$12 DECEMBER 2016 COVER

E BY MARK LECKEY
K
Nan Goldin blood on my hands
Matthew Marks New York
Keith Sonnier
32 East 57th Street, New York
November 26, 2016 – January 21, 2017
HERMÈS BY NATURE
 2017
Tal R
Louise Bourgeois
1/5 – 2/11

Ron Gorchov
2/16 – 3/25

Sean Scully
3/30 – 5/13

Chantal Joffe
5/18 – 6/30

The “Horizontal”
7/6 – 8/31

Louise Fishman
9/7 – 10/28

Milton Resnick
11/2 – 12/23

Cheim & Read

 72 96
WORLDLY ABSTRACTION LAS VEGAS REVISITED
by Carter Ratcliff by Brian O’Doherty
After decades of critical neglect, 101-year-old painter Artist, writer, and former A.i.A. editor Brian O’Doherty
Carmen Herrera—born in Cuba, long based in New York— visits the Neon Museum in a now transformed
currently offers a triumphant survey of her linear abstractions Las Vegas, searching for the great roadside signs he lauded
at the Whitney Museum. in a 1972 article.

80 106
EVERYTHING IS SUBURBAN FUTURISM
by Gavin Kroeber
ABOUT TO BEGIN Arguing that urban sprawl is the dominant growth
by Ara H. Merjian
paradigm of the present and future, the author advocates a
Visiting the US in 1966 and 1969, Italy’s controversial
close examination of dynamic, amorphous metroplexes
postwar Renaissance man, Pier Paolo Pasolini, found a
like Phoenix and Dubai.
rejuvenating energy in his encounters with fellow filmmakers,
artists, writers, and activists.

88
PORTFOLIO
by Mark Leckey with an introduction by Sukhdev Sandhu
A lifelong fan of “low” British culture, artist Mark Leckey
presents seven new digital photographs referencing
e-commerce, ecology, gender politics, cosmic bodies,
and Felix the Cat.

Cover: Mark Leckey, Noon Photoshoot,

digital photograph by Adam Laycock.
See Contributors page.

FEATURES DECEMBER 2016

 14 48
CONTRIBUTORS UP CLOSE
Buildings Seeking Art by Victoria Camblin
Real estate developer John Portman’s model of integrating art
18 into self-contained architectural spaces affects even edgy
galleries and funky nonprofits in Atlanta, where artists are
EDITOR’S LETTER often invited to spearhead gentrification.

23 59
THE BRIEF BACKSTORY
Basim Magdy survey at Chicago’s MCA; Russian Revolution–era
Going the Distance by David White
works at New York’s MoMA; Miami Art Week; International
David White, senior curator at the Robert Rauschenberg
Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana; India’s
Foundation, recalls helping the artist mount the first showing
Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
of his giant installation The ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong Piece in
Fort Myers, Florida, in 1982.
27
FIRST LOOK 63
Jasmine Nyende by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal
Los Angeles artist Jasmine Nyende specializes in
BOOKS
Eleanor Heartney on Reiko Tomii’s Radicalism in the
performances that mockingly protest the American heritage of
Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in
slavery and racism.
Japan; plus related titles in brief.

31 116
ATLAS MIAMI REVIEWS
Flotsam from the Future by Gean Moreno
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, São Paulo,
What should citizens—especially art professionals—do in
London, Berlin, Basel, Taipei
response to rising sea levels and other ecological threats in
socially fragmented Miami?
136
37 ARTWORLD
People, Awards, Obituaries
SIGHTLINES
Raqs Media Collective talks to Ross Simonini.

41 LOG ON
artinamericamagazine.com
GLOBAL CONTEXT Access the art world with
An Armorial Age by Josephine Livingstone additional features, reviews,
In the exhibition “Jerusalem 1000–1400,” now at New York’s and exclusive interviews.
Metropolitan Museum, artworks and artifacts created
during the bloody turmoil of the Crusades are displayed in
peaceful coexistence, despite their divergent Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim origins.

DEPARTMENTS DECEMBER 2016

R IC HA R D OE L Z E 1900 – 1980 1 2 N O V E M B E R – 7 J A N UA RY

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: Publisher:
LINDSAY POLLOCK CYNTHIA ZABEL

Managing Editor: RICHARD VINE Senior Account Managers:

Senior Editors: CATHY LEBOWITZ,
WILLIAM S. SMITH
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Art in America
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Emeritus:
LUCY LIPPARD, LINDA NOCHLIN,
IRVING SANDLER PRINTED IN USA
 CHAMBERLAIN
DE KOONING
NOVEMBER   DECEMBER , 

MNUCHIN GALLERY
 EAST  STREET NEW YORK, NY  T: + .. MNUCHINGALLERY.COM
WILLEM DE KOONING Untitled X, 1983, oil on canvas, 77 × 88 inches (195.6 × 223.5 cm). Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Arch Brown, 1962, painted steel, 37 × 38 × 29 inches (94 × 96.5 × 73.7 cm). Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT
Philip Taaffe
Recent Paintings

26 December - 12 February

Baldwin Galle ry
209 S. Galena Street Aspen CO 81611 Tel 970.920.9797 baldwingallery.com
Wind-Rose, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 84 x 631⁄2 inches (213.4 x 161.3 cm)
 PAU L K A S M I N G A L L E RY NOW R E P R E S E N TS

L E E K RAS N E R
W O R K S F R O M T H E P O L L O C K - K R A S N E R F O U N D AT I O N
L E E K R A S N E R , E A R LY 1 9 4 0 S . P H O T O : R O B E R T E . M AT E S A N D PA U L K AT Z .
L E E K R A S N E R A R T WO R K © P O L L O C K - K R A S N E R F O U N DAT I O N / A R T I S T ’ S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y ( A R S ) , N E W YO R K / A DA G P, PA R I S .
 Contributors
MARK LECKEY JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE
British artist Mark Leckey, who lives and works in
London, contributes a cover and portfolio to this issue.
His long-standing interest in how technology mediates
fiction and reality, particularly in film, is evinced in the
survey “Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers,”
on view at MoMA PS1 in New York through March 5,
2017. Like this issue’s cover, the show prominently
features Felix the Cat, whose visage was the first
picture transmitted on American television, in 1928.
Leckey’s work has been widely exhibited, with solo
exhibitions at venues such as the Hammer Museum,
Los Angeles; the Serpentine Gallery, London; and the
Haus der Kunst, Munich. In 2008 he won the Turner
Prize for his video Industrial Light and Magic.
BRIAN O’DOHERTY ARA H. MERJIAN
Editor in chief of this magazine in the early 1970s,
Ireland-born, New York–based critic and artist Brian
O’Doherty revisits his 1972 A.i.A. feature on Las
Vegas signs by embarking on a trip to the city’s Neon
Museum. Perhaps best known for his book Inside
the White Cube: Ideologies of the Gallery Space (1976),
O’Doherty has also published works of fiction, and in
2012 was awarded the Clark Prize for Excellence in
Arts Writing. From 1972 to 2008, O’Doherty worked
as an artist under the pseudonym Patrick Ireland, one of
five alter egos. An exhibition of his new work will open
at Simone Subal Gallery, in New York, in January.
VICTORIA CAMBLIN GEAN MORENO
Artistic director of Art Papers, a nonprofit arts
organization in Atlanta, and editor of its magazine of the
same name, Victoria Camblin is one of five recipients
of this year’s Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Art in
America Arts Writing Fellowship. From 2006 to 2013,
she was editor of 032c, a Berlin-based contemporary
culture magazine for which she remains an editorial
board member. In 2006, Camblin was awarded the
Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst prize for
research at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She later
held the 2009–12 Leslie Wilson Research Scholarship
from Magdalene College, Cambridge. In this issue,
Camblin discusses gentrification and the shifting
socioeconomic landscape in Atlanta.
14 DECEMBER 2016
This month, New York–based cultural historian
Josephine Livingstone parses the exhibition
“Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,”
on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York through January 8, 2017. Livingstone holds a
PhD in medieval literature from New York University,
where she is currently a postdoctoral lecturer.
Additionally, she writes a column on academia for
culture website The Awl and is program coordinator
of the magazine n+1. In 2016, Livingstone cofounded
Web Safe 2k16, an online archive of pre-broadband
internet memories. The project was recently included
in “Internet! A Retrospective” at the SPUR Urban
Center in San Francisco.
Ara H. Merjian is associate professor of Italian studies
at New York University, where he is an affiliate of
the Institute of Fine Arts and the department of art
history. Merjian is the author of Giorgio de Chirico
and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism
(Yale University Press, 2014) and is currently working
on Heretical Aesthetics: Pier Paolo Pasolini Against the
Avant-Garde, for which he received a Creative Capital /
Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2012.
On the fiftieth anniversary of a trip Pasolini took
to New York, Merjian details the Italian writer and
director’s engagement with American culture.
Gean Moreno is curator of programs at the Institute
of Contemporary Art, Miami, where he runs the Art +
Research Institute. He also serves as codirector of the
Miami-based nonprofit press [NAME] Publications,
as a contributing editor to Art Papers, and as an
advisory committee member for the 2017 Whitney
Biennial. Previous positions include artistic director
of the Miami arts nonprofit Cannonball, where he
organized performances and courses with artists such
as Dawn Kasper and Anton Vidokle, and director of
programming at the city’s nonprofit gallery Locust
Projects. Moreno is this month’s Atlas contributor.
 ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH
DECEMBER 1–4, 2016 | BOOTH F11

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

534 W 21ST STREET NEW YORK 212 255 1105 WWW.PAULACOOPERGALLERY.COM
Samuel Levi Jones
Burning all illusion
December 8, 2016 – January 28, 2017

528 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001

212.315.0470 www.galerielelong.com

Samuel Levi Jones, Burning all illusion (detail), 2016.

Deconstructed encyclopedia books, law books,
and African American reference books on canvas.
ON V I E W TH RO UG H JA N UA RY 2 01 7
 Editor’s Letter
THIS FALL I STOOD in the dazzling Beaux-Arts
lobby of the 1894 Union Station Hotel in St. Louis. It
was nearly empty, as were a café and other public areas.
Once, the hotel had serviced a bustling train station,
built at the turn of the twentieth century as a “gateway
to the West” for waves of immigrants seeking their
fortune in the US.
Carmen Herrera: Iberic, 1949, acrylic on canvas on board, 40 inches
across. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
As a Manhattanite who is over the crowds, noise,
and expense of this little island, I was both impressed and
depressed while admiring the barrel-vaulted ceiling and
terra-cotta molding. Too many American cities with their
grand infrastructures intact do not attract their fair share
of commerce, tourism, tax dollars, and reputation.
This month we present a group of articles focused
on urban and suburban development. Victoria Camblin
examines how gentrification in Atlanta is putting its
stamp on the art scene in counterintuitive ways. Gean
Moreno discusses Miami’s impending environmental
crisis and the inadequate responses from local politi-
18 DECEMBER 2016
cians and artists. Gavin Kroeber, whose “New Cities,
Future Ruins” conference took place in Dallas last
month, scrutinizes the rise of the global suburb and its
implications for cities and artists. Brian O’Doherty, in
something of rejoinder to a 1972 cover article he wrote,
revisits the Las Vegas Strip and describes the casino-
resort spectacles and sanitized playgrounds that have
replaced the once magnificent neon signage.
Our cover comes courtesy Mark Leckey, whose first
US solo museum show, titled “Containers and Their
Drivers,” is on view at MoMA PS1 until March 5. He
also contributed a portfolio, introduced in our pages by
scholar Sukhdev Sandhu. Like Leckey’s show, the portfo-
lio explores popular and digital culture, personal history,
consumerism, and issues of class. Ara Merjian delves into
filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infatuation with New
York and the subsequent reciprocal fascination on the
part of American artists ranging from Julian Schnabel to
Mike Kelley. Elsewhere, Carter Ratcliff looks closely at
the Whitney Museum’s Carmen Herrera survey, which
has brought the pioneering geometric abstractionist
long-overdue critical attention.
Returning to St. Louis, I would be remiss not
to mention my visit to Kelley Walker’s show at the
Contemporary Arts Museum, which tapped into heated
national debates about cultural appropriation. The
exhibition drew intense local criticism and calls for the
artworks, racially offensive to some, to be removed. It’s
worrying to weigh in on this controversy as a white
woman and an outsider. But the exhibition reflected a
careful and thorough treatment of the artist’s practice.
The nuanced contextualization, which centered on ideas
of appropriation, circulation, and the manipulation of
imagery, makes the controversy all the sadder and more
ironic. Probably the museum needs to work harder to
connect with local communities. Ultimately, though,
institutions have an obligation to stand behind the art
they show. CAM was right to keep the work on view.
Communication and empathy must always prevail over
censorship.
LINDSAY POLLOCK
 MIKE KELLEY
KANDORS
N O V E M B E R 9 - D E C E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 6

© M I K E K E L L E Y F O U N D AT I O N F O R T H E A R T S
980 MADISON AVENUE
LICE NSE D BY VAGA N EW YOR K V E N U S O V E R M A N H AT TA N . C O M
NOVEMBER 5, 2016 TO JANUARY 21, 2017

DOUGLAS GORDON
MAAG AREAL

NOVEMBER 19, 2016 TO JANUARY 21, 2017

ADAM PENDLETON
LÖWENBRÄU AREAL

NOVEMBER 19, 2016 TO JANUARY 21, 2017

SUE WILLIAMS
LÖWENBRÄU AREAL

GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER

WWW.PRESENHUBER.COM
 BRUCE CONNER

OCT 29–JAN 22
The first comprehensive retrospective of this pivotal
American artist’s work features over 300 objects—films,
assemblages, photographs, and more!

Sponsored by:

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Image: Bruce Conner and Edmund Shea, SOUND OF TWO HAND ANGEL, 1974; collection Tim Savinar and Patricia Unterman;
© 2016 Conner Family Trust, San Francisco / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and Edmund Shea Trust

A concise guide to some of the most
exciting new exhibitions, art fairs, and
festivals opening in December.
BASIM MAGDY
Egyptian artist Basim Magdy’s first
US survey is organized by MCA Chicago
senior curator Omar Kholeif. Magdy,
who trained as a painter, now works
primarily in photography and film.
Shooting on Super 8 film, the artist
“pickles” his footage, often of landscapes,
in household chemicals before transfer-
ring the material to high-definition
digital video. The psychedelic results
prompt reflection on memory and dreams
of collective utopias. This presentation
includes Magdy’s videos 13 Essential
Rules for Understanding the World (2011)
and Time Laughs Back at You Like a
Sunken Ship (2012), as well as new
photographic commissions.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
Dec. 10, 2016–Mar. 19, 2017.
RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION
Commemorating the 1917 Russian
Revolution, “A Revolutionary Impulse: The
Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde” covers
the highly innovative period between 1912
and 1934. Drawn primarily from MoMA’s
collection, the show’s paintings, draw-
ings, sculptures, prints, books, film, and
photography by figures such as El Lissitzky,
Kasimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Aleks-
andr Rodchenko, and Dziga Vertov trace
the creation of new abstract movements,
notably Suprematism and Constructivism,
as well as avant-garde poetry, film, and
photomontage. These multidisciplinary
THE BRIEF
artists were most closely linked by an Recently restored relations between the
earnest desire to prompt sociopolitical US and Cuba provide a diplomatic
transformation through their work. backdrop to the thirty-eighth edition of
the International Festival of New Latin
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Dec. 4,
2016–Mar. 12, 2017. American Cinema, held annually in
Havana. While the festival hosts a wide
Basim Magdy: An
variety of international films, the official
MIAMI selections are fiction, documentary, and
Apology to a Love
Story that Crashed
animated works by Latin American and into a Whale, 2016,
ART WEEK Caribbean filmmakers. This year,
C-print on Fujiflex
metallic paper.
Approximately twenty satellite fairs
the event is dedicated to director and Courtesy Gypsum
supplement the main attraction of Gallery, Cairo;
theorist Julio García Espinosa, a pioneer Hunt Kastner,
Miami Art Week, Art Basel Miami
of New Latin American Cinema in the Prague; artSümer,
Beach, which gathers more than Istanbul.
1960s, who died earlier this year.
250 galleries from around the world.
Artists contributing projects to the Karl Marx Theatre, Havana,
Dec. 8–18.
Positions section include Maggie Lee
at New York’s Real Fine Arts and
Amy Yao at Los Angeles’s Various
Small Fires. In the art-historical Survey
section, San Francisco’s Ratio 3 high-
lights the late Margaret Kilgallen, while
London’s Vigo Gallery shows work by
recently deceased Emirati conceptual
pioneer Ibrahim El-Salahi. Ambitious
exhibitions are likewise on offer at
the city’s museums, including a Thomas
Bayrle survey at the Institute of
Contemporary Art. The Faena Forum,
a 50,000-square-foot cultural program-
ming space designed by Rem Koolhaas/
Exterior view of
OMA, will be inaugurated with a
performance by Madonna.
KOCHI-MUZIRIS the Faena Forum,
Miami Beach, 2016.
Various venues, Miami, Dec. 1–4. BIENNALE Photo Mariana
Gatto.
The third edition of the Kochi-
LATIN AMERICAN Muziris Biennale, the largest in
South Asia, is curated by Mumbai–
CINEMA based artist Sudarshan Shetty. For
Cuban cinema has been tightly controlled “Forming in the pupil of an eye,”
by the state since Castro’s rise to power. Shetty has taken inspiration from
mythical tales of India as the “land
of seven rivers,” conceiving of the
biennial around his notion that the
present consists of “streams” flowing
from the past. Indian artists such as
Gustav Klutsis:
Avinash Veeraraghavan, Orijit Sen, Memorial to Fallen
and Praneet Soi are exhibiting Leaders, 1927, cover
with lithograph
alongside international peers including photomontage
Achraf Touloub, Erik Van Lieshout, illustrations, 13½
by 10¼ inches.
and Pawel Althamer. Courtesy Museum
Various venues, Kochi, India, Dec. 12, of Modern Art,
New York. © Artists
2016–Mar. 29, 2017. Rights Society
(ARS), New York.
—The Brief is compiled by
Julia Wolkoff
ART IN AMERICA 23
 A New Dawn:
Contemporary Cuban Art
December 8, 2016 - January 12, 2017

Nalia Martínez Grau, Geometry III, 2015, oil on canvas, 39 ½ x 39 ½ in.

The exhibition is the American debut of eight Cuban artists,

and is curated by Luis C. Granados and ACUBA

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

KEVIN APPEL
17 November – 23 December 2016

AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011
tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com
Institute of On view
Contemporary Nov 29 2016
Art, Miami – Mar 26 2017

ICA Miami exhibitions are funded through the Knight Contemporary Art Fund at The Miami Foundation.
Thomas Bayrle, Stadt am Wald, 1982. Photo collage and dust on cardboard, 39 3/8 x 29 5/8 inches.
 FIRST LOOK
Jasmine Nyende
by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal
“I DIDN’T BRING RACE into the room, the room brought
race into me.” So begins “Crown,” a poem by Los Angeles
performance artist Jasmine Nyende. Race doesn’t belong to
individuals, she says here, but to structures—not to people but
to the houses they live in. Nyende’s works often use actions of
binding, tethering, and containment to convey the claustropho-
bia of her experience of white supremacy, particularly within art
institutions. In Auction (2016), presented at As It Stands gallery
in LA, Nyende stood before a metal dog crate as she inflated
several narrow, brightly colored twist-and-shape balloons
and tied them around her legs, waist, and arms. These props
alluded to the massive, mirrored balloon dogs by Jeff Koons,
sold for vast sums at auction houses like Sotheby’s. “The stage
is haunted by the auction block,” she yelled, as half-abstract bal-
loon creatures squeaked, farted, and popped around her. Nyende
placed both the history of black performance and the art
market in dialogue with the commoditization of black bodies
in the slave trade. “How much would you pay for that?” Nyende
asked as she entered the crate and slammed the door. The artist
aligned herself not with Koons but with his balloons, with the
animal or the object rather than the human—incriminating the
art world as a kind of open-air prison.
Jasmine Nyende in
her performance
Auction, 2016,
at As It Stands,
Los Angeles.
Nyende’s use of restraints points to a conceptual double-
bind of black performance art as both the subject of her
work and an object to consume: she explores the dependence
of self-expression on institutional exploitation and vice versa.
In So Real, So Fake (2016), a performance presented as an
open rehearsal in the Hammer Museum’s courtyard, Nyende COMING
SOON
used song lyrics from an episode of the Nickelodeon cartoon Work by Jasmine
“As Told by Ginger,” in which the main character performs Nyende in “Sorority:
at a talent show. She added her own lines, including: “the The Woods and The
Internet,” a performance
720 only runs once an hour,” a joke about the LA bus that salon at the Hammer
brought her to the Hammer. Museum, Los
Halfway through the hour-long performance, a Hammer Angeles, Dec. 3–4.
curator turned down the volume of Nyende’s microphone
at the request of patrons and staff of the museum’s restau-
rant. I couldn’t help but balk at the irony. A few minutes TRACY JEANNE
ROSENTHAL
earlier, Nyende had wrapped the cord of her microphone is a writer based in
around her, as if strangled by the tool for self-expression— Los Angeles.
a beautiful, wrenching literalization of the aporia of black
performance. “I know if I stay chipper,” she sang over and
over—the first half of a conditional statement, with a “then”
that never arrived. With a combination of determination and
forbearance, the words rang out like prayer.
ART IN AMERICA 27
 “Near,” 2015, acrylic on canvas, 48'' x 48''

Victor Kord
Anonymous Collaborations
New Paintings

1 December 2016 –17 January 2017

JUNE KELLY GALLERY

166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012/212-226-1660
www.junekellygallery.com
INKA ESSENHIGH
Represented by

AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011
tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com
 ATLAS MIAMI

Screengrab,
showing sea level
rise projections,
from a presentation
given by Alliance
of the Southern
Triangle during
Cannonball’s
“Making a Global
City” conference,
April 2015, Miami.

Flotsam from the Future

by Gean Moreno
THE RUMOR THAT Miami’s December art fairs could
be called off due to the outbreak of the Zika virus was a per-
verse reminder of how measured the panic in the city feels. No
meltdowns and hyperventilating politicians, no quarantines or
doomsday warnings. Just a few canceled school field trips, an
overbooking of indoor tables at restaurants, and a robust quarter
of earnings for insect repellent companies. (In any case, given
congressional failure to fund a proper federal response, the Zika
scare has only magnified Florida governor Rick Scott’s ineptitude
in the public health sector.) Having made a news staple and
shelf-clearing commercial opportunity of the yearly hurricane
season, Miami is used to finding itself abstractly plotted on maps
and in “zones of probability” diagrams that forecast storm land-
fall. “Points of origin” and “perimeters of contagion” and radiating
rings of viral spread are taken in stride.
All the maps tracking the virus, marking off neighbor-
hoods and threatened areas, are also a reminder that Miami
is a series of geographies, a compendium of zones that seem
to flourish independently. The situation is rendered all the
more complex by the appearance of porous or temporary
borders where least expected. While of course all cities are
heterogeneous assemblages to some degree, few in the US are
nothing but parts that don’t recognize each other.
The art fairs, for instance, belong on a map that includes
the new museums and the sprouting luxury condos—a zone
awash in money, inexplicable red jeans, wildcat investments, and
other jet-set attitudes that baffle the locals. The reaction to these
phenomena goes beyond the natural shock that the native strains
of outrageous behavior elicit. Outside the environs where obscene
amounts of money are blown on rarefied decor (contemporary
art) and its containers (luxury condos), there are many other GEAN MORENO
is curator of
geographies to move through. programs at the
There is the map that binds Miami to the Black Atlantic— Institute of
Miami as the twenty-first district of Kingston, Jamaica, and part of Contemporary
Art, Miami. See
Haiti’s diasporic “Tenth Department.” This geography is marked Contributors page.
by botanicas, sacred ceiba trees, and Creole restaurants rather than
by condo towers. Percussive music and sinuous betterments of the
English language saturate its atmosphere. Plastic bags filled with
enigmatic things and left at railroad tracks for orisha, loa, or other
voodoo spirits speak to the mysteries of this Caribbeanized Miami.
Then there is the map—perhaps the newest one—of Cuban
migration in the wake of the “normalization” of US–Cuba

ART IN AMERICA 31
 If ever there were a time for interventionist programs and
new pedagogical platforms, this is it.
View of Bik
van der Pol’s
installation
Speechless, 2015,
at the Pérez Art
Museum Miami.
Photo Oriol
Tarridas.
relations. This territory rarely coincides with that of other genera-
tions of Cubans who have capitalized on the city’s image and
resources. Its cartography is soundtracked by a reguetón repertoire
identical to the one currently playing in Havana. As writer Ivan de
la Nuez recently put it in the Madrid-based magazine El Estado
Mantal, reguetón, which pervades the Caribbean, is the most
significant expressive form for the first post-Revolution genera-
tion that can live both on and off the island of Cuba, divesting the
Florida Straits of their old physical and symbolic power to obstruct
the traffic of cultural and affective transactions.
Finally, there is the projective map that is consolidating
around climate change. It marks a future geography that increas-
ingly prompts younger Miami citizens to demand substantial
changes in the city’s politics. This is perhaps the darkest terrain of
all, despite the unprecedented Southeast Florida Regional Com-
pact, an effort by the four coastal counties vulnerable to climate
change—Miami-Dade County among them—to join forces and,
in collaboration with local universities, develop policy and push
state resources toward “mitigation and adaptation strategies.” Yet
many of the efforts undertaken have led to dead ends. Miami
Beach’s recent $400-million infrastructural expenditures, including
investments in water pumps and elevated roads, have not kept the
city from flooding during non-storm high tides or safeguarded a
substantial swath of it from almost-assured disappearance over the
32 DECEMBER 2016 ATLAS
next century. Beyond this, the new infrastructure has had dev-
astating unintentional environmental consequences, irreparably
damaging the biodiversity of Biscayne Bay (where the Miami
Beach pumps expel collected waters). We know that we can’t
survive climate change unscathed. Pessimism weighs heavily on
the collective imagination, even as this ambient gloom mobilizes
a new critical vocabulary and energy.
ONE OF THE MOST surprising things about Miami,
pressed between sea and swamp, a slight past and a watery
future, is that none of the concern about climate has made
much headway in local cultural production. Somehow still
caught up making discrete objects for showroom spaces—be
they booths at an art fair or entryways in luxury condos—
many Miami artists seem to be imagining themselves safely
ensconced in some landlocked city far from here. To be fair,
a few artists have responded more conscientiously. When
Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol, of the duo Bik van der Pol,
visited the city, they couldn’t believe that there is an unofficial
mandate, according to what state employees have told report-
ers, to excise phrases like “climate change,” “sea-level rise,”
and “global warming” from official Florida documents. The
Dutch artists, familiar with their homeland’s long history of
tangling with the sea, produced Speechless (2015), an aviary in
 Contemporary
Brazilian Art

&

High Anxiety:
New Acquisitions
Nov 30, 2016 – Aug 25, 2017

RUBELL FAMILY COLLECTION /

CONTEMPORARY ARTS FOUNDATION
95 NW 29 ST, Miami, FL 33127 +1.305.776.9731 www.rfc.museum
Calvin Marcus, detail of Me With Tongue, 2015
Rendering of Jean
Nouvel’s Monad
Terrace, Miami
Beach. Courtesy
Ateliers Jean Novel/
JDS Development
Group.
which parrots spoke lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,”
evoking the madness of language’s failure to bring about posi-
tive environmental change. They installed it at the Pérez Art
Museum Miami, which was designed as a raised structure that
can withstand a ten-foot storm surge. Alliance for the Southern
Triangle is an art collective that has generated speculative fiction
in the form of documents, PowerPoint presentations, and murals
that speak to us from fifty years and a few feet of sea-level rise in
the future, when, according to their narratives, South Florida will
have seceded from the rest of the state and its head-in-the-sand
politics. There are other artists who illustrate ecological instabil-
ity. But what we need now is the opposite of symbolic produc-
tion. If ever there were a time for interventionist programs and
new pedagogical platforms, this is it.
When art glides on the surface of things, anthropogenic
effects and their everyday consequences are articulated only in
technical terms—in scientific jargon and its journalistic reca-
pitulation. We can continue to shoot videos of the ocean that
insinuate some impending doom, or make paintings of coral
reefs proliferating over the DJ booths of submerged South Beach
clubs, or draft a few sketches of species on the “red list”; we can
even, as Jean Nouvel recently did, put lagoons in architectural
animations for luxury towers and hope that these will convince
someone that they can mitigate the flood and the fleeing that it
will demand. But the amount of pep talk needed to think that
this is enough defeats the effort in the first place.
We don’t have to become dry and charmless analysts. We
can still underpin the work we do with some J.G. Ballard–type
thinking when looking for ways to supplement hard science
34 DECEMBER 2016 ATLAS
with sensible speculative forms. After all, we know that, aside
from indispensable local crime writers, Ballard is the only psy-
chosocial diagnostician that Miami has. His novel The Drowned
World (1962) is a picture of the city’s future. The gigantic reptiles
and poisonous ferns are coming. The vertical gardens will no
longer be planned.
On the other hand, an imagination of the future drawn from
Ballard helps only insofar as light can bounce off it and onto top-
ics like the “climate gap,” the disparities in the projected impact
of climate change on poor and affluent communities. Such a shift
in attention can return difference—in terms of race and ethnicity
and class—to the homogeneous anthropos that many global-
warming narratives presuppose and promote. Pollution hotspots,
heat islands, food deserts, and flood-prone areas can be easily
mapped, and they usually coincide with communities of color.
There is work to be done here.
The very exercise of understanding Miami as a landscape
that has so far survived year in and year out assaults by uncon-
trollable forces has made us immune to panic when faced with
a Zika outbreak or a toxic algae bloom. But perhaps that same
capacity has prevented our cultural sensors from registering the
magnitude of what is coming. Perhaps it has dulled our sensi-
tivity to the need to retune our practices so that the forms we
produce are spared the sad fate of becoming useless driftwood
when viewed from the future.
Atlas is a rotating series of columns by writers from
Dubai; Stavanger, Norway; and Miami.
TO BENEFIT Henry Street Settlement

ORGANIZED BY Art Dealers Association of America

February 28–March 5, 2017 PARK AVENUE ARMORY AT 67TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY

F O U N D E D 1 9 6 2

ON PARK AVENUE
Gala Tickets 212.766.9200 , EXT. 248 OR HENRYSTREET.ORG/THEARTSHOWTICKETS Lead sponsoring partner
of The Art Show
ARTDEALERS.ORG/ARTSHOW #TheArtShow
Arwa Al Neami, Never Never Land IV 2014 Courtesy of the artist and Pharan Studio, Jeddah

75 Russell Street, Lewiston, Maine 04240

Programming information: bates.edu/museum 207.786.6158
Sept-May: Mon, Wed 10am-7:30pm Tues, Thurs, Fri, Sat, 10am-5pm,
and open by appointment. Closed during college holidays and between exhibitions
 SIGHTLINES
RISE UP
On August 15, thousands of Dalits
(defined in 1972 by the Dalit Panthers,
an anti-caste organization, as various
untouchables, poor peasants, women,
and others exploited in outmoded social
and religious hierarchies) took an oath
of refusal in the town of Una, Gujarat.
They vowed to withdraw their labor from
occupations like carrying refuse and deal-
ing with animal remains that were ritually
Photos: Raqs: Srinivas Kuruganti; The Three Body Problem: courtesy Tor/Forge Books, New York; Salemy: courtesy Gwangju Biennale Foundation; Asiko: Erin Rice.

consigned to them by more powerful

BODIES IN MOTION
The Three-Body Problem [pictured
above] is a best-selling science fiction
novel, originally published in Chinese
by Cixin Liu. It presents deep space
in surprising ways, freeing us from the
prison of the here and now. The book
takes its title from the “three-body
problem” in physics—the idea that any
two particles tend to settle into a regu-
lar pattern of reciprocal attraction, but
that things get really interesting and
complicated when a third body enters
the picture. Since Raqs is a triangulated
practice, we have long been fascinated
with all things that come in threes.  2016, digital prints.
FOREMOTHER
Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis
hominin, lived roughly 3.2 mil-
lion years ago. On a recent visit to
Ethiopia, we came face to face with
her remains at the National Museum
in Addis Ababa. She is someone we
might designate as the mother of
all artfulness. Her performance of
standing up in the savannah in the
Rift Valley in East Africa changed the
way apes that became bipedal saw the
world. She, who was not yet human,
made it possible for us to be. We owe
her our vision and our dreams.
upper castes. The strength of mass refusal
has heralded a magnificent political dis-
sonance in India.
Mohammad Salemy: For Machine Use Only (detail),
MAN VS. MACHINE
Mohammad Salemy is an Iranian artist/
curator whose work offers us a way to
think about the machine in a world
dominated by algorithms. Both Raqs and
Salemy had work in this year’s Gwangju
Biennale. His project, For Machine Use
Only, is about how search engines produce
image fields that may someday reconfigure
art practices. Salemy offers a procedure
for thinking, without lament or euphoria,
about the question of what remains
human in the aftermath of the rise of
machines and artificial intelligence.
Raqs Media
Collective
The New Dehli–based artist
collective shares five recent
insights with Ross Simonini.
Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 in
New Delhi by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula,
and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Working as both
artists and curators, they refer to themselves
as “philosophical agents provocateurs.” Their
artistic practice is extremely diverse, ranging
from videos and apps to theatrical performances,
billboards, and clocks. For the 2015 Venice Bien-
nale, Raqs peppered the Giardini with a series
of disfigured monarchical statues on (or next
to) plinths. This year, the collective is curating
the 11th Shanghai Biennale, titled “Why Not
Ask Again? Maneuvers, Disputations and Sto-
ries.” When asked to describe their intentions
for the biennial (November 11, 2016–March 12,
2017), Raqs posed the kind of inscrutable ques-
tion that seems to provoke all of the collective’s
work: “What do you hear when you walk into an
exhibition that listens?”

