The Broad is a commanding addition to Los Angeles’ downtown cultural artery along Grand Avenue, situated beside the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall, and across from the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA). The Broad, nearly 10 years in the making, opened its doors to the public last month, presenting Edith and Eli’s massive collection of blue-chip artworks free of charge. Preceding the construction of their name-sake, the Broads had established historical ties to every major Los Angeles museum, including LA MOCA, the Hammer, and more recently the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) — a sizable gallery built on-site at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA) in 2008. The permanent collection exhibited at Grand Avenue will be familiar to Angelenos from earlier presentations at LACMA’s Renzo Piano-designed BCAM wing.

In terms of the building itself, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro refer to the Broad’s unique design as a “veil-and-vault” structure, consisting of a fiber-reinforced concrete façade, or veil, that allows for controlled, natural light to permeate the gallery spaces surrounding the “vault” — a state of the art climate-controlled storage unit at the building’s core.

For the inaugural exhibition, Joanne Heyler, a 20-year Broad Foundation veteran and director of the nascent museum, has selected more than 250 works by some 60 artists in what she refers to as “a sweeping, chronological journey.” This presentation is indeed a journey, one that communicates the history of the international art market of the past 30 years, reified by these artists’ positions within such an axiomatically authoritative institution as the Broad. Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation further reinforces this point.

Ed Ruscha’s companion pieces, Old Tech Chem Building (2003) and Blue Collar Tech Chem (1992), open an exhibition of recently acquired works on the museum’s first floor. The works depict the 11-year transformation of a fictional “Tech Chem” facility into a space newly named “Fat Boy.” The 1992 work depicts a grey night sky, which in 2003 bleeds red. The phrase “Fat Boy” recalls the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 — nicknamed “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” respectively. These paintings serve as an intense opening to the show: while the present is foreboding, the future perhaps radioactive, Ruscha instructs us not to be nostalgic for the past. Tech Chem limns our present experience as a product of our dark origins.

Following Ruscha’s powerful introduction, I was disappointed that the curators failed to draw any relationship between Mark Grotjahn’s poignant formal studies and the more explicitly political works on display. Grotjahn’s 2007 Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) consists of a series of rotating mathematical grids — vertical lines become horizontal and vantage points slant and skew. The artist’s black geometric shapes flutter to life along the length of the series, creating optical impressions that change as the viewer moves in the space. The wall text reads that these shifting vantage points provide “room for many perceptions of and points of entry into the work.” It is precisely this awareness of the capacity of artworks to read multiply, for meaning to bend and shift, which could have successfully brought historically disparate works in dialogue with one another.

The museum’s main gallery upstairs opens with Jeff Koons’ monumental Tulips (1995-2004), surrounded on all sides by Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1990), a nine-panel installation in which the words “Run Dog Run” are stenciled in repetition using black enamel on aluminum. Wool breaks apart the words themselves, the R and U placed above the N, the D and O placed above the G. With the dismemberment of these three-letter words, Wool highlights their semiotic function, encouraging the viewer to understand them as formal signifiers divorced from their meaning within the phrase.

This relationship between signifiers and concepts was explored by American artist Jasper Johns 30 years prior with his masterpiece, Watchman. This 1964 assemblage highlights the artist’s radical refusal of any single identification: how exactly is his composition ordered? Which paints are laid down first? Which are stripped away? Do his colors prefigure their descriptions? Johns’ Watchman mirrors the scale of the human form — reinforced by the cast of a human leg in the upper register — and, as such, demands to be understood as contingent upon the viewer’s own physicality, identity and experience.

Glenn Ligon also works at this intersection of language and identity, as evidenced by his series Runaways from 1993. For these works, Ligon asked friends to draft descriptions of him as though they were reporting a missing person to the police, and was shocked to find that they recalled the 19^th-century runaway-slave ads he had researched for the series. The descriptions vary widely from piece to piece — different features are highlighted, others glossed over. While the exhibition privileges formal and historical relationships over conceptual ones, it would have been inspiring to examine Wool, Johns and Ligon’s work side-by-side, as a means of highlighting the discursive production of meaning in all three. Instead, Ligon’s installation is predictably flattened, reduced to what the curators call “the parallel senses of insider and outsider in us all.”

Mysteriously, the late activist-artist David Wojnarowicz shares one of the final galleries with art star Julian Schnabel, an odd juxtaposition that the wall text fails to engage with or defend. The Wojnarowicz works are striking and impassioned, in particular The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of The U.S.A., from 1986. Here, a crucified figure is undergirded by layers of painted-over newsprint with the phrases “10 years,” “life and death,” “in the womb” and “foul” left bare. Veins extend from the voodoo figure and wrap around images of mosquitos, cowboys, blood red steak and a hand literally covered in a blood. This is a work about AIDS, homophobia, fear of infection and government inaction resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands.

Like other works in the exhibition, Wojnarowicz’ pulsing political message is tamped down by Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation that resists social-historical examination. The Broad falls victim to a universalizing narrative that presupposes that the meaning attached to these artworks is fixed, conveyed to a disembodied spectator that approaches the work in isolation, divorced from her own social experience. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “veil-and-vault” concept then serves as a poignant lens through which to understand The Broad’s political stakes. It’s all right there in the architecture — the museum’s surface appears porous, penetrable and malleable. However, this veil is merely a symbol of access that instead serves to reinforce the institutionally fixed, guarded and rich marrow within.

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June 20 to September 13, 2015
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, 310 443 7000

“Perfect Likeness,” organized by veteran curator Russell Ferguson, is an intentioned and poignant show, with moments of profound tenderness. It was without question the best exhibition I’ve seen this year. It charts a renewed interest in photographic composition beginning in the 1970s, focusing in particular on the prolific photographers of Europe, Canada and the US working between the 1990s and 2000s. The works flow beautifully without the conventional curatorial buttresses of chronology or conspicuous thematic groupings. Ferguson’s deft arrangement sparkles with the subtle lyricism of a photographer’s series, allowing for moments of affection, irony, and fascination to unfold in front of the viewer.

