March 31 to July 22, 2018
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York City, moma.org

The intuition in Adrian Piper’s work is evident everywhere. The curators had good reasons for titling this grand, inclusive retrospective of her art A Synthesis of Intuitions.

But which way do you want to take that word? In ordinary English it refers to immediate thought, what comes out of you without preparation as if because it has always been in there. Emerson speaking of the human instinct, as opposed to what schools provide, says, “We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.”

On the other hand Kant, whom this title phrase alludes to directly (and who was one of the subjects of Piper’s Ph.D. thesis at Harvard), pictures intuitions as the raw material of experience. The understanding brings formless sensory input together, using concepts to construct what we call experience in the act of synthesis. “Concepts without intuitions are empty,” Kant says, as if intuition filled our thinking, as if from outside. So the exhibition’s title is telling us that we’ll be looking at Adrian Piper’s efforts to organize what had come upon her from outer sources and shape it into her art – unless (because we can’t just forget the ordinary meaning of the word) it describes the synthesis that is this show at MoMA, organizing the various outpourings of Piper’s instincts.

It’s a good confusion to start with, between the wellspring of inner life and its independently grasped truths and what comes to that inwardness in the rush of experience, uncontrolled and often unwanted. As this survey ranges from minimalism and concept to political observation and comment, with news from the frontlines as well as from the artist’s backstory, it shows her persistently negotiating the interplay between what we know as inner and outer. Everyone thinks about what elements of their experience originate in their own minds as opposed to entering from elsewhere; but artists especially, and in another way especially philosophers. This exhibition, highly conscious of Piper as someone trained and practiced in both philosophy and art, keeps your mind on her meditations on mind.

The richly documented early work, when Piper was studying at the School for Visual Arts and then at City College, shows both Sol LeWitt’s influence and her own first inquiries into consciousness. At twenty, and in her early twenties, Piper worked at minimalist constructions, stringent observations of experience, and a range of performances, including the alter ego she called “The Mythic Being.” The “Situation” pieces map what is external or given in an incident (a walk down the stairs and to the grocery store around Hester and Forsythe Streets), to imply the inarticulable additional element that is the self to whom these experiences are given. To map the space in which an experience comes to be is to legitimate, without having captured and reduced, the consciousness that experiences in that space. “Reality adds to mind inductively; mind adds to reality deductively,” as one of her early writings says.

Not only the physical world is outside, because outside is also where you find the social world with all its expectations. The Mythic Being dances to music that no one else hears or speaks phrases whose context and justification are known only to that being. The mental, previously knowing itself afloat within time and space, now increasingly strategizes the grounds for its integrity among surrounding mentalities. Alongside the problem of the external world we have the problem of other minds.

So what is it that other minds see or know when the engagement takes place amid differences in race, sex, and class? Then the very general social expectations that the Mythic Being faces take a pointed and violent form. A recurring panel in the “Decide What You Are” triptychs (1992) overwhelms its human figure, the photograph of a black girl, with repeating texts of language that denies her understanding of things, from the bland initial sentences “It’s fine” and “I didn’t notice anything wrong” into the territory of “You’re the one with the problem,” “You’re being irrational.” For the girl to learn to speak, when this is the language around her, is to acquire proficiency at doubting her own experience. In another context Kant calls the loss of trust in empirical knowledge “the scandal of philosophy.” “Decide What You Are” imagines the concrete loss of trust in one’s own knowledge, not the fate of all rational minds but the path followed by a few insofar as they are barred from the status of rational minds; call this the scandal of social existence.

The expectations of a social world become the beliefs of the art’s audience when the black man on the video screens in “What It’s Like, What It Is” (1991) has to say in every direction of the compass, to everyone seated around that minimalist amphitheater: “I’m not lazy. I’m not horny. I’m not vulgar.” Just to appear to the audience that is a theatricalizing society, he has to identify and disavow, preemptively, the adjectives that that audience comes prepared to attribute to him. The situation allows for only a compromised liberation, given that every sentence out of the man’s mouth has to be negative, not “what it is” despite the piece’s title but what he isn’t. The final burden of entering a conversation about you that has already settled on the words to be used is that you can only join in the conversation by disrupting it, or refusing to go on with the dialogue.

