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    ‘I Don’t Want Them to Replicate My Work’: Marina Abramović’s First Show After a Brush With Death Tests the Afterlife of Her Performance Art

    Proximity to death is nothing new for Marina Abramović. But never was it closer than three months ago, when the 76-year-old performance artist had a pulmonary embolism, and almost died.  
    The Royal Academy’s long-awaited Abramović blockbuster this fall surveys a 55-year career that has repeatedly played out her greatest fears—pain, death, isolation, and humiliation among them—in front of the public through feats of endurance. She has set herself on fire, swapped places for a night with a prostitute in Amsterdam, and walked the length of the Great Wall of China. 
    Speaking at the inauguration of the exhibition, the Serbian artist recalled the aftermath of her health scare earlier this year, which included three operations and ten transfusions. “I was in unbelievable pain, they said it was a miracle I survived,” she told attendees to the press conference, crediting her persistence to the application of her practice. “I used every single knowledge and experience I had doing my difficult performances: breathing, dealing with pain, working with consciousness.” 
    The experience has left her too weak to perform any of her work herself, presenting the true test of the exhibition (on view through January 1), which is essentially an experiment in the afterlife of her performance art. Abramović was a pioneer of the medium and key to bringing the ephemeral art form into the mainstream, and it is clear that she also wants to be active in considering how her legacy and work will live on without her.
    Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0 (1974). Performance; 6 hours. Studio Morra, Naples. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović. Photo: Donatelli Sbarra.
    The show experiments with different ways to chronicle her many performances, through which she has repeatedly tested her own limits, as well as the limits of her audience, in a quest for insight into the nature of being. “We are so afraid of pain. I don’t like pain, but I think that pain is such an important element in human life,” she said. “Suffering is like a kind of gate in order to understand the universe, in order to understand yourself.” 
    Her historic works are shown variously through archival footage, photographic documentation, and installation, as well as the re-performance of a selection of work by performers trained in “the Marina Abramović method” by her eponymous institution in New York.  
    Several static installations are successful at evoking a sense of the original work. A long table installed at the end of one gallery is laid out with 72 objects relating to pain and pleasure, including a rose, scissors, feathers, a bullet, and a gun. It memorializes a harrowing 1974 performance in Naples during which she stood motionless in the gallery for six hours, inviting the public to use the objects on her “as desired,” to see what they would do with the freedom, and just how much she could withstand. What started out as playful interaction soon turned traumatic as her clothes were cut, her body brutalized, and the gun loaded and held to her neck. A slideshow of still images from the performance archives the event in spine-tingling horror. 
    Marina Abramović, Balkan Baroque, June 1997. Performance at XLVIII Venice Biennale; 4 days. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović
    But not all of the archival works included prompted the same reaction. Less successful was the evocation of her 1997, Golden Lion-winning performance at the Venice Biennale, where she sat for days on piles of bloody cow bones trying to scrub them clean, in a statement on the ethnic conflict in her native country, the former Yugoslavia and the Sisyphean task of trying to wash it away. The neat pile of bones in the heavily air-conditioned room did little justice to the grueling performance, which has since become symbolic of horrors of war everywhere. 
    Other failed attempts at capturing the life of her performances include alabaster slabs immortalizing The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas (a cynic might even suggest that these works were more about creating a commercial object than about legacy carving). New age experiments with crystal energy, including a portal of rose quartz, from 2022, feel at best like an Instagram trap and at worst like filler.
    Notably absent from the exhibition was the dead-eyed VR Marina who stared at the viewer through a headset, which she showed at the Serpentine in 2019, a poor extension of her famous 2010 MoMA performance, The Artist is Present, for which she sat motionless in a chair for six hours a day for three months, inviting members of the public to sit opposite her. Instead, that famous performance is captured in a video installation where, on one side of the room, videos of Abramović’s mostly stoic expressions face off with videos of the public, including some famous faces, like Kim Catrall and Antony Gormley. The documentation, showing humans responding to each other and emoting, was a much more moving extension of this work.  
