Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
E BY MARK LECKEY
K
Nan Goldin blood on my hands
Matthew Marks New York
Keith Sonnier
32 East 57th Street, New York
November 26, 2016 – January 21, 2017
HERMÈS BY NATURE
2017
Tal R
Louise Bourgeois
1/5 – 2/11
Ron Gorchov
2/16 – 3/25
Sean Scully
3/30 – 5/13
Chantal Joffe
5/18 – 6/30
The “Horizontal”
7/6 – 8/31
Louise Fishman
9/7 – 10/28
Milton Resnick
11/2 – 12/23
80 106
EVERYTHING IS SUBURBAN FUTURISM
by Gavin Kroeber
ABOUT TO BEGIN Arguing that urban sprawl is the dominant growth
by Ara H. Merjian
paradigm of the present and future, the author advocates a
Visiting the US in 1966 and 1969, Italy’s controversial
close examination of dynamic, amorphous metroplexes
postwar Renaissance man, Pier Paolo Pasolini, found a
like Phoenix and Dubai.
rejuvenating energy in his encounters with fellow filmmakers,
artists, writers, and activists.
88
PORTFOLIO
by Mark Leckey with an introduction by Sukhdev Sandhu
A lifelong fan of “low” British culture, artist Mark Leckey
presents seven new digital photographs referencing
e-commerce, ecology, gender politics, cosmic bodies,
and Felix the Cat.
23 59
THE BRIEF BACKSTORY
Basim Magdy survey at Chicago’s MCA; Russian Revolution–era
Going the Distance by David White
works at New York’s MoMA; Miami Art Week; International
David White, senior curator at the Robert Rauschenberg
Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana; India’s
Foundation, recalls helping the artist mount the first showing
Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
of his giant installation The ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong Piece in
Fort Myers, Florida, in 1982.
27
FIRST LOOK 63
Jasmine Nyende by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal
Los Angeles artist Jasmine Nyende specializes in
BOOKS
Eleanor Heartney on Reiko Tomii’s Radicalism in the
performances that mockingly protest the American heritage of
Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in
slavery and racism.
Japan; plus related titles in brief.
31 116
ATLAS MIAMI REVIEWS
Flotsam from the Future by Gean Moreno
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, São Paulo,
What should citizens—especially art professionals—do in
London, Berlin, Basel, Taipei
response to rising sea levels and other ecological threats in
socially fragmented Miami?
136
37 ARTWORLD
People, Awards, Obituaries
SIGHTLINES
Raqs Media Collective talks to Ross Simonini.
41 LOG ON
artinamericamagazine.com
GLOBAL CONTEXT Access the art world with
An Armorial Age by Josephine Livingstone additional features, reviews,
In the exhibition “Jerusalem 1000–1400,” now at New York’s and exclusive interviews.
Metropolitan Museum, artworks and artifacts created
during the bloody turmoil of the Crusades are displayed in
peaceful coexistence, despite their divergent Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim origins.
M I C H A E L W E R N E R G A L L E RY 2 2 U P P E R B R O O K S T. L O N D O N W 1 M I C H A E LW E R N E R . C O M
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DE KOONING
NOVEMBER DECEMBER ,
MNUCHIN GALLERY
EAST STREET NEW YORK, NY T: + .. MNUCHINGALLERY.COM
WILLEM DE KOONING Untitled X, 1983, oil on canvas, 77 × 88 inches (195.6 × 223.5 cm). Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Arch Brown, 1962, painted steel, 37 × 38 × 29 inches (94 × 96.5 × 73.7 cm). Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT
Philip Taaffe
Recent Paintings
26 December - 12 February
Baldwin Galle ry
209 S. Galena Street Aspen CO 81611 Tel 970.920.9797 baldwingallery.com
Wind-Rose, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 84 x 631⁄2 inches (213.4 x 161.3 cm)
PAU L K A S M I N G A L L E RY NOW R E P R E S E N TS
L E E K RAS N E R
W O R K S F R O M T H E P O L L O C K - K R A S N E R F O U N D AT I O N
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Contributors
MARK LECKEY JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE
British artist Mark Leckey, who lives and works in This month, New York–based cultural historian
London, contributes a cover and portfolio to this issue. Josephine Livingstone parses the exhibition
His long-standing interest in how technology mediates “Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,”
fiction and reality, particularly in film, is evinced in the on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
survey “Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers,” York through January 8, 2017. Livingstone holds a
on view at MoMA PS1 in New York through March 5, PhD in medieval literature from New York University,
2017. Like this issue’s cover, the show prominently where she is currently a postdoctoral lecturer.
features Felix the Cat, whose visage was the first Additionally, she writes a column on academia for
picture transmitted on American television, in 1928. culture website The Awl and is program coordinator
Leckey’s work has been widely exhibited, with solo of the magazine n+1. In 2016, Livingstone cofounded
exhibitions at venues such as the Hammer Museum, Web Safe 2k16, an online archive of pre-broadband
Los Angeles; the Serpentine Gallery, London; and the internet memories. The project was recently included
Haus der Kunst, Munich. In 2008 he won the Turner in “Internet! A Retrospective” at the SPUR Urban
Prize for his video Industrial Light and Magic. Center in San Francisco.
14 DECEMBER 2016
ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH
DECEMBER 1–4, 2016 | BOOTH F11
18 DECEMBER 2016
MIKE KELLEY
KANDORS
N O V E M B E R 9 - D E C E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 6
© M I K E K E L L E Y F O U N D AT I O N F O R T H E A R T S
980 MADISON AVENUE
LICE NSE D BY VAGA N EW YOR K V E N U S O V E R M A N H AT TA N . C O M
NOVEMBER 5, 2016 TO JANUARY 21, 2017
DOUGLAS GORDON
MAAG AREAL
ADAM PENDLETON
LÖWENBRÄU AREAL
SUE WILLIAMS
LÖWENBRÄU AREAL
OCT 29–JAN 22
The first comprehensive retrospective of this pivotal
American artist’s work features over 300 objects—films,
assemblages, photographs, and more!
Sponsored by:
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Image: Bruce Conner and Edmund Shea, SOUND OF TWO HAND ANGEL, 1974; collection Tim Savinar and Patricia Unterman;
© 2016 Conner Family Trust, San Francisco / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and Edmund Shea Trust
THE BRIEF
A concise guide to some of the most artists were most closely linked by an Recently restored relations between the
exciting new exhibitions, art fairs, and earnest desire to prompt sociopolitical US and Cuba provide a diplomatic
festivals opening in December. transformation through their work. backdrop to the thirty-eighth edition of
the International Festival of New Latin
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Dec. 4,
2016–Mar. 12, 2017. American Cinema, held annually in
Havana. While the festival hosts a wide
Basim Magdy: An
variety of international films, the official
MIAMI selections are fiction, documentary, and
Apology to a Love
Story that Crashed
animated works by Latin American and into a Whale, 2016,
ART WEEK Caribbean filmmakers. This year,
C-print on Fujiflex
metallic paper.
Approximately twenty satellite fairs
the event is dedicated to director and Courtesy Gypsum
supplement the main attraction of Gallery, Cairo;
theorist Julio García Espinosa, a pioneer Hunt Kastner,
Miami Art Week, Art Basel Miami
of New Latin American Cinema in the Prague; artSümer,
Beach, which gathers more than Istanbul.
1960s, who died earlier this year.
250 galleries from around the world.
Artists contributing projects to the Karl Marx Theatre, Havana,
Dec. 8–18.
Positions section include Maggie Lee
at New York’s Real Fine Arts and
BASIM MAGDY Amy Yao at Los Angeles’s Various
Egyptian artist Basim Magdy’s first Small Fires. In the art-historical Survey
US survey is organized by MCA Chicago section, San Francisco’s Ratio 3 high-
senior curator Omar Kholeif. Magdy, lights the late Margaret Kilgallen, while
who trained as a painter, now works London’s Vigo Gallery shows work by
primarily in photography and film. recently deceased Emirati conceptual
Shooting on Super 8 film, the artist pioneer Ibrahim El-Salahi. Ambitious
“pickles” his footage, often of landscapes, exhibitions are likewise on offer at
in household chemicals before transfer- the city’s museums, including a Thomas
ring the material to high-definition Bayrle survey at the Institute of
digital video. The psychedelic results Contemporary Art. The Faena Forum,
prompt reflection on memory and dreams a 50,000-square-foot cultural program-
of collective utopias. This presentation ming space designed by Rem Koolhaas/
Exterior view of
includes Magdy’s videos 13 Essential
Rules for Understanding the World (2011)
OMA, will be inaugurated with a
performance by Madonna.
KOCHI-MUZIRIS the Faena Forum,
Miami Beach, 2016.
and Time Laughs Back at You Like a Various venues, Miami, Dec. 1–4. BIENNALE Photo Mariana
Gatto.
Sunken Ship (2012), as well as new
The third edition of the Kochi-
photographic commissions.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
LATIN AMERICAN Muziris Biennale, the largest in
South Asia, is curated by Mumbai–
Dec. 10, 2016–Mar. 19, 2017. CINEMA based artist Sudarshan Shetty. For
Cuban cinema has been tightly controlled “Forming in the pupil of an eye,”
RUSSIAN by the state since Castro’s rise to power. Shetty has taken inspiration from
mythical tales of India as the “land
REVOLUTION of seven rivers,” conceiving of the
Commemorating the 1917 Russian biennial around his notion that the
Revolution, “A Revolutionary Impulse: The present consists of “streams” flowing
Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde” covers from the past. Indian artists such as
Gustav Klutsis:
the highly innovative period between 1912 Avinash Veeraraghavan, Orijit Sen, Memorial to Fallen
and Praneet Soi are exhibiting Leaders, 1927, cover
and 1934. Drawn primarily from MoMA’s with lithograph
collection, the show’s paintings, draw- alongside international peers including photomontage
ings, sculptures, prints, books, film, and Achraf Touloub, Erik Van Lieshout, illustrations, 13½
by 10¼ inches.
photography by figures such as El Lissitzky, and Pawel Althamer. Courtesy Museum
Kasimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Aleks- Various venues, Kochi, India, Dec. 12, of Modern Art,
New York. © Artists
andr Rodchenko, and Dziga Vertov trace 2016–Mar. 29, 2017. Rights Society
the creation of new abstract movements, (ARS), New York.
notably Suprematism and Constructivism,
as well as avant-garde poetry, film, and —The Brief is compiled by
photomontage. These multidisciplinary Julia Wolkoff
ART IN AMERICA 23
A New Dawn:
Contemporary Cuban Art
December 8, 2016 - January 12, 2017
G O D E L &C O
506 EAST 74TH STREET 4W NEW YORK NY 10021
212-288-7272 WWW.GODELFINEART.COM
ICA Miami exhibitions are funded through the Knight Contemporary Art Fund at The Miami Foundation.
Thomas Bayrle, Stadt am Wald, 1982. Photo collage and dust on cardboard, 39 3/8 x 29 5/8 inches.
FIRST LOOK
Jasmine Nyende in
her performance
Auction, 2016,
at As It Stands,
Los Angeles.
Jasmine Nyende
by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal
“I DIDN’T BRING RACE into the room, the room brought Nyende’s use of restraints points to a conceptual double-
race into me.” So begins “Crown,” a poem by Los Angeles bind of black performance art as both the subject of her
performance artist Jasmine Nyende. Race doesn’t belong to work and an object to consume: she explores the dependence
individuals, she says here, but to structures—not to people but of self-expression on institutional exploitation and vice versa.
to the houses they live in. Nyende’s works often use actions of In So Real, So Fake (2016), a performance presented as an
binding, tethering, and containment to convey the claustropho- open rehearsal in the Hammer Museum’s courtyard, Nyende COMING
SOON
bia of her experience of white supremacy, particularly within art used song lyrics from an episode of the Nickelodeon cartoon Work by Jasmine
institutions. In Auction (2016), presented at As It Stands gallery “As Told by Ginger,” in which the main character performs Nyende in “Sorority:
in LA, Nyende stood before a metal dog crate as she inflated at a talent show. She added her own lines, including: “the The Woods and The
Internet,” a performance
several narrow, brightly colored twist-and-shape balloons 720 only runs once an hour,” a joke about the LA bus that salon at the Hammer
and tied them around her legs, waist, and arms. These props brought her to the Hammer. Museum, Los
alluded to the massive, mirrored balloon dogs by Jeff Koons, Halfway through the hour-long performance, a Hammer Angeles, Dec. 3–4.
sold for vast sums at auction houses like Sotheby’s. “The stage curator turned down the volume of Nyende’s microphone
is haunted by the auction block,” she yelled, as half-abstract bal- at the request of patrons and staff of the museum’s restau-
loon creatures squeaked, farted, and popped around her. Nyende rant. I couldn’t help but balk at the irony. A few minutes TRACY JEANNE
ROSENTHAL
placed both the history of black performance and the art earlier, Nyende had wrapped the cord of her microphone is a writer based in
market in dialogue with the commoditization of black bodies around her, as if strangled by the tool for self-expression— Los Angeles.
in the slave trade. “How much would you pay for that?” Nyende a beautiful, wrenching literalization of the aporia of black
asked as she entered the crate and slammed the door. The artist performance. “I know if I stay chipper,” she sang over and
aligned herself not with Koons but with his balloons, with the over—the first half of a conditional statement, with a “then”
animal or the object rather than the human—incriminating the that never arrived. With a combination of determination and
art world as a kind of open-air prison. forbearance, the words rang out like prayer.