I ran into versions of the same stumbling block with other pieces from the late 1980s and 1990s. Piper expands her attention from the lone subjectivity seeking to know its own integrity, to the beliefs and behaviors of the surrounding audience. She often posits or declares what the audience is thinking, her spiritual exercises having become exorcisms of the watching others who come to her art.

Second-guessing the audience hits home in a piece like “Cornered” (1988). It is a well-known monologue by Piper, the video of her behind a table on a screen that has appropriately been backed into a corner. What does she say she is: black or white? She imagines the objections to either answer, then asks the white people watching why they don’t call themselves black too. Does black culture put them off? Would they rather not know about their African ancestry?

The premise (that one chooses racial identity) might sound dated thirty years later. The provocation is not. Racial identification has cornered Piper, and she’s showing her non-black audience what it might feel like to inhabit a corner. Consider the possibility that you will blunder and contradict yourself when explaining why you call yourself white. Consider whiteness as racial identification not a self-evident fact.

Viewers may deny having the motivations that Piper ascribes to them. But even then the denial of those motives engages the viewers in the act of thinking through identity that Piper invites her audience to join her in. If you come up with different reasons for your position on identity you will still be coming up with some reasons; and now racial identification has come in for newfound thinking.

An essay of Piper’s, “Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness,” uses a similar technique on its readers. There Piper itemizes the “mechanisms” by which people escape self-examination. To read that essay is to enter a fitting room of rationalizations, putting on one after another in order to figure out exactly how you’re putting yourself on.

Elsewhere Piper’s effort to get the jump on her audience works against her. I commented on the limitation to “What It’s Like, What It Is” built into the speaker’s script, as it were, having been generated by an audience antecedently configured as biased. Another difficult case, “Safe #1-4” (1990), displays four photographs of black people in groups with text that says “We are among you”; “We are around you”; “We are within you”; “You are safe.” The captions almost fit the paintings. It is more accurate to say that they offer one reading of the photographs they caption – for example that an image of a family around the dinner table, almost a stereotype of wholesome tradition when the family is white, in this instance invites interpretations about cultural encroachment.

Meanwhile however what sounds like Piper’s voice speaks from above criticizing the installation (“too militant”; “too explicit”). The critical voice contradicts itself, unsure whether to condemn the installation for being obvious or for being indirect. What follows from the criticism’s self-defeat? That this installation can demonstrate its own value by refuting all negative judgments about it? That if it leaves you unmoved you must subscribe to everything this particular hostile voice is saying? One might worry that pre-empting actual voices from outside with a constructed outside voice is unfair to critics; but the unfairness doesn’t even matter as much as the sight of an anxiety behind this process, of a sort that does not usually take over Piper’s work. I don’t say that she should trust her audience. But in such moments, uncharacteristically, she gives the impression of fearing it. The putative external voice seems less to destabilize the viewing experience than to over-stabilize it, allowing the work to play to its own ears.

That Piper can recreate a distinct subjectivity without projecting words onto other people ought to go without saying. Her parents’ smoking habits and deaths provide the subject for one tender and affecting example, “Ashes to Ashes” (1995). She lets Rodney King and George H. W. Bush speak in “Black Box/White Box” (1992) without adding a comment. Descended in their different ways from Piper’s early “Situation” works, these presentations dwell on fact letting her audience’s mind add to the reality deductively.

