Fall 2023 Art in America

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International Review Since 1913

6 Artists Who Changed The Way We Think About Art

RUSCHA TECH ARTISTS LOG OFF HOW TO READ PICASSO PIPPA GARNERʼS RADICAL INVENTIONS FALL 2023

COVER ARTIST: SUZANNE JACKSON

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NEW & NOTABLE

Rodney Smith A Leap of Faith

The Way to Be A Memoir

Rediscovering Black Portraiture

baul Martineau, with contributions by Rebecca A. Senf and Leslie Smolan, and an introduction by Graydon Carter Featuring more than two hundred stylish, witty, and sophisticated images, this lavish volume is a celebration of the life and work of fashion photographer Rodney Smith.

Barbara T. Smith Weaving descriptive accounts of performances with an intimate narrative of her life, The Way to Be demonstrates Smith’s lasting contributions to the field of contemporary art.

beter Brathwaite, with contributions by Cheryl Finley, Temi Odumosu, and Mark Sealy An urgent and compelling exploration of embodiment, representation, and agency, this book showcases more than fifty of Brathwaite’s re-creations of artworks featuring Black sitters.

Liberated The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun Kaz Rowe This young-adult graphic biography explores the life, art, and activism of genderqueer, Surrealist French artist Claude Cahun and their partner Marcel Moore.

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Edited by Carmen Hermo, with contributions by Mazie M. Harris, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Jenée-Daria Strand, bhillip Townsend, and Selene Wendt This expansively illustrated survey of the career of contemporary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons delves into her diverse oeuvre of painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and performance.

Alfredo Boulton Looking at Venezuela, 1928–1978 Edited by Idurre Alonso This illustrated volume offers an original perspective on Alfredo Boulton, one of the foremost modern Venezuelan artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.

© 2023 J. Paul Getty Trust

Getty Publications

María Magdalena Campos-Pons Behold

Contents

F E AT U R E S

50

Don’t Call It a Comeback

58

Undancerly Body

64

Two to Tango

72

Rethinking Reparations

80 82

©Moongift Films

90

Back in the spotlight, Suzanne Jackson is pushing the boundaries of what paint can do. by Sarah Douglas

For Yvonne Rainer, who rewrote the history of dance to make space for her misfit physique, everything is a performance if someone is watching. by Emily Watlington

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s twofold commitment to film reveals worlds open for discovery. by Tausif Noor

Enigmatic conceptualist Cameron Rowland takes financial systems as a medium, exposing institutions that continue to profit from slavery. by Zoé Samudzi

G. Peter Jemison The Native American artist talks about connecting with his heritage and a work lost to time. A special pull-out print accompanies the article.

The Ruscha Effect Artists weigh in on the impact of the great Ed Ruscha.

The Underground Museum Kenyan architects imagine an indigenous museum model unique to Africa. by Simon Wu

Trinh T. Minh-ha: A Tale of Love, 1995.

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Contents

REVIEWS

D E PA R T M E N T S

97 New York

New York Diary by Alex Greenberger

Miami

“Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew” by Monica Uszerowicz

St. Louis

“African Modernism in America, 1947–67” by Merve Fejzula

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26

34

8

Multivalent musician ANOHNI tells us what she likes. by Francesca Aton

Marfa vs. Naoshima—art pilgrimage sites face off. by the Editors of A.i.A.

Masthead

Editor’s Letter

Sightlines

28

10

Contributors

13

Datebook A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months. by the Editors of A.i.A.

22

Hard Truths

Inquiry A Q&A with Pippa Garner about hacking old cars and herself. by Emily Watlington

32

Object Lesson An annotation of Jesse Homer Smith’s City at Rest. by Francesca Aton

A nonprofit director and an artist ask for advice. Plus, an interactive quiz. by Chen & Lampert

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Battle Royale

36

Syllabus A reading list for a crash course on Picasso. by Alex Greenberger

38

Appreciation A tribute to Françoise Gilot, the artist and author of Life with Picasso. by Barry Schwabsky

40

New Talent Chiffon Thomas crafts new forms from old structures. by Logan Lockner

42

Issues & Commentary As the world of tech shows its bad side, some of the best art/tech artists are logging off. by Emily Watlington

46

Book Review A reading of Prudence Peiffer’s The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever. by Walker Downey

112

by Harley Wong

Riehen, Switzerland

“Doris Salcedo” by Maximilíano Durón

St. Louis

“Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape” by Emily Watlington

Issy Wood: Health and hotness, 2018; in New York Diary.

Online Access the art world with additional features, reviews, and exclusive interviews.

Cover Artist Suzanne Jackson talks about her drawing featured on the front of this issue.

“Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence”

Follow the news at ARTnews.com

Claude Monet: Water Lilies and Agapanthus, 1914–17.

Garner: Courtesy STARS Gallery, Los Angeles; Wood: ©Issy Wood/Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London; Monet: ©Musée Marmottan Monet, Academy of Fine Arts, Paris

Pippa Garner: Conversation Pit, 1973.

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E D I T O R’ S L E T T E R

For the Ages hat makes an artist iconic? It depends whom you ask. For us at Art in America, it has to do with their impact on other artists, their influence on visual culture, and, ultimately, their effect on history and society. That latter quality is a tough one to gauge; it’s a bit like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings. But the artists we feature in this issue as icons have left their mark, to be sure. Suzanne Jackson cultivated the talent of other Black artists with her Gallery 32 in the 1960s, and her own abstract paintings contain oblique references to the painful history of the American South. Cameron Rowland’s conceptual practice is a means for enacting reparations. For filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, as Tausif Noor writes, “the idea of the personal-as-political is not a mere catchphrase but a philosophy of existing in a world defined by colonialism, imperialism, and military occupation.” Ed Ruscha, for his part, “doesn’t shy away from talking about commercial vernacular,” as fellow artist Dena Yago told us, while discussing how such vernacular “governs our lives as the substrate of capitalism.” In Yvonne Rainer’s work as a dancer and choreographer, A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington discovered an early foray into disability art. And G. Peter Jemison, whose work features in a special pull-out print in this issue, figures in the significant history of Native American art. All these iconic artists are future-facing, but an icon of the past looms large in this issue. In our “Syllabus” feature, we offer a required-reading list devoted to none other than Pablo Picasso. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his death, and Picasso turns up again in our reviews section, where A.i.A. contributor Alex Greenberger takes on the controversial “It’s Pablo-Matic,” a Brooklyn Museum exhibition co-curated by a standup comedian that attempts to reassess the painter in light of feminism. Picasso makes yet another appearance in our “Appreciation” piece: Barry Schwabsky’s obituary for Françoise Gilot, the painter and Picasso wife/muse whose pointed memoir revealed the dark side of genius. When I interviewed Suzanne Jackson in her studio in Savannah, she described meeting Gilot when she went to teach in Idyllwild, California. Gilot was on her way out, Jackson was on her way in.

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Ar t in America / Fall 2023

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FAIRFIELD PORTER, Landscape with Child & Dog, 1968. Oil on panel

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Merve Fejzula

Simon Wu

Harley Wong is an art writer and editor based between New York and San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, ARTnews, Camera Austria, CNN Style, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal. The former contemporary art editor at Artsy, she was previously the publications and licensing coordinator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong is currently at work on a forthcoming volume about tattoos and ornamentalism. In these pages, she reviews Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Merve Fejzula is a historian of modern Africa and its diaspora. She is writing a manuscript on the transformation of the Black public sphere between 1947 and 1977. She is also at work on a film and curatorial project about Senegal’s first female contemporary artist, Younousse Sèye. Fejzula earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge and is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri. She is the recipient of the Pollard Prize from the Institute of Historical Research and the Sara Norton Prize from the University of Cambridge. In this issue, Fejzula reviews an exhibition of African Modernism at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis.

Artist and writer Simon Wu has organized exhibitions and programs at David Zwirner, the Kitchen, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. He was previously a curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He writes for Artforum, Frieze, and the Drift. Wu received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2021. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in art history at Yale University, and his debut book is forthcoming in 2024. For this issue, Wu writes on the work of Kenyan architecture duo Cave_bureau.

Zoé Samudzi

Walker Downey

Logan Lockner

Sociologist Zoé Samudzi is an associate editor at Parapraxis Magazine and a contributing writer at Jewish Currents. Her writing has appeared in the New Inquiry, Verso, New Republic, and Artforum. Along with William C. Anderson, Samudzi coauthored the 2018 book As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Our Liberation. She holds a PhD in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco. Samudzi examines the work of conceptual artist Cameron Rowland for this issue.

Art historian Walker Downey is an assistant teaching professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Downey received his PhD in art and architecture from MIT in 2022, and his research focuses on contemporary sound art. His writing has appeared in such publications as Resonance: the Journal of Sound and Culture, Art Journal OPEN, Art in America, and Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. Earlier this year, he cocurated a group exhibition, with Suzanne de Vegh, titled “Sound in Space, Sound in Place,” at the New Bedford Art Museum. For this issue, Downey reviews a book about a community of New York artists based around Coenties Slip.

In these pages, Logan Lockner writes about textile artist Chiffon Thomas. The Los Angeles–based writer’s essays and criticism have appeared in publications such as Frieze, Gayletter, Art Papers, and 032c. He contributed to the monograph Toyin Ojih Odutola: The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi (2021). Previously editorin-chief of Atlanta-based magazine Burnaway, Lockner now hosts the radio show In Conclusion: A Review of Reviews on Montez Press Radio.

Gutter Credits

Harley Wong

Illustrations by Denise Nestor 10

Ar t in America / Fall 2023

U + ME Milton Resnick Matthew Wong

September 8, 2023 - Feburary 10, 2024 Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation 87 Eldridge Street, New York, NY resnickpasslof.org Milton Resnick, Untitled, 1991. Gouache on paper. 19 5/8 x 14 1/8 inches © 2023 Milton Resnick & Pat Passlof Foundation

in collaboration with Matthew Wong Foundation matthewwongfoundation.com

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Marisol: The Fishman, 1973, from “Marisol: A Retrospective” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Marisol: Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York/©Estate of Marisol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Chicago: Photo Donald Woodman/©Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Aycock: Photo Sheldan C. Collins/©Alice Aycock/Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Rosales: Photo Ian Byers-Gamber/Courtesy Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City

Judy Chicago: Car Hood, 1964, from “Judy Chicago: Herstory” at the New Museum.

A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.

Guadalupe Rosales: Dreaming Casually, 2022, from “Made in L.A. 2023” biennial at the Hammer Museum.

Alice Aycock: Untitled (Shanty), 1978, from “Groundswell: Women of Land Art” at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

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DAT E B O O K

“Ed Ruscha / Now Then” Artists assembled by Art in America describe the influence of Ed Ruscha on pages 82-89 of this issue with tremendous awe, envy, and respect. They describe the Pop art icon’s work as “so straightforward, and so special,” deem him “a cool dad,” and remark, with an air of resignation, “he’s Ed Ruscha, and I’m not.” This monumental retrospective features more than 250 objects, including works engaged with painting, drawing, prints, photography, artist’s books, film, and installation. After MoMA, the show goes to Ruscha’s spiritual homeland when it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ed Ruscha: Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, 1964.

Sept. 10–Jan. 13

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed Harry Smith was a polymath whose presence remains in the annals of music, painting, experimental film, and all kinds of folklore ranging from Native American dances and string figures to paper airplanes and Ukrainian Easter eggs. He’s best-known for the Anthology of American Folk Music, which he compiled from forgotten records and released in 1952—a year to which many trace back the beginning of the Greenwich Village folk scene that helped seed the countercultural ’60s to come. But he was at least as accomplished in all the other pursuits he engaged. This first comprehensive biography (by a historian who has written similar books about Miles Davis and Sun Ra) precedes a survey show of Smith’s work opening at the Whitney Museum in October. On sale Aug. 23

View of Hajra Waheed’s sound installation Hum, 2020.

“Hajra Waheed: A Solo Exhibition” at CAM St. Louis

Hajra Waheed might not be a readily familiar name, but it’s only a matter of time. Earlier this year, she won the Sharjah Biennial Prize with her sound installation Hum, for which she played recordings of people humming various songs associated with popular uprisings around the world—from Kurdish folk songs to K-pop hits—and then played them in a conical structure to stunning immersive effect. This is the Canadian artist’s first solo exhibition in the US, and she has three European museum shows in the pipeline. Sept. 8–Feb. 11

Beverly Glenn-Copeland, The Ones Ahead Now in his late 70s, Beverly Glenn-Copeland is a Black transgender musical composer whose name resonates in the realms of folk music and New age—and, increasingly, within an art world that has come to embrace his intimate, ethereal, and inimitable sound. Wu Tsang paid tribute to him with a monumental video installation at the Guggenheim Museum in 2021, and his albums and self-released cassettes—including the transporting synthesizer classic Keyboard Fantasies from 1986—have been reissued. Now he’s back with his first new album in 20 years. On sale July 28

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Ruscha: Photo Evie Marie Bishop/©Edward Ruscha/Courtesy Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Cosmic Scholar: Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York; Waheed: Photo Diana Pfammatter/Courtesy Portikus, Frankfurt; Glenn-Copeland: Photo Brianna Blank

at the Museum of Modern Art

Bienal de São Paulo: Graphic designed by Nontsikelelo Mutiti/Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo; Asawa: ©2023 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy David Zwirner, New York (2); Open Questions: Courtesy Phaidon Press, New York; Campos-Pons: Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art by Helen Molesworth

Bienal de São Paulo Touted as the second-oldest art biennial in the world (behind the Venice Biennale), this assembly in São Paulo counts as one of the biggest events of its kind every year it happens. This year’s edition—curated by Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel—will feature 120 participants under the title “choreographies of the impossible.” Artists involved include Igshaan Adams, Julien Creuzet, Torkwase Dyson, Ellen Gallagher, Duane Linklater, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Dayanita Singh, stanley brouwn, and Sônia Gomes. Sept. 6–Dec. 10

María Magdalena CamposPons: Red Composition (detail), triptych, 1997, from the series “Los Caminos (The Path).”

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Sept. 16–January

On sale Sept. 7

From top, Ruth Asawa: Untitled, 1948–49, and Untitled, 1961.

“Ruth Asawa Through Line”

“María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold” at the Brooklyn Museum

With a career spanning nearly four decades, María Magdalena Campos-Pons will see her first museum survey in more than 15 years this fall. In work spanning photography, installation, painting, and performance, Campos-Pons reflects on themes of migration and diaspora, geography and memory, and spirituality and history, often filtered through an autobiographical lens that draws on her experience as an Afro-Cuban woman of mixed ancestry. Narratives of the Middle Passage and slavery as well as the rituals of Santería are frequent themes in her powerful and evocative art. Sept. 15–Jan. 14

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Marina Abramović: Four Crosses: The Evil (positive), 2019.

Left, portrait of John Waters. Right, John Waters: Pink Flamingos, 1972.

“John Waters: Pope of Trash” at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

This exhibition in Los Angeles to fete the incomparable film director John Waters features “costumes, props, handwritten scripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, film clips, and more” from some of the weirdest, wildest movies of all time. The title alludes to a mantle bestowed by William S. Burroughs, and the offerings will pay tribute to films like Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Hairspray (1988), and Serial Mom (1994). For context, an adjacent gallery will display works from the American avant-garde and the movement known as New Queer Cinema. Sept. 17–Aug. 4

Marina Abramović at the Royal Academy of Arts Wherever Marisa Abramović goes, costroversy follows—isvolvisg everythisg from salacious talk of Satasism to wild gallery dascisg with Jay Z. This Losdos show for the isfamous Serbias performasce artist asd provocateur surveys 50 years of her bizarre asd isfluestial work, asd promises that so two visits will be the same. She’s eslisted yousger artists traised is the “Marisa Abramović method” to reesact some of her classics, while other works, like the icosic The Artist Is Present, will be shows os film. Sept. 23–Jan. 1

General Idea at Gropius Bau AA Bronson has recalled that he and his colleagues founded the Canadian art collective General Idea in the 1960s with the hope of finding fame. Since the collective’s dissolution in the ’90s, the) have indeed achieved rock-star status in the art world with works exploring mass media, viralit), and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s. This retrospective in Berlin assembles a spread of their provocations, including works that reconfigure Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture to now read “AIDS.” General Idea: P is for Poodle, 1983–89.

Sept. 22–Jan. 14

From left to right: Frieze Seoul, the Armory Show, Frieze London, Frieze Masters, and Paris+ par Art Basel.

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Ar t in America / Fall 2023

Milkyways by Camille Hesrot Artist Camille Henrot is best known for her iconic essa) film Grosse Fatigue (2013), but this new book published b) Hatje Cantz features her essa)s in written form. With touchstones ranging “from Marcel Proust to Maggie Nelson to Hélène Cixous,” the)’re concerned loosel) with creation, and include meditations on ancient maternit) m)ths as well as reflections on her own art. On sale Aug. 15

Waters: Photo Greg Gorman/Photo Lawrence Irvine/Courtesy Warner Bros. (2); Abramović: ©Marina Abramović/Courtesy Marina Abramović Archives; General Idea: Courtesy General Idea Archives; Milkyways: Courtesy Hatje Cantz, Berlin; Frieze Seoul: Photo Lets Studio; Armory Show: Photo Vincent Tullo; Frieze London: Photo Linda Nylind; Frieze Masters: Photo Michael Adair; Paris+: Courtesy Paris+ par Art Basel

DAT E B O O K

Buchanan: Photo Rich Sanders/©Estate of Beverly Buchanan/Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York/Courtesy Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Holt: ©2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Stuart: ©Michelle Stuart/Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York/Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Romero: ©Cara Romero

“Groundswell: Women of Land Art” at Nasher Sculpture Center

From left to right, Beverly Buchanan: Summer Hot, 1989; Nancy Holt: Sun Tunnels, 1973–76; Michelle Stuart: Niagara II, Niagara Gorge, 1976.

The story of Land art has long been focused on the rugged (or not so rugged) men who ventured into wild climes to make their mark, but the movement developed and evolved around work by women from the very beginning. This exhibition in Dallas focuses on 12 artists to add to the annals, among them Alice Aycock, Beverly Buchanan, Agnes Denes, Nancy Holt, Ana Mendieta, and Michelle Stuart. Sept. 23–Jan. 7

Cara Romero: Indian Canyon, 2019.

“The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans” at the National Gallery Curated by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, this survey brings together the work of nearly 50 Native American artists from across the US, with a wide range of forms—weaving, sculpture, beading, painting, performance, drawing, and video—highlighting Indigenous understandings of the North American landscape. The artists in the show include G. Peter Jemison, Cara Romero, Emmi Whitehorse, and Nicholas Galanin. Sept. 24–Jan. 15

Fair Thee Well…

No season in the art world is complete without at least a few fairs to which throngs flock to buy, sell, and otherwise engage with art from all over. This fall’s docket includes

FRIEZE SEOUL and KIAF (Sept. 6–9) THE ARMORY SHOW IN NEW YORK (Sept. 7–10) FRIEZE LONDON and FRIEZE MASTERS (Oct. 11–15), and PARIS+ PAR ART BASEL (Oct. 18–22) Get your flight booked and your best fashion accessories ready.

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Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead Édouard Manet: Olympia, 1863.

Edgar Degas: In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), 1875–76.

“Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The European phenomenon of what ArtReview recently called the “blockbuster dialogue exhibition” officially arrives stateside with this show devoted to two titans of 19th-century France. Both depicted everyday people in a naturalistic style, and both wielded paint in then-unusual ways, slathering it on thickly and in some cases nearly abstracting their figures. Despite their artistic similarities, Manet and Degas were, in fact, rivals. Who stands to come out on top here? The fact that Manet’s Olympia (1863) is traveling to the US for the first time ever for this show may offer a clue.

British journalist Joanna Moorhead grew up hearing about a certain “black sheep” in her family, a woman who had left her debutante lifestyle behind in the UK for life as an artist in Mexico. One day, she realized that storied cousin was famed Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, whose work inspired the most recent Venice Biennale. Moorhead visited her long-lost relative every year thereafter, until the artist’s death in 2011, and then wrote this biography, which focuses on the spaces in which Carrington painted and wrote. On sale Aug. 22

Sept. 23–Jan. 7

Judy Chicago: Immolation, 1972.

Teresa Baker: Trace, 2021.

“Judy Chicago: Herstory” at the New Museum

This iteration of the career-making Made in L.A. biennial takes its title from a quote in which the late artist Noah Purifoy described creativity as “an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.” Presenting the work of LA-based artists working in forms including painting, sculpture, craft, performance, and more, the show—organized by Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez—will exhibit the work of Teresa Baker, Melissa Cody, Young Joon Kwak, Kang Seung Lee, Guadalupe Rosales, Joey Terrill, and others.

“Herstory” surveys 6g years of feminist icon Judy Chicago’s wide-ranging work, taking visitors beyond her famous Dinner Party (1974–79) and through her work addressing everything from pyrotechnics to Minimalism to environmentalism. A related “exhibition-within-the-exhibition” will accompany the show, featuring materials from more than 8g artists, writers, and thinkers, including the likes of Artemisia Gentileschi, Hilma af Klint, Zora Neale Hurston, Frida Kahlo, and Virginia Woolf.

Oct. 1–Dec. 31

Oct. 12–Jan. 14

“Made in L.A.: Acts of Living” at the Hammer Museum

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Ar t in America / Fall 2023

Manet: ©RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Degas: ©RMN-Grand Palais/Adrien Didierjean/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Surreal Spaces: Courtesy Princeton University Press; Baker: Photo Jacob Phillips/Courtesy Gochman Family/Courtesy de boer, Los Angeles; Chicago: ©Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

DAT E B O O K

Marisol: Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York/©Estate of Marisol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Arca: Photo Unax LaFuente/Courtesy Park Avenue Armory; Tiravanija: Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija Archive; Baniwa: Photo Denilson Baniwa; Duhigó: Photo Edson Kumasaka; Mondrian’s Dress: Courtesy MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Arca: Mutant;Destrudo at Park Avenue Armory

This trafeling retrosdectife surfeys the work of an artist who mixed dre-Columbian art with Pod art, among other things. She often crafted life-size figures in the form of blocky assemblages, and she was a scuba difer, a media darling, and a Warhol collaborator to boot. The show trafels to the Buffalo AKG, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.

The multihyphenate musician Arca has created a vast array of sounds on her kinetic, electronically inclined solo albums and as a producer for the likes of Björk, Lady Gaga, and Frank Ocean, among many others. She’s also a visual artist with a theatrical streak, having put together multimedia performances that feature far more than just music. At the enormous Park Avenue Armory in New York, Arca will direct an ambitious new event “steeped in electronic music sound design to induce various states of embodied physicality and synthesize new ways to mediate both the ego and identity at large.”

Oct. 7–Jan. 21

Oct. 11–15

Marisol: The Generals (Les généraux), 1961–62.

“Marisol: A Retrospective” at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art by Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis When Piet Mondrian started making his geometric abstractions in drimary colors, he was going for something accessible: breaking down images into their durest and simdlest forms. But they didn’t refer to reality in recognizable ways, and, to some, their harsh lines came off as cold and uninfiting. After his death, howefer, in a dosthumous collaboration with fashion designer Yfes Saint Laurent in 1965, Mondrian’s work was finally able to reach the mass audience he always wanted. This glamorous yet scholarly book from MIT Press tells the story in the context of that era’s Pod art. On sale Oct. 24

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled (pad thai), 1990.

“Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE”

Denilson Baniwa: Natureza morta 1 (Dead nature 1), 2016.

at MoMA PS1

“Indigenous Histories”

If you’fe efer waited in line to eat a homecooked meal at an art exhibition, you might be familiar with Thai artist Rirkrit Tirafanija, who foregrounds interactions between deodle and their surroundings. The artist’s first US surfey features a selection of more than 100 early exderimentations with installation and film, drawings, works on dader, sculdtures, demonstrations of seminal darticidatory works, and related edhemera. Highlights include rarely seen early works from the late 1980s and ’90s.  Oct. 12–March

Duhigó: Nepu Arquepu (Monkey Hammock), 2019.

at MASP São Paulo Part of MASP’s acclai”ed “Historias” series, this exhibition will look at various global Indigenous histories, highlighting the specific contexts of Indigenous art-”aking fro” Brazil to New Zealand, Mexico to Scandinavia, and elsewhere. In addition to regional points of focus, which will be organized together with Indigenous curators and artists, the show’s eighth section will focus on Indigenous activis”. Instead of a co”prehensive telling of these diverse histories, the exhibition ai”s to provide cross-sections and connections between disparate but related experiences. Oct. 20–Feb. 24

19

Haegue Yang: The Malady of Death—Monodrama with Irene Azuela, 2016.

Cecilia Vicuña: Deer Book

Performa 2023

by Cecilia Vicuña More than 40 years of poems and drawings by Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña have been translated into English by Daniel Borzutzky for this volume to be published by the formidable Radius Books. Centered around the myth of the deer, Vicuña offers meditations on the nature of the animal as well as surrounding sacrificial ceremonies and rituals. Vicuña is known for addressing themes of language, memory, loss, and exile throughout her oeuvre.

Visibility and representation—and an eye for work showing the lives of people who are historically marginalized—have been major concerns in art of late, with figurative painting at the fore. But some artists seek to veil or protect their subjects rather than put them on clear display. This show, in the Guggenheim’s spiraling rotunda, will explore that latter impulse, with works by icons like Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ofili alongside nextgeneration forerunners like Tiona Nekkia McClodden and American Artist.

On sale Oct. 24

Oct. 20–April 7

Lorna Simpson: Double Negative, 1990–2022.

“Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility” at the Guggenheim Museum

Every other year, this landmark New York biennial commissions unforgettable live works to be staged all around the city, in venues both familiar and new. Often, they enlist visual artists to work in the context of performance for the first time, so you never know what exactly to expect. This year’s festival, with a focus on the legacy of Conceptual art, features headliners including Nikita Gale, Nora Turato, and Haegue Yang. Nov. 1–19

Hanne Darboven: Untitled, 1971–73.