ART IN AMERICA 27
“Near,” 2015, acrylic on canvas, 48'' x 48''
Victor Kord
Anonymous Collaborations
New Paintings
Screengrab,
showing sea level
rise projections,
from a presentation
given by Alliance
of the Southern
Triangle during
Cannonball’s
“Making a Global
City” conference,
April 2015, Miami.
ART IN AMERICA 31
If ever there were a time for interventionist programs and
new pedagogical platforms, this is it.
View of Bik
van der Pol’s
installation
Speechless, 2015,
at the Pérez Art
Museum Miami.
Photo Oriol
Tarridas.
relations. This territory rarely coincides with that of other genera- next century. Beyond this, the new infrastructure has had dev-
tions of Cubans who have capitalized on the city’s image and astating unintentional environmental consequences, irreparably
resources. Its cartography is soundtracked by a reguetón repertoire damaging the biodiversity of Biscayne Bay (where the Miami
identical to the one currently playing in Havana. As writer Ivan de Beach pumps expel collected waters). We know that we can’t
la Nuez recently put it in the Madrid-based magazine El Estado survive climate change unscathed. Pessimism weighs heavily on
Mantal, reguetón, which pervades the Caribbean, is the most the collective imagination, even as this ambient gloom mobilizes
significant expressive form for the first post-Revolution genera- a new critical vocabulary and energy.
tion that can live both on and off the island of Cuba, divesting the
Florida Straits of their old physical and symbolic power to obstruct ONE OF THE MOST surprising things about Miami,
the traffic of cultural and affective transactions. pressed between sea and swamp, a slight past and a watery
Finally, there is the projective map that is consolidating future, is that none of the concern about climate has made
around climate change. It marks a future geography that increas- much headway in local cultural production. Somehow still
ingly prompts younger Miami citizens to demand substantial caught up making discrete objects for showroom spaces—be
changes in the city’s politics. This is perhaps the darkest terrain of they booths at an art fair or entryways in luxury condos—
all, despite the unprecedented Southeast Florida Regional Com- many Miami artists seem to be imagining themselves safely
pact, an effort by the four coastal counties vulnerable to climate ensconced in some landlocked city far from here. To be fair,
change—Miami-Dade County among them—to join forces and, a few artists have responded more conscientiously. When
in collaboration with local universities, develop policy and push Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol, of the duo Bik van der Pol,
state resources toward “mitigation and adaptation strategies.” Yet visited the city, they couldn’t believe that there is an unofficial
many of the efforts undertaken have led to dead ends. Miami mandate, according to what state employees have told report-
Beach’s recent $400-million infrastructural expenditures, including ers, to excise phrases like “climate change,” “sea-level rise,”
investments in water pumps and elevated roads, have not kept the and “global warming” from official Florida documents. The
city from flooding during non-storm high tides or safeguarded a Dutch artists, familiar with their homeland’s long history of
substantial swath of it from almost-assured disappearance over the tangling with the sea, produced Speechless (2015), an aviary in
&
High Anxiety:
New Acquisitions
Nov 30, 2016 – Aug 25, 2017
which parrots spoke lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” with sensible speculative forms. After all, we know that, aside
evoking the madness of language’s failure to bring about posi- from indispensable local crime writers, Ballard is the only psy-
tive environmental change. They installed it at the Pérez Art chosocial diagnostician that Miami has. His novel The Drowned
Museum Miami, which was designed as a raised structure that World (1962) is a picture of the city’s future. The gigantic reptiles
can withstand a ten-foot storm surge. Alliance for the Southern and poisonous ferns are coming. The vertical gardens will no
Triangle is an art collective that has generated speculative fiction longer be planned.
in the form of documents, PowerPoint presentations, and murals On the other hand, an imagination of the future drawn from
that speak to us from fifty years and a few feet of sea-level rise in Ballard helps only insofar as light can bounce off it and onto top-
the future, when, according to their narratives, South Florida will ics like the “climate gap,” the disparities in the projected impact
have seceded from the rest of the state and its head-in-the-sand of climate change on poor and affluent communities. Such a shift
politics. There are other artists who illustrate ecological instabil- in attention can return difference—in terms of race and ethnicity
ity. But what we need now is the opposite of symbolic produc- and class—to the homogeneous anthropos that many global-
tion. If ever there were a time for interventionist programs and warming narratives presuppose and promote. Pollution hotspots,
new pedagogical platforms, this is it. heat islands, food deserts, and flood-prone areas can be easily
When art glides on the surface of things, anthropogenic mapped, and they usually coincide with communities of color.
effects and their everyday consequences are articulated only in There is work to be done here.
technical terms—in scientific jargon and its journalistic reca- The very exercise of understanding Miami as a landscape
pitulation. We can continue to shoot videos of the ocean that that has so far survived year in and year out assaults by uncon-
insinuate some impending doom, or make paintings of coral trollable forces has made us immune to panic when faced with
reefs proliferating over the DJ booths of submerged South Beach a Zika outbreak or a toxic algae bloom. But perhaps that same
clubs, or draft a few sketches of species on the “red list”; we can capacity has prevented our cultural sensors from registering the
even, as Jean Nouvel recently did, put lagoons in architectural magnitude of what is coming. Perhaps it has dulled our sensi-
animations for luxury towers and hope that these will convince tivity to the need to retune our practices so that the forms we
someone that they can mitigate the flood and the fleeing that it produce are spared the sad fate of becoming useless driftwood
will demand. But the amount of pep talk needed to think that when viewed from the future.
this is enough defeats the effort in the first place.
We don’t have to become dry and charmless analysts. We
can still underpin the work we do with some J.G. Ballard–type Atlas is a rotating series of columns by writers from
thinking when looking for ways to supplement hard science Dubai; Stavanger, Norway; and Miami.
February 28–March 5, 2017 PARK AVENUE ARMORY AT 67TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY
F O U N D E D 1 9 6 2
ON PARK AVENUE
Gala Tickets 212.766.9200 , EXT. 248 OR HENRYSTREET.ORG/THEARTSHOWTICKETS Lead sponsoring partner
of The Art Show
ARTDEALERS.ORG/ARTSHOW #TheArtShow
Arwa Al Neami, Never Never Land IV 2014 Courtesy of the artist and Pharan Studio, Jeddah
SUMMER SCHOOL
The nonprofits Ashkal Alwan in Beirut and Asiko in Addis Ababa are both models for art
education. We participated as tutors for each this summer, spending a month in Lebanon
in June and a week in Ethiopia in July. Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works initiative brings a
rotating group of mentors and teachers to lead workshops on a particular theme; ours was
“Everything Else Is Ordinary,” and we attempted to unravel the mundane and the miracu-
lous in everyday life. Asiko—which is run by the Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos, but
holds sessions in various cities in Africa—is a combination workshop, residency, and school,
with classes on art-making techniques and critical thinking. Both programs bring together
Asiko participants and faculty on an excursion to the stelae extraordinary creative and intellectual energy. We found dynamic thinking about how art
fields of Axum, Ethiopia. engages with geopolitics and how art education can be positioned for the future.
ART IN AMERICA 37
GLOBAL CONTEXT
Detail of a
manuscript
illumination,
attributed to the
Master of the
Barbo Missal, from
Maimonides’s
Mishneh Torah,
1135–1204, tempera,
gold leaf, and ink
on parchment,
346 folios, each
9 by 7¼ inches.
Courtesy Israel
Museum, Jerusalem,
and Metropolitan
Museum of Art,
New York.
An Armorial Age
by Josephine Livingstone
STANDING BESIDE a medieval grave topper in the Met- The effigy was that of a knight of the d’Aluye family. Just
ropolitan Museum of Art (the technical term is “monumental like Larkin’s stone couple, his feet rest on a stupid-looking
effigy,” but some of them are so reminiscent of cake toppers CURRENTLY
animal: a small fluffy lion, in this case. But there’s no wife,
that we should change the name), I overheard a couple make ON VIEW
a bet. They were walking around the exhibition “Jerusalem because this is a fighter attired for battle. He lies there in “Jerusalem 1000–
1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,” and their wager chain mail, a sword and shield resting on his legs. He is a 1400: Every People
Under Heaven,” at
was about the identity of the poet who wrote “An Arundel crusader. The sword has a distinctive trefoil handle of no kind
the Metropolitan
Tomb.” The man stumped for Philip Larkin, the woman, Sea- ever manufactured in Europe. The man’s effigy was carved Museum of Art,
mus Heaney. This elderly couple was thinking about that poem in France in the thirteenth century, but his sword is not New York, through
because in it, Larkin (sorry, lady) writes about one such topper: Jan. 8, 2017.
French. He wished to be buried beneath a foreign weapon,
one perhaps abandoned or captured in a battlefield far away,
Side by side, their faces blurred, because he was the kind of man whose life derived meaning JOSEPHINE
LIVINGSTONE is
The earl and countess lie in stone, from fighting and living in the Holy Land.
a writer and editor
Their proper habits vaguely shown Jerusalem is a weird overloaded place now, and it was a living in New York.
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, weird overloaded place then. According to the Met’s wall See Contributors
page.
And that faint hint of the absurd— label, in the medieval era Jerusalem “was home to more cul-
The little dogs under their feet. tures, faiths, and languages than at any other period,” a city
ART IN AMERICA 41
Left to right: “of productive coexistence and the backdrop for strife.” Muslim culture, they call it “the Haram al-Sharif or the Noble
Jewish wedding ring, Although Jerusalem of course remains a place of contrast and Sanctuary.” The curators use the Gregorian calendar (the one
Germany, ca. 1300–50, conflict today, from 1000 to 1400 ce the balance of society that Pope Gregory introduced in 1582, the most widely used
gold, approx. 2 by 1 by
1 inches. Thuringian
tipped differently. European Christians and Muslim powers calendar in the world today) to date objects, with the apolo-
State Office for tussled for control as waves of crusade and jihad alike were getic acknowledgment that “many calendars were and are still
Heritage and launched and rebuffed, and the art of this period is similarly current.” Met house style dictates that they use ad and bc, but
Archaeology, Erfurt.
dominated by artisans of those faiths. Jerusalem’s medieval Jews the curators write that they “have used these abbreviations
Mosque lamp were poorer and more marginal. The great seams of medieval minimally and, we hope, with sensitivity.”
attributed to the
patronage of Sultan Jewish scholarship, artwork, manufacture, and trade—including The show is organized in six sections, each named in an “X
Sayf al-Din Sa’id the work of artists and scholars who reflected on Jerusalem as a of Y” format: The Pulse of Trade and Tourism; The Diversity of
Barquq, Egypt or
Syria, ca. 1382–99, key site—ran through Europe, not Jerusalem itself. Peoples; The Air of Holiness; The Drumbeat of Holy War; The
glass with gold and There is Jewish art here, but mostly not, which is odd Generosity of Patrons; The Promise of Eternity. The titles are
enamel, 13¾ by
10½ by 10½ inches.
because Jerusalem is in Israel. It’s worth thinking about as a good guide to the show’s ideological spread, which is highly
Victoria and Albert you walk through the show. The exhibition’s curators, Bar- generalized, more a platform to display the unbelievable trea-
Museum, London. bara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, have handled sures that the Met can summon than a vehicle to make any par-
Detail of Matthew the political implications of these objects with great delicacy. ticular point about any particular politics. The exhibition itself
Paris’s map of the Holy Diplomatically, they have relied on context when citing place- could be considered a kind of confidence-building measure,
Land from Chronica
majora, vol. 1, England, names. “When discussing a Jewish perspective on the sacred from one angle: Jerusalem’s factions are at least symbolically at
ca. 1240–53, watercolor esplanade where the Ancient Temple once stood,” they write peace in this show. The treasures sit there very quietly indeed.
and ink on parchment.
