September 12, 2019 – February 23, 2020
2 Columbus Circle, W. 58th St at 8th Ave
New York City, madmuseum.org

“The World of Anna Sui” is exactly what is delivered through the excellent curating and exhibition design that clearly articulates both the process of Sui’s collections, the inspiration behind her oeuvre and the collaborative methods behind the designer’s practice, runway shows and design studio. This exhibition is an adaptation of the 2017 version at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London.

Sui emerged in the late 1980s as an ambitious, driven, and indefatigable figure that deftly navigated the intricacies of the fashion landscape from her early days working for Seventh Avenue sportswear companies. Sui quickly learned the importance of satisfying the retail market by appealing to department store buyers in designing wearable and thus saleable garments. From her early days as a fashion stylist associated with Steven Meisel and Franca Sozzani, she honed her talent of putting together forceful fashion statements by combining clothing and accessories paired with the work of top hair stylists, make-up artists, and models. No less important was her presence on the NYC Club scene, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Likewise, as Sui absorbed trends in cinema culture, avant-garde fashion, as well as Karl Lagerfeld’s robust reshaping of the House of Chanel, those resources fueled her creative process. Against this backdrop, Sui has forged an immersive, highly imaginative style that transfers her aesthetic obsessions culled from contemporary culture into wearable designs for a youth focused market.

The fifth floor gallery at the Museum of Art and Design is dedicated to Sui’s influences highlighting examples of fashion luminaries such as Zandra Rhodes, Norma Kamali, Betsy Johnson, Diana Vreeland, and Biba (as worn by Anita Pallenberg) that are equally notable as highly influential female role models; against this formidable backdrop Sui’s fashion narrative emerges. The trademark Tiffany-style pendant lamps and glossy black Victorian furnishings that serve as fixtures in her boutiques amplify the mood of the Sui universe within the exhibition design. A wall of rock ‘n roll band posters sets the tone for both Sui’s internal soundtrack and that of her fashion shows.

If the spirit of the times stretching from the 1990s to the present could be encapsulated by a fashion exhibition, this presentation hits it out of the park. The show cogently identifies a uniquely American brand of fashion designer that, unlike her European counterparts, is indebted to the functionality of wearable sportswear that channels contemporary culture to a youth market. Sui’s influences – such as the vintage revival, rock ‘n roll, punk, grunge and surf culture – are displayed in imaginative tableaux reflecting a set design befitting each theme. Thus, a lush tropical backdrop completes the presentation of surfer motifs from Spring 2004, 2016 and 2019. Additionally, there are panoramic projections of video footage from associated collections throughout that bring each runway show and fashion moment to life.

Notable are the exhibition portions illustrating the creative process such as mood boards. For example, one board references the recent Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum, including his early commercial shoe illustrations and iconic celebrity paintings, fashion illustrations, various fabric swatches, and passementerie. Video footage of key Sui collaborators such as Pat McGrath (make-up), Garren (hair), and Thomas Miller (studio head), indicate both Sui’s long-term creative relationships and reveals the highly imaginative and collaborative work methods associated with her output.

European designers of this generation such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, Romeo Gigli and John Galliano created fantasy statement-based collections whereby wearablity came as a second thought. Conversely, Sui’s output is grounded in stylistic functionality. Sui notes, in a 1999 profile in the New York Times, in reference to vintage designs, that, “You have to bring it back so that a person can walk down the street and not look like she walked out of a costume epic or a time machine. It’s got to fit how people dress today.”

Sui, as an aficionado of pop music and the associated fashion looks of the punk movement, such as the shock fashion designs of Vivienne Westwood and the anarchistic impresario motives of Malcolm McLaren, nonetheless puts a positive spin on their punk negation and revolt tactics by transforming the rejection of the status quo into bold and fanciful fashions – perhaps as a reflection of American positivism. In a similar vein, the disheveled thrift-store look exemplified by Kurt Cobain and the grunge movement is channeled, not as an affirmation of heroin chic, but rather, by Sui as readymade ensembles for those connected to the grunge aesthetic rather than the actual decadent and ultimately destructive image of the rock star lifestyle.

Sui’s persona and design outlook are best mirrored in the dichotomy of the pirate and the fairy princess as both figures appear in several collections. The pirate ensemble worn by Naomi Campbell (Fall 1992) replicates a swashbuckling outlaw in full seafaring regalia. Sui often transmits the fantasy of the romantic Bloomsbury era with diaphanous florals exuding a nymph-like aura. Likewise, both the Fairytale and Nomadic collections contain several pixie-like designs, such as Icelandic princesses and fairies. Sui’s muse, Keith Richards. is often associated with the pirate archetype with an androgynous bent – that is equally a Sui touchstone. The hyper-feminine girlish tendencies are shot through many of Sui’s collections as in reference to the schoolgirl and surfer girl looks. Her longtime friend and associate Steven Meisel remarks, in a catalog essay, “Anna is extremely feminine and her femininity translates into her fashions… She’s all about dresses – slip dresses, tunic dresses, smock dresses, baby doll dresses.”