Ferguson’s introductory wall text presses upon our current condition of image saturation, a point which interested me less than the mid-century break he posits between pictorialism and more candid, even journalistic, photography. The return to the “inauthentic” or arranged image is where “Perfect Likeness” finds its genesis. A gorgeous Robert Mapplethorpe work, Orchid (1982), could have opened the exhibition — it nearly perfectly characterizes the pictorial shift for which Ferguson argues. It was in 1982 that Mapplethorpe found his muse in female body builder Lisa Lyon, and his evocative image of a drooping orchid is anthropomorphized on film, displaying the same elegance, grace and emotion as his expertly staged corporeal forms. While Ferguson could have just as easily chosen a nude to mark Mapplethorpe’s predilection for choreographed imagery, I appreciate the fact that the flower, itself a site of sexual reproduction, was chosen. Roe Ethridge’s work Peas and Pickles (2014) shares a wall with the Mapplethorpe, and serves as both a formal counterpart and self-aware double entendre.

Christopher Williams’ Department of Water and Power General Office Building (Dedicated on June 1, 1965), from 1994, consists of two images taken at slightly different angles in the morning and evening. The subtle change produces vastly different effects: in the first, the building’s vertical lines are emphasized, while in the second it appears wider and more horizontal. One of the aims of “Perfect Likeness” seems to be the unification of painterly technique with that of photography. In Department, Williams draws upon the tradition of Monet, who depicted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times as a means of indicating the subtle distinctions in perception caused by shifting light and shadows.

This understanding of the photographic subject as malleable speaks to the issue of authenticity, a question which photographer Jeff Wall has spent a career examining (and debunking). Wall’s 2011 work, Boxing, features two white teenage boys sparring in what appears to be their childhood home — an elegant high-rise apartment with a Joseph Albers painting hung in the background. The art historian Michael Fried has made much of the quality of absorption present in Wall’s subjects; many times they perform a task or mundane action that suggests they are oblivious to the fact that they are being photographed. This absorptive quality squares with Wall’s pictorial aims: to create an image that appears candid but is in fact painstakingly composed. While two of Wall’s major large-format works are featured in the exhibition, it was his more diminutive 1993 piece Diagonal Composition that was the standout. The quotidian image of a kitchen sink glows with the help of a light box and was so perfect, so complete, and so personal, that I was nearly moved to tears.

Lucas Blalock’s Broken Composition, from 2011, consists of a double image of a broken light bulb. The wall text equates Blalock’s visible method of technical composition to the painter’s brushstroke. Here, both the picture and its subject are broken, adding another layer of ambiguity between the photo’s “truth” and inauthenticity. Stan Douglas’ Hastings Park was another standout in the show, a composite of a photo taken in 1955 and edited using Photoshop in 2008. For the photo, Douglas restages the 1955 scene at a Vancouver horse track using models in period clothing, creating an image composed of 30 separate snapshots.

Sharon Lockhart’s evocative 1997 series The Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team makes manifest a century-long photographic cliché: with her carefully arranged images Lockhart raises a mundane scene to the level of magnificence. By omitting the ball from the frame, the players appear to gaze up hopefully towards a higher power above. Thomas Ruff’s glossy portraits from the 1980s take up an equal amount of the exhibition’s real estate, though they’re nowhere near as compelling as Lockahart’s scenes. Ruff’s sitters look directly at the camera blankly, as though posing for an identification card. While the enormous format of these images is in itself seductive, they lose their visual punch when displayed in a series. In contrast, Elad Lassry’s Chocolate bars, Eggs, Milk (2013) is deliberately diminutive; apparently his subject of glossy chocolate and smooth eggs is plenty seductive, even at such a small scale.

The poignancy of the images on display is what left me thinking about “Perfect Likeness” weeks later. Catherine Opie’s 2012 portrait of the artist Lawrence Weiner raises him to the level of an old master, equal parts Rembrandt and Hans Holbein. However, Weiner’s soft body and gentle face lay bare a degree of tenderness on Opie’s part — she doesn’t revere Weiner, but cares for him. Equally affectionate were Gillian Wearing’s self portraits dressed as her mother and father from 2003. In these blown-up images, Wearing’s wig, glue, and mask are made visible, though not pronounced. This evidence of the characters’ construction points to the mother and father themselves as constructed figures, reproduced and reimagined in our own memories, often tainted with shades of nostalgia. Rather than recognizing “Perfect Likeness” on a register as broad as the shared human condition (as the wall text suggests), I understand it as a touching time capsule — one that, in my opinion, will mark the set of issues facing photographers today.

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John Currin at Gagosian Beverly Hills

February 19 to April 11, 2015
456 North Camden Drive (between S. Santa Monica Boulevard and Brighton Way)
Beverly Hills, 310 271 9400

John Currin’s current solo show at Gagosian Beverly Hills will not disappoint devotees of his signature style. The artist’s sensuous play between lush fabrics, fruit and the female form — while exceedingly literal — is nonetheless striking and seductive. Culling inspiration from Italian Mannerism and the art of the Northern Renaissance, Currin recasts the classical image of the female nude, limning and embracing its current cultural significance in tandem with its historical precedent. Gender and sexuality become the subjects of Currin’s paintings, and while his relationship to art of the 15^th century has been discussed at length, rarely is his work regarded in politically salient terms.

