SEPTEMBER 2023 ARTFORUM

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THE ANTI-AESTHETIC AT FORTY CHRYSSA SUNG NEUNG KYUNG ED RUSCHA SEPTEMBER 2023

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MARÍA BERRÍO A FEAST FOR AM M IT 7–10 S E PTE M B E R 2023 · TH E AR MORY S HOW · BOOTH 100

Victoria Miro

Act II, Scene 1: Orchestra of the Departed (detail), 2023 Collage with Japanese paper and watercolour paint on linen 125.1 x 94.6 cm, 49 1/4 x 37 1/4 in © María Berrío. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

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william kentridge Oh To Believe in Another World

m a r i a n g o odm a n g a l l e r y new york

12 september – 21 october 2023

SEPTEMBER 2023 COLUMNS PASSAGES Boris Groys on Ilya Kabakov

FEATURES

BOOKS Catherine Quan Damman on Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture

57

J. Hoberman on Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real

69

VAULT Denise Koller on Ferdinand Hodler

79

ON SITE Suzanne Hudson on Blythe Bohnen

87

TOP TEN CAConrad INTERVIEW The curators of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo: “Choreographies of the Impossible”

158

THE ANTI-AESTHETIC AT FORTY Hal Foster

164

STATION TO STATION: THE ART OF ED RUSCHA David Platzker

174

CAUSING A SCENE: THE EARLY ART OF SUNG NEUNG KYUNG Joan Kee

182

ELECTRIC AFFINITIES: THE ART OF CHRYSSA Molly Warnock

190

LOST WORLDS: THE ART OF CHARLES SIMONDS Jules Pelta Feldman

200

OPENINGS: JES FAN Cassie Packard

49

95

95

239

REVIEWS

158

164

Cover: Ed Ruscha, Cigarettes (detail), 1956, tempera on board, 15 × 10". (See page 164.) From top: Jason Dodge, Cut a Door in the Wolf (detail), 2021, mixed media. Installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. Photo: Piercarlo Quecchia, DSL Studio. Promotional video for Apple Vision Pro, 2023. Cover of Artforum, September 1966. Ed Ruscha, Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, 1966. Sung Neung Kyung, Smoking (detail), 1976, seventeen gelatin silver prints, each 10 × 8".

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206

Sarah K. Rich on Ellsworth Kelly

208

From New York, Beacon, Philadelphia, Laramie, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Santiago, London, Liverpool, Paris, Milan, Vienna, Berlin, Bonn, Münster, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Tbilisi, Istanbul, Dubai, Cape Town, Gwangju, Manila, and Melbourne

steve mc queen m a r i a n g o odm a n g a l l e r y los angeles

23 september – 4 november 2023

ALEX DA CORTE THE DÆMON MATTHEW MARKS LOS ANGELES

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CONTRIBUTORS

BORIS GROYS

JOAN KEE

DENISE KOLLER

CASSIE PACKARD

DAVID PLATZKER

SARAH K. RICH

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ARTFORUM

BORIS GROYS is a professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University and a professor of philosophy and art history at the European Graduate School at Saas Fee, Switzerland. He is the author of the books An Introduction to Antiphilosophy (Verso, 2012), Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (Columbia University Press, 2012), On the New (2014) and In the Flow (2016; both Verso) Logic of the Collection (Sternberg Press, 2021), Philosophy of Care (Verso, 2022), and Becoming an Artwork (Polity, 2022). In this issue, Groys reflects on the life and artwork of Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023). JOAN KEE is a professor of art history at the University of Michigan and a contributing editor to Artforum. Her most recent book is The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity (University of California Press, 2023). A coeditor of Primary Documents Korea for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she was an inaugural Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence from 2022 to 2023, she is the author of Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). More recently, she has contributed essays to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, for catalogues accompanying shows on modern and experimental Korean art, respectively. She is presently working on a book on emojis provisionally titled Welcome to Emojiland. Here, Kee writes on the early work of Sung Neung Kyung. photo: ross anthony DENISE KOLLER is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in modern art history at Princeton University currently based at Harvard University. Her writing on art, architecture, and contemporary culture has appeared in publications and exhibition catalogues in Europe and the US. She previously served as an editor for the German edition of Interview magazine. She is a former Ertegun Scholar at Oxford University and a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London; her research has been supported by awards and grants including a Swiss Government Excellence Research Fellowship at the University of Basel, where she was an affiliated researcher at eikones—Center for the Theory and History of the Image. In this issue, Koller considers the art of Ferdinand Hodler. photo: micah nelp CASSIE PACKARD is a writer based in Brooklyn. Often focusing on the intersection of visual culture and worlding,

she has penned criticism, essays, and profiles for Art in America, Artforum, ArtReview, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Inquiry, among other publications. She is the recipient of critical writing fellowships at Momus and Recess. Packard is the author of Art Rules (Frances Lincoln, 2023), which reflects on artists’ working practices, and has contributed to books and catalogues including those published by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Dais Books, Karma, and Viaindustriae. This month, Packard examines the practice of Jes Fan ahead of the second chapter of his “Sites of Wounding” project, opening this month at M+ in Hong Kong. DAVID PLATZKER is an art historian, curator, writer, and art dealer. Between 1998 and 2004, Platzker was the executive director of the nonprofit bookstore Printed Matter, where he organized numerous exhibitions and artists’ publications in addition to cofounding its annual book fair. In 2004, he founded Specific Object, a gallery and bookstore mainly dedicated to ephemera from the 1960s forward. From 2013 to 2017, Platzker was curator of drawings and prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he cocurated the exhibitions “There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4'33" and “Sites of Reason” (both 2014), “Gilbert & George: The Early Years” (2015), and “Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions” (2017), which traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, under the title “Concepts and Intuitions, 1965–2016” (2018). In 2018, Platzker resumed his position as president of Specific Object, contributing essays to the monographs Charles Gaines: Palm Trees and Other Works (Hauser & Wirth, 2019), John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonné; Volume Six: 2011–2019 (Yale University Press, 2021), and Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects [Other Stuff] (Steidl/Gagosian, 2023). In these pages, Platzker writes on the genesis of Ed Ruscha’s artists’ books and associated works on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective, opening September 10 at moma. SARAH K. RICH is an associate professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University. She has published scholarly essays and criticism about French and American art during the Cold War. She is also the director of Penn State’s Center for Virtual/Material Studies, a research Institute dedicated to the investigation of technical art history and materiality. In this issue, Rich reviews “Ellsworth Kelly at 100,” on view through March 2024 at Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland.

Artwork © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate, courtesy Center for Creative Photography

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ILYA KABAKOV 1933–2023 Boris Groys WHEN I MET ILYA KABAKOV for the first time, in 1977, he was already the central figure of Moscow’s unofficial art milieu. He was respected and admired not only as an artist but also as a profound and insightful commentator on the art process. His studio, at the top of a six-floor building on Sretensky Boulevard in the center of Moscow, was a place of philosophical and art-historical lectures, poetry readings, and informal meetings of artists and literati. To reach this studio, one had to climb the whole way up from the ground floor to the attic (no elevator!) via a staircase that was often dimly lit and partially covered in garbage. Nevertheless, the usually nervous and capricious artists and poets of Moscow readily made this effort to be warmly greeted by Kabakov—and immediately involved by him in an amiable conversation. Time and again, Kabakov invited his friends over to show them his new works. He not only showed them but commented on them. Comments from the audience were also welcome—and even implicitly required. Kabakov is mostly known in the West as an author of large-scale installations. These installations have some recognizable commonalities: Full of images and of commentaries on those images, they are narrative in structure, imposing on their visitors a certain order to be accepted and followed. Now, it seems to me that it is difficult to understand and rightly appreciate these

specific qualities of Kabakov’s installations without taking into consideration the conditions under which he produced and exhibited his work before the disintegration of the Soviet Union and his immigration to the US. During the Soviet time, Kabakov was a very successful children’s-book illustrator. He illustrated about 150 books that were widely distributed in the country. But he could not publicly exhibit his own personal art because it did not fit the conventions of socialist realism. At that time, the division between the official and unofficial art milieus was clear enough: One either followed the official line or one didn’t. In the latter case, one could make art but not show it publicly. This division cut through Kabakov’s work: As a book illustrator, he accommodated himself to the official criteria of the permissible, but as an independent, unofficial artist, he remained confined to his studio. In fact, Kabakov’s illustrations are quite charming and by no means ideological. But he always denied them the status of being his “own” works. For him, only the works that he showed in his own, private space to his guests were truly his own. Kabakov’s “total installations,” as he called them, are the results of his attempts to re-create this private space inside the anonymous spaces of the Western art institutions. In 1988, he told me that he was shocked by the neutral, generic design and homogeneous lighting of

New York galleries and museums and that he wanted to transform the space that he had been given to create his personal territory. And, indeed, the visitor to Kabakov’s installations always had a feeling of entering a foreign realm that allows one to cross its borders but functions according to rules that remain obscure to outsiders. Often, the installations generated a visual and textual overkill, confronting spectators with a mass of images and texts that they were incapable of processing during the standard time of an exhibition visit. The baroque lighting made it even more difficult because some parts of the installations were only dimly illuminated. Visitors were confronted with a space that did not allow itself to be completely owned by their gaze. The tension between the privacy of the individual artist’s space and its institutional context is well demonstrated by the famous “toilet” that Kabakov built in the courtyard of Kassel’s Museum Fridericianum for Documenta 9: a private apartment inside the public toilet. Obviously, it was a microcosm of the Fridericianum itself, where every artist got his or her space, which visitors could enter to satisfy their aesthetic urges. However, while Kabakov always tried to build his own world, he never insisted on stylistic originality in his images and texts. On the contrary, during his Soviet time, he used his studio as a space of reflection on the

Ilya Kabakov with his 1983–84 The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, New York, August 1988. Photo: Marty Lederhandler/AP.

SEPTEMBER 2023 49

Clockwise, from left: Ilya Kabakov, Top and Bottom, 2015, oil on canvas, 44 1⁄8 × 77 1⁄8". George Kiesewalter, Ilya Kabakov, Joseph Backstein, and Dmitri Prigov at Kabakov’s studio, Moscow, ca. 1984–85. Ilya Kabakov, Die Toilette (“Leben in der Toilette”) (The Toilet [“Life in the Toilet”]), 1992, mixed media. Installation view, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel. From Documenta 9.

He used his studio as a space of reflection on the everyday reality and mass culture in which he lived. As an unofficial artist, he analyzed his own role as an official artist.

everyday reality and mass culture in which he lived and in which he participated as a book illustrator. As an unofficial artist, he analyzed his own role as an official artist. Kabakov’s discovery of his own artistic problematic came at the beginning of the 1970s, with the series of albums “Ten Characters,” 1972–78. Each of these albums looks like a book with loose pages, telling in words and images the history of an imaginary artist who lives on the margins of society and whose work is neither recognized nor preserved. The images, allegedly produced by the artist-characters, are accompanied by captions in which their friends and relatives comment on the work. Each album concludes with a white page announcing the death of the protagonist. The private visions with which the heroes of the albums are obsessed refer in many cases to the glorious history of twentiethcentury modern art. But the artistic execution of the albums themselves recalls the aesthetic of Kabakov’s Soviet children’s-book illustrations; the modernist visions of the heroes are subverted by the trivial visual language through which they are manifested. The textual commentaries bear witness to all the possible misunderstandings to which art is necessarily exposed. The albums are wonderfully poetic, full of earnest artistic pathos. But they also betray the fear of their protagonists, and of Kabakov 50 ARTFORUM

himself: namely, that their works will remain disregarded, be thrown into the garbage, erased from cultural memory. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936–37), Martin Heidegger argues that the creation and preservation of an artwork belong together. Now, Kabakov hoped for but never really believed in the preservation of his works. An obvious reason for this fear of oblivion was his position as an unofficial artist outside the Soviet system of art representation and musealization. But to an even greater degree, he felt that the growth of mass society, mass culture, and mass communication all over the world renders the survival of an individual artistic gesture increasingly improbable. Characteristically enough, the first large installation that Kabakov made after his arrival in the West was also called “Ten Characters.” In this installation, first shown in its entirety at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York in 1988, the works that Kabakov had for the most part created in Russia over the preceding decades were distributed among ten different fictitious authors, who were described as lonely, isolated people practicing their art in the seclusion of small rooms inside a communal apartment. For them, a crowded everyday coexistence was coupled with complete inner isolation. Here, the albums became rooms—but abandoned ones. Visitors were con-

fronted with the remnants of a life that belonged to the past. The key room in the installation was that of a man who collected all kinds of garbage: worn-out everyday things that became useless without being made aesthetically attractive. Later, Kabakov depicted this becominggarbage of Soviet culture in his installation School No. 6, 1993, at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa—one of the very few of the artist’s installations still on display. The temporal character of installations always irritated Kabakov. That is why, later in his life, he increasingly turned to painting, with its promise of greater longevity—even if he still made installations, some of them site-specific, in coauthorship with his wife, Emilia Kabakov. However, his paintings likewise reveal traces of the Soviet past: neither ideology nor propaganda but, rather, a certain aesthetic, stylistic commonality that united different aspects of Soviet visual culture. In the Soviet Union, Kabakov repeatedly staged the symbolic dissolution and disappearance of this culture. But after its factual disappearance, Kabakov’s work became a rare reminder of the past. If, today, one were asked to describe what the Soviet space looked like, the best answer would be: like a Kabakov installation. n BORIS GROYS IS PROFESSOR OF RUSSIAN AND SLAVIC STUDIES AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

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CAFTAN MARVEL Catherine Quan Damman on Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture

View of “Louise Nevelson: Moon Garden Plus One,” 1958, Grand Central Moderns, New York.

Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face, by Julia Bryan-Wilson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. 352 pages.

THE ICONIC LOUISE NEVELSON sculpture would appear straightforward to summarize: monochrome, modular, monumental. In general, such qualities—and to them we might add wooden, assemblage, usually black, comprising found objects—indicate an artist singularly absorbed, working through a set of formal propositions over a career, pursuing the archetypal enterprise of the modernist master. In particular, though, up close and personal, Nevelson’s sculptures are, well, defiantly weird. In confronting their grids and boxes, their all-consuming size, and their dedication to a particular color, the scholar or critic is firmly set upon recognizable, even overly familiar grounds. Looser underfoot is the works’ insistence on so much unnecessary filigree, their many wonky flanges and cavities. More destabilizing still are the ways that the artist’s preferred dusky hues unsettle the eye’s disciplined construal of recess and protrusion, how the voluptuous curves of lathe-turned wood jostle against the firm perpendiculars of the crates that contain them, or the sculptures’ magpie dedication to hodgepodge and their often visibly precarious construction. The interplay between the established category and the stresses put upon it by any singular articulation is the rich loam of art history. To cultivate it, Julia BryanWilson’s new study comes to us in four slim volumes,

which nestle together inside a rectangular slipcover (like a Nevelson, a black box). Their clipped titles—Drag, Color, Join, and Face—are a foursome hewn from the artist’s working method: Here is Nevelson lugging hunks of wood or cast-off furniture parts into the studio, applying color in her idiosyncratic way (before construction, and sometimes even dipping components straight into paint with tongs), assembling the elements, and finally releasing them to the public to “face” fans and critics. Each volume, at around seventy pages, stretches the prototypical academic chapter, elaborating its principal term less like a mathematical proof than a center of gravity exerting centripetal force. In homage to the hypothetical modularity (rarely enacted in practice) of Nevelson’s work, the author invites the reader to recuse herself from linear consumption. Though my multiple readings were always in the gently prescribed order, I found each volume never to be in the slot in which I was certain I had deposited it, its inky cover accumulating streaks from my fingers, an experience tactile and unruly. I have never touched a sculpture by Louise Nevelson, but perhaps interacting with Drag, Color, Join, and Face mirrors the way her forms make “you think you can feel yourself caressing their knobs, curved bellies, bulging urns, tracing the lips and swells with your finger,” as Bryan-Wilson puts it. It is not only in terms of objecthood that this book slips the knot of convention. On the one hand, it conforms to the expectations of the scholarly monograph—

an in-depth, dedicated study of a given topic (in art history, unlike in other disciplines, the term typically indicates a concentration on a single artist), here focused on what is primarily understood as the “mature” phase of Nevelson’s career, from roughly the midpoint of the twentieth century until her death in 1988. At the same time, it is, in Bryan-Wilson’s opening salvo-cum-admission, purposely an “amonograph or counter-monograph, a feminist queering of the monograph form.” Bryan-Wilson’s task was not an easy one, as Nevelson is hardly unknown or a victim of institutional neglect awaiting a too-satisfied scholar to rescue her from obscurity. Instead, it is almost the artist’s omnipresence that has been the basis of her dismissal; that is, there is a qualitative, rather than quantitative, paucity of interpretation and encounter. Nevelson’s ample reception history is investigated from two distinct perspectives. In the first of the four volumes, Bryan-Wilson confronts the persistent opprobrium in professional assessments of the artist’s work as “overweening, grandiose, staggering, excessive,” that is, as approaching kitsch or bad taste. (“Yuck” is a verbatim quotation from an unnamed scholar.) In repeated condemnations, Nevelson was cast as a sorceress or witch, at once distinctly, hyperbolically feminized and too masculine in her rejection of lived norms. In the last volume, Bryan-Wilson investigates the sculptures’ commitment to the planar facingness of the relief and also fulfills her initial promise “to pry [Nevelson’s] art loose from hewing too tightly to her body”—that is, to contest the submersion of her sculptures in the deluge of images featuring the artist’s exaggerated necklaces, kohl-rimmed eyes, and false lashes. Yet Bryan-Wilson does not lose sight of or dismiss what Nevelson has meant to myriad others, taking seriously the artist’s “amateur” or nonscholarly reception, her status as a beacon or image: feminist and queer homages in art and poetry alike, the reams of “fan art” Bryan-Wilson found in Nevelson’s archives, a commission for a tiny, dollhouse-size Nevelson sculpture, and her uptake as inspiration for elementary-school arts and crafts projects. It is in the middle two volumes that Bryan-Wilson most explicitly models an alternative to the reductive calls to “diversify” art history by merely additive methods. In Color, she takes seriously Krista Thompson and Huey Copeland’s assertion of Blackness as “an ever-present medium, imaginary, and lexicon that is manifest and latent . . . within the history of modern art,” interrogating the relation between Nevelson’s “affirmative theory” of blackness, the hue uniquely foregrounded in her art, and the ascriptive category of Blackness as a lived racial designation (an exploration the author undertakes in crucial dialogue with Adrienne Edwards’s 2016 exhibition SEPTEMBER 2023 57

Above: Louise Nevelson with one of her wall works, location unknown, ca. 1970. Photo: Geoffrey Clements. Right: Louise Nevelson, Untitled, 1985, painted wood, 44 × 22 × 17 1⁄4".

“Blackness in Abstraction”). Bryan-Wilson highlights the artist’s own engagement with the civil-rights movement and antiracist efforts—given explicit sculptural form in Homage to Martin Luther King, Jr., 1974–85, donated to the Studio Museum in Harlem’s permanent collection—but does not let Nevelson off the hook for her paternalistic statements or her quasi-fetishistic collection and appreciation of so-called non-Western objects. Nor does Bryan-Wilson treat her categories as transhistorical, ontological conditions, but rather as historically specific effects of shifting regimes of racialization, including Nevelson’s own uneasy assimilative march—as a Jewish Ukrainian refugee—from exoticized, ethnic “other” to approximate whiteness. In Join, Bryan-Wilson explicitly links the artistic strategy of assemblage to an earlier theorization of queerness as a mode of “improper attachments.” Here, the collaborative labor of Nevelson’s assistants comes to the fore, especially that of Diana MacKown, with whom the artist cohabited for twenty-six years, arousing great speculation about their relationship. Bryan-Wilson acknowledges the desire to fact-check Nevelson’s queerness (which the artist publicly disavowed), to cement it as history, but ultimately rejects a “forensic hunt for biographical certainties.” She relates this acceptance of ambiguity to a thoughtful inquiry into the role of titles as “thin filaments that connect artworks to our interpretations of them,” a tethering that may be especially important in the case of work that rejects figuration. The wider methodological question is: What do we take as meaningfully referential, and why? If I have been tempted to draw too-neat parallels in 58 ARTFORUM

pairing the outer volumes (Drag and Face) and the inner ones (Color and Join), it is perhaps because I have been trained in a discipline that takes comparison as its primary, if sometimes implicit, protocol. Here Bryan-Wilson likewise intervenes. Her comparanda will no doubt ruffle disciplinary feathers and occasion charges of pseudomorphology. The assembled list is hardly unthinking: Precedents include not merely Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, and Ad Reinhardt’s optically thwarting monochromes but also the quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins, the assemblages of Lonnie Holley and Noah Purifoy, the sculptures of Beverly Buchanan and Saloua Raouda Choucair, and the crafts of textile whitework and ceramic blackware. Rather than attempt to legitimize Nevelson’s art by insisting that her formal achievements are equal to those of (white male) artists already firmly in the canon, Bryan-Wilson interrogates legitimacy itself, asking after the constellations shaped by placing Nevelson alongside other historically marginalized stars. Often, her comparisons take cues from, adapt, or even directly interpolate contemporary curatorial sight lines—for instance, she discusses the 2017 exhibition at New York’s Invisible Exports gallery that paired Nevelson and Vaginal Davis. The book is clearly in dialogue with the author’s long-standing interest in questions of labor and with the contradictions of the political commitments at the center of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California Press, 2009), and it continues the querying of hierarchies between fine art and handicraft that animated Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Yet her inclusion of up-to-the-minute texts, exhibitions, and

even personal experiences of climate grief are but a few of the signs that although Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture emerges decisively from decades of expertise, the book is unshy about being marked by its historical moment and desire to experiment in response. I am sympathetic to those who see art history as a discipline irredeemably shackled to its origins in odious social arrangements at the level of both the symbolic (investments in “beauty,” “taste,” and the phantasm of bodily perfectibility) and the material (colonial extraction and dispossession, the gobsmacking accumulation of wealth). These truths are inarguable, as is the discipline’s role as informational handmaiden to the art market (an arrangement that, among its other effects, leads to the privileging of the contemporary above all) and its parlous status within higher education (art-history departments are on the verge of collapse owing to administrative bloat, the demonization of the humanities, and the ongoing casualization of labor). Amid these crises within academia and the ever-accelerating convulsions beyond the ivory tower, it is sometimes hard, quite frankly, to see the point. Yet if we are to continue to do art history, despite everything, we should not make a mockery of the enterprise. I don’t know from babies or bathwater, but it seems an error not to disarticulate the wretched baggage of the discipline from some of its granular methods, which might be harnessed toward different ends. Is it not still the task to stay with the snarling contradictions of an artist’s life as it ricochets against a history not of her own choosing, to fuss over little eddies of texture or the unexpected detail, to tumble down the rabbit warren of paper in acid-free boxes, to look and look again and then return to look some more? These endeavors may better be understood neither as commands issued from on high nor as unthinking supplications at the feet of a colossus idealized as “rigor,” but rather as opportunities to luxuriate in the weirdness that only specificity and intimacy can provide, as well as the site of real pleasures, both intellectual and often embodied, even sensual. Here is the art historian traveling to rural Ukraine, eager with anticipation to familiarize herself with vernacular architecture in the artist’s hometown, Pereyaslav; here she is learning to turn wood on a lathe, letting its friction inform her understanding of a sculpture’s tactility; here she is in the archive, puzzling over a turn of phrase on scrap paper; here she is, for several hours, sitting in the galleries, sketching an untitled sculpture from 1964 (and in the process finding out that the objects to which she had previously been referring as “slotted spoons” were in fact shoe trees). Here is a book that is not only a transformative study of a single artist but also a record of the scholar’s own labor—and her devotion. Those who told us to look closely in order to master had it wrong: We look closer to be undone. n CATHERINE QUAN DAMMAN IS THE LINDA NOCHLIN VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE INSTITUTE OF FINE ARTS, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. SHE IS COMPLETING HER FIRST MONOGRAPH, ON PERFORMANCE AND AFFECTIVE LABOR.

ADRIAN GHENIE

12 October - 24 November 2023

RINUS VAN DE VELDE 31 August - 7 October 2023

VANLAERE LAEREGALLERY GALLERY TIMTIM VAN ANTWERP ANTWERP

Opening Soon

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY ROME

JIM NUTT

SHOULDN’T WE BE MORE CAREFUL? SEPTEMBER 6 - OCTOBER 14, 2023

DAVID NOLAN GALLERY 24 East 81st Street New York NY 10028 davidnolangallery.com

Constantin Brancusi, View of the Studio, 1924 – 1925

September 14 ‑ October 14, 2023

To Will One Thing

Vincent Barré Constantin Brancusi Christian Butterfield Miles Gertler Sondra Meszaros

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

George Platt Lynes Leopold Plotek

LAURA ANDERSON BARBATA

Opening Reception Saturday, September 9, 6 – 8pm

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

Yo no soy digno de que vengas a mí, pero una palabra tuya bastará para sanar mi alma, 1996, cast gesso, cotton thread with incised pearls, unique; installation dimensions variable

September 9 – October 28, 2023

SINGING LEAF

Traces of Abstraction: 1958 – 2020 through October 14, 2023

Young-Il Ahn Vincent Barré Yves Gaucher Jean Albert McEwen Guido Molinari Louise Nevelson Jules Olitski Leopold Plotek Larry Poons Jean-Paul Riopelle Gina Rorai Dana Schutz Françoise Sullivan David Urban

Larry Poons, Herch, 8IG-11, 1981 (detail)

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Anthony Meier 21 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley, CA 94941 1.415.351.1400 • anthonymeier.com

ERICA DEEMAN EMERGING STATES 7 SEPTEMBER –   20 OCTOBER 2023

BOOKS

UP AGAINST THE WALL J. Hoberman on Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real

Ben Morea, Red Eclipse, 1965, house paint on canvas, 56 × 56".

Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action, by Nadja Millner-Larsen, University of Chicago Press, 2023. 288 pages.

THERE ARE MANY PATHS through the radical arts of the 1960s. Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action takes one back alley and turns it into a bustling boulevard. Her central figure: Ben Morea, artist-activist and acolyte of the Living Theatre and of East Village anarchist Murray Bookchin; member of Aldo Tambellini’s anti-commodification mixed-media Group Center; cofounder of the Neo-Dada provocateurs known as Black Mask (their name likely referencing the 1920s pulp magazine as well as eliding Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks); and de facto leader of Up Against

the Wall Motherfuckers (UAW/MF), the notorious “street gang with an analysis.” Born in 1941 and largely raised in Hell’s Kitchen, Morea, a teenage heroin addict and aspiring jazz musician, was serving time in a prison rehabilitation center when an art therapist turned him on to painting. Inspired by the Abstract Expressionists as well as by his readings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Morea based much of his early work—iconic, often monochromatic abstractions—on a single circular form. Like the work of Jordan Belson, these totemic paintings anticipate the hippie modernism that would reach its oppressive apogee in Timothy Leary’s multimedia Death of the Mind (1966) and George Lucas’s movie mythos—but Morea was not exactly a hippie. As a member of Group Center, Morea contributed

to the pioneering mixed-media assault Black Zero. Conceived by Tambellini as a meditation on blackness, the piece was first performed as part of the late-1965 New Cinema Festival organized by Jonas Mekas and John Brockman, an epochal event that was the forerunner of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Slides and films were projected on dancers, canvases, and, in some iterations, an expanding black balloon. A blinding shaft of white light was directed at the audience. Umbra poet Calvin Hernton declaimed his Harlem-riot-inspired “Jitterbugging in the Streets.” Jazz musicians Bill Dixon and Alan Silva improvised on trumpet and bass, while Morea’s “clamorous machines” added to a cacophony described by one reviewer as “a buzz saw gone berserk.” Black Zero’s sensory overload was influenced more by the theories of László Moholy-Nagy than by those of Marshall McLuhan. Experiencing what he called a “theatre of the senses,” Village Voice theater critic Michael Smith was receptive yet confounded. “The eyes can’t cope with the data and the sense of space goes vague; meanwhile wild sounds have deadened the sense of time. It made me high. It also made me sleepy. . . . For audiences at any future performances of ‘Black Zero,’ I think the secret ingredient is LSD.” As mind-blowing as Black Zero may have been, Millner-Larsen has chosen a different entry point to her story: Black Mask’s debut, arguably the decade’s first great example of Conceptual art as political theater. In autumn 1966, with The Death of the Mind installed in the future Fillmore East on Second Avenue and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls drawing record crowds to the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, Black Mask sent out a press release announcing that on Monday, October 10, at 12:30 p.m., they would “close the Museum of Modern Art,” explaining that this action, taken with America embarked upon a “path of total destruction,” signaled the opening of a new front: “We seek a total revolution . . . let the struggle begin.” Obligingly, the spooked museum shut itself down. Morea and his Group Center cohort Ron Hahne and their friend Everett Shapiro simply showed up at moma’s entrance, unfurled a banner with the stenciled message museum closed, and distributed leaflets: “destroy the museums—our struggle cannot be hung on walls.” moma served Morea as the art world’s prime establishment beast. The October 10 Happening had a precedent in Group Center’s 1962 demonstrations outside the museum and would be followed by the critic Gene Swenson’s picketing of the museum with a question-mark sign; the kinetic sculptor Takis’s removal of one of his artworks from a moma show; the Art Workers Coalition’s SEPTEMBER 2023 69

Above: Ron Hahne, Elsa Tambellini, Aldo Tambellini, Ben Morea, Nan Rosenthal, and Otto Piene of Group Center, ca. 1962–63. Right: Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers leaflet, 1968.

sit-in in the sculpture garden; and the Guerilla Art Action Group’s mess-making. Assuming the mantle of Berlin Dada (whose primary spokesman, Dr. Richard Huelsenbeck, was alive and well and living in New York), Black Mask provided a theoretical cover for a broad international tendency that included the No!art group, Destruction artists, the Viennese Actionists, and the more confrontational members of Fluxus (not that they necessarily wanted it). The Black Mask position was made explicit in the first issue of their self-titled periodical, sold for a nickel at an NYU symposium, “What Is Art Today?” Morea’s heckling (“a shattering experience for museum directors and curators,” per the East Village Other) complemented the group’s blunt demand for—as Millner-Larsen puts it— “the complete ruination of bourgeois culture.” (By way of example, Black Mask disrupted a Jean Arp show at a Fifty-Seventh Street gallery and ambushed poet Kenneth Koch with a mock assassination mid-reading at St. Mark’s Church.) Opening in March 1968, moma’s overly formalist, historically obtuse, and apolitical “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage” (by which the museum meant mainly the New York School) was a magnet for NeoDada shenanigans. But by then, further radicalized by the Newark Insurrection, Black Mask had turned to political theater—or rather, instrumentalized political theater—renaming themselves Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers after a line in Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black People!” Black Mask had no Black members; UAW/MF (which identified with the Lower East Side community) did have members of color and thought of itself as sharing a common struggle with the Black Panther Party. For their first act, during the February 1968 New York garbage strike, the Motherfuckers transported uncollected garbage from the Lower East Side up 70 ARTFORUM

to Lincoln Center, where they dumped it into the fountain. UAW/MF took urban detritus as their material, as Tambellini and Ralph Ortiz, not to mention Mark di Suvero and Claes Oldenburg, had in the early ’60s. But the garbage event (which one group member called a “cultural exchange”) was a provocatively empty gesture. The Motherfuckers, as Millner-Larsen points out, “refused to offer a coherent intervention in the name of the disenfranchised.” They identified neither with the striking sanitation workers nor with those in the community working to clean up the city, which that spring included the more civic-minded elements of another newly hatched, LSD-fueled East Village cadre, the Yippies. Where the Yippies sought and thrived on media attention, the Motherfuckers preferred the propaganda of the deed—although their garbage event did provide material for the guerrilla filmmakers of the Newsreel group. A few weeks after the garbage strike, UAW/MF helped precipitate a bloody police riot during the great Grand Central Terminal “Yip-In” with an attack on the station clock, then turned up two days later to razz the swells attending the preview of moma’s Surrealism exhibit. As self-appointed representatives of the Community, the Motherfuckers took some ideas from San Francisco’s millennialist (and mellower) Diggers, operating neighborhood switchboards and crash pads for runaways. Other ideas came from the Black Panthers, themselves masters of political theater. Setting up a community patrol with the playful acronym acid (Action Council for Immediate Defense, or Information Distribution), the Motherfuckers cast themselves, in Millner-Larsen’s phrase, as “protagonists in their own countercultural drama.” The Lower East Side merged with the third world as the Motherfuckers fought turf wars with the local pigs over St. Marks Place. Indeed, Morea inspired his own cartoon avatar, Trashman, a black-clad agent of the

Sixth International created by Spain Rodriguez for the East Village Other in a strip set in a rubble-strewn fascist future Amerikkka. (Despite this homage, UAW/MF received much more favorable coverage and space to do their art thing in Rat, the most political of the underground weeklies.) In April 1968, UAW/MF participated in the Columbia University strike, joining the SDS occupation. Though dismissive of students and critical of SDS, they briefly became—seemingly for their own amusement—a gadfly chapter. Their most dramatic piece, executed during a season of political theater that brought Yayoi Kusama’s continuous naked Happenings, the triumphant production of Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, and the tumultuous return of the Living Theatre, was a bid for community control of Bill Graham’s new rock palace, the Fillmore East. The Battle of the Fillmore, played out over a period of months in late 1968, can be seen as an extended performance intended, as Millner-Larsen notes, to liquidate the idea of performance as “an autonomous cultural product.” Life, not art. Graham prevailed, at the cost of a broken nose, but wild man Morea takes credit for cutting the fence and allowing the hippie masses into Woodstock the following summer. A few months later, he would leave New York for rural New Mexico. Living for years off the grid, he would eventually resume painting. (New York’s White Columns and Boo-Hooray have hosted shows.) Academic throat-clearing aside, Millner-Larsen’s book is lucidly written and densely reasoned. The author doesn’t romanticize Morea’s flame-throwing ideas; she takes them seriously. Up Against the Real is also impressively researched, with a bit more than two hundred pages of text followed by forty-five pages of notes. Given the airborne toxic event of the late ’60s, her book (more than a decade in the works) is a major reclamation project, not least in its final chapter. After detailing the Fillmore saga, the author concludes with a flashback to June 1968 to meditate on Morea’s comrade Valerie Solanas, the ultimate art-world terrorist, and her oneperson group, scum (the Society for Cutting Up Men). Like Dada or Black Mask, scum was less a political organization than an art project, albeit one with actual casualties. Motherfucker posters parodied the longrunning Famous Artists School ad that attached Norman Rockwell’s signature to the slogan “We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw,” substituting a holstered revolver for the avuncular Rockwell. The Motherfuckers stashed guns but did not use them. Solanas did. Solanas’s attack on Warhol (an artist Morea loathed) was for him the ultimate Dada act. Black Mask staged a fake assassination; Solanas attempted a real one. Morea wrote a paean—“the camp master slain by the slave / and america’s white plastic cathedral is ready to burn”—that he distributed outside moma, where “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage” was enjoying its final few days. Dead end. n J. HOBERMAN IS WRITING A BOOK ABOUT UNDERGROUND MOVIES AND NEW YORK IN THE 1960S.

WORKSITE Sept 8 - Oct 21, 2023

Sabrina Ratté Reality-Settings

Sept 23 - Nov 6, 2022

21 Cortlandt Alley, 2nd floor, New York

+1 917 262 0233

www.arsenalcontemporary.com

Caroline Monnet, Mitik, 2023, Maple, lacquer, 35 x 18 x 11.57 in.

Caroline Monnet

ANIMALS’ READING ROOM September 7 – October 28 Opening reception on September 9, 4 – 6pm

Rebel Splendor, the 2023 monograph and 25-year survey of the work of Kim Anno, released in conjunction with the exhibition.

1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, California +1 415·433·2710   [email protected]

KHALIF TAHIR THOMPSON WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES

DUBAI LUXEMBOURG PA R I S

W W W. Z I D O U N - B O S S U Y T . C O M

Cof fee and Cigarettes, 2023. Oil, pastel, acr ylic, pleather, fabric, handmade paper, abaca, cotton, papyrus, tissue and construction paper on canvas. 207.5 x 149.5 cm (81 3/4 x 58 7/8 in)

28 SEPTEMBER - 11 NOVEMBER 2023 LUXEMBOURG

VAULT

DRAWING RESTRAINT Denise Koller on Ferdinand Hodler

Left: Ferdinand Hodler, study for Blossoming, 1911–17, graphite, oil, paper, collage, 29 7⁄8 × 39 1⁄2". Above: Ferdinand Hodler, study for View into Infinity, 1913–15, oil on tracing paper mounted on paper and cardboard, 23 1⁄2 × 19 3⁄4".

IN 1985, Joseph Beuys offered his thoughts on the quintessential Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853– 1918): “At bottom, he was a constructivist,” remarked the German artist. Beuys’s surprisingly apt characterization echoes a comment made seventy-four years earlier by Hodler’s contemporary Wassily Kandinsky. To him, Hodler’s work exemplified the “constructive aspirations” of painting, his compositions being “built” (gebaut) out of “the feeling of calm, the calm repetition, the quite uniform distribution.” Indeed, over the years, artists as temperamentally diverse as Puvis de Chavannes, Sophie Täuber-Arp, Louise Lawler, and Thomas Hirschhorn have engaged with the “constructed” nature—the distinct formal solidity—of Hodler’s paintings. And despite the fact that Hodler almost exclusively worked in twodimensional media and never used the word construction to describe his compositions, his picture-making

was a hands-on process, one of componere, a piecingtogether of parts. It is this understanding of composition as an act of literally building a picture that is at the heart of the exhibition “Ferdinand Hodler: Drawings—Selections from the Musée Jenisch Vevey,” organized by Isabelle Dervaux and now on view at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum. In addition to providing an account of Hodler’s working practice, revealing how his motifs are composed, the show offers Hodler as an artist for American audiences, fostering a certain “becoming public,” an Öffentlichwerden, of Switzerland’s most acclaimed modern painter. Hodler was internationally recognized during his lifetime as one of Europe’s great artists, compared to Cézanne and van Gogh, yet he fell largely into obscurity outside of Switzerland following his death in 1918.

Hodler’s drawing process was an open, ongoing search for the conceptual nucleus, or concetto, of his art.

Though regarded as a key figure of Symbolist and Expressionist painting, Hodler has remained on the periphery of public discourse, especially in the Anglosphere. In the United States, relatively few museums hold finished paintings by the artist in their collections. The exhibition at the Morgan seeks to rectify this absence but shifts the focus from Hodler the painter to Hodler the draftsman, presenting his psychologically charged, rigidly formalist oeuvre through some of his most private works. Hodler considered himself a painter above all and made drawings only in the service of this medium, producing thousands of works on paper over the five decades of his career. Calling his compositional sketches a “shorthand of ideas” (sténogrammes d’idées), he saw these drawings as working tools; for most of his life, he didn’t exhibit or sell them. Hodler’s drawing process was an open, ongoing search for the conceptual nucleus, or concetto, of his art; Oskar Bätschmann has described this method as “orbit[ing] in spirals around his paintings.” While not a strategic undertaking as traditional academic training would have it (which understood the development of a composition as a deliberate, step-bySEPTEMBER 2023 79

Clockwise, from top: Ferdinand Hodler, study for Day, ca. 1880–90s, graphite, pen, india ink, and wash on paper mounted on paper, 9 1⁄8 × 15 3⁄8". Ferdinand Hodler, Portrait of Valentine Godé-Darel Dying, 1915, charcoal, graphite, and white chalk on paper, 12 3⁄4 × 19 3⁄4". Ferdinand Hodler, fragment from a version of Day, 1899, oil on canvas, 44 1⁄8 × 25 3⁄8". 80 ARTFORUM

step procedure), his process was anything but chaotic. Hodler cared deeply about accurate representation and order within his art, and his close study and observation of nature went hand in hand with his use of measurement to enhance the precision of the human eye. (So obsessed with mathematical exactitude was the artist that he even took the measurements of his dying lover.) In a multistep process that grew increasingly elaborate over the course of his career, Hodler’s drawing drew, as it were, from different media and materials, iterating forms and details until he arrived at a final composition. Repetition was crucial to this method, as it was to Hodler’s artistic philosophy more broadly, which he theorized under the term “parallelism” (parallélisme). Based on a structure of rhythmic repetition known since antiquity that he encountered in the art writings of Charles Blanc, parallelism was, for him, “any form of repetition” manifested in the multiplication and

symmetrical arrangement of his motifs. The simplicity inherent in this concept is most apparent in the streamlined nature of his drawings. Many consist of just a few lines and stick figures. Indeed, through this elemental austerity, Hodler aspired to expose a universal order of the cosmos, a “unity” (unité) underlying all of life. Line was indispensable to this visual essentializing. As he prepared his compositions, Hodler would first study and sketch from nature, often using a framing device or so-called Dürer pane (described by Albrecht Dürer as a pane of glass deployed as a drawing apparatus to quickly capture the outline of a scene). He would then transfer his sketches via tracing paper, revising and manipulating them, multiplying them further, often cutting out pieces and gluing them together in collage-like assemblies. Given that most of his paintings are monumental in size, he would also enlarge his figures with grids, which are often still visible in his finished works. Using a compositional grid allowed Hodler to geometrize nature, reduce its three dimensions to a pictorial sign, and render this sign on the two-dimensional surface of his support. The grid, an inherently modernist device, thus severed his art’s links to naturalism and informed a certain figurative abstraction that theorists like Peter Bürger identified in Hodler’s work. In their provisional state, Hodler’s drawings stand in stark contrast to the highly finished paintings; schematic lineaments of pencil and charcoal confront highly detailed, ornamental shapes of vibrant color. While his canvases present themselves as being carefully composed, the drawings show a greater degree of density, energy, and control, inviting dynamism into the picture. As a direct trace of the artist’s hand, drawing has long been associated with a certain presentism. Hodler’s compatriot and contemporary Paul Klee spoke of the drawn line’s instantaneous character: “An active line that strolls along freely, a walk for a walk’s sake. The agent is a point, shifting its position forward.” The immediacy of the drawn line persists in the moment of its revelation. As Norman Bryson wrote in reference to Klee, drawing “always exists in the present tense, in the time of its unfolding, the ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward.” The painted image, by contrast, presents the viewer with a completed object created in the past, with time brought to a standstill inside the frame: “If painting presents Being, the drawn line presents Becoming.” Looking at Hodler’s drawings at the Morgan alongside eight of his paintings thus offers an opportunity to engage with his oeuvre in a new way; by undoing his works’ completeness, the show opens the gaze and draws the works closer to the viewer’s present. The exhibition thereby provides an active rehearsal of Hodler’s compositional method, incorporating the audience into the very process of building a picture. The construction of meaning takes place in the moment of reception. n “Ferdinand Hodler: Drawings—Selections from the Musée Jenisch Vevey” is on view thorugh October 1 at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York. DENISE KOLLER IS A WRITER AND ART HISTORIAN IN CAMBRIDGE, MA. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

Elle Pérez September–October Xavier Cha October–November G. Peter Jemison November–January

Image: Elle Pérez 47canal.us

47 CANAL 291 Grand Street, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10002

DA TORINO Giorgio Griffa, Giulio Paolini, Gilberto Zorio (works)

7 September – 10 November 2023 Opening 7 September 2023, 6 – 9 pm Rue Isidore Verheyden 2

T +32 (0)2 512 92 95

b-1050 Brussels

[email protected]

Tuesday – Saturday: 11 am – 6 pm

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Albert Baronian

QUINQUAGESIMUM Lynda Benglis, Alain Biltereyst, Marie José Burki, Jo Delahaut, Daniel Dezeuze, Lionel Estève, Michel Frère, Max Frintrop, Gilbert & George, Tony Grand, Olaf Holzapfel, Bernard Joubert, Bernd Lohaus, Joseph Marioni, Xavier Mary, Mario Merz, Olivier Mosset, Matt Mullican, Richard Nonas, Giulio Paolini, Charles Sandison, Jan Schoonhoven, Alain Séchas, Philippe Van Snick, Takis, Mitja Tusek, Richard Tuttle, Philippe Vandenberg, Charlotte vander Borght, Claude Viallat, Stanley Whitney, Gilberto Zorio and Yves Zurstrassen

6 September – 25 November 2023 Opening 6 September, 5 – 8 pm

Rue Borrens 32

b-1050 Brussels

THE SEA WITHIN ME

September 16 — October 28, 2023

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

Rodney McMillian Landscape in Red September 2 - October 21, 2023

1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com

ON SITE

MEASURES OF FREEDOM Suzanne Hudson on Blythe Bohnen WRITING IN 1973 for Art International, Douglas Crimp reviewed Blythe Bohnen at New York’s A.I.R. (Artists in Residence Inc.) Gallery, the landmark women’s cooperative that opened in 1972, of which the artist was a founding member. That same year, she completed her MFA at Hunter College and was included in the “Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Brushstroke,” the near-taxonomic series that Bohnen had started in 1968—and which included 48 Brushstrokes, 1971, a matrix of gesture, instantiated and recalled, that was reproduced on the announcement for A.I.R.’s first season of programs—was abandoned by the artist shortly after its completion four years later. In what became a common point of differentiation, Crimp invoked Roy Lichtenstein’s stylized renderings of brushstrokes from 1965–66 to argue for Bohnen’s eschewal of the sign in favor of its heuristic function as “an object of investigation.” If Lichtenstein registered the passage of expressionistic cipher into hard-edge, commercial vernacular (he sourced his smears from “The Painting,” a tale printed in the October 1964 issue of the comic book Strange Suspense Stories), he retained its iconicity as differently autographic. In “Notes on Brushstrokes,” an unpublished document from the early 1970s, Bohnen described an extra-analytic activity twinning circumstance and consequence, involving “the forms created by brushstrokes in reaction to a given situation . . . the nature of human response . . . [and] ideas of relationship [that] are based on the feeling that every act, no matter how freely conceived, really takes place within a fairly restricted set of possibilities.” Shown again at A.I.R. this month—almost a year after Bohnen’s death in October 2022—some twenty works from the series, in storage for half a century, will demonstrate the breadth of her project and the variability of her tools: particularly, the widths of the brushes she used, in conjunction with the contingencies of pressure and tilt from her body more generally. One can trace in “Process Is Life,” curated by David Hall, Bohnen’s push through initial allover compositions that acknowledge the impossible proximity of Jackson Pollock (his revival in the context of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective was well under way when Bohnen moved to New York from Boston in 1967). In these works, we see the artist driving paint from edge to edge, stopped only by the physical boundary of the support. They are rich with dense, wriggling fields and competing striations that arc or turn in on themselves. Other pieces center single, serpentine outlines or enumerate, in tidy rows, more atomized traces of the movements—the artist’s disciplined private choreography, trained by Pollock and increasingly conversant

with the examples of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer—of a subject shaping matter. No longer overlapping, the strokes in smaller studies (such as Brushstrokes Navigating a Quadrant Grid, ca. 1970) become holistic entities, each gray nub a ridged and palpably sinuous mark. The grid holds these individuations in place but does not so much rationalize them as admit to its own status as external as well as internalized restraint, a legitimizing construction against which such articulations have come to exist. This lattice is a bulwark in trials like Brushstroke Series, Silhouettes, ca. 1970, which Bohnen took into the shower to abrade its pigments after the acrylic had begun to congeal but before it had fully set. Heavily rinsed, the works feature evanescent silhouettes that Jacqueline

Moss, writing in a piece with an explicitly forensic title, “Anatomy of a Brushstroke,” would describe in 1974 as “strikingly ghostlike.” Seen at close range, these sluiced surfaces are caught between emergence and disappearance, portending forms so delicate that they seem on the verge of evaporation as they steadfastly cling to the ground. Even absent Bohnen’s language of causality, these pieces model the ways in which asemic marks nevertheless come to signify and reveal themselves as already imbricated in a durational, as well as creator-driven, narrative of making. The serial application of new paint across the rows threatened to compromise the viability of marks already executed and thus the integrity of the whole. Coating and dousing and repeating the cycle as she moved across a given piece meant courting failure with each transition. Indeed, for Bohnen, these paintings were not characterized by some wanton spontaneity but were, in her words, “isolated irrevocable choices.” Despite this, she did scale up—with curator Marcia Tucker’s encouragement, one work grew to an epic six by eight feet, lined with 1,200 singular figures—in a performance that Bohnen justifiably described as “high

For Bohnen, these paintings were not characterized by some wanton spontaneity but were, in her words, “isolated irrevocable choices.”

Blythe Bohnen, 48 Brushstrokes, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 96". From the series “Brushstroke,” 1968–72. SEPTEMBER 2023 87

Above: Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Spatter, 1966, oil and Magna on canvas, 68 × 80".

Above, right: Blythe Bohnen, untitled, ca. 1968, acrylic on paper, 6 1⁄8 × 12 1⁄4". From the series “Brushstroke,” 1968–72.

risk.” Once in place, though, the strokes—there and across the series, but most cannily in these last efforts— serve as evidence of this course, like mnemonics chronicling, or literally indexing, the passage of time and our implacable distance from so many originary moments. As it happened, with the culmination of the “Brushstroke,” Bohnen left painting behind. One might read this foreclosure in relation to certain period prohibitions, especially those then consolidating within Artforum. (In an issue from 1975 devoted to painting’s assumed obsolescence, artists were exhorted to work in “any material but paint.”) Bohnen was well aware of this milieu; the magazine’s offices were on the first two floors of the building at 205 Mulberry Street, where she lived with the artist Alan Sonfist, the pair acting as the publication’s landlords. In 1976, Lawrence Alloway penned a text on her in these pages, where he highlighted a selection of graphite drawings that Bohnen had been making since 1973—featuring horizontal, vertical, or diagonal bars that the artist torqued from within—to positively argue for her engagement with “process and kinesthesia[, which] make the term ‘abstract’ seem marginal now.” Yet he did return to the unit of the stroke, and the “Brushstroke” brackets the essay. He sees in them the “continuity of gesture and image” that courses 88 ARTFORUM

Right: Blythe Bohnen, Vertical and Horizontal Painted Gestures on Glass, 1984, thermogram and acrylic on glass, 36 × 44".

through her various modes of working. In any case, alongside the painting, Bohnen had already begun to experiment with an array of media. In the early ’70s alone, she was making drawings on film, photographs of pencil dots enlarged by microscopes, and “thermograms,” works that captured the artist’s movements via medical-imaging machines as she drew on sheets of Mylar. Bohnen’s arrest of motion beyond the iconography of the stroke became focal enough that in 1984, a group of life-size gelatin silver prints begun in 1974 (selfportraits the artist made using slow exposures to facilitate blurring and distortion) were paired with comparatively crisp movement studies by Eadweard Muybridge at New York’s Light Gallery. Still, the lessons of the “Brushstroke” series remained central throughout Bohnen’s oeuvre in their more direct keying of self to deed. The works importantly attest to how starkly she grasped not only formalism as a putative by-product of then-ubiquitous “process,” but the institutions of its rebarbative if less acknowledged conditioning. Nineteen seventy-two was also the year of the grid— Bohnen’s primary structure too—what with Suzanne Delehanty’s exhibition “Grids,” at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, and John Elderfield’s Artforum essay titled “Grids” (a response to Lucy

Lippard’s characterization, in the ICA catalogue, of the construction as “merely an armature” for dissimilar means and ends). By the end of the ’70s, Rosalind Krauss had offered her influential summary, likewise titled “Grids,” writing of the framework’s foundational role within modernism as it “declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic.” Bohnen, however, thought otherwise. Evoking theorist C. Wright Mills’s famous diagnosis of the crisis of the “sociological imagination”—the mistaking of personal limitations for broader structural circumscriptions—another unpublished ca. 1974 manuscript from the artist, “Comment on Women’s Work,” reads, “Moreover . . . formal dynamics may have evolved out of grappling with feminist issues. Life experienced as a woman may have been generalized into art that is expressive of confinement, conflict or other aspects of women’s experience.” Even the thermograms, for example, were inspired by the thermograph’s initial application: breast-cancer screening. But the larger point is a recognition of the impossibility of autonomy in grids, as elsewhere. In Bohnen’s tracings of a life, put down and washed away yet still tenaciously present, another kind of sovereignty remains. n SUZANNE HUDSON IS A PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY AND FINE ARTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

AUCTION NEW YORK 19 SEPTEMBER EXHIBITION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 14–18 SEPTEMBER 1334 YORK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10021 ENQUIRIES +1 212 606 7332 [email protected] Estimate Upon Request © SOTHEBY’S, INC. 2023

SCAN TO LEARN MORE

AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND AUSTRALIA ADELAIDE CONTEMPORARY EXPERIMENTAL Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace, Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide 5000 Tel: 61 8 8211 7505 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ace.gallery

Until October 1 Brad Darkson: Ruled Us, Ruled Us, Ruled Us (Museum of Economic Botany, Adelaide Botanic Garden) September 2 – October 28 Peter Waples-Crowe: PRIDE

STATION 9 Ellis Street, South Yarra, Melbourne, VIC 3141 91 Campbell Street, Surry Hills, Sydney, 2010 Tel: 61 3 9826 2470 (Melbourne) Tel: 61 2 9055 4688 (Sydney) E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.stationgallery.com.au

Until September 23 Adam Lee: Dry Bones, Crying Stones (Sydney) September 2–30 Dane Lovett (Melbourne) September 2–30 Michael Staniak (Melbourne) September 30 – October 21 Zac Langdon-Pole (Sydney) October 7 – November 4 Isadora Vaughan (Melbourne) October 28 – November 18 Reko Rennie (Sydney)

ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY 185 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, VIC 3000 Tel: 61 3 9654 6131 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.annaschwartzgallery.com

Until September 16 Louisa Bufardeci: holding several threads at once, figuring a future together Until September 23 Amrita Hepi: Straight torque, twin series Until December 16 Mike Parr

FINE ARTS, SYDNEY 23 Hampden Street, Paddington, Sydney, NSW 2021 Tel: 61 2 9361 6200 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.finearts.sydney

Until October 21 Francis Upritchard: Sydney Scallop November – December Simon Denny

WHITE RABBIT 30 Balfour Street, Chippendale, NSW 2008 Tel: 61 2 8399 2867 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.whiterabbitcollection.org

Until November 12 Group Show: I Am The People

NEW ZEALAND TE PĀTAKA TOI ADAM ART GALLERY Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington Gate 3, Kelburn Parade, Wellington 6140 Tel: 64 4 463 5229 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.adamartgallery.nz

Until October 29 Back of House

GERTRUDE CONTEMPORARY 21-31 High Street, Preston South, Melbourne, VIC 3072 Tel: 61 3 9480 0068 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gertrude.org.au

September 16 – October 29 Sarah Contos: In the Belly of Mary Shelley September 16 – October 29 Lou Hubbard: Pleasure First

GERTRUDE GLASSHOUSE 44 Glasshouse Road, Collingwood, Melbourne, VIC 3066 Tel: 61 3 9480 0068 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.gertrude.org.au

Until September 2 Mia Boe

ROSLYN OXLEY9 GALLERY 8 Soudan Lane, Paddington, Sydney, NSW 2021 Tel: 61 2 9331 1919 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.roslynoxley9.com.au

Until September 23 Tom Polo Until September 23 Sarah Contos September 29 – October 28 Tracey Moffatt

DUNEDIN PUBLIC ART GALLERY 30 the Octagon, Dunedin 9016 Tel: 64 3 474 3240 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.dunedin.art.museum

Until November 12 Cora-Allan: Encountering Aotearoa Until November 12 Taloi Havini: Shared Aspirations Until November 12 Suite 2023: Kate Fitzharris, Madison Kelly, Small Measures (Jane Venis and Hannah Joynt), and Motoko Kikkawa

MICHAEL LETT 312 Karangahape Road, Newton, Auckland 1010 3 East Street, Newton, Auckland 1010 Tel: 64 9 309 7848 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.michaellett.com

Until October 7 Imogen Taylor September 13 – October 14 Ian Scott

Rise Above Flower, Version 1, 2021

2 Orchard Turn # 02-16 ION Orchard, Singapore 238801

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+65 6735 2618

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[email protected]

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operagallery.com

New York Miami Bal Harbour Aspen London Paris Madrid Monaco Geneva Dubai Beirut Hong Kong Singapore Seoul

Canada | East Hampton

HARPER’S East Hampton

98 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 212 925 4631 [email protected] www.canadanewyork.com Thursday – Sunday 12–5

87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 631 324 1131 [email protected] www.harpersbooks.com Thursday – Saturday 10–6

Until September 23 Lily Ludlow

David Lewis

Until September 13 Group Show: Hyegyeong Choi, Chloe West, Lumin Wakoa, Cece Phillips, Jiwoo Kim, Michele Fletcher, and Anastasia Koma Until September 13 Yesiyu Zhao

53 The Circle, East Hampton, NY 11937 [email protected] www.davidlewisgallery.com

Until September 3 Kan Seidel

Dia Bridgehampton 23 Corwith Avenue, Bridgehampton, NY 11932 Tel: 631 537 1476 [email protected] www.diaart.org Thursday – Sunday 12–6

Please contact gallery for information.

