became endemic after the turn of the millennium. Documenta 11, in 2002, famously included more than six hundred hours of video, which viewers could see only if they stayed for the full length of the hundred-day exhibition. Of course, the larger context for such visual saturation lies beyond exhibition culture. The pressure placed upon the human capacity to digest information is an inevitable outcome of the “attention economy,” in which businesses compete for consumers’ consideration, as measured by clicks on pop-ups, sponsored posts, personalized offers, etc. My concern here is less with the ethics of unsolicited advertising than with the visual and semiotic interference to which we have become habituated and the perceptual routines that have formed and hardened in response. I have learned to recognize and scroll past interruptions. Block it out, resume reading, scroll down, repeat. I have developed new forms of focus, from the selective blinkering of vision (being able to read a text despite the flashing banner next to it) to enhanced peripheral attention (reading my phone while walking down the street). I have trained myself to switch quickly among focal points and to recover more rapidly after interruptions. At times, this shuttling of attention strikes me as a useful skill; at others, I wish I hadn’t needed to acquire it. Two key rubrics for the new styles of literacy and spectatorship that have emerged in the past two decades are skimming and sampling. When skimming, we accelerate our reading to get the gist. On the average web page, one study reports, users read about 20 percent of the words. 21 The more text there is to process, the less we absorb and the faster we hit our attention ceiling. Sampling, by contrast, is what scientists do when a data set is too large to be analyzed in full. A subset is selected for analysis; results are inferred and then generalized back to the larger unit. This is arguably the best way to experience research-heavy installations within a reasonable time frame and perhaps explains why so much of this art is based on modular units (like Tillmans’s tables). We have to assume that the artist doesn’t expect us to digest all the material on display, just to taste a few dishes. However we decide to tackle such installations, the effects of reading online bear directly on our literacy as viewers of art. When large amounts of text are deployed in an installation, it is more likely to be experienced as a continuation of data overload rather than as a sensuous
Opposite page: Screen capture from Tate Modern’s visualizer of Wolfgang Tillmans’s 2017 truth study center, Tate. From the series “Truth Study Center,” 2005–. Above: Two images from Forensic Architecture’s Killing in Umm al-Hiran, 2017–19, video and photography analysis, 3D modeling, digital video (color, sound, various durations). From “The Long Duration of a Split Second,” 2018. Left photo: Activestills Collective.
respite. This is not to say that text can’t be enjoyable or that it automatically feels like onerous labor. My point is that the craft of assembling language, and how it is presented, needs to transcend quotidian communicational efficiency. Text is never neutral but is shaped by the mode of its delivery. A review of Renée Green’s exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles in 2015 is notable for containing sentiments not found in criticism of her work twenty years earlier. Tellingly, it couches this criticism in the vocabulary of postdigital fatigue: This abundance of information—of content—displayed with clinical restraint is difficult to absorb and easiest to conceive of as a grouping of thoughts whose relationship belonged primarily to the artist herself. . . . the viewer browsed around, forever waiting for the artist to arrive in some authorial form to tell her how it fit together. This is what it feels like to be alone with information: awash in abundance, forever waiting for the connection to go through, confronted with the generous and endlessly frustrating opportunity to make sense of matter. 22
It’s not that Green significantly changed her artistic methods after Import/ Export Funk Office. What has changed is the viewer’s ability and desire to put in the effort of looking. An abundance of information without authorial pointers now feels unwelcome, plunging us into intellectual uncertainty. “Waiting for the connection to go through”—the existential limbo of buffering—signals the degree to which certain artistic strategies from the ’90s are no longer reaching their audience, who feel less and less willing to take up the baton of co-researcher. Such exhibitions seem to demand a kind of reading that is no longer pleasurable or innovative or liberating but echoes the all-too-routine experience of connecting the dots as we search the Web, frantically trying to synthesize a morass of conflicting opinions (about medical conditions, hotels, recipes). Renouncing the authorial rudder is no longer subversive but experienced as frustrating, burdensome, and opaque. This is not to invalidate the experiments of the ’90s—spatialized materials, a fragmented authorial voice, and information as public resource. In their moment, these were necessary alternatives to the hegemony of white male voices and offered
crucial opportunities for cross-disciplinary research that had not yet found a place within academia. Today, however, the stakes have changed. Some formal strategies might need to be rethought. On the other side of aggregation and fragmentation, I find myself yearning for selection and synthesis—a directed series of connections that go beyond the subjective, contingent, and accumulative. In the strongest examples of research-based art, the viewer is offered a signal rather than noise, an original proposition founded on a clear research question rather than inchoate curiosity. If this sounds like a crypto-academic call to apply traditional research criteria to works of art, then it is, to an extent: Earlier, I differentiated between search and research, and I unabashedly prefer the latter. But art can also become academic. The practice that best represents the vanguard of research-based art (and a possible fourth phase) is housed at a university and is organized precisely around strong arguments that refute neutrality. Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary group of academics based at Goldsmiths, University of London, since 2010, did not begin as an artistic collective but is now recognized as such by museums globally. Although their research has been used in international courtrooms, United Nations assemblies, and truth commissions, it makes more frequent appearances in art institutions, where the group’s audiovisual installations elegantly present video, architectural models, maps, timelines, wall texts, and diagrams. The group’s interests are multiple but center on state and corporate violations of human rights. Through 3D modeling, pattern analysis, and geolocation, among many other methods, Forensic Architecture uncover counterevidence to the established narrative, often reframing who is culpable. For example, their Turner Prize presentation at Tate Britain in 2018, “The Long Duration of a Split Second,” was based on dozens of blurry and chaotic cell-phone videos of the Israeli police’s nocturnal raid of a Bedouin village the previous year, which had destroyed buildings and killed two people. Forensic Architecture analyzed the video metadata (e.g., time stamps) and the sound of gunfire—along with eyewitness accounts, autopsy reports, and other materials—to disprove the police’s version of what occurred.23 In their interdisciplinarity and technophilia, Forensic Architecture have much in common with the first phase of research-based art. Formally, the aesthetic is APRIL 2023 129
The stakes have changed. Some formal strategies might need to be rethought.
informational and high-tech. The content is counterhegemonic. The group insist on the value of their work as a public resource. Rather than being noncommittal to avoid didacticism or authoritarianism, however, Forensic Architecture believe that “having an axe to grind should sharpen the quality of one’s data rather than blunt one’s argument.”24 Accordingly, the viewer is carefully taken along the process of the group’s research method, which they call “forensis.”25 The spectator is no longer expected to formulate their own arguments (as in phase one), or to second-guess the artist’s connections (as in phase three), but to follow the forensic method to its logical conclusion. There is no room for ambiguity or contestation. My point is not to disparage Forensic Architecture’s highly original practice and often dazzlingly inventive research, but to draw attention to how the relationship to truth has changed once more in this genre of art. Data produces information, information produces knowledge, and knowledge produces truth—now in the service of explicitly ethical claims. Yet the viewer’s experience of this in the gallery still feels like an exercise in processing and visualizing too much information. The sense of monodirectionality is only intensified by the fact that Forensic Architecture hold our hand throughout. WE NEED TO BE CAREFUL what we wish for: at one pole, the presentation of information without an authorial voice or position; at the other, a position that can’t be contested, only agreed with. That said, artistic research can push against the limits of academic research in two ways: first, by allowing personal narrative and challenging an objective relationship to truth via fiction and fabulation (a tendency already present in academia via feminism and Black studies); and second, by presenting research in aesthetic forms that exceed the merely informative (the pleasure of a well-crafted story; connections and juxtapositions that surprise and delight). Since the late 1970s, Egyptian artist Anna Boghiguian has produced small-scale paintings, collages, and books that reflect her itinerant lifestyle—travels across the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and farther afield. She investigates the past, charting the intertwining paths that have led to the current moment. Her works on paper and canvas are often overlaid with near-illegible handwritten text that elliptically condenses these narratives. In the past decade, she has integrated these two-dimensional works into installations, such as The Salt Traders, 2015, in which drawings that incorporate painting, collage, and handwritten text are displayed on a grid of 144 frames arranged like a large folding screen. The work weaves together a range of global histories in which salt plays a role, from Alexander the Great’s discovery of salt lakes to the recent economic crisis in Greece (known as the “collapse of bread and salt”). While Boghiguian undertakes research online as well as offline, the more important point is that it is embodied and durational: All her literary, historical, and philosophical reading is grounded in time spent on the sites where these events took place. Everything she paints and draws is made on location or from her own photographs. Events are visualized in sketched portraits, jittery lines, bursts of text, and pools of color. The viewer’s mode of reception is equally somatic. The Salt Traders evidences research on the part of the artist, but synthesizes this into a richly sensory polemical overview that is sculptural and olfactory. Throughout the grids, images and words are intertwined, but also punctuated by empty frames 130 ARTFORUM
Deliberate and architectonic, Soulages’s compositions resist being read as visual transcriptions of psychic flux. resist being read as visual transcriptions of psychic flux.
Above: Anna Boghiguian, The Salt Traders (detail), 2015, mixed media. Installation view, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Photo: Peter Cox.
Opposite page: Anna Boghiguian, The Salt Traders, 2015, mixed media. Installation view, Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul. From the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Photo: Sahir Uğur Eren.
filled with organic materials—sand, salt, and honeycombs—that offer moments of silence and opacity and a chance to pause, inhale, and reflect. Boghiguian’s internalization and processing of history is not simply the outcome of digital meandering (although that inevitably plays a role). It is a lived, sensuous encounter that has been digested. The format of the grid enables a line of inquiry that is nonlinear but not unstructured, while the honeycomb frames anchor the research in a nondigital apparatus of communication. Nor is it an unmediated truth claim: The Salt Traders is a poetic and critical journey of visualized connections between the past and today—one in which history is presented as messy, unfinished business. Boghiguian’s work, like the much better-known practice of Lebanese artist Walid Raad, points to some of the differences between search and research, and between information aggregation and original lines of questioning. It doesn’t drag us back to academic criteria of rigor but asserts and embraces artistic idiosyncrasy— a difference that seems particularly pressing when we’re faced with the development of new AI search engines, image generators, and GPTs (generative pretrained transformers). As British artist Mark Leckey commented a decade ago, “Research has to go through a body; it has to be lived in some sense—transformed into some sort of lived experience—in order to become whatever we might call art. . . . A lot of art now just points at things. Merely the transfer of something into a gallery is enough to bracket it as art.”26 The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. Such artists show that interpretative syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counterhistory, packing all the more punch because imaginatively and artfully delivered. n CLAIRE BISHOP IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF ARTFORUM. THIS ESSAY IS EXCERPTED FROM HER BOOK DISORDERED ATTENTION: HOW WE LOOK AT ART AND PERFORMANCE TODAY, FORTHCOMING FROM VERSO. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.) For notes, see page 189.
APRIL 2023 131
ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS CATHERINE QUAN DAMMAN ON SUNG TIEU AND THE ART OF DERIVATIVE CRITIQUE
LIKE SO MUCH ART of the present, the work of Sung Tieu necessitates a fair amount of explanatory text. Reading the growing body of writing about Tieu (the artist will open her first US solo exhibitions—“Infra-Specter” at Brooklyn’s Amant on March 30, “Civic Floor” at Cambridge’s MIT List Visual Arts Center on April 4—nearly concurrently), I was struck by the frequency with which the Cold War surfaced as a referent. The term rightly identifies the period about which much of the artist’s research is conducted, but also slyly tethers her object of study to her own artistic operations. The Cold War was deemed so because it was understood to be psychological, secretive, by proxy. Yet this construction is itself an 132 ARTFORUM
illusion of vantage: Exactly who experienced that era as one absent outright fighting or bloodshed? Tieu—who was born in 1987 in Hải Dương, in northern Vietnam, knows how language swells and wobbles—the spelling of her first name as Sung more readily lubricates its circulation in the art world, as well as other bureaucratic contexts. (It is properly written as Ðung in chữ Quốc ngữ, Vietnam’s Latinized alphabet, where the pronunciation of Ð approximates the sound “ts”). Consider also the hospitality connoted, but hardly realized, in the Gastarbeiter (“guest worker”) programs of Germany before reunification, which directly shaped her immediate
This spread: Two stills from Sung Tieu’s, Moving Target Shadow Detection, 2022, HD video, color, sound, 18 minutes 56 seconds.
family’s history. (Vietnamese migrants constituted the largest group of guest workers in the GDR thanks to an agreement, established in 1980, with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam; Tieu immigrated as a child and became a German citizen in 2007.) So words fail or are designed to ricochet, deflecting precise meaning. Yet Tieu’s is a practice fluent in twenty-first-century art’s signal procedures. (We’ll return to that.) While her work is sometimes lassoed within the Arendtian topos of the “banality of evil,” this too seems a canard. If one early strain of Conceptualism deprioritized art’s visual components, Tieu’s art is undeniably, almost lushly cinematic. Her installations are unsettling environments by turns anonymous and
bleak. They offer a brutal visual pleasure, a totalitarian vision of order. The artist has described Minimalist sculpture as a kind of cultural imperialism. Yet in appropriating its “rhetoric of power,” her work at once critiques and reinscribes its totemic command.1 Everywhere in her installations are matte sheets of metal, hulking concrete forms, slick chrome stools, orderly shelving units, tantalizing symmetry, vanishing points. Think Brunelleschi, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Tony Smith, Posenenske, Asher, the Bechers. This year’s East Coast shows will not be the first time Tieu has presented twinned exhibitions, having done so previously at London’s Nottingham Contemporary APRIL 2023 133
Above: View of “Sung Tieu: In Cold Print,” 2020, Nottingham Contemporary, England. From left: Untitled (in Cold Print), 2020; Recycling—Army Style, 2020. Photo: Lewis Ronald (Plastiques).
134 ARTFORUM
Below: Two views of “Sung Tieu: Zugzwang,” 2020, Haus der Kunst, Munich. Photos: Maximilian Geuter.
(“In Cold Print”) and Munich’s Haus der Kunst (“Zugzwang”) in early 2020. The former confronted its viewer with walls of perforated-steel fencing supported by concrete pillars: a labyrinth leading to a dead end, stripped entirely of orienting wall labels or other exhibition didactics. Uniforms were hung on the walls, with rucksacks of various kinds piled on the ground, concealing speakers emanating strange sounds. This “hostile architecture” was punctuated by metallic stools drilled menacingly into the wall, as well as by data visualizations in the style of Fox News and Infowars about so-called Havana Syndrome. (In the middle of the exhibition and without notice, the position espoused on these screens abruptly changed; a covert attack by a foreign adversary morphed into a hysterical conspiracy theory.) Similar operations were redoubled in the latter exhibition, the title of which, “Zugzwang”— often used figuratively in political commentary—names a disadvantageous circumstance in chess when a player has no choice but to make an injurious move. Unlike the London maze, the Teutonic room directed viewers to a culminating end point: a large desk and ergonomic chair, both black. On the desk sat a mug in the shape of a shark’s head—its handle a warped fin, its lip interrupted by a raised yellow eye, its scarlet mouth exposing gnashing teeth. Other objects taunted: a tourist’s magnet, grayscale except for a red cursive flourish reading berlin; a Polaroid of a child on a motorcycle, affixed to a reflective surface with magenta tape. Installation images do not capture the menacing soundtrack: Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture (1845), mixed with ambient “office sounds.” On the walls were documents with such titles as “Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal,” overlaid with grisaille chessboards, and an enormous shelving unit displayed an inventory of further clues: flowers, glitteringly unreal; a mesh wastebasket filled with crumpled papers; an aluminum briefcase, sprung open; a glove; two fire-engine-red step stools branded viet nha t (a plastics factory), one nestled atop the other; a grumpy-looking piggy bank in Pepto-Bismol pink. Studium and punctum were chopped and screwed in this Kubrickian dark side of the Museum of Ice Cream. Every object loomed with portent, tempting the iconographer to paranoid excess. The exhibition brought to mind a famous essay
Like the financial instrument that provides its name, the art of derivative critique is research-based, revealing crystalline structures and interconnections that seem too startling, too demented, or too neat to be true.
Above: Sung Tieu, Moving Target Shadow Detection, 2022, HD video, color, sound, 18 minutes 56 seconds. Installation view, Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris.
Below: Sung Tieu, Exposure to Havana Syndrome (MRI/left), Self-Portrait, 2020, laser-engraved stainless-steel prison mirror, 17 3⁄4 × 11 3⁄4". From the series “Exposure to Havana Syndrome,” 2020–.
by Carlo Ginzburg, wherein the late-nineteenth-century art historian, psychoanalyst, forensic scientist, and detective all come to recuperate the “conjectural paradigm” (feminized and lay) in an era dominated by the laboratory model of scientific method (masculinized and elite).2 In his writing, one finds a dizzying lineage that sees various methods of deduction—from Mesopotamian divination to Sherlock’s famous, near-oracular powers of observation to the many revelations promised by the “inadvertent little gestures” on the analyst’s couch—all brought into constellation with the scrutinizing of distinctly rendered ears by Fra Filippo Lippi, Signorelli, and Botticelli.3 This semiotic approach to art, Ginzburg suggests, is all about looking for—and knowing how to read—clues. Tieu’s work similarly enlists its viewer in the giddy roles of detective, cryptographer, and conspirophile. It conjures a misty nostalgia for Cold War secrecy but also strokes a distinctly contemporary compulsion for decipherment that is by turns anodyne (Reddit threads on cinematic “easter eggs,” most conversations about astrology), idiotic (the “escape room”), and chilling (QAnon, etc.). Issuing from the same crossroads, of course, is the aforementioned Havana Syndrome, symptoms of which were first reported by US government officials in 2016. In the series “Exposure to Havana Syndrome,” 2020–, the artist subjected herself to a re-creation of what ostensibly composes this “sonic weapon” at England's University of Nottingham and had the resulting magnetic-resonance images (MRIs) laser-engraved into prison-issue steel mirrors. Some were rendered in a militaristic camouflage colorway; others were barely perceptible line-drawing abstractions. Tieu’s 2022 video Moving Target Shadow Detection reconstructs, via 3D modeling, the interior of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, the site of the first “attacks.” The video roves from the hotel’s checkerboard of pale and putrefied green hall tiles and bays of paneled doors in sickly yellow-lavender combinations to aerial views of its manicured courtyard. Another shot woozily scans a tufted sofa resting on International Klein Blue wall-to-wall carpet that, in the work’s 2022 installation at Kunstverein Gartenhaus in Vienna (itself then recently relocated into a postmodernist Marriott), leaked from the screen and into the gallery. ARTISTIC INTEREST in paranoia, conspiracy, and governmental secrecy is hardly new.4 Yet Tieu’s work is representative of a particular strain of recent art demanding further elaboration. By this I mean work that is first and foremost researchbased, frequently comprising ready-made elements incorporated into larger installation-cum-environments and often, but not always, mobilizing video, sound, and other screen infrastructures. It trains its attention on the technocratic operations, ethical malfeasance, and real violence of various legal, governmental, and financial entities. No doubt it has roots in artistic engagement with “systems theory,” especially as animated by tangled political and social systems rather than strictly cybernetic or scientific ones.5 Such work often responds to or is reflexive about the location of its host venue but cannot be satisfactorily explained by either the “site specific” or “institution critical” in the orthodox sense, nor by the more expanded category of the “functional site” theorized in the late ’90s by James Meyer and elaborated at book length by Miwon Kwon.6 APRIL 2023 135
This art is emphatically not social practice, but it may require, hire, or enjoin the participation of people who do not consider art to be their profession, whose labor and expertise are indexed in the exhibition form (but who are themselves not physically brought “into” the gallery).7 It obeys what Hal Foster in 2004 called an “archival impulse” and may perform a degree of what Carrie LambertBeatty in 2009 called the “parafictional.”8 This work is like many of these categories, but it is not properly any of them. It shimmers with similitude but parries true equivalence. The above are all terms from academic art history of the past thirty years: historical accounts of artistic practice of the 1960s and ’70s as they collided with artmaking of the late ’90s and early 2000s. So we might say that this work’s primary font is the institution of higher education (and to the doctoral program add Städelschule, MFA, ISP); it materializes amid a coterie in which reading deeply informs processes of making, though, importantly, it does not draw from artistic discourses alone. It does not aim to “demystify” but nevertheless demands the artist herself acquire a great deal of specialized knowledge—indeed, this is among 136 ARTFORUM
its defining features. To telegraph the milieu, a few names: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Cameron Rowland, Hito Steyerl, maybe all of Adam Szymczyk’s Documenta 14. There are particular flavors: In Danh Võ, the lines converge at personal history, vulnerably intimate; in Maria Eichhorn, one often sees a reparative gesture; in Steyerl and Cao Fei, supercharged absurdist humor rendered via chroma-key; in Bouchra Khalili, a tone of essayistic estrangement; and in Forensic Architecture, only the thinnest shell of “art” and the firmest commitment to public elucidation, to research as political praxis. To periodize or geolocate is hazardous, but I’ll say 2012 may have opened the floodgates (read: close on the heels of Occupy), and the biennial its familiar home. In its peek behind the curtains of states and empires, police and military-industrial complexes, corporations and full-service banks, it is especially attuned to the multinational nature of such regimes, tracing what we might characterize as the global supply chains of racial dispossession. Let us call this work “derivative critique.” The term sounds pejorative but is not intended as an accusation of unoriginality. (The only pale imitation I hope to foreground is my own parroting of art criticism’s penchant for coinage, neologism,
Concomitant with the spread of paper money, Osaka merchants began to trade in nobemai, or futures. Futures are a relatively simple concept to grasp: Each party enters the contract agreeing to buy (or, conversely, sell) a commodity asset at a future date for a set price. (In theory, each party ventures that the terms will, by then, benefit themselves.) In the twenty-first century, futures, highly liquid, are often a tool of speculation—an investor or trader, who in this example may have no interest in or use for rice, might nevertheless buy or sell rice futures, and in so doing influence the direction of the market. If all goes well, the speculator now has more money but zero rice (in lieu of M-C-M' we have M-M').10 “Speculative finance” gets a bad rap, but it often does so on the presumption that “speculative” implies that those involved are just guessing, throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. This commonsense impression is wrong—as it is to see speculation, in the fanciful or conjectural sense of the word, as the sine qua non function of contemporary capitalism—for what makes contemporary financial markets so especially good at extracting profit is their mobilization of massive amounts of data, procured legally or not, and hitched to an enormous and delicate algorithmic rigging; this is why major financial institutions have phalanxes of interchangeable entry-level “analysts.”11 Equally, if not more, important is that any one risky speculation can be conjoined with a second designed to ensure “offsetability.” This second, “reversed” contract, a ghostly mirror image, countervails the risk of the first. Speculation, at the most capital-intensive levels, always finds its ballast in hedging; “hedge funds” are so named because although such firms can and do make enormously dodgy trades, a portion of their assets is always simultaneously invested in compensatory directions, to counterbalance loss. In theory, the house always wins.
Opposite page, clockwise from left: View of “Danh Vo: Cathedral Block Prayer Stage Gun Stock,” 2019, Marian Goodman Gallery, London. Photo: Nick Ash. Bouchra Khalili, The Typographer, 2019, 16 mm transferred to digital video, black-and-white, silent, 3 minutes 25 seconds. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rubber Coated Steel, 2016, HD video, color, sound, 21 minutes 47 seconds.
Top: Forensic Architecture, The Beirut Port Explosion: The Welders, 2023, video analysis, 3D modeling, digital video (color, sound, variable duration).
Bottom: Forensic Architecture, Restituting Evidence: Genocide and Reparations in German Colonial Namibia, 2022, video and photography analysis, 3D modeling, digital video (color, sound, variable duration).
and identifiable “movements.” If to periodize is treacherous, then to name is folly.)9 These practices’ engagement with art history and their reworking of its strategies are generative, more often than not, and, let’s be honest, of all the modernist myths, originality is perhaps the most tired. Rather, this art might be so christened in order to conjure a particular financial instrument—the derivative—that structures contemporary life more than is readily acknowledged. At its basis, a derivative is simply a category of contract. The derivative is designated as such because its price is derived from the performance of an underlying asset that is that is not, itself, necessarily actually traded. They fall into four primary categories—futures, forwards, options, and swaps—and the entering parties determine their individual participation on conditional terms; a given derivative’s price is set by each party’s calculus of probability that x phenomenon will happen or that z conditions will be met. Derivatives are speech acts in the subjunctive mood. To make the example concrete, let us take the Dōjima Rice Exchange, an artifact from the Edo period later absorbed into Japan’s Government Rice Agency.