    Gallery view of the Marina Abramović exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 23 September 2023 – 1 January 2024, showing Imponderabilia (1977/2023). Live performance by Agata Flaminika and Kam Wan, 60 minutes. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry
    There is clearly the most potential in the live re-performances, although they carry with them the risk of dilution of the original work, whether that is through bad casting or the limits imposed by health and safety rules. 
    Imponderabilia, a joint work made during her 12-year partnership with the late artist Ulay, where visitors squeeze through a doorway formed by a naked man and a woman, was faithfully re-staged due to a request from Ulay’s estate. Others lived somewhere between that and an homage to the original piece; Nude with Skeleton is performed on top of a video box playing the original performance, for example. 
    “I don’t want them to replicate my work,” she said of the re-performances. “The source has to be mentioned, but the interpretation is personal. You have to have your own experience as an artist, your own stamina, your charisma, and also add some new elements of your own.” 
    She stressed that the acts must be emancipatory for the performer—“you share the pain with others and you’re free,” she noted—as well as inspirational to the viewer. “I’m your mirror,” she said. “If I can do this, you can do it too in your own life.”  
    Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View (2002). Performance; 12 days. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives © Marina Abramović. Photo: Attilio Maranzano
    In the same gallery, a three-room house has been constructed, which will be the setting for a re-performance of The House With the Ocean View; for the moment, it contained a video projection of Abramović’s original performance at Sean Kelly gallery in New York in 2002, during which she lived in the construction for 12 days without food, speaking, and only drinking water.
    It is a work that is clearly extremely dear to her. “This performance really actually changed the state of my consciousness,” she noted. “Long performance leads to real transformation. You can’t pretend, you can’t act, you are your true self and you’re vulnerable, and that vulnerability is how you make a true connection with the public.”
    And while the other pieces are performed by a rotating cast of 42 people, Abramović found only three performers she could trust with this work. Performances begin in October.
    Abramović herself is still recovering from her brush with death, but has kept the question open on whether she will perform when she feels better. If she does anything, she said, it will be working with public in the courtyard, rather than in the museum, and it will mark a new phase of her practice, as getting so close to death has changed her outlook. “I’m actually worried, because I’m happy. So how am I going to work now with happiness? This is a completely new thing for me. My work is so tragic,” she said. “Now it’s going to be fun.” 
     “Marina Abramović” is on view from September 23, 2023 to January 1, 2024 at the Royal Academy in London.

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    Bwo Gallery Has Opened in Cameroon, Filling a Gap in the Contemporary Art Scene of Central Africa

    On September 2, on a lively street in Bonapriso, an upscale neighborhood of Douala, Cameroon, an eager crowd gathered outside Bwo Art Gallery. The stylish throng had come to see the gallery’s inaugural show—by Cameroonian artist Sesse Elangwe—and Central Africa’s newest platform for contemporary art.
    The enthusiasm was just as palpable inside, where artists and collectors perused Elangwe’s richly detailed portraits of Cameroonians in outdoor spaces. There is an underlying sense of determination in the works. The show’s title, “The Defiant Ones,” refers to overcoming challenges the country faces, among them an armed conflict in the Anglophone regions that has raged since 2016.
    Installation view of artist Sesse Elangwe’s “The Defiant Ones” exhibition. Courtesy of Bwo Art Gallery.
    “If people can begin to do things in ways different from the structures that have been put in place in Cameroon and all over the African continent,” Elangwe said at the opening, “maybe change will come.” His paintings of people with one eye bigger than the other are intended as a metaphorical representation of strength and awareness. “We must always keep an eye open to visualize what we want to achieve,” he said.
    With 1,079 square feet and a ceiling height of 16 feet, Bwo Gallery is a point of pride for Douala, the largest city in Cameroon with over 5 million inhabitants, but where precious few exhibition spaces exist. There are only a handful of galleries and, besides the National Museum in the capital of Yaoundé, which sporadically hosts contemporary art exhibitions, there are no contemporary or modern art museums in the country that receive government support.
    Sesse Elangwe, The Allegory of Knowledge (2023). Courtesy of Bwo Art Gallery.
