Below is the full, edited transcript of a conversation I conducted with the artist Christina Quarles in April of 2023, prior to the openings of her shows Come in from an Endless Place, at Hauser & Wirth Menorca (which closes on 29 October), and Collapsed Time, at the Hamburger Banhoff, Berlin (which closed this month on 17 September).

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Neil: You stated once that when you moved to painting from drawing, that language was replaced by pattern. Can you elaborate on that?

Quarles: When I was first moved into painting in grad school, I just went ahead and wrote on the canvases alongside the imagery that I was working with. All the things that I loved about text were the way that it flattened a plane, literally, and that it is also a reference to something that isn’t there. It was a way of creating this common ground, something like a shared understanding, that was also really specific to the individual reading it. So much of my work is about the way that you read an image and the way that an image unfolds with meaning, based on how we’re sort of trained and taught to read an image. I think that there’s just an inevitable desire when you see a visual image to understand it, and to find answers quickly. We don’t trust ourselves to live with the visual image. So if there’s text, most people will go to the text to answer the image because it’s scary to be in that place of not understanding. Since I wasn’t using the text as a caption for the narrative or for a conclusion about the image, I found that it was like putting in a few red herrings, and that felt unnecessarily misleading – to be like, here’s text on the bottom right-hand corner with an image above it and the two do not have anything to do with one another. That’s rude! So when I took out the language, I found that I still needed something. Also there is this element in my paintings of having areas where the paint will just be a linear and it won’t be filled in. So to anchor that as a decision, feeling finished, as a set of choices, text was that anchor for me. When I removed the text, I found that the anchor was missing. I wanted something that could anchor the work in that shared language that you could hook into, but which was also open-ended. So I looked for patterns that are that sort of a reference: something that you’ve maybe seen in art history, but maybe it’s actually from television and maybe it’s television referencing art history. So it still has that iterative quality.

N: Is it important that it remains a two-dimensional flattening?

Q: Yes, the flattening is part of it. In many ways the idea of pattern and planes in my work could replace the way that I think about language. It is a more two-dimensional reference to something that you have to complete in your memory. I always try to find, whether it’s language or imagery, moments of punning and double meaning. That’s important to me.

N: Is this why the bodies that are depicted are pushed to the brink of legibility? There’s a push and pull of recognizability, areas where that legibility is distinct and then breaks down.

Q: Exactly. I’m interested in having moments of legibility that are immediately apparent and then other contextual clues within the painting that undermine that first reading. That legibility breaks down not because there’s a lack of information, but because there’s too much information that contradicts itself. That’s always the standpoint I have: away from the idea of a lack and into the idea of excess.

N: It becomes more like signal and noise versus figure and ground.

Q: Exactly. I find that question of legibility to be central to my practice.

N: You have said that you like Adobe Illustrator because of the ability to scale infinitely: the vector image versus the bitmap. A lot of the work has either a kind of architectural element that defines a space or there are the 2D planes that have been rotated into space that lay out a zone in the canvas. How do you conceive of the scale and space of your paintings?

Q: I think of the composition of the figures in architecture within the painting to exist fully within that canvas space. It’s sort of like outside of the painting none of the elements of the painting exist. Even though I’m referencing moments of architecture or pattern or imagery that I have seen, whether it’s high moments of architecture and art or these very low or mass forms of culture. The figures also come from the sustained practice of figure drawing with live models. But when I come to the painting, all of that is just used as snippets of memory that get filtered through the process of making the painting. Scale is very much determined by the edge of the canvas. There are constants of scale which relate purely to my scale of making. I just did this huge installation for the show in Berlin; it’s like a 40-foot-wide painting. But even that, the scale of the figures, the scale of the pattern, it’s the same. What changes is the way that it is read in the context of a room. The way I think about the scale of painting is really related to my physical scale and the figures within it. They’re interacting with objects and the environment that relates to their scale. It’s because they are more in this embodied state of experiencing the world. Sometimes we have, whether it’s an awareness of our own body or the spaces that we’re in, moments when the scale of things are unnoticed or unseen because we seamlessly move through the scale of our world. And then there are other times when there really is a misfit between how we fit into our environments or how our environments fit into us. It’s like, when you become really aware, you’re like, “oh, I’m in a seat that’s too small for me,” or “I’m in a couch that’s making my body sink too much.” So it’s how to represent those moments of moving through a world that is taken as a given. We take architectural spaces as a given, but they’re actually decisions that were made, representations of how a body would move through them. What does it mean when your body doesn’t quite work in that space. There is a distortion of scale within the figuration. It’s more how you feel your body. How if there’s a part of your body that’s in pain, for example, it distorts the scale of your perception. It’s more a sense of perceived scale. But it’s always related to the physical limitations of my wingspan. Which is why the computer and bringing in the digital is something that I like. It’s a way of working more in that psychic space without having it always be interpreted via my own body.

N: Do you think of every painting as an attempt to look at or develop this sense of perceived embodied experience?

Q: It’s also just the feeling of that disconnect, and at other times the harmonious experience of your sense of self moving through the world. I think of this idea kind of like code switching: how you are constantly aware of how your sense of self is shifting in your environment. It’s always this sort of play between occupying space versus being occupied by space; what it means to be a person that can occupy space and what it means to be a person that is occupied by space.

N: Space not as neutral but always coded.

Q: I don’t really adhere to this idea of neutrality. I think that everything has a presence. It’s just there are certain states of being where you’re not having to be aware of that presence because it is catered to how you move through the world.

N: Do you meditate?

Q: I don’t! I think it’s probably because, in the studio, if I have a real painting day, not a day that’s sort of truncated by a million meetings and things, but just a full painting day, that is what I imagine a meditative practice would be like — that moment of being in the present, which I find does not happen elsewhere in my life. Actually, it does happen a little bit now that I have a baby; it’s another time when you’re kind of like very in the moment — well, we haven’t really childproofed our home!

N: In the past when you’ve said your work is about what it’s like to “live in a body” — this is a curious way of putting it, because it does imply a kind of inherent dualism. That there’s the container, and that there is something else, whether that’s the mind or spirit or soul. But I don’t get the sense that you believe that, right? You’re not a mind/body dualist. In fact, I’d argue your work is an attempt to demonstrate the irrelevance or the illogic of that dualism. Embodiment is a process or a practice. Like painting is a practice, and one can be more or less attuned to it. This is where we come to how you adapt or find yourself adapting to spaces or communities that you either do or don’t line up with, which is where the conversations about race and gender usually come in. But once you’re past those initial categories, there is a more universal problem, this problem of embodiment.

Q: Those ideas of race or gender, all identity categories, they are the product of that problem, which is more universal. I think that it’s easy to function in the framework of a duality or of a binary, and I fall into that trap a lot myself, even with the language and ways that I discuss my work. But I do think that one of the reasons why I make art is because I can express these ideas through the art.

N: I think a lot of conversations over the last five to ten years have confused what it means to recognize another subject with what it means to identify a subject and so to identify with some category of identity. Recognition just doesn’t get discussed quite as often, because it’s very easy to go to representation as the the logic of what we’re supposed to be paying attention to – what position, race, gender, sexuality, or politics are being represented. Though race and gender or sexuality are almost always mentioned in the context of your work, I think what’s interesting is that the perceptual and cognitive demands of the viewer have more to do with some process of recognition, of something becoming legible, and cognizable, rather than merely identifiable. Your figures appear as prior to any given representational category. They are pushing the boundaries of recognition, not representation. Would you agree?

Q: I think that’s a different way of phrasing this idea if “living in a body” versus looking at a body. Living in a body is more like that recognition rather than that externalized or internalized representation. Recognition is actually going past that sort of facade of representation. That idea of representation, it still creates this dynamic that others, and it still creates a dynamic that maintains the current power structure. Because it ignores the fact that if you can easily move through the world, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t still moving through a bunch of systems that were designed to organize how you have to move within them. There are people who have not had to question their identity as much, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t a whole host of assumptions being made about them. So yes, pushing the limits of recognition while still having elements that you can easily latch onto — pattern is one and figuration is a huge one; we try to find a figure in almost anything. I’ve always felt like the figure is a foil in the paintings to talk about humanity, but using the figure just as an entry point.