The trademark 19th Century Aubrey Beardsley-style Art Nouveau graphics paired with dark gothic Victorian-style and lavender backgrounds appear in Sui’s interior store designs as well as in the packaging of her cosmetics and fragrances. Sui, throughout her career, embraces rigorous branding associated with these visual elements, which evolved over the years through her serious interest in graphic design, interiors, flea markets, and thrift shops.

Also notable within the presentation of “The World of Anna Sui” is the robust public programming that accompanies the exhibition. Panel discussions with fashion world luminaries such as hair stylist Garren and make-up artist Pat McGrath bring the creative influencers to the stage. Likewise, screenings of films such as Marie Antoinette (2006), including a conversation with director Sofia Coppola, showcase the visual media that had lasting impact on Sui’s designs while highlighting key contemporary cultural figures within a dynamic public forum.

Lastly, Sui’s runway productions – which began in 1991, jump-started by model friends Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington – added a supercharged endorsement to her debut show situated in an offbeat Chelsea warehouse. Later runway incarnations, such as a performance by rock band Elastica “in concert” with models strutting the stage perimeter, demonstrate her dedication to indie rock and the performative gesture within a fashion context.

One need not be a bohemian, a rock star, a surfer girl or a hippy to dress the part and touch the magic all the while going about one’s everyday life. Sui designs enable an idealized fantasy version of oneself all the while navigating a contemporary urban landscape, a suburban environment, or a rural outpost. One can dress in a Sui design, and thereby transform into version of a Sui fashion trope, be it a rock star, boho, punk, or a surfer chick. Once engulfed in the magical world of Anna Sui, one finds all that is cool and edgy yet safe to wear both at home and at work. Creative and alternative lifestyles embody fashion looks, and Sui translates such visual statements magically into classic wearable designs.

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November 12, 2018 – March 31, 2019
99 Gansevoort Street, between 10th Avenue and Washington Street
New York City, whitney.org

Eighteenth century commentators made a nice distinction between ‘celebrity’ which they defined as fleeting achieved during but not outlasting one’s lifetime, and fame (fama) as a noble and fitting reward for great works, usually military valor or literary achievement, which would inspire posterity to virtuous emulation. – James Delbourgo

Andy Warhol was obsessed with celebrity and that obsession undoubtedly brought him fame in the 18th-century sense of the term. He also coined the ubiquitous phrase, that “in the future, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” which resonates sharply in the current era of reality TV and social media. The exhibition’s first nod to the famous and the celebrated is the Lobby Gallery where a salon-style hang of Warhol’s trademark portraits are displayed from ceiling to floor. These paintings of the wealthy and the celebrated serve as modern versions of traditional oil painting portraiture, albeit constructed using photography-based silk-screen methods.

Warhol’s artist’s proofs were used to create a sort of pantheon of the 20 Century. Figures such as Mick Jagger, Lee Radziwell, Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar form a tableau of such luminaries that sat for portraits in the Factory. Warhol’s self-professed “Business Art,” part of which was portrait production, lined his coffers, allowing him to advance his experimental and avant-garde projects in unremunerative areas such as film, video, music and journalism.

Warhol’s collection of leading figures from the 1970s and ‘80s recalls the 19th-century project of Nadar who captured images of “Le tout-Paris” in his legendary early photo studio. In a direct antecedent to Warhol’s “Interview” magazine, Nadar envisioned a type of subscription service to circulate images of leading figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Eugene Delacroix, Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola. The portraits situated in the Lobby Gallery are single source elements of final artworks that were usually comprised multiple image panels. Thus, the Ground Floor gallery stands in as an image feed of Warhol’s Factory portrait production.

The exhibition opened on the fifth floor with a large camouflage painting and a vitrine with contents from one of Warhol’s Time Capsules (1973-74). Warhol filled and then sealed boxes with various objects from his Factory. The example here included a drawing of a chair by Yves Saint Laurent, a Lou Reed album, a book on Marcel Duchamp, a postcard of the Empire State Building, The Beatles coloring book, a Cy Twombly catalog, and a variety of personal letters: a snapshot of the denoted time period through detritus and ephemera. There is a random quality to the selection of the packed contents as each box reveals an archeological object-based narrative.

The “Time Capsule” formula seems to have been the inspiration for an exhibition that crams in voluminous quantities of material without a strong organizing arc. The temptation to amass a profusion of artworks was taken to an extreme often at the expense of thoughtful display strategies and attention to audience viewing experience. An exhibition itself should never be source material for a catalogue, but unfortunately this show often falls into just such a trap. That said, the resultant publication is highly comprehensive and will serve as an invaluable scholarly resource for generations to come.

