April 9 to December 3, 2017
The Pinault Collection
Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice

“Yes” is hard to find. At times it requires one clamber up a ladder and look through a magnifying glass at a teeny-tiny printed word; as in Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting) (1966). In Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Damien Hirst fabricates an elaborate and absurd mythology that leads us back two hazy millennia, to the bottom of the sea and up to the top again, in order to find Yes: an ultimately exalted demesne of the human spirit populated by unicorns, lions, bears, Mickey, Goofy, attractive naked people, the entire history of art, plus colossal demons and other fearsome horrors for good measure. Hirst’s quest has two parts: as he picks and chooses his mythological and archeological all-star team he underscores again and again that all of this is found and his for the taking. This is explicit in the narrative of the expedition to find the works, as well as the accreted coral, barnacles and shells which have “grown” over the works, signifying their ultimate decontextualization from the world of human culture. The artist is collector and adventurer, but not necessarily the creator, more the fabricator-in-chief. Hirst has always embraced the found object as source of inspiration, and he has always been willing to go out on a limb to push the boundaries of what found means, from the mortal remains of sharks, butterflies, cows sheep and pigs, to the pills in your medicine cabinet and realms to which they can take you. In this massive Venetian undertaking, the artist pillages art history via pages ripped from H.W. Hanson.

Frank Zappa recorded an album called “Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar” (1981) in which he restrained his juvenile sense of humor that was expressed through his lyrics, and simply played his instrument—to great effect. The seriousness of Hirst’s enterprise in “The Unbelievable” is tripped up by similarly nerdy, teen-age boy silliness. Mostly this involves inserting himself into the exhibition, as in The Collector with a Friend, a full-size replica of the iconic Blaine Gibson piece “Partners” (1993) depicting Walt Disney holding hands with Mickey Mouse, in this case Hirst standing in for Walt. The other weak point is a previously unprovenanced “genre” of sculpture, purportedly Greek, which offers extremely accurate representations of mostly naked women: The Diver is a particularly porny depiction of a headless woman’s body. Hirst expends so much mileage convincing the viewer that he can play with the concept of aesthetic and historic styles, at least via costume and context, that these astylistic examples, clearly generated using body casting techniques or seeming to, lack the foreignness that comes with the idiosyncrasies of mannerism. It is this historical and national diversity that is the basis of the whole project. The initial videos of scuba divers retrieving the sculptures, followed by the galleries of coins, ingots, jewels and amphorae go a long way in reinforcing the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Aten a faux-Egyptian sculpture in red marble using Rihanna as inspiration falls within the parameters of almost being Egyptian, and The Warrior and the Bear depicting a scimitar-wielding gamin in a bikini bottom astride a giant bear is so absurd as to constitute a new hybrid style of Anime-crossed-with-Dungeons-and-Dragons. Unfortunately, most of the other hyper-realistic pieces depicting solely human subjects without monsters or costumes are unconvincing.

Can a fatalistically cheery outlook on the history of human creativity be wrenched from an ultimately reductionist Duchamp-ian approach to that creativity? Hirst is counting on the fundamental sentimentality that exists at the root of most human mythology and spirituality to make possible his broad generalized anthropological connections. He is largely successful. He equates the Gods of Hinduism, Ancient Egypt and the Aztecs with Walt Disney, contemporary celebrities Rihanna and Yolandi Visser, and fantasy novel/sci-fi imagery. It may be insulting, but one gets the impression that while Hirst’s avoidance of Judeo-Islamic-Christian imagery might be aesthetic colonialism, it’s more likely bred of the opposite: he finds those familiar traditions far too played-out and boring in terms of visual culture. Western culture’s contribution is Disney and porn, not Jesus and Mary, and through the eyes of his collector/slave alter ego Cif Amotan II, he has assembled what he thinks are all the meaningful characters, tropes, situations and motives from the history of world art and culture.

