Thursday, April 8 at 7 PM

JENNIFER COATES and DAVID HUMPHREY join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Julie Mehretu at the Whitney and Matthew Bollinger: Furlough at Zürcher Gallery, plus musical bonus

Timed reservations are required to view exhibitions at the Whitney

Whitney Museum of American Art: 99 Gansevoort Street, between Washington Street and 10th Avenue
Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery

The post Zoom Recording of The Review Panel from April 2021 with Jennifer Coates and David Humphrey appeared first on artcritical.

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist at the Whitney Museum of American Art

March 13 – June 28, 2020
99 Gansevoort Street, between Washington St. and 10th Ave
New York City, whitney.org

The exhibition of Agnes Pelton’s inwardly inspired paintings at the Whitney, “Desert Transcendentalist,” will inevitably be compared to the Guggenheim’s record-breaking Hilma af Klint show of last year. Both feminist pioneers were trained landscapists whose calling was mystical abstraction; both were neglected until Maurice Tuchman’s legendary 1986 exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – although the show included only one Pelton, and the fuse of her fame has been, like her paintings, a very slow burn. If you take af Klint at her word, she is simply the medium of the works she is celebrated for, a conundrum of authorship which only adds to her contemporaneity, her moment. Pelton is another matter. Her symbolic abstractions are hard-won and timeless, as impeccably composed and crafted as Renaissance nativities. Georgia O’Keeffe’s equally impeccable paintings have been the usual comparison – to the point of being an eclipsing doppelgänger. Indeed, O’Keeffe trained, a quarter century after Pelton, with the same modestly enlightened American landscapist, Arthur Wesley Dow; both were introduced to the Southwest by Mabel Dodge Luhan and her fabulous entourage, and both thereafter spent their lives painting in the desert – the one to immense popular and critical acclaim, the other in near anonymity.

After seeing the LACMA exhibition, I’d been intrigued by the occasional Pelton sighting in regional museums in the West, often in connection with the Transcendental Painting Group, founded in New Mexico in 1938 (Pelton was by then living in remote Cathedral City, CA, east of Palm Springs). She has been virtually unknown in New York, where she grew up and studied, and where she exhibited in the watershed 1913 Armory Show. The current show and its beautifully designed catalogue originated at the Phoenix Art Museum, where I happened to see it in 2019, increasing my knowledge of Pelton’s corpus by dozens of astonishing works, not a few of them rescued from thrift shops and garages.

Pelton, like many artists of her time (as the LACMA show reminded us), explored every alternative belief system that came her way, chief among them Theosophy, a kind of gateway drug to eastern mysticism and western hermeticism. She copied passages from esoteric texts into her journals and set up a proper meditation room in her studio, in which she seems to have contemplated her own paintings while summoning new visions. Perhaps some of these visions bog down in diagrammatic information, taking occult symbolism almost too literally. The urn which runneth over of Even Song (1934), for example, strikes me as received wisdom rather than firsthand insight, although the ethereal Deco calm of the overflow is transfixing. Memory (1937) has an even more complex schema to work through, albeit a more cryptic one; moreover, as with a number of Pelton’s works, it is almost too skillfully sweet, even cute. With its soft theatrical lighting and choreographic charm, the painting approximates a Disney storyboard. Of course, these qualms are, all the same, full-fledged fascinations.

The earliest and most sugary painting in the exhibition, Room Decoration in Purple and Gray (1917), is the epitome of a transitional work. For a decade, Pelton had been making what she called “imaginative paintings,” inspired by the enervated fin-de-siècle symbolism of Arthur B. Davies and others, in which mysterious, virginal waifs commune with nature. An earlier and murkier such painting, Vine Wood (1913), is reproduced in the catalogue; it was one of her Armory Show works, and the impact of Cubism and Orphism, first seen there by most Americans, is clearly manifest a few years later in the translucent chromatic planes and splintering plant forms of Room Decoration.

In 1921, after her mother’s death, Pelton retreated to a lonely Long Island windmill and painted her first abstractions, dispensing with the waifs while digging deeper into curving, overlapping constructions. With Radiance in 1929 Pelton perfected a fluid, biomorphic shell game in which light and space change places as you look. But with Star Gazer and Divinity Lotus, painted that same year, Pelton found her true voice: serene, tuned in, and heraldic. 

The artist was exhibiting in New York and elsewhere when, in 1931, she chose to move permanently to a village in the California desert, in near isolation from the art world, although closer to West Coast centers of eclecticism like Pasadena and Ojai. Her life among the locals in Cathedral City seems to have been about as passably sociable as O’Keeffe’s in Abiquiu, NM, although in more scorched and humble surroundings. As the last of her family money dried up, she sold landscapes and portraits to support herself (mostly uninspired, even dull, it must be said), while continuing to work on her soaring inward visions. 