The Drawing Room 55 Main Street, 2nd Floor, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 631 324 5016 [email protected] www.drawingroom-gallery.com Thursday – Monday 11–5, and by appointment mid-week

Please contact gallery for information.

Eric Firestone Gallery 4 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 62 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 631 604 2386 [email protected] www.ericfirestonegallery.com Monday – Sunday 10–6

Please contact gallery for information.

Halsey McKay Gallery 79a Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 631 604 5770 [email protected] www.halseymckay.com

September 2 – October 16 Martha Tuttle September 2 – October 16 Joseph Hart and Johannes Vanderbeek

Hauser & Wirth | Southampton 9 Main Street, Southampton, NY 11968 [email protected] www.hauserwirth.com

Until September 30 Two Pieces in the Shape of a Pear

Jack Hanley Gallery 98 Newtown Lane, East Hampton NY 11937 Tel: 631 604-6664 [email protected] www.jackhanley.com

Until September 4 Chris Johanson and Johanna Jackson

Parrish Art Museum 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, NY 11976 Tel: 631 283 2118 [email protected] www.parrishart.org Monday and Thursday 11–5, Friday 11–8, Saturday and Sunday 11–5 Until October 15 James Brooks: A Painting is a Real Thing Until October 30 JR: Les Enfants D’Ouranos Until February 4, 2024 Artists Choose Parrish, Part II October 29 – February 18, 2024 Artists Choose Parrish, Part III

Pollock-Krasner House 830 Springs-Fireplace Road, East Hampton, NY 11937 Tel: 631 324 4929 www.pkhouse.org Open May – October. Guided tours and virtual reality tours by reservation Thursday – Sunday. Reserve on our website. Check our online calendar for lectures, workshops, and special events.

Until October 29 Lee Krasner: Portrait in Green

The Ranch 8 Old Montauk Highway, Montauk, NY 11954 [email protected] www.theranch.art Guided tours by reservation.

September 16 – October 28 Drunk vs. Stoned 3

Tripoli Gallery

Hamptons

26 Ardsley Road, Wainscott, NY 11975 (Cross Street: East Gate Road from Montauk Highway) Tel: 631 377 3715 [email protected] www.tripoligallery.com Wednesday – Saturday 10–6, Sunday 12–5, closed Tuesday

Until September 18 A Magical Day at Ditch: Katherine Bernhardt, Katherine Bradford, Vaughn Davis Jr, Sabra Moon Elliot, Travis Fish, Jason Fox, Marcus Jahmal, Yung Jake, Deborah Katon, Dan Mccarthy, Scott Reeder, Adrianne Rubenstein, and Jerry Wilkerson September 23 – October 23 Lauren West: Down Here

BLYTHE BOHNEN EXHIBITION Process is Life Gestural and Conceptual Process Brushstroke Paintings 1968 – 1972

155 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, New York 11201 www.airgallery.org September 9 – October 8, 2023

Untitled, Brushstroke series, c. 1972 Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60"

THE ESTATE OF BLYTHE BOHNEN (1940–2022) IS REPRESENTED BY DAVID HALL GALLERY

555 Washington Street, Wellesley, MA 02482 | www.davidhallgallery.com | 781-235-0955

KIM COGAN

HASHIMOTO CONTEMPORARY S A N F R A N C I S C O | OCTOBER 2023

TOP TEN

CAConrad Photo: Augusto Cascales

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of 9 books, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They also received a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize that year, as well as a Creative Capital grant in 2019, a Lambda Literary Award in 2018, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Literature in 2011. Conrad also makes art, with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal. Their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. A new collection of Conrad’s poetry, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, is forthcoming from Wave Books and UK Penguin in 2024.

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YOKO ONO, “YES, I’M A WITCH” (RYKODISC, 1997) One of my favorite (Soma)tic poetry rituals is to lay out food next to a speaker, then cover everything with a basket. After this, I pile the basket with blankets and pillows. I then blast this Ono track, so that her transformative words penetrate and vibrate inside the food: “Yes, I’m a witch, I’m a bitch / I don’t care what you say . . . each time we don’t say what we want to say, we’re dying.” Once the song has filled my meal, I slowly chew and digest the music while writing, remembering her beautiful threat: “I’m not gonna die for you / You might as well face the truth / I’m gonna stick around / For quite a while!”

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1 1. Cover of Yoko Ono’s A Story (Rykodisc, 1997). 2. Objects given to CAConrad by crows, Seattle, January 27, 2022. 3. Jason Dodge, Cut a Door in the Wolf (detail), 2021, mixed media. Installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. Photo: Piercarlo Quecchia, DSL Studio. 4. Laraaji, New York, January 12, 2023. Photo: Balarama Heller/The New York Times/Redux.

CROW GIFTS During the Covid-19 lockdown, I was in Seattle, the empire of the crows. I fed them fruit, nuts, and crackers from a plastic hummus container I nailed to a window ledge. The birds came all day, different tribes moving over their city, terrorizing cats and humans who wronged them. One began to bring me gifts and would stay on the ledge to eat lunch with me, allowing me to stroke its beak. The biologist Lynn Margulis flew in the face of the neo-Darwinists because she believed evolution’s most significant steps forward have been through interspecies cooperation. I feel her theory in my body, and I wonder if you do, too.

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JASON DODGE, CUT A DOOR IN THE WOLF (MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART OF ROME, 2021–22) The next time you find a listing for a Jason Dodge exhibition, please see it! The title of this site-specific installation for macro was especially fitting, considering the tale of Remus and Romulus, the mythical founders of Italy’s capital, who suckled at the teats of a wolf mother. Dodge created multiple dimensions of sensory experience with a wide assortment of materials—including herbs, flowers, plastic debris, and old lottery cards—which littered the floor of the space, producing a crunching sound as you walked over them (elsewhere in the show were stacks of soap and desiccated palm fronds, accentuating the work’s overall strangeness). I left this presentation, which pressed itself deep inside me, with remarkably changed footsteps.

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LARAAJI, SEGUE TO INFINITY (NUMERO GROUP, 2023) I challenged myself to listen to one of Laraaji’s songs for 8 consecutive nights with the lights turned off. I made myself comfortable but very alert to the artist’s footsteps up the road to the gods. You should do the same with a friend! Each song is about 18 to 24 minutes—just long enough to allow for a trip into unexpected realms, which your party can return to later for a much broader conversation. Doing this will make your friendship even weirder and more beautiful. Laraaji offers a sweet and lasting joy. SEPTEMBER 2023 95

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MAX DAVIES, INVENTIONS FOR BROKEN & PREPARED GUITAR (SELFRELEASED, 2021) Each of the 9 songs on this album is titled “Invention.” The energy entering the tail of the number 9 flows up and circulates within the crown chakra, producing an epiphany. The album is a little under 27 minutes and loops beautifully. I’ve listened to it while driving across Montana; the music practically carves itself onto the land. Nikola Tesla said, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration”—Davies’s astonishing soundscape feeds and is fed by all three of these elements.

5. Max Davies, Boulder, CO, 2014. Photo: Toni Oswald. 6. Gwendolyn Brooks unveiling the sign for her namesake park, Topeka, KS, 1996. Photo: The CapitalJournal-USA Today Network. 7. Konza Prairie, Flint Hills, KS, 2011. 8. Melissa Auf der Maur at Basilica Hudson, NY, 2014. Photo: Eve Alpert. 9. Photo: Alamy.

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GWENDOLYN BROOKS PARK IN TOPEKA, KANSAS “Poetry is life distilled,” said Gwendolyn Brooks. When driving across the United States, stop in Topeka to read the work of this great poet in her park. As she once wrote, “Because the world is at the window / we cannot wonder very long.” Read her poems with those you love or for those who cannot be with you.

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THE FLINT HILLS OF KANSAS The Flint Hills are the last patch of original tallgrass prairie that used to cover much of America. In a very short time, European colonizers chewed up the land for corn and wheat, littering it with barbed wire, shopping malls, condos, and endless highways and destroying much of the terrain and many of the creatures that once thrived here. Watch­ ing the sun rise over the Flint Hills is one of my favorite things to do—I listen to the sparrows, buntings, and bobwhite quail call to the new day. Your imagination will always remember this place once you have visited it.

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BASILICA HUDSON The cofounder of this unique space in New York’s Hudson Valley—which is dedicated to the presentation of innovative music, film, and performance—is the rock legend Melissa Auf der Maur, who is also the venue’s director. I was fortunate to hear her perform there one night, playing her haunting song “22 Below” (2010). Throughout the gorgeous weave of electric guitar and percussion, she chanted, “I’m your healer, and you’re mine.”

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THE NUMBER 27 Some numbers hold us so continuously that we can live a lifetime without noticing them. The moon takes about 27 days to circle around Earth, and the average menstruation cycle is roughly as long. There are 27 channels to God in the Kabballah. A little over 27 percent of our planet’s surface is covered by land, while male ejaculate can travel up to 27 miles per hour. In Sanskrit, 27 is a Harshad number, and Harshad means “joy giver.” There are 27 bones in my hand, making the letters and words in my notebook.

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ILIASSA SEQUIN (1940–2019) She is one of my favorite poets, and almost no one has heard of her, because she refused to publish a book in her life­ time. Her husband, Ken Sequin, beautifully edited her very first volume, Collected Complete Poems, which was put out by Grey Suit Editions in 2021. “Would you confound—in dual languor / another artifice of sapped inventions, interred smiles // as if the moon miscarried / her inanimate yellow,” reads one of her mysterious and beautiful verses. If you love poetry, let Sequin into your life! n

HONG KONG DAVID ZWIRNER

MOU PROJECTS

5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central +852 2119 5900 [email protected] davidzwirner.com Tue – Sat 11am to 7pm

202, The Factory, 1 Yip Fat Street, Wong Chuk Hang +852 3709 6884 [email protected] mouprojects.com Tue – Sat 11am to 7pm

September 14 – October 28 Frank Walter: Pastorale

EMPTY GALLERY 18 & 19/F, Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan +852 2563 3396 [email protected] emptygallery.com Tue – Sat 11am to 7pm

September 2 – November 4 Cici Wu: Belonging and Difference

GAGOSIAN 7/F, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central +852 2151 0555 [email protected] gagosian.com Tue – Sat 11am to 7pm

Please contact gallery for information.

HANART TZ GALLERY 2/F, Mai On Industrial Building, 17-21 Kung Yip Street, Kwai Chung +852 2526 9019 [email protected] hanart.com Mon – Fri 10am to 6:30pm, Sat 10am to 6pm

Until September 2 Christian Schwarzwald and Kurt Chan: To Paint the Written World

HAUSER & WIRTH G/F, 8 Queen’s Road Central +852 3958 7188 [email protected] hauserwirth.com Tue – Sat 11am to 7pm

Coming soon in 2024.

KIANG MALINGUE 馬凌 12 & 13/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai +852 2810 0317 [email protected] kiangmalingue.com By appointment only

Please contact gallery for information.

MASSIMODECARLO Shop 03-205A & 205B & 206, 2nd Floor, Barrack Block, Central Police Station, No. 10 Hollywood Road, Central +852 2613 8062 [email protected] massimodecarlo.com Tue – Fri 10:30am to 7pm, Sat 11am to 7pm

Until October 21 Pietro Roccasalva: Recent Paintings

Until September 9 Pocono Zhao Yu: Pomegranate September 16 – October 14 Sung Jik Yang

PACE GALLERY 12/F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road Central +852 2608 5065 [email protected] pacegallery.com Tue – Sat 11am to 7pm

Until September 7 Chewing Gum VI: Yto Barrada, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Mao Yan, Robert Rauschenberg, Li Songsong, Lee Ufan, Brent Wadden, Xiao Yu, and Zhang Xiaogang

PERROTIN HONG KONG 807, K11 ATELIER Victoria Dockside, 18 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui +852 3758 2180 [email protected] perrotin.com Tue – Sat 11am to 7pm

September 1 – October 14 Christiane Pooley

TAI KWUN CONTEMPORARY JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Central [email protected] taikwun.hk Tue – Sun 11am to 7pm

September 27 – November 19 Killing TV October 13 – November 26 Maria Hassabi: I’ll Be Your Mirror

WHITE CUBE 50 Connaught Road, Central +852 2592 2000 [email protected] whitecube.com Tue – Sat 11am to 7pm

Until September 9 New Moroism September 21 – November 11 Julie Curtiss: Bitter Apples

ALiVE! Silver Slipper Saloon Salon. Sunday, 10/1/23. 9 am – 1 pm. Bathroom Rugs, Ironing Boards, Asst‘d Designer Bags, Mother‘s Teapots, Large-format Polaroids, 1980s – 2000s, shot at SF/NYC 20 x 24 STUDIOs & elsewhere.

S E P T E M 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

September 14 – November 4 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

September 7 – October 21 Richard T. Walker: Never Here / Always There

September 9 – 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

September 9 – 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

September 8 – October 21 Roger Eberhard: Escapism

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

September 8 – October 21 Kathrin Linkersdorff: Fairies

Roger Eberhard, Wave, 2022, archival pigment print, 211⁄4 × 29 3 ⁄5". Courtesy Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin.

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

September 8 – October 7 Elle Pérez October 19 – November 11 Xavier Cha

September 5 – October 7 Austin Martin White: Lost in the Sauce

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.

September 5 – October 7 MaryKate Maher: Beyond the Mauve Zone

FOXY PRODUCTION

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

Until September 16 Sondra Perry: Part 1 September 30 – November 11 Lisa Alvarado November 18 – January 6, 2024 Olga Balema

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

September 5 – October 22 Erin Calla Watson

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

September 15 – October 28 Sidsel Meineche Hansen September 15 – October 28 Marsha Pels, Jean Baptiste-Boyer, and Chris Lloyd

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

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

September 13 – October 21 Sahana Ramakrishnan: An Ocean of Time

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

Until September 9 Jeff Canham: LUSH Until September 9 Madeleine Tonzi and Keya Tama September 16 – October 7 Scott Albrecht: The Shadow Of The Sun

September 8 – October 21 Joe Fig: Contemplating Compositions

KI SMITH GALLERY

DOWNTOWN NYC in partnership with nineorchard.com

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

Until September 3 Ki Smith Gallery Group Show: Judged by Akeem K. Duncan, Marina Granger, and Maryana Kaliner; curated by Natasha Roberts September 8 – October 15 Charlie Hudson: Room with a View September 8 – October 15 James Rubio: Ugly Paintings

Joe Fig, Joan Mitchell: Wood, Wind, No Tuba/Zwirner, 1984, oil on linen mounted on MDF board, 15 × 16". Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.

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

September 14 – October 28 Daniel Boccato September 14 – October 28 Zach Bruder: Clear Arrears

MIGUEL ABREU

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

September 8 – 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

September 8 – February 10, 2024 Milton Resnick and Matthew Wong: U + ME

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

September 6 – October 7 Lisa Beck September 6 – October 7 Sangram Majumdar and Miko Veldkamp

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

September 7 – October 21 Jane South: Halfway Off

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

September 7 – October 28 Shaunté Gates: In Light of the Hunt

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

September 10 – October 22 Amy Ruhl: Between Tin Men

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

September 6 – October 14 Daniel Arsham: 20 YEARS September 6 – October 14 Kelly Beeman: Summer

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

September 8 – October 14 Catherine Mulligan September 8 – October 14 Julia Selin

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

September 9 – November 19 Elsa Mora: An Inventory of Tools for Coping

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

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

September 7 – November 4 TR Ericsson: Letters from Home

Please contact gallery for information.

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

Please contact gallery for information.

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

September 7 – October 21 Recall: Jessica Frances, Gregoire Lancaster, and Pajtim Osmanaj

Kate Mosher Hall, Flipper, 2023, flashe and acrylic on canvas, 50 × 52". Courtesy the artist, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles.

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

Until September 23 Daniel Guzmán: El hombre que debería estar muerto – tienes que entrar para salir

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

Until September

Roger White: The Rainy Season

GALERIA HILARIO GALGUERA Eva Jospin, Galleria (detail), 2023, cardboard, wood, brass, embroidery, drawings, 19' 2 1⁄4" × 8 ' 1⁄2" × 10' 8". Courtesy the artist and Mariane Ibrahim. Photo: Alum Gálvez.

Francisco Pimentel 3, Colonia San Rafael, 06470, Mexico City galeriahilariogalguera.com [email protected] +44 78 1809 0392 Tue – Sat 11–5

September 7 – 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 September 1 Summer Break Until October 28 John Zurier: Sleeping Horses

GALERÍA RGR

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

Until October 13 Juan Manuel Salas: Sopa de Anguilas

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 September 15 Summer Group Show: Gonzalo Lebrija, Milena Muzquiz, Jose Dávila, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Jorge Méndez Blake, Mateo López, and Sara Ramo September 27 Gonzalo Lebrija

Gral. Antonio León 48, Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec, 11850, Mexico City rgrart.com [email protected] +52 1 55 8434 7759 Mon – Thu 10:30–6:30, Fri 10:30–4:30, Sat 11–4:30

Until September 9 Anais Horn and Pedro Zylbersztajn: The Afterwake September 21 – November 18 Spiritual Abstractions: Tania Candiani, Hilma’s Ghost, Kati Horna, Magali Lara, France Lise McGurn, Vibe Overgaard, and Salmo Suyo

GENERAL EXPENSES Revillagigedo 108, Colonia Centro, Cuauhtémoc, 06010, Mexico City generalexpensesart.com [email protected] +52 1 55 2898 1016 / +52 222 708 07998 Wed, Thurs, Sat 11–6

Until September 2 Roger Muñoz Rivas: Las cumbres del desprecio. Antimadre Parte 1 September 9 – October 7 Group Show: Daniel Aguilar Ramírez, Tom Bull, Natalia Caballero, Karla Ekaterine Canseco, Octavio Gómez Rivero, Santiago Gómez, Hellène Hector, Mili Herrera, Ángela Leyva, Rodrigo Ramírez, and Paloma Rosenzweig October 14 – November 18 Orpheus Liberal Youth Ministry / Antonio Zaragoza: A Dark Wolf Triumph

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

Until September 19 Eva Jospin: Folies

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

September 20 – 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 September 30

José Eduardo Barajas

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

September 21 – November 11 Javier Peláez: Blue Lotus (Main Room) September 21 – November 11 Alejandro García: Vibrations of an imperfect cosmic web (Project Room)

TRAVESÍA CUATRO

José Eduardo Barajas, FLARE 1, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 51 1⁄10 × 37 2⁄5". Courtesy PEANA.

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 September 8 Sofía Bassi and Elena del Rivero September 21 Gonzalo Lebrija and Goro Kakei

MONTERREY

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 September 21 Max Frisinger: Penedo September 26 Adeline De Monseignat: Skin to Skin

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

Until September 21 Ash Keating: Perceptual Fields October 9 Aldo Chaparro

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

Please contact gallery for information.

INDIA MUMBAI Chatterjee & Lal 01/18, Kamal Mansion, 1st Floor Arthur Bunder Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400 005 Tel: +91 98202 98246 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.chatterjeeandlal.com Instagram: @chatterjeeandlal

Until September 16 Nihaal Faizal: red curtains opening September 30 – October 28 Ashish Avikunthak: Recent Works

Chemould Prescott Road Queens Mansion, 3rd Floor, G. Talwatkar Marg, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 Chemould CoLab: Sugra Manzil, 2nd Floor BEST Marg, Colaba, Mumbai 400-039 Tel: +91 22220 00211 E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Web: www.gallerychemould.com Instagram: @chemouldprescottroad, @chemouldCoLAb

September 13 – November 4 Continuum, curated by Atyaan Jungalwala and Sunaina Kewalramani (Chemould CoLab) September 16 – October 28 CheMoulding | Framing Future Archives – Part 1: Framing, curated by Shaleen Wadhwana (Chemould Prescott Road) October 30 – November 5 Remembering, curated by Chemould Prescott Road team members (Gallery Chemould, Jehangir Art Gallery, First Floor) November 14 – December 23 CheMoulding | Framing Future Archives – Part 2: Futuring, curated by Shaleen Wadhwana (Chemould Prescott Road)

Experimenter

Project 88

Sunny House, 1st Floor 16/18 Merewether Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400 001 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.experimenter.in

BMP Building, Ground Floor N.A. Sawant Marg, Colaba, Mumbai 400 005 Tel: +91 22 2281 0066 Fax: +91 22 2281 0099 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.project88.in Instagram: @project88mumbai

September 14 – October 21 Sakshi Gupta October 11–15 Frieze London (Booth A04)

Until September 2 Sushen Ghosh

Jhaveri Contemporary Devidas Mansion, 3rd Floor 4 Mereweather Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400 001 Tel: +91 22 2202 1051 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.jhavericontemporary.com

Until September 9 On a Limb: Matthew Krishanu September 14 – October 21 Amina Ahmed: Circle, square, triangle, turtle, fish October 11–15 Frieze London: Ali Kazim, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Fiza Khatri, Matthew Krishanu, and Simryn Gill

Galerie Isa Kamani Chambers, Ground Floor Ramji Kamani Marg, Ballard Estate, Mumbai 400 038 Tel: +91 98 2004 8002 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galerieisa.com

September 14 – October 21 Eeman Masood (Galerie Isa 9) September 14 – October 21 Hiroe Saeki

TARQ K. K. (Navsari) Chambers, Ground Floor 39B, AK Nayak Marg, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 Tel: +91 22 6615 0424 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.tarq.in Instagram: @tarqmumbai

Until September 30 Parag Tandel: Archipelagic Archivist, curated by Shaunak Mahbubani

ALIBAUG The Guild 1028, Ranjanpada, Mandwa Alibaug Road, Alibaug 402 201 Tel: +91 22 2287 5839 / 2288 0195 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.guildindia.com Instagram: @theguildartgallery

Please contact gallery for information.

DELHI AKAR PRAKAR D-43, Defence Colony, 1st Floor New Delhi 110 024 Tel: +91 11 4131 5348 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.akarprakar.com

Until September 27 Group Show: It’s Personal October 4 – December 10 Somnath Hore October 18 – March 4, 2024 Carte Blanche to Manish Pushkale (Musee de Guimet, Paris)

EXHIBIT 320 F-320, Lado Sarai, New Delhi 110 030 Tel: +91 11 4613 0637 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.exhibit320.com

September 2–9 Delhi Contemporary Art Week (Bikaner House)

Gallery Espace 16, Community Centre New Friends Colony, New Delhi 110 025 Tel: +91 11 2632 6267 / 2692 2947 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galleryespace.com Instagram: @galleryespace Facebook: GalleryEspace

Until September 30 Ishita Chakraborty: Sleeping in the Bed of Salt September 2–9 Delhi Contemporary Art Week (Bikaner House) October 12 – November 12 Ink – A Group Show: Amitava, Dilip Ranade, Gautam Bhatia, Jeram Patel, Partha Pratim Deb, Madhvi Parekh, Manu Parekh, and Mekhala Bahl

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

EMAMI ART

145, DLF South Court Mall, Saket, New Delhi 110 017 Plot 3-A, Sec 126, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201 303 Tel: +91 11 4916 0000 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.knma.in Facebook, YouTube: KiranNadarMuseumOfArt Instagram: @knmaindia Twitter: @KNMAIndia

777, Anandapur, E.M. Bypass, Kolkata 700 107 Tel: +91 33 6623 2300 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.emamiart.com Instagram: @Emamiart

Until September 20 Very Small Feelings (Saket)

NATURE MORTE Main Gallery: The Dhan Mill, 100 Feet Road, Chhatarpur, New Delhi 110 074 Gallery 2 and Offices: 7, Poorvi Marg, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi 110 057 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.naturemorte.com Instagram: @naturemorte_delhi Twitter: @NatureMorte Facebook: Nature Morte

Until September 30 Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri: The Dream of an Idiot – Tapestry, Painting, Drawing, Prints; curated by Ushmita Sahu Until September 30 Lalit Mohan Sen: An Enduring Legacy, curated in consultation with Debdutta Gupta Until January 7, 2024 Debashish Paul: The Magic of the Silver Swan – My work: Body as a Landscape; Body in a Landscape (video), curated by Kinnari Sariya (Bowes Museum, UK) September 29 – December 10 Fragments of Our Time: Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri and Ujjal Dey, curated by Uthra Rajgopal (British Textile Biennale 2023, Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery)

Until September 24 Ayesha Singh (The Dhan Mill) September 7–10 The Armory Show, New York: Booth 218 September 9 Shristi Rana Menon (Vasant Vihar) September 15 – October 14 Shailika Shrivastava (Vasant Vihar) September 30 – October 29 Kodanda Rao Teppala (The Dhan Mill) October 11–15 Frieze London (Booth B6)

2/1, Hindusthan Road, Kolkata 700 029 45, Ballygunge Place, Kolkata 700 019 Tel: +91 33 4001 2289 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.experimenter.in

KOLKATA

Until October 14 In Between the Notes: Biraaj Dodiya, Lala Rukh, Parul Thacker, Samson Young, and Superhero Sighting Society October 11–15 Frieze London (Booth A04)

AKAR PRAKAR P-238, Hindustan Park, Kolkata 700 029 Tel: +91 33 2464 2617 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.akarprakar.com

Please contact gallery for information.

Experimenter

SPECIALIZING IN MID AND LATE CAREER ARTISTS FROM TEXAS & BEYOND 1200 E. 11th St, Suite 109 Austin, TX 78702 www.LydiaStreetGallery.com

FALL LINEUP 2023 Madelon Umlauf - Harmonizing the Rapture of Color: September 23 - October 30 Elsa Gebreyesus - The Color of Words Erin Cunningham - Elemental Topography : November 11 - December 17

31 Aug– 29 Oct 2023

eva.ie

ikkibawiKrrr, Image courtesy of the collective.

Elsa Gebreyesus

Madelon Umlauf

Erin Cunningham

New Art Book Breaks Boundaries

Featuring over 450 individual artworks by more than 100 neurodiverse artists.

Scan to learn more! Jack Balas, 2023; THIS WAY (#2407); India ink on paper, 23 x 30 inches

JACK BALAS .com creativityexplored.org

@creativityexplored

FA L L 2 0 2 3

“A tour de force of media theory and history . . . reconnects cinema and media and mobilizes a fundamental rethinking of screen.”

“Crary describes anew an epoch of unrelenting, dissolute flows as if he were both its visionary poet and fiercest critic.”

“Seldom does a work of history force us to revisit an entire universe of evidence as if we had never seen it before.”

— Weihong Bao,

— George Baker,

— Nicolás Wey Gómez,

author of

University of California,

author of

Fiery Cinema

Los Angeles

The Tropics of Empire

white columns / est. 1970

Thank you for visiting Venice Familiarize yourself with Krygier's work at zasoby.msl.org.pl

J.DEMSKY

gallery and residency

BARBARA ESS Archives PIERO PENIZZOTTO

montreux — switzerland 01.07.2023 — 30.10.2023 www.laurentmarthaler.com

September / October whitecolumns.org © J.DEMSKY

laurent marthaler contemporary

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

DENNY GALLERY

38 Walker Street georgeadamsgallery.com [email protected] 212 564 8480

39 Lispenard Street dennygallery.com [email protected] 212 226 6537

September 8 – October 28 Katherine Sherwood: Cajal’s Revenge September 8 – October 28 Matjames Metson: A Tower

September 5 – October 7 Sheida Soleimani: Birds of Passage October 13 – November 11 Clarity Haynes: Portals

BORTOLAMI 39 Walker Street 55 Walker Street bortolamigallery.com [email protected] 212 727 2050

September 8 – October 28 Barbara Kasten (55 Walker) September 8 – November 4 Rebecca Morris (39 Walker) September 8 – November 4 Eric Wesley (39 Walker)

BROADWAY 375 Broadway broadwaygallery.nyc [email protected] 212 226 4001

September 8 – September 30 Project Room: Yoshiaki Mochizuki September 8 – September 30 Devin Troy Strother October 6 – November 4 Sarah Cain November 9 – December 23 Andrew Kuo

HAL BROMM 90 West Broadway, 2nd Floor halbromm.com [email protected] 212 732 6196

September 5–9 Group Show: End of Summer Sale (Online) September 21 – December 20 Joey Tepedino

GAA GALLERY 4 Cortlandt Alley gaa-gallery.com/gallery [email protected] 212 381 1396

September 8 – October 21 Autumn Wallace: Drawing Blood October 27 – December 9 Emily Yong Beck October 27 – December 9 Elizabeth Tibbetts

GRIMM 54 White Street grimmgallery.com [email protected] 212 280 3877

September 8 – October 14 Angela Heisch: As above, so below October 20 – December 16 Matthias Weischer

JACK HANLEY GALLERY 177 Duane Street jackhanley.com [email protected] 646 918 6824

September 8 – October 7 Karen Barbour

KAUFMANN REPETTO 55 Walker Street kaufmannrepetto.com [email protected] 917 388 3580

September 8 – October 28 Skuja Braden: Pardon My Body

CANADA 60 Lispenard Street 61 Lispenard Street canadanewyork.com [email protected] 212 925 4631

September 7 – October 21 Gerald Ferguson September 7 – October 21 Marc Hundley

CHAPTER NY 60 Walker Street chapter-ny.com [email protected] 646 850 7486

September 8 – October 21 Willa Nasatir September 8 – October 21 Stella Zhong

ANDREW KREPS 22 Cortlandt Alley 394 Broadway 55 Walker Street andrewkreps.com [email protected] 212 741 8849

Please contact gallery for information.

DAVID LEWIS 57 Walker Street davidlewisgallery.com [email protected] 212 966 7991

September 8 – October 20 Lisa Jo

SILKE LINDNER

JAMES COHAN

350 Broadway silkelindner.com [email protected] 646 322 6827

48 Walker Street 52 Walker Street, 2nd Floor jamescohan.com [email protected] 212 714 9500

September 8 – October 7 Nina Hartmann October 13 – November 11 Neal Vandenbergh

September 8 – October 21 Eamon Ore-Giron (52 Walker) September 8 – October 21 Jesse Mockrin (48 Walker) October 26 – December 23 Yinka Shonibare CBE: Boomerang – Returning to African Abstraction (48 Walker) November 2 – December 23 Josiah McElheny (52 Walker)

JANE LOMBARD GALLERY 58 White Street janelombardgallery.com [email protected] 212 967 8040

September 8 – October 21 Michael Rakowitz: The Monument, The Monster, and The Maquette October 27 – December 16 Bradley Wood

MENDES WOOD DM | NEW YORK 47 Walker mendeswooddm.com [email protected] 212 220 9943

TRIBECA NYC

September 15 – October 27 Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

CHARLES MOFFETT 431 Washington Street charlesmoffett.com [email protected] 212 226 2646

September 8 – October 14 Keiran Brennan Hinton: A Break in the Clouds

Angela Heisch, Throwing It Away Warm, 2023, oil on linen, diptych, 60 × 96" each. Courtesy the artist and GRIMM, New York. Photo: Matthew Herrmann.

KLAUS VON NICHTSSAGEND GALLERY

MARGOT SAMEL

87 Franklin Street klausgallery.com [email protected] 212 777 7756

295 Church Street margotsamel.com [email protected] 212 597 2747

September 8 – October 21 Alex Dodge September 8 – October 21 Quantum States: Anonymous Tantric artists, Chloë Bass, Peggy Chiang, Jules Gimbrone, Yutaka Matsuzawa, Hasani Sahlehe, Mika Tajima, and Maria Lulu Varona October 27 – December 16 Sam Contis October 27 – December 16 Thomas Øvlisen

September 5 – October 14 France-Lise McGurn and Rita McGurn: Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos October 19 – November 22 Melissa Joseph: Irish Exit

OFF PARADISE 120 Walker Street offparadise.com [email protected] 212 388 9010

Until September 27 Robert Hawkins: Dream Mine

P·P·O·W 392 Broadway 390 Broadway, 2nd Floor ppowgallery.com [email protected] 212 647 1044

September 8 – October 7 Jjagi-yi- – Air of Life: Carlos Motta with Elio Miraña, ELO, Gil Farekatde Maribba, Higinio Bautista, Kiyedekago, Rosita, and Yoí nanegü (392 Broadway) September 8 – October 21 Mosie Romney: Rhizome St. / Fugue Avenue (390 Broadway, 2nd Floor) September 8 – October 21 Suzanne Treister: Kabbalistic Futurism (390 Broadway, 2nd Floor) October 13 – November 11 Hilary Harkness: Prisoners from the Front (392 Broadway) October 27 – December 9 Daniel Correa Mejia: Soy el dueño de mi casa (390 Broadway, 2nd Floor) November 17 – December 23 Carolee Schneemann: Of Course You Can / Don’t You Dare (392 Broadway)

RUTTKOWSKI;68 46 Cortland Alley ruttkowski68.com [email protected] 646 727 8067

September 6 – October 7 Philip Emde and Susan Te Kahurangi King: Playdate October 12 – November 10 Stefan Marx and Sigmar Polke November 16 – December 22 Parra

SCHOELKOPF 390 Broadway, 3rd Floor schoelkopfgallery.com info@schoelkopfgallery. 212 879 8815

Fall Arthur Dove: Yes, I Could Paint a Cyclone

KERRY SCHUSS GALLERY 73 Leonard Street kerryschussgallery.com [email protected] 212 219 9918

Please contact gallery for information.

SHRINE

368 Broadway shrine.nyc [email protected] 212 381 1395

September 8 – October 21 Clairvoyance: Hayley Barker, Aglaé Bassens, Rasmus Eckhardt, Aaron Johnson, Claudia Keep, Maddy Inez Lesser, Rebecca Manson, Gwen O’Neil, Liz Nielsen, Prophet Royal Robertson, and Adrianne Rubenstein

STORAGE 52 Walker Street, 4th Floor storageartgallery.com [email protected] 917 450 8366

Please contact gallery for information.

52 WALKER 52 Walker Street 52walker.com [email protected] 212 727 1961

Please contact gallery for information.

WASHINGTON DC — MARYLAND — VIRGINIA WASHINGTON DC HAMILTONIAN ARTISTS 1353 U St. NW, Washington, DC 20009 202 332 1116 · [email protected] hamiltonianartists.org · @hamiltonian_artists

Until September 16 Kyrae Dawaun September 30 – October 14 Kinetic Group Show

PAZO FINE ART 4228 Howard Ave. LL, Kensington, MD 20895 571 315 5279 · [email protected] pazofineart.com

September 30 – November 16 Proximities: Olivier Mosset, Michael Scott, and Blair Thurman

VIRGINIA ICA AT VCU

HEMPHILL ARTWORKS 434 K St. NW, Washington, DC 20001 202 234 5601 · [email protected] hemphillartworks.com · @hemphillartworks

September 16 – October 28 Jacob Kainen Paintings November 11 – December 23 Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi

601 W. Broad St., Richmond, VA 23220 804 828 2823 · [email protected] icavcu.org · @icavcu

September 8 – January 7, 2024 Morgan Bassichis: More Little Ditties September 8 – January 7, 2024 Paul Chan: Breathers

VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS PAZO FINE ART 1932 9th St. NW, #C102, Washington, DC 20001 571 315 5279 · [email protected] pazofineart.com

September 16 – November 2 Epicenter: Sue Crawford, Elise Ferguson, and Richard Tinkler

MARYLAND C. GRIMALDIS GALLERY 523 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21201 410 539 1080 · [email protected] cgrimaldisgallery.com · @cgrimaldisgallery

Until September 16 Summer ’23: Chul-Hyun Ahn, Christopher Batten, Anthony Caro, Erin Fostel, Grace Hartigan, Heejo Kim, Eugene Leake, Ben Marcin, Jane Manus, Giorgos Rigas, Bill Schmidt, and Alexey Titarenko

200 N. Arthur Ashe Blvd., Richmond, VA 23220 804 340 1405 · [email protected] vmfa.museum · @vmfamuseum

Until September 10 Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village Until September 10 Whitfield Lovell: Passages November 18 – February 25 Dawoud Bey: Elegy

SAN FRANCISCO ANGLIM/TRIMBLE

FRAENKEL GALLERY

1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, 94107 [email protected] 415 433 2710 anglimtrimble.com Tues – Sat 11–5

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

Please contact gallery for information.

September 7 – October 21 Richard T. Walker: Never Here / Always There

ALTMAN SIEGEL

HASHIMOTO CONTEMPORARY | SAN FRANCISCO

1150 25th Street, San Francisco, 94107 [email protected] 415 576 9300 Tues – Fri 10–6, Sat 11–5

altmansiegel.com

September 14 – October 21 Simon Denny: Metaverse Landscapes

BERGGRUEN GALLERY 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, 94105 [email protected] 415 781 4629 berggruen.com Mon – Fri 10–5

September 14 – October 13 Matt Kleberg: Pigeon Holes

1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, 94107 [email protected] 415 655 9265 Tues – Sat 10–6

hashimotocontemporary.com

Until September 23 Lorien Stern: Old Friends October 7–28 Kim Cogan

ANTHONY MEIER 21 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley, 94941 [email protected] 415 351 1400 Tues – Fri 10–5, by appointment only

anthonymeier.com

September 7 – October 20 Erica Deeman: Emerging States

RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY 1275 Minnesota Street, #210, San Francisco, 94107 [email protected] 415 982 3292 renabranstengallery.com Wed – Sat 11–5, and by appointment

Until September 9 Nobuyushi Takahashi: Lyrics of Sea Horizon Until September 9 Henry Wessel: On the Shore September 16 – November 18 Hung Liu: Capp Street Near Mission (Re)presenting Resident Alien, 1988

CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY 248 Utah Street, San Francisco, 94103 [email protected] 415 399 1439 Tues – Fri 10:30–5:30, Sat 11–6

cclarkgallery.com

Until September 23 Yes, it’s an original – Recent publications by Mullowney Printing. Prints by Arleene Correa Valencia, Sherrill Roland, Kali Spitzer, Stephanie Syjuco, Masami Teraoka, Storm Tharp, and Marie Watt Until November 4 Arleene Correa Valencia: Naces Así, Naces Prieto. No Naces Blanco / You Are Born Like This, You Are Born Brown. You Are Not Born White. September 30 – December 23 Josephine Taylor: Sadness

CROWN POINT PRESS 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, 94105 [email protected] 415 974 6273 crownpoint.com @crownpointpress Mon – Fri 9–5

September 8 – November 2 Group Show: Contemporary Scenes – Cityscape/Landscape

GALLERY WENDI NORRIS 436 Jackson Street, San Francisco, 94111 [email protected] 415 346 7812 @gallerywendinorris Tues – Sat 11–6, and by appointment

gallerywendinorris.com

Until September 9 Leo Marz: Modern Office September 6 – October 7 Time Warriors: Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee (Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite, New York)

JESSICA SILVERMAN 621 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, 94108 [email protected] 415 255 9508 Tues – Sat 10–6

jessicasilvermangallery.com

Until September 16 Matthew Angelo Harrison: Invisible Silhouettes Until September 16 Kei Imazu: Sowed Them to the Earth Through September A Growing Season (615 Grant Avenue, 5th Floor) September 21 – November 4 Cathartic Creatures: Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Atsushi Kaga, Takuro Kuwata, Woody De Othello, Grace Weaver, and Mie Yim September 21 – November 4 Julia Jo

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

İSTANBUL ANNA LAUDEL

ABU DHABI

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

CULTURAL FOUNDATION – ABU DHABI

Until September 10 Who doesn’t love you, may die, curated by Gülben Çapan September 21 – November 5 Sarp Kerem Yavuz: Glorious Century

Until January 28, 2024 LOBI LOBI: Pascale Marthine Tayou Until January 28, 2024 BOBO LAND: Pascale Marthine Tayou Until January 28, 2024 Comic Craze

ARTER

Al Hosn, Abu Dhabi +971 2 657 6348 culturalfoundation.ae [email protected] @abudhabicf

THE NYU ABU DHABI ART GALLERY Saadiyat Island, P.O. Box 129188 +971 2 628 8000 nyuad-artgallery.org [email protected] @nyuadartgallery

October 3 – January 14, 2024 Blane De St. Croix: Horizon, curated by Maya Allison

DUBAI ZIDOUN BOSSUYT GALLERY

796 Jumeirah Street, Umm Suqeim 2 +971 5 020 14336 zidoun-bossuyt.com [email protected] @zidounbossuytgallery

October 6 – November 11 Samuel Olayombo: The Lotus Bloom Ranchers

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 September 17 Elina Brotherus: Large de Vue, curated by Emre Baykal Until September 17 Eva Koťátkova: I Sometimes Imagine I’m a Fish with Legs, curated by Eda Berkmen 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 September – August 18, 2024 Mat Collishaw: Arrhythmia, curated by Alice Sharp September 16 – August 18, 2024 Hyper Digital Forces: Selections from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, curated by Dr. Necmi Sonmez

MEŞHER

SHARJAH MARAYA ART CENTER

Al Qasba, Al Taawun Road, P.O. Box 62932 +971 6 556 6555 maraya.ae [email protected]

September 11 – January 11, 2024 Thinking Art: Artists as Writers from the UAE, organized by the Emirates Fine Arts and curated by Dr. Noha Farran September 11 – January 11, 2024 33 songs, 99 words: An installation based on Arab music and poetry by Sawsan Al Bahar, curated by Cima Azzam

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 September 22 – October 28 Bosco Sodi: The Silence of Form

SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION

Arts Square, Al Shuwaiheen, Sharjah +971 6 5685 050 sharjahart.org [email protected]

Until September 24 In the Heart of Another Country (Al Mureijah, Galleries 1–6) Until January 14, 2024 Casablanca Art School (Tate St Ives) October 5 – February 4, 2024 Kadist Collection Exhibition (Kadist, Paris) October 14 – March 10, 2024 Henok Melkamzer (Al Hamriyah Studios) October 14 – March 10, 2024 Vantage Point Sharjah 11 (Al Hamriyah, Old Al Diwan Al Amiri) October 28 – January 28, 2024 Lubaina Himid (Al Mureijah, Galleries 1–3)

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 Omar Barquet (Zilberman Project Space) Until November 25 Group Show, curated by Yekhan Pınarlıgil (Zilberman Istanbul & Zilberman Selected)

SAVE THE DATE

11–14 APRIL 2024

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

September 6–30 Emma Stern: Penny & The Dimes – Dimes 4Ever World Tour October 10 – November 18, 2024 After Picasso: 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

September 13–22 The David 2023 Exhibition, selected and September 28 – November 4 September 28 – November 4

& Yuko Juda Art Foundation Grant curated by Alison Wilding Elizabeth Magill: By This River (4th Floor) Philipp Goldbach: Verso (3rd Floor)

B E L M ACZ

C ELL PR OJ EC T SPA 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

September 15 – November 19

Ksenia Pedan: Solo Exhibition

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

September 5–30 Abel Auer September 5 Inaugural exhibition of Neither, a new space in collaboration with greengrassi (London)

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.

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

September 8 – September 22 Faramarz Zahedi: Untitled: “Good / some specks of / purple needed / in the middle / set it dry first” 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

F R ITH ST R 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

September 15 – November 11

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (Golden Square)

CE CI L I A B R U N S ON P R O J E C T S

GA GOSIA N

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

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

Until September 15 Until September 15

Francisco Valdés: Manual Lizi Sánchez: Constelaciones Carbónicas

Please contact gallery for information.

H AUS E R & W I R T H L ONDON

MOT H ER ’S T A NK STA TIO N

23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET Tel: +44 20 7287 2300 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hauserwirth.com Tues. – Sat. 10–6

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 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

September – November

Yuko Mohri

PA C E GA LLERY 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

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

September 6–30 Pam Evelyn: A Handful of Dust October 10 – November 11 Mary Corse and Robert Irwin

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

PIPPY H OU LDSWORT H G ALLERY

Until January 13, 2024

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: The Pavilion (2023)

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

September 15 – 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 September 15 – October 22 Eduardo Sarabia: Prologue October 27 – December 22 Max Hooper Schneider MORENA DI LUNA 3 Adelaide Crescent, Hove BN3 2JD Sat. – Sun. 12–6 Until September 10 Chioma Ebinama: The Eyes of the Beloved are Everywhere

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

Until September 17 Nunzio. Drawings October 11 – November 30 The Paradox of Proximity: Agostino Bonalumi & Lee Seung Jio

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

September 8–30 Sophia Loeb: Todos os Seres são de Todos os Seres (All Beings are of All Beings) October 7 – November 11 Wangari Mathenge: A Day of Rest

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 September 3 Maria Lassnig Prize 2021 Mural: Atta Kwami Until September 10 Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) Of Life (Serpentine South) 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 Georg Baselitz Sculptures 2011–2015

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

September 28 – November 24

Cabrita: New Works

S PRÜT H M A GE R S

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

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

Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8 Tel: +353 1612 9900 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.imma.ie Tues. – Sat. 10–5:30, Wed. 11:30–5:30, Sun. 12–5:30; booking essential at imma.ie

Please contact gallery for information.

Until September 3 Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth 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 September 21–24 Earth Rising

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

September 6–30 Christian Marclay: Doors (Mason’s Yard) September 15 – November 5 Julie Mehretu (Bermondsey)

SCOTLAND

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

September 1–30 William McKeown: An Open Room October 6 – November 12 Callum Innes

I N G L E B Y G A L L E RY 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh EH3 6NX Tel: +44 131 556 4441 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.inglebygallery.com Wed. – Sat. 11–5

Until September 16 Andrew Cranston: Never a joiner September 30 – December 16 Nick Goss: Smickel-Inn, Balcony of Europe

MOT H ER ’S T A NK STA TIO N 41–43 Watling Street, Usher’s Island, Dublin D08 NP48 Tel: +353 1671 7654 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.motherstankstation.com Thurs. – Sat. 12–6

September – November

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

Atsushi Kaga

BEIJJ ING 北京 BEI BEIJING COMMUNE｜北京公社 No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 8456 2862 [email protected] www.beijingcommune.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 10–6

Until September 15 Shang Yixin: Qu

GALLERIA CONTINUA BEIJING｜北京常青画廊 No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Dashanzi Art District 798, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 5978 9505 [email protected] www.galleriacontinua.com Hours: Tues – Sun, 11–6

PLATFORM CHINA CONTEMPORARY ART INSTITUTE｜站台中国当代艺术机构 No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, 798 Art District, D07 798 Main 2nd Street, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing [email protected] www.platformchina.cn Hours: Tues – Sun, 11–6

September Gong Jian September Liu Gangshun

SHANGHART BEIJING｜香格纳画廊(北京) No. 261 Caochangdi, Old Airport Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 6432 3202 [email protected] www.shanghartgallery.com Hours: Tues – Sun, 11–6

Please contact gallery for information.

Until September 12 Hans Op de Beeck: Vanishing

SPURS GALLERY｜马刺画廊 HUA INTERNATIONAL BEIJING

D08-3, 798 East Street, 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 170 60455427 [email protected] www.hua-international.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 10:30–6:30

September 23 – October 21 Alfredo Aceto and Jenkin van Zyl: A curtain, that is a room on Uranus

LONG MARCH SPACE｜长征空间 No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 5978 9768 [email protected] www.longmarchspace.com Hours: Tues – Sun, 10–6

Until October 22 Chen Chieh-jen: Detoxify Illusion with Māyā

PIFO GALLERY｜偏锋画廊

No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, B11, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 5978 9562 [email protected] www.pifo.cn Hours: Tues – Sun, 10–6

September Tong Kunniao

No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, D06, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 5762 6012 [email protected] www.spursgallery.com Hours: Tues – Sun, 11–6

September 2 – October 8 A Breath on the Glass: Yale MFA Exhibition

TAIKANG ART MUSEUM｜泰康空间

1-2F, Building 1, Yard 16, Jinghui Street, Beijing Taikang Group Building, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 8433 8003 [email protected] www.taikangspace.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 10:30–5:30

Until January 12, 2024 Engaging with the World: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Since the Dawn of the 20th Century

SAFETY MARGIN (all important information is best placed within this border.

U + ME Milton Resnick Matthew Wong

September 8, 2023 - Feburary 10, 2024 Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation 87 Eldridge Street, New York, NY resnickpasslof.org Matthew Wong, The Family (detail), 2016. Acrylic on paper, 12 x 9 inches. © 2023 Matthew Wong Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

in collaboration with Matthew Wong Foundation matthewwongfoundation.com

BEIJJ ING 北京 BEI

SHANGHAII 上海 SHANGHA

TRIUMPH GALLERY｜凯旋画廊

ALMINE RECH｜阿尔敏·莱希上海

A-05, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 5762 3012 [email protected] www.triumphart.com.cn Hours: Tues – Sun, 10–6:30

September 23 – November 12 Nashunbatu

UCCA CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART UCCA尤伦斯当代艺术中心 No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, 798 Art District, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 5780 0200 [email protected] www.ucca.org.cn Hours: Tues – Sun, 9:30–7

Until October 15 Matisse by Matisse September 2 – January 7, 2024 Maria Lassnig: Happy Martian

GALERIE URS MEILE｜麦勒画廊 D10, 798 East Street, 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 10 576 260 51 [email protected] www.galerieursmeile.com Hours: Tues – Sun, 11–6:30

Until October 29 Wang Xingwei: Love Expert

WHITE SPACE｜空白空间

No. 255 Caochangdi, Airport Service Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing F1, Bldg D7, Yard No. 3, Jinhang East Road, Shunyi District, 101316 Beijing Tel: +86 10 8456 2054 [email protected] www.whitespace.cn Hours: Tues – Sat, 10–6

Until October 7 Chen Zhe: As Precise As Fever (Shunyi)

2F, 27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, 200002 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6312 0260 [email protected] www.alminerech.com.cn Hours: Tues – Sat, 11–7

Until October 14 John Giorno: I am a Poet

ANTENNA SPACE｜天线空间

Room 202, Building 17, 50 Moganshan Road, Putuo District, 200060 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6256 0182 [email protected] www.antenna-space.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 11–6:30

Until October 25 Group Show – Horizons: Is there anybody out there?