WHAT DOES THIS EXCURSUS have to do with contemporary art? Like the financial instrument that provides its name, derivative critique, to reiterate, is research-based, often revealing crystalline structures and interconnections that seem too startling, too demented, or too neat to be true, and some of its strange, grim pleasure resides in the ostranenie of one’s encounter with what has been disinterred. (As I write, I learn online that residents of East Palestine, Ohio, now vulnerable to extreme environmental toxicity because of a recent train derailment—mere months after Biden’s strikebreaking betrayal of US railroad workers—had themselves been extras in the scene depicting the fictional post-train-crash “airborne toxic event” in the recent film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.)12 Like the disparate practices assembled here, the derivative itself is a baggy, capacious category. It can hold any number of formal operations under its tent. Here, the analogical usefulness of the derivative—a financial instrument premised on abstraction—is intimately related to the fact that, as a contract, it underscores that the will of capital is often shored up through enforcement by the state. This art often reverses or redirects the systems it unearths, turning them on their heads in a maneuver that can be understood as detournement, but that can also rehearse the infelicities of a hedge or the illogics of acquisition.13 What’s more, the possibilities of creative assemblage and reassemblage are neither intrinsically liberatory nor art’s alone (the “collateralized debt obligations” backed by subprime mortgages made famous as a major cause of the 2008 financial crisis are a kind of financial product–cum– found-object collage). Capital “imagines otherwise,” too. We make grave errors, both analytic and political, if we view the worst brutalities of our current social arrangements as issuing from individually held prejudices or evil diktats rather than the law of accumulation by any means—and by means that, more often than not, are ad hoc, improvisatory, compensatory, and reactive.14 If “derivative critique” emerges from a specific historical conjuncture, it is both shaped by phenomena exogenous to contemporary art (ongoing capitalist crisis) and, crucially, an intramural reaction to the de rigueur positions of the early aughts, which held that power was too distributed and too diffuse to ever be seen, much less acted against. APRIL 2023 137
That Weltanschauung has, I hope, fallen away. It is not—as some would still have it—that we entered a regime of pure “immateriality,” or that the industrial production of objects was replaced whole cloth with an economy primarily concerned with the production of “images,” “symbols,” “content,” or “services.” (Like the phantasm of a “bloodless” Cold War, this particular myopia issues from the privileged vantage of wealthy people in the Global North; as anyone in the working poor and/or the Global South knows all too well, millions on our planet still spend their labor time in factories, farms, mines, and warehouses.) Where one horror of late capitalism was famously said to be its endless proliferation of hollow spectacles, we can now see that the algorithms driving consumer platforms (“the feed”), although they are the ones I and most readers of this magazine probably encounter most regularly, no doubt to some deleterious effect on the psyche, are probably less detrimental to human life overall than the mathematical model known as Black-Scholes-Merton.15 Let me put my cards on the table and say that my own investments—and the kernels of potentiality I find in this work—lie in a return to discourses oriented by the materialist terms of Marxian analysis rather than the many proper names and associated concepts through which art in the first two decades of the twentyfirst century often described itself (“homo sacer,” “society of control,” “objectoriented ontology”). An important stipulation is that any such project must find its lights in the traditions of Black and anticolonial Marxisms, Marxist feminisms, and other analyses that know race, gender, sexuality, and ability are hardly epiphenomenal and still less a “distraction.” Such ascriptive categories are infrastructural to the workings of capitalism, not only in our grotesquely unequal present but since its advent. So, too, must it be attentive to environmental destruction via resource extraction and ongoing Indigenous dispossession and take exclusion from the wage—whether in the form of feminized domestic labor, surplus populations relegated to prisons, informal economies that prey on the noncitizen vulnerability of migrants, or other appearances of what Marx called the stagnant, latent, and floating reserves of labor—as equally, if not more, central to the functioning of capitalism as the symbolic figure of the straight white male setting off each day to the steel mill or Fordist factory.16 LET US RETURN to Tieu. This all seems rather a lot to hang on one—rather young!—artist’s shoulders. Yet I view her rapid rise in the art world as evidence of derivative critique’s entrenchment as a valorized artistic procedure—recognizable, desirable, and desirable because recognizable. Take the artist’s interest in military helicopter landing mats, sometimes colloquially called Marston Mats or PSP (pierced or perforated steel planking), devised just before World War II for the timely construction of temporary runways and landing strips. The Vietnam War required technological innovation, as the tropical climate—wet and muddy, with vegetation that would grow quickly through the mats’ piercings—demanded a new, more solid surface, strengthened by corrugation that would facilitate the drainage of water, resulting in the model known as the M8A1. Modular M8A1 mats slot into one another, with the resutlt that their surfaces are endlessly extendable and easy to move. Following the conclusion of the war in 1975, many such mats found their way back to the States, and eventually the US Army Corps of Engineers saw fit to repurpose them into sections of the US-Mexico border wall that stretches from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas.17 In Recycling—Army Style, 2020, Tieu’s looped digital files paired the M8A1 with grid drawings by Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, noting the pseudomorphology of their designs. With this knowledge, the art historian may be tempted to note that the transposition from landing pad to erect bulwark (and with it, from infrastructure for ease of imperial transport to that for the deterrence of noncitizen mobility) directly reverses the canonical displacement of the vertically oriented picture plane conceived as a diaphanous veil to see through by the horizontal, tablelike surface on which to place objects, 138 ARTFORUM
Above: Sung Tieu, Recycling—Army Style (detail), 2020, two displays, four-image digital slideshow (color, silent, 1 minute 30 seconds), 66 1⁄8 × 37 3⁄4". Opposite page: Sung Tieu, No Gods, No Masters, 2017, HD video, color, sound, 19 minutes 13 seconds.
understood by Leo Steinberg as indicative of the shift from modernism to postmodernism.18 With the same knowledge, by contrast, the hypothetical hedge-fund manager may be tempted to structure a derivative that links the price of domestic steel and aluminum to stock prices of known defense contractors in the US Southwest. Derivative critique is characterized by its baroque complexity and textual volubility. At its worst, it can exude a certain wonkish superiority or, conversely, bring to mind the maligned corkboard obscured by a mess of red string. (Not all of the art made under its sign should be understood as qualitatively “good.”) Yet this weakness is perhaps also its strength: Via the networks it draws between physical commodities and art objects, legal and financial contracts, buried histories both concrete and abstract, it makes available the key Marxian insight that whatever one encounters as a “thing” is in fact a “relation,” and rarely a tidy one.19 The appearance of this art in the past decade suggests a field hungry, even desperate, to confront the previously untouchable—totality—which we might more readily
associate with the domain of literature in general and the nineteenthcentury novel in particular.20 Totality is not a “thing” that can be “represented” (nor is its “unrepresentability” a consequence of its putative intricacy or scale); it is not an object to be thought but rather, as Anna Kornbluh helpfully elucidates, a method of cognition that roots its particular power in its attentiveness to causality, to tracing the strange, always contradictory relations between the individual and the structural, and above all in its capacity to disclose “the contingency and artifice of any social formation.”21 Made in the wake of or alongside much art that exhumes long-buried histories, anxiously wrings its hands about art’s complicity in structures of domination, or attempts to intervene directly into the social by remaking or “repairing” community, this work articulates the contemporary loci of power not as attenuated, dissolved, or dispersed but rather as capitalizing on a myth of incomprehensible complexity—not an infinite-headed hydra, then, but a mere advertisement for one. I like the sloganlike simplicity found in a 1949 CPUSA campaign film for New York city-council member Ben Davis: “banker-lyncher-profiteer-Klansmen-cop.” Derivative critique asks: Are our adversaries, in the end, so multiple, or so invisible?22
Consider Tieu’s 2017 video titled after a centuries-old anarchist slogan, No Gods, No Masters. It excavates the US military’s sixth psyop, Operation Wandering Soul, an early sonic weapon developed during the Vietnam War. Exploiting local beliefs about the deceased—who, if not properly buried, will continue to roam the Earth—US military engineers recorded sounds and distorted voices intended to simulate the unattended souls of slain Vietnamese. The result, Ghost Tape Number 10, was played in theaters of operation under the cover of night. It is hard to think of a more perverse articulation of the American imperial war machine, predicated as it is on the racist and callous abuse of trauma and grief. Of course, the great irony of Operation Wandering Soul is that for all its foul logic, and as often as it achieved its intended effects, it also sometimes indicated to the Liberation Army of South Vietnam the proper direction in which to shoot. n CATHERINE QUAN DAMMAN IS THE LINDA NOCHLIN VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE INSTITUTE OF FINE ARTS, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, AND IS COMPLETING HER FIRST MONOGRAPH, ON PERFORMANCE AND AFFECTIVE LABOR, AS A 2022–23 AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES FELLOW. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.) For notes, see page 189.
The appearance of this art in the past decade suggests a field hungry, even desperate, to confront the previously untouchable—totality.
APRIL 2023 139
CULTURES
Opposite page: Josh Kline, Creative Hands, 2011, pigmented cast silicone, commercial shelving, LEDs, 36 1⁄2 × 26 3⁄8 × 15 1⁄2".
Below: Announcement for the group exhibition “Nobodies New York” at 179 Canal, New York, 2009.
COLBY CHAMBERLAIN ON THE ART OF JOSH KLINE
AMERICA LOVES its unconscionable mash-ups. Since the 1990s, a fixture of Thanksgiving Day football coverage has been television anchors’ ritual consumption of a “turducken”: a chicken stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey. Following that logic, what would be the apposite coinage for a manifesto slipped into a press release set inside the screenshot of a Gmail message? A manipresscreenmail, or a Gshotleasefesto? Either way, the announcement for “Nobodies New York,” a small group show organized by Josh Kline in 2009, a full one hundred years after the Futurist Manifesto appeared in Le Figaro, immediately felt important. Something about its tone, which switched erratically between chatty earnestness and businesscasual cliché—“Let’s touch base about this soon?”—captured the frantic, perversely buoyant mood of the city following the 2008 financial crash. “Some of my friends and some of their friends are making really confusing and strange art about and with painting and sculpture and no one’s seen it,” wrote Kline. “This in addition to everything else they are making on and off the job(s) with computers, cameras, and souped-up cell phones.” The “nobodies” in question included Alisa Baremboym, Antoine Catala, Trevor Shimizu, and Anicka Yi, at the time all members of the art world’s quasi-anonymous precariat class, the untrustfunded sans-MFAs making work at the ragged edges of their freelance gigs. Kline promised “informal attire for informal situations during informal times,” a combination of “the painting skill-set and the sculpture skill-set and the dark comedy skill-set” with little regard for pedigree. For anyone unsure of the exhibition’s politics, the postscript gave away the game: “p.s. The show opens on May Day, the international worker’s holiday.” “Nobodies New York” was the debut show at 179 Canal, a linoleumtiled second-floor space that artist Margaret Lee managed to lease for free when the real-estate market bottomed out. This month, fourteen years, three presidential elections, and one global pandemic later, Kline’s work will be shown in more upscale digs, at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, in a midcareer retrospective curated by Christopher Y. Lew. Though monographic in focus, “Project for a New American Century” is APRIL 2023 141
poised to spotlight Kline’s whole peer group, among whom he has frequently played the role of curator and catalyst. Several of the artists in “Nobodies” later joined the roster of 47 Canal, the gallery Lee cofounded with Oliver Newton after 179 Canal’s closure, and Kline has organized several shows since at artist-run spaces, museums, and Electronic Arts Intermix, where he held down a day job for ten years. One might also look to the credit lists on the wall labels for his sculptures, videos, and installations, which map the social relations among a milieu of artists and like-minded “creatives” who are constantly exchanging tips, favors, and expertise in the course of experimenting with new technologies, methods, and materials. The visual record of “Nobodies” consists of only a few grainy snapshots, which has been the source of some belated consternation and headscratching, since Lee herself was an accomplished photographer then employed as a studio assistant to Cindy Sherman. The silver lining to the exhibition’s lack of high-res jpegs is that it underscores how little anyone involved cared about circulating the show online, an inconvenient truth for those who have attempted to situate the 47 Canal scene within the thenemerging discourse of post-internet art. Kline has vocally opposed the post-internet label, suggesting, only half-jokingly, that “post-9/11” or “post–Lehman Brothers” would be more accurate, but involuntary categorization is the price an artist pays for relevance.1 Zeitgeist-chasing curators have pinned Kline to virtually every buzzword-laden theory that gained traction over the past decade—not just post-internet art, but also “speculative realism” and the microwaved leftovers of Italian autonomia. To varying extents, the writings of Vilém Flusser, Reza Negarestani, Franco “Bifo” Berardi touch on topics that Kline also addresses, like labor, class, technology, and climate change, but none really capture the essential strangeness of injecting a painting skill-set and a sculpture skill-set with a dark-comedy skill-set, or account for why Kline’s installations can be so welcoming and discomfiting in equal measure. Lee’s former employer belonged to a cadre of artists, together engaged in a semiotically inflected critique of mass media, who came to be associated with the exhibition title “Pictures,” a word that Douglas Crimp chose for its polysemy. “[A] picture book might be a book of drawings or photographs, and in common speech a painting, drawing, or print is often called, simply, a picture,” Crimp wrote in the revised version of his catalogue essay. “Equally important for my purposes, picture, in its verb form, can refer to a mental process as well as the production of an aesthetic object.” 2 To make out the common project that Kline has pursued in concert with his peers, you need an even more multifarious concept: cultures. IN HIS CLASSIC 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams identified “culture” as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”3 Its earliest uses referred to the process of promoting natural growth in agriculture or animal husbandry, which in turn led to the metaphor of culture as tending to one’s mental and physical acumen. By the late eighteenth century, this term of process could also indicate a finished product, at which point culture became a cudgel in struggles for power. Culture, or the state of being cultured, was claimed by the upper classes, and, when used interchangeably with civilization, it served as a pretext for Europe’s forcible extension of its influence. (The Latin root word for culture, colere, is also the root of “colony.”) A campaign of liberal-minded critique broke the concept apart, so that one now speaks of multiple cultures spreading across different regions and distinguishes among types of culture, such as folk, middle-class, urban, online, and pop. Still, an ambiguity persisted over whether culture encompassed 142 ARTFORUM
Above: View of “Nobodies New York,” 2009, 179 Canal, New York. From left: Anicka Yi, cruisin’ for a bruisin’, 2009; Amy Yao, Screwball Dance Club, 2004; Josh Kline, Box 4A: Extra Coffee Mugs, 2008; Josh Kline, Box #1C: Extra Calculators, 2008; Josh Kline, Box #12: Extra Tylenol, 2009; Josh Kline, 25 Tylenol Paintings, 2008–2009; Allyson Viera, 2,3,5 I, 2009; Allyson Viera, 2,3,5 II, 2009; Allyson Viera, Marble Relief, 2008; Allyson Viera, Torso, 2009. Photo: Margaret Lee.
Opposite page, from top: Josh Kline, Forever 27, 2013, HD video, color, sound, 14 minutes 39 seconds. Josh Kline, Forever 48, 2013, HD video, color, sound, 16 minutes 6 seconds.
the full range of everyday behaviors or a narrower set of intellectual and artistic disciplines. Definitions also diverged among academics. Cultural anthropologists, for instance, located culture in a community’s material production. By contrast, Williams, Stuart Hall, and other early proponents of the interdisciplinary field known as “cultural studies” conceived of culture as a signifying or symbolic system.4 Culture, in short, is both a process and a product, a means of either asserting or leveling social hierarchies, a rarefied pursuit or a widespread phenomenon, an object of study and a framework for analysis. In Kline’s practice, these competing denotations and connotations come together in surprising, genre-bending configurations. For the videos Forever 48 and Forever 27, both 2013, Kline appropriated a familiar television format, the prying tell-all interview, and hired a Diane Sawyer look-alike to pitch questions to actors playing, respectively, Whitney Houston and Kurt Cobain, here miraculously still alive. “Whitney,” we learn, survived her 2012 overdose; “Kurt” left Nirvana to deal with his chronic stomach ailments, now ameliorated by reduced stress and probiotics. Using a precursor to presentday deepfake software, Kline unconvincingly grafted Houston’s and Cobain’s faces over the actors’ mouths. The glitches recall the smudges on Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silk screens, imperfections that mourn and tarnish a dead celebrity at the level of facture. Yet unlike the static image of Monroe, forever the icon who passed away at thirty-six, these digital surrogates struggle to keep up with the times. “Kurt” puffs an e-cigarette, gripes about the diminishing returns on his music royalties, and calls aging a disease; “Whitney” recalls feeling invincible when she was younger. Alongside these fictionalized exchanges, a third video, Kurts & Whitneys (Extras), 2013, takes a more ethnographic approach. Off camera, Kline, who studied visual anthropology as an undergraduate at Temple University, interviews the twentysomething actors themselves: What do you pay in rent? How do you make a living? Have you gone to college? A meditation on the cult of fame rubs up against an appraisal of culture-industry aspiration.
APRIL 2023 143
Above, from left: Josh Kline, Applebee’s Waitress Interview, 2016–18, HD video, color, sound, 20 minutes 9 seconds. Josh Kline, Fedex Delivery Worker Interview #2, 2014, HD video, color, sound, 14 minutes 21 seconds. Both from the series “Blue Collars,” 2014–20. Below: Josh Kline, Packing for Peanuts (FedEx Worker’s Hand with Scanner) (detail), 2014, 3D-printed sculptures in plaster, ink-jet ink, and cyanoacrylate; cast urethane, vinyl, cardboard, medium-density fiberboard, overall 35 × 36 × 12". From the series “Blue Collars,” 2014–20. Opposite page, clockwise, from top left: Josh Kline, Denial, 2017, Amana washing machine, Samsung washing machine, hardware, duct tape. Installation view, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. Josh Kline, Make-Believe (detail), 2017, Oster blender, Vitamix blender, hardware, duct tape, wood, contact speaker, audio hardware, sound. Installation view, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. Josh Kline, Fake News, 2017, oven with four-burner electric range, oven with six-burner gas range, hardware, duct tape, contact speaker, audio hardware, sound. Installation view, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. Josh Kline, Lies (detail), 2017, HP laptop, MacBook, hardware, duct tape, wood, contact speaker, audio hardware, sound. Installation view, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. All from Civil War, 2016–17. Photos: Robert Glowacki.
144 ARTFORUM
Commodities not only surround the body with signifiers but transfigure the body from the inside out, until flesh itself convulses into another sign of exchange.
Complementary methods of inquiry also inhere in Kline’s sculptures. For his “Blue Collars” series, 2014–20, he conducted videotaped interviews with individuals working in the service economy as hotel housekeepers, waiters, and delivery persons, asking even-toned questions about their onthe-job responsibilities, family budgets, long-term ambitions, and, on occasion, voting habits. Kline made digital scans of each subject and turned their likenesses into 3D-printed objects that function as allegories for the disaggregation of employees into productivity metrics and user profiles. Packing for Peanuts (FedEx Worker’s Hand with Scanner), 2014, arranges three versions of a man’s truncated arm gripping a package scanner across a FedEx box filled with bespoke foam peanuts printed in the shape of miniature hands. Other sculptures reflect cultural-studies insights into how politics plays out through purchasing power and trademarks. Kline’s installation Civil War, 2016–17, at Stuart Shave/Modern Art in London, shrank the fractured American landscape down into a carpeted living room furnished with bifurcated commodities. In Make-Believe, 2017, for instance, one half of a high-end Vitamix blender appears sutured to its discountbrand equivalent, seemingly held together by a thin strip of duct tape while a hidden audio component replicates the sound of a ticking time bomb. The Janus-faced appliances of Civil War could be seen as the inheritors of two lineages within Pop art—the parodically inflated fetishism of Jeff Koons or Haim Steinbach on one side and the working-class American Gothic of Mike Kelley or Cady Noland on the other. Yet Kline stands apart from both precedents, on two counts. First, he suspends Pop’s play of highand-low in favor of treating the “painting skill-set” and the “sculpture skill-set” as equivalent to every other expertise he and his peers have picked up in order to make a living. For Creative Hands, 2011, Kline cast the hands of friends and collaborators clutching office paraphernalia, like Advil bottles, computer mouses, or BlackBerries, and titled the resulting pigmented-silicone sculptures according to the subjects’ jobs as editors, designers, retouchers, or publicists. By contrast, even Kelley, the most obvious forerunner for Kline’s cultural-studies approach, consistently maintained a tension between his interests in fringe popular culture and his training at the kind of art schools that Kline never attended.5 (And who can forget that Noland’s grungy ensembles are sanctified by her status as one of the art world’s original nepo babies?) Second, Kline breaks through Pop’s preoccupation with surface sheen by portraying “consumption” as both symbolic and biological. Commodities not only surround the body with signifiers but transfigure the body from the inside out, until flesh itself convulses into another sign of exchange. Kline articulated his concept of the cultured body in the press release for “Skin So Soft,” a group show he organized in 2011 through Gresham’s Ghost, a roving curatorial project run by artist Ajay Kurian. “In NineteenHundred-and-Seventy, the body provided artists with a safe haven from market forces and the production of objects,” he wrote. “It was a site for feats of endurance or willpower, a location for confronting the self.” A generation steeped in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Herbert Marcuse could believe in the body as a bulwark against commodification, but now such faith was in short supply, along with any stable sense of what constituted the self in the first place. “Twenty-First Century aspiration and desperation are transforming the human body into something that ‘used to be human.’ What do we put in it? What do we put on it? What comes out of it? How can we use it? Who owns it?” These questions brought together works by Yi, Michele Abeles, A. K. Burns, Brian Clifton, Jesse Greenberg, and the collective Yemenwed that variously riffed on neoliberalism’s exhortations to reduce drowsiness, cleanse regularly, stay connected, and eat organic. APRIL 2023 145
Left: Josh Kline, Overtime Drip (detail), 2013/2020, IV bag, espresso, Adderall, deodorant, Red Bull, Ritalin, printer ink, vitamin C, mouthwash, toothpaste, Plexiglas, LEDs, wood, 17' 6" × 5 3⁄8" × 8".
Below: Josh Kline, Share the Health (Assorted Probiotic Hand Gels), 2011, assorted cultures in nutrient gel, plastic dispensers. Installation view, Gresham’s Ghost, 401 Broadway, New York. Photo: Margaret Lee.
Opposite page: Screenshot from Josh Kline’s ArtFCity essay “New Century Modern Surface Magazine,” October 21, 2010.
Bottom: Josh Kline, Skittles (detail), 2014, commercial refrigerator, blended liquids in bottles, Plexiglas, LEDs, wood, 7' 1⁄8" × 10' 7 1⁄2" × 3' 5".
Instead of tapping into past memories, Kline’s uncanny pierces through the present and triggers a vague, persistent sense of being stuck in the wrong reality.
Kline himself exhibited Share the Health (Assorted Probiotic Hand Gels), 2011, a row of hand-sanitizer dispensers containing bacteria swabbed from specific New York landmarks—a G-train subway car, a Chase Bank ATM— and placed in a nutrient gel, which in bacteriology is known as a “culture.”6 Here, culture’s earliest definition, of tending to natural growth, erupted through the sediment of its subsequently accumulated meanings, like the return of the repressed. To a striking degree, the preoccupations that informed “Skin So Soft” paralleled concurrent developments in cultural studies. If the cultural studies of the Birmingham School during the 1960s and ’70s consisted of Gramsci, Althusser, semiotics, and sociology, and the Visual and Cultural Studies program at New York’s University of Rochester added a heaping dose of poststructural and psychoanalytic theory to this mixture in the ’90s, then cultural studies in the twenty-first century has been infused with biopolitics. The proposition that power operates on and through life itself— most prominently associated with Michel Foucault, but also apparent in the early work of Donna Haraway, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers— has become central to how we understand culture today. In recent scholarship, one finds it in Mel Y. Chen’s relating of panics over traces of lead in 146 ARTFORUM
Chinese-manufactured toys to nineteenth-century “one drop” miscegenation laws; Paul B. Preciado’s frenzied auto-theory on the effects of topical testosterone; Simone Browne’s not-paranoid-if-it’s-true inquiry into the biometric surveillance of Blackness; and Ari Larissa Heinrich’s siting of the medically commodified body within flows of transnational capital.7 According to their job titles and the catalogue listings of Duke University Press, these authors are affiliated with an extensive medley of academic concentrations—Asian studies, African American studies, queer theory, trans studies, Asian American studies, Black diaspora studies—even as their arguments repeatedly stress the contingency of any such identity-based designation. Kline has reflected on his own Filipino heritage with comparable nuance. “Filipinos are a mestizo people by definition,” he wrote in a contribution to Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts. “Like many mixed-race/mixed-culture peoples who have emerged, are emerging, or perhaps yearn to emerge from a colonial legacy, most Filipinos see no contradiction in this racial, ethnic, and cultural mix.”8
Pop art lavished so much attention on the aesthetics of the Coke bottle that it never considered whether its sugar content would spike obesity rates or how strung-out service workers might come to rely on its hit of caffeine. In Kline’s work, culture’s symbolic meanings and chemical properties are harder to pry apart. Past sculptures have been laced with painkillers, energy boosters, appetite suppressants, and antidepressants formulated to meet the demands of what Jonathan Crary has called “24/7” capitalism.9 Necromantic concoctions of such products as Red Bull, Wellbutrin, Adderall, and Coke Zero have filled the cafetières of Sleep Is for the Weak, 2011, the IV solution of Overtime Drip, and the chilled blood bag of ThinkStrong, both 2013. Kline treats the synthetic hues of brand-name beverages as a reliable source of “local color,” especially so in Skittles, 2014, named after a candy so ruthlessly effective in its marketing that I cannot see the word without recalling its accompanying slogan, “Taste the rainbow.” An immaculately illuminated version of a standard-issue bodega refrigerator, Skittles was first installed on the High Line in New York directly underneath the Standard hotel. Behind its locked glass doors lay shelves of smoothie-style beverages with offbeat names and curious contents. In the bright orange “williamsburg,” torn-up shreds of plastic credit cards and American Apparel clothing floated in a mixture of kombucha, agave, and quinoa; Windex, the Wall Street Journal, vodka, and Champagne together gave “bottle service” a sickly green complexion. Like August Sander’s epochal “People of the Twentieth Century,” ca. 1922–64, Skittles was an exercise in typology, a cross-section of contemporary society rendered as an assortment of distressingly ingestible beverages. The bottles were less representations of lifestyles than evidence of life styled, their saturated hues an index of human bodies awash in stimulants and polymers. Passersby on the High Line could discern the different ingredients in Skittles because they were printed on the bottles themselves, in the lowercase sans serif lettering currently prevalent in the design aesthetic of healthconscious consumerism. The kind of information that gallery-goers usually find in an exhibition checklist was thus transferred onto the work through the appropriation of a commercial vernacular. Kline’s use of plainly legible communication formats is part of what made Skittles a remarkable instance of “public” art, yet, ironically enough, this very directness has often puzzled an art world accustomed to ambiguity and hermeticism. In a catalogue essay for Kline’s exhibition “Antibodies” at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in 2020, Domenick Ammirati openly wondered whether a critic had any meaningful role in presenting a body of work with so few messages to decode or art-historical references to unpack.10 (If at times Kline’s sculptures recall Minimalism, the resemblance derives more from his engagement with commercial-display strategies than from any sustained dialogue with Donald Judd.) This inscrutable lucidity has intensified since the launch, in 2014, of an ambitious cycle of installations that, in the spirit of science fiction, are set somewhere between our projected future and a period of time that Kline has called an “exacerbated present.”11 IN OCTOBER 2010, Kline published “New Century Modern Surface Magazine” on ArtFCity, part of the blog’s “IMG MGMT” series of imagebased artist essays. Accompanied by website screenshots, architectural renderings, and Photoshop collages, the two-thousand-word text looked back on the preceding decade through an incongruous array of off-kilter references. In one particularly dizzying sequence, Kline put forward the Star Trek franchise as a cipher for fifty years’ worth of interior decor. “The original Star Trek (1966–69) presents a mid-century modern fantasy in space—with avocado walls on alien planets and blue-gray talking computAPRIL 2023 147
ers,” and its follow-up, Star Trek: The Next Generation, “takes the beige computer and beige hospital from the late ’80s and flies around the galaxy in it, visiting planets full of lavender vases, mauve corporate carpets, and static electricity orbs from Spencer’s circa 1986.” By contrast, the 2009 film directed by J. J. Abrams offered “a vision of interstellar exploration charted from the bridge of the Apple Store.”12 The latter style, an ostentatiously sleek throwback to midcentury modernism, is what Kline called “New Century Modern.” The essay’s assembled images located the tendency in the offerings of Design Within Reach and West Elm, in recently renovated airports like JetBlue’s Terminal 5 at JFK, and, most extensively, in New York’s bumper crop of new luxury condominiums. These aughts-era structures, designed by starchitects such as Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel, were first and foremost a testament to the plutocrat-friendly policies of the Bloomberg mayoralty, but Kline detected in their sweeping curves the same psychic forces that made the retro sound of the Strokes so inescapable in the fall of 2001. In much the same way that Takashi Murakami has framed Japanese anime culture as a collective neurosis rooted in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kline saw New Century Modern as a protracted response to the trauma of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s war on terror.13 All those gleaming high-rises, with their unnerving capacity to appear as digital simulations even when completed in concrete and steel, were symptoms of a repetition compulsion—one of the sources, according to Freud, of that peculiar category of human experience known as the uncanny.14 Alongside Star Trek, the other television touchstone for “New Century Modern” was Mad Men (2007–15), a prestige drama set amid the Saarinen chairs and three-martini lunches of the ’60s advertising industry. Wrote Kline, “Mad Men cunningly portrays America’s transition from socially conservative monolithic culture with legislated discrimination to the dysfunctional, fragmented, lifestyle-oriented consumer culture that we enjoy today.”15 This gloss on the show’s thematic arc drew uncited inspiration from another of Kline’s interests, filmmaker Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self (2002). (Kline organized a group-watch of the four-part documentary at the Brooklyn gallery Cleopatra’s in December 2008.) Through his signature mixture of archival footage, probing interviews, and charmingly conspiratorial narration, Curtis explains how psychoanalysis was deployed to manipulate the masses through “public relations,” a field founded by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays. Various plot elements in Mad Men sync perfectly with Curtis’s argument: German-accented academics linking smoking habits to the death drive; psychologists running market-research focus groups; a series finale set at a gestalt-therapy workshop modeled after the Esalen Institute in California. In Curtis’s telling, Esalen kicked off the Me Generation lifestyle politics that powered the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the late ’70s and the left’s surrender to neoliberalism under Bill Clinton and Tony Blair during the ’90s—effectively setting the stage for the accumulated crises that have shaped twenty-first-century life. The popular appeal of Mad Men was initially attributed to nostalgia, but, as its later seasons wore on, the show’s exacting re-creations of period style appeared more and more, like New Century Modern high-rises, as an uncanny compulsion to repeat. Architecture and television were the primary reference points for “New Century Modern,” but to the same degree that Dan Graham’s analysis of suburban housing in Homes for America, 1966–67, sneakily commented on Minimalist sculpture, Kline’s essay could also be read as a diagnosis of the art world’s incessant returns to modernism throughout the aughts. In the same summer that Mad Men premiered, the 2007 edition of Documenta adopted as its leitmotif the left-wing melancholy of T. J. Clark’s question 148 ARTFORUM
Above: Two stills from Josh Kline’s Hope and Change, 2015, HD video, color, sound, 17 minutes 10 seconds. From Freedom, 2014–16.