With the exception of three paintings executed in 2013, each work in the exhibition was painted within the last three months. The luscious 2015 work Maenads depicts an alabaster-skinned, auburn-haired sitter in Currin’s Mannerist style. A pink gossamer top traces her breasts and a silk scarf is draped listlessly over her lap. Two ripe apples placed at eye-level mirror her rounded breasts and belly, further emphasizing the figure’s sensuous form. In the background lie two additional women with similar coloring, one with legs splayed open and the other reaching over to touch her. However any contact between the two is obscured by the foreground sitter’s raised knee. The show’s earlier works exhibit slightly more explicit instances of sexuality, integrating what appears to be ‘70s-era pornography as background imagery. However, it serves to mention that the naughtiest bits are always concealed: no genitals and certainly no penetrative sex. So why, after having depicted explicit sex acts for years, does John Currin offer us these references to sexuality without the titillation?

The Storm (2013) similarly alludes to what appears to be an explicit sex act between a man and two women, but Currin’s languid golden-haired nude obscured our view. In this image, like the others in the show, paint is applied thinly and sparingly, the texture of the canvas visible behind his rendered satins and furs. Bust in a Convex Mirror and Nude in a Convex Mirror, both from 2015, present a refracted view of Currin’s female forms, allowing for the delectation of his figures’ breasts and buttocks without interference.

Lemons and Lace (2015) remained with me long after leaving the exhibition. A vaguely historical pastiche, the female figure bares a striking resemblance to Currin’s wife and frequent sitter, Rachel Feinstein. Posed as an odalisque, his subject is dressed in lingerie that refers in equal parts 17^th century vestments and to 1970s adult films, all the way down to her thigh-high stockings and shimmering gold mules. In the background, a snuffed-out candelabra and pieces of fruit beg to be analyzed in art-historical terms — do these props allude to fertility? Integrity? Death? Plays with translucence and opacity abound, a useful metaphor in understanding these new works.

The thread unifying these paintings is a deliberate attention to what’s exposed and what is concealed. The images are PG-13 alternatives to the artist’s previous X-rated works, and by adhering to socially prescribed limits of probity, Currin further demarcates those boundaries, naturalized for centuries via the art-historical canon.

I want to make very clear what I understand as a distinction between the operations of Currin’s nudes and those of other contemporary artists. Now perhaps cliché, Classical and Modern artists have portrayed the pliant and available female body for centuries. Understanding this cultural and historical signification as implicit in any image of a white female nude, artists of Currin’s epoch have subverted the classic trope as a means of illustrating the restrictive politics of gender and visuality. Take for instance the arresting and corpulent nude portraits of Jenny Saville, tellingly referred to as “grotesque” by art critics and historians. Or perhaps Rineke Dijkstra’s nude mothers, photographed shortly after giving birth, stretchmarks and bloated bellies proudly on display. Even pornography, as employed by Ghada Amer, serves to represent the female body as imbued with agency, deliberate and purposeful. Currin’s return to classical tropes then brings ideological markers of taste and class into sharp relief, naturalized for centuries and only very recently challenged by postmodern theory and feminist politics. And, as in the classical tradition, the sensuousness of Currin’s forms is heightened by their relative modesty.

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Queer artists in the late 1980s such as David Wojnarowicz, Gregg Bordowitz and members of the collective Gran Fury employed directive text and images as a means of addressing AIDS, its representation, and the concomitant cultural crisis in the United States. The work of artist Jim Hodges, in contrast, limns the line between the evocative and the sublime, employing minimalist forms in line with what has been recently referred to as “queer formalism:” work that turns away from aesthetics typically associated with “activist” art in favor of coded political motivations as a means of resisting censorship. Hodges’s palpable earnestness is reinforced by the lack of didactic wall texts at his ambitious retrospective, currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The original iteration of “Give More Than You Take” was co-organized by Olga Viso, from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Jeffrey Grove, from the Dallas Museum of Art. Hammer Museum director Connie Butler organized the show’s third stop in LA, alongside curator Aram Moshaedi. Artists Julie Ault and Martin Beck were brought on as consultants to aid in the show’s reconceptualization at the Hammer, for an exhibition featuring 75 pieces realized between 1987 to present. Notably, the curators in LA reserve ample space between artworks, allowing the viewer to experience each installation individually, and draw connections between the evocative pieces and their own experiences. This notion of correspondence — either between individuals, politics or objects — is central to Hodges’s work, for which he employs delicate silk flowers, gold leaf, broken mirrors and tenuous chains, to speak to issues as varied as mortality, artifice, and the interrelation of our myriad selves.

In circles attuned to queer art and politics, Hodges is often referred to alongside the late Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres as employing the language of queer formalism. Hodges was close friends with Gonzalez-Torres, and, according to Walker director Olga Viso, produced a number of works in his memory on the day of the artist’s death from AIDS in 1996. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Hammer Museum will screen a number of Hodges’s films, including Untitled (2011), produced with collaborators Carlos Marques da Cruz and Encke King. The 60-minute film, made in honor of Gonzalez-Torres, uses archival material to showcase injustices throughout history. While the film pays special attention to the politics and activism surrounding AIDS in the 1980s, it goes as far back as WWII to point to ideological abuses of power in the face of cultural crises. Hodges writes of the film:

We have people in power who are disrespectful, who are prejudiced, who don’t see, who refuse to acknowledge an aspect of the society at large because of their ideological position. They won’t allow themselves to see the humanness that’s there. This is the problem that I see: this continuation — and the continuum — where the powers deny the humanness of the other.