    Bwo was founded by young entrepreneurs and friends Brice Yonkeu and Noelle Mukete-Elhalaby with the aim of showcasing talent from Cameroon as well as the rest of the African continent and diaspora. The gallery’s name, explained Yonkeu, is derived from Medumba, a language widely spoken by the Bangangté people in the Grassfields region of Cameroon. The word ‘bwo’ means ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful,’ and it can also refer to fine art.
    “We were very inspired by the growth of art scenes in other African countries like Ghana,” Yonkeu said, “with the rapid rise of its art scene, multiplying the number of artists in the country. Opening Bwo felt like the next step for us. We also wanted to choose a space where we could make a difference through art and Cameroon felt special. We felt it would be a great way for people to connect to the country through art.”
    Three years ago, they launched the precursor to the Douala space: Bwo Art, an artist management and art advisory based in Atlanta, Georgia. Through their consultancy work there, they have placed over 150 artworks in private collections across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, and supported numerous exhibitions for their artists, who largely hail from the African continent.
    Installation view of artist Sesse Elangwe’s “The Defiant Ones” exhibition. Courtesy of Bwo Art Gallery.
    But the pair had always wanted to foster Cameroonian art from within Cameroon. “We wanted to provide an opportunity to engage with our own national past and contemporary heritage that is lacking on the ground, depriving local populations a part of their identity,” offered Mukete-Elhalaby at the opening. Ultimately, she said, “we want Bwo to go beyond the idea of a white cube art space, to provide inspiration for young and established creatives, and offer them a way to grow their career at home and abroad.”
    Both Yonkeu and Mukete-Elhalaby grew up in Cameroon but studied and worked abroad, Mukete-Elhalaby in the United States and Yonkeu in France. With their new space, they hope to add a contemporary component to Central Africa’s existing talent, artists such as Pascale Marthine Tayou, Hervé Youmbi, Maurice Pefura, Samuel Fosso, Bili Bidjocka, and Barthélémy Toguo, who’s planning to open an art museum in Yaoundé.
    “The art scene in Cameroon is vibrant,” said the art writer and curator Simon Njami, telling Artnet News that he continues to visit twice a year and will take part in the SUZA Manifest biennale in 2024, organized by Douala-based Galerie MAM. “There are a lot of initiatives, collectives, and individuals trying to make a change among the youth,” he added. “I have been conducting numerous workshops these past years with artists, curators, and writers under 30 and I was impressed by their determination to exist.” Moreover, he stressed, it doesn’t stop at art. “Musicians like Blick Bassy and intellectuals like Achille Mbembe are increasingly invested in the artistic and intellectual development of the country.”
    Yonkeu said that, despite seeing how contemporary African art has flourished, African artists are “still a bit in the shadows,” adding, “The global understanding and perception of contemporary artistic production from this region doesn’t adequately represent the diversity, in terms of practices and discourses. Presently, the narrative is still not in our control but I am confident that with the emergence of more galleries on the continent, the recognition of more African curators and writers, we could occupy the full spotlight, permanently.”
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    The 1930s Have Been Viewed as a Time of Simple-Minded Art. ‘Art for the Millions’ Shows Just How Dazzlingly Complex It Was

    Does it sound weird to say that “Art for the Millions: American Art in the 1930s” at the Metropolitan Museum is a delightful show? The 1930s are synonymous with hardship. Its art, until quite recently, was generally considered dowdy, unsophisticated.
    But this exhibition, curated by Allison Rudnick, is artfully assembled and thought-provoking. It’s a useful new chapter in the wider revaluation of the ‘30s in art in the United States.
    The good and the bad of what the 1930s represent is right there in the title of the show: “Art for the Millions.” Artistic populism is the thousand-foot-up view of what the ‘30s stood for in culture. Several generations of post-war U.S. taste-makers defined themselves against this heritage of the 1930s, as they tried to make room within the U.S.’s typically utilitarian and mass-oriented culture for more intellectual and experimental art. On the flip side, when art does look to the ’30s for inspiration, it is exactly because the era provides models of how it might put itself at the service of “the people,” via agitprop, public works, and documentary.