N: “Surrealism” is a word that has been used to situate your work, but I think most people toss that off with an idea that your figures might look like some of the figures they have seen in surrealist photographs or painting. Less noted is how surrealism was often an attempt to undo certain categories of thought, to break free from social constraint, or societal convention or convention in general, bourgeois subjectivity and sexual mores or what have you. There is an echo here of your trying to overcome the categorical, to unlock a way of thinking about embodiment that isn’t categorical. That uses painting and figuration, and the space of the canvas, to think up new rules of the game, rather than playing some existing game.

Q: Where I always come from is having lived through certain identity categories that I find do exist beyond categorization, like primarily with my racial identity, and experiencing the isolation and difficulty of that position. There is this theoretical ideal of breaking down categorization that I find to be not actually livable, sustainable, or just the way we function as humans in this stage of our evolution. I think that the call for breaking down categories is one that works really well in theory, but not in practice. Being somebody that is multiracial in a system that fundamentally is not designed for that and can’t reconcile the disconnect between looking white while also identifying as a person of color – that’s just too incongruous. And I find it just leads to a great deal of alienation. Ultimately it creates this sense of not having a sense of self in a social context. Social context only undermines my sense of self. I only feel othered by camaraderie. Maybe it is more like what you’re saying, the idea of recognition is what is needed more than representation.

I’ve actually found that whenever I do studio visits with grad students, one of the things I often will share with them is that we have this idea that in our art, that if we are too personal or too specific, too individual with what we work with in our practice, it’s going to be selfish and nobody will relate to it. So we try to be more general to appeal to more people and not feel so self-centered. And it’s whenever those general moves are made that it feels actually completely superficial and hard to access as work. I found that for my own work and for other people’s work that I’ve really been able to connect with; it’s because of tapping into this personal and individual experience that then I’m able to, I don’t know, it somehow unlocks the ability to trust.

N: At the Hamburger Banhoff show, who is the person that you would most love to see in that set of galleries looking at your work?

Q: I don’t know! It’s such a crazy question. In the last few years I had a conversation with Maggie Nelson and that was so cool. It’s just hard to say. I can’t answer that. It’s impossible. I mean, because…

N: Doesn’t have to be just one person.

Q: Well then, it’s just cool to have people spend time with your work period. I always really like talking with the security guards because they’re the ones that get to watch everyone watching. One told me that there were bunch of queer teens spending like an hour looking at my paintings. That’s really cool to me. There are obviously really impressive thinkers – it would be cool to see what Judith Butler would think of the work. Right? Let’s see what she’s got to say.

N: So Judith Butler and Wendy Brown come to the Hamburger Banhoff…

Q: Let’s get them there!

N: And get into an argument about this question of figuration and performance in front of your work….

Q: Yes! Okay. There you go. Let’s do it. You got the the connect? I think it’d be interesting to see people who have tackled this question in different ways, specifically with race and identity. For instance, Adrian Piper — it’d be cool to see what things she would say about my work. Because again, these questions aren’t static, so to think about people who are still alive who have really put forward ideas about something that isn’t static and is still changing. You get known for the moment that you first became very successful and how you discussed things. And there’s an idea that therefore you need to be held to that static standard. Most people that are able to think [like Piper] are not static people.

N: I imagine Piper would have very interesting things to say.

Q: For sure.

N: But also, on the evidence, the work actually really exceeds that initial discussion.

Q: Yes, I try to be honest with myself with that too, that these were the things that made me ask these questions when I was 15. And they were the questions that continued to propel my practice when I went to grad school. Absolutely. And even today. But we all have this adolescence of discovery. You have to start with this more adolescent way of thinking. At the end of the day I make painting. So it’s still the language I use, but I would hope I would have an ability to evolve and change. I appreciate the questions that you’ve brought forward because I think that certain types of artists get asked questions about identity all day long, and then it’s kind of like, “well, can we have a formal discussion or a historical discussion about this work?” Then other artists don’t get asked about their identity at all, and it’s like, “well, can we actually talk about their identity?” I think that would be really interesting to think more about, about their relationship to masculinity, to whiteness. That is interesting. It’s in the work. Both types of artists get shortchanged. The public gets shortchanged. It’s not that one is better than the other. It’s that one only happens with one type of artist.

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A portion of this interview was published by ArtReview Magazine as “Christina Quarles: Existing Beyond Categorization,” on May 30, 2023.

Cy Twombly: Making Past Present
The Getty Museum, August 2–October 30, 2022 / MFA Boston, January 14–May 7, 2023
Cy Twombly
Gagosian, Beverly Hills, September 15—December 17, 2022

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There are two ways of thinking about what “making past present” means in the context of Cy Twombly’s half-century as a major figure in the history of modern and contemporary art. The first is how the MFA Boston and Getty Museum mean it, which is that Twombly’s fascination with classical antiquity is what informed and energized his artistic practice from start to finish. To understand Twombly is to understand how his immersion in the fragments and fascinations of Greek and Roman culture made his work a living conduit to the “enduring” forms, figures, and stories of the ancient world. If Twombly is “about” something, this is what it is.

The second way of thinking about it may seem more banal but is nevertheless inescapable if one cares to look closely. It is this: What makes a Twombly a Twombly, and not something else, is the presence of specific kinds of repetitions and returns. One might take that as a dismissal, but it is not. Twombly was not the first artist to hit upon a “style” and then to stick with it. But Twombly’s great feat was to acknowledge this condition, accept it sincerely, and embrace it strategically—which ultimately looked a lot like disavowing it (one could be forgiven for thinking that Twombly eschewed style itself). Nevertheless, if the great rallying cry of modernism was “Make it new!” Twombly replied more humbly, in the decadent yet waning days of the modernist moment, “Yes. Let’s make it new. Again.”

Just consider one of the artist’s late “Gaeta” works: Untitled (2007, on view at Gagosian). It’s a “signature” Twombly to be sure. One’s first impression is of eight massive and overlapping crimson loops, painted in a backhanded motion (for a righthander, from left to right) against a cadmium yellow field. These are the same gestures that Twombly had isolated and began using systematically in the so-called “blackboard” works of the mid-1960s. In the “Gaeta” there appear to be at least two “starts,” both beginning in the lower third of the painting at the left edge, and two “ends,” one that stops against the right edge of the canvas just above the picture’s lower-right corner, and the other that travels that edge and stops just before entering the top quadrant of the painting. These pairs attest to the fact that there are two sets of strokes. Which one follows the other doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are two.

Now look past those strokes, and what one finds is in fact two paintings, two episodes of charging the brush with crimson paint and going in for those big signature gestures that announce that this (to echo Richard Wollheim) is “painting as an art.” That first episode is painted over but not out. Even the roughly cursived “Gaeta” that signs the piece is written twice, once on top of the yellow wash (at top, just off center) and once below it (closer to the left edge, and lower). And note how certain strokes of that cursive lettering are themselves repeated: the cross of the “t”, the body and tail of the “a.” This is a work that is about temporal repetition: one could say it “thematizes” the act of doing something again, like making a mark, or painting. In more colloquial terms, it’s a rep, not a copy.

The exhibition at Gagosian is dedicated to this second way of thinking about “making past present.” Of course, it helps that a healthy majority of the works are dated between 2002 and 2006, and thus are from the last decade of the artist’s career (Twombly died in 2011). But it is only from this vantage point that one can begin to see how repetition and returns remain conscious formal strategies rather than accidental elements of a style, or worse, cringe confirmation of an artist becoming his own cover band by endlessly repeating the old catalogue of hits.

The best examples of this come, understandably, out of specific pairings, such as two large crimson-on-beige acrylics from 2006 (both Untitled), in which the loops from the “blackboard” and later “Gaeta” paintings are repeatedly worked out across three distinct horizontal bands. That the repetitions and returns could be separated by long stretches of time is made clear by a pair of collage-drawings made of shredded paper, acrylic, wax, crayon, and pencil which are formally and structurally similar yet separated by more than a decade (both Untitled, but 1992 and 2003).