Opposite page, left: Josh Kline, Respect (detail), 2015, modified mannequin, plastic helmet, cotton, leather, nylon, cast resin, paint, steel, foam, aluminum, LED screen, media player, video. Installation view, New Museum, New York. From Freedom, 2014–16. Photo: Joerg Lohse.
Opposite page, right: Josh Kline, Freedom, 2014–16, mixed media. Installation view, New Museum, New York, 2015. Photo: Joerg Lohse.
from Farewell to an Idea (1999), “Is modernity our antiquity?” A mere coincidence, perhaps, but both these backward glances could be plausibly interpreted as neurotic symptoms stemming from the same set of historical traumas. Kline has sought to break with this pattern of compulsive repetition by taking up the public-relations techniques highlighted by Century of the Self and marshaling them against the neoliberal order that they were so instrumental in bringing about. The installments of his cycle have drawn on the expertise of professionals in political stagecraft, advertising, and commercial film to mount protests against policing, precarity, and climate change. According to various critics, this combination of ubiquitous communication strategies and overt leftist politics can come off as “literal,” “blunt,” or “propagandistically clear.” It also, however, induces an unmistakably uncanny effect, distinct from the one elicited by New Century Modern architecture or even by the Surrealist objects of Méret Oppenheim
and Man Ray. According to Freud, the uncanny arises from the reemergence of something once repressed. The uncanny engendered by Kline’s installations comes closer to a recurring trope in Star Trek where characters find themselves in a “mirror universe.” Instead of tapping into past memories, Kline’s uncanny pierces through the present and triggers a vague, persistent sense of being stuck in the wrong reality. Jokes about living in a “cursed timeline” started peppering my Twitter feed during the pandemic, and “multiverses” are right now everywhere in pop culture. I first experienced the mirror-universe uncanny back in 2015, while watching Kline’s video Hope and Change, which debuted at New York’s New Museum for that year’s triennial. Kline hired an actor to deliver an alternate version of Barack Obama’s first inaugural address—not the shockingly forgettable speech he delivered in January 2009, but the fullthroated call for climate, racial, and economic justice that many who voted for him had wanted, and even expected, to hear. Thanks to the same deepfake software that previously resuscitated “Kurt” and “Whitney,” the words seemed to emanate from a patchy approximation of the former president’s familiar face. Most would point to this avatar’s trembling presence as the source of the video’s uncanny charge, since it sporadically dipped into the “uncanny valley” of insufficiently lifelike digital animation. However, the mirror-universe uncanny of Hope and Change hinged more on Kline’s collaboration with a professional speechwriter well versed in the art of public relations. The eeriness came from hearing such a transformative set of political promises in the precise cadences that typically offer only platitudes and empty-calorie uplift.16 Hope and Change appeared as part of a larger installation, called Freedom, 2014–16, that reproduced the distinctive pavement of Zuccotti Park, the site of the 2011 encampment by the Occupy Wall Street movement, which had coalesced in part out of widespread disappointment in Obama’s failure to hold responsible either investment banks for the financial crash or the Bush administration for the Iraq War. The space was patrolled by four life-size mannequins sporting swatteam tactical gear and bearing the smooth plastic visages of Teletubbies, the multicolored anthropomorphic creatures of the eponymous British children’s show (1997–2001). Kline regards the program’s plastic pastoral
APRIL 2023 149
Above: Josh Kline, Unemployment, 2016, mixed media. Installation view, 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Opposite page: Josh Kline, Adaptation, 2019–22, 16 mm, color, sound, 10 minutes 45 seconds. From Climate Change, 2019–.
environs as a perfect soft dystopia; unseen authorities issue orders from a network of horns that spring out from the Astroturf, and the screens on the Teletubbies’ stomachs periodically play surveillance footage of people going about their days. The police-officer Teletubbies of Freedom, variously named Po-Po, Professionalism, Courtesy, and Respect, thus embodied a state apparatus dedicated to both placating and monitoring its population. Against this backdrop, Hope and Change sketched the outline of another world that, for a few euphoric days following the 2008 election, had once seemed possible. After Freedom, the second installment in Kline’s cycle was Unemployment in 2016, nominally set in the 2030s or ’40s, at a time when automation will have replaced most of the middle-class workforce (a scenario that the recent proliferation of AI applications has made increasingly plausible). Repeating the approach of “Blue Collars,” Kline both video-interviewed and digitally scanned individuals who had recently lost their jobs as accountants or administrative assistants. Their 3D-printed likenesses lay curled in the fetal position on the carpeted floor of 47 Canal, wrapped in clear plastic bags. The intimation of living persons subjected to asphyxiation and disposability was deeply unsettling, but, much as Freud regarded the automaton doll Olimpia as secondary to the uncanny effect of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” (1817), I might point instead to the exhibition’s accompanying video, Universal Early Retirement (spots #1 & #2), 2016.17 Drawing in part on the responses his interview subjects gave to questions about what they would do if their living costs were covered, Kline produced two slickly folksy advertisements promoting universal basic income (UBI) as a means of alleviating precarity and giving people more time to pursue 150 ARTFORUM
interests and help others. The two ninety-second spots seamlessly replicate the soft-focus, picket-fence sheen of advertisements that affectively bind us to what Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism”: the stubborn, ultimately deleterious fidelity to a vision of “the good life” that neoliberalism has made increasingly unattainable.18 Here, however, those finely calibrated aesthetics promote an alternate American dream that, uncannily enough, privileges mutual care over individual advancement. The latest installment of the cycle, called Climate Change, comprises a presentation at 47 Canal in 2019; a video installation debuting this month at the Whitney; and Adaptation, 2019–22, a 16-mm film that first screened at LAXART in 2022. Through miniature models and other practical effects, the film portrays a small tugboat navigating the half-submerged skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan in a future where rising seas have flooded the city. Crew members climb out from the water in scuba gear and plop down on the deck, unwrapping burritos just as the golden hour hits. Watching this multiracial crew of “essential workers” take a well-deserved break, I found myself thinking of José Esteban Muñoz’s interpretation of Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” as a glimpse of the utopian within the quotidian, as well as Tina Campt’s call for living in “the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen.”19 In Adaptation, the society on the other side of environmental catastrophe approximates what Kline has described as “the kind of utopian majority-minority future America I’ve fantasized about living in for decades.”20 Maybe it would be nicer to slip into the mirror universe where Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election and established strong climate protections twenty years ago, but at least this cursed timeline of ours may still have its moments.
FOR A CERTAIN SEGMENT of readers, my attempt here to strike up a dialogue between Kline’s work and cultural studies will inevitably recall the academic debates of the ’90s, when art history entered a turf war with an offshoot of cultural studies known as “visual culture.” In 1996, the editors of October published a notoriously hostile questionnaire contending that, since visual culture drew variously from anthropology, psychoanalysis, and media discourses, the field had abandoned the task of history, untethering images from the specific mediums that had anchored them to the past.21 This disciplinary schism was long ago resolved, or perhaps just repressed, but it is worth acknowledging that the art of Josh Kline fulfills all of that questionnaire’s worst fears. Here is an artist who studied visual anthropology, dabbles in pop psychology, and pays far more attention to the synchronic sprawl of contemporary culture than to his place in some artistic lineage. (When I emailed Kline to ask whether he viewed Graham, Kelley, or Dara Birnbaum as influences, he wrote back with a list of film directors and science-fiction authors.) For many who confront Kline’s blood bags and Teletubbies at the Whitney, “Project for a New American Century” will doubtlessly augur nothing less than the wholesale liquidation of art’s history. Against such conclusions, one could offer a counterargument that might go like this: For the past fifty-odd years—a period of time roughly coincident with the social experiment known as neoliberalism—the art of museums and galleries has mostly been working through the same limited set of forms. Minimalism, Pop, Conceptualism, the abstraction-versus-figuration push-and-pull of painting: These strategies have been endlessly revised or
retooled, invested with new contents or applied to different contexts. From a certain distance, though, all these variations resemble the finicky adjustments one sees across several centuries’ worth of European painting, when the Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, and Romantic movements made only minor tweaks to the fundaments of Renaissance naturalism. The first true rupture came from Gustave Courbet, who combined a commitment to capturing the realities of labor and class with a capacity for infusing academicism with the traits of popular culture, like the flat graphic quality of the épinal prints enjoyed by his rural family.22 Perhaps it follows, then, that the cultural field that Kline has been mapping out since “Nobodies New York” constitutes a comparable assault on our current status quo. Institutionally accredited critics like me will try to associate Kline’s work with this or that historical reference, and others will continue to call it literal or blunt, but from the vantage point of some future majority-minority country where UBI and responsible climate policy are palpable realities, perhaps all these assessments will be seen, like the broadsides against A Burial at Ornans back in 1851, as the befuddled sputtering of an atrophied regime.23 But there I go again, mixing up notions that don’t belong together, when really that should be left to the likes of Josh Kline. n “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” will be on view April 19 through August 13, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. COLBY CHAMBERLAIN TEACHES ART AND THEORY AT THE CLEVELAND INSTITUTE OF ART. HIS BOOK FLUXUS ADMINISTRATION IS FORTHCOMING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.) For notes, see page 189.
APRIL 2023 151
REQUIRED VIEWING YVE-ALAIN BOIS ON MANUEL BORJA-VILLEL’S TENURE AT THE REINA SOFÍA
I DO NOT THINK I CAN CONCEAL my immense admiration for Manuel BorjaVillel (or Manolo, as his friends and collaborators call him), and, in truth, I do not think that I should. So there: I have long considered Borja-Villel the best curator-director of any museum of modern and contemporary art that I know of, by a long shot. The man is indefatigable: During his fifteen years directing Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía (from January 2008 to January 2023), he personally curated, shepherded, or hosted (and edited) 207 exhibitions. And of course it is not the quantity of shows that matters but their stunning inventiveness—the novelty of their topics, their conceptual crispness, the intelligence of their installation: All those I saw were eye-openers and remain vibrant in my memory. (This is true as well of the shows Borja-Villel mounted during his tenure at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, which he led from 1990 to 1998, and at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona [macba], which he helmed for the following ten years.) 152 ARTFORUM
Lavish praise is not my forte (my Huguenot background forestalls it), but at present, emphasis is imperative in response to the campaign of unprecedented violence launched by the Spanish conservative press and its ultra-right allies against Borja-Villel and all he has accomplished at the Reina Sofía. It was not the first time, of course, that nostalgics for Franco assailed him: In November 2014, for example, the Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers, offended by a work included in the exhibition “Un saber realmente útil” (Really Useful Knowledge), brought a case against him. Though the government was very conservative at the time, these charges fizzled, thanks to the autonomous status of the museum, which Borja-Villel had fought for and obtained in 2011. Today, however, the attack is plain vicious. It gathered momentum on January 15, 2023 (only days before the termination of his contract), when the front page of ABC, one of the three most important Spanish dailies (with El País and El Mundo), sported this
Opposite page: Manuel Borja-Villel, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2021.
Above: View of “Un saber realmente útil” (Really Useful Knowledge), 2014–15, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. From left: Wilfredo Lam, Nativité (Nativity), 1947; Anonymous, Auca de Queipo de Llano (Queipo de Llano’s Hallelujahs), 1937; Diego Rivera, Vendedora de flores (Flower Vendor), 1949. Photo: Joaquín Cortés/Román Lores.
Below: Ray Johnson, Birthday Gift to La Monte Young, ca. 1962–63, envelopes, paper, string, cardboard box. Installation view, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2013. From “± I96I La expansión de las artes” (± I96I Founding the Expanded Arts). Photo: Joaquín Cortés/ Román Lores.
boldfaced headline: the director has been under a fraudulent contract for ten years. The paper repeated this claim every day for a week, often on the front page (it was also parroted by less prominent journals), even though the Reina Sofía immediately sent a note to ABC debunking the allegation and requesting a retraction, which never came. The issue is not that complex: Borja-Villel’s initial five-year contract, dated January 18, 2008, stipulates that his appointment can be renewed two more times, every five years—that is, until January 18, 2023—by common accord of him and the tutelary authorities, which is exactly what happened both times (oh, the irony!) under the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy. Now, ABC’s rant did not come out of the blue: It is based on a law passed on October 4, 2011, concerning, among other things, the nomination process for the director of the Reina Sofía (involving an international selection committee and so forth—nothing very different from what had led to Borja-Villel’s appointment three years before). Discounting the fact that this new law was not retroactive, as determined by lawyers for the ministry of culture and sports when Borja-Villel’s contract was renewed in 2013 and again in 2018, ABC cooked up the idea that because no selection committee had presided over his two reappointments, his contract was void. In other times, this would have been a tempest in a teapot. Not in the present climate of a far-right culture war amplified by social media. Why all this fuss now, ten years after the first renewal? The fact is, BorjaVillel’s bosses—the Reina Sofía’s president, its board of trustees, and the minister of culture—had not been shy in letting him know that they would gladly welcome his (perfectly legal) reapplication for his old job (with the understanding that he would have to go through the same process as any other candidate). And why this interest from the powers that be in finding a way to retain Borja-Villel? Quite simply because, under his leadership, the Reina Sofía has been wildly successful in attracting visitors (per the highly respected online journal CTXT, the museum officially reported “4,425,699 visitors in 2019, compared to 1,818,202 in 2008; 3,063,092 in 2022, still healing from the pandemic”—that is, greater attendance than the Prado!), as well as in soliciting private funding. Borja-Villel, in turn, admitted that he was tempted by the prospect of remaining at the museum, where he could attend to unfinished business and consolidate his and his colleagues’ considerable legacy. He mulled the decision for several weeks and, having agreed to cocurate the forthcoming Bienal de São Paulo, finally decided not to reapply. Would he have averted the right-wing campaign against him had he made his decision public sooner, rather than waiting until the last moment in order—or so he thought—to protect his team? Nothing is less certain, but one thing is clear: The mere thought of his reconduction excited the bullies in the conservative press like a red flag. But why this rage? The answer lies in Borja-Villel’s legacy, which they— with the support of traditionalist segments of the art world—had hoped to erase in one fell swoop. LET ME START WITH AN ANECDOTE. In the summer of 2013, I visited the museum to see an extraordinary exhibition curated by my friends Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec, “± 1961: La expansión de las artes,” (± I96I Founding the Expanded Arts). whose starting point had been La Monte Young’s famous 1963 book An Anthology of Chance Operations. (This was a particularly difficult show to install, given the need to balance a heavy reliance upon documentation and the enactment of its very topic, intermediality.) There was lots to munch on—films and videos, live dance performances, photographs, objects, musical scores, and loads of vintage print material and private correspondence. Fairly exhausted after several hours, APRIL 2023 153
Above: View of “Dalí: Todas las sugestiones poéticas y todas las posibilidades plásticas” (Dalí: All of the Poetic Suggestions and All of the Plastic Possibilities), 2013, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Photo: Joaquín Cortés/ Román Lores. Opposite page: View of “Colección 1. La irrupción del siglo XX: utopías y conflictos (1900–1945)” (Collection 1. The Irruption of the 20th Century: Utopias and Conflicts [1900–1945]), 2010–20, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Foreground: Julio González, Masque de Montserrat criant (Mask of Montserrat Screaming), ca. 1938–39. Background: Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Photo: Joaquín Cortés/Román Lores.
I had planned to venture to the permanent collection as a quieter, less demanding reward, noticing in passing that a Dalí retrospective was also on the menu. I was actually relieved: Amid the bountiful cornucopia that, as usual, the Reina Sofía was offering to its visitors, here was one thing I could skip without remorse, given that this show was coming from the Centre Pompidou, where I had forced myself to attend it a few months prior. That’s when I stumbled upon Borja-Villel, who nudged me to take a peek: Even though most of the works that had been exhibited in Paris were again on view, he hinted, here I’d hardly notice. Dalí is among my least favorite artists, but I had been particularly repulsed by the Pompidou exhibition and its blatant advocacy of spectacularization as an installation strategy, the low point being the Mae West room, a 1975 environment based on a painting from 1936, on the couch of which onlookers, after a long wait in line, could go sit and take a selfie. Borja-Villel, of course, was right: In its Reina Sofía iteration, the show was unrecognizable. It had doubled in size, but, once again, quantity is not what mattered. Every work was given context, displayed alongside others in various media (by Dalí or other artists, many of them Spanish and hitherto perfectly unknown to me) with which it had shared a historical moment; additionally, every work received support from the archive, supplied via abundant documents in vitrines that carefully retraced a given piece’s inception and reception. Mini-narratives crisscrossed and enriched one another. One learned an enormous amount about the milieu to which Dalí belonged in his youth, for example, but also about his “exile” and the way it fundamentally differed from that of many of his peers. This was no longer a monographic show, or, rather, the monograph had become rhizomatic, an endless sequence of doors opening onto other doors. Context and archive: Such are the tools that Borja-Villel wielded against spectacle—an enemy he had identified long before heading to the Reina 154 ARTFORUM
Sofía but that at the time of his arrival was considered the only path to survival for museums competing with touristic attractions. Back then, the Reina Sofía was a sleepy institution, the installation of its permanent collection consisting mainly of monographic rooms devoted to grand modern masters (Picasso, Miró, et al.) and to the generation of Spanish painters who had come up for air after being occulted under Franco, Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, functioning as an isolated talisman. Though he desired to make the museum popular, Borja-Villel was determined to fight at all costs the spectacularization brought about by the global economic crisis of 2007– 2008, which he saw as the swan song not of neoliberalism but of the hypocrisy on which it was built and by which it had managed to seduce a growing middle-class population of depoliticized consumers: The quick-fix mode of the spectacle was a handmaiden to the economy of planned obsolescence. At the same time, he realized that returning to the old model of the museum as a refuge of the Muses, a space of sheer contemplation, was no longer possible; spurred by a wish to activate new demographics, museums everywhere had turned this page. Instead, he invoked another model, one more ancient—that of the museum as a repository of knowledge—and tweaked it to become a producer of knowledge. His first act, within months of his arrival, was to end Guernica’s solitary confinement—not to take it down from its justified pedestal but to return it to historical life. Josep-Lluís Sert’s maquette and plans for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, Guernica’s first destination, were brought into the fray and presented alongside artworks that had been displayed with it in the pavilion by figures both famous (Miró, Calder, Julio González) and lesser-known. As would become the signature of Borja-Villel’s Reina Sofía, the display offered plentiful documentation, and the mass of contextual material has continued to grow:
At present, Guernica is a nucleus around which four satellite galleries revolve (two specifically devoted to the 1937 fair and its repercussions), those satellite galleries themselves serving as the nuclei of other configurations or as pathways sending visitors to other segments of the collection. I could write at great length about any of the many exhibitions I saw at the Reina Sofía—as I could about those I saw at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies and at macba. All of them, without exception, met the criterion that is for me the essential condition of success—that is, they functioned at two distinct but parallel levels, endorsing two possible temporalities: They could be rushed through in only half an hour, allowing one to gain even from that brief visit, and they could be explored in detail, sustaining one’s interest until one’s legs give out. Rather than musing on those revelatory shows, I shall briefly invoke Borja-Villel’s grand finale, the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection, for two reasons. First, it’s what most stuck
in the right wing’s craw; second, it reproduces and expands the model (context plus archive) Borja-Villel had honed for years, as if one of those temporary exhibitions had metastasized. Titled “Vasos comunicantes” (Communicating Vessels), the reinstallation fills 143 galleries—which means 143 multimedia mini-exhibitions related by the same rhizomatic organization I mentioned above. But there is no risk of getting lost: Those mini-exhibitions are grouped into eight thematic-historical “episodes,” each stocked with its own detailed map (one can easily skip a section or come back for more). Wall texts are not overbearing, because the mere juxtaposition of works in all media and the plethora of printed documentation in vitrines conveys a perfectly clear message. Admittedly, it is impossible to take in “Communicating Vessels” all at once; the installation is obviously designed for multiple viewings. Furthermore, one can study it in even more detail at home by visiting the
Borja-Villel was determined to fight at all costs the spectacularization brought about by the global economic crisis of 2007–2008, which he saw as the swan song not of neoliberalism but of the hypocrisy on which it was built.
APRIL 2023 155
museum’s website (museoreinasofia.es/en/collection), which provides a phenomenal amount of data. For each “episode,” except for the second half of the fifth and the entirety of the sixth, which is treated more lightly (from sheer lack of time?), the digital visitor is offered (1) interviews with curators who worked on it, often Borja-Villel himself; (2) a “best of” selection of works on display; (3) installation views of each room; and (4) an illustrated inventory of every object in each room, room after room, with links to more information on each work and its author. The possibilities for exploration are potentially infinite, exponential. I know of no better introduction to the birth and development of modern art, from the 1880s to the late 1930s, than the first episode, “Territorias de vandguardia: ciudad, arquitectura y revistas” (Avant-garde Territories. City, Architecture and Magazines) I highly recommend a visit for any scholar of modernity. It should be mandatory for every curator dealing with the period.
156 ARTFORUM
The last thing I would underline is the installation’s emphasis on Spanish art, of which it reveals many forgotten aspects. (The rooms devoted to historical exhibitions, such as the Spanish pavilion at the 1951 Triennale di Milano, are particularly riveting; how long did it take Borja-Villel’s team to find all those decorative art objects as they cruised flea markets, photographic evidence in hand?) At first, one wonders why Borja-Villel is so often charged in the conservative press with being an “internationalist,” too attentive to artistic developments and avant-garde practices outside of Spain, for no one has done more to bring Spanish art literally out of the closet. But for Borja-Villel, any account of Spanish art must extend beyond its development in the nation-state; to do otherwise would be a distortion—a blottingout, for example, of all the Spanish artists who were forced into exile under Franco and, by extension, the impact of this diaspora on artistic practices in Latin America during and after the war (this is the subject of episode two,
Opposite page, top left: View of “Vasos comunicantes” (Communicating Vessels), episode 6, “Un barco ebrio: eclecticismo, institucionalidad y desobediencia en los ochenta” (A Drunken Boat: Eclecticism, Institutionalism and Disobedience in the ’80s), 2021–, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofiá, Madrid. Opposite page, bottom left: View of “Vasos comunicantes” (Communicating Vessels), episode 1, “Territorias de vandguardia: ciudad, arquitectura y revistas” (Avant-garde Territories. City, Architecture and Magazines), 2021–, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofiá, Madrid.
Opposite page, top right: View of “Vasos comunicantes” (Communication Vessels), episode 2, “El pensamiento perdido” (The Lost Thought), 2021–, Sabatini Building, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofiá, Madrid. Opposite page, bottom right: View of “Vasos comunicantes” (Communicating Vessels), episode 7, “Dispositivo 92. ¿Puede la historia ser rebobinada?” (Apparatus 92. Can History Be Rewound?), 2021–, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofiá, Madrid.
Above: View of “Vasos comunicantes” (Communicating Vessels), episode 3, “Campo cerrado” (Enclosed Field), 2021–, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofiá, Madrid. Below: Still from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofiá’s video for “Vasos comunicantes” (Communication Vessels), episode 3, “Campo cerrado” (Enclosed Field), 2021–, Diego López Bueno, 4 minutes 30 seconds.
“El pensamiento perdido” [The Lost Thought]). Latin American art as a whole is in fact extremely well represented in “Communicating Vessels” (episode five, “Los enemigos de la poesía: resistencias en América Latina” [Enemies of Poetry: Resistance in Latin America], is entirely devoted to its radical turn from the end of the ’60s through the mid-’80s, again featuring a vast amount of hitherto utterly neglected information, notably on the activities of many artist collectives in the region). So even though Borja-Villel installed relatively little American art in “Communicating Vessels” and refrained from including any work by some of the artists dearest to him, such as Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, or Hans Haacke (all three well known to the Spanish art world, thanks to the two exhibitions he has devoted to each in the past), the country’s ultranationalists nevertheless accuse him of digging the grave for Spanish culture. But ABC and its satellites are the real gravediggers, unable to understand that the best antidote for the type of globalization forced on us by neoliberalism is not protectionism. There is much more to say about Borja-Villel’s achievements at the Reina Sofía. Most important, perhaps, is to acknowledge the team that he formed and the truly democratic institutional culture that he nurtured—the reason for the museum’s resounding success. Let us hope that whoever succeeds Borja-Villel will not radically change course but will stay true to the innovative script this heterogeneous but united group so brilliantly wrote and enacted. n YVE-ALAIN BOIS IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF ARTFORUM. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.) APRIL 2023 157
TO DIE FOR ALEX JOVANOVICH ON THE ART OF SCOTT COVERT
158 ARTFORUM
Opposite page: Four works from Scott Covert’s “Lifetime Drawings” series, 1985–, oil wax pastel and ink on paper, each 18 × 23 1⁄8". Clockwise, from top left: Duo Dead Disco, 2016; Andrews, 2019; Rudolph Valentino #1, date unknown; Edie #1, date unknown. Above: Lex Niarchos, Scott Covert: Up Until Now, ca. 1990–2022, video and digital video, color, sound, 22 minutes 21 seconds.
DURING 2021, roughly 1,773 wildfires burned across Arizona. That year, in early July, the artist Scott Covert and his traveling companion, the filmmaker Lex Niarchos, were driving through the state. They were going to Pinal Cemetery, located near the tiny burg of Superior, so that Covert could do a rubbing of the headstone that belonged to the “Bandit Queen” Pearl Hart, one of the last known stagecoach robbers of the Old West. One night, the two encountered a roadside memorial comprising a humble crucifix with some blue LED lights wrapped around it. Niarchos captured the modest structure in a video. Yet in this clip, we see that the mountainous terrain behind the marker is utterly ablaze: Massive fires crackle against the black evening sky. This extraordinary scene, practically a blink, opens Niarchos’s Scott Covert: Up Until Now, ca. 1990–2022, a quiet and meditative minidocumentary, just over twenty-two minutes long, that follows the artist as he traverses our crumbling world, visiting burial site after burial site to create his painterly frottages of the gravestones of the illustrious and the infamous. (After leaving Hart, the pair headed to Phoenix to get rubbings from the tombs of Barry Goldwater and Walter Winchell.) This version of the film was created on the occasion of Covert’s first institutional survey, APRIL 2023 159
Above: Scott Covert, Construction #1 Where Blue Meets Green, 1996–2022, oil wax pastel and acrylic on muslin, 77 1⁄2 × 75 5⁄8".
Opposite page, top: Scott Covert, With the Bush, ca. 2016, oil wax pastel, ink, and collage on paper, 8 1⁄2 × 11". From the series “Lifetime Drawings,” 1985–.
Opposite page, bottom: Scott Covert, Betty & Joan #2, ca. 2019, oil wax pastel and ink on paper, 18 × 23 1⁄2". From the series “Lifetime Drawings,” 1985–.
