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    in Street Art

    Artist Interview: Shepard Fairey

    Shepard Fairey: I’m Shepard and I’m an artist, and an activist best known I guess for my Obey Street Art and Clothing line, and of course the “Hope” Obama poster that I made as a grassroots tool to aid the Obama’s campaign. Or maybe the, “We the People” posters that I created for the Women’s March on Washington.Matthew A. Eller: Perfect, and can you tell me a little about this beautiful Blondie Print you are currently signing?Shepard Fairey: Well I have worked with Lisa Project on a few different projects over the years including in 2016 painting this Blondie mural depicted in this print. So when the opportunity came up to paint this image on a wall at Bleeker and Bowery, right across from where CBGB’s used to be, I couldn’t turn it down. I absolutely loved the idea because my first solo art show in New York in 1998 was at the CBGB’s Gallery, plus I love all the music that came out of CBGB’s like The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Bad Brains played there a lot, and of course Blondie.Additionally, in 2016 I worked on Blondies album package for their “Pollinator” album, and the flower and the bee at the top right corner of the mural is from that album art. I was extremely excited to do something that tied in with a band like Blondie that I loved historically, but who I had also worked with recently. So this print is based on the mural that I previously painted across from CGBG’s, which is now coming down and I’m replacing it with a new mural of the one and only Bad Brains. It’s just great that this mural is now being memorialized with this really beautiful large format screen print by Gary Liechtenstein with the proceeds helping the LISA Project fund future murals and events. And just in time because as of this morning it’s just a yellow wall. We already started on prepping for Bad Brains!Matthew A. Eller: How is this new Bad Brains mural going to be different then the old Blondie one?@obeygiant, @glenefriedmanShepard Fairey: So this Bad Brains mural is basically an update to the first Bad Brains collaboration I did in 2008. In that image three out of the four photos were based on pictures taken at CBGB’s. Only the HR image in that 2008 collaboration was photographed at the Whiskey in LA. So to keep it geographically relevant, I talked to Glenn (Friedman) and said, “You know, why don’t we re-illustrate HR? But Glenn was so partial to his shot of HR that I ended up re-illustrating two of them. So this will be something special when it’s finished that people haven’t seen exactly before, but it’s definitely reminiscent of the 2008 piece.Matthew A. Eller: Were Bad Brains your first choice for the mural?Shepard Fairey: Well, my first choice after Blondie , but I also love, the Talking Heads, I love Richard Hell and the Voidoids who were all in the running, but I think that having an opportunity to remind people that Bad Brains are the first all black hardcore band (honorable mention off course to A Band Called Death the first all black punk band). And even though they’re from DC originally, that first album cover with the Capital being struck by Lightning was recorded on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and they played CBGB’s all the time. So they are as important as anybody who was part of that history of the first wave of New York punk. They were a very crucial band. They heavily influenced that next wave of New York hardcore bands like the Cro-Mags, and Agnostic Front to name just a few. All of those bands were massive fans of Bad Brains. So I feel honored to get to paint a mural to represent that era.Matthew A. Eller: I know that skateboarding culture and Punk Rock has been a huge influence on your work. For this new Bad Brains mural you used Glen E. Friedman’s Bad Brains photos as we just discussed a bit, and he got his start as a photographer for Thrasher and later captured every punk band and hip-hop artist you can imagine. Can you talk a bit about this fusion of skateboarding culture and your art?Shepard Fairey: I grew up in South Carolina and skateboarding was my gateway to creatively as well as my social life. Skateboarding was rebellious, it was creative, just like street art. Street art was re-enacting things on landscapes that weren’t supposed to be written on. But punk was just as in your face if not even more outspoken. It was political and I became very interested in it especially later when I started doing my street work, I was massively influenced to say the least. I already at this point in my life was skateboarding, making t-shirts, stickers, skate zines, and putting up flyers with glue. So I thought, well I wanna do work on the street… but I want to do it with techniques that I already have been using and refining. So pasting up posters seemed to fit the best.Matthew A. Eller: There also seems to be a common thread between the two because skateboarding and street art both involve objects that you need to destroy to create something new. More