One fifth floor gallery was packed with iconic works such as 32 of his Campbells’ Soup Cans installed as a grid. While this grid is the traditional Museum of Modern Art hang with which museum goers are now quite familiar, one wonder why, for this outing, the curators chose not revisit the original Ferus Gallery (1962) horizontal shelf installation? The Brillo Boxes are massed in a crowded corner. Coke Bottles, S & H Green Stamps and One Dollar Bills with Dance Diagram hung on the horizontal in the center of the gallery demonstrate a glut of famous Warhol artworks. Groupings of such well known pieces struck this viewer as crowded and unimaginative.

In an adjacent gallery, Warhol’s Bull Wallpaper served as a backdrop for several renditions of his Flower Painting. This doubled-up presentation is justified by the fact that Warhol intended for artwork to be hung on the wallpaper artwork, as is noted in accompanying wall text. The opportunity to include Silver Clouds, the mylar pillow balloon installation ,that would have created an interactive environment, is lost by the serial repetition of Flower Paintings groupings in yet another curatorial insistence on creating their own installation art.

Early works of commercial illustrations were situated in a vitrine in an attempt to perhaps separate them from Warhol’s fine art practice. The shoe drawings as gifted to various influencers highlights Warhol’s early business acumen. The ephemera in the wall vitrine offered highly informative material on Warhol’s commercial art career. However, the disastrous early Living Room (1948) oil painting adds little to his artistic legacy. There was too much emphasis on early works: Two walls of very similar drawings was particularly superfluous.

The gallery dedicated to Warhol’s use of mass media images with corresponding drawings powerfully revealed his inventive image selection and highly skilled painting process. The impact of comic book figures such as Dick Tracy and Superman stand in as potent examples of the radicality of Pop Art’s High/Low innovations.  The drawings based on news events reveal careful studies that again demonstrate both Warhol’s fascination with mass media content and his skilled draftsmanship.

The elegiac paintings Mustard Race Riot, Lavender Death (Rosenberg execution) and the haunting Electric Chair are potent political statements while the Disaster series, that includes works such as Tuna Fish Disaster, Suicide Fallen Body and Orange Car Crash are a critical commentary on print journalism and its sensationalist depictions of tragic human events. However, the distinction between clearly political images and the sensational media topics is something the curators did not lucidly demarcate.

A strength of the exhibition was the compilation of video footage on the second floor with a bank of six TV monitors displaying highlights ranging from Factory footage (David Bowie visits) to Interview TV segments (Brooke Shield, male models). The archival quality of the presentation managed to bring the Factory era to life. Another research point presented weel was Warhol’s collaborative projects with artists such as Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring and most notably Jean-Michel Basquiat. Likewise, Gallery 3 was stunning as the large-scale works were given ample space to breath. The pairing of two abstract Rorschach paintings – the monumental Last Supper with Camouflage and White Mona Lisa – offered a model of exactly the kind of thoughtful, spare installation that allows artworks to resonate within an impressive gallery space lacking in earlier phases of this exhibition.

Overall, Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again brought out everything and the kitchen sink in a profession of the “more is more” ethos. There was a lack of focus on the political content of Warhol’s practice and the social radicality of the Factory’s highly experimental environment. At the Factory, Warhol pioneered highly collaborative production practices, fusing fashion, music, journalism, and filmmaking and fostering a cult-like entourage of downtown denizens – an aspect that is not adequately expressed in this exhibition.

Warhol created a “world apart” that reflects an era when social worlds collided and sometimes merged in venues such as the Factory and later Studio 54 where the artist and his entourage were regulars. Equally, he created an alternative environment, specifically as a gay male figure, not unlike Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Joel-Peter Witkin. Warhol surrounded himself with a family-like cohort of “Superstars” and Factory workers that operated in opposition to the routine status quo of traditional white male dominated workplaces.

The social environment of Warhol’s cultural space reflects a High/Low dichotomy that is often assigned only to the visual language of the Pop Art movement. Warhol radically extended this phenomenon into social space in both his portrait and interview subjects, the Factory social milieu, and the contents of his numerous Time Capsules. This essential component to the artist’s legacy is lost under the weight of an overabundance of artworks and archival materials that comprised – and compromised – an overly encyclopedic retrospective.

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November 2, 2018 to March 3, 2019
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
New York City, jewishmuseum.org

Martha Rosler consistently challenges power structures, particularly in relationship to class and gender. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, power passes thorough the powerful as well as through the powerless. Her long overdue New York City mid-career retrospective embraced the breadth of her oeuvre with works that ranged from sculpture, installation, video and photography. It should be said, however, that while opening wall text states that the show is in close chronological order, the visitor’s path is not clearly defined, nor is chronology followed.

