Eliana Willis

A 1972 retrospective of Diane Arbus’s work, mounted at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) just one year after she took her own life, divided viewers the way few exhibitions ever have. 
New York Times critic Hilton Kramer called it “an artistic and a human triumph,” praising the late photographer’s ability to “inhabit the mind and body and the milieu of certain people society has judged to be abnormal or unusual.” On this same topic Susan Sontag took issue, writing—somewhat infamously—that the artist’s “work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.”
“Arbus’s photographs,” Sontag went on, “suggest a naïveté which is both coy and sinister, for it is based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.”
A word-of-mouth sensation both revered and reviled, the show drew out-the-door, around-the-block lines, quickly becoming the museum’s most-attended solo exhibition to date. “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for communion,” John Szarkowski, MoMA’s legendary director of photography who curated the retrospective, once recalled. 
It’s no stretch to say that the show changed the way photography, a once-marginalized art form, was perceived by the institutional art world. And now, a full 50 years later, it’s going on view again. 
Diane Arbus, Four people at a gallery opening, N.Y.C. (1968). © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
Opening today at David Zwirner in New York is “Cataclysm,” a recreation of the 1972 show, down to the last picture.
Organized by Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, who jointly represent the Arbus estate, the show brings together 113 of the artist’s photographs across two floors and seven gallery spaces. It’s a museum-quality presentation, with all the prints secured via loan or consignment; some of them actually hung on MoMA’s walls in 1972. (No new estate-approved prints of Arbus’s pictures have been made since 2003.)
The name, “Cataclysm,” refers to the unexpected impact of the retrospective. “The pictures had a cataclysmic effect,” said dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel, who has worked with the Arbus estate since founding his eponymous gallery in 1979. “When people walked into MoMA and saw these photographs—BAM! No one had seen anything like them before,” 
“[Arbus] went further than anyone had and took chances and was so courageous,” Fraenkel explained. “’Fearless’ is the word. That was part of the electricity people were touched by.”
Diane Arbus, Tattooed man at a carnival, MD. (1970). © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
Arbus’s photographs, now among the most recognizable in art history, won’t have the same effect this time around. And for cynics, restaging a historic exhibition will surely feel, at first blush, contrived—a gimmick akin to, say, bringing Star Wars back into theaters for the umpteenth time. 
The business appeal is easy enough to see: for collectors, it’s the rare opportunity to collect Arbus’s greatest hits; for the galleries, the profit such an opportunity affords. Prices range from $10,000 to $175,000 for posthumous prints, and $40,000 to “close to a million” for prints made by Arbus herself, according to David Lieber, a partner at Zwirner. 
But there’s non-monetary value in putting on this particular show again, too.
Today, photography is cemented in the firmament of the contemporary art world, just as Arbus is cemented in its canon. Far more precarious, though, are the questions raised by her work—the same questions that stoked a furor five decades ago: Society otherized Arbus’s subjects, but did she? Can photographs empower, or do they only objectify? What does it mean to look?
Diane Arbus, A very young baby, N.Y.C. [Anderson Hays Cooper] (1968). © The Estate of Diane Arbus.What’s captured in Arbus’s pictures is not a “decisive moment” but a conditional set of relationships—a kind of social contract to which we as onlookers are made party. “When you look at an Arbus image, you’re always aware of this triangulation between the subject, the photographer, and the viewer,” noted Leiber.
Indeed, to engage with Arbus’s pictures is to engage with what it means to take a photograph of another human. And that, Fraenkel said, is an exercise just as vital in 2022 as it was in 1972.
“These are pictures I know very well. But when I walked into the gallery yesterday and turned left and saw a picture…I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time,” Fraenkel recalled upon visiting “Cataclysm.” “It sent lightning through my system.”
“There is nothing about the pictures that feels old. They feel thoroughly alive and speaking to us in this moment.”
Diane Arbus, Woman in a rose hat, N.Y.C. (1966). © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
​​”Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited” is on view now through October 22 at David Zwirner in New York.
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It’s not hyperbole to say that Michael Heizer’s City is a work of art unlike any other. 
