$12 APRIL 2017 COVER BY ANICKA YI

Kevin Francis Gray

537 West 24th Street, New York
March 30 April 22, 2017
S E A N S C U L LY WA L L O F L I G H T C U B E D 3 / 3 0 5 / 2 0 / 1 7 C H E I M & R E A D

B L O C K R E D 2 0 1 6 O I L O N A L U M I N U M 8 5 X 7 5 I N 2 1 5 . 9 X 1 9 0 . 5 C M S E A N S C U L LY
 72 100
THE HERE AND THEN IN THE STUDIO:
by Richard Kalina
Affirming Cy Twomblys place in the discourse on paint-
ANICKA YI
with Ross Simonini
ing today, a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris,
The Korean-born, New Yorkbased artist recounts how her
highlights three major cycles as well as examples from the
penchant for the immersive experiences of film, cuisine,
artists last series.
and fiction led her to experiment with outr scents and odd
installation materials such as bacteria, fried flowers, spores,
82 hair gel, and fungi.
THE TASK OF ART
by Christopher P. Heuer
Three exhibitions marking the 500th anniversary of Martin
Luthers 95 Theses celebrate the bold, sometimes ruthless
monk who helped launch both the Protestant Reformation
and a new stripped-down style of art.

90
HEAVEN SENT
by Glenn Adamson
In a Seattle church, Josh Faught has installed a fifty-foot-
tall fabric work in which the themes of the Passion of
Christ, the 1980s songs of Belinda Carlisle, and the com-
plexities of gay life are united with formal insouciance.

94
POEMS WITHOUT WORDS Cover: Anicka Yi + Jon Santos/Common Space
Studio, Tropiclone, 2017, C-print, 9 by 11 inches.
by Raphael Rubinstein See Contributors page.
With a 1975 series of stacked-line compositions, the
painter David Reed began to garner recognition from
critics and peers alike. Now those legendary works
from his first solo exhibition are on view again,
raising intriguing questions about cultural memory
and the vicissitudes of art world taste.

FEATURES APRIL 2017

 12
CONTRIBUTORS
14
EDITORS LETTER
21
THE BRIEF
Images Festival in Toronto; Documenta 14; Being Material
digital technology symposium at MIT; Art Cologne fair;
Age of Empires, featuring Qin and Han Dynasty work, at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Paul Ramirez Jonas
at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
23
FIRST LOOK
Rafa Esparza by Erick Lyle
LA artist Rafa Esparzas adobe-brick installations and edgy,
sometimes dangerous performances protest the erasure of ethnic
diversity and local histories in the age of gentrification.
27
PERFORMANCE
Time Out by Travis Jeppesen
The enduring legacy of Tehching Hsieh, who will
represent Taiwan at the Venice Biennale this year, rests on
five grueling yearlong performances that he completed in
New York between 1978 and 1986.
35
SIGHTLINES
Curator Jos Esparza Chong Cuy tells Ross Simonini
whats on his mind.
37
ATLAS DUBAI
Art Without America by Rahel Aima
President Trumps seven-nation travel ban has had a chilling
effect on Dubais relations with the West, leaving the USs status
as a global art center more questionable than ever.
DEPARTMENTS
42
MUSE
Portal_Ranch.txt by Ian Cheng
In short iPhone notations that he calls portals, digital artist
Ian Cheng compiles quotations and personal reflections that
stimulate his creative play.
47
ART & RELIGION
Varieties of Faith by Eleanor Heartney
Martin Scorseses recent film, Silence, depicting Christians
in seventeenth-century Japan forced to trod on images of
Jesus and Mary, prompts transhistorical reflections on art,
faith, and psychological trauma.
55
BACKSTORY
Snow Day by Jack Youngerman
Painter Jack Youngerman recalls the joys and misadventures
of raising a young son in the late 1950s among Coenties Slip
neighbors such as Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Lenore
Tawney, and Agnes Martin.
59
BOOKS
Christina Rosenberger on Laurie Wilsons Louise Nevelson: Light
and Shadow; plus related titles in brief.
108
REVIEWS
New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Portland, Bristol and Oxford,
London, Paris, Zurich, Mexico City.
128
ARTWORLD
People, Awards, Obituaries
APRIL 2017
GEORG BASELITZ 1977-1992 1 0 M A R C H 6 M AY

M I C H A E L W E R N E R G A L L E RY 2 2 U P P E R B R O O K S T. L O N D O N W 1 M I C H A E LW E R N E R . C O M
 Editor in Chief:
LINDSAY POLLOCK
Managing Editor: RICHARD VINE
Senior Editors: CATHY LEBOWITZ,
WILLIAM S. SMITH
Associate Editor, Reviews: KYLE BENTLEY
Associate Editor and Online Editor: BRIAN DROITCOUR
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FAYE HIRSCH, TRAVIS JEPPESEN, RICHARD KALINA,
PEPE KARMEL, JANET KOPLOS,
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NANCY PRINCENTHAL, CARTER RATCLIFF,
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ONCE UPON A TIME, 1981 2011
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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #216, 1989, installed at Mnuchin Gallery. Artwork 2017 Cindy Sherman. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
 OPENING LONDON

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 Contributors
ANICKA YI RICHARD KALINA
Seoul-born, New Yorkbased Anicka Yi, who
created this issues cover, is known for sculptures
and installations that engage multiple senses in
order to expand the art experience beyond vision.
A solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum
in New York opens this month, in conjunction
with Yis 2016 Hugo Boss Prize win. Her work is
also included in the Whitney Biennial (through
June 11). The artist has been shortlisted for the
2017 Absolut Art Award, whose winner will be
announced at the Venice Biennale in May.
CHRISTINA
CHRISTOPHER P. HEUER ROSENBERGER
Art historian Christopher P. Heuer directs
the research and academic program at the
Clark Art Institute and teaches on the graduate
faculty of Williams College, both in Williamstown,
Massachusetts. In 2014 he was appointed a senior
fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts, Washington, D.C. His book Into the
White, on Renaissance encounters with the Arctic,
is forthcoming from Zone Books/MIT Press. In
this issue, Heuer considers the legacy of the
Protestant Reformation, on the occasion of
several quincentenary exhibitions.
IAN CHENG
Muse columnist Ian Cheng is the subject of
a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 this month
(Apr. 9Sept. 25). The show features the
New Yorkbased artists Emissary trilogy The Magazine Antiques, discusses the work of
(201517), video-game-like simulations that
span human history. Chengs work, which often
explores our relationship to technology, has
recently been shown in Forking at Perfection,
a solo presentation at the Migros Museum
fr Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, and in group
exhibitions such as Dreamlands: Immersive
Cinema and Art, 19052016 at the
Whitney Museum, New York.
12 APRIL 2017
In addition to serving as a contributing editor to
this magazine, Richard Kalina is a professor of art at
Fordham University, where he chairs the department
of theater and visual arts. A critic and painter, Kalina
is also on the board of governors at the National
Academy Museum, New York. His most recent solo
show, Panamax, appeared at Lennon, Weinberg,
Inc., in New York in early 2016. This month, he
discusses on the Cy Twombly retrospective on view
at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through April 24.
An art historian living in Albuquerque, Christina
Rosenberger reviews a recent biography of Louise
Nevelson. Her latest book, Drawing the Line:
The Early Work of Agnes Martin (University of
California Press, 2016), was awarded a Meiss/
Mellon Authors Book Award from the College
Art Association in 2015. Rosenbergers research
has been supported by fellowships from the
Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual
Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.; the Harvard University Art Museums,
Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.
GLENN ADAMSON
Glenn Adamson, a senior scholar at the Yale
Center for British Art and editor-at-large for
textile artist Josh Faught. Adamson was previously
director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New
York. He joined MAD from the Victoria and
Albert Museum, London, where he served as head
of research. He most recently coauthored, with
Julia Bryan Wilson, Art in the Making (Thames
& Hudson, 2016). In 2013 Adamson received
the Iris Foundation Award for outstanding
contributions to the decorative arts.
Ivn Argote As Far As We Could Get (still), 2017. Video HD

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 Editors Letter
David Reed at his exhibition at Susan Caldwell Gallery,
New York, 1975. Photo Lisa Kahane.
EARLIER THIS YEAR, when winters gloom settled
over New York, I spent several blue-sky days in Phoenix,
speaking with local artists, curators, and museum direc-
tors. There I witnessed the same conditions found in
many parts of the country: a diverse array of visual arts
institutions and museums, energetic and serious artists,
well-intentioned curators and directors, and very little art
criticism. Recently in Seattle, Jen Graves, a respected and
stalwart art critic writing for an alternative paper (the last
such writer in town) called it quits.
Whats going on? Traditional publishing business
models are crumbling, and local newspapers are getting
clobbered in the race to go digital. Contemporary art
resources are being spent on prizes, collections, social
climbing, and all manner of self-indulgent projects,
rather than on art writing. And, you may ask, whats
happening to veteran art writers around the country
who now lack outlets for their work? Most discouraging
about all this is that there seems to be little action to
remedy the situation.
14 APRIL 2017
Turning to this months issue, we have a trio of
articles considering the intersection of art and religion.
Glenn Adamson examines a fiber art commission cur-
rently installed in the nave of a Seattle cathedral. The
work by Josh Faught interweaves themes of gay identity,
craft, and kitsch. Stepping back to the sixteenth century,
Christopher P. Heuer discusses several extraordinary
exhibitions that focused on German art and artifacts
linked to theologian Martin Luther. Five hundred years
ago Luther posted a list of grievances on a church door,
or so the legend goes. Examples of Reformation art,
including prints, altarpieces, and sculpturesas well as
requisite Cranach paintingswere presented at the
Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Morgan Library &
Museum in New York. Eleanor Heartney considers
Martin Scorseses latest film, Silence, which presents a
nuanced look at religious oppression and spiritual com-
plexity in seventeenth-century Japan. In the same article,
she examines artistic censorship in relation to Edwina
Sandyss female Christ figure, shown in a 1984 exhibition
at the New York Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Two articles on recent painting exhibitions
consider the brushstroke as a form of writing. Rich-
ard Kalina visited a major Cy Twombly retrospective
at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Raphael
Rubinstein discusses a new exhibition of David Reeds
groundbreaking 1975 Brushstroke paintings, curated by
Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool.
Anicka Yi created this months cover, which
addresses topics including odor, class, and race. These
issues will be at the heart of her solo exhibition open-
ing later this month at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York. In an interview with Ross
Simonini, Yi talks about her interest in science and
her relatively late attraction to art-making. The figure
on the cover, one of the ubiquitous trash pickers found
in downtown Manhattan, appears as if standing on a
microscope slide, literalizing the way globalization and
technology are making human beings feel like subjects
in a giant involuntary science experiment.
LINDSAY POLLOCK
 M A R I A N N E B O E S K Y G A L L E R Y

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Justin Matherly, Untitled (Fear, Anxiety and Joy), 2016, Modified gypsum,spray paint, aluminum powder, airplane ashtray, concrete, ambulatory equipment, 52 x 60 x 39 1/2 in. Justin Matherly.
Tropic, 1945, Oil on panel, 22 x 26 1/2 inches, 55.9 x 67.3 cm

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23 March 22 April 2017

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Frederick Hammersley
Paintings and Works on Paper
26 April 24 June 2017

A concise guide to some of the most
exciting new exhibitions, art fairs, and
festivals opening in April.
IMAGES
FESTIVAL
Part avant-garde film festival, part new
media extravaganza, the annual Images
Festival partners with Toronto arts organi-
zations to present eight days of screenings,
events, performances, and exhibitions.
Marking the programs thirtieth anniver-
sary, the festival this year spotlights Cana-
dian artist Deirdre Logue and London-
based filmmaker Isaac Julien. Julien also
has a show of new and recent works at
the Royal Ontario Museum through
April 23. And dont miss a one-night-only
performance of AFROGALACTICA: A
brief history of the future by Canadian-born,
Paris-based Kapwani Kiwanga in partner-
ship with the Power Plant.
Various venues, Toronto, Apr. 2027.
DOCUMENTA 14
Greeces multibillion-dollar bailout by
the European Union and the ongoing
migrant crisis serve as the backdrop for
Documenta 14, which this year is split
between Athens and its usual host city
of Kassel. In Learning from Athens,
artistic director Adam Szymczyk hopes
to address tensions between Greece and
Germany in order to unsettle prevailing
notions of identity, place, and property.
Artists, including Regina Jos Galindo,
Hiwa K, and William Pope.L, have
been commissioned to develop projects
for both sites that deal with European
sociopolitical realities.
Various venues, Athens, Greece, Apr. 8July 16,
and Kassel, Germany, June 10Sept. 17.
THE BRIEF
BEING AGE OF EMPIRES
MATERIAL The arts flourished during the Qin and
Han dynasties, when Chinas warring
There has been much hand-wringing over
states were united into a sophisticated
how digital technologies mediate our daily
and powerful kingdom. Age of Empires:
lives. The symposium Being Material
Chinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynas-
gathers academics, scientists, artists, and
ties (221 bcad 220) assembles more Kapwani Kiwanga:
writers to discuss recent developments
than 160 ancient objectsceramics, AFROGALACTICA:
in engineering and design. Technologi- A brief history of the
textiles, sculptures, paintings, calligraphy future, 2012, live
cally engaged panelists, such as fashion
samples, and architectural modelsto reading with video
designer Hussein Chalayan and artist
elucidate aspects of Chinese cultural projection. Courtesy
Trevor Paglen, discuss themes ranging Galerie Tanja
identity that persist to this day. (The Wanger, Berlin.
from the influence of programming on
name China derives from the Qin
creativity to wearable tech to the shifting
pronounced Chinwhile the Han
nature of material culture in the digital
established a lasting model of imperial
era. The symposium is capped off by a
order. Chinese still refer to themselves as
concert featuring cellist Maya Beiser in
tribute to late composer Pauline Oliveros.
the Han people.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology,
Cambridge, Mass., Apr. 2122.
Apr. 3July 16.
ART COLOGNE
Touted as the oldest fair of its kind, Art
Cologne, which opened with eighteen
galleries in 1967, is reinvigorating its con-
temporary program following its fiftieth
birthday this year. The inaugural New
Market section features gallerieslike The
Journal Gallery (New York), Project Native
Informant (London), and Temnikova &
Kasela (Tallinn, Estonia)that have been
in operation for ten years or less. The fairs
main section, now boasting approximately
Burial suit of
two hundred galleries, welcomes first-time,
blue-chip participants Gagosian (New
PAUL RAMIREZ Dou Wan, western
Han dynasty
York), Galerie Daniel Templon (Paris), and JONAS (206 bc9 ad),
jade with gold
White Cube (London). wire, 67 inches
Known for participatory artworks that
Koelnmesse, Cologne, Germany, renegotiate the roles of artist and spec-
long. Courtesy
Metropolitan
Apr. 2629. tator, New Yorkbased Paul Ramirez Museum of Art,
Jonas (b. 1965) invites audience mem- New York.
bers to perform actions like tapping
a circular arrangement of water-filled
wine bottles with a mallet to plunk out
the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Atlas,
Plural, Monumental, his survey at the
Paul Ramirez
Contemporary Arts Museum Hous- Jonas: His Truth is
ton, includes sculptures, photographs, Marching On, 1993,
videos, drawings, performative lectures, wood, wine bottles,
water, mallet, and
and participatory works produced hardware, 84 inches
between 1991 and 2016. across. Courtesy
Contemporary Arts
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Museum Houston.
Apr. 29Aug. 6.
The Brief is compiled by
Julia Wolkoff
ART IN AMERICA 21
 FIRST LOOK

View of Rafa
Esparzas
performance
i have never been
here before, 2015.
Courtesy LACE
(Los Angeles
Contemporary
Exhibitions). Photo
Betsy Winchell.

Rafa Esparza
by Erick Lyle

THE HISTORICALLY sensitive site-specific installations
and performances made by Rafa Esparza in his native Los
Angeles contest the citys official booster narratives, reveal-
ing various submerged community traumas, rituals, and his-
tories obscured by redevelopment. In recent years, the artist
has transformed the interior of the nonprofit LACEs white
cube gallery on Hollywood Boulevard into that of an adobe
hut and created a temporary public sauna on the former site
of an East LA bathhouse popular among closeted gay men.
In 2013 Esparza staged a street performance in Chinatown
near the site of the Chinese Massacre of 1871the larg-
est lynching in US historyconnecting old racial conflicts
to the frictions now generated by the gentrification of the
area, particularly the emergence of galleries there. In an
era marked by the ubiquity of creative placemakingthe
top-down rebranding of low-rent neighborhoods as arts
districtsEsparzas ephemeral memorials set in motion a
kind of place unmaking.
Esparzas works layer local history and bodily memory,
often prompting a frisson when the artist puts himself in
physical danger. The Chinatown performance, for instance,
ended with Esparza lying on his back with his arms bound,
in the middle of the crowded street while a collaborator
threw lit firecrackers at his face, which was protected only by
a layer of freshly applied plaster. Esparzas work is under-
girded by deeply personal meditations on masculinity, race,
Latino family tradition, and sexualitythemes that coalesce
most powerfully in an ongoing collaboration between the
artist and his father. The two had a falling out when Esparza CURRENTLY
ON VIEW
came out as queer. In an effort to mend the relationship,
Work by Rafa
Esparza asked his father to teach him how to fabricate the Esparza in the
earthen bricks that he had made as a young laborer in rural Whitney Biennial,
Whitney Museum
Mexico. Since 2011, these bricks, which the two make by
of American Art,
hand from a mixture of dirt, dung, and water from the Los New York, through
Angeles River, have become a recurring fixture of Esparzas June 11.
performances and increasingly ambitious installations.
The artist has used more than three thousand bricks ERICK LYLE is
to make an immersive installation for the Whitney Bien- the editor of SCAM
magazine and the
nialan adobe room hung with works by his friends and
author of Streetopia
collaborators, where he hosts performances. Esparza said in (2015).
an interview that the work intervenes in the westward flow
of European colonialization. By bringing earth from Los
Angeles to New York, he attempts to unmake the traditional
from-New-York-outward narrative of US art history.

ART IN AMERICA 23
Urs Fischer Urs Fischers work is anchored in the body and
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imaginary realms and a sense of the fantastical.
With over 30 works installed throughout 10
galleries, he creates a sprawling tableau that
posits our negotiation of the world as a process
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Urs Fischer, Snail Crossing Helmet, 2016, Cast bronze, cast stainless steel, oil paint
11 1/2 x 9 5/8 x 12 1/2 in. (29.2 x 24.4 x 31.8 cm).Edition of 2 & 2 AP
Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Massimo De
Carlo, Milan. Photo: Mats Nordman.
 Paintings from 1956 to 1999

Bernard Buffet, La plage, 1956, oil on canvas, 114 x 195 cm 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

980 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10075
VENUS April 5 May 27, 2017
MANHATTAN LOS ANGELES
 AT

PA L M S P R I N G S A R T M U S E U M

JEFFREY GIBSON: ALIVE!

THROUGH APRIL 30
From original negative, gift of Dr. Beatrice Willard, Palm Springs Art Museum (XL33)
Stephen H. Willard, Sand Dunes (with Santa Rosa Mountains in the distance), 1925.

O N T H E G R I D : A LO O K AT
S E T T L E M E N T PAT T E R N S I N
THE HIGH DESERT
T H R O U G H M AY 2 5

G A L E N F I R S T F R I DAY:
D E S E R T X PA R T Y
APRIL 7

As a Desert X program partner, Palm Springs Art Museum presents a range of

artist installations, special projects, conversations, and public programs.

psmuseum.org | desertx.org
 PERFORMANCE

Tehching
Hsieh:One Year
Performance 1981
1982, New York.
Courtesy Gilbert
and Lila Silverman
Collection, Detroit,
and Sean Kelly,
New York.

Time Out
by Travis Jeppesen
THE WINTER OF 198182 was one of the coldest on your fellow humansnegligent passersby, street thugs, police
record for New York City. In the fall, Tehching Hsieh, a officers, and property owners whose patience your very
then little-known performance artist and an illegal immi- presence tests. The threat of annihilation is very real, though OPENING
grant from Taiwan, had declared that he would not take most often you are simply asked to move onto keep mov- SOON
shelter for an entire year. So throughout that winter, in the ing when there really is no other place to go. Tehching Hsiehs
exhibition Doing
freezing cold, Hsieh could often be spotted on the streets Outdoor Piece could be read as a dramatization of Time, at the
of SoHo warming his hands over a fire. The only thing Hsiehs immigration status in New York, in all of America, Taiwanese pavilion,
separating him from a typical homeless person was a sign at the time. He was an undocumented alien, a stateless person. Palazzo delle
Prigioni, Venice
hanging from his knapsack, specifying the rules of the And when you have no nation to call your own, you have Biennale, May 13
performance that he had embarked upon. For Outdoor the burden of freedom to contend with: your home is essen- Nov. 26.
Piece,1 he forbade himself to enter any building, subway, tially anywhere, everywhere. You are left to wanderand
train, car, airplane, ship, cave, tent from September 26, 1981, to do little else. TRAVIS JEPPESEN
to September 26, 1982. Taiwan, a country that is not currently recognized by is a writer and artist
Surrendering to the natural elements for a prolonged the United States or most other nations, is the place he living in Berlin.

period makes one, in effect, an animal. The problem is that ran away from, at a time when it was a military dictator-
youre still in human form and thus vulnerable not only to ship. Hsieh trained as a merchant sailor, jumped ship in the
the violence of the elements but also to systematic abuses by Delaware River, and swam to shore.

ART IN AMERICA 27
One Year Performance
19781979, New
York. Courtesy Sean
Kelly. Photo Cheng
Wei Kuong.

All that is left now of Hsiehs yearlong exposure is the

documentation. Thats because the artist doesnt re-create
his works. And he creates no new work. He has given up
art-making altogether to devote himself to a different task:
documentary re-presentation.
The process is based on five works that he made
between 1978 and 1986, each a performance lasting twelve
months. In the first, known as the Cage Piece (197879),
Hsieh locked himself in an 11-by-9-by-8-foot cage
he had installed in the loft where he was living at the time
in downtown Manhattan. He had a friend deliver food,
remove his waste, and take photos to visually confirm
One of 366 daily the performance. For the duration, Hsieh eschewed
maps Hsieh made
duringOne Year reading, writing, conversation, listening to the radio, and
Performance watching TV.
19811982.
Courtesy Gilbert Time Clock Piece (198081), the second perfor-
and Lila Silverman mance, is today the best known, its documentation a
Collection and
Sean Kelly.
curatorial favorite. Every hour, Hsieh punched a time clock
in his studio, took a self-portrait, and left the room; he also
scrupulously recorded each occasion when he missed his
punch time, or checked in early or late. At the beginning
of the project, he shaved his head. Consequently, in both
the completed photo sequence and a six-minute compila-
tion video, you can see the artists hair grow back.
Then came the outdoor performance, followed by
Rope Piece (198384), in which Hsieh and artist Linda
Montano were tied at the waist with opposite ends of an
eight-foot rope. The pair stipulated that they would not
touch each other as they went about their activities for the
next twelve months. For the fifth one-year performance, No

28 APRIL 2017 PERFORMANCE

Hsieh has given up art-making altogether to devote himself to
documentary re-presentation.

Art Piece (198586), Hsieh vowed to abstain from making,

seeing, discussing, or reading about art.
Hsiehs endurance activities culminated in a project
spanning thirteen years (198699), during which he could
make art but not show any of it. The worklasting from his
thirty-sixth birthday to his forty-ninthconstituted a sort
of tapering-off, a drawn-out withdrawal from the world of
creation, the world of doing. Yet Hsiehs retreat was based
on a rather equivocal premiseparticularly in light of his
current re-presentation phase, which coincides with the
art markets rediscovery of the artists work, its chance to
digest (i.e., capitalize on) his past production. How to docu-
ment a thirteen-year span of something that is not meant
to be revealed? What art was createdif any? At the end,
using cutout letters of the sort associated with ransom notes,
Hsieh simply issued a statement reading: I kept myself alive.
I passed the Dec 31, 1999. The artist attempted to sum
up the whole experience by calling it Wasting Time Art. In
actuality, he later admitted, he simply ran out of ideas.

AROUND THE year 2000, after that project ended and

Hsieh announced that he would make no more art, he met the
British performance-studies scholar Adrian Heathfield. Soon,
Heathfield was the foremost authority on Hsiehs workand,
frequently, the artists spokesman. In 2009 Heathfield pub-
lished the multiauthor volume Out of Now: The Lifeworks of
Tehching Hsieh, the definitive monograph on Hsiehs work.2
Although Hsieh has not lived in his native land for more
than four decades, he will nonetheless represent Taiwan in
the 2017 Venice Biennalewith an exhibition called Doing
Time, curated by Heathfield. This has ignited debates, both
within and outside of Taiwan: Is Hsieh still a Taiwanese art-
ist? (Technically, yes and no. He was granted United States
citizenship in 1988. Taiwan recognizes dual citizenship; the
US is neutral on the issue.) Is he even still an artist?
Tehching has spent most of his time doing time,
Heathfield said last fall at a Taipei news conference
announcing their plans. But by doing time, he became a
person who is out of timenot in his own time. A person
very much predicting a future time.3
Hsieh concurred, somewhat cagily. Since 2000, I have
said I wouldnt create more artworks, he noted. But Im not
dead yet. Im still alive. And I show my work, so that makes
me a sub-artist, in my own words. In Taiwan, we often say,
Im just trying to make both ends meet. . . . But Im still
alive, Im still a witness, so I can give you all sorts of clues
related to this crime scene.
The exhibition in Venice will feature documentation of
Time Clock Piece and Outdoor Piece, the latter material
rarely shown before. It is said to consist largely of photographs
and hand-drawn maps of Hsiehs peregrinations around
New York City. Heathfield reads the piece as revelatory of a One Year Performance
19801981, New
moment to come, the moment we presently occupy: York. Left, the first
five hourly images
from Hsiehs Time
We see in the Outdoor Piece that Tehching Clock Piece, and
understands something that will have happened to right, the last five
us all, which is that life is becoming more precari- hourly images.
Courtesy Sean Kelly.
ous, unstable, itinerant. He sees that we are as a
species becoming increasingly cast out of our securi-
ties, outside of our dwellings. The real issues for the
human subject in the future might have to do with
our illicit status, our migrant life. That we are in a
sense people constantly on the move. This involves
us in a new relation to the elements, to outside, to
nature. It involves us in a new struggle to survive, to
create conditions in which we can survive as human
subjects. So . . . this is why Tehching is our contem-
porary, not a historical artistthough, of course, his
work took place in the past.

PERFORMANCE ART IN AMERICA 29

 One Venice Biennale piece
records Hsiehs leap from a
building, breaking both ankles.

In a way, Hsiehs ongoing project of re-presentation of past

work fits well with the contemporary art worlds obsession with
the archive. Modernisms insistence on making it new has
given way to a widespread concern with preserving vestiges of
the past that are threatened with loss.
Hsieh and Heathfield both stressed, however, that the
Venice project is not a retrospective. If I do a retrospective,
said Hsieh, I would do it another way. He was not keen on
doing the project at all. When initially notified of his selection
by the organizing committee in Taiwan, he turned the offer
down. Eventually, the organizers won out. Ive never been to the
Venice Biennale before, he said. Id actually never even been
to Venice before. But I went this year, after I was selected to
represent Taiwan, in order to see the space.
Since 1995, Taiwans presentations at the Venice Bien-
nale have been held in the Palazzo delle Prigioni, just off Saint
Marks Square on the Grand Canal. The Palazzo was originally a
supplement to the jail facilities in the Palazzo Ducale, to which
it is joined by the Bridge of Sighs. Once they told me it was a
Jump Piece, 1973, former prison, Hsieh said, I knew then I would not show the
Taiwan. Courtesy Cage Piece, as that would endow it with too much political
Sean Kelly.
meaning. With the Rope Piece, that was a collaboration with
another artist, which makes it not so easy to show. Thats why
we settled on the Time Clock Piece and the Outdoor Piece.
Heathfield stresses that this is the first time materials docu-
menting the two works will be shown in concert, and that each
re-presentation will be more complete than in previous separate
exhibitions. Promising to be even more of a revelation, however,
is the inclusion of several early works. Made when Hsieh was still
living in Taiwan, these pieces have never been shown in public. Hsieh
and Heathfield were mum on the details when they made their
announcement; in fact, they were still looking through the archives,
trying to decide which works to choose and how to present them. In
February, Hsiehs New York gallery, Sean Kelly, revealed that one of
the pieces will document the young artists intentional leap from a
building, which resulted in two broken ankles.
Whats certain is that Hsiehs Venice endeavor is likely to
be a step forward in his ongoing projecthis ongoing projec-
tion, we might say. This is not a simple historical exhibition,
said Heathfield. This is really an exhibition in which time is in
question. His eyes sparkled with excitement, but, when pressed,
he would go into no further detail, other than to add: With
Tehching, there is always something new in the archive.
1. Officially, Hsiehs endurance pieces are now titled One Year Performance 19811982,
etc. For clarity and economy, however, I have used their long-familiar informal names
throughout this text.
2. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. The other major contributors are Marina Abramovi,
Carol Becker, Tim Etchells, Peggy Phelan, and Santiago Sierra.
3. This and all subsequent quotes by Heathfield and Hsieh are from their Venice Biennale
press conference at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Nov. 21, 2016.

30 APRIL 2017 PERFORMANCE

JASON MIDDLEBROOK
Represented by
AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE
525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011
tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com
TEFAF IS
COMING

MAY 4-8, 2017 OCTOBER 2731, 2017 MARCH, 2018

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FINE & DECORATIVE ART 7,000 YEARS OF
ART & DESIGN FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1920 ART HISTORY

www.tefaf.com
Magnolia, 2016, oil on linen, 60 x 82 inches

BRIAN RUTENBERG
L O W C O U N T R Y: N E W PA I N T I N G S

March 23 May 6, 2017

475 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022 (212) 355 4545 forumgallery.com

Forum Gallery exhibits at Art Market San Francisco, April 27 30, 2017
at the Fort Mason Center Festival Pavilion, 2 Marina Blvd, San Francisco, CA 94123
 SIGHTLINES
FAIR TRADE
Monoblock, a 1971 piece by Mexican
multidisciplinary artist Juan Jos Gurrola
(19352007), responds to the 1923 Bucareli
Treaty. The treaty purported to compensate
US businesses for property damages caused
by the Mexican Revolution. A common
belief in Mexico is that the document
prohibited the production of specialized
machinery, like the titular car engine part,
hindering the countrys economic growth.
Photos: Esparza Chong Cuy: Camila Cossio; Barragn: June Canedo; Latinx Summit: Maria Fernanda Molins; Begley: courtesy Field of Vision, New York.