BANK

Building 2, Lane 298, Anfu Road, Xuhui District, 200031 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6301 3622 [email protected] www.bankmabsociety.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 10:30–6:30

Until September 16 Liang Hao: Gesture and Speech

CAPSULE SHANGHAI｜胶囊上海

1st Floor, Building 16, Anfu Lu 275 Nong, Xuhui District, 200031 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6417 0700 [email protected] www.capsuleshanghai.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 10–6

Until September 9 Ryosuke Kumakura: Habituation Until September 9 Tian Jianxin: Vessel of Faces

DON GALLERY｜东画廊

2555-9 Longteng Avenue, West Bund, 200232 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6473 1533 [email protected] www.dongallery.cn Hours: Tues – Sat, 10–6; Sun, 1–6

September 8 – October 22 Li Shan: A Red, Red Blossom

PABLO ATCHUGARRY

A LIFE BETWEEN LECCO AND THE WORLD

May 28 - November 12, 2023 Palazzo delle Paure, Lecco - Italy

In collaboration with

SHANGHAII 上海 SHANGHA DUMONTEIL SHANGHAI｜杜梦堂 上海 Building 105, 199 Hengshan Road, Xuhui District, 200031 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6418 6367 [email protected] www.dumonteil.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 11–7

September 22 – October 28 Rubén Fuentes

LEO GALLERY｜狮語画廊

Ferguson Lane, 376 Wu Kang Road, Xuhui District, 200031 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 5465 3261 [email protected] www.leogallery.com.cn Hours: Tues – Sun, 11–6:30

September 23 – October 29 Brad Brown and Chen Kai

LIANG PROJECT

PERROTIN SHANGHAI｜贝浩登（上海） 3F, 27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, 200002 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6321 1234 [email protected] www.perrotin.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 11–7

September 15 – October 26 Gabriel Rico

POND SOCIETY｜池社 2555-4 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, 200232 Shanghai [email protected] Hours: Tues – Sun, 11–5

Until September 7 Public Private – Part II: Hayley Barker, Ulala Imai, Sarah Lee, GaHee Park, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan September 16 – October 31 Francesca Mollett: Noon

SHANGHART SHANGHAI｜香格纳上海

West Bund, 2555-10 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, 200232 Shanghai M50, Bldg 16, 50 Moganshan Road, 200060 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6359 3923 [email protected] www.shanghartgallery.com

Room 104, Building 4, No. 50 Moganshan Road, 200060 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 5292 0166 [email protected] www.liangproject.art Hours: Tues – Sun, 11–6

September – November Body as Medium: Among Objects and Fields

September 16 – October 16 Tang Shu

2F, No. 88 Xizang Bei Lu, Jing’an District, 200085 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6628 6861 [email protected] www.ucca.org.cn Hours: Tues – Sun, 10–7

LISSON GALLERY｜里森画廊（上海） 2F, 27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, 200002 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6333 9296 [email protected] www.lissongallery.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 11–6

Until September 2 Between Being and Becoming September 15 – October 28 Spencer Finch: Forever is composed of Nows

UCCA EDGE

Until October 8 Modern Time: Masterpieces from the Collection of Museum Berggruen / Nationalgalerie Berlin

GALLERY VACANCY｜吉屋 上海 6F, 261 S Yunnan Road, Huangpu District, 200021 Shanghai Tel: +86 21 6241 1239 [email protected] www.galleryvacancy.com Hours: Tues – Sat, 10–6

Until September 2 Michael Ho: Grotto Heavens September 16 – October 21 Charline Tyberghein: Domestic Blitz

Opening October 1, 2O23 through June 24, 2O24

manettishrem.org Deborah Butterfield, John, 1984. Found steel, welded. 82 x 88 x 32 in. The Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. Gift of Edward Nicoll and Helen KentNicoll. © 2023 Deborah Butterfield /Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Muzi Rowe. Photographed on site at the Manetti Shrem Museum.

Denmark AROS AARHUS ART MUSEUM 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

Until September 3 Erró: The Power of Images Until October 22 Annette Messager: Désirs désordonnés October 7 – January 21, 2024 A Surreal Shock: Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans van Beuningen December 2 – April 7, 2024 A Cosmos Within

DEN FRIE CENTRE OF CONTEMPORARY ART Oslo Plads 1, 2100 Copenhagen K Tel: +45 33 12 28 03 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.denfrie.dk Tues. – Sun. 10–6, Thurs. 12–9, Mon. closed

Until October 22 Bad Timing: Ulla von Brandenburg, Atiéna R. Kilfa, Jota Mombaca, Lea Porsager, Marie Søndergaard Lolk, Henriette Heise, Anna Munk, Eliyah Mesayer, and Bob Smith

MARTIN ASBÆK GALLERY

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

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

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 September 2

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

Summer in the City

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: New Work

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

September 15 – 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 September 30 – January 14, 2024 Group Show: Full of Days

COPENHAGEN CONTEMPORARY 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 September 3 Beautiful Repair: Mending in Art and Fashion Until September 28 Reset Materials: Towards Sustainable Architecture Until November 11 Abbas Akhavan: Curtain All Until December 30 James Turrell: Aftershock Until December 30 Yet, it Moves!

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 September 2 Until September 2

Marie Søndergaard Lolk: Brug mig Per Kirkeby: Isolation of the Parts

ARTISTS SPACE Jonathan Lyndon Chase his beard is soft, my hands are empty September 8 – December 2

11 Cortlandt Alley, New York artistsspace.org

ICELAND

in partnership with Icelandic Art Center www.icelandicartcenter.is | [email protected] | +354 562 7262

LISTASAFN ÁRNESINGA / LÁ ART MUSEUM

Austurmörk 21, 810 Hveragerði www.listasafnarnesinga.is | [email protected] | +354 483 1727 Summer: Open daily 12–5; Winter: Tuesday – Sunday 12–5

Until December 22 Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir: Kosmos / Kaos Until December 22 Jakob Veigar Sigurðsson: May Your Hand Not Hurt

MARSHALL HOUSE

AKUREYRI ART MUSEUM

Kaupvangsstræti 8-12, 600 Akureyri www.listak.is | [email protected] | +354 461 2610 | Open daily 12–5

Until September 17 Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors Until September 24 North Iceland Biannual: Anniversary Until November 19 Group Show: Foundation Until January 14, 2024 Circuits: Sólveig Aðalsteinsdóttir, Elsa Dóróthea Gísladóttir, Guðjón Ketilsson, and Guðrún Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir Until February 4, 2024 Katrín Jósepsdóttir: Simply Sincere Until March 10, 2024 Dröfn Friðfinnsdóttir: Wonders of The Woodcut Until March 10, 2024 Melanie Ubaldo: Completely Tasteless Until August 11, 2024 Brynhildur Kristinsdóttir: To Be a Being October 5–8 A! Performance Festival October 5 – January 14, 2024 Conducting Wire: Hilda de Paulo and Tales Frey

Grandagarður 20, 101 Reykjavík www.marshallhusid.is | [email protected] | Wednesday – Sunday 12–6

THE LIVING ART MUSEUM www.nylo.is | [email protected] | +354 551 4350

Until October 1 Anna Reutinger, Brák Jónsdóttir, Hugo Llanes, and Sigurður Ámundason KLING & BANG www.this.is/klingogbang | [email protected] | +354 616 8736

Until September 24 Eva Isleifs: Earth is My bed i8 GRANDI www.i8.is | [email protected] | +354 551 3666

Until December 20 B. Ingrid Olson: Cast of Mind ÞULA www.thula.gallery | [email protected] | +354 771 8010

BERG CONTEMPORARY

Klapparstígur 16, 101 Reykjavík Smiðjustígur 10, 101 Reykjavík www.bergcontemporary.is | [email protected] | +354 562 0001 Tuesday – Friday 11–5, Saturday 1–5

Until September 30 Pablo Jansana: From one day to the next

Please contact gallery for information.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ICELAND

Fríkirkjuvegur 7, 101 Reykjavík www.listasafn.is | [email protected] | +354 515 9600 | Open daily 10–5

GERÐARSAFN KÓPAVOGUR ART MUSEUM

Until October 1 Rúrí: Glassrain Until October 1 The Private Collection: Selected works from the collection of Ingibjörg Guðmundsdóttir and Þorvaldur Guðmundsson Until October 1 Jóhannes Kjarval: The Thought of Drawing September 9 New Works: Recent acquisitions to the museums collection

Until September 17 Rósa Gísladóttir: Fora September 30 Sculpture/Sculpture

THE HOUSE OF COLLECTIONS

Hamraborg 4, 200 Kópavogur www.gerdarsafn.is | [email protected] | +354 441 7600 | Open daily 10–5

HAFNARBORG

The Hafnarfjörður Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Strandgata 34, 220 Hafnarfjörður www.hafnarborg.is | [email protected] | +354 585 5790 Wednesday – Monday 12–5

Until September 3 Elísabet Brynhildardóttir: Hesitant Line Until September 3 Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson: On a Sea of Tranquillity September 14 – October 8 Sindri Ploder September 14 – December 30 Landscape for the Chosen Ones

i8 GALLERY

Tryggvagata 16, 101 Reykjavík www.i8.is | [email protected] | +354 551 3666 | Wednesday – Saturday 12–5

Until September 2 Karin Sander: Ideoscapes September 21 – November 4 Between the Window and the Door: Renee Gladman, Iman Issa, Christine Sun Kim, and Iris Touliatou

Hverfisgata 15, 101 Reykjavík | Open daily 10–5

Until December 30 Resistance: Interplay of Art and Science HOME OF AN ARTIST Bergstaðastræti 74, 101 Reykjavík | Open daily 10–5

Until December 30 A Window in Reykjavík

REYKJAVÍK ART MUSEUM

Please visit our website for information: www.artmuseum.is | [email protected]

HAFNARHÚS Tryggvagata 17, 101 Reykjavík | +354 411 6410 | Open daily 10–5, Thursday 10–10

Until October 22 D49 Helena Margrét Jónsdóttir Until December 31 Erró: Cunning Scissors Until January 7, 2024 Kaleidoscope: Icelandic 21st Century Art KJARVALSSTAÐIR Flókagata 24, 105 Reykjavík | +354 411 6420 | Open daily 10–5

LIBRARY OF WATER

Bókhlöðustígur 19, 340 Stykkishólmur www.artangel.org.uk/project/library-of-water | [email protected] | +354 865 4516 Sunday – Wednesday 10–5, Friday – Saturday 10–5

Long term installation by Roni Horn Please contact [email protected] for visitor information and hours.

Until October 29 Our Art Until December 31 Icelandic 20th Century Art ÁSMUNDARSAFN Sigtún, 105 Reykjavík | +354 411 6430 | Open daily 10–5 (May – September)

Until January 15 Ásmundur Sveinsson and Carl Milles: Mentor

JAMES YAYA HOUGH

JUSTICE REFLECTED Justice Reflected is made possible with generous support from Art For Justice Fund, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, in partnership with the Ford Foundation and the Battery Park City Authority.

ESPLANADE PLAZA RIVERFRONT WALL BATTERY PARK CITY

Explore Public Art spanning 35 years in Battery Park City – works by Siah Armajani, Richard Artschwager, Ugo Attardi, Giancarlo Biaggi and Jill Burkee, Louise Bourgeois, Scott Burton, Segundo Cardona and Antonio Martorell, Tony Cragg, Jim Dine, Autumn Ewalt and Dharmesh Patel, R.M. Fischer, Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil, James Yaya Hough, Mary Miss, Thierry Noir, Tom Otterness, Demetri Porphyrios, Martin Puryear, Ned Smyth, and Brian Tolle.

NEW YORK Visit bpca.ny.gov for more information and to see videos about the art.

andriesse eyck galerie

Galerie Ron Mandos

Leliegracht 47, 1016 GT Amsterdam Tel: +31 20 623 62 37 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.andriesse-eyck.com

Prinsengracht 282, 1016 HJ Amsterdam Tel: +31 20 320 70 36 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ronmandos.nl

September 8 – October 21 Koen Taselaar October 28 – December 9 Sylvie Zijlmans & Hewald Jongenelis

Until September 10 Best of Graduates 2023, curated by Radek Vana and team Galerie Ron Mandos September 8–10 The Armory Show: Remy Jungerman, Hadassah Emmerich, Marcos Kueh, Isaac Julien, and Daniel Arsham September 21–24 Unseen Amsterdam: Julian Rosefeldt, Gilleam Trapenberg, and others September 23 – October 29 Gilleam Trapenberg September 30 – October 29 Muntean/Rosenblum

Dürst Britt & Mayhew Van Limburg Stirumstraat 47, 2515 PB The Hague Tel: +31 6 339 847 83 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.durstbrittmayhew.com

September 2 – October 29 Raúl Ortega Ayala: Montserrat (a phono-archeology) September 29 – October 1 Around Video Art Fair, Brussels: David Roth October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel – Sites: Jacqueline de Jong

Ellen de Bruijne Projects Singel 372 1016 AH Amsterdam Tel: +31 6 4948 5207 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.edbprojects.com

September 9 – October 21 Dora García: Insect, History, Mirror, Revolution October 7 Performance: Clara Amaral–She gave it to me I got it from her October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel: Tyna Abebowale, Lara Almarcegui, Anne-Lise Coste, and Pauline Curnier Jardin October 28 Launch of UNREAL ESTATE, by Ksenia Galiaeva 

eye museum IJpromenade 1, 1031 KT Amsterdam Tel: +31 20 589 14 00 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.eyefilm.nl

Until October 1 Werner Herzog: The Ecstatic Truth October 14 – January 7, 2024 Janis Rafa: Feed me. Cheat me. Eat me

GRIMM Keizersgracht 241, 1016 EA Amsterdam Tel: +31 20 675 24 65 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.grimmgallery.com

September 14 – October 28 Matthew Day Jackson September 21–24 Unseen Amsterdam: Dirk Braeckman November 3 – December 22 Group Show, curated by Caroline Walker

Slewe Galerie Kerkstraat 105A, 1017 GD Amsterdam Tel: +31 20 625 72 14 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.slewe.nl

September 30 – October 28 Paul Drissen November 2–5 Artissima November 16–19 Art Cologne November 25 – December 23 Roos Theuws

Stevenson Prinsengracht 371B, 1016 HK Amsterdam Tel: +31 62 532 13 80 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.stevenson.info

September 16 – October 28 Neo Matloga October 11–15 Frieze London

Galerie Fons Welters Bloemstraat 140, 1016 LJ Amsterdam Tel: +31 20 423 30 46 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.fonswelters.nl

September 8 – October 14 Sven Kroner: Atmosphere September 8 – October 14 Win McCarthy October 28 – December 23 Adriano Amaral October 28 – December 23 Group Show (Front Space)

The Netherlands

SEOU L ARARIO GALLERY

LEEAHN GALLERY

85 Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 03058 Tel: 82 2 541 5701 Hours: Tues. – Sat. 11–6 43 Mannam-ro, Dongnam-gu, Cheonan-si, Chungcheongnam-do 31120 Tel: 82 41 551 5100 Hours: Mon. – Sun. 11–7 E-mail: [email protected] Web: arariogallery.com

9, 12-gil, Jahamun-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 03043 Tel: 82 2 730 2243 Fax: 82 2 512 2243 188-1, Icheon-ro, Jung-gu, Daegu 41956 Tel: 82 53 424 2203 Fax: 82 53 426 2203 E-mail: [email protected] Web: leeahngallery.com Hours: Tues. – Sat. 10–6

September 1 – October 21 Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different (Seoul) Instagram: @arariogallery_official Facebook.com/ARARIOGALLERY WeChat ID: ararioshanghai

BARAKAT CONTEMPORARY 58-4 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 03053 Tel: 82 2 730-1949 E-mail: [email protected] Web: barakatcontemporary.com Hours: Tues. – Sun. 10–6

Until October 27 Jewyo Rhii: Of Hundred Carts and On Instagram: @barakat_contemporary

GALLERY BATON 116 Dokseodang-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04420 Tel: 82 2 597 5701 E-mail: [email protected] Web: gallerybaton.com Hours: Tues. – Sat. 10–6

Until September 27 Lee Jaeseok: Exceptionally complex, yet elegantly engineered. Instagram: @gallerybaton

GALLERY HYUNDAI 14 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 03062 Tel: 82 2 2287 3500 Fax: 82 2 2287 3580 8 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 03062 Tel: 82 2 2287 3591 Fax: 82 2 2287 3590 E-mail: [email protected] Web: galleryhyundai.com Hours: Tues. – Sun. 10–6

Until October 8 Botched Art: The Meanderings of Sung Neung Kyung September 7 – October 8 Sarah Morris: Pine Cones and Corporations Instagram: @galleryhyundai

KUKJE GALLERY 54 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 03053 Tel: 82 2 735 8449 Fax: 82 2 733 4879 Hours: Mon. – Sat. 10–6, Sun. 10–5 F1963, 20 Gurak-ro, 123 Beon-gil, Suyeong-gu, Busan 48212 Tel: 82 5 1785 2239 Hours: Tues. – Sun. 10–6 E-mail: [email protected] Web: kukjegallery.com

Until October 22 Wook-kyung Choi: A Stranger to Strangers (Busan) Until October 22 Anish Kapoor Instagram: @kukjegallery

LEHMANN MAUPIN 213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04349 Tel: 82 2 725 0094 Fax: 82 2 725 0095 E-mail: [email protected] Web: lehmannmaupin.com Hours: Tues. – Sat. 11–7

September 5 – October 28 David Salle: World People Instagram: @lehmannmaupin

September 5 – October 28 Lee Kang-So: The Wind Blows (About the Sculpture) September 2 – October 14 Imi Knoebel: Figura (Daegu) Instagram: @leeahngallery

ONE AND J. GALLERY B1, 26, Apgujeong-ro 60-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul 06014 Tel: 82 2 745 1644 Fax: 82 2 745 1642 E-mail: [email protected] Web: oneandj.com Hours: Tues. – Sun. 11–6

September 1 – October 22 MeeNa Park: House Instagram & Facebook: @oneandjgallery Twitter: @oneandj_gallery

PACE GALLERY 267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04348 Tel: 82 2 790 9388 Fax: 82 2 790 9388 E-mail: [email protected] Web: pacegallery.com Hours: Tues. – Sat. 10–6

September 5 – October 21 Yoshitomo Nara September 5 – October 21 Robert Nava

THE PAGE GALLERY Galleria Foret G205, 32-14 Seoulsup 2-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul 04769 Tel: 82 2 3447 0049 Fax: 82 3447 0050 E-mail: [email protected] Web: thepage-gallery.com Hours: Tues. – Sat. 10:30–6

September 4 – October 13 Misha Kahn: Glancing Blows September 4 – October 13 Sadie Laska: Electrosmog Instagram: @thepage_gallery

PERROTIN 10 Dosan-daero 45-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul 06021 Tel: 82 2 545 7978 Hours: Mon. – Sat. 10–6 E-mail: [email protected] Web: perrotin.com

September 2 – October 7 Tavares Strachan: Do And Be Instagram: @galerieperrotin

THADDAEUS ROPAC 1–2F, 122-1 Dokseodang-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04420 Tel: 82 2 6949 1760 E-mail: [email protected] Web: ropac.net Hours: Tues. – Sat. 10–6

September 4 – October 20 Donald Judd September 4 – October 20 Joseph Beuys: Reservoirs of impulse – drawings, 1950s–1980s Instagram: @thaddaeusropac

MYTHS OF GOLD Part I: SEPTEMBER 6 — DECEMBER 9, 2023 AMERICAS SOCIETY

Curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Tie Jojima, and Edward J. Sullivan Olga de Amaral, Denilson Baniwa, Charles Bentley, Juan Brenner, Wendy Cabrera Rubio, Leda Catunda, Juan Covelli, Theodor De Bry, Scherezade Garcia, Anna Bella Geiger, Mathias Goeritz, Thomas Hariot, John Harris, Pablo Helguera, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Alfredo Jaar, Nancy La Rosa & Juan Salas Carreño, Jaime Lauriano, Karen Lofgren, Lambayeque artist, Liliana Maresca, Sara Mejia Kriendler, Quimbaya style artist, Mazenett Quiroga, Ana María Millán, Marta Minujín, Herman Moll, Priscilla Monge, Santiago Montoya, Eamon Ore-Giron, Rubén Ortiz Torres, José Antonio Peñaloza, Armando Queiroz, Ronny Quevedo, Freddy Rodríguez, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Julia Santos Solomon, Pedro Terán, Ernest Charton de Treville, Moara Tupinambá, Laura Vinci, Alberta Whittle. After Charles Bentley and Robert H. Schomburgk Twelve Views in the Interior of the Guianas,1840. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

680 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065

www.as-coa.org/visualarts

UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES

ACKLAND ART MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL 101 South Columbia Street, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514 Tel: 919 966 5736 Web: ackland.org Wed. – Sat. 10–5, Sun. 1–5, second Fri. of every month 10–9

Until December 31 Various Artists: Permanent Collection Galleries Until July 7, 2024 pARC by The Urban Conga

BATES COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell Street, Lewiston, Maine 04240 Tel: 207 786 6158 Web: bates.edu/museum Mon. and Wed. 10–7:30, Tues. and Thurs. – Sat. 10–5

Until October 7 Selections from the Synergy Fund Diversify the Collection Program Until October 7 Who Are They? Who Am I? – Portraits of Artists & Artist Self-Portraits from the Permanent Collection October 27 – March 4, 2024 Exploding Native Inevitable October 27 – March 4, 2024 Brad Kahlhamer: Nomadic Studio, Maine Camp

GEORGIA MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA 90 Carlton Street, Athens, Georgia 30602 Tel: 706 542 4662 Web: georgiamuseum.org Tues. – Wed. 10–5, Thurs. 10–9, Fri. – Sat. 10–5, Sun. 1–5

Until September 24 Sky Hopinka: Lore Until October 8 Jim Fiscus: Where Shadows Cross Until December 10 Southern/Modern Until February 11, 2024 In Dialogue – Power Couple: Pierre and Louise Daura in Paris Until February 11, 2024 Power and Piety in 17th-Century Spanish Art: Pedro Orrente, Francisco de Herrera, the Elder, Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and José Antolínez October 28 – March 31 Nancy Baker Cahill: Through Lines

MEADOWS MUSEUM, SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY 5900 Bishop Boulevard, Dallas, Texas 75205 Tel: 214 768 2516 Web: meadowsmuseumdallas.org Tues. – Sat. 10–5, Thurs. 10–9, Sun. 1–5

September 17 – January 7, 2024 Spanish Light: Sorolla in American Collections

HENRY ART GALLERY, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 15th Avenue NE + NE 41st Street, Seattle, Washington 98195 Tel: 206 543 2280 Web: henryart.org Thurs. 10–7, Fri. – Sun. 10–5

Until September 30 Taking Care: Collection Support Studio

HESSEL MUSEUM OF ART, BARD COLLEGE 33 Garden Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 Tel: 845 758 7598 Web: ccs.bard.edu Wed. – Mon. 12–6

Until October 15 Erika Verzutti: New Moons Until November 26 Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969

SAMUEL DORSKY MUSEUM OF ART STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT NEW PALTZ 1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz, New York 12561 Tel: 845 257 3844 Web: newpaltz.edu/museum Wed. – Sun. 11–5

Until November 12 Notes for Tomorrow, curated by Independent Curators International (Alice and Horace Chandler and North Galleries) September 9 – December 10 Purple Haze: Art and Drugs Across the Americas

YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511 Tel: 203 432 0600 Web: artgallery.yale.edu Free and open to the public Tue. – Fri. 10–5, Thurs. 10–8, Sat. – Sun. 11–5

Until December 3 In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art September 8 – January 7, 2024 Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space

One new pavilion Three major exhibitions Mario Schifano: The Rise of the ‘60s Curated by Alberto Salvadori September 14, 2023 – January 8, 2024 Ettore Spalletti: Parole di Colore A project conceived by Fondazione Ettore Spalletti and Alberto Salvadori in collaboration with architect Alberto Campo Baeza September 14, 2023 – January 8, 2024 Carlo Scarpa: Timeless Masterpieces Curated by Marino Barovier September 14, 2023 – March 31, 2025

Robert Olnick Pavilion Magazzino Italian Art 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, NY Thursday–Monday 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. magazzino.art

UNBOUND PERFORMANCE AS RUPTURE PANTEHA ABARESHI, ELEANOR ANTIN, SALIM BAYRI, NAO BUSTAMANTE, MATT CALDERWOOD, PETER CAMPUS, PATTY CHANG, JULIEN CREUZET, VAGINAL DAVIS, UFUOMA ESSI, VALIE EXPORT, CAO GUIMARÃES, SHURUQ HARB, SANJA IVEKOVIĆ, ULYSSES JENKINS, JOAN JONAS, STANYA KAHN,

KLARA LIDÉN,

TAREK LAKHRISSI,

MANDLA & GRAHAM CLAYTON-CHANCE, LUTZ MOMMARTZ, SENGA NENGUDI, MAME-DIARRA NIANG, LYDIA OURAHMANE, CHRISTELLE OYIRI, P. STAFF, MANFRED PERNICE, SONDRA PERRY, HOWARDENA PINDELL, POPE.L, PIPILOTTI RIST, KATHARINA SIEVERDING, AKEEM SMITH, GWENN THOMAS

12 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 28 JULY 2024 JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION

LEIPZIGER STRASSE 60 D-10117 BERLIN

ON VIEW AUG 25–DEC 30, 2023

Sahar Khoury: Umm Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally Harold Mendez: one way to transform and two and three Outpost Office: Color Block No. 2

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS | THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY | COLUMBUS, OHIO | WEXARTS.ORG Harold Mendez, Invocation for a return, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and PATRON Gallery, Chicago. Photo: Evan Jenkins.

Hudson Valley MIDDLE

Hessel Museum of Art | CCS Bard Galleries

Analog Diary

33 Garden Road, Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504 [email protected] 845 758 7598 ccs.bard.edu Wed – Mon 12–6

Until September 10 Group Show: Chromazones

Until October 15 Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 Until October 15 Erika Verzutti: New Moons

1154 North Avenue, Beacon, NY 12508 [email protected] analogdiary.art Sat – Sun 11–5

Ongoing Rita McBride: Arena Momentum Ongoing stanley brouwn Ongoing Senga Nengudi

Elijah Wheat Showroom

195 Front St, Newburgh, NY 12550 [email protected] elijahwheatshowroom.com By appointment only Until September 23 Alex Yudzon: A Room for the Night Until September 24 Kat Ryals and Caitlin McCormick: Souvenirs of the Wasteland Ongoing Marton Nemes: The Wave

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604 [email protected] vassar.edu/theloeb Wed 10–5, Thurs 10–9, Fri–Sun 10–5 Until September 3 In the Spotlight – Between the Lines: Innovation and Expression in Women’s Sewing Samplers (Part 2) Until September 10 Body Matters Until September 24 The Hairy Leg or What To Do Wrong – Artist’s Choice: Judy Linn Selects Photographs from the Loeb

Geary

34 Main Street, Millerton, NY 12546 [email protected] 518 592 1503 geary.nyc Fri – Sun 11–5 Until October 1 Katy Schimert and Ping Zheng

Headstone Gallery

28 Hurley Ave, Kingston, NY 12401 [email protected] headstonegalleryny.com Fri – Sun 12–5 September 2 – October 1 Michael McGrath: Some Small Threats

Magazzino Italian Art

2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, NY 10516 [email protected] 845 666 7202 Thurs – Mon 11–6

233 Liberty Street, Newburgh, NY 12550 [email protected] 917 703 9262 visitorcenter.space Fri 4–6, Sat 1–5, weekdays by appointment September 1 – October 6 Field Dressings for Lazarus: a LODGERstudio project

UPPER

Dia Beacon

3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY 12508 [email protected] 845 440 0100 diaart.org/sites/main/beacon Thu – Mon 11–6

VISITOR CENTER

Art Omi magazzino.art

September 14 – January 8, 2024 Mario Schifano: The Rise of the ‘60s September 14 – January 8, 2024 Ettore Spalletti: Parole di colore September 14 – March 31, 2025 Carlo Scarpa: Timeless Masterpieces Ongoing Arte Povera

MOTHER

1154 North. Avenue, Beacon, NY 12508 [email protected] mothergallery.art September 16 – October 21 Bhakti Baxter: Resident Frequencies November 4 – December 16 Anders Hamilton and Jenny Morgan: The Heart Wants What It Wants, Or Else It Does Not Care

Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

State University of New York at New Paltz, 1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz, NY 12561 [email protected] 845 257 3844 newpaltz.edu/dorskymuseum Wed. – Sun. 11–5 Until November 12 Group Show: Notes for Tomorrow, curated by Independent Curators International (Alice and Horace Chandler and North Galleries) September 9 – December 10 Group Show: Purple Haze

Stoneleaf Retreat

838 Ashokan Road, Kingston, NY 12401 [email protected] stoneleafretreat.com By appointment only Until April 1 Lizania Cruz: Freedom Budget Ongoing Projects by Liz Collins, Lizania Cruz, Joy Curtis, Moko Fukuyama, Macon Reed, and Rebecca Reeve

Turley Gallery

98 Green Street, Hudson, NY 12534 [email protected] turley.gallery Fri – Sun 12–5 September 2 – October 1 With: Kelcy Chase Folsom and Jason Reed

1405 County Route 22, Ghent, NY 12075 [email protected] artomi.org 9–5 daily Until October 29 Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELF Ongoing AD-WO, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Alexandre Arrechea, Alice Aycock, Robert Grosvenor, Steven Holl, Hana Kassem and Spencer Topel, Alicja Kwade, Jon Lott, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Anna Sew Hoy, Jean Shin, Nari Ward, Agustina Woodgate, and Cameron Wu

Bill Arning Exhibitions | Hudson Valley 17 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 12106 [email protected] 617 359 9643 Fri – Sun 12–5

Until October 1 Once Removed: Meghan Gerety, Erik Daniel White, and Zeke Williams

Jack Shainman Gallery | The School 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 12106 [email protected] 518 758 1628 jackshainman.com Sat 11–6

Until December 1 Michael Snow: A Life Survey (1955–2020)

Opus40

356 George Sickle Road, Saugerties, NY 12477 [email protected] 845 246 3400 opus40.org Thurs – Mon 10:30–5 See https://opus40.org/events/ for information about live performances, gallery exhibits, workshops, nature walks, and more.

SEPTEMBER

4 Hudson Street, 3rd Floor, Kinderhook, NY 12106 [email protected] septembergallery.com Thurs – Sun 11–5 Until October 8 Laleh Khorramian: Myth-Maker

Thomas Cole National Historic Site 218 Spring Street, Catskill, NY 12414 [email protected] 518 943 7465 @thomascolesite Ticketed

thomascole.org

Until October 29 Women Reframe American Landscape – Susie Barstow & Her Circle / Contemporary Practices: Teresita Fernández, Guerrilla Girls, Marie Lorenz, Tanya Marcuse, Mary Mattingly, Ebony G. Patterson, Anna Plesset, Jean Shin, Wendy Red Star, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, Kay WalkingStick, and Saya Woolfalk

ISAAC JULIEN

Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement

ORGANIZED BY

ON VIEW

Yale Center for British Art

Yale Architecture Gallery, New Haven

Yale School of Architecture

August 24 to December 10, 2023

Isaac Julien, Soluções inventadas / Solutions Invented, 2019. Image courtesy Isaac Julien; Victoria Miro, London; and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. © Isaac Julien

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

Inmaculada Salinas:

September 14 – November 11 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

September 14 – November 3 Koo Jeong A: an + bn = cn September 24, 2023 – September 2024 Solo Summer Group Show III (Solo Houses, Cretas)

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

Until September 28 Kim Simonsson (Main Gallery) Until October 19 Bruno Ollé (Madrid Gallery) Until October 27 Clàudia Valsells (Turó Park) Until November 3 Three Under Forty (Palau de Casavells)

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

September 14 – October 28

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

September 14 – 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

September 14 – October 28

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

September 14 – November 18

Jürgen Klauke: Kreuz & Queer

Pedro Cabrita Reis, Blossom, 2023, polyurethane on aluminium, 12' 5 5⁄8" × 7' 6 1⁄2" × 6' 10 5⁄8". Courtesy Albarrán Bourdais, Madrid.

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

September 21 – November 11

Viktor Pivovarov: PANTHEON

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

Until September 8 José Miguel Pereñiguez: El tambor de sarga Until September 8 Elisa Pardo Puch: Bajo el cielo de la noche (Boiler Room) September 22 – 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

September 13 – 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

September 14 – November 4

Nancy Spero

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

September 14 – 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

September 14 – November 30

Mateo López: Camina Habla Canta Baila

WARHOL x SCHOLDER COWBOYS & INDIANS MUSEUM OF THE SOUTHWEST

~ OCTOBER 2023

MUSEUMSW.ORG Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait with Skull, 1977 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. 1998.1.2866 Andy Warhol, Fritz Scholder, 1979 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. 2002.806

BELGIUM ANTWERP TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY Jos Smolderenstraat 50, 2000 Antwerp Tel: +32 3 251 14 17 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.timvanlaeregallery.com

Until October 7 Rinus Van de Velde September 7–10 The Armory Show October 12 – November 24 Adrian Ghenie

RODOLPHE JANSSEN

ALMINE RECH

rue Livourne 35, 1050 Bruxelles rue Livourne 32, 1050 Bruxelles Tel: +32 2 538 08 18 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.rodolphejanssen.com

Abdijstraat 20 rue de l’Abbaye, 1050 Bruxelles Tel: +32 2 648 56 84 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.alminerech.com

September 7–10 Brussels Gallery Weekend September 7 – October 14 Gina Beavers: Florid (Livourne 35) September 7 – October 14 Fred Bervoets: Paintings & Works on Paper from the Stéphane Janssen Collection (Livourne 32) October 26 – December 16 David Adamo (Livourne 35)

IRÈNE LAUB GALLERY ZENO X GALLERY Zeno X Gallery Antwerp Borgerhout Godtsstraat 15, 2140 Antwerp Borgerhout Zeno X Gallery Antwerp South Leopold de Waaelplaats 16, 2000 Antwerp Tel: +32 3 216 16 28 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.zeno-x.com

September 20 – October 28 Group Show: Soul Mapping (Antwerp Borgerhout and Antwerp South) October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel

29 rue Van Eyck, 1050 Bruxelles Tel: +32 2 647 55 16 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.irenelaubgallery.com

September 7–10 Brussels Gallery Weekend September 8 – October 14 Gauthier Hubert: je dois vous dire que Tarzan n’a pas écrit Le Livre de la jungle et Mowgli n’a pas couché avec Jane October 5–8 Art on Paper: Gauthier Hubert October 27 – November Pedro Paixão, curated by Sorana Munsya

HARLAN LEVEY PROJECTS

BRUSSELS BARONIAN rue Isidore Verheyden 2, 1050 Bruxelles rue de la Concorde 33, 1050 Bruxelles Zeedijk 731, 8300 Knokke Heist Tel: +32 2 512 92 95 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.baronian.eu

Until September 10 David Nash (Knokke) September 6 – November 25 QUINQUAGESIMUM: Albert Baronian’s 50th Anniversary (Fondation CAB) September 7 – November 10 Yann Bronder: Tu m’as reproché en fait ce que tu faisais avec moi sans que je ne le sache. Top. (Concorde) September 7 – November 10 Da Torino: Giorgio Griffa, Giulio Paolini, and Gilberto Zorio (Verheyden) September 16 – November 5 Charles-Henry Sommelette (Knokke) October 5–8 Art on Paper

Harlan Levy Projects 1080 rue Isidoor Teirlinckstraat 65, 1080 Bruxelles Tel: +32 485 699 146 | +32 476 234 757 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.hl-projects.com

September 7–10 Brussels Gallery Weekend September 7 – December 16 Emmanuel Van der Auwera: A Thousand Pictures of Nothing

Until September 10 Group Show: Harry Irene, curated by Joe Bradley (rue Van Eyck) Until October 28 Nathanaëlle Herbelin: Undivided Attention (107 rue St-Georges) September 7–10 Brussels Gallery Weekend September 10 – October 14 Thierry De Cordier (6 rue St-Georges) September 22 – November 10 Ulala Imai (rue Van Eyck) October 11–15 Frieze London October 18–22 Paris+ par Art Basel October 26 – December 16 Sterling Ruby (6 rue St-Georges)

SORRY WE’RE CLOSED / SEBASTIEN JANSSEN 39 rue des Minimes, 1000 Bruxelles Tel: +32 478 354 213 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.sorrywereclosed.com

September 7–10 Brussels Gallery Weekend September 7 – October 28 Eric Croes: La nuit est une femme à barbe

GALERIE TEMPLON rue Veydt 13, 1060 Bruxelles Tel: +32 2 537 13 17 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.templon.com

September 7 – November 4 Claude Viallat September 8–10 The Armory Show

LU X E M B O U R G CEYSSON & BÉNÉTIÈRE rue d’Arlon 13-15, L-8399 Koerich/Wandhaff, Luxembourg Tel: +35 2 262 020 95 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.ceyssonbenetiere.com

GALERIE GRETA MEERT rue du Canal 13, 1000 Bruxelles Tel: +32 2 219 14 22 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.galeriegretameert.com

September 7–10 Brussels Gallery Weekend September 8 – October 21 Edith Dekyndt: Ne pas laver le sable jaune September 8 – October 21 Richard Tuttle September 9 Book Launch: Richard Tuttle – Stories I–XX

September 30 – November 18

Bernar Venet: Gravité

NOSBAUM REDING GALLERY rue Wiltheim 2 + 4, L-2733 Luxembourg Tel: +35 2 281 12 51 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.nosbaumreding.lu

September 22 – November 4 September 22 – November 4

XAVIER HUFKENS 44 rue Van Eyck, 1050 Bruxelles 107 rue St-Georges, 1050 Bruxelles 6 rue St-Georges, 1050 Bruxelles Tel: +32 2 639 67 30 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.xavierhufkens.com

September 7–10 Brussels Gallery Weekend September 7 – November 4 Larry Poons September 7 – November 4 The Wall: Antoni Tàpies

Thomas Arnolds (rue Wiltheim 4) Jeanne Mons (rue Wiltheim 2)

NOSBAUM REDING GALLERY 60 rue de la Concorde, 1050 Bruxelles Tel: +32 2 411 11 85 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.nosbaumreding.lu

September 8 – October 7 September 8 – October 7

Kate Burling William Grob

ZIDOUN-BOSSUYT GALLERY rue Saint-Ulric 6, L-2651 Luxembourg Tel: +35 2 262 964 49 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.zidoun-bossuyt.com

September 28 – November 11 Khalif Tahir Thompson: Who Knows Where The Time Goes

August 18 –December 17, 2023

M S A V E B O L E whenthe children come home Ken L um

a t i k i N Gale

h a n n a H vy Le

Jes F an

n i e s Orhas n i P

david antonio cruz

118 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 icaphila.org Free. For All.

Support for Moveables has been provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support has been provided by Danielle M. Anderman, Carol & John Finley, Stacey & Benjamin Frost, Patricia & Howard Silverstein, Meredith & Bryan Verona, Caroline & Daniel Werther, and The Study at University City. Support for David Antonio Cruz: When the Children Come Home has been provided by The Inchworm Fund. Additional support has been provided by Monique Meloche Gallery, the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, and by Nancy & Leonard Amoroso, Cheri & Steven Friedman, Marjorie & Michael Levine, B.Z. & Michael Schwartz, and Stephanie & David Simon.

GERMANY BERLIN GALERIE BUCHHOLZ Fasanenstraße 30, 10719 Tel: +49 30 8862 4056 galeriebuchholz.de [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 September 15 – October 21 Melvin Edwards: B WIRE, BEWARE, ALL WAYS ART – Steel, Paper & Paint

CAPITAIN PETZEL Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Tel: +49 30 240 88 130 capitainpetzel.de [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 September 15 – October 21 Ragen Moss: C O N S P I R E

GALERIE EIGEN + ART Auguststraße 26, 10117 Tel: +49 30 280 6605 eigen-art.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 Until October 28 David Schnell Flyer November 2 – December 16 Stefan Guggisberg

EIGEN + ART LAB Torstraße 220, 10115 Tel: +49 30 3087 7940 eigen-art-lab.com [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 2–6, Sat. 11–6 September 8 – October 21 Vanessa Opoku November 3 – December 22 Charlotte Edey

HUA INTERNATIONAL Potsdamer Straße 81B, 10785 Tel. +49 30 2579 2410 hua-international.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 12–6 Please contact gallery for information.

JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION Leipziger Straße 60 (entrance: Jerusalemer Straße), 10117 Tel: +49 309 2106 2460 jsfoundation.art [email protected] Sat. – Sun. 12–6 September 14 – December 17 Double Feature: Young-jun Tak September 14 – July 28 Group Show: Unbound – Performance as Rupture

KLEMM’S

GALERIE NORDENHAKE

Prinzessinnenstraße 29, 10969 Tel. +49 30 4050 4953 klemms-berlin.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6

Lindenstraße 34, 10969 Tel: +49 30 206 1483 nordenhake.com [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 11–6

September 15 – October 28 Bernard Piffaretti: Kombi

September 15 – October 27 Lap-See Lam

KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE

SPRÜTH MAGERS

Neue Grünstraße 12, 10179 Tel: +49 30 5059 6820 konradfischergalerie.de [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6

Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Tel: +49 30 2888 4030 spruethmagers.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6

September 15 – November 4 David Douard: Achéte le nacré à leurs âmes September 15 – November 4 Gregor Schneider: Homeless

September 16 – November 11 Bernd & Hilla Becher September 16 – November 11 Nora Turato September 16 – November 11 Pamela Rosenkranz

KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

ZILBERMAN

Auguststraße 69, 10117 Tel: +49 30 243 4590 kw-berlin.de [email protected] Wed. – Mon. 11–7; Tues. closed; Thurs. 11–9, free admission 6–9 September 14 – January 7, 2024 Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island September 14 – January 7, 2024 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research: Kameelah Janan Rasheed – in the coherence, we weep September 14 – January 7, 2024 SKIN IN THE GAME: Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Andrea Zittel

Goethestraße 82, 10623 Schlüterstraße 45, 10707 Tel: +49 30 3180 9900 zilbermangallery.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 September 12 – November 25 Omar Barquet: The Passage of Amnesia – Ghost Variations, 1st Regression

COLOGNE GALERIE BUCHHOLZ

GALERIE MAX HETZLER Bleibtreustraße 45, 10623 Bleibtreustraße 15/16, 10623 Goethestraße 2/3, 10623 Potsdamer Straße 77-87, 10785 Tel: +49 303 464 978 50 maxhetzler.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 September 13 – October 21 Paul McCarthy (Potsdamer Straße) September 15 – October 28 Beatriz Milhazes (Goethestraße) September 15 – October 28 Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince, and Rudolf Stingel (Bleibtreustraße 45)

Neven-DuMont-Straße 17, 50667 Tel: +49 221 257 4946 galeriebuchholz.de [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 11–6, Sat. 11–4 September 1 – October 7 Lutz Bacher: Bien Hoa

GALERIE JAN KAPS Lindenstraße 20, 50674 Tel: +49 221 828 202 12 jan-kaps.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 September 1 – October 28 Minh Lan Tran: Space of Resistance

LOVERS-THOMAS HOUSEAGO 2023.09.16-2024.03.10 2380 LONG TENG AVE SHANGHAI

www.tankshanghai.com

[email protected]

021-6950 0005

GERMANY DÜSSELDORF

FRANKFURT

MÜNSTER

ANNA LAUDEL DÜSSELDORF

GALERIE BÄRBEL GRÄSSLIN

LWL-MUSEUM FÜR KUNST UND KULTUR

Mühlenstraße 1, 40213 Tel: +49 211 902 269 62 annalaudel.gallery [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 12–6, Sat. 11–3 Until September 24 Anke Eilergerhard: Überzuckert Until October 6 Belkis Balpinar: Relative Points of View

Schäfergasse 46 B, 60313 Tel: +49 69 2992 4670 galerie-graesslin.de [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 10–6, Sat. 10–2 September 9 – October 21 Imi Knoebel: etcetera October 28 – December 9 Günther Förg

Domplatz 10, 48143 Tel: +49 251 5907 201 lwl-museum-kunst-kultur.de [email protected] Tues. – Sun. 10–6, open until midnight on the second Friday of each month Until September 3 Modern Summer

KUNSTHALLE DÜSSELDORF Grabbeplatz 4, 40213 Tel: +49 211 54 23 77 10 kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de [email protected] Tues. – Sun. 11–6 Until September 17 The Inescapable Intertwining of All Lives: Keltie Ferris, Ilse Henin, Hayv Kahraman, Gisela McDaniel, Soraya Sharghi, and Emma Talbot

KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE Platanenstraße 7, 40233 Tel: +49 21 1685 908 konradfischergalerie.de [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 September 1 – November 4 Susan Philipsz: Sokol Terezín, with works by Max Neuhaus

JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION Schanzenstraße 54, 40549 Tel: +49 21 1585 8840 jsfoundation.art [email protected] Sun. 11–6 Until December 10 Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age September 3 – December 17 Double Feature: Young-jun Tak

FILIALE Stiftstraße 14, 60313 Tel: +49 69 2992 4670 galerie-filiale.de [email protected] Tues. – Fri. 2–6, Sat. 11–3

MUNICH

September 2 – October 28 Robin Stretz: Complex November 4 – December 22 Manuel Romero

HAUS DER KUNST

MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST Domstraße 10, 60311 Tel: +49 69 212 30447 mmk.art [email protected] Tues. 11–6, Wed. 11–7, Thurs. – Sun. 11–6 Until October 15 Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i Until May 29, 2025 Cyprien Gaillard: Frankfurter Schacht

HAMBURG SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY Admiralitätstraße 71, 20459 Tel: +49 40 3751 9940 sfeir-semler.com [email protected] Mon. – Fri. 11–7, Sat. 11–4 September 7 – October 28 Khalil Rabah: Relocation, Among Other Things September 7 – October 28 Christine Streuli: Falling Apart (permanent version)

Prinzregentenstraße 1, 80538 Tel: +49 89 2112 7113 hausderkunst.de [email protected] Mon. & Wed. 10–8, Tues. closed, Thurs. 10–10, Fri. – Sun. 10–8 Until September 10 Katalin Ladik: Ooooooooo-pus September 8 – March 3, 2024 WangShui: Toleranzfenster September 8 – March 3, 2024 In anderen Räumen: Enviroments

LENBACHHAUS Luisenstraße 33, 80333 Tel: +49 89 2339 6933 lenbachhaus.de [email protected] Wed. – Sun. 10–6, Thurs. 10–8 Until September 10 Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theater? Until October 8 Natascha Sadr Haghighian Until July 28, 2024 Fragment of an Infinite Discourse: Maria Bartuszová, Mario García Torres, Rodney Graham, On Kawara, Beate Kuhn, Isa Melsheimer, Stephen Prina, Karin Sander, Wilhelm Sasnal, and Wiebke Siem

PULPO GALLERY

LEIPZIG GALERIE EIGEN + ART Spinnereistraße 7, Halle 5, 04179 Tel: +49 34 1960 7886 eigen-art.com [email protected] Tues. – Sat. 11–6 September 2 – October 21 Ulrike Theusner Mahagonny October 28 – December 16 Maja Behrmann Findling

Obermarkt 51, 82418 Murnau am Staffelsee Tel: +49 17 1177 8796 pulpogallery.com [email protected] Wed. - Fri. 10–4, Sat. 10–2 Until December 30 POP-UP BERGSON X PULPO GALLERY: Gabrielle Graessle, Gao Hang, Patrick Tresset, Taylor White, and others September 15 – October 18 It’s a material world: Constanza Camila, Kramer Garfias, Bob Geerts, stephanie mei huang, Tanya Ling, and Kiki Smith

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023 – J A N UA RY 7, 2 0 2 4

YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y A R T G A L L E RY

Free and open to the public artgallery.yale.edu @yaleartgallery

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

September 14 – January 8, 2024 Mario Schifano: The Rise of the ‘60s September 14 – January 8, 2024 Ettore Spalletti: Parole di colore September 14 – March 31, 2025 Carlo Scarpa: Timeless Masterpieces Ongoing Arte Povera

October 18 – April 27, 2024 Motherwell, Segal, Stella October 18 – April 27, 2024 Helen Levitt New York Street Photographer 1930s–1990s October 18 – April 27, 2024 Mimmo Paladino: Painting and Sculpture October 18 – April 27, 2024 Only Sculpture: Bladen, Heizer, Fabro Perlman, Serra, Tony Smith, Snelson, Tucker, Wilmarth October 18 – April 27, 2024 15 Artists New to the Collection including Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz October 18 – April 27, 2024 Danny Lyon

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 September 24 Florian Krewer: everybody rise 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

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

Until September 17 Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting Until November 26 Jammie Holmes: Make the Revolution Irresistible

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

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

Until October 1 Ming Smith: Feeling the Future Until November 26 Jordan Strafer: Trilogy

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

Until September 3 Pacita Abad 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 29 List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares October 27 – March 10, 2024 Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme October 27 – March 10, 2024 Carlos Reyes

Contemporary Art in U.S. Museums

Ron Mueck, Mass, 2016-17, variable dimensions, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 2018. © Ron Mueck. Photo: Tom Ross.

E XHIB ITIO N J U N E 8 — N OVEMB ER 5, 2023

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 September 19 Hadi Falapishi: Almost There 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 September 10 Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity Until February 4, 2024 April Bey: Atlantica, The Gilda Region Until February 4, 2024 Guillermo Bert: The Journey

Until December 31 Until December 31 Until December 31

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

WILMINGTON PHILADELPHIA

ST. LOUIS

Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

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

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

Until September 10 Rhythms of Nature: The Art & Design of DRIFT 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 Unrtil 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

3750 Washington Blvd, St Louis, MO 63108 Tel: 314 535 4660 Web: www.camstl.org

September 8 – February 11, 2024 Dominic Chambers: Birthplace September 8 – February 11, 2024 Justin Favela: Ruta Madre September 8 – February 11, 2024 Hajra Waheed: A Solo Exhibition

SAVANNAH

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

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

Until December 18 Group Show: Likewise – Artists Portraying Artists 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 September 8 – December 26 Xiwen Zhu: Soft Shell September 8 – January 29, 2024 Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Energy/Synergy September 8 – January 29, 2024 Yu Hong: Night Walk

Contemporary Art in U.S. Museums

THE ANTI-AESTHETIC AT FORTY HAL FOSTER

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Opposite page: Jenny Holzer, Living: Some days you wake up and immediately . . . , 1980–82, bronze, 8 × 10".

Below: Cover of The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Bay Press, 1983).