Asiko participants and faculty on an excursion to the stelae
fields of Axum, Ethiopia.
SUMMER SCHOOL
The nonprofits Ashkal Alwan in Beirut and Asiko in Addis Ababa are both models for art
education. We participated as tutors for each this summer, spending a month in Lebanon
in June and a week in Ethiopia in July. Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works initiative brings a
rotating group of mentors and teachers to lead workshops on a particular theme; ours was
“Everything Else Is Ordinary,” and we attempted to unravel the mundane and the miracu-
lous in everyday life. Asiko—which is run by the Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos, but
holds sessions in various cities in Africa—is a combination workshop, residency, and school,
with classes on art-making techniques and critical thinking. Both programs bring together
extraordinary creative and intellectual energy. We found dynamic thinking about how art
engages with geopolitics and how art education can be positioned for the future.

ART IN AMERICA 37
 GLOBAL CONTEXT

Detail of a
manuscript
illumination,
attributed to the
Master of the
Barbo Missal, from
Maimonides’s
Mishneh Torah,
1135–1204, tempera,
gold leaf, and ink
on parchment,
346 folios, each
9 by 7¼ inches.
Courtesy Israel
Museum, Jerusalem,
and Metropolitan
Museum of Art,
New York.

An Armorial Age
by Josephine Livingstone
STANDING BESIDE a medieval grave topper in the Met- The effigy was that of a knight of the d’Aluye family. Just
ropolitan Museum of Art (the technical term is “monumental like Larkin’s stone couple, his feet rest on a stupid-looking
effigy,” but some of them are so reminiscent of cake toppers CURRENTLY
animal: a small fluffy lion, in this case. But there’s no wife,
that we should change the name), I overheard a couple make ON VIEW
a bet. They were walking around the exhibition “Jerusalem because this is a fighter attired for battle. He lies there in “Jerusalem 1000–
1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,” and their wager chain mail, a sword and shield resting on his legs. He is a 1400: Every People
Under Heaven,” at
was about the identity of the poet who wrote “An Arundel crusader. The sword has a distinctive trefoil handle of no kind
the Metropolitan
Tomb.” The man stumped for Philip Larkin, the woman, Sea- ever manufactured in Europe. The man’s effigy was carved Museum of Art,
mus Heaney. This elderly couple was thinking about that poem in France in the thirteenth century, but his sword is not New York, through
because in it, Larkin (sorry, lady) writes about one such topper: Jan. 8, 2017.
French. He wished to be buried beneath a foreign weapon,
one perhaps abandoned or captured in a battlefield far away,
Side by side, their faces blurred,    because he was the kind of man whose life derived meaning JOSEPHINE
LIVINGSTONE is
The earl and countess lie in stone,    from fighting and living in the Holy Land.
a writer and editor
Their proper habits vaguely shown    Jerusalem is a weird overloaded place now, and it was a living in New York.
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,    weird overloaded place then. According to the Met’s wall See Contributors
page.
And that faint hint of the absurd—    label, in the medieval era Jerusalem “was home to more cul-
The little dogs under their feet. tures, faiths, and languages than at any other period,” a city

ART IN AMERICA 41
Left to right: “of productive coexistence and the backdrop for strife.” Muslim culture, they call it “the Haram al-Sharif or the Noble
Jewish wedding ring, Although Jerusalem of course remains a place of contrast and Sanctuary.” The curators use the Gregorian calendar (the one
Germany, ca. 1300–50, conflict today, from 1000 to 1400 ce the balance of society that Pope Gregory introduced in 1582, the most widely used
gold, approx. 2 by 1 by
1 inches. Thuringian
tipped differently. European Christians and Muslim powers calendar in the world today) to date objects, with the apolo-
State Office for tussled for control as waves of crusade and jihad alike were getic acknowledgment that “many calendars were and are still
Heritage and launched and rebuffed, and the art of this period is similarly current.” Met house style dictates that they use ad and bc, but
Archaeology, Erfurt.
dominated by artisans of those faiths. Jerusalem’s medieval Jews the curators write that they “have used these abbreviations
Mosque lamp were poorer and more marginal. The great seams of medieval minimally and, we hope, with sensitivity.”
attributed to the
patronage of Sultan Jewish scholarship, artwork, manufacture, and trade—including The show is organized in six sections, each named in an “X
Sayf al-Din Sa’id the work of artists and scholars who reflected on Jerusalem as a of Y” format: The Pulse of Trade and Tourism; The Diversity of
Barquq, Egypt or
Syria, ca. 1382–99, key site—ran through Europe, not Jerusalem itself. Peoples; The Air of Holiness; The Drumbeat of Holy War; The
glass with gold and There is Jewish art here, but mostly not, which is odd Generosity of Patrons; The Promise of Eternity. The titles are
enamel, 13¾ by
10½ by 10½ inches.
because Jerusalem is in Israel. It’s worth thinking about as a good guide to the show’s ideological spread, which is highly
Victoria and Albert you walk through the show. The exhibition’s curators, Bar- generalized, more a platform to display the unbelievable trea-
Museum, London. bara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, have handled sures that the Met can summon than a vehicle to make any par-
Detail of Matthew the political implications of these objects with great delicacy. ticular point about any particular politics. The exhibition itself
Paris’s map of the Holy Diplomatically, they have relied on context when citing place- could be considered a kind of confidence-building measure,
Land from Chronica
majora, vol. 1, England, names. “When discussing a Jewish perspective on the sacred from one angle: Jerusalem’s factions are at least symbolically at
ca. 1240–53, watercolor esplanade where the Ancient Temple once stood,” they write peace in this show. The treasures sit there very quietly indeed.
and ink on parchment.
Corpus Christi College, in the exhibition catalogue, “we refer to the area as the Temple And the treasures are overwhelming. Almost two hundred
University of Cambridge. Mount.”1 When they refer to the same place in the context of works are assembled here, lent from sixty owners across more

42 DECEMBER 2016 GLOBAL CONTEXT

The exhibition could be
considered a kind of confidence-
building measure: Jerusalem’s
factions are at least symbolically
at peace in this show.

than a dozen countries. A quarter are from Jerusalem itself:
from the Custodia Terrae Sanctae, the Greek Orthodox Patri-
archate, the Armenian Patriarchate, the Islamic Museum. Each
item is deeply special, but some are exceptionally surprising.
Look for the strangely shaped swords, the fourteenth-century
New Testament written in Arabic, the walrus ivory cross.
Geopolitics is inevitably part of the conversation. The
first object you see as you enter the show is one of the maps
made by St. Albans monk Matthew Paris in the 1250s, illus-
trating his work the Chronica Majora. It’s an itinerary map,
meaning that it shows a pilgrimage route. The map is very
green, with Jerusalem inside a pretty red box. There are little Left, a knight of
the d’Aluye family,
flaps on the edges of the pages, panels you can lift to find France, ca. 1248–67,
secrets beneath. Maps are not neutral forms of knowledge. A limestone, 83½ by
34½ by 13 inches.
map does not possess a one-to-one correspondence with that Metropolitan
which it represents, for the simple reason that it is a repre- Museum of Art.
sentational form and not that thing itself. But a true map is
Right, illustration,
linked necessarily to real world space of some kind. Matthew by Mardi ibn ‘Ali
Paris’s map places Jerusalem in a big red square, because to of Tarsus, for a
treatise on medieval
him it was the most important place in the world. A map weaponry, Syria,
always confronts its user with an interface that mediates the 1187 or before,
knowledge it contains. watercolor, gold, and
ink on paper, one
Exhibitions do the same thing, and there are some odd of 217 folios, 9⅞ by
moments in this one. One of the many small golden objects 7⅝ inches. Bodleian
Libraries, University
in this show is a phylactery with the Finding of the Cross. of Oxford.
A phylactery is a kind of container. In our time, they’re
most often found in the form of tefillin worn by Jewish
men at prayer. But this is a Christian one, originally hung
above an altar or worn by a priest. It isn’t from Jerusalem
at all. It depicts events taking place in Jerusalem, but it was
made in Belgium in 1160. The phylactery is made of gilded
copper, émail brun, champlevé enamel, gems, rock crystal,

GLOBAL CONTEXT ART IN AMERICA 43

 Pantheon of today as bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on
the same site also Agrippa’s original edifice.”2
This is what the many-layered Jerusalem is like: the
objects in the show are all identified with the same physi-
cal place, but with different spiritual and community logics,
layered like memory. The Met is also palimpsestic. In this
building in uptown Manhattan, perched on the edge of
Phylactery with Central Park, uncountable objects rest in an impossible
narrative account of number of rooms. Stunning and encyclopedic exhibitions
the finding of the
cross, Meuse Valley like this one are acts of tribute, an attempt to say to the
(Belgium), 1160, visitor, “This time was important, more important than you
gilded copper, émail
brun, champlevé
know, and you never think about it—behold its treasures.”
enamel, gems, rock But we live in a time too, and I just wish the Met could have
crystal, and wood, shut it out of this room. I mean the monitors, in a way, but
8⅞ by 8¾ by 1¼
inches. Private I also mean all the things I know and wish I could forget
collection, UK. about Jerusalem’s troubled inheritance. Like Larkin’s effigies,
a person walking around this show feels “helpless in the
hollow of / An unarmorial age.” These Samaritan Bibles
and temple diagrams and gorgeous swords feel strange when
contemplated as aesthetic objects or historical artifacts,
because they are really testaments to spiritual beliefs held by
people now long dead: “Time has transfigured them into /
Untruth.”

and wood. In its four narrative panels, the phylactery shows 1. Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, “Note to The Reader,” in Jerusalem
scenes of the discovery of the true cross by Helena, mother 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2016, p. xvi.
of Constantine the Great. This story was very popular in the 2. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, New York,
medieval period. W.W. Norton & Company, 1989, p. 18.
The caption for this object in the exhibition describes Hel-
ena using “enhanced interrogation techniques” to find the cross:
her soldiers are portrayed dangling Jews over a pit of fire. Is this
joke funny? Is it grim? Perhaps it is grimly funny, conscious of
the past and future of Jerusalem as a place of sectarian violence.
Perhaps it is the only moment where the curators couldn’t help
but throw a little politically conscious critique into their show,
otherwise so sensitive and pluralistic.
The present day intrudes into this exhibition in the
Illustration of form of video monitors. The press release refers to videos
temple implements that show us, “as through windows,” people in contemporary
from a Hebrew
bible, Catalonia
Jerusalem. But the monitors are nothing like windows. They
(Spain), ca. 1300–25, are like televisions. The sound is tinny and distracting, filling
tempera, gold, and the dark galleries thinly but inescapably. “I have to be very
ink on parchment,
one of 500 folios, alert in my job,” a Jerusalem priest says over and over again.
15½ by 11½ The sound’s thinness feels dimensional: it sits on top of the
inches. Collection
Jay and Jeannie enormous historical depth of the show like cheap frosting on
Schottenstein, some priceless cake.
Columbus, Ohio.
It is very difficult not to think of Freud on palimp-
sests when touring these galleries. In Civilization and Its
Discontents, he writes of the mind as a place overlain with
successive layers of thought and memory. The mind is like
Rome, Freud says, if you could imagine all the different eras
of Rome’s development occupying the same space in the city
at exactly the same time: “Where the Coliseum stands now,
we could at the same time admire Nero’s Golden House;
on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the

44 DECEMBER 2016 GLOBAL CONTEXT

STEVEN SHEARER
November 2016–April 2017

The Brant Foundation

Art Study Center
941 North Street, Greenwich CT 06831
www.brantfoundation.org (203) 869-0611

ART MIAMI PARTICIPATING GALLERIES
Adler & Conkright Fine Art, Miami | Allan Stone Projects,
New York | Alon Zakaim Fine Art, London | Álvaro Alcázar,
Madrid | Amstel Gallery, Amsterdam | Andrea Schwartz
Gallery, San Francisco | Antoine Helwaser Gallery, New York
| Arcature Fine Art, Palm Beach | ARCHEUS/POST-MODERN,
London | Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans | Ascaso
Gallery, Miami | Benrimon Projects, New York | Bernarducci
Meisel Gallery, New York | Bernice Steinbaum Gallery,
Miami | Berry Campbell Gallery, New York | Bowman
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Cutts Gallery, Toronto | CONNERSMITH, Washington |
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| Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London | CYNTHIA-REEVES,
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Klein Gallery, Detroit | Dean Project, Miami Beach | DE RE
GALLERY, Los Angeles | Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Miami
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Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco | Durban Segnini Gallery,
Miami | EDUARDO SECCI CONTEMPORARY, Florence |
Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York | Espace Meyer Zafra, Paris
| Fabien Castanier Gallery, Culver City | Galeria Freites,
Caracas | Galería La Cometa, Bogotá | Galerie Boulakia,
Paris | Galerie Dukan, Paris | Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna
| Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki | Galerie Francesco Vangelli
de’Cresci, Paris | Galerie Terminus, Munich | GALLERY
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| Gallery Rueb, Amsterdam | Gazelli Art House, London |
Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore | Haines Gallery, San
Francisco | Heller Gallery, New York | HEXTON | modern and
contemporary, Chicago | Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York
| HORRACH MOYA, Palma de Mallorca | Jackson Fine Art,
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Johnson Gallery, San Francisco | Jerald Melberg Gallery,
Charlotte | JEROME ZODO GALLERY, London | Jonathan
Novak Contemporary Art, Los Angeles | Klein Sun Gallery,
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CONTEXT HAS MOVED ONE BLOCK NORTH OF
ART MIAMI AT NE 1ST AVE @ NE 34TH STREET
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ACRYLIC ON WOOD ON CANVAS COLLAGE
22X16 IN., RUEB GALLERY, AMSTERDAM
Indeterminate, 2016, mixed media on linen, 54 x 54 inches

CHERYL GOLDSLEGER
MORRIS MUSEUM OF ART UNQUIET TERRITORIES
1 Tenth Street
Augusta, GA 30901 December 10, 2016 - March 12, 2017
www.themorris.org Catalogue available
 UP CLOSE

Buildings Seeking Art

by Victoria Camblin

Robert Rauschenberg
Foundation /
Art in America
Arts Writing Fellowship
Essay
This article is part of the Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation / Art in
America Arts Writing Fellowship,
a joint project designed to
foster cultural criticism in cities
throughout the United States.
VICTORIA CAMBLIN is the editor and artistic
director of Art Papers. See Contributors page.
Disused manufacturing lofts have histori-
cally attracted artists seeking affordable
spaces—this is how New York’s SoHo
came to be, and the “SoHo effect” a wide-
spread model of gentrification. Atlanta’s
former industrial buildings are being
repurposed too, and its neighborhoods
rebranded with four-letter nicknames, just
as they are in many American cities. All
this is happening at an accelerated pace,
encouraged by city leaders and made pos-
sible by private investment from the city’s
prime mover: real estate development.
Traditionally, though, property developers
have followed artists to the frontiers or
forgotten corners of a city. In Atlanta, they
put them there. A look back at the city’s
entwined architectural and economic
histories sheds light on this inversion,
and what it means for the artistic life of
Atlanta today.
The Old Urbanism
(or, Koolhaas vs.
Portman)
Among the many cultural events staged
in anticipation of the 1996 Summer
Olympics was “Atlanta,” an exhibition
of photographs by Jordi Bernadó and
Ramón Prat taken in the centennial
games’ host city, and presented at the
Institute of North American Studies
(Institut d’Estudis Nord-Americans) in
Barcelona. Most of the works on view
were black-and-white urban landscapes,

48 DECEMBER 2016
devoid of people but full of cars and
buildings. These were reproduced in an
accompanying photo book of the same
name that includes written contributions
by art historian Maria Lluïsa Borràs,
writer Rafael Argullol, and architects
Richard Dagenhart, Enric Miralles,
Randall Roark, and Rem Koolhaas.1
Koolhaas had written about Atlanta
before. In 1989, his essay “Toward the
Contemporary City” appeared in Design
Book Review, where it urged readers
to “leave Paris and Amsterdam—go
look at Atlanta, quickly and without
preconceptions.”2 Koolhaas included
the essay, “Atlanta,” in S, M, L, XL
(1995)—a 1,376-page tome produced
with his firm, Office for Metropolitan
Architecture, and designer Bruce Mau,
and containing twenty years of architec-
tural plans, diary excerpts, sketches, and
research, among other items. The essay
crystallizes the architect’s apparent, if
brief, preoccupation with the Georgia
capital. “Sometimes it is important to
find out what the city is—instead of
what it was, or what it should be,” Kool-
haas wrote. “That is what drove me to
Atlanta—an intuition that the real city
at the end of the 20th century could be
found there.”3 Listed among Koolhaas’s
findings: “Atlanta has culture, or at least
it has a Richard Meier museum.”
About three years ago, when I was
moving to Atlanta, if people I talked
to from other cities around the world
had read anything about Atlanta, it was
Koolhaas’s essay in S, M, L, XL. I believe
this text remains the most true and
relevant theoretical text about the city, but
its observations—often abstract—lend
themselves to casual misinterpretation
by those who have not spent time
here. Koolhaas’s comment about the
Richard Meier museum refers to the
High Museum of Art, after which Meier
received a Pritzker Prize in 1984. (It was
completed the previous year.) Though it
may seem so, Koolhaas was not dismiss-
ing the museum’s contents, which even
at the time were impressive. What makes
his comment continually relevant is not
the collection’s cultural or material value,
but the fact that the museum’s holdings
doubled in size after the execution of a
Renzo Piano–designed annex in 2002,
Jordi Bernadó: Atlanta, 1994, Lambda
print, 5 by 67/8 inches.
almost as swiftly as the square footage. If Opposite, view of downtown Atlanta’s
the current incarnation of the High was Peachtree Center, showing its
John Portman–dominated skyline,
born a building in search of a collection, including the Marriott Marquis (left)
then Koolhaas’s intuition points to the and the Hyatt Regency with rooftop
restaurant (center). Courtesy John
reality that in Atlanta, the city’s buildings Portman & Associates.
motivate the production, acquisition, and
exhibition of visual art.
This goes for Atlanta’s private col-
lections as well: the most impressive and
international of these seem to be owned
by individuals involved in real estate
development, sales, or management. One
View of Sue and John Wieland’s exhibition
notable collection, belonging to Sue and space wareHOUSE. Photo Fredrik Brauer.
John Wieland (of John Wieland Homes),
contains works by Olafur Eliasson, Rachel
Whiteread, John Baldessari, Louise Bour-
geois, and Gregory Crewdson, among oth-
ers. Each piece in the wareHOUSE, as the
Wielands’ by-appointment-only exhibition
space is called, has been selected because it
engages the image of the house.4
Far from these private collections,
Atlanta’s skyline is still dominated by
buildings designed and realized by the
city’s own starchitect, John Portman, in the
last decades of the twentieth century—
convention centers, “marts,” and hotels,
interconnected by labyrinthine pedestrian
skyways and punctuated by grand, surreal
indoor atria. A staff writer for the urban
design blog Curbed Atlanta once called
Portman “the ultimate architect/developer-
in-one,” noting his resounding rejection
ART IN AMERICA 49

Top, lobby of
John Portman
& Associates’
SunTrust Plaza,
showing Portman’s
sculpture One-
of “the notion that his projects should be
Eyed Jack, 1992. built in dialogue with site, context, or any
Photo Michael space shared by the larger public.”5 With
Portman.
Portman’s multiple roles, Koolhaas wrote,
Above, elevator “the traditional opposition between client
core in the atrium
of John Portman & and architect—two stones that create
Associates’ Atlanta sparks—disappears. The vision of the
Marriott Marquis.
architect is realized without opposition,
Photo Jaime
Ardiles-Arce. without influence, without inhibition.”6
Portman himself identifies as an architect,
a developer, and an artist, and in his view,
these three occupations are at their best
when merged. Portman has said that “to
understand development, analyze feasibil-
ity, and design accordingly is an architect
performing at the highest level,” and simi-
larly that “architecture and art, particularly
sculpture, can both be elevated to a higher
realm by their impact on each other when
properly fused.”7
Portman’s fusional impulse resonates
with some of Koolhaas’s conclusions about
Atlanta as a whole. “Atlanta is a creative
experiment,” the Dutch architect wrote, I
believe favorably, “but it is not intellectual
or critical: it has taken place without
argument.” The best (and least frictional)
place to see a John Portman artwork in
Atlanta is inside a John Portman building.
At SunTrust Plaza, the tallest building in
the downtown area, corporate employees
and intrepid art hunters can view the
polymath’s One-Eyed Jack, an aluminum
sculpture installed atop a fluted column, in
the two-story lobby. Portman’s Beilei I, a
“budding flower” made of sheet bronze, is
installed on the lower lobby level.
When SunTrust Plaza opened in
1992, John Portman & Associates already
had a thirty-year global portfolio that
included Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency (Port-
man’s first atrium hotel, which opened in
1967); San Francisco’s Embarcadero Cen-
ter, Los Angeles’s Westin Bonaventure
Hotel, and Detroit’s Renaissance Center
(all 1970s); the ostentatious and contro-
versial Marriott Marquis in New York’s
Times Square as well as hotels in South
Korea and Singapore (all 1980s); and the
Shanghai Centre in China (1990). Major
cities across the United States, East Asia,
and “even” Europe, as Koolhaas put it,
came to boast examples of Portman’s rein-
vented atrium: an architectural device that
was once “a hole in a house or building that
injects light and air—the outside—into
the center,” but in Portman’s hands was
the opposite: “a container of artificiality
that allows its occupants to avoid daylight
forever—a hermetic interior, sealed
against the real.”8
The isolationist flavor of Portman’s
buildings—“self-contained citadels,” to
cite scholar Eric Avila, in which public life
and space are aggressively privatized—has
been explained as both a symptom of
and a response to suburbanization and
white flight.9 Following desegregation
and the Civil Rights Movement, as white
Americans began to leave the city center
in search of homogeneous communities
“outside the perimeter”—OTP, as we say
in Atlanta—they took their business, and
their businesses, with them. In 1960, central
Atlanta contained 90 percent of the metro-
politan area’s office space; by 1980, it held
42 percent, and by 1999, only 13 percent.10
Yet this period of attrition was Portman’s
heyday. John Portman & Associates built in
downtown Atlanta throughout the 1970s,
1980s, and 1990s, enticing commerce with
convenient skyways that allowed transient
conventioneers and salespeople to float
undisturbed above the city’s increasingly
impoverished and crime-ridden streets.
Portman’s atrium replaced the piazza and
became, again in Koolhaas’s words, an
“ersatz downtown.”
The canonical Portman atrium has
made some exciting new appearances in
popular visual culture in the last several
years—a comeback that was the subject of
a 2015 article in the Atlantic called “How
1980s Atlanta Became the Backdrop
for the Future.”11 The author cites
television series such as “The Walking
Dead” and movie franchises such as The
Hunger Games and Divergent—all filmed
in Atlanta, thanks in no small part to
Georgia state tax incentives—as inheri-
tors of the dystopian aesthetic of Paul
Verhoeven’s Robocop and John Carpenter’s
Escape from LA, which contain footage
shot in Portman’s Renaissance Center
and Westin Bonaventure, respectively.
For The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, a film
that depicts a society-wide class revolu-
tion, the impressive atrium in Portman’s
Atlanta Marriott Marquis was adapted as
part of the setting for the decadent and
corrupt Capitol of Panem. When artists,
designers, or architects come to visit, I
take them to the lobby of the Marriott
Marquis for cocktails, then on to the
Hyatt Regency—via skyway—to Polaris,
a “Jetsons”–meets–“Mad Men”–styled
rotating restaurant. Each revolution charts
a city structure hostile to humans and the
connectivity and mobility that tradition-
ally nourish dialogue and discovery in the
arts. Peppering the view from Polaris are
pockets of buildings confined by freeways
and heavy industrial rail lines; to the
north, two additional clusters of skyscrap-
ers assert themselves through the density
of Atlanta’s tree canopy: the alternative
commercial districts of Midtown and,
beyond it, Buckhead, which ascend in
affluence as one moves uptown.

50 DECEMBER 2016 UP CLOSE

The Creative
Class and the Myth of
the “New”
Despite its cinematic popularity, Portman’s
twentieth-century legacy, in all its dysto-
pian glamour, seems mostly maligned in
twenty-first-century Atlanta, particularly
by the creative community. The “fortress
impulse”—to combine retail, office, public,
recreational, and even residential spaces in
megastructures that segregate themselves
from city centers—is considered socially
and culturally destructive. The scale of
Portman’s buildings is viewed as “inhu-
man,” unnatural, and counterproductive
to things like community building,
green space, and “place-making.”12 By
the 1990s, something called the New
Urbanism (TNU) had gained traction
among urban designers, planners, and
frustrated citizens, first nationally, then
internationally—“even” in Europe—as an
alternative to the model that Portman and
Atlanta had come to epitomize.
According to its charter, the
Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)
“views disinvestment in central cities,
the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing
separation by race and income, environ-
mental deterioration, loss of agricultural
lands and wilderness, and the erosion
of society’s built heritage as one inter-
related community-building challenge.”13
Georgia’s built heritage has received
substantial investment from the Savan-
nah College of Art and Design (SCAD).
Founded in the once declining old center
of Savannah, the arts university began to
purchase and restore historic buildings in
its hometown in 1979. SCAD has since
been responsible for the rehabilitation of
some of the few remaining architectural
gems in Atlanta, where it bought the
Atlanta College of Art in the mid-
2000s—acquiring the school responsible
for the undergraduate educations of
artists Radcliffe Bailey, Kara Walker,
Roe Ethridge, and Fahamu Pecou,
and for complex reasons dismaying
many locals, faculty, and alumni.14
SCAD calls itself the “University for
Creative Careers,” and its ethos is
particularly suited to TNU’s creative-
class-driven mission. SCAD puts capital
into the eroding built heritage of its
environment, and puts out creative Organizations operating on a
professionals. The school’s appetite for “coat-of-paint” or a crowdsourced model
historic buildings has increased—and emerged in this climate of penury; their
apparently, it has the capital necessary missions of neighborhood improvement
to restore them—making for another and/or public engagement have in turn
compelling confluence of real estate and attracted public funds, limited as they
artistic production in Atlanta. are. WonderRoot, an arts organization
Of course, the values of TNU were explicitly committed to community
brought to the city center by the same advancement and grassroots social change,
influential social and economic group that recently commissioned Fahamu Pecou
abandoned it in the first place. In other as lead artist for a mural on the King
words, the bourgeoisie is back in town, and Memorial station, part of the Metro-
it doesn’t travel light. It expects to live in politan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority
town, and to live so well that it forgets why (MARTA) rail system located near
it moved to the suburbs in the first place. the Martin Luther King Jr. National
The New Urbanists, seeking to “preserve, Historic Site. The elevated concrete
design, develop, and restore our regions, wall now depicts a young person taking
cities, and neighborhoods,” claim respon- flight beneath the words rise above.
sibility for creating and disseminating now
internationally popular strategies such as
mixed-use development, transit-oriented
development (TOD), and traditional
neighborhood design (TND). The New
Urbanism is thus a neo-traditional move-
ment particularly suited for the digital age,
its tenets easily distilled into Twitter-ready
three-letter acronyms. It embraces an
attractive rhetoric of “beautification” and
“restoration,” the implication being that
the city’s default position is ugliness and
blight. Atlanta is approached by newcom-
ers and returnees as though it were an old
warehouse: the city needs some work, it’s
priced “as is” (depending on the neighbor-
hood), but it’s got plenty of potential. Just
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, showing Richard Meier’s
as Atlanta was a blueprint for white flight, building (foreground right) and Renzo Piano’s exten-
now it’s the ultimate fixer-upper. sion (background left). Photo Timothy Hursley.
The Home Depot was founded in
Atlanta and remains one of the city’s
top employers. It is also the holy land of
do-it-yourself (DIY). (Until 2008, the
company’s slogan was, aptly: “You can The first Home Depot store opened
in Decatur, Georgia, in 1979.
do it. We can help.”) Atlanta knows that
nothing fixes up a place more quickly
and cheaply than a fresh coat of paint.
Underfunded arts institutions—new
and old, public and independent—have
embraced the potential of this low-cost
DIY approach to supporting the arts.
Perhaps this is because Georgia is the
second stingiest state for arts funding
in the country: its arts agencies will be
allocated only 10¢ per capita in 2017,
placing it ahead of only Kansas (6¢) and
well behind its neighbors Tennessee
($1.06) and Florida ($2.15).15
ATLANTA ART IN AMERICA 51