In one of the last series in this retrospective, the “Everything” pieces of 2010-2013, Piper moves beyond thoughts of her audience and their judgments. “Everything will be taken away.” The sentence appears on photographs or by itself. In one room, four blackboards show the sentence written in chalk, 25 times per blackboard, and increasingly erased away as one advances from the first to the fourth board. Do children in school still have to write something on the board a hundred times? I can’t think of a more economical depiction of a life-lesson: Stoicism on the wall. Heroes are killed, possessions decay, health is soon gone. Then the admonitory words themselves begin to fade. Standing in that room, I couldn’t decide, and I was glad not to be able to decide, whether the fading of the words meant that people go through their lives forgetting that essential Stoic maxim, denying its truth; or that what you might think you still have after all the anguishing experiences of loss, namely the consciousness with integrity that remains and knows the essential nature of loss – that too will go. Even the strategy of reminding yourself of life’s difficulties is a temporary and half-effective strategy. Sorry about that.

Suppose you imagined yourself bringing chalk to those boards to rewrite what has been erased. You make it a full one hundred sentences. Did you just make things better (restoring the intuition’s outward articulation) or worse (insisting on the unwanted news pressing inward with its moral)? These were the kinds of questions that I found the “Everything” series provoking me to ask, even while asserting nothing and promising only Nothing. Down to the end, which is the present, the retrospective sustains its restlessness of thought, the synthesis work still never done, regardless of where you want to locate the origins of its intuitions.

The post The Restlessness of Thought: Adrian Piper at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

November 12, 2015 to March 6, 2016
144 W 125th Street (at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard)
New York, 212 864 4500

“A Constellation,” which recently closed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, presented a series of works selected to juxtapose established artists’ work with newer work, disparate in media but engaged in similar themes. Differences between elements of the show reveal that opposing signs — rather than repeated signs — may be more effective in signifying an idea.

From Al Loving’s Variations on a Six Sided Object (1967), the eye bounces back to Cameron Rowland’s Pass-Thru (2013). The latter title conveys an idea of access or transfer of an object. Yet the plastic sculpture, a replica of mechanisms used at bodegas or liquor stores, seems more interested in refusing access. A transparent rectangular box sits on a Lazy Susan within a larger rectangular box. The nails used to construct each box visibly protrude and lend a sense of danger. More obviously, there is only one open side to the larger box, meaning there is no through. An object placed in the pass-thru would only go round and end up exiting the same side. This refusal of use value is reflected in Loving’s painting which, with its solid and dotted lines, is reminiscent of an origami pattern or instructions for constructing a cube. However, the distortion and extension of “sides” beyond the pictorial frame frustrate any attempt to imagine its construction. While Rowland is described as more explicitly interested in social relations, both artists negotiate the viewer’s access to space.

Moving into more specific sites than spaces, Sondra Perry and Nona Faustine ask where a black body has been/is now situated. This is an intentionally objectifying statement; Faustine’s photograph From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth (2013) explicitly places a body (the artist’s own) at an intersection in the financial district, standing naked on a wooden box with shackled wrists, on display. The viewer is conscious of their gaze. The choice of site does not immediately carry meaning, as the sign for a Tumi store and AT&T kiosk indicate that this is a relatively contemporary scene in New York’s Financial District. We learn from the text that this is the site of a former slave market, where countless bodies would have been examined, objectified, and evaluated as property that could be transplanted into the white space of a stranger’s home. The evident comparison of black bodies across time is eerie, and the fact that the viewer is still in a position of examination is troubling. This perhaps is why Faustine chose to reveal the significance of the site only in the text: the distinct experience of realizing its meaning is important. Perry reconstructs the white space Faustine problematizes (the space of a stranger or white master) as one of torment with Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I (2013). Photoshopped (objectified and deconstructed) dancers move desperately, emphatically within the confines of a corner in a blank room. Few architectural details reveal the nature of the space, yet it is clear that these bodies are supposed to disappear within it. Instead of arms, legs, and torsos, the viewer sees a grey blur occasionally interrupted by the misplaced line of floor meeting wall. (Architectural space is displaced onto the body just as the body experiences displacement in space.) Our only indication of the identity of the dancers is in the signification of their race — their hair — which in turn becomes the reason that they must disappear, the reason they must move so frantically through space. The trauma of their confinement in this space parallels Faustine’s refusal to belong in a slave market.