Five ​​decades in the making, the Land Art pioneer’s magnum opus stretches out like an abandoned alien complex in the desolate Nevada desert, a crop circle without the crops—which some Google Earth users are sure to mistake it for, given that Area-51 is just one valley over. 
Groomed gravel paths give way to towering concrete shapes and massive mounds of earth. So primal and powerful are Heizer’s forms that they recall ancient structures—temples, pyramids, henges—more than they do modern industrial ones. The whole thing runs a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, making it among the largest artworks in the world—though few actually know where it is. Even fewer have seen it in person.  
“There’s no one else in the modern era that has taken on a project of this magnitude and then stuck with it,” said Emily Wei Rales, director of the Glenstone museum and a longtime supporter of Heizer.
Rales recently joined the board of the Triple Aught Foundation, a nonprofit formed 25 years ago to oversee City. “I would say the length of time and the amount of labor and resources that he’s poured into this—it’s on a scale of something people would do in medieval times.”
With City’s singularity comes a challenge: How do we begin to understand the achievement of this artwork? The years of anticipation, the artist’s unconstrained ambition, and the scale of its footprint make it big in every sense of the word—but is it also a big deal? In terms of art history, how will it be remembered?
Michael Heizer, City (1970 –2022). © Michael Heizer. Courtesy of the Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Eric Piasecki.
For the first time, we have a chance to answer that question. After 52 years of work, City is finally open to the public. 
And yet, in typical Heizer fashion, it remains almost as difficult to see. Just one group of six people is allowed to see the artwork per day. Reservations are required, and mostly spoken for (viewings are booked through the rest of this year). 
Those who have scored a viewing will be directed first to the tiny town of Alamo, Nevada—about 90 miles north of Las Vegas—and to the office of the Triple Aught Foundation. From there, a staff member will drive guests three hours—the last of which takes place entirely on bumpy dirt roads—to Heizer’s masterpiece. 
Those who have seen City don’t seem to regret the arduousness of the journey to get there. “There is no other sculpture, no other architecture, no other kind of art experience I’ve had that is like it,” said Kara Vander Weg, a director at Gagosian and a Triple Aught board member since 2018. 
Vander Weg knows City better than almost anyone, having spent five months at Heizer’s nearby ranch during the pandemic. She’s walked along the artwork, run around it, driven through it. “You don’t see the City project until you’re in the City project,” she said. “That’s one of the genius ways in which Michael has designed it.”
Comparisons have been made to other Land Art masterpieces, Vander Weg pointed out—works of art that, because of their size and destination status, have garnered a kind of metonymic relationship to their creators: Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76), James Turrell’s Roden Crater. 
“Each of [those] is a great artwork in and of its own, but this is different,” she said. 
Michael Heizer, 2015. Photo: Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post via Getty Images.
Heizer began City way back in 1970, and has been chipping away at it—often literally—ever since. A mythology grew around the project and its creator, this dogmatic cowboy who, decades ago, decamped to the remote Great Basin to devote himself to his life’s work. Though he continued to make other forms of art, his presence in the art world all but evaporated, save for the occasional interview, for which he would offer anachronistic—and sometimes slightly offensive—statements that made him sound like a man who never left the 20th century.
“A decaffeinated, used-up, once-was quick-draw cowboy, a sissy boy who eats at Balthazar for lunch,” is how Heizer described himself in a 2016 New Yorker profile, lamenting the loss of his younger self’s id. “Chemical castration—doesn’t happen all at once,” he said. “It’s slow. You just wake up one day and you’re dickless.”
In a way, Heizer is living in another time. “Just imagine somebody who is just essentially working without any deep relationship to peers,” said Julian Myers-Szupinska a Land Art scholar who has written about Heizer on several occasions. “If he’s bouncing off of anything, it’s weird bunkers and architectural forms of that region, or it’s the archeological record of massive indigenous community-constructed architectures.” 
“Where you fit that into the contemporary I don’t know,” Myers-Szupinska continued. “I don’t think it does fit into the contemporary. And I don’t think he aims for it to. The scale on which this project is aimed is the long term. He wants it to be there in 500 years.”