One gallery, for instance, dedicated to text related pieces contains works from 2006 to the present. “Reading Hannah Arendt” (2006) is an installation consisting of clear plastic ceiling-to-floor panels with large black text excerpts from Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” set up as a maze-like structure. Opposite is a wall of large-scale photographs of bookshelf groupings with titles such as “Debt,” “The “Anatomy of Fascism” and “What Really Happened in the 1960s.” These book images range from 2008 – 2018 and serve as an archive of Rosler’s artistic and pedagogic research. The photographs pay homage to the book form, employing a constructed documentary strategy. The labyrinth piece is difficult to navigate or make sense of in a gallery setting. The book photographs do inspire one to take notes for future reading, underscoring the theoretical and historical foundation of Rosler’s artistic practice.

It is evident that Rosler occupies a feminist position in many of her works. Vital Statistics Simply Obtained (1975), for example, a video depicting the artist’s body being measured in a regimented manner, equates raw statistical data to an idealized female body type. This objectification highlights unequal power relationships within gender politics. However, to label Rosler solely as a feminist artist delimits her prescient and powerful contributions to both art history and theoretical discourse. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974), for example, challenges the photographic gaze of the social documentary genre and the asserts the force of Conceptual Art strategies.

The groundbreaking work of well-meaning historical figures such as Jacob Riis, Louis Hine and Dorothea Lange, at times, debase the lower-class subjects through the photographic gaze. Rosler critiques the photographer’s power position by substituting cliché images of skid row alcoholics with images where there is a deliberate absence of human subjects, deliberately frustrating viewer expectations. The unpeopled spaces are paired with derogatory descriptive terms of that malign the individuals and their inebriated state with words in two different font styles. Pejorative terms such as “drunk, derelict, bum” questions the objective stance of the social documentary project that at once brings attention to social ills while concurrently objectifying subjects that lack social agency. In an ironic historical twist, the current gentrified Bowery renders the piece an historic document much like Atget’s photographs of Old Paris. This theme reoccurs in Rosler’s recent project that records the transformation of her Brooklyn neighborhood from a working-class community to a bourgeois enclave.

Greenpoint Project (2011), the city exemplifies the role of gentrification in the rise in income inequality. She photographs and interviews numerous local merchants creating photographic portraits that are juxtaposed with quotes from the interviewees. As an inverse to the word text of The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems the subjects here speak for themselves. One notable tension within the artwork is the artist Carlos Valencia, a barista at Five Leaves restaurant. His words reveal a conflicted role as he states that he is a “Friend of the Owner, not an Owner.”

Rosler’s landmark early video work, Semiotics of the Kitchen, (1975), inadequately displayed on a small television monitor in the corner of a gallery, parodies TV cooking shows and essentialist definitions of women’s domestic roles. Rosler wryly invokes semiotic theory to explode the limitations of such social constructs. In this black and white video, the artist boldly addresses the camera reciting the alphabet, pairing each letter with a corresponding kitchen implement.

The elegiac series, Bringing the War Home (1967-72) utilizes home decor magazine editorials combined with Vietnam War news images in a photomontage format. Rosler reproduces the phenomenon of the horrors of this unpopular war entering American homes through the mass media in using those same print materials in a remarkable example of both image appropriation and recontextualization. Notable is the photograph of Pat Nixon within an ornate interior, dressed in a ballgown, where in a picture frame on the wall of the White House drawing room Rosler inserts the image of a war victim.

Overall, this exhibition rightfully situates Rosler as a standout visionary figure who perpetually interrogates the social and political dynamics of contemporary culture. She often highlights the manner in which the mass media manipulates and reinforces social norms by utilizing the same source material to bear witness to social and political inequality. In an age of the #metoo movement, Time’s Up and gross economic inequality with the rise of the 1% “Martha Rosler: Irrespective” speaks volumes to the perils of our current state of affairs. Rosler forcefully challenges viewers to adopt an activist consciousness.

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KAREN E. JONES
You began this project well before the watershed #MeToo movement in which numerous powerful American men, particularly in the media and entertainment fields, have faced allegations and repercussions for sexual harassment and rape. Can you pinpoint the inspiration for addressing the topic in an exhibition? Have you found yourself framing the exhibition differently within the current cultural context?