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    in Exhibitions

    The Turner Prize Exhibition Promises to Tell Us Something About the Art of Our Time. In 2023, It’s Complicated

    The annual exhibition of artists nominated for the Turner Prize has opened at the Towner in Eastbourne, a coastal town south of London. The museum’s galleries are each filled by an installation of recent works by one of four selected artists—Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim, and Barbara Walker—putting their best work forward in hopes of winning the coveted accolade.
    Each presentation strikes its own distinctive tone to address our present moment, but Darling’s is the clear standout.
    The Turner Prize is one of the most prestigious prizes for contemporary art and the winner will receive £25,000 ($30,425) with £10,000 ($12,170) awarded to each runner up. The prize was established in 1984 and past winners include Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lubaina Himid. Veronica Ryan won the prize last year.
    This year’s winner will be announced on December 5 at a ceremony at the Winter Garden in Eastbourne.
    Barbara Walker at Turner Prize 2023, installation view. Photo: Angus Mill, courtesy of Towner Eastbourne.
    Barbara Walker makes the strongest initial impact upon arrival to her gallery on the top floor. A huge mural stretching across the opposing wall brings the visitor face to face with people affected by the Windrush scandal, which saw thousands of people who had arrived to Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1973 wrongly classified as illegal immigrants. The portraits’ mammoth size belies their intimate sensitivity, and this same affection for her subjects is evident in “Burden of Proof,” a series of smaller works on paper, for which Walker overlays these images with drawings of the documents that each individual used to prove they had settled legally. In one case, this is a certificate issued by the U.K.’s Home Office in 1979.
    An almost feature length film at just over one hour, RAFTS is Rory Pilgrim’s chief contribution, although colorful drawings filled with childlike fantasies adorn the surrounding walls. A multi-part oratio, the video was made during the pandemic and features a mix of songs, dances, and rambling monologues by residents of London’s Barking and Dagenham borough. Their reflections on the small acts of creativity and community that have rescued them from “dark places” is sweet and, thanks to its harmonies, oddly transfixing. However, peppered with statements like “some days we just have to create our own sunshine” and “my raft has always been my dreams,” the work never pushes past its slightly tedious sentimentality.
    Jesse Darling at Turner Prize 2023, installation view. Photo: Angus Mill, courtesy of Towner Eastbourne.
    If Pilgrim’s overly earnest film revises the overall mood of 2020, focusing on the moments when some believed the pandemic might produce some kind of cultural reset, the wry and rickety installation by Jesse Darling feels like a more realistic wakeup call. Responding to its location, the work plays with stereotypes of a British coastal town in a decades-long decline with union jack flags made of tea towels flying over jaunty assemblages of metal barriers, red striped tape, lace doilies, and fragmented porcelain dolls that all look on the verge of falling to pieces.
    Highlights include The Big Dipper (2023), rollercoaster rails from a funfair that crash energetically through the wall before dipping, breaking, and collapsing on the floor, and Epistemologies (2022), in which the hefty paper binders so symbolic of bureaucracy are stuffed with thick blocks of concrete. Without ever being too heavy-handed, these witty works speak to a society that has moved on from lonely lockdowns to face inflation, rising energy costs, and the fallout from Brexit.
    Ghislaine Leung at Turner Prize 2023, installation view. Photo: Angus Mill, courtesy of Towner Eastbourne.
    By far the most impenetrable of the artworks on display are those by Ghislaine Leung, which easily stump even a seasoned art journalist. Her “scores,” or written instructions, dictate how the found objects included should be displayed; in this case, a group of children’s toys were to be lined up along one wall, a makeshift fountain installed in the opposite corner and, cutting across the room, are the metal ventilation pipes once used to vanquish cigarette smoke. In spite of the instructions, these conceptual pieces manage to communicate very little, and could be mistaken for a random arrangement of items salvaged from a junk yard.
    Each year, the Turner Prize is hosted by a different institution in the U.K. Towner Eastbourne in East Sussex is a gallery for contemporary art that is currently celebrating its centenary year. The Turner Prize 2023 exhibition runs through April 14, 2024.
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    in Exhibitions