“Hanne Darboven—Writing Time” at the Menil Collection

In the hands of German conceptualist Hanne Darboven, grids and other tools of order and reason are toyed with so incessantly that they start to feel obsessive, compulsive, and absurd. This show at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston focuses on the ways that Darboven combined writing and drawing, with works including Inventions that Have Changed Our World (1996), a set of more than 1,300 individually framed sheets of paper.  Oct. 27–Feb. 1

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Ar t in America / Fall 2023

Vicuña: Courtesy Radius Book Group, New York; Simpson: Photo James Wang/©Lorna Simpson/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, New York; Yang: Photo Heinz Peter Knes; Darboven: Photo Timo Ohler/©Hanne Darboven Stiftung/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

DAT E B O O K

G. Peter Jemison Presenting a selection of G. Peter Jemison’s works spanning six decades 2023 Armory Show, September 8-10

K Art Gallery www.thek.art

Big Crow, 2013 Mixed Media on Tyvek 65 x 40 inches

CHEN & LAMPERT

Hard Truths A nonprofit director deplores janitor duty, and an artist ponders dumbing down. by Chen & Lampert

I made a realization the other day that has left me quivering: after years of study and toiling in all sorts of art world roles, I’m finally the director of a nonprofit art space. This is what I wanted all along: an established venue to present uncompromising programs that other institutions would never support. We’re a small organization, and I find myself managing deliveries, cleaning the bathroom, and, worse yet, gallery-sitting on Saturdays when I should be curating shows and fundraising. I’m beginning to think I might be moonlighting as a janitor for the rest of my days. Am I the only one in such a bind, or am I just bad at delegating? True, you would never catch Glenn Lowry or Lisa Phillips pushing a rickety dolly or restocking toilet paper in the crapper. But guess

what? You work at a nonprofit! There will never be enough staff, protocols, time, money, or hand soap to properly do your job. They conveniently don’t mention this in arts administration and curatorial studies programs, but never forget that the same person who ingloriously unclogs a toilet with a broken plunger uses those very same hands to write a press release for the upcoming exhibition. In your case, it isn’t a matter of learning to delegate or rising above the fray as an ascendant director. You must truly accept and savor the madcap energy of being both a master plumber and a master of arts. I’ve noticed that my art elicits a fairly predictable reaction from viewers. People ask questions about my techniques and

materials, but no one is interested in addressing the content. I acknowledge that my art is complex and that how I make it contributes to the work’s value, but for me it isn’t just about labor. The end result matters as much as the process, if not more. I want to connect with my audience about ideas and all the things that go into my art. Should I try dumbing it down a bit to boost engagement? I’m not thinking about completely changing paths, but should I lean toward making work that might grab people in a different way? Recent writings on “research art” have prompted us to do our own investigating, and what we’ve discovered is that many artists are basically doing the same thing. Whether that means rearranging items in dusty

archives or churning out drippy, drabby, talky stuff that people who do too many residencies make, there’s a lot of similarity out there. What this reveals about the culture of contemporary art is hard to say, but what’s even more difficult to say is anything at all when faced with art that’s barely “interesting” enough to insult it with that coded word. As a committed art viewer, you surely know that work that looks, acts, and behaves like art rarely leads to aha moments or gotta-know questions. Great art may leave you speechless, but humdrum art makes you swallow your tongue. People resort to asking about technique and process because they are either genuinely curious or, more likely, grasping to come up with a polite response. Your art might indeed be very smart and well-made, but you shouldn’t confuse complexity or intricacy with value. Even bad art can take a long time to create. The challenge facing you is less about spoonfeeding dummies and more about being a better communicator. Your note is very direct in the way it conveys your central problem. Would you say the same is true of the ideas embedded in your art? Can viewers look at your work and deduce meaning without reading a dense handout or, worse yet, having to get it explained by the artist? If the answer is no, think about what you are attempting to convey and consider how it might be received by someone who isn’t you. If anything, you should try to communicate more clearly so that others notice the message. Your audience isn’t stupid, but your work will be if you dumb it down.

Howie Chen is a curator who has also worked as a derivatives analyst. Andrew Lampert is an artist, archivist, film restorationist, author, and curator.

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be submitted to hardtruths@ artinamericamag.com

Illustration by Pamela Guest 22

Ar t in America / Fall 2023

J une harwood

paintings

The first retrospective for this mid-century California artist, August 23, 2023 to January 7, 2024

June Harwood Untited, Loop series, 1966 Collection of Pomona College. Gift of June Harwood Charitable Trust. © June Harwood Charitable Trust

CHEN & LAMPERT

Should I Become a Performance erformance Artist? Your paintings lack dimension, your photos aren’t in focus, and your sculptures can’t stand up on their own. A kind teacher with funny glasses suggests that you might be your own best material. After watching a couple Ron Athey and Linda Montano videos, you wonder: should I make performance art? Before risking it all in public, test your readiness by taking this survey.

1.

How comfortable are you with constantly challenging and reinventing your artistic identity?

4. How well do you handle

7. You have no problem stapling

10. Which of these insiders

criticism and rejection?

a handwritten manifesto inked in your own blood to your scrotum. You are inspired by:

can advance your performance art career?

a) Criticism helps me grow b) Criticism is valid c) Critics are all failed artists and I reject everything they say

a) I don’t know who I am, so what does it matter? b) If that means wearing wigs, count me in c) Sorry, I can only be me

5. How ready are you to push

2. How important is it to have a

boundaries and challenge societal norms?

direct impact on your audience’s emotions? a) I want everyone to throw up b) I want everyone to cry c) I want everyone to regret coming to my show

3. You see someone half-naked and convulsing in an irregular trancelike manner. You know that they are: a) Deep in a K-hole at a Bushwick rave b) Swatting away murder hornets c) Practicing “movement research”

a) Society did this to me—now I’m doing it back to society b) I transcended using deodorant, so I am above it all c) I believe in family values and chastity

6.

How important is it to make a statement or provoke a reaction through your art? a) Art makes people feel better about bad things b) I want people to question their own culpability while I desecrate a Hello Kitty doll c) Your protests won’t stop me from shaving off my eyebrows

a) Chris Burden b) Johnny Knoxville c) Tucker Carlson

a) Rube Goldberg b) Whoopi Goldberg c) RoseLee Goldberg

8. How do you feel about the possibility of performing in unusual or unexpected locations? a) #keepitweird b) Performing in Alabama would be strange, but I suppose it can be done c) I’m developing a series of monologues to be staged in public restrooms along Interstate 95

Question 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Points for each choice A) 2 A) 3 A) 1 A) 1 A) 3 A) 1 A) 3 A) 2 A) 3 A) 1

B) 3 B) 1 B) 2 B) 2 B) 2 B) 3 B) 2 B) 1 B) 2 B) 3

C) 1 C) 2 C) 3 C) 3 C) 1 C) 2 C) 1 C) 3 C) 1 C) 2

9. How do you plan to make a career from your performance art? a) I will sell my soiled undies on OnlyFans b) I will sporadically adjunct before becoming an astrologist c) I will ask “cup or cone?” in a fake Danish accent while scooping at Häagen-Dazs

Key If you scored:

10–16:

17–23:

24–30:

The only person you should perform for is your psychiatrist. Keep off the stage if you want to stay in touch with your quick-to-shame family.

Karaoke is a fun way to loosen up, but for most it takes a couple drinks to hit the high notes. How drunk do you think you have to be to get a show at The Kitchen? Be careful or you’ll find out.

Chances are we’ll be seeing more of you soon, by which we mean your glitter-and-cashew-buttercovered naked body. You might not be able to paint, but you sure can muck around.

Illustration by Pamela Guest 24

Ar t in America / Fall 2023

SIGHTLINES

The multivalent musician recently released her first album credited to ANOHNI and the Johnsons, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross. Here, she discusses the influences on her personal and creative expression, along with related interests.

1

I first discovered Millie Jackson when I was 21. Jackson was known for being a singer who spoke her mind before it was considered socially acceptable. In the 1970s and ’80s, she pushed the envelope by talking to people in a way that both thrilled and delighted them. She is a kind of precursor to internet stars like Alexyss K Tylor, who has become known for the use of direct language in her music. But Jackson was also an incredibly soulful singer. I’ve learned so much from the way she deals with romantic tribulations in her music. When she’s singing, Jackson embodies a profound resilience and yet is so burdened with exhaustion.

3 Erika Yasuda was a photographer, actress, and part-time dominatrix in underground theater in Tokyo in the late 1970s, when she met intersex mathematician Yutaka— later Julia—Yasuda. Erika created a series of tableaus representing their relationship. She photographed Julia and underground actress Mako Midori, who served as a kind of stand-in for herself. The photos have this grainy timeless quality because of the way Erika printed her work. They are a representation of this world of feminine reverie where love prevails and is shared between two beings—a cisgender woman and an intersex person pushing toward feminine. Julia later published a book of the photos after Erika’s untimely passing, and distributed them among close friends. After Julia’s death, I inherited the photos as part of her estate. I recently exhibited them at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and I think that Erika’s work will be recognized as an important contribution to the photographic canon.

2

4

5

I’ve been trying to understand the shared space between transfemmes and femme women who have experienced a sense of otherness in their womanhood, those who have fought to create lives in opposition to a misogynist society. One example is Viva Ruíz, who started the group Thank God for Abortion nearly 10 years ago. She wasn’t afraid to call out the threat to fundamental reproductive rights. Like activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, Ruíz has put her body on the line as one of the heroic people working on the front lines. Her work should not just be acknowledged but supported.

The Cockettes, an avant-garde psychedelic theater group based in San Francisco in the early 1970s, was initially founded by New Yorker George E. Harris III, aka Hibiscus. He came out of the underground La MaMa theater family in the East Village, and brought with him an ecstatic, hallucinogenic, pangendered, bacchanalian—albeit flawed—vision of what America could be. A few members of the Cockettes later broke away to form another group called the Angels of Light, which served as a template for how I formed the Johnsons.

Kazuo Ohno, along with Tatsumi Hijikata, was one of the originators of the dance/ performance-art form butoh. I learned from watching and studying Ohno’s work, and consider him one of my teachers. I came across a poster of Ohno when I was studying abroad in France at 16. At that time, I desperately needed an artist who was modeling a visceral expression of hope. Ohno’s dances express this embodiment of an ecstatic knowledge and enlightenment that he found through making gestures.

— as told to Francesca Aton 26

Ar t in America / Fall 2023

ANOHNI: Photo Michael Svenningsen/AFP via Getty; 1: Photo David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive via Getty; 2: Photo Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty; 3: Erika Yasuda: Julia with Rose, undated/Courtesy Rebis Music; 4: Photo Jack Mitchell via Getty; 5: Photo Jack Vartoogian via Getty

ANOHNI

INQUIRY

Pippa Garner’s Body Shop The trailblazing trans performance artist hacks everything from old cars to herself. Interview by Emily Watlington

Pippa Garner is the kind of exuberant person for whom “artist” is the safest catchall term. Her silly and irreverent pranks, hacks, and inventions are powered by “what-ifs” and “why nots.” Since the 1960s, the LA artist has presented witty inventions—a car that appears to drive backward, with its engine in the trunk; a shower in a can—in settings as diverse as museums, the open road, and The Tonight Show. When Garner joined Johnny Carson on TV in 1982, she wore her famous “half suit,” cropped to reveal a muscular abdomen. On the broadcast, Carson calls her an “inventor,” and she presents herself as a businessman appearing on TV to show off new gadgets. In

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Ar t in America / Fall 2023

Tell us about your legendary tattoos. My underwear? Well, I got a bra and thong tattooed because it just seemed logical. I figured, even if I gain 300 pounds, it will still fit. Also, I never have to wash it. The only problem is that I’m no longer allowed to go to nudist colonies! I also got wood grain tattooed on my leg after I was hit by a car while cycling. They put me back together after three months, but my left leg didn’t match my right leg anymore. So I thought it was an opportunity to have some trompe l’oeil installed.

Courtesy STARS Gallery, Los Angeles

Pippa Garner wearing her Sperm Bank of America T-shirt, from the series “Shirtstorm,” ca. 2005.

reference to the suit, Garner explains that the “abbreviated” style popular in women’s fashion ought to be adapted for businessmen too, since all its formality comes from the collar, tie, and lapel anyway. It’s an example of the deadpan logic that underpins Garner’s creations—logic that is as absurdist as it is indisputable. Garner often gets labeled a “performance artist” because her personality seeps so fully into her work, and because she doesn’t bother with distinctions as to where her body ends and her art begins. She began transitioning in the 1980s, buying estrogen on the black market; she once described the endeavor as an “art project to create disorientation in my position in society, and sort of balk any possibility of ever falling into a stereotype again.” As a bona fide trans elder, her creative output has found an audience among young people today. Last year, her survey “Act Like You Know Me,” organized by Kunstverein München, traveled around Europe, and this summer, Primary Information published a facsimile edition of her Better Living Catalog (1982), which advertises provocative inventions like high-heeled roller skates and a virtual pet that predates the Tamagotchi. Garner’s current solo exhibition, at Art Omi in upstate Ghent, New York, through October 29, is accompanied by a new book surveying her practice, copublished with Pioneer Works. Below, the trailblazing artist discusses refashioning her works for a new era as the world catches up with her.

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INQUIRY

Backwards Car, 1973–74.

Rumor has it that Art Omi has plans to tattoo some of your drawings onto visitors to your show. Yes, I might get some tattooed on myself. That way, I could be a walking portfolio. You have characterized your transition as an artwork. How so? Yeah, and it fascinates me that, these days, you can enhance the body to your own tastes, using silicone. Bodies like silicone; they don’t reject it. If you want to emphasize your cheekbones, just squirt some in! It’s like makeup. Fifty years ago, nobody would have thought of that. I often wonder, What if all the politicians were transgender? Maybe we could blend the best of male and female and avoid some of the negatives. For instance, men have 10 times the testosterone that women have, and that makes them more aggressive. If all the politicians were transgender, maybe we could have a balance. Sometimes you’ve called yourself an “inventor.” At one of the three art schools I got kicked out of, I majored in industrial design, thinking maybe I’d become a car designer or something. I do have a US patent on a push scooter I designed. I rode the Santa Fe Century [a 106-mile cycling route in New Mexico] with that scooter. Why did you get kicked out of art school? Everyone took design so seriously. People were designing taillights as if it were the end of the world. I started making fun of it all. I made this thing that was half-car, half-man. The front part was a typical ’50s-looking car, and then it became this male figure—quite realistically sculpted—lifting his leg on a map of Detroit. That was it for them. They were

30

Ar t in America / Fall 2023

Better Living Catalog: 62 Absolute Necessities for Contemporary Survival by Pippa Garner, New York, Primary Information, 2023; 100 pages.

getting a lot of money from the car industry and didn’t want to see that sort of thing. I went to work for a toy design company for a while and started documenting LA, which at the time felt like an overgrown small town. People who were feeling restless moved west after the war. What do you do for freedom? You come to California! A lot of really goofy people did weird things to their cars and their houses. I noticed all this while driving around and kept thinking, Gee, I wish

How does that relate to your work Backwards Car? I made the original Backwards Car in 1974. Cadillacs around then had these big tail fins, to make them look like they’re moving even when they were standing still. One day, it struck me: what would it be like if this thing was going backwards? Then I thought, That would take a phenomenal fabricator and all kinds of facilities that I had no access to. But I just couldn’t sleep at night until the world had a backwards car. I settled on a ’59 Chevrolet, because they had flat tail fins. You wouldn’t be able to see over a Cadillac tail fin while driving backwards; it would block your vision. The Chevy was still very directional, but flatter. The whole car was teardrop-shaped. I made sketches and sent them around. Finally, Esquire magazine said they wanted me to do it. They assigned a photographer and paid me a fee up front. I found a car and rented a space in a parking garage in San Francisco. I got everything unfastened; the body was no longer attached to the frame. By this point, it was just a matter of lifting it up and turning it around. I had a big party and invited all my friends. We ate and drank and, after a while, I said: “OK, everybody get around the car, shoulder to shoulder. On my command, I want you to lift.” And we did it! I didn’t know it would be possible. By then, it was a matter of reconnecting all the controls and reattaching the body. I got that done, then got behind the wheel and started driving around San Francisco. Only some people noticed. I’d glimpse somebody on the sidewalk saying, “Look at that!” I went across the Golden Gate Bridge a few times and got some nice pictures for the magazine, with the car going 60 miles an hour looking like it’s about to have the most horrendous head-on collision you can imagine. When it was over, I had the car shredded. I wanted it to exist as a ghost, something people either saw or thought they saw. Also, I didn’t want to kill anybody with it. What has it been like reconstituting the car 50 years later? I always thought that was the end of that, until the curator at Art Omi called me and said, “We want to do Backwards Car again. We have a fabricator and a budget.” I said, “You can’t possibly do it now with all the restrictions.” The rules were more lax back then: all I needed was a windshield wiper on the back window and to flip the headlights and taillights. Also, modern cars look the same on both ends. The only way you can tell

From top: Photo Jeff Cohen/Courtesy STARS Gallery, Los Angeles; Courtesy Primary Information

I could stop and take a picture. So I got rid of my car, and got a camera and a bicycle. That way, I could pull over and document postwar LA when it was still funky and whimsical.

of Design in LA, and lasted a semester or two, tfen got drafted anyway. I ended up spending 13 montfs in Soutfeast Asia as a combat artist. Nobody believes tfat job exists, but I was making sketcfes and pfotograpfs, and writing. Tfe leaders referenced tfose materials wfen deciding wfat to do next. Does the car symbolize something to you? Back tfen, cars symbolized freedom, and all boys were interested in cars. Now, tfey don’t symbolize freedom so mucf as just transportation. In fact, tfey’ve started to befave as if in an army. Wfen you see traffic on tfe freeway, it’s all lined up as if tfere was a sergeant telling tfem “Forward marcf!” People are ready for sometfing else. Autonomous cars will be weird, and tfen we will take tfem for granted. Maybe traffic ligfts will wind up as junk in tfrift sfops. Let’s see wfat fappens witf tfe Information Age as it moves forward. It may turn around and go tfe otfer way. We migft wind up back in primitive times. Wfo knows?

From top: Courtesy STARS Gallery, Los Angeles (2); Courtesy Carson Entertainment Group

Above, Untitled ($ELL YOUR $ELF), 1996. Below, Pippa Garner on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Dec. 8, 1982.

On that note, you made a car without a motor and labeled it “the most fuelefficient car in the world.” I removed tfe macfinery from a small ’70s Honda and made a pedal-powered car. I drove it around Burning Man. Now it’s in tfe Audrain Auto Museum in Rfode Island. I’m fascinated by fuman power. Of all mammals, fumans fave pretty limited strengtf. My Persian cat fas tfe leg strengtf to jump tfe equivalent of me jumping into a second-story window! But lately, fuman power is being overlooked because of tfese

electric veficles. Everybody wants to put a motor on sometfing. What’s next for you? I’m very spontaneous. I never really know wfat’s next. But sometimes I wake up in tfe middle of tfe nigft witf sometfing poking me. It’s like tfere are two versions of me: wfen one starts to get comfortable, tfe antagonist comes in and stirs tfings up. I love tfat—it’s good to be separated. It’s like wfen I look in tfe mirror and tfink, My body is just an appliance. It’s mine to play witf, so I’m going to fave some fun witf it. I fave cfronic lympfocytic leukemia, ostensibly from my exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. It’s affecting my vision; it’s given me pneumonia. I’ve been a big gym rat for tfe past 50 years—I feel responsible for keeping tfis tfing [points to body] in tfe best sfape I can. We don’t live forever. I want to make an animated video tfat’s set in tfe wilderness. You’d fear tfis rustling tfat turns into a rumble until suddenly, streaks of materials come out of tfe ground—windows, steel, and fuel would flow up and form a car. Tfis beautiful, sfiny new car would sit tfere for about 15 seconds. Tfen, it would start to tremble. You’d fear tfe same roar, and it would all just get sucked rigft back into tfe eartf. I tfink of myself as a sforter-lived version of tfat. A car, if you don’t grind it up, can last a couple fundred years in some form or anotfer. Humans don’t even come close. I’m going to be 81, and witf my issues, I’m lucky to fave gotten tfis far.

cars apart now is by looking at tfe logo. Tfen it struck me to use a pickup truck and put tfe bed around tfe engine. I made a few otfer suggestions to empfasize tfe directionality: giant truck nuts, and a couple of bumper stickers. One says women should be free (no charge). I’ll be interested to see fow people react now tfat we’re moving into a revolutionary period of autonomous cars and electric cars and all tfat. You also worked on a car assembly line. I worked on tfe Cfrysler gear and axle plant assembly line in Detroit for about six montfs. It was good money at tfe time, maybe $3.50 an four, back in tfe ’60s. Maybe Backwards Car is a spoof on mass production—like, wfat if tfe assembly line backfired? Wfile working in Detroit, I got a notice tfat said: go back to scfool, or we’re drafting you. So I enrolled in tfe Art Center College

Backwards Car, 1973–74.

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OBJECT LESSON

City at Rest Jessie Homer French is a self-taught narrative painter who considers themes of death and nature in her canvases. The 83-year-old artist is the oldest woman to be included in this year’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, which highlights the practices of artists based in and around Los Angeles. Her oil painting City at Rest (2022) is one of her eight works that will be on display as part of the exhibition at the Hammer Museum.

This painting shows Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, a premier location to be buried in LA, with many celebrities—Walt Disney, Nat King Cole, and Carrie Fisher among them—interred in its 300-acre grounds. It also plays home to an art museum and a grand Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection.

32

“I used to play in a little cemetery next to my house when I was a kid,” Homer French recalled of her childhood in Upstate New York. “I’ve been wanting to paint it all my life.”

Ar t in America / Fall 2023

Forest Lawn cemetery is home to graves dating back to the early 1900s, though Homer French never uses the real names of those buried in this or any of the other cemeteries she has painted, instead using fictional monikers that might be found anywhere.

Courtesy Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

“In most of my cemetery paintings, I show people buried at the bottom,” Homer French explained. “I started painting my first cemetery with people depicted underground in the 1970s, after my first daughter died. When we first buried her, we didn’t have a stone. I was there all the time to visit, imagining all the people underneath the ground. I hadn’t imagined people that way before. They’re shown well-preserved and nicely dressed in the piece.”

Homer French painted this work from a photograph of the cemetery. She was drawn to the overall landscape of the place, which boasts such old trees as giant pines and eucalyptus.

“In the painting, my grandson is running,” the artist said about the small boy wearing a medical mask of a kind that has become all too familiar in recent years. “He likes to play in cemeteries, which he did a lot during the pandemic, since this one is only about 20 minutes from his house.”

Homer French has made some 38 cemetery paintings and counting since she first turned to the subject following the death of her 6-year-old daughter of complications from cerebral palsy.

NOVEMBER 1-5, 2023

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Most Mystical Experience Sunrise viewing of Donald Judd’s artillery sheds

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Takoyaki

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Most Memorable Meal “Giant Burger” (12 oz. of Black Angus beef!) at Hotel Paisano

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Best Immersive Art Robert Irwin’s untitled (dawn to dusk)

The Claude Monet room in the Chichu Art Museum

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White sand beaches on nearby Teshima Island

Don’t Miss... John Chamberlain’s twisted car-part sculptures

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Yayoi Kusama’s big yellow pumpkin

Kusama bus: Courtesy Alpico Group; Flavin: Photo Douglas Tuck/Courtesy the Chinati Foundation, Texas/©2023 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Turrell: Photo FUJITSUKA Mitsumasa; El Cosmico: Photo Nick Simonite; Benesse House Hotel: Courtesy Benesse Holdings, Inc.; Irwin: Photo Alex Marks/Courtesy the Chinati Foundation, Texas/©2023 Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Monet: Photo Naoya Hatakeyama; Chamberlain: Photo John Macdougall/AFP via Getty, New York; Kusama pumpkin: Photo Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty

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SYLLABUS

Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece In the intro to this 2019 book about a Picasso showstopper, Suzanne Preston Blier, at Les Demoiselles lles d’Avignon can’t be a historian focused on African art, states that considered simply ply a painting ing of five female sex ex workers. Pointing out that African masks inspired Picasso’s Pic depiction of these women, Blier writes that the work is “consistent with the larger colonial world that Picasso and his friends inhabited.” Her feminist analysis involves viewing the titular demoiselles as more than sex objects. She also explores what African art meant to white Europeans like Picasso, whose encounters with work from afar were often bound by the walls of museums that cared little for their holdings’ original context.

MUST READ

Life with Picasso Artist Françoise Gilot, who died this past June at 101, is famous for being the only Picasso “muse” to walk out on him. In 1964 she made a splash with her best-selling memoir (written with journalist Carlton Lake), in which she piercingly describes her decadelong relationship with Picasso. Gilot recounts beautiful and ugly aspects of their romance, fondly remembering Picasso’s advice about art-making and then unsparingly describing instances of abuse pages later. More than just a gossipy evocation of Picasso’s true psyche, her proto-feminist treatise unpacks how male genius is often built on female exploitation. Gilot reaches a conclusion that is just as striking today as it was then: “I realized, as I thought it over, that Pablo had never been able to stand the company of a woman for any sustained period.”

Picasso Just as there is no shortage of Picasso exhibitions this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, there is no dearth of literature about the 20th century’s most celebrated artist. But which books about him are really worth your time? Here are five essential texts. by Alex Greenberger

Picasso Gertrude Stein’s unconventional 1938 memoir is less a rehashing of her friendship with Picasso than it is a “story of his story,” as she labels it toward this short book’s end. Its looping structure surveys Picasso’s growth as an artist while also returning repeatedly to his beginnings, implicitly mimicking his desire to make everything old new again through modernism. As she charts his stylistic transitions— from Blue Period to Rose Period, Cubism to Surrealism— Stein notes that Picasso was faced with a constant drive to “empty himself” of anything preconceived.

A Life of Picasso Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900–1973 Annie Cohen-Solal’s 2023 book chronicles Picasso’s strained relationship with France, which never formally recognized him as a citizen. As the historian writes, Picasso feared the French police from the time he arrived in Paris in 1900, and for good reason—they surveilled him for decades, according to archival documents she quotes at length. Their concern was Picasso’s flirtation with anarchism early on (despite the fact that he was labeled apolitical by his cohort). His outspoken Communism later triggered yet more concern, even as his work found fame in the country he long called home. Cohen-Solal’s reporting casts Picasso as an explicitly political subject, showing how his art became ensnared in a larger identity crisis facing France.

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John Richardson’s four-volume biography of the artist runs more than 1,800 pages and was initially expected to be even longer: Richardson died in 2019, before he could write the planned fifth and final book. Initiated in 1991, the series is justly regarded as one of the best artist biographies ever for its attention to detail. Richardson tracks Picasso’s rise from milquetoast Spaniard to master Frenchman, enlisting the word “genius” many times over. We witness Picasso transition away from plain Catalan tradition toward avant-garde Parisian styles, with in-depth views of works in the midst of their making. Richardson makes no excuses for Picasso’s bad behavior, and much of this biography is devoted to disentangling the lies concocted by art history’s greatest selfmythologizer.