The campaign of red and blue crayon drawings on handmade paper from 2003 (all Untitled) could be offered up to belabor the point, as could Untitled I-VI (Green Painting) from 2002–2003, a suite of six large canvases of billiard green and thick, almost thrown-on white. But these works hazard a different read, which it is important to head off. By mid 1966, when Twombly’s repeating loops first appear as both form and content in his work, to call them examples of “seriality” would have been one way of gathering them into the avant-garde of that moment. But seriality—either via Donald Judd’s “one thing after another,” or Sol Lewitt’s “systems,” or Steve Reich’s scores—was a strategy designed to overcome time, to break it open and expand it, to make it spatial. Seriality was the dialectical backside of modernism’s desire for simultaneity, for the “all-at-once.” This is not what Twombly’s art was about, not in 1966 and not in 2006.

To put it probably too plainly, then, time mattered to Twombly. Every drip, every scrawl, every script is a mark that embeds and encodes time, that indicates a start and a finish, and often in Twombly’s case, a start again. Furthermore, on the evidence of the work, Twombly painted and drew this way self-consciously, even self-awarely. No other painters made time the medium of their practice in the way that Twombly did.

Time is also the reason Twombly’s sculptures don’t quite measure up. The time that he could see embedded in the antiquities he collected could not be made again, or made anew in three dimensions in quite the way that time could be embedded in his paintings and drawings. The sculptures cannot embody a “then” and “now” (and an “again”) except by way of representation or analogy. They work via the implication of certain forms or shapes or objects with particular histories. Too much of Twombly’s sculpture models, in the simplistic, scaled-down sense used in architecture, the built forms of the ancient Mediterranean world.

In contrast, time is definitely inscribed in the fragments Twombly collected. The “fragment” itself is a temporal idea, an artifact of an event that speaks to a “whole” that is no longer. This is why the photographs of Twombly’s collections, with his arrangements of these objects in the enfilade of his apartment in Rome, are so much more satisfying than seeing the objects themselves, or at least similar ones from the Getty’s collections, juxtaposed with Twombly’s work. Every photograph is itself also a fragment, and as I have been arguing, the repetition, the fragment of a fragment in this case, is what makes a Twombly a Twombly, and so made his collecting and selecting of artifacts an integral part of his practice.

Now, there is a more well-known story about Twombly that goes something like this: after Jackson Pollock, artists (but not all) were challenged by what it meant to wield a brush in the act of putting paint to canvas. By translating the Surrealists’ automatic writing into so many dripped and dribbled rivulets of paint, Pollock had once and for all (or once again?) freed the artist’s gesture from the work of picturing, or “representing,” and made it supposedly a direct link to the artist’s unencumbered, expressive self.

Some artists, such as Allan Kaprow, drew the conclusion from this that all art going forward would be nothing but gestures, nothing but “happenings” (as his and others’ activities would come to be known). Other artists, Jasper Johns for example, accepted that art could henceforth only be picturing: if there was an act or gesture, it would either be inscrutable, or also, itself, pictured, which is to say taken, or targeted, or cast—an act caught in the act, if you will.

Then there was Twombly, who took the artist’s gesture, newly freed (again) from its service to description, as an opportunity to regress. If you want the unconscious, Twombly seemed to say, if you want pure expression, I’ll give it to you, in the markings of a child, or a vandal. Not so much back to basics, but back to beginnings, to a primordial drive to establish, for oneself as much as for others, that one exists and exerts oneself by making a mark. To start, this will look like a defacement, the outcome of aggression, or a demand for recognition. But it will evolve into other kinds of gestures that bear significance: writing most of all.

It’s a cliché by now to quibble over whether what Twombly was doing was “graffiti.” The crux of that debate has to do not with what Twombly’s marks meant but how they carried their meaning. Were they, on the one hand, referential and reverential, an expression of the artist’s mind and his great and abiding admiration for, say, the feats of Apollo (1975), or the figure of Venus (1975), or her double Aphrodite Anadyomene (1975; again in 1979)? Not really graffiti then, but, as the artist put it to Sir Nicholas Serota in 2007, something “more lyrical” and poetic, an evocation of the Classical past through the names of its players. This is how the organizers of Making Past Present understand how Twombly’s marks mean.

Moments later in that same conversation, however, Twombly says, with regard to an early painting, which he also calls “beautiful,” that, yes, “it’s graffiti, but it’s something else, too.” And so if it is graffiti, that means it’s important to accept what kind of mark that is. Graffiti is performative and invasive (some would say “violent”). One doesn’t “interpret” graffiti, like some lyric poem. One simply gets it, is hit by it. Twombly may have wanted to avoid associations with the toilet—Serota: “So does it irritate you when people talk about graffiti in relation to your work?” Twombly: “Yeah, I don’t think of graffiti and I don’t think of toilets”—but we know Twombly’s kind of mark led precisely in that direction. Witness Olympia (1957) and The Italians (1961) with their commode-appropriate scrawls. Twombly just wanted the “something else, too.”

The point here is that Twombly’s work engages both the lyric and the low. The way to keep these simultaneously in play is never to consider one primary over the other. However, each is already a supplement, additional to the other. The challenge is to find a way of working that instantiates this dualism and makes it an animating factor of the work—a way of working, not merely representing. And this is what Twombly’s signature doubling and defacing marks make possible.

What is more, as Twombly’s most distinguished admirer Roland Barthes put it, “the essence of graffiti is to be found in neither the inscription nor the message. The essence of graffiti is the wall, the background, the tabletop. The background, the support, has a full existence of its own as an object that already has had a life of its own, and this is why whatever is scribbled across it always comes as an enigmatic supplement.” That Twombly showed some self-awareness about this “essence” can be seen in Plato (A Painting in Two Parts) (1977; at The Getty), in which Twombly decomposes the graffiti mark, or “graphism” (to use another term favored by Barthes) by pulling it apart from its ground.

One “part” of Plato is pure painted background, cheekily presented as a large panel of what appears to be an ever-so-lightly-clouded blue sky—the cliché of a “backdrop” if ever there was one, like what one might find in a discount photo studio. The other “part” is a white page on which is written, in Twombly’s large clumsy capitals, “PLATO,” followed in smaller lettering by “PhAEDRUS,” “SYMPOSIUM,” and “REPUBLIC”: a short list of the named philosopher’s major works, all of which question, it would seem important to note, whether “truth” can ever arise through rhetoric, poetry, or art—whether it can ever arise, that is, through representation.

This is the Twombly that the MFA Boston and Getty Museum cannot admit, the Twombly for whom the past will not be made present without challenging how that presentation is made.

Witness Christine Kondoleon (the George D. and Maro Kehrakis Chair of the Art of Ancient Greece and Rome at the MFA Boston), for whom Plato (A Painting in Two Parts) “sets forth [Twombly’s] own choices as an artist” as, on the one hand, “landscape painter” (now that would be a dismissal!) and on the other hand, as an artist committed to the “enlisting of texts” (as if these were the only options on offer). If he is a landscape painter, according to Kondoleon, then Twombly’s blue sky “recalls” nothing as much as those same skies “in Poussin’s paintings of staged classical myths—and also the color of the sky in Raphael’s frescoes at the Vatican.” If he is a writer, then Twombly’s names “trigger an intellectual exercise” that pose “for us” the “rigors of philosophy.” What Plato (A Painting in Two Parts) “does accomplish,” Kondoleon concludes, “is to suggest the immensity both of the heavens and the world of learning.”

Plato (A Painting in Two Parts) is not a work of “immensity” by any measure; it’s a work of pique. Twombly was capable of the grand gesture, of course. The “Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves” series from 2009 is a testament to this, as are the artist’s massive “Blossom” works from a couple of years earlier. But in 1977, Plato (A Painting in Two Parts) is yet another return on Twombly’s part: an opportunity to get back to beginnings by questioning (again) the rudiments of representation and our philosophies of it. What, after all, could be less referential than a picture of the sky? In seeing the selectively historical precedents of Poussin and Raphael, in seeing the “heavens” and the “world of learning,” one simply fails to see Twombly at all.

If I have returned to this point again it is to do two things. First, it is to keep kinship with the subject at hand, with Twombly’s incessant repetitions and returns, which are the things that most make his art what it is, his “signature” capacity to make the kind of mark that decries authorship in the same measure that it declares it, and to make time the measure of his art. Second, it is to challenge the no doubt well-meaning, but to my mind misguided, attempt to situate Twombly’s importance today in his works’ capacity to transmit the classical past to our present. The last thing we might want for Twombly’s legacy is for it to stand at once as an elegy of itself and of a desire for the “Classics,” which today are regarded by many as irrelevant (at best) and reactionary (at worst), but whose lessons remain a necessary resource for the ills of our polity.