Right: Two stills from Lex Niarchos’s Scott Covert: Up Until Now, ca. 1990– 2022, video and digital video, color, sound, 22 minutes 21 seconds.
curated by Ariella Wolens, at the Nova Southeastern University Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The show’s tongue-in-cheek title, “I Had a Wonderful Life,” was lifted from the tombstone of Brooke Astor, the hardnosed American blue blood who died in 2007 at the age of 105—it seems to me an affectionate tribute from one tenacious queen to another. In 1985, the actress and novelist Cookie Mueller, a friend of Covert’s, saw his rubbing of the headstone of Florence Ballard, the former Supreme who’s interred at the Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery in Warren, Michigan, and told him he’d found his calling. (Covert had been a longtime fan of the star-crossed singer, who was a founding member of the legendary Motown girl group. Sadly, Ballard was axed in 1967 because of her alcoholism and died only nine years later, at the age of thirty-two, from a heart attack.) In the February 1988 issue of Details, Mueller describes a trip to Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, for the magazine’s “Art and About” column. Covert went there to get a rubbing from Jayne Mansfield’s gravestone— which is, appropriately, heart-shaped—so Mueller came along for the ride. 160 ARTFORUM
Her article, ostensibly a report on Manhattan’s art scene, is largely a meditation on the dubious value of fame, especially on a disintegrating planet: Forget about being immortal. Unless you have talent, like van Gogh, plus media-blitz ability like Jayne Mansfield . . . then forget about your name in the art or film history books. Human beings will be fighting for space on the globe, and the space in history books won’t get any bigger because of waning paper pulp because all the trees have been leveled. Accounts of great talented artists will flutter like dried brown leaves.
Covert is a kind of noble gleaner for these unsettling end-times, a collector of all those brittle leaves that fell from Earth’s once mighty redwoods. Generationally, he’s kin to Gary Lee Boas, that consummate fan and photographer who spent endless hours outside thronged stage doors and near red carpets during the 1970s and ’80s, hoping to capture Elizabeth Taylor or Joan Bennett or Barbara Stanwyck on film. Yet Covert’s not hanging around for anybody, anywhere; the biggest and brightest stars of yesteryear
Covert is a kind of noble gleaner for these unsettling end-times, a collector of all those brittle leaves that fell from Earth’s once mighty redwoods.
are waiting on him (what other choice do they have?), with his sheets of muslin and boxes of oil wax pastels in tow, to gather their autographs—in a manner of speaking—while basking in their lifeless company. I think of those ancient Chinese rubbings of monuments and metalworks, done on delicate rice paper, that have long outlasted the sources from which they were taken. Maybe one day, when the planet’s a charred and fallow husk, a lone soul will come across a painting by Covert in a dilapidated museum with the words bette davis emblazoned across it. This person, not knowing who she was, will say her name aloud, perhaps with some confusion, bringing the actress back to life for just a few seconds. It’s an oddly comforting thought. Covert is familiar with oblivion: “I became a major drug addict because of aids,” he once told me. “Every morning I’d wake up and look at myself and wonder when I was going to see the purple sores,” he wrote in an essay for Ursula magazine a few years ago, referring to the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions that were often a signpost of the disease. Covert lost too many friends and loved ones, including Mueller, to aids. Surrounded by so much unbearable suffering and death throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the artist nearly obliterated himself with drugs and sex. In a group of modestly scaled works from Covert’s ongoing “Lifetime Drawings” series, which he began in 1985—their surfaces are laboriously inscribed with tiny checkerboard patterns that bleed off the edges—we see evidence of that troubled time that is nonetheless flecked with Covert’s trademark black humor. In one of these drawings, a dark, smeary impression of Lucille Ball’s nameplate—taken from the comedienne’s niche in the columbarium at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles—sits next to a photograph depicting a well-endowed naked man in a cluttered room . . . the artist’s studio? Elsewhere, Ball’s plaque, captured in a grimy, lipstick-y red, is suspended over a photo of an erect cock, which stands at attention before the resting place of one Michael S. Salupo, who appears to have died in 1987. In another, the rubbing, tipped at a jaunty forty-five-degree angle, points to a shirtless dude with a scarred and tattooed torso. Pants pulled down and genitals exposed, he glares right into the camera, daring the viewer to break eye contact. In the upper left-hand corner of the composition is a postage stamp with a portrait of former US president George H. W. Bush, his thin, viperish lips curled in a weirdly self-satisfied smirk. The piece calls to mind a postcard, perhaps delivered from one of hell’s sexier, more celebratory precincts. Printed at the bottom of the Bush stamp are the words usa forever. In the context of Covert’s art, the expression has a comically funereal quality—like something that should be written out in flowers and planted atop America’s grave. These images, most of which have never been publicly exhibited, had their genesis in 2003, when Covert heard that Ball’s cremated remains were being moved from California to a plot in Jamestown, New York, the actress’s birthplace. Before the reinterment occurred, the artist rushed to the Hollywood Hills site and, in what must have been an adrenaline-fueled frenzy, made one thousand rubbings of Ball’s plate in a day. The photographic elements, which document Covert’s self-destructive period, were only discovered later, after he had some old rolls of film developed. The drawings’ checkerboard grounds, however, push the works into an eternal space. The motifs, which have their roots in cultures going back thousands of years, symbolize all manner of duality: life and death, good and evil, joy and sorrow. This pattern, a type of doodle Covert has been making since he was a kid, frequently expands and contracts, twists, and breaks—much like a heart, until it no longer can. n ALEX JOVANOVICH IS AN ARTIST AND THE REVIEWS EDITOR OF ARTFORUM. APRIL 2023 161
REVIEWS 164 165 166 167 168 169
NEW YORK Darla Migan on Abigail DeVille Jan Avgikos on Andrea Fraser Linda Simpson on Tom of Finland Jeffrey Kastner on Adam Putnam Lauren O’Neill-Butler on Eve Fowler Johanna Fateman on Martha Edelheit Evan Moffitt on Ravi Jackson Lloyd Wise on Nöle Giulini Donald Kuspit on Athena LaTocha
179 180
PARIS Lillian Davies on Djamel Tatah PALMA, SPAIN Carlos Quijon Jr. on Daniel García Andújar TURIN Laura McLean-Ferris on Lydia Silvestri
181
VIENNA Yuki Higashino on John Dilg
182
BERLIN Travis Jeppesen on Thilo Heinzmann
170
STONY BROOK, NEW YORK Tausif Noor on “Revisiting 5+1”
171
MIAMI Alpesh Kantilal Patel on Didier William
172
CHICAGO Susan Snodgrass on Luftwerk
183
173
LOS ANGELES Suzanne Hudson on Adam Higgins Jan Tumlir on Ed Johnson
184
HELSINKI Sini Mononen on Maija Blåfield
174 175
TORONTO Gabrielle Moser on Denyse Thomasos Dan Adler on Howard Podeswa
185
ISTANBUL Kaya Genç on Nancy Atakan
176
MEXICO CITY Gaby Cepeda on Débora Delmar
177 178
LEIPZIG Camila McHugh on “The Broken Pitcher” STOCKHOLM Natasha marie Llorens on Dana-Fiona Armour
NEW DELHI Kate Sutton on Karan Shrestha
SÃO PAULO Felipe Scovino on Cinthia Marcelle
186
SEOUL Andrew Russeth on Moon Shin
LONDON Emily LaBarge on Gretchen Bender
187
KUALA LUMPUR Wong Binghao on “Dream of the Day”
188
MELBOURNE Helen Hughes on Peter Tyndall
HASTINGS, ENGLAND Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith on Caragh Thuring WAKEFIELD, ENGLAND Andrew Hunt on Hannah Starkey
Martha Edelheit, Jones Beach, West End, 1972–73, acrylic on canvas, 18 × 24". (See page 167.) 162
ARTFORUM
FEBRUARY 2023
163
REVIEWS
NEW YORK
Abigail DeVille
BRONX MUSEUM OF THE ARTS Abigail DeVille’s exhibition, appropriately titled “Bronx Heavens,” begins by offering visitors an invitation to board Lunar Capsule (all works cited, 2022). The quirky Mork & Mindy–style spacecraft, with its gilded interior and Rococoesque chair—an item of furniture that conjures an elder’s sitting room, where family history is often passed down—has traveled to many cultural events and festivals, collecting stories from people of all ages that have now become treasured records of daily life on Earth. A voice-activated microphone within Lunar Capsule captures our narratives, which are eventually broadcast through a media player connected to the headphones of a separate work, Black Monolith, a telephone booth–like object that glows with numinous blue and purple lights. A direct refutation of the idea of a singular experience of Blackness, Monolith operates like an inverse of Adrian Piper’s What It’s Like, What It Is #3, 1991, a rectangular white cube containing a series of videos in which a Black man plainly states, among other things, that he is “not shiftless,” “not childish,” and “not evil” in order to challenge any stereotypical ideas a white and presumably liberal museum-going audience might have about Black people.
a stratospheric installation comprising Masonite panels painted in blastoff shades of violet blue and punctuated by salvaged bits of home fixtures—windows, a screen door—seems as if it is somehow reflecting the light bouncing off the ancient seafloor (which can now be seen up close, thanks to recent advances in imaging technology). Or perhaps the work is a rendering of an older, moribund version of our galaxy. In a lot of ways, “Bronx Heavens” functions as an open-source archive that honors and energizes the lives of those who occupy the titular borough—including family members, scholars, and other artists who have vitalized DeVille’s own existence for decades. Her show takes the idea of going “uptown” as a way of entering a divine realm, but one grounded in and nurtured by the goings-on of everyday life. While New York is giving us a lot of exhibitions by Black artists with work that seems as though it was inspired by the American South or the Caribbean, it is refreshing to experience art that channels the joy and curiosity of living in a place that could only be expressed by a lovingly devoted “city kid.” Whether we consider the multiple generations of Southern Black families that moved to the Bronx in waves during the Great Migration or those immigrants from all over the world who are still arriving in the borough today, we might ask what those roots constitute, given the ways they have been dragged across the sea and continue slipping through the universe. For some viewers, DeVille’s exhibition could be a metaphor for the Bronx itself—a place that belongs to myriad interconnected systems that may only now be coming into view, like the light of exploding stars from eons ago. —Darla Migan
Andrea Fraser
MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY
Abigail DeVille, Lunar Capsule, 2022, steel, aluminum, fabric, gold leaf, found chair, recorder, acrylic paint, approx. 75 × 82 × 82". Photo: Argenis Apolinario.
164 ARTFORUM
An otherworldly blue radiance suffuses the exhibition, representing the universe. Outer space has been a prominent theme in DeVille’s work since 2008. Take Cosmos Gate, a pyramid of repurposed television sets on which video loops of old home movies made by Bronx residents play. (The artist, who works in the borough, was also born and raised there— her deep affection for this section of New York, and for the city as a whole, is absolutely clear throughout this show.) DeVille even reorients Gotham’s origin myths in her sculpture Halve Maen, a salty reconfiguration of the eponymous ship on which the English explorer Henry Hudson sailed. The vessel traveled on the river—the one he likely died in or around—that now bears his name. The object, which calls to mind a precariously tilted-looking hobbyhorse, is twisted up in damaged clothes and a tangled United States flag, all of which is topped off by a fiberglass effigy of a deer’s head. The work is a funny yet bleak meditation on colonial rapaciousness and the brutal histories of antique regimes, but it is also a monument to better futures forged by someone who wants to build a brighter and more expansive tomorrow. Ascension (meditation),
The remarkable accomplishment of Andrea Fraser’s genre-defying career has been to meld the disparate domains of feminist performance and institutional critique, a maneuver assisted by the invention of fictional female characters, among them a museum docent, a news reporter, an artist, and a matron. In many of Fraser’s narratives, these personae, uncomplicated and guileless at first, grow increasingly complex as they deliver streams of facts and historical data that are the substance of the artist’s investigations. They might be earnest or comedic, polite or raunchy, but the discourses they deliver—like the worlds they represent—are real. Her expert ability to challenge the status quo was on full display in an exhibition that presented, among several classically Conceptual documents, a selection of three videos that included two vintage pieces—Welcome to the Wadsworth: A Museum Tour, 1991; Reporting from São Paulo, I’m from the United States, 1998—and a new tour-deforce performance, This meeting is being recorded, 2021. In the videos from the 1990s, Fraser directs her laser focus at the political ideologies of two art institutions—the small civic Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, founded in 1842, and the sprawling international São Paulo Bienal. Her subterfuge, as always, is one in which she appears to blend in, as if in sync with the agenda of the respective institutions she critiques. As the enthusiastic guide in Welcome, she breezes through the genealogy of the Wadsworth’s white founders and their families while exalting the museum’s values. Yet, as she extols the virtues of heritage, tradition, and patriotism, she manages to reveal a more toxic persona, acknowledging that she is a “Daughter of the American Revolution.” She then rants about the deplorable immigrants living in squalor around Hartford’s historic town square while arguing for a “purified America.” When invited to participate in the 1998 São Paulo Bienal, Fraser transformed herself into a sunny news reporter who appears to promote
Tom of Finland DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
Andrea Fraser, This meeting is being recorded, 2021, UHD video installation (color, sound, 99 minutes), six chairs. Photo: Alex Yudzon.
the event’s official agenda, which champions cultural diversity. In addition to chatting with one of the artists at the opening, she interviews some of the show’s real-life principals, including the curators, the moneymen, and even Brazil’s minister of culture. She never challenges or interrogates them, but simply lets them respond to her softball prompts. By inferring that she’s “one of them,” her subjects candidly reveal the backstories of the corporate sponsorships and business arrangements that are their markers for “success.” Nobody really cares about or understands the art, or for that matter the disadvantaged populations they profess to educate. In This meeting is being recorded, a single-channel, ninety-nineminute video, Fraser plays seven different people, primarily white women, who meet for a session of “diversity and anti-racism training.” The artist’s monologues are based on interviews she conducted with several women who, according to the show’s press release, “apply psychoanalytic group-relations methods to the task of examining their internal racism and their roles in white supremacy.” Fraser appears life-size on a large monitor; the chair she occupies is the same as those in which we are invited to sit, and she frequently addresses the audience directly. We are all entangled in the problematic, soul-bearing excursus Fraser orchestrates. One character emphatically announces that she’s having a very hard time. She wants to feel safe, but alienation is her constant companion. She’s overwhelmed by problems of male domination, white fragility, aging, and her own racism and self-loathing. Nothing is spared in this deep dive into how white women constantly and competitively turn on each other. The video also looks at their conflicted relations with Black women, their appalling narcissism, their struggles with guilt and privilege, and their contempt for the younger generation. (“I don’t want to be told what my politics are, for God’s sake. But if you give me shit, I just, you know . . . deal with your anger. Don’t make it mine. I got plenty of my own.”) She’s putting it all out there, complete with extraordinary body language, mannerisms, and expressions that effectively help to blur the distinction between truth and fiction. Her character’s emotions are riding high as she exhorts us to examine ourselves. “We are all people, we’re all vulnerable. What about you! What about you!” Are we about to achieve a breakthrough? No such luck, alas. “We’ve hit our time boundary, so see you next week.” —Jan Avgikos
True to his pseudonym, gay erotic illustrator Tom of Finland was, in fact, a Finn. Born Touko Valio Laaksonen in 1920, he was by all accounts a humble man. As a young recruit in World War II, he was majorly inspired, creatively and sexually, by the hypermasculine, physically fit military aesthetic of Allies and Nazis alike (minus the fascism of the latter). He went on to invent a vast army of his own, featuring a battalion of big-dicked studs who were forever on the hunt for a good fucking and sucking. By the time he died in 1991, at the age of seventyone, his reputation as an iconic pornographer was known the world over; it has only expanded since. Starting in 1968, Laaksonen developed a series of black-and-white graphic novels titled Kake, named after its mustachioed star character. Two different stories, rendered in pen and ink and arranged in sequential page order, were on display at David Kordansky Gallery. Both tales are rape fantasies that, in classic Tom of Finland fashion, are portrayed not as abhorrent, but rather as opportunities for playful debauchery, with plenty of position swapping so that everyone gets a chance to either top or bottom. The action is fast and furious: No need for lube or brushed teeth, it’s all wham, bam, fuck me man! The outrageousness of everything is downright comical. In Kake vol. 22 – “Highway Patrol,” 1980, Kake is depicted as a leather-clad motorcyclist savagely ravished by a couple of highway patrolmen behind a giant billboard. Meanwhile, Kake vol. 21 – “Greasy Rider” 1978, begins as a trespassing dispute in the countryside and turns into yet another ménage à trois, involving boot licking, double penetration, water sports, and more. One can practically hear the ecstatic moans and groans emanating from each framed panel. On a gentler note, the exhibit also included preparatory sketches, highlighting the artist’s masterly drawing skills, along with “mood board” photocollages, consisting of images torn from magazines and newspapers of men and their assorted riding machines. Obviously, Kake and company’s sexploits aren’t meant for your Aunt Gladys. But in this day and age, someone’s likely to be offended. Has the alarm been rung about this unabashed celebration of “toxic masculinity?” Honestly, to judge the work with such a flinty spirit is silly and counterrevolutionary. For most of the past century, gay guys were portrayed as prancing pansies. Laaksonen smashed the stereotype, providing an alternative full of smiling sexy studs who provoked countless men to launch their own sexual explorations. His vision especially influenced the 1970s gay clone era and helped provoke much cultural debate about what constitutes “manliness” in both attitude and appearance. How wonderful that Laaksonen, as if by magic, turned shopworn images of machismo into gloriously flaming symbols of fagginess that often make even the draggiest of drag queens look pretty modest by comparison.
Tom of Finland, Untitled, 1978, pen and ink on paper, 11 3⁄4 × 8 1⁄4". From the twenty-two-part suite Kake vol. 21 – “Greasy Rider.”
APRIL 2023 165
REVIEWS
Interestingly, or maybe ironically, the gallery’s West Chelsea location was once an after-dark playground for Tom of Finland types. Up until the early 2000s, the neighborhood and the nearby Meatpacking District were sprinkled with various leather bars and clubs. (Only the Eagle remains, a few blocks from Kordansky, surrounded by glass high-rises.) Nowadays, the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, which helped curate the exhibition, keeps Laaksonen’s legacy alive via artist residencies, events, shows, and contests. Meanwhile, a slew of retailers provide a wide range of merchandise, from oven mitts to jigsaw puzzles, emblazoned with all kinds of kinked-out ToF imagery. Even in a gentrified, commodified world, Laaksonen’s work still has the ability to shock, delight, and arouse. Horny hunks with ten-inch erections will never go out of style. —Linda Simpson
Adam Putnam P.P.O.W
In a conversation a few years ago with critic Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Adam Putnam spoke of his interest in what he called “the format of the fragment” and the role it plays in supporting a certain mood of circumspection he wants present in his work—an “ambition to keep things hidden,” as he put it. For the artist, who has embraced a wide assortment of modes and media over the past two decades, this willful opacity isn’t just free-floating obscurantism. Rather, it’s designed to be placed in productive tension with the idea that meaningful connections are in fact ultimately discoverable within and between even the most esoteric sources, if only the right procedures and/or sensibilities are brought to bear on them.
of work, “Landscapes,” 2019, consisted of sixteen small ink drawings focused mostly on bits of unidentified sky and horizon, calling to mind a colorized version of Emily Nelligan’s en plein air chiaroscuros. “Holes,” Putnam’s exhibition at P.P.O.W, felt like a quantitative and qualitative apotheosis of both those projects—here, his conceptual interests were further atomized and dispersed among literally hundreds of discrete works. This densely compelling show included a selection of forty-four-by-thirty-inch framed drawings, a trio of gelatin silver prints, and an arrangement of long tables on which 377 postcardlike ink-on-paper “Visualizations,” 2020–, an ongoing series he began during the pandemic lockdown, were displayed. Also, stewing away in a second gallery was Tower, 2023, a looming white monolith that hummed and burbled while various sorts of ejecta occasionally percolated from the orifices that dotted its surface. (The sculpture was based on another piece Putnam made for “Human Threads,” a 2022 show at Glasgow’s Tramway that featured projects designed to give individuals with profound and multiple learning disabilities opportunities to interact with diverse sensory phenomena.) When I first encountered Tower, most of its circular apertures seemed inert. Occasionally, however, one burped up a slick of bubbles, while another emitted a cloud of smoke—illuminated like sunset cirrus by a bank of juicily colored spotlights—that swirled above viewers’ heads. Wispy remnants of the haze eventually wended their way into the main gallery, hovering above the mazelike counters on which the visualization cards were laid out. Each of the larger framed drawings depicted a cavity cut into a decorative horizontal plane, like a tile floor in some hot, dusty Iberian hallway, that stretched backward toward a flat wall or horizon line. The geometric incisions—triangular in [Untitled] – Hole 4; trapezoidal in [Untitled] – Hole 5; rectangular and snaking, in a recapitulation of the nearby display tables, in [Untitled] – Hole 6— were strategically poised between trap and portal. However, [Untitled] Hole 2 (all 2021–22), with its glimpse of the very top of a descending ladder, proposed that they were, at least in part, meant to be thought of as means of escape, perhaps from the endless flatness of the multiyear isolation during which they were made. Putnam’s colorful miniatures constituted the show’s most populous element. Eluding all but the most general categorizations, the images, responding to both nature and culture, ran the gamut—figurative and abstract, ominous and cheerful, celestial and terrestrial, mundane and spiritual. A hand offering a rose, a wave pouring from the open entrance of a brick building, a bolt of lightning creasing a dark sky— taken together, Putnam’s tableaux suggested a kind of oneiric tarot deck in which the stable cosmology of the major and minor arcana has been replaced by an unfettered cascade of cryptically symbolic, inscriptive, and decorative mark-making. Instead of functioning as windows onto the future, however, these acted more like keyholes through which to view the affectual history of one person’s recent past, inside and out. —Jeffrey Kastner
Eve Fowler
GORDON ROBICHAUX Adam Putnam, Tower, 2023, mixed media, 13' 6" × 36" × 36". Photo: Stan Narten.
166 ARTFORUM
O’Neill-Butler and Putnam were discussing the artist’s 2017 photographic series “Portholes,” which comprises roughly sixty small, seductively dim gelatin silver prints that depict enigmatic bodies, bits of architecture, and scenes from nature. But since that project, Putnam’s deployment of the fragment to simultaneously suggest and forestall meaning has become even more deeply ingrained. His next major body
Through a tripartite cycle of exceptional films made over the past seven years, Eve Fowler has surrounded herself with women working. Shot on 16 mm, the black-and-white with it which it as it if it is to be, 2016, portrays artists doing what they do in their studios, day in and day out. For part II, 2019, she focused more explicitly on women artists thriving during their “late career” phases and on the breakthroughs that still occur therein. The third piece in the filmic trifecta, Labor, 2023, is a
Rounding out the show were eight testimonial-style collages from 2022 that are part of an ongoing body of work. For these pieces— constructed from blocky green, yellow, and blue hand-cut letters mounted on white paper and echoing the style of previous text-based objects—Fowler drew from her diurnal practice of jotting down various observations. Most of the works resembled concrete poetry: For instance, one read the buzz is high pitched today there are cars and birds and that is all, while another asserted god is and was a woman. Amen to that. As we yet again face a divisive, partisan culture war in the United States, bolstered by Republican demagoguery and the party’s attacks on fundamental human rights, Fowler’s art reminds us that the most important political platform for our creative work exists at the level of everyday life, where it can unfurl quietly, collectively, and subversively. —Lauren O’Neill-Butler
Martha Edelheit
ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY
Eve Fowler, Labor, 2023, nine-channel video installation (twenty videos, each color, sound, 3 minutes).
nine-channel video installation showing close-up views of her subjects’ hands. For her debut solo exhibition at Gordon Robichaux, Fowler presented this work as a grid of flat-screen monitors attached to poles that extended from floor to ceiling. The installation depicts, variously, Leilah Babirye brandishing a blowtorch, Jennie Jieun Lee drawing judiciously on ceramics, and Sara VanDerBeek painting on a photograph. A slew of other short vignettes feature Kelly Akashi, Isabelle and Lita Albuquerque, Fiona Connor, Jean Foos, Aimee Goguen, Samara Golden, Kate Hall, Siobhan Liddell, Nevine Mahmoud, Reverend Joyce McDonald, Liliana Porter, Adee Roberson, Ana Tiscornia, Uman, Faith Wilding, and Rosha Yaghmai engaged with different types of making. Though silent, Labor speaks volumes about the determination of women on virtually every single front, despite the threats they face to their livelihoods and liberties on an ongoing basis. Fowler is well known for her celebrated collaborations: In 2008 she cofounded, with Lucas Michael, Artist Curated Projects, an organization whose mission involves fostering opportunities for underrepresented artists to develop their curatorial skills and ideas in order to exhibit the work of their peers. Throughout Fowler’s presentation here, a similar intergenerational, feminist, and queer communal ethos could be found, including the artist’s mentioning of the production team behind Labor—Rhys Ernst, Mariah Garnett, Michael, and Olivia Ambrosia Taussig-Rees—in the press release. Many of these people also worked on Florence Derive, 2023, a 16-mm color film transferred to video that was projected here onto a large wall. After reading Derive’s autobiographical essay, “The History of Herstory,” published in 2011 by the online journal Seymour Magazine, Fowler embarked on this stunning, nearly twelve-minute meditation (which she made with additional assistance from Clément and Léonard de Hollogne). In the piece, the trans artist stares straight into the camera without a trace of inhibition while sitting in her Paris studio. An audio recording of Derive reading her text in French plays, in which she recounts growing up in “sheltered environments . . . filled with warmth and wonders” and the many beautiful afternoons she spent with her grandmother in Nantes, France. Later, she describes a homophobic teacher whose harassment led to her being expelled from school, and the gradual realization that she was always a girl, inside and out.
