$12 SEPTEMBER 2017 COVER MARTA MINUJÍN

Sitka spruce, Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon, 1999–2000

Rober t Adams Trees Matthew Marks New York

Loie Hollowell
Point of Entry
229 Hamilton Ave., Palo Alto
September 20 – November 2, 2017
Cheim & Read September 7 – October 28, 2017 Louise Fishman
Monongahela 2017 oil on linen 66 x 55 in 167.6 x 139.7 cm
 68
MOLECULAR SCULPTURE
by Ruba Katrib
Following a path blazed by Duchamp, a host of current artists—
Nina Canell, Pamela Rosenkranz, Anicka Yi, Rochelle Goldberg,
Pierre Huyghe, Josh Kline, and others—are using scents,
atmospheric conditions, and microorganisms to create a new,
multisensory rapport between viewers and artworks.
76
DRASTIC TIMES
by Julian Kreimer
The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has joined the massive Pacific
Standard Time initiative with a 1960–85 survey of long under-
recognized Latin American women artists, many of whom resisted
both political repression and art-world patriarchy to pioneer a
regional turn from abstract painting to new media and the body.
82
DITHYRAMBS AND CENTAURS
by Brooks Adams
Replete with loose, painterly amalgams of abstraction and
figuration, contemporary social critique and historical reference,
two recent museum surveys in the US confirmed that Markus
Lüpertz, now seventy-six, remains among the most provocative of
Germany’s postwar bad-boy artists.
88
MFA QUALITY
by Erica Dawn Lyle
Founded in 2009 by eight Cooper Union alums, Bruce High
Quality Foundation University—a “free” New York art school in
every sense of the word—brought a DIY, group-talk approach to
technical training and critical judgment. Now BHQFU is in search
of a new model tailored to the times and its own changing nature.
94
THE REPATRIATION OF F$
by Lucy Ives
Reared on the Continent before returning to her US homeland,
Jewish socialite Florine Stettheimer used her flamboyant painting
and set-design skills—and her own consummate insider-outsider
experience—to explore the complexity of American identity
in the interwar period.
FEATURES
102
THE LIGHTNING FIELD
Interview with Jessica Morgan by William S. Smith
Discussing a soon-to-be-released selection of photographs
of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation
director Jessica Morgan reflects on the seeming paradox of a
highly orchestrated viewing experience in a natural setting. The
vintage images, sampled in our pages, commemorate the fortieth
anniversary of the landmark work.
108
IN THE STUDIO:
LESLIE HEWITT
with Julia Wolkoff
Known for abstract sculptures as well as photographs and films that
probe the relationship between objects and memory, Leslie Hewitt
talks with a former student about seventeenth-century Dutch
still-life painting, recollections of her family in the Civil Rights era,
archival research, and her often collaborative working method.
Cover: Marta Minujín: Mattress,
1964/1985, acrylic on fabric and foam
rubber (reconstructed), 59 by 34¼
by 21¼ inches. Collection Jorge and
Marion Helft. Courtesy Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles.
With psychedelic forms and raucous
Happenings, Marta Minujín (b. 1943)
invigorated the art scene in her native
Argentina during the 1960s, often
challenging her country’s repressive
governments in the process. Mattress
is included in “Radical Women:
Latin American Art 1960–1985,”
on view at the Hammer Museum in
Los Angeles this month as part of the
Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard
Time LA/LA initiative (see pp. 76–81
for an exhibition preview). Minujín’s
Parthenon of Books (1983/2017), a
reconstruction of the ancient Greek
temple employing tens of thousands of
volumes that have been banned around
the world, is on view in Documenta 14
in Kassel, Germany (for more on
Documenta see pp. 43–45).
SEPTEMBER 2017
 12 51
CONTRIBUTORS BACKSTORY
Desert Oasis by Emilia Kabakov
In the early 1990s, Donald Judd introduced Russian-born
19 Ilya and Emilia Kabakov to the charms and dangers of the
West Texas borderland.
ISSUES & COMMENTARY
by Ashley Holland, America Meredith, and Jonathan Griff in
Two Native American writers take issue with the Cherokee
identity ascribed to Jimmie Durham in A.i.A.’s May 2017 article
55
on the artist. The author of the controversial piece responds. BOOKS
Michèle C. Cone on Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush:
How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French
29 Novels; plus related titles in brief.
THE BRIEF
Istanbul Biennial; Rachel Whiteread at Tate Britain, London;
“Speech/Acts,” a group exhibition examining black poetry and
116
culture, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; REVIEWS
Chicago Architectural Biennial; Lyon Biennial; Zeitz Museum New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto,
of Contemporary Art Africa opens in Cape Town. London, Zurich, Dubai

33 136
FIRST LOOK ARTWORLD
Julia Weist by William S. Smith People, Awards, Obituaries
New York artist Julia Weist applies her library science training to
projects ranging from a “lost word” internet search to artistic
interventions in Cuba’s weekly trade in preprogrammed hard drives.

37
SIGHTLINES LOG ON
Curator Jamillah James tells Ross Simonini what’s on her mind. artinamericamagazine.com
Access the art world with additional
features, reviews, and exclusive interviews.
41
CRITICAL EYE
Brian Droitcour on the Venice Biennale; Rachel Wetzler on Documenta
14 in Kassel; Andreas Angelidakis on Documenta 14 in Athens
Is the Venice Biennale too complacent? Did splitting Documenta 14
between Germany and Greece only exacerbate some of the very cultural
and economic problems the event was designed to address? Three
writers offer distinct views of these 2017 mega-surveys.

DEPARTMENTS SEPTEMBER 2017

PETER DOIG 1 5 S E P T E M B E R - 11 N O V E M B E R

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Christian Marclay, Boneyard, 1990, hydrostone casts of telephone receivers, in 750 parts, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Sotheby’s Inc., 2016.

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY
SEPTEMBER 7 – OCTOBER 7, 2017

PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK

 Contributors
LESLIE HEWITT JULIAN KREIMER
In the Studio this month features New York–based
artist Leslie Hewitt interviewed in her Harlem
workspace by A.i.A. assistant editor Julia Wolkoff.
Hewitt’s photographs, films, and sculptures investigate
the relationship between objects, images, and memory.
Her work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial
and the 2009 “New Photography” show at the Museum
of Modern Art, both in New York. She has had
solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art;
SculptureCenter, New York; and the Power Plant,
Toronto, among other institutions. Hewitt recently
joined the faculty of the School of Art at the Cooper
Union, New York. Her work can be seen in the group
show “Woman with a Camera” at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, through January 14, 2018.
LUCY IVES
On the occasion of a traveling Florine Stettheimer
retrospective, Lucy Ives reappraises the socialite artist,
whose paintings lyrically capture the mood of interwar
New York. Ives is the author of several books of poetry
and prose. Her first novel, Impossible Views of the World,
was published by Penguin Press in August. Ives’s long-
form poem Anamnesis won the 2008 Slope Editions
Book Prize. Ives was previously an editor at Triple
Canopy and contributed to the nonprofit’s presentation
at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is currently editing a
collection of writings by artist Madeline Gins.
AMERICA MEREDITH
Cherokee texts and imagery figure prominently in
the work of America Meredith, who lives in Norman,
Oklahoma. Her work is on view this month at the
Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Oklahoma.
Meredith is also the director of Ahalenia Studios, an
alternative art space in Santa Fe; the associate publisher
of Noksi Press, a Cherokee-language publishing house;
and editor of First American Art Magazine. She sits
on the boards of the Cherokee Arts and Humanities
Council and the Wheelwright Museum of the
American Indian. In this issue, Meredith, along with
Ashley Holland, responds to Jonathan Griffin’s recent
essay on Jimmie Durham.
12 SEPTEMBER 2017
A frequent contributor to Art in America, Julian Kreimer
previews the Hammer Museum exhibition “Radical
Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” part of the
Getty Foundation’s sprawling Pacific Standard Time:
LA/LA. An associate professor of painting and art
history at Purchase College, State University of New
York, Kreimer has been awarded Yaddo and MacDowell
fellowships, and was the 2017 artist-in-residence at Hotel
Pupik at Schrattenberg Castle in Austria. His work is
included in a two-person show at the artist-run space
Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Los Angeles, through October.
RUBA KATRIB
Ruba Katrib is curator at SculptureCenter, New York,
where she has organized solo exhibitions by Cosima
von Bonin, Anthea Hamilton, Michael E. Smith,
and Aki Sasamoto, to name a few. Prior to joining
the Long Island City institution, she was associate
curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North
Miami. Katrib serves as curatorial adviser for the Focus
section of the Frieze London art fair, which opens this
October. She is also on the curatorial team of the 2018
Carnegie International. Here, she writes on artists who
incorporate bacterial growth and other organic and
chemical processes in their work.
ERICA DAWN LYLE
Since 1991, Brooklyn-based writer, curator, and
musician Erica Dawn Lyle has edited the zine Scam,
a chronicle of the San Francisco punk scene. She
currently plays in the bands Black Rainbow, Negative
Joy, and Scum Labyrinth. Additionally, she is the
co-host of the internet radio show Free Air. The book
Streetopia, a chronicle of the 2012 Anti-Gentrification
Art Fair in San Francisco, was edited by Lyle and
published by Booklyn in 2015. This month, she
discusses New York’s free, unaccredited art school Bruce
High Quality Foundation University.
 NEW YORK LOWER EAST SIDE

WIM DELVOYE
SEPTEMBER 9 - OCTOBER 29

PARIS MARAIS

CHEN FEI
SEPTEMBER 7 - OCTOBER 7

KLARA KRISTALOVA
SEPTEMBER 7 - OCTOBER 7

XAVIER VEILHAN
SEPTEMBER 7 - SEPTEMBER 23

HONG KONG CENTRAL

JOHN HENDERSON
SEPTEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 11

JESPER JUST
SEPTEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 11

SEOUL JONGNO-GU

BERNARD FRIZE
AUGUST 30 - OCTOBER 21

TOKYO ROPPONGI

PAOLA PIVI
AUGUST 26 - NOVEMBER 11

Wim Delvoye
“Pegasus & Perseus Rorschach” 2016
Patinated bronze. 61 × 61 × 78 cm / 24 1/16 × 24 1/16 × 30 11/16 in
© Wim Delvoye / ADAGP, Paris, 2017
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Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Buck Nasty: Player Haters Ball, 2017, black charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, oil pastel, acrylic gold powder on Coventry Vellum paper
 FRANKLIN EVANS

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2017 EXHIBITIONS
John Bock
Carol Bove
Anya Gallaccio
Ryan Gander
Mark Lewis
Lionel Maunz
Wangechi Mutu
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Garth Weiser
Ai Weiwei
And, announcing the exhibition for the inaugural Suzanne
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 ISSUES & COMMENTARY

Roy Boney Jr.:


T (Blood
Myth), detail, 2017,
acrylic and vinyl tape
on plexiglass, 24 by
18 inches overall.

This piece features

the phrase “blood
untruth or lie,” written
in Cherokee syllabary,
under a diagram of the
smallest protein in the
hemoglobin molecule.
The term “blood
myth” refers to claims
of Native ancestry
based solely on
family lore.

A Jimmie Durham retrospective has revived questions about the

artist’s identity. Two Native writers respond to Jonathan
Griffin’s feature on Durham from Art in America’s May 2017 issue.

The Artist Formally
Known as Cherokee
by Ashley Holland (Cherokee Nation)
IN HIS ESSAY ON the exhibition “Jimmie Durham: At
the Center of the World,” writer Jonathan Griffin fails to
explain the complexities of Native identity and representation
that surround Durham, reflecting the confusion prevalent
throughout the show and catalogue. This has left many Native
artists, scholars, curators, and community members feeling,
once again, ignored and frustrated.
It is well past time for the art world to stop calling Durham a
nity.”1 Durham made this statement in the wake of the contro-
versy surrounding the passage of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act
(IACA) of 1990, a federal law that prohibits artists and artisans
who are not enrolled in recognized tribes from claiming Native
identity when marketing their work. Whether Durham believed
what he wrote in 1993, or simply wanted to avoid the possibility
of repercussions from the IACA, we should honor his statement.
Durham’s activism with the American Indian Movement
(AIM) in the 1970s is frequently cited as evidence of his Native ASHLEY
heritage. Yet, just as Rachel Dolezal’s position at the National HOLLAND
is a doctoral student
Association for the Advancement of Colored People did not in Native American art
give her, a white woman, a pass to misidentify herself as African history at the University
American, neither should Durham’s work on behalf of Native of Oklahoma, Norman.

Cherokee artist. Though he once self-identified as Cherokee, and
much of his work addresses an assumed Native persona, Durham
renounced tribal identity years ago. In response to Lucy Lippard’s
1993 essay “Jimmie Durham: Postmodernist ‘Savage,’” published
in this magazine, Durham wrote a letter to the editor in which
he states: “I am not Cherokee. I am not an American Indian. This
is in concurrence with recent US legislation, because I am not
enrolled on any reservation or in any American Indian commu-
people be confused with confirmation of his tribal affiliation.
Durham’s supposed refusal to enroll as Cherokee has also been
cast as a critique of the United States government’s colonial
influence over Native tribes and their enrollment procedures.
Legal sovereignty and self-determination of citizenship by
tribal nations such as the Cherokee Nation, Eastern Band of
Cherokee Indians, and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee
Indians are complicated facets of the contemporary Native experi-

ART IN AMERICA 19
Even though Durham was referred to as Cherokee or Indian in the
past, those words should never be applied to him in the future.
ence. When Durham flippantly discredits enrollment and implies
that he has chosen not to adhere to its requirements, he misrepre-
sents the issue. Cherokee citizenship for any of the three federally
recognized tribes was not an option for Durham. His parents were
not documented in the necessary ways by either the US or the
Cherokee governments. His grandparents or great-grandparents
were not either.
As a Cherokee Nation citizen, I may not always agree with
how tribal nations choose to handle enrollment. Many practices
for determining tribal enrollment, like referring to historical US
documents such as the Dawes Rolls, are determined by a specific
history of settler colonialism. Within settler colonialism, the
colonizer aims to become the eventual “indigenous” community
through the assimilation and annihilation of the original indig-
enous peoples. Tribal sovereignty is a hard-won counterweight
to this ongoing threat, and it is essential for tribes to assert their
right to self-determination. The US government does not dictate
enrollment for any tribe. Each tribal government, in an act of
sovereignty, determines who is eligible for enrollment.
For a Cherokee person, enrollment is also a means of fortifying
traditional social structures in the face of settler colonialism. A
Native person’s family remains a pivotal aspect of his or her identity
and place in the community. I did not grow up in Oklahoma, where
many Cherokee, including my ancestors, were forcibly resettled
after the Trail of Tears. Nor have I made my home in any of the
ancestral lands that are now part of the Southeastern US. But I
know my family. I can tell any Cherokee person where I come from.
Durham’s public criticism of the IACA should not be regarded
as an example of his Native activism. The IACA is far from perfect,
but it does afford Native people a measure of control over represen-
tations of their identity. There are provisions in the IACA that allow
non-enrolled Native artists to market their work as Native-made if
they have the support of their community. Durham does not have
such support. The IACA does not allow the US government to
designate who can and cannot be labeled Native artists. Instead, the
law grants tribal nations the authority to make that determination.
Native identity is also far more than legal recognition. In his
seminal work of Native critical theory, X-Marks: Native Signatures
of Assent (2010), Scott Richard Lyons (Ojibwe/Dakota) argues
that Native identity arises from an array of factors, including
personal history, self-identification, and legal enrollment. He
writes: “All we can do is think consciously about the materi-
als out of which our identities are made—their origins, logics,
and implications—and make the best calls we can during those
moments when identity controversies beg for authentication.”2
My identification as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation is tied
first and foremost to my family and my sense of responsibility to
being Native. I know that everything I do has to answer to my
Native relatives. And I use the word “relatives” in the sense of all
Cherokee peoples and even all Native peoples.
Instead of forging links to the Cherokee community, Durham
20 SEPTEMBER 2017 ISSUES & COMMENTARY
has created an artistic persona that resonates with what scholars
such as Philip J. Deloria (Dakota) have called the practice of “play-
ing Indian.”3 Durham and non-Native scholars want to argue that
his art is forcing a critical look at how colonizers have romanticized
and stereotyped Native peoples, but many of the references to
Cherokee traditions in his work reek of pan-Indian pandering. His
claims to a specific clan affiliation, for example, are highly dubious,
as many Cherokee citizens with deep ties to the community do not
know their clans. He has recounted having received a “real name”
from a Coyote, an animal that does not, in fact, play the trickster
role in Cherokee stories as Durham claims. The artist’s text pieces
also frequently include misuses of Cherokee words, despite his
claims to have grown up in a Cherokee-speaking household.
“Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World,” organized
by Anne Ellegood of the Hammer Museum, will travel to venues
in the United States and Canada through 2018. Institutions that
continue to promote Durham as Cherokee, and frame his work as
informed by indigenous identity, are doing a disservice to Native
peoples and artists. Retrospective exhibitions can be moments
to rethink and reevaluate artists whose own understanding of
themselves may have changed as much as their art over the years.
Why not use this exhibition to do that with Durham? The exhi-
bition could be an opportunity to heal and explicitly acknowledge
that even though Durham was referred to as Cherokee or Indian
in the past, those words should never be applied to him in the
future. Ellegood and the Hammer Museum failed to change the
conversation. Curators and institutions must be held accountable
for their actions and words, just as artists need to acknowledge
their impact on marginalized communities.
Scholar Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) also wrote
a letter to Art in America in response to Lucy Lippard’s 1993 article
to correct the record about Durham’s uses and misuses of Chero-
kee identity.4 Mithlo critiques his work for pandering to clichés.
Mithlo was arguing for something that almost a quarter century
later we are still having to debate. We are tired. But we won’t stop.
I hope the art world can appreciate our commitment and finally
acknowledge that they made a mistake, a mistake that can be righted
by an increase in domestic and international retrospectives of deserv-
ing Native artists. We never want to make institutions afraid to work
with Native artists because of identity issues. It’s about listening,
learning, and respect. We may be tired but we are also hopeful.
Wado.
1. Jimmie Durham, letter to the editor, Art in America, July 1993, p. 23.
2. Scott Richard Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 2010, p. 40.
3. See Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998. Deloria
states, “[The] practice of playing Indian has clustered around two paradigmatic moments—
the Revolution, which rested on the creation of a national identity, and modernity, which
has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and
postindustrial life,” p. 7.
4. Nancy Marie Mitchell [Mithlo], letter to the editor, Art in America, July 1993, p. 23.
TOMORY DODGE
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 Ethnic Fraud and Art
by America Meredith
“ONE MIGHT IMAGINE that Durham’s ethnicity would
be, today, beyond question,” writes Jonathan Griffin. Why
would that be? After all, Jimmie Durham, an American-born
sculptor who has spent most of his career in Europe, has never
discussed his ethnicity in detail. An examination of his family
tree shows that his ancestors are primarily English, with some
Scottish and French. Griffin shared what has been the artist’s
standard bio for decades: “Durham was born in Washington,
Arkansas, as a Wolf Clan Cherokee but considers himself state-
less.” Yet, Durham was likely born in Harris, Texas.1
To be Cherokee, at the very minimum, requires Cherokee
ancestors. Durham has none. Subsequently, he is not an American
Indian. Still, this assumed identity has informed much of his
artistic practice for more than forty years. Critics, historians, and
curators have continued to promote the claim that Durham is
Native American. This practice reached a crescendo in his North
American retrospective “Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the
World,” organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Durham’s activism in the American Indian Movement
(AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) in the
1970s might seem to validate his Native heritage. Ward Churchill,
AMERICA
Durham’s former comrade-in-arms, was also active in AIM.
MEREDITH Churchill’s claims of being Cherokee and Muscogee Creek ended
is an artist and editor when the Rocky Mountain News found no evidence of any Native
of First American
Art Magazine. See
people among 142 of his direct ancestors.2 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Contributors page. claimed to be Cheyenne when she worked with Durham in AIM
and IITC. She subsequently acknowledged being white. Now,
most unfortunately, she identifies as Cherokee.3
Why is it always Cherokee? The phenomenon of non-Native
people claiming to be Cherokee began in Georgia in the mid-
nineteenth century. Among certain non-Natives, Cherokee has
become a generic placeholder, what people claim when they think
they are Indian but don’t know what tribe. In Southern racial
politics, Cherokee was even twisted into a code word for a “real” or
“authentic” American identity. The best-selling novel The Educa-
tion of Little Tree (1976) was marketed as a memoir by Forrest
Carter, a Cherokee man from Texas. As early as 1976, however,
the New York Times revealed the book’s true author to be Asa
Earl Carter, a Ku Klux Klan propagandist from Alabama, but the
exposé did little to dampen the book’s success at the time.4 Chero-
kees must be one of the few ethnicities in which the nonmembers
claiming the identity outnumber the actual members. Since
Cherokees are an exogamous group, it was relatively easy to pass
as a member—at least before the internet simplified genealogical
research about published claims.
Why does this matter? With so little representation in the
mainstream art world for Native American artists, a retrospective
of an individual who built his career on falsely claiming to be
American Indian is a major setback for the Native community.
Curators at both the Hammer Museum and the Walker Art
Center, where the exhibition was on view this summer, have
claimed that they did not present Durham as an indigenous
22 SEPTEMBER 2017
artist. Yet almost every page of the exhibition catalogue does just
that. Illustrated throughout the catalogue, Durham’s artwork
makes conspicuous references to Native heritage. To cite just two
examples, real indian blood is inscribed on the collage titled
My Blood (1985/1991), and a photograph of Durham’s parents
included in the collage The Indian’s Family (1985) is captioned the
indian’s parents (front view).
In an interview published in the catalogue, curator Anne
Ellegood and Durham discuss the artist’s appropriation of
Cherokee language. “I recall you explaining that beyond the
obvious fact that you are Cherokee,” Ellegood says, “you like to
use the language because very few people speak it.”5 She echoes
Griffin’s observation that Durham uses the Cherokee language
(and, by extension, an assumed Cherokee identity) to position
himself as the ultimate Other for a mostly European audience.
Griffin quotes Durham’s explanation for not translating into
English the Cherokee writing in his mixed-medium painting
Zeke Proctor’s Letter (1989): “What I want them to know is
that they can’t know that,” referring to non-Cherokee-speaking
viewers’ inability to decipher the letter’s meaning.6 Roy Boney Jr.
(Cherokee Nation), a scholar who has promoted the use of Chero-
kee in everyday life, offers a simpler explanation: Durham doesn’t
know what the original nineteenth-century missive, by a Cherokee
Civil War veteran, actually says.7
INDIGENOUS IDENTITY can be highly convoluted and
fraught. Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones explores this
complexity in his series “Identity Genocide” (2012–13). Jones
overlays photographic portraits of Ho-Chunk children who were
denied tribal citizenship with text such as ineligible, removed,
or not recognized. He provides captions detailing his subjects’
stories. Sometimes parents cannot enroll their children in their
tribe. Sometimes one person can enroll while their sibling cannot.
But complexity doesn’t mean that curators and art historians can
simply throw up their hands and give up trying to understand the
situation. The solution is to consult the tribes in question. If cura-
tors, critics, and historians don’t like the answers, the problem lies
with them, not the tribes.
In explaining the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, Griffin neglects
to mention that federally recognized tribes determine their own
membership criteria and have the right to designate anyone they
choose as tribal artisans. None of the three Cherokee tribes—
Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, United Keetoowah Band of
the Cherokee Indians, and Cherokee Nation—have chosen to
designate Durham as a tribal artisan. Why would they? He has
no interaction with any of them and has been misrepresenting
Cherokee culture, language, and history for decades.
Placing a tribal affiliation next to someone’s name is
not a minor footnote. To paraphrase Richard Ray Whit-
man (Yuchi-Muscogee), artists are our ambassadors. What
a tribally affiliated artist says and does in the public arena
reflects back on the tribe. The visual arts have been one
avenue of communication open to Native American peoples.
Even in the darkest times in indigenous history, art allowed
us to share our viewpoints and affirm our identities. In 1932,
during the nadir of the Native population, when American
TOM LaDUKE
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Indians were believed to face imminent extinction, the
United States exhibited Native arts in its pavilion at the
Venice Biennale.8
Popular discourse about Native cultures is already domi-
nated by misinformation and stereotypes. Discussion of Native
issues must be governed by honesty. Part of Durham’s draw is his
outspoken criticism of colonialism. What could be more colonial
than non-Native curators and museums providing a platform for
a European-American man living in Europe to speak on behalf of
all indigenous peoples of the Americas? Native American people
deserve the fundamental right to speak for ourselves, even within
the art world.
1. For details about genealogical research on Durham, see Sheila Regan, “Jimmie Durham
Retrospective Reignites Debate Over His Claim of Native Ancestry,” Hyperallergic,
June 28, 2017, hyperallergic.com.
2. Kevin Flynn, “Special Report: The Churchill Files: The Charge: Misrepresentation,”
Rocky Mountain News, June 9, 2005, accessed via the Internet Archive, internetarchive.org.
3. For histories of false claims of Cherokee identity, see György Ferenc Tóth, From
Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie: The Alliance for Sovereignty Between American Indians
and Central Europeans in the Late Cold War, Albany, N.Y., SUNY Press, 2016; Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2006;
and Laura Flanders, “From Indigenous Socialism to Colonial Capitalism, Examining
Native History of a Settler State,” truthout, Oct.14, 2014, truth-out.org.
4. Dana Rubin, “The Real Education of Little Tree,” Texas Monthly, February, 1992,
texasmonthly.com. See also Dan T. Carter, “The Transformation of a Klansman,” New York
Times, Oct. 4, 1991, nytimes.com.
5. Jimmie Durham and Anne Ellegood, “A Conversation,” in Jimmie Durham: At the Center
of the World, ed. Anne Ellegood, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, 2017, p. 217.
6. Durham quoted by Jonathan Griffin in “Elements from the Actual World.” Originally
from “Jimmie Durham in Conversation with Jeannette Ingberman,” in Jimmie Durham:
The Bishop’s Moose and the Pinkerton Men, Jeannette Ingberman, ed., New York, Exit Art,
1990, p. 31.
7. Roy Boney Jr., “Not Jimmie Durham’s Cherokee,” First American Art Magazine, Fall
2017, forthcoming.
8. Dorothy Dunn, American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas, Albuquerque,
University of New Mexico Press, 1968, p. 240.
JONATHAN GRIFFIN RESPONDS
I cannot overstate how much I have learned in the course
of researching and writing this essay, and in the subsequent
debates driven by the scholarship and reasoned arguments
of Meredith, Holland, and their colleagues. The fact that
I—like so many others—was oblivious to the extraordinary
claims of “ethnic fraud” in Durham’s narrative raises troubling
questions about who gets to write art history, about the effec-
tiveness of our archives, and about whose voices are amplified
and whose are ignored.
It is beyond question that Native American tribes have the
sovereign right to autonomy and self-determination. It is also
beyond doubt that Durham is not an enrolled member of any
Native tribe. He freely admits as much. I cannot argue with
Holland’s contentions that Durham’s use of Cherokee language
is imprecise, or that his references to Cherokee myths and
traditions are inaccurate. But to say that the issue of Durham’s
ethnicity is “simple” seems unfair. Durham has never sought
this validation of his identity. He never tried to prove his
Cherokee heritage to those authorities who would legitimize
it. Given his vocal criticisms of the system of registration,
his inflammatory words about Native society (“colonization
. . . makes people stupid”1) and his rejection of most of the
24 SEPTEMBER 2017
sanctioned Native arts and crafts that the IACA was established
primarily to protect, why would any tribe claim him?
When Durham uses romantic and stereotypical Native
motifs, he is openly critiquing the systems of prejudice and
ignorance that make them so. These motifs are traps in a body of
work that is fundamentally concerned with the subject of authen-
ticity. When looking at Durham’s art, I—as a white, European
viewer—apprehend such motifs in his work as being “Indian”
an instant before I realize I am being fucked with, and that I
am guilty of the very fetishization that the artist is calling out.
Durham flings at non-Native viewers such unstable references
before exposing their very instability.
For what it’s worth, I cannot believe that Jimmie Durham is
a white man who has consistently lied about his family back-
ground, as if consumed by a shameful desire for Native American
culture. I am also not convinced that his five-decade career in art,
writing, and activism has been detrimental to the growing expo-
sure of Native American art on the international stage. Speaking
with Meredith and Holland on the radio show Native America
Calling recently, artist Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw-Cherokee)
credited Durham with opening up a space in contemporary art
for Native concerns that he found “incredibly freeing.”
What does this debate mean for our understanding of
Durham’s work in the future? There are three broad scenarios I
can imagine. In the first, Durham is proved to be an unrepen-
tant ethnic fraud in the mold of Rachel Dolezal, as Holland
suggests. In this scenario, his entire oeuvre could be seen as a
remarkable—if unhinged and utterly unreliable—examination
of identity, its social construction, and its public performance.
If, on the other hand, Durham is exonerated from these
accusations (for example, by genealogical research more
rigorous than what websites like FindaGrave.com currently
allow), then this chapter in his biography would serve as an
illustration of a presumption of guilt. If—and this may be the
most likely reality—the truth is somewhere between the two,
that his self-presentation as Native American, though grounded
in good faith and consonant with his upbringing and self-
understanding, may have relied on some smudged truths and
edited biography, then his art is entirely reflective of his identity
as a dubiously authentic Native American, and its academic
contextualization should keep this in the foreground.
Crucially, in all three scenarios, Durham should never be
regarded as an “ambassador” for his tribe or his race. This concep-
tion of an artist’s role would, I suspect, be utterly anathema to
him. He does not speak for anyone except himself, as I believe
that the retrospective at the Hammer made abundantly clear. To
discredit him because he fails to fulfill this function is to mis-
understand the unique and solitary path that he has forged for
himself over the last half century. I remain intensely distrustful of
anyone who claims to speak for their entire group, as if a tribe or
an ethnic group—no matter how close-knit—were a monolithic
entity, and not a responsive network of individuals, some with
louder voices than others.
1. Jimmie Durham, “Cherokee-US Relations,” The American West, Warwickshire, UK,
Compton Verney, 2005, p. 54.
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August 18 – October 28, 2017

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 MANO-MADE:
NEW EXPRESSION
IN CRAFT BY
LATINO ARTISTS
AUGUST 26, 2017–JANUARY 20, 2018

CRAFT IN AMERICA CENTER

8415 W. Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048
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CRAFT IN AMERICA:
BORDERS and NEIGHBORS
PBS Premiere September 29, 2017
(check local listings)

View all episodes at www.craftinamerica.org/episodes


A concise guide to some of the most
exciting exhibitions, art fairs, and
festivals opening in September.
ISTANBUL
BIENNIAL
The sixty artists included in the Istanbul
Biennial’s fifteenth edition, titled “A Good
Neighbor,” investigate how diverse groups
can coexist. This is an urgent concern in
a country—traditionally considered the
gateway between East and West—that
was rocked by a coup attempt in 2016.
The exhibition’s curators, artist duo
Elmgreen & Dragset, have dramatically
scaled back the usually sprawling event,
which this year coincides with the Con-
temporary Istanbul art fair (Sept. 14–17).
The six Biennial venues are all within
walking distance of one another.
Various venues, Istanbul, Sept. 16–Nov. 12.
RACHEL
WHITEREAD
Turner Prize–winning artist Rachel
Whiteread’s sculptures render nega-
tive space in industrial materials like
plaster, rubber, concrete, and metal. This
midcareer survey also includes drawings,
collages, photographs, documentation of
public projects (one of her best-known
works, House, 1993–94, a concrete cast
of the interior of a domestic structure,
was controversially destroyed soon after
its completion), and a restaging of the
artist’s first solo exhibition (1988), along
with new, never-before-exhibited works.
Tate Britain, London, Sept. 12, 2017–
Jan. 21, 2018; 21er Haus, Vienna,
Mar. 1–July 31, 2018; National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C., Sept. 16, 2018–
Jan. 13, 2019; Saint Louis Art Museum,
Mar. 1–May 31, 2019.
THE BRIEF
SPEECH /ACTS
Language has the ability not only to
communicate identity but to shape it.
This is the idea behind “Speech/Acts,”
a group exhibition featuring six young
artists and poets who explore how
social and linguistic constructs have
molded the black experience in Amer-
ica. Recent and newly commissioned
collages, drawings, text-based installa-
tions, and video works by Jibade-Khalil
Huffman, Steffani Jemison, Tony Lewis,
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah
Janan Rasheed, and Martine Syms draw
from experimental black poetry and
popular culture.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadel-
phia, Sept. 13–Dec. 23.
CHICAGO
ARCHITECTURE
BIENNIAL
Chicago has long served as an incubator
for experimental architecture, boasting a
diverse array of buildings by figures like
Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Led by
artistic directors Sharon Johnston and
Mark Lee, “Make New History,” the
second edition of the Chicago Archi-
tecture Biennial, counters the typical
modernist insistence on creating formally
original works divorced from tradition.
The show’s one hundred or so individual
architects, firms, and artists instead
ground their forward-looking designs in
specific contexts and a creative engage-
ment with structural precedents.
Chicago Cultural Center, Sept. 16, 2017–
Jan. 7, 2018.
LYON
BIENNIAL
“Modernity,” Charles Baudelaire once
wrote, “is the transient, the fleeting, the
contingent; it is one half of art, the other
being the eternal and immovable.” As in
Left, works by
its previous edition, the fourteenth Lyon Martine Syms, one
Biennial explores the term “modern.” For of six artists slated to
appear in “Speech/
this iteration, titled “Floating Worlds,”
Acts” at the Institute
curator Emma Lavigne, director of the of Contemporary
Centre Pompidou’s branch in Metz, has Art, Philadelphia.
Courtesy Bridget
selected works by Diana Thater, Cildo
Donahue, New York.
Meireles, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Photo Mark Blower.
and other artists who confront contempo-
rary social concerns.
La Sucrière and Place Antonin-Poncet,
Lyon, Sept. 20, 2017–Jan. 7, 2018.
ZEITZ MOCAA Rendering of the
Zeitz Museum
OPENS of Contemporary
Art Africa, Cape
The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Town. Courtesy
Heatherwick
Art Africa opens this month in Cape
Town. A former grain silo has been
Studio, London.
transformed into a modern museum by
British architect Thomas Heatherwick.
In addition to special exhibition galler-
ies, Zeitz MOCAA includes perma-
nent collection spaces and research
departments devoted to fashion,
photography, performance, film, educa-
tion, and curatorial training. Dedicated
to twenty-first century art from Africa
and the African diaspora, the museum
opens with a monographic show by
Swaziland-born, South Africa–based Rachel Whiteread:
artist Nandipha Mntambo (on view Untitled (Amber
through January 27, 2018). Bed), 1991, rubber,
20 by 14 by 15¾
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, inches. Courtesy
Cape Town, opens Sept. 22. Tate Britain,
London
—The Brief is compiled by
Julia Wolkoff
ART IN AMERICA 29
“Day into Night,” 2016, water, Sumi ink, Flashe on hot press watercolor paper, 511/2" x 69 3/16"

Sky Pape
Passing Through: New Works on Paper

7 September –10 October 2017

JUNE KELLY GALLERY

166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012/212-226-1660
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38 x 38 x 4 ½ inches

OLGA de AMARAL and RUTH DUCKWORTH

BUILDING ON BEAUTY

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ANIMAL FARM
Curated by Sadie Laska
May – October 2017

© Kenny Scharf. Courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery.