In an age when the capacity for the artist’s mark to carry meaning is in deep need of new thinking, and in which many contemporary artists are doing this thinking in and through “painting,” Twombly would seem to offer a nearly infinite resource, if we care to look. If all we do is see through his work to the ancients, then we lose sight of what makes Twombly necessary for seeing today.

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This piece first appeared in the November 2022 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

A second Trump presidency would have ended the American experiment, and the exceptionalism in which I am guilty of believing

As of this writing, which is one week after election day 2020 in the United States, more than 71.5 million people have voted for Donald J. Trump. That is 8.5 million more votes than Trump received in 2016, just about the population of New York City. It’s the second largest vote tally (one behind Joe Biden’s) in US history.

In California, Trump took one third of the vote. California is a big state, and Trump’s third of it was around 5 million votes. In LA County, where I live, roughly one out of every four votes, more than 1 million, went to Trump – that’s larger than the population of San Francisco. It’s also 300,000 more than Trump received in 2016.

I keep these numbers in mind when I think about Joe Biden’s victory, for which I am thankful. A second Trump presidency would have ended the American experiment, and the exceptionalism in which I am guilty of believing – of which most Americans are guilty. What is clear to me, however, is that there has been no repudiation of Trump, or Trumpism, as I and many on the left had hoped for. Very much unlike Trump, the numbers don’t lie. We cannot now lie to ourselves.

Though I have only lived in Los Angeles for four years, I’ve read enough (Joan Didion, Kevin Starr, Eve Babitz, Mike Davis, and more Didion) to know that California’s deep blue politics is mostly skin deep. Subdermally it is oily with contradictions and complexities.

One need only turn to California’s 2020 ballot measures, those exercises in direct democracy by which the people have their say on everything from constitutional amendments to voter-initiated referendums, for an effective political exfoliant.

Six months after the killing of George Floyd and the most significant racial justice awakening in the US in three generations, and amidst broad demands that businesses and institutions, notably museums, hire and promote nonwhite people into leadership and other power positions, California’s electorate voted down a proposition (Prop 16) that would have allowed considerations of race in applications for public education and for government employment and contracts.

Californians also said no to rent-control, corporate and commercial real-estate tax increases, and making ‘app-based’ ride services, i.e. Uber and Lyft, treat their drivers as employees, with all the benefits (health care and retirement) and liabilities (loss of control over working hours) that this entails. But Californians also said yes to granting felons full voting rights upon completion of their prison terms, expanded consumer privacy regulations, and a $5.5 billion bond offering for stem cell and other medical research.

None of these measures reached past a 60% majority. That rung was only grasped by a measure that would have instituted stricter parole and sentencing for certain criminal misdemeanors and felonies (which failed) and one that would have subjected dialysis clinics to stricter regulation (also failed). In every other case the spreads were less than 20%, often much less, and nowhere near the 31% by which Biden won the state.

The lesson here may be a banal one. There is no monolithic political culture, even amongst the so-called California coastal elite. California voted (barely) in favor of criminal justice reforms; it voted (barely) in favor of science funding; it voted (barely) against greater commercial regulations; it voted (barely) against race-based hiring and admissions practices.

If I had to hazard the very likely off, or even off-putting, interpretation of these results, I would say that California is hewing to some loose or weakly held liberal individualism. It’s holding that individual agency in both work and politics matters. And that this agency must be taken seriously in the public arena – which is the arena of culture, which is the arena of art – rather than belittled as so easily overdetermined by either reductive caricatures of identity or the monied forces of persuasion – or mere regional contingency, which is why holding that “California” is holding to anything at all is, by my own logic, a stupid way of putting it.

In January, Joe Biden, a seventy-seven-year-old Democrat from the state of Delaware with a four-decade career in the US Senate and two terms as Vice President of the United States under his belt will take the oath of office as President. Joining him in this endeavour will be Kamala Harris, a Californian (born 1964, Oakland) and Senator from the Golden State. Prior to her senatorial term Harris served as Attorney General of California and as San Francisco’s District Attorney. In both cases she was the first woman to do so. On 20 January, Harris will become the first woman to serve as Vice President of the United States.

Kamala ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. When she first entered the race, I remember saying to my wife, ‘I think she’s going to win – she’s smart, she’s a cop, she’s Black, she’s South Asian, she’s young, and she’s got… style’. Kamala Harris was my early pick, my favourite. And then, like so many others, as I watched the race unfold, I grew disenchanted – too much of that oily contradiction, too much of that oily complexity. When it was time to vote in the Democratic primary election, Harris wasn’t even on the ticket. She’d ended her campaign three months earlier. But she endorsed Joe Biden. Did I mention that Harris is smart?

I don’t expect amazing things from Biden and Harris. This wasn’t an election of ‘hope’, of ‘yes we can’, of ‘we are the future we have been waiting for’, or any of the other vacant slogans; it’s enough just to have no more MAGA; it’s enough to know that this old man and this middle-aged woman, possessors of august accomplishments and chequered records, are competent and capable – the white blood cells of the American immune system.

11 November 2020 artreview.com Link

What David Joselit offers in Heritage and Debt (2020) is a convincing description of the global and historical dynamics that produced ‘contemporary art’ as something distinct from what preceded it. For most observers of art and its history today, that question would be answered with some combination of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘modernism’, which is not incorrect. But on Joselit’s account, that answer is both woefully incomplete and politically compromised.

Prior to 1989, the global economic order was divided into a hierarchy (as the West saw it) of three different worlds: the advanced capitalist economies of the first, the socialist economies of the second and the developing economies of the third. Joselit’s first innovation is to identify each of these worlds with its own aesthetic ‘idiom’: a ‘modern/postmodern’ idiom for the first world, a ‘realist/mass cultural’ idiom for the second world and a ‘popular/indigenous’ idiom for the third. The first world valued its own idiom above the others, whose products it collected, or dismissed, as artefacts, decoration or kitsch.

As a second innovation, Joselit proposes a ‘deregulation of images’ paralleling the economic deregulation that began in the West during the late 1970s, accelerated during the 1980s and went global after 1991 with the Soviet Union’s collapse and China’s rise. Joselit’s deregulation entailed postcolonial practices of indigenous artists, socialist realism from China and the USSR, and underground art from Soviet bloc countries and South America claiming equal status with first-world fine art, in both exhibitions and sales.

What Joselit calls the ensuing ‘recalibration’ of aesthetic value and recognition is conducted through the marshalling of ‘heritage’: inherited cultural resources and properties that are available not just to those within a specific culture but to everyone. Importantly, Joselit describes ‘heritage’ as a ‘set of living traditions’ whose ‘invocations’ do not ‘inherently possess a specific political valence, either conservative or progressive’, but whose ‘potential lies in the negotiation… between heritage and perceived debts to “one’s own” cultures and those of others’. When cultural heritage is ‘synchronized’ in and with the present through strategies of ‘appropriation’, ‘pastiche’, ‘reframing’ and ‘curation’ – all definitive strategies of global contemporary artistic practice – it leads either to art’s ‘financialization’ (bad) or to new forms of ‘authorization’ (good). Either way, the dynamic of idiomatic deregulation and the synchronization of cultural heritage in the present is what produces the phenomenon, and our period, of ‘global contemporary art’.

This is surely right. As history it integrates and coordinates the geopolitics of ‘globalization’ with diverse practices: Joselit includes close readings of Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei, Shahzia Sikander and Raqs Media Collective, among others. As theory it does for the ‘cultural logic’ of contemporary art what Fredric Jameson did for postmodernism. But as an ethics and politics of art practice and history it is less convincing.

Putting aside Joselit’s hyperbolic demonisation of the market and art’s financialisation, his prescription for ‘art’s progressive politics’ ultimately turns on one favoured concept, ‘authorization’, which is too capacious to do the job meant for it: progressively minded subjects must ‘authorize’ themselves; every artwork must itself be ‘authorized’; the ‘meaning’ of images is determined by the ‘social and geopolitical conditions’ under which they are ‘authorized’ to appear; aesthetic strategies are ‘differently authorized in different parts of the world’, and so forth.

