OCTOBER 2023 ARTFORUM

Citation preview

STANLEY BROUWN WALTER DE MARIA PETER McGOUGH ART HISTORY AFTER BLACK STUDIES OCTOBER 2023

I

N

T

E

R

N

A

T

I

O

N

A

L

ALI BANISADR TH E CHANG I NG PAST 11 OCTOB E R–11 NOVE M B E R 2023 · VICTOR IA M I RO · LON DON

Victoria Miro

The Changing Past (detail), 2021 Oil on linen. 182.9 x 243.8 cm, 72 x 96 in © Ali Banisadr. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Jules de Balincourt Sam Gilliam Loie Hollowell Robert Irwin & Mary Corse Sui Jianguo William Monk Paulo Monteiro Yoshitomo Nara Robert Nava Julian Schnabel Scan here to see our exhibitions

delcy morelos

g a l e r i e m a r i a n g o odm a n 79 & 66 rue du Temple 75003 paris

14 ocTober – 21 december 2023

OCTOBER 2023 COLUMNS

FEATURES

BOOKS Kay Gabriel on Greer Lankton’s Sketchbook, September 1977

35

DESIGN Rock Herzog on HGTV

41

ON SITE Daniel Marcus on Allan Sekula’s Fish Story

45

ON SITE Sasha Frere-Jones on Harry Smith’s “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten”

53

TOP TEN Craig Seligman

59

INTERVIEW Folakunle Oshun

204

128

LET’S RIDE: ART HISTORY AFTER BLACK STUDIES Huey Copeland talks with Sampada Aranke and Faye Raquel Gleisser

140

STANDARD BEARER: THE ART OF STANLEY BROUWN Annie Ochmanek

144

PORTFOLIO: PETER McGOUGH Alex Jovanovich

154

EXTREME MEASURES: THE ART OF WALTER DE MARIA Julia Robinson

164

THE PRINCIPLE OF IMPERMANENCE: THE PRESERVATION OF WALTER DE MARIA’S EARTH ROOM Jeffrey Weiss

172

OPENINGS: MARCIN DUDEK Orit Gat

35

REVIEWS 176

172

128

Cover: Detail of Emory Douglas’s back cover for The Black Panther, April 3, 1971. Bobby Hutton. (See page 128.) From top: Page detail from Greer Lankton’s Sketchbook, September 1977 (Primary Information, 2023). Marcin Dudek, Paluch, 2023, digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes 3 seconds. From NEOPLAN, 2023. Bobby Hutton and Bobby Seale during the Black Panther Party demonstration at the California State Capitol, Sacramento, May 2, 1967. Photo: Ward Sharrer/Sacramento Bee. Peter McGough, Misrepresenting Joy, 2022, oil on canvas, 30 × 30".

144

From New York, Stamford, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, Lima, São Paulo, London, Glasgow, Metz, Zurich, Winterthur, Vienna, Berlin, Ghent, Oslo, Mumbai, Colombo, Yongin, Tokyo, and Sydney

CONTRIBUTORS

SAMPADA ARANKE

HUEY COPELAND

FAYE RAQUEL GLEISSER

KAY GABRIEL

PETER McGOUGH

ANNIE OCHMANEK

4

ARTFORUM

SAMPADA ARANKE is an assistant professor in the art history, theory, criticism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and Black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, e-flux, and October. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette, Zachary Fabri, Rashid Johnson, Kambui Olujimi, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and Sable Elyse Smith. Aranke is the recipient of the 2021 Art Journal award for her article “Blackouts and Other Visual Escapes.” Her book Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power (Duke University Press, 2023) examines the ways artists and activists reconceptualized death as a generative visual and political force in the Black Power era. photo: kristie kahns HUEY COPELAND is BFC Presidential Associate Professor of History of Art and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A contributing editor of Artforum, Copeland is the author of Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), in addition to more than sixty articles and interviews, including forthcoming essays on Marcel Duchamp (Museum für Moderne Kunst) and the writing of Afrotropic art histories (Duke University Press). Along with Steven Nelson, Copeland edited Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (Yale University Press, 2023), a Seminar Papers volume that at once aims to undo hegemonic modernist narratives in the West and to move toward the discipline’s intersectional futures. The same ambition characterizes Copeland’s book of collected writings forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons. FAYE RAQUEL GLEISSER is an art historian and curator based in Bloomington, Indiana, where she is associate professor of contemporary art and critical theory and an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications including Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, and the Journal of Visual Culture, as well as in exhibition catalogues for the Propeller Group (at Prospect.5: “Yesterday we said tomorrow”) and “Out of Easy Reach.” (at Indiana University Bloomington’s Grunwald Gallery in 2018). She is the author of Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), which analyzes the relationship between state power, policing, and artists’ use of guerrilla tactics in US-based conceptual and performance art. Gleisser is currently a CAHI/Kinsey Institute Research Fellow, examining the history and surveillance of hormones

and hormonal management and how artists navigate somatic knowledge under these conditions. In this issue, Aranke, Copeland, and Gleisser discuss Black studies and new arthistorical approaches. KAY GABRIEL is a writer based in New York. She is the author of A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat, 2022) and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021; Nightboat, 2023). With Andrea Abi-Karam she coedited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She is the editorial director at the Poetry Project, where she edits the Poetry Project Newsletter. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, Dissent, The Nation, Post45 Contemporaries, Social Text, and the Yale Review. She is currently working on her first novel, Doll Food. In this issue, Gabriel considers the early work of Greer Lankton. photo: tess mayer PETER McGOUGH is a painter, photographer, filmmaker, and writer. His highly affecting and critically acclaimed memoir, I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene in Downtown New York in the 1980s (Pantheon Books), was released in 2019. His most ambitious artwork to date, The Oscar Wilde Temple, 2017/2018–19, was exhibited at London’s Studio Voltaire in 2018 and will appear in a forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern, in the same city. As part of a previous collaborative endeavor, McGough showed at numerous galleries and museums across the world, including in three Whitney Biennials. In these pages, the artist presents a portfolio of new and recent works. photo: kate simon ANNIE OCHMANEK is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Columbia University, where she is currently a Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Fellow. Her writings on Minimal sculpture’s relations of production and afterlives of Conceptual art have appeared in Artforum, Domus, Texte zur Kunst, and in exhibition catalogues for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Artists Space and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York; and Z33 Hasselt, Belgium. A former curatorial assistant at moma and former associate editor of Artforum, Ochmanek is a coeditor of the 2021 October Files volume on Donald Judd (MIT Press) and an editor for the Paris- and New York–based journal May Revue. Her dissertation research on artists’ and poets’ experiments with communication in the late 1960s has been supported by the Association for Low Countries Studies, the Institute français, Terra Foundation for American Art, and UC San Diego. In this issue, Ochmanek reviews the stanley brouwn exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and Dia Beacon, New York. photo: michele abeles

MARK BRADFORD

29 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 10 FEBRUARY 2024 MONACO The Hu nter s Ret u r n to t he C a st l e (det a i l) , 2 0 2 0, mi xe d med i a on c a nva s, 36 8 . 5 × 3 9 0. 5 × 5 . 2 c m / 145 1/8 × 15 3 3/4 × 2 in © Ma r k Br a d ford . P h oto : Stef a n A lte nb u rg er P h oto gr a p hy Zür i c h

NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I’VE SEEN

A s f a r a s p os si b l e (d eta i l) , 2 0 2 3 , i n k a n d s cre en p r i nt on ge ss oe d f i b e rg la s s, uniq ue , 170. 2 × 127 × 3 . 5 c m / 6 7 × 5 0 × 1 3/8 in © Lo rna S imp so n. Photo : James Wan g

LORNA SIMPSON

30 SEPTEMBER – 22 DECEMBER LIMMATSTRASSE, ZURICH

AVERY SINGER

10 OCTOBER – 22 DECEMBER LONDON

Deepfake Marcy (detail), 2023, acrylic on canvas stretched over aluminium panel, 216.5 × 241.9 × 5.3 / 85 ¼ × 95 ¼ × 2 1/8 in © Avery Singer. Photo: Lance Brewer

FREE FALL

I g ot b rot h er s A L L OVA t h e wor l d b u t th ey forget we’re re lated (d eta i l ), 20 23 , a c ry l ic o n c a nva s, 2 1 3. 4 × 24 3.8 × 7.9 c m / 8 4 × 9 6 × 3 1/8 i n © He n r y Tay l or. P h oto: Kei t h Lub ow

HENRY TAYLOR

FROM SUGAR TO SHIT

14 OCTOBER 2023 – 7 JANUARY 2024 PARIS

MICHAEL SNOW SATURDAYS, 11AM–6PM THROUGH DECEMBER 16

Pictured: Michael Snow, The Viewing of Six New Works, 2012, 7 looped video projections, silent

PAUL McCARTHY Them as Was Is

Santa with Butt Plug, 2009 – 2012, steel, fibreglass (red), 609.6 × 315 × 304.8 cm.; 240 × 124 × 120 in. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

September 13 – October 21, 2023 Potsdamer Straße 77-87 10785 Berlin maxhetzler.com

F R A N K STELLA

Indian Birds

O C TO BE R 4 – D E C E M BE R 9, 2 0 2 3

4 5 EA ST 78TH STRE E T

MNUCHI N GA LLERY

N E W YORK , NY 10 075

T: + 1 2 12 8 61 0 0 2 0

MNUCH I NGA LLERY.COM

Frank Stella, Maha-lat, 5.5x, 1978–79, mixed media on metal relief, 87 3/4 × 111 × 38 1/2 inches (222.9 × 281.9 × 97.8 cm) Photography by Bill Orcutt © 2023 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JOHN ZURIER Sleeping Horses

GALERIE NORDENHAKE Mexico City

August 31- October 28

ARTFORUM Media, LLC, is owned and published by Penske Media Corporation

Editor David Velasco Managing Editor Jeff Gibson Executive Editors Elizabeth Schambelan, Lloyd Wise Reviews Editor Alex Jovanovich Senior Editors, Artforum.com Zack Hatfield, Chloe Wyma Associate Editor, International Kate Sutton Associate Editor Sophie Fox Assistant Editor Julia Ribeiro Editorial Assistant, Artforum.com Donasia Tillery International Reviews Barry Schwabsky Research Madeline Casteel, Mika Lee Design Director Alex Lesy Photo Director Chandra Glick Photo Editor Jessica Butler Associate Producer, Digital Brian J. Green Engagement Editor Emma Weinman News Desk/Copy Chief Polly Watson Copy Editors James Camp, Mike Laws, Thaddeus Rutkowski Artforum.com.cn Associate Publisher Sirui Zhang Editor Du Keke Assistant Editor You Feng Marketing Associate Ruishi Ge Contributing Editor Zhang Hanlu

Publisher Danielle McConnell Associate Publisher Kate Koza Production Manager Tica B. H. Tran Digital Projects Manager Jashin Friedrich Web Development Daniel Burckhardt, Maegan Dolan Circulation and Administrative Director Melissa Mudry Circulation Associates Kiara Alvarado, Courtney Garvin Business Manager Kanduu Ashley-Minott Business Associate Mary Raap

Canada Kate Fox Tel (212) 475 4000 Email: [email protected] China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Singapore Sirui Zhang Tel +86 155 2297 6971 Email: [email protected] Ruishi Ge Tel +86 155 4119 1668 Email: [email protected] France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria Melanie Facchetti Tel +33 (0)6 84 03 08 99 Email: [email protected] 18

ARTFORUM

DAN FEINBERG Vice President, Associate General Counsel

GEORGE GROBAR Chief Operating Officer SARLINA SEE Chief Accounting Officer

DENISE TOOMAN Vice President, Marketing, Strategic Solutions Group

CRAIG PERREAULT Chief Digital Officer

GABRIEL KOEN Vice President, Technology

TODD GREENE EVP, Business Affairs and Chief Legal Officer

GRETA SHAFRAZIAN Vice President, Business Intelligence

PAUL RAINEY EVP, Operations & Finance

JENNY CONNELLY EVP, Product & Engineering KEN DELALCAZAR EVP, Finance DEBASHISH GHOSH Managing Director, International Markets

DAVID ROBERSON Senior Vice President, Subscriptions DOUG BANDES Senior Vice President, Partnerships PMC Live FRANK McCALLICK Senior Vice President, Global Tax

Artforum International @Artforum @Artforum

ADVERTISING

West Coast, Southwest, US Shannon Timms Tel (323) 633 1972 Email: [email protected]

GERRY BYRNE Vice Chairman

DAN OWEN EVP, GM of Strategic Industry Group

Publisher Emeritus Anthony Korner

Senior Advertising Executive Kate Fox Advertising Manager/Production Micaela Houtkin Digital Advertising Associate Serena Warren Design Assistant Marta Sharapova

COURTNEY GOLDSTEIN Vice President, Human Resources

TOM FINN EVP, Operations & Finance

Editor at Large Jack Bankowsky Contributing Editors Jan Avgikos, Daniel Birnbaum, Claire Bishop, Yve-Alain Bois, Dennis Cooper, Huey Copeland, Thomas Crow, Johanna Fateman, David Frankel, Tim Griffin, Bruce Hainley, Joan Kee, John Kelsey, Donald Kuspit, Rhonda Lieberman, Greil Marcus, James Meyer, Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ida Panicelli, John Rajchman, David Rimanelli, Katy Siegel, Amy Taubin, Philip Tinari, Anne M. Wagner

New York Editorial and Business Offices 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Tel (212) 475 4000 Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

JAY PENSKE Chairman & CEO

Germany, Poland Jessica Aimufua Tel +49 (0)1 517 0076 321 Email: [email protected] India, Middle East, Turkey Gayatri Uppal Tel +91 9810182153 Email: [email protected] Italy, Switzerland, Greece Georgia Cadenazzi Tel and Fax +39 (02) 545 75 01 Cell: +39 338 621 3851 Email: [email protected] Latin America, Spain, Portugal Ana Castella Tel +52 55 2729 5732 Email: [email protected] United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand Louise O’Kelly Tel +44 (0)79 177 44 209 Email: [email protected]

JESSICA KADDEN Senior Vice President, Programmatic Sales JUDITH R. MARGOLIN Senior Vice President, Deputy General Counsel LAUREN UTECHT Senior Vice President, Human Resources MARISSA O’HARE Senior Vice President, Business Development NELSON ANDERSON Senior Vice President, Creative

JAMIE MILES Vice President, eCommerce JAMES KIERNAN Head of Industry, Agency Development JENNIFER GARBER Head of Industry, Travel JERRY RUIZ Vice President, Acquisitions and Operations JONI ANTONACCI Vice President, Production Operations KAREN REED Vice President, Finance KATRINA BARLOW Vice President, Business Development KAY SWIFT Vice President, Information Technology KEIR McMULLEN Vice President, Human Resources MIKE YE Vice President, Strategic Planning & Acquisitions NICI CATTON Vice President, Product Delivery RICHARD HAN Vice President, International Sales SCOTT GINSBERG Head of Industry, Performance Marketing SONAL JAIN Vice President, Associate General Counsel TOM McGINNIS Vice President, Corporate Controller

ADRIAN WHITE Vice President, Associate General Counsel ANNE DOYLE Vice President, Human Resources ASHLEY SNYDER Vice President, Associate General Counsel BRIAN LEVINE Vice President, Revenue Operations BRIAN VRABEL Head of Industry, CPG and Health BROOKE JAFFE Vice President, Public Affairs & Strategy CONSTANCE EJUMA Vice President, SEO

LOS ANGELES OFFICE 11175 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90025 310.321.5000

NEW YORK OFFICE 475 Fifth Avenue NEW YORK, NY 10017 212.213.1900

Lisa Brice, Untitled (detail), 2023. Oil on tracing paper 50.2 x 38 cm. © Lisa Brice. Photo: Mark Blower

Lisa Brice

Lives and Works Paris October—December 2023

LOUIS FRATINO In bed and abroad

OCTOBER 27–DECEMBER 9 | SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO.

Sprüth Magers Berlin Bernd & Hilla Becher September – November Pamela Rosenkranz Alien Blue September – November Nora Turato NOT YOUR USUAL SELF? September – November London Sylvie Fleury S.F. September – November Peter Fischli David Weiss November – January Los Angeles Analia Saban Synthetic Self September – October Louise Lawler GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS November – January New York Kaari Upson Body as Landscape September – October spruethmagers.com

O CTO BER 27–DECEM BER 15, 2023

Women

Rina Banerjee Aviv Benn Louise Bonnet Louise Bourgeois Caitlin Cherry Emma Cousin Elizabeth Glaessner Katya Grokhovsky Payton Harris-Woodard Maryam Hoseini Hayv Kahraman Barbara Kendrick Maria Lassnig

MJ Lounsberry Wangechi Mutu Gladys Nilsson Christina Quarles Christina Ramberg Celeste Rapone Karen Seapker Tschabalala Self Cindy Sherman Nicola Tyson Robin F. Williams Caleb Yono Mary Lou Zelazny

on the Verge

C U R AT E D B Y L IS A WAIN W R I G H T

PA U L A R E G O D ra w i n g B r e a t h

Paula Rego, Feeding, 2001, ink and wash on paper, 42 x 59 cm © Ostrich Arts Ltd. | Courtesy Ostrich Arts Ltd and Victoria Miro

13 October - 18 November 2023

Galerie Lelong & Co .

| 1 3 r u e d e Té h é r a n 7 5 0 0 8 Pa r i s | g a l e r i e - l e l o n g . c o m

SAMUEL LEVI JONES Longing

Samuel Levi Jones, Hidden Face, 2023, portfolios on canvas, 177.8 x 152.4 cm © Samuel Levi Jones | Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

13 October - 18 November 2023

Galerie Lelong & Co .

| 3 8 a v e n u e M a t i g n o n 7 5 0 0 8 Pa r i s | g a l e r i e - l e l o n g . c o m

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN

GENERAL IDEA / AA BRONSON

OLIVIA PLENDER

MUAC

GENERAL IDEA

KALMAR KONSTMUSEUM

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

GROPIUS-BAU

KALMAR, SWEDEN

2 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 27 MARCH 2024

BERLIN, GERMANY

25 OCTOBER 2023 – 11 FEBRUARY 2024

22 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 14 JANUARY 2024 AUX FRONTIÈRES DE L’AUDIBLE WOLFGANG TILLMANS

FRAC FRANCHE-COMTÉ KAYE DONACHIE

BESANÇON, FRANCE 19 NOVEMBER 2023 – 14 APRIL 2024

SONG FOR THE LAST ACT

FELIPE BAEZA

TO LOOK WITHOUT FEAR ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO (AGO)

PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY

TORONTO, CANADA

CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX, UK

7 APRIL – 1 OCTOBER 2023

13 MAY – 8 OCTOBER 2023

UNRULY FORMS

TO LOOK WITHOUT FEAR

PUBLIC ART FUND

SFMOMA

CITYWIDE THROUGHOUT NEW YORK, CHICAGO, BOSTON IN THE UNITED STATES, AND MEXICO CITY, LEÓN, QUERÉTARO IN MEXICO

LIAM GILLICK FILTERED TIME PERGAMONMUSEUM BERLIN, GERMANY

9 AUGUST – 19 NOVEMBER 2023

SAN FRANCISCO, USA 9 NOVEMBER 2023 – 3 MARCH 2024

6 APRIL – 15 OCTOBER 2023

OSCAR TUAZON WHAT WE NEED KUNSTHALLE BIELEFELD

ALEXANDRA BIRCKEN

RORY PILGRIM

RESETNOW!

TURNER PRIZE 2023

6TH BIENNIAL 2023

BIELEFELD, GERMANY 9 AUGUST – 12 NOVEMBER 2023

TOWNER EASTBOURNE

HAUS DER KUNST

EASTBOURNE, UK

MUNICH, GERMANY

28 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 14 APRIL 2024

7 AUGUST – 29 SEPTEMBER 2023

REBECCA WARREN WADE GUYTON & REBECCA WARREN.

FIONA CONNOR

40TH EVA INTERNATIONAL

THE RAW AND THE COOKED:

LIMERICK, IRELAND

THE POWER OF TRANSFORMATION

31 AUGUST – 29 OCTOBER 2023

BECHTLER STIFTUNG, USTER,

DRAWING SOMETHING UNDER ITSELF

SWITZERLAND

KUNSTVEREIN DÜSSELDORF

30 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 1 APRIL 2024

DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY 23 SEPTEMBER – 26 NOVEMBER 2023

MAUREEN PALEY

WWW.MAUREENPALEY.COM

[email protected]

+44 (0)20 7729 4112

LAURA ANDERSON BARBATA

545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 +1 212 541 4900 marlboroughnewyork.com

Antiguo luto, 1993; charcoal, graphite, and pastel on canvas; 501/2 × 581/2 in. / 128.3 × 148.6 cm photo: Pierre Le Hors

Through October 28

SINGING LEAF

galleria raffaella cortese

milan

via a. stradella 7 ~ 1 ~ 4, milan

edi hila experienced territories september 29 ~ november 4, 2023

albisola superiore

via c. colombo 54, albisola superiore

francesco arena lo starec from october 7, 2023

art fairs

galeries | booth A23

paris+ grand palais éphémère, paris october 20 ~ 22, 2023

main section | white hall, booth 9

artissima oval lingotto, turin november 3 ~ 5, 2023

still a place raffaellacortese.com

a due passi dal mare aedicula.raffaellacortese.com

ADRIAN GHENIE 12 October - 24 November 2023

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY ANTWERP

BEN SLEDSENS Opening Fall 2023

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY ROME

BOOKS

BABY DOLL Kay Gabriel on Greer Lankton’s Sketchbook, September 1977 Sketchbook, September 1977, by Greer Lankton. New York: Primary Information, 2023. 160 pages.

IN SEPTEMBER 1977, a precocious Greer Lankton scribbled in a Chicago suburb. Nineteen, talented, asthmatic, embattled, she described her art practice: “I remember telling Joyce once to excuse my behavior while I’m working on dolls because the excitement overcomes me. I also have found that I don’t need sleep or food when I work just liquids. I work very fast.”  Making dolls was a rare solace to the young Lankton, whose 1977 sketchbook Primary Information has reproduced in a facsimile edition, released this month. One page diagrams her life; a line stretches to a node titled “creation,” under which three more lines lead to “Dancing,” “Dollmaking,” and “cross-sex.” These nodes stand in contrast with the others on the page: “self torture,” “Mother,” and “Speeding up life to get it over with.” It’s an endearing moment of reflection from a young woman at a pivotal moment—pre-notoriety, weighing a sex change. Artmaking and transition appear as related but

distinct activities, nonidentical and catalytic of each other, as if pursuing one might hasten the other. The sketchbook’s publication arrives at a critical juncture: Nearly three decades after Lankton’s untimely death in 1996, her work is enjoying a serious revival. Of course it is. Masturbating by the subway, sporting a crown of thorns, strung out, painted, dying, bloated, as sick and fabulous as life itself: Lankton’s dolls provoke devotion. In 2014, Participant Inc. exhibited her work for the first time in New York since her death. That show— I remember my own instant conversion—imprinted Lankton onto a fresh generation of transsexuals or soon-to-be transsexuals and chasers and other admirers. An exhibition last year at New York’s Company Gallery confirmed the faith, complete with a photograph of a dollified transsexual Jesus (JESUS/MARY, 1989) and a sculpture of red pumps impaled with bloodied nails designed to leave stigmata in the feet (JESUS’S CHACHA HEELS, 1986). Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory, which hosts a permanent installation of her final work, It’s All About ME, not you, 1996, received a grant to

Spread from Greer Lankton’s Sketchbook, September 1977 (Primary Information, 2023).

digitize its entire collection of Lanktoniana, which it released publicly in 2022. New Yorkers have been spoiled for shows, but now anybody in any place can view photos of the dollmaker and her unruly creations across her truncated thirty-eight years.  If audiences are feeling Lankton fever, what does her teen notebook—its speedy, stimulated handwriting and skeletal illustrated women, its adoring nods to Candy Darling and Maria Tallchief—indicate about her practice? The intrigue and scandal of Lankton’s hard living sometimes clarify and sometimes cloud what her dollmaking was all about. Lankton attributed “bad habits” to her figures, perceptible in their grotesque faces and sickly, attractive shapes. Certainly they get some of that from their mother-manufacturer and her social world, so surely there’s at least a distant biographical relationship between the doll and her dolls. On the other hand, curators and writers during Lankton’s lifetime and since have struggled to write about her art without stigmatizing her trans status, her anorexia, or her drug use, stagewhispered about in a basically moral tone. (“Former East Village artist Greer Lankton makes kitsch mannequin busts of Candy Darling and other transvestites,” sneered a reviewer of the 1995 Whitney Biennial— everything kind of sounds like that.) The result is an overly biographical interpretation of her work that tends to both elide her substantial personal struggle for a dignified life and treat her prolific artistic output as sceney, cross-dressed shock, as if she hadn’t honed her aesthetic with extreme specificity. Fabric stretched over a wire frame can look like anything. In Lankton’s hands, it looks like nothing else. Or rather, as Gary Indiana wrote lovingly in 1984, her dolls look as if “they have all been ripped apart, mucked around with, and pieced back together in the middle past. They have learned to live with an unalterable strangeness.” Your shock is your problem. Lankton did everything she did with precision. “It’s impossible to keep a constant record of experience,” she writes. In a way, the sketchbook’s rapid transcription of ideas, feelings, and meals recalls Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger, 1972–74—a durational, journal-based project of Acconci-generation Conceptualism that proceeds from the premise that volumes of thought under extreme psychic circumstance will produce insight. Social and psychological pressure was key to the production of Lankton’s insights, too: “The rich keep the poor in ‘their’ place by withholding knowledge that is beneficial, by keeping the price of that knowledge above a level that a poor or average person is allowed to pay.” The drive for knowledge courses through Lankton’s notations; so does a wide-ranging antagonism. “Limits for growth are set mostly by one’s perception,” she writes, “very evident in American art that we saw at museums.” She felt keenly the limits of others’ imaginations and the abrasiveness of her own, largely isolated, curiosity. After this torrent of reflections, she pivots to thinking about hormone therapy, and her sketches move in a OCTOBER 2023 35

decidedly transsexual direction. An illustration follows of a wire skeleton with blue lips, ears, and eye shadow— something between a self-portrait and a plan for dollmaking—against a lithe figure pictured in the distance from behind with arms raised. And a caption: “I was so surprised to see myself on Video Tape Dancing.” Previously, Lankton noted the stares of others and the weight of their expectation. “It’s not the drag that sinks the queen it’s the acceptance of the guilt and shame one feels one must have . . . put out by parents, peers, media doctors, moralist etc. etc.” In the grip of others’ perception, Lankton shrinks. Catching a glimpse of herself looking girlish, she expands again.  The young Lankton collected evidence of other transsexuals. “My constant need to save anything to do with sex change,” she notes in one column. Susan Stryker’s 2019 interview with the NYC Trans Oral History Project suggests a pattern of young people in the ’60s and ’70s collecting TS documentation: “I paid a lot of attention to the Renee Richards story and it was in newspaper coverage about Renee Richards that is like, ‘Most Famous

Transsexual Since Christine Jorgensen in the 1950s,’” Stryker says. Richards and Jorgensen show up in Lankton’s pantheon; somewhat closer to her style, so do Darling and Canary Conn.  There’s another series of possible self-portraits, the subject clothed and nude, seen from behind, next to an anecdote about a friend of a friend telling Lankton she’d “be the perfect transsexual.” “All of the sudden my scrapbook makes sense,” she says in an apparent epiphany. Then a further series of captioned sketches, mostly bony, striking faces, painted women with their hair combed back. “If you can be a women [sic] at 20,” she asks, “can you at 60.” The faces become both more feminine—framed by longer hair—and more garishly painted, with deep rose blush streaks on their cheekbones and green half-moons above their eyes. “Naturally I’ll be Miss Drama,” she notes. “It’ll be scary   Painful   Long   and disappointing at times,” followed by what appears to be a self-portrait in which a distraught Lankton gazes at her own work. “People will stare but they always have.” And finally: “It’s worth it.” 

It’s striking, even tender, to see Lankton validate herself—committing even to a public ugliness. “As a sex-change many people will discriminate but alas does it really matter,” she writes, both maudlin and determined. In a sense, the line she draws early in the book between creation and dollmaking on the one hand and creation and sex change on the other suggests a lifeaffirming orientation of her work that critics, distracted by “bad habits” and her early death, have largely skirted. If, per Indiana, Lankton’s dolls “have learned to live with an unalterable strangeness,” the emphasis might sit on learning to live, which is another way to understand maladjustment. Life has detonated inside of them. They want too much of it, and they deserve every inch. If there’s a parallel here with an ample transsexual social reality, Lankton suggests it when she paraphrases her reigning icon: “As the late Great Candy said ‘I’ve got a right to live.’ ” n KAY GABRIEL IS A POET AND ESSAYIST LIVING IN NEW YORK. HER MOST RECENT BOOK OF POEMS IS A QUEEN IN BUCKS COUNTY (NIGHTBOAT BOOKS, 2022). (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

Your shock is your problem. Lankton did everything she did with precision.

Three pages from Greer Lankton’s Sketchbook, September 1977 (Primary Information, 2023). 36 ARTFORUM

Leopold Plotek paintings from 1979 – 2021

Leopold Plotek, La Fontaine des Aveugles, 1981 (detail)

October 11 – November 14, 2023

Distillery District · 7 Tank House Lane, Toronto 416 979 1980 · www.corkingallery.com [email protected]

DESIGN

GRAY GARDENS Rock Herzog on HGTV IN 2019, Architectural Digest declared HGTV “an indispensable part of America’s home design culture” and a “juggernaut.” Then along came Covid-19 lockdowns, which radically expanded what our homes had to do for us and what we had to do in them. HGTV, a 24-7 source of interior-design and house-flipping content, became one of the country’s most watched entertainment networks, announcing a gargantuan slate of sixteen new series for 2021. As the channel expanded, so did discussions of the HGTV-ification of our spaces: a phenomenon painfully evident in real-estate listings and the TikToks of influencers buying their first homes. Most of the critiques were directed at a few aesthetic tics: sliding barn doors and farmhouse decor (blame Fixer Upper’s Chip and Joanna Gaines), blah wall colors only a landlord could love, and renos of original hardwood floors replaced with gray plank vinyl flooring. Avocado toast was joined by a rival cliché, “millennial gray”—a chromatic preference seen as a response to “the trauma of Tuscan villa decor, ivy everywhere, and farm-animal-themed kitchens” (to quote Apartment Therapy’s description of the suburban homes many millennials grew up in). While the design was categorized as homogeneous, HGTV was lauded for its diversity, specifically its ability to increase the acceptance of gays and lesbians through LGBTQ+ representation on its shows. This argument was countered—notably by Roxane Gay—and its limits examined as part of a wider scrutiny of how far queer representation really went on HGTV. In 2022, Americans’ acceptance of “gay and lesbian relations” hit its highest percentage point since Gallup started tracking this statistic in 2001, but between 2022 and 2023, the polling company showed that acceptance dropped from 71 to 64 percent, the largest percent change in any “Americans’ opinions on moral issues” category in that time period. Convincing Americans that gays love shiplap might not move the needle for LGBTQ+ acceptance (probably because, well, most gays do not love shiplap). All of which is to say that the HGTV-ification discourse could use some historical and sociopolitical contextualization. HGTV is a millennial too, born in 1994, another time in American history shaped by a virus. It was in that year that hiv/aids became the leading cause of death for Americans ages twenty-five to forty-four. By then, the virus had been decimating the design and architectural industries for more than a decade. Entire firms were destroyed. Many designers who brought the decadence and hedonism of the era’s queer culture into their interiors were lost and with them a liberatory sense that anything and everything was possible in both design and the world.

In the years that followed, as millennials came of age in their parents’ rooster-filled kitchens, another interior-design trend emerged: ’90s blond-wood minimalism, with its focus on muted colors and spare furnishings. Far from the high-tech minimalism replete with chrome and black leather championed in the ’70s by designers like Joseph D’Urso, this version had very different intentions. Austerity in interior design was no doubt a reaction to the loud, colorful, and unabashedly queer aspects of the two preceding decades’ aesthetics. Look at what the excess of the ’70s ran straight into in the ’80s: an ongoing plague and two recessions in three years. As the design world rushed to support those with the virus, pragmatism (read: moneymaking) won out in both the public and private sectors. The tiresome simplicity that traveled, and still travels, under the label minimalism (no real relation to the capital-M art movement) became a driving force in design, taking

up space previously occupied by those lost to hiv/aids. Today we find ourselves in another political moment in which we are meant to choose monochrome dullness. For every TikTok “Before and After” video about somebody painting a multicolor wave across their wall (call that dopamine decor), there’s yet another one of a Tudor Revival turned into a “modern farmhouse”: modern because it’s subdued, free of rural kitsch—in other words, minimalist. And minimalism persists not because it’s embraced by millennials per se, but because it’s embraced by homeowners, house-flippers, and landlords. Individualism is eschewed in resale, while conservative values—which are thriving, as Gallup’s polling shows—celebrate property as a facet of identity. Almost half of millennials in the United States can’t afford to buy a place to live; the modern farmhouse represents the sensibilities of America’s shrinking propertied class. HGTV tells us how to maximize the value of an asset that, for more and more of us, will remain an aspirational pipe dream. Self-expression, in this context, is perceived as frivolous. But maybe that is precisely why we need it. n ROCK HERZOG IS A LOS ANGELES-BASED RESIDENTIAL INTERIOR DESIGNER. FROM 2020 TO 2023, HE BUILT THE TWITTER ACCOUNT COCAINE DECOR, WHICH IS BEING ARCHIVED TO CAPTURE THE IMPACT OF QUEER CREATIVES IN THE DESIGN WORLD OF THE 1970S, ’80S, AND ’90S.

HGTV is a millennial too, born in 1994, another time in American history shaped by a virus.

Fixer Upper, 2013–18, still from a TV show on HGTV. Season 1, episode 10, “Reaching for the Unreachable.” OCTOBER 2023 41

PORTUGAL LISBOA GALERIA 111

Rua Dr. João Soares, 5B, 1600-060 Tel: (+351) 217 977 418 E-mail: [email protected] Website: 111.pt/en/ Tuesday – Saturday 10–7

Until November 4 Heron P. Nogueira November 11 – January 6, 2024 Samuel Rama: INSPIRARE

GALERIA FILOMENA SOARES

Rua da Manutenção, 80 Tel: (+351) 218 624 122 E-mail: [email protected] Website: gfilomenasoares.com Tuesday – Saturday 10–7

Until November 11 Christian Philipp Müller: Global Portraits Until November 11 Ricardo Valentim: Works From the Collection of Armando Martins

GALERIA FRANCISCO FINO

Rua Capitão Leitão, 76 Tel: (+351) 215 842 211 E-mail: [email protected] Website: franciscofino.com Tuesday – Friday 12–7, Saturday 2–7

3+1 ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA

Largo Hintze Ribeiro, 2E – F Tel: (+351) 210 170 765 E-mail: [email protected] Website: 3m1arte.com Tuesday – Friday 2–8, Saturday 11–4

Until November 11 Juan Tessi: Dios me odia November 17 – January 6, 2024 Rita Ferreira: Fac-símile

GALERIA BRUNO MÚRIAS

Rua Capitão Leitão, 10–16, Marvila Tel: (+351) 218 680 241 E-mail: [email protected] Website: brunomurias.com Tuesday – Saturday 2–7, or by appointment

Until November 11 António Júlio Duarte: Guinea-Bissau 1990 November 18 – January 6, 2024 Marcelo Cidade: Realismo do Sul (Southern Realism)

Until October Group Show: Labirintos e abalos sísmicos November Tris Vonna-Michell

LUMIAR CITÉ

Rua Tomás del Negro, 8A Tel: (+351) 217 551 570 E-mail: [email protected] Website: maumaus.org Wednesday – Sunday 3–7, or by appointment

October 14 – January 14, 2024 Alejandro Cesarco: Other Recent Examples

MADRAGOA

Rua dos Navegantes 53 A Tel: (+351) 213 901 699 E-mail: [email protected] Website: galeriamadragoa.pt Wednesday – Saturday 11–7

Until November 4 Luís Lázaro Matos: Divertimento November 9 – January 13, 2024 Annette Barcelo: Live Your Transformation

DOCUMENT

Avenida António Augusto de Aguiar, 11 – 3º Esquerdo Tel: (+351) 918 888 689 E-mail: [email protected] Website: documentspace.com Wednesday – Friday 12–5, Saturday 1–7

Until November 4 Light Waves: Matthew Fischer, Victoria Fu, Mariko Makino, and Sara Greenberger Rafferty November 9 – January 27, 2024 Andrew Norman Wilson

GALERIA DAS SALGADEIRAS

Rua da Atalaia, 12 – 16 Tel: (+351) 213 460 881 E-mail: [email protected] Web: salgadeiras.com Wednesday – Saturday 3–8

Please contact gallery for information.

CRISTINA GUERRA CONTEMPORARY ART

Rua Santo António à Estrela, 33 Tel: (+351) 213 959 559 E-mail: [email protected] Web: cristinaguerra.com/en/ Tuesday – Friday 11–7, Saturday 3–7

Until November 11 João Onofre: Solo Show

ON SITE

THE SEA, THE SEA Daniel Marcus on Allan Sekula’s Fish Story THIS PAST SUMMER, as the world followed the grisly saga of the OceanGate Titan submersible, which vanished in the deep ocean while descending to visit the Titanic, I thought of Allan Sekula. “The sea returns, often in a gothic guise, remembered and forgotten at the same time, always linked to death, but in a strangely disembodied way,” he wrote at the turn of this century, during the first wave of Titanic mania. He meant this in the Freudian sense: a return of the repressed. Sekula marveled at the “lugubrious arrogance” of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, which took obsessive pains to resurrect its doomed subject, constructing the ultimate screen image of Gilded Age hubris and horror. Similarly cathected, OceanGate founder Stockton Rush sought to brand the trip to the Titanic as an elite bonding rite, while refusing safety inspections of the Titan’s bargain-rate hull. Predestined for failure, the vessel imploded catastrophically, killing all five crew members, Rush included. In the abyssal zone, repression gets you only so far. A decade after his death, Sekula’s work has returned in its own right: His magnum opus, Fish Story, 1988–95, is currently on view in full at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, its first complete exhibition in the US in more than two decades. For Sekula, who grew up overlooking the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, California, the neoliberal dream of a frictionless, lag-free economy obscured an enduring—yet disavowed—reliance on the sea. This was the argument of Fish Story, a photographic research project developed in the aftermath of the Cold War, during a period of capitalist reconstruction driven by the expansion of transoceanic shipping. Presented in dual formats, as an exhibition of photographs, texts, and slides and as a long-form publication, Fish Story carries the viewer on a journey across more than a dozen sites, from the shipyards of South Korea to the port cities of Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Veracruz, Barcelona, and Gdańsk, returning intermittently to Los Angeles. More than a simple tour of trade routes, the project explores the survival of low-tech, low-speed transport at the center of the world economy, proceeding from the thesis that a “society of accelerated flows is also in certain key aspects a society of deliberately slow movement.” Although crucial to the digital economy, undergirding the seemingly instantaneous transmission of retail goods, the sea constitutes what Sekula calls a “forgotten space”—that is, a blind spot, out of sight and beyond representation. In a scene that is emblematic of this lacuna, Fish Story opens on the Staten Island Ferry, where a young boy stands before a pair of coin-operated binoculars; facing away from the water, he seems unsure how to look or where to aim the device. Answering his uncertainty, the earliest photographs included in the project seem to have been captured by a Chomskyan

private eye; taken snapshot style with an unsteady hand, they reveal the massing forces of American military and economic power, often in tight coordination. For example, in a photograph shot in Rotterdam during the lead-up to Operation Desert Storm, we spy a convoy of armored trucks belonging to the US VII Army Corps aboard the deck of a merchant ship en route from Stuttgart to the Persian Gulf. Like Freud, Sekula regarded

Allan Sekula, Boy looking at his mother. Staten Island Ferry. New York harbor. February 1990., Cibachrome print, 30 × 20". From Fish Story, 1988–95.

forgetting as a motivated act; in this case, the myth of a new blitzkrieg—war delivered at the press of a button— obscured the deployment of a vast naval apparatus, America’s hard leverage in an era of soft power. Blinkered vision emerges as a major theme of Fish Story. “In the past,” Sekula recalls, “harbor residents were deluded by their senses into thinking that a global economy could be seen and heard and smelled. The wealth of nations would slide by in the channel.” The advent of the container ship permitted this wealth to travel incognito, packed into opaque metal boxes and transported in orderly stacks, like “slightly elongated banknotes.” Extending the writ of opacity to the ship itself, freighters frequently operate under so-called flags of convenience, legal devices allowing companies to

register craft in favorable regulatory jurisdictions, thus securing access to choice labor markets. Today, a ship might be owned by a Japanese leasing company but formally operated from Taiwan, managed by an agent in Dubai, and staffed by Indian officers and crew, all while flying the flag of Panama, Liberia, or the Marshall Islands (these three low-regulation jurisdictions account for more than 40 percent of the world’s merchant fleet). As documented by scholar Laleh Khalili, who contributed a preface to a recent reissue of Fish Story, mariners staffing these vessels face disproportionate odds of being abandoned, cut adrift by absent employers, turned away by coast guards, and “left at sea with no fuel, electricity or potable water.” If the ocean flickers at the edge of visibility— “remembered and forgotten at the same time, always linked to death,” per Sekula—so does the maritime proletariat. Seafarers and dockers emerge as a collective protagonist of Fish Story, portrayed in the throes of a generational struggle against automation, port closures, eroding union density, and other occupational hazards. Traveling to Barcelona in November 1990, for example, the artist met with members of La Coordinadora, a longshoremen’s cooperative that had short-circuited a seniority-based hierarchy by devising a lottery system for distributing jobs to its membership, ensuring that all would receive a modicum of pay. A photographic closeup isolates the implements of the workers’ lottery: wooden tokens, each bearing the number of a corresponding longshoreman, and a humble gourd to draw them from. This DIY system formed part of longer history: During the revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century, anarchist syndicalists had envisioned a “vast stateless association of seafaring and waterfront proletarians of all nations, described as ‘an industrial republic of the ocean,’ or, alternatively, as a workers’ ‘dictatorship of the seven seas,’” Sekula notes. Informed by this older tradition of labor militancy, his photograph of La Coordinadora captures the longshoremen’s refusal—and reversal—of capitalist abstraction, figuring their solidarity as a democratic aggregate. In other episodes, Fish Story tells a tale of proletarian malaise—especially the chapter titled “Middle Passage,” a chronicle of Sekula’s 1993 voyage aboard the M/V Sea-Land Quality, a container ship bound from Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Rotterdam. This was the first time the ship’s US-based officers and crew had made port at Rotterdam’s newly completed ECT/Sea-Land Terminal, an automated dock serviced by robotic gantry cranes and driverless shuttles whose movements were controlled by computer. Aboard the Sea-Land Quality, Sekula registered the workers’ apprehensive mood, noting a “general spirit of . . . mournful and weary anticipation of unemployment” as the vise grip of the shipping OCTOBER 2023 45

Clockwise, from top left: Allan Sekula, U.S. Army VIIth Corps en route from Stuttgart to the Persian Gulf. Prins Johan Frisohaven. Rotterdam, the Netherlands. December 1990., Cibachrome print, 20 × 30". From Fish Story, 1988–95. Allan Sekula, Lottery determining equitable distribution of work. “La Coordinadora” dockers’ union dispatch hall. Barcelona, Spain. November 1990., Cibachrome print, 20 × 30". From Fish Story, 1988–95. Allan Sekula, Filling lifeboat with water equivalent to weight of crew to test the movement of the boat falls before departure. Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. November 1993., Cibachrome print, 30 × 20". From Fish Story, 1988–95. Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black] (detail), 1999–2000, wall text, slide projection of eighty-one 35-mm slides, color, silent, 13 minutes 30 seconds.

The sea constitutes what Sekula calls a “forgotten space”—that is, a blind spot, out of sight and beyond representation.

industry steadily tightened. A handwritten note posted in the engine room voiced the crew’s anxiety in a wry verse: “Question? / De-flagging. / Is it true / Sea-Land will / use Russian officers / with Vietnamese crew? / . . . They couldn’t beat us / so they’ll unemploy us! / God bless corporate America.” Its title invoking the blood-soaked origins of racial capitalism, “Middle Passage” recasts the container ship as a floating penitentiary, where resistance is a choice between escape and mutiny. In a photograph taken from within the Gigeresque cleft between container bays, for instance, we spy the chief mate clambering up a rainslicked row of shipping containers like an inmate scaling a prison wall. The next image shows a soiled white boiler suit discarded on the floor before an open door, as if its wearer had been raptured away. Later in this sequence, a photograph taken in the ship’s engine room isolates a view of a worker’s ear protection, to which an embossed slogan has been added: “i can not be fired / slaves are sold.” Sekula pairs this image with another close-up from the engine room: a shot of a Klingon figurine from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Brandishing a war club, the toy serves as a warning on the crew’s 46 ARTFORUM

behalf, promising blow-for-blow retribution against the corporate overlord. The chapter leaves us to ponder this symbol of a one-man war against the bosses: a rebel without a chance. If the container ship is a prison—“one of the last unequivocal bastions of absolutism,” per Sekula—then how might its captives get free? This question seems to have preoccupied Sekula as Fish Story progressed. He reports a conversation with unemployed Mexican dockworkers in Veracruz, one of the whom jested that they should enlist the Zapatistas, members of an Indigenous insurgency underway in neighboring Chiapas, to conduct “‘fiscal audits’ of the port.” The meaning of this proposal is left hazy—we can only guess how the Zapatista auditors would have handled the port’s ledgers. Pointedly, no photograph corresponds to this episode, which remains spectral in Fish Story, too improbable to visualize. Although the Zapatistas never arrived at the Port of Veracruz, their rebellion proved fateful in other ways, anticipating a global wave of anti-capitalist demonstrations in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the precursors to Occupy Wall Street. Sekula became a participant-

observer in this movement, which he documented in several projects, including his color slide installation Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black], 1999–2000, a group portrait of demonstrators gathered to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference at the infamous “Battle of Seattle.” Here, finally, were capitalism’s self-appointed auditors, braving truncheons and gas grenades in militarized streets and plazas, their slogans loosely adapted from the movement in Chiapas. Sekula died prematurely in August 2013, a few weeks after the mass protests following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman. Had he lived longer, he might have been cheered to witness the longshoremen’s strike on Juneteenth, 2020, which shut down twenty-nine US ports in solidarity with the George Floyd rebellion. Intricately enmeshed, capitalism and empire remain an opaque enterprise, surrounded by steel and silence. Even so, a phantom democracy—anarchism’s “dictatorship of the seven seas”—still clamors to be born. n “Allan Sekula: Fish Story,” organized by William Hernández Luege, is on view at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, through January 21, 2024. DANIEL MARCUS IS ASSOCIATE CURATOR OF EXHIBITIONS AT THE WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS IN COLUMBUS, OHIO.

OCTOBER 19 - NOVEMBER 18, 2023

© JUDITH WHITNEY GODWIN FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS

524 W 26TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10001 TEL 212.924.2178 WWW.BERRYCAMPBELL.COM [email protected]

Roma GALLERIA CONTINUA Via Vittorio Emanuele Orlando 3 Tel: 39 333 387 0553 Web: www.galleriacontinua.com Tues. – Sat. 11–7, by appointment only

Please contact gallery for information.

GAGOSIAN Via Francesco Crispi 16 Tel: 39 06 42 08 64 98 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gagosian.com Tues. – Sat. 10:30–7

MAXXI, MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO (continued) Until February 25, 2024 Nico Vascellari: Falena Until February 25, 2024 Collezione MAXXI: FUORI TUTTO Until March 10, 2024 Time Source: From founts to artwork, from artwork to founts (archive wall) October 25 – February 18, 2024 Jacovittissimevolmente: The Irresistible Art of Humour

Until November 11 Sabine Moritz: August

MONITOR MACRO, MUSEO D’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA ROMA Via Nizza 138 Tel: 39 06 69 62 71 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.museomacro.it FREE ENTRY Tues. – Thurs. 11–8, Fri. – Sat. 11–10, Sun. 11–8, Closed on Mon.

Until October 29 Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel: The Bidet and the Jar Until October 29 Group Show: Vicolo della Penitenza 11/A, curated by Janice Guy Until February 18, 2024 Barrikadenwetter: Image Acts of Insurrection, curated by the Arsenale Institute, Venice Until February 18, 2024 Alexander Brodsky: Depth of Field Until February 18, 2024 Experimental Jetset: AUTONOMIART, EPOVERARCHIZO, OMEMPHISUPERST, UDIOPERAISMO Until March 17, 2024 Alvin Curran: Hear Alvin Here Ongoing RETROFUTURE

MAXXI, MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO Via Guido Reni 4a Tel: 39 06 32 23 453 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.maxxi.art | www.maxxilaquila.art Tues. – Sun. 11–7, Thurs. 11–10

Until October 1 Marisa Merz and Shilpa Gupta (MAXXI L’Aquila) Until October 8 FUORI TUTTO (videogallery) Until October 8 Enzo Cucchi: The Poet and the Magician Until October 15 BioGrounds: For a New Environmental Awareness (Venezia, Isola della Certosa) Until October 15 Collezione MAXXI – Architetture a regola d’arte: From the archives BBPR, Dardi, Monaco Luccichenti, Moretti Until October 15 Time regained: Stories of Jewish architects Until January 7, 2024 Pascale Marthine Tayou: Brainforest

Via degli Aurunci 44, 46, 48 Tel/Fax: 39 06 39 37 80 24 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.monitoronline.org Tues. – Sat. 1–7

Please contact gallery for information.

LORCAN O’NEILL Vicolo Dei Catinari 3 Tel: 06 68 89 29 80 Fax: 39 06 68 38 832 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.lorcanoneill.com Mon. – Fri. 12–8, Sat. 2–8

Until October 28 Matvey Levenstein: 10 New Paintings November 10 – January 2024 Anselm Kiefer: New Works

SANT’ANDREA DE SCAPHIS Via dei Vascellari 69 Tel: 39 06 93 57 68 99 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.santandreadescaphis.com Thurs. – Sat. 12–7, or by appointment

Until November 18 Alex Katz

Z2O GALLERY New location opening soon E-mail: [email protected]

Please contact gallery for information.

Z2O PROJECT Via Baccio Pontelli 16 Tel: 39 33 97 85 39 47 E-mail: [email protected] Mon. – Fri. 1–7, Sat. by appointment only

Please contact gallery for information.

Denmark AROS AARHUS ART MUSEUM

COPENHAGEN CONTEMPORARY

Aros Allé 2, 8000 Aarhus C Tel: +45 87 30 66 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.aros.dk Mon. – Fri. 10–9, Sat. – Sun. 10–5

Refshalevej 173 A, 1432 København K Tel: +45 29 89 80 87 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.copenhagencontemporary.org Wed. – Sun. 11–6, Thu. 11–9

Until October 22 Annette Messager: Désirs désordonnés Until December 3 Susan Philipsz: Study for Strings Sokol Terezín October 7 – January 21, 2024 A Surreal Shock: Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans van Beuningen December 2 – April 7, 2024 A Cosmos Within

Until November 11 Until December 30 Until December 30

Abbas Akhavan: Curtain All James Turrell: Aftershock Yet, it Moves!

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART MARTIN ASBÆK GALLERY Bredgade 23, 1260 Copenhagen K Tel: +45 33 15 40 45 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.martinasbaek.com Tues. – Fri. 11–6, Sat. 11–4

Please contact gallery for information.

Gl. Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk Tel: +45 49 19 07 19 Fax: +45 49 19 35 05 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.louisiana.dk Tues. – Fri. 11–10, Sat. – Sun. and holidays 11–6, Mon. closed

Until October 22 Nan Goldin: Memory Lost Until October 22 Ragnar Kjartansson Until November 26 Cave_bureau October 5 – February 18, 2024 Firelei Báez November 23 – April 7, 2024 Group Show: The Creative Human

GALLERI BO BJERGGAARD Flæsketorvet 85 A, 1711 Copenhagen V Tel: +45 33 93 42 21 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.bjerggaard.com Tues. – Fri. 1–6, Sat. 11–4

Until October 21 Tal R: Sølvbryn October 27 – December 16 Anna Bjerger: New Work

GALLERI SUSANNE OTTESEN Gothersgade 49, 1123 Copenhagen K Tel: +45 33 15 52 44 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.susanneottesen.dk Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–4, Mon. closed

Until December 30 Art Oblige/Kunsten Forpligter: Celebrating 40 Years of Galleri Susanne Ottesen

KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG Kongens Nytorv 1, 1050 Copenhagen K Tel: +45 33 74 46 39 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk Tues. – Fri. 12–8, Sat. – Sun. 11–5

Until January 14, 2024 Group Show: Full of Days Until February 18, 2024 Seeds and Souls: Brook Andrew, Shiraz Bayjoo, Sonia Boyce, Ishita Chakraborty, Annalee Davis, Michelle Eistrup, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Linda Lamignan, and Yvon Ngassam

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Lumière de Paris

September 4 - November 6, 2023 Le Village Royal - 25 Rue Royale, Paris

MAUD MADSEN

OCTOBER 2023

235 EAST 4TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10009

ON SITE

MR. SMITH CAME FROM WASHINGTON Sasha Frere-Jones on Harry Smith

From left: Harry Smith, Film No. 1: A Strange Dream, ca. 1946–48, 16 mm, color, silent, 3 minutes. From Early Abstractions, ca. 1965. Two stills from Harry Smith’s Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic, ca. 1957–62, 16 mm, black-and-white, sound, 66 minutes.

“FRAGMENTS OF A FAITH FORGOTTEN,” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art through January, is the first museum exhibition attempting to corral the work of Harry Smith, and it took five curators—Carol Bove, Dan Byers, Kelly Long, Rani Singh, and Elisabeth Sussman— nine years to get here. It is not surprising that the wait was so long. Smith hated the word artist and consistently abandoned or destroyed his own works. Although landlords were his major antagonists when it came to the archiving and preservation of his oeuvre, Smith’s aversion to paying his rent can be seen as fairly intentional self-sabotage. These days, would Smith be able to live even in farthest Ridgewood? Or in any major city, for that matter? Smith was born in 1923 and raised in Washington State. He and his family spent time around the Lummi Nation and often lived in sparsely populated towns. Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music is often adduced as a central text of what Greil Marcus

calls the “old, weird America,” and this may be a result of the plain fact that Smith lived in that America. Smith was, in fact, completely American—he never left the country, not even at the height of his notoriety in the 1960s. As much as he was a collector, one of the most legendary, it is important to remember that his lived experience was unique, especially in the context of the New York avant-garde community he drifted into during the second half of his life. Most teenagers in the ’30s were not trying to record the dances and rituals of Native American peoples, to put it mildly. Smith curated his very first museum show when he was a teen in Anacortes, Washington. As reported in John Szwed’s essential new biography of Smith, Cosmic Scholar, Smith’s father arranged for him to use a oneroom house owned by his employer, a cannery company. Young Smith used it to display his collection of skeletons, birds’ nests, driftwood, feathers, agates, “sea creatures

If Harry was just fucking around sometimes, would that make his role in the postwar American avant-garde any less important?

in formaldehyde, various other beach findings, and some unidentifiable objects.” Tours were conducted. Since Smith considered himself an anthropologist as much as a painter or filmmaker, there is a strong case to be made that the purest Smith exhibition of all would be a reconstruction of that self-made museum. Or maybe it would be a show of the string figures and paper airplanes he collected, as these are what the first two volumes of his catalogue raisonné document. Those books were put together by Anthology Film Archives in New York. Why would a film preservation society get involved in somebody’s paper-airplane collection? (It was not sent to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, as one of the many tall tales about Smith would have it.) Because when Allen Ginsberg brought Smith’s films to Jonas Mekas in the early ’60s, the second half of Smith’s career began in earnest. Mekas, like many others, thought Smith was a capital-G genius, and his impact on experimental film was not minor. Those films are still part of Anthology’s “Essential Cinema” series, and they screened on a Sunday night in August. Several of them are in the Whitney show, includOCTOBER 2023 53

Above: Harry Smith, Film No. 18: Mahagonny, 1970–80, 16 mm, color, sound, 141 minutes. Left: Patti Smith.