The Brant Foundation Art Study Center

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 FIRST LOOK
Julia Weist
by William S. Smith
“I’M INTERESTED IN places on the internet where there
are holes,” Julia Weist recently told me. A New York–based
artist as well as a trained librarian, Weist discovered in 2014
that “parbunkells,” an alternative spelling for an archaic nautical
term, did not appear when searched on the World Wide Web.
She printed the word in large type on a billboard in Queens.
The analog advertisement revealed an online vacuum that
people rushed to fill; as the mysterious sign garnered attention
from passersby and the press, Weist documented some twenty
thousand searches per day for a word that seventeenth-century
sailors coined to designate a doubled rope used as a hoisting
sling. Other projects have included manipulating the Google
results for Haim Steinbach and redirecting online searches for
“Miami Inmates” to pages featuring prisoners’ poetry.
Weist’s first solo museum exhibition, developed during
an emerging artist fellowship at the Queens Museum, stems
from her research on the robust offline data-sharing networks
that have developed in Cuba, a nation where internet access
is expensive, data rates slow, and government censorship
prevalent. These restrictions have done little to dampen
Havana residents’ desire to keep up with the latest episodes of
“Game of Thrones.” The solution: el paquete semanal, a “gray
Still from a video
made by Julia Weist
and Nestor Siré
showing a hard drive
paquete distributed
by BABALAWO
in Holguín, Cuba,
2016.
market” hard drive, delivered weekly to cutomers, loaded with
Turkish soap operas, pop songs, Hollywood films, telenovelas,
and YouTube clips—all of its content pirated, at least from the
perspective of United States copyright lawyers.
Collaborating with Cuban artist Nestor Siré, who organizes
an art folder for one paquete company, Weist has archived content
collected over a year on a sixty-two-terabyte server, preserving
files that are purged from the drives on a weekly basis to make
room for fresh content. Visitors to the Queens Museum will be
COMING SOON
able to search the server and take home versions of a paquete. But “17.(SEPT) [By
these Americanized approximations of the Cuban offline inter- WeistSiréPC]™” at
net will be riddled with holes. Weist has ensured the material the Queens Museum,
New York, Sept. 17,
she’s distributing is in full compliance with US copyright law, and 2017–Feb. 18, 2018.
some files will be replaced by letters explaining that permission to
circulate copyrighted materials has been denied.
Weist is also making new contributions to one Cuban
paquete. She has solicited homemade videos of international
celebrities describing their internet use habits. The first such
video, featuring actor Mark Ruffalo narrating the process of
purchasing old records on Etsy, has proven popular in Cuba and
received the coveted mark of paquete success: it hasn’t yet been
deleted from the weekly selections on the hard drives.
ART IN AMERICA 33
 Aria Bianca
2017 ∙ Carrara Marble ∙ 74 by 24 by 20 inches
RichardErdman.com

Photos: James: Paul Mpagi Sepuya; Marshall: courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Fassbinder: courtesy Janus Films, New York; Russell: courtesy British Film Institute, London.
Kerry James Marshall: The Lost Boys, 1993, acrylic and
collage on canvas, 100 by 120 inches.
A MOVEABLE FEAST
It’s important for me to see a show more
than once and sometimes in different spaces
to understand the key choices that cura-
tors make. I saw the Kerry James Marshall
survey, for instance, in Chicago at the MCA
and three times at MOCA, Los Angeles.
As a former Chicagoan, I’m thrilled to see
the painter finally get his due. He’s mastered
portraiture in a way that’s revealing, well
humored, and always on point.
THE DEVILS YOU KNOW
Ken Russell’s The Devils, based on Aldous
Huxley’s nonfiction novel The Devils of
Loudun, is a horror movie in the same way
that Jordan Peele’s Get Out has been classified
as a horror movie, even though both films
function primarily as social commentary.
Made in 1971, the full version of The Devils
was never released because of its searing
critique of religion and government. It’s dif-
ficult to watch. It’s damaging. But it deserves
critical reevaluation and a proper theatrical
release, especially considering the current
state of affairs in the United States.
Poster for Ken Russell’s The Devils, 1971.
SIGHTLINES
MAN OF THE MOMENT
I felt lucky to see “Merce Cunningham:
Common Time” at the Walker Art
Center. I was especially drawn to
the Charles Atlas installation MC-9
(2012), nine channels of footage
documenting Cunningham’s career.
There are clips of solo and
group dances, as well as videos
of Cunningham at various points
in his life. It was wonderful to
witness viewers enraptured and
delighted by this wealth of mate-
rial, which was expertly edited
and stitched together by Atlas. 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder: World on a Wire, 1973,
film transferred to video, 2 hours, 32 minutes.
REALITY CHECK
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on
a Wire is one of his many films first
conceived as a television show. Set in the
early ’70s, it entails a conversation about
the potential problematics of virtual
reality. The film is a powerful cautionary
story about how technology can affect our
everyday interactions.
STAGES OF LAUGHTER
I want to tip my hat to the
writers of television comedy. We
turn to late-night TV as a way to
decompress from the horrendous
news we hear every day. “Satur-
day Night Live” and talk shows
hosted by Stephen Colbert,
Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee,
and others have been doing a
fine job of keeping things critical
while highlighting the absurdity
of our situation.
Jamillah
James
The Los Angeles–based
curator shares five
recent insights with
Ross Simonini.
Jamillah James is responsible for some
of the most exciting exhibitions in
Los Angeles in recent history. At the
Hammer Museum, where she was an
assistant curator from 2014 to 2016,
James organized presentations of work
by Simone Leigh and Njideka Akunyili
Crosby, and at the nonprofit Art +
Practice—in a partnership with the
Hammer—she curated shows by Alex
Da Corte and Charles Gaines. Now,
James is curator of the Institute
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—
the reincarnation of the Santa Monica
Museum of Art as a non-collecting
institution—which opens this month
in downtown LA. The ICA LA’s
inaugural program features works
by Martín Ramírez, Abigail DeVille,
and Sarah Cain. Appropriately for an
LA curator, James cites film as a major
point of departure for her projects.
“I find myself thinking in cinematic
terms,” she says. “I conceive objects
in a space as ‘actors’ in a narrative and
exhibition design as mise-en-scène,
with each show serving as a ‘take’
contributing to or challenging a
larger history.”
ART IN AMERICA 37
 SIMON DINNERSTEIN
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 CRITICAL EYE
Three critics take stock of the 57th Venice Biennale and Documenta 14,
with an eye to the controversies surrounding each show.
VENICE
Off Beat
by Brian Droitcour
Critical consensus formed quickly around “Viva Arte Viva,”
the exhibition that Christine Macel, chief curator of the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, has mounted at the 57th Venice Biennale. It’s
out of touch with the harsh present, too soft to face an ominous
future. “It just feels sentimental,” Evan Moffitt wrote on Frieze’s
website, “an ineffective response to the current global surge of
fascism and intolerance.”1 Artforum critic Kate Sutton said that
the show’s “emphasis on aesthetics and process made some politi-
cal intentions seem decorative.”2 During the Biennale’s preview
days the New York Times ran a news piece headlined “A Venice
Biennale About Art, With the Politics Muted.”3 Holland Cotter
followed up two weeks later with a review saying the show “feels
almost perversely out of sync with the political moment.”4 Most
critics began their reviews of “Viva Arte Viva” by describing the
first work they encountered in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion,
View of Olafur
Eliasson’s installation
Green light—An
artistic workshop,
2016–, in “Viva Arte
Viva” at the Venice
Biennale. Photo
Francesco Galli.
Mladen Stilinović’s photo series “Artist at Work” (1978–2017)—
in which the Croatian artist is seen lolling in bed, asleep or
dreamy—and took the images as emblematic of an exhibition
hopelessly unalert to its sociopolitical context.
Andrea Fraser once said that “all art is political, the problem
is that most of it is reactionary, that is, passively affirmative of the
relations of power in which it is produced.”5 Sometimes this view CURRENTLY
gets reduced to the rejection of any art subtler than comedian ON VIEW
“Viva Arte Viva,” at
Kathy Griffin’s fake decapitation of Donald Trump or artist the Venice Biennale,
Molly Crabapple’s maudlin wheatpastes satirizing the president through Nov. 26.
and his cronies. If being in sync with the political moment means
Documenta 14,
matching its spectacle of cruelty and accelerated disposability, “Learning from
then why not work in a different rhythm? “Viva Arte Viva” is a Athens,” Kassel,
reminder that warmth is a strong position, that generosity and Germany, through
Sept. 17.
hospitality can be strategies of resistance in a time of xenophobia
and nationalism. Of course, this art doesn’t do anything. Gentle
as it is, the work championed by Macel is not effective in the way
that organizing and marching are. But art carrying an explicit
political message doesn’t actually do anything either. It just makes
critics feel slightly less guilty for gallivanting around Venice
instead of hashtag-resisting at home.
ART IN AMERICA 41
Mixed-medium
artworks by Nicolás
García Uriburu
showing dye actions
in various locations,
1968–73; in “Viva
Arte Viva” at the
Venice Biennale.
Photo Italo
Rondinella.
There is little painting in Macel’s exhibition. From Yee
Sookyung’s amalgams of broken Korean ceramics and Abdoulaye
Konaté’s collaged textile banner to Lee Mingwei’s clothes-darning
station and David Medalla’s long swath of fabric onto which visitors
can sew their own everyday objects, “Viva Arte Viva” is characterized
by references to craft. Andrew Russeth, writing on the ARTnews
website, called the preponderance of such handiwork “outmoded
and naïve.”6 In a sense, he’s right—but not because it’s a touchy-feely
“hippie” throwback. Incorporating skills from outside the repertoire
of the fine arts is often a way of alluding to art produced by and for
a community, rather than in a studio for a market. It evokes a social
purpose for art that is now outmoded. As a contemporary art exhibi-
tion, “Viva Arte Viva” almost exclusively features works made by
individuals for display rather than collective use, but it’s permeated by
an impulse to integrate art into the social fabric. This is often subtle,
as in Senga Nengudi’s A.C.Q. (2016–17), composed of suspended,
sand-filled hosiery whose stretchy synthetic fabric alludes to skin and
whose sand evokes guts, a material metaphor for bodily elasticity.
In the past, Nengudi has reinforced her interest in the communal
aspect of art by working with collaborators who touch and move the
sculptures; here, the works’ fabric is set atremble by fans.
Truly community-based art is represented in “Viva Arte Viva”
through documentation and ephemera. Prominently featured near
the entrance to the Arsenale, a video samples iterations of Anna
Halprin’s Planetary Dance (1981–), an annual ritual first performed
to reclaim the hiking trails of Mount Tamalpais in Northern
California after seven women were murdered there. Planetary Dance
resonates with indigenous notions of dance as a form of community
healing; according to the work’s legend, cited in a wall text and the
Biennale catalogue, Halprin met with an elder from the Native
American Huichol tribe after the first dance, and he advised her
to repeat it. After the third performance, the “Trailside Killer” was
caught. Since then, Planetary Dance has been performed around the
world. A large print of its score hangs on the wall of the Arsenale,
beside photographs showing how Halprin’s choreography has been
realized in Poland, Peru, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere.
42 SEPTEMBER 2017 CRITICAL EYE
Environmental architect Bonnie Ora Sherk organizes gardens
in neglected neighborhoods, transforming communities not only
physically through the introduction of greenery but also socially, by
bringing people together to learn skills through the implementa-
tion of her plans. Photographs and documents in the Arsenale
selected from decades of material show people working in Cross-
roads Community (The Farm), 1974–, a garden in a once-derelict
lot by a freeway in San Francisco, and A Living Library (1981–), a
plot in New York’s Bryant Park.
Sherk’s work is displayed opposite documentation of several
projects by Nicolás García Uriburu (1937–2016), an Argentinian
artist engaged in social and environmental activism. During the
1968 Venice Biennale—an edition marred by violence, as local
police repressed protesting artists—he dyed the Grand Canal
green. García Uriburu organized these dye actions in cities around
the world, a message of unity against the division of the globe into
an imperialist North and exploited South.
Several installations include people at work in the galleries.
Their presence has been cited in reviews as evidence of Macel’s
political cluelessness. Huni Kuin Indians are performing rituals in
Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar (A Sacred Place, 2017), in the
Arsenale, and refugees (many from Africa) are building modular
lamps with green bulbs in Olafur Eliasson’s Green light—An artistic
workshop (2016–), in the Central Pavilion. Dan Fox wrote for
Frieze that these works add up to “a sightseer’s guide to different
ways of life that in some places comes close to fetishizing alterity.”7
If you understand the exhibition space as a one-way channel where
the viewer consumes the work, Fox is right. But that’s not how
these artists approach it. While Eliasson has greater name recogni-
tion in the art world than Halprin, García Uriburu, or Sherk,
he is as unbeholden to the white cube as they are. His work has
always been intensely collaborative, and he uses art as a means for
bringing people from diverse disciplines and backgrounds together.
His Green light project (which has also been realized in Vienna and
Houston) creates a bubble for alternative ways of engaging with
art, interrupting the pace of tourist shuffling.
Any ambitious exhibition will challenge viewers’ expectations for
what can happen in the gallery.

View of Maria
Eichhorn’s
“Rose Valland
Institute” project,
showing (center)
Unlawfully acquired
books from Jewish
ownership, 2017, in
Documenta 14 at the
Neue Galerie, Kassel.
Photo Mathias
Voȋlzke.

Any ambitious exhibition will challenge viewers’ expectations

for what can happen in the gallery. In “Viva Arte Viva,” Macel
has endeavored to build an atmosphere of earnest exchange. Open
Table, a program that invites visitors to enjoy a free lunch with a
Biennale artist, and the video interviews posted to the Biennale’s
website reinforce the curator’s commitment to conversation and
conviviality. The problem is that most critics can’t shake the habit
of treating artworks as images and products. They stroll through
the Arsenale like you scroll down an image feed, sometimes paus-
ing to register approval, but ignoring most of it. In this regime of
reception, which is exacerbated by the expanding scale of interna-
tional shows and the shrinking time to publication for reviews, it’s
easy for a stereotype about a show—that it’s backward, apolitical,
out of touch—to get parroted so much it sounds like the truth
rather than the shallow distortion it is. That’s the drawback to
being of the moment.
1. Evan Moffitt, “57th Venice Biennale: The Central Pavilion,” Frieze, May 11, 2017,
frieze.com.
2. Kate Sutton, “Politics by Other Means,” Artforum, May 17, 2017, artforum.com.
3. Rachel Donadio, “A Venice Biennale About Art, With the Politics Muted,”
New York Times, May 7, 2017, nytimes.com.
4. Holland Cotter, “Not of This Moment,” New York Times, May 23, 2017, p. C1.
5. Andrea Fraser quoted in Gregg Bordowitz, “Tactics Inside and Out,” Institutional
Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson,
Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2009, p. 444.
6. Andrew Russeth, “A Look at ‘Viva Arte Viva,’ the Hippie, Heal-the-World Venice
Biennale,” ARTnews, May 9, 2017, artnews.com.
7. Dan Fox, “57th Venice Biennale: The Arsenale,” Frieze, May 11, 2017, frieze.com.
KASSEL
Dislocated Loot
by Rachel Wetzler
LOOTED ART IS everywhere in the Kassel portion of
Documenta 14, posited as something like the uncanny double
of today’s globe-trotting artworks. Networks of international
circulation are central to the functioning of the contemporary
art world, and Documenta is a key node.
Artistic director Adam Szymczyk originally intended for
the centerpiece of the Kassel exhibition, which takes place in RACHEL
over thirty venues throughout the city, to be the Gurlitt col- WETZLER
lection, a trove of stolen artworks amassed by Nazi art dealer is a writer based in
New York.
Hildebrand Gurlitt. Discovered in the Munich apartment of
his son, Cornelius, in 2012, the hoard came to public atten-
tion around the time Szymczyk began preparing the show,
and he wanted it to occupy the entirety of the Neue Galerie.
Ultimately, Szymczyk was unable to secure the loans. Instead,
a portion of the museum is given over to Maria Eichhorn’s
“Rose Valland Institute” (2017), a research project named for a
French art historian who secretly documented the Nazi theft of
cultural items during the German occupation of Paris. Devoted
to the study of ongoing restitution claims, the project includes
an installation of books that were stolen from Jewish owners
but still remain in German libraries. The curators invoke the

CRITICAL EYE ART IN AMERICA 43

Above left, Gurlitt collection obliquely via two Romantic landscapes of
Andrzej Wróblewski: the Acropolis by Cornelius Gurlitt’s great-grandfather, the
Surrealist Execution
(Execution VIII), nineteenth-century Düsseldorf painter Louis Gurlitt, trian-
1949, oil on canvas, gulating Nazi plundering, the origins of the modern German
50¾ by 78 inches;
in Documenta 14.
state, and its neocolonial relation to Greece in the present.
Courtesy National But, of course, the act of expropriating artworks wasn’t
Museum in Warsaw. exclusive to the Nazis. Also in the Neue Galerie are several
Benin Bronzes depicting royalty and dignitaries, just three of the
Above right, The roughly four thousand objects looted from the Kingdom of Benin
Black Code or
collection of rules by British soldiers in 1897. The artworks were subsequently sold
that have been passed to museums across Europe. Pointedly juxtaposed with these
so far, regarding
government,
examples are a number of marble Neo-Classical statues (dated
administration of 1876–82) by the German sculptor Carl Friedrich Echtermeier;
justice, police, the drawn from the Neue Galerie collection, they allegorically
discipline & trade
of Negros in the represent what the artist considered “nations of art,” all of them
French colonies. And in Europe. As evidenced by displays throughout this venue, the
the councils and
companies established
forced relocation of objects and resources was a foundational
for these matters element of the Enlightenment project and, in turn, central to the
(Paris, Prault, 1742); development of German national identity and culture, embodied
in Documenta 14.
Courtesy Berlin by the institution of the public museum.
State Library. Photo At the center of Friedrichsplatz, historically the city’s ceremo-
Mathias Voȋlzke.
nial center, stood Marta Minujín’s Parthenon of Books (1983/2017),
a replica of an Athenian temple composed of censored volumes.
The polemical move of splitting Documenta 14 between Kassel, its
traditional home, and Athens pervades the entire exhibition, as
indicated by its vague overarching title, “Learning from Athens.”
But what, exactly, is being learned, and by whom, never becomes
clear: Szymczyk and his curatorial team gesture toward weighty
ideas and themes—restitution, debt, migration, the long tail of
colonialism—without fully embedding them into the narrative
of the exhibition in a way that feels necessary or convincing.
Simultaneously overbearing and incoherent, the show too often
instrumentalizes the artworks, treating them like bullet points in
the scattered outline of an argument.
The curators describe the Neue Galerie as this Documenta’s
“historical consciousness,” and its eclectic array of historical
artworks, archival documents, and artifacts—positioned as a kind
of theoretical scaffolding for the whole exhibition—exempli-
fies the fundamental weakness of Szymczyk’s approach. The
problem isn’t the quality of works, which are often surprising and
44 SEPTEMBER 2017 CRITICAL EYE
exquisite. Of particular note are Andrzej Wróblewski’s haunt-
ing painting Surrealist Execution (Execution VIII), 1949, which
registers the trauma of wartime violence through nightmarish
figural distortion; the intricate abstract patterning of Replica of a
Chip (1994), Navajo artist Marilou Schultz’s woven depiction of
a computer chip, commissioned by the Intel Corporation; and
Geta Brătescu’s video Automatism (2017), in which a man walks
the length of a room slicing through sheets of paper blocking his
passage, a belated realization of a project first conceived by the
artist in 1974. All of these, and many other works in the show,
deserve a more central place in the art historical canon.
But the logic behind their selection and arrangement
alternates between frustratingly opaque and hyperliteral, with any
number of artworks included only to illustrate abstract concepts.
Take, for instance, the two early Florentine Renaissance portray-
als of the hermit St. Anthony Abbot shunning gold (one painted
by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini and the other by Giovanni di ser
Giovanni Guidi). Situated near the exhibition’s entrance, they
were chosen, according to the wall label, because of their “topical”
relationship to current concerns about wealth and inequality.
There are also numerous books and manuscripts placed under
glass, where they can be looked at but not read. Among these
are the Polish constructivist Władysław Strzemiński’s annotated
typescript for Theory of Vision (uselessly accompanying his 1949
painting Afterimage of Light: Landscape); Samuel Beckett’s 1936
travel diary, which, we are told, describes his travels throughout
Germany, including Kassel; and a copy of Le Code Noir, a French
legal document formalizing the institution of slavery in the Loui-
siana colonies. A book enclosed in a vitrine illuminates nothing
for the viewer, merely pointing to the existence of an idea and
telling us that it is curatorially significant.
Displays in the show’s smaller venues—several of which,
selected for the first time, are located in Nordstadt, home
to many of Kassel’s immigrant communities—largely took
their organizational cues from the functions and histories of
the buildings themselves. The exhibition guide refers to the
Neue Neue Galerie (as Szymczyk and his team christened the
disused Neue Hauptpost, the city’s former central post office)
as “a nexus of distribution,” thematizing the show’s purported
two-way exchange between Kassel and Athens. The works here
are mostly new commissions that meditate on communication
and migration. Otobong Nkanga’s Carved to Flow (2017), for
example, is a multipart project in which black soap produced in
a laboratory installation in Athens is created with ingredients
sourced from the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, and
West Africa, and then sent to Kassel for storage and display.
The Ottoneum, housing the city’s natural history museum, con-
tains riffs on the anthropological gaze, mostly by non-Western
artists. Khvay Samnang, who lives in Phnom Penh, presents the
three-channel video Preah Kunlong (2017), which is based on
his extensive engagement with the indigenous Chong people
from Cambodia’s southwestern forests. Nearby, Nomin Bold’s
brilliant paintings draw on Central Asian pictorial traditions to
depict contemporary life in her native Mongolia. The display
at the Grimmwelt, a new museum devoted to the Kassel-born
Brothers Grimm, reflects on the relationship between language,
mythology, and nationhood via works like Susan Hiller’s video
Lost and Found (2016), an archive of endangered languages.
The most dramatic of Szymczyk’s curatorial moves in Kassel,
turning over the Fridericianum to the collection of Athens’s
National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), is also its
most hollow. Presumably intended as a gesture of solidarity
and community, it serves mostly as a reminder of how few of
these artists would otherwise find their way into a prestigious
international event like Documenta. Moreover, in isolating
the Athens collection in its own sub-exhibition, “Antidoron,”
curated, it should be noted, by EMST director Katerina Koskina
rather than the Documenta team, the organizers treat the works
like sociohistorical curiosities—contemporary art according to
Greece—rather than as full participants in the Kassel show.
Over the past two years, Szymczyk has regularly insisted
that his aim is to resist the spectacular quality that so fre-
quently characterizes global biennials and the like. But the
installation of the EMST collection in the Fridericianum
is a superficial spectacle at its core, in spite of its spare and
dour aesthetic. The same might be said of the entire Docu-
menta 14, which requires a plane trip—preferably on official
partner Aegean Airlines’s exclusive Kassel-Athens route—to
be viewed in its entirety. For an exhibition that purports to
learn from Athens—a stand-in, it seems, for the entire global
South—it has strikingly little to say about the actual geopo-
litical and economic conditions undergirding its own execu-
tion, namely that moving freely between European capitals is
possible for only a privileged subset of the world’s population
holding the right passports. I suspect Szymczyk’s team is
painfully aware of this irony; but they seem to think that it
is sufficient to treat the dislocation as a comment in itself,
invoking the dilemma of migration through a divided exhibi-
tion that is perversely rendered doubly inaccessible.
CRITICAL EYE
ATHENS Rebecca Belmore:
Biinjiya’iing Onji,
2017, marble,
Chorus of Complaint on Filopappou
Hill, Athens, in
by Andreas Angelidakis Documenta 14. 
Photo Fanis Vlastaras.
DOCUMENTA 14 crash-landed in Athens like a big black
monolith that shattered into a million pieces. Well, maybe not a
million, but with forty-seven local venues organized by fourteen
curators and curatorial advisers, there was nothing singular about
it. More than a mere event, Documenta 14 became a hyperobject,
which theorist Timothy Morton, who coined the term, describes
as something “so massively distributed in time and space as
to transcend spatiotemporal specificity.”1 A phenomenon like
Documenta 14 makes people angry, because nobody can describe
it exactly and nobody can see it whole, whereas the art world
functions almost entirely on forming opinions and passing judg-
ments on the basis of authoritative observations.
Titled “Learning from Athens,” which suggests a process,
Documenta 14 produced a friction, an anger that didn’t ease The Athens portion
up even after the Athens part officially closed. Sparks flew of Documenta 14 ran
from the get-go, in a litany of questions: Why Athens? Who Apr. 8–July 16, 2017.
in Athens? Why learning? Why are there so many venues?
Why are there so many performances? Why is there no infor- ANDREAS
mation? Complaining about Documenta was apparently more ANGELIDAKIS is
an artist and architect
appealing than anything Documenta itself could offer. based in Athens.
The Documenta 14 organizers released little informa-
tion before the public opening on April 8, when the Athens
half launched with a performance of Jani Christou’s Epicycle
(1968/2017), a musical composition of indefinite duration
that invites all audience members to join in with their own
voices and sounds. Documenta, too, was conceived as an
open-ended composition. Four design offices were employed
to make sure that the project would have no single graphic
identity. I told artistic director Adam Szymczyk that I was
beginning to identify his methods of fragmentation. “Yes,
and because it’s so spread out, no two people can claim
to have had the same exhibition experience,” he replied.
“Nobody can claim to have seen the entire thing.”
In Athens, the criticism in the local press included
everything you would expect. Documenta colonized a scene.
ART IN AMERICA 45

A digital collage It didn’t include enough Greek artists (so it wasn’t coloniz-
by the artist group
Verstopfte Maschine
ing enough). The Greek artists included weren’t the right
depicting the ones. Its hiring methods were riddled with favoritism. It
Documenta 14 failed to appoint Greek curators to the team (Marina Fokidis
curatorial staff
dressed as owls (the and Katerina Tselou were eventually promoted to curatorial
exhibition’s mascot). advisers). No one knew how much money they had. No one
knew where the money was coming from. Documenta was
too leftist. Documenta was too capitalist.
In an interview published on Art-Agenda, Yanis Varou-
fakis, Greece’s former finance minister, went so far as to
compare Documenta’s arrival in Athens to the privatization
of the national airports, because the exhibition drained the
country’s financial resources. Documenta, he claimed, paid
only a token amount to the National Museum of Contem-
porary Art (EMST).2 I don’t know if Documenta drained
funding from the Athens art scene. To be honest, I don’t
think there were any funds to be drained. Furthermore,
Varoufakis’s description of Documenta’s miserliness seems
exaggerated, and he doesn’t cite any numbers to back it
up. While Documenta has not publicly confirmed budget
figures, sources within the organization told me that EMST
was paid 600,000 euros ($704,000) for hosting part of Docu-
menta, and 3 million euros ($3.5 million) were spent on the
exhibition of works from the EMST collection at the Kassel
Fridericianum. Nevertheless, Varoufakis was quoted in e-flux,
Artnet, Hyperallergic, Spike, and other art publications as
proof of the negative reception to Documenta in Greece.
In early June, almost simultaneously with the publica-
tion of Varoufakis’s interview, Zoi Konstadopoulou, another
member of the leftist Syriza party, threatened to sue Docu-
menta for colluding with Germany to avoid paying Greece’s
World War II reparations. The absurdity reached an apex in
mid-July, when Documenta became the subject of debate in
the Greek Parliament. Finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos
For coverage of urged the parliamentary body to applaud Documenta 14,
Skulptur Projekte while other members argued against it.
Münster and
selected national One doesn’t have to be an economist to know that one
pavilions in Venice, of the currencies artists deal in is that of attention, and
visit our website:
www.artinamerica Documenta donated heaps of it to the city of Athens. The
magazine.com. landing of Documenta 14 threw civic hype into overdrive.
46 SEPTEMBER 2017 CRITICAL EYE
Now Athens was not only a cheap and sexy crisis survivor.
It was also the host of Documenta, at the cutting edge of
contemporary culture. Hordes of art people descended on
the city. The huge amount of cultural capital that Athens
amassed will take some time to register at the currency
exchange, but it quickly generated a multitude of exhibition
projects all around the city this summer. I remember a rainy
Friday morning in June, when I found out that “Driftwood,
or how we surfaced through currents,” a group exhibition
featuring eleven site-specific projects sponsored by the Fon-
dazione Prada, was opening that night a few blocks from my
home. I knew that, before Documenta 14, it would have been
the event of the year. Now it was something I was willing to
skip because of a few raindrops.
I grew up in Athens, and I moved back in 2005, when
I realized that New York was not the best place to make
work. There was too much going on, and it was dominated
by the market. Since then I have watched Athens develop
from a forgotten periphery to a hyped periphery, thanks
in part to the 2007 Athens Biennial (which I worked on
as an exhibition designer) and the many private initiatives
from galleries and foundations. As a participating artist in
Documenta 14, I decided to go back to my student research
on the city and its unauthorized construction practices. Now
that the Athens portion of the exhibition is over, the city has
become even more fascinating, because it has been given a
new chapter, rather than getting written off as a victim of a
financial crisis.
One of the properties of hyperobjects is that we are
always inside them, like Jonah in the whale. Whatever we do
becomes a part of this hyperobject. That’s what I found most
fascinating about Documenta 14. All the criticism, whether
justified or spurred by petty politics, was subsumed into the
hyperobject that is Documenta 14, and contributed to the
attention that was deposited in the city. The chorus of com-
plaint gave voice to people who were not part of the official
organization. It included all those who were excluded, through
the parade of articles and social-media rants and hilarious
trolling sessions, like the ones produced by the organizers of
the Athens Biennial on the Verstopfte Maschine Facebook
page, which posted satirical remixes of photos and videos
released by Documenta. During my first chat with Szymczyk,
he spoke about creating a situation rather than an exhibition,
and it has become obvious that Documenta in Athens was the
mother of all art world situations.
In retrospect, Athens was the perfect setting for this
kind of extreme complexity and contradiction, because it
is an unresolved city. Athens is never what you expect. It is
dirty and sad and alluring and vibrant. Most important, it is
not a city that pretends to know, but a city in the process of
learning.
1. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2010,
p. 130.
2. iLiana Fokianaki and Yanis Varoufakis, “We Come Bearing Gifts,” Art-Agenda,
June 7, 2017, art-agenda.com.
BEN WILSON
FROM SOCIAL REALISM TO ABSTRACTION
CURATED BY JASON ROSENFELD, PHD

SEP 6–NOV 4 GEORGE SEGAL GALLERY MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY

1 Normal Avenue, Montclair, NJ 07043 973-655-6941 For directions and info, log on to montclair.edu
Gallery hours: Tue, Wed, Fri, Sat 11:00 AM–6:00 PM; Thur 12:30–7:30 PM Color catalogue available
Untitled, 1985. Oil on Masonite, 42 x 48 inches. Montclair State University Permanent Collection. Gift of the Ben and Evelyn Wilson Foundation. MSU 2012.001.307
Lalla Essaydi, Harem #2, 2010, chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist and of Edwynn Houk Gallery, NY.

Announcing the 7th Biennial Hamad bin

Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art.
November 2–4, 2017 in Richmond, Virginia
at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
islamicartdoha.org
Speakers include HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani,
contemporary artists Lalla Essaydi, Shahzia Sikander and
Hassan Hajjaj, and some of the leading curators, collectors
and leaders in the field of contemporary Islamic art.

Presented by Virginia Commonwealth University School of

the Arts in Richmond, Virginia and Doha, Qatar; Qatar Foundation;
Hamad Bin Khalifa University; and the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts.
 BACKSTORY

Donald Judd (left)

and Ilya Kabakov
outside Marfa, Tex.,
ca. 1993. Photo
Emilia Kabakov.