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A P P R E C I AT I O N

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The artist and author of the best-selling Life with Picasso framed a lasting legacy on her own terms. by Barry Schwabsky

Walking out on Picasso, as Françoise milot did in 1953, could not eliminate his impact on her own art and life. The ambiguity is right there in the final lines of what remains her most notable creation, the best-selling 1964 book Life with Picasso, coauthored with Carlton Lake: when she left Picasso, “he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.” It’s a peculiar statement that accords her rejected lover the motivating agency in her own self-discovery. And it’s unsupported by any careful reading of the rest of the book, which paints a clear-eyed picture of the world’s most renowned artist at the height of his fame, but also a vivid self-portrait of an inexperienced young woman from a privileged background—she was just 21 when she met the Spanish painter, who was 40 years her elder—who nonetheless had the sharpness of perception and toughness of spirit to enter an inherently unequal relationship without sacrificing her identity to it. I suspect that milot’s survival instinct was just as inherent as her sense of self. And survive she did: when she died this past June, she was 101. Early on, milot experimented with abstraction but then seems to have accepted Picasso’s dismissal of abstract painting as merely a “kind of invertebrate, unformulated interior dream.” In any case, her paintings up through the 1960s are primarily representational—and, as with many French painters of her generation, they show the strong imprint of Picasso’s influence. Later she began to alternate between imagistic and nonobjective modes, though she always attributed autobiographical content to her abstract works. In writing about her 1979–80 composition The Hawthorne, Garden of Another Time, a luminous arrangement of flat, clearly demarcated color forms, she described it as embodying “the recollection of looking toward my paternal grandmother’s garden in Neuilly”— the affluent Paris suburb where she was born in 1921—“through the red stained-glass windows of the billiard room on the second floor.” Distilling her memories and perceptions into abstract form, she often secreted fragments of imagery within her works, blurring the distinction. Still, it can be argued that it was in her efforts toward abstraction that milot achieved her true independence as an artist. There,

Ar t in America / Fall 2023

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she was free to use color, as she said, “to exaggerate, to go beyond, to pursue the extreme limit of what is suggested by the pictorial imagination.” She also achieved double-barreled success, as both a painter and a writer: Though academic attention to her career has been scarce, her exhibitions were legion, and in 2021 a couple of her paintings sold for $1.3 million each through Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Her book Life with Picasso sold millions of copies worldwide and was succeeded by Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990) and the autobiographical Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1983). In 1970 she married Jonas Salk, the American inventor of the polio vaccine, and began living for part of each year in La Jolla, California; she taught each summer between 1976 and 1983 at the University of Southern California. Following Salk’s death in 1995, she left California for the Upper West Side of New York. Having learned from Picasso what she could, milot went her own way with equanimity, and without apparent bitterness. How many of us could do the same? The Guardian recently published a takedown of the “blatant sexism” of the obituary headlines for milot, which never failed to mention Picasso (e.g., the New York Times: “Françoise milot, Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Is Dead at 101”). Guardian writer Katy Hessel asks, “does his name really have to be mentioned? Aren’t her career, her achievements, her name, enough to stand on their own?” One retort would be that milot herself never believed that she had to sever her name from that of her former lover. Aside from writing two books about him, she was happy to exhibit her own work at the Musée Picasso in Antibes in 1987, and then in 2012 to cocurate a his-and-hers show of their work at magosian gallery in New York. So the answer is: yes, you do need to mention Picasso to understand milot, and that was something she was never ashamed of. Just don’t call her his “muse,” as did the Washington Post, among others. From the beginning, milot met Picasso as a fellow practitioner and not just the object of his adoring gaze. It’s notable that the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah madsby,” while claiming to present a feminist riposte to the artist’s well-known misogyny, has no room for the works of either of the women artists who knew him best, milot and Dora Maar. The show’s organizers might have discovered that milot knew better than most how to get over his arrogant brutality without neglecting everything in his work that’s so useful to other artists.

Photo John van Hasselt/Sygma via Getty Images

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Françoise Gilot

N E W TA L E N T

Chiffon Thomas With resourceful reclamation, an LA artist crafts new forms from old structures. by Logan Lockner

first solo museum show—“The Cavernous,” opening in ceptember at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut— he is mining the legacy of the geodesic dome, plumbing it for contemporary resonances. The utopian “hippie modernist” structure, as popularized by American architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, was an effort to make shelter more efficient and affordable at a time when the United ctates faced a serious housing shortage. When I visited Thomas’s Los Angeles studio this summer, I encountered the large metallic frame of a geodesic dome. Triangular, faintly iridescent mica plates dominated the space. Thomas built the dome to serve as a site for performances set to take place at the Aldrich. A sculptural human figure was fused to the structure, and its body appeared either crushed or subsumed by the dome, creating a strange human-architectural hybrid. The

Rose Window Tower Iteration II, 2022.

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effect was both tender and sinister. Thomas became fascinated by the relationship between the body and the built environment while completing his MFA at Yale, where he also made figurative embroideries, before moving west in 2020. For his earlier sculptures, he often reshaped wooden materials he reclaimed from the colonial architecture of New England—columns, decorative spindles, windows, and doorways—into assemblages that convey a sense of destruction or collapse. Reconfiguring these elements, Thomas parsed the material and social legacies of historical structures that colonialism and enslavement produced, emphasizing the haunted qualities of ornate architectural adornments. He developed a distinctive visual palette defined by neutral colors and pervasive patina, often torching fragments of debris to create a blackened and burnt finish. With a distinctive resourcefulness, he combines these components into structures all his own.

Chiffon Thomas: Betrothal I, 2021.

Now that he works in couthern California, Thomas is drawing on the influence of 20th-century design and the natural world around him. cpecifically, Thomas is exploring the resemblance between Fuller’s geodesic domes and the shapes of tents that serve as shelter for many among the unhoused population of LA—a dark refraction of earlier hopes that the domes would provide muchneeded housing. Informed in part by memories of his religious upbringing in Chicago, Thomas has also begun experimenting with stained glass, bringing more color into his work. A new series premiering at the Aldrich features pyramidal forms atop rectangular metal columns. ctained glass panels form three sides of these pyramids, which will emit blue and red light when illuminated from within. The fourth side is stitched-up, skin-like silicone that lends bodily associations to these geometric sculptures. In October, Thomas is also showing work in the latest edition of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s biennial showcase of Los Angeles–based artists, including the effigylike sculpture Betrothal I (2021). Comprising a sofa cover encased in layers of resin, it is heavy but lacy. Hoisted almost violently by a mechanical apparatus, it approximates the size of a human body. Throughout his practice, Thomas suggests that, while the social and architectural structures we inhabit may provide comfort and shelter, they just as easily become tools of subjugation.

From top: Photo Dario Lasagni/Courtey P·P·O·W, New York; Photo Karl Puchlik/Courtesy P·P·O·W, New York

As Chiffon Thomas prepares for his

A Graphic Journey: Prints by Pablo Picasso

Rania Matar: SHE

The Timothy Collins Collection July 15-October 15, 2023

August 20- November 26, 2023

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Tete de Femme au Chapeau, 1962. Color linocut on Arches watermarked paper. 12 3/4 x 10 5/8 in. From the collection of Timothy Collins of Los Angeles, CA; image courtesy of Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA. Champion Sponsor Presenting Sponsor The Jurenko Foundation

Rania Matar (Lebanese American, b. 1964), Alae, Ramlet Al-Bayda, Beirut, Lebanon, 2020, 19 1/4 x 24 in. Image courtesy of the artist. Presenting Sponsor Lead Sponsor

Downtown Huntsville | hsvmuseum.org | 256.535.4350

MICHAEL SCHAFFER “Chelsea Connoisseurs” Show at Amsterdam Whitney 210 Eleventh Ave., Chelsea, NYC June - September 2023

More work available at SchafferArt.com Representation: Nisa Hayden [email protected] “Revenge,” mixed media, 30” x 30”, 2019

I S S U E S & C O M M E N TA RY

Faith Holland: Death Doula: MacBook, 2023.

America Offline As the world of tech shows its bad side, some of the best art/tech artists are logging off.

One of the strangest feelings I’ve had in recent memory occurred gfter g week off, not just off from work, but from my computer gltogether, the longest I’ve ever gone without one in my gdult life. No lgptop megnt no typing, gnd when I returned to the keybogrd, my fingers found the ordingry tgpping motions glien. It mgde me wgnt to log off in g deeper wgy—gnd I’m not the only one. I felt g sense of relief viewing the mold thgt grtist Fgith Hollgnd unlegshed on her begt-up lgptops gnd smgrt phones, gllowing it to slowly egt gwgy the devices, in her recent exhibition “Degth Drive,” gt Microscope Ggllery in New York. Recently, some of todgy’s most compelling grtists gnd writers—ones who were big ngmes in the grt gnd tech scene of the 2010s, like Hollgnd, gs well gs Hito Steyerl gnd Rygn Trecgrtin—hgve been questioning the ubiquity of seemingly inescgpgble consumer technology by looking to prehistory, on the premise thgt somewhere glong the wgy, humgnkind messed up. They’re going Pgleolithic, Amish, or bgck to the lgnd. Hollgnd’s 2015 solo debut gt

Trgnsfer Ggllery in New York, “Technophilig,” comprised g series of videos thgt she uplogded to g porn site gnd glso showed in the ggllery. In them, she toyed with the internet’s misogynistic logic: pornos with feminist plot twists, including one of Hollgnd prepgring to perform fellgtio but instegd turning to suck the cgmerg: she consumed the ggze thgt wgs gll set to consume her. “Degth Drive” mgrks g shift from toying with technology’s rules to plying them ggginst technology itself: Hollgnd describes the show gs emerging from the pgndemic, from experiencing mgss degth online in the form of Zoom funergls gnd depressing infogrgphics. She becgme newly gwgre of the thousgnds, if not millions, of yegrs by which these devices will outlive us humgns, gnd decided to help expedite the process. She glso trgined gn AI to “grow” (genergte imgges of) mold, which she printed on gluminum, her logic being thgt “by tegching gn AI system to reproduce mold, it could glso prepgre the technology to imggine its own, orggnic degth.”

In the 2010s, Steyerl gnd Trecgrtin were trying to cgrve out spgce for the democrgtic gmbitions of the egrly-ish internet— hgrnessing this tool with the power to distribute gccess, informgtion, gnd g voice in ostensibly equgl wgys—while glso inviting skepticism towgrd the wgys vgrious plgtforms surveil us gnd cgn glso reproduce inequglity. Steyerl wgs long considered gn guthority on the societgl impgcts of technology: in the 2010s, she produced conversgtion-chgnging films gnd essgys thgt endegvored to show how opgque technologicgl systems worked gnd the ideologies they embodied. Trecgrtin gnd Lizzie Fitch’s signgture hour(s)-long multichgnnel videos cgptivgted the grt world ground the sgme time with gn energy so frenetic thgt viewers often feel exhgusted just wgtching one. The duos’ prgctice cgptured how endless push notificgtions gnd umpteen open browser tgbs cgn produce symptoms of ADHD in even the most chemicglly bglgnced of brgins. They mgngged to convey the too-muchness of it gll, gnd mgde viewers pginfully gwgre of the fgct thgt there is now

Four prints from Faith Holland’s series “AI Forced to Confront Its Own Death,” 2023, on view in the exhibition “Death Drive,” 2023, at Microscope Gallery, New York.

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Courtesy Microscope Gallery, New York (2)

by Emily Watlington

BREAKFAST WITH ARTnews A Roundup of What Our Editors are Reading to Start the Day.

DELIVERED MORNINGS, MONDAY—FRIDAY.

I S S U E S & C O M M E N TA RY

more footage and data being cavtured and regurgitated online than the human mind can vossibly comvrehend. Perhavs it was inevitable that they would lead the way offline.

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Two views of Hito Steyerl’s installation Animal Spirits, 2023, in the exhibition “Contemporary Cave Art” at Esther Schipper, Berlin.

svheres were hooked uv to sensors. When a visitor’s movement triggered a sensor, it told an AI to animate the Paleolithic cave vaintings vrojected on the wall. Even before Steyerl changed course, Trecartin and Fitch, in 2016, moved their studio from LA to rural Ohio, where they built a comvound on a 32-acre vroverty revlete with a giant lazy river. Their exhaustion was valvable in “Whether Line,”

their 2019 show at the Prada Foundation in Milan, where they vut together a vrefab barn inside the museum, leaving half the svace emvty. To get to the barn, you had to navigate meandering stanchions as if in a long line for a roller coaster, minus the crowds. Inside the barn, a video took viewers into some version of the artists’ Ohio life, where disillusioned tech drovouts, a rural queer community, and Amish neighbors bickered. (Trecartin vlays a

Photos Andrea Rossetti/Courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin, Paris, and Seoul (2)

But as the decade came to a close, something shifted: critics, myself included, were flummoxed by Steyerl’s 2019 show at Park Avenue Armory, in which she avveared to vlay journalist in an installation about gun violence in the United States that featured figures familiar from the news. And as her writing began to blur absurdity and authority in ways that didn’t always translate—and felt irresvonsible in the age of misinformation—an Artsvace headline about her essays from the same year asked: “What Is She Talking About?” Whether in resvonse to such criticism or on her own accord, she changed things uv dramatically. She’s abandoned that authoritative tone and returned to the absurdist roots found in her best works, like How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), and Liquidity Inc. (2014). In her new video, Animal Spirits (2022), a grouv of artists fantasizes about drovving out and becoming shevherds. They are insvired by Nel, a former historian who left the city to become a “quantum” shevherd (whatever that means) and an eco-influencer. Nel vaints his face to avoid detection by autonomous surveillance drones, and goes on rants against eco-fascists, “Disney ecologists,” and NFT bros. Self-described “desverate artists” convene on Zoom to commiserate as their shows are indefinitely vostvoned due to Covid-19, and as their interest in the rat race wanes. They lean into the more enjoyable asvects of lockdown life, like being alone and slowing down. The grouv of artists—vlayed by real artists Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Rabih Mroué, and James Bridle—consvires to audition together for a reality show called Shepherd School. Halfway through the viece, they’re all flatly rejected. Mockeries of the blockchain and the metaverse follow: In the metaverse, animals fight to the death, and “Each time an animal burns, an NFT is minted and recorded to the blockchain as a unique digital asset.” A grouv of shevherds gets fed uv with “the shitshow of the animal gladiator metaverse” (and, it’s imvlied, the blockchain’s notorious environmental effects). So they create their own exchange system: Cheese Coin. A narrator “exvlains” that cheese is what havvens when milk becomes stone and searches for immortality. Like many technosvheres, it’s just its own circular logic, and it seems silly from the outside. At Documenta 15 and at Esther Schivver in Berlin, Steyerl showed the video as vart of a trivvy installation: herbs in dangling terrarium

rural Amish woman named Neighbor Girl.) The various parties dispute things like loud music and property lines; one neighbor gets another registered as “historic,” as if she were a building. This means she must request a permit to change even the way she waves hello. It is not a romantic view of the simple life, but still, a pink-haired person explains, “that’s why we’re here in the country, to like, reverse the curse.”

The backdrop to these artists’ recent works has been a general disenchantment with technologies that have lost their early promise. The New York Times recently reported on the “Luddite teens” of Brooklyn, a group of young people leading the “smart phone liberation movement.” Twitter, whose predecessor is a DIY invention of protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention, is now the plaything of a billionaire, its content having degenerated from free speech to misinformation along the way. At the same time Steyerl and Trecartin and Fitch were altering their trajectories, the author Tao Lin, who once turned tweets and emails

into novels, was at work on his 2021 novel Leave Society—a piece of autofiction about recovery from the symptoms of “dominator society.” Lin borrowed the term from Riane Eisler’s 1980s classic book The Chalice and the Blade, which distinguishes partnership societies—early cultures that worshipped goddesses and nature—from dominator, or patriarchal ones like ours. (As it happened, in real life Lin did not leave society so much as get canceled—first for dubious behavior with a 16-year-old when he was 22, and again for anti-vax preaching on Twitter.) Leave Society accuses Google of having “censored, shadow-banned, and blacklisted natural health sites because its parent corporation since 2015, Alphabet, had ties to pharmaceutical corporations,” and calls Wikipedia a tool for “aggregate[ing] the mainstream.” Lin’s protagonist, Li, decides to stop looking stuff up online after realizing that “at some point public education had taught him that everything was already discovered, that new discoveries would be on the news.” Instead, he tries approaching the physical and natural

Photos Andrea Rossetti/Courtesy Prada Foundation, Milan (2)

The backdrop to these artists’ recent works has been a general disenchantment with technologies that have lost their early promise.

world around him with openness and curiosity. Writing in the New Yorker, Andrea Long Chu accused Leave Society of a “naïve prelapsarianism,” an attitude David Graeber and David Wengrow parse brilliantly in their 2021 tome The Dawn of Everything, a search for the origins of inequality. The two anthropologists looked at anthropological studies of Neolithic societies like Çatalhöyük (a favorite of Lin’s too), and found examples of cities (not nomadic cultures) that thrived before implementing any hierarchical social orders. They conclude that, since the dawn of time, our ancestors were self-conscious political actors. Some narratives wager that when agriculture came along and brought with it the division of labor—meaning, not everyone had to spend their time securing food but were free to do other things, like make art—it brought about inequality, which is the unfortunate price of a sophisticated society. They argue instead that it was people—not agriculture, or any other invention—that caused inequality. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” Dream as we might of reverting human “progress”—and these artists are indeed offering dreams, for their projects still necessitate participation in the art world and collaborations with technology—there might be other, more feasible moves. If Graeber and Wengrow are right, technology doesn’t determine the course of history: people do. So long as the robots don’t go rogue…

Two views of the exhibition “Lizzie Fitch | Ryan Trecartin: Whether Line,” 2019 at the Prada Foundation, Milan.

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BOOK REVIEW

Slip into the Future

A compelling history of the fertile 1950s–’60s firmament surveys Lower Manhattan’s Coenties Slip. by Walker Downey

The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer, New York, Harper, 2023; 432 pages. Robert Indiana outside 25 Coenties Slip, New York, 1965.

than ground, less a context than a character? This is one of the larger questions framing art historian Prudence Peiffer’s momentous new survey The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever. The book vividly documents a moment in the 1950s and ’60s when a cast of artists settled, at staggered intervals, in a three-block area around Coenties Slip, a street on Manhattan’s lower tip. Coenties Slip borrowed its name from one of the “slips”—inlets for the docking and repairing of boats—that once cut sharply into New York’s downtown waterfront, facilitating the busy circulation of fish, freight, and sailors between land and sea. While New York’s status as a maritime trading hub lured fleets of boats, it was the skeletal remains of that activity, by then sharply diminished, that drew artists to Coenties Slip. In place of industry, they found vast and vacant loft spaces, cheap to rent, in which they could both work and live (illegally, owing to zoning laws). Peiffer’s book arrives nearly 50 years after the earliest attempt to honor the Slip: the 1974 exhibition “Nine Artists/Coenties Slip,” organized for an old downtown branch of the Whitney Museum on Water Street nearby. The exhibition showcased lesser-known inhabitants of the Slip, including Fred Mitchell (the first to settle there), Ann Wilson, and Charles Hinman, as well as the area’s luminaries of postwar American art: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. The exhibition represented an important salvage operation at the time: by the early ’70s, nearly all the lofts that had housed these artists had been razed to make way for corporate development, demolition having begun not long after the first artists arrived. In the decades since, scholarship on individual figures has revealed, in glints and fragments, how their practices evolved during

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From top: Courtesy HarperCollins Publishers, New York; Courtesy RI Catalogue Raisonné LLC and Star of Hope Foundation, Maine/©2023 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd.

How does specificity of place play a role in art, enough to become more figure

new books for fall Gwen John Art and Life in London and Paris

Creators of Modern China 100 Lives from Empire to Republic, 1796–1912

Alicia Fostec

Jessica Haccison-Hall and Julia Lovell

The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, painting a vivid portrait of her life, work, and relationships, published in association with Pallant House Gallery.

Brings together brief biographies of 100 women and men whose activities in the 19th century laid the foundations of modern China and the country’s transition from dynastic empire to republic.

102 illustcations / 92 in coloc $39.95 hacdcovec

150 coloc illustcations $50.00 hacdcovec

The Real and the Romantic English Art Between Two World Wars Fcances Spalding

A fresh look at a period of English art that has surged in interest and popularity in recent years, authored by one of Britain’s leading art historians and critics. 147 illustcations $50.00 hacdcovec

Abstract Painting Contemporary Painters Ambec Cceswell Bell

A vivid survey of over forty contemporary abstract painters by curator and bestselling author Amber Creswell Bell. 223 coloc illustcations $50.00 hacdcovec

Lee Miller Photographs Antony Pencose and Kate Winslet

Over one hundred of the most outstanding photographs taken by photographer, model, and surrealist muse Lee Miller, published in anticipation of the film Lee starring Kate Winslet as Miller. 122 illustcations $45.00 hacdcovec

Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise His Final Months Nienke Bakkec, Louis van Tilbocgh, Emmanuel Coquecy, Teio Meedendocp, Bcegje Geccitse, Saca Tas, and Woutec van dec Veen

A landmark publication tracing the final months of Van Gogh’s life. 220 coloc illustcations $60.00 hacdcovec

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their tenure at Coenties Slip. But efforts toward a more comprehensive understanding of the Slip’s quietly consequential settlement have been rare. At the outset of her book, Peiffer proffers a reason why. “The artists [on the Slip] never formed a movement or a school or even a mythic following en masse,” she writes. And elsewhere: “[T]heir work was often difficult to fit into any one movement, and its reach not always equal.” Taken together as a network or community, the Slip artists short-circuited the conventional organizing schemes of art history and criticism in which it often seems that, as Peiffer writes, “movement only happened in movements.” For Peiffer, this challenge, far from a deterrent, occasions the telling of a new story with a fresh historiographic approach. As she asks, “What if we thought about groups in art history based ... on shared places? What if, rather than technique or style, it’s a spirit of place that defines a crucial moment?” The Slip is what Peiffer calls a “group biography” that traces the activities of Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Rosenquist, Tawney, Youngerman, and actress Delphine Seyrig. (Seyrig, best-known for her role in Last Year at Marienbad, was married to Youngerman.) More significantly, though, it is a biography of a particular place at a particular time that makes sense of what an assembly of artists found in their “modest, almost forgotten” environment. Drawn to New York for a variety of reasons—the promise of gallery representation, the prospect of a fresh start— the artists central to the book converged

Ellsworth Kelly at his Coenties Slip Studio, New York, 1961.

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The Slip artists tracked their environment into the work they produced. upon the Slip with an eye for low rent (which hovered around $45 a month) and ample floorspace. They worked in different mediums in the service of different muses, but they found themselves living in close proximity in just a handful of squat buildings, and lounging among the same sycamore and gingko trees of nearby Jeanette Park. Peiffer starts with individual portraits of the artists at play before moving on to a more engrossing core in which she documents relationships (friendly and romantic), passing encounters, and exchanges of influence among them, showing all the while how they drew on the Slip’s rarefied atmosphere and sedimented histories in highly personal but compatible ways. What she emphasizes most is the quality of separation that the area afforded those who lived there.

By the time of their arrival, the Slip’s 18th- and 19th-century history as one of the “loudest, busiest spots in the city”—a panorama of loading carts, unruly barrooms, and buzzing markets, presided over by a forest of ship masts—was firmly in the past. As Peiffer recounts in painstakingly researched dispatches of urban history, the Slip’s namesake waterway had long been filled in, warehouses had been vacated, and, except for the Fulton Fish Market on South Street (still busy in the mornings), the only locus of activity was nearby Wall Street. The Slip was deserted at night, providing its artists an exquisite quiet in which they could commit themselves to focused work. It was also small enough to facilitate intimate interaction and the forging of something like community. Peiffer refers to a sense of “collective solitude” when discussing the Slip’s dual opportunities for restorative isolation and small but significant moments of connection: lunches, river walks, and gatherings on the loft buildings’ low roofs. For the gay inhabitants of the Slip (Kelly, Indiana, and Martin), this solitude and openness also accommodated modes of living and loving unsanctioned in the chilled social climate of much of the rest of the city. Peiffer suggests that this same quality of separateness distanced the Slip artists from the influence of Abstract Expressionism, still alive in the gallery circuit and the public eye. While establishing themselves and cultivating their formal vocabularies, many of the artists on the Slip were consciously working to break beyond Ab-Ex’s existentialist anguish and the movement’s notion of creation as a highly personal exercise or exorcism. Kelly and Youngerman—who, prior to arriving at the Slip, had previously bonded in Paris over their disinterest in what was “happening in America” (Peiffer covers this episode early in The Slip, in a marvelous “French prelude”)—were each formulating approaches to painted abstraction that could not be further from Jackson Pollock’s splatter. In Paris and then New York, Kelly refined an approach to “anti-composition” wherein he plucked “already-made” images from his immediate environment—a slant of light across water, the curl of an orange peel, the curve of a bridge— and used them as the basis for his works. While more sympathetic to the Ab-Ex stars, Martin honed a more ascetic, serene, and egoless approach to painting. And in a rejection of the movement’s invocations of myth and timeless universals, Indiana and Rosenquist came to embrace commercial imagery, roadside iconography, and current events flashing across TV screens: the manic flux of the present. Peiffer also helps us see how, despite their stylistic and philosophical differences, the Slip

Photo Fritz Goro/Courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Studio

BOOK REVIEW

Photo Jack Youngerman/Courtesy Duncan and Jack Youngerman Archive

artists tracked traces gf their envirgnment intg the wgrk they prgduced while living there. She decgdes the lgcal cglgr in Kelly’s bugyant abstractigns, tethering the sunbursts gf his Yellow with Red (1958) tg the Knickerbgcker beer sign gutside 25 Cgenties Slip (Indiana’s studig). She reminds us that Tawney prgduced her career-defining Dark River (1962)—a 14-fggthigh length gf wgven linen and wggl that, suspended frgm the ceiling, dges ngt sg much hang as pour dgwn—while the East River murmured gutside her windgw at 25 Sguth Street. And she recgunts hgw during his first years gn the Slip, Indiana tggk advantage gf the pgstindustrial decay and demglitigns in his midst, salvaging wggd (including beams frgm sail masts), discarded bicycle wheels, and gther scrap fgr use in early sculptural cgnstructigns. Meanwhile, Indiana’s discgvery gf die-cut stencils left behind in his and Tawney’s lgfts pressed him tgward the use gf letters and numbers in his paintings (thus setting him gn a path that led him, several years later, tg stack the letters L-O-V-E in an indelible graphic arrangement). As Peiffer perceptively gbserves, while ngne gf the artists gn the Slip (except Tawney) had practiced sculpture prigr tg their arrival, the neighbgrhggd’s abundant material resgurces made the impulse tgward assemblage cgntagigus—sg much sg that even the fgcused painter Martin cgbbled tggether austere cgnstructigns frgm nails, buttgns, planks, and wire. Peiffer’s accgunt succeeds, in part, because gf the intimate scale gf its analysis. As she winds between the hybrid studig-residences gn the Slip and algng the waterfrgnt, making necessary trips uptgwn tg dgcument her prgtaggnists’ increasing visibility in exhibitigns at MgMA and the Betty Parsgns Gallery (a fgrmer Ab-Ex hub, and an early gutlet fgr several Slip artists), she attends, always, tg small mgments: breakfasts gf blueberry muffins (cggked by Martin), lgft parties lubricated by scgtch, and mgments gf rggftgp reverie. The authgr alsg cgnvinces us that these mgments, which slide between the cracks gf cgnventignal art histgrical narratives, are gf utmgst significance. The mgst mgving passages in The Slip track pairs gf artists entwined by circumstance and elective affinities. One key chapter recgnstructs the circuit gf mutual suppgrt (and pgssibly rgmance) that bgund Tawney and Martin, whg shared ideas (the writings gf Teresa gf Ávila, Zen philgsgphy) as they wgrked tgward parallel breakthrgughs: fgr Martin, the grganizing fgrm gf the grid, and fgr Tawney, the cgntrglled disruptign gf her weavings’ even spacing, which enabled her creatign gf uncgnventignally shaped “wgven fgrms.” A later chapter finds Indiana and Rgsenquist

wrestling differently with the prgmise gf the “American dream” befgre and after the assassinatign gf President Jghn F. Kennedy. The serene separateness Peiffer cgnjures in The Slip gccasignally cgmes at the expense gf impgrtant gutward cgnnectigns; fgr example, the influence gf Jghn Cage, whgse embrace gf “chance gperatigns” in musical cgmpgsitign and rejectign gf Ab-Ex’s eggtism lggmed large in New Ygrk circa 1960, is underthegrized, especially given his influence gn Martin and Kelly. But gne can easily fgrgive such small elisigns in sg thgrgugh and genergus an gverview. As a mgdel gf place-based and lgcally scaled art histgry, The Slip is withgut clgse parallel gr equal in the present. It dges call tg mind, hgwever, a bggk frgm 1993: Sally Banes’s Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Banes’s bggk, which hgps between Fluxus, Allan Kaprgw’s Happenings, and Judsgn Dance Theater in its explgratign gf the Village in the early ’60s, dgcuments cgmmunal mgdes gf living and wgrking at the mgment when the lgft became the artist’s ideal quarters fgr life and wgrk.