With international trade agreements

now being questioned, this photo- and
text-based project, which included a

Barragn: Spring/Summer 2017
campaign.
BRAND NAME
Gender-bending Mexican
designer Victor Barragn,
who lives and works
in New York, recently
rebranded his acclaimed
underground label
YtinifninfinitY as simply
Barragn. Taking inspira-
tion from the internet and
early 2000s culture, this
forward-thinking fashion
house is paving the way for
many Mexican designers.
ART OF THE
EVERYDAY
Originally organized by
Lina Bo Bardi at the Museo
de Arte de So Paulo during
its opening program of
exhibitions in 1969, A mo
do povo brasileiro (The
Hand of the Brazilian Peo-
ple) was recently restaged
at MASP through the
curatorial efforts of Adriano
Pedrosa, Julieta Gonzlez,
and Tomas Toledo. With
over one thousand craft and
folk art items, the show is a
testament to the countrys
rich and diverse culture,
recalling a Brazil that is now
hard to find.
performance with the monoblock inside an
industrial fridge, seems especially relevant.
City, where he was preparing the second installment of
Lechuga Zafiro performing at the Latinx Summit,
2016. Courtesy N.A.A.F.I, Mexico City.
SONGS OF SOLIDARITY
Last summer the Mexico Citybased
music collective and record label
N.A.A.F.I launched its first-ever Latinx
Summit, a festival presenting some of
the most boundary-pushing musical acts
in Latin America. The daylong con-
cert showcased acts like Mexicos Lao,
Uruguays Lechuga Zafiro, and Chiles
IMAABS in a strong display of pan-
American solidarity.
Jos Esparza
Chong Cuy
The curator shares ve recent
insights with Ross Simonini.
Jos Esparza Chong Cuy spoke to me from Mexico
the exhibition series Pasajeros (Passengers), which
he co-created while associate curator at the Museo
Jumex. The series highlights historical figures who left
an indelible mark on the citys artistic culture. Esparza
holds a masters degree in critical, curatorial, and
conceptual practices in architecture from Columbia
University, New York; this iteration of Pasajeros
focuses on architecture critic Esther McCoy.
Esparza, a strong proponent of Latin-American
culture, recently joined the Museum of Contempo-
rary Art, Chicago, as associate curator. His curatorial
debut here (Apr. 15Aug. 20) is the first US museum
exhibition for Tania Prez Crdova, a sculptor and
performance artist from Mexico. Her sculptures are
very much alive, Esparza said. Shes really trying
to position the viewer in another persons shoes.
Now more than ever, its important that we think of
other people as ourselves.
UP AGAINST THE WALL
Josh Begleys short film Best of Luck With the Wall went
viral on social media a few months ago. Edited with
Laura Poitras and her team at Field of Vision, the
film is an eye-opening visual essay composed of two
hundred thousand satellite images from along the US-
Mexico border, emphasizing the complicated nature of
the Trump administrations plan to build a wall there.

Josh Begley: Best of Luck With the Wall, 2016, video, 7 minutes.

ART IN AMERICA 35
ANIMAL
FARM

Curated by Sadie Laska

May October 2017

The Brant Foundation

Art Study Center
941 North Street, Greenwich, CT 06831
www.brantfoundation.org (203) 869-0611
 ATLAS DUBAI
Art Without America
by Rahel Aima
ON JANUARY 27, barely a week into his presidency,
Donald Trump signed an executive order that temporarily
barred nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from
entering the United States. The immediate ramifications
were catastrophic for refugees in transit, travelers holding
valid visas, and, initially, even green-card holders, who sud-
denly found themselves cut off from the American lives
they had built. According to The Guardian, some people
who had merely visited the seven banned countries were
detained at the border. The executive order was quickly
dubbed the Muslim ban.
As of this writing, the Muslim ban appears to have
stalled in court, but it is likely that the coming months will
see the implementation of a similar edict, albeit one that is
less openly discriminatory and more legally sound. Whatever
the ultimate fate of the ban, the episode points to a broader
shift in how the US is perceived in the Middle East.
In Dubai, a global city thats home to many citizens of
the banned countries, the news set off a series of aftershocks
that left behind a low rumble of anxiety and uncertainty.
Thaier Helal: A
Political Map of the
World, 2013, mixed
mediums on canvas,
67 by 134 inches.
Courtesy Ayyam
Gallery, Dubai.
One measure of this uncertainty can be found in the citys
relatively young and highly cosmopolitan art world. Many
of Dubais most important galleries specialize in Iranian or
Arab art, and their staffers hail from blacklisted nations.
I reached out to some of the citys leading dealers to inquire
about their perceptions of this hostile mood in the US, a CURRENTLY
country that had, in recent years, become a key destination ON VIEW
Rebel, Jester, Mystic,
for sales despite the expense and difficulty of traveling there.
Poet: Contemporary
It became clear from these conversations that the Persians, at the
ban jeopardized whatever attraction the American art world Aga Khan Museum,
Toronto, through
might have held for Dubai-based artists and dealers.
June 4.
Mexican-Lebanese curator Maymanah Farhat, artistic
director of Ayyam Gallery, which has a program of modern RAHEL AIMA
is a writer based in
and contemporary Syrian art, anticipated that the Trump
Dubai.
era would be sure to shift the dynamics of the international
art world. She predicted that the USs role as an influential
center will diminish in the next four years, derailing the recent
attempts of its art fairs and museums to be more inclusive.
While there are more than fifty galleries operating in
Dubai, only about eight, all clustered in and around Alserkal
ART IN AMERICA 37
Mohannad Orabi:
Untitled,from the
Family Portrait
series,2014,
mixed mediums on
canvas,55 by 78
inches. Courtesy
Ayyam Gallery.
The Muslim ban jeopardized
whatever attraction the American
art world might have held for
Dubai-based artists and dealers.
Avenue, have strong ties outside the region. Most of these
market work by artists from the Middle East to collectors and
institutions around the region and in Western Europe. Still,
this ban comes at a time when Dubai galleries are making
inroads into US markets. In the days during which the ban
was in effect, dealers postponed trips to the US and fretted
about whether they would be able to participate in upcoming
American fairs. Some of their artists missed their own openings
abroad for fear of not being able to return to their homes in the
US. Shahpour Pouyan, an Iranian who is based in New York
and is represented by Dubais Lawrie Shabibi, did not travel
to Toronto for the Aga Khan Museums Rebel, Jester, Mystic,
Poet: Contemporary Persians, which opened in February.
While the casual cruelty of the ban horrified Dubais
art scene, the relatively privileged proprietors of the citys
galleries remained mostly insulated from its direct effects. As
is common among Dubais moneyed elites, local dealers from
the banned countries generally have second passports from
the UK, Canada, or another Western nation. Many of the
bigger regional artists represented by Dubai galleries also
reside in Western countries. Lawrie Shabibis roster includes
38 APRIL 2017 ATLAS
Mounir Fatmi (Morocco), Nadia Kaabi-Linke (Tunisia), and
Farhad Ahrarnia (Iran)prominent figures who now live
and work in European capitals. Yet gallery workers rarely
enjoy the same global mobility as senior staff. As Farhat
explained, because her staff is mostly Syrian, the ban makes
working in the US virtually impossible.
In truth, its never been easy for Syrians, Iraqis, or Iranians
to obtain US visas, and Trumps effort can be understood as an
intensification of long-standing policies. A 2015 change in visa
procedures, introduced by the Obama administration, mandated
that any visitor to the US who has visited one of the seven
countries subsequently included in Trumps ban had to apply for
a visa in advance and face heightened scrutiny at the border. The
prospect of confronting additional hurdles to entering the US
already an arduous processhad a chilling effect on regional
travel. Dont forget we do go to Iran, cautioned Iraqi-British
Asmaa Al-Shabibi, who directs the Lawrie Shabibi gallery. We
have to do studio visits there because we have artists there.
Other barriers to the American art world also predate
the Trump ban. Artists and gallerists described the regional
biases, reinforced by market imperatives, that have long
pervaded the supposedly global art world. Farhat cited an
informal rule that those hoping to enter the New York mar-
ket, for example, needed to partner with a local gallery. Its
a different type of vetting that is equally limiting, she said.
The result is that the American art scene isnt as cosmopoli-
tan as it claims to be. Al-Shabibi was even more succinct
when asked about the current climate, saying pointedly: Its
always been America First, hasnt it?
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 THESE GALLERISTS ARE equally aware of the nativist
and xenophobic sentiments that exist below the surface of
Dubais cosmopolitan image. The art scene exists as a mirror
image of the racial hierarchy that structures other aspects of
social life in the city. As Kourosh Nouri, the Iranian-Austrian
codirector of Carbon 12, which is unique in eschewing the
regional focus for a program featuring germanophone artists,
notes, It is significantly harder to sell an Austrian artist in
Nazgol Ansarinia: Dubai than it is a Syrian or a Bahraini. A white European
Article 45, Pillars,
2015, epoxy resin
may command a much higher salary and benefits on the job
and paint, 20 by market, but his or her artwork will find very little traction.
15 by 15 inches. While the local collector base has slowly become more open,
Courtesy Green Art
Gallery, Dubai. people do still want to acquire work by artists who share
their ethnic backgrounds, which Nouri sees as symptomatic
of the markets immaturity. Geopolitical tensions leave their
mark too. Nouri has observed some Arab collectors who
will not touch an Iranian artwork. Nouri added that this
regionalization of art becomes a kind of protectionism, and
it does a favor to no one.
Still, most of the dealers I spoke with view the US
market with a modicum of optimism. Yasmin Atassi, the
Syrian-Canadian director of Dubais Green Art Gallery
known for its conceptually rigorous programhas long
focused on building relationships with European audiences.

I dont think Americans like political art. Actually, I know

they dont! However, she cited a reason to believe that this
bias may be changingin part because Trump is forcing it.
This is the first time Americans are faced with political
problems on this scale and that has, I think, expanded a lot
of their thinking, she said. But you know, weve been living
with political problems all our life. It is all we think about.
Politics is in our veins, in our blood, and it shows in the art.
Indeed, in response to the ban, US institutions have
rushed to exhibit work by artists from the affected countries.
Kamrooz Aram:
Ephesian Fog, 2016,
A prominent hanging of such work by the Museum of Mod-
wood; terrazzo ern Art in New York was a much appreciated gesture, if only
and brass pedestal; for its symbolic value. Their swift response is fantastic,
ceramic vase;
acrylic, oil, and Atassi said, echoing the sentiments of other gallerists, and I
pencil on linen; think MoMA as an institution, with its power and strength,
in Ornament
for Indifferent
says a lot, but it also poses the question, why did they have
Architecture, 2017, to wait for a ban to unearth these works?
at the Museum Atassi anticipated heightened attention for her US fair
Dhondt-Dhaenens,
Belgium. Courtesy presentations, even as she remains wary of tokenism. Her
Green Art Gallery. Armory Show offering happened to comprise two Iranian
artists, Nazgol Ansarinia and Kamrooz Aram, and she wor-
ried about becoming a tourist booth. Theres definitely
going to be a fetish period, she said. But, while acknowl-
edging the often cynical logic of the art market, Atassi, like
everyone I spoke with, affirmed the importance of art in
opening up discourse across closed (or closing) borders.

Atlas is a rotating series of columns by writers from

Dubai; Stavanger, Norway; and Miami.

40 APRIL 2017 ATLAS

 Las Terrenas Abstraction V, 2015, oil on linen, 52'' x 74''

Julio Valdez
Dreams & Reflections
New Paintings

7 April9 May 2017

JUNE KELLY GALLERY

166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012/212-226-1660
www.junekellygallery.com
 MUSE

Ian Cheng: Emissary

Forks at Perfection,
201516, ongoing
digital simulation.

Portal_Ranch.txt
by Ian Cheng
I KEEP A running list of quotes, aphorisms, and phrases on
my iPhone Notes app. I call them portals. The only require-
ment is that each portal is short. Ease of recall is key because
it is the feeling of ease that lets me begin to play freely with
the ideas that each portal contains. It is a way to trick the brain
into hoarding complexities. I constantly reshuffle portals to
reflect how Im feeling in my life and my work. Sometimes I
make up portals or misattribute them. Nothing is sacred here
CURRENTLY
ON VIEW
except for the routine of tending to them like a rancher. Over
Ian Chengs solo time, I can see which portals endure as centers of gravity, and
exhibition, at which portals were actually just fast-food energy. Its a live,
MoMA PS1,
New York, through
ongoing process. Whatever the current order of the list is, thats
Sept. 25. the story of now. Theres a saying that you are the average of
the five people you spend the most time with. In the always
unpredictable future, I believe your sense of agency is the
IAN CHENG
is an artist based average of the portals you keep.
in New York. See
Contributors page.
Take a routine, interrupt it
[From Keith Johnstone, on improvising a story. Also applies
to imagining new forms as the accumulation of mutations on
familiar forms: smart house. self-driving car. three-parent baby.]
Art = playing with the human nervous system from the
outside in
[Ive come to believe that art is really the art of hacking the
human nervous system, and composing with its sensations
and feelings. This is the implicit agreement between a viewer
and an artist. Once a viewers limbic system is engaged, the
artist can portal in almost any content or argument. But what
argument is worth making? And what composition of nerves
needs to be touched right now? And what container form
does the artist devise to hold all this? Perhaps together, these
qualities can be deployed to touch something beyond our
human nature, to allow us to exercise stretching outside of
ourselves.]
emissary
[Ive named several recent works after this word. It comes
from the title of the book The Master and His Emissary, by
Iain McGilchrist. I think of an emissary as an organism who
attempts to stretch the container of itself, however foolish. It
is the figure who is navigating between unraveling old reali-
ties and emerging weird ones.]

42 APRIL 2017
E3 Live Brain-On + Concentrace mineral supplement
[I met a 70-year-old author who looked 45, in great shape and
great wit. This is the magic he recommended alongside regular
exercise and no sugar or dairy.]

change your state to change your mind

[From a Tony Robbins audiobook. I think about this when I
feel stuck or anxious or upset. The mind cant talk itself out
of itself. It needs new inputs. So I physically get up and go
somewhere or rearrange my space. Related: the body is the
user interface to the brain. if you dont participate in changing
your physical state, your de-facto environment will program
your brain for you.]

Reality is that which doesnt go away when you stop

believing in it
[Philip K. Dick]

Seeking Truth (ST) vs. Seeking Normalcy (SN). Speaking in

Stories (SS) vs. Speaking in Codes (SC)
[These are the two dimensions of an artists psychology that
Screenshot of
Ive been boiling down to their most metaphysically primitive. the Notes app on
From this you can derive 4 personality types of art: Flag Art Chengs iPhone.
(SNxSC), New Art (STxSC), Good Art (SNxSS), Portal
Art (STxSS)]

Formula for the next 10,000 startups: whatever we previously

electrified, were now going to cognify.
[From Kevin Kelly. Also applies to art. In making simulations,
Ive come to take greatest pleasure in composing different
models of the mind together for the simulated agents. Minds
as a compositional space.]

A writer is a student of human nature. A writer is limited

only by their understanding and curiosity of human behavior.
[From Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter/director]

The allure of pastoralism

[From Ventakesh Rao, Breaking Smart Season 1. The troubles
our country face right now are in part rooted in the conflict
between life scripts that idealize the past and the sense that
those scripts are losing meaning day by day. Related thought:
We dont just fight/flight from physical threats, we fight/
flight from ideas that threaten our life script.]

What bits of human nature are actually sacred?

[I sober myself with this question whenever I have a gut reac-
tion against something radically new, which is more and more
the more I age. VR. Blockchain. Three-parent baby. Artificial
meat. Cloning.]
Infinite Game of Thrones
[A mutation of James Carses idea of Finite and Infinite
Games and George RR Martin. Martin said he wrote A Game
of Thrones because he wanted to know what happens AFTER
you win the war and have to actually figure out the tax codes
of Westeros. Winninga finite game with a fixed goalis
a LOT easier than indefinitely governingan infinite game
where the only goal is to keep the game going.]
I am a contradiction. three in one. one in three.
[From The Young Pope. Relates to Marvin Minskys The
Society of Mind, the idea that you are actually a composition of
multiple subagents. Also that you yourself might be a neuron in
an emerging superorganism intelligence. God (as higher dimen-
sional complexity) suddenly doesnt seem so out there.]

ART IN AMERICA 43
S H E L LY M A L K I N
O F PA R A D I S E , S TO R M S & B U T T E R F L I E S

7 29 APRIL JA MES GR AHAM & SONS 2 7 E 6 7 N YC

G R A H A M 1 8 5 7. C O M 2 1 2 5 3 5 5 76 7 C ATA L O G AVA I L A B L E W I T H E S S AY B Y K A R L K U S S E R O W
PARRISH ART MUSEUM
WATER MILL, NY

May 7 July 30, 2017

John Graham: Maverick Modernist

John D. Graham (American, born Ukraine, 18861961)

Head of a Woman, 1954
Art. Illuminated. Oil, chalk, ballpoint pen, colored pencil, pencil, brush, pen,
and ink on tracing paper, 24 x 18 inches
parrishart.org @ parrishart #parrishartmuseum Collection of Leonard and Louise Riggio, New York. Photo by John Labbe
 ART & RELIGION
Varieties of Faith
by Eleanor Heartney
IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY Japan, officials of the
Tokugawa regime forced Christians to renounce their faith by
stepping on a fumiea bronze tile bearing a relief image of Jesus or
Mary. The Tokugawa shogunates suppression of Western religion,
part of a broad policy aimed at isolating Japan from foreign influ-
ence during the era of European colonialism, was largely successful.
Today, only about 1 percent of the Japanese population identify as
practicing Christians. Many of the surviving fumie are on display at
the Tokyo National Museum, their softly rounded edges attesting
to the thousands of feet pressed on them during the 250 years of
religious persecution initiated by the Tokugawa.
A fumie is a peculiar kind of iconan anti-icon, reallycre-
ated by nonbelievers to trap the faithful. Its spiritual significance
for the missionaries and their followers is thus divorced from the
motivations of those who created it. The fumie offer both an image
of Christian faith and a test of belief in the face of a hostile culture.
Because they embody this fundamental tension, these reliefs, pro-
duced centuries ago, offer a touchstone for contemporary artistic
reflections on religious experience.
Rodrigues (Andrew
Garfield) stepping
on a fumie in Martin
Scorseses Silence,
2016. Courtesy
Paramount Pictures,
SharpSword Films,
and Al Films. Photo
Kerry Brown.
The fumie lie at the heart of Martin Scorseses new film,
Silence, a faithful adaptation of a 1966 novel of the same name by
Shsaku End. Both the book and the film recount the tribula-
tions of two Portuguese Jesuits, fathers Sebastian Rodrigues and
Francisco Garupe, who travel to Japan in 1638 to search for their
mentor, father Cristvo Ferreira, who has reportedly recanted his
faith by stepping on a fumie. After witnessing the persecution of
members of Japans underground Christian communities, the pro-
ELEANOR
tagonist, father Rodrigues, also steps on a fumie to prevent further HEARTNEY is a
torture of the ragtag flock to whom he has been ministering. writer and critic based
in New York.
Based on a true story (the epilogue to Ends Silence includes
an eyewitness report by Dutch traders about the fate of the priests
on whom the novel is based), the book sparked controversy when it
was first published. Japanese Christians condemned it, questioning
the novels focus on the foreigners who disavowed their faith rather
than the Japanese martyrs who died for theirs. But while Chris-
tians boycotted the book, young leftists took it up as a metaphor
for the political repression of Marxism in postwar Japan, helping to
make Silence a bestseller.1
ART IN AMERICA 47
 For Scorsese, Ends Silence At first, in scenes of torture and compulsion, the signifi-
cance of the fumie appears to derive from the belief among
reveals arts ability to express the Japanese Christians that they are a physical embodiment of
divine authority. However, End leads us to understand that,
ambiguities of lived religion. in fact, the real power of the fumie is in their message of mercy
and forgiveness. At a crucial moment when the Inquisitor
demands that Rodrigues step on the depiction of Christ, God
breaks his silence and the priest hears the figure depicted on
the relief calling to him: Trample! It was to be trampled on
by men that I was born into this world. It was to share mens
pain that I carried my cross.4 Rodrigues complies, making an
outward renunciation of faith in order to save the converts from
being tortured in his stead.
For Scorsese, Ends Silence reveals arts ability to express
the ambiguities of lived religion in ways that elude official
dogmaa key theme he also explored in Last Temptation.5
Is Rodrigues still a Christian even though he has officially
renounced his faith? Novel and film both suggest that he holds
true to his faith in his heart even as he assists the Tokugawa in
rooting Christianity out of the culture.
In an afterword to Approaching Silence, a recent scholarly book
about the legacy of Ends Silence, Scorsese remarks that the novel
confronts the mystery of Christian faith and, by extension, the
mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time,
Rodrigues and Martin Scorsese read the book in 1989 while flying to Japan that Gods love is more mysterious than he knows, that he leaves
Mokichi (Shinya
Tsukamoto) to work with Akira Kurosawa on his last film, Dreams (1990). much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that he is
in Silence, Scorsese was then mired in controversy over The Last Temptation always present . . . even in his silence.6
2016. Courtesy
of Christ (1988), his adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakiss 1960 novel
Paramount Pictures,
SharpSword about Jesuss all-too-human struggles with fear, doubt, depression,
Films, and Al Films. reluctance, and lust. Scorsese was deeply touched by Silences por-
Photo Kerry Brown.
trayal of the tension between belief and doubt, and for twenty-five
years he attempted to produce a film based on the narrative.2
The movie has garnered mixed reviews, some of which echo
the initial reactions to Ends novel by challenging Scorseses
focus on apostate outsiders engaged in an imperialist project
rather than on the struggles of Japanese people. But instead of
simply decrying colonial oppression, the film takes on the much
trickier subject of compromised faith within the context of geo-
political and cultural power struggles. The Japanese authorities,
A 17th-century brass despite their brilliantly orchestrated cruelty, elicit sympathy. They
fumie, approx. 7
by 5 by 1 inches. defend the traditional Buddhist and Shinto faiths and argue
Tokyo National cogently that the priests have no place in their country. Japanese
Museum. Courtesy
TNM Image leaders accuse the Jesuits of having recklessly placed their follow-
Archives. ers in danger out of an exalted sense of the superiority of Western
culture. Conversely, the priests are driven by their sincerely held
beliefs to undergo incredible hardships but appear ignorant and
closed-minded in their missionary zeal. The absence of clear-cut
distinctions between good and evil has likely contributed to the
films lackluster performance at the box office.
Along with such issues as the universality of faith and the
right of cultures to resist the imposition of alien belief systems,
Silence raises questions about the power of images. In the
novel, a samurai known as the Inquisitor inveigles Rodrigues
to trample on a fumie by insisting that its only a formality,3
while knowing full well that it is much more than that, as the
deaths of Christians who have refused attest.

48 APRIL 2017 ART & RELIGON

 This nuanced depiction of lived religious experience has made
Silence a key point of reference for visual artists. Makoto Fujimura
is an American-born Japanese painter who converted to Christian-
ity after encountering the fumie in the Tokyo Museum. He makes
luminous abstract paintings that employ traditional Japanese
nihonga techniques. Fujimura uses pigments composed of pulverized
minerals, shells, and semiprecious stones to create fields of brilliant,
prismatic color. His iridescent materials create flickering, visually
unstable surfaces that the artist regards as metaphors for the soul
transformed by belief. He describes his paintings as slow art, offer-
ing viewers a contemplative experience often inspired by spiritual
texts, from the Four Gospels to Silence.7
Fujimura is also an inventive writer, and his recent collec-
tion of essays, Silence and Beauty (2016), uses Ends novel as the
springboard for an extended meditation on the relationship between
art, faith, and trauma. Fujimura describes a close link between
dominant currents of contemporary Japanese art and culture and
the Tokugawa suppression of Christianity. He goes so far as to dub
contemporary Japan a fumi-e culture, using an alternate translit-
eration of the term for the tiles.
Fujimura writes that the Tokugawas successful purging of
Christianity from Japan had long-term ramifications. In banning
Christianity, he argues, they created an imprint of it, a negative
space within culture. In a culture that honors the hidden, the weak
and the unspoken, Christianity became a hidden reality of Japanese
culture.8 This invisible reality can be sensed, Fujimura claims, in
Japanese aesthetic traditions that understand beauty to reside in the
hidden, the fugitive, and the brokenqualities particularly pro-
nounced in traditional pottery. Fujimura even connects the notion of
wabi sabi, a celebration of the worn and imperfect, to the unintended
beauty of the softly rounded fumie trampled by Christians.
While Christian persecution may be reflected in a uniquely
Japanese form of beauty, Fujimura also argues that such persecu-
tion contributed to the creation of a national psyche wounded
by the suppression of individuality and personal expressions of
faith. Fujimura ties this injured psyche to the many pathologies
of contemporary Japan, among them the high suicide rate, the
emphasis on mindless consumption, and the widespread malaise
of the otakuantisocial young people who have essentially
dropped out of life.
For readers and viewers in the West, Silence offers insight
into a different set of cultural tensions. Contemporary artists
who employ religious imagery are often accused of conservatism
(if they follow traditional aesthetic strictures) or are dogged by
charges of blasphemy and sacrilege (if they attempt personal
expressions through religious tropes). Yet Ends narrative suggests
that a more complex aesthetic of faith is possible.
COINCIDENTALLY, Scorseses Silence opened during the run
of The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies, an exhibition
that celebrated heterodox depictions of Christ. On view last fall and
winter at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, the
show looked back to an earlier controversy: the inclusion of a bronze
sculpture of a nude, crucified female Christ by the artist Edwina
Sandys as part of a 1984 exhibition at the Cathedral. Christa, origi-
nally cast in 1975, is a nearly life-size, expressionistically modeled
ART & RELIGON
Makoto Fujimura:
SilenceThe Aroma
of Sunshine, 2015,
mineral pigments
and gold on canvas,
137 by 82 inches.
Courtesy Artrue
Gallery, Taipei.
figure stretched on a Lucite cross. The Cathedral, which is the seat
of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, has long maintained an
adventurous visual arts program. But when Christa was featured in
the 1984 Holy Week exhibition on The Feminine Divine, the
response was immediate and explosive.
The New York Times reported that Episcopal Bishop
Walter D. Dennis condemned Christa from the pulpit, thunder-
ing, This symbol is theologically and historically indefensible.
Meanwhile, the dean of the Cathedral, who had immediate
control over the display, defended the work as an expression of
the inclusive nature of Christs mission.9
The controversy was an early salvo in the culture wars that
roiled the art world in the late 1980s and 1990s. Like Andres
Serranos Piss Christ (1987) and Chris Ofilis Holy Virgin Mary
(1996), later targets of the religious and political right, Christa
was a thoughtful expression of personal faith that many religious
leaders read as an overt provocation. In a recent interview, Sandys
denied that she intended to make a polemical feminist statement.
Although she welcomes the association with the feminist tradition,
she maintains that her aim was more inclusive, remarking, I didnt
make Christa just for women. Men also suffer and that is one of
the meanings of Christ on the Cross.10
In 1984, Christa was removed from view after eleven days
of intense controversy. Now, thirty-three years later, Sandys has
donated the work to the Cathedral. The recent exhibition indi-
cated how much things have changed, at least at the Cathedral of
Saint John the Divine. Artists in the show used religious imagery
to explore a wide range of contemporary identities and issues. For
instance, Gabriel Garcia Roman presented Queer Icons (2011),
a series of richly patterned silkscreen prints depicting homosexual
ART IN AMERICA 49

Edwina Sandys:
Christa, 1975, bronze
and Lucite, approx.
41 by 34 by 7
inches. Courtesy
Cathedral of
St. John the Divine,
New York.
friends in the guise of Byzantine saints; Heidi Loening painted the
Virgin Mary as a teen mother; and Bettina Witteveen created five
mixed-medium crosses that honor historical women who acted
as social activists and resistance fighters. In The Christa Project,
institutionally sanctioned images of Christ gave way to more
diverse and multicultural expressions of faith.
There is a theological justification for Sandyss female
Christ. Describing gender relations in the Middle Ages, histo-
rian Caroline Walker Bynum maintains that the long-standing
association of man with mind or spirit and woman with body
leads to a surprising identification of woman with the body
or humanity of Christ. Clerics and scholars, she writes, often
went so far as to treat Christs flesh as female, at least in certain
of its salvific functions, especially its bleeding and nurturing.
This fact helps us to understand why it was women more than
men who imitated Christ bodily, especially in stigmata.11 As
evidence she cites the existence of gender-bending images of a
female Christ on the cross, the tendency of mystics and devo-
tional writers to speak of Christ in female terms as mother, and
the association in texts and images of the bloodshed in Christs
Passion with womens monthly bleeding.12
This association of a female Christ with the more feminine
virtues of nurture and mercy provides the key to Ends Silence.
In the novel, Rodrigues is continually haunted by the face of
Christ that appears silently in his minds eye. He speaks to it,
begs it for guidance, and conjures it as a talisman when he tries
to gather his strength to resist the Inquisitor. But at the crucial
moment, just before he steps on the fumie, Christ finally speaks,
not as the authoritarian father but in the voice of the nurturing
mother. In an essay on Silence written in 1974, End reveals his
own interpretation of the book. He says:
The image of Christ carved in the fumie was a maternal
image, a woman seeking to suffer with her child and to
share the childs pain. It is not the paternal image
50 APRIL 2017 ART & RELIGON
to be found in so much Western art, the face of
Christ resplendent with majesty and wearing an
expression which represents the epitome of order
and discipline. . . I intended this transformation
to be the theme of Silence.13
Scorsese dramatizes this aspect of the narrative by giving Rodrigues
a recurring mental image of a suffering, feminized Christ.
Controversies reveal the fault lines in society. Art and
religion, once mutually dependent, now frequently come into
conflict when artists insistence on individual expression and
freedom of thought run up against religious dogma. Together,
Silence and The Christa Project provide a way to think
about the relationship of art and religion that goes beyond
mutual suspicion and condemnation. The continuing conflicts
that surround the artistic appropriation and presentation of
sacred images are a reminder that the significance we invest in
religious or artistic images is not, in the words of the Inquisitor,
merely a formality.
As Arthur Danto pointed out in his short monograph
on Andy Warhol, art and religion share an ability to invest
ordinary looking objects with meanings that may not be appar-
ent on the surface. One cannot distinguish art from nonart, or
sacred objects from secular ones, solely by visual means. What
makes Warhols Brillo Box art and the communion chalice a
sacred object is something else, an ineffable quality that trans-
forms their essence.14 Scorsese seems to be getting at a similar
idea when he remarks in his meditation on Silence, I think that
every truly great work of art orients you toward what isnt there,
what cant be seen or described or named.15
Silence is about the elusiveness of the spiritual and the insep-
arability of faith and doubt. It demonstrates how art can inform
and deepen our understanding of the complexities and contradic-
tions of the lived experience of belief. And it is a reminder that
when todays unorthodox artists ruffle official feathers, it isnt
necessarily because they are anti-faith; it is because the explora-
tion of the meaning and transformative power of images is one of
the enduring functions of art.
1. Van C. Gessel, Silence on Opposite Shores: Critical Reactions to the Novel in Japan
and the West, in Approaching Silence, ed. Mark W. Dennis and Darren J. N. Middleton,
London, Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2015, p. 26.
2. Paul Elie, The Passion of Martin Scorsese, Nov. 21, 2016, New York Times Magazine,
nytimes.com.
3. Shsaku End, Silence, trans. William Johnston, New York, Picador Modern Classics,
1969, p. 183.
4. Ibid.
5. Elie.
6. Martin Scorsese, afterword to Approaching Silence, p. 398.
7. Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suering, Downers Grove,
Ill., InterVarsity Press Books, 2016, p. 20.
8. Ibid., p. 68.
9. Kenneth Briggs, Cathedral Removing Statue of Crucified Woman New York Times,
Apr. 28, 1984, nytimes.com.
10. Edwina Sandys quoted in NettieReynolds, Christa Interview with Edwina Sandys,
Feminism & Religion, Oct. 6, 2015, feminismandreligion.com.
11. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the
Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York, Zone Books, 1991, p. 104.
12. Ibid., p. 106.
13. End, The Anguish of an Alien, The Japan Christian Quarterly, no. 4, 1974, p. 181.
14. Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 2009, p. 136.
15. Scorsese, p. 397.
 < Four Seasons Series, 1972 - 1976 >
Summer, 1974, Oil on linen, 60 x 72

Photograph of Ralph Wickiser painting in plein air 5HHFWHG6WUHDP6HULHV!

ca. 1934 Sparkling, 1983, Oil on linen, 48 x 72

$EVWUDFW6WUHDP6HULHV!
Shadow II, 1994, Oil on linen, 40 x 60

< Mexican Series, ca. 1940 >

Watercolor on paper

7KH&RYHUHG$SSOH7UHH6HULHV!
Flurries, 1996, Oil on linen, 36 x 50

< Compassion Series I 1951 - 1956 >

Red, 1954, Oil and mixed media on canvas, 50 x 72

6KDGRZV2Q7KH*UDVV6HULHV!
Shadows On The Grass, 1997, Oil on linen, 26 x 36

The Reflected Stream: 7KH5HHFWHG6WUHDP The Covered Apple Tree 1987-1998

< Compassion Series II 1957 - 1965 >
The Early Years 1975-1985 The Abstract Years 1985-1998 Shadows on The Grass 1996-1998
Autumn, 1960, Oil on linen, 84 x 72 Essay by David Adams Cleveland Essay by David Adams Cleveland Essay by Lydia Wickiser Tortora
SPRING TEMPER

SEBASTIAN HECTOR ALLAN

VALLEJO ARCE-ESPASAS TA R A N T I N O

March 30 - April 21, 2017

G O D E L &C O
506 EAST 74TH STREET 4W NEW YORK NY 10021
212-288-7272 WWW.GODELFINEART.COM

Monday-Friday 10-5:30 and weekends by appointment

SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSIT Y MUSEUM of ART
 BACKSTORY

Clockwise from
left, Jack Youngerman,
Duncan Youngerman,
Delphine Seyrig, Jerry
Matthews, Dolores
Matthews, Ellsworth
Kelly, Lenore Tawney,
and Robert Indiana,
New York, Feb. 15,
1958. Photo
Agnes Martin.