Specific to the site of the gallery itself is Torkwase Dyson’s 2015 wall painting, Strange Fruit (Dignity in Hand), which relates to the geometry of Loving and Rowland but seems more interested in conveying meaning. Representations of demographic statistics first come to mind when taking in Torkwase’s grid of painted dots. Again, the viewer only understands its meaning through the exhibition text. We learn that the painting on the wall commemorates “a fraction of the nearly 4,000 lynchings recorded in American history.” Structure communicates the presence of a narrative, but the narrative only unfolds through text.

Narrative is again constructed with ruby onyinyechi amanze’s that low hanging kind of sun… (2015), where the spacing of mixed media elements relates to the layers of that narrative. Here, not even the text reveals what the drawing must contain for the artist. The exquisitely rendered face of a woman kisses the masked face of another body melting into a mermaid’s tail. Three motorcycles drift into the web of a flock of birds nestling into the charcoal hair of another woman, drawn diagonally opposite from the first.

More explicit in creating a narrative, Talwst’s jewelry boxes encouraged the viewer to hold contemporary memories of racial violence close. The miniature scale of depiction should not be confused with scarcity of detail or meaning. In Por Qué? (2014), the killing of Eric Garner is recreated in front of a white American flag, reminiscent of flags by Jasper Johns. Within our culture of wealth and privilege, jewelry and commitments, what cases of cultural violence do we snap shut and hide away?

A literary mind could draw proximate parallels between titles: Jack Whitten’s Psychic Intersection becomes Billie Zangewa’s Divine Intervention (2015), or Andy Robert’s After Mass (2015) transmutes into the aftermath of Talwst’s Por Qué?, and from there into the math of Perry’s Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I. A visual mind may find representational rhymes: a wooden sculpture, Mother and Child (1993) by Elizabeth Catlett, stands in front of a silk tapestry of another mother and child by Billie Zangewa. The arrangement of elements in Troy Michie’s STRAND, CABLE, TWINE (2015) seems tied to the spatial arrangement of drawings in amanze’s work. Money transfers invoked by Pass-Thru relate to David Hammons’s piggy bank, Too Obvious (1996). Adrian Piper’s thought-bubble portrait painting hangs near Tony Lewis’ speech bubble Make His Mouth Bigger, Angrier (2015). Melvin Edwards’s Working Thought (1985) concretizes the slave shackles depicted in Faustine’s photograph.

This is not to say that these works are unproductive in and of themselves. A constellation is about the larger picture, but the curation of the show focused too narrowly on connecting dots based on narrative and representation.

The post Drawing a Line: “A Constellation” at the Studio Museum in Harlem appeared first on artcritical.

Okwui Enwezor’s two main presentations of the present and future of visual culture, at the Arsenale and at the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, are difficult, provocative and unwieldy, as intended. The work shown at the Arsenale is like a full course meal from soup to coffee, the Central Pavilion at the Giardini is more like a cafeteria style serving of a range of dishes you can choose yourself. They each have their advantages. One starts, in Room 1, with the American artist Bruce Nauman’s well-known neon antinomies such as Human Nature/Life Death/Knows Doesn’t Know (1983), which annoyingly and persistently flash their contradictory assertions at you from the darkened walls. They share this space with the 2015 work of Algerian/Parisian artist Adel Abdessemed, whose swords and machetes are clustered, sticking up from the floor, and titled Nympheas or water lilies. The works of these two artists, in their darkened room, as a prologue to what follows, don’t so much re-enforce each other or dialogue, as present two contrasting manners of plugging into the culture around them, Nauman as signage of pop-culture aphorisms, and Abdessemed as a relevant yet straining op-ed page metaphor. The viewer is put in a mode of plugging in, connecting to the work, extracting fragmented meanings and pleasures, and moving on. The implied point is not so much to seek unified understanding or unifying judgments of value and resonance, but to seek rhapsodic impressions, maybe snatches of fact and opinion, and continue to the next.