In Martha Edelheit’s groovy scenes of erotic languor—featuring nudes in unselfconscious poses with intent or with distant facial expressions, usually basking in the sun—the pulsing undercurrent of optimism is most seductive. That, and the THC-Technicolor extravagance of her realist style. The ninety-one-year-old artist’s exhibition here, “Naked City, Paintings from 1965–1980” which included several monumentally scaled works, spanned a period of social upheaval, when the artist labored with visionary feminist vigor. She rendered slack dicks and unidealized bodies in detail, holding the sexual revolution to its word in the realm of painting. Edelheit, who is based in both Sweden and New York, makes her egalitarian point—vis-à-vis art history, at least—most explicitly in her revision of Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863. In the French modernist’s tableau, two men in conversation picnic with an incongruously nude woman, as another woman bathes in the background. The American painter’s View of Empire State Building from Sheep Meadow, 1970–72, shows a parallel group—two men, two women—in Central Park. Yet Edelheit’s subjects are all naked, sitting on a bright blanket, gazing together at something out of frame. Edelheit levels the playing field in the verdant meadow, substituting the traditional
Martha Edelheit, View of Empire State Building from Sheep Meadow, 1970–72, acrylic on canvas, 76 × 94". APRIL 2023 167
REVIEWS
feminine passivity of the reclining nude with unisex hippie torpor. She depicts her subjects’ bare flesh and air of disengagement democratically—though in truth the men, their legs parted, are more exposed. The urban skyline appears like a frieze beyond the line of trees at the group’s slouching backs. A nature/culture tension is often at play in the artist’s approach to the figure. New York takes up more space compositionally in the grand vista of Birds: A View from Lincoln Tower Terrace, 1974. The canvas portrays a sunbathing man and woman—nude and huge in the foreground—sprawled out on a sheet printed with silhouetted pigeons. On the terrace of a high-rise apartment, they seem to float, soft-hued skyscrapers all around them. They each have one leg bent. The man’s frames a triangle of the metropolis; the woman’s knee points outward toward us, her foreshortened thigh steering our gaze to her centered thatch of pubic hair. There’s something territorial in Edelheit’s laid-back transposition of such louche vignettes and unembarrassed bodies onto the built environment. Anita Steckel, a contemporary of Edelheit’s in the women’s art movement, was at the same time making her “Giant Women” series, ca. 1969–74. She portrayed nude women, monstrous in scale, conquering New York and towering over its buildings, whose phallic character she underscored. (Steckel founded the Fight Censorship Group, of which Edelheit was a member, alongside such luminaries as Judith Bernstein and Joan Semmel.) Though very different—Steckel was unconcerned, for example, with the kind of painterly beauty Edelheit pursued—both represented the city as a backdrop or foil to liberation. The pair were also deemed obscene, their careers curtailed owing, in part, to their insistence on depicting the penis. But that little body part was only a small portion of this show. As important as it was to Edelheit to treat the male nude evenhandedly, she made radical images of women, too. The largest piece on view, the multiracial triple portrait Women in Landscape, 1966–68, differently upsets the notion of a pliant and static female model. In each of the mural-like work’s three panels, a different woman is shown in a range of positions and moods, her active interiority reflected in this time-lapse effect. Edelheit bridges domestic and mythic space with a lush Edenic background. The island of floral upholstery where the women sit melts into a royal-blue sea at dusk, under a peach-sorbet sky. Then, there is Fleshcycle, 1969. A nude female biker is mounted on a Vespa-ish sex machine composed of pink and tawny curves, its wheels secured by clitoral lug nuts. She drives up a steep mirrored ramp, looking down at her reflection, below a slit of fluffy clouds and cerulean sky visible at the picture’s dividing diagonal. It’s hard to resist imagining the rider as Edelheit herself, bearing down on her project of feminist figuration. In these radiant paintings, the representation of bodily reality, carnal fantasy, and boundless ambition is where the rubber meets the road. —Johanna Fateman
Ravi Jackson
DAVID LEWIS GALLERY There she was, either crouched seductively on a polar bear–skin rug or posing in a red bikini with a Beretta at her crotch, simultaneously taunting us and turning us on: Lil’ Kim, the Queen Bitch and multiplatinum rapper, who was the surprise star of “Hardcore,” Ravi Jackson’s first solo exhibition in New York. The show was named after Lil’ Kim’s 1996 debut album and was filled with smeary, low-res pictures of her, which Jackson printed from the internet and pasted to sculptures bearing hinged wooden panels, as though she were the deflowered Madonna 168 ARTFORUM
Ravi Jackson, Kim, 2022, plywood, rubber door stopper, hinges, ink-jet prints, acrylic paint, 48 1⁄8 × 61".
on an altarpiece. If many gay men worship Lil’ Kim, it’s likely because she’s good at “making [straight] male rappers quiver with fear,” as Rolling Stone remarked in 2004. In Jackson’s show, she was rightfully presented as an empowered, self-made, sex-positive woman, and a counterpoint to hetero masculinity in crisis. The exhibition opened with My Queen, 2020, a wooden panel painted with pink labial slits on a muddy-brown ground. At its center was a printout of lyrics from Lil’ Kim’s 1996 single “Queen Bitch”—in which she boasts about making lavish designer purchases—alongside an ad for discount shoes from Nordstrom Rack. Hovering over them was a rubber office doorstop, which resembled an impenetrable orifice. Throughout the show, Jackson used domestic hardware to invoke male impotence or female prohibition: for instance, phallic metal coils that buckled with the slightest pressure, or door handles that refused to turn. The hinged elements of Jackson’s sculptures had the suggestive ability to open and close like parts of a human body. On several of these works, Jackson pasted a famous promotional image from Lil’ Kim’s album, but cropped from the picture were her spread legs. As her lyrics repeatedly attest, sex happens—or doesn’t—on her own terms. On Queen Kim, 2022, the same photograph, altered to reveal just her face, appeared at the bottom of two separate collages, fashioned as twin door hangers—the kind one uses to demand privacy during a hotel tryst—which dangled from a pair of doorknobs that resembled oversize nipples. Accompanying Lil’ Kim’s visage were images of raw meat, a Tony Smith sculpture, African kente cloths, and the second-century Roman marble Sleeping Hermaphroditus: fetishes of race, sexuality, and aesthetics that burnish the singer’s own self-objectification. That said, Jackson’s humor has an immediacy that resists overly literal interpretation. I can’t say why I found his insertion of Rihanna’s
flawlessly made-up mug over a man’s roided-up abdominals so funny (Rihanna Body, 2022), but it’s almost certain the pop star could get any dude to do her sexual bidding. A number of freestanding and fully abstract wax-candle sculptures seemed to extend this corporeal comedy, their puckered, punched-out “orifices” demanding that the viewer crouch down to hungrily peer through them. Small, turd-shaped incense sticks sat conspicuously on the floor or atop mirrored tables, as though left by a prank-loving child. Like the subjects of a diss track, these works literally begged to be burned. Yet no one got scorched quite as much as the men in Jackson’s show. In Outlaw Peaceful Kurt, 2022, a mustachioed Kurt Russell, dressed as a stereotypical cowboy for his gunslinging role in Tombstone (1993), appeared comically emasculated with clownish daubs of yellow paint highlighting his cheeks. On either side of his deeply grooved face, Lil’ Kim’s alluring eyes dangled from hooks that beckoned like fingers. Below all this was another sampling of lyrics from “Queen Bitch,” in which the rapper threatens to kill anyone who dares mess with her friends; you could sense that, unlike Russell, she wasn’t acting. A wall-mounted piece, Dick Gregory Needed, 2022, featured a flyer, designed in the style of a “Wanted” poster, for the 1968 presidential campaign of the eponymous Black comedian and civil rights activist. Gregory’s White House run—intended as a protest against the Vietnam War and anti-Black racism—made the Marxist-leaning actor into a target of assassination for the FBI. In front of Gregory’s face, Jackson suspended a phallic wooden bedpost, the symbolic castration possibly symbolizing the way Black men are too often objectified. This “dick joke” reclaims power through satire, just as Gregory’s self-effacing humor fucked with racist stereotypes. Like Lil’ Kim, Gregory played with tired tropes of race and gender in order to subvert them. “I got that bomb ass cock, a good ass shot,” she boasts about her firearm skills in “Queen Bitch.” Watch as they both take aim. —Evan Moffitt
Nöle Giulini 15 ORIENT Nöle Giulini, Banana Shoes, 1991, dried banana peels, thread, frankincense, myrrh, glass box, 1 1⁄2 × 8 × 13".
In 2018, curator Alan Longino found himself browsing through the (excellent, useful) archive of exhibitions on the New Museum website and stumbled on an entry for a show called “A Labor of Love.” Organized by Marcia Tucker in 1996, the exhibition surveyed fifty artists whose foregrounding of craft in their work, according to the
curator, destabilizes boundaries between fine art and folk art, genius and hobbyist, art and daily life. Two pieces caught Longino’s eye: a ratty, stitched-together Mickey Mouse sculpture and a pair of ballet slippers sewn from dried banana peels. To his surprise, the former was made from neither leather nor resin but something altogether different and novel: dried kombucha mother. The artist behind both works: Nöle Giulini. A few years after his discovery, Longino assembled a small, smart survey of the Port Townsend, Washington–based artist’s output at the Brooklyn gallery 15 Orient, featuring selections from major bodies of work. Much of her art flows from an eccentric methodology Giulini developed in the early 1990s. First, she grows kombucha mothers in large, custom fiberglass incubators. Next, she carefully removes the slimy, gelatinous fungus from the tank, treats it with frankincense and myrrh to preserve it, and sews it while it’s still wet, allowing it to shrink and distort as it dries into a hard black leather. The Mickey was absent here; instead, we found kombucha bunched and knotted to form a “wig,” sewn into crowns or flowers, shaped into a sack or witch hat, and cut into dessicated nets, among other talismanic arrangements and weird abstractions. Footage of Giulini’s process, displayed in the gallery’s back room, came across as vividly biomechanical: a Gigeresque entanglement of organic and inorganic, spongy flesh tenderly pulled from its fiberglass womb. To that end, Giulini’s art seems linked to the work of several younger artists today. If sculptors in 1960s America found themselves enthralled by Plexiglas and fluorescent tubes, artists in recent years face a different set of circumstances. Faced with 3D printing, lab-grown meat, robotics, haute-cuisine fermentation, and viral pandemics, artists have begun to suffuse their works with biological materials and processes, combining bacteria, fungus, and fermentation, say, with more traditional sculptural approaches. Think Nour Mobarak, Jenna Sutela, or Anicka Yi (who has herself used kombucha). This is art that might rot or disperse; it exists as aroma and remains alive; it makes the gallery a biome. (Such work also seems to split the difference between additive sculpting, like the shaping of clay, and subtractive sculpting, like the carving away of marble, for this is sculpture that grows.) In this regard, Giulini’s art comes across as a striking precedent. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One of Giulini’s really great works is called Artist Statement, 1991/2022, and it consists of dozens of rubber bands hanging from nails, arranged so that the loops suggest letters and words making up a few lines of text. What the message might say is a mystery to you and me. In other words, the exhibition’s first note—put forward by an artist who hadn’t shown in New York in decades—was a withholding of meaning and artistic intention. In the place of MFA blather, we got Zen quiet. This felt appropriate. As tempting as it is to situate Giulini amid a matrix of contemporary practices, to fit her in lineages and assign her “relevance,” doing so risks flattening the oblique otherness that remains so key to her work. As Tucker said of “A Labor of Love”: “Issues of quality are issues of power . . . the most interesting and significant activities are usually found at the edges rather than at the center of artistic discourse.” —Lloyd Wise
Athena LaTocha JDJ
If “the medium is the message,” as philosopher Marshall McLuhan once said, then the message of Athena LaTocha’s art is death. The ten mixed-media abstractions on display in the artist’s show here were made of earth—culled from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery—along APRIL 2023 169
REVIEWS
Athena LaTocha, Untitled No. 2 (detail), 2022, shellac ink, earth from Green-Wood Cemetery, demolition sediment from a Brooklyn construction site, and glass microbeads from New York State Department of Transportation on paper, custom rawsteel artist frame, 18 1⁄2 × 27 × 2".
with demolition-site debris, pulverized building materials, and the glass microbeads used in traffic paint, which she sourced from the New York State Department of Transportation. LaTocha’s framed compositions distill mortality into a concentrate, undiluted by any intimations of life—unless they feature the kind of glass bead called a “seed bead,” perhaps suggesting that the reclamation of wasteland for the sake of one’s creative endeavors makes it a fertile ingredient. That her dirt comes from a graveyard indicates as much, for Green-Wood is not necessarily a fallow and morbid place, considering all the flora and fauna that inhabit it. Was the inseparability of life and death the implicit theme of LaTocha’s exhibition? Her version of Gotham is not exactly ”Fun City,” as former mayor John Lindsay characterized New York in 1966. It’s more of a picker’s paradise. The Brooklyn-based Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe artist grew up in Alaska. Early on, she became acutely aware of the devastating effects oil and gas drilling had on the “rugged monumentality” of her home state, as she explains on her website. Without question, her works are memento mori to it. In a sense, LaTocha is reappropriating what was taken away from Native American people by the United States government. Indeed, she spins poison into gold: Even though her art is culled from exploitation and darkness, she manages to imbue it with great light. Take Untitled No. 3, 2022, a horizontal strip of variegated whites, browns, blacks, and musty reds that calls to mind a sublime landscape on the brink of ruin, or Untitled No. 4 of the same year, a marvelous abstraction that evokes J. M. W. Turner’s paintings with its crepuscular palette and stormy textures. LaTocha’s “pictures,” if that’s how you choose to characterize them, are bordered by darkmetal frames. Such a presentation lends the work a distinctly funereal quality, as if each piece were lovingly displayed in its own heavy, rawsteel sarcophagus. LaTocha is a protest artist, and her output has an important place in the histories of feminist and Native American activist art. Her images also function as Earthworks, in a way, though not as self-aggrandizing as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, or as space consuming as Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room, 1977. Instead, LaTocha invites the viewer into an intimate relationship with our fading planet and much of the toxic detritus that has shaped it. As Percy Bysshe Shelley does in his 1818 poem “Ozymandias,” the artist conveys the despair that attends death, rather than deny it with delusions of grandeur. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” writes Shelley. “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The 170 ARTFORUM
pieces in this exhibition were ruthlessly physical, subtly Conceptual, and deeply emotional. Though modest in scale and materials, each work was gargantuan in scope and spirit. —Donald Kuspit
STONY BROOK, NEW YORK
“Revisiting 5+1” PAUL W. ZUCCAIRE GALLERY AT STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY In recent years, curatorial efforts to recuperate the stories and careers of Black artists who practiced during the 1960s and ’70s have indicated an undeniable expansion of the American art canon—a development that recognizes the as-yet-untapped legacies of Black expression that have, consciously or not, evaded these same historicizing modes. Consider the 2021 restaging of the “Sapphire Show,” among the earliest West Coast exhibitions dedicated to Black American women artists, at New York’s Ortuzar Projects, or the recent “Just Above Midtown” presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, honoring Linda Goode Bryant and the dynamic roster of artists, including David Hammons and Senga Nengudi, who showed at the eponymous gallery. These outings were two newer examples of how throwing institutional muscle behind archival research can yield fantastic results. “Revisiting 5+1” joined the list of successful retrospective efforts that have substantiated how the knotty debates concerning political representation, activism, and aesthetics among Black artists remain ever complex and salient. The show took as its starting point “5+1,” the 1969 exhibition of Black abstraction at Stony Brook University that featured art by Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams and was organized by British Guyanese painter Frank Bowling, the “+1” to the quintet. The curators of this iteration— Stony Brook Ph.D. candidates Elise Armani, Amy Kahng, and Gabriella Shypula, with consultation from the university’s distinguished professor of art Howardena Pindell and advisement from Karen Levitov and Katy Siegel—cannily moved beyond a mimetic redux of the first presentation. The decision was partly practical: Many of the original works were lost to history or had been econfigured by the artists themselves. Vitrines filled with press clippings and documentation of protests by student organizations demanding support and guidance for minorities within the US college system demonstrated how public universities such
as Stony Brook did not succeed when they tried implementing more inclusionary policies during the 1960s. A number of these schools were models of progress when they tried bringing in more Black and Latinx students. Yet these populations were failed by the institutional (and racist) impulse to surveil and punish when they became more activistminded and the “war on drugs” began. Bowling’s exhibition was staged at a time of massive upheaval. His original curatorial conceit was for “5+1” to account for the formal, social, and political tensions between mainstream culture and Black culture by showcasing the range and depth of Black abstraction, suggesting manifold references to historical forms, popular music, and everyday street aesthetics. The elegant stature of Johnson’s work invites comparison to West African sculpture, for instance, and Jack Whitten’s painting from this period bears an energetic gesturalism inspired by jazz, often layered beneath thin, graffiti-like drips of paint.
View of “Revisiting 5+1,” 2022–23. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Recognizing abstraction’s embeddedness within the social and the political highlighted a major gap in Bowling’s thinking about the original presentation—namely, the absence of Black women who worked with abstraction. To rectify this, the curators of “Revisiting” asked Pindell to select a group of six Black women artists to be in the show, while including something from her own oeuvre. Like their male counterparts, these women often took an active part in civil rights demonstrations but chafed at demands that they make their art conform to any overt political ideology. Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s large-scale painting Jabberwocky, 1976–77, for instance, mobilizes the poetic gesturalism of AbEx. Its faint streaks of neon pink and green against a ground of lampblack, collected from the sooty detritus of oil lamps, produce a haziness that evokes the atmospheric conditions of the Bay Area, where she had moved after leaving New York in the early 1970s. Betye Saar was represented here by one of her idiosyncratic assemblage sculptures as well as by a rare film, Eyeball, 1971, a quasi-anthropological montage of eyes culled from pop imagery and spiritual iconography. What emerged across these contributions, and throughout the exhibition as a whole, was a shared sensibility that recognized Black culture as multitudinous and resistant to reduction, embodying, as Bowling described in the 1969 “5+1” exhibition catalogue “a creative, self-perpetuating process of anarchist, pro-life zeal which a study of the fine arts and history alone, though helpful, can never fully define.” —Tausif Noor
MIAMI
Didier William
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART NORTH MIAMI The title of Didier William’s impressive solo exhibition here, “Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè,”is Kreyòl, or Haitian Creole, for “We Have Left That All Behind”—fitting, as the artist’s family relocated to North Miami from Haiti during the late 1980s. While William’s genealogy and the name of the show evoke specific geographic locations, the “where” and “when” examined in the thirty-nine works on display—mixed-media paintings on wood panels, prints, artist books, and one sculpture—are never straightforward. Mosaic Pool, Miami, 2021, is a case in point: The titular basin, surrounded by orange-brown tiles and brightly colored flora, is not an atypical scene for south Florida. However, the lush foliage could also be reminiscent of the Caribbean landscape William’s family left behind. From afar, the dynamic and elaborately patterned forms emerging from the pool read as frolicking, miasmic bodies wearing bathing suits in bright green, orange, and blue. Indeed, the work was inspired by the artist’s recent stay in one of Miami’s high-rise luxury buildings, where he and his brothers had rented a room. Yet a text from William hung next to the image explains that he would not have had access to this kind of lavishness as a young person growing up in a working-class immigrant family. As one gets closer to the picture, one clearly sees that the figures are composed of innumerable disembodied eyes that the artist meticulously and obsessively inscribed into the piece’s wooden surface—carving plays a major role in a lot of William’s work. The sheer number of irregular and wavy black outlines delineating the eyes elicits a powerfully unsettling feeling. Moreover, the subjects’ clothing is rendered over the eyes via colorful hatching, intensifying the painting’s overall vertiginous effect. William began incorporating the motif shortly after the 2012 murder of teenager Trayvon Martin, who lived in Sanford, Florida. Perhaps the eyes are meant to shield the bodies from an omnipresent and oppressive white gaze, offering a form of protection that surveils the surveillant. Also included here are a group of paintings that transform more art-historical works. One powerful example is Ma Tante Toya (My Aunty Toya), 2017, which riffs on Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 canvas Death of Marat. In William’s piece, the subject of David’s work is replaced by a woman emerging from a bathtub. The vibratory aspect of the image caused by the surfeit of eyes suggests that the enigmatic figure depicted is vividly alive. Her head is impossibly tilted and parallel to her outstretched arm, which holds a machete. Used in sugarcane farming, the massive blade is also a potent signifier of Haiti’s eventual disentanglement from French colonial rule (under France, the nation was known as Saint-Domingue). William’s intent is to subversively supplant the revolutionary figure of Marat with one that references the world’s only successful slave revolt.
Didier William, Ma Tante Toya (My Aunty Toya), 2017, ink, collage, and wood carving on panel, 64 × 50".
APRIL 2023 171
REVIEWS
One gallery in the show, dimly lit, is covered with custom-made textured wallpaper printed with countless eyes. However, their sclerae are a slightly different shade of black than their outlines, which makes them largely invisible. Once again, this type of camouflaging further underscores the artist’s interest in anti-legibility, or a kind of Glissantian opacity. It is worth noting that William is queer, but his art is closer in spirit to the word’s use as a verb rather than a noun. The artist’s works destabilize, rather than reinforce, a singular identity and function in the interstices between race, sexuality, and nationality as both objects of fantastical narrative and documents of Black life. —Alpesh Kantilal Patel
CHICAGO
Luftwerk
CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER “Color is the most relative medium in art,” according to Josef Albers. Its relativity, along with the subjective nature of visual perception, forms the basis of the immersive light installations that comprise “Exact Dutch Yellow,” the most recent exhibition of Chicago-based collaborative Luftwerk (Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero), who transformed the fourth-floor galleries of this cultural institution into an oasis of complex optical phenomena. Luftwerk’s multimedia practice encompasses light-based public projects and large-scale architectural interventions, often within iconic modernist buildings. Here, viewers were lured into darkened galleries by the radiant glow of eight mainly wall-based objects, including two neon word sculptures, a mural, and various concave and flat panellike works airbrushed with botanical dyes and “activated” by programmed sequences of LEDs. Spaciously installed to offer a series of intimate individual encounters, these works revealed how light changes our perception of color—as illustrated in Interaction of Light, 2020, a set of prints pairing two color wheels that show how the same spectrum of colors appears differently on reverse grounds. The title of the work spins on Albers’s influential book The Interaction of Color (1963). The related three-dimensional Portrait No. 1 Yellow to Blue, 2020, and Portrait No. 2 Mauve to Gamboge, 2021, set Albers’s theories in motion to examine the ways in which color impacts the body and senses. Installed on opposite sides of an interior wall, these conical forms (constructed of painted fiberglass and aluminum and rimmed with LEDs) appeared, when viewed head-on, as floating orbs of pulsating chroma whose concentric rings seamlessly flow from fiery oranges and saffron yellows to hot mauves and deep blues, all to mesmerizing effect. While Luftwerk never deny the metaphysical and sometimes spiritual properties of their chosen medium, the duo use light to demonstrate how color defines the physical world and our understanding of it. To that end, the exhibition took its inspiration from Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814), a taxonomic guide by geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner that established fifty-four colors found in nature, including a reddish flaxen he identified as Dutch orange, the hue of the common marigold. Before Pantone, Werner’s book set the standard for the study of color in the arts and natural sciences. The manual was also used by Charles Darwin during his infamous voyage on the HMS Beagle. Writing within the pages of Werner’s text, Darwin noted his observation of a striated caracara (a Mexican eagle), the legs of which he described as “exact Dutch yellow.” Such history, provided within the works’ didactics, was helpful for understanding the provenance of the exhibition’s title—scripted 172 ARTFORUM
in an orange-and-yellow neon sculpture at the show’s entrance—but not essential to one’s experience of the art itself or its atmospheric plays upon the gallery’s interior architecture. In the floor-based Landscape of Perception, 2022, a horizontal field covered in raw powdered pigments of ultramarine, ocher, and green is transfigured into a kind of lunar, otherworldly terrain through a gentle wave of projected light that undergoes subtle changes in intensity, so that each color appears to blend fluidly into the next. An accompanying score of synthesized Minimalist tones enhances the installation’s spatial and affective dimensions. Luftwerk’s sundry colorscapes owe as much to legacies of abstract painting as to the histories of natural science, as suggested by the triptych Meadow, 2022: three canvases airbrushed in earthen tones of yellow and green that, when illuminated, suggest the passage from dawn to dusk; the piece evoked the work of Mark Rothko and the Color Field school. The more static The Sky at the Time was Berlin Blue, 2022, enveloped the viewer in a numinous expanse of the titular hue while taking up an entire gallery wall. Descending from ultramarine blue-black to near white, this meditative monochrome painting— comprising fifty-two horizontal bands rendered in various shades of cerulean—was created with the aid of a cyanometer, a tool invented in 1789 to measure the blueness of the sky. At once contemplative and alluring, such works give form to the immaterial while remapping the natural world as experiential environments of pure color and light. When viewed against the backdrop of today’s climate crisis, which has severely altered Earth’s ecology, “Exact Dutch Yellow” presented an exactingly distilled view of nature, asking us to really see. —Susan Snodgrass
LOS ANGELES
Adam Higgins
CHRIS SHARP GALLERY “My Salad Years,” the title of Adam Higgins’s debut exhibition at Chris Sharp Gallery, was a paean to innocence, channeling the halcyon times spoken of in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1623), where
Luftwerk, The Sky at the Time was Berlin Blue, 2022, fifty-two shades of blue acrylic paint, LEDs, 12 × 30'. Photo: John Faier.
“green” connotes youth as much as lettuce. Yet the artist’s deft, nearly photorealistic renditions of salads—Caesars more specifically, keeping with the classical theme—do belie this, as they suggest durational practice and studied command of painting’s devices instead. In any case, Higgins has worked on this subject exclusively for the past two years. (An iterative body of work from 2019 focused on California halibut, and was executed with a similar formal and conceptual approach.) The installation here contained eight oil-on-canvas-mounted-on-panel compositions of varying size, some of which were overwhelmingly, even preposterously, large (the biggest was five by six feet). Despite the shifts of physical and pictorial scale, all shared a consistent framing device hovering at some indeterminate distance over the neatly composed food that, in the artist’s hands, was made unequivocally and viscerally strange. Caesar salad with gulf shrimp and red chard (all works 2022), for instance, featured some chopped romaine and darker, crimsonveined leaves layered with oddly projecting crouton geometries and glistening prawns, while Caesar salad with chicken and housefly contained gruesomely gelatinous morsels of raw poultry atop waxy puddles of dressing. Evidently commensurate with strategies of merchandising and commercial cuisine photography—or its social media counterparts via the food-porn gurus—the works nevertheless made clear the extent to which they are engaged in histories of painting (and the medium’s preeminent status within the art market), as well as in conventions of picturing, of world-making within the representational order of a given frame. They earnestly recalled the genre of still life, from seventeenthcentury Dutch meditations on abundance, consumption, and mortality to Édouard Manet’s own self-conscious renditions of white asparagus and splayed oysters. Higgins’s versions differently image the scenes from above, making their passage to the verticality of the wall that much more pronounced. For his part, the artist also names the influence of Jackson Pollock’s allover spreads, and there is in Higgins’s imagery— vis-à-vis Leo Steinberg’s flatbed picture plane, but realized as a tabletop at a chain restaurant or the bounty of a proud home cook—a link to Pollock’s floor-bound abstractions, always intended for upright wall display. Higgins’s downward gaze at items propped back up, arrayed, and shot under harsh light sometimes occludes his subject matter, despite the work’s technical prowess. Caesar salad with pecorino romano lump is especially gnomic: Flush to the plate (or bowl, or countertop, or generalizable and defiantly nondescript support) are crisp cuts of green
Adam Higgins, Caesar salad with lemon wedge, boiled egg, and baguette slices, 2022, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 30 × 36".
drizzled in dressing that alternately oozes and clumps. Gingerly resting atop the whole thing is a wedge of cheese that glows aggressively incandescent, a monochrome obstacle at the painting’s center. With Caesar salad with lemon wedge, boiled egg, and baguette slices, Higgins tips the plane of table upward and dims the lights. It is a terrifically perverse kind of nocturne. Under an indeterminately hued cast, more intact leaves funnel the same mix of olive oil, egg yolk, pepper flecks, garlic, and the rest to the sliced bread that awaits. Raw ingredients remain intact, too: A sectioned lemon sits in the picture’s upper-right corner, with a half of a hard-boiled egg below it. The original recipe for the Caesar, concocted in Mexico by Italian restauranteur Caesar Cardini, who left the United States during Prohibition, called for lime. Yet crossing the nearby Tijuana border meant swapping lime for lemon and, more generally, banalizing the dish while effacing its origins. It is tempting to read something of the history and geopolitics of the salad from Higgins’s props, and to posit these inanimate objects as bodily surrogates (as the anchovy carcasses are already). But this interpretation coexists with the mutability of creamy dressing and paint, and the unshakable fact of the salad as pretext for formal play. Meyer Schapiro famously argued that realism re-creates the world by a “series of abstract calculations of perspective and gradation of color.” In this show, Higgins performed as much. In salad years, one can have it both ways. —Suzanne Hudson
Ed Johnson SOLDES
Ed Johnson is a painter who does not cut corners. The last time the public received any news from his studio was in 2017, on the occasion of his exhibition at MiM gallery in Los Angeles. Johnson’s output is scarce, which might be one of the reasons he shows so infrequently, even though he works continuously. This much can be gathered at a glance: His paintings are evidently the product of intensive deliberation. They are meticulously realized, yet far from fussy; this impression bolstered by the seemingly casual aspect of what they feature in terms of content. Johnson’s starting point is always a more or less banal photograph, a snapshot that would strike anyone as random, even failed, were it not translated into paint with such extraordinary focus. This attention is evenly distributed between what the picture represents and what it is in itself as a technical construct. On the viewer’s end, a reciprocal oscillation occurs: The picture that is pictured appears both as a view and a thing in the view. So what kind of thing is a photograph once it enters a painting? This is not a new question—it is at the crux of the discourse around Photorealism. Yet Johnson comes at it in ways that never cease to surprise and disturb. First, a pronounced temporal discrepancy obtains between the work’s photographic instantaneity and the deliberate painterly process that unfolds over months, often years. In a piece such as Sugar Creek, 2021, which is based on an overexposed photograph of a neglected landscape, the viewer could acutely sense to what extent the source image has been bored into and excavated. Every grain or pixel in its raster is treated individually; a vast array of tiny, independent, and often brightly colored—sometimes fluorescent—marks infuse the whole scene with an air of compacted exuberance that’s entirely at odds with one’s first impression of its washed-out inertia. On closer inspection, these minuscule gestures were revealed to be attuned to the various things that they also serve to depict, turning languid in relation to the eponymous creek that runs through the composition at a slight diagonal, and then more abrupt and rigid for the weeds that wantonly APRIL 2023 173
REVIEWS
Ed Johnson, Sugar Creek, 2021, oil and gesso on Plexiglas, 36 × 48".