Fahamu Pecou’s mural Rise Above, 2016, at
the King Memorial MARTA station, Atlanta.
Courtesy WonderRoot.
View of Walker Keith Jernigan’s exhibition
“Repurposed Aggression,” 2016, at Mammal
Gallery, Atlanta. Photo Dustin Chambers.
A performance during the exhibition “Extreme Weather,”
2015, at Murmur, Atlanta. Photo Arno Hunter Myers.
This mural project was financed by the
National Endowment for the Arts, Fulton
County Arts & Culture, the Georgia
Council for the Arts, and the Atlanta
Regional Public Art Program of the
Atlanta Regional Commission.16 The
embrace of WonderRoot’s accessible
public art model by public funding entities
constitutes an ironic institutionalization of
the ethics and aesthetics of the DIY cul-
ture that thrived in response to austerity.
52 DECEMBER 2016
On a neighborhood scale, a coat of
paint can be a strategy for New Urbanist
beautification, be it encouraged by artist/
activists, by public institutions, or by
private interest. One Atlanta organiza-
tion exploring this model is Living Walls,
founded in 2009 with a mission to “pro-
mote, educate and change perspectives
about public space in our communities
via street art.” Supported by a variety of
in-kind and fiscal sponsors, from national
foundations to local businesses and prop-
erty owners, Living Walls has pursued
this goal through conferences on street art
and urbanism and by commissioning local
and international artists to create murals
in public spaces in neighborhoods across
the city.17 Although the program has been
largely well received, by the time I arrived
in December 2013, the New York Times
had already reported that “two murals
intended to spruce up blighted neighbor-
hoods in Atlanta have been painted over
after some residents complained that
they were confusing at best, demonic at
worst.”18 One of the murals removed
depicted an alligator-headed man with a
serpent’s tail; it was painted by a French
street artist named Pierre Roti, who had
traveled to Atlanta on his own dime to
create what he intended to be an alle-
gory about capitalism. A representative
from the mostly black neighborhood in
southwest Atlanta told the Times, “people
didn’t understand it. . . . It absolutely did
not represent what people want to see on
a busy street every day.” The coat-of-paint
philosophy has been embraced elsewhere
in Atlanta—and elsewhere in the world,
from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to
Tirana, Albania—but this episode sug-
gests its limits: DIY improvement works
best in your own house.
Similar misunderstandings are
perpetuated by newcomers and those
returning to cities such as Atlanta—“born
again” urban evangelists, as I like to call
them—who have a limited grasp of
neighborhood occupancy. What develop-
ers, property investors, and prospective
homeowners perceive to be abandoned
fixer-uppers may actually have had people
living in them all along. This misconcep-
tion has led to such confusing headlines as
“The Mammal Gallery Brings Humans
to Downtown: South Broad’s new music
UP CLOSE
venue focuses on community,” which
appeared in the community-driven
free culture weekly Creative Loafing
(Atlanta’s answer to the Village Voice).19
South Broad is a short downtown street
located in the overlapping shadows of
Portman’s skyscrapers and the offices
of the City of Atlanta; it’s lined with
storefronts, though only a couple of the
current businesses survived downtown’s
decades of desertion.20 Those that did
are fabulous: Miller’s Rexall Drugs is a
drugstore carrying Hoodoo and homeo-
pathic remedies that appear on the cover
of Paul McCartney’s 1999 album Run
Devil Run; Taj Perfumes stocks body
oils and incense, and hosts daily prayers
at the nearby Islamic Center.21 Still, as a
local urban-planning blogger who goes by
ATLUrbanist put it, “drugs and prostitu-
tion stubbornly linger” on South Broad—a
formulation that, like the headline above,
minimizes the humanity of the area’s
existing communities.22 The default
vocabulary used to describe neighbor-
hoods that might be new to the creative
class thus erases any history of previous
occupation, and credits recent arrivals
with the areas’ effervescent culture.
Mammal Gallery, one of the first
artist-run initiatives to open on South
Broad, was already ambitiously pro-
grammed when I arrived in Atlanta. In
the intervening years, additional project
spaces have opened on the same block;
these include the performance venues
Broad Street Visitors Center and the
Downtown Players Club, and Murmur, a
community resource for DIY media and
printed matter where I currently serve
on the board of directors. Chief among
the newer entities’ reasons for moving to
the area is the extremely low rents they
pay, an incentive organized and brokered
by the Goat Farm Arts Center, which
Creative Loafing editor Thomas Wheatley
has described as “one of the city’s most
creative real estate companies.”23
The Goat Farm is a twelve-acre former
textile mill on Atlanta’s Westside purchased
by Hallister Development Partners for
$7 million in 2010. Artists had occupied
the complex’s industrial buildings on
and off for years, and its new own-
ers—finding themselves with a ton of
property and little capital to develop it,
given the recession—embraced this history
and ran with it.24 The Goat Farm is now
a profitable “arts incubator” occupied by
creative professionals who pay market prices
to rent studio space. Various groups receive
“arts investment packages” and get access
to the Goat Farm’s communal areas and
production resources; their well-attended
art parties in turn boost the Goat Farm’s
citywide reputation as an arts commons.
The Goat Farm charges for permission to
film or shoot photographs on the prop-
erty, and its picturesque industrial ruins
have made it a popular venue for every-
thing from wedding photos to big-budget
movies. Hunger Games producers chose
the Goat Farm as the backdrop for the
impoverished District 12—a dystopian
counterpoint to the District 1 scenes shot
in the Portman atrium downtown.
Last year the Goat Farm turned its
interest downtown to South Broad and
launched a program called BEACONS—
another arts incubator, and the mecha-
nism by which artist- and activist-run
spaces have been able to secure such
affordable rent in the area. Organizations
that preexisted the program—including
Mammal Gallery and the much older
Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery, which
was founded in the 1990s and is now
located a block away from the South
Broad enclave—have been made retroac-
tive members, designated on social media
by a #GoatFarmBEACONS hashtag.
Occupants agree to contribute to the
improvement and maintenance of their
storefronts, assisted by limited access to
the Goat Farm’s construction resources.
In other words, Broad Street’s organiz-
ers get help in the form of materials
and manpower to execute that critical
improvement: the new paint job.
Though wildly different from
Portman’s work in appearance, the Goat
Farm’s cross-disciplinary arts incubator–
meets–developer model derives in some
ways from Portman’s, for instance in
its synthesis of traditionally separate
roles and in its site-specific approach to
artistic endeavor. Despite its population
of artists and organizers, and its distinct
popularity with the New Urbanists,
Atlanta’s latest arts district thus flirts
with Portman’s fusional philosophy—the
megalithic products of which these
groups claim to oppose. It’s all hap-
pening only steps away from Portman’s
ground zero—just on a smaller budget,
and in much smaller buildings. For now.
As we go to press, the South Broad
Street buildings have been bought by the
German company Newport Holdings
GmbH, whose plans for the area have
not yet been announced. Other develop-
ers recently purchased the neighboring
Underground Atlanta, another massive
mixed-used facility opened in 1969 as
a “city beneath the streets,” slated for
redevelopment as a live-and-shop hub.25
Just as Portman’s developer-cum-archi-
tect-cum-artist model represented an
unusual and, to some, unsavory conflict
of interests, its equivalent in twenty-
first-century Atlanta—developers
moving artists in?!—implies an obviously
problematic system in which creatives
become agents of displacement and real
estate capitalism, far more quickly than
The Goat Farm Arts Center, Atlanta.
their twentieth-century counterparts in
SoHo. Where this leaves BEACONS, or
Atlanta’s next new arts district, remains
to be seen. What is certain is that this
model subverts the traditional gentri-
fication approach of real estate capital
waiting to see where artists go, then fol- post-slavery, white New South have since
lowing them—an accelerationist move, been tossed around newspaper headlines
perhaps, toward certain social change. and music columns seeking an updated
definition, reappropriated for a Black New
South, in which historically oppressed
Resurgens communities are repositioned as both the
(or, plus ça change?) motors and the beneficiaries of progress
and prosperity; for the recent postindus-
Koolhaas wrote that Atlanta comes trial growth of the creative class in cities
close to fulfilling a “post-cataclysmic such as Atlanta; or to broadly suggest
new beginning.” Perhaps he was aware an equitable, integrated, or simply more
of the city’s slogan, Resurgens, and its dynamic near future. In hip-hop—the
accompanying mascot: a Phoenix rising culture industry for which Atlanta is best
from the ashes. Atlanta has been burnt to known—what the South newly “sounds”
the ground more than once—in 1864, by like has been actively questioned in the
Sherman’s Union Army, and again during twenty years since rapper André 3000
the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917—result- declared, at the 1995 Source Awards,
ing in the city’s deeply ingrained preoc- “the South got something to say.” When
cupation with its own destruction, and a Brooklyn’s Desiigner released “Panda,”
fascination with radical new beginnings. with its memorable line, “I got broads in
(Atlanta is an ideal setting for “The Walk- Atlanta,” he was accused of ripping off
ing Dead” for this reason.) The language Atlanta native Future, whose work was in
of TNU resonates with ideas about the turn put forward as the authentic 2016
“New South,” a term coined by journalist sound of his hometown.26 While this
Henry W. Grady in 1874 to address the claim caused contention too, this is one of
region’s shift from an agrarian economy many conversations that speak to Atlanta’s
to an industrial one. The terms of Grady’s place as a city whose specific identity
ATLANTA ART IN AMERICA 53

View of “ATLBNL: Recent Conversations,”
2016, showing (on wall) videos and
collages by Kalup Linzy. Courtesy Atlanta
Contemporary. Photo Erin Jane Nelson.
View of the exhibition “Sprawl! Drawing Outside the
Lines,” 2015, showing HENSE’s Wall Drawing 1,
2013, acrylic on wall. Courtesy High Museum of
Art. Photo Mike Jensen.
is constantly in question—even in its
highest-profile cultural exports.
In the visual arts, the nature of the
contemporary Southern voice has been
widely sought in small- and large-scale
exhibitions in Atlanta, in the Southeast,
and nationally. The High has turned
its attention to local artists with two
drawing exhibitions in the last three
years: “Sprawl! Drawing Outside the
Lines” in 2015, and “Drawing Inside the
Perimeter” in 2013, in which the works
served “as a roadmap to the crisscross-
ing avenues of artistic production in
Atlanta” and reflected “the chaotic,
dynamic spirit of the city.”27 Elsewhere,
the self-questioning specter of the New
South is merely implied. “Southern
Accent: Seeking the American South
in Contemporary Art” is on view at
the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke
54 DECEMBER 2016
University (through January 8), and aims
to articulate “a composite portrait of
southern identity through the work of
60 artists”—including Radcliffe Bailey,
Fahamu Pecou, and Kara Walker—and
to “create a space to reimagine the
South in new ways.” “ATLBNL: Recent
Conversations”—a reboot of the on-
again/off-again Atlanta Biennial, which
I co-curated with Daniel Fuller of the
Atlanta Contemporary (where the show
is on view through Dec. 18), Jacksonville-
based curator Aaron Garvey, and Gia
Hamilton of the Joan Mitchell Center
in New Orleans—directly references
Atlanta’s claim to be the “capital of the
New South.” We selected artists from
throughout the region to demonstrate
the diversity of creative experience here,
and indeed, all the participants had to
be “new”: to the Atlanta Biennial, to
the Atlanta Contemporary, and to other
major exhibition spaces in the city.
Despite its means and resources,
Atlanta is not known as an international
art city. The often-cited reason for this
is the 1962 crash of a chartered plane at
Paris’s Orly airport, which killed more
than one hundred Atlanta art patrons
who were on a European museum tour—
another fire after which the city, and
its arts community in particular, had to
reinvent itself. Atlanta’s accelerated cycle
of renewal, then, is part of its histori-
cal DNA, fueled by fresh coats of paint
promising to consolidate a kind of iden-
tity, or at least to brand a narrative. With
regard to hip-hop, it’s been argued that
what makes Atlanta’s sound distinct is its
freedom from the East Coast/West Coast
binary, allowing artists to try new things;
appropriately, the city’s annual hip-hop
conference—A3C, standing for “all three
coasts”—asserts Atlanta as the capital of a
new, Southern shoreline.28 Atlanta’s visual
arts community, with its art-hungry build-
ings providing luxurious space in which
to self-question, stands only to grow from
this condition.
1. Jordi Bernadó with Ramón Prat, eds., Atlanta,
Barcelona, Actar, 1995.
2. Rem Koolhaas, “Toward the Contemporary City,”
Design Book Review 17, Winter 1989, pp. 15–16.
3. Rem Koolhaas, “Atlanta,” S, M, L, XL, New York,
Monacelli Press, and Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1995,
p. 835.
UP CLOSE
4. Thewarehouse.org/about.
5. “It’s John Portman’s Sand Castle, We’re All
Just Living in It,” Curbed Atlanta, March 23, 2012,
atlanta.curbed.com.
6. Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL, pp. 839–41.
7. “The Man at a Crossroads: Architect, Developer, and
Artist John Portman,” CODA WORX, April 10, 2014,
codaworx.com.
8. Koolhaas, “Atlanta,” p. 841.
9. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight:
Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, Los Angeles,
University of California Press, 2004, p. 236.
10. Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making
of Modern Conservatism, Princeton, N.J., Princeton
University Press, 2013, p. 244. As Kruse notes, a few
corporate giants, including Coca-Cola, remained loyal
to the area.
11. Kristi York Wooten, “How 1980s Atlanta Became the
Backdrop for the Future,” The Atlantic, March 30, 2015,
theatlantic.com.
12. See Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, Princeton, NJ,
Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, p. 93.
13. “The Charter for the New Urbanism,” www.cnu.org.
14. See Lilly Lampe, “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the
Worst of Times: Art Education Reaches an Apex in the
American South,” Art Papers 38, no. 04, July–August 2014,
artpapers.org.
15. Nasaa-arts.org.
16. Wonderroot.org.
17. See livingwallsatl.com.
18. Robbie Brown, “Outcry Brings Down Murals in
Atlanta Art Project,” New York Times, Dec. 13, 2012,
nytimes.com.
19. Sonam Vashi, “The Mammal Gallery Brings
Humans to Downtown: South Broad’s new music venue
focuses on community,” Creative Loafing, Jan. 14, 2014,
clatl.com.
20. Not all these spaces have been abandoned organically:
the community forced the closure of one convenience
store that, according to a resident journalist, had “not so
quietly doubled as a place to buy and sell drugs.”
See Saba Long, “Living in Atlanta’s Hamsterdam—our
city’s south downtown” Saporta Report, July 6, 2015,
saportareport.com.
21. Onthegrid.city.
22. Darin Givens, “The seedy side of South Downtown,”
ATLUrbanist,Jan. 30, 2013, atlurbanist.tumblr.com.
23. Thomas Wheatley, “Goat Farm Economics,” Creative
Loafing, Nov. 12, 2015, clatl.com.
24. There are goats (and llamas, chickens, and a donkey)
on the premises; they were brought in to manage kudzu
overgrowth and became a fixture there.
25. Wrsrealestate.com.
26. Mosi Reeves, “Desiigner’s ‘Panda’ Is Number One:
What Is the Future of Authenticity?” Rolling Stone,
Apr. 26, 2016.
27. High.org.
28. Blog.a3cfestival.com.
 Important Modern & Contemporary Art Auction
to benefit
Nader Art Museum Latin America
Art Basel Week Miami, Nov. 29th, 7pm

Seating arrangements and paddle registration are by reservation only

Full-color printed and online catalogues will be available.

Nader’s
62 NE 27 St. Miami, FL 33137 t+1.305.576.0256 f.+1.305.576.0948
auction@garynader.com www.garynader.com
 George Curtis Polar Sea, The Cathedral, 1867
1816-1881 15 x 26 in.
Best in Show, Peabody Essex Museum “To The Ends of the Earth, Polar Landscape”

George de Forest Brush Pasuckuakohowog

1855-1941 14 x 20 in.

AM Fine Arts, Inc. By Appointment Only

New York, NY 10021 212 472 7400 • anne@amfinearts.net
 Thomas Moran Sunset In the Mountains, 1870’s
1837-1926 14 x 19 in.
©2016 AM Fine Arts, Inc.

Jasper Francis Cropsey Autumn On Hudson

1823-1900 12 x 20 in.

AM Fine Arts, Inc. By Appointment Only

New York, NY 10021 212 472 7400 • anne@amfinearts.net
 BACKSTORY

Robert
Rauschenberg
(far right) and
David White
(third from right)
with a panel from
Rauschenberg’s
installation The ¼
Mile or 2 Furlong
Piece, 1981–98, at
Edison Community
College, Fort Myers,
Fla., 1982. Photo
Terry Van Brunt.

Going the Distance

by David White

THIS WAS TAKEN in early February 1982, when Robert
Rauschenberg’s The ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong Piece was first
installed at the Gallery of Fine Arts at Edison Community
College in Fort Myers, Florida, not far from Bob’s place on
Captiva Island. He showed the installation several times
there over the years, as the piece progressed, so he could see
it in full. It’s so sprawling—eventually comprising about 190
panels—that there wasn’t room to spread it out in his studio.
I first met Bob at Leo Castelli’s gallery, where I worked after
college. He moved to Captiva around 1970, and I’d visit him there
periodically. He was looking for someone to organize his records,
and hired me for an archivist/registrar type of job in 1980. Bob
wasn’t so concerned with titles; everyone did a little of everything.
If you saw the turtle standing in front of the fridge, you’d open it
and give him some lettuce or strawberries. In this photo I’m third
from the right, and Bob is holding up the point. The guy on the
far left is Eric Holt, Bob’s studio assistant at the time. The others,
I believe, were affiliated with Edison. This particular panel is one
of the heaviest, most complex parts of ¼ Mile. The background is
a world map, and there are remnants of a white-painted bamboo
beach chair. You can’t tell because the photo is black-and-white,
but the joints of the chair are wrapped in colorful fabric. There is
a tentlike plexiglass cover that we are all supporting; it’s really
complicated trying to fit everything together.
Bob was always one for the expansive gesture. He was
never hesitant to start a seemingly overwhelming project. This
long-running installation is often thought of as a retrospec-
tive, in that he incorporated methods and materials into it CURRENTLY
that matched what he was doing separately in the studio. For ON VIEW
“Robert Rauschen-
example, he made a series of dark silkscreen paintings on metal,
berg,” at Tate
called “Night Shade,” and you can see similar somber, mysteri- Modern, London,
ous panels in a section of ¼ Mile. Scrap metal figures into a Dec. 1, 2016–
Apr. 2, 2017.
sculpture series called “Gluts” as well as into portions of ¼ Mile.
Bob worked on this artwork sporadically. There’d be
flurries of activity, and then he’d move on to something else. DAVID WHITE
is senior curator
He made the last couple of sections around the time of his
at the Robert
retrospective in the late 1990s. The show traveled to the Rauschenberg
Guggenheim Bilbao in November 1998, and ¼ Mile was Foundation,
New York.
installed in an enormous gallery there, where Richard Serra’s
sculptures are now on view. It wrapped around the walls, but
stopped a little short, so Bob made a few extra panels to fill
the space. That was the last time anything was added.
— As told to Leigh Anne Miller

ART IN AMERICA 59
 William Frederick de Haas Mt. Desert, Maine, 1879
1823 -1900 15 x 26 in.
©2016 AM Fine Arts, Inc.

Charles Kingsley Bermuda, 1875 William Verplank Birney Girl with Berries
1855-1941 10 x 12 in. 1858 -1909 8 x 10 in.

AM Fine Arts, Inc. By Appointment Only

New York, NY 10021 212 472 7400 • anne@amfinearts.net
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6LPøHVbGHb$VVLVb_7RN\Rb*DOOHU\bb%7$3b_*HRUJHV3KLOLSSHb b1DWKDOLHb9DOORLVb_9LJR
 BOOKS
Multiple Originals
by Eleanor Heartney
REIKO TOMII
Radicalism in the Wilderness:
International Contemporaneity
and 1960s Art in Japan
Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2016; 311 pages, 18 color and 81 black-and-white
illustrations; $36.95 hardcover.
Reiko Tomii’s Radicalism in the Wilderness deals with one of the
persistent conundrums of art historical study—why do strik-
ingly similar movements and artworks appear simultaneously
in distant and disconnected places? Traditionally, the evolution
of art is cast in terms of binaries like “mainstream vs. periphery”
or “originality vs. imitation.” In this explanation, ideas ripple
outward from major cultural centers to the margins, becom-
ing ever more diluted as they move away from the source. But
Tomii’s account marshals a strong argument against such linear
thinking. Focusing on one artist and two artist groups that
emerged in Japan in the expanded 1960s (1954–77), she pre-
The Play: Current of
Contemporary Art,
1969, performance
on the Yodo River,
Japan. Photo
Higuchi Shigeru.
sents carefully researched and analyzed case studies that point
to a less chauvinistic way of understanding globalism in art.
This book had a long gestation. In the acknowledgments,
Tomii says that her work as researcher and co-curator for several
1990s exhibitions sparked both the questions and the answers that
she discusses here in depth. Of particular relevance was “Global
Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s.” A sprawling
multipart show mounted in 1999 by the late Jane Farver, then ELEANOR
curator at New York’s Queens Museum, it reviewed two contem- HEARTNEY is an
A.i.A. contributing
poraneous waves of conceptual thinking in thirteen geographic editor who lives in
regions worldwide. Tomii, who worked closely with Farver on the New York.
exhibition, was responsible for the Japanese segment, forming the
kernel that, seventeen years later, became this volume.
To make her case for the distinctive nature of Japanese con-
ceptual art of the 1960s, Tomii offers a series of terms that direct
the reader away from the top-down model of artistic influence.
Primary among these is the notion of “international contempora-
neity,” a phrase coined by the Japanese art critic Haryū Ichirō. This
rather ungainly formulation captures Japanese artists’ sharp aware-
ART IN AMERICA 63
 Tomii’s “wilderness” denotes both remote locales and art
activities “outside the norms in thinking.”
View of GUN’s ness of their place in the tumultuous art world of the period, an
performance Event awareness grounded in the simultaneous appearance in Japan and
to Change the Image
of Snow, 1970, the Euro-American sphere of related ideas and shared experiences.
Niigata Prefecture, Tomii borrows from quantum physics to illustrate her vision
Japan. Photo
Hanaga Mitsutoshi.
of art history. Noting how the paths of subatomic particles are
made visible by collisions with other particles in a cloud chamber,
she suggests a similar process in art. In this model of artistic devel-
opment, invisible artistic narratives (including those chronicled by
Tomii) come into view when they collide with more visible ones—
in this case, the accepted story of concept-based Western art.
The author introduces several other helpful notions for under-
standing relationships among artists and artworks both within and
outside Japan. “Connections” corresponds to the conventional art
historical search for actual points of contact. “Resonances” is a more
nebulous concept encompassing the unexpected cultural synchron-
icities that, for example, led artists in Europe, America, and Japan
to create exhibitions consisting of empty galleries at roughly the
same moment in history. Such synchronicities are further probed by
subjecting them to the dyad “similar/dissimilar,” thereby teasing out
the ways in which the execution, motivations, and understanding of
formally comparable phenomena reveal their distinctive natures.
WITH THESE THEORETICAL tools in hand, Tomii
examines her three prime examples, which highlight the complex
nature of the Japanese art world’s relationship to the West during
64 DECEMBER 2016 BOOKS
the 1960s. Bypassing better-known Japanese art movements like
Gutai and Mono-ha, she homes in on artists who lived outside
Tokyo and made work corresponding to the international tenden-
cies of Conceptualism, performance art, and Land art. The book’s
titular “wilderness,” she writes, denotes both remote locales and art
activities “outside the norms in thinking.”
This close study brings its often eccentric figures to life.
Matsuzawa Yutaka (1922–2006) drew on parapsychology,
contemporary physics, and esoteric Buddhism in his quest to
express the invisible in art. The Play, an ever-mutating group of
artists based in Osaka, undertook such actions as the whimsically
named Current of Contemporary Art, in which members floated
down the Yodo River in 1969 on an arrow-shaped raft created
from rented blocks of Styrofoam. The signature achievements of
GUN (Group Ultra Niigata), a collective located in the “snow
country” of Niigata Prefecture, included a 1970 performance
titled Event to Change the Image of Snow, which involved spraying
colorful pigments over the frozen white terrain.
In this account, moments of “connection,” as when The Play
adopted the term “Happening” after early ’60s visits to Japan
by Allan Kaprow and John Cage, are followed by moments of
“resonance,” as when the group placed Thunder, a pyramid-shaped
structure designed to capture lightning, on Mount Jūbu in Kyoto
Prefecture in 1977, the same year that Walter De Maria created his
Lightning Field in New Mexico. Even when the Japanese artists
were aware of similar Western developments, Tomii argues, their
projects came out of specific local concerns and histories.
The author also stresses a deep-seated ambivalence toward
alignment with the West, a tension illustrated by the battle
between Matsuzawa and representatives of the mainstream
Japanese art world over the label to be affixed to the ’60s
tendency to dematerialize art. Matsuzawa pushed for kannen,
a Buddhist term that Tomii translates as “idea.” This would
have underscored the indigenous roots of the impulse toward
an art of “vanishing matter.” But Matsuzawa was ultimately
overruled by a cadre of prominent critics who preferred the
word gainen (concept), because it emphasized Japanese artists’
affiliation with international currents.
Tomii makes intriguing suggestions about the reasons for the
subtle differences between Japanese and Euro-American conceptu-
alism (in the broad sense). She points out that the Land art move-
ment was predicated on the existence of vast empty spaces in the
American West, whereas in tiny, heavily populated Japan, nature is
never far from urban centers. Hence the former’s signature location
was the desert, while the latter’s was the dry riverbed.
She argues further that American conceptualism developed
in tandem with an active art market, which encouraged the
creation of salable photo documentation of ephemeral projects,
and with a program of active sponsorship that fostered massive
projects like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). By contrast,
avant-garde Japanese artists worked without institutional or
 private market support. They therefore developed what she calls
a “culture of showing,” which relied on photojournalists and the
mass media for dissemination of their work.
Such differences affected Japanese artists’ approach to audience,
terminology, and format. Although Tomii probably overstates the
degree of institutional support for Euro-American conceptualism,
her argument does point to the impact of patronage on even the
most supposedly antimaterialistic and market-resistant forms of art.
Radicalism in the Wilderness draws a clearly organized, metic-
ulously researched picture of a very important strain of postwar
Japanese art. It will thus be an invaluable resource for scholars.
But Tomii offers something far more than just a regional study.
She advocates an alternative approach to contemporary art his-
tory that is gaining more and more traction these days.
Dispensing with linear narratives of global influence and
artistic development, Tomii raises questions about the over-
valuation of originality that lies at the heart of conventional art
historical scholarship. Who did it first, she suggests, is often a
much less productive question than why they did it—a query that
reveals how superficially similar works actually differ in concept,
context, and local meaning. Using the lively Japanese art world of
the 1960s as a template, she offers a map for understanding the
intricate web of influences, social conditions, and histories that
shape today’s global art world.

Books in Brief

ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN, ed.
Parallel Views:
Italian and Japanese The Sixties:
Art from the 1950s, A Worldwide
60s and 70s Happening
Supplementing a 2014 show
at the Warehouse in Dallas,
this catalogue compares works
by postwar artists on opposite
sides of the globe, from Arte
Povera in Italy to the Gutai
and Mono-ha groups in Japan.
Defeated in World War II, both
countries strove to rebuild their
cities and national identities
following fascist eras. Scholars
Joshua Mack, Carolyn Christov-
Bakargiev, and Nicholas Cullinan
discuss connections between the
two nations’ art and artists of this
period—particularly their use of
“poor” materials—and the vari-
eties of modernism that evolved
in each place.
Bologna, Damiani, 2015; 408 pages, 240
color illustrations, $75 clothbound.
MIRJAM SHATANAWI and
WAYNE MODEST, eds.
The term “globalization”
entered the vernacular during
the 1960s, after Marshall
McLuhan claimed in his 1962
book The Gutenberg Galaxy that
“the new electronic interdepen-
dence recreates the world in
the image of a global village.”
Accompanying an exhibition of
the same name at Amsterdam’s
Tropenmuseum, this book of
photo essays and texts inves-
tigates how new technologies
and the growing role of media
ushered in a frenetic era of inter-
cultural exchange in art, design,
fashion, music, architecture, and
photography.
Eindhoven, Lecturis, 2015; 208 pages,
125 illustrations, $32 paperback.
DIANE DUFOUR and
MATTHEW WITKOVSKY, eds.
Provoke:
Between Protest
and Performance—
Photography in
Japan 1960–1975
Although only three issues were
published, the Japanese magazine
Provoke crystallized cultural and
artistic trends at a moment of post-
war cultural reinvention. Contribu-
tions by Provoke collective members
including critic Koji Taki, poet
Takahiko Okada, and photographer
Daido Moriyama blended protest
photography, avant-garde art, and
critical theory to critique modern
Japanese life. Published in lieu of a
traveling retrospective, this catalogue
positions Provoke between 1960s
political movements and the rise
of performance art in Japan in the
early 1970s.
Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2016; 680
pages, 600 black-and-white illustrations,
$75 softcover.
MANFRED HEITING, ed.
The Japanese
Photobook,
1912–1980
This tome chronicles the develop-
ment of photography publications
in Japan, from early examples
reflecting Western influences to
distinctive experiments following
the end of World War II. During
the postwar years, a new genera-
tion of photographers and artists
explored unorthodox techniques
in photography, design, and
printing. Progressive publications
like Shomei Tomatsu’s Nagasaki
11:02 (1966) and Nobuyoshi
Araki’s Sentimental Journey
(1971) became internationally
influential. Illustrations of more
than four hundred photobooks
are augmented by an introduction
by historian Ryuichi Kaneko and
essays by a host of academics.
Göttingen, Germany, Steidl, 2016; 516
pages, 3,000 color illustrations, $145
hardcover.

BOOKS ART IN AMERICA 65

HOHMANN ®

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40
YEARS

since 1976

NOV 29 - DEC 4 | 2016 FEB 16 - 19 | 2017

_KRKPDQQĕQHDUWFRPDLD
PRINTS & EDITIONS
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Shepard Fairey, “Palace of Power”, 2016, Silkscreen and Mixed Media Collage on Paper, HPM, 30 x 40 inches (45.7 x 61 cm),
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DECEMBER 2016
Carmen Herrera / Pier Paolo Pasolini / Mark Leckey
Las Vegas / Suburban Futurism

LAS VEGAS
View of the the Neon
Museum, Las Vegas,
showing a sign
from the Horseshoe
Hotel and Casino.

ART IN AMERICA 71
CURRENTLY
ON VIEW
“Carmen Herrera:
Lines of Sight,” at the
Whitney Museum of
WORLDLY
ABSTRACTION
American Art,
New York, through
Jan. 2, 2017.

CARTER
Trained as an architect, Carmen Herrera makes
RATCLIFF is a poet,
critic, and author of
paintings that reconfigure the vertiginous perspectives and
the novel Tequila
Mockingbird (Station
lean shapes of modern city life.
Hill Press, 2015).

by Carter Ratcliff
THE CRISPLY GEOMETRIC paintings of Carmen Herrera
draw us into a “world of straight lines,” to borrow a phrase from
one of her interviews.1 Hers is a world where the relations between
shapes are clear and the shapes themselves are even clearer. Yet this
unflagging clarity has the power to surprise. In the “Blanco y
Verde” series, which occupied Herrera from 1959 to 1971, she
punctuates fields of white with elongated triangles of emerald
green. There are usually just two of these slivery shapes to a canvas,
though sometimes there are as many as three or as few as one.
With these limited means she turns blank white fields into specific
environments. Herrera has never disclosed much about her process,
though she did say in 2010, at the age of ninety-five, that “every
painting is a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win.”2
Because the results of these struggles are so consistently successful,
one assumes that each of her paintings is the product of an intense,
even obsessive process of trial and error.
The “Blanco y Verde” canvases appear just after the midpoint
in “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,” an exhibition now on view at
the Whitney Museum of American Art. The earliest works feature
flexible grids dividing the surface into lively, nested shapes. An
array of greens and browns give the curving forms of Green Garden
(1950) an oblique resemblance to tropical fronds and shadows.
Within two years, Herrera had banished all traces of identifiable
subject matter. Black and White (1952) is a sixty-eight-inch square View of the
divided into quadrants, articulated by patterns of black and white exhibition “Carmen
Herrera: Lines of
stripes. Hung not as a square but as a diamond, this painting seems
Sight,” 2016–17,
at once precarious and locked into its symmetries. showing (left to
For the rest of the 1950s, Herrera played stability off instabil- right) Horizontal,
1965; Rondo, 1958;
ity, often giving the latter a slight edge. Though the layout of a A City, 1948; and
Herrera canvas can be grasped in a single glance, further looking Untitled, 1949.
Courtesy Whitney
complicates matters. As the viewer tries to determine which Museum of
shape in a painting is figure and which is ground, the forms come American Art,
together in a single plane. The image stabilizes, but only for a New York. Photo
Ronald Amstutz.
moment. Herrera’s color-shapes are always on the move. A hue
advances, it retreats; a dynamic form seems to push the right-
angled frame slightly out of kilter, then rectilinearity reasserts itself.
These subtleties bring her paintings to life and give each one a
vibrantly distinctive presence, if not a personality.
 HERRERA’S STORY is now well-known in the art world, but
it still amazes. Although she has been painting seriously for more
than seven decades, “Lines of Sight” is her first exhibition at a
major museum. Herrera was marginalized in large part because of
her gender. A Manhattan dealer named Rose Fried told her that
she could paint circles around the men in her stable, but refused to
give a show to a woman.3
Born in Havana in 1915, Herrera grew up as one of seven
siblings in a milieu devoted to art and literature. Her mother,
Carmela, was a journalist and author. Her father, Antonio,
served in the war of independence from Spain and afterward
founded the newspaper El Mundo. The family’s art collec-
tion included paintings by Spanish old masters as well as
contemporary Cubans. Drawing lessons were almost a matter
of course for Herrera and her brother Addison. At fourteen,
she moved to Paris, where she studied French and art history
at the Marymount International School and became familiar
with the city’s museums. Before returning to Havana two
years later, she traveled in Germany and Italy with her mother
and one of her sisters. While still in high school, Herrera
became a painter accomplished enough to be included in
group exhibitions at Havana’s Lyceum and Circulo de Bellas
Artes alongside established artists. Nonetheless, she chose to
major in architecture at the University of Havana.
It was then that she learned something about herself. “There
Among the Whitney exhibition’s most striking paintings is is nothing I love more than to make a straight line,” she said years
Black and White, Green and Orange (1958), in which the two titular colors inter- later. “How can I explain it? It’s the beginning of all structures,
1952, acrylic on
canvas with painted
lock in a pattern of cantilevered bars. The green bars reach to really.”4 Though Herrera passed her exams with honors, she never
frame, 68 inches the right, the orange ones to the left, and Herrera has extended received her architect’s license. This was not a cause for deep
square. Collection them all precisely to the point beyond which they would make regret. As much as she loved straight lines and right angles, she
Estrellita and David
Brodsky. the picture rickety. Next come variations on the narrow shapes was reluctant to deal with clients and their demands. She did not,
of the “Blanco y Verde” series in blue and white, then black and however, completely abandon the third dimension. The Whitney
white. By the mid-1960s she was centering diamond shapes exhibition includes several of the “Estructuras” (Structures) that
on circular canvases, a return to symmetry that accompanied
a diminishment in scale. These are intimate paintings. Shape
takes on more visual heft in a cluster of paintings from the
1970s. Here, blunt rectilinear shapes in red dominate fields of
white. One is reminded, if only obliquely, of buildings massive
enough to block out much of the sky. Having turned toward
View of “Lines of monumentality, Herrera embraced it fully in a series of black-
Sight,” showing (left and-white paintings that would qualify as Brutalist if their
to right, on wall)
Epiphany, 1971;
internal proportions were not so grandly refined. From here it
Red and White, was a short step to the series of seven canvases that bring the
1976; and Amarillo Whitney exhibition to its finale.
“Dos,” 1971; and
(left to right, on Painted in 1975 and 1978, the works are named after the days
platform) Untitled, of the week. In each, one or two large, angular black forms share the
1971, and Estructura
Roja, 1966/2012. surface with one other hue: a luminous yellow in Tuesday (1978), a
Courtesy Whitney smoldering orange in Friday (1978). Aside from the blue of Blue
Museum of
Monday (1975), the choice of colors seems arbitrary, or dictated
American Art.
Photo Ronald by associations so thoroughly personal that we have no way of
Amstutz. knowing what they might be. So we bring our own associations
to bear—or not. These paintings need no extravisual buttress-
ing. Appealing to our sense of shape and space, they endow their
expanses of black and bright color with a levitating weightiness.
Here and throughout Herrera’s oeuvre, line measures off the sur-
face with a precision so economical that it counts as pictorial wit.