    New Red Order Built a Fake World’s Fair in Queens to Make a Very Real Demand: Give Back All Native Stolen Lands Now

    Queens, New York has hosted the World’s Fair twice: once in 1939, and then again in 1964. Now the borough is home to something else: “The World’s UnFair,” a feverish carnival of attractions that evoke the look of those old 20th-century expos—but not their nationalistic aims. New Red Order, the group of Native artists behind the public art project, has an altogether different agenda in mind: the return of all Indigenous land.  
    The Creative Time-presented exhibition opened this month in a raw, half-block lot that is owned by a developer, but not yet developed. In theory, that sense of provisionality teases the possibility that the site could be restituted. For now, it feels like it’s been hijacked. Wheatpaste posters styled like men’s magazine ads tote “rematriation services” on the lot’s walls. So do sandwich boards inside. Tribal flags are staked in Home Depot buckets and strung like banners at a car lot. A film, pitched like a corporate commercial, reminds us to “Never Settle.” It plays inside a sculpture that is half cheval de frise, half white picket fence, while an animatronic beaver and tree chat about settler colonialism nearby. 
    This is a body of work that is not afraid to hit you over the head with what it has to say, even if that means mocking pockets of its audience along the way. But the cumulative effect is powerful. It’s the most essential show in New York right now. 
    New Red Order, Dexter and Sinister (2023). Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
    New Red Order defines itself as a “public secret society composed of networks of informants and accomplices dedicated to rechanneling desires for indigeneity towards the expansion of Indigenous futures.” If that description sounds elaborate, it’s because it was designed that way. “We don’t want to be contained to just being an art collective,” New Red Order said in a recent interview. (The three founding founders interviewed for this article—Adam and Zack Khalil, both of the Ojibway, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Jackson Polys, of Tlingit heritage—prefer to be identified under the collective banner of the group.)  
    The language of the mission statement is also coded with New Red Order’s argot. By “informants,” it means people who share knowledge of their own communities and cultures. “Accomplices” are those who support informants. The shadowy tone of it all echoes, with knowing irony, the group’s namesake, a 19th-century white fraternity called the “Improved Order of Red Men.” (The organization, which once counted Presidents Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt as members, often used Native designs and rituals.) 
    But not all of New Red Order’s messaging is that complicated. The group’s central refrain—and the title of its main, ongoing body of work—leaves little room for misinterpretation: “Give it back.” It is both a provocation and a demand: Give back all land to the peoples who were forcibly displaced from it by colonialists. Give it back now.  
    Installation view of “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair,” September 15 October 15, 2023. Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
    Throughout “The World’s UnFair,” you’ll find variations of that message presented through the visual language of agitprop, infographics, recruitment videos, real estate placards, and other pieces of media that, in their ordinary states, are used to sell the idea of a better life. Many of these works also feature the same recurring character, played by veteran actor—and frequent New Red Order collaborator—Jim Fletcher. He is the apparent ringmaster of this weird pageant, but also something of a mascot. The group first met the white actor after he donned Native American garb in a 2014 stage Wooster Group play called “CRY, TROJANS!” The incident stoked backlash among Native communities. 
    Regretful of the decision, Fletcher—who now identifies as an “accomplice” and a “Native American impersonator”—has since given himself over to a number of New Red Order projects. For a 2017 Artists Space performance conceived by the group, he stripped naked, put on a department store “Indian” costume, and apologized for his role in “CRY, TROJANS!” Even when the joke is on him, Fletcher, to his credit, is game. 
    “It’s Jim Fletcher playing Jim Fletcher,” New Red Order said of the layers to the actor’s performance in “The World’s UnFair,” referring to him as a proxy. “If we say ‘Give it Back,’ I worry that it gets dismissed by many people. But if a successful middle-aged non-Native performance artist says it, maybe it has a chance of making it out of the echo chamber.” 
    Installation view of “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair,” September 15 October 15, 2023. Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
    With its puppets and punny riffs of self-help speak and jingoistic lingo, “The World’s UnFair” is very funny (one banner reads “Mission Accomplice,” referencing the infamous George W. Bush proclamation). The tone is a welcome twist on the solemnity that typically categorizes projects about indigeneity or repatriation, though it has its risks as well.  
    “At times, humor has been a roadblock for some people to engage, because they don’t want to be made fun of,” said the group. “We find it’s a necessary way to engage, to crack open really uncomfortable conversations in ways that don’t lead to the expected places, to keep people on their toes… so they can’t easily categorize it in ways that they already understand.” 
    But in putting together “The World’s UnFair,” New Red Order’s members also found themselves drawn to an earnestness that hasn’t always been present in their past work. Playing on several screens throughout the show are examples from their ongoing Give It Back series of documentary-style films highlighting people who have voluntarily repatriated land to Indigenous communities, tribes, or non-profits. Surrounded by works barbed with wit, these clips have a refreshing sincerity. 
    “We found a need to [lean] a little bit more toward sincerity and transparency,” New Red Order explained. “That way, the real, powerful actions that real people are taking to address settler colonialization and the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land isn’t disregarded as a fantasy or as a joke, but seen as something real.” 
    “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair” is on view now through October 15, 2023 at 24-17 Jackson Ave. in Long Island City, Queens.
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    in Exhibitions