Snow Day
by Jack Youngerman

AGNES MARTIN TOOK this photo in February 1958, in a
little park that separates Coenties Slip from the Seamens Church
Institute. My son Duncan was about a year and a half old. I dont
remember organizing anything; the others all came out, I think,
because they were responsive to the feeling of excitement that
radiated from Duncan. This was his first big snow. At the time,
both Agnes and Lenore Tawney lived in the same building on
Coenties Slip that we did, #27. Bob Indiana came too; he lived
next door, at #25. Bob must have contacted Ellsworth [Kelly],
who also showed up, along with our other neighbors in the build-
ing, an actor named Jerry Matthews and his wife, Dolores.
My wife, Delphine, and I had returned to New York from
Paris via boat in 1956. Ellsworth met us at the dock. Within a few
days, we visited him in his studio at 3 Coenties Slip. A few months
later, he told us that there was a vacant building down the street;
we moved in, and stayed there for about three years. The heating
and bath situation was very primitive and uncomfortable. But we
were young, and thats the way we lived.
We found a public daycare for Duncan near Chinatown. He
was about two and a half or three, and Id take him there on my
motor scooter. I can scarcely believe it now, but he used to stand
on the little platform in front of me and hold on to the handlebars.
We did lots of things then that, looking back, I dont approve of.
We left the building when we were evicted.This coincided
with Delphines desire to return to France. So she and Duncan
went back to Paris and I moved into the Seamens Church Insti- CURRENTLY
ON VIEW
tute for a while, and also briefly lived in #3, where Ellsworth lived. Paintings by Jack
Eventually I was evicted again, and moved to Fulton Street. Youngerman in
My studio was on the attic floor above our loft. I had my first Between Land and
Sea: Artists of the
New York show, at Betty Parsons, while living on Coenties Slip, and Coenties Slip, at the
sold a few things.This was the first time I was able to make a living Menil Collection,
from my paintings. And I was in Sixteen Americansat MoMA, Houston, Apr. 14
Aug. 6.
with Ellsworth and others. Ellsworths work was of extraordinary
interest and quality. I was always very impressed by his awareness
and probity. He was the most impeccable person I knew. JACK
YOUNGERMAN
At one point Agnes said that those of us who lived way is an artist based
downtown were smart enough to leave each other alone most of in Bridgehampton,
the time, and I think thats true.There wasnt a Cedar Tavern type N.Y.
of atmosphere; those artists were much more sociable and outgoing
than we were. We respected everyones need for solitude.
As told to Leigh Anne Miller

ART IN AMERICA 55

BENRUBI GALLERY
521 West 26th Street, 2nd oor
New York, NY 10001
t: 212.888.6007
info@benrubigallery.com
benrubigallery.com
Through April 15: Eric Cahan, Rabbits,
Rats, & Cats.
CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY
300 W. Superior Street
Chicago, IL 60654
312.266.2350
info@edelmangallery.com
edelmangallery.com
Through April 29: Laurent Millet:
Somnium.
ETHERTON GALLERY
135 S. 6th Ave
Tucson, AZ 85701
520.624.7370
info@ethertongallery.com
ethertongallery.com
March 29-April 2, 2017: The AIPAD
Photography Show, Booth #506
Etherton Gallery has been a desti-
nation for photography collectors
since 1981and is known for its exten-
sive and ever-changing inventory of
vintage and contemporary photog-
raphy and supporting photogra-
phers advancing the medium in new
and compelling ways.
Exhibiting works by: Ansel Adams,
David Emitt Adams, Diane Arbus,
Roger Ballen, Manuel lvarez Bravo,
Harry Callahan, Ted Croner, Walker
Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander,
Emmet Gowin, Mark Klett, Danny
Lyon, Ray Metzker, Richard Misrach,
Nicholas Nixon, Frederick Sommer,
Garry Winogrand, Joel-Peter Witkin
Through May 31: Color Theory:
Kate Breakey, Andy Burgess, Gail
Marcus-Orlen
Summer, 2017: Danny Lyon
PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY
2525 Michigan Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90404
310.453.6364
info@peterfetterman.com
peterfetterman.com
March 4- April 29: Stephen Wilkes, Ellis
Island: Ghosts of Freedom.
PHOTOGRAPHY
REN GROEBLI (Switzerland, b. 1927) Eye of Love #532, 1953. Gelatin Silver Print. Paper 19 x 23 inches;
Image 15 x 22 inches. Edition 6 of 7. Ren Groebli/Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery/Santa Monica, CA
HOWARD GREENBERG L. PARKER STEPHENSON PHOTOGRAPHS
41 East 57th Street, 1406 764 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10065
New York, NY 10022 212 527 8700
212.334.0010 lparkerstephenson.com
info@howardgreenberg.com info@lparkerstephenson.com
howardgreenberg.com
L. Parker Stephenson Photographs is a
April 6- May 20: The Mechanisms of Expression, Vera New York based gallery specializing in
Lutter + Otto Steinert; Judy Glickman Lauder (HGG2) avant-garde and classic photographs
Opening reception: Thursday, April 6, 6-8 of the 20th century. The Gallery also
represents a select number of contem-
porary artists whose work is inspired by
STEVEN KASHER GALLERY these traditions.
515 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
t: 212 966 3978 STALEY-WISE GALLERY
f: 212 226 1485 560 Broadway
stevenkasher.com Suite 305
info@stevenkasher.com New York, NY 10012
212.966.6223
The Photography Show presented by AIPAD featur-
photo@staleywise.com
ing works by:
staleywise.com
Jules Allen, Jill Freedman, Marianna Rothen, Diane
Arbus, Phyllis Galembo, Ruddy Roye, Teju Cole, Lyle
For April: Women Photographers
Ashton Harris, Lucien Samaha, Martha Cooper, Lou-
Including Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni
ise Lawler, Accra Shepp, Jimmy DeSana, Olivia Locher,
Frissell, Deborah Turbeville, Ellen von
Ming Smith, Wendy Ewald, Vivian Maier, Mickalene
Unwerth, and Sheila Metzner. Coming in
Thomas, Leonard Freed, Marilyn Minter, Andy Warhol.
May, Deborah Turbeville for Comme des
Garons.
RICCO/MARESCA GALLERY
529 W 20th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY10011
212.627.4819
riccomaresca.com
info@riccomaresca.com
March 9 May 6: Rosie Camanga: Rose Tattoo
Opening reception: March 9, 6-8
 Sequita
2017 Carrara Marble 34 by 36 by 18 inches
RichardErdman.com
BIENNALE OF
MOVING IMAGES
COMING SOON IN SPRING 2017
FAENA FORUM MIAMI BEACH
FAENA ART CENTER BUENOS AIRES
For more information please visit
www.faenaart.org
A platform to explore the ever-shifting
territories of the moving image in
contemporary art by highlighting artists
from around the world working in
performance, video and lm.
Curated by Andrea Bellini, in collaboration with Caroline
Bourgeois, Cecilia Alemani and Elvira Dyangani Ose.
 BOOKS
Inventing Nevelson
by Christina Rosenberger
LAURIE WILSON
Louise Nevelson:
Light and Shadow
New York, Thames & Hudson, 2016; 506 pages, 98 black-and-white illustrations,
$39.95 hardcover.
Laurie Wilson notes early in her new chronicle of Louise Nevel-
sons life that the artist was shameless about constructing aspects
of her biography. Having arrived in the US as a child of five and
a half, Nevelson (18991988) often rearranged, revised, or simply
left out aspects of her personal story, beginning with her age and
her birthplace. (She reasoned that American audiences would
recognize Kiev, not Pereyaslav.) The artist compounded these
fantasies with elaborate outfits: floor-length sable coats worn
over antique Japanese kimonos topped with flattened beer-can
pendants, silk headscarves, and layers of false eyelashes, which she
glued together herself. Wilson warns that if we need to know
the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we shall be alter-
nately irritated, confused, or severely disappointed. And so, one
wonders, why waste time trying to discern between myth and
factespecially when the performance is so beguiling?
Louise Nevelson
and Bobby Giza
working on a
metal sculpture at
Lippincott, Inc.,
North Haven,
Conn., 1975. Photo
Roxanne Everett.
In Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow, Wilson maps Nevelsons
art onto this complicated personal history. As an art historian
and psychoanalyst, the author probes into her subjects inner life,
especially the conscious and unconscious themes that animate the
artwork. Nevelson offers ample material in this regard, but Wilsons
psychological insights distract from her larger portrait of the artist.
Was Nevelsons intense productivity in terra-cotta in the late 1940s
and early 1950s, for example, an attempt at replacing the missing
people in her life and her multiple disappointments with masses of CHRISTINA
three-dimensional objects? Or was the rapid production of similar ROSENBERGER
is an art historian
objects, as with her later wooden boxes, Nevelsons way of working who lives in
through an idea or testing a new medium? This is a methodological Albuquerque. See
issue: Wilson, characterizing Nevelson as motivated by Freudian Contributors page.
impulses, argues for the primacy of the personal meanings underly-
ing the sculptures. Her approach is complicated by Nevelsons
reliance on performance and deliberate obfuscation, and downplays
the artists considerable aesthetic agency.
Through Nevelsons intuitive eye, common objects transcend
their functions as toilet seats or door handles to become compelling
works of art. Of course the material is wood, she said. Of course
its black. And of course its sculpture. But those are the mechanics!
ART IN AMERICA 59

Louise Nevelsons When you look at a Rolls Royce, a Silver Cloud, you dont say, Oh,
son, Mike Nevelson,
installing her theyve got guts to make em run. You say, Isnt the Silver Cloud
sculpture Sky great?1 The artist, who began using found wood in the 1940s after
Cathedral at the
Thorndike Hotel,
taking classes at the Art Students League in New York, traveling
Rockland, Me., to Munich and Paris, and assisting Diego Rivera, saw her work as
1959. Photo James distinct from the metal sculptures of artists like Alexander Calder
Moore.
and David Smith. In a 2007 essay, Brooke Rapaport notes that
Nevelson was motivated by historical circumstances: metal was
rationed during World War II.2 She preferred the availability and
economy of found wood, which Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, and
Robert Rauschenberg soon embraced as well.
Wilson has a long history with Nevelson, having interviewed
the artist for her dissertation many times between 1975 and
1977, and having contributed short commentaries to the cata-
logue for the 1980 Nevelson exhibition at the Whitney Museum
of American Art in New York. Wilson showed these entries to
Nevelson, who rejected her interpretationswhy she did this
work, and how it was related to mourning and her feelings about
marriage. The author revised her texts, calling the exchange my
lesson in censorship.3
LIGHT AND SHADOW, then, is Wilsons response, unfettered
by the dictates of a living artist and amplified by a career as
a practicing psychoanalyst. Numerous interviews, conducted
with a wide range of sources, are the books strength. Wilson is
forthright about how her take on Nevelson has changed in the
forty years between her first graduate school conversations with
the artist, moving from antipathy toward Nevelsons selfish,
grandiose behavior to sympathy with her plight as a female art-
ist trying to make it in the macho culture of postwar New York.
One of the revelations of Wilsons volume is how hard Nevel-
son worked to produce art and to have that art recognized. (When
a museum director showed up ten minutes late for an appointment
Nevelson snapped, I think youre thirty years late for my work.4)
Consumed with her art-making, Nevelson had a basement full of
sculpture when, in 1941, New York dealer Karl Nierendorf offered
to hold her first solo gallery exhibition. Fellow artists marveled at
her productivity. In 1956, Dorothy Dehner couldnt photograph
60 APRIL 2017
Nevelsons sculptures individually because there wasnt room; Wilson
estimates that there were nine hundred works of art stored in Nevel-
sons Thirtieth Street townhouse. (A photograph in the book shows
sculptures stored in the bathroom.)
Part of Nevelsons genius, at a time before seriality and modular
units became the rage, was the way in which her wooden boxes
could be reused and reconfigured at willexasperating collectors,
curators, and dealers, but providing Nevelson with a fluid inven-
tory of parts for expressing her artistic vision. When there was a
problem shipping her sculpture to the 1962 Venice Biennale for
the group show in the American pavilion, Nevelson and curator
Dorothy Miller cannibalized pieces from an exhibition traveling in
Europe and made a new work. Such practicality is one of Wilsons
most surprising discoveries. Nevelsons famous headscarves? The
artist didnt want to waste time in the beauty parlor. Ditto the
kitchen. And all those early terra-cotta sculptures? Artist friend
Anna Walinska recalled, Louise said simply and frankly, Ill flood
the market with my work until they know Im here.
Wilson concludes that Nevelsons struggles for recognition
made her legendary egotism justifiable. This is a sticky issue.
Nevelsons provocative persona was intended to call attention
to herselfand thus to her artin a male-dominated culture, a
strategy that Wilson believes only partially succeeded. But Wil-
son, in her sympathy for her subject, sets biographical objectivity
aside, excusing Nevelson for startling lapses in basic responsibil-
itymost notably, abandoning her young son Myron (Mike) for
long periods. I was always most interested in what I could do
for myself, Nevelson said. I wont do anything for anyone else.
One of my complaints is that I never have been selfish enough.
Likewise, Wilsons claim that Nevelson was the only woman
artist of her time to succeed without the help of a famous or
powerful mate rings hollow. At various times, Nevelson relied
upon the financial support of her husband, businessman Charles
Nevelson, whom she married in 1920 and divorced in 1941, as
well as an allowance from her family, and even on her sons sal-
ary from the Merchant Marine during the Second World War.
(Her brother Nate Berliawskys largesse included a brownstone
in Manhattan, a gift that Nevelson took in stride.) By compari-
son, the artist Agnes Martin, roughly Nevelsons contemporary,
had no such assistance.
Beginning in March 1959, Nevelsons family allowance was
replaced by a $20,000 annual stipend from Martha Jackson, set-
ting up a pattern whereby Nevelsons dealers would support her
art and her lifestyle. After a disastrous affiliation with Sidney Janis
that included a single unsuccessful exhibition, negative reviews,
and, ultimately, a legal battle to regain control of her work, the artist
landed in 1963 with the young dealer Arnold Glimcher, founder of
Pace Gallery. It was a match made in art world heaven: Glimcher
sent Nevelson to designer Arnold Scaasi, who sewed fur linings into
her clothing, and Nevelson let Glimcher guide her career.5 In one
of the most illuminating parts of the book, Wilson describes how
Glimchers backing allowed for the later phase of Nevelsons work
the monumental metal sculptures and the grand public commissions.
Wilson also notes the cost of Nevelsons long-awaited fame. In a
1989 interview, Mike Nevelson lamented that he couldnt buy his
mother the fur coats that Glimcher provided.
BOOKS
 I always thought bluntly that I was a glamorous goddamn
exciting woman, Nevelson observed, with characteristic bravado.
She wasthough you often wonder if you should be cheering
for her. June Wayne, who invited Nevelson to make work at
the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles after her
paralyzing association with Janis, recalled that she was never more
fearful than when she seemed the most brazen; her plumage was
merely camouflage. Waynes assessment is astute, and Wilson
only hints at the fear and desperation lurking behind Nevelsons
fantastical facade. Laurie Lisle, an earlier Nevelson biographer, tells
a story about showing up to interview the artist at 29 Spring Street
in New York, where she had moved in 1958. Startled, Nevelson,
who had forgotten the appointment, told Lisle to come back in ten
minutes. When I returned, she had pulled an old knitted cap over
her cropped gray hair and thrown on a richly embroidered kimono,
which opened to show little wooden finials in the pocket of her
denim shirt underneath.6 The wooden finials hint at the woman
we want to see but rarely glimpse: the artist at work.
1. Louise Nevelson, Dawns + Dusks: Conversations with Diana MacKown, New York,
Charles Scribners Sons, 1976, p. 125.
2. Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Louise Nevelson: A Story in Sculpture, in The Sculpture of
Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 2007,
p. 10.
3. Laurie Wilson, Laurie Wilson with Betsy Baker, Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 1, 2016,
brooklynrail.org.
4. Oral history interview with Louise Nevelson (conducted by Arnold Glimcher),
Jan. 30, 1972, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
5. Glimcher also surveyed the artists life and career in Louise Nevelson, New York,
Praeger, 1972.
6. Laurie Lisle, Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life, New York, Summit Books, 1990, p. 11.

Books in Brief

ROBERT STORR MARY GABRIEL DONNA SEAMAN WANDA M. CORN

Intimate
Geometries:
The Art and Life of
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois (19112010)
achieved international fame in
her seventies following a 1982
retrospective at New Yorks
Museum of Modern Art.
A grande dame of modernist art,
Bourgeois contributed to move-
ments from Surrealism to Post-
Minimalism, though her brooding
and sexually explicit sculptures
defy easy categorization. Art critic
Robert Storr, a close friend of
the artist, brings extensive critical
analysis to bear in this heavily
illustrated biography.
New York, Monacelli Press, 2016;
828 pages, 1,000 illustrations,
$150 boxed hardcover.
Ninth Street
Women
This biographical study by
National Book Award finalist
Mary Gabriel details the lives
of five female paintersLee
Krasner, Elaine de Kooning,
Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell,
seven twentieth-century
and Helen Frankenthaleras
they attempted to infiltrate
the masculine Abstract-
Expressionist scene in postwar
New York City. Although
these women lived, drank,
and worked as hard as their
male contemporaries, they
were often excluded from
exhibitions and suffered a
lack of sales.
Boston, Little, Brown, forthcoming
Nov. 2017; 568 pages, $35 hardcover.
Identity Georgia OKeeffe:
Unknown: Living Modern
Rediscovering Accompanying an exhibition
Seven American at the Brooklyn Museum,
Women Artists this catalogue by art historian
Wanda M. Corn consid-
Donna Seaman discusses
ers how Georgia OKeeffes
the lives and practices of
artistic style bled into her life.
The volume, which includes
female artists who struggled
photographic portraits of the
for years against com-
artist as well as images of the
mercial, critical, and art
clothing and the two New
historical marginalization:
Mexico homes she designed,
Gertrude Abercrombie,
demonstrates how a meticu-
Joan Brown, Ree Morton,
lous self-presentation carried
Los Mailou Jones, Lenore
OKeeffes modernist aesthetic
Tawney, Christina Ram-
beyond her paintings.
berg, and Louise Nevelson.
New York, Prestel, 2017; 320 pages,
New York, Bloomsbury, 2017; 217 color and 112 black-and-white
480 pages, two 16-page color illustrations, $60 hardcover.
inserts, $35 hardcover.

BOOKS ART IN AMERICA 61

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 Season Two Ariel String Quartet Alex Klein
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July 7-September 16, 2017
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 Matisse/Diebenkorn
Edited by Janet Bishop and
Katherine Rothkopf, with
contributions by John Eldereld
and Jodi Roberts
This sumptuously illustrated book brings
together the work of Henri Matisse and
Richard Diebenkorn as never before,
illuminating unexpected resonances that
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space.
184 pages, 135 color illustrations
Hardcover, 978-3-7913-5534-4
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DelMonico Books
Georgia OKeeffe
Living Modern
Wanda M. Corn
Georgia OKeeffe lived the way she
paintedwith elegance and simplicity.
This impeccably produced book shows
how the renowned painter famously
created her own aesthetic, no matter
where in the world she lived.
320 pages, 300 color illustrations
Hardcover, 978-3-7913-5601-3
9 x 10 in., $60.00
DelMonico Books
Alexei Jawlensky
Vivian Endicott Barnett
Focusing on one of the lesser known
Expressionist artists of the Blue Rider
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Jawlensky.
192 pages, 180 illustrations
Hardcover, 978-3-7913-5638-9
9 x 11 in., $60.00
Picasso and Rivera
Conversations Across Time
Edited by Michael Govan and Diana Magaloni
Examining the artistic development of
Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, two
towering gures in the world of modern art,
this generously illustrated book tells an
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304 pages, 268 color illustrations
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Infinity Mirrors
Edited by Mika Yoshitake, with
contributions by Melissa Chiu,
Alexander Dumbadze, Yayoi Kusama,
Gloria Sutton, and Miwako Tezuka
Explore the history of Yayoi Kusamas
best-known and most spectacular series
the Innity Mirror Roomsand its
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224 pages, 200 illustrations
Hardcover, 978-3-7913-5594-8
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DelMonico Books
The Big Picture
Contemporary Art in
10 Works by 10 Artists
Matthew Israel
Discover the compelling story of the
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Degas, Impressionism,
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Simon Kelly and Esther Bell, with
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Franoise Ttart-Vittu
Filled with beautiful works by Edgar Degas
Mary Cassat, and other Impressionist
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296 pages, 242 illustrations
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Inventing Downtown
Artist-Run Galleries in
New York City, 1952-1965
Melissa Rachleff, with introduction by
Lynn Gumpert
This enlightening and thought-provoking
look at New York Citys postwar art scene
focuses on the galleries and the artists
that helped transform American Art.
288 pages, 220 illustrations
Hardcover, 978-3-7913-5558-0
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Materials from Robert Rauschenbergs home and studio. Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York. Photography: Nicholas Calcott.
New York
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 APRIL 2017
Cy Twombly / Art and the Reformation / Josh Faught
David Reed / Anicka Yi

CY TWOMBLY
Untitled (Bassano in Teverina), 1985,
oil and acrylic on wood panel, 71
by 71 inches. Cy Twombly
Foundation. Courtesy Archives
Nicola Del Roscio.

ART IN AMERICA 71
Cy Twombly:
Camino Real (V),
2010, acrylic on
wood panel, 99
by 72 inches.
Fondation Louis
Vuitton, Paris.
THE HERE
AND THEN
All artwork this
article Cy Twombly
Foundation. Courtesy
Archives Nicola Del
Roscio.

A Cy Twombly retrospective in Paris

reveals the artists lifelong fascination with personal
and historical memory.

by Richard Kalina
THE STRENGTH OF memory that is left behind. Those,
I was told by a witness, were Cy Twomblys last words.
Enigmatic, evocative, open-ended, forceful yet melancholy,
they seem to be a fitting subtext and coda for the work of a
great postwar painters painter.
Twombly, who died in 2011, is the subject of a thorough
and sensitive retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris,
curated by Jonas Storsve, with the support of the Cy Twombly
Foundation, its president, Nicola Del Roscio, and Twomblys son,
Alessandro. The 140 or so paintings, drawings, sculptures, and
CURRENTLY photographs on view hit the major developments and periods in
ON VIEW the artists career, even if the show does not contain all of his best
Cy Twombly, at the works. The quality level is consistently high, easily convincing
Centre Pompidou,
Paris, through Apr. 24. viewers that Twomblys reputation as a perplexing but indispens-
able marker of our time is well deserved.
The exhibition will not travel, largely because many of
RICHARD
KALINA is an artist the loans were nearly impossible to obtain. That difficulty par-
and writer based allels a particular aspect of Twomblys work. You have to make
in New York. See an effort to come to this art. It doesnt reach out to meet you.
Contributors page.
A certain state of absence, openness, recession, and whiteness
(verging on erasure) is key to the enterprise.
Twombly himself could be hard to pin down. Born
in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, he studied in Boston and
Lexington, at the Art Students League in New York, and at
Black Mountain College in North Carolina during its heyday
in the early 1950s.1 He lived at various times in New York, and
early on became part of a group of artists that included Robert
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He joined the Leo Castelli
Gallery in 1958 and had his first show there in 1960. He
returned to the city frequently, both to visit and to work.
By the late 50s Twombly had settled in Italy, having married
an Italian artist, Baroness Luisa Tatiana Franchetti; they bought
a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome. He stayed in Rome
for the most part but also lived and worked in a host of other
Italian locales. His periods of fixed residency were regularly
punctuated by travel to Morocco, Egypt, the Sudan, Yemen,
Iran, Turkey, Greece, Russia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and in
the winter months to various tropical islands. Del Roscio told
me that Twombly was not the kind of artist who got up every
morning and spent eight hours in the studio no matter what.
His works were nearly formed in his mind before he sat down
to paint. Thinking, reading, traveling, remembering, and more
thinkingnot tortuously finding the image, obliterating it, and
then refinding itwas the way he came to his art. That method
makes for a kind of contemplative serenity and a feeling of
remove, of distanced engagement with the work. It serves to set
Twombly apart from the Abstract Expressionists, to whose work
his bears some resemblance, aligning him instead with his friends
Johns and Rauschenberg. (Rauschenberg, whom he met at the
Art Students League in 1950, was perhaps his oldest and closest
artist friend.) However, more than Johns or Rauschenberg,
Twombly was simultaneously able to move beyond and to hold
on to Abstract Expressionism, inserting outside references into
his paintings, yet retaining an obdurate core of abstraction.
His mixing of gestural abstraction and wide-ranging
reference (not the least of which were the many varieties of
handwriting) puts Twombly at the center of debates around
painting today. He was both antecedent to and elder contem-
porary of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Brice Marden,
Christopher Wool, Chris Martin, Amy Sillman, Jonathan Lasker,

