As a writer, I have become slightly perturbed by the state of corporatized digital media. It is becoming increasingly difficult to express any opinion that might diverge from the prevailing narratives of our time. So, this blog will serve as an outlet for my observations, my tastes, my experiences, my anxieties, my habits, and otherwise.
2018 was a year of conflict for geopolitical, sociological, and personal reasons. But if I had to boil the year down to a single notion, that notion would be outrage. Outraged when I watch CNN and see white, middle aged fascistic Trump talking heads lie to my face that what I’m seeing right in front of my face isn’t actually happening. Outraged at the death of nuance and the further corporatization of the flow of information and ideas. But more than anything, I’m outraged over the death of intellectualism. Outraged at the right wing’s cult worship of an objectively horrible president and morally bankrupt human being. I also have at times been outraged by the left’s outrage: cancel culture, de-platforming, Twitter freak outs. I feel a bit out of phase with the culture, to be honest. Superhero movies are suddenly worth the kind of critical praise normally associated for auteur-driven cinema. Mind-numbingly simplistic television series warrant more cultural discussion that transcendent works of literature. It can be a drag to be a cranky, youngish but aging, intellectual snob living in this era.
Nevertheless, 2018 was a magnificent year for art. Art can carry you through, and help you achieve a relation of yourself, your being, to the world around you. Susan Sontag once wrote that a photograph can be “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.” I’d wager that this assertion can apply to any work of creative energy: a text, an object, a film, whatever. This year, I found myself engrossed by the new records that I listened to, the new films that I watched, and the new books that I read. In many ways, I found more power in culture in 2018 than in any other year that I’ve been alive. But of course, contemporary art is my cultural domain. The area in which I develop my most cohesive opinions. I share here the exhibitions, the art, that most challenged me and appealed to my personal understanding of what great art is (note, all exhibitions took place in New York, my home city).
Fall programming at New Museum (Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel, Marianna Simnett: Blood in my Milk, Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal, Dan Herschlein: The Architect)
by Marguerite Humeau
I found myself making repeat visits to the New Museum over the last few months when the institution hosted exhibitions by some of my favorite artists currently working. But even more pleasurable is that if one strived to see them, one could detect thematic connections between all four of the artists that had work on view at the museum. The much (deservingly) lauded Sarah Lucas retrospective that populates the majority of the museum’s primary space “Au Naturel,” the emotionally challenging video projection of British artist Marianna Simnett’s Blood in my Milk installation, the overwhelmingly sensory confusing of French artist Marguerite Humeau’s Birth Canal installation of sculpture, sound and scent, and the storefront window featuring New York-based artist Dan Herschlein’s anxiety-inducing sculptural installation The Architect, certainly all varied differently in style and approach. Nevertheless, all the shows carried themes related to cultural and personal angst, eroticism, the corporeal, the blurring of the beautiful and the grotesque, and contemporary surrealism. Anyone of these exhibitions on their own would have brought me out to the museum to see them, but together I was able to cross-reference ideas and thoughts between the individual shows. The coiling distorted limbs of Lucas’ ‘NUD’ sculptures imbue in me a similar disturbance related to the fragility of the body to that elicited by the varicose veins shot in close-up and featured in Simnett’s film Blue Roses. Humeau’s sculptures, the result of a process of intensive research merging with vibrant imagination and fantasy, and Herschlein’s installation, an examination of horrific memories projected onto interior space, both highlight a contemporary surrealist art’s quest to deconstruct reality.
In the Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton wrote, “We are still living under this reign of logic.” This is no longer remotely true. We are living in the time of conspiracy theories being reported as news. Opioid epidemics. Humans with diseases being unable to heal their bodies due to the tilting of a global economy that has placed all the power into the hands of a few oligarchs. We are living in an age of anxiety, of chaos. All of these fantastic artists that the New Museum hosted this fall forced me to confront the blurred realities of living now. And amidst all this confusion, we still have bodies. Bodies that get sick, bodies that get old, bodies that are conflicted by sex and desire and hunger, and bodies that entrap the immensity of our psyches.