74 DECEMBER 2016 WORLDLY ABSTR ACTION


Herrera began to build in the mid-1960s. Some are wall pieces;
others stand on the floor. All are composed of two monochrome
slabs that almost fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, but
not quite, because Herrera has adjusted the position of the slabs
to produce narrow wedge-shaped openings where they meet. In
the “Blanco y Verde” paintings, these wedges are made of green
pigment. In the “Estructuras,” they are empty space.
In 1939 Herrera married Jesse Loewenthal, a New Yorker she
had met while he was traveling in Cuba. Soon afterward, Cuba’s
political turmoil prompted the couple to leave for the United
States. Once they had settled into an apartment in downtown
Manhattan, Loewenthal returned to his teaching post at Stuyves-
ant High School. Herrera painted, occasionally studying at the Art
Students League or the Brooklyn Museum Art School. In 1948,
with the war in Europe over, Loewenthal took a sabbatical and
they moved to Paris. The center of Herrera’s artistic life was the
Salon Réalités Nouvelles, which had been founded two years ear-
lier by Sonia Delaunay, Jean Arp, and other veterans of the prewar
avant-garde. With a sensibility tilted strongly toward geometric
abstraction, the Salon fostered Herrera’s pictorial predilections. In
1949 her work was sufficiently geometric to qualify her for mem-
bership in the group, and she was included in its fourth annual
exhibition, held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
As Herrera became a regular in the Salon’s yearly shows, her
paintings appeared at L’Institute Endoplastique, Galerie Olga
Bogroff, and other Parisian venues. Immersed in a steady round of
concerts, plays, and literary events, she and Loewenthal acquired
a large circle of friends and colleagues. Loewenthal extended his
sabbatical, enabling them to stay abroad for five years. Obliged
to return to New York in 1954, the couple took up residence in
Greenwich Village. Paris, she later said, had been “like heaven.”5
New York was far from that. Abstract Expressionism was in the
CAR MEN HERRER A
Blanco y Verde, 1967,
acrylic on canvas,
40 by 70 inches.
Private collection.
ascendant, and Herrera found her work welcomed only at galleries
and institutions that specialized in art from Latin America. She
exhibited very little during the next three decades, but continued to
paint, strengthening her command of the “world of straight lines.”
In 1984 “Carmen Herrera: A Retrospective, 1951–1984”
opened at the Alternative Museum in downtown Manhattan. The
dominant art at the time went by the name Neo-Expressionism—a
development as thoroughly at odds with Herrera’s sensibility as
Abstract Expressionism, if not more so. After her retrospective, she
was included in group shows with increasing frequency. El Museo
del Barrio in New York presented a large selection of Herrera’s
black-and-white paintings in 1998. She had stopped painting
two years earlier to take care of Loewenthal, whose health was
deteriorating. He died in 2000. Herrera did not return to painting
until 2006, encouraged by the favorable response to a retrospective
exhibition of her work presented the year before at Latincollector, a
gallery on West Fifty-Seventh Street.
In the last decade, Herrera has had solo shows in Madrid, Milan,
London, and New York. Now the Whitney is celebrating the first half
of her career with a major exhibition, and one hopes that it will be
followed by another devoted to the second half, either at this or some
other museum. Having been discovered at long last, Herrera’s place
in the durable tradition of geometric abstraction is assured. But this Following spread,
view of “Lines of
raises a question: where in that tradition does she belong? Sight,” showing
(left to right)
Wednesday, 1978;
AMONG THE ORIGINATORS of geometric abstraction are Tuesday, 1978;
two avant-gardists with metaphysical leanings: Kasimir Malevich and Sunday, 1978;
Piet Mondrian. Malevich claimed that with his Black Square (1915) Friday, 1978;
and Thursday,
he had made painting the vehicle of “pure feeling”—not his or any 1975. Courtesy
other individual’s feeling but “the spirit of non-objective sensation that Whitney Museum
of American Art.
pervades everything.”6 Several years later, Mondrian arrived at the Photo Ronald
pared-down repertory of straight lines and “rectangular color planes” Amstutz.
ART IN AMERICA 75
Line measures off the surface with a precision so economical that
it counts as pictorial wit.
 that expressed “the immutable.”7 Like Malevich, Mondrian wanted
to reveal the ultimate and imperishable realities hidden by the
contingencies of the everyday world, as well as by artists’ representa-
tions of such fleeting and metaphysically negligible things as trees
and clouds and the faces of individual people. Despite their shared
beliefs, the two painters disagreed on a crucial point.
Malevich rejected all utilitarian applications of art. The
abstract paintings that followed Black Square make no utopian
proposals for the betterment of ordinary life. True art, Malevich
declared, provides “the longed-for tranquility of an absolute
order.”8 Mondrian, on the other hand, believed in the practical
benefit of pictorial order. In 1919 he declared that the “equilibrated
relationships” of a properly composed painting “signify what is
just” in society.9 Moreover, it was his expectation that, as geometric
painting became sculptural and sculpture became architectural, the
way would be open to city planning capable, by such formal means,
of creating a utopia. Mondrian and Malevich established the two
poles defining the nature of geometric abstraction. At one extreme
stood self-sufficient purity—transcendence for transcendence’s
sake. The other held a purity that promised to redeem the world.
Herrera’s art finds no comfortable place between these
options, perhaps because her “world of straight lines” has no need
for metaphysical absolutes. Of course, the unrelenting straightness
of her lines brings with it an air of idealism, yet this quality does
Shocking Pink, 1949,
acrylic on canvas,
32 by 40 inches.
Private collection.
78 DECEMBER 2016 WORLDLY ABSTR ACTION
not completely remove her art from everyday experience. Since the
advent of International Style architecture, certain buildings have
presented us with crisply rectilinear forms, and the triangles in several
of the “Blanco y Verde” canvases evoke razor-straight highways in
extreme perspective. Whereas Mondrian presented his paintings
as concise blueprints for a new world, Herrera’s feel as if they are
grounded in this one. Furthermore, her colors seem to originate in
the immediacies of observation, rather than in a theorized system.
One of the earliest paintings in the Whitney show is Shocking
Pink (1949), a complex arrangement of bars and diamond shapes.
The prevailing colors are black, white, and purple. Pink appears in the
band that runs along the edges of the canvas, simultaneously cutting
the surface into two not quite equal parts and uniting what it divides.
The most prevalent colors in geometric abstraction from the 1920s
to the ’60s are the bright red, blue, and yellow introduced early on by
Mondrian. Pink is rare, though one sees it in canvases by Auguste
Herbin, a founder of the Salon Réalités Nouvelles and one of the
painters Herrera got to know when she lived in Paris. Like his greens
and oranges, Herbin’s pinks have the look of systematic variations on
Mondrian’s primary colors. Herrera has never been constrained by
the precedents that have regulated most geometric abstraction over
the decades. So she was free to charge the color pink with meanings
undreamt of in the universe created by the geometers of Mondrian’s
generation and sustained by their many heirs.

Shocking pink made its debut in the late 1930s, in the
package design for a perfume by Elsa Schiaparelli. So there is no
denying that Herrera made a theme of femininity by turning the
name of this color into the name of a painting. Yet her shocking
pink is not to be mistaken for Schiaparelli’s. The fashion designer
used it as an emblem, however ironic, of unbridled sensuality. In
Herrera’s painting, pink has a silvery cast that renders it a touch
austere without denying its fleshly warmth. There is nothing in the
theories and precedents of geometric abstraction to prepare us for
Shocking Pink. Standing face to face with this painting, we sense
that its palette originates not in Euclidean absolutes but in nuances
of a self-possessed individual’s experience of gender and sexuality,
and her attendant thoughts and feelings about them.
Georges Vantongerloo and Theo van Doesburg, who
cofounded De Stijl with Mondrian, admitted green into the com-
pany of the three primary colors.10 Mondrian did not. When he
left behind his early, Symbolist work, he came to detest the color. It
reminded him of nature, the mundane realm his utopia was meant
to transcend. Herrera often deploys green, but not in shades that
evoke trees and shrubbery. In Green Garden it has a sharp, nearly
acidic quality, and the green of the “Blanco y Verde” series has a
crystalline luminosity befitting its role in structuring wide expanses
of white. Elsewhere, as in Green and Orange, green hovers between
structural solidity and atmospheric permeability, much as the form
this green defines can be seen as figure or as ground. Mondrian
standardized colors. Herrera does not. Every time green appears in
her paintings, it reinvents itself.
Offering neither to loft us above ordinary life nor propel us
into a perfected future, Herrera’s abstractions are not program-
matic, much less didactic. As important as Mondrian was to
her—she dedicated not one but two of her paintings to him—she
is something of an outlier in the history that he did so much to
CAR MEN HERRER A
Green Garden, 1950,
acrylic on canvas,
18 by 24 inches.
Courtesy Lisson
Gallery, London
and New York.
launch. It is of course undeniable that Herrera would not have
become the painter she is without the example of geometric
abstraction, in all its theory-driven yearning for transcendent order.
In Herrera’s art order has the tone—one might say the feel—of life
on the plane where it is actually lived. Her paintings inflect picto-
rial logic with the impulses of physical gesture and the demands
of fully felt emotion. Her oeuvre prompts a strong intuition of an
uncompromisingly individual presence.
Yet the straight lines and smooth surfaces of her images
ensure that she will never be taken for an expressionist.The ele-
ments of her style are those of modern architecture compressed
into two dimensions, as if to suggest that her presence is indistin-
guishable from the settings it builds for itself. A Herrera painting
invites us to meet her on grounds emphatically her own.There is a
challenge in the invitation extended by her works, for they require
rigorous, even scrupulous looking.There is generosity, as well, for
Herrera’s challenge is attuned to the pleasure we take in making
sense of what we see, even—or especially—when we focus on
subtleties as demanding as hers.
1. Dana Miller, “Carmen Herrera: Sometimes I Win,” Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, p. 15.
2. Hermione Hoby, “Carmen Herrera: ‘Every painting has been a fight between the
painting and me. I tend to win,’” Guardian, Nov. 20, 2010, theguardian.com.
3. Miller, p. 22.
4. Ibid.
5. Carmen Herrera, “Backstory: Heavenly Paris,” Art in America, Nov. 2015, p. 73.
6. Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism” (1927), Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L. Herbert,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1964, p. 94.
7. Piet Mondrian, “A Dialogue on Neoplasticism” (1919), in Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl,
New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1971, p. 122.
8. Malevich, p. 101.
9. Mondrian, pp. 121, 123.
10. John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 2000, p. 260.
ART IN AMERICA 79
Pier Paolo Pasolini
photographed by EVERYTHING
IS ABOUT TO
Richard Avedon,
New York,
Sept. 24, 1966.
© The Richard
Avedon Foundation.
BEGIN
Exactly fifty years ago, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Italy’s controversial writer-activist-filmmaker, made his
first of two galvanizing visits to New York.
by Ara H. Merjian
“ACTOR NEEDED TO PLAY Pier Paolo Pasolini.” Thus
reads an untitled 1990 work by Mike Kelley: a mock flyer
stamped on a large piece of felt, seeking a man of “squar-
ish facial structure” and “medium height” for an unnamed
production. As much as its specific criteria, or its appeal to
nonprofessional actors, the piece’s very format—mixing the
handwritten and the mechanically produced, the individual and
the anonymous—evokes the legacy of the unseen subject, an
artist who repeatedly addressed the encroachment of industrial
modernity upon vernacular expression. Somewhere between
a wanted poster and a casting call notice, the flyer obscures
ARA H. MERJIAN Pasolini’s likeness (substituting a censor’s black square) even as
is associate professor
of Italian Studies at it describes him. Indeed, the scandal of his absence—he was
New York University. murdered in 1975 at the age of fifty-three by a young hustler in
See Contributors murky, politically charged circumstances—has long rivaled the
page.
renown of his work in cinema and a host of other cultural fields.
Whether through the ferocity of his death or the abiding
vitality of his aesthetics, Pasolini has inspired a staggering
number of international artists—including Ming Wong,
William Kentridge, Francesco Arena, Tracey Moffatt, Elisabetta
Benassi, Cerith Wyn Evans, Nathaniel Mellors, Julian Schna-
bel, and Berlinde de Bruyckere—to produce works in a wide
range of mediums and styles. As if in response to Kelley’s ersatz
leaflet, the director Abel Ferrara cast the physically appropriate
Willem Dafoe in his 2014 Pasolini biopic.
80 DECEMBER 2016
If Pasolini has left a profound mark on these shores, his
own work—particularly following his visits to New York City
in 1966 and 1969—reveals an intense engagement with Ameri-
can culture, from the period’s youth and antiwar movements
to black culture to Ezra Pound’s poetry and Andy Warhol’s
painting and film. Fifty years after his first visit to the United
States, he remains known here mostly for his work as a director
of films, among them the gritty Accattone (1961) and Mamma
Roma (1962), both dealing with prostitution, as well as the more
hermetic Teorema (Theorem), 1968, featuring a divine visitation,
and the sexually brutal Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). His
auteur status was reaffirmed by MoMA’s comprehensive (and
jam-packed) film retrospective in 2012–13.
In Italy, however, Pasolini singlehandedly reinvented the
notion of the Renaissance man in the postwar era—producing
work as poet, novelist, painter, dramatist, screenwriter, jour-
nalist, essayist, and unrelenting polemicist. Having studied
under the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi at the
University of Bologna, he imparted a fundamentally painterly
sensibility to his films from the start: aiming as much to frame
a new sense of the sacred as to assail form or upend convention.
His work is most consistent, in fact, in its ideological incongrui-
ties, or what he referred to himself as a productive “contami-
nation”—between loathing of the bourgeosie and animosity
toward the hollow pieties of the Italian left; between a clamorous
ART IN AMERICA 81

Mike Kelley: 
Untitled (Pasolini),
1990, felt and glue,
93¾ by 70½ inches.
© Mike Kelley
Foundation for the
Arts. Licensed by
VAGA, New York.
Photo Douglas M.
Parker.
iconoclasm and a profound aesthetic conservatism; between
atheism and what he called the “nostalgia for a belief.”
For a country lacking a Catholic dominance or a deep-
seated Marxist tradition—the two phenomena out of which
Pasolini’s worldview emerged—the United States has produced
a wide spectrum of artists fascinated with his legacy. “I Killed
My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver with Joy: An Obses-
sion with Pier Paolo Pasolini,” a 2013 group exhibition on the
lower East Side that summed up this penchant with contribu-
tions by thirty-seven artists, was just one manifestation of an
enduring aesthetic fixation.1 A degree of irony lurks in this
cultlike veneration by many contemporary artists. For all his
irreverence, Pasolini maintained a contentious relationship—
both verbal and visual—with the avant-garde of his time, view-
ing their insistence upon innovation as an insidious extension
of neo-capitalist development. By the late 1960s, he had given
up on avant-garde efforts to resist consumerism or conformity.
Whatever praise he withheld from the New Left and
its fellow travelers in Europe, however, Pasolini heaped upon
American bohemian rebels, hailing Allen Ginsberg’s Beat
experiments—and the “new revolutionary language” to which
they contributed—as indispensable to the revitalization of
postwar culture. “In Europe,” Pasolini said just after his first
visit to New York, “everything is finished; in America one has
the impression that everything is about to begin.”2
He first encountered these proverbial beginnings in the early
fall of 1966. By way of Montreal, he arrived for the screening
of his latest movie, Uccellacci e Uccellini (The Hawks and the
Sparrows), at the New York Film Festival. The journalist Oriana
82 DECEMBER 2016 EVERYTHING IS ABOUT TO BEGIN
Fallaci accompanied him on behalf of the magazine L’Europeo,
penning a wry chronicle of his activities and impressions. Titled
“A Marxist in New York,” her article basks in the irony of Italy’s
most rabidly anticapitalist intellectual let loose on the streets of
Manhattan. Her travel companion declared the city “sublime,”
deemed it “the navel of the world.” Its architecture appeared to
him “as Jerusalem appeared to the Crusader,” but also as “a multi-
layered cake” appears to a wide-eyed child.3 He was partial, Fal-
laci reports, to Coca-Cola. The photographer Duilio Pallottelli, in
images accompanying a Pasolini essay published posthumously
in the Corriere della Sera, duly evoked these ironies, capturing
Pasolini reveling in Times Square and supping at diners, posing
in front of Broadway marquees and shopwindows.4
His stay entailed far more than superficial pleasures. He
visited leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-
mittee (SNCC) and trade unionists, Black Panther party officials,
and pacifist protestors. He met with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac
(whom he had attempted to cast as Jesus in his 1964 film The
Gospel According to St. Matthew) and attended a performance
of Frankenstein by the Living Theatre. The company’s director,
Julien Beck, would later star in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), as
well as influence his burgeoning efforts in the theater over the
next several years, extending the visitor’s debt to the American
avant-garde in new directions. Pasolini hoped, in fact, to stage his
first completed play in New York City, “so as to avoid hearing it
savaged by the petit-bourgeois voices of our atrocious actors.”5
ONE PALLOTTELLI SHOT documents yet another New
York City rendezvous: Pasolini’s visit with Richard Avedon
for a series of portraits. Though detailed by Fallaci as well, the
studio encounter has long been assumed to have borne no fruit.
Destined for Vogue but never published, the images—recently
rediscovered in the Avedon Foundation holdings—reveal
a relaxed and jovial Pasolini, plainly basking in the relative
anonymity of his American visit, worlds away from the scandals
which plagued him back home. Fallaci recounts:
He departs [from New York] today and has much to
do: most importantly, to pose for a certain individual
who really insisted on it, and who he thinks is named
Avalon.
“Dick Avedon?”
“Yes, something like that.”
“You don’t know who Dick Avedon is?”
“No, who is he?”
“Perhaps the greatest photographer alive in America,
without a doubt one of the greatest in the world.”
“Oh, really?”
Avedon asked him to arrive at the studio around
eleven, but he got there late because he met a vagabond
on the stairs, drunk since dawn, and a vagabond drunk
since dawn is worth more than a hundred photographs
by Avedon.
He listened to the drifter with maternal patience,
tenderness, before handing him goodness knows how
many dollars, and now he turns, with somewhat less
 William Kentridge:
Pasolini, November 2,
1975, 2015, ink,
colored pencil, and
masking tape on
ledger pages, 4 by
9½ feet. Courtesy
Lia Rumma
Gallery, Milan and
Naples.

Berlinde de
Bruyckere: Into
One-Another III To
P.P.P., 2010, wax,
epoxy, iron, wood,
and glass, 76 by
71⅝ by 33⅛ inches.
Courtesy Hauser &
Wirth, New York.
Photo Thomas
Mueller.

PASOLINI ART IN AMERICA 83

David
Wojnarowicz:
Untitled (Face in
Dirt), 1990,
gelatin silver print,
28½ inches square.
Courtesy Estate of
David Wojnarowicz
and P.P.O.W.,
New York.
interest, to contemplate the immense photograph
which covers an entire wall of Avedon’s studio. Charlie
Chaplin depicted like a devil, his index fingers held up
to the sides of his head like horns or a pitchfork. “I took
it on his last day in the United States,” Avedon explains,
“a few hours before he took the boat straight to Europe.
Come look . . .”
But Pasolini is more interested in the story behind other
photographs on the walls: this black boy, for example,
who was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan. Or this
mulatto elected twice to Parliament [sic] but who was
never sworn in because of his opposition to the war in
Vietnam. Or this one of Allen Ginsberg posed nude,
covered only by his beard and his body hair, which
moves him to another declaration of love.
Avedon’s images of Pasolini bear the same distinctive
format the photographer had begun honing in portraits of
countercultural leaders. Avedon’s portrait of Ginsberg had
recently appeared in Nothing Personal, a book on which Avedon
collaborated with James Baldwin, set opposite an image of
George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi
Party. Tried for obscenity over his 1955 poem Howl, Ginsberg
loomed—in his dissident politics and heretical eroticism
alike—as a kindred spirit to Pasolini. That they struck up a
friendship (“brother poets,” in Pasolini’s words) is no great
84 DECEMBER 2016 EVERYTHING IS ABOUT TO BEGIN
surprise. As one of Ginsberg’s translators put it to the Ital-
ian public in 1965: “The bitter laugh of a Jewish homosexual
poet—in the face of a puritanical and racist [American] society,
in which Communism is illegal and the poet explicitly persona
non grata—resounds to the walls of the seediest parts of town.”6
It was precisely these parts—redolent of the social, sex-
ual, and racial margins so alive in his own work—to which
Pasolini felt drawn in New York. Excusing himself whenever
possible from professional engagements, he ventured to
rougher neighborhoods in Harlem and Brooklyn, seeking
out—as Fallaci put it—“that dirty, unhappy, violent America
which suited his own tastes.” Following a second trip to New
York in 1969, he would come to coauthor the dialogue for
the Italian version of Andy Warhol’s Trash (1970), a film
bound up with a different, but not unrelated, aesthetics of
sexual abjection. By the late ’60s, Warhol’s glib “Common-
ism” diverged about as much as possible from Pasolini’s
political commitment. Each artist, however, lent voice and
dignity to individuals—and the larger social realities to
which they were attached—excluded from polite society.
“Tolerance,” Pasolini writes in his Lutheran Letters,
published just before his murder, “is a more refined form of
condemnation.”7 The politics of his own desire remained a
matter deeply fraught. Pasolini never agitated for gay rights per
se, fearing that the enshrinement of sexual identity would lead
inexorably to its conformity. His relentless defiance of bourgeois
Whatever praise he withheld from the New Left in Europe,
Pasolini heaped upon American bohemian rebels.
propriety, however—whether aesthetically or existentially—has
inspired countless gay artists. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1995
exhibition “Untitled (Vultures),” installed in New York’s Andrea
Rosen Gallery shortly before the artist’s death from AIDS, is a
case in point. Featuring framed, black-and-white photographs
of circling birds of prey, the show was promoted in a press
release that notably included lines from Pasolini’s 1964 poem
“I Work All Day . . .” (translated by the Beat poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti):
With the calm courage of a scientist,
I watch myself being massacred.
I seem to feel hate and yet I write
verses full of painstaking love.
[. . .]
Passive as a bird that sees all, in flight,
and carries in its heart,
rising in the sky,
an unforgiving conscience.”8
What worthier balm for the tribulations of AIDS (and of gov-
ernment inaction) than Pasolini’s lyricism, its mix of avenging
anger and a humanist resistance to what he called “the violence
of reason”?9
PASOLINI
Assailing Reagan-era ignorance with a barrage of visual Carlton DeWoody:
Pasolini Highschool:
activism, David Wojnarowicz turned to the same literary work. Varsity Jacket, 2013,
His poetry invokes Pasolini as early as 1979, though it is his nylon, chenille,
later, AIDS-related interventions that allude most poignantly to and embroidery on
letterman jacket.
the Italian’s precedent. Anticipating his own imminent demise, Courtesy Invisible-
Wojnarowicz staged the 1990 photograph Untitled (Face in Dirt), Exports and Allegra
LaViola Gallery,
depicting his face nearly covered by soil—an allusion to Pasolini’s New York.
Teorema, in which a working-class maid entombs herself in the
gravel of a new construction site, emblematic of the soulless neo-
capitalism against which the film, and Pasolini’s work at large,
protests. That Wojnarowicz’s imagery became the target of cen-
sorship at the Smithsonian’s 2010 exhibition “Hide/Seek: Differ-
ence and Desire in American Portraiture” only further confirms
its affinities with the work of Pasolini, who underwent more than
thirty trials during his lifetime on charges for everything from
blasphemy to creating “scenes offensive to the public.”
Julian Schnabel:
Transgender artists, too, have paid attention to Pasolini’s Accattone, 1978,
depictions of sexual outsiders. Fashioned from makeup, nail oil, wax, and
polish, and African-American hair products, the “terrorist drag” modeling paste on
canvas, 84 by 72
portraits of the queer/trans artist Vaginal Davis delight in a inches.
reflexive perversity indebted—however obliquely—to Pasolini’s
aesthetics, and exhibited under the aegis of his influence. For
the Italian debut of Warhol’s 1975 “Ladies and Gentlemen”
exhibition in Ferrara, Italy—comprising Pop portraits of anony-
mous black and Latin drag queens—Pasolini notably wrote the
introductory text. Rather than simply extol Warhol’s represen-
tations as courageous, however, he challenged their evacuation
of history, both personal and social.10 The assimilation of
sexual otherness to neo-capitalist culture—exemplified here by
Warhol’s serial, “celebratory” images—strips its corporeal reality
of any dissenting energy.
ART IN AMERICA 85

Alfredo Jaar: The PASOLINI’S WORK LONG skirted the pitfalls and
Ashes of Pasolini,
2009, film, 38
pigeonholes of identity politics, however. It is thus fitting
minutes. Courtesy that his legacy has appealed to such a wide swath of indi-
Galerie Lelong, viduals. Resident in New York for several decades, Alfredo
New York.
Jaar has turned repeatedly to Pasolini as muse, occasion-
ally by way of Antonio Gramsci (the Communist theorist
integral to the Pasolini’s vision), but also on his own terms,
as in the 2009 film The Ashes of Pasolini, with its montage of
disparate documentary footage. Created the same year, Paul
Chan’s six-hour-long animated projection Sade for Sade’s
Sake conjures up Pasolini’s Salò, his controversial last film
and one of the most consequential in terms of artistic cha-
risma—even, or especially, in its brutality. Bodies converge
on Chan’s screen in a silhouetted frenzy of either sexual
activity or torture. The piece’s conflation of eroticism and
violence recalls not simply de Sade’s writing, but its terrify-
ing interpretation in Salò—further evoked in Chan’s essay
“A Harlot’s Progress” (2012), which he had an actress read at
MoMA’s Pasolini retrospective.
The New York–based artist Leigha Mason references
the same film in her Spit Banquet (2013), a videotaped
performance of bodily excretion and communion—guests
sitting at a dinner table and continually spitting—which
also recalls the work of Paul McCarthy. The latter’s films and
performances exchange Pasolini’s almost ritualistic sacrality
for a numbing bathos. Yet McCarthy stylized violence owes
a debt to the director, to whom he recently paid homage
with a seething, blood-red image of his murdered body.
Made into a series of unnumbered posters, the images were
pasted on walls of Pasolini’s hometown of Casarsa della
Delizia in northern Italy. If many artists have drawn upon
the sensational embodiments of Pasolini’s work (and death),
Richard Serra’s eponymous sculpture (1985) appears instead
enigmatic in its earthy mass of wrought iron.
Pasolini’s hostile relationship with the avant-garde of
his own era casts these tributes in a problematic, or at least
curious, light. Various international fashion designers such
as Fausto Puglisi and Gosha Rubchinskiy have even recently
declared themselves directly inspired by Pasolini’s oeuvre.
Perhaps the logic of late capitalism renders such perverse
affinities entirely conceivable, even inevitable—which is,
after all, consonant with Pasolini’s admonishments. For all
86 DECEMBER 2016 EVERYTHING IS ABOUT TO BEGIN
their potential fashionableness, however, aesthetics may also
wield the weapons of irony and reflexivity. To wit, Carlton
DeWoody’s 2013 Pasolini High School, a varsity “PPP” jacket
emblazoned with personal insignia, can be seen as sartorially
commodifying Pasolini’s homoerotic rough trade.
At Thomas Hirschhorn’s 2013 Gramsci Monument—a
makeshift pavilion erected in the midst of a Bronx hous-
ing project, facilitating various talks, readings, and social
gatherings inspired by Gramsci’s work—one of the plastic
windows bore a photocopied image of Pasolini standing in
front of Gramsci’s grave in Rome. The relevance of Pasolini’s
dedication to Rome’s poor, peripheral neighborhoods, and
the (doomed) efforts to preserve them from the depradations
of commodity culture, never seemed more relevant in an
American context.
“Your new forms,” Pasolini told the experimental film-
maker Jonas Mekas regarding the American avant-garde
in 1967, “are new contents of opposition to American
society.”11 It is opposition—in all of its ideological ramifi-
cations—that Pasolini has come to embody for successive
generations of artists like no other figure in postwar Europe.
Less soothing, by contrast, is the inexorable pessimism of his
last works and their various forewarnings—portents from
which not even the New World is spared. For he warned
Ginsberg that America might potentially witness “a second
Hitler who may accomplish that which did not succeed the
first time: the suicide of the world. . . . It will be far worse
the second time.”12 Recently, Donald Trump’s campaign
revived the specter of fascism, if not of outright apocalypse,
through its hostility to ethnic, sexual, ideological, and spiri-
tual difference. Invoked for decades as having foretold Silvio
Berlusconi’s disastrous governance, Pasolini’s body of work
perhaps offers up glimmers of a different future in its defiant
past, new models of resistance against the refined condem-
nation he saw in mere tolerance.
1. The show, organized by Invisible-Exports gallery, was presented at the Allegra
LaViola Gallery , Feb. 22–Mar. 23, 2013.
2. Quoted in Oriana Fallaci, “Un Marxista a New York,” L’Europeo, no. 41, Oct. 13,
1966, oriana-fallaci.com, unpaginated, my translation. For Pasolini’s impressions
of New York and America following his first visit, see Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Civil
War,” in Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett, trans. Louise K. Barnett and
Ben Lawton, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988, pp. 142–49.
3. Quoted in Fallaci.
4. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il Cielo sopra New York,” 7–Supplemento del Corriere della
Sera, no. 14, Apr. 7, 1990, pp. 36–50.
5. Quoted in Nico Naldini, Pasolini: Una Vita, Turin, Einaudi, 1989, p. 371, my
translation.
6. Paolo Lionni, Almanacci Letterario Bompiani 1965, Milan, Bompiani, 1964, p. 56.
7. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere Luterane, Turin, Einaudi, 1976, p. 23, my translation.
8. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca
Valente, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986, p. 87.
9. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “21 Giugno 1962,” Poesia in forma di rosa, Milan, Garzanti,
2014 [1964].
10. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Andy Warhol’s Ladies & Gentlemen” (1975), trans.
Rodney Stringer, in Andy Warhol: Ladies and Gentlemen, New York, Skarstedt
Gallery, 2010, pp. 5–7.
11. Quoted in Jonas Mekas, “Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Selected Poetry, edited and
trans. Stephen Sartarelli,” BOMB, no. 130, Winter 2015, bombmagazine.org.
12. Pasolini, letter to Allen Ginsberg, Oct. 18, 1967; reprinted in Pier Paolo
Pasolni, Lettere (1955-1975): Con una cronologia della vita e delle opere, Turin,
Einaudi, 1988, p 805, my translation.
 Paul Chan: Sade for
Sade’s Sake, 2009,
three-channel
digital video
projection, 5 hours,
45 minutes, looped.
Courtesy Greene
Naftali, New York.