    A New Show at MCA Denver Reins in the Myth of the Cowboy With Works by John Baldessari, Amy Sherald, and More

    Hold onto your cowboy hats. This is no ordinary Western art show.
    The simply titled “Cowboy” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on September 29 and it’s sure to garner major attention in the Western U.S. and beyond.
    The show, organized by curators Nora Burnett Abrams and Miranda Lash, takes aim at the mythic figure, which they describe as “one of the most fraught and persistent figures in contemporary American culture.” The show raises questions such as how the myth of the cowboy exists today and how this archetype of masculinity shaped how we think about gender now. It further delves into cowboys’ relationship to the land through a series of broad perspectives and aims to debunk the homogenous concept of the cowboy as a white male.
    Karl Haendel, Rodeo 11 (2023). Image courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles, Mitchell- Innes & Nash, New York, and Wentrup Gallery, Berlin
    “There is no mythic figure who is more grand and complicated than the cowboy,” said Burnett Abrams in a phone interview. Originally, she said, she was looking into the history of the Black cowboy, but over the course of years of conversations, the concept was broadened.
    “We approached it from all angles,” said Lash, including very much from the side of satire and critique, but also from the perspective of “homage,” with artists incorporating the stories of their own family members. “The stories range from the deconstructive impulse to the very personal. Cowboys are just so much more diverse than what gets depicted in the mainstream media.”
    While the show starts with some classic blue-chip names and works like a John Baldessari (The Space Between Hat Rock and Shadow), Richard Prince’s famous Marlboro Man photo, and Andy Warhol’s film of a horse, it quickly delves into the contemporary and ultra-contemporary realm with 27 artists spanning 70 works.
    Stephanie Syjuco, Set Up (The Broncho Buster 2) (2022). Image courtesy the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; RYAN LEE Gallery, NewYork; and Silverlens, Manila.
    Take for instance Stephanie Syjuco’s photographs of Frederic Remington’s famous bronze sculptures of bucking broncos in the Amon Carter collection that depict them being measured with tape and alluding to the popularity of—and poking fun at—the sculptures and replicas on CEO desks across the country as symbols of bravura. “She jokes about how it’s such a popular bronze on the desks of corporate executives because it connects so deeply with this idea of the rugged individual, the entrepreneur, the man who sets his own terms,” said Lash.
    The two curators said the tagline for the show could be: “This is not your grandfather’s Remington.”
    Another topic that the show tackles is the “very problematic binary of the cowboy versus Indian, which is just an invention,” said Burnett Abrams.
    Grace Kennison, I Remember Being Alone (2023). Image courtesy the artist.
    One of the artists included in the show is Oklahoma native Nathan Young, whose art delves into his family history with parents who are of the Pawnee and Delaware Tribe. The multi-disciplinary artist delves into Pawnee rodeo culture in this series of work in the show.
    And four contemporary artists, including Rafa Esparza, Young, and Colorado-based artists R. Alan Brooks and Gregg Deal were commissioned to make work for the show.
    “There are those who are Native American or are of Native American descent who actively participate in cowboy culture,” said Lash. “There is not that distinction or binary.”
    Burnett Abrams said: “Our ambition is to expand the story and I think that for those who are ready to be a part of that, it’s going to be amazing.”
    “Cowboy” is on view at MCA Denver, 1485 Delgany Street, Denver, through February 18, 2024.