David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, The Whitney
'David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night,' The Whitney
However late it is, it was satisfying to finally see a full career retrospective of the iconic American artist, writer, poet and activist David Wojnarowicz. Though he passed away from complications related to AIDS at age 38, Wojnarowicz developed a dazzlingly broad and yet stylistically tight body of work across various mediums. With so much to sort through, the curators of the exhibition did their best to guide viewers through a chronological journey through Wojnarowicz’s art. Wojnarowicz was first and foremost a writer, and his forays into visual art sought to place him in the lineage of other radical queer writers, namely Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet. Wojnaworicz’s first series of visual art works, a brilliant series of black and white photographs of Wojnarowicz and his friends wearing Rimbaud masks while engaged in activities around New York, grounds Wojnarowicz in a well-defined history of iconoclastic poet radicals that allows one to view Wojnarowicz with the kind of antiquated mystique and intrigue of a romantic poet that stood in contrast to his decidedly postmodern art making.
With Wojnarowicz, it’s always astonishing just how brilliant his work was across so many mediums. He was chameleonic in his talent, and his photography, mixed-media, sculpture, video work and painting all seamlessly blend into one another. Wojnarowicz’s large-scale paintings however, perhaps the most historically under-discussed element of his work, are particularly brilliant. A peculiar sense of symbols (elements, frogs, sex) and an organic style combine offering images that eviscerate the decaying culture of Reagan era America. Wojnarowicz was a deeply political artist, but he was also a highly inventive one. He was an artist, first and foremost. He cared about beauty, and in beauty’s power for overcoming oppression. He wasn’t a sloganeer. He placed his faith in aesthetics and culture.
Beside Me, curated by Dan Herschlein, JTT Gallery
Art by Sedrick Chisom
“The abject,” as defined by philosopher Julia Kristeva in her 1982 text The Powers of Horror, refers to the human reaction (horror) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object or self and other.” In other words, it’s the emotion elicited when a human is faced with the realization of the impurity of their bodily functions (Kristeva believed that the repression of our bodily impurities were necessary to function as people, and if you’ve ever had to use the restroom while consuming a psychedelic substance, you’d agree with her). Artists throughout history have explored this terrain, the grotesque and the abject, from Hieronymus Bosch through Paul McCarthy. However (and I can say this as an artist myself invested in exploration of the abject and the grotesque), there is a blurry boundary when dealing in these themes between something genuinely challenging, provocative and indeed scary, and something outright goofy and stupid. Artist and curator Dan Herschlein knows this boundary well. Beside Me, an exhibition curated by Herschlein at JTT Gallery, explores these boundaries well. An excellent survey of contemporary artists exploring anxiety and their relation to the unseen, the works in the show how this ancient artistic concept can be reinvigorated through history as cultures move forward. In sculpture by David Altmejd, installation by art duo Tarwuk, painting by Sedrick Chisom, drawing by Vanessa Gully Santiago, video projection by Elizabeth Schraeger, and even “manga” comic strips by genius Japanese comic auteur Junji Ito, Herschlein posits that the abject manifests strongest when subtly elicited.
Tala Madani Corner Projects, 303 Gallery
Art by Tala Madani
Having been born in Tehran, Iran, there have been cases of critics wanting to understand artist Tala Madani’s paintings, illustrations and videos through the prism of Islamic culture. That isn’t totally right though, and in fact if Madani addresses the political and social structure of her homeland, it’s by drawing connections between it and western culture more than she differentiates between the two. That connection, it seems, is male dominance. In a confrontational style that brings to mind artists such as Philip Guston and the illustrative work of Mike Kelley, Madani depicts male figures almost comically concerned with maintaining power and dominance.