sprout to either side. In this, Johnson would seem to be operating like any painter, except that these marks, executed on a microscopic scale with a resolutely nonexpressionistic precision, turn sign-like, a miniature typography. Moreover, the echo between painterly form and imagistic content is by no means formulaic. What kept one looking intently while passing from one painting to the next is the formal inventiveness of Johnson’s gestural marks, which always veer off into the hallucinatory. The awe-inspiring Untitled (California), 2021, is a case in point. This view of a suburban lawn, with a house barely visible in the background, is marred by a massive lens flare; yet the information loss that normally occurs when you point your camera toward the sun instead becomes an opportunity for fervid byzantine elaboration here. Emanating from a white void are countless agitated brushstrokes of every color, a lysergic maelstrom churning with specters, luminous and sinister in equal measure. The unbroken concentration evinced by these works quickly turns ominous. What happened here, one might wonder? Car Fire, 2021, a small nocturnal painting, presents an oblique view of a burning automobile on an otherwise perfectly unremarkable neighborhood street. Yet even in what was this show’s only instance of a dramatic scene, one couldn’t help but withdraw from the action to once again become lost in a thicket of paint. After all, we confront all manner of atrocity every day on our image feeds without raising an eyebrow. The real event, here and elsewhere, is one that begins in the studio: looking at photographs, painting photographs, and then looking again, until something that has very little to do with photography, and might not even relate to the visible world, begins to appear. —Jan Tumlir
TORONTO
Denyse Thomasos ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO
Both abstract and gestural, figurative and architectural, the works of Trinidadian Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos (1964–2012) vibrate with the punitive potential of human structures. It was fitting, then, 174 ARTFORUM
that this retrospective of the late artist’s oeuvre opened with a photograph of Thomasos at work on Hybrid Nations, 2005, a large-scale mural whose composition is dominated by a computer rendering of a sage-green panopticon. Single-storied, unlike Jeremy Bentham’s prototype, Thomasos’s edifice has quadrants that radiate from the center with varied geometric forms—including the graphic demarcations for a basketball court—while its walls are made from densely layered bars evoking jail cells or slaughterhouses. Around this central wheel, the artist has painted interlocking rectangular shapes that bend and transform into gestural patches suggesting graffiti, the hull of a ship, a rickety hallway, or a skeletal form (a rib cage? a serpent’s bones?). The documentation of the painting, which is no longer extant, attests to the continued resonance of Thomasos’s investigations into the frameworks of power, more than ten years after her death. Among these investigations in “Just Beyond,” a carefully curated show of Thomasos’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is Virtual Incarceration, 1999. At eleven by twenty feet—the dimensions of the biggest wall in the artist’s East Village studio in New York, where she spent the later part of her career—it was one of the largest canvases on view and is composed entirely of interlocking grids assembled at tight angles to suggest a kind of Brutalist penitentiary. In some areas the painting’s surface is suffocatingly overloaded with superimposed grids, while in others hallways and passages are delineated with spare rectilinear pulls of paint, which are separated by ample expanses of negative space. Here, Thomasos invokes the modernist myth of the grid as ground zero for experiments in abstraction, only to reveal the motif’s more oppressive physical and intellectual characteristics. Lines in nearly identical hues are often layered over one another, allowing the acrylic paint to drip down the canvas in long thin lines. Josef Albers’s color theory is at work here, but one can also feel the influence of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental ruined landscapes and Luis Cruz Azaceta’s polychromatic renderings of dense and crumbling urban scenes. One of Thomasos’s remarkable skills as a painter was to create a feeling of compactness and dynamism through a restrained repertoire
Denyse Thomasos, Virtual Incarceration, 1999, acrylic on canvas, 11 × 20'.
of gestures and colors. (Video interviews with the artist’s former studio assistants, mentors, and colleagues helped explicate her working methods.) Recurring architectural motifs—slave ships, prisons, cave dwellings, and staircases—ground the work when it threatens to dissolve into full-on abstraction. But the spaces of near dissolution, such as the group of skulls assembled in the center of Arc, 2009, are also where Thomasos’s compositions stop the viewer dead in their tracks. Amid these epic landscapes was a selection of smaller works, including a suite of acrylic paintings on paper. These pieces, completed during a 2000 residency in Wyoming, were rendered in a subdued palette of grays, earthy browns, black, moss green, and crimson. Elsewhere was a collection of studies featuring indigenous buildings the artist encountered during her travels to China, India, Indonesia, and South America; the images point to Thomasos’s ability to work across scales and to her voracious curiosity regarding non-Western architecture. The exhibition concluded with several “late works” (the phrase is painful to write, given her untimely death at the age of fortyseven) by the artist, including Babylon, 2005, in which the geometric rigidity of her forms had loosened. Here, Thomasos prioritizes the sweeping gestural inflections of her brush, which produce textures that suggest impermanence, urban ruin, or the passage of time—aspects that attest to the artist’s uncanny ability to conjure those things that lay, indeed, just beyond. —Gabrielle Moser
Lime, both 2018, were rendered realistically against neutral grounds. Yet the artist’s take on these sour fruits, depicted both head-on and in profile, gave them a vaguely corporeal quality, their skins suggesting raw or pockmarked flesh. In the larger painting Studio with Lemon, 2021, the titular citrus was placed upon a striped piece of fabric. Both of these elements were precariously arranged on a stretched canvas, all of which was surrounded by studio paraphernalia. The lemon appears abnormally big, cast in shadow and/or somewhat sullied; whether it is meant to signify as “real” or fictional is unclear. Another piece of cloth, sans stripes, appeared in Crumpled Fabric Taped to Linen, 2020. Here the item is suspended and utterly alone, its edges frayed. This weathered swatch takes pride of place within one of the paintings depicted in Red Studio. The sheer persistence of this worn item, humble to a provocative extent, takes on a certain gravitas, having been exposed and processed, and held up by the artist for examination and judgment. This solemnness was further expressed in Still Life with Table, 2022. The mixed-media work features handmade sculptural versions of studio props (books, a ball, a Magrittean chess piece), with textural and chromatic irregularities reflecting an imperative to intensively reconsider and recast, quite literally, what is simply at hand, as though the normally steadfast appearance and presence of those objects were somehow in question.
Howard Podeswa BIRCH CONTEMPORARY
Ranging from the mournful to the exuberant, or from grand and tumultuous scenes of hell to the humblest and quietest of still lifes, Howard Podeswa’s canvases seem to examine all facets of existence. The artist shies away from any one signature style, and while his motives often feel elusive, he appears to be driven by a deep curiosity about—or even a loving submission to—his subjects, be they the people he counts among his nearest and dearest, or scraps of materials just lying around his work space. At Birch Contemporary, Podeswa’s exhibition “Dépaysement / Studio” (Change of Scenery / Studio)—thoughtfully organized by curator and critic E. C. Woodley in collaboration with the gallery— surveyed a small fraction of the artist’s output from the past few years. The show’s centerpiece, Red Studio, 401 Richmond St / The Human Condition, 2022, wears its debts to Magritte and Matisse with pride, featuring renderings of previous works by Podeswa with schematic depictions of studio furnishings, such as stools, shelving, and plinths. The entire tableau is set upon a monochromatic ground that includes the outline of a central and transparent canvas positioned on a more solidly defined easel. Upon closer inspection, however, this artwork appeared to pervert its celebrated sources: For instance, its reds are bloodier than Matisse’s and applied in more restless ways. But the contours of the things portrayed come across as singularly strange, vibrating nervously as they waver between shades of crimson, blue, green, and yellow. These pulsating effects are likely due to the artist’s resituating, reworking, and recasting of objects within the composition, which may correspond to maneuvers within the artist’s mind and, of course, the studio. Navigating Podeswa’s show, one felt a growing sense of his subjects becoming unhinged—everyday materials appeared askew and off-kilter. Perhaps this was the result of pandemic-related isolation, exacerbated by the death of the artist’s father, a Holocaust survivor and fellow painter. Two diminutive oil-on-paper works, Lemon and Lemon and
Howard Podeswa, Red Studio, 401 Richmond St/The Human Condition, 2022, oil on canvas, 48 1⁄8 × 48".
Similar strains of ambiguity—about whether a phenomenon is actually there or imagined—run through much of Podeswa’s artistic projects, often inspired by regional forms of Surrealism (Latin American, Belgian) that were, in part, relatively marginalized reactions to the rise of fascism during the 1930s and often practiced by artists who were profoundly uncertain about what they could believe or represent. With the proliferation of right-wing movements around the globe, this questioning of what is given to us reflects a haunting awareness of the recurrence of evil that has the potential to color the perception of everything from a vase to a sooty segment of radiator. Podeswa’s paintings compel and convince partly because they reflect an ever-present need to perform an existential commitment to reexamining what is before us: a myriad of adversities, losses, and doubts. —Dan Adler APRIL 2023 175
REVIEWS
MEXICO CITY
Débora Delmar LLANO
View of “Débora Delmar,” 2023. From left: Frontier, 2023; Fort, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
176 ARTFORUM
Débora Delmar is an astute critic of the aesthetic habits of her own class. Brought up in a cushy golf club in the moneyed southern part of Mexico City, she is observant of the ways in which, through gentrification and the privatization of public space, the logic of the gated neighborhood has expanded to dominate the entirety of the city. In “Castles,” Delmar’s first exhibition in her hometown in almost ten years, she articulates that critique with surgical precision. At the very entrance, Delmar has built a high white wall that she adorned with Locator “66” (all works 2023), an illuminated house number corresponding to that of her family’s home. Past this barrier stands another in parallel, Frontier, a yellow scaffolding structure covered in a ubiquitous mesh canvas print, like those so often seen outside soon-to-be-remodeled buildings in gentrifying neighborhoods. Delmar’s fabric covering shows an architectural rendering of the facade of Chapultepec Castle, built for the viceroy of Spain during colonial times and home to Mexico’s later lethal experiment with a Hapsburg emperor. The image is printed in black over greige—the innocuous but extremely popular beige and gray mix that turns up everywhere from living and working spaces to hotels and Kardashian abodes. Behind it sits Fort, an inflatable sculpture based on the towers and features of the same castle, including its iconic checkered flooring. The soft, penetrable structure felt like a cheeky pun on inflation and its effects on the urban landscape. A castle held up by air is a fitting analogy for a city that is currently tormented by a development bubble causing rampant housing speculation and price gouging. On the walls nearby hang works from the series “Community,” a group of dismembered steel gates: rectangular black frames with diagonal bars across them. Delmar had previously shown these dismantled segments as a single piece at Mexico City’s Material Art Fair in 2020, at a booth where promotional flyers for 1950s urbanization projects reprinted on steel sat behind the locked fence to which only the gallerist had the key. Delmar often extracts the domestic signifiers of her mostly upper-class peers and turns them into works that nod to Minimalist history while staying on target with her critique. A cute little piece, Access, dangles by the entrance and adds a note of levity to the somewhat severe show. It’s a
lock with a key from which hang dozens of key chains, a few of them with self-referential trinkets, such as the Union Jack (Delmar has lived in London for some years); a smiley avocado, because of her love for the fruit; and a friendly caricature of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. So careful and measured are Delmar’s works that many describe them as cold or cryptic. I’d simply say that she refuses to spoon-feed her critique and that viewers have to put the pieces together themselves. Her approach is poetic rather than didactic, but no less urgent for that. Mexico City’s government is currently working with Airbnb to lure more affluent digital nomads to the already sprawling metropolis, which of course means more displacement, more elevated rents, and the tearing apart of diverse yet tight-knit communities. Delmar weaves a thread between Chapultepec Castle with its historical links to European and American invaders, and this new, less violent, but perhaps no less insidious invasion. In that sense, Delmar’s return to the local scene feels very timely, and her works more mature and eloquent than ever. —Gaby Cepeda
SÃO PAULO
Cinthia Marcelle
MUSEU DE ARTE DE SÃO PAULO “Cinthia Marcelle: por via das dúvidas” (Cinthia Marcelle: By Means of Doubt), organized by Isabella Rjeille, was a survey of the work of the Brazilian artist, whose career began in the late 1990s. Marcelle belongs to a generation of artists that includes, among others, Marilá Dardot, Lais Myrrha, Matheus Rocha Pitta, and Sara Ramo, all of whose works are characterized by the association of Conceptual language with an investigation of economics and politics. That generation was marked by two moments of transition. The first, around 2003, was the election of a leftist government in Brazil, following a string of dictatorships and neoliberal governments. These artists looked hopefully to the future in a country still treading cautiously around constitutional processes and social policies. The second transitional moment came around 2019, when a far-right government began to destroy the bases of social programs and to create laws making the purchase of firearms easier. Soon after, that government would also deny the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic. The works in this show assert a narrative of insubordination, a call to uprising, and poetic and political responses to crucial moments in recent history. However, Marcelle’s work does not depict only the Brazilian scene, it also evokes undefined territories and times. In the photographic series “Capa morada” (Stay [Cape Town]), 2003, a collaboration with Jean Meeran, Marcelle drapes herself in fabrics of the same color as the background before which she poses: an experiment in blending into the landscape of the South African city. In attempting to leave no trace of her existence, she becomes a ghostly presence that periodically emerges in different settings. Linking the phantasmagoric to culture, space, and bodies in Africa is a potent metaphor for thinking about forms of domination and power. The idea of insurrection is revisited in Confronto (Confrontation), from the series “Unus Mundus” (One World), 2005. The video documents two jugglers who toss flaming torches back and forth as they wait for traffic lights to change. “Each time the traffic lights turn red, two more join in the action until they take up the whole length of the pedestrian crossing. By the end of the video, the jugglers have formed a barrier of fire in front of the vehicles and motorcycles,” as Rjeille’s wall text explains. In Brazil, panhandling jugglers are a common sight at traffic lights, but here, an impasse emerges between the performers—
Cinthia Marcelle and Jean Meeran, Capa morada (Stay [Cape Town]), 2003, ink-jet print, 19 3⁄4 × 29 1⁄2".
representatives of precarity—and the drivers who create a mounting cacophony of honking horns as they huddle in the vehicles emblematic of their socioeconomic distinction. In Leitmotiv (Leitmotif), 2011, the camera remains static and focused on a concrete surface. Gradually, we hear the sound of water being poured. Slowly, the floor is covered with water and soap, and we see the movement of rodos, wooden toothless rakes. In this allegory of the world of precarious work, its tools are transformed into prompts for potential political discussion. As the video proceeds, the intensity with which the rodos are manipulated increases. They move repeatedly from the outside toward the inside, concentrating foam in the center of the image. What was simply the washing of an area becomes a gesture of revolt and an attempt to empower the periphery. But, in the end, the movement ceases, and the entire effort dissipates. Marcelle’s work reflects on the contemporary world from the viewpoint of someone who, surrounded by evil and danger and threatened with death by economic, cultural, religious, or political circumstances, turns toward insurgency. —Felipe Scovino Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers.
LONDON
Gretchen Bender SPRÜTH MAGERS
It was a nice touch, installing Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image (Image World Version), 1989, so that it faced the gallery’s front window and the nine bulky wall-mounted CRT monitors were visible from the street, their televised grid flickering with 24-7 live feeds of mainstream media channels. What they were drawing us into was the exhibition “Image World,” which gathered three works made between 1984 and 1990—and a selection of related archival materials—by the Pictures generation artist who died in 2004. Inside, closer to the work, we could read the series of phrases overlaid on the screens in matteblack vinyl, interrupting the current of images like static ticker tape stuck onto the same messages. Sardonic and disquieting, the appliquéd statements had by turns vexed, ironic, or distressing relationships to the content glowing behind
them. gender technology hovered over a home-shopping channel special on velvet dresses, while military research branded the unaptly named Tory Foreign Secretary James Cleverly as he addressed the House of Commons about humanitarian aid to Turkey and Syria. people with aids struck through an ITV2 reality dating show, and I was momentarily mesmerized by a commercial for a stainless-steel and ceramic pet fur trimmer, over which read where truth lies. TV Text & Image was originally exhibited in the windows of the Donnell Library Center in New York, its pairings of image—live from 1984— with text likewise as varied (or, arguably, as similar: same shit, different day) at diverse hours and for diverse viewers. Here in London, the British media of today feeds the work (cannibalism or coprophagy?), lending its bulky obsolescent technologies an uncanny immediacy. For Bender, spaces outside the white cube were salient for work that critiqued what she called the “cannibalistic river” of the media, with its “flow or current that absorbs everything.” Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version), 1984—a two-channel video installation on four monitors stacked in a cube, one turned on its side—was first shown in the nightclub named in its title, at an event hosted by synth-pop band Dominatrix. Bender collaborated with the band’s leader, Stuart Argabright, and his associate Michael Diekmann to produce the work’s glitchy, percussive soundtrack. Gunshots, laser blasts, video-game effects, and shattering glass overlap frantically, giving way to a Cabaret Voltaire–style pulsing dance track. Clips from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and the TV series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983–85), as well as of a cartoon eyeball floating in space and the Statue of Liberty with her torch exploding, are interspersed with kaleidoscopic computer animations and sinister manipulations of media logos: CBS, ABC, and what Bender called the “Death Star,” or AT&T’s swirling “Earth in bondage.” For long periods, the screens are overtaken by an animated head, bald and swaying in the darkness, eyes blank, mouth opening and closing in what looked to me like rapture or ecstasy. “I use media on its own terms regarding the vastness of its seduction and the inversion of that seduction,” Bender said, articulating the ambivalence behind her manipulations. Her work does not propose judgmental binaries such as good and bad, but, as the title of Aggressive Witness—Active Participant, 1990, suggests, highlights our own complicity. The artist’s critique is aimed not just at the media and its hegemony of corrupt corporate overlords but at viewers—you, me, us—at how we look yet do not really see. If Bender’s multichannel works bombard and assault the senses, they also remind us that it is we who choose what to focus on, interpret, and believe. The future in which technology liberates has not arrived (surprise!) and appears nowhere on the near horizon. The revolution, it seems, really will not be televised, streamed, or live cast on Instagram or TikTok. These media are no substitute for lived experience, and neither is art. In Bender’s work we are simultaneously looking at all three, looking from inside and outside the system, looking at ourselves—animals in and of the image world. —Emily LaBarge
Gretchen Bender, TV Text & Image (Image World Version) (detail), 1989, live television broadcast on nine monitors (color, silent), vinyl lettering, dimensions variable. Photo: Ben Westoby.
APRIL 2023
177
REVIEWS
HASTINGS, ENGLAND
Caragh Thuring
HASTINGS CONTEMPORARY Images of an erupting volcano have been common in Caragh Thuring’s paintings since the mid-2000s. A semi-submerged submarine started to complement that motif a decade later, by which time clear distinctions between natural and human-caused calamity were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. What the volcano and submarine share are intimations of turbulent depths as well as a dramatic breaching of fragile boundaries between a world that is familiar and one that is not. The submarine sprang from a childhood spent in Holy Loch on the Firth of Clyde in the south of Scotland, where the US Navy maintained a base for underwater craft. The Clydeside upbringing of the Belgium-born artist may also partly account for her recurrent use of imagery evoking the industrial architecture of a bygone age.
and cumulative allure benefits from its formal heterogeneity. The twenty or so substantial paintings assembled here, most measuring around four by six feet, offered a useful overview spanning the past fifteen years. A grid of small monotypes from 2021 was also on view, as was a selection of works in ink on paper dating from a decade earlier. Thuring’s paintings, in particular, belong to a lineage of disjunctively layered pictorial composition that might be traced from Francis Picabia’s “Transparencies” via Sigmar Polke through the resurgence of figurative painting in the 1980s and beyond. Specific details here and there recall the work of fellow painters ranging from René Daniëls to Laura Owens. Until recently, Thuring’s paintings tended to provide the viewer with some breathing space in the form of areas of raw unprimed linen, but, in a body of work produced over the past five years, she denies her audience such respite. These are painted on custom-made fabric supports, made by Suffolk weavers, that feature digital renderings of photographs she has either found or taken, including imagery derived from her own earlier paintings. As the debris of history continues to pile up, it seems new means are required to bring as much as possible to the surface. —Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith
WAKEFIELD, ENGLAND
Hannah Starkey
THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD
Caragh Thuring, August 1779, 2011, oil and matting agent on dyed linen, 72 1⁄8 × 96".
As for the volcanoes, the most arresting painting in this exhibition— a survey of twenty or so paintings made over the past fifteen years—was August 1779, 2011, which suggests a debt to historical depictions of a notable eruption of Mount Vesuvius. More general mythic associations are also, however, surely pertinent to a body of work that registers a significant degree of self-consciousness regarding its own coming into being. Vulcan was, after all, a master of invention, god of craftwork, and a patron of artists and artisans. Prominent in the foreground of August 1779 is a redbrick wall whose incongruous semitransparency reveals it as yet another disconcertingly permeable boundary, an emblem of the nexus between artifice and nature—brick being made of clay extracted from the earth in order to impose a construction on it. Like the windows that also punctuate some of Thuring’s paintings, notably in a series invoking Dutch interiors, the brick wall can also signify as a facade, a bounded liminal plane that may resist or accommodate penetrative vision. David Gandy, 2014, is an unusually small canvas whose relatively straightforward composition features the outline of the famous male model striking three poses, his tanned features and buff body replaced by patchworks of patterned red brick. Earth’s crust, sea surface, windowpanes, brickwork, not to mention the numerous silhouettes that haunt these pictures, are surrogates for an infrathin picture plane on which any number of signifiers of disparate kinds, from rude scribbles to photographic tableaux, mingle uneasily. To call attention to these threads that bind together Thuring’s oeuvre is not to say she does not allow herself freedom; her work’s individual 178 ARTFORUM
Wakefield is a famously friendly place. Hannah Starkey’s close personal involvement with the city began with a post-lockdown residency during which she produced photographs that intimately document the lives of local teenage girls in the city’s favorite venues. Wakey Tavern, 2022, an image emanating working-class warmth and resilience, documents some of her relationships from this experience: Four young women sit at a greasy spoon café, with a classic English pub—whose name is an affectionate reference to the town—closed, boarded up, and visible through the window in the background. Navigating Wakefield’s streets on my way back from the exhibition, I found myself standing in the location pictured, attempting to triangulate the view in real time and mulling over the pub’s rumored takeover by mega-chain Wetherspoons and the impact of Starkey’s activism in the city. By contrast, the majority of Starkey’s staged portraits of women she has encountered in various locations in the UK portray her subjects absorbed in solitary activities. These images can be termed documentary fictions, not unlike those of Bill Brandt, but with a third- or fourth-wave feminist twist. As with Brandt’s work, Starkey’s images comprise highly composed scenarios, adroitly emotive cinematic mise-en-scènes—a hybrid of street art and contemporary art photography that restages everyday events to imply psychological truth rather than photographic fact. Untitled, May 1997 is the most iconic in its feigned vulnerability. In a different café—like Edward Hopper, Starkey is attracted to such settings where people can be alone in public—a woman stares into a mirror, watched by her bemused older counterpart, while a London bus flashes past. Operating both on the minor dramatic register of the film still and on the major level of narrative painting, this early image is typical of those that would follow. Taken over a twenty-five-year period, starting when the Belfast-born artist moved to London, the images in the show provide a personal vista onto a quarter century of UK history, from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to the post-Brexit era, as witnessed in Untitled, May 2022, where a young woman rushes past sectarian murals in Northern Ireland. Tellingly, Starkey claims to have been at every UK-based protest related to women since 2018 after attending the previous year’s worldwide Women’s March, which took place the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump.
Hannah Starkey, Untitled, March 2022, C-print, 48 × 64 1⁄8".
