Eliana Willis

Remember when, seemingly overnight sometime during those first few weeks of quarantine, companies shoehorned uplifting messages of solidarity and hope into their TV ads, without ever neglecting to peddle their products?
“We’re here for a reason, and it’s bigger than selling cars,” began a Ford commercial that otherwise was just a Ford commercial.
“Now’s the time for us to show off our strength,” a Michelob Ultra ad inexplicably declared. 
For pop appropriationist Julia Wachtel, who for four decades has been mashing up mass-media images on painted canvases, the discordant tone wasn’t new. 
“That’s the COVID advertisement—which is what advertising has always been,” she tells Artnet News.
After filming snippets of commercials, reality shows, and other bits of TV, the artist created a series of short videos exaggerating this tonal tension to trippy, often humorous effect.
In one, footage of a NASCAR pit stop is intercut with shots of an electric toothbrush cleaning a corn cob. In another, a low-budget bible commercial is set to polka music. 
A still from one of Wachtel’s videos. Courtesy of the artist.

The films—her first stab at the medium—will premier weekly on Thursdays on Perrotin gallery’s Instagram. (Wachtel’s work is also included in “The Secret History of Everything,” a group show on view at the gallery’s New York location.)
They’re short and lo-fi and have a distinct, one-step-forward, two-steps-back rhythm. They’re silly, but they’re still underscored by a languid, late-capitalist sadness—like when you find yourself watching informercials in the middle of the day. 
In short, if Wachtel’s paintings were to come to life, they’d look a lot like this. 
And that makes sense, considering their origin. Not long after quarantining at her home and studio in Connecticut, Wachtel ran out of the custom-made canvases she uses for her painted work. So she decided to try her hand at video. 
The process was humble. In a habit she likens to fishing, Wachtel would turn on the TV and simply started surfing, using her phone to record little clips along the way.
After she had reeled in enough material, she would load it into iMovie and start experimenting. Eventually she graduated to Adobe Premiere, but was sure to maintain the sketch-like quality—a balance she learned to strike with her painting. 
A still from one of Wachtel’s videos. Courtesy of the artist.

But the formal logic of painting is not the one through which she thinks and talks about the works. 
“I listen to a lot of hip hop and rap and have since 1979 when the Sugarhill Gang came out with the first rap song,” she says, citing Kendrick Lamar as a particular hero.
“If you think about scratching or sampling and the building of overlapping layers of beats and melodies, there is a visual equivalent. For me, that’s very inspirational.”  
There’s another layer between the canvases and the videos too, one that the artist is still reconciling. 
Through the act of painting, Wachtel says, she’s undermining the ocean of images from which her material comes.   
“I’m extracting out of that, and locating images in history,” the artist says. “They become objects that are made at particular moments. They’re physical things that will stay in their current form. It’s about making static something that reflects a condition that is fundamentally time-based.”
And then, after finishing her fishing expedition, she throws her catch back in the water. 
“I’m swimming with the devil now.”
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As galleries and art institutions around the world begin to reopen, we are spotlighting individual shows—online and IRL—that are worth your attention.

“Grace Weaver: Steps” at James Cohanthrough September 12, 2020
What the gallery says: “In her striking portrayals of the tragicomic everyday, Grace Weaver examines the charged social and cultural conditions that underlie self-concept, intimacy, and individual experience. Depicting elastic-limbed figures that collide on street-corners and tumble down steps, Weaver’s new paintings turn an incisive yet empathetic eye onto the self-conscious performativity and precarious footing of her contemporaries. In her work, the body itself becomes scenario: playful, sweeping lines and dense planes of luminous color act as linguistic elements, each directing [their] own physical weight and affect onto her female subjects.
Weaver’s paintings are an exploration of what she terms a ‘theater of public life’… These scenes allow her to build an audience within the painting, creating a chorality within the picture plane. The cast of characters, like Weaver, are as much subject to performing a strata of social anxieties as they are to wryly observing them.”
Why it’s worth a look: Weaver’s deft drawings and charcoal studies, which are full of lyricism and emotion, recall Eadweard Muybridge’s landmark 19th-century motion-study photographs, with each erasure marking another aspect of the body’s movement through space.
The paintings that result from Weaver’s many preparatory works are flattened with color, but not diminished in affect: the bright orange and hot pink of the female characters, outlined almost as animation cels, are hilarious and heartwarming. The balloon-shaped extremities and accordion-pleated skirts of some figures are reminiscent of Olive Oyl’s elasticity, and the tight-lipped portrait Choker II calls up an image of Daria, the surly heroine at the heart of MTV’s animated sitcom. Both are models of imperfect, fallible women—all the better for their foibles.
The “Steps” noted in the show’s title could be a simple reference to the physical flights of stairs the subjects clumsily traverse. But it could just as easily be an allusion to the steps of performance, the process of maturity, and the many hurdles of simply going about life.
What it looks like:

Grace Weaver, Affront (2020).© Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Misstep (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Droop (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Limbo (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Study for ‘Limbo’ (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Transfer (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Step (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Choker II [detail] (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Stunt (2020). Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery.© Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Crying (I, Upwards) (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Confrontation (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Crying (II, Downwards) (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Shame (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Sunshower (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Choker I (2020).  © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Split Leap (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

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Everything Chicago-born artist Theaster Gates sees, hears, touches, even imagines, is material just waiting to be transformed into art.
In 2016, in an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of its “Art in the Twenty-first Century” series, Gates explained his circuitous career route.
He began as an urban planner with an interest in religious studies, defecting along the way to try his hand at being a potter.
“I stopped making pots and was looking for a thing to do, and remembered that I had good hands,” he says in the interview, recalling how his father, a roofer by profession, had taught him from an early age to build things.
With this realization, the artist began to set his sights on large buildings as the raw materials for his work, transforming crumbling buildings into revitalized community-gathering spaces, balancing art with social responsibility.
The structures, which Gates strips and transforms into sculptures, are sold as bonds or investments to benefit rehabilitation projects, which many banks declined to fund.
Newly restored buildings are turned into repositories for Black culture, and there is even space for artists to live.
“The world is ripe for a making, for a re-making, for a re-shaping,” he says in the Art21 interview.
“Can art and culture change communities?” he asks. “It does all the time… I’m asking questions of what the Black world might look like if we invested in it, if we gave a damn.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Art in the Twenty-First Century, below.
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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