In her recent exhibition at 303 Gallery, Madani presents several paintings and two video projections. In these images, Madani arguably liberates the male figures from patriarchal duties presenting them engaging in acts of unrestrained desire that confront social convention. In one animated video projection, a male figure continuously attempts to ride an escalator to a floor above him where he keeps being met with a mob that viciously attacks him and sends him flying back down the stairs. An animated audience, a stand-in for the viewer, passively watches. Madani forces us to come to terms with our mass engagement with the bystander effect: we submit to societal standards that allows us attempt to liberate ourselves from social structure are beaten down until we are fragmented versions of ourselves. New to this body of work is Madani’s use of infantile figures. These babies are full of mischievous desire: one painting finds a baby holding a knife above the anus of a forward reclined male figure. Babies, in a Freudian view, are pure id, functioning purely according to bodily desire. Madani locates the freedom in this, in relation to a societal structure’s influence over, or corruption, of her male figures. Madani’s work is challenging and thrilling, demanding aesthetic engagement and psychological ponderousness.
Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, MoMA and MoMA PS1
Art by Bruce Nauman
New Yorkers were treated to some truly excellent museum retrospectives this year, but perhaps the most necessarily creatively uplifting was the sprawling takeover of both MoMA and MoMA PS1 by iconic American mixed-media and performance artist Bruce Nauman. In an art world full of simplistic, one-dimensional, and ideologically sanitized political messages and hollow, thoughtless provocations, Nauman reminds us of art making as a practice inherently tied to self-discovery. The exhibition’s title, Disappearing Acts, is in reference to Nauman’s “withdrawal as an art form.” He fragments bodies (his own and others), spaces are suspiciously empty but haunted by the artist’s presence, and the artist “sculpts himself in absentia" (Nauman’s fascination in negative space was inspired by a Willem de Kooning quote about painting the space within objects).
Nauman’s work has often been thought of as being boring (critic Hilton Kramer wrote it off as such in 1973). And certainly with the repetitiousness of movements in his performance videos that sometimes go on for 60 minutes at a time it is at times hard not agree with that sentiment. But one must always consider Nauman’s oeuvre in relation to himself. It may be trying to watch him endure monotonous movements in his early videos, but the artist is clearly trying to gain some kind of new awareness for himself. In some ways, he is a very selfish artist, and I mean that positively. This selfishness has led Nauman to being notoriously averse to being pinned down. The exhibition looks at Nauman’s grotesque disembodied figurative illustrations, his large-scale sculptures, video, performance, and even speculative architecture. A blurb about this show feels a bit faux and wrong-headed so let me just say: you don’t have to like every piece the artist produces, it’s not the point. And indeed as much as I love Nauman’s illustrations and pornographic and literary neon installations, I don’t have the patience for a 3D film that finds him limping across a floor back and forth. But Nauman’s work is supremely thrilling to an artist simply because his philosophy dictates that everything he produces in-studio is an art work. It’s hard to overstate the freedom that belief imbues in other artists, and partly explains Nauman’s vast influence.
Art and Conspiracy: Everything is Connected, Met Breuer
Art by Jim Shaw
The most quintessentially American exhibition of the year was at the Met Breuer. Art and Conspiracy: Everything is Connected, curated by Doug Eklund and Ian Alteveer, is dedicated to the late Mike Kelley who often intertwined anxieties and desires of the self with social corruption. The exhibition’s exploration of American conspiracy theory begins with the assassination of JFK. JFK’s probable (but perhaps not only) assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald’s definite assassin Jack Ruby, are depicted side by side in artist Wayne Gonzales’ painted portraits. Here, the work and the exhibition argues, is where conspiracy theories entered the lexicon of American culture.
The exhibition is broken into two halves. The first half of the exhibition finds artists, in a sense, acting as citizen journalists and detangling convoluted webs of evil, greed, and corruption. Projects such as these prove that some conspiracy theories are in fact with merit, and that sometimes the corruption that appears so brazen as to be false is in actuality truth and uses conspiracy as its shield. Hans Haacke’s spectacularly researched project Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971) revealed how a family had used shell companies to dominate New York real estate and inflate its value (surely resulting in the removal of working class families). This project, as well as other in this section, reveals how truth is most certainly stranger, and often so much more insidious, than fiction.