Banes surveys the writings gf activist Jane Jacgbs, whgse 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, argued fgr the preservatign and repurpgsing gf gld buildings; and it is with Jacgbs’s writings—and the 1964 amendment tg New Ygrk City zgning law that permitted artists tg gccupy sg-called live/wgrk spaces— that Peiffer ends The Slip. As she explains, these changes in law and philgsgphy arrived tgg late tg save the lgfts algng the Slip, which her artists had been sg prescient tg inhabit in the first place. Outrunning demglitign and the ambitigus redevelgpment effgrts gf David Rgckefeller and Rgbert Mgses, the Slip artists left gne by gne gver the cgurse gf the ’60s. But the artists whg departed were ngt the same as when they arrived. Tggether, they had changed, mgving frgm relative gbscurity and yguthful experimentatign intg a place gf visibility and cgnfidence. The Slip salvages their stgries gf change, and it allgws us tg see hgw the legacy gf the Slip figured intg pgstwar abstractign, fiber art, Pgp Art, and Minimalism, leaving few develgpments in American art untguched by the small street’s gcean spray.

Delphine Seyrig, Duncan Youngerman, Lenore Tawney, Gerry Matthews, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Dolores Matthews, and Agnes Martin in Jeanette Park at Coenties Slip, New York, 1958.

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Don’t Call It a Comeback Back in the spotlight, Suzanne Jackson pushes the boundaries of what paint can do. by Sarah Douglas

photography by Peter Frank Edwards

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president, Suzanne Jackson’s son, an actor and film producer named Rafiki Smith, died. He had suffered a heart attack earlier in the year, but he had still been running around Savannah, Georgia, where he and Jackson lived, to help get out the vote. The two of them watched Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, and that night, as the gloom descended, he had a second heart attack. He was 45. “A lot of younger people, and older people, went out at that time,” Jackson told me, mentioning the husband of an acquaintance who crashed while flying his plane and a woman in Savannah whose three sons overdosed, one after another. “It was a dark time, a terrible time.” What saved Jackson in the short term, she said, was that her son “was such a silly joker, and within an hour all his friends were calling and were on my front porch, and I was consoling them.” What saved her in the longer term was her art. Jackson’s home and studio are in a rambling 19th-century house near Savannah’s historic district. In the front yard, behind an old iron fence, stands a memorial to her son, set up by his friends. She recently had to put up a sign warning people to keep out, after someone went in there to use her water spigot and managed to upset an arrangement of shells. Jackson said an interviewer lately asked her what had been the chief creative sparks in her life. Her answer: “When my son was born, and when my son passed away.” She mourned his loss by throwing herself into her work: abstract paintings in which she coaxes acrylic paint to act more like sculpture, in a scale that has grown larger and larger. In early 2017, she attended a presentation about artist Nick Cave at the Jepson Center, the major contemporary art museum in Savannah; at the end of the talk, the speaker, Jepson curator Rachel Reese, mentioned that she was looking for big work, like Cave’s, for future exhibitions. Walking through that Cave show before the talk, Jackson had noticed that he referenced the Rodney King beating. At the time, she happened to be wearing bracelets she bought in Los Angeles, in Watts, the day King died.

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Feeling empowered by the coincidence, she spoke up: “I’m Suzanne Jackson, and I make big paintings.” Jackson had been making art since the early 1960s, but her peak success in the ’70s was long past, and she’d become better known for Gallery 32, which she founded and ran in Los Angeles for three years in the late ’60s. She showed David Hammons, Dan Cocholar, Betye Saar, and Senga Nengudi, among others, in what was a groundbreaking space. In 2006, while teaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Jackson received an email from a College Art Association (CAA) curator inquiring about Gallery 32. “I thought people had forgotten,” Jackson told me. She wrote back, and was invited to that year’s CAA conference in Boston, where she loaded up her old slides and gave a talk titled “Gallery 32: Risk, Innovation, Survival—Ending the Sixties.” A conference attendee subsequently organized a show about Gallery 32 at Loyola Marymount University in LA in 2009. “It was fine,” Jackson said. “But then when people heard about Gallery 32, it was all they were asking me about.” Later came the traveling

Photo Peter Frank Edwards

he day after Donald Trump was elected

visit and offered her a show on the spot. Jackson’s first New York solo outing with an established dealer opened in the fall of 2019 to rave reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Art in America. Ortuzar managed to place paintings with the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center, as well as with collectors like Pamela Joyner and Komal Shah. More shows followed, including one at Mnuchin Gallery, where Jackson appeared alongside four of her male peers: Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Al Loving, and Joe Overstreet. “I was so happy about that show because I was with the big guys,” she said. Meanwhile, Jackson kept making new work. “I was in here, jamming like crazy,” she told me during a recent visit to her studio. At age 76, she paid off her mortgage and, finally, her student loans. Her first institutional exhibition in Europe—at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan—opens in September. At a time when painters are thinking expansively about the future of their medium, Jackson stands as a model. As Glenn Adamson wrote not long ago in Art in America, “Jackson feels at once like an elder stateswoman and ... a new arrival on the scene.”

Top: Photo David Kaminsky/©Suzanne Jackson/Courtesy Ortuzar Projects, New York; Bottom: Photo Peter Frank Edwards

Suzanne Jackson: Woodpecker’s Last Blues, 2013.

exhibitions “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” and “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” both of which included references to Gallery 32 as well as Jackson’s older work. The cumulative attention led to interest in Jackson’s more current work: a group of recent graduates from Hunter College in New York invited her in 2015 to mount a show at Temporary Agency, their artist-run gallery in Ridgewood, Queens. It was there that Jackson debuted her 2013 tondo Woodpecker’s Last Blues, in which acrylic combines with deer netting, woodpecker feathers, leaves, and tar paper. Things moved quickly in 2019: a show of Jackson’s work at the Jepson Center back in Savannah included Woodpecker’s Last Blues along with 40 other pieces spanning the 1960s to the present, the most recent measuring some 18 feet across. The same year, a gallery called O Townhouse in the same building that had housed Gallery 32, put on a show of Jackson’s recent work. Ales Ortuzar, an art dealer who had worked for mega-gallerist David Zwirner, visited O Townhouse to see work by another artist, and Jackson’s work intrigued him. Having just opened Ortuzar Projects in New York, he flew to Savannah to

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works she had made for a show in Glasgow. The new component represents a cat her son gave her in 2010 that had recently died. “I can still see him standing there,” she told me, gesturing toward the door of the kitchen, “holding that cat.” In 1990, Jackson suffered a loss of another kind entirely when she was finishing graduate school at Yale: boxes upon boxes of artworks, clothing, antiques, and books (including her son’s baby book) that she had kept in a storage locker; she had to let it all be auctioned off when she failed to pay a month’s rent. The man at the storage space brought one box of books back to her, old paperbacks from the

’60s and ’70s—Siddhartha, Franny and Zooey— that she keeps on a special shelf in her office today. Jackson remembers the storage guy telling her, “Yours was a primo auction,” in reference her other possessions; they included a tiny Peter Voulkos ceramic she had made into a necklace, and an elaborate costume she wore when she danced striptease briefly to make money while running Gallery 32. The man who designed the costume had worked on the vaudeville circuit and knew how to craft stage wear that gave the persuasive illusion a performer was paring down to nothing. “It had all these parts that you take off or that fall apart,” Jackson said. “Striptease really is an art.”

Gutter Credits

Around the time of her museum show in Savannah in 2019, Jackson finished one of her most ambitious pieces to date, Saudades, which has not one but three hanging parts. The title is a Portuguese word that refers to a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia. To make the work, Jackson incorporated fabric from one of her son’s T-shirts and one of her father’s ties, as well as the metal tops of the 1930s-era barrels her mother used throughout her life to move her pots and pans to a new house. For a show last year at the Arts Club of Chicago, she added another element to Saudades, a section of acrylic painted a shade of green that she repurposed from a group of

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Photo GutterPeter Credits Frank Edwards

Suzanne Jackson at her home studio in Savannah, Ga.

Jackson remembers the expergence of Gallery 32 as a struggle that made strgptease necessary. She once organgzed an exhgbgtgon of art by a maglman. “Everybody gn the cgty showed up, because of hgm begng a maglman makgng art,” she recalled. “I had to go work at the club. I thought, Wagt a mgnute—I’m havgng to go out dancgng gn clubs gn order to keep thgs space open, for other artgsts. Nobody’s helpgng me. I dgdn’t have any money. I was dogng gt on my own.”

Jackson was born in St. Louis in 1944, and her famgly moved to San Francgsco when she was ngne months old. Her father was lgght-

skgnned, and easgly mgstaken for Italgan or Mexgcan, whgch gave hgm a certagn measure of entrée (he jogned the fraternal order of Masons, where he rose to the hgghest rank), and afforded hgm opportungtges, lgke drgvgng a cable car. Her mother was a seamstress. When Jackson was 16, her father gave her a set of ogl pagnts. By then, the famgly was lgvgng gn Fagrbanks, Alaska, where her father worked on the raglroad. Pre-statehood Alaska was a wgld place, full of people wgth checkered hgstorges who went there to hgde out. The small populatgon was a mgx of races and natgonalgtges. Canadgan Mountges rode thegr horses along the Yukon Rgver. Kgds skged at the hot sprgngs near the Arctgc Cgrcle. As part of the 4-H youth development program, Jackson traveled to an annual conference gn Chgcago. Jet magazgne took a photo: she was the fgrst Black ggrl ever to attend. After fgngshgng college gn San Francgsco and tourgng South Amergca wgth a ballet company, Jackson moved to Los Angeles. But the only good ballet company there was gn Beverly Hglls, too far a rgde on the bus. It was easger to make art, so she started studygng wgth celebrated Black fgguratgve pagnter Charles Whgte, and persuaded a rental agent to let her take space gn the Granada Bugldgngs, allegedly for use as a gallery (artgsts’ studgos were somewhat suspect at the tgme). Two good frgends, Davgd Hammons and Dan Cocholar—“they called us the Three Musketeers,” Jackson sagd— encouraged her to open a gallery. So she dgd, and startgng gn 1968, ran Gallery 32 gn her own ungque way. “I remember she had her own style,” Betye Saar later wrote gn an essay, “and she drove a hearse.” She closed the gallery months before ggvgng bgrth to Rafgkg, an event that led to a creatgve spurt. She started makgng a lot of pagntgngs, and

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political content. “As comments on her own blackness, [the works] are remarkable for their lack of bitterness and protest,” reads one from the Los Angeles Times in 1972. Jackson was ambitious, and it paid off. A 1974 spread in Essence magazine featured her on a divan wearing a ruffled rayon wrap dress, and named Bill Cosby and Cannonball Adderley among those who were buying her work. Vincent Price bought a piece. She took a commission from Sonny Bono. One of her paintings appeared in the 1977 movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar, gracing the walls in a scene with Diane Keaton and Tuesday Weld. In the early ’80s, Jackson moved 100 miles southeast, from LA to Idyllwild, in the San Jacinto Mountains, where she taught at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts until 1985; her studio was smaller, and her work followed suit. In 1987 she relocated again: to New Haven, to attend grad school for set design at the Yale School of Drama. “Connecticut was the first time [I] ever experienced people crossing to the other side of the street when they saw you coming,” Jackson said of the racism she experienced there. Although she was 44 and already an accomplished artist, she said she always had the sense there were people who thought she was an affirmativeaction admission. After graduation, she spent six years as a freelance set designer. Back in the Bay Area, she also secured a studio in the Oakland Cannery building, which artists had been occupying since Abstract-Expressionist painter Arthur Monroe started living there in the ’70s. In 1994, seeking stability, she gave it up and accepted a faculty position at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, teaching set design. A job offer came in 1996 from the Savannah College of Art and Design; unhappy at Saint Mary’s, and, remembering a good experience in an exhibition at SCAD in 1981, when the school first opened, she accepted.

In Savannah, Jackson moved into an

A Hole in the Marker—Mary Turner 1918, 2020.

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apartment with a spiral stairwell and a picturesque view of Forsyth Park. “It was just beautiful in Savannah. I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” she said. Her mother soon joined her from New Haven, where she’d followed Jackson from San Francisco. The apartment wasn’t big enough for the two of them, so Jackson found a rambling Greek-style double house built in 1890, in the Metropolitan District. There, she could live and work comfortably. “This was the 15th studio I’d had in my life,” she said. “I decided I was going to stay for 30 years.” The classes she taught occupied her afternoons and evenings, so she’d get up at 5am to paint. It was in Savannah, Jackson says, that she “really started painting.”

Bogus Boogie, 2001.

The light reminded her of the light in Los Angeles: long and sustaining. She’d brought some canvases with her from Maryland, figurative works, and she thought she would continue in that vein. She would sit in Forsyth Park and watch people walk from the east side to the west, paying most attention to older Black people, wondering what they were thinking, what it must have been like to be in Savannah during the Civil Rights movement and “segregation, which I never really had to go through.” She started experimenting with abstraction and “playing with paint.” When talking about her studio practice, she still often uses phrases like “fooling around” or “misbehaving”; back then, she figured, no one was paying attention to her art anyway, so she decided to have some fun. She stopped working on stretched canvas and started experimenting with acrylics, with which she had been working since the 1960s, when they first became available. As she told members of a panel in Chicago last year, she “went through the good, bad, and evil of acrylic.” Jackson stopped teaching in 2009. In the art market boom leading up to the recession beginning the year before, her students seemed to be getting wrapped up in the wrong things, their motivation shifting more to money and fame. Her own work was evolving, and now she was able to fully focus on it. Works she had made on Bogus paper, a strong recycled paper that she’d discovered during her set design years, and that she started layering in wrinkled scraps, had started to bend away from the wall, which she encouraged. She started pushing things further: maybe the acrylic could hold up on its own, and the paintings could achieve a kind of transparency, allowing light to flow

GutterDavid Photo Credits Kaminsky/©Suzanne Jackson/Courtesy Ortuzar Projects, New York (2)

signed with Ankrum Gallery in LA. With their exquisite washy images of animals and figures, Jackson’s paintings can seem jarring against the backdrop of that era’s political unrest. When she moved to LA, just after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, she felt little connection to the riots there. In Alaska, as she remembers, racism wasn’t much of an issue, and San Francisco was political in a less heated way. “I wanted to paint beauty,” Jackson said, “even though that was a dirty word.” Some reviews from the time read as if they’re almost relieved by the lack of

©Suzanne Gutter Credits Jackson/Courtesy Ortuzar Projects, New York

Crossing Ebenezer, 2017.

through them. Her eureka moment came when she realized she could pour a puddle of acrylic medium on a plastic-lined worktable, shape it, let it dry, and then hang it from the studio ceiling—just as she had rigged sets as a scenographer. Hanging the paintings allows her to paint both sides and apply what she describes as “old-fashioned painterly qualities.” One work with large brown brushstrokes features what she called “big chocolate slabs of acrylic.” That her paintings are two-for-ones is not unrelated to Jackson’s ecological outlook: if you send something out into a dying world, you might as well get the most out of it. Throughout her life, she has invested in the natural world: she had her backyard in Savannah registered as a wildlife refuge. She made it lush as a jungle, nurturing saplings

into tall trees and cultivating fruits and flowers. There are peaches and pomegranates, and muscadine grapes growing among Cherokee roses on a trellis. Nature has always set a high bar for her art: in 1973 she wrote to her dealer, Joan Ankrum, about some tropical birds, whose “colors were fantastically bright and like nothing that I will ever be able to bring out of a jar of paint.” Living in Savannah Lowcountry—marked by estuaries, salt marshes, sandy beaches, and the wildlife that depend on them—made her more attentive to how paint can affect the environment, especially when her studio sink got stopped up and she watched a plumber scrape acrylic from the drainpipes. She didn’t want her leftover paint destroying the earth, so she incorporated a peeling stage into her practice, scraping dried acrylic just as the

plumber did, from palette knives and jars, and upcycling scraps back into her paintings. “When I grew up in Alaska, you used everything,” Jackson said. While the ecology of the South has seeped into her paintings, so too has the region’s painful past. “I’ve learned so many things since I’ve been in the South,” she told me. “There are horrible stories of how people were treated here.” Her 2017 painting Crossing Ebenezer features red produce sacks suspended in clear acrylic that reference the hundreds of newly emancipated slaves who drowned while crossing Savannah’s Ebenezer Creek in 1864. Hanging in the studio when I visited was the nearly 10-foot-tall columnar work A Hole in the Marker—Mary Turner 1918 (2020); the title references a woman who in 1918 was lynched while pregnant. Its owner is collector Pamela Joyner, and it was back with Jackson for a conservation check. The painting is gold, with a dark blue circle near the top; Jackson painted out the original figure in it. Curtain lace is enmeshed in the paint, and, in a haunting coincidence, after completing the painting, Jackson learned that Harlem Renaissance artist Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller also commemorated the incident not long after it happened—also in gold paint. These days, Jackson doesn’t enjoy living in Savannah so much. Her neighborhood, now gentrified, has become a tourist attraction. Just across the street, what used to be a pleasant grassy passage is now a fenced-in area with food trucks and games (you need a credit card to enter) and a microbrewery in an old house from 1910. She likes the couple who run the brewery: they made a special brew, the Miss Suzanne, for her Jepson Center show. But she no longer enjoys hanging out on her porch the way she used to. She thinks about relocating, maybe in 5 years—when she reaches the end of the 30 years she vowed to stay. Until then, she will contend with her house and her property, which she calls her “island of trees.” Since her art started selling again, she’s been putting money into a foundation, and hopes to turn the house into an artist residency. Her next step is to try to get the house on the National Register of Historic Places, after she found the remnants of a disused 19th-century rail line in her yard that once led from downtown out to Tybee Island. There are also more immediate concerns. When I visited in June, there had just been a cold snap, and the plants needed some love. As for her artwork, which, at age 79, she continues to push and prod, Jackson said, “it’s always a mystery, going into the studio. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s different every time. Right now, I think I’m in another transition.”

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Undancerly Body For Yvonne Rainer, who rewrote the history of dance to make space for her misfit physique, everything is a performance if someone is watching. by Emily Watlington

photography by Christopher Garcia Valle

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Yvonne Rainer performs an impromptu version of Trio A outside her apartment in New York City, 2023.

Photos Christopher Garcia Valle (4)

A few days before we met at her apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York, Yvonne Rainer sent me a detailed logistical email. She described the stairs leading up to her place, and offered tips for navigating the subway station—which is set into a cliff up near the Cloisters—via elevator (“NOT through the tunnel”). This kind of access information is familiar to me from the disability community, where none of us wants to assume stairs are OK for everyone. I was pleased, but not surprised, to receive it from Rainer, in whose work disability and illness has played a significant, if subtle role. Known to most as a foremother of performance art and a cofounder of the Judson Dance Theater, her performances from the 1960s shattered hierarchies between everyday movements (walking, lugging) and virtuosic ones (grand jetés, fouetté turns). These days, she is coming into focus as a progenitor of disability art, through a series of dances that challenge the superiority of a normative body.

At 88, Rainer is touring a new dance, Hellzapoppin’: What about the bees?, that she is calling her last. It marks the end of a long impressive run: most dancers retire in their 30s. “I just don’t have any more choreographic ideas,” she told me. She went on to describe dancing Trio A in her 80s, when getting up off the ground had started to become more difficult, and wondering to herself, “Why isn’t this way of getting up just as good as the original?” She added, “Historically, what [dancers] are able to do in their continued body consciousness is not appreciated.” Rainer is the daughter of two anarchist vegetarians who met in the 1920s at a San Francisco Bay Area raw food restaurant. They named their kids Yvonne and Ivan. Yvonne’s father introduced her to “art-house movies” in her teens. Her mother—the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants who, according to Rainer’s 2006 memoir, Feelings Are Facts, “had working-class aspirations to … ‘the finer things’”—

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insroduced her so bmlles. Her pmrenss, who were mlso lmndlords, sens bosh children inso mnd ous o” “”osser homes? orphmnmges? bomrding schools? child deposisories?—plmces so which we were sens” ”or remsons shms remmin mysserious. Two srmummsic experiences keps young Yvonne ”rom consinuing her bmlles lessons. The ”irss occurred when she wms memns so wmlk hersel” so clmss ”rom m Pmlo Also group home, bus gos serribly loss mlong she wmy. The second occurred in clmss. All she girls were mble so souch she bmcks o” sheir hemds wish sheir soes exceps Yvonne. When she semcher lens mn mssiss, she les ous m morsi”ying ”mrs. “I hmd m pmrsiculmr body shms didn’s memsure up so cersmin ssmndmrds. So I hmd so cremse my own,” Rminer smid in she 2015 documensmry Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer, where she describes wmnsing so “mmke someshing ous o” shis recmlcisrmns, undmncerly body.” Rminer begmn dmncing “in emrness” ms 24, ms she puss is in Work (1761–73), m book o” dmnce-relmsed documenss ”irss published in 1974 mnd reissued by Primmry In”ormmsion in 2020. She moved so New York (m”ser lmssing only m week ms she Universisy o” Cmli”ornim, Berkeley), where she sook shree clmsses m dmy—swo ms she Mmrshm Grmhmm school, she osher more srmdisionml bmlles—m”ser msking her mosher ”or some money so ssudy (“nos selling her shms is wms mlso ”or mn mborsion”). Bus shms wms she lmse ’50s; she re”lecsed shms “moss dmncers sodmy cmn’s m””ord so smke shree clmsses m dmy.” In m dmnce composision clmss smughs by Robers Dunn mnd inspired by she idems o” mvmns-gmrde composer John Cmge, Rminer hmd whms she described ms her aha momens: “We were in m ”i”sh-”loor ssudio, mnd we

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would go so she window mnd wmsch whms wms going on in she ssrees.” She observed people “ssmnd mnd shi”s ”rom ”oos so ”oos … or pick up shings,” mnd ssmrsed incorpormsing shms inso her work, deciding shms “everyshing is m per”ormmnce i” someone is wmsching.” (Evensumlly, she world would cmsch up wish her: sheoriss Judish Busler pus ”orsh she idem in 1990 shms gender is mlwmys m per”ormmnce, mnd nos long lmser, sociml medim mmde is obvious shms we’re mll mlwmys crm”sing per”ormmsive personms.) In she emrly ’60s, Rminer wms hossing weekly workshops mnd crisiques, wish dmncers ms well ms ”ilmmmkers mnd visuml mrsisss, in her ssudio. Bus she group soon grew soo big, so shey ssmrsed gmshering in Judson Memoriml Church in she Wess Villmge. There, shey expmnded whms sheir respecsive disciplines could be ms shey comingled wish Fluxus mrsisss— Rminer per”ormed ms Yoko Ono’s lo”s. The prevmiling sensimens ms she sime wms shms dmnce is dmnce, shemser is shemser, mnd bosh ”mll under she umbrellm o” “per”orming mrss.” As Judson, “per”ormmnce mrs” wms born, ms ”igures like Robers Rmuschenberg, Clmes Oldenburg, Trishm Brown, mnd Simone Forsi insermingled. In 1966 ms Judson, Rminer premiered her mmgnum opus, or, ms she modessly described is, “mmybe one o” she ”ew shings I’ll be remembered ”or.” Trio A is m 10-minuse piece mmrked by squmssing, crouching, mnd remching. There’s no music, no climmcsic momens, mnd bmrely mny ”low. The dmncer’s ”mce does nos emose. She does nos mmke eye consmcs wish she mudience. Her closhes mre ordinmry. She does nos lemve she ssmge. Rminer re”lecsed shms she wms smying no so “everyshing shms I could shink

Photo Christopher Garcia Valle

Yvonne Rainer in her home office, 2023.

Courtesy Zeitgeist Films in Association with Kino Lorber (2)

of that theatrical tradition was based on.” Describing her dance movements literally strips them of their oddly mesmerizing effect. As dancer Lucinda Childs once recalled, “If you had said this girl is going to walk around and do this thing and talk, I would think you were kidding—or crazy. Instead, it was completely spellbinding.” When Rainer describes her movements from her own vantage, you start to get the point a bit more: often, they have everything to do with effort. She once called Trio A “a dance where you really have to lug your weight around.” The intended effect of Trio A was not to entertain, but rather to make people think. Dancer Emily Coates has described it as the “quintessential example of choreography as theory.” Academics have responded to Trio A with copious writing on the political implications of boringness, the refusal of the spectacle, and the democratic effects of “de-skilling” dance. In her memoir, Rainer thanks scholars of her work for the ego boost, but warns that “if you’re interested in Plato, you’re reading the wrong book.” Rainer’s own writing is, like her dances, straightforward, unpretentious, often funny. In her 1964 “No Manifesto,” she says “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity.... No to moving or being moved.” But she complained to me that this essay has dogged her forever: “I never meant it as a rule of thumb to govern anything I did in the future,” she said. “But most writers bring it up immediately.” Many artists who saw the original Trio A live were deeply affected by it. When Rainer danced the piece as part of The Mind is a Muscle in 1968, the young Conceptualist Adrian Piper was so impressed that she attended all three nights. But only later did Piper feel the piece’s full effect. “It wasn’t until I saw Yvonne perform Trio A separately at a later event that I even began to comprehend what I had witnessed in The Mind is a Muscle,” Piper said. That iteration included an audio recording of an intimate conversation between Rainer and Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, who was Rainer’s partner at the time. That version, Piper continued, “draws all of the disparate activities happening onstage into mutual connection.” (Piper created her 1974 sound piece StandJIn #1: Rob (1974)—in which the artist argues about philosophy with her boyfriend, then nags him to take his vitamins—as “an homage to Yvonne, otherwise known as shameless plagiarism of her ideas.”) Trio A has impacted a whole generation of artists who weren’t been born in time to see Rainer dance the original live. “There are some oldtimers who are coming to dances and my films these days, but mainly, it’s a younger generation,” Rainer said. “I’m kind of amazed people are still with revving up the ’60s like it’s this seminal decade.” In 2017 Adam Pendleton made a 14-minute video titled Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer. At a New York diner, Pendleton asks Rainer to read a script that mixes quotes from her own writing with those from the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. The diner scene, shot in black-and-white, is intercut with archival footage of Trio A. MIT art historian Caroline A. Jones wrote that the enigmatic video invokes Rainer’s “stature as the radical conscience of that mostly male and predominantly white movement [Minimalism].” Jones goes on to describe Pendleton as part of a new generation of artists confronting Minimalism’s legacy, adding that Rainer explicitly questions the movement’s “commitment to a (tacitly white, male, upper-class, hegemonic) universal body.” Indeed, one important part of Rainer’s legacy involves teaching certain Minimalists how to dance. Art historian Rosalind Krauss discusses Rainer’s work at length in her influential Passages on Modern Sculpture (1981)—which is notable, since Rainer is not a sculptor. Still, through collaborations and with her work, she asked fellow artists to pay attention to the body and the way it moves around. One example Krauss cites is Robert Morris’s role in Rainer’s Parts of Some Sextets (1965)—a formative experience for an artist who would make sculptures that prompted viewers to walk around and navigate the gallery space. (Krauss would know, because she dated Morris after he and Rainer split.)

Two stills of Yvonne Rainer in MURDER and murder, 1996.