As for that family money, it leads us to events before Pelton’s birth – a sensational prologue that might have been scripted by Orson Welles or Paul Thomas Anderson. In prosperous, 1855 Brooklyn Heights, Agnes’s grandparents, the Tiltons, were joined in wedlock by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Theodore Tilton was an editor and worked closely with Beecher, a spellbinding orator of national prominence, in the abolitionist cause, and after the Civil War in support of women’s suffrage. In 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confirmed to her spouse that she had been having an affair with the charismatic Beecher. Theodore reported the confession to the “free love” Presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, with whom he had been having his own affair, and she publicized the behavior to call attention to Beecher’s hypocritical support of traditional marriage, with its legal and financial bondage of women. The scandal detonated in the burgeoning national press and burned continuously for years with endless claims and counterclaims.

Pelton’s grandparents got much the worst of it. Theodore lost a suit of adultery and exiled himself to Paris (eventually, he was buried next to the painter Jean-François Millet), while Elizabeth, shunned by society, raised their daughter, Florence, in genteel poverty. Florence, who had betrayed her mother’s affair to her father, was later sent to Germany to study music, where she married Mr. William Pelton. After moving around the continent for some years, the couple split, Florence rejoining her mother in Brooklyn with young Agnes in order to support the family by opening a music school. Mr. Pelton remained behind and died of a morphine overdose. Agnes was then nine. 

At age 14, Agnes, always described as quiet, enrolled in the study of art at Pratt Institute. The silent, solitary vocation she fixed upon and followed thereafter was a refuge from the whirlpool of politics, religion, and sex that had swallowed up her ancestors –– among whom we should reckon Beecher and Woodhull. His was an ecstatic, Transcendentalist version of Christianity; she was a practicing clairvoyant who summoned the dead. Thus, spirituality and spiritualism, forces writ large in the era, were particularly mingled in Pelton’s cultural DNA (and perhaps not just cultural, considering that Beecher was rumored to have fathered more than one of his congregants’ children). One last vignette from this prologue: in 1875, the same year as the adultery trial, Madame Helena Blavatsky founded, in New York, a mystical, post-Christian sect she called Theosophy, or divine knowledge. It was a syncretic, inward road map past the gross matter of the here and now, beyond mental shackles like Heaven and Hell, and it was destined to preside at the birth of modernist abstraction.

Pelton’s deeply moving 1933 painting The Primal Wing seems intended to answer the call of one indispensable Theosophist text, Thought-Forms. An illustrated tract by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater first published in 1901, the book asserts that thoughts can be seen by trained clairvoyants. Despite some silly and prudish moments, Thought-Forms opens the door for synesthetic speculations – especially with an epilogue of clouds visualizing the music of Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn. (Pelton’s 1950 premonition of a Lisa Yuskavage painting, Lost Music II, not on view but reproduced in the catalogue, is surely up this alley.) The pamphlet includes a color chart of auras, as well as illustrations of particular thought vibrations. Greed for drink is a grasping brown blob with cartoonish claws wrapping around an absent bottle – and fledgling Theosophists are warned to imagine how lustful thoughts would appear to advanced lodge members. 

With perhaps equal credulity, peace and protection appears as a pair of rose-colored wings, and Pelton’s The Primal Wing must have been suggested by this image – keeping in mind that the authors of Thought-Forms openly invited artistic license by acknowledging their illustrations’ limits. In Pelton’s unforgettable interpretation, peace and protection is a single incandescent rosy wing hovering over a slumbering gray landscape with the tragic grace of a Fra Angelico angel at a Crucifixion. 

Pelton consulted many doctrines, from the Agni Yoga promoted by Nicholas Roerich (whose phantasmal Tibetan landscapes seem to have influenced her dawn-and-dusk palette), to the aphorisms of Carl Jung (who might have noticed Pelton’s early paintings when he attended the Armory Show). Most of Pelton’s symbolism was so fundamental as to be beyond dogma; of stars, vessels, luminous orbs, and fire she was a seer on her own terms. Messengers (1932), with its buoyant, precision-tooled mystery can contend with any O’Keeffe steer skull or af Klint temple painting, any Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian, any Arthur Dove or Charles Burchfield or Marsden Hartley, or indeed any other spiritualist Twentieth Century work of art. I can say the same for Orbits (1934), Alchemy (1937-1939) and The Blest (1941) – as well as The Voice (1930) and White Fire (1930), two incredible paintings that are sorely missed in the exhibition (again, consult the catalogue). In each of these centered, delicately refined compositions Pelton presents us with something very like an icon for a new religion.