Toward the end of the Arsenale, in Room 11, at another terminus of this cultural multiplicity, is a room containing among other works, Rikrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2015 of 14,086 unfired clay bricks with the Chinese characters which one can take for a donation of 10 Euros. The money goes to an organization supporting Chinese worker’s rights. Also in this room is Maria Eichhorn’s presentation of works created on site by volunteers on blank canvases painted with a single color (Toile/Pinceau/Peinture, 2015. So here audience and viewer are invited to participation and engagement, undermining and subverting passivity and viewing. One enters the workshop and can assume a living role in relation to works in the states of production and distribution. In this room is also a continuous performance by two people of Dora Garcia’s The Sinthome Score (2014 – 2015). One performer reads and one assumes assigned choreographed postures related to the text based on a Jacques Lacan seminar, and they alternate roles periodically. The viewers are left to interact as they wish with the performers. Works like these that once seemed to grate more strongly against prevailing norms, now seem largely unmoored and single-minded. While the future always holds the possibility of forging more connections to these works, the connections offered seem weak in the present.  The actual final room of the Arsenal, Room 12, extends these ideas in the works of Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera.

Enwezor proposes three filters for the exhibit, and possibly for a view on contemporary culture and the art world at large: the filters of liveness and epic duration, the garden of disorder, and reading capital. And presumably Enwezor’s filters should be seen in relation to culture and art in states of permanent transition with unfixed goals and concepts, as he has previously described the art world. Enwezor’s title for the whole mass of works is “All the World’s Futures.” The ambition Enwezor presumably sees in the works and their being brought together is admirable for embracing both the anxieties and hopefulness implied. In the end, in my opinion, its value is supported not only by the Marxian evaluations of value, work and effort ­but also by a Kantian critique of experiential engagement, implied in numerous echoes in Enwezor’s essay on the shows filters.

Between Rooms 1 and 11 are the works of roughly 90 to 100 artists and collaborative groups that cover a range of contemporary visual art, performances, videos, sculptures, films, installations, objects, images, and paintings.   They follow a range of concepts and impressions that resist unification, fixation and rigidity of thought and experience, and they serve to extend in various manners the ideas of 19th, 20th, and 21st-century observers ranging from Marx, to Kristeva, and Jacques LaPlanche to Enwezor himself. Likewise they extend the ideas and works of various artists extending from Romare Bearden and Gerhard Richter to Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson and Joan Jonas – the last two represented in the Arsenale and the US Pavilion respectively.

One further focus or group of ideas to access these works is provided by the judgments of the jury in awarding Adrian Piper, Massinissa Selmani and Harun Farocki, respectively, the Golden Lion, Silver Lion and Honorable Mention. While Piper moves closer to the concerns of Room 11 and Garica and Tiravanija than perhaps Nauman and Abdessemed, it is important to notice that her work offers multiple connections to contemporary culture, if mainly through social and artworld institutions and their critique. Her primary work in Room 5 is The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game # 1-3 (2013). Three performers/recorders sit at three circular desks with three aphorisms – or brandings – in gold on the wall behind them. Viewers are invited to register into a system where contact information is eventually shared with other registrants and contact is made, which is recorded and kept as part of an ongoing archive of contacts. Even viewers not registering are made aware of a system of which they are not part, going on around them, paralleling everyday experience of social, political and commercial exchange. Piper continues to highlight the inclusions and exclusions that go on around us and provoke our knowledge of them. While clearly conceptual in its premises, Piper’s work offers several parallels to the culture of the art world and the culture of everyday life that locates it and gives it more than a single focus.

The Czech German filmmaker of a mixed German and Indian family, Farocki who died last summer at the age of 70, is presented through a section of Room 8 which shows an atlas of his films on small screens in a matrix around the walls. I am not sure if this is the best way to either be introduced to his works or to sum up his works. But the films themselves are careful observations of everyday life through short, often found, footage. Again, like Piper’s works, his offer multiple intersections to the world of art and the world of every day life, including his re-working of ideas of, among others, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard.