    Installation view of “Art for the Millions” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Both takes, however, may yield a somewhat flattened image of the 1930s. As cultural historian Michael Denning writes in The Cultural Front, his classic volume about this period:
    Nothing is more firmly established than the perception that the “thirties” was a time of social realism… Social realism in this sense has come to mean three things: the documentary aesthetic, a rearguard opposition to modernism, and a relatively straightforward representationalism in the arts. In fact, all three aspects are misunderstood: the documentary aesthetic was actually a central modernist innovation; the cultural front was not characterized by an opposition to modernism; and the crucial aesthetic forms and ideologies of the cultural front were not simple representationalism.
    So, what I like most about “Art for the Millions” is pretty simple: Rudnick’s show brings out how much lively formal experiment and aesthetic diversity existed within the 1930s art scrum—not as a dissident impulse, but as integrally connected to attempts to create a popular audience and to convey the realities of social life through art.
    The sobriety of The Soup Kitchen (ca. 1937) by the painter Norman Lewis (who would go on to greater fame as an abstract artist) certainly fits intuitively with an image of ’30s art. It is a clearly legible statement in support of government poverty relief.
    Norman Lewis, The Soup Kitchen (ca. 1937) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    But it’s also elegantly stylized, and Lewis’s design is working with its message: The underlying X-shape conveys the sense of a Works Progress Administration kitchen bringing some order to the chaos of the era. Read left to right, your eye is led upwards, from the sadness of the man hunched over his bowl to the helpful chef serving up a hot meal at the top right; from the need that justifies government action to the reality of that action.
    Elizabeth Olds’s Burlesque (1936) more clearly fuses social commentary with a demotic expressionism. The variegated cartoon grimaces of the dancers’ faces, and the repeating, mechanical formation of the chorus line, convey the exhausting work of selling sex appeal. The artist’s idea is immediately clear; her means veer from plain-spoken realism.
    Elizabeth Olds, Burlesque (1936) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of artworks here that fit the typical image of social realism, from Harry Gottleib’s lithograph Three Lane Traffic, showing a turbulent picket line outside of a posh restaurant on a rainswept night, to Riva Helfond’s Curtain Factory (ca. 1936-39), showing women bowed over their labors in a textile workshop. Even these have a lot of flair.
    At the same time, as Denning argues, a lesser-remembered “Proletarian Surrealism” was also a major current of the 1930s. It echoes in Alice Neel’s 1939 portrait of her friend, the poet (and future pulp crime novelest) Kenneth Fearing, who is shown as literally haunted by the demons of the Depression, a skeleton wringing blood out of his heart perched in his open chest. You see it also in Hugo Gellert’s lithographs, made for a 1934 edition of Marx’s Capital, where humans are crucified on the gears of an immense machine. You can even sense this impulse in Dox Thrash’s watercolor Untitled (Strike), where a Black union organizer appears transformed into a giant by the force of his rhetoric.
    Dox Thrash, Untitled (Strike) (ca. 1940) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Photography came into its own as a medium in the 1930s, and it is naturally in the crusading photojournalism of the day that you come closest to a “realist” documentary aesthetic. But obviously the genius of photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans was not just to document protest and poverty. A mythologizing energy charged the facts with symbolism and made them arresting.
    This is radiantly self-evident in Lange’s Demonstration, San Francisco (1933), where a sharp low-angle image of a May Day protester turns him into a rock-jawed colossus gazing to the future. It’s more subtle in Lange’s Mexican Migrant Family with Tire Trouble, California (1936). There, a group of travelers fret over their stranded jalopy—but the detail that stops you is the small girl who stares plaintively out at you, as if asking silently for the viewer’s help.
    Huge Gellert, The Communist Party poster (ca. 1935) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    “Art for the Millions” does contain repeating and repetitive scenes of toiling white industrial workers—probably the subject matter that comes closest to evoking the cornier cliches of “social realism.” Even here, I think there’s something touching in how aestheticized these proletarian beefcakes are. We are obviously much closer to fantasy than to reality.
    Whether we are talking about the brawny industrial Spartacus rallying the workers from the cover of the Communist Party USA’s Daily Worker or the supernaturally assured construction workers of James Edmund Allen’s etching The Builders (1932), these are not real workers. They represent the promise of bodies transformed by dignified work and industrial renewal into stylized superhero versions of the working class—in a way, they are the negative images of the desperation and depletion brought by mass unemployment.