When Joselit does explicitly state what he means by ‘authorization’, he calls it ‘a provisional situational seizure of a quantum of meaning as legitimately one’s own’ (my emphasis). One could be forgiven for thinking Joselit was talking here about Twitter or Instagram rather than laying out the programme for a ‘responsible history of global contemporary art’. The question of course is, ‘Who decides what’s legitimate, and how?’ But this goes unaddressed in Joselit’s account. ‘Legitimacy’ is a problem not just for art history and criticism. It is the crisis faced by the global north today, politically (with neoliberal democracy threatened from both right and left), socially (with the reckoning of racism and colonisation) and economically (with the rise of authoritarian capitalism). But perhaps these are questions for Joselit’s next book.

Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization by David Joselit, published by MIT (October Books)

Book Review 08 October 2020 ArtReview

What to make of the intertwining controversies surrounding the Whitney Museum’s harbouring of (now former) trustee Warren B. Kanders and the (too-white) critical reception of its biennial exhibition? Are these just epiphenomena of the national derangement that goes by the name of Trump? Or are they tremors of something deeper, a shift in the plate tectonics of art and politics in the US? What is for sure is that we are in the midst of a new culture war, but one in which it’s unclear, as yet, who are the righteous and who are the reactionaries.

Take the Kanders controversy: on one side stand the defenders of the museum – the Whitney in particular, but museums and cultural institutions in general – and what we can call the American model of museum funding, whereby a wealthy elite both ‘gives and gets’ substantial sums of money to their institutions of choice in return for social status and public recognition. The intent of such largesse, whether altruistic, aspirational or instrumentalised, is the stuff of society gossip. But from the perspective of the museum, that’s beside the point; the mission justifies the money.

Once you’re in the business of drawing up a list of morally acceptable monetary sources, you’re either sliding down some slippery slope to the pecuniary inquisition or hazarding moral compromise and contradiction

Upon realising that the money Kanders was giving to the Whitney was coming from his ownership of companies that produced, among other things, the tear gas used against migrant families and asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border on 25 November of last year, a large number of the staff at the Whitney signed a letter to the museum leadership ‘asking for Warren Kanders’ resignation’. The letter also demanded that the museum provide a ‘clear policy’ on ‘Trustee participation’, to which was added a nota bene asking, rhetorically, whether or not there was a ‘moral line’ to be drawn on such participation, before drawing that line at having museum staff ‘afflicted’ by trustees ‘whose work or actions are at odds with the museum’s mission’.

Now, for the curious, I recommend reading the Whitney’s mission; it’s unclear how Kanders’s work or actions could be at odds with it. (You can find the museum’s mission statement on the publicly available Form 990 tax returns required of all nonprofit institutions in the US; oddly, it’s not reproduced on the museum’s website.) Nevertheless, the signatories of the letter raise the key question that most defenders of the museum have been asking: where is that moral line? What makes some money immoral and other money not? Money from guns? Not acceptable. But bulletproof vests? How about money from cigarettes? No. But what about electronic cigarettes? Real estate developers that gentrify but also build low-income housing? A fossil fuel company that also builds wind farms?

The strategy here is again rhetorical, for once you’re in the business of drawing up a list of morally acceptable monetary sources, you’re either sliding down some slippery slope to the pecuniary inquisition or hazarding moral compromise and contradiction. Which is why the ‘moral line’ question is really a false one. Answering it isn’t the point; all that matters is asking it. On the other side of this controversy, the future of the museum (the future of all arts and politics and, well, the future of the future itself) is tied up with the project or process of decolonisation.

For some context, consider the op-ed that Olga Viso, the former director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, published in The New York Times last spring. ‘Decolonizing the Art Museum: The Next Wave’ reckoned with a different controversy from a year prior concerning Sam Durant’s Scaffold (2012), a sculpture that aggregated replicas of gallows that had been used in US state-sanctioned executions. The largest execution, of 38 Dakota men, had taken place in Minnesota in 1862. Scaffold was originally shown in Europe, where its lethal referents could be read abstractly. The Walker acquired the work in 2017 as a marquee piece for the museum’s sculpture garden, where the Dakota community in Minnesota could entertain no such abstractions. After considerable protests, negotiations and media campaigns, Scaffold was removed from the museum’s grounds and dismantled. In a further gesture of what Viso would identify as ‘empathy’, Durant transferred to the Dakota elders his intellectual property and moral rights to the work, at once a gift and, if not a destruction, then a disavowal of his art.

Viso places this episode within a wider history of struggles by museum professionals, artists and activists since the 1980s to ‘expose’ the ‘power structures of white establishment culture, corporate America, and the federal government’. The art market is indicted as an additional ‘colonizing force’, such that today, according to Viso, there are ‘two incompatible art worlds: one committed to inclusion, artistic freedom and change, the other driven by money and entitlements’. (Incompatible? The last 200 years of artmaking would suggest the opposite.)

Viso ends her piece with the following entreaty: ‘The next wave of decolonizing America’s art museums must succeed, because to lose our capacity for empathy in a democracy is not an option’. Viso is not wrong, but for the partisans of decolonisation, it’s not our ‘capacity’ for empathy that is central, but rather who is owed it. According to Decolonize This Place, one of the engines of activism at the centre of the Whitney protests, decolonisation is a ‘perspective’ that, properly deployed, recognises ‘that the settler-colony of the United States was founded on the theft of land, life, and labor over 400 years’, and thus decolonisation ‘necessitates’ the ‘abolition of prisons and police, borders and bosses, empires and oligarchs’, what is elsewhere identified as the ‘dynamics of contemporary racial capitalism’.

If racial and ethnic identity are inextricable from the process of decolonisation, then the process should require that every player be so identified

Though both Viso and Decolonize This Place position racial justice as crucial to the decolonial project, the latter is careful to point out that racial and ethnic identity cannot be taken as a proxy for a commitment to decolonisation. And yet race and identity remain, if not central, then at least priority categories for the ‘solidarity between struggles’ that Decolonize This Place describes as its ‘work’. Why else quote Xaviera Simmons’s 2 July call in the pages of The Art Newspaper for ‘whiteness’ to ‘undo itself’, a call that was meant to challenge how ‘white art critics’ had been ‘condescending and dismissive’ of the art in the Whitney Biennial? Simmons’s ‘undoing’ was echoed just a couple of days later, and more explicitly, in the pages of The New York Times by Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, who, in ‘The Dominance of the White Male Critic’, decry that identity and state that the members of its persuasion ‘ought to step aside and make room for… writers of color’. (But wait. Wasn’t Holland Cotter’s review of the show glowing and justly sensitive to much of the art’s new politics of form? Wasn’t it Linda Yablonsky in The Art Newspaper and Nadje Sayej in The Guardian and Debra Solomon on WNYC who dismissed the show’s lack of radicality?)

Nevertheless, if racial and ethnic identity are inextricable from the process of decolonisation, then the process should require that every player be so identified. Which means that, in response to Decolonize This Place’s question, ‘What are we willing to sacrifice?’, the uncomfortable but wholly accurate answer (but not the only one) would be: a rich Jew, who supported Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president, and whose business interests and place on the Whitney’s board of trustees had been reported back in 2015 – two biennials ago.

And yet. I don’t believe that the partisans on either side of this controversy want to traffic in racial animus or cynical rhetoric, not the partisans of pragmatic reform (cleaner money, higher pay, more ‘inclusion, artistic freedom, and change’), nor the believers in the beloved community that will come after capitalism’s demise (after decolonisation, after ‘money and entitlements’, after Kanders). But racial animus and cynical rhetoric is what we have. Righteousness and reaction are what we’re feeding on. And there is shockingly little empathy to go around. 

It’s a culture war. And everyone is losing. 

Jonathan T.D. Neil is a contributing editor of ArtReview 

Online exclusive published on 16 August 20019

Why Nauman?