This focus on “humanness” is central to Hodges’s delicate artworks at the Hammer, which emphasize the phenomenological effects of our own physicality. Hodges presses upon the experience of interacting with other (often anonymous) bodies in space as a means of gesturing towards a shift in the cultural understanding of the body after AIDS. His 1997 work You features thousands of silk and polyester flowers, petals and leaves stitched together to form a 30-foot-tall curtain. The installation is designed to be exhibited in the center of the gallery so as to allow viewers to walk around it on all sides, letting them catch short glimpses of one another — fluttering fingers, a tuft of hair, a flash of skin — through the work’s small interstices. Later that year Hodges produced Changing Things, which deconstructs the curtain of flora found in You as a means of recognizing each one of its disparate parts, pinning each silk flower, petal and leaf, like specimens for study. Here, the viewer experiences Hodges’ materials in the visual language of taxonomy, laying bare the slipperiness between notions of the authentic versus the fabricated, the natural versus the constructed.

Hodges is deeply interested in the effects of layering and fragmenting, and the relationship between exposing and concealing. Often described as “poetic,” it serves to mention that much of his work is markedly feminine, itself a queer aesthetic device when recognized in tandem with the works’ seriousness. For Landscape (1998), the artist places 15 boys’ and men’s shirts in successive sizes, one inside the other, to create a series of concentric collars in different colors and patterns. The outermost shirt is a buttoned-up white oxford, alluding to the disparity between our innermost and outermost selves. Hodges’s ambitious installation And Still This (2005-08) takes on similar themes of transformation over time. The work consists of a series of 10 body-sized gessoed canvases overlaid with gold leaf and arranged upright in a circle. The viewer steps into the installation via a small opening between two canvases, forcing her to confront the rarely-seen wooden stretchers as she makes her way inside the configuration of paintings. Once inside, the viewer encounters a carefully designed modern day creation myth in an abstract narrative designed to be read from left to right. This relation between interior and exterior highlights the artist’s own experience during the AIDS crisis, when revealing details about one’s self — whether one’s HIV status or sexuality — was highly politicized.

Chain-link spider webs are a recurrent theme in the artist’s 25-year oeuvre, beginning in 1991 with Untitled (Gate), a human-scale installation made of steel, copper, aluminum and brass chain. From a distance the work connotes both neglect and interdiction, though closer inspection reveals that the innermost chains are constructed of delicate girls’ charm bracelets. For What’s Left (1992) the artist has constructed a still life of rumpled jeans, a t-shirt, belt and tennis shoes overlaid with a sparking chain-link web. The installation alludes to clothes left on the bed or bathroom floor, perhaps belonging to a lover whose body has since disappeared. Hodges produced this work in New York City at the height of AIDS, again, shying away from the overtly political works that were rallied against, or worse, censored by the religious right and conservative museum structures.

Perhaps the most arresting piece in “Give More Than You Take” is Hodges’s 2008 work The Dark Gate. The viewer is invited to enter a small wooden chamber nestled in the pitch-black gallery through a pair of swinging doors. Inside, the artist has created an oculus lined in razor spikes, or, perhaps, an image of a sunburst left in reserve. The bright spot in the center again reinforces the artist’s inquiry into relativity: is the darkness encroaching or receding? The fragrance of Hodges’s mother’s favorite perfume, Shalimar, permeates the chamber, which also contains notes of the cologne Hodges himself wore at the time of her passing. In this evocative installation Hodges references danger, hope, violence, death and birth. The small dwelling is deeply personal but utterly social, a successful metaphor for his prolific 25-year career.

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“Fiber Madness,” at the Palos Verdes Art Center through November 16, showcases the larger-than-life knits of fiber artist Mark Newport, also known as Sweaterman, whose work defies its own aesthetic whimsy, tackling social issues such as labor, gender, and domesticity. The artist is the head of the fiber arts program at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, where he is also the acting artist in residence. His fiber works are both bizarre and arresting, due in equal parts to their evocative resonance and massive scale.

The exhibition’s first gallery houses eight oversized hand-knit bodysuits crafted with cheap acrylic yarn. The suits’ hoods and colors create the impression of homespun superhero costumes, which hang lifeless like misshapen, stretched and molted skins. In Hollywood movies, Batman and Spiderman wear suits made from structured latex and polymers that cling to each muscle, ripple and bulge — the actor’s athletic and masculine physique left on full display. With works such as Newport’s 2008 piece Sweaterman 5, the artist queers this conventional superhero archetype, creating an impotent, cast-off hero using a traditionally “female” craft.

Newport’s suits sometimes include a corresponding element of performance in their production: outfitted from head to toe in one of his signature knits (which serves to both glove his hands and mask his face), Newport will work quietly in a rocking chair in the corner of the gallery, fumbling over his needles with yarn-covered fingers. Here, he embodies the figure of the crestfallen hero, the speed and dexterity associated with comic book warriors is replaced by quiet, frustrating tedium. This quality of impotence, even failure, which guides the work, touches upon an inquiry into gender normativity begun a decade earlier. In the 1990s, Newport designed a series of hand-embroidered sports trading cards.

By contrasting the hyper-masculinity of professional sports with a method of women’s labor, Newport puts gendered notions of professionalism in dialogue with cultural constructions of pastime, performance and dress. Unlike more “conventional” queer and feminist practice, which often takes for granted the artist’s marginalized subjectivity, Newport’s work stems from an inquiry into his internalized conceptions of masculinity and the ways in which he identifies with the associated tropes. By both embodying and critiquing his relation to this normative position, Newport reframes our understanding of gender and sexuality to resist binaries, upend classifications and embrace failure.

In the interest of full disclosure it serves to mention that Maddie Phinney curated an exhibition at the Palos Verdes Art Center earlier this year. 