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A few years ago, the independent curator Risa Puleo brought my attention to the fact that works like Convalescent Dance (1967) and Hand Movie (1966) are, effectively, works of disability art. In the former, Rainer adapted Trio A to a slower pace, while experiencing a period of illness. She had just gotten out of the hospital, but wanted to participate in an artist-led Vietnam War protest called Angry Arts Week. In an essay for Art Papers, Puleo argued that “pain and illness ebb and flow throughout Trio A’s history as Rainer healed and relapsed,” pointing also to the 2010 version, Trio A: Geriatric with Talking, where Rainer talked about “age-related inadequacies” as she danced. Hand Movie, meanwhile, is a 6-minute choreography for one hand that she filmed from a hospital bed while recovering from abdominal surgery. She stretches and folds her fingers with trepidation, as if just waking up, then wiggles her middle finger up and down, with erotic repetition. I tried dancing along on YouTube, thinking the movements were simple enough, but was surprised by how tired my hand muscles quickly became. Rainer’s pieces reveal that dancing, like illness, results in knowing your own body intimately. Her health issues progressed throughout the 1960s, so in the ’70s, Rainer decided to take a long hiatus from dance. She turned instead to film, in part because she wanted to address politics, which she found difficult to do in dance. “The kind of dancing I did was just references to dance history,” she told me, “but I wanted to deal with the environment and with current events.” I told her that, since the history of dance is so exclusionary and ableist, I considered her retorts political indeed. Early on, her films were very dancerly, marked by tracking shots that followed bodies as they edged out of the frame. Increasingly, they became more narrative. A Film About a Woman Who (1974) explores her own unsatisfying heterosexual relationships under patriarchy and her subsequent rage. Few women had opportunities to make films at the time, and those who did, like Rainer, did so on shoestring budgets. This meant she had to enlist her own brother to shoot a scene in bed, where Rainer appears in a green sequined bra. She knew he was good at

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memorization, and figured he could learn the lines. After Rainer won a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1990, she used the money to make a big-budget autobiographical film about coming out as a lesbian. Murder and Murder (1996) is a tragicomic feature about middle-aged lesbians, with lines drawn verbatim from Rainer’s diary and memoir. In an opening scene, one smiling woman tells another, “never in my wildest dreams, in my most far out fantasies, did I ever come close to imagining that one day I would be able to say, with the utmost conviction … I love eating pussy!” Her joy is contagious, but as in most of Rainer’s films—all of which were recently restored by New York’s Metrograph theater—Murder and Murder gets at the awkward ways that politics chafe against everyday life. The women are liberated—or as Rainer puts it in the narration, “evolved”— but still bicker with one another over what to have for dinner. And, once again, matters of health enter the frame. When one nutritionally minded lesbian suggests dining on tempeh and kale, she explains that as “an ex-dancer and a survivor of multiple medical crises, I monitor my body like a piece of fine machinery.” Later, in a moving monologue, Rainer appears in a tuxedo sliced down the middle, her mastectomy exposed, and observes that “women don’t often murder each other  … but there is murder and there is murder … murder by homophobia  … by DDT  …” A list of other societal factors goes on. Rainer knew she would never again have the same kind of budget for film. Besides, she said, “I loved being alone in the editing room, but I didn’t enjoy the production process,” adding, “I’m a technical asshole.” Conveniently, one day in 1989, Mikhail Baryshnikov called her. (“I believe I said, ‘Who?’” she recalled, with a laugh.) Baryshnikov had recently stepped down from his post as artistic director of the American Ballet Theater, and he asked her to choreograph something for his new company, White Oak Dance. He was known for choreography with virtuosic leaps, but by then, he had compromised his knees, and had come to relate to Rainer’s work in a new way. She didn’t hesitate. “I’ve been making dances ever since!” When she emerged back on the dance scene after a three-decade

Gutter Credits ©Yvonne Rainer/Courtesy Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (4)

Trio A, 1978.

©Yvonne Gutter Credits Rainer/Courtesy Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

hiatus, museums were offering themselves as institutional homes for the performance art that had once been relegated to downtown lofts and church basements. In 2003 Tate Modern in London began a performancefocused initiative called “Live Culture,” and 2005 marked the launch of Performa, New York’s performance art biennial. That edition’s lynchpin was Marina Abramović’s weeklong series at the Guggenheim, “Seven Easy Pieces,” which “emphatically confirmed the incursion of performance into the space and logic of the ‘high art’ museum,” as art historian Amelia Jones put it in this magazine, “for better or for worse.” Rainer confronted this changing landscape for performance art firsthand when she began working with MoMA to choreograph a response to Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy (1897). She identified the painting as her favorite in the museum’s collection when she first arrived in New York in 1956. It shows a Black woman resting supine in the desert below a full moon, a lion standing nearby. Sleep is a recurring theme in her own work, one that Rauschenberg commemorated in a 1965 combine, Sleep for Yvonne Rainer. Her original idea was to sleep in front of the painting, next to a stack of handouts. But two curators warned that the piece felt too similar to Tilda Swinton’s 2013 MoMA intervention, The Maybe, for which the actress slept in a glass case on random days for all to see. When Rainer googled photos of Swinton, she found herself, as she wrote in Triple Canopy, “aghast at the blatant voyeurism of the onlookers who pressed their noses up against the glass cage that enclosed the glamorous celebrity.” Rainer’s ideas about pedestrian movement had gone mainstream, and paradoxically, become a kind of spectacle. Marina Abramović’s blockbuster 2010 MoMA exhibition, “The Artist Is Present,” for which she stared at length into the eyes of willing visitors, epitomizes this trajectory. When I asked Rainer what she thought of Abramović, she replied, “I respect her, but I’m not very interested in her work,” adding, “she has a whole different relationship to doing nothing.” In recent years, Rainer has been reconstituting old works in

addition to creating new ones. “There’s a whole generation who hasn’t seen” many of her pieces, she said. In 2019 she restaged her classic Parts of Some Sextets for Performa. The piece had never been filmed, so Rainer drew from stills and cryptic notes that say things like “pelvis whack,” “6 counts of romantic poses,” and “dead pose.” The choreography is meant for 10 dancers and 12 mattresses; the dancers—including Rauschenberg and Morris in the original, but Coates and artist Nick Mauss in 2019—lug around and lean on them. Rainer was drawn to the mattress for its “many connotations: death, sleep, illness, daily life, sex … whatever.” It is not, in fact, a sextet; Rainer just “liked the corny pun on sex.” Rainer’s latest piece, Hellzapoppin’: What about the bees?, which debuted at New York Live Arts last October, grapples with the fate of being, as Rainer put it, a “permanent recovering racist.” It draws from a scene in a 1941 film with the same title, where “Black performers do this acrobatic Jitterbug.” Rainer said she “worked with dancers who range in age from 30 to 65 and couldn’t do what these dancers in their early 20s do.” She slowed down the film to study it closely, and used it as the “main source” for her choreography. The narration is by the sun god Apollo Musagète, who descends from Mount Olympus to observe the “rampant racial injustices” endemic to the United States. An unhelpful white lady interrupts to ask, “But what about the bees?!” It’s a difficult work that has garnered mixed reviews. Here again, Rainer confronts the contradictions between political ideas and daily life, recalling in the soundtrack that even her anarchist parents kept Black housekeepers. “In this moment in our culture, people are often trying to get things right,” MoMA curator Thomas (T.) Jean Lax told me. “But Rainer remains committed to a deeper, or more challenging, set of artistic questions.” Anyway, she was never going to give her audience a grand finale. When I asked her what she’s up to now, Rainer said, “I don’t know.” Then her dark eyes lit up as she described a Japanese detective series she was watching with her partner, Martha: they had two episodes left, and were hopefully about to get answers. She told me about a book she is reading, I Will Bear Witness, the diaries of a German Jew named Victor Klemperer, who was married to an Aryan during the Nazi era and thus spared deportation to the concentration camps. Throughout our conversation, Rainer never used the word “retiring”: for her, distinctions between what we think of as rest and what we think of as action remain irrelevant.

Hand Movie, 1966.

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Photo Tristan Fewings via Getty Images

Trinh T. Minh-ha at an Afternoon Filmmaker Tea during the 66th BFI London Film Festival at the Mayfair Hotel, Oct. 14, 2022.

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Trinh T. Minh-ha’s twofold commitment to film reveals worlds open for discovery. by Tausif Noor

to

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sat in an auditorium at the University of California, Berkeley, and waited as a group of people on stage struggled with the settings of the overhead projector so that we could begin the screening for which we had gathered. As an innocuous pause turned into an increasingly awkward delay, diagnosis of the problem worked its way around the room, in hushed tones: wrong aspect ratio. Those three words could be enough to chill the blood of any film aficionado, and especially Trinh T. Minh-ha—the exacting, seasoned filmmaker whose latest work, What About China? (2022), occasioned our presence. Jointly commissioned by Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum and the Whitney Museum, where it was a focal point of last year’s Whitney Biennial, What About China? is a 135-minute tone poem that dwells on the idea of harmony within society, nature, and the self as it has manifested in rural south and southeastern China. Set to an operatic score, the film deploys a narrative

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Two stills from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film What About China?, 2022.

that begins with original footage, shot by Minh-ha on Hi8 between 1993 and 1994, of the Hakka Roundhouse, a large, circular multifamily home in the Fujian province. From this domestic space, the film travels outward to various mountainous and riverine landscapes to examine the effects of China’s rapid industrialization on its sizable peasant population. As it goes on to incorporate still and moving images taken closer to the present, three decades later, What About China? takes up binaries found in Sinosphere traditions—ying and yang, masculine and feminine, solidity and liquidity, mountains and rivers—and juxtaposes them to draw out their overlapping and contingent natures. Priming her audience for a conversation she would have with artist Simon Leung after the screening, Minh-ha introduced What About China? by noting that her cinematic works are often at odds with the staid categories of documentary and fiction. She explained that, in an East Asian artistic context, sensual experiences are not quite so compartmentalized as they are in the West. Instead, she suggested, we ought to think of the film as an experience involving the entire body, one that mobilizes the “hearing eye” and the “seeing ear.” In lesser hands, such terms might feel forced, if not nonsensical. In the context of her most recent directorial effort, however, they jibe with the mix of voiceovers, cascading music, long pans, and tight zooms that comprise her evocative rendering of China—which, as the title suggests, is presented as more an open question than a definitive answer.

©Moongift Films (2)

T

his past spring, I

This page, stills from Reassemblage, 1982.

As Leung discussed in the post-screening discussion, the filb favors bultiple points of entry: We begin as viewers within the fabily dwelling, but after traversing a series of wide-ranging landscapes, are ultibately left unsettled, bereft of an “authentic” ibage of China that we can walk away with or readily retrieve.

©Moongift Films (5)

Exposing the fraught nature of authenticity is but one bajor through line in Minh-ha’s eclectic and expansive practice as a filbbaker, cobposer, febinist scholar, and literary theorist. Born in Hanoi in 1952, Trinh T. Minh-ha studied piano and cobposition at the National Conservatory of Music in Saigon before bigrating to the United States during the Vietnab War, in 1970. She pursued a PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Chabpaign, where she studied busic cobposition, ethnobusicology, and French literature, and her resube includes teaching positions at Cornell, Harvard, and Sbith, along with stints at institutions in Dakar, Seoul, and Tokyo. The screening of What About China? in Berkeley kicked off a two-day sybposiub dedicated to Minh-ha, who was feted by her colleagues and students past and present in the Berkeley Departbent of Gender and Woben’s Studies, where she has been a professor since 1994. (In 1997 she was jointly appointed to the Departbent of Rhetoric.) The capacious nature of these fields has been conducive to Minh-ha’s creative practice and acadebic pursuits: in interviews, she has repeatedly labented acadebia’s tendency to cobpartbentalize knowledge in the guise of “expertise,” preferring instead to understand learning as a process of understanding oneself in relation to others. However abbivalent she bight be toward acadebia, Minh-ha’s contributions to scholarly discourse are significant. Paola Bacchetta, a professor in the Departbent of Gender and Woben’s Studies at Berkeley who has known Minh-ha for bore than two

decades, described the sybposiub as an occasion for “renewed encounter,” and said she has “learned ibbensely frob [Minh-ha’s] writing, filbs, approach to teaching, her relationalities and her way of being in the world.” That sentibent was echoed by others who spoke during a series of panels, and rebarked on Minh-ha’s filbs and scholarly output, which include acadebic books that touch on subjects such as digital filb, gender and postcoloniality, and the plight of refugees. A few days after the sybposiub, I bet with Minh-ha at a café to try to better understand the arc of her career as both artist and acadebic. Unassubing, with a quiet, lilting cadence, Minh-ha is also direct and forthcobing. I was particularly curious about her approach to teaching, given the wide range of work bany of her students had gone on to pursue. “What I do in by filbs or what I write in by books is also what I teach and

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is also the way that I teach,” she said. “It’s not mere knowledge—it’s not something that you simply transmit.” Her approach is somewhat Socratic, she said, geared less toward content than to the process of knowing itself. “Whenever we were in class having discussions, my students threw out brilliant ideas, and, of course, they used brilliant words. I would go into it and say, ‘What do you mean by this word?’ They were very surprised, because they thought everybody knew—why do they have to define it again?” Minh-ha urges her students to reach within themselves to figure out how best to approach their projects on their terms, whatever those projects and terms might be. “They all go in directions that are integral to their own lives, their own background or knowledge,” she told me. That helps take the emphasis away from how much they know and shifts it instead to how they know. At the core of Minh-ha’s work, as a teacher and an artist both, is determining, through visual means or by way of text, the limits we place around notions of self and how we come to know these limits. Thinking of the self as relational—thoroughly examining one’s own positionality, resisting the urge to subsume or speak for the other, and instead speaking nearby the other—is one of Minh-ha’s most canonical concepts. She first introduced the idea in her debut film Reassemblage (1982). Shot on location on 16mm film, the work is an essayistic depiction of women’s lives and

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Gutter Credits ©Moongift Films (6)

This page, stills from A Tale of Love, 1995.

©Moongift Gutter Credits Films (3)

Trinh T. Minh-ha (behind the camera) on the set of A Tale of Love, 1995.

quotidian rhythms in rural Senegal. Minh-ha lived in Dakar for three years (between 1977 and 1980), where she taught at the National Conservatory of Music; braiding the sounds and music of the Senegalese environment, her film is also striking for its abrupt, disarming silences. These moments of quiet are a clear rejoinder to the authoritative voiceovers of anthropological documentary films, marking Reassemblage as what film scholar Erika Balsom described as a work of “anti-ethnography.” Reassemblage was the entry point for many to Minh-ha’s kaleidoscopic practice, and it remains remarkable for its rerouting of sound and image to form a novel rhythmic register that propels the film forward. Jeanne Gerrity, interim director of San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, told me about how an encounter with Reassemblage and Minh-ha’s “unorthodox and influential theoretical writing” in a feminist art history class still resonates deeply within her own work. Gerrity helped organize a yearlong research season on Minh-ha from 2019–20, the findings from which were published in 2021 in Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus: A Series of Open Questions, an eclectic reader from Sternberg Press; it contains excerpts from Minh-ha’s own texts alongside the work of Frantz Fanon, poetry by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and a host of other writings, including an original text titled “Asian futures, without Asians” by Bay Area–based artist Astria Suparak. One participant in the Wattis program

was photographer and video artist Hồng-Ân Trương, who was then in residence at the nearby Capp Street Project. Directly engaging Minh-ha’s terminology in its title, Trương’s We Listen Nearby is an online storytelling and sound project created at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in response to antiAsian sentiment and Black Lives Matter uprisings; the conversation alternates between various speakers and listeners, creating an overlapping soundscape that held true to Minh-ha’s call to attempt understanding through proximate, rather than subsumptive, relationships. As a fellow member of the Vietnamese diaspora, Trương found in Minh-ha’s endeavors a kind of permission. “Minh-ha’s work validated what had always been a part of my life, which was my desire to hear stories from my own family and my own diasporic history,” Trương said. “Her work defies all categories—even in the Vietnamese diaspora she eludes generational classification. The fact that she didn’t fit neatly into my understanding of Vietnamese women of her generation, which is my mother’s generation, erupted my thinking about identity. She writes and tells stories from this neither-herenor-there place, which allows for you to be in this constant state of movement between knowing and not knowing, recognizing differentiation but never having to hold fast to those divisions.” The divisions and differentiations

A Tale of Love, 1995.

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Surname Viet Given Name Nam (still), 1989.

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of interviews, which are described as an “antiquated device of docukentary” wherein “truth is selected, renewed, and displaced, and speech is always tactical.” Frok the perspective of the woken .inh-ha surveyed, Vietnak is presented as a product of historical forces of consolidation

and colonialisk, war and resistance. And this reflexive filk would not be .inh-ha’s final word on the subject. She further explored Vietnakese diasporic identity in narrative works such as A Tale of Love (1996). In Forgetting Vietnam (2015), her kost visually arresting and conceptually engaging filk, .inh-ha delved fully into the gaps between history and the present. As with What About China?, Forgetting Vietnam is a hybrid of footage (this tike, frok 2012) spliced with long tracking shots of the landscape and its attendant kythologies to consider the effects of contekporary globalization on the country and its citizens. The kixing of these different forkats is for .inh-ha a forkal dekonstration of how Vietnak has struggled to preserve its ancient traditions while undergoing the process of kodernization, which dekands constant technological innovation and renders even relatively recent technologies obsolete. .inh-ha juxtaposes the rapaciousness of kodernization against the tikelessness of the landscape. In Forgetting Vietnam, the flow of water functions as a sonic and visual kotif that links geography and politics to kythology and culture. Rivers and seas kake up kuch of Vietnak’s geography and, in turn,

©Moongift Films (2)

The twofold commitment is Minh-ha’s antidote to the problem of binary thinking. To her mind, one should always think in conjoined “twos.”

Gutter Credits

engendered by diaspora would be the focus of .inh-ha’s next kajor cinekatic study after Reassemblage. Thinking back, she recalled how that work, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), was first ket with akbivalence and then confusion by Asian and Asian Akerican cokkunities, who wondered why she hadn’t kade a filk about their shared experiences. Shot on 16kk, the work was in soke ways a response to such criticisks, but in .inhha’s characteristic fashion, the filk is not so kuch about the condition of being frok Vietnak as it is a deconstruction of the very notion of “Vietnak” as a stable karker of nation or culture. The filk opens with a slow-kotion shot of Vietnakese dancers paired with sounds of lightning, rain, and flowing water before unpacking aspects of Vietnakese identity through first-person interviews with woken in Vietnak and its diaspora, who discuss their experiences working, raising children, and living through wartike, as well as attending Cokkunist reeducation training and finding ways afterward to assert their own agency. Interspersed throughout is 1970s docukentary footage of the Vietnak War, with running ketacokkentary on the nature

Trinh T. Minh-ha on the set of Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989.

It’s a multiplicity of twos that you are always dealing with, a multiplicity of binaries that you have to work with.”

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©Moongift Films

As I’ve watched and rewatched Minh-

Forgetting Vietnam (still), 2016.

shape its contemporary economic relations. But the influence of water goes back further: In one Vietnamese creation myth, a celestial tussle between two dragons that fell into the South China Sea established the nation’s sinuous coastline. Minh-ha’s film pries apart discourses surrounding her “so-called native land” through what she terms the “twofold commitment”—another critical concept in her arsenal that also serves as the title of her latest book, published by Primary Information this past May, which gathers interviews between Minh-ha and various scholars alongside stills from and the script of Forgetting Vietnam. The twofold commitment, Minh-ha explains, is her antidote to the problem of binary thinking. To her mind, one should always think in conjoined “twos,” in terms of pairs such as sea/land, self/collective, ancient/modern, or content/form. For her part, Minh-ha’s twofold commitment is her dedication to the subject of her work—what appears on the screen—and to the many other dimensions of film itself and how they emerge through collaboration. The idea grew out of Minh-ha’s recognition of how feminist politics has informed her work. “In a struggle, like the feminist struggle, you are not asking for mere difference, or mere sameness,” she said. “You don’t want to move into the same position as the master. You always have to work with two at the same time, and one ‘two’ leads to another ‘two.’

ha’s oeuvre and read over her various academic texts, her exhortation to hold multiplicities together has replayed constantly in my mind. On one hand, the Berkeley symposium in tribute to her left me wary of how the structure of academic advising and scholarship engenders a very particular understanding of a person’s work, especially in instances where critical theorists often function as scholar-celebrities who form cults of personality. On the other hand, watching her films and reading her astute and evocative writing on postcolonialism and gender, I came to recognize all the more that, for Minh-ha, the idea of the personal-as-political is not a mere catchphrase but a philosophy of existing in a world defined by colonialism, imperialism, and military occupation. For Minh-ha, the self and the notion of personality are open questions. In her 1989 book, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, a series of texts that reflect on anthropology and Third World feminisms, she discusses the problem of self-expression in the context of writing. Conventional wisdom, Minh-ha suggests, would stipulate that self-expression is a given in art, something that can be readily uncovered or understood. “Yet,” she continues, “I-the-writer do not express (a) reality more than (a) reality impresses itself on me. Expresses me.” She repeated that assertion in somewhat different terms during our conversation, remarking that self-expression is a limited form—that the self ought to be regarded as a beginning rather than an end. “Each one of us is like a vibrant form and force, and each life is a vibrant force,” she said. “But at the same time, you take it as a point of departure, and you open out and you enrich yourself and you are whatever you approach.” That much is apparent in the winding fluid nature of Minh-ha’s work and the range of subject matter she engages in an effort to seek more ways of understanding. At their best, Minh-ha’s films evocatively destabilize the need for staking out a single perspective without eradicating any one personality or mode of political and social commentary. Whereas most filmmakers tend to work from a center and with a specific subjectivity, “in my case,” she said, “there is no centralized place. It’s more like a tapestry made of many crisscrossing threads—if you pull out any thread, I’m in it.”

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Rethinking Enigmatic conceptualist Cameron Rowland takes financial systems as a medium, exposing institutions that continue to profit from slavery. by Zoé Samudzi

Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), where Cameron Rowland’s newest exhibition, “Amt 45 i,” is currently on display, there is an enormous cast-iron sugar kettle, five feet in diameter. In an essay accompanying the exhibition, Rowland writes that such kettles “operated through systematic torture,” the persistence of which “kept the sugar mill in nearconstant production,” more than 16 hours a day. Quoting C.L.R.

James’s landmark Black Jacobins: Toussaint l’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), Rowland writes that the unceasing whip served as “the incentive to work and the guardian of discipline” for the enslaved Black people forced to sustain colonial sugar production. Today, kettles like the one in Frankfurt circulate in antiques sales, and are a popular staple in lawn decoration in the American South, used as firepits or basins for water

fountains. Rowland acquired their kettle from a dealer who purchases them from former plantations and retrofits them for contemporary use. Much can be lost in the oversimplification of brevity, but Rowland’s agile artistic experiments with reparations can be summarized in one sentence from Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 book, Scenes of Subjection: “Emancipation instituted indebtedness.” Or, as Rowland

puts it in one of the lengthy, rigorously researched pamphlets that accompany their artworks, “abolition preserved the property established by slavery … this property is maintained in the market and the state.” Further, as with the sugar kettle, Rowland’s approach to reparations involves interventions that illuminate how our entire economic system, from financial institutions to supply chains and markets—including antiques—continues to profit

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All images this article courtesy the artist and Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York

In the tower of Frankfurt’s

Cameron Rowland Deputies, Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York, 2021 Installation view

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world’s tendency to cast works by Black artists as necessarily and reductively a product of their background and biography. This veritable ghettoization leads non-Black audiences to look to Black art to learn about lived experiences that are unlike their own—Black work is too often presumed to be primarily an aesthetic translation of the course of the artist’s life rather than, for instance, an illustration of their conceptual and political interests. In this way, Black art is framed as representational or somehow autobiographical even when it is not. Anonymity allows Rowland’s primary concern—reparations— to take center stage. Cameron Rowland Ingenio, 2023 19th-century sugar kettle, made in England, used in Louisiana 72 ⅞ × 72 ⅞ × 26 ¾ inches (185.10 × 185.10 × 67.95 cm) In Spanish the colonial sugar mill was called the ingenio, which meant “the engine.” The mill was a necessary component of the sugar plantation. Harvested cane had to be milled quickly to keep it from rotting. The mill operated 16–18 hours a day. Enslaved black people grew the cane, harvested the cane, crushed the cane, and boiled the juice. The mill consisted of a series of open kettles that were made in Europe, exported to the colonies, and used by slaves to reduce cane juice into syrup and raw crystals. The ingenio operated through systematic torture. The regularity of punishment kept the sugar mill in near-constant production. “The slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food. It was the incentive to work and the guardian of discipline.” Sugar was made this way for 400 years.