THE NOTION OF POSTMODERNISM was once a great stimulant to art and thought; today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past. In some ways, postmodernism seems more historical than modernism, reanimated as modernism is by questions of colonialism, diaspora, and globality. On the other hand, this untimeliness makes the present a good moment to look back at postmodernism, if only to measure our distance from it. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which I edited, was published forty years ago; it was quickly followed by Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984), assembled by Brian Wallis. Although academic presses soon produced related anthologies, these initial entries were issued by an independent publisher (Bay Press) and a contemporary museum (New Museum), respectively. In other words, the discourse of postmodernism wasn’t hatched in the academy, even if it came to roost there, and it wasn’t conjured up by journalists and publicists, even if it came to serve the culture industry. Although not as nihilistic as our libertarian present, the early 1980s was a time of deep reaction. With Thatcher, Reagan, and Kohl, neoliberalism had captured the levers of political power, and neoconservatives like Daniel Bell were ascendant ideologically. What motivated the neocons above all was revenge against “the ’60s.” The problems of contemporary society, they claimed, were due to militant students, Black activists, and strident feminists, not, say, the ravages of advanced capitalism, and the necessary cure was a return to tradition, family, and moral values. Yet even as the Left was in political retreat, it had advanced on cultural fronts. There was real vitality in these multifarious debates, not least in matters of critical theory, which was heterogeneous, especially in the anglophone context. To come to terms with these ideas new and old, a bevy of reviews appeared, including

Camera Obscura, Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, differences, New German Critique, October, Representations, Screen, Semiotext(e), Social Text, Telos, Third Text, Wedge, and Zone. In retrospect, though, the drift from politics to criticism was a bad trade, however limited the options then were. When a Social Text editor said to me that critical journals were the political parties of our time, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In part because of the vagaries of translation, young intellectuals in the United States encountered the Frankfurt School about the same time as structuralism and poststructuralism. Gramsci came via British cultural studies along with Althusser and Debord, who represented very different lines of Marxist thought. French feminism and film theory, which drew on Saussure, Freud, and Lacan, arrived with Foucault, who was skeptical of all three. A main motive of The Anti-Aesthetic was to parse how these various models might bear on contemporary art and architecture. Yet this also set up the ambiguous posture of the book, which was vanguard in its commitment to theory but defensive in its opposition to the neoconservativeneoliberal order. The Anti-Aesthetic was unambiguous, however, in its rejection of any postmodernism associated with neo-figurative art and neo-ornamental architecture. Stylistic in orientation, that postmodernism was more anti-modernist than anything else, and it appeared to support the cultural politics of the reactionary alliance. The Anti-Aesthetic also appeared in the wake of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), in which Jean-François Lyotard argued that “the grand narratives” of modernity—the dialectic of spirit, the emancipation of the worker, the accumulation of wealth, the classless society––had run into the sand. I wanted to begin, then, with a contrary voice, that of Jürgen Habermas, the central figure of the late Frankfurt School. As luck would have it, he had delivered his Theodor W. Adorno Prize lecture, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” at New York University in 1981; New German Critique published it later that year. The title of the essay carried its thrust, which insisted, against both Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition and Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), that the modern commitment to “communicative rationality” be recovered. Habermas acknowledged that the Enlightenment mission––to separate knowledge into the three spheres of science, morality, and art and to develop their “inner logic” professionally––had had mixed results at best, one of which was to distance such activities from the public. He also understood that “the 20th century . . . shattered this optimism” about the “rational organization of everyday social life.” On the other hand, Habermas averred that “efforts to ‘negate’ the culture of expertise,” à la Dada and Surrealism, were mostly “nonsense experiments”: “Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow.” Hence his ultimatum, cast in the form of a question: “Should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?”1 Habermas wasn’t sanguine about the possibility of this holding on. “Modernism is dominant but dead,” he admitted, “the disillusionment with the very failures of those programs that called for the negation of art and philosophy has come to serve as a pretense for conservative positions,” and communicative reason was outmatched by capitalist rationality. Nevertheless, he urged that the good fight be fought, as did Kenneth Frampton in “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” For Frampton, architecture was a central arena in which “local culture” confronted “universal civilization.” This shifted the question, which Frampton posed via the philosopher Paul Ricoeur: “How to become SEPTEMBER 2023 159

Above, top: Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, 1997, September 22, 1999. Photo: Alamy.

Above, bottom: Alvar Aalto, Säynätsalo Town Hall, 1952, Finland, 1976. Photo: Larry Speck.

Opposite page: View of “Rayyane Tabet: The Return,” 2023, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut.

modern and to return to sources, how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization?” Postmodern architects like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Robert A. M. Stern, and Michael Graves proffered a populist “return to history” but “merely [fed] the media-society with gratuitous, quietistic images.”2 Against this cynical program, Frampton pressed architects to “[build] the site” according to the principles of critical regionalism, which were exemplified for him in the work of Alvar Aalto and Jørn Utzon. With an emphasis on the tactile and the tectonic over the imagistic and the scenographic, architects might promote a sensuous kind of place-making that would support the realm of “human appearance” (an allusion to Hannah Arendt) and thus resist the predations of advanced capitalism. It soon turned out, however, that a greater threat than pophistorical postmodernism came from architecture refashioned as a sculptural media logo, à la the Guggenheim Bilbao, which suited the interests of a now-global capitalism even better. Again, The Anti-Aesthetic advocated practices that were not merely antimodernist. At the same time, in essays first published in October, Rosalind Krauss and 160 ARTFORUM

Douglas Crimp demonstrated how modernist conceptions of both medium and museum had fallen into crisis. Concerned that the category of sculpture had become almost meaningless after Minimalism, Krauss, in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” reasserted its old definition as a commemorative monument in order to trace the breakdown of that logic in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, first in the work of Rodin, where sculpture entered “its negative condition— a kind of sitelessness,” and then in that of Brancusi, where it became a “pure marker” that, through a reflection on its materials and processes, “depicts its own autonomy.” For several decades, Krauss argued, modernists explored this “idealist space” productively, but in time it was “experienced more and more as pure negativity,” with sculpture understood mostly as that which was not-architecture or not-landscape. However, in a deft structuralist move, Krauss argued that this negative binary could be expanded “into a quaternary field” in which sculpture was revealed to be “only one term on the periphery” along with “site-construction,” “marked sites,” and “axiomatic structures.” “Within the situation of postmodernism,” she concluded, “practice is not defined in relation to a given medium–– sculpture––but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium––photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself––might be used.” This renowned text remains a brilliant demonstration of method, one that openly privileges structure over history as a mode of explanation, yet that very emphasis also renders it silent on socioeconomic factors, such as the dominance of the commodity form and the rise of spectacular society, that have impacted sculpture far more than any logical operation.3 So, too, other critics have used the quaternary field deployed by Krauss to map not artistic expansion but ideological closure, and though Earthworks and other such constructions did extend sculpture spatially, for the most part they have proved to be a dead end aesthetically.4 Another ruse of history has operated on the art institution as analyzed by Crimp in “On the Museum’s Ruins.” According to Foucault, it was Manet who underscored the reflexivity of modernist art, whereby “every painting now belongs within the squared and massive surface of painting.”5 So what happens, Crimp asked, when photography is let loose on that surface not as a discrete medium of art but as an anti-auratic operation of image reproduction and proliferation as performed by Rauschenberg? Can the disciplinary boundaries of the institution hold up, or does such postmodernist art demonstrate once and for all that, as the theorist Eugenio Donato put it, “the set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe”? Important at the time, this epistemological crisis of the museum seems a minor problem today compared with its complicities in colonialism and imperialism, not to mention its histories of expropriation and exclusion. In “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” one of the most influential texts in The Anti-Aesthetic, Craig Owens redescribed the postmodern crack-up of the “grand narratives” of modernity as a “loss of mastery.” Although “the representational systems of the West admit only one vision—that of the constitutive male subject,” feminist artists had come to challenge that dominance. Long “excluded from representation by its very structure,” the female subject was its most incisive critic, one dedicated to its “ruin.” The prime move of feminist postmodernism was thus to “expropriate the appropriators,” an operation that Owens described, in terms that are now canonical, in the work of Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman. “Here,” he concluded, “we arrive at an apparent crossing of the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist critique of representation.” After Rosler, Owens warned that women should not be “a token for all markers of difference”; at the same time, he insisted, “sexual inequality cannot be reduced to an instance of economic exploitation.” This tension between difference and totality has returned with force in contemporary debates about race and class.6

When a Social Text editor said to me that critical journals were the political parties of our time, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

For the Marxist Fredric Jameson, however, it was only through such totalizing that any difference could be understood. A year after the publication of The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson lectured at the Whitney Museum on “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” his first text on the subject. For Jameson, the passage from modernism to postmodernism was a matter less of a rupture than of “a restructuration of a certain number of elements already given,” of which he offered several telling instances. Whereas intellectual inquiry was once undertaken in discrete discourses like philosophy, history, political theory, and literary criticism, the new species of critical theory roamed across these disciplines, poaching from them freely. Jameson next pointed to a shift in the typical relations between high and low art. Whereas modernists tended to oppose the two, postmodernists liked to intermingle them. More precisely, whereas modernists alluded to classic texts for parodic effect (as with Joyce), postmodernists tended to incorporate them in a pastiche that undercut their normativity (as with Kathy Acker).7 Most important, Jameson refused any stylistic understanding of the notion of postmodernism. Its purpose, rather, was “to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order”—those of advanced capitalism. If modernists stressed the originality of their oeuvres, postmodernists enacted “the death of the author,” and their practice

of pastiche took the modernist fragmentation of language to a new level, one that Jameson likened to the effects of schizophrenia, in which “meaning is lost,” “the materiality of words becomes obsessive,” and the world is “transformed into an image.” Through this staging of an “unreality” that feels like “intensity,” Jameson concluded, postmodernism expresses “the inner truth” of advanced capitalism, which is to erode any “sense of history.” “Our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.” Jameson ended with a proposition of his own: “Postmodernism replicates or reproduces––reinforces––the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic.” In “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Jean Baudrillard also associated the postmodern subject with a schizophrenic who, no longer able to “produce the limits of his own being,” “is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.” Of course, as with Jameson, such pathological diagnoses of an entire society are problematic, and Baudrillard was indeed prone to extreme statements, which were sometimes parroted in ’80s art talk. Yet he produced important insights, some of which anticipate “the hyperrealism of simulation” all SEPTEMBER 2023 161

around us. Here are several examples: “Advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears.” “Bodily movements” are displaced into “electronic commands.” “The instantaneity of communication has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants.” “In place of the reflexive transcendence of mirror and scene, there is a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold––the smooth operational surface of communication.” The opposition between private and public is “effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media.” Finally, in “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” Edward Said concluded The Anti-Aesthetic with a critical reflection on “the politics of interpretation.” This phrase performs a discursive twist typical of the time: Rather than to represent or interpret politics, the charge was to politicize representation, to politicize interpretation. Yet Said was already alert to the problem that such criticism, however interdisciplinary, hardly translated into more direct communication with a wider audience. On the contrary, “critics read each other and

cared about little else.” If “technical language” remained the criterion and “selfpolicing” remained the protocol, “the particular mission of the humanities” would be only “to represent noninterference in the affairs of the everyday world,” and its primary function would be merely “to represent humane marginality, which is also to preserve and if possible to conceal the hierarchy of powers that occupy the center, define the social terrain, and fix the limits of use, functions, fields, marginality, and so on.” Guided by figures like Said, the humanities have improved dramatically on these fronts, but representing “humane marginality” remains their primary purpose. MOST ANTHOLOGIES worth a damn are products of urgency and contingency, and The Anti-Aesthetic was no different. A twenty-eight-year-old editor and critic at Art in America at the time of its publication, I was almost too eager to trace the connections among art, theory, and politics that the contributors pointed toward.8 Urgency and contingency bring oversights, then, some of which remain especially galling to me. Although the premier artists of postmodernism were women, only

Baudrillard was prone to extreme statements, which were sometimes parroted in ’80s art talk. Yet he also produced important insights.

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ernist practice, which was often called “appropriation art,” this operation was taken to challenge unexamined assumptions about authorship as authority and art as property. Now the notion is fraught with ethical peril, and the term often functions as an accusation. Second, though it was always trivial to treat postmodernism as a stylistic term, its use value as a period marker has become uncertain. Simply put, we overstated the break with modernism, if not with modernity (whose grand narratives appear more defunct than ever). Certainly, the modernism that provided a foil for postmodernism was a reductive one, often too focused on a straw man or an easy target (such as Greenberg or Color Field painting). Perhaps what Lyotard, Habermas, and others counted as modernity is also due for revision––and postmodernity along with it. Third, in my introduction to the book, I opposed “a postmodernism of resistance” to “a postmodernism of reaction” and associated the former with poststructuralist critique and the latter with neoconservative politics. Already a year later, I had questioned this binary, for both appropriation art and postmodern architecture can be taken to promote a fragmentation of cultural signs that speaks to the corrosive action of capital more than anything else.10 Fourth, rejection of the aesthetic has eased. Suspicious of the lazy aestheticism all around us (late Greenbergianism, art photography, neo-expressionist painting, bronze sculpture), my cohort of artists and critics was skeptical of the aesthetic as a category, and in an early moment of the digital revolution, we were more dismissive of artistic aura than even Walter Benjamin (who influenced us enormously). As a site of reconciliation between different faculties (as Kant had defined it), the aesthetic seemed to be aligned with the ideological. This led me to draw, within the postmodernism of resistance, a distinction between two positions, one affined with Gramsci, the other with Adorno, and to offer an ultimatum of my own: The adventures of the aesthetic make up one of the great narratives of modernity: from the time of its autonomy through art-for-art’s sake to its status as necessary negative category, a critique of the world as it is. It is this last moment (figured brilliantly in the writings of Theodor Adorno) that is hard to relinquish: the notion of the aesthetic as subversive, a critical interstice in an otherwise instrumental world. Now, however, we have to consider that this aesthetic space too is eclipsed—or rather, that its criticality is now largely illusory (and so instrumental). In such an event, the strategy of an Adorno, of negative commitment, might have to be revised or rejected, and a new strategy of interference (associated with Gramsci) devised. Opposite page: Promotional video for Apple Vision Pro, 2023.

Above: Kerry James Marshall, Vignette (Wishing Well), 2010–12, acrylic on PVC panel, 72 7⁄8 × 61".

one woman appears as an author in the book, and there is only one text on feminist art, and that was written by a man.9 And though I participated in a seminar on Orientalism given by Said, the book includes no text on postcolonial discourse. There are excuses––Said was focused on literature and music, not art, and critics like Geeta Kapur were not widely known and journals like Third Text not yet founded—but these are excuses. It took the auto-critique of anthropology, along with the provocation of the notorious “Primitivism” show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, to foreground the many implications of postcolonial critique for art. Difference, as understood by both poststructuralism and feminism, was still difference within more than alterity without. I have already noted some shifts in the subjects taken up in The Anti-Aesthetic since its publication; here, to conclude, are several more. First, the valence of appropriation has obviously undergone a sea change. Once central to postmod-

In his account of the politics of interpretation Said had also advocated for Gramsci; there was a counterhegemonic thrust in the texts by Frampton, Owens, and Jameson; and a Gramscian position appeared to be the one to take up in the face of the neoconservative-neoliberal order. Yet I have come to doubt the necessity of this Gramsci-Adorno opposition. They are not as mutually exclusive as I made them out to be in the exigencies of the moment. And today there is a new insistence on the aesthetic, even a return to the beautiful, especially among Black artists and critics, in large part because it offers some respite from an otherwise necessary focus on traumatic histories, some promise of “a transfiguration of the given.”11 Fifth and finally, there is a shift in the valence of the critical, which is no longer the undisputed good or inviolate criterion that my cohort often took it to be. That said, I remain committed to the kind of critical intervention that The AntiAesthetic attempted to make; the postcritical is not for me. Nor is the insistence that criticism be reparative; in my view, that notion edges toward a redemptive idea of culture that much of the most important art, modernist and postmodernist alike, rejects.12 Criticism and culture are not therapy, not then, not now. n HAL FOSTER’S BRUTAL AESTHETICS: DUBUFFET, BATAILLE, JORN, PAOLOZZI, OLDENBURG WAS PUBLISHED IN 2020 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. For notes, see page 236. SEPTEMBER 2023 163

STATION TO STATION DAVID PLATZKER ON THE ART OF ED RUSCHA

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This page and opposite: Two spreads from Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (Cunningham Press, 1963).

THE DISTANCE from the Knox-Less service station in Oklahoma City to Bob’s Seaside Service, not so far from the Santa Monica Pier at the terminus of Route 66—both pictured in Ed Ruscha’s 1963 artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations—was about 1,400 miles. It’s a drive Ruscha has taken many times since he traveled it with Mason Williams in Ruscha’s lowered 1950 four-door Ford, with throaty Smitty Glasspack dual muffler, following their graduation from Oklahoma City’s Classen High School in 1956.1 The trail from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles via Route 66 holds a mythic place within the lore of the American West, from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road— typed in 1951 and published in September 1957, a full year after Ruscha and Williams’s journey—to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which the author framed the trip from Oklahoma to California as one driven by drought and depression. But Ruscha’s drive straight out of high school was born of neither wanderlust nor economic anxiety; rather, it was spurred by a desire for new prospects beyond the limitations of Oklahoma City. Los Angeles offered the possibility of an education in graphic design and new adventures in a city experiencing a rapid evolution in

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Left: Ed Ruscha, SU, 1958, oil, ink, and fabric on canvas, 37 3⁄4 × 36 1⁄8".

Ruscha’s penchant was to overtly maximize content within clearly demarcated spaces such as those defined by the edges of a sheet of paper, the lip of a canvas, an advertising block, covers of books, and the clean interior pages of artists’ publications.

the advertising, film, television, and technology sectors. In turn, the booming growth of the middle and upper classes had the capacity to sustain—albeit marginally—art galleries, which afforded scrappy young artists opportunities and odd jobs to make ends meet. In Ruscha’s telling, As I came out to California, I knew that I had to have some of my artwork, so I packed up a portfolio and I tried to get into Art Center because that was commercial art to me, and that was the thing I wanted to be. I wanted to be a commercial artist. . . . In the Saturday Evening Post, there was a story about Art Center School which my dad read, so he encouraged me to go to that school for that reason. I got out here and found out I couldn’t get in, you know, there’s no opening. So, I went to Chouinard and started to go to school there. Now that was the Bohemian school.2

Those early years of Ruscha’s education and his initial projects—artistic, commercial, and personal—presented signposts pointing toward the artist’s future work. In 1956, Art Center was a clean-cut, white-collar “straight” school best known for its automotive, advertising, and industrial-design departments and still teeming with students on the GI Bill. At Art Center, “you couldn’t have facial hair—no moustaches, no beards—short pants . . . or bring bongo drums to school,”3 but only 166 ARTFORUM

Opposite page: Ed Ruscha’s contribution to Orb 2, no. 1, 1960.

a few miles away, at the definitively West Coast countercultural Chouinard Art Institute, such attire was not only allowed, it was practically encouraged. “You could wear rags to school and get away with it and still have a good time. And I fell into a class which was actually advertising design by a guy named Bud Coleman. And he right off started going into the history of books in book design. We did field trips to places like the Clark Library downtown. And I sort of got awakened by book design, and the history of book design. And that’s always kinda stayed with me.”4 Coleman told Ruscha about Los Angeles printers that were producing fine-art books, including Plantin Press, a small private printer and publisher owned by Saul and Lillian Marks that had been founded in 1931.5 The Markses briefly hired Ruscha in 1958 and taught him typesetting for letterpress and the basics of book construction, fortifying the young artist’s growing knowledge of classical page design. “I worked for him for maybe six months or so . . . and I started learning and being interested in typography and I kind of built up this desire to make some books.”6 In contrast with the elegant but stolidly traditional Plantin Press layouts, Ruscha’s earliest printed-graphic energies hewed closer to those of Wallace Berman’s generation-defining beat-culture periodical Semina,7 which included poetry, graphic arts, and photography by Charles Brittin, Cameron, Allen Ginsberg, David Meltzer, and Michael McClure, as well as translations of European poets such as Herman Hesse, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Éluard. At the time, Ruscha additionally made note of books such as Robert Lebel’s sophisticated Marcel Duchamp monograph,8 designed by Duchamp with Arnold Fawcus. These two publications both toyed with and refuted fine-press conventions by adding elements of chance operation’s ordered disorder. Ruscha’s avant-garde proclivities surfaced in his first pagework as a member of the group Students Five, a collective of friends—Joe Good, Jerry McMillan (both high-school classmates of Ruscha’s), Patrick Blackwell, Don Moore, and later Wall Batterton. Their mailer/bulletin, Orb,9 published in seven issues between 1959 and 1960 by Chouinard’s Society of Graphic Designers, contained an amalgam of cartoons, collages, graphic experiments, texts, and exhibition announcements. Ruscha edited and laid out the issues on a single seventeen-by-twenty-two-inch sheet, printing it recto-verso in an elaborate overlapping two-color system and folding it six times down for dissemination through the mail. Commenting on the genesis of Orb’s design, Ruscha would say, “I pasted the thing up and I maybe was thinking in the back of my head, Dada, ’cause they kind of echo a lot of the things that the Dadaists were doing. Things can be upside down, they don’t have to be orderly, you don’t have to have a proper well-behaved page line.”10 An untitled text-and-photo collage by Ruscha highlights this radical inclination. Published in the final issue of Orb and dated September 30, 1960, the piece takes the form of a “letter written home to the mother of an art student,” wherein a starving artist pleads for funds for food. In the margins, the artist reveals that the cash would in fact be put to use “purchasing paint, pencils, paper and various other tools so necessary to an art student!!!!,” with the center of the collage being a homemade bomb crafted from found images of a “dry cell ignitor” wired to a vine of tomatoes. Beside the improvised explosive, Ruscha drolly scrawled a modified George Bernard Shaw quote: “The true artist will let his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.” Ruscha’s penchant, exhibited in Orb—and reflected consistently in his future work—was to overtly maximize content within clearly demarcated spaces such as those defined by the edges of a sheet of paper, the lip of a canvas, an advertising block, covers of books, and the clean interior pages of artists’ publications.

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Stylistically, his typically unassuming grounds meant the work’s primary focus (texts and graphics) could be rapidly absorbed (or read) by viewers. Ruscha’s systems thus mimicked those long employed in the design of print advertising and highway billboards, where the effectiveness of one’s layout is measured by its capacity to capture attention in the brief span it takes to flip a magazine page or speed by in a car on an open road.

BURNING GASOLINE

All along Route 66 in the ’50s, gas stations dotted the sides of the road between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City. One or more at every roadside rest stop, town, and city spread out along the asphalt backbone crossing the heartland, lassoing and wrangling passing cars much as saloons with rails and water troughs once did roving cowboys and their horses. Ruscha’s 1950 Ford would have had a sixteengallon tank for fuel and gotten an average of around fifteen and a half miles per gallon. If his foot wasn’t heavy on the gas pedal, he could have driven, give or take, 250 miles between stops. Traveling back and forth with some regularity, Ruscha

would have gotten to know the filling stations fairly well, and indeed he photographed many of them over a year and a half. “I think it started [in] maybe ’61 . . . shooting gas stations across the highway.”11 As with so many shaggy-dog stories, there’s a lack of clarity as to the origins of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha’s first publication. Did the photographs that form its content come to Ruscha’s mind first, or did its title? While the title page boldly states “1962” in large typography below the artist’s name, the colophon denotes the book’s publication year as being 1963.12 When asked in the late summer of 2019 about Twentysix Gasoline Stations and the role of artist’s books within his work, Ruscha said that the twenty-six stations he photographed along Route 66 “provided an excuse to make the book and otherwise I would have made the book anyway out of something else. . . . The real motivation I liked about it [was that] it had some kind of dark humor to it, and also I knew, well, if I made one book, I might as well make another one.” He continued, “I like my books because I felt like they lacked aesthetic value and they didn’t have a game plan. . . . So, in a certain sense, it’s the same as having an empty

The schemas of many of Ruscha’s drawings and paintings establish his idealization of how information could be conveyed in a flash.

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Opposite page: Map annotating a hitchhiking trip by Ed Ruscha and Bill Elder, 1954.

Above: Ed Ruscha’s cover proposal for Arquitecto 13, 1956, ink and tempera on illustration board, 11 3⁄4 × 9 1⁄4".

Right: Ed Ruscha, 1938, 1958, oil and ink on canvas, 49 1⁄8 × 33 3⁄8".

book like blank pages. If I showed it to somebody who worked in a gas station, they’d say, ‘Ah, great.’ If you showed it to a poet or an intellectual, they kind of dry up and say, ‘Are you putting me on?’” While the captions dryly note the location of each gas station, there’s no apparent rhyme or reason to the sequencing of images, as they don’t follow a straight path from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City; rather, they meander at random abandon among locales in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma before concluding with a final image of a fina gas station in Groom, Texas. As to the number twenty-six—which could easily align with the number of letters in the alphabet, if not religious numerology or an inversion of the purported publication date, ’62—he added, “I hiked from Oklahoma City to Miami and back when I was in junior high school with a friend, and I clearly recall that it took twenty-six rides to get down to Miami and twenty-six rides to get back to Oklahoma City. I’m opening up that as a possibility that maybe I was fixated on that number. And I knew it wouldn’t be twenty-five, knew it wouldn’t be twenty-

seven, so it had to be twenty-six. And the reasoning behind it could easily be justified by saying, my hitchhiking days is what gave me that idea.”13 Indeed, Ruscha documented that adventure on an annotated copy of a Conoco Highway Map of United States inscribed with the caption “eddie ruscha–bill elder hitchiking trip—summer 1954.”14 Moreover, the schemas of many of Ruscha’s drawings and paintings from 1956—such as the cover designs he mocked up as two proposals for a student architectural journal, Arquitecto,15 on behalf of his sister, who was studying architecture in Mexico City—establish his idealization of how information could be conveyed in a flash via a clean, uncluttered layout, be it a book-cover-like format or, say, a twelve-inch LP record jacket.16 Further, paintings such as 1938, 1958, and Boss, 1961,17 and the drawing US 66, 1960,18 mark the absorption of Ruscha’s learned graphic-design knowledge into his painting practice and the beginning of his mature artworks. As Ruscha put it to me, “I like the idea of typography and books. . . . So I was thinking that maybe I’m painting book covers.”19 SEPTEMBER 2023 169

Left: Ed Ruscha, Standard Study [#3], 1962, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 9 3⁄8 × 12 1⁄2". Below: Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations Opened to Title Page, 1962, pencil and ink on paper, 22 7⁄8 × 29 1⁄8". Right: Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Standing Open, 1963, colored pencil and ink on paper, 10 × 7 7⁄8".

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Opposite page, left: Ed Ruscha, Box Smashed Flat (Vicksburg), 1960–61, oil and ink on canvas, 70 × 48". Opposite page, right: Ed Ruscha’s cover for Mason Williams’s Music (Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Records, 1969).

Ruscha has been coy about how his artist’s books operated as tools to reach wider audiences.

Throughout 1962, Ruscha created multiple drawings based on one of his photographs found near the center page of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, a threequarter profile of a Standard gas station in Amarillo, Texas, captured like a starlet’s headshot.20 At the same time that he was producing those initial drawings, he executed Twentysix Gasoline Stations Opened to Title Page,21 a drawing featuring the book splayed open to its title page in an off-center rotation, highlighting the book’s title, author’s name, and 1962 date. Many drawings executed in 1963 of the book’s cover would relay it as a three-dimensional object, fanning page edges, exposing what would become the iconic Standard station in many successive works, idealizing the book as an object in action.22 Ruscha’s choice to use the font Beton Slab, printed in bright Signal Red, on the cover could be construed as a winking effort to confer on it the full weight of governmental authority, in that Stymie Extra Bold—Beton Slab’s doppelgänger— was used by the United States Government Printing Office on the covers of many of its publications in the ’50s and ’60s.23 Around this time, Ruscha also made multiple works that incorporated a Sun-Maid Raisins box—which likewise featured Beton Slab—such as Box Smashed Flat (Vicksburg), 1960–61.24 Beton Slab would remain one of Ruscha’s go-to fonts in much of his future work, appear-

ing on the covers or title pages of nine of his seventeen artist’s books published between 1963 and 1978. It appeared again in many successive drawings and paintings and on the cover of the vinyl LP Music (1969),25 the design of which didn’t incorporate the name of the album’s musician—Williams—on the cover. This significant missing detail required Warner Bros. to place a clear adhesive sticker on the record’s protective shrink-wrap, reading: by mason williams which was also printed using Beton Slab. 26 Ruscha has been coy about how his artist’s books—most of them self-published, and all but one priced between $2.50 and $10—operated as tools to reach wider audiences. To get Twentysix Gasoline Stations into the world, Ruscha crafted a humorous, if not ironic, advertisement promoting the publication in the pages of the March 1964 issue of Artforum. Announcing in its header that the Library of Congress had rejected the book, the ad directed potential customers to make their purchase, at $3 a copy, from Wittenborn & Company in New York City or from the book’s publisher, National Excelsior. (Ruscha appropriated the name for himself SEPTEMBER 2023 171

don’t forget;33 Henry Hopkins, who was an influential presence in Los Angeles prior to becoming the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, eventually presenting a large-scale Ruscha traveling retrospective in 1982; and many, many others. It’s not hard to imagine Ruscha, a week or two after mailing a book, following up with a phone call and asking the recipient in his Oklahoman drawl, “Hey, you get my book?” as an icebreaker toward discussing other business. That the books were inexpensive, easy to disseminate, catchy in title and contents, and somewhat mysterious, as Ruscha pointed out, encouraged the publications to linger in the mind of “readers” like dewdrops on a bottle of cold beer on a hot Los Angeles afternoon.

. . . SAYS GOODBYE . . .

Above: Cover from Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston’s Business Cards, 1968, offset lithograph on paper, cardstock, leather cord, photographs, letterpress and offset printed cards, staples, 8 3⁄4 × 5 3⁄4".

Opposite page, top: Page from Artforum, March 1964. Bottom right: Advertisement for Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (Cunningham Press, 1963).

Opposite page, bottom left: Ed Ruscha’s advertisement from Artforum, January 1967. Opposite page, bottom right: Cover of Artforum, September 1966. Ed Ruscha, Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, 1966.

from the front cover of the 1955 National Excelsior datebook,27 which he was using as a daybook, idea journal, and sketchbook at the time.28) This advertisement would become the first of six artist’s projects Ruscha crafted for Artforum,29 as well as one of the first interventions by an artist outside of the editorial process into the magazine itself.30 The reality of being a small publisher required Ruscha to seek other tools of the trade to sell his wares—a pamphlet, a poster, a movie, and a flyer31 were all produced to spur sales. Additionally, he seeded the books through the art world, sending copies to movers and shakers including Martin Friedman, the director of the Walker Art Center, whose copy of Business Cards, 1968, was inscribed by Billy Al Bengston, Ruscha’s collaborator on the book, a bribe for martin friedman;32 Museum of Modern Art, New York, curator Kynaston McShine, who included Ruscha’s artist’s books in his 1970 show “Information” (McShine’s copy of Business Cards was inscribed for kynaston—you owe us ten bucks a[nd] we 172 ARTFORUM

From October 1965 to summer 1969, Ruscha had a “side hustle,” making between $400 and $500 monthly34 doing paste-up production for Artforum, appearing on the magazine’s masthead under the pseudonym Eddie Russia. Russia’s job—using templates that had been set up when the magazine was originally based in San Francisco—started after Artforum fully relocated to Los Angeles following publication of its September 1965 issue, taking office space above Ferus Gallery at 723 1⁄2 La Cienega Boulevard, and continued after it moved to New York City with the May 1967 issue. “I’d get on a plane, arrive in New York on a Thursday afternoon. . . . I’d stay with a friend, and then Friday morning I’d go up on Madison Avenue to their offices,” Ruscha recalled. “And they had this little cubby hole in the back there, and I would work Friday, Saturday, and then get on a plane on Sunday and come back.”35 While Ruscha described the job as simply working with a preestablished template that he didn’t design, it afforded him the opportunity for some high jinks. For the cover of Artforum’s Surrealism special issue in September 1966, the editors commissioned his work Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, an image composed by Ruscha and photographed by Patrick Blackwell (also a fellow Oklahoman). Four months later, Ruscha would pull off a grander caper within the pages of the January 1967 issue. After tendering the trade of an undocumented artwork in the form of a plaque that read california36 with Artforum’s then-publisher, Charles Cowles, for advertising space, Ruscha received page seven, a favorable right-hand page in the magazine. He then enlisted the photographer Jerry McMillan, his friend since the two had attended junior high in Oklahoma City, to stage a photo session in the bedroom belonging to Williams and actress Nancy Ames. Initially, Skip Farley—the wife of painter Jack Farley—Ruscha, and future founders of New York’s Metro Pictures Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer were splayed on Williams and Ames’s bed. However, as McMillan would say, “we had three and so it got a little crowded and it didn’t look quite right so we asked [Winer] to step out,”37 turning the scene into a ménage à trois. The resulting image, shot from a vantage above the foot of the ornate bed, shows Ruscha apparently in slumber, spooning a sleeping Reiring with his arm draped over her back, and Farley, also in slumber with a grin on her face, spooning Ruscha, a hand resting on his shoulder. To complete the ad, gallerist Irving Blum provided the text, ed ruscha says goodbye to college joys,38 casting the intervention as a tongue-in-cheek announcement to the eleven thousand Artforum subscribers of Ruscha’s impending marriage to Danna Knego. Unlike Lynda Benglis’s “dildo ad,” which would run in the November 1974 issue, spurring months of heated debate about the ethics of an artist using the ad pages of the magazine as an “intrusion” into its editorial space, in addition to the appropriateness of the image itself, Ruscha’s ad received merely a kind of “Huh?” from the magazine’s editors and the general public, not unlike the reception to his artist’s books. In September 1963, shortly after the publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Artforum ran a short review of the book by the managing editor, Philip Leider, who had a regular books column in the magazine. Alongside short blurbs about new

books on Modigliani and Miró and volumes titled Maine and Its Role in American Art and The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, Leider penned three paragraphs about Twentysix Gasoline Stations, making it the longest review in the issue. Leider began, “It is perhaps unfair to write a review of a book which, by now, is probably completely unavailable. But the book is so curious, and so doomed to oblivion that there is an obligation, of sorts, to document its existence, record its having been here, in the same way, almost, as other pages record and document the ephemeral existence of exhibitions which are mounted, shown, and then broken up forever.” He then obliquely noted that the slender volume would either sell quickly or be remaindered owing to its lack of sales and distribution or its flat-out oddity as a book that was as blunt as its title, just photographs of twenty-six gas stations. Instead, it sold well enough for Ruscha to reprint it twice, ultimately producing 3,900 copies. It was circulated widely, inspiring artists including John Baldessari—who, in the fall of 1963, became perhaps the first artist to purchase a copy in a bookshop39—Hanne Darboven, Louise Lawler, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and a multitude of others to make artists’ books. These publications were not a platform for the reproduction of existing art but a primary venue for new art to be presented within handheld traveling gallery spaces. Further, this platform could reach a far greater number of individuals than would visit a standard gallery venue, offering a lasting shelf life far exceeding the limited run of traditional exhibitions. n “EDWARD RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” organized by Christophe Cherix with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 10–January 13, 2023; travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 7–October 6, 2024. DAVID PLATZKER IS AN ART HISTORIAN, CURATOR, AND DEALER. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.) For notes, see page 236.

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CAUSING A SCENE JOAN KEE ON THE EARLY ART OF SUNG NEUNG KYUNG

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TO CONSIDER what lies outside a world under political or economic duress is to reject the illusion that an unchanging existence is equivalent to harmonious stability. The artist Sung Neung Kyung understood this especially well. Between the mid-1970s and the late ’80s, his considerations of reading, looking, marking, and grouping afforded viewers space for reflecting on the fraught years of authoritarian rule in South Korea and, later, on the flawed promises of democracy. Avoiding the absorption of culture into the hegemonic enterprise of nation-building that seemed interminable by the time South Korean president Park Chung-hee declared martial law in 1972, each of Sung’s works outlined a realm that distinguished communication from content creation, urging viewers to ask how things mean. Yet Sung was equally critical of the self-regard that reduced art and life to squalid contests of power. Through performance, Sung contended that shaping a political imagination requires not only physical stamina and a high level of tedium tolerance but also a firm refusal of self-affirmation as the primary filter through which to process sensory experience. The world is, as he suggests, always about you but never about only you.

Opposite page and above: Sung Neung Kyung, Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on (details), newspapers, acrylic boxes, performance, each spread 24 3⁄4 × 34 1⁄4".

Sung participated in his first exhibition in 1964, shortly before fellow students at Hongik University unveiled the earliest known example of performance art in Korea. But it was not until 1973, after he completed a mandatory three-year tour of duty in the South Korean military, that he began his artistic career in earnest.1 Following a brief dalliance with displays of stones reminiscent of those by Lee Ufan,2 Sung turned to the newspaper to wage new battles.3 Then the most popular mode of spreading information in South Korea, newspapers were both weapons and casualties in the escalating conflict between the state and its critics. For one week at the National Museum of Modern Art in Deoksu Palace in Seoul, Sung hung four sheets of the daily Dong-a Ilbo, then well known for its critical stance toward the government. Using a razor, the artist selectively removed articles, leaving only a few pictures and advertisements. Each day, the previous edition of the newspaper would be neatly laid to rest on the gallery floor in an acrylic container that resembled a ballot box yet whose transparency only emphasized the opacity of the electoral process at that time. As a source of knowledge ordinary citizens could convert into forms of

political participation—from voting to street protest—the newspaper became Sung’s preferred means of exploring the political legibility of daily life. Begun at home two months before Sung performed the work in public, Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on, reads as an attempt at resocialization following the artist’s long years of conscription. The mandatory draft reminded citizens of the nation’s perpetual war with its neighbor to the north, while “peacetime” in civilian life under martial law meant compulsory silence. Sung recounts how the “idea of peace was really about keeping one’s mouth shut. It doesn’t promise harmony; rather, it only guarantees the erasure of dissent.”4 He broke down the viewing experience into four distinct modes: viewers reading the artwork from a distance, in the nominal privacy of their homes versus reading in public; the artist reading the paper out loud as he excises images and text; the silent and oral habits of reading by an unnamed populace that accessed newspapers through household subscriptions; and those same habits of reading, belonging this time to the impromptu assemblies absorbing the daily papers displayed in front of newspaper offices. Sung transformed passive viewing into active reading, SEPTEMBER 2023 175

insisting that one look for absence even before apprehending what is printed on the page. Presaging Sarah Charlesworth’s “Modern History” series of prints in the late ’70s, which also stripped newspapers of text, Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on implores viewers to read newspapers not for content but for how their very form shapes the production of knowledge. Functioning like real-time quotes, Sung’s newspaper works belong to an international fellowship of like-minded engagements in the majority of the world then struggling under nondemocratic rule, including Antonio Dias’s silk-screen takes on the dazibao, the large-scale posters dominating public communication during the Cultural Revolution, and Antonio Manuel’s reconfigured flans, paper matrices used to create lead molds in newspaper printing. Made in Brazil under a military regime similar to that governing South Korea, the works by Manuel and Dias—together with those by Charlesworth, Sung, and others—lay bare a world defined less by ideological, social, or economic divides than by what unesco director-general Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow described as “one of the greatest forms of inequality in the contemporary world”: uneven access to information.5 Most of Sung’s early works were made in discussion with his friends and colleagues in S.T., the loose assembly of Seoul-based artists active from 1969 to 1981 that included Chang Sukwon, Choi Hyojoo, Kim Yongmin, Lee Kunyong, and Yoon Jin Sup. Dissatisfied with existing pedagogical structures, the self-funded S.T. hosted seminars during which members discussed a highly eclectic variety of writings by Hans Haacke, Heidegger, Joseph Kosuth, Laozi, Wittgenstein, Nakahara Yusuke, and Zhangzi, even if the Korean translations were, according to Sung, “not terribly reliable.”6 Among his S.T. colleagues, Sung was unique in distancing himself from what he considered the apathy of an art world that sometimes appeared too insistent on segregating itself from the politics of a state that controlled everything, from which artists could travel abroad to the supply of imported oil paint and film. Location, 1976, addressed the orientation of the artist vis-à-vis interpretation. Sung had himself photographed with a copy of the June 1976 issue of Space, a cultural journal founded in 1966 by de facto state architect Kim Swoogeun that was then South Korea’s primary outlet for art writing. In one image Sung stands still, holding the publication in his mouth like an obedient dog; another depicts him clasping the issue between hands held as if in prayer. For some of his contemporaries, performance was a way to resist excessive state oversight such as the 1973 Minor Offenses Act, which regulated choices of attire and hair length. But Sung considered performance as something more: a space for speculating on what he described as “condition of living.”7 As he remarked years later, “Art is not a placard.”8 Sung came of age amid the utopian promise of April 19, 1960, which saw the overthrow of Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first democratically elected president as well as its first postwar dictator, and he knew too well the limits of direct protest. In the decade that followed, the revolutionary dreams of April 19 devolved into the ironically named Restoration (Yusin) era, with youthful hopes crushed by a state that appealed to an older generation scarred by the privations of war and desperate for a standard of living beyond mere subsistence levels. Contraction and expansion, 1976, is a compelling thematization of selfcontrol, following Sung’s body as he moves from an upright position to a fetal curl, then finally extends his arms and legs while balanced on his stomach. The work’s title suggests that during the mid-’70s, freedom of thought diminished commensurate to the spread of authoritarian politics.9 Contraction and expansion asks how the rules and instructions central to Conceptual art can disclose how easily rules can become laws operating as 176 ARTFORUM

Above: Antonio Dias, The Illustration of Art/Dazibao/The Shape of Power, 1972, silk screen and acrylic on canvas, 3'11 5⁄8" × 10'4 3⁄4". Below: Sung Neung Kyung with Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 1974. Photo: Lee Kyeong-seok.

Opposite page, left: Sung Neung Kyung, Location, 1976, nine gelatin silver prints, each 18 5⁄8 × 10 1⁄2".

Opposite page, top right: Sung Neung Kyung, Smoking (detail), 1976, seventeen gelatin silver prints, each 10 × 8".

Opposite page, bottom right: Sung Neung Kyung, Counting money, 1976. Performance view, Seoul Gallery, 1976.

pretexts for domination enforced by the threat of punishment. But it also implies that the execution of Conceptual art can play a more active role in highlighting how and when personal action can undo the rules applied to contain bodies within structures governed by a select few. One of the few vices permitted in Yusin Korea was smoking, and Sung made this the subject of a brief but pithy performance. In pictures, he exudes a relaxed air as he smokes a cigarette until it is reduced to a precarious column of ash. His attitude reads as a small but significant triumph over the deadening pragmatism used to justify the expendability of personal lives— which persisted long after Park Chung-hee’s assassination and the end of Yusin in 1979. The quick smoke break—once an indispensable staple of the workday—is stretched out over nine stages in seventeen photographs, commemorating the concept of rest so devalued throughout Korean society. Many of Sung’s works implicitly problematize how postwar citizenship was filtered through state demands for total obedience. Dying for one’s

Many of Sung’s works implicitly problematize how postwar citizenship was filtered through state demands for total obedience.

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Above: Sung Neung Kyung, Mr. S’s half way career, 1977, fifteen gelatin silver prints. Installation view, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2016. Photo: Netjjae. Opposite page: Sung Neung Kyung, Here (details), 1975, eighteen gelatin silver prints, each 3 1⁄4 × 4 1⁄2".

country may have sufficed during the Korean War, but in the second age of Korean national sacrifice, the state required nothing less than unquestioned conformity to impossible and arbitrary standards. In Counting money, 1976, the artist threw small amounts of Korean currency onto a low white plinth while reciting the sums out loud. At the time, small proprieties exuded the force of law among the unacknowledged bourgeoisie, and such an act, even in the context of an exhibition, would have been regarded as almost unforgivably crude, particularly as it so vividly foregrounded a value system that encouraged calibrating human worth to quantifiable metrics.10 One must not “be satisfied with the falsehood of frequency,” as he wrote years later in his mock curriculum vitae under the heading “Solo Exhibitions.”11 Sourced from the artist’s own personal collection, the fifteen chronologically arranged photographs of Mr. S’s half way career, 1977, insist on a time line indifferent to world events, rational chronological systems ordered in regular increments, and linear thinking reinforced by the idea of a future compromised by the imminence of armed conflict. Always in search of perspective, Mr. S’s half way career shows Sung taking stock at age thirtythree, which was then considered the midpoint of the life span of the average South Korean male. Visualizing his autobiography as a record of personal relationships, the installation consists of photographs from childhood on. Faces of family, friends, and artist colleagues peer out, with the last image showing Sung standing in front of documentation of Apple, 1977, another of his sequential performances. There is little in the way of sentiment. 178 ARTFORUM

Family and group portraits address an unexamined history of colonial social order, reinforced by Japanese ethnographers who reduced Korean lives into regional, biological, and occupational types. Enlarged well beyond the dimensions of a typical snapshot, published newspaper photograph, or yearbook picture, each image bridges the gap between artist and viewer by inviting us to project our own life trajectories onto the work. Mr. S’s half way career rehearses some of the aims contained in Here, 1975, Sung’s first sustained work with a camera. After asking his father to buy him a Nikon F2 in 1974, the artist began photographing ephemeral works by his S.T. colleagues. Noting how cameras were veritable luxury goods in ’70s Korea, art historian Kim Mikyung points out the then-nascent class divide between artists who could have their works photographed and those who could not.12 Such privilege underwrites Here, which depicts Sung photographing himself in a mirror placed at a three-way intersection in an alley outside his home in Seoul, rotated to show eighteen different backgrounds. However, the artist seems to disappear from Mr. S’s half way career, displaced by a slew of grainy images. Reflecting his belief that much could be “learned from that which was third rate,” Sung’s deliberately “low quality” images snap to attention as foot soldiers marching against the tide of pictures carefully manage to crowd out even the possibility of other descriptions of a given theme or subject.13 The brilliantly titled series “No relationship to a particular person,” begun in 1977, pivots around a history of photography imbricated in a parallel history of internal violation via gross infringements

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of privacy in the name of public interest, condoned by the very institution entrusted with safeguarding personal and national security. Sung initated this series by mining newspapers for pictures of faces and rephotographing and silk-screening approximately 110 of them, which he obscured with thin yellow strips across the eyes, the action recalling attempts to ensure the anonymity of victims and criminals. A perverse isonomy emerges, in which public and private figures are rendered equally anonymous in the context of harm that recognizes people only as insitgators or recipients. The strips flattens faces once belonging to bodies in the round while also shrouding preexisting connections a viewer might have with the depicted subjects. Shown at the second Daegu Contemporary Art Festival in 1974, a major experimental-art exhibition in Korea, An upside down map of world challenges cartographic authority. A large world map is divided into rectangular sections, which are then re-presented as a gridded display next to the dissected original. Sung is sharply attuned to language in a manner echoing that of his cousin the poet Sung Chankyung, and the work’s Korean title (“Segye chŏndo”) carries several loaded meanings. The words literally translate to “complete map of the world,” but chŏndo is also a homonym for “guidance,” “transmit,” and “evangelize.” By weaponizing its facture, the work retools Yves Lacoste’s watershed critique of the map’s susceptibility to political machinations. Whatever instructional force the map once possessed is literally cut into pieces and—in later iterations of the work where sections are assembled flat on a horizontal plinth—brought back to earth. An upside down map of world was for Sung a “scenario” foreshadowing one of his longest-running series, “Venue.” Begun in 1979, each entry in the series (forty-two exist to date) begins with Sung identifying newspaper photographs bearing editorial markings, usually broken dashes encircling damage or small arrows and crosses marking the scene of an accident, crime, or construction, which the artist describes as “internalized daily violence.”14 The pictures are then rephotographed, with Sung painting his own notations directly on negatives with white ink so that they will appear more prominent than the original markings. Printed and enlarged to the dimensions of standard office paper, the images are arranged in patterns on a wall. “Venue” challenges the claim that media publications can mint truths, a point Sung underscored when he described “information as mere taxidermy 180 ARTFORUM

Above, left: Sung Neung Kyung, An upside down map of world, 1974, world map, panel. Installation view, Seoul Museum of Art, 2017. Photo: Netjjae.

Above: Sung Neung Kyung, No relationship to a particular person 1, 1977, silk screen on 110 gelatin silver prints, each 10 × 8". From the series “No relationship to a particular person,” 1977–.

Below: Sung Neung Kyung, Venue 3 (details), 1980, ten gelatin silver prints, each 7 3⁄8 × 8 1⁄4". From the series “Venue,” 1979–. Opposite page: Sung Neung Kyung, Venue 22, 1985, gelatin silver prints. Installation view, Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul. From the series “Venue,” 1979–.

and the truth as a living, breathing creature.”15 Comically large arrows studding Venue 3, 1980, attempt to “invalidate the editorial gesture” unilaterally instructing readers what to see while also refusing a space for response.16 Stripped of their original captions, the images bait viewers into asking when disclosure in the name of public interest becomes a pretext for illicit surveillance. With every distortion, manipulation, and degradation of published images, Sung emphasized the gap between a fourth estate convinced of its own authority to legitimate representation as truth and a public for whom the politics of representation entailed much more than accepting reported accounts as fact. Venue 6, 1981, puts into concrete form what the artist imagined as the trail North Korean spies followed while infiltrating the South. “I wanted to convey something of the anxiety those spies must have felt, knowing that as soon as they crossed the border, they were forever excluded from any chance at belonging to a home, a family, or a nation.”17 Rather than arrows, Sung used dashes to track footsteps moving into enemy territory while visually stitching together the work so that the entire installation appears to crawl across the wall. As if to distance “Venue” from potential demands for experimental art to champion liberal democracy, Sung made versions that cast doubt on the spectacularization of electoral politics using press images of the 1985 Korean national-legislature elections. Unsurprisingly, “Venue” appealed to artists associated with the stridently pro-democracy Minjung movement, but Sung’s commitments remained firmly aligned with bracketing what tried to pass as legitimate information rather than with staging

clear-cut confrontation.18 Indeed, Sung’s works appear especially suited to audiences as skeptical of collective unity as they are of libertarian detachment; the tacit, but nevertheless palpable, critique Sung makes of representational politics in all forms may explain the general absence of his post-1980 work from supposedly progressive histories of Korean art. Of the series, it is Venue 22, 1985, that most immediately manifests what Sung intended by the title “Hyŏnjang,” whose Korean meaning is sometimes translated into English as “field” but which the artist explains is a compound of “the time called ‘now’ and the place called ‘here.’”19 For that work, eight hundred photographs papered the wall of the Kwanhoon Gallery in Seoul, while the floor teemed with loosely piled images, an anarchic overload of information. Exhibited on the eve of Korea’s reemergence as a full-fledged democracy, Venue 22 signaled a new contest of survival, in which keeping one’s head above the oceanic torrent of information amounted to a critical life skill. If Sung’s early works have only gained potency since their debut, it is because the questions they ask of representation and its politics remain as prescient as ever. n Sung Neung Kyung’s work appears in “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 1, 2023–January 7, 2024. The show, curated by Kyung An and Kang Soojung and co-organized with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, travels to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, February 11–May 12, 2024. JOAN KEE IS A PROFESSOR IN THE HISTORY OF ART AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AND A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF ARTFORUM. SHE IS A COEDITOR OF PRIMARY DOCUMENTS KOREA (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK). (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.) For notes, see page 236.

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ELECTRIC AFFINITIES MOLLY WARNOCK ON THE ART OF CHRYSSA

SPEAKING AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY in January 1968, the artist Chryssa detailed a disposition toward creative practice that she described as the “cool mind.”1 The term served to telegraph, via contrast, her disdain for certain endeavors aimed at bridging art and life—all of which, in her view, simply reproduced the disordered flux of the “human pattern.” Of particular concern was what she cast as the fundamentally regressive credo of Happenings, with their freewheeling yet ultimately pointless amalgams of things and deeds: “Let us let things happen.” The cool mind makes things happen, eschewing “Surrealism, Dada, and psychological extensions” so as to elaborate “new logics.” Informed by her experience as an early adopter of new media and a creator of works that required collaboration, this stance was necessarily alert to both the promises and the constraints of emerging technologies and industrial materials. Yet Chryssa consistently underscored the need for a wholly lucid impelling vision, one that would allow the artist to remain aloof from potentially enthralling novelties—to control and not simply be controlled by them. The cool mind, she emphasized, “goes beyond the limits of technology and of the material and is independent of both.” These were the reflections of an artist at the height of her powers. Born in Athens in 1933, Chryssa lived briefly in Paris and San Francisco before settling in the late ’50s in Manhattan, where she occupied a studio residence near Union Square. She quickly made a name for herself, participating in a number of group exhibitions from 1960 on and garnering major solo presentations at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery, Pace Gallery, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, among other venues. By the late ’60s, she was broadly recognized as a groundbreaking figure in the field of light art, her reputation centered on

Opposite page: Chryssa, The Gates to Times Square, 1964–66, cast aluminum, stainless steel, neon, Plexiglas, paper, 120 × 120 × 120". Above: Chryssa at work on The Gates to Times Square, 1964–66, in her studio, New York, ca. 1965. Photo: Howard Harrison.

the neon sculptures she had begun making around 1962 and cemented by her recently completed magnum opus The Gates to Times Square, 1964–66. Laboriously constructed over a two-year period and exhibited at Pace shortly after its completion, the massive work—a ten-foot cube, complexly layered and transected, in welded stainless steel, cast aluminum, neon, and Plexiglas—was at the time of her NYU lecture installed on a dais at Grand Central Terminal. It would subsequently travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and to the São Paulo Bienal before entering the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum). She continued to exhibit widely throughout the ’70s and in 1982 was awarded an important survey at the Albright-Knox. Yet her profoundly innovative SEPTEMBER 2023 183

oeuvre, so celebrated in its own day, was in recent decades all but forgotten. Key works languished in storage, and one—a neon sculpture originally created for Documenta 4—was even demolished by its holding institution in the face of prohibitive restoration costs. Chryssa’s first North American survey in more than forty years, which debuted at Dia Chelsea in March and opens this month at Houston’s Menil Collection, is therefore a genuine event. Expertly curated by Megan Holly Witko and Michelle White, “Chryssa & New York” focuses on the artist’s formative early tenure in the city. Sixty-two objects from 1955 to around 1975 track her enduring engagement with Times Square in particular: Fascinated by systems of mass communication, she was drawn both to the glowing marquees and to the fact that the New York Times and other media organizations were headquartered there. An excellent catalogue encompasses new scholarship, an in-depth examination of the conservation of the neon work, and a detailed chronology. As this volume makes clear, numerous histories flow through the art on view: narratives of Greekness and Americanness; of gender and queerness; of technological innovation and obsolescence. Yet there is also value in staying close to the exhibition, which offers a particularly rich opportunity to reappraise her art. THE DIA SURVEY plunged visitors directly into an encounter with Chryssa’s signature sculptures, devoting the first of its two large exhibition spaces to her work with neon technology. Here was The Gates to Times Square, on view in New York City for the first time in more than fifty years. The second half of the exhibition focused on the enigmatic artworks, mostly reliefs of various sorts, that she began making in the years immediately following her arrival in New York. Exiting the show required retracing one’s steps. Returning visitors to the neon gallery with a new understanding of the deep context, this inspired presentation seemed attuned to the profound continuities as well as the no less significant ruptures of an oeuvre oriented virtually from the beginning to both light and language. After the electric color and omnipresent hiss of the pieces in the first space, the early objects appeared altogether alien, bleached, and hushed. Most were monochromatic or nearly so, in neutral and metallic tones dictated by Chryssa’s preferred materials: plaster, terra-cotta, aluminum, bronze. Yet despite this initially startling difference, these works provided crucial indexes to an emerging philosophy that would shape her practice as a whole. Eschewing autographic marking, Chryssa privileges iterative procedures of casting, printing, and stamping that necessarily distance the hand. Precisely in so doing, however, she identifies iteration with intentionality. Installed near the entrance of Dia’s second room were the earliest objects on view, the “Cycladic Books,” which Chryssa produced primarily between 1955 and 1962. As she later recounted to I. M. Pei, she began the series one day when, in the course of casting other elements, she accidentally poured plaster into an ordinary cardboard box. Curious about the result, she opened the container the next day to discover a “somewhat T-shaped image that has some of the same geometric qualities of Cycladic sculpture.”2 Tellingly, where the reference is clearly to Cycladic figurines, she grasped the result as essentially textual: something like a found book, struck with a single graphemic form. Converting sheer serendipity into serial practice, she then repeated the process with countless other cartons and an expanding array of sculptural materials, yielding rectangular slabs imprinted with the subtly varied traces of different configurations of folds and flaps. Mature iterations, such as the twenty plaster “Books” from 1957, presented horizontally in long vitrines or three additional examples in marble, all 1957–62/1997, displayed on an angled, lectern-like pedestal, appeared 184 ARTFORUM

This page, top: View of “Chryssa & New York,” 2023, Dia Chelsea, New York. From left: The Gates of Times Square, 1965; Americanoom, 1963; Cents Sign Traveling from Broadway to Africa via Guadeloupe, 1968. Photo: Don Stahl. This page, bottom: View of “Chryssa & New York,” 2023, Dia Chelsea, New York. From left: untitled, date unknown; Letter “T,” 1959. Photo: Don Stahl.