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The installation of “Mike Kelley” at LA MoCA is more comprehensive than any of its previous three presentations, at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, or the Stedelijk Museum, where former Stedelijk director (and former LA MoCA curator) Ann Goldstein first organized the show in 2012 in consultation with the Mike Kelley Foundation. The exhibition at MoCA was organized by Bennett Simpson and held in the Museum’s Geffen Contemporary, a former warehouse in Little Tokyo with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Geffen’s open floor plan (with small galleries at the periphery) makes for a very different show than the most recent iteration, at New York’s PS1, which was broken up into smaller groupings due to the Museum’s diminutive galleries appropriated from former classrooms. The LA show puts particular focus on Kelley’s evocative, ritualistic and often hallucinatory video installations, which, shown simultaneously, take center stage in the Geffen’s enormous space. Here, sounds ricochet, lights flash and music drones, contributing to a feeling of sensory overload frequently attributed to the artist’s later works.

Kelley’s appropriation of kitschy stuffed animals and puppets, naughty cartoons and images from high school yearbooks have placed him in line historically with a “postmodern” rubric of production popularized by his Metro Pictures peers in the 1980s. However, rather than open-ended rejections of authenticity or originality (à la Richard Prince or Louise Lawler), Kelley’s work resonates with recurrent references to his own biography as expressed through his deep social and political investments. Be it via inquiries into the controversial subject of “memory repression” with his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000- 2006); the politics of labor with From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003); or the sanctity of art with his massive (and now iconic) More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), the artist’s work is imbued with the vulnerable politics of our discursive and manifold selves.

Day is Done (2005-2006), an epic multimedia installation composed of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32, opens the show and serves as an important barometer for Kelley’s ongoing artistic concerns. Central to the project is the experience of viewing each narrative from different angles and perspectives, a metaphor that aids the viewer in considering the artworks that follow. Day is Done was inaugurated by Kelley’s 30-minute video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), which is on view on a small monitor near the exhibition’s entrance. All of Kelley’s EAPRs were staged and scripted around images from high school plays found in yearbooks. Latching onto a new cultural investment in the study of repressed memory therapy, which rose in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s due to a moral panic over alleged satanic abuse rituals, Kelley uses these installations to examine the multiple layers of signification in American folk rituals. Understanding the slippages between personal and collective memory, Kelley crafts a series centered on “socially acceptable” forms of performance, such as school plays, Halloween, and corporate “dress-up days.” In one scene, a cherubic middle schooler wanders out alone for a haircut and finds himself at the mercy of an obnoxious, sweaty barber who morphs into a vile, red-faced devil as standup comedian. In another, the same child is chased around a creaky attic by a ghoulish Virgin Mary, while he screams “I want to wake up!” Originally designed as a live 24-hour installation, Kelley hoped to eventually film 365 tapes, a monumental unrealized undertaking.

An entire gallery is devoted to From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003), an installation that incorporates the artist’s Loading Dock Drawings from 1984. For the work, Kelley reproduced flyers that feature naughty cartoons or institutional gripes circulated among administrators at CalArts via fax. The wall facing the drawings features a stenciled fist in representation of workers’ solidarity, while a carrot dangles from the ceiling as the clichéd symbol of futile incentive. The relationship of the fist to the goofy cartoons speaks to the potential of these administrators to organize, even if only through shared grievances and blue humor. Originally, red tape was intended to connect the installation to the administrative offices of the institution in which it was presented. At MoCA, a door which reads “employees only” has been built alongside, a testament (albeit less impactful something the artist might have come up with) to Kelley’s original ideological intent.

A number of Kelley’s installation-cum-shrines are featured prominently, composed of plush toys, felt and afghan rugs which reinforce the artist’s complicated investment in childhood, memory and spirituality. Also on view is a selection of ephemera from early collaborative performance works — tape recorders, megaphones and whoopee cushions — which feel a bit precious in their given context. Perhaps the most compelling installation in the show is made up of Kelley’s monumental Kandors series of (1999 – 2007, 2009, and 2011), which taps a quality of failure that pervades the whole exhibition — not of pessimism so much as a sense of sympathy for inadequacy, the underdog, or the misunderstood. Kandors reproduces Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton, shrunken by his arch nemesis Brainiac, in a series of hyperbaric bell jars that sputter, smoke, and glow neon. Each is reproduced according to the graphic history of the comic at different historical moments as closely as possible. Again, the complicated relationship of Superman to his home, the nostalgia for childhood and an attempt to fill gaps in memory left blank are central components to the piece. In the wake of Kelley’s untimely death, his monumental retrospective encourages us to come to terms with the complicated experience of childhood, imparting a sense of trepidation, wonderment and hopefulness.

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Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

Grey Art Gallery, NYU
September 10 to December 7, 2013
100 Washington Square East
New York City, 212-998-6780

Part two of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art will open November 14 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and will remain on view until March 9, 2014.

The ambitious two-part survey Radical Presence, originally organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is a thrilling endeavor.  The exhibition showcases 50 years of performance by black artists, with two dozen artists featured in the first installment on view at Grey Art Gallery.  According to the gallery’s director Lynn Gumpert, this portion of the show will be the more historical of the two, with a selection of contemporary works to open at the Studio Museum in Harlem next month.  It was inspiring to see a show entirely devoted to black artists in performance, one which exhibits Cassel Oliver’s deep investment in tracing a historical lineage for artists of color outside the modernist fabric of aesthetic judgments or the strategies of production central to postmodern cultural critique. The exhibition will be accompanied by more than a dozen live performances during its run. However, it is the historical evidence of these works—the document, the artifact, the object—which are central to the installation, forming a new heredity of black performance rooted in the subjective experience of viewing.