The next half of the exhibition focuses on the fantastical elements of conspiracy and interrogates the unique surrealism attained when conspiracy bleeds into reality. Jim Shaw, inspired by a tabloid story claiming that lizard people were living inside humans, sketched over photographic portraits of friends to depict them as the lizard versions of themselves, and rephotographed over the sketches to make it look more realistic. The aforementioned Kelley’s sculpture “Education Complex” redesigns architecture plans for a school that found itself embroiled in the false scandal accusing educational facilities of widespread Satanic child abuse, commenting on national hysteria. And the incredible works by Sarah Anne johnson examines her grandmother’s memories of being made victim to MK Ultra Tests at a mental institution. MK Ultra is a shadowy CIA program that studies the potentials of forced LSD use, and rumor (or, conspiracy) has it that these tests were used on Ted Kaczynski and Bobby Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sohab. Johnson presents her grandmother’s image stamped, or corrupted, with blotter designs, and in a sculptural dollhouse miniature recreates the asylum where the viewer can peer through windows and view the grandmother’s hallucinations.
Saul Fletcher: Four Loom Weaver, Anton Kern Gallery
Art by Saul Fletcher
From the not exactly represented in the art world locale of Northern England, artist Saul Fletcher has been producing pioneering photography with a notable peculiar, almost cult appeal since the mid-‘90s. His work draws in the gaze with a profound sense of psychological anxiety. It’s the artist’s anxiety surely, as his work with human subjects is both intimate but removed; he reveals little about his subjects, and the work hints Fletcher may have trouble getting to intimately know other humans altogether. The approach imbues Fletcher with a haunting melancholy. Meanwhile, the formal aspects of the work take on elements of assemblage and painting, with Fletcher pre designing his visual world before delivering the images to the public.
Fletcher’s recent exhibition at Anton Kern found the artist presenting 16 new images made outside his homeland in in his new (and decidedly more art world hip) home of Berlin. As is often the case with Fletcher’s oeuvre, the artist uses photography as the mechanism to cohesively tie together a larger artistic practice: Fletcher paints his studio walls and uses found objects as props (though formally the artists are vastly different, the use of photography to bring together various mediums of Fletcher mirrors those of Roger Ballen). The images in the show seem to address Fletcher’s personal history as well as the nature of the modern industrial city. Sometimes, paintings combine with sculptural found objects as flattened assemblages, and when human subjects appear the paintings and objects appear to accentuate the subject in question. Fletcher is deeply invested in exploiting as well as pushing back against classical notions of both photography and portraiture. If portraiture indeed says more about the artist than the subject, Fletcher accentuates the notion by forcing his visual perspective, via paintings objects, into each image. In an era when photography is constantly undermined as a medium, Fletcher’s insistence on photography’s ability to do things that no other medium can fascinates and reassures me.
Art by Tau Lewis (sculpture) and Cheyenne Julien (painting)
Ever since I saw her mesmerizing showing of sculpture at the Cooper Cole booth at Frieze New York, the work of Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis has been a constant fascination all year. A particularly strong showcasing of the artist came this past summer at Chapter NY alongside the figurative paintings of astonishingly young wunderkind artist Cheyenne Julien. Rooted in portraiture, the exhibition focused on imagined environments that examine how personal traumas fit into larger collective traumas. Lewis exhibited two sculptures both indicative of the artist’s practice of incorporating found objects into doll-like horrific assemblages. “Pet Rock” finds a fabric-based doll falling in the arms of an abstracted but noticeably figurative assemblage of tree stumps and a wooden head punctured with metallic objects. The image is disquieting; brutal in its subtlety.
Julien’s paintings achieve a similarly disquieting effect in a far more direct manner. Dreamlike and bordering on surrealism, Julien’s figures respond to oppression in a multitude of ways that feel realistic: with resolve, with strength, with vulnerability, with embarrassment. She achieves a stunning array of emotions in her work.
While I’m on it, I’d also like to point out that Lewis’ solo installation at Shoot the Lobster gallery in New York was similarly great.
Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art, David Zwirner
Art by James Ensor
For what it’s worth, the fantastical and grotesque imagery of Symbolism, Dada and Surrealism has had the longest and most enduring influence on my own work (I tend to think of my photographic works as approaching the human bodies similarly as did the surrealists, and my mixed media digital collages I think fo as being connected to symbolism, because, well, they use symbols) so it should be no surprise that I was blown away by one of the boldest gallery exhibitions I’ve seen this year, Endless Enigma at David Zwirner. The show created a dialog with the pioneering 1936 MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and like that exhibition not only introduced the dreamlike and fantastical aesthetics of surrealism and dada to a larger public, they also placed that kind of imagery into a larger historical context. That exhibition and this one both demonstrate how artists as early as the 15th century forward have been drawn to imagery of monsters, dreams, distorted bodies, the unconscious mind, and the supernatural to evoke themes related to desire, subversion, angst, and radicalism.
The range of artists in the exhibition is breathtaking. Old masters such as Bosch and Titian share space with surrealists like René Magritte and Max Ernst. Symbolist painters like Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch form dialogue with modernists like Louise Bourgeois and Alberto Giacometti. The exhibition’s organizer Nicholas Hall, a specialist in the field of Old Masters and 19th century painting, even saw fit to include contemporary works by artists like Robert Gober and Kerry James Marshall. One can surmise that the use of fantastical language will never become obsolete because it inherently allows the artist to examine his/her inner world. These symbols become universal emblems of angst. No matter what is going on within culture, how we relate to the world will be marred by angst, confusion, and desire.
I will also mention that an artist who is heavily featured in this and the original MoMA exhibition, 20th century painter Leonor Fini’s exhibition at the Museum of Sex (of which conflict of interest prevents me from fully reviewing) is stunning.
Frida Orupabo: Cables to Rage, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York
![Art by Frida Orupabo Norwegian sociologist and artist Frida Orupabo, to paraphrase artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, has the most “mesmerizing Instagram [see her account at @nemiepeba] account in existence.” “This is nothing short of a mobile reposi…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b8d50fe89c172835f96fe61/1549755971684-E2CEXTJN3GFL3TAGRNZ0/1522387280-a14e4.jpg)
Art by Frida Orupabo
Norwegian sociologist and artist Frida Orupabo, to paraphrase artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, has the most “mesmerizing Instagram [see her account at @nemiepeba] account in existence.” “This is nothing short of a mobile repository,” wrote Jafa on Orupabo’s Instagram account. “A litany of residua, a voluptuous trail of black continuity, pyramid schemata as densely inscribed as any book of the dead, not so much an archive as an ark, a borne witness to the singularity that is blackness.”
He’s not kidding. Orupabo has revealed Instagram posting as an artistic medium ripe for exploration. A long, continuous collage that when properly curated can achieve a singular mood and aesthetic and express a distinct visual ethos. But would the artist be able to translate this idiosyncratic vision into salable art works? Jafa certainly believed so, and encouraged Orupabo to print her digital collages at large-scale, which resulted in her doing so for Jafa's exhibition at Serpentine Galleries in London. That show made Orupabo realize she was able to make singular objects based on her techniques (she had previously been worried that the low resolutions of her digitally appropriated images would render physical prints impossible) and she had her first solo show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprises this year. For the most part, Orupabo focused on black female figures for this exhibition. She built female forms from various images sourced on the internet, nails them together into singular forms, and presents the cut-out distorted portraits onto the walls of the space. The result is surprisingly more in line with art history than one might think, simultaneously recalling the grotesque figurations of Francis Bacon, the implied violence of Kara Walker’s prints, and the haunted but vivacious beauty found in black life in the black and white photographic imagery of Sabelo Mlangeni. Orupabo claims to mostly source her images from "colonial pictures" bringing a fascinating conceptual conceit into her practice. These images, used to present racial differences as "otherness," are dismantle in Orupabo's collages and the resulting images exude power and radiant beauty.
All I can say about Frida Orupabo’s work is that it both liberated me and validated something that I had been pondering in terms of my own interests in art making. It validated the idea of digital research and digital collage as a new medium. It verified that Jpegs, like printed matter, could be re-contextualized and altered and presented as new images. And this is the exact exhibition that I needed to see in 2018.