Leigha Mason:
Spit Banquet,
2012, 16mm film
transferred to video,
4-minute loop.
Courtesy Invisible-
Exports and Allegra
LaViola Gallery.

PASOLINI ART IN AMERICA 87

 PORTFOLIO

MARK LECKEY
“I think of myself as an ambassador for crap British culture,” said Mark Leckey in
2014. Born in Birkenhead, England, the artist, who won the Turner Prize in 2008, has
always staged and even channeled complex ideas—about technology and time, about
the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, about the psychological conse-
quences of convergence culture—in a playful, disarmingly amiable fashion. Here he is
dressed up as Felix the Cat, a frequent avatar in his multimedia productions. In 1928,
long before cats became social-media memes, Felix (whose name is Latin for happy)
was the first image broadcast on American television. These days, cats are a good
example of how contemporary culture functions virally. How odd, how anachronistic,
and funny, too, that Leckey’s cat is in a physical space.

All the following pictures, as if to replicate the context-scrambling experience of using

Google Images, have been left unnamed and uncredited by the artist. They are designed MARK LECKEY’s
exhibition
as cross-echoing pairs. First, two global brands—one devoted to e-commerce, the other “Containers and
to cigarettes. Their reputations are almost equally controversial: the former damages Their Drivers” is on
producers, while the latter addles the lungs of consumers. By overlaying the cigarette view at MoMA PS1,
New York, through
box on a photograph of a seacoast, Leckey evokes the specter of ecology, reminding us Mar. 5, 2017. See
how the e-commerce company has transformed the cultural and economic landscape. Contributors page.

The second pairing includes a still from me and annarose (2010) in which Leckey himself SUKHDEV
appears, at once nervous and seemingly turned on, next to a glamorous transvestite, who SANDHU is the
director of the
is handling a projection unit. On the opposite page, there’s a gleeful posse of elaborately Colloquium for
coiffured, cross-dressing men filming something or someone with a variety of cameras. Unpopular Culture
It’s not necessary to know that the picture was taken at Casa Susanna, a 1950s refuge at New York
University. His
for transvestites in New York’s Catskills, to be struck by the uncanny, real/not-quite-real most recent book is
power of these pages, with Leckey being the least plausible figure in them. Other Musics.

The third and final pairing features the Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid the Sun (the
very acme of “crap British culture”) and its perversely suggestive cover of a total solar
eclipse, published in 1999; it faces the soundtrack LP for Leckey’s recent autobiographical
film Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD. A work of visual plunderphonics, the film is
a near-psychedelic trawl through the filtered and broadcast past that draws heavily on
his immersion in rave culture, a source of working-class futurism that also informed his
landmark Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). That film, while euphoric and witty, was
imbued with a profound sense of dislocation. It clung to memories while knowing those
memories were processed and mediated. It left you, as does all Leckey’s art, wondering:
Where are we now? And also: What is this thing called “now”?
—Sukhdev Sandhu

ART IN AMERICA 89
Cover of the
January–February
1972 issue of
LAS VEGAS
REVISITED
Art in America.
Returning to Las Vegas after more than four decades,
Brian O’Doherty finds that enveloping new spectacles have
replaced the gigantic signs he once praised in these pages.
by Brian O’Doherty
TIME IS ODD everywhere, particularly in America, where
a century can seem shunted into a decade. And time is
especially odd in Las Vegas: held in suspension, elasticized,
circadian rhythms canceled, a version of immortality prom-
ised, no tick-tock, just a smooth air flow in the desert.
Several centuries have passed since I regularly visited
Las Vegas, then at its apogee, in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Walking the Strip you strolled through a man-made Monu-
ment Valley. The monuments? The towering signs, of course.
They offered an ecstasy of neon with staccato blinks, timed
cycles, fluid runs, sudden bursts, transient sheaths of fibrillat-
BRIAN
O’DOHERTY is a ing light, all semaphoring seductive messages for their palaces
writer and artist who of chance: “Here you can make millions (or lose your shirt).”
served as editor of And the linguistic virtuosity! Words were clipped, stretched,
Art in America from
1971 to 1974. See and abruptly compressed. The signs delivered (and illustrated)
Contributors page. their messages by punning on their shapes to invent their own
concrete poetry from imagination’s font.
Those great signs are now gone. Like the giant mam-
mals, they were too big to survive. The Strip’s successors—
acromegalic hotels, ever larger—briskly and firmly write
their names on their parent buildings in blocky, sans-serif
type, identifiers only. The entertaining spectacle of the signs,
which had their own aesthetic (even ethic) for presenting
information are replaced by brilliant attempts to forestall a
visit to Europe by reproducing its iconic treasures. Illustrat-
96 DECEMBER 2016
ing an ancient American inferiority complex, Europe signi-
fies culture. That culture has been ransacked, appropriated,
re-presented, translated, and put on offer, in a reflection of
American innocence, without those ironies that would take
away all the fun. Iconic cherry-picking? Here is the Eiffel
Tower, now a very large toy. The Arc de Triomphe stands
near a huge balloon adorned with a digital sign. Look at
that pyramid, quite convincing. There is Venice’s St. Mark’s
campanile. Nearby is an exact reproduction of a Paris street
corner, quite atmospheric, these fakers are good. Some-
where, a child visiting Europe with his parents has no doubt
exclaimed, “Gee, Mom, it’s just like Las Vegas!”
This is progress. Vegas’s once wicked edge has been
blunted to allow a polymorphous circus to flourish, offering
an amiable embrace, catering to families. Back in the age
of the signs, acres of bare flesh were available in the grand
hotels’ entertainment machines. The shows offered an
operatic sense of luxury, climax, and excess (the eighteenth
century was alive in Las Vegas). The flashiest costumes, the
most ornamented Marie Antoinette hair, the longest legs,
and the greatest voices of the era were all served in those
distant days with a titillation of wickedness, a touch of
danger, and an icy heart. Sex, once wafting in the atmo-
sphere like an air freshener, has lost its musky edge. The
bar girls who looked like vamps are now just girls roosting
ART IN AMERICA 97
 at the bar, not fantasies of themselves. Everyone looks just
like themselves, however themselves may look.
Inside, the ceremonies of chance are conducted in a
twilight, absorbing day and night. Silence is broken only by
group exhalations after laden pauses, the cricket sound of
the dice, a sudden flow of silver from a slot machine. The slot
machines’ arms have been amputated—the mere touch of a
button now sends apples, oranges, and plums spinning. The
blackjack tables gather their shadowy crowds around bright
oases of green, business conducted—as quasi-ritualistic
Opposite, opening occasions should be—in silence and suspense. What is the
three spreads from medium here, that which facilitates, transforms, but ever
“Highway to Las
Vegas,” published remains unchanged? Money, of course, which within this
in A.i.A.’s January– zone has more than monetary value: it has symbolic value.
February 1972 issue.
Money is the holy viaticum around which everything else
revolves. But inside these palaces, money undergoes a strange
metamorphosis. It becomes slippery, chipped, devalued, light
to the fingers, only to resume its hard value back outside.
Indeed, inside and outside are primal divisions here.
When the eye’s laggard cones and rods emerge from the
inner dusk into bright daylight, the “reality” outside, in one
of the many switches Vegas pulls on the compliant body,
seems brittle, artificial, a somewhat depthless landscape.
The inside of the long-lived Caesar’s Palace (built 1966),
a classic survivor delivering its own parody of Classicism,
still outstrips all its competitors but one (on which more
Bellagio
Las Vegas.
Courtesy
MGM Resorts
International.
98 DECEMBER 2016 LAS VEGAS REVISITED
later). Here the invitation is not only to gamble, but to
shop. Window after window offers idealized lures. Magnetic
elegance lives behind these panes of glass, suggesting you
can become what you see. The aim is to stimulate desire, the
preface to possession, though romanticized as the unattain-
able beyond the glass. Objects and jewelry become fetishes,
often reflected in the ubiquitous mirrors that endlessly check
your identity. These subtly lighted window displays (perfect
mannequins wearing perfect clothes) are Vegas’s intimate
stage sets, each an episode in a narrative of fascination, Boc-
caccio in America, talking to the strollers in their perpetual
evening. The stunning invention evidenced here recalls
the Christmas presentations at Bonwit Teller, perhaps the
historic gold standard of window dressing.
Outside, what has the city done to delight in the
absence of the great signs? It has constructed entertainments
at a willfully naive level of boyhood (not girlhood) fantasy.
In recent years, two pirate ships engaged, guns flashing, the
sounds of battle rolling, on the artificial lake in front of the
Treasure Island Hotel. There was a script which “actors”
declaimed. There were pretty dancers, music, flashing lights,
lots of rigging, smoke, a formidable spiral staircase, and,
ultimately, fireworks. Did one ship sink? What is stunning
is the amount of care, energy, and money that went into
perfecting a mediocre show. The famous volcano outside
the Mirage is a daylight disappointment. It looks like an
accumulation of discarded dirty pillows. At night, it vom-
its its savage, beastly flames. Impressive, I suppose, as fire
always is. Some other outdoor sights are paralyzed artifacts:
the huge MGM lion had a mildly cubistic makeover (for
many years, visitors could enter the MGM Grand just below
the lion’s mouth—where are you, Niki de Saint Phalle?); the
great Luxor pyramid faithfully emanates Egyptian mystery.
An inside/outside site at one of the newer hotels offers,
with your cocktails, a wide, unbroken sheet of water falling
into a lake that never fills. (What are its dimensions? The
ever so slightly warped space in Las Vegas does not encour-
age dimensional readings.) But the ultimate water experi-
ence is to be found in a majestic row of spouts and valves,
cunningly timed, outside the Bellagio. An almost military
drill (shadow of Busby Berkeley) marshals each of some
forty units and gives them a dynamism of great imagina-
tion and mobility. The jets spray out brief curtains forward,
backward, sideways, but variations in pressure make the jets
undulate like whips being cracked. And when one stream
marries the vertical jet next door, the two interweave and
undulate together, producing a long row of shimmying water
dancers that are among Vegas’s finest moments. Wait until
the sequence is completed. Then, with the second and third
repetition, its program deciphered, the surprise, as it does
with mechanical things, evaporates. After the first enact-
ment, miracles have a limited sell-by date.
But the winner (in terms of creating a totally convincing
artificial environment and thereby licensing every imagina-
tive excursion) among all of Las Vegas’s extravaganzas is the
Venetian Hotel, an extraordinary amalgam of pastiche with a
magnificent hallway à la Versailles, enlarged Caravaggesque
images (well painted) on many walls, one excellent restau-
rant among the semi-ethnic feeding sites, and an artificial
lake-river, with gondoliers poling along their gondolas
(which Byron compared to a coffin clasped in a canoe). Do
not forget the excellent replica of the Doge’s palace.
What crowns this fantasy of appropriation is the stunning
fulfillment of Vegas’s not so subconscious dream—the ulti-
mate control of night and day in an adjusted climate, under
a perfectly false (painted) blue sky, to be darkened at will. In
this Fuller-like bubble, the gamblers, the eaters, the camera
clickers, the strollers all swim through a thickened, sweetened
air, slightly slowed as they populate the miracle of outdoors
indoors. The sky darkens, lightens, stimulating the body. The
faithful corpus makes its unconscious adjustment inside this
vast, warm stomach—Vegas’s full-body massage. When one
returns to the real world outside, it does not offer reassurance;
instead, one perceives it with a degree of suspicion.

HOW IS TIME marked in historic Las Vegas? One way

is to record the departure schedule of the big mastodons,
the giant signs. For decades they appeared to be doing their
duty well—announcing place, elevating a message board,
inventing a symbol. Yet between the dates they were first
erected and the dates they were wrecked, something in Las
Vegas changed. Part of the reason (which must be some-

LAS VEGAS REVISITED ART IN AMERICA 99

American culture, as visitors have remarked for nearly two
hundred years, is in rapid motion, trying to consume the future
before it has occurred.

where among de Tocqueville’s durable insights) is American

impatience with the new when it ceases to be new, a habit
(perceptual fatigue?) visible in every major American city. If
you break something in the United States, don’t try to fix it.
Get a new one.
The first great sign, for the Sands, a relatively modest
concoction, went up in the 1950s and came down some time
in the 1980s. Most of the great signs were erected during
the 1960s, as each new hotel/casino tried to outstrip the
last. This brief period, golden as the 1440s in Florence, was
the optimistic height of Las Vegas sign building. The sky
was literally the limit; creativity was in full flood. Las Vegas,
an outpost of Los Angeles in the 1940s and ’50s, defined
itself through—it sounds absurd—monumental signage. The
crowds and cars cruised the Strip, the Valley of the Signs. By
implicit consensus, the Stardust (1968–2007) was the king
of signs. Markers for the Flamingo, the Frontier, the Aladdin
(home of the most complex of the old signs) were in their
own way (i.e., how they articulated their message) magnifi-
cent. Yet one by one, down they came, generally after a life
span of around thirty or forty years. The Frontier lasted until
2007. The Castaways came down in 2006. The Flamingo, the
most elegant of the signs, is still there but deprived of neon.
Unlike the soundless fall of the great oak in the forest,
the Stardust’s fall, in 2007, reverberated. Remarkably, this
destruction, like that of Penn Station in New York, stirred
preservation instincts, particularly in the local Allied Arts
Council. Even as it was coming down, its fragments splashed
into a pool of regret. The owners of the property donated
the broken corpse to a small start-up institution, called by
the rather grisly name of the Boneyard. And thus began one
of the great professional acts of retrieval and restoration of
memory in American culture. The Boneyard houses the main
collection of what is now called the Neon Museum, founded
in 1996. The museum, a scholarly public institution, has
tracked down, acquired, and preserved many of the signs, or
what remains of them, documenting their provenance. In a
brilliant coup, the museum closed an amazing circle
by returning some of the signs—or pieces of them—to
downtown Las Vegas.
To visit the Neon Museum and Boneyard, a two-acre
open space, is to enter a living archive of dead signs. It is one
of the most extraordinary museums in the world. Physically,
it looks like a dump, for the accumulation of signage detritus
outstrips the museum’s capacity to display and catalogue its
holdings (though one important book has been published).
The remains recall Shelley’s “Ozymandias” in the desert. There
is the Stardust galaxy resting on its side. There is a fragment
of the Frontier logo. Here, Aladdin’s lamp. The amount of

100 DECEMBER 2016 LAS VEGAS REVISITED

 The Castaways
Hotel and Casino,
Las Vegas, ca. 1969.
Courtesy University
of Nevada, Las
Vegas University
Libraries.

Opposite top,
Mirage Las
Vegas. Courtesy
MGM Resorts
International.

Opposite, bottom,
interior of the
Venetian Las Vegas.

The Dunes (left) and

the Aladdin (right),
looking north down
the Las Vegas strip,
late 1960s. Courtesy
University of
Nevada, Las Vegas
University Libraries.

LAS VEGAS REVISITED ART IN AMERICA 101

This page and
previous spread,
views of the
Boneyard at the
Neon Museum,
Las Vegas,
showing salvaged
neon signs.

104 DECEMBER 2016 LAS VEGAS REVISITED

material is vast; the visitor is guided along wide avenues
between eight-foot-high walls of accumulated signage,
through a maze of pathways that can, if you wish to display
your sophistication, recall the Hampton Court labyrinth and
other European complexities. The erudite guide keeps up a
commentary on the history of each sign, the eccentricities
of the casino owners, the vagaries of the excessively wealthy,
the hints of criminal menace, and the sheer fun of creating a
new vernacular art which, with loving devotion, is encouraged
to transcend itself and become—what? Art-like certainly. A
form of public address, an aesthetic experience by immersion
in a past era in which nostalgia, Eliot’s “unearned emotion,” is
redefined in terms of Burkean awe.
Why did the signs come down? Partly because advances
in technology made neon somewhat déclassé. But they had
done their job superbly and were wonderfully crafted. They
induced awe, prompted a kind of bemused fascination, and
did their advertising duties efficiently and uncomplainingly.
With the exception of great buildings like the Chrysler in
New York, America’s monuments don’t hang around to admire
themselves. American culture, as visitors have remarked for
nearly two hundred years, is in rapid motion, trying to con-
sume the future before it has occurred. But the main reason
for the signs’ removal en masse was more banal. As always,
follow the money. The Stardust sign came down because its
parent casino realized—apparently rather suddenly—that it
occupied some fairly extensive real estate. Why not take down
the sign—and build? Building is an irresistible impulse in Las
Vegas. You can count time by the generations of hotels that
succeed each other. Las Vegas needs to reinvent itself every
decade with new enticements. There were plans. A venture
called Echelon—another casino?—was to rise on the Star-
dust’s big footprint. Today the plot is still bare—though an
Asian developer reportedly has plans.
The not-so-hidden subtext of this interrupted remake
of large parts of Las Vegas is easy to track. The existential
question “Why is Las Vegas?” can be answered by any
six-year-old: money is Las Vegas’s raison d’être. The casinos
need people inside. That is why Las Vegas exists. Outside
is a foreign country. The signs didn’t bring people in. They
declared; they did not invite. So in a move from the verti- Contemplations of recent history in the US, whether Final two
spreads of “Highway
cal to the horizontal, from the sky to the pedestrian and of baseball statistics or Vegas’s dead signs, are reminders of to Las Vegas.”
the automobile, the signs were succeeded by the era of mortality. They carry precise meanings related to history,
cantilevered entrances that, with a skill worthy of architect to the past carefully reimagined, and to what passes for a
Morris Lapidus, the laureate of sophisticated narcissism and theology of consumption and decay, and a version of resur-
comfort, flatter visitors and invite them indoors. rection. Of resurrection? Decidedly. For, the Neon Museum
So what do visitors to the Neon Museum feel? They may has returned some of its holdings to their previous sites.
well understand an experience reported by those nineteenth- When the scintillating Silver Slipper from the casino of the
century artists, particularly German and American, who same name tiptoed back downtown, rising on a Las Vegas
tramped the marble wreckage of the Roman Forum seeking Boulevard median, a brilliant—and invisible—transformation
to register vibes from the imperial past, frequently in a stew had changed its essence. Once merely a relic, it has returned
of nostalgia for a remote age they were now experiencing to the public gaze not as a mnemonic for a casino, but as a
by proxy. The experience of the Boneyard may not be the full-fledged artwork in its own right. For the Neon Museum
equivalent of meditating on the ruins of Rome. But it is a has not just preserved it. In a strange alchemy, in which
particularly American experience that speaks to the com- reciprocal paradoxes abound, it bestowed on it a status it
pression of time here. never had before.

LAS VEGAS REVISITED ART IN AMERICA 105

Edward Burtynsky:
Breezewood,
Pennsylvania,
2008, C-print.
Courtesy Nicholas
SUBURBAN
FUTURISM
Metivier Gallery,
Toronto/Howard
Greenberg and
Bryce Wolkowitz,
New York.
As suburbia becomes a global phenomenon,
it’s urgent to reconsider its profound limitations and
speculative possibilities.
by Gavin Kroeber
IMAGINE A CITY, a city that embodies our historical
moment. A set of well-worn images, reproduced in popular
media and contemporary art, likely informs this mental
picture. Fantastic visions rise in Dubai, Shanghai, and Asia’s
other megacities—strange menageries of skyscrapers and
clusters of man-made islands, suicide nets on the factories
and dust masks on the smog-choked pedestrians. In Detroit
and other shrinking cities, abandoned temples of industry
loom over the urban prairie. In elite legacy cities like San
Francisco and New York, hyper-gentrification and foreign
real-estate speculation strangle middle-class aspirations.
This mosaic of twenty-first century urban clichés provides
a fragmentary view of the world—but a ubiquitous one. It
GAVIN KROEBER suggests a narrative of widespread change, signaling the end
is an artist and of the Americanized world as we’ve known it and the rise of
urbanist based
in St. Louis.
a brave new global regime in its wake.
This narrative draws its potency from an old tradition in
Western thought, one that employs images of cities as symbols
of profound social disruption. In the modern era, this tradi-
tion extends from Engels’s Manchester to Dickens’s London
to Benjamin’s Paris and beyond, with writers and thinkers
grounding claims about a changing world in careful observa-
tions of a cityscape that seems to most starkly embody them.
We have inherited this impulse, if not the rigor evident in the
tradition’s most influential examples. A city’s paradigmatic
weight today may stem primarily from the intensity of cultural
responses it provokes. Voyeuristic, brooding images of declining
Detroit are so widespread they’ve earned the neologism “ruin
porn.” Gentrifying Brooklyn and the hipster fait accompli of
106 DECEMBER 2016
Portland anchor a whole genre of television shows, with adrift
millennials seeking fulfillment through consumer lifestyles.
BuzzFeed lists enumerating the trashy excesses of Abu Dhabi’s
nouveaux-riches compete with headlines about the human
rights violations at the construction sites where elite Western
cultural institutions like the Louvre and the Guggenheim will
soon open prestigious Gulf franchises.
I am drawn to a blind spot in this global panorama of
decline, gentrification, and foreign spectacle. Consider Phoenix,
the reductio ad absurdum of the suburban city. The capital
of Arizona holds the center of the state’s sprawling Valley of
the Sun, a galaxy of suburbs that is home to some 4.5 mil-
lion people, itself just the northern terminus of the Arizona
Sun Corridor, a vast megalopolitan agglomeration that also
subsumes Tucson and the border cities of Nogales and Agua
Prieta. Phoenix, in this extended sense, epitomizes the national
exurban landscape—which is flourishing in vast rings around
every American city, new and old, and growing despite its scant
cultural clout. Indeed, as the emerging consumer classes in
India and China begin to follow a suburban course of urban
development, it seems Phoenix may offer a glimpse of future
urban development around the globe.
From the Texas Triangle to the Tijuana-San Diego
borderplex, there is a particular legibility to these patterns in
the cities of the American West. This is what we might call
America’s “other West”: all malls and cul-de-sacs rather than
mesas and ghost towns, growing explosively in America’s most
extreme environments. It is the urban negative space framing
the celebrated landscape of the postcard Southwest, where the
 newness of the built environment leaves the cityscapes feel-
ing unmoored, like islands of fresh suburban contemporaneity
floating on a sea of regional myth.
This urbanized—or, more accurately, suburbanized—West
represents both an ascendant paradigm and an emerging crisis.
For decades, the nation’s embattled middle class has been
retrenching in these Sunbelt meccas, though the severity of the
subprime crisis in many of their growth machine economies
has shown just how precarious things are even in “affordable”
cities. Sprawling into delicate ecosystems, given over almost
completely to car culture and strained by resource overuse, these
places are built around the cardinal sins of the sustainability
movement. As capitals of “gap states,” with extreme racial
disparities between the oldest generations (80 percent Anglo
in Arizona) and youngest (40 percent), cities like Phoenix are
home to both the Trump voter bloc and key members of the
“Obama coalition.” They have become the loci of intense politi-
cal struggles between entrenched conservative interests and new,
diverse groups of residents.1 Phoenix and its sister cities represent
a North American particularization of urgent planetary crises:
migration, sustainability, and rapid urbanization.
Burtynsky: Suburbs #2,
Las Vegas, Nevada,
2007, C-print.
Courtesy Nicholas
Metivier, Howard
Greenberg, and
Bryce Wolkowitz.
108 DECEMBER 2016 SUBURBAN FUTURISM
No Future
Phoenix is quintessentially suburban, and the American
suburbs have long been subject to two intertwined critiques.
One, what we might call the social critique, is technocratic—
coming mostly from academics, planners, designers, and other
specialists. It bloomed in the 1980s and ’90s in the hands of
historians of the suburbs like Kenneth T. Jackson and Dolores
Hayden, who explored the environmental unsustainability of
resource-intensive sprawl, challenged the mistaken assumption
that suburban ubiquity signals consumer preference rather than
systemic support of development interests, and enumerated the
social costs of the public policies that subsidized freeways and
built subdivisions on the backs—and through the exclusion—of
urban communities of color.
This critique emphasizes the untenable nature of perpetual
suburbanization. The most strident critics prophesize inevi-
table collapse. “When the suburban economic equation fails in
America,” writes James Howard Kunstler in his 1993 polemic
The Geography of Nowhere, “the physical arrangement of life will
fail with it, and many Americans will be stuck in places that no