Cassel Oliver’s mission to find historical precedents (ie generational links) for artists of color is readable through her installation, which places canonized performances (Adrian Piper and David Hammons) next to lesser known ones.  Radical Presence presents black performance art not as an extension of theater—a medium rooted in visual passivity—but rather in terms of body art practices that illustrate questions of racial difference by actually enacting this difference through its relationship to the body of the viewer.  One such artist is the brilliant Pope.L, whose work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) occupies a prominent place in the exhibition.  The installation consists of a toilet mounted on a 10-foot tower where Pope.L originally sat for several days, dressed in a jockstrap and caked in flour, reading pages from the Wall Street Journal before consuming and eventually purging them.  The wall text quotes the artist who writes, “I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will…. My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement … to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.”  His crawl pieces, a project he began in the 1970s, also display the politics of embodiment and social history.  For The Great White Way, Pope.L crawled down 22 miles of Broadway in New York, making himself horizontal against the pavement amidst a capitalist jungle of high-rises and industry.  For this work he donned a capeless superman costume—an appropriated illusion of (white) strength, historically unavailable to him.  These works engage a cross-cultural conversation: why is it that we conceive of whiteness as somehow separate from blackness when one relies on the other for signification?  Rather than seeing either culture as “authentic” or segregated, Pope.L’s work performs the ways in which binary social structures are in fact deeply imbricated in one another.

Coco Fusco is another artist interested in our preconceptions of “the other.”  She is perhaps most well-known for her 1992 collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Peña in The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994), which traveled widely and remains the archetype for contemporary questions of colonization, the aesthetic of primitivism and the very function of the museum.  Fusco’s Sightings Photo Series from 2004 continues her examination of the role and responsibility of the viewer.  The work came out of her video project In her video a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert (2004) in which Fusco weaves together archival video and staged surveillance footage of the FBI search for Angela Davis.  In a portion of the video Fusco narrates “Some women began to fear that an afro had become a one-way ticket to a holding cell, other women decided to put on afro wigs to pass for black.”  During the FBI search, hundreds of black women were wrongly detained or arrested before Davis herself was brought to trial.  What then does it mean when white women appropriate this righteous black aesthetic without any potential for misidentification and thus no actual bodily risk?  This notion of “passing” is something that Adrian Piper commented on extensively early on in her career—a question that is rooted in the experience of the seer as opposed to that of the subject.

Benjamin Patterson’s 1962 work Pond is on display as a series of instructions for performers to produce an indeterminate work.  The open action is guided by a grid designed by Patterson, as well as a number of wind-up frogs that direct the participant’s movements.  In the exhibition catalog Cassel Oliver notes that it was actually an investigation into Patterson’s career that prompted her to begin researching work for Radical Presence.  Patterson, a classically trained musician, was one of the founding members of Fluxus yet remained largely absent from canonical discourse, that is, up until Cassel Oliver organized his retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The Fluxus preoccupations with destabilizing hierarchies through chance operations and the group’s emphasis on the phenomenological (and thus subjective) experience of the viewer is very much in line with the more provocative works in Radical Presence.

The artist Rammellzee (1960-2010) also comes from a musical background.  Known for his elaborate performance costumes and narratives, he became famous in the 1980s New York underground through his freestyle rapping and graffiti tags in the subway.  A photograph on display at Grey Art Gallery features a selection of his elaborate costumes, as the original garments were installed as part of the exhibition in Houston.  Also on view is his 1979 document, Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism.  In this treatise, Rammellzee speaks to the political power of language, in particular letters, which, when separated from their narrative function can become powerful weapons that work in opposition to what he calls “counterfeit linguistic systems.”  He was directly inspired by monastic traditions and illuminated manuscripts, in which letters serve both a literary and formal function.  Interestingly, the wall text glossed over Rammellzee’s sci-fi, urban shaman persona; like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he began as an artist by using the city’s walls as his drawing board.

The art historian and performance art theorist Amelia Jones notes the power of body art, as enacted by the non-normative subject, to expose the naturalized exclusionism in modern art history.  The works in Radical Presence hinge on elements of social construction, intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and the idiosyncratic relationship between seer and seen. This is art that challenges not only the structure of the art institution, but also makes an indelible impact on the social structures beyond the gallery’s walls: Radical, indeed.

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In May 2013 the app publishing company Art Intelligence released Art Intelligence: Keith Haring, a decidedly comprehensive and dynamic app designed exclusively for iPad 2.  The program’s introduction screen, in an essay entitled The Politics of Dancing, notes that Haring was a follower of the Warholian tenents of mass-production. This was first evidenced in the early 1980s in ephemeral chalk drawings in New York City subways in which he employed the black paper used to cover old advertisements as canvases for his iconic visual vocabulary.  Today the wide availability of Haring watches, coffee mugs, and even cleaning supplies speaks to this same interest—perhaps then to be able to download a piece of Keith Haring is the logical next step.  Haring opened his Pop Shop in 1986 making his iconography available to the denizens of downtown Manhattan, but now not even geography can preclude the digital consumer from getting a piece of Keith.

The app’s “curator” Bridget L. Goodbody describes Art Intelligence: Keith Haring as a “visual Wikipedia on steroids,” and she has a point: the energy of the 1980s art scene is reanimated through a virtual library of photography, video, and artwork that the user is invited to explore.  The app successful skirts the line between accessibility and political and art historical investment; clearly designed for adults, the descriptions are often wordy and sometimes academic, though younger users could appreciate the app equally for its incredibly comprehensive catalog of artworks and archival photos.  In this way, the app mimics the accessibility of the artist’s own work—Haring created a collaborative mural project with public schools in Chicago in 1989, and his famous 1986 “Crack is Wack” mural was designed for children, painted on a Harlem handball court.  His later focus on socio-political themes such as AIDS prevention and Apartheid in Africa birthed (sometimes pornographic) works obviously designed for adults, but his cartoonish visual vocabulary has always lent itself to young fans.