Heji Shin: Men Photographing Men, Reena Spaulings
Art by Heji Shin
Heji Shin is perhaps best known to a wider public for her stunning fashion photography. She has shot portraits of celebrities like Isabelle Huppert, has contributed fashion campaigns to the likes of Purple and Dazed magazine, and received widespread attention for her Eckhaus Latta campaign that was totally devoid of clothes (Shin instead photographed real couples of all races, sexualities and gender during the act of lovemaking). What not many realize however is that Shin’s commercial work is only one facet of a fascinating and genuinely fine art photographic practice.
Shin likes to transgress notions of acceptability in photographic representation, or “make images of images” as she describes it. Her 2016 Baby 1-7 series consisted of several close-up photographs of babies emerged from their mothers’ wombs that were equally horrifying and beautiful (considering artist Carmen Winant’s deserved attention for her installation of appropriated photographs of childbirth at MoMA’s New Photography exhibition, I’ve always been a bit surprised Shin didn’t get more attention for this series). More recently, Shin’s current solo exhibition at Kunstalle Zurich features x-ray self-portraits alongside portraits of Kanye West. I can only imagine Shin’s elation at the outsized rage of the art world elite against her inclusion of the portraits, but Kanye is Shin’s ideal subject: a contradictory symbol of both black artistic genius and alt-right, Trump supporting liberal anathema.
And that brings me to Shin’s under-covered and brilliant solo exhibition at Reena Spaulings gallery. Using an old school gay pornographic trope, “the hot cop,” Shin brilliantly upends notions of what a heterosexual female photographer is allowed to photograph. Shot in her signature edgy high contrast and heavily saturated style, Shin framed highly explicit images of gay law enforcement officers lost in homosexual embrace. Shin’s spectacular talent is by provoking the viewer into questioning what kinds of identities are allowed to shoot certain kinds of identities. Shin is a true libertine, and she will shoot who she wants.
Art by Carroll Dunham
Artist Carroll Dunham rose to prominence at a time (1980s) when painting re-entered the center of art world discussion. And yet, Dunham’s painting never fit nearly into neither of the prominent movements that rose in tandem with his career. His paintings are too conceptual to make sense in the context of the neo-expressionism of Basquiat, Schnabel or Eric Fischl, and too expressive to be compared alongside the postmodernist paintings of Julia Wachtel, Christopher Wool or Walter Robinson. Dunham has always deftly balanced figuration and abstraction, surrealism, pop art, graffiti and cartooning and his aesthetic is so mutable that he has perhaps reinvented himself as art history has moved forward better than any of his contemporaries.
Despite a career primarily (though certainly not only) obsessed with the rendering of the female form, Dunham looked at the male figure in his most recent solo exhibition at Gladstone Gallery. Playing with visual tropes related to the mythological depiction of wrestling. Dunham skillfully manipulated a similar set of images. In the paintings, wrestling appears playful, and at other times sexual, and occasionally full of brutality and violence. The power of body language is explicit here. Dunham implies how much emotion, whether desirous or vengeful, is betrayed by our bodies.
Huma Bhabha: With a Trace, Salon 94, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Met’s Iris and Gerald B. Cantor Roof Garden
Art by Huma Bhabha
Up on the rooftop of The Met, Pakistani-born and New York State-based artist Huma Bhabha installed two of her massive figurative sculptures. One, a 12 ft ambiguously gendered body that slightly recalls a less cartoonishly evil version of The Predator, and the other, the 18-ft long huddled and obscured by apparently a large burqa entitled Benaam. A smaller version of that piece (Untitled, 2006) appeared at the artist’s concurrent exhibition at Salon 94 that elaborated on the rooftop’ installation antiwar themes with a series of sculptures, photo drawings, and works on paper.
I’ve always loved Bhabha’s work for how it seems to evoke such a specific idea while still remaining utterly averse to easy explanations. The artist draws on diverse high and low sources: science fiction, arthouse cinema (Tarkovsky’s Stalker is a particularly potent reference point here), and B movies merge with modernist sculpture, Egyptian reliquary, and Greek kouroi. Bhabha's figures are grotesque and anatomically off, but nevertheless appearing neutral. Bhabha depicts nothing threatening in their body language and expressions. She makes profound statement on the nature of otherness here, and how culture applies fear to that kind of otherness. But as always, Bhabha doesn’t make the narrative easy for anyone. Her aesthetic guides the viewer, and the viewer applies his/her own interpretation.