MONIKA FABIJANSKA
The inspiration for the show came in December 2014 when Carolee Thea prepared a slide show of her artworks for me. Among them I saw Sabine Woman (1991) – a life-sized installation rendering a drastic gang rape scene. I remember coming back home wondering why I had never seen a work like that. Because I am particularly sensitive to censorship, I immediately thought that since I have not, there probably were other works by women about rape. I was right. But I could not guess what would become apparent within a mere couple of hours: a rudimentary internet search made it clear that the subject has been addressed by a majority of famous women artists, internationally. Its omnipresence meant that this would also be true for all women artists, whether more or less accomplished, and probably across time. I was stunned by the contrast between the number and quality of works about rape and almost complete absence of their discussion in literature.

Further development of my project was guided by people’s reactions to my interest in researching art on rape. At the beginning of 2015, they usually showed surprise, to put it diplomatically. Whether it was disgust or disbelief, it reassured me that the subject was worth inquiry. When I mentioned the idea of an exhibition, a common expectation was that it would be international and include artists from countries where “they rape,” like India. Such reactions made me aware of how strong the taboo was in the American society, and I decided that I had to make an American exhibition. The contrast between the silence around the subject and rape statistics was mirrored by the chasm between the silence of art exhibitions, art history and critique and the omnipresence of the subject in women’s art.

You have chosen 1968 as a starting point, and yet, the exhibition opens with Kathleen Gilje’s piece Susanna and the Elders, Restored with X-Ray that refers to Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1610 painting. Why bracket the subject within the last 50 years?

You would need a whole museum to give full justice to the subject. Yoko Ono’s 1968 film “RAPE” belongs to the earliest works on rape by contemporary women artists, and even predates them by a few years. The subject can easily be traced back to the early 1970s. It is more difficult to trace it before women gained broader access to the art world, and will probably be impossible to find more than a few artworks prior to the mid-19th century, except for works that used allegorical themes and were painted by the few women artists active then, like Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi (1610). Timoclea pushing the Thracian captain who raped her into a well by Elisabetta Sirani (1659) is more interesting as a type of representation and I would like to find historical works by women, at least drawings, representing rape realistically, and reactions to its impact on their psyche and sexuality. This, not “histories,” is the focus of works by contemporary women artists. I never intended to present the works chronologically within the exhibition, so Yoko Ono’s film does not open the display. Kathleen Gilje’s Susanna and the Elders, Restored (1998/2018) is the opening artwork because the exhibition is about iconography of rape, not about rape per se. It is not a selection of artworks on rape, which I found particularly compelling or formally interesting, but an attempt to analyze a representative sample of iconography of rape in women’s art. I marked this intention by opening the exhibition with a work that is a critique of the male iconography of rape in the history of art.

In your research, where did you identify the earliest representations of rape in both literature and visual culture?

I focused on how contemporary (mostly American) women artists represent the subject. At first, because rape is taboo, one might think that we have never talked or represented rape visually, but in the next moment the realization comes that rape is omnipresent in human culture, and therefore its descriptions and – to a lesser degree – visualizations. You find them wherever you look for the roots of our culture: in the Greek mythology, and in the Bible. In her book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (NYC 1975) Susan Brownmiller argues that the biological possibility of rape is the basis of the socio-economic relations of men and women, and that a marriage contract, according to which a woman belongs to a man, was just a safer way to secure a woman from another man than her abduction. Abduction of Sabines is one of the founding myths of Rome!

But as “heroic” rape is present in the dominant historical narrative, that of mythology and holy scriptures, and created by men, its different image is preserved in fables which were told by women and meant to be cautionary tales, like Little Red Riding Hood which early versions can be traced to the 10th century. When it was eventually written down and published by men (Charles Perrault in the 17th century and Brothers Grimm in the 19th c.), the girl was stripped of agency and wit, and the concepts of guilt, punishment and a male savior (the hunter) appeared instead, not to mention that rape was no longer discussed openly but disguised as wolf eating the girl.

When it comes to visuals, I don’t know what representation can be called the earliest. The context for my exhibition are numerous representations in painting and sculpture, which were popular in Western classical painting from the Renaissance through the 19th and even 20th century: Abduction of the Sabines, Rape of Persephone, Rape of Europa, Zeus and Leda, Susana and the Elders. I guess cave paintings also show scenes of rape. But what would interest me would be scholarly research of early representations by women, besides the era of Gentileschi or Sirani. Looking at modern and contemporary art is extremely interesting, too. The earliest 20th century depiction of rape by a woman artist I know of is the exquisite 1907 engraving by Käthe Kollwitz. I am sure there are more. We were made to believe that rape is an isolated event, a rare crime, happening when we come home too late, in a skirt too short. Rape happens all the time and everywhere. Women’s knowledge of that fact and its sharing, including art on rape, has been censored by patriarchal society. As a result, it is hidden in plain sight.

Why did you select Susan Brownmiller’s term the “heroic rape” that locates the glamorization and justification of rape? You upend the term as your title. Can you unpack the term and discuss why you selected it?