Opposite page, top, from left: Chryssa, Cycladic Book No. 8, 1955, terra-cotta, 16 5⁄8 × 8 3⁄8 × 2 1⁄4". Chryssa, Cycladic Book No. 5, 1955, terra-cotta, plaster, oil paint, 12 × 9 1⁄8 × 2 1⁄4". Both from the series “Cycladic Books,” 1954–62/ 1997. Chryssa, Car Tires, 1959–62, oil on paper, 38 × 23 1⁄2".

Opposite page, bottom: Chryssa, Newspaper Sculpture (One Page of Classified Ads), 1963, cast aluminum, 14 3⁄4 × 15 1⁄4".

The inspired presentation seemed attuned to the continuities as well as the ruptures of an oeuvre oriented virtually from the beginning to both light and language.

essentially as supports for the phantom inscriptions of ever-shifting patterns of shadow. From here, it was but a short step to the diverse array of reliefs with considerably more marked depths and intervals (and in many cases, explicit letterforms) that she began making just a bit later than her initial “Books.” A second turning point, as decisive as the cardboard casts, was represented by works at the opposite end of the same long gallery. There, the cast-aluminum Newspaper Sculpture (One Page of Classified Ads), 1963, suggested a Cycladic Book rearticulated through an additional act of imprinting—one that, in this case, was explicitly figured as machinelike. The work belongs to a larger body of objects (including the first paintings of her New York period), mostly produced between 1959 and 1962, that Chryssa created by pressing various supports with discarded linotype printing plates (or, according to some accounts, stamps produced from such plates) that had been used in newspaper production. For the oil-on-paper Car Tires, 1959–62, the artist repeated an individual advertisement in a gridded array. It’s surely not incidental that the titular product is an O-like form, a found letter-object in its own right. Other paintings on canvas— for example, Newspaper II and Newspaper No. 3, both 1961—find her using the plates to lay down text in large blocks, at times superimposing multiple impressions. These works translate the formless passages of shade at stake in her reliefs into the light-dark modulations of print on SEPTEMBER 2023 185

Unlike the mythical protagonist of American action painting, Chryssa begins not with a blank canvas or a metaphysical void but with a concrete fragment of the material world.

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Opposite page: Chryssa, Newspaper No. 3, 1961, oil and graphite on canvas, 80 1⁄4 × 103 3⁄4".

Above: Chryssa, Les Toyota sales, date unknown, neon, oil on canvas, wood, 52 1⁄2 × 37 1⁄4 × 6 3⁄4".

Above, right: Chryssa, Times Square Sky, 1962, aluminum, steel, neon, 60 × 60 × 9 1⁄2".

print. The result is an allover density of linguistic imagery in which individual letters give way to a generalized buzzing or burgeoning—the linguistic ground of everyday life. WITHIN THIS BLURRED GRAY WORLD, neon emerges as the vehicle of a newly marked artistic agency. Here, installed among the Newspaper works, we found Chryssa’s initial forays into neon technology, the 1960 Classified and the closely related, undated Les Toyota sales. In both paintings, the stamped area is confined to a roughly central rectangular field, and in each

case, the eponymous word or phrase has been painted, either in whole or in part, in large uppercase letters above or below that block. Pale-blue neon serves to highlight specific fragments: the terminal FIED of CLASSIFIED, the LES of SALES. (The latter additionally presages the rotation and reversal of some of the elements in her later signage works: TOYOTA SALES is upside down, but the neon LES appears right side up, as if assuming the role of the French plural article.) Distanced from the surface by tube supports, these refulgent partial reiterations cut themselves out decisively against the paintings’ deep-blue grounds.3 They appear as veritable emblems of the artist’s cool mind, visual metaphors for her own capacity for detachment and projection.4 Yet where neon offered Chryssa a set of figuratively resonant analogues to the self-possessed intentionality described in her 1968 lecture, that same technology also imposed a seemingly endless panoply of new challenges. It was not simply that she had to learn to design forms that would allow for an uninterrupted flow of gas, a point that she explicitly singled out as a defining difficulty. In a more general sense, she now found herself importantly dependent upon a host of other minds and hands and forced to act accordingly—for example, “endlessly readapting my drawings for the glassblower so that my final work will dominate the limitations of the new techniques.” As the NYU text emphatically declares, “wITh ThE nEw mEDIA A nEw ApprOACh TO ThE TErm ‘OrIgInAL ThOughT’ IS ESTAbLIShED.” This newness had to do not just with material and technical realities but with interpersonal ones, as well.5 Of particular interest, in this respect, are a number of neon sculptures that, like the “Cycladic Books” and the Newspaper works before them, draw impetus from a cache of found objects—or, more precisely, of cast-off language: the disused metal signage, always featuring words and letters, that Chryssa recuperated at various sites around New York. In a new twist, SEPTEMBER 2023 187

Iteration offers proof of the cool mind’s autonomy, its fidelity to an overarching idea—however continually readapted in the face of contingency.

the scavenged items are literally incorporated into the completed works, rather than used to create impressions or stamps as with the linotype plates. Chopped into fragments and combined with additional, specially fabricated elements in complex assemblages, they are explicitly positioned as so many starting points for an iterative process that now spans materials and technologies, each link in the chain acquiring significance relative to the others. The earliest such works at Dia were both wall-hung reliefs. The first, Times Square Sky, 1962, establishes a basic opposition between the unruly physicality of the hulking metal remnants and the ethereal quality of coolblue neon. Confined to the upper right of an otherwise packed landscape of cursive-letter forms, a single length of tubing spells out AIr. The multipanel Americanoom, 1963, is a more complex case: Here, a particular set of fragments—some, such as OOm or nEw, are legible, whereas others verge on abstract meanders—have been fabricated both in cast metal and in neon. Reading from left to right, in accordance with the conventions of Western writing, the three-part sequence from found relief to flat metal cutout to colored neon script suggests first a controlled rematerialization on Chryssa’s own terms (note the displacement of the notched O of OOm from the first position in the found fragment to the second position in the cutout), followed by a no less disciplined distillation into glowing line. That the neon elements cycle through timed intervals of illumination and darkness adds still another dimension of authorial choice. These works instantiate a distinctive engagement with the found object, one that is visibly responsive to dominant aesthetic trends of the later ’50s and early ’60s even as it stands apart from them. Unlike the mythical protagonist of American action painting (or the cognate discourses she could have encountered in Paris), Chryssa begins not with a blank canvas or a metaphysical void but with a concrete fragment of the material world. True to the terms of her 1968 lecture, however, she refuses “Surrealism, Dada, and psychological extensions.” Chryssa had known key members of the Surrealist group during her time in Paris and later credited them with helping to expand her concept of art; yet her targeted repurposing of select sign elements is antithetical to the associative thrust of Surrealist assemblage and its many offshoots, flatly rejecting “automatism of every sort or unconscious overt drives of every sort, sadistic, masochistic, etc.” Nor can it be reconciled with the pseudosociological transcription of the real that Pierre Restany saw as the beating heart of Nouveau Réalisme (however strongly the French critic advocated for her art).6 On the contrary, her iterative procedures progressively distance the objects in question from the untransformed dross of the given, subjecting her finds to the imaginative but not aleatory play of transformation and displacement proper to the cool mind. It is in The Gates to Times Square that this iterative model finds para188 ARTFORUM

Above: Chryssa, Study for the Gates #14 (Clytemnestra) from “Iphigenia in Aulis” by Euripedes, 1967, neon, glass, plywood, metal, wire, rheostat, 51 × 29 × 39 1⁄2".

Opposite page, top: Chryssa, The Gates to Times Square, 1964–66, cast aluminum, stainless steel, neon, Plexiglas, paper. Installation view, Grand Central Terminal, New York, 1968.

Opposite page, bottom: Two details of Chryssa’s The Gates to Times Square, 1964–66, cast aluminum, stainless steel, neon, Plexiglas, paper, 120 × 120 × 120".

digmatic expression. Composed of four distinct vertical sections separated by slight gaps, the work demands to be studied from all angles, and the installation at Dia gave it plenty of breathing room. Coming upon it initially, one was likely to be struck primarily by the hieratic facade, a bisected capital A flanked by aluminum wings. It was only on returning to the sculpture after making my way through the show’s second large gallery that I realized Chryssa’s crowning achievement is best read from the back,

where the artist archived the catalytic fragments in two Plexiglas boxes. The entire work was projected from this inauspicious jumble of discarded elements. (The fragments’ bright-red interiors underscore their importance: The color commands the gaze.) The vertical section second closest to a viewer looking at the work from the rear contains the refabricated cast-metal forms at slightly larger dimensions than those of the found originals, now spreading out to fill both halves of the upright gridded armature. Each cast volume is presented in a layered and welded composite, the repetition registering—paradoxically—as at once machinelike and deeply meant. Just behind the A facade are the refabricated elements in icy-blue neon, the glowing symbols thrust forward from their respective transformers by supertall tube supports. Traversing diverse operational strata, iteration offers proof of the cool mind’s hard-won autonomy, its fidelity to an overarching idea—however continually readapted in the face of material and technical contingency. And indeed, capping off that frontal A, Chryssa has included the templates that guided her throughout this process, effectively bringing us back to her motor powers of conception and translation. Rolled and placed at a reserve in twinned acrylic containers, the paper patterns at once answer to and transcend the found fragments that set this process in motion, ready and waiting to be unfurled anew. ALL OF THIS SUGGESTS an essentially Apollonian sensibility. The curator and critic Gordon Brown, summarizing Chryssa’s NYU lecture in Arts Magazine in the spring of 1968, related her emphasis on “measure and control” to the ancient Greeks (a reference doubtless inflected by the artist’s own Greek heritage), but to my eye, much of her mature production recalls the far more recent precedent of Matisse, whose cutouts had been the subject of an expansive survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1961.7 (Consider, for example, Chryssa’s inclusion of a “negative” symbol that appears to have been excised from a blue neon surround in Five Variations on the Ampersand, 1966; such forms are among the mainstays of Matisse’s late art.) Chryssa shares with Matisse an interest in what the catalogue for the latter’s momA exhibition calls “the quintessential and the universal,” but she reimagines the extreme distillation of the cutouts in terms of the new union of line and color enabled by neon tubing.8 Nonetheless, one work in particular opens onto darker—as it were, Dionysian—forces. Study for the Gates #14 (Clytemnestra) from “Iphigenia in Aulis” by Euripides is one of two sculptures in freestanding neon, both from 1967, that are nominally preparatory to The Gates to Times Square but in fact followed it chronologically. (The other, Study for the Gates #15 [a flock of morning birds from “Iphigenia in Aulis” by Euripides], was also displayed at Dia.) In this case, the letter-like silhouette has an avowedly anthropomorphic derivation, referred by the artist to a specific moment in a then-recent performance of the titular play in which the actress Irene Papas, interpreting Clytemnestra, “twists her body into a shocked S and screams.” The fragile black tubing, which glows deep purple when illuminated, has a nakedly vulnerable quality, even as the tubes are thicker—more bodily, so to speak—than those in the sculptures enclosed in Plexiglas boxes. Exposure had always been a dimension of Chryssa’s work, of course; what is offered to light is given equally to darkness, and her constant ruminations on control are equally reflections on all the ways it might be lost. Now, with Clytemnestra, that finitude attains an explicitly tragic dimension. Chryssa would iterate this object for the next thirty years. n MOLLY WARNOCK IS THE AUTHOR OF SIMON HANTAÏ AND THE RESERVES OF PAINTING (PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020). For notes, see page 237. SEPTEMBER 2023 189

LOST WORLDS JULES PELTA FELDMAN ON THE ART OF CHARLES SIMONDS

Above: Charles Simonds, Dwellings, 1981, clay, sand, sticks, stones, wood, plaster, cloth, chicken wire. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins. Right: Charles Simonds’s 1972 Dwelling and passersby, East Houston Street, New York, 1972.

IF YOU HAVE EVER taken the stairs at what used to be the Whitney Museum of American Art—Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist masterpiece on New York’s Upper East Side—you have almost certainly encountered the work of Charles Simonds, though you may not have realized it. One of only two pieces in the Whitney’s collection that did not head downtown when the institution moved to the Meatpacking District in 2015 (the other being Nicole Eisenman’s Exploding Whitney Mural, 1995), Simonds’s permanent installation huddles unobtrusively above the stairwell’s only window. It is a miniature village, an apparently abandoned settlement of squat, ramshackle brick buildings perched on an irregular earthen protuberance. It’s difficult to make sense of the relationship between the work, Dwellings, 1981, and the imposing geometries of Breuer’s midcentury museum, opened in 1966 to both censure and acclaim. While the building’s smooth, cantilevered facade and sculptural windows still look modern and fresh, the roofs and walls of Simonds’s installation are crumbling as if under the weight of centuries. Dust motes blow like tumbleweeds along the tiny paths among the rudimentary brick structures. The ensemble could easily be mistaken for an antiquated anthropological exhibit, misplaced in both space and time. 190 ARTFORUM

Yet its misfit quality is precisely what gives Simonds’s installation its power. The artist made this work at the high point of a successful career that has been all but forgotten today. The modest installation not only testifies to what Simonds accomplished in the 1970s and ’80s, but also represents an alternative chapter in the history of institutional critique, casting new light on the work of his better-known peers. Moreover, telling the story of the Whitney’s Dwellings is a chance to revisit the origins of a building that is about to transition from a temple of art to a marketplace for it: In 2024, it will become the global headquarters of Sotheby’s. Embedding his fragile, fantasy-driven sculptures in Breuer’s structure—currently the temporary home of the Frick Collection, and before that an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—allowed the artist to slyly undermine the museum’s architectural philosophy and to challenge its institutional authority. The story begins downtown, miles from the genteel realm of the Breuer building. Simonds began constructing his best-known works, the Dwellings, on the streets of New York following an epiphany in his loft. One day in 1969, he sprinkled sand on a small quantity of clay and “had the feeling that I was looking upon a place.”1 Clay and sand became landscape; when

Above: Charles Simonds, Dwelling, 1972, clay, sand, wood. East 2nd Street, New York.

Right, center: Charles Simonds, Dwelling, 1974, clay, sand, wood. East 4th Street, New York.

Right, top: Charles Simonds, Dwelling, 1980, clay, sand, wood. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Right, bottom: Charles Simonds, Dwelling, 1972, clay, sand, wood. East Houston Street, New York.

Opposite page, left: Young person working on Charles Simonds’s 1972 Dwelling, East 2nd Street, New York, 1972. Opposite page, right: Charles Simonds, Dwelling, 1975, clay, sand, wood. Prince and Mercer Streets, New York. From the 1975 Whitney Biennial.

Simonds began to make bricks, these materials became architecture as well. Though he initially made these “places” in his apartment, the sounds of children playing lured him onto the streets, where the Dwellings took root. Before long, Simonds had conceived an evolving series of such structures, the traces of an itinerant civilization of invisible beings—Little People, he called them—who migrated from SoHo and wandered throughout the Lower East Side.2 There, Simonds built hundreds of Dwellings within a few years, finding neighborhood kids and their adult relatives to be a more engaged audience than his artist peers. In photographs, the miniature architectural structures seem to emerge organically from gutters, broken walls, and empty lots—wherever the city’s crumbling infrastructure afforded a place for their putative inhabitants, the nomadic Little People. Simonds used a delivery bicycle to cart around clay and bricks he made at home. When he found a suitable spot, he transformed the space into a miniature landscape by smearing it with red clay. He constructed the Dwelling atop this surface, dipping each gray brick into a mixture of water and craft glue and placing it with tweezers. No ornament was applied save for sand and bits of twig, but his materials provided a surprising range of rich, earthy hues: grays, brilliant reds, oranges, browns, tawny beiges and yellows. Simonds spent no more than a day constructing each Dwelling, after which it was left to its fate. Some were destroyed almost immediately by playful or mischievous children or by weather. And while architecture is sometimes defined as protection against the elements, the unfired bricks returned to mud when exposed to rain. Other Dwellings were ruined by viewers’ attempts to take them home—their delicate virtuosity often provoked a desire to protect, touch, possess. Few lasted longer than a few days. Despite their brief life spans, the miniature sites often look as if they have endured for thousands of years. Simonds sees each one as “part of the story 192 ARTFORUM

The miniature sites often look as if they have endured for thousands of years.

of the Little People, a different time and place in their history”; collectively, the installations represent the archaeological remains of a vast culture.3 He recalls that people sometimes reported seeing Dwellings where none had been built, proving that the fantasy of the Little People grew larger than their material presence.4 As he became more involved with the people he met on the Lower East Side, participating in local activism and “sweat equity” projects, Simonds’s interest in the art scene from which he had emerged diminished. “I was not against the art world, but it seemed so pointless. . . . I was so busy and happy doing my thing that there didn’t seem much that it could offer me.”5 The art world embraced him nonetheless—or tried to. When curator Marcia Tucker invited Simonds to participate in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, he refused. He was unconcerned with establishment legitimization and felt that his sculptures were most effective when encountered by surprise.6 “To put the [D]wellings in a gallery would be to destroy them,” he said.7 Undeterred, Tucker asked again for the ’75 Biennial, and this time Simonds agreed to participate—at a distance. He contributed a Dwelling in a parking lot at the intersection of Prince and Mercer in SoHo; a plaque within the museum announced its existence. Of course, by the time viewers sought out the work, there was likely very little to see. Over the next few years, Simonds’s work appeared in many exhibitions, including solo shows in New York, Paris, and Berlin, where he received a prestigious residency. He took part in Documenta 6 and exhibited a major piece in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Projects” series. He came to appreciate art exhibitions as

opportunities to experiment with more elaborate architectural designs. Nonetheless, he still felt that “the experience of a Dwelling was greatly diminished if the audience of the Little People went to ‘see’ a Dwelling with that concept in mind,” instead of encountering it by chance in the street.8 Asked to exhibit at the Whitney once again, for the ’77 Biennial, he finally agreed to show his work within the museum—but only if the curators supported his plan to focus viewers’ gazes beyond it. In deciding to exhibit his work at the Whitney, Simonds took on a formidable challenge. The unauthorized street Dwellings were as dependent on their surroundings as any architectural structure and benefited from the anonymous landscape of nineteenth-century brick tenements downtown, which allowed them both to hide and to be discovered. Breuer’s Whitney, an inverted Brutalist ziggurat surrounded by genteel brownstones, is both a hard-edge geometric sculpture and an instrument fine-tuned to the cerebral Conceptualism and sober Minimalism that Simonds had deliberately left behind when he left his artist peers in SoHo for the Lower East Side, where responses to his work were not constrained by art-world trends.9 At the Whitney, Simonds would be compelled to reckon with a forbidding modernist icon that embodied a strict separation between art and the life of the city. While his contemporaries’ works thrived under such conditions, the Dwellings threaten to wither away in the Breuer building, deprived of the surprise and mystery that kept their legend alive on the street. When the new Whitney opened in 1966, critics praised its functionality as a museum, noting its innovative movable gallery walls and flexible lighting SEPTEMBER 2023 193

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Breuer’s Whitney is both a hard-edge geometric sculpture and an instrument fine-tuned to the cerebral Conceptualism and sober Minimalism that Simonds had left behind.

Opposite page: Marcel Breuer, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1966, New York. Photo: Ezra Stoller. Right: Marcel Breuer, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1966, New York, May 1988. Photo: David Churchill/Arcaid Images/Alamy. Below: 2016 renovation of Marcel Breuer’s 1966 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Peter Aaron/OTTO.

system.10 Many modernist architects understood their mission as the design of ideal buildings for an idealized modern life, and Breuer—a protégé of Walter Gropius and a Bauhaus master in his own right—here sought to provide optimal conditions for works of modern art. To curtail visual distraction, he not only minimized ornamentation within the galleries but also made efforts to sequester the art within from an urban environment too complex and variegated to meet high modernism’s demands for purity. As critic Paul Goldberger noted in 1989, “the building’s essential architectural

idea is its own aloofness.” Breuer used a high concrete wall to shield the Whitney from its neighbors, ensuring that it “would not even appear to touch other structures.”11 Breuer’s philosophy of hermeticism is clearly announced by the concrete bridge that physically separates the museum’s entrance from the sidewalk. The effect recalls that of the reinforced concrete columns, or pilotis, that Le Corbusier hailed in his Five Points of Architecture and which were intended to replace supporting walls. In such structures as his Unités d’Habitations, the pilotis appear to seal off the building from contamination. Fredric Jameson noted that the pilotis seem to negate the possibility of an entrance.12 Breuer’s sunken sculpture court performs a similar function, evoking a medieval moat spanned by a drawbridge. Inside the Whitney, climate and lighting were artificially controlled—a relative novelty at the time—so natural light was only a distraction. Breuer himself referred to his few windows, asymmetrical trapezoids protruding from the facade, as “psychological”—they were meant to “dispel feelings of claustrophobia,” not to provide illumination or a glimpse of the outside world.13 Ada Louise Huxtable called the Whitney “a superb artificial environment for an art . . . that thrives best in hothouse isolation.”14 Her botanical metaphor posits the museum as conservatory, nurturing specimens that are unable to compete for sunlight or other resources in the wild. This concept of the museum as an autonomous habitat was profoundly well-suited to contemporary directions in art. Conceptualism, then in its infancy, had already established that anything—any object, phrase, or idea—could be a work of art. Yet outside of a dedicated art space, such works may well be invisible as art. In fact, during the installation of the Whitney’s inaugural exhibition, Huxtable reported, it was “sometimes difficult to distinguish art from artifact. . . . It is rumored that a shovel stood by a wall for a week before its status was settled.”15 The Breuer thus represented the distillation of the very climate that Simonds had hoped to circumvent by working on the Lower East Side. In building Dwellings at the Whitney, he confronted the opposite problem faced by many artists of his generation: Simonds’s work was at its most effective when it escaped the connotations of art. Uprooted from the street, the Dwellings might not survive the rarefied air of the museum. Accordingly, Simonds’s decisive move was to break the Breuer’s hermetic seal. On the fourth floor of the Whitney, he exhibited Quarry, 1976, a mountain of jagged cliffs with a soft, visceral center. This sculpture spread across the floor like a miniature work of Land art, providing a strikingly textured contrast to Minimalist works by Ron Gorchov and Jackie Winsor in its immediate vicinity, and bringing some untidiness into the pristine environment. He constructed an elaborate group of Dwellings against one of the asymmetrical windows that are a signature of the building—and another across Seventy-Fifth Street, on the facade of an apartment building. In the few extant photographs of the indoor sculpture, this second Dwelling can just be seen at the far corner of the Whitney’s window—a lumpy irregularity amid the austere pediments of the residential structure. If Simonds’s SEPTEMBER 2023 195

Simonds’s decisive move was to break the Breuer’s hermetic seal.

Dwelling for the 1975 Whitney Biennial had asked museum visitors to chase the Little People through SoHo, this latter group prompted them to look beyond the museum’s walls and out into the street. Curator Patterson Sims was sufficiently convinced by Simonds’s contribution to the 1977 Biennial to commission a permanent installation, an unusual undertaking for a museum at the time. Sims recalls having been inspired by Alan Saret’s permanent installation at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), The Hole at P.S.1, Fifth Solar Chthonic Wall Temple, made for its inaugural exhibition, “Rooms,” in 1976.16 Saret intervened in the very fabric of the building, excavating in the wall a pointed oval that terminates in a tiny aperture, letting in the air and light of the outside world. This precedent may have helped Sims imagine how an essentially anti-institutional artist who worked in the street could create an artwork for a museum. Saret’s work brought the outside in, as would James Turrell’s better-known Meeting, just down the hall from The Hole; Turrell’s work, which frames the wide-open sky as an aesthetic experience, had already been commissioned by P.S. 1’s Alanna Heiss but would not be completed until 1986. Simonds’s Dwellings, too, connected the world outside the museum to the art within it, but unlike Saret and Turrell, Simonds sought to send viewers out into that world. Saret’s Hole and Turrell’s Meeting are both negative spaces, literally defined by—and reliant on—the substance of the museum. The Dwellings, conversely, undermined the necessity of a dedicated structure for viewing art just as such structures were taking on unprecedented authority. In reviewing “Rooms,” Nancy Foote reflected that such site-specific installations represented “a risky business for museums to get into. . . . (Imagine, just for fun, Gordon Matta-Clark sawing the Whitney in half, or Alan Saret knocking a hole through the wall at MoMA.)”17 Matta-Clark had indeed sawed a building in half with Splitting, 1974, but many of his “building cuts”—including Doors, Floors, Doors, his contribution to “Rooms”—were internal. These dealt more with the interior structure and experience of architecture than with the building’s relationship to anything outside of it. (Simonds, too, took part in “Rooms”; he built Dwellings on the roof, where they venturesomely confronted the Manhattan skyline.) Foote’s parenthetical aside is “just for fun” because such interventions seemed impossible at a prestigious and pedigreed institution like the Whitney. But Simonds did not need to gouge into the walls or ceiling in order to erode the Whitney’s program of separation. For the permanent installation, he again proposed a multipart sculpture that would reside both in and outside the museum. In 1981, he installed another miniature municipality—this time, not in a space designed to display art but instead tucked away in the building’s dimly lit stairwell, where the rough-hewn clay brick of Simonds’s construction clashes magnificently with Breuer’s elegant modern design. Two other groups of brick habitations were placed across the street on the facade of 940 Madison Avenue, then a branch of the Chemical Bank, where sharp eyes can find them today. (Simonds restored them in 2015.) One small cluster sits on a second-story windowsill, the other atop a chimney. These settlements are just visible from the Breuer building. The sight lines suggest that the Little People could see and perhaps signal to each other across Madison Avenue, emphasizing 196 ARTFORUM

Above: Charles Simonds, Quarry, 1976, clay, sand. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. From the 1977 Whitney Biennial. Below: Charles Simonds, Dwelling, 1977, clay, sticks, stones, sand. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. From the 1977 Whitney Biennial.

Opposite page, left: Charles Simonds, Dwellings (details), 1981, clay, sand, sticks. Madison Avenue, New York. Photos: Jerry Thompson.

Opposite page, right: Charles Simonds, Dwellings, 1981, clay, sand, sticks, stones, wood, plaster, cloth, chicken wire. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Jerry Thompson.

by extension that they are part of a larger network of Dwellings extending out beyond the museum. This element of exchange, however fictional, suggests a more reciprocal relationship to the outside world than Saret’s and Turrell’s installations at P.S. 1, where the communication only flows in one direction. The outdoor works may be tough to spot, but the stairwell installation allows close observation. Nestled in a corner, several stories of pueblo-like structures rise from mounds of reddish clay that form a bulging, corporeal landscape. These fleshy lobes, which seem to sprout from the austere gray planes of the stairwell, lend the ensemble the appearance of a parasitic growth, or perhaps an anthill. The Little People are invited guests here, but they appear to have sneaked in through a crack in the concrete. Despite their modest size and easy-to-overlook locations, Simonds’s Dwellings effectively subvert Breuer’s plan to seal out the city. The artist’s choice of location within the museum also contributes to this subversion. On the streets, the individual characteristics of the Dwellings’ host buildings are softened, if not obliterated, by the very decay that renders them suitable for Simonds’s purposes: Missing bricks and eroded walls provided the Little People with caves and plateaus for their settlements.18 Yet given the chance to intervene in the intimidatingly distinctive environment of Breuer’s Whitney, Simonds did not choose neutral or anonymous spaces that would allow his Dwellings to stand out. Rather, he confronted the architecture directly by intervening in two of its most striking and celebrated features: in 1977, on the ledge of one of the building’s signature trapezoidal windows, and in 1981 in its staircase, praised by architects and critics for its elegance in proportion and materials.19 Bushhammered and board-formed concrete reveal the processes of construction, while the cantilevered stairs are embellished with dark green granite treads and an elaborately joined teak banister. The cool darkness of the staircase lends particular magnetism to its single window. Robert F. Gatje, a partner SEPTEMBER 2023 197

Simonds’s ruinous little habitations still insist, as he did, that “the art world is only part of the real world.”

in Breuer’s firm, called the staircase a “magical place,” and claimed that “when we were fighting to save the Whitney from its expansion plans” (of which more shortly), “more than one architect went out of his way to say, ‘Whatever they do to the building, make sure they don’t monkey with the great stair.’ ”20 The permanent installation’s home may be a modest, tuckedaway corner that declines to call attention to itself, but the location is also the consummate reflection of the building’s design philosophy. Ultimately, the Dwellings defy both the reigning museum ideology and the architect’s own ideas about how a work of art might interact with a building: “I welcome art as an addition to the architecture,” Breuer once said, “the same way that I welcome people, flowers, books—signs of living and usage for which the space is the container.”21 Rather than the tasteful ornaments imagined by the architect, the Dwellings are more like weeds, sprouted from seeds that infiltrated the museum from the wilds beyond it. Despite their diminutive size, they undermine the very idea of the building as a sealed container and suggest a potentially endless network of similar structures beyond its confines—for, like weeds, they are liable to pop up anywhere. If Conceptual works are fragile specimens requiring the controlled hothouse environment of the museum, Simonds’s wild Dwellings served to contaminate their pristine soil. In a building designed to isolate art, these ruinous little habitations still insist, as he did, that “the art world is only part of the real world.”22 In 1981, the year Simonds’s permanent installation went on view at the Whitney (and the year Breuer died), the museum unveiled a plan for a major expansion by postmodern architect Michael Graves. His proposal, which positioned the Breuer building as a sort of pillar for a massive structure that would occupy the entire block, seemed as calculated to cause a stir as Breuer’s had been. Many commentators decried the design as bombastic and kitschy, but Goldberger noted with relief that the central cylindrical “hinge” Graves planned between the Breuer and his new “Graves wing” would not entirely obliterate the Whitney’s beloved staircase, “which may well be the most endearing aspect of the Breuer building”; instead, “it would merely cover its windows.”23 For Goldberger, the loss of the view of and from the stairwell was an acceptable compromise; it wouldn’t mutilate the building itself. For Simonds’s Dwellings, however, this would have been fatal: In covering the stair window, Graves’s expansion would have severed the connections between the Little People within the building, nestled above the window, and their fellows across the street. In short, it would have destroyed the sense of vitality and connection to the outside world that Simonds managed to smuggle into Breuer’s modern cloister. Graves’s plan was ultimately rejected, and as of this writing, Dwellings is safe. It remains part of the Whitney’s collection regardless of the Breuer building’s current tenants, though the work will be on loan to Sotheby’s once they occupy the premises. The paradox of Simonds’s practice is that it combines ephemerality— sculptures destined to survive a few short days—with a deep sense of time that reaches toward an achronological conception of art. He saw his personal mythology as a “tool to fracture the present” and the narrowness of artworld trends.24 But if his story has been almost lost today, even as his friends 198 ARTFORUM

Above: Charles Simonds, Dwellings (detail), 1981, clay, sand, sticks. Madison Avenue, New York. Photo: Jerry Thompson. Left: Michael Graves, Whitney Museum Expansion Scheme 1, Madison Avenue elevation, 1985, color pencil on yellow trace paper, 16 × 16". Opposite page, top: Charles Simonds, Age, 1982–83, clay, plaster, wood, sand. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983. Photo: Charles Simonds. Opposite page, bottom: Charles Simonds, Dwelling, 1981, clay, wood, plaster. Installation view, Kunsthaus Zürich.

and peers of the ’70s downtown scene have been eagerly devoured by the canon, it may be partly because few of his works have lasted long enough to make this point.25 Though many of the Dwellings were meant to decay and disappear, the marvelously intricate installations meant to be permanent have not always fared better. An innovative piece (one of Simonds’s first “wall cuts”) embedded in the wall of the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1981 was purchased by the museum only to be subsequently entombed within the wall, never again to see the light of day. A multipart installation commissioned by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, also in 1981, was abandoned and ultimately demolished after the museum moved to its current building in 1996. And Simonds’s large freestanding sculpture Age, 1982–83, was partially destroyed when he could no longer afford to store it; only the top portion remains. As the episode with the failed Graves expansion shows, the fate of the Whitney’s installation is tied to that of its former home, but the Dwellings’ continued endurance there may also be partly due to their unobtrusiveness, their apparent diffidence in the face of art-world machinations. Simonds’s works exemplify the difficulty of historicizing artists and artworks that resist institutionalization. But their story also offers an alternative pathway through well-trodden annals of art history, reminding us of just how much we lose when we lose sight of the Little People. n JULES PELTA FELDMAN IS AN ART HISTORIAN, CRITIC, AND CURATOR. THEIR BOOK CHARLES SIMONDS AND THE SEVENTIES WILL BE PUBLISHED BY HATJE CANTZ IN 2024. For notes, see page 237.

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OPENINGS

JES FAN CASSIE PACKARD

Opposite page: Jes Fan, Systems III, 2018, silicone, glass, epoxy, melanin, estradiol, wood, 19 × 48 × 28". From the series “Systems,” 2018.

Below: Jes Fan, Diagram XIII (detail), 2021, resin, selenium glass, glass, pigments, 36 × 10 × 7". From the series “Diagrams,” 2018–.

IN 2018, Jes Fan, then in residence at Brooklyn arts nonprofit Recess, approached a local for-hire synthetic-biology lab with an unusual request. The artist, whose conceptually and materially complex work often showcases his facility with glassblowing—which he sharpened while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design—commissioned the laboratory to synthesize eumelanin for use as a sculptural material. The black or brown biopigment is found in organisms across taxonomic kingdoms. Among humans, however, it is racialized matter, synonymous with phenotypic constructions that have historically been deployed to naturalize structural oppression and violence, framing skin color as something that must be tracked and policed. Fan, who splits his time between New York and Hong Kong, where he was raised, is cognizant of racist schemata in which people of color are cast as potential contaminants to whiteness—a hideously tenacious idea that has informed American anti-miscegenation laws and that led to the violent stigmatization of Asian populations during the Covid-19 pandemic. The eumelanin, sloshing darkly in its test tubes for the artist’s early projects at Recess, materially foregrounded this racialized contagion discourse: Fan had the substance engineered using E. coli, bacteria present in healthy human and animal intestines but also famously capable of causing infection (and infectious panic). Fan filled dimpled, droopy blown-glass globes with translucent silicone, used as a soft-tissue substitute for cosmetic or reconstructive plastic surgery, and injected it with the fetishized and feared eumelanin. A window onto the enmeshment of nature and culture, the glossy vessels—their interiors now richly filamented, spattered, and flecked—put the construction of race on display, the glass cells sagging like wilted vivaria under the material’s projected meaning. In his 2018 “Systems” series, the artist presented these vesicles alongside others containing ready-made chemicals such as pharmaceutical estrogen and testosterone, which he began working with around the time of his own transition. Commodified, legislated, and pathologized with cruel vigor amid bans on gender-affirming care, these hormones are tangled up with what Paul B. Preciado has termed the “pharmacopornographic era,” in which control and resistance operate on the biomolecular level. Fan arranged the assorted globules in fleshy, resin-and-silicone-coated scaffolding, conjuring the concertina’d systems— chemical, medical, legal, informatic, technological, economic, biopolitical—through which such molecules typically travel. The suspension of their flow by the “Systems” sculptures hints at the potential for these substances to be powerfully reconceptualized or literally reconfigured: hacked, disordered, made unmanageable. Evoking the slice-and-dice aesthetic of medical illustrations, the corporeal is fragmented and repeated (“cloned”) to the point of illegibility in Fan’s ongoing “Diagrams” series, 2018–. Again, literalism begets abstraction: After applying silicone directly to body parts (a nape, a shoulder blade) belonging to queer friends, lovers, or himself, Fan scrambles distinctions between interior and exterior by making casts from the molds. He sands the resultant Aqua-Resin carapaces to an erotically smooth, mottled finish and installs them as if they were modular shelving. Their sloping surfaces bear blistered glass sacs, which faintly call to mind nineteenthcentury Chinese painter Lam Qua’s sensual portraits of men and women afflicted by severe tumors—the patients of an American doctor and missionary by the name of Peter Parker. (Several reproductions of these works are tacked onto the walls of Fan’s studio.) The transfiguration of flesh into furniture emphasizes the biopolitical alienation and biomedical commodification of the human body and its parts; it also implies an ontological fluidity or lability wherein a body could be anything. SEPTEMBER 2023 201

Above: Jes Fan, Network (For Survival), 2021, Phycomyces zygospores, silicone, borosilicate glass, 25 × 61 × 78". From the series “Networks,” 2021. Left: Jes Fan, Left and right knee, grafted, 2023, Aqua-Resin, glass, pigment, 12 × 9 × 12". Right: Jes Fan, Left torso, four times, 2023, Aqua-Resin, glass, pigment, metal, approx. 58 × 31 × 8". Opposite page: Four stills from Jes Fan’s Palimpsest, 2023, HD video, color, sound, 5 minutes 39 seconds.

The rangy, celadon-colored roots that hold together an abstracted corpus in sculptures such as Left torso, four times, 2023, literalize Fan’s fondness for “stolonic strategies,” a concept introduced by neuroscientist Deboleena Roy in her 2018 book Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. The idea is based on stoloniferous grass, which grows horizontally across the surface of the ground and constantly puts out “feelers.” Roy locates an ethics in the organism’s “reaching toward and touching of an always unfixed and incompletely knowable other, in search of a response—any response,” without any expectation. In his own stolonic thinking, Fan’s feelers have increasingly crept toward matters of nonhuman life via his explorations of other organisms’ materiality, modes of being, and entanglement with humans (an interpenetration that is quite apparent in his use of hormones and melanin derived from soy and E. coli, respectively). For his 2021 “Networks” series, Fan cultivated black mold, which is both a contaminant that causes adverse health effects and a substance used for food preservation. Out of his care for and attunement to this other form of life emerged filaments that snaked through a sprawling 202 ARTFORUM

glass reticulation evoking test tubes while upending the clinical glassware’s isolationist verticality. “Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option,” writes anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), a book that examines the social lives of matsutake. In other words, we can be damaged or extinguished by such contact, but it can also occasion growth, resilience, or beauty. In his ongoing “Sites of Wounding” project, the first chapter of which was presented at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong between March and June of this year, Fan highlighted organically occurring instances where “the site of contamination becomes the site of regeneration.” To defend against foreign objects that slip

into their shells, oysters secrete nacreous layers that transform the contaminant into a pearl. In a material-semiotic project undertaken with Hong Kong scientists between 2020 and 2023, the artist implanted the mantles of native Akoya oysters with small, sculptural Chinese characters for “Pearl of the Orient,” a colonialist moniker for Hong Kong. The irritated mollusks responded by covering the characters with nacre—the process unfurled like a slow, lustrous embossing. This poetic act of biohacking metaphorizes colonialism as a vector of infection, as it so often literally has been—something that postcolonial subjectivity responds to like an antibody. The video Palimpsest, 2023, portrays an ambivalent interspecies interaction marked by care as well as by violence; scenes of oyster cultivation (a practice in Hong Kong that predates British colonization) are intercut with close-up shots of Fan prying open the mollusks and the angry bubbling of their soft yellow mantles, studded with the occasional pearl. i want it to swallow its own name, reads a caption along the bottom of the screen. The next chapter of “Sites of Wounding” opens at Hong Kong’s M+ museum this month and builds on Fan’s exploration of generative con-

tamination as well as on his interest in human bodies via biomedical aestheticization; the ways in which they are valued, commodified, parceled out, and atomized; and their capacity for transformation and resistance. Fan made casts of computed tomography scans of his own organs and bones, which he abstracted through shifts in scale. Inspired by the ancient practice of consecrating statues of Buddha—which was done by hiding scrolls, herbs, ashes, and human viscera inside of them—Fan embedded several sculptures into the walls of M+, allowing blown-glass components to ooze through its holes and cracks. The glass’s brown hue mimics that of agarwood, a resinous material that is formed via fungal infection and is used in luxury perfumes, religious ceremonies, and traditional medicine. The heartwood, long cultivated in China, has a potent balsamic aroma, which might be the reason Hong Kong (the phrase translates to “Fragrant Harbor” in English) is so named. A tiered sculpture trails its stolons on the floor and they extend toward something unknown, anticipating new connections to the outside world with an inherent bravery. n CASSIE PACKARD IS AN ART WRITER BASED IN BROOKLYN. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

Fan is cognizant of racist schemata in which people of color are cast as potential contaminants to whiteness.

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REVIEWS 206

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209 210 211 212 213 214

FOCUS Sarah K. Rich on Ellsworth Kelly NEW YORK Zack Hatfield on Seth Price Cassie Packard on “Dissident Practices: Brazilian Women Artists, 1960s–2020s” Donald Kuspit on Arthur Dove Michael Corris on Stan VanDerBeek David Colman on Elisabeth Kley Barry Schwabsky on Eunnam Hong Chris Murtha on Alice Adams Chloe Wyma on Les Levine Max Lakin on Nancy Dwyer

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MILAN Ana Vukadin on Yuri Ancarani 225

VIENNA Lisette May Monroe on Margaret Salmon

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BERLIN Martin Herbert on Samuel Hindolo Olamiju Fajemisin on Diamond Stingily

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BONN Noemi Smolik on Ulrike Rosenbach MÜNSTER, GERMANY Moritz Scheper on Taslima Ahmed

BEACON, NEW YORK Dan Adler on Senga Nengudi 215

PHILADELPHIA Athi Mongezeleli Joja on Sue Williamson and Lebohang Kganye

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LARAMIE, WYOMING Dan Beachy-Quick on Jenene Nagy

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SAN FRANCISCO Maria Porges on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

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LOS ANGELES Catherine Taft on Vaginal Davis Ashton Cooper on Brie Ruais Annabel Osberg on Max Hooper Schneider

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MEXICO CITY Gaby Cepeda on Josef Strau

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PARIS Lillian Davies on Basma al-Sharif

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AMSTERDAM Annie Goodner on Simnikiwe Buhlungu

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STOCKHOLM Adam Kleinman on Monica Sjöö TBILISI Franz Thalmair on Ana Gzirishvili

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ISTANBUL Kaya Genç on Cengiz Çekil

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DUBAI Yalda Bidshahri on Dorsa Asadi CAPE TOWN Nkgopoleng Moloi on Faith Ringgold and Hank Willis Thomas

SANTIAGO, CHILE Verónica Tello on Cecilia Vicuña

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GWANGJU Adela Kim on the 14th Gwangju Biennale

LONDON Gabrielle Schwarz on Florence Peake Daniel Culpan on “Picture This: Photorealism 1966–1985” Jonah Goldman Kay on Alfredo Jaar

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MANILA Carlos Quijon Jr. on Nona Garcia

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MELBOURNE Helen Hughes on Stephen Bush

LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND Dylan Huw on the Liverpool Biennial 2023

Ellsworth Kelly, Three Gray Panels, 1987, oil on canvas, three panels. Installation view, Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, 2023. Photo: Ron Amstutz. 204

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Left: View of “Ellsworth Kelly at 100,” 2023–24. From left: La Combe II, 1951; Painting for a White Wall, 1952; Cut Up Drawing Rearranged by Chance, 1950. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Above: Ellsworth Kelly, Toilette, 1949, oil on canvas, painted wood frame, 24 3⁄4 × 18 3⁄4".

Ellsworth Kelly GLENSTONE, POTOMAC, MARYLAND CURATED BY EMILY WEI RALES AND YURI STONE

Sarah K. Rich

ELLSWORTH KELLY, who would have been one hundred years old this year, was a maker of beautiful, exuberant things. He translated the flotsam of visual experience—a waistline, shadows cast on a stair, the colors of packaged construction paper—into objects that could be at once monumental and subtle. His process of collecting and elaborating upon source material was exhaustive; his output of finished works was massive. How could one mount a comprehensive retrospective of his work without clobbering viewers with its magnitude? Glenstone chose a strategy of understated grandeur, with an exhibition that is huge (more than seventy works) yet uncrowded. Many selections come from museums outside of the United States, such as Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949, and private collections, such as Kelly’s famous and infrequently shown painting of a Turkish loo, Toilette, 1949. (Toilette rewards special scrutiny; only in person can one see the two impasto swirls with which Kelly indicated the foot supports of the fixture while also suggesting the full cheeks of a face.) The folding multipanel screen La Combe II, 1951, is displayed across the corner of a room as if to accentuate the angles of its composition and construction; its red-and-white, 206 ARTFORUM

non-folding companion La Combe I, 1950, stands opposite the room, and one of Kelly’s photographs of stairs—much like the one from which he derived ready-made patterns for both compositions—is just down the hall. The elegance of the exhibition is possible in part because large categories of Kelly’s production are reduced or excluded. Only a few of the works on display are drawings, and while several important photographs are present, there are few collages; the only preparatory sketches or archival material in the show accompany a single work (Yellow Curve, 1990). There are no lithographs. Early works that don’t readily fit into major exegetical trends in Kelly scholarship (like his portraits from 1950) do not appear. No designs for dresses or dancers’ costumes are included. Most heartbreaking is the omission of Kelly’s astonishing sketchbooks. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is showing those, along with the giant contrapuntal mural of aluminum panels that Kelly made for the Philadelphia Transportation Building in 1957.) These exclusions render invisible the cycles of formal discovery and elaboration that informed much of Kelly’s practice, though they are perhaps unavoidable given the sheer size of the artist’s output. And with its economical selection of major works, Glenstone provides Kelly’s art ample space to breathe. The museum’s pavilion architecture, with its high concrete ceilings and serene clerestories, is especially hospitable to Kelly’s large, stand-alone works, particularly those that stretch across the wall, like Diagonal with Curve XV, 1984, whose arc seems continued by Red Curve VI, 1982, when viewed through a doorway from an adjacent room. The uncluttered installation also makes some of Kelly’s intentionally compressed pieces more notable. The relatively narrow spaces that the artist stipulated as the required distance between the elements of Painting in Three Panels, 1956, for example, could have been overlooked in the 1950s,

when galleries hung canvases more closely together, but here, the work’s tight arrangement is so at odds with the rest of the exhibition that the negative space is unmistakably part of the composition. The viewer at Glenstone is thus encouraged to consider the subtle incongruities of the combined arrangement: to note that the two spaces between the paintings are not quite the same; that the red segment at the top of the yellow canvas is not quite congruent with the cropped-away segments of the black circle; that the lateral division of the central panel might read as a horizon because the top is blue and the bottom is green, but that this horizon does nothing to establish a unitary space or common gravity across the set. Canvases juxtaposed in this way could be in danger of reading as a narrative sequence (this effect is risked more explicitly by the billowing, tumbling shapes of Three Gray Panels, 1987, which is also on view) but instead appear as propositions about the somatic possibilities of form: largeness, salience, levity, slowness, or stability. The relationship between a canvas and its surroundings is the chief concern of the exhibition’s showstopper, Yellow Curve, which was originally produced for Frankfurt’s Portikus and has here been exhibited in a custom room to reproduce the original installation. The Curve is dizzying. Not quite a standard section of a circle, it stretches forward and toward the right, prompting the viewer to contemplate the difference between knowing a shape and perceiving it. Meanwhile, because the painting takes up most of the floor in its small room, its yellow paint reflects onto the walls, making them

glow. This is, in other words, a transitive object that, like many other works in this exhibition, absorbs the surrounding space within its composition while simultaneously expanding into it. Not everything has been re-created from the original Portikus installation, however. Photographs of Yellow Curve as it was installed in 1990 document an object whose canvas sides are white; the sides of the curve shown at Glenstone, by contrast, are yellow. Differences like these can shift the function of a piece by Kelly dramatically. When the whole of Yellow Curve is the same hue, it spreads as a thick layer of color that is sensuously present in real space. When the yellow expanse is restricted to the topmost two-dimensional surface, however, the object reads as a painting anomalously placed on the floor and enacts conflicts among the medium, its remnants of pictorial surface, and the conventions of its physical display. A different room at Glenstone is dedicated to discerning the paragone in Kelly’s objects. There, objects made of wood hang on separate walls: The modestly sized Pair of Wood Reliefs and Concorde Relief I, both 1958, oppose the thick slab of the red-oak Diagonal with Curve XV, across the room. These are objects that visibly put the materiality of the wood to work: The grain of the elm used in Concorde Relief I affirms the vertical orientation of the panel, even when the angled plane of the carved relief slants off course; each terminus of Diagonal with Curve XV cuts through a knot from the wood, making the anomaly visible from both the front and the side. Between them stands Untitled, 1988. A much darker brown than the objects that flank it, Untitled could be mistaken (and was mistaken by several viewers) for a plank of dark, stained wood, especially as its one-inch thickness is a standard dimension of milled lumber. It is, of course, bronze, as anyone who has seen it at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, knows, but in the context of the Glenstone installation, placed in proximity to pieces in elm and oak, it obtains a trans-medium valence, hovering not so much between painting and sculpture as between historically reified materials of sculpture (wood and bronze). That is the continuing reward of Kelly’s work—that for all its quiddity and its claim to selfevidence, the poetic ambiguities continue. Consider Painting for a White Wall, 1952, an early work in which Kelly tested painting’s relationship to its surroundings. The panels lack frames that would establish their autonomy; instead, they cast shadows directly on the wall according to lighting conditions in the space. The white panel seems to mimic the white wall of the gallery, but because it was made with artist’s oil paint on canvas, its chromatic effect is unlikely ever to match any architectural surface. The ultimate ambiguity of this piece, however, has emerged through decades of disagreement about one of its colors. Kelly famously stated that a child passing by initially ratified the work by naming its colors “black—rose—orange—white—blue— blue—white—orange—rose—black.” Richard Shiff, in his most recent publication, agrees that

the first panel is black. Yet Eugene Goossen praised the chromatic workings of the painting in 1973 by noting that the leftmost panel’s “purplish blue” contrasted with the brighter blue on the other end. One might suspect that Goossen was studying an inferior photographic reproduction while writing, except that in 1992, Yve-Alain Bois similarly described that first panel as a “dark blue” and allowed that its color “was hard to perceive even in normal viewing conditions, [and] probably could not have been grasped [by the child in] the street.” Bois elaborated on his correction years later by explaining that Kelly’s colors derived from industrial preprinted paper for schoolchildren, noting, “If you had gone to French schools in the ’50s or even ’60s, you’d recognize them when seeing the paintings.” It is curious that the boy of Kelly’s recollection was not sufficiently familiar with the conventions of school papers to recognize the obvious color, no matter

the lighting. It is even more curious that Kelly’s original assertion that the panel is black could be considered incorrect by others (he did, after all, buy containers of paint that would have been labeled noir or bleu foncé). Such vicissitudes of color and the paradigms that govern the hues we perceive (Goossen’s aesthetic appraisal of a balanced composition; Bois’s ethos of the anti-compositional, tinged with some autobiographical urgency) richly exemplify the paradox of Kelly’s work: It presents as straightforward while remaining elusive. I do not know how to lock down the color of that dark panel with a name. Like the best of Kelly’s work, its hue is an artifact of a past moment that has made its way to the present as a living thing that is vibrantly unfixed. n “Ellsworth Kelly at 100” is on view through March 2024; travels to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, spring 2024; Fire Station, Doha, Qatar, fall 2024. SARAH K. RICH IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

For all the quiddity and claim to self-evidence in Kelly’s work, the poetic ambiguities continue. Clockwise from above, left: View of “Ellsworth Kelly at 100,” 2023–24. From left: Diagonal with Curve XV, 1984; Red Curve VI, 1982. Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Curve, 1990, acrylic on canvas on wood. Installation view. Ellsworth Kelly, Painting in Three Panels, 1956, oil on canvas, three panels, overall 6' 8" × 11'7". View of “Ellsworth Kelly at 100,” 2023–24. From left: Pair of Wood Reliefs, 1958; Concorde Relief I, 1958; Untitled, 1988. Photos: Ron Amstutz.