This religion has a distinctly feminist lineage – mysticism in the West being re-introduced by lionhearts like Woodhull, Madame Blavatsky and Besant, and patronized by trend-setters like Luhan. The feminine principle, as a Theosophist might say, had long been suppressed but was now re-emerging, and Pelton, for one, perfectly captures and distills it in works of devotion such as Messengers and Orbits. What makes these softly radiant visions unique is that they are actually chipped from diamond-hard philosopher’s stone. Her painterly sleight-of-hand transforms colored earth into sheer light and space. A gossamer 1931 work, Translation, is in every way the antipode of Jess’s alchemical Translations of the 1960s – those impossibly thick, yet precise paintings that seem imprinted by occult, perhaps demonic dimensions. But if Pelton’s beatific vision is not as literally thick as Jess’s, it is, in all its passionate naiveté, equally potent. The two artists might be halves of a whole, yin and yang, the good cop/bad cop of American visionaries.

The post Desert Rose: Agnes Pelton at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Time-Capsule Formula: Warhol at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Sites of Attraction: David Wojnarowicz at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

Proclaiming, gesticulating, cajoling and even flailing, poet Pamela Sneed chanted a litany of fear, strength and tragedy, but ultimately admonished the cheering crowd to act with the words “Always Uprising.” The J20 event at the Whitney Museum, organized by Occupy Museums and Megan Heuer, Director of Public Programs and Public Engagement at the museum, offered a passionate alternative to the morbid events taking place simultaneously on the steps of the capitol on what Noah Fisher of Occupy Museums referred repeatedly to as “this Horrible day.” On a gray morning with intermittent showers, the Whitney became a wide umbrella shielding a vibrant and motley crew of cultural actors and activists in what is becoming an ever widening definition of art and artistic practice including environmentalists, low-income housing activists and community organizers, and advocates for the differently-abled who stood for a few minutes each to speak to the standing-room only crowd in the Hess Family Theater. Some plans were laid, narratives of both betrayal and progress were related, and a forward momentum and the groundwork for action through artistic channels were laid in amorphous but possibly practicable terms.

While the initial intent of J20 was a strike in which all museums would close in a nationwide demonstration of defiance against a bigoted, sexist and anti-intellectual administration taking power, the Whitney offered pay-what-you-wish entry and a venue for what could only really be called a group-therapy session to deal with a surreal transition in American and world politics. The speakers fell into roughly three categories, all co-mingled. The first were speakers who sought to verbalize the collective sense of anxiety and anger and by expressing it artfully, to expiate it and move the crowd briskly along the stops of denial, anger, bargaining, depression to acceptance (and then change). Pamela Sneed fell into this group with her plaintive and desperate petition to the crown not to allow this political set-back to reach catastrophic proportions, while Martha Rosler spoke of struggle to regain mental composure after being “just a little thunderstruck by an orange comet” and Aruna D’Souza plainly stated “everything we fear has already happened.”

A second varietal were activists who presented firm data, often describing successful collective action taken as well as cautionary anecdotes of failures precipitated by the status quo, which will become de rigeur in this new regime. Alicia Boyd of Movement to Protect the People described her ongoing battle to keep Crown Heights and the areas around Prospect Park accessible to low income Brooklynites and maintain a decent standard of living by requiring height restrictions on housing built around the park. She called out the Brooklyn Museum for its real estate entanglements and demanded that all museums be responsive to the need of local communities irrespective of median income. Kim Fraczek of the Sane Energy Project provided the most cringeworthy moment of the event, looking defiantly into the crowd and challenging the Whitney to divest itself of patronage from the fossil fuel industry. She explained the campaign she had participated in raising awareness of the dangerous natural gas pipeline running directly under the museum’s front steps which had been the target of local residents and activists alike. Their requests for dialogue had been flatly rejected by the museum administration. As she stood in the auditorium, listing the museum’s intransigencies, there was a satisfying sense of arrival, ironically caused by the Inauguration.

Avram Finkelstein and Dread Scott, who were among the planners of the event, characterized the third subset of speakers by suggesting ways forward. Scott immediately drew acclamation by walking to the front of the room carrying a poster with the words “BY READING THIS, YOU AGREE TO OVERTHROW DICTATORS”, implying there is no alternative at this point. Reminding those present that Nixon was re-elected by a landslide and still was removed from power within a year-and-a-half of that show of public support, he ended with “don’t wait until 2020.” Finkelstein talked about his own philosophy as a founding member of Silence=Death Collective and the artists’ collective Gran Fury: to avoid goals and instead pursue activism as a life-long occupation. This would prevent the normalization of dangerous, censorious, and exclusionary practices and generate a corps of activists always nimble and prepared to deal with the curve-balls tossed by an unpredictable despot. Leading the chorus of the group Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter who recited the names of police-murdered black women, Simone Lee made a simple but effective request of the crowd—simply start trusting black women.