Depending on where you start your voyage on Hirst’s magic swirling ship, and I would recommend the Palazzo Grassi followed by the Punta Della Dogana, you begin with a sixty-foot tall headless demon and end in a tower ringed by unicorn skulls. The inclusion of curios as well as sculptures introduces another of Hirst’s favorite themes, the question of what constitutes a work of art. By pushing the momento mori/still-life to its absolute maximum in his works utilizing animal corpses in the past, Hirst forced a literal definition of the genre, removing all pretense and metaphor. In The Unbelievable, his frame is the museum itself, and his inclusion of reproduced natural objects such as Nautilus and giant clam shells, mineral specimens, gorgon heads and mammoths skulls in this very wide purview confers a legitimacy on all the objects, real or imagined. It is a wonderful make-believe narrative of art similar to what one finds in other singular presentations of esoteric collections like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

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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.

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Like any Venice Biennale, this year’s is not merely a curator’s egg (good in parts, rotten in others) but a veritable battery farm of them, with more ill and excellent specimens gathered together than one might wish to contemplate, let alone summarize in a thousand words.

The good news is that the signature event — the main exhibition, convincingly curated by Okwui Enwezor, divided between the Padiglione Centrale, in the Giardini, and the Arsenale — is carefully structured, intellectually engaging, aesthetically rewarding and, for so vast an exhibition, unusually coherent. The bad news is that the majority of the national pavilions are pretty lousy, only a handful worth the effort or long queues. Venice is also enlivened, as always, by numerous satellite events, group exhibitions, solo shows, performances — several outstanding, many atrocious, all providing added incentive to survey La Serenissima before the fun ends in November.

Enwezor’s exhibition title, ”All the World’s Futures,” sounds like the sort of waffle cobbled together by a committee and hardly suits a show more about the past than the future. Unless, that is, Enwezor meant “futures” in the financial sense, for his stated intention is to bring a Marxist analysis to bear on the current context. This “return to Marx” might be compared to Lacan’s “return to Freud,” an extension and elaboration of the franchise unrecognizable to purists. Such commitment includes a full reading of Marx’s works, every single word recited in architect David Adjaye’s central performance space, which even features a bearded lookalike dressed as the great man. The paradoxical contrast between this Marxist rhetoric and the billionaire collectors and well-heeled gallerists swarming the opening events was a source of bitter mirth to local anarchist groups who continuously heckled and attacked the proceedings, even launching physical protests against the Giardini and the Guggenheim.

A more engaging anarchistic intervention was the “Sinking of Venice,” performed by veteran Fluxus poet Alain Arias-Misson, who appeared on the Grand Canal in a boat towing the word “VENICE,” the giant letters inevitably sinking to the applause of enthusiastic onlookers. Throughout the main exhibition various soi disant Marxist figures lay out the territory, especially an older generation of radical filmmakers such as Jean-Marie Straub, Chris Marker, Chantal Ackermann, and Harun Farocki, whose works provide rigorous ideological backbone. And the extensive program of events scheduled for the performance arena, involving a dazzling range of thinkers, composers, performers, academics, show just how intelligent and sophisticated Marx’s theories remain, even if it is more about “the enchantment of the physical object” than class warfare.