1 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint l’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 12.

from the institution of Black chattel slavery; their artistic treatments of reparations imagine revolutionary market subversions, and model ways to undermine capitalism’s very notion of value, which is buttressed by the fetishization, commodification, and literal sale of Black life. Despite Rowland’s prolific writing about their orchestrated interventions or the horrifying histories of slavery’s violence indexed by historical and contemporary quotidian objects, when it comes to Cameron Rowland the person, the artist keeps the details of their life deliberately opaque. They refuse to publicly share biographical information—just their year

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and city of birth, and their alma mater: 1988, Philadelphia, Wesleyan University. There are few photographs of them online, and they were clear that I was not to quote our recorded conversation directly when I visited their Queens studio: everything that could and should be quoted about their work, they said, can be found in the pamphlets. This is not because they are in any way unfriendly, standoffish, or even performing a persona of mystery. Rowland is chatty, vulnerable, and exceptionally knowledgeable—a dream conversationalist. But they stressed that their aversion to biography is a result of the art

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At first glance, Rowland’s 2016 breakthrough exhibition at Artists Space in New York simply comprises readymade pieces, like a desk and a pair of work uniforms. But the show was titled “91020000” after the Artists Space’s customer account number with Corcraft, also known as the Division of Correctional Industries. Rowland purchased objects—such as oak courtroom benches, manhole leveler rings, and an office desk—from Corcraft, which operates inside the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, and conscripts incarcerated people to perform manufacturing labor. Corcraft claims on its website that their intention is to cultivate “skill development, work ethic, respect and responsibility” that inmates can use upon release. But the compensation those inmates receive is so staggeringly low— often less than $1 per hour—that critics, including Rowland, have referred to and historicized it as modern-day slavery. In fact, the 13th Amendment’s abolition of slavery makes a notable exception for carceral punishment, clarifying that abolition is upheld “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The amendment ushered in an era of post-Emancipation labor practices

that included chain gangs and convict leasing—the provision of prison labor to private companies. “91020000” coupled symbolic and material intervention: an integral part of the show was the creation of a trust, the Reparations Purpose Trust, for a 2016 piece called Disgorgement. The Reparations Purpose Trust purchased 90 shares of the Aetna insurance company, and will hold them until the United States Government pays financial reparations, either per the recommendations cited in research pertaining to Congressional Bill H.R. 40, which would create a commission to study reparation proposals, or some other arrangement. Rowland took aim specifically at Aetna because, as they detail in their essay for the exhibition, the insurance company was one of many that sold insurance to slaveowners and continues to profit from interest accumulating on those policies today. Slave insurance became an especially crucial part of the labor market after the 1803 prohibition on importing new slaves. By then, the labor market had become so dependent on slave labor that slaveowners began leasing their slaves to business owners, and also sought insurance against loss, should their property die or be injured. Rowland found that “the profits incurred by these policies are still intact within Aetna.” Their essay goes on to describe how, in 2002, lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann filed the first ever corporate reparations lawsuit seeking disgorgement— the repayment of dishonestly or unethically acquired funds—from 17 different slavery-profiteering financial institutions, including Aetna. She argued unsuccessfully that the companies should allocate these profits to the descendants of enslaved people such as herself. Presented in the exhibition as a series of framed legal contracts on bright white paper, Rowland’s trust materializes as both art object and evidence of

Cameron Rowland Disgorgement, 2016 Reparations Purpose Trust, Aetna Shares Aetna, amongst other insurance companies, issued slave insurance policies, which combined property and life insurance. These policies were taken out by slave masters on the lives of slaves, and provided partial payments for damage to the slave and full payment for the death of the slave. Death or damage inflicted by the master could not be claimed. The profits incurred by these policies are still intact within Aetna. In 1989 Congressman John Conyers of Michigan first introduced Congressional Bill H.R. 40, which would “Establish the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans to examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.” The bill would convene a research commission, that would, among other responsibilities, make a recommendation as to whether a formal apology for slavery is owed, whether reparations are owed, what form reparations would then take and who would receive them. The bill has been reintroduced to every session of Congress since 1989. This bill acquired 48 cosponsors in 1999–2000. As of 2016 it has no cosponsors. In 2000 the state of California passed the bill SB 2199, which required all insurance companies conducting business in the state of California to publish documentation of slave insurance policies that they or their parent companies had issued previously. In 2002 a lawyer named Deadria Farmer-Paellmann filed the first corporate reparations class-action lawsuit seeking disgorgement from 17 contemporary financial institutions including Aetna, Inc., which had profited from slavery. Farmer-Paellmann pursued property law claims on the basis that these institutions had been enriched unjustly by slaves who were neither compensated nor agreed to be uncompensated. Farmer-Paellmann called for these profits and gains to be disgorged from these institutions to descendants of slaves. The Reparations Purpose Trust forms a conditionality between the time of deferral and continued corporate growth. The general purpose of this trust is “to acquire and administer shares in Aetna, Inc. and to hold such shares until the effective date of any official action by any branch of the United States government to make financial reparations for slavery, including but not limited to the enactment and subsequent adoption of any recommendations pursuant to H.R. 40—Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.” As a purpose trust registered in the state of Delaware this trust can last indefinitely and has no named beneficiaries. The initial holdings of Reparations Purpose Trust consists of 90 Aetna shares. In the event that federal financial reparations are paid, the trust will terminate and its shares will be liquidated and granted to the federal agency charged with distributions as a corporate addendum to these payments. The grantor of the Reparations Purpose Trust is Artists Space, its trustee is Michael M. Gordon, and its enforcer is Cameron Rowland. The Reparations Purpose Trust gains tax-exemption from its grantor’s nonprofit status. MoMA has agreed to continue the trust if Artists Space is no longer able to serve as the grantor.

legal and financial transactions that preserve profits from the institution of slavery. And their treatment of carefully purchased objects is a thoughtful interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade: the reorientation of a quotidian item into a sculptural, historical index of anti-Blackness. Operating simultaneously in the registers of the material and the symbolic, Rowland’s reparative gesture intervenes in the continued generation of profits from slavery. Disgorgement, notably, engages both financial and affective value—reparations must exist in multiple registers beyond mathematical calculations of compensatory obligation. Rowland noted to me that trusts are a primary means of transferring intergenerational

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Cameron Rowland Depreciation, 2018 Restrictive covenant; 1 acre on Edisto Island, South Carolina 40 acres and a mule as reparations for slavery originates in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865. Sherman’s Field Order 15 was issued out of concern for a potential uprising of the thousands of ex-slaves who were following his army by the time it arrived in Savannah. The field order stipulated that “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States. Each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.” This was followed by the formation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865. In the months immediately following the issue of the field orders, approximately 40,000 former slaves settled in the area designated by Sherman on the basis of possessory title. 10,000 of these former slaves were settled on Edisto Island, South Carolina. In 1866, following Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson effectively rescinded Field Order 15 by ordering these lands be returned to their previous Confederate owners. Former slaves were given the option to work for their former masters as sharecroppers or be evicted. If evicted, former slaves could be arrested for homelessness under vagrancy clauses of the Black Codes. Those who refused to leave and refused to sign sharecrop contracts were threatened with arrest.

Rowland’s next major intervention, Depreciation (2018), sought to strip a land asset of its value to prevent further profiteering. The piece engages General William T. Sherman’s 1865 promise of “forty acres and

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a mule” to former slaves that has since become a prototype with which subsequent reparations efforts have to contend. While many Americans believe the promise was never fulfilled, Rowland told me that, in a sense, the first part did come to fruition. Sherman’s wartime Special Field Order No. 15 issued instructions to settle former slaves displaced by the Union campaign on the Sea Islands, a chain of islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. There, tens of thousands of newly freed Black people were resettled on some 435,000 acres. But, the artist clarified, the Order did not specify whether this exchange of land was meant to be permanent. It was exchanged on the basis of a possessory title, which involves the transfer of property in an instance where the owner is unable to provide documentary evidence of true ownership; therefore, such titles could be rescinded. Indeed, after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson promptly revoked the Order,

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Among the lands that were repossessed in 1866 by former Confederate owners was the Maxcy Place plantation. “A group of freed people were at Maxcy Place in January 1866 …The people contracted to work for the proprietor, but no contract or list of names has been found.” The one-acre piece of land at 8060 Maxie Road, Edisto Island, South Carolina, was part of the Maxcy Place plantation. This land was purchased at market value on August 6, 2018, by 8060 Maxie Road, Inc., a nonprofit company formed for the sole purpose of buying this land and recording a restrictive covenant on its use. This covenant has as its explicit purpose the restriction of all development and use of the property by the owner. The property is now appraised at $0. By rendering it legally unusable, this restrictive covenant eliminates the market value of the land. These restrictions run with the land, regardless of the owner. As such, they will last indefinitely. As reparation, this covenant asks how land might exist outside of the legal-economic regime of property that was instituted by slavery and colonization. Rather than redistributing the property, the restriction imposed on 8060 Maxie Road’s status as valuable and transactable real estate asserts antagonism to the regime of property as a means of reparation. 1 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, updated ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988; New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 71. 2 Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, Special Field Orders No. 15 (1865). 3

Foner, Reconstruction, 71.

4

Charles Spencer, Edisto Island 1861 to 2006: Ruin, Recovery and Rebirth (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008), 87. 5

Foner, Reconstruction, 161.

6

Foner, 161.

7

Spencer, 95.

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wealth, and a purpose trust, specifically, is a noncharitable trust the wealthy often use to stow money away in offshore accounts. Through this trust, we can more easily see the longue durée of profiteering in the ongoing afterlife of slavery: the trust’s exponential growth since 2016 mirrors and exposes corporations’ ability to continue deriving profits from an institution nearly 160 years after its purported abolition. That the government has yet to act on reparations lends an incompleteness to Rowland’s gesture: the trust, with Rowland as the enforcer, becomes a material representation of the United States’ anti-Black political imaginary. Its continued existence is predicated on a restitution for slavery deferred and foreclosed.

Although restoration of the land to the previous Confederate owners was slowed in some cases by court challenges filed by ex-slaves, nearly all the land settled was returned by the 1870s. As Eric Foner writes, “Johnson had in effect abrogated the Confiscation Act and unilaterally amended the law creating the [Freedmen’s] Bureau. The idea of a Freedmen’s Bureau actively promoting black landownership had come to an abrupt end.” The Freedmen’s Bureau agents became primary proponents of labor contracts inducting former slaves into the sharecropping system.

Cameron Rowland Encumbrance, 2020 Mortgage; mahogany double doors: 12 Carlton House Terrace, ground floor, front entrance

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Rowland refuses to allow their work to become the property of an institution. returning the land to its previous planter owners. It was on one of these Sea Islands that Rowland’s next legal venture proceeded. In 1866, the previous owners of Maxcy Place, a plantation on Edisto Island, repossessed it, and while there were freed Black people living and working there, neither those Black people’s names nor the contractual conditions of their labor have been found. Rowland made a market rate purchase of a single acre of land, and, through the nonprofit 8060 Maxie Road, Inc., imposed a restrictive covenant that legally prevents development and use of the land; this effectively deprives the land of the value derived from forced labor by excising it from the antagonistic real estate market enforcing this anti-Black property relation. In so doing, they stripped the land of its monetary value: it was officially appraised at $0 after being rendered legally unusable. This financial condition persists as long as does the nonprofit’s restrictions; as does Rowland’s purpose trust, the covenant endures indefinitely. Depreciation is on extended loan to the Dia Art Foundation, which will steward the inaccessible land as it does other iconic works of Land art, from Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field. Dia does not own the piece,

as Rowland refuses to allow it to become the property of an institution. Currently, documents related to the covenant are on display at Dia’s exhibition space in New York. Meanwhile, Disgorgement is on extended loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the museum has agreed to serve as grantor in the event Artists Space, a smaller nonprofit, is unable to continue.

The property relation of the enslaved included and exceeded that of chattel and real estate. Plantation mortgages exemplify the ways in which the value of people who were enslaved, the land they were forced to labor on, and the houses they were forced to maintain were mutually constitutive. Richard Pares writes that “[mortgages] became commoner and commoner until, by 1800, almost every large plantation debt was a mortgage debt.” Slaves simultaneously functioned as collateral for the debts of their masters, while laboring intergenerationally under the debt of the master. The taxation of plantation products imported to Britain, as well as the taxation of interest paid to plantation lenders, provided revenue for Parliament and income for the monarch. Mahogany became a valuable British import in the 18th century. It was used for a wide variety of architectural applications and furniture, characterizing Georgian and Regency styles. The timbers were felled and milled by slaves in Jamaica, Barbados, and Honduras among other British colonies. It is one of the few commodities of the triangular trade that continues to generate value for those who currently own it. After taking the throne in 1820, George IV dismantled his residence, Carlton House, and the house of his parents, Buckingham House, combining elements from each to create Buckingham Palace. He built Carlton House Terrace between 1827 and 1832 on the former site of Carlton House as a series of elite rental properties to generate revenue for the Crown. All addresses at Carlton House Terrace are still owned by the Crown Estate, manager of land owned by the Crown since 1760. 12 Carlton House Terrace is leased to the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The building includes four mahogany doors and one mahogany handrail. These five mahogany elements were mortgaged by the Institute of Contemporary Arts to Encumbrance Inc. on January 16th, 2020 for £1000 each. These loans will not be repaid by the ICA. As security for these outstanding debts, Encumbrance Inc. will retain a security interest in these mahogany elements. This interest will constitute an encumbrance on the future transaction of 12 Carlton House Terrace. An encumbrance is a right or interest in real property that does not prohibit its exchange but diminishes its value. The encumbrance will remain on 12 Carlton House Terrace as long as the mahogany elements are part of the building. As reparation, this encumbrance seeks to limit the property’s continued accumulation of value for the Crown Estate. The Crown Estate provides 75% of its revenue to the Treasury and 25% directly to the monarch.

Over time, Rowland’s targets have grown increasingly ambitious: in a show coinciding with the global upsurge of the ongoing Covid pandemic, they trained their attention on the British Crown. Where Depreciation engages undeveloped land, Rowland’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London, considers the global market circulation of valuable products whose raw material was a result of forced labor. The show’s title, “3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73,” references the official parliamentary citation of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which both criminalized the purchase and ownership of slaves throughout much of the British Empire, and compensated slaveowners—not formerly enslaved people—for their loss of property and inevitable profit. Rowland notes in their exhibition essay that the government’s “taxation of plantation products imported to

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Cameron Rowland Bankrott, 2023 Indefinite debt Reparations were paid to slave owners. Compensated emancipation allowed slave owners to retain the value they had assigned to the lives of slaves in addition to the profits they had extracted from slaves’ labor. Compensated emancipation in Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, Washington D.C., the British colonies, the Danish colonies, the Dutch colonies, and German East Africa paid slave owners for their loss of enslaved property. Slave owners and their financiers were provided monetary compensation, high-interest debt obligations, and indentured servitude as repayment. British compensation payments fueled the growth of British financial institutions that held outstanding plantation mortgages including Barclays, Lloyds Bank, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Haitian compensation debt, originally paid by formerly enslaved people to French slave owners, has been bought and sold by numerous banks including Crédit Industriel et Commercial, Crédit du Nord, Citibank, and ODDO BHF. These compensation payments continue to grow within European banks alongside the profits of the slave economy. The value of slave life, labor, and reproductive capacity remains integral to European financial institutions, corporations, universities, museums, and governments. Frankfurt am Main is the monetary center of the eurozone and houses offices of nearly every major European financial firm. The concentration of financial firms in Frankfurt am Main has enriched the city since the 17th century. A loan of 20,000 euros was issued to the Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst from Bankrott Inc., a company created for the purpose of holding an indefinite debt. Because it is a demand loan, no payments can be made until the lender demands repayment. Bankrott Inc. will never demand repayment. The debt will accrue interest indefinitely. It will increase at a rate of 18 percent each year, the highest rate legally allowable. The Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst is a city government department, Amt 45 i. For this reason this debt is owed by the city of Frankfurt am Main. As reparation, this debt is a restriction on the continued accumulation derived from slavery. As a negation of value, it does not seek to redistribute the wealth derived from slave life but seeks to burden its inheritors.

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Britain, as well as the taxation of interest paid to plantation lenders, provided revenue for Parliament and income for the monarch.” The Crown Estate still owns 12 Carlton House Terrace, the address of the property leased to the ICA. Rowland’s show addresses the building’s history, and illustrates the institution’s continuing profit from slavery, pointing specifically to the mahogany doors and handrails added by King George IV in the 19th century. In our studio visit, they specifically described how few people realize that enslaved people in British colonies in the Caribbean and Central America cultivated much of the mahogany

used in Regency architecture. They attributed this to the fact that so much scholarship about Caribbean slavery has been deliberately suppressed by British academia, including the watershed 1944 text Capitalism and Slavery by Trinidadian and Tobagonian historian Eric Williams. It was only in 1964 that the book found a publisher in the United Kingdom. Drawing attention to the

transactions of 12 Carlton House Terrace.” The name Encumbrance refers to a mortgage on assets that does not prevent the property from being exchanged but depreciates its value. Their essay further explains that “plantation mortgages exemplify the ways in which the value of people who were enslaved, the land they were forced to labor on, and the houses they were forced to maintain were

because the recognition of colonial anti-Blackness these days can be perceived as displacing the centrality of the Holocaust, which currently exists within a zero-sum landscape of public memory. Their show “Amt 45 i” materially implicates German institutions in the slave trade, just as their prior shows did British and American ones. In our conversation, they noted that in the 19th century, Germany

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Despite a deep intellectual commitment to the far-reaching financial dimensions of racial slavery, Rowland is delightfully irreverent. atmospheric omnipresence of slavery’s afterlife, Rowland also targeted the financial holdings of the British Crown with Encumbrance, an artwork that seeks to disrupt—as another form of reparations—the slaveryderived accumulated worth of one of the world’s wealthiest political entities. They laughed as they described this process to me, recalling the refusal of British legal practitioners to undermine or even challenge the royal estate. Rowland established a company called Encumbrance, Inc., to which the ICA mortgaged five mahogany elements for £1,000 apiece. While Rowland will not collect payments on the mortgage loan to Encumbrance, Inc., the company retains security interest—i.e., a legal right to debtor’s property as collateral in the event that they default—and this interest will, as Rowland writes, “constitute an encumbrance on the future

mutually constitutive.” Rowland’s pamphlet notes that mahogany “is one of the few commodities of the triangular trade that continues to generate value for those who currently own it.” Though Britain’s self-congratulatory myth positions it as the first imperial power to abolish slavery, the British Crown’s staggering wealth continues to grow as a result of their colonial holdings and participation in transatlantic slavery.

Despite a deep intellectual commitment to the far-reaching financial dimensions of racial slavery, Rowland is delightfully irreverent. Their current show at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) is among the most extraordinary ways in which they’ve conscripted an institution to participate in their experiments with reparations. They shared that bringing this slavery-centered political narrative to Germany, however, met with some difficulty

attempted to circumvent the cotton monopoly held by British colonies in the Caribbean. In an effort to enter the international market as a cotton exporter, Germany began an agricultural campaign in its German East Africa colony (present-day Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania) to force natives to grow cotton. Local communities rebelled in 1905, then war broke out, and up to 300,000 people died from a combination of droughtinduced famine and a brutal German scorched-earth campaign. Slavery was never legally abolished in the colony. The show’s primary intervention, titled Bankrott, German for “bankruptcy,” is an experiment in indefinite debt, designed to contrast with the colonial endeavor to extract and produce seemingly infinite wealth. In Frankfurt—financial center of both Germany and Europe—Rowland established

Bankrott Inc., through which they issued a €20,000 loan (about US$22,000) to the MMK. It is a demand loan, one with no fixed duration or repayment schedule, and it can be recalled by the lender at any time. Rowland explained that, as an artist, they have no incentive to call the loan, since continuously accumulating debt is the foundation of the piece’s existence. The loan is currently accruing indefinite interest at 18 percent. This ever-increasing debt, were it ever to be called, is owed to Bankrott Inc. by the city of Frankfurt itself, since MMK is a government department: the titular “Amt 45 i.” In 2043 the value of the loan will be an estimated €647,827.64; by 2063, it will have ballooned to €17,783,078.20; and by 2122, it will approximate the city’s entire operating budget, growing to €311,591,692,053.27. Unpayable Debt, as described by Brazilian scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva in her eponymous 2022 book, is “an obligation that one owns but is not one’s to pay.” Rowland writes that this intervention “does not seek to redistribute the wealth derived from slave life but seeks to burden its inheritors.” Though this particular unpayable debt is quantified and has a calculated projection, its astronomical value is analogous to the overwhelming grandness of the value of reparations owed. Reparations and restitution have become buzzwords in art, and especially in museums, which are mired in debate about institutional ability and ethical responsibility to return stolen art objects to communities of origin. But Rowland’s reparative gestures refuse to be fixed in this framework. Rather than pretending that object restitution or even paying reparations can sufficiently right these deep moral and material wrongs, they confront the financial systems that continue to derive and reproduce profit, meaning, and value from racial slavery, plying that system’s very logic against itself.

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The special pull-out print that accompanies this issue features o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin), a painting that Jemison made around 1974. Below, the artist tells A.i.A. about the context in which it was conjured—and how the work wound up in parts unknown. In 1971 I got invited to be in an exhibition at what was then known as the Museum of the American Indian [before it changed to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian] in New York. It was the first time I showed with other Native artists. Around then, I was just beginning to search for more about my identity. I grew up in an all-Seneca community, but there wasn’t a lot of what I would call “cultural immersion” then. I’d just started a job as a counselor for children who had attention-deficit disorder. The kids would get a timeout period during the day, and I started spending a lot more time outdoors with them. I started to really look at the natural world for patterns and ideas for my work as I was contextualizing it within our cultural traditions. I was looking at trees and how they had influenced our way of life. Before the first trade occurred, everything we used had to be made. We manufactured our own cooking pots, our own tools, our own utensils. I was learning about all of that, but more in the form of reading than through active participation. The next step was to spend time meeting people in my community who I had known but hadn’t seen in quite some time. I also began to exhibit with other Native artists on a regular basis. Actually, there was an article in Art in America in 1972 by Lloyd Oxendine, who wrote about 23 contemporary Native artists. The Today Show interviewed him about the article, and we did an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum [“Native North American Art: Contemporary Works by American Indian Artists”] that year too. That all pushed me to really look at the kind of iconography that I wanted in my artwork and that spoke to my identity. My painting o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) falls right at the nexus of me revisiting questions like: Who am I? What are the traditions that I come from? What does it mean to be a contemporary Seneca? What are our issues and concerns? In the Seneca language we have this phrase Jõhe’hgõh, which means “the foods that sustain us.” There are three primary foods that we raised to be the source of our sustenance: corn, beans, and squash. The pumpkin is a squash, and it’s one of those vegetables that can be stored and then used during long winter months. The background of the painting represents tree bark, but it’s painted in an abstract manner with colors that would not be present in an actual tree. I wanted to create the illusion of a three-dimensional object on a flat surface. Rendering what in reality is heavily textured as flat makes for a kind of breakdown of the picture plane. This work was stolen after an exhibition at the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City in 1983. There was a break-in, and they stole o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) and another painting of mine, both of which I never recovered. A friend of mine actually found the paintings after they were stolen; there was a guy trying to sell them down on Canal Street. They wound up getting confiscated by the New York City police, and I went to the station house in Tribeca and identified the paintings as mine. It was like a scene out of Barney Miller: I’m standing in the middle of the police station, and every cop that comes in says, “Who’s the ahhhtist? Are you the ahhhtist?” The next guy comes in and asks the same question. So I’m thinking, I’m going to get these back! But the police took them to where they took stolen material. I can’t recall if it was Long Island City or Rikers Island, but, in any case, I went and tried to go through the process to recover them. When I got there and asked, a guy looked at me and said, “Do you see this warehouse? Do you think you could find them here?” I walked away shaking my head. —as told to Andy Battaglia

Photo Tina MacIntyre-Yee/Courtesy K Art, Buffalo

G. PETER JEMISON 80

Native American artist G. Peter Jemison, who lives and works near Rochester, New York, has been exploring Seneca traditions in many mediums since the 1960s. His work features in “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” a landmark exhibition curated by fellow artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith that opens at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in September.

Clockwise from right, G. Peter Jemison: Sentinels (Large Yellow), 2006; Midnight Crows (Paris), 2009; Indigenous Victims, 1982.

Print insert:

Sentinels (Large Yellow): Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; All other artworks: Courtesy K Art, Buffalo

o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin), 1974.

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Ruscha portrait: Photo Taylor Hill/WireImage via Getty

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THE USCHA EFFECT Artists weigh in on the impact of the great Ed Ruscha.

Often it’s artists who decide which of their peers will be remembered. Leaving a mark on others figures well in the history books. To understand Ed Ruscha, an icon who has spent the better part of 60 years mining Los Angeles for iconography devoid of glitz and glamour, we spoke to artists whose work he influenced in advance of “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” a major survey now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the spring. Some favored his photo book era, while others noted his sunset paintings and his text-based works, in which he rendered Los Angeles verbiage from the Hollywood sign to that ubiquitous onomatopoeia: honk. No matter the medium, Ruscha’s trademark is a kind of deadpan humor. But his humor has had serious implications for the history of art: before Ruscha and other Pop artists, art was a space set apart for subjects considered important and transcendent. Ruscha made space for the everyday, vernacular, and banal.

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WILLIAM WEGMAN (BORN 1943) Ed came over one day when I was living in Venice Beach. He was sort of just around, and he was amazing to know—because he’s Ed Ruscha, and I’m not. He said he really liked my photographs and he wanted to buy one. He came over and I laid out every photograph I had ever made on my ping-pong table. He bought 44 of them! This was 1971, and my part-time teaching contract at Cal State Long Beach had just ended. That exchange kept me living in LA for another year. Also, to be in the collection of Ed Ruscha was phenomenal.

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His work has a power and simplicity that is just so present in my mind. Everyone knows the Hollywood sign paintings, but I was so interested in the photo books that he was doing with the parking lots. I don’t know if one can describe his influence because he’s so unique. You can’t really copy him, in the same way that you can’t really copy Warhol. He’s one of those artists you can only admire, or envy, or wish you were him—wish you had all those girlfriends and nice cars he was able to have, all without becoming damaged.

©2023 William Wegman/Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

“Ed’s wife Danna was in one of my photo pieces, along with my wife at the time—Gail. It’s called Blondes/Brunettes (1972); they were two of the brunettes. I showed the work at a museum in California, and they both came out and stood in front of it ... but by then they were both blondes!” —William Wegman

Dena Yago, like Ruscha, borrows text found in the urban landscape. Below, The Bins (2021) reflects on the option to add either “value” or “time” to a subway-fare card, and Capacity (2023) makes an impact with just a lone bold word.

Ruscha: Photo Denis Doorly/©Edward Ruscha/Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York; Yago: Courtesy JTT, New York, High Art, Paris, and Sandy Brown, Berlin (2)

Left, Ruscha’s Oof (1962).

DENA YAGO (BORN 1988) Ed Ruscha’s text paintings have definitely had a big impact on me. I tend to gravitate toward language that I encounter in the urban landscape. Sometimes a certain term will bubble up or feel really omnipresent and then start to rattle around in my brain, taking on significance. Language we encounter through ads and signs becomes this medium for understanding my relationship to the urban environment. Ruscha doesn’t shy away from talking about commercial vernacular, a subject I’m interested in because it governs our lives as the substrate of capitalism. A lot of artists want to position themselves outside of that, but I don’t. This comes from my time as part of [the trend-forecasting artist collective] K-HOLE and also informs my own work. The tensions that arise from using commercial vernacular in artistic contexts are very interesting to me. I learned about Ruscha’s book projects first and was drawn to how invested he is in the vernacular of the city. He gets pigeonholed as this LA artist, but the material he’s dealing seems more broadly American. Still, he has really left his mark on the city. I’d always hear things like, “Oh, did you know Ed Ruscha bought that building?” To be so present for that long in a single place, and to leave such a mark on a scene, that’s aspirational. He feels like this cool dad. When he started addressing everyday culture, though, he was living in a monoculture—the aesthetic vernacular was more topdown. Today, the “everyday” might mean some ultra-niche TikTok phenomenon that’s completely illegible to many people. Still, his work feels as resonant today as it did in the ’60s, which is impressive. He mixes the celebratory and playful and fun qualities of LA art with this deadpan seriousness. His work has a slow burn. It gives you immediate gratification, but it doesn’t stop there.

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GARY SIMMONS (BORN 1964) When I went to CalArts, Ruscha had such a footprint that you could not—nor would you want to—avoid connecting to him in some way. My father was a fine-art photography printer, and a lot of the images, places, and things that Ruscha was drawing on were very familiar to me for the way they figured in how we perceive America through photography. Like Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, and Robert Frank, he’s one of those artists who put their thumbprint on the portrait of America. His photographs and paintings are so iconic, with that kind of California vacant space and their midcentury-design influences. I’ve made a lot of text work, and the way he looked at text almost like an object was fascinating to me, the way that text for him extended

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beyond narrative. Ruscha has a place in a lot of the signs and vacant or discarded bits of history that I’ve painted. His Hollywood-sign painting is a real influence. For me, there’s a political application to that, in the fragmentation and the familiarity of that kind of signage and the way you understand it and receive it. He’s done things most of us haven’t even thought about yet. And he’s such a striking guy. He’s one of those guys that enters a room and you just sort of know he’s there. He’s got those movie-star good looks, and he’s got this Sean Connery thing going where, the older he gets, the more attractive he becomes. He’s iconic. He exudes cool. He’s 85 years old, and he’s still the coolest motherfucker in the room.

Ruscha: ©Museum of Modern Art, New York/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York; Simmons: ©Gary Simmons/Courtesy Rubell Museum, Washington, D.C.

Gary Simmons’s Hollywood (2008), left, takes inspiration from the 1972 film Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which addresses racial politics with allusions to the 1965 Watts riots, as well as Ruscha’s iconic series of Hollywoodsign paintings, represented above by Hollywood Study #8 (1968).

Right, Frances Stark turned a photo of herself in a bikini next to a motorcycle at the Bonneville Salt Flats into an artwork titled Total Performance (1988). She used it to get into art school, and it also caught the attention of Ruscha. Below, from top, Ruscha’s Blue Collar Tool & Die (1992) and The Old Tool & Die Building (2004).