Right: Two stills from Harry Smith’s Film No. 11: Mirror Animations, ca. 1957, 16 mm, color, sound, 3 minutes 35 seconds.

ing Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (ca. 1957–62), the only one of Smith’s films for which he created the soundtrack (mostly from sound effects like water running and birds screeching). He cut out animals and people from store catalogues and magazines and produced some delicate, exalted black-and-white scratchboard drawings. Using stop-motion techniques, Smith shaped a vaguely narrative sixty-six minutes, whose constituent scenes could be described as “Victorian male dances with stiff legs and bonks unidentified symbol with hammer,” followed by “Woman with eyedropper head chases other woman with rifle,” and so on. Heaven and Earth Magic contains the seeds of Monty Python interstitials and a hundred psychedelic cut-ups, and it seems like Smith had a very good time making it. Whether or not his alchemical magic transforms viewers, his high spirits must have been crucial to loosening up the avant-garde hierarchy of the early ’60s. His own explanation of the film is to be taken as seriously as you think it should be: “The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land in terms of Israel, Montreal and the second part depicts the return to earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward the Seventh declared the Great Sewer of London.” (I agree that the watermelon does seem important.) There is a crux here, which permeates the work in “Fragments”: If Harry was just fucking around sometimes, would that make his role in the postwar American avant-garde any less important? He drew patterns from his vast bank of esoteric knowledge, putting faith in symmetry and numerical order, even cuing some images to the average human heartbeat and breathing patterns 54 ARTFORUM

(as he conceived them). I can neither verify nor deny the power of these decisions, but I can confirm that he was also engaged with less gnostic, better-known popular culture. The short films in his Early Abstractions compilation (ca. 1965) are set to Meet the Beatles!, with only the roughest of coordination—and the first of them, the only one included in the Whitney’s presentation, is silent. Film No. 11: Mirror Animations (ca. 1957) is synchronized, in lockstep, with Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso.” Some of the images are thick and rough color blocks made from dye and Vaseline, like a hundred electronica album covers tumbling past, and others are elegant geometric patterns of color, more like the early interstitials of PBS programming. So much of what Smith did in these films became a part of popular culture, even as he was channeling the complexities of Oskar Fischinger, whom he admired and dedicated a film to. Smith could clearly perceive and anticipate trends, even if he wasn’t much concerned with capitalizing on his own good taste. In 1958, he apparently brought William Paley of CBS a reel of animations, including one with a cat cavorting inside the frame. Bassist Percy Heath, a friend from the jazz scene Smith followed closely, reports that Smith never got a gig, but his cat animation showed up on CBS. “He was exploited but he didn’t care,” Heath recounted. “He said he would be famous when he was dead.” Looking through “Fragments,” you’ll see things that feel familiar and unremarkable, but together they embody a remarkable set of connections. You’re seeing the traces of the person who made the connections first and brought a riot of dissimilar notions into a single space. Smith recorded the peyote rituals of the Kiowa tribe and collected the quilts of the Seminole people and

gathered up string figures—the handmade representations of elements and animals that he found, most often, in communities without written language. Smith used black paper and string to fix (literally) these soft logos, passed down for centuries, and recorded the provenance and meaning of each one. What Smith ended up recording most—and possibly most faithfully, though with what intention it is hard to know—was New York City in the ’60s and ’70s. Film No. 14: Late Superimpositions (1964) is just that, several films layered on top of one another. We see Moe Asch of Folkways Records, a butcher shop, and quite a lot of a handsome young man with a mustache with whom Smith wrestles at one point—this turns out to be Peter Fleishman, a student follower of Smith’s who would become known as Peter White Rabbit in his days with the anarchist theater troupe the Diggers in ’60s San Francisco. Smith uses the headlights of cars as something of a visual sprocket set, giving the film more cohesion than you’d expect. Smith said, “I honor it the most of my films, otherwise a not very popular one before 1972.” I find it touching and beautiful and easier to watch than his leaping-watermelon animations, though I honor the entire lot. Late Superimpositions is shown with Brecht and Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) as the soundtrack, with “no attempt at all to synchronize” the elements, per Smith. This could be a bit confusing, because the most ambitious film being played as part of “Fragments” is Film No. 18: Mahagonny, a four-projector film-and-slide presentation completed in 1980 and lasting more than two hours. Shown here in a digital print, it is rarely exhibited and has never been projected as it is in this installation, as Smith once hoped it would be, on the floor of a boxing ring. Unfortunately, the Whitney version does not include the pool tables he also called for. The cast of Mahagonny consists of denizens of the Chelsea Hotel—among them Rosebud Feliu-Pettet (briefly Smith’s “wife,” though that arrangement is hard to pin down), Ginsberg, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mekas, Patti Smith, and others. The action is synchronized with the soundtrack very carefully, though the plot is translated in ways perhaps only Smith could see. According to him, there is a palindromic pattern to the structure of the film, but it’s hard to know how many viewings it would take for that pattern to become tangible. When Smith showed it originally, only “a few hundred people” saw it, partly because he was “high on amphetamines” at one screening and broke many of the glass slides. Adventurous souls can now post up at the Whitney and watch Mahagonny as many times as they can bear; maybe they’ll see if the patterns Smith looked for in everything really do play out beneath all the loops and animals and symbols. Smith turned out to be right, most of the time, even when he wasn’t there. n “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” will be on view October 4 through January 28, 2024 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; travels to the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, November 2024. SASHA FRERE-JONES IS A MUSICIAN AND WRITER WHO LIVES IN THE EAST VILLAGE. HIS MEMOIR EARLIER WAS JUST PUBLISHED BY SEMIOTEXT(E).

PAU L W I N S TA N L E Y THE PERSISTENCE OF THE SUBLIME

vera munro GALERIE VER A

MUNRO

GMBH

&

CO.

KG

HEILWIGSTRASSE 64 • 20249 HAMBURG +49(0)40 474746 • G A L L E R Y @ V E R A M U N R O . D E W W W.V E R A M U N RO. D E

MIAMI THE BASS

2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, 33139 thebass.org [email protected] 305 673 7530

Until October 22 Kerry Phillips: Between the Mundane and the Miraculous October 4 – August 18, 2024 Nam June Paik: The Miami Years November 24 – March 17, 2024 Etel Adnan: Painting Into Space November 24 Social Assembly: Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Hernan Bas, Francesca Dimattio, Cerith Wyn Evans, John Giorno, Emmett Moore, Mark Handforth, and Haegue Yang

DIANA LOWENSTEIN GALLERY 326 NE 61st Street, Miami, 33137 dianalowensteingallery.com [email protected] 786 512 6181

Until November 10 Ómò Oba (HRH) Adétòmíwá A. Gbadébò: Man’s origin; in the vast space and continuous time – We are born + We conquer + We sustain + We are here to stay. = A journey through the eyes of a Yorùbá Prince and his people.

EMERSON DORSCH

5900 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, 33127 emersondorsch.com [email protected] Instagram: @emersondorsch 305 576 1278

October 14 – November 18 Jessica Gispert October 14 – November 18 Eleen Lin

JUPITER CONTEMPORARY

1217 71st Street, Miami Beach, 33141 jupitercontemporary.com [email protected] Instagram: @jupitercontemporary 786 238 7299

October 8 – November 11 Stephanie Pierce: Simple Pleasures

KDR305

790 NW 22nd St, Miami, 33127 kdr305.com [email protected] Instagram: @kdr305 305 282 7177

October 27 – November 18 Nick Irzyk: Total Modeling

THE MARGULIES COLLECTION AT THE WAREHOUSE 591 NW 27th Street, Miami, 33127 margulieswarehouse.com [email protected] 305 576 1051

October 18 Motherwell, Segal, Stella October 18 Helen Levitt: New York Street Photographer 1930s and 1940s October 18 Mimmo Paladino: Painting and Sculpture October 18 Only Sculpture: Bladen, Heizer, Fabro, Perlman, Serra, Tony Smith, Snelson, Tucker, Wilmarth October 18 15 Artists New to the Collection including Jenny Brosinski October 18 Danny Lyon: 100 Photographs

PAN AMERICAN ART

274 NE 67th Street, Miami, 33138 panamericanart.com [email protected] Instagram: @panamericanartprojects 305 751 2550

Until November 4 Leticia Sanchez Toledo: Intimate Pauses Until November 4 White Layers

PIERO ATCHUGARRY GALLERY 5520 NE 4th Avenue Miami, 33137 pieroatchugarry.com [email protected] Instagram: @pieroatchugarrygallery 305 639 8247

Until November 11 mounir fatmi: Whispered Stories of Forgotten Wires Until November 11 Elian Stolarsky: Tracing Silence

PRIMARY

7410 NW Miami Court, Miami, 33150 thisisprimary.com [email protected] Instagram: @primaryprojects 954 296 1675

October 14 – November 11 Oona Brangam-Snell: Junglebar

PAT PERRY

HASHIMOTO CONTEMPORARY L O S A N G E L E S | OCTOBER 2023

TOP TEN

Craig Seligman Photo: Daniel Nicoletta

Craig Seligman is the author of Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Counterpoint, 2004) and Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag (PublicAffairs, 2023). He lives in Brooklyn.

1

3

PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME Ruinously mobbed for most of the year, but, but . . . Keats died overlooking the Spanish Steps, which are to architecture what the Odes are to verse.

2

HENRI ROUSSEAU, LA BOHÉMIENNE ENDORMIE (THE SLEEPING GYPSY), 1897 When I was young, my family would drive from Louisiana to Long Island every summer to see my cousins, and I would take the train in to Manhattan to wander the old Museum of Modern Art. I always returned to this inexplicable painting, which has followed me, in poster or postcard form, to every place I’ve lived. Now that moma has become—like everything else conceived for the public good (museums, universities, hospitals)—a profit center, I stay away. But The Sleeping Gypsy is still with me as my computer-screen wallpaper.

1

3

4

1. Church of Trinità dei Monti and Spanish Steps, Piazza di Spagna, Rome, 1955. Photo: Mario De Biasi/Mondadori/Getty Images. 2. Henri Rousseau, La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy), 1897, oil on canvas, 51 × 79". 3. Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, ca. 1540, oil on wood, 40 1⁄8 × 33 1⁄2". 4. G. W. Pabst, Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), 1929, 35 mm, black-and-white, silent, 131 minutes. Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) and Lulu (Louise Brooks). 5. Cover of the New Yorker, June 13, 1953. 2

5

HENRY JAMES ON BRONZINO IN THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (1902) In the era of the Übermensch, the mannered Master chose the Mannerist master’s Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, ca. 1540, as the model for Milly Theale, a figure of superhuman goodness—perversely, since “splendid as she is,” observes the suitor who brings James’s heroine to Bronzino’s painting, “one doubts if she was good.” Milly, touched to tears and fading already, doesn’t want to see the likeness, but she can’t avoid it: “a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead.”

4

G. W. PABST, DIE BÜCHSE DER PANDORA (PANDORA’S BOX), 1929 Seeing the Expressionist masterwork for the second or third time at a midnight screening in London during the blistering summer of 1976, I was irked when the stoned audience laughed at the antiquated gestures of the silent-movie actors. The laughter waned. By the time Jack the Ripper entered near the end, there was dead silence, which continued afterward as we made our way out onto Portobello Road.

5

WILLIAM SHAWN’S NEW YORKER The magazine was derided during the 1980s as boring. And Mr. Shawn, its editor until 1987, is retrospectively, and probably justly, regarded as tyrannical and kind of crazy. But if you thumb through any of the dense issues from the first three decades of his tenure, you may be amazed to discover how lavish, how rich American culture once was. OCTOBER 2023 59

8

9

6

5

6

MINA, “SE TELEFONANDO” (IF BY CALLING), 1966 Possibly the career apex of possibly the greatest diva of twentieth-century pop and drag-queen style (and, as a bonus, a workout in Italian verb tenses). A thrilling montage of clips of Alain Delon and Monica Vitti—at the apex of their beauty—from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 L’eclisse, compiled to accompany the song (music by Ennio Morricone, who also produced), invites you down the best of all YouTube rabbit holes, where you’ll find who knows how many monumental videos of Mina herself.

7 6

THE VOICE OF NIMET Nimet Habachy has been classical WQXR’s DJ to insomniac New Yorkers since 1980. The first time I heard one of the syrupy monologues she starts her late-night shift with, I cringed. Now I don’t want the music to begin. That voluptuous purr, curling easily around the vowels of apparently every language, makes me unfailingly, unreasonably happy.

8

ALPANA BAWA In the ’80s, I thought it was cool to wear only black, white, and red. In 1990, when I moved back to New York, I discovered Alpana’s downtown shop (which is now upstate). Her shirts—fever dreams of psychedelic embroidery over multihued Indian fabric— changed my life. Or at least my look.

6. Mina between takes of the TV show Canzonissima, Rome, 1960. Photo: Reporters Associati & Archivi/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images. 7. Nimet Habachy, 2019. Photo: Matthew Septimus. 8. Look from Alpana Bawa’s Fall/Winter 1998 collection. 9. Program cover for Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, 1968, in a production directed by Kenneth Elliott at WPA Theatre, New York, 1996. 10. Emily Nunn, Sandy Springs, GA, February 28, 2022. Photo: Melissa Golden/The New York Times.

9

DAVID GREENSPAN AS HAROLD IN THE BOYS IN THE BAND AT MANHATTAN’S NOW-DEFUNCT WPA THEATRE IN 1996 Every year or so, Greenspan, the most eccentric of great New York actors, does an impossibly virtuosic, arguably demented turn, like his solo rendition of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (eight characters, six hours) in 2017. He’s an exceptional writer, too. What stays with me most, though, is his creepy, otherworldly Harold, animated by the layers of malice he’d unearthed beneath all the malice that was already there on the surface.

10

10

60 ARTFORUM

7

EMILY NUNN’S DEPARTMENT OF SALAD Until Pauline Kael, nobody thought of film writing as a vehicle for addressing the cosmos. And until Emily Nunn, nobody thought about salad writing that way, either. These days, I wait for her weekly Substack and her dilations on her recipes (and on politics, loneliness, madness, longing, and joy) with the impatience that used to keep me checking my mailbox for the week’s New Yorker and Kael’s newest burst of happiness or rage. n

JOAN MITCHELL Sunflowers, 1990-91

CONTEMPORARY EVENING AUCTION NEW YORK 16 NOVEMBER CONTEMPORARY DAY AUCTION NEW YORK 17 NOVEMBER EXHIBITION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 1334 YORK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10021 ENQUIRIES +1 212 894 1032 [email protected] SOTHEBYS.COM/CHEIM #SOTHEBYS © ESTATE OF JOAN MITCHELL © SOTHEBY’S, INC. 2023

SCAN TO LEARN MORE

CHICAGO ALAN KOPPEL GALLERY 806 North Dearborn St, Chicago, IL 60610 Tel: 312 640 0730 E-mail: [email protected] Web: alankoppel.com Mon. – Fri. 10–5:30, Sat. by appointment

GOLDFINCH 319 North Albany Ave, Chicago, IL 60612 Tel: 708 714 0937 E-mail: [email protected] Web: goldfinch-gallery.com Instagram: @goldfinch_gallery_chicago Fri. – Sat. 12–4, and by appointment

Until October 21 Carris Adams: Signs All Kinds Until October 21 Scott Wolniak: Crosscurrents November 4 – December 16 Sofia Fernández Díaz November 4 – December 16 Madeline Gallucci: Sound of my father singing

Please contact gallery for information.

GRAHAM FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN THE FINE ARTS THE ARTS CLUB OF CHICAGO 201 East Ontario St, Chicago, IL 60611 Tel: 312 787 3997 Fax: 312 787 8664 E-mail: [email protected] Web: artsclubchicago.org Instagram: @artsclubchicago Tues. – Fri. 10–1, 2–6; Sat. 11–3

Until October 7

4 West Burton Pl, Chicago, IL 60610 Tel: 312 787 4071 E-mail: [email protected] Web: grahamfoundation.org Visit our website for gallery and bookshop hours and information. Follow us on social media: @GrahamFoundation

November 2

CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal

Garden Project: Yasmin Spiro – Groundation

HYDE PARK ART CENTER BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle, Evanston, IL 60208 Tel: 847 491 4000 E-mail: [email protected] Web: blockmuseum.northwestern.edu Instagram: @nublockmuseum Wed. – Fri. 12–8, Sat. & Sun. 12–5, Mon. – Tues. closed

Until December 3 Rosalie Favell: Indigenous Artists Facing the Camera Until December 3 For One and All: Prints from The Block’s Collection

5020 South Cornell Ave, Chicago, IL 60615 Tel: 773 324 5520 Fax: 773 324 6641 E-mail: [email protected] Web: hydeparkart.org Mon. – Thurs. 10–7, Fri. 10–4:30, Sat. 10–4, Sun. 10–1:30

Until October 29 William Estrada: Multiples and Multitudes Until November 5 Not Just Another Pretty Face 2023 November 11 – March 3, 2024 Candace Hunter: The Alien-Nations and Sovereign States of Octavia E Butler

LOGAN CENTER EXHIBITIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY 2156 West Fulton St, Chicago, IL 60612 Tel: 773 278 1664 E-mail: [email protected] Web: corbettvsdempsey.com Tues. – Sat. 10–5

Until November 4 Gregg Bordowitz: Tetragrammaton Until November 4 Josiah McElheny: From Red Black to Black, from Blue Black to Black

at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts 915 East 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773 834 8377 E-mail: [email protected] Web: loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu Tues. – Sat. 9–9, Sun. 11–9

October 6 – December 10

Sapphire & Crystals: Freedom’s Muse

MARIANE IBRAHIM DOCUMENT 1709 West Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 535 4555 E-mail: [email protected] Web: documentspace.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6

Until October 28

Jimmy DeSana

437 North Paulina St, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 877 5436 E-mail: [email protected] Web: marianeibrahim.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6

Until October 28 No Martins: Encontros Políticos (Political Encounters) . . . Part 2 November 18 – January 13, 2024 Joël Andrianomearisoa: Almost Here, Almost There, Almost Home

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery West Palm Beach

COMI NG S OON Octob er 20 23

CHICAGO MONIQUEMELOCHE 451 North Paulina St, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 243 2129 E-mail: [email protected] Web: moniquemeloche.com Instagram: @moniquemeloche Facebook: MoniqueMelocheGallery Tues. – Sat. 11–6

Until October 28 Until October 28

Luke Agada: Arms, Feet, and Fitful Dreams Sanford Biggers: Back to the Stars

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY at Columbia College Chicago 600 South Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605 Tel: 312 663 5554 E-mail: [email protected] Web: mocp.org Mon. – Sat. 10–5, Thurs. 10–8, Sun. 12–5

Please contact museum for information.

NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY at The University of Chicago 5701 South Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 E-mail: [email protected] Web: neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu Mon. – Fri. 9–4

Until January 12, 2024

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY 1711 West Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 455 1990 E-mail: [email protected] Web: rhoffmangallery.com Tues. – Fri. 10–5, Sat. 11–5

Until October 21 Bassim Al Shaker: Four Minutes October 27 – December 16 Women on the Verge, curated by Lisa Wainwright

SMART MUSEUM OF ART at The University of Chicago 5550 South Greenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773 702 0200 E-mail: [email protected] Web: smartmuseum.uchicago.edu Tues. – Sun. 10–5, Thurs. 10–8, Mon. closed

Until February 4, 2024 Until February 4, 2024 Until February 4, 2024 the Collection

Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity Smart to the Core: Poetry is Everything Calling on the Past: Selections from

VOLUME GALLERY 1709 West Chicago Ave, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 666 7954 E-mail: [email protected] Web: wvvolumes.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6

Until October 28 Stephen Burks: Spirit Houses November 3 – December 16 Luftwerk

Gelitin: Democratic Sculpture 7

WRIGHTWOOD 659 PATRON 1612 West Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 Tel: 312 846 1500 E-mail: [email protected] Web: patrongallery.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6, and by appointment

Until November 4 Kaveri Raina: Songs of silence, yet bluebirds hum

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY at The University of Chicago 5811 South Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773 702 8670 E-mail: [email protected] Web: renaissancesociety.org Wed., Fri. 12–6, Thurs. 12–7, Sat. – Sun. 10–6

Until November 26

Dala Nasser: Adonis River

659 West Wrightwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60614 Tel: 773 437 6601 E-mail: [email protected] Web: wrightwood659.org Instagram: @wrightwood659 Fri. 12–7, Sat. 10–5

October 13 – December 16 Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art October 13 – December 16 Tadao Ando: Spontaneous Sketches

ZOLLA/LIEBERMAN GALLERY 325 West Huron St, Chicago, IL 60654 Tel: 312 944 1990 Fax: 312 944 8967 E-mail: [email protected] Web: zollaliebermangallery.com Tues. – Fri. 10–5:30, Sat. 11–5:30

Until October 14 Dan Ramirez: Vertical Thoughts (South Gallery) Until October 14 Maria Tomasula: My Body is a Haunted Land (Main Gallery) November 10 – December 23 David Lozano (South Gallery) November 10 – December 23 Rene Romero Schuler and Isabelle van Zeijl (Office Gallery) November 10 – December 23 Glenn Wexler (Main Gallery)

O C T O B E R

DEBORAH BELL PHOTOGRAPHS

STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY

526 West 26th Street, Room 411, New York, NY 10001 212 249 9400 [email protected] www.deborahbellphotographs.com Thurs. – Sat. 11–5, and by appointment

1356 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M6J 1Y2, Canada 416 504 0575 [email protected] www.bulgergallery.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6

Until November 4 Ahead of Her Time: Marcia Resnick

FRAENKEL GALLERY 49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108 415 981 2661 [email protected] www.fraenkelgallery.com Tues. – Fri. 10:30–5:30, Sat. 11–5, and by appointment

Until October 21 Richard T. Walker: Never Here / Always There October 26 – December 22 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Until November 4 Sanaz Mazinani: An Impossible Perspective

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY 525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 646 230 9610 [email protected] www.yanceyrichardson.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6

Until November 11 Mickalene Thomas: je t’adore

YOSSI MILO MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY (MOCP) Columbia College Chicago 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605 312 663 5554 [email protected] www.mocp.org Mon. – Sat. 10–5, Thurs. 10–8, Sun. 12–5

Until December 22 Group Show: LOVE – Still Not the Lesser

ROBERT MORAT GALERIE Linienstraße 107, 10115 Berlin, Germany 49 30 2520 9358 [email protected] www.robertmorat.de Tues. – Sat. 12–6

Until October 21 Roger Eberhard: Escapism October 28 – December 21 Linn Schröder: Ich denke such Familienbilder

245 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10001 212 414 0370 [email protected] www.yossimilo.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6

Until October 21 Kathrin Linkersdorff: Fairies Until October 21 David Goldes: Unpredictable Drawings

Mickalene Thomas, Back Cover 1981, 2023, rhinestones on dye sublimation prints, 63 3⁄8 × 49 1⁄2 × 1 3⁄4". © Mickalene Thomas. Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.

47 CANAL

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

291 Grand Street, 2nd Floor [email protected] 47canal.us Wednesday – Saturday 11–6

300 Broome Street derekeller.com [email protected] 212 206 6411 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6

Until October 7 Elle Pérez October 19 – November 11 Xavier Cha November 16 – January 20 G. Peter Jemison

Until October 7 Austin Martin White: Lost in the Sauce October 12 – November 11 Scott Covert: The Dead Supreme

FORMah

BAXTER ST AT CCNY

42 Allen Street theFORMah.com [email protected] Tuesday – Saturday 12–6

126 & 128 Baxter Street baxterst.org [email protected] 212 260 9927 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6

Please contact gallery for information.

Until October 7 MaryKate Maher: Beyond the Mauve Zone

BRIDGET DONAHUE

FOXY PRODUCTION

99 Bowery, 2nd Floor bridgetdonahue.nyc [email protected] 646 896 1368 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6

2 East Broadway, #200 foxyproduction.com [email protected] 212 239 2758 Wednesday – Sunday 11–6

Until November 11 Lisa Alvarado November 16 – January 13, 2024 Olga Balema

Until October 8 Erin Calla Watson

FRIDMAN GALLERY

COMPANY GALLERY 145 Elizabeth Street companygallery.us [email protected] 646 756 4547 Wednesday – Saturday 12–6

Until October 28 Sidsel Meineche Hansen Until October 28 Marsha Pels, Jean Baptiste-Boyer, and Chris Lloyd

169 Bowery fridmangallery.com [email protected] 646 345 9831 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6

Until October 21 Sahana Ramakrishnan: An Ocean of Time November 1 – December 16 Heather Dewey-Hagborg: Hybrid

HASHIMOTO CONTEMPORARY

CRISTIN TIERNEY 219 Bowery, 2nd Floor [email protected] cristintierney.com 212 594 0550 Tuesday – Friday 10–6, Saturday 12–6

Until October 21 Joe Fig: Contemplating Compositions October 27 – December 16 peter campus: Three Transitions October 13 – Novemeber 18 Seminal: Masculinity in Contemporary Art

54 Ludlow Street hashimotocontemporary.com [email protected] Tuesday – Saturday 10–6

Until October 7 Scott Albrecht: The Shadow Of The Sun October 14 – November 4 Joel Daniel Phillips

KI SMITH GALLERY 170 Forsyth Street kismithgallery.com [email protected] 212 677 5131 Wednesday – Sunday 11–7

DOWNTOWN NYC in partnership with nineorchard.com

Until October 15 Charlie Hudson: Room with a View Until October 15 James Rubio: Ugly Paintings October 21 – November 26 Sang Eun: Unknown Faces October 21 – November 26 Indivi Sutton: Eurythmy

Shaunté Gates, In Light of the Hunt: The Messenger, The Lover, The Archer, 2023, acrylic, photo, pulled paper, colored pencil, pastel, and collage on wood panel, 48 × 72". Courtesy the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York.

MAGENTA PLAINS

MIGUEL ABREU

149 Canal Street magentaplains.com [email protected] 917 388 2464 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6

88 Eldridge Street 36 Orchard Street miguelabreugallery.com [email protected] 212 995 1774 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6

Until October 21 Daniel Boccato: ghost of Until October 21 Zach Bruder: Clear Arrears

Until October 22 Kate Mosher Hall (88 Eldridge Street)

THE MILTON RESNICK AND PAT PASSLOF FOUNDATION 87 Eldridge Street resnickpasslof.org [email protected] 646 559 2513 Thursday – Saturday 11–6

Until February 10, 2024 Milton Resnick and Matthew Wong: U + ME Until February 10, 2024 Milton Resnick: Insignias

NATHALIE KARG 291 Grand Street, 4th Floor nathaliekarg.com [email protected] 212 563 7821 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6

Until October 7 Sangram Majumdar and Miko Veldkamp Until October 7 Lisa Beck Until October 7 Marta Pierobon

PARTICIPANT INC Opening soon at 116 Elizabeth Street, Floor One participantinc.org [email protected] 212 254 4334 Online programming at participantafterdark.art

Until October 22 Amy Ruhl: Between Tin Men

PERROTIN 130 Orchard Street perrotin.com [email protected] 212 812 2902 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6

Until October 14 Daniel Arsham: 20 YEARS Until October 14 Kelly Beeman: Summer October 27 – December 23 Jean-Michel Othoniel: The Reconciliation of Opposites October 27 – December 23 Gérard Schneider: Rhapsody in Blue

RAMIKEN 389 Grand Street ramiken.biz [email protected] 917 434 4245 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6

Until October 1 Jean Katambayi Mukendi October 8 – November 12 Omari Douglin and Lukas Quietzsch

SARGENT’S DAUGHTERS 179 East Broadway sargentsdaughters.com [email protected] 917 463 3901 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6

Until October 14 Brandi Twilley: Crest Foods

SPENCER BROWNSTONE 170-A Suffolk Street spencerbrownstonegallery.com [email protected] 212 334 3455 Wednesday – Sunday 10–6

Until October 21 Jane South: Halfway Off

SPERONE WESTWATER 257 Bowery speronewestwater.com [email protected] 212 999 7337 Tuesday – Saturday 10–6

Until October 28 Shaunté Gates: In Light of the Hunt

TARA DOWNS 424 Broadway, 3rd Floor taradowns.com [email protected] 646 468 7190 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6

Until October 14 Catherine Mulligan: Bad Girl’s Club Until October 14 Julia Selin: Moth Paths October 19 – December 8 Dionne Lee and Sarah M. Rodriguez October 19 – December 9 Jiang Cheng

THOMAS NICKLES PROJECT 47 Orchard Street thomasnickles.com [email protected] 917 667 5016 Wednesday – Sunday 11–6, Thursday 11–7

Until November 19 Elsa Mora: An Inventory of Tools for Coping November 30 – February 4, 2023 Dionnys Matos

Amy Ruhl, Between Tin Men: 3, 2023, video, 10 minutes 51 seconds. Courtesy Participant Inc., New York.

TOTAH

TROTTER&SHOLER

183 Stanton Street davidtotah.com [email protected] 212 582 6111 Tuesday – Saturday 11–6

168 Suffolk Street trotterandsholer.com [email protected] 646 684 9304 Tuesday – Saturday 12–6

Until November 4 TR Ericsson: Letters from Home

Until October 21 Recall: Jessica Frances, Gregoire Lancaster, and Pajtim Osmanaj

MEXICO MEXICO CITY KURIMANZUTTO Gob. Rafael Rebollar 94, Col. San Miguel Chapultepec, 11850, Mexico City kurimanzutto.com

[email protected]

+52 55 5256 2408

Tue – Thu 11–6, Fri – Sat 11–4

October 21 – December 16 X Zhu-Nowell: A Story of a Merchant

LABOR Gral. F. Ramirez 5, Daniel Garza, Del. Miguel Hidalgo, 11830, Mexico City labor.org.mx

[email protected]

+52 55 6304 8755

Mon – Thu 11–6, Fri – Sat 11–3

October 5 Kiriakos Tompolidis: God Loves You (But Not as Much to Save You)

Liberal Youth Ministry / Antonio Zaragoza, Monster, 2022, latex mask, polyethylene cotton, spray paint, polyester spandex, and horns, 106 1⁄5 × 90 1⁄2". Courtesy the artist. Photo: Antonio Zaragoza.

GALERIA HILARIO GALGUERA Francisco Pimentel 3, Colonia San Rafael, 06470, Mexico City galeriahilariogalguera.com +44 78 1809 0392

[email protected]

Tue – Sat 11–5

Until November 4 Issa Salliander: Love on the Record

GALERIE NORDENHAKE MEXICO CITY Monterrey 65, Colonia Roma Norte, 06700, Mexico City nordenhake.com

[email protected]

+52 55 7414 9776

Mon – Thu 10–6, Fri – Sat 11–4

Until October 28 John Zurier: Sleeping Horses

GALERÍA RGR Gral. Antonio León 48, Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec, 11850, Mexico City rgrart.com

GUADALAJARA

[email protected]

+52 1 55 8434 7759

Mon – Thu 10:30–6:30, Fri 10:30–4:30, Sat 11–4:30

Until November 18 Spiritual Abstractions: Tania Candiani, Hilma’s Ghost, Kati Horna, Magali Lara, France Lise McGurn, Vibe Overgaard, and Salmo Suyo

CURRO Andrés Terán 726, Col. Santa Teresita, 44600, Guadalajara galeriacurro.com [email protected] +52 33 1516 3714 Mon – Fri 10–6

GENERAL EXPENSES

Until October 13 Juan Manuel Salas: Sopa de Anguilas

generalexpensesart.com

Revillagigedo 108, Colonia Centro, Cuauhtémoc, 06010, Mexico City [email protected]

+52 222 708 07998 Wed, Thurs, Sat 11–6

TRAVESÍA CUATRO Avenida de la Paz 2207, Colonia Americana, 44140, Guadalajara travesiacuatro.com [email protected] +52 33 3615 2694 Tue – Fri 10–6, Sat 12–3

Until October 28 Gonzalo Lebrija: Dormir

Until October 7 Group Show – No hay refugio en un cielo sin estrellas: Octavio Gomez Rivero, Rodrigo Ramirez, Santiago Gomez, Natalia Caballero, Paloma Rosenzweig, Daniel Aguilar, Karla Canseco, Angela Leyva, Mili Herrera, and Tom Bull October 21 – November 25 Orpheus Liberal Youth Ministry / Antonio Zaragoza: A DARK WOLF TRIUMPHS

MARIANE IBRAHIM GALLERY Río Pánuco 36 col. Renacimiento, Cuauhtémoc, 06500, Mexico City marianeibrahim.com [email protected] +52 55 2580 9822 Tue – Fri 11–6, Sat 11–4

October 6 – January 13, 2024 Ayana V. Jackson: Los hilos invisibles son los lazos más fuertes

MORÁN MORÁN Horacio 1022, Polanco, Miguel Hidalgo, 11550, Mexico City moranmorangallery.com [email protected] Tue – Fri 10–6, Sat 11–6

Until November 4 Robin F. Williams: Watch Yourself

PEANA Tlaxcala 103, Roma Sur, Cuauhtémoc, 06760, Mexico City peana.co [email protected] +52 55 9039 6247 Mon – Thu 11–6, Fri 11–4, Sat 11–3

Until October 21

José Eduardo Barajas: Saliva

PROYECTOS MONCLOVA Lamartine 415, Polanco, Polanco V Secc, Miguel Hidalgo, 11560, Mexico City proyectosmonclova.com [email protected] + 52 55 5525 9715 Mon – Fri 10–6, Sat 11–4

Until October 28 German Venegas: Vaciar y llenar, curated by Patrick Charpenel

SAENGER GALERÍA Manuel Dublán 33, 4to piso, Tacubaya, Miguel Hidalgo, 11870, Mexico City saengergaleria.com [email protected] +55 5516 6941 Tue – Fri 11–7, Sat 11–4

Until November 11 Javier Peláez: Blue Lotus (Main Room) Until November 11 Alejandro García: Vibrations of an Imperfect Cosmic Web (Project Room)

Javier Peláez, Sol Azul, 2023, oil on linen, 62 7 ⁄8 × 42 1 ⁄4". Courtesy the artist.

TRAVESÍA CUATRO Valladolid 35, Colonia Roma Norte, 06700, Mexico City travesiacuatro.com [email protected] +52 55 5206 3617 Tue – Thu 10–6, Fri 10–4, Sat 11–3

Until December 16 Until December 16

Gonzalo Lebrija: Dormir Goro Kakei: Solo Show

MONTERREY COLECTOR ORIENTE Distrito Armida L-16, Circuito Frida Kahlo 303, Valle Oriente, 66269, SPGG, Monterrey colector.gallery [email protected] +52 81 1769 8300 Mon – Fri 10–6

October 7 – January 5, 2024

Aldo Chaparro: Lluvia

COLECTOR PONIENTE Lázaro Garza Ayala Pte 436, Casco Urbano, 66230, SPGG, Monterrey colector.gallery [email protected] +52 81 1769 8300 Tue – Fri 10–6, by appointment only

Until January 5, 2024

Adeline De Monseignat: Skin to Skin

PEANA Via Clodia 169, 66220, Monterrey peana.co [email protected] +52 81 2315 9150 Mon – Fri 10–6

Please contact gallery for information.

PORTAL

JANICE FREEMAN

Opening: October 7th (Saturday) 6039 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA 90232 RSVP: 424.253.4242

ANNA LAUDEL

Gümüşsuyu Mahallesi, Kazancı Yokuşu No: 45, Beyoğlu 34437 İstanbul +90 212 243 3257 [email protected] Instagram: @annalaudel.gallery Tue – Sat 12–7, Sun 12–6 Until November 5 Sarp Kerem Yavuz: Glorious Century

ARTER

İSTANBUL

founded by the Vehbi Koç Foundation Irmak Caddesi No: 13, Beyoğlu 34435 İstanbul +90 212 708 5800 [email protected] arter.org.tr Instagram: @arteristanbul Tue – Sun 11–7, Thu 11–8 Until October 19 In Its Own Shadow, curated by Emre Baykal and Gizem Uslu Tümer Until October 22 Cengiz Çeki: I Am Still Alive, curated by Eda Berkmen Until December 31 Nuri Kuzucan: Passage, curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer Until February 4, 2024 Sarkis: ENDLESS, curated by Emre Baykal

BORUSAN CONTEMPORARY

Perili Köşk, Rumelihisarı, Baltalimanı Hisar Caddesi No: 5, Sarıyer 34470 İstanbul +90 212 393 5200 [email protected] borusancontemporary.com Instagram: @borusancontemporary blog.borusancontemporary.com Sat – Sun 10–7 Until August 18, 2024 Mat Collishaw: Arrhythmia, curated by Alice Sharp Until August 18, 2024 Hyper Digital Forces: Selections from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, curated by Dr. Necmi Sonmez

DIRIMART | DOLAPDERE

Hacıahmet Mahallesi, Irmak Cad. 1-9, Dolapdere 34440 İstanbul +90 212 232 66 66 [email protected] dirimart.com Instagram: @dirimart Tue – Sat 10–7, Sun 12–7 Please contact gallery for information.

DIRIMART | PERA

Meşrutiyet cad. No:99 Kat -1, Beyoğlu 34430 İstanbul +90 212 232 66 66 [email protected] dirimart.com Instagram: @dirimart Tue – Sat 10–7, Sun 12–7 Please contact gallery for information.

[email protected]

ISTANBUL MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Kılıç Ali Paşa Mahallesi, Tophane İskele Caddesi, No:1/1, Beyoğlu 34433 Istanbul +90 212 334 73 00 [email protected] istanbulmodern.org Tue – Sun 10–6, Fri 10–8 Until November Nuri Bilge Ceylan: In Another Place Until November Always Here Permanent exhibition Constructing Architecture Permanent exhibition Floating Islands Permanent exhibition Renzo Piano: Genius Loci

MEŞHER

founded by the Vehbi Koç Foundation İstiklal Caddesi No: 211, Beyoğlu 34433 İstanbul +90 212 708 59 00 [email protected] mesher.org Instagram: @mesher_official Tue – Sun 11–7 Until May 26, 2024 İstanbul as Far as the Eye Can See: Views Across Five Centuries, curated by Şeyda Çetin and Ebru Esra Satıcı

SEVIL DOLMACI GALLERY

Cihannüma Mahallesi, Çömezler Sokağı, No: 16, Beşiktaş 34353, İstanbul +90 212 258 9585 [email protected] sevildolmaci.com Instagram: sevildolmaciartgallery Tue – Sat 10:30–6, Sun 11–6:30 Until October 28 Bosco Sodi: The Silence of Form

ZILBERMAN ISTANBUL

İstiklal Caddesi, Mısır Apartmanı, No: 163 K.2 & 3 D.5 & 10, Beyoğlu 34433 İstanbul Zilberman Selected | Istanbul: İstiklal Mahallesi, Piyalepaşa Bulvarı, No: 32C, Beyoğlu 34440 İstanbul +90 212 251 1214 [email protected] zilbermangallery.com Instagram: @zilbermangallery Spotify: ZilbermanGallery Tue – Sat 11–7 Until November 25 Group Show: 2019, curated by Yekhan Pınarlıgil (Zilberman Istanbul, Zilberman Selected, Zilberman Project Space)

AT HOME, EVERY WHERE AND NOWHERE 6 October -

SIMEON BARCLAY

11 November 2023

SÃO PAULO, BRASIL | WWW.MILLAN.ART

5 WARWICK STREET LONDON W1B 5LU

now representing

Maxwell Alexandre Photo: Gui Gomes

VIENNA

G A L L E R I E S Galerie Kandlhofer

Lisl Ponger, Making of (detail), 2023, direct scan from installation. © Lisl Ponger. Courtesy Charim Galerie, Vienna.

Brucknerstrasse 4, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 503 1167 [email protected] kandlhofer.com

Charim Galerie Dorotheergasse 12, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 512 0915 [email protected] charimgalerie.at

Until October 14 Group Show: The Dark Side of White, curated by Julia Hartmann October 22–28 Paris Pop-up store, during Paris+ par Art Basel October 24 – November 29 Lisl Ponger: MAKING OF November 3–5 Artissima, Turin November 16–19 Art Cologne

CHARIM SCHLEIFMÜHLGASSE Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1040 Vienna

Until October 14 Alban Muja November 7–30 Scott Clifford Evans

CHARIM FACTORY

Absberggasse 27/9/3, 1100 Vienna

October Artist in Residence: Brigitte Maria Mayer November Artist in Residence: Isa Rosenberger November 9 Solo Show: Isa Rosenberger November 19 Isa Rosenberger: Book Launch and Performance

Galerie Crone Wien Getreidemarkt 14, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 581 3164 [email protected] galeriecrone.com

Until October 31 Das Dorf: Ludwig Schirmer, Werner Mahler, and Ute Mahler; curated by Ingo Taubhorn November 9 – January 13, 2024 Hamlet Lavastida: Internal Control November 2–5 Artissima, Turin: Jean Arp and Józef Jarema November 16–19 Art Cologne

Until October 14 Focus On: Kazuhito Tanaka Until October 14 Glossary: Tereza Červeňová, Harminder Judge, Andreas Reiter Raabe, and Jessica Warboys; curated by Sacha Craddock October 19 – November 17 Rodrigo Valenzuela and Reza Aramesh October 19 – November 17 Focus On: Melissa Steckbauer and Estrid Lutz November 23 – January 19, 2024 Hannah Perry and Richie Culver November 23 – January 19, 2024 Focus On: Allen-Golder Carpenter

Georg Kargl Fine Arts Schleifmühlgasse 5, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 585 4199 [email protected] georgkargl.com

GEORG KARGL FINE ARTS

Until October 28 Comizi d'Amore: Renée Green, Sharon Hayes, Christian Philipp Müller, Julia Scher, Marina Xenofontos, and Bruno Zhu; curated by Cathrin Mayer October 13–15 ArtVilnius'23, Project Zone: Agnieszka Polska October 18–22 Paris Internationale November – December Mladen Bizumic

GEORG KARGL BOX

Until October 28 Renée Green: Comizi d'Amore, curated by Cathrin Mayer November – December Jakob Lena Knebl

GEORG KARGL PERMANENT Schleifmühlgasse 17, 1040 Vienna

Until November 25 Peter Fend: GLOBAL WARMING

Christine König Galerie Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 585 7474 [email protected] christinekoeniggalerie.com

Until October 14 Blue for Distinction, Red for Correction: Ania Bąk, Alicja Bielawska, Agnieszka Grodzińska, Gizela Mickiewicz, Alona Rodeh, Kuba Stępień, and Thilo Jenssen; curated by Agnieszka Pindera October 19 – November 25 Payer Gabriel (Third Room: Walter Holzer) November 16–19 Art Cologne

KOENIG2 by_robbygreif Margaretenstraße 5, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 585 7474 [email protected] koenig2.at

Until October 14 Nikita Kadan: The Crime of the Light (Злочин світла) October 19 – December 23 Erika Hock

Angela de la Cruz, Barricade (Foam), 2023, Florence Knoll chair, foam, 393/8 × 373/4 × 341/4". Photo: Studio Angela de la Cruz. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna.

Galerie Krinzinger

Seilerstätte 16, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 513 3006 [email protected] galerie-krinzinger.at

Until October 28 Angela de la Cruz: Barricade Until October 28 Otto Piene (Showroom) October 11–15 Frieze London October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 10 – January 12, 2024 Secundino Hernández November 10 – January 12, 2024 Andreas Werner (Showroom) November 23–26 Abu Dhabi Art Fair

KRINZINGER SCHOTTENFELD Schottenfeldgasse 45, 1070 Vienna

Until October 21 Curated by Verena Formanek

MEYER*KAINER Eschenbachgasse 9, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 585 7277 [email protected] meyerkainer.com

Until October 29 Ad Minoliti: Play Mode, curated by Gaby Cepeda

BOLTENSTERN.RAUM Eschenbachgasse 9, 1st floor

Until October 29 Flora Hauser

Layr

Gabriele Senn Galerie

Singerstraße 27, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 967 7432 [email protected] emanuellayr.com

Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1040 Vienna T: +43 1 585 2580 [email protected] galeriesenn.at

Until October 14 Dowsing, curated by Nick Irvin October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel October 27 – December 2 Philipp Timischl and Evelyn Plaschg

Until October 14 Curated by Raphael Oberhuber

Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Grünangergasse 1, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 512 1266 [email protected] schwarzwaelder.at

October 4 – November 18 Karin Sander October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 3–5 Artissima, Turin November 16–19 Art Cologne November 29 – January 2024 Miao Ying

DOMGASSE 6 Domgasse 6, 1010 Vienna

Until October 14 Gritli Faulhaber, Brian O’Doherty, and Mia Sanchez; curated by Roman Kurzmeyer October 25 – December Heinrich Dunst

Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Seilerstätte 7, 1010 Vienna T: +43 1 512 0840 [email protected] galeriethoman.com

October – November Éva Bodnár October – November [tart vienna] Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, curated by Miriam Bettin November – December Thomas Feuerstein Nevember 16–19 Art Cologne

Galerie Hubert Winter Breite Gasse 17, 1070 Vienna T: +43 1 524 0976 [email protected] galeriewinter.at

Until October 14 Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili and Carrie Yamaoka, curated by Allyson Spellacy October – November Katherine Porter November – December Davide Allieri November 3–5 Artissima, Turin

Sweden BONNIERS KONSTHALL

MAGASIN III

Torsgatan 19, 113 90 Stockholm Tel: 46 87 36 42 55 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.bonnierskonsthall.se

Museum for Contemporary Art Frihamnsgatan 28, 11556 Stockholm Tel: 46 8 545 680 40 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.magasin3.com

Until October 29 Sara-Vide Ericson and Tilda Lovell: Something darkly set itself at our senses’ five thresholds without stepping over them December 6 – January 21, 2024 The Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation Grant Recipients 2023

Until December 17 Meriç Algün: A Glossary of Distance and Desire Until December 17 Sirous Namazi: Pending Until December 17 Group Show: Skin of the Soul

BORÅS KONSTMUSEUM

MAGASIN III JAFFA

Kulturhuset P. A. Halls Terrass, 504 56 Borås Tel: 46 73 432 73 86 E-mail: [email protected] Web: boraskonstmuseum.se

Olei Zion 34, 68 13131 Tel Aviv-Yafo E-mail: [email protected]

Please contact Magasin III Jaffa for information.

Until November 5 Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg: Only For the Wicked

MODERNA MUSEET CECILIA HILLSTRÖM GALLERY Hudiksvallsgatan 8, 113 30 Stockholm E-mail: [email protected] Web: chgallery.se

Until October 14 Lovisa Ringborg: The Living Room Until November 3 Linnea Rygaard October 21 – December 16 Tova Mozard November 10–12 Gallery Weekend Stockholm

DUNKERS KULTURHUS Kungsgatan 11, 252 21 Helsingborg Tel: 46 42 10 74 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.dunkerskulturhus.se

Until October 1 Jorden runt på 80 souvenirer Until January 7, 2024 Korsettkriget Until March 3, 2024 Under Hökens Vingar Kom! October 19 – November 5 Helsingborgs Dagblads Fotopris November 23 – February 4, 2024 Öppna Konstnärskapet: Bortom Detta

Box 16382, 10327 Stockholm Visiting Address: Skeppsholmen Tel: 46 85 202 35 00 Web: www.modernamuseet.se

Until October 18 Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother Until January 14, 2024 Group Show: Sleepless Nights – From the 1980s in the Moderna Museet collection Until September 8, 2024 Group Show: Seven Rooms and a Garden – Rashid Johnson and The Moderna Museet Collection Until January 1, 2025 Group Show: Pink Sails – Swedish Modernism in the Moderna Museet collection

MODERNA MUSEET MALMÖ Ola Billgrens Plats 2–4, 21129 Malmö Tel: 46 40 685 79 37 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.modernamuseet.se

Until October 1 Lotte Laserstein: A Divided Life

NEVVEN GALLERI MAGNUS KARLSSON Fredsgatan 12, 11152 Stockholm Tel: 46 86 60 43 53 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com

Until October 7 Kent Iwemyr: The Blue Rider October 14 – November 18 Idun Baltzersen: The Bathers November 25 – January 27, 2024 Jeff Olsson: Oh No

GALERIE NORDENHAKE Hudiksvallsgatan 8, 11330 Stockholm Tel: 46 82 11 892 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.nordenhake.com

Until November 3 Marjetica Potrcˇ

LOYAL Odengatan 3, 11424 Stockholm Tel: 46 86 80 77 11 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.loyalgallery.com

Until October 21 Ross Caliendo: Horizon Pupil October 26 – December 9 Hiejin Yoo: Solo Show

Molinsgatan 11, 411 33 Gothenburg Tel: 46 76 086 73 05 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.nevvengallery.com

Until November 12 Shafei Xia: I Am Still Me November 23 – February 11, 2024 Andreas Meinich

WETTERLING GALLERY Kungsträdgården 3, 111 47 Stockholm Tel: 46 81 01 00 9 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.wetterlinggallery.com

October 5 – November 4 Peter Johansson November 9 – December 16 Astrid Kruse Jensen November 9 – December 16 Marjolein Rothman

BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

34 Main St, Millerton, NY 12546 | [email protected]

Duane Linklater, dislodgevanishskinground, 2019; Courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Photo: Jueqian Fang

Duane Linklater mymothersside

bampfa.org

October 7, 2023–February 25, 2024

kristin moore skyscapes november 2023

montreux switzerland laurentmarthaler.com

laurent marthaler contemporary

Reeve Schley

October 21 - December 17, 2023

PETER BLUM EDITION

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013 Tel: 212 244 6055 Fax: 212 244 6054 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.peterblumgallery.com Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–6

Recent publications include, Kamrooz Aram, hardcover, 2022; Rebecca Ward, before and after, hardcover, 2022; Nicholas Galanin, Never Forget, artist book, hardcover with slipcase, 2021; Nathaniel Dorsky, ECLOGUES: Letters and Correspondence, limited edition artist book, hardcover, 2020; Nicholas Galanin, Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces, hardcover, second edition, 2020 Publications include John Beech, Huma Bhabha, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Enzo Cucchi, Helmut Federle, Eric Fischl, Herzog & de Meuron, Roni Horn, Michael Day Jackson, Alex Katz, Esther Kläs, Brice Marden, Chris Marker, David Rabinowitch, Thomas Ruff, Robert Ryman, Anselm Stalder, Philip Taafe, Su-Mei Tse, James Turrell, Robert Zandvliet, and John Zurier Print editions by John Baldessari, Huma Bhabha, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Sandrio Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Tacita Dean, Martin Disler, Helmut Federle, Eric Fischl, Simon Frost, General Idea, Alfredo Jaar, Matthew Day Jackson, Alex Katz, Kimsooja, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Brice Marden, Chris Marker, Josef Felix Müller, Adrian Paci, A.R. Penck, David Rabinowitch, Thomas Ruff, Ansel, Stalder, Rosemarie Trockel, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Rolf Winnewisser, Terry Winters, Yukinori Yanagi, and Robert Zandvliet

BRODSKY CENTER AT PAFA

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 128 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102 Tel: 215 391 4809 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.brodskycenter.com Open by appointment. View selected works in PAFA galleries: Thurs. – Fri. 10–4, Sat. – Sun. 11–5

PRINTS + EDITIONS

New edition by Wilmer Wilson IV Forthcoming editions by Kukuli Velarde and Dyani White Hawk. Available editions and selected work by Pacita Abad, Emma Amos, Laura Anderson Barbata, Rick Bartow, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Elizabeth Catlett, Zoë Charlton, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Liz Collins, Melvin Edwards, Parastou Forouhar, Chitra Ganesh, Leon Golub, Harmony Hammond, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Sharon Hayes, Barkley L. Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks, Isaac Julien, Matsumi Kanemitsu, William Kentridge, Byron Kim, James Lavadour, Glenn Ligon, Hew Locke, Sarah McEneaney, Pepón Osorio, Nell Painter, Ben Patterson, Faith Ringgold, Juan Sanchez, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Semmel, Sylvia Sleigh, Kiki Smith with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Pat Steir with Anne Waldman, May Stevens, Richard Tuttle with John Yau, Didier William, and Sue Williamson, among others

CENTER STREET STUDIO

PO Box 870171, Milton Village, MA 02187 Tel: 617 821 5458 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.centerstreetstudio.com By appointment

Coming soon: series of etching monoprints by Anna Schuleit Haber New watercolor monotypes by Emilio Perez New suite of four etchings with chine colle’ by George Whitman New oil based monotypes by Janine Wong New large-scale monotypes by Markus Linnenbrink New edition by Bill Thompson New watercolor monotypes by Markus Linnenbrink, Emilio Perez, and Laurel Sparks New editions by George Whitman, William Steiger, and Jeff Perrott Portfolio of twenty-six aquatints by type designer Matthew Carter

CIRRUS GALLERY AND CIRRUS EDITIONS, LTD

2011 South Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90021 Tel: 213 680 3473 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.cirrusgallery.com Tues. – Sat. 10–5

October New monoprints from Daniel Gibson, “Butterfly,” “Flower Head,” and “Shrine” (IFPDA Print Fair, New York)

CIRRUS GALLERY AND CIRRUS EDITIONS, LTD (continued) Available editions by Lita Albuquerque, Farah Atassi, John Baldessari, Mark Bradford, Derek Boshier, Matthew Brannon, Judy Chicago, Fred Eversley, Eamon Ore-Giron, Joe Goode, Grant Levy-Lucero, Bruce Nauman, Simphiwe Ndzube, Ed Ruscha, Barbara T. Smith, Mary Weatherford, Jonas Wood, and Daniel Gibson, among others

CROWN POINT PRESS

20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: 415 974 6273 Fax: 415 495 4220 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.crownpoint.com Mon. – Fri. 9–5

Until November 3 CONTEMPORARY SCENES – Cityscape/Landscape: Darren Almond, Mamma Andersson, Robert Bechtle, John Chiara, Tony Cragg, April Gornik, Jane Freilicher, Yvonne Jacquette, Per Kirkeby, Joan Nelson, Jockum Nordstrom, Laura Owens, Ed Ruscha, Pat Stair, and Wayne Thiebaud New editions by Ed Ruscha

FLYING HORSE EDITIONS

University of Central Florida, 380 W. Amelia Street, Orlando, FL 32801 Tel: 407 235 3619 Web: www.flyinghorseeditions.com Mon. – Fri. by appointment

New editions by Chakaia Booker, Will Cotton, Holly Coulis, Tomory Dodge, Alex Dodge, Tara Donovan, Amze Emmons, Elliott Green, Sarah Faux, Inka Essenhigh, David Humphrey, Mark Fox, Mark Thomas Gibson, Joshua Marsh, Eddie Martinez, Suzanne McClelland, Ryan McGinness, Linn Meyers, Jiha Moon, Odili Donald Odita, Kelly Reemtsen, James Siena, and others

FOREHANDPRESS

14518 Hempstead Road, Suite 3F, Houston, TX 77040 Tel: 713 922 6872 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.forehandpress.com Mon. – Fri. by appointment

New lithography editions by Peter Bradley Current editions by Stanley Whitney and Robert Moskowitz

GEMINI G.E.L.