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NEW YORK

Seth Price PETZEL

In Seth Price’s novel Fuck Seth Price (2015), the narrator offers guidance for how to make “cool” paintings irresistible to collectors and critics alike. He calls these works post-problem art. “Any number of methods or styles would do,” he counsels, as long as the resulting paintings evoke “cynical irreverence toward sincerity or depth” and retain a “knowing” air. “The all-important twist here, the redeeming feature, would be the way in which this work was generated, which would expand in importance, endowing the abstraction with meaning.” Post-problem art would appear tasteful, but “in its apparent lack of concern for traditional skill or labor . . . it would be tasteless.” Another pro tip: “The painting could be based on chance, which obliterated traditional notions of composition and looked kind of punk: accidental stains on canvas, for example.” The big new paintings in “Ardomancer,” Price’s first New York show in five years, were emphatically post-problem: sleek and randomlooking acrylic-on-aluminum compositions incorporating hand-applied brushstrokes, CGI renderings, and visuals generated through artificial intelligence. As usual, Price, a failed art-world dropout, wasn’t selling out so much as giving in, surrendering to the tide of contemporaneity— in this case via AI models, whose pictorial sleights lend another wrinkle to the work’s already dense, metaleptic enmeshments of text and paratext, irony and sincerity. Like readers of Fuck Seth Price, viewers of “Ardomancer” found themselves locked in an ongoing negotiation of what’s “real” and what’s not.

Thought Comes from the Body II, 2022–23, contains an allusion to Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait in the form of a convex mirror depicting two people—perhaps artist and assistant—floating above a busted hyperspace of neon orange and squamous purple. Van Eyck’s masterpiece has long moved critics to hermeneutic excess, every inch of oil paint (then a cutting-edge medium) parsed for clues. In Price’s images, everything is a red herring, including mystery itself. jan van eyck was here. 1434, the Flemish Primitive famously wrote above a mirror, with a calligraphic flourish. Price could shake a can of spray paint and do a throw-up: “Steh Pirce was here. 2023.” Timelessness is anathema to the artist, whose forms—freely circulated PDFs, jihadist beheading videos, vacuum-formed bomber jackets, playlists, autofiction—tend to quiver in the aspic of the zeitgeist, technologically forward yet strangely, solidly of their moment, even as they meld with other eras and temporal shifts. The title Thought Comes from the Body II references a line in “Machine Time,” a sinuous fifteenthousand-word story that Price published in the literary magazine Heavy Traffic in 2022. “For millennia one had measured oneself against the cycles of the seasons and the heavens,” the narrator intones. “To now be compelled to measure one’s life against the pace of machine time invited madness.” Even as “Ardomancer” felt like figurative painting’s last stop, Price does not catastrophize about this madness; the work was neither a requiem for humanism nor an embrace of some posthumanist turn. (He is surely phlegmatic about the idea of apps like dall-e putting him out of business. As he once said, “Art’s not a job.”) Rather, Price’s collusion with deep-learning models—systems trained on billions of preexisting images on the internet—perversely facilitates an unlearning of art’s conventional criteria. “In all my work, I’m kind of trying to go against thinking,” he told the Brooklyn Rail in 2018. Indeed, for all these paintings’ brash profusions and trick reflections, they were studies in subtraction. Imagination, beauty, control, thought, emotion, meaning: Take these things away from art, and what’s left? A problem worth pursuing. —Zack Hatfield

“Dissident Practices: Brazilian Women Artists, 1960s–2020s” ANYA AND ANDREW SHIVA GALLERY Seth Price, Danlivin, 2022, acrylic, generatively produced image reversetransferred into acrylic polymer, and UV print on aluminum composite, 78 1⁄2 × 95 3⁄4".

Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The show’s main motif was a shiny chrome cylinder that Price designed in a 3D software program, then had industrially printed and adhered to the works’ Dibond supports. The artist’s trompe l’oeil pipes mirror and warp the other components of the paintings, such as Seeptember, 2022–23, or Danlivin, 2022, whose trio of tubes reflect some gestural marks and an oleaginous puddle logoed with the presumably AI-generated phrase the tnetes 1989. (Price stets the nonsense; invoking modernism’s vaunted methods of chance, collage, and readymaking, his work reminds us that the history of art is one of misuse.) The human body, a specter in all of Price’s work, was there, too, frequently glimpsed in footprints and finger smears and acheiropoietic faces, skin and screen conflated into a single surface. 208 ARTFORUM

Curator Claudia Calirman was mindful not to describe “Dissident Practices” as a show of feminist art. According to Calirman, many artists who lived through Brazil’s US-backed military dictatorship—which lasted from 1964 until 1985—repudiated feminism as a “North American import” while combating patriarchal authoritarianism through their art and leftist activism. Meanwhile, some of the presentation’s younger artists—likely impacted by the anti-femicide #NiUnaMenos (#NotOne[Woman]Less) movement that swept Latin America beginning in 2015—identify as feminists. Rather than impose an ahistorical framework of intergenerational feminist battles or waves, “Dissident Practices” loosely constellated these artists’ vital acts of resistance to an intersectional tapestry of oppressive structures in and beyond Brazil. Using video, photography, and performance, the artists cast themselves as stand-ins for social bodies. Take Anna Bella Geiger’s psychogeographic video Passagens I (Passages I), 1974, in which Geiger wearily ascends an interminable series of staircases. Whether she is traversing them in private (domestic) or public (political) settings, a meaningful destination seemed hopelessly out of reach. Contemporaneous works foregrounded depictions of closely cropped mouths: apparatuses of discourse, consumption, and seduction. Anna Maria Maiolino’s

artist living in a country that is notoriously hostile to trans people like her. Riffing on Lygia Clark’s canonical hinged metal Bichos (Beasts) sculptures, 1960–66, Parayzo’s Bixinha (Little Queer), 2022, comprises two interlocking serrated steel sheets that resemble razor blades, evoking the humble weapons that trans individuals might carry for protection (or be threatened with) in public spaces that are unsafe for them. This double-edged queering simultaneously pays homage to NeoConcretism—so frequently mistaken as a metonym for Brazilian art history—and slices it wide open. —Cassie Packard

Arthur Dove ALEXANDRE

Berna Reale, Quando todos calam (When Everyone Is Silent), 2009, ink-jet print, 39 3⁄8 × 59". From “Dissident Practices: Brazilian Women Artists, 1960s–2020s.”

In-Out (antropofagia) (In-Out [Anthropophagy]), 1973–74, is titled after poet Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto), a text in which he exhorts his fellow Brazilians to ingest the colonizer’s culture and produce new forms. Maiolino’s video toggles between mouths that are taped shut, slurping up threads, or endeavoring, unintelligibly, to speak—evoking Brazil’s dictatorial censorship as well as broader injunctions against feminized subjects’ speech. In Lenora de Barros’s Poema (Poem), 1979, six sequential photographs feature a woman’s tongue licking a typewriter’s keys before lodging itself in the machine’s knifelike strikers. Here, de Barros—who studied linguistics and concrete poetry—underscores language’s materiality and performs a kind of écriture féminine, using her body to speak outside of a hegemonic symbolic order. The show bypassed Brazil’s redemocratization and the neoliberal 1990s in favor of the twenty-first century, highlighting work made amid popular protest movements and the far right’s rise. Galvanized by loosening social mores, some artistas brasileiras feature the body more explicitly in their work. In Berna Reale’s photograph Quando todos calam (When Everyone Is Silent), 2009, the artist depicts herself supine on a table, naked, and draped with entrails in an open-air market where sex work is commonplace. More recent protest spectacles by Reale have grown larger and showed the artist adopting a militaristic aesthetic, a strategy complicated by her proximity to state power as a women’s prison employee and forensics specialist. The video Rosa púrpura (Purple Rose), 2014, portrays Reale leading fifty adolescent girls in a unified march, their mouths plugged with rubbery sex-doll lips, to denounce child prostitution. Renata Felinto is part of a cohort that has problematized de Andrade’s manifesto by asking who, exactly, was doing the cannibalizing (Brazil’s wealthy white avant-garde) and who was marginalized in the process. A detournement of minstrelsy and a critique of urban segregation, her video White Face and Blonde Hair, 2012, follows the Afro-Brazilian artist, wearing a blond wig, pale makeup, and corporate drag, as she browses boutiques in São Paulo’s affluent Jardins neighborhood. One year after the work was made, thousands of poor Brazilian youths, many of whom were Black, protested their tacit exclusion from upscale malls by converging upon them en masse via rolezinhos, or “little strolls.” Lyz Parayzo likewise occupies sites from which she has been shut out. A photograph of her unsanctioned pop-up nail salon, Manicure política (Political Manicure), 2016–21, captures her—seated by a giant toe sculpture—painting a visitor’s nails pink: a brave act by an

Between 1910 and 1911, Arthur Dove (1880–1946) made several abstract paintings, becoming the first American artist to do so. Calling them “extractions,” he mined the shapes and colors of nature, rendering its material content as a kind of afterthought, more hallucinatory than real, more suggested than insistently present. The works were never shown during his lifetime, but they were known to Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited him regularly. He noted that Dove arrived at nonobjective art uninfluenced by Matisse, Picasso, and even Cézanne, all of whom were featured at 291, the photographer’s Fifth Avenue gallery in Manhattan. It’s probable that Dove read an excerpt from Kandinsky’s essay “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1911), which was published in a 1912 issue of Stieglitz’s quarterly magazine, Camera Work (1903–17). But, as Dove once said, “[I] could not use anothers [sic] philosophy . . . any more than I could use another’s art.” “Sensations of Light” at Alexandre gallery, an exhibition of Dove’s paintings and drawings made during the 1930s and ’40s, confirmed his originality. The works fell into three broad groups: pieces that alluded to nature, nonobjective and primarily geomorphic abstractions, and several untitled watercolors that seemed to go back and forth between the aforementioned categories. All of the works were relatively modest in scale, grand in manner, and dense with meaning—the sublime, whether man-made, steeped in nature, or purely aesthetic, were here distilled into an intimate form of intensity. Dove said that he was obsessed with “sensations of light from within and without,” reminding me of Robert Motherwell’s remark that

Arthur Dove, Sun and Moon, 1932, oil on canvas, 18 1⁄4 × 22". SEPTEMBER 2023 209

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abstraction is a kind of mysticism—the “light of revelation”—as Dove’s oil paintings Dawn I, Sun and Moon, and Sunday, all 1932, strongly suggest. How are we to reconcile this with Georgia O’Keeffe’s remark that Dove was “the only American painter who is of the earth,” that is, of nature? A reproduction of a pastel by the artist that O’Keeffe saw in 1913, probably at 291, was her introduction to modernist art. Her close-ups of flowers and animal skulls, emblematic of life and death, are as concentrated and intense as Dove’s rendering of the titular subject in Silver Log, 1928, a crepuscular canvas that makes the object look like mortified flesh. The painting Freight Car, 1937, is similarly unsettling— the car itself is perceived as a bloodred blotch against razor-like trees and quivering telephone poles. O’Keeffe and Dove appear to have something else in common: Their works are the last hurrah of Emersonian transcendentalism. The fact that The Dial (1840–1929)—a literary magazine founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller— published an article about Dove’s art certainly implies as much. In Emerson’s “Nature” (1836), transcendentalism’s central text, the author famously wrote that “nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it.” One can partake in its “rapid transformations,” as Dove seems to do, or become what Emerson called a “transparent eyeball,” discerning the essential spirit of objects, as O’Keeffe did. Dove understood nature through its rapid transformations—its seemingly parthenogenetic amorphousness, indicative of what philosopher Henri Bergson called the élan vital. For Dove and O’Keeffe, art was a means of articulating and preserving the fundamental essences of life. Their transcendental realism is more intimate than even that of the Hudson River School painters. Dove, however, eventually withdrew from the outside world completely, as the entirely geometrical compositions of the 1940s in this presentation indicated. He finally came into his own as a purist, an unapologetically abstract artist, stuck between a symbolic realism and a robust formalism. He eschewed European vanguardism for something stranger, messier, and more interior—that is, something deeply American. —Donald Kuspit

Stan VanDerBeek MAGENTA PLAINS

Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) realized, via Marshall McLuhan, that behind the cinematic and televisual surface were only other surfaces, seemingly countless in their number. That, in effect, is how reality was depicted by this visionary artist of the 1960s. His films emerged from the landscape of New York’s filmmaking avant-garde, populated by figures such as Tony Conrad, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, and Jack Smith. In the case of See Saw Seems, 1965—the namesake work of this presentation at Magenta Plains—the artist’s TV-production experience played a significant role. Within his milieu, few were as versatile and as technologically gifted as VanDerBeek. Only a handful could tease film apart as he did, lay bare its world-making illusions, or match his faith in the idea that art will always amount to so much more than the newest technology. In addition to See Saw Seems, two other films were featured in the artist’s exhibition here: A La Mode, 1960, and BreathDeath, 1963. The thread that bound these predominantly stop-motion animations together was the visual pun, which served as the hinge that enabled VanDerBeek to shepherd the viewer from one scene to the next at high velocity. (And if a sequence of images seems to present a case for believing that the veil has been parted to reveal truth’s ground zero, it is immediately transformed into something else to destabilize the viewer.) While these works certainly owe a formal debt to early-twentieth210 ARTFORUM

century avant-garde filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and Dziga Vertov, they wear those influences lightly. Their sense of absurdity can be traced back to the beginning of cinema, to the popular cinématographe of the Lumière brothers, and especially the early films of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton. A La Mode is all Victorian soft-core porno full of buttocks and breasts, with Model Ts and musclemen cavorting on a nude torso “landscape.” Faces of fashion models are bombarded with all sorts of objects or are depicted as facades—their features fall away to reveal still other moving-image scenes. Sometimes their heads are supported by a scaffolding, as if they were human Potemkin villages. Hollywood fakery is supplanted by the authenticity of vanguard experimentation. Reality is never in doubt—the artist is always broadcasting the message that the truth is multidimensional, elusive, tricky. BreathDeath is a black-and-white film that begins with a montage of hypnotic all-seeing eyes, set to the bass line of “I Put a Spell on You” (1956) by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Its fast-moving precredit sequence presents snippets of solarized footage showing people dancing the twist in a jungle setting, parading troops, faces morphing into mushroom clouds, computers, skeletons, and death heads. Intertitles announce breath and death against a carnivalesque soundtrack. The film is dedicated to Chaplin and Keaton, and we see the latter lighting his cigarette with the burning fuse of a bomb. (Breath and Death, indeed.) Further sequences in this strangely surreal work include vignettes featuring the artist, his wife, and their daughter. Some of these segments are framed by a print of a proscenium arch, a TV screen, or a conference room. But despite these banal tableaux, the subtext is always war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Chaplin’s head bifurcates, revealing a mushroom cloud. Death rides on horseback. A speech bubble incredulously asks, don’t you ever knock? In 1966, VanDerBeek wrote, “Sights and sounds, the changing illusion of the world in which we live, and the world that lives only in the mind, are the basic materials of film creation.” The artist still had faith in humanity’s ability to discern truth from fiction. He longed to create a space for genuine self-realization through technology, not in spite of it. In this regard, he was more pragmatic and optimistic than McLuhan. The global-village guru proclaimed our instantaneous unconscious connection to each other via electronic technology, while VanDerBeek insisted on the individual’s right to construct their own network of truth-affirming experiences. One wonders what the artist would have made of AI and other forms of digitality, their distortionary powers, and the impact they’ve had on our social and political landscape.

Stan VanDerBeek, A La Mode, 1960, 35 mm transferred to video, blackand-white, sound, 6 minutes 18 seconds.

I imagine he, too, would have been startled to see all those televisual surfaces shatter into billions upon billions of seductive, confusing, and life-altering pixels. —Michael Corris

Elisabeth Kley CANADA

The ceramics revival over the past decade or so has in many ways been more reboot than renaissance. This means that, in service of this quest, many cool young artists have skipped back to pottery’s Play-Doh DNA, creating the kind of clumsy naive things we might have brought home to Mom from kindergarten. The less educated and refined the better— much of it seems intent on declaring, “I don’t know anything about pottery; I’m just having fun.” On behalf of those who have a deeper sense of the craft’s long, important, and complicated history, I am glad you had fun. Here’s your warm milk and animal crackers. It’s nap time. In contrast, the discreetly munificent flowering of one of contemporary art’s most talented ceramic artists, Elisabeth Kley, comes as both a welcome breeze and a puzzlement. Who is this woman flouting today’s potter-house rules and making seductive, intriguing work that seems to have not an MFA in irony but a Ph.D. in history? The question attended her splendid spring show at Canada in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, as well as at other recent exhibitions at New York’s Gordon Robichaux and Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, the latter an institutional presentation that traveled to the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha. With an ever-palpating grasp on the dizzying carousel of pattern of the past four thousand years, Kley has developed her own kind of motif Esperanto, tearing leaves from myriad sources such as ancient Egyptian friezes; Etruscan, Coptic, and Islamic symbology; pre-Columbian urmodern figures; the electric geometries of the Wiener Werkstätte; the folksy cheer of midcentury ceramics by Roger Capron and Stig Lindberg; and the retro-Deco drawings and stage designs of Edward Gorey, to name but a few. Her singular art is a little bit gnostic, a little bit Frank Stella, with a smattering of medieval Persia and a dash of Gucci. Her show at Canada, “A Seat in the Boat of the Sun,” was a precis of the Kley mystique, one that evinced an ambitous expansion of her ceramic forms. Using her favorite colors—a range of blue-blacks on a cream-white ground—the artist created a sort of theatrical set that recalled the occult shenanigans of the theosophist movement that flourished during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. (At the moment, comeback kid Hilma af Klint is theosophy’s most famous exponent; Kandinsky and Mondrian both worked with its relation of abstraction to higher consciousness.) Like them, Kley excels at making her own quasi-religion and culture, summoning her own idiosyncratic deities. (The show would have been perfect for a séance—Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, are you there?) Placing her architectural ceramics and handpainted geometric patterns directly onto the gallery’s walls or on wall-mounted canvas screens, the Canada exhibition expressed this idea exceptionally. Kley took her own skill at hand-building earthenware slabs to a new level, forming large totemic pieces that ranged from simple cubic shapes to arch segments, bringing to mind the most fabulous expression possible of the iconic unit blocks so popular in kindergartens everywhere a couple of generations ago. One pharaonic, Vasarely-inflected totem, Vessel Interrupted by Emptiness, 2023, cleverly hints at the arbitrary line between design and art: In a “useful” vase, the firing hole is at the top so the object can be properly utilized. But in this sculpture, the opening is out of sight, on its bottom, rendering it a solid-looking and “useless” aesthetic

object. Snake, 2022, a semi-sinuous chain of five discrete blocks, brings the fascinating zoological principle of aposematism (or warning coloration) into Kley’s field of reference. The work makes it seem as though she’s linking the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur to the menagerie of stuffed reptiles in New York’s Natural History Museum—right up Cleopatra’s alley. Kley’s building blocks suggest that she can channel a bit of child’s play herself, and honestly, who among us cannot? But in the end, what was so charming about Kley’s presentation here—and her work in general—was not just her enthusiastic devouring of millennia of decoration and pattern, but the light, restrained, yet unpredictable way she plucks shapes and symbols out of her cerebral archive to create new keys to her culture, taking a cosmetic approach to the cosmic. And what embodies great art if not that? —David Colman

View of “Elisabeth Kley,” 2023. From left: Vessel Interrupted by Emptiness, 2023; Idol, 2022; Overlapping Discs, 2023; Snake, 2022. Photo: Joe DeNardo.

Eunnam Hong LUBOV

I had never seen Eunnam Hong’s art before walking into “Souvenirs,” her New York solo debut at Lubov. Something about it seemed strangely familiar—or rather, familiarly strange. Yet in a minute I clocked it: Her canvases possess an atmosphere reminiscent of certain works by women Surrealists of the mid-twentieth century. In particular, I thought of that marvelous painting in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday, 1942. The reason it took me a moment to realize this was that Hong has deducted from her pictures the whole fantastical stockpile of overtly bizarre Surrealist imagery: From Birthday, for instance, the weird little winged monster that accompanies Tanning’s dominating self-portrait, and the astonishing outfit—quasi-Elizabethan and partly composed of what appears to be living greenery—in which she is decked out. What Hong has retained, aside from the accent on costume, is the kind of space in which Tanning placed herself, a fully enclosed and somehow uncanny domestic interior with no windows opening to the outside. But Hong has also adapted from the late painter a certain manner of portraying that environment: plain, factual, chromatically muted— a subdued literalism meant to heighten the picture’s strangeness by SEPTEMBER 2023 211

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Alice Adams ZÜRCHER GALLERY

Eunnam Hong, Lunch Break, 2023, oil on linen, 33 × 40".

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lending it verisimilitude. Hong has further followed Tanning by basing her paintings on self-portraiture—or at least we have to accept the gallery’s word on it, for we see in Hong’s paintings little of the face, as it is frequently obscured by big eyeglasses and the tresses of curly wigs, worn by the woman she depicts over and over again. Nor, I should say, does Hong’s subject proudly bare her breasts as Tanning did; the recurring figure is demurely covered up by her voguish clothing. Another element Hong has taken from Tanning, but in a remarkably transmuted way, is repetition. In Tanning’s art, we see doorway after doorway after doorway, like mirrors mirroring other mirrors, leading to an endless number of rooms that might, after all, be the same room, an infinitude that becomes a labyrinthine enclosure. With Hong, the recurring motif is her self-portrait, a nearly anonymous or incognito figure despite our being told it represents the artist—but then we have to ask, Who is she? Hong’s multiplicity is a show of force: The artist outnumbers the viewer. Her proliferating avatars hang around their sparsely furnished rooms like fashion models—lanky, rail thin, elegantly posed, and expressionless, according to what little we see of their faces. More than a person, she is a platoon, appearing five times (with take-out coffee cups and a bagged sandwich) in Lunch Break, 2023, or as chic twins in Women in Blonde Wigs, 2022. Is she one or two in White Collar, 2023, meaning, is this a picture of her lying down on a bed facing her doppelgänger, or is she simply admiring her own reflection in a mirror? Given the serial nature of this group of ten paintings, even the solitary figure of Myth, 2023, seems incipiently numerous. Hong’s ambiguous meditations on identity are fascinating, but what carries the work is the refinement of her self-effacing facture. I found myself getting pleasurably lost in the folds of the snowy shirt and bedsheet in White Collar, and fascinated, in Japanese Teapot, 2022, by the almost unnoticeable reflection of the surrounding room in the titular vessel, on which the composition centers. Just as the artist obliquely displays herself as quasi anonymous, she shows her virtuosity by underplaying it. —Barry Schwabsky

“The wall,” Alice Adams declared in 1972, “is a non-subject.” Yet, at the time, she was producing a series of latex casts of her studio walls, including Bowery Wall, 1970, the centerpiece of this exhibition. The surfaces, structures, and substrates of walls were very much her subject, and she sought to challenge their supposed nullity. Adams began her career as a weaver and has spent the past several decades realizing large-scale, site-specific projects in the public realm. This presentation, her first solo show in New York in more than two decades, focused on a transitional period between 1964 and 1974, during which she used common construction materials to engage with the more private terrain of her studio. The assembled sculptures and drawings formed a kind of portrait of the artist’s workspace at 246 Bowery in Manhattan, just around the corner from this show at Zürcher Gallery, but from another era. After a yearlong apprenticeship studying tapestry making in Aubusson, France, Adams maintained a successful weaving practice through the early 1960s. Anticipating her interest in undergirding structures, she worked from the reverse of her tapestries to emphasize the loose, tangled threads that typically go unseen. By 1964, she was applying her command of weaving to an array of industrial “fibers,” including telephone wire, steel cable, and chain-link fencing. Positioning Adams within the vanguard of “soft” or “anti-form” sculpture, Lucy Lippard included three of her woven objects in the group show “Eccentric Abstraction” at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1966. Two of those works appeared at Zürcher in intriguing variations that demonstrate the pliability of her sculptures. (As seen in a vintage installation shot of the Fischbach exhibition, the nestled sleeves of woven aluminum wire and chain-link fencing in Big Aluminum, 1965, were slung provocatively from the ceiling.) In a new iteration here, the chainlink segment alone lay twisted on the floor—a molted skin, deflated yet still commanding. Also on view was Fluorescent Structure, 1964, a stout, basketlike sculpture woven from rusted-steel cable, which Adams repurposed, entwining it with a freestanding roll of chain-link fencing to produce 22 Tangle, 1968. The two forms are so thoroughly conjoined that the cable piece seems to organically inhabit the pillar of chain link, like a tree grown through fencing. Adams sourced materials from local hardware stores and lumberyards (if she couldn’t salvage them from the streets), and often used them as they were intended. For instance, she employed wooden laths, plaster, and vinyl tiles to build Wall and Floor, 1967. The sculpture, a crosssection that resembles Gordon MattaClark’s building extractions, was her ramshackle tongue-in-cheek rejoinder to the slick, hard-edge Minimalism of the time—a matter-of-fact “primary structure.” Unfortunately, the object appears to be a one-off, though her practice continued to shift toward the architectural

Alice Adams, 22 Tangle, 1964–68, rusted-steel cable, fluorescent paint, steel chain-link fence, 69 × 28 × 23".

when she relocated her studio to the Bowery. The artist’s output from this period embodied the raw physical character of her new work environs. She jettisoned the plaster but continued to use laths to create hollow slatted towers, such as Wooden Column, 1973, and Volume, 1974. These sculptures, like her early tapestries, make visible what is usually hidden and evoke the “unfinished” ancillary spaces of basements and attics. Vessels for our imagination to inhabit, they stand in their respective corners, mysterious and proud but also aloof—a little unused to the spotlight. Though she was included in “Eccentric Abstraction” and the 1973 Whitney Biennial, Adams didn’t receive as much attention as her male peers and was largely ignored by commercial galleries. Many of the works on view debuted at 55 Mercer, an artist-run cooperative gallery that she cofounded. A longtime New Yorker, she understood the struggle to find places to live, create, and exhibit in, and the politics of housing infused her art (she dedicated one of her later site-specific works—a heavily buttressed retaining wall—to her neighbors and allies in a landlord dispute). Still, the worn-down surfaces and skeletal frameworks of buildings were what truly spoke to her. In a 1975 review in these pages, critic Alan Moore quoted Adams on her inspiration: “I like the eloquence of these old loft spaces with their pitted walls and the sense of the wood lath murmuring underneath.” Her sculptures express her intimacy with the bones of aging buildings and attempt, at least, to echo their murmurings. —Chris Murtha

dark-blue tie with white dots; pale-blue shirt”); the cracker-barrel witticisms of committee chair and self-styled “country lawyer” Sam Ervin (“blue-gray suit; blue tie with blue checks; pale-blue shirt”): All this and much more were redacted into a stenographic flow of mundane sartorial information

Les Levine BLANK FORMS

“For eight years, Les Levine has been a prominent gadfly of New York avant-garde art,” Peter Schjeldahl observed in a New York Times review of the artist’s show at Manhattan’s Stefanotty Gallery in 1974: “But it is a role that Levine has had to play in increasingly lean times, as the pleasure-loving art scene of the middle sixties has disappeared under waves of Vietnam politics, cultural breakup and now economic recession.” It was in this mood of creeping stagflation and national disenchantment that the ubiquitous “media sculptor,” like 71 percent of his fellow Americans, watched the Senate Watergate hearings, which were broadcast “gavel to gavel” between May 17 and November 15, 1973. Conflating cloak-and-dagger secrecy with mediatized spectacle, the televised political soap opera appealed to Levine’s archly administrative sensibilities. From its palace intrigues and procedural tedium, he created Watergate Fashions, 1973–2023, a roughly forty-sevenminute recording of the artist describing, with bone-dry bathos, the daily wardrobe of every commitee member and witness to participate in the six-month-long proceedings. Visitors to the gallery did not hear the explosive, inculpatory testimony of former Nixon counsel John Dean, but we did learn that he appeared before the committee on Tuesday, June 26, in a “gray striped suit; paisley tie; [and] pale blue button-down shirt.” (His glamorous wife Maureen wore a “lemon-yellow safari suit; white neck scarf; [and] pearl earrings.”) The confessions of notorious spook and scripturient spy novelist E. Howard Hunt—who, in a slapstick prelude to the Watergate break-in, burgled then–US military analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in a red fright wig—were likewise supplanted by a laconic account of “beige suit; light- and dark-blue diagonally striped tie; [and] pale-blue shirt.” The perjurious performance of Nixon gatekeeper and avowed “pluperfect SOB” Bob Haldeman (“gray suit; dark-blue tie with white diagonal stripes”); the pro forma denials of blue-blooded former CIA director Richard Helms (“dark-blue suit;

An apogee of 1970s anomie, Watergate was also the perfect object for Levine—a “cheerfully cynical parodist and manipulator of ‘systems,’” per Schjeldahl—who, even before the shoe-leather reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, relished his part as the art world’s resident Tricky Dick. If Levine’s multimedia sculptures of the 1960s— with which he had endeavored to turn “the viewer into information” via closed-circuit television—already suggested a predilection for surveillance, several works from 1970 exude an uncannily Nixonian paranoia. See, for instance, Fecaloids, an installation of paper shredders frantically destroying documents; or Wire Tap, a stereo playing a year’s worth of the artist’s bugged phone calls; or the Museum of Mott Art Inc., an intelligence agency–cum–consulting firm set up by Levine as an “art-world version of the rand Corporation” (coincidentally the same year that Ellsberg left rand). Mott Art advertised wiretapping services, among other deliverables, to clients and staged recorded “hearings” on the New York art scene featuring prominent artists and critics. Levine’s cybernetic dandyism could indemnify a rather bleak technological determinism. Jack Burnham’s 1970 Artforum essay on the artist quotes him thus: “In a totally programmed society my art is about packaging.” In Watergate Fashions, Levine made the hearings’ dramatis personae into empty suits—a coup of style over content, televisual medium over ideological message. If this transmission from the fading past immediately conjures the multitudinous scandals and investigations of the Trump White House, its attitude of withdrawn irreverence toward liberal norms and right-wing criminality betrays a deeper disenchantment with the systems of technocratic governance that energize reactionary pseudo-populism in a real-time feedback loop. Some may find Levine’s double negativity, compensatory irony, and “total technical ambience” (in the artist’s words) problematically

View of “Les Levine: Watergate Fashions, 1973–2023.” Photo: Les Levine.

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aloof or exasperatingly glib. Many did. As Burnham wrote, “There are two distinct types: those who detest Les Levine and those who appreciate the negative vibrations which Levine radiates with such effortless ease.” The artist certainly has my vote, but to each their own. It’s a free country, after all. —Chloe Wyma

Nancy Dwyer THETA

“Words tend to be inadequate,” Jenny Holzer once declared. Nancy Dwyer must have missed the memo—for her, words are the whole thing. Since 1974, when Dwyer and her peers at the State University of New York, Buffalo, began hanging their art in improvised hallway galleries between their studios, she has made hay out of thoughtless chitchat. Dwyer thinks about language until it inflates to the size of furniture, jailbreaking it from the polite confines of the page—or the banal environs of work, the grocery store, and the local bar—to loose it upon an unsuspecting populace. Her patter rudely barges in midconversation and makes a spectacle of itself. You can talk about Dwyer’s art, but it talks back.

Nancy Dwyer, Everybody’s Angry, 2013, papier-mâché, plaster, latex paint, monofilament, 74 × 48 × 44".

BEACON, NEW YORK

Senga Nengudi DIA BEACON The artist’s show “How About Never?” was a tight survey of nine works from 1997 to the present. Such a small presentation might not have seemed worth the bother, but the pieces provided an effective entry into Dwyer’s conceptual project, which has always been deceptively simple yet bitingly funny. Dwyer hijacks consumerism’s vulgarities and insecurities, its come-ons and carnival barking, and takes the whole mess out for a joyride around aphoristic possibility before letting it

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all crash into a deadpan one-liner, forcing the viewer to sort out the linguistic wreckage. Featured in this show were a video animation, four paintings, two sculptures, and a pair of wall works. Such medium-specific descriptions, however, form a rough taxonomy (were the bandsawed wood pieces detachable friezes or shaped paintings? Yes. Were the acrylicdaubed panels sprouting from flat-screen TV wall mounts paintings or sculptures? Also yes). Their refusal to conform to the strict parameters of objecthood doubles as a neat analogue for how Dwyer treats language: as something unstable, mysterious, and full of trapdoors, its meaning locatable at multiple points, always correct but also wrong. Usually Dwyer sets her sights on a word or two and its constituent letters, but short phrases also come into play. (The artist loves a good colloquialism.) Much of the work has ripened beautifully. Take Everybody’s Angry, 2013, a set of fifteen papier-mâché spheres that spell out the titular observation. Strung from the ceiling as if ready to be plucked for a Powerball drawing, the sculpture is as accurate an assessment of the national mood now as it was a decade ago, maybe even more so. Its pastel palette makes the sentiment look absurdly cheerful as it waves away the corrosive bitterness: Everybody is angry—so fucking what? Dwyer’s art is especially effective at revealing advertising’s barely hidden manipulations—the industry’s casual abandonment of soul for surface. One could also align her work with that of the concrete poets, who cared how words both read and looked. Consider her painting Uhuh, 1998, which turns on that very ’90s utterance of ambiguity. The expression is arranged into a daisy-chain pattern within the borders of what appears to be an emerald-hued sheet of paper floating against a backdrop of variegated greens. The letters look die-cut, as if the object were a party favor for a recalcitrant teen. One can almost hear the phrase being grunted with passive-aggressive dissent. The work’s retinal effect is transfixing, like a horrific droning sound made flesh. Hasbeen Wannabe, 2002, a fifty-six-second digital animation featuring seven letters that morph from one word of the title to the next (and back again), also seizes upon the language of the late twentieth century. (“Wannabe,” the Spice Girls’ unfathomably popular and gleefully nonsensical hit single, was released six years before this work was made). The piece seems to be a meditation on the vicissitudes of artistic ambition and obsolescence: The puffy attenuated characters float in a soup of toxic-sludge green, lolling within innocuous, drowsy graphics that call to mind those of a PC screen saver. The daggers of Dwyer’s critique are sharp—this twenty-one-year-old reflection on success finds new purchase today, wrung into a kind of lament for the “late career” artist who’s likely seen and experienced too much of the art world’s capriciousness, intellectual laziness, and cruelty. Dwyer, who was born in 1954, has exhibited widely, yet she’s never really achieved the sort of acclaim that many in her Pictures generation cohort did. Her smart, droll, and prescient art deserves to be more than a well-kept secret. —Max Lakin

Combining early sculptures with recent large-scale installations, this show—memorably curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi—helps to underline the importance and relevance of Senga Nengudi’s practice, which exudes a powerful presence within this venue. Set in the same vast building as long-term exhibits by predictably canonical figures (Judd, Serra, Smithson, et al.), Nengudi’s sculptural project exudes material and formal inventiveness, striking notes of emotional, political, and

the site of much ritualized (and perhaps choreographed) mark-making: Flurries of footprints are juxtaposed with breast-like mounds topped with bright monochrome pigments, along with partially immersed sections of metal pipe with knotted lengths of nylon stockings attached to them. The fact that one can walk around the work accentuates its sacred, shrine-like aura—a piece of plumbing that rises against the wall becomes a site of ritual adornment. Multicolored bits of nylon stocking are tied to the plumbing, with pigment messily spread all around. Were these gestures meant to be reverent or rebellious? “We thank you for your guidance, for your love, for your vision of better, for your courage, for all of you whose lives were unjustly and maliciously taken before your time,” says someone on an accompanying audio track. The work, a site of ruin and trauma, is actually a stage for acts of tribute and defiance in the face of unjust inhuman pasts. Yet despite the horror, as the anonymous speaker suggests, hope will prevail. —Dan Adler

PHILADELPHIA Senga Nengudi, Water Composition II, 1970/2019, vinyl, water, rope, dimensions variable. From the series “Water Compositions,” 1970–. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

spiritual resonance—qualities frequently eschewed by her aforementioned peers. Six elegant examples from the artist’s ongoing “Water Compositions” series, 1970–, are on hand. Ideal for Dia in terms of its rigorous, reductive elegance, the floor-bound Water Composition (green), 1969–70/ 2023, features a clear piece of plastic twisted into five compartments that come across as connected bodies filled with emerald-hued fluid. A strand of thick rope catches a pair of them—subtly suggesting that these vulnerable figures are being captured (and eventually separated) from their kin. Water Composition I, 1970/2019, features another fluid-filled vinyl form strung up on a wall, in this case subjected to exacting geometric treatment, resulting in baglike forms with sharp points containing red, orange, and clear liquid. These six appendages are part of a centralized— incarcerated?—creature, lying on the ground, partially prone. While comparable in some sense to Hans Haacke’s works incorporating air and moisture (e.g., Condensation Cube, 1963–65), Nengudi’s series may be associated more broadly with post-Minimal, process-based approaches employing unconventional and often flexible materials, which often emphasize the forces of gravity (as in Robert Morris’s Untitled felt sculptures from the late 1960s). But Nengudi’s works differ partly because of their uncanny ability to signify the predicaments of people—as figures subjected to restraint, to processing, to suspension and strain. They do so with such austere means, and yet manage to set off, as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s art does, a remarkable range of subjective associations. Nengudi’s vibrant palette—and the presence of tiny bubbles lying beneath her plastic skins—may signify signs of breath, growth, and animation, emitting a sense of hope in the face of persecution. The artist’s ability to test the technical and metaphorical boundaries of her materials is further evident in the more expansive Water Composition II, 1970/2019. A single length of vinyl zigzags between two wall-bound sections of rope, from which hang a trio of floor-bound bodies of blue fluid. A central circular form offers intriguing intricacies with its irregular, jellyfish-like edges and darkened navy perimeter with glacial, glass-like qualities, along with a wave-shaped passage of condensation. In this case, the streaked and stretched sections of vinyl between the azure pools shimmer and shine; their folds and creases may be read as being in dialogue with the drapery adorning monumental marble statuary, depicting (mostly white) bodies, historically deemed worthy of portraiture. These elements also recall Eva Hesse’s “draped” works, such as Expanded Expansion, 1969. Nengudi’s sprawling, room-size installations here include Sandmining B, 2020, which features a floor-based, rectilinear expanse of sand,

Sue Williamson and Lebohang Kganye BARNES FOUNDATION At the Barnes Foundation, “Sue Williamson & Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember” was a two-woman show organized by Emma Lewis, a curator at Turner Contemporary in Margate, England. The exhibition featured photographs, videos, and mixed-media installations that revisit the artists’ memories of growing up in South Africa, where they both continue to live and work (Williamson in Cape Town, Kganye in Johannesburg). In the postapartheid era, memory remains a contentious and political zone, one that continues to divide South Africans between those who seek to fortify the dominant narrative of a liberated polity and those who challenge the veracity of this claim. Since the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement—a student-led revolt aimed at taking down a statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, which led to a push in decolonizing the sociopolitical and educational systems across all of South Africa— the dubious claim that democracy delivered “freedom for all” has

Lebohang Kganye, Setshwantso le ngwanaka II, 2013, ink-jet print, 11 3⁄8 × 16 1⁄2". From the series “Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story” (It’s My Heritage: Her-Story), 2013.

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become even more specious. “Tell Me What You Remember” partly presupposed, and even undermined, this bifurcation in memory through its title. But how do we recall and remain attentive to a past that refuses to stay there? The show staged a transgenerational and racial dialogue between the artists—one white, one Black—whose work invokes the past in two different ways. Williamson, born in 1941, is a renowned white antiapartheid activist and writer whose art follows a more conventional approach to political commentary via memory, reconciliation, and the transmission of information. Kganye, born in 1990, also traverses this territory of memory, but through a different route: She draws from her family’s history and archives via an inward-looking tack that is distinct from the “struggle aesthetic” typified by Williamson’s art. Set against a selection of older works, some of which dated back to the 1980s, Williamson’s pair of two-channel video installations, What is this thing called freedom?, 2016, and That particular morning, 2019, staged dialogues between mothers and their children. In both works, the younger generations are often at odds with their elders, questioning their motives to “forgive and forget” historical injustices or their instinctive desires for restitution. In each piece, the interlocutors are pictured on two separate screens—generationally divided—and talk about myriad issues, including single-parenting, apartheid killings, retribution, reconciliation, and how apartheid dramatically impacted family relations and heightened socioeconomic inequalities in its aftermath. Kganye chose a different interaction with her elders—a more celebratory and commemorative one—as shown in her photo series “Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story” (It’s My Heritage: Her-Story), 2013. In these images, Kganye reproduced old pictures of her late mother and restaged them by acting as her ghostly double. In a conversation with Williamson, Kganye noted that in this “journey of recording my family history . . . [I] try to locate myself in the family narrative or in the family history,” thereby turning the work into a sort of reconfiguration of the past. The prints were all displayed in a kind of oval shape, resembling a human eye, a symbolic motif that represents the interrelation between witness and photographic act. The show conformed somewhat to the narrative trope of aesthetic difference in the ways in which Williamson and Kganye were positioned on the political-versus-quotidian axis. The exhibition also played into the dominant liberal view of multiracialism that put the postapartheid era on the global map. The dialogic motif became the modus vivendi between the artists and their works. However, what seemed ominous here was the belief that this multiracial/generational dialogue is unfolding between those who were in the struggle and those who were supposedly “born free” (born toward and after the fall of apartheid). But this idea is troubling in many ways, especially considering that the term “born free”—often imposed on Black children—is an analogical catchphrase based on conservationists’ attempts to anthropomorphize African wildlife. I am equally apprehensive about the implied instantiation of a certain South African sisterhood beyond the color line. “Tell Me What You Remember” affirmed the very racially charged subtext that it intended to undermine. —Athi Mongezeleli Joja

art to the simplest measure: paper and graphite. Those elements evoke multiple connotations of the primary: from grade-school supplies— pencils, lined paper—to the immediacy of a sketch in a notebook. There is an immediacy of utmost concern evident in her work as well: a care for close connection. This proximity is spatial and temporal, yet her sense of time does not center around an accumulation of hours demarcating life into the fateful tenses of future, present, and past. Nagy’s investigation is an experiment in thinking about the passage of days differently, in which the planet’s turn around the sun doesn’t bring us simply to another year, but takes us back to the point from which we began, returning us to our origin, a place in which creation is ongoing, mythical, and somehow—impossible to explain—eternally nascent. The Weight, 2016, made from graphite on paper, feels like a fundamental example of the artist’s binding vision, epic but singular. The work is immense—some twenty feet long and six and a half feet high. And though its vastness calls to mind Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, there is no spectacle, only meditation. The light of the gallery gently illuminated the work’s grisaille surface, and as the eye adjusted, one saw that Nagy’s piece is comprised of minute rubbings that call to mind tally marks, used not for counting, but for some other form of gathering that produces meaning. The paper has also been folded into isosceles triangles that measure no more than seven inches per side, accentuating the graphite’s subtle vibrancies. At certain moments, the pattern coalesces into squares, rectangles, and hexagons, as if one is watching a universe unfurling, a cosmic plenum of a kind, a whole that asks a question about what it is to be whole, not on the level of mimetic representation, but as a deeper form of verisimilitude. The hand makes first what the mind realizes later. Nagy invites us into that experience, showing us how filling one small shape, as humble as the gesture seems, points to a cosmic principle: that from a place of is-not, an is comes to be. It is a thought as old as Parmenides, as Zen, as artmaking itself. Nagy’s art of devotion evokes that of Ad Reinhardt’s in its slow and sensuous opticality, making patience a prelude to pleasure. As with The Weight, we can also detect Agnes Martin’s spiritual geometry in the more intimate palm grid 6, 2019, an enigmatic drawing executed in graphite and gouache on palm-frond paper that was created by Nagy herself. Embedded in this substrate are shiny flakes of mica, like stars,

LARAMIE, WYOMING

Jenene Nagy

UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING ART MUSEUM Simplicity can feel visionary in a way that a more striving, complicated approach can fail to achieve. Jenene Nagy, in her exhibition “While navigating the distance around the sun,” reduced the materials for her 216 ARTFORUM

Jenene Nagy, mass 17, 2018, graphite paint and torn paper mounted on paper, 33 × 33".

adumbrated by intersecting vertical and horizontal lines that form a lattice of small boxes, each no more than five millimeters square and filled with a daub of white paint. With this piece, the artist’s care doesn’t seem to be in regard to the cumulative whole, but centered on the myriad discrete elements. Sometimes the gouache is very opaque; sometimes it seems the barest wash. Every quadrate is an attempt at cool perfection that collapses, making it undeniably human. What could be airless precision instead embodies Wallace Stevens’s insight that “the imperfect / is our paradise.” Indeed, there is something paradisical (though not necessarily Edenic) about Nagy’s work, which is full of necessary and revelatory errors that teach us to love this errant world, like Lucretius’s clinamen—the slight swerve that allows existence to exist. I saw it everywhere in this show, especially in the works mass 16, 17, 18, and 19, all 2018, which are created from carefully torn strips of paper and a graphite paint made by the artist. Each individual work, roughly three feet square, holds a pattern in relief. Torn strips of paper descend vertically, others cross horizontally, and where they overlap a small square rises. The shape punctuates the work with a dynamic, diagonal rhythm, the haptic presence of its geometric vibrancy recalling the scarification on the skin of ancient tribes—pattern as faith of a kind. It’s a revelation of squares: as profound a prayer as I know. —Dan Beachy-Quick

SAN FRANCISCO

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer GRAY AREA

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is one of those rare artists who both understands complex technologies and can harness them to make works of art that are, miraculously, not only smart but spectacularly visually compelling. The eleven pieces on view in this exhibition at Gray Area spanned nearly twenty years, reflecting a variety of Lozano-Hemmer’s interests and concerns, such as immigration and border politics, the creative subversion of tech used primarily for policing or militaristic purposes, and the need to dismantle ideas surrounding white Eurocentrism and US exceptionalism. (Having emigrated as a teenager from Mexico to Canada, Lozano-Hemmer has a unique perspective on cultural/continental divisions, whether they are practical, poetical, or utterly nonsensical.) A central focus—as expressed by the show’s title, “TECHS-MECHS: A Survey of Mexican Technological Culture”—was the idea of calling into question the narrative regarding Silicon Valley’s dominance over innovation. The largest piece in the show was the immersive Pulse Topology, 2021, a wavelike grid of three thousand lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling. The work suggests both an upside-down landscape and a threedimensional EKG, twinkling in response to the heartbeats of both past and current visitors. Three downlights marked spots where you could hold your hand out until your own pulse took over a portion of the work’s rhythm, visually and aurally, until it was superseded, absorbed, and catalogued for inclusion into the installation’s nearby servers, which were filled with thousands of other examples. At the start of this process, a single bulb glowed brightly—like an incandescent memento mori—and then became absorbed by the other flashing lights around it until the heartbeats of three thousand more spectators were recorded. This representation of “hearts beating as one” was enchanting, even as it reminded viewers of the brevity of human life. The sense of ephemerality was also foregrounded in Airborne Newscasts, 2013, in which a silhouette rendering of a viewer’s body heat, cast onto a theatrically scaled white screen, disrupted projections of live news bulletins, turning

them into nonsensical eddies of letters. With a kind of exquisite generosity, Lozano-Hemmer gave viewers a chance to short-circuit their own automatic response of seeing and reading, as the transmissions put out by AlterNet, Fox, La Jornada, Notimex, and other networks dissolved into illegibility. Between these messages were stories of Mexican scientists and intellectuals whose discoveries and contributions have been hidden (or attributed to US citizens). These stories were similarly altered by the silhouettes, implying a digital colonialism. Throughout the show, data were performed in a visible and even at times viscerally tangible way. In Sway, 2016, a stiffened, roughly sevenfoot-tall version of a rope noose—a longtime symbol of American violence and ruthless vigilantism—was quixotically presented upside down. A complex metronomic mechanism gave it a subtle back-and-forth movement, the frequency of which was determined by a statistic chosen by curators at the venue where the work was being presented. In this case, the tiny sway every three or four minutes represented the frequency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) arrests in 2021. It’s possible to experience much of Lozano-Hemmer’s work innocently, but its astonishing formal beauty serves as a Trojan horse for the social and political commentary with which the artist imbues everything. The big ideas that animate Lozano-Hemmer’s output give it intellectual heft and poignancy, but we are not bombarded. With great skill and an even greater beneficence, he leaves enough room for each viewer to enter the art on their own terms. He allows us to choose our own adventure, knowing that we’ll eventually get to the message at the center of it all. —Maria Porges

Rafael LozanoHemmer, Airborne Newscasts, 2013, projectors, computers, surveillance cameras, custom-made software running NavierStokes equations, programmed in Delphi and TouchDesigner. Installation view. Photo: Drew Altizer.

LOS ANGELES

Vaginal Davis

MARC SELWYN FINE ART In the first volume of Marcel Proust’s epic novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913–27), the narrator famously tastes a madeleine dipped in tea, which transports him into childhood memories of the home of his Aunt Léonie in the French-countryside town of Combray. Vaginal Davis’s intimate works on paper—thirteen of which were included in this jewel SEPTEMBER 2023 217

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Vaginal Davis, Her Cardboard Lover, 2017, watercolor pencil, nail varnish, lip stain, eye shadow, glycerin, hydrogen peroxide, witch hazel, coconut oil, cocoa butter, perfume, hair spray, Anacin Fast Pain Relief tablets, Excedrin Migraine & Headache tablets, Lydia E. Pinkham Women’s Compound, and Health Tonic on paper, 11 × 8 1⁄4".