Farocki’s inclusion, like that of Terry Adkin and Chris Marker, remind us of recently deceased artists whose works continue to make their impact on ideas of other artists; Farocki and Marker in the mode of film and photography and Adkin in the installation of sculptures with African American and musical references and sources.

Massinissa Selmani was born in Algeria and studied in France. His works, such as the drawing series A-t-on besoin des ombres pour se souvenir? [Do we need shadows to remember?] (2013-2014), are sparse, almost illustrational, drawings of news events and photos, which document both the quotidian nature and the bizarreness of reported news. Selmani has also worked in short projected animations and photo collages to report on actual events and planned utopian social structures. Like other artists showing at this Biennale, his works record and diagram present moments and idealized plans. Like Selmani, the artists Joachim Schonfeldt and Madhusudhanan, use drawing as an end in image making in order to portray and report on how the world is simplified and reimagined through our observations and experiences of it. In the works of these artists which serve to represent both deadpan and dreamlike image making, recording the present moment is more prevalent than presenting structures and images that break down or pull apart our sense of the world to move us into the future. Rather than rebellion of the present moment as a precondition for future development, the respect for present moments becomes a prerequisite for modeling future thoughts. Selmani and Schonfeldt use drawing as just one of their media, exploring similar connections to political and social events through photography, and film. They both are using fixed image media in ways that parallel Farocki’s use of short films, which is to say as a media for creating essays on current events and for reflecting opinions about these events.

The stated curatorial premises of the Biennale, in dialogue with the works themselves, yield an interesting emphasis on works that stress the present as a model for engaging the future. These works are strongest when they offer more than one connection to the current art world and the culture at large.

But not all the works fit neatly inside the narrowest confines of the promise of the curatorial concepts. The widest readings of liveness, disorder and value lead in some other directions. Some works stretch across a wide range of cultural concerns including those from recent, if not contemporary, art history. As Amanda Sarroff discuses in her comments on Gedi Sibony’s paintings in the Short Guide to the Biennale. His works touch on concerns of Arte Povera, Minimalism, and Rauschenberg’s combines. Sibony paints on and over aluminum sheets often printed with other images from their previous uses as sides of trucks. In works such as The Shake (2015) and One Foot to Shoe On (2015), he manages to engage, almost as collaged elements, shapes and partial images from commercial messages as abstract elements in large abstract images of three or four colors and a similar number of shapes. In a way that seems to move back and forth from a magnification of small scales to a shrinking of immense scales, Sibony creates a virtual world of image and light that seems recognizable from both the physical and the digital worlds of structure and space, and from art works of the past and the present.

Some of the most moving works in Venice, among a host of notable works that there is not room to mention here, go beyond the curatorial issues of the exhibitions. And yet they carry out the promise of Enwezor’s curatorial premises. Jenny Holzer’s installation from her “War Paintings” Series at the Correr Musuem make moving visual statements. Holzer’s works are large printed canvases of the redacted statements of the United States military and intelligence reports concerning interrogation of those held in the Iraq War. They are shown among the paintings and artifacts at the Correr Museum of Venice’s past glories and accomplishments. They run the risk of exploitation of the topic and people involved, and yet they can be defended both as acts of journalism and art. They quote the words of those interviewed as represented in the documents released by the freedom of information act. They stand as un-easy records of words and acts classified as “interrogation,” but clearly of actual inhumane and cruel treatment of the interrogated.

Many of the works at the Biennale embody the Enwezor’s focuses of a Garden of Disorder and Reading Capitol in relation to the world at large. Good examples are Helen Sear’s “. . . the rest is smoke,” and the Invisible Borders: Trans-African Project, a collaboration initiated by the Nigerian artist Emeka Okereke. Sear and the Trans-African Project both show a series of projections and photographs, which address the place of humanity in relation to the natural world, our use of the natural world as a source of economic value and desired goods, and our reliance on our environment and political structures. At this point we could call this a presentation of imaginative reporting and engaged looking, which is maybe the same thing. They offer us a vision not of a road map for the future, but of a cautionary tale of future choices. If our use of images and art is to bring to life shared stories about our world that both report on its condition, and also allow further considerations in our own thought, then Sear’s and the Trans_African Project’s series of projection and photographs stand as one clear example of how to accomplish this.