DESERT OASIS
by Emilia Kabakov

ILYA AND I SPENT about a month in Marfa, Texas,
with Donald Judd in 1992 or ’93. We were good friends with
Don and Marianne Stockebrand, a German curator who
was his girlfriend at the time. Marianne introduced us in
Germany, and we all spent time together in Switzerland and
many other places. We’d been to Marfa a few times before,
but only for three or four days, maybe a week, at a time. We
were working on our installation School No. 6 at the Chinati
Foundation. Texas was wild, empty, and very hot. It seemed
dangerous somehow. There were rattlesnakes and other
animals I’d never encountered in my life. We’re city people,
so to us Marfa felt very exotic.
Don took us around, introducing us to his friends and
talking about his work, explaining why he’d decided to live
there. We went to a former silver mining city, which had
become a ghost town. There were about twelve houses, a
store, a post office, a train station—all closed. Absolutely
nobody there. Don said he and I should buy the town, and
be called “Don” and “Donna.” Later, he took us to the border
between Mexico and the US. There was a little creek—Don
said it was the Rio Grande. Ilya was joking around, and
jumped to the Mexican side of the border. I was very ner-
vous because he didn’t have his papers with him.
We spent a lot of time at Don’s ranch. One evening,
he decided to grill some steaks. I left him and Ilya by the
grill, and when I came back, Ilya was so happy. He said that
he and Don had had such a great conversation. And I said,
“How?,” because Don doesn’t speak Russian and you don’t
speak English! And Ilya was very offended. He said artists
don’t need to share a language to understand each other.
Later that night, after we’d gone to bed, some drug
smugglers came to the gate of the ranch. There was no tele-
phone or electricity. Don grabbed his rifle and ran outside. CURRENTLY
His daughter, who had been sleeping on the porch, ran into ON VIEW
“Ilya and Emilia
the house. I’m running to take pictures. Ilya doesn’t know Kabakov: The
where to run! There was a helicopter with border patrol fly- Utopian Projects,”
Hirshhorn
ing overhead. It was like a movie. Museum and
During this visit, Don also brought us to a little Sculpture Garden,
restaurant run by a very old woman. The whole place was Washington, D.C.,
Sept. 7, 2017–
decorated with murals of cowboys, horses, and Indians; the Mar. 4, 2018.
woman was a painter in her free time. She took us to a small
room that was entirely covered—floor, ceiling, walls—with ILYA AND
paintings showing what happens when you’re drunk: the EMILIA
KABAKOV are
devil will take you to hell, you’ll be fried, etc. When the artists based in
woman’s husband came home drunk, she’d lock him in this New York.
room. Don said that he wanted to buy the room and relocate
it to Chinati, but unfortunately, he died before he could
make this happen. The next time we went to Marfa, the
woman had also died, and her house had been torn down.
There was nothing left.
— As told to Leigh Anne Miller

ART IN AMERICA 51
Independent

“This is the way to do an art fair in

New York City.”
— Guelda Voien, Observer

Save the Date

New York March 8-11, 2018
PARRISH ART MUSEUM
WATER MILL, NY

Audrey Flack (American, born 1931)

Wheel of Fortune, 1977–78
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 96 x 96 inches
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
Gift of Louis K. and Susan P. Meisel
Art. Illuminated.
parrishart.org @ parrishart
Au gu st 6, 2017 – Jan u ar y 21, 2018
From Lens to Eye to Hand:
Photorealism 1969 to Today
Also on view through October 15, 2017
Platform: Clifford Ross
Light | Waves
#parrishartmuseum
 BOOKS
Art into Fiction
by Michèle C. Cone
ANKA MUHLSTEIN
The Pen and the Brush: How
Passion for Art Shaped
Nineteenth-Century French Novels
New York, Other Press, 2017, trans. Adriana Hunter; 228 pages, 13 black-and-white
illustrations, $18.95 hardcover, $7.99 e-book.
The Pen and the Brush follows two other alluringly titled, the-
matically related books by Anka Muhlstein. Balzac’s Omelette
(2011) explores the culinary references in Honoré de Balzac’s
gargantuan Comédie humaine, while Monsieur Proust’s Library
(2012) unearths some of the literary sources that shaped Marcel
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Muhlstein’s new volume
seeks to show the influence of art on the work of not only
Balzac and Proust but also Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant,
and Joris-Karl Huysmans. The book started out as a lecture that
Muhlstein, a Paris-born, New York–based author known for
multiple biographies, gave at the Frick Collection. Subtitled How
Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels, it posits
Eugène Delacroix:
Women of Algiers in
Their Apartment,
1834, oil on canvas,
70¾ by 90 inches.
Louvre, Paris.
that the opening of the Louvre in 1793 and its expansion under
Napoleon I awakened the passion of French literati for European
art of the past, and that the Doyenné quarter of Paris, where
many practitioners of the pen and of the brush lived and worked,
facilitated interdisciplinary friendships. “I have often wondered
why nineteenth-century French novelists were so obsessed with
painters and painting,” Muhlstein writes, calling their preoccupa-
tion “essentially a French phenomenon.” Her text moves back
MICHÈLE C.
and forth between biography and textual analysis, in search of CONE is a
evidence for how the visual arts transformed the era’s fiction. New York–based
critic and cultural
Even for readers familiar with Balzac’s novella The Unknown
historian.
Masterpiece, which culminates in the discovery that a small well-
shaped woman’s foot is the only representation left on the surface
of a canvas otherwise layered with ten years’ worth of lines, shapes,
and colors, the importance of art in the writer’s oeuvre will be
something of a revelation. Balzac arrived in Paris in 1814, and is
known to have spent many days as a teenager visiting the Louvre.
Giving due credit to Olivier Bonard’s La peinture dans la création
balzacienne (1969), Muhlstein notes that many aspects of Balzac’s
fiction derive from sustained art-viewing. Old men often have
ART IN AMERICA 55

Édouard Manet: Rembrandt-like features. Young girls and elegant young women
Émile Zola, 1868,
oil on canvas, 57¾ evoke an earlier master: “no flicker of irritation could spoil that
by 44¾ inches. ingenuous face or the calm in those eyes immortalized before
Musée d’Orsay,
Paris.
their time in Raphael’s sublime compositions.” The novelist is
inspired by Girodet in giving his blonde females a hard and selfish
physiognomy, and by Titian when he describes cozy interiors with
warm colors and sunny light. Balzac looked so closely at paintings
that he could use a rarely noticed aspect to make a portrait. The
horrible old woman in his tale The Peasants is characterized as “a
hideous black parchment, endowed with movement,” her visual
antecedent found tucked among much younger figures in David’s
The Intervention of the Sabine Women.
Yet Balzac does not seem to have had many artist friends.
No model is invoked for Frenhofer, who dies before he can
finish painting his ideal woman in The Unknown Masterpiece, or
for the eponymous young sculptor in Sarrasine, who falls in love
with a beautiful opera singer, only to discover that “she” is actu-
ally a castrato. In The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the sensuality
of the Parisian love slave Paquita—enhanced by the reds, golds,
and whites of her opulent surroundings—could well have been
borrowed from Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.
In fact, says Muhlstein, “inspired by [the painter’s] brio, his
mastery of color, and his taste for the exotic, Balzac wanted to
try his hand at writing in the manner of Delacroix.” The artist,
it seems, had no desire to return the favor.
56 SEPTEMBER 2017 BOOKS
OF ALL THE NOVELISTS studied by Muhlstein, Proust
references the greatest number of artists in his writings. As the
painter Eric Karpeles demonstrated in Paintings in Proust (2008),
the list includes Michelangelo, Leonardo, Giorgione, Botticelli,
Rubens, Rembrandt, Turner, Watteau, Whistler, Renoir, Fantin-
Latour, and dozens of other masters. For all his knowledge of
art, however, Proust was not a collector. Although, as a youth, he
frequented the Louvre, later in life, when asthmatic crises kept
him at home, he depended on reproductions.
“It isn’t the painting itself that matters to him,” Muhlstein
contends, “but the fact that it serves his purpose.” Proust out-
lines characters with the help of pictorial allusions; he nails the
physical appearance of a person with a detail from a painting.
He associates myriad individuals with a painting or painter to
help the reader picture them. In one instance, he uses the voice
of someone disparaging Manet’s Asparagus to represent a type
of viewer who does not understand modern art. He introduces
the idea that Swann’s lover Odette is bisexual by mentioning a
painting of her with both male and female accoutrements.
Proust was not the type of novelist who spent time visiting
artists’ studios. He did, however, sit for his friend Jacques-Émile
Blanche, a traditional portrait painter. Paul César Helleu was
also a friend, as attested by the fact that he drew the author on
his deathbed. The novelist gained his understanding of the art
of his day from reading, especially the works of John Ruskin,
and from gallery shows, salon gatherings, and private collections.
Muhlstein mentions such personages as the collector Charles
Ephrussi, chief editor of the Gazette des Beaux Arts, who owned
Manet’s Asparagus; Madeleine Lemaire, an artist who intro-
duced Proust to Monet; and Madame Straus, at whose home
the writer saw paintings by Corot, Monet, and Boudin.
Elstir, the painter character in À la recherche, has often been called
a stand-in for Monet or Manet. But the project of respected French
writer and diplomat Jean-Pierre Angrémy to give this imagined artist
a show by assembling Proust’s real-life referents proved futile, since
Elstir is a composite of too many painters. Lacking full development,
he is “important only for his paintings, his concept of art, and, above
all, for initiating the Narrator into the world of art.”
For Muhlstein, the nineteenth-century writer who best
typifies the interaction between novelist and visual artist is
Émile Zola, and for good reason. Cézanne was his friend
from their youth in Provence. After both moved to Paris,
Cézanne introduced Zola to numerous young painters,
including Pissarro, Renoir, Bazille, and Monet. Zola sat for
portraits by Cézanne and Manet. At a time when vanguard
artists were repeatedly rejected by the official Salons, Zola
wrote enthusiastically about them. Soon the relationships
became reciprocal. Manet owed the title and subject of his
painting Nana to a loose young woman portrayed in Zola’s
L’Assommoir. Degas’s paintings of laundresses at work helped
Zola describe such women in his fiction. Cézanne, Manet,
and others were models for Zola’s struggling artist characters
in L’Oeuvre. Above all, the writer’s link with the new painting
lay in a mode of perception prompted by natural illumination:
“The descriptions of the ocean, trees, and flowers in Maupas-
sant or Huysmans are like paintings, and Proust would prove
a master of this art. But Zola remains the first to have made
light so predominantly important in his writing.”
The research required to write a book like The Pen and the
Brush is enormous. Small wonder that the Académie Française has
previously honored Muhlstein with prizes, although she is not an
academic. One may question her Franco-centric view and venture
to suggest that the rise of commercial galleries and art publica-
tions (of which she says little) also shaped the phenomenon she
describes, not only in France but beyond. She does credit Henry
James with adopting art as a literary subject in the late nineteenth
century—a topic expertly examined in the exhibition “Henry
James and American Painting,” on view at the Morgan Library
& Museum in New York until September 10. The show features
genre paintings and several portraits of James, most notably an
iconic image by John Singer Sargent. The Morgan website quotes
James’s classic statement from “The Art of Fiction”:
The analogy between the art of the painter and the art of
the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their
inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the
different quality of the vehicle) is the same, their success
is the same. They may learn from each other, they may
explain and sustain each other. Their cause is the same,
and the honour of one is the honour of another.
Muhlstein’s concise and fascinating book brings that insight
home—for everyone, but especially for readers familiar with
nineteenth-century French literature and art.

Books in Brief

JENS HOFFMANN, ed. MARCEL PROUST ERIN E. EDGINGTON KATHRYN BROWN

The Arcades: Chardin and Fashioned Texts Matisse’s Poets:
Contemporary Art Rembrandt and Painted Books: Critical Performance
and Walter Benjamin Written when he was twenty- Nineteenth-Century in the Artist’s Book
Accompanying an exhibition at four but published posthu- French Fan Poetry Art historian Kathryn Brown
the Jewish Museum, New York, mously, Marcel Proust’s story In addition to being a traces Henri Matisse’s achieve-
this catalogue pairs work by follows an unnamed narrator ubiquitous fashion accessory ments as a book artist, showing
contemporary artists like Walead as he guides a melancholy in fin-de-siècle France, how his engagement—both
Beshty, Pierre Huyghe, and friend through an imaginary the folding fan served as a social and literary—with writers
Cindy Sherman with the thirty- tour of the Louvre in an collectible art object and like Charles Baudelaire, James
six themes in Walter Benjamin’s effort to lift his spirits. The substrate for poetic texts. In Joyce, and Stéphane Mallarmé
unfinished magnum opus, The influence of the visual arts on this volume, fan poetry and fueled his aesthetic develop-
Arcades Project (1927–40). A the young writer is evinced prose by figures such as Guy ment. Using the metaphor of
sprawling meditation on urban through ecstatic discussions de Maupassant and Marcel the theater, Brown describes
modernity in nineteenth-century of painters like Chardin, Proust are matched with fan Matisse’s publishing projects
Paris, Benjamin’s text character- whose “rich depiction of leaves designed by artists as a stage where the painter
izes the flaneur as the archetype mediocrity” in genre scenes like Manet and Gauguin, could perform his role not only
of the modern artist. This respon- elevate the everyday. An elucidating the interplay as an illustrator but as a reader
sive volume includes scholarly afterword by scholar Alain of word and image in this and critic deeply involved with
essays, a graphic novelette, and Madeleine-Perdrillat accom- unconventional subgenre. modernism in all its forms.
poetic annotations to each work. panies this new translation. New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017;
Chapel Hill, University of North Caro-
New Haven, Yale University Press, 2017; New York, David Zwirner Books, 2016; lina Press, 2017; 212 pages, 2 halftone 384 pages, 92 black-and-white and 8 color
136 pages, 50 color and black-and-white trans. Jennie Feldman, 64 pages, 8 color illustrations, $65 paperback. illustrations, $140 hardcover.
illustrations, $35 paperback. illustrations, $12.95 softcover.

BOOKS ART IN AMERICA 57

 MYTHO OGIES
EUGENE VON BRUENCHENHEIN

Eugene Von Bruenchenhe n, unt t ed (var ous works), c 1940-80 John

M chae Koh er Arts Center Co ect on Photo R ch Mac ejewsk , 2016

An unprecedented, sweeping view of the

artist’s extensive oeuvre.
On view now. Free admission.
This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the
State of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Funding was also provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Kohler Trust for the Arts
and Education, Kohler Foundation, Inc., Herzfeld Foundation, and Sargento Foods Inc.
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SEPTEMBER 2017
Molecular Sculpture / Radical Women / Markus Lüpertz / BHQFU
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RADICAL WOMEN
Liliana Porter: Untitled (hands and triangle),
1973, gelatin silver print, 8¾ inches square.
Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

ART IN AMERICA 67
 MOLECULAR
SCULPTURE
Chemical and biological processes
open the encounter with artwork to
nonvisual modes of sensation.

by Ruba Katrib
Nina Canell: BY PRESENTING AN empty-looking glass ampoule as his 1919 sculpture
Perpetuum Mobile
(40 kg), 2009–11, 50 cc of Paris Air, Marcel Duchamp brought invisible molecules into the pur-
water, basin, view of sculpture. The work is not just a conceptual proposition; the ampoule
ultrasound generator,
and cement,
actually did contain Parisian air when the work was first made. Since the
dimensions variable. piece was subsequently broken and repaired, the geographical coordinates of
Courtesy Barbara the air sample’s origin are now in question. Yet in any case, the title of the
Wien Galerie,
Berlin. Photo Robin work encourages the audience to look at the invisible element that all things,
Watkins. including artworks and their audiences, coexist within.
Duchamp was a progenitor of site specificity. In works like the gallery-
filling installation Sixteen Miles of String (1942), he examined the exhibition
context and how it affects the way objects are perceived—a topic that has
come to dominate the discourse around sculpture from the postwar period to
the present. Duchamp’s inclusion of nitrogen and oxygen as primary materi-
als in an artwork, and his naming of the location where those materials were
sourced, prefigures the concerns of many artists working today.
In recent years, several artists have engaged with chemical reactions to
create works about the molecular compositions of substances. The similarity
of these approaches to the lines of thinking in philosophical movements like
object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism, which aim
to reconfigure relationships between humans and nonhuman agents and enti-
ties, has led a number of curators and critics to position such art in terms of
those discussions.1 But it can also be seen in connection with artistic inquiries
into site and context dating back to Duchamp’s 50 cc of Paris Air.
When artists acknowledge molecular interactions and their effects, their con-
ceptual gestures bring out the histories and cultural contexts of their materials. When
viewers pay attention to the interconnectedness of invisible and visible elements,
RUBA KATRIB it alters their encounter with a work of art. Duchamp’s 1919 language-based
is the curator at gesture of titling a work with a measurement of air has been perceived for nearly
SculptureCenter,
New York. See a century as a proto-Conceptual move. But it can be newly discussed as a prec-
Contributors page. edent for works that incorporate imperceptible entities as their medium and site.

68 SEPTEMBER 2017
ART IN AMERICA 69
Pamela Rosenkranz: IN NINA CANELL’S Perpetuum Mobile (40 kg), 2009–11,
Our Product
(Conversation),
ultrasound waves generate mist from a basin of water. A bag
2015, liquid, moving of concrete mix rests nearby. Over time, the mist moistens the
skin color, and cement in the bag, though there isn’t enough water to immedi-
sound algorithm,
dimensions variable. ately cure the mixture. This demonstration of cause and effect
Courtesy Miguel underscores the malleability of even the toughest materials.
Abreu Gallery, New
York. Photo Marc
The mist in Perpetuum Mobile (40kg) wets the mix and enters
Asekhame. viewers’ nostrils. They feel the humidity on their skin. The air
of the exhibition space interacts with the damp concrete as an
unnamed yet necessary actor that enables the gradual effect
of the work. The chemical interaction of substances creates an
atmosphere that permeates viewers’ skin and bodies, lingering
even after they have left the exhibition.
In addition to exploring material transformations like
these, artists are engaging chemical components invisible to
the human eye, but perceptible through other senses. Smell
is important to artists like Pamela Rosenkranz and Anicka
Yi, who work with the unseen process by which matter enters
the nostrils and binds to neurons, triggering physiological
responses and cultural associations. In Rosenkranz’s Our
Product (Conversation), 2015, a pool of shimmering, thick,
pink, fleshy liquid gives off a scent engineered to mimic
that of a baby’s skin. Rosenkranz has also included cat
pheromones in a number of her artworks, most recently in
a solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan last spring.
70 SEPTEMBER 2017 MOLECULAR SCULPTURE
Infection (2017) features a synthetic cat pheromone used as
an ingredient in perfume. Known as civetone, the chemi-
cal is derived from animal musk, and it can either repel or
attract people and animals depending on its concentration.
Rosenkranz contends that the chemical generates particularly
strong responses from women who carry Toxoplasma gondii,
a common parasite that reproduces in cats; and she has read
studies finding that infected women are also more likely to
wear designer clothes.2 Rosenkranz thus points to the pos-
sible connections between seemingly disparate elements such
as chemical exposure, parasites, and shopping habits. Yi’s
Washing Away of Wrongs (2014) consists of two commercial
clothes dryers installed in a wall. They contain synthetic fra-
grances that chemically approximate the smells of prehistoric
wetlands and yellow-throated bullfrogs. These “interpretive”
scents contrast directly with the good smells and cleanliness
associated with the dryers. Mostly unpleasant, the scents in
Yi’s installation summon the existence of complex organisms
from places and times far beyond the household environment
of the dryer.
Both Rosenkranz and Yi use synthetic replicas instead of
organic scents, relying on scientist collaborators to determine
the molecular compounds that will best imitate their scent
referents. As with synthetic flavors, the fidelity of the result is up
for debate. That indeterminacy can be the point. At the entrance
The chemical interaction of substances creates an atmosphere
that permeates viewers’ skin and bodies, lingering even after they
have left the exhibition.
to “Life Is Cheap,” Yi’s recent solo exhibition at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, insecticide canisters
emanated a scent designed to mimic the artist’s conception of
the smells of both Asian American women and ants. It would
be difficult to discern to what extent the scent she concocted is
actually connected to these subjects; rather, the odor stimulates
not only viewers’ sense of smell but also their reflections on the
relationship between biological and cultural identity, which can
be just as strange as the scent itself.
IN HIS 1966 ESSAY “Entropy and the New Monuments”
Robert Smithson discusses why he and his colleagues
eschewed traditional sculptural materials such as marble and
granite in favor of artificial ones, such as plastic, chrome,
and electric light to make works that “are not built for the
ages, but rather against the ages.”3 Smithson was primarily
interested in the disposability of industrial materials used in
construction, in opposition to the permanence of materials
used in monumental sculpture. In the ’60s, people were only
beginning to realize that while these materials are cheaper
and easily replaced, they would stick around in oceans and
landfills for centuries. Nevertheless, Smithson’s main point
remains: the materials used by artists can refer to and push
up against time spans and environmental realities bigger than
the site where the works are exhibited.
New industrial materials were central to the investigations
made in Smithson’s milieu—and now artists are turning to the
microscopic to continue to reveal a multiplicity of life spans
and scales through their choice of material. They are pushing
substances to reveal their complex biological and chemical
compositions, as well as being responsive to the microelements
of any given exhibition site.
Rosalind Krauss’s canonical 1979 essay “Sculpture in the
Expanded Field” laid out a framework for understanding modes
of working with site initiated by Land artists and Minimalists.4
Since then, the sociopolitical dimensions of architecture and
landscape have become key factors in sculptural practice and
criticism. Miwon Kwon has more recently highlighted the
fact that the site of a work is both physically and culturally
determined. After Minimalism and institutional critique, site

View of Anicka
Yi’s installation
Force Majeure,
2017, plexiglass,
aluminum, agar,
bacteria, refrigeration
system, LED lights,
glass, epoxy resin,
powder-coated
stainless steel,
light bulbs, digital
clocks, silicone,
and silk flowers;
at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York.
Courtesy 47 Canal,
New York.Photo
David Heald.

MOLECULAR SCULPTURE ART IN AMERICA 71

 People, places, and other kinds of sites are seen not only as singular
entities, but also as the microscopic multitudes they comprise.
specificity implicates not only codes of the institutional frame-
work and the architecture or topography of place, but social
contexts and cultural associations as well.5 New practices and
scientific discourses have brought chemical processes into the
fold of the site, as sculptural practice expands to accommodate
human relationships to microscopic materials.
La déraison (2014), Pierre Huyghe’s cast-concrete sculpture
of a reclining female nude, puts a biological twist on a classical
subject. Headless and hollow, the body radiates heat from an
internal system that duplicates human body temperature. The
moss and pools of water in the crevices on the surface make the
sculpture resemble an unmaintained outdoor monument, but the
growth in combination with the palpable heat emanating from
the stone instead evokes life and symbiosis. Huyghe counters
typical perceptions of stone as a cold material, and turns moss
into a sculptural element rather than an unwanted growth. Fur-
thermore, the moss becomes host to a slew of unnamed entities,
making the work part of an ecosystem. By introducing the life
cycles of various small and microscopic species into a seemingly
static object, Huyghe takes Smithson’s notion of entropy even
further, subjecting his works not only to time and erosion but
also to the needs of plants and animals, which could overrun the
Pierre Huyghe:
La déraison, 2014,
54½ by 40⅞ by 74⅝
inches. Courtesy
Hauser & Wirth,
London. Photo
Hugo Glendinning.
72 SEPTEMBER 2017 MOLECULAR SCULPTURE
sculpture if left to do so. Though the work offers a classical image,
it also points to another, less perceptible world of microorganisms
transforming and living off its topography.
The air, light, and moisture of the exhibition space
determine whether the chia seeds in Rochelle Goldberg’s
sculptures sprout or remain lifeless. Goldberg’s floor-based
installations are sprawling works that change over time. She
juxtaposes natural materials such as crude oil and dirt with
high-tech fiber optics. The scent of the oil, the substance that
fueled the machine age, is noxious; the off-gasses announce a
reflective pool of prehistoric fossils turned viscous, contained
in a standing ceramic vessel. Chia seeds, which Goldberg often
places on the surfaces of her sculptures and the floor around
them, have become popular in recent years as a superfood. The
newfound significance of the seeds as a healthy dietary supple-
ment becomes part of Goldberg’s narrative, which questions
notions of progress by juxtaposing growth and entropy on
varying scales of time. The works are site-specific in an insti-
tutional sense, as she conceives of the pieces in situ, spreading
dirt on the walls and placing blocks of seeded sod on the floor.
They also function as a reminder that the exhibition space is
not neutral or static, but subject to environmental factors and

flux. In Nina Canell’s Gum Drag (2017), shown in the Nordic
pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, mastic gum (the resin
of an evergreen tree) is cast in a long rectangular form around
a vertical rod. Over the exhibition’s duration, the gum bends
and melts as it sinks to the floor, a process that, in effect,
makes the temperature and gravity of the room visible.
ELABORATING ON Smithson’s newly influential notions
of entropy in art, Gordon Matta-Clark “cooked” materials in
his works of the early 1970s to transform multiple ingredients
into a new entity. (A little younger than Smithson, Matta-Clark
installed one of these works, as a sort of homage, near the elder
artist’s loft.)6 To make the pieces, Matta-Clark mixed organic
and nonorganic materials, combining saltwater algae and
chocolate-flavored Yoo-hoo to produce an agar, a gelatinous
substance that functioned as a medium for his bacterial cultures.
He also made a soup of V-8, yeast, and a fungus found in Cam-
embert cheese. He would pour these mixtures into trays where
they fermented and dried, becoming what he called “skinlike
fabrics of dormant life.”7 He showed a grouping of these works
in an installation called Museum, in a gallery exhibition in 1970,
where the trays continued to grow mold, transforming over the
course of the exhibition. Another version blew up in his studio
for undetermined reasons.8 For Matta-Clark, the instability of
MOLECULAR SCULPTURE
Rochelle Goldberg:
the sculptures, the ingredients, and their behavior was key to the No Where, Now
process. The trays that held the works hosted interactions not Here, 2016, stainless
just between chemicals but also between the cultural connota- steel, ceramic,
wood, chia, and
tions carried by the brand-name and generic substances. carpet, dimensions
In 2011 Josh Kline made the sculpture Share the Health variable. Courtesy
Whitney Museum
(Assorted Probiotic Hand Gels), which features three commercial of American Art
hand-sanitizer pumps installed in gallery walls. They hold bac- and Miguel Abreu
teria swabbed from a Uniqlo store, an iPad app developer, and Gallery, New York.
Photo Genevieve
a graphic designer. By putting together people and places in Hanson.
the same series, Kline wryly equates them as nodes for cultural
associations. Removed from their original contexts and the
visual coding of identity and place, the bacterial cultures grow
and transform within the translucent pumps. Kline’s microbial
sculptures are similar to Matta-Clark’s, but they were con-
ceived in response to a more germophobic era. Kline often uses
familiar products (or resin casts that look like the real thing):
IV bags, blood sample vials, and the bottles for drinks that
supposedly enhance physical and mental performance. But the
forms are filled with substances ranging from pharmaceuticals
to street drugs to health foods.
For a 2015 exhibition in Hong Kong, Kline created
sculptures exploring the situation of migrant domestic workers
in the city. These works contained materials such as Filipino
pesos, Indonesian rupiah, floor cleaners, and remittance slips—
ART IN AMERICA 73

Josh Kline: Share materials evocative of monetary transactions and labor condi-
the Health (Assorted
Probiotic Hand Gels), tions in Southeast Asia. Essence of Bitter Melon (2015) is an IV
detail, 2011, various bag filled with a green liquid described in the list of materials
bacterial cultures
in three plastic as Dettol floor cleaner infused with powdered Indonesian
dispensers, 6¼ by rupiah, bringing together a cleaning product with currency in a
4½ by 4 inches each.
container used to pump fluids into the bloodstream.
Courtesy 47 Canal.
Turning symbolic as well as chemical substances into a new
stew, Kline comments on the synthetic and organic compounds
regularly circulated, marketed, and ingested to augment human
functions. The sanitizer pumps suggest defense against contami-
nations and the spread of illness, a message contradicted by the
bacterial growth visible inside. Site specificity emerges through
the places and types of people that Kline swabbed, creating both
material narratives about and microbial portraits of his subjects.
Information found in the works’ titles and lists of materials, which
identify substances that are not visually recognizable, point to their
potential meanings. For instance, the parenthetical reference to
probiotics in the title of Share the Health (Assorted Probiotic Hand
Gels) also suggests—in addition to the germophobia evoked by the
dispensers—the health craze for “good” bacteria marketed in yogurt
and food supplements designed to overpower “bad” bacteria and
create a healthier gut. The work prompts us to wonder what effect
some bacteria from a Uniqlo store or the body of a graphic designer
would have on our system if it were “shared” with ours.
In “Life Is Cheap,” Yi showed a bacterial agar like the kind
Matta-Clark used. She swabbed the samples from locations in
74 SEPTEMBER 2017 MOLECULAR SCULPTURE
Manhattan’s Chinatown and Koreatown neighborhoods. “We
have a mythology around ethnic smells, that certain people smell
a certain way, but really the main factors are diet, environment,
and an individual’s unique, genetic smell,” Yi said about the
Guggenheim work. “A lot of that uniqueness has to do with how
much bacteria you produce in your gut.”9
Where Matta-Clark was more concerned with the formal
properties of putting bacteria on display—and the semiotic
interplay of natural and synthetic substances—Kline and Yi,
operating with more recent scientific information, remove
microbes from their hosts to create abstract portraits of places
and people. Broad concepts such as “women,” “iPad app devel-
opers,” and “Koreatown” become amorphous and abstracted,
although the substances associated with them contain billions of
pieces of highly specific information in their molecular makeup.
THE BEHAVIORS AND interactions of materials are essen-
tial to considering the meaning of these works. Political theorist
Jane Bennett has argued that all matter is active, generating
effects and influences beyond common human comprehen-
sion. Her work repositions humans within a more complex
constellation of being. In her book Vibrant Matter, she writes,
“If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between
subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared
materiality of all things is elevated.” Applying anthropolo-
gist Bruno Latour’s term “actant” to both living and nonliving
entities, Bennett advocates new relationships grounded in
collaboration between human bodies and other things.10 Her
perspective has profound ramifications for concepts of identity.
Who—or what—is the graphic designer if not a composite of
cells, bacteria, and other microorganisms? This reconfigured and
broadened definition of materiality is relevant to the works of Yi,
Kline, Rosenkranz, Goldberg, and other artists whose vision is
expansive enough to accommodate the microscopic, encompass-
ing components like oxygen, chemical odors, and bacteria.
Bennett’s work—and that of the artists discussed here—
accompanies an increasing vernacular awareness of microor-
ganisms and their role in human health and behavior. Sharing
the recent discovery that “there are more bacteria in your gut
than there are stars in our galaxy,” science writer Ed Yong
explains how the microbiome of an animal is just as crucial
to its biological composition and survival as its genome.11 In
addition to performing key functions such as building organs
and immune systems, bacteria also connect many things
through microbial relationships and symbiosis.12 In her recent
book Staying with the Trouble, scholar Donna J. Haraway also
problematizes the hierarchy proposed by the traditional “host-
symbiont” model, pointing out that all things involved in any
situation are symbionts to each other.13
Accepting these propositions means renegotiating the
boundaries between self and other, and understanding that
the identity of a person or place is constituted in part by the
bacteria that live therein. Kline’s and Yi’s microbial portraits
offer new modes of representation that follow this logic. As
Rosenkranz makes clear with her network of cat, parasite,
human, and designer clothing in her works with civetone,
we are only partially aware of the impact an organism such
as a parasite might have on the perception of a scent and our
social behaviors. The implications are far-reaching.
Philosophers and scientists broach these ideas in discourse
and laboratories; artists do the same in their treatment of the site.
People, places, and other kinds of sites are seen not only as singu-
lar entities, but also as the microscopic multitudes they comprise.
Beyond the conceptual strategies of naming, as in Duchamp’s
early gesture, artists now allow sculpture to express the sensuous-
ness of microscopic material, permitting them to have their own
relationships with the viewer, fostering increasingly subtle acts of
perception. The acknowledgment of known and unknown interac-
tions beyond the visual or measurable brings to the fore previously
overlooked actors and events. While artists need not try to fully
represent or determine these processes, a well-formed suggestion
can have a similar effect to that of a hallucinogen kicking in, when
another layer of reality opens up and all senses are on high alert,
bringing new details into focus.
To address the chemical compositions of the space, the
materials, the human viewer, and other unannounced visitors, is
to work against the controlled exhibition site and to challenge
the static notion of representation. This means making art with
MOLECULAR SCULPTURE
a heightened awareness of the seen and unseen ecologies of any Rosenkranz:
Infection, 2017, sand,
given site and the range of bodies, human and otherwise, that fragrance, LED
might come into contact with a work. light, and mixed
mediums, approx.
23 by 40 by 40 feet;
at the Fondazione
1. Some examples include “Speculations on Anonymous Materials,” the 2013 exhibition
Prada, Milan.
curated by Susanne Pfeffer at the Kassel Fridericianum, and edited anthologies such as
Photo Delfino Sisto
Realism Materialism Art, Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2015. Legnani and Marco
2. Aoife Rosenmeyer, “In the Studio: Pamela Rosenkranz,” Art in America, January 2015,
Cappelletti.
p. 79.
3. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 1966, in Jack Flam, ed., Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996, p. 11.
4. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8, Spring 1979,
pp. 30–44.
5. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity,
Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2002, p. 3.
6. Pamela M. Lee, Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press, 2001, pp. 43–44.
7. Gordon Matta-Clark, quoted in Lee, p. 43.
8. Lee, p. 43.
9. Ross Simonini, “In the Studio: Anicka Yi,” Art in America, April 2017, p. 105.
10. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, N.C., Duke
University Press, 2010, p. 13.
11. Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life,
New York, Harper Collins, 2016, p. 8.
12. Ibid., pp. 23–25.
13. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham,
N.C., Duke University Press, 2016, p. 11.
ART IN AMERICA 75
 DRASTIC
TIMES
Based on seven years of research, the Pacific Standard
Time exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art,
1960-1985” forges a new significance for previously
excluded artists.
by Julian Kreimer
Sandra Eleta: THE NEWEST INSTALLMENT of the Getty Foundation’s
Edita (the one with
the duster), Panama, Pacific Standard Time, titled LA/LA, focuses the attention
1978–79, black-and- of almost every Southern California art institution on Latin
white photograph.
30 inches square. American and Latinx art and culture.1 Of the more than seventy
shows under the LA/LA banner (fifty received Getty Founda-
tion funding), none perhaps is more ambitious than the Hammer
Museum’s “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.”
The curators, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, have been
doing research since 2010, before the Getty’s LA/LA project was
conceived, and the show brings together more than 270 artworks
by 120 women from fifteen countries stretching the seven thou-
sand miles from California to Tierra del Fuego.
The curators went deep, finding artists who had disappeared,
COMING SOON
“Radical Women: both literally and metaphorically, starting in the years after World
Latin American Art, War II. Many lived in exile or were jailed and tortured for their
1960–1985,” at the
political activities. The scope eventually became unwieldy, lead-
Hammer Museum,
Los Angeles, ing Fajardo-Hill and Giunta to select a period in which they saw
Sept. 15-Dec. 31. utopian abstraction give way to an experimental scene, with works
often directly addressing political and social themes.
JULIAN KREIMER Most of the artists had active careers during the decades
is associate professor covered by “Radical Women,” including solo shows at important
of painting and
international biennials and museums like the Centre Pompidou
art history at
Purchase College, in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney
State University Museum of American Art in New York. However, the majority
of New York. See
have been left out of the big survey exhibitions and books on
Contributors page.
postwar Latin American art. Luis Camnitzer, for example, in his
76 SEPTEMBER 2017
canonical book Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of
Liberation (2007), includes only two women (and one of them,
his then-wife Liliana Porter, was part of the New York Graph-
ics Workshop with him from 1965 to 1970).2 With this show,
Fajardo-Hill, an independent British-Venezuelan art historian,
and Giunta, an art historian based in Buenos Aires, strove to
recover these neglected artists for the history books.
The curators have encountered opposition to the idea
of an all-women exhibition, hearing dismissals like “ya fue”
(that’s over). Some feared that it might ghettoize women.
(Several artists declined to participate for this reason.) Others
worried that feminist work critiquing sexism would exacerbate
the stereotypes of Latin machismo. The curators’ theme, which
is the female body as a site of political struggle, was consid-
ered by some to be passé or neo-essentialist, given contempo-
rary gender and queer theory.
Speaking at a symposium on the exhibition at the art fair
arteBA in Buenos Aires, Giunta posed a key question: why are the
numbers of women artists in Latin American art exhibitions still
so dismal? In response, she argued that many sensibilities and ideas
are blocked by patriarchal taste.3 Fajardo-Hill, in her catalogue
essay, describes this vicious circle bluntly: “the system . . . judges the
quality of artists’ work on the basis of visibility and success, which
are often denied to women.”4 She points out that “only a few
women artists have been chosen to represent the field at large, and
these figures have been highlighted again and again.”5
Lourdes Grobet:
La Venus, from the
series “The Double
Struggle,” 1981–82,
black-and-white
photograph, 9½ by
14 inches.
Fajardo-Hill and Giunta go beyond performing due diligence
on twenty-five years of art history; their goal is a complete overhaul
of taste. As Fajardo-Hill put it: “how can you create a context to
recognize these women, given that they are left out?” She said that,
as a curator, she doesn’t want to continue the history of segregation
and invisibility.6 To these ends, the curators divided the works into
nine thematic categories (such as “The Self-Portrait,” “Performing
the Body,” and “Resistance and Fear”), bringing artists from dif-
ferent countries together. The dense catalogue meanwhile sticks to
national borders, as does much scholarship on the region.
THE WORKS IN the show are unified by a turn toward the
body, thanks especially to the experimentation that came with
Portapaks, which facilitated performance documentation.7
Lacking long-established artistic conventions, video let in the
messy realities of class and race.
María Luisa Bemberg’s early short El mundo de la mujer (The
World of Women, 1972) documents an event at La Rural, a vast
convention ground ensconced in the ritzy north side of Buenos
Aires. A man’s voice announces: “Femimundo Incorporated orga-
nizes the first international fair of women and their world, appeal-
ing for the first time to the most powerful factor of consumption
of our time: Woman.” The camera captures the Argentine middle
classes clustering to catch up on the latest ways to set hair, make
dinner, and clean house. Brilliantined men in dark suits spear
hors d’oeuvres with toothpicks while well-coiffed ladies watch
young models demonstrate rotating beds, electric looms for the
home, and space-age fashions. From a shot of a small girl getting
her makeup done, Bemberg cuts abruptly to a platform presenting
78 SEPTEMBER 2017 DR ASTIC TIMES
what appear to be swimsuited mannequins. But then, one figure in
a green wig and matching bikini turns her head slightly, revealing
that she is only pretending to be a doll. Bemberg (1922–1995), one
of only seven or so artists in the show to label herself a feminist,
was a leading female director in Latin America. This approximately
fifteen-minute film included in “Radical Women” prefigures her
feature films, such as Camilla (1984), depicting well-to-do women
who chafe at the confinement created by social expectations.
Lack of physical freedom is explored in the videos of Brazilian
Letícia Parente, who became an artist at forty-one while continu-
ing her career as a chemist. She treats her own body like a product
in her best-known piece, Marca Registrada (Trademark, 1975),
which shows her sewing the phrase made in brasil into the sole
of her bare foot. In Tarefa 1 (Chore 1, 1982), the white-clad artist
unceremoniously lies down on an ironing board, and a black maid,
dressed in black, irons her. The power of the repressive regime,
which is dependent on the export market, is reinforced by racialized
class hierarchies and, within them, sexist divisions of labor.
In Victoria Santa Cruz’s spoken-word performance Me
gritaron negra (They Shouted “Black” at Me, 1978), the artist
recites: “I wasn’t even five, when some voices in the street shouted
‘black’ at me.” She ends with the proud line “Negra soy!” (I am
black!). Panamanian Sandra Eleta’s black-and-white photograph
Edita (la del plumero), Panama (Edita [the one with the feather
duster], Panama, 1978–79) portrays a maid staring at us regally
from her employers’ gilded armchair. Her dark skin set off against
her white uniform, she holds a duster in lieu of a scepter. From
Bemberg to Eleta, these artists address not social homogeneity but
rather the hierarchies and divisions that shape each woman’s life.
The curator Andrea Giunta argues that many sensibilities and
ideas are still blocked by patriarchal taste.
In her essay “An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics,” in the
Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, the Chilean multidisciplinary
artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña (represented by several works in
the show) points out that the vitality of Latin American literature
arises from its mestizaje, the mixing of indigenous, European,
African, and Asian influences.8 Likewise, cultural blending is
evident in much of the art in the show. For Brasil native/Brasil
alienígena (Native Brazil/Alien Brazil, 1977), Anna Bella Geiger,
who is Brazilian and of Jewish-Polish descent, pairs postcards of
indigenous subjects with postcards of herself imitating their poses,
such as aiming a bow and arrow at the sky. The absurdity of her
staging these postures in Western dress highlights the constructed
exoticism at the heart of the Brazilian self-image. The pioneering
video work of Mexican artist Pola Weiss emerged after a 1973
meeting with Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota in New York.
The eighteen-minute Mujer Ciudad Mujer (Woman City Woman,
1978) intercuts and overlaps images of a nude dancer, psychedelic
patterns, and mundane scenes of Mexico City.
Another kind of mixing appears in Vicuña’s drawing
Nuevos diseños eróticos para muebles (New Erotic Designs for
Furniture, 1971), which depicts a combination recliner/work
Letícia Parente:
bench on which a naked woman leans over an open book with a photo series “La doble lucha” (The Double Struggle, 1981–82)
Trademark, 1975,
pen at the ready. The artist’s poem typewritten below the image foils coherent identity. Grobet pictures masked and costumed video, 10 minutes,
announces that fixed positions have become too limited and women wrestlers performing everyday activities, such as feed- 19 seconds.
Courtesy Galeria
proposes different furnishings / that offer a multi- ing a baby or applying makeup, adding tenderness to a public Jaqueline Martins,
plicity of movements or corporeal situations / to the persona that is equal parts aggressive and sexual. São Paulo.
user of her own body. Lourdes Grobet’s black-and-white
THE NEED TO SPEAK openly about specifically female expe-
riences, like maternity and menstruation, motivates many works.
Lea Lublin’s 1968 performance, Mon fils (My Son), in which she
cared for her seven-month-old child at the Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris during a group exhibition, is presented in
several photographs. Performance artists Mónica Mayer and Maris
Bustamante, who formed the feminist art group Polvo de Gallina
Negra (Black-Hen Dust), used their appearance on a Mexican TV Cecilia Vicuña:
talk show as the conduit for their piece Madre por un dia (Mother New Erotic Designs
for Furniture
for a Day, 1987). When the straitlaced host asks about the duo’s (detail), 1971,
name, which refers to a folk remedy against hexes, Mayer tells poem, two sheets,
each 8½ by 7 inches.
him: “It’s hard to be a woman in this world, it’s hard to be an artist,
it’s hard to be a woman artist, but to be a woman, an artist, and a
feminist is very hard! So we said, a name like Polvo de Gallina
Negra protects us against any evil eye that comes our way.” In
the approximately fifteen-minute video, Mayer and Bustamante
discuss their work and motherhood, telling the host that they
will demonstrate how art can use mass media to change soci-
ety’s views of women’s issues. Pulling out props, they ask him
to try out pregnancy by dressing in a big-bellied yellow apron
and a tiara. They play the cues and gags of television to bring
attention to a subject usually absent from such forums.
The performances of Colombian artist María Evelia
Marmolejo focus on the shock of exposing what’s usually hidden.