    James Edmund Allen, The Builders (1932) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    “Art for the Millions” contains many more great details and minor discoveries, but let me just skip to the third gallery, where the topic shifts to industrial design. Here, you see one of the ambiguities of how New Deal-era political discourse cyphered into culture.
    In 1929, Wall Street led the nation into calamity. For huge sections of the population, U.S. capitalism was discredited. Edmund Wilson recalled:
    The stock market crash was to count for us almost like a rending of the earth in preparation for the Day of Judgment… Yet to the writers and artists of my generation who had grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding out of everything they cared about, these years were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden and unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom, and it gave us a new sense of power to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a beating.
    Millions upon millions of people were out of work, suffering, betrayed, and angry. In that space, there was bitter, back-against-the-wall protest, but also a lot of dreaming about what a better system might look like. The two fused in powerful ways. One consequential example: In 1934, The Jungle author Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement came within striking distance of taking the governorship, based on the promise to transform the Golden State into a cooperative economy.
    The captains of industry responded to 1930s with bitter resistance—but they also pivoted to adapt some of the crusading popular rhetoric about the promise of a transformed future to their own ends. In fact, this was true of Roosevelt’s New Deal itself, explicitly an attempt to save capitalism by stabilizing society, and to head off the more radical protest movements (though the business bloc that united to try to sink the New Deal in the 1936 elections refused to see this).
    Gellert’s illustrations for Das Kapital and Charlie Chaplin’s all-time masterpiece Modern Times—a clip of the 1936 film is shown in the first gallery—form one pole of the era’s ideas of what the machine age represented: workers brutalized by ravening factories. But the other pole was modernisation-as-deliverance, the promise of a progressive and hygienic new world based on technological advance.
    Lester Beall, Rural Electrification Administration posters (1937) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    At the Met, the latter is encapsulated by Lester Beall’s 1937 posters for FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration: clean and geometric primary-color graphics promising running water, radio, electricity, and more. (Even card-carrying Communists were open to the romance of the machine, enchanted by fantastical tales of Stalin’s success at vaulting an impoverished rural Russia into a workers’ utopia via heavy industry.)
    Streamlining was the design gospel of the 1930s. Everyday appliances were kissed with machine-age magic, given the connotation of forward-driving speed. I mentioned that all those heroic images of workers’ bodies purified and made powerful radiated hopes of a possible better world. I think the act of reimagining everyday goods, giving them this kind of futuristic dazzle, tried to tap some of that same energy, making consumerism over as progressive.
    “Patriot” radio (ca. 1940) designed by Norman Bel Geddes, Electric Clock (ca. 1933) designed by Gilbert Rohde, and Desk lamp, model no. 114 (1939) designed by Walter Dorwin Teague and Frank Del Guidice, in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    “Art for the Millions” ends with artifacts and images related to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, maybe the ultimate example of how Depression-era utopian foment became recoded into marketing. The slogan of that event was “Dawn of a New Day;” it promised to show its millions of visitors a glimpse of the “World of Tomorrow.”
    Joseph Binder’s 1939 World’s Fair poster shows the Fair’s twin symbols, a spire and sphere—the so-called Trylon and Perisphere structures. They hearken to back to landmarks of visionary architecture like Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton (1784), which sought to convey the grandeur of the Enlightenment, or even the symbolic geometry of Vladimir Tatlin’s homage to the Bolshevik experiment, Monument to the Third International (1919)—though unlike either of these, the Trylon and Perisphere were actually built in Queens (temporarily).
    They are depicted in Binder’s poster graphic towering over the earth, dwarfing a tiny modern Manhattan skyline at bottom left. It is as if the promises of a luminous future had already applied a rear-view mirror to the dark realities of the preceding decade.