8365 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90069 Tel: 323 651 0513 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.geminigel.com Mon. – Fri. 9–5

October 7 – January 2024 Sculpture at Gemini New editions by Frank Gehry Recent releases by Julie Mehretu and Richard Serra Additional work by John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Philip Guston, Ann Hamilton, Michael Heizer, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Ken Price, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Susan Rothenberg, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, and others

GRAPHICSTUDIO

University of South Florida 3702 Spectrum Boulevard, Suite 100, Tampa, FL 33612 Tel: 813 974 3503 Fax: 813 974 2579 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.graphicstudio.usf.edu Mon. – Fri. 10–5

Recent Editions by Diana Al-Hadid, Sebastiaan Bremer, E.V. Day, Mark Dion, Alex Katz, Duke Riley, Bosco Sodi, and Rodrigo Valenzuela Works available by Judy Chicago, Chuck Close, Lesley Dill, Rochelle Feinstein, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Arturo Herrera, Los Carpinteros, Robert Mapplethorpe, Christian Marclay, Jason Middlebrook, Vik Muniz, Robyn O’Neil, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Kenny Scharf, Kiki Smith, Richard Tuttle, and William Villalongo, among others

PRINTS + EDITIONS

Faith Ringgold, Jazz Stories: Somebody Stole My Broken Heart 2, 2023, dye print on Satin D’Hauteur, hand sewn, variable pieced borders, hand quilted, 72 × 58 3⁄4". Variable edition of 24. Produced by Carolina Nitsch for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.

HIGHPOINT EDITIONS

I.C. EDITIONS, INC./SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY

New editions by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Julie Mehretu, Jim Hodges, Brad Kahlhamer, and Delita Martin Additional work by Dyani White Hawk, Julie Buffalohead, Carlos Amorales, Andrea Carlson, Carter, Willie Cole, Santiago Cucullu, Mary Esch, Rob Fischer, Adam Helms, Joel Janowitz, Michael Kareken, Cameron Martin, Clarence Morgan, Lisa Nankivil, Todd Norsten, Chloe Piene, Jessica Rankin, David Rathman, Aaron Spangler, Do Ho Suh, and Mungo Thomson

Until October 14 William Villalongo: Black Menagerie October 19 – November 25 Allison Miller Editions by Barbara Bloom, Bruce Conner, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Jessica Diamond, Marcel Dzama, Anna Gaskell, George Herms, Barbara Kruger, Annette Lemieux, Sol LeWitt, Allan McCollum, Paul Noble, Claes Oldenburg, Robyn O’Neil, Catherine Opie, Raymond Pettibon, Rona Pondick, Richard Prince, Erika Rothenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, Dana Schutz, Simone Shubuck, Aaron Spangler, Jessica Stockholder, Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, Lawrence Weiner, Terry Winters, and Andrea Zittel

912 West Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408 Tel: 612 871 1326 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.highpointprintmaking.org Mon. – Fri. 9–5, Sat. 12–4, or by appointment

522 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 Tel: 212 647 9111 Fax: 212 647 9333 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.iceditions.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6

JUNGLE PRESS EDITIONS

LELONG EDITIONS

232 Third Street, Suite B302, Brooklyn, NY 11215 Tel: 718 222 9122 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.junglepresspress.com Mon. – Sat. by appointment

13 rue de Téhéran, 75008 Paris, France Tel: 33 1 45 63 38 62 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.lelongeditions.com Tues. – Fri. 10:30–6, Sat. 2–6:30

New editions by Nicole Eisenman, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Elizabeth Hazan, Judith Linhares, Kyle Thurman, Jacqueline Humphries, Jennifer MackWatkins, Jennifer Marshall, Sam Messer, Jill Moser, and Mark Di Suvero Available editions by Richard Baker, Laura Battle, Ken Buhler, Diana Cooper, Nicole Eisenman, Gabrielle Evertz, Jane Fine, Mary Frank, Jane Freilicher, Yoshishige Furukawa, Mary Louise Geering, Julie Heffernan, Peter Hutchinson, Robert Kushner, Rene Lynch, Jennifer Marshall, Michael Mazur, Melissa Meyer, Andrew Mockler, Alexander Oleksyn, Richard Ryan, Katia Santibañez, Elena Sisto, William Steiger, Billy Sullivan, Chuck Webster, Stephen Westfall, Brian Wood, and more

Until October 7 David Nash: Colours and Columns October 13 – November 18 Etel Adnan: La mer. Rien d’autre. La mer. Editions available by Etel Adnan, Pierre Alechinsky, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Chillida, Marc Desgrandchamps, Jean Dubuffet, Simone Fattal, Barry Flanagan, Günther Förg, Alberto Giacometti, David Hockney, Konrad Klapheck, Jannis Kounellis, Nalini Malani, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, David Nash, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Jaume Plensa, Arnulf Rainer, Paula Rego, Robert Ryman, Alison Saar, Sean Scully, Richard Serra, Kate Shepherd, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Antoni Tàpies, Barthélémy Toguo, and Fabienne Verdier

KRAKOW WITKIN GALLERY 10 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 Tel: 617 262 4490 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.krakowwitkingallery.com June and July: Tues. – Sat. 10–5:30, August: by appointment

PRINTS + EDITIONS

Until October 14 Barbara Broughel: Requiem Portraits Until October 14 Cary Leibowitz: Official Candyass Muggery / Drinking Vessels 1990–2023 Index Until October 14 WHOM: Christian Boltanski, Robert Fillou, Lyle Ashton Harris, Cary Leibowitz, Sherrie Levine, Liliana Porter, David Robbins, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, James Van Der Zee, and David Wojnarowicz Announcing the publication of the Official Candyass Muggery Drinking Vessels 1990–2023 Catalogue Raisonné Recent and historic editions by Josef Albers, Richard Artschwager, Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, Daniel Buren, Sarah Charlesworth, Tara Donovan, Peter Downsbrough, León Ferrari, Joseph Grigely, Jenny Holzer, Ellsworth Kelly, William Kentridge, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Allan McCollum, Abelardo Morell, Julian Opie, Giulio Paolini, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Liliana Porter, Martin Puryear, Kay Rosen, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Kate Shepherd, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, and Fred Wilson Publisher of the Sol LeWitt Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (www. sollewittprints.org) and of the Mel Bochner Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (www.melbochnerprints.org)

DAVID KRUT PROJECTS, NEW YORK AND JOHANNESBURG New York Gallery: 526 West 26th Street, Suite 816, New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212 255 3094 Tues. – Thurs. by appointment, Fri. 11–6 Johannesburg Gallery: 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg, South Africa 2094 Tues. – Sat. 10–2, or by appointment Johannesburg Gallery and Archive: 151 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg, South Africa 2094 Mon. – Fri. 9–5, Sat. 9–4 David Krut Workshop: Arts on Main, 264 Fox Street, Johannesburg, South Africa 2094 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.davidkrutprojects.com | www.davidkrutportal.com

Until October 20 Raquel van Haver: Rising Phoenix (526 West 26th Street) Recent and historic editions by William Kentridge, Maaike Bakker, Vusi Beauchamp, Deborah Bell, Olivia Botha, Heidi Fourie, Stephen Hobbs, Lebogang Mabusela, Maja Maljević, Mikhael Subotzky, Nina Torr, Mbali Tshabalala, Anna van der Ploeg, Diane Victor, Zhi Zulu, and others

MARLBOROUGH GRAPHICS 545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212 541 4900 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.marlboroughgraphicsnewyork.com

Until October 28 Rufino Tamayo: Prints Featuring prints by Tauba Auerbach, Alice Aycock, Francis Bacon, Herbert Bayer, Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud, Adolph Gottlieb, Maggi Hambling, Red Grooms, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, R. B. Kitaj, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Michele Oka Doner, Pablo Picasso, Jesús Rafael Soto, Rufino Tamayo, Neil Welliver, Zao Wou-Ki, and others

MIXOGRAFIA® 1419 East Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90011 Tel: 323 232 1158 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mixografia.com Mon. – Fri. 10–5, or by appointment

October 1 – March 1, 2024 New editions by Polly Apfelbaum and Alison Saar Recent and Historic editions by Arman, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Burri, Sonya Clark, KwanYoung Chun, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Dario Escobar, Gajin Fujita, Helen Frankenthaler, Francesca Gabbiani, Joe Goode, Robert Graham, Peter Halley, Jacob Hashimoto, Alex Israel, Kcho, Donald Lipski, Jason Martin, Richard Meier, Henry Moore, Kenneth Noland, Mimmo Paladino, Jorge Pardo, Larry Rivers, Ed Ruscha, Alison Saar, Analia Saban, Julião Sarmento, George Segal, Kiki Smith, Pierre Soulages, Frank Stella, Donald Sultan, Rufino Tamayo, William Tillyer, Manolo Valdés, Tom Wesselmann, Rachel Whiteread, Terry Winters, and Jonas Wood

CAROLINA NITSCH 101 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212 463 0610 Cell: 646 251 3804 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.carolinanitsch.com Tues. – Fri. 10–6 by appointment

October – November Nitsch Projectroom Exhibition: Prints and Monotypes (59 Wooster St) October 26–29 IFPDA Print Fair, New York New and recent editions by Faith Ringgold, Nicolas Party, Kiki Smith, Thomas Schuette, Elmgreen & Dragset, Firelei Baez, Simone Leigh, Tschabalala Self, Derrick Adams, Marilyn Minter, Matt Mullican, Mary Heilmann, Kaari Upson, Wangechi Mutu, Sarah Lucas, Ebony G. Patterson, Tracey Emin, and Urs Fischer Select inventory by Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Barry Le Va, Cy Twombly, Josef Albers, Carolee Schneemann, Gunther Foerg, and Cecily Brown Previously sold-out editions from Parkett Publishers, please inquire.

PRINTS + EDITIONS From top: Liam Gillick, Replicated Revision, 2022, powder-coated aluminum piece in 8 color variations, each 6 × 61⁄4 × 3". Edition of 12. Liam Gillick, Equal Quarters, 2022, tubular aluminum in four sections, powder coated, each different in color combination, 52 × 2”. Edition of 10. Published by Schellmann Art, Munich.

PAULSON FONTAINE PRESS 2390 C Fourth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 Tel: 510 559 2088 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.paulsonfontainepress.com Tues. – Fri. 10–4 by appointment

New editions by Torkwase Dyson Editions by Tauba Auerbach, Hernan Bas, Woody De Othello, Kota Ezawa, Spencer Finch, Charles Gaines, Gee’s Bend Quilters, Lonnie Holley, David Huffman, Chris Johanson, Samuel Levi Jones, Caroline Kent, Kerry James Marshall, Alicia McCarthy, Martin Puryear, and Gary Simmons

SCHELLMANN ART Ainmillerstrasse 25, 80801 München, Germany Tel: 49 89 3866 6080 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.schellmannart.com | www.arspublicata.com

New editions by Liam Gillick: Replicated Revision, 2022, powder-coated aluminum piece, in 8 color variations. Edition of 12 per color; Equal Quarters, 2022, tubular aluminum in four sections, powder coated, each different in color combination. Edition of 10; Unequal Quarters, 2020, tubular aluminum in four sections, powder coated, each different in color combination. Edition of 10.

PRINTS + EDITIONS

William Villalongo, A Dance for Dave, 2023, acrylic, velvet flocking, and paper collage on wood panel, 36 × 76 1⁄4 × 2 3⁄4". Copyright the artist. Courtesy Villalongo Studio LLC and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.

TANDEM PRESS

WINGATE STUDIO

University of Wisconsin-Madison 1743 Commercial Avenue, Madison, WI 53704 Tel: 608 263 3437 Fax: 608 265 2356 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.tandempress.wisc.edu Mon. – Fri. 9–5

941 Northfield Road, Hinsdale, NH 03451 Tel: 603 239 8223 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.wingatestudio.com Mon. – Fri. by appointment

New and upcoming editions by Derrick Adams, Suzanne Caporael, and Jeffrey Gibson Available editions by Richard Bosman, Andy Burgess, Squeak Carnwath, Robert Cottingham, Lesley Dill, Jim Dine, Benjamin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Michelle Grabner, GRONK, Richard Haas, Al Held, Manabu Ikeda, Robert Kelly, José Lerma, Nicola López, David Lynch, Cameron Martin, Maser, Judy Pfaff, Sam Richardson, Alison Saar, David Shapiro, T.L. Solien, Robert Stackhouse, Swoon, and Mickalene Thomas

TWO PALMS 38 Crosby Street, 3rd Fl., New York, NY 10013 Tel: 212 965 8598 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.twopalms.us Mon. – Fri. by appointment

Featuring new prints by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ana Benaroya, Mel Bochner, R. Crumb, Carroll Dunham, Marilyn Minter, Chris Ofili, Tschabalala Self, and Stanley Whitney Works from Marina Adams, Matthew Barney, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Nona Faustine, Titus Kaphar, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, David Row, Dana Schutz, and Terry Winters

New and Upcoming Editions by Hayley Barker, Xylor Jane, Jeremy Frey and Paula Wilson Editions available by Ahmed Alsoudani, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Elizabeth Atterbury, Sebastian Black, Gideon Bok, Louise Bourgeois, Meghan Brady Sascha Braunig, Ambreen Butt, Robin Cameron, Mira Dancy, Mathew Cerletty, Xylor Jane, Walton Ford, John Gibson, Josephine Halvorson, Robert Kushner, Orion Martin, Shona McAndrew, Jill Moser, Aaron Noble, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Richard Ryan, Barbara Takenaga, Chuck Webster, Roger White, and Marie Watt

Canada’s Art Fair 100+ Galleries 500+ Artists

Esmaa Mohamoud (Olga Korper Gallery)

Tickets:

Metro Toronto Convention Centre More Info: ArtToronto.ca

ENGLAND AL M I N E REC H Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House, London W1K 3JH Tel: +44 20 7287 3644 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.alminerech.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6

October 10 – November 18

Celebrating Picasso Today: Infinite Modernism

AN N E LY JU DA F I NE A RT 23 Dering Street, 4th Floor, London W1S 1AW Tel: +44 20 7629 7578 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk Mon. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–5

Until November 4 Until November 4

Elizabeth Magill: By This River (4th Floor) Philipp Goldbach: Verso (3rd Floor)

1A Kempsford Road, (off Wincott Street) London SE11 4NU Tel: +44 20 7840 9111 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.corvi-mora.com Tues. – Sat. 11–6

October 5 – November 11

Anika Roach

DAVID Z WIR NER 24 Grafton Street, London W1S 4EZ Tel: +44 20 3538 3165 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.davidzwirner.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6

Please contact gallery for information.

F R IT H STR EET GA LLERY 17–18 Golden Square, London W1F 9JJ 60 Frith Street, Soho Square, London W1D 3JJ Tel: +44 20 7494 1550 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.frithstreetgallery.com Tues. – Fri. 11–6, Sat. 11–5

B E L M ACZ 45 Davies Street, London W1K 4LX Tel: +44 20 7629 7863 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.belmacz.com Instagram: @belmaczlondon Mon. – Fri. 10–6

October 6 – December 22 Women of the ’20s: Coco Crampton, Agata Madejska, Hanna Mattes, Devin Mays, Sadie Murdoch, Lydia Ourahmane with Daniel Blumberg, Ronit Porat, Anna Wachsmuth, and Ines Weizman

CE CI L I A B R U N S ON P R O J E C T S 3G Royal Oak Yard, Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3GE Tel: +44 20 8088 3696 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ceciliabrunsonprojects.com Tues. – Fri. 12–6

October 5 – November 3 October 5 – November 3

Claudia Alarcón and Silät Janet Sobel

CE L L PRO J E C T S PA C E 258 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA Tel: +44 20 8981 6336 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.cellprojects.org Thurs. – Sun. 12–6

Until November 19

C ORVI-MOR A

Ksenia Pedan: Reversion

Until November 11

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (Golden Square)

GA GOSIA N 17–19 Davies Street, London W1K 3DE Tel: +44 20 7493 3020 20 Grosvenor Hill, London W1K 3QD Tel: +44 20 7495 1500 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gagosian.com Mon. – Sat. 10–6 by appointment

October 5 – December 22 Richard Prince: Early Photography, 1977–87 (Grosvener Hill and Davies Street)

H A U SER & WIR T H LO N D O N 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET Tel: +44 20 7287 2300 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hauserwirth.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6

October 11 – December 22

Avery Singer: Free Fall

HAUSER & WIRTH SOMERSET Durslade Farm, Dropping Lane, Bruton, Somerset BA10 0NL Tel: +44 1749 814 060 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hauserwirth.com Tues. – Sun. 10–5 Until January 1, 2024

GRUPPENAUSSTELLUNG: Part Two

L O N D O N MI T H R A E U M B L OOM B E R G SPA C E

PIPPY H OU LDSWORT H G ALLERY

12 Walbrook, London EC4N 8AA E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.londonmithraeum.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6, Sun. 12–5

6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT Tel: +44 20 7734 7760 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.houldsworth.co.uk Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–6

Until January 13, 2024

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: The Pavilion (2023)

October 7 – November 11 Wangari Mathenge: A Day of Rest November 17 – December 23 Francesca DiMattio: Wedgwood

M AURE E N P A L E Y 60 Three Colts Lane, London E2 6GQ Tel: +44 20 7729 4112 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.maureenpaley.com Instagram: @maureenpaley Wed. – Sun. 11–6

Until October 22 Eduardo Sarabia: Prologue October 27 – December 22 Max Hooper Schneider STUDIO M Rochelle School, 7 Playground Gardens, London E2 7FA Wed. – Sun. 11–6 Until October 22 Eduardo Sarabia: Prologue October 27 – December 22 Max Hooper Schneider

SER PENT INE Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Tel: +44 20 7402 6075 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.serpentinegalleries.org Press: [email protected] By appointment only

Until October 22 Gabriel Massan and Collaborators: Third World – The Bottom Dimension Until October 29 22nd Serpentine Pavilion: À Table, 2023; designed by Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture October 5 – January 7, 2024 Georg Baselitz Sculptures 2011–2015 Ongoing Atta Kwami: Maria Lassnig Prize Mural (Serpentine North)

SPR OVIER I

M AZZO L E NI 15 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4AX Tel: +44 20 7495 8805 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mazzoleniart.com Mon. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. by appointment

October 11 – November 30 The Paradox of Proximity: Agostino Bonalumi and Lee Seung Jio

23 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BQ Tel: +44 20 7734 2066 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.sprovieri.com Mon. – Fri. 10–6

Until November 24

Cabrita: New Works

SPR Ü TH MA GER S M O T HE R’ S T A NK S T A T I O N 58-64 Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, London E2 6 GP Tel: +44 74 1258 1803 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.motherstankstation.com Thurs. – Sat. 12–6, and by appointment

October 8 – December

Yuko Mohri: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye

PACE G AL LE RY 5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ Tel: +44 20 3206 7600 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.pacegallery.com June & August: Tues. – Sat. 10–6, July: Tues. – Thurs. 10–6, Fri. 10–4

October 10 – November 11 Robert Irwin + Mary Corse November 22 – January 13, 2024 Paulina Olowska: Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas

7A Grafton Street, London W1S 4EJ Tel: +44 20 7408 1613 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.spruethmagers.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6

Until October 28 Sylvie Fleury: S.F. November 24 – January 27, 2024 Peter Fischli and David Weiss

T I M O T H Y TAY L O R

IMMA – IR ISH MU SEUM O F MO D ERN ART

15 Bolton Street, London W1J 8BG

Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

Tel: +44 20 7409 3344

Tel: +353 1612 9900

E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.timothytaylor.com

E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.imma.ie

Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–5

Tues. – Sat. 10–5:30, Wed. 11:30–5:30, Sun. 12–5:30; booking essential at imma.ie

October 12 – November 18 Eddie Martinez: Enough November 30 – January 20, 2024 Michel Pérez Pollo: Two Poets

Until October 8 Kevin Atherton: In Two Minds Until October 8 Influence & Identity: Twentieth Century Portrait Photography from the Bank of America Collection Until October 30 Howardina Pindell: A Renewed Language Until January 21, 2024 Anne Madden: Seven Paintings Until January 21, 2024 Coming Home Late: Jo Baer’s in the Land of the Giants

W HI T E CUB E 144–152 Bermondsey Street, Bermondsey, London SE1 3TQ Bermondsey: Tues. – Sat. 10–6, Sun. 12–6 25–26 Mason’s Yard, London SW1Y 6BU Mason’s Yard: Tues. – Sat. 10–6 Tel: +44 20 7930 5373 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.whitecube.com

Until November 5 Julie Mehretu: They departed into their own country another way (Bermondsey) October 10 – November 11 Marina Rheingantz: Maré (Mason’s Yard)

K ER LIN GA LLER Y Anne’s Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2 Tel: +353 1670 9093 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.kerlin.ie Tues. – Fri. 10–5:30, Sat. 11–4:30

October 6 – November 12 Callum Innes November 17 – December 23 Ailbhe Ní Bhriain

SCOTLAND

MOT H ER ’S T A NK STA TIO N

I N G L E B Y G A L L E RY

41–43 Watling Street, Usher’s Island, Dublin D08 NP48

33 Barony Street, Edinburgh EH3 6NX

E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.motherstankstation.com

Tel: +44 131 556 4441

Thurs. – Sat. 12–6

E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.inglebygallery.com Wed. – Sat. 11–5

Until December 16

Nick Goss: Smickel-Inn, Balcony of Europe

REPUBLIC OF IRELAND HUG H L AN E GA L L E RY Charlemont House, Parnell Square North, Dublin 1 Tel: +353 1222 5564 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hughlane.ie Tues. – Thurs. 10–6, Fri. – Sat. 10–5, Sun. 11–5

Until January 7, 2024 Bown + Bacon October 6 – January 28, 2024 Andy Warhol Three Times Out Ongoing Recent Acquisitions

Tel: +353 1671 7654

Until December

Atsushi Kaga: Here I am

Southwest CHARLOTTE JACKSON FINE ART

554 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 charlottejackson.com [email protected] Instagram: @charlottejacksonfineart 505 989 8688

Please contact gallery for information.

GERALD PETERS CONTEMPORARY

1011 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 gpgallery.com [email protected] Instagram: @geraldpeterscontemporary 505 954 5800

Until October 28 The Topography of Memory: Teresa Baker, Elizabeth Hohimer, and Hank Saxe Until October 28 Steven J. Yazzie: Throwing Stars Over Monsters Until October 28 Patrick Dean Hubbell: You Embrace Us

KIMBALL ART CENTER

1251 Kearns Blvd, Park City, UT 84060 kimballartcenter.org [email protected] Instagram: @kimballartcenter 435 649 8882

Until October 29 Between Life and Land – Crisis: Lani Asuncion, Justin Brice Guariglia, Desert ArtLab, Hope Ginsburg, and others

KOURI + CORRAO GALLERY 3213 Calle Marie, Santa Fe, NM 87507 kouricorrao.com [email protected] Instagram: @kouricorrao 505 820 1888

Until October 21 Alpay Aksayar Until October 21 Stephanie Robison October 27 – December 2 Ileana Alarcón

MOCA TUCSON

SITE SANTA FE

Until December 17 Raven Chacon: While hissing Until December 17 Na Mira: Subrosa Until February 2024 Keioui Keijaun Thomas: Magma & Pearls

Until November 6 Deborah Roberts: Come walk in my shoes October 6 – February 5, 2024 N. Dash: and Water October 6 – February 5, 2024 Nicholas Galanin: Interference Patterns

265 South Church Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85701 moca-tucson.org [email protected] Instagram: @mocatucson 520 624 5019

OGDEN CONTEMPORARY ARTS 455 25th Street, Ogden, UT 84401 ogdencontemporaryarts.org [email protected] Instagram: @ogdencontemporaryarts 801 810 2898

Until October 15 Stephanie Leitch: Spell Field Until October 15 Holly Wong: Emergence

1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 sitesantafe.org [email protected] Instagram: @sitesantafe 505 989 1199

ZANE BENNETT CONTEMPORARY ART

435 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 zanebennettgallery.com [email protected] Instagram: @zanebennettgallery 505 982 8111

Until October 14 Jennifer Ling Datchuk: Solo Showcase

PHOENIX ART MUSEUM

1625 North Central Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85004 phxart.org [email protected] Instagram: @phxart 602 257 1880

Until November 5 Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression Until December 3 MOVE: The Modern Cut of Geoffrey Beene Until December 31 Princely States of the Punjab: Sikh Art and History Until December 31 Mission and Legacy: Friends of Mexican Art’s Enduring Impact in the Valley and Beyond Until May 12, 2024 Arizona Artist Awards Exhibition Until June 30, 2024 William Herbert “Buck” Dunton: A Mainer Goes West November 5 – February 25, 2024 Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory Ongoing Philip C. Curtis and the Landscapes of Arizona Ongoing Yayoi Kusama: You Who are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies

October 18, 2023 – January 21, 2024 Contemporary programming at the AGO is supported by

Arnold Newman. Dan Flavin, 1967. Chromogenic print, 50.8 × 40.6 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Anonymous Gift, 2012. ©️ Arnold Newman Properties/Getty Images (2023). 2015/4035. Commissioned by Look.

TEXAS

VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 1511 Commerce Street Dallas TX 75201 www.vsf.la [email protected]

Until October 28

Che Lovelace: Nightscapes with Palms and Egrets

FORT WORTH KIMBELL ART MUSEUM 3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth TX 76107 817 332 8451 www.kimbellart.org

AUSTIN

Until October 4 The Kimbell at 50 November 5 – January 28, 2024 Bonnard’s Worlds

BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART 200 East Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Austin TX 78712 512 471 7324 www.blantonmuseum.org [email protected]

Until January 5, 2024 Group Show: Native America – In Translation Until January 7, 2024 Forces of Nature: Ancient Maya Art from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Until February 11, 2024 If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change

LANDMARKS, THE PUBLIC ART PROGRAM OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN 2616 Wichita Street, A7100, BWY 3rd Floor, Austin TX 78712 512 495 4315 www.landmarksut.org [email protected]

Now open Now open Now open

Simone Leigh: Sentinel IV Sarah Oppenheimer: C-010106 Eamon Ore-Giron: Tras los ojos (Behind the Eyes)

NORTHERN–SOUTHERN 411 Brazos Street # 105, Austin TX 78701 (entrance on E 5th Street, between Brazos and San Jacinto) www.northern-southern.com [email protected]

Until October 15 The Source: Evan Horn and Lauren Moya Ford November 12 – December 17 Laura Lit

DALLAS

MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH 3200 Darnell Street, Fort Worth TX 76107 817 738 9215 www.themodern.org [email protected]

Until November 26 Jammie Holmes: Make the Revolution Irresistible October 15 – January 21, 2024 Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map

HOUSTON ART IS BOND. 4411 Montrose Boulevard, Suite E, Houston TX 77006 713 834 1156 www.artisbond.gallery [email protected]

Until November 11 Golden Ratio: Mapping Self, Space, and Other: Tomiwa Arobieke, Sonja Henderson, Payton Harris-Woodard, Wayne J Bell Jr., Jasmin Penelope Charles, Floyd Newsum, J. Johari Palacio, and Mia Ghogho November 17 – January 13, 2024 Troy Ezequiel: Cielo Azul / Cielo Nublado

BARBARA DAVIS GALLERY 4411 Montrose Boulevard, Houston TX 77006 713 520 9200 www.barbaradavisgallery.com [email protected]

Until November 11 Yuriko Yamaguchi: The Trees Are Humming November 17 – January 6, 2024 Fernanda Caballero: The Way The Wind Blows

McCLAIN GALLERY 2242 Richmond Avenue, Houston TX 77098 713 520 9988 www.mcclaingallery.com [email protected]

LILIANA BLOCH GALLERY 4741 Memphis Street, Dallas TX 75207 214 991 5617 www.lilianablochgallery.com [email protected]

Until November 11 Kathy Lovas: Indexicality, the Archive, and the Frame – A Retrospective Installation Until December 30 Alicia Eggert: The Time for Becoming November 18 – December 30 Bret Slater, featuring Berta Kolteniuk

Until November 2 Bo Joseph: Holding Spaces

GALLERY SONJA ROESCH 2309 Caroline Street, Houston TX 77004 713 659 5424 www.gallerysonjaroesch.com [email protected]

Until October 28 Knopp Ferro: Levitating Composition November 4 – December 30 Ruth Pastine: Light as Air

CONDUIT GALLERY 1626 C Hi Line Drive, Dallas TX 75207 214 939 0064 www.conduitgallery.com [email protected]

Until October 7 Rosalyn Bodycomb: Pixilated Until October 7 Nancy Newberry: Smoke Bombs and Border Crossings Until October 7 Reinhard Ziegler: Gardener of Peace October 14 – November 25 Jules Buck Jones October 14 – November 25 Ted Larsen October 14 – November 25 Jeffrey Chong Wang

BARRY WHISTLER GALLERY 315 Cole Street, Suite 120, Dallas TX 75207 214 939 0242 www.barrywhistlergallery.com [email protected]

October 7 – November 11 Linnea Glatt: Recent Drawings October 7 – November 11 Peter Ligon: En Plein Air November 18 – December 22 Ann Stautberg: Recent Photographs November 18 – December 22 Danny Williams: Back From Black

KEIJSERS KONIG 150 Manufacturing Street, Suite 201, Dallas TX 75207 917 279 9009 www.keijserskoning.com [email protected]

MARFA HETZLER MARFA 1976 Antelope Hills Road, Marfa TX 79843 432 729 7272 www.maxhetzler.com [email protected]

Until December 10

Grace Weaver: Indoor Paintings

SAN ANTONIO RUIZ-HEALY ART 201-A East Olmos Drive, San Antonio TX 78212 210 804 2219 www.ruizhealyart.com [email protected]

Until November 18 Cecilia Paredes: The Weaving of Dust November 29 – December 30 Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Tammie Rubin

ROCKPORT

Until October 7 Beya Gille Gacha October 14 – November 18 Rush Baker

ROCKPORT CENTER FOR THE ARTS

GREEN FAMILY ART FOUNDATION

Until November 12 Mary Jenewein Until November 19 Spencer Tinkham October 6 – November 19 McKay Otto November 24 – January 11, 2024 Rockport Center for the Arts: All Member Exhibition

2111 Flora Street, Suite 110, Dallas TX 75201 214 274 5656 www.greenfamilyartfoundation.org [email protected]

October 7 – January 21, 2024

Nicolas Party: Landscape

204 S. Austin Street, Rockport TX 78382 361 729 5519 www.rockportartcenter.com [email protected]

Mood of the moment

Gaby Aghion and the house of Chloé

October 13, 2023– February 18, 2024 Tickets: TheJewishMuseum.org/Chloe Support for the exhibition Mood of the moment: Gaby Aghion and the house of Chloé is provided by the Wilf Family Foundations, the Arnhold Foundation, the Peter Jay Sharp Exhibition Fund, an Anonymous donor, Wendy Fisher and the Kirsh Foundation in honor of Claudia Gould, the Goldie and David Blanksteen Foundation, the Estate of Gaby and Curtis Hereld, the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation, Inc., Liz Lange and David Shapiro, The Feshbach Family, the Liane Ginsberg Family Fund, Michèle Gerber Klein, Ann and Mel Schaffer, John Simoudis and Jerry Rose, the Alfred J. Grunebaum & Ruth Grunebaum Sondheimer Memorial Fund, and other generous donors. Additional support is provided by CHLOÉ.

5th Ave at 92nd St, NYC The publication has been supported by CHLOÉ and the Jewish Museum. Both the publication and the exhibition feature garments from the CHLOÉ Archive collection. Dress designed by Phoebe Philo, autumn–winter 2004, chiffon. © Chloé Archive, Paris. Photo by Julien T. Hamon. Courtesy the Jewish Museum, NY. The Jewish Museum is under the auspices of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

AIR DE PARIS

GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL

Until October 21 Parole: Eliza Douglas and Lily van der Stokker October 15 – December 2 DESTINÉES: Mona Filleul, Jeanne Jacob, Aurélien Potier, and Leïla Vilmouth October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 5 – January 14, 2024 Stéphane Dafflon

Until October 7 Anri Sala October 16 – November 18 Jean-Luc Moulène October 16 – November 18 Wade Guyton October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 9–12 ART021 Shanghai

43, rue de la Commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville Tel: +33 1 87 66 44 06 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.airdeparis.com

GALERIE ALLEN

6 passage Sainte-Avoye, 75003 Paris (entrance 8 rue Rambuteau) Tel: +33 1 45 26 92 33 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerieallen.com

Until October 7 Tarek Lakhrissi: THE PRELUDE THE HOURS THE KISS THE END October 14 – November 25 Jason Dodge featuring Florence Jung October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel: Tarek Lakhrissi, Jacqueline de Jong, Jason Dodge, Maurice Blaussyld, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, and Daniel Turner

APPLICAT-PRAZAN

Rive gauche, 16, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris Rive droite, 14, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 43 25 39 24 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.applicat-prazan.com

October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel October 28 – December 16 Hélion: Florilège (Rive gauche) October 28 – December 16 Post-war school of Paris (Rive droite) November 20–26 FAB Paris

ART : CONCEPT

4, passage Sainte-Avoye, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 53 60 90 30 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerieartconcept.com

October 14 – November 25 Andrew Lewis: Au bonheur des femmes October 14 – November 25 Lin May Saeed October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 1–5 Artissima

CEYSSON & BÉNÉTIÈRE

23, rue du Renard, 75004 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 77 08 22 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ceyssonbenetiere.com

Until October 7 Lionel Sabatté: Poussières des cimes October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel October 19 – December 2 Wilfrid Almendra

10, rue Charlot, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 77 38 87 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.crousel.com

GALERIE DVIR

13, rue des Arquebusiers, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 9 81 07 44 08 | +33 6 03 57 07 45 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.dvirgallery.com

Until October 14 Dor Guez: Gina, mon cœur October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel

GAGOSIAN

9, rue de Castiglione, 75001 Paris 4, rue de Ponthieu, 75008 Paris 26, avenue de l'Europe, 93350 Le Bourget Tel: +33 1 75 00 05 92 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gagosian.com

October 16 – December 22 Giuseppe Penone: Imprints of Light (Ponthieu) October 18 – December 22 Anna Weyant (Castiglione) October – December 22 Takashi Murakami: Understanding the New Cognitive Domain (Le Bourget)

GALERIE CHRISTOPHE GAILLARD

5, rue Chapon, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 78 49 16 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerie-gaillard.com

October 7 – November 11 Bernard Réquichot (Front Space) October 7 – November 11 Pablo Tomek (Main Space) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 21–26 FAB Paris

GALERIE MARIAN GOODMAN

66 & 79, rue du Temple, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 48 04 70 52 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mariangoodman.com

Until October 7 Lawrence Weiner: APRÈS ICI & LÀ (79, rue du Temple) October 14 – November 25 Delcy Morelos (79, rue du Temple)

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

57 & 46, rue du Temple, 75004 Paris Tel: +33 1 57 40 60 80 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.maxhetzler.com

Until October 21 Katharina Grosse: The Bed October 11–16 Frieze London October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 4 – January 6, 2024 Ai Weiwei November 16–19 Art Cologne

WRIGHTWOOD

CHICAGO

YOUR TECHNOLOGY IS WATCHING YOU... WHAT IS IT LEARNING? 17 ARTISTS EXPLORE THE PROMISE & DANGER OF OUR DIGITAL WORLD IN THIS AWARD-WINNING EXHIBITION

THIS EXHIBITION IS PRESENTED BY ALPHAWOOD EXHIBITIONS AT WRIGHTWOOD 659. DIFFERENCE MACHINES: TECHNOLOGY AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY ART IS ORGANIZED BY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM.

OCT/13 - DEC/16, 2023 | wrightwood659.org

HUSSENOT

GALERIE LOEVENBRUCK

October 12 – November 10 Gina Fischli and Mike Kelley November 16 – January 2, 2024 Emily Sundblad

Until October 28 Ashley Hans Scheirl: L’or dans l’œil (6, rue Jacques-Callot) October 16 – November 18 Inaugural Group Show (12, rue Jacques-Callot) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel

MARIANE IBRAHIM

MAYORAL

Until October 7 ruby onyinyechi amanze: The Poetics of Space October 13 – December 2 Peter Uka

October Picasso / post-Picasso October 18–22 Estampa Madrid November 9–12 Westbund Art & Design, Shanghai November 21–26 FAB Paris

5 bis, rue des Haudriettes, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 48 87 60 81 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriehussenot.com

18, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 81 72 24 60 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.marianeibrahim.com

GALERIE JOUSSE ENTREPRISE

18, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris 6, rue Saint-Claude, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 53 82 13 60 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.jousse-entreprise.com

October 7 – November 11 Anne-Charlotte Finel, curated by Clara Darrason (rue Saint-Claude) October 12 – November 10 Emmanuel Boos (rue de Seine) October 17–22 Design Miami/ Paris October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel: Silent Waves – Ange Leccia and Jean-Luc Vilmouth, curated by Marie Brines November 18 – January 13, 2024 Group Show: Renaissance sauvage – la perspective symbiotique, curated by Guillaume Logé

GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN

11-13, rue des Arquebusiers, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 86 76 05 50 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.peterkilchmann.com

Until November 4 Kenrick McFarlane October 20–22 Asia NOW

GALERIE LELONG & CO.

13, rue de Téhéran, 75008 Paris 38, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 45 63 13 19 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerie-lelong.com

Until October 7 David Nash: Colours and Columns (Library, rue de Téhéran) Until October 7 Barthélémy Toguo: Water is a Right (avenue Matignon) Until October 7 Richard Tuttle: My Best (rue de Téhéran) October 11–15 Frieze London October 13 – November 18 Etel Adnan: Prints (Library, rue de Téhéran) October 13 – November 18 Samuel Levi Jones: Longing (avenue Matignon) October 13 – November 18 Paula Rego: Drawing Breath (rue de Téhéran) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel October 26–29 IFPDA Print Fair, New York

6 + 12, rue Jacques Callot, 75006 Paris Tel: +33 1 53 10 85 68 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.loevenbruck.com

36, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 99 61 79 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriamayoral.com

GALERIE MITTERRAND

79, rue du Temple, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 43 26 12 05 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriemitterrand.com

Until November 4 THE WORLD IS WHOLLY INSIDE, AND I AM WHOLLY OUTSIDE MYSELF: Corinna Gosmaro, Mariana Oushiro, Andrew Sendor, Chibụike Ụzọma, Scott Young, and Monsieur Zohore; curated by Barbara Newman with a performance by Monsieur Zohore October 11–15 Frieze Masters, London: Group Show October 17–22 Design Miami/ Paris: Lalanne

GALERIE NATHALIE OBADIA

3, rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, 75004 Paris 91, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 74 67 68 Web: www.nathalieobadia.com

Until October 21 Joris Van de Moortel: Why do you tear me from myself? a tête-à-tête with Marsyas (rue du Cloître St-Merri, Space II) Until October 21 Andres Serrano: Doom of Beauty (rue du Cloître St-Merri) Until October 28 Group Show (rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 4 – December Nú Barreto (rue du Cloître St-Merri) November 6 – December Luc Delahaye (rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré) November 9–12 Paris Photo

PERROTIN

76, rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris 2bis & 8, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 16 79 79 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.perrotin.com

Until October 5 Germaine Richier (8 ave Matignon) October 11–15 Frieze Masters, London October 11–15 Frieze London October 12 – November 16 Group Show (2bis ave Matignon) October 14 – November 18 Elmgreen & Dragset (rue de Turenne) October 14 – November 18 Laurent Grasso (rue de Turenne) October 14 – November 18 Chen Ke (rue de Turenne) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel October 19–22 Asia NOW October 25–28 Art Collaboration Kyoto November 1–5 ADAA Art Show November 9–12 Westbund Art & Design, Shanghai November 9–12 ART021 Shanghai November 15–19 Abu Dhabi Art

Unique Experiences at Every Turn

A global destination for creative expression, SCAD MOA presents awe-inspiring exhibitions and events with internationally renowned contemporary artists. 601 Turner Blvd.

|

Downtown Savannah

|

scadmoa.org

|

@scadmoa

|

#SCADMOA

GALERIE PRAZ DELAVALLADE

GALERIE SUZANNE TARASIEVE

Until November 10 Sam Durant November 18 – January 6, 2024 Maude Maris

Until October 7 Carole Mousset: Corruptible Bodies (Project Room) Until October 7 Anne Wenzel: The Future is Present – The Present is the Past October 14 – November 18 Alin Bozbiciu November 8–12 Paris Photo: Juergen Teller November 25 – January 13, 2024 Juergen Teller

5, rue des Haudriettes, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 45 86 20 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.praz-delavallade.com

ALMINE RECH

64, rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris 18, avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 45 83 71 90 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.alminerech.com

Until October 7 Choi Myoung Young (Matignon) Until October 7 Sasha Ferré, Aly Helyer, Alec Egan, and Sylvia Ong (Turenne) October 14 – November 4 Kenny Scharf (Turenne – Front Space) October 14 – November 10 Kenny Scharf (Turenne) October 15 – November 10 Alex Israel (Matignon) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 10 – December 8 Selma Parlour (Turenne – Front Space) November 18 – December 22 Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and Jose Lerma (Turenne) November 18 – December 22 Kim Tschang-Yeul (Matignon)

MICHEL REIN

7, rue Pastourelle, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 71 76 54 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.suzanne-tarasieve.com

TEMPLON

30, rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris 28, rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 72 14 10 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.templon.com

Until October 14 Jonathan Meese (rue Beaubourg) Until October 21 Robin Kid: Kingdom of Ends (rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel

GALERIE GEORGES-PHILIPPE & NATHALIE VALLOIS

42, rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 42 72 68 13 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.michelrein.com

33 & 36, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris Tel: +33 1 46 34 61 07 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerie-vallois.com

Until October 1 Around Video, Brussels Until October 7 Enrique Ramírez: El lento clamor del viento October 5–8 Art on Paper, Brussels October 13 – November 25 Agnès Thurnauer October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel November 30 – January 2024 A.K. Burns

Until October 28 Niki de Saint Phalle: Tableaux éclatés (36, rue de Seine) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel

GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC

7, rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris 69, avenue du Général Leclerc, 93500 Pantin Tel: +33 1 42 72 99 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ropac.net

Until October 13 Han Bing: got heart Until November 30 Irving Penn: The Bath October 11–15 Frieze London October 16 – December 23 Lisa Brice October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel October 18 – January 27, 2024 Alvaro Barrington: They Got Time (Pantin)

SKARSTEDT GALLERY

2 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 88 88 48 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.skarstedt.com

Until October 12 Marco Pariani: Landscaping October 11–15 Frieze Masters, London October 16 – November 28 Jana Schröder: ÉQUIPE TACHISTOSCOPIQUE October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel

ZIDOUN BOSSUYT GALLERY

51, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris Tel: +33 1 87 44 78 81 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.zidoun-bossuyt.com

Until November 4 Yashua Klos: Building Our Being November 10–12 Luxembourg Art Week November 16 – January 12, 2024 Noel W. Anderson: In Blue Fur

DAVID ZWIRNER

108, rue Vieille du Temple, 75003 Paris Tel: +33 1 85 09 43 21 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.davidzwirner.com

Until October 7 Josh Smith: Living with Depression October 16 – November 18 Mamma Andersson

October 19, 2023 — April 21, 2024

Presenting Sponsors Mary Janigan & Tom Kierans The Reitberger Family in honour of Renate Reitberger Noreen Taylor & David Staines Exhibition Supporters David Binet The Linda Frum & Howard Sokolowski Charitable Foundation

Government Support

A Dialogue Un dialogue with Objects avec les choses

This exhibition includes objects generously provided by the Royal Ontario Museum

Organized by the Gardiner Museum

111 Queen’s Park, Toronto

Magdalene Odundo, Untitled, 1995, Ceramic, Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Photo: PD Rearick

CANADA CALGARY

Patrick Mikhail Gallery

1011 9th Avenue SE, Fourth Floor, Calgary, Alberta T2G 0H7 Tel: 403 930 2490 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.eskerfoundation.art | www.permanentcollection.eskerfoundation.com Instagram/Facebook/Twitter: @EskerFoundation

Please contact gallery for information.

Esker Foundation

Until October 15 asmaa al-issa Until December 17 Care and Wear: Bodies Crafted for Harm and Healing Until December 17 Like everything alive that we try to hold forever: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Diane Borsato, Stephanie Dinkins, Bridget Moser, Sondra Perry, and Miya Turnbull October 23 – February 4, 2024 Angeline Simon

HALIFAX

The Blue Building Gallery

2482 Maynard Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3K 3V4 Tel: 902 429 0134 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.thebluebuilding.ca Instagram: @thebluebuildinggallery

Please contact gallery for information.

MONTRÉAL

4815 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montréal, Québec H2T 1R6 Tel: 514 439 2790 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.patrickmikhailgallery.com

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain 963 Rachel East, Montréal, Québec H2J 2J4 Tel: 514 395 6032 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.pfoac.com

Until October 21 Chih-Chien Wang: BLUE LAKE, PINK LAND, PATCHED SPHERE, FRESH WOUND Until October 21 Guiding Hands: Samonie Toonoo, Napachie Pootoogook, and Shuvinai Ashoona November 6 – December 16 Leila Zelli: A Chant Can Cross the Ocean

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

1380 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1J5 Tel: 514 285 1600 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mbam.qc.ca

October 7 – January 21, 2024 Marisol: A Retrospective November 1 – February 18, 2024 Françoise Sullivan: “I let rhythms flow”

PHI Foundation For Contemporary Art

2020 William Street, Montréal, Québec H3J 1R8 Tel: 514 938 3863 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.blouin-division.com

451 & 465 Saint-Jean Street, Montreal, Québec H2Y 2R5 Tel: 514 849 3742 E-mail: [email protected] Web: foundation.phi.ca Instagram/Facebook/Twitter: @fondationphi

Fonderie Darling

Galerie Robertson Arès

Until October 22 Jeannette Ehlers: Play Mas Until October 22 Valérie Blass: This Is Not a Metaphor Co-produced and presented in conjuction with MOMENTA Biennale

October 7–28 François Arès: A Statement of the Exact Meaning November 10 – December 2 Marie-Claude Marquis: Solo Show

Blouin Division

Until November 4 Pierre Dorion Until November 4 Edward Bustynsky

745 rue Ottawa, Montréal, Québec H3C 1R8 Tel: 514 392 1554 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.fonderiedarling.org Instagram: @fonderiedarling

Patel Brown | Montreal

372 Saint-Catherine Street West, Suite 412, Montreal, Quebec H3B 1A2 E-mail: [email protected] Web: patelbrown.com Instagram: @patelbrowngallery

October 5 – November 11 Kim Dorland: Is this it? November 16 – December 23 Native Art Department International: High Magick

Until October 8 Moridja Kitenge Banza: Inhabiting the Imaginary November 3 – March 10, 2024 Rirkrit Tiravanija: JOUEZ/PLAY

1490 rue Sherbrooke O., Montréal, Québec H3G 1L3 Tel: 514 657 1221 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerierobertsonares.com Instagram: @robertsonaresgallery

SEPT 15 –DEC 31, 2023

Frist Ar tMuseum.org •

Nashville, Tennessee

Multiplicity will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Phillips Collection, Washington DC.

Jamea Richmond-Edwards. Archetype of a 5 Star (detail), 2018. Acrylic, spray paint, glitter, ink, and cut paper on canvas; 60 x 48 in. Rubell Museum, Miami. © Jamea Richmond-Edwards

Organized by the Frist Art Museum

CANADA SASKATOON

Remai Modern

102 Spadina Crescent East, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 3L6 Tel: 306 975 7610 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.remaimodern.org

Until October 22 Becoming the Faun: Pablo Picasso, Elaine Cameron-Weir, John Kavik, Bridget Moser, and Dominique Rey Until December 31 Meryl McMaster: bloodline Until January 28, 2024 Laure Prouvost: Oma-je October 6 – February 25, 2024 Kapwani Kiwanga: Remediation

TORONTO Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) 4700 Keele Street, Accolade East Building, York University, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Tel: 416 736 5169 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.agyu.art Instagram: @a_g_y_u

Until December 2 Tim Whiten: Elemental Fire Until December 2 Erica Stocking: MotherGinger Promenade

Art Gallery of Ontario

317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1G4 Tel: 416 979 6648 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ago.ca Instagram: @agotoronto

Until October 1 Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear Until January 7, 2024 Sarindar Dhaliwal: When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours Until March 31, 2024 KAWS:FAMILY Until May 2024 Feels Like HOME October 18 – January 21, 2024 Building Icons: Arnold Newman’s Magazine World, 1938–2000 November 8 – March 17, 2024 Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody

Art Museum at the University of Toronto 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H3 Tel: 416 978 1838 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.artmuseum.utoronto.ca Instagram: @artmuseumuoft

Until November 25 Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story Until November 25 The Performance of Shadows: Betye Saar, Tim Whiten, and Erika DeFreitas

Patel Brown | Toronto

21 Wade Avenue, Unit 2, Toronto, Ontario M6H 1P4 E-mail: [email protected] Web: patelbrown.com Instagram: @patelbrowngallery

Until November 4 Kim Dorland: A small digital print show Until November 4 Shellie Zhang: Elemental November 17 – December 23 Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber: Vulnerability in transition November 17 – December 14 Lindsay Montgomery: Bugbear

Blouin Division

45 Ernest Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6P 3M7 Tel: 647 346 9082 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.blouin-division.com

Please contact gallery for information.

Corkin Gallery

7 Tank House Lane, Toronto, Ontario M5A 3C4 Tel: 416 979 1980 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.corkingallery.com

Until October 14 To will one thing: Vincent Barré, Constantin Brancusi, Christian Butterfield, Miles Gertler, Sondra Meszaros, George Platt Lynes, and Leopold Plotek October 7 – November 11 Barbara Astman: Woven Stories October 7 – November 11 Peter Campbell: Echo October 11 – November 14 Leopold Plotek: paintings 1979–2021 October 14 – November 18 Miles Gertler: Typical Oasis October 19 – November 25 Figures of Revolution: Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White, André Kertész, Dora Maar, Barbara Morgan, Roger Parry, Marion Post Wolcott, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Margaret Watkins

Daniel Faria Gallery

188 Saint Helens Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6H 4A1 Tel: 416 538 1880 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.danielfariagallery.com Instagram: @dfariagallery

Until October 14 Allyson Vieira: You Too October 24 – November 25 Douglas Coupland: The New Ice Age

Olga Korper Gallery

17 Morrow Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2H9 Tel: 416 538 8220 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.olgakorpergallery.com

Until October 7 Luca Soldovieri: Now That the Dust Has Settled October 14 – November 11 Meaghan Hyckie: Ley Lines November 18 – December 21 Robert Fones: Solo Show

CANADA TORONTO

VANCOUVER

Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

Until November 11 Rochelle Goldberg: Sun Moon Stars

Until December 10 Carole Itter: Only when I’m hauling water do I wonder if I’m getting any stronger

1286 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M6H 1N9 Tel: 416 536 1519 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mercerunion.org Instagram: @mercerunion

MKG127

1445 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario M6J 1Y7 Tel: 647 435 7682 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mkg127.com Instagram: @mkg127

Until October 14 Kristiina Lahde: Vice Versa October 21 – November 18 Dean Baldwin Lew: not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else’s

1825 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2 Tel: 604 822 2759 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.belkin.ubc.ca

Libby Leshgold Gallery

Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 1A7 Tel: 604 844 3809 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.libby.ecuad.ca Instagram: @libbyleshgoldgallery

Please contact gallery for information.

Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto

Vancouver Art Gallery

Until February 4, 2024 Phyllida Barlow: Eleven Columns Until February 4, 2024 Liz Magor: The Separation Until February 4, 2024 The Wedge Collection: Dancing in the Light

Until October 9 Group Show: Fashion Fictions Until November 19 Parviz Tanavoli: Poets, Locks, Cages Until February 4, 2024 Conceptions of White November 11 – March 24, 2024 Denyse Thomasos: just beyond

158 Sterling Road, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2B2 Tel: 416 530 5125 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.moca.ca

Paul Petro Contemporary Art

980 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario M6J 1H1 Tel: 416 979 7874 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.paulpetro.com | www.multiplesandsmallworks.com Instagram: @paulpetrocanada | @multiplesandsmallworks Twitter: @paulpetrocanada Facebook: @paulpetrocontemporaryart

October 6 – November 4 Sadko Hadzihasanovic: Breaking the Surface October 6 – November 4 Olia Mishchenko: New Work November 10 – December 23 Amy Bowles and Zachari Logan: The Offering

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

231 Queens Quay West, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8 Tel: 416 973 4949 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.thepowerplant.org Instagram: @thepowerplantto Facebook: @thepowerplantto Twitter: @thepowerplantto

October 13 – January 7, 2024 Abdelkader Benchamma: Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss October 13 – January 7, 2024 Anna Boghiguian: Time of Change October 13 – January 7, 2024 Aria Dean: Abattoir, U.S.A.!