72 APRIL 2017
Volubilis, 1953,
white lead, oil-based
house paint, and
crayon on canvas,
55 by 76 inches.
Menil Collection,
Houston.
Suzanne McClelland, and Dona Nelson, among others, who
create semiotically and formally complex, layered canvases often
featuring script and large areas of open space. Furthermore,
Twomblys seemingly casual and unaggressive approach allies
him with younger informal abstractionists like Richard Tuttle,
Mary Heilmann, Harriet Korman, and Raoul De Keyser.
THE POMPIDOU SHOW highlighted three cycles of work,
each given its own room: Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963),
Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), and Coronation of Sesostris (2000).
These groups of paintings, executed at what the curator considers
to be key points in the artists career, do not necessarily comprise
Twomblys most important individual works, but they provide an
opportunity to study his development as an artist.
The exhibition starts with four large, roughly surfaced,
muscularly gestural black and white paintings from the early
50s. The last two, Quarzazat and Volubilis (both 1953), were
produced after Twombly returned from a trip to Morocco
with Rauschenberg and the writer Paul Bowles.2 The paintings
are bold and harsh, with strong linear elements that suggest
primitive architectural constructions. Twombly soon moved
away from this assertive, form-creating mark-making, embrac-
ing instead quieter compositions with considerably less tonal
contrast. But the big emphatic gesturenot something we
74 APRIL 2017 THE HERE AND THEN
normally associate with Twomblynever really went away.
The artist employed it at various times, for example in the Nine
Discourses on Commodus series; in the 199395 Quattro
Stagioni, a group of paintings based on Nicolas Poussins Four
Seasons (executed at the end of the French artists life); and in
Twomblys own powerfully graphic final works, the Camino
Real series (201011). These suites add considerable variety
and depth to our understanding of his oeuvre.
Twomblys more characteristic workopen, loosely sprung,
with large, lightly inhabited, mostly white areas interspersed
with scrawled or incised linear elementsbegan in earnest in
the mid-50s. One of the pictorial assumptions that he (along
with many other painters) inherited from the Abstract Expres-
sionists was that scale mattered. Size was especially important
for Twombly, since it rescued his work from the impression
of delicacy and tentativeness. His paintings were big from the
beginning, allowing for the accumulations of hand gestures to
have both breathing room and a sense of purposeeven if that
purpose was not immediately evident. These elements could
be seen in the white, nearly empty Lexington paintings from
1959, which were rejected by Castelli because he did not know
what they were,3 as well as in the considerably more exuberant,
colorful, and sensual (body parts abound) School of Fontainebleau
(1960), Empire of Flora, and School of Athens (both 1961). The last

three works were painted in Rome, and their titles pay homage to
Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio, Poussin, and Raphael.
The paintings seem to echo the large, baroque spaces of the city
Twombly inhabited. Living abroad, working in spacious studios
and surrounded by a complex, historically rich Mediterranean
culture allowed Twombly the freedom he needed for his art.
Importantly, the scale of Twomblys paintings removed his
abbreviated calligraphic markings, which included handwriting,
scribbled depictions, and pure abstraction, from the realm of
drawing, with its implicit acknowldgement of the papers edges,
and shifted them to the arena of allover painting. He used script
to great and varied effect. Writing, as a manifestation of lan-
guage, has the ability to move freely between different levels of
abstraction. Twombly played with this, just as he negotiated the
elision between legible and illegible script, exploiting the many
ways that handwriting can be regarded as a thing in itselfthe
slant and spacing of the letters, the tilt of the word line, the
CY TWOMBLY
School of Athens,
1961, oil, oil-based
house paint, colored
pencil, and graphite
on canvas, 75 by
79 inches. Private
collection.
scripts forcefulness or shakiness, its lightness or darkness, and
the degree to which it is visible or obscured by erasure, super-
imposition, or overlay.
THE EXTREMELY WELL-READ Twombly often employed
literary and historical references in his works. He was very keen
on poetry, and lines and passages from John Keats, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Stphane Mallarm, C.P. Cavafy, Giorgos Seferis, and
Octavio Paz (among many others) regularly appear in them. But
what seemed to resonate most with Twombly was the world of
ancient Greece and Rome. (His mother once said that when he
was in kindergarten he repeatedly mentioned that he wished to
go to Rome.) To involve yourself deeply in the past is to position
your art in the realm of memory, and with that come the distor-
tions, lapses, and unexpected connections that memory is prone
to. Memory is a sort of collage, and plumbing its potential was a
key element of Twomblys working method.
ART IN AMERICA 75
Nine Discourses on Commodus reects the attention that Twombly
paid to Bacons work and to the writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
While the artists classical references often impart an elegiac
or lyrical sense to the paintings, this is not the case with Nine
Discourses on Commodus. Painted in the distressing period
immediately after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
in November 1963, the series is named after an especially mega-
lomaniacal and bloodthirsty second-century Roman emperor.
Commoduss twelve-year reign was a disastermarked by coups,
assassinations, massive corruption, and bloody gladiatorial com-
bats. His misadventures caused serious military and territorial
losses for the empire and contributed to its decline.
The nine equally sized vertical paintings, executed on
monochrome, medium-gray grounds, replete with smears
and drips of yellow, white, and (most prominently) red,
call to mind flayed flesh and seem, Francis Bacon-like, to
capture a scream or the unfolding of a psychotic break.
They are a powerful commentary on a world that seemed
to be teetering on the brink of chaos.
76 APRIL 2017 THE HERE AND THEN
Before and during the time he worked on this series,
Twombly paid a good deal of attention to Bacons work and to
the writing of French author Alain Robbe-Grillet (creator of
the screenplay for the slow and uncanny 1961 film Last Year
at Marienbad). The influence of Robbe-Grillets measured,
granular, repetitive, systematic, and disjunctive narration can be
found throughout the Nine Discourses.
Forceful as these paintings are, their debut at Castelli in
1964 proved to be a commercial and critical fiasco. Minimal-
ism and Pop were riding high, and the exhibition came at a
bad time for work with an Abstract Expressionist flavor. The
reviews were generally poor, but Donald Judds review in Arts
Magazine was especially contemptuous and dismissive. For
Twombly, however, the impact of the shows reception was not
entirely negative, although it did move him away from current
developments in American art. He felt liberatedable to
enjoy his solid European reputation without having to worry

about what people back home thought. He said that he was
the happiest painter around for a couple of years: no one gave
a damn what I did.4
He returned to Castelli in 1967 with the first of two
relatively austere series that became known as the Blackboard
paintingswhite wax crayon on grounds of gray industrial
paint. Some of the works feature looping and Slinky-like
scrawls, others trace out complex mathematical or drafting
diagrams. All in all, the works were well received. They were a
better fit with the art of that time, and the often-reproduced
paintings continue to look fresh. While they remain among
Twomblys most popular and highly valued canvases, in the
context of the Pompidou show, they feel a bit like outliers.
THE TEN-PAINTING SERIES Fifty Days at Iliam
finds Twombly back in the world of the Greeks. Begun in
the summer of 1977, it is a meditation on the Trojan War
as recounted in Alexander Popes early eighteenth-century
English translation of Homers Iliad. The canvases are
immense, with the largest, Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and
Hector, measuring about 10 by 16 feet. That painting, while
being an integral part of the cycle, is relatively simple and
CY TWOMBLY
View of the series
Nine Discourses on
Commodus, 1963,
oil, wax crayon, and
graphite on canvas,
each approx. 80
by 52 inches; at
the Guggenheim
Museum, Bilbao.
quite effective on its own. It consists of three quatrefoil-like
shapes rendered in oil paint, oil crayon, and pencil and set
on a glowing white ground. Each shape is about a third the
height of the canvas and the three are centered horizontally
just above its midpoint. The shield forms are (from left to
right) crimson red for Achilles, purpled gray for Achilless
beloved (and slain) companion Patroclus, and a ghostly
white for the Trojan Hector. The color in the shields is a bit
sullied and the paint applicationespecially in the Achil-
les and Patroclus emblemsfeels pressured and frenetic,
the overall forms barely keeping the marks contained. The
heroes names are penciled in on a diagonal just outside the
upper left quadrant of each quatrefoil, and there is enough
coarse shading, again most prominent in the Achilles and
Patroclus sections, to give the shapes weight and presence.
More than the other paintings in the group, we sense an
emptied-out, funerary qualitya formal, cadenced memori-
alizing, an archaic drumbeat of sorts.
Twombly repeated the quatrefoil form, which he then
overlaid with a square, in three untitled 1985 oil-and-acrylic
works on shaped panels. The crisply edged (and completely
symmetrical) painting surfaces allow for a more densely filled
ART IN AMERICA 77
Quattro Stagioni:
Inverno, 199395
acrylic, oil, and
graphite on canvas,
123 by 87 inches.
Tate, London.
image, and these paintings, executed in shades of deep sap
green cut with creamy white, are among Twomblys most
pictorial works. They recall the late Monet of the Water Lilies
or Joan Mitchells assertive and melancholy paintings from the
early 60s, with their large, rounded, dark green forms. There is
not the usual empty space in these paintings, and yet there is
an abundance of cool light and shade, depth and air. They may
depart from Twomblys typical work, but in this show they act
as a kind of self-assured resting place.
Overt landscape references recur in Twomblys series
Quattro Stagioni. These four luscious, roughly ten-
foot-high canvases are painterly and colorful, especially
the green-black, yellow, and white Inverno (winter) and
Autumno, with its juicy, dripping reds and purples. (Twom-
bly would likely have had in mind the annual winegrowers
festival in Bassano in Teverina, the municipal region north
of Rome where he had a studio and painted these works.)
78 APRIL 2017 THE HERE AND THEN
The ten-painting Coronation of Sesostris (2000) is
the last major series anchoring the exhibition, although
to my mind the later Bacchus or Camino Real series
would have worked as well. According to Thierry Greub,
Twombly based the paintings on the rising and setting of
the sun, inspired both by the story of the Egyptian king
Sesostris and the mythical journey of the Egyptian sun god
Ra across the skies in his divine boat.5 Incorporating verses
from Sappho and quotations from American poet Patricia
Waters that contemplate the death of the ancient gods,
the Coronation series is more overtly narrative than most
of Twomblys works, dealing explicitly with the cycle of
birth and death.
It is fitting that a man in his seventies would give some
serious thought to the arc of his life and the possibility both
of its end and of its continuation. It also makes emotional
sense that Coronation was started in Italy but shipped to and
finished in a studio that Twombly had set up in his childhood
hometown of Lexington.
Twomblys work did not flag as he aged. Nor did it
decrease in scale or ambition. Of particular note are the Bac-
chus paintings (2006-08), which were done during the Iraq
War and feature blood- and wine-red coiling scrawls, and the
final works of the Camino Real series, where the loops from
the Blackboard paintings and the Bacchus paintings are made
even bigger and more graphically and chromatically harsh with
vehement swirls of red, orange, and yellow bleeding out against
a field of acid green acrylic.
The title for the Camino Real series was taken from
Tennessee Williamss 1953 play set in a dead-end towna
mix of Latin America and New Orleanswhich contrasts the
high-mindedness to which we aspire with the shabby reality we
are forced to inhabit. We can certainly imagine that Twombly,
who was ill at the time and near the end of his life, took this
potentially tragic dichotomy to heart.
SCULPTURE CLEARLY engaged Twombly, even though
he did not produce any of it between 1959 and 1976.
Modestly scaled for the most part (some are quite tall), his
sculptures are white-painted or plastered assemblages of what
seems like the detritus of ordinary lifestudio sweepings,
wood scraps of all sizes, dried or artificial flowers, cardboard
CY TWOMBLY
boxes, bits of metal, electrical boxes. The works whiteness Fifty Days at
unifies the disparate materials, causing the forms to appear to Iliam: Shades of
float, but also obscures the materialspushes them away from Achilles, Patroclus
and Hector, 1978,
reference and comprehension. As Twombly said, White is oil, oil crayon, and
my marble. Marble it might be, but not the smoothly carved graphite on canvas,
approx. 10 by 16
stone of the Roman busts he collected. Twomblys white feels feet. Philadelphia
bleached out, fugitive. The hue was important for the artist Museum of Art.
in all of his work. He said in a late interview, Whiteness can
be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of
remembranceor as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarm.6
Whiteness for Twombly signified a kind of potential, like
blank paper, or John Cages7 seemingly silent composition, or
Rauschenbergs early white paintings.8
A connection to archaic sculpturea number of Twom-
blys three-dimensional works evoke draped cloth or simplified
kouros figuresis clear. Also apparent is the link to another
area of his collecting: African art. Del Roscio confirmed to
me Twomblys long-standing interest in African fetishes and
their importance to his sculpture. The fetish reference, however,
is downplayed, with no obvious summoning of the ritualistic
power of such objects. This reticence, reinforced by the sculp-
tures white color (black would have a completely different feel)
allows the force of the African art invoked to come upon the
viewer more slowly and more subtly, and to lift the works out of
the realm of the expected.
ART IN AMERICA 79

Untitled (Formia),
1981, wood, iron
wire, nails, string,
and white paint,
59 by 34 by 13
inches.
The Pompidous dramatic and effective installation of
Twomblys sculpturea group of sixteen pieces set on a low,
white, stepped pedestal in a room whose wall of windows
opens onto a spectacular view of the Paris skylineadds to
the power of the works. It imparts a sense of clustering and
reiteration, creating charged spaces between the separate
objects. While recalling a display of anthropological arti-
facts, the Pompidou installation also brings to mind images
of Brancusis studio, and cements the sculptures affinity to
important developmental lines of modernist work.
Twombly is an acquired taste, a bit of a dandy, a bit of
a flneur, and not American in the same way as Johns and
Rauschenberg. He lived for the most part in Italy, yet his artist
friends were Americans, and he had limited connections with
the Italian art of his day.
Other American artists have spent time abroad, but not
quite like Twombly. He lived in Italy for nearly sixty years
and was, somewhat unrelated to art, integrated into its society.
But he also kept his distance and his independence. Being
an American, visiting his native countryoften for extended
periodsbut neither living there nor acknowledging his expa-
triate status, gave him a kind of freedom from assumptions
about what his art ought to be. In many ways, his peripatetic
existence anticipated the lives of artists today.
Twomblys artistic stubbornness, his avoidance of
certainty, brings weight and resistance to his art. As Clem-
ent Greenberg said in Emile de Antonios 1973 film, Painters
80 APRIL 2017 THE HERE AND THEN
Painting (not in relation to Twombly, but it fits), The best
art of our time or any art since Corot, not just since Manet,
makes you a little more uncomfortable at first, challenges you
more. It doesnt come that far to meet your taste or meet the
established taste of the market. Twomblys art always seems
to be slipping away. Its ambiguities and uncertainties are
baked into it, which quite possibly points to the reason for its
continuing and now rapidly growing appeal.
In a time of doubt and anxiety, many yearn for belief and
assurance, for comfortable and irrefutable ideology, while others
are willing to let go and be fruitfully unrooted. Rauschenbergs
seemingly straightforward yet deeply enigmatic statement for
the catalogue of Dorothy Millers landmark 1959 Museum of
Modern Art show, Sixteen Americans, applies perhaps even
more directly to Twombly. Rauschenberg said, Painting relates
to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that
gap between the two.) Twombly has certainly left something
behind, something to fill the gapthe strength of memory is
probably as good a description as any.9
1. Although he was born and raised in the South, Twomblys parents were
originally from New England. His father was a coach and the athletic director
at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and had played profes-
sional baseball for a time. The young Twombly (born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr.)
inherited his nickname Cy from his father, who was called that after the well-
known pitcher Cy Cyclone Young. The Twombly family was a cultured and happy
one, and the young mans artistic pursuits were encouraged.
2. That formative voyage came during the two artists eight-month stay in Europe
and North Africa. Twombly had gotten a travel grant from the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts in Richmond and invited Rauschenberg along.
3. Paul Winkler (Lex), in Cy Twombly, exh. cat., ed. Jonas Storsve, Paris, Centre
Georges Pompidou, p. 54. This comes from a conversation between Winkler and
Twombly discussing Leo Castellis initial response to the paintings.
4. Nicholas Cullinan, Nine Discourses on Commodus, or Cy Twomblys Beautiful
Fiasco, in Cy Twombly, note 45, p. 87, citing Kirk Varnedoes conversation with
Twombly.
5. Thierry Greub, Cy Twomblys Antiquities, in Cy Twombly, p. 104.
6. Kirk Varnedoe, Inscriptions in Arcadia, in Writings on Cy Twombly, ed. Nicola
Del Roscio, Munich, 2002, p. 27.
7. Cage composed 433 in 1952. He was a teacher at Black Mountain when Twom-
bly was there, and served as an inspiration to him.
8. In a letter from Rauschenberg to Twombly (the text is written in caps) Rauschen-
berg refers to the creation of the white paintings:
IF ONLY TIME WERE OURS TO SPEND, AGAIN. TO HAVE
OUR LIVES. I PAINTED THE 4-PANNEL [sic] PAINTING
A VERY EXPENSIVE FLAT WHITE TONIGHT AND IT IS
DRYING
NOW LIKE WHITE AIR FROZEN IN ITS STUBBORNESS [sic]
. . . I WANTED YOU TO BE WITH ME SO MUCH
WHILE I WAS DOING THE PAINTING AND THOUGHT OF
BLK. MT. IN THAT FUNNY LITTLE ROOM WHEN WE
PAINTED THEM THE FIRST TIME.
Apr. 15, 1954, Archives of the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Gaeta.
9. At the very end, Twombly was hallucinating due to his deteriorating condition
and the lack of oxygen in his brain. And yet there was an underlying and poetic
rationality to it all. He spoke continually of art, asking, for example, that a small
Picasso that he owned be brought to his bedside. His last thoughts were about his
art: I let it inside to create, to regenerate, to make it stronger rather than let it go
out all at once like a flash in the eye. I made art that regenerates itself. I enjoyed
making it so much. Oh! I loved it so much. Then after a long pause: The strength
of memory that is left behind. From conversations with Nicola Del Roscio,
and Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonn of Drawings, vol. II, 19561960, Munich,
Schirmer Mosel, 2012, pp. 56.
 Coronation of
Sesostris, Part V,
2000, acrylic,
crayon, and graphite
on canvas, 81 by
61 inches. Pinault
Collection.

CY TWOMBLY ART IN AMERICA 81

Lucas Cranach
the Elder: Martin
Luther as an
Augustinian Monk,
THE TASK
OF ART
1520, copperplate
engraving, 5
by 3 inches.
Luther Memorials
Foundation of
Saxony-Anhalt.

Exhibitions on Martin Luther and the

Reformation explore authoritarianism and dissent
in the rst media age.

by Christopher P. Heuer
IT IS APT that in this American winter of misinformation,
xenophobia, and false prophetsthis winter of resistance and
introspectionexhibitions in New York, Minneapolis, and
Atlanta revisited the Protestant Reformation.1 This year marks
CURRENTLY the cinquecentennial of Martin Luthers famous 1517 act of
ON VIEW
The Image of a nailing to the door of a church in Wittenberg his 95 Theses,
Fractured Church: a list of complaints against Church abuses. Though historians
Martin Luther and have come to question whether the dramatic gesture actually
the 95 Theses at
500 Years, at Pitts happened, it lingers in popular imagination as the original
Theology Library, incendiary post, the spark for a schism that has framed
Emory University, worldwide histories of revolution (and reaction) for centuries.
Atlanta, through
July 7. The actual artistic production of the German Reforma-
tion erahomely woodcuts, rebuslike paintings, polemical
medallionsis rarely exhibited outside of northern Europe.
CHRISTOPHER
P. HEUER directs Lucas Cranach the Elders portraits of choleric humanists are
the research and familiar to many. But these panels, with their ultramarine or
academic program moss-hued backgrounds, are only part of the story.
at the Sterling and
Francine Clark Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation, at the
Art Institute, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Word and Image: Martin
Williamstown, Mass. Luthers Reformation, at the Morgan Library and Museum
See Contributors
page. in New York, surveyed the material culture of early modern
Germany in all its nuance. As far as Reformation art was
concerned, text-heavy altarpieces, crude life-size block prints,
and cheap broadsides were the means through which reform-
ers created an ideological public that split Christendom
forever. If the idea of art as difficulty rather than decor is a
modern one, these brilliant exhibitions explored a specific
moment when visual information was not just sloganeering
but work. One doesnt have to believe, as did Hegel, that real
art begins when representation falls apart (zerfllt) in the
Reformation to be astonished by these shows.
Organized in partnership with German institutions
in Halle, Wittenberg, Gotha, and Berlin, the curatorial
framework for both exhibitions, which featured overlap-
ping material, foregrounded context. The Minneapolis show
in particular mimicked the displays often encountered in
Landesmuseen, public institutions less familiar in the United
States than in Europe. The presentation examined a broad
cultural landscape through the lens of both art and history.
Vitrines held riding boots, tankards, daggers, and chalices, as
well as woodcuts by Erhard Schn and Hans Baldung. Some
surprising arguments quietly emerged from the show and the
sumptuous two-volume catalogue produced by the partner-
ing museums.2
Chief among these arguments was another challenge to
the hoary characterization of the Reformation as tragoedia
artis, a phrase coined by humanist scholar Erasmus upon wit-
nessing the fury of Reformation iconoclasts in Basel. Indeed,
at the center of Lutheran faith was not the image of godhead,
but the Wordan abstraction. Yet, as these important shows
authoritatively demonstrate, the visual arts played a key role in
both articulating and refuting Lutheran precepts.

82 APRIL 2017
Erhard Schn
(attributed): The
Devils Bagpipe, ca.
153035, colored
woodcut and
typographic text,
14 by 10 inches.
Unknown German
artist: Fool and
Voppart, ca. 1525,
colored woodcut
and typographic
text, 15 by 11
inches.
Images this spread
courtesy Foundation
Schloss Friedenstein
Gotha.
MARTIN LUTHER was born in a small mining town in the
Harz Mountains in 1483. (He liked to portray his youth as an aus-
tere one, yet archaeologists have recently unearthed evidence that
his family owned an entire block of houses.)3 Luthers upbringing
was unremarkably medieval. He prayed to saints; he mourned
when his brother died from plague; he studied the seven liberal
arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
music), intending to become a lawyer. Luthers life changed in July
1505 when, according to his own testimony, he was nearly struck
by lightning near Erfurt. Within two weeks he had entered an
Augustinian monastery, and by 1510 he was professor of theology
at the university in Wittenberg, a backwater town of two thousand
people. The university had deep ties to the local court of Frederick
the Wise, a voracious collector of art and relics.
In Wittenberg, Luther taught, studied the Bible, and engaged
in the scholastic tradition of disputation, wherein students
exchanged arguments on controversial subjects. His 1517 Theses
were something like an invitation to a public debate about the
Churchs sale of indulgences, those certificates that absolved sins or
reduced punishments in the afterlife.
The document made no great splash when it was later
printed in Leipzig and Basel. Rather, it was the Church,
responding to a rumored threat to its lucrative indulgence busi-
ness, that ignited rhetorical flames. As representatives of the
pope in northern Europe began to stir, Luther responded with
letters, many on display in the Morgan Library show. Early
missives apologize; subsequent letters attack. Luther wrote
in a vernacular German, while the Church kept to scholastic
Latin. Popular sympathy for Luthers case swelled. Summoned
in 1521 to recant publicly before Emperor Charles V, ruler of
84 APRIL 2017 THE TASK OF ART
the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Americas, Luther
refused. He was quickly excommunicated by Pope Leo X,
Medici patron of Raphael. The media war was on.
Open letters, rebuttals, pamphlets, satiresdozens of
which filled the bookish Morgan exhibitionpoured forth
from presses throughout German-speaking Europe. The prints
lampooned Lutheran or Church teachings as heretical. Or they
extolled the salvific merits of the competing theologies. Not
unlike today, ad hominem attacks were the norm. The pope and
his minions were caricatured as jesters, dogs, and mice. Luther
took the form of an ass and a devil.
Sympathetic imagery could cast the belligerents in a saintly
light. Both shows revealed much about mass-produced portrai-
ture. Luther was (arguably) one of the first non-noble sitters
whose visage became widely known. In Lucas Cranachs 1520
copperplate engraving, made to advertise the reformers atten-
dance at the Diet of Worms, Luther appears as a tonsured monk
dramatically lit from above. He wears a roomy Augustinian habit
and is posed against a white, defiantly austere background. The
self-reflexive inscription offers a subtle meditation on image-
making: Luther himself creates an eternal image of his spirit, his
mortal features are but the wax of Cranach. Other pictures are
not so flattering: a colored woodcut by Johannes Cochlaeus from
1529 depicts Luther as the seven-headed beast of Revelation
(12:3 and 13:110), an image conveying a transformation from a
pious monk to duplicitous heretic.
Relative to books, such Flugbltter (literally: flying leaves)
could be produced quickly and cheaply. These sheets became
speedy and efficient vehicles for polemic in a time of fast-paced
events and unreliable distribution networks. Comparisons to
Text-heavy altarpieces, crude life-size block prints, and
cheap broadsides were the means through which reformers
created an ideological public.
Twitteronly softly pushed in the exhibitions but glibly invoked
in recent popular commemorations of 15174remain problematic,
however. As scholar Andrew Pettegree has pointed out, reading
the Reformation as a media event gets us only so far.5 Printed
words and texts in early modern Europe worked on vastly different
registers for different parts of that population; they were media, but
not always social. While prints may have rendered theology, fear
mongering, and solace accessible like never before, they reached
readers at varying levels of consciousness and literacy. News was
still a slow and expensive affair. Luther would not have succeeded
without important friends like theologian Philip Melanchthon
who could buttress and share his message. Luthers own publish-
ing strengths, to be sure, lay in his writings very structure. He was
direct, and he was brief. His 1518 Sermon on Indulgence and
Grace, aimed at a popular audience, was only 1,500 words, and
ran through thirteen editions in a single year.
MARTIN LUTHER
LUTHERS WAS a negative theology. If the Church held
that salvation was possible only through the intermediaries of
priest and mass, Luther preached the removal of all that came
between humanity and God. In sermons, and eventually in
print, he advocated sola desfaith alone, with the individual
experience of scripture (and not some ecclesiastics presentation
of it) as the only way to Christian instruction. (Luther, a scholar
of Greek, attempted to master Hebrew to translate both biblical
testaments.) Anything intercessional was clutter. In much of Workshop
Reformation Europeand, later, in Puritan New England of Heinrich
Fllmaurer: Gotha
absence became a favorable condition. Altar, ca. 153941,
Yet Luther was hardly immune to earthly beauty. He loved mixed mediums
on fir panel, center
music, for example, and both exhibitions held choir books as well panel: 79 by 82
as luminous late medieval metalwork. Highlights on view in Min- inches, outer wings:
35 by 41 inches,
neapolis included a silver spoon, an inkstand, and a strap buckle inner wings: 37 by
owned by Luther. Today, these objects have a reliclike quality, and 19 inches.
ART IN AMERICA 85
Conrad Meit:
Adam and Eve, ca.
1510, varnished
and partially
polychromed
boxwood, 14 by
6 by 3 inches
(Adam) and 13
by 5 by 2 inches
(Eve). Courtesy
Foundation Schloss
Friedenstein Gotha.

86 APRIL 2017 THE TASK OF ART

their treatment as quasi-sacral objects was a subtle reminder that
Luther saw himself not as overturning the Church but fixing it.
At the Morgan we found a locking iron indulgence chest and a
breathtaking duo of boxwood sculptures from ca. 1510 by Conrad
Meit depicting Adam and Eve. These exquisite objects reaffirm
the authority of craft, as much as faith, within the late-medieval
aesthetic that framed Luthers world.
Unlike many of his apologists, Luther himself said nothing
consistent about visual art. As Katrin Herbst skillfully reviews
in a catalogue essay, even the most heated iconophobes like
Andreas Karlstadt initially asked for image removal rather than
image-destruction.6 Luther appreciated the pedagogical value
of the icon, yet disavowed its necessity in churches. His printed
catechisms subtly omitted the Second Commandments ban on
graven images, but his own translation of the Decalogue kept it
intact. Luther disowned his zealous acolyte Huldrych Zwingli
after he penned combustible tracts about iconoclasm in the
1520s, but in 1522 Luther himself zestfully urged the benefits
of ein geystlich bild abthuna spiritual putting-away of images
(for Luther, mental Bilder were vitally different from images
made of wood and paint).
Far away from Wittenberg, bursts of iconoclasm began to
rage from 1522 on. Luther, ever a foe to extremism, presciently
realized that image-breakers partook of precisely the same
idolatry they claimed to be demystifying; both worshippers and
destroyers assumed an invisible presence within the wood and
pigment of sculpture or altarpieces, a hidden spirit in Luthers
words. But civil chaos was always of a piece with false gods.
Bildersturm was actually a word coined by Luther himself.7 By
the mid-sixteenth century, Calvinism in Switzerland and the
Netherlands would go on to radicalize Luthers ambivalence.
For the latter, churches were purified to a point of emptiness,
superficially presaging the gallerys modern white cube.
Shamelessly didactic, a new art emerged to propagandize
for the new theology. Panel painting in particular reconfigured its
relationship to mimesis, since realism risked inviting idolatry. Per-
spectival spacethe graceful geometric lie that structured so many
Renaissance pictureswas compressed. Later, English artists would
take this Protestant flatness to extremesconsider how portrait-
ists there presented sitters as surface decoration, riots of jewelry and
brocade, rather than bodies in space. Witness, too, the flatness of
Cranachs famous portraits of Luther and his eventual wife, Katha-
rina von Bora (more than a dozen iterations appear in Minneapolis
alone), or the severe frontality of the artists Law and Grace, a wholly
original Lutheran composition copied endlessly from 1529.
In the latter work, symbol and text crowd out terrain
formerly reserved for saints, and vernacular texts narrate a
binary scene contrasting alternative means of salvation. Moses
points at the Tablets of the Old Testament while John the
Baptist, holding a book, points to Christ. The colorful picture is
deliberately unbeautiful, almost collagelike, easily transferrable
to print. Cranach jumbles scriptural communiqus which it
remains our responsibility to decode.
In both Minneapolis and New York, the Reformation
debate about the image read not as an up-or-down proposition,
but as an open-ended conversation. One of the achievements
of both venues was to allow the plurality of local approaches
MARTIN LUTHER
Bust of a female
saint excavated from
Gouvernementsberg
in Magdeburg,
Germany, second
half of the 14th
century, sandstone.
Courtesy State
Office for Heritage
and Archaeology,
Saxony-Anhalt.
Photo Andrea
Hrentrup.
to iconoclasm the space to breathe and speak for themselves.
(Many such instances were actually undramatic; in Zurich, for
example, the town council hired workers to carefully pack away
offending sculptures.) In one of the last rooms of the Min-
neapolis show, broken fragments of sandstone sculpture from
Magdeburg cathedral are displayed in a single vitrinenot
reconstructed as a body, but left unassembled as if scattered
across the ground. The effect is brilliant. The pulverized figure
appears like blasted miscellany rather than an elegiac ruin.
When the ontology of the artwork changed, artists were
forced to adapt. Church commissions declined throughout
Reformed Europe in the third decade of the sixteenth century,
and the Minneapolis show reveals what often came next. Many
painters dove into the relatively safe mediums of woodcut and
engraving (few would confuse gritty black-and-white paper
artworks with idols). Some, like the Augsburg painter Hein-
rich Vogtherr, turned to writing about art, in essence teaching
what they could no longer profitably do. Herbsts catalogue
essay reminds us how Vogtherr published a bestselling pattern
book in 1538, prefaced with a lament about the Reformations
diminishment of the liberal arts.8 According to the grandest
narrative (Hegel again), it was because of Luther that artists
turned to scenes of the everyday, to landscapes, to merry com-
panies, and still lifes, and the modern art market began.9 From
the Reformation on, that is, capital, rather than sacred presence,
would come to re-enchant art.
LUTHERS LETTERS, portions of which were on view at both
venues, offer different surprises. In them we discover Luthers
ability to counsel, reassure, and question, but also a chilling capacity
for vanity, annoyance, and outright hate. The Reformers self-
ART IN AMERICA 87
 We discover Luthers ability to counsel, reassure, and question, but
also a chilling capacity for vanity, annoyance, and outright hate.

confidence never seems to waver. At the Morgan, a 1523 missive
from Dessau sees Luther berating Georg Spalatin, an ally at the
Wittenberg court, for ignoring repeated calls for assistance. Do
your job! he writes angrily. Elsewhere Luther tenderly comforts a
worried follower, Barbara Lysskirchen of Freiburg, by sharing an
account of his personal fears.
Luther was unrelentingly anti-Semitic, wrote entire books
defaming Islam, and had nothing but contempt for civil dis-
obedience, urban or rural. In response to uprisings in 152425
in Thuringia, he went so far as to publish Against the Robbing
and Murderous Horde of Peasants, which included, among its
more memorable advice: Let everyone who can, smite, slay, and
stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more
poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one
must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you,
and a whole land with you. Artisans of humbler aspirations,
like Vogtherr, actually sided with the peasants. Not so for a
crypto-Lutheran like Albrecht Drer, who, at the height of his
powers in the 1520s, proposed a monument to commemorate
(not mourn) the slaughter that eventually befell said rebels at
the hands of nobility-backed mercenaries in 1525. Such incite-
ment is cast in an entirely new light by archaeological findings
about Luthers elite background. Class, as much as creed, clearly
drove the Reformers fear of various Others.
There lingers an undercurrent of violence, pictorial and actual,
in both shows. In many simplified Reformation paintings, for
example, the strains of decoupling expression from belief crackle
beneath seemingly dulcet picture surfaces. In placid full-length por-
traits of Luther or depictions of seventeenth-century whitewashed
Dutch church interiors by Pieter Saenredam, the impression is less
balance than unease. In our own time, such older works have been
placed within a telos of modern abstraction.10 But the underlying
agitation of such seemingly still images is their truth, as it would
be for later artists. As Mark Rothko, who was often cast as a soft
iconoclast, put it: Those who are friendly to my pictures on the basis
of their serenity . . . have found endurable for human life the extreme
violence that pervades every inch of their surface.11 The minimal, far
from a quiescence, presages a kind of metaphysical activism.
On this score, a smaller exhibition in Atlanta adds a power-
ful and timely dimension to Reformations cinquecentennial.
The Image of a Fractured Church: Martin Luther and the
95 Theses at 500 Years, at Pitts Theology Library, at Emory
University, was organized in partnership with the exhibitions in
Minneapolis and New York and extends the narrative offered in

Left, Lucas
Cranach the Elder:
Martin Luther,
1529, mixed
mediums on birch,
15 by 9 inches.

Right, Lucas
Cranach the Elder:
Katharina von
Bora, 1529, mixed
mediums on birch,
15 by 9 inches.