Corpus Christi College, in the exhibition catalogue, “we refer to the area as the Temple And the treasures are overwhelming. Almost two hundred
University of Cambridge. Mount.”1 When they refer to the same place in the context of works are assembled here, lent from sixty owners across more
green, with Jerusalem inside a pretty red box. There are little Left, a knight of
the d’Aluye family,
flaps on the edges of the pages, panels you can lift to find France, ca. 1248–67,
secrets beneath. Maps are not neutral forms of knowledge. A limestone, 83½ by
34½ by 13 inches.
map does not possess a one-to-one correspondence with that Metropolitan
which it represents, for the simple reason that it is a repre- Museum of Art.
sentational form and not that thing itself. But a true map is
Right, illustration,
linked necessarily to real world space of some kind. Matthew by Mardi ibn ‘Ali
Paris’s map places Jerusalem in a big red square, because to of Tarsus, for a
treatise on medieval
him it was the most important place in the world. A map weaponry, Syria,
always confronts its user with an interface that mediates the 1187 or before,
than a dozen countries. A quarter are from Jerusalem itself: knowledge it contains. watercolor, gold, and
ink on paper, one
from the Custodia Terrae Sanctae, the Greek Orthodox Patri- Exhibitions do the same thing, and there are some odd of 217 folios, 9⅞ by
archate, the Armenian Patriarchate, the Islamic Museum. Each moments in this one. One of the many small golden objects 7⅝ inches. Bodleian
Libraries, University
item is deeply special, but some are exceptionally surprising. in this show is a phylactery with the Finding of the Cross. of Oxford.
Look for the strangely shaped swords, the fourteenth-century A phylactery is a kind of container. In our time, they’re
New Testament written in Arabic, the walrus ivory cross. most often found in the form of tefillin worn by Jewish
Geopolitics is inevitably part of the conversation. The men at prayer. But this is a Christian one, originally hung
first object you see as you enter the show is one of the maps above an altar or worn by a priest. It isn’t from Jerusalem
made by St. Albans monk Matthew Paris in the 1250s, illus- at all. It depicts events taking place in Jerusalem, but it was
trating his work the Chronica Majora. It’s an itinerary map, made in Belgium in 1160. The phylactery is made of gilded
meaning that it shows a pilgrimage route. The map is very copper, émail brun, champlevé enamel, gems, rock crystal,
and wood. In its four narrative panels, the phylactery shows 1. Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, “Note to The Reader,” in Jerusalem
scenes of the discovery of the true cross by Helena, mother 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2016, p. xvi.
of Constantine the Great. This story was very popular in the 2. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, New York,
medieval period. W.W. Norton & Company, 1989, p. 18.
The caption for this object in the exhibition describes Hel-
ena using “enhanced interrogation techniques” to find the cross:
her soldiers are portrayed dangling Jews over a pit of fire. Is this
joke funny? Is it grim? Perhaps it is grimly funny, conscious of
the past and future of Jerusalem as a place of sectarian violence.
Perhaps it is the only moment where the curators couldn’t help
but throw a little politically conscious critique into their show,
otherwise so sensitive and pluralistic.
The present day intrudes into this exhibition in the
Illustration of form of video monitors. The press release refers to videos
temple implements that show us, “as through windows,” people in contemporary
from a Hebrew
bible, Catalonia
Jerusalem. But the monitors are nothing like windows. They
(Spain), ca. 1300–25, are like televisions. The sound is tinny and distracting, filling
tempera, gold, and the dark galleries thinly but inescapably. “I have to be very
ink on parchment,
one of 500 folios, alert in my job,” a Jerusalem priest says over and over again.
15½ by 11½ The sound’s thinness feels dimensional: it sits on top of the
inches. Collection
Jay and Jeannie enormous historical depth of the show like cheap frosting on
Schottenstein, some priceless cake.
Columbus, Ohio.
It is very difficult not to think of Freud on palimp-
sests when touring these galleries. In Civilization and Its
Discontents, he writes of the mind as a place overlain with
successive layers of thought and memory. The mind is like
Rome, Freud says, if you could imagine all the different eras
of Rome’s development occupying the same space in the city
at exactly the same time: “Where the Coliseum stands now,
we could at the same time admire Nero’s Golden House;
on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the
CHERYL GOLDSLEGER
MORRIS MUSEUM OF ART UNQUIET TERRITORIES
1 Tenth Street
Augusta, GA 30901 December 10, 2016 - March 12, 2017
www.themorris.org Catalogue available
UP CLOSE
Robert Rauschenberg Disused manufacturing lofts have histori- histories sheds light on this inversion,
cally attracted artists seeking affordable and what it means for the artistic life of
Foundation / spaces—this is how New York’s SoHo Atlanta today.
Art in America came to be, and the “SoHo effect” a wide-
Arts Writing Fellowship spread model of gentrification. Atlanta’s The Old Urbanism
former industrial buildings are being
Essay repurposed too, and its neighborhoods (or, Koolhaas vs.
rebranded with four-letter nicknames, just Portman)
as they are in many American cities. All Among the many cultural events staged
this is happening at an accelerated pace, in anticipation of the 1996 Summer
This article is part of the Robert
encouraged by city leaders and made pos- Olympics was “Atlanta,” an exhibition
Rauschenberg Foundation / Art in sible by private investment from the city’s of photographs by Jordi Bernadó and
America Arts Writing Fellowship, prime mover: real estate development. Ramón Prat taken in the centennial
a joint project designed to
foster cultural criticism in cities
Traditionally, though, property developers games’ host city, and presented at the
throughout the United States. have followed artists to the frontiers or Institute of North American Studies
forgotten corners of a city. In Atlanta, they (Institut d’Estudis Nord-Americans) in
VICTORIA CAMBLIN is the editor and artistic
put them there. A look back at the city’s Barcelona. Most of the works on view
director of Art Papers. See Contributors page. entwined architectural and economic were black-and-white urban landscapes,
48 DECEMBER 2016
devoid of people but full of cars and
buildings. These were reproduced in an
accompanying photo book of the same
name that includes written contributions
by art historian Maria Lluïsa Borràs,
writer Rafael Argullol, and architects
Richard Dagenhart, Enric Miralles,
Randall Roark, and Rem Koolhaas.1
Koolhaas had written about Atlanta
before. In 1989, his essay “Toward the
Contemporary City” appeared in Design
Book Review, where it urged readers
to “leave Paris and Amsterdam—go
look at Atlanta, quickly and without
preconceptions.”2 Koolhaas included
the essay, “Atlanta,” in S, M, L, XL
(1995)—a 1,376-page tome produced
with his firm, Office for Metropolitan
Architecture, and designer Bruce Mau,
and containing twenty years of architec-
tural plans, diary excerpts, sketches, and
research, among other items. The essay Jordi Bernadó: Atlanta, 1994, Lambda
print, 5 by 67/8 inches.
crystallizes the architect’s apparent, if
brief, preoccupation with the Georgia almost as swiftly as the square footage. If Opposite, view of downtown Atlanta’s
capital. “Sometimes it is important to the current incarnation of the High was Peachtree Center, showing its
John Portman–dominated skyline,
find out what the city is—instead of born a building in search of a collection, including the Marriott Marquis (left)
what it was, or what it should be,” Kool- then Koolhaas’s intuition points to the and the Hyatt Regency with rooftop
restaurant (center). Courtesy John
haas wrote. “That is what drove me to reality that in Atlanta, the city’s buildings Portman & Associates.
Atlanta—an intuition that the real city motivate the production, acquisition, and
at the end of the 20th century could be exhibition of visual art.
found there.”3 Listed among Koolhaas’s This goes for Atlanta’s private col-
findings: “Atlanta has culture, or at least lections as well: the most impressive and
it has a Richard Meier museum.” international of these seem to be owned
About three years ago, when I was by individuals involved in real estate
moving to Atlanta, if people I talked development, sales, or management. One
View of Sue and John Wieland’s exhibition
to from other cities around the world notable collection, belonging to Sue and space wareHOUSE. Photo Fredrik Brauer.
had read anything about Atlanta, it was John Wieland (of John Wieland Homes),
Koolhaas’s essay in S, M, L, XL. I believe contains works by Olafur Eliasson, Rachel
this text remains the most true and Whiteread, John Baldessari, Louise Bour-
relevant theoretical text about the city, but geois, and Gregory Crewdson, among oth-
its observations—often abstract—lend ers. Each piece in the wareHOUSE, as the
themselves to casual misinterpretation Wielands’ by-appointment-only exhibition
by those who have not spent time space is called, has been selected because it
here. Koolhaas’s comment about the engages the image of the house.4
Richard Meier museum refers to the Far from these private collections,
High Museum of Art, after which Meier Atlanta’s skyline is still dominated by
received a Pritzker Prize in 1984. (It was buildings designed and realized by the
completed the previous year.) Though it city’s own starchitect, John Portman, in the
may seem so, Koolhaas was not dismiss- last decades of the twentieth century—
ing the museum’s contents, which even convention centers, “marts,” and hotels,
at the time were impressive. What makes interconnected by labyrinthine pedestrian
his comment continually relevant is not skyways and punctuated by grand, surreal
the collection’s cultural or material value, indoor atria. A staff writer for the urban
but the fact that the museum’s holdings design blog Curbed Atlanta once called
doubled in size after the execution of a Portman “the ultimate architect/developer-
Renzo Piano–designed annex in 2002, in-one,” noting his resounding rejection
ART IN AMERICA 49
sculpture, can both be elevated to a higher their businesses, with them. In 1960, central
realm by their impact on each other when Atlanta contained 90 percent of the metro-
properly fused.”7 politan area’s office space; by 1980, it held
Portman’s fusional impulse resonates 42 percent, and by 1999, only 13 percent.10
with some of Koolhaas’s conclusions about Yet this period of attrition was Portman’s
Atlanta as a whole. “Atlanta is a creative heyday. John Portman & Associates built in
experiment,” the Dutch architect wrote, I downtown Atlanta throughout the 1970s,
believe favorably, “but it is not intellectual 1980s, and 1990s, enticing commerce with
or critical: it has taken place without convenient skyways that allowed transient
argument.” The best (and least frictional) conventioneers and salespeople to float
place to see a John Portman artwork in undisturbed above the city’s increasingly
Atlanta is inside a John Portman building. impoverished and crime-ridden streets.
At SunTrust Plaza, the tallest building in Portman’s atrium replaced the piazza and
the downtown area, corporate employees became, again in Koolhaas’s words, an
and intrepid art hunters can view the “ersatz downtown.”
polymath’s One-Eyed Jack, an aluminum The canonical Portman atrium has
sculpture installed atop a fluted column, in made some exciting new appearances in
the two-story lobby. Portman’s Beilei I, a popular visual culture in the last several
“budding flower” made of sheet bronze, is years—a comeback that was the subject of
installed on the lower lobby level. a 2015 article in the Atlantic called “How
When SunTrust Plaza opened in 1980s Atlanta Became the Backdrop
1992, John Portman & Associates already for the Future.”11 The author cites
had a thirty-year global portfolio that television series such as “The Walking
included Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency (Port- Dead” and movie franchises such as The
man’s first atrium hotel, which opened in Hunger Games and Divergent—all filmed
1967); San Francisco’s Embarcadero Cen- in Atlanta, thanks in no small part to
ter, Los Angeles’s Westin Bonaventure Georgia state tax incentives—as inheri-
Hotel, and Detroit’s Renaissance Center tors of the dystopian aesthetic of Paul
(all 1970s); the ostentatious and contro- Verhoeven’s Robocop and John Carpenter’s
versial Marriott Marquis in New York’s Escape from LA, which contain footage
Times Square as well as hotels in South shot in Portman’s Renaissance Center
Korea and Singapore (all 1980s); and the and Westin Bonaventure, respectively.
Shanghai Centre in China (1990). Major For The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, a film
cities across the United States, East Asia, that depicts a society-wide class revolu-
and “even” Europe, as Koolhaas put it, tion, the impressive atrium in Portman’s
came to boast examples of Portman’s rein- Atlanta Marriott Marquis was adapted as
Top, lobby of vented atrium: an architectural device that part of the setting for the decadent and
John Portman
& Associates’ was once “a hole in a house or building that corrupt Capitol of Panem. When artists,
SunTrust Plaza, injects light and air—the outside—into designers, or architects come to visit, I
showing Portman’s
sculpture One-
of “the notion that his projects should be the center,” but in Portman’s hands was take them to the lobby of the Marriott
Eyed Jack, 1992. built in dialogue with site, context, or any the opposite: “a container of artificiality Marquis for cocktails, then on to the
Photo Michael space shared by the larger public.”5 With that allows its occupants to avoid daylight Hyatt Regency—via skyway—to Polaris,
Portman.