750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H7 Tel: 604 662 4700 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

WHISTLER Audain Art Museum

4350 Blackcomb Way, Whistler, British Columbia V8E 1N3 Tel: 604 962 0413 E-mail: [email protected] Web: audainartmuseum.com Instagram: @audainartmuseum

Until October 9 Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage Until January 29, 2024 Karin Bubaš: Garden of Shadows

WINNIPEG Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art

1–460 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3C 0E8 Tel: 204 942 1043 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.plugin.org Instagram: @pluginica

Until December 17 Juan Ortiz-Apuy: Darkroom Until December 17 Farah Al Qasimi: The Swarm

OCT 3, 2023—JAN 14, 2024 | nyuad-artgallery.org New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE

ATLANTA

COLD SPRING

MIAMI

SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film

Magazzino Italian Art Foundation

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse

1600 Peachtree St NW, Atlanta, GA 30309 Tel: 404 253 3132 Web: www.scadfash.org Instagram: @scadfash

2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, NY 10516 Tel: 845 666 7202 Web: www.magazzino.art

591 NW 27th St, Miami, FL 33127 Tel: 305 576 1051 Web: www.margulieswarehouse.com

Until January 8, 2024 Mario Schifano: The Rise of the ‘60s Until January 8, 2024 Ettore Spalletti: Parole di colore Until March 31, 2025 Carlo Scarpa: Timeless Masterpieces Ongoing Arte Povera

October 18 Motherwell, Segal, Stella October 18 Helen Levitt New York Street Photographer 1930s and 1940s October 18 Mimmo Paladino: Painting and Sculpture October 18 Only Sculpture: Bladen, Heizer, Fabro Perlman, Serra, Tony Smith, Snelson, Tucker, and Wilmarth October 18 15 Artists New to the Collection including Jenny Brosinski October 18 Danny Lyon: 100 Photographs

Until January 8, 2024 Ellen von Unwerth: This Side of Paradise Until January 28, 2024 The Blonds: Glamour, Fashion, Fantasy

ASPEN Aspen Art Museum 637 E Hyman Ave, Aspen, CO 81611 Tel: 970 925 8050 Web: www.aspenartmuseum.org

Until October 22 Nairy Baghramian: Jupon de Corps Until November 5 Jeffrey Gibson: THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING Until January 14, 2024 A Lover’s Discourse: Guglielmo Castelli, Chase Hall, Ulala Imai, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Zeinab Saleh, and Issy Wood

CAMBRIDGE MIT List Visual Arts Center 20 Ames St, Cambridge, MA 02139 Tel: 617 253 4680 Web: listart.mit.edu

Until October 29 List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares October 27 – March 3, 2024 Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme October 27 – March 10, 2024 Carlos Reyes November 16 – February 18, 2024 List Projects 28: Sophie Friedman-Pappas and TJ Shin

FORT WORTH Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 3200 Darnell St, Fort Worth, TX 76107 Tel: 817 738 9215 Web: www.themodern.org

Until November 26 Jammie Holmes: Make the Revolution Irresistible October 15 – January 21, 2024 Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map

HOUSTON Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 5216 Montrose Blvd, Houston, TX 77006 Tel: 713 284 8250 Web: www.camh.org

MINNEAPOLIS Walker Art Center 725 Vineland Pl, Minneapolis, MN 55403 Tel: 612 375 7600 Web: www.walkerart.org

Until November 26 Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present Until January 21, 2024 Allan Sekula: Fish Story Until May 5, 2024 Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection Until May 5, 2024 Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection Until May 19, 2024 Among Friends: The Generosity of Judy and Ken Dayton November 11 – March 10, 2024 Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s

Until October 1 Ming Smith: Feeling the Future Until November 26 Jordan Strafer: Trilogy October 27 – March 17, 2024 Six Scenes From Our Future

Contemporary Art in U.S. Museums

GREEN FAMILY ART FOUNDATION PRESENTS:

OCTOBER 7, 2023 - JANUARY 21, 2024 | 2111 FLORA ST, STE. 110, DALLAS, TX | GREENFAMILYARTFOUNDATION.ORG

NEW YORK

RENO

VIRGINIA BEACH

Whitney Museum of American Art

Nevada Museum of Art

Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art

99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014 Tel: 212 570 3600 Web: www.whitney.org

Donald W. Reynolds Center for the Visual Arts, E. L. Wiegand Gallery 160 West Liberty St, Reno, NV 89501 Tel: 775 329 3333 Web: www.nevadaart.org

2200 Parks Ave, Virginia Beach, VA 23451 Tel: 757 425 0000 Web: www.virginiamoca.org Instagram: @virginiamoca

Until October 29 Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions Until February 1, 2024 Inheritance Until February 1, 2024 Trust Me Until May 1, 2024 The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965

Until February 4, 2024 April Bey: Atlantica, The Gilda Region Until February 4, 2024 Guillermo Bert: The Journey October 7 – June 2, 2024 Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless

118 South 36th St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Tel: 215 898 7108 Web: www.icaphila.org Instagram: @ICAPhiladelphia

Until December 17 Moveables: Jes Fan, Nikita Gale, Hannah Levy, Ken Lum, and Oren Pinhassi Until December 17 David Antonio Cruz: When the Children Come Home

ST. LOUIS Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 3750 Washington Blvd, St Louis, MO 63108 Tel: 314 535 4660 Web: www.camstl.org

Until February 11, 2024 Dominic Chambers: Birthplace Until February 11, 2024 Justin Favela: Ruta Madre Until February 11, 2024 Hajra Waheed: A Solo Exhibition

SAVANNAH Philadelphia Museum of Art Benjamin Franklin Pkwy & 26th St, Philadelphia, PA 19130 Tel: 215 763 8100 Web: www.philamuseum.org

Until October 15 Ellsworth Kelly: Reflections on Water and Other Early Drawings Until October 29 The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia Until January 1, 2024 A Century of Kanthas: Women’s Quilts in Bengal, 1870s–1970s Until July 7, 2024 Of God and Country: American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection Until July 7, 2024 Zoe Leonard: Strange Fruit Until January 5, 2025 Rodin’s Hands (Rodin Museum) October 21 – February 11, 2024 The Shape of Time: Korean Art After 1989 November 19 – April 14, 2024 Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place

Collector’s Edition Open (C)all 2023: Curious Collections ARTlab

WILMINGTON

PHILADELPHIA Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania

Until December 31 Until December 31 Until December 31

SCAD Museum of Art 601 Turner Blvd, Savannah, GA 31401 Tel: 912 525 7191 Web: www.scadmoa.org Instagram: @scadmoa

Cameron Art Museum 3201 South 17th St, Wilmington, NC 28412 Tel: 910 395 5999 Web: cameronartmuseum.org

Until October 8 Love: Ghada Amer, Thomas Barger, Susanna Coffey, Alanna Fields, Andrea Galvani, Jeffrey Gibson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rashid Johnson, Jana Vander Lee, Felicita Felli Maynard, William Selig, Lien Truong, Akram Zaatari, and more Until November 12 Traer a Luz/Bring to Light: Dayana and Diego Camposeco Until January 14, 2024 Place of Encounters/Lugar de Encuentros: Nico Amortegui, Cornelio Campos, Rodrigo Dorfman, Mario Marzan, Renzo Ortega, and Rosalia Torres-Weiner November 9 – April 4, 2024 Monument: Sonya Clark, Stephen Hayes, Juan Logan, Alison Saar, Augustus SaintGaudens, Kara Walker, and more

Until December 18 Group Show: Likewise – Artists Portraying Artists Until December 26 Xiwen Zhu: Soft Shell Until December 31 Tyler Mitchell: Domestic Imaginaries Until January 7, 2024 Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: Get Home Safe Until January 8, 2024 M. Florine Démosthène: Mastering the Dream Until January 15, 2024 Nevin Alada: Refraction Until January 15, 2024 Erwin Wurm: Hot Until January 29, 2024 Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Energy/Synergy Until January 29, 2024 Yu Hong: Night Walk

Contemporary Art in U.S. Museums

biennale.org.sa

Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale February 20 2024 JAX District Diriyah Saudi Arabia

The Diriyah Biennale Foundation is proud to announce the 2nd edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and its curatorial team led by Ute Meta Bauer as Artistic Director. A platform for global dialogue and exchange between Saudi Arabia and the world

The curatorial team comprises: Anca Rujoiu – Co-Curator | Wejdan Reda – Co-Curator Rose Lejeune – Co-Curator | Rahul Gudipudi – Adjunct Curator And working with: Ana Salazar Amina Diab Dian Arumningtyas Alanood AlSudairi

The international art event will run in Diriyah until May 24, 2024. We look forward to welcoming you!

ON VIEW OCTOBER 13, 2023–JANUARY 7, 2024

SOLASTALGIA: ARCHAEOLOGIES OF LOSS Abdelkader Benchamma TIME OF CHANGE Anna Boghiguian ABATTOIR, U.S.A.! Aria Dean ORGANIZED AND DEVELOPED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE VEGA FOUNDATION

ALL YEAR, ALL FREE

PRESENTED BY

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, CA thepowerplant.org

@ThePowerPlantTO

Anna Boghiguian, The Chess Game, 2022. Installation view first floor, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2022. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy of the artist © Anna Boghiguian, Kunsthaus Bregenz.

Hugh Lane Gallery Charlemont House, Parnell Square North Dublin, D01 F2X9, Ireland Book Tickets at HughLane.ie

1 mira madrid Until November 11

Secundino Hernández, Untitled, 2023, silkscreen on cardboard, 102 7⁄8 × 68 3⁄8". Courtesy Galería Ehrhardt Flórez, Madrid. Photo: Rafael Trapiello.

Argumosa 16, 28012 Madrid Tel: +34 912 40 05 04 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.1miramadrid.com

Inmaculada Salinas: La voz a ti debida

albarrán bourdais Barquillo 13, 28004 Madrid Tel: +93 238 97 50 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.albarran-bourdais.com

Koo Jeong A: an + bn = cn

Until November 3

Solo Houses, 44623 Cretas Web: www.solo-houses.com Instagram: @solo.houses

Until September 2024

Solo Summer Group Show III

alzueta gallery Main Gallery: Sèneca 9-11, 08006 Barcelona Turó Park: Josep Bertrand 3, 08021 Barcelona Madrid: Marques de Monasterio 1, 28004 Madrid Palau de Casavells: Santa Llucia 1, 17121 Corçà Tel: +34 611 55 56 93 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.alzuetagallery.com Instagram: @alzueta_gallery

Bruno Ollé (Madrid Gallery) Clàudia Valsells (Turó Park) Three Under Forty (Palau de Casavells)

Until October 14 Until October 27 Until October 29

galería ehrhardt flórez San Lorenzo 11, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 91 310 4415 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ehrhardtflorez.com Instagram: @ehrhardtflorezgallery

Secundino Hernández

Until October 28

juana de aizpuru Calle del Barquillo, 44, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 91 310 55 61 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.juanadeaizpuru.es

galería elba benítez

October 28

San Lorenzo 11, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 913 08 04 68 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.elbabenitez.com Instagram: @galeriaelbabenitez

luis adelantado | valencia

Until November

Fernanda Fragateiro: Escola Clandestina

galería elvira gonzález Hermanos Álvarez Quintero 1, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 913 19 59 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriaelviragonzalez.com Instagram: @galeriaelviragonzalez

Until November 4

Chema Madoz

galería helga de alvear Doctor Fourquet 12, 28012 Madrid Tel: +34 914 68 05 06 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.helgadealvear.com Instagram: @galeriahelgadealvear

Until November 18

Jürgen Klauke: Kreuz & Queer

galería hilario galguera Doctor Fourquet 12, 28012 Madrid Tel: +34 635 97 53 34 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriahilariogalguera.com

Until November 11

Viktor Pivovarov: PANTHEON

Chase Wilson

Bonaire, 6, 46003 Valencia Tel: +34 963 51 01 79 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.luisadelantadovlc.com

Until November 17 Rubén Guerrero: Trompe l’esprit. Algunos tipos de espacios

mayoral

Consell de Cent 286, 08007 Barcelona Tel: +34 934 88 02 83 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriamayoral.com Instagram: @galeriamayoral

Until October 6 Jordi Alcaraz October 10 – December 9 Antoni Tàpies, Joan Miró: Tàpies / Miró

noguerasblanchard Beneficencia 18B, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 915 06 34 84 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.noguerasblanchard.com Instagram: @noguerasblanchard

Until November 4

Nancy Spero

Isaac Peral 7, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, 08902 Barcelona Tel: +34 934 63 63 13

Until November 3 Anne-Lise Coste: Emoji peace dove Emoji red heart Emoji blue butterfly

spain

travesía cuatro Calle San Mateo 16, 28004 Madrid Tel: +34 91 310 00 98 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.travesiacuatro.com Instagram: @travesiacuatro

Until November 30

Mateo López: Camina Habla Canta Baila

The Mall, St. James’s, London SW1Y 5AH ica.art

The Red Sun is High [detail], 2023, multi-media installation with six renderings on vinyl of film stills from Querelle, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982; vinyl tape on floor; emulsion paint on windows; audio 20:00 min loop; overall dimensions variable.

NORWAY VI, VII Operagata 75A, 0194 Oslo Tel: +47 90 27 98 62 [email protected] www.vivii.no Tues – Fri 11–5, Sat – Sun 12–4

Until October 22 Doris Guo: disorientations

KUNSTNERNES HUS

Wergelandsveien 17, 0167 Oslo Tel: +47 22 85 34 10 [email protected] www.kunstnerneshus.no Instagram: @kunstnerneshus Tues – Sun 11–5, Thurs 11–7

Until October 15 The 136th Autumn Exhibition November 10 – January 14, 2024 Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz November 10 – January 14, 2024 Agder Art Academy

ASTRUP FEARNLEY MUSEET Strandpromenaden 2, 0252 Oslo Tel: +47 22 93 60 60 [email protected] www.afmuseet.no Tues – Fri 12–5, Thurs 12–7, Sat – Sun 11–5

Until December 3 Before Tomorrow – Astrup Fearnley Museet 30 Years Until December 3 Before Tomorrow Live

KUNSTHALL STAVANGER Madlaveien 33, 4009 Stavanger Tel: +47 51 56 41 20 [email protected] www.kunsthallstavanger.no Instagram: @kunsthall_stavanger Wed – Sun 11–4

October 26 – January 7, 2024 Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings: Bleak House

BERGEN KUNSTHALL Rasmus Meyers allé 5, N-5015 Bergen Tel: +47 94 01 50 50 [email protected] www.kunsthall.no Tues – Sun 11–5, Thurs 11–8

Until January 7, 2024 Loretta Fahrenholz: Trash The Musical Until January 7, 2024 Ahmed Umar: Glowing Phalanges

OSL CONTEMPORARY Haxthausens gate 3, 0263 Oslo Tel: +47 23 27 06 76 [email protected] www.oslcontemporary.com Tues – Fri 12–5, Sat 12–4

Until November 11 Ane Mette Hol November 17 – January 6, 2024 Toril Johannessen

GALLERI K Bjørn Farmanns gate 4, 0271 Oslo Tel: +47 22 55 35 88 [email protected] www.gallerik.com Tues – Fri 11–5, Sat 11–4, Sun 12–4

Until October 1 Else Marie Hagen: Denne dagen, denne natten October 6 – November 5 Sara Korshøj Christensen: Let‘s Begin . . . With a Break November 10 – December 20 Anna Sofie Mathiasen: Pigen i Ilden

HENIE ONSTAD KUNSTSENTER Sonja Henies vei 31, 1311 Høvikodden Tel: +47 67 80 48 80 [email protected] www.hok.no Tues – Sun 11–5, Thurs 11–9

Until December 31 Merz! Flux! Pop!: New installation Until January 14, 2024 Per Barclay: Soft Sweet Vortex October 27 – February 25, 2024 Magdalena Abakanowicz Permanent Installation Yayoi Kusama: Hymn of Life

PEDER LUND Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo Tel: +47 22 01 55 55 [email protected] www.pederlund.no Wed – Sat 12–4

Until December 16

Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards

2023.8.22-2024.1.12 ENGAGING WITH THE WORLD 入世

20 世纪以来的中国现当代艺术 Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Since the Dawn of the 20th Century

泰康美术馆 Taikang Art Museum 北京市朝阳区景辉街16号院1号楼泰康集团大厦 1 - 2 层 1-2F, Building 1,Yard 16, Jinghui Street, Beijing Taikang Group Building

主办单位

展品支持

泰康美术馆

泰康保险集团

Organizer

Exhibition Works Supported by

Taikang Art Museum

Taikang Insurance Group

泰康美术馆公众号

活动总策划

陈东升

General Organizer Chen Dongsheng 泰康美术馆理事长

Chairman of the Taikang Art Museum

活动总协调

应惟伟

General Coordinator Ying Weiwei 泰康美术馆副理事长

Vice Chairman of the Taikang Art Museum

策展人

唐昕

Curator Tang Xin 泰康美术馆艺术总监

进入泰康美术馆小程序 领重磅优惠券购买门票

Artistic Director of the Taikang Art Museum

PUBLISHERS

PAUL CÉZANNE The Great Masters of Art Christoph Wagner $13 GEORGE BOLSTER When Will We Recognize Us Ed. Miranda Driscoll $36 SECESSIONS Klimt - Stuck - Liebermann Ed. Ralph Gleis, Ursula Storch $52 Exhibition: Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS Collection Highlights Ed. National Museum of Women in the Arts $60 Washington, D.C., National Museum of Women in the Arts

TIBETAN MUSTANG A Cultural Renaissance Luigi Fieni, Kenneth Parker Photographer Luigi Fieni, Kenneth Parker $70

www.hirmerpublishers.com

MARK DION AND ALEXIS ROCKMAN Journey to Nature‘s Underworld Ed. Suzanne Ramljak $35 Exhibition: Greenwich CT, Bruce Museum

MAKING AMERICAN ARTISTS Stories from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 1776–1976 Ed. Anna O. Marley $50 Travelling Exhibition: Wichita KS, Wichita Art Museum; Albuquerque NM, Albuquerque Museum of Art; Tulsa OK, The Philbrook Museum of Art; Chapel Hill, NC, Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill; Salem MA, Peabody Essex Museum; Roanoke, VA, Taubman Museum of Art

find us on facebook and instagram

10 A.M. ART

RENATA FABBRI

Corso San Gottardo, 5 Tel: 02 9288 9164 [email protected] www.10amart.it Tues. – Fri. 10–12:30, 2–6

Via Antonio Stoppani 15 Tel: 02 4244 9047

November Group Show – 10 Years of the Gallery: MARIO BALLOCCO, FRANCO GRIGNANI, and LUIGI VERONES

GALLERIA CHRISTIAN STEIN Corso Monforte 23 Tel: 39 0276393301 Mon. – Sat. 10–7 Via Vincenzo Monti 46, Pero By appointment only [email protected] October – December GIULIO PAOLINI: Firmamento (Corso Monforte 23)

DEP ART GALLERY Via Comelico 40 Tel: 02 3653 5620 [email protected] www.depart.it Tues. – Sat. 10:30–7 October 23 – November GIUSEPPE UNCINI, curated by DEMETRIO PAPARONI November 3–5 Artissima, Turin: IMI KNOEBEL, REGINE SCHUMANN, and WOLFRAM ULLRICH (Main Section)

C+N GALLERY CANEPANERI Foro Buonaparte 48 Tel: 02 3676 8281 October OLIVIA PARKES: Something for Nothing October Group Show: While the Vertebrae of Time Continue to Spin (Genoa Gallery) November AYOBOLA KEKERE EKUN: Another Life, curated by DOMENICO DE CHIRICO

October – November 18 SOPHIE KO: Before the Night Falls, text by RICCARDO VENTURI

KAUFMANN REPETTO Via di Porta Tenaglia 7 Tel: 02 7209 4331 Fax: 02 7209 6873 [email protected] www.kaufmannrepetto.com Tues. – Fri. 11:30–7:30, Sat. 3:30–7:30 October – November 18 SKUJA BRADEN: Strange Bargain October – November 18 DIANNA MOLZAN: Double Take

MAAB GALLERY Via Nerino 3 Tel: 02 8928 1179 [email protected] www.maabgallery.com Mon. – Fri. 10:30–6 October – November 17 GIORGIO GRIFFA: Declinazioni infinite

MONICA DE CARDENAS Via Viganò 4 Tel: 02 2901 0068 Fax: 02 2900 5784 [email protected] www.monicadecardenas.com Tues. – Sat. 3–7 Until November 18 STEPHAN BALKENOL

MONICA DE CARDENAS ZUOZ Please contact gallery for information.

MONICA DE CARDENAS LUGANO CADOGAN GALLERY Via Bramante 5 [email protected] www.cadogangallery.com October EMANUEL SEITZ and ASTRID BAUER: Oggi, no performance November 1 – December 1 THEO PINTO

MILANO

Please contact gallery for information.

hammer.ucla.edu Joey Terrill, Painted by Her Brother, 1983 (detail). Acrylic on canvas. Frame 25¼ × 31¼ in. (64.1 × 79.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Ortuzar Projects, New York. Photo: Timothy Doyon

Switzerland Ardez

SKOPIA ART CONTEMPORAIN

GALERIE URS MEILE

Until October 28 Bon anniversaire, Monsieur Bulatov

Please contact gallery for information.

WILDE

E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerieursmeile.com By appointment only

Basel GAGOSIAN

Rheinsprung 1, 4051 Tel: 41 61 262 00 80 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gagosian.com

9, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers, 1205 Tel: 041 22 321 61 61 Fax: 041 22 321 02 33 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.skopia.ch

24, rue des Vieux-Billard, 1205 Tel: 041 22 310 00 13 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.wildegallery.ch Until November 2 KHALED JARRAR: ALL THE WOUNDS TO CLOSE

Gstaad

Until October 28 CHRISTO: Selected Works

HAUSER & WIRTH STAMPA

Spalenberg 2, 4051 Tel: 041 61 261 79 10 Fax: 041 61 261 79 19 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.stampa-galerie.ch Until October 21 KATJA AUFLEGER: Fruits and Other Planets

Vieux Chalet E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hauserwirth.com Please contact gallery for information.

Lucerne

WILDE

Angensteinstrasse 37, 4052 Tel: 041 61 311 70 51 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.wildegallery.ch Until October 21 CARMEN PERRIN: Voir venir

Geneva GAGOSIAN

19, place de Longemalle, 1204 Tel: 041 22 319 36 19 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gagosian.com

GALERIE URS MEILE Beijing-Lucerne

Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Tel: 041 420 33 18 Fax: 041 420 21 69 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerieursmeile.com _ Until October 28 REBEKKA STEIGER: ma quy�ỷ vô ỷỷd`ông tu˘�ỷ – ghosts without pupils

St. Moritz HAUSER & WIRTH

Please contact gallery for information.

Via Serlas 22, 7500 Tel: +41 81 522 10 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hauserwirth.com

PACE GALLERY

Please contact gallery for information.

15–17, Quai des Bergues, 1201 Tel: 041 22 900 16 50 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.pacegallery.com Until October 28 LOIE HOLLOWELL: The Third Stage

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA A LOT OF PEOPLE

Rirkrit Tiravanija. untitled 1997 (atlas III), 1997

OCT 12, 2023–MAR 4, 2024

Switzerland Zürich ANNEMARIE VERNA

Neptunstrasse 42, 8032 Tel: 044 262 38 20 Fax: 044 201 32 35 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.annemarie-verna.ch

HAUSER & WIRTH

Bahnhofstrasse 1, 8001 Tel: 043 547 18 99 Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Tel: 044 446 80 50 Fax: 044 446 80 55 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hauserwirth.com Please contact gallery for information.

Please contact gallery for information.

MAI 36 GALERIE GALERIE BRUNO BISCHOFBERGER Weissenreistrasse 1, 8708 Männedorf Tel: 044 250 77 77 Fax: 044 250 77 88 Web: www.brunobischofberger.com

Ramistrasse 37, 8001 Tel: 044 261 68 80 Fax: 044 261 68 81 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mai36.com Until October 14 RITA MCBRIDE / GLEN RUBSAMEN: Daily Echo Free Mirror Until October 14 ALBRECHT SCHNIDER: at the garden’s border

Please contact gallery for information.

PETER KILCHMANN GALERIE ERICH STORRER Scheuchzerstrasse 25, 8006 Tel: 044 362 73 14 Web: www.galeriestorrer.com By appointment only

Please contact gallery for information.

GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER

Waldemannstrasse 6, 8001 Zahnradstrasse 21, 8005 Tel: 043 444 70 50 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.presenhuber.com Until October 28 Group Show: Galerie Eva Presenhuber × Taxa Seoul Until October 28 SAM FALLS (Waldemannstrasse) Until October 28 SUE WILLIAMS (Maag Areal)

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA

Paradeplatz 2, 8001 Talstrasse 37, 8001 Tel: 044 226 70 70 Fax: 044 226 70 90 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gmurzynska.com Please contact gallery for information.

Rämistrasse 33, 8001 Zahnradstrasse 21, 8005 Tel: 044 278 10 10 Fax: 044 278 10 11 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.peterkilchmann.com Until October 12 Group Show: The Other Side of the Mirror is Home (Zahnradstrasse 21) Until October 14 SIMON MARTIN: 13 images par seconde (Rämmistrasse 33)

WILDE PRIVATE

Waldmannstrasse 6, 8001 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.wildegallery.ch Please contact gallery for information.

GALERIE URS MEILE Zürich

Rämistrasse 33, 8001 Tel: 041 76 320 24 43 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerieursmeile.com _ Until October 14 REBEKKA STEIGER: ma quy�ỷ vô ỷỷd`ông tu˘ỷ� – ghosts without pupils

HENRY TAYLOR B SIDE

NOW AT THE WHITNEY OCT 4, 2023–JAN 28, 2024

Henry Taylor: B Side is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

This exhibition is sponsored by

Henry Taylor, Gettin it Done, 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 in. (182.9 x 243.8 cm). Hudgins Family Collection, New York. © Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Whitney Museum of American Art

LET’S RIDE HUEY COPELAND TALKS ART HISTORY AFTER BLACK STUDIES WITH SAMPADA ARANKE AND FAYE RAQUEL GLEISSER

128 ARTFORUM

Bobby Hutton and Bobby Seale during the Black Panther Party demonstration at the California State Capitol, Sacramento, May 2, 1967. Photo: Ward Sharrer/ Sacramento Bee.

Opposite page: Detail of Emory Douglas’s back cover for The Black Panther, April 3, 1971. Bobby Hutton.

BLACK STUDIES—as modeled by the transdisciplinary work of contemporary thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, and Frank B. Wilderson III—has grown increasingly central to critical thought in the art world and the academy, with especially urgent implications for art-historical praxis: How do the discipline’s notions of objecthood and objectivity shift in light of transatlantic slavery’s production of persons as property? How must art-historical methods, given their origins in racist, sexist, and colonialist epistemologies, be retooled to engage with complexities of Black life and expression that are designed to evade capture? What becomes of art history as an intellectual enterprise when the ethical imperatives and liberatory horizons of Black studies occasion an interrogation of both the discipline’s objects of analysis and its political imaginaries? This year marks the publication of two groundbreaking books that address these questions. In Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power, Sampada Aranke provides a lyrical and materially nuanced account of how the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense mobilized a range of visual media, objects, and tactics to commemorate the tragic deaths and extend the revolutionary lives of three assassinated party leaders: Fred Hampton Jr., Bobby Hutton, and George Jackson. In the process, Aranke not only reorients our understanding of “the political” in art of the 1960s, but also puts tremendous pressure on art-historical conceits such as “the curatorial,” which in the Panthers’ hands does not mean protecting priceless artworks within neoliberal institutions, but rather involves preserving the bloodstained objects left in Hampton’s apartment in order to make visible the anti-Black violence that enables the coherence of American “civil society” and the ongoing expansion of the carceral state undergirding it.

A similar set of investments animates Faye Raquel Gleisser’s Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987, which takes a complementary tack by homing in on the social reproduction of white supremacy and its import for art-historical inquiry. Organized around a diverse cast of Conceptual and performance artists and collectives, the book tells the riveting story of how US-based practitioners working in the shadow of the third-world guerrilla adapted themselves and their tactics to a nation increasingly reliant upon the prison-industrial complex, among other modes of racialized enclosure. Key to these efforts, and to Gleisser’s framing of them, is the notion of “punitive literacy,” which she defines as “the cumulative knowledge that allows for self-protective mobility in a penal society. It is a calculus of risk based on the body, spaces, and networks one inhabits. . . . Broadly speaking, punitive literacy is the ability to assess how one’s body will, or will not be, subjected to state violence.” Taken together, these books’ foregrounding of Black radical histories and hermeneutics helps to model the discipline’s intersectional paths forward and enrich the African-American art historian’s methodological toolbox. Just as important, they set a rigorous standard for further work that moves beyond opportunistic engagements with African/diasporic art, whether produced by art historians with purposefully delimited understandings of Black culture or by cultural theorists with only a glancing familiarity with the aesthetic and the racialized historicity of its conventions. Here, contributing editor Huey Copeland, author of Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, speaks with fellow travelers Aranke and Gleisser about their books as well as about the impact of Black studies on their scholarly and pedagogical practices, both present and future.

HUEY COPELAND: First off, I want to thank you both for these important interventions, which radically reframe our understanding of American visual culture post-1967—both its objects and histories as well as its figures and structural considerations. I think this is in no small part because of your projects’ sustained engagements with Black studies, which is still a relatively rare phenomenon within art history. I had the privilege of seeing these books at earlier stages, and I wonder how, in bringing them into the world, you thought about negotiating both the demands of the art-historical discipline—the container in which we operate, departmentally and discursively—and the ethical imperatives of Black study, in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s sense, which push against and want to rupture precisely those kinds of disciplinary frameworks? FAYE RAQUEL GLEISSER: Thank you for this invitation to be in conversation, Huey. It’s really such an honor. I’m thinking about how the art-historical discipline traditionally assigns value to arguments. I’m thinking about how these arguments are expected to be steeped in visual evidence that relies on formal analysis and classifications that are observable. The discipline uses comparative frameworks, and it relies on chronology and linearity. All these demands of art history are at odds with artists’ tactics that subvert institutional power and thwart legibility and knowability. And, really, the Black radical tradition has been absolutely necessary to thinking through the work of artists’ tactics. I think, in some ways, what has been most useful in this challenge to art history is that Black studies provides methods for thinking about the relationship between vulnerability and power and how it’s maintained and normalized OCTOBER 2023 129

under white-supremacist conditions that manufacture and legalize gendered and sexualized anti-Black precarity. From Black studies, I’ve learned that the call is not to become an expert on these subjects but to literally find ways to survive and collectively dismantle these structures. This approach has been critical to helping me understand that art history doesn’t merely tell stories about artists and art. It’s really through its own structural insistence on chronology, comparison, and classification that it reproduces anti-Black and colonial power structures. These power structures have been scrutinized in necessary ways by scholars like Fred Moten, who show us that it’s not just looking but looking away—that it’s a particular kind of looking within the “hegemony of the visual”—or Saidiya Hartman’s work on the violence of empathy under conditions and afterlives of slavery. Or the work and writing on Black livingness that Katherine McKittrick names as the “praxis” of Black subjectivity. This arena of scholarship has been a real toolbox for thinking about the politics of risk-taking and its racialized and gendered conditions. And that’s really what I’ve been trying to do in this study of “risk work,” which wants to think about more than just the romanticization of individualism and radicalism that we typically see in art history. Because there’s the celebration of the Artist with a capital A and the individual and their agency, but there’s also this story about the racialized, gendered work of taking risks that’s completely left out of a white-centering art history, which reconsolidates power in the stories we tell about resistance and intervention because it leaves white supremacy and anti-Blackness unaddressed. HC: Word. SAMPADA ARANKE: I’m so grateful to Huey for convening us. It’s a dream come true for many reasons, but key among them is what Faye just dropped. I’m sitting here like, Finally. It’s just this renewed energy, Faye, to hear you talk about the discipline of art history from a place of seeing where it recapitulates the same violence that some of us are aiming to undo. We’re a generation of scholars who have had the joys of coming up from within that critique. That was our starting point, working with people who trailblazed that. Huey, you’re among them. Krista [Thompson] is among them. Fred and Frank Wilderson are among them. Saidiya. We are able to start our work where we do only because of the work that you all have done to create an environment for scholars like us to be able to say brilliant things like what Faye just dropped unequivocally and without any fear or trepidation. I feel like I can exhale, like, OK, we’re within our people. Which is such a big part of the work of Black studies: It forms and informs where you’re able to start a sentence. I call myself a bad art historian. I don’t have an art-history degree. My degree is in performance studies, so I feel like I’m on this strange path. And it’s because of people like Huey, who are like, “Come, find shelter in this section of the discipline that is a refuge for people invested in the things that aesthetics can make outside the burdens of market value, outside the teleological inheritance that Faye’s talking about, the construction of agency along racial vectors that don’t fit most of us.” For me, the other piece that is so generative for the project—and just for the way that I think about what art can do—is how Blackness helps us rethink the intersection between objects and objecthood. Not only as a site of the production of extreme violence in the way that [Frantz] Fanon describes, but also in the uncanny way in which the aesthetic object is somehow constructed with Blackness always already in mind. There’s this fork in the road: You can—and we should— think about the extreme violence this mandates. And it also creates the opportunity to think about Blackness as an aesthetic formation that produces other forms that are both attached and unattached to a fixed or essential subjectivity. 130 ARTFORUM

Another way to put it is Blackness as a field, Blackness as a formation that almost turns upside down whiteness as the standard. That is a project, or maybe a language, that Black studies has given us and that I don’t take for granted. It still makes heads turn if you’re coming from a space so beautifully detailed, an idea of the aesthetic or an idea of objecthood that is bound to this white-supremacist ideal. HC: It’s just amazing to hear both of you. What your accounts speak to, I think, is a fundamental shift in the temporal relation between Black studies and art history. I usually think of art history as belated in relation to Black studies—and to be honest, to many other things, methodologically! Folks like Moten and Hartman have been taken up in a broad way within the discipline only since, say, 2020, when they began to have more “mainstream” visibility and acclaim. There are many folks now trying to wrap their heads around those discourses, and sometimes it happens to be in ways that at best misconstrue and at worst instrumentalize them as opposed to y’all, who have been deeply engaged with the work from the get-go. To me, that speaks to a different orientation in terms of what one wants the discipline to do because it has a much broader horizon of ethical and political commitments. That brings me to a second question. Your books share a lot in terms of period and praxis—particularly their move away from singular artistic actors—and I think, importantly, your insistence on framing the American project as a carceral one, particularly as articulated for both of you by the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore. But your interventions do differ in emphasis. To put it in baldly reductive terms, in Death’s Futurity, the project, it seems, is to understand the aesthetics of Black Panther politics as a revolutionary response to state violence. While Risk Work, we could say, reframes Conceptual and performance artists in relation to the ongoing production and reproduction of that same violence. I’m hoping that you each might speak about how the aesthetic, the political, and their complex relation get recast in these books and about the implications for future studies not only of this period but of American art and contemporary art more broadly. SA: Faye, I can’t wait to dig into this with you, because I feel like what you’re helping me do, in the aftermath of Death’s Futurity, is reconfigure the impact of the carceral in retrospect. I was so focused on the book being a microhistory. There are so many books on the Panthers. I just wanted this to be a trailer that I could hitch as a little addendum to something like Leigh Raiford’s Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare [2011] or [Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.’s] Black Against Empire [2013]. One thing that I was really moved by when doing research is the way that the visual has always been constituted within the logic of the political. And because of that, the idea that the aesthetic is something that can be unbounded from the political imperatives of the mandate to be Black and live while there is an ongoing war against you—that, somehow, an aesthetic thing would be extra or abundant in relation to that—was completely false, (a), but (b), it’s also a misunderstanding of the political, which always mandates the formation of an aesthetic wing, whether that’s ideological or material or visual. It’s always already constituted within the logic of what it means to live in a world that is constantly out to kill you. One of the things that really struck me was the way that documentary photography and documentary film were the technological apparatuses by which these aesthetic objects formed. That’s not because drawing or painting wasn’t happening. It’s because, within the logic of photographic technology, there is this relationship to capture, to fugitivity, to the ways that the history of the photographic is always dependent on anti-Black violence. It’s impossible for us to untether the things that apparatus makes, the way that apparatus gets perfected, for example, through Louis Agassiz and J. T. Zealy’s use of enslaved peoples in their experiments

“It’s really through art history’s structural insistence on chronology, comparison, and classification that it reproduces anti-Black and colonial power structures.” —Faye Raquel Gleisser

Above: Harry Gamboa Jr., First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974, C-print, dimensions variable. From left: Patssi Valdez, Humberto Sandoval, Willie Herrón III, and Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro. Left: Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Loitering, 1974, two gelatin silver prints, each 8 × 10". Photos: James Guttmann. OCTOBER 2023 131

in daguerreotype, through these histories of extreme violence. It’s impossible for us to think about what those things produced, their aesthetic accumulations, as somehow separate from the politics from which they form. And because of that, Black radicals of the time turn to those very mechanisms, with their roots in anti-Black violence, to generate another form of resistance, rebellion, revolutionary existence. I was committed to this idea of one story and one object, but it was so incredible to read your project, Faye, and all the multiplicities that it created for me in terms of recasting the entanglements of politics and aesthetics in the very same moment that my book is trying to unpack. FRG: That gives me so much to think about, and I loved reading your book. One of the reasons I’m excited to teach it is because it models this intentional closeness with following the mutations of images or the different contexts in which they accrue these important instances of resistance. But you really have to be looking for it, and your transparency about letting the objects lead, not covering up those gaps or those “imperfections” of the chronologies—what that’s teaching us is really powerful. In my project, one of the things that came out was this desire to stay close to the centrality of the carceral within art history, how art history as a form reproduces carcerality through the ways that the discipline hasn’t adequately engaged with surveillance, violence, and force. It’s not ancillary to performance art, to Conceptual art, especially the artists I’m looking at, like Adrian Piper, Tehching Hsieh, and Pope.L and the groups pests, the Guerrilla Girls, and Asco, among others. They are anticipating arrest or the presence of police, and not as an afterthought. But that’s often how it’s talked about in art history when the police are mentioned anecdotally: “An artist did this thing in public, and then a police officer showed up and halted the piece.” That’s unsatisfactory; it discounts how artists differently anticipated that there would be police there and choreographed their movement and its documentation accordingly. Pope.L, for example, crawled through Times Square, a small space that was nevertheless one of the most heavily policed areas in all of New York City at that time. Not looking away from the carceral is what allowed the naming of “punitive literacy” to come through in the book. In the United States, we have a lot of conversations around literacy. We talk about media literacy, financial literacy, cultural literacy, legal literacy. But becoming aware of how punitive relations shape our decisions to move, to act—how each of us is differently positioned, differently vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence—is a literacy, too. Artists who are thinking about form and aesthetics are great theorists of punitive literacy because within the guerrilla tactics they deploy in public, they are not only anticipating arrest but simultaneously theorizing how mobility, visuality, and materiality align within this reality. I think of when Harry Gamboa Jr., one of the cofounders of Asco, spoke about anticipating police presence in East Los Angeles and needing to enact and document performance-based works on the street very quickly. He said you just have to be in a place for “a thousandth of a second” to take the photograph. I’m interested in how an image like First Supper (After a Major Riot) [1974] materializes this kind of temporality of being there and surviving punitiveness. And how the punitive temporality that informs Asco’s occupation of space is linked directly and dialectically to the timing of what Chris Burden is doing in the same city but in the gallery district, with a piece like Deadman [1972], where he feels comfortable lighting flares on the street and expecting them to last the full fifteen minutes he needs to perform. And he is shocked when police officers come and actually arrest him on charges of a false emergency being called in. Those temporalities, those literacies, and punitive relations are linked. They are a form within the work. It’s not an ancillary aesthetic. And that’s also a politics of enablement, one that reveals, for example, Burden’s relationship as a white man to assumed protections under the law and the underpolicing that occurs in 132 ARTFORUM

Above: Chris Burden, Deadman, 1972, C-print, dimensions variable. Photo: Gary Beydler.

Below: Chris Burden, Deadman (arrest), 1972, gelatin silver print, dimensions variable. Photo: Charles Arnoldi.

Opposite page: Pope.L, Times Square Crawl a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece, 1978, digital C-print on gold fiber silk paper, 10 × 15".

predominantly white, upper-class, English-speaking areas and neighborhoods. The book is thinking, too, about how artists’ punitive literacies are specific to the places where these artworks are happening in the United States, yet this is also a much larger story because policing is global. The United States plays a massive part in the manufacture of weaponry and the training and enhancement of militarized police violence worldwide. These relations shape art and its interpretation but have not yet been adequately named. We’re seeing a necessary, emergent critical vocabulary change art history now—thanks in no small part to methods of inquiry rooted in Black studies—with concepts like Nicole Fleetwood’s “carceral aesthetics” and Simone Browne’s “dark sousveillance.” SA: Hearing you talk about Pope.L, Gamboa, and Burden so brilliantly teases out how we think about the artist as a social formation. So often, we have to turn to

the biographical to make our case. But your work posits a different matrix of formation, which is organized specifically around these structural realities like place, policing, the temporal registers of whatever medium is at play. And then it allows us to make the case for the way that the artist’s subject is formed precisely, maybe even primarily, through their relationship to the carceral versus the way that the carceral is embedded in their life story. There’s a way, for example, that with the Pope.L crawl pieces, people turn to his relationship to being houseless, or his relationship to poverty, and the proximity of his life story to those systems. It is directional: from the singular person out. But you help us think about the structures that give rise to moments of artistic subjectivity instead of the ways that artistic subjectivity points to structures. I’m blown away that you’re able to get us to a nonessential, maybe even anti-essential notion of artistic subjectivity.

“Within the logic of photographic technology, there is this relationship to capture, to fugitivity, to the ways that the history of the photographic is always dependent on anti-Black violence.” —Sampada Aranke

This, I thought, changes everything.

OCTOBER 2023 133

HC: Both projects are so smart in how they emphasize these fields of relation and how different actors can and cannot move within them—clearly, the lessons of performance studies have served you both well! Faye, you have this notion of interlacement, which I found incredibly compelling. I would love it if y’all could speak about the process of constructing a method that allows you to produce these narratives, which have different frames of reference and different understandings of what the individual artistic actor is and is not in relation to a wider constellation of possibilities. FRG: I love writing, but it was really a struggle to write this book. Along the way, I got feedback saying that this wasn’t “art history.” I would get excited, like, “Why isn’t it art history? What are the narratives in place that suggest that we should limit our understanding of knowledge production and artistic practice?” But on the other hand, there is something about the book format that feels antagonistic to the story of artists’ tactics. Especially an art-history book, which is often based on these expectations of “high quality” visual documentation. Some of the images I’m working with don’t exist. Or they’re black-and-white, they’re grainy; they get swept up in the complications of collectives working together around possession and authorship and property rights. So the writing of the book just continued to reveal these larger power structures in which it is trapped or conditioned. One of the ways that the writing of the book came together was through curation, and one of the earliest experiments with this question of literacy as a constructed condition was through a show called “The Making of a Fugitive” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2016. An inspiration for the show was a 1970 cover image of Life magazine that features Angela Davis; the title of the story was “The Making of a Fugitive.” I remember noticing how, in this dramatically cropped, blown-up image of her on the cover, another story in the magazine hovers nearby: “The Sculpture of Matisse.” And just sitting and looking at this cover, I realized I was seeing a composite image, an object lesson in the entanglement of power and form, wherein the making of a fugitive and the making of sculpture are cultural processes codetermined by racialized, gendered, and sexualized notions of innocence, beauty, and deviance. That cover, to me, is a case study in what you were saying earlier, Sam: The aesthetic and the political are deeply imbricated. In that exhibition, I was thinking alongside artists like Glenn Ligon and Burden, Hương Ngô and Xaviera Simmons, looking at how we learn to know what fugitivity is or how that form takes shape in art history, in a museum collection. The writing is in some ways belated to the story that needs to be told. I don’t think necessarily that the book format is the best one for a history of guerrilla tactics, but I see the importance of writing it down on at the scale of a book alongside exhibitions and documentaries. It feels like a very cinematic story because it’s in motion, so I’ve struggled with the writing of it, and I think the interlacement is thinking about artists relationally but also the sites of knowledge production: archives, museums, police headquarters. Thinking about how art-history archives are also archives of policing and about how police archives are archives of art history. Interlacement was a strategy for thinking about those interconnections, those entanglements, as consistently as possible. SA: My first response to the question of method is the question of urgency, which I think is actually related to Faye. When you conduct this kind of research, be it 134 ARTFORUM

archival or institutional, you’re returning to scenes that arose out of necessity. In the immediate aftermath of the murders of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton [Jr.], and George Jackson, there was this sense of a state of emergency. We were at war, and so we needed to create opportunities and occasions for the visual to help us fight that war. Which is already a different temporal register than conventions of art history, which assume that art comes after the war it’s about because it takes five years to make that painting about a war. When you’re a historian decades out looking at this particular moment, if you’re doing it with a certain kind of attention, that urgency makes its way through. Then there’s the second layer, writing with that same urgency, by which I don’t mean doing it quickly, but holding on—in method or in voice or in form— to the fact that the scenes you’re turning to were responsive, that they had a certain political or ethical weight. When it came to thinking about method, I also tried to think about how to tell the story through the object instead of through the ecosystem from which the object might appear for a few sentences or a few sections and then trail back off. I tried to hold on to the same urgency with which those objects were created, by letting the objects be the thing that propelled the narrative or that guided me through these other arenas. I wanted to tell the story of the object. HC: I wanted to ask about the archive. Your frames of address are radically interdisciplinary, engaging the best of all these different fields, but you have really different means of expanding and critiquing the archive— both its violence and its silences, which, of course, have been a major preoccupation of scholars like Saidiya and Krista. How have your approaches to the archive evolved over the course of research and writing in relation to the specific material, political, and ethical concerns unique to each study and in the stories you wanted to tell about them? FRG: I’ll start by saying that I really was in awe, Sam, of your work with the archive and your ability to name your own struggle with what you called “archival chasing,” this desire to find these stories, and then describing coming up short and really understanding that that is a big part of the story. Early on in this research, I wanted to write about Asco’s Decoy Gang War Victim, a significant media intervention in the ’70s, during which the artists created a staged image of gang-war aftermath that ended up on the local news as an authentic depiction of violence. It’s usually dated 1974. I wanted to find the footage of the news program that the artists had disrupted with their media hoax. So I went to UCLA, to the Film & Television Archive, and searched news programs from that year, but I couldn’t find the footage. What I found instead, as I continued to research this piece in exhibition catalogues, articles, and the artists’ archival papers, was that Decoy has been given many different dates: ’74, ’75, ’76, ’78. It jumps around, and initially I was like, How do I write about this act of sabotage if I can’t find it? Then I realized that’s what’s guerrilla. It’s fugitive within the archive, and what I’m seeing is the duration of its own misinformation as it’s moving around. That was a turning point in my thinking about what the archives are when it comes to the story of guerrilla tactics in art. The other turning point was when I began to understand the long-lasting significance of when artists solicit arrest and when they evade arrest. For example, Pope.L evaded arrest in Times Square Crawl [1978] because crawling isn’t technically illegal. Because, as he says, “I wasn’t

“We talk about media literacy, financial literacy, cultural literacy, legal literacy. But becoming aware of how punitive relations shape our decisions to move, to act— how each of us is differently positioned, differently vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence—is a literacy, too.” —Faye Raquel Gleisser

Opposite page: Cover of Life, September 11, 1970. Angela Davis.

Above: Emory Douglas, George Jackson Lives!, 1971, offset lithograph poster, 17 × 11".

Above, right: Bobby Seale and Bobby Hutton, detained by the Oakland Police Department while their guns are checked, Oakland, CA, 1967. Photo: Ron Riesterer.

loitering, I was actually moving.” That is punitive literacy. He’s moving in a particular way that draws attention to these structures of legality around mobility. But his evasion of arrest is a present absence in legal discourse, one that impacts future court rulings: His non-arrest is not covered in studies of art and law. Instead, you start to see arrests of white men like Burden and Jean Toche, who are differently enabled and protected by police, become fundamental case studies for the emergent art law that is developing out of Stanford [University] in the mid-to-late 1970s. Those instances of punitive encounter become standards that set legal precedents around risk-taking in art, and they’re almost entirely shaped by the arrests and acquittals of white men. I now have different questions about what is actually being constituted in art archives. I have interviewed artists who have recently evaded arrest while making

performance art in public. The book’s epilogue considers today’s expanding carceral environment, and it became clear that I couldn’t include some of these examples. It was important to avoid bringing renewed and potentially harmful legal scrutiny to [these artists’] actions. That turns into another question of just how much of art history or these archives is shaped by the ability and necessity of people differently vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence to evade the historical record. What is the ethical imperative to talk about that shape in the archive, that shadow archive of non-arrest and what it does by remaining illegible? Sam, you do such an amazing job of staying with those moments of not knowing. It’s so easy to retroactively think about what we know now—the proof of [the illegal FBI project] cointelpro, for example. You keep us in that moment of the archive, of exactly when and why the Black Panthers needed to create evidence of the state-sanctioned murders before this information was publicly accessible, and it’s really incisive. SA: I feel so seen right now. I too, Faye, have images and stories that didn’t appear in the book because they weren’t mine to tell. Kara Keeling in The Witch’s Flight [2007] I think embodies this spirit so beautifully. Reading that book taught me the importance of trying not to betray the very thing that you want to live. Certain archives were not meant to live; some objects in the book were meant to die. They were just supposed to be conduits to make the revolution happen, and then we wouldn’t need political posters or documentary films like this. They were OCTOBER 2023 135

Above: Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney, 1987, screen print on paper, 22 × 17".

Opposite page, left: PESTS, letter of solicitation, December 6, 1986. Photo: Getty Research Institute.

Opposite page, right: Tehching Hsieh, Wanted by U.S. Immigration Service, 1978, printed paper, 11 × 8 1⁄2".

Above, right: Guerrilla Girls, You’re Seeing Less Than Half the Picture, 1989, screen print on paper, 16 7⁄8 × 22".

cheaply made because they were popular objects and they were supposed to be accessible and democratic with a lowercase d, and they were stuffed in folders and pinned on walls, and they weren’t archival pigment. For me, trying to approach those objects in their livingness, in the ways that they were meant to be used, was fundamental. I think you and I have this in common, Faye. We keep talking about artists. I’ve taught in art schools for ten years, and I want artists to be able to use this book. And I hope that they use these objects to make other histories so that there isn’t a unified consensus. HC: I’m really interested in how these projects have shifted your pedagogical practices, above all in terms of what it means to narrate the story of American art or contemporary art. What does it even mean to tell the story of American artists? Do we care about Robert Smithson anymore? Or do we care about him because of Hotel Palenque [1969–72] instead of Spiral Jetty [1970]?

136 ARTFORUM

FRG: I really love this question about pedagogy. I think of it in terms of the structures of art history, the visual-analysis paper, the exhibition project, the chronologies, and the comparisons that are the bedrock of the discipline, especially in these introductory classes. I’ve been trying to rethink pedagogical exercises that make sure we are having conversations in the classroom around constructions of power through the stories we tell about art. Something I’ve been implementing alongside visual-analysis assignments are wonderment exercises, where I invite students to sit and ask questions about artworks based on things they cannot know. To really show that the practice of sitting with and asking questions about what you don’t know is a skill, that it’s knowledge-producing, and that it could be the basis of art or a research project. I’ve also shifted away from relying on the exhibition project, where we invite students to curate shows around a theme. Alongside that, I now like to assign acquisition reports. It might sound boring to them at first, but that’s the point: “If you think this is bureaucratic, that is where power and knowledge are reconsolidated and normalized.” They’re writing a proposal for why a museum should acquire work and what that would do long-term. This makes them aware that these proposals are what curators do at collecting institutions: They have to go in front of a board of trustees. I’m trying to demystify the romanticized version of art history and get them involved in recognizing how structures of authority and whiteness are reinforced and the histories they come from. The other, I think bigger takeaway for me pedagogically is that teaching art history or American art or contemporary art is also about teaching advocacy and collaboration. I want students to see that they have a part to play right now in changing the way things are done and that there are tactics at their disposal. Some of the really exciting work has happened when I’ve understood my own internalizing of noncompensation. I remember having teachers say, “Go interview an artist. You’re a student, they’ll think it’s cute and they’ll talk to you (for free).” But there’s no follow-up about payment or talking about the ways that universities normalize noncompensation for artists and how this model hides and exacerbates class, gender, and racial hierarchies within economies of exchange. So I worked in my department to create a fund so that students get in the practice of raising money for artists. If they’re interviewing artists for one of their projects, they compensate them, and this has been incredible, seeing students understand that they are part

“The story of American art is a story of racial formation, and if you’re not willing to tell the story in that way or see it on its own terms, that’s not my problem.” —Sampada Aranke of institutions, that universities are not neutral, and that they can be advocates. We can have conversations around these structures that normalize extractive power relations and think differently about access and accountability. I also rely on and teach the work of curators who are attuned to these concerns, like Allison Glenn and her recent collaboration with Amy Sherald in creating a coacquisition of the painting by Sherald of Breonna Taylor. Shifting this idea of just one institution owning an object, what it means to even think about coacquisition or to really care for art objects and the lives of the people connected to them, opens alternative possibilities. I also teach Thea Quiray Tagle’s work on “relational curation.” Thea is centering the care of artists and their trust and needs and prioritizing that over an exhibition schedule or object maintenance. SA: I wish I could take your class. When I teach certain kinds of intros to American art, I basically teach it as an intro to African American art. I always start with a lecture about the Middle Passage, turning upside down this idea that the making of

the modern world is anything other than anti-Black at its core. If you start from there, it allows students to self-select if they want to be in that class, but it also clarifies certain stories in art history. Suddenly, Surrealism doesn’t become something that’s so psychedelic or about a flight of fancy. It becomes shaped by the horror of the transatlantic slave trade: “If that is what constitutes the real, then fuck.” I’ve really been unabashed about this since writing the book: “I don’t tell the story in this way. I tell the story in this way.” From there, I fill in everybody in relation to Black American artists. Then maybe the story isn’t just Smithson; the story is Smithson in the wake of Benjamin Patterson or, more directly, Smithson in conjunction with Noah Purifoy or Thornton Dial. Those are the artists who tell the dominant story, and then other stories are positioned in relation to them. That is absolutely an ideological argument I’m making, and I tell students that outright. But for me, it’s also fundamentally about naming, without fear, whiteness as an aesthetic formation and white supremacy as a vector of power. Blackness is an aesthetic formation that reflects something about white supremacy but is OCTOBER 2023 137

Left: Faith Ringgold, The United States of Attica, 1972, offset lithograph, 21 5⁄8 × 27 3⁄8". Opposite page, left: Doug Lawler/ East Bay Media Collective, This Monster, 1971, screen print on paper, 20 × 30". Opposite page, right: David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970, body print and silk screen on paper, American flag, 63 × 40 1⁄2".

actually not primarily about that. It’s a very simple thing, just flipping it around so I don’t have to name the phenomenon of a certain story of American art as a story about a white canon or a white Western canon or a white male canon. It does that for me. I’m disinterested in code-switching between being the African Americanist in the department and then having to do the service of these bigger classrooms and pretending to be a generalist. Instead, it’s just like, “This is what I do. If you would love for me to do it in this way, let’s ride.” The story of American art is a story of racial formation, and if you’re not willing to tell the story in that way or see it on its own terms, that’s not my problem. HC: More and more, for the students I’m encountering, intersectionality is the floor. If you can’t speak to that analytic, they’re like, “Um . . . what are you talking about?” [Laughter.] In closing, I want to ask, What is on the horizon for each of you? How does what you’re working on now extend, redirect, radically depart from, or build on the lessons you learned writing these books? 138 ARTFORUM

SA: Toward the end of my research, I started seeing the works of Black American artists who weren’t directly a part of the Black Panthers or weren’t even organizers in their own right but who were making works that were responsive to the same kinds of political events that the Panthers were responding to. Artists like Melvin Edwards and Benny Andrews and Faith Ringgold. That cracked open a whole turn that I’m hoping to take up in the second project, which is loosely called “The Hammons Effect.” It’s not about David Hammons, really, but about the ways that David Hammons presses on certain methodologies and conventions of contemporary art history that help us reconfigure the role of the Black American artist as we think about how to stage stories in an exhibition setting. It may or may not be a book. But as of now, that project will look at artists, curators, and collectors who are impacted by methodological turns that Hammons himself performs to help us assemble modes of storytelling that fall out of some conventions. And, quite honestly, forms of policing, to your point, Faye, that art history mandates that we perform, which completely recapitulate the violences that we want to undo when we tell stories about Black arts and Black aesthetics.