    Joseph Binder, New York World’s Fair, The World of Tomorrow poster (1939) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    On the actual fair grounds, within the 180-foot-diameter Perisphere, the Fair’s central attraction was an immense diorama of something called “Democracity,” a vision of a vastly ambitious urban development formed of a network of interlinked “Centertons” (government centers), “Pleasantvilles” (residential spaces), and “Milltowns” (factory districts). For Depression-wearied audiences, Democracity was a promise of a near-future U.S. society that had solved crime, class struggle, poverty, and pollution through ambitious real estate development. Insisting that it was “not a utopia,” its brochure spelled out how such a plan could practically work in detail. “The City of Tomorrow which lies below you is as harmonious as the stars in their courses overhead—No anarchy—destroying the freedom of others—can exist here.”
    It was quite a pitch—and of course the technocratic renaissance it advertised remained principally in the realm of fantasy. Mostly, the 1939 World’s Fair was a glammed-up product expo for mammoth corporations like GM and Westinghouse; as one account laconically put it, the fair would embody a “general corporate understanding of progress.”
    Ruth Reeves, Scarves (1938) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Meanwhile, the Trylon and Perisphere became useful logos to print on merchandise for those looking to take home a memory of the promised “World of Tomorrow.” At the Met, Ruth Reeves’s silk scarves are shown as an example. Their pattern mingles the futuristic profiles of the Trylon and Perisphere with images of the Founding Fathers—sci-fi spectacle helpfully harmonized with cheerful patriotism; a better future advertised at a price that was not too unreasonable, either in terms of money or in terms of social strife.
    The scarves are lovely. They are also a perfect note to end this show on. They nicely point to how ‘30s aspirations for a more just economic order were spun into promises of ever-“new and improved” stuff, post-World War II—essentially, how the U.S. went from embracing one meaning of the slogan “Art for the Millions” to another, very different and more familiar one.
    “Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s”  is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through December 10, 2023.

    For more images of the show, see below.
    Entrance to “Art for the Millions: American Art in the 1930s” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, featuring a film of Martha Graham performing Frontier (1935) and a Dress by Ruth Reeves (ca. 1930). Photo by Ben Davis.
    The first gallery of “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Harry Gottlieb, Three Lane Traffic (1937) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Alice Neel, Kenneth Fearing (1935) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Dorothea Lange, Demonstration, San Francisco (1933) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Screenprints and lithographs by Harry Gottloeb, Louis Lozowick, James Lesesne Wells, David P. Chun, and Harry Sternberg. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Riva Helfond, Curtain Factory (ca. 1936-39) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Robert Blackburn, People in a Boat (1938) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Hugo Gellert, Machinery and Large Scale Industry 44 and 46 (1933) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Ben Shahn, Resettlement Administration poster (1937) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Thomas Hart Benton, Approaching Storm (1940), Seymour Lipton, Flood (1937), and Marsden Hartley, Albert Pinkham Ryder (1939) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Dorothea Lange, Mexican Migrant Family with Tire Trouble, California (1936) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    José Dolores López, Adam and Eve and the Serpent (ca. 1930) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Dress (1929) manufactured by H.R. Mallinson and Company, and Charles Sheeler, Americana (1931) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Visitors contemplate examples of ’30s industrial design in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Isamu Noguchi, ‘Radio Nurse’ monitor (1937), Norman Bell Geddes, ‘Manhattan’ cocktail set (1936-40), and Gilberd Rohde, Desk lamp (1933) in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Covers from Fortune magazine, 1937, in “Art for the Millions.” Photo by Ben Davis.
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    Freud, Hockney, Pigeons, and Pubs. Step Inside the Eccentric New London Art Show Curated by Designer Jonathan Anderson

    As evidenced by the viral, plasticine hoodies and shorts debuted at London Fashion Week on Saturday, the fashion brand J. W. Anderson never shies from eccentricity and experimentation. At the heart of creative director Jonathan Anderson’s myriad projects is a love for and deep knowledge of art – and it shows. His runways are just as much about ideas as they are about clothes, and the same spirit carries through to a new exhibition curated by Anderson at London’s Offer Waterman gallery.
    “On Foot” opened today and runs through October 28. An ode to his beloved London, the show’s mix of modern British and contemporary art and ceramics has been arranged by Anderson to invoke the experience of walking around town. “It is just a little snapshot into the things that I love, the people that I love, and the city that I love,” Anderson said last week when we met for a walkthrough of the show. He was dressed casually, but not uncharacteristically, in a grey hoodie and blue jeans.