Martha Rosler’s pronouncement “Thank you Whitney, fuck you Whitney,” were the final words, highlighting the contradictory nature of the presence of museum and artist in the context of activist politics. Many of the speakers decried the presence of patronage from wealthy individuals and corporations in the art world, a contradiction of philosophies for many artists that will be very difficult to change and has been the norm for the production of art objects for millennia. Laura Raicovich, President of the Queens Museum, and Carin Kuoni, Director of the Vera List Center, opening the program of speakers, pledged to support, promote and encourage the increased politicization of art, and the production of political art, but as with the entire political system, it is not the good intentions of galleries and curators in the art world that will effect any lasting change, it is the need to disseminate the ideas beyond the choir that was being preached to in a room on a rainy Friday afternoon at the Whitney Museum. A paradigm shift in the practices of artists and institutions away from capital will be the only way to generate truly collective art and promote a collective society, but even at this dreadful juncture in American history, after all the lessons of the 20th Century, is that what we want either?

The post “Thank You, Fuck You”: J20/Occupy Museum at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

September 16, 2016 to January 2, 2017
99 Gansevoort Street, between 10th Avenue and Washington Street
New York City, info@whitney.org

This exhibition is focused on a relatively short segment of Carmen Herrera’s long career (she is now 101), namely 1948 to 1978. It presents her painting in Paris during the years immediately after World War Two, and then her development when she moved to New York. In the first gallery you find Siete (1949), a relatively small painting with hard-edged yellow, red and black forms. The Parisian works in this room show her experimenting with hard-edge abstraction, moving quickly, restlessly seeking resolution, not always with entire success. Untitled (1947-48), for example, is a fussy-looking construction of many relatively small circles and geometric forms, an all-over composition which feels cramped; and Untitled (1948) a decorative display of intersecting rectangles lacking a clear resolution.

The second room, has paintings made in New York, (Horizontal, 1965, is the best, in my opinion) which simplify her earlier abstract constructions, creating large scale compositions which surely must owe something to American painting of this period. Then the next, larger gallery contains a roomful of her “Blanco y Verde” paintings, nine in all, made between 1959 and 1971. Constructed of green and white, with triangular wedges, these magnificent pictures show her in full command of a passionate visual idiom. Thus Blanco y Verde (1962) shows a narrow rising green triangle of color; and Irlanda (1965) is a diamond, with similar triangles of color at the bottom edges, and another green form coming down from the top. And then, in the next gallery you find four wooden sculptures from the 1960s, including Azul “Tres” (1971), a two-part construction in blue which really stands out. Finally, facing the elevator are her seven Days of the Week, large-scale hard edge abstractions from the 1970s. The last part of the show is less than impressive, as if she hadn’t figured out how to build upon her achievement in the 1960s.

As a woman and as a Cuban-born artist, Herrara was obviously treated unjustly by the art world in the period covered by this show. Complementing the Whitney’s belated attention, in a well-meaning act of reparation, Herrera is being much praised in the media. She certainly is a gifted artist—anyone can see that. But because this relatively small exhibition, which certainly doesn’t present her entire career, or even, so I imagine, identify her starting point, offers such a limited selection of her art, it’s impossible to offer a confident, critical evaluation. Compare, for example, her Green and Orange (1958) in this exhibition with the very similar-looking works by Ellsworth Kelly and other American men or women. Her picture is impressive, but it’s hard to place. How original was she? Did she borrow from Kelly, or did he learn from her? A third, tantalizing possibility is that they arrived at their results independently.

We are left hungry for more insights into her situation within the Parisian art world. And much more information about how exactly she found herself in New York in the 1950s. This is neither a complaint about this exhibition nor a criticism of the artist, but rather, a plea for a fuller show and, also, for a more complete presentation of the historical context in which she developed. But a long journey must start somewhere, and this show is a welcome first step.

The post A Passionate Visual Idiom: Carmen Herrera at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

February 26 to March 13, 2016
99 Gansevoort St
New York, 212 570 3600

The Whitney’s elevator doors slid apart to reveal an open room marked by expanse and emptiness, illuminated by the slipping rays of a setting sun. In spite of a modest number of occupants, the space resounded with a roar of commotion. Andrea Fraser’s expansive sound-installation, Down the River (2016), inhabited the fifth floor like a ghost, hovering at the limits of awareness, threatening to become manifest. The audio was recorded in the A-block of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, which, although 32 miles distant from the museum, also looks onto the Hudson River and the landscape beyond.