For anyone familiar with Bruce Nauman and his well-established place in the history of contemporary art, the answer, ‘Because it’s Bruce Nauman’, will suffice. But what will follow, inevitably, are explanations that, since at least the 1990s, have begun to harden into doxa: ‘No other artist has so consistently defied the pull of a recognisable style’. ‘No other artist’s practice has tarried more with incoherence.’ ‘No other artist has moved so effortlessly between sculpture, film, video, performance, photography, installation, etc.’ ‘No other artist has so antagonised his audience.’ ‘No other artist has such important devotees.’ ‘No other artist has managed in art what Beckett managed in literature and theatre.’ ‘No other artist is so tricky.’ ‘No other artist is a cowboy.’ ‘No other artist is smarter.’ ‘No other artist…’

None of these answer exactly ‘why Nauman?’ The artist, now in his seventies, is the subject of a third retrospective, his first in 20 years, and his second at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, though this one opens at the Schaulager in Switzerland. Both this exhibition and Nauman’s previous retrospective were organised by onetime MoMA deputy director and now Rauschenberg Foundation executive director Kathy Halbreich, one of Nauman’s devotees. For Halbreich, the persistence of ‘disappearance’ as ‘act, concept, perceptual probe, magical deceit, working method, and metaphor’ in Nauman’s art is what distinguishes, or at least organises, this year’s retrospective. While preparing her show, this ‘oxymoronic’ appearance of disappearance, Halbreich writes in her introductory essay to the show’s catalogue, ‘surprised – really sideswiped me’, insofar as it offered a new means to understand Nauman’s notoriously difficult practice.

‘Disappearance’ is not Halbreich’s answer to the ‘why Nauman’ question, however. That answer is ‘freedom’. ‘Where freedom begins,’ she writes, ‘the absoluteness of truth disappears and becomes various.’ ‘Freedom demands canniness and care,’ she continues, ‘the developing of questions rather than acceptance of the often seductive deceits and prohibitions of authority. In encouraging the disappearance of certainty, Nauman may be the most political of artists after all.’

One should read these words with great curiosity, because ‘politics’ is not something Nauman is known for. In fact, his ability to sidestep overt political content by bouncing around in the less well-illuminated corners of the human psyche – his own psyche, really – is, if not a signature of Nauman’s work, then at least one of its more abiding tropes. If there is a politics to Nauman’s work, it is not one legislated by the work itself, but by the times that have received it. For what Halbreich encapsulates in her statements on freedom is not so much a new reading of Nauman as an evolution of the reception of his work over the years, a reception which can be broken into three main phases: its postminimalist reception from the 1960s and early 70s, the traumatic reception of the 90s and its contemporary reception – a political one – offered up as a new read, a new lease, on Nauman’s relevance today. That these phases only mark periods of Nauman’s reception is important to note, as the work itself does not periodise so easily.

The postminimalist reception of Nauman is the Nauman of process, performance and moving image. This is the Nauman of Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) (1968) or Walk with Contraposto (1968), the artist’s iconic ‘studio’ works, in which, with only a 16mm film or video camera as audience, Nauman ‘did things’ in the studio, sensing that, at the moment when his peers, such as Robert Smithson, were leaving the studio to engage the dialectics of the outdoors, the studio was diminished – no longer sufficient, no longer necessary – and so open to new possibilities for practice, for actions taken without ends in sight. But this is also the moment of Nauman’s early fibreglass and polyester resin casts, works which were included in seminal exhibitions, such as Lucy Lippard’s 1966 Eccentric Abstraction show, a catalogue of challenges to the orthodoxies of Modernism that still hung heavy over the art of that time. Nauman’s work of the 1960s was understood and received squarely within these terms, as work that engaged process, duration and the body, with all its weight and dimension, its presence and obdurateness, its ‘thrownness’ – all things that modernist art sought to sublimate and that Minimalism (as well as Conceptual art, and much Pop art too) sought to sidestep.

The Nauman of the 1990s, the traumatic Nauman, absorbs this postminimalist reception but expands it in order to make room for signs of subjective distress. This is the Nauman of psychic assault and battery, a vein that was tapped early with Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968), whose disembodied voice creepily exhorts its audience to do just that. It reaches an apex with Clown Torture (1987) and Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer) (1988), video installations in which the audience is again assaulted, but now by images of alien otherness (circus clowns, rats in a maze), subjected to harsh sounds (the torture victim’s pleas, rock’n’roll drums). Of the 1995 retrospective, in which most people encountered these works for the first time, Pamela Lee noted that Nauman’s ‘almost hysterical proliferation of artistic procedures’ suggests nothing so much as his ‘inability to master the self’s relation to the world’. What is trauma except failure by another name – failure to represent, failure to incorporate, failure to work through and to sublimate.

The contemporary Nauman, the Nauman of 2018, might then be received as a champion of failure (the ‘pathos of failure’ is what Nauman’s work is about according to Yve-Alain Bois et al’s Art Since 1900). If his strategies and aesthetic never seem to cohere, nor has his work achieved any clear meaning. The reason for that, at least according to Halbreich, is that ‘Nauman generously delegates responsibility for creating meaning to us’. The importance of this statement should not be tied to its veracity (recall, Halbreich holds that Nauman’s work disappears the validity of truth) but to the artists, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, for whom such a transfer of responsibility was a foundational condition of possibility for their art.

For Duchamp, the ‘creative act is not performed by the artist alone’, as it is the ‘spectator’ who, in ‘deciphering and interpreting [arts] inner qualifications… adds his contribution to the creative act’, even when that act entails nothing more than pointing at something, anything, extant in the world. Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001), a multichannel video installation showing Nauman’s New Mexico studio at night and the very little (though not nothing) that goes on there, makes this lineage explicit. Like Cage’s ‘silence,’ which is never nothing, so Nauman says this is my studio, my art. You be the judge of it. But you cannot deny it’s not nothing.

The question, then, is what kind of freedom is born of this doubled negative? A challenge to orthodoxy? A disappearance of certainty? A failure of meaning? And if these beget freedom, what kind of freedom is it? What politics attends to it?

Today, Nauman’s ‘pathos of failure’ has been domesticated by the tech industry, whose startup culture came to terms with its own anxieties by embracing the supposed benefits of creative self-destruction. The first FailCon, ‘a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers, and designers to study their own and others’ failures’, took place nearly a decade ago. A common mantra around the Valley, ‘Fail Fast, Fail Often’, was one of Stanford University’s most popular continuing education courses before it became a book, authored by Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz, in 2013. By the following year, New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose had enough material to diagnose startup culture’s new ‘failure fetish’. The slackers had been absorbed by the Googleplex.

This would all have been quite amusing had not real politics in the United States gone dark. 2014 witnessed the emergence of new racial consciousness and street-level activism in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in New York City, at the hands of the police. The following year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published Between The World and Me, a quite beautiful, and tragic, exposition of how American history is written on the backs, and in the blood, of black bodies. Then, in 2016, we the people of the United States elected Donald J. Trump to the presidency, and what has followed has been nothing less than a kind of moral bloodshed. Truth and facts – the cornerstones of certainty, and so of action and amelioration – have been massacred by venal foot soldiers for the politics of cynicism.

In 2018 we cannot afford, nor should we accept, the politics that Halbreich puts forward for Nauman. We cannot afford, nor should we accept, a freedom that is predicated upon the ‘disappearance of certainty’ or that cashiers the ‘absoluteness of truth’.

The artist, choreographer and conceptualist Ralph Lemon doesn’t. Writing in the same catalogue, Lemon addresses the politics of Nauman’s 1968 video Wall-Floor Positions:

Here was a particular projection of white-male autonomy taking place concurrently with the exigencies of the black civil rights movement, with this culturally defined lack of autonomy, creative and otherwise, and its resistance to organizational racism (The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in ’65 – a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation.). I try to imagine a black body in an art studio, in the United States, in 1965, negotiating the inspired labor of positioning itself within the perfectly simple architectural confines of wall and floor. I cannot imagine it.

Lemon does not seem uncertain. In 2003, Lemon staged a performance of Nauman’s movement from Wall-Floor Positions before a live audience at the Walker Art Center. There were two performers rather than just one, and both were black (one was Lemon). Two black bodies, alive, where once there had been only one white body, recorded.