FRG: I can’t wait to learn more about that project. Coming out of Risk Work, I’ve taken a turn toward embodiment that combines the sensorial, the haptic, and its relationship to racial formation. This new project is tentatively called “The Color of Hormones.” I’m going to be a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and a College Arts and Humanities Institute research fellow at Indiana University in the fall, and I want to spend time in the archive thinking about and looking for material articulations of hormonal management and relations of hormones and perception. Part of this research extends the interest in Risk Work around punitive literacy to the ongoing criminalizing of gestational bodies and surveillance of hormonal management. I’m looking to better understand the narration of hormones. Hormones, in the scientific sense, were “discovered” in the early twentieth century, but the story of hormones goes much farther back, obviously. I’m interested in the history of trying to know what happens inside our bodies and how this narration of hormones is also a history of how the desire to know has been enacted within a society that largely prioritizes visual evidence and documentation and criminalizes illegibility, nonlinearity, and nonnormative desires. I’ve been really influenced by the work of artist Elizabeth M. Claffey and her questions around hormonal consciousness and radical kinship and am looking to her and a number of artists investigating somatic knowledge. This research is unfolding at a very particular moment. The Kinsey Institute [originally the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research] has been hosted at Indiana University since the late 1940s, and it’s always been under assault by conservative and religious groups because of the way it documents and celebrates and legitimizes human sexual desires. This past spring, Indiana State legislators banned the use of state funds to support the Kinsey. That’s become a very complicated event, with large implications for the existence and role of the Kinsey, and I think that will also be part of the story I’m tracing. It’s not just how hormones have been narrativized but how the archives or the sites for their study are increasingly policed. HC: That’s fascinating! It’s interesting, too, because one of the things you say toward the end of your introduction is, “Look, this is a study that I realize is focused on people that are cis-gendered and heteronormative.” It seems like this new project is trying to sit more within that complicated space that wasn’t centered in Risk Work because of how the artists’ own identities and identifications informed their actions.

FRG: Thank you for mentioning that. That is definitely something I’ve been thinking about. In a lot of ways, Risk Work is about canon revision, and I think this next project is less invested in the canon as a structure to navigate. I’m drawn to the work that’s emerging in critical trans* and disability studies that is challenging rights-based or representationally based politics or modes of resistance. Hormones hopefully open up powerful modes of connection that resist this ocular-centric needing to see, needing to know. Because it’s impossible to adequately describe these internal hormonal experiences, and yet there is a desire to do that. I’m drawn to this tension. HC: That so beautifully underlines how what animates the work, for both of you and for us as readers, is that willingness to sit with these impossible-to-narrate moments and to allow them to open onto other sets of possibilities than the ones scripted for us. So thank you. n OCTOBER 2023 139

STANDARD BEARER ANNIE OCHMANEK ON THE ART OF STANLEY BROUWN

THIS PAST SPRING, the Art Institute of Chicago held the first ever comprehensive solo exhibition of stanley brouwn’s work in the United States. Expertly curated by Ann Goldstein and Jordan Carter, the show included more than fifty works made between 1960 and 2006 and was accompanied, at Dia Beacon, New York, by a presentation of two additional room-size installations organized by Carter. The Beacon exhibition will remain on long-term view, and the Chicago show will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2024. Aside from these basic facts, the hosting museums provide little to no public information about these shows, their decision to do so in keeping with the late artist’s exacting and deliberately minimal approach to promotional and representational conventions. This debut may seem belated for someone whose work was at the forefront of artistic production and discourse in the decades following World War II. But brouwn is known for being enigmatic. A key figure in Fluxus, the Zero Group, and Conceptual art, he showed in major exhibitions throughout the 1960s and ’70s and was represented by leading European galleries of that era such as Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf and Art & Project in Amsterdam, the city where brouwn was based for most of his career. Yet he chose an elliptical path through the mechanics of the whole thing. Beginning in the early ’70s, brouwn (who spelled his first and last names in lowercase) stopped allowing photographs of himself or his works to be printed, refrained from giving interviews or showing up to his own openings, and prohibited the publication of biographical or bibliographical information in connection to his art. This meant that his sculptures, text pieces, drawings, artist’s books, films, and videos were to function without a “before” (absent an author figure or an identifiable origin story) or an easily captured “after” (in the form of photographic reproductions or a CV line in the back of a book). brouwn’s decisions were meaningful amid the growing contemporary art market of the ’60s, wherein the international circulation of artworks in reproduction (via magazines and catalogues) and of artists themselves (via plane tickets and live talks and interviews) were key tools for validation. Minimalist art, though designed to stamp out from the final product any traces of the author’s subjective 140 ARTFORUM

decision-making, nonetheless tended to be buttressed by the figure of a vocal artist holding court. Conceptual art, which took the form of relatively dematerialized textual and ideational propositions, occupied new avenues of publicity that merged the life of art with the business of advertising.1 brouwn took up many of the aesthetic, compositional, and conceptual strategies that were in vogue in the ’60s, but he did so without any such forms of auxiliary representation, thus doubling back on those movements’ gestures of negation. The result is a powerfully open and generative body of artworks—so long as you can manage to see them. In Europe, his pieces are still frequently on view in museum collections and the occasional gallery show. But they are otherwise hard to come by. Significant scholarship on his work does exist, one classic example being Anne Rorimer’s New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality, which includes a section on brouwn, but no monograph has been attempted. Since his death in 2017, brouwn’s studio archive has remained closed to researchers. For these reasons and more, this current exhibition is a major event, made possible by Goldstein’s longtime support of the work and brouwn’s having agreed, prior to his death in May 2017, that the curator could organize a show of this scale. It wasn’t that brouwn was against circulation per se. And he wasn’t, like some other artists at the time, concerned with irretractable site specificity, nor did he vanish off the grid. On the contrary, many of his works evoke international mobility and networked connections, both interpersonal and mediatic. In the ’60s and ’70s, he used telecommunications and various means of transportation as conveyances for his work. One film he purportedly shot on a train ride into eastern Turkey in 1970 and then screened on the backside of a van driving through the streets of Amsterdam. For three televised pieces from 1970 and 1971, he broadcast footage of urban pedestrian crosswalk traffic on national channels in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands; brouwn was behind the camera, unseen but either walking steadily at a brisk pace or standing still and taking one deliberate step while unnamed businessmen, young mods, elders, pigeons, bicyclists, cars, and trams crisscrossed one another’s paths around him.2 In exhibitions of that same period, he would use closed-circuit TVs to beam live views of the sidewalk outside the gallery or museum to a monitor displayed in the interior. These works conjure an anonymous, simultaneous collective of individuals on the move, a kind of supranational “imagined community” rendered conceivable by that era’s satellite-transmission and emergent information technologies.3 At Dia, one of the rooms devoted to brouwn is empty aside from a small wall label, which tells viewers they are walking through cosmic rays (particles that enter our atmosphere from outside the solar system):

brouwn took up many of the aesthetic, compositional, and conceptual strategies that were in vogue in the ’60s, but he did so without any forms of auxiliary representation, thus doubling back on those movements’ own gestures of negation.

. . . in this space, just as in every building on earth, it is also a case of “raining cosmic rays.” walking consciously through the invisible cosmic rays in this space confirms, intensifies the presence of this space.

The original installation of this piece, at the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach, Germany, in 1970, featured one of brouwn’s closed-circuit-TV works, the pedestrians outside the museum ostensibly also bathed in cosmic rays. Though we don’t have that at Dia, a work in the next room summons the outside world in a different way. Several small paths outlined in white strips vectorize the floor, telling visitors to “walk 5m in the direction of belém,” “walk 5m in the direction of calcutta,” or “walk 3m in the direction of marrakech,” all pointing toward those cities. The initial version of this piece was realized in 1970 at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, the Netherlands. Together, these rooms endow the ground on which one stands with an expanded sense of space, suffusing a single point with planetary connectedness. We are reminded that one always stands in relation to an elsewhere. If in their initial context these works would have touched on psychedelic- and moon-landing-era visions of micro and macro scalability, as well as on the postOCTOBER 2023 141

colonial waves of migration and interchange then unfolding in Europe, today they resonate with an ever more prevailing virtuality and the time-space compressions produced by global capitalism. EVEN AS BROUWN ABSENTED the artist figure in a conventional sense, he inhabited his works with details pertaining to his location, both actual and imaginary. For the “Information” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1970, his sole contribution was a page in the show’s catalogue listing his home address and telephone number. In other pieces from 1970 sent by mail and as messages in bottles tossed out to sea, he asked recipients to “send me a map of the place where you are living” or “send me a poste-restante letter / send the letter to a city of your choice . . . ” and provided his address. Works from the last decades of his life, two of which are on view in Chicago, inform the viewer that “at this moment the distance between stanley brouwn and yourself is x feet.”4 Appearing frequently in the third person, “brouwn” comes across as a protagonist we are trailing in a book, a kind of everyman. Counts of brouwn’s footsteps in various cities and countries populate his oeuvre, as in a 1971 bulletin that Art & Project mailed out for his solo exhibition that year, consisting of lines referring to the artist’s hypothetical travel in the future: the total number of my steps in 1971 in oslo the total number of my steps in 1972 in addis ababa the total number of my steps in 1973 in tokyo the total number of my steps in 1974 in dublin the total number of my steps in 1975 in montevideo the total number of my steps in 1976 in rome the total number of my steps in 1977 in reykjavik the total number of my steps in 1978 in beirut the total number of my steps in 1979 in port au prince the total number of my steps in 1980 in mexico city5

brouwn’s art parodies the spirit of modern technocracy. It plays on a classic dialectic, that of systems of rationalization and all that escapes them. From the early ’70s onward, his works articulated such dynamics using the metalanguage of standardized measurement. At the Art Institute, the curators’ selection beautifully showed the great breadth brouwn found by using this as an artistic material for nearly five decades. In the ’60s, Minimalist and Conceptual art had been looking to numerical measurements as supposedly neutral means of composition and a factual expression of real, not illusory, depth. (Take Donald Judd’s mathematically sequenced wall progressions, begun in 1964, or Mel Bochner’s “Measurement Works” of 1968–71.) brouwn’s works summon that objectivity, but they also delve into systems of measurement as so many dialects of a broader language of space, which can disclose philosophical observations and material histories. Archaic systems are brought alongside those currently in use, reminding us that such “standards” have been imposed historically by empire and by laws of exchange as they calibrate and rewrite the world. brouwn primarily made use of single units of length, which can accrue to an extended plane (when grouped as orthogonal pairs) or to a volume (when arranged in three dimensions). One meter, one foot, one eighteenthcentury Dutch ell, one ancient cubit: He often represented these with thin lines drawn side by side on a sheet of paper or with flat strips of metal laid on custommade tables painted a quiet blue-gray. When they are aligned and juxtaposed, their difference and alikeness are plain. One unit is shorter or longer than the next, but we can see that they are like different words for the same thing. The systems they come from all measure length, just by means of a different baseline. Each unit can be rephrased as a ratio of another. Every distance can be written in feet. Into this matrix, brouwn introduces his unit of the step. “One brouwn step” is equal to the length of a stride by brouwn. It is an embodied, personal unit of 142 ARTFORUM

The disconnect speaks to the near impossibility, in our entrepreneurial and image-heavy present, of doing as brouwn did—participating in a broader discourse while sidestepping its requirements for visuality.

measurement, variable between roughly 840 and 890 mm depending on the iteration. Integrating “one step” thickens the joke on codification and bestows on one person’s gait the glimmer of a universal convention (a kind of anti-“foot” of the British imperial system, which is a concretized generalization of the length of a man’s foot). Charts, clockings-in, and tallies of brouwn’s steps record the paces he takes through life with rigorously empty exactitude, as in a Borgesian short story. The Chicago show included several of brouwn’s card-file sculptures, in which uniform stacks of cataloguing drawers contain dozens of index cards, each representing an individual step or other length, each drawer standing for a single walk or some other distance. These submit brouwn’s individual strides to the law of equivalence proposed by the card file, raising the specter of population control, of the inscription of human bodies into coded and gridded systems of power.6 Taylorization, or the processing of workers’ limbs and movements within a standardized regimen of labor, looms here too. But brouwn submitted these files in lieu of providing actual biographical content. His card files and step counts lean more toward the straight-faced humor of Fluxus events, in which artists carried out nonsensical, funny actions with officious, bureaucratic airs. FOR HIS BEST-KNOWN SERIES, begun in the early ’60s, brouwn stopped passersby on the street, asked them for directions from their present location to elsewhere in the city, and took whatever they’d written on his notepad as a readymade drawing, stamping it with the series’ title, this way brouwn. The “This Way Brouwn” drawings, of which hundreds were made (six were on view in Chicago), externalize individuals’ subjective conceptions of space and their paths through it. Hovering on an otherwise empty page, they evoke walking in the city as a phenomenological intuition more than the set Euclidean navigation of one’s surroundings. Eric C. H. de Bruyn has written that the topological diagrams of “This Way Brouwn” are symptomatic of the disorientation effected by postmodernity, demonstrations of the Jamesonian theory that the mid- and late-twentieth-century city dweller’s increasing inability to decipher a cognitive map of the place in which they lived emblematized the “bewildering new world space” of late capitalism, under which we lack all critical distance.7 De Bruyn sees the drawings as fragmented cognitive maps; they exemplify people’s lack of a vantage point from which they might picture the whole in which they are embedded. This is one narrative that brouwn’s work, and the legacy of global Conceptualism more broadly, has to contend with today.8 Conceptualism’s developments along international communication lines, its shifting of artistic materials toward data sets, systems, and text-based operations, lie in perilous proximity to what de Bruyn calls the “informational networks of power” that have in the course of the twentieth century transformed multinational capitalism into something beyond cognitive reach or, for that matter, democratic control. Born of a moment of optimism regarding the potentials of electronic media and forged in the context of a multipolar world, Conceptualist projects such as brouwn’s have tended to be judged, from a post-’89 point of view, as naive passengers or complicit actors in the creative destruction wrought by neoliberalism and the triumph of capitalism on a global scale. One could even read brouwn’s artistic vocabulary of intersystem translations as a corollary to the internet itself, which at its start was essentially a protocol enabling different computational codes to speak with one another, thereby lacing together disparate places, people, and networks. And his step counts and comparative coordinates may read today as a proto-Fitbit, analog geo-tracking, or a vision of the world become one big treadmill. Though brouwn’s cosmic depictions of space exhibit qualities of what the scholar Zöe Sutherland has identified as a vacuous “abstract globality” found in much Conceptual art, his work also puts imaginaries of universality in tension with the particular or the individual.9 To relegate the complex irreducibility of brouwn’s project to a mere symptom of quantification and data-fication of every aspect of life would be to miss the art of

it. And how would one square such a claim with the artist’s own prohibition against reducing his life to a market-ready CV? Another prominent way in which brouwn’s work has been discussed in recent years brings the artist’s identity into the picture. Present-day theoretical frameworks, which emphasize embodied, experiential knowledge as artworks’ chief source of meaning, see brouwn’s work through his personal background—brouwn was of Afro-Surinamese descent and emigrated from the continental Caribbean Dutch colony of Suriname to the Netherlands in 1957. New interpretations of his work have considered the ways in which his cross-border steps and relational distances register experiences of migrancy and displacement. In this light, brouwn’s oeuvre begins to figure its own theory of identity. As Adrienne Edwards writes, “brouwn’s conceptualization of the artwork circumvents an authorial position for a relationality”; this enacts a philosophy not dissimilar to Édouard Glissant’s vision of “entanglement,” a societal condition epitomized by the Caribbean context but applicable to cultures and identity formations worldwide.10 brouwn’s translation of himself into so many steps or routes, in place of a rooted persona grounded in the past, echoes the anti-essentialist kinetics of African and Caribbean diaspora studies, disciplines that have rethought the concept of cultural identity outside of national borders or fixed origins.11 Recent coverage of his work attributes to brouwn’s early-career elisions a politics of refusal by a Black artist within a then-white art-world context, or within the colonial metropole. Some have attested to the fact that his work mobilizes conceptions of space traceable to AfroSurinamese spiritual perspectives.12 In other words, under the lenses of diaspora, Black radical study, and decolonial histories, the abstractions of brouwn’s work take on political significance, but at the expense of breaking the artist’s rule of keeping his biography separate. The curators of the current survey exhibition chose not to go this way. Taking a what-would-stanley-brouwn–do approach, they provided in Chicago a small introductory text that was adapted from brouwn’s 2005 retrospective at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, giving only spare contextual information with which to approach the show. No events, no educational programming, no catalogue, no fanfare, no photos, no biographical background were in sight. This allowed the works to stand by themselves in stark relief, articulating by their own powers the distinct poetics of his work. However, on the day that I visited, at least, the show was nearly empty, even while the rest of the museum was packed. The few people who entered the exhibition in most cases either voiced a lack of connection or breezed through its rooms too quickly to glean anything from what was on view, leaving a palpable feeling of vacancy in the air. On the one hand, this atmosphere of lack was appropriate to works that traffic deliberately in absence and emptiness. But it also felt like a missed opportunity for greater engagement. Maybe the disconnect speaks to the near impossibility, in our entrepreneurial and image-heavy present, of doing as brouwn did—participating in a broader discourse while sidestepping its requirements for visuality. In any case, a quandary lingered: Respecting the artist’s boundaries also risks an unintended elitism, or the hushed stagnation that a cultlike following can bring. And wouldn’t that also be a form of fetishizing the artist’s biography? To write on this work is, admittedly, a rather self-defeating task, which some even argue should be forgone entirely, in accordance with the artist’s wishes and given the crass commercialism of the arena in which such texts participate. But the self-irony built into brouwn’s systems seems not so much to wish to punish us for trying to write about the questions his art raises. Rather, the work taunts and puzzles our desires to do so, watching as we overlay analyses onto it like so many systems of measure. n ANNIE OCHMANEK IS A WRITER AND EDITOR BASED IN NEW YORK AND A PH.D. CANDIDATE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.) For notes, see page 202. OCTOBER 2023 143

PORTFOLIO PETER McGOUGH

Peter McGough, Brass Belt Buckle, 2023, oil on canvas, 24 × 18". Peter McGough, Butterfly Kiss, 2020, oil on canvas, 30 × 24". Peter McGough, The Womb of the Cosmos, 2022–23, oil on canvas, 61 3⁄4 × 61 3⁄4". Peter McGough, Faggot, 2023, oil on found brick, 3 3⁄4 × 8 × 2 1⁄4". Peter McGough, Misrepresenting Joy, 2022, oil on canvas, 30 × 30". Peter McGough, Fuck Me Pumps, 2022–23, oil on canvas, brass bar and rings, silk fabric, 36 × 24". Peter McGough, Boozers, Losers, & Users, 2023, oil on canvas, 40 × 30". Peter McGough, The Cave of the Heart, 2022–23, oil on polypore mushroom, carved wood, cotton detachable cuff, gold-and-motherof-pearl cuff link, 25 × 7 1⁄2 × 7 1⁄2". Peter McGough, The Last Selfie, 2020, oil on canvas, 40 × 30".

PETER McGOUGH’S fabulous, fanciful, and unrepentantly faggy figuration looks like little else within the landscape of representational queer painting today. His art is simultaneously alien and anachronistic, like a series of transmissions from some antebellum (i.e., pre-Stonewall) homo universe, full of spatterdashes, starched collars, morning suits, and candlestick phones. Of course, this is hardly novel terrain for the artist, who has been subversively reshaping the past for nearly four decades with his erstwhile time-traveling companion David McDermott. (The pair officially dissolved their creative relationship just a few years ago: If you’ve read McGough’s 2019 memoir, I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s—an astonishing account of their lives together, by turns harrowing, heart-shattering, and utterly hilarious—you’ll understand why the split seemed inevitable, as McDermott was an exceptionally outsize, demanding, and tempestuous personality, to put it mildly.) Around the time his book came out, McGough began the process of his postMcDermott individuation by making small, colored-pencil replicas of works the two were famous for, including the oil-and-gold-leaf-on-canvas Queer, 1885, 1987 (a splendidly antique rendering of the titular word that hovers before a midnight field trimmed with lilies of the valley, flowers that symbolize luck, happiness, and—ahem—chastity), and A Friend of Dorothy, 1943, 1986 (another text painting, this one festooned with an assortment of quintessential gay slurs—cocksucker, mary, pansy, fairy—that gleefully swim within a velvety, lemony ether). Creating the drawings was a way for the artist to reclaim some degree of autonomy while also reflecting on the herculean effort he put into maintaining their lengthy career. While McDermott was often considered the conceptual driver of their joint project, it was McGough who, crucially, imbued their temporal peregrinations with a homoerotic subtext. He was also largely responsible for the execution and public dissemination of their art. 144 ARTFORUM

It was during the gloomy isolation of the pandemic lockdown that McGough blessedly, finally managed to recover some of his own light. Cut off from the hubbub of daily life, the artist harnessed the idiosyncratic visual language he’d developed with McDermott and applied it to his own singular vision. (With characteristic style and flourish, he now signs much of his work made by peter mcgough—a pointed statement of sole authorship.) Naturally, the duo’s camp and cockeyed classicism remains intact, but in McGough’s hands, these elements become stranger, richer, more expansive. Suffusing many of the pieces here is a form of gloriously queened-up hermeticism: Take The Womb of the Cosmos, 2022–23, a canvas in which a nude, rose-colored ephebe—perhaps an adolescent Nero?— plays the fiddle while surrounded by licking flames. Below him is a glittering he-man seemingly crafted out of pure celestial energy. This muscular figure holds the boy aloft with only one arm, as though he were a less beleaguered Atlas, unbothered by the crushing weight of the world. There’s also The Senses Pay Their Homage, 2022, an oil of a nattily attired blondine from the 1920s. He wears a milky-emerald threepiece while floating within a luminous firmament of crimson and gold. Like an angel, he has enormous wings, but they resemble those of a resplendent lepidopteran (the Spanish word mariposa, which translates to “butterfly,” is also a derogatory slang term used to describe a gay man). Souls of an uglier, baser sort might be tempted to assault this heavenly creature with a brick that has the word faggot emblazoned across it—McGough has actually made a series of them, and on each the epithet is elegantly written out in a cheery vintage typeface. According to the artist, the bricks represent the homophobic harassment and abuse he endured from other children as a kid—an all-too-familiar experience that shadows the lives of countless queer people. Fortunately, I’m not at all saddened by this emotionally charged object, as this limp wrist can only imagine grabbing one from her big ole nellie handbag to vigorously “touch up” some wretched little rug rat’s face. —Alex Jovanovich

146 ARTFORUM

OCTOBER 2023 149

OCTOBER 2023 151

152 ARTFORUM

EXTREME MEASURES JULIA ROBINSON ON THE ART OF WALTER DE MARIA

154 ARTFORUM

WALTER DE MARIA (1935–2013) almost never gave interviews. In a rare one from 1972, he mentioned that he had conceived twenty-four three-dimensional works based on the structure of the box before he left California for New York in 1960.1 He went on to say that he built almost all of them in the first two years after his arrival. I had read the interview before, but the reality of this critical mass of boxes, all on the record by 1962, had never struck me as it did now. If there were so many, why had we never seen them? Why had no account of the artist and his peers, of Minimalism or Conceptual art, attempted to figure these sculptures into the larger history? It was hard to imagine that De Maria had worked his way through this de-skilling—from sculptor to carpenter—as his friend Robert Morris had, and produced so many spare wooden placeholders for the recalibration of subjectobject relations, and undertaken the shift into phenomenological presence aptly characterized by Morris as “aesthetic withdrawal.” An irrepressible mix of curiosity and skepticism led me to contact the scholar who has, to my knowledge, done the most work on De Maria to date, Jane McFadden, who quelled all doubt with one photograph: the artist’s first New York studio, filled with boxes.2 This, I thought, changes everything. The Menil Collection in Houston has been gathering works from the full span of De Maria’s career for decades.3 Yet it was not until after the artist’s death that the institution managed to secure the pivotal selection from the beginning of the 1960s. In its quality and quantity, this was a truly rare, history-making acquisition.

This page and opposite: Views of “Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work,” 2022–23, Menil Collection, Houston. Photos: Paul Hester.

Long ago, De Maria made a decision to hold on to a cluster of his most historically significant works, to let the world reckon with his whole oeuvre only when it was truly final. By dint of the Menil’s long-standing commitment to the artist and the different priorities of other museums, the institution’s De Maria holdings now amount to twenty-seven three-dimensional works, most of the early wood pieces already mentioned, a film, ten paintings, and more than five hundred works on paper (drawings and notes). It is an expansive field of thought and execution with major implications for the understanding of De Maria, his generation, and of what we have for so long parsed as Minimalism and Conceptual art. The exhibition “Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work,” curated by Michelle White and Brad Epley, was a thrilling first step toward sharing these treasures with the public and illuminating multiple avenues of new research. Another extraordinary resource appeared concurrently: Walter De Maria: The Object, The Action, The Aesthetic Feeling, a monograph weighing in at a hefty 476 pages, edited by Elizabeth and Michael Childress and published by Gagosian. One of the great revelations of the show came immediately, with an array of the earliest box constructions, all dated 1960–64—that is, the formative years of a landmark decade. In this period, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Morris, et al. were grappling with the same basic form. De Maria “regards boxes as being almost the archetypal form of the ’60s,” David Bourdon noted in 1968.4 This is not the place to ask why. Suffice it to say that the box is, among other things, a unit on which to build. Moreover, in sidelining the visual address and foregrounding the functional (you ponder what the box is for, you want to open it) this new form broke the spell of aesthetic appeal that had for so long governed the experience of art. De Maria’s boxes—columnar, compartmentalized, or perfectly plain—all carry direct addresses to the spectator, structurally and verbally. In-person viewing deliv-

ered many rewards. Up close, one could make out handwritten prompts inscribed in pencil directly on the wood. Humble to the point of disarming, each object beckons the perceiver in familiar terms. Absent the conventions of art, it is this everyday language that anchors the encounter. Short or long, De Maria’s notations do double duty as titles and prompts (Ball Drop, 1961/64; Move the Ball Slowly Down the Row, 1962). Like a game or a musical instrument, the object breaks through the barrier of passive contemplation. Each spur to cathexis involves some active engagement. The first grouping of works in the exhibition, laid out fairly densely across a whitewashed, stepped platform about fifteen feet wide, seemed intended to evoke the cramped situation in De Maria’s early Bond Street studio. This impulse to conjure an “authentic” arrangement, always tempting to curators, competes with the alternate mandate to isolate works, underscoring the significance accrued in the half century since they were made. Standing out in this cluster was a highly original piece comprising two canvases and three balls (one of a small series the artist made but never showed). Abutting each other like the covers of a book, the canvases form a ninety-degree angle, one against the wall, the other flat on the floor. Handwritten letters on the wall-bound canvas instruct: move any ball to any open spot. The canvas on the floor supports three balls and is marked up with four circles indicating the possible spots. Also in this first gallery were two painting-plus-box pieces from 1961 (Walk Around the Box and Put One Box on Top of Another Box, Wait One Minute, Then Place the Top Box Back on the Floor). Walk Around the Box has been shown just three times.5 It debuted in January 1963 in a two-person exhibition with Robert Whitman in a project space the artists were renting at 9 Great Jones Street.6 Out of some fifteen box pieces in De Maria’s installation, Walk Around the Box— with its clunky painterly lettering, its bold imperative walk, and its surprising range of olive greens—was the most colorful piece in the show. Put One Box on OCTOBER 2023 155

Left: Walter De Maria, Put One Box on Top of Another Box, Wait One Minute, Then Place the Top Box Back on the Floor, 1961, painted wood, oil on canvas, boxes each 15 1⁄4 × 11 1⁄2 × 13 1⁄4", painting 49 1⁄2 × 24".

Top of Another Box had never been shown before the Menil exhibition. These two works cycle through logic and linguistics, semiology and phenomenology—flat letters indexing an experience in three dimensions—as they split the field into realms of signifier, signified, and referent. If De Maria’s childlike lettering de-skilled painting, his key countermodernist move was to make the artwork nonautonomous. The boxes to which the paintings refer stand in actual space, outside the domain of the canvas, on the same floor as the viewer. In addition to the box pieces of 1961 and ’62 in the show, scores more exist in the form of notes and sketches. One would have liked to see more of those he built. In any case, the curators’ selection gave a taste of how De Maria deployed boxes and bases, columns and floor space, to support active encounters—how he staged the object for a subject. If any of the early plywood pieces is familiar to scholars and curators, it is the one that gave the show its title: Boxes for Meaningless Work, 1960/61.7 Two boxes of equal size, filled with rough pieces of wood, sit on a wooden platform. The visitor is prompted to move the contents from one box to the other.8 The apparent simplicity of the situation is deceptive. We first have to understand what De Maria meant by “meaningless work.” It is no longer sufficient, if it ever was, to take the phrase in the most literal sense. Sadly, this does not seem to stop people from doing so. (We have learned not to take John Cage’s “silence” in the common sense of the 156 ARTFORUM

Above: Walter De Maria in his studio, Bond Street, New York, 1963. Opposite page, bottom left: Walter De Maria, The Gold Frame, 1964, enamel paint on wood, 72 × 48 × 6”

Opposite page, top: Walter De Maria, A: Walk to Sign B, B: Walk to Sign A, 1961, Formica laminate lettering and oil on two canvases, each 12 × 10”. Opposite page, bottom right: Walter De Maria, The Silver Frame, 1964, enamel paint on wood, 72 × 48 × 6".

term; to acknowledge that he meant virtually the opposite: a world of unintended but valued sound.) A March 1960 text by the artist on “Meaningless Work” is illustrated by short descriptions of possible objects that could exemplify the concept; this appeared, a little forlorn, among some other items in a display case.9 When one attends to this mini-manifesto, it becomes clear that it set up the premise of the works that followed. Notwithstanding the necessary skepticism as to the exactness of dates (given the rivalries of that moment), the tense De Maria used in March 1960 makes it clear that the idea came first: “PROJECT FOR BOXES / Boxes for Meaningless Work / I will have built two small boxes.”10 This tract, along with a handful of textual propositions for objects and actions, was printed in La Monte Young’s An Anthology (1963). De Maria was still in California for much of 1960.11 The following year, he made several key additions to the body of work based on the box form. These included Column with Ball on Top (on view at the Menil) and Surprise Box, each of which was accompanied by a text (also published in An Anthology). The text for Column announced a fait accompli: “I have built a box eight feet high.”12 (Note De Maria’s use of the word box, rather than column.) Each work in the growing series of boxes appears as something on the order of an essay, a tentative “solution” to a line of inquiry that another form, conceived with the same focus, might equally have supplied. Cracking the code of postmedium, postdisciplinary art forms was a highly competitive game, fueled in this case by Young as editor, if not gatekeeper. From the moment in 1961 when the contributions to An Anthology started coming in—scores, instructions, protocols for chance-based sound poetry, etc.—through its publication in 1963, works that had been submitted were adjusted, substituted, supplemented, and withdrawn. The stakes changed almost monthly as new models of “composition” were invented and refined. The year 1961 also saw the publication of Silence, Cage’s writings and lectures, which had a clear impact on De Maria and his peers. An excerpt from a singularly performative lecture, “45' for a Speaker,” became Cage’s one-page contribution to An Anthology. The second text of the three Cage wrote on “Experimental

Music” (1957), reprinted in Silence, harbors some distinctly plausible sources for De Maria’s turn to “nature” and for “meaningless work.” Regarding the latter, there is Cage’s advocacy of “purposeless play.”13 The composer also evoked the power, drama, and emotion that nature arouses, with examples (far from anodyne for De Maria) like a mountain and flashes of lightning.14 Cage’s Buddhism-inflected “purposeless play,” like De Maria’s “meaningless work,” is clearest in relation to the “non-function” by which Marcel Duchamp’s readymade redefined art. Equally important in the present context is the French artist’s concept of the “anti-retinal,” which Cage tested by reversal, asserting the visual as a part of the experience of music: “We have eyes as well as ears.” For De Maria and his peers, developing the anti-retinal critique meant extending the art object’s address to the other senses— auditory, tactile, even olfactory. The Menil show’s second gallery conducted the viewer through a dramatic transition from the scale of boxes to that of architecture (unusual for De Maria). The towering centerpiece, The Columns, The Arch, 1964, had not been on public view since the show at Paula Johnson Gallery (later Paula Cooper Gallery) in 1965. Moreover, it is reproduced for the first time in the new monograph. The elements were installed at the Menil in a hieratic, processional lineup, similar to their arrangement at De Maria’s studio in recent years. In the 1965 installation, sitespecific avant la lettre, the columns lined the corridor entrance to the gallery, conducting visitors along a passageway culminating in the arch. People walking

OCTOBER 2023 157

Above: Walter De Maria, Calendar, 1961–75, wood, brass hinge, no. 18 single jack chain, open 70 3⁄8 × 2 1⁄2 × 1 1⁄2".

Right: Walter De Maria, High Energy Bar, 1966, stainless steel, paper certificate, bar 1 1⁄2 × 14 × 1 1⁄2", certificate 8 1⁄2 × 11".

Opposite page: Walter De Maria, Yellow Painting /The Color Men Choose when They Attack the Earth, 1968, oil on canvas, stainless steel plate, 6' 10 7⁄8" × 19' 10 1⁄2".

through described feeling as if they were about to enter a temple. The medium, too, was significant: All the elements are mahogany-veneered plywood.15 We therefore have to figure in the strong scent of mahogany as a factor in the original installation. That the space between the columns is wider than that beneath the arch adds a phenomenological aspect to this work’s particular challenge to the retinal. Nearby, the Menil curators included two more pieces from the Paula Johnson show, The Gold Frame and The Silver Frame, both 1964— handsome, wall-bound boxes with empty rectangular niches at their centers. Painted in the eponymous metallic colors, they augmented the ritualistic atmosphere.16 What was missing at the Menil was the announcement De Maria created for the Paula Johnson Gallery. “He considers all his flyers to be integral parts of his shows,” noted David Bourdon in one of his interviews with the artist.17 That document identified all the elements as an ensemble: “The Columns / The Arch / The Gold 158 ARTFORUM

Frame and The Silver Frame / The Invisible Drawings / Her Beautiful Lips.” (There is no space here to explore the question of how the gold, the silver, and the lips might relate to those devices in Warhol, but it is worth doing.) At the other side of the gallery, another pair of “paintings” set up a relay for the viewer from A to B and back again. Two whitewashed canvases—A: Walk to Sign B, B: Walk to Sign A, 1961—sported familiar industrially produced signage, white letters on a black ground, akin to that on the doors of public restrooms. Each painting directed the viewer to about-face and go to the other on the opposite wall. If the date is correct, these works are among the earliest in a wave of protoConceptual “sign painting” (or the equally tongue-in-cheek “action painting”). De Maria’s pair debuted in a 1963 group show, “Hard Center,” at New York’s Thibaut Gallery (later Fischbach Gallery), with a now-surprising mix of artists including Morris, Robert Breer, George Brecht, Jasper Johns, and Robert Watts.18

Two more of the earliest works at the Menil, in the following space, were Statue of John Cage, 1961/84, and Calendar, 1961. The latter consists of two equal lengths of wood joined at the base with a 365-link chain. The two wood parts expand into a V shape and snap together like oversized chopsticks. At the start of January, the parts are flush. As the year unfolds, the piece does as well, one link/ day at a time. At the opposite end of this gallery was one of De Maria’s first “chrome” (stainless steel) pieces, High Energy Bar, 1966. The concept for the Bars, seemingly contrary to their rarefied elegance, was as an unlimited edition ending with the artist’s death. For each one, De Maria issued a certificate—that would have been nice to see—laying out the conditions for ownership and declaring, “This certificate will be incorporated as part of the whole work of art, to be known as the High Energy Unit.” Not often acknowledged as such, the contractlike stipulations De Maria outlined for prospective collectors are likewise quite early as a device of artistic control and anticipate those conceived and applied in Conceptual art in the years ahead. This third gallery, falling roughly at the center of the exhibition, was dominated by a vast yellow monochrome with a metal plate dead center on which the work’s title, The Color Men Choose when They Attack the Earth, is inscribed.19 Created in

1968 for “Earthworks,” the show Robert Smithson curated that year at the Dwan Gallery, New York, the painting was something of an outlier in that context amid maps, raw materials, even actual earth. The concept behind The Color Men Choose . . . , not to mention its title, mystified viewers then as now. There are several layers to the story of how it came into being. De Maria was in Europe at the time of the show, so he phoned it in, as it were—not, László Moholy-Nagy style, to a factory foreman to have the piece fabricated according to precise instructions, but to another artist. Ironically enough, it was his earth-attacking friend Michael Heizer. The color De Maria required was not just any yellow. It was identified with great specificity as John Deere yellow, which forever tied the painting to the agricultural machinery for which that company is known. As to the art rationale: Rarely in the twentieth century do we find this kind of reference to a color. A longer investigation might also discuss the Munsell color system first tested on soil. For now, I will hazard two of the most compelling, and apparently untapped references, both from a single source: “a world in yellow” (un monde en jaune) and “agricultural machine” (machine agricole). These phrases appear in the opening pages of Richard Hamilton and George Heard Hamilton’s English translation of The Green Box, Duchamp’s notes for his Large Glass, published in 1960 (and promptly

This, I thought, changes everything.

OCTOBER 2023 159

Left: Exhibition announcement for “Walter De Maria: Beds of Spikes,” 1969, Dwan Gallery, New York. Mile Long Drawing, 1968.

Opposite page, left: Walter De Maria, Ocean Bed, 1969, mattress, steel, audiotape player, two sets of headphones, 360-minute audiotape of ocean sounds recorded by the artist. Installation view, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Opposite page, right: Walter De Maria, Small Landscape, 1965–68, stainless steel, graphite on paper, glass, leather, box 13 × 13 × 13", framed drawings, each 11 1⁄4 × 8 3⁄4".

reviewed by Johns). While we are on this subject, it is surely no coincidence that Richard Bellamy decided to call the white cube he inaugurated in 1960 the Green Gallery. Needless to say, De Maria is far from the only artist who seems to have noted and applied Duchamp’s anomalous references. The most prominent example is Robert Rauschenberg’s term Combine. For city slickers: A combine is another agricultural machine. In late 1968, De Maria, still in Europe, penned a letter to Virginia Dwan with a return address c/o George Brecht at Ladbroke Grove, London. At the time, the two artists were developing macro-concepts/projects involving the theoretical movement of vast landmasses (Brecht) and the linear mapping of multiple continents (De Maria). This was the moment when De Maria decided to make a work based on audio recordings of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The result was Ocean Bed, 1969, an ensemble one might formally identify as a hybrid of Pop and Minimalism (fuchsia mattress and steel headboard, respectively). Lying on the mattress with the dual soundtrack playing on headphones, the listener is suspended between the two vast bodies of water. Ocean Bed debuted in the 1969 exhibition “Op Losse Schroeven” (On Loose Screws) at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. More than half a century later, the Menil made an exact replica of the mattress as an exhibition copy so the work could be experienced as intended.20 Nineteen sixty-eight was also the year De Maria made his first trek into the Mojave Desert to develop his concept for Mile Long Drawing. Versions of it had been on his mind since the early 1960s. Several drawings of lines in the desert exist from that period. Although this body of work is usually discussed with reference to De Maria’s friendship with Heizer—whose vast excavations to create “negative sculpture” remain a world away from De Maria’s noninvasive surface work—it is plausible that the original intuition for this mode of “drawing” had more to do with his earlier friendship and interaction with Young in 1960–61. This was the period in which Young’s Composition 1960 #10, dedicated to their mutual friend Morris, was being performed with creative interpretations of the instruction “draw a straight line and follow it.”21 What also comes to mind are Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (three meter-long pieces of 160 ARTFORUM

De Maria imagined anew some of the most difficult Duchampian premises: the electricity in the Glass; the unit of energy, of conventional measurement, of experience.

string dropped from the height of a meter), 1913–14, and Sixteen Miles of String, 1942. To make Mile Long Drawing, 1968, De Maria put down two half-mile lines of chalk, the kind used to demarcate tennis courts—marks that, like the Stoppages, could be seen fully only from above. It is probably no coincidence that De Maria asked the pilot of the plane from which the work was to be photographed to maintain a height of one mile. Among the different perspectives of the on-site photographs, the Menil curators chose the now-classic image of the artist in a suit lying face down on the ground in between the two lines with his feet touching one (presumably to indicate scale). This was used for the poster announcing his 1969 solo show at Dwan; the only text was three D-words printed across the bottom edge: de maria–danger–dwan. Since he returned home safely from the desert, we have to think how or, better still, why De Maria wanted to signal “danger.” Let’s bracket the show this incongruous poster was meant to announce.22 I would argue that the function of the word on the poster was to lay a particular claim (beyond that of art) on the viewer’s attention, like public signage or a novel advertisement. This reasoning should help us at last to decode De Maria’s somewhat bewildering epigraph to Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art (1968): “I think both art and life are a matter of life and death.”23 The exhibition’s last room, its quietest, was largely devoted to De Maria’s concept of “invisible drawing.” Initiated in the early-to-mid-’60s, these drawings have a score-like aspect in that they elicit particular behavior in the viewer. They do not supply verbal instructions, even if some deploy image-like words. Small Landscape, 1965–68, consists of eight framed sheets of paper, each featuring a single word: sun, cloud, mountain, tree, grass, river, sky, field.24 These delicate graphite signifiers of nature are inscribed so lightly that they hover at the threshold of visibility, drawing the “reader” into an intimate proximity. The piece includes not only the individual paper sheets in their stainless-steel frames but also their housing: a highly polished stainless-steel box with eight internal grooves to facilitate the (quasiperformative) act of sliding each one in and out, as if from a miniature museum

storage rack. The shiny exterior surfaces of the box capture viewers’ faces, as if to suture their thought processes to the landscape elements so laconically invoked. In the same gallery, opposite Small Landscape, was Untitled (Pure Polygon Series), 1975–76, which comprises seven drawings hung adjacently in a long row. Though they are much larger in format, the three- to nine-sided polygons, extending to the outer limits of the paper, close to the frames, are equally “invisible”; you can discern the pencil markings only when you’re so close that your nose almost touches the paper. The paradox, of course, is that at this range, you cannot see the whole field. Apart from the poetics of floating an idea of pure form, an abstraction, this work and the premise of “invisible drawing” strike me, at least in part, as a further elucidation of the Duchampian “anti-retinal.” (And if they were that, in De Maria’s mind, then it would be reasonable to interpret the beyond-what-the-eye-can-see desert drawings in a similar vein.) For the eye-level-scale work, the example in Duchamp is his “Small Glass” of 1918, with the instructive title To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918, which was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the ’50s and ’60s as it is today. If it clearly targets the conventions of perspective, painting as window and the “ideal” position assigned to the spectator, To Be Looked at should probably also be acknowledged as the first instruction piece of the twentieth century. In closing, it is impossible not to touch on a few of De Maria’s most expansive projects, which, for obvious reasons, could only be alluded to in the Menil survey. Across vastly diverse formats, he dealt with measurement and with extremes, putting us on the spot by illuminating new modes of experiencing the limits of the perceptual field in which we find ourselves. De Maria made numerous works that address measure explicitly, foregrounding it in both title and subject. Many of these reflect on the meter. Then there are the two kilometer works. Vertical Kilometer, 1977, in Kassel, can be grasped only imaginatively, unless we are up for a journey toward the center of the Earth. Broken Kilometer, 1979, splayed laterally and tweaked at the far end, redefines that measure, through its striking OCTOBER 2023 161

Above: Walter De Maria, Vertical Earth Kilometer (detail), 1977, solid-brass rod, red sandstone plate. Installation view, Kassel, 2022. Photo: dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo.

Below: Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer, 1979, 500 solid brass rods. Installation view, Dia Art Foundation, 393 West Broadway, New York. Photo: John Abbott.

Opposite page: Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977, 400 stainless-steel poles. Installation view, western New Mexico. Photo: John Cliett.

five-part rupture. Given that the latter is on permanent display at 393 West Broadway, New York, why, we might wonder, did the artist opt for metric in a country where the imperial measure prevails. A possible explanation is that our attention is more piqued by the nonstandard measure than by the standard. De Maria’s all-encapsulating statement, The Lightning Field, 1977, was represented at the end of the Menil show by Gold and Silver Lightning Field, 1993, a silver plate with gold inlay in the form of circles representing each pole on a stainless-steel base. The Lightning Field’s extreme measure is emblematized by its one kilometer by one mile outer perimeter, and the radically protracted duration of the piece (a visit requires a twenty-four-hour stay), not to mention the prior commitment required by this mythical work, to travel to a remote swath of the New Mexico desert to locate it. De Maria, like so many of his contemporaries, was initially drawn in by the profusion of sexual puns in Duchamp’s notes and works. The real achievement was to see through them, to grasp the vast chasm between language and its referents, the readymade indeterminacy of ambiguity, and, as shared ground, a set of conventions that could communicate in the hypothetical space of art. Inside this frame, the subject could find ways to contend with the otherwise ungraspable, whether it be modern art, modern physics, or the nature of subjectivity in the present. Terms that are at once sexual and technical, like attraction and fatigue, energy and magnetism, could cut through difference, distance, ramifying complexity, and sheer unfathomable abstraction. Neither a black square nor the permutation of a primary-colored grid could stand in for abstraction in perpetuity. De Maria’s otherwise perplexing decision to define and demarcate the Lightning Field with two noncorresponding units of measurement confronts all that is simultaneously arbitrary, incommensurable, and conventional about the units that order everyday experience. He might also have been processing Cage’s mediation of measure, most succinctly articulated in his landmark 4' 33". It will be obvious to some, perhaps mostly those who use imperial measurement, that the humble intervention of what in regular grammar we call an apostrophe and quotation marks (or inverted commas) signifies not only minutes and seconds but also feet and inches. And the multiple metrics, in both Cage and De Maria, is Duchamp’s redefinition and defunctionalization of the meter, as he sought a new, ideally unfamiliar unit of measurement. All systems of measurement are arbitrary, Duchamp and Cage seem to insist, but we need them, like air, money, traffic laws, rules of the game. In his oeuvre as a whole, but especially with the Lightning Field, De Maria imagined anew some of the most difficult Duchampian premises: the electricity in the Glass; the unit of energy, of conventional measurement, of experience; the thematizing of the timed action and the momentary record inherent in the conditions of the photographic (or extra rapid exposure, as Duchamp invoked it). At the mesmerizing sight of lightning, how can we not think back to that innocent moment when we simply counted how many seconds (miles) it would take for the sound of the thunder to follow the light, fascinated that it could be a measure? In a line that starts with Rauschenberg and runs through to Andre, De Maria posits exposure of the elements and exposure to the elements simultaneously. The Lightning Field brings all this and more into play in a guise so original that it is hard to recognize its full conceptual scope. De Maria even managed to include Duchamp’s protocol that the readymade will “later be looked for (with all kinds of delays).” Exploring the show, and thinking how best to evoke the potential it brought into view, I did not expect to run into Duchamp. I end on this note not only because De Maria’s project reveals new aspects of Duchamp’s impact on his generation, but also because of an energetic note to self the artist penned (circa 1961): “Write to Marcel Duchamp *how important he is!!! [my god].”25 n JULIA ROBINSON IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. For notes, see page 202.

162 ARTFORUM

OCTOBER 2023 163

164 ARTFORUM

THE PRINCIPLE OF IMPERMANENCE JEFFREY WEISS ON THE PRESERVATION OF WALTER DE MARIA’S EARTH ROOM

Opposite page: Poster for the 1980 reopening of Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977, Dia Art Foundation, 141 Wooster Street, New York. Above: Walter De Maria, Munich Earth Room, 1968, topsoil, peat. Installation view, Heiner Friedrich Gallery, Munich. Photo: Heide Stolz. Right: Walter De Maria, Darmstadt Earth Room, 1974, sandstone gravel. Installation view, Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Germany. Photo: Timm Rattert.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, which had been closed for a monthslong period of maintenance, was reopened to the public. Officially known as The New York Earth Room, the work is owned and maintained by the Dia Art Foundation. It became a permanent installation in 1980 and—but for annual summer closures and, of course, a pandemic shutdown—has been open continuously since then. Although boosted in recent times by the work’s appearance in guidebooks and online journalistic accounts, visitation is scant. News of its hiatus barely made it into the press. Nonetheless, the existence of the Earth Room is something of a miracle. And in keeping with the impression that it appeared as if by fiat or decree, the very act of closing it for conservation invites us to reflect on its relation to time and place. One way to begin is to unpack the work’s circumstances and terms, including the language used to frame it early on. The Earth Room is a loft space filled with soil up to several inches below the windowsills. The 1980 Dia press release describes it as “a minimal, interior, horizontal earth sculpture.” The statement goes on to explain that the New York iteration is the third such installation by the artist. In fact, all three were produced in coordination with gallerist Heiner Freidrich. The first two were sited, respectively, at Friedrich’s gallery in Munich in 1968 and at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1974, both versions no longer extant. The location of the now-permanent site is the second floor of 141 Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan, which originally served as one of Friedrich’s gallery spaces. The New York Earth Room was first shown there in 1977. Friedrich, one of Dia’s founders, sold the work to the foundation and closed the gallery to renovate the space for a new installation, which opened in 1980 on New Year’s Day. A minimal, interior, horizontal, earth sculpture. The characterization is concise, in keeping with the work itself and, more broadly, with the seemingly fact-based aesthetics of some artmaking in New York during this period. These qualities obviously also motivated the decision, for the initial announcement of the work’s appearance in 1977, to provide vital statistics in the form of a list: 222 cubic yards of earth 3,600 square feet of floor space 21" depth of material 220,000 lbs. weight of material

The composition of “earth and soil” is also listed, being made up of “peat and bark” and “earth,” with transportation and delivery credited to Cityscape Landscaping. In that it fully occupies available space, the Earth Room is dependent on a given site. But because it is replicable elsewhere, it is not site-specific. Described in 1977 as being “for sale” (as it had been in Munich and possibly OCTOBER 2023 165

Practices of preservation and remaking possess their own relation to deep content. Is a room filled with dirt historically specific?

Above: Installation of Walter De Maria, Munich Earth Room, 1968, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich. Photo: Heide Stolz.

166 ARTFORUM

Below: Walter De Maria (right) during the installation of his Munich Earth Room, 1968, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich. Photo: Heide Stolz.

Opposite page: Poster for “Walter De Maria: The Land Show; Pure Dirt, Pure Earth, Pure Land,” 1968, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich.

Darmstadt), it was also said to be subject, if relocated, to certain modifications. The press release explains that “subsequent installations . . . may be various depths as long as the cubic yardage, 222, remains the same,” making cubic quantification the statistic according to which the identity of the Earth Room stays consistent despite change. Even so, depth and therefore weight were increased when the work was remade and reopened in 1980: twenty-two inches and 280,000 pounds. Finally, while the installation at 141 Wooster Street offers a single vantage, with viewers gazing into the room from a small adjacent space, variants could permissibly possess two or more viewing points, “providing that, if more than one room is used, the earth flows contiguously throughout the space used.” The installation is separated from the viewing area by a pane of glass whose height just exceeds the level of the earth. The work’s first incarnation was not called an earth room, although it would be referred to later as Gallery Earth Room, Munich. On the poster for the show, its title is dryly matter-of-fact: 50 M³ (1600 Cubic Feet), Level Dirt. In addition to a plan and elevation of the gallery space (showing that the installation could be viewed from any of three doorways in a hall that ran along one side), the poster contains the following dicta: PURE DIRT · PURE EARTH · PURE LAND / NO OBJECT ON IT / NO OBJECT IN IT // NO MARKINGS ON IT / NO MARKINGS IN IT // NOTHING GROWING ON IT / NOTHING GROWING IN IT. The inscription, which may well have been composed with Friedrich (who wrote a related gallery press release), constitutes a tell, since the terms dirt, earth, and land implicate a set of value-based distinctions—raw material, organic matter, and territorial location. By the time of the New York installation, De Maria had abandoned language of this kind, which he must have come to feel was overworked. Physical and material details may seem marginal or banal. But by invoking them, De Maria clearly intended to avoid symbolic claims, even if encountering the work’s obvious tonnage and impassive, monolithic form makes recourse to such claims almost unavoidable. The list of properties is a cue, in that it means to characterize the work as a sum of parts. The basic components of the Earth Room are uninflected quantities of medium and space. This austerity has a direct bearing on methods of conservation, which respond to the installation’s material demands. In turn, practical concerns illuminate historical and conceptual ones. Dia has only briefly referred to the work done on the Earth Room while it was closed. Indeed, the artist believed questions of maintenance were distracting, a position now held by his estate. (For the sake of full disclosure, I must acknowledge that I briefly served as director of the foundation in 2008, where I participated in discussions concerning the care of various sites under Dia’s jurisdiction.) In a recent press release, however, reference was made to “upgrading the infrastructure,” including the addition of an HVAC system. The dirt gives off moisture, resulting in the growth of mold and even mushrooms, and central air mitigates that. (Fungi still grow, and they are still routinely culled.) It surely also provides a level of comfort for visitors and staff. Installing the system meant removing and replacing the soil

OCTOBER 2023 167

that fills the room, which sounds startling but, while onerous, is permitted by the work’s original principles of iteration and renewal. Despite its purported facticity, the Earth Room wants to appear fully formed and, as such, to be a source of wonder. Most visitors will surely spend at least some time imagining the process of its making, their rumination encouraged by De Maria’s list of dimensions and weight. But publicity for the work often shows a rhetoric of candor facing off with a bid for permanence. “Now more than forty-three years old,” we were told on the occasion of the reopening of the site following Covid, “the installation appears timeless and unchanged.” GIVEN THE DISTINCTION after around 1960 between the artwork as concept and the work’s multiple realizations as an object or site, invocations of perpetuity are easy to take for granted. But iterative fabrication is a technical procedure; it does not necessarily imply timelessness, a transcendent value. The first Earth Room belonged to the early history of installations— by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra, among others—that engage the space of an entire room. With works of this kind, the status of each version of a given installation could be unstable. Over time, a version—or variant—might be characterized as either an iteration of the same work or an instance of one that is new. This duality was practically (and to be sure, commercially) useful, but it also represents a kind of working paradox: Renewal is a means of longevity—even, by implication, of permanence. Accordingly, terms are often elastic, if not ill-defined. Early statements about the Earth Room refer to it as ephemeral. Once acquired, it became subject to stewardship and preservation as a “permanent” site. The Earth Room intensifies the role of the encounter in aesthetic beholding, as if to make the sensation of seeing feel urgent and elemental. This form of experience was a topic of discussion in early criticism. Morris, for example, wrote of the “interaction between the perceiving body and the world” in the process-based work of his contemporaries. With reference to the installation of raw materials, both he and Robert Smithson identified an opposition of form to anti-form and of “containment” to “scattering.” Though such formulations were anathema to De Maria, who resisted theoretical language, the Earth Room turns on a dialectic of this kind. Here, particulate matter, unbounded and without intrinsic form, assimilates itself—given massive quantity and an uninterrupted lateral spread—to the strict shape and dimensions of the room. Closer to home, Jane McFadden, in her recent book on the artist, isolates the principle of “meaningless work” that informed De Maria’s early production. The concept implicates the artist’s close association with composer La Monte Young, whose work with “static” sound was the model for a kind of sculptural practice. Indeed, “Meaningless work” is the title of a foundational text by De Maria that was included in Young’s An Anthology of Chance Operations, published in 1963. Repetition and boredom were defining elements. For example, De Maria produced a variety of wooden boxes, “clean, quiet, static, non-relational sculptures,” as he described them in his 1972 interview for the Archives of American Art. These were made for simple kinds of interaction: dropping a ball through a hole or moving it slowly down a channel. Other activities were unrelated to made objects. “Digging a hole, then covering it,” is one, reminding us that the premise of the Earth Room is partly derived from a pointless act. De Maria once referred to the first Earth Room as “all of the dirt in the room in Munich.” The task-based and freely propositional nature of the installation—its qualification as meaningless work—is easy to overlook. But while the Earth Room is a room, its early relation to Land art is 168 ARTFORUM

Above: Walter De Maria with Ball Drop, 1961, in his Bond Street studio, New York, ca. 1963.