“The trouble with the internet is that there is not enough Africa in it,” Brian Eno said a decade ago, and much the same might be true about the contemporary art world. Enwezor has rightly pushed a wider African (or at least black) participation, to a perfectly judged degree. While certainly not color-blind, Enwezor has engaged with a wide range of Diaspora artists whose varied practices are far beyond the banal rhetoric of previous “identity politics.” Among all this it is interesting to see how well painting fits the agenda, with key spots given to works by the likes of Ellen Gallagher — set next to the Aboriginal abstraction of Emily Kngwarreye — Wangechi Mutu and Chris Ofili, with the Arsenale culminating in a display of new towering canvases by Georg Baselitz, a man open in his loathing for “the revolution” (including, notoriously, the sexual revolution). Yet there is no sense that these paintings and sculptures (including many works by the late lamented Terry Adkins) are in any way token, obligatory inclusions, but rather embody a new level of sophistication in the art world, exemplified by Lorna Simpson’s latest work, paintings that extend rather then refute her conceptualist origins. In a final room of the Arsenale, Chinese laborers are working throughout the Biennale to craft individual decorated bricks, for sale for 20€ each, this being a work by Rirkrit Tiravanija, while next to them a paid actor reads out his book, gainfully employed by conceptual artist Dora Garcia. Adjacent to all this local art school students (half of them, revealingly, Asian) have signed up to create assembly-line monochrome paintings under the aegis of Maria Eichorn — some of which are actually quite beautiful. Global factory cultural production, minimum wage performance art thus providing a perfect Marxist dialectic for today’s pan-international economy.

Despite the seamless integration of painting into Enwezor’s theoretical argument, it was still shocking to see the Romanian Pavilion entirely given over to paintings and a few drawings, by just one artist, Adrian Ghenie, this most straightfoward display entirely radical today but standard practice for most of the Biennale’s history. There is no need to even mention the worst pavilions (France! Austria!) so let’s rather celebrate the few successes: the weird dark world of Fiona Hall in the Australian, the obsessive microlabor of Marco Maggi chez Uruguay, a sort of digital Gustave Doré by IC-98 at Finland’s Aalto-designed pavilion and that heady poetic hex cast by Joan Jonas on behalf of the USA. The Armenian Pavilion, titled “Armenity” was a rightful winner of the official prize, not just because this year marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, but because the whole experience of visiting the island of San Lazzaro with its 18th-century Armenian monastery is a delight in itself. The beauty of the cloisters, buildings and historic collections are discretely, judiciously accompanied a range of current Armenian artists, and best of all there are no crowds. But in the end perhaps one outstandingly bad pavilion does warrant mention, the Italian, which is just so kitsch, as every year, that it may well be time that they had their Arsenale space taken away from them just as they previously lost their main pavilion in the Giardini.

Within the curator’s egg principle it is hardly paradoxical that one of the best group shows and the single worst solo exhibition should both come thanks to François Pinault. At the French collector’s Dogana there is the exemplary “Slip of the Tongue,” curated by Dahn Voh, so rich in contrasts and curios, whether medieval illuminated manuscripts next to Hubert Duprat gold maggots, or actual Bellini wooden panels and a wonderful assembly of all Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud. But over at Palazzo Grassi there is a stinkingly bad Martial Raysse show (even the poster is truly nasty), which undoes all the good of his recent Pompidou retrospective. Other painters are to the fore around town, not least a lovely floor of Twombly at Ca’Pesaro, (don’t miss the marvelous rare outing novocento magic realist Cagnaccio di san Pietro on the floor below, by the way) and an impeccably tight small show of recent work by Peter Doig at the low key Palazzetto Tito.

The issue of winners and losers, and whether one is allowed to make such judgments in the art world these days, is central to Biennale practice: after all, they give out Golden Lions, so national pavilions are in principle battling one another. The show that most perfectly sums up such cultural competition is the long overdue retrospective of Charles Pollock at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which grants as much visual delight as it does larger existential doubt. Here is the question: is it better to die at 44, a bald alcoholic, having enjoying five years of fame and then future immortality, or to live to 85 with a full head of magnificent hair making very nice abstractions, no money, and no reputation? It was through his older brother Charles that Jackson studied with Thomas Hart Benton, moved to New York, persisted in trying to become an artist. He owed Charles everything but wiped him clean off the map. All art students should be obliged not just to go and study the latest Biennale but also to visit the Charles Pollock exhibition and ponder its real meaning, to ask themselves exactly what they want in becoming an artist.

