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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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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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 11, 2007 under the title “Pax American in the Serene Republic”

The Venice Biennale has been the Olympics of the visual arts since its inception in 1895. In odd years countries choose their artist representatives for permanent pavilions in the Giardini or in rented spaces around town: scuoli, palazzi, churches, cultural foundations. In addition there are major curated exhibitions that offer overviews of the state of art: in the Italy Pavilion, the largest in the Giardini, which since the demise of fascism has become an international survey; in the Arsenale, where generally hipper talents are showcased in a mammoth, historic rope factory; and in a cornucopia of “collateral” satellite events.

This year, for the first time, the director is an American: Robert Storr, a former Museum of Modern Art curator and recently appointed dean of the Yale Art School. The title he has come up with is “Think with the senses, feel with the mind: Art in the present tense.” While his selections and reasonings reflect a notion of art in troubled times, his generally neat, sober, focused festival is a deal less anarchic and querulous than biennials past. Pax Americana has arrived in the Serene Republic.

Actually, a division between the Giardini and the Arsenale, crudely speaking, is between War and Peace. The rougher, former military-industrial buildings include such meditations on conflict as Mr. Storr’s choices of Italian artists Paolo Canevari, whose “Bouncing Skull” (2007) features a kid kicking around a skull in front of a gutted tower block in the former army HQ in Belgrade, and Gabriele Basilico’s sumptuously ruinous cityscapes, “Beirut 1991” (2003). The mood in the work of both, however, is melancholy and poignant rather than desperate or macabre. Argentine Léon Ferrari, by contrast, went for the jugular with “Western-Christian Civilization” (1965), in which Christ is crucified on an American bomber. The inclusion of this early work at the opening of the exhibit reads as a political apologia by Mr. Storr.

Having, so to speak, atoned for his passport at the Arsenale, the American curator has no qualms in presenting many of his countrymen in the Italia pavilion, which is the heart of the Biennale. There are rooms devoted to Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois and Sol LeWitt, Biennale familiars all, but also to newer introductions for an international audience such as Elizabeth Murray, Thomas Nozkowski and Raymond Pettibon. Mr. Nozkowski’s thoughtful, quirkily compact little abstractions – loosely intimating specific sources and improvising playfully upon art historical precedents – epitomize Mr. Storr’s thesis of art at the nexus of the sensual and the cerebral.

Two of the largest rooms are given over to German giants of the contemporary scene, Gerhard Richter (whose 2002 MoMA retrospective was organized by Mr. Storr) and Sigmar Polke. But where Mr. Richter might have contributed to the sense of political tension and terrorism with his Baader-Meinhof paintings, and Mr. Polke with his cacophonous, deliberately overloaded referential paintings, they are shown instead here in a serene mode, Mr. Richter with his enigmatically lush smudge paintings and Mr. Polke by a series of arcane, near-monochrome sensual pictures using violet pigments on irregular stretches of fabric, as in “Neo Byzantium” (2005).

With so many Americans elsewhere, the actual American pavilion is given over this year to a deceased Cuban: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996 at age 38. His spare, minimalist heaps of candies and stacks of posters that visitors can take away elegaically symbolize a dispersal of essence. The show offers a welcome moment of quiet and repose amid the clamor of the Biennale.

National pavilions are each chosen by a named commissioner, who is sometimes also that show’s curator. While following their own tastes and local agendas they often respond to the mood set by the Biennale director. The British artist Tracey Emin has played down her carefully cultivated popular persona as the “bad girl” of the British art scene with an elegant, almost prim display. There is nothing like her earlier slept-in bed or tent embroidered with the names of everyone she has slept with. While her imagery continues to play on a harrowing personal mythology of teenage angst – evident in earlier monotypes shown here taken from earlier sketchbooks and delivered in a knowingly pathetic, spindly line – sexual languor does not prevent her paintings from looking like polite salon abstraction riffs on Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.

Next door, in one of the strongest shows in the Giardini, France’s Sophie Calle picks up Ms. Emin’s self-pity and takes it in a totally different direction. When the artist was jolted via e-mail by a boyfriend, she sent his crass missive to over a hundred women chosen for their different professions and skills and asked each to interpret the letter and propose a reply. A statistician analyses the length of 22 sentences in the letter; a clown reads aloud with personal asides, interpreting the letter in positive terms, grasping at straws, feeling the tenderness of his ellipses and parentheses; a pair of Talmudists debate its meaning dialectically; an actress – Miranda Richardson – reads it dramatically and then performs origami.

In harmony with Mr. Storr’s breakdown of dichotomies, there are many shows that elide the personal and the political. Callum Morton is one of three Australians showing in different venues. In the grounds of a private foundation in the Dorso Duro that also hosted shows for Armenia, Latin America, Scotland, and the New Forest in England, Mr. Morton erected a macabre, battle-worn wreck of a modernist breeze-block house. This turns out to have been modeled on his childhood home, built by his architect father, scaled down to two-thirds actual size. The intrepid visitor enters this smoldering ruin through a front door, only to discover an air-conditioned white marble elevator lobby attended by a custodian in a white jacket. Pressing the button actually releases various ominous sound effects.

It so happens that in the blistering Venetian summer any art work that offers creature comforts is guaranteed sympathetic attention. In Singapore’s slick but thoughtful four-person show at the neo-gothic Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, for instance, Zulkifle Mahmod’s “Sonic Dome: An Empire of Thought” (2007) has a huge circular bed visitors lie on to contemplate a halogen star-studded, sound-filled dome, the bed occasionally vibrating in harmony.

The sprawling Arsenale hosted two large areas for places hitherto excluded from the Biennale: the People’s Republic of China and Africa.  The Chinese offered four women installation artists, including Cao Fei a.k.a. China Tracy, who filled an inflated tent with gentle pop music and computer animations, and Kan Xuan, whose video animations of transmogrifying Buddhist sculptures were placed amidst the arsenal’s rusty, pungent gas tanks. Africa was an odd show. A curatorial panel chaired by Mr. Storr borrowed exclusively from one private collection (Luanda-based Sindika Dotolo’s). While it is a step in the right direction to franchise the continent, the inclusion of a white Spaniard, Miguel Barceló; a dead American, Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the British artists Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare wastes wall space for deserving, living Africans.

Actually, nationality is often a point of contention at the Biennale, whose organization remains a legacy of 1890s nationalism and imperial power. Often countries chose famous citizens who live abroad, or domiciled foreigners. Newly autonomous regions in Europe, such as Wales or Northern Ireland, now have their own shows. Wales, for instance, out in a former beer warehouse on the Giudecca, includes the sculptor Richard Deacon, who lives in London, and the painter Merlin James, who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, but who were both born in the principality. Their shows – sharing space with a thoughtful photography-and-video-based Lebanese national pavilion (Syria and Egypt also have pavilions, incidentally, as does Israel) – are definitely worth the vaporetto ride. Mr. James, in particular, rivals Mr. Nozkowski as a poster boy for Mr. Storr’s notion of thinking sensually and feeling cerebrally. His self-referential yet authentic seeming paintings are delectably anxious about their own condition.

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