Brownmiller’s “heroic rape” refers to “the direct connection between manhood, achievement, conquest, and rape.” In art, the male narrative of the conquest includes a dramatic struggle ending with romantic submission. Also, the focus on action is characteristic of the male perspective as shown in the history of literature and film. One does not have to look for historical representations to find it. A 2017 film Wind River, ironically distributed by the Weinstein Company (in October 2017 its producers cut relations with TWC), which seems progressive because it draws our attention to the atrocities happening on Indian reservations, shows the raped woman only twice: running through frozen fields and lying dead in a pool of blood during the captions, and during the rape scene reconstruction as part of explanation of what happened. It is not a film about rape of a woman. It is yet another film of a man in pursuit of another man; “a good man” chasing “a villain.”

What makes works by women radically different from those by men is the focus not on the action or drama, but on the lasting psychological devastation of the victim: her suffering, shame, silence, and loneliness. Upending Brownmiller’s term seemed right for the title of the exhibition, which was intended to show how women narrate the rape of women, and call attention to the history of rape misrepresentation in culture. The adjective “heroic” used by Brownmiller is descriptive in the context of historical representation of wars, but already contains more than a hint of sarcasm. I planned an exhibition analyzing iconography of women’s art and I needed to illuminate the counterpart: the existing and charted iconography created by men.

Why did you decide to focus on women artists and the US? Could you see the exhibition expanded to include international artists?

The exhibition was originally planned as international. The reactions of its potential audience made me limit its scope. I am referring to my conversations from the beginning of 2015, before the #metoo movement was formed. I realized that New Yorkers often thought rape occurred predominantly in some “peripheries,” whether geographical or social; it happened elsewhere, but not “here,” not “to us.” By that time I knew most of American women artists made a work on rape, and I also knew that one in six American women has been raped. I thought that addressing our society was crucial: what happens now and here, in Manhattan, in the Bronx, in Ohio. There was also a problem of representation. Based on what criteria would I choose international artists? India but why not Sri Lanka? A Swedish artist because Sweden has one of the highest rape statistics, but only because its definition of rape is truly broad? Such a project risked finger pointing unless it were huge in scope and truly representative of many cultures.

I am fully aware of the fact that not only women are raped and I refer to it in the catalog. Men are raped, too, and quite a few men told me their stories during my work on the exhibition. LGBT people are raped. One may also think of a separate project about sexual abuse of children. A responsible exhibition cannot be about everything. Men’s rape is much more of a cultural taboo than the rape of women, and it requires a separate scholarly research of its specificity. Same with rape of LGBT people. I did not curate an exhibition about rape in general but specifically focused on women’s art.

Could you discuss the various artistic strategies in the exhibition, as there’s a wide range of practices here. For example, the abstract sculptural works of both Sonya Kelliher-Combs and Senga Nengudi to the document-based conceptual work of Susanne Lacy’s Three Days in May? Was it a conscious decision to have various working methods represented?

In order to curate a representative survey of some twenty works capable of representing hundreds that I found, the curatorial selection takes into account the following five elements at the same time: 1) three generations of artists; 2) ethnic diversity (artists of American Indian, African American, and Asian origins, and Latinas); 3) all visual mediums (from drawing to social practice); 4) themes that inspired artists to address rape (from fairy tales to rape as a war crime); and 5) varied visual languages they chose (from symbolism to performative re-enactment).The exhibition also explores themes that inspired artists to treat rape, such as trauma, domestic violence, child abuse, media coverage of sensational cases, college rape culture, the role of social media, criminal trials and responsibility of public institutions, rape in the military, rape as a war crime, slavery, rape epidemic on Indian reservations, women trafficking, rape in public and political discourse, and visual and literary tradition, especially art history and fairy tales. Often, several themes inspire one artwork.

The Un-Heroic Act examines remarkably varied visual languages artists employed in order to evoke feelings as contrasting as empathy and shock. Some employ realism (Ada Trillo, Carolee Thea), others symbolism (Sonya Kelliher Combs, Angela Fraleigh), sometimes verging on abstraction (Senga Nengudi). Some aim for poetic beauty in opposition to the act itself, in an attempt not to victimize again (Roya Amigh, Angela Fraleigh). Some avoid depicting the female body altogether and use text instead (Guerrilla Girls, Andrea Bowers, Bang Geul Han, Guerrilla Girls BroadBand, to some extent Jenny Holzer), others contest classical iconography through subversive representation (Kathleen Gilje, Kara Walker, Natalie Frank, Roya Amigh), or complicate the relation between reality and fiction in para-documentary treatment (Yoko Ono, Lynn Hershman Leeson). Yet others employ performative re-enactment (Ana Mendieta, Jennifer Karady, Naima Ramos-Chapman), activism (Suzanne Lacy, Guerrilla Girls, Andrea Bowers, Guerrilla Girls BroadBand), or conceptual instruction works (Yoko Ono). The artistic language of expression does not follow any specific theme which provided inspiration. Rather, expression follows the artist’s intention: to shock, to remember, to meditate, to heal, to express anger and pain.