Portman’s multiple roles, Koolhaas wrote, forever—a hermetic interior, sealed a “Jetsons”–meets–“Mad Men”–styled
Above, elevator “the traditional opposition between client against the real.”8 rotating restaurant. Each revolution charts
core in the atrium
of John Portman & and architect—two stones that create The isolationist flavor of Portman’s a city structure hostile to humans and the
Associates’ Atlanta sparks—disappears. The vision of the buildings—“self-contained citadels,” to connectivity and mobility that tradition-
Marriott Marquis.
architect is realized without opposition, cite scholar Eric Avila, in which public life ally nourish dialogue and discovery in the
Photo Jaime
Ardiles-Arce. without influence, without inhibition.”6 and space are aggressively privatized—has arts. Peppering the view from Polaris are
Portman himself identifies as an architect, been explained as both a symptom of pockets of buildings confined by freeways
a developer, and an artist, and in his view, and a response to suburbanization and and heavy industrial rail lines; to the
these three occupations are at their best white flight.9 Following desegregation north, two additional clusters of skyscrap-
when merged. Portman has said that “to and the Civil Rights Movement, as white ers assert themselves through the density
understand development, analyze feasibil- Americans began to leave the city center of Atlanta’s tree canopy: the alternative
ity, and design accordingly is an architect in search of homogeneous communities commercial districts of Midtown and,
performing at the highest level,” and simi- “outside the perimeter”—OTP, as we say beyond it, Buckhead, which ascend in
larly that “architecture and art, particularly in Atlanta—they took their business, and affluence as one moves uptown.
Nader’s
62 NE 27 St. Miami, FL 33137 t+1.305.576.0256 f.+1.305.576.0948
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George Curtis Polar Sea, The Cathedral, 1867
1816-1881 15 x 26 in.
Best in Show, Peabody Essex Museum “To The Ends of the Earth, Polar Landscape”
Robert
Rauschenberg
(far right) and
David White
(third from right)
with a panel from
Rauschenberg’s
installation The ¼
Mile or 2 Furlong
Piece, 1981–98, at
Edison Community
College, Fort Myers,
Fla., 1982. Photo
Terry Van Brunt.
THIS WAS TAKEN in early February 1982, when Robert a tentlike plexiglass cover that we are all supporting; it’s really
Rauschenberg’s The ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong Piece was first complicated trying to fit everything together.
installed at the Gallery of Fine Arts at Edison Community Bob was always one for the expansive gesture. He was
College in Fort Myers, Florida, not far from Bob’s place on never hesitant to start a seemingly overwhelming project. This
Captiva Island. He showed the installation several times long-running installation is often thought of as a retrospec-
there over the years, as the piece progressed, so he could see tive, in that he incorporated methods and materials into it CURRENTLY
it in full. It’s so sprawling—eventually comprising about 190 that matched what he was doing separately in the studio. For ON VIEW
“Robert Rauschen-
panels—that there wasn’t room to spread it out in his studio. example, he made a series of dark silkscreen paintings on metal,
berg,” at Tate
I first met Bob at Leo Castelli’s gallery, where I worked after called “Night Shade,” and you can see similar somber, mysteri- Modern, London,
college. He moved to Captiva around 1970, and I’d visit him there ous panels in a section of ¼ Mile. Scrap metal figures into a Dec. 1, 2016–
Apr. 2, 2017.
periodically. He was looking for someone to organize his records, sculpture series called “Gluts” as well as into portions of ¼ Mile.
and hired me for an archivist/registrar type of job in 1980. Bob Bob worked on this artwork sporadically. There’d be
wasn’t so concerned with titles; everyone did a little of everything. flurries of activity, and then he’d move on to something else. DAVID WHITE
is senior curator
If you saw the turtle standing in front of the fridge, you’d open it He made the last couple of sections around the time of his
at the Robert
and give him some lettuce or strawberries. In this photo I’m third retrospective in the late 1990s. The show traveled to the Rauschenberg
from the right, and Bob is holding up the point. The guy on the Guggenheim Bilbao in November 1998, and ¼ Mile was Foundation,
New York.
far left is Eric Holt, Bob’s studio assistant at the time. The others, installed in an enormous gallery there, where Richard Serra’s
I believe, were affiliated with Edison. This particular panel is one sculptures are now on view. It wrapped around the walls, but
of the heaviest, most complex parts of ¼ Mile. The background is stopped a little short, so Bob made a few extra panels to fill
a world map, and there are remnants of a white-painted bamboo the space. That was the last time anything was added.
beach chair. You can’t tell because the photo is black-and-white,
but the joints of the chair are wrapped in colorful fabric. There is — As told to Leigh Anne Miller
ART IN AMERICA 59
William Frederick de Haas Mt. Desert, Maine, 1879
1823 -1900 15 x 26 in.
©2016 AM Fine Arts, Inc.
Charles Kingsley Bermuda, 1875 William Verplank Birney Girl with Berries
1855-1941 10 x 12 in. 1858 -1909 8 x 10 in.
Multiple Originals
by Eleanor Heartney
REIKO TOMII sents carefully researched and analyzed case studies that point
Radicalism in the Wilderness: to a less chauvinistic way of understanding globalism in art.
This book had a long gestation. In the acknowledgments,
International Contemporaneity Tomii says that her work as researcher and co-curator for several
and 1960s Art in Japan 1990s exhibitions sparked both the questions and the answers that
Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2016; 311 pages, 18 color and 81 black-and-white she discusses here in depth. Of particular relevance was “Global
illustrations; $36.95 hardcover. Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s.” A sprawling
multipart show mounted in 1999 by the late Jane Farver, then ELEANOR
Reiko Tomii’s Radicalism in the Wilderness deals with one of the curator at New York’s Queens Museum, it reviewed two contem- HEARTNEY is an
A.i.A. contributing
persistent conundrums of art historical study—why do strik- poraneous waves of conceptual thinking in thirteen geographic editor who lives in
ingly similar movements and artworks appear simultaneously regions worldwide. Tomii, who worked closely with Farver on the New York.
in distant and disconnected places? Traditionally, the evolution exhibition, was responsible for the Japanese segment, forming the
of art is cast in terms of binaries like “mainstream vs. periphery” kernel that, seventeen years later, became this volume.
or “originality vs. imitation.” In this explanation, ideas ripple To make her case for the distinctive nature of Japanese con-
outward from major cultural centers to the margins, becom- ceptual art of the 1960s, Tomii offers a series of terms that direct
ing ever more diluted as they move away from the source. But the reader away from the top-down model of artistic influence.
Tomii’s account marshals a strong argument against such linear Primary among these is the notion of “international contempora-
thinking. Focusing on one artist and two artist groups that neity,” a phrase coined by the Japanese art critic Haryū Ichirō. This
emerged in Japan in the expanded 1960s (1954–77), she pre- rather ungainly formulation captures Japanese artists’ sharp aware-
ART IN AMERICA 63
Tomii’s “wilderness” denotes both remote locales and art
activities “outside the norms in thinking.”
Books in Brief
ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN, ed. MIRJAM SHATANAWI and DIANE DUFOUR and MANFRED HEITING, ed.
Parallel Views: WAYNE MODEST, eds. MATTHEW WITKOVSKY, eds.
The Japanese
Italian and Japanese The Sixties: Provoke: Photobook,
Art from the 1950s, A Worldwide Between Protest 1912–1980
60s and 70s Happening and Performance— This tome chronicles the develop-
Supplementing a 2014 show The term “globalization” Photography in ment of photography publications
at the Warehouse in Dallas, entered the vernacular during Japan 1960–1975 in Japan, from early examples
this catalogue compares works the 1960s, after Marshall Although only three issues were reflecting Western influences to
by postwar artists on opposite McLuhan claimed in his 1962 published, the Japanese magazine distinctive experiments following
sides of the globe, from Arte book The Gutenberg Galaxy that Provoke crystallized cultural and the end of World War II. During
Povera in Italy to the Gutai “the new electronic interdepen- artistic trends at a moment of post- the postwar years, a new genera-
and Mono-ha groups in Japan. dence recreates the world in war cultural reinvention. Contribu- tion of photographers and artists
Defeated in World War II, both the image of a global village.” tions by Provoke collective members explored unorthodox techniques
countries strove to rebuild their Accompanying an exhibition of including critic Koji Taki, poet in photography, design, and
cities and national identities the same name at Amsterdam’s Takahiko Okada, and photographer printing. Progressive publications
following fascist eras. Scholars Tropenmuseum, this book of Daido Moriyama blended protest like Shomei Tomatsu’s Nagasaki
Joshua Mack, Carolyn Christov- photo essays and texts inves- photography, avant-garde art, and 11:02 (1966) and Nobuyoshi
Bakargiev, and Nicholas Cullinan tigates how new technologies critical theory to critique modern Araki’s Sentimental Journey
discuss connections between the and the growing role of media Japanese life. Published in lieu of a (1971) became internationally
two nations’ art and artists of this ushered in a frenetic era of inter- traveling retrospective, this catalogue influential. Illustrations of more
period—particularly their use of cultural exchange in art, design, positions Provoke between 1960s than four hundred photobooks
“poor” materials—and the vari- fashion, music, architecture, and political movements and the rise are augmented by an introduction
eties of modernism that evolved photography. of performance art in Japan in the by historian Ryuichi Kaneko and
in each place. Eindhoven, Lecturis, 2015; 208 pages, early 1970s. essays by a host of academics.
125 illustrations, $32 paperback. Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2016; 680
Bologna, Damiani, 2015; 408 pages, 240 Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2016; 516
color illustrations, $75 clothbound. pages, 600 black-and-white illustrations, pages, 3,000 color illustrations, $145
$75 softcover. hardcover.
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40
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since 1976
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PRINTS & EDITIONS
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LAS VEGAS
View of the the Neon
Museum, Las Vegas,
showing a sign
from the Horseshoe
Hotel and Casino.
ART IN AMERICA 71
CURRENTLY
ON VIEW
“Carmen Herrera:
Lines of Sight,” at the
Whitney Museum of
WORLDLY
ABSTRACTION
American Art,
New York, through
Jan. 2, 2017.
CARTER
Trained as an architect, Carmen Herrera makes
RATCLIFF is a poet,
critic, and author of
paintings that reconfigure the vertiginous perspectives and
the novel Tequila
Mockingbird (Station
lean shapes of modern city life.
Hill Press, 2015).
by Carter Ratcliff
THE CRISPLY GEOMETRIC paintings of Carmen Herrera flexible grids dividing the surface into lively, nested shapes. An
draw us into a “world of straight lines,” to borrow a phrase from array of greens and browns give the curving forms of Green Garden
one of her interviews.1 Hers is a world where the relations between (1950) an oblique resemblance to tropical fronds and shadows.
shapes are clear and the shapes themselves are even clearer. Yet this Within two years, Herrera had banished all traces of identifiable
unflagging clarity has the power to surprise. In the “Blanco y subject matter. Black and White (1952) is a sixty-eight-inch square View of the
Verde” series, which occupied Herrera from 1959 to 1971, she divided into quadrants, articulated by patterns of black and white exhibition “Carmen
Herrera: Lines of
punctuates fields of white with elongated triangles of emerald stripes. Hung not as a square but as a diamond, this painting seems
Sight,” 2016–17,
green. There are usually just two of these slivery shapes to a canvas, at once precarious and locked into its symmetries. showing (left to
though sometimes there are as many as three or as few as one. For the rest of the 1950s, Herrera played stability off instabil- right) Horizontal,
1965; Rondo, 1958;
With these limited means she turns blank white fields into specific ity, often giving the latter a slight edge. Though the layout of a A City, 1948; and
environments. Herrera has never disclosed much about her process, Herrera canvas can be grasped in a single glance, further looking Untitled, 1949.
Courtesy Whitney
though she did say in 2010, at the age of ninety-five, that “every complicates matters. As the viewer tries to determine which Museum of
painting is a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win.”2 shape in a painting is figure and which is ground, the forms come American Art,
Because the results of these struggles are so consistently successful, together in a single plane. The image stabilizes, but only for a New York. Photo
Ronald Amstutz.
one assumes that each of her paintings is the product of an intense, moment. Herrera’s color-shapes are always on the move. A hue
even obsessive process of trial and error. advances, it retreats; a dynamic form seems to push the right-
The “Blanco y Verde” canvases appear just after the midpoint angled frame slightly out of kilter, then rectilinearity reasserts itself.
in “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,” an exhibition now on view at These subtleties bring her paintings to life and give each one a
the Whitney Museum of American Art. The earliest works feature vibrantly distinctive presence, if not a personality.