longer function.”2 In rhetoric recalling that of the prepper move-
ment, he holds up small, neglected mill communities as ready-
made alternatives that “will not have to be retrofitted to function
as coherent towns in the future.” Less reactionary versions of
this critique adhere to the same basic narrative. Jackson’s classic
1985 study of suburban development Crabgrass Frontier, architect
Andres Duany’s 2000 “New Urbanist” manifesto Suburban
Nation, Hayden’s seminal 2004 A Field Guide to Sprawl, and jour-
nalist Leigh Gallagher’s 2013 The End of the Suburbs (published
as America’s rising suburbanization hit its first-ever plateau and
evidence emerged of the millennial rejection of car culture) all
predict, call for, or chart the failure of suburbanization and an
attendant turn toward other, classically walkable forms of urban-
ism. Such models are gaining some ground, primarily in coastal
American metropolitan areas, but they have hardly prevailed. As
the demographer Joel Kotkin points out, the trumpeted “triumph
of the city” is predominantly an elite phenomenon and may
prove a challenge to sustain as white urban millennials face the
financial calculus of raising children.3
SUBURBAN FUTURISM
To borrow a phrase from Hayden, the social critique
emphasizes “the political and economic consequences of sprawl”
over “the aesthetic failures of sprawl as a product,” which
have long been a target of a second strand of anti-suburban Michael Light:
New Construction on
thought.4 Concerned more with the individual experience of East Porter Drive,
the suburbs than with their systemic effects, this critique has Looking South,
a scholarly variant (often tangled up in the social critique) but Camelback Mountain
Beyond, Scottsdale,
also a more prevalent, less reliable pop-cultural expression: the AZ, 2007, pigment
image of white-bread suburbia. A caricature of white people print, 40 by 50
inches. Courtesy
and white picket fences, freeways and malls, homogeneity Danziger Gallery,
and home values, this image derides both the flat aesthetics New York.
of suburbia’s built environment and the cultural patterns of
conformity and isolation that have become synonymous with it.
Midcentury sociological studies of paradigmatic suburbs,
such as Herbert Gans’s participant-observation masterwork
The Levittowners (1955), attempted to complicate this common
association but were drowned out by more insistent works. In
William Whyte’s 1956 The Organization Man, urbanist Lewis
Mumford’s 1961 The City in History, and feminist Betty Friedan’s
1963 The Feminine Mystique, public intellectuals produced influ-
ential images of a monotonous, stifling suburbia and its repressive
sociality. Mass media and advertising, oriented toward emerging
suburban consumer markets, inflated the perceived importance Light: Houses on the
of these communities in lasting ways while also producing a Edge of the Snake
distorted public image of their inhabitants—coldly aspirational, River Lava Plain,
Canyon View Road
performing satisfaction while showcasing consumer goods. Pop Looking North,
cultural representations have echoed these patterns ever since, Jerome, ID, 2009,
pigment print, 40 by
from Malvina Reynold’s 1962 song “Little Boxes” to Peter Weir’s 50 inches. Courtesy
1998 film The Truman Show and beyond. Danziger Gallery.
This critique is loaded with biases that reflect a lingering
Romantic sensibility. The gridded, functional suburbs—home to
gridded, functional conformists—represent an absurd reshaping
of lived space according to the industrial capitalist logic that
historic Romanticism reacted against. The manicured, repressive
suburb represents the antithesis of wild Romantic desire, which
today finds satisfaction not only in the conventional image of
nature but also the dynamic, complex, sublime city.
Scholars such as James Chandler, Kevin Gilmartin,
and Larry H. Peer have begun to trace Romanticism’s urban
aspects—showing how the movement’s preoccupation with
nature spoke to an urbanizing society’s divorce from the land,
and how its obsession with individual freedom was inconceivable
without the novel division of labor that organized metropolitan
life.5 Romanticism was a vision of a world in crisis rendered
through the lens of the city, and contemporary ideas about
both the city and crisis carry the imprint of the worldview that
intertwined them so tightly. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” prepares us
for the industrial ruins of the struggling Midwest; glass-and-
steel transmutations of Delacroix’s orientalism rise out of the
desert; the weary denizens of Blake’s industrial “London” labor
in iPad assembly plants. The prevalence of this old vocabulary,
struggling to signify the new, reminds us that while Detroit or
Dubai’s outsize place in the public imagination testifies to the
extraordinary urgency of crisis on the ground, it speaks just as
much to the symbolic potency of a crisis rendered in the language
of Romanticism.
ART IN AMERICA 109
 There has been no “suburban turn” in the art world, but there have
been projects that offer alternative strategies for engaging suburbia.
Four pages from Ed If the social critique of suburbia cedes the future of the
Ruscha’s book Every
Building on the Sunbelt to the developers building it, the second, Romantic
Sunset Strip, 1966. aesthetic critique encourages those invested in urban crises to
Courtesy Gagosian.
© Ed Ruscha.
ignore these landscapes in the first place. It is crucial to chal-
lenge these impulses to turn away from the suburbs, away from
Phoenix. With a global suburban future coming, it is essential
to construct a critical cultural imagination that can inhabit that
future—not just better places built on its elite margins.
The Deadpan Suburb
The design world has been taking up this challenge in suburbs
that no longer behave like suburbia. These are places like Fergu-
son, Missouri, or the Muslim enclave of Dearborn, Michigan,
where the seemingly unassailable veneer of new real estate has
given way to more complicated realities: to the accelerated
dilapidation of cheap construction, to immigrants turning
McMansions into apartment buildings and empty big box
stores into places of worship. As the architect Ellen Dunham-
Jones has said, “the big design and development project of the
110 DECEMBER 2016 SUBURBAN FUTURISM
next fifty years is going to be retrofitting suburbia” and more
and more designers have been attracted to the challenge.6
It may be equally important, however, to confront the
cultural blind spot within which the suburbs continue to exist.
There has been no commensurate “suburban turn” in the art
world, but there have been influential projects that offer alter-
native strategies for engaging suburbia. Ed Ruscha’s seminal
photo books depicting Los Angeles architecture exemplify a
deadpan aesthetic, projecting a nonjudgmental attitude toward
the low-rise city. His 1966 Every Building on the Sunset Strip—
the title offering a famously literal description of the book’s
contents—is a landmark in this tradition. It comes on the heels
of the similar studies Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and
Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965).
Ruscha’s Pop sensibility has parallels in urban fields. His
imagery directly inspired Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,
and Steven Izenour’s landmark Learning from Las Vegas (1972), a
research report about architectural kitsch in its most exaggerated
instance—the Vegas Strip. “We came to the automobile-oriented
commercial architecture of urban sprawl as our source for a civic
and residential architecture of meaning, viable now,” the team
wrote, “as the turn-of-the-century industrial vocabulary was viable
for a Modern architecture of space and industrial technology 40
years ago.”7 In the early 1970s, as the modernist utopian dream
seemed to implode alongside the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe
public housing complex in St. Louis, there was an outpouring
of similar discussions, all written from positions of sympathetic
ambivalence. Brian O’Doherty’s 1972 account of driving a “High-
way to Las Vegas,” published in this magazine, gave serious critical
attention to the often maligned city.8 Perhaps the most substantial
work in this vein is Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture
of Four Ecologies, a book-length study that looked closely at the
city’s maligned sprawl in order to differentiate distinctive urban
ecosystems within it. “I share neither the optimism of those who
see Los Angeles as the prototype of all future cities,” he wrote, “nor
the pessimism of those who see it as the harbinger of universal
urban doom.”9 Instead, he sought to make careful observations
about urban features, which could be read as symptoms of world-
historical forces—social, economic, and cultural.
This is precisely the project set forward by Los Angeles’s
Center for Land Use Interpretation, an organization of artists,
researchers, and writers that produces reports and exhibitions
seeking to illuminate “the nature and extent of human interac-
tion with the surface of the earth.”10 The group is perhaps best
SUBURBAN FUTURISM
known for its research excursions into “the internal fringes Dan Graham:
Alteration to a
of America”—military bases, kitsch tourist stops, abandoned Suburban House,
towns, and mines, all documented in a flat, head-on photo- 1978, painted wood,
graphic style. They often depict unassuming minutiae like plastic, and mixed
mediums, 6 by 43 by
entrance signage, guard kiosks, and fences—zooming in on 48 inches. Courtesy
details without asserting any grand import. Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York.
Many of their projects engage suburban sites—not because Photo John Berens.
they are suburban, but as examples of wider land-use patterns.
Their 2007 exhibition “Pavement Paradise: American Park-
ing Space,” held at the CLUI’s venue in Culver City, featured
more than a hundred photographs of different parking spots
from across the country. The taxonomy emphasized the flip side
of automotive mobility: the need for vast amounts of paved
surface for static cars. The group’s 2009 initiative “Urban Crude:
The Oil Fields of the Los Angeles Basin” homed in on the
under-recognized fact that one of the country’s largest urban
centers sits on significant crude reserves tapped by wells and
pump jacks working away amid suburban tract housing. The
project included a photographic study of a unique building
typology: oil derricks in and around the city’s upscale west side,
disguised as bland, windowless, but strangely tall commercial
buildings. CLUI brings attention to obscure phenomena with Two photos from
Center for Land
important social and environmental implications, but the Use Interpretation’s
tone of their projects remains resolutely neutral—they’re not project “Urban
Crude: The Oil
explicitly fighting a war on sprawl, and instead are quite content Fields of the Los
to dwell in it and drill down on the odd realities hidden there, Angeles Basin,”
revealing the contingency and potential malleability of other- 2009–, showing
oil facilities in
wise naturalized quotidian environments. Long Beach (top)
Where CLUI’s work is all about display and analysis, the and Beverly Hills
(bottom).
artist Mary Ellen Carroll’s suburban intervention prototype 180
(2011–) subtly alters a neighborhood’s built texture. On the
surface, it is an elegantly simple suburban extension of Land
art. Carroll separated an aging ranch-style property in a first-
ring Houston subdivision from its foundation and rotated the
structure 180 degrees, inverting the pattern of adjacent lots: the
building is set far back from the street, with the old front door
opening toward the fenced perimeter of a public park backed
up against the neighborhood.
In this modification of an archetypal example of suburban
architecture, Carroll’s work recalls that of Dan Graham. Another
chronicler of suburban housing types of the 1960s, Graham’s
ART IN AMERICA 111
 comparison of Minimalist art with tract homes in the photo-essay
Homes for America (1966–67) is a canonical work of Conceptualism.
In a lesser-known series of the 1970s, “Alteration of a Suburban
House,” Graham created models of ranch-style houses whose
front facades have been replaced with glass curtain walls—both
transparent and mirrored—an architectural feature more typical of
corporate office buildings than domestic homes. Though Graham
envisioned only a slight modification to each home, the change
brought a kind of radical transparency to suburban living—inviting
the Joneses to look in, all the time.
Carroll’s rotated house is concerned less with inhabitants’
behavior than with the public policy conditioning it. Interested
in policy’s capacity to shape everyday life, Carroll found her way
to Houston, a city with one of the weakest planning regimes
in the country, and her primary material is arguably Houston’s
zoning laws (or, more accurately, its complete and unusual lack
of them) rather than the building itself.
The project does not attempt to produce overt transforma-
tions or contrasts in the neighborhood. Rather, it enacts the
maximum (but notably very subtle) variation allowed by private
covenants—the free market’s answer to municipal zoning. These
Amie Siegel: neighborhood-by-neighborhood agreements, many implemented
Black Moon, 2010, by private developers, have produced restrictions on private prop-
Super-16mm film
transferred to erty use just as constraining as any governmental zoning might
video, 20 minutes. have. Carroll’s project reveals this system even as the physical
Courtesy Simon
Preston Gallery,
work flirts with invisibility, a deadpan suburban artwork that does
New York. not depict its surroundings but fades into them.
112 DECEMBER 2016 SUBURBAN FUTURISM
Suburban Romanticism
Another strain of suburban aesthetics forgoes detached
observation, instead deploying Romantic techniques to
transform the way suburbs are seen. One night in 1951, while
driving on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike, Tony Smith
famously had an epiphany that would lead him to develop his
Minimalist aesthetic. As he later recounted, he found himself
entranced by the limitless space around him, perceiving a
“reality that had not had any expression in art.”11
Robert Smithson, a New Jersey native like Smith and
Graham, produced a strange and influential paean to his
home state. In a famous 1967 essay, detailing a walk through
suburban Passaic, his language turns hallucinatory and
fantastic: at a construction site he imagines “ruins in reverse”
and idle machines that resemble “mechanical dinosaurs
stripped of their skin.” Photos Smithson took on this jour-
ney share the blunt snapshot aesthetic typical of Ruscha’s
books, but Smithson imbued his images with a mythical
stature: these were not storm drains and sandboxes, but sites
of visionary wonder.12 Taking up a parallel approach more
recently, Catherine Opie has likened her own mid-1990s
series of grainy black-and-white photographs of California
freeway interchanges devoid of cars to nineteenth-century
depictions of pharaonic monuments. “The Freeways are the
architecture that will be left behind like the pyramids in
Egypt,” she said in an interview with curators at New York’s
Phoenix boosters have translated the native enthusiasm for
unfettered growth into a program of techno-utopianism.
Guggenheim Museum.13 Evoking historical and geologic
time, Smithson’s and Opie’s works emerge from the indus-
trial and infrastructural edges of the suburbs, but can also
feel oriented away from them, toward the sublime.
Other artists trade temporal distance for spatial dis-
tance. There is a preponderance of aerial photography of
suburban sprawl—the most formally sophisticated of which
is by Edward Burtynsky, Michael Light, and Alex MacLean.
Their compositions figure suburban subdivisions radiating
out into desert terrain or perched precariously on foothills.
The panoramic view can obfuscate everyday experience in
the manufactured landscape, with signs of inhabitation
indistinct so far below. However, the shift in scale reveals
patterns of land use and, further, lets the striking effects of
Western landscape photography become entangled in the
mathematical sublimity of cul-de-sacs stretching to the hori-
zon. Burtynsky, in other photographs taken at ground level,
has even applied the same compositional techniques that
Ansel Adams used to convey the grandeur of national parks
to elevate views of the gas stations and fast food restaurants
clustered around highway off-ramps.
More recently, the foreclosure crisis has shaded sub-
urban imagery. Amie Siegel’s video Black Moon (2010) was
shot in two nearly identical, nearly completed developments
in California and Florida that had been abandoned after the
housing bubble burst in 2008. The work follows a fictional
band of armed female mercenaries who silently roam
through the ruins of a past society, stalking empty streets
and sleeping in empty swimming pools.
In all of these works, the ostensibly banal becomes monu-
mental, strange, overwhelming. Operating at suburbia’s fringes,
zooming out from its signature spaces or misusing them, these
images foreground suburbia but also recenter it and, by trans-
forming it, partially retreat from it. They remind us, however,
that suburbs have Romantic valences, that they can look very
different when the prosaic and the fantastic are held in tension.
SUBURBAN FUTURISM
Catherine Opie:
Untitled #7, 1994,
platinum print,
2¼ by 6¾ inches,
from the series
“Freeway.” Courtesy
Regen Projects,
Los Angeles.
Precarious Phoenix
Phoenix has not enjoyed the enduring affection of cataclysmic
fantasists the way Los Angeles and New York have, but it is
becoming a focal point for narratives of collapse. Built atop
a thousand miles of abandoned canals constructed by the
Hohokam civilization, which ended in the fourteenth century in
the face of resource scarcity, Phoenix has always had a lot to offer
in the way of dusty apocalypse. In Cadillac Desert, his 1986 study
of the history of water use in the Western US, historian Marc
Reisner describes the city in terms that echo Smithson’s Passaic
narrative, calling Phoenix’s largest modern canal—a waterway
that sustains millions—“a man-made river flowing uphill” that
would become a “ruin before it’s time” on a “Sumerian scale.”14
Last year saw the release of Paolo Bacigalupi’s best seller The
Water Knife, a thriller in the cli-fi genre—science fiction centered
on climate change. The narrative moves between the city-states
of Las Vegas and Phoenix in a near future where “Big Daddy
Drought” has sparked a Colorado River water war.
These retooled Western boomtown-to-ghost-town narra-
tives haunt the city from the margins, projected on it mostly by
outsiders. Locally, a much louder strain of futurism dominates:
faced with a mortgage crisis that hamstrung the city’s primary
industry and the mounting actuality of water scarcity so acute
it can’t be denied, Phoenix boosters have translated the native
enthusiasm for unfettered growth into a program of techno-
utopianism. In this narrative, the city’s precarity—imagined so
vividly by scholars and cli-fi authors alike—will provide a catalyst
for new innovations. New infrastructure and technologies will
sweep in just before the breaking point, enabling Phoenix’s growth
to continue unabated—“disruption” in the service of the status quo.
The humblest manifestation of this impulse may be the solar
panels and xeriscaping blanketing Scottsdale and other affluent
sections of the metroplex—sustainable ornamentation wrapping
twentieth-century tract housing in twenty-first-century skins
without challenging the formula of the single-family detached
ART IN AMERICA 113
 home. More ambitious plans have also been articulated. In 2009,
Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon announced a seventeen-point
plan to make the municipality the “greenest in the nation”—an
astounding claim for a city whose “green” spaces (i.e., manicured
lawns) are prime symbols of its unsustainability.15 Gordon
projected an image of a carbon-neutral solar city devised by a
bumper crop of local sustainability think tanks and research
initiatives. It is a speculative vision no less fantastic or thought-
provoking than a work of science fiction, further proof that,
just below its surface, Phoenix harbors potent futurist potential.
Apocalyptic and utopian, this potential is nascent, but when
the light catches it, the city can seem to hover just a bit off the
ground, hinting at the possibility of richer suburban futures.
The Global Suburb
Thousands of miles from Phoenix and the postwar housing typolo-
gies that dominate American thinking about the suburbs, the artist
Sophia Al-Maria has assembled a body of work around suburbia’s
hallmark public space: the mall. To frame her work this way might
conjure images of ’80s LA, but Al-Maria, who grew up shuttling
between Qatar and Tacoma, Washington, draws her material
from the Arabian Gulf ’s urban complexes, especially Doha. The
View of Sophia
Al-Maria’s video
Black Friday, 2016,
with (on floor) The
Litany, 2016, sand,
glass, smartphones,
tablets, and mixed
mediums, at the
Whitney Museum
of American Art,
New York. Courtesy
Anna Lena Films,
Paris, and The Third
Line, Dubai. Photo
Ron Amstutz.
114 DECEMBER 2016 SUBURBAN FUTURISM
consumption is more conspicuous there than any San Fernando
Valley mall rat could imagine. Her video installation Black Friday
(2016), shown at New York’s Whitney Museum, offers a hallucina-
tory depiction of an opulent, marble-clad shopping center. Much
of the work, which is projected on a tall vertical screen, was shot
by a drone flying through the mall’s huge corridors. Elements of
classic American suburbia have been abstracted, shipped abroad,
and amplified. Al-Maria’s work reveals an international langue of
suburban consumer society rendered in Gulf parole.
The suburban has been migrating. In the US, if geo-
graphic suburbs often don’t behave like they’re supposed
to, we increasingly see the suburbia caricature embodied in
affluent country enclaves and urban developments. The writer
Sarah Schulman has argued, in The Gentrification of the Mind
(2012), that gentrification represents the transplantation of
the classically suburban social cocktail (“gender conformity,
compulsory heterosexuality, racial segregation, and homoge-
nous cultural experience”) into new spatial arrangements (“big
buildings, attached residences, and apartments”).16
Al-Maria’s work suggests how extensive these kinds of dis-
placements might be, evidence that we’d do well to dissociate the
concept of the suburban from a single geographic zone (between
city and not-city) or built typology (detached single-family
homes). The suburban (if it remains a useful concept at all) either
has to be understood as a historical phenomenon (now concluded)
or as a principle—a modality within the capitalist production of
space, a set of tendencies that produced a certain way of life in
those geographic zones at a certain time, but that can operate else-
where, evolving and even finding new physical forms but retaining
a basic economic and cultural logic underneath.
Crucially, Al-Maria delivers her visions of present-day
Gulf suburbia in a futuristic visual vocabulary. In Black Friday
and other works, like Your Sister (2014), imagery has been
filtered through layers of digital distortion and augmented by
brooding cinematic sound design, all evocative of cyberpunk
aesthetics. Ten years ago, Al-Maria coined the term “Gulf
Futurism” to evoke the accelerating pace of development in
the rapidly urbanizing region. The concept mines American
traditions of ethno-futurism—her online video Sci-Fi Wahabi
(2008), for example, loops the opening lines of Sun Ra’s
album Space Is the Place: “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t
you know that yet?” Like much Afrofuturism, Al-Maria’s work
does not just project forward but claims the now as the future.
In today’s Gulf, however, Al-Maria hardly has a monop-
oly on this move: the spectacular skyscrapers and islands of
culture rising in new desert cities are at least partly perfor-
mative, designed to reclaim the region from old, dominant
Western stereotypes about the Arab world. In this context,
Al-Maria’s dystopian futurism is a contravening force, refus-
ing the official boosterish image-making as much as it refuses
the historical stereotypes. In Al-Maria’s videos, the future
is indeed now, but by turning from the skyline to the mall,
letting spaces of everyday life perform this revelation, she
deflates the claim and modulates it: the future is suburb.
When one traces this counterintuitive braid of futurism
and suburbanism from Al-Maria’s malls back to the subdivi-

sions of Phoenix, the contours of another paradigmatic city
begin to appear: a planetary web of spaces, a globally distrib-
uted suburbia. The suburban qualities of Dubai or Beijing
become apparent if we look at them not as exotic counter-
points to the American landscape but as places where its pat-
terns are being transformed in an encounter with new cultural
and political forces. Reciprocally, the fantastic light cast by
these growing cities might throw into relief the speculative
aspects of Phoenix or Dallas.
In all these places, imagining a future, whether an
apocalyptic or a utopian one, can risk offering a retreat from
crisis. Narratives of inevitable disaster or the promise of
technological solutions just over the horizon can absolve
one of the responsibility to act in the present. The suburban
white-bread caricature does the same by promising perpetual
stasis. Still, somewhere between the banal and the sublime,
there may be an image of a compelling suburban future. It is
an image of a city worth living in.
1. See Roland Brownstein, “Obama’s Support in Rust Belt, Sun Belt Very
Different,” The Atlantic, Nov. 2, 2012, and the same author’s “Clinton and Trump
Are Shuffling the Electoral Map,” The Atlantic, Oct. 4, 2016, theatatlantic.com.
Brownstein shows how the suburbs are becoming strikingly bipartisan, writing
in the latter article: “Democrats are increasingly looking toward Sunbelt states
rather than Rustbelt states for victory in 2016 and beyond. Not long ago that
would have been unthinkable.”
SUBURBAN FUTURISM
Light: City View
Hiking Trail Looking
Southeast, “Sun City
MacDonald Ranch”
Development Below,
Henderson, Nevada,
2010, pigment print,
40 by 50 inches.
Courtesy Danziger
Gallery.
2. James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of
America’s Man-Made Landscape, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 186.
3. Joel Kotkin, “The Triumph of Suburbia,” Apr. 29, 2014, newgeography.com.
4. Dolores Hayden, “What Is Sprawl?” Hartford Courant, July 1, 2004, in
Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, eds., The Suburban Reader, New
York, Routledge, 2006, p. 477.
5. See James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis: The
Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, New York, Cambridge University
Press, 2005; and Larry H. Peer, Romanticism and the City, New York, Palgrave
Macmillian, 2011.
6. Ellen Dunham-Jones, Retrofitting Suburbia, Hoboken, N.J., Wiley, 2008, p. vi.
7. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from
Las Vegas, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1972, p. 90.
8. Brian O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” Art in America, January–February
1972, pp. 80-89.
9. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Berkeley and
Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1971, p. 6.
10. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, “About Us,” clui.org.
11. Tony Smith, “Talking with Tony Smith,” interview by Samuel J. Wagstaff,
Jr., Artforum, December 1966. For a discussion of Smith’s relationship to
suburbia see David Salomon, “Tony Smith and the Suburban Sublime,” Places,
September 2013, placesjournal.org.
12. Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” in
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. by Jack Flam, Berkeley and
Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 71–74.
13. Catherine Opie, “Freeways,” Sept. 2009, guggenheim.org.
14. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing
Water, New York, Viking Penguin, 1986, p. 304.
15. Andrew Ross, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,
Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 9.
16. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
University of California Press, 2012, pp. 24–25.
ART IN AMERICA 115
Exhibition
Reviews
FEATURED REVIEW
NEW YORK
117 KAI ALTHOFF
at the Museum of Modern Art
SÃO PAULO
128 SÃO PAULO BIENAL
at the Ciccillo Matarazzo
Pavilion
NEW YORK
118 LYNDA BENGLIS
at Cheim & Read
119 LILLIAN SCHWARTZ
at Magenta Plains
120 ANTONIO LOPEZ
at El Museo del Barrio
121 SUELLEN ROCCA
at Matthew Marks
116 DECEMBER 2016
121 YEVGENIYA BARAS SÃO PAULO
at Nicelle Beauchene 127 IVENS MACHADO
at Pivô
122 WALTER ROBINSON
at Jeffrey Deitch LONDON
129 URIEL ORLOW
123 SLAVS AND TATARS at The Showroom
at Tanya Bonakdar
BERLIN
124 JONATHAN GARDNER 130 GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA
at Casey Kaplan at the Hamburger Bahnhof—
Museum für Gegenwart
CHICAGO
124 ZAK PREKOP 131 RENÉE GREEN
at Shane Campbell at Nagel Draxler
LOS ANGELES BASEL
125 HENRY TAYLOR 132 LIN MAY SAEED
at Blum & Poe at Nicolas Krupp
SAN FRANCISCO TAIPEI
126 SUZANNE BLANK 133 CHOU YU-CHENG
REDSTONE at Project Fulfill
at Jessica Silverman
EXHIBITION REVIEWS

KAI ALTHOFF
NEW YORK — Museum of Modern Art
It is easy for the visitor to Kai Althoff ’s retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art, “and then leave me to the common
swifts,” to grow irritated: the long wait for entry into the over-
crowded galleries, the admonishment from the well-meaning
museum employees about the absolute prohibition of photography,
the barely legible checklist available at the entrance, and then,
finally, the show. A jumble. The figurative paintings for which
Althoff is best known—depictions of small social groups done in a
nostalgic manner that blends the Expressionist styles of Kirchner,
Schiele, and Dix with references to children’s book imagery and
Asian shadow puppets—are scattered around an installation that
also includes vitrines of notes and postcards and at least a few
vials of what looks like blood; mannequins in nineteenth-century
costumes; architectural maquettes of gloomy European villas;
snapshots of men hanging out together; Pop-style photocollages;
an early twentieth-century gynecological exam chair, among other
spooky furniture; more mannequins.
The artist designed the exhibition himself. Worn white wood
planks cover the floor, and white fabric draped from the walls gives
the impression of being inside a tent. Freestanding partitions at
the far end of the gallery, also constructed from wood planks and
serving as supports for many of the paintings, are steeply angled at
the top, suggesting the architecture of an attic with a pitched roof.
More important is what Althoff has left out. He has rejected all
the usual means by which the museum provides historical context
and analysis of the work on view. Wall texts are absent, but so, too,
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
Photograph by
Kai Althoff
showing his recent
collaborators Este
Lewis and Lillian
Pickett interacting
with his exhibition
“and then leave
me to the common
swifts,” 2016, at
the Museum of
Modern Art.
is any kind of curatorial structure that might guide a comparison
of different works or elucidate the significant relationships between
different aspects of Althoff ’s output. It would be interesting
to unpack the idea of “alternative” lifestyles that runs through
the show, which includes references to Asian cultures, imagery
associated with German communes of the 1970s, and paintings of
Hasidic men. But the exhibition is a barely differentiated pile, one
clearly intended to be a total work of art, conveying, above all, the
sheer immensity of the artist’s creativity.
Althoff made a name for himself as a polymath in the
Cologne scene of the 1990s, where he produced dance music and
began creating installations that integrated his painting into archi- ON VIEW
tectonic structures. He has since embarked on a spiritual journey, THROUGH
JAN. 17, 2017
living among the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn’s
Crown Heights. In other words, he is an artist who has, in various
ways, folded art into life.
Given the anticipation leading to the opening of Althoff ’s
retrospective and the mystery of its presentation, one might
expect to have an encounter with the blood, sweat, and tears of
the artist. But the promise of such a major emotional experi-
ence is constantly undercut by the pervasive suspicion that only
minor feelings are afoot: Is the exhibition architecture mysti-
cal and chapel-like, or merely shabby chic? Does the display
methodology imply a deep mystery, or needlessly mystify?
Does the photo ban, constantly enforced by harried security
personnel, guard the sanctity of this work, or simply protect
ART IN AMERICA 117
 the intellectual property of collectors who own these pleasant into the process. But while establishing a meaningful connection
and highly sought-after figurative compositions? Is the attic to a certain spiritual community or a small group of ideal viewers is
imagery a profound challenge to linear historical narratives, or a a totally valid reason to make art, it leads to misunderstandings at
ham-fisted haunted house? Am I experiencing catharsis in front a public institution, especially one that was so aggressively barred
of this creepy mannequin, or just feeling annoyed? from any meaningful collaborative role. Althoff used MoMA’s
Althoff appears to have been annoyed frequently while gallery space to construct an inward-looking version of his own
realizing the show. His dissatisfaction with MoMA and the career—a distortion that obscures his deep links to subcultures and
apparently contentious curatorial negotiation he undertook is collaborators. What’s left feels like an odd version of institutional
a conspicuous frame for the exhibition. Or maybe it’s better to critique, one directed not at examining ideological constructs and
say that Althoff ’s ultimate victory in this negotiation is evident. challenging potted historical narratives, but at realizing the narrow
The artist wrote his own oblique press release. A rabbi, DovBer goal of co-opting the museum to accommodate individual desires.
Naiditch, contributed the main catalogue essay, a meditation on —William S. Smith
the nature of magic and mysticism. The catalogue also includes
an astonishing interview between Althoff and the exhibition’s
nominal curator, MoMA’s Laura Hoptman, in which they NEW YORK
attack each other: he calls her “blind,” and she insists that his
unrelenting obscurity is disingenuous. LYNDA BENGLIS
This dustup is peculiar because, to a great extent, the show
Cheim & Read
does much of the work that a normal midcareer retrospective
would, as it mostly cobbles together previous installations. A ver- Speaking with a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1989, Lynda
sion of Althoff ’s contribution to the 2012 Whitney Biennial—a Benglis expressed her disdain for a Puritan strain of society
wooden staircase surrounded by a fabric scrim on and around that, as she put it, “gets nervous if things are too pleasurable,
which colorful paintings on wood panels are piled—is on view, as too beautiful, or too open.” Feminist art’s most significant
are many of the elements central to his previous solo shows, such legacy, for her, was a liberation from such circumscribed
as a cardboard cash register from his 2007 exhibition at Gladstone notions of taste. Her show of new sculptures at Cheim
Gallery in New York and parts of a cluttered 2005 installation at & Read proved that Benglis is still able to run with that
ACME in Los Angeles. He has bent the great MoMA to his will, freedom, as she has for the past half-century. Many of the
yet the ultimate payoff from this struggle amounts to little more works consist of cocoonlike chicken-wire armatures wrapped
than a thin mystical gloss on a regular survey of the hits. in paper painted in bold, glittering Mardi Gras hues or, with
Althoff ’s individual paintings frequently suggest complex just a few streaks of ground-coal paint, barely at all. Hung
allegories. For example, Naiditch speculates that an untitled 2010
painting, which shows several Hasidic men crowded around a
red dog, is a depiction of communism stifling workers. Maybe.
Whatever nuance exists in individual works is subsumed by the
blunt allegorical content of the overall exhibition, which is all
about the conflict between the expressive individual artist and the
worldly institution that can only constrain his vision. The uncon-
ventional look of this show, in that sense, masks a cliché: the
fascination with the exotic, the hints of wild bohemian lifestyles,
Lynda Benglis: the ambiguous politics, and, finally, the male artist’s triumph over
Scudder Flip, 2016, stodgy academic resistance to achieve creative freedom. Haven’t
chicken wire,
handmade paper, we heard this story before somewhere? MoMA’s early twentieth-
ground coal, and century galleries, perhaps? Given the context, the supposed rift
matte medium,
36 by 24 by 17½ this show caused in the upper echelons of museum manage-
inches; at Cheim ment actually feels like a staid throwback to a set of tropes that
& Read. © Lynda
Benglis, licensed by
undergird the myths of male modernist genius that MoMA has
VAGA, New York. encouraged in the past, and that subsequent artists—including
many women and people of color—have spent decades working
to overcome.
Althoff has effectively mitigated these tropes in the past by
making his process highly collaborative. In New York he animated
an unruly installation at the small Dispatch gallery through an
electrifying performance with the black metal band Liturgy. He
worked with graffiti artist Nick Z for the 2007 Gladstone show.
Arguably, this collaborative spirit manifests in the MoMA exhibi-
tion as a dialogue with the Hasidic community, with a rabbi invited