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    in Exhibitions

    A Show at the Louvre’s Satellite Space Brings Together Artistic Depictions of Mythical Creatures, From Lion-Headed Eagles to Unicorns. See Them Here

    When the animal kingdom met the artistic imagination, the result was a whole zoo full of fantastical creatures from dragons to unicorns, phoenixes to sphinxes. These strange mythological beasts haven usually taken on symbolic significance, and reappeared time and again in art made by different cultures across time, as shown by an ambitious new survey of more than 250 objects opening this fall at the Louvre-Lens.
    This wide-ranging, whistle-stop tour starts off in the Bronze Age. The oldest surviving fragments of cave art are proof enough that humans have long been driven to depict the wonders of the natural world, but it wasn’t long before we started taking a bit of creative license. One of the show’s earliest exhibits, a Mesopotamian seal cylinder that dates back to 3300–3000 B.C.E., features a lion-headed eagle.
    As pagan beliefs died out in favor of modern religion, biblical tales still kept audiences in awe by having their brave saints slay the same dragons that had once been popularized by ancient Greek mythology. Majestic, make-believe beasts were not always our adversaries, however, but often had magical powers of healing or protection.
    The exhibition won’t leave visitors in the dark ages, but instead goes on to explore how mythological creatures have continued to enthrall new audiences. It turns out that the wild visions of Romantic artists like Henry Fuseli and the Pre-Raphelite painter Edward Burne-Jones have plenty in common with the science fiction and comic books that are so popular today.
    “Fantastic Animals” is on view at Louvre-Lens, 99 Rue Paul Bert, 62300 Lens, France, from September 27, 2023 through January 15, 2024.
    Preview artworks from the exhibition below.
    Jean Gargot, Big Ghoul (1677). Photo: Christian Vignaud, © Musée de Poitiers.
    Nicolas Buffe, Peau de Licorne (2011) Photo: © Cité internationale de la tapisserie, Aubusson, © Nicolas Buffe.
    Jean-Auguste-Dominqiue Ingres, Roger freeing Angelica (1819). Photo: Franck Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre).
    Figurine of the demon Pazuzu (911-604 B.C.E.). Photo: Thierry Olivier, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
    Will Cotton, Roping (2019–20). Photo courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris-Bruxelles-New York, © Will Cotton © ADAGP, Paris 2023.
    Henry Fuseli, Thor fighting the serpent of Midgard (1790). Photo: © akg-images, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
    Molding of a relief depicting a mythological scene, (c. 1200-1100 B.C.E.). Photo: Raphaël Chipault, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
    Paolo Uccello, Saint George Fighting the Dragon (c. 1440). Photo: Agence Bulloz, © RMN-Grand Palais.
    Thomas Grünfeld, Misfit (flamingo-pig) (2005). Photo: © Galerie Jousse Lothar Schnepf © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
    Gustave Moreau, The traveler or Oedipus the traveler (1888). Photo: René-Gabriel Ojeda, © RMN Grand Palais.
    Walter Andrea, Dragon-serpent on Ishtar Gate (1902). Photo: Andres Kilger, © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
    Cylinder seal depicting lions and an eagle (3300-3000 BEC). Photo: Franck Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre).
    Edward Burne-Jones, The Doom Fulfilled (1884-1885). Photo: Paul Carter – Bridgeman Images, © Southampton City Art Gallery.
    An acquamanile (vessel). Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre).
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    in Exhibitions