    Exemplary works by David Hockney, Lucien Freud, and Frank Auerbach are interspersed with some of Anderson’s more outré and arty designs. While the idea that a sequestered suite of galleries in Mayfair could convincingly take on the character of bustling streets between Shoreditch and Soho is a bit of a stretch, the conceit allows for some effective and often humorous touches.
    J.W. Anderson, Look 14, AW 2020 and Look 6, SS 2023. Courtesy of J. W. Anderson
    “Since Brexit, I fell out of love with London,” Anderson said and elaborated on the frustrations of traveling back and forth from Paris, where he lives part-time to fulfil his duties as creative director of Loewe (the Spanish luxury house has been at the forefront of fashion since Anderson took the reigns in 2013). “This was about being humble, refinding the love of a city that I became used to, and looking at how its subconsciously inspired me.” In locating and rekindling this passion for London, Anderson makes a point of reveling in the city’s more unseemly elements. He insists that these have informed his creative vision just as much as the more rarified influence of fine art.
    The first room, the show’s most serious, offers a somewhat abstracted take on the urban populous, whether as the hazily swarming mass in Leon Kossoff’s Outside Kilburn Underground March (1985) or a remote cluster of silhouettes elegantly evoked by Akiko Hirai’s “Morandi” bottles. The formal affinities between a 2017 ceramic by Magdalene Odundo—”a very dear friend”—and two bulbous, layered dresses from J.W. Anderson’s AW20 women’s collection provide a clear curatorial throughline.
    Ditto, a 1940 drawing by Henry Moore that hangs opposite Barbara Hepworth’s Elegy (1945). “I have always loved her philosophy that through touching sculpture you get to know sculpture,” Anderson said, and hovered before the piece in rapture. “There’s such a physicality to it. I always find her work strong in its conviction, very different from Moore. Moore can be way more romantic, whereas with Hepworth, there is something more psychological and poignant.”
    Installation view of “On Foot” with ceramics by Shawanda Corbett, featuring David Hockney’s Mo in Carennac (1971), Florian Krewer’s Flamboyant (2020), and look 06 from J.W. Anderson’s SS23 men’s collection. Photography by Thomas Adank, courtesy of Offer Waterman.
    A much more colorful celebration of contemporary youth culture follows. “I like this idea that when you go to a park most people are on their phones,” he said, gesturing to a typically eclectic canvas by Richard Hawkins in which one man is texting a nude pic. “Popular culture has become part of our phone and has become part of what you see now,” he added, raising his palm in front of his face.
    The art is echoed by semi-sculptural pieces from the recent J.W. Anderson men’s SS23 collection such as a blue sweater pierced by a fragmented skateboard and a Breton jersey tied around an actual BMX handlebar. These surrealist additions refer to “how youth culture has become broken through the idea of naivety, non-naivety, growing up too quickly,” according to Anderson.
    Attentive viewers will spot evidence of Anderson’s exacting eye for detail. One example is the pairing of a 2020 painting of two young men play-fighting by Florian Krewer with a typically nondescript, uniform group of marching figures by L.S. Lowry. “What is interesting about Lowry is he cuts down into the face,” Anderson explained, “so you get this relief and the head becomes sunken as he scrapes back the oil paint. In Krewer’s work you have a similar technique.”
    J.W. Anderson pigeon clutch in print by Anthea Hamilton. Photography by Thomas Adank, courtesy of Offer Waterman.
    Tucked around a corner is an array of J.W. Anderson’s pigeon clutches, some “camouflaged” in a new design by Anthea Hamilton. “Obviously the pigeon became synonymous with the brand, somehow, by mistake,” said Anderson, referring obliquely to the bag’s viral appeal after Carrie Bradshaw was seen sporting the accessory on HBO’s And Just Like That in 2022. “Pigeons have been used in art for time immemorial. They featured in Renaissance paintings but somehow they’ve become a pest and we’ve demoted them.”