It seems that you situate rape as a symptom of violence against and oppression of women, whether the psychological harassment and invasion of personal space in Yoko Ono’s “RAPE,” the brutal performance in Ana Mendiata’s Untitled (Rape Scene) — based on an actual event — orthe trauma and aftermath addressed in Naima Ramos-Chapman’s film, And Nothing Happened.

Each of the works you mention represents its time, but also the artist’s intention and cultural experience. For example, even though both Mendieta’s and Ramos-Chapman employed re-performance, Mendieta decided to re-perform the harrowing scene of rape with an intention of shocking her audience (a set of photographs documenting a performance Rape Scene, 1973/2001), while Ramos-Chapman re-performs her living with and battling trauma, clearly with an intention to win, and to give example to other young women to speak out (a film And Nothing Happened, 2016). Rarely a millennial artist represents a vulnerable female body avoiding re-victimization. Naima Ramos-Chapman’s work expresses the voice of the generation that finally speaks about rape, female sexuality and psyche openly, and despite pain, asserts that voice.
Ono’s work is an exception in the exhibition because the artist most probably considered it a metaphor, where stalking a woman and a threat of rape were to portray abuse of power and tensions in contemporary world, from international relations in the era of Vietnam, to the artist’s own experience of being stalked by the media. Ono’s conceptual score for the film said that camera may also chase men. Nevertheless, “RAPE” is also a great work on abuse of women.

What has been the reception and discourse within the university community? And what kind of critical reception are you getting?

I am independent curator but I volunteered to guide many John Jay College student groups through the exhibition. The exhibition makes a strong impression on them. I received several letters from John Jay professors praising the exhibition and thanking me for both addressing the subject, and for selecting renowned artists and bringing their art to this community. They appreciated guided walks and gallery labels. I was told that the gallery had many more requests for tours of the exhibition than usually. It is important to mention that a majority of the John Jay student population does not have much interaction with art and they do not visit museums. They have professional knowledge though on many subjects covered by the exhibition, like domestic violence or trafficking women and the exhibition certainly opened their minds to new language of expression. The College of Criminal Justice has been a great venue for this exhibition.

The exhibition has, so far, been very favorably reviewed in the press. Jillian Steinhauer in The New York Times not only praised it but picked exactly what I wanted the audience to understand, through careful presentation of varied iconography: that rape has been a major subject for women artists. The review also emphasized the historical aspects of women’s art and of the subject of rape. I couldn’t dream of a review closer to my intentions for the exhibition. There were also excellent reviews in The Brooklyn Rail and Art Papers, as well as interviews in the Hyperallergic podcast and Bomb.

How do you see the discourse on rape expanded by activist practices such as the Guerrilla Girls artworks in the exhibition? Do you think that their practices affect change?

No ultimate goal of activism is ever achieved. Our lives, both in the singularity of our individual biographies, and our collective life, are woven of doing, not of having things done. No single exhibition or artwork can make a change. But together they do. As part of the project, Guerrilla Girls Broadband organized a workshop with John Jay students, which resulted in two anti-rape culture posters. In order to make them, students first needed to learn the language of expression based on facts. I observed them working on it, and it was obvious what an amazing experience it was for these young women. Once students posted them on the campus, they obviously received mixed reception and had to learn and practice the language to explain and defend their project.

If you think of Suzanne Lacy enormous projects involving thousands of people, they definitely bring change. Among her nine projects devoted to rape, Three Weeks in May (1977), documentation of which we show in the exhibition, was re-performed at the invitation of the Getty in 2012 and the comparison of its many elements, reception, and impact in 1977 and 2012 is telling. We will never eliminate rape but the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Police Department and local media changed their attitude, developed the language to name rape, and mechanisms to fight it. It is impossible to prove what percentage of this change can be credited to Lacy’s project. But I strongly believe she had an impact. For example, as part of her 1977 project she organized a dinner for the City officers to discuss the language used in relation to rape. Three Weeks in May was one of the founding projects of social practice.

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July 13 to September 30, 2018
99 Gansevoort Street, between 10th Avenue and Washington Street
New York City, whitney.org

In a counter-intuitive approach, the exhibition “David Wojnarorwicz: History Keeps Me Up at Night” opens with the photographic series, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” (1979) a group of black and white photographs. Wojnarowicz disguises himself as the poet Arthur Rimbaud with a mask of his own creation and takes it on a journey through New York City. “I fashioned a mask of Rimbaud and brought him on a narrative trail – the places I haunted when living on the streets as a teen as well as the industrial sites that were like technological meadows where I could place New York City at my back,” he wrote.