    See Kehinde Wiley’s New Suite of Presidential Portraits That Depict African Heads of State With an Ornate ‘Vocabulary of Power’

    A new series of presidential portraits by Kehinde Wiley just went on view in Paris—but you won’t find Barack Obama’s face among them. On view, instead, are ornate paintings of Macky Sall, Nana Akufo-Addo, and other African heads of state. 
    These make up Wiley’s “A Maze of Power” series, which the artist has quietly been working on since 2012—years before he was tapped by President Obama. The new artworks are, in Wiley’s words, an effort to look at the African presidencies through the lens of Western European art history. 
    “What happens when we use the language of aesthetic domination in the context of Africa in the 21st century?” the artist said in a short film he made to accompany the project. “Is it possible to use the language of empire, as it related to painting, in an African context, and arrive on the other side with something completely new? This body of work supposes that there is.” 

    [embedded content]

    The portraits debuted today in a Galerie Templon-sponsored exhibition at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Among those depicted in the show are Olusegun Obasanjo, the former President of Nigeria; Hery Rajaonarimampianina, the former leader of Madagascar; and Félix Tshisekedi, the current President of Democratic Republic of Congo.  
    Wiley, who initially set out to paint all 54 African presidents, visited each of his subjects on their own turf, in sites of their choosing. He brought with him a book of aristocratic, noble, and military portraits from the 17th to 19th centuries, introducing what he called a “vocabulary of power that each one of the presidents could choose to work with, or choose to ignore.” 
    Installation view of “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” at The Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, 2023. Photo: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images.
    The “Maze of Power” referred to in the show’s title is one that exists between Wiley and his subjects, the artist explained. “‘The Maze of Power’ is the maze that’s being run by me the artist, but also by the sitter—the sitter deciding how they want to be seen, me responding to their set of decisions,” Wiley said in his film. “Each one of us are responding to a received history of image-making, power, and the ways in which art function within that dynamic.” 
    Portrait of Denis Sassou Nguesso, President of the Congo’s Republic (2023) on view at “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” at The Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, 2023. Photo: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images.
    In producing his series, Wiley made a point not to talk politics, just pictures. The series, he explained, is not a “celebration of individual leaders,” but a “look at the presidency itself.”  
    “The very act of creating a set of portraits in Europe, and now using that language in Africa, creates an… interesting provocation,” the artist went on. “This is an invitation for the viewer to expand the possibilities of what it means to look at art in Africa, about Africa, and about power.” 
    “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 37 Quai Jacques Chirac, Paris, France, through January 14, 2024.

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    in Street Art

    “ALL OF US!” by Saype in Geneve, Switzerland

    Handicap International has invited Saype to take part in an unusual artistic operation. The artist created a giant fresco on the Place des Nations using biodegradable paint, in dialogue with Broken Chair’s fight against explosive weapons, entitled “ALL OF US!”A giant eco responsible landart painting by Saype in Place des Nations in Geneva (CH). This artwork was created using natural pigments made out of charcoal and chalk. This artwork represents a hand, symbol of humanity, presenting a new chair leg to the Broken Chair, figure of the numerous civils victims of war bombings.In each of his works, Saype captures the fragility of our societies and the challenges we are all called upon to meet, with the monumental frescoes he creates on grass, earth, sand and snow around the world: New York, Paris, Venice, Geneva, Cape Town, Turin, Dubai, Nairobi, Istanbul, Ouagadougou, Miami, (…)The aim of these frescoes, which are destined to fade away, is to impact mentalities in a way that respects nature. They are painted with an eco-responsible paint composed essentially of chalk and charcoal.Check out below from more photos of Saype’s recent piece. Photo credits: Saype More

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    What I’m Looking at: Michael Rakowitz Makes a Meta-Monument, the Debate Over ‘Art Without Men,’ and Other Things at the Edge of Art