88 APRIL 2017 THE TASK OF ART


those venues. The Emory show connects early Protestantism to
the legacy of hometown reformer Martin Luther King Jr., the
man behind the most progressive American social achievement
of the twentieth century. In Atlanta we learn that King, who
invoked not just Luther but Wittenberg by name in a sermon the
day before his 1968 assassination, preached to overflow crowds
in East Berlin in September 1964. It was a stirring event, albeit
one that remains little-known. East Germany had long seen
propaganda value in the USs dismal record on race relations, and
Kings socialism was always a worry for US handlers when he
traveled (on the Berlin visit his Allied hosts actually confiscated
his passport; King and his entourage disobeyed and passed
through Checkpoint Charlie untouched).
Newspapers from both Berlins covered the scene, and photos,
included in the catalogue, are remarkable. Speaking in Berlin of
barriers of race, creed, ideology, and nationality, King summoned
the vision of a common humanity which makes us sensitive to
the sufferings of one another.12 Civil disobedience here becomes
prerequisite for justice as well as freedom, something the original
Luther implied in his writings, if not in his deeds.
In 1966, King reenacted the gesture of his namesake by post-
ing twenty-four demands for fair housing practice on the doors of
Chicago City Hall. Such episodes in the history of Cold War civil
rightsdescribed in a catalogue essay by Louis B. Nebelsickare
perhaps unexpected in the context of Luther. They shouldnt be.
The objects and images related to King help materialize how dis-
sentfor good or for evilremains the Protestant Reformations
headiest bequest to any visual culture today.
MARTIN LUTHER
Lucas Cranach
the Elder: Law
and Grace, 1529,
mixed mediums on
limewood, 32 by
46 inches.
Images this spread
courtesy Foundation
Schloss Friedenstein
Gotha.
In their directness, Luthers writings summoned terror
and hope. Centuries of followers, self-acknowledged and not,
recognized how populism could be harnessed as an opposi-
tional force capable of dooming or rescuing entire nations. For
the artists of the Reformation, the mediated image was never
an easy reflection of what was, but a glimpse of what might be.
What Bertolt Brecht understood about the modern world is
also true of Luthers moment: art works best not as a mirror,
but as a hammer.
1. As did, in part, Renaissance and Reformation: German Art in the Age of Drer and
Cranach at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nov. 20, 2016Mar. 26, 2017.
2. See Martin Luther: Treasures of the Reformation, Dresden, Sandstein Verlag, 2016.
3. Bjrn Schlenker, Archologie am Elternhaus Luthers, in Luther in Mansfeld, ed. Harald
Meller, Halle, Germany, Landesmuseum fr Vorgeschichte, 2007, pp. 17112.
4. How Luther Went Viral, Dec. 17, 2011, The Economist, economist.com
5. See Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation,
New York, Penguin, 2015.
6. Katrin Herbst, Lutherana Tragoedia Artis? The Impact of the Reformation on Art
History, in Martin Luther: Treasures of the Reformation, pp. 210220. See also Ulrich Kopf,
DieBilderfragein der Reformationszeit, Bltter fr Wrttembergische Kirchengeschichte 90,
1990, pp. 3865.
7. Beat Hodler, Bildersturm auf dem Land, in Bildersturm: Wahrsinn oder Gottes Wille?, ed.
Ccile Dupeaux, Strasbourg and Zurich, NZZ, 2000, p. 52.
8. Werner Hofmann, ed. Luther und die Folgen fr die Kunst, Munich, Prestel, 1983, p. 130.
9. See Joseph Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life, Princeton,
N.J., Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 8689.
10. For example, Roland Barthes, The World as Object, in Critical Essays, Evanston, Ill.,
Northwestern University Press, 1972, pp. 212.
11. Mark Rothko quoted in Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art, Sydney,
Power Institute, 2017, p. 43.
12. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted in Louis D. Nebelsick, Expansive Grace, in Martin
Luther: Treasures of the Reformation, p. 404.
ART IN AMERICA 89
 HEAVEN
View of Josh Faughts
installation Sanctuary,
2017, handwoven,
hand-dyed cotton,
hemp, and gold lam;
scrapbooking stickers;
DVDs of the 1999
season of Passions;
sheet music for the
Bangles Eternal

SENT
Flame; sheet music
for Peter Hallocks A
Song of Deliverance;
advertisements for
the Monastery (the
Sanctuary); issue six
ofPot Pourri, a sexual
questionnairefor
the new age; an
advertisement for the

Josh Faughts exuberant fabric work melds pop Date-Record; giant

clothespins, nail
polish, and pins; two
references with deep religious themes. tapestries, 45 by 6
feet overall. Photo
Mark Woods.

by Glenn Adamson
We will reject White Nationalism. We will expose and oppose
racial prof iling in policing. We will work to end misogyny that
enables sexism and a culture of sexual violence.
NOT EVERY CHURCH in America would greet its parish-
ioners with these words, but they are affixed, Martin Luther
style, to the front door of St. Marks Episcopal Cathedral in
Seattle. This gives perhaps some indication of the churchs orga-
nizational mind-set. Back in 1972, its bishop denounced the
bombing of North Vietnam. More recently, St. Marks hosted
a family of Syrian refugees, welcoming them with hand-sewn
quilts laid across the beds in their new home. Steven L.
Thomason, dean and rector of the cathedral, responded to
the election of Donald Trump by issuing a press release that
announced: Our church stands as a sanctuary and safe haven
for people threatened by those who would attack them.
Even knowing all this, you might still be surprised to walk
into the cathedrals nave and confront a newly commissioned
artwork by San Franciscobased Josh Faught. Two panelseach
twenty-five feet tall and dyed in bright reds, purples, and blues
hang one above the other on one of the church pillars. Woven
into the fabric are song titles from Belinda Carlisles hit 1987
album, Heaven on Earth. The hanging also functions as a giant
DVD cozy; discs of Passions (19992008), a bizarre soap opera
with palpable religious undertones, are tucked into multiple
pouches on each panel. The DVD jewel cases are lovingly hand-
painted with nail polish and printed with episode numbers as
though they were Psalms. The work is simply titled Sanctuary.
An ecclesiastical artwork as progressive as this must be
counted a minor miracle, particularly in the dark days of early
2017. How did it come to pass? Part of the story, clearly, is the
long-standing liberal vision of the church. Another part has to
do with the patrons Bill and Ruth True, who are parishioners
at St. Marks. They commissioned the work and will eventu-
ally take private ownership, after it has been on display at the
church for eighteen months (their home has high ceilings). CURRENTLY
A third factor is the unusual intertwining of religion and gay ON VIEW
Josh Faughts
culture in Seattleabout which, more in a moment.
installation
The rest we can attribute to the artist himself. When Sanctuary, at St.
Dean Thomason discussed the commission with Faught, he Marks Episcopal
Cathedral, Seattle,
said that it would be absolutely finein fact, it would be
through July 2018.
advantageousfor the work to express a commitment to
gay pride. Faught says his first thought was how about gay
GLENN
shame?1 He has long been interested in the traumatic aspects
ADAMSON is a
of queer life: the fusion of desire and guilt that so many young senior scholar at
people feel, the difficulty of coming out, the pain of family the Yale Center for
British Art, New
conflict. He has said that he can often tell when a work is
Haven, Conn. See
finished because he starts to feel embarrassed. Contributors page.
In past projects (shown regularly at Lisa Cooley in New
York, until that gallerys much lamented demise last year),
Faught managed to project an air of confessionalism with-
out actually giving that much away. The inclusion of found
objectslike an oversize pink eraser stamped For BIG
Mistakesand the repetition of mens first names seemed to
suggest regret and nostalgia, but this vibe was always balanced
by sheer formal exuberance. Despite his seemingly improvisa-

ART IN AMERICA 91
 80s. But it turns out that there is an online subculture of true
believers who take the phrase Heaven on Earth literally, parsing
her lyrics as hidden expressions of godly devotion.
Faught is fascinated by Carlisles triple-coding, her ability to
appeal equally to suburban kids, gay men, and devout Christians.
His incorporation of her song titles into the banners echoes this, as
it evokes both a listing of Bible verses and a handmade mix tape.
He is also wickedly funny, and perceptive, to have paired her with
the TV show Passions. The series was intended in earnest, and
accepted as such by religious viewers. But its exaggerated emotions
and creaky storylineslots of dream sequences and flashbacks
earned it a place in the annals of millennial camp taste. By the
late 1990s, even its daytime TV format seemed tragically dated,
implying someone at home with nothing to do but cry.
The programs showrunner, James E. Reilly, could well be
construed as working from a queer sensibility. Prior to his efforts
on Passions, Reilly achieved notoriety as the head writer for
Days of Our Lives, creating storylines that were notable for
their fantastical themes. The show could even be read as an
allegory of the closet. Its plots often revolved around the dangers
of sexuality; it was shot entirely indoors, probably for budgetary
reasons, thereby engendering a feeling of claustrophobia.
Max, 2014, tory approach, Faught has an impressive command of weaving
handwoven and
hand-dyed silver
techniques and draws deeply from the disciplines history. It is
lam and hemp, nail telling that he often leaves threads hanging, as if the sculpture
polish, sequin trim, might still undergo a transformation, or even an unraveling; the
resin, broken mug,
giant clothespin, artist says that one thing attracting him to textiles is that they
denim, silk, and can all just come undone so easily.
toilet paper on cedar
support, 68 by 65
by 12 inches. Photo THE AWKWARD LEGACY of 1970s fiber art, which had a
Cary Whittier. brief moment of institutional success and then fell from fash-
ion, looms particularly large in Faughts work. One can often
detect subtle references to artists of that movement, and not
just the safe ones like Sheila Hicks or Lenore Tawney but also
figures like Walter Nottingham, Josep Grau-Garriga, and Claire
Zeisler, artists whose hairy, let-it-all-hang-out sculptures now
seem like countercultural relics. I spoke with Faught on this
point a couple of years ago, and he noted that he was interested
in the way that fiber art had sometimes acted as a surrogate
for political activity, particularly among feminist-identified
artists.2 Appropriating their vocabulary is an earnest tribute to
Sanctuary (detail), this radical intent. Given the uneasy art-historical status of fiber
2017, showing issue art, however, quoting it could never read as straightforwardly
six of Pot Pourri.
Photo John Wilson heroicizing. Rather, Faught is acknowledging both the rebel-
White. liousness and the painful reality of a marginalized history.
Compared to earlier works, Sanctuary hints rather
obliquely at the theme of anxiety by including badges that
bear cringe-worthy jokes such as Im LOLing on the outside,
but WTFing on the inside, and by giving Belinda Carlisle top
billing. As pop stars go, Carlisle, once a member of the Go-Gos,
has lost most of her previous luster and can be understood
here only as a nostalgic reference to teenage enthusiasms.
Faughts use of her album as the works conceptual scaffolding
is ingenious, for not only is she a gay icon but also an object of
Christian reverence. This last may seem a bit surprising, given
the sexy persona that Carlisle projected on MTV back in the

92 APRIL 2017 HEAVEN SENT

 Faught was an obsessive fan of Passions when it first
aired, watching every episode on the cable channel Lifetime as What is sacred, to whom,
devotedly as he had listened to Belinda Carlisle ten years previ-
ously. In Sanctuary, these two textual crushesa secular pop
and why? Even to pose these
album and a sacred soap operaoperate as complements. The questions is unusual in the
juxtaposition is spelled out in the works overall form, with one
banner devoted to the A side of Carlisles album, the other to history of ecclesiastical art.
the B side, one half dominated by red tones, the other, by blue.
You could read that pairing as political if you wanted to, though
there is also interior decoration to be consideredthe stained-
glass windows in the church have similar colors.
The quality of emotional attachment in Sanctuarys refer-
ences is deepened through the works materiality. Faught dyed
the warp threads (the ones held in tension on the loom) using
an uncommon technique: bundling them under a layer of ice
that in turn was sprinkled with powdered pigments. Melting
distributed the dye onto the cotton fibers slowly, producing an
intense yet blurred effect. Further visual splendor was added
through the use of a synthetic gold lam weft. Cheap and
cheerful, it may be (Faught bought the thread, all 600 spools
of it, through the craft mega-chain Michaels), yet the gold
adds a note of grandeur, equally reminiscent of a medieval
tapestry and a drag queens frock.
The duality that runs through Faughts work also has a
particular local resonance. While researching the project, he
learned about a gay club that had once existed in the city, set
in a deconsecrated church building. Going variously under the
names the Monastery or the Sanctuary, it started out in 1978
as a typical social club but later became notorious for drug use
and hard-core sex. It was closed down by city authorities in
1985. Local historians have done important work in excavat-
ing this story and other materials from the citys underground
history. Drawing particularly on the archives of St. Marks late
choirmaster Peter Hallock and queer activist Tim Mayhew,
Faught has reproduced various flyers and other documents,
and attached them to his banners with jumbo plastic clips. By
alluding to these disparate strands, weaving them together in
his work, he sought to do some justice to Seattles queer history.
Despite the many layers of content in Sanctuary, the
work ultimately resolves into a single line of inquiry: what
is sacred, to whom, and why? Even to pose these ques-
tions is unusual in the history of ecclesiastical art; to do so
by conflating spirituality with pop ephemera is rarer still.
Religion is, after all, a domain of eternal faith. Believers may
experience doubt; they may undertake complex theological seems founded on deep respect. Faught recognized the uplift Sanctuary (detail),
speculation. But such investigations of the soul and mind are that a church can provide, and looked for correspondences in 2017, showing the
sheet music for the
premised on certainties. Without convictionin the case of his own experience. Lord knows, we could use more dialogue Bangles Eternal
St. Marks Cathedral, a belief in the Christian Godthere like this, occurring between people of very different world- Flame. Photo
Mark Woods.
can be no transcendence. views and different passions. As a wise woman once put it: I
Faught approaches these articles of faith as an outsider. begin, baby, where you end. / We belong together. (Circle in
Raised Jewish, he is today thoroughly secular and nonobser- the Sand, Heaven on Earth, side A, track 2.)
vant; making the work, he felt a little like Whoopi [Gold-
berg] in Sister Act. There is certainly an element of dissonance 1. Unless otherwise noted, all statements by Faught are from emails and conversations
in Sanctuary, perhaps even of challengethe worship of a with the author, winter 201617.
2. The interview will be included in the forthcoming book Queer Threads: Crafting
former Go-Go is not exactly authorized by the Good Book. Identity and Community, ed. John Chaich and Todd Oldham, Los Angeles, AMMO
But the hanging is by no means a satirical artwork. Indeed, it Books, 2017.

JOSH FAUGHT ART IN AMERICA 93

 POEMS
WITHOUT
David Reed: #64,
1974, oil on canvas,
76 by 56 inches.
Goetz Collection,
Munich.

All Reed paintings

this article David
Reed/Artists Rights

WORDS
Society (ARS),
New York. Courtesy
Gagosian Gallery.

David Reed exhibited a group of work in 1975 at Susan

Caldwell Gallery in New York. A traveling show reunites
these Brushstroke paintings for new audiences.

by Raphael Rubinstein

A Parable precincts of downtown Manhattan. Nonetheless, they manage

to exert, via word of mouth and the occasional image in an
At the age of twenty-nine a New York artist has his first solo exhibition catalogue or art magazine, a sub-rosa influence
CURRENTLY
ON VIEW show. Hanging in the clean white space are nineteen of his on subsequent painters. Its only when the artist enters his
Painting Paintings recent paintings: gestural abstractions striking for their stacks seventies that a university art museum mounts a show devoted
(David Reed) 1975, of bold, modular brushstrokes (mostly black on white grounds) to these elusive works, enlisting the curatorial help of a
at 356 S. Mission,
Los Angeles, and unusual formats (many of the canvases are exceedingly somewhat younger and greatly celebrated painter who was
Apr. 1May 21. narrow and tall). Despite being critically well receivedone affected by them early in his career. The show travels to New
David Reed: Vice reviewer proclaims the work to be a new kind of painting, one Yorks most prominent gallery, where it includes a number of
and Reflection
An Old Painting, that recasts the vocabulary of abstraction in a form giving rise contextualizing works by other artists, finally returning these
New Paintings and to new precisions of feelingthe show doesnt do particularly by now legendary works to public view in the city of their
Animations, at the well with collectors: only one painting sells. making after four decades of largely underground existence.
Prez Art Museum,
Miami, through In the years to follow the artist leaves behind the limited
May 21. palette of his early work, as well as its modular compositions.
Gesture remains central but his broadening palette of artificial
How to Do Things
RAPHAEL colors and experiments with glazing and translucency gradu- with Paint
RUBINSTEIN is ally lead him away from the reductive strategies of his debut The canvas receives a coat of white oil paint. While the paint
a New Yorkbased show. Within a decade his passion for Baroque and Man- is still thoroughly wet, a brush loaded with black oil paint is
writer and professor
of critical studies nerist paintingand memories of Cinemascope Hollywood dragged horizontally in a straight line from the top left edge of
at the University of moviesresults in highly complex structures populated with the painting almost to its right edge. As soon as the stroke is
Houston. opulent cascades of ribbony brushstrokes. made, the painter dips the brush into the black paint and paints
Rarely reproduced and almost never exhibited, the early another stroke, slightly below the first one, trying to make it
paintings (which disappear back into the artists studio for as similar as possible to the preceding stroke. He continues in
years after the show) remain largely unknown outside the this way until the canvas is filled, top to bottom, with thick,

94 APRIL 2017
View of the evenly spaced brushstrokes. The entire process takes only a
exhibition Painting
Paintings (David few minutes, but as he works his way down the canvas, things
Reed) 1975, 2017, happen in the brushs wake. Under the force of gravity, the black
at Gagosian Gallery,
New York. Photo
paint (which he sometimes replaces with mars violet or orange-
Rob McKeever. brown) begins to flow into the white undercoat. Depending on
how thick the white paint is and, more important, how much
paint the artist loads onto his brush, this downward seepage can
be minor or catastrophic, especially along the left side, where
the brush is most loaded. On occasion, the downward flow from
one brushstroke pushes through the stroke below it, creating an
avalanche that threatens to sweep away much of the subsequent
mark. When this effect is most extreme, the painting evokes
marbleized paper or a stalactite-filled cavern. The only means
the artist has to control the resulting turbulence is to remove the
canvas from the wall and lay it flat on the floor, which he does
almost immediately after completing the final brushstroke. One
time, in his rush to move the canvas from wall to floor, he drops
it: in the finished work a line of disruptions record this jolt,
turning the painting into a kind of seismograph.
Whether the canvases are tall and narrow, leaving
room only for brushstrokes less than a foot long, or wide
enough to permit strokes of more than four feet in length,
the number of stacked strokes averages around thirteen or
fourteen. Perhaps because the brushstrokes are composed
like a page of writing, the number of lines gives them a
formal resemblance to a sonnet. This stanzaic quality was
noted early on by Paul Auster in an essay for the first show
of the Brushstroke canvases. Each of these paintings,
he wrote, resembles a vast poem without words. In the
wider paintings, which are created on abutted canvases, the
evocation of poetic form is especially strong: every time the
brush traverses the seam between one canvas and another
96 APRIL 2017 POEMS WITHOUT WORDS
there is a slight disturbance: a vertical line slicing through
the stroke. (These vertical segments are also like bar lines
on music staff paper.) If we think of the resulting segments
as poetic feet (tetrameter, pentameter, etc.) the paintings
can be scanned like poems.
Process into Image
I came out of Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975
at Gagosian, where I saw this exhibition, thinking that
Reeds Brushstroke paintings were possibly the single most
impressive achievement of mid-1970s New York abstrac-
tion. This may seem like an audacious claim given that the
likes of Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, and Frank Stella
were also producing memorable paintings at the same time,
but Reeds canvases embody that moment in art history
with unique clarity and power. Their strength depends in
part on the sheer graphic drama of the brushstrokes as they
confront the inescapable facts of gravity and turbulence.
Like many other artworks of the 1970s, they narrate their
own making. But in contrast to artists such as Dorothea
Rockburne or Robert Ryman, who used low-key, oblique
strategies, Reed pursued self-referentiality through imme-
diately striking images. In a similar way, he drew painterly
motifs out of the entropy-obsessed realm of process art.
Reeds influences include seeing John McLaughlins
stripped-down paintings as a young man in California,
studying at the New York Studio School with the intense
Milton Resnick, and inhabiting a gritty New York poised
on the verge of the punk era. In his catalogue essay, Rich-
ard Hell evokes how musicians and painters worked in an
atmosphere of indifference. By the time of his first show,
 misreading of Reed, who even at his most process-driven never
abdicated the challenge of form, as Smith appears to do. A far
more effective selection was Barry Le Vas shattered-glass floor
piece from 196871 that underlined Reeds debt to procedure-
based sculpture. The presence of compelling black-and-white
paintings by Wool and Joyce Pensato effectively attested to
the impact of the New York Studio School, which both artists
attended a few years after Reed studied there.

What Is No Longer There

The 1975 Whitney Biennial included only one of the Brushstroke
paintings, #48 (1974). In the book accompanying Painting
Paintings, Reed recounts how he became dissatisfied with this
particular canvas, which his friends, colleagues, supporters
urged him to have removed from the show in favor of a different
Brushstroke painting, and how he destroyed it after it came back
from the Whitney, a decision he regrets because he now thinks
that it may have been his strongest statement from that time.
Looking at reproductions of #48 its clear that Reed was trying
something different: on a pair of canvases hung side by side, he
has repeated a composition of stacked short horizontal strokes
flanked by a long, slightly angled vertical one. The painting is an
anomaly on two counts: its doubleness and its heterogeneous
which was held in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery, Reed structure combining horizontal and vertical strokes. Historically,
was able to synthesize the reductivist, materialist legacy of it looks back to Rauschenbergs Factum I and Factum II, and
everything that had happened to abstract painting since ahead to French painter Bernard Piffarettis decades-long pursuit View of Painting
Paintings (David
Minimalism and use it to reopen the medium (at a moment of twinned compositions, but it lacks the coherence (visual and Reed) 1975,
when it was widely denigrated) to sensuality, expressiv- conceptual) of the other Brushstroke paintings. Interestingly, showing work by
ity, and performative presence, to the new precisions of marks very similar to the 1970s Brushstroke paintings showed up (left to right, on
walls) Christopher
feeling noted by Peter Schjeldahl. In other words, he was in Reeds exhibition of recent work at Peter Blum Gallery in New Wool, Joyce
making not last paintings but first paintings. York in 2016. In an email to me, Reed described how he wanted Pensato, and James
Nares, and (on floor)
The contextualizing works assembled by Katy Siegel to physically reenact the making of those marks from the 1970s, Barry Le Va. Photo
and Christopher Wool go some way toward conveying the without setting out to do something that looked similar. Rob McKeever.
influences and dialogues swirling around the Brushstroke
paintings, but I would have preferred to see fuller representa-
tion of the artists Reed was looking at and talking to in the
mid-1970s. Of the artists Siegel names in the catalogue as
important to Reed at the time including Resnick, Joan Snyder,
Jack Whitten, Ree Morton, Murray, Alan Shields, Al Loving,
Mary Heilmann, and Guy Goodwin, only one (Whitten, with
a great striated abstraction from 1975) was in the show. Paint-
ings by Snyder, Heilmann, and Goodwin (or Michael Venezia,
Ralph Humphrey, and Ron Gorchov, whom Reed has cited)
would have been more illuminating than the pieces by Dieter
Roth and Charles Ray, which seemed only tangentially related.
Similarly, one of Philip Gustons mid-1960s brush-heavy
paintings (or even one of the 1970s figurative paintings, with
their flurries of dirty, wet-into-wet brushstrokes) would have
been preferable to the Cy Twombly on view, especially since
Reed encountered Guston at the Studio School.
I also could have done without a small, smudged 2006
painting by Josh Smith. In a conversation with Siegel
published in the catalogue, Wool argues that it is Smiths
rejection of all formal issues, his favoring of process over
picture-making, that links him to Reed. This seems to me a

DAVID REED ART IN AMERICA 97

 Barry Buxkamper Judy Pfaff
Sam Cady (a wall and floor scatter piece that
Cristiano Camacho counters Reeds constraint with a
Larry Ray Camp kind of dissociative formalism
Sarah Anne Canright every time I see a photo of one of
Mel Casas Pfaff s forever vanished early
(cool-looking painting titled installations, I have to catch my breath)
Anatomy of a White Dog, likely Tomaso Puliafito
inspired by Romain Garys book Jerry Jones
about US racism, White Dog) Salvatore J. La Rosa
Thomas Chimes Patricia Lay
(a great portrait of Antonin Artaud) Marilyn Lenkowsky
Joseph Clower Alvin Light
(smart comic-book-influenced Carol Lindsley
painting) Kim Robert MacConnel
Phil Douglas Davis David Mackenzie
John Dickson William E. Mahan
(gnarly symmetrical assemblage of Allan McCollum
cut-up canvases, Richard Jackson (way before the Surrogates: a big
meets Al Loving) funky grid painting)
Joe Di Giorgio Jan Lee McComas
Paul Dillon Todd McKie
Reeds page in Reeds #48 is not the only vanished John E. Dowell Jr. George Miller
the catalogue for
the 1975 Whitney
component of the 1975 Biennial, which included Carol Eckman Judith Suzanne Miller
Biennial, showing approximately 130 artists, many of whom, rightly William Fares Scott Miller
#48, 1974. or wrongly, spark little recognition forty-two years Frank Faulkner Rudolph Montanez
on, even in someone like me who devours back Kathleen Ferguson Philip Mullen
issues of art magazines and collects catalogues of Carole Fisher Hiroshi Murata
long-forgotten exhibitions. Leafing through the John Ford Hass Murphy
75 Biennial catalogueas I have done numerous Kent Foster Paula Nees
times, often with great curiosity about the work Charles F. Gaines Stuart Nielson
(seen in black-and-white photographs, usually Charles Garabedian Rob Roy Norton Jr.
poorly lit) of artists whose names were previously Richard George Mary McLean Obering
unknown to meis a powerful reminder how Abigail Gerd Carl Palazzolo
steep the odds are against any artists work win- Roland Ginzel Cherie Raciti
ning serious public attention, and how unlikely it Ron Gorchov Kaare Rafoss
was that Reeds Brushstroke paintings would be (who would have looked great in David Reed
remembered and brought back into public view. the Gagosian show) (notes that Reed lived on lower
Perhaps the most effective way to convey this is John S. Gordon Broadway in New York City,
simply to transcribe the names of all 135 artists. (wire, glass, and scrawled word which, rather amazingly, he still
Here is the list, with some random annotations: tabletop setup) does in 2017)
George Green Roland Reiss
Domingo Barreres Tom Green Gregg Renfrow
W.B. Bearman Dominick Guida Philip Renteria
Tony Bechara Leonard L. Hunter III Bill Richards
Gene Beery Miyoko Ito Judy Rifka
(one of my favorite artists!) Jack Jefferson (a painting on plywood featuring
Allen Edward Bertoldi Pamela Jenrette two irregular geometric shapes;
Gary Beydler (bumpy acrylic abstraction that looks Reed and Rifka were married to
Ross Bleckner like a dcollage; the website of each other at the time)
(nothing like the work that would Artists Space, where she had a show, John Scott Roloff
bring him limited success in the notes that she gave up art to pursue Edward Ross
1980s) a successful career as a freelance Barbara Rossi
Cheryl Bowers makeup and hair stylist) (an acrylic on plexiglass, like those seen
Robin Bruch Virginia Johnson last year in her New Museum show)
Scott Burton David Jones Barbara Quinn Roth

98 APRIL 2017 POEMS WITHOUT WORDS

Edwin Rothfarb
(spare wall-to-floor arrangement
with rocks and patterning)
Paul Rotterdam
Ursula Schneider
John Schnell
Barbara Schwartz
Samuel Scott
Rudy Serra
(large beautifully proportioned,
artfully skewed drywall installation)
Charles Simonds
(you can still see his contribution to
the Biennial in the stairwell of the
Met Breuer)
Alexis Smith
(reproduction so sketchy its impossible #49, 1974, oil on
canvas, 76 by 44
to get any idea of the work)
inches. Museum of
Andrew Spence Contemporary Art,
Earl Staley San Diego.
(big painting Skull with Landscape
features one of the best list of materials
I have ever seen: acrylic, dirt, glitter;
now in collection of the Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston)
Barbara Strasen
Gene Sturman
Susanna Tanger
Robert Thiele
Richard Thompson
Ken Tisa
Alan Turner
(one of the few straightforwardly
figurative paintings; Turner shows
with Mitchell Algus)
Alan Uglow
(given a posthumous show in 2013
at David Zwirner)
Carolynn Umlauf
(aka sculptor Lynn Umlauf )
Thomas M. Uttech
Mary Warner Followed by a separate cohort of Anthony Ramone
Robert J. Warrens video artists: Allen Ruppersberg
(outrageous comic-grotesque painting Ilene Segalove
of some sort of warthog or boar by a Billy Adler John Sturgeon
vigorous New Orleans painter new to me) John Arvanites Bill Viola
Sibyl L. Weil George Bolling (a description on the Electronic Arts
John Wenger Jim Byrne Intermix website for Violas contribution,
Wanda Westcoast Juan Downey a 1973 video titled Information,
(ne Mary Janet Hansen, 19332011, Terry Fox sounds like it could be describing one
involved with Womanhouse) Hermine Freed of Reeds paintings: a disintegrating
Mark Christian Wethli Frank Gillette and self-interrupting signal that
Edward R. Whiteman Joel Glassman perpetually reiterates itself )
Andrew Wilf Beryl Korot
Donald Roller Wilson Paul Kos [Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 appeared at the
Connie Zehr Andy Mann Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Mass., Sept. 11-Dec. 11, 2016,
Elyn Zimmerman John Margolies and Gagosian Gallery, New York, Jan. 17-Feb. 25.]

DAVID REED ART IN AMERICA 99

 ANICKA
CURRENTLY
ON VIEW
Work by Anicka Yi in
the Whitney Biennial,
YI
Whitney Museum
of American Art,
New York, through
June 11.

COMING SOON
The Hugo Boss
Prize 2016: Anicka
Yi at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York,
Apr. 21July 5.

Interview by Ross Simonini

Portrait by Grant Delin

ROSS SIMONINI
is a writer and artist
based in Muir Beach,
Calif.