Kandis Williams, Eurydice, Night Gallery
Art by Kandis Williams
I first came across Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist Kandis Williams in 2017 when a few of her utterly disorienting and fascinating collages appeared at a group show at Shoot the Lobster gallery. So much of mixed-media and paper collage work now is so haphazard, a way for an artist to randomly throw a slew of found photographs onto a piece of paper and quickly make a visually provocative image. Williams’ collages, however, are deeply considered, tackling violence, eroticism, race, bodies, and objectification with a meticulous sense of placing and framing. She has become one of my favorite emerging artists.
Williams is primarily known for her aforementioned collages and performance work. Both of these practices were on display at the artist’s brilliant 2018 exhibition at Night Gallery. Entitled Eurydice, Williams presented collage, sculpture, video and floral arrangements that explored the Myth of Eurydice (look it up) and American literary critic Hortense Spillers’ analysis of black culture as a “curricular object.”
The collage works, applied to mirrored objects, explore Israel artist and philosopher Bracha Ettinger’s notion of American culture’s tendency “estrange and absorb” its subjects. Ettinger believes that American culture tends to diminish the consciousness and inner experiences of a human, while appropriating those humans' various cultures into its lexicon. Williams applies this to the experience of black American life. Williams’ work is deeply engaged with literature and philosophical thought, but the academic and research aspect of her practice is in service of a powerful and provocative image.
The videos confront the myth of Eurydice. With music by cellist Patrick Bellaga and Alex Zhang Hungtai (a musician well-known for his project Dirty Beaches, which deftly balanced the amphetamine rock of Les Rallizes Denudes with 21st century experimental electronic music, and who in 2018 released a stunning solo album of digitally manipulated saxophone compositions entitled “A Divine Weight,” I’m a fan obviously, but I digress, this isn’t a music post) a choreographed dance places the myth onto contemporary issues surrounding race. In the myth, Orpheus as “the perennial artist,” frees his wife Eurydice from the underworld by playing his lyre for Hades. The catch is that he must guide Eurydice back to the living realm without looking back at her, he just needs to avoid gazing back at her. He fails, looking back at Eurydice who is permanently rendered towards the realm of the immaterial. The metaphor here is particularly potent: Williams looks at how artistic and academic fetishization minimizes the personal weight that those who belong to the studied or aestheticized group must carry. We apply so much visual attention to cultures that we fail to acknowledge an individual's humanity.
Artwork by Benedicte Glydenstierne Sehested
If I had any bias towards any kind of visual art, it would be towards sculptors who photograph and photographers who sculpt and those artists who use the two mediums to emphasize and interrogate the other: Auguste Rodin, Hans Bellmer, Sarah Lucas, etc.. Photography allows sculptors to emphasize, re-contextualize, and fetishize the objects they will into existence through imagination and skill.
Berlin-based artist Benedicte Glydenstierne Sehested’s 2018 exhibition at Greenspon Gallery presented five figurative sculptures, three photographic prints, 6 coffee mugs emblazoned with photographic images, and one appropriated image of a 1980s Dutch advertisement. The ad finds three children engaged in crafts-like activities being supervised by their father. The mother on the other hand is towards the back and reviewing correspondences and holds the viewer’s gaze; her physical gestures betray a kind of idiosyncratic streak that she holds onto to maintain autonomy against the sterilizing aspects of the nuclear family. That attention towards physical gesture is explored throughout Sehested’s sculptural work as well. The five figures, made of materials like pinkish wax, starched cotton, and latex sheets, are without faces and instead suggest humanity and identity through physical gesture. A photograph, ‘Untitled (YBY),’ shows several of the sculptures huddled together, either tenderly showing affection or desperately clinging for attention. Sehested’s use of photography and sculpture belies a visual fascination with physicality and its connection to self-identity.