A virtual gallery of Keith Haring’s art is presented through detailed high-resolution reproductions.  Organized chronologically, the user is invited to browse a massive selection of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and murals.  These works are then searchable via the “Timeline” tab, which is divided into the broad categories of “life,” “art,” and “world” providing a social and historical context for the artist’s work. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of how Haring and his art were at the forefront of public consciousness, each artistic milestone can be clicked on for more information. For instance, in 1985 Brooke Shields posed nude for photographer Richard Avedon with a Haring-painted pink heart.  The caption for the image reads: “Nothing Comes Between Me and My Keith.”  Haring was at the forefront of a scene that dominated downtown Manhattan, and his ties to major players in fashion and music, in relation to his cartoonish subway drawings, created an instantly recognizable visual iconography.  Also in 1985, Haring produced his Free South Africa poster for the concert where Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and Hall and Oates sang “We Are the World;” a video of the performance is available via YouTube on the app.

The “Connections” tab is organized by themes such as “art,” “birth,” “Africa” or “AIDS.”  The user can maximize each image to see a short blurb: I stumbled upon a 1987 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show entitled “Lets Talk about AIDS.”  The “Resources” tab includes links to a selection of film, music, and literature that the creators feel is somehow relevant to Haring’s work.  Toni Morrison’s Beloved is listed for purchase alongside Paris is Burning, a 1990 documentary about ‘80s drag ball culture in New York City, and Duran Duran’s 1982 album Rio.  These choices are thoughtful, and while many address a historical relationship, a work such as Beloved (set 100 years before Haring’s birth at the end of the American Civil War) speaks instead to the artist’s commitment to visual representation of marginalized groups, a trope which is often schematized in Haring’s early work, which shows dogs, human figures and aliens in the same scene.  Perhaps the least useful portion of the program, at least currently, is the “Conversations” tab, which touts itself as “a forum to express your ideas to fellow art geeks.”  In this early iteration there are few conversations to be had, though in our era of digital anonymity and polemical web boards the prospect of sparking debates and sharing experiences is encouraging.  Fittingly, Art Intelligence: Keith Haring has a feeling of dynamism that recalls Haring’s own playfulness, as well as his simultaneous emphasis on stylistic consistency alongside innovation.

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February 13 to May 26, 2013
235 Bowery, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, (212) 343-0460

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, currently on view at the New Museum, examines the art scene in New York over the course of one year and attempts to chart a lineage connecting the city’s artists working today with the major players of twenty years ago.  Of course, many of the featured artists are still active in the New York scene, and it’s a falsehood to suggest that this group of artists was the first to engage in robustly political art.  The insinuation that these artists were the first to tackle such historically broad issues as race, gender, economic concerns and sexuality is one of the many frustrations of the exhibition, and while the works on display are some of the most visible of the period, one senses a missed political opportunity on the part of the curators.

The show is certainly prolific in scale, the first in the New Museum’s history to span all five floors and take up every gallery space.  The wall text and catalog essays (much of it written by curator Massimiliano Gioni and the New Museum’s director Lisa Phillips) stress the notion of “capturing a particular moment.”  This moment, according to Gioni, saw the rise of relational aesthetics—in his view a product of a global recession—as well as a critique of consumerism, and an emphasis on art as a basis for community building.  But why turn to 1993 as a time capsule for these problems?  On the same day as the press preview, the brilliant critic and theorist Amelia Jones was featured on a panel at the College Art Association Annual Conference titled “Art Criticism: Taking a Pulse.” In her talk Jones brought to light the enormous debt that Rirkrit Tiravanija and others working directly within Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of relational art owed to the feminist artists of the 1960s and ‘70s.  I bring this up to illustrate that what Gioni terms a “new conceptual climate” seems much more influenced by the art of twenty years prior than is made public in the text for the show. The missing historical link is the broad adoption in the 1970s of postmodern theory in academia and MFA programs across the country, and the guidance of artist-teachers who were deeply invested in feminist and relational politics.

While much of the work in NYC 1993 is rooted in institutional critique and questions of gender and race, the wall labels and curators’ comments in the catalog are no match for the intellectual rigour of the art on display.  Furthermore, many of these works would be greatly enriched by a reading that steps outside of their historical contingency. David Hammons’s quietly shocking In the Hood consists of the hood cut from a green sweatshirt, hung on the wall.  The work recalls decapitation, the suspicious image of the hooded black man so often seen on facial composite sketches, and even evokes the Ku Klux Klan.  If the curators were to initiate a conversation that relates the art practices of 1993 with the political landscape of today, the shooting of the black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 would have been an obvious parallel to draw with this piece.  Hammons’s simple work is imbued with suspicion, fear, and the simultaneous concealing and exposure of identity: issues that are far more nuanced than the translation of “hood” as black lexicon for “neighborhood,” which the wall text offers.

With that being said, many of the works on display are incredibly powerful, and, for me, aesthetically representative of the time period the show examines.  Two understated pieces by the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco on display in the second floor gallery fell under this category. Yielding Stone is a clay ball of the artist’s weight, which he rolled from his studio on Broadway to the New Museum in 1993.  The sculpture resembles a boulder, and though its surface is constituted by the grit and grime of lower Manhattan, the art object more closely resembles an organic form found outside the city.  Isla en la Isla (Island within an Island) is a small photograph taken next to the West Side Highway of a miniature Manhattan skyline made from garbage and wood debris facing the real skyline.  This “gritty” work, in which the city plays a lead role, is characteristic of the overall aesthetic of the exhibition. The rough simplicity of Orozco’s work shares an urban poignancy with the enormous, yet equally subtle, Félix González-Torres billboard Untitled, on the fourth floor. In marked contrast, the filmmaker Larry Clark’s multimedia installation revels in the same “downtown” aesthetic without the conceptual or emotional weight.