HERRERA’S STORY is now well-known in the art world, but
it still amazes. Although she has been painting seriously for more
than seven decades, “Lines of Sight” is her first exhibition at a
major museum. Herrera was marginalized in large part because of
her gender. A Manhattan dealer named Rose Fried told her that
she could paint circles around the men in her stable, but refused to
give a show to a woman.3
Born in Havana in 1915, Herrera grew up as one of seven
siblings in a milieu devoted to art and literature. Her mother,
Carmela, was a journalist and author. Her father, Antonio,
served in the war of independence from Spain and afterward
founded the newspaper El Mundo. The family’s art collec-
tion included paintings by Spanish old masters as well as
contemporary Cubans. Drawing lessons were almost a matter
of course for Herrera and her brother Addison. At fourteen,
she moved to Paris, where she studied French and art history
at the Marymount International School and became familiar
with the city’s museums. Before returning to Havana two
years later, she traveled in Germany and Italy with her mother
and one of her sisters. While still in high school, Herrera
became a painter accomplished enough to be included in
group exhibitions at Havana’s Lyceum and Circulo de Bellas
Artes alongside established artists. Nonetheless, she chose to
major in architecture at the University of Havana.
It was then that she learned something about herself. “There
Among the Whitney exhibition’s most striking paintings is is nothing I love more than to make a straight line,” she said years
Black and White, Green and Orange (1958), in which the two titular colors inter- later. “How can I explain it? It’s the beginning of all structures,
1952, acrylic on
canvas with painted
lock in a pattern of cantilevered bars. The green bars reach to really.”4 Though Herrera passed her exams with honors, she never
frame, 68 inches the right, the orange ones to the left, and Herrera has extended received her architect’s license. This was not a cause for deep
square. Collection them all precisely to the point beyond which they would make regret. As much as she loved straight lines and right angles, she
Estrellita and David
Brodsky. the picture rickety. Next come variations on the narrow shapes was reluctant to deal with clients and their demands. She did not,
of the “Blanco y Verde” series in blue and white, then black and however, completely abandon the third dimension. The Whitney
white. By the mid-1960s she was centering diamond shapes exhibition includes several of the “Estructuras” (Structures) that
on circular canvases, a return to symmetry that accompanied
a diminishment in scale. These are intimate paintings. Shape
takes on more visual heft in a cluster of paintings from the
1970s. Here, blunt rectilinear shapes in red dominate fields of
white. One is reminded, if only obliquely, of buildings massive
enough to block out much of the sky. Having turned toward
View of “Lines of monumentality, Herrera embraced it fully in a series of black-
Sight,” showing (left and-white paintings that would qualify as Brutalist if their
to right, on wall)
Epiphany, 1971;
internal proportions were not so grandly refined. From here it
Red and White, was a short step to the series of seven canvases that bring the
1976; and Amarillo Whitney exhibition to its finale.
“Dos,” 1971; and
(left to right, on Painted in 1975 and 1978, the works are named after the days
platform) Untitled, of the week. In each, one or two large, angular black forms share the
1971, and Estructura
Roja, 1966/2012. surface with one other hue: a luminous yellow in Tuesday (1978), a
Courtesy Whitney smoldering orange in Friday (1978). Aside from the blue of Blue
Museum of
Monday (1975), the choice of colors seems arbitrary, or dictated
American Art.
Photo Ronald by associations so thoroughly personal that we have no way of
Amstutz. knowing what they might be. So we bring our own associations
to bear—or not. These paintings need no extravisual buttress-
ing. Appealing to our sense of shape and space, they endow their
expanses of black and bright color with a levitating weightiness.
Here and throughout Herrera’s oeuvre, line measures off the sur-
face with a precision so economical that it counts as pictorial wit.
Herrera began to build in the mid-1960s. Some are wall pieces; ascendant, and Herrera found her work welcomed only at galleries
others stand on the floor. All are composed of two monochrome and institutions that specialized in art from Latin America. She
slabs that almost fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, but exhibited very little during the next three decades, but continued to
not quite, because Herrera has adjusted the position of the slabs paint, strengthening her command of the “world of straight lines.”
to produce narrow wedge-shaped openings where they meet. In In 1984 “Carmen Herrera: A Retrospective, 1951–1984”
the “Blanco y Verde” paintings, these wedges are made of green opened at the Alternative Museum in downtown Manhattan. The
pigment. In the “Estructuras,” they are empty space. dominant art at the time went by the name Neo-Expressionism—a
In 1939 Herrera married Jesse Loewenthal, a New Yorker she development as thoroughly at odds with Herrera’s sensibility as
had met while he was traveling in Cuba. Soon afterward, Cuba’s Abstract Expressionism, if not more so. After her retrospective, she
political turmoil prompted the couple to leave for the United was included in group shows with increasing frequency. El Museo
States. Once they had settled into an apartment in downtown del Barrio in New York presented a large selection of Herrera’s
Manhattan, Loewenthal returned to his teaching post at Stuyves- black-and-white paintings in 1998. She had stopped painting
ant High School. Herrera painted, occasionally studying at the Art two years earlier to take care of Loewenthal, whose health was
Students League or the Brooklyn Museum Art School. In 1948, deteriorating. He died in 2000. Herrera did not return to painting
with the war in Europe over, Loewenthal took a sabbatical and until 2006, encouraged by the favorable response to a retrospective
they moved to Paris. The center of Herrera’s artistic life was the exhibition of her work presented the year before at Latincollector, a
Salon Réalités Nouvelles, which had been founded two years ear- gallery on West Fifty-Seventh Street.
lier by Sonia Delaunay, Jean Arp, and other veterans of the prewar In the last decade, Herrera has had solo shows in Madrid, Milan,
avant-garde. With a sensibility tilted strongly toward geometric London, and New York. Now the Whitney is celebrating the first half
abstraction, the Salon fostered Herrera’s pictorial predilections. In of her career with a major exhibition, and one hopes that it will be
1949 her work was sufficiently geometric to qualify her for mem- followed by another devoted to the second half, either at this or some
bership in the group, and she was included in its fourth annual other museum. Having been discovered at long last, Herrera’s place
exhibition, held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. in the durable tradition of geometric abstraction is assured. But this Following spread,
view of “Lines of
As Herrera became a regular in the Salon’s yearly shows, her raises a question: where in that tradition does she belong? Sight,” showing
paintings appeared at L’Institute Endoplastique, Galerie Olga (left to right)
Wednesday, 1978;
Bogroff, and other Parisian venues. Immersed in a steady round of AMONG THE ORIGINATORS of geometric abstraction are Tuesday, 1978;
concerts, plays, and literary events, she and Loewenthal acquired two avant-gardists with metaphysical leanings: Kasimir Malevich and Sunday, 1978;
a large circle of friends and colleagues. Loewenthal extended his Piet Mondrian. Malevich claimed that with his Black Square (1915) Friday, 1978;
and Thursday,
sabbatical, enabling them to stay abroad for five years. Obliged he had made painting the vehicle of “pure feeling”—not his or any 1975. Courtesy
to return to New York in 1954, the couple took up residence in other individual’s feeling but “the spirit of non-objective sensation that Whitney Museum
of American Art.
Greenwich Village. Paris, she later said, had been “like heaven.”5 pervades everything.”6 Several years later, Mondrian arrived at the Photo Ronald
New York was far from that. Abstract Expressionism was in the pared-down repertory of straight lines and “rectangular color planes” Amstutz.
Shocking pink made its debut in the late 1930s, in the launch. It is of course undeniable that Herrera would not have
package design for a perfume by Elsa Schiaparelli. So there is no become the painter she is without the example of geometric
denying that Herrera made a theme of femininity by turning the abstraction, in all its theory-driven yearning for transcendent order.
name of this color into the name of a painting. Yet her shocking In Herrera’s art order has the tone—one might say the feel—of life
pink is not to be mistaken for Schiaparelli’s. The fashion designer on the plane where it is actually lived. Her paintings inflect picto-
used it as an emblem, however ironic, of unbridled sensuality. In rial logic with the impulses of physical gesture and the demands
Herrera’s painting, pink has a silvery cast that renders it a touch of fully felt emotion. Her oeuvre prompts a strong intuition of an
austere without denying its fleshly warmth. There is nothing in the uncompromisingly individual presence.
theories and precedents of geometric abstraction to prepare us for Yet the straight lines and smooth surfaces of her images
Shocking Pink. Standing face to face with this painting, we sense ensure that she will never be taken for an expressionist.The ele-
that its palette originates not in Euclidean absolutes but in nuances ments of her style are those of modern architecture compressed
of a self-possessed individual’s experience of gender and sexuality, into two dimensions, as if to suggest that her presence is indistin-
and her attendant thoughts and feelings about them. guishable from the settings it builds for itself. A Herrera painting
Georges Vantongerloo and Theo van Doesburg, who invites us to meet her on grounds emphatically her own.There is a
cofounded De Stijl with Mondrian, admitted green into the com- challenge in the invitation extended by her works, for they require
pany of the three primary colors.10 Mondrian did not. When he rigorous, even scrupulous looking.There is generosity, as well, for
left behind his early, Symbolist work, he came to detest the color. It Herrera’s challenge is attuned to the pleasure we take in making
reminded him of nature, the mundane realm his utopia was meant sense of what we see, even—or especially—when we focus on
to transcend. Herrera often deploys green, but not in shades that subtleties as demanding as hers.
evoke trees and shrubbery. In Green Garden it has a sharp, nearly
acidic quality, and the green of the “Blanco y Verde” series has a
1. Dana Miller, “Carmen Herrera: Sometimes I Win,” Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,
crystalline luminosity befitting its role in structuring wide expanses New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, p. 15.
of white. Elsewhere, as in Green and Orange, green hovers between 2. Hermione Hoby, “Carmen Herrera: ‘Every painting has been a fight between the
structural solidity and atmospheric permeability, much as the form painting and me. I tend to win,’” Guardian, Nov. 20, 2010, theguardian.com.
3. Miller, p. 22.
this green defines can be seen as figure or as ground. Mondrian 4. Ibid.
standardized colors. Herrera does not. Every time green appears in 5. Carmen Herrera, “Backstory: Heavenly Paris,” Art in America, Nov. 2015, p. 73.
her paintings, it reinvents itself. 6. Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism” (1927), Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L. Herbert,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1964, p. 94.
Offering neither to loft us above ordinary life nor propel us 7. Piet Mondrian, “A Dialogue on Neoplasticism” (1919), in Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl,
into a perfected future, Herrera’s abstractions are not program- New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1971, p. 122.
matic, much less didactic. As important as Mondrian was to 8. Malevich, p. 101.
9. Mondrian, pp. 121, 123.
her—she dedicated not one but two of her paintings to him—she 10. John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, Berkeley, University of
is something of an outlier in the history that he did so much to California Press, 2000, p. 260.
BEGIN
Exactly fifty years ago, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Italy’s controversial writer-activist-filmmaker, made his
first of two galvanizing visits to New York.
by Ara H. Merjian
“ACTOR NEEDED TO PLAY Pier Paolo Pasolini.” Thus If Pasolini has left a profound mark on these shores, his
reads an untitled 1990 work by Mike Kelley: a mock flyer own work—particularly following his visits to New York City
stamped on a large piece of felt, seeking a man of “squar- in 1966 and 1969—reveals an intense engagement with Ameri-
ish facial structure” and “medium height” for an unnamed can culture, from the period’s youth and antiwar movements
production. As much as its specific criteria, or its appeal to to black culture to Ezra Pound’s poetry and Andy Warhol’s
nonprofessional actors, the piece’s very format—mixing the painting and film. Fifty years after his first visit to the United
handwritten and the mechanically produced, the individual and States, he remains known here mostly for his work as a director
the anonymous—evokes the legacy of the unseen subject, an of films, among them the gritty Accattone (1961) and Mamma
artist who repeatedly addressed the encroachment of industrial Roma (1962), both dealing with prostitution, as well as the more
modernity upon vernacular expression. Somewhere between hermetic Teorema (Theorem), 1968, featuring a divine visitation,
a wanted poster and a casting call notice, the flyer obscures and the sexually brutal Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). His
ARA H. MERJIAN Pasolini’s likeness (substituting a censor’s black square) even as auteur status was reaffirmed by MoMA’s comprehensive (and
is associate professor
of Italian Studies at it describes him. Indeed, the scandal of his absence—he was jam-packed) film retrospective in 2012–13.