Such an updating of Nauman’s work, an engaged and political reception of it, is generative of new certainties, of new absolute truths. It does point the finger of failure at Nauman, but as if to ask, rhetorically, ‘How could you have missed this?’ The answer to that question of course is freedom, the freedom that Nauman was privileged to enjoy in the 1960s as a young white artist, free to move about the country, and in this studio, as he wished. This freedom that was not, and is still not, shared by all. Nor is it a freedom that comes from a disappearance of certainty, but rather one that becomes explicit, one that appears, against the backdrop of its absence. This is called getting at, and down to, the truth. It’s also called enlightenment. If Nauman is relevant today, it’s because artists such as Ralph Lemon can make his work relevant, not just for us, or for Nauman himself, but for now.

From the October 2018 issue of ArtReview.

Jasper Johns, ‘Something Resembling Truth’ at The Broad, Los Angeles; 10 February – 13 May

Could Jasper Johns be the most strategic of conceptual painters working today? By strategic I mean the most calculated, the most perceptually acute and the most decisive, particularly at a moment when painting – one might say the enterprise of art in general – can’t decide on its purpose, save some weak sense that it’s locked in a game with its own history, one that still allows for cursory gestures at self-expression when not succumbing to decorative self-conscious formalism? On the evidence of ‘Something Resembling Truth’ at The Broad, the only US venue for this thematic exhibition of Johns’s work (organised by London’s Royal Academy of Art), I’d wager that this is the case. And it takes a show such as the current one to demonstrate how Johns’s strategies – reticence, irony, quotation; they’ve gone by many labels – have all been marshalled towards the renewal of how it is that painting might come to mean anything at all.

Let’s begin with Johns’s Catenary series (1997–2003), one of the artist’s most recent. These works have been nearly universally lauded since they first appeared in 2005 in the artist’s first solo exhibition with Matthew Marks (itself something of a strategic move given the painter’s long association with Leo Castelli). That’s where I first saw them, and I didn’t like them. There was something about the precarious awkwardness of the hinged slats that lean off the sides of many of the works, and the seeming hobby-store quality of the hanging strings, whose curves give the series its name, which didn’t seem either well designed or fully intended. These works just didn’t cohere, and most of Johns’s work had been nothing if not coherent, sometimes internally so (e.g. the Targets, 1955–), and sometimes in conspiracy with the viewer (The Critic Sees, 1961, or Painting with Two Balls, 1960).

In a work such as Bridge (1997) that awkwardness remains, but the incoherence now reads more like a necessary feature of the work, as when the challenges of intellectual inquiry or research remain as yet unresolved. I’m sure this is what Johns is after: the venture of thinking, as it tarries over the rules of its own delicate physicality (the string, the slats), grounded, as it were, by the generic images of thought – the painted mimesis of the frame’s wood grain, the painted picture of a stellar galaxy, the symbol of the Big Dipper, the harlequin pattern, the word ‘BRIDGE’ – all different means and modes of representing, of disciplining the riot of the real and making something meaningful.

Perhaps this search began in the mid-1980s, with Johns’s cycle The Seasons (1985–86), in which picturing this venture of thought required a detour through picturing something like a self – hard to commit to it being Johns’s self – through references to some of the artist’s earlier image strategies (flags, devices) as well as icons of philosophical thinking such as the Platonic forms, Joseph Jastrow’s duck-rabbit diagram (the latter made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s inquiry into ‘seeing as’ in the Philosophical Investigations, 1953) and Pliny’s origin story of the birth of painting as the tracing of a loved-one’s silhouette in shadow.

It is quite possible that all of this is thrown into the work to throw us off the scent of its meaning – like cleverness that covers up a fear of hard thinking, or a wilful determination not to state what the work is about, which is what defines so many of Johns’s iconic image-strategies of the 1960s. But in light of the last 30 years, Johns’s work now seems defined, or rather challenged, by the prospect, the very real difficulty, of how making paintings – how making art – can be considered a means of making the obdurate stuff of the world, including such obdurate stuff as words and marks, meaningful.

From the March 2018 Issue of ArtReview.

Yuri Ancarani, Il Capo [still] (2010)

Few people outside of film circles in the United States will be familiar with Yuri Ancarani’s work, and one hopes this series of short films, which is being screened continuously at the Hammer Museum, will remedy that fact. Rather than showing Ancarani’s works intermittently as part of a regular schedule and larger lineup, which museum film programs are wont to do, the Hammer has three of his best works, Il Capo (2010), Piattaforma Luna (2011) and Da Vinci (2012), a trilogy that the artist calls La Malattia del Ferro (The Disease of Iron), on continuous view in a single side-gallery appointed with comfortable beanbag seating that suggests one should get comfortable. And indeed one should.

Ancarani, born in Ravenna and living and working in Milan, has been showing his work in art exhibitions for more than a decade, but since 2009 his films have been making the festival rounds, and awards have been stacking up. Spend just a little time with Il Capo and one understands why. This film is ‘about’ the operations of a Carrara marble quarry and the grizzly but sad-eyed foreman who directs the excavators that break off enormous, impossibly geometric slabs of the rock. The soundtrack consists only of the hacking roars of the excavators’ engines and the piercing clanks of metal on metal and loud knocks of metal on stone, all punctuated by moments of seeming near silence when the foreman surveys the cuts just made. In one sequence, he stands in front of a wall of marble, which an excavator gradually takes down from behind and below to reveal the mountain quarry’s opposite slope, dusted white with what look like grains of light.

Piattaforma Luna goes from the extreme environment of the quarry to the no less extreme containment of a deep-sea mining operation, where Ancarani’s camera is trained on a group of divers who move around their cramped, pressurized quarters with careful deliberation. The only sound here comes from the constant hum of the rig’s environmental controls and the occasional squawk of the divers’ voices, rendered comically high-pitched from the mix of helium in the air they need to breathe at such depths. Da Vinci opts for even more claustrophobia as it records the actions of a da Vinci Surgical System – a robotic platform that doctors use to keep major surgeries minimally invasive – at work inside a patient’s body.

Ancarani is not afraid of the still camera and the centered shot. This formal language, combined with his favoring of ambient, synched sound and far-from-equilibrium environments, gives the trilogy its signature definition. If Il Capo remains king here, though, it’s only because the beauty and the violence of that film is less contained than in the other two. The vastness of its geological scale, of its brute industry, is more palpable than the fluid dynamics of Piattaforma Luna or the invisible electronics of Da Vinci. Yet, because this is a trilogy, one needs to recognize how the technological refinement of ‘excavation’, for which the films together serve as a kind of allegory, is not really, or not only, progress – these scenes and their actors are all contemporaries – but a kind of repression as well. The deeper we go into the interior of the earth or the body to excise or extract the things we need or want – or, in the case of Da Vinci, the things we don’t want – the less of us we are apt or able to see.

Published in ArtReview, January-February, 2015

Frank Stella, Puffed Star II (2014)

What should we make of Puffed Star II (2014)? Well, for one, it’s big: almost six metres high and wide. It’s shiny too: pure polished aluminium. And it’s regularly geometric: a 20-pointed, equal-sided star with protuberant – ‘puffed’ – planes. If it hadn’t been made by Frank Stella, one could be forgiven for thinking that Jeff Koons had turned his attention to Christmas- tree decorations. That might be good for Koons, but it’s not for Stella. In all fairness to Jeff, he would never allow chipped tips or misaligned facets to make it into the public eye (Puffed Star has both). In all fairness to Frank, he likely could care less; merchandise has never been his thing.

But then what is his thing here? Puffed Star II is juxtaposed with a similarly sized work from nearly 20 years ago, Fishkill (1995), whose geometries are as far from regular as one might get. A car wreck of cast stainless steel, Fishkill shows how Stella embraced digital modeling and manufacture early, but only as part of a sustained attack on the formal coherence that had dictated his earliest painting series and which Puffed Star II resumes.

The tension between regular geometries and irregularity is taken up more singularly in K.150 (2014), a ‘tabletop’ sculpture of digitally printed ABS, a thermoplastic that is a staple of the rapid-prototyping industry. K.150 delights in the sectioning and intersectioning of regular three-dimensional forms: Stella’s newfound star form is present, twice, one in Irish green and the other in cyan. Both have been sliced by the digital knife and merged with a series of circular springs, apparently a favorite form for CAD jockeys in training. All of this is held up by a folded, polka-dotted plane, which returns the work, at least rhetorically, to the problem of relief, with which Stella has con- tended in one form or another for decades. As if to push the point home, K.150 is placed next to Creutzwald(1992), a duo of earlier mangled steel constructions, one compact, the other winglike, situated on a low base.