Starkey’s new activism is reflected in a significant shift in her work from theatrically absorbed self-reflection to protest, specifically around #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the environmental crisis, all of which have been incorporated as issues alongside wider gender equality. ‘Pussy power’, Women’s March, London 2017, for example, uses bathos and humility to demonstrate strength, with a lone middle-aged woman standing confidently between two pink placards inscribed pussy power and we shall over comb. Starkey’s feminist perspective on mainstream political events and patriarchal constructs emerges through a portrayal of female introspection that avoids depicting women as insular and melancholy. Alongside the works’ fragmented historical narratives, which show individuals living their lives during world political moments, the images suggest an erosion of the self or psyche connected to the emotional impact of new technologies on young people, such as those she’s photographed in Wakefield. An innate durability is evident, as in Untitled, March 2022, where a teenager applies makeup to a friend’s face within the unstable reality of an infinitely mirrored room. The girl glances back in our direction with tender defiance, breaking the fourth wall and resisting her confinement. Similarly, in Metaverse, May 2022, another young woman stands with her eyes closed; surrounded by a crowd of compliant seated counterparts wearing virtual-reality headsets, her ecstatic stance implies she’s in a state of reverie, picturing another reality in the face of sublime external technological pressure. As I walked away from the Wakey Tavern, it struck me that the artist and her subjects provide an optimism that has not only helped push contemporary photography as a psychologically loaded medium, but has also transformed power in real life. —Andrew Hunt
this large-scale oil-and-wax painting (Untitled, 2020) would have stood as tall as a grown man, but, like Manet’s The Dead Toreador, 1864, he lies fallen. The Matisse-like outline that delineates the figure pulses against the background: two matte fields, one of midnight blue and one of crimson. The composition is a testament to human tragedy and a pointed question for the onlooker: What do you do in those wide fields of color the artist leaves otherwise empty? The viewer becomes a witness and is dared to look away. It’s an assertive strategy, equal parts political and devotional. Two decades ago, Tatah was practically the only significant artist in France committed to painting the human form. Today, of course, he shares company with a new generation of figurative painters, many of them former students of his at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Here, two canvases hung individually in a pair of small sanctuarylike spaces embracing the works’ silence. They picture women, shoulders up, with undulating waves of dark-brown hair and round pink lips. Their eyes turn away from the viewer’s. Two larger canvases reiterate this denial of the gaze. Women obscured by hair or veils, in robes depicted with the artist’s signature dramatic folds, cover their faces with open hands. Theirs are portraits of agony or shame or a simple refusal to be seen. In another canvas, a woman’s earth-toned headscarf and robes echo a dark expanse that runs in a horizontal band across the bottom of a square canvas. She seems to be digging her gray-white fingertips and toes into this field of rich color—as if to crawl back into the material of painting itself. On the canvas hung at the back of the austere rectangular gallery, where the altar of a church would be, we found a bald man dressed in a rumpled gray suit, his feet cropped off at the bottom of the composition. In fact, none of the figures, now consistently rendered life size, is pictured whole—all are sliced by the edge of Tatah’s canvases. On the other hand, the absence of a horizon line allows the viewer, or perhaps the artist himself, a way into each composition, unhindered by the illusion of a separate landscape—better to chase his subjects into an immense and impossible space. Five canvases, all Untitled, 2022, reiterate a female figure, her mouth subtly shifting shape and her hands gradually rising from her sides. She could be singing a song of lament. In addition to icons of European art history, Tatah also appropriates images clipped from the news. In a recent interview with Michel Hilaire, curator of a concurrent exhibition of the artist’s work in Tatah’s adopted hometown of Montpellier, France, the artist refers
PARIS
Djamel Tatah GALERIE POGGI
Djamel Tatah confronted visitors to his recent show with an image of the aftermath of violence. Rendered at human scale, Tatah’s subject in
Djamel Tatah, Untitled, 2020, oil and wax on canvas, 78 3⁄4 × 98 3⁄8". APRIL 2023
179
REVIEWS
to himself as a “mutant,” continuing, “I know where I come from, but not where I’m going.” Born in the South of France to Algerian parents, Tatah is attentive to the ravages of colonialism and the massive loss of life as millions of migrants attempt to cross the Mediterranean. Communicating in the language of painting, Tatah’s canvases give voice. —Lillian Davies
PALMA, SPAIN
Daniel García Andújar
ES BALUARD MUSEU D’ART CONTEMPORANI DE PALMA Traversing the vastness of the Mediterranean as both historical and imaginary, Daniel García Andújar’s solo exhibition “Patente de Corso” (Letter of Marque) offered a disconcerting account of how the sea has been a locus for expulsions and migrations throughout European history. In works ranging from installations and videos to archival displays and a presentation of historical paintings, we saw how mare nostrum has been witness to the “bare life”—to borrow a phrase from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben—of migrants and refugees.
nation, alluding not just to contemporary political debates but also to how the sea has been used to allegorize the threshold beyond which lies the other. In the two seventeenth-century oil-on-canvas paintings by Vicent Mestre that greeted visitors at the exhibition entrance, we followed the fate of the Moriscos (Muslim descendants forced to convert to Christianity) as they were expelled from Spain and sent to sea (Embarque de los moriscos en el puerto de Denia [Moriscos Embarking at the Port of Denia], 1612–13). Their boats eventually crowded the shore of Oran in northwestern Algeria (Desembarco de los moriscos en el puerto de Orán [Moriscos Landing at the Port of Oran], 1612–13), where most of them reportedly were robbed or killed. In both paintings, the sea symbolizes the unknowable: a means of obscuring one’s origins as well as a passage beyond the canvas, where the life of the Moriscos is cast past historical memory. Juguete de los hados (Forced by the Fates), 2022, a video of a refugee boat with a caged statue of Poseidon aboard it, compellingly rounded out Andújar’s marine mythopoetics. Yoking the mythic and the contemporary, the projection was accompanied in the exhibition space by the actual boat, displayed as though overturned, and the life-size imprisoned god. The vastness of the sea is at once the heritage of a rich culture and an oppressive inhospitality that has refused humanity to countless people deemed other. —Carlos Quijon Jr.
TURIN
Lydia Silvestri BAR
Daniel García Andújar, Mediterraneum. Atlas. Puertos (Mediterraneum. Atlas. Ports) (detail), 2022, 163 robotic drawings printed on paper, dimensions variable.
180 ARTFORUM
Occupying the entirety of a stark red wall in the middle of the exhibition, Mediterraneum. Atlas. Puertos (Mediterraneum. Atlas. Ports), 2022, presented a set of 163 “robotic drawings” that trace onto old maps the possible combination of routes that had been taken by migrants over the years to reach the various ports and harbors that rim its coasts. A dry and mechanical rendering complements the frenzied tangle of trails of Migrantes desaparecidos registrados en el Mediterráneo desde 2014 (Missing Migrants Recorded in the Mediterranean Since 2014), also 2022, which filled an adjacent wall with a sprawl of drawings that tabulate the total number of migrants who failed in their attempts to cross the sea: an ongoing count of dead or undiscovered bodies. Andújar’s treatment of these cases transforms the unspeakable fate that migrants face into unfeeling maps and metrics. The cold calculation of human life and experience into the data sets comprising these two works renders the events surrounding them commonplace. From this data-driven factuality, the exhibition proceeded to interrogate the powerful hold of the Mediterranean on the European imagi-
Lydia Silvestri said that her mountain upbringing in Chiuro, close to Italy’s border with Switzerland, taught her to take pleasure in “weaving baskets, whittling bowls and clogs out of wood, kitchen utensils, seeing a wall grow stone by stone chosen out of a heap of stones with a careful eye, and silkworms constructing perfect cocoons of gold, making vats for wine, repairing a doll’s arm or the hoof of a calf.” Her words gleam with a sensual enjoyment for all kinds of creaturely manufacture and ancient practices, and suggest a curious equity among these processes. Though she often worked in Italian sculpture’s most durable classical materials, such as marble and bronze, the forms that she created were extravagantly fluid. Many of her sculptures seem to integrate buttocks, breasts, penises, testicles, and other harder to name body parts: bladelike bones or clavicles, lumpy rolls of flesh reaching, contorting, stretching. A number of works by the artist, who died at the age of eighty-eight in 2018, were included in the 2020 Rome Quadriennale with those of a younger generation of artists who have emerged in a period during which gender fluidity entered the mainstream. In that context, Silvestri’s sculptures from the 1960s through the ’80s affirmed a joyful perversion of the modernist principles of statuary developed by Constantin Brancusi, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, whose work Silvestri studied closely. At BAR, “studi per vetri, poi sogni” (Studies for Glass, Then Dreams) focused on a series of drawings (1969–70) for glass sculptures that Silvestri developed and made between 1970 and 1971 on the Venetian island of Murano. Mostly executed with a combination of charcoal lines and watercolor, these studies explore the potential of glass—thanks to its translucency and molten flexibility—to depict metamorphosis. In one brightly colored example, a pair of bulbous yellow and black forms (eggs, breasts, butt cheeks?) might also be wings blossoming from the back of a green-and-red figure. In another, a streak of red issues from a quartet of proud corporeal swellings, two of them with cherry-shaped nipples, two without. The glass sculptures
Lydia Silvestri, Untitled, 1969–70, mixed media on paper, 27 5⁄8 × 40 3⁄8".
eventually produced on the basis of these drawings were all titled sogno (Dream). In them, Silvestri’s erotic freestyling reaches a kind of boundlessness, conjuring an oozing world of transparent honey that seems to occasionally solidify with a pop of color and a halfrecognizable body part. The fact that the blank paper stands for both the transparent glass and its surrounding space gives the compositions a great openness. When looking at them I thought about how the sensation of desire in a body, of wanting, feels both like bursting fullness and extreme emptiness. More than the work of any other artist, the drawings reminded me of the most jubilantly corporeal sculptures of Alina Szapocznikow: visions of bodies dissolved and reconfigured without rules. Though some might by now be fatigued with the revisionism that constantly resurrects the work of recently deceased women artists who’ve been overlooked or forgotten, it was truly a pleasure to see this work brought out of storage. Silvestri’s dream visions of transfiguration are as ancient as whittled wooden bowls, yet her particular expressions of bodies and dreams unhooked from biological polarities of gender are able to open an important channel between 1971 and today. —Laura McLean-Ferris
VIENNA
John Dilg
inhospitable—an effect heightened by the thin and dry paint application. The oversize full moon in many of the pictures enhances their dreamscape quality. The exhibition text described Dilg’s works as “painted forms derived from found images and his memory of the American landscape.” Indeed, to non-American eyes, they are close to our idea of an American vista, perhaps of its grasslands or its rocky Southwest, rather than any specific locale: visions of the nation held by those who have never been there. One might think of Henri Rousseau’s depictions of jungles he never visited. But Dilg’s colors have nothing of Rousseau’s tropical lushness. They are muted, reserved. This place knows winter. One wonders why an American painter would want to create pictures that feel American while looking as though they were made by someone who has only read about America, depicting fantastical rather than real flora, fauna, and geology. The landscape appears inhospitable, but it is not scarred. Perhaps it is what North America might have been, had it not been ravaged by colonization and industrialization. Could it be that a longing for the country that did not come to pass drives him to paint these scenes? One drawing, melancholically titled Historical Fiction (all works 2022), shows a top-hatted white man and a Native American man sitting together peacefully in a canoe on calm waters, under a starry sky. Occasional human figures are tiny and unobtrusive, so fully integrated that they become elements, like trees, in the landscape—for instance, the figure watching the whale in Fishing. The only rupture of this otherworldly serenity is in Jungle Republic, whose title might be a nod to Rousseau. A lone leopard, proud, challenging, fills the width of the canvas and looks directly at the viewer. The animal, illuminated by the full moon, is beautifully rendered, but something about it is off. Perhaps its neck is too thick or its head too small? It recalls tigers painted by premodern Japanese painters, masters who had never seen a tiger. Dilg is highly skilled, and his painterly erudition is unmistakable. He gives shape to an idea of a place that might have but did not come into being. This drive unites him with medieval monks imagining the Levant, Japanese painters throughout the ages pining for classical China, or Rousseau dreaming of the jungle. However, unlike these historical predecessors, he works with the full awareness that what he imagines does not exist. As the drawing’s title suggests, it is a fiction. Art allows one to pursue a world that exists only as a concept. It is a drive that neither melancholy nor loss can temper, because the impulse to give a shape to a place one cannot reach is one of the reasons we bother making art at all. —Yuki Higashino
GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER An anonymous fifteenth-century Belgian miniature depicts a battle from the Books of the Maccabees in which the hero Eleazar slays a war elephant whose body is about to crush him to death. The illustration shows a truly fanciful creature, a cross between a donkey and an anteater, with an elongated nose, gray fur, and hooves, bearing on its back a stone tower inhabited by three soldiers. The artist, presumably a monk, had evidently never seen an elephant and relied instead on descriptions of the animal. Many similar images exist throughout history and across cultures: manifestations of hearsay, imagination, and interpretation in the absence of visual information. These artists were driven by the insatiable craving to depict places, creatures, and people they had never seen. It appears this desire also drives John Dilg. Consisting of thirteen small paintings—the largest measuring sixteen by twenty inches—and five drawings, his recent exhibition “Leaving the New World” offered a rare degree of concentration and consistency. All the works depict forlorn and rough settings with sporadic trees. Despite some lakes and waterfalls, the geographies look parched and
John Dilg, Jungle Republic, 2022, oil on canvas, 12 × 16". APRIL 2023
181
REVIEWS
BERLIN
Thilo Heinzmann NEUGERRIEMSCHNEIDER
To the tired old refrain of the death of painting—or, to get even more specific, the death of gestural abstraction—one need only utter two words: Thilo Heinzmann. If forced to categorize his work, one might hesitantly call it a child of Abstract Expressionism, but in truth Heinzmann’s canvases don’t really look like anyone else’s. Rather, these slabs of frore complexion trace a processual narrative of fluidity and flux out of the snowish ether that forms their foundations and through which ribbons and reams of color break. Were the sky white, and light composed of darkish hues, these paintings might be the documentation of celestial phenomena. Alas, they leave us without any real astral or geographical plane by which to orient our musings, so we must construct our own centralized perspective out of these surfaces of paint, pigment, and tiny shards of glass. Most of the paintings in Heinzmann’s recent exhibition “Playing Slowies” (all works 2022) are large, even monumental, overtaking the body. All are titled O.T., for Ohne Titel, or Untitled. This self-conscious play on wordlessness further accentuates, perhaps, the ontological nature of his enterprise. In any case, no titles are needed; language, with all its inadequacies, always interferes. In each piece, white is the predominant colour, and the unbound pigment Heinzmann uses gives the paint a rugged texture when viewed up close. Some sort of underpainting is often apparent. In one specimen, I detected shades of the lightest blue, yellow, purple, and pink occasionally breaking through the surface, where thinner shades of white had been applied. On top, often in the centermost parts of the works, darker hues, coalescing into thicker swaths, emerge: here, deep dark purple; there, a fleshy pink that elicits a sense of wounding or tumescence. Great slashes of curvaceous lines give shape to the overarching white that otherwise threatens formlessness. In some canvases, the gestures are more frequent and more severe than in others; these compositions elicit a harsh melody rather than a soft hum.
Thilo Heinzmann, O.T., 2022, oil, pigment, and glass on canvas, acrylic glass cover, 28 3⁄4 × 32 5⁄8 × 3 3⁄8".
Some smaller works, displayed behind glass—not on the wall but affixed to metal stands—more clearly revealed how all the paintings were made. One showcased more profusely the tiny tooth-size morsels of colored glass that, in the larger canvases, one might have mistaken 182 ARTFORUM
from a certain distance for splotches of paint. The painting’s main formation was enunciated in glacial blues, stretching horizontally into a hornlike structure, its “cranium” area erected through a brighter white impastoed onto the canvas, then leveled down with slight lacerations, as if made by a pencil eraser. So much thought, consideration, and feeling goes into the creation of these surfaces that the effect approaches the sculptural: an imposition of form that conjures a presence to be encountered. Heinzmann’s paintings hint at dimensions of the otherworldly, exposing the limitations of our world and bringing to the cusp of consciousness what poet William Bronk once deemed “the world and the worldless”—place unburdened by the necessity of location. —Travis Jeppesen
LEIPZIG
“The Broken Pitcher”
GALERIE FÜR ZEITGENÖSSISCHE KUNST “The Broken Pitcher,” a collaborative project by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian, employed its title as a metaphor for the empty promises of the banking system. The exhibition revolved around the negotiation of the foreclosure of a family home in Larnaca, Cyprus, in 2019. The arbitration arose after a woman was unable to repay an exponentially increasing business loan that her late ex-husband had, unbeknownst to her, added her name to shortly before canceling his life insurance policy. A reenactment of the conversation between the family in question, their lawyer, and two bank representatives, filmed in a reimagined bank conference room incorporating interventions by artists invited by the initiating trio, frames a seemingly isolated story as a symptom of systematic financial manipulation and histories of colonialism. The film, also titled The Broken Pitcher (all works cited, 2021), hinges on a key moment in which one of the employees breaks the fourth wall. Turning to the camera, she asks (in Greek, with subtitles): “In your view, what should the bank employees do?” After a segue marked by a beeping tune reminiscent of a Nintendo soundtrack, the film’s second part comprises roughly twenty responses from an international array of housing-rights activists, artists, lawyers, and economists, as well as business owners and other interested parties from Cyprus. Berlin-based sociologist Andrej Holm says, “The question aims at a moral acting, but I don’t see much prospect for a solution for the family in this way.” German writer Heike Geißler wonders, “So how can you destroy this system? How do you make it go away without destroying yourself in the process?” After an extended silence, Lebanese researcher and activist Nizar Ghanem concludes, “Confrontation is the only solution.” The film set was exhibited alongside a selection of sculptural and photographic works concerned with financialization in a broader context and a presentation of books and video interviews on the topic of debt. Like a web spun from myriad media and perspectives, the show was informative, but also intriguing, enraging, moving, and even amusing. The meetingroom installation, with its sculptural additions by invited artists, was subtly playful. The rubber fingers of Nayia Savva’s The Invisible Hand parted the slats of the room’s venetian blinds as if to snoop on the meeting, while Stelios Kallinikou’s Ziziros (Cicadas) consisted of an iPhone, plugged into the wall to charge, that occasionally chirped a cricket sound. In Eramian’s Round Table, a graveled surface erupts into a volcanic mound brimming with glazed ceramic throat lozenges, as if to acknowledge and accentuate the surreality of the circumstances. An air of absurdity surrounds a debt that multiplies inexorably, a bank’s valuation of a home at figures astronomically higher than any
View of “The Broken Pitcher,” 2022–23. Photo: Alexandra Ivanciu.
actual offers, the disastrous intersection of geopolitical and interpersonal turmoil that saddled a woman with her ex-husband’s debt, and the bank personnel’s point-blank admission, “We are not here to find a solution.” Though it was likewise not outcome oriented, “The Broken Pitcher” conveyed a willingness to grapple with the situation in contrast with the bank’s refusal to do so. One thing art can do is to be generous enough to pay attention—and, in this case, to amplify the geopolitical echoes inextricable from a seemingly individual story. At the exhibition’s stop in Leipzig (after public screenings throughout Cyprus and an iteration at the Beirut Art Center), Germany’s complicity was brought to the fore, as the de facto EU leader ultimately benefited from the stringent austerity conditions—including foreclosures—of its bailout of Southern European nations after the 2012 financial crisis. A wall-size installation in the resource room traced the historical leveraging of debt as an exploitative tool: Enlarged documents from the family’s case were layered atop late nineteenth-century treaties with the Ottoman Empire that outlined the British occupation of Cyprus as a guarantee for military loans. By pairing such research with more abstract and associative artistic responses, “The Broken Pitcher” embodied a move beyond witnessing and toward a compelling manifestation of involved and collaborative engagement as a means of navigating oppressive systems. And it carved out a fissure of hope that such an approach might open new ways ahead. —Camila McHugh
made of blown glass tinted rose pink and deep violet with melanin, oxides, and metallic salts. Their title refers to a type of aerial root structure some plants develop to obtain oxygen in waterlogged habitats. Armour’s recent exhibition “A Tale of Symbiogenesis” extended a research project she has undertaken with the French biopharmaceutical company Cellectis, which specializes in genome-editing technologies. Under the guidance of several biogeneticists, Armour isolated the human MC1R gene, reproduced it synthetically, and then rigged a virus to insert the gene into the DNA of the Nicotiana benthamiana, a tobacco plant commonly used for tests in biotech labs. The MC1R gene, when activated, triggers the production of melanin, the amino acid that allows human skin to tan when exposed to the sun. Armour’s artistic research demonstrated that a human molecular structure could be made to exist in that of a plant. The video Scan Micro CT Nicotiana Benthamiana – Pre Transgenesis ACT II shows a digital rendering of the vein structure of the tobacco plant’s leaves before its genes were modified. The simulation, rendered in tones of matte grayish pink, traverses the model’s intricate exterior before entering the hollow passage of its spine. With all visual noise digitally eliminated, the video mimics the medical imagery used to develop biological products. Three vividly colored microscopic photographs of the same subject, Vue microscopique numéro 4, 5, and 6 (Microsopic View Number 4, 5, and 6), use the same science-based formal vocabulary. Ubiquitous and opaque, Armour’s representations of the molecular world are indistinguishable from the biotech industry’s corporate imaginary. They do not express any of the ethical complexity involved in forcing a plant to host a bit of humanness. The assumption here is that humans may transgress the genetic integrity of nonhumans for the sake of aesthetics. To construct three wall-mounted cast-glass pieces, Nervures secondaires 1, 2, and 3 (Secondary Veins 1, 2, and 3), Armour combined crystal, opaline, and colored glass to make bony structures inspired by
STOCKHOLM
Dana-Fiona Armour ANDRÉHN-SCHIPTJENKO
A pair of long, delicately colored tubes lay in parallel on top of a low plinth in the gallery’s entrance. One end of each elongated form bent itself off the edge of the traditional pedestal, like a creature curious about what was beyond the plinth, but did not connect to anything—not to the ground, not even to its companion. Pneumatophore #2 and #4 (all works 2022), resemble oversize water-snake toys—hollow forms made of latex or rubber and filled with liquid, designed as fidget devices to train motor control and concentration. But Dana-Fiona Armour’s sculptures are
View of “Dana-Fiona Armour,” 2023. Wall: Vue microscopique numéro 6 (nicotiana benthamiana transgénique), 2022. Pedestal, from left: Pneumatophore #4, 2022; Pneumatophore #2, 2022. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger. APRIL 2023
183
REVIEWS
Maija Blåfield, Scenic View (detail), 2023, four-channel 4K video installation, color, sound, 15 minutes.
tobacco-plant leaves she had genetically modified. These works came the closest to visualizing the exhibition’s title and framework, the notion of symbiogenesis—the process by which two organisms merge to form another that is genetically distinct and more complex. Yet these haunting quasi skeletons retain a precious quality, as art objects categorically uninvolved with biological processes such as putrefaction. In a text about Armour’s work commissioned for her first exhibition at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, in 2021, curator Nicolas Bourriaud asked, “Is art, as a whole, in itself a dead element inserted into the life of human society? This is a profound question, which Armour attempts to answer by emphasizing calcification or crystallization as a tool for producing forms.” Perhaps the cynicism implicit in Bourriaud’s question about the death of art derives from the inert quality in Armour’s work, the formal lifelessness with which she renders symbiogenesis. Rather than address the deadness of art critically, Armour produces a simulacrum that ignores the difference between, on the one hand, invading other beings for the sole purpose of implanting ourselves in them and, on the other, developing resilient hybrid life-forms capable of surviving the man-made catastrophe at hand. —Natasha marie Llorens
HELSINKI
Maija Blåfield
HELSINGIN TAIDEHALLI Climbing up the stairs to the exhibition halls of Helsingin Taidehalli, I could already hear Maija Blåfield’s voice. Blåfield not only writes, directs, shoots, and edits her films, she also narrates them. Although I was used to her soft and calm tone, guiding the viewer in a patient and inviting manner, there was something perplexing about it: I couldn’t decide whether or not she is a reliable narrator. For instance, in her most recent work, Scenic View, 2023, is she adopting the role of documentary commentator, or is she recounting a fairy tale? 184 ARTFORUM
Blåfield is particularly interested in the mundane and how, even in the most ordinary circumstances, reality can be deceiving. Often, our own eyes lead us astray. In her film Kulta-aika (Golden Age), 2015, she tells a story in which, while traveling in a war zone, she sees a burned-out house and notices a pair of men’s long underwear that has been hung out from one of the balconies to dry. She takes a photograph of the scene and travels home, telling everyone a moving story of bravery and care in the middle of devastation, symbolized by the image of the underwear. It is only later, after developing the photograph, Blåfeld realizes what she’d seen was really a shredded piece of the building itself, hanging from the torn facade. Misinterpretations, and documentary cast as fantasy (or vice versa), hold Blåfield’s oeuvre together. She is not only concerned with human perception, but with the nature of the camera and how it transmits stories. For example, in her film The Fantastic, 2020, she interviewed people from North Korea about how Western movies smuggled into the country framed their understanding of the outside world. How could they have known whether depictions of space travel or cell phones were plausible? This exhibition, “Tarinoita tienpientareelta” (Roadside Narratives), followed the twenty-year arc of Blåfield’s career from her student work to the present. The large series of photographs from 2022 that lent its title to the show encompasses a travelogue-like collection of snapshots with small written captions for each image. However, as the exhibition showed, Blåfield is above all a filmmaker. Among the six moving-image works presented in the show—along with The Fantastic, Kulta-aika, and Scenic View—is Tuhoutumisesta ja säilyttämisestä (On Destruction and Preservation), 2017, in which she combines documentary film techniques and essayistic narration. Again, she tells us incredible stories, from that of a suitcase lying on the bottom of the ocean to an eel living 150 years alone in a dark well. In the four-channel installation Scenic View we see a brown bear in the borderland between Finland and Russia, a calm enough area in which to film, without disruption by humans. Here, in the middle of nowhere, Blåfield pans her camera across the landscape and then
reveals the artificial depiction of nature; everything has been arranged, designed, and rearranged by the filmmaker. Blåfield illustrates the ways in which documentaries can associate the most unlikely things with each other in convincing ways. For instance, in one part of Scenic View, the camera floats above a snowy forest while the soundtrack talks about roaming bears, even though during winter months the beasts would be hibernating. The audiovisual scenography of nature documentary is exposed bit by bit. Blåfield shows how the bear is lured to the woodland scene with dog food when the story requires it. A few small tricks turn the forest into a fantasy version of itself while Blåfield’s voice guides our gaze and our interpretation. As she says in the film, “I can narrate anything at all, and you will see it.” —Sini Mononen
ISTANBUL
Nancy Atakan PI ARTWORKS Nancy Atakan, Window of Time, 2022, antique cloth, embroidery, 74 3⁄4 × 29 1⁄2".
Born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1946, Nancy Atakan studied art at that state’s Mary Washington College and then moved to Turkey at age twenty-three. She has lived in the same Istanbul apartment since 1969. While she is now well known in Istanbul as a Conceptual artist with a penchant for collaborative initiatives, in the 1970s and ’80s Atakan was an unknown painter moonlighting as an art instructor at a local high school. During those frustrating years, she faced rejection from gallerists and art-prize juries. Instigated by a 2022 documentary by Dilek Aydın on her practice, Atakan excavated her paintings from that time and produced a new body of work that brought the old and new into harmony. The embroideries, cloth collages, watercolor paintings, and installation works in her solo exhibition “Scent of Time” wove an aesthetics of remembrance. Continued Loneliness, 2022, a substantial embroidery piece made of felt and needlework, hung next to three watercolors from 1987 that depict longlegged, blurry-faced nudes in states of isolation. Transporting and echoing the loneliness the artist felt in the 1980s to our pandemic era, Atakan stitched the solitary figure from one of those watercolors, Inside, into the embroidery and placed a smartphone in her hand. Window of Time, 2022, took its inspiration from a 1983 watercolor titled Window, also displayed in the show. The older work depicts plants, pots, and a lonely tree viewed at a distance through a window; the new image, by contrast, made of antique cloth and embroidery given to the artist by friends and relatives, features blossoming flowers coming ecstatically to the fore, the sad window demoted to the
background. The technique of stitching the present into the past found its most striking expression in a larger work, Challenging Cliché 3 (Quilt with Wedding Vows), 2019, which used as its canvas an American patchwork quilt made in 1940 by the artist’s grandmother and great aunt and presented as a wedding gift to her parents. Atakan added patches with colorful patterns as well as illustrations of family snapshots and wedding vows (love till death do us part). Elsewhere she coupled two patches, sickness and health, with scenes depicting her own graduation from high school and the treatment she recently underwent for cancer. Transfiguring Atakan’s personal histories in a different way was the installation Searching for the scent of time, 2022. Here, Atakan has placed a cloth in an embroidery hoop, decorating the perimeter of this circular frame with linked needlepoint motifs. At the frame’s center, she projects a three-minute video featuring shots of the artist interacting with variously shaped and modeled antique clocks rotating on a round table. On the soundtrack, dozens of timepieces tick as Atakan reflects on “remembering the future in fluid time” and her career-long tactic of pondering what she terms “circular movement” and “circular thoughts” through leaps and silences. Embracing the old and the new at once, “Scent of time” chronicled, at its own contemplative pace, the past and present practice of this mainstay of Turkey’s art scene. —Kaya Genç
NEW DELHI
Karan Shrestha
SHRINE EMPIRE GALLERY Not long after Anton Chekhov framed the narrative principle now known as “Chekhov’s gun”—if there’s a rifle on the wall, it must fire eventually—Andrei Bely unleashed Petersburg, a 1916 novel about turn-of-the-century terrorism, whose parricidal plot unfolds to the ticking of a bomb ignominiously concealed in a sardine tin. The question never is, will the device explode, but who will it destroy when it does? Karan Shrestha’s solo exhibition “apparatus at play” was steeped in a similar tension, a jitteriness that resists commitment to any one particular form. Much as Bely draws the comparison between the terrorist’s bomb and a city on the verge of social eruption, Shrestha’s works speak about Kathmandu as a metropolis under threat of collapse from within. The city itself is encircled by mountains, so that the horizon appears not as a straight line, but as an irregular progression of peaks. The artist exploits this ready-made metaphor with a central installation comprising four video works, each encapsulating its own kind of chaos. Projected onto an entire wall, an uncertain horizon, 2017, sets the Nepali capital spinning in whirling handheld-camera footage of the city projected across a full wall. Anchoring this dizzying imagery was a small monitor embedded within the same wall. It featured ason, 2014, a portrait of Kathmandu’s central marketplace in Asan square. Here, Shrestha’s lens remains steady, its focus unwavering; all circulation is internal to the scene, as streams of pedestrians contend with rickshaws, motorcycles, and open-backed trucks. On the floor were two monitors. One featured Chobar, 2016, which contrasts idyllic footage of tourists, pilgrims, and schoolchildren on a riverside with grim shots of the man-made waste now blanketing those same shores. The other monitor featured a one-minute excerpt from a popular Nepali movie, Ta Ta Sarai Sapris Badri (2013). In the clip, a man cowers on the ground as another points a pistol at him. Suddenly, a third man pops up to press a gun to the second man’s head, and then a fourth, and a fifth, and so on, until there is a long chain of would-be killers brandishing handguns, rifles, swords, and even a very large stick. The effect APRIL 2023
185
REVIEWS
the 1940s and ’50s, after art school in Tokyo, he fluidly recorded slices of everyday life in South Korea—a farmer lounging near a cramped chicken coop or fish gazing up from a basket—with the concise eloquence of a Park Soo-keun and the thick color of a Georges Rouault. Moon was inventive, and he moved in the right circles; he was a member of the Modern Art Society alongside legends-to-be such as Han Mook and Yoo Youngkuk. But he was also restless. In 1961, Moon decamped from South Korea for a few years in France. He did carpentry and stonemasonry work on a château north of Paris where Hungarian sculptor László Szabó was running a residency, and his art underwent quicksilver changes. He adopted art informel language with characteristic élan, making spare, playful abstractions with rough surfaces, and he also began experimenting seriously with sculpture. After a brief return to South Korea in 1965, he settled back in France and devoted himself to that medium with zeal. As if to memorialize his dramatic shift, he erected a Brancusi-style column—two sets of wooden hemispheres soaring more than forty feet—at a show on the beach in Le Barcarès, France, in 1970.