“Slip of the Tongue” at the Punta della Dogana curated by Danh Vo provides a contrast to the Biennale that tells a different related curatorial story of contemporary works. If the Biennale provides an example of the strengths of curating contemporary works in an attempt to place them so they both tell their own stories and offer interesting dialogues with each other, this show – also huge in its scope with 50 artists or more spanning eight or so centuries – shows some strengths and some weaknesses of curating works from a single and more impassioned point of view. The sharpness of Vo’s viewpoint is evident in both how he separates the works, and how he brings them together. In short, some of the works exude a passion and breadth of thought that allows them to play brilliantly and at times subtly off each other, and sometimes they become shallow and more desultory. At times one feels Vo wants us desperately to relate to the works as he does, but we can’t locate our history and connection to them.

In both “All the World’s Futures” and “Slip of the Tongue” there are examples of curatorial intelligence in allowing works separate spaces to speak for themselves: for example in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, the three works of Wangechi Mutu, and at the Punta della Dogana the Cri du Coeur (2005) and “Codex Artaud” series (1971 – 1972) of Nancy Spero. But also there are places in each when the works are placed to allow the voices of the artists to be heard in concert or in contrast to each other, such as Nauman and Abdessemed mentioned above, and at the Giardini, the works of Huma Bhabha and Ellen Gallagher. At Punta della Dogana there are several examples of dialogues attempted and provoked. The oddly at once subtle and jarring sculptural juxtapositions of Jean-Luc Moulene’s La Toupie (2015) yields a set of difficult but interesting comparisons with the awkward but material directness of Sadamasa Montonaga’s Work 1961. Likewise, Moulene’s work contrasts but enriches aspects of Vo’s pieces, also close by. Both curatorial objectivity, like Enwezor, and curatorial passion and conceptual pointedness, like Vo’s, can have advantages and disadvantages.

The post Plugging in and Moving on: Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures appeared first on artcritical.

July 17 to September 13, 2015
50 Orange Street
New Haven, CT, 203 772 2709

This summer marks one year since New York City police choked Eric Garner to death. Since and before then, an uprising of activism and conversation has highlighted systemic racism and its link to criminalization and brutality. Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns,” curated by Sarah Fritchey with Titus Kaphar and Leland Moore, tackles these issues in a group show innovatively framed around seriality.

Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project (2011–present) began with the artist discovering a series of other men in the criminal justice system sharing his father’s name. From the project’s Asphalt and Chalk Series, X (2015) overlaps three black men killed by police: Michael Brown, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo; while XVII (2015) stacks three Jeromes on top of each other. The poignant connections made in these pieces through repetition set the tone for the show.

Adrian Piper also explores the connotations of names with Everything #19.3: NYT Portrait of Megan Williams (2007-8). A search for images of a twenty-year-old African American woman named Megan Williams kidnapped by white perpetrators resulted in exclusively white women and men unrelated to the incident. Piper tightly prints the Megans from the image results and repeats the mug shots of the perpetrators.

Andy Warhol was obsessed with how images of death and disaster could be repeated until they became meaningless. His obsession remains pertinent in our contemporary 24-hour news cycles and perpetually refreshed feeds. Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot (1964) reflects upon the persistent question of police brutality. The piece’s appropriation of a Life magazine image feels immediate in its cold, blurred reproduction.