The deception implicit in the layered sounds of museum and prison was never fully realized by Fraser’s installation. It was only too easy to discern that the recorded audio was not of the museum space, for surely the expected tourists and Chelsea gallery-hoppers were not hammering and shouting across an echoing expanse; it was not the museum’s loudspeaker that echoed through the recording. Content was not the only indication of displacement. Saturated with texture and reverberation, the sounds were overwritten by the spaces in which they were captured. With eyes closed, the clamor of voices and the scrape and clang of metal recreated a place that was almost tangible when you could escape the visual. Walking from one window to the other, I sensed my passage through a variety of spaces: the loudspeaker reflected and mutated, inscrutable in its own echo and attesting a vast scale. A man murmured and the interstices between projection and reverberation indicated that he had spoken to the walls of a small room. Some voices were startling in their appropriateness, seeming too vividly real in contrast with the unnatural character of the other sounds. In their uncanny realism, they threatened to reach out and pull me into that smaller space. In these uncomfortable moments, Fraser brings her viewers the magic of transportation tainted by the shock of realizing the place they have been brought to is one that they never want to be. I felt that if I looked up, I would find myself as a fly on the wall of Sing Sing, as if there was another expanse just beyond the gallery. When I heard voices in the recording, I would involuntarily halt, as though I had been called or spoken to. Because, in a sense, I had.

Should we be fooled? The failure of this recording to alter the museum in which it was housed perhaps necessarily indicates the fundamental incompatibility of these spaces. The emptiness of the floor met the litany in a contrast that expressed that museum halls are never truly empty, are always echoing with implications and suppressions. Fraser’s text attempted to tie the Whitney and Sing Sing in the tradition of institutional critique for which the artist is known. The installation’s title refers explicitly to a slang term for incarceration, “going up the river.” In the same manner that the audio itself transports its listener to the place of the prison, the title reorients its audience; we are asked to consider what it is to be a prisoner who exists in captivity, looking from afar toward the museum, a space which is characterized by influx of attendants who choose to enter and may depart at will. The work is a biting condemnation of the viewers that it addresses, who, in their mere presence, empower the museum and further the distances between these institutions.

Last December at Light Industry, in Brooklyn, Fraser expressed regrets regarding the caustic, joking form that her performances often take; works such as Museum Highlights (1989) and Little Frank and His Carp (2001) condescend not only to the museums that they are executed in, but also, to an extent, to the audience that visits such institutions. Within the group of onlookers there is an even further divide between those who know the insincerity of her behavior and those who accept her actions at face-value. Wearily, Fraser observed that, no matter the ultimate recipient of her critique, the audience always laughed hardest at those of its own members who did not understand her performance for what it was. Joke’s on you. Although this installation is not farcical in the same manner, instead, following the more serious tone of recent works such as L’1% C’est Moi (2011) or There’s No Place Like Home (2012), Fraser continues to manipulate her audience. However, this joke is on all of us, even the artist herself.

I began to walk to the stairs, passing first through the sharper sounds of a single cell, then on to the din of the hall, which was punctuated by the opening and closing of heavy metal gates. I paused. I stood as a single point in the expanse of the Whitney’s fifth floor, an expanse that felt like infinitude and possibility. Diagonally across the wooden floor, a couple walked towards each other, taking pictures that depicted the sequentially closed distance between them. At the massive windows, groups of visitors stand pointing out landmarks of the New York skyline, impervious to the rattles and clanks that shook through the room. Criticism is most painful when it contains glimmers of truth, that some gaps cannot be bridged.

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JAY SANDERS: When did you meet Jack?

FELIX BERNSTEIN: Well, I was really young, and Jack, at the end, nobody really liked him, I would just hang out on the lower east side, I was a poser, I wasn’t an artist, I wasn’t really interested in culture, I just found the lower east side a compelling place to experience things.

I would pick up guys, I would cruise, basically one of the guys was Jack, and he had all these punk neo-Nazis hanging around with him. Ludlum was over, and the Club Kids were a mess, and Jack was really generous, and I wouldn’t be an artist or anything if it weren’t for his generosity. He would tell me to meet him for a rendezvous or whatever, but he wouldn’t even show up. But that taught me a lot. Him not giving me attention made me show up in wilder and wilder costumes. I was called a child prostitute, but I wouldn’t think of myself as that, but as a rebel. We had a lot of encounters where we wouldn’t talk. He would give just little statements, not positive or negative, that just pushed me along. I think of that as generous. Pina Bausch, or someone like that, is very hands on, obviously…. Jack wasn’t even there. It was a teaching in absence.

Was it difficult?

Yeah cause you’re put on the spot and there’s no one there for you. His father died when he was very young, in a sea accident.

I don’t want to say I came into my own because he didn’t want me to come into my own. I wasn’t self-possessed; I didn’t have a self, and he took that material and used it.

Anyone who evaluated him was ascribed as a monster, patriarchal, crazy. I grew up in a world where there was no evaluation. You can imagine that having a teacher like that wasn’t an easy situation. He wasn’t evaluated and didn’t evaluate me, but I learned from him to evaluate others. But nowadays, German art magazines pay me to say the sort of stuff Jack Smith said. They love to see me bite the hand that feeds.

What about ideas? Did he have any ideas?

His ideas were already out there, and people used them all the time. When I was on St. Marks Place I was bored, cause everyone wanted to be Jack, and I didn’t. I didn’t want anything to do with him, and I think that’s why he found me.