PACIFIC STANDARD TIME ART IN AMERICA 79

 lated body is seen in overgrown grass. Chilean Luz Donoso created
a thirteen-foot scroll of photocopied images of the “disappeared,”
titled Huincha sin fin (Endless Band, 1978), which she unfurled, at
great personal risk, in public actions throughout Santiago.

AS BOTH CURATORS emphasized in my interviews

with them, pressure from leftist groups in Latin America to
maintain a unified political front greatly decreased the number
of women artists who explicitly labeled themselves feminists.
Mexican-American artists, however, dealt more directly with
the problem of “double militancy.” Carla Stellweg explains in
the catalogue, “Chicana feminists saw that the sexism within
the Chicano movement intersected with racism in the larger
society and made addressing both simultaneously a central
component of their ideology.”10 The exhibition includes Chi-
cana artist Isabel Castro’s series of photocopied slides titled
“Women Under Fire” (ca. 1980). A gun’s crosshairs appears
over portraits of the artist’s smiling female friends. According
to Stellweg, Castro was responding to the federally funded
Paz Errázuriz: The nine black-and-white photos documenting 11 de marzo—Rit- nonconsensual sterilizations of Mexican-American women at
Macarena, 1986,
from the series
ual a la menstruación, digno de toda mujer como antecedente del origen an East LA hospital in the mid-1970s.11
“Adam’s Apple,” de la vida (March 11—Ritual in Honor of Menstruation, Worthy In the catalogue, curator and critic Rosina Cazali clarifies the
1982–90, gelatin of Every Woman as a Precursor to the Origin of Life, 1981) show complications of political action in a stratified culture. Discussing
silver print, 15½
by 23½ inches. her marking the gallery walls with her menstrual blood by pressing the influence on feminism of Guatemalan Ana María Rodas’s
Courtesy Galeria her pelvis against them. In the catalogue, Carmen María Jaramillo book Poemas de la izquierda erotica (Poems of the Erotic Left,
AFA, Santiago.
recounts a conversation with Marmolejo in which the artist said 1973), she writes, “the slender volume of poems spoke of some-
she was inspired by a Chocó myth. “First came woman. She thing that the authoritarian structures did not expect, something
menstruated, mixed her blood with mud, and made a phallus. She
buried it and out came man.”9
Many of the works are more conceptually driven, emphasiz-
ing an analytical approach and challenging the notion of any
reductive female aesthetic. The short film Por la mañana (In the
Morning, 1980) by Colombian artist Patricia Restrepo presents
the same domestic morning scene three times, each with different
audio and visual perspectives. First, we hear a woman describing
a man’s ritual of having coffee and a cigarette. We see her face
Hand-painted slowly dropping as we hear her voice: “And he left, in the rain,
photocopied slide without saying a word, without looking at me. And I covered
from Isabel Castro’s
series “Women my face with my hands, and cried.” The second version shows
Under Fire,” repeated close-ups of a man pouring coffee, lighting a cigarette,
ca. 1980, mixed
and blowing smoke rings. The camera changes position and focus
mediums, 10 by
6½ inches. slightly with each take. He carefully ends each pour with a crisp
wrist-twist to avoid spilling the final drop. We sense his effort at
keeping his own attention on his immediate action, lest a stray
glance throw an emotional line to the unseen woman seated
across from him. The third time, the film cuts back and forth
between the man and woman, following the rhythm of pour-
ing coffee, milk, and so on. The repetition captures the distance
between the two characters’ perspectives and the claustrophobic
tension of a relationship where communication has stopped.
The exhibition also examines women’s responses to the
violence that plagued Latin America during the show’s focus years.
The works in the “Resistance and Fear” section reflect the dark
tenor of state terror by right-wing dictatorships from the late 1960s
into the ’80s, which was supported by the US. In Argentine Diana
Dowek’s 1975 acrylic painting of a car’s side-view mirror, a muti-

80 SEPTEMBER 2017 DR ASTIC TIMES

 María Evelia
Marmolejo:
Anonymous I, 1981,
performance.
Photo Fabio
Arango.

that they could not fathom. . . . The book’s title became a sort of
manifesto.”12 Cazali notes, however, that Rodas’s book affected
primarily middle-class and urban women. The sexual liberation of
her poems was of little use to poor indigenous and mestiza women,
particularly outside cities, since their bodies “became war booty
and cannon fodder” in the vicious Guatemalan civil war and many
other conflicts in the region.13
Gender roles are explored most directly in Chilean Paz
Errázuriz’s photographic series of transgender female prostitutes
in a Santiago brothel, titled “ La manzana de Adán” (Adam’s
Apple, 1982–90). At the symposium at arteBA, Errázuriz
addressed the challenges she faced. She was told that a housewife
couldn’t be an artist and that photography wasn’t a serious art
form; in addition, her subjects were in danger of being killed if
the police caught them.14 Her photos finally appeared in a book
with a text by culture critic and poet Claudia Donoso in 1990,
but it was banned and removed from stores after selling only one
copy. Over time, Errázuriz befriended the sex workers and their
families. Almost all the workers died of AIDS in the coming
years. What remains are these images of tenderness, boldness, and
solidarity. At the same time, the closed-in reality of the brothel
parallels the nation’s claustrophobia under Pinochet’s regime.
“Radical Women” makes a compelling case that women
artists in Latin America were central to joining social engagement
with formal experimentation. In doing so, they played a large role
in shaping our contemporary understanding of art.The subsequent
omission of their contributions from the records has left an enor-
mous gap. Happily, the show provides a much-needed foundation
upon which to build.
1. Latinx is a gender-neutral replacement for the exclusionary Latino or the cumber-
some binary Latino/a.
2. Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation,
Austin, University of Texas Press, 2007.
3. Andrea Giunta at arteBA Open Forum on “Radical Women,’ Buenos Aires, May
21, 2016, youtube.com.
4. Fajardo-Hill, “The Invisibility of Latin American Women Artists: Problematiz-
ing Art Historical and Curatorial Practices,” in Radical Women: Latin American Art,
1960–1985, Los Angeles and New York, Hammer Museum and Delmonico/Prestel,
2017, p. 21.
5. Ibid.
6. Cecilia Fajardo-Hill interview conducted in Spanish, Feb. 16, 2017, Los Angeles.
7. Andrea Giunta interview conducted in Spanish, Feb. 7, 2017, New York, and
Fajardo-Hill interview.
8. Cecilia Vicuña, “An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics,” in The Oxford Book of Latin
American Poetry, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. xvii–xviii.
9. María Evelia Marmolejo quoted in Carmen María Jaramillo, “In the First Person:
Poetics of Subjectivity in the Work of Colombian Women Artists, 1960–1980,” in Radical
Women, p. 263.
10. Carla Stellweg, “No son todas las que estan ni estan todas las que son,” in Radical
Women, p. 296.
11. Ibid., p. 295.
12. Rosina Cazali, “One Hundred Times One,” in Radical Women, p. 246.
13. Ibid., p. 247.
14. Paz Errázuriz at arteBA Open Forum on Radical Women, Buenos Aires, May 21,
2016, youtube.com.

PACIFIC STANDARD TIME ART IN AMERICA 81

 DITHYRAMBS
AND CENTAURS
Two museum exhibitions in Washington, D.C., explore
the references—from Classical to Nazi to Pop—running
through the eccentric oeuvre of Markus Lüpertz.

by Brooks Adams
Markus Lüpertz: AT AGE SEVENTY-SIX, Markus Lüpertz, the murkiest ’70s, including examples from the artist’s “Dithyramb” series—
Donald Duck’s
Wedding, 1963, oil of the German Neo-Expressionists, is painting centaurs. That paintings of loosely modeled forms, sometimes resembling
on cotton, 79½ ancient amalgam of man and beast sums up the duality at the pitched tents or roof tiles, that he meant to be neither fully
inches square. Hall
Art Foundation.
heart of his enterprise, the struggle between the highly acces- representational nor fully abstract—and his “German Motifs,”
Courtesy Hirshhorn sible and the inscrutable, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. replete with helmets, military caps, and other paraphernalia
Museum and These works confront old-fashioned Arcadian subjects, while evoking a verboten Nazi past.
Sculpture Garden,
Washington, D.C. freely mingling abstraction and figuration, Ab-Ex and Pop. The American consideration of postwar German art may
Since 1963, when he first emerged in Berlin with perverse well have begun between 1979 and 1980, with the Joseph
All works this article
© Artists Rights mixes of the painterly and the geometric in his “Donald Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New
Society (ARS), Duck” series, Lüpertz’s art has seemed caustic and dense with York. Beuys’s art opened a new world of dark content, evoca-
New York/VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn.
indecision, or rather with an overweening ambition to have it tive materials, and artistic hero worship. The Neue Wilden or
both ways, often in a single painting. the Neo-Expressionists—including Gerhard Richter, Anselm
Two concurrent shows closing this month in Washington, Kiefer, A.R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, and Jörg
D.C., provide an opportunity to find out more about Lüpertz Immendorff (some of whom were Beuys students)—and their
(b. 1941, Liberec, Czech Republic). At the Phillips Collection, work arrived shortly thereafter, reaching critical mass in New
CURRENTLY
ON VIEW a five-decade retrospective containing forty-six works, curated York in 1984. That year, Lüpertz spent two months in the city.
“Markus Lüpertz,” at by the museum’s director Dorothy Kosinski (and idiosyncrati- Lüpertz was not a Beuys student, but rather one of a band
the Phillips Collection, cally installed by the artist), suggests new continuities in an of international artists who found themselves drawn to the
Washington, D.C.,
through Sept. 3; oeuvre that is hard to pin down. Kosinski is the right person ferment of Cold War–era West Berlin. A naturalized Ger-
“Markus Lüpertz: to shepherd such a project: she worked for many years in man citizen, whose family had come from Eastern Europe as
Threads of History,” Europe and her dissertation addressed the image of Orpheus refugees in 1948, he had attended art school in Krefeld, and
at the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture in Symbolist art, a recurrent subject in Lüpertz’s painting, after stints in Paris and the French Foreign Legion, ended
Garden, Washington, sculpture, and poetry. up in Berlin in 1962 alongside Baselitz and Penck. He was
D.C., through Sept. 10; The Phillips show was inspired by a large trove of Ger- a nightclub bouncer and a boxer, a provocateur and a show-
and “Max Klinger /
Markus Lüpertz,” man and Danish works given to the museum by the artist’s man (today he still sports rock-star rings, bespoke suits, and a
at the Museum der principal dealer, Michael Werner, in 2015. Since the mean-looking walking stick). In 1964 he cofounded the coop-
bildenden Künste Phillips Collection cannot accommodate Lüpertz’s largest erative gallery Grossgörschen 35 with artists K.H. Hödicke,
Leipzig, through
Sept. 24. paintings (one from 1968 is more than forty feet long), the Bernd Koberling, and Lambert Maria Wintersberger. In ’68
venue collaborated with a second institution. In the big base- he became part of the nascent Michael Werner stable.
ment galleries of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gar- Lüpertz also had an illustrious academic career: begin-
BROOKS ADAMS
is a writer based in den, “Markus Lüpertz: Threads of History,” curated by Evelyn ning in 1974, he taught in Karlsruhe; then, from 1988
New York. C. Hankins, features thirty-two works from the 1960s and early to 2009, he was dean of the Staatliche Kunstakademie

82 SEPTEMBER 2017
Dithyramb
(Triptych), 1964,
distemper on
canvas, three parts,
78¾ by 118⅛
inches overall.
Würth Collection,
Germany. Courtesy
Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture
Garden.
Düsseldorf. With age, the “wild man” artist has become a
media personality and a semiofficial emissary of German
culture. A little-known Lüpertz commission graces the
German ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C., a
bright white, bunkerlike house designed in 1994 by Oswald
Mathias Ungers. While in the capital, I made the trek
there. After noting Lüpertz’s heroic bronze figure Clitunno
(1989–90) at the edge of the driveway (on loan), I was
shepherded in to see the artist’s magisterial installation in
the severe, barrel-vaulted grand salon.
Eight gigantic woodcuts on square canvases are set into
the walls at cornice level. Each depicts an androgynous head
with a bob hairdo set against a background of loosely drawn
grids with lots of cross-hatching. Related to Lüpertz’s series
“Men without Women: Parsifal” (1993), they could almost
be parodies of Expressionist chiseling; the fact that they are
woodcuts makes them look even more “German.” The use of
color is heraldic, amping up a long line of neo-medievalist
references in his work.1 The room could be understood as an
update on the Rittersaal, the type of knights’ hall featured in
Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal.
AT THE HIRSHHORN show, with its straightforward,
blow-by-blow layout, anyone interested in early ’60s paint-
ing—whether Hand-Painted Pop or Hard-Edge abstrac-
tion—would have to take note of Lüpertz’s blazing ambition.
Working on low-grade canvases with cheap distemper paint
“borrowed” from daytime construction jobs, Lüpertz put
ideas through their paces with both relentless fury and quiz-
zical detachment.
84 SEPTEMBER 2017 DITHYR AMBS AND CENTAURS
The artist began his “Dithyramb” paintings in 1962. The term
refers to a type of ecstatic ancient Greek verse praising Dionysus.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s slim poetry volume Dionysian-Dithyrambs
(1891) and ’60s-era orgiastic groups in West Berlin also influenced
the artist. We sense Lüpertz searching for an idea he can claim as
his own. The dithyramb was a way for him to put his mark on a
number of motifs, and he worked it well into the ’70s.
Richard Shiff ’s excellent catalogue essay indicates that the
first dithyrambs were appropriated from the 20th Century Fox
logo.2 Lüpertz reworked the Art Deco construct and put it
through so many iterations that it becomes almost unrecognizable,
though you still sense the dramatic perspectival rendering of the
original. At the Hirshhorn, Dithyramb (Triptych), 1964, presents a
hulking deep blue and red-brown form, with two finials resem-
bling Mouseketeer ears and a loosely brushed portal shape in the
middle. The big shaded volume is stretched across three canvases,
the central one being slightly taller than the others. There’s a tug-
of-war between image and form, and the religious format suggests
that Lüpertz is thinking about the sacred in abstract art.
A whole gallery at the Hirshhorn is devoted to the
buoyant, bright “Tent-Dithyrambic” paintings (1965), which
formally evoke pitched tents and are often numbered in the
upper right corner. The imagery, appropriated from mail-order
catalogues, seems so inclusive, relentless, and encyclopedic
that one wonders if the artist is exceptionally compulsive or simply
an avid careerist, creating his own brand. In Tent 9—Dithyrambic,
an upturned flap becomes an abstract triangle. The deep blue
ground abuts a high horizon line; above is a “sky” of raw
canvas. The tension between Hard-Edge and lyrical abstraction
feels whimsical and theatrical.
 An early climax of certitude is the more than forty-foot-
long, five-panel Westwall (Siegfried Line), 1968, which takes
an array of dragon-teeth blockades from World War II as
its subject. The artist went to visit the fortifications along
Germany’s western border and had himself photographed
in a fur-collared coat and dress shirt dancing along what
Hankins describes in her catalogue essay as “pyramidal
concrete tank traps” in the snow.3 The tonal daubing on
the traps produces perspectival recession and an illusion
of patina but also floats freely as abstract markings. The
forms, separated by sharp narrow alleyways, create an
impression of an Aztec City of the Dead, a military cem-
etery, or a forest of felled trees. There’s something insistently
man-made and something unremittingly natural about
these forms, each of which is unique. It’s as if Lüpertz were
re-creating this Third Reich battlefront as an earthwork.
The “German Motifs” paintings no longer appear to
be Lüpertz’s most incendiary. Rather, they look somewhat
hackneyed, soft, and familiar at the Hirshhorn: Lüpertz was
treading softly on forbidden territory. The works depict Ger-
man steel helmets, shovels, and other fraught objects sitting
in fields. The conceit of a still life in a landscape is an old
Baroque convention. Other variants, like the three “Cyclops—
Dithyrambic” (1973), riff on the ancient Greco-Roman
tropaion (a monument comprising a defeated foe’s armor). The
The “German Motifs” paintings teased out war memories
that Germans were only just beginning to deal with.
MARKUS LÜPERTZ
paintings each portray a humanoid assemblage of a German
military uniform, an officer’s cap, and an artist’s palette; the
same paper stencil was used for all three compositions. These
dark, brooding depictions of war trophies caused quite a stir in
the artist’s 1973 retrospective in Baden-Baden; critics branded
Lüpertz a latent Fascist.4 The works evidently teased out war
memories that Germans were only just beginning to deal with.
More fascinating to my mind is the colossal Helmets
Sinking—Dithyrambic (1970), in which the murk of Nazi
helmets in a nocturnal landscape is relieved by a strip of red
sky at the top of the composition, along with a little crescent
moon and stars. Lüpertz painted this work, we learn from a
marvelous 2014 interview with Peter Doig, while in Florence
on a one-year fellowship, a time when he watched lots of
American World War II movies dubbed in Italian.5 In other
words, the artist’s sources are Pop and second-hand, not gut-
wrenching childhood memories of war.
Something happened to Lüpertz’s work in the 1970s,
after the first scandal around the “German Motifs.” Clearly, he
retreated into more abstract imagery. Maybe semi-obscurity
was as good a strategy as any. Curving letter shapes are
rendered in dizzying, Mannerist-style perspectives. Forms
appear to be plunging, or soaring, but what they depict is not
immediately obvious. Lüpolis—Dithyrambic (1975), one of the
last works in the Hirshhorn show, gives us a clue: as the title
Helmets Sinking—
Dithyrambic, 1970,
distemper on
canvas, 102¼ by
177 inches. Stoffel
Collection in the
Pinakothek der
Moderne, Munich.
Courtesy Hirshhorn
Museum and
Sculpture Garden.
ART IN AMERICA 85
 suggests, it’s the artist’s metropolis—shimmering, seen from
on high, the windows of its skyscrapers rendered as fat white
highlights.
AS AN INTRODUCTION to the artist’s work, the Phillips
retrospective is perhaps not ideal—dizzyingly diverse, the
whole thing might be a group show. Woe to the unsuspecting
viewer: there are no reductive lines of development, no easy
hooks for understanding. One of the first paintings I encoun-
tered was the deadpan funny Water Lily (1970)—Lüpertz’s
nod to Claude Monet. Almost ten feet tall, the work is
occupied by large, green zigzag shapes that start at the top of
the canvas and seem to snake progressively downward. Gradu-
ally, we realize that these refer to ripples in the water. In the
upper left corner, one white blossom looks more like an open
coconut. The painting is hard, mean, and hip.
The Phillips show becomes a kind of deliberately perverse
tone poem. The centerpiece is a long wall displaying three
works of the same height: Rendezvous, The Rumor, and The
Large Spoon (all 1982). The Large Spoon is a dense, allover dark
composition relieved only by bright yellow or blue ribbon-forms
Men without Women:
Parsifal, 1993, oil
and tempera on
cardboard, 33 by
20½ inches. Private
collection.
86 SEPTEMBER 2017 DITHYR AMBS AND CENTAURS
and a Pop image of one enormous utensil.6 The Rumor features
hard-to-read Cubist scaffolding and, in the lower right corner,
an image of a huge blue ear. The artist seems to be tweaking his
oeuvre, making new triptychs in a show that already contains them.
Lüpertz’s many takes on the old masters are best exem-
plified at the Phillips by Poussin—Tangier (1989), a bravura
treatise on rupture and representation. In the upper section,
Lüpertz has painted a torn reproduction of what looks like
an Annunciation, perhaps by Nicolas Poussin, but the figures
are treated in a style more akin to that of 1940s Picasso. The
bottom section features a pileup of urban detritus, in which one
can discern brick buildings, a childish rendering of an automo-
bile, and garbage cans. But here, the manner is more like Philip
Guston’s late figurative allegories, which were a huge influence
on younger artists beginning in the ’80s. Lüpertz is juggling
a lot, but the rich brown-red coloration and the roiling black
outlines pull the whole thing together.
The ’90s and aughts works are summarily treated at the
Phillips. These include four examples of the “Men without
Women: Parsifal” series, in which the faces appear to be
grimacing (an effect Kosinski brilliantly compares to the
eighteenth-century physiognomic sculptural heads of Franz
Xaver Messerschmidt), and an untitled series from 2008 featur-
ing the German steel helmet, now appearing atop grotesque
exploded heads. The effect of these works was ho-hum, but a
trio of small landscapes from 2010, the series “Agepan” (a type
of German fiberboard), stood out. In all three works, Lüpertz
coaxes bucolic scenes out of the substrate’s textures.
IN A SHOW OF RECENT work this past summer at
Michael Werner in New York, Lüpertz ripped with char-
acteristic panache through the Arcadian themes that have
preoccupied him since 2011. The big painterly canvas Susanne
(2017) displays an archaic greeting of heroic figures. But
here we also stumble upon zones of total abstraction: a white
trapezoidal form at the left edge and a little red necktie shape
dangling from the top edge. The men are dark and the woman
light-skinned—a sure sign that Lüpertz is evoking the gender
distinctions of ancient wall painting. A dappled horse stands in
front of a burly bearded guy, who in turn appears to cop a feel
from the woman beside him. The horse’s head is missing, as is
one of the man’s legs, creating the impression of a centaur. A
liminal zone of fat pointillist daubs around the horse’s shoul-
ders suggests a magical transition between equine and human.
For Lüpertz, the archaic hybrid of the centaur says some-
thing profound about the nature of painting and the process
of abstraction. In his view, the centaur—in its combination of
the rational and emotional—is painting. The equine subject,
not a new one for the artist, puts Lüpertz’s late work squarely
in line with that of nineteenth-century “Italian Germans” like
Hans von Marées (1837–1887) and the Swiss Arnold Böcklin
(1827–1901). Von Marées, that purveyor of homoerotic fres-
coes in Naples and three strange, mythological triptychs from
the 1880s, died young in Italy and was posthumously acclaimed
by Julius Meier-Graefe, an early champion of Cézanne. (The
Werner show was full of Cézannesque bather types.)

Böcklin’s work, famous in his lifetime for his signature
“Isle of the Dead” paintings (1880s) as well as his many
images of full-bodied Tritons, mermaids, centaurs, and satyrs,
counters the forces of nineteenth-century rationalism with its
delight in a more genuinely Pan-inspired vision of freedom
and sexuality. His investigation of ancient mythological crea-
tures has long been understood as a parable for the forces of
nature, and it was characterized by Clement Greenberg as the
best and the worst of nineteenth-century painting. Copied by
a young Giorgio de Chirico, and claimed, ironically perhaps,
by Marcel Duchamp as his favorite painter, Böcklin is part
of a well-worn, if less traveled, “other” modernist tradition of
which Lüpertz is definitely part.
The new work recently shown at Werner mines this vein
of nineteenth-century German Symbolist painting, which is
under-known in the United States and under-emphasized in
the recent American literature about Lüpertz’s work. The artist’s
hand-painted frames, in particular, put his work in the tradition
of polychrome polyptychs by Max Klinger, such as his over-
the-top fusion of painting and sculpture, The Judgment of Paris
(ca. 1886–87).
The Phillips/Hirshhorn catalogue, on the whole a com-
mendable addition to Lüpertz studies, lacks a bibliography,
and the texts are notably short on biographical information:
MARKUS LÜPERTZ
Susanne, 2017,
mixed mediums on
canvas in artist’s
frame, 78¾ by 102¼
inches. Courtesy
Michael Werner
Gallery, New York
and London.
everything aims for the Olympian view of the elder states-
man. The absence of sculpture from the Phillips show is
perhaps the most egregious oversight, especially since the
museum owns at least one painted bronze, 3 Graces (2000),
a work illustrated in Kosinski’s essay and part of the Werner
gift. Sculpture is integral to Lüpertz’s pursuit, and it’s what
first attracted me to his work in the early ’80s in New York.
Everything postwar European was up for reappraisal, and
in the old protectionist, isolationist school of American
art criticism, the “German invasion,” as we used to call it,
was (along with the Italian and French versions) part of an
immensely exciting larger cultural shift.
1. For the medievalist vein in Lüpertz’s work, see Roberta Smith, “Paintings from
Germany, With a Wink and a Sneer,” New York Times, May 22, 2007, nytimes.com.
2. Richard Shiff, “A Stone Is a Hill, a Hill Is a Stone,” in Markus Lüpertz, Munich,
Sieveking Verlag, 2017, p. 42.
3. Evelyn C. Hankins, “‘A Painter without Responsibilities,’ Markus Lüpertz,
1962–1975,” in Markus Lüpertz, p. 49.
4. See Siegfried Gohr’s excellent essay, “German Motifs,” in Markus Lüpertz, New
York and Cologne, Michael Werner Gallery, 1996, n.p.
5. Interview with Peter Doig in“Markus Lüpertz: Players Ball,” London, Michael
Werner Gallery, 2014.
6. The Large Spoon was a lodestar; included in Kynaston McShine’s “An International
Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
in 1984, the work was bought in 1986 for MoMA’s permanent collection.
ART IN AMERICA 87
 MFA
QUALITY
A free art school conceived as a rebuke to runaway
student debt, Bruce High Quality Foundation University
has had to negotiate a position between
institutionalization and anarchy.
by Erica Dawn Lyle
A poetry class A MONTH AFTER the inauguration of Donald Trump,
at Bruce High
Quality Foundation
I found myself in a cold and dimly lit loft in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park
University’s East neighborhood—the home of the Bruce High Quality Foundation
Village location, fall University, a free art school. Fifteen or so students were discussing
2014. Photo Jake
McNulty. “Porgy,” a 1988 text by Adrian Piper, in which the legendary con-
ceptualist argues that, in order to retain intellectual integrity, artists
should make their income by means other than the sale of art.1
The essay evokes concerns that still preoccupy many art stu-
dents. “I’m between jobs right now,” one said to begin the discussion.
“This piece for me captures the basic struggle of how to find free
time to make art at all.” “Of course Piper can live without selling her
work!” a young woman added. “She’s a tenured professor!” Another
woman quickly agreed that the text was “annoying” for this very
reason. After all, tenured teaching gigs are in short supply today.
When I was coming up as a writer and musician in the San
Francisco punk community, the question that haunted all artistic
production was whether or not you were selling out. But today,
virtually no once-dark corner of any underground, subculture, or
avant-garde has avoided exposure and co-optation by the main-
stream. Questions of what is inside or outside the system have
become far murkier as young artists are increasingly expected to
ERICA DAWN sell themselves on social media and earn graduate degrees in MFA
LYLE is the editor programs. Perhaps the question of selling out has always really
of SCAM magazine been an existential one about the purpose of art. Is art to be made
and the author of
Streetopia (2015). See for the sake of community, friendship, and conversation with other
Contributors page. artists? Or is making art just another way to make a living?
88 SEPTEMBER 2017
This question is at the heart of BHQFU, an ambitious
institution that has been operating for nearly a decade in various
locations around New York City. It appeared at the height of
the MFA bubble, and continues to operate as applications to
and enrollment in those programs has precipitously declined.2
Launched in 2009, BHQFU provocatively promised on its
website “an MFA-quality education” free of charge, in an environ-
ment where “students are teachers are administrators are staff.”
The deadpan premise contained a kernel of satire, needling the art
world’s crisis over growing professionalization and financialization.
BHQFU IS A PROJECT of the Bruce High Quality Founda-
tion, which was formed in 2001 by a group of eight anonymous
artists who met as students at Cooper Union in New York
and upon graduation realized, as one of them put it in an early
interview, that in the era of an ever-expanding art market and the
professionalization of art-making, “all we really had in the world
was our work and each other.”3 At the outset, BHQFU resembled
its founders’ other actions, bitingly witty pranks poking fun at the
excesses of the art world. BHQF first made headlines in 2005 with
The Gate: Not the Idea of the Thing but the Thing Itself, a gonzo inter-
vention in a high-budget public art piece mounted by the Whitney
Museum. Inspired by a drawing by the late Robert Smithson, the
museum produced a miniature floating model of Central Park
that was towed by a tugboat around Manhattan. BHQF rented a
speedboat and mounted on its bow a scale model of Christo and
 BHQFU’s true achievement was facilitating a space where different
kinds of people could come together without having to spend money.