New York University. murdered in 1975 at the age of fifty-three by a young hustler in In Italy, however, Pasolini singlehandedly reinvented the
See Contributors murky, politically charged circumstances—has long rivaled the notion of the Renaissance man in the postwar era—producing
page.
renown of his work in cinema and a host of other cultural fields. work as poet, novelist, painter, dramatist, screenwriter, jour-
Whether through the ferocity of his death or the abiding nalist, essayist, and unrelenting polemicist. Having studied
vitality of his aesthetics, Pasolini has inspired a staggering under the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi at the
number of international artists—including Ming Wong, University of Bologna, he imparted a fundamentally painterly
William Kentridge, Francesco Arena, Tracey Moffatt, Elisabetta sensibility to his films from the start: aiming as much to frame
Benassi, Cerith Wyn Evans, Nathaniel Mellors, Julian Schna- a new sense of the sacred as to assail form or upend convention.
bel, and Berlinde de Bruyckere—to produce works in a wide His work is most consistent, in fact, in its ideological incongrui-
range of mediums and styles. As if in response to Kelley’s ersatz ties, or what he referred to himself as a productive “contami-
leaflet, the director Abel Ferrara cast the physically appropriate nation”—between loathing of the bourgeosie and animosity
Willem Dafoe in his 2014 Pasolini biopic. toward the hollow pieties of the Italian left; between a clamorous
80 DECEMBER 2016
ART IN AMERICA 81
Fallaci accompanied him on behalf of the magazine L’Europeo,
penning a wry chronicle of his activities and impressions. Titled
“A Marxist in New York,” her article basks in the irony of Italy’s
most rabidly anticapitalist intellectual let loose on the streets of
Manhattan. Her travel companion declared the city “sublime,”
deemed it “the navel of the world.” Its architecture appeared to
him “as Jerusalem appeared to the Crusader,” but also as “a multi-
layered cake” appears to a wide-eyed child.3 He was partial, Fal-
laci reports, to Coca-Cola. The photographer Duilio Pallottelli, in
Mike Kelley:
Untitled (Pasolini),
images accompanying a Pasolini essay published posthumously
1990, felt and glue, in the Corriere della Sera, duly evoked these ironies, capturing
93¾ by 70½ inches. Pasolini reveling in Times Square and supping at diners, posing
© Mike Kelley
Foundation for the in front of Broadway marquees and shopwindows.4
Arts. Licensed by His stay entailed far more than superficial pleasures. He
VAGA, New York.
Photo Douglas M.
visited leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-
Parker. mittee (SNCC) and trade unionists, Black Panther party officials,
and pacifist protestors. He met with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac
(whom he had attempted to cast as Jesus in his 1964 film The
Gospel According to St. Matthew) and attended a performance
of Frankenstein by the Living Theatre. The company’s director,
Julien Beck, would later star in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), as
well as influence his burgeoning efforts in the theater over the
next several years, extending the visitor’s debt to the American
avant-garde in new directions. Pasolini hoped, in fact, to stage his
first completed play in New York City, “so as to avoid hearing it
savaged by the petit-bourgeois voices of our atrocious actors.”5
iconoclasm and a profound aesthetic conservatism; between ONE PALLOTTELLI SHOT documents yet another New
atheism and what he called the “nostalgia for a belief.” York City rendezvous: Pasolini’s visit with Richard Avedon
For a country lacking a Catholic dominance or a deep- for a series of portraits. Though detailed by Fallaci as well, the
seated Marxist tradition—the two phenomena out of which studio encounter has long been assumed to have borne no fruit.
Pasolini’s worldview emerged—the United States has produced Destined for Vogue but never published, the images—recently
a wide spectrum of artists fascinated with his legacy. “I Killed rediscovered in the Avedon Foundation holdings—reveal
My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver with Joy: An Obses- a relaxed and jovial Pasolini, plainly basking in the relative
sion with Pier Paolo Pasolini,” a 2013 group exhibition on the anonymity of his American visit, worlds away from the scandals
lower East Side that summed up this penchant with contribu- which plagued him back home. Fallaci recounts:
tions by thirty-seven artists, was just one manifestation of an
enduring aesthetic fixation.1 A degree of irony lurks in this He departs [from New York] today and has much to
cultlike veneration by many contemporary artists. For all his do: most importantly, to pose for a certain individual
irreverence, Pasolini maintained a contentious relationship— who really insisted on it, and who he thinks is named
both verbal and visual—with the avant-garde of his time, view- Avalon.
ing their insistence upon innovation as an insidious extension “Dick Avedon?”
of neo-capitalist development. By the late 1960s, he had given “Yes, something like that.”
up on avant-garde efforts to resist consumerism or conformity. “You don’t know who Dick Avedon is?”
Whatever praise he withheld from the New Left and “No, who is he?”
its fellow travelers in Europe, however, Pasolini heaped upon “Perhaps the greatest photographer alive in America,
American bohemian rebels, hailing Allen Ginsberg’s Beat without a doubt one of the greatest in the world.”
“Oh, really?”
experiments—and the “new revolutionary language” to which
they contributed—as indispensable to the revitalization of Avedon asked him to arrive at the studio around
postwar culture. “In Europe,” Pasolini said just after his first eleven, but he got there late because he met a vagabond
visit to New York, “everything is finished; in America one has on the stairs, drunk since dawn, and a vagabond drunk
the impression that everything is about to begin.”2 since dawn is worth more than a hundred photographs
He first encountered these proverbial beginnings in the early by Avedon.
fall of 1966. By way of Montreal, he arrived for the screening He listened to the drifter with maternal patience,
of his latest movie, Uccellacci e Uccellini (The Hawks and the tenderness, before handing him goodness knows how
Sparrows), at the New York Film Festival. The journalist Oriana many dollars, and now he turns, with somewhat less
Berlinde de
Bruyckere: Into
One-Another III To
P.P.P., 2010, wax,
epoxy, iron, wood,
and glass, 76 by
71⅝ by 33⅛ inches.
Courtesy Hauser &
Wirth, New York.
Photo Thomas
Mueller.
interest, to contemplate the immense photograph surprise. As one of Ginsberg’s translators put it to the Ital-
which covers an entire wall of Avedon’s studio. Charlie ian public in 1965: “The bitter laugh of a Jewish homosexual
Chaplin depicted like a devil, his index fingers held up poet—in the face of a puritanical and racist [American] society,
to the sides of his head like horns or a pitchfork. “I took in which Communism is illegal and the poet explicitly persona
it on his last day in the United States,” Avedon explains, non grata—resounds to the walls of the seediest parts of town.”6
“a few hours before he took the boat straight to Europe.
It was precisely these parts—redolent of the social, sex-
Come look . . .”
ual, and racial margins so alive in his own work—to which
But Pasolini is more interested in the story behind other Pasolini felt drawn in New York. Excusing himself whenever
photographs on the walls: this black boy, for example, possible from professional engagements, he ventured to
who was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan. Or this rougher neighborhoods in Harlem and Brooklyn, seeking
mulatto elected twice to Parliament [sic] but who was out—as Fallaci put it—“that dirty, unhappy, violent America
never sworn in because of his opposition to the war in which suited his own tastes.” Following a second trip to New
Vietnam. Or this one of Allen Ginsberg posed nude,
York in 1969, he would come to coauthor the dialogue for
covered only by his beard and his body hair, which
the Italian version of Andy Warhol’s Trash (1970), a film
moves him to another declaration of love.
bound up with a different, but not unrelated, aesthetics of
sexual abjection. By the late ’60s, Warhol’s glib “Common-
Avedon’s images of Pasolini bear the same distinctive ism” diverged about as much as possible from Pasolini’s
format the photographer had begun honing in portraits of political commitment. Each artist, however, lent voice and
countercultural leaders. Avedon’s portrait of Ginsberg had dignity to individuals—and the larger social realities to
recently appeared in Nothing Personal, a book on which Avedon which they were attached—excluded from polite society.
collaborated with James Baldwin, set opposite an image of “Tolerance,” Pasolini writes in his Lutheran Letters,
George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi published just before his murder, “is a more refined form of
Party. Tried for obscenity over his 1955 poem Howl, Ginsberg condemnation.”7 The politics of his own desire remained a
loomed—in his dissident politics and heretical eroticism matter deeply fraught. Pasolini never agitated for gay rights per
alike—as a kindred spirit to Pasolini. That they struck up a se, fearing that the enshrinement of sexual identity would lead
friendship (“brother poets,” in Pasolini’s words) is no great inexorably to its conformity. His relentless defiance of bourgeois
What worthier balm for the tribulations of AIDS (and of gov- Assailing Reagan-era ignorance with a barrage of visual Carlton DeWoody:
Pasolini Highschool:
ernment inaction) than Pasolini’s lyricism, its mix of avenging activism, David Wojnarowicz turned to the same literary work. Varsity Jacket, 2013,
anger and a humanist resistance to what he called “the violence His poetry invokes Pasolini as early as 1979, though it is his nylon, chenille,
of reason”?9 later, AIDS-related interventions that allude most poignantly to and embroidery on
letterman jacket.
the Italian’s precedent. Anticipating his own imminent demise, Courtesy Invisible-
Wojnarowicz staged the 1990 photograph Untitled (Face in Dirt), Exports and Allegra
LaViola Gallery,
depicting his face nearly covered by soil—an allusion to Pasolini’s New York.
Teorema, in which a working-class maid entombs herself in the
gravel of a new construction site, emblematic of the soulless neo-
capitalism against which the film, and Pasolini’s work at large,
protests. That Wojnarowicz’s imagery became the target of cen-
sorship at the Smithsonian’s 2010 exhibition “Hide/Seek: Differ-
ence and Desire in American Portraiture” only further confirms
its affinities with the work of Pasolini, who underwent more than
thirty trials during his lifetime on charges for everything from
blasphemy to creating “scenes offensive to the public.”
Julian Schnabel:
Transgender artists, too, have paid attention to Pasolini’s Accattone, 1978,
depictions of sexual outsiders. Fashioned from makeup, nail oil, wax, and
polish, and African-American hair products, the “terrorist drag” modeling paste on
canvas, 84 by 72
portraits of the queer/trans artist Vaginal Davis delight in a inches.
reflexive perversity indebted—however obliquely—to Pasolini’s
aesthetics, and exhibited under the aegis of his influence. For
the Italian debut of Warhol’s 1975 “Ladies and Gentlemen”
exhibition in Ferrara, Italy—comprising Pop portraits of anony-
mous black and Latin drag queens—Pasolini notably wrote the
introductory text. Rather than simply extol Warhol’s represen-
tations as courageous, however, he challenged their evacuation
of history, both personal and social.10 The assimilation of
sexual otherness to neo-capitalist culture—exemplified here by
Warhol’s serial, “celebratory” images—strips its corporeal reality
of any dissenting energy.
Leigha Mason:
Spit Banquet,
2012, 16mm film
transferred to video,
4-minute loop.
Courtesy Invisible-
Exports and Allegra
LaViola Gallery.
MARK LECKEY
“I think of myself as an ambassador for crap British culture,” said Mark Leckey in
2014. Born in Birkenhead, England, the artist, who won the Turner Prize in 2008, has
always staged and even channeled complex ideas—about technology and time, about
the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, about the psychological conse-
quences of convergence culture—in a playful, disarmingly amiable fashion. Here he is
dressed up as Felix the Cat, a frequent avatar in his multimedia productions. In 1928,
long before cats became social-media memes, Felix (whose name is Latin for happy)
was the first image broadcast on American television. These days, cats are a good
example of how contemporary culture functions virally. How odd, how anachronistic,
and funny, too, that Leckey’s cat is in a physical space.
The second pairing includes a still from me and annarose (2010) in which Leckey himself SUKHDEV
appears, at once nervous and seemingly turned on, next to a glamorous transvestite, who SANDHU is the
director of the
is handling a projection unit. On the opposite page, there’s a gleeful posse of elaborately Colloquium for
coiffured, cross-dressing men filming something or someone with a variety of cameras. Unpopular Culture
It’s not necessary to know that the picture was taken at Casa Susanna, a 1950s refuge at New York
University. His
for transvestites in New York’s Catskills, to be struck by the uncanny, real/not-quite-real most recent book is
power of these pages, with Leckey being the least plausible figure in them. Other Musics.