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box of an exhibition—function in much the same way as the cake: They are confectionary portals that transport the viewer to longago eras of now-forgotten actors, fictional characters, writers, dancers, and artists. Davis’s Aunt Leonie et Combray, 2019, for example, depicts Proust’s protagonist in washes of pink and gray against an abstraction of green foliage. Her eyes are weary and melancholy, as she perpetually suffered from various ailments. The work is rendered on a piece of found stationery bearing the name fondation d’entreprise galeries lafayette, just barely visible through the painted ground. The letterhead is from the OMA-redesigned art institution located in central Paris. The new design preserves the institution’s original nineteenth-century facade while featuring an ultra-contemporary utilitarian space within. Davis’s portrait did something similar in its bridging of past and present. Bringing together works made between 2017 and 2019, this exhibition reflected Davis’s dreamy world of fainting couches and laudanum, klieg lights and close-ups, on-screen romances, curtain calls, gold diggers, snake-oil salesmen, parlor songs, illegitimate daughters, Ascension Days, and yesterday’s fan magazines. Some works, such as Davis’s portraits Cyd Charisse, Geordie Graham, Moira Shearer, and Raven Wilkinson, all 2018, were decidedly Fauvist. Each is a headshot-style, three-quarter rendering of its subject in high-key colors and bold spontaneous brushstrokes. And, like the imagery of les Fauves, these compositions reflect a heady, emotional, nostalgic worldview. Importantly, many of the works were composed not of paint or other traditional art mediums, but of beauty elixirs, makeup, herbal tinctures, lotions, painkillers, and other tonics. The various combinations of these sundry elements produced a watery, primarily pastel palette that seemed to capture the deep emotional states of each female subject. For example, Her Cardboard Lover, 2017—which takes its title from a 1942 movie starring George Sanders, Norma Shearer, and Robert Taylor as star-crossed swells enmeshed in a comical love triangle—was created with watercolor pencil, nail varnish, lip stain, eye shadow, glycerin, hydrogen peroxide, witch hazel, coconut oil, cocoa butter, perfume, hair spray, Anacin Fast Pain Relief tablets, Excedrin Migraine & Headache tablets, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Women’s Compound and Health Tonic, and a late-nineteenth-century herbal potable marketed to alleviate menstrual discomfort. Other pieces incorporated perfume, rouge, Aqua Net Extra Super Hold hair spray, mandrake, henbane, datura, and Iberogast herbal gas relief, among other natural and man-made ingredients. Davis’s kaleidoscopic mediums are like magical potions, meant to alter consciousness, induce fertility, sedate, soften, lighten, tighten, contour, and hold. While the artist, like a grand witch, offers remedies for resilient women, “female troubles” were, nevertheless, a running subtext of this show. Many of Davis’s characters—women in love, either thwarted by vanity or adrift in longing—play out tiny dramatic episodes of lives both luxurious and flawed. Stylistically, her pictures recall the lavish interiors of Florine Stettheimer, the dynamic figures of Sonia Delaunay,

and the weirdly disfigured heads of Hannah Höch. Yet Davis’s ladies, made with exotic powders and glamorous unguents, are hers alone. The originality in their making belies the wistfulness and nostalgia of their subjects, and the artist asserts that picturing the female is always, first, an aesthetic proposition. —Catherine Taft

Brie Ruais NIGHT GALLERY

In the darkened back room of Night Gallery’s massive new warehouse space, five of Brie Ruais’s large circular ceramic works appeared to be hovering on the walls. Each piece, individually spotlit with rings of white light, referenced a lunar phase. The alabaster Spreading Outward, Full Moon, 130lbs and onyx Spreading Outward, New Moon, 130lbs, both 2023, bookended the cycle. As usual, Ruais starts each piece with a chunk of clay that weighs as much as she does, pounds it into shape, and then rips the resulting form into manageable portions that are ultimately fired and screwed to the wall. This process is visible in the mottled surfaces of the works themselves, but is also further emphasized in Daughter, You Seem Foreign to Me, 2023, an accompanying video that was projected on the wall as a circle instead of the typical cinematic rectangle—a form that mirrors the shape of her celestial ceramics. The film put us in Ruais’s body, showing us the strenuous job of spreading the clay from her perspective. In another section of footage, there is an overhead view of her pushing and mashing the clay, ostensibly by moonlight. The intensity of the physical struggle Ruais experiences with her material is heightened by the pulse of her labored breathing, the video’s primary sound component. The overt connections made between the feminine body, the moon, the landscape, and art as labor lent the dimly lit installation a slightly moody, if not witchy, vibe. Ruais, however, isn’t replicating overwrought “female” tropes, but is bravely tackling and interrogating these loaded mythoi. The artist’s encounters with the clay are indexed on the works’ surfaces: We saw evidence of a footprint, what looked like the press of a knee or the side of a palm, and long ridges where her fingers pushed the

Brie Ruais, Spreading Outward, New Moon, 130lbs, 2023, glazed stoneware, hardware, 77 1⁄4 × 74 3⁄4 × 3 1⁄4".

material outward. Glaze pools in these pockets—indeed, Spreading Outward, New Moon, 130lbs is a diverse ecosystem of textures and glosses. On this piece, an inky, shimmering expanse borders a crackly, almost scaly field of cerulean, while an artful swipe of pearlescent turquoise butts up against tiny lagoons of slightly translucent black-blue agate. In the video, another basin of pigment appears in a depiction of an abandoned New Mexican gold mine flooded with water, its aquamarine surface not unlike the artist’s milky glazes. Other sections further connect the ceramics with the landscape of the American Southwest. The video offers views of a desert trail as well as an aerial shot of a lone figure steadily marching up an arid incline, all punctuated by Ruais’s staccato breaths. This aural texture became the soundtrack for the entire show, assuring that the artist’s labor was omnipresent as viewers surveyed the sculptures. Ruais, who recently moved to Santa Fe after working in New York for twenty-two years, is now part of a tradition of artists decamping from the city to the Southwest and enmeshing their practices with its mythic scenery. Georgia O’Keeffe’s fierce desert independence, as well as Agnes Martin’s decision in 1967 to drive west in a white pickup truck by herself to create a new life, are the stuff of legend. One can groan about these romanticized tales of white women going into the desolate wilderness to labor alone, but it’s hard not to be enthralled by their courage (tinged by more than a little audacious self-mythologizing). Attesting to her own impossibly resolved self-sufficiency, Martin once quipped: “There’s so many people that don’t know what they want, and I think that in this world that’s the only thing you have to know: exactly what you want most.” Mercifully, that kind of rigid certainty was absent from this show. Ruais takes a different approach to representing women working in the desert. Her art is steeped in unknowingness, exploration, and improvisation. Daughter, You Seem Foreign to Me, also the title of the exhibition, is based on a conversation the artist had with her mother, who is living with dementia. Attempting to seek out a memory is a bit like trying to locate a new moon in the night sky, searching for a trace of something that we know is there but cannot find. It is a thing both absent and present, like a fingerprint left in a slab of clay. —Ashton Cooper

lemons, grown for human consumption, are everywhere in the series but evolve into bizarre poisonous entities that defy easy classification. In the next gallery was Fossil Epizoon (dyrosaurus), 2021, a cross between a science experiment gone awry and a natural-history museum display. The work features a spidery steel form sporting more than a dozen legs hovering over a gharial skull. The metallic insect has been affixed to the cranium by a glob of metal resembling a crumpled wad of aluminum foil. As one approaches, the arachnoid entity’s jointed legs move up and down—the startling creepiness of this effect was here heightened by sudden sounds of electrical popping and crackling emanating from a nearby piece, Falling Angel, 2023, in which a cascade of chains and fluorescent light tubes descend from the wreckage of an airplane cockpit suspended high over a reflecting pool harboring glowing snippets of neon text. The Hollywood-style artifice and scale of this assemblage recall the ersatz decor of theme restaurants or shopping malls. But far from evoking the quaintness of such contrivances, the work instead suggests the aftermath of some mysterious man-made catastrophe.

Max Hooper Schneider, Fossil Epizoon (dyrosaurus), 2021, Eocene epoch fossil, aluminum machine, custom base. Installation view. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Max Hooper Schneider FRANÇOIS GHEBALY

Max Hooper Schneider’s show “Falling Angels” unfolded across four dim chambers as though it were an eerie sequence of dreams evoking a postapocalyptic world in which humans have gone extinct, making way for all manner of strange creatures and growth to take over and repopulate the earth. It all began innocuously enough: A roomful of pedestaled sculptures from the series “Dendrite Bonsai,” 2023, featured arborescent morphologies that suggested hybrids of vegetation and humanoid nerve cells. At first, these copper-electroplated assemblages seemed tamely ornamental, like baubles intended for opulent interiors, but, the closer you looked, the more their nubbly coralline forms called to mind feral horror-movie beings. Broom-like protuberances extended in myriad directions like severed electrical wires or monstrous fingers, casting lacy shadows across the white plinths. Globule-encrusted sinusoidal branches zigzagged upward and outward, as though each one were some sort of arthropod poised to crawl away. In Dendrite Bonsai (Corn), six ears of maize protruded vertically from fruticose shrubbery in a configuration resembling a candelabra, channeling fears of genetically modified mutations. Cameo appearances by plants such as bananas or

Hooper Schneider’s themes of death, destruction, and mutation reach a crescendo of dark humor in a tabletop diorama titled ROUTE 666, 2023. This intricately detailed dystopia—the only work on display containing overt representations of people—features a campy, Egyptian-themed drive-in movie theater. Masses of dead bodies are draped across trees; skeletons and wrecked cars litter the ground; an oil field has sullied a now-blackened palm grove. Almost everything is in shambles, except for the tiny TV screens scattered throughout the tableau, the largest of which features a low-tech video displaying the slow-moving exploits of improbably animate lichen-like growths. Movies are playing, but no one is there to watch them. At intervals, miniature oil wells suddenly begin pumping, plumbing underground depths to fuel abandoned vehicles. Everyone, of course, is extinct, but the damage lives on. The artist seems to suggest that the Earth might be better off without us. At this stage of our planet’s demise, largely brought about by mankind, who could argue? —Annabel Osberg SEPTEMBER 2023 219

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MEXICO CITY

Josef Strau HOUSE OF GAGA

View of “Josef Strau,” 2023. Photo: Omar Olguin.

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Tin, jewelry, and iron fences have been persistent in the work of Josef Strau, an Austrian identified with the Conceptual art scene that emerged from Cologne in the 1990s. Another constant has been text, usually in large quantities—but that was absent from this show, “El Comercio de los Lamentos Finos” (The Shop of Fine Lamentations), whose title evokes the baroque atmosphere of the busy downtown Mexico City shops where Strau sourced many of his materials. One had the feeling that what lay at the center of his intentions for this show was incertitude, the power of randomness and serendipity over our lives. The exhibition featured fourteen canvases painted in shades ranging from butter yellow to off-white. Varied in size, their compositions were even more so: Strau had resorted to lithomancy, the esoteric divinatory practice of throwing stones or charms to glean predictions from the patterns in which they land. The artist slung over his shoulder handfuls of rocks welded to tin sheets, which he then fixed with epoxy to the canvases where they fell. These “approximations of paintings,” as Strau usually refers to his canvases, hung among a scenography of forced juxtapositions. A pair of knee-high curved wrought-iron fences, both titled The Fence of the Comercio de los Lamentos Finos (all works 2023), encrusted with Strau’s colorful tin-wrapped rocks, divided each side of the room. A massive mandorla-shaped table lamp sat on the floor, its light softly bouncing from the stones in the nearby canvases. At the rear of the main space, a theatrically illuminated ornamented iron gate rested against a wall, its volute designs projecting a portal of shadows behind. Photographs intercalated with the canvases on the walls showed a closeup of meteorites, a frame filled with the ripples of blue water, a bunch of wilting purple roses. In the reduced space of the gallery’s back room, the rubbing together of these objects set off obvious sparks. Two tin-heavy paintings, Exposed to Wavelengths of Brief Attachment Withering Away like the Grass in

the Evening and Eternal Beauty of Observant Seraphic Meteors, hung together facing Stones Hope of the Hopes of Poverty. All three recall the compositions Strau has favored in recent shows—landscapes of rugged tin and semi-angelic representations. Here, the tin was ripped away from the canvas, exposing its white and yellow flesh adorned with gems, glittering in yellow, orange, and blue and absorbing light in deep black. Stones was a little simpler and a lot more striking, with an almost symmetrical shape floating in the upper third of its buttery canvas: two seriously bedazzled tin wings suspended in a sunny void. Untitled—the pairing of a white-painted board and a chrome sink, both encrusted with gems—sat across the room from a dirty chunk of engraved blue Plexiglas, likely removed from a sliding shower door. A picture of a cat and another of some hands completed the stochastic scene. Strau speaks of rocks as memory containers, an idea that has been around since at least the seventeenth century, when Nicolaus Steno first claimed that strata of layered rocks evince geological change. As such, common nonprecious stones would be just as valuable as precious ones—as would be photographs, lamps, iron railings, and all of the random objects that absorb our existence in the form of constant entropic change. In the end, tin is as shiny as silver, fool’s gold as golden as the real thing. Who are we, then, to ascribe hierarchy in a world of chaos? —Gaby Cepeda

SANTIAGO, CHILE

Cecilia Vicuña

MUSEO NACIONAL DE BELLAS ARTES Curated by Miguel A. López, Cecilia Vicuña’s “Soñar el agua. Una retrospectiva del futuro (1964–)” (Dreaming Water. A Retrospective of the Future [1964–]) opens with a small but powerful painting: La muerte de allende (Allende’s Death), 1973. The quasi-Surrealist, quasiSymbolist oil-on-canvas depicts a vast crimson wound oozing onto a fractured landscape strewn with skeletal human remains. Made on the evening of September 11, 1973, after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup against Salvador Allende and the latter’s subsequent suicide, the artwork foretells the intergenerational and multifaceted violence that Pinochet’s regime advanced in collaboration with the US government. Vicuña’s little painting sets the scene for the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective to date, with more than 150 artworks and dozens of archival documents, many of which have never been exhibited before, and situates Vicuña in local art history. Vicuña left Chile in 1972 to study in London and, after the coup, never lived there again permanently. But her practice began in the mid1960s in Santiago, where she worked both independently and with the collective Tribu No across poetry, manifestos, participation, performance, collaboration, drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture, establishing a commitment to radical transnational solidarity and Latin American Indigenous knowledges as the basis of her art. Tamaiti, 1966, an early earth-pigment painting, represents the artist’s dialogue with Indigenous peoples across the Pacific, particularly Polynesia. Her most famous works, the quipus (wool installations based on Incan accounting and documentary systems) engage global ecological crises and healing and appear in a variety of forms, such as the staggering Quipu Menstrual (La Sangre de los Glaciares) (Menstrual Quipu [The Blood of the Glaciers]), 2006, which hangs in the museum’s foyer. Much of the exhibition explores Vicuña’s anti-imperialist and anticolonialist transnational solidarity—for instance, with Vietnamese and African as well as African American people (Angela Davis features in a drawing and a painting)—but primarily with the Chilean people, el pueblo. López displays scores of the artist’s poems, paintings,

Cecilia Vicuña, Janis Joe (Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker), 1971, oil on canvas, 78 3⁄4 × 86 5⁄8".

pamphlets, textiles, posters, sculptures, videos, and photos, many from the 1970s, dedicated to el pueblo. He devotes a gallery to Vicuña’s London-based collective, Artists for Democracy, founded in 1974 to stage the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile (AFDC) at the Royal College of Art alongside mass protests at Trafalgar Square. La ruca abstracta (o los ojos de allende) (The Abstract Ruca [or the Eyes of Allende]), 1974/2023, an installation originally created for AFDC and re-created for this retrospective, is contextualized with archival footage, including a 1974 BBC documentary on Vicuña. Given the ephemeral and, as she says, “precario” (precarious, contingent, insecure) nature of Vicuña’s work, much has been lost and subsequently reconstructed for this exhibition. One gallery, for instance, displays newly printed photographs documenting a 1979 action—spilling glasses of milk on the streets of Bogota—Vicuña performed in solidarity with influential Chilean art collective cada (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) following a call out as part of their itinerant and iconic work Para No Morir de Hambre en el Arte (So As Not to Starve in Art) of the same year. While Chilean art history has canonized cada, it has sometimes ignored Vicuña. López argues in his contribution to the monograph Veroír el fracaso iluminado (Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, 2021), which accompanied an earlier retrospective of the artist’s work, that this is because she was not aligned with the preferred aesthetics of anti-dictatorial resistance, namely, the local mode of Conceptualism known as la escena de avanzada (the Advanced Scene). Vicuña’s precarious art reminds us that marginal, inconvenient, anticolonial histories and archives are fragile. However, they survive and return to affect history in oblique ways. Can local art history remake itself as a home for Vicuña this time around? —Verónica Tello

LONDON

Florence Peake

SOUTHWARK PARK GALLERIES On the first hot day of summer, a midday performance of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, 2023, took place in the cool and cavernous hall of Dilston Grove, a deconsecrated church on the edge of Southwark Park in southeast London. From the wooden beams of

the high vaulted ceiling hung seven large unstretched canvases—each attached to a rope clipped to one corner, falling in a conical drape. The paintings were multicolored, mostly gauzy abstractions, although sketchy outlines of bodies could be glimpsed here and there. A shining white sheet of vinyl lined the floor; audience members wore foot covers or took off their shoes to protect it. Over the next hour, six performers—all female identifying or nonbinary—engaged in a kind of dance, or perhaps a merging, with the canvases: raising and lowering them via a system of pulleys, hanging them on the wall, laying them flat, dragging them around, collapsing onto them, and wrapping each other up like parcels. Around the halfway mark, a performer reentered the space in a strange costume of dangling “medallions”: thick swirls of paint on blob-shaped boards, one piece covering her face so that she had to feel her way around. She was occasionally assisted by Peake and her producer, Nikki Tomlinson. Later, another performer proceeded down the hall with bare stretchers hanging from neck and arms. And in a climactic finale more people got involved: Viewers were invited to select passages of text from a stack of art books (Cézanne, Chardin, Vermeer, Byzantium, and so on). The extracts were transcribed live and then intoned into a microphone by a performer stripped to the waist and rolling around in wet paint. This action was set against an increasingly layered soundtrack of vocal and nonvocal noises run through a loop pedal. When the audio was switched off, the crowd erupted into applause. I had already seen the performance in dress rehearsal and was equally captivated both times. While nonnarrative, Factual Actual is also clearly structured, with a strong forward propulsion. Charged with affective power, it is by turns funny (the flailing limbs of the performer laden with stretchers got a loud laugh) and frightening (the figures shrouded in canvas sometimes seemed eerily still). It gives plenty to think about, too. The performance I saw formed part of a project that Peake began in 2020, with the artist lying on canvases and painting around her moving body. In 2021, the National Gallery in London staged the first live version of the work. Since then, the artist has produced more paintings and drawings, including a 150-foot-long frieze created collaboratively and presented in Southwark Park in a gallery near the church. The title refers to what Peake has called the “awful schism” between the sensation of having a body and its “factual” appearance in the eyes of others. How do you represent that experience? As Peake is aware, this is a question that has long occupied artists, and the performance of Factual Actual was saturated with allusions to predecessors, from the figures painted by the old masters and Impressionists to the frame-exploding practices of Rebecca Horn, Yves Klein, and Carolee Schneemann. Peake’s contribution to this legacy offered no definitive answer. Rather, it was an open-ended exploration of how, via a blend of movement and mark-making, the body might itself become a painting—and the painting itself a body. —Gabrielle Schwarz

Florence Peake, Factual Actual: Ensemble, 2023. Performance view, Dilston Grove, London, April 14, 2023. Rosalie Wahlfrid. Photo: Mischa Haller.

SEPTEMBER 2023

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“Picture This: Photorealism 1966–1985” WADDINGTON CUSTOT

Tom Blackwell, Queens Boulevard, 1974, oil on canvas, 61 1⁄8 × 83". From “Picture This: Photorealism 1966–1985, Part 2,” 2023.

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A solitary 1962 Chevy gleaming in a Wells Fargo parking lot. The brightly lit bumpers of a pinball machine. Ketchup bottles shining in a deserted diner. All the classic scenes of postwar American capitalism, seductive and abundant, featured in the two-part show “Picture This: Photorealism 1966–1985.” Each of these thirty-seven paintings in oil and acrylic—taken from a collection of more than seventy works—is a high-fidelity re-creation of a photograph. With a conjurer’s eye, the Photorealists translated the textures, colors, and details of flat analog images into ravishingly three-dimensional illusions. In Robert Bechtle’s ’64 Chrysler, 1971, the car is parked in a neighborhood of beige stucco bungalows and white picket fences. All neat lines, the pigment is creamily even, as if enacting the inviting blandness of suburbia. In Tom Blackwell’s Queens Boulevard, 1974, the lateafternoon sun lends an unexpected romanticism to the lanes of traffic passing a First National City Bank. The scene itself is painted from the perspective of the driver’s seat of another vehicle, placing the viewer inside this archetypal American scene of motion and money. If the Photorealists’ ambition was to make it appear as if only a pane of glass divided subject from viewer, then Don Eddy’s Bananas, Apples, Avocados, Tomatoes; Supermarket Window III, 1973, is a perfect example. A series of dazzling reflections within reflections—plastic-wrapped fruit displayed behind glass that in turn captures the facing skyscrapers—reveals the sensuousness hidden in the surface of the everyday. Yet this transparency is a fiction. The Photorealists were as drawn to invention as fidelity. The artists often worked with multiple photographs to distill an ideal image. They also frequently swapped black and white for color, or switched the perspective of the originals entirely. Human figures are almost entirely missing; places are lent an eerie vastness. In Still Life (Color Pick), 1982, Ralph Goings zooms in on a diner interior. He traces the shine of a chrome napkin dispenser glinting in dappled shadows. Pools of liquid light well up on the red Formica counter. (To deepen the illusion, the work itself was hung next to a gallery window, as if the light depicted was streaming in from outside.)

Despite attempts to suppress the artist’s hand in pursuit of the represented subject, traces keep appearing. Often, a signature is incorporated within the mise-en-scène. John Baeder’s name can be seen on a hand-painted sign on the window of Max’s Grill, 1974, and appears as graffiti on a building in the background of Silver Top Diner from the same year. The artist’s identity becomes another brand name. Collectively, these works amount to an odyssey through the American landscape in the latter half of the twentieth century, but their preoccupations are typically male: from Robert Cottingham’s vast rendering of a beerbranded neon sign in daylight (Miller High Life, 1977) to car engines stickered with swaggering, performatively macho statements (Ron Kleemann’s Harry Loves Maxine The American Way, 1973). For all its alleged neutrality, the movement, with its maleness and whiteness, presents a partisan view of the culture. Yet intriguing slippages in style remain. In Ben Schonzeit’s Fruit of the Month (F.O.T.M.), 1972, photographic images of fruit are spliced over an advertisement for an aerospace company, the original edges and folds reproduced by the painter’s hand. Cottingham’s Old Crow, 1983, depicts the dichotomies of all-American consumerism: A sign reading spiritual reader and advisor is displayed next to a liquor store. For all the peppiness and plenty of these scenes, we sometimes see the other side of the coin. John Salt’s two “Arrested Vehicle” paintings from 1970 feature cars in junkyards, the paint mistily applied with an airbrush to create an almost wistful effect. And despite a preoccupation with the triumphalist ethos of the American dream (Richard McLean’s portraits of racehorses; the gambling arcade close-up of Charles Bell’s Gin, 1977), its beneficiaries are oddly absent. —Daniel Culpan

Alfredo Jaar

CECILIA BRUNSON PROJECTS September 11 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile, in which the dictator overthrew a democratically elected president with the backing of the United States. Yet September 11, 1973, is not the September 11—that title belongs to the events of 2001. As Alfredo Jaar reminded the audience at the opening of his recent exhibition, “50 Years Later,” this is why the Pinochet coup is often referred to by historians as the “other 9/11.” It is precisely the sentiment bound up in this phrase that Jaar’s exhibition sought to investigate. The show, which coincided with a survey of the artist’s career at Goodman Gallery in Mayfair, extracted specific examples of Jaar’s early work that relate— directly and indirectly—to this other 9/11. In these pieces, as in all of Jaar’s art, a critical outlook toward the image-making process takes a central role. “Images are not innocent,” is Jaar’s oft-repeated line. Through investigations of mass media, he seeks to uncover the unspoken political and social forces that shape visual narratives, and to undermine the notion that photography is unbiased. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Jaar has been fascinated by the figure of Henry Kissinger, who features in eight of the twelve works in the exhibition. After all, it was Kissinger who supported the ouster of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, by Pinochet, even advising the dictator on how to effectively interact with President Jimmy Carter. Kissinger created an image for himself as a formidable figure in American politics, appearing in press-pool photographs alongside world leaders and in glowing magazine profiles touting his foreignpolicy acumen. Jaar’s investigations into Kissinger take a variety of forms, including a falsified letter from Kissinger to the artist, produced in the decade after the coup (Dear Mr. Jaar, 1976), and a series of multilingual advertisements placed in a German newspaper that demanded the arrest

Alfredo Jaar, September 11, 1973 (Black), 1974/2017, ink-jet print, 19 × 39".

of the former secretary of state (The Kissinger Project, 2012). At times, Jaar’s interest in Kissinger borders on obsession, and his approach to the notorious political figure fits into a typology familiar from the artist’s wider oeuvre: The Kissinger Project is part of an ongoing interest in visual activism centered on targeted messages implanted into mass media, while Dear Mr. Jaar emerges from appropriations of existing materials that are edited and therefore recontextualized by Jaar. A 2001 cover of the Village Voice on display declares Kissinger to be “Manhattan’s Milosevic”—part of Jaar’s ongoing practice of scanning and reproducing copies of magazine covers whose images he finds powerful. Though Jaar does not allude to it directly, the shadow of the 9/11 hangs over the works in the exhibition. In September 11, 1973 (Black), 1974/2017, Jaar replicates a calendar for 1973 in which the 11th replaces every date for the rest of the year, as if time was frozen by catastrophe. Even this work is not immune to the effects of narrative domination—after the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, the date became loaded with the weight of this new trauma and subsequently functioned as a potent symbol of the United States’ endless war in Afghanistan. Placed above the vitrines holding Searching for K, 1984, the calendar piece is also a reminder of Kissinger’s past as chair of the 9/11 Commission—his role in the Pinochet coup was a source of controversy in the weeks following the attacks on the World Trade Center, ultimately leading to his resignation from the commission. Notably, Jaar never compares the two tragedies or examines Kissinger’s roles in them. He simply presents them as they appear in mass media, using gentle interventions to redirect our attention to hierarchies of distribution and cyclic presentations of power that so often go unquestioned. —Jonah Goldman Kay

(especially linguistic) that support transgenerational bonds and prioritizes active processes of producing joy and resistance within conditions of historical subjugation. Liverpool was, for a time, the British Empire’s second city, its port lands central in the transatlantic slave trade. Several works—Ranti Bam’s “Ifa,” 2021–23, a series of sculptures in the church gardens where the city’s first recorded Black resident is buried; Torkwase Dyson’s Liquid A Place, 2021, a sequence of immense curved edifices that occupy the entire lower gallery of Tate Liverpool—mine a uniquely located pathos from this history. Yet for a show rich in installations that address, directly or implicitly, the ways in which legacies of imperial plunder manifest in the city’s present-tense psychological and geographical landscapes, its tenor is rarely oppressively grim. Metaphors of wind (“uMoya” is an isiZulu word for “spirit, breath, air, climate and wind”) invite associations between works that recast violence, trauma, and grief not as inevitabilities, but as conditions that might engender new knowledge and new vocabularies. For the first time, Liverpool’s turbo-gentrifying north serves as the biennial’s base, with the Tobacco Warehouse—the gigantic epicenter of its bustling docklands—proving a particularly fertile setting for Albert Ibokwe Khoza’s The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu, 2022, a live work restaged as an installation, encompassing a number of videos and two candlelit shrines, cobbled together from bones, plastic waste, flowers, and supermarket soft drinks. Khoza here interrogates the kinds of self-exoticization demanded of artists from sub-Saharan Africa in “international” contexts, while nodding to the biennial model’s complicity in these patterns of extraction, gentrification, and fetishization of the other. The work’s privileged space within the exhibition—and its productively discomfiting and energizing impact—is an indicator that this biennial has commitments in mind beyond lofty rhetoric.

LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND

Liverpool Biennial 2023 VARIOUS VENUES

Nicholas Galanin’s brief video, K’idéin yéi jeené, 2021, focuses on the artist’s child while an offscreen voice recites the words of the work’s title, which translates to “You’re doing such a good job” in Lingít, a language indigenous to North America’s Pacific Northwest. It’s the first work that you encounter at Bluecoat, one of eight venues of this summer’s twelfth edition of the Liverpool Biennial, and one that crystallizes many of the themes of South Africa–based artist and curator Khanyisile Mbongwa’s capacious and disarmingly gentle exhibition. Titled “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things,” the biennial foregrounds structures

Binta Diaw’s Chorus of Soil, 2023, samples audio of Liverpudlians reading M. NourbeSe Philip’s oft-appropriated found-text poem Zong!, (2008), alongside a bed of shoot-sprouting soil in the shape of a slave ship. The sounds seep into Khoza’s installation, unifying the works’ explorations of anticolonial emancipation across eras. Another sonic bleed occurs in Gala Porras-Kim’s six-minute sound piece Roll Call, 2023, in which the artist recites the names of deceased as if they were reincarnated as objects in museum storage. Intended as an exercise of active Indigenous conservation, the work is placed in the entrance corridor of the World Museum, rendering the artist’s voice

Binta Diaw, Chorus of Soil, 2023, soil, okra, cowpea, and indigo seeds, sound. Installation view, Tobacco Warehouse. From the Liverpool Biennial 2023. Photo: Mark McNulty.

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nearly inaudible and somewhat dulling its impact. Porras-Kim’s wallmounted muslin—featuring propagated fungal spores sampled from the British Museum’s storage facilities—at Tate Liverpool fares better, its liveness and evocation of art history’s subterranean formlessness striking an unexpected synergy with two early Lubaina Himid paintings hanging opposite. The most memorable of the biennial’s specially commissioned outdoor works, and among its richest invocations of how ancestral knowledges might redress cultural wounds, is Eleng Luluan’s Ngialibalibade – to the Lost Myth, 2023, which is informed by the artistic inheritances of Indigenous southern Taiwan. This vessel of recycled fishing nets, docked within the River Mersey, was, at least during the opening, nonetheless dwarfed by an enormous cruise ship named Ambience. Another moment of symbiosis between the changing city and the biennial’s ambitious, if inherently limited, interventions occurred at the Stanley Dock. Brook Andrew’s NGAAY, 2023, a somewhat simplistic neon work spelling out variations of the phrase “to see” in various languages, was installed opposite a sign advertising luxury apartments at the Tobacco Warehouse complex, with the foreboding heading dream big. —Dylan Huw

PARIS

Basma al-Sharif GALERIE IMANE FARÈS

View of “Basma al-Sharif,” 2023. Photo: Tadzio.

Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif weaves together French, English, and Arabic in her trilingual book and installation a Philistine, 2019–23. Handwritten on craft paper and string-bound with black thread, al-Sharif’s rhythmic visual narrative follows her young protagonist, Andaleeb, as she travels from France to Lebanon, through Palestine to Egypt for her father’s funeral. The book is in three languages, with English and French on the right-hand pages, under the English title, translated into French as Les Barbares, while the vernacular word Nawar titles the Arabic text on the left. Al-Sharif remembers, as a child, hearing the term pejoratively employed to describe nomadic peoples in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria—as in, “Don’t be like the

Nawars.” “They’re barefoot and loud,” al-Sharif implicitly understood, as she recalled in an artist’s talk following the opening of the show, “doing precisely the things I want to do.” Adorned with golden bookmarks, several copies of al-Sharif’s book were arranged around the gallery among bouquets of pink blossoms in vases and low cushions arranged as seats. Invoking Orientalist fantasies while also creating an urban refuge, Al-Sharif turned the storefront space into a velvet-upholstered living room. (At a certain point this past spring, a customized fragrance by Parisian parfumeur Hervé Domar, inspired by al-Sharif’s last exhibition at the gallery, had to fight to overcome the pungent odor of trash heaps outside. Protesting French President Macron’s proposed changes to the retirement age, trash collectors’ strikes left the city awash in waste.) On the walls, six color photographs, showing the blackened windows of a city bus, a wall of pay phones, and vacant municipal interiors, imagined the sites of Andaleeb’s wanderings through the Middle East. Downstairs, al-Sharif’s installation of a two-channel video and inkjet-printed banners, Capital, 2022, opened with mirrored scenes of high-rise towers against backgrounds of desert and television. Nino Ferrer’s ballad “Le Sud” (1975), in which he sings of sunshine and immortality, captures the haze of nostalgia and desire and provides the perfect soundtrack for this film. Dressed in satin the color of rich soil, her face masked in heavy makeup, al-Sharif’s protagonist, played by Italian actress Francesca Tasini, is as polished and still as the suburban mansions that scroll past on the facing screen of the installation. Likewise, Assicurazioni Generali’s red-line logo that runs atop Zaha Hadid’s interminable tower in Milan, home to the global insurer, echoes the actor’s red lips, which rest in an exhausted frown. When she reaches her manicured hand to answer a white turn-dial phone, she hears a promoter pitching a new housing complex. “For the whole family, sicurezza!” (security!) She comes alive, aroused as he repeats: “Green avenues, golden yard, roses.” “Ancora!” (More!) she demands, flinging herself over an armchair and comically caressing herself with her phone. Her excitement in this piece resonates with Andaleeb’s euphoric release at the end of her journey in a Philistine’s closing pages. In its final scenes, Capital dissolves into laughter. Tasini’s is rich and a bit crazed. A ventriloquist with a sock puppet appears. He wants to make a joke about fascism. “I don’t know if I should make it in Italian, in German, or in English,” he says. Al-Sharif closes her video with somnolence. The actor and his sock puppet go limp from fatigue and the black-and-white static of a box television set overtakes the image. A self-described nomad, al-Sharif currently lives in Berlin but is teaching this year in Tourcoing, France, where she’s working on a Philistine’s next chapter. Though intimidated by literature, she says, she harnesses its power to overturn the fictions we carry. —Lillian Davies

MILAN

Yuri Ancarani

PADIGLIONE D’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA DI MILANO Yuri Ancarani makes moving-image works that bear witness to fragments of lives of which we are often unaware. From expert divers who live inside an offshore hyperbaric chamber to service a natural gas field pipe in the Adriatic Sea (Piattaforma luna [Platform Luna], 2011) or traditional Haitian dancers who reenact the inherited trauma of the violent bonds between plantation owner and enslaved worker (Whipping Zombie, 2017), to the rapidly changing population of Rimini’s beaches (Ricordi per moderni [Memories for Moderns], 2009), Ancarani’s curiosity and empathy appear boundless. 224 ARTFORUM

Yuri Ancarani, Il capo (The Chief), 2010, 35 mm, color, sound, 15 minutes.

“Forget Your Dreams” surveyed the past twenty years of Ancarani’s practice. His films, frequently scored by brilliant sound designer Mirco Mencacci, draw on a variety of influences, including Michelangelo Antonioni and Luigi Ghirri, as well as Ancarani’s years as a videographer for Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s hip magazine Toilet­ paper. Yet his art films are uniquely his own. The majestic Il capo (The Chief), 2010, projected onto a large screen, opened the show. In a recent interview, Ancarani joked it was his cult item, despite being only fifteen minutes long. It remains one of his best works. Its protagonist is the foreman of a marble quarry in the Apuan Alps, a stunning white landscape against a blue sun-soaked sky. A master of visual storytelling, Ancarani unfolds his narrative via camera angles that fluidly zoom in and out from details (a close-up of the man’s face and hands) to entire vistas (a bird’s-eye view of ragged mountain peaks). Not a single word is spoken between the capo and the workers manning the huge machines that cut, lift, and move the huge blocks of marble. Amid the roar of equipment, they instead communicate through a series of coded gestures, the capo directing the men like an orchestral conductor. Ancarani’s newest film, Il popolo delle donne (The People of Women), 2023, is an incisive forty-seven-minute lecture by Marina Valcarenghi, an accomplished psychoanalyst, journalist, and activist, now in her eighties. We see her sitting at a desk in a lush, colonnaded courtyard at the University of Milan, speaking to a group of unseen students. She unflinchingly and articulately dissects femicide in Italy by analyzing gendered violence as a collective and societal phenomenon, rather than a series of random isolated acts. Valcarenghi’s thirty-plus years of experience treating men imprisoned for violence against women, whose chilling testimonies she reads out, give extra heft to the work. Meanwhile, Ancarani’s camera alternately focuses on her face as she pauses to gather her thoughts or on her hands as she fiddles with her watch, portraying an otherwise formidable character as uniquely human. San Vittore, 2018, part two of the trilogy “Le radici della violenza” (The Roots of Violence), 2014–, is a harrowing twelve-minute, dialogue-

free film that opens with a close-up of a colorful backpack being searched by a police officer. Among its contents are red Natural World plimsolls— shoes frequently worn by children in Italy. Slowly, without revealing faces or voices, the film shows small bodies walking down sterile corridors, dragging toys along the walls or holding an officer’s hand, accompanied by the sound of jangling keys and children’s shallow breathing. These, we discover, are the children of prisoners visiting their parents in Milan’s San Vittore Prison. The shots are interspersed with the children’s fantastic drawings, by which they attempt to make sense of their young lives—the result of workshops run by Bambinisenzasbarre (Children Without Bars), part of the European network Children of Prisoners Europe. Ancarani’s greatest strength lies in his sympathetic portrayals: His subjects are filmed without judgment or direction, whether they’re misogynistic men bragging about their sexual prowess or police officers frisking children. They are all, in one way or another, victims of a ruthlessly patriarchal and unequal world. As I watched Il popolo delle donne with a female friend, she leaned over and whispered, “This needs to be on prime-time TV.” I could only agree. These beautiful and elegiac films, portals into unusual lives, but nonetheless touching on universal themes, deserve to be seen over and over again, by everyone. —Ana Vukadin

VIENNA

Margaret Salmon SECESSION

Across the works presented in her solo presentation “Monument,” Margaret Salmon brings intentions both sensitive and honest. Using 16-mm and 35-mm film, she has produced an exhibition about the formation of masculine identity, looking at leisure activities in maleSEPTEMBER 2023

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through the precious analog material, moments that could seem incidental are woven into something poetic via Salmon’s instinctive editing. Late in the film, there is a heartbreaking moment featuring a young man on the precipice of something huge, something that society traditionally will use to bind his gender tighter to him: He is about to become a father. He speaks in a broad Scots dialect while playing a video game. You feel him lose himself in this imaginary world, as if he were trying not to think about the reality about to explode into his life. I still think of him, this man, weeks after seeing the work. I think of him when I pass fathers with their small babies in the street. This is Salmon’s power: her quiet ability to pass on these stories in a way that not only illuminates, but also lasts. She makes our experiences and our growth a community concern. There is much talk of care within the art world (sometimes with the best intentions, sometimes in a co-opted way). Salmon’s work is caring. It gives, it shows, and, crucially, it holds space for flaws in their multitudes. —Lisette May Monroe

BERLIN

Samuel Hindolo GALERIE BUCHHOLZ Margaret Salmon, Boy (winter), 2022, 35 mm, black-andwhite, sound, 32 minutes 39 seconds.

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dominated spaces and pursuits such as boxing, golf, and “fixing things.” For Study for a Film About Monuments, 2023, the artist stacks four television monitors atop one another along the back wall of the gallery. On screen, footage flickers between men in different stages of communing: out with their friends on the golf course, thwacking balls around, or dutifully erecting a makeshift shelter with a tarpaulin. These images are interspersed with shots of a World War I monument in Penpont, Scotland, which depicts a solitary figure frozen in time, its metal skin catching the light. In a departure from her moving-image work, Salmon set up in a small side gallery an assortment of assemblages that feel frenzied in the best possible sense. Objects, still images, and ephemera tumble from the films and meet in the gallery, where they are displayed free from any aesthetic hierarchy. These new works have an immediacy: At times a little funny, at times a little jarring, they counter the long meditative scenes in Salmon’s films. In one arrangement thinking space, 2023, a small goalkeeper’s glove rests atop a bell, beside an upside-down mug that reads i’m the father. i’m just pretending to know the rules. On the walls are darkroom test prints, some with edges caught or with noticeable folds. In contrast to a perfect representation—a mastery of replicating reality—Salmon offers us life; we step into its swirling, transient reality to find an answer, if only for a moment. In the darkened back gallery, Salmon’s most recent film, Boy (winter), 2022, follows different males at various stages of life, investigating the ways in which these individuals perform gender through their bodies. Over a shot of a young baby, an older child announces that he will play “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance on the piano, but “not all of it.” The haunting introductory notes ring out, and the sound stays with us. Throughout Salmon’s work, the camera is a character, an expensive friend. Letting it run through spools of costly 35-mm film, the artist puts her proximity to her subjects on display. At one point, she takes her camera into a ring with boxers, who manage to maintain their focus, as if she wasn’t there. In another scene, a small child draws a picture of the artist with her camera, as Salmon films. The looked-on and the looker now mirror each other in a lateral dynamic. Replicated

For his solo show “Guest room,” Samuel Hindolo presented new paintings in the gallery’s first-floor space, along with drawings in a separate room. Before viewers got there, though, they might have profitably surveyed the Brussels- and Berlin-based American artist’s sparse ground-floor collaboration—also part of the exhibition—with Londonbased artist Solomon Garçon, solomon’s knock, 2023, which deftly previewed Hindolo’s own concerns: bodies, charged spaces, plunging mysteriousness. Along with five slightly voyeuristic C-prints of downat-heel domestic interiors showing signs of recent occupancy—a crucifix had evidently hung for a long time on the dirty white wall in one room; a transparent bodysuit lay like a ghost in a stairwell—was a constructed divider protruding diagonally into the space. When one donned accompanying headphones, one heard disembodied knocking sounds, left and right. An act of communication, then, oblique but ominous. Upstairs was a meticulously spaced arrangement of mostly small figurative paintings on a range of supports. In Nuque, 2023, a darkskinned man in a beanie gazes, facing away from us, into a curvilinear piece of architecture—bandstand, tunnel? In a very similar painting, not in the show, Yet to be titled, 2021, the depicted figure is an automaton or mannequin, insistently de Chiricoesque. Hindolo deploys architecture as a protagonist, as a threat or transforming force, mobilizing

Samuel Hindolo, thirty pieces of silver, 2023, oil and collage on cardboard, 19 1⁄4 × 39 3⁄4".

strangeness before meticulously throttling its—or our—narrative. He drops parsimonious hints. The wide-screen thirty pieces of silver, 2023, on cardboard, whose title refers to the price Judas was paid to betray Jesus, invites the viewer to align that betrayal with the gray mannequin leaning against a wall, looking out at a spectral figure in the landscape. Let’s say, at this point, that Judas has taken the money and we know what’s coming, although there’s a bunch of other stuff in the painting—to the left, like part of a double-exposed photograph, half-hidden amid a mass of coppery smudging, is something machinelike or architectural—that hasn’t shaken itself out yet. This narrative limbo is often where Hindolo, at his most semitransparent, likes to suspend matters. In 4:02, 2022, whose alternately scratchy and watery handling spreads itself across two pieces of board, a trio of soldiers grip field telephones under a sickly green sky—we could be in the 1940s, or in present-day Ukraine, where such comms systems are heavily used—while on the right, in the middle distance or in another dimension entirely, a spectral figure materializes; there’s not much to say about him except that he’s apparently the next thing, the immediate future. For all their feeling of being aesthetically unmoored from the present, and for all their careful open-endedness amid psychological atmospherics, Hindolo’s paintings begin to translate a contemporary and surely widespread gut-level anxiety about the short- to medium-term horizon—that if a snowballing war or climate or disease doesn’t get us, a rogue superintelligence might—while vouchsafing awareness that such feelings can only be visually articulated aslant. Behind the trio of drowsing figures in Peter, James and John Sleeping, 2023, two background characters march past, one in a military helmet, one partly obscured by a tree. In his laconic handout, Hindolo writes of these figures that “being adrift gives them the sense that they’re elsewhere in some prolonged retreat from the present when in fact looming in the distance is something else,” and he’s surely speaking about more than just that canvas. Amid his work’s abundant nods to the past, “something else” is knocking. —Martin Herbert

Diamond Stingily

GALERIE ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the ego takes form during the “mirror stage” of early-childhood development, through identification with one’s own reflection. This moment of recognition entails an experience of alienation, as the “other” is conflated with the recognizable “I,” undermining and fragmenting one’s cohesive sense of self. For her solo exhibition “I’m Not Coming Back Here,” Diamond Stingily aggravated the conditions necessitating this behavioral characteristic, using the symbolic object of the mirror as a tangible surface to be engaged with via silk-screen printing, rather than as merely a looking glass. Continuing the development of a sculptural vernacular based on the appropriation of household objects—particularly those, such as doors, fences, and gates, that serve as literal and spiritual thresholds or boundaries, Stingily’s mirrors open a space for reflection on the theme of the psychology of memory as it pertains to and is contained by inanimate objects. Located in a former apartment in a canalside Altbau in Berlin, the exhibition space at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi is less a white cube than an emptied, renovated family home, still bearing traces of its prior function, such as doorbells, marble mantels, built-in cabinets, and a bay of seats where a table likely once stood. These domestic features were complemented, but ultimately overshadowed, by Stingily’s fourteen

new assisted readymades, in which mirrors functioned as picture frames for found and personal images of homes and personal effects that had been printed on them in either monochromatic ultramarine or oxblood ink. The printed images had to be closely scrutinized in order to distinguish them from the mirrored planes, contributing to a tandem viewing experience that included the beholder’s own reflection and that of their surroundings.

At each corner of a wood-paneled former drawing room, four six-and-a-half-foot-tall unframed mirrors were surreptitiously hung. Containing close-up and cropped images that appeared nearly abstract, these pieces became more identifiable through their titles—Apple Tree, Byron’s Closet, Pearl’s Cross, and Pearl’s Kitchen (all works 2023)— which began to suggest something of the artist’s relationship with the objects and locations shown in the images while neglecting to reveal entirely the logic of the selection. The gallery’s main room—the grand former reception or living room—contained the vast unframed mirror Stairway II, which peers upward at a carpeted flight of stairs, as well as Side of House, the largest of the works at nearly seven feet by four feet, in a gilded and carved frame that shows the white, paneled western facade of a two-story home, and Garage II, in which an austere view of a nondescript indoor parking garage is offset by the obnoxiously elaborate gilded frame containing it. Basement, Dudley Beauty College, Front of House, and Garage I lined the walls of the long narrow corridor connecting the main room with a smaller one at the back of the apartment, putting viewers perhaps uncomfortably close to their own reflections even while making the details of the printed image more perspicuous. Likewise, in the final room, a former bedroom perhaps, the installation of three sleek full-length mirrors, the triptych Living Room, Ma’s Room II, and Children’s Room II, directly opposite the gilded Back of House, replete with flecks of mirror rot, problematized the act of viewing by creating an infinite regress of reflections. The elegiac presentation Stingily devised upset the erotics of observation. The works’ simultaneous inhibition and encouragement of looking yielded uncertainty as to their subjects, seeming to allow glimpses of the artist’s memories but finally denying access to them. —Olamiju Fajemisin

View of “Diamond Stingily,” 2023. From left: Living Room, Ma’s Room II, Children’s Room II, 2023, triptych; Back of House, 2023. Photo: Philip Poppek.

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BONN

Ulrike Rosenbach GALERIE GISELA CLEMENT

Ulrike Rosenbach, Schmelzprozesse (Melting Processes), 1982/2023. Installation view. Foreground: Herzpendel— Energetisches Phänomen (Heart pendulum—Energetic phenomenon), 1990. Background: Last Call für Engel (Last Call for Angels), 2022. Photo: Mareike Tocha.

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Not only was Ulrike Rosenbach a pioneer of video art, integrating it into her installations and performances, but she was also one of the first artists—on the German and international scenes—to embrace the feminist cause in her work in the late 1960s. Unlike so many women artists of her generation, however, she did not let herself get bogged down in an often exhausting and lopsided struggle to assert feminist ideas. Her quest for an alternative social and cultural position for women led her to encounters with archaic and mythical ways of thinking that would change her perspective on herself and on nature—at a time when the relationship between nature and humanity was not yet a widely recognized concern in art. This transformation was also propelled by her in-depth studies of non-European and, in particular, Asian traditions that enabled her to consider her own European identity from a distance. Again, this was at a moment in which art audiences and even critics weren’t necessarily familiar with postcolonial approaches. As a result, her work was often misunderstood. But new interpretations of the artist’s work are beginning to catch on. The ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, is celebrating her eightieth birthday with a grand retrospective that opened in late June. Meanwhile, Galerie Gisela Clement in Bonn is presenting a selection of installations that exemplify the rich complexity of Rosenbach’s practice. One work abruptly confronts the beholder with an enormous black-and-white photomural of an ancient statue of Hercules, stark naked, with a pensive expression, supporting himself on a club as he flaunts his brawn. A small monitor is mounted to the wall over the crook of his left arm. It shows the artist herself in a color close-up. The camera lens approaches and withdraws from her face in a rhythmic motion, producing sometimes sharp, sometimes blurry images. Moving in the same rhythm, her lips keep mouthing the word Frau (woman). The ephemeral quality of the image on the screen and the single word, whispered so softly as to be almost inaudible, contrast sharply with the male body bursting with strength; its muscles look inflated, out of proportion, preposterous. This 1977 work, which was shown at Documenta 6 in Kassel, is titled Heracles—Hercules— King Kong. Another work demonstrating Rosenbach’s interest in archaic and mythical subjects is Schmelzprozesse (Melting Processes), 1982/2023. It shows a powder-coated aluminum silhouette on the wall: the outline of a black angel from a fresco at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. Angels appear in her installations with regularity, as creatures that mediate the real world and the transcendent—genderless fleeting

apparitions who serve as messengers and intercessors. Here, the angel is accompanied by a slow-motion video of the artist’s hands as she uses her fingers to form the outline of a heart. A bronze heart hangs from the ceiling by a yellow mourning band above marble powder scattered on the floor. Rosenbach melds the archaism of the angel and the then-new medium of video in a creation that is timeless. Such unions of the ancient and the technological are the hallmark of her work of the 1980s. The installations are flanked by drawings, which the artist used as a kind of diary: gorgeous images filled with miracles—humans metamorphosing into trees and vice versa, the artist herself occasionally appearing in the guise of an angel. Rosenbach also never abandoned the quest for beauty, a pursuit that has sometimes garnered hostile reactions. Today, though, we are beginning to cherish it as what makes her art special. —Noemi Smolik Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.

MÜNSTER, GERMANY

Taslima Ahmed

WESTFÄLISCHER KUNSTVEREIN Printed canvases and computer-assisted painting are everywhere these days, but to date only a handful of people who tap into the conjunction of digital technology and painting have succeeded in making work that does more than preen about its own presentness. With her impressively worldly-wise exhibition “Canvas Automata,” Taslima Ahmed clearly earned her membership in that exclusive club. A third of the eighteen large vertical UV-printed canvases on view were sober-minded, analytical black-and-white pictures in the style of scientific diagrams illustrating laws of composition. Or, more accurately, diagrams that seem to illustrate. Reconstructor Painting (optical flow), 2022, for example, appears to be a gestural painting brimming with individual creative decisions. In particular, the ink was obviously applied in thick layers in an imitation of the irregularity and arbitrariness of painterly processes. The shuddering trajectories and grayish fields might seem to represent detected eye movements. Whether optical flows, points of tension, or algorithmic learning curves—in making praxis and theory coincide—the “Reconstructor Paintings,” 2022–, show that Ahmed has raised the language of painting to the level of method. The (merely technical) switch to advanced printing technology, it appears to me, further catalyzes this shift. In either case, it should presumably be read as a way to dodge the idea that painting today means being in on the play with context. Considered in isolation, the “Reconstructor Paintings” may come across as a bit too clever for their own good. But the works that dominated the exhibition, the “Canvas Automata” pictures, 2022–, build on the earlier series and add an undogmatic ebullience. Canvas Automata (Jupiter), 2023, looks like a geometric study à la Sean Scully: four squares with stripe patterns in muted lime green and pale brown sourced from an organic AI that may have made them by amalgamating a zebra’s hide, a gecko’s skin, and aerial shots of marshland. Three differently sized patches of olive-green embossing are overlaid on the composition. True to style, the print has them stand out from the ground but, in a completely counterintuitive twist, lets the underlying pattern show through. As in all the works in this series, the bottom quarter of the canvas is left blank, as if the artist meant to exhibit the work’s mechanized fabrication. At the same time, the hard edge on the picture planes between print and blank canvas within the work confronts the standard format of analog painting with the

Taslima Ahmed, Canvas Automata (Jupiter), 2023, UV print on canvas, 60 1⁄4 × 44 7⁄8".

reality of computer vision, which, because the pixel is a square, pre­ ferably works with approximately square images. Then again, Ahmed knows how to play with the white edges as well, fraying them or making pictures seem to bleed into them. I should emphasize that, for all her use of digitally produced material, whether cellular autom­ atons or AI­generated patterns, Ahmed never relinquishes control. It is she who paints, only with a keypad and mouse, always aiming to say something about painting and something about abstraction by machine. Canvas Automata (Barricelli), 2023, is based on images visualizing information on symbiogenetic processes; in other words, evolutionary time here presents itself in a complex spatial diagram. Ahmed, however, modu­ lates the model of abstraction into a dainty grisaille: a mountain scene complete with a colossal cloud formation. The liberal nonchalance with which this picture (and others) short­circuits the discourses of painting, information visualization, and phenomenology is simply breathtaking, even sexy, despite the fairly cool temperature of the surfaces. The exhi­ bition was additionally enhanced by pictures in which the technical means are altogether subordinated to painterly process. Canvas Automata (Common Fate), 2023, a cloudy chromatic abstraction in pastel tones, is a digital remake of a piece from her art­school days, over which she layered a rocaille or legume totem in a friezelike print—as though wanting to hint for just a moment, and not without a snicker, at the immense potential of the painterly spheres she has unlocked for herself, and for us. —Moritz Scheper Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.

echoed throughout the grand eighteenth­century premises of Ellen de Bruijne Projects. The large powder­blue banner Don’t I Know You From Somewhere?, 2023, displayed next to the gallery’s ornate front windows, contained perhaps the most explicit suggesture of the show. It posed the rhetorical question in the title, silk­screened in lowercase block serif letters that curved around the fabric, prompting the reader to consider their own involvement in a moment that already occurred. Together with three “Modular Khuaya Stands,” 2022—roughly var­ nished wooden platforms fitted into one another and the existing archi­ tecture of the room—the banner considered suggesture as a set of spatial relationships inspiring a variety of speech acts from salutation to storytelling to interruption. Buhlungu repeatedly employed circularity, both as a motif in the artworks’ compositions and in the way one work might act as a blue­ print or score for another. In the installation Same-ing the same Sames, 2023, the tape of a three­minute forty­second recording of the artist tinkling the keys on Jabavu’s antique piano, now in the possession of his eighty­year­old daughter, spools off the reel of a ’70s Sony recorder to pass through a series of spindly gold hooks placed at short intervals along the length of the gallery’s longest wall before looping back to meet the second reel. The sounds that materialized were fragmented— the bouncing of the keys, laughter, gentle razzing, strains from a radio—yet nevertheless produced a fluid map of a space and time, edited and translated into a site­specific representation of perpetuity and nostalgia in the circular movement of the tape. From a slight dis­ tance the magnetic tape itself was nearly invisible, little more than a specter or a breath vibrating just above the hooks, which appeared like elongated notes on a music staff. Suggesture combined image and text in a pair of large drawings: Theory Sketches (wallet) I and Theory Sketches (wallet) II, both 2020–23, which mapped the artist’s search for a lost wallet across a landscape of swirling and triangular pen strokes. Here, notations— the geographic coordinates for the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam nearby hovered above an adage about searching—were fitted into a rhythmic topography of birds, forests, bulbous hills, and mitochon­ drial structures that merged the fantastic and familiar. Rather than help locate the lost property, the map illustrated the sensorial and associative terrain evoked in its place. Dotted across both maps are puddles in gradients of black and gray, precisely rendered like volup­ tuous punctuation marks that demand pause and respite. Buhlungu

View of “Simnikiwe Buhlungu,” 2023. Photo: Sergi Pera Rusca.