Seth Cameron, president of BHQFU and the only original

member of the Bruce collective still on the school’s board, told me
that he believes “learning becomes possible when received ideas
become unfamiliar and when ‘knowledge’ becomes questions,” a
state he believes is reachable when unlikely ideas and people are
put into collision with each other.5 This theory was put into prac-
tice to great effect in the loft on Avenue A. The place combined
the atmospheres of a dive bar and a think tank in an almost fully
gentrified downtown neighborhood where countless cherished
institutions—from Max Fish to the Brecht Forum—had recently
closed. Established art stars mingled with student activists. In the
most expensive city in the country, the loft provided a space where
you could show up at almost any time of day, any day of the week,
and be allowed to simply hang out without spending a dime.
While the school often lacked funds to pay honoraria
to guest speakers, the buzz around BHQFU gave the school
enough social capital to encourage the participation of many
accomplished artists and academics. Sean J. Patrick Carney, now
the school’s outreach coordinator, recalled scraping together
fifty dollars from his own pocket to pay philosopher Simon
A blackboard from Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates—a series of portals drapped in orange Critchley for a guest lecture. Critchley not only accepted but
a BHQFU class
taught by Joe Riley, fabric installed in Central Park earlier that year—and chased happily joined students at a bar around the corner where the
Victoria Sobel Smithson’s island. Subsequent projects include an exhibition of classroom discussions continued deep into the night.6
and Casey Gollan,
fall 2013.
early works from what they claimed would be a decades-long The school’s scrappy DIY aesthetics obscured the fact that
effort to reproduce the entire collection of seventeen thousand in a short time the members of the Bruce High Quality Founda-
antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in children’s tion had become art world insiders. While it was launched as
modeling clay,4 and the Brucennial (2008–14), an erratically an intervention into big money’s influence on art, BHQFU is
recurrent, unjuried, open-call exhibition presenting young funded by sales of high-priced art. BHQF has been generously
Opposite top, left unknowns alongside famous veterans. rewarded by the art world for its trenchant institutional critique;
to right, “Chopped,
Given the satirical nature of the collective’s work, observ- some of the group’s Play-Doh “antiquities” sold for six figures.
Except That It’s Art
Chopped,” 2015, ers could not help but wonder whether BHQFU was truly a Cameron told me sales of the collective’s art, along with the auc-
at the East Village sincere effort to found a school. Popping up in various loaned tion of donated works by friends of the school, including David
location, photo
Andrea Arrubla; a storefronts and residencies in the fall of 2009, BHQFU at first Salle and Francisco Clemente, paid the bills.
class at BHQFU’s appeared indistinguishable from the group’s usual spoofs. This The school’s efforts to blur the line between inside and outside
Tribeca location,
ca. 2009.
perception was hardly dispelled by Teach 4 Amerika (2011), a provided one ongoing source of frustration: speaking off the record,
five-week tour of college campuses sponsored by Creative Time. students groused that the ostensibly freewheeling school simply
Middle, limousine/ The school’s founders drove around the United States in a recycled the top-down structure of traditional MFA programs.
school bus from
Bruce High Quality stretch limo painted school-bus yellow to discuss the dire state Indeed, the wide-open curriculum belied the school’s transi-
Foundation’s Teach of arts education. But in fall 2012 the school made a serious tion away from its early utopian rhetoric toward a conventional
4 Amerika tour,
Chicago, 2011.
move toward sustainability, opening its first permanent space, a administrative structure. Concurrent with the move to Avenue A
loft on Avenue A in the East Village. in 2012, BHQFU restructured the once all-volunteer organization
Bottom, left to On the surface, the new iteration of BHQFU seemed tradi- to include paid staff and teachers, 501(c)(3) status, and centralized
right, a summer
residency at the tional enough. It offered lectures, seminars, and group critiques. decision-making. The structure was a problem in other ways; some
East Village But these mixed high and low culture in an anything-goes, found the school’s programming to be overdetermined, offering
location, 2015,
photo Stephen BYOB atmosphere. One former teacher fondly remembers insti- the appearance of laid-back, hands-on education rather than true
Faught; Lorelei tuting a two-beer maximum at his classes. An exemplary class participation. For them, the school succeeded not because of the
Ramirez and Tynan
might be “Chopped, Except That It’s Art Chopped,” modeled on curriculum but almost in spite of it. BHQFU’s true achievement
DeLong performing
during the BHQFU one of the Food Network’s competitive cooking shows. Boxes of was facilitating a space where different kinds of people could come
book fair, 2016, “ingredients” were handed out to a rotating cast of students, who together without having to spend money. Impromptu experiments
at the Brooklyn
location, photo were judged by how effectively they could use the items to create and one-off courses blossomed in the gaps between scheduled
Andrea Arrubla. a new artwork on the spot. classes, and the students created a kind of unscripted community.

90 SEPTEMBER 2017 MFA QUALITY

BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION ART IN AMERICA 91
The professionalized art era has created an all-encompassing
environment that obscures the difference between networking
and community.
In the end, however, there was no way for them to move into posi-
tions of authority within the school.
Cameron agrees that to some extent the move away from
total volunteerism did undermine the original spirit of the school.
But he said that, ironically, the departure from a free-form school
was, in part, a strategy to provide an answer to such questions.
“We specifically went this route because we didn’t want our
community to be guinea pigs in a social sculpture,” he wrote in
an email. “Some degree of institutionalization, we felt, would set
up the appropriate distance from our own practice to give the
community its autonomy.”7
Joe Riley was one of several activists with Free Cooper
Union who taught classes at BHQFU while also occupying
the dean’s office at Cooper Union to protest plans to phase out
tuition-free education there. Riley’s complaints about BHQFU
will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time talking about
the school: its community was a conglomeration of preexisting
friend groups; classes were either overcrowded or poorly
attended; the policies on payment for teachers and guest speakers
were uneven and opaque. “On one hand, BHQFU was ad hoc
and sometimes experimental,” he said. “On the other, it was
re-creating existing hierarchies.”8 Yet while Riley found his
official participation with BHQFU oddly deflating, he fondly
remembers the so-called Night School—an unofficial collabora-
tion between Free Cooper Union and BHQFU students, who
gathered informally at the Avenue A loft on a nightly basis to
organize, plan actions, learn, and just hang out.
The Avenue A site closed after the fall 2015 semester, and
the school reopened shortly thereafter in Sunset Park. The move
accompanied a reorganization of the school as a yearlong resi-
dency program called the MFU, an undecipherable acronym that
mashes up the school’s name with MFA. Five residents chosen
from an open application process were each given a free studio
in exchange for teaching a course during BHQFU’s spring 2017
semester. They worked with Jarrett Earnest, the school’s faculty
liaison, to develop the curriculum based on their own interests.
WHEN I VISITED the school’s classes over several weeks
last March, I found them reliably interesting. Kentaro Ikega-
mi’s course, “Inside the Artist’s Studio,” where the aforemen-
tioned discussion of Adrian Piper’s essay took place, featured
guest artists who talked about pivotal moments in the early
foundation of their work and careers. In the wake of Trump’s
election, Andrew Ross’s seminar, “Post-Fact Studio,” seemed
particularly timely, promising to consider “the influence of
dystopian fictions on reality.” Artist Daniel Bejar visited the
class one week to discuss how he games Google searches to
make images of himself acting out fictional scenarios appear
as fact alongside actually true information. In Jesse Chun’s
“ESL: Transcultural Poetics,” guest artists and class readings
92 SEPTEMBER 2017 MFA QUALITY
offered perspectives on art from people of color, promising to
examine “the interplay of image and text, poetry, and multilin-
gual narratives.”
The classes seemed a more sober and traditional bunch than
what BHQFU used to offer. Only “Skill Yourself,” taught by Nina
Behrle, with its hands-on workshops and drunken bravado, recalled
the spirit of Avenue A. Over the course of the semester, students
learned DIY techniques ranging from making and casting with
molds to building synthesizers. When I arrived for my first visit to
her class, Behrle—looking uncannily like a Trader Joe’s employee in
a floral-print shirt and baseball cap—immediately offered me a beer.
Later, when the students abandoned their chairs and stood around
Behrle as she demonstrated how to stretch a silkscreen, more than
half of them were drinking beer or smoking cigarettes.
Still, there was something depressingly self-conscious about
the wackiness of Behrle’s class. Turning the classroom into a
crowded and smelly bar seemed to me not quite a means for
community building. The participants I met said they would like
more opportunities to interact with other students. But the fabled
informal community of Avenue A seemed almost impossible to
re-create deep in South Brooklyn. Students live too far away to
simply drop by anytime, and the commutes are so long that few
choose to linger after class. The industrial setting of Sunset Park
is also limiting. If Simon Critchley were to return, he would now
have to choose between a Dunkin’ Donuts and an adult video
store as the location for his post-class salon. Chun helpfully
maintained a Facebook group page where students could post
readings and comments for each other throughout the week, but
it was hardly an adequate substitute for face-to-face interaction.
Yet there are more reasons for the reduced sense of community
than just the new location. As the MFA programs that BHQFU
once set itself up against begin to decline, BHQFU seems to have
become more institutionalized. Chun arranged her classroom chairs
in a circle, encouraging students to direct their conversation at one
another, but for the most part in the classes I attended students faced
forward, with individual students addressing the teacher, who then
relayed an interpretation to the class. The subjects discussed in the
various courses were all interesting and the guest artists top-notch,
but without the intangible community once promised by BHQFU,
the school in this iteration seemed more like a well-curated univer-
sity lecture series than an alternative arts education.
BHQFU began with a promise to deliver “an MFA-quality
education.” But things fell flat when they actually attempted
to deliver on that promise. For most of the students I talked to,
the question of MFA-quality education was a moot point. They
either already had an MFA or knew they could never afford
one. Perhaps the school painted itself into a corner by focusing
so much on the construct of the MFA program—by making an
insider’s critique—rather than on ways to build an alternative
community outside the current arts system.
 I couldn’t help but wonder what the school would have
been like had it prioritized helping students teach and learn
from each other rather than inviting them to sit for lectures
by celebrity guests. Of course, any distinction between
inside and outside probably collapsed before the school even
existed. The 2010 Brucennial opened on the same night as
the Whitney Biennial, which featured BHQF’s work. Yet
there’s the rub: the students, seeing no opportunity outside
the existing art system, also sought to make it there. The
professionalized art era has created an all-encompassing
environment that obscures the difference between network-
ing and community.
BHQF U IS PERHAPS the highest-profile example of
a growing alternative arts education movement. In the
summer of 2016, young artists in North Carolina launched
a school on the site of the original Black Mountain Col-
lege. In November of the same year, Brooklyn’s nonprofit
Pioneer Works hosted the Alternative Art School Fair,
with presentations by more than fifty educational initiatives
from around the world. For participants like Beta-Local in
San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the Black School in Brooklyn,
an alternative arts education offers not just the promise
of experimentation with new forms of art-making but an
opportunity to test ideas for the reorganization of society.
BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION
BHQFU’s future is uncertain. After the end of the spring View of Bruce
High Quality
2017 semester, the school suspended the MFU program. Instead Foundation’s
of holding classes this fall, the BHQFU’s brain trust will meet exhibition “Ode to
with former teachers and students, as well as artists and theorists, Joy, 2001–13,” at the
Brooklyn Museum,
to discuss other possible models. 2013. Courtesy Vito
And so BHQFU is still a work in progress. It is an idea that Schnabel Projects,
New York. Photo
contains a mass of contradictions pushed to the crisis point. It Jonathan Dorado.
was started by an anonymous art collective whose members were
dedicated to destroying art stardom but then became art world
insiders. It was a critique of institutions that became an institution
of critique. Yet it often felt like the only game in town for those
seeking noncommercial community in New York’s art world in
the last decade. An ever-evolving experiment that has somehow
managed to keep the doors open, BHQFU remains somewhere
between the idea of the thing and the thing itself.
1. Adrian Piper, “Porgy,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I: Selected Writings in
Meta-Art 1968–1992, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1996, p. 239.
2. Brian Boucher, “After a Decade of Growth, MFA Enrollment Is Dropping,”
Artnet, Oct. 18, 2016, news.artnet.com.
3. “Interview between the Bruce High Quality Foundation and BHQFU’s current
dean, Haley Mellin,” Social Text Online, Oct. 22, 2013, socialtextjournal.org.
4. “Meditation of the Emperor,” at Vito Schnabel Projects and Mark Fletcher
Gallery, Nov. 9–Dec. 18, 2013.
5. Email from Seth Cameron to the author, July 6, 2017.
6. Interview with Sean J. Patrick Carney, New York, July 1, 2017.
7. Email from Seth Cameron to the author, June 12, 2017.
8. Email from Joe Riley to the author, June 9, 2017.
ART IN AMERICA 93
 THE
REPATRIATION
OF F$
Florine Stettheimer’s work reflects both the wealth that helped
make her part of New York’s cultural elite and the
interwar era’s conflicts over the meaning of American identity.

by Lucy Ives
Florine Stettheimer: NEITHER FRANZ KAFKA nor Louis-Ferdinand Céline had
The Cathedrals of
Wall Street, 1939, extensive experience in the United States, yet both wrote novels
oil on canvas, set wholly or in part in the land of opportunity. In 1932’s Journey
60 by 50 inches.
Metropolitan
to the End of the Night, Céline limns New York’s “gold district,” aka
Museum of Art, Manhattan, which the narrator-hero, Bardamu, fancifully main-
New York. tains can be entered only on foot, “like a church.” “It’s a district
filled with gold, a miracle, and through the doors you can actually
hear the miracle, the sound of dollars being crumpled, for the
Dollar is always too light, a genuine Holy Ghost, more precious
than blood.”1 This eerie concatenation of capitalism, architecture,
and human ambition resembles the earlier surreal landscapes of
Kafka’s Amerika ( The Man Who Disappeared), written 1911–14
and published posthumously in 1927. Yet, there is a haunted
and perhaps more vicious mood circulating in Amerika’s bizarro
CURRENTLY
ON VIEW USA: The Statue of Liberty, for example, holds a sword instead
“Florine Stettheimer: of a torch, and “unchained winds” blow around her. “One couldn’t
Painting Poetry,” at look for pity here,” the protagonist, Karl Rossmann, reflects of
the Jewish Museum,
New York, through this port city of “haste, precision, clarity of representation.”2
Sept. 24. The show While hyperbolic and rife with allegory, these portrayals of
travels to the Art pre-World War II New York are weirdly accurate. Or, rather, it
Gallery of Ontario,
Toronto, Oct. 21, is their use of hyperbole and allegory that makes them accurate.
2017–Jan. 28, 2018. Modern New York is a place one can see even without seeing it
with one’s own two eyes, given the long-range power of media.
LUCY IVES The city really is the dream of skyscrapers, big bucks, and mobil-
recently authored ity dangled before the exploitable immigrant, which also makes it
the novel Impossible something of a nightmare. And these novelizations, dreamed and
Views of the
World (2017). See fantasized and pasted together from others’ accounts, resemble,
Contributors page. tonally and rhetorically, nothing in the visual arts of their time
so much as the paintings of Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944),
who, as a Jazz Age socialite and actual resident of the US, would
seem to have little in common with either the clerklike Kafka or
war veteran and later anti-Semite Céline. Yet both authors are
uncharacteristically comic, even zany, when it comes to American
tableaux. It is, for example, possible to compare Amerika’s Nature
Theater of Oklahoma, a massive imaginary entertainment opera-
tion that ostensibly hires all comers, to Stettheimer’s canvases,
which are likewise anomalous sites of performance, often depicting
large casts of figures. In their detail, excess, and carefully deployed
allegorical systems, Stettheimer’s paintings depict an era of conser-
vative nationalism and roaring decadence, a contradictory cultural
and political amalgam that looks ever more familiar.
STETTHEIMER BECAME an American late. Though she was
born in Rochester, New York, she lived somewhat less than half
her life within her country of origin. In an early instance of the
mix of extreme privilege and social uncertainty that would define
her life, Florine, along with her four siblings, was whisked off to
Germany as a young child after her father abandoned the family. It
is not known whether her mother, Rosetta Walter Stettheimer, was
aiming to save face or cash, or both.3 The result was a childhood
like an extended vacation. Florine briefly returned to the US in
the 1890s, to study at the Art Students League, the first school in
New York to permit female students to make drawings from nude
models. She was otherwise in Vienna and Paris and other places
European, often in the company of her chic sisters, Ettie and Car-
rie. There were performances of the Ballets Russes, discussions of

94 SEPTEMBER 2017
 There is, to be frank, often something of a letdown when it comes
to Stettheimer’s reception. Wanda Corn and Michael Leja—two art
historians who have, to their credit, shown a greater tolerance than
most for the minutiae of the interwar period in the US—have little to
say about her. Yet, as New York Times art critic Roberta Smith observes
in her review of the current one-woman show at the Jewish Museum,
“Every 20 years or so an exhibition devoted to Florine Stettheimer . . .
shakes up modernism’s orderly hierarchies.”7 This latest survey, “Florine
Stettheimer: Painting Poetry,” suffers somewhat from a cramped,
windowless setting. Stettheimer’s four late masterpieces, her “Cathe-
drals” series of 1929–42, in the permanent collection of the nearby
Metropolitan Museum of Art, are not included, meaning that it is all
but impossible to comprehend Stettheimer’s enormous achievement as
a painter by way of the show. Without the “Cathedrals” as zenith, the
exhibition culminates uncertainly in maquettes, publicity headshots,
and barely legible snippets of film related to Four Saints in Three Acts,
a 1934 avant-garde opera, featuring an entirely African American
cast, with libretto by Gertrude Stein and score by Virgil Thomson.
Stettheimer designed iridescent cellophane scenery and feathered and
View of Gertrude the vitalism of Henri Bergson, careful examinations of canonical sequined costumes for the show, making something of a splash.8
Stein and Virgil
Thomson’s opera Continental paintings. Then, with the outbreak of the Great The catalogue for “Painting Poetry” hardly mitigates the disap-
Four Saints in War, the Stettheimers decamped to New York, which became a pointment. Even given the dearth of popular writing on Stettheimer
Three Acts, 1934,
with set design
permanent home. Florine Stettheimer would leave the US only that is not a rehashing of Linda Nochlin’s 1980 tour de force in this
by Stettheimer. once thereafter, to vacation in Canada. In 1914 she was forty-
Photo White three, with an impressive education but no career.
Studio. Courtesy
Florine and Ettie Most critics of Stettheimer’s multiform body of work—which
Stettheimer Papers, includes poetry, furniture, and stage sets, along with her complex
Yale Collection of
American Literature,
paintings—have a tendency to cast their essays as close read-
Beinecke Rare ings of the artist’s social calendar.4 These treatments have mainly
Book & Manuscript taken the paintings as portrayals of, and decorative backdrops for,
Library, Yale
University, New Stettheimer’s interactions with Marcel Duchamp (who may have
Haven, Conn. modeled Rrose Sélavy on her), Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe,
Elie Nadelman, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Van Vechten, among
other celebrities, some of whom, like best-selling author Joseph
Hergesheimer, were more renowned in their own day than they
are now. With recourse to her archives at Columbia and Yale,
Stettheimer’s careful readers have disclosed her uptown avant-
garde coterie. She is understood to have led a life of comfort and
leisure, if of questionable romantic and professional fulfillment.
The contradictions were many, but increasing quantities of family
money seem to have made them more interesting than tragic. (By
New York /Liberty, the time Florine, Ettie, Carrie, and Rosetta Stettheimer resettled in
1918–19, oil on New York, they were apparently quite financially secure.)
canvas, 23⅝ by
16½ inches. Private Starting around 1918, Stettheimer entered her mature period.
collection. Photo She stopped painting Post-Impressionist mediocrities and got
courtesy Jerry L.
weird. She festooned her studio with cellophane and Victorian lace.
Thompson/Art
Resource, New York. She gilded liberally, filling her canvases with lithe little bodies en
pointe. She was at once a consummate Continental decadent and
a patriotic American modern—a hyper-feminine late bloomer and
visionary, the ultimate outsider-insider. She became a satirist of
artistically inclined upper classes, as well as a depicter of nationalist
pageantry. She was not a bad poet. She showed infrequently and was
nearly forgotten after her death.5 Andy Warhol got a private viewing
of her work in 1961 from a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Though professing his “love” in his memoir POPism, Warhol was
not above dubbing his forebear a “wealthy primitive painter.”6

96 SEPTEMBER 2017 THE REPATRIATION OF F$


magazine, the two workmanlike essays by Stephen Brown and Geor-
giana Uhlyarik are lamentable. (Uhlyarik, for example, resorts to such
platitudes as, “Stettheimer painted herself into an art history of her
own making, informed by a long classical tradition and activated by
a vanguard attitude.”9) A subsequent coda-like transcript of a round-
table discussion among contemporary painters rehearses the usual
terms in which Stettheimer is praised.10 Overall, this lackluster if
jauntily packaged retrospective, with its anodyne title and incomplete
trajectory, deviates little from the boom-bust cycle Smith describes.
IF WE WANT TO grapple more seriously with Florine
Stettheimer, it is worth returning to Kafka and Céline’s unreal
depictions of the US. We could well think of Stettheimer on
similar terms: as an artist who treated America as an exotic,
largely unknowable locale and who used the space of fantasy
and escapism this orientation opened up as a source of inspira-
tion, improvising at will. This way of looking at Stettheimer
may not endear her to contemporary American audiences, who
seem to enjoy her work mainly for its flowers, stars, large-eyed
maidens, and ubiquitous crystalline frills. However, highlight-
ing Stettheimer’s interest in allegory and appropriation helps to
explain such apparently contradictory impulses as her life-long
fascination with the figure of the faun as portrayed by Vaslav
Nijinsky in his famous choreography for L’Après-midi d’un
faune, a ballet based on a Stéphane Mallarmé poem with a score
by Claude Debussy, and her equally powerful obsession with the
far less sensuous George Washington, to whom she dedicated
FLORINE STETTHEIMER
Asbury Park South,
1920, oil on canvas,
50 by 60 inches.
Collection halley
k harrisburg and
Michael Rosenfeld,
New York.
an entire shrinelike room in her Bryant Park studio and
who repeatedly appears in her paintings.11 From the intently
researched exoticism of contemporary designers Léon Bakst,
who created sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, and Paul
Poiret, the celebrity couturier who in 1911 held a “Thousand
and Second Night” fancy-dress soirée, Stettheimer learned the
power of orientalist pastiche.
Critics often note the impact Nijinsky’s June 8, 1912, Paris
performance of L’Après-midi d’un faune made on Stettheimer.
She immediately began sketching costumes and scenery for her
own ballet, the story of a well-heeled father-daughter duo who
are accosted by art students and compelled to don Bakstian/
Poiretian garb and begin dancing. Though the ballet, L’Orphée
des Quat-z-arts, whose title cites an annual Parisian ball, was
never staged, Stettheimer’s mock-ups evidence rapt work,
including collaged fabric and beading. This early undertaking is
usually seen as a sign of the talent that would be more concretely
manifested in Stettheimer’s designs for Four Saints in Three Acts.
L’Orphée might also be read as an indication of Stettheimer’s
fashionable equation of personal liberation with the assump-
tion of non-European dress; the clothing of the art students
points to a generalized East, in which the constraints of Western
society are imagined not to apply. Indeed, in one of the very
few extant photographs of Stettheimer, taken ca. 1917–20 in
her Bryant Park garden, she wears a matching set of billowing
pantaloons and embroidered white tunic. Stettheimer’s garments
are even more loosely cut than Poiret’s iconic “lampshade” tunic
ART IN AMERICA 97
Beauty Contest:
To the Memory of
P.T. Barnum, 1924,
oil on canvas, 50
by 60½ inches.
Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum
of Art, Hartford,
Conn.
ensemble, but the association is unmistakable and incorporates
another trend in which Poiret also participated: deliverance from
the corset.
Stettheimer thus favored an eccentric exoticism—one in
which fauns, George Washingtons, and other stock figures were
caricatured and fetishized—over related contemporaneous avant-
garde movements, even as she maintained a rather straightforward
relationship to the sensuality of paint. The academically trained
and always elaborately decorative Stettheimer was, for example,
never fully taken with Dada’s sardonic anti-art. The Stettheimer
sisters’ liking for puckish Duchamp, aka “Duche,” their sometime
French teacher, occasionally took a turn for the patronizing, as
when Ettie Stettheimer referred to him as a “charming garçon” or
the “queer but charming French boy who painted ‘Nude Descend-
ing the Stairs’ and other cubistic creations.”12 Meanwhile, the
uncanny imagery and narrative ruptures of Surrealism never caught
on with Florine, nor did the movement engage the materiality
of paint as much as she might have liked, though comparisons
to Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo are hardly out of
place. For Stettheimer did not just daub, she built her faux-naive
pictures with an artfully wielded palette knife (which is why it is
remarkable that her substantial canvases sometimes look like finely
delineated New Yorker covers in reproduction). Stettheimer has also
been said to have roots in the European Symbolist tradition, and
there are clear parallels between her work and the oneiric images of
Odilon Redon, for example. However, to the synthesis of the sym-
98 SEPTEMBER 2017 THE REPATRIATION OF F$
bol she clearly preferred the ambivalence and deferral associated
with allegory, the effect produced when a thing in a picture does
not represent that thing, purely or exclusively, but rather points
to something else.13 This current runs so strongly through her
work that the very fact that it has not been clearly elaborated by
Stettheimer’s critics suggests that the artist’s failure to fully “appear”
within either the canon or major American museums may be due
as much to this omission as to the artist’s gender. For it is difficult
to understand or, for that matter, see Florine Stettheimer, without
examining her allegorical depictions of America.
An important political fact of the era during which
Stettheimer resettled in New York was the increasing prevalence
of attempts to define American identity, as well as domestic policy,
with recourse to types and categorization. The use of statistics
by the government during the Progressive Era, while ostensibly
indicative of a turn to objectivity, was also linked to attempts to
limit access to US citizenship and the protections it entails, as
well as to jobs, reproductive rights, freedom of movement, and
so on. The rise of “race science” in mainstream academia in the
teens drove a wave of popular white supremacist publications that
claimed empiricist authority, including books like amateur anthro-
pologist and anti-immigration activist Madison Grant’s The Passing
of the Great Race of 1916. While the US had maintained a policy
of relatively open borders until the late nineteenth century, in 1917
the Asiatic Barred Zone Act expanded California’s anti-Chinese
restrictions of the 1870s and national anti-Chinese restrictions of
Stettheimer’s mature works recognize the racial and ethnic
divisions of American society with an outsider’s clarity, even as
they participate in the reduction of nonwhites to stock types.
1882, identifying a large portion of Asia as the source of unwanted
immigrants, who were to be banned along with idiots, illiterates,
anarchists, et al. This was followed by the Emergency Quota Act
of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which restricted
immigration from most parts of the world. Though Stettheimer
was born in America, she was raised a European. Her status as a
native daughter who had to become American in middle age was,
in itself, a challenge to the essentialism of nativist views. How-
ever, Stettheimer brought with her a European eye for Asian and
Middle Eastern art and design. Painted in the midst of the devel-
opments enumerated above, her first mature works recognize the
racial and ethnic divisions of American society with an outsider’s
clarity, even as they participate in the reduction of nonwhites to
stock types. At times her use of cliché and stereotypes can appear
merely fey or decorative, since these types are obviously not
intended to be realistic; yet it is worth examining how her work
both resists and conforms to conservative currents of her day.
STETTHEIMER’S New York/Liberty (1918–19) is an early
example of the technique for superimposing diverse historical and
personal events that Duchamp later termed multiplication virtuelle,
a technique that inscribes multiple, discrete meanings into a single
image.14 Depicting battleships in New York harbor, New York/
Liberty layers manifold times, tacitly commemorating Stettheimer’s
1914 repatriation into the port of New York, even as it more overtly
indicates America’s late May 1917 entry into WWI and President
Wilson’s subsequent voyage to the 1919 the International Peace
Conference.15 Though ostensibly about victory and American
exceptionalism, Stettheimer’s composition seems designed to be
read as an allegory for immigration and assimilation under the
American flag (clearly pivotal processes for Stettheimer) as its
vantage point is from on board a ship that, as indicated by a thickly
gilded Statue of Liberty, is located near Ellis Island.
The Manhattan cityscape that dominates the top half of
the canvas functions as a painting within a painting. A bit like a
birthday cake, parade float, or theatrical backdrop, this seduc-
tively vulnerable skyline justifies the guns mustered to protect
it. Like the red, white, and blue banners employed through-
out the scene, it signifies both power and peace. Despite its
consummate charm, the city appears secondary to the enlarged
seal of New York City occupying the bottom margin. Featur-
ing a pair of allegorical figures, this doubly significant seal is a
supposedly collective image, an icon for the municipality. But
it has been personalized and privately “stamped” by Citizen
Stettheimer, who as a woman did not have the right to vote in
1918. The Dutchman, no hardened colonist, possibly an early
twentieth-century Dutch naval officer, is jaunty with ribbons.
Meanwhile, the Native American employs a union shield as a
bizarre breechcloth, while wearing a flag-themed headdress.
Stettheimer’s revision of New York City’s social compact sug-
FLORINE STETTHEIMER
gests, in a strange softening of the US’s new 1917 exclusivity, that
Lady Liberty lifts her lamp for all those who resemble Broadway
extras. As do Kafka and Céline’s novels, New York/Liberty com-
plicates the utopian fantasy of a newly arrived immigrant. It pres-
ents an Oz-like America seen, gleefully and somewhat ignorantly,
from the exterior, an advertisement for a theatrical production
full of esoteric, and perhaps ultimately inaccessible, cheer.
In the late 1910s and early ’20s, Stettheimer’s paintings become
increasingly social, and the miniaturization of compositional elements
explored in New York/Liberty and other paintings like Picnic at Bed-
ford Hills (1918) predominates. Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T.
Barnum (1924) shows a more complex and less ambivalent response
to the question of American identity, filtering its visible forms
through a beauty contest reimagined as a hybrid event incorporating
a circus. Stettheimer presents a pageant of human types watched over
by recognizable individuals, including herself at upper left, smiling
and well made up, next to writer Edna Kenton and photographer
Edward Steichen. At lower right, an impresario who may or may
not be a slenderized Barnum oversees bathing beauties tanned
and pale, as well as, at center, children in feathered headdresses, a
Rudolph Valentino–like figure leading a horse that may or may not
be a Lipizzaner, and, at left, an all-black band in elaborate uniforms
over which the painter has obviously lingered.
The beauty contest is a pretext for various kinds of showmanship,
which Stettheimer organizes according to genre, race, and gender. A
seemingly endless supply of palm fronds and dripping red, white, and
blue crystals mediate the carefully divided scene, in which everyone
stays in his or her corner, as the show goes on. With the exception
of Stettheimer and her artist friends, who are legible as themselves,
everyone plays (and represents) a role, a mere type, suggesting that
their identities within this convocation are at least partly performa-
tive. Identity’s fungibility is additionally figured, for example, by
the labels (“Miss Atlantic City,” etc.) held by the beauties. Read
allegorically, the painting offers a retort to American nativism, since it
implies that much national belonging is merely “put on,” contingent
and assumed for public occasions. Yet, here Stettheimer also limited
herself to satirically depicting contemporary norms rather than
upending or abandoning these norms for something else. Though
the painting presents a quasi-democratic social sphere in which
Americans ostensibly gather to have fun, there remain real divisions
and inequalities within the collective setting. Indeed, so many shows
go on simultaneously that it is difficult to determine the actual nature
of the contest or what is at stake, and for which participants. The
scene is, additionally, unrelentingly festive and self-congratulatory,
though there is something unsettling about the many knowing smiles
exchanged: some smile because they observe an amusing scene, others
because they are on display. The painting’s commentary on these
dynamics is uneven, whimsical, never quite attaining irony or critique.
Stettheimer’s unusual semi-realist, semi-allegorical mode in
her mature paintings, combining both stylized stock figures and
ART IN AMERICA 99
 portraits of individuals known to her, of which Asbury Park South
(1920), depicting a segregated New Jersey beach, is also an example,
reaches its zenith with the late “Cathedrals” series, four large-scale
compositions devoted to Broadway (1929), Fifth Avenue (1931),
Wall Street (1939), and Art (1942). Though Stettheimer’s work was
not commercially successful during her lifetime, in the “Cathedrals”
series she explicitly appropriates commercial styles only hinted
at elsewhere, exploring billboards, industrial lighting, illustration,
entertainment industry publicity, and contemporary fashion. The
costumes and sets she designed to great acclaim for Four Saints in
Three Acts clearly influenced these late paintings, which are setlike in
their composition and contain lacy elements recalling the cello-
phane she used in these designs.
There is a certain seamlessness between this light and
purposely vapid work and actual advertising, as one clipping in
Stettheimer’s papers at Yale indicates: an East Coast department
store advertised its latest cellophane raincoat collection, imitat-
ing Stein’s prose style in the copy and including illustrations of
Two figures from
Stettheimer’s
unstaged Pocahontas
ballet, ca. 1934.
Florine Stettheimer
Papers, Rare Book &
Manuscript Library,
Columbia University,
New York.
100 SEPTEMBER 2017 THE REPATRIATION OF F$
Stettheimer’s scenery, an image of one cellophane lion plus palm
tree. Like Kafka’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma, where “angels”
on ladders play trumpets all day to publicize the performances,
Stettheimer’s late works devote themselves strenuously to the
American cult of celebrity, perhaps reveling in the emptiness of this
endeavor. Even their satirical elements feel resigned to the vapid-
ity of glamor, and recognition of a certain emptiness in New York
social life may be as close as Stettheimer came to openly acknowl-
edging the divisions of her new-old homeland.
AT THE END of her life, Stettheimer was working on a ballet
about the life of Pocahontas, which, like her 1912 effort, was never to
be staged. This patriotic work—celebrating the foundational myth in
which Pocahontas rescues John Smith—had a number of strange fea-
tures: Stettheimer and her collaborator, Virgil Thomson, had decided
that Smith and his countrymen would wear Scottish highland garb
rather than the expected British costume, and the ballet’s Native
American characters were to be dressed in cellophane, gold foil, and
feathers. The curators of the Jewish Museum show chose not to
include the twenty-two maquettes Stettheimer produced, instead
devoting space only to the two earlier stage design projects.16 Yet
the designs for this unfinished epic are worth mentioning because
they demonstrate Stettheimer’s enthusiasm for styles of appropria-
tion germane to period popular culture, along with her use of the
trope of the noble savage, a stock character embodying the concept
of the uncorrupted outsider and therefore allegorizing humanity’s
innate goodness, a figure not unlike the faun. This choice of subject
additionally implies Stettheimer’s acquiescence to increasingly fervent
nationalism leading up to the US’s 1941 entry into WWII, sug-
gesting not only that she viewed indigenous identity as yet another
performance, available to a modern update via musical theater, but
that she believed, or was willing to pretend that she believed, in an
excessively cheerful national origin story.
It is possible that Stettheimer, an unmarried and childless
Jewish woman, played down her own anomalousness in mainstream
Protestant America, while also answering her family’s polite rejec-
tion of her ambitions to be an artist, by exoticizing and feminizing
nearly everyone and everything in turn. However, such speculation
verges on armchair psychology and almost certainly misses the point,
which is that Stettheimer struggled with questions regarding power
and assimilation throughout her American career. Oil painting, an
economically and culturally dominant art form, became reconciled to
minor decorative styles in Stettheimer’s hands, even as she took on
major themes, including the nature of American identity. Stettheimer’s
ever-changing signatures reflect the fact that she deliberated a great
deal about her own authority as an artist. Until about 1920, while she
still painted in a derivative European style, she favored her initials,
“FS,” superimposed in such a way that the “F” appears to be impaling
the “S,” transforming the first letter of Stettheimer’s surname into a
certifying dollar sign, as if to say, “Look at me, I am a rich Ameri-
can!”17 But in later paintings she more confidently offers her full
name, often trompe l’oeil-style, trickily “written” on a depicted object.
She additionally abbreviated, sometimes becoming the saintly “Florine
St.,” a moniker that may have had something to do with Stein’s opera.
Wealth allowed Stettheimer to be at once candid, utopian,
hermetic, escapist, appropriative, and in violation of good taste, and
she grew into this fact from 1914 on. She assumed an American
identity of a kind, as a woman who could, at least in theory, buy
whatever she desired. Whereas staunchly middle-class William
Carlos Williams in a 1923 poem railed against the lack of “peasant
traditions to give them / character,” which made average Americans
fools for “gauds,” Stettheimer embraced artificial forms of pleasure
and liberty, for she could afford them.18 The mature Stettheimer
made no secret of her affection for luxury. No longer using the
hermetically crest-like “F$,” she proudly provided, usually in white,
a full, or nearly full, name on her decadent, gilded, and frosted can-
vases—at least until The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931), where
her old “F$” does double duty as the mark on a luxury car. Yet, in
spite of her wealth, Stettheimer depicts herself in her final, unfin-
ished painting of 1942, The Cathedrals of Art, standing on the side
of folk culture. In the painting, icons of modernism such as MoMA
director Alfred H. Barr Jr. and a painting by Picasso appear on
one side of a templelike structure, while signifiers of vernacular
aesthetics, a stylized bald eagle and Juliana Force of the Whitney
Museum, occupy the other. Stettheimer is standing on the side of
folk-influenced american art, as the right-hand column reads,
rather than on that of the more lucrative high-modernist art
in america, on the left. Florine Stettheimer, formerly F$, had
become extraordinarily, surreally American, as only someone who
adopts her nationality as a decorative style can.

1. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph Manheim, New
York, New Directions, 2006, p. 166.
2. Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. Michael Hoffman, New York,
New Directions, 2002, pp. 3, 28, and 13.
3. Rosetta Walter Stettheimer possessed “an inheritance,” according to a wall label at the
current Jewish Museum show, that permitted her to support her five children. In her 1994
dissertation, Florine Stettheimer: Alternative Modernist, Barbara J. Bloemink speculates
that the move to Europe might have allowed Rosetta to escape the censure of her even
wealthier relatives in the US while also living more cheaply.
4. Such works follow in the footsteps of Barbara J. Bloemink’s Friends and Family: Portrai-
ture in the World of Florine Strttheimer, Katonah, N.Y., Katonah Museum of Art, 1993.
5. Stettheimer’s first and only solo show during her lifetime, which opened in October 1916
at M. Knoedler & Co., “Exhibition of Paintings by Miss Florine Stettheimer,” was not a
success, in that no paintings sold. As others have indicated, though Stettheimer never again
consented to a solo exhibition, in spite of pleading invitations from Alfred Stieglitz among
others, she contributed individual works to group shows. Stettheimer asked that her paintings
be destroyed upon her death, and though her wish was not carried out by her survivors, her
legacy was somewhat loosely managed, leading to further obscurity for an artist who had
in fact established herself as a major painter with those who knew her work, including such
critics as Henry McBride and Paul Rosenfeld.
6. The Met curator in question was Henry Geldzahler. After a visit to Warhol’s studio,
during which, as Warhol writes, Geldzahler “scanned all the things I collected—from the
American folk pieces to the Carmen Miranda platform shoe,” the curator extended an
invitation to view Stettheimer’s “Cathedrals” series, then in storage. Andy Warhol and Pat
Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, New York, Harcourt, 1980, p. 16.
7. Roberta Smith, “A Case for the Greatness of Florine Stettheimer,” New York Times,
May 18, 2017, nytimes.com.
8. “Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry” supplies sparse interpretive text regarding Four
Saints in Three Acts. For more analysis, see Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions:
Modernism and the Radiance of Form, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 2009, p. 168.
Brown writes: “The cast members, in all the ontological presence accorded the African
American, appeared in relief against the modern and deeply compelling absence of the
set (and against the disembodied absence of the ‘civilized’ and thus white modern subject
who did not appear at all on the Four Saints stage). The modern script that accepted
the civilized/primitive binary held true, then, even on the avant-garde stage. Modernity,
represented by the manufactured plastic sky, is here aligned with death or stasis, in
contradistinction to the life force of the African American cast on stage.”
9. Georgiana Uhlyarik, “4 St.s Seen by Florine: A Case Study,” in Florine Stettheimer:
Painting Poetry, ed. Stephen Brown and Georgiana Uhlyarik, New York and New
Haven, Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, 2017, p. 56.
10.The roundtable, with Cecily Brown, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Jutta Koether, Ella Krug- The Cathedrals of Art,
lyanskaya, Valentina Liernur, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Katharina Wulff in conversation with 1942, oil on canvas,
Jens Hoffmann, praises Stettheimer’s use of color, her style of figuration, and her feminism, 60¼ by 50¼ inches.
noting the queer and/or “trans” aspects of her work. Painter and installation artist Karen Metropolitan
Kilimnik, one of Stettheimer’s most obvious living artistic heirs, is not included; see Florine Museum of Art.
Stettheimer, pp. 143–159.
11. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten, as Bloemink notes in several publications,
Stettheimer quipped of Washington, “He is the only man I collect.” Her 1939 painting
The Cathedrals of Wall Street contains the dedication, written along two flowing ribbons
securing a red, white, and blue bouquet offered to a massive gilded statue of the first
president, to george washington from florine st 1939.
12. Letters of 1916 and 1917 from Ettie Stettheimer to her friend “Gans.” Beinecke
Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.
13. To clarify: A symbol is combinatory and imprecise, bringing together many mean-
ings and suggesting that they coexist, also in the object’s real instantiation. Allegory, by
contrast, severs the allegorical object from the context in which it occurs, deploying it as
the representative of some hidden or secondary meaning. This is why allegorical depic-
tions are more strongly associated with religious encoding, as well as conspiracy theories
and other forms of paranoid reading.
14. The painting’s point of view is that of an individual aboard a ship approaching Ellis
Island. It would seem to include Stettheimer’s own return to the city along with larger,
distinct events related to WWI. New York/Liberty is thus a history painting imbued with
Proust’s modern, synthetic sense of time.
15. Included in the current Jewish Museum show, this painting also had the interesting
distinction of being the only artwork borrowed from a private collection for the Whit-
ney’s 2015 reopening exhibition, “America Is Hard to See,” which was otherwise drawn
entirely from the museum’s permanent collection.
16. Another reason for not including the Pocahontas ballet maquettes may be their fragility.
17.The “$” created by Stettheimer’s early initialing of her paintings was pointed out by
scholar Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen in a talk at the Jewish Museum on May 11, 2017.
Butterfield-Rosen did not speculate on the meaning of this visual pun; the interpretation
offered here (for better or for worse) is the author’s own.
18. Williams’s poem “The pure products of America / go crazy,” later titled “For Elsie,”
was included in his 1923 collection, Spring and All, reprinted in Imaginations, New York,
New Directions, 1971, p. 131.

FLORINE STETTHEIMER ART IN AMERICA 101

102 SEPTEMBER 2017
THE LIGHTNING
FIELD
Interview with Jessica Morgan
by William S. Smith

SHORTLY AFTER Walter De Maria (1935–2013) completed The Lightning

Field in 1977, he and the Dia Art Foundation, which had commissioned the proj-
ect, enlisted John Cliett to photograph it. Located on a remote stretch of land near
Quemado, New Mexico, The Lighting Field comprises four hundred polished steel
poles implanted in the ground at even intervals over a one-by-one kilometer grid.
The small number of Cliett’s images published in De Maria’s lifetime have become
iconic. Produced using sensors borrowed from a NASA scientist, shots of lightning
bolts connecting with the poles have come to define the public image of the work.
To mark the fortieth anniversary of The Lightning Field, this November Dia is
publishing a book featuring a wider selection of Cliett’s photographs. Shot at different
times of day, these images offer a nuanced depiction of the project and reflect the artist’s
directive that visitors spend twenty-four hours on site, staying in a small cabin, walking the
range, and contemplating the space. I spoke with Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art
Foundation, about De Maria’s monumental work and what these photographs mean now. Walter De Maria:
The Lightning Field,
1977, long-term
installation, western
New Mexico.
WILLIAM S. SMITH Many accounts of The Lightning Field take the form of Photo John Cliett,
first-person narratives, emphasizing personal responses and self-discovery. How do September 1979.
you experience the site in your dual role as visitor and institutional custodian?
All images ©
JESSICA MORGAN The choreography of the visit is carefully produced so that The Estate of
you can focus on the work and experience the landscape and the work together. This Walter De Maria.
Courtesy Dia Art
idea of creating a place of concentration is one of the things that fascinates me about Foundation, New
the project. We have extraordinary documentation in the archives of many, many York.
conversations De Maria had with Dia about the number of visitors to be permitted at
one time, the timing of the visit, the arrival, the meeting place, where visitors eat on
the way, the vehicle that gets them there—every single aspect of the encounter.
People often take issue with the restrictions around the piece—the edict not to
take photographs, the necessity to spend the night, the long journey there. But for me
these are the most remarkable aspects of the work. From an institutional perspective,
it’s important to maintain these elements because they really are part of the piece.
They’re not extraneous. It’s about achieving a high level of concentration, particularly
now, when none of us can easily concentrate on anything. A key concern of
De Maria’s was how to make the work public while retaining that focus.
SMITH Photography played a role in that process of making the work public.
There’s the direct experience of the site, but there’s also a media history of The Lightning
Field, defined by the controlled release of images.

ART IN AMERICA 103

The Lightning Field, 1977,
long-term installation, western
New Mexico. Photo John
Cliett, August 1979.

104 SEPTEMBER 2017 THE LIGHTNING FIELD

 The Lightning Field, 1977,
long-term installation, western
New Mexico. Photo John
Cliett, September 1979.

WALTER DE MARIA ART IN AMERICA 105

 MORGAN There was a big fear that the work would be sensationalized and
treated as a phenomenon, or even as a kind of freak show, rather than an artwork.
There was a series of magazine articles about Land art in the 1960s, but De Maria
did not participate—in part, I assume, because he sensed the failure of photography to
capture the essence of that work. At the heart of this question about the photography
is the fundamental belief that no image of The Lightning Field can convey what it is to
be at The Lightning Field.
When Dia and De Maria commissioned Cliett, they specified that they would
control the photography. De Maria wanted the images to be used in a specific way, and
he thought carefully about this. They weren’t simply to be thrown out for regular press
use. I think the project Artforum published in 1980 reads in that way: the gray pages
at the beginning of the article, the selection of images, the artist’s text—it’s a piece.
De Maria also wanted to do a billboard near Grand Central Terminal with an image
of The Lightning Field. It’s the most magical idea: you’re at this transportation hub, you
see an image of The Lightning Field, and you’re taken out of your humdrum commute.
SMITH The visual language of Cliett’s photographs is quite different from that
of Conceptual photography in the 1960s and ’70s. The shots very clearly reproduce
romantic tropes about the West.
MORGAN The images themselves are not Conceptual art. These photographs
are not part of Ed Ruscha’s or John Baldessari’s turn away from the high photography
tradition. The material on its own resembles standard landscape photography of the
American West.
SMITH What do you consider these images to be now?
The Lightning Field,
1977, long-term
MORGAN I think they are documentation. That’s why I feel justified in releas-
installation, western ing more of them. De Maria is no longer with us to think about ways in which this
New Mexico. material might be used in a personally conceived manner. There was always discus-
Photo John Cliett,
September 1979. sion about creating a book. Many books. The Lightning Field calendars and postcards.
There was talk about photographing every single pole at different times of the day—a
book of portraiture of the four hundred poles. These would have been highly concep-
tualized projects. And the discussion about a potential book continued until the time
of De Maria’s death. These are images he had explicitly approved. We’re not producing
new photography of the field by somebody else, and I don’t think we ever would.
SMITH How do you see the work as having changed over forty years?
MORGAN There’s a huge difference between physical change and interpreta-
tive and contextual change. The meaning of the piece, or one’s encounter with it, is
different now than what it was four decades ago. The idea for The Lightning Field
originated in the 1960s, when a specific sense of impending crisis and of world
historical catastrophe felt real. Ecological factors, the relationship between technology
and the land, the relationship between the urban and the rural—these things have
arguably shifted. The physical work, on the other hand, is very much the same today.
It’s been maintained constantly. Robert Weathers, a Quemado local, built the field
with De Maria, and he’s been there ever since. The Lightning Field was incredibly well
made. De Maria was interested in fabrication and production—surfaces, materials,
process—and his works are extraordinarily durable.
SMITH Do you see other artists taking up the legacy of this work?
MORGAN There are few current artists who would think about making works
like this—epic projects—and I think those who do are often criticized for it. Though
I understand the “critique of the grand narrative,” I also feel slightly disappointed
because it prevents people from trying to work on an ambitious scale—it doesn’t have
to be about physical scale, it can be about scale of thinking.

106 SEPTEMBER 2017 THE LIGHTNING FIELD

WALTER DE MARIA ART IN AMERICA 107
 LESLIE
HEWITT
CURRENTLY
ON VIEW
Work by Leslie
Hewitt in “Woman
with a Camera”
Interview by Julia Wolkoff
at the Museum of
Contemporary Art Portrait by Grant Delin
Chicago, through
Jan. 14, 2018.

IN THE
108
STUDIO
SEPTEMBER 2017
Leslie Hewitt:
Riffs on Real
Time (5 of 10),
2013, traditional
chromogenic print,
30 by 40 inches.
LESLIE HEWITT’S fascination with memories, both
personal and cultural, and the physical things that elicit them,
is articulated in her abstract sculptures, assemblage-based
photographs, and collaborative films. Layering her collection of
worn books, vintage magazines, photographs, and other quotid-
ian materials on wood planks or stacking them before a wall
in her studio, Hewitt often constructs visual puzzles that tease
out the relationships between images and objects, and then,
through the impassive camera lens, examines how we construct
meaning from such mixed components. These precise, minimal
arrangements, with their diverse content, suggest many concur-
rent histories and experiences.
Recalling vanitas paintings, the series “Riffs on Real Time”
(begun 2002) and “Still Life” (2013) feature still-life tableaux
photographed in shallow spaces. Hewitt is committed to a mate-
rial presence. The stringent geometrical alignment of the objects
in these elegantly spare pictures deliberately holds the viewer at
the surface. The photographs are often displayed in maple frames
propped up against gallery walls; the crisp white paint and tactile
woodgrains depicted in the shots mimic the typical white cube
space, calling attention to the ultimate frame of the works—the
commercial gallery or museum.
Hewitt’s carefully selected personal items offer an oblique
commentary on both individual and communal experiences
of race, gender, and class. For example, Frantz Fanon’s 1961
book The Wretched of the Earth sits in the center of the C-print
Topologies (Fanon mildly out of focus), 2017. Beneath its dra-
matic black-and-orange cover, the dog-eared paperback, the
110 SEPTEMBER 2017 IN THE STUDIO
lone object in the photograph, presents a searing psychological
analysis of the effects of colonization.
Hewitt’s hybrid approach to photography and sculpture,
as well as her concern with the thornier aspects of American
experience, was fostered by her graduate work in sculpture at
Yale University and her fellowship in Africana studies and visual
cultural at New York University, where she worked under photog-
raphy historian Deborah Willis.
In 2012, after almost seven years of a nomadic existence par-
ticipating in one residency after another, Hewitt moved her “mobile
studio” into a two-room workspace on West 138th Street in Harlem,
only a few blocks from where her grandfather once worked as a
police captain. Both sets of Hewitt’s grandparents settled in Harlem
in the 1930s during the Great Migration. With an apartment close
by, Queens-born Hewitt has fulfilled a long-held desire: cultural
ancestry and family heritage linger in the present.
I interviewed the artist at her studio on an unusually fine day
last December and again, at a café, on Martin Luther King Jr.
Day. The bright, uncluttered studio space is, like her sparse works,
contemplative and emotionally potent. As a former student of Leslie’s
at Barnard College, I was nervous to encounter my professor in
the real world, but she proved to be as warm and gracious as I
remembered her to be in the classroom.
JULIA WOLKOFF Your projects are formally composed
and edited. I want to get a sense of your working process, a typical
day in the studio.
 LESLIE HEWITT Like many artists, I’m always working
to find and continually refine a form of address, one that will aid
in developing an idea from an immaterial status in my mind to a
material existence as art. The process often starts out incongruent
and irrational, and then goes through stages of logic. This imposed
logic comes from my desire for structures that can help make sense
of the chaotic nature of living, perhaps a kind of chaos theory.
WOLKOFF What are the steps to realize these structures in
your work? Do you have assistants?
HEWITT I do, sometimes. But my studio practice is often
post-studio; I conduct a lot of intensive research and exploration in
archives, which is something I must do as an individual. Depending
on how a project unfolds, I also collaborate with other artists. For big
sculpture projects, I work with John Roche, an amazing sculptor and
painter I studied with as an undergraduate at Cooper Union. He has
a high level of craftsmanship that I admire. I also work with my art-
ist friends like Carlos Sandoval de León—or William Cordova, who
has an interest in geometric principles found throughout the history
of art, particularly in the architectural forms of ancient American,
African, and Asian civilizations. For lens-based work, I partner with
photographer Julie Pochron and cinematographer Bradford Young.
Relationships are a critical component of any art practice, although
they are often overlooked or misrepresented.
WOLKOFF How did these collaborations come about?
HEWITT Isn’t this normal, how artists work? Perhaps I
should state more definitively: this is how I work. To believe that
LESLIE HEWITT
artists rely purely on a solo operation is extremely sad to me; that’s
not the reality, and it is not how artists are taught. At art school,
students work in groups and spend generous amounts of time
speaking about or interacting with the work of their peers. This
is the model that I responded to as a young person, when I saw
it exemplified by my mentors and by other artists that I admired.
I was especially aware of it when I lived in Houston on a Core
Program residency [2005–07]; I saw it in the artists who founded
the social sculpture Project Row Houses.
WOLKOFF Do you remember how you were introduced
to art?
HEWITT I am a native New Yorker, one who grew up in
Queens. I went to the Met on school trips, and my dad really loved
the Museum of Modern Art. My parents were of the Sixties and
really cool. They had many friends who were artists, musicians,
fashion designers, dancers, and photographers. They were curious
people, very attuned to their time politically and socially.
WOLKOFF Your work often incorporates archival books
and family photographs that suggest your upbringing had a
political dimension. Did your parents talk to you about the social
upheavals of that era—the antiwar, Civil Rights, Black Power, and
women’s movements, for instance?
HEWITT This probably sounds strange to say now, but home
was a politicized space. Building a library was important to my par-
ents. They collected books that told the history of African Americans
from Reconstruction forward, books that you didn’t have exposure
Untitled (Blue), from
the series “Still
Life,” 2013, digital
chromogenic print
in custom maple
frame, 52¼ by 62¼
by 6 inches.
ART IN AMERICA 111
 “The technological components of mediation, reproduction,
and distribution complicate corporeal memory in ways that are
extremely fascinating and strange.”
to in school. There were also many math and science books and,
of course, important literary titles, but the social science section
fascinated me the most as a child, perhaps because the narratives
felt so distant and almost unbelievable to my young mind.
My mother attended the March on Washington in 1963.
There was a documentary series about the Civil Rights struggle
televised in the ’80s called “Eyes on the Prize.” My brothers and I
would always watch it and try to find my mother in the crowd.
WOLKOFF Did you ever succeed?
HEWITT No! It’s not possible. But that experience of
scanning the television screen, the ritual of searching for that single
figure, allowed me to pivot away from central characters, icons of
the March like Martin Luther King Jr. I was able to explore the
individual stories that create an invaluable support structure, a
larger context. The March on Washington was organized by
A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, with the full participation
of the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which
Color Study_01, put pressure on the government to pass the long-awaited Civil
2016, digital Rights Act, a major advance in the ongoing struggle for equality in
chromogenic print,
15 inches square.
the United States. There’s so much energy that comes out of that
particular moment in time. The courageousness of it lingers.
112 SEPTEMBER 2017 IN THE STUDIO
Did the movement succeed? I grapple with that question
a great deal, since it’s clear that there are many unanswered
injustices yet to come to account. The fact is that hegemony reas-
serts itself with very little effort and progressive values don’t just
flow freely from one generation to the next. We have to deal with
where we grew up, what school we went to, whom we choose
to love, or the music we consume or make. We have to work to
implement concrete measures to ensure that we live in a truly
cultured and equitable world.
WOLKOFF The interplay between memory and objects
is a major concern in your practice, particularly in relation to
how cultural experiences are conveyed over time. Where did
that interest originate?
HEWITT My maternal grandparents died about a month
apart when I was in the second grade. That made a really strong
impression on me. I remember traveling to their home the day
my grandmother died—she did not answer the door. Once we
were inside, I looked around at everything because I thought that
it would all disappear. At seven, I understood what death meant,
but I also felt that I should record in my mind where everything
was placed and try to memorize every detail, including the time
of day. My fascination with the past definitely began there.
My research with professor Deborah Willis at NYU and
my study of the works of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Allan
Sekula, and Siegfried Kracauer helped me relate that personal
story to the haptic and optical processes that structure our
memories. The technological components of mediation, repro-
duction, and distribution complicate corporeal memory in ways
that are extremely fascinating and strange.
WOLKOFF Your video installation Untitled (Struc-
tures), which you produced with Bradford Young in 2012, was
inspired by Civil Rights–era photographs in the Menil Col-
lection archives in Houston. The piece comprises film footage
you shot on location at historically charged sites in Memphis,
Chicago, and New York. How does film complicate memory
in this situation?
HEWITT I studied film theory at NYU, and I feel that
the language of film criticism is connected to the conversations
playing out formally in my work. Our culture often has amnesia.
The documentary impulse fills a space, like a shorthand.
WOLKOFF People are asking a kind of Civil Rights–era
question since the last presidential election—how does one
prepare to resist a repressive government?
HEWITT This is a sobering time. If there’s a stance that
I could claim—one with a lineage based on survival systems
developed by those who have struggled through the founding
of this nation, the hypocrisy of slavery, the brutality of the
Civil War, the horrors of Jim Crow, the criminal neglect of
the Great Depression, the injustices addressed by the ongoing
human rights struggle—it’s to always be somewhat skeptical,

prepared, and disciplined, and, for one’s sanity, to hold a deep
relationship with creativity and beauty.
I heard a great post-election radio interview with the writer
Ta-Nehisi Coates. A guy called in to ask, “Is there hope? Do you
have any words of wisdom?” and Coates said firmly, “No.” I actu-
ally found that quite liberating; it felt good just to hear someone
say that out loud. It’s going to be a struggle, and that’s not a bad
thing. Coates then added, “That’s what your great-grandparents
did. That’s what your great-great-grandparents did. That’s what
your great-great-great-grandparents did. And if they hadn’t
struggled, you wouldn’t be here.”
WOLKOFF Your longer view of civil rights battles relates
to your practice, which often deals with the fluidity of history
and time. Do you remember how that theme first developed?
HEWITT An early work that I did at Cooper Union, for a
class called “The Body and Memory,” explored the phenomenon
of the found object in the history of art. I found an old Brownie
camera and welded a stand for it out of steel. In place of the film
roll I put in paper tape that I wrote about my week on. It was
like a concrete poem that cascaded out of the camera. Back then
I wasn’t thinking about these things, but now I see the connec-
tion with my current practice, and my interest in the relationship
between text and image, or images as triggers for memory.
WOLKOFF What led you to photography as your primary
medium?
HEWITT I would have to say the immediacy it produces,
and what I like to call the “internal pull” of the photographic
image, or what the photographer Dawoud Bey would call
“subjective opticality.” Photographs can generate the uncanny
sensation of something being familiar yet unfamiliar, and
create simultaneous feelings of horror and awe deep in your
subconscious.
LESLIE HEWITT
View of Leslie
Hewitt and
Bradford Young’s
installation Untitled
(Structures),
2012, 35mm film
transferred to video,
approx. 17-minute
loop; at the Power
Plant, Toronto.
Photo Toni
Haf kenscheid.
I grew up studying the work of famed music photographer
David Ogburn. I explored the work of light sculptors like Roy
DeCarava; the conceptual play in the collages of László Moholy-
Nagy, John Baldessari, and Barbara Kasten, among others; and the
examination of power and narrative in the photographic works of
Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Andy Warhol. And I had the
opportunity to work under Andrea Robbins and Max Becher as
their assistant for a few projects.
WOLKOFF What impression did that experience make
on you?
HEWITT Their works often track colonialism. Pivotally, I
traveled with them to the Dominican Republic to photograph a
community of German Jews and a community of Japanese people
who had migrated there. I also went with them to Spain to work
on their “Spaghetti Western” project, in which they mirrored classic
film shots. In most of their works you think you’re looking at one
thing but then you read the text and it completely shifts your
understanding.
WOLKOFF You continued your sculpture practice while a
student in a cultural studies program at NYU, and described mak-
ing “sculptural acts.” What do you mean by that?
HEWITT I mean “act” as a shorthand for “action.” I didn’t
have a permanent workspace, so I would set up a sculpture that I
wanted to explore and document it for my own records. It started
just as a form of notation. But I gradually began to see something
in the photographs. I became more intrigued with the representa-
tion of the sculpture than with the sculpture as an object. Through
the mediation of the camera I was able to avoid the impulse to
fetishize the sculptures as physical objects; the photographic image
transformed them into something new.
At the same time, I also fell in love with a lot of the Con-
ceptual art of the 1970s. Many of these works you get to see only
ART IN AMERICA 113
View of the through documentation, which inevitably becomes the artwork.
exhibition “Leslie
Hewitt: Collective
For instance, I loved looking at the photographs of Gordon
Stance,” 2016, at Matta-Clark’s works, like the cut pier.
SculptureCenter, WOLKOFF Some of your series, like “Midday” (2009),
New York. Photo
Kyle Knodell. have conflated Harlem, New York, with Haarlem in the Neth-
erlands. I’m struck by your fascination with seventeenth-century
Holland. I find a resonance between your photo-sculptures and
the vanitas paintings from this period, famed for both their real-
istic detail and their symbolism. What drew you to this history?
HEWITT I’m not a painter, so I had to make sense of the
still-life genre in another way. I became interested in optics, surfaces,
and the rendering of light. That’s why those works are so fascinat-
ing, right? Julie Hochstrasser’s scholarship on still-life painting and
international trade really influenced me. I applied for grants to travel
to the Netherlands, where I got to do research at the Rijksmuseum,
even examining Hochstrasser’s notes. I began to reread Dutch
still life through a sociopolitical lens. This artistic form emerged at
the beginning of global capitalism and the intensification of our
relationship to displaced objects, things we don’t make ourselves.
WOLKOFF At the time, those luxury items—the cups,
bowls, vases, and whatever else the Dutch were importing
from all over the world—were so valuable that people would
commission still lifes of the objects so they could further show
off their material wealth.
114 SEPTEMBER 2017 IN THE STUDIO
HEWITT Yes, and their power.
WOLKOFF You engage, however, with the postcolonial.
Your work often concerns the middle-class domestic sphere,
seen through both a personal and a wider sociopolitical lens.
HEWITT I guess artists can’t avoid an autobiographical
tenor, but I try to reject it whenever I can. The snapshots that I
choose to include in my works, for example, don’t always depict
my personal family, but they do show manicured lawns or other
little hints that complicate the conventional notion of the black
experience. This is in part an alternative view of the political
idea that the middle class is shrinking, that there’s a collapse of
equality. I wouldn’t say that my work is about that, but I want
to make a formal connection.
Once I delved into why Dutch still life is such an
important art historical genre, I asked myself, what is my
counterpoint? It turned out to be technological. In recent
years, we’ve been moving from material photographs,
which you can print out and touch, to purely digital or
virtual forms of representation. My counterpoint is that
trend, coupled with what you might call the collapse of the
still-life table. The still lifes I construct aren’t cascades of
abundance like those of the seventeenth century. Instead,
they involve the compression and expansion of space in new
ways evocative of our time.
“The fact is that hegemony reasserts itself with very little effort and
progressive values don’t just flow freely from one generation to the next.”
WOLKOFF Several decades ago your photographs might
not have read as sculptural, but now, as you suggest, the digital
image has such primacy that the printed photograph offers a
special kind of tangibility. Do you also work digitally?
HEWITT I’m not a purist, but I still photograph with film.
I was taught that way, so I feel comfortable with it. I also enjoy
the quality of film.
WOLKOFF But you’re currently working on a Web-based
project with Triple Canopy, right?
HEWITT Yes, it will be a part of their “Vanitas” issue. I’ll
continue my investigation of art and objecthood in the seven-
teenth century and their contemporary parallels. The project
requires research at the Met as well as exploration of program-
ming languages, architectural structures, and spatial maps.
WOLKOFF The Dutch Golden Age saw an increased
emphasis on optical devices like the camera obscura. The artists
of this time downplayed linear perspective in favor of empirical
perspective, which prioritizes close observation and detail.
HEWITT I’m being ahistorical, but it’s hard for me to
view Dutch still lifes without thinking about how much they
connect to photography. I’m interested in the history of tech-
nology. We invent things that shift our ways of seeing. Dutch
paintings really manipulate light, and are arguably lens-based. So
I am definitely drawn to this optical tradition.
But I am not a painter. I really, really stress that. The still-
life tradition speaks to me, as an artist who uses photography,
because of its relationship to memory, the simulacrum, and
duplication. My interest centers on the lexicon, the symbols,
the way in which the images are read. But I’m also very much
fascinated with the brutality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
and Western colonialism, which is not directly pictured but
haunts every single Dutch painting.
WOLKOFF It’s very present in that era’s material cul-
ture. The irony is that Europeans idolized East Asian goods and
imports from other parts of the world, but their awe for these
materials and techniques rarely if ever translated into a respect
for the artisans and their cultures. It’s wild, because these objects
were so valuable.
HEWITT Cherished.
WOLKOFF But the people who made them were con-
sidered inferior. How can that be? It’s difficult to imagine from
today’s perspective.
HEWITT Yes, it is. That contradiction also fascinates me.
I’m hyperaware of it lurking within those paintings.
WOLKOFF Still life as a genre remains popular. I’m
thinking particularly of flat lays on Instagram, which promote
consumerism and material goods. What’s unsaid is that many of
those covetable clothes and objects were made halfway around
the world, in factories with terrible labor conditions.
HEWITT Yes, yes, yes, exactly. I’m not like Mika Rot-
tenberg, explicitly criticizing mass production or capitalism or
LESLIE HEWITT
this type of labor exploitation. But it would be fair to hold me
accountable to the time I live in. I do intentionally use very ubiq-
uitous things, like plywood. Most of our homes and structures
are built with this material, and it is usually the least expensive.
It pretty much structures our world. The other materials I use—
books, photographs, or sometimes digital equipment—have their
own symbolism and harsh realities.
WOLKOFF That goes back to the things that are
left unsaid, that are maybe implied if you know the right history
or context. You use very minimalist language in your work.
HEWITT Inference is essential. I select objects and
arrange them to suggest different meanings without a directive or
a didactic mode of address.
WOLKOFF You’ve mentioned the influence of female
Minimalists and Post-Minimalists on your practice. Agnes
Martin and Eva Hesse are having big institutional moments. The
Guggenheim recently held a Martin retrospective, and Hesse’s
diaries were published last spring.
HEWITT Yes, I love that book. I’m not from an artist
family. My mother studied math and my dad was a computer
programmer. I was horrible in math. Or at least I thought I was,
even though my mother to this day will tell me that I’m very
good at it. She’s supposed to say that. But I do gravitate toward
systems and patterns. I find something strong, beautiful, and
elegant—something delicate but at the same time resonant—
about Agnes Martin’s work. From my first encounter with her
graph drawings, I found them really amazing; they’re so technical
but still have the human touch. They’re warm, even though with
less nuanced observation they could be seen as clinical or cool.
I also think about that in relation to Adrian Piper’s
work. Piper chooses a very cool and bureaucratic language
for topics, such as oppression and dehumanization (i.e.,
racism), that are fraught with psychic pain. I love that con-
tradiction. I learned from her practice how to treat certain
subjects with emotional distance.
WOLKOFF Do you find that distance necessary to over-
come gender stereotypes? Is it a protective impulse?
HEWITT I do maintain a strategic distance between my
corporeal body and my work. We project certain concerns or
feelings onto the body very easily.
WOLKOFF You may not be directly present in your
photo-sculptures but your choice of objects and their placement
is crucial.
HEWITT If there is anything in my work that does lend
itself to the feminine, meaning my own body, it’s my specific use
of interiors. Though geometric and angular, they are womblike.
And wombs, though in one sense so feminine, can also be shared
spaces, which aren’t gender specific. Almost all living entities have
this important incubation period. The evidence of my presence is
in the metadata: the selection, placement, and moment in which
the event is captured and time-coded.
ART IN AMERICA 115
Exhibition
Reviews
FEATURED REVIEWS 121 MIRA DANCY SAN FRANCISCO
at Chapter NY 127 CANDY JERNIGAN
NEW YORK at the CCA Wattis Institute for
117 “UGO RONDINONE: 122 ROBERT LONGO Contemporary Arts
I Ɔ JOHN GIORNO” at Metro Pictures
at various venues TORONTO
123 BRIAN BELOTT 128 YDESSA HENDELES
LONDON at Gavin Brown’s enterprise at the Power Plant
129 “SOUL OF A NATION: ART
IN THE AGE OF BLACK 123 “WITH THE EYES OF LONDON
POWER” OTHERS: HUNGARIAN 131 LUKE WILLIS THOMPSON
at Tate Modern ARTISTS OF THE SIXTIES at Chisenhale
AND SEVENTIES”
at Elizabeth Dee ZURICH
NEW YORK 132 HERNAN BAS
119 BECKY SUSS 124 JULIANA HUXTABLE at Peter Kilchmann
at Jack Shainman at Reena Spaulings
DUBAI
119 POOH KAYE CHICAGO 132 HERA BÜYÜKTAÇÇIYAN S
at Shoot the Lobster 125 ZHANG PEILI at Green Art Gallery
at the Art Institute of Chicago
120 LAURA COTTINGHAM
at Artists Space LOS ANGELES
126 RAPHAEL MONTAÑEZ
ORTIZ
at LAXART