IN THE
100
STUDIO
APRIL 2017
 WHEN ANICKA YI began making art in her late thirties with
no formal training, her entry point was unusual: a self-directed
study of science. She doesnt fully identify with the term artist.
The art world was not her destination but simply a receptive venue
for her ideas, which she culls from the experimental corners of
cuisine, biology, and perfumery.
The Korean-born Yi, who studied at Hunter College in New
York, produced her first artworks in 2008 with a collective called
Circular File, numbering among its members artist Josh Kline and
designer Jon Santos. Around the same time, she took an interest
in natural fragrances, which led to early, self-directed tests with
tinctures and olfactory art. One of her first projects in this vein
was a scent named Shigenobu Twilight, after Fusako Shigenobu,
leader of the radical left faction Japanese Red Army. The fragrance
blended cedar, violet leaf, yuzu, shiso, and black pepper.
Yis work is characterized by unorthodox combinations of
esoteric ingredients. She often uses materials that areor were
recentlyalive, which can make her sculpture volatile and dif-
ficult to archive. She deep-fries flowers, displays live snails, grows
a leathery fiber from the film produced by brewing kombucha,
and cultivates human-borne bacteria. For her 2015 exhibition
You Can Call Me F at the Kitchen in New York, Yi asked one
hundred women to swab their microbe-rich orifices, cultured
the samples, and used the resulting green-brown growth to paint
and write on an agar-coated surface set in a glowing vitrine. The
final work had an overwhelming smell, with notes of cheese and
decay, both corporeally familiar and sensorially challenging. The
equally noisome sculpture Convox Dialer Double Distance of a
Shining Path(2011) is a boiled stew of recalled powdered milk,
Anicka Yi: Convox
Dialer Double
Distance of a Shining
Path,2011, recalled
powdered milk,
abolished math,
antidepressants,
palm tree essence,
shaved sea lice,
ground Teva rubber
dust, Korean thermal
clay, steeped Swatch
watch, aluminum
pot, cell phone signal
jammer, electric
burner, and palm
tree, 23 by 15 by 15
inches. Courtesy 47
Canal, New York.
Photo Joerg Lohse.
102 APRIL 2017 IN THE STUDIO
antidepressants, palm tree essence, shaved sea lice, and ground Teva
rubber dust, among other ingredients. The scent suggests a psycho-
logical narrative of off-the-grid seaside living.
In an age of long-distance digital exchanges, Yi works with scent
to sensitize herself to the oldest, most animal forms of communica-
tion, and she hopes her art encourages us to do the same.We are a
conservative culture when it comes to the nose, a limitation that mutes
our experiences and our interactions. Yi wants to provoke us, but she
also wants us to inhale more deeply, to experience smells before judging
them offensive, and to consider the social role of disgust.
Yi fabricates her smelly objects in multiple sites. Her base
studio in Bushwick is a small, no-nonsense space where she develops
prototypes, but much of the production happens in laboratories and
through the mail, as she exchanges vials with forensic chemists and
Parisian perfumers. She was also a 201415 visiting artist at the MIT
Center for Art, Science &Technology and the MIT List Visual Arts
Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the last year, Yis work has received a significant spike in
attention. The 2017 Whitney Biennial includes her new video, The
Flavor Genome, an episodic narrative informed by science fiction,
cultural ideas of taste, and the anthropological beliefs of indigenous
Amazonians. As the recipient of the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize, she has
a solo exhibition opening at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
in New York on April 21. When I spoke with her in January, she
discussed the conceptual framework of the exhibition as ethnicity
and the perception of odors, but declined to reveal anything specific
about the physical form the work would take, since it was likely to
change. Her experiments often fail, she explained, so while her ideas
are consistent, their manifestations are unpredictable.
ROSS SIMONINI Youve said that the most radical artistic
statements are being made in the world of cuisine.
ANICKA YI Cuisine is the amalgamation of performance,
sculpture, painting. It has everything. And what it has to do,
consistently, is appeal to our sense of taste. Its uncharted territory
for art. Theres a time pressure. A work on your plate might last
only a few minutes. Its ephemeral. And its mutually transforma-
tive. It gets transformed physically, in the way its masticated,
metabolized, and expelled from the body. But as the person who
is sampling the work, you are also transformed. Thats how it
becomes activated. That, to me, is radical.
SIMONINI Have any culinary experiences transformed you?
YI It was a dream of mine to go to the restaurant El Bulli in
Spain. I went in 2009, two years before it closed. I dont think Ive
ever really come down from that meal, and I hope I never do. It was
so startling. You had to drive forty-five minutes through grape vine-
yards and up a mountain. Or you could take a yacht. And then you
walked into this richly textured setting, like something from a Luis
Buuel film, and you knew you were going to have an experience that
would change your chemicals in irreversible ways.
There were forty-two courses. It was a seven-hour meal. A
staggering orchestra of research and composition went into creat-
ing each dish. But the thing is, it wasnt all pleasure. Thats what I
really appreciated about it. People dont always talk about this in
polite circles, but molecular gastronomy can be downright painful.
 Your Hand Feels
Like a Pillow Thats
Been Microwaved
(detail),2015, vinyl,
steel pipes, metal
bowls, beeswax,
dried shrimp,
glycerin soap, hair
gel, metal pins,
seaweed, foam,
plasticine, pigment
powder, and work
light, 122 by 78 by
50 inches overall.
Courtesy 47 Canal
and the Kitchen,
New York. Photo
Jason Mandella.

ANICK A YI ART IN AMERICA 103

Maybe Shes Born
With It,2015,
blower, Mylar,
plastic, resin,
tempura-fried
flowers, LED
lights, plexiglass,
and wood, 60 by
120 by 120 inches.
Courtesy 47 Canal
and Kunsthalle
Basel. Photo
Philipp Hnger.

235,681K of Digital
Spit,2010, PVC and
leather bag, hair gel,
and tripe, 7 by
11 by 4 inches.
Courtesy 47 Canal.
Photo Margaret
Lee.

104 APRIL 2017 IN THE STUDIO

I write a lot of backstory for my sculptures, as if theyre
characters in a novel or screenplay.
Because the food was not intuitive. It wasnt bread and butter. It
was highly avant-garde conceptual food, and, ten courses in, you
start feeling that. Most bodies experience a degree of incompat-
ibility metabolizing this stuff. And thats what I loved about it. It
was kind of torture, as mellifluous and diaphanous and beautiful as
it may have tasted. The texture, the ocular experience, the haptic,
the sonic. . . . Your body had to reconcile all these concepts, and my
body, in particular, was not very receptive to it.
SIMONINI You got sick?
YI I had stomach pains halfway through the meal. I was
eating a lot of chemical-based flavorings. There were so many new
textures and forms. (But you can also get stomach pains from too
much pizza, so its not just a hazard of avant-garde cuisine.) It was
all-consuming. I can now divide my life into two periods: before and
after El Bulli. It changed my relationship to food, to art, to how I
dined with other people. It was a performance, and as a diner you
didnt have much agency. There was a set menu. You couldnt make
substitutions. You couldnt just use the restroom when you wanted
to. There was a flow and a rhythm to it. Id never experienced
anything like it before, and I dont really want to again.
SIMONINI Have you had any other experiences with other
art forms that matched the intensity of dining at El Bulli?
YI Well, I dont know that I could qualify any visual art as
all-consuming, in a way that encompasses the metabolic and the
physical. So in that sense, no, I havent. But Ive experienced that
kind of demonic possession of all the senses with certain films and
with fiction. But cuisine is its own category.
SIMONINI Is it a goal of yours to insert your art into
someone?
YI Well, using smell is a way to take communication a little
further. Smell can prompt a transference of environment, of time, of
memory. And thats part of my intention.
SIMONINI Did you have any training as a perfumer?
YI I did not go to perfume school. Im completely self-taught.
I just had the audacity to try it. It certainly helps to have a knowl-
edge of chemistry and strong command of notes and scents, but I
had no training.
SIMONINI How did you begin?
YI Around 2008 I started making tinctures. I didnt even
buy anything. I just put everything around me in alcohol for three
months to see what would happen. I read everything I could
on the subject. I had a friend who worked for one of the largest
perfume companies in the world, and wed smell things together.
Later on, a friend in the fashion industry asked me to create natu-
ral perfumes for her. I invited my friend Maggie Peng, an architect,
to the event and she got excited about the perfumes, so we created
Shigenobu Twilight together. We wanted to create a series of
biographical fragrances based on living women. I wanted to chal-
lenge the culture around perfume, which is very stodgy and quite
unimaginative in terms of the images it offers: the fashion house,
the actor, the pop star, the athlete. They all promote conventional
aspirational lifestyles. After millennia of human beings exchanging
ANICK A YI
oils and fragrances, its disappointing that the perfume industry is
limited to this paltry set of narratives.
SIMONINI Is there a large culture of avant-garde olfaction?
YI Completely. A young perfumer called Zoologist just sent
me a group of scents based on animals: Panda, Bat, Beaver. I tend
to like extreme scents. But its a hard area to be experimental,
because people wont wear unfamiliar smells. And that says a lot
about our society. We havent gone very far outside of polite smell,
which has everything to do with social constructs around smell and
power relations. People are afraid to smell strange. Its a problem
that we refer to smells only as good or bad. We dont have a sophis-
ticated language around it. We have a limited palate.
SIMONINI Are we averse to smell because its more
animalistic than other senses?
YI Theres a larger social context. I grew up in a Korean-
American home and my mother cooked Korean food. Our house
was labeled by other kids as the stinky home. If you talk to Korean-
Americans about smell, many of them associate early memories of
smell with shame and rejection. And now Korean food is every-
where. Theres less of a stigma. I wish there were more tolerance and
openness to smells. Any person who eats curry smells like curry.
Turmeric will seep out of anyones pores. We have a mythology
around ethnic smells, that certain people smell a certain way, but
really the main factors are diet, environment, and an individuals
unique, genetic smell. A lot of that uniqueness has to do with how
much bacteria you produce in your gut. Economics is also a factor. If
someone eats McDonalds all the time, that affects his body odor.
SIMONINI Theres racism and classism in smells.
YI Each person has a unique olfactive identity, determined
by genetics. Chemists call it the human bar codea reference to
the biometric technology that is used to identify individuals. Gen-
eralizations about the odor of an ethnic group cant be supported
with evidence.
SIMONINI Do you have a heightened sense of smell?
YI I think so. But it comes from a will and desire to develop
my perception. I dont close myself off to new smells. I go on smell-
ing journeys. When something smells strong, I dont reject it. I try
to get past my initial reaction and take in the subtlety of the smell.
I may have shown a little promise with smell, but Ive really had to
cultivate and practice it. So much of who we are is made through
sheer discipline.
SIMONINI Making art is all about developing a sensitivity.
YI Its a self-education, a special ability to get rigorous and
be in the world. Through art, Ive learned more about my body,
my relationship to other organisms, and thats part of my job: to
engage myself with intensity.
SIMONINI Your video The Flavor Genome deals with the
complicated ramifications of flavor. How do you approach that
through the medium?
YI The work is all about perception. Theres a fictional aspect
that drives the narrative. A flavor chemist goes to the Amazon in
search of a mythical flower in order to extract a compound and
ART IN AMERICA 105
 I dont close myself off to new smells. I go on smelling journeys.
When something smells strong, I dont reject it.
synthesize a new drug from it. And if you take this drug you can
perceive what its like to be a pink dolphin or an angry teenager.
Its not a technology we have yet, but it relates to virtual reality,
which is becoming more prevalent in contemporary art and in
culture more broadly. But my idea is not about placing myself in
a coral reef, as I would with VR, but actually feeling what coral
feels, and creating empathy.
SIMONINI Do you write fictional narratives around your
sculptures?
YI Writing is one of my primary tools. I often discover
my thoughts about the work through writing. Syntax, sentence
structure . . . these things really help. I write a lot of backstory for
my sculptures, as if theyre characters in a novel or screenplay. I
share this writing with friends, but no one else sees it. Im not really
a visual person. I dont think in images. I dont sketch things. I dont
use visual references as much as I should. Its a huge handicap for
me. My writing doesnt capture the idea for the work as a sketch
would. So maybe Im not working in the most productive way. My
starting point is verbal.
SIMONINI You think of your art as fiction?
YI To use a term coined by Caroline Jones, a scholar at the
Two stills from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my work is bio-fiction. I
The Flavor
Genome,2016,
want to fuse the writing of lifethe notion that all living things
single-channel 3D have their own stories, contexts, perspectives, and historieswith
video, 22 minutes. the study of life, which also now includes an embrace of nonhuman
perspectives. The concept of nonhuman persons is found in the
indigenous Achuar people in the Amazon, who believe that all life
is a person, whether a plant person, an animal person, or a human
person. This way of thinking is also shared by other Amazonian
tribes, as well as by the Inuit and other native peoples of North
America. Humans arent necessarily at the top of the hierarchy of
life in these belief systems.
SIMONINI You adapt the theories of science to art.
YI I loosely sample scientific procedure in my work. But my
science is not one thats of value to anyone, not that I think some-
thing has to be useful to be science. I dont want to be disrespectful
to science. Fiction can be true.
SIMONINI Your work is like science fiction.
YI Making the work is a kind of world-building. Im always
thinking about where my objects fit into the world Im creating.
And usually, I need to create the world first before I can give
the objects movement, context, function, identity. Without that,
sculpture seems rather empty to me.
SIMONINI Do you have a model for the linguistic and
visual worlds youre building?
YI I think film is a really good medium for that. Certainly
the canonical science-fiction films, like 2001: A Space Odyssey
[1968] and Tarkovskys Solaris [1972]. Chris Markers films are
hugely successful at merging his language with images to create a
world. His Sans Soleil [1983] was a major inspiration for The Flavor
Genome. Its a masterpiece of the film essay. Adrian Piper is also
106 APRIL 2017 IN THE STUDIO
really great at generating written language around her work.
SIMONINI Earlier you mentioned literature as one of the
more potent art forms for you. Do you read much nonfiction?
YI My love is definitely fiction but I fortify myself with non-
fiction. I read books about scientific theories in biology and anthro-
pology, because they support the work that I make and the fiction
that I read. In the last few months I have read Eduardo Viveiros de
Castros Cannibal Metaphysics and Philippe Descolas Beyond Nature
and Culture and Gregory Batesons Mind and Nature. I read The Last
of the Tribe by Monte Reel and A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and
Humans by the biosemiologist Jakob von Uexkll. I read a lot, and
I read many books at once. I like to cross-pollinate discourses. Im
lucky that my job allows me to read.
SIMONINI Do you think about art as a job? Do you have a
nine-to-five schedule?
YI I would love to have a nine-to-five schedule. I usually work
twelve to sixteen hours a day. I havent had a day off in months. I
have a punishing work schedule. Forty hours a week is a very light
week for me. After you and I speak, I will go watch the Blu-rays for
The Flavor Genome, to make sure everything is calibrated.Then I
have to write proposals for new projects. Its a large mound of work
to sift through.
SIMONINI This is quite recent for you, the professional art life.
YI I repressed it for a long time. I didnt go to art school.
My goal in life was to be a vagabond. I wanted the opposite of a
credentialed existence, much to the chagrin of my parents. I belong
to Generation X and our goal was to drop out.
SIMONINI Did you succeed at that?
YI I survived, but it was absolute torture. Its not for everybody.
You have to have a tremendous amount of fortitude.The world we
live in is so focused on vocation. If you dont have that business-card
attitude, people dont want to talk to you, especially in New York.
Youre invisible. A plague. And for a really long time, it was lonely
and alienating. My education was just the texture of life.
SIMONINI And you ended up as an artist because . . .
YI I say that Im an artist only for logistical reasons. I have
anxiety around identifying as an artist. Art just happens to be the
medium I can use to say what I want to say. I was familiar with the
community and it embraced me because I had a lot of friends within
it. I always thought Id find my voice in film. I worked as a fashion
stylist and copywriter.
SIMONINI Because you came to art in your late thirties, do
you think you had a clearer sense of what you wanted from it than
you would have if you had started in your twenties?
YI I forget who said it, but theres this phrase: nothing ever
really happens until youre forty. And I feel that way. I love being in
my forties. Youre still young enough to do what you want, but you
have experience and a sense of humor around what you do. You dont
take everything so seriously. I dont have the anxiety about my age
that many people I know feel, maybe because Im still a young artist.
It energizes me. It keeps me light on my feet.
ANICK A YI ART IN AMERICA 107
Exhibition
Reviews
FEATURED REVIEWS 113 KEN OKIISHI PORTLAND, ORE.
at Reena Spaulings Fine Art 119 MARIA ANTELMAN
NEW YORK at Melanie Flood Projects
109 KERRY JAMES MARSHALL 114 PERPETUAL REVOLUTION:
at the Met Breuer THE IMAGE AND SOCIAL BRISTOL AND OXFORD
CHANGE 122 LUBAINA HIMID
MEXICO CITY at the International Center of at Spike Island and
120 GENERAL IDEA Photography Modern Art Oxford
at the Museo Jumex
115 THE STAND LONDON
at P! 122 AMIE SIEGEL
NEW YORK at South London Gallery
110 JAMES COLEMAN 116 ANDREA JOYCE HEIMER
at Marian Goodman at Hometown PARIS
123 LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR
111 ANTHONY CARO ST. LOUIS at Kamel Mennour
at Mitchell-Innes & Nash 117 ENCODED
at the Gallery of 124 NOT VITAL
112 GLADYS NILSSON Contemporary Art at Thaddaeus Ropac
at Garth Greenan
LOS ANGELES ZURICH
112 KATHARINA GROSSE 117 LLYN FOULKES 125 DOUGLAS GORDON
at Gagosian at Sprth Magers at Eva Presenhuber

118 KATHLEEN RYAN

at Ghebaly

108 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS


KERRY JAMES MARSHALL
NEW YORK Met Breuer
The title of Kerry James Marshalls retrospective,Mastry, functions
on multiple levels. It alludes to Marshalls comic strip Rythm Mastr
(1999), which features black characters wrestling with problems in
African American communities using the power of new technology
and the mythologies of the African past. It additionally evokes the old
masters whose work Marshall often cites in his paintings, as well as
the artistic mastery he himself has achieved over the past four decades.
The title also, of course, conjures the power relations of slavery, whose
traumas and inequities still pervade this country.
Issues of race are central to Marshalls work.The African
American artist was born in Alabama in 1955, during the Jim Crow
era, and grew up in Los Angeles, where he witnessed the 1965
Watts Rebellion and the rise of the civil rights and Black Power
movements. One can see the beginnings of his investigation of race
in the earliest works in the exhibition, which was organized by the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where it debuted; the
Metropolitan Museum, which presented the show at its modern
and contemporary branch, the Met Breuer; and the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where the show is on view
through July 3. In the 1980 painting A Portrait of the Artist as a
Shadow of His Former Self, a man rendered primarily in black on a
black ground stares at the viewer with an unsettling grin, the whites
of his eyes, teeth, and shirt collar gleaming in the dark. Inspired
by Ralph Ellisons modernist novel Invisible Man, the portrait
captures the books complex mooda mixture of slapstick humor,
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
Kerry James
Marshall: Better
Homes, Better
Gardens, 1994,
acrylic and collage
on canvas, 100 by
142 inches; at the
Met Breuer.
ferocious satire, and tragedy. A later diptych, Two Invisible Men (The
Lost Portraits), 1985, features a version of the same portrait on the
right, and a monochrome of light pinkoften dubbed skin tonein
premixed paint setson the left.The visual disparity between the two
panels produces a strong psychological tension: the near-invisibility of
the black figure prompts viewers to peer more closely into the other
paneland despite its apparent emptiness, the pink monochrome
seems to gaze back at them with invisible eyes.The diptych reverses
the traditional terms of art history by spotlighting the black figure and
wiping out its white counterpart, but, paradoxically, the empty panel
maintains a powerful presence in the piece.
The forces of an unseen white presence are felt in much of Mar-
shalls work. His world of low-income neighborhoods, barbershops,
nightclubs, and homes populated with black characters may appear
autonomous and self-sufficient, but it exists within a universe whose
rules and standards have been determined by white people. Even
though white people are not portrayed directly in the paintings, they
are invariably present in oblique symbolic or referential ways. Some-
times we hear their judgmental voices, as in Beauty Examined (1993),
which depicts a black woman on an examination table with critical
remarks floating about her body: big thighs, big hips, big ass, etc.
Sometimes the white presence is suggested through the socioeco-
nomic factors that shape the black characters living conditions and
their lifestyle ideals. Taken as a whole, Marshalls practice functions
within the traditions and conventions of Western art history: his
ART IN AMERICA 109

Kerry James
Marshall: School
works echo and respond to those of white masters, filling in their
of Beauty, School erasures and omissions and challenging assumptions concerning
of Culture, 2012, which artists and subjects are worthy of canonization.
acrylic and glitter
on canvas, 107 by At the Met Breuer, the lavish retrospective presented a
157 inches; at the historical progression of Marshalls work over two floors of the
Met Breuer.
museum. His early works have densely packed surfaces, with every
plane and shape modulated or textured; they combine painted
figures with abstract gestural marks, stenciled patterns, fragments
of text, and collaged book and calendar pages. A 1992 piece,
Could This Be Love, shows a black couple undressing in a bedroom
while listening to a romantic song, its musical notation and words
drifting above their heads.The pair appears vulnerable and slightly
self-conscious: the woman looks at us sideways as she pulls her
red dress over her head; the man faces us with an uncertain smile,
his left hand feeling inside his underwear, a line of text floating by
his lips, what a woman what a woman. In a distorted echo of
the scene, a cover for a plantation romance novel attached near the
bottom of the canvas shows a shirtless black man, presumably a
slave, pulling the red dress off a fevered blonde.
Perhaps the most important works of Marshalls early period
are those of the Garden Project (199495)five large paintings that
offer semi-fantastical portrayals of life in public housing projects in
Chicago and Los Angeles, depicting children playing and adults
relaxing amid the idyllic-looking grounds of the urban locations.
These paintings and four others that are thematically related but
generally show suburban settings covered the walls of a single gallery
at the Met Breuer, forming a loose narrative sequence resembling
Renaissance fresco cycles.The scenes, with their realistic imagery and
pastoral character, might bring to mind Socialist Realist paintings if
not for their artificial, staged atmosphere and the solemn, inscrutable
expressions on the charactersfaces. Amid the richly decorated com-
positions are floating banners bearing equivocal inscriptions: better
homes better gardens, we are one, etc.
In the late 1990s, Marshalls work changed stylistically and
began to suggest a different psychological position. The paintings he
has made from this time on bear tighter, more carefully constructed
compositions and demonstrate greater control in execution; gone
are the collage elements and stenciled patterns, the spills and drips,
that complicate his earlier works. As Marshalls approach has
110 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
become more conventional and restrained, his characters have grown
tougher and more assertive. The 2014 Untitled (Club Couple) shows a
young black couple sitting at a table with cocktails before them, their
smiles wide and happy, their fingers entwined, their faces pressed
close together as if for a snapshot; behind the womans back, the man
flaunts a small jewelry box that suggests the occasion for the photo.
Unlike the partially exposed, vulnerable-seeming couple from Could
This Be Love, these figures present themselves the way they wish to be
seen and admired by strangers.
Self-display and self-styling have become dominant themes in
Marshalls recent work. A magnificent canvas, School of Beauty, School
of Culture (2012), shows the interior of a beauty parlor, with more
than a dozen figures conversing, posturing, or primping themselves
in front of multiple mirrors. The scene has an oddly disturbing detail
hovering in the foregroundan anamorphic image of Disneys
Sleeping Beauty that provides a pop-culture echo of the skull found
in Hans Holbein the Youngers The Ambassadors (1533). Another
echo, this one of Velzquezs Las Meninas (1656), occurs by way of
a photographer figure reflected in a mirror at the back of the room.
While present in the reflection, the man is absent from the visible
space of the parlor and appears to be standing where the viewer of
the painting would be. He captures the scene but is himself largely
unseen, since his cameras white flash blots out his face in the reflec-
tion and his body is blocked by another figure.
The logic of mirrors, reflections, and optical deceptions is at
the heart of Marshalls practice. His work points toward the major
paradox of vision: while we may choose to see or not to see others,
we remain somewhat obscure to ourselves and need a counter-
presence to throw back at us our more or less distorted reflection.
To depict the black figure, Marshall employs and inverts traditions,
stereotypes, and expectations established by white culture. The
image he constructs becomes another mirror, in which black and
white Americans may face themselves and each other.
Tatiana Istomina
NEW YORK
JAMES COLEMAN
Marian Goodman
James Colemans exhibition of several new digital videos, projections,
and films from the 1970s offered a profound meditation on the act of
seeing. While many art objects demand to be looked atwhich is to say,
contemplated at a distancethe Irish artists works force the viewer to
consider the role of unconscious activities in constructing meaning.
It is easy to forget how much mental processing underlies the
act of seeing. Scientists have long recognized that what we experience
consciously as a seamless visual field is, in fact, a convincing synthesis
of information filled with blind spots, colorless patches, distortions,
and micro-blackoutsall stitched together by our brains. The con-
scious perception of an image is further shaped by unconscious desires
and socially mediated expectations.
Sometimes the right prompting can bring these unconscious
processes to light. Of Colemans two new works on view, the more
provocative was Still Life (201316). Projected in a darkened gallery,
the silent digital video depicts an unearthed poppy plant. Its roots
are exposed and caked with dirt, and two of its vibrant pink petals
are torn away, while the others seem to float in a dimensionless
black void. At first, the projection appears motionless, as if it were
a photographic still. But knowing its a video loopchanges ones
experience of seeing it. The viewer peers more closely, searching
for movement, for patterns. Only after several minutes of seeming
stasis does one begin to feel sure: yes, that thin filament of root
has twitched. Meanwhile, we imagine narcotic chemicals coursing
unseen through the poppys veins.
D 11 (19982002) is another silent video loop of what appears
to be a static image. Is it a close-up of an X-ray? A detail of a blurry
black-and-white photo? Staring at the expressionistic swirl of black,
gray, and white, viewers become alert to movements that may or may
not be happening and grow suspicious of their own perceptions.
In a separate gallery was a recent untitled video installation
(201115). The video is a fragmented and looped projection of a
spinning carnival ride in motion. The ride seems to freeze and restart
because the video repeats the same three clips, each lasting less than
a second, according to an indecipherable pattern. The result is a
dynamic riot of abstract color in which the occasional face or foot is
glimpsed. An audio tracka repeating sample of a short, unidentifi-
able soundis synchronized to the rhythm of the cuts.
Coleman has experimented with tensions between still and
moving images for decades, and several of his early color films (all
circa 1970) were projected in another room. A different film played
each week for the run of the exhibition. Work Apron consists of
a fixed view of a womans apron draped across the wrought-iron
railing of a balcony. As the projection rolls, the apron billows from a
gentle breeze; nothing else happens.
The film is dull and repetitive at first, but it soon invites the
mind to fill in the blanks. Who fills the apron when the breeze does
not? What is her life like? By slowing down and focusing on a single
image, the imagination, with little prompting, goes to work. One
is reminded that even formto say nothing of meaningis not
conferred from artist to viewer but is mutually constructed.
Austin Considine
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
ANTHONY CARO
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
English artist Anthony Caro left an enormous legacy when
he died in 2013 at age eighty-nine. He was celebrated for his
sculpture in Britain by the late 1950s, and internationally begin-
ning in the early 60s. Among his important aesthetic advances
were his decisions to remove sculpture from the constraints of
the pedestal, to use industrial materials, and to apply color to his
abstract constructions.
This exhibition, Anthony Caro: First Drawings Last Anthony Caro:
Blue Moon, 2013,
Sculptures, spanned more than six decades and occupied both the stainless steel and
Chelsea and Upper East Side branches of the gallery. In addition Perspex, 54 by 103
by 90 inches; at
to eight large-scale sculptures and a number of smaller pieces, Mitchell-Innes &
the presentation included nineteen of Caros earliest drawings. Nash.
Most of these medium-size ink-on-newsprint drawings are dense
with thick lines and bold planes that describe figures or animals.
Several, such as Figure and Warrior (both 195556), contain pas-
sages of brilliant hues that correspond to the colored plexiglass in
some of the late sculptures. The drawings were created when Caro
worked as an assistant to Henry Moore, and the simplified forms
of the figures reflect the older artists influence.
In his final years, Caro became fascinated by the properties
of glass. The earliest example in the show, Display (201112),
consists of a glass box resting on a steel pedestal. Resembling
a museum vitrine, the box holds a bronze plate, several bronze
bars, and two frosted-glass vessels cast from the artists clay James Coleman:
Still Life, 201316,
pots. The satisfyingly rough-hewn contents of the box seem like digital projection; at
castoffs from the sculpture studio. Caro ultimately found glass Marian Goodman.
to be too fragile and cumbersome for his larger sculptures. In a
2014 catalogue essay, critic Alastair Sooke explained that Caro
came to plexiglass after Michael Fried told the artist about
Brazilian Waltercio Caldass use of colored planes of the material
in a series of abstract steel works he began in the late 1990s.
Some works on view employ plexiglass in ways that evoke
passing light phenomena. In the approximately six-and-a-half-foot-
ART IN AMERICA 111
 tall Autumn Rhapsody (201112), bent and folded sheets of steel,
painted pale green, form a semicircular enclosure with a small,
rectangular entryway. Slabs of chartreuse plexiglass attached to the
structure cast golden-yellow highlights on the green metal surface
like flickering leaves in early fall. In Blue Moon (2013), a large
disk of deep blue plexiglass is angled amid a low-lying structure
composed of long steel bars and tubing. A slightly concave canopy
of clear plexi covering the piece creates a shimmering light.
Sundown (2013) has the overall shape of an ancient
Roman sarcophagus or an antique reliquary. Approximately
seven feet long, the work consists of a reconfigured grain hop-
per set on an industrial tablelike support. The lilting curves
of a piece of beige plexiglass spanning the sculpture give it a
vaguely anthropomorphic quality, as if Caro wanted to suggest
a human figure. Grand, but not grandiose, this elegiac object
marks the culmination of a long career.
David Ebony
Gladys Nilsson:
Vested Interest, 1987, GLADYS NILSSON
watercolor on paper,
40 by 60 inches; at
Garth Greenan
Garth Greenan.
Figures big and small inhabit the stunning watercolors Gladys Nils-
son made in the late 1980s. Its unusual to see the medium deployed
with the forceful colors and monumental scale of these works, ten
of which, all about forty by sixty inches, were on view in this recent
show. Each depicts a few central characters framed by planes of
color and surrounded by dozens of smaller humanoids who perform
routine activities of everyday life, albeit with absurd twists.
Nilsson was among the original members of the Hairy Who,
a group of young graduates of the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago who, in the mid-1960s, established themselves as
id-and-laughter-fueled excavators of commercial culture. Nilsson
was among the first female artists to be given a solo show at
the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1973. She and her
Hairy Who peers have received steady exposure in New York
for the last few years, with much attention paid to their iconic
112 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
early experiments. Its refreshing to discover this suite of ambitious,
mature works from a lesser-known period in Nilssons career.
The Dicky (1986) portrays five women clad in diaphanous one-
shouldered tunics happily clutching at the dicky (a false shirtfront)
worn by an otherwise bare-chested male who struggles to hold up the
yellow-on-red polka-dot boxers that hardly contain his bulging phal-
lus. A tiny purple woman hangs off the hem of those boxers, tugging
them down while staring up between the mans giant legs. Her other
hand grips the garter holding up his single remaining sock, while her
two legs and bare bottom frame an even smaller figure seated on the
ground behind her. In addition to the main group centered on the
dicky, a horde of about three dozen small figures romp around the
edges of the sheet. Along the top, fourteen naked pink women carry
nine green Doric columns, while additional tiny figures saunter along
the bottom, filling out the playfully orgiastic work.
Nilsson demonstrates a keen awareness of the sensual, as well
as of the signifying, possibilities of clothing. In Vested Interest (1987),
six women take off their gym shorts and tank tops. A couple of them
look up, eyes closed and mouths open, as if breathing heavily after
a workout.The largest figure winks and sticks her tongue out while
pulling her shirt down. Two tiny men caress her sneaker, and twelve
additional little men are wedged into a gray triangle that extends
along the bottom of the piece. Unlike the seminude athletes above,
the males are fully clothed in suits and wide-brimmed hats. They
resemble, perhaps, laborers of the 1940sa time when Nilsson was
a childheading off to work. Meanwhile, the headband-wearing
women in the paintings upper register evoke an entirely different era,
place, and mood. Framed by bands of deep color and a few palm trees,
they call to mind California in the 1980s.
The colored geometric shapes that form the backgrounds of
Nilssons watercolors were inspired by the aesthetics of German
Expressionist film. Sometimes these abstract forms seem to tint
the entire composition, like sheets of colored glass. Occasionally,
they take on a more narrative role. In perhaps the most outr
works, chic.con.co (1986) and the diptych Lger Faire (198687),
they become elements in construction sites where all-female or all-
male groups perform a sort of burlesque act. There are two forms
of exuberance seen in Nilssons watercolors: her evident joy in
confronting the formal challenges of the unforgiving medium, and
her playful imagining of narratives that cover a wide emotional
range and animate an unruly fantasy world.
Julian Kreimer
K ATHARINA GROSSE
Gagosian
Since the late 1990s, German painter Katharina Grosse has worked
almost exclusively with industrial spray guns in lieu of brushes,
applying vibrant fields of atomized acrylic to virtually any available
surface. For her project Rockaway!, organized by MoMA PS1 and
produced last summer, she transformed the exterior of a beachfront
shack ruined by Hurricane Sandy, covering not only the structure
itself but the surrounding sand with diffuse streams of fiery red and
white; for One Floor Up More Highly, installed at Mass MOCA
in 201011, she created a vast landscape composed of Styrofoam