“My good friend Richard Serra is building out of military-grade steel,” Heizer said in that same New Yorker piece. “That stuff will all get melted down. Why do I think that? Incans, Olmecs, Aztecs—their finest works of art were all pillaged, razed, broken apart, and their gold was melted down.”
“When they come out here to fuck my City sculpture up, they’ll realize it takes more energy to wreck it than it’s worth.”
Michael Heizer, City (1970 –2022). © Michael Heizer. Courtesy of the Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Eric Piasecki.
In 2022, erecting an artwork with the intention of it lasting hundreds of years feels almost comically ambitious. When Heizer began City, on the other hand, a sense of wonder and mythos remained in the American West—a vestigial glimmer of “manifest destiny.” Today, the once-sprawling landscape lives under permanent threat—of fracking, strip mining, or other forms of fossil fuel extraction; of corporate development or environmental calamity. What once felt abundant now feels precarious.
City itself has been embroiled in a political fight for years. A railroad for transporting nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain once threatened to disrupt the land surrounding Heizer’s artwork before longtime Nevada Senator Harry Reid urged then President Obama to declare the region a National Monument in 2015. (Two years later, President Trump considered undoing Obama’s executive order, which would have re-opened the land for development.)
Similarly, the size of City is sure to induce eye rolls from those who interpret Heizer’s project as an ego-driven exercise in artistic man-spreading. Couple that with the fact that City cost $40 million to build and it’s tempting to wonder whether it merited such vast resources.
But Myers-Szupinska warns against that line of thinking. The scholar points to the “scrawl of Las Vegas and the effort of the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, the militarization of the [land], and all that generates the modernized American West. The scale of the earthwork that is Nevada is mind-boggling.”
“The relative scale of what Heizer’s doing, it’s just puny by comparison,” Myers-Szupinska went on. “There are all kinds of massive things that get constructed that cost more than this. So why is an aesthetic purpose any less valid?”
“Measurements are one way our culture tries to talk about artworks—the time, the size, the remoteness, the distance from a place,” added Vander Weg. “Those are measurements, but they are not the summary of this artwork.”
“Complex One,” City. © Michael Heizer/ Triple Aught Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Mary Converse.
William L. Fox, the founding director of the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, compared the experience of City to a kind of meditation. “When you are down inside it, it’s not that you can’t see the mountains. It’s just the mountains mentally disappear,” he said. “Everything arises around you and you’re powerfully enfolded.”
Fox wrote about Heizer in two books published in the early 2000s: Mapping the Empty, about artists and Nevada, and The Void, The Grid, and The Sign, about the Great Basin. Fox was close with Heizer then, spending time at his ranch and seeing City take shape. But the two men fell out shortly thereafter, partly because the artist despised what Fox had written about his creations.   
In 2019, Fox published a career-spanning—and occasionally critical—book about Heizer, who he has called a “highly problematic character.”
But when asked about his thoughts on City, Fox had no trouble putting his complicated relationship with the artist aside. “When Heizer’s at his very best, you experience reverence and awe,” Fox said. “That’s what he wants you to experience inside [City] and you do.”
“People are just dying to see it. And it’s going to wow them,” he said. “It’s not compromised in any way.”
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Earlier this week, David LaChapelle was giving a preview tour of his new exhibition to a small press cadre. He passed a wall of iconic big-budget glamour images that hung in chic cobalt-painted frames. The vamping models in heavy makeup were out-of-step with today’s post-2020 fashion landscape—and apparently with the photographer himself.
“Those are just fashion images they don’t mean anything,” he said, dismissively waving his hand, and without pausing lead the group to the next room.
Eminem: About to Blow (1999, New York), a detail from LaChapelle’s Vox Populi wheatpaste poster installation. Photo: ©David LaChapelle, courtesy of Fotografiska New York.