Opposite page, left: Rothko Chapel, 1971. Houston, 2020. Photo: Bryan Schutmaat.

Opposite page, right: Aerial view of the Ise Jingu Shrine, Ise, Japan, August 26, 1953. Photo: The Asahi Shimbun/ Wikicommons.

explicit. The medium is, of course, from and of the earth, as De Maria made clear in 1968, which makes it deliberately jarring in contrast to the Wooster Street loft. Moreover, the work’s initial appearance in Munich came just before De Maria’s move to outdoor sites, above all the deserts of Nevada, California, and New Mexico—remote places of great, flat, open expanse. The way he tells it in the AAA interview, the Munich installation was a rupture, marking the pursuit of new means. In any case, the sites of Land art, which implicate the sublimity of archaeological and geological time, occupy their own order of permanence versus change. Yet it is through those sites’ conjunction of expansive flatness and absence of incident that the spatiality of the Earth Room also summons rapt attention. The work’s correspondence to Land art is underscored by the smell of the dirt, which is a pronounced part of one’s experience on Wooster Street. Or rather, it used to be. The new HVAC system, which lessens moisture in the room, has greatly diminished its once-pungent scent. In fact, while the

shows, the artist preferred to keep the soil clear, then the change could be said to lessen the “problem” of organic growth. Yet, intentions notwithstanding, in its long history in New York the Earth Room had acquired a sensate identity of its own. Recurrence makes nostalgia at once beside the point and inevitable. Part of the paradox of permanence and change is that acts of preservation and renewal often lead to consequences of loss.

installation remains astonishing, it looks and feels more decorous than it did. (As part of routine maintenance, the soil is still watered, though the effect appears to dissipate more rapidly than before.) Moreover, like the scent, ambient sound has also been unintentionally suppressed; it used to include traffic from the surrounding streets that was noticeably dampened by the absorbing effect of the soil, but, thanks in part to replaced windows that improve the seal to the outside, is now largely limited to the hush of the artificial circulation of air. By choice or by circumstance the conditions have changed. Whereas the atmosphere of the installation was once thick, it has now become thin. How significant is this factor, given that the demands of preservation often justify change? After all, the iterative nature of the work implies a new audience, not repeat visitors for whom the work’s past belongs to living memory. In other words, the impact of drier air raises a contradiction, perhaps even a conundrum, of preservation. If, as his Munich pronouncement

PAMELA LEE WRITES that the rise of communication and information technologies and the promise of instantaneity after the middle of the past century instigated a fear—intrinsic to certain tendencies in American art—of the accelerated passage of historical time. Perhaps the implications of this condition reach far into the material life of the art we tend to take for granted. That words and actions on behalf of the temporality of the new work are conflicted only reveals the significance of the debate. In Smithson’s 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” the artist said that “every object, if it is art, is charged with the rush of time even though it is static.” It is the commodification of the artwork that plucks it out of time. But Smithson’s pronouncement disregards the long-term care of the work, which was itself a cause for concern among his colleagues. In turn, practices of preservation and remaking possess their own relation to deep content. Is a room filled with dirt historically specific? In his discussion of the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form (Works, Concepts, Process, Situations, Information),” organized by curator Harald Szeemann in Bern, Switzerland, in 1969, art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh describes Szeemann’s effort as an attempt to establish Post-minimalism’s “transhistorical immediacy of pure process,” opposing it to the obvious historicity of Minimal and Pop art. Likewise, during the 1960s and ’70s, artists themselves often awarded an atemporal, even ahistorical status to the presumed purism of Minimalist and post-Minimalist form. By extension, in the interest of maintaining art over the long term (Dia’s original goal), Friedrich has compared sited artworks to medieval or Renaissance chapels, where murals on permanent display can be viewed repeatedly over time. Of course, murals decay, and since they are unrenewable without risk of falsifying the artist’s hand, the comparison is flawed on a basic material level. But it is also loaded. The nature of the chapel as a specifically sacred site begs scrutiny on the occasion of a renewed Earth Room. OCTOBER 2023 169

The chapel is not a museum for the display of art but a place of worship. My remark about the religious fresco takes as its premise that the mural’s modern aesthetic value supersedes its value as an object of religious veneration—that some chapels have become, in a manner of speaking, museums. Yet comparing the permanent aesthetic site to a chapel also endows the installation with aura, as if the aesthetic encounter were an elevated form of experience that transcends historical time. (In some cases, such as that of the “ecumenical” Rothko Chapel in Houston, devotional experience and aesthetic beholding are meant to be thoroughly collapsed.) The complexity of this problem cannot be explored through shorthand references. In the present context, it is enough to say that while the metaphor of a sacred site was not De Maria’s but Friedrich’s, it does reflect the close correspondence between Dia’s early support of “permanent” display and the spatial and temporal ethos of the art. One way to recast the language of timelessness and transcendence is to draw from alternative models of the philosophy of preservation. Such a model, which well predates the postmodern era (and, for that matter, the modern, for which Alois Riegl’s “Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origins” of 1903 is generally cited as a touchstone), can be traced back to the seventh or eighth century, possibly beyond. This is the method of architectural preservation that historian Maurizio Peleggi calls “devotional conservation.” Far in advance of the development of conservation as a professional discipline, refabrication was used to resolve a fatal discrepancy between the “eternal aspiration” of monuments and their “impermanent constitution,” which is subject to decay. An object of sacred or cultic distinction in ruinous condition is not restored but remade. In this way, it attains an “uncorrupted state befitting eternal time,” thereby sustaining its “thaumaturgic efficacy,” or power. One sub-practice of this kind is “cyclical re-edification,” the chief exemplar being the Ise Jingu, a Shinto shrine at Ise, a coastal city in Japan. For centuries, the shrine has been rebuilt every twenty years, in a ritualized undertaking called shikinen sengu. Cyclical or “preemptive” rebuilding applies as well to numerous other shrines, and as a means of redressing the decomposition or diminished integrity of relics and artifacts, it recurs across multiple traditions apart from Buddhist Japan. The point of the comparison is not that preemptive restoration, never mind cyclical re-edification, openly applies to the conservation of the Earth Room or other sites of the period. Rather, with respect to the Earth Room, it is that the language of ephemerality and permanence is rhetorical in a deep sense, demonstrating how values that condition the origin and then future preservation of the work do or do not correspond. The three iterations of the Earth Room were each dated to the year they were produced, but no double date is awarded to The New York Earth Room now that it has been remade. This is fairly common practice among artists of the era, for whom a work’s date is claimed to be the year of its conception, regardless of when or how many times it was realized. But while it is commonly accepted, it is not without significance. Morris said refabrication supports an “ontology of newness.” As with the shrine at Ise, the implication is that, contrary to an antiquarian bias, an aged object is not venerable. The work’s intangible efficacy requires it to be tangibly clean and intact. The role of the camera is surely relevant. While, as McFadden has discussed, De Maria used photography and film, after the early period of his work on the land he came to prefer that his sited works not be disseminated in that form. With due diligence in this regard, signage on Wooster Street asks that visitors refrain from taking pictures, though the prohibition is virtually impossible to enforce. The artist’s resistance seems to lie with the 170 ARTFORUM

Above: Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer, 1979, 500 solid brass rods. Installation view, Dia Art Foundation, 393 West Broadway, New York. Photo: John Cliett.

Opposite page: Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977, earth, peat, bark. Installation view, Dia Art Foundation, 141 Wooster Street, New York. Photo: John Cliett.

opposition between representation and encounter. As he said in 1972, the extreme remoteness of a Land art site suggested to some that the work “exists only for the photograph and not for itself.” This was clearly not De Maria’s intention. When speaking of Land art as being the only kind of work that incorporates the space “behind your back,” he is referring to a form of immersive spatiality that depends on firsthand experience, something the camera cannot show. But sites were—and remain—difficult to visit; the situation is sometimes accounted for with reference to destination and “pilgrimage,” another figure of speech drawn from the language of devotion. Other related implications apply. To see the Earth Room is to gaze at it from just outside its perimeter, since there is no question of walking on or through the soil. Ironically, this is the view that appeared on the poster in 1980, one of the few official photographs released for general circulation. The photo does not account for the in-person act of leaning over the glass partition to scan the rest of the room. Nonetheless, the door is a viewing aperture that compresses, even pictorializes, what we see. From far enough back, it also crops the installation, as if to imply an infinite extension beyond the frame. Something similar is true for De Maria’s The Broken Kilometer, 1979, which was a Dia commission originally installed in Friedrich’s West Broadway gallery space, where it remained as a permanent site. (Both final installations were produced with the close on-site participation of architect Richard Gluckman.) The Broken Kilometer consists of five hundred polished brass rods that together total one kilometer in length. They are arranged in five parallel rows of one hundred elements each, and the space between the rows increases as the work recedes into the back of the enormous room. This configuration creates a reverse forced perspective, in which perceptual compression produces the illusion of an evenly spaced grid. Highly lit, the reflective surfaces of the brass rods belie their weight. The Broken Kilometer is an exercise in linear measurement, while the Earth Room is a demonstration of the quantification of mass. But both deploy a measure of illusion: They want to be more, in a material sense, than they are—a gap that the artist would close when he began producing work

outdoors, where actuality is enough. (For example, his Lightning Field, 1977, in New Mexico, comprises four hundred stainless-steel poles arrayed in a precise, not attenuated, grid.) Yet illusion demonstrates the origin of a quasi-numinous dimension in De Maria’s later work on the land, the subliminality of its faith in the sublime. As Christine Mehring writes in her contribution to a new book on the artist (published by Gagosian and prepared under the aegis of the estate), the Darmstadt Earth Room did not contain earth, which was prohibited by local authorities due to moisture—something that, indeed, would instigate the need for maintenance and renovation on Wooster Street. The material was local sandstone gravel, which was directly relevant to the eclectic collections of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, where works of high art and objects of natural history reside together. In turn, an early custodian of The New York Earth Room, the artist Haim Steinbach, wrote—apparently against De Maria’s conviction—that the organic identity of the medium, in which things grow and must be removed, was fundamental from the outset: “Whether the experience beheld is material, spacial [sic], political, or of the sublime[,] the esthetic circle appears to be complete with the ascertained knowledge that what is beheld is truly earth.” In fact, he also remarked that correcting for this by adding chemicals to prevent organic change—as if this had been considered—would not only “transform the quality of the earth” but would “amount to the substitution of one kind of meaning for another.” Location is a further, complex factor. It certainly was—if partly by coincidence or default—in the cultural climate of postwar Munich and in

Darmstadt. And the history of SoHo, with its shift in occupancy from light manufacturing to vacated lofts to artists’ studios to failed collectives to commercial art galleries to high-end fashion boutiques and luxury real estate, has now undeniably heightened the material and sociocultural incongruity of the Earth Room in New York. (If the Earth Room ever succumbs to a force bigger than art, it will be the market for loft space.) Both openly and by default, implications of this kind are consonant with the ambivalent imperatives of preservation. The Earth Room seeks transcendence, but its identity cannot be detached from its actual spatial and material means. Would it be wrong to address it not as three autonomous works but, by conceit, as one work composed of three episodic parts produced over twelve years? As such, its relation to time—to history, natural history, and durational beholding— would demonstrate an accrual of implications deriving from the same-butdifferent iterability of the installation across multiple sites. Which is to say that while the Earth Room is not a thaumaturgic site, it does possess a poetics: of repetition and difference as well as setting, medium, and form. The installation’s implacable raw presence is decidedly unnerving—arrestingly still. Its literalism is so irreducible that it becomes a figuring device, and intimations of mortality emerge: The Earth Room incarnates acts of deposition and elevation, terms of lateral and vertical measure that imply ritual passages of life and death. The physical and material practicalities of making and change are inseparable from the work’s many mythologies of boredom, beholding, and awe. n JEFFREY WEISS IS A CURATOR AND CRITIC LIVING IN BROOKLYN.

OCTOBER 2023 171

OPENINGS

MARCIN DUDEK ORIT GAT

ON A STREET CORNER in London one evening a few months back, Marcin Dudek borrowed a lighter and dedicated his monograph Slash & Burn by setting the edge of the book on fire. This surprising, ruinous signature suited the artist’s work, which draws on his personal history as a soccer hooligan. Born in Poland in 1979, Dudek spent his teenage years following his local club, MKS Cracovia. His installations, performances, paintings, and mixed-media works use sports fandom as a framework through which to investigate the intersections of masculinity, violence, community, and subcultural aesthetics. He uses roughhewn or industrial materials like metal chains, nylon, and cement; still, there is a tenderness to his portrayal of the lives of his subjects. NEOPLAN, 2023, on view in Dudek’s exhibition this past summer at the London gallery Edel Assanti, reflects on the important role that bus rides to away games play in football culture. The artist parked the decrepit skeleton of 172 ARTFORUM

a Dinamo Bucharest fan bus inside the gallery, inviting visitors to walk through the collapsed seats and watch several videos installed among them. A monitor on the dashboard showed a player’s injured toe. Another video included slides of soccer fans asleep on the road. A third, displaying footage of liquids sloshing in a plastic bag, was evocative of a fan’s body after a day of drinking beer and eating junk. Alongside the bus were three works from the series “Path,” 2022–, wall-based assemblages of aluminum scraps, shards of glass, steel chains, and printed images of soccer fans that Dudek collected from books and newspapers. During a performance at the show’s opening, the artist lit a smoke grenade and dragged it along the wall, leaving a thick orange line across these works as the audience quickly dispersed onto the street. A concurrent exhibition, “The Group” at Extra City in Antwerp, took its title from a 2021 installation that cobbled together a makeshift tent from burned, torn hoodies and

Dudek’s work combines a sense of looming carnage with references to the history of art.

Opposite page, top: Marcin Dudek, NEOPLAN (detail), 2023, disassembled NEOPLAN Dinamo FC bus, monitors, DVD players, vintage T-shirts, mixed media. Installation view, Edel Assanti, London. Opposite page, bottom: Marcin Dudek, Paluch, 2023, digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes 3 seconds. From NEOPLAN, 2023. Above: Marcin Dudek, Path III, 2023, aluminum, steel, glass, paper, plastic, rubber, rivets, offset print, lacquer, image transfer, UV varnish, smoke grenade, 84 5⁄8 × 65". From the series “Path,” 2022–. Right: Marcin Dudek, Corps de Ballet, 2023, paper, steel, foam, UV varnish, chains. Installation view, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp. Photo: We Document Art.

bomber jackets worn by hooligans. Suspended from the ceiling by chains were male torsos sculpted in papier-mâché made from pulped soccer magazines and the Bible, among other sources (Corps de Ballet, 2023). Studies have shown that during a soccer match fans secrete nearly as much testosterone as the players themselves. In Fever Pitch, his 1992 memoir about his love of the London team Arsenal, novelist Nick Hornby sums up his impression of the first game he ever attended as a boy: “I remember the overwhelming maleness of it all.” Dudek ties this overwhelming masculinity to intimacy, a closeness between men, a sense of belonging that is expressed physically. The reference to ballet is not contrarian. There’s a beauty to these choreographies of proximity, which Dudek recognizes touch on the homoerotic, without reducing the complex relations he cites to only one form of connection. And the violence? It can be seductive. Descriptions of violence are full of verbs; its representation involves images of bodies stretched to their full capacity. Dudek’s work combines this sense of looming carnage with references to the history of art (the orange smoke-grenade streak is a reference to the famous blue line in Polish neo-avant-garde artist Edward Krasiński’s studio in Warsaw; the sculpted torsos are reminiscent of antiquity) and to his own history. The work’s emotional charge comes from memory, from what Dudek has described as a sense of unfinished business that lingered with him after he left the group he was part of and went to art school. No longer being part of a group remains with him, like a scar; you don’t need to be a soccer fan to grasp what longing to be part of something is like. “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us,” writes Leslie Jamison in the title essay of her book The Empathy Exams (2014); “it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.” Even those who know nothing about this subculture of soccer hooliganism can readily understand how deeply this personal body of work is shaped by a sense of loss. n ORIT GAT IS A WRITER AND ART CRITIC BASED IN LONDON. SHE IS WORKING ON HER FIRST BOOK, IF ANYTHING HAPPENS, AN ESSAY ABOUT SOCCER, LOVING, AND LOSING. OCTOBER 2023 173

REVIEWS 176 177 178 179 180 181

182 183

NEW YORK Darla Migan on Wangechi Mutu Jeffrey Kastner on Sherrie Levine Karen Butler on Luciano Fabro Jan Avgikos on Michelle Grabner Harmon Siegel on Aura Rosenberg Chloe Wyma on J. C. Leyendecker Donald Kuspit on André Kertész Barry Schwabsky on “Schema: World as Diagram” Coco Romack on Juan Pablo Echeverri Dennis Zhou on John Hyen Lee Darren Jones on André Hemer STAMFORD, NEW YORK Jennifer Krasinski on “Love and Bottle Rockets: Brooke Alderson and Peter Schjeldahl”

184 185

186 187

CHICAGO Jeremy Lybarger on Patric McCoy Susan Snodgrass on Edra Soto LOS ANGELES Andy Campbell on Judith Bernstein Suzanne Hudson on Elaine Reichek Rebekah Weikel on “This Is My Community!”

188

TORONTO Amin Alsaden on Aziz Hazara

189

MEXICO CITY Gaby Cepeda on ASMA and Julio Ruelas LIMA Giuliana Vidarte on Ishmael Randall Weeks

190 191

192

GLASGOW Susannah Thompson on Carole Gibbons

193

METZ, FRANCE Lillian Davies on Suzanne Valadon ZURICH Agnieszka Gratza on João Modé

194

WINTERTHUR, SWITZERLAND Vojin Saša Vukadinović on Sylvie Fleury

195

VIENNA Vanessa Joan Müller on Denisa Lehocká

196

GHENT, BELGIUM Nina Möntmann on Grace Ndiritu 197

198

OSLO Anne Szefer Karlsen on Gunvor Nervold Antonsen MUMBAI Mario D’Souza on Matthew Krishanu COLOMBO, SRI LANKA Jyoti Dhar on “The Foreigners”

200

YONGIN, SOUTH KOREA Andrew Russeth on Kim Whanki TOKYO Dan Adler on Nobuko Tsuchiya

SÃO PAULO Evan Moffitt on Paulo Nimer Pjota LONDON Elizabeth Fullerton on Larry Achiampong and David Blandy Daniel Neofetou on Niklas Taleb

BERLIN Ana Teixeira Pinto on Michael Rakowitz E. N. Mirembe on Teresa Kutala Firmino

201

SYDNEY Toni Ross on Amber Boardman

Wangechi Mutu, In Two Canoe, 2022, bronze. Installation view, Storm King Art Center, New York. Photo: David Regen. (See page 176.) 174

ARTFORUM

FEBRUARY 2023

175

REVIEWS

NEW YORK

Wangechi Mutu NEW MUSEUM

Although I did not know it at the time, Wangechi Mutu’s “Intertwined,” a survey spanning nearly thirty years, began with my encountering her outdoor installation In Two Canoe, 2022, last year on the grounds of Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York. The bronze vessel—containing a pair of creatures with elegantly elongated cocoon-shaped heads, wearing either leaf-embossed helmets or a cornrow-patterned camouflage mimicking plant ribs—also made its appearance on the first floor of the New Museum. The work introduces us to the twinning visual and metaphorical grammar utilized by the Kenyan artist in this massive presentation that featured more than two hundred works spanning painting, drawing, collage (or a combination thereof), animation, sculpture, and installation. In Two Canoe immediately invited us to enter Mutu’s rich universe, where we encounter a host of binding pairs that structured the show: inside(r)/outside(r), human/ animal, heads/tails, Kikuyu/English. Bronze embodies the literal and symbolic weight of building new modes of transport to enable us to carry on with the work of liberation. It is heavy, but we are also moving between ports, these seeming like so many membranes through which diasporic energy infuses the transfer amid wounds and world-building. For example, by fastening together experiential perspectives on Pan-Africanist unity and diasporic womanist resistance to devastation, Mutu plaits together and relinquishes the plot of all male-dominated patriarchal tribalism— including the cult of Catholicism, anti-holistic “Western” medicine, AI-powered neoliberal extractive economies, and ongoing regimes of institutional discipline.

history through a folk tale–style narrative featuring a woman walking with a bundle atop her head. However, as she travels, her load begins to grow larger and larger as it collects skyscrapers, satellite dishes, cell towers, and all the garbage of mass consumption. Finally the mass is transformed into a bioluminescent glob that slides off a cliff and into the sea, only to be burped up again as primordial ooze. The sculptures of the titular insects that make up the installation Moth Collection, 2010—crafted from porcelain, chalk, leather, feathers, acrylic, duct tape, newsprint, and paper—conjure a physio-temporal shift in the exhibition. Are we, too, drawn to drawing the blood of others in a stupor akin to the dream haze that watching a moth dance to a flame invokes? The pain and pleasure are delightful, invigorating even, but also deadly. And yet, throughout this retrospective, there was also a sense of being brought to an awareness of the beginning of time, of encountering a glimpse of our total annihilation while tethered to everything else that gives life, tight as matted palm leaves. This awareness allows us to hold onto the possibility that we may, despite every dire thing, begin again. Mutu has embraced the spiritual necessity of splitting her studio practice, like a serpent’s tongue, between New York and Nairobi, Kenya, learning from nature, myriad cultures, and her Pan-Africanist roots. The artist, who also studied anthropology, recognizes and claims the similarities happening between various folk-tale traditions—from Kikuyu lore to the Brothers Grimm and the stories of Br’er Rabbit that move between African-descended peoples of the Caribbean and the American South—and is deeply sensitive to the ways that beliefs about ourselves, our neighbors, and our species underlie all the actions that go into the creation of our world. —Darla Migan

Sherrie Levine DAVID ZWIRNER

Wangechi Mutu, The End of Carrying All, 2015, threechannel digital animation, color, sound, 10 minutes 45 seconds.

176 ARTFORUM

In the title work Intertwined, 2003, a watercolor collage on paper, we made eye contact with a pair of fashionable upright dogs—a cancan team sashaying through connotations of the word bitch and cheekily embracing all it implies. I was compelled by this piece because it appears representative of a team that is perhaps on the way to being part of a pack. The work also nullifies the more pejorative aspects surrounding the term “dog”—how could comparing a human being to such a gorgeous and noble creature be seen as adverse or antagonistic? Whether tired bodies or tender beasts, the masses of people on this earth are taken over by the absurdity of increasing corporatized labor— agricultural, industrial, managerial—that is killing us. The End of Carrying All, 2015, a digital animation, shows the whole of human

Trailing a reputation for formal and theoretical austerity that’s exacting even by the rigorous standards of her Pictures generation cohort, Sherrie Levine has in fact engaged with a remarkably sensuous array of forms and approaches over the past forty-odd years. She’s been indelibly written into the canon via her audacious deadpan appropriations of historic artworks by photographers such as Walker Evans, Alexandr Rodchenko, and Edward Weston, and painters including Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Egon Schiele. But she’s also worked in sculpture—Fountain (Buddha), 1996, for instance, is a gleaming bronze urinal she fashioned after Marcel Duchamp’s that wrestles away her conceptual progenitor’s ur-readymade and directs it, almost eight decades later, into yet another system of circulation. Whatever the medium, Levine’s confrontations with authorship and authenticity— and the manner in which she has further mobilized these ideas to spotlight gender inequities embedded in art-world hierarchies—have influenced subsequent generations in ways that can sometimes feel almost too deeply ingrained to fully discern. The two intellectual lodestars of Levine’s practice—Walter Benjamin’s argument that artifactual aura is inevitably distorted by reproduction and Roland Barthes’s notion of the moribund author—are similarly baked into contemporary artistic discourse, so often unpacked and repackaged that drilling down into the replications and arrogations that underpin her output can seem at times almost nostalgic. “Wood,” Levine’s tightly focused show at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side location, contained just four works, each of which played out a slightly different version of her central concerns. If the sparing selection confirmed the endurance of the fundamental issues with which she has long

enterprise—are increasingly understood as decisive problematics in contemporary discourse, schemes that instrumentalize vital things in the service of narrowcast art-world concerns start to seem not just a bit wearied, but also vaguely pernicious. —Jeffrey Kastner

Luciano Fabro

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

View of “Sherrie Levine,” 2023. From left: Fitz: 1–12, 1994; Head, 2023.

engaged, it also called into question the degree to which her habitual gestures can still find traction amid the altered political and ethical terrain of our current moment. The only work on view not from 2023 was Fitz: 1–12, 1994, a piece comprising a dozen small panels that feature an image of a grouchy dog drawn in the 1920s by animator Dick Huemer for the celebrated Fleischer Studios, originator of Betty Boop. Like Levine’s other recapitulations of early-twentieth-century cartoon imagery—most famously of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and his antagonist Ignatz the Mouse—the Fitz suite consists of superficially identical paintings of the titular character, here in black casein on ten-by-ten-inch squares of cherry wood. Of course, the point is that they’re not precise duplicates at all: Not only does the natural character of each individual surface predictably diverge from its companions in terms of grain and coloration, the renderings themselves are also subtly varied in both line and compositional alignment. (The easiest way to see how these minor deviances present themselves is to swipe through pictures of the panels, one after another, on the Zwirner website, which lends the pup’s grimacing mug an uncanny locomotion reminiscent of a flip-book.) While Fitz: 1–12 intervenes in an artifact that has a distinct provenance with which Levine’s actions can be understood to be in dialogue, the other three pieces in the show were all unique objects not made by her but rather created (or chosen) by unidentified individuals. Each had quite specific and complex valences: Fox is a piece of polished and decorated burl wood in the form of a Japanese kitsune figurine; Head is a carved stone implement from New Guinea resembling a skull that was used as a ceremonial mortar; and Scholar Figure is an exquisitely complex hunk of wood “crafted” by nature and then collected (by someone, at some point) for philosophical contemplation. All were fascinating to see, both for their own intrinsic material conditions and for what they suggest about Levine’s personal program of attention. And yet because these items were presented as effectively “authorless” ethnographic materials (at least epistemologically, if obviously not ontologically), the artist’s overwriting of even the slender contextual particulars they did possess in favor of brute annexation to her own program felt strangely unpersuasive. Levine has, of course, been doing this sort of thing for years. But as the suppression and distortion of the histories of one sort of maker for the delectation of another— appropriation not as conceptual gambit, but as structurally malign

This exhibition of Luciano Fabro’s work inaugurated Paula Cooper Gallery’s representation of the artist’s estate (in conjunction with the Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro) and was a significant homage to the Arte Povera sculptor—by his lights, a resolute “heretic” of the movement—who died in 2007 at the age of seventy. Fabro is not a well-known entity in the United States, so it was a pleasure to see a presentation of his singular and contradictory output, which unabashedly incorporates Italian aesthetic traditions, classical history, and high-end design. The show featured nineteen sculptural pieces produced over a span of thirty-eight years. Works such as Ruota (Wheel), 1964/2001, and Tubo da Mettere Tra i Fiori (Tube to Place Among the Flowers), 1963/2001, both of which employ everyday items that could be bought in any hardware store, were elegant in their facture and material simplicity. In the former, a slender metal circle balances precariously upon a thin steel rod anchored horizontally to the wall. It creates a sense of anticipation, inviting one to envision the calamitous fall of the titular wheel. In the latter, a long steel tube is placed among a group of ordinary houseplants. The tube could be carried around to the homes of friends with flora of their own, so it became a kind of traveling artwork (a useful development, because Fabro didn’t have space for it in his studio). By the 1970s, more complicated cultural references had come to overlie his art. For one piece, Fabro evoked a tale from Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, holds off a group of suitors by weaving a shroud by day for her father, Laërtes, that she unravels at night, creating a potentially endless project that lasts until her husband returns from his twenty-year absence. For Penelope, 1972, a series of needles, arranged at the top and the bottom of a gallery wall, are threaded with a single piece of fine green silk that runs in a zigzag pattern from floor to ceiling. The work does not narrate or depict but brilliantly evokes this loaded ancient story through austere symbolic association. Tensions between beauty and kitsch are exacerbated in “Piedi” (Feet), 1968– 2000. Two of the works from this series, Piede Senile II and III (Senile Feet II and III), both 2000, called to mind classical columns in their proportions but possess bases that resemble human versions of the namesake appendages. However, in the case of Bronzo e seta indiana (Piede) (Bronze and Indian Silk [Foot]), 1970–85, we were met by a trio of bird claws, patinaed black. The highly polished whiteand-gold bronze surfaces of Piede Senile II and III are crafted to appear wrinkled and awkward, each appearing like some malformed giant’s foot. Each column is draped by a pant leg—full of pleats, folds, and ruffles—made from silk and hand-

Luciano Fabro, Bronzo e seta indiana (Piede) (Bronze and Indian Silk [Foot]), 1970–85, bronze with black patina, silk, 13' 10" × 4' 11" × 4' 11".

OCTOBER 2023 177

REVIEWS

sewn by Fabro’s seamstress mother. The works are sensuous and ugly, humorous and severe, familiar and alien—indeed, they are paradoxically yet particularly “Italian” in their seriousness and utter Surrealism. Perhaps most puzzling was the central section of the show devoted to his “Computer” series, 1988–94. The works seem to have nothing to do with the actual machine, although they are made of industrial materials and employ serial aspects of computerized production in their making. They are crafted from a combination of long steel bars pierced with holes and often feature blocks, chains, and aluminum plates interspersed with colored aluminum poles hung from a single point on the wall. A consummate theoretician, Fabro discussed the titular subject for this body of work: “For me, the computer means to trigger a process in an irresponsible way.” Do the artist’s sculptures critique the overwhelming power of technology? Pay it some kind of oblique tribute? Or was he attempting to “humiliate” this ubiquitous and meddlesome aspect of modern life by turning it into a starved and skeletal version of itself? We will never know, and I imagine that was Fabro’s intention all along. —Karen Butler

Michelle Grabner JAMES COHAN

Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2023, walnut wood, powder-coated steel bookends, silver, marble, bronze, trashcan lid, found jam-jar lids, 96 × 39 × 34".

178 ARTFORUM

There’s plenty of humor in Michelle Grabner’s art. Whether in the cheerful gingham patterns she collects and parlays into paintings, the everyday objects she deposits in her sculptures, the rigorous yet buoyant formalism, or the tricky maneuvers she orchestrates between the real and the representational, it was all on display. The artist touted her exhibition here as a retrospective, with the caveat that all the work on display was made in 2023. Indeed, everything old is new again—an important ethos that goes to the conceptual heart of her intentionality. More than three decades of practice are distilled into sixteen untitled pieces that articulate Grabner’s enduring interest in vernacular patterns drawn from domestic life, which she channels into formats that originate in high modernism— grids, Color Field paintings, and assemblage. She pairs throwaway found objects with materials that signify great value, contrasting the mass-produced with the made by hand. The apparent collapsing of hierarchies (craft/art, high/low), staged over and over again, evokes a philosophical position once advanced by historian Alois Riegl, who argued that the creative urge manifests itself in both great art and the humblest artifact, and that all systems of patternmaking, existing in continuous circulation and change, are unoriginal—invented by no one but used by everyone. Textiles are important markers in Grabner’s art, particularly found crochets, which here comprised more than half the works in the show. One method of production for her ongo-

ing series of “Indexical” paintings, 1992–, involves mis-stretching a piece of crochet over a gessoed canvas, then spray-painting it (via an often an elaborate process) before removing it, producing a negative or ghost image of the design. Grabner’s compositions dazzle with intricate geometries—fractal arrays of flowers, starbursts, swirls, spirals—all of which emerge from deep histories of ornamentation that go back into antiquity and loop forward to grandmothers’ afghans. The finished paintings—presented individually and in series—are pale, muted. Her pastel colors fuse with the evanescent whiteness of the works’ grounds, softening the clarity of the stenciling. The results are mesmerizingly out of focus, atmospheric. The blur triggers a nanosecond of dizziness and delirium, with the potential to induce a kind of experiential synesthesia— indeed, one can “feel” the artist’s seeing. The leftover crochets, now the by-products of the painting process, are recycled again as templates for a selection of wall-mounted, castbronze sculptures. Four were included in the show, each replicating a folded bundle of the delicate, weblike cloths, their lacy patterns highlighted with white paint, which glows against the works’ polychromed patinas. Loaded with commemorative value, they solicit a meditation on how we embrace the past and bring it forward, which Grabner identifies as the ethical ground of her practice. She valorizes order, predictability, regularity, security—core concerns that suffused every aspect of this presentation. The type of gingham-printed lid that ornaments certain commercial jam jars is one of her studio staples. It is emblematic of vernacular patterning and is infinitely polysemic. Gingham was also the basis for a large tondo painting here, sixty inches in diameter, of a tight checkerboard motif rendered on burlap in white, red, and pink. The rough warp and weft of the fabric confounds the artist’s precision, but Grabner exploits this failing by highlighting the irregularities with complementary green paint, a comical addition that makes the work’s surface seem as though it is fraying right before our eyes. Another humorous note was struck by an eight-foot-tall slab of walnut held upright by a pair of giant bright-blue metal bookends— facsimiles of the type found in office-supply stores. The sculpture is ornamented on both sides with playful arrangements of sundry elements, such as jam-jar and garbage-can lids, as well as circular forms wrought in silver, marble, and bronze. Like bubbles rising to the surface of the ocean, or celestial orbs constellating in the sky, they flirt with weightlessness, the sensation of which is enhanced by the flow of the wood grain. Elsewhere, a pair of long horizontal wooden plaques proposed a similar reverie with assortments of bronze-cast lids (or those taken directly off jars of Smucker’s) plus a couple of bronze sandwich cookies and silver disks. The roundels seem to ramble and roll along, slightly out of alignment while comfortably in place—like everything in Grabner’s art. That temperament was one of the big takeaways from this “retrospective.” Her work is critically engaged, yes, but it allows us the pleasures of meaningful distraction—and hence, the opportunity to see the world anew. —Jan Avgikos

Aura Rosenberg

MISHKIN GALLERY/PIONEER WORKS Photos of men climaxing. A Technicolor clown. A panel of built-up acrylic spelling out the words what is psychedelic––no question mark. Given her work’s striking heterogeneity, it feels right that Aura Rosenberg’s overdue retrospective was divided across two locations, the Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in Manhattan and Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The split spatialized her oeuvre’s over-

Aura Rosenberg, Louise Lawler/Felix, 1996, ink-jet print, 48 × 40". From the series “Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?,” 1996–2008.

arching concern: holding contradictions and oppositions in the unstable equilibrium she calls dialectic. Like the artist herself, Rosenberg’s art is slyly funny. But unlike its maker, it is decidedly not friendly. It seems calculated to resist casual consumption, at times seeming to parody the postcritical ease of much contemporary art. Take her closely cropped headshots of famous male artists such as Mike Kelley, Mike Smith, and her husband, John Miller, apparently captured mid-orgasm. They are hilarious, but also somehow morbid, the men’s expressions oddly pained. Or consider The Dialectical Porn Rock, 1989–93: stones piled Smithson style in a corner of the gallery, lacquered with old-timey smut. Women’s faces smiled and laughed from smaller round pebbles, their inviting expressions asking us to join in the prurient fun. But I found some of the stones so viscerally grotesque (a man cheerfully autofellating) and others so brutal (a woman being spit-roasted) that they provoked a prudish embarrassment I didn’t know I had in me. Likewise, Rorschach, 2014, a metallic print overlaid with acrylic paint. It shows a porno actress as she spreads her anus—the image is repeated four times in an X-shaped kaleidoscopic formation— her stiletto heel suggestively positioned to foreshadow penetration. Facing this work, I giggled immaturely. But it also made me terribly uneasy, and I hope I never see it again. In Rosenberg’s work, spontaneous bodily pleasure is both promised and withheld. The overpainting of Rorschach, for instance, materializes a logic of mediation already present in the underlying image. Here, porn does not document desire so much as fabricate it––human see, human do. Likewise The Astrological Way, 2012–13: Inspired by a vintage black-light poster featuring sex positions based on the zodiac, Rosenberg assembled a group of performers, in sets of two, to re-create these smutty star signs. The artist provided them with a gallon of white acrylic paint to cover themselves in so that they could imprint their nude bodies on large sheets of black velvet. The resulting images are crisp and precise, implying a frozenness at odds with the convulsive passion of the intercourse they describe, evincing a dialectic between action and structure, performance and script. Fucking is structured like a language. Rorschach and The Astrological Way denaturalize sex, the former through superimposition, the latter via discretization. It is hardly accidental, moreover, that they do so with paint. Rosenberg thereby synthesizes two primary concerns of her artistic generation: first, a feminist critique of sexual norms and, second, a postmodern reckoning with painting as a medium. In these works, the latter recovers its historic function as surrogate flesh, not in some amnesiac revival of painterly plenitude––an ideal irretrievably bound to misogynistic fantasy––but rather to overcome an impasse between dematerialized and more bodily practices within feminist art. Consider Louise Lawler/Felix, 1996, a photograph from Rosenberg’s long-running, “Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?,” 1996–2008. That series began when the artist went to pick up her daughter from school and found that the children were all wearing face paint. Later,

Rosenberg collaborated with a group of other artists––John Baldessari, Kelley, Laurie Simmons, and Kiki Smith––on works that explore the scenography of childhood. Here, Lawler costumed her son Felix like a clown, whom Rosenberg then photographed as a disembodied face, painted lurid yellow against a vivid-red background. Against the slogancum-doxa “the end of painting,” the repressed returns in this playful allusion to the Janus-faced innocence/guilt of painterly tradition, wherein artists from Jean-Antoine Watteau to Pablo Picasso have alternated between two avatars: those of unsullied child and tragic harlequin. Unlike her modernist precursors, however, Rosenberg does not present these works as self-images but examines them as images. After all, the more knowingly one seeks naïveté, the more clownish one becomes. Yet, as she exposes this dialectic, the artist does not disavow her modernist inheritance but lovingly unsettles its whos, whats, and whys. —Harmon Siegel

J. C. Leyendecker

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY J. C. Leyendecker died in the summer of 1951, in Norma Desmond–like obscurity, on the grounds of his once-magnificent mansion in New Rochelle, New York. His Ivy League Adonises and Madison Avenue boulevardiers—definitive images of aspirational American manhood in the first three decades of the twentieth century—were long ago processed and extruded by the sausage factory of modern visual culture, their maker eclipsed by his onetime protégé (and soon-to-be pallbearer), Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker’s lover, Charles Beach—whose squarejawed good looks and Winckelmannian physique had inspired his most iconic and ubiquitous creation, the Arrow Collar Man— sold the artist’s work at a yard sale and burned his memoirs at Leyendecker’s request, opening his legacy to innuendo and fictionalization. Fortunately, the illustrator received a thoughtful treatment this summer at the New-York Historical Society’s “Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity,” a small but scholarly exhibition that punched above its weight, attending to the homoerotic overtones of the artist’s output alongside the stereotypes and exclusions that defined his Yankee beau ideal. Opening the show was Leyendecker’s Easter 1936 cover for the Saturday Evening Post, one of the 322 illustrations he produced for the magazine. A foppish youth is seen adjusting his tie in a gilded mirror. Assembled in the foreground alongside a potted narcissus are the accoutrements of dandyism (a cane, a top hat, and kid gloves), which here become a latter-day vanitas, gently warning against the perils of male self-admiration and the feminizing excesses of fashion (as the wall text explains, daffodil, the common name for the narcissus flower, was an epithet for a gay man). If the moralizing

J. C. Leyendecker, Thanksgiving: 1628–1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player), 1928, oil on canvas, 28 × 22".

OCTOBER 2023 179

REVIEWS

message here becomes an alibi for a coded representation of queerness, other Leyendecker covers cathect on the athletic male body, exuberantly commingling beefcake homoeroticism and a triumphant American nationalism, which can, as the curators acknowledge, resonate uncomfortably with fascist kitsch. See the bellicose racecraft of Leyendecker’s 1928 Thanksgiving cover for the Post, featuring a swole, blunderbuss-packing pilgrim beside a strapping football player, glistening pectorals and biceps bulging from his ripped uniform. As media historian Dan Guadagnolo has written, Leyendecker’s Chads and swells can’t be credited with “normaliz[ing] same-sex desire,” but they did innovate “a visual discourse for the creation of a new mode of gay identity in the late 1920s and 1930s,” one no longer premised on “gender inversion but instead rooted in a virile sexuality and the built muscular form.” Hailed by the rough-riding Teddy Roosevelt as a “superb example of the common man”—and name-checked by queer wit Cole Porter in his effervescent “You’re the Top”— Leyendecker’s Arrow Collar Man personified the consumptive dreams of an emerging managerial class (literally “white collar,” white and male) while securing, and in fact surpassing, such dreams for the artist himself. (By 1908, an illustration by Leyendecker earned the artist $350, about the yearly income for the average American worker.) The most provocative of these advertisements cloister male pairs in exclusive homosocial environs such as golf clubs or, in Men Reading, 1914, a tenebrous mahoganyappointed library. The dapper gent depicted on the left looks away from his book, saving his place with his finger. The vector of his gaze is ambiguous. Is he lost in contemplation, peering into the artificial enveloping darkness that heightens the intimacy between the picture’s two subjects, or is he eyeing his lithe flaxen-haired companion, who, absorbed in his newspaper, unwittingly flashes a well-turned ankle beneath houndstooth trousers? This coy dance of normativity and deviance today lends Leyendecker’s work a camp frisson and a contemporary resonance rarely recognized in the products of the so-called golden age of American illustration. We dismiss this work to our detriment, for if, as Clement Greenberg famously lamented, “the same civilization produces simultaneously . . . a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover,” the latter surely tells us more about our lust and longing in the afterglow of modernity, about racial capitalism and gender panic, about cruel optimism and the meretricious promise of the American Dream. “You resemble the advertisement of the man,” Daisy told Gatsby, almost certainly with Leyendecker’s dashing pictures in mind. “She went on innocently. ‘You know the advertisement of the man.’” —Chloe Wyma

André Kertész

BRUCE SILVERSTEIN GALLERY This remarkable exhibition, “The Visual Language of Modernity: The Early Photographs of André Kertész,” featured forty-three of the artist’s gelatin silver prints, almost all of which were made between 1926 and 1936—the years he spent in Paris after leaving his native Budapest. Kertész (1894–1985) was not simply a “photo-reporter,” as he styled himself when he moved to the City of Light, but an exquisite, inventive, and rigorous formalist whose images, even many decades later, still manage to feel strangely and unerringly fresh. His art made “the same demand for awareness,” to quote Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that Cézanne’s did, unsettling and discrediting preconceived notions of perception with a merciless form of looking. In the show were portraits of many canonical artists—Brancusi, 180 ARTFORUM

Calder, Chagall, Mondrian—and one of fellow Jewish photographer Edwin Rosskam, as well as photos of still lifes, cityscapes, and everyday people. Distortion #37 and Distortion #159, both 1933, are torqued, Brancusi-esque renderings of female nudes, pictures that seem more stylistically clever than phenomenologically disruptive. Yet Chairs in the American Library, Paris, 1928, and Paris from the Eiffel Tower, 1933, properly disorient the viewer: Both works are implicitly geometrical abstractions. However contained, the spaces depicted in them are sublime in their attenuated splendor. In the former, the shadows of an elaborately wrought window frame are cast onto a floor, extending beyond the room and, seemingly, into infinity. In the latter, the people perched high upon the famous Parisian landmark look down at a city that, from the artist’s vantage point, appears to bend and warp like overheated glass. Kertész was a master of drama: See the figures in On the Quais, Paris, 1926, and the row of lampposts in Place Gambetta, Paris, 1929, whose subjects function as repoussoir devices marking perspectival space. Being a dyed-in-the-wool formalist, Kertész brings a certain indifference to people—and their inherent messiness—into his photographs, as the small, even trivialized figures in View by the Seine and Dieppe, both 1927, indicate. While he was still making representational art, Kertész’s lack of interest in the “all too human,” as Clement Greenberg dismissively characterized it, suggests that he was implicitly a purist, interested in the cool and controllable. For instance, a man might use the namesake utensil of Fork, Paris, 1928, to shovel vast quantities of greasy food into his hungry maw, but who would dare sully such an object, especially as the artist depicts it? By his estimation, it is a Platonic form, pristine and hypnotically curved—even the shadows it casts are uncannily clean. Meanwhile, the comically contorted woman in Satiric Dancer, 1926, is convulsively abstract, the angles of her white arms and legs at odds with the deep blacks of her dress, reminding us that a photograph, at its most fundamental, involves the insightful exploration of relationships between light and dark. The contrast of a coal-black locomotive racing across a vertiginous bridge surrounded by open white panels of space (Meudon, 1928) demonstrates that these compositional elements are at dialectical odds, irreconcilable to the extent of being enemies. The work also implies that Kertész was an abstract symbolist, and this point is made explicitly clear in Untitled (Chair & Horn), 1936, a refined union of unlike objects that calls to mind the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” as the proto-Surrealist/Dadaist Isidore Lucien Ducasse (aka Le Comte de Lautréamont) described it. Although Kertész had acquainted himself with a number of Dadaists during his time in France, his art eschewed the group’s nihilism, cynicism, and love of absurdity; he chose to distill the chaos of the modern world instead. —Donald Kuspit

André Kertész, Chairs in the American Library, Paris, 1928, gelatin silver print, 8 1⁄2 × 5 1⁄8".

“Schema: World as Diagram” MARLBOROUGH Diagramming seems to be a midpoint or hinge between writing and picturing. Like writing, the diagram takes the two-dimensionality of its support as a given rather than as something to be overcome, but, like a picture, it operates upon the surface spatially, not in a purely linear way. The diagrammatic evidently has something in common with the flattened planes of modernist abstraction, but the two are not necessarily synonymous. As Raphael Rubinstein points out in the catalogue essay for “Schema: World as Diagram,” the exhibition he curated with Heather Bause Rubinstein, the diagram enters Western painting more or less simultaneously with abstraction and the readymade. For this reason, perhaps, the basic questions that animated this unusually rich and stimulating exhibition were: Where does the border between the diagrammatic and the abstract lie? When and how does an apparently abstract painting reveal itself as diagrammatic? While Rubinstein’s essay focuses on the historical background—a brisk sweep through twentieth-century art and culture—the show itself was planted firmly in the era from roughly 1970 to the present. Only a few of the nearly eighty works on display were dated earlier. That’s perhaps another way of saying that the selection acknowledged how

crucial Conceptual art was to the Rubinsteins’ investigations—that is, art in the mode of information rather than of visuality. But purely conceptual works were few here. It’s telling that the essay considers Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, 1966, but the exhibition itself did not include any of his diagrammatic works from the 1960s or ’70s. And though Bernar Venet’s painting Vitesse d’un point matériel se déplaçant au voisinage du point double sur le bord d’une fenêtre de Viviani (Velocity of a Material Point Moving Near the Double Point on the Edge of a Viviani Window), 2022, was featured, his early scientific graphs, diagrams, and formulas, which he presented untransformed, were not. Back then, Venet was attempting to convey an absolutely univocal content in art. But later, by painting a picture of a diagram, he admitted a shift in perspective: the potential for ambiguity. Ambiguity is at the heart of most of the works in “Schema”—or maybe irony would be a better word. For a painting to incorporate a

diagram, a structure designed to convey determinate information—or even to use something that merely looks like one and thereby suggests that it might offer some kind of data—is for the work to enter into a situation in which the sign becomes unmoored from its frame of reference and, therefore, semantically indefinite. The process means subjecting the diagram, with its claim to factuality, to a destabilizing irony. Emblematic of this is Lydia Dona’s States of infiltration into the Real, the Lack, the Symbolic, and the Semiotic, 1993, in which a concatenation of schematic fragments—elements that have been culled from “car manuals, medical devices and stray bits of infrastructure,” according to the curators—are caught up in an ecstatically irrational flux. The “infiltration” referred to in the work’s title undermines legibility in favor of visual experience, though without entirely abandoning the referential. Form proves more durable than denotation. Some artists work hard to resist ambiguity. David Diao’s canvas Studios Updated, 2019, straightforwardly compiles the footprints of the spaces where he made his art between 1964 and the year this piece was painted. The relevant facts are clear; nothing is in doubt, except that the work’s refinement of surface, and Diao’s unexpected color choices (celadon and rose pink), impart a distinctly subjective, even nostalgic, tinge to this autobiographical traversal of the decades. But when were such feelings ever clear or immune to doubt? —Barry Schwabsky

View of “Schema: World as Diagram,” 2023. From left: Karla Knight, Pilot, 2021; Stephen Mueller, Vesper Dancehall, 2008; Paul Laffoley, Dimensionality: The Manifestation of Fate, 1992; Lane Hagood, Eyeball Rug, 2012; Mike Cloud, (M)ildly toxic, (F)ast drying speed, (B)rittle film, 2008.

Juan Pablo Echeverri JAMES FUENTES In yoSoy r i a l, 2004, a video projected in the basement of James Fuentes, Juan Pablo Echeverri serenades himself through a landline telephone. Only he’s not really singing—he’s lip-synching the words of Jennifer Lopez’s early-aughts banger “I’m Real (Murder Remix),” mouthing, in light drag, both J. Lo’s and Ja Rule’s verses from opposite ends of a split screen. On one side, the artist is dressed as a bimbo, with messy curls and sheer tights styled under white panties, who’s on the line with her trade—Echeverri as a bald dude, who wears a basketball jersey while scratching his ass. Captured on Sony Digital Handycam that fogs the footage with lo-fi grain, the work might look at home among those clips uploaded to YouTube in its early days. The platform, which was launched a year after Echeverri made this video, became a haven for OCTOBER 2023 181

REVIEWS

family after his sudden death from malaria in 2022 at the age of fortythree. Two works from the artist’s best-known series, “miss fotojapón,” 1998–2022, were included in the show: Every day for more than twenty years, Echeverri took a passport-size self-portrait in a photo booth, cataloguing his sundry hairdos and various facial piercings. (At one point, he’s even dressed as Hello Kitty.) Each piece features a scrambled arrangement of 432 photographs mounted to a box frame. We don’t know the dates the pictures were taken, which makes it difficult to look at these compositions and not see an Instagram feed—one of the many resonances Echeverri’s project would conjure in the years since it began. —Coco Romack

Juan Pablo Echeverri, IDENTIDAD PAYASA: Totoy el Especialista (CLOWN PERSONA: Totoy the Specialist), 2017, two ink-jet prints mounted on MDF, wood frames with acrylic, each 44 1⁄2 × 31". From the series “IDENTIDAD PAYASA,” 2017.

John Hyen Lee HARPER’S APARTMENT queer creators sharing amplified versions of themselves: flashy personae who often appeared trapped in lonely domestic settings—a shabby bedroom, Mom and Dad’s bathroom. Years before the first iPhone hit the market, Echeverri wittily predicted the pervasiveness of our current era of digital self-representation, filled with artificial images of ourselves captured “casually” or “on the go.” Echeverri never seemed to take himself too seriously—but he was an obsessively maniacal worker, and once described his diaristic practice as being “like an addiction, I guess,” blithely adding that “if I smoke, I smoke.” His work evolved from stark self-portraits snapped daily in photo booths to faggified music videos and meticulously staged photographs incorporating colorful costumes that eventually turned into outright pantomimes of the social-media spectacle. A two-part retrospective of sorts that first stopped at the Berlin gallery Between Bridges, “Identidad Perdida” (Lost Identity) tracked this development through the artist’s sculptures, videos, and photographs. Echeverri appears as himself in many of the pieces on view, or as a vague embodiment of some character—sporting a tongue piercing here, a bleached mustache there—while gazing blankly into a camera. Frequently, however, he transformed himself into someone else entirely, continuing an exercise he began as a boy to escape the homophobic bullying he endured while attending a Catholic school in Bogotá. In another music video, miamerican Laiff, 2006, Echeverri performs in his apartment to “American Life,” the title track from Madonna’s 2003 album. Released by the pop star as an ersatz anti-war statement, the song choice feels significant given the civil war that served as a backdrop for Echeverri’s artmaking. Six diptychs from “IDENTIDAD PAYASA” (CLOWN PERSONA), 2017, were hung upstairs in the gallery’s street-level viewing room. Echeverri documented Mexico City street clowns for this ambitious photographic series, which calls to mind Cindy Sherman’s creepy images of jesters. He also invited the performers to replicate their own makeup on him, documented the transformation, then placed the snapshots of himself alongside his subjects’ portraits. The arrangement makes one feel as though one is seeing double, which becomes even more dizzying as one starts to notice the distinguishing characteristics between artist and model. Clowns are ubiquitous throughout the Mexican capital—they are figures of nonconformity who act out in public spaces. A similar idea powers Echeverri’s “Around the World in 80 Gays,” 2007–15, a series of music videos the artist staged in international city squares, surrounded by throngs of tourists. While Echeverri makes use of his own likeness to reveal the mutability of identity, he also revels in the joys of self-(re)invention. Although humor courses through the artist’s oeuvre, the occasion for the exhibition was undeniably somber: It was organized by Echeverri’s friends and

182 ARTFORUM

When Korea’s Sejong the Great introduced the Hunminjeongeum—or the “proper sounds for the instruction of the people”—in 1446, he explained that “there have been many who, having something they want to put into words, have in the end been unable to express their feelings. I have been distressed because of this.” Until then, the literate population of his kingdom wrote in classical Chinese. By replacing logographic characters from another language with a phonetic system that reproduced the vernacular, the idea was that speech, rather than signs, would bring people closer to themselves. Now called hangul, the modern Korean alphabet consists of twenty-four letters (fourteen consonants and ten vowels), many shaped like the speech organs used to produce that sound, from the tongue placed at the roof of one’s mouth, say, to one’s lips pressed firmly together. In his first solo show at Harper’s Apartment, Korean American painter John Hyen Lee interrogated the junction from which speech and signs diverge. Eleven beguiling, meditative oil-on-wood abstractions—ranging from one foot in length to wall-spanning panels—blur the boundaries of language, revealing the ways it both provides and evades meaning. Largely adopting the structure of grids and ruled lines, the paintings resemble the books that children use for practicing handwriting or mathematics. Sometimes the compositions are executed in bluish greens and grayish whites so faint that one must stand inches away from the surface to properly observe the artist’s careful, focused shading. They recall the works of Agnes Martin or Robert Ryman with their palimpsestic feel and unvarnished wooden edges, layering, and accumulation. Fluent in both English and Korean, Lee demonstrates how doubling can both add and obfuscate. Repetition belies variation. While the paintings may evoke portraiture or landscape, they ultimately resist easy classification. Take Memory Forest (all works 2023), which presents rows of strangely shaped mounds that could be lidded eyes, trees, hills, or scratches of writing. At the top of the composition is a crescent moon; below it are semicircles the color of dried blood that linger like setting suns. 벽해 (Blue Sea) arranges a series of pupilless eyes

John Hyen Lee, Moon with Memory, 2023, oil on panel, 30 × 20".

against a chalky-blue ground. Bits and pieces of Hangul litter Lee’s works, reducing sounds back into shapes. Sometimes he does this explicitly, as in Memory of Square, which reproduces the letter giyeok (two lines meeting perpendicularly at a corner) over and over again. At other moments, the characters feel more vestigial, as we saw in Moon with Writing, in which a pair of rectangles with thick black borders frame what appear be the recto and verso of a book. Curlicues and slashes float alongside forms evoking disembodied ears and noses. Lee’s paintings reassemble the building blocks of language into images at once alien and familiar. Curiously, the works often seem faded or exposed, like botched photographs or analog slide projections, their surfaces ostensibly smudged by an unseen finger. A shadow might fall over a part of the painting, as though it were produced by a page being turned. Is this how memory is summoned before it is rendered into speech? These works offered an attempt at translation, albeit from a prelinguistic realm and into a private argot. We might not have the words to answer the question, but with his attentive, delicate approach, Lee begins to gather a personal vocabulary for things unsaid and unsayable. —Dennis Zhou

André Hemer HOLLIS TAGGART

André Hemer, Troposphere #8, 2023, acrylic and pigment on canvas, 24 × 18".