shards, mounds of soil, and piles of discarded clothes, painting
over the lot in garish rainbow hues.
Departing from such site-specific hybrids of painting and
sculpture, Grosse turned to more conventional canvas supports
for her first exhibition at Gagosian. Sixteen large-scale paintings
(all untitled and dated 2016) were spread across three rooms
of the gallerys cavernous Chelsea location, arranged in loosely
thematic clusters. A small side gallery visible from the street
was given over to the shows sole sculpture, a torqueing form in
painted aluminum set on the floor, accurately described in the
press release as hovering between driftwood and space junk.
For the paintings, Grosse employed irregularly cut cardboard
and foam stencils, layering areas of sprayed pigment to build up
palimpsests of painterly effects, from vaporous fields to rapid,
graffitilike scrawls and concentrated drips. The compositions of
the paintings shown in the first two rooms are mostly orga-
nized around dominant central motifs, establishing distinctions
between figure and ground only to undermine them through
juxtapositions of dissonant patterns and colors. In one, a semi-
oval of black streaked with acidic yellow is framed by a field of
haphazardly sprayed blue; in another, a wash of pale peach has
been applied over sweeping arcs of deep blue and teal, leaving
only a central burst of vivid color exposed.
Because Grosse reuses the stencils, forms often recur
from one canvas to the next; however, the repetition serves
to highlight the versatility of her approach, enabling her to
produce strikingly distinct paintings despite their similarin
some cases, virtually identicalcompositions. One painting
features an undulating vertical form in purple, white, and green
surrounded by exuberant jets of red-orange and turquoise.
Another shows the same motif rendered in a sludgy palette of
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
dark violet and grayish pink and set against a stark white ground,
which amplifies the effect of the thin rivulets of dripping paint
running down the length of the canvas.
White backgrounds also appear in the most captivating
works on viewa set of larger, and more emphatically vertical,
canvases that were shown in the gallerys third room. These
works display dense pile-ups of stenciled layers, replacing the
sweeping, gestural sprays of the exhibitions other paintings with
accretions of truncated marks and mottled drips. Each of the Katharina Grosse:
paintings has the restrained volatility of an explosion in a bottle, Untitled, 2016,
acrylic on canvas,
compressing the anarchic energy of the artists site-specific 114 by 76 inches;
environments into the circumscribed space of the canvas. at Gagosian.
In Grosses installations, the diverse supports to which
the paint clings produce all manner of effects. Canvas, by
contrast, is relatively uniform in texture and thus serves to
highlight the specific materiality of the airbrushed medium.
Even as sprayed layers accumulate atop Grosses canvases,
giving the visual impression of varied surfaces, the works
remain notably flat, as if offering simulations of painted
marks rather than the real thing.
Rachel Wetzler
KEN OKIISHI
Reena Spaulings Fine Art
Whether layering references to different eras within a single
work or organizing pseudo-retrospective exhibitions, Ken Okiishi
often folds the past into the present. His second show at Reena
Spaulings, Being and/or Time, combined some of his earliest
output with more recent videos and paintings. The exhibition
emphasized a fundamental unsteadiness in the images the artist
has produced and gathered over the past two decades. New
York, where Okiishi has lived and worked for much of that time,
emerged as a city that invites shifting modes of viewership.
A sequence of four videos from the late 1990s and early
2000s was projected on a wall near the gallery entrance. Among
these works was David Wojnarowicz in New York, 1999 (1999
2000), which begins with artist and writer Travis Jeppesen walk-
ing along the West Side Highway carrying a copy of the cata-
logue for Wojnarowiczs 1999 retrospective at the New Museum
in New York. Dressed in 1970s period garb and channeling a
young Wojnarowicz, Jeppesen strolls through the Chelsea Piers
sports complexa preHigh Line symbol of the neighbor-
hoods revitalization that opened in 1995. The high-end fitness
center offers a comic contrast to Jeppesens somber performance,
which is more in tune with the dilapidated West Side piers
that Wojnarowicz frequented decades prior. Scenes of Jeppesen
walking around or reading poems by the artist are intercut with
sequences shot outside the Cock, an East Village gay bar. There, a
young man delivers a monologue about recent sexual encounters,
frequently interrupting himself to address the camera directly
to remind viewers that he is a Lacanian. Over his shoulder, nyc
2000 appears spray-painted on the wall like a time stamp.
Playing on a screen nearby was Being and/or Time (2016),
a slideshow of all 25,000 images Okiishi took on his phone
ART IN AMERICA 113
 PERPETUAL REVOLUTION:
THE IMAGE AND SOCIAL
CHANGE
International Center of Photography
ON VIEW THROUGH MAY 7
At a moment when the United States seems increasingly governed
by tweet, Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change
offers a fascinating look at what todays media can and cant do. The
exhibition reflects the International Center of Photographys ongo-
ing mission to broaden its mandate through an embrace of myriad
forms of print, online, and social media. Divided into six sections,
each organized by a different curatorial team, the show feels shock-
ingly current. Perpetual Revolution opened in late January, just in
time for Donald Trumps onslaught of executive ordersincluding
the thwarted immigration banaimed at curtailing civil rights.
The videos, documentary materials, and selected tweets (which
Ken Okiishi: David between 2013 and 2016. Cycling through twenty-four cycle on big screens in a simulation of a live feed) demonstrate the
Wojnarowicz in
New York, 1999,
images a second (the standard frame rate for films), the lessons that we now seem to be learning on a daily basis: the internet
19992000, work makes it all but impossible to grasp more than flashes is not inherently democratizing, the public privileges memes and
video, 18 minutes, of distinguishable content. Occasionally, a few images of moments over thoughtful analysis, and social media simultaneously
5 seconds; at
Reena Spaulings. the same subject appear in succession, seeming to slow connects and shapes communities of interest, thereby creating echo
the rapid flow of imagery. The work may be diaristic, but chambers that reify identities and assumptions. Setting the varied
it comes across mostly as a series of textures and colors. operations of contemporary media side by side, the exhibition makes
Flickering behind viewers as they watched Okiishis more their strengths and weaknesses readily apparent.
slowly paced early videos, the slideshow also felt like a The opening sections present topical issues as they are
taunting presence in the gallery, challenging those attempt- represented in the media. Climate Change delivers environmen-
ing to devote attention to the nuances of other works. tal warnings in the form of videos, interactive charts, and visual
The tension between absorption and distraction projections of rising temperatures and water levels, along with
established by the videos carried over to a large humorous reports on eco-activism. Flood uses documentary photographs to
painting, 1 RPM (2017), which both commands and deflects connect the current wave of refugees to the history of Holocaust
attention. Mounted on a motorized spindle that rotates survivors and postwar displacements. Black Lives Have Always
clockwise, the grungy, enigmatic work features two speech
bubbles over a streaky white background. The words people
and but are written in the bubbles but crossed out. Editorial
corrections are offered: i appears adjacent to people, while
and borders but. A rectangular flap cut from the canvas
flops around as the painting spins. While most of the exhibi-
tion dealt with social spaces beyond the gallery, this winking,
opaque canvas seemed like a parody of the insular art thats
been a staple in New York galleries for the past decade.
In the back of the exhibition space, Okiishi screened
A meme, ca. 2016,
a recent video that gives a dashboard-eye view of a GPS-
from a slideshow guided drive through Manhattan and Queens. With a
of digital images classical music soundtrack and a navigation apps verbal
in Perpetual
Revolution. instructions, this matter-of-fact tour felt considerably more
sober than the affected, performative stroll we see in David
Wojnarowicz in New York, 1999. The lurching movement
of the vehicle in heavy traffic strips the landscape of the
personal, the queer, and the historical. Here is New York
seemingly unburdened by cultural memory. Still, like the
other works on view, this casual, technologically inflected
piece feels both of-the-moment and temporally volatile.
Thea Ballard

114 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

Mattered links images from the civil rights struggles of the 1960s
to recent police shootings. Up to this point, the exhibition looks
like an inventory of current hot-button issues. The closest thing
to a conventional artwork is Mel Chins engaging video The Arctic
Is Paris (2016), which dramatizes global warming by following an
Inuit dragging a sled through the streets of Paris.
The tone of the show changes dramatically with Fluidity
of Gender. Here, a party atmosphere prevails as videos present
transpeople and cross-dressers vamping, dancing, and generally
strutting their stuff. In one video, actress Laverne Cox remarks that
the internet has given transpeople a voice. Another centers on Caitlyn
Jenner and the 2015 Vanity Fair cover story that showcased her
glamorous new femininity. Music videos celebrate noted drag queens
and queer icons. Together, the selections highlight the medias role in
mainstreaming images of gender-nonconforming people.
The liveliness of these presentations finds a peculiar parallel in
Propaganda and the Islamic State. This deeply unsettling section
focuses on ISIS recruitment strategies. Slick videos produced by Al
Hayat Media Center, the propaganda arm of the group, introduce us
to martyrs and executioners. Another shows a cheery British journal-
ist reportedly kidnapped by ISIS who now transmits upbeat news
reports from ISIS-held cities on the good works done by his captors
and on persecution by Western forces. Still another portrays a former
pop singer who now produces jihadi songs for use as soundtracks in
ISIS videos. As in the gender section, we see how the sophisticated
packaging of charismatic individuals creates cult heroes, and how
music, compelling personal narratives, and engaging graphics help
build a sense of community for outsiders. The videos here also offer an
alternate reading of the refugee crisis as it is presented in the Flood
section, where the focus is on innocent victims of violent upheav-
als. The ISIS videos show how such events also radicalize jihadists,
thus providing grist for people who see potential agents of radical
Islam in all those who have suffered because of armed conflict in the
Middle East.
The exhibition closes with video collages of the presidential elec-
tion as seen by the so-called alt-right. Here we are confronted with
the through-the-looking-glass nature of our new Orwellian reality,
as tactics pioneered by participants in the civil rights move-
ment become part of the arsenal of white supremacists and the
relativistic vision promoted by postmodernism feeds beauti-
fully into the delegitimization of facts and truth by Trump
and his team. Throughout the show, we see mediawhether
professional or amateuras being equipped to expose truths
and to invent them, to undo harm and to perpetuate it. We
leave Perpetual Revolution with a mix of hope and forebod-
ing as we hurtle headfirst into an unknown future.
Eleanor Heartney
THE STAND
P!
Just in time for the inauguration of the forty-fifth president of
the United States and the announcement from The Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists that the Doomsday Clock had been moved
forward from three minutes to midnight to two and a half,
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
P! staged a version of the apocalyptic nightmares many have View of the
exhibition The
been having of late. The Stand, curated by P! director Prem
Stand, 2017,
Krishnamurthy and artist-curator Anthony Marcellini, drew showing (center)
inspiration from Stephen Kings novel of the same titlea Faheem Majeeds
Fields of Our
sprawling epic in which good and evil duke it out in the after- Fathers, 2016,
math of a global epidemic. Featuring the work of twenty-five charcoal on muslin,
at P!
artists crammed into the mini storefront gallery, the exhibition
was bewildering, cacophonous, and surprisingly odorous thanks
to a curatorial decision to spread rubber mulch across the floor,
dividing it diagonally into a blue section and a black section that
loosely demarcated opposing sides of the struggle. Meant as a
play on the sandbox Robert Smithson proposed in A Tour of
the Monuments of Passaic, New Jerseyin which the con-
tents of two different-colored sections of sand would inevitably,
irreversibly mix, due to forces of entropythe floor installation
undermined what already seemed an unstable boundary between
light and dark, with the mulch being tracked back and forth over
the course of the exhibitions run.
Hung along the blurry borderline was Faheem Majeeds
Fields of Our Fathers (2016), a large piece of muslin crisscrossed
by charcoal rubbings made from the surfaces of farmlands in
Wisconsin, where the work was originally exhibited. This was one
of several pieces making reference to the American landscape,
whose depopulated locales take on weighty significance through-
out Kings saga. Another such work, e-teams Articial Trac Jam
(2005), is a video made in the Nevada desert in collaboration with
the people of Montello, a remote community of fewer than a hun-
dred inhabitants. We watch a series of dusty automobiles gradually
form a bumper-to-bumper traffic line along an otherwise aban-
doned dirt road, their drivers honking raucously as Willie Nelsons
On the Road Again plays on the soundtrack.
The familiar voice of the perpetually road-tripping country
crooner lent an unsettling irony to the more macabre works on
view. These included Xaviera Simmonss Whatever the Cost, Ill
Pay in Full (2010), a black-and-white pigment print featuring
a large owl with a mouse dangling helplessly from its beak, and
Dana Schutzs Bird in Throat (2011), a woodblock print depict-
ing a man whose neck is agonizingly distended in the shape of a
bird. In the company of these avian terrors, the American eagle
ART IN AMERICA 115
 represented in sculptural outline in Marcos Lutyenss Bird of a
Feather (201617) seemed a sinister national emblem, while a
Andrea Joyce Trevor Paglen photograph of contrails left in restricted airspace
Heimer: I Am above Nevada, presumably by military aircraft, reminded us
Jealous of Those
Who Can See Their that our skies are perpetually stalked by the most deadly birds
Own Facial Features of prey. Jonathan Bruce Williamss Reception Room (2017),
Echoing down Their
Family Lines Like a
a blipping and bleeping chandelier made from 3D-printed
Voice Telling Them materials, has a signal jammer nestled within it, evoking the
Just Where Theyve dark territory not only of a world without wireless com-
Been, 2016, acrylic
and pencil on panel, munication, but of a political moment in which much appears
18 inches square; at cloaked in secrecy.
Hometown.
The show also included a number of seeming counterpoints
to these evocations of the state apparatus. The contribution by
the collaborative group the Hinterlands from their larger work
The Radicalization Process (2016) includes archival storage boxes
filled with sticks of dynamite, presumably for seditious ends.
Edgar A. Heap of Birdss Genocide and Democracy (2016) com-
prises eight red-and-white monoprints resembling protest signs,
which intermingle hollow patriotic sentiments with references
to the opprobrious treatment of Native Americans.
Needless to say, most of the work on view seemed to amplify
the anxieties of the present moment. But there were notable excep-
tions. Hanging inconspicuously on opposite walls of the space were
two small, abstract compositions by Lisi Raskin, each tenderly con-
structed out of paper and slivers of glued-together wood. Although
the titles, Rise and Shine, had ambiguous connotations in relation
to the shows larger themes, they read foremost as subtle allusions
to a brighter dawn in this period of last stands.
David Markus
ANDREA JOYCE HEIMER
Hometown
The title of one of Andrea Joyce Heimers paintings is so
long that Hometown had to bunch some of the words
together on the checklist, deleting the spaces between them.
Frequently exceeding twenty words and comprising one or
more complete sentences, the titles of the works in this
exhibitionher first solo show in New Yorkexpress
sources of the artists broad-ranging envy. Provocative, styl-
ized phrasings like I Am Jealous of Everyone You Have Ever
Been with and There Have Been Many, and Then I Find Out
Some of Them Were Squirters and I Am Undone by This Knowl-
edge. It Weighs on Me like a Stone underscore a fascination
with storytelling that pervades the paintings. In colorful,
intricately detailed scenes derived from her own biogra-
phyand rendered in acrylic and pencil on panelthe
Washington Statebased painter (b. 1981) conveys narratives
regarding her fears of abandonment, insecurities about her
body and disposition, and sense of alienation as an adopted
child without access to records of her parentage.
Crowded with characters nude and clothed, the most
exuberant paintings on view offer lush gardens of earthly
delights, whether set outdoors or indoors. One depicts
figures cavorting and getting high in a brushy desert.
116 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
While Heimer fully painted some of their bodies, she simply
outlined others in pencil, allowing their forms to blend into
the desert. Further playing with typical relationships among
the landscape and its occupants, she rendered the painted
bodies much larger than the cacti and rams around them. The
technique effectively conveys the distortions of memory and
imagination, the ways in which the subjects of our envy can
loom large and intimidating in stories we tell ourselves about
the superior lives they lead.
In domestic scenes, natural elements appear in the forms
of floral wallpaper, a starry constellation on a television set, and
tall grass seemingly sprouting from a kitchen floor. Nature takes
on gendered connotations in two paintings, as revealed by their
titles: Since I Was a Small Girl I Have Dreamed of Living o the
Land and Building All I Need. I Am Jealous of Self-Made Men and
On the Ranch I Remember Squatting in the Bushes and Watching
the Farmhands Piss in the Pond, and Ever Since Ive Envied the
Bravado of Boys and Bulls. Here we see that Heimers frustra-
tions extend beyond the personal to the societal.
The works also conjure far older narratives, with Heimer
making reference to the Garden of Eden (thin green snakes
appear throughout the compositions) and other mythologies
(a sea monster floats in a corner; unicorns and virgins copulate
along a pink path; a woman dangles grapes above her head
like Dionysus). In a painting evoking narrative friezes and
tapestries, an outdoor landscape is organized in three distinct
rows, each portraying a different stage in the lives of women.
Throughout her work, Heimer demonstrates an interest in
originsof the universe, of narrative artthat seems a
response to the obscurity surrounding her own inception (she
even titled a former series The Adopted Child).
Heimers paintings in themselves convey fantastic, off-kilter
worlds with poignancy and humor. If their cumbersome titles
at times limit room for interpretation and make the images feel
like large-scale illustrations from an as-yet-unrealized book
project, they also reveal an artist with plenty of stories to tell,
searching for ever more inventive ways to represent them.
Alina Cohen
ST. LOUIS
ENCODED
Gallery of Contemporary Art
It risks oversimplification to read the recent group show
Encoded as a rejoinder to the racially charged controversy
around Kelley Walkers fall retrospective at the Contemporary
Art Museum St. Louisbut it is also nearly impossible not to.
Walkers schema and Black Star Press series, which feature
appropriated and digitally manipulated images of black sub-
jects, ignited arguments over artistic intention and institutional
responsibility that gained national attention and triggered a boy-
cott of the museum. Encoded was assembled by a close circle of
six black St. Louis artists, most of whom were prominent voices
in the public debate. Opening at St. Louis Community Colleges
Gallery of Contemporary Art just as CAMs exhibition came
down, the show seemed timed to get in a few last words.
Some of the first works one saw when entering the gallery
conveyed a spirit of protest in line with the boycott. Rendered
in the same grayscale palette as the venuewhich has white
walls, a black ceiling, and a gray floorthe works produced
the stark illusion of symbolically desaturated space. The most
visually dominant of them was exhibition curator Kahlil Irvings
Cortge (Martin, Malcolm), 2016, two large black-and-white
United States flags installed vertically, side by side, one upside-
down. Printed on sheets of copy paper roughly seamed together,
the flags hung down the length of the wall and curled onto
the floor. Next to them was The Elephant in the Room (2017), a
text-based triptych by the design duo WORK/PLAY in which
the phrase you see color is silk-screened on each of three
faux-velvet panels in block letters, black on black. The word
color fades increasingly into indiscernibility from one panel
to the next. By invoking hallowed figures of black struggle and
a stubborn trope of post-racial discourse, Irvings and WORK/
PLAYs works situated Encoded in the same territory as the
Walker protests, which challenged the artists use of civil rights
imagery and his public refusal to address the racial content of
his works. Unambiguous and confrontational, these pieces also
reproduced the boycotts tone, but without making explicit
reference to it. Recalling but not necessarily dwelling on the
events of the fall, they oriented the exhibition just as much
toward the crises of post-Ferguson St. Louis and, moreover,
the national crises that were deepening as a Trump presidency
approached (Encoded opened on Inauguration Day).
As one moved into the middle of the single-room gallery, other
vocabularies emerged through works with more vibrant palettes and
subtler sensibilities that also grapple with questions of black identity.
Kat Reynoldss theatrically staged photographic portrait and Jen
Everetts images appropriated from old family photo albums
show black subjects whose gazes meet the camera in nonchalant
acknowledgment. Addoley Dzegedes beautiful alabaster sculpture
Strange Fruit (2003), its evocative organic form more ambigu-
ous than its title might suggest, is pregnant with suggestions of
burgeoning life, physical trauma, and decomposition. Two works
from Lyndon Barrois Jr.s Stereotypography series (both 2017)
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
consist of evocative framed groupings of found ethnographic photos
of African tribal people, printed samples of the typeface Neuland
(often used to convey an exotic quality: think tiki bar signage), and
other elements, all set against chipboard fields.
The shows contributors are young, and many of their works,
while promising, could have been pushed further.There was fre-
quently room to develop concepts or refine technique. A consistent
economy of means (disposable materials and rough edges recurred
throughout) felt at times intentional, at others circumstantial, and
at others simply hasty. What cannot be overstated, however, is the
shows success in conveying the energy of a dialogue evolving among
these artists (and throughout St. Louiss art scenes) in a city and at a
moment where questions of blacknessits ontology, representation,
and exploitationhave deep political urgency. Using tone and timing
to evoke the CAM controversy and broader national issues while
intermingling pieces that operate in varied registers, Encoded deliv-
ered a group statement: these artists have been energized by recent
events, but they refuse to let their work be determined by them.
Gavin Kroeber
LOS ANGELES Lyndon Barrois Jr.:
Stereotypography
(Neuland, Neuform),
2017, magazine
LLYN FOULKES clipping, marbled
ink print, solvent
Sprth Magers transfer, board,
Llyn Foulkess Sprth Magers exhibition consisted of and stained oak,
23 by 29 inches; in
thirty-seven mixed-medium paintings, the vast majority of Encoded.
them made since the Hammer Museums celebrated 2013
retrospective of his work. That survey traveled to the New
Museum in New York and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in
Germany and brought broad acclaim to this distinctive Los
Angeles figure, who began exhibiting with Ferus Gallery in
1959. The pieces shown at Sprth Magers generally employ
the assemblage approach familiar from his previous work, in
which he brings together disparate images and found items
to explore themes of American culture.
ART IN AMERICA 117
 Walt Disney to the military to notions of heroism. Yet Old Man
Blues suggested the artist is daunted by the challenges of the new
political epoch. In this era of newspeak and alternative facts, one
Llyn Foulkes: To can only hope he will continue subverting the symbols propagated by
Bernie, From Llyn,
2016, photograph, reigning regimes rather than throwing in the towel.
oil paint, fabric, Ciara Moloney
ink, and found
objects on plywood,
11 by 12 inches; at
Sprth Magers.
KATHLEEN RYAN
Ghebaly
Kathleen Ryans first solo exhibition flowed like a nostalgic but sobering
love ballad, the seven sculptures speaking to the beauty found in the
fluctuations of nature, industry, and culture. The shows title, Weight-
less Again, played on the heft and lightness of the artworks and was
borrowed from a song of the same name by the husband-and-wife duo
The first painting visitors encountered was Throwing in the Handsome Family. This is why people OD on pills and jump from the
Towel (2016), a surreal self-portrait. Mysterious symbolsa dead Golden Gate Bridge, the lyrics go. Anything to feel weightless again.
animal resembling a hybrid of a wolf and a deer, an LA highway Between Two Bodies (all works 2017) features two three-ton
sign, and a wandering astronautpopulate a rocky, desertlike land- granite blocks that are notched and angled with the severity of
scape in which Foulkes, depicted life-size, is seen discarding a towel brutalist architecture. One block rests atop three glazed ceramic
in a garbage can. The throwing in of the towel, one assumes, was also oranges placed on the other block. The sculpture poetically eulogizes
meant figurativelythe piece offering a defeatist opening note for formerly thriving industries that helped shape Los Angeles. The
the exhibition, which was titled Old Man Blues. granite, which Ryan bought on eBay, originally belonged to the
A sense of gloominess indeed pervaded the presentation. It defense contractor Northrop Grumman. The aerospace industry, once
quickly became apparent that the artists despair was due in no booming in Southern California, has shrunk to a fraction of what it
small part to the countrys recent presidential election. In Untitled was at its peak in the 1990s. Commercial orange groves, which were
Dinghy (2016), a black man is shown lying in a boat stamped with established in the 1840s, flourished until the 1950s in what is now
the logo trump lifeboat co. With a United States flag draped downtown Los Angeles but gave way to factories and homes.
in his lap and an empty flagpole clutched in his hand, he looks Rise and Fall is a stucco sculpture of an unusually shaped palm
somewhat worse for wearthrown overboard, perhaps, given the tree, which Ryan often visited while walking through her former
new political direction of his nation. In To Bernie, From Llyn (2016), Pasadena neighborhood. Growing in a freeway underpass, the tree
the word anger is spelled out on a red fabric swatch pasted over a
portrait of five military men. Trump himself is portrayed in Night
Train (2016), which presents a dark landscape with a sky made
from black velvet. A billboard, standing in a field of headstones,
bears an image of Trump pointing at a sign for Goldman Sachs,
while, nearby, a swastika is emblazoned on a wooden post.
Some of the depicted landscapes appear surprisingly unsullied,
idyllic even, their blue skies and dusty hills resembling those that
Foulkes has rendered throughout his career, basing them on images
Kathleen Ryan: appropriated from old postcards and photographs. A quick look at
Between Two
Bodies, 2017, the checklist, however, reveals that these more optimistic-seeming
granite, glazed works were made in years prior to the presidential race and the arrival
ceramic, and steel,
82 by 41 by
of the current, controversy-mired administration.
47 inches; at As is typical of Foulkess work, almost all the faces in the
Ghebaly. recent pieces have been disfigured. The distorted, red-painted
heads in paintings like Esther, Al Fucken Al, and Untitled
(Small Bloody Head), all 2016, create a sense of unease and
recall Francis Bacons figuration. In Happy Days (2016), the
head of Mickey Mouse is transposed with that of a young
child, whereas the heads in Sailor Boy and Go Girl (both 2016)
are removed from the figures entirely.
Over the course of his career, Foulkes has used his idiosyncratic
visual vocabulary to express a distrust of institutions of any kind
and to critique many of the sacred cows of American culturefrom