The third and final pairing features the Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid the Sun (the
very acme of “crap British culture”) and its perversely suggestive cover of a total solar
eclipse, published in 1999; it faces the soundtrack LP for Leckey’s recent autobiographical
film Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD. A work of visual plunderphonics, the film is
a near-psychedelic trawl through the filtered and broadcast past that draws heavily on
his immersion in rave culture, a source of working-class futurism that also informed his
landmark Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). That film, while euphoric and witty, was
imbued with a profound sense of dislocation. It clung to memories while knowing those
memories were processed and mediated. It left you, as does all Leckey’s art, wondering:
Where are we now? And also: What is this thing called “now”?
—Sukhdev Sandhu
ART IN AMERICA 89
Cover of the
January–February
1972 issue of
LAS VEGAS
REVISITED
Art in America.
by Brian O’Doherty
TIME IS ODD everywhere, particularly in America, where ing an ancient American inferiority complex, Europe signi-
a century can seem shunted into a decade. And time is fies culture. That culture has been ransacked, appropriated,
especially odd in Las Vegas: held in suspension, elasticized, re-presented, translated, and put on offer, in a reflection of
circadian rhythms canceled, a version of immortality prom- American innocence, without those ironies that would take
ised, no tick-tock, just a smooth air flow in the desert. away all the fun. Iconic cherry-picking? Here is the Eiffel
Several centuries have passed since I regularly visited Tower, now a very large toy. The Arc de Triomphe stands
Las Vegas, then at its apogee, in the late 1960s and early ’70s. near a huge balloon adorned with a digital sign. Look at
Walking the Strip you strolled through a man-made Monu- that pyramid, quite convincing. There is Venice’s St. Mark’s
ment Valley. The monuments? The towering signs, of course. campanile. Nearby is an exact reproduction of a Paris street
They offered an ecstasy of neon with staccato blinks, timed corner, quite atmospheric, these fakers are good. Some-
cycles, fluid runs, sudden bursts, transient sheaths of fibrillat- where, a child visiting Europe with his parents has no doubt
BRIAN
O’DOHERTY is a ing light, all semaphoring seductive messages for their palaces exclaimed, “Gee, Mom, it’s just like Las Vegas!”
writer and artist who of chance: “Here you can make millions (or lose your shirt).” This is progress. Vegas’s once wicked edge has been
served as editor of And the linguistic virtuosity! Words were clipped, stretched, blunted to allow a polymorphous circus to flourish, offering
Art in America from
1971 to 1974. See and abruptly compressed. The signs delivered (and illustrated) an amiable embrace, catering to families. Back in the age
Contributors page. their messages by punning on their shapes to invent their own of the signs, acres of bare flesh were available in the grand
concrete poetry from imagination’s font. hotels’ entertainment machines. The shows offered an
Those great signs are now gone. Like the giant mam- operatic sense of luxury, climax, and excess (the eighteenth
mals, they were too big to survive. The Strip’s successors— century was alive in Las Vegas). The flashiest costumes, the
acromegalic hotels, ever larger—briskly and firmly write most ornamented Marie Antoinette hair, the longest legs,
their names on their parent buildings in blocky, sans-serif and the greatest voices of the era were all served in those
type, identifiers only. The entertaining spectacle of the signs, distant days with a titillation of wickedness, a touch of
which had their own aesthetic (even ethic) for presenting danger, and an icy heart. Sex, once wafting in the atmo-
information are replaced by brilliant attempts to forestall a sphere like an air freshener, has lost its musky edge. The
visit to Europe by reproducing its iconic treasures. Illustrat- bar girls who looked like vamps are now just girls roosting
96 DECEMBER 2016
ART IN AMERICA 97
at the bar, not fantasies of themselves. Everyone looks just later). Here the invitation is not only to gamble, but to
like themselves, however themselves may look. shop. Window after window offers idealized lures. Magnetic
Inside, the ceremonies of chance are conducted in a elegance lives behind these panes of glass, suggesting you
twilight, absorbing day and night. Silence is broken only by can become what you see. The aim is to stimulate desire, the
group exhalations after laden pauses, the cricket sound of preface to possession, though romanticized as the unattain-
the dice, a sudden flow of silver from a slot machine. The slot able beyond the glass. Objects and jewelry become fetishes,
machines’ arms have been amputated—the mere touch of a often reflected in the ubiquitous mirrors that endlessly check
button now sends apples, oranges, and plums spinning. The your identity. These subtly lighted window displays (perfect
blackjack tables gather their shadowy crowds around bright mannequins wearing perfect clothes) are Vegas’s intimate
oases of green, business conducted—as quasi-ritualistic stage sets, each an episode in a narrative of fascination, Boc-
Opposite, opening occasions should be—in silence and suspense. What is the caccio in America, talking to the strollers in their perpetual
three spreads from medium here, that which facilitates, transforms, but ever evening. The stunning invention evidenced here recalls
“Highway to Las
Vegas,” published remains unchanged? Money, of course, which within this the Christmas presentations at Bonwit Teller, perhaps the
in A.i.A.’s January– zone has more than monetary value: it has symbolic value. historic gold standard of window dressing.
February 1972 issue.
Money is the holy viaticum around which everything else Outside, what has the city done to delight in the
revolves. But inside these palaces, money undergoes a strange absence of the great signs? It has constructed entertainments
metamorphosis. It becomes slippery, chipped, devalued, light at a willfully naive level of boyhood (not girlhood) fantasy.
to the fingers, only to resume its hard value back outside. In recent years, two pirate ships engaged, guns flashing, the
Indeed, inside and outside are primal divisions here. sounds of battle rolling, on the artificial lake in front of the
When the eye’s laggard cones and rods emerge from the Treasure Island Hotel. There was a script which “actors”
inner dusk into bright daylight, the “reality” outside, in one declaimed. There were pretty dancers, music, flashing lights,
of the many switches Vegas pulls on the compliant body, lots of rigging, smoke, a formidable spiral staircase, and,
seems brittle, artificial, a somewhat depthless landscape. ultimately, fireworks. Did one ship sink? What is stunning
The inside of the long-lived Caesar’s Palace (built 1966), is the amount of care, energy, and money that went into
a classic survivor delivering its own parody of Classicism, perfecting a mediocre show. The famous volcano outside
still outstrips all its competitors but one (on which more the Mirage is a daylight disappointment. It looks like an
Bellagio
Las Vegas.
Courtesy
MGM Resorts
International.
Opposite top,
Mirage Las
Vegas. Courtesy
MGM Resorts
International.
Opposite, bottom,
interior of the
Venetian Las Vegas.
by Gavin Kroeber
IMAGINE A CITY, a city that embodies our historical Portland anchor a whole genre of television shows, with adrift
moment. A set of well-worn images, reproduced in popular millennials seeking fulfillment through consumer lifestyles.
media and contemporary art, likely informs this mental BuzzFeed lists enumerating the trashy excesses of Abu Dhabi’s
picture. Fantastic visions rise in Dubai, Shanghai, and Asia’s nouveaux-riches compete with headlines about the human
other megacities—strange menageries of skyscrapers and rights violations at the construction sites where elite Western
clusters of man-made islands, suicide nets on the factories cultural institutions like the Louvre and the Guggenheim will
and dust masks on the smog-choked pedestrians. In Detroit soon open prestigious Gulf franchises.
and other shrinking cities, abandoned temples of industry I am drawn to a blind spot in this global panorama of
loom over the urban prairie. In elite legacy cities like San decline, gentrification, and foreign spectacle. Consider Phoenix,
Francisco and New York, hyper-gentrification and foreign the reductio ad absurdum of the suburban city. The capital
real-estate speculation strangle middle-class aspirations. of Arizona holds the center of the state’s sprawling Valley of
This mosaic of twenty-first century urban clichés provides the Sun, a galaxy of suburbs that is home to some 4.5 mil-
a fragmentary view of the world—but a ubiquitous one. It lion people, itself just the northern terminus of the Arizona
GAVIN KROEBER suggests a narrative of widespread change, signaling the end Sun Corridor, a vast megalopolitan agglomeration that also
is an artist and of the Americanized world as we’ve known it and the rise of subsumes Tucson and the border cities of Nogales and Agua
urbanist based
in St. Louis.
a brave new global regime in its wake. Prieta. Phoenix, in this extended sense, epitomizes the national
This narrative draws its potency from an old tradition in exurban landscape—which is flourishing in vast rings around
Western thought, one that employs images of cities as symbols every American city, new and old, and growing despite its scant
of profound social disruption. In the modern era, this tradi- cultural clout. Indeed, as the emerging consumer classes in
tion extends from Engels’s Manchester to Dickens’s London India and China begin to follow a suburban course of urban
to Benjamin’s Paris and beyond, with writers and thinkers development, it seems Phoenix may offer a glimpse of future
grounding claims about a changing world in careful observa- urban development around the globe.
tions of a cityscape that seems to most starkly embody them. From the Texas Triangle to the Tijuana-San Diego
We have inherited this impulse, if not the rigor evident in the borderplex, there is a particular legibility to these patterns in
tradition’s most influential examples. A city’s paradigmatic the cities of the American West. This is what we might call
weight today may stem primarily from the intensity of cultural America’s “other West”: all malls and cul-de-sacs rather than
responses it provokes. Voyeuristic, brooding images of declining mesas and ghost towns, growing explosively in America’s most
Detroit are so widespread they’ve earned the neologism “ruin extreme environments. It is the urban negative space framing
porn.” Gentrifying Brooklyn and the hipster fait accompli of the celebrated landscape of the postcard Southwest, where the
Four pages from Ed If the social critique of suburbia cedes the future of the next fifty years is going to be retrofitting suburbia” and more
Ruscha’s book Every
Building on the Sunbelt to the developers building it, the second, Romantic and more designers have been attracted to the challenge.6
Sunset Strip, 1966. aesthetic critique encourages those invested in urban crises to It may be equally important, however, to confront the
Courtesy Gagosian.
© Ed Ruscha.
ignore these landscapes in the first place. It is crucial to chal- cultural blind spot within which the suburbs continue to exist.
lenge these impulses to turn away from the suburbs, away from There has been no commensurate “suburban turn” in the art
Phoenix. With a global suburban future coming, it is essential world, but there have been influential projects that offer alter-
to construct a critical cultural imagination that can inhabit that native strategies for engaging suburbia. Ed Ruscha’s seminal
future—not just better places built on its elite margins. photo books depicting Los Angeles architecture exemplify a
deadpan aesthetic, projecting a nonjudgmental attitude toward
the low-rise city. His 1966 Every Building on the Sunset Strip—
The Deadpan Suburb the title offering a famously literal description of the book’s
contents—is a landmark in this tradition. It comes on the heels
The design world has been taking up this challenge in suburbs of the similar studies Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and
that no longer behave like suburbia. These are places like Fergu- Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965).
son, Missouri, or the Muslim enclave of Dearborn, Michigan, Ruscha’s Pop sensibility has parallels in urban fields. His
where the seemingly unassailable veneer of new real estate has imagery directly inspired Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,
given way to more complicated realities: to the accelerated and Steven Izenour’s landmark Learning from Las Vegas (1972), a
dilapidation of cheap construction, to immigrants turning research report about architectural kitsch in its most exaggerated
McMansions into apartment buildings and empty big box instance—the Vegas Strip. “We came to the automobile-oriented
stores into places of worship. As the architect Ellen Dunham- commercial architecture of urban sprawl as our source for a civic
Jones has said, “the big design and development project of the and residential architecture of meaning, viable now,” the team
Catherine Opie:
Untitled #7, 1994,
platinum print,
2¼ by 6¾ inches,
from the series
“Freeway.” Courtesy
Regen Projects,
Los Angeles.
sions of Phoenix, the contours of another paradigmatic city 2. James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of
America’s Man-Made Landscape, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 186.
begin to appear: a planetary web of spaces, a globally distrib- 3. Joel Kotkin, “The Triumph of Suburbia,” Apr. 29, 2014, newgeography.com.
uted suburbia. The suburban qualities of Dubai or Beijing 4. Dolores Hayden, “What Is Sprawl?” Hartford Courant, July 1, 2004, in
become apparent if we look at them not as exotic counter- Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, eds., The Suburban Reader, New
York, Routledge, 2006, p. 477.
points to the American landscape but as places where its pat- 5. See James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis: The
terns are being transformed in an encounter with new cultural Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, New York, Cambridge University
and political forces. Reciprocally, the fantastic light cast by Press, 2005; and Larry H. Peer, Romanticism and the City, New York, Palgrave
Macmillian, 2011.
these growing cities might throw into relief the speculative 6. Ellen Dunham-Jones, Retrofitting Suburbia, Hoboken, N.J., Wiley, 2008, p. vi.
aspects of Phoenix or Dallas. 7. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from
In all these places, imagining a future, whether an Las Vegas, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1972, p. 90.