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Composed of industrial-grade, black-painted steel, Polish artist Monika Sosnowska’s mammoth Tower (2014) sprawls across the gallery floor at Hauser & Wirth on 18^th Street in New York like the shed skin of an enormous snake. The gallery itself is cavernous but even so, the 105-foot-long, horizontal span of the sculpture commands the space. Sosnowska is known for tremendous works that investigate the intersection between sculpture and architecture. She represented her native country at the 52nd Venice Biennale, where her work 1:1 (2007) was exhibited at the Polish Pavilion. That work took over the space where it was installed, but at Hauser & Wirth the viewer has room to walk freely around the entire structure, which makes for a different experience, and a different kind of sculpture.

Here, Sosnowska grapples with the International Style of architecture, first conceived of by Mies van der Rohe. Drawing inspiration from van der Rohe’s iconic Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings in Chicago, Sosnowska has replicated the façade of those two towers in steel, minus the glass windows. But the steel has been further manipulated. Twisted and crumpled, cracking apart at its seams, Tower stands not vertically, but stretches out horizontally across the gallery floor, a tremendous helix that nearly renders the International Style illegible.

Tower is the result of an artist’s labor-intensive process. Sosnowska first creates a maquette of her projected work and then, with the assistance of engineers and skilled technicians, the maquette is enlarged in 1:1 scale. (Unfortunately, the maquette for Tower is not on display at Hauser & Wirth. It would have been valuable to see it alongside the final version, in order to get a clearer sense of both Sosnowska’s working process, and the sheer magnitude of her undertaking.) After it was fabricated as a complete entity, Tower was subsequently broken into more than fifty parts in order to facilitate its transportation to New York. The deliberate breaking of the work contributes to the poignant quintessence Tower embodies.

There is a formal beauty to the mangled steel. A viewer standing at the wider, open mouth on one end, which peters out into a lip, is afforded a view of a winding, industrial road. From this vantage point, the smaller opening at the opposite end of the room is obscured by the sculpture’s own steel ribs. When engaging with architecture, one typically experiences the building as it was meant to stand — that is, vertically. The structure mimics an erect body. But Sosnowska has not situated Tower as one expects, and a full circumnavigation around the work affords the viewer a unique, corporeal experience. It’s possible to understand, in a more intimate way, the true massiveness of a building, and what it means when it is destroyed.

It is difficult to engage with Tower without also thinking about the towers that were razed in New York 13 years ago. Sosnowska makes no specific reference to the World Trade Center, but it seems prescient that the work had its debut in New York in the week leading up to the anniversary of that horrific day. The Trade Center towers were also of the late International Style (sometimes called International Style II), a somewhat watered-down version of Mies’s original vision, which was popular through much of the 20th Century, particularly for commercial architecture. Comparing an image of the Lakeshore Drive towers alongside one of the World Trade Center, one can easily see the influence of the former on the latter. Tower unsettles, for it looks eerily like images of the twisted steel skeletons the world saw replayed and reprinted on television, in newspapers, and online for weeks, months, and years after September 11, 2001. However, an image cannot compare to the experience of being in proximity to hunks of architectural wreckage. Standing alongside Tower at Hauser & Wirth, one has a bodily sense of how terribly awe-inspiring it was for those two structures to come crashing completely into ruin, in one fell swoop.

Sosnowska is a resident of Warsaw, a city whose own, long history of mass destruction far exceeds that of New York’s. The city is still suffused with effects of Hitler’s attempt at its total annihilation during World War II, as well as the grim Soviet rebuilding and expansion efforts that followed during the Cold War. The artist has noted that she often walks around her hometown, documenting demolished, abandoned, and otherwise overlooked sites which nonetheless contain essential, elemental truths of its embattled past. In a way, Tower serves as a connector between the two cities, one with a very old notion of violent destruction, and one much more recent. However, Tower also, curiously, awakens in its viewer a sense of uplift. Standing at the smaller opening, gazing up through the great steel ribs bathed in sunlight, the pathway through Tower is clear, and seems to offer hope.

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