118 DECEMBER 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

high and low across the gallery walls, these pieces appeared
like so many butterflies about to take flight.
Driven by a feminist critique of historical continuity,
Benglis’s oeuvre rejects linear progress, as seen with her
return to chicken wire, which she used in the ’70s as a frame
for polyurethane foam spills and in wall-mounted plaster
pieces. As if to demonstrate this point, Look Back (2015–16)
performs its titular operation by echoing, in its twisting,
roiling form, the slits and orifices of Benglis’s earlier work,
which is so often equated with human anatomy. Like an
asymmetrical helix, a swath of chicken wire winds loosely
around the front of Look Back’s vertical core. The passage
curves gently around to expose its hexagonally patterned
wire support, attesting to Benglis’s ongoing commitment
to revealing process and suggesting her engagement with a
dramatic openness of form. Her production seems motivated
not by outside formal or political expectation, but by urgent
curiosity about the behavior of materials: how liquids pool,
clay curls, fingerprints fire, paper drapes.
There is an unshakeable sensuality to the paper works.
One imagines the tactile sensations of stretching and apply-
ing the wet paper, a process that the artist, in a video on the
gallery’s website, refers to as “fleshing the form out.” Benglis
often thinks like a painter, and the association in these works
between surface and skin is indisputable. The upper portion
of Scudder Flip (2016), for example, curls forward, so that
light falling through this area lends the paper the translu-
cency and fragility of human tissue. The first artist to make
sculpture of paint, Benglis has long scrambled conventional
distinctions between mediums. While surely we’re beyond
policing medium boundaries, one salutary aspect of Benglis’s
paper works is the facility with which she plays with such
traditions: she enlivens the grid, that ur-signifier of paint-
ing’s flatness, by crooking and kinking her chicken wire into
three dimensions, while simultaneously flouting sculpture’s
historical reliance on concealed interior cores.
In addition to the paper sculptures, the exhibition included
two other works, each made this year and shown in its own
gallery. One is an androgynous cast-aluminum figure that
challenges the portrayal of idealized male and female bodies
throughout art history. Its title, The Fall Caught, evokes the
creation myth while also, more prosaically, pointing to gravity’s
pull on the figure, which leans back on the wall for support.
The second work is Elephant Necklace (2016), a sequence of
black ceramic curls installed in a circle on the floor. Imprints of
Benglis’s fingers testify to her handling of the malleable clay.
The various sculptures on view demonstrate that, for
Benglis, art need not conform to external pressures of any
kind, whether formal conventions, gender binaries, or ever-
shifting notions of taste. Extending this license to her audi-
ence, Benglis insists it is the viewers’ prerogative (“pleasure,”
as she called it in 2014) to read what they want into her
work. As such, her sculptures are contingent, propositional,
and profoundly generous. They perform, like the coiling and
yawning forms of her new paper pieces, a radical openness.
—Elizabeth Buhe
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
LILLIAN SCHWARTZ Lillian Schwartz:
Pixillation, 1970,
Magenta Plains video, 4 minutes; at
Magenta Plains.
Human-size mainframe computers and magnetic tape stor-
age units, a clunky light pen, cathode-ray tube monitors, film
reels: these were the tools that Lillian Schwartz used to make
experimental films and graphics at Bell Laboratories in the
1970s. In 1976, Bell Labs’ parent company, AT&T, produced a
short documentary on Schwartz, who worked at the research and
development technology company from 1968 to 2001. On view in
Schwartz’s exhibition at Magenta Plains—her first solo show since
a presentation in an Arizona computer lab twenty years ago—the
film, titled The Artist and the Computer, shows Schwartz toiling
in the techie trenches by day and consulting art history books by
night. This false divide, perpetuated by the art world, between
commercial and creative labor may be partly why Schwartz, who
joined Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.) in 1966 and
participated in the groundbreaking 1968–69 Museum of Modern
Art exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechani-
cal Age,” has long been sidelined in the art world.
The Magenta Plains exhibition featured the artist’s
computer-related works on paper and a dazzling selection of
sixteen films, with the earliest pieces dating from 1969. On the
ground floor, a television played the Schwartz documentary and
Schwartz’s 1984 Emmy Award–winning computer-animated
advertisement for MoMA’s new wing. Among the framed works
surrounding the monitor were two gridded drawings (Abstract
#8 and Hippy, both 1969) that look like studies for computer
animations, as well as works that explore art historical subject
matter. A computer-processed photographic print from 1969, for
instance, portrays, in five stacked frames, a reclining nude female
figure, while two etchings for integrated circuits from 1970—
both titled Homage to Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase)—
reference an avant-garde masterwork.
The films, transferred to DVD, were shown on a loop in the
gallery’s basement. For these works, Schwartz collaborated with
programmers, experimental musicians, and even environmental
specialists, combining analog and digital methods. Many of
the films can be viewed in both 2D and, using ChromaDepth
glasses, 3D. Pixillation (1970), the earliest in the sequence, retains
an experimental energy, with rapid editing and a rhythmic Moog
ART IN AMERICA 119
 synthesizer track by composer Gershon Kingsley. The four-minute
film mixes computer-generated pixel patterns, shot on black-and-
white stock and colored by filters, with images of growing crystals
and time-lapse photographs of hand-painted abstract swirls.
Mutations (1972) also brings together natural and man-made
phenomena, with sections devoted to laser patterns, gem growth,
and random patterning. Audio by computer-music composer and
Bell Labs analyst Jean-Claude Risset switches from organic, spacey
ambient tones to what sounds like a video game track. Googolplex
(1972) features flickering black-and-white patterns (which appear,
at times, to register optically as full-spectrum color); the imagery is
accompanied by Schwartz’s own remix of an audiotape of African
villagers’ music. Later films show the artist turning her attention
more to organic forms, as in Papillons (1973), a meditative flow of
morphing shapes suggesting butterflies and lava-lamp blobs.
As with many tech pioneers, Schwartz’s underlying motives
remain humanist, even spiritual. But sometimes the results of her
efforts to humanize technology miss the mark. Lily’s Sea (2013),
one of three films on view made after the 1970s, shows a succession
of neon-colored, psychedelically patterned forms, often mutating
into one another—a flat landscape sprouts mountains, from which
oceanic creatures crop up that, in turn, became floating orbs and
wormlike organisms, and so on. In the final segment, the action
culminates with a number of digital scans of human faces embed-
ded in rugged terrain. Swirling through a dark abyss, these visages
suggest citizens of the uncanny valley rather than the global village.
—Wendy Vogel
Antonio Lopez:
Shoe Metamorphosis,
Alvinia Bridges/
Charles James,
1978, pencil and
watercolor, 22 by 30
inches; at El Museo
del Barrio.
ANTONIO LOPEZ
El Museo del Barrio
As the science of anatomy advanced, artists of the Renaissance
learned to render bodies not as components of an image but as
flesh in the world, and enhanced their presence in space by por-
traying the effects of gravity and light on the fabric that covered
them. The influential fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez (1943–
1987), who was born in Puerto Rico but lived in New York and
Paris, wrought his own vision of anatomy from a late twentieth-
120 DECEMBER 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
century concept of the performance of selfhood in his work for
magazines and fashion houses and his own personal sketches.
Inspired by disco, bodybuilding, and other ascendant subcultures of
his time, he drew images of bodies becoming images.
Take, for example, a series of drawings he did for Yves Saint
Laurent, some of the first works you encountered in “Antonio Lopez:
Future Funk Fashion,” a retrospective at El Museo del Barrio. Three
men bend and flex to spell YSL with their bodies. Jockstraps frame
their buttocks and fissures delineate their musculature (the two types
of detail having been depicted with negative space, using the white of
the paper). Fabric, light, and physical contortion here define the body
in equal measure. In Lopez’s poster design for the 1976 Olympics,
displayed nearby, three pairs of runners’ legs show extreme vascularity;
a swimmer’s back bears ribbonlike curves indicating muscle in con-
traction; and the torchbearer’s singlet clings so closely to his abdomen
that it’s hard to tell a ripple in the fabric from a fold in his skin.
Lopez produced his works in collaboration with Juan Ramos
(1942–1995)—who was also his partner in life—under the name
“Antonio,” a brand of sorts. The museum emphasized the collabora-
tion in wall texts and in the accompanying publication, a newsprint
facsimile of an issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview that the two
guest-edited. A few black-and-white snapshots of construction
workers glimpsed on New York streets in the 1960s were attributed
solely to Ramos, but his primary role was to network and correspond
with clients so Lopez could be free to focus on the art. Ramos also
selected palettes and added pigments to Lopez’s pencil drawings.
The work in “Future Funk Fashion” didn’t come from the
world of fine art, and the exhibition didn’t follow the conventions
of the retrospective. There was no chronology put forth, and it
seemed hard to parse one out; while some of the drawings had
titles and dates, most didn’t. The show was hung like a spread-out
sketchbook, with drawings for a Missoni campaign or variations
on a concept, for instance, arranged salon-style. Some swaths of
the walls were painted ultramarine, peach, lavender, and forest
green—all prominent colors in Antonio’s 1980s palette—to
underscore the groupings. Scrapbooks, photographs, and hand-
written notes appeared in vitrines. You got the sense of curators
rummaging through portfolios, trying to piece together a history
that was filed away in haste as Lopez and Ramos rushed to keep
up with the flurry of their life and work.
But the chaos of the exhibition seemed to highlight fashion’s
appeal for Lopez: its promise of constant transformation, its play
of surface and bodily substance. “Future Funk Fashion” generously
represented Lopez’s photographic series, which he shot on an Insta-
matic and arranged in grids of nine. One shows a model in a sudsy
bath. She’s underwater; then she breaks through the surface, and the
shimmery wet sheen of her skin makes her a part of the pool and the
pool a part of her. One of Lopez’s drawings presents a series of four
sketches in which the image of a woman is increasingly abstracted.
First she is shown standing with her chest out and her arms behind
her; in the subsequent images, she turns into a dress form and then
stretches beyond exaggeration until her arms bend backward into an
impossibly high stiletto spike and her torso contorts into a curvy sole.
Lopez’s beautiful mutants play up the fantasy of self-presentation. His
unfolding transformations always reveal the depths in the surface.
—Brian Droitcour
 experimented most freely as a draftsman. Big Policeman (ca. 1968) is a
crisp, black pen-and-ink work on paper featuring a menagerie of tiny
objects, including pants, pine trees, and poodles. These elements are
layered and superimposed, creating odd negative spaces and complicat-
ing the meaning of each iconic form. A cop’s silhouette is filled with
squiggly lines that separate it into three dozen smaller spaces, the way
Suellen Rocca:
geographic boundaries function on a map. The figure is in the bottom Big Policeman,
third of the composition and separated from the upper portion by a ca. 1968, ink on
paper, 25 by
line, above which is a shelving unit with bowling trophies. A complete
18 inches; at
description of any of these drawings would fill a novella, but this draw- Matthew Marks.
ing, with its repeating pyramid shapes and masculine icons, suggests
how imposing figures can be broken down into many small parts.
By the time Rocca painted Palm Finger, in 1968, her mastery
of color had caught up to her compositional virtuosity. She switched
palettes for different parts of this painting. Against a sky-blue back-
ground, a giant phallic finger is rendered in naturalistic pinks with
pale blue veins. On its tip sits a palm tree in a full chromatic scale.
Two braids of green, yellow, and purple yarn serve as a frame for the
picture, and pick up the colors in the palm tree.
The show’s bet on Rocca’s timeliness is a good one. Dana
Schutz and Trenton Doyle Hancock are only two of the best
SUELLEN ROCCA known of the countless younger artists working with cartoon-
Matthew Marks inspired figuration. Rocca approached pop culture through
The recent proliferation of smart, funny, cartoony paintings by humor and the uncanny. It’s inspiring to think of the twenty-
younger artists in New York has coincided with the rediscovery, something Rocca, often working while her two young children
through a spate of museum and gallery shows, of work by artists slept, riffing on commercial culture’s id.
who made smart, funny, cartoony work half a century ago, often —Julian Kreimer
outside New York. It’s not clear which trend is driving the other,
but both are certainly welcome. The two-dozen works by Suellen
Rocca in her first New York solo show were made between 1965
and 1969, while she was exhibiting with the Hairy Who, the
YEVGENIYA BARAS
standard-bearers for the larger Chicago Imagist group. Nicelle Beauchene
Yevgeniya Baras:
Given that she was twenty-two and a recent graduate of the Yevgeniya Baras’s “All Inside of Itself, Close” was the artist’s second solo Untitled, 2016, oil
on canvas, 16 by
Art Institute of Chicago when she made the four largest paintings exhibition in New York and her first with Nicelle Beauchene. Display- 20 inches; at Nicelle
in the show, it’s no surprise that they’re not as accomplished as the ing tight compositions and keyed-up color, the fourteen untitled paint- Beauchene.
later drawings and paintings here. The word comics cuts across the
diptych Bare Shouldered Beauty and the Pink Creature (1965)—the
largest piece, at just under seven feet tall and ten feet wide—and
identifies a major source of her imagery. The canvas is jam-packed
with small pictograms—flat forms with bold outlines—that repre-
sent ice cream cones, people, and furniture. Reminiscent of Egyptian
hieroglyphs, Rocca’s emblems reflect the visual culture of midcentury
American suburbia, a world of advertisements, cartoons, and junk
food. The palette is dominated by dirty peach and pea green, applied
in an unfussy manner on some of the pictograms. Others are left bare
so that the gessoed surface of the canvas and a few stray marks of
charcoal underdrawing are visible. Despite this lack of finish, which
feels indebted to a kind of residual art-school expressionism, the
work, like Rocca’s other large paintings, has chutzpah. It reflects an
encyclopedic ambition to create a dense visual catalogue on such a
scale that the work barely fits through a gallery door.
In the following four years, Rocca stuck to her root language
of iconic forms rendered bluntly, as if constrained by the condi-
tions of a cheap printing process. But she transformed her subject
matter through more complex compositional techniques so that her
pictograms create unexpected resonances with dream imagery. She

EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 121

 ings on view (all 2016) demonstrate a significant leap from the pieces
in her first solo show, at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in 2015.
The new works (most no larger than twenty-five inches on
a side) are thick with colorful garlands of oil paint and have the
presence of wrapped gifts. Baras built up their stuccolike surfaces
in layers; to many of the canvases she attached pieces of wood and
gnarly bits of material, producing an irregular support for the paint.
Her abstract imagery has an organic, mystical quality. The compo-
sitions feature hot colors over cool grounds, and scrawled markings
that recall runes, children’s drawing, or graffiti. In one work, bright
Walter Robinson: orange lines and squiggles read as primeval depictions of energy,
Lotion, 1984, acrylic while pink, blue, and red forms resemble lava lamp blobs; there is
on canvas, 60 by 36
inches; at Jeffrey a pleasurable confusion as to where the support—a canvas affixed
Deitch. with triangular wood pieces—ends and the paint begins.
Holes in two of the canvases underscore the paintings’ object-
hood and counter any sense of preciousness that the small scale of
Baras’s work might suggest. Baras also plays up the three-dimension-
ality of the canvases by painting their sides or, in some instances, ren-
dering the compositions on their versos. In one work, a wood frame
is attached to the front of the canvas; wavy, looping red and blue lines
meander around the canvas and up onto the wood, which is painted
pinkish brown and notched with marks suggesting the surface of
bark. Forrest Bess’s symbolic landscapes in dark, weathered frames
come readily to mind, though here the conceit of painting wood pat-
terning on real pieces of wood provides a subtle touch of humor.
Some of Baras’s painted passages read as portrayals of natural
phenomena like weather patterns, mountains, and planets. The fast food items, and other media subjects are part of a long Pop art
feathery brushwork evokes that of the American visionary Charles tradition that began in the mid-1960s. Artists from Tom Wes-
Burchfield. Yet for all their swirling colors and eccentric pictorial selmann to Richard Prince have employed similar imagery with
space, the paintings have a curious stillness. It is as if the energy put tongue-in-cheek humor and irony. But unlike many Pop images,
into them crystallized too quickly into aesthetic realization. which can be coolly detached, Robinson’s lushly painted composi-
When Baras enters territory closer to sculpture, her works tions are blatantly romantic in temperament. His work as a whole,
have a livelier, fresher feel, as seen in the two shaped canvases on though based on media images, encompasses a specific and rather
view—a wonky trapezoid and a craggy, shieldlike form. These personal exploration of love, passion, and objects of desire.
pieces have an almost jigsaw quality, their compositions made up The seventy-some paintings spanning more than four
of various clearly defined areas of color. Two red lozenge shapes decades in “Walter Robinson: A Retrospective” at Jeffrey
in the trapezoidal work seem talismanic, as if they offer “evil Deitch were arranged thematically. (The show was a slightly
eye” protection. Both of the shaped canvases display less obses- pared-down version of a museum survey organized by curator
sive handiwork than that of the other pieces, and they function Barry Blinderman for the University Galleries of Illinois State
simultaneously as energetic surfaces and solid objects. University, Normal.) The first works one saw were a group of
With today’s rampant image-sharing culture, painters too medium-size still lifes from the mid-1980s based on photos of
often focus on making photogenic compositions. There’s some- drug-store items, such as a jar of Vicks VapoRub and a bottle
thing refreshing about Baras’s tactile approach to her medium. of Vaseline Intensive Care. Robinson’s paintings often harbor
She can be viewed in the context of a cross-generational commu- a subtly acerbic view of commercial advertising, his portray-
nity of painters, including Chris Martin and Katherine Bradford, als of brand-name goods underscoring the way desire can be
whose work playfully combines early American modernism and packaged and sold. Other “quick fix” imagery included scotch
so-called outsider art while demonstrating a belief in paint as a bottles ( Johnny, 1984) and burgers (Big Mac, 2008, and Turkey
material that can transcend pictorial representation. Cheeseburger, 2012). Robinson seems to parody the seductive
—Nora Griffin allure of ads by putting these mundane items on canvases and
painting them with exaggeratedly sumptuous brushwork.
A central figure in the New York art scene since the 1970s,
the Delaware-born, Oklahoma-raised artist showed his work in
WALTER ROBINSON various East Village galleries in the 1980s and was a member of
Jeffrey Deitch the collective Colab. He is also known as an editor and writer.
On one level, Walter Robinson’s paintings of glamorous models, He put out the magazine Art-Rite, with Edit deAk, from 1973
sexy couples based on 1950s pulp-fiction covers, adorable kittens, to ’78, and was an Art in America contributing editor for many

122 DECEMBER 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

years. In 1996, he became the founding editor of Artnet’s
online magazine, where he remained for sixteen years.
Portraits of friends painted in the mid-1980s, including
artists Mike Bidlo and Martin Wong and critics Carlo
McCormick and Joe Masheck, were grouped together in a
mezzanine space. During the ’80s, Robinson also experimented
with abstraction, taking a typically Pop approach by making
“spin art,” using an enlarged version of the children’s toy. The spin
paintings on view here, made between 1985 and 1987, predate
similar works by Damien Hirst by nearly a decade. More recent
series present images from mail-order catalogues, depicting items
like folded men’s shirts. Lavender Shadow Plaid (2014), and Long
Sleeve Plaid (2015) isolate their garments in the center of the
canvases against monochrome grounds. The gridded patterning
of the plaid fabrics brings to mind Minimalist art, particularly
some of Agnes Martin’s early abstractions.
Robinson’s most complex—and in some ways most accom-
plished—works are his figural paintings, which often feature stock
scenes of passion between heterosexual couples. Capturing emo-
tions ranging from ardor, as in Something of Value (1986), showing
lovers embracing, to alienation, as in My Love is Violent (2011),
where a pensive woman in a robe turns her back to the painter just
as he unveils an unfinished nude study of her propped up on his
easel, these paintings show the quirky expressiveness that can be
found in archetypal figures and mass-produced source material.
—David Ebony
SLAVS AND TATARS
Tanya Bonakdar
Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars is an international collective
whose eclectic work focuses on the vast, multiethnic portion of
Eurasia that lies, according to the artists, “east of the former Berlin
Wall and west of the Great Wall of China.” At Tanya Bonakdar,
the group gleefully redirected Donald Trump’s call to “make
America great again” in their work Make Mongolia Great Again
(2016): a map of Eurasia with splotches and swirls of white paint
suggesting aspects (military campaigns, migrations, trade routes)
of the Mongol Empire in Genghis Khan’s day. Slavs and Tatars
deals in hybridity. The words on the map that call for Mongolia’s
renewed greatness are inexplicably, and hilariously, in Spanish.
Fermentation was a prevailing theme in the show, including
the use of microbes to preserve or produce culturally important
foods, with various works referring to dairy products, leavened
bread, and pickles. The doctored photograph After Pasteur (2016)
was displayed just inside the gallery, on the wall next to the
front desk. The work shows Louis Pasteur—the microbiologist
famous for inventing a standard process for purifying milk and
other food of harmful bacteria—with “milk” (it’s actually white
acrylic paint) spilling from his mouth and splattering his clothes.
Nearby, spanning the entrance to the ground-floor exhibition
space, was Milk Champagne (2016): a curtain made of PVC
panels, akin to the strip doors sometimes used on walk-in coolers,
printed with a faux advertisement for kumis, the ancient Central
Asian beverage traditionally made from fermented mare’s milk.
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
The advertisement, which features an image of three horses
against a field of magnified microbes, ironically calls this drink, in
English, a “traditional Russian remedy,” although it is identified
with those long resisting Russian hegemony. After Pasteur and
Milk Champagne present two types of microbes: bad ones that
have to be eradicated (to render milk safe) and good ones that
work wonders (by enriching milk with probiotics and making
it mildly alcoholic). Microbes can be considered immigrants of
sorts, as they reside in and on hosts, and thus the works implicitly
address a central immigration issue—whether alien “others” are
to be feared and repelled or welcomed and absorbed.
Slavs and Tatars’ works make surprising connections
between disparate signifiers. A suite of United States military
cots are covered by wool blankets that recall Oriental carpets and
Islamic prayer rugs. (US soldiers are a dramatic foreign presence
in “host” Eurasia.) On one blanket, the statement give peace a
chance appears above an image of a bomb containing the absurd
phrase bomb ayran. Ayran is a beloved yogurtlike Turkish drink,
but this statement evokes rabid calls to bomb Iran. Meanwhile, a
convivial milk bar in the gallery dispensed ayran, giving visitors a
taste of the Middle East.
The show also included eight works from the series “Tranny Slavs and Tatars:
Tease (pour Marcel),” 2009–, which consists of vacuum-formed Kwas ist Das, 2016,
vacuum-formed
plastic signs featuring words and phrases in different languages. plastic and acrylic,
One of the examples on view, Kwas ist Das (2016), concerns kvass, 25¼ by 38⅞
inches; at Tanya
a Slavic and Baltic fermented beverage made from rye bread. In Bonakdar.
the work, a German transliteration of the drink’s name (“Quaß”) is
followed by a Cyrillic transliteration of “ist das” (as in the German
question “was ist das?”)—the combined phrases seeming to ask,
what is this weird drink? Addressing fraught issues such as shifting
borders and cross-cultural exchanges in Europe and devastating
conflicts between the Germanic and Slavic worlds, Kwas ist Das,
like so many of Slavs and Tatars’ works, offers a pithy, humorous
take on complex historical and geopolitical matters.
—Gregory Volk
ART IN AMERICA 123
 JONATHAN GARDNER
Casey Kaplan
Two nearly identical young women with bobbed red hair
sit before a large standing mirror in a room carpeted in
jungle green. One of them perches on a divan, holding a
telephone away from her ear. Her white underwear peaks out
from beneath a blue ombré tunic, the slightly indecent pose
resembling the relaxed stances of Balthus’s underage models.
Reclining atop several overlaid rugs on the floor, her twin,
in nothing but stilettos, raises her arm above her head, her
legs carefully concealing her private parts. This scene, shown
in an oil-on-linen painting titled In the Mirror, served as an
appropriate introduction to Jonathan Gardner’s exhibition
at Casey Kaplan—his first solo show in New York—which
comprised ten new works (all 2016).
Jonathan Gardner: Readily apparent in these works is Chicago-based
Salmon Sofa, 2016,
oil on linen, 50 by Gardner’s adoration of past masters, from the Surrealists to
67 inches; at Casey the Chicago Imagists. Gardner (b. 1982), who studied under
Kaplan.
Hairy Who member Jim Nutt at the Art Institute of Chicago,
belongs to a new generation of Midwest artists, including
Keegan Monaghan and Ryan Travis Christian, who either
cannot escape the legacy of Chicago’s most bleeding-edge
group or don’t wish to. Almost every painting here depicts
women in various states of repose and undress—often on
fabulous, Memphis Group–inspired furniture—in bright
domestic worlds populated with agents of reflection and
transparency: mirrors, windows, and twins. Slight varia-
tions between figures hint at the subjects’ differing comfort
with viewing and being viewed, as well as the artist’s role in
capturing them. The girl on the divan in the aforementioned
piece avoids the spectator’s gaze, averting her eyes to the left,
unaware of or unconcerned about her exposed underwear.
124 DECEMBER 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
Her sister is one of the few female subjects in the works
who engages the viewer. She poses willfully, perhaps for the
painter himself, and quite seductively, even with her lopsided,
tacked-on breasts, rendered in a style reminiscent of Léger.
In Waves, a nude splayed out on a sofa, clutching a glass of
wine, appears vaguely bored, as one might during the late
stages of modeling for a painting. A clothed counterpart
in Salmon Sofa, also reclining on a couch, seems blissfully
unaware of onlookers, her face buried in a book.
Two paintings diverge from the odalisque trope,
Sculpture in the Studio and Sculpture Posing. Both works
depict abstract Surrealist sculptures on display in highly
stylized rooms (the environment of the latter work bears
an uncanny resemblance to the Max diner in “Saved by
the Bell”). The inclusion of these unpeopled paintings
reinforces my sense that Gardner does not intentionally
proffer the female nude as a subject of male pleasure but
has, perhaps unwittingly, laid bare the complex dynamics
of objectification. On the single, flat planes of his canvases,
Gardner renders his women as decorations, as carefully
positioned as the furniture. While this representational
tactic may seem unsettling, there have in fact been eras in
art—particularly the Rococo in France—where women
served as important complements to lush interior environ-
ments. Not merely passive petites fleurs, as art historian
Mimi Hellman has argued, these women performed—with
immense skill—elaborately coded social rituals.
I first saw Gardner’s work in a two-person exhibition, with
Vanessa Maltese, at Nicelle Beauchene in 2015. The female fig-
ures in the paintings he showed there were titillating, sure, but
standoffish too. They smoked like chimneys or played ferocious
tennis—their apparent exploitation offset by a certain sauciness
that his new figures lack. Gardner’s strength may be his ability
to translate forms between one painting and another, exercising
the possibilities of composition rather than representation. And
so, I choose to feel no feminist guilt in enjoying these works for
what they are: lovely, decorative, female worlds underpinned by
fanciful plays of perception and observation.
—Julia Wolkoff
CHICAGO
ZAK PREKOP
Shane Campbell
The Brooklyn-based artist Zak Prekop has honed a distinc-
tive style with an undeniably contemporary feel, all while
employing formalist elements that abstractionists have
been using for more than a century. He presented ten of his
latest oils in his fifth solo exhibition at Shane Campbell,
where he first showed in 2008—the same year he received
his master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. It was his debut in an expansive, open-truss space
in the city’s South Loop neighborhood that the gallery
 Among other highlights were Four Pairs and Three
Patterns (White). The former, a black, yellow, and orange
painting on canvas, was among the tidiest compositions in
the show, with a less improvisatory feel than others. In the
latter, carefully aligned white polka dots appear to bump into
irregular red blotches showing through from the other side
of the canvas. Overlying both of these are black blobs, with
fine white outlines, scattered across the light-gray ground.
The playfulness of these juxtapositions of different sets of
Zak Prekop: Three
spots added yet another dimension to Prekop’s technically Patterns (White),
sophisticated updates on abstraction. 2015, oil on muslin,
96 by 64 inches; at
—Kyle MacMillan Shane Campbell.

LOS ANGELES

HENRY TAYLOR
Blum & Poe
Henry Taylor, a stalwart of the Los Angeles art scene, is
known for painting sympathetic portraits of local characters,
family, friends, and celebrities in a loose, gestural manner,
with thick strokes of acrylic quickly marking out details.
The figures tend to stare out from the pictures, producing a
tension in which viewers are made aware of their voyeuristic
gaze. Taylor has also ventured into installation: his 2013
made its main location in 2015. In response to the venue, exhibition at Blum & Poe, for instance, included, among
Prekop showed more large-scale paintings—many measuring other items, a formal dining table set atop a grooved plot of
eight feet tall—than he ever has prior. soil that evoked a plowed field, the combination underscor-
These compositions, made in the past two years, continue ing themes seen in the surrounding paintings, which were
his adventuresome use of color and his emphasis on line as inspired by WPA-era photographs of black farm workers. In
much as form, but they tend to be looser, more layered, and his recent exhibition at the gallery, Taylor demonstrated an
ultimately more complex than their predecessors. Indeed, these expanded installation approach, creating a series of distinct
works don’t photograph well, because their subtleties, such as immersive environments for his paintings. View of Henry
meandering faint lines, are often lost in reproductions. Part of The first space, which featured an earthen floor (the dirt Taylor’s exhibition,
2016, at Blum &
their appeal derives from the particular techniques Prekop uses. dry and gravelly, unlike the tilled soil in the 2013 show), a Poe. Photo Joshua
Among them is painting on the backs of his muslin supports, barren tree, a graffitied cinder-block wall, and a makeshift White.
which results in enigmatic, ghostly effects when the works are
seen from the front. This approach is especially effective in End-
ing Pattern, where black dots and saturated red forms and lines
sit on top of a very pale red that—hovering like a shadow in the
background—has been applied to the verso.
Perhaps even more crucial to these works’ appeal is their
insistent and sometimes startling contrasts—hard and soft
edges, painterly and non-painterly surfaces, amorphous and
exact forms. All these qualities can be found in Edit, essen-
tially a white-on-white painting with traces of black and gray
and with two gestural figure-eight swishes in the bottom half
of the composition. To make this work, Prekop spackled white
paint on the muslin with a palette knife, painted over parts of
those sections with black, and then added more coats of white.
The resulting overlaps and intersections give the composition
a sense of depth. It looks as if there are at least three differ-
ent shades of white, but the artist used the same pigment
throughout. Thin meticulous lines of muslin are visible in
some sections, in an impressive display of draftsmanship.

EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 125

 campsite, suggested a postapocalyptic landscape or, more sim-
ply, the urban wastelands of Los Angeles. On the walls hung
Suzanne Blank Taylor’s portraits and vignettes of everyday life. In one, a man
Redstone: Portal 1, (Haitian, according to the painting’s title) washes windows for
1967, acrylic on
masonite, 44½ by money; in another, a gray-haired woman works on a seated
66 inches; at Jessica man’s braids. The figures exude a calm and grace at odds with
Silverman.
the dereliction of the installation.
White metal gates flanked the entrance to the next space,
which, bearing an Astroturf floor with a sculpture of a swim-
ming pool at the center, was rendered as a residential backyard.
The acid-toned paintings shown here depict figures engaged in
leisurely activities like swimming and lounging in deck chairs. An
adjacent room (also part of the show) screened a black-and-white
video installation, Wizard of the Upper Amazon (2016), by Kahlil
Joseph, a music video director and friend of the artist. Apparently
inspired by an encounter Taylor had with Bob Marley at a concert
in Santa Barbara, Joseph’s video piece shows several men sitting in
a darkened space smoking marijuana. It seemed out of place here,
its connection with the rest of the works unclear.
The final room offered yet another striking scene change,
this one transporting viewers to an artist’s studio. Littered
with stepladders, crates, buckets, and paint tubes, the space
featured numerous paintings hung salon-style or propped
casually against the walls. The piling up of these intimate
portraits made it difficult to appreciate each work individually,
though there was a vitality to the crowded presentation, which
brought together subjects of various races and ranged from
close-up portrayals to more distant views, from small canvases
to monumental ones.
The undoubted highlight of the exhibition was Too Sweet
(2016): a masterful painting of a vagrant begging on the
street—a familiar sight in Los Angeles—that was shown in
the first gallery space. In this painting, telephone wires cut
diagonally across a flat plane of blue sky, and the remaining
elements—a car window, the man’s cardboard sign and spiky
hair—are set at odd and dramatic angles to one another.
Taylor elevates the beggar, turning the figure into a subject
worthy of classical portraiture. The painting, which burns with
intensity and, at eleven feet tall, dwarfed the works around it,
provided a haunting moment in the show. As I made my way
through the subsequent galleries, the image’s lingering power
helped reinforce the sense that Taylor’s installation approach
was an unnecessary conceit. While the strategy might have
provided evocative scenery, it also distracted from a powerful
body of work that needs no additional support.
—Ciara Moloney
SAN FRANCISCO
SUZANNE BLANK REDSTONE
Jessica Silverman
Suzanne Blank Redstone’s exhibition at Jessica Silverman
Gallery highlighted her early, formative explorations of
abstraction. The presentation featured ten acrylic paint-
126 DECEMBER 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
ings (nine on masonite and one on canvas) from the artist’s
“Portals” series (1966–69), as well as a selection of drawn
studies for the works. In this series, Redstone used primary
colors and lines at forty-five- and ninety-degree angles to
construct architectonic compositions whose forms often
make use of axonometric projection—a system of represen-
tation (famously employed by El Lissitzky in his “Prouns”)
in which orthogonal lines are parallel to one another instead
of converging at a vanishing point, creating images that are
divorced from the spectator’s point of view and that appear,
by turns, to recede and to protrude forward. Redstone’s
compositions suggest both interior spaces and openings onto
something beyond.
Now in her seventies, Redstone, who is from Long
Island and has lived and worked in Devon, England, since
1974, is just beginning to receive critical attention; this was
her first solo show in the United States. She produced the
“Portals” while living in New York and Philadelphia shortly
after receiving her BFA from the Rhode Island School
of Design. Included in the exhibition was the 1967 work
After Piero Della Francesca Painting—The Flagellation of
Christ, whose composition is based on that of the fifteenth-
century masterpiece, which she saw in Italy while spending
her senior year in Rome as part of RISD’s senior honors
program. Piero’s painting, which relies on traditional linear
perspective to render a space that is at once logically impos-
sible, since its light sources suggest two different temporal
registers, and highly realistic, provides a clue to the spatial
and semantic instability that likewise informs Redstone’s
“Portals.” Her images “play games with our eye muscles,” as
François Bucher said of Josef Albers’s earlier experiments
with geometric illusion, collected in the artist’s book Despite
Straight Lines, which influenced Redstone’s series.
Yet while Albers’s modernist drawings are spare and
pristine, offering simple and generic, if dynamic, Möbius
strip–like shapes and objects, Redstone’s “Portals” are
idiosyncratic and complex. Intentional “mistakes” and
inconsistencies disrupt her illusions: a transparent grid
becomes solid and opaque in Portal 8 (1968); lines do not
quite meet up at a corner in Portal 1 (1967), transforming
what could be one side of a three-dimensional volume into
a free-floating facade. Her use of color deviates from the
modernist palette, as she tweaks the value and saturation
of primary hues to create pastel yellows and pinks, and deep
shades of oxblood and midnight blue. She further distin-
guishes her brand of formalism by nodding to Surrealism
with Magritte-like clouded skies in Yellow Filter: Diptych
(1966) and Portal 3 (1967), infusing otherwise nonobjective
works with narrative and metaphor.
In a brochure essay for the show, Jenni Sorkin suggests
that Redstone’s belated recognition fits a pattern common
to women artists. But if the gender politics of the art world
have affected the reception of Redstone’s work, her identity
and lived experience as a woman have also surely shaped
its production. Helen Molesworth provides a compelling
framework for such an interpretation in her catalogue essay
for “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” the touring
survey that originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles, in 2007. Though she does not discuss Redstone
per se, Molesworth points to the “ambivalence” with which a
number of female painters of Redstone’s generation, including
Mary Heilmann, Howardena Pindell, and Joan Snyder, have
appropriated modernist techniques and tropes that have been
historically and culturally coded as masculine. Like the artists
Molesworth discusses, Redstone simultaneously deploys the
formal devices of modernist abstraction and distances herself
from them, reinscribing them with a difference that does not
necessarily or simplistically equate with gender, but does lend
originality to this particular body of work.
—Gwen Allen
SÃO PAULO
IVENS MACHADO
Pivô
This concentrated look at the first two decades of
work by Ivens Machado (1942–2015), titled “O Cru do
Mundo” (Raw of the World), opened with a re-creation
of a destroyed, untitled 1982 sculpture that consists of a
reinforced-concrete egg studded with shards of glass and
resting on an armature of iron bars and concrete feet. The
new version was produced for the exhibition by Machado’s
former assistant, who provided crucial knowledge to cura-
tor Kiki Mazzucchelli in the organizing of the show, which
comprised twenty-two pieces mostly from the 1970s and
’80s, many of them absent from institutional circulation
since the time they first appeared. The sculpture refers
to the concrete walls topped with glass shards that often
secure the homes of the wealthy in Brazil. Here, as in other
works, Machado used materials from barriers that perpetu-
ate class conflict in Brazil—that manifest the decisive lines
between private and public space and between rich and
poor. By beginning the show with this sculpture, Maz-
zucchelli seemed to nod to the fact that the tensions that
drove Machado have never really dimmed: his practice
appears today just as relevant as it was then.
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
A sense of indignation ignites the pieces on view.
Machado’s work celebrated interruption in institutional
spaces; he rebelled against the formalism of Concretism
and broke away from Neoconcretism, which began as a
rejection of Concretism in the late 1950s by introducing
more sensualized forms to abstraction. His drawings from
the 1970s imitate ruled notebook paper, but their lines are
jagged, cresting, or intersecting. Among the few late works
in the show was an untitled installation from 2007, in
which a net clamped into sacklike compartments holding
different-colored rocks and minerals descends from a wall
and curls across the floor.
Machado’s sculptures bring together natural materials View of Ivens
and harsh man-made ones. For all their tactility, they can’t Machado’s
exhibition “O Cru
be touched, because they are both dangerous (with their do Muno” (Raw of
incorporation of items like broken glass) and fragile. Pivô’s the World), 2016,
showing (from left)
gallery space is stark, steely, and serpentine, much like the Untitled, 1985,
undulating exterior of the Copan building it is housed in. Versus, 1974, and
Untitled, 2007, at
(Oscar Niemeyer designed the Copan in the 1950s as a Pivô.
building that could provide housing for all classes of Brazil-
ian society.) It can be difficult for work to assert itself at
Pivô, but Machado’s mixture of monumental bravado and
attention to bodily forms makes for an effective symbiosis
with the Copan’s architecture.
Reinforced-concrete phallic forms from the mid-1980s
are dotted with spikes or iron and precariously balanced.
They pointedly demonstrate the paradox of vulnerability
masking strength, and vice versa, that animates Machado’s
practice. Fundamental forms—arches, ropes, pillars, can-
tilevers—pop up again and again in his work, but they are
continually subverted by sensuality or brutality or both. By
breaking the mold of the monument, they become more
vulnerable and legible, and, therefore, more human.
—Alexandra Pechman
ART IN AMERICA 127
View of Victor
Gripp’s mixed-
medium installation
Analogía I, (2da.
versión), 1970,
in the São Paulo
Bienal. Photo Leo
Eloy.
SÃO PAULO BIENAL
SÃO PAULO—Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion
A long brass pipe extends through a window in a second-
floor gallery of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion into the park
outside, where it widens into a large flared bell. The giant
ear trumpet is trained on the leafy top of a palm. Created by
Argentinian artist Eduardo Navarro, Sound Mirror (2016)
asks gallery visitors to listen to the tree. I perched on a stool
and cocked my head toward the earpiece, which delivered
a faint rumble. Was it the stirring of sap in the trunk? The
crawling of bugs? Occasionally I’d hear something like the
ON VIEW murmur of a distant conversation, as if Navarro’s instrument
THROUGH were picking up the tinny back-and-forth of security guards
DEC. 11 on their walkie-talkies.
Curated by Jochen Volz with Gabi Ngcobo, Júlia Rebouças,
Lars Bang Larsen, and Sofia Olascoaga, the thirty-second
edition of the São Paulo Bienal is called “Incerteza Viva.” The
English translation of the title is “Live Uncertainty,” which
evokes an uncertainty that’s alive. It also sounds like a prompt
urging people to endure amid epistemological instability, or
like a cheer—“Long live uncertainty!”—celebrating unknow-
able otherness. In another vitalist facet of the curators’ approach,
the show treats the pavilion’s park location as a link to the
mysteries of nature. Navarro’s site-specific sculpture, for
128 DECEMBER 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
instance, encourages deep listening to life itself, the slow growth
and constant changes of a living thing.
An assembly of works at the ground-floor entrance to the
pavilion tease out the trope of the garden as a model for politics,
where different forms of life coexist in an environment coaxed into
harmony by human intervention. Frans Krajcberg, a Polish artist who
emigrated to Brazil in the 1970s, shows a gathering of slender tree
trunks whose bark has been stripped, wholly or partially, and occa-
sionally replaced with painted bands in hues of fire or charred wood.
Here and there, the trunks have actually been scorched or allowed to
decompose. They stand on bases hewn from logs in various shapes,
some resembling networks of branches or roots. Behind Krajcberg’s
sculptures, in the installation Back to the Fields (2015–16), the young
Scottish artist Ruth Ewan has arranged flowers, plants, gourds, ani-
mal skulls, and other natural objects in a clocklike circle that evokes
cyclical time enveloping the staggered life spans of the things she’s
gathered. Opavivará!—a Rio de Janeiro artist-activist collective that,
at the opening, organized protests against Brazil’s right-wing presi-
dent, Michel Temer, who had the week before seized power in a soft
coup—shows Transnomad (2016), a collection of mobile, interactive
items (cabin, bed, library, karaoke machine) based on the carts used by
vendors and workers in São Paulo to navigate the city, and life.
 On the pavilion’s third floor, notebooks frequently appear,
recalling the naturalist’s process of accumulating information
through consistent observation. Lyle Ashton Harris’s installa-
tion “Once, Once” (2016) comprises large-format scans from
the artist’s journals, diaristic videos, and blown-up Ektachromes
intertwining his personal narrative in the years 1986–98 with
selected public events (e.g., the Black Popular Culture Confer-
ence in New York in 1991). Playing with scale and site in the
series “Cotidiano” (Everyday), 1975–84, Brazil’s Wilma Martins
offers surreal drawings of her domestic surroundings disrupted by
wild animals. Other projects evoke the atmosphere of a labora-
tory. In the late Argentinian artist Victor Grippo’s Analogía I
(1970), mounds of potatoes are wired to a device that measures
the electrical output of their decomposition. Grippo conceived
of the work as an analogy for the collective production of human
consciousness. Nearby is “Hydragrammas” (1978–93), a series of
sculptures by Sonia Andrade, known in her native Brazil primar-
ily as a video artist, consisting of object manipulations like an
unfurling roll of paper installed in a frame and a bandaged canvas
that represent her experimental pursuit of the way things go.
Incompatibilities are inevitable in an exhibition of eighty-
one artists from thirty-three countries. Some artists seem to be
included as a nod to current tastes and trends of the biennial
circuit, rather than an expression of a particular curatorial vision.
This is true for good work (like Hito Steyerl’s video installation,
debuting here, juxtaposing robotics research in the US with
the destruction of a museum of medieval automata in Turkish
Kurdistan) as well as bad (like British artist Heather Phillipson’s
theatrical arrangements of large-print emojis that have nothing
to offer but a cheap and ephemeral sense of relevance).
But the random-seeming insertions aren’t the only false notes
struck. In principle the São Paulo Bienal should be a good plat-
form for art from or about indigenous communities of Brazil and
Latin America. But given the overall theme, the inclusion of such
work here puts viewers—if not the curators—in the embarrassing
position of uninformed ethnographers, with a lack of knowledge
being exploited as an appealing “uncertainty.” Most baffling is the
presence of three documentaries by Leon Hirszman (1937–1987),
a Rio de Janeiro–born filmmaker who went into the rainforest to
record disappearing ways of working. The members of tribes he
focuses on sing songs ennobling labor and hymns of praise to the
cacao trees. As the documentaries are meant to preserve knowledge
of traditional practices and make them available to outsiders, I
wondered what room remains for uncertainty. The works’ position-
ing under such a curatorial rubric seems to exoticize the subjects,
casting them as inhuman others. Happily, Jonathas de Andrade’s
video The Fish (2016) functions as an internal critique of the pater-
nalism suggested by the inclusion of Hirszman. It appears to be a
documentary about traditional fishing practices in the mangroves
of northeastern Brazil, but de Andrade parodies the genre by ask-
ing the fishermen to perform bogus rituals that most memorably
involve tenderly embracing and kissing fresh catches.
The presence of Hirszman’s documentaries serves as a
microcosm of a bigger problem of conflicting agendas. Interna-
tional surveys need to present themselves to funders as projects
of enlightenment, which puts the burden on their curators and
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
education teams to contextualize geographically and historically
disparate works. I know it’s hopeless to complain about wall texts,
but at “Incerteza Viva” the mysteries evoked in the works are
immediately foreclosed by sheer curatorial cant: this work “exposes
the way in which practices and discourses of violence affected
the bodies and the subjectivities in these peoples,” while that one
“challenges imaginaries of the feminine.” It all makes “uncertainty”
sound like an alibi for international curators who look at too much
of everything to really believe in anything. The fate of Navarro’s
Sound Mirror offers a model of how habits of overcoming differ-
ence can thwart an intent to embrace it. The artist wants his audi-
ence to listen to the palm, but I saw several people walk up to the
earpiece and use it as a mouthpiece. Instead of trying to empathize
with another species, they talked at it.
—Brian Droitcour
LONDON Uriel Orlow: The
Crown Against
Mafavuke, 2016,
two-channel video,
URIEL ORLOW 30 minutes, 50
seconds; at The
The Showroom Showroom.
Uriel Orlow is Swiss, and lives and works in London—so
mounting an exhibition about the history and culture of
South Africa, specifically exploring links between plant
ecology and social identity in that country, wasn’t perhaps the
most obvious route for him to take. For sure, his past practice
has focused on how meaning is culturally constructed across
a variety of historical periods and locations. Still, it would
have been interesting had “Mafavuke’s Trial and Other Plant
Stories” provided some insight as to how he arrived at this
particularly remote nexus of colonialism and botany.
That aside, the actual work in the show was fascinat-
ing. The main piece was the video installation The Crown
Against Mafavuke (2016), whose two channels play sequen-
tially across two screens. The first projection dramatizes
the eponymous criminal trial from 1940 in which British
ART IN AMERICA 129
 authorities prosecuted a local inyanga—a native healer or Mandela’s political writings in their tiny prison garden. In
herbalist—for being an unlicensed druggist. Initially, the the sound piece What Plants Were Called Before They Had
case seems a fairly straightforward instance of colonial a Name (2016), indigenous language speakers deliver a
repression: an attempt to stamp out indigenous traditions litany of precolonial plant nomenclature. These are concise,
based on plants, roots, and tree barks, which provided an specific works, but taken together they convey a sense of
alternative to the medicines of white pharmacists. Yet, as conceptual fecundity—of diverse ideas branching out, and
the video makes clear, the issues were far more nuanced. forgotten histories taking root.
In fact, the basis of the charge against Mafavuke was that —Gabriel Coxhead
of dispensing, alongside herbal remedies, treatments he
had mixed using store-bought chemical solutions—using,
in other words, Western medicinal processes. Thus, he was
BERLIN
accused of “untraditional behavior,” his appropriation of
the colonizer’s scientific knowledge being viewed as a kind GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA
of usurpation, a racial transgression—and not just by white
Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für
chemists, but also by his fellow herbalists, one of whom
testified to the impurity of Mafavuke’s hybrid practice. Gegenwart
Orlow’s video is a similarly impure thing. The stag- ON VIEW THROUGH JAN. 15, 2017
ing, the artifice of the courtroom reenactment, is made Gülsün Karamustafa’s work explores the processes of
manifest, with actors assuming multiple roles—we see modernization, political turbulence, and civil rights issues
the prosecution attorney, for instance, changing outfits to that have arisen in Turkish society in a period that spans,
play the defense—and frequently even switching genders among other events, the military coups of 1960, 1971, and
and ethnicities. The point is to sound a note of anti- 1980. Her retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof consists
essentialism, to emphasize the gap between biology and of videos, sculptures, installations, and paintings from the
identity, as a parallel to how pharmaceutical substances, 1970s to today organized thematically, charting her reflec-
irrespective of their origins or native ecology, become tions on subjects ranging from orientalism to transgender
freely adopted by different medical traditions. politics to nation building and domestic aspirations.
The second projection is more open-ended. Handheld- Hailed as one of Turkey’s most influential contemporary
camera footage documents the collection, preparation, and artists, Karamustafa (b. 1946) stands out among peers such
distribution of herbal cures within contemporary South as Ayşe Erkmen and Füsun Onur for her incorporation
Africa, from street vendors gathering wild plants to apoth- of pop culture, folklore, and personal biography into her
ecaries pounding barks into powder. Yet far from being work. Concepts of staging and role play are also significant
quaint, the industry, with its specialist nurseries and mod- features for Karamustafa, who worked as a set designer and
ern educational facilities, often appears as professionalized art director for theater and film. Colorful textile collages,
as any Western enterprise. Only in the final scene, when
an inyanga demonstrates the burning of certain roots to
“expel negative vibes,” is a more spiritual, faith-based aspect
introduced, in a way that initially appears to challenge
rationalist, Western preconceptions of healing, but that
also provokes thoughts about how every medical tradition
perhaps equally depends upon ritual, esoteric elements.
The “other plant stories” of the show’s title were
exhibited within a so-called conceptual herbarium. In
Gülsün
this modular, wall-like structure, Orlow displayed several
Karamustafa: pieces by other artists—mostly pictures by South African
Prison Painting 6, photographers, such as David Goldblatt’s shot of a hedge
1972, mixed
mediums on paper, originally planted by seventeenth-century Dutch settlers
15¾ by 16½ inches; to fence out indigenous peoples—alongside his own works,
at the Hamburger
Bahnhof—Museum which were, unsurprisingly, the standouts. The Fairest Heri-
für Gegenwart. tage (2016) is a video projection overlaying stills from a ’60s
film celebrating the centenary of Cape Town’s botanical
gardens with images of a black female actor, who appears
to mix amid the oversize images of flowers and white
dignitaries, as a kind of retrospective disruption of the rac-
ist pageant. Grey, Green, Gold (2015–16) includes, among
other components, slide-projected texts in which Robben
Island inmates describe how they grew chilies and secreted

130 DECEMBER 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

plastic masks, theatrical costumes, assemblages of ready-
made objects, photocopied articles pinned to walls, and
loosely shot handy-cam videos combine artifice and kitsch
with charged political content.
The sculpture Double Reality (1987/2013) greets visi-
tors to the top floor of the exhibition. A male mannequin,
its head cocked to one side, wears a pale mauve housedress
and is missing an arm. The crippled, androgynous figure
is encased within two open iron cubes (one green and the
other red)—held captive behind invisible walls. Nearby is
the mixed-medium installation Kültür: A Gender Project
from Istanbul (1996), in which two televisions sit on a
table, playing episodes from popular Turkish variety and
talk shows of the 1990s hosted by transvestite actor Seyfi
Dursunoğlu (whose stage name is Huysuz Virjin) or
transgender actress Bülent Ersoy. Both celebrities fought
long-standing censorship battles with the government
for their “deviant” gender-bending activity. Pinned to the
wall behind the TVs are news articles, posters, and essays
attacking or supporting their struggles for expression.
Karamustafa has also focused on the role of marginal-
ized women in contemporary Turkish society in works such
as the installation Objects of Desire/A Suitcase Trade (100
Dollars Limit), 1998. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, waves
of Russian and Balkan women came to Istanbul, many of
them seeking commercial commodities to smuggle back for
sale and offering sex in exchange for money to finance their
purchases. Their dealings became known as “suitcase trading,”
and the phenomenon led to increased human trafficking. For
Objects of Desire, Karamustafa purchased goods from Istanbul
markets and brought them in suitcases to Western cities,
where she presented and sold the goods in gallery perfor-
mances. At the Hamburger Bahnhof, Polaroids of the items
hang in a grid on the wall and a short video documenting the
performance component plays on a small TV nestled in a pile
of plastic flowers, toys, wigs, cheap lingerie, and clothes.
In a darkened room hang Karamustafa’s “Prison
Paintings” (1972–78), a somber series of figurative works
on paper recounting the six months she was incarcerated
in a women’s prison for harboring a political dissident in
her home. Two portraits show forlorn women in isolation,
while others depict people engaged in daily activities, like
eating or sleeping, while clustered together in tight quar-
ters. Karamustafa’s right to travel abroad was taken away
for sixteen years following her imprisonment, constraining
her to her home country.
With July’s attempted coup against President Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime—in which some
three hundred people were killed and thousands injured—
and the mass arrests and extensive purge of the civil service
and other sectors of Turkish society that have occurred
since, it is clear that the social battles Karamustafa has
fought in over the decades are hardly over. Her humanism
resonates loud and clear today, as Turkey cycles back to
right-wing conservatism.
—Arielle Bier
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
View of Renée
RENÉE GREEN Green’s exhibition
“Placing,” 2016,
Nagel Draxler showing (on wall)
Space Poem #5 (Years
In Renée Green’s recent exhibition at Nagel Draxler, a row of & Afters), 2015,
at Nagel Draxler.
twenty-eight small fabric banners hung across two walls facing Photo Simon Vogel.
the gallery’s storefront windows, displaying a mix of bold and
dissonant colors—hot reds and yellows broken up by cooler
blues, greens, and gray. The banners, uniformly rectangular,
were printed with poetic textual fragments, the ideas seeming
to jump from one piece of fabric to the next, due in part to
several examples whose phrasing ended with a conjunction: a
sign reading, after the rumba and, for instance, was followed
by one stating, after the lights and. This sense of a flowing
thought, however, was perpetually disrupted, whether through
the syncopated cadence of the text, the jarring incongruity of
the colors, the doorway between the two walls, or the occasional
intrusion of banners bearing single columns of consecutive
years in the otherwise linguistic sequence.
Combining aspects of continuity and rupture, the
installation served as a relatively immediate illustration of
what Green—borrowing a term from literary theorist
Mary Louise Pratt—has called the “contact zone,” referring
to the encounter staged in her practice between disparate
people, cultures, and events. In the contact zone, discrete
genealogies become entwined. Green drew the various
works in the show, which was titled “Placing,” from a num-
ber of her recent site-specific efforts. The collation of previ-
ous site-specific projects in yet another place is a hallmark
of Green’s practice and speaks to her engagement with site
as (in her words) “a network of operations,” in which her
exhibition history itself, as Miwon Kwon has pointed out,
becomes a kind of site.
Green, who is based in New York and Cambridge,
Massachusetts, has produced installations, videos, and
critical and experimental writing for the past three decades.
The bodies of work on view here covered several areas of
her recent interest, though the exhibition’s key historical
eminence was Viennese modernist architect R.M. Schindler
(1887–1953), in whose former Los Angeles home, which
now houses the MAK Center for Art and Architecture,
she had a show in 2015. She originally produced the ban-
ner installation for that show, and the columns of years
ART IN AMERICA 131
 printed on some of the pieces, it turns out, count down
from 2015 to the year of Schindler’s birth. Another com-
ponent of the Schindler House project that was included
at Nagel Draxler is a set of prints, housed in vitrines, that
reproduces a fragmented version of Schindler’s influential
1912 manifesto calling for an architecture dealing “with
‘space’ as its raw material and with the articulated room as
Lin May Saeed: its product”—an idea that informs the poetics of Green’s
The Liberation installation-environments.
of Animals from
their Cages XVII / Among the other works on view were two significant
Moschophoros (door), videos unrelated to Schindler. One of them, Walking in
2015, tool steel and
lacquer, 77⅛ by 41
NYL (2016), follows from Green’s long-standing interest in
by 2¾ inches; at Lisbon and the broader Portuguese sphere of influence. The
Nicolas Krupp. other, Climates and Paradoxes (2005), considers the centenary
of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity via an excavation of
the history of a high-rise apartment building in Berlin that
Green once lived in and that occupies the former site of the
pacifist organization Bund Neues Vaterland, of which, the
video’s associative narration informs us, Einstein was the
twenty-ninth member.
“Placing” as a whole—with its inward-facing video
monitors and street-facing banners—staged competing
spaces of isolation and sociality, privacy and publicness,
recalling the “contact zones” with which the work itself
is preoccupied. The banners offered a pronounced visual
and textual front to the video works, which were generally
more formally subtle and interior in nature. One banner in heritage. The classical Greek calf bearer appears in one of the
particular, bearing a single-word column alternating between gate works, The Liberation of Animals from their Cages XVII /
the terms begin and again, seemed to provide a memorable Moschophoros (door), 2015. Here, Moschophoros is reimagined
encapsulation of Green’s imaginatively iterative approach to as a masked animal-rights activist—akin to the heroes of
historical consciousness. Matt Miner and Javier Sanchez Aranda’s comic-book series
—Mostafa Heddaya Liberator—thus subverting the calf ’s fate. Another gate
work, this one horizontal and serving as the exhibition’s title
piece, shows St. Jerome removing a thorn from a lion’s paw.
BASEL In contrast to these harmonious scenes, a cartoonlike draw-
ing on canvas, Ankunft der Tiere II (Arrival of the Animals
LIN MAY SAEED II, 2007), pictures several animals taking revenge as they
attack two women clad in fur coats.
Nicolas Krupp
Imprisonment and liberation are recurring themes. A
Lin May Saeed (b. 1973) is as much an animal rights advo- sculpture titled Yahya, perhaps evoking the Islamic prophet
cate as an artist. Despite the progressive perspectives put John the Baptist, consists of a graphite-blackened polystyrene-
forth by scholars like Donna Haraway in her book Compan- and-jute wildcat standing atop a wooden crate—one of
ion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signif icant Otherness several works in which creatures are shown commanding
(2003), empathy with animals remains rare in art. When their cages. In the striking twenty-one-foot-wide Freier
Pierre Huyghe uses dogs and monkeys as performers in his Markt (Free Market, 2007)—the aforementioned painting
exhibitions, the animals’ welfare is not the central issue. As a with cutouts lit from behind—birds in cages and a man, an
society, we rely on animals but are largely—often willfully— elephant, and a camel tethered to heavy weights are por-
ignorant of them as fellow creatures. Saeed approaches the trayed as if being offered for sale. Other creatures around
subject with endearing and persuasive lightness, perhaps to them seem more alien than earthly. The figuration is spare
keep us from turning away from the discomfort it can create. and the palette reduced, producing an airy and diagrammatic
This exhibition, “St. Jerome and the Lion,” ranged from image. The enslavement of animals is depicted as equivalent
wall-hung gatelike pieces with figurative metalwork to to that of humans, and one infers that the abolition of both
painted polystyrene reliefs to mixed-medium sculptures to a is necessary for an enlightened society.
large backlit painting with cutout silhouettes. The motifs in Saeed’s use of “poor” materials like cardboard, cheap
the interspecies scenes depicted throughout derive from the wood, and aluminum foil in many of the sculptures rein-
Western world and the German-born artist’s Jewish-Arab forces the deliberately innocent mood of her tableaux, as

132 DECEMBER 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

if she wants her message to sneak in under the radar. The
works have cross-cultural resonance, underlining common
histories of humans interacting with animals and opening
the door for our interspecies narratives to evolve.
—Aoife Rosenmeyer
TAIPEI
CHOU YU-CHENG
Project Fulfill
Chou Yu-Cheng (b. 1976) has become known for an
administrative brand of conceptualism inspired by European
strategies like relational aesthetics. For the 2010 installation
TOA Lighting, for instance, the Taipei-based artist, who did
his graduate work in Paris, arranged for the private Hong-
gah Museum in Taipei to receive modern fluorescent lights
and sponsorship from the company TOA Lighting. Recently,
however, Chou has abandoned his self-described position
as “intermediary” between art institutions and society at
large in a series of exhibitions, all titled “Chemical Gilding,
Keep Calm, Galvanise, Pray, Gradient, Ashes, Manifestation,
Unequal, Dissatisfaction, Capitalise, Incense Burner, Sur-
vival, Agitation, Hit, Day Light” followed by a number. His
Project Fulfill exhibition was the third show in the sequence.
The title of Chou’s series, with its jumble of terms, could
be viewed as a distant relative of Conceptual language works
like Robert Smithson’s Heap of Language (1966) and Richard
Serra’s Verb List (1967–68). But it comes across more like a
stream-of-consciousness assortment of Instagram hashtags,
with its commingling of personal mantras, artistic materi-
als, and references to income inequality. Indeed, the Project
Fulfill presentation seemed optimized for sharing on social
media, as it brought together photogenic works referencing
such trending topics as urban ruins, Minimalist aesthetics,
and traditional craftsmanship.
Taiwan has seen much political agitation recently,
including the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement and
protests in solidarity with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy
Umbrella Movement. Chou’s exhibition obliquely referenced
this turbulent sociopolitical context through provisional
architectural elements. Visitors entered the show behind
a wooden lattice installed opposite the gallery’s windows;
affixed to the partition was blue mesh of the type that covers
building facades under construction. Metal scaffolding was
erected throughout the space. The most dramatic gesture,
however, lay underfoot: Chou had broken apart the gallery’s
linoleum tile, revealing the original wooden boards under-
neath. Some of the rubble lay in haphazard piles, though
the larger shards were propped up against the walls and,
in a couple instances, covered with gold or copper foil. The
metals recall both traditional Asian gilding and Taiwan’s
natural resources.
Contrasting sharply with the rugged space were two
freestanding sculptural walls whose vocabulary builds upon
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
that of the work in the two earlier “Chemical Gilding . . .”
exhibitions, which were held at Berlin’s Künstlerhaus
Bethanien and Hong Kong’s Edouard Malingue Gallery
and presented paintings and sculptures related to building
materials and economic infographics. Incorporating
elements from those installations, the new pieces are
sculpture-painting hybrids that combine gleaming stainless-
steel disks, corrugated metal panels, gradient images in
pleasing sunset hues, and shelves bearing pieces of fruit and
gold-leafed plaster casts resembling broken pillars. Suggest-
ing at once religious-shrine worship and decay, the humble
offerings on the shelves hover between the purity of the View of Chou
freestanding industrial units and the chaos of the gallery– Yu-Cheng’s
exhibition
as–construction site. “Chemical Gilding,
The “Chemical Gilding . . .” exhibitions mark a new Keep Calm,
Galvanise, Pray,
direction for Chou. If his works were previously understood Gradient, Ashes,
as demonstrating conceptual methodologies like institutional Manifestation,
critique, this group hints at his interest in working more Unequal,
Dissatisfaction,
intuitively. But in jettisoning his procedural, bureaucratic Capitalise, Incense
working methods for free association, Chou risks losing the Burner, Survival,
Agitation, Hit, Day
political potency of his work. Light. III,” 2016, at
—Wendy Vogel Project Fulfill.
Vol. 104, No. 11 (December). Art in America is published monthly except combined June/July by Art Media AiA, LLC, 110
Greene Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012, Tel: (212) 398-1690. Contents Copyright © 2016 by Art in America, and
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134 DECEMBER 2016
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PEOPLE
The Centre Pompidou in Paris has
appointed critic and art historian Jean-PierreHugo Boss Prize, presented by the Solo-
Criqui curator of contemporary art.
Criqui has served as editor in chief of the
institution’s Les Cahiers du Musée national
d’art moderne since 1994.
Abraham Thomas has been named cura-
tor in charge of the Smithsonian American
Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in Washing-
ton, D.C.Thomas was previously director of
Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.
Dexter Wimberly,
2016. Photo
Akintola Hanif.
Dexter Wimberly, former director of Abdallah, and Raha Raissnia each receive
New York’s Independent Curators Inter-
national, has been appointed executive
John Jonas Gruen: director of the Aljira Center for Contem- been chosen as the recipient of the 2017
Klaus Kertess, Water
Mill, N.Y., July 7,
porary Art in Newark, New Jersey.
1996, silver gelatin New York’s Armory Show has hired
print. Courtesy Nicole Berry as deputy director. Prior to her to a contemporary sculptor.
Whitney Museum of appointment, Berry had served as deputy
American Art, New
director of EXPO Chicago since 2011.
York. © Estate of
John Jonas Gruen. Stella Rollig, artistic director of the of the 2016 Joyce Alexander Wein
Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, has been
appointed director of Vienna’s Belvedere
Museum. Rollig replaces Agnes Husslein- $50,000 cash award.
Arco, who was dismissed last August for
alleged financial mismanagement.
Aimee Marcereau DeGalan has been Conferred by the Association for the Inter-
named senior curator of European art at
the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in
Kansas City, Missouri. DeGalan comes to
the museum from the Dayton Art Institute
in Ohio, where she was chief curator and
curator of European art.
The director of Indonesia’s Museum
of Modern and Contemporary Art in
Nusantara since May 2015, Thomas J.
Berghuis has left his post to return to
work as an independent curator, scholar,
and consultant to art institutions. His
successor has not yet been named.
The Institute for Contemporary Art
at Virginia Commonwealth University
in Richmond has appointed Stephanie
Smith as chief curator. Smith previously
held the same title at the Art Gallery of
Ontario in Toronto.
136 DECEMBER 2016
ARTWORLD
AWARDS
Anicka Yi has been awarded the 2016
mon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New
York. The Seoul–born, New York–based
artist receives $100,000 and a solo exhibi-
tion at the Guggenheim Museum in 2017.
The winners of the $1 million Aga
Khan Award for Architecture, given in rec-
ognition of selected projects every three years
by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, include
Marina Tabassum, Zaha Hadid Architects,
and collaborators Diba Tensile Architecture,
Leila Araghian, and Alireza Behzadi.
Elizabeth LeCompte, founding
member and director of the experimental
New York theater company the Wooster
Group, has won the twenty-third annual
Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, worth
approximately $300,000.
Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum has
been awarded the 2017 Abraaj Group Art
Prize of $100,000 to develop a “dream
project” that will be unveiled at Art Dubai.
Shortlisted artists Doa Aly, Sarah Abu
cash prizes of $10,000.
French artist Pierre Huyghe has
Nasher Prize, $100,000 presented by
the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas
The Studio Museum in Harlem
announced Derrick Adams as the winner
Artist Prize. Given annually to an African-
American artist, the honor includes a
French artist Kader Attia is the
recipient of the Prix Marcel Duchamp.
national Diffusion of French Art, the prize
comes with approximately $38,000 and an
exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.
Independent Curators International
awarded Miguel A. Lopez, chief curator
of TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica,
the 2016 Independent Vision Curatorial
Award, which includes a $3,000 prize in
support of new projects.
The Fellows of Contemporary Art in
Los Angeles bestowed the 2018 Curators
Award, worth $60,000, to LA’s Craft and
Folk Art Museum for a solo exhibition of
Egyptian artist Sherin Guirguis’s work.
The grant-giving organization Anony-
mous Was A Woman presented their 2016
awards—unrestricted funds of $25,000 to
female artists over forty—to Shiva Ahmadi,
Laura Anderson Barbata, Tania Bruguera,
Sonya Clark, Simone Leigh, Medrie
MacPhee, Eiko Otake, Rona Pondick,
Lourdes Portillo, and Shinique Smith.
OBITUARIES
Painter Shirley Jaffe, an American ex-pat
who had lived in Paris since 1949, died
on October 29 in Louveciennes, France.
She was ninety-two. Jaffe’s early gestural
abstractions were shown at the Jean Fournier
Gallery, but she soon broke with the Abstract
Expressionists, transitioning to an animated,
colorful geometric style. Her first New York
solo show was at the Holly Solomon Gallery
in New York in 1988. In 1999 the Musée
d’art moderne de Céret mounted a survey of
her paintings. Her final show was at Tibor de
Nagy, New York, in 2015.
Klaus Kertess, whose Bykert Gallery
on Fifty-Seventh Street launched the careers
of artists such as Brice Marden, Chuck
Close, and Dorothea Rockburne, died on
October 8 at age seventy-six. In 1968 New
York magazine declared Bykert the gallery of
the year. From 1983 to 1989, he was adjunct
curator of drawing at the Whitney Museum
in New York, and he curated the museum’s
1995 biennial. In 2009 Kertess received the
Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Schol-
arly Excellence in the Field of American Art
History from the Smithsonian’s Archives of
American Art.
Elaine Lustig Cohen died on October 4
at age eighty-nine. After her first husband
Alvin Lustig’s death in 1955, Cohen took
over his design practice, creating the lettering
for Manhattan’s Seagram Building, signage
for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and
catalogues for clients such as the Jewish
Museum and General Motors. She later
turned to painting and in 1979 was the first
woman to have a solo show at Mary Boone
Gallery.The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian
Design Museum in New York presented a
show of her graphic work in 1995. In 2012
Cohen won an AIGA medal.
—Artworld is compiled by
Julia Wolkoff
Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series

Nov. 8, 2016 – Jan. 7, 2017

This exhibition will be accompanied by
a fully illustrated color catalogue with
an essay by Pellom McDaniels III, Ph.D..
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery represents
the Estate of Benny Andrews (1930-2006).

100 ELEVENTH AVENUE @ 19TH, NEW YORK, NY 10011 • 212.247.0082 • MICHAELROSENFELDART.COM

O R P H E U S

CY
T WO M B LY
December 1, 2016 – February 18, 2017
Gagosian Gallery 4 rue de Ponthieu 75008 Paris +33 1 75 00 05 92 www.gagosian.com
Veil of Orpheus, 1968 (detail), oil-based house paint, lead pencil, and wax crayon on canvas, 90⅛ × 192 inches (229 × 488 cm) © Cy Twombly Foundation