8. Brian O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” Art in America, January–February
apocalyptic or a utopian one, can risk offering a retreat from 1972, pp. 80-89.
crisis. Narratives of inevitable disaster or the promise of 9. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Berkeley and
technological solutions just over the horizon can absolve Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1971, p. 6.
10. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, “About Us,” clui.org.
one of the responsibility to act in the present. The suburban 11. Tony Smith, “Talking with Tony Smith,” interview by Samuel J. Wagstaff,
white-bread caricature does the same by promising perpetual Jr., Artforum, December 1966. For a discussion of Smith’s relationship to
stasis. Still, somewhere between the banal and the sublime, suburbia see David Salomon, “Tony Smith and the Suburban Sublime,” Places,
September 2013, placesjournal.org.
there may be an image of a compelling suburban future. It is 12. Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” in
an image of a city worth living in. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. by Jack Flam, Berkeley and
Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 71–74.
1. See Roland Brownstein, “Obama’s Support in Rust Belt, Sun Belt Very 13. Catherine Opie, “Freeways,” Sept. 2009, guggenheim.org.
Different,” The Atlantic, Nov. 2, 2012, and the same author’s “Clinton and Trump 14. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing
Are Shuffling the Electoral Map,” The Atlantic, Oct. 4, 2016, theatatlantic.com. Water, New York, Viking Penguin, 1986, p. 304.
Brownstein shows how the suburbs are becoming strikingly bipartisan, writing 15. Andrew Ross, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,
in the latter article: “Democrats are increasingly looking toward Sunbelt states Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 9.
rather than Rustbelt states for victory in 2016 and beyond. Not long ago that 16. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
would have been unthinkable.” University of California Press, 2012, pp. 24–25.
KAI ALTHOFF
NEW YORK — Museum of Modern Art
It is easy for the visitor to Kai Althoff ’s retrospective at the is any kind of curatorial structure that might guide a comparison
Museum of Modern Art, “and then leave me to the common of different works or elucidate the significant relationships between
swifts,” to grow irritated: the long wait for entry into the over- different aspects of Althoff ’s output. It would be interesting
crowded galleries, the admonishment from the well-meaning to unpack the idea of “alternative” lifestyles that runs through
museum employees about the absolute prohibition of photography, the show, which includes references to Asian cultures, imagery
the barely legible checklist available at the entrance, and then, associated with German communes of the 1970s, and paintings of
finally, the show. A jumble. The figurative paintings for which Hasidic men. But the exhibition is a barely differentiated pile, one
Althoff is best known—depictions of small social groups done in a clearly intended to be a total work of art, conveying, above all, the
nostalgic manner that blends the Expressionist styles of Kirchner, sheer immensity of the artist’s creativity.
Schiele, and Dix with references to children’s book imagery and Althoff made a name for himself as a polymath in the
Asian shadow puppets—are scattered around an installation that Cologne scene of the 1990s, where he produced dance music and
also includes vitrines of notes and postcards and at least a few began creating installations that integrated his painting into archi- ON VIEW
vials of what looks like blood; mannequins in nineteenth-century tectonic structures. He has since embarked on a spiritual journey, THROUGH
JAN. 17, 2017
costumes; architectural maquettes of gloomy European villas; living among the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn’s
snapshots of men hanging out together; Pop-style photocollages; Crown Heights. In other words, he is an artist who has, in various
an early twentieth-century gynecological exam chair, among other ways, folded art into life.
spooky furniture; more mannequins. Given the anticipation leading to the opening of Althoff ’s
The artist designed the exhibition himself. Worn white wood retrospective and the mystery of its presentation, one might
planks cover the floor, and white fabric draped from the walls gives expect to have an encounter with the blood, sweat, and tears of
the impression of being inside a tent. Freestanding partitions at the artist. But the promise of such a major emotional experi-
the far end of the gallery, also constructed from wood planks and ence is constantly undercut by the pervasive suspicion that only
serving as supports for many of the paintings, are steeply angled at minor feelings are afoot: Is the exhibition architecture mysti-
the top, suggesting the architecture of an attic with a pitched roof. cal and chapel-like, or merely shabby chic? Does the display
More important is what Althoff has left out. He has rejected all methodology imply a deep mystery, or needlessly mystify?
the usual means by which the museum provides historical context Does the photo ban, constantly enforced by harried security
and analysis of the work on view. Wall texts are absent, but so, too, personnel, guard the sanctity of this work, or simply protect
LOS ANGELES
HENRY TAYLOR
Blum & Poe
Henry Taylor, a stalwart of the Los Angeles art scene, is
known for painting sympathetic portraits of local characters,
family, friends, and celebrities in a loose, gestural manner,
with thick strokes of acrylic quickly marking out details.
The figures tend to stare out from the pictures, producing a
tension in which viewers are made aware of their voyeuristic
gaze. Taylor has also ventured into installation: his 2013
made its main location in 2015. In response to the venue, exhibition at Blum & Poe, for instance, included, among
Prekop showed more large-scale paintings—many measuring other items, a formal dining table set atop a grooved plot of
eight feet tall—than he ever has prior. soil that evoked a plowed field, the combination underscor-
These compositions, made in the past two years, continue ing themes seen in the surrounding paintings, which were
his adventuresome use of color and his emphasis on line as inspired by WPA-era photographs of black farm workers. In
much as form, but they tend to be looser, more layered, and his recent exhibition at the gallery, Taylor demonstrated an
ultimately more complex than their predecessors. Indeed, these expanded installation approach, creating a series of distinct
works don’t photograph well, because their subtleties, such as immersive environments for his paintings. View of Henry
meandering faint lines, are often lost in reproductions. Part of The first space, which featured an earthen floor (the dirt Taylor’s exhibition,
2016, at Blum &
their appeal derives from the particular techniques Prekop uses. dry and gravelly, unlike the tilled soil in the 2013 show), a Poe. Photo Joshua
Among them is painting on the backs of his muslin supports, barren tree, a graffitied cinder-block wall, and a makeshift White.
which results in enigmatic, ghostly effects when the works are
seen from the front. This approach is especially effective in End-
ing Pattern, where black dots and saturated red forms and lines
sit on top of a very pale red that—hovering like a shadow in the
background—has been applied to the verso.
Perhaps even more crucial to these works’ appeal is their
insistent and sometimes startling contrasts—hard and soft
edges, painterly and non-painterly surfaces, amorphous and
exact forms. All these qualities can be found in Edit, essen-
tially a white-on-white painting with traces of black and gray
and with two gestural figure-eight swishes in the bottom half
of the composition. To make this work, Prekop spackled white
paint on the muslin with a palette knife, painted over parts of
those sections with black, and then added more coats of white.
The resulting overlaps and intersections give the composition
a sense of depth. It looks as if there are at least three differ-
ent shades of white, but the artist used the same pigment
throughout. Thin meticulous lines of muslin are visible in
some sections, in an impressive display of draftsmanship.
SÃO PAULO
IVENS MACHADO
Pivô
Machado’s sculptures bring together natural materials View of Ivens
This concentrated look at the first two decades of and harsh man-made ones. For all their tactility, they can’t Machado’s
exhibition “O Cru
work by Ivens Machado (1942–2015), titled “O Cru do be touched, because they are both dangerous (with their do Muno” (Raw of
Mundo” (Raw of the World), opened with a re-creation incorporation of items like broken glass) and fragile. Pivô’s the World), 2016,
showing (from left)
of a destroyed, untitled 1982 sculpture that consists of a gallery space is stark, steely, and serpentine, much like the Untitled, 1985,
reinforced-concrete egg studded with shards of glass and undulating exterior of the Copan building it is housed in. Versus, 1974, and
Untitled, 2007, at
resting on an armature of iron bars and concrete feet. The (Oscar Niemeyer designed the Copan in the 1950s as a Pivô.
new version was produced for the exhibition by Machado’s building that could provide housing for all classes of Brazil-
former assistant, who provided crucial knowledge to cura- ian society.) It can be difficult for work to assert itself at
tor Kiki Mazzucchelli in the organizing of the show, which Pivô, but Machado’s mixture of monumental bravado and
comprised twenty-two pieces mostly from the 1970s and attention to bodily forms makes for an effective symbiosis
’80s, many of them absent from institutional circulation with the Copan’s architecture.
since the time they first appeared. The sculpture refers Reinforced-concrete phallic forms from the mid-1980s
to the concrete walls topped with glass shards that often are dotted with spikes or iron and precariously balanced.
secure the homes of the wealthy in Brazil. Here, as in other They pointedly demonstrate the paradox of vulnerability
works, Machado used materials from barriers that perpetu- masking strength, and vice versa, that animates Machado’s
ate class conflict in Brazil—that manifest the decisive lines practice. Fundamental forms—arches, ropes, pillars, can-
between private and public space and between rich and tilevers—pop up again and again in his work, but they are
poor. By beginning the show with this sculpture, Maz- continually subverted by sensuality or brutality or both. By
zucchelli seemed to nod to the fact that the tensions that breaking the mold of the monument, they become more
drove Machado have never really dimmed: his practice vulnerable and legible, and, therefore, more human.
appears today just as relevant as it was then. —Alexandra Pechman
A long brass pipe extends through a window in a second- instance, encourages deep listening to life itself, the slow growth
floor gallery of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion into the park and constant changes of a living thing.
outside, where it widens into a large flared bell. The giant An assembly of works at the ground-floor entrance to the
ear trumpet is trained on the leafy top of a palm. Created by pavilion tease out the trope of the garden as a model for politics,
Argentinian artist Eduardo Navarro, Sound Mirror (2016) where different forms of life coexist in an environment coaxed into
asks gallery visitors to listen to the tree. I perched on a stool harmony by human intervention. Frans Krajcberg, a Polish artist who
and cocked my head toward the earpiece, which delivered emigrated to Brazil in the 1970s, shows a gathering of slender tree
a faint rumble. Was it the stirring of sap in the trunk? The trunks whose bark has been stripped, wholly or partially, and occa-
crawling of bugs? Occasionally I’d hear something like the sionally replaced with painted bands in hues of fire or charred wood.
ON VIEW murmur of a distant conversation, as if Navarro’s instrument Here and there, the trunks have actually been scorched or allowed to
THROUGH were picking up the tinny back-and-forth of security guards decompose. They stand on bases hewn from logs in various shapes,
DEC. 11 on their walkie-talkies. some resembling networks of branches or roots. Behind Krajcberg’s
Curated by Jochen Volz with Gabi Ngcobo, Júlia Rebouças, sculptures, in the installation Back to the Fields (2015–16), the young
Lars Bang Larsen, and Sofia Olascoaga, the thirty-second Scottish artist Ruth Ewan has arranged flowers, plants, gourds, ani-
edition of the São Paulo Bienal is called “Incerteza Viva.” The mal skulls, and other natural objects in a clocklike circle that evokes
English translation of the title is “Live Uncertainty,” which cyclical time enveloping the staggered life spans of the things she’s
evokes an uncertainty that’s alive. It also sounds like a prompt gathered. Opavivará!—a Rio de Janeiro artist-activist collective that,
urging people to endure amid epistemological instability, or at the opening, organized protests against Brazil’s right-wing presi-
like a cheer—“Long live uncertainty!”—celebrating unknow- dent, Michel Temer, who had the week before seized power in a soft
able otherness. In another vitalist facet of the curators’ approach, coup—shows Transnomad (2016), a collection of mobile, interactive
the show treats the pavilion’s park location as a link to the items (cabin, bed, library, karaoke machine) based on the carts used by
mysteries of nature. Navarro’s site-specific sculpture, for vendors and workers in São Paulo to navigate the city, and life.
metals recall both traditional Asian gilding and Taiwan’s offices. SUBSCRIPTIONS include combined June/July which counts as 2 out of 12 annual issues: US 12 issues $45.00. In
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freestanding sculptural walls whose vocabulary builds upon and allow six weeks for change.
CY
T WO M B LY
December 1, 2016 – February 18, 2017
Gagosian Gallery 4 rue de Ponthieu 75008 Paris +33 1 75 00 05 92 www.gagosian.com
Veil of Orpheus, 1968 (detail), oil-based house paint, lead pencil, and wax crayon on canvas, 90⅛ × 192 inches (229 × 488 cm) © Cy Twombly Foundation