AMSTERDAM

Simnikiwe Buhlungu ELLEN DE BRUIJNE PROJECTS

How might a puddle contain suboceanic vibrations, a bioluminescent deep­sea fish, a shebeen in Johannesburg’s Sophiatown in the 1950s, or the clinking keys of a piano belonging to eminent South African scholar and activist D.D.T. Jabavu (1885–1959)? What words, episte­ mologies, and bodies hold the lineages of things both minuscule and mythical, prophetic and retrospective? Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s exhibi­ tion “suggestures among us (Interlude)” explored these questions through narrative forms such as the hunch and the sketch. In the ten works on view, including drawings, installation elements, a single Post­it note containing location coordinates, and a performance in collaboration with fellow artist Negiste Yesside Johnson, Buhlungu imagined knowledge as a shape­shifting vessel that links time and place, remembering and losing track, waiting and moving forward. Buhlungu describes the word suggesture as a “portmanteau of sug­ gestion and gesture,” and in the works on view the artist used sugges­ ture to draw the viewer into social encounters with text or sound that SEPTEMBER 2023

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and Johnson’s performance, a scored conversation with musical interludes, again referenced the idea of a puddle, this time reconceived as an ecological and ancestral portal linking evaporated canal water in Amsterdam to the potholed streets of present-day Johannesburg— Buhlungu’s hometown—and the latter city’s multiracial neighborhood of Sophiatown before it was razed by apartheid-era authorities and its Black community forcibly uprooted in 1955. The possible links within this constellation were also revealed in the performance to be gaps or ruptures in established and traumatic histories. Suggesture might then be understood as a kind of simultaneous mapping and remapping that circles back to excavate experiences of joy, strangeness, and resiliency. —Annie Goodner

STOCKHOLM

Monica Sjöö MODERNA MUSEET

Monica Sjöö, God Giving Birth, 1968, oil on Masonite, 72 × 48".

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The intensity and increased frequency of individual wildfires, which now span the globe from Australia to Canada, can be spied as a single global omen of a forthcoming man-made climate catastrophe. Consequently, artists, writers, and curators are faced with a critical question: How can we effectively engage people to confront ecological destruction in a crowded cultural field that is intricately interconnected yet marred by disparities in wealth, resources, geography, desire, and power? Contemporary art and curatorial discourse have focused on three main strategies for building a sense of progressive solidarity: promoting the notion of care, encouraging empathy, and shaming complicity. “The Great Cosmic Mother,” the first major retrospective of Monica Sjöö (1938–2005), a Swedish British radical eco-witch, artist, organizer, and pamphleteer, traces the long preherstory of these approaches through her life’s work, yet braids them together through a fourth dimension, generally neglected today: spiritual unity. The lodestar of the exhibition, which will travel to Modern Art Oxford in England and the Moderna Museet Malmö in Sweden, is Sjöö’s 1968 painting God Giving Birth, with its titanic, stoic female deity flanked by ringed exoplanets. Her face is half black and half white, a sort of yin-yang, while the painting’s overall tone, predominantly in grisaille, finds vibrancy through the use of loose impassioned brushwork. A child’s head emerges from within her as she squats, straddling a black orb, itself ringed by the painting’s title inscribed in eye-popping red lettering. The now-iconic image, which has become a symbol of the environmental feminist movement, is more famous than the artist who created it. Instead of proudly proclaiming this showstopper as the exhibition’s culmi-

nation, the curators (Moderna Museet’s Jo Widoff and Modern Art Oxford’s Amy Budd) situated God Giving Birth within Sjöö’s extensive oeuvre, represented here by nearly sixty artworks, including paintings as well as banners, political posters, and an expansive display of her publications along with other documents of her art and activism. The collage The Beginning of the End of Patriarchy, 1993, frames a central black-and-white print of the birthing goddess with an inkand-graphite drawing colored with orange and yellow crayon and gouache. It celebrates an action in which Sjöö and other eco-feminist activists interrupted a Sunday service at Bristol Cathedral in England to sing, as written on the image itself, the verses of the hymn “Burning Times.” With painted faces, and dressed in robes adorned with esoteric symbols, a chevron of women, backed by a phalanx of oversize lit candles whose bases are obscured by these apparent neo-pagans, confronts two priests in their vestments. The viewer is positioned behind the clerics so that we see their backs as the women look directly at them, and by extension, us. The huddled and elongated forms of the women and the candles melt into each other, at once emphasizing their solidarity and evoking the history of witches burned at the stake. While this setup could be read as a condemnation of the church and its long and still current history of suppressing women’s rights and rites, it also raises another question: Who is the moral arbiter of the world? Is it men, women, the church, or, as the pantheon of psychedelic goddesses seen in the exhibition’s other works suggest, some greater authority? Several of the archival materials included in the exhibition document the artist’s visits to ancient pilgrimage sites, demonstrating how she drew inspiration from their iconographies. Whether “the before times” of pre-Christian civilization were more equitable or not, Sjöö’s investment in recycling potent mystical attractors of the past reveals a divinely inspired vision. It suggests that the only cure for fossil-fuel dipsomania might be a religiously inspired recourse to a higher power springing from the life-giving forces of the earth itself—as opposed to the disenchantments of capitalist secularism, which, like the preceding world order of the patriarchal church, appears to hold no qualms in burning our ancestors, both human and nonhuman, for power. —Adam Kleinman

TBILISI

Ana Gzirishvili E.A. SHARED SPACE

When the positive part of a fastener engages in the negative, it makes a noise: snap open, snap shut. Things into the handbag, things out of the handbag. With snap fasteners, but also with buckles, rivets, carabiners, zippers, leather straps, and other connecting pieces, some of them decorated with ornaments, the materials in Ana Gzirishvili’s sculptures are joined together—sometimes amorphously, sometimes biomorphically, but always as strange foreign bodies. So “Snaps” was what she called her recent show. But the artificial leather, plastic, and metal of the handbags bought by the artist on the secondary market are not the only things that “snap” when the materials combine and form new art objects. As precisely arranged in the exhibition space, they snapped into place with the context of the exhibition itself, with Tbilisi and its informal markets, with Georgia as a country between Orthodoxy and globalization. Even before visitors entered the exhibition space through the door of what was previously a bourgeois apartment, they were welcomed by Tranquil Soil, 2023, a structure of partially colored textiles. The sinuous piece clung to the entrance as if at home there, as if it had been

Ana Gzirishvili, Tranquil Soil, 2023, artificial leather, leather, metal, fabric, plastic, wood, 29 1⁄2 × 4 × 2 1⁄2".

watching over a portal to another dimension for a very long time, a time before mankind; flowers—former handbag ornaments—sprout from it like mushrooms, giving it an organic feel. Inside the exhibition, the two-part assemblage Freckled Wing, 2023, each of its pieces more than seven feet long, crept up along the edges of the shutters to the top of the window frame. Locale, 2023, roughly the same size, lay on the parquet floor between a corner and a doorframe, fit snugly against the white wall. In addition to these site-specific works, Gzirishvili showed individual objects made of experimentally joined bags of all sorts. “A handbag is a property, shelter, and territory,” the artist wrote in a text accompanying the show, explaining her feminist view of pocketbooks as bridging public and private, inside and outside—transitional spaces. Also shown were four framed and three unframed watercolor paintings, all Untitled, 2022–23, and eight tiny white plastic 3D prints. While the watercolors emphasize the organic aspects of the handbags, with colors mixing on the paper to create images between abstraction and figuration, the plastic objects—with titles such as Hiss, Crackle, or Flap, all 2023—reproduce elements that thematize and visualize moments of transition: a hinge, a clasp, or an eyelet. Gzirishvili—who, together with Salome Dumbadze and Nina Kintsurashvili, is also active in the collective Tales of Loss—is part of a generation of young Georgians who want to connect their country to a global discourse without losing sight of their Caucasian heritage. Her artworks also reflect the transformations that Georgia and its conservative society are currently undergoing. The handbag not only is mere material for the artist, but also becomes a symbol for a country that is home to both twelfth-century Orthodox monasteries and queer techno parties. From within this state of suspension, this limbo, Gzirishvili’s works make a sound that is clearly perceptible beyond the borders of Georgia, reminding us of the satisfying sound when a fastener closes: snap! —Franz Thalmair

found at a Paris atelier as a spiderlike vulva at the center of a web made of hemp cords strung from a wooden frame. The zipper’s teeth become an uncanny symbol of castration anxiety. Clandestine Light, 1987/2010, is a square mausoleum of gray concrete slabs stacked on a white cloth. Light emanating from a fluorescent lamp within gives a sense of life defying a crushing weight. This use of light as an emblem of resistance finds its most striking expression in Towards Childhood, Since Childhood, 1974/2010. Inspired by the Vietcong guerrilla tactics against the invading US forces, Çekil emptied twelve Coca-Cola bottles, tied them to sticks, and—using string, electric tape, and light bulbs—transformed icons of capitalism into a set of ready-made Molotov cocktails. When this work debuted in Çekil’s first Paris show in 1975, the bottles pointed to a north-indicated compass mark, embodying an ideological attack on the Global North. The version exhibited at Arter takes its cue from Vasıf Kortun’s 2010 Çekil retrospective at Rampa, Istanbul, where the bottles were aligned in three rows like army ranks. Another seminal work, Reverse Image, 1980, produced in the wake of Turkey’s military coup of that same year, comprises a camera obscura and a microphone bringing the sights and sounds outside the gallery inside. The upside-down landscape, not recorded but streamed (as we now say) in real time, inspires reflection on the transience of the image. The installation was Çekil’s attempt to counter the veneration of realism among socialist painters and a reminder of radical art’s uphill battle against the mass-media proliferation of images. Berkmen installed the work in a gallery whose windows overlook a street undergoing gentrification, contrasting inside with outside in a gesture Çekil might have appreciated.

ISTANBUL

Cengiz Çekil ARTER

In the 1970s, Cengiz Çekil (1945–2015) fell under the spell of Arte Povera and the practice of Joseph Beuys. Using materials such as bedsprings, stones, and Coke bottles, he mastered bricolage, as the fifty sculptures, installations, and paintings in his retrospective “I Am Still Alive” prove. Many of Çekil’s works are site- and time-specific, so Eda Berkmen and her curatorial team at Arter had to rebuild them by using new material and following the artist’s detailed instructions. In Obsession, 1974/2013, Çekil reimagined a black-leather pencil case he

Awakening, Communication Stone, 1987, is another work that ponders the ideas of inside and outside and that summons a ghost from the artist’s youth. While he worked as an art instructor in eastern Anatolia in the 1960s, Çekil’s radical teaching methods and leftist worldview caused suspicion among local nationalists who threw a stone at his bedroom window one night, firing a shot afterward in an apparent attempt to kill him. Çekil, awake in the kitchen, survived the attack and found inspiration in the use of the stone as a weapon—a tactic he would employ to artistic ends. By padding a cobblestone he found nearly twenty years after the event with a piece of thick canvas, stamping it with his initials and strapping it all together, Çekil repurposed the

Cengiz Çekil, Towards Childhood, Since Childhood, 1974/2010, Coca-Cola bottles, string, tree branches, light bulbs, cable, electric tape, electrical equipment, each 13 3⁄8 × 4 × 4".

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object as an embodiment of the fears that reigned over his formative years and a reminder of how anxieties about death inspired his art. Ironically, Diary, 1976, a work comprising a school notebook whose every page Çekil stamped with the words i am still alive in Turkish before going to sleep—a gesture resembling On Kawara’s monochromatic “Today” series, 1966–2014—isn’t on display at the Arter show to which it gave its title. My Father’s Will, 2014/2023, a large wooden cabinet with glass doors containing tools that belonged to Çekil’s father, a watch repairman, is exhibited for the first time. Also holding the gravestone his father designed for himself on its lowermost shelf, this metonym of a family legacy traveled with the artist for years. The work is typical of Çekil’s practice, embodying a private history in a sparse language that displayed as much as it concealed. His father’s gravestone and watch parts remain locked inside, available to be only glimpsed or imagined from the outside. For Çekil, provocative artistic work resided in the corollary to that act of encounter, in the spectator’s imaginative and subjective auto-completion. —Kaya Genç

DUBAI

Dorsa Asadi

GREEN ART GALLERY

Dorsa Asadi, “A sinner’s flesh should have an Immersion baptism,” Belle said, 2022, glazed ceramic, 19 3⁄4 × 23 5⁄8 × 11".

Iranian Nowruz celebrations begin with Chaharshanbe Suri, a ritual of purification, which involves jumping over flames and reciting in Farsi words meaning “May your redness be mine, and my pallor be yours.” Fire is a device for transformation. It cures ailments and gives new life. For her exhibition “Strange Fruit,” Dorsa Asadi joined the transformative power of fire with a narrative structure derived from Dante. Small glossily glazed ceramic sculptures resting on raised tables arranged in clusters across the room took the form of plants, bodies of water, flames, and human figures that together laid out a journey of ascension via a path of destruction. Taking a page from the Divine Comedy, Asadi divided the exhibition into three parts: “Inferno,” “Purgatory,” and “Paradiso.” The colorful style of the works, as well as the character names indicated in the titles, turn Dante’s epic into a gruesome Grimm’s fairy tale

with a Disney makeover. The first piece was “A sinner’s flesh should have an Immersion baptism,” Belle said, 2022. The miniature scene depicts a variety of flora and what might be a glint of flames surrounding an elevated body of turquoise water. Occupying the shallow pool are two figures with chalky-white skin, wearing pale-yellow dresses. One has long red hair while the other’s is cool blue, recalling the colors you’d see in a fire. Their hands are bloody. They stand over a third, unclothed body, pink and featureless. The redhead seems to be digging her fingers into the naked figure’s face. In Elle leading the sinnerman through the Inferno, 2022, a naked body appears hunched over on all fours, flames bursting out of his back. The blue-haired figure stands overhead with her legs between those of the naked body, positioned like an instructor directing the blazing body into annihilation. Asadi made references to Nina Simone’s songs throughout the exhibition, starting with its title, taken from the protest song made famous by Billie Holiday but also recorded by Simone. Some of the individual works’ titles, too, evoke Simone’s songs, as does the very name of Sinnerman, taken from one of her most famous recordings. In “Purgatory,” where Asadi’s palette has been toned down to create an overall feeling of anguish and decay, Fructifying Chenar (plane tree) with the strange fruit at the wrong time of Autumn, 2023, shows the now-defeated Sinnerman’s torn-apart limbs hanging from and being absorbed into a tree. In “Paradiso,” Sinnerman is reborn as Sugarman. In The Ascension of the Sugarman, 2023, the figure steps out, fully intact again, from a flower with a light-green stem and a large tonguelike petal. And that wasn’t the only pink featureless naked body featured in this section. Take me to the river, 2023, shows a line of them, their legs dragging the water they stand in, their hands clutching each other’s hips and shoulders as if in a rhythmic procession. Although none have faces, one can imagine them smiling, joyous. The blue- and red-haired characters are also here. In Elle and Belle bathing in the pools of Paradiso, 2023, they hold each other in waist-deep water, in a setting that looks very similar to what was portrayed in the opening piece of the exhibition. In Asadi’s work, materials go hand in hand with narrative: The soft and wet mineral clay forms have been transformed by fire, emerging from the flames as vivid characters. Their appearance always maintains an organic feel. The looseness of the glaze recalls the earthy origins of clay and complements the natural elements that are active components in Asadi’s compositions. —Yalda Bidshahri

CAPE TOWN

Faith Ringgold and Hank Willis Thomas GOODMAN GALLERY

What happens when we attempt to connect freedom to practices of the everyday—when we think of it not as a theoretical concept but rather as something that impacts the ordinary aspects of our ordinary lives? Perhaps then, an Afro pick comb can function as a tool for personal care but also as an implement of struggle toward Black liberation. Connecting freedom to the everyday dissolves the separation between the theoretical and the biographical, the philosophical and the personal. The tightly packed two-person exhibition “Freedom is Going Home” brought recent works by Hank Willis Thomas into conversation with older pieces by Faith Ringgold. Thomas riffs off Ringgold’s quiltmaking and painting practice, responding with tapestries, lenticular works, and bronze sculptures, all of which bring to the fore questions of race in the United States, as well as in Africa and its diaspora. 232 ARTFORUM

View of “Faith Ringgold and Hank Willis Thomas,” 2023. From left: Faith Ringgold, Windows of the Wedding #15: Friends, 1974; Faith Ringgold, Windows of the Wedding #6: Patience and Understanding, 1974; Hank Willis Thomas, Tomorrow, The United States of Africa, 2023. Photo: Nina Lieska.

Thomas’s All Power to All People, 2023, is a nearly eight-foot-tall bronze sculpture of an Afro pick comb whose raised handle is a hand clenched in a fist. It evokes the Black Power movement of the 1960s while also referring further back to ancient Egypt, where the comb was used as an article of status. The work reflects on complex politics associating hair and conceptions of beauty within racial hierarchies. For Ringgold, social justice is bound up with personal experience. Her silk-screened Hate Is a Sin Flag, 2020, is based on the artist’s recollection of the first time she heard a white man call her the N-word, in 1968. One could argue that the exhibition repudiated the stability of symbols by removing them from their original contexts while failing to draw clear connections to how and why the symbols are employed in the work itself. In what way do Kuba designs from Central Africa— found in Ringgold’s tapestry Windows of the Wedding #6: Patience and Understanding, 1974—speak of freedom? And did the exhibition really succeed in putting that idea in dialogue with, say, the quotes from various pan-Africanist thinkers found in Thomas’s flag work Tomor­ row, The United States of Africa, 2023? What does freedom look like or taste like if we think about it in relation to African American history via the Underground Railroad, versus thinking about it through a text that details a story of separation and reunion in apartheid South Africa? The exhibition failed to tease out the tensions and contradictions between these nuanced narratives. It failed to unpack the subtle differences between what freedom meant to the people of Central Africa making Kuba designs in the seventeenth century on the one hand and what it meant to, say, the Black Panthers in 1966. “Freedom is Going Home” missed an important opportunity to home in on specificity by challenging ideas of universal Blackness, Black liberation, or freedom. The lack of nuance drained the work of its potency. Without an explicit connection to questions of freedom today, here in South Africa these symbols—the comb, the Kuba designs from Central Africa, folkloric quilt patterns—register a deficiency

through radical dislocation from their original context. Thomas and Ringgold are clearly committed to social justice, but the exhibition failed to advance ideas of freedom. —Nkgopoleng Moloi

GWANGJU

14th Gwangju Biennale VARIOUS VENUES

“There is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.” So declared the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, a fundamental text of Taoism noted for its poetic character. In early Korea as in China, the literati laboriously studied the Tao Te Ching so as to hone their virtues. In what promised to be the wettest summer in South Korea to date— one of innumerable consequences of our continued failure to rein in global warming—it could hardly be more timelier that the 14th Gwangju Biennale took water as its emblem. In drawing from the Taoist text, the exhibition, “soft and weak like water,” pointed to our shared world in all of its beauties and contradictions. We needed look no further than the exhibition’s opening work for a visualization of this ethos. In Buhlebezwe Siwani’s sprawling, three-channel video installation The Spirits Descended (Yehla Moya), 2022, female nature deities dance in the ocean, the performers’ bodies morphing into an Arcadian wave. Within the tidal ruptures is rapture. Just as water has caused destruction through floods, it can nourish and restore. This year’s biennale, helmed by London-based curator Sook-Kyung Lee, asked viewers to slow down. Only in so doing could we discern the subtle formal and thematic intersections among cultures and histories in the show—as in the suspended discs of incense inscribed with the text of SEPTEMBER 2023

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a Buddhist scripture on impermanence in Charwei Tsai’s sculpture Spiral Incense Mantra—Heart Sutra, 2023, whose coils were mirrored in the rock holes in the adjacent paintings by Betty Muffler. Nearby, veteran South Korean performance artist Lee Kun-Yong’s Bodyscape 76–3–2023, invites the audience to inscribe their own bodily movements with a crayon or colored pencil on drawing paper hung on the wall. Stemming from authoritarian Korea in the 1970s, the work puts pressure on notions of self-expression through collective participation. Tuakirikiri, 2023, by New Zealand’s Mataaho Collective, offers a woven counterpart. Crisscrossed with ratchet tie-downs, the Māori fiber-art installation comments on the power and obligation of community in kawe, or carrying a burden. Mulling over these connections one by one was no easy endeavor, particularly when the anchoring “nodes” were as sweeping and intertwined as “Ancestral Voices” and “Transient Sovereignty.” Traversing rows of abstract painting and sculpture or, for that matter, works with water (which abounded in the show), one had to wonder if the emphasis on form and material risked dimming the sociocultural histories indexed by each work. The more iconographic pieces grounded the show and advanced its aim of generating cross-cultural connections. One such case was Edgar Calel’s Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer eternab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge), 2023, an installation of fruits positioned on top of stones as an offering to Guatemalan Kaqchikel ancestors. Among the pineapples and bananas were an apple and jujubes. These fruits—traditional funerary food in Korea—delivered a surprising pang of delight, as one recognized, then appreciated, affinities between two distinct cultures. As ever, it was impossible to ignore the Gwangju uprising, the 1980 student protest against military dictatorship that ended in state-sponsored violence resulting in hundreds of deaths. This episode has been writ large in the many editions of the biennale, and this year was no exception. Pangrok Sulap’s breathtaking set of woodcut prints, Gwangju Blooming, 2023, for instance, depicts solemn scenes of resistance redolent of Käthe Kollwitz’s haunting socialist works. Still, whether these images can effectively stand against the increasing authoritarianism around the world—or whether they merely relegate the uprising to the convenient space of the past—remains to be seen. —Adela Kim

Mataaho Collective, Tuakirikiri, 2023, tubular slackline webbing, cam buckles, s-hooks. Installation view, Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall. From the Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Photo: glimworkers. 234 ARTFORUM

MANILA

Nona Garcia SILVERLENS

In “Overland,” Nona Garcia offered an experience of both immensity and calm. She works on a grand scale to depict scenes of tranquility, objects finding repose in a mountain expanse or rainforest. Overland, 2023, measures some twelve feet across; the painting, framed, is propped up by real boulders. It portrays an abandoned and battered truck, with parts missing, parked on a mountaintop. Behind it, a mountain range rises toward a bright-blue sky. In Oil, 2022, rust and plant life overtake an oil tank is parked in the middle of a forest. Vines engulf the tank. Some of the leaves have dried out and match the color of rust. In Ascend III, Green Fortress, 2022, moss and weeds grow in the grout of a stone wall. The motif of man-made objects—the truck, the oil tank, and the stone wall—succumbing to nature is not novel, but Garcia expresses it in a new light, and her use of scale is part of the novelty. Yet Garcia’s paintings do more than evoke an existential condition. They specifically reference Cordillera, a mountainous region of the Philippines north of Manila, where an American hill station was sited in the early twentieth century—an escape from colonial Manila outposts because of the area’s cooler climate. The truck, for instance, is American military equipment, of a sort that has been appropriated by the locals to deliver agricultural products to the lowland. The works ask us to situate traces of industrial civilization against the ecology and culture of the mountains and its people. Garcia presents these abandoned objects as part of an expansive landscape—not as monuments to the colonial encounter but as structures that have been claimed and overrun by a thriving local ecology. On the flip side, this ecology has been exploited. In the oil-on-canvas Building Mountains, 2023, heaps of gravel transform into a lifeless mountainscape. In a frame with a cement-like finish, the work provides a counterpoint to the thriving forests and mountains in the other works around it. Nearby, the diminutive Fool’s Gold, 2023, an oil painting on cement, is ensconced in a miniature smoothed-concrete obelisk. The

Nona Garcia, Overland, 2023, oil on canvas, 7' 3 3⁄8" × 12' 3 3⁄8".

image depicts a magnified crystalline stone, its facets giving it a deceptively enticing luster. This juxtaposition between the clearing of the mountain and the harvested fool’s gold is quite didactic in thought but stunningly depicted in this discrepant scale. Perhaps the artist’s most successful interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture comes in Untitled Pine Tree, 2018, a suite of fifty wood-veneer panels of various sizes covering the entirety of a fifty-eight-foot-long wall. Each panel presents an oil painting of a found fragment of wood, ranging from small dried branches to cut sections of tree trunks. Whereas the other paintings work within binary frameworks of nature and culture, Untitled Pine Tree blurs the distinction between one or the other. The found wood is natural, yet it is abstracted from its context and playfully rendered on manufactured wood veneer. The binary dissipates as the labor of culture (the artistic labor, the painted thing) and the raw material from nature (found wood) become a perpetually displaced signifier for an ecosystem elsewhere. —Carlos Quijon Jr.

At the back of the gallery, four large enamel-and-oil paintings on old plywood doors commanded attention; a denser hang at the front clustered small and midsize works, including several pencil drawings. Many of the works are named for places in Belgium (Eikenberg, 2021; Leberg, 2021; Kapelmuur, 2021–23; Knokteberg, 2021), evoking one of Bush’s strongest art-historical references: Northern European landscape painting of the Romantic period, with its cool, diffracted light. The paintings and works on paper explore similar themes; both channel a collage-like spatial logic. Bush’s technical skill as a draftsman is evident in his deft gradations of tone and his renderings of complex perspectival structures. But we always sense the ineluctable pull of painting as his primary medium, even when he is working outside it. In the drawing Grüngold, 2022, a man lies prostrate in the foreground while another hovers nearby smoking a pipe while holding a backup pipe in his right hand. Two cocks strut by, while a boat full of people plies its course across a lake, with a small town in the distance. The lake reflects the colors of the sky, which is not the expected slate blue but rather a polychrome abstract profusion—not unlike the viscous blobs of a lava lamp. This sky recalls Bush’s experiments with the liquidity of paint in his earlier, more luridly colored poured-enamel works. Other drawings, such as Elfenbein, 2022, evidence Bush’s use of the pencil for both line and color. Here, he nests a full spectrum of violet, yellow, green, and pink in the brown hues of the dilapidated roof of a small shed.

MELBOURNE

Stephen Bush

Stephen Bush, Grüngold, 2022, colored pencil on paper, 33 7⁄8 × 43 3⁄4".

SUTTON GALLERY

“A Troubled Mind” was an evocative title for Stephen Bush’s most recent exhibition. Characteristic of the artist’s practice, which spans almost five decades now, certain tropes reappeared across many of the paintings like demons that could not be exorcised. A preening cockerel, a goat looking back at the viewer over its left shoulder, a potbellied man pissing on the street, another man with several pipes dangling ostentatiously from his mouth—these forms echoed across this body of work produced, for the most part, over the past three years. Some of the motifs—for instance, the farm animals—have been haunting Bush’s practice for far longer, reflecting the artist’s childhood on a farm in rural Victoria. Also recurrent are images of small-wheeled vehicles: a trailer (seen in one of the exhibition’s outlier 1979 paintings, Lead Tin Yellow Light), a minibus, or an ice-cream truck. These, in turn, connect with another image that Bush has painted consistently over recent decades: the humble cabin, connoting Abraham Lincoln, Henry David Thoreau, and Ted Kaczynski, as well as the moral benefits or drawbacks of selfreliance. Each of Bush’s paintings is like a cabin: an autonomous space marked out, constructed, and ultimately inhabited solely by the artist— a place for the rehearsal of private obsessions.

Using tricks, rules, and constraints, Bush treats both his subject matter and his painting processes playfully. In the 1990s, for instance, he painted a large body of work using only one color—Venetian red— thus producing a suite of eerie rust-toned monochromatic representational images. He has done similar work using emerald green and purple, too. Several of the artworks in “A Troubled Mind” are named after single colors (Dark Nasturtium Yellow, 2021; Lead Tin Yellow Light; Lichter Ocker, 2022; and Scheele’s Green, 2022, among others), despite being executed in a range of hues. Lady Campbell Weed Mau­ veine, 2022, and Lady Campbell Weed Speckled Jim, 2022, by contrast, are monochromatic treatments of the pipe smoker in purple. This pipe smoker—and, in fact, every man depicted in the drawings and paintings on display—is the artist himself. With this in mind, to rehearse an argument that Michael Fried famously made in relation to Courbet, each pipe or urinating penis in hand reads like a metonymic paintbrush, and each canvas an allegory of the act of painting itself. In Bush’s hands, Courbet’s self-seriousness becomes comic self-questioning, and the canvases, allegories of excess. —Helen Hughes SEPTEMBER 2023

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FOSTER/ANTI-AESTHETIC from page 163

6. Ruscha, conversation.

28. See M1964.01 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects) 71.

NOTES

7. Designed and published by Wallace Berman, Semina was issued in nine volumes between 1955 and 1964.

29. Ruscha’s artists’ projects for Artforum included Rejected Oct. 2, 1963 by the Library of Congress, Washington 25, D.C. (A1964.01); the layout for the article “Concerning ‘Various Small Fires’: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications” (A1965.01); the commissioned cover design Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed (A1966.0A); the faux advertisement “Ed Ruscha Says Goodbye to College Joys” (A1967.01); an advertisement for his artist’s book Crackers (A1969.11); and Advertisement for “Paintings: January 1970” (A1970.02), a promotion for his one-man exhibit at Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York, all in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects.

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). I dedicate the present text to its publisher, my great friend Thatcher Bailey, who was crucial to the making of the book from first to last. 2. There was pushback on the Frampton essay from architect friends who didn’t see critical regionalism as properly postmodernist, but what appealed to me was precisely its critical posture; it pointed to a “postmodernism of resistance.” 3. “The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument,” Krauss wrote in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” “By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place.” Two decades later, Benjamin Buchloh offered this diabolical revision: “The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the commodity fetish. By virtue of this logic, a sculpture is always already a fetishized object whose function is disavowal. It lacks any particular location and it is universally accessible. It speaks in a symbolic tongue about the meaning or use of the fetish.” See his “Sculpture: Publicity and the Poverty of Experience,” in Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 510. 4. See Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); see, too, the foreword by Fredric Jameson. Recently, of course, “the logic of the monument” has been contested in very different ways. 5. Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 92. 6. It could be argued that Owens totalized in his own way, hypostatizing all authority as domination. 7. I was stumped by how to treat postmodernist literature, in large part because the writers associated with the term (such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and even Amiri Baraka and William Burroughs) were more hypermodernist than anything else. (There is a lesson here about the nonsynchronicity of the various arts.) In a text on “post-criticism” for The Anti-Aesthetic, Gregory Ulmer argued, after Rosalind Krauss, that critical theory had achieved a “paraliterary” status of its own, in large part through carrying over the modernist critique of representation, especially through the devices of collage and montage, into the domain of philosophy. See Krauss, “Poststructuralism and the ‘Paraliterary,’” October, no. 13 (Summer 1980), 36–40. 8. Also contingent was my acquaintance with the authors. I knew Frampton from the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and Krauss and Crimp from October. I worked alongside Owens at Art in America and Jameson at Social Text. I studied with Said at Columbia and met Baudrillard on one of his many trips to New York. 9. This problem is not mitigated by the fact that Owens was gay. However, in the short time remaining to him—he died, far too young, in 1990––he did become an important voice in queer theory, which had only begun to emerge at the time of The Anti-Aesthetic. 10. See my “(Post)Modern Polemics,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985), 121–138. 11. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019), 33. Also see Christina Sharpe, “Beauty Is a Method,” e-flux, no. 105 (December 2019). 12. I allude here to my “Post-Critical?,” in Bad New Days (London: Verso, 2015); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–151; and Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). PLATZKER/RUSCHA from page 173 NOTES

8. The American edition of Marcel Duchamp was published by Grove Press in 1959 following the French edition, which was issued by Trianon Press earlier the same year. Beyond the text and artworks reproduced within the book, Ruscha may have been inspired in particular by the collaged series of images of Duchamp’s works printed on the reverse side of the book’s dust jacket and by the scattered overlapping drawings on its endpapers in particular. A copy of the book was held within Chouinard’s library. This specific copy of the book was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013 by the author of this essay. Romantically, one might consider this well-read copy to have been instrumental to the development of artists who attended or taught at Chouinard, including Terry Allen, John Altoon, Larry Bell, Llyn Foulkes, Joe Goode, Jack Goldstein, Robert Irwin, Ruscha, and many others, as this title was the only substantial English-language book on Duchamp prior to the publication of his Pasadena retrospective catalogue in 1963 and Arturo Schwarz’s catalogue raisonné of Duchamp’s work, issued in 1970. 9. See A1957.02-d.7 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects [Other Stuff] (New York: Gagosian; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 57. 11. Ruscha, conversation

34. Ruscha, conversation.

12. Ruscha inscribed copy no. 1 of the four hundred numbered copies of the first edition of Twentysix Gasoline Stations with the dedication “To Patty with love, Ed. May 24–June 2, 1963.” See Buy Early / Die Late (New York: John McWhinnie/Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2010), 86–87.

35. Ruscha, conversation.

14. See A1954.04 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects, 48. 15. See A1956.03 and A1956.04 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects, 49.

38. Ruscha, conversation.

16. From the 1960s to the present, Ruscha designed many books, periodicals, magazine covers, posters, LP jackets, and other promotional materials for friends and as commercial work. A small sampling of these projects includes covers for Bicyclists Dismount (1964), A1964.08; Adventures in Poetry (1969), A1969.08; Music (1969), A1969.02; Rhymes of a Jerk (1974), A1974.02; Dinner at Mme— (1977), A1977.04; California Rock—California Sound (1978), A1978.06; Before Calculus: Functions, Graphs & Analytic Geometry (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), A1985.03; Thrift Store Paintings (1990), A1990.02; The Band: A Musical History (2005), A2005.01; Geoff Muldaur and the Texas Sheiks (2009), A2009.05; an imaginary record sleeve (2010), A2010.01; and It Happened to Me (2018), A2018.02, in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects. See also in the same volume A1954.03, A1965.03, A1965.04, A1966.03, A1968.04, A1968.07, A1969.12, A1971.07, A1972.01, A1974.02, A1975.09, A1982.01, A1982.02, A1983.02, A1983.07, A1986.05, M1991.01, A1992.02, A1995.05, A2000.02, A2001.04, A2002.02, A2007.02, A2014.07, A2015.02, A2015.04, A2016.02, and A2017.01. Rather than artworks or artists’ projects, Ruscha thinks of most of these efforts as side or commercial jobs—stuff produced out of friendship or, regarding the earlier productions, as a means of support.

39. Laurence and Geraldine McGilvery’s Nexus Bookshop in La Jolla, CA, was the first bookstore to stock Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Correspondence from Ruscha to Laurence McGilvery dated October 15, 1963, and October 20, 1963. Collection of Dr. Paul Marks, Toronto.

17. See: P1958.01 and P1961.05 in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, vol. 1, 1958–1970 (New York: Gagosian; Göttingen: Steidl, 2003), 16–17, 46–47, 233. 18. See: D1960.12 in Edward Ruscha, Works on Paper, vol. 1, 1956–1976 (New York: Gagosian; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 53. 19. Ruscha, conversation. 20. See D1962.47 to D1962.53 in Works on Paper, 1:100–102. Those drawings would become the templates for a multitude of Standard station paintings and prints. 21. See D1962.56 in Works on Paper, 1:103. 22. See D1963.56 through D1963.62 in Works on Paper, 1:128–30. 23. Stymie Extra Bold was used as the title font of the front covers of the book Specimens of Type Faces in the United States Government Printing Office, published in Washington, DC, by the US Government Printing Office in 1950 and 1960. It is further documented on pages 117–18 of the 1950 edition and pages 124–25 of the 1960 edition. Beton Slab was not included in this publication.

26. Beton Slab made its first appearance in Ruscha’s work in the single letter E within his photograph Type, 1957 (A1957.01), in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects, 49. Beton would return in his work with the drawing Study for Box Smashed Flat(Vicksburg), 1960–61 (D1960.11), and the associated painting Box Smashed Flat, 1960–61 (P1961.02), both depicting the design and typography of a period Sun-Maid Raisins box.

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36. Artist’s studio, email to author, June 28, 2023. 37. “Ed Ruscha, Jerry McMillan, and Mason Williams Oral History: Part 1 of 4,” oral history interview, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, January 23–24, 2007, video, 50:15, youtube.com/watch?v=lmSjvlYcFQc. Quote appears at 16:50.

13. Ruscha, conversation.

2. Ruscha, oral history interview by Paul Karlstrom, October 29, 1980–October 2, 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, transcript aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-edward-ruscha-12887.

5. See the Online Archive of California’s finding aid to the Plantin Press Papers, oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4z09n9h8/.

32. The work can be viewed online at the Walker’s website, at walkerart.org/ collections/artworks/business-cards. 33. This copy of Business Cards is documented on the Museum of Modern Art Library’s website: https://library.moma.org/permalink/01NYA_INST/90vked/ alma991003647919707141.

24. See P1961.02 in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1:40–41.

4. Ruscha, conversation.

31. See A1968.05, A1969.13, A1971.01, and A1971.03 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects.

10. Ruscha, conversation.

1. Patricia Failing, “Ed Ruscha, Young Artist: Dead Serious About Being Nonsensical,” Artnews, vol. 81, no. 4, April 1982, reprinted in Ed Ruscha: Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed. Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 228.

3. Ruscha, in conversation with the author, Culver City, CA, September 10, 2019.

30. Artist Arthur Secunda placed small advertisements offering private art classes in Artforum within the May and June 1963 issues. An unattributed half-page advertisement for Joe Goode also appears in the March 1964 issue of Artforum.

25. See A1969.02 Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects, 103.

27. See Ruscha’s National Excelsior, from the series Seven Products, 1961, on the website of San Francisco’s de Young and Legion of Honor, famsf.org/ artworks/national-excelsior-from-the-series-seven-products.

KEE/SUNG from page 181 NOTES 1. Partly based on his interest in the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose work he encountered in the pages of the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techō, Sung’s early art included abstract paintings, which he later disowned after having “intense shame for feeling as if he copied foreign artists.” Sung, “Pijuryu ŭi kaenyŏm misulga, Sŏng nŭnggyŏng ŭi ‘mangch’in’ modŏnijŭm,” interview by Cho Soo Jin, in Chungsim kwa chubyŏn ŭi misulsarŭl nŏmŏsŏ: ‘chiyŏk misul’ ŭi yŏksa, chaengjŏm, hyŏnan (Seoul: Hanguk kŭnhyŏndae misulsahakhoe, 2022), 33. 2. Beginning with his July 1969 article on contemporary Japanese art for the influential journal Space, Lee had a significant impact on a small but critical group of younger Korean artists. 3. Sung realized that, as a “three-dimensional artist,” he would never be more “than a second or third-rate.” Sung, “Pijuryu ŭi kaenyŏm misulga, Sŏng nŭnggyŏng ŭi ‘mangch’in’ modŏnijŭm,” 34. 4. Sung, conversation with the author, March 28, 2023. 5. Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, quoted in Tran Van Dinh, “Non-Alignment and Cultural Imperialism,” Black Scholar 8, no. 3 (December 1976): 45. 6. Sung, conversation, March 28, 2023. 7. Sung, conversation with the author, September 1, 2022. 8. Sung, quoted in “OB dŭl ŭi suda,” in 1970–1980 nyŏndae hanguk ŭi yŏksajŏk kaenyŏm misul (Seoul: Noonbit Press, 2011), 307. 9. Sung, conversation, September 1, 2022. 10. Sung recalls that during the performance at the Seoul Gallery in 1976, fellow experimental artist Chung Chan-seung screamed, “Wow you have a lot of money! Drinks on you!” Sadly, Chung died of liver cancer in 1994. Sung, conversation, September 1, 2022. 11. Sung Neung Kyung, “Career sibilgyemyŏng” [Eleven commandments for a career] (1991), reprinted in Tangsinŭn na ŭi t’aeyang: tongsidae han’guk misurŭl wihan sŏngch’aljŏk not’ŭ (Seoul: Total Museum of Art, 2005), n.p. 12. Kim Mikyung, “OBdŭl ŭi suda,” 285. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Sung, conversation, March 28, 2023. 16. Sung, conversation, December 27, 2022. 17. Sung, conversation, September 1, 2022. 18. Venue 29a-1 and Venue 29b-w were included in the 1987 group exhibition

curated by Um Hyuk, “Min Joong Art: New Movement of Political Art from Korea.” It was the first North American presentation of Minjung art at A-Space in Toronto and at Minor Injury, run by the artist formerly known as Bahc Mo (Bahc Yiso), in New York. 19. Sung Neung Kyung, “Hyŏnjang” [Venue] (August 8, 1986), reprinted in Tangsinŭn na ŭi t’aeyang: tongsidae han’guk misurŭl wihan sŏngch’aljŏk not’ŭ, n.p. WARNOCK/CHRYSSA from page 189 NOTES 1. “A Lecture by Chryssa Given on January 10, 1968, at New York University,” in Chryssa & New York, ed. Megan Holly Witko, Sophia Larigakis, and Michelle White (New York: Dia Art Foundation; Houston: Menil Collection, 2023): 26–39. This is a lightly edited version of a text previously available only at the Archives of American Art; citations refer to the Dia/Menil publication.

22. Simonds and Lippard, “Microcosm,” 39. 23. Paul Goldberger, “For the Whitney, Adding Less May Result in More,” New York Times, August 11, 1985, H31.

FELDMAN/SIMONDS from page 199 NOTES 2. Kate Linker, “Charles Simonds’ Emblematic Architecture,” Artforum, March 1979, 32–37.

4. Charles Simonds and Lucy Lippard, “Microcosm to Macrocosm / Fantasy World to Real World,” Artforum, February 1974, 37.

8. Simonds, Dwelling, 44.

7. Gordon Brown, “The Cool Mind: Notes on Neon from Chryssa,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 5 (March 1968), 40.

Caption acknowledgments Cover and pages 164–173: All Ed Ruscha works © Ed Ruscha. Pages 49–50: All Ilya Kabakov works © Ilya Kabakov/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Pages 57–58: All Louise Nevelson works © Estate of Louise Nevelson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Pages 79–81: All Ferdinand Hodler works © Musée Jenisch Vevey. Page 88: Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Spatter, 1966. © Roy Lichtenstein. Page 158: Jenny Holzer, Living: Some days you wake up and immediately . . . , 1980–82. © Jenny Holzer/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Pages 182–189: All Chryssa works © Estate of Chryssa, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens. Pages 190–199: All Charles Simonds works © Charles Simonds/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Page 194: Marcel Breuer, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1966, New York. Photo: Ezra Stoller. © Ezra Stoller/Esto. Pages 204–205: Ellsworth Kelly, Three Gray Panels, 1987. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Pages 206–207: All Ellsworth Kelly works © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.

5. Oral history interview with Charles Simonds, July 31–August 14, 2012. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

3. Chryssa’s 1968 lecture states that the dark-gray Plexiglas she had adopted in her neon boxes “resembles night”; the deep-blue grounds of Classified and Les Toyota sales may already have carried that connotation.

6. Restany included Chryssa in “Le Nouveau Réalisme,” an exhibition of both French and American artists, at the Galerie Rive Droite in 1961; he also wrote a monograph on her art (Chryssa [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977]) as well as the preface to her first institutional survey in France (“Le verre se fait livre,” in Chryssa: œuvres récentes Chryssa [Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1979], n.p.).

25. New Yorkers may know a more recent work, Dwelling, permanently installed in the lobby of the Museum of Arts and Design in 2011, though its consort across the street has since been removed.

3. John Hallmark Neff, ed., Charles Simonds (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1981), 152.

6. Patterson Sims, interview with the author, March 22, 2018.

5. Early commentators describe Chryssa’s at times fractious relationships with fabricators in ways that often read as inflected both by the artist’s gender and by her Greekness, as when Sam Hunter, in his 1974 monograph (the first on Chryssa’s art), introduces her to readers as “a dark, handsome, and mercurial woman . . . known as an artist who can make strong workmen and artisan assistants blanch by her eruptions of cold fury, especially when some fabricated sculpture element she ordered does not meet her exact specifications” (Chryssa [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974], 5). Intended as a gloss on the artist’s perfectionism, this portrait equally reminds us just how incongruous her presence likely seemed to many of her collaborators and consultants in the predominantly white male art world of the moment (another reason, it is permitted to think, why she sought so ardently to rise above—as opposed to simply reproduce—the already existing “human pattern”).

24. Daniel Abadie, “Charles Simonds Interviewed by Daniel Abadie,” in Temenos (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1977), 14.

1. Charles Simonds, Dwelling (Cologne: König, 2015), 11.

2. “Conversation between I. M. Pei and Chryssa,” in Chryssa Cityscapes, ed. Douglas Schultz (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 47.

4. Already in 1968, discussing Chryssa’s neon boxes in the catalogue for the artist’s second solo exhibition at Pace, critic Diane Waldman noted Chryssa’s interest in revealing “the physical structure of the neons,” adding, “In a psychological way, the exposed mechanism functions as the ‘brain’ of the image” (Chryssa: Selected Works 1955–1967 [New York: Pace Gallery, 1968], 7). (Such foregrounding of the apparatus, Waldman went on to suggest, had become less psychological and more “formal” over time.) In taking certain features of the neon elements as visual metaphors for “cool-mindedness” (over and above some more general brainlikeness), I mean to advance a less mechanistic concept more attuned to Chryssa’s consistent emphasis on authorial intention.

21. Paul Heyer, Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America (New York: Walker and Company, 1978), 272.

8. Monroe Wheeler, The Last Works of Henri Matisse: Large Cut Gouaches (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961): 9.

7. Simonds and Lippard, “Microcosm,” 39. 9. Artists were not, in Simonds’s words, “the people who were giving me something new.” Charles Simonds interviewed by Ethan Swan, Bowery Artist Tribute Interview, New Museum, New York, June 21, 2012. 10. Charles W. Millard, “The Great Grey Whitney,” Hudson Review 19, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 618. 11. Paul Goldberger, “The Whitney Paradox: To Add Is to Subtract,” New York Times, January 8, 1989, 31.

Vol. 62, No. 1 SEPTEMBER 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.

12. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 41. 13. Barry Bergdoll, “I. M. Pei, Marcel Breuer, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and the New American Museum Design of the 1960s,” Studies in the History of Art 73 (2009): 119; “Ziggurat for Whitney’s Art,” Architectural Review 61, no. 15 (1966), 100. 14. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Harsh and Handsome: The New Whitney Is Superbly Suited for an Art That Thrives on Isolation,” New York Times, September 8, 1966, 57. 15. Huxtable, “Harsh and Handsome,” 57. 16. Sims, interview. 17. Nancy Foote, “The Apotheosis of the Crummy Space,” Artforum, October 1976, 30. 18. The Little People struggled to find building sites in orderly, well-kept neighborhoods. When invited for an exhibition at Münster’s Westfälischer Kunstverein in 1978, Simonds had trouble building Dwellings in the tidy West German town.

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.

19. One Breuer scholar calls the Whitney’s staircase “one of the best examples of Breuer’s ability to make staircases into functional sculpture.” Robert McCarter, Breuer (London: Phaidon, 2016), 318. 20. Robert F. Gatje, Marcel Breuer: A Memoir (New York: Monacelli Press, 2000), 171.

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ELEVEN QUESTIONS FOR . . .

THE CURATORS OF THE 35th BIENAL DE SÃO PAULO: “CHOREOGRAPHIES OF THE IMPOSSIBLE”

WHAT IS THE MOST IMPOSSIBLE PART OF CURATING AN EXHIBITION ABOUT “THE IMPOSSIBLE”? DIANE LIMA: The formation of the curatorial team itself and making the impossible forms of art institutionally possible. HÉLIO MENEZES: Finding time for readings not related to work. MANUEL BORJA-VILLEL: How to describe what is impossible—who determines what is possible or impossible and for whom. GRADA KILOMBA: To dismantle the many impossibilities that define our world.

DL: How to approach difference without having violence as an erotic method. MBV: There is still a major need, especially among big art institutions, for museums to question their own structures, to recognize their own contradictions, and to speak critically about themselves and their practices. There is a need to unmake the gap between the discourse of the institutions and their own practices. There is a need to break the asphyxiating homogeneity of the art system. Any change is only possible with the others, with those who are radically different, including other forms of organization and governance.

WHAT IS THE SUBJECT THAT COMES UP THE MOST IN CONVERSATIONS YOU HAVE AS A TEAM? DL: How to survive until the end, together. MBV: There are many: diaspora, structural violence, commons, territory, enigma . . . but I would say that, consciously or unconsciously, how to work together has been a continuous exercise of learning, unlearning, and humbleness, which has been central in our dialogue.

WHAT BOOK DO YOU KEEP BY YOUR BED? MBV: I keep several, as I read several at the same time. Now I am reading Toni Negri’s Storia di un Comunista [2015] and Carolina María de Jesús’s Quarto de Despejo. GK: I always read several books at the same time as well. So now I am reading Ailton Krenak’s Futuro Ancestral [Ancestral Future, 2022], Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes [2023], and Mary D. Garrard’s Artemisia Genti­ leschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe [2020].

WHAT WAS THE LAST SHOW YOU TRAVELED TO SEE? HM: The permanent exhibition of Acervo da Laje’s collection in Salvador. GK: “Intertwined,” by Wangechi Mutu, at the New Museum, New York. NAME A CRITICAL BOOK OR TEXT THAT CHANGED YOUR LIFE. DL: The life of Maria Catarina de Souza—the human book that was my great-grandmother. HM: Quarto de Despejo [Child of the Dark, 1960], by Carolina Maria de Jesus. MBV: There is not one, but many. Their significance has changed in different moments of my life, and reading them again has always proved relevant. I would mention Frantz Fanon, Aníbal Quijano, and Gloria Anzaldúa, and in the last years Leda Maria Martins and Gladys Tzul Tzul. That said, and to be literal and less poetic, I would say that the book that really conditioned my life is one which at least all Spaniards have read. It is called “Libro de Familia.” It is always written by an anonymous civil servant, who has no relationship with what is written. In it, the names of your parents, and, if any, those of your spouse and children, are annotated. Also,

Clockwise, from top left: Diane Lima. Photo: Uiler Costa-Santos. Grada Kilomba. Photo: Ute Langkafel. Manuel Borja-Villel. Photo: Joaquín Cortés/ Roman Lores. Helio Menezes. Photo: Georgia Niara.

date of birth and death. It is your administrative and dehumanized biography. Without it, you don’t “exist.” WHAT EXHIBITION COMING UP (BESIDES YOURS) ARE YOU MOST EXCITED FOR? DL: The one that is yet to come and that is still a challenge for the collective imagination. HM: The next edition of the Programa de Exposições [Exhibition Program] at Centro Cultural São Paulo, an open call for contemporary art projects that has existed since 1990. WHAT SONG OR ALBUM ARE YOU LISTENING TO ON REPEAT THESE DAYS? DL: “Green Grasshopper” [1974] by Marcia Griffiths. HM: Coisas [1965] by Moacir Santos. MBV: Sun Ra’s version of “Take the ‘A’ Train” [1976]. GK: The Blue Notebooks [2004] by Max Richter. In particular the song “This Bitter Earth/On the Nature of Daylight,” composed by Clyde Otis and sung by Dinah Washington. IS THERE A CONVERSATION YOU WISH PEOPLE WERE HAVING THAT THEY’RE NOT, ESPECIALLY WITHIN ART INSTITUTIONS?

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE NON-ART PLACE IN SÃO PAULO? DL: The airport. HM: Sunday, lunchtime, at Ocupação 9 de Julho. MBV: Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House. WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING A CURATOR CAN DO FOR AN ARTIST? DL: Don’t pretend to be a god, a saint, or an orisha. GK: Say nothing. I THINK WE ALL HAVE SOMEONE (IDEAL OR REAL) IN MIND WHEN WE MAKE SOMETHING. COULD YOU DESCRIBE THE PERSON YOU HOLD IN YOUR IMAGINATION WHEN PLANNING THE BIENAL? MBV: From the beginning I had in mind Maya Deren. The way she made the camera move in Meditation on Violence [1948] is exemplary. Her approach to Haiti is to me a curatorial and artistic model. GK: All the people who, like my mother, would never dare to enter a museum—but this time will. n The Thirty­Fifth Bienal de São Paulo will be on view September 6 through December 10 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. SEPTEMBER 2023 239