LaChapelle is best known as a celebrity photographer nonpareil. His shoots are high-concept (and high-budget) with lurid colors that pop like Skittles. The retrospective “Make Believe,” which opens today at Fotografiska New York, is a reminder that there is much more to LaChapelle than his Hollywood forays, and that he is in fact, a lot more interesting when he veers away from the glitz.
Yes, there are cameos by Madonna, Lizzo, and Tupac in the show. But the exhibition utilizes the minimum of his vast celebrity fodder in the more than 150 works spread across Fotografiska’s five floors. It is the artist’s first solo New York museum outing and his largest-ever exhibition, and showcases work from 1984–2022.
Good News for Modern Man II (1984, New York). Photo: © David LaChapelle, courtesy of Fotografiska New York.
The show makes the argument that there is a vast difference between a “best of” and a “greatest hits.” “Make Believe” is more of the former and illustrates how far LaChapelle has come, but also in many ways, how he’s remained unchanged.
The show is only a few blocks from 303 Gallery, where LaChapelle had his first shows in 1984. “Angels, Saints, and Martyrs” depicted his East Village cohort posing in dramatic religious tableaux. At the heart of these works was a profound daily meditation of mortality.
“My friends were dying of AIDS so fast, I thought I was dying, too,” Lachapelle said. One of those early black and white works is on display, a triptych warmly printed with a saturated Man Ray metallic sheen. A female nude reaches for divine light. “She’s wearing a wig because everyone had short spiky hair,” LaChapelle said.
Behold (2015, Hawaii). Photo: © David LaChapelle, courtesy of Fotografiska New York.
As the press tour continued, we came across a recent image of a Christ-like figure in the woods. LaChapelle explained that the model is a dancer who is currently going through hardships, and then described how he makes the halo effect by using revolving LED lights and slow exposure.
A devout Catholic, LaChapelle frequently references Christ and during the tour he was dressed like a hip prophet, in nerdy black spectacles, orange Nike dunks and a shirt, hand-painted by his friend, the artist Stefan Meier, that was adorned with images of flaming doves, flowers, and hands with eyes. The words “Rain Stars Ultra Super Universe” were printed across the back.
LaChapelle revealed that he is again staging Bible-inspired scenes from his home base in Hawaii. He decamped there in 2006, escaping his gilded cage of celebrity success and excess in New York—and started cranking out a lot of work that critiques his former milieu.
Aristocracy: Private Pirates (2014, Los Angeles). Photo: © David LaChapelle, courtesy of Fotografiska New York.
A standout in the show are the still-life images from 2011’s “Earth Laughs in Flowers” series. Heady and romantic, LaChapelle was clearly inspired by Dutch masters and the photos look like oil paintings. But beauty camouflages decay. If you look closely, the sickeningly sumptuous blooms are beginning to wilt. Some are surrounded by cellophane, discarded cell phones, abandoned drugstore teddy bears, and other detritus.
“Vanitas traditionally are about the brevity of life,” LaChapelle said. “This one is kind of like our world today. Shopping online or for sex on apps—it’s like people shopping for body parts.”
Also of note is 2006’s darkly clever “Recollections in America” series, in which he sourced random vintage snapshots from eBay, inserted other characters and altered the final images.  Another eye-catching series from 2014 featured private planes haphazardly flung about and floating in surreal, gradient airspace.
Earth Laughs in Flowers: Wilting Gossip (2008–11, Los Angeles). Photo: © David LaChapelle, courtesy of Fotografiska New York.
And although many of the photographer’s usual celebrity subjects are absent, transgender nightlife icon and forever LaChapelle muse Amanda Lepore looms large. In one image, she snorts a line of diamonds through a cocaine straw (the artist mentioned that this was a statement on materialism). Elsewhere she poses as a garish fever dream of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn and Liz.
A shot of her breast-feeding in a hooded faux sable coat is perhaps the most poignant. “Everything in this photo is fake,” LaChapelle said. “The fur, the baby, everything. But Amanda’s tears are real.”
Towards the end of the tour, LaChapelle got emotional as we reached an image of Travis Scott’s Astroworld album art, and the ensuing concert tragedy last November, when 10 people died being crushed in the crowd.