    “What I’m Looking at” is a monthly column where I digest art worth seeing, writings worth reading, and other tidbits. Below, thoughts from the end of August and the beginning of September.
    Tower of Power
    The favorite thing I’ve seen recently is this sculpture by Matjames Metson, shown solo in a back room at George Adams Gallery in New York (on view through October 28). A Tower (2023) is a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall garage-art labor of love, made over the course of 14 years. It has a funk-and-junk aesthetic, but with a flair all its own, bringing a Joseph Cornell-esque interest in antique photographs and psychically charged bric-a-brac to the alter-like object.
    It’s full of scrappy flourishes: little pocket knives displayed in tiny windows, details made of pearl buttons, rows of sharpened pencils that resemble Gothic ornament, collaged bits of old love letters salvaged from estate sales. A Tower seems to be a structure almost literally built out of memories of a world of tactile creativity. It’s just very fun to spend time circling it, looking for all the little secrets Metson has nested within all its crannies and compartments.
    Matjames Metson, A Tower (2023) at George Adams Gallery. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Matjames Metson, A Tower [detail] (2023) at George Adams Gallery. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Catching up to Kené
    I only know about Sara Flores’s abstractions what I read in the gallery material for her show, “Soi Biri,” at Clearing (on view through October 22): that the artist hails from the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon; that the artworks draw on kené, a visual language of intricate, all-over, maze-like designs; that the vibrating patterns connect symbolically to the characteristic hallucinations seen in an ayahuasca ceremony; that the finished paintings are meant to have healing properties; that their medium, “vegetal pigments on wild cotton,” also suggests a closeness to nature.
    The backstory is important, though I think that if you look at Flores’s artworks, you do feel immediately that they are more than just patterns. The works I like best at Clearing are those like Untitled (Shao Maya Punté Tañan Kené 1, 2023) (2023), where the individual areas have the most differentiation, while still maintaining the impression of a total repeating whole. In general, their effect lies in a first perception of a rigorously harmonious overall order that, upon closer examination, reveals itself to be constructed using a grammar of individual marks that do not repeat. That particular balance does feel like it naturally reflects a particular intuition about the cosmic order.
    Sara Flores, Untitled (Shao Maya Punté Tañan Kené 1, 2023 (2023) at Clearing. Photo by Ben Davis.

    A Monument to the “Monument Conversation”
    At Jane Lombard, Michael Rakowitz’s Frankenstein’s Monster of a sculpture, American Golem, is a gawky anthropomorphic assemblage formed of fragments of other sculptures, models, maquettes, and artifacts all related to public artworks. On each element, Rakowitz has scrawled some graffiti, noting facts about the various public artworks, their materials’ origins, and the debates they are caught up in. As a whole, it’s a memorial of the heated debates over what gets celebrated in public, turbo-charged by the big protests of 2020.
    You might do a reading of American Golem where the didactic, late-conceptual graffiti elements aren’t just commentary on the past but also one more layer in a critical history of how monuments express power in the United States. The “monument conversation,” after all, has been both a needed reckoning with history and a way for liberal metropolises to deflect attention away from more intractable issues and into conciliatory public art commissions.
    Maybe that’s me reading against the grain of Rakowitz’s interests—although the accompanying sculpture Behemoth, a black tarp that ceaselessly inflates into a monument-sized mass and then deflates, does convey a low-key ominous sense of a conversation stuck in a loop.
    Michael Rakowitz, American Golem (2023) at Jane Lombard. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Michael Rakowitz, American Golem (2023) at Jane Lombard. Photo by Ben Davis.