These pairings are unsubtle to say the least, but that’s a complaint about curating, about the logic of selection, not the logic of the work. Stella deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the new pieces, and here the comparisons to the earlier work are helpful, at least as heuristics. Because what the new works speak to is the kind of techno-utopia that has largely been confined to screens, both film and computer, but which is coming to the civilian sphere in the form of MakerBot and other 3D printers, the capacities of which K.150 is just an advanced example. If the historical works in this show speak to the apocalyptic obdurateness of heavy metal, then Puffed Star II and K.150 speak to the formal promiscuity of our plastic future, which will be big on shape, but lack weight, let alone substance. The works are there, and yet their being there, or here – their being at all – seems inconsequential. That, this, is what the world of 3D printing promises, and Stella has been ahead of his time before.

Published in ArtReview, January-February, 2015

Tara Donovan, Untitled (2014)

Tara Donovan’s recent work does not hold up to the promise of what she was making a decade ago. The two large sculptures (both untitled, both 2014) occupying one of Pace’s 25th Street galleries are impressive feats of labour, and like much of Donovan’s sculpture, they are remarkably mimetic evocations of organic forms, in these cases a monumental profusion of quartz or salt crystals and a series of towering stalag- mites. And that’s the problem: these sculptures have been made largely to look like the outcomes of certain kinds of physical processes or conditions, while the process or condition that is actually on display – and which the sculptures in some sense must be about because they broadcast it through their accumulation of identical (in the case of the stalagmites) or similar (in the case of the crystals) units of construction (styrene index cards in the case of the stalagmites; acrylic rods in the case of the crystals) – is the repetitive labour expended in producing them.

Anyone familiar with Donovan’s work of the last 15 years will recognize the signature decision-making: find a mass-produced unit, one with little, if any, cultural specificity – no plastic water bottles or Coke cans here – and then find a way to combine that unit with itself to achieve an unexpected yet familiar form. In the best cases, what was unexpected were the capacities of the units to combine of their own accord, as with Donovan’s Untitled (Toothpicks) and Untitled (Pins) (both 2004), where static friction between the units themselves when massed into a cubic form was enough to hold them in place. And then there were effects that the combined units sometimes produced, as with Haze (2003), an ineffable surface built from translucent plastic drinking straws stacked perpendicular to the wall. What these works demonstrated was that, with a deep sensitivity to material potentials, quantitative changes can produce qualitative transformations, that differences in degree can become differences in kind, that, in short, more is different.

Not so with the new work, where the equation is nothing more than quantity is quality. The more labour on display (and the bigger the thing gets) the more valuable the thing becomes. The striking mimesis of natural forms is presumably what then qualifies it as ‘art’, but it also interrupts our recognition of the material potential that is actually at work in the work: all of that repetitive, unskilled labour. That stacks of index cards can be made to look like stalagmites is a testament to Donovan’s feeling for novelty. That this is the only feeling issuing from her new work, though, is unfortunate, especially at a time when questions of work and labour are more pressing than ever.

One doesn’t want to say that labour is what Donovan more self-consciously needs to make her work about; in its present state, and on the evidence of these two new works, it cannot but be about it, and how Donovan chooses to address this labour and the ends that it serves must be accounted for. Making it look natural, and so somehow neutral, is no accounting at all.

Published in ArtReview, September 2014.

Leigh Ledare, Double Bind (2010/2012)

Artists curious to understand what ‘commitment’ means in the practice, let alone the discourse, of the visual arts, would be wise to pay close attention to the work of Leigh Ledare, because no other young artist I’m aware of approaches artmaking with as much honesty as he does. But of course such words of praise demand defence.

This is easily mounted with the resources of the two projects presented at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Neither body of work, Double Bind (2010/2012) or An Invitation (2012), is brand new, though this is the first time that either has been given a public airing in New York (Double Bind was shown in LA in 2012, and reviewed in these pages by Andrew Berardini; An Invitation has never before been shown in the US).

Both projects involve Ledare personally. For Double Bind, he spent time photographing his ex-wife during a short sojourn in a cabin in upstate New York. He then arranged for her and her new husband, also a photographer, to undertake a similar sojourn and photographic campaign at the same cabin. The results are juxtaposed against one another and clippings from old print magazines (from porno to fashion to culture). With An Invitation, Ledare accepted a commission from a European high-society couple to make erotic photographs of the wife (who is some 20 years her husband’s junior) over the course of one week in July 2011. A set of these pictures were kept by the couple, but as per their agreement, Ledare kept a set for himself and produced a series of screenprints that show the pictures, with the wife’s face redacted, juxtaposed against the front page of The New York Times from the days of the shoot.

There is much to be said about the language of photography in both cases, about questions of power, both statutory and otherwise (a redacted version of the contract and confidentiality agreement that subtends An Invitation is also on view, for example), and about the kinds of subjects that photographs and photographic imagery produce or interpolate. But in these projects – as well as others that Ledare has pursued, such as, perhaps most significantly, Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2008), a portrait of the fraught, Oedipal relationship that Ledare shares with his mother – there is always a palpable feeling of risk.

Ledare hazards what we cheaply call ‘difficult situations’, not by staging them but by getting into them. His aim isn’t transparency, however, but complication – at the affective rather than intellectual level. Ledare does work as much inside of photographic theory as practice, yet without his work becoming either esoteric or didactic, as so much contemporary conceptual photographic work does today. Perhaps this is because the central paradox of photography – this image is there, fixed; but its meaning can never be – serves Ledare as an amplifier of the many vulnerabilities – his own, those of his subjects, ours – that we all try to keep from public view.

Published in ArtReview, Summer 2014.

Elliott Hundley, It Will End (2014)

Since 2006 or 2007, just after he earned his MFA from UCLA and began to gain serious institutional recognition – Eden’s Edge at LA’s Hammer Museum; Unmonumental at the New Museum, New York; The Shapes of Space (all 2007) at the Guggenheim Museum, New York – Elliott Hundley has relied heavily on straight pins as a kind of signature material. Those pins have held together, precariously and variably, accumulations of all kinds of flinty detritus, from photo cutouts to Styrofoam insulation, and this work walked a fine line between painting, collage, relief and sculpture, though Hundley made singular moves into each of these genres as well.

His new work is more self-consciously painting and sculpture. The pins are mostly still there, of course – what would a contemporary artist be without a signature material standing in for style? – but the precarity is not. Instead, Hundley has toned down the manic accumulations in order to more earnestly address composition, which has the best works coming out as straightforward, considered, compelling abstractions – and lacking pins! – such as Silent Factory (all work 2014), which channels the palette of a Frankenthaler while weaving in the feel of Rauschenberg’s Canto series (1958–60). It Will End is another good example, tipping as it does over into the anamorphic dreamscape of some lesser-known science-fiction set designer.

The confidence manifest in these paintings is matched in the ribbonlike meshes of a series that Hundley calls Scaffold. Perched above rough-hewn wooden ladders, these works are composed of lengths of heavy-gauge bronze wire held in near parallel by solders of the artist’s signature straight pins. Like some latter-day ‘cold structures’ of a Karl Ioganson, the Scaffold works are constructivist in their simplicity and transparency, yet resolutely bourgeois in their aesthetic – one wishes Hundley would have made these with something other than the pins, which, even as ‘found objects’, remain too closely identified with his self-legislating and self-marketing ‘I’.

One also wishes he had left behind the two biggest works in the show, Destroyer and The Hesitant Hour, both large, four-paneled tableaus that rely too heavily on staged photographic portraits. The images are clumsy, and for all their supposed theatricality, the works come off as quick and amateurish. They play at being big, but bear none of the balance of the abstractions.

‘When in doubt, keep working it’ is not a mantra Hundley should stick to. Whether the unevenness here is a fault of his needing to fill a big space or just a lack of self-critical judgement in the studio doesn’t really matter. The modestly scaled but hugely effective abstract paintings and sculptures are enough to keep one wanting to see more.

Published in ArtReview, Summer 2014.