116 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS


“UGO RONDINONE:
I Ɔ JOHN GIORNO”
NEW YORK—various venues
“Ugo Rondinone: I Ɔ John Giorno” was both a valentine
from a sweetheart and an open invitation to explore the
legacy of an iconic New York poet. In celebration of John
Giorno’s eightieth birthday, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone,
who is his husband and occasional collaborator, restaged
and substantially expanded an elaborate exhibition of the
same name that was held at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris
in 2015–16. While the Paris version had eight “chapters,”
this one had a whopping eighteen, spread across thirteen
locations in Manhattan and featuring over twenty artists,
Rondinone and Giorno among them.
Giorno was simultaneously muse and star of the exhibition,
the mood and geography of which were as expansive as his own
career. The many roles he has assumed over the past several
decades—poet, performer, model, visual artist, record producer,
activist, Tibetan Buddhist—were all represented somewhere in
Rondinone’s loving survey. Though each space offered a distinct
view of Giorno as a cultural figure and maintained its own
personality, the exhibition was united by Giorno’s unrelenting
spirit: sex-positive, playful, generous, and always sincere.
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
View of Ugo
Rondinone’s
installation the
archive of john giorno
(1936–ongoing),
2017, in “Ugo
Rondinone: I Ɔ
John Giorno” at
Sky Art.
For those unfamiliar with Giorno’s poetry, Rondinone’s
immersive video installation THANX 4 NOTHING (2015) made
for a good introduction. Shown at Sky Art, a temporary gallery
in the lobby of a seventy-one-story luxury apartment complex in
Hell’s Kitchen, a venue that felt somewhat at odds with Giorno’s
underground milieu, THANX 4 NOTHING brings together forty-
eight black-and-white recordings of Giorno reciting his poem of
the same name. From these, Rondinone created a perfectly syn-
chronized viewing experience across four large screens and sixteen
monitors arranged in a circle so that viewers can watch Giorno
from virtually every angle. Barefoot on a spare Paris stage, some-
times in a black tuxedo and sometimes a white one, Giorno
looks like a vaudevillian prophet, the white of his hair almost
preternaturally bright. His poem, a list of appreciations he
wrote for the occasion of his seventieth birthday, offers a slant
autobiography—not just a recollection of his life, but an invocation
of the past made vivid in the present. Of his lovers (“beauti-
ful brilliant men with brilliant minds, great artists”), Giorno
says, “May they all come here now and make love to you, if
you want”; of his late friends (“Allen, Brion, Cookie, Jack”),
ART IN AMERICA 117
 “May they come back from the dead and do whatever is your
pleasure”; of Warhol, “May Andy come here, fall in love with
you and make each of you a superstar.” Eventually bringing us
all the way back to the “primordial wisdom soup” from which
we came, Giorno speaks with the authority of someone who
has lived long and with intention. At the film’s finish, when he
bows, lights a joint, and takes a single satisfied drag, it’s impos-
sible not to feel grateful to have stepped inside his poem.
Outside the installation, brightly colored facsimiles of
pages from Giorno’s personal archive papered the walls from
the floor to the thirty-foot ceiling. The full collection—over
fifteen thousand documents dating from 1936 to 2016—was
organized into eighty tomelike albums, one for each year, dis-
tributed on tables in the lobby. It might have taken months to
flip through all the binders—Giorno is a meticulous collector,
particularly of his own publications and press—but fans of the
downtown poetry scene were likely tempted to try.
Further south from Sky Art, at the Swiss Institute in
Tribeca, “Sleep and Other Works” spun an origin story
of Giorno as artist’s muse and subject. Warhol befriended
Giorno and made him the star of Sleep (1963), his first long
film. (Humorously, a whole section of Giorno’s archive is
dedicated to its mostly unfavorable reviews.) Though Sleep
got top billing at the Swiss Institute, where it was promi-
nently projected on the back wall, it was far less revealing
than the shorter films on view. Warhol, fearing Sleep would
be read as gay, sublimated his desire into the extreme
contrast of the cinematography and the sheer length of the
film, but he made no such efforts to obscure his affection
View of various
John Giorno for Giorno in screen tests and brief home movies. Whether
artworks, 1968–95, Giorno is shown washing dishes naked, wrestling with a
in “Ugo Rondinone:
I Ɔ John Giorno” at
female friend, or reclining in a hammock, the camera lingers
Red Bull Arts. on his svelte body with a lover’s unshakeable focus.
118 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
“I Ɔ John Giorno” was full of reverberations. At Howl
Happening, Pierre Huyghe’s 1998 film Sleeptalking offered
the backstory to and a reprise of Warhol’s Sleep, as well as a
moving commentary on age and the passage of time. Inside
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s plywood pavilion at The Kitchen, among
the ten hours of footage in his untitled 2008 (john giorno
reads), you could watch Giorno read the title poem from the
1978 book he made in collaboration with painter Richard
Bosman, Grasping at Emptiness, while at Hunter College’s
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery you could see the
manuscript of paired poems and images. At Red Bull Arts
New York, along with animated versions of Giorno’s sound
poems and rotary phones that play recordings of his cel-
ebrated Dial-A-Poem project (now active again at 641-793-
8122), there was a looped single-channel version of Rondi-
none’s THANX 4 NOTHING.
If this sounds overwhelming, well, it sometimes was, but
repetition and excess have always been central to Giorno’s work.
The exhibition was much greater than the sum of its parts, pre-
cisely because of how those parts reflected and illuminated one
another. The ostensible outlier show, “John Giorno and Tibetan
Buddhism,” featuring Giorno’s home shrine and works from
the Rubin Museum of Art collection, was intelligently housed
at 205 Hudson Gallery, alongside material related to the AIDS
Treatment Project, the direct-action program Giorno founded
in 1984 to provide financial support to people living with
AIDS. Peter Ungerleider’s short documentary Loving Kindness
(1995) showed how Giorno’s Tibetan Buddhist practice has
not only fueled his activism but also informed the rest of his
oeuvre. “My intention is to treat a complete stranger as a lover
or close friend,” he writes of the Treatment Project’s mission
in one of the reproduced documents on view. “In the golden
age of promiscuity, we celebrated life with glorious substances,
and made fabulous love with beautiful strangers. Now that life
is ravaged with AIDS, we offer love from the same root, in the
form of boundless compassion.”
You felt that sense of compassion everywhere in “I Ɔ John
Giorno,” not just from Giorno himself but also from the various
artists who have painted, photographed, filmed, and, in many
cases, loved him. The possibility that any relationship can be a
loving one—indeed, that they all might be—suffused the exhibi-
tion, and it was a comforting premise whether or not you were
convinced. For a lifelong depressive who has, as he confesses in
the “THANX 4 NOTHING” poem, felt “like suicide every day
of [his] life,” Giorno possesses a stunning optimism.
Reality, of course, doesn’t always cooperate. Trekking
around Manhattan to see the exhibition’s various components,
I was struck by how little they resembled the city conjured in
the work of Giorno and his contemporaries, especially in the
slick new venues like Sky Art and Red Bull Arts New York.
If there was something anachronistic about the version of
New York that “I Ɔ John Giorno” asked us to visit, it was both
a testament to Giorno’s enduring appeal and a bittersweet
reminder of a bygone era when the borough the exhibition
stretched across was still a place for artists.
—Jameson Fitzpatrick

NEW YORK
BECKY SUSS
Jack Shainman
Becky Suss’s exhibition, titled “Homemaker,” was a visually
striking presentation of seventeen recent paintings. Most of the
compositions portray domestic interiors with crisp lines and
flat, unmodulated expanses of bright color. Absent of figures,
the images nevertheless imply a human presence in rooms
adorned with bric-a-brac, such as needlepoint wall hangings
and Fiestaware. Suss convincingly articulates intimate details of
clothing and decor, yet a sense of artifice prevails in the works,
primarily because she eschews illusionism in favor of schematic
forms and a rather abstract, shallow space. The images evoke the
austerity of Minimalism, the geometric patterning of Islamic
art, and the distorted perspectives often found in works by
outsider or self-taught artists.
In Hallway (2017), an imposing painting some eight feet
high and fifteen across, Suss offers a panorama of an interior
space that resembles a stage set. The wooden balustrade on the
left, set against a vibrant turquoise-blue wall, provides a rhyth-
mic motif that leads the eye down the staircase and through
the hallway on the right. Here, the sequence of depicted details,
including a colonial-style cabinet and a partially open closet
with clothes on hangers, a cap on a shelf, and boots on the floor,
suggests a personal, psychological narrative, perhaps an allusion
to a childhood memory.
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
In most of the paintings, Suss—who was born in 1980
in Philadelphia, where she currently lives—combines details
from the homes of friends and family, especially those of her
grandparents, reflecting a mix of Russian-Jewish and Irish
heritage. Sometimes she bases the images on her memories of
such spaces and sometimes reconstructs them with the help of
photographs and objects she has gathered over the years.
One of the show’s most arresting works, Red Apartment
(2016), portrays a kitchen with a searing red wall, an obvious
nod to Matisse’s Red Studio (1911). Toward the right, the shelves
of a tall blue hutch hold what appear to be antique leaf plates, a
Becky Suss: Red
ceramic object depicting a pair of white birds, and a moka pot. Apartment, 2016,
The intricate, mesmerizing patterning of the tiled floor, in its oil on canvas, 84 by
intensity and rigor, recalls early grid paintings by Agnes Martin 60 inches; at Jack
Shainman.
(whom Suss cited as a major influence in an interview published
in the catalogue for her 2015 exhibition at the Institute of Con-
temporary Art in Philadelphia), as well as Moorish tile work.
In smaller paintings, such as Stars and Stripes Forever
(2016), which mimics a needlepoint image of an American flag,
and Victory Cookbook (2017), which depicts a vintage cookbook
cover, Suss toys rather ineffectively with centralized images and
Pop-style irony. The strength of her work lies in her ability to
give psychological dimension and theatrical panache to more
complex scenes dealing with themes of home and family.
—David Ebony
POOH KAYE
Shoot the Lobster
In her brief film Going Outside (1980), Pooh Kaye barely
makes it outside at all. The work takes place almost entirely
inside a bedroom of her downtown loft. Kaye, in a T-shirt
and pants, raises and lowers a window shade, climbing onto
the windowsill to do so; she slithers through the window,
lying on her back on the fire escape with her legs in the air;
she maneuvers across the sill, the floor, a chair, and a bed;
she wriggles beneath the fitted sheet of the bed and bends
and jumps atop the mattress. Throughout, her movements
are twitchy, due to their having been shot on Super 8 using
a method Kaye accidentally discovered when she set the
camera speed incorrectly, allowing her to condense longer
performances into a minute or two of film. In this private
performance transformed into filmic experiment, Kaye
assesses the contours and functions of the room by confront-
ing them with those of her own body.
Going Outside was one of the five performance-films by
Kaye—and, at two and a half minutes, one of the longest—on
view at Shoot the Lobster in “Pooh Kaye: Object Actions
1975–1980,” which was organized by writer and curator Jose-
phine Graf. Kaye was a graduate of Cooper Union and active in
New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s, and the show made
a strong case for the relevance of her early work to histories
of interdisciplinary art practice. The five films, with their
explorations of the body in motion and in space, attest to the
convergence of experimental dance and cinema in New York at
ART IN AMERICA 119
 the time, and offer an intimate record of a moment whose art
historical import is still being unpacked.
Still from Laura The films Swim (1977) and Table-Walk (1976) focus most
Cottingham and explicitly on the moving body, with simple, prosaic actions that
Leslie Singer's video
The Anita Pallenberg
evince the influence of minimalist choreographer Simone Forti,
Story, 1999–2000, for whom Kaye worked in the mid-’70s. Both feature a nude
76 minutes, showing Kaye interacting in unconventional ways with pieces of furni-
Nicole Eisenman
as Keith Richards. ture in the loft. In Swim, she balances her body on the armrests
Courtesy Artists of a metal chair that is itself balanced on a table, paddling her
Space.
arms and legs as though moving rapidly through water. Table-
Walk centers on the table, which the artist climbs on top of,
around, and underneath. Throughout the works on view, Kaye’s
manipulation of the film gives her actions a frenetic energy and
renders the images grainy and pixelated. Specific movements—
back, forth, up, down—shift an object or Kaye’s body an inch or
two at most; these tiny shifts eventually coalesce into the simple
actions illustrated by the films’ titles.
Despite the rigorous focus on the basics of movement,
Kaye’s works feature moments of humor that undercut the
potential for self-seriousness in the main contexts in which
her practice can be situated, minimalist dance and structural
film. In the playful Climb (1976), Kaye shimmies up and down
a column in the loft while wearing a grass skirt; at one point,
she’s interrupted by a curious dog. And Going Outside features
audio of Kaye’s voice sped up along with the image to create a
comically squeaky, unintelligible soundtrack. That film in par-
ticular draws out the absurdity of the body-object interactions
Kaye sets up, and of the ways in which environments structure
human movement more broadly. While Kaye disavows the
influence of feminism on her work at the time—“We’d already
been liberated . . . we were freed women,” she claims in a new
Pooh Kaye: Swim, interview published in the accompanying publication—her
1977, digital transfer corporeal-cinematic experiments defamiliarize her usual sur-
from Super 8,
2 minutes, 34 roundings, and in doing so suggest, if very subtly, the limita-
seconds; at Shoot tions domestic space imposes on the gendered body.
the Lobster.
—Dana Kopel
LAURA COTTINGHAM
Artists Space
“Loads of people are scared of me. I guess it’s all the savoir
vivre I have,” drones Anita Pallenberg, played by the German
artist Cosima von Bonin. It’s one of a handful of lines spoken
by this title character of The Anita Pallenberg Story, a seventy-
six-minute video made between 1999 and 2000 by cultural
critic Laura Cottingham and filmmaker Leslie Singer. Cot-
tingham’s recent Artists Space exhibition featured the film,
framed production stills, and an essay, titled “Love, Sex, Fame
and the Life of the Image,” that she wrote about the project at
the time. Inspired by the directorial methods of Andy Warhol
and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who cultivated a family
atmosphere among their nonprofessional actor-muses, Cot-
tingham writes that the video was “‘curated’ more than cast.”
In the work, she does not attempt an exhaustive biography
of Pallenberg—the model and actress who became famous as
the lover of Rolling Stones members Brian Jones and Keith
Richards (for whom she left Jones). Rather, with her cast of
hip New York artists, dealers, and critics, she aims to draw a
parallel between the Stones’ decadent rock-and-roll lifestyle
circa 1968 and a late-’90s art world newly flush with money.
Investigating the Stones’ place in the cultural imagination,
Cottingham splices clips of other films between scenes she and
Singer filmed. These bootlegged clips include footage from Jean-
Luc Godard’s One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil), 1970, and
Robert Frank’s controversial Cocksucker Blues (1972). Fresh off the
release of her important video essay Not for Sale: Feminism and
Art in the USA in the 1970s (1998), Cottingham undermines the
Stones’ “dick rock” image with queer feminist politics. She recasts
the band as lesbians, playing Jones and Mick Jagger herself, with
painter Nicole Eisenman as Richards. Exaggerating the Stones’
androgynous glam look, Cottingham’s Jagger is in full drag, with
glittery blue eye makeup and a cherry red lip.
In most of Pallenberg’s scenes, the model-muse pleads with
the Stones to take her to meet Andy Warhol. In a hotel room,
Jagger and David Bowie (Art Club 2000 member Patterson Beck-
with) compare the commercial prospects of rock music with those

120 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

of the art world, while art collector Peter Norton makes a cameo as
a pizza delivery guy. But the headiest scene departs from the loose
narrative about the relationship between the Stones and con-
temporary art. Here, two journalists (one played by artist Ghada
Amer) interrogate the Stones about cultural appropriation. When
asked whether they would give money to the African American
communities whose culture they have borrowed and capitalized
on, Richards scoffs, “Not even Elvis does that.” Pallenberg remains
silent when the journalists ask her about her experiences with the
band. “To live with a rock star, a woman must find her ways of
independence,” she says in the next scene, alone.
Like Warhol’s films, The Anita Pallenberg Story serves to
document a social scene as much as to tell a cinematic story.
We see future art stars: Eisenman, von Bonin, and dealer
Gavin Brown (who appears as Stones manager Andrew Loog
Oldham). We see legends who would die premature deaths:
artist Steven Parrino (as a Hell’s Angel) and art dealer Colin
de Land (as SoHo dealer Robert Fraser). Most important,
through Cottingham’s glancing depiction of Pallenberg, we
see the impossibility of reenacting a woman’s story that has
been dominated by male relationships and sexist perspectives.
Cottingham’s accompanying essay fleshes out her meth-
odology behind the film. She muses on the power relations
between rock stars and groupies, the lesbian-feminist prec-
edents to her film, the anti-violent cinematic choices she
makes, and how even the leftist art circuit replicates exploitative
dynamics of past cultural eras. Over the nearly two decades
since Cottingham made The Anita Pallenberg Story, those
dynamics have continued while her own name has grown rela-
tively obscure. Looking back, the film seems almost prophetic.
—Wendy Vogel
MIRA DANCY
Chapter NY
Countless styles of nasty woman T-shirts, a Secret deodorant
campaign focusing on women’s work-related stress, over four thou-
sand results when you search for “feminist buttons” on Etsy—the
evidence abounds that consumerism and feminism are more deeply
entwined than ever. Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dancy’s recent
exhibition of paintings, neon signs, and works on paper—which
spanned Chapter NY’s two Lower East Side spaces—fit squarely
into this entanglement. In the show, whose title, “Call NOW,”
evoked the urgency with which we’re advised both to respond to
infomercials and to telephone our senators, Dancy offered images
of female empowerment alongside text components that highlight
echoes between advertising and protest language.
The large-scale painting Her Sex // Her Say (2017) reads
as a billboard advocating sexual autonomy. Three women are
shown reclining, each resting on an elbow. In different shades, on
different planes, they inhabit their own worlds. The top woman,
the largest, is nude. Beyond her, horizontal lines and planes
convey land and sky, while vertical lines suggest trees and other
flora—she’s a natural woman in a natural setting. A white shape
that demarcates her forehead and nose resembles a lightning bolt.
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
Indeed, power and energy seem to course through her wavy hair
and radiate from her long, curving fingers. With her soft stare
and closed mouth, she confronts us with a contented, assertive
expression, as if to say she doesn’t really care what we think of
her. The women below her are clothed; both wear dresses and
one, with her leg bent and foot in front of her, displays a high
heel. In block letters, the phrase her sex sprawls down the left
side of the image and her say across the bottom right.
Dancy has stated that she’s interested in the advertising
culture that markets products to make women feel more feminine.
Her images call on viewers to reexamine ideas about femininity,
power, and strength, particularly as language conflating activism
and consumerism guides women toward becoming a single, unified
group of purchasers. But while a certain digestibility might very
much be the point at hand, Dancy’s text components can nonethe-
less seem a little obvious or silly. In front of Her Sex // Her Say—
unnecessarily driving the point further home—hung a purple
triangular neon work reading, ask me. In the bottom right corner
of Herfume // Her Truth (2017), Dancy has scrawled herfume. Mira Dancy: Hollow
Body, 2017, acrylic
If this phrase is meant to inject some humor, it also cheapens the on canvas, 76 by 96
powerful image, which shows a nude woman raising her right hand inches; at Chapter
NY.
in the air and holding what looks like discarded shackles in her left,
as multicolored flamelike shapes rise within and around her.
Two particularly compelling works were the text-less
paintings Hollow Body (2017) and Blue Mirror (2017). In both,
the landscapes and the women’s bodies are rendered in a shared
palette (intense reds, pinks, purples, and blues) that evidences a
strong Fauvist leaning and seems to assert a connection between
women and the natural world. In the former work, three women
gaze upon a crouching fourth, who looks to be mid-fall. Despite
the women’s divergent expressions and gestures—one appears
ART IN AMERICA 121
 aloof, one tilts her head, one covers her mouth with her hand—
they’re all poised to watch the woman go down, on her own. In
Blue Mirror, a woman reaches toward a mirror that seems out of
place in the otherwise natural setting. Both paintings ask us to
consider how women view themselves and their peers, offering
not advice or condemnation but open-ended questions of a sort
that stands in contrast to the simplistic messages often found in
ad campaigns or on protest signage.
—Alina Cohen
ROBERT LONGO
Metro Pictures
In this arresting and contemplative show, titled “The Destroyer
Cycle,” Robert Longo highlighted the epic quality of con-
temporary events. The thirteen recent monumentally scaled
charcoal drawings on view were based on still shots culled from
the daily flow of images across our screens and newspapers.
Pictures of refugees, riot cops, and prisoners, all rendered with a
heightened realism in velvety gray scale pushed to extremes of
light and dark, offered a crepuscular vision of the world at this
turbulent political and social moment.
The first gallery presented a beautiful choreography
between four works that each portray a lineup of figures.
Untitled (St. Louis Rams, Hands Up), 2016, sourced from a
photograph taken shortly after the fatal shooting of Michael
Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, depicts five
African American members of the Saint Louis Rams enter-
ing the stadium side by side with their hands up in the “don’t
shoot” pose. Adept at creating epochal images since beginning
his iconic “Men in the Cities” series in 1979, Longo here casts
the football players in vivid relief against a murky backdrop
Robert Longo:
Untitled (Raft at
Sea), 2016–17,
charcoal on paper
mounted on dibond,
three panels, 140 by
281 inches overall;
at Metro Pictures.
122 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
of spectators and captures the racial divisions embroiling the
nation. Displayed nearby, Untitled (Riot Cops), 2016, shows
a wall of policemen whose faces are obscured by helmets
and shields and the charcoal’s nocturnal atmospherics, and
Untitled (Prisoners, Kandahar Airport), 2016, based on an
infrared telephoto image, depicts suspects being transported
to a CIA black site. In the grainy haze of the latter work, only
the body language in the line of figures—slumped shoulders,
hands behind backs—is clearly legible, the image conveying a
timeless sense of people in transit, displaced, abject. The last,
and perhaps strangest, of the works showing figural lineups
was Untitled (Teletubbies), 2016, with the four Technicolor
characters from the British preschool children’s television
series rendered disconcerting at large scale in black-and-
white, their alien faces pressed to the foreground in what
seems a futile attempt at communication.
Creating a breathtaking sense of drama in the back gallery,
the triptych Untitled (Raft at Sea), 2016–17, is a composite
image based in part on a photograph of refugees on an inflat-
able raft in the Mediterranean. (That Longo stitched together
multiple source photographs to create this image attests to
the inadequacy of the term “Photorealist,” which has been
applied to him over the years.) The vast sea consumes the lower
two thirds of the triptych—which measures around twelve
by twenty-three feet overall—with the charcoal medium well
suited to depicting the dark, glinting waves. The vantage point
is low in the water, so the viewer looks up to the migrants
riding high on the swell of a wave in the center panel. Offering
a tonal contrast to this triptych, Untitled ( Justine) and Untitled
( Juliette), both 2017, each use the palest values of gray to white
to represent the faceted side of an iceberg that, at once impos-
ing and delicate, fills the entire picture plane apart from a thin
strip of water along the bottom edge.
 In the upstairs gallery hung Study of Lights Out (2017),
which portrays the Statue of Liberty in silhouette against a
smoky white haze encroached by darkness. A little on the nose,
it borders on bathos. Longo didn’t need such an overt symbol
to create an astute and visceral portrait of our times, as he had
achieved that with the rest of the show.
—Hilarie M. Sheets
BRIAN BELOTT
Gavin Brown’s enterprise
Brian Belott created a secular church to children’s art for his show
at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Harlem. He selected three hun-
dred pieces from the over one million housed in the Connecticut
storage unit belonging to the estate of educator and psychologist
Rhoda Kellogg (1898–1987), and installed them salon-style on
walls covered with custom wallpaper whose design he based on
Kellogg’s tracings of children’s drawings. The figures the children
had drawn, blown up to large scale on the wallpaper, towered
like patron saints over the individual artworks. One wall featured
dozens of Belott’s “forgeries” (as he calls them) of works found
in Kellogg’s collection or in his own vast collection of books on
children’s art, the images reading as homages by an adult longing
to reconnect with the unfiltered energy of childhood.
Are his re-creations compelling paintings? Sure. The elevation
of bobbleheaded, wonky-bodied figures from scribbles on cheap
paper to paintings on canvas does make for enjoyable viewing, even
if, as Belott himself would readily admit, they don’t hold a candle to
the originals. While it’s easy to dismiss contemporary artists who
borrow from outsider or Art Brut vocabularies as aesthetic tourists
appropriating the earnest expressions of those unencumbered by the
market or the academy, Belott’s admiration for children’s art and for
Kellogg’s tireless effort to catalogue and celebrate it as a universal
proto-language comes across as sincere.
Serving as a soundtrack to the show was a two-hour col-
lage of found sounds (some from “The Audio Kitchen,” an old
WFMU radio program devoted to such recordings), including
clips of children screaming, making up songs, and playing. It was
an appropriately rambunctious audio accompaniment. High on
one wall hung a light-box piece mimicking a rose window, with
forms, rendered in theater gels, based on Kellogg’s taxonomy of
imagery children make as they proceed through stages of devel-
opment. Belott also unearthed some never-before-seen gems
by Kellogg: a 16mm film (Early Expressionists, 1965) and an
unpublished book (How One Three-Year-Old Girl Taught Herself to
Draw, 1959) that was distributed here as a takeaway zine.
The most irresistible aspect of the exhibition was the on-
site classroom: an area at the center of the gallery demarcated
by three freestanding walls that regularly hosted children from
New York public schools without arts programs. In keep-
ing with Kellogg’s pedagogical method, the kids were given
supplies and encouraged to go wild, with minimal guidance
from Belott and a handful of his artist pals. The resulting works
became part of the show, filling the classroom’s walls. At the
exhibition’s close, the students and their families and friends
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
View of Brian
were invited to a special event celebrating the works they had Belott’s exhibition
created. During additional public hours held on the weekends “Dr. Kid President
throughout the show’s run, the gallery welcomed anyone in the Jr.,” 2017, at Gavin
Brown’s enterprise.
neighborhood to come and make work. As I spoke to the gal-
lery’s outreach director, Marquita Flowers, during my visit, sev-
eral passersby entered through the invitingly open garage door,
marveled at the installation, and asked, “What is this?” When
Flowers said they could come back with children and use the
art supplies, they were surprised but enthusiastic. “Seriously?”
asked one woman. Yes, seriously.
—Sean J. Patrick Carney
“WITH THE EYES OF OTHERS:
HUNGARIAN ARTISTS OF
THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES”
Elizabeth Dee
“With the Eyes of Others,” an ambitious survey of the Hun-
garian neo-avant-garde of the late ’60s and ’70s guest-curated
by writer and researcher András Szántó, took its title from a
1973 work by Károly Kismányoky, a grid of four black-and-
white photographs of the artist with cutout renderings of eyes
covering his own. Kismányoky’s absurdist gesture articulates the
plight of artists who worked under Hungarian state socialism
and were confronted with pervasive surveillance, censorship,
and constantly shifting boundaries of the permissible.
The “eyes of others” preoccupied the artist and his peers in
more ways than one. The watchful eyes of the authorities were a
constant source of anxiety for them, and their works were condi-
tioned by the double bind of what the Hungarian dissident writer
Miklós Haraszti called the “velvet prison,” in which artists and
writers effectively self-censored in exchange for relative creative
freedom. At the same time, given the lack of exhibition opportuni-
ties, the eyes of others—particularly those of the international art
world—were also objects of desire.
ART IN AMERICA 123
 Few of the artists in the exhibition have received sig-
nificant international attention, and it’s admirable that the
gallery took on the daunting task of introducing them to an
unfamiliar public. But the show often fell short in its attempts
to situate them historically and contextually. While the gallery
published a well-illustrated catalogue with informative essays
and artist interviews, the only information provided in the
exhibition itself about the works on display came by way of
brief, superficial captions on an accompanying checklist. The
caption for Tamás Szentjóby’s Sit Out/Be Forbidden (1972)—a
one-man sit-in protest the artist staged outside an interna-
tional hotel in Budapest—neglects to mention that the action
was an homage to the imprisoned Black Panther Bobby Seale,
or that the “forbidden” of his title alludes to Hungary’s “Three
Ts” cultural policy, which required artworks to be divided into
the categories of supported (támogatás), tolerated (tűrés), and
forbidden (tiltás). Likewise, the show’s thematic organization
often obscured more than it revealed: informal gatherings and
Imre Bak: SUN- The first floor of the show was primarily given over to interpersonal ties (as the catalogue rightly emphasizes) were
OX-FACE, 1976,
acrylic on canvas, geometric abstraction, with artists synthesizing the influ- crucial to these artists in the absence of mainstream art-world
two panels, 86⅝ by ences of Hard Edge painting and Pop they encountered infrastructure, but this wasn’t reflected in the installation,
118⅛ inches overall;
in “With the Eyes
on rare trips to Western Europe with local references—to which often separated artists who worked closely together
of Others.” prewar Hungarian Constructivism, as well as to folk tradi- and did little to illuminate the country’s distinct local scenes.
tions. Dominating one wall at the show’s entrance, Imre Ultimately, recovering historically neglected artists isn’t just
Bak’s two-panel painting SUN-OX-FACE (1976) features a matter of making their work visible; it also comes with a
flat graphic shapes rendered in blinding shades of purple, responsibility to make it legible.
orange, and green. Nearby hung Ilona Keserü Ilona’s textile —Rachel Wetzler
work Wall-Hanging with Tombstone Forms (Tapestry), 1969,
whose playful wavy pattern was derived from the forms of
tombstones in rural Hungarian cemeteries.
Upstairs, the exhibition turned to the range of con-
JULIANA HUXTABLE
ceptual and performance-based practices that emerged in Reena Spaulings
Hungary at the end of the 1960s. This gallery was packed Juliana Huxtable’s first solo exhibition opened shortly after the
with photographs, video monitors, and vitrines of mail art release of her first book of poetry, as if to suggest that they are
and other Fluxus-tinged ephemera arranged in thematic two halves of a diptych. The book, titled Mucus in My Pineal
groupings: for instance, “Unpickable Locks,” featuring works
containing coded messages decipherable only by the artists’
close circles, such as the inscrutable pseudo-scientific proj-
ects of Miklós Erdély; and the unfortunately titled “Snap-
chat 1970,” devoted to ephemeral actions and performances,
including the masochistic scenarios that Tibor Hajas carried
out for the camera.
While the formal strategies the artists employed recall
Juliana Huxtable: contemporaneous developments in the West, the works’
A Split during themes were specific to the region, with many artists
Laughter at the
Rally, 2017, video,
ironically taking up the state’s own rhetoric and forms to
21 minutes, 41 emphasize the gulf separating socialism’s promised utopia
seconds; at Reena from its reality. Endre Tót’s series “Zeroes” and “Gladnesses,”
Spaulings.
which he began in the early ’70s, parody the emptiness of the
socialist state’s affirmative proclamations, applying them to
the most banal actions—as in I am glad if I can stand next to
you (1971–76), a photograph from the latter series that shows
the artist beside a statue of Lenin. Sándor Pinczehelyi’s Sickle
and Hammer (1973), a red silkscreen print depicting the art-
ist holding the party’s emblems, brings the logic of Pop art
to bear on Communist iconography.

124 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

Gland, contains poems from the last five years, some of which as the Joker’s. The mouth is an organ of pleasure and a vulner-
first appeared on Huxtable’s Tumblr. Several of these poems are able way into the body. But teeth form a gate that can block
set in New York circa 2010, a world of smelly sidewalks and entry, and they’re weapons, like the sharp words that can issue
dark, sweaty clubs; others take place in suburbia, and episodi- from between them. In the video, Huxtable’s mouth, with lips
cally recount the process of a teen piecing together a persona painted electric blue, appears at intervals as a narrator, a chorus
through discoveries made on internet message boards or in of one. Huxtable’s use of her own body and image in her work
the back of a parked van. The exhibition, titled “A Split during often leads to the assumption that the work is autobiographi-
Laughter at the Rally,” was situated in the immediate pres- cal. But the way she twists her face into a grinning mask, and
ent. Using imagery from protest marches and fringe political isolates the smile, abstracts the body into something else: a
literature, the works on view asked how to live in a world where machine for processing information, a position for faith. As her
everything seems stacked against you. mouth says at the video’s end, not until the characters found “a
Five posters hung around the gallery, stuck to murkily reflec- place from which to posit their actions . . . could they stand in
tive metal panels with magnets resembling the sloganeering pins something like protest without laughing.”
on a punk’s jacket. The posters began as paintings that Huxtable —Brian Droitcour
made and photographed in her studio before digitally adding text
and graphics. They appear as covers of zines exposing conspira-
cies to keep black Americans in the margins. Invisible Chattel (all
works 2017) explains how black men are emasculated by chem-
trails and low frequency radio waves, while The Feminist Scam
warns of lesbians recruiting girls at school basketball games. On
a yellow wall in the gallery’s rear, a sprawling diagram of internet
screenshots printed on clear plastic maps out a skinhead fetish for
black women. The diagram recalls drawings by Mark Lombardi
or Suzanne Treister that illustrate shadowy networks of power,
but Huxtable’s inclusion of a Facebook post in which she writes
about having unwittingly hooked up with a skinhead makes the
creepiness more intimate and more discomforting, by implicating
personal desire in systemic violence.
The show’s title video begins with a small band of
protesters, most of them black and/or queer, marching down a
quiet Brooklyn sidewalk, chanting: “No Trump / No KKK /
No fascist USA.” At a break, two of them commiserate about
the futility of the protest and laugh. “What’s so fucking
funny?” a white guy in the group says. “Don’t you realize all of
our lives are on the line right now?” The characters reappear
in apartments and empty bars over the course of the roughly
twenty-minute video. Topics of conversations and monologues
slip from parties to justice and back again, leaving you with
Zhang Peili:
a sickening awareness that the tools of liberation, including CHICAGO Document on
a good beat that makes the body feel free, are inextricably Hygiene No. 3, 1991,
video, 24 minutes,
bound to mechanisms of oppression. 45 seconds; at the
Huxtable’s work often feels like she’s taking her audience ZHANG PEILI Art Institute of
Chicago.
along as she retraces the steps of her own intellectual wanderings. Art Institute of Chicago
This can make for slippery ground. There Are Certain Facts that
Cannot Be Disputed, Huxtable’s 2015 performance at the Museum The video works of Zhang Peili tend toward the slow, dull,
of Modern Art in New York, jumped around references including and even tedious. And that’s by design. Take his ground-
samurais and the French baroque, W.E.B. DuBois’s Encyclopedia breaking three-hour 30 x 30 (1988)—considered the first
Africana and GeoCities. The connections were so abundant and artwork in the medium to be produced in China—which
rapidly shifting that it was hard to make sense of it all. (The offers nothing more than a largely unchanging, cropped view
script is in Mucus in My Pineal Gland, awaiting analysis.) But the of Zhang breaking a mirror and then gluing it back together.
work in “A Split during Laughter at the Rally” is more cunningly According to the catalogue for the Art Institute of Chicago’s
crafted. It takes the connective conspiratorial imagination as its recent exhibition “Zhang Peli: Record. Repeat”—which fea-
subject, so its method folds in on its message. tured an edited thirty-two-minute version Zhang made after
Another unifying element is Huxtable’s toothy smile. the original had been damaged—30 x 30 ’s original viewers
Some of the magnets holding the posters sport a black-and- protested after just a few minutes, and that was exactly the
white photo of her face where her mouth is exaggerated, big response the artist desired: he wanted to challenge notions

EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 125

 of what art could and should be. The following year, he wrote
an unpublished text that advocated the elimination of “con-
noisseurship, entertainment, theatricality, and reportage.”
Zhang, who was born in 1957 (nine years before the begin-
ning of the Cultural Revolution), became part of ’85 New Wave,
China’s largest avant-garde art movement. But just three years
later, he grew disillusioned by government interference and a
concern that, given historical precedents abroad, avant-garde art in
China would eventually be co-opted by market forces. Formerly
devoted to painting, he turned to the newfound realm of video—a
medium for which no formal conventions had yet been established
in China—and made his bid for aesthetic restraint as a means to
counteract those governmental and commercial threats to pure art.
Zhang has worked on a large scale and created complex
installations, but this show concentrated on his earlier, smaller
works employing the clunky TV monitors of the time. We find
him learning the properties of video and exploring the disorien-
tation induced by repetition, as he does in Focal Distance (1996),
which features eight monitors placed in a row. He began this
work with footage of an unremarkable street scene in Hang-
zhou and then shot video of that video, repeating the process
six more times. The various iterations, each shown on its own
monitor, grow increasingly obscure until the image becomes an
indecipherable blur.
Although Zhang mostly avoids making direct statements
in his work, an undercurrent of sociopolitical commentary runs
through many of his pieces, such as Document on Hygiene No. 3
(1991). This deliberately banal video of the artist washing a
chicken, which is uncooperative at first but eventually gives into
its bath, serves as a metaphor for the squashing of dissent and the
View of Raphael cleansing of impure ideas in Communist Chinese society.
Montañez Ortiz’s Zhang also examines and, in some cases, deconstructs
performance
The Ritual Piano Socialist Realist cinema. In a 2006 two-channel video ironically
Destruction titled Happiness, he juxtaposes disjointed snippets of speeches
Concert, 2017, with
Phil Wagner, at
by the lead character in the Cultural Revolution–era movie In
LAXART. the Shipyard (1975) with a recurring loop from the same film
126 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
showing close-ups of four supporters ardently clapping. So we
get sentences or phrases from the man speaking on the left side
and then the applause segment again and again on the right.
The repetitive pairings critique the sameness and predictability
of such films but also seem to question whether such blind
acceptance extends to other realms as well.
Coming into his own in the 1980s, when television was
belatedly arriving in China and the government was learning
to exploit it, Zhang found ways to both thwart the powerful
medium of video and repurpose it in radical artistic ways.
—Kyle MacMillan
LOS ANGELES
R APHAEL
MONTAÑEZ ORTIZ
LAXART
A ring of kosher salt surrounded the dramatically lit wreck of a
baby grand piano, suggesting a sacred barrier not to be crossed.
Gashes on the keyboard evinced the blows of an axe; black keys
had been knocked off. Here and there among the splintered
veneer and slack wires lay sledgehammers and hatchets—the
implements of the destruction—their handles wrapped in
bright red tape. Since pioneering “destruction art” in the 1960s,
Raphael Montañez Ortiz has decimated dozens of pianos,
repeatedly enacting blunt trauma on this symbol of the taut
harmonies of Western culture. His most recent such perfor-
mance occurred amid LAXART’s short summary of his career.
Like many songs of the ’60s, Ortiz’s piano demolition still turns
out a crowd but—although once vigorous and shocking, with
its suggestion of smashing the system—has been repeated to
the point of becoming an almost melancholic ritual.
The wrecked piano was the most sensational work in
the LAXART exhibition. Ortiz’s videos of the 1980s are less
known but similarly dogged in their composition. The artist
reedited short clips of classic films by stuttering the playback of
Laserdiscs with a joystick and recording the results to tape. This,
too, is a blunt technique—and one superficially echoed today by
animated GIFs. But unlike their looping contemporary coun-
terparts, which confine narratives in tight circles, Ortiz’s works
seem to tangle storylines into knots. In What Is This (1985),
the rhythmic, repetitive edit slowly reveals the gesture of a girl
reaching for a bomb inexplicably resting on an end table in an
upper-middle-class living room. “What is this?” she asks, over
and over, gripping and regripping the device. Mom glances up
from her knitting as the bomb rolls off and on and off the table,
hits the floor, and hiccups into flames.
Ortiz relishes disastrous combinations—Hollywood tropes
and avant-garde techniques, for instance, or piano and axe. The
methods combine in the earliest work on view, Cowboy and
“Indian” Film (1957–58). To make this piece, Ortiz chopped up
a reel of a Hollywood Western with a tomahawk, then pulled
the pieces from a bag at random and spliced them together
however they emerged—upside down, sideways, reversed—all
the while chanting, as he puts it in the film’s title card, a “‘native
American’ ‘war cry.’” The soundtrack’s gunshots, orchestral
swells, and horses’ hooves clatter into chaos. The mulched and
sutured footage manages to tell a story anyway: that of a violent
film made by a violent culture.
By combining charged symbols, Ortiz composes tense
harmonies that are always one slip away from dissonance. Two
vinyl banners bearing digital paintings, Christ-Eve (2002) and
Kabbalah Zemi (2001), hung in alcoves. The compositions are
divided into quadrants resembling warping hallways running
into dead ends. Printed in contrasting colors on the “walls” of
the hallways—red on green, orange on blue—are idols, symbols,
and texts drawn from disparate cultures. Hebrew letters are
adjacent to Aztec symbols, and excerpts from scientific texts
are paired with passages from the New Testament. The banners
embody the balance of shamanic flair and intellectual calcula-
tion evident throughout Ortiz’s work, always staggering back
and forth between ritual and interpretation.
—Travis Diehl

SAN FRANCISCO

CANDY JERNIGAN
CCA Wattis Institute for
Contemporary Arts
Candy Jernigan (1952–1991) made art about overlooked or
cast-off things, transforming ordinarily unlovely objects into
images and sculptural works of great wonder and wit. In one
of her best-known pieces, she turned hundreds of crack vials
and caps she discovered on the streets of the East Village
in the mid-1980s into a meticulously notated multicolored
collage. The intimate show of her work at the Wattis Insti-
tute focused on her drawings, allowing her less sensational
subjects and remarkable draftsmanship to take center stage.
The eighty or so drawings show Jernigan directing the
same genuine curiosity to inhabitants of the natural world
(dead bugs, leaves) as to the detritus of the modern metrop-
olis (crushed cigarette packs, soda can tabs). Three small
undated compositions depicting green bug-eaten leaves are
uncannily realistic. Even if the subjects are browning at the
edges, there is a kind of springtime waxiness to their surfaces
that is both related to and somehow separate from the
materials of their creation. The modest toolkit that Jernigan
used to produce many of the works on view is conveyed by
the show’s subtitle, “A Couple of Pencils and Some Paper,”
which was borrowed from one of the drawings.
Jernigan deftly parodies the visual language of the scien-
tific illustrator in compositions that resemble scientific charts.
She has drawn everything in these works, from the subjects
of her studies (buttons, beans, and cigar labels, to name only
a few) to accompanying diagrams, arrows, and other graphics.
While her presentational style implies rationality, it is put
to absurd ends. In the large drawing Ham n’ Cheese (1988), Candy Jernigan:
Gauloises, R.X.
she presents three types of ham and three blocks of cheese, Nov. 13 1983,
separating them into two rows. At the bottom, she diagrams 1983, colored
all the possible permutations of the ham and cheese alongside pencil, stamped
ink, and collage
a handwritten caption that notes the date and location of each on board, 10 by 8
item’s purchase and explains unceremoniously that at the end inches; at the CCA
Wattis Institute for
of the drawing session “they were tossed.” Contemporary Arts.
In New York City: 24 Cheez Doodles (1986), the show’s
only oil painting, Jernigan arranged the bright orange
snacks in a grid whose precision evokes that of a Wayne
Thiebaud pastry case. Theatrically lit, they cast long shad-
ows and seem to wriggle, as if straining to push up from
the ground. Viewed up close, they appear to be both very
real and pure fantasy. Jernigan’s painted representations and
the objects themselves, as her punning title points out, are
both cheese “doodles.”
A seldom-exhibited group of fifty-nine acrylic draw-
ings of vases and other vessels closed the exhibition.
Jernigan made these works between 1990 and 1991, at the
end of her struggle with cancer. The objects, of different
sizes, shapes, and materials, all sit in the lower fifth of
their frames. Bright backlight throws many of them into
silhouette against gray, ocher, red, or blue grounds. In some
of the drawings there is a luminous radiance that makes the
shadows look more solid than the objects themselves; in
others, the vessels tip sideways, as if expressing personality
or psychological weightiness. Throughout these and the
other drawings in the show, Jernigan’s close attention to

EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 127

 otherwise mundane objects gives them a kind of life. At
first glance, the images seem to represent the world as it
is, but in each there is also a fleeting, destabilizing glimpse
behind reality’s mask.
—Kim Beil
TORONTO
YDESSA HENDELES
Power Plant
The art of German-born Canadian Ydessa Hendeles intersects
with her parallel collecting and curatorial practices. Playing
with the conventions of museum display with her arrangements
of selected artworks, artifacts, and original sculptures, Hendeles
interweaves personal narratives with complex histories of group
identity and social exclusion.
Her retrospective at the Power Plant was titled “The Milli-
ner’s Daughter.” This reference to the occupation of her mother,
a Holocaust survivor, also conveyed the overarching concern
with childhood that was evident throughout the exhibition.
Through seven multipart works, each of which occupied an
entire gallery or a transitional space (like the upstairs corridor
Ydessa Hendeles: or downstairs clerestory), Hendeles created a mercurial environ-
THE BIRD THAT ment that alternately suggested a church, a courtroom, a theater,
MADE THE
BREEZE TO
a cabinet of curiosities, and a hall of mirrors.
BLOW (Aero-Car The last of these came by way of seventeen distortion
No. 500), detail, mirrors, once used in a fairground attraction, hanging on the
2011, mechanical
car, key, and walls for her installation “From her wooden sleep. . . ” (2013),
mahogany-and- which also includes roughly 150 articulated wood mannequins
glass vitrine, 12 by 8
by 17 feet overall; at of various sizes, as well as vitrines filled with antique toys
the Power Plant. and children’s literature. Some of the smaller figures, such as
128 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
two sixteenth-century Gliederpuppen jointed with catgut, are
displayed in an old museum vitrine, while others are housed in
a vitrine Hendeles designed with curved glass that multiplies
viewers’ reflections like the distortion mirrors. The main group
consists of seventy-nine mannequins, of various degrees of
lifelikeness and carved detail, that sit on benches arranged in
six rows of three. The figures are posed so that their collective
(and vaguely accusatory) gaze appears to be directed at another
upright mannequin, positioned outside the group on a triangu-
lar pedestal.
Several references in the installation to the figure of
Golliwogg, a black rag doll with minstrel-like features popular
at the turn of the century, connect this haunting arrangement
to a broader cultural context. A recording of Claude Debussy’s
“Golliwogg’s Cake Walk” (1908) plays on a loop, and four open
copies of The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg”
(1895), the popular children’s book illustrated by Florence Kate
Upton, lay open in a vitrine. Hendeles displays these books
alongside two Dutch dolls with round lathe-turned heads
and spindly limbs. Waking from their “wooden sleep” in the
book, such dolls meet the titular Golliwogg and embark on a
sweet childhood adventure in a fantasy world that nonetheless
reproduces the real one’s racial hierarchies.
In another installation, “THE BIRD THAT MADE
THE BREEZE TO BLOW,” 2006–11, Hendeles offers an
expansive three-part meditation on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797–98), which
tells of an undead seaman cursed to wander the earth for
shooting an albatross that helped his ship navigate free of
Antarctic ice. A huge teardrop-shaped vitrine at the center of
the installation houses a greatly enlarged version of a flying
toy car manufactured in American-occupied Nuremberg
around the time of Hendeles’s birth to Polish-Jewish parents
in Marburg, Germany. Fifteen-and-a-half times bigger than
the original toy, Hendeles’s version has a wingspan equal to
that of the wandering albatross. Remote activation causes a
mechanical lever to descend on the back of the car, the wings
to unfold from the sides, and the propeller to emerge from the
nose and spin noisily for nearly two minutes.
Two related works surround the gigantic toy. For THE
BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW (PART
ONE–PART ELEVEN), 2011, Hendeles reproduced eleven
of Gustave Doré’s engravings for a posthumous edition of
Coleridge’s poem as large and beautifully detailed pigment
prints hung on nearby walls. THE BIRD THAT MADE THE
BREEZE TO BLOW (Hallowe’en Girl), 2006, is a large photo-
graph of a painted iron doorstop in the shape of a girl dressed
as a ghost and holding a jack-o’-lantern. Intended as a holiday
novelty and a depiction of childhood innocence, the doorstop
nonetheless remains tied to the jack-o’-lantern’s origins in an
Irish folk tale about Stingy Jack, a figure doomed to wander
the earth forever after tricking the Devil into barring him
from hell. Hendeles’s world is populated by such wander-
ers, and her installations suggest how such old narratives of
banishment and exclusion persist in the present.
—Milena Tomic

“SOUL OF A NATION:
ART IN THE AGE OF
BLACK POWER”
LONDON—Tate Modern
Norman Lewis’s striking painting America the Beautiful (1960)
confronts visitors near the entrance to Tate Modern’s exhibition
“Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.” Initially, the
work appears to be an abstract arrangement of craggy white motifs
dancing on a black ground, but soon the shapes take on the form
of Ku Klux Klan hoods interspersed with white crosses. Lewis’s
painting embodies several core dilemmas facing African American
artists during the tumultuous period the exhibition spans, from
1963 to 1983. Could black artists legitimately pursue art for art’s
sake or did they have a moral obligation to produce art that served
the cause of civil rights? Was abstract art capable of speaking to a
black audience? Did such a thing as a black aesthetic exist?
“Soul of a Nation,” which travels to the Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art in Arkansas (Feb. 3–Apr. 23, 2018)
and the Brooklyn Museum (Sept. 7, 2018–Feb. 3, 2019), brings
together works by more than sixty mainly African American
artists who gave energetic voice to such questions during this
period of mass marches, assassinations, and KKK attacks.
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
Faith Ringgold:
American People
Series #20: Die,
1967, oil on canvas,
6 by 12 feet; in
“Soul of a Nation:
Art in the Age of
Black Power.”
Encompassing political posters, photographs, collages, sculptures,
films, prints, and paintings, the show demonstrates different
ways black artists from across the United States contended with
issues of identity and representation and the role of art in a
society pervaded with racism. A tale of trauma and revolution as
well as strength and hope shines through. 
Tate curators Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley faced a
tough task in pulling the many works and themes into a cohe-
ON VIEW
sive whole. The show is organized largely by artistic groupings THROUGH
and styles over twelve rooms. It is not always tidy and overlaps OCT. 22
occur, but effective links are drawn between the artists, the
few galleries that exhibited them, and the historic events that
inspired their work. The presentation begins with the Spiral
group in New York, which Lewis, Romare Bearden, Charles
Alston, and Hale Woodruff founded in 1963 as a means for
members to discuss their role as African American artists
working amid civil rights struggles. As this first room shows,
Spiral participants diverged significantly in their approaches
ART IN AMERICA 129

David Hammons:
Injustice Case, 1970,
margarine and
powdered-pigment
body print on paper
with American f lag,
63 by 40½ inches;
in “Soul of a Nation:
Art in the Age
of Black Power.”
Courtesy Los
Angeles County
Museum of Art.
(though they did agree to limit their palette to black and white
for their sole group show, in 1965). The works range from
Lewis’s semiabstract painting to Bearden’s dynamic collages of
photo fragments from popular magazines depicting Harlem
scenes, a religious ritual, and a magical folkloric figure called a
Conjur woman to Reginald Gammon’s stark portrait of angry
protesters, Freedom Now (1963).  innocently dancing and drumming, exemplify AfriCOBRA’s
As the Civil Rights movement evolved into Black Power,
many black artists felt that galleries were not the right venue
for galvanizing the community. “The ghetto itself is the gallery
for the revolutionary artist,” Emory Douglas, the Black Panther
Party’s minister of culture, is quoted as saying in the catalogue.
Douglas designed eye-catching posters and illustrations for
the Black Panther newspaper, as well as pamphlets and other
graphic material, that were reminiscent of Soviet agitprop. On
the South Side of Chicago, a collective of artists, writers, and
educators called the Organization of Black American Culture
(OBAC) created a vibrant mural, The Wall of Respect (1967), that
celebrated black luminaries in diverse fields and inspired similar
initiatives in other cities. A segment of the mural commemorat-
ing the writer Amiri Baraka is on display in the show. Other
artists deployed traditional forms like sculpture and canvas-
130 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
based painting to make potent works in support of Black Power.
Elizabeth Catlett’s giant mahogany fist and Dana C. Chandler
Jr.’s re-creation of the bullet-ridden door of slain Black Panther
activist Fred Hampton are powerful, if unsubtle, works express-
ing solidarity. Conveying a more ambiguous view in the same
exhibition section (“Figuring Black Power”), Faith Ringgold’s
painting American People Series #20: Die (1967) portrays race riot
carnage, with blood-spattered adults and children tumbling in
wide-eyed terror amid guns and violence.
The theme of resistance to the American state looms large
in the show. A number of artists employed the Stars and Stripes
ironically to underscore their alienation from the privileged
white majority. In the painting Did the Bear Sit under the Tree?
(1969), for instance, Benny Andrews pitted a man with balled
fists and a zipper for a mouth against the American flag, while
in the body print Injustice Case (1970) David Hammons used
a cut-up flag to frame a depiction of Black Panther Party
cofounder Bobby Seale bound and gagged on a chair in court.
Several artists in Los Angeles delivered social critiques in
the form of assemblages of found materials. Melvin Edwards
welded together machine parts and tools to form brutally
elegant wall sculptures called “Lynch Fragments.” Betye Saar
made acerbic sculptures from racist memorabilia. Her Liberation
of Aunt Jemima (1972) subverts the Aunt Jemima stereotype by
presenting in a shrinelike box a notepad holder in the form of a
cheery black mammy bearing a broom and a shotgun and with
an image of a black fist rising up in front of her. These works are
superbly juxtaposed in a room with disquieting doll sculptures
John Outterbridge made between the early 1970s and 1982 as
part of his “Ethnic Heritage” series and totems Noah Purifoy
constructed out of street detritus from the 1965 Watts riots.
Founded in 1968, the Chicago collective AfriCOBRA
(African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) included some
of the OBAC artists among its members and—carrying on
the uplifting approach seen with The Wall of Respect—pro-
duced exuberant paintings and prints encouraging black
viewers to take pride in their culture. Wadsworth Jarrell’s
dazzling portrait of Malcolm X, Black Prince (1971), and
Carolyn Lawrence’s psychedelically hued painting Black
Children Keep Your Spirits Free (1972), which shows children
bright, Kool-Aid-influenced palette and technique of com-
bining images of black figures with inspiring text.
Abstract artists also sought to create works that would
speak to black culture, even if their means were less direct than
those of figurative artists, as in William T. Williams’s joyful
interplay of multicolored diagonal forms paying homage to the
jazz musician John Coltrane (Trane, 1969) and Sam Gilliam’s
mottled-purple, crimson-stained canvas marking the first anni-
versary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination (April 4, 1969).
Many in the black community, however, criticized abstract art
as irrelevant and dictated by white aesthetic traditions, prompt-
ing some artists to rethink their styles. In the early ’70s, Alvin
Loving turned his back on his acclaimed geometric abstractions
and, influenced by jazz and the quilting tradition, began making
improvised collages from cut-up canvases and other materials. 
 That such an ambitious survey of American Civil simply using a camera to record whatever Reynolds chose to
Rights–era art would be organized in London might strike do for the length of the filming. The idea was for the piece to
some as curious. The show originated with Godfrey’s work be as immediate—as unmediated—as possible.
researching North American artists that previous genera- As it happens, Reynolds doesn’t do very much. A
tions of Tate curators had overlooked in terms of acquisi- single, fixed-position shot frames her head and shoulders,
tions. Many of the participating artists are being shown in as she sits in three-quarter profile, wearing on-trend aviator
Britain for the first time, and even at home African Ameri- glasses and her hair in pigtails, looking slightly uncomfort-
can artists largely remain less known than their white peers able, her eyes mostly downcast. A second shot follows,
(though the Brooklyn Museum’s recent show “We Wanted representing another roll of film stitched on, this one
a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” went some focused more tightly on her face. After a little while, she
way toward exposing viewers to a range of neglected female looks more steadily ahead and seems generally to open up.
contributors to this same period). Presenting work that has She starts softly mouthing words, nodding her head—she’s
not been adequately historicized due to the artists’ skin color speaking, perhaps, or singing. Without sound, it is impossi-
and their pursuit of themes that challenge dominant narra- ble to know. It could be some favorite song she and Castile
tives, “Soul of a Nation” is an electric exhibition that attests shared. Or maybe she’s praying.
to how significantly racial biases have limited the canon. The work invites such conjecture, of course. Warhol’s
—Elizabeth Fullerton “Screen Tests” are an obvious touchstone. But autoportrait is
less about the allure, the unknowable seductions, of cinema as
a medium. Rather, a lack of knowing, it feels like, is presented
LONDON as a sort of offering—for indeed there’s a quasi-religious tone
to the film, with its slow, somber mood suggesting a sense
LUKE WILLIS THOMPSON of ritual and reverence, and with Reynolds herself, in her
stillness, appearing vaguely Madonna-like. What is being
Chisenhale
offered, then, is the promise of respite from the twenty-four-
There have been several significant moments in recent hour news cycle of information overload: a cinematic space
history when the latest camera technology has been of safety, and silence, and perhaps even a selfhood that isn’t
used to record episodes of police officers using brutal or defined by extraneous discourses of race. And the implicit
lethal force against African Americans. The Rodney King sadness of the work is that this offer is impossible to take up,
Luke Willis
incident in 1991 was the first, and demonstrated the power because, after all, we have to live in the real world—a world Thompson:
of a camcorder to expand the parameters of what it meant in which the police officer who killed Castile was acquitted autoportrait, 2017,
film, approx.
to be a witness; and in the past decade there’s been the of all wrongdoing the week before the show opened. 4 minutes; at
seemingly never-ending litany of fatal events captured —Gabriel Coxhead Chisenhale.
on mobile phones. Perhaps the most harrowingly involv-
ing such record of recent years was Diamond Reynolds’s
Facebook Live broadcast, on July 6, 2016, of the moments
after her partner, Philando Castile, was shot during a traffic
stop, as she sat in the passenger seat, clearly in a state of
shock, filming and narrating and futilely intoning, “Please
don’t tell me he’s dead,” over and over.
Over and over indeed. Inevitably, Reynolds’s footage
was picked up by news outlets and circulated around the
world—repeated endlessly, branded with media corporations’
logos, cut for editorial purposes, and generally manipu-
lated according to ideological requirements. It is these
degradations that Luke Willis Thompson’s film autoportrait
(2017)—the sole work in his Chisenhale show—intends to
respond to by providing a counter-narrative, or a counter-
image (what he calls a “sister-image”), to Reynolds’s original
broadcast. Here, Reynolds, whom Thompson reached out to
via her lawyer, is the sole subject. But unlike the Facebook
footage, autoportrait was shot on 35mm film, so the work is
contained on a physical reel, serving as a unique artifact—
one, moreover, that Thompson is withholding from digital
circulation. Also, the black-and-white projection is silent,
because to mix in a soundtrack would have been an editorial
act, an effect of postproduction, detracting from the ethos of

EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 131

 ZURICH
HERNAN BAS
Peter Kilchmann
Whether the settings are bohemian interiors or lush
swamplike landscapes, nearly all of Hernan Bas’s paintings
are populated by thin, young men with an aloof air. For the
works in his latest exhibition, the Miami- and Detroit-
based artist placed his trademark figures—“lanky twinks,”
as curator Storm Janse van Rensburg describes them in the
accompanying publication—in ornate rooms meant as an
aesthetic homage to the Bloomsbury Group, the British
cohort known for their literary, artistic, and intellectual
output and unconventional lifestyles in the early decades of
the twentieth century.
While the group, whose members included Virginia
Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey, lived
and worked in the London area of Bloomsbury, they also
gathered frequently at a country house called Charleston,
home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Today, Charles-
ton is a museum dedicated to the group. Its preserved
interiors are chock-full of paintings, books, and ceramics;
almost all of the surfaces, by way of paint or upholstery,
are covered in figurative or abstract-patterned decoration.
Bas’s exhibition consisted of three large acrylic paintings
and smaller works on linen or paper that draw on aspects
of Charleston’s eclectic interiors. The familiar detail and
intricacy of Bas’s pictures is especially intense in these
Hernan Bas:
Bloomsbury Revisited
(The New Perfume),
2017, acrylic on
linen, 21½ by 17½
inches; at Peter
Kilchmann.
132 SEPTEMBER 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
horizonless images of stuffed spaces. Charleston’s decor
seems to gain an almost tropical edge in his portrayals,
which feature displays of seashells and coral and com-
mingle warm yellows and pinks with hues of aquamarine
and moss green.
In one of the large acrylics, Bloomsbury Revisited (The
Sea Fan Collector), 2017, a dark-haired, fine-featured, and
full-lipped youth, seen in profile, sits on a pink chair; pink
and white pieces of coral hang from strings above his head.
Though limned by a thin, dark line, he does not stand
out from the background but is absorbed into the texture
of the composition. His striped shirt offers one pattern
among several in the painting, with a curtain and a swath
of wall, for instance, providing areas with circular motifs.
Bas’s young men often seem trapped in his works. They not
only appear stuck on the cusp of manhood—their budding
authority tempered with a kind of innocence—but also are
embedded within the artist’s busy compositions. Some of
the new paintings imprison the figures even further, pre-
senting them not as living beings but as framed portraits
amid still-life arrangements.
Today many critics and historians view the Blooms-
bury set’s tangled relationships and liberal attitudes as
queer avant la lettre. The members are also celebrated for
their collaborative methods and their lack of concern for
distinctions among disciplines. At the same time, some
commentators criticize what they regard as Bloomsbury’s
willful disengagement from the outside world during and
after World War I. For Bas, Bloomsbury seems to serve a
mostly decorative function, with the Charleston aesthetic
giving a certain ambience to his images depicting seductive,
vulnerable-looking characters. But while these paintings
delight in sheer visual terms, whatever meaning Bloomsbury
holds for Bas beyond that realm remains elusive.
—Aoife Rosenmeyer
DUBAI
HERA BÜYÜKTAŞÇIYAN
Green Art Gallery
Two hands lay outstretched on a narrow bench, palms
facing up, as if in supplication, asking for alms. They
were delicate, beautifully shaped; yet the palms and
wrists appeared scorched and scarred, with leathery skin
resembling a mummified crocodile hide. Their dark sheen
was actually from bronze, and the “scars” were in fact the
imprints of myriad tiny marble squares, forming a kind of
tile-less mosaic.
This idea of imprinting is central to the work of
Istanbul-based artist Hera Büyüktaşçıyan (b. 1984). Her
second solo show at Green Art Gallery, “Write Injuries on
Sand and Kindness in Marble,” drew on the space’s former
life as a marble factory. In the show brochure and recent

email correspondence, the artist says that places retain the
stories of their past, the lives of all those who have inhabited
or used them. Memories, geographies, and experiences are
cumulatively embedded within the walls, much as pieces of
old buildings are repurposed to create new ones in spolia
architecture. Büyüktaşçıyan explores these historical traces
through a notion she calls “aquamorphology,” which refers to
water’s capacity to transform, over time, all that it touches.
In this exhibition, Büyüktaşçıyan, a 2006 painting
department graduate of Marmara University in Istan-
bul, focused on the lives of the locale’s erstwhile marble
workers. She invited viewers to consider how invisible
hands have shaped our physical and social environments.
For marble workers, a lifetime spent polishing marble and
refining it with water means that their fingerprints—so
closely allied with identity—are literally erased, sacrificed
to the material they work with. That same stone has long
stood as a symbol of power, used by rulers over the millen-
nia to showcase their status. Yet the DNA of each worker,
carrying their lineage and histories related to their former
homelands, is mingled with the marble and the site.
The main exhibition space was largely taken over by
Everflowing pool of nectar (2017), its eight long sheets of
paper—each emblazoned with V-shaped bars of yellow, white,
and gray—running down a wall and stretching far out onto
the floor. Muted images on the gray and yellow bands depict
traditional designs and construction techniques. The work,
inspired by the artist’s travels in India, alludes to the marble
water courses prevalent in traditional Mughal architecture.
These channels, with their constantly moving water, were built
to enhance public and private garden spaces, feeding fountains,
and pools that reflect the beauty of nature.
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
View of Hera
Büyüktaşçıyan’s
exhibition “Write
Injuries on Sand
and Kindness in
Marble,” 2017, at
Green Art Gallery.
Displayed nearby was “The discovery of 36 wells” (2016),
a series of drawings in which Büyüktaşçıyan, perhaps reacting
to predicted global water shortages, imagines new wells in
the form of architectural fragments (severed building facades
and balconies, truncated archways). The twenty marble panels
of Chanting if I live, forgetting if I die (2017), lined up side by
side on a raw plank and moved by a hidden mechanism, bring
to mind the keys of a player piano, its silent “music” marking
the passage of time.
In the context of Dubai, where so much is new and
so many luxury towers are being erected, Büyüktaşçıyan’s
show was a welcome opportunity to contemplate themes of
power and labor, past and present. Centering on indus-
trial spaces and practices, and on flowing water in both
its pragmatic and metaphorical aspects, it brought a rare
poetry and historical appreciation to a place not particu-
larly known for either.
—Anna Wallace-Thompson
Vol. 105, No. 8 (September). Art in America is published monthly except combined June/July by
Art Media AiA, LLC, 110 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012, Tel: (212) 398-1690.
Contents Copyright © 2017 by Art in America, and may not be reproduced in any manner or form
without permission. ISSN: 0004-3214. The opinions expressed, apart from the editor’s comments,
are those of the writers themselves and not necessarily those of this magazine. Not responsible
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ART IN AMERICA 133
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Americas 2018: Paperworks, Northwest Art
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nac@minotstateu.edu
Traditional or experimental works, on or of paper,
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in purchase awards. Juror: Arvie Smith DEADLINE:
November 7, 2017
134 SEPTEMBER 2017
8TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL JURIED
EXHIBITION GALLERY 110
A non-profit gallery in Seattle’s Pioneer Sqaure invites
emerging and established artists to submit original
artwork in any two or three dimensional media.
Juror: Sara Krajewski, Robert and Mercedies Eichholz
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Meseum.
Apply: www.callforentry.org; info at www.gallery110.
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$35 for 3 entries. $10 each additional piece
Deadline: 10 PM (MT) October 30, 2017. Exhibition
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Color exhibition catalogue. Cash awards $1000
20TH ANNUAL NATIONAL JURIED SOLO
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1st prize-$3,000 2nd prizes-$2,000
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info@mdfedart.org
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International, Juried Exhibition: Small Wonders
Submission Deadline: September 26
On Display: December 1 - December 23
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Cash awards $1000.
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Floor at Tate Britain, designed by Caruso St John. Photography Luke Hayes.

PEOPLE
William D. Adams, chairman of the
National Endowment for the Humani-
ties since 2014, has stepped down from
his post to pursue scholarship opportuni-
ties. Jon Parrish Peede has been named
acting chairman.
The director of the Isamu Noguchi
Foundation and Garden Museum since
2003, Jenny Dixon will retire from the
position at the end of the year.
Jenny Dixon.
Photo Don Stahl.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foun-
dation has appointed Karole P.B. Vail, a
member of the curatorial staff since 1997
and granddaughter of Peggy Guggenheim,
director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collec-
tion in Venice and foundation director for
Italy. She succeeds Philip Rylands, who led
the museum for thirty-seven years.
The Shed, a nonprofit arts center that
will open in New York in 2019, has hired
Emma Enderby as curator. Prior to joining
the Shed, Enderby was an associate curator
at the Public Art Fund in New York.
The chief curator of the Barnes
Hans Breder. Foundation in Philadelphia, Sylvie Patry,
Courtesy Barbara
Welch Breder. has returned to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris,
where she previously served as chief curator
of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist
paintings, in the role of deputy director for
curatorial affairs and collections.
The Andy Warhol Museum in Pitts-
burgh has promoted José Carlos Diaz, who
joined the museum as a curator in 2016, to
chief curator. Associate curator Jessica Beck
has been promoted to curator.
Brandeis University in Waltham, Mas-
sachusetts, has selected Luis A. Croquer,
deputy director of exhibitions, collections,
and programs at the Henry Art Gallery
at the University of Washington Seattle, to
head the Rose Art Museum.
Eungie Joo has been named curator
of contemporary art at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. Joo most recently
136 SEPTEMBER 2017
ARTWORLD
served as artistic director of the fifth
Anyang Public Art Project in Korea.
AWARDS
The jury of the fifty-seventh Venice Bien-
nale awarded the Golden Lion for best
national participation to Germany, which
presented Anne Imhof’s Faust (2017).
German artist Franz Erhard Walther won
the Golden Lion for best artist in the main
exhibition, “Viva Arte Viva,” and the Silver
Lion for promising young artist was given
to Egyptian-born Hassan Khan.
Multidisciplinary artist Pope.L has won
the 2017 Bucksbaum Award. Presented by
the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, the $100,000 prize recognizes an
artist featured in the Whitney Biennial.
Artist Sarah Contos has been
awarded the inaugural Ramsay Art Prize,
which is funded by the James and Diana
Ramsay Foundation in recognition of
an Australian artist under forty. Contos
receives $75,000 in honor of her 2016
work The Long Kiss Goodbye.
The winners of the inaugural Rabkin
Prize for Arts Writers, conferred by the
Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation,
are Phong Bui, Charles Desmarais, Bob
Keyes, Jason Farago, Jeff Huebner, Caro-
lina Miranda, Christina Rees, and Chris
Vitiello. Each awardee receives $50,000.
The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art
Foundation has named Ed Halter and
Rudolf Frieling the recipients of the 2017
Arts Writing Awards in Digital Art. Hal-
ter, director of Light Industry in New York,
receives a $20,000 grant for an emerging
arts writer, and Frieling, curator of media
arts at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, receives a $40,000 prize for
an established arts writer.
Houston’s Menil Collection has
announced Palestine- and Jordan-based
curator Reem Fadda the winner of the
eighth Walter Hopps Award for Cura-
torial Achievement. Fadda receives a
$20,000 stipend and will deliver a public
lecture at the institution this fall.
Dutch-Filipino artist Martha Atienza
and American artist Sam Pulitzer have
been awarded the Baloise Art Prize at
Art Basel, Switzerland. The annual prize
is sponsored by Baloise Group, with each
artist receiving approximately $31,000.
In recognition of his work in Docu-
menta 14, Nigerian-born, US-based artist and
curator Olu Oguibe has been named the win-
ner of the Arnold Bode Prize, about $11,000
awarded by the city of Kassel.
OBITUARIES
Edit DeAk, an art critic and champion of
the downtown New York art world, died on
June 9 in Manhattan. She was sixty-eight.
Born in Budapest, DeAk fled Communist
Hungary in 1968. During her senior year at
Columbia University, where she received a
degree in art history in 1972, DeAk took a
seminar on art criticism with Art in America
editor Brian O’Doherty. Also in attendance
were Walter Robinson and Joshua Cohn.
Together the trio founded Art-Rite, a
magazine published between 1973 and 1978
with the goal of providing “coverage of the
undercovered.” In 1976, DeAk, along with
Robinson, Sol LeWitt, and Lucy Lippard,
founded Printed Matter, a publisher and
distributor of artists’ books.
German-born artist Hans Breder, who
created one of the first interdisciplinary art
programs, died on June 18 in Iowa City at
age eighty-one. Breder moved to New York
on a study grant in 1964. His minimalist
sculptures were noticed by gallerist Rich-
ard Feigen, who organized a solo show of
Breder’s work in 1967. Breder left New York
for the University of Iowa in 1968. Drawn to
Conceptual art and the performance work of
the Viennese Actionists, Breder created the
Intermedia Program at the university’s art
school, embracing video and performance art
and encouraging students to work across dis-
ciplines. His most famous students include
Charles Ray and Ana Mendieta.
—Artworld is compiled by
Julia Wolkoff
malCOlm X: COmplete
September 9 – November 4, 2017

This exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated color catalogue with new scholarship by
Pellom McDaniels III, Curator of African American Collections, Stuart A. Rose Library at Emory
University in Atlanta, GA. The catalogue will also include a recent interview between the artist and
Carlos Basualdo, the Keith Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Photo credit: Grant Delin

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