André Hemer’s paintings contain gobs and streaks of viscid acrylic and pigment—crimsons, golds, purples. Their surfaces are adorned with floral elements that encircle blue skies and peachy sunsets. Think the Rococo magnificence of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Chariot of Aurora, ca. 1760s, or François Lemoyne’s Apotheosis of Hercules, 1733–36, which sits in the Palace of Versailles. But Hemer soups up that movement’s genteel pastels with vivid saturation, depopulates its mythic scenarios, and melts the remaining abstract components into gooey, lava lamp–like wreaths. The results of these processes were realized in “Troposphere,” the artist’s compelling solo exhibition at Hollis Taggart gallery, comprising ten paintings and a video, all from 2023. While the canvases were of various shapes and scales, a selection of oval pieces reached a high point of aesthetic fineness and felt most in sync with canonical references—the ovate structures even allude to rebirth, the literal meaning of renaissance. To make his works, Hemer captures the sky with a flatbed scanner (lending the plein air approach a digital twist) while arranging sculptured portions of dried paint and botanic fragments on the device’s glass. He then prints the visuals onto canvas, adding both wet paint and pigments made from desiccated flora to form thick volcanic surfaces that trap light and accentuate tone. The compositions are based on di sotto in sù, a technique used in Italian Renaissance ceiling frescoes to create the illusion of space and distance. From our point of view, Hemer’s imagery makes it seem as though we’re hunkered down in the nest of a bird or animal of prey, gazing out into the vastness of the heavens. It puts things in perspective, reminding us of our insignificance relative to the universe, as was evident in Troposphere #9, whose palette of dramatic pinks and reds were skillfully used to produce a vertiginous contrast between foreground and background.

The troposphere is the lowest level of Earth’s atmosphere, extending approximately six miles above the planet’s surface. If Hemer’s art occupies a metaphorical region, it is there, where terrestrial reality meets celestial aspiration. Many of the works featured a tantalizing array of coppers and silvers, which evoke the metallic fabrics of satellite sails and spacecraft—the instruments that enable our ceaseless quest for knowledge. It was apparent in Troposphere #3, which looks like an orbiting field of cosmic debris from the film Gravity (2013). In Troposphere #7, a section of digital imagery in the pinkish, Martianlike sky was smeared into a warped sci-fi blur that collides with the surrounding blooms. Hemer’s palette is also redolent of opulent aristocratic costumes and garish papal regalia, with all their attendant dogmatic rituals. For instance, the bloodred smudges at the lower-left segment of Troposphere #2 called to mind a priestly silhouette, ostentatiously hooded and robed. His right arm appears to be raised in what could be a protective stance, or one of pompous acrimonious judgment. While Hemer’s works are evocative of history painting in their import and ambition, this does not impede their conceptual ingenuity and inventive transporting formalism. Because the artist’s compositions are often telescopic, Hemer encourages us to look beyond the confines of the frame—out onto the world, into the stratosphere, and back at ourselves. The beauty of his art is a testament to both our most humbling moments and our greatest achievements. —Darren Jones

STAMFORD, NEW YORK

“Love and Bottle Rockets: Brooke Alderson and Peter Schjeldahl” OSMOS STATION “An everlasting miracle of human invention,” Peter Schjeldahl once wrote, not of a masterpiece of the Western canon, but of the art for which he possessed an intemperate and lifelong passion: fireworks. For twenty-six years, every Fourth of July, the great New Yorker art critic and his wife, actress Brooke Alderson, threw a party at their Catskills home. She was the gracious hostess and de facto executive producer, while he was the conductor of the evening’s main event: a fireworks display, roughly twenty minutes long, that lit up their lush, wooded property. What began as a neighborly gesture—all were welcome, even if not invited—grew into an event attended by thousands between 1990 and 2016. A humble and tender retrospective of sorts, “Love and Bottle Rockets: Brooke Alderson and Peter Schjeldahl” at osmos Station commemorated these celebrations via photographs and ephemera, deadstock (and otherwise dead) explosives, event signage, and video footage. Also featured is a documentary portrait of Schjeldahl by musician Carmine Covelli and director Casimir Nozkowski, in which the critic shared one motive for designing the displays that he worked on devotedly year-round: “It keeps me in touch with what artists do.” To some it may seem out of character that Schjeldahl (1942–2022)— esteemed for prose lucid and opulent, his sentences polished and inlaid with a jeweler’s precision—was, in his off-hours, a maestro of mayhem, deploying explosives like paint spattered on the canvas of the night sky. But he always delighted in spectacle. What other writer could harness hyperbole—critical thought’s arch nemesis—then make it prance out of the chute like a Lipizzan entering some rube-opinion rodeo? (To wit: “It’s time to say that Robert Mapplethorpe is the greatest pure studio photographer of our time and one of the most important photographers of all time.” Or lay down dynamite rhythms in sentences such as “Set concrete insists insists insists?” Or demolish the art that ticked him OCTOBER 2023 183

REVIEWS

View of “Love and Bottle Rockets: Brooke Alderson and Peter Schjeldahl,” 2023. Photo: Zaid Arshad.

off with a scorching kaboom: “Gigantic in scale and pipsqueak in imagination, the show must be seen to be properly disbelieved.”) Composition is composition, whether in ink or gunpowder, and the footage on view of his fireworks captures their streaking, shimmering trajectories across the fore-, middle, and backgrounds of the landscape, casting luminous color over the lawn and all the guests, throwing the trees into silhouette. What looks like magic was in fact the product of Schjeldahl’s meticulousness. Here, visitors could peruse his “battle plans”—essentially stage directions for what and where the pyrotechnics would be set off—as well as his reviews of the rockets, Roman candles, and sundry explosives that comprised the rest of his arsenal, in which he evaluated their virtues, writing it all down in red pen. Apparently, the firework named awesome was not so, while the one called very evil garnered a great! must have. However, trigger happy, sad to say, received an n/a. Like Alderson and Schjeldahl’s party, “Love and Bottle Rockets” included contributions by those who attended and supported the event, each in their own way: Two bound volumes of photographs by Stephen Shore from 2004 feature detailed shots of friends and the vast offerings of food. Artist Rob Howard’s picture stops time on the smoke and sparkle. Artist Scott Hill painted a very funny sign of a star-spangled Uncle Sam designating the mark of a true patriot: men! i want you to pee in the woods. Poignant was Alderson and Schjeldahl’s goodbye, written in Magic Marker on a piece of wood they posted outside their driveway to let passersby know they were retiring from hosting the party. It ends on a note of gratitude and praise for the communal, collaborative artwork that they had helmed for so many years: we are lucky to have shared with you a tradition of togetherness and so much fun. —Jennifer Krasinski

alongside their rotgut! The Rialto was a pickup bar, a place to score drugs and work the dance floor. Its clientele was mostly Black men, and so during the bar’s heyday—the 1970s and ’80s—it was doubly estranged from the straight corporate world of the Loop. It was one of those gems you either knew about or didn’t.  Of course, photographer Patric McCoy knew about it. In the 1980s, he took portraits of the bar’s regulars with a 35-mm camera he had recently bought and was still teaching himself to use. But his isn’t an insular body of work, like Anders Petersen’s tender documentation of Hamburg’s Cafe Lehmitz. McCoy radiated outward from the hive of the Rialto, cruising the city and the lakefront on his bicycle, taking portraits of anybody who asked him to. His subjects posed themselves. McCoy was just there to record their irrefutable Black agency. Fifty such portraits were on view here, a mix of color and black-andwhite, hung salon style—a variety of faces, each with its own attitude of seduction or languor or inscrutability. The photos, all of which were taken in 1985, were grouped into themes: “Body,” “Chillin’,” “Fashion,” “Men on Bikes,” “Portraits,” “Puns,” “Rialto,” and “The Look.” The jumble initially seemed contrary to the spirit of close encounter that underlies McCoy’s project. Yet as I regarded each picture on its own terms, the faces resolved into specificity and enacted an intimacy in keeping with the ambient eros. The exhibit was a casual paean to Black masculine beauty. Row Row shows a buff, shirtless man piloting an inflatable raft. In Benson & Hedges, another young idol flexes his cantaloupe-size biceps. These images have a sensuality that is more natural, more impromptu, than the work of George Dureau or Robert Mapplethorpe: white photographers whose portraits of Black bodies can evince mannered fetishism.  McCoy is a connoisseur of textures, fabrics, and hair. Cream and Green captures the fortuitous synchronicity between the palette of a man’s jacket and that of a passing city bus. Slick, one of the most expressive works here, is a black-and-white portrait whose subject strikes a pseudo-Napoleonic pose, hand to chest, hair luminously pomaded back. New Day is a grayscale study in light, featuring a bus rider in profile, his handsome face and white collared shirt gilded with sun. If you told me the photo was from the 1950s, I wouldn’t doubt it; the image has a timelessness reminiscent of, say, Roy DeCarava’s work. McCoy has a sense of humor, too, evident in the series of punning photos. In Famous Fried Chicken, a shirtless man mimes a bodybuilding pose—a front-lat spread—in front of the titular fast-food joint, looking much like the eponymous bird himself. The subject of Five perches atop a bench advertising rent me, i’m ready. He flashes a quintet of fingers to the camera, insinuating perhaps that five dollars is his going rate.   

CHICAGO

Patric McCoy WRIGHTWOOD 659

Like many gay bars, the Rialto Tap in downtown Chicago was not so much a hole in the wall as a hole in the universe. You could fall in at 4 am and find yourself in the boozy confidence of hustlers, dealers, drag queens, office drones, and faded Adonises. The fire code permitted a limited number of souls, but what multitudinous fantasies they imbibed 184 ARTFORUM

Patric McCoy, Row Row, 1985, ink-jet print, 10 × 13 1⁄4".

Despite these pleasures, the show should have been more rigorously edited. Too many of the photos were unremarkable. The images of a man lounging on a couch, a man glancing back from a bike, or a man simply looking into the camera felt like outtakes. They imparted no mystery, no formal or conceptual intrigue, no narrative implications. The curator, Juarez Hawkins, invoked the political power of representation, but the mixed quality of the work on view demonstrated that not every picture of the past merits our veneration. Curatorial wall text mentioned aids, but almost as an obligatory aside, since there’s no way to know which of McCoy’s subjects succumbed to the disease, and none of the photos on view alluded to that tragic scourge. Even without the ravages of time and successive pandemics, these photos were already requiems. The Rialto is gone, too, razed in 1990. If you go there today, not a trace remains. You either know it was there or you don’t. —Jeremy Lybarger

Caribbean corals and greens) and explorations of various materials (ranging from wood to steel to concrete) reinforced Graft’s seemingly endless array of permutations and possibilities. Small viewfinders embedded within these fragments revealed miniature photographs of the original location where each work was installed. Previous versions depicted family portraits and images of Puerto Rico’s architecture and rich landscape. Also included were artifacts from several related publicart pieces, including the gazebo-like Screenhouse, 2019–23, currently on view in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Edra Soto

HYDE PARK ART CENTER For Chicago-based, Puerto Rican–born artist Edra Soto, home is a psychic, geographic place as well as a locus for gathering and community. It is also a political space that defines who we are as civic and social beings. The complex relationships between citizenship and migration, displacement and belonging, inform the impressive suite of sculptural installations comprising “Destination/El Destino: A Decade of GRAFT,” an unconventional survey celebrating ten years of this ongoing project by Soto. Her series of nomadic installations transposes vernacular design elements derived from Puerto Rico onto the existing architecture of a museum or gallery and within various outdoor public sites to create large-scale, immersive environments that redefine what constitutes home and homeland. The works’ abstract ornamental motifs are based on the rejas (wrought-iron grilles) and quiebrasoles (concrete-block screens) that provide protection and ventilation for the island’s houses (the structures’ Afro-Caribbean origins can be traced to the African slave trade during Spanish colonial rule). These objects are employed by the artist as symbolic markers of her birthplace’s culture and history. As the title suggests, Soto’s interventions invoke both the medical and horticultural meanings of graft—to transplant organic tissue onto another life-form in order to heal it or make it whole—as metaphors for migration that also challenge established definitions of site specificity. Each iterative installation responds to the spatial conditions of its location. Grafting markers of the island’s domestic life onto seemingly neutral settings creates counternarratives to known architectural histories, symbolically upending centuries of territorial subjugation to assert Puerto Rico’s diverse cultural identity. The Hyde Park Art Center (hpac) offered a fitting tribute to Soto’s interventionist project, which the artist originally developed while a participant in this venerable institution’s studio-critique program in 2013. The resultant Graft (1), a decorative screen of painted white wood created for Terrain Exhibitions in Oak Park, Illinois, in 2013, encased the front porch of a house, while Graft (2), 2013–19, the artist’s first interior installation, occupied the glass walls and windows of hpac’s library and meeting room. The exhibition shunned any strict chronology while highlighting Graft’s many formal and conceptual developments over time, via fifteen sculptural fragments interwoven throughout the space in dialogue with each other. For example, the hard-edge geometry of earlier works gave way to more sinuous, organic patterns in various recent installations; shifts in palette (including

Graft’s most recent evolution culminated in the exhibition’s central titular installation, Destination/El Destino, 2023, a monumental openframe dwelling whose exposed infrastructure of interlocking aluminum tubing is repurposed from a previous public work, Casa-Isla/HouseIsland, 2022, formerly installed in a lagoon of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Graft’s many themes of cultural memory and resiliency were reimagined here through a shimmering facade of more than five hundred hand-tooled aluminum stars that take their inspiration from the Akan people of Ghana. Soto reinterprets this Adinkra symbol, still found throughout Puerto Rico, in alternating patterns of silver, copper, and gold stars that sheath her freestanding shelter in a luminous glow. True to other installments of Graft, various performances and events, as well as a domino table for game playing (created by Soto and her partner, Dan Sullivan) were included in the show, offering a destination for communion—or a kind of “third place,” as sociologist Ray Oldenburg termed spaces for informal public life. Transcending dimensions private and public, personal and political, Graft imagines home across multiple spaces and time, a project that has proven both generative and generous. —Susan Snodgrass

Edra Soto, Destination/ El Destino, 2023, aluminum foil, aluminum, Sintra, wood, plastic, concrete, ink-jet prints, latex paint, 12 × 60 × 12'. Photo: Eugene Tang.

LOS ANGELES

Judith Bernstein THE BOX

Anyone who is wondering, “What the hell is Judith Bernstein’s problem?” need only look at the world around them. Since the late 1960s, Bernstein has channeled the sexually violent id of a puritanical nation—the United States—with imagery as crass as its OCTOBER 2023 185

REVIEWS

Judith Bernstein, GASLIGTING (Blue Ground), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 90 1⁄2 × 87".

186 ARTFORUM

ever-devolving politics. Bernstein’s enduring art serves to highlight misogyny’s metastatic persistence and influence on the daily lives of those navigating its effects and deprivations within the cacophonous morass that is America. Humor and gestural rigor are at the heart of Bernstein’s approach, which she has only sharpened through decades of practice, deploying hardy strategies for fragile times. The artist’s most recent missive to the masses arrived in an exhibition of recent paintings at the Box, curated by her pal, Paul McCarthy (the show marked Bernstein’s sixth solo outing with the gallery). In addition to the artist’s comically large signature (her trademark), the works bore a range of texts, both familiar and new, such as gasligting (purposefully misspelled and sometimes appearing as gasliting), trumpenschlong, and we don’t owe u a tomorrow, which was also the show’s title. The phrase looked as though it was inhabiting a deflated spiral—a brain-like fold articulating a ghastly cranial boundary. The statement’s nihilistic charge, combined with a maddening tonal informality, begs a number of questions: Whose tomorrow are we talking about here? And what, exactly, is expected or owed? In the run-up to the US election in 2016, Bernstein created her Trumpenschlong character, a kind of reincarnation of the artist’s Cockman from the 1960s. Her version of the titular faux mogul is rendered as a limp-dicked dictator, whose face resembles a wilted, overtanned scrotum. While he appears with less frequency in Bernstein’s work today, his presence lingers like a noxious “hamberder” fart. Gasligting (We Don’t Owe U a Tomorrow), 2023, depicted two Trumpenschlongs— each with a swastika cheek tattoo, red lips, and Hitler mustache—that anchor the composition’s lower-left and upper-right corners. In another part of the picture, a “cuntface” (another creature from Bernstein’s menagerie) holds court and is dressed in the same patriarchal, fascist accessories as the Trumpenschlongs. A second and more abstractly chthonic cuntface, its eyeholes blotted out with flat orange and purple shapes, radiates rageful lines of color from its center and seems closer to the artist’s original intentions for the figure, which she described in a Brooklyn Rail interview as “a black hole [with a] celestial inside.” The cuntfaces, one complicit with authoritarianism and the other seemingly ready to obliterate it, articulate two different responses to living in a poisonously misogynistic country, which is becoming more polarized—and certainly more terrifying—by the minute. Also notable here were Bernstein’s subtle material innovations in Pink Gasligting, 2022, and GASLIGTING (Blue Ground), 2021, which were made on dyed, not painted, canvas grounds. The shard-like patterns produced by the dyeing process made manifest the psychological violence of the paintings’ ostensible subjects. GASLIGTING (Green Ground), 2021, was perhaps the most airy, even bucolic, of the works on display. In it, skull-like faces shout at and slime one another with a bile-like ooze. The heads have open voids for eyes, recalling the manner in which Joyce Pensato (1941–2019), a contemporary of Bernstein’s, would sometimes draw upon the blank existential horror embedded in American pop-culture characters (such as Bart Simpson or South Park’s Kenny McCormick) for her own art. Yet Bernstein’s

figures are aggressively, unequivocally splenetic; and, because they are rendered with a limited number of brushstrokes, they often appear deathly, skeletal. These beings speak from the beyond and, apparently, could give a flying fuck about our future. Understanding the toughest parts of Bernstein’s work makes you realize that if you think the present we currently inhabit is at all normal or acceptable, you do not deserve a better tomorrow. —Andy Campbell

Elaine Reichek

SHOSHANA WAYNE GALLERY Elaine Reichek’s “Frock-Conscious” further developed “Material Girl,” her 2022 show at New York’s Marinaro gallery. The mini survey in Los Angeles—featuring some fifty works, the majority of which were made over the past five years—emphasized her long-standing interest in the history of textiles and the presumptive gendering of their makers and wearers alike. For this outing, Reichek took a cue from The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1915–41), citing this passage from the work in the accompanying checklist: “My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness, &c.” The installation here cohered around twenty-four linen panels centering on richly colored digital or hand-embroidered sections of garments taken from paintings, drawings, and sundry designs, including a drapery study by Michelangelo; the deep golden folds of the dress worn by Artemisia Gentileschi’s subject in Conversion of the Magdalene, ca. 1620; the winsome rainbow bands covering the chemise of Henri Rousseau’s supine protagonist in The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897; and the pulsating pinstripes of a pair of skintight pants sported by a leather man in Ed Paschke’s Sunburn, 1970. Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Gallery), 2016, was the most recent citation. Its depiction of a woman before a white wall of framed images was recapitulated by Reichek as a vertical diptych of pattern atop pattern: The subject’s tessellated shirt wryly quotes Jasper Johns’s crosshatches, and her verdant, leaf-printed skirt comes courtesy of Rousseau’s unreal phytology. The recursive gathering honored what Reichek has named her propensity for “translation”—fabric into paint into fabric—but more so evidences an “aesthetic politics.” Hers is a sustained interference within male-dominated painting, or what she drolly describes as “the center of a cult”—legible in relation to her BFA studies at Yale University in the 1960s, but remarkably unchanged since. (Like Gentileschi, Sonia Delaunay and Méret Oppenheim are artists who’ve received the Reichek treatment here—women who were exceptions to the masculinist canon despite its nearly inescapable pervasiveness.) The artist’s methodology of distantiating extant models stresses the interval between would-be pattern and current means of and circumstances for recalling it. Still, Reichek made sure that viewers would follow this referential regression by supplying a multipage guide redolent of art-historical

Elaine Reichek, Artemisia Gentileschi Robe, 2020, digital embroidery on linen, 13 1⁄2 × 12".

slideshows that catalogued her comparative approach and likewise forthrightly named her sources, which were touched upon in each of the works’ titles. Reichek’s strategy forces a kind of blackmail comparable to Sherrie Levine’s exposed borrowings that rely on a more than casual familiarity with art history. Reichek’s process also and differently accords with more recent trends privileging transparency and traceability in sectors, such as food and clothing, beyond the institutions of art. The artist also included a few of her needlework samplers, which represent a genre of domestic craftwork she has been examining through a deeply feminist lens since the early 1990s. These works recall earlier technologies of appropriation predicated upon (as well as demonstrative of) skill and here functioned as corrective pedagogic objects. Like some pre-Victorian examples that move beyond the alphabet and arithmetic (many are reference works in mode and theme), these pieces include texts by the likes of Susan Howe and Barbara Pym. Allegorical more than aphoristic, Darning Sampler: Lewitt’s Color Grids, 2018, offered—unlike her titular subject’s gallery-swallowing art—a pointedly petite, nine-inch-square matrix of crossed pastel threads. Differently domesticated were two pieces parroting Jackson Pollock (JP Textile/Text 1 and JP Textile/Text 2, both 2021), which take as their supports ready-made Spatter fabric distributed by homefurnishing company Kravet Inc., in different colorways of scrupulously rendered drips. Each is embroidered with bibliographic mentions from the vast literature on the artist (Reichek also provides a full reading list). One hung near a triptych of scarves printed with Cecil Beaton’s now-infamous 1950s photographs of couture-clad models posing in front of Pollock’s allover compositions as stylish if anemic backdrops. These segued into a final gallery, chock-full of works about the commercial ubiquity of Henri Matisse’s forms (emblematized by a Wayfair rug with a Monstera plant design), in addition to a more explicit critique of his own inspirations—African artifacts and textiles, unclothed women—pinned to a folding screen to form an aspirational mood board. Two vintage-style dresses, absent corsets, rounded out the ensemble. Fabricated with material sketched by Vanessa Bell for the Omega Workshops, they suggested the possibilities of other productive genealogies, of affiliations both uncovered and necessarily invented. —Suzanne Hudson

“This Is My Community!” CANEPA SELLING

“This is My Community!,” a group exhibition curated by Michael Rashkow, a Southern California–born artist and Canepa Selling’s new director, featured works by four intergenerational Los Angeles–based artists who, to paraphrase Rashkow, are skilled in creating atypical surrogate objects imbued with private subjectivity. Entering the space, one immediately felt a sense of equilibrium in the pale-hued ensemble and its meticulous installation. Each of the nine equivalently pristine pieces on view transmitted their personal idiosyncrasies in service to a heavenly, paradisiacal whole. Two strong works by Swedish artist Torbjörn Vejvi offered dynamic yet controlled access points for entry. Affixed to the back wall was Untitled (Portal), 2022, a hollow, wall-mounted architectural model that radiated elegance and rigor through its precisely measured, minimal design. Built from wood adumbrated by thin washes of aqua oil paint, the sculpture featured a short upward stairway foregrounding a fortified gateway to a seemingly idyllic yet unidentifiable place. Untitled (Curtain), 2023, was a shaped acrylic-on-canvas painting that cleverly depicted volumetric form through a narrative lens. This stunning

trompe l’oeil, skillfully crafted to resemble a billowing ocher curtain, seemed to extend a sealed portal to what lay beyond. Jennifer Boysen’s trio of curvaceously symmetrical wall-based objects comprised diaphanous swaths of linen stretched over metal and wood supports. Their undulating forms swelled outward, and the fineness of the linen, which functioned like soft, fitted screens, afforded one ghostly views of their interior structures. What mysteries are kept in these curious haunted objects, which are at once simultaneously evanescent and oddly corporeal?

More of this otherworldly terrain could be located in Allen HungLun Chen’s sculpture Pillar Ornament for the Living and the Dead, 2022, which sat at the heart of the exhibition. Carved out of smooth black walnut, the work incorporated two planks laid parallel to one another and fitted with wild winglike appendages embellished with scrawls in blue ballpoint pen. These delicate, directional markings— evoking feathers and scales—felt fundamental, supplying dynamic movement and an additional sense of body to the work. United in phenomenological measure, Chen’s Pilaster I (Stone Bird Sanctuary) and Pilaster II (Stone Bird Sanctuary), both 2023, hung nearby. Each of the two convex aluminum pillars, nearly identical in appearance, held framed photographic iPhone images of carved stone friezes from a temple in Taipei, seen by the artist during a stay there. The monochromatic aspects of the pictures seemed to accentuate the spatial recessions of the wall designs, which presented herons blissfully at peace in nature. The birds typically symbolize harmony and stability—their presence charged the connections between Chen’s objects here with a boundless energy. This communion with nature was also carried over in Victor Estrada’s gorgeous oil painting Reflex / It Feels Right to Me, 2017. Built up with thick impasto brushstrokes in a sunlit autumnal palette, the work depicted a kind of Gustonesque human/animal hybrid in profile: a beautiful synthesis of numinous visceral forms that called to mind a mythical phantasm or a portrayal of an expanded interior self.  Transmission relies on shared exchange and the attunement of the receiver. To build an environment for such sensitive transactions—to build this community—was Rashkow’s intention for this presentation, and the outcome couldn’t have been more fulfilling.  —Rebekah Weikel

View of “This is My Community!”. Foreground: Allen Hung-Lun Chen, Pillar Ornament for the Living and the Dead, 2022. Background, from left: Jennifer Boysen, Untitled, 2020; Torbjörn Vejvi, Untitled (Curtain), 2023; Jennifer Boysen, Untitled, 2020. Photo: Sylvia Hardy.

OCTOBER 2023 187

REVIEWS

TORONTO

Aziz Hazara MERCER UNION

An eerie wind howled throughout. A boy dressed in what appeared to be a perahan o tunban, traditionally worn by Afghan men, could be observed in the entrance-facing screen, the last of the five comprising Aziz Hazara’s multichannel video Bow Echo, 2019, installed within the oblong space of Mercer Union. In that part of the work, the boy struggles to maintain a foothold atop a small rock. The screens surround the viewer and repeat the exact same scene, but with five different boys. In the background is a city nestled within a desolate mountainous terrain, obscured by what seems to be dust or smog, under dark cloudy skies. The children gradually appear, like spectral visions, each standing on that rock in the foreground. They persevere against the relentlessly strong winds. The boy in the last screen struggles the most, but he gets back up after being thrown off. The protagonists exhale with all their might into brightly colored plastic whistles—some blow with such vigor that they almost scream— but the sounds they make soon get drowned out by an ominous reverberating musical note. Yet the squealing chorus returns, calling to mind the insistent, high-pitched shrieking of sirens heard when natural disasters hit, or at wartime—a tune I despised more than the deafening boom of fighter jets or explosions rocking the ground of Baghdad, my childhood home. The images fade, and the videos loop again. Viewing Bow Echo was an endurance test in resisting interpretation. It reveals so little about Afghanistan, where Hazara shot this work, and is so clearly its focus. But the sharp contrasts within this tender yet unsettling piece allude to a difficult situation. The subjects’ actions alone seem like allegories, which oscillate between two readings: as children’s play, suggesting the kind of adaptation necessary for living in a troubled land; or as cries for help, sounding an alarm to bring attention to the ordeals of the artist’s kin. Both interpretations create a debilitating sense of defeat as we contend with the tribulations of innocent people who have a right to better lives. I feel the same helplessness

toward my own people in Iraq, a country that also suffered reckless foreign—specifically, US—military interventions, which unleashed utter chaos: from suicide bombings to insurgencies, kidnappings, and the savagery of ferocious militias. Hazara presented an irreconcilable paradox. The artist was tackling the formidable challenge of translating distressing realities into an artwork, displayed to mostly foreign, non-Afghan audiences, impassively encountering a mere representation of those immense adversities. I always find it perverse for a work of this sincerity, of this vulnerability, to be viewed within a culture of spectatorship, of voracious image consumption. Part of me hopes that visitors to these exhibitions engage in deep introspection; another part cringes at the thought that some might fancy themselves saviors in relation to those experiencing unimaginable horrors. Nevertheless, Bow Echo is a forceful and necessary work, urging us to reflect on our collective responsibility, as a global community, for the fate of fellow human beings in distant geographies—hopefully without a vacuous bout of moral superiority induced by a few minutes of sympathizing. The work also raises critical questions about the ethics of representing children in such artworks and in such venues. My ambivalence is not just about their consent or safety (implicitly, the boys invoke what is invisible: the dangers women or girls could find themselves in had they appeared before the camera). What I take issue with is the subjects’ lack of choice and awareness at that young age, especially when these individuals grow up to realize they were gazed at within settings mired in voyeurism. Eschewing sensationalized or stereotypical imagery of those who live in so-called war zones, Hazara’s installation polemically asked whether there is a place for such works within platforms largely incapable of coming to terms with their culpability in what is being beheld. I do not want to succumb to cynicism, and I do not want viewers to be indifferent. But for me, Hazara inadvertently interrogates the viability of presenting this work to societies largely apathetic to the plight of “others,” within countries that participate in decimating the subjects on view. —Amin Alsaden

Aziz Hazara, Bow Echo, 2019, five-channel HD video, color, sound, 4 minutes 17 seconds. Installation view. Photo: Vuk Dragojevic. 188 ARTFORUM

MEXICO CITY

ASMA and Julio Ruelas PEANA

asma’s recent two-part show, “Inverse sátiro envy” (Inverse Satyr Envy), curated by Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio, was an enigmatic pairing of the artist duo—Ecuador-born Matias Armendaris and Mexico-native Hanya Beliá—with Julio Ruelas, the painter and engraver who embodied the Decadent and Symbolist movement in Mexico until his death in 1907 at the age of thirty-seven. This match is not exactly an obvious one, and at times it felt capricious. Ruelas had a reputation as an enfant terrible, prone to borrowing motifs from Belgian artist Félicien Rops: nudes, demons, and chimerical creatures, such as scorpion women and satyrs. In asma’s reading, Ruelas’s recurrent satyrs are stand-ins for his uninhibited male appetite, and the title of the show toys with this masculine intensity: not penis envy, but satyr—or maybe satire—envy. With the help of a fin de siècle hand, asma took the chance—so they told me—to scratch a very millennial itch: online cancel culture. Why are millennialaged artists afraid of bohemian hedonism? Why is our decaying society preoccupied with political correctness in the face of doom? Was Ruelas an incel or a sigma male? asma attempted some answers in the form of intricate visual puns. The first version of the show, which opened in early June, included thirteen pieces by Ruelas, including the classic engraving La crítica (The Critique), 1906, a self-portrait in which a birdlike, top-hatted demon crawls on the artist’s head; and La esfinge (The Sphinx), 1906, which depicts a monstrous, big-breasted half woman half feline attacking a gaggle of flying, bourgeois-looking pig men. Ruelas’s pieces, all small format, mostly engravings, were illuminated by asma’s lamps, whose five green shades imitate the classic banker design. The asma shades are made of silicone and decorated with deliriously composed images. A highlight is Dos flamantes como obsidianas negras, verdaderamente más del tono del estiércol, con un fulgor de brillo nocturno que embriaga no solo el borde de sus inflamados belfos sino también sus cuerpos embadurnados en grasienta bacteria (Two of Them Flaming Like Black Obsidians, Truly More the Color of Manure, with the Glow of a Nocturnal Shine That Intoxicates Not Only Their Inflamed Lips but Also Their Bodies Smothered in Greasy Bacteria), 2023, which shows the feet of a couple mid-sex, panties around their ankles, standing above a sewer, while below them a pair of loved-up cockroaches mirror the human actions. As usual, asma’s masterly handling of the material makes for an extremely seductive object. The light shines brighter at the center of the composition, as if radiating from the sewer. In contrast with that libertine scene, Exhala irresistible aliento que atrae pistilos digitiformes de flores despedidas de sus cimientos, olvidadas a la negra espesura de su manto (Exhale the Irresistible Breath That Attracts Finger-Shaped Pistils from Flowers Separated from Their Foundations, Forgotten into the Black Density of Their Cloak), 2023, pictures two veiny phalli pointing in opposite directions, wearing their tips like little flower hats in a landscape that curtly brands them with a no sign, the classic circle crossed with a diagonal, as a tiny ghost shudders in a corner. Part two of the show opened a few weeks after the first. The layout remained almost unchanged: the mud-red wall paint, reminiscent of provincial historical museums, was still there; the lamps remained at work illuminating Ruelas’s pieces, but there was a conspicuous new addition, asma’s Inverse sátiro envy, 2023, a huge human figure outlined in green bronze lying on the floor with one arm outstretched, one foot hoofed. It was not so much a statue as a curvilinear silhouette, hollow and filled with found trinkets: a box of acrylic fingernails, a blonde braid, some bicycle seats. A furry tail took the place of its dick. This culminating piece, as usual with asma, was beautiful like all the

rest, but the show as a whole felt inchoate. The crossover critique of millennial masculinity and sexist belle epoque hedonism did not quite congeal into something substantial. In fact, it felt timid, as if taking cover behind a well-known figure, under the protective cloak of his gilded controversy. —Gaby Cepeda

View of “Inverse sátiro envy” (Inverse Satyr Envy), 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.

LIMA

Ishmael Randall Weeks

ESPACIO GERMÁN KRÜGER ESPANTOSO Over the past two decades, Peruvian artist Ishmael Randall Weeks has created works that reflect on public space, the current environmental crisis, and the construction of shared narratives. His particular focus is Peru, where there is a constant friction between superimposed historical times and the present, as its pre-Hispanic past is constantly revisited from a contemporary perspective. Using drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, Randall Weeks deploys a research methodology that allows him to approach the particularities of cities through an emphasis on architecture and the modes of constructing, inhabiting, and creating memory, and to highlight the tension between transformation and permanence. Curated by Miguel A. López, the exhibition “Metalizamos nuestras memorias” (We Metallized Our Memories), brought together some fifty medium- and large-format works created by Randall Weeks between 2006 and 2023. Ordinary materials such as concrete, stone, rubber, brick, and metal are recurrent in these works, but they are used in ways that are anything but everyday: Boxes for transporting fruit are made of mirrors; gym equipment is built out of bricks. Things and their use are in contradiction, as are mobility and permanence. Necesito alas para volar, lápiz y piedra para estudiar y flores para nuestra muerte (I Need Wings to Fly, Pencil and Stone to Study, and Flowers for Our Death), 2016, for instance, is composed of three cement sculptures that mimic oversize paper airplanes. Placed on metal tripods that emphasize the weight and magnitude of the massive structures, the works suggest different directions for an impossible flight, projected toward an unreachable movement. Nómade I, 2006, is a sculpture based on a three-wheeled cargo bike—a mode of transportation with a crucial role in the exchange of OCTOBER 2023

189

REVIEWS

Ishmael Randall Weeks, Metalizamos nuestras memorias (We Metallized Our Memories), 2010–23, copper-plated items, Plexiglas display case, light box, 7 68 ⁄8 × 68 7⁄8 × 7 7⁄8".

materials, waste, or merchandise throughout a city such as Lima—and a transportable house built with recycled metal containers, a prototype for low-cost housing. The exhibition’s final room featured, alongside more recent works, Balances/Tensiones, 2006/2008, which was first shown in one of the artist’s early solo exhibitions, held in this very room in 2006. This sculpture, also based on the three-wheeled cargo bike, uses the structure as a base for metal stands from which hang stones from the Vilcanota River in the Cusco region. On the other side of this last room was Metalizamos nuestras memorias, 2016—the work that lent its title to the exhibition—in which bits of industrial debris such as metal rods, pipes, nuts, and bolts, all found near huacas (ancient burial sites) in the city of Lima, have been copper plated to preserve them like precious memories. Thus, the exhibition concluded by suggesting the possibility that intervening in the materiality of things—the essence of Randall Weeks’s art—can be a way of altering their temporality. Making permanent the objects with which we coexist allows us to see them from other viewpoints and understand their impact on human interactions and on our ways of inhabiting the world. —Giuliana Vidarte Translated from Spanish by Michele Faguet.

SÃO PAULO

Paulo Nimer Pjota MENDES WOOD DM

Pastiche is a borrowed word, much like what it signifies. Originally French, it derives from the Italian pasticcio, for something blended, which in turn shares a root with the painterly impasto. It seems a perfect descriptor, then, for the fifteen canvases in Paulo Nimer Pjota’s “Do cômico e do trágico” (Of Comedy and Tragedy), on whose surfaces hyperrealist renditions of ancient vessels collide with heavy encrustations of oil paint. Pjota dons and sheds historical styles as easily as the masks that appear in some of his paintings, from the loose brushwork of the great Henris—Matisse and Fantin-Latour—to the crisp geometry 190 ARTFORUM

of Bridget Riley. His works’ layered planes, meanwhile, trace the development of figurative painting from mimesis to memes. Take Estúdio vermelho (Red Studio), 2020–23, for instance: Apart from the thinnest of lines, the long-necked vases and table in Matisse’s painting of the same name have here become almost entirely monochrome, as if subjected to an Instagram filter. Pjota toys with the French master’s childlike figuration by adding cartoons of a butterfly and a bug-eyed fly to his version; these, in turn, hover over a photorealistically rendered ancient Greek vase and thickly painted poppies. Pjota borrows freely, and imitates successfully, to produce a work that is undeniably his own. The viability of appropriation should hardly be in question now, decades after the advent of cultural forms, such as house music and hip-hop, driven by sampling and the ceaseless repurposing of images on the internet. Still, art discourse hasn’t fully given up its anxiety over the copy, particularly in painting, which is often understood as the medium that most directly translates the mark of an artist’s hand. Writing in 1985’s Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Hal Foster fulminated that postmodern painters “only give us hallucinations of the historical, masks of these moments,” concluding that “for now it seems we no longer need meaning.” Such a reading makes pastiche a dirty word—a sullying of the hallowed Western canon—but it hardly applies to artistic traditions from formerly colonized parts of the world, such as Brazil, where hybridity is regarded as culturally essential. As early as 1928, in his Manifesto antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto), poet Oswald de Andrade called for Brazilian artists to “cannibalize” European and Indigenous avant-garde and archaic influences alike. Pjota’s appetite is appropriately vast. Two paintings, Boneco de neve I and II (Snowman I and II), 2023, pair faithful renditions of details from Picasso paintings with Greek vases, setting them within bulbous white forms—the snowmen of the title—and framing the Western canon from the classical period to high modernism as solid enough to melt. Yet, rather than abandon meaning, they ask us to consider how it might be shared across time and space. More vases, as well as vessels from China and Latin America, appear in other paintings. Skeletal masks depicting Tibetan Buddhist Citipati—twinned deities symbolizing the eternal dance of life and death— appear in Mercúrio com cabeça de citipati, medusa e vaso abobodal (Mercury with Citipati Head, Medusa and Abobodal Vessel) and Mercúrio com cabeça de elmo romano, citipati, e cerâmica pré-colombiana (Mercury with Roman Helmet Head, Citipati, and pre-Colombian Pottery), both 2023, while a small bronze sculpture of a skull with a long spinal column (Ex voto, 2023) invokes popular Brazilian religious tradition. While acknowledging their culturally specific references, these works point to themes of life and death that have animated art as long as humans have been making it. Comedy and tragedy, too, unite more than they divide. Such dialectical forces will outlast art historians’ obsession with linearity and categorization. There can be no end to history, or to painting for that matter, when old forms are made anew. —Evan Moffitt

Paulo Nimer Pjota, Mercúrio com cabeça de elmo romano, citipati, e cerâmica précolombiana (Mercury with Roman Helmet Head, Citipati, and Pre-Columbian Pottery), 2023, acrylic, oil, and tempera on canvas, 82 7⁄8 × 62 1⁄4".

LONDON

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy WELLCOME COLLECTION Who gets to set social norms, and based on what criteria? Who benefits from scientific advances? Whose voices are erased? Such are the questions posed by “Genetic Automata,” an exhibition about the intersection of race, identity, and science by British artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy. A free museum focused on human health, the Wellcome houses pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome’s collection of books, paintings, and medically related artifacts. Last November the museum closed its fifteen-year-old “Medicine Man” exhibition, citing concerns about perpetuating a colonial-inflected narrative “based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language.”

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, _GOD_MODE_, 2023, 4K video, color, sound, 12 minutes 25 seconds.

The show centers on four collaborative video installations reflecting the artists’ distinct life experiences: Achiampong’s as a Black man of working-class Ghanaian background, and Blandy’s as a white man of middle-class English heritage. The films are housed in purpose-built pods alongside wallpapers featuring repeating motifs from the works. In A Terrible Fiction, 2019, narrated alternately by both artists, Blandy says, “Through these structures we live by today many others and myself have never been human. . . . We have fought to be considered equal but on what basis, whose rules, whose ideals.” Such inequality looms large in A Lament for Power, 2020, in which a dystopian virtual city is smothered by an expanding black shape representing the cells taken in 1951, without consent, from an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, and used in groundbreaking scientific research without compensating her family. Together, the films construct a picture of a starkly unjust world permeated by racist ideologies, from video games featuring white heroes killing African zombies, to the default yellow of emojis widely understood as connoting white skin, to DNA testing kits with their specious claims to reveal one’s ancestry. Dust to Data, 2021, shines a light on the interconnected histories of British colonialism, archaeology, and eugenics, all mired in pernicious theories of racial hierarchy whose legacy has pervaded education, health care, and immigration. Both artists being keen gamers, they explore these ideas through the use of video-game technology, avatars, and virtual environments, time traveling between past and present to point up lessons for the future. Achiampong and Blandy’s newest film, _GOD_MODE_, 2023,

draws an analogy between Western patriarchy and a video game, proposing that most of us exist in “survival mode,” trapped in a grid defined by white men according to parameters that justify their superiority. Even worse is the fate of prescripted “nonplayable characters,” who have no agency and whom the artists compare to enslaved and oppressed people. The title refers to a cheat mode in video gaming that makes the player invincible, but equally alludes to the way Victorian scientists played God in categorizing and measuring humans to determine their worth. A particular focus is eugenics pioneer Francis Galton, whose ideas on racial improvement through breeding were vigorously embraced in the early twentieth century in the United States and Nazi Germany. _GOD_MODE_ switches between real and virtual worlds, the first half showing video footage from anthropological archives of implements used by Galton and his followers to measure skulls, rank women’s attractiveness, and classify the eyes of Jewish immigrant children in East London. The second half is set within an immersive videogame environment, created using the 3D computer-graphics engine Unreal. The actual objects are also displayed in the show, reminding us that such studies were done by scientists less than a century ago. An additional vitrine presents the artists’ cultural influences, including graphic novels, a Michael Jackson video, and books by Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde. “Genetic Automata” is a powerful, troubling exhibition, yet it leaves room for hope, not least in the artists’ friendship across race and class divisions. Moreover, the possibility of change is held out at the end of _GOD_MODE_, when a gigantic hairy spider, evoking Anansi, the trickster god of West African mythology, transforms into a stag, apparently breaking out of its nonplayable-character status. Within the speculative environment of the video game, the artists invite us to envisage a potential future without enslavement and in which all players have agency. —Elizabeth Fullerton

Niklas Taleb

CELL PROJECT SPACE Niklas Taleb’s one-person show “Solo Yolo” featured photographic works of various sizes, mostly richly colored pigment prints along with a few digital C-prints, all housed in frames made by the artist himself. As is typical of the German artist’s work, the content of the photographs is ostensibly mundane. The images are nevertheless arresting, not because

Niklas Taleb, The Personal Life, 2021, ink-jet print, tissue wrapping paper, glass, tape, 16 × 21 1⁄2". OCTOBER 2023

191

REVIEWS

they transcend the quotidian nature of their subjects, but because the compositions seem to illuminate those subjects from within. In Simon, 2023, a white man whose face is half obscured by a gray New York City baseball cap eyes a debit card, which he has apparently just drawn from a cross-body bag. The Personal Life, 2021, displays several photographs of various sizes as a domestic still life: Tucked into and propped just below a gilt picture frame are, inter alia, a naturally lit picture of a bunch of elementary-school-aged kids in the forest, a shot of a woman’s expressionless passport photo, and the image of a sleeping baby. Taleb is a young father, and his work often features signs of early childhood. Untitled, 2023, is a triptych whose images of progressively increasing size portray the window of a darkened room at various stages of illumination by a star-projector night-light. Another work, also Untitled, 2023, is an oblique-angled carpet-level photo with a Hello Kitty bucket in the foreground and unicorn stickers and shadows of bed slats on the wall in the background. Perhaps the most intimate work on display, also Untitled, 2023, is a close-up of adult hands filing down a baby’s delicate fingernails. These works are best accounted for in terms of what Theodor W. Adorno called “the transformation of communicative into mimetic language,” with mimesis here referring to modes of relating to the world that aren’t premised on conceptual identification. Outside of a fine-art context, photography as a medium is more often than not discursively communicative. This is evident in its most ubiquitous contemporary manifestation, social media, as influencers convey their status and others post snapshots of private moments, aimed at an audience of friends and family. Taleb’s work is, prima facie, largely indistinguishable from more enigmatic examples of the latter, with a crucial difference: We dwell on candid pictures in a social-media feed only fleetingly, scrolling past once we’ve recognized who’s in them or where they were taken. Blown up and isolated in the gallery, similar-seeming images command intuitive attention in a manner that would not be enriched by knowledge of their context. This is not to say that Taleb’s personal relationship to the works’ content is irrelevant, but rather that the nondiscursive elements of this connection are all that matters. What is important here is not paraphrasable significance, but affective elements of perception that would usually be factored out of cognition. This focus is emphasized by the few works in the show that have been obviously manipulated: Alex, 2023, superimposes the image of a man reclining on a couch with his hands behind his head over an image of the same man on the same couch with his hand contemplatively on his chin, while Playgroup, 2023, horizontally splits in two a photo of four twentysomethings whose attention is captured by a point out of frame and switches these two halves around. The reasons for these choices cannot be translated into language, and yet they never appear arbitrary, but rather inextricable from their subjects’ particularity. —Daniel Neofetou

GLASGOW

Carole Gibbons CÉLINE

Carole Gibbons may be the most famous artist you’ve never heard of. Now in her late eighties, the Glasgow-born painter racked up a flurry of successes between the 1960s and the 1980s, including major solo exhibitions (Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre in 1975); landmark group surveys (Edinburgh College of Art’s “Painters in Parallel,” 1978); and acquisitions by royals and national collections (National Galleries of Scotland, among others). She also won the support of high-profile 192 ARTFORUM

Carole Gibbons, Goddess, 1972, oil on canvas, 46 × 55 7⁄8".

figures, including art historian, curator, and critic Duncan Macmillan; gallerists Richard Demarco and Andrew Brown; artists John Bellany and Alasdair Gray; and the influential Keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Douglas Hall. And then, nothing. Yet Gibbons persevered, continuing to develop an exceptional body of work. When asked in a 2021 interview how she defined success, she replied, “a good brushstroke.” In the past decade or so, though, largely thanks to those good brushstrokes and the efforts of a younger generation of curators as well as artists such as Andrew Cranston, Lucy Stein, and Gibbons’s son, Henry Gibbons Guy, her work is, tentatively, hopefully, once again attracting the attention this exhibition proves she deserves. Last summer, a handful of paintings were showcased at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow, in a small but stunning display held to launch the artist’s first monograph (by publishers 5b). That exhibition acted as a teaser for Gibbons’s show at Céline, which featured six paintings spanning more than thirty years. Often teetering between abstraction and figuration, Gibbons’s work has shifted over the decades from mythological and folkloric subjects to more quotidian themes: interiors, cats, still lifes. But these categorizations are too easy; she finds epic, mythological qualities in ostensibly domestic subject matter (Green Cat, 1963, is more psychedelic Louis Wain than restful Elizabeth Blackadder) and a magic realism in her fabulous folkloric landscapes and figures, such as Chinese Horse, 1977, or Birth of Venus, 1969. In these, fantastic visions appear to be material, tangible parts of the world, as though such spectacles could be glimpsed from the window of a Highland cottage. But whatever their subject, her paintings share an outstanding feature: their use of color. Early ’70s works look resolutely contemporary as a result. In Goddess, 1972, a face appears in close-up, looming large from the frame. Set against an expansive orange background, clouds of pink hair crown a lilac face, a green-tinted chin and aqua blue neck are outlined in yellow, and eyes and mouth are messily rendered in purple—as if some film star had blurrily photobombed Vision After the Sermon, 1888, the great Gauguin housed in Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland, pushing his pious Breton women to one side. Gibbons’s statement is bold, jarring, and discordant, and all the more captivating for it. In 1978, Guardian and London Times critic Cordelia Oliver described Gibbons as “a poet who happens to paint, feeding through deeper-thanconscious roots in an effort to connect the soaring world of the imagination with the moist, basic comfort of mother earth.” Oliver was right: Through this small selection, Gibbons’s range, vision, and enduring talent are wholly evident. Her reverberating, resonant use of color, the bleeding edges between forms, and her makeshift decorated frames and dreamlike visions are the work of an exceptional, high-voltage artist. —Susannah Thompson

METZ, FRANCE

Suzanne Valadon CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ

“Un monde à soi” (A World of Her Own), curated by the director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Chiara Parisi, is Suzanne Valadon’s first retrospective in France in nearly sixty years. The title of the show, which will travel to the Musée d’Arts de Nantes and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, evokes Virginia Woolf, who published her great essay A Room of One’s Own in 1929, just a few years after Valadon (1865–1938) painted her self-portrait in La chambre bleue (The Blue Room), 1923. The large-scale canvas is now in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Limoges, the provincial French city Valadon left as a girl with her mother at the tail end of the nineteenth century, destination Paris. In this painting, the self-taught artist reclines in striped-silk pajamas, an unlit cigarette dangling defiantly from her lips. Instead of that black cat posed at the slippered feet of Édouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863, two books rest on the edge of Valadon’s plush bedspread. Her feet are proudly bare, each toe outlined in the artist’s signature black line. After growing up in others’ worlds, Valadon here presents a vision of herself fully inhabiting her own.

artist’s masterly work than a kind of blossoming. Valadon’s vegetal sublimation of the body is echoed in the coat of green leaves that Ali Smith writes as a refuge for her dying character in the opening pages of her novel Autumn (2016). Both artists imagine the metamorphosis of human to plant. No wonder Valadon’s still lifes, with their decadent bouquets and vibrant bowls of fruit, and her lush forest landscapes took center stage in this exhibition. Hung salon style on a wide expanse of lilac-colored wall, as if to frame the exhibition, were the society portraits Valadon continued to produce throughout her career. She had to. Caring for herself and her alcoholic son, Maurice Utrillo, who would outshine her in his early renown as a painter, Valadon never stopped being a mother. That’s a life’s work, too, and it does not negate a creative practice. Nor should it be ignored in the evaluation of one. Valadon shared her canvases with her own mother, her lovers, and her son. Ultimately, though, as in her Autoportrait aux seins nus (Self-Portrait with Bare Breasts), 1931, which graces the cover of the exhibition catalogue, she sits most proudly alone. —Lillian Davies

ZURICH

João Modé

GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN João Modé’s solo show “Geom Poem” started with an open window. Located in a corner, the narrow aperture let daylight, color, and air into the otherwise sterile environment of the white cube. The breeze stirred the pleated buriti mat sculpture suspended from the ceiling (Untitled, 2023), making the loose, dry palm fronds at the bottom edge shuffle along the wooden floor. The neighboring wall-based work 9 circles, 2023, was brought to life by the same gust of wind, which brushed against its protruding flaps of round white paper, each folded a different way, rising out of the dark-blue ground like so many phases of the moon. The distinctive hue of the smooth metallic Dibond support, its artificial nature somewhat at odds with the handmade and organic materials that the artist tends to privilege, recalls Yves Klein’s trademark

Suzanne Valadon, La chambre bleue (The Blue Room), 1923, oil on canvas, 35 3⁄8 × 45 5⁄8".