    Cinema of Forgetting
    I just missed writing about Let’s Talk at Brooklyn’s experimental art hangout Kaje before it closed—but it’s still worth remarking on because Simon Liu is one to watch.
    His fragmentary images may feel a bit hard to orient yourself within. It helps to know the project Liu has been working on in previous works: to capture, via a kind of memory-collage effect, how images of Hong Kong are remembered, forgotten, and change meaning as the actual texture of the city itself shifts in the wake of the recent political crackdown. If you keep that framework in mind, the unmoored quality of Let’s Talk‘s floating fragments becomes more and more poignant.
    One thing about Liu’s work that rewards your attention is how the multiple video channels of his installations repeat the same images across different surfaces—but also diverge at moments. Suddenly, if you’re paying attention, one channel seems to be leading the other, or an alternative version of a scene starts playing out, sometimes almost without you realizing it. That’s another way that Let’s Talk feels like being inside the mental process of trying to reconcile multiple images from the past into one thought, even as its meaning slips away.
    Simon Liu, Let’s Talk (2023) at Kaje. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Simon Liu, Let’s Talk (2023) at Kaje. Photo by Ben Davis.

    Peak Pike
    I can’t get these raw wooden sculptures by Shana Hoehn at Jack Barrett Gallery out of my head (they are on view in a two-person show called “To Look is to Eat,” alongside Yan Xinyue, through October 21). Honestly, how great is Pike II (2023), this image of a folded woman’s body draped impossibly across a swan’s neck like a scarf? This kind of folk-surrealist carpentry vibe is just very fun to watch an artist play around with.
    Shana Hoehn, Pike II (2023) at Jack Barrett. Photo by Ben Davis.

    The Story of Art Without Men Lacks More Than Just Men
    Worth clicking into: critic Jillian Steinhauer’s balanced but sharply deflating review of Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men from The New Republic. Steinhauer finds a certain impressionistic quality to the facts within Hessel’s much-touted counter-history. She also points out that the origin story for Hessel’s entire Instagram-account-turned-podcast-turned-book—a visit to a 2015 Frieze Masters where Hessel says she was stunned to realize that “not a single [artwork] was by a woman” turns out to have a certain exaggerated-for-effect, Hassan Minhaj quality to it (Louise Bourgeois, Carmen Herrera, and Bridget Riley were all big sellers that year).
    But really, Steinhauer is using the reception of The Story of Art Without Men to get at something bigger: the relationship—or non-relationship—of pop feminist art history to the robust, complex, critical, decades-long legacy of serious feminist art history, and the question of how much is being lost in the meme-ificiation of its insights. (Who can forget the high-end “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” fashion line of a few years ago?) Steinhauer argues that the way that Hessel treats artists’ stories, through a lens “tinged with the boosterism of girlboss feminism,” means that they all start to sound the same, even as consequential differences among women go untalked-about. And basically, she just thinks we should demand more, after a half century of feminist scholarship, than this.
    Katy Hessel attends the Mango Loves London celebration of the new London flagship store on November 11, 2021 in London, England. (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Mango)

    The “Painting, Painting, Painting” Moment
    If I told you I went to the Armory Show earlier this month, looked around, and mainly thought “wow, that’s a lot of painting!”… well, I would only be repeating exactly what Jerry Saltz said earlier this year about Frieze New York. The fact that we’re stuck with this thought is part of this problem, but it’s true. If you walk around all the galleries right now, what you will see overwhelmingly is painting, painting, and more painting—and mainly mid-sized, colorful paintings.
    You can say that there’s always been lots of painting. Painting is the ur-gallery art. True—but the present state of affairs is kind of analogous to how, for a long period, people were complaining about how Hollywood was putting out so many sequels and superhero films—and then suddenly there was a moment where it really was like, wow, everything really is a sequel or a superhero movie, and anything riskier than that does feel like it’s shriveling away.
    Don’t get me wrong, I like painting. Painters are cool. Every time I go out, I see painting I like. But art’s an ecosystem, and ecosystems need species diversity.
    What does it mean? My guess is that it represents a flight to the safety of the easiest sales pitch: art as investment-grade décor. Given the deep economic queasiness behind the scenes in the art world right now, that is how I am interpreting the “painting, painting, painting” moment, rather than as a real renaissance of contemporary painting. It’s an odd effect—all this genial, colorful painting expressing all that nervousness underneath.
    Luce Gallery at the 2023 Armory Show VIP Preview at Javits Center on September 07, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

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