I had no diva worship for Jack, and I don’t like Jack and I don’t like who you think he is. To put it cutely, You Don’t Know Jack, and that was the space of our interaction. I’m not gonna dress up as a Flaming Creature and dance around Barbara Gladstone gallery or at a Pride parade. He would hate that. In fact, I’ll let you know: he hates you, if you do that. And if you say performance art is subversive in a museum, he’ll kill you.

Did you ever have sex?

The phallus is an organ belonging to the father, and Jack’s father was dead but he didn’t care. Jack had no phallus: he hated phallic men. He just had a flaccid penis, hanging around all the time. That’s what’s so “obscene” about his film Flaming Creatures; there are no erections.

Jack was at that weird time: the birth of pop art. Like Warhol, he didn’t want to be a subject; he wanted to be an object. But unlike Warhol, he didn’t want to be a commodity, even though he loved the world of commodities—Maria Montez and the starlets. But Smith liked being the pivot between subject and object. He couldn’t settle on one or the other, and it drove him. Most of us pick. He wouldn’t. He was neither Batman, the hero, the free agent or Dracula, the bloodsucking villain (he played both in his one filmic collaboration with Warhol)—it’s clear that Warhol chose to be a vampire, an undead object who fed off of the lives of subjects.

What did he invent?

Everyone in Greek Theatre knows what this look means. He didn’t splinter the disclosure of thinking but some people think he did. But he wasn’t expressive. It wasn’t about the outpouring of emotion. The beauty of Smith’s Hamlet is that emotion is rendered through objective correlatives, and it connects you to the subject through a skewed view. You directly feel it through indirection, as T.S. Eliot has explained of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Nowadays all intimacy is delayed through parody and irony…but for Smith there was no deferral. The indirect was always already directed at the viewer. It was an instantaneous transferal through spontaneous yet effective bodily hieroglyphics.

Famed experimental artist Tony Conrad was originally Smith’s intern. Of course, Conrad is a straight, minimal artist. Conrad was using drugs to control his emotions: to go from happy to sad, the two faces of theatre—all very simple, controlled, framed. Jack Smith, Conrad thought, was so corny and emotional. And this helped him reduce emotions to stark symbols. Maximalism became minimalism. In turn, it is true that Smith invented minimalism. And he turned away from Kant’s subjectivism towards a new paradigm: the subject-as-object or the subject as thing. 

For someone like Jack Smith, what’s the boundary of an artwork?

To be or not to be, to be art or not to be art, hard or soft dick, wavering, stuck in wavering, because phallic authority is dead. That lack of resolution became what others manufactured in their attempts to claim his legacy. Even Warhol.

Jack Smith didn’t hate all proper names. He always hated the one, who led the chain gang of signification: Jonas Mekas, that was the master signifier he abhorred. Smith was always playing the crazy polymorphous signified. That was Jack Smith, or Jack Smith was that thing. Mekas uses his subjectivity to interpellate and determine, Smith was always the interpellated thing. Young performance artists and queer academics always say with a smile, “that was Jack Smith.” But perhaps the “that” that was Jack is really just the stab in the back caused by the reclusive and elusive referent. So it is not wrong when everyone says “that was Jack Smith,” the one who sent me that strange and hostile letter. That was him since he was always that thing, and we were always determining him through such anecdotes.

We’ve talked about the reptilian technique. How did Jack Smith convey his own technique?

Interns became baroque apprentices. You can never master baroque art but you can at least be told about it. The student can never be more than a subjective creature; only he was ever really an object; and so he remained better than us. We would decorate or be “flaming,” he would watch us then morph based on what he saw us seeing. Like Warhol, he was a voyeur not a “flaming” participant, like the modern gay/queer artist. But unlike Warhol, he would become what he watched the watcher watching. Thus, Warhol’s cruel glare was more than just a subjective standpoint for Smith—but rather, it was also an internalized compass for designing selfhood.

What do you think about his legacy?

John Waters said about Jack Smith: that he bit the hand that fed him. He’s wrong. Jack Smith was never even fed. Rather, he fed the hand that bit him. Not to over-emphasize the point, but Jack Smith’s dad died at sea. He was untreatable and unfeedable, because you cannot treat someone who does not accept, as an ontological premise, the supplement of health—he was the living embodiment of what Richard Foreman termed the Ontological Hysterical Theater.

Can Smith be anything more than a dodo? What does Jack Smith mean for productivity?

Plenty of people will say, Jack Smith is a real artist, but Rent the musical is superficial. They are wrong. Gay Marriage is neoliberal fantasy and so is Rent but your critique is just as neoliberal. Protesting gentrification is gentrification. Jack wouldn’t have cared about Rent: it would’ve been as good as anything else. Idina Menzel might even be our Maria Montez.