Valadon was a performer at heart (it had been her dream to become an acrobat). Some say it was as a model in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre studio that Valadon became a voracious reader, and that it was he who noticed her sketches, encouraging her to present them to Edgar Degas. Valadon’s meeting with Degas was the moment she transgressed her gender and her class. From him, Valadon learned the technique of gravure. The sharp lines of the numerous prints displayed here limn intimate domestic scenes: a grandmother bathing her young grandson, an adolescent girl peering into a mirror. The grand-scale canvas Adam and Eve, 1909, is the artist’s selfportrait with André Utter. The young man was a painter, a friend of her son, and she had fallen in love with both him and his art. This work, a knowing study of knees and elbows, proudly attests to the couple’s romantic relationship and to her own artistic mastery. Her Eve smiles as she plucks an apple from the tree that nearly embraces the couple with its green branches. Her fingertips peek around Adam’s waist and clasp the hand he rests on his hip. Valadon shadows the nearly life-size pair’s bare skin in green, which makes the laurel leaves she was obligated to paint over the man’s genitals in order to show the canvas in the 1920 Salon d’Automne seem less of a violation of the

View of “João Modé,” 2023. From left: Constructive [Paninho], beach, 2019–23; Blue column, 2023; br, 2023. Photo: Sebastian Schaub. OCTOBER 2023

193

REVIEWS

color. This blue is echoed in a freestanding sculpture consisting of stacked blue-glass ovals—Blue column, 2023, a nod to Constantin Brâncuși’s modular Endless Column of 1918—installed on the opposite side of the showroom. Through such dialogues between works, Modé created subtle resonances—formal, material, and chromatic—that acted as invisible threads binding together the eleven pieces on view. The show’s playful title was at once an homage to Brazil’s geometric abstract art and to the homegrown concrete poetry movement, both of which emerged in the 1950s. “Geom” suggests “geometry” as well as “geo,” which feels fitting, given the way Modé weaves organic elements into his composite artworks—from stones in the elaborately framed Two drawings (Diptych), 2023, to pink seashells in Constructive [Paninho], beach, 2019–23. Modé’s sensual approach has affinities with NeoConcretism, which emerged in his home city of Rio de Janeiro when Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica reacted against the rigidity and mathematical rigor of Concrete art as it was practiced in São Paulo. Factions aside, geometric abstraction and Concretism of every stripe constitute a high point in the country’s artistic production, and it is this tradition that the artist wishes to emulate at a time in which Brazil’s contemporary art scene appears fixated on figurative art with marked political overtones. In his 1956 manifesto, poet Augusto de Campos described concrete poetry as “the tension of thing-words in space-time.” The graphic and phonetic affinities that Campos enacts in poems such “tensão” (tension), 1956, are equally present in Modé’s exhibition title. Time, in tandem with space, is an integral part of this fragile body of work. In fact, the show’s centerpiece was a bouquet of flowers displayed in a vase on the floor next to Open Guias [for Cabelo], 2023, two beaded cords hanging from the ceiling and spilling onto the floor to form a serpentine motif. Regularly replaced but allowed to wither, their petals strewn on the ground around the vase, the flowers were there to make visitors more keenly aware of the temporal dimension of Modé’s art and the time that went into its making. To make the twin strings, whose contrasting palettes draw on the elemental symbolism associated with different orixá spirits in the African-Brazilian Candomblé and Umbanda religions, Modé undertook to learn some fiendishly complicated Indigenous beading techniques from a Xavante craftsman. No less intricate and labor intensive is the exquisite beadwork of Skin, 2023, so named because the black and white lozenge motifs evoke the body painting of Indigenous people. The devil is in the details, and to appreciate its sheer delicacy Modé’s handiwork must be seen in the flesh. —Agnieszka Gratza

WINTERTHUR, SWITZERLAND

Sylvie Fleury

KUNST MUSEUM WINTERTHUR Back in 1990, Sylvie Fleury caused some irritation when she grouped assorted shopping bags filled with luxury goods on the floor of Galerie Rivolta in Lausanne, Switzerland. The legend claims that she had purchased these items shortly before arriving at her very first group exhibition, where she then neatly placed them in front of artworks by fellow Swiss artists John M. Armleder and Olivier Mosset. Over the years since, she has produced a loose series of similar works and, as with these groups of bags that really contained high-quality goods acquired during shopping tours, they’ve occasionally prompted thievery. Fleury’s recent exhibition “Shoplifters from Venus” featured new paintings and installations along with older work, highlighting her recurrent themes of consumerism and fashion as well as her propensity 194 ARTFORUM

for appropriation: Catwalk, 2008, for example, is an actual catwalk occupying an entire room. It is surrounded by black paintings—with colors splashed onto them à la Jackson Pollock—that come with a chain affixed to their top edge, so that they can actually be carried like handbags, adding a twist to the notion of appropriation itself: Just go ahead, take it, and turn it into something else, as long as it’s fashionable! Eternal Wow on Shelves, 2008, resembles one of Donald Judd’s wall-mounted stacks, but with some slightly gross, amorphous heaps of polyurethane foam populating each level’s surface. And “Flawless Finish,” 2017–, is a series of acrylic paintings (Perfect Cherry Blossom, Perfect Lavender, etc.) that look like giant makeup palettes waiting to be used. Gender stereotypes are among Fleury’s prime targets, and she is at her best when she attacks them most literally. For her 2008 video Cristal Custom Commando, she hired three women from a Geneva motorcycle club to shoot guns at Chanel handbags (a satiric take on the 1968 exploitation movie She-Devils on Wheels), filming both the female protagonists and the destroyed items in assertive close-ups. This attack was not aimed at luxury, as such, but at its predominant meaning, which ideologizes wealth for women in a way that takes the shape of an accessory. One room gathered the notorious rockets that Fleury has manufactured since the mid-1990s. Their oversize dimensions make fun of the notion of technology being a male toy and of the masculinist desire to conquer, whether that urge pertains to war or to space. Some of them—for instance, First Spaceship on Venus (16 ABC), 1998—are covered in fake fur, creating giant toys to cuddle with or cherish like a precious doll. Others shimmer in garish colors, such as First Spaceship on Venus (Icy Purple), 2023, which was specially made for the show—close to a hundred pounds of car paint were applied to it. However, the wit behind Fleury’s positive or amusing exaggeration of abundance does not always come through in times like the present, when one economic uncertainty rapidly follows the next and large parts of formerly flourishing societies are slipping into poverty. The conditions of consumption have dramatically changed since 1990. With online shopping taking over from physical stores, today’s hot new shopping bag is the mail parcel. Will Fleury eventually comment on the current flood of cardboard as well? —Vojin Saša Vukadinović

View of “Sylvie Fleury,” 2023. Photo: Reto Kaufmann.

VIENNA

Denisa Lehocká GEORG KARGL FINE ARTS

Denisa Lehocká usually calls her works Untitled, refraining from singling out individual pieces from her continuous flow of production. Each one is a manifestation of an elaborate, intuitive process of creation. Once they leave her studio to become part of an exhibition, these artworks can turn into elements of temporary compositions, form clusters, or else remain solitary entities, punctuation marks of a sort within the larger formation of the given show. For her recent exhibition “POINT,” Lehocká created a nuanced choreography of sculptures, drawings, and installations that deepened her ongoing reflections on the production of objects, material memories, and the endless permutation of form. Small, organically shaped sculptures, many of them made of white or light-beige fabric, some of which showed signs of previous use, protruded delicately from the wall in a straight line. These textile parcels are tightly wrapped with yarn. Hundreds of tiny white beads cover some of them, adding texture to the amorphous structures. Others are encased in plaster, with pearls scattered across their surfaces. Fascinating in their detail, these meticulously crafted pieces are a testament to the time invested in their making. In fact, they seem to encapsulate time itself.

Denisa Lehocká, Untitled (detail), 2023, mixed media, plaster, painted plywood, mirrors, coins, potatoes, 2' × 13' 1 1⁄2" × 14' 5 1⁄4".

Throughout the gallery’s sequence of rooms, “POINT” featured single pieces and large formations of works, unfolding fragments of a highly subjective poetic language based on shapes and materials. In the first room, a small piece dated 2023—false eyelashes sitting on top of a plaster object that looked like an enlarged aspirin—was juxtaposed with one from 2022, a medium-size abstract painting in light pink. Its most notable attribute, a small black circle, turned out to be a perforation in the canvas. These elements––the disk shape with the groove, the perforation–– recurred in the following ensembles of works like repeated syllables that structure a stanza of verse: Drawings of biomorphic landscapes with threads stitched into the paper have circular perforations; one canvas with circular cuts has a man’s white shirt attached; textile works incorporate beads and embroidery; a large three-dimensional installation responded to the exhibition space, using the artist’s archive of objects made since 2014. In the latter, many individual works were arranged in a grid on the floor, with large pill sculptures balanced upright on their round edges, while smaller ones lay flat, harmonizing with the countless coins, round mirrors, and oval plaster forms scattered around. Silver-

ware was partly encased in plaster; compasses and biomorphic plaster shapes were wrapped in yarn. Potatoes, whose texture naturally changes over time, of course, accentuated the tone-on-tone composition. To contemplate this large subjective display of the artist’s oeuvre was strangely soothing. Lehocká’s pale universe seems to suspend the here and now. Both poetic and Conceptual, it merges an associative Surrealist object language with an artistic practice that refuses to divide its production into finalized works or distinct projects. It generously invites us to enter the intimate twilight zone of the real and the imagined, to translate time spent working into time spent being. The openness of these works and their ephemeral interactions are the source of their strength. —Vanessa Joan Müller

BERLIN

Michael Rakowitz BARBARA WIEN

Near the beginning of his film I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze, 2017/2023, Michael Rakowitz reads a missive to Leonard Cohen (1934–2016): “Dear Leonard, I hope this letter finds you well. I am typing it on your green Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, a prize eBay acquisition for which I paid dearly.” I wonder whether Cohen ever read it—if he laughed, cried, or thought about calling the police. He never responded. Vulnerability can be disarming, yet it can also feel like forced intimacy, and Rakowitz wields his like a crowbar. But I’m good at love is not a film about parasocial relationships––the technical term for one-sided relationships with celebrities, though Rakowitz uses parasocial interaction to express a double articulation, combining admiration and disavowal. Cohen was scheduled to perform in Ramallah in September 2009, but the gig was canceled because the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel objected to Cohen playing a twin concert in Tel Aviv. “Attempts at ‘parity,’” they wrote, “equate the oppressor with the oppressed.” Rakowitz finds boycotts “problematic” and understands that structural contradictions cannot be solved individually, yet his unease with Cohen’s stance leads him to examine how often wrong has been done for allegedly right reasons. In 1973, Cohen, probably driven by growing tension with his partner after the birth of their son, flew from the Greek island of Hydra to Tel Aviv. There, he reluctantly agreed to play for Israeli troops fighting the Yom Kippur War, masking his personal crisis with a geopolitical one. He never discussed his decision except in a verse of “Lover, Lover, Lover,” released on August 11, 1974: “I went down to the desert / To help my brothers fight / I know that they weren’t wrong / I know that they weren’t right”––lines he would excise before the song’s release.

Michael Rakowitz, I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze, 2017/2023, HD video, color, sound, 32 minutes. OCTOBER 2023

195

REVIEWS

Cohen is not alone in sitting on the fault line between personal experience and historical record. Rakowitz’s grandparents were Arab Jews forced to flee Iraq when the British mandate for the partition of Palestine made their lives unlivable and their identity an incongruity. Yet the artist is not trying to litigate who did what to whom or who owes what to whom. I’m good at love is a film about finding intelligible forms for moments when meaning does not properly “line up,” because subjectivity is structured via conflicting sites of identification. As the film, and the letter, come to a close, Rakowitz finally discloses his reason for writing to Cohen: He is seeking permission to restage the canceled Ramallah concert with himself taking Cohen’s role; not because he wants to undo Cohen’s deeds, but simply because Cohen “came from the West and made a choice,” while Rakowitz approaches from the East to “make another.” It is apt, however tragic, that a story involving so many levels of surrogacy would lead its political conflicts to play out legally as a case of copyright infringement. The manager of Leonard Cohen, on behalf of the estate of Leonard Cohen, rescinded the rights for Rakowitz’s use of his music, leaving the film to be “presented as a ruin,” with voice-over descriptions filling in the gaps for the removed songs. There are now two films, the original one that can only be seen privately and the reedited one recently presented at Barbara Wien. Each has its own merits. In the film you can no longer see, Rakowitz, before an empty theater, sings Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” (1984), chosen because the song expresses a plea: “From this broken hill / All your praises they shall ring / If it be your will / To let me sing.” The lyrics forebode the subsequent legal challenge, but what is perhaps eeriest is how Michael might be the truer Leonard and give the most haunting rendition of Cohen’s song. —Ana Teixeira Pinto

direct reference to the reconstruction of identities that her grandparents had to undertake after escaping the conflict, Firmino uses collage to represent parts of the characters: eyes, fabric, jewels. The show’s subtitle, “Owelema,” is an Umbundu term referring to a lack of light. The titles of the twenty paintings that were on display form a poem. Read together, two works in particular capture perfectly the spirit of Owelema. Both depict figures that can be interpreted as deities emerging from a pitch-black background. The one-eyed being in My subconscious cuddles you / For your touch is familiar (all works 2023) surveys three characters in a place that blurs the domestic and the wilderness. Two women recline facing away from this deity, calling to mind Firmino’s grandmother’s experience in the Congolese forest. The artist uses African masks for her protagonists’ faces, in particular the Congolese fertility mask, which evokes and takes seriously the survival strategies of her matrilineal ancestry’s histories and knowledge.

Teresa Kutala Firmino

Teresa Kutala Firmino, Your embrace is comfort / Your presence is home, 2023, acrylic and collage on canvas, 37 × 41 3⁄4".

GALERIE NAGEL DRAXLER

Teresa Kutala Firmino’s family history is a complex one, with both sets of her grandparents having fled civil war. Firmino was born to a Congolese father and an Angolan mother in 1993 in Pomfret, a town in the North West province of South Africa, where many of the former soldiers of the country’s 32 Battalion—a unit of the South African army founded in 1975 that fought in Angola—settled after the Angolan war. She tells the story of how her Congolese grandmother, while hiding out in the forest, having fled not just the war but also an abusive marriage, fell into a dreamlike trance in which she saw humanoid figures that were so tall she could not possibly see the tops of their heads. Many other women in Firmino’s childhood community have similar stories of these figures, whom they called “owners of the earth.” Firmino’s work starts at the point where trauma begins to fracture reality, opening up the possibility for a plurality of worlds. The latest installment in an ongoing series, her exhibition “The Owners of the Earth Vol. 3: Owelema” was an extended attempt to give the dream image tangibility—a face, a form—using speculative fiction and fantasy to explore ideas of what the spectral beings of her grandmother’s lore might look like, who they might be. The characters in Firmino’s paintings, mostly women, radiate otherworldliness. They are strange and impractical, sometimes one-eyed or contorted in unlikely positions, reposing on clouds and falling from black skies, but they are always unquestionable presences dominating their settings, impossible fantastic spaces. One cannot help but think of Aimé Césaire’s assertion that the inferiority of myth is in the degree of its precision, but its superiority is in its richness and sincerity. Firmino reaches into the mythical plane of her forebears’ stories and creates an eclectic ensemble. In a 196 ARTFORUM

Your embrace is comfort / Your presence is home shows a being draped in a blue-bedazzled robe, seated cross-legged. The figure looks down, observing people suffering the many consequences of the war. One turns their head away, perhaps in despair or resignation, while another looks to the presiding being, as if to ask for salvation. Firmino’s work broods over a silenced and traumatic history whose aftermath is still very present, and it attempts to embody the madness of that history. It does not shy away from its long and difficult consequences but rather beautifully sinks into them and sits with the darkness. —E. N. Mirembe

GHENT, BELGIUM

Grace Ndiritu

STEDELIJK MUSEUM VOOR ACTUELE KUNST North, south, east, west: The points of the compass served as the matrix for Grace Ndiritu’s first midcareer retrospective, suggesting the new allinclusive scope she wants to give the museum. At Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ndiritu associates each cardinal direction with a central aspect of a healthy society that is today in a fundamental crisis, and with the collective practices that respond to it. South, for example, stands for ecology and “time to play” as a collective praxis. In this section, Ndiritu

funding streams. What remains after the experience of this arresting exhibition, then, is an open question: Is synergy possible between a political decolonial approach and spiritual techniques, Indigenous knowledge production and ethical appropriation? How would such a practice commit itself to the mission of changing, gradually yet inexorably, our institutions and hence society itself? —Nina Möntmann

OSLO

Gunvor Nervold Antonsen KUNSTNERNES HUS View of “Grace Ndiritu,” 2023. Photo: Dirk Pauwels.

presented colorful costumes, masks, and protest banners reading plant life love life and save the mushrooms from her participatory performance Plant Theatre for Plant People, 2021, for which about twenty people came together in Aberdeen, Scotland, as an eco-activist community. East is associated with community and time to protest, west symbolizes healing and time to change, and north represents the nonlinear understanding of deep time. Here, in the two-channel video projection Black Beauty: For a Shamanic Cinema, 2022, a Black model (Aida Welle) is in the desert for an advertising shoot in 1978. A beam of light strikes her, and she is overcome with a vision of herself as a cigarette-smoking late-night TV host in 1983, interviewing Jorge Luis Borges (Emilio Linder). They discuss Tierra del Fuego’s climate change, Africa as the cradle of culture, and the idea that “all past and future problems are caused by sedentary lifestyles.” Next, visitors ascend to the Temple, that is, the exhibition’s main room, which presents the concept of healing that she directs to the west. The show’s title, “Healing the Museum,” also designates the ongoing research project Ndiritu has been engaged with since 2012. Her timing is good: The modern public museum is presently in the midst of what might be the most profound transformation in its history, as it jettisons its founding narrative, the propagation of colonialism, and the production and affirmation of a bourgeois public. At home in a Hare Krishna ashram and new-age communities, the artist considers the institution from a holistic perspective, and her Temple is a shamanistic effort to address the museum’s impact on individual well-being and society as a whole. An imposing wooden structure shelters the Temple; its form was inspired by modernist exhibition pavilions, Canadian First Nation sweat lodges, and African adobe houses. Resting on a thick carpet strewn with pillows, visitors could experience a cosmic dialogue among some fifty objects—not accompanied, for once, by descriptive labels—that Ndiritu selected from smak’s collection. Schwarzer Elefant (Black Elephant), 1999, a naturalistic sculpture by Carsten Höller, knelt near Jesus (Es Geht um die Wurst) (Jesus [It’s All About the Sausage]), 1992, a wooden figure by Jimmie Durham. A couple of mysterious portraits by Marlene Dumas eyed Gerhard Richter’s nebulous blackand-white painting Große Piramide (Large Pyramid), 1966, while Lois Weinberger’s living Garten (Garden), 1997–2003, in combination with Ndiritu’s own stylish textile designs and photographic works, evoked the contemporary interest in permaculture. The installation—compelling throughout, intuitive, and deeply moving—really did seem to bring about what Ndiritu calls a “transformation . . . through the spiritual energy,” a meditative expansion of the visitor’s consciousness through their perception of their own body. One might have hoped that such an experience would also begin to heal the museum, yet this second step was where Ndiritu’s vision faltered. Though the artist’s personal cosmos enveloped the visitors, it ignored the necessity of the pragmatic work of reimagining the museum from the ground up—its infrastructures, hierarchies, collection-building policies, and

A pair of sculpted lions wrap their front paws around the bases of the two flagpoles in front of the entrance of Kunstnernes Hus, an artist-run gem of an institution. For Gunvor Nervold Antonsen’s solo exhibition “De fleksible” (The Adaptables), these frisky felines were joined by a large wooden sculpture portraying one grown-up and two children, made by the artist together with Erik Pettersen. The piece had turned out to be too heavy to move into the upstairs gallery spaces. Yet that weight—a weight that could everywhere be felt in this exhibition—was not only material, it was social and discursive. Nervold Antonsen has, over her twenty-year career, challenged the conventions of textile art, first with text, by incorporating words into her textiles, and later by publishing books of her own poetry to accompany her works. In this exhibition, she shared text via sound recordings of her reading. In recent years, moreover, she has paired her textiles with wooden sculptures, mostly carved by chain saw. The wooden forms were initially smaller, as in the 2015–16 exhibition “Hybridenes poesi” (The Poetry of Hybrids) at the Textilmuseet in Borås, Sweden, but now they can weigh hundreds of pounds. The works in “De fleksible” are rooted in Nervold Antonsen’s home in Rollag, Numedal, the southernmost of the major valleys in eastern Norway. From Conversations With (all works 2022–23)—installed in an old boardroom tucked away between two magnificent skylighted exhibition halls—is a forty-minute-long sound recording. Listening on headsets, we hear Nervold Antonsen reading stories she heard while interviewing inhabitants of the region, including accounts of alcohol abuse, rape, incest, the legacy of poverty, and the shock of a society transitioning from an agricultural basis to a condition of neoliberal

View of “Gunvor Nervold Antonsen,” 2023. Photo: Uli Holz.

OCTOBER 2023

197

REVIEWS

precarity. There are heart-wrenching stories of resignation, of accepting fate and making the most of the cards dealt. While listening to the piece, one could contemplate These Dreams Do Not Exist in You, three smaller reliefs in linden and poplar, each depicting a fetus or small child on a backdrop of yellow petals. Many of the works in the gallery spaces nodded to art-historical precursors such as Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, and Vincent van Gogh, but with a twist. In one of the textile collages in the Iconostasis group, sleeping faces peek out from among the green petals of water lilies emerging from the background. The textile collages are just as monumental as the wooden sculptures, and the tight hang here makes the exhibition feel a bit too crowded. Some even spill out of their frames or onto the floor. The flowers depicted in the textile piece In the Morning the Shadows Rise form the meadowy background to fifty-five differently colored flower sculptures in ash, beech, birch, fir, maple, pine, and poplar, arranged in a half circle on the floor in front of it. Both in the textile collages and in the wooden sculptures, Nervold Antonsen liberates the human figure from gender markers. This approach makes it easier to focus on other aspects of life and gives a nonbinary person like me a sense of relief. The group of eleven wooden sculptures that lent the exhibition its title emphasizes intergenerational relationships. These pieces tenderly depict grown-ups and children and evoke the need to protect the smaller ones. Yet the work is far from sentimental or nostalgic and, like the exhibition as a whole, deals respectfully with real lives lived. —Anne Szefer Karlsen

MUMBAI

Matthew Krishanu, Two Boys in a Tree, 2023, oil and acrylic on canvas, 106 1⁄4 × 78 3⁄4".

Matthew Krishanu JHAVERI CONTEMPORARY

Two brown boys perch precariously on branches, their delicate wrists and palms pressed against its trunk for support. They balance by spreading their legs, as if mimicking the branches on which they stand. We meet the pair in Matthew Krishanu’s large acrylic-and-oil painting, Two Boys in a Tree, 2023. In another recent work, Boy in a Tree, 2023, a child in a red long-sleeved T-shirt stands alone without holding on, looking sideways as though he’s distracted by something in the distance. These two large works set the tone of an exhibition, “On a Limb,” that grappled with the conditions of dependence, fear, safety, and isolation—with holding on and letting go. Born in Bradford in the north of England in 1980, Krishanu spent his childhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This body of work draws on photographs of family trips in Bangladesh and India, as well as on his recollections of a trip with his late partner to the city of Agra in Uttar Pradesh, India. Images coalesce like distant memories, blurry at the edges. But the compositions are resolved. Krishanu keeps the focus on his protagonists. With large, translucent strokes and rough brushwork, he reduces landscapes and settings to silhouettes—swatches of greens for forests and trees; browns for clay, bark, and in some cases architecture; blues for skies and water. The saturated palette remains largely true to the subtropical climate; occasionally it is muted to portray gloom. The artist also plays with distance in three small oil-on-board works from 2020: Boy in Blue Vest, Boy in Dungarees, and Boy in Yellow Shirt, each a waist-up portrait of a child with a deep, pronounced gaze. The intimacy unsettles. A strong undercurrent of grief and loneliness runs through these works. The imagery can be stark, the scale distorted. Krishanu lets go of details, staying with the atmosphere. Trees have few if any leaves, for example. Things function as metaphors. In Banyan (Red and Blue 198 ARTFORUM

Boy), 2019, a child climbs a large, dense, seemingly unsurmountable banyan tree. The protagonist of Boy in Tunnel, 2023, is silhouetted and alone with the light shining in. One often feels these figures must be coming to terms with loss. Two kinds of protagonists appear in Krishanu’s work: those who look you in the eyes like the boys on the tree, and the ones that look away in contemplation. In Agra Fort (View), 2023, a woman dressed in yellow gazes out a window. In the distance, past the fields and waters of the Yamuna River, the Taj Mahal is visible. Krishanu’s situating of figures in the scenography also differs. Some are centralized; others are placed at the composition’s edge. Agra (Water View), 2023, is an example of the latter. A red sandstone building rises up along the extreme right of the composition, with a man standing on its balcony. The two tones of blue that fill the remainder of the canvas are sky and water, and they establish the setting’s expansive scale. The man’s peripheral position illustrates the condition proposed by the show’s title: out on a limb of isolation and precarity. —Mario D’Souza

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

“The Foreigners”

MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART SRI LANKA In a recent interview, Sri Lankan–born British author Romesh Gunesekara quipped that his “difficult name” was more likely to be misspelled in his homeland than it was abroad. He also revealed that he

often felt displaced as a kid in Colombo, less so as an adult in London. This latter notion of feeling estranged from, or dislocated within, one’s country of birth is depicted in Hema Shironi’s A Bundle of Joy, 2020— an installation consisting of ten colorful cloth bundles covered with stitched silhouettes of the many homes and towns the artist’s family had to move between, or leave behind, after Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009. In contrast with the multiple shows in which diasporic artists examine issues of migration, exile, and alienation overseas (including, presumably, the next Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere”), this exhibition, simply titled “The Foreigners,” brings the exploration of otherness back home. The question of who belongs and who doesn’t is not new to Sri Lanka; the issue has been central to the country’s modern conflicts (based on ethnolinguistic divides or postwar Islamophobia) as well as its ancient epics (from the Ramayana to the Mahāvam . sa). The island’s varying names—from Serendib to Taprobana to Ceylon—are reflective of the imprint of foreigners. This exhibition, curated by Sandev Handy and Sharmini Pereira, acquires special impact and relevance against its current backdrop: It is being held at a time when scores of Sri Lankans are leaving the country—or are looking to leave—due to the dire economic and political situation, and this sense of being alienated at home is heightened. At times the show takes a light and literal approach, confronting us with the obvious trope of the white expatriate in a bathing suit at a plush hotel (as in the photograph Tourist, Ahungalla, 1991, by Stephen Champion) or evoking the lingual dissonance oft felt by Tamil-, Sinhala-, or English-speaking communities when faced with a national language they don’t understand (as in Sumudi Suraweera and Dinelka Liyanage’s video Threshold (Part I), 2021, in which city

scenes are spliced with soundscapes of two Sinhala-speaking artists trying to decipher signboards in Tamil). The exhibition is at its strongest, however, when it challenges our ingrained ways of seeing—as it does in Nina Mangalanayagam and Oliver Barrett’s Balancing Act, 2012, a split-screen video installation in which we see a pair of feet diligently following demarcated lines along a gym floor before finally relenting and jumping over them in a childlike manner. Overlaying the choreography of these strained and relaxed gestures is Barrett’s fusion of national anthems and poetic reflections on being an outsider, narrated by the artist. “I cannot change you, I can only change myself,” we hear Mangalanayagam say at the end. Shown in this context, Balancing Act itself feels less limited to interpretation; the point is not to explain to a Western audience the artist’s experience of her hybrid Sri Lankan and Scandinavian heritage, but to address the universal experience of shedding generational trauma. Similarly, Shyama Golden’s painting Rooms II, 2018, showing the artist and her husband dressed as yakka, or demons (a figure used to represent, but also to ward off, evil), sitting at a table together in their Brooklyn apartment, subverts fear by embodying, embracing, and having fun with it. Like many other artists in the show, Golden draws from her own life to evoke the idea that everyone in some way feels like a stranger. This is an exhibition less interested in representing or replicating the concept of “the foreigners” by selecting works, for example, by artists of Burgher, Muslim, or Tamil background, or from any other communities that have been ostracized in Sri Lanka. Instead, it presents us with a series of vignettes—a collection of “short stories” of autobiographical fiction, much in the same vein as Sri Lanka’s most prized authors. —Jyoti Dhar

Shyama Golden, Rooms II, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 36". From “The Foreigners,” 2023. OCTOBER 2023

199

REVIEWS

YONGIN, SOUTH KOREA

Kim Whanki

HOAM MUSEUM OF ART An unpleasant fact: Though trailblazing Korean modernist Kim Whanki made his most vital paintings—luminous, swirling abstractions of repeated stains and dots—while he was living in New York in the decade or so before his death in 1974, the city’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art own nothing by him. In Paris, where Kim spent the late 1950s, the Centre Pompidou, at least, has a lone canvas, and thankfully it is a major example. While he is revered at home in South Korea, he has never had a career-spanning museum survey abroad, and so it is a shame that this affecting retrospective of some 120 works, at Samsung’s handsomely renovated Hoam Museum, will not travel.

Had Kim stopped there, he would still rank as one of his country’s great figurative painters, alongside Chang Ucchin and Park Soo-keun. But he was restless. Paris beckoned. Some late-’50s efforts from there have an awkward, self-conscious difficulty, his subjects depicted with thick lines and rough-hewn textures. But he could still deliver crowdpleasers, such as the enormous—eighteen feet wide, nine feet tall!— Women and Jars, 1960, which shows what its title says amid wide fields that are shades of mint, eggshell, and rose. What to make of the contented, berry-munching deer that appear here and in some other works? They hint at a kitsch streak that went mostly uncultivated. In New York beginning in 1963, Kim charted a course into purely abstract territory, with amorphous shapes floating atop expanses of color, vaguely recalling Adolph Gottlieb (whom he knew). He scaled up his work without losing his tender matter-of-fact touch, so that, around 1970, when he arrived at his signature method of grouping minute dots and stains of a single color into slightly imperfect grids, the results beguile. Up close: simple, workmanlike marks. From a distance: stars cascading through space, new universes coming into being. The most famous ones are blue, but, following a stroke right before his death, he was wielding black and leaving tiny gaps in places to create lines that might recall shooting comets, the veins of leaves, or sunblessed horizons. It looks like he was onto something. He was sixty-one and just getting started. —Andrew Russeth

TOKYO

Nobuko Tsuchiya SCAI THE BATHHOUSE

Kim Whanki, Shanty, 1951, oil on canvas, 28 1⁄2 × 35 1⁄2".

Kim was born into a well-to-do family on a remote island off Korea’s southwestern coast in 1913, early in Japan’s occupation of the country. He decamped to Tokyo in 1933 to study art, returning four years later to settle in Seoul. A few pieces on hand from the latter half of that decade suggest an artist proficient in, but not exactly moved by, Cubism and Constructivism, with interlocking flat planes of color that only sometimes aim for representation. A quicksilver talent, Kim was on the hunt, and a breakthrough came before long. He trained his sights on his homeland, using just a few carefully chosen shapes and colors to conjure mountains in twilight; giant moons overhead; and interiors adorned with flowers, fruit, and often a spherical “moon jar”—the striking, restrained type of white-porcelain vase that was a prized aesthetic object in the eighteenth century. (One that he owned, at least three centuries old, was on view.) Flower Shop, 1948, a heartbreaker of a painting slightly smaller than a sheet of paper, has tiny plants sitting on shelves against a background of pure blue, the color with which Kim most often uncorked his magic. A certain timeless sensibility, even a yearning for an idyllic past, radiates from Kim’s pictures, but in the early ’50s contemporary life intrudes. Shanty—from 1951, the year he fled Seoul amid the Korean War and went south to Busan—presents a low, rectangular house, with faceless people standing at the windows in pitch-black rooms. A watercolor with pen from the following year has boats crowded with people on the water in Busan, where Kim was teaching at Seoul’s temporarily relocated Hongik University. (His students included the future Dansaekhwa kingpin Park Seo-Bo.) 200 ARTFORUM

For more than twenty years, Nobuko Tsuchiya has been developing a singular and seductive sculptural vocabulary that combines degraded detritus with handcrafted materials. Nimbostratus (all works 2023), a piece prominently placed in this show at scai’s Roppongi location, first registered as a makeshift shelter, supported by a rusty range of fragmented rods, brackets, beams, and pipes. The materials are typical for the artist in that such dregs have no obvious use value; they would not be candidates for conventional upcycling. Atop this armature is a canopy of cloudlike white felt, stretched with considerable care to register as a roof: As at a shrine, one had to crouch or kneel to view the pair of wax cylinders—which resemble rolled-up scrolls with fraying edges—on the floor below. Not quite a wheel, the nearby floor-based Cirrostratus is the product of a laborious layering process: Arc-shaped pieces of wax have been joined and then covered successively with gesso, Jesmonite, and oil paint. Infused with a sense of fervent toil and tactility, this relic strays from the rationalism of the circle into softer realms that may be associated with a cosmic (orbital) energy and bodily intimacy. Tsuchiya tends to draw connections between contrasting qualities: hard and soft, delicate and durable, new and old. Placed together, Cirrocumulus and Altocumulus feature elongated elements—a plastic tube and a rusty wire, respectively—that link aged disk- and oval-shaped machine parts with fragile bits of fluff. Central to Altocumulus is a nearly rectangular plate of steel that appears as a platter, but isn’t quite, thanks to its irregularities and delicacy. Elsewhere, the suggestion of Etsy-style craftbased consumerism in Altostratus is slightly more pronounced, with its stack of felt sheets—rendered in indigo with white and yellow accents— but they occupy a dysfunctional container of eroded steel scraps. Tsuchiya’s spiritualized interest in straying from (or softening) hardedged, rationalist geometries of Minimalism—along with her melding of organic and industrial qualities—recalls Joseph Beuys’s felt pieces

View of “Nobuko Tsuchiya,” 2023. From left: Cirrocumulus, 2023; Altocumulus, 2023. Photo: Nobutada Omote.

and fat corners from the 1960s, as well as figures of post-Minimalism more broadly. However, her approach to composition is more about attention to detail and reverence for the materials in themselves, as much as to their Conceptual significance, as though she were submitting to their needs and desires. Placed on slender pedestals, five relatively contained assemblages recombine Tsuchiya’s signature components in diverse permutations, as though they were examples of genetic variation across a species (as many of her titles imply). Gaspra, for instance, is an uneasy melding of a resin shell-like structure; a cement brick with an arch-shaped wire anchored to its base; and a hunk of wax with Swiss cheese–like fissures and steel screws running through its flesh. In the case of Chiron, a brick becomes the armature for hanging other elements—including wires, a brass plate, and an antenna-like form with a “lampshade” made from a rolled up piece of thin metal—along with a clear plastic pipe containing smoky wisps of white and blue felt. Such works are reminiscent of Isa Genzken assemblages from the late ’80s and early ’90s, but Tsuchiya’s frame of reference is more diffuse and pleasingly ambiguous. Resolutely avoiding new consumer goods or kitsch, Tsuchiya refuses focused subjects of critique such as architectural modernism or ecological issues. Juno features a spheroid wire substructure with a felt outer layer resembling a globe with a consistent overcast; this presses into a hunk of resin that was likely once a bowl but is now partially imploded, with bubbles, cracks, and holes. Eschewing irony or cynicism, Tsuchiya’s project is infused with a devotional earnestness, expressing or anticipating the ecosystem of a postindustrial (and perhaps posthuman) place with radically different concepts of value and utility. Our trash will become treasure for someone or something else. —Dan Adler

addressed contemporary internet and lifestyle cultures via the haptic plasticity of neo-expressionist facture. The pictures in “Dude,” described in Boardman’s catalogue essay as “piles of objects,” were all essentially still lifes, yet they tell, as she explains, the story of a fictional character, a “serial subculture hobbyist . . . into coffee, hiking gear, sports and its trophies,” and subject to the “ebbs and flows of love relationships.” In Trophy Melt, 2022, gold cups and every kind of sports ball imaginable form an oozing, coagulated mass tipping forward Cézanne-like on a tabletop. Brass Knuckle and Wedding Ring Collection, 2023, indexes the extreme poles of romance, with sparkling renderings of these contrarily signifying items nestled side by side in a plush pink ring-display case. The oil-on-panel Spilt Milk Crypto Fortune, 2023, gestures to a souring of cryptocurrency speculation. An open drawer flush with the picture plane reveals three USB sticks—often used to store crypto wallets—swimming in a cartoonish puddle of spilled milk. The Rock of Sisyphus, Chasing Gains, 2023, likewise wryly deflates aspirational striving, showing a huge boulder pierced by a barbell dominating a somber-hued gym. Clear enough: Body-pumping obsessiveness replays the Greek myth of the man condemned by the gods to an underworld eternity of futile labor, rolling a rock up a mountain only to have it tumble back down again. Though a still life typically represents inanimate objects, those populating Boardman’s paintings incarnate a fleshy, scintillating, or morphing vitality familiar from cartoon animation. The last was especially apparent in seven small, square oils on panel, lined up along one wall. Unlike the recognizable object traces of a caricatured internet bro in other paintings, five of the series depict object ensembles—sculptures, according to the works’ titles—that defied identification. Swirling semitransparent snakes of blue, white, and red pigment explode from a box in Red Hot Sculpture, 2023, while Unruly Sculpture, 2023, shows a mesh of tubular forms suspended between compression and eruption. Contained Sculpture, 2023, portrays a clutch of mysterious abstract forms tightly huddled together on a white field. These pictures speak as much of the artist flaunting the visceral materiality of oil paint as of a dude hopelessly torn between disciplined and excessive drives. Rather than simply excoriating twenty-first-century lifestyle fads and consumerist churn, Boardman’s smart, visually diverting, relatable paintings squeeze equal measures of satire and pathos from the life world we all currently negotiate. —Toni Ross

SYDNEY

Amber Boardman CHALK HORSE

Amber Boardman’s exhibition “Dude” assembled twenty-two slyly funny oil paintings with the fluent paint handling and cartoonish figuration we’ve come to expect from her work. One of my favorites was Baggage Competition, 2023, which gave me a rueful reminder of the outlandish amount of time and money I had recently spent sourcing trekking gear for a vacation. The canvas depicts a row of five blockish figures from behind, exaggerating their bulging backpacks and dangling hiking paraphernalia. Overburdened with adventure-travel consumables, these nature tourists appear poised to assault a snowcapped peak rising timidly before them—as if getting ready to crack a nut with a sledgehammer. Since moving to Sydney from the United States in 2012 and following an early career in commercial animation, Boardman has habitually

Amber Boardman, Baggage Competition, 2023, oil on canvas, 48 × 60". OCTOBER 2023

201

OCHMANEK/BROUWN from page 143 NOTES 1. Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 2. At the Art Institute of Chicago, one room in the permanent-collection galleries included a similar, later video work by brouwn from the Van Abbemuseum collection: steps, 1989. 3. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh characterizes brouwn’s “artistic structures” as “collective, anonymous, and participatory.” In his estimation, the seriality in brouwn’s work is like that of Daniel Buren and Dan Graham in that it “led away from the collectible (and collected) found objects [of other art deploying seriality in the 1960s] . . . into a public architectural space of simultaneous collective experience.” My reference here links such qualities with Benedict Anderson’s idea of the modern nation-state as an “imagined community” brought to consciousness by a new perception of simultaneity and the consolidation of regional dialects enabled by print capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 32. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006). 4. This serves as a caption below a thin strip of aluminum seemingly one foot long for one 1996 work included in the Art Institute of Chicago’s show. A 2014 piece also in the Chicago show consisted of a small box containing a text that reads, “at this moment the distance between stanley brouwn and yourself is x feet, x feet is the length of the sides of an imaginary square 1 brouwnfoot = 26 cm.” 5. brouwn’s list continues up to the year 1985. A version written on index cards, the total number of my steps in . . . , 1972, was on view in Chicago. 6. Allan Sekula discusses photography’s nineteenth-century entry into the filing cabinet in these terms. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, no. 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. 7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 6. Eric C. H. de Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,” Grey Room, no. 25 (Fall 2006): 32–63. 8. The term global conceptualism was coined by the exhibition of that name curated by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss in 1999. The show countered a predominantly white, Western, male canon of Conceptual art from the 1960s with a decentered history of Conceptualist strategies emerging between the ’50s and the ’80s, many of which were politically motivated. Claude Gintz’s essay in the catalogue analyzes brouwn’s work in the context of Situationism. Claude Gintz, “European Conceptualism in Every Situation,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, ed. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss (New York: Queens Museum, 1999). 9. Zöe Sutherland, “The World as Gallery: Conceptualism and Global NeoAvant-Garde,” New Left Review, no. 98 (March/April 2016): 81–111. 10. Edwards discusses brouwn’s use of errantry, relation, and opacity in light of Glissant’s writings. She provides historical context regarding the Dutch colonial project, legacies of enslavement and marronage in Suriname, and prejudice faced by Surinamese immigrants in the Netherlands in brouwn’s generation. Adrienne Edwards, “At the Threshold of Withholding: Stanley Brouwn’s Modernist Repetitions,” in Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, ed. Huey Copeland and Steven Nelson, Seminar Papers 4 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2023), 181. On brouwn and Glissant, see also Allison K. Young, “Remy Jungerman: ‘To Say Without Saying’: Abstraction and the Black Atlantic,” in The Measurement of Presence: Body, Spirit, History. Dutch Pavilion Venice Biennial 2019, ed. Benno Tempel (Lichtervelde, Belgium: Kannibaal bvba/Hannibal, 2019). 11. Stuart Hall’s writings on cultural identity post-Windrush and our changing relationship to place under globalization, as well as his thinking about the Creole character of Caribbean cultures as “translated societies,” in continual transformation and hybridization, find echoes in brouwn’s project. brouwn offers perpetual movements in place of fixed identity (“steps” in place of biography) and presents distance or length as inherently relational. Stuart Hall, “Créolité and the Process of Creolization,” in Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, ed. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate. Migration and Identities (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 12. See writings by Charl Landvreugd and debates surrounding the Dutch pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale in Tempel, ed., The Measurement of

THE ANTI-AES THETIC AT FORTY SEPTEMB ER

2023

I

N

T

E

R

N

A

T

I

O

N

A

L

CHRYSSA SUNG NEUNG KYUNG ED RUSCHA VIVIENNE WESTWOOD DODIE BELLAMY

ON JOAN BROWN

SARAH SCHULMAN

ON NICOLE EISENMAN FEBRUARY 2023

202

I

N

T

E

ARTFORUM

R

N

A

T

I

O

N

A

L

ALEX KATZ: FOUR VIEWS

Presence. On discussions of race and brouwn’s cultural identity in the Dutch context, see also Sven Lütticken, “The Distance Between Stanley Brouwn and Yourself,” Texte zur Kunst 28, no. 109 (2018): 186.

think of the focused exploration of such precious metals by artists in the 1950s and ’60s, starting with Rauschenberg.

ROBINSON/ DE MARIA from page 162

17. David Bourdon, notes from a telephone conversation with Walter De Maria, folder 4, box 27, Walter De Maria, 1968–1993, pp. 16–28, Bourdon Papers.

NOTES

18. The curators of “Hard Center” were Elena Calas and Nicolas Calas.

1. Walter De Maria, oral history interview by Paul Cummings, New York, October 4, 1972, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

19. Originally a stand-alone painting; De Maria made it part of a trilogy called The Statement Series in 2011, coupling it with red and blue monochromes of the same dimensions. Thereafter, this work was known by an even longer title: The Statement Series: Yellow Painting/The Color Men Choose when They Attack the Earth.

2. I wish to acknowledge Jane McFadden for her scholarship on De Maria, her book Walter De Maria: Meaningless Work (Reaktion Books: London, 2016), and her generosity. 3. The Menil’s efforts, and the resulting collection of De Maria’s work, are to my knowledge rivaled only by all the prime pieces the late Germano Celant progressively acquired for the Fondazione Prada. The other major repository of De Maria’s work is of course the estate. 4. David Bourdon’s notes from a telephone conversation with Walter De Maria, dated March 28, 1968, folder 4, box 27, Walter De Maria, 1968–93, pp. 16–28, David Bourdon Papers, 1941–98, Archives of American Art (hereafter cited as Bourdon Papers). 5. The three outings on record for Walk Around the Box are 1963, 1970, and 1984. In 1970, it was exhibited at the Dwan Gallery. A decade and a half later, it was shown in Barbara Haskell’s “Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958–64” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and reproduced in the catalogue. 6. At the time when his close friendship with Robert Morris was eroding into competitiveness, De Maria slid under the wire with his January “box show.” Morris would debut his Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961, Portal, 1961, and Untitled (Cloud), 1962, and a couple of other works the next month (February 1963) in a group show called “Boxing Match.” Most obviously, the title underscored the prevalence of the box format, but it also evoked the one large sketch/plan for Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass then on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Combat de boxe. Not to be outdone, De Maria contacted some actual boxers from a gym at Union Square and refereed a bout as a scheduled event at 9 Great Jones Street. 7. Boxes for Meaningless Work was reproduced in the “Blam!” catalogue like Walk Around the Box and a three-dimensional work titled 4' × 8', all 1961. See Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958–64 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984), 98–99. 8. The Menil made copies of all the wood works it owns, and, with the help of University of Houston Fluxus scholar Natilee Harren and artist Gabriel Martinez, organized a day of activity (March 4, 2023) giving the public the chance to become involved with De Maria’s propositions. 9. De Maria’s format of concept-plus-examples echoes that of Robert Morris’s main An Anthology contribution, “Blank Form.” Unfortunately, he withdrew it in 1962, a few months before the volume went to print. The Menil exhibition was rather low on documents, given the implications of De Maria’s oeuvre for Conceptual art as well as Minimalism. Why is it, one wants to ask, that American museums are so often allergic to so-called printed matter, favoring artificially “pure” formalism over a productive contextualization? 10. Walter De Maria, “Project for Boxes,” in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young (New York, 1963), n.p. 11. De Maria arrived in New York in late fall 1960. 12. Walter De Maria, section in An Anthology, n.p. 13. Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 12. 14. The relevant passages are “Does not a mountain . . . evoke in us a sense of wonder?” and “What is more angry than [a] flash of lightning . . . ?” Cage, ibid., 10. 15. De Maria’s erstwhile friend Morris did a similar thing several years earlier with his Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. He chose maple, identifying it as a scent remembered from his youth. De Maria’s and Morris’s choices of wood share an “essence,” if not a whiff, of Duchamp. See the mention of this in the Jura-Paris Road note in the Hamiltons’ translation of Duchamp’s Green Box, five pages in (n.p.): “The pictorial matter . . . will be wood . . . [an] affective translation. . . . Perhaps see if it’s necessary to choose an essence of wood (the fir tree, or then polished mahogany).” 16. It is beyond the scope of this essay, but there were definite reasons for the cultivation of ritualistic elements in postwar art. As for De Maria’s deployment of gold and silver, if we take this as seriously as we should, we cannot but

20. “Op Losse Schroeven” was one of several landmark exhibitions in this period. Two others that concern De Maria are Harald Szeemann’s “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Kunsthalle Bern, and Jan van der Marck’s “Art by Telephone,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. For those who have wondered why De Maria was represented by a clean black telephone and instructions in the former, a show dominated by made-on-the-spot, process-oriented art, this was the artist’s improvised solution when the latter show, for which it was intended, was delayed. 21. The surveyor’s plumb line used in the first performances might also have inspired De Maria. 22. The poster in question was made for the artist’s Bed of Spikes at Dwan, NY, in 1969. 23. Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968). 24. I would like to express my gratitude to Emily Schecter for singling out Small Landscape for special attention, for being an invaluable interlocutor at every stage of preparing this essay, and for her supportive reading of many drafts. 25. Walter De Maria, notes, circa 1961, unpublished, Walter De Maria Estate. Caption acknowledgments Cover: © Emory Douglas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Pages 129 and 135: All Emor y Douglas works © Emor y Douglas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Page 131: Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Loitering, 1974. © Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) Foundation Berlin. Page 132: All Chris Burden works © Chris Burden/Licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Page 133: Pope.L, Times Square Crawl a.k.a. Meditation Square Pieces, 1978. © Pope.L. Page 138: Faith Ringgold, The United States of Attica, 1972. © Faith Ringgold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York. Page 139: David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970. © David Hammons. Pages 154–171: All Walter De Maria works © Estate of Walter De Maria/Walter De Maria Archive. Page 193: Suzanne Valadon, La chambre bleue (The Blue Room), 1923. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Vol. 62, No. 2 OCTOBER 2023. Contents copyright © 2023 Artforum Media, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Artforum International Magazine, Inc. Subscriptions: Orders, inquiries, and address changes should be sent to ARTFORUM SUBSCRIPTION DEPARTMENT, P.O. Box 37943, Boone, IA 50037-0943, or call (877) 514-6871. E-mail: [email protected]. For information on our terms and conditions please visit www.artforum.com/terms. Subscribers: If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within six months. Mailing List: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you prefer that we not include your name, please call or write us. Back Issues: Single copies and back issues are available prepaid at artforum. com/print/archive. Microfilm: University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Microfiche: Bell & Howell, Micro-Photo Division, Old Mansfield Rd., Wooster, OH 44691. ARTFORUM is indexed in the Art Index, ARTbibliographies, MODERN, and RILA. ARTFORUM INTERNATIONAL (ISSN-0004-3532) is published 10 times annually in September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May, and Summer (June) for $75 per year ($145 outside the US) by ARTFORUM, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Printed by Fry Communications, Mechanicsburg, PA. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to ARTFORUM SUBSCRIPTION DEPARTMENT, P.O. Box 37943, Boone, IA 50037-0943.

SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE 68% OFF COVER PRICE artforum.com/subscribe

LACE Benefit Art Auction Save the Date Thursday, October 26, 2023 Artworks to benefit Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions will be available on ARTSY welcometolace.org

FIFTEEN QUESTIONS FOR . . .

in itself. In sculptural terms, a mold is broken and a space that hitherto was thought of as a vacuum is set free.

FOLAKUNLE OSHUN Folakunle Oshun is an artist and curator and the founder and director of the Lagos Biennial. The exhibition “Lagos Peckham Repeat: Pilgrimage to the Lakes,” which he curated with the South London Gallery, is on view through October 29.

recently read “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits” (2022), by Achille Mbembe. This didn’t change my life but it got me thinking about my work and research, which revolve around postindependence monuments in West Africa.

HOW DOES YOUR WORK AS AN ARTIST INFLUENCE YOUR CURATORIAL WORK AND VICE VERSA? Sculpture is all about form and its relation to space. As a sculptor, I see the world through that prism, and even when curating, space is just another form—just another shell—with its own context, of course. On the flip side, curating makes me overthink my art, which is both a good and bad thing.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE (NON-ART) PLACE IN LONDON? IN LAGOS? London: My hotel room. Lagos: Riding through the city on my Vespa. WHAT IS THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PECKHAM AND LAGOS? Electricity!

WHAT WAS THE LAST SHOW YOU TRAVELED TO SEE? Before “Lagos Peckham Repeat,” the last art event I traveled for was Berlin Gallery Weekend in May. There I was taken by the Hiwa K exhibition “Like a Good, Good, Good Boy” at KOW and Rhea Dillon’s “We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils” at Sweetwater Gallery, which was a fantastically curated exhibition.

NAME A CRITICAL BOOK OR TEXT THAT CHANGED YOUR LIFE. Great Artists: From Giotto to Turner (2001) by Phil Grabsky, Tim Marlow, and Philip Rance. I read this book when I was eighteen. I had just dropped out of a university where I had been studying economics and was about to register for art school at the University of Lagos. My brother sent me the book from London without realizing how intense it was for my level of art appreciation at the time. I wouldn’t say it was a critical text in the conventional sense, but it changed my life. I 204 ARTFORUM

IS THERE A CONVERSATION YOU WISH PEOPLE WERE HAVING THAT THEY’RE NOT, ESPECIALLY WITHIN ART INSTITUTIONS OR IN THE ART WORLD MORE BROADLY? That elephant has left the room. I believe most museums and art institutions in the West are mere outlets for government propaganda. So you get invited to curate an exhibition and the bureaucracy and interactions are identical to applying for a visa. It’s the exact same language, protocol, and cockiness. Once you’ve done this for a while it gets predictable. In a nutshell, no real change is coming out of these mega-institutions, just performativity. It took a while for me to accept that, but I have made my peace. It’s not that one cannot make a difference in these spaces, just that it is all closely monitored, and there is way too much censorship to maintain an association with art. WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS? Instagram: curators_complaining_2.0. X: @n6oflife6 WHAT BOOK DO YOU KEEP BY YOUR BED? My Bible. It’s an old, massive King James edition. My father, a pastor and theology professor, gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday. I travel everywhere with it, and it helps keep immigration officers busy.

WHAT EXHIBITION COMING UP ARE YOU MOST EXCITED FOR? Definitely the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial, which opens in February 2024. With the theme “Refuge,” it will explore the premise of the nation-state. TELL US ABOUT THE LAST EXCITING CONVERSATION YOU HAD WITH A FRIEND. I met someone at a cafe today and we spoke about our experiences as foreigners in Paris. I told her that even though I don’t speak French I often come off as French in my mannerisms. This is quite frustrating because I must be extremely explicit when speaking English to French people, making me feel very German. Most of my communication is nonverbal, so it’s like learning to speak English all over again instead of just learning a new language. We both had a good laugh and continued our French-bashing.

WHAT SONG OR ALBUM ARE YOU LISTENING TO ON REPEAT THESE DAYS?  Born to Do It by Craig David (2000). Still sounds like it was produced last week.

IF YOU WERE TO HELP BUILD A UTOPIAN SOCIETY, WHAT ONE ASPECT OF THE ART WORLD WOULD YOU BRING WITH YOU? Red wine at exhibition openings. I SEE YOU TEACH A COURSE CALLED “SPATIAL POLITICS AND STORY TELLING” AT THE STAATLICHE HOCHSCHULE FÜR GESTALTUNG KARLSRUHE, GERMANY. WHAT IS THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN ART? I think every artist is a storyteller in some form, but we shouldn’t get lost in the poetics of storytelling. For me, it is more about which stories are being told and who is telling them. An African proverb goes, “Until the lion learns to write, the hunter will always be the hero.” When I visited Germany in 2015 it was the first time in my life that I got the feeling that the world began with World War II. This right here is storytelling, the spinning of narratives to push certain agendas—in this case, an endless loop of atonement. In teaching the course, I use historical, monumental architecture as a grid to navigate the past. The buildings tell their own stories, and confronting them with art can unlock deeper layers. Even though architecture comes with a lot of baggage, you literally have to tear down a building to erase its associated history—and even then, there is no guarantee. That act of tearing down is a story

WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING A CURATOR CAN DO FOR AN ARTIST? Just tell them the truth. There is no love lost in this business. I’ve been on both sides of the fence and I see too many people who are either disillusioned or believe in their own lies. Many artists think they will make great art, make lots of money, and live an incredible life all at once. These things might come, but definitely not in a rush and usually not simultaneously. Great art comes from sorrow and pain, and life has to be lived one day at a time. If a twenty-one-year-old artist is selling for a million dollars, it’s one of two things: The art is crap or someone in the background is running a racket. Usually, it’s both. COULD YOU DESCRIBE WHO OR WHAT YOU HAD IN YOUR IMAGINATION WHEN YOU FOUNDED THE LAGOS BIENNIAL? While preparing for the first edition, I told my team that Lagos does not need a biennial: Lagos is a biennial in real time. The city has way too much energy; we just needed to harness it. And that we did. n

UBS Art Gallery at 1285 Avenue of the Americas

Sylvie Fleury, First Spaceship on Venus, 2022, fiberglass, car paint. UBS Art Collection. © Sylvie Fleury and Karma International, Zürich. Photo credit: Nicolas Duc. © UBS 2023. All rights reserved.

Reimagining: New Perspectives – recent acquisitions from the UBS Art Collection On view through January 12, 2024. Free and open to the public on weekdays from 7:00am–6:00pm. Accompanying publication available for purchase at phaidon.com.