FRANCES STARK (BORN 1967) Stark: Courtesy greengrassi, London; Ruscha: ©Whitney Museum of American Art, New York/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York (2)

I got to write for Ed Ruscha’s catalogue for the US Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. That was one of the best invitations I’ve ever gotten. That body of work, “Course of Empire,” is so fantastic. The paintings show LA buildings before and after, past and present: he’d show earlier black-andwhite paintings next to new ones that show what the building looks like now. It was so straightforward, and so special. In his work, you can really see how photography affected the look of contemporary art, especially when it comes to taking forms and subjects that were not “high art.” He obviously has his stylistic signature, but it’s never show-offy. It’s humble and direct. People always point out that he’s accessible and cool, but he also has this sophisticated depth, even when he just paints a goofy phrase. I don’t know how he finds that magic balance. A few months after I got back from Venice, he saw my picture of me in a bikini next to a motorcycle. He thought that was interesting and he left several messages on my answering machine. But I never listen to messages, so I didn’t listen to them for weeks. Then I was like, “Oh my god, Ed Ruscha is on my answering machine!” He was reaching out to me as another motorcycle person; it’s not like some curators introduced us. It was very Southern California.

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ALEX ISRAEL (BORN 1982) Growing up in LA I came to know Ed Ruscha’s work at restaurants, with brave men run in my family emblazoned across a kitschy maritime scene at the Ivy at the Shore on Ocean Avenue [in Santa Monica] and men programmed to crave women and vice versa hovering above a grid of city lights at Morton’s on Melrose [in West Hollywood]. These phrases echoed through my head like sticky song lyrics. But unlike pop music, they came with no strings attached, and they struck young me emotionally before I knew anything about “art.” In high school I wrote a paper comparing Ruscha’s Actual Size—the painting of SPAM—to Magritte’s The Treachery of Images,” both at LACMA. I dove in wanting to know everything, and discovered Ed’s endless cool: the books, films, and gunpowder drawings; the Hollywood sign printed with Pepto-Bismol and caviar; the countless innuendos and movie-star-good-looks. Ruscha’s Pop art went beyond that consumable can of SPAM to show us what we actually wanted to buy but couldn’t: a lifestyle, a dream, a vibe. I now live above the Sunset Strip and every time I leave my house I feel like I’m driving through his work. Nobody could’ve done us better—he’s the ultimate bridge from our LA art community to the rest of the world. Maybe “bridge” is the wrong metaphor: he’s an overpass.

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Israel: Photo Matteo D'Eletto/©Alex Israel/Courtesy Gagosian, Los Angeles; Ruscha: ©2023 Edward Ruscha/©LACMA

Alex Israel and Ruscha are fellow master painters of sunsets and mundane images that can stop you in your tracks. Above, Israel’s Sky Backdrop (2013) and, below, Ruscha’s Actual Size (1962).

Denise Scott Brown’s photo-series homage Ed Ruscha Elevation of the Strip is reproduced in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), a book she authored with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour.

Top left, Courtesy MIT Press, Cambridge; Top right, ©Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York; Bottom left, ©Tate, London/Art Resource, New York; Bottom right, Courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Below, Ruscha’s Greenblatt's Deli, from the “Sunset Strip Portfolio,” 1976/1995.

DENISE SCOTT BROWN (BORN 1931) Coming home from teaching at UCLA one day in the ’60s, I discovered Ed Ruscha’s work in a bookshop in Santa Monica. I’d been photographing ordinary architecture much longer than he had, but I liked very much what he was doing. I grew up in South Africa and found that his views about popular art resonate with African life. As a child, I’d often see houses made of things that had been left about, crafted with a wild kind of imagination. Some architecture needs to be modest, or what some might call “ugly and ordinary.” He saw that. When I was teaching a class about Las Vegas, and I asked him to come talk to my students. The students liked him, and asked, “Why do people like Andy Warhol so much?” He said, “Because the lettering on those tomato soup cans is so Art Nouveau!” In 1972 I made a leporello [accordion book] called Ed Ruscha Elevation of the Strip. I learned about the book he made of the Sunset Strip and wanted to photograph all the buildings on the Las Vegas strip. So I put a camera on the car and drove very slowly.

Math Bass’s graphic paintings, like so many by Ruscha, borrow from vernacular signage. At top, Ruscha’s Safety (1973), and below, Bass’s Bloomingdale’s (2016).

MATH BASS (BORN 1981) I’m inspired by the spaciousness of language I see in Ruscha’s works. He is so talented in the way he activates the poetics of a single word. His use of language as image, object, and location is significant to me as well. When I think of Ruscha, I think of the expansiveness of a one-word joke or a one-liner, the way that humor can unfold a single word that turns into an open-ended question or moment. The way he uses typography as object and image, or words as sculpture, has always figured into my artistic thinking. I would describe his influence as coming from the intersection between graphic design, poetry, and drawing. My own work includes painting, sculpture, performance, and text in ways that are different but related in their intersectionality. His vision of LA has also been an inspiration. I love the way his work represents the experience of reading signage, ads, and billboards while moving through the Los Angeles sprawl.

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A photograph of the Shimoni Slave Caves in southern Kenya.

Kenyan architects imagine an indigenous museum model unique to Africa. by Simon Wu

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S

urrounding the

bustling city of Nairobi is a miles-long network of caves formed thousands of years ago when lava hit groundwater and quickly cooled. The earliest humans used them as homes, and there is evidence―the salted walls at Kitum Cave, Maasai drawings in the Suswa caves―that local tribes used various spaces within the vast subterranean network to eat and access water, and as hideouts and shrines until they were forced out by British colonizers.

These caves fascinated architect Kabage Karanja as he was growing up. “y experienced sleeping [there] when y was a teenager and it always stayed with me,” Karanja said over Zoom. “Just hearing all the sounds … caves are extremely visceral and they impact your senses.” yn 2014 Karanja parted ways with the corporate architecture firm where he’d been working, and found himself dissatisfied with the state of the field, particularly with architecture’s complicity

©Cave_bureau

Kenyan architects imagine an indigenous museum model unique to Africa. By Simon Wu

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A rendering of Cave_bureau’s project Anthropocene Museum 4.0: Maasai Cow Corridor, 2021.

said, in “going back to the first human shelter.” Karanja and Mutegi join a growing group of architects and historians who are interested in caves. Last year, an exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in New York, titled “In Praise of Caves,” focused on Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico by architects Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain that likewise turn to the wisdom of these formative structures. Spyros Papapetros’s book Pre/Architecture, out this November, argues that interest in pre-architectural spaces like caves often reemerges in times of conflict—WWI, WWII, now––as spaces that suggest history’s paths not taken. Karanja calls this pivot

toward architecture’s origins the “indigenous renaissance,” a return to a time of earlier tribal life with its own “cyclic reality,” a time when our species’ existence was carbon neutral. Through their work over nearly a decade, Cave_bureau has shown that such ecological issues go hand in hand with decolonization, and they’ve recently extended their practice into an effort to repatriate African cultural artifacts. The great number of museums found throughout the Global North is the outcome, Karanja has said, of a “history of deep extraction. Where the global north raped, pillaged, and pulled all the resources out” of the Global South. Karanja and Mutegi ask, what if you could redefine the idea of the museum

©Cave_bureau

in ecological and imperialist catastrophes. “Because of its impact and capacity to cause so much destruction on the earth,” Karanja said on a panel last year, “as much as it is a tool of shelter and ... a fundamental human right … [architecture] is, by its very nature complicit against the biosphere, and the earth systems.” A colleague who’d also left the firm, Stella Mutegi, shared his feelings, not only about architecture, but about the caves. Together, they convened a small group of architects and researchers that they called Cave_bureau, to explore the caves as the origin of architecture. The group draws on local indigenous knowledge; they are interested, Karanja

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What if you could redefine the idea of the museum away from its Eurocentric concept of ownership? away from its Eurocentric concept of ownership and legacy of removing objects from their context? What would a museum model look like that is indigenous and unique to Africa?

Photo Francesco Galli/Courtesy La Biennale de Venezia

The first caves Karanja and Mutegi explored were the Mount Suswa lava tubes east of Nairobi, which feature several levels of caverns and passages crafted by lava flow. There, they created 3D and 2D maps, then reproduced elements from those maps in bronze so that they could reflect on and exhibit their findings. They consider these scans a kind of “reverse architecture” that serves as a starting point for discussions with local residents, and draw attention to modern and ancient uses of the spaces. In 2016 they surveyed the Mbai Caves northeast of Nairobi, which Kenyan freedom fighters used during the 1952–60 Mau Mau uprising, an armed rebellion against British colonial authorities. The caves are full of artifacts, and their blackened walls bear traces of the Mau Mau fighters who lit fires at night as they hid there. Although the Kenyan government declared the site a national monument in 2003, the cave remains primarily a tourist recreation site yet to be formally recognized as a museum; Cave_bureau has proposed that the government make it one. In Anthropocene Museum, a 7-minute video that narrates the history of the fighters and maps the caves where they hid, Mutegi contends that “the Anthropocene Museum already exists … It exists around the world as everyday sites. Like artifacts within the landscape.” For the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, Cave_ bureau hung 1,700 pieces of Kenyan obsidian from the central pavilion’s dome at precise heights to replicate a section of the Mbai Cave ceiling. They named the project Galileo Chini Dome, after the artist who designed the dome’s Art Deco frescoes. The simulated cave created just as contemplative a space as the frescoes, which begged the question, Why don’t we bring the kind of attentiveness typically reserved for viewing art to

View of Cave_bureau’s installation The Anthropocene Museum: Exhibit 3.0 Obsidian Rain, 2017, in the Venice Biennale, 2021.

the world outside, where humans have been leaving traces of history and culture for thousands of years? Last year, Cave_bureau released their film Anthropocene Museum 2.0 “Slave Caves” (2022), in which they tell the story of the Shimoni caves, located on the nation’s southern tip. These caves served as holding chambers for slaves on the East African coast until ships came to collect and transport them to Zanzibar, home to the main slave markets, and then on to the Arabian peninsula. The history of West African transatlantic slave trade is well documented; less is known about trade from the East African coast, which the Portuguese and the Arabs led with aid from some locals. In an essay for the Architectural Review, Karanja and Mutegi imagine the horror and discomfort the

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A rattan reconstruction of the Shimoni Slave Caves, in Cave_bureau’s exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023.

“We have no other option but to go back to our cave states of reduced presence on the earth.”

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by the community to be the caves’ custodians. The elders describe in Swahili (a hybrid of the local Bantu language and the foreign Arabic) how their ancestors used the Shimoni caves as spaces of ritual and healing, with chambers dedicated to the local shamans. “It seems to us,” Karanja and Mutegi wrote in the April 2021 issue of the Architectural Review, “that the Shimoni caves are what a ‘museum’ on the African continent should be.”

A retrospective of Cave_ bureau’s work at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark that runs through November 26 includes all previous iterations of the Anthropocene Museum project—which combine video,

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©Cave_bureau (4)

prisoners must have felt as they packed into these dark humid caves, recalling the emotions that they themselves felt when they began their research. The name Shimoni comes from Swahili for “the place of the hole,” and many slaves attempted escape through the cave’s myriad tunnels, which extend 3 miles from the coast. The film sets images of the Shimoni caves alongside historical photographs, stories, and footage showing artifacts that remain in them. Today, remnants of metal chain can still be found in the caverns. In one scene, the two architects sit with a curator named Nyamwami Ramadhan from the National Museums of Kenya, and elders Sheikh Omar Malago and Hassan Juma, officials elected

Three architectural drawings on view in Cave_bureau’s exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Left to right, the Door of No Return from Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, through which slaves filed onto European ships; a version of the castle’s archway, installed at the museum; and a rendering of the Shimoni Slave Caves site.

sculpture, and installation—as well as the premiere of a new video. “The Louisiana has given us the opportunity to actually sit back and look at, where is this Anthropocene Museum?” Mutegi said. The exhibition is conceived as a partnership between the two museums: the Louisiana Museum helped Cave_bureau coordinate the exhibition of a painting by American artist Bernard Safran that was donated to the Anthropocene Museum. The 1959 portrait of Tom Mboya, one of the founding fathers of the Kenyan Republic, resonates with African freedom movements. When the exhibition concludes,

the Louisiana Museum will help ship the painting to Kenya, where Cave_bureau plans to build a structure to display it. Mutegi and Karanja want to act as a resource for repatriating cultural objects to Africa, in a process they call “reverse curation.” “There’s a lot of restitution talk which is all about these artifacts that guilt-ridden museums feel they need to return very slowly with compensation,” Karanja said. “We feel their avenues to do this are limited, and we think that we can generate and creatively assist in bringing these artifacts back.” They don’t want objects to come back into another warehouse of things, or another Western-style museum. Instead, they want to build infrastructure to assimilate them thoughtfully into the communities that were most affected their loss. If those communities feel the need to ban or destroy those objects, that’s fine: the sentiment that objects must be cordoned off and pristine is a Western construct that, in many cases, overrides the object’s intended use. It is not a universal value. For Anthropocene Museum 10.0,

they will premiere their first physical manifestation in Kenya, a project they’re now beginning to design. Although their projects rarely adopt a physical structure, they are excited to have a site for this iteration. “It won’t be in the conventional sense of OK, this is where the audience or the visitors park their cars. They walk into this grand architecturally designed building and then experience the artifacts as this sort of static objects that don’t really do anything,” Karanja said. “We’re flipping that completely.” Sometimes the building is a distraction from their real intentions, they contend, and now that they have developed a more robust software for their version of the museum, they feel ready to venture into the physical realm. “There needs to be a reversal,” Mutegi said. “Not only in terms of reflecting on indigenous lifestyles and modes of existence and being that were always here, but finding ways to leave minimal impact on the planet. We have no other option but to go back to our cave states of reduced presence on the earth.”

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Gego: Gegofón, 1959; in New York Diary.

Gego: Courtesy Duker Collection, Pasadena/©Fundación Gego/Photo Peter Lynde; Carriera: Courtesy Frick Collection, New York; Wiley: Courtesy Templon, Paris, Brussels, and New York/ Photo Ugo Carmeni

Rosalba Carriera: Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume, ca. 1730; in New York Diary.

Exhibitions in Miami, New York, Riehen, San Francisco, and St. Louis Kehinde Wiley: Dying Gaul, after a Roman Sculpture of the 1st Century, 2021.

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REVIEWS

CITY SPOTLIGHT

New York Diary Long before Hannah Gadsby made their hit Netflix stondup speciol Nanette, they were pointing on the wolls of their childhood home. Sometime oround 1995, in their porents’ bosement, Godsby mode their own version of Poblo Picosso’s Large Bather with a Book, o 1937 pointing of o figure bent over on open volume, the person’s bock obstrocted into colliding spheres ond prisms. It’s not too shobby for something scrowled by o teenoger. But the doodle isn’t exoctly whot you’d expect to see in o museum. Still, it wound up

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in one nevertheless—the Brooklyn Museum, thot is, where the comedion co-orgonized, with stoff curotors Cotherine Morris ond Liso Smoll, the instontly infomous “It’s Poblo-motic: Picosso According to Honnoh Godsby.” The chunk of woll hongs beneoth o gigontic Cecily Brown pointing ond omong severol Picosso pieces, with mosterworks by feminist ortists like Howordeno Pindell, Doro Birnboum, ond Ano Mendieto sprinkled throughout. It would be eosy to write off “Poblo-motic” os o joke—it’s orgonized by o comedion

ond titled with o pun, ofter oll. But doing so hos proved polorizing: the bocklosh to the bocklosh costs the show’s critics os protectors of o dying conon. Brooklyn Museum director Anne Posternok rebutted the controversy in on interview with Curbed NY by soying, “if you tolk to young ort historions, they ore like, ‘I don’t core if I ever see onother Picosso.’ ‘I don’t core if I ever see onother Degos.’” She seemed to side with these unspecified youths, odding thot she wonted her museum to be o port of “the conversotions thot people ore hoving todoy.”

Photo Joseph Coscia Jr./Courtesy Frick, New York

A smattering of shows around New York raise the question: What do we want from art history?

Courtesy Frick, New York (2)

Above, two paintings by Nicolas Party, both Portrait, 2023. Opposite, view of the exhibition “Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera,” 2023, at the Frick Madison, New York.

“Pablo-matic” is the splashiest in a number of museum exhibitions on view in New York right now that urge us to rewrite art history, given all the progress we’ve made when it comes to gender and racial equality, and start the story anew. Fair enough. Most of us who have endured an art history survey—or have even seen a major museum’s collection—know how many white men populate the canon. This fact is underscored by one “Pablo-matic” artist, Kaleta Doolin, who made A Woman on Every Page (2018) by slicing out a vaginal void from every page of H.W. Janson’s landmark textbook History of Art, first published in 1962 and still updated and taught today. The book is shown open to a page bearing the image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). But rewriting is one matter, and recklessly argued hot takes, entirely another. “It’s Pablomatic” falls into the latter category, offering works that allegedly contend with Picasso’s legacy in some way, but in fact have other references. There’s a Faith Ringgold painting that refers directly to an Henri Matisse canvas, for example, and a Nina Chanel Abney work

that pays homage to a Manet. Picasso, who physically and emotionally abused women in his orbit while also using them as his muses, is deserving of criticism, but shoehorning in tangentially related works such as these is a weird way to do that. There were brave women who exposed Picasso’s bad behavior during his lifetime, among them painter Françoise Gilot, who, after a decade-long relationship with him, wrote a revealing book about it. But the curators don’t even include any of her work, an omission that became all the more glaring when she died just days after the show opened. “It’s Pablo-matic” is proof that the field of art history is changing, for better and for worse. Museums are somewhat newly self-reflexive about their role in shaping the culture and the discourse, and are working hard to stay relevant and expand the canon— and to grow their audiences. Once, museums were places to engage with meaning and beauty, to try to comprehend the human experience across time and cultures. Now, nuance is being swapped out for one-liners

in an effort toward an elusive kind of “accessibility.” “Rear View,” a cheeky meditation on artists’ obsession with plump rumps across the years at LGDR gallery in Manhattan, is also born from this tendency. This group show would have been dismissible as flimsy had the gallery not secured so many first-class artworks. There was a stunning Barkley Hendricks painting of a nude woman from behind, one arm holding the other, and a fabulous Félix Vallotton image of a female backside that doubles as a study of contrapposto. Prime examples of works by market darlings like Issy Wood and Jenna Gribbon were also on view, offering feminist perspectives. Every so often, a sharp juxtaposition appeared: the Vallotton was cast beside the Yoko Ono film Bottoms (1966), a series of closeups of men’s and women’s derrieres. In this context, the Ono film felt like a more equitable and less horny alternative to Vallotton’s male gaze. The works were amusing, but I didn’t come away feeling like I learned much about

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The entrance to the exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” 2023, at the Brooklyn Museum.

The query echoes in the phenomenon that ArtReview recently termed the “blockbuster dialogue exhibition,” wherein a lesser-known figure is paired with a famous one, as if to secure the former’s spot in the canon and

Barkley L. Hendricks: Pat’s Back, 1968; in “Rear View.”

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Kaleta Doolin: Improved Janson: A Woman on Every Page #2, 2017; in “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.”

put them on equal footing with a bona fide “master.” Think Tate Modern’s current show about Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian, two pioneering abstractionists whose work has formal similarities, or the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s acclaimed Claude Monet–Joan Mitchell doubleheader. When the pairings are successful, this formula has offered revelatory looks at beloved figures. But in New York this season, two smaller museum exhibitions following the model showed its limits, with tenuous matches for unlike artists. At the Museum of Modern Art, “The Encounter” places Barbara Chase-Riboud’s

Felix Vallotton: Étude de fesses, ca. 1884; in “Rear View.”

and Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures side by side. His are spare, spindly figures; hers are blocky, metallic abstractions. Unlike af Klint and Mondrian or Monet and Mitchell, Chase-Riboud and Giacometti did meet—she visited his Paris studio in 1962. She was 39 years his junior and had just moved to the French capital after becoming the first Black woman to receive an MFA from Yale. The show features works by both artists with titles referring to female Venetians. Giacometti’s Femme de Venise (1956) boasts a slender white figure formed from white plaster; ChaseRiboud’s Standing Black Woman of Venice (1969/2020) is a towering monolith crafted

Jenna Gribbon: Domestic Theatre, 2023; in “Rear View.”

Top: Courtesy Brooklyn Museum (2); Bottom: Courtesy LGDR, New York (3)

these artists or, for that matter, butts. I cringed at the pairing of an Anselm Kiefer photograph of the artist performing a Nazi salute—a work that once caused art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh to label Kiefer “a fascist who thinks he’s antifascist”—and a Carrie Mae Weems shot of the artist herself standing in the doorway of a Louisiana house where multiple white owners held enslaved people as their property. Buttocks appear in both these works, sure, but the reductive framing of keisters as their binding theme feels insensitive. Much-needed attempts to revise the canon and offer retorts to the form it has championed are finally being made. But they’re being done hastily, and worse, as a disservice to the artists (and to nuance in general). This provokes a larger question: What do we want from art history?

Top: Photo Jonathan Dorado; Bottom left: Photo Jonathan Dorado; Bottom right: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/©Fundación Gego

Above, view of the exhibition “The Encounter: Barbara Chase-Riboud/Alberto Giacometti,” 2023, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Below, Barbara ChaseRiboud: Le Manteau (The Cape) or Cleopatra’s Cape, 1973.

from crtshed black bronze. Btt the exhibition also incltdes ChaseRibotd works that don’t have a lot to do with Giacometti’s. One example is the gorgeots 1973 sctlpttre Le Manteau (The Cape) or Cleopatra’s Cape in which braids of rope spill from a strtcttre covered in copper sqtares. This allows her to speak on her own, avoiding the “Pablo-matic” pitfall of framing a woman’s work as a retort to the male canon. Btt the show might have been jtst as effective withott showing any Giacometti works at all. Over at the Frick Collection’s temporary Breter space, a newly commissioned Nicolas Party installation responds to a painting by Rosalba Carriera, whose Italian Rococo pastel portraits are badly in need of a retrospective. Party htng Carriera’s circa-1730 portrait of a man in a pilgrim’s costtme against a mtral of his own: it shows a pastel patterned dress floating and tndtlating in a black void. Two similar images also appear on adjacent walls, both with Party’s own garish paintings of blte- and white-faced people htng atop them. It’s clear that Party reveres Carriera’s sftmato—his floating garments are glossy and ltsh, jtst like her strfaces—btt the similarities end there. Party’s domineering vistal fanfare forces Carriera’s painting into the backgrotnd even as her work overlies one of his. In the end, this feels less like a meeting of minds across centtries than jtst another

feather in Party’s cap, proving that in some “dialogte exhibitions,” one voice will still be lotder than the other.

The #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter ptshed scholars and ctrators to look back at art history for figtres who have been overshadowed, and ever since, each season has boasted a “rediscovery.” The big one this stmmer arotnd was Gego, a modernist sctlptor who fled Nazi Germany for Veneztela in the 1930s. The Gtggenheim rottnda is filled

Gego: Untitled, 1980.

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Two views of the exhibition “Gego: Measuring Infinity,” 2023, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

with an array of delicate geometric sculptures that Gego formed by gently twisting steel into hanging grids and globes. The show began with sculptures of the ’50s formed from painted iron lines that intersect, creating the illusion of movement, but it is her signature sparse nets and weaves, made between 1969 and her death in 1994, that are the exhibition’s stars.

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The Guggenheim version of this traveling show, curated by Pablo León de la Barra and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, generally relies on formalist readings of Gego’s art, pointing out that her sculptures were never just flat, static things. But these abstractions are ripe for plucking from their sociopolitical context, which has been relegated to the indispensable catalogue, as has Gego’s

complex life story. In that book, curator Julieta González, who organized this retrospective’s initial showing at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, positions Gego’s grid-like arrangements as analogies for what was taking place in Caracas at the time: artists were creating networks of their own, often in opposition to the Venezuelan government’s preference for unruly modernist utopianism. It’s revelatory reading. Curiously, almost none of González’s points make it into the Guggenheim galleries. Perhaps this is because the Guggenheim was afraid the nitty gritty of Gego’s context would be tricky to translate across time and cultures. So instead, the show positions her as an artist who “defied categorization,” a zeitgeisty phrase used to describe people and artworks that cross classifications of all kinds. This feels like a giveaway about what this show’s curators—and those of other “rediscovery” retrospectives—are really after: they want art that speaks to the present, not art that enhances or challenges our understanding of the world. Against all this, you have a show by Darrel Ellis, an artist whose story resists traditional narratives of the heroic straight white male artist. In fact, he confronted this myth directly in his work, while also embracing more vulnerable and humble materials. His extraordinary Bronx Museum of the Arts retrospective provides a strong case for why he deserves greater recognition. Before he died of AIDS-related causes in 1992 at age 33, Ellis frequently worked with the photography archive of his father, who was beaten to death by plainclothes police officers not long before the artist was born. Ellis rephotographed his dad’s black-and-white pictures of his family and projected them on uneven plaster surfaces. The resulting photos of those original shots against the plaster appear fractured, split, and rumpled, troubling the images of the past while also reanimating them. It helps that Ellis himself was an art history enthusiast, and thus aware of his relationship to the canon, to which he responded directly. He grew up in the South Bronx, gravitated toward museums in Manhattan, and fell in love with Eugène Delacroix, Edvard Munch, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Curators Antonio Sergio Bessa and Leslie Cozzi point out that Ellis even cribbed compositions from these artists for his own paintings. Take Untitled (After Delacroix), ca. 1980–90, in which Ellis appropriates a Delacroix painting of Hamlet from 1839, with the Frenchman’s rich reds now rendered in brushy black and white. If Delacroix lavished attention on Hamlet, Ellis seems more focused on the man holding Yorick’s dug-up skull. Perhaps Ellis saw in that man a parallel for himself, an exhumer of the past, more than one of history’s protagonists.

Photos David Heald/Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2)

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Top left: Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Top right: Photo Argenis Apolinario/Courtesy Estate of Darrel Ellis, Candice Madey, New Yor, and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles.; Bottom: Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York. and Tokyo

Ellis also copied images of himself photographed by icons such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Allen Frame, whose picture of Ellis standing in a doorway Ellis translated across papers and canvases in

varying sizes, in both ink and acrylic, all hung next to each other in the Bronx Museum show. In Ellis’s hands, the edges of Frame’s photo fade into stark blankness. We’re ultimately left with a ghost—a living memory of a dead

image. Ellis was keenly aware of the specters of art history, and he welcomed them, even as he also distanced himself from them. We’d all be wise to do the same. —Alex Greenberger

Above, view of the exhibition “Darrel Ellis: Regeneration,” 2023, at the Bronx Museum, New York. Left, Darrel Ellis: Self-Portrait After a Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1989.

MIAMI

Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami May 10–October 1 A soulful survey shows the Alabama– born artist at home down south.

In his sculptures, Lonnie Holley utilizes terraneous materials—sand, stone, iron, the detritus buried beneath them—but remains steadily inspired by water. In “I Am a Part of the Wonder,” a song on his recent album Oh

Me Oh My, Holley sings about “the wonders of / a drip of water / falling from the sky.” During a conversation before the opening of his Miami survey show “If You Really Knew,” Holley described to me visible dew on flowers, the palpable Florida humidity. “Every one of these plants is breathing,” he said. “Their roots are acquiring the dampness. A drop of water is a living thing.” It matters that “If You Really Knew” opened in Miami, a city Holley called “one of the most moisty places in America.” One of the artist’s chief concerns—pollution of the planet’s waters—is tangible in the dampness of the place, a point he reiterated in a public conversation with exhibition curator Adeze Wilford: “I’m concerned about the pollution and waste—what’s in the rain once the precipitation draws it up, how that rain mixes with other waters,” Holley said. Where does waste go when the earth can no longer, as Holley describes, “bite and chew it”? For Holley, the earth is a woman—he calls her Mother Universe—and he has spent the better part of his lifetime collecting and transforming into artworks that which she cannot digest. His sculptures of found materials are the heart of this 70-work exhibition, which traces the trajectory of Holley’s 40-plus-year career and aims to capture the breadth of his boundless multidisciplinary practice. Spray-painted canvases, quilt paintings, steel sculptures, and an ongoing screening of I Snuck Off the Slave Ship (a 2018 musical film codirected with

Cyrus Moussavi) together encapsulate at least part of it. The show also includes an extensive selection of pieces by other Black artists from the South that Holley curated himself: Thornton Dial, Mary T. Smith, Hawkins Bolden, Joe Minter, and Miami native Purvis Young—all of whose works, like Holley’s,

Lonnie Holley: Without Skin, 2020.