“They had taken my gold heads and painted them into skulls without permission, without asking,” LaChapelle said of the festival’s decorations, which he helped design. “The love of money is the root of all evil… all of that greed. That’s what killed those kids. And [then] they had to walk through a skull and see all this dark imagery. If imagery doesn’t matter, then why bother doing it at all? If art doesn’t have impact then why bother with it at all?”
After the preview, we briefly sat down with the artist at the gallery’s Veronika restaurant to discuss the show and his work over the years.
Fly On My Sweet Angel Fly on to the Sky (1988, Farmington, Connecticut). Photo: © David LaChapelle, courtesy of Fotografiska New York.
The celebrity aspect of the show was pretty low-key. When people think of you, they often think of images like Eminem holding a stick of dynamite.
That’s why its on the wall of the restaurant! It was a part of my life for a long time. I had that book called Lost and Found. There was a bit of getting lost after finding out that I didn’t have HIV around 1994. It coincided with suddenly getting contracts with Conde Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, and Details.
I threw myself into that world, became a workaholic, and got lost. I really felt it was time to stop. And when I was young, I prayed for a cabin in the woods inside my little squat on 3rd Street. I’ve got that now.
It’s funny that your “wandering in the desert” period consisted of fortune and fame. You chose to leave fashion behind. 
I was questioning this idea of happiness coming with the next purchase. I knew it wasn’t true, yet I was working in a world where that was the promise. That was a paradox.
Listen to Her (1986, New York). Photo: © David LaChapelle, courtesy of Fotografiska New York.
So much about your work is showing different versions and definitions of beauty. I was surprised that at the root of so much of your work was a rumination of death.
I don’t fear death, but I have been aware of it for a long time. I feared it a lot when I was a kid. My first boyfriend died of AIDS when I was 21. I didn’t go to a doctor for 15 years. Then, I had experiences that really lead me to believe that there is life after death.
I know that there’s something more than the material plane. I’m not afraid of death anymore. I want to live—as best I can and do the best pictures I can, because art does mean something. Images do mean something. And this was what I knew I was gonna do since I was a little kid. I was gonna be an artist.
I didn’t know I was gonna be a photographer, but I knew I was gonna be an artist. That’s been a calling, and I want to make pictures that mean something, not just look good.
“Make Believe” is now on view at Fotografiska New York, 281 Park Avenue South. Admission is $20-$30. Monday to Sunday, 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

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In a new commission by the U.K. public art producer Artangel, the artist Marcus Coates investigates the stigma around mental illness with a new body of films now showing in London.
The films show Coates exhibiting five different types of psychosis, from intense anxiety, to isolation, delusion, depression and exhaustion. Each was directed by a different person recovering from mental illness, and shares their personal story. In one of the films, Coates experiences vivid hallucinations while riding on a bus. In another, his anxiety becomes so crippling he is unable to go downstairs to fetch a pack of cigarettes.
To help understand the experience of psychosis for the films, Coates started his research in 2017, with visits to the clinic of Dr. Isabel Valli, in Maudsley Hospital in south London, the country’s largest mental health institution. There, the artist sat in the doctor’s waiting room and made notes, eventually gaining the trust some patients, who agreed to help Coates make his films in order to counter preconceptions about people with mental illness.  
Installation view of The Directors—Lucy (2022). Photo: Hugo Glendinning.
Coates told Artnet News in a phone call that he thinks his work ultimately can help foster a “greater understanding and compassion” towards people with mental illness. “I learned from this experience that everyone has a different reality. At the core of my work is a struggle to relate,” he said. 
“At a certain level, my new films are an extension of these elements—anthropological, participatory, but also poetic and compassionate,” Coates added. “Art can be a useful tool in reducing the stigma around mental health.”
The films, varying in length from 16 to 26 minutes, are installed in various locations in the Pimlico neighborhood, near Tate Britain. A map to find all five works can be picked up at the Churchill Gardens Residents’ Association building. Screening times are between Thursday and Saturday, from 3 p.m.–8 p.m., and Sundays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. The project, which opened last Thursday, will remain up until October 30.
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