118 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

developed a coiling trunk that seemed to mirror the forms of the
freeway arteries. Ryan made her twenty-foot work in the gallery, and
it was destroyed at the exhibitions end. While Charles Ray, with
whom the artist studied at UCLA, removed a decomposing Califor-
nia redwood and reproduced it in Japanese cypress for his sculpture
Hinoki (2007), Ryans palm remains where she found it.
Complementing the tree, two palm fronds (taken from another
tree) cast in iron, both titled Wisp (Carrie Furnace), sat on the floor
nearby. Ryan brought a rubber mold of the leaves from California
to the historic Carrie Furnaces in Pennsylvania to have these works
poured. Once responsible for more than 60 percent of the countrys
iron production, the furnaces are now open periodically for educa-
tional demonstrations. Hanging in the same room, Pearls convinc-
ingly approximates a necklace in giant scale using pink bowling balls
strung together with rope. Procured from eBay and Craigslist, the
balls bear the marks of previous ownersan engraving of Andrea or
Deb, a decorative pattern of mawkish swooping heartsserving as
reminders of how the items were once treasured. The necklace draped
over a wall into the next gallery, where the rope was broken as if it
had been ripped off a wearers neck.
The feral parrots that fly over Southern Californiaa
phenomenon that arose after parrots were released from the Busch
Gardens theme park when it was turned into a brewery in the
1970swere the subject of two works in the show. For these, Ryan
made versions of the parrots in mottled, glazed clay, their tails
drooping down, perhaps as a sign of their rough city life. A pair
sit on a ledge in an untitled piece, and in Parasol a group rests on a
steel umbrella-like object instead of a tree. As with the depictions
of birds in Greek funerary memorials or Dutch vanitas paintings,
these parrots remind us of the transformative power of time.
Jennifer S. Li
PORTLAND, ORE.
MARIA ANTELMAN
Melanie Flood Projects
The title of Maria Antelmans exhibition at Melanie Flood Projects,
My Touch, Your Command, Your Touch, My Command, alluded
to the mutually influential relationships between machines and their
users. The gallerys front room contained a number of works that use
images of microfilm terminals to present the human body as both
operator and tool, as both architect of information and piece of infor-
mation architecture. The sculpture Eyecom (2014) has an obliquely
utilitarian form: part obelisk, part lectern. A photograph of a terminal
whose screen displays a grid of human eyes is affixed to the slanted
top, the machine looking back at us from a reclined position. Hung
on surrounding walls were photomontages from the artists Spac-
esaver series (2016). Made using a combination of digital and analog
photographs, the Spacesaver images show human hands carrying
out simple gestures in front of microfilm terminals or on their screens
or, in especially disorienting examples, in a combination thereof. In
Spacesaver I, a users hands adjust settings on a terminal while also,
engaged in somewhat different actions, appearing on-screen in a
nested composition suggesting video feedback. In Spacesaver III, the
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
Maria Antelman:
Spacesaver I, 2016,
C-print, 43 by 28
inches; at Melanie
Flood Projects.
screen of an unmanned terminal shows hands elegantly winding a
roll of film.The image suggests a sort of daydream or a scene pictured
in a thought bubble, but it is unclear to whom this vision belongs:
a mechanized user or an anthropomorphized machine. Antelmans
blurring of roles brings to mind the behavior of touch screens, which
put people in the position of constantly attending to the very devices
that are supposed to be attending to them.
While Antelmans Spacesaver images visualize scenarios in
which human operators appear flattened and processed as film,
her split-screen video The Repeater (2015), shown in the next
room, explores the psychological quandaries that arise from such
disembodiments. The video presents photographs of equipment
belonging to amateur radio operators on a remote island, the
images appearing in pairs that sync or stagger. A voice-over directs
the viewer to visualize a scenario in which a person comes into
contact with a duplicate who shares all her memories, thoughts,
experiences, and tastes. There is one you here and another you
there, the voice counsels. You are the person here, and that other
person there with your personality is also you.
The audio track carried from the smaller screening room into the
main gallery, intermingling with the images of human hands being
incorporated into microfilm terminals. Together, the works reflect a
society that has lost its grip on information. Antelmans pieces involv-
ing analog information machines of the past provide an archaeology
of gestures: she excavates forgotten actions like rolling film, packing
slides into trays, tuning a dial to catch a radio signal. The act of touch-
ing information through objects that help deliver it once gave us hope
of controlling that information, or at least maintaining our identities
amid the maelstrom of technological duplication. The science-fiction
scenario described in The Repeater is hypothetical, but we already have
real, virtual doubles in the petabytes of personal information stored
beyond our immediate reach in proprietary black boxes. In the age of
big data, we all live with other versions of ourselves located there.
Robert Rhee
ART IN AMERICA 119
View of the
exhibition General
Idea: Broken Time,
2017, at the Museo
Jumex.
GENERAL IDEA
MEXICO CITY Museo Jumex
Gay nightlife gave rise to the drag ball as an underground
simulation of female celebrity. General Idea, the Toronto-
based art collective, did something similar with its Miss
General Idea pageant, though only one of the four winners
of the annual event, held in Toronto from 1968 to 1971,
was a man; the competition wasnt about gender so much as
it was about art as a system for producing value and fame.
Playing on a monitor at the entrance to the retrospec-
tive exhibition General Idea: Broken Time at the Museo
Jumex, Pilot (1977), which the group made for Ontario
public television, is a thirty-minute deadpan documentary on
the pageant that provides an introduction to the collectives
interests and sensibilities.
Miss General Idea is basically this: an ideal framing
device for arresting attention without throwing away the
key, one of the groups members intones. Later, as a suc-
cession of still images shows photo cutouts of the pageant
winners in various indoor and outdoor settings, we hear a
woman saying: Miss General Idea may not be beautiful; her
title grants her the framework within which glamour settles
like dust. Aspiring to become famous artists, the boys of
General Idea were fascinated by the architecture of notoriety
120 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
and found a hybrid method that suited their ends. Duchamp
appropriated objects; Warhol, images. General Idea stole
cultural platforms, producing an illegal gay marriage of Pop
appropriation and parody.
But General Idea was a threesomeAA Bronson,
Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontaland their approach, cor-
respondingly, incorporated a third strategy: the infiltration
of available communications networks to make them work
for the collectives own purposes. The artists used this tactic
throughout their work, from their early mail-art projects
which included instructions for Fluxus-like actions distributed
through chain letters, as well as solicitations for applicants to
and spectators at Miss General Idea pageantsto Imagevirus
(19871994), their transformation of Robert Indianas 1966
love logo into an aids one that they distributed via magazine
ads, billboards, and posters, as well as T-shirts, scarves, and
other paraphernalia. Imagevirus dominated the final years
of General Idea, starting before Zontals and Partzs HIV
diagnoses and lasting until their deaths.
General Idea was constantly testing and contesting the
relations among different frameworks and among the objects
that garnered attention through them. Often a concept that
began as an object became a framework and vice versa. rows of oversize styrene pills serving as a calendar of a life
The group was drawn to formats where that ambiguity evenly meted out in retroviral drugs, clashed productively
was inherent: Miss General Idea is both the pageant and with the screwball timeline of Pilot, which intersperses
its winner, mail art signifies both a network and a thing images of past winners of the Miss General Idea pageant
that travels through that network. FILE Megazine, a DIY while promoting the fictional future edition of it.
periodical that General Idea published from 1972 to 1989, So many writers have discussed General Ideas involve-
was not only a means of documenting and distributing ment in the AIDS crisis as both activists and victims that
the collectives work, but also a hub where artists could its virtually a critical clich. What about balancing such
meet like-minded peers. A vitrine of FILE issues at Jumex retrospective closure with a realization that General Idea
included one open to a page with image requests (e.g., incorporated a rebeginning into the end of every work? They
Ed the Shed / Requests images of legs from the knees were obsessed with recording and rerecording their actions
& of red shoes)a slow, collaborative counterpart to the and transmissions, producing archives while the works were
online research artists do now. still live. In their hands, the ziggurat, usually associated with
As General Idea: Broken Time unfolded in the mausoleums and death, became a brightly generative form. In
museums circular warren of galleries, concepts and the video Shut the Fuck Up (1984), which documents a perfor-
motifs mutated and developed. This evolution was most mance in Zurich while also providing a petulant rant about
visible in works involving the ziggurat form. In the first the mass medias distortion of the intent of contemporary art,
gallery, which highlighted mail-art projects and per- Zontal says: We dont want to destroy television. We want to
formance documentation, one vitrine contained a sheet stretch it, until it loses shape. They did the same thing with
of graph paper with multiple drawings of interlocking time. Like any artists with ambitions of fame, they saw death
ziggurats. Each ziggurat occupies sixteen squares of the coming, and lived their lives so as to outlast it.
graph paper; the base spans seven cells and the rows Brian Droitcour
taper to a single cell at the top. The ziggurats fit together
in rectangles animated by the effect of various staggered,
stepwise movements.
The walls of the next gallery were lined with Ziggurat
Paintings (196869), which realize such compositions in
bold pigments, some of them Day-Glo, teasing the eye as
much as the funky symmetry of the overall pattern. Each
painting in the series is dedicated to a Miss General Idea
contestant, and on a platform in the gallerys center, two
mannequins wore ziggurat-shaped dresses made of Vene-
tian blindsa concept for the 1984 Miss General Idea
pageant, which the group began releasing ephemera about
in the 1970s as a sort of future event that had come to a
dramatic end, as the pavilion that supposedly housed it
had burned down during the event. The following gallery
featured other designs for this fictitious pageant, including
a seating chart for 1,984 audience members, drawn as a General Idea:
Imagevirus (New
floor plan of 124 interlocking ziggurats, and photographs York Subway), 1991,
of a wooden ziggurat engulfed in flames. C-print, 30 by
19 inches; at the
Agustn Prez Rubioinstigator of the exhibition Museo Jumex.
and curator at the Museo de Arte de Latinoamerica
Buenos Aires, where the show is on view through June
26conceived the title Broken Time because, as he
argues in a catalogue essay, time is the primary parameter
for experiencing General Ideas work. At first blush the
conceit sounds specious: doesnt physical distance matter
just as much as temporality when it comes to measuring
the journeys of the groups images and ideas by means of
chain letters, Telex transmissions, and television broad-
casts? But the layout of the Jumex installation was subtly
persuasive, as it revealed how concepts gradually accu-
mulated layers, and how works created a decade or more
apart mutually enhance each others meaning. Even at
the entrance, the installation One Year of AZT (1991), its

EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 121

 BRISTOL AND OXFORD
LUBAINA HIMID
Spike Island and Modern Art Oxford
Zanzibar-born British artist, curator, and writer Lubaina
Himid has been an important voice on issues of race, gender,
identity, and representation in Britain for the past thirty years.
She came to prominence in the 1980s as a member of the
British Black Arts Movementwhich sought to highlight
concerns about racial prejudice and the postcolonial legacy
and as a curator of shows giving greater visibility to fellow
black diaspora artists, particularly women. As an artist, Himid
is known primarily for her painting and installation art. This
winter saw the opening of two institutional shows devoted to
her artwork: Navigation Charts at Spike Island in Bristol
and Invisible Strategies at Modern Art Oxford.
Lubaina Himid: At Spike Island, the undoubted highlight was the installa-
Le Rodeur: The
Lock, 2016, acrylic tion Naming the Money (2004), which comprises one hundred
on canvas, 72 by 96 life-size painted wooden cutouts of figures wearing colorful hats
inches; at Modern
Art Oxford.
and garments. Although fictional, these characters are based
on Himids historical research and represent the African slaves
who were put to work in various roles (as dancers, drummers,
mapmakers, ceramists) in the royal courts of eighteenth-century
Europe. Tales of uprooting and resilience are told in individual
texts displayed on the back of the figurese.g., My name is
Untombinde / They call me Sally / I made tiny bowls for my
children / Now children make me cry / But I keep it secret
and narrated in a soundtrack that also contains musical inter-
ludes. By placing her figures center stage and giving them distinct
identities, Himid emphasizes the characters individuality and
humanity, countering the common portrayal of slaves in Western
art history as exotic status symbols for wealthy masters.
122 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
Also at Spike Island was Drowned Orchard: Secret
Boatyard (2014), an installation made up of sixteen brightly
colored wooden planks propped against one wall in the
curving manner of a ships hull. Hand-painted with images of
fruits, plants, and people, these planks evoke themes of labor
and migration, as well as the crammed slave ships that set out
on perilous journeys from the artists birthplace, which was
once East Africas main slave-trading port.
The ambivalent motif of the sea as a source of both escape and
danger threads through Himids two exhibitions. In the Modern
Art Oxford presentationon view through April 30it is found
in two unsettling paintings from her series Le Rodeur(2016),
which takes its title from a nineteenth-century French slave ship
whose captain had a large number of his forced passengers thrown
overboard after they contracted an illness that made them blind and
therefore unsellable.The paintings on view depict groups of black
people with lifeless eyes in impersonal interiors.The sea appears as a
menacing presence seen through windows, while strips of geometric
abstraction symbolize, according to comments Himid made at the
press preview, the incomprehensible horror of the slavesmurder.
Himids works, while political and critical, frequently express
humor and joy.The Oxford show, for instance, includes an exuber-
ant installation, Freedom and Change (1984), that wittily plays on
Picassos canonical 1922 painting Two Women Running on the Beach,
replacing his white protagonists with black ones. Kicking sand at
two white mens heads shown as cutouts to the left of the painting,
the women are yanked forward by four cutout dogs to the right, as
if being pulled out of the conventional modernist narrative.
Himids practice is rife with such bold revisions. One room
in Oxford is devoted to pieces from a satirical dinner service
consisting of ceramics she found in Lancaster and painted with
images about the history of slavery in the region (Swallow Hard:
The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007) and to a series in which she
draws attention to conscious or unwitting racial bias and ste-
reotyping through painterly amendments to newspaper spreads
(Negative Positives, 2007). Such works, expressed with visual
economy and a lush palette, feel fresh and powerful; amid the
resurgent nationalism in the West, their investigations of racism
and oppression resonate loudly.
Elizabeth Fullerton
LONDON
AMIE SIEGEL
South London Gallery
Marble is a metamorphic rocklimestone, originally, that
has been compressed and refined by geologic forces and has
undergone a change of state. And theres a parallel sort of meta-
morphosis in Amie Siegels video Quarry (2015), which traces
the processing of marble as a commodityfrom the materials
excavation to its use in interior designand the cultural mean-
ings that are forged along the way, the changes in its status.
The centerpiece of the New York artists first London solo
show, Quarry initially depicts marble as terrain, as mountainside.
 Amie Siegel:
Quarry, 2015,
video, 33 minutes,
41 seconds; at South
London Gallery.

We see the cavernous, shadowy interior of the worlds deepest tion of antiquities being meticulously dusted; the ornate carpet
marble quarry, which is located in Vermont. Neptune, from that usually covers his famous couch being peeled back for vacu-
Gustav Holsts The Planets suite, serves as the videos soundtrack uming, revealing the shabby yellowed padding beneath, stained as
and accentuates the primeval, otherworldly atmosphere of a realm if with the sweat of anxious analysands. The video functioned as a
shown half-flooded and lit only by faint bluish light. Next we see sort of codicil to Quarry, turning to the dirt and grime of another
areas of active excavation, where gargantuan blocks of marble are kind of excavationthat in which people attempt to unearth the
neatly levered free by monstrous diggers, before being sawn into effects of lived experience through psychoanalysis.
slabs and packaged, stored, and labeled with their destinations, Gabriel Coxhead
Park Avenue being a notable one.
Such Manhattan locations then become the videos main focus,
in the form of a montage portraying what appear to be high-end
PARIS
apartments with polished marble countertops, tables, and bathrooms
that the camera pans across, examining in close-up the various pat- LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR
terns and colors. Other signifiers of luxury and power are everywhere
Kamel Mennour
on display: designer fittings and furnishings, sleekly recessed lighting
fixtures, seemingly expensive works of art (including, at one point, a Lili Reynaud-Dewars exhibition Teeth, Gums, Machines,
Brice Mardenesque painting), sheer glass windows giving high- Future, Society, comprising a video and a sculpture instal-
rise views of New Yorks skyline. The cameras scrutiny is relentless, lation, focused on the grill, a decorative metal plate over the
vaguely creepy, at once forensic and fetishistic. Its tracking gives the front teeth, pluralized as grillz or frontsAmerican rap
sense of a constant search for somethingfor signs of life or habita- cultures version of a tradition of dental adornment stretching
tion, perhaps (the title, Quarry, becomes a sort of pun). The video is back at least two-and-a-half millennia and spanning societies as
quite literally unsettling, as its parade of surfaces keeps your eye from disparate as the Maya, Etruscan, and Viking.
Lili Reynaud-
settling on anything, casting it adrift in a maze of exquisite facades. In the half-hour-long, quasi-documentary video that was Dewar: Teeth, Gums,
For that is what the spaces essentially are: mere facades. the exhibitions lodestar, the talking heads of Reynaud-Dewars Machines, Future,
Society, 2016, video,
Some of them are show apartments: stage settype constructions interviewees are often shown in close-up. Their mouthy half-faces 36 minutes; at
produced to give buyers a sense of the potential homes-to-be prob- speak through grillz with which the artist had them fitted, each Kamel Mennour.
ably before the proper buildings have even been completed. Others
appear by way of computer-generated mockups. The marble seen
throughout the ersatz spaces is simply set dressing or a digital
rendering and, as such, seems to embody some grotesque triumph
of culture over nature: that such a monolithic material, such a
quintessence of weighty physicality, should somehow be adopted in
the cause of the virtual, illusory, and artificial.
Ideas about simulation and authenticity were also explored in
the installation Dynasty (2017), which was shown in a small upstairs
gallery. Here, what looked like two thin book-matched slabs of mar-
ble hanging on the wall were in fact digital scans. Nearby, a rather
nondescript chunk of marble placed on a plinth turned out to be an
actual fragment from the lobby of New Yorks Trump Tower, bought
from eBay after the United States presidential election as a kind of
historical relic. In the other small gallery, visitors encountered the
video Fetish (2016), which documents the annual cleaning of Freuds
study at the Freud Museum in north London: his personal collec-

EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 123

 uneasily flashing their finery. The setting is Memphis, Tennessee,
where, during a residency, Reynaud-Dewar began connecting the
materialist and feminist propositions in Donna Haraways 1984
essay A Cyborg Manifesto to the citys racial and labor history.
The specific incidents that the artist draws upon are Martin Luther
King Jr.s 1968 speech to striking sanitation union workers and
his assassination the day after, which are addressed in the video
via imagery of trash and a critical discussion of Kings legacy. The
thumping bass of the videos hip-hop and electronic soundtrack,
coupled with interspersed B-roll footage of Memphis streets, recalls
the gangster-rap music videos that popularized grillz at the end of
the last century.
The human encounters Paris-based Reynaud-Dewar (b. 1975)
orchestrated in Memphis between a diverse group of local spoken-
word and comedy performers (along with an electronic noise
musician) supply the videos narrative. Their responses to Reynaud-
Dewars questions often lead to a freewheeling discursivity. The
concept of a woman as a cyborg is kind of offensive to me, because
women are characterized as overly emotional or compassionate,
says one woman. Even though she later resolves this objection,
the element of doubt renders the exchange speculative but not
conclusive, a critical riff rather than a polemic.
A separate gallery displayed six works for which the grillz
designed for Reynaud-Dewars participants were enlarged to body
width, cast in aluminum, and affixed to waist-high poles. The
hollows of the grillz are stuffed with the refuse generated over the
course of the videos productioncigarette cartons, paper cups, etc.
This detritus also littered the gallery floor, which was carpeted with
posters depicting the performance in a Memphis band shell that is
the culminating point of the video. In rare moments of computer-
generated intervention, the same garbage floats ethereally on-
screen. In the band shell scene, the artist reads Haraways mani-
festo from a high stool while her interlocutors converse beneath
her, resulting in a cacophonous, incoherent layering of speech.
The different ideas at play in Teeth, Gums, Machines, Future,
Society felt less calcified than opened up by this strategy of asso-
ciative accumulation. While conspicuous consumption accentuates
the surface politics of the mouth, as artist Deanna Havas writes
in a brief yet dynamic text accompanying the exhibition, the
conspicuous historical facts Reynaud-Dewar invokes seem to
trouble the past just as the grillz trouble the mouth. These parallel
Not Vital: procedures refocus the testifying, narrating mouth as a lexicon
Sta(i)re(s), 2013, in itself, encoding as it codesand so glittering grillz come not
stainless steel,
approx. 17 by to adorn hidden incisors and cuspids but rather to represent the
28 by 19 feet; at occluded legibility of the historical violence that haunts Memphis.
Thaddaeus Ropac.
Mostafa Heddaya
purchased the twelfth-century Tarasp Castle, which will
evolve into a cultural center. Over the past fifteen years Vital
has merged architecture and sculpture; for one ongoing
project, he is constructing a House to Watch the Sunset on each
continent, following the same design but using local materi-
als. The striking design (first realized in adobe in Niger in
2005) consists of a four-story tower buttressed by three wide
staircases that each lead to a different floor.
Vital has had a studio in Beijing since 2008, and most
of the twenty-five sculptures in his exhibition in Thaddaeus
Ropacs 13,000-square-foot suburban Pantin space were made
in China. Three massive ceramic heads were lined up in the
entrance bay. In the ten-foot-tall Tongue on HEAD (2016), an
abstracted head, glazed a grainy matte white, supports a like-
size, upright, shiny greenish-gray tongue. In 1985 Vital molded
a bovine tongue and cast it in bronze; this twelve-inch erect
tongue is gross and funny, alimentary and sexual. In the thirty
years since, he has produced the tongue in different materials
and sizesS, M, L, XLmaking it a signature motif.
Hanging on a wall near Tongue on HEAD was Ice (3),
2013, a roughly two-foot-square plaster block; on its front
face, a finger-wide section of plaster surrounds an off-white
expanse bearing a few faint smudges. After looking more
closely or reading the checklist, the viewer realized that the
off-white piece is a marble slab. Dreamstonesmarble slices
with allusive veininghave long been esteemed in China.
Vitals work, with its quasi-blank stone, takes sly license with
that tradition. Five other pieces feature more conventional
dreamstones, one almost photographic in its evocativeness.

NOT VITAL
Thaddaeus Ropac
The sculptor Not Vital has traveled widely and exhibited
often since the early 1970s, living a peripatetic life that
nurtures his art-making. But he remains rooted in the
Engadine region of his native Switzerland, where he opened
a foundation in 2003, built a sculpture park, and in 2016

124 APRIL 2017 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

The artists funkily geometric enclosures transform them from
objets dart into contemporary artworks.
Vital is at home with the monumental. Echoing the forty-
five-degree staircases of his sunset houses, the seventeen-foot-tall
Sta(i)re(s), 2013, filled the end of a large gallery bay at Ropac. This
flight of mirror-polished stainless steel steps captures and frag-
ments different parts of the body and the surrounding space as the
viewer moves toward or away from it. Frank Stellas remark What
you see is what you see doesnt apply here: viewers see the steps,
see the staircase, yet lose themselves as they might in a fun house.
As Vitals title suggests, its the staring that makes these spectacular
stairs dissipate into a clamor of reflections.
The marble sculpture NotOna (2011), shown on the grass in
front of the gallery, took viewers to another of Vitals far-flung
structures. The white, seemingly amorphous piece resembles a
patch of snow but turns out to be a reduced-scale rendering of the
gray marble islandin a Chilean lakethat the artist bought in
2008 and named NotOna. There, Vital tunneled into the stone,
carving out a fifty-five-yard-long passagecumdwelling space, one
end of which frames the setting sun.
Most of the other exhibited sculptures were fabricated
in hammered, welded, and polished stainless steel, a material
that is light and can go outdoors. Stainless steel is also cold
and reflective. These qualities suit the arresting Sta(i)re(s), but
at other times run counter to Vitals strengths: his generosity,
feeling for place, and insouciant inventiveness.
Wade Saunders and Anne Rochette
ZURICH
DOUGLAS GORDON
Eva Presenhuber
The Scottish artist Douglas Gordon is drawn to iconic figures.
With 24 Hour Psycho (1993), for instance, he paid homage to
Hitchcock, radically slowing down the directors 1960 film. For
Zidane: A 21st Century Portait (200506), which he made in
collaboration with Philippe Parreno and which exists as both a
film and a two-screen installation, he captured the soccer star
Zindine Zidane from multiple perspectives for the duration of
a game. Gordons recent exhibition at Eva Presenhuber consisted
of a video installation titled I Had Nowhere to Go that took
Jonas Mekas, the ninety-four-year-old grandee of New Yorks
experimental cinema, as its subject. Gordon concentrated on
Mekass diaries from 1944, the year he left his native Lithuania
to escape Nazi persecution, to 1954, by which time he had settled
in Brooklyn and started a film magazine. (Mekas published these
diaries under the same name as the installation in 1991.)
The installation featured a floor-to-ceiling projection on
one wall and two flat monitors near the middle of the room.
As we listened to a voiceover of Mekas reading excerpts from
his diaries, darkness often prevailed. Sporadically, imagesof a
gorilla, a chimp, bare feet walking in snow, beetroots and potatoes
cookingappeared on the three screens and were reflected in the
dozen or so poster-size mirrors that hung on the walls. Gordon
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
used Mekass diaries in a nonlinear way. We moved back and View of Douglas
Gordons video
forth in time, hearing about Mekass visit to the lone surviving installation I Had
chimpanzee in Hamburg Zoo, his impressions of New York upon Nowhere to Go,
2016, 96-minute
his arrival, his experiences in displaced persons camps, his transit loop, at Eva
through Germany. The imagery on-screen repeated at different Presenhuber.
points, enhancing the zigzagging quality.
At one juncture, Mekas appeared on the large projection,
recounting a tale about a Russian soldier destroying his first
photographic efforts. Aside from this cameo, we did not see him,
but only heard his voice. There was also a periodic soundtrack of
explosions, distant music, and thrumming machines.
The film received mixed reviews when the artist released
a cinematic version last year, with some critics saying it lacked
narrative drive and investigative bite. However, shown in
the form of an art installation, a format Mekas himself has
embraced, the work was effective. The rich color, minimal
lighting, quiet observation, occasional action, and non-narrative
collage all echoed Mekass own filmmaking techniques.
As we learned from the diary passages, Mekas could not
return to the home he knew, because Lithuania lost its sover-
eignty in the war. The viewer of this exhibition was positioned in
a kind of limbo, too, waiting for the subject to reveal itself. Mekas
questioned patriotism, championed literature, and spoke of seek-
ing out culture even when he was hungry and exhausted. Man
can live on bread and art alone, Gordon seemed to suggest, but it
takes an extraordinary figure like Mekas to manage doing so.
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Vol. 105, No. 4 (April). Art in America is published monthly except combined JuneJuly 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
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ART IN AMERICA 125
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Exhibited at Waverly Street Gallery
info@mdfedart.org
Enter: http://www.mdfedart.org
Entry Deadline: May 1
Eligible: All 3-D free-standing artwork in any media
will be considered.
Cash awards $1000.
1 or 2 entries $35 (MFA members $20). Additional
entries $5 each. Maximum 6 entries.
14TH ANNUAL BLANCHE AMES
NATIONAL JURIED ART EXHIBITION.
Deadline July 8, 2017. $2,000+ in awards. Juror
Theresa Ganz, artist, assistant professor visual art
Brown University. Exhibit September 12 to October
3,2017. Ames Mansion Museum, Borderland State
Park, North Easton MA. Open to all living artists
18+ residing in the USA. All mediums including pho-
tography. Full color catalog. Download prospectus
at www.friendsofborderland.org or send SASE to
BANJAE, 4 Essex Rd, Sharon Ma 02067.
60TH CHAUTAUQUA ANNUAL
All artists. All media. The 60th Chautauqua Annual
Exhibition of Contemporary Art is a substantially
expanded show including 60 works selected by
co-jurors Don Kimes, Lois Jubeck and Judy Barie.
Recently in residence co-leading the Art and
Philosophy seminar at the American Academy in
Rome, former Program Director at the NY Studio
School, and Director of Studio Art at American
University, Kimes has curated major exhibitions
working with museums, galleries and collections
in New York City, Washington, DC and Rome, Italy
over four decades. As Managing Director of VACI
Lois Jubeck has played an instrumental role in
building Chautauquas art programs and has also
curated many exhibitions there and in New York,
Pittsburgh and Florida over three decades. Over
the past 30 years Judy Barie has shown extensively
across the country and has worked nationally with
numerous galleries and art fairs to curate exhibi-
tions. She currently serves as the Susan and John
Turben Director of VACI Galleries.
PRINCE STREET GALLERY announces a
National juried exhibition July 11-29, 2017
Eligibility: two-dimensional artworks.
Entry fee: $35; Deadline: April 15, 2017
For entry and prospectus, Submit at
www.princestreetgallery.com
530 West 25th St, NY, NY 10001
Juror: Stuart Shils
Exhibition: 8/28-9/28, 2017.
Color exhibition catalog. Purchase awards avail-
able. Online entry: www.harpercollege.edu/small-
works. Questions: smallworks@harpercollege.edu
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WRITERS

WATERING HOLES ARTSCRIBE.NET

Exhibited online is MFAs Curve Gallery
info@mdfedart.org
Enter: http://www.mdfedart.org
Entry Deadline: May 2
Eligible: All 2-D and 3-D artwork in any media
highlighting our worlds varied gathering places will
be considered.
Cash awards $500.
1 or 2 entries $35 (MFA members $20). Additional
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AMERICAS 2017: ALL MEDIA SMALL WORKS JURIED EXHIBITION

Prospectus: www.minotstateu.edu/nac
Americas 2017: All Media, Northwest Art Center,
500 University Ave W, Minot, ND 58707
nac@minotstateu.edu
Traditional or experimental works, completed in
the last two years. Entry deadline June 1, 2017.
Exhibit August-September 2017. Cash and purchase
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Harper College 40th Annual National Juried Exhibi-
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PEOPLE
Nancy Spector, the longtime chief cura-
tor of the Guggenheim Museum who
joined the Brooklyn Museum as deputy
director and chief curator last spring,
returns to the Guggenheim as chief cura-
tor and artistic director.
Nancy Spector.
Photo Elena Olivo.
New York nonprofit Artists Space has
appointed Jay Sanders, performance cura-
tor at the Whitney Museum, as executive
director and chief curator.
Creative Time, a New Yorkbased
nonprofit focused on public art, has promoted
chief curator Nato Thompson to artistic
director and hired independent curator Elvira
Dyangani Ose as senior curator.
Nari Ward. Gonzalo Casals has been hired as
Courtesy the director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum
Vilcek Foundation,
of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York.
New York.
Casals was previously in charge of pro-
gramming and community outreach at the
Friends of the High Line.
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, has named Kate Lewis as chief conser-
vator. Lewis has served as the museums media
conservator since 2013. She succeeds James
Coddington, who retired last December.
Ulysses Grant Dietz, chief curator
and curator of decorative arts at the New-
ark Museum in New Jersey for thirty-
seven years, has retired. He now holds the
title of curator emeritus.
Laurel Ptak has been tapped to lead
Art in General as executive director. She
replaces Anne Barlow, who left the New
Yorkbased nonprofit to join Tate St Ives as
artistic director. Ptak was formerly director of
the nonprofit Triangle, also in New York.
Norways National Museum has
appointed Karin Hindsbo as director.
Hindsbos previous positions include direc-
tor of KODE in Bergen, the Srlandets
Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand, and Den
Frie Udstilling in Copenhagen.
128 APRIL 2017
ARTWORLD
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts,
has selected Esther Bell as senior curator.
Bell comes to the museum from the Fine
Arts Museums of San Francisco, where she
was curator in charge of European paintings.
AWARDS
The Genesis Prize Foundation has
named Anish Kapoor as its 2017 laureate.
The Jewish Nobel Prize recognizes
individuals who have made a significant
contribution to Jewish or Israeli culture. The
British sculptor has pledged to donate the
$1 million purse to aiding Syrian refugees.
Hans Haacke has been awarded the
Roswitha Haftmann Prize in recogni-
tion of his lifes work. The German-born
artist receives approximately $150,000
from the eponymous Zurich foundation.
Jamaican-born artist Nari Ward
has won the 2017 Vilcek Prize in
Fine Arts, $100,000 conferred by the
Vilcek Foundation, which recognizes
immigrants contributions to American
culture. Egyptian-born Iman Issa,
Botswanan-born Meleko Mokgosi,
and Colombian-born Carlos Motta
have won the Vilcek Prize for Creative
Promise in the Fine Arts, $50,000 each.
The New Yorkbased Foundation
for Contemporary Arts has announced
its 2017 grant recipients. Linda Austin
has won the Merce Cunningham Award;
Jimmie Durham, the Robert Rauschen-
berg Award; and poet Liz Waldner, the
inaugural Dorothea Tanning Award.
Grants to artists working in dance, sound,
performance, poetry, and the visual arts
have been given to Adrienne Truscott,
Anselm Berrigan, Andrea Fraser, and
Aki Sasamoto, among others. Each
awardee receives $40,000.
British filmmaker John Akomfrah
has been named winner of the Artes
Mundi 7 prize. The biennial award, which
honors a UK artist, comes with approxi-
mately $40,000 and an exhibition at
Waless National Museum Cardiff.
The Aspen Art Museum, designed by
Shigeru Ban, has received the 2017 Archi-
tecture Award from the American Institute
of Architects. The environmentally sustain-
able building was completed in 2014.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
presented the 2017 Maud Morgan Prize,
which acknowledges a Massachusetts
female artist, to Boston-based Annette
Lemieux. The artist receives $10,000 and an
exhibition at the museum.
OBITUARIES
A prolific champion of the New York
School, Dore Ashton died on January
30 at age eighty-eight. A friend of Philip
Guston, Mark Rothko, and others, Ashton
was active in the postwar art scene in
New York. Her criticism for publications
including Art in America and the New
York Times, as well as her many books on
modern and contemporary art, positioned
Abstract Expressionism as the defining
artistic movement of mid-twentieth-
century America. In 1963 the College Art
Association presented Ashton with the
inaugural Frank Jewett Mather Award
for distinguished arts journalism. Ashton
taught at the Cooper Union, New York,
from 1969 until 2014.
Harvey Lichtenstein, who spearheaded
the revival of the Brooklyn Academy of
Music and the transformation of its Fort
Greene neighborhood into a cultural hub,
died on February 11. He was eighty-seven.
Lichtenstein promoted cutting-edge perfor-
mance art during his thirty-two-year tenure
as executive producer of BAM. His first
season there, from 1967 to 1968, included a
production of Alban Bergs atonal opera Lulu
and performances by the modern dance
companies of Merce Cunningham and
Martha Graham. He established BAMs
Next Wave Festival in 1983. Lichtenstein
was awarded the National Medal of Arts
by President Bill Clinton in 1999. In 2013,
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg presented
him the Handel Medallion.
Artworld is compiled by
Julia Wolkoff
WILLIAM T. WILLIAMS

1987 Peter Bellamy

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