An arresting work to see in person was Janine Antoni’s installation Lick and Lather consisting of fourteen self-portrait busts deformed either through Antoni bathing herself, as she did with the busts carved from soap, or gnawing and licking away at those made of chocolate. The work was originally displayed at the ’93 Venice Biennale, and this show along with the ’93 Whitney Biennial were touched upon numerous times within the exhibition.  Glenn Ligon’s contribution to the 1993 Biennial catapulted him to art superstardom, and while his Notes on the Margin of the Black Book was absent from NYC 1993 (perhaps because he started working on the piece in 1991) his Red Portfolio was an ingenious addition to the exhibition.  The work exists as a series of framed descriptions, white text on black background, of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs as penned by the Reverend Pat Robertson in a 1989 letter for his constituents in an effort to describe government-funded works.  “A photo of a man in a suit exposing himself” refers to Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit (1980), an image that is a subtle and tender a commentary on the fear of black masculinity this is possible in the presence of an enormous black penis.  The culture wars of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was certainly burned into the public consciousness of the time, and Ligon’s work brilliantly displays the attitudes of the religious right without judgment or commentary, allowing the slippery relationship between art images and language to be laid bare.

My experience of NYC 1993 was one of equal parts frustration and fascination.  It would have been impossible to include every revered work from that year in the exhibition, but the selection of art chosen by the curators was extraordinary. It must be noted, however, that a majority of the work was rooted in the political or institutional critique of its time.  The frustration thus lies in a reticence on the part of the New Museum to examine more closely the historical and social contingencies of the art on display, and the ways in which it differentiates itself from art being produced in 2013. Instead of taking up these thorny issues, the curators have presented a neat time-capsule exhibition that seemingly functions no differently today than it would have in 1993.

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September 6 to December 8, 2012
New York University
100 Washington Square East
New York City, 212-998-6780

Ten years after the artist’s death from AIDS complications, Grey Art Gallery celebrates the work of Frank Moore with the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date.  Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated catalogue edited by Grey director Lynn Gumpert containing essays on the artist by Klaus Kertess, Susan Harris, and Gregg Bordowitz.  The catalogue also compiles a collection of Moore’s own writings on his work along with reproductions of his paintings and works on paper.  The book is a very well crafted glimpse into the artist’s life and art, with a particular emphasis on his interest in the body as a site of “Toxic Beauty.”

A skilled painter trained in abstraction, Moore turned to representation in the early 1980s for its narrative capacity.  In her catalogue essay, abstract painter Susan Harris points to the artist’s archive, The Frank Moore Papers, now housed at NYU, to trace his professional history and search for clues about his subjects.  Poignantly, she is stricken with a luminosity evidenced by Moore’s spirited journals, which she relates formally to an effulgent quality in his work.  There was something hopeful about Moore’s endeavor, his countless books, articles, and journal entries evidence of his searching for answers about how our lives are reproduced through visual culture.  Moore moved to Paris after graduating from Yale in 1975 to study at the Cité Internationale des Arts.  By the early 1980s he had already exhibited in numerous group shows in New York, and upon his return to The States struck up a relationship with Choreographer Jim Self for whom he worked as a set designer.  The dreamlike quality of Moore’s work from this time has its roots in surrealism, in particular the American surrealist Paul Cadmus, evidenced both by the artist’s formal use of color and the iconography in his work dealing with gender and sexuality.

Gregg Bordowitz, an artist and activist himself, was a close friend of Moore’s, and his essay “Battle Lines” very carefully contextualizes the artist’s work surrounding identity, HIV/AIDS, and the environment within the socio-political climate of 1980s New York.  For all of its poetic subject matter and delicate narrative structure, Bordowitz sees Moore’s work as inherently tied to conflict.  Be it conflicts been the AIDS activist community and the policy governing their treatment, or a metaphysical examination of conflicts between the living and the dead, there is a tension in Moore’s work which is offset by his delicate forms.  His most captivating inquiry deals with Moore’s 1997 work Emigrants, a painting which is included in the catalogue but not on display in the exhibition.  The piece depicts two young gay art handlers who carry an upside down painting of a flag, á la Jasper Johns, collaged in newspaper clippings, one reading “Prostitutes and AIDS.”  These visual hints insist that the viewer look closely at the painting within the painting for clues about the narrative.  Our view of the flag painting is obfuscated by transparent packing material that protects the fragile work while also, perhaps, acting as a symbol for safe sex.  Regrettably, an interrogation of the work alongside that of Jasper Johns is markedly absent from Bordowitz’ commentary.  Johns, a gay artist practicing during the Cold War, was forced to used carefully placed iconography within his paintings to allow for a queer reading of his work without having outing himself to those outside his circle.  Moore, of course, was openly gay throughout his career, open even about his HIV status, and this working through of his personal life—the deepest part of himself—is evident in his work.

Dream-like as they are, there is something distinctly literary about Moore’s paintings, each a tome with layers of information to be read and discovered.  In his essay in the volume, curator Klaus Kertess speaks to Moore’s interest in myth and allegory, a trend, he sees in late 20th–century American art.  He points to Kara Walker’s witty, and often grotesque, reworkings of master/ slave narratives, and the dreamlike fictive universe of creation, destruction and rebirth that Mathew Barney creates for his Cremaster series.  Kertess highlights Moore’s hilarious 1993 work, Venus in particular.  Venus is an allegorized portrait of New York drag queen Lady Bunny portrayed as a mermaid lounging languorously on the beach, her erotic gaze designed to meet and challenge the viewers.  Littered on the sand around her we find used condoms, hypodermic needles, pill bottles, and evidence of sperm swimming ashore.  Bunny’s penis is featured front and center in the work, for which Moore insists he used himself as a model, painting with his pants down to get the perfect view.  Moore is equally interested in issues of sexuality as he is in topics as wide ranging as genetic engineering, addiction, and the sublimity of nature.  He is able to bound effortlessly both in tone and in subject matter from one work to another with either a wink or a turn of the knife, his oeuvre a testament to his wide range of interest.

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