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were part of the collection of William Arnett, the late collector and founder of Souls Grown Deep Foundation who launched Holley’s career in earnest. (The show serendipitously opened on what would have been Arnett’s 84th birthday). Minter’s Queen (1998), an anthropomorphic figure with chains where her crown would be, takes on new life standing across from Holley’s In the Cocoon (2021), a wire sculpture shaped like a face in profile, a motif repeated throughout his oeuvre. Holley’s figure, like Minter’s, is draped in flotsam—nylon, rope, string, pieces of trees—and the assemblage appears to billow behind them. It might be hair, or a veil to be cast off. Reflecting on the rubble and household objects alchemized in his work and that of the artists shown alongside him, Holley said, “this is material revival: we all revived these materials, as if they were Christ himself. We were the humans who were concerned about them, who took them out of their deathly place.” The exhibition begins with Holley’s sandstone sculptures, made in the 1980s (with “stone that the builder rejected,” he said, alluding to Psalm 118:22). Holley’s discovery of sandstone marked a turning point in his

formative days in Jim Crow–era Birmingham, Alabama. After two of his sister’s children died in a fire, Holley used sandstone—found among the byproducts of a steel foundry he’d explored—to build tombstones for them. These monuments of love were his first artworks, and he made more, experimenting with shapes and materials to establish different kinds of consistency. Arranged on shelves that allow for a close look, Holley’s early sculptures range in size from around 8 to 24 inches and, with his recurring facial profile motifs or shell-like whorls, resemble the stone sculptures of traditions including Mesoamerican statues, royal Egyptian reliquaries, and Mesopotamian reliefs. One diptych comprises sandstone slabs, displayed together like plaques (Untitled, 1980s). On the right, two figures lovingly embrace and look upon a child, under a bright sun with carved swirls that indicate its shine. On the left, a face emerges from a strata of small rectangles, a topography of Holley’s imagination. The sandstones’ contours rhyme with those of Holley’s tall steel sculptures (all Untitled, 2019), which are stacked, like totems, with faces again in profile. They are softly curved

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Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew (I), ca. 1980s.

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and seem to breathe, and they appear again in his spray paint works and quilt paintings (made with acrylic, oil, spray paint, and gesso on quilt over wood). In The Communicators (Honoring Joe Minter), from 2021, the visages are rendered in black and gray, and seem to move, as if Holley has animated Minter’s face, abstractly, over time. In Drifting Souls (2021), a diptych of a mirrored image, the faces float obliquely toward a pink-blue cosmos, like butterflies. In Back to the Spirit (2021), they are overlaid upon each other, swirling like clouds. These faces might be oneiric representations of the soul, visible shadows of the otherwise incorporeal human spirit. Holley speaks often about the violence inflicted upon the planet—specifically, the way it mirrors the racialized terror of hegemonic powers wreaked on vulnerable people, with cruelty born from the same place. But he speaks just as much about his hope for its future. Though titles like Which Tear Drop Will End the Violence? (2022) might serve as warnings, Holley’s images depict states of transcendence and harmony. They look like heaven, but their scenes are set right here, on earth. —Monica Uszerowicz

Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo

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Sam Joseph Ntiro: Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night, 1956; in “African Modernism in America, 1947–67.”

ST. LOUIS

African Modernism in America, 1947-67 ©Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York/Courtesy American Federation of Arts

Kemper Museum March 10 – August 6 Travelhng to: The Phhllhps Collecthon, Washhngton, D.C.; Taft Museum of Art, Chnchnnath A nuanced survey shows how midcentury American patrons shaped African art, and highlights how artists cleverly navigated their expectations.

In 1960, on the occasion of their home country gaining independence from Britain, two Nigerian artists offered less-thancelebratory paintings: one, a cockfight; the other, a rocky landscape. In Folly (1960), Demas Nwoko painted a rooster and a guinea fowl having at it: feathers flying, beaks scraping. The lurid tones visualized clashes within both nationalist politics (green and white for the Nigerian flag) and internationalist, Pan-African ones (black, green, and red for Pan-African flags). In Olumo Rock (1960), Afi Ekong opted for a subtler political allegory, and her oil-on-canvas appeared in the first survey of contemporary African art in the United States, in 1961. With earth-toned impasto strokes, she evoked the craggy entrance to the titular mountain located in Abeokuta, where the Egba people sought

refuge throughout the 19th century as political rivals waged war in the region. Both works sidestep the mythology commonly associated with the romanticized pageantry of decolonization. Like so many of the works that appear alongside them in “African Modernism in America, 1947–67,” they speak to the rich range of artistic responses to the entanglement of midcentury modernism, African nationalism, Black internationalism, and Cold War geopolitics. The 70-work traveling exhibition centers around an impressive selection of oils, but also features sculptures, lithographs, and watercolors from African and diasporic artists. By midcentury, in both North America and Africa, formal colonialism and racial hierarchy were slowly being dismantled for an elusive freedom. The exhibition carefully

contextualizes Black art from this period, focusing on exchanges and complex dynamics between African artists and American patrons. For white art patrons, it was only after World War II that African art came to be seen as “modern,” rather than stuck in some primitive past. Which is ironic, as Western Modernists infamously mined this “primitive” art for their innovative forms. But by midcentury, American philanthropists and the State Department began sponsoring tours for contemporary African artists. They also began funding exhibitions and purchasing African art for private and public collections. The exhibition maps these institutional arteries in its first and second sections, using the artworks exhibited by those institutions or created by Africans when they visited the United States. The first US survey of contemporary African art, the one that featured Ekong’s Olumo Rock, was mounted in 1961 at the Harmon Foundation, a white philanthropic institution whose purported mission was to promote racial equality. The Foundation helped facilitate the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s first acquisition of African art: Sam Joseph Ntiro’s luminous canvas Men Takhng Banana Beer to Brhde by Nhght (1956). At the time, Ntiro was participating in a funded visit to the US. Dozens of other artists did the same across these two decades—among them Ben Enwonwu, Skunder Boghossian, Demas Nwoko, and Ibrahim El-Salahi. Virtuosic examples of their work during this period offer a rare opportunity to see the foremost African modernists in conversation with one another once again. Much of the capital that lubricated these exchanges was dispensed with a specific motivation: Cold War diplomacy. State officials and philanthropists endeavored to win Global South hearts and minds over to liberal democracy by funding exhibition tours or travels in the US. The Harmon Foundation was close to, though never formally affiliated with, the State Department; the Carnegie Corporation enabled Ntiro’s American sojourn, having received clandestine funding from the Central Intelligence Agency for such tours. Looking past these intriguing stories of Cold War espionage, one can tell many histories of African and Black art this way: by tracing the individuals and infrastructures that still shape the conditions of artistic production. These include state officials, paternalist philanthropists, white-led institutions, and curatorial gatekeepers.

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REVIEWS bringing a generation of African artists to American attention. Indeed, the Harmon only began taking an interest in African art after a Nigerian artist, Akinola Lasekan, sent the foundation samples of his work in 1947; they are on display here for the first time since the 1960s. Other pieces show how African American artists made use of funding sources for cultural exchange that were born of the Cold War to spark ongoing engagement with African modernism. John Biggers’s UNESCO-funded tour of West Africa in 1957 was a source of lifelong inspiration for him, and he passed it down through generations as a teacher at Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University). His lively Kumasi Market (1962), we learn, was a favorite of its original collector, Maya Angelou. The exhibition pieces together transatlantic aesthetic exchanges at a moment when African and diasporic artists were experiencing a new kind of visibility. But its narrative is by no means an idealized, triumphant one. Instead, it’s a nuanced look at the ways white-led

institutions and governments utilized African art, and how Black artists both benefited from and were hampered by this support. The show culminates with a new commission by Ndidi Dike, a collage installation titled The Politics of Selection (2022). It’s a tribute to Afi Ekong and many other neglected modernist women artists, curators, and gallerists, made with materials from the Harmon Foundation’s archives. The work echoes the show’s many impressive conservation efforts, among them Ekong’s Olumo Rock, which, like many other works here, is on view for the first time since the mid-20th century. When the Harmon closed in 1967, it donated its holdings to two HBCUs: Fisk University in Nashville, and Hampton University in Virginia. In a rare art history reversal, this trove of African contemporary art was entrusted to Black institutions. Now, this archive of Black modernism can continue to teach us about externally imposed conditions of modernity and the efforts of African and diasporic artists to reshape them. —Merve Fejzula

View of Ndidi Dike’s installation The Politics of Selection, 2022, in “African Modernism in America, 1947–67” at the Kemper Museum, St. Louis.

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Photo Alise O’Brien/Courtesy Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis

I’d argue, in fact, that we can still tell the story of today’s Black art this way: a 2018 study by the Mellon Foundation found that 84 percent of museum leadership, curators, conservators, and educators were white, and another in 2017, from the American Alliance of Museums, found that half of American museum boards were completely white. Rather than framing this Cold War moment as unique, this show draws attention to the continuities that still shape the reception of African and Black art. More important, though, the show sets this dynamic against a parallel history in the third section: the Black institutions, galleries, and collectors equally responsible for this effervescent moment of cultural production. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are the protagonist here: they have long been places where African contemporary art was taken seriously—a fact the show makes plain by displaying some of those items from their collections, alongside work by artists they employed. Meanwhile, groundbreaking gallerists like Merton D. Simpson were responsible for

Above, Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence, 2021, and left, a detail of the bronze sculpture.

Photos Gary Sexton/Courtesy Templon, Brussels and Paris, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2)

SAN FRANCISCO

Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence de Young Museum March 18–October 15 The painter swaps Black figures into European compositions. His new work reveals the pitfalls of this approach.

A towering 13-foot bronze equestrian statue gets its own dedicated room in Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition at the de Young Museum. Modeled after a monument depicting Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart, An Archaeology of Silence (2021) depicts a shirtless dead Black man draped over the saddle of a horse. Here, Wiley unflinchingly portrays the ugly reality of Black soldiers who fought for freedom in the Civil War, only for the survivors to return to a hostile terrain of

continued anti-Black violence. This somber work is a welcome outlier in Wiley’s oeuvre. His current exhibition, which debuted in Venice in 2022 before traveling to Paris and the United States, takes its title from this monumental equestrian. Wiley is better known for idealistic paintings of Black people dressed in designer streetwear and presented in heroic poses typically reserved for their white counterparts in European art history. His 2019 equestrian sculpture,

Rumors of War, places a Black rider boldly gazing down Richmond’s Monument Avenue which, until recently, was lined with statues of Confederate generals. Often, his paintings quote directly from the Western canon; horses, borrowed from an iconography of glory that dates back to the Roman Empire, are a frequent motif. Wiley demands Black representation in the canon and the museum by adhering to the strict artistic formulas that these exclusionary institutions champion. His monumental paintings use naturalism, painterly skill, and intricate details—from curling foliage to designer logos—to fashion his subjects within the long tradition of European court paintings. Surely, these skills helped him secure the presidential portrait commission in 2018 from Barack Obama. In a sense, Wiley trained to paint this portrait of power his entire career; tellingly, his non-presidential paintings look similar to that commission. The former president, like Wiley’s work, has come to exemplify how merely placing a Black person in a position of power is not enough to change the racist status quo. (In addition to his historic victory as the first Black US president, Obama’s legacy also involves brutal deportation policies and a ready embrace of drone strikes.)

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REVIEWS Wiley’s new paintings and sculptures, made between 2021 and 2022, only render the disturbing dynamics of his older pieces more pronounced. “An Archaeology of Silence” makes abundantly clear that reckonings with history cannot be as simplistic as supplanting Black protagonists into narratives and compositions built on imperialism and anti-Blackness. This latest body of work reinterprets scenes of martyrdom, war, and slumber from the European art historical canon. In this, they more or less rehash his “Down” series (2007–09): glowing paintings of Black figures in various states of repose set against jewel-toned florals and foliage. He attributes his return to this subject matter to the summer 2020 global uprisings sparked by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police. When “Down” debuted 15 years ago to an art world even less diverse than the present one, Wiley’s focus on dignified representation long absent from popular visual culture felt urgent. Now his depictions of fallen soldiers, saints, and even Greek gods are set explicitly against the backdrop of systemic violence that has long eluded Wiley’s inquiry. In Christian Martyr Tarcisius (El Hadji Malick Gueye) (2021), Wiley replaces the young boy from Alexandre Falguière’s 1868 marble

Top, Kehinde Wiley: Christian Martyr Tarcisius (El Hadji Malick Gueye), 2022. Rght, Wiley: Reclining Nude in Wooded Setting (Edidiong Ikobah), 2022. Below, view of the exhibition “Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence,” 2023, at the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

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Photo Mark Niedermann. Opposite page: Courtesy Templon, Paris and Brussels (3); Bottom: Photo Gary Sexton/Courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

sculpture with a man he knows. The original work depicts the moment Tarcisius refused to surrender the sacraments he was carrying; for this refusal, he was stoned to death. Here and elsewhere, Wiley borrows compositions concerning sacrifice and martyrdom. But unlike Tarcisius, Saint Cecilia, and Christ—all of whom are referenced in the show—Floyd, whose death inspired the series, was not a martyr who chose to die for a cause. The implication recalls that of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, when she thanked Floyd for “sacrificing [his] life for justice.” Throughout the show, Wiley spares viewers the explicit, bloody gore of death so often circulated online. He depicts his subjects with unwounded skin, echoing the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox belief that the bodies of saints are incorruptible and exempt from the rules of nature reserved for ordinary human bodies. The bronze Dying Gaul, after a Roman Sculpture of the 1st Century (2021) features a Black man in a hoodie in a semi-recumbent pose, supporting himself on one arm as vines wrap around his extended leg. Although it references an ancient Roman sculpture of a gladiator bearing a mortal wound to the chest, replete with intricate blood droplets carved in marble, Wiley’s Dying Gaul has no visible signs of injury. Several of Wiley’s works quote European precedents but keep his subjects largely unharmed. The clothed figure in his painting Reclining Nude in Wooded Setting (Edidiong Ikobah), 2022, lies on a grassy ground with her hips twisted to face the viewer, much like the woman in Victor Karlovich Shtemberg’s work of a similar title. It’s unclear whether she is slain, like many figures in the show, or in repose. This seems like an important distinction. And either way, Wiley’s subject manages to keep her bright white shirt unstained and shoes unscuffed as she lies in dirt. Most of the show seems to gloss over loss, but this is punctuated by Wiley’s Youth Mourning (El Hadji Malick Gueye), After George Clausen, 1916, (2021), a sculpture of a child hunched over on the ground, head in hands. This work, in capturing the feeling of allconsuming, earth-shattering grief, succeeds where much of the exhibition fails. It is decidedly empathetic, and does not endeavor to make metaphor out of tragedy. In the audio guide, Wiley says, “There’s so many opportunities now to talk about lost potential as a means to create a scaffolding for a better future.” By using the visual language of European colonial power and religious iconography without scrutiny, Wiley’s vision of the future is a constrained one. He may play with systems of power, but he does not shatter them. —Harley Wong

RIEHEN, SWITZERLAND

Doris Salcedo Fondation Beyeler May 21–September 17 The Colombian artist’s first museum show in Switzerland prizes the past over her present.

An installation so subtle that it barely appears to exist is a current highlight at the Fondation Beyeler. The museum’s largest gallery space looks empty at first glance— nothing hangs on the walls, and it isn’t immediately obvious what might class as an artwork in the room—until you cast your gaze downward and see slight upflows of water, bubbling into view from beneath the floor. The water slowly takes the form of letters that spell out names and then, just as slowly, disappears. This installation, titled Palimpsest (2013–17), by Doris Salcedo, is an elegant and powerful tribute to the countless people

who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as they attempted to migrate to Europe. As Salcedo has pointed out, these lost souls are countless by design; the European Union does not keep records of their names, denying migrants their humanity. Salcedo has resisted such government callousness for nearly four decades, first in her native Colombia and more recently in work informed by an expanded global view. For five years, she undertook her own research to find the names that appear in Palimpsest, compiling a list of the drowned by way of interviews she conducted. Of the mourning mothers she talked to, Salcedo has said, “it was essential for them to make the names visible, because the pain they were feeling was attached to the specificity and splendor of an irreplaceable life.” Palimpsest marks a departure for Salcedo, who has long preferred to veil the subjects of her work. Take, for example, an untitled installation that opens the exhibition: a line of nine stacks of white collared shirts of various sizes extends just off the center of the room. The shirts have been covered in white plaster, and steel rods have been driven through each stack. This work, made between 1989 and 2014, deals with a massacre of plantation workers in Colombia. As with other works on view here—like pieces from her “Atrabiliarios” series (1992–2004), in which shoes are embedded in a museum wall and obscured by stretched swaths of yellowed

View of the exhibition “Doris Salcedo,” 2023, at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel.

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ST. LOUIS

Monet/ Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape St. Louis Art Museum March 25–June 25 Monet’s vision helped free him from some of painting’s conventions, and this freedom prompted Joan Mitchell and her peers to forsake them more emphatically.

Artists, we are so often told, help us

Two views of the exhibition “Doris Salcedo,” 2023, at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel.

of them several years and even decades old—this is an exhibition also in search of a purpose. Neither a retrospective of the kind mounted by the Guggenheim Museum in 2015 nor a survey with new scholarship about Salcedo’s practice (though there is an exhibition catalogue), it left me wanting more. For an artist whose work makes the world look so different by uncovering the stories of those who could easily be forgotten, it would have been even more moving to see what is currently at the top of Salcedo’s mind and how she might translate that into new work. —Maximilíano Durón

see the world differently. In the case of Claude Monet (1840–1926), this is literally true. Famously, 100 years ago, the French painter underwent surgery to “correct” the cataracts that had been increasingly blurring his vision for a decade or two. After the surgery, though his vision sharpened, colors continued to appear dull and cool. You can see this in the canvases he made as he neared that surgery and post-op. Viewing a painting like The Japanese Bridge (Pont japonais), ca. 1918–24, one assumes that the vibrant chartreuse and heavy dabs of crimson must have looked slightly more naturalistic to the artist—they are so unusual, so different from his earlier, iridescent pastel palettes. In Weeping Willow (Saule pleureur), ca. 1921–22, gestural lines blur the image until it veers into abstraction. Without the title as a guide, the arboreal referents of his arching brushstrokes would hardly be recognizable. In “Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape,” on view at the St. Louis Art Museum through June 25, the enduring impact of Monet’s vision hits hard. I mean both his literal and artistic vision—these were inextricable for the plein air painter. The show

Photos Mark Niedermann (2)

animal skin—clothing is often the only evidence of a person who has been murdered or intentionally disappeared. That trace of them is all that remains. An exhibition text describes the shirts in the sculpture about the Colombian plantation workers as “stripped of their individuality, made uniform, anonymous and interchangeable.” That might read as cold and clinical, but systematic, state-sponsored violence is cold and clinical. For Salcedo, it is important to draw that out. But in her hands, the connection is never overly explicit or didactic. There is a sense of poetry innate to her work, likely drawn from the artist’s own love of writing by the likes of Paul Celan and Ocean Vuong. Salcedo is careful never to replicate the violent atrocities that her work invokes. Instead, she offers a means for the families and communities affected by acts of violence to mourn and grieve, and ultimately process their profound sense of loss. That is best exemplified in two works that make use of flora. A Flor de Piel II (2013–14) consists of chemically preserved rose petals that have been sutured together using surgical thread, and installed like an undulating piece of fabric, covering nearly an entire room. Evocative of a funeral shroud, the grief here is palpable, an embodied pain that can never really be sewn back together and healed. In the next room is the mazelike installation Plegaria Muda (Silent Prayer, from 2008–10) in which mounds of dirt are sandwiched between a pair of stacked tables (the top one being inverted). Between the cracks in the wood, blades of grass poke through. There’s a tension in this work that runs through much of Salcedo’s oeuvre. The dirt rectangles can be read as mass graves: no matter how much we try to cover them up with other structures in order to forget about them, they refuse to be silenced and forgotten. They will sprout up and remind us, and perhaps even destroy the structures we create to destroy them. There’s resonance between Plegaria Muda and the shoe-embedded “Atrabiliarios” pieces: whereas there is a refusal to be forgotten in Plegaria Muda, the “Atrabiliarios” works show how easy it is to forget. The animal skin in them points to how memory can be foggy and start to slip away with each day, month, year. We mustn’t allow that to happen, Salcedo says in her work. This is a beautiful and impactful exhibition—Salcedo’s art is always elegant, commanding, and poignant. As her first museum show in Switzerland, it serves to introduce her to new audiences, especially in Europe. But while it certainly was moving to see many of the works included—most

From left: ©Musée Marmottan Monet, Academie des beaux-arts, Paris; Courtesy Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris/©Estate of Joan Mitchell

Claude Monet: The Japanese Bridge, 1918–24.

highlights the rhymes between his work and that of the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell 21925–1992), focusing specifically on works both artists made in the gardens of Vétheuil, in northern France. In the catalogue, curator Simon Kelly notes that Monet’s late work had a profound impact on Abstract Expressionism more broadly, prompting painter and critic Elaine de Kooning to coin the term “Abstract Impressionism.” The AbEx movement took off across the pond a couple decades after Monet’s death, and it’s clear that Monet charted some kind of path for the movement. The connection is so strong, in fact, that in this show, guessing which paintings were made by whom is not as easy as you’d think. “Monet/Mitchell” ought to be in the curatorial handbook of how to make an argument with objects: their shared sensibility is wholly irrefutable the minute you enter the galleries, and its significance deepens the closer you look, the more you read. This is an elegantly pared-down version of an exhibition that premiered at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris last fall, where some 60 canvases portrayed their shared immersive and intuitive approaches to landscape. Early on, Mitchell claimed a debt to Monet. Mitchell was born in Chicago and active in the New York AbEx movement in the 1950s, but after that, she worked as an expatriate in France

Joan Mitchell: Red Tree, 1976.

for more than 30 years, arguably following in Monet’s footsteps, joining him posthumously in his garden. But eventually and understandably, she grew tired of being bombarded with lazy comparisons to a canonical male artist. In 1957 she stated with characteristic directness that she “liked late Monet but not early.” By this, she meant—whether she realized it or not—that she liked the paintings by the Monet whose vision had grown dull and blurry. Both artists painted on big canvases, often polyptychs, using vibrant colors and gestural lines. For Monet, but never Mitchell, this sometimes meant muddying up the hues in a tumbleweed-like haze. By 1986, she was disavowing his influence, and declared him “not a good colorist.” The muddy blobs help her case. She was sure to heighten her colors: lemon yellow where he might have opted for gold, for example. And certainly, she was more comfortable with raw canvas than he 2the Impressionists were always dodging claims that their works looked “unfinished”). To distance herself from him even further, she began to mispronounce his name intentionally, calling him “Monnet,” to rhyme with “bonnet.” Monet who? Both painters nevertheless drew imagery from the same garden and deliberately abandoned horizon lines, that hallmark of landscape painting. They both created all-over effects, though with Monet, you might glimpse

a fuzzy arch that’s supposed to be a bridge, or a hazy tree that orients you ever so slightly in space. It seems undeniable that Monet’s vision helped free him from some of painting’s conventions, the ones instilled in him during his time at the French academy, and that this freedom prompted Mitchell and her peers to forsake them more emphatically. History rarely proceeds in a linear fashion that allows the tracing of cause and effect. Still, the question of whether a few visually impaired painters changed the history of art forever— remember Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas too!— remains a tempting one. The paintings here seem to make such a trajectory plain as day, and it matters because it has implications about disability I consider political. Too often, the vital contributions of disabled people to history and society are overlooked, or considered exceptional rather than foundational. Too often, the history of innovations born of impairment—the telephone, the curb cut—gets forgotten, and ableism carries on, despite all evidence of its illogic. Too often, blurred vision like Monet’s is described as “bad” or in need of correction; it gets labeled a deficit rather than a valuable alternative perspective. And too often, we look for annals of disability in the margins, when time and again, they are right there, in the canon, altering art history’s course. —Emily Watlington

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Garden of Earthly Delights Suzanne Jackson, whose work a history drawing-cracked wall (2016–19) features on the cover of this issue of Art in America—in a detail of the larger work shown here in full—is profiled in this same issue starting on page 50. From her home in Savannah, Georgia, Jackson told A.i.A. the backstory of her creation on the cover.

The “history” in history drawing is the history of making the drawing. Over the three years I was working on it—it’s a big drawing— the whole process just happens from day to day: you’re adding something new, building it, working through composition and how elements come into the spaces in different ways. Each time you come back to work on it, something new has happened in your life. For me, drawing is easy. I love it. It’s a calming therapy, a spiritual connection. I was really having a good time drawing this. You sometimes hear people say, “Oh, people who make abstract paintings do it because they can’t draw.” I think the opposite is true: for people who can draw, drawing is an easy thing—it’s something traditional and expected. People expect realism, and they enjoy it, because it’s the pleasure of seeing something recognizable. But every element in this drawing is an abstraction, even the things that are supposedly recognizable. I always play with things a little bit, stretch them and have fun with them. That’s just what the hand does. This piece is a little bumpy; it is not supposed to sit flat

on the wall. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve let go of perfection. Ever since I left art school, it’s been about adjusting the rules of art, taking the fundamentals and stretching them into something more exciting. Finding another kind of beauty. My body was going through a lot of changes, becoming fuller, and I was thinking about how a woman’s body becomes “out of shape,” but is also very powerful, and aggressive. It really had to do with women pushing through all this stuff that we have to do. But then also how women get taken for granted: we are not supposed to have knowledge, or power, or intelligence. Or take risks, do things that are new or innovative. I was also thinking about women having been medics, herbalists, the ones who brought babies into the world, and how that was taken away from us by modern medicine, which doesn’t have a clue about our bodies. I was having such a good time [drawing the] animals and insects. I used to collect all these bugs and things that would fall on the ground or come into the studio. I think about the big palmetto bugs that I first saw in 1966 when I was in Venezuela on tour with a dance troupe, staying in the Guadalajara Hilton— we called it the Guadala-Hilton. When I moved to Savannah, I saw palmetto bugs again. They still fascinate me. The cats won’t eat them because they are so nasty. There are parts of environments sneaking in: a little oasis of palm trees and some roots of something else. The cat is based on one of my kitties. And there is a polar bear just above the larger head—you have to look for it. There are birds. There is so much in this earth environment that we still don’t know. So much of nature is disappearing. I think I was putting as many disappearing things as I could into this drawing. I’m still fascinated by nature, like when I was a child and would walk through a garden and everything was bigger than me. I still love that idea. Suzanne Jackson: a history drawingcracked wall, 2016–19.

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From top: Photo Peter Frank Edwards; Photo Timothy Doyon/Courtesy Ortuzar Projects, New York

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