Connecticut-based Iyaba Ibo Mandingo’s Grave Marker Series (2014) reads with the pop sensibility of Warhol’s protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat and uses bright house paint, oil sticks, and crayon on recycled paper. The pieces commemorate black parents of murdered sons and allude visually and linguistically to African patterns. The language scribbled and repeated on the markers (“Boo!,” “Y do I frighten?,” “I am ur boogie man”) addresses the systemic fear of black bodies.

Language is also central to Jamal Cyrus’s Eroding Witness 7 Series (2014), four pages of laser-cut papyrus reproducing headlines covering the 1970 shooting of organizer Carl Hampton. These works, which include both mainstream and alternative presses from Houston, demonstrate the range of language used to report the event (“Black Militant Slain on Dowling” contrasts with “Exclusive Eyewitness Accounts: Police Fired First”).

“Arresting Patterns” insists on plain and direct confrontation. Dread Scott’s two-channel video Stop (2008) (in collaboration with Joann Kushner) depicts six men of color from New York and London stating how many times they have been stopped by police. Adrian Piper’s Safe (#1-4) (1990) corners the viewer with four images of smiling black families captioned “We are around you,” “You are safe,” “We are among you,” and “We are within you.” The installation, which contemplates questions of assimilation, includes self-aware audio of the artist talking as a white viewer who is having a “really hard time” with the piece.

The works in the show are as much about looking as they are about looking away: Kaphar’s dizzying portraits contain multiple pairs of eyes; Scott’s stopped men stare; Piper’s black families wave. The show is aware of the things that we can’t look at—either because they’re blurred by Google Maps like the unseen jail in the work of Maria Gaspar (Wretches and Paramount (Extreme Landscape Series; Google study of Cook County Jail in Chicago), 2014-5) or because they’re fading and fragile like Jamal Cyrus’s papyrus newspapers. It knows that we’re constantly doing both.

Along with “Arresting Patterns,” Artspace is also showcasing work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program, this year led by Titus Kaphar, Aaron Jafferis, and Dexter Singleton and inspired by The Jerome Project. The New Haven high school apprentices worked closely with visual and performance artists to create work contextualized by a curriculum and field trips. Kaphar discussed processing the heavy experience of visiting a corrections facility with the apprentices and assuring them that there was art to be made about those moments.

The work impressively echoes the ideas of “Arresting Patterns” and shows a range of approaches: from Ruby Gonzalez’s acrylic abstractions (Untitled I) to Emanuel Luck’s realistic white pencil portrait, Don’t Chalk Your Ancestors. In collective collages (Sinque 1, Sinque 2), the apprentices also addressed complex the history of their city, researching New Haven’s cartography and its role in the Amistad trials to inform their art.

The work of Arianna Alamo, entitled Martyrs and The Prophet (MLK), depicts the mug shots of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, among others. Using tar paper and white chalk (like Kaphar), Alamo frames the figures in a gold Byzantine halo, achieving an almost Warholian allusion to devotion. Most striking was the halo around King: a pop collage composed of gold, consumerist jewelry.

Artspace’s approach to both shows is effectively interdisciplinary. Looking beyond the language of art and the space itself, the works are contextualized not just through wall labels, but also through takeaway cards with statistics relevant to the ideas presented in the show. Further contextualization is provided with the space’s reading room, which includes a timeline of American racial violence and books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010).

The conversation about race and criminalization goes beyond the content of this (or any) show. Less explicit in the works displayed are the patterns of policing femininity, queerness, and nationality—which often also intersect with race and with violence.

Still, Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns” and the work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program make important and engaging connections through seriality, language, and confrontation. No matter the age of the work or the artist, the show’s selections feel immediate and challenging.

In continuing the urgent advocacy activism addressing these layered issues, admitting patterns and highlighting repeating acts—of violence, of incarceration, of policing—will remain critical.

Artspace aims to continue the conversation with a free two-day conference on September 12th and 13th at the Yale University Art Gallery. Visit arrestingpatterns.org for registration and more information.

The post Aesthetics and Social Justice: “Arresting Patterns” at ArtSpace appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Radical Bodies at Grey Art Gallery appeared first on artcritical.