Funny story—a budding hip gay artist blocked me from all his social media accounts after I wrote a critique of his safe aesthetics—an hour later, he shared a glossy ArtForum essay that praised Jack Smith for being an aggressive trailblazer. “Never conform,” he tweeted as a caption. Jack Smith is rolling in his grave. Or anyway, Jack Smith is the thing that rolls in a grave.

Bieber Bathos Elegy will be presented in the Whitney Museum’s theater on January 15th & 16th at 9PM. Advanced tickets will be available. More information is forthcoming.

(Transcription by Julien Nguyun)

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David Carrier, 2014
Saul Ostrow, 2014
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Gagosian Gallery

Full index entry for “Koons” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

The post Jeff Koons at artcritical appeared first on artcritical.

I am not a fan of Jeff Koons. It is not a matter of his being a symptom of a culture gone bad, or that the work is self-indulgent. It is simply that sometime after the early stainless steel pieces, organized at the Whitney under the title Statuary, I found that it became uninteresting — and over the long years had stopped thinking about it. This retrospective has not changed my mind but it does have me rethinking the nature of his subject, which is not popular culture but the artist himself. The key to Koons is his narcissism — whether actual or faked I do not know.

In a funny way, therefore, I have a newfound respect for his conceptual complexity. A key work that supports my premise of narcissism is not, as it happens, included in the exhibition. The New Jeff Koons (1980) is a self-portrait of what appears to be an enlarged family photo of the artist-to-be exuding the wellbeing of a middle-class boy circa 1960. The young Jeff sits at a desk with a coloring book, a crayon poised in his fingers. This staged photo seems to imply that ‘The New” of the title is meant to indicate perfection in the sense of both pure as well as reinvented.

Koons identifies with his iconographical subjects — they represent both how he hopes to present himself to others as well as his fears as to how he might be perceived. We find the hero, the king, and the demi-god alongside the comedian, the cartoon character strong man and the gorilla. Mirrors and polished surfaces, his most recurrent motif, are in essence narcissistic, a product of someone who in all ways is watching himself. His portrayal of women reveals his fear of them, and his adolescent obsession, which reduces them to sexual fantasy and object. Within his work we also find a record of all he has done to become a celebrity, a star, a success and all he has done to hide his secrets behind a veil of postmodern pastiche, eclecticism, and appropriation.

Such, indeed, Koons’s cleverness often conceals his serious intellectual abilities that I have to consider whether I have been taken in, that the discerned biography is a red herring rather than a sincere expression of the artist’s psyche. This encrypted biography is actually part of Koons’s masterly invention of himself not as artist but as huckster, a con man that promises his audience what they really want, glamour and allure. Yet, even with his declared mission of making things alright, he has made no commercial concession to his popular audience. Instead of creating a mass market for his work he has instead made ever more expensive works — although recently he has signed a deal with H&M to design handbags.

Problematically, to this day Koons’s works do not escape the gravity of Duchamp, or that of the notion of appropriation, which permits everything to become a readymade via its re-presentation, re-contextualization, or re-purposing, the mainstay aesthetics of the early ‘80s. His works in themselves are insignificant — even with the seriousness and insight one can afford them in hindsight, they have not been influential or culturally affective the way, say, Warhol has been. What saves Koons from being reducible to reflections on our material culture and the semiotics of objects is that there is something more personal in his focus on domesticity, perfection (newness), infallibility (expansiveness) and identity. Without these tropes the imagery Koons employs would have revealed itself to be little more than an intellectual form of flower arranging — a motif, in fact, of his early work.

The young Koons, we find at the Whitney, was an assembler who juxtaposes existent ideas and practices. His early works exploit the fact that Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptualism shared an antecedent in Duchamp’s readymade. Koons combines these three movements in cartoonish, multi-colored, cheap inflatable flowers, arranged on or in front of acrylic mirrors so as to multiply their image. The resulting arrangement, as in Inflatable Flowers (Tall Purple, Tall Orange) 1979, make a comic reference to Warhol’s flower paintings while Sponges and Single Double-Sided Floor Mirror, 1978 seems to reference Robert Smithson’s mirror displacements of the late 1960s.

The Flowers are followed by a series of pop-minimalist assemblages in which he combines banks of fluorescent lights recalling Dan Flavin with such household items as a tea pot and a Hoover vacuum cleaner. These were followed by a series consisting of differing models of Hoover vacuums sealed into Plexiglas boxes. More than introducing another of Koons most persistent themes — a pristineness and purity associated with newness — these works produced between 1978–80 also give expression to Koons’s initial intuition that the readymade has the capacity to transform everyday objects into a commentary on the confluence of modernity, technology, aesthetics, mass production, taste and their illusionary nature.