These various locations that have drastically transformed over the past twenty-five years. Ironically, Rimbaud/ Wojnarowicz finds himself at several sites near to the current Whitney Museum, an area that was formerly operational in its now quaint name, the Meatpacking District, as well as a pick up zone for transvestite prostitution. The nearby piers were once a gay male sex destination. Other rapidly disappearing haunts, such a Greek coffee shop, graffitied interiors of subway cars, and an extremely seedy Times Square, are remnants of a lost cityscape. One notable image has him by a warehouse wall graffitied with the phrase “The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated.” Central to the installation of the series is the actual Rimbaud mask, encased in glass on a vertical axis, mounted on a pedestal. The mask, to some extent like the series itself, begs the question: artwork or archival object?

In the same gallery there are images that include other iconic gay literary figures, William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet amongst them, in works such as the photographic collage Untitled (Genet After Brassaï) (1979). The opening exhibition wall text is juxtaposed with a large-scale self-portrait of the artist that combines photography, painting and collage. The self-portrait contains leitmotifs such as maps, flames, globes, clocks and a fleeing man engulfed in flames that appear in numerous artworks throughout the exhibition.

Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre encompasses multiple media and genres: painting, sculpture, drawings, photography, installation and performance, as well as film, music, and literature. The stunning Gallery 7 contains the four remarkable paintings from his series on the four elements first exhibited at Gracie Mansion Gallery in the East Village in 1987. The layered imagery is powerfully compelling, bringing the viewer into multiple visual and symbolic readings of earth, air, water and fire.

Wojnarowicz’s prolific output is well organized by the curators in bringing together disparate works from his curtailed career (he died in 1992, aged 37). The later flower series (1990) includes the mixed media painting History Keeps Me Up at Night, revealing another innovation of the artist in terms of layering techniques. The series consists of painted (phallic) flowers with square cutouts and red yarn sutured in small black and white photographs. The floral images are overlaid with text blocks of the artist’s memoirist writings silk-screened onto the picture plane, the texts often referencing the AIDS crisis, his own activism, and personal, everyday experience. Sculptures of reconfigured globes are exhibited in the same gallery linking personal reflection to a geo-political context. Notable is Wojnarowicz’ use of black and white photography in multiple images that are individually framed within a single composition such as Spirituality (For Paul Thek) (1988-89).

Another gallery is filled with truncated bust-like sculptures both painted and/or covered with various materials such as maps, masks, collage, and paper currency. Despite working in the heyday of post-modern appropriation, Wojnarowicz consistently avoided seductively slick advertising materials, preferring, for example, to utilize cheap silk-screen posters that advertise food sale specials in grocery stores windows. These crude, ephemeral advertising posters serve as canvases on which the artist paints graphic stenciled images.

A prescient figure in his use of photography and innovative painting techniques, Wojnarowicz is all the more remarkable for harnessing this creativity to the pressing issue of the AIDS crisis, addressing the horrors of living with the disease and demanding political action. In an elaborate installation, The Lazaretto (1990), a collaboration with artist Paul Marcus AIDS organizations were invited to distribute informational materials in the gallery alongside the sculptural tableaux. This installation, however, and the activism it incorporated, isn’t reconstructed for the Whitney show. Similarly absent is Wojnarowicz’s literary contribution: a vitrine or reading area could have represented such works as “Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration,” “Memories that Smell Like Gasoline” and “7 Miles a Second,” a prescient graphic novel created in collaboration with James Romberger & Marguerite Van Cook

This exhibition demonstrates the extreme depth and breadth of this artist’s work while concurrently leaving the viewer with the sense of profound loss. It is a loss of an extremely talented young artist and the work that he may have produced; as well as the magnitude of lost lives in the wake of the AIDS crisis. Wojnarowicz wrote of the Rimbaud Series, “I didn’t see myself as Rimbaud but rather used him as a device to confront my own desires, experiences, biography and to try to touch on those elusive ‘sites of attraction’; those places that suddenly and unexpectedly revive the smell and traces of former states of body and mind long left behind…” As a whole the exhibition is an elegy to a generation that lived and endured through the perils of the AIDS crisis. It stands both as a memorial to the era and as a testament to progress won, in part, through the efforts of activists like Wojnarowicz. In the landmark case, Wojnarowicz vs. American Family Organization and Donald Wildmon (1990) the artist defeated the misuse of his artwork in political propaganda leaflets that discredit the National Endowment for the Arts

An artist as complex, prolific and engaged as David Wojnarowicz rarely appears at so appropriate a moment within the arc of art history, as this exhibition hauntingly reveals.

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