Karan Shrestha, in these folds, 2019, ink on paper, 60 × 94".
is clearly comic, the acting appalling, but at the same time, all it would take to ignite the whole queue is one slip of the hand, one shaky finger. But drawings, rather than moving images, made up the bulk of the show. The more ambitious of them—above all, the colossal in these folds, 2019—suspend myriad narratives in a kind of incomplete calcification of national myths, depicted with an uneasiness that never quite settles on the page. This visual nausea haunts the artist’s work as a whole. With all of his experiments across media (from a sculpture made from oat and wheat grains, to digital photographs, to a pair of sandwiched bricks sprouting an outstretched little arm), one gets the sense of the artist’s practice as a collage without glue. This effect worked to the benefit of the final video in the exhibition, the nearly seven-minute hundreds of flowers more, 2020. In 2007, as part of Nepal’s bid to rebuild itself ideologically, the country instituted a new national anthem to replace its former monarchist tribute. Bridging the transition from one anthem to the other with the pop-accented 1978 revolutionary song “Gaun Gaun Bata Utha” (Rise Up from Every Village), Shrestha created a soundtrack for a sequence of fragments of propaganda films. The images include documentation of religious rituals, police brutality, and the 2015 earthquake; music-video excerpts; stills of historical paintings; and scattered other footage ranging from a young runner finishing a race, to protesters buffeted by water cannons, to a body unceremoniously fished from a muddy river. Ricocheting from humor to grief, the film ends with schoolchildren chanting the new anthem, their assembled selves a vision of the “hundreds of flowers” that constitutes the nation’s future. Even with this note of optimism, Shrestha portrays Nepal as a country whose breath is still held for the next upheaval. —Kate Sutton
SEOUL
Moon Shin
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART DEOKSUGUNG Judging by the evidence presented in this intoxicating retrospective, Moon Shin (1922–1995) could have had a standout career as a painter and perhaps gone on to secure a place in the canon, but instead he established himself as one of South Korea’s preeminent sculptors. In 186 ARTFORUM
View of “Moon Shin,” 2022–23. Photo: Image Joom.
Over the next quarter century, Moon made abstract sculptures that are as alluring as they are idiosyncratic. Often no more than a few feet tall, they are composed of ovular shapes and curving planes that appear to have been pinched, pulled, and hollowed out to become alien birds, flowers, organs, or body parts. Though they are always smoothly polished, their forms were hard-won, carved from woods such as ebony, oak, or yew, or forged from bronze or stainless steel. They tend to stand upright, address you frontally, and exhibit some type of not-quiteperfect symmetry, all of which heightens the uncanny sense that these are organic beings, albeit ones that are elusive and unplaceable; some can be more than a little discomfiting to behold. Dozens were displayed together here with the occasional circular mirror overhead and a dash of slinking jazz, so that the dimly lit galleries resembled a sci-fi bestiarycum-nightclub.
What drove Moon? “If there is anything I hope for,” he once said, “it is that the forms I create reach life, and ultimately come to signify ‘life.’” His sculptures do that with ease, while spurning categorization. He named a number of them Towards the Universe—he seemed to be chasing universal, if unnameable, sensations—which this survey’s curator, Hyesung Park, took as her show’s title. In a richly researched catalogue, she links Moon’s freewheeling practice to his fraught, nomadic biography: Born in Japan to a Korean father, who was a migrant worker, and a Japanese mother, he was sent at age five to Masan, his father’s hometown on Korea’s southern tip, to be raised by a grandmother; at sixteen, he snuck back into Japan to pursue art. In 1980, Moon moved home to Masan from France a celebrated figure, and went about designing every aspect of a museum there for his art. In 1988, a steel piece that recalls his endless column went up in Seoul’s Olympic Park, and his sculptures now dot public spaces around the city. At a glance, some can look bizarre or outmoded, like artifacts of vanished futures—a bit too confident, utopian, or extroverted for our era. But give them time, and they will grow on you. I have come to think of them as peculiar old friends who are resplendent in their eccentricities, holding secrets about the past and ready to regale you about all that is still possible. —Andrew Russeth
KUALA LUMPUR
“Dream of the Day” ILHAM GALLERY
Gustav Metzger described the “Cloud Canyons” David Medalla began making in 1961—kinetic sculptures known informally as his “bubble machines”—as generating the “random activity” of a “quarter million forms continuously changing, reflecting, growing, disintegrating.” The uncontainable spuming energy of Medalla’s artworks embodies the spirit of the sprawling exhibition “Dream of the Day,” which draws its title from a 1965 poetic manifesto by Medalla, emblazoned near the gallery’s entrance. Curated by Patrick Flores and featuring more than eighty works by thirty-nine artists, predominantly from Southeast Asia, the exhibition aspires neither to articulate nor to capture an essentialist regional identity or representation, but to rouse our minds from such dead-end desires and imagine unpredictable, unconventional ways forward. To that end, the exhibition features as its key proposition a significant display of work in a Surrealist vein. Lined with Medalla’s vivacious pronouncements, the gallery’s entryway frames, head-on, the zany,
sexual, hybrid figurations of I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, better known simply as Murni. This directness is, however, purely spatial: In the undated Aku dan simbolku (Me and My Symbol), the largest of five enigmatic paintings displayed, a large jade dragon has, in place of its head, a book of empty pages—an emblem of our witlessness about the artist’s sense of self. On either side of this display are several other impenetrably Surrealistic paintings. Literalizing a metaphor, Lucia Hartini’s The Eye, 1990, depicts a single steely oculus staring out from the heart of a roiling storm. In Manuel Ocampo’s pair of slime-green paintings, Mitra contra Goya and Tout est permis, both 2020, an emaciated naked creature with a disproportionately elongated nose, among other foreboding symbols (a skull and a snake), annotate a backdrop of owls and bats derived from Francisco Goya’s 1799 etchings. Indifferent brown bovines of different sizes, some gargantuan with hyperbolically long tails, populate Ivan Sagita’s The Essence of Cow in the Macro and Microcosmosis, 1989. The exhibition features a number of moving-image works to similar effect. Taking place in a jungle, Worldly Desires, 2005, a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, shows itself to be a mise en abyme, a film about the filming of a film. An increasingly visible and restless crew shoots two interchangeably relatable stories about the elusive search for love and happiness. A girl group in matching white ensembles practices singing and dancing to a saccharine pop song; elsewhere, a miserably wailing heterosexual couple attempts to evade unseen dangers. Poignance is felt not in the film’s predisposed melodrama, but in its farcical revelation of itself as a work in progress. Veejay Villafranca’s Magicians of God, 2011, consists of twelve black-and-white photographs that document “psychic surgeon” Jun Labo performing surgery on patients’ bodies with his bare hands, sans anaesthesia, in his home and clinic in Baguio, the Philippines. Call it faith or madness, but these photographs, installed in a sharp corner of the exhibition space, have the power to shift the viewer’s faith away from Western medicine. And those are not the only works here that promise to transform our worldview. Scattered among a sequence of black-and-white photographs by Jess Ayco, Van Leo, and Lionel Wendt, mostly of identifiably male torsos, Alfonso Ossorio’s paintings depict inchoate totemic figures against vivid backgrounds; these lurid thrashing scribbles unsettle the conventionally beautiful physiques seen in the photos. The exhibition’s atypical curatorial constellations—of artworks carrying kindred ideals but originating from different times and places—compel us to reimagine inherited art-historical models. In the same way, a buoyant Medalla dreamed, in his manifesto, of creating sculptures that “breathe, perspire, cough, laugh, yawn, smirk, wink, pant, dance, walk, crawl.” —Wong Binghao
I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, Aku dan simbolku (Me and My Symbol), date unknown, acrylic on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 118 1⁄8". From “Dream of the Day,” 2022–23. APRIL 2023
187
REVIEWS
View of “Peter Tyndall,” 2022–23. Photo: Christian Capurro.
MELBOURNE
Peter Tyndall
BUXTON CONTEMPORARY Over half a century, Peter Tyndall’s oeuvre has undergone an enigmatic evolution. This survey, comprising more than two hundred works, begins with a single black-and-white painting from 1993 of the pictogram that in 1974 Tyndall conceived of as his primary symbol and which he has continued using ever since: a square with two vertical lines protruding from the top like antennae, signifying a painting and its hanging wires. Having emerged in Melbourne in the mid-1970s, Tyndall is associated with that city’s distinctive postmodernist scene, with its tongue-incheek intersection of European modernism and Australian vernacular, a mode also characteristic of peers such as Dale Hickey and Robert Rooney. Tyndall consistently foregrounds the regional by signing off his correspondence from Bonzaview (the name of his home in Hepburn Springs—bonza being Australian slang for excellent), and rubber-stamping works on paper with his fictional fosterville institute of applied & progressive experience (after the tiny mining town where Tyndall began making art in 1972). Yet Tyndall’s practice is best defined not by adherence to any particular style or movement but by his long-term and unwavering commitments to a few fundamental aesthetic decisions: to reproducing his pictogram and the diamond matrix made by repeating it along intersecting diagonal axes; to hanging his paintings on two wires visible above the canvas rather than hidden behind it; to locating the site of his practice at Bonzaview and the Fosterville Institute; to naming all his artworks identically: detail / A Person Looks At A Work Of Art / someone looks at something . . . ; and to designating his own wall labels, which he insists accompany his artworks—even if that means double labels at the more pedantic institutions. Tyndall’s pictogram is an exercise in reduction that nods at the modernist teleology of self-referential painting, but his continual emphasis on the hanging wire signifies the work’s connection with the world beyond its frame. Witness the introduction, in 1979, of a sole figure or nuclear family regarding the pictogram. These figures are rendered in cartoonlike outlines and are illuminated by a bare lightbulb—recurring 188 ARTFORUM
tropes in his paintings that are distinctly anti-hermetic. Like fractals, Tyndall’s artworks zoom inward and outward—replicating themselves at different scales. This telescoping quality is channeled in the detailed scale model of the old artist-run Melbourne gallery Art Projects, where Tyndall exhibited in 1980. Other projects include his LOGOS/ HA HA text works, which encompass large-scale painting and ready-made assemblages; his experimental music outfit Slave Guitars; and his Puppet Culture Framing System, whereby his pictures’ hanging wires are replaced by stylized marionette controls. A messier side of Tyndall’s practice unfurls in more recent work, evidence of the refreshing latitude of his practice as it develops. We encounter a banner from his protest against the National Gallery of Victoria after it temporarily banned drawing in its galleries in 2004, and a monumental wall of quick, posterlike paintings from 2018, each a fleeting and radiant thought experiment. Also on view is his correspondence with sports-mad art historian Chris McAuliffe concerning Tyndall’s beloved Australian Football League team, the St. Kilda Saints. In the same vitrine, preparatory sketches depict a Saints player “taking a specky”— that is, catching the ball “spectacularly”—by jumping atop a Melbourne Demons player’s back. Tyndall subtitles another variation of this composition The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism, a witticism indicative of his abiding sense of humor as well as his capacity to see art history unfolding everywhere—as if on the pages of a great Mnemosyne Atlas. Wisecracks aside, there is something unmistakably spiritual about Tyndall’s works, which arts writer Pamela Hansford once described as “designs for worship.” Though he developed an appreciation of Zen Buddhism, he was raised a devout Catholic. A fishing net cast over one wall is both a metonym for Tyndall’s matrix and, as a friend of mine perceptively noted, a reference to the Apostles’ task of becoming “fishers of men.” The interplay of the pictogram and matrix is, it seems, Tyndall’s theology. He inscribed on a yellow matrix from 2000: i dreamed that the diamond matrix represents love “because everything is shared.” —Helen Hughes CORRECTION: In the March issue, in a review of the work of Ryan Sullivan [pp. 156–157], the accompanying image showed a painting that was not included in the show. Artforum regrets the error.
BISHOP/RESEARCH from page 130
15. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.
NOTES
16. David Joselit, “On Aggregators”, October, no. 146 (Fall 2013): 12–14.
1. See Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October no. 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22. Foster discusses the work of Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, and Thomas Hirschhorn. For artist-curated exhibitions, see Alison Green, When Artists Curate: Contemporary Art and the Exhibition as Medium (London: Reaktion, 2018).
17. David Joselit, “The Epistemology of Search: An Interview with David Joselit,” by Troy Conrad Therrien, ARPA Journal, no. 2 (2014), arpajournal. net/the-epistemology-of-search/.
2. James Elkins, Artists with PhDs (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing/The Spring, 2009), online at jameselkins.com/yy/. Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music (now the Tokyo University of the Arts) established a Ph.D. program in 1977, but the program did not result in research-based art of the kind I am describing in this essay. Other institutions in Japan developed Ph.D. programs in fine art much later: Tama Art University began its Ph.D. course in 2001 and Musashino Art University in 2004. Thanks to Yoshitaka Mori for this information. Because the US has so few doctoral programs in fine art, New York’s Whitney Independent Study Program, founded in 1968 by the Whitney Museum of American Art, has been at the forefront of generating research-based artists. It could be considered both a precursor to the rise of the studio-art Ph.D. program and an outlier, as a one-year program that awards no degrees. 3. Hito Steyerl, “Aesthetic of Resistance?,” in Florian Dombois, Ute Meta Bauer, et al., eds., Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research (London: Koenig Books, 2012), 55. 4. The best of these publications is Tom Holert’s Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 5. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 6. Import/Export can be considered a bridge between previous models of artistic research in the 1970s and the emergent model of research-based art in the 1990s. With the former it shares an engagement with contemporary culture (rather than a historical topic) and includes the artist’s own primary research. It nevertheless augurs later work in its aggregation of preexisting materials (books, texts, newspapers, photographs) and in leaving the viewer to decide what conclusions to draw. Import/Export invites comparison with two signal exhibitions at the Dia Center: “Democracy” by Group Material (1988– 89) and “If You Lived Here . . .” by Martha Rosler (1989). Both projects assembled works of art, posters, slogans, photography, and research materials in themed installations addressing democracy, education, the aids crisis, and homelessness. Yet compared with Import/Export, these projects are activist and polemical. Although there is a great diversity of information displayed within each project, the textual components all position the viewer as the recipient of an already synthesized position. 7. George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 4–5. 8. George Landow, Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 35, cited in Renée Green, “The Digital Import/Export Funk Office” (1995), in Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, ed. Gloria Sutton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 9. Renée Green, in Russell Ferguson, “Various Identities: A Conversation with Renée Green,” in World Tour: Renée Green (Los Angeles: LA Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), E58. 10. Leo Steinberg discusses the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol (among others) as exhibiting a perceptual shift from verticality to horizontality: “The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.” Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1972), 84. Since Steinberg’s essay, horizontality is no longer a “symbolic allusion,” but a direct emulation of the infosphere of data management. It is not just images that are taken as readymades but the apparatus of their display (tabletops, shelves, vitrines). 11. I am skeptical about the success of these artists’ attempts to fuse the individual and the historical. More successful, in my view, is John Akomfrah’s use of archival footage to reconstruct the life of cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014) up to 1968, in the three-screen video installation The Unfinished Conversation, 2012. Akomfrah’s majestic work juxtaposes Hall’s life with world historical events rather than the artist’s own. A comparable effort in literature might be found in W. G. Sebald’s subjective approach to history in The Rings of Saturn (1995). 12. Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 21. 13. Mario García Torres, in Montse Badia, “The Structures of Art: An Interview with Mario Garcia-Torres,” A*Desk, October 20, 2012, a-desk.org/en/magazine/las-estructuras-del-arte-una-entrevista-con-mario-garcia-torres. 14. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2006), 18. Although Bourriaud is not describing artistic research but cultural assemblage more generally (sampling, hacking, DJing), his term is a useful one to capture a sense of digital drift.
18. tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/wolfgang-tillmans-2017/ studying-truth. 19. Appropriately, Tillmans designed a pink canvas tote bag printed with a word cloud of phrases as merchandise for “To look without fear,” his 2022 moma retrospective. 20. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Polymorphous Genius of Wolfgang Tillmans,” New Yorker, October 10, 2022. 21. Jakob Nielsen, “How Little Do Users Read?,” Alertbox, 2008, nngroup. com/articles/how-little-do-users-read. 22. Susanna Newbury, “Things We Think With,” X-tra Contemporary Art Journal 18, no. 1 (Fall 2015), x-traonline.org/article/things-we-think-with/. 23. For an excerpt of Forensic Architecture’s video in The Long Duration of a Split Second, see youtube.com/watch?v=mQdlOMxEiig&t=96s. 24. Eyal Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), 13. 25. Forensis denotes both the production of evidence (by trawling open-source images and information in the public domain) and questioning the practice of evidence-making. Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” 12. 26. Mark Leckey in conversation with Mark Fisher, “Art Stigmergy,” Kaleidoscope Almanac of Contemporary Aesthetics, no. 11 (Summer 2011), kaleidoscope.media/article/mark-leckey. DAMMAN/SUNG TIEU from page 139 NOTES 1. Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 5 (January 1990): 44–63. 2. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and the Scientific Method,” History Workshop 9 (Spring 1980): 5–36. 3. Morelli, 9, quoting Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1963), 40. Published in 1980, the article itself was written in the middle of the Cold War, and, importantly, its author hailed from a prominent family of antiFascist and communist intellectuals in Turin (his father was scholar Leone Ginzburg, his mother the writer Natalia Ginzburg); one wonders what impact the coded language necessitated by Fascist and anti-Communist regimes might have had on his thinking. 4. Douglas Eklund, ed., Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018) and Pamela M. Lee, “Open Secret: The Work of Art Between Disclosure and Redaction,” Artforum 49, no. 9 (May 2011): 220–29. 5. Luke Skrebrowski, “All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke’s Systems Art,” Grey Room 30 (Winter 2008): 54–83; Johanna Gosse and Timothy Stott, eds., Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics Since the 1960s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022); Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). 6. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009) and especially Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” 408–17; James Meyer, “1. The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 23–37; and Miwon Kwon, One Thing After Another (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 7. Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October, no. 140 (Spring 2012): 91–112; Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon, eds., Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 8. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22; Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October, no. 129 (Summer 2009): 51–84. 9. I’m partial to David Antin’s wry observation: “Artists do not commonly arrange themselves in groups any more than sea urchins and starfish align themselves with the echinoderms. At its most harmless the group show is a piece of innocent connoisseurship (‘Seafood I Like’): at its most ambitious it is Linnaean, aiming at isolation of some tendency or cluster of tendencies by virtue of which the artists may be said to ‘play the same game.’ This is dangerous––they say that when Linnaeus found some animal that did not conveniently fit into one of his categories he crushed it underfoot.” David Antin, “Eccentric Abstraction,” Artforum, November 1966, 56–57. 10. Karl Marx, “The General Formula for Capital,” in Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 1:247–57. Marx here develops his “general formula for capital” in which, through circulation, money (M) is not merely transformed into commodities (C) and then back into money (M), but rather, value acquires “the occult ability to add value to itself” (M'). It is in volume 3 that Marx treats more fully “interestbearing capital” or “money that produces more money, self-valorizing value,” described as “the capital mystification in the most flagrant form.” Marx, “Interest-Bearing Capital as the Superficial Form of the Capital Relation,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1991), 3:515–25. 11. See Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden, Germany: Brill, 2018). Although there are a number of things about which Vishmidt and I likely agree, my argument here differs first and foremost from the scale of her project, which aims to homologize a “speculative” function in art to that in capitalism. Here, I am describing neither all art nor art qua art, but a certain set of procedures ascendant in a particular historical period. 12. Ben Goodman and Kyla Russell, “After a Train Derailment, Ohio Residents Are Living the Plot of a Movie They Helped Make,” CNN, February 21, 2023, cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailment-white-noise/index.html. 13. The genius of Cameron Rowland’s reworking of property relations gets to this. For example, his Depreciation, 2018, tracks the purchase of a one-acre lot on Edisto Island, South Carolina—part of the former Maxcy Place plantation and land given to formerly enslaved people under General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1865 Special Field Orders, No.15 (commonly known as the provisioning of “forty acres and a mule”), and rescinded the next year by President Andrew Johnson. Later repossessed by Confederate owners, the land, under Rowland’s 8060 Maxie Road Inc., was placed into a restrictive covenant upon its 2018 purchase, prohibiting all future development and use, and as a consequence, dropping its price to zero in perpetuity, effectively “eliminat[ing] the market value of the land.” 14. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 15. Black-Scholes-Merton, also known colloquially as “Black-Scholes,” is a widely adopted mathematical model for the dynamics of financial derivative markets. Comprising a parabolic partial differential equation, the formula was first published in 1973 by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes. 16. Marx, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” in Capital, 1: 762–872, especially 781–801. 17. See also Sung Tieu, “Charlotte Posenenske and the Circulation and Reassemblage of Industrially Produced Goods” (lecture, Rethinking German Art Symposium, Dia Art Foundation, New York, November 12, 2021). Victoria Hattam, “Imperial Designs: Remembering Vietnam at the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall,” Memory Studies 9, no. 1 (2016): 27–47. 18. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” (1968) reprinted in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1972). 19. This helpful mnemonic is Sianne Ngai’s, from footnote 3 in her “Ambiguous Lever,” PMLA 137, no. 3 (2022): 529–35. 20. György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel; A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the forms of Great Epic Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). 21. Anna Kornbluh, “Defamiliarizations: Totality,” Victorian Literature and Culture 47, no. 3 (2019): 671–78. Fredric Jameson looms large here, but the artistic operations I am describing cannot be reduced to his notion of “cognitive mapping,” less due to any inadequacy of the concept and more so because of contemporary art’s irreducibility to modes of “representation.” See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 51. 22. See VALIE EXPORT’s, Invisible Adversaries, 1976, adopted as the title of an excellent 2016 exhibition at the Bard College Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, curated by Lauren Cornell and Tom Eccles. The title was selected because EXPORT’s film “connects with the ways artists [in the exhibition] approach their adversaries: not as obvious enemies to overthrow but as complex relationships that are a profound part of our history and personal lives.” Thank you to Brendan Harvey for discussing derivatives with me and to Tom Rhoads for discussing everything. CHAMBERLAIN / JOSH KLINE from page 151 NOTES 1. Eli Diner, “Radical Futures: A Conversation with Josh Kline,” Flash Art, October no. 30, 2020, flash---art.com/2020/10/conversation-with-josh-kline/. 2. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October no. 8 (Spring 1979): 75. 3. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87. 4. Williams, 87–93. 5. Howard Singerman, “The Educational Complex: Mike Kelley’s Cultural APRIL 2023 189
Studies,” October no. 126 (Fall 2008): 44–68. 6. Williams, 90.
13. Takashi Murakami, Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
7. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Phamacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: The Feminist Press at cuny, 2013); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Ari Larissa Heinrich, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
14. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 145.
8. Josh Kline, “What Are You?,” in Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts, ed. Christopher K. Ho and Daisy Nam (Brooklyn: Paper Monument, 2021), 66.
17. Freud, 135–41.
9. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Brooklyn: Verso, 2013).
19. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 5–7; Tina M. Campt, “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity,” in Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 17.
10. Domenick Ammirati, “The Communicating Object,” in Josh Kline: Antibodies, ed. Therese Möllenhoff (Oslo: Astrup Fearnley Museet, 2020), 27–30. Prior to writing on Kline’s work for “Antibodies,” Ammirati collaborated with Kline on the scripts for Forever 27 and Forever 48, both 2013. 11. Josh Kline, “Josh Kline in Conversation with Ryan Trecartin,” in Surround Audience: New Museum Triennial 2015, ed. Lauren Cornell and Helga Christoffersen (New York: New Museum, 2015), 17. 12. Josh Kline, “New Century Modern Surface Magazine,” ArtFCity, October no. 21, 2010, artfcity.com/2010/10/21/img-mgmt-new-century-modern-surface-magazine/.
Caption acknowledgment Page 55: Film strip from Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, 1963. © Estate of Stan Brakhage. Vol. 61, No. 8 April 2023. Contents copyright © 2023 Artforum Media, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Artforum International Magazine, Inc. Subscriptions: Orders, inquiries, and address changes should be sent to ARTFORUM, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, or call (877) 514-6871. E-mail: [email protected]. For information on our terms and conditions please visit www.artforum.com/terms. Subscribers: If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within six months. Mailing List: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you prefer that we not include your name, please call or write us. Back Issues: Single copies and back issues are available prepaid at artforum.com/print/archive. Microfilm: University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Microfiche: Bell & Howell, Micro-Photo Division, Old Mansfield Rd., Wooster, OH 44691. ARTFORUM is indexed in the Art Index, ARTbibliographies, MODERN, and RILA. ARTFORUM INTERNATIONAL (ISSN-0004-3532) is published 10 times annually in September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May, and Summer (June) for $75 per year ($145 outside the US) by ARTFORUM, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Printed by Fry Communications, Mechanicsburg, PA. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to ARTFORUM, P.O. Box 3000, Dept. AF, Denville, NJ 07834.
15. Kline, “New Century Modern Surface Magazine.” 16. The techniques of political theater have also been explored by the artist Liz Magic Laser, whose videos Kline included in a 2013 screening he curated at Electronic Arts Intermix called “Uncanny Valleys.” 18. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
20. Kline, “What Are You?” 21. “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October no. 77 (Summer 1996): 25. 22. Meyer Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery” (1941), in Selected Papers, vol. 2, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Brazilier, 1978), 47–85. 23. T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 121–54.
SUBSC RIBE AND S AVE 65 OFF CO % VER PR ICE
ar tforu
m.com/
190
ARTFORUM
subscri
be
BACK OF THE NAPKIN Agnieszka Kurant