Combining readymade imagery, with which he personally identifies, with a finish-fetish aesthetic and cunning intellectualism, Koons tracks the process by which all aspects of our lives, desires and fantasies — even our neuroses — are objectified, commodified, and culturally sold back to us. Importantly, he does this without implicit or explicit judgment or criticism. Viewed in this manner, his works’ content and potential meaning lies in his shrewd ability to use a thing’s attributes to create analogies and metaphor, rather than commentary. For instance, while his Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules, 2013), and Popeye (2009-12) respectively reference classicism and comics, in turn they each also represent the demi-god, the hero, and the strong man. The irony here is that Hercules is made of plaster and Popeye is carved from granite. Subsequently, along with Buster Keaton, Kiepenkerl, Michael Jackson with Bubbles, Self-Portrait, Hulk (Organ), Gazing Ball (Mailbox), etc. these works in passing index masculinity. Throughout his work other such indices can be assembled concerning women, (love, class, and childhood). Another pattern set early on, is that for each new subject and form he employs a new technology, as well as the highest production values that industry can supply. As such, his works also represent the best that money can buy.

There is a significant shift in Koons’s works grouped as Equilibrium (1985) where he introduces celebrity basketballs afloat in steel and glass tanks. This is followed by Luxury and Degradation, which consists of liquor ads and stainless steel sculptures of kitsch objects. With this work Koons becomes the maker of stand-alone 3D images, rather than representing and arranging objects. At the same time, he has decided to make himself the subject of his work. This is the moment in which Koons appears to win the coveted position held by Warhol, left vacant by his death and that of his heir apparent, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet rather than model himself on the idiot savant Warhol played, Koons emerges as the glad-handed politician and big smile huckster who is willing to repackage for his middlebrow audience high-art as novelty and fetish, and the artist as personality.

He begins to cast in stainless steel things such as Jim Beam-J.B. Turner Train and Louis XIV (1986), producing up-scale facsimiles of souvenir shop items and collectables in glazed porcelain or polychrome wood. These are exhibited under the heading Banality. Koons employs advance technologies, skilled labor, and high production values for these works but as before, these items are not a portrait of our culture so much as loaded meditations on sex, desire, success, masculinity, competence, and self. I suspect both Michael Jackson with Bubbles and Pink Panther (both 1988) are surrogate self-portraits for they seem to sum up Koons’s sense of himself, whether via the tragic creative childlike genius of Jackson or the sly cartoon character whose popularity spurs it on from being a film title character to a classic cartoon series with international appeal. A clue that he might be indexing these images to himself is the contemporary portfolio of four Art Magazine Ads each featuring Koons projecting a different persona.

Made in Heaven (1989-1991) consists of works we might see as collaboration between Koons and his then wife, Italian porn star turned politician Ilona Staller (La Cicciolina). With these works he gives his life over to the spectacle of tabloid journalism and male fantasy. The result is images of him and his trophy (La Cicciolina) engaged in sex presented as over-life-size, highly retouched photographs, printed on canvas and/or made into Venetian glass figurines. These softcore, de-eroticized images, rather than emancipating his audience from shame and embarrassment, undo the promise of pornography, announcing that the fulfillment of male fantasy is sterile — all the ambition driven by self doubt and adolescent desire comes to emptiness.

After his acrimonious divorce there appears to be an eight-year break in Koons’s production. Then under the title Easyfun (1999) he produces a series of colored crystal animal head-shaped mirrors, then with Easyfun_Etheral (2000) his studio begins to turn out collage-like paintings that are highly derivative of the works of James Rosenquist, Sigmar Polke and the later paintings of David Salle. Koons attempts to produce two-dimensional works have in general been uninspired. This may be a result of the fact that it is harder to produce iconic images by appropriating, de-contextualizing, or merely representing existent materials.

Between 1994–2003 he appears not to have been able to produce coherent bodies of work as he had previously done, though he continues to group works under various titles, such as Celebration and Popeye. These works form a confused assemblage of assorted inflatable poolside toys and re-runs of earlier imagery such as the up-scaled balloon dog. All these works seem to be about scale, fetishistic surfaces, production values, and illusion — though one may suspect that they in some way are inspired by Koons growing brood. Then with Hulk Elvis (2006–14), Antiquity (2009) and Gazing Ball (2013) Koons turns to the Pop, Classical and the Baroque periods as references. These works collectively appear to be engaged in an extended and perplexing meditation on masculine identity, women and sex. Many of these recent works sport flowering plants (a sign of optimism?). Along with these he has produced oversized sculptures of the baubles one buys as anniversary and Valentine gifts: diamond rings, heart-shaped pendants, bouquets of flowers. Though much is made of Koons’s happy marriage with six children and the (obsessively) perfectly ordered life, one gets the impression from his work that his psychic life is still full of sexual confusion and a conflicted sense of identity. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that his retrospective introduces the never-before-seen Popeye, and ends with a monumental multi-colored sculpture of unformed lumps of Play-Doh.

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