    The works have been paired with new drawings by another of Anderson’s past collaborators Pol Anglada, in which pigeons swoop over basking male torsos. “I liked the idea that this becomes a peep show and a coop,” Anderson said. “They’re all looking at you.”
    Where do so many walks through London end? As visitors arrive to Anderson’s pub, they are met first with a series of plant paintings by Christopher Wood, Cedric Morris, and Eliot Hodgkin beside garish anthurium flowers from Loewe’s SS23 collection. “For many, many years I’ve had an obsession with curated flowers,” Anderson explained. “In Britain, we like to arrange flowers in bizarre ways or cover pubs in grotesque plants.”
    David Hockney, Mo in Carennac (1971). Courtesy of Offer Waterman.
    Once inside, the pub is conjured by a circular space closed off by red screens and lined with portraits by the likes of Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Walter Sickert, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. These faces float over vessels by Jennifer Lee, scattered in a manner familiar to anyone whose enjoyed a pint or two too many. The gathering gives new meaning to the classic art speak cliché of putting works “in conversation.”
    “Pubs should be one of the most protected things,” said Anderson, lamenting their slow backslide into cultural irrelevance since the rise of wellness trends. “I don’t think you could tell the history of British art without the pub. The pub creates debate, the pub creates characters,” he added with a grin, citing Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Maggi Hambling.
    “For me, the whole thing about the show was a very simplistic look at the mundane, that we sometimes forget but is actually so important to be able to be creative,” he adds, suddenly getting to the heart of the matter. What connects Anderson’s interest in pigeons, “grotesque” plant boxes, and everyday pubs is an unusual aesthetic curiosity that feels almost daringly indiscriminate and comically unpretentious.
    Installation view of “On Foot” at Offer Waterman gallery, featuring ceramics by Jennifer Lee, Frank Auerbach’s Portrait of Debbie Ratcliff (1983-84), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Wounds at the Bases (2020), and Stanislava Kovalcikova’s Endangered Species (2021). Photography by Thomas Adank, courtesy of Offer Waterman.
    This instinct surely powers the originality of Anderson’s collections, as well as his cultivation of a close coterie of longterm artistic collaborators and friends, among them Anthea Hamilton, Lynda Benglis, and Gilbert & George, and the estates of Tom of Finland and David Wojnarowicz. The thoughtful intentionality behind their designs and campaigns for J.W. Anderson and Loewe has set these heartfelt projects apart from the glitzy gimmicks that are more often expected when luxury brands dabble in contemporary art.
    It is not surprising, therefore, that Anderson primary achievement with “On Foot” is layering his great appreciation for London’s grittier past—”I don’t think I would be the designer I am without those legacies” – with an uplifting and relevant reflection of the city as it is today, thanks to a lively array of contemporary names.
    Frank Auerbach, Park Village East (1994). Courtesy of Offer Waterman.
    “I think sometimes we forget how multifaceted Britain is,” he said. “This is why I find the whole immigration policy so ridiculous. Britain is built upon immigration and that’s why some of the most exciting things have happened.” It is a point Anderson, who grew up in Northern Ireland, demonstrates repeatedly, placing works by early innovators like Lucie Rie, who fled Nazi Austria, and Bavarian-born Walter Sickert alongside those by London’s living artists, including Akiko Hirai from Japan and ex-New Yorker Shawanda Corbett.
    “This is why I wanted all these characters in the pub,” he added, gazing at the unlikely encounters that surrounded him. “I wanted the debate. I’m fed up of non-debates. A tiny bit of alcohol can help debates to let go. They shouldn’t be filtered, they should be uncensored so that there can be solutions.”
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    The Nasher Museum’s New Art Show Was Curated by ChatGPT. We Asked ChatGPT to Review It 

    “In an unprecedented fusion of technology and art, the Nasher Museum of Art has boldly ventured into uncharted territory with their latest exhibition, ‘Act as if you are a curator: an A.I.-generated exhibition.’ This ambitious undertaking harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to curate an immersive journey through the digital realm. While not without its challenges, the exhibit offers a unique and thought-provoking experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional curation.”
    This was the first paragraph produced by ChatGPT when we asked it to review the new ChatGPT-organized exhibition at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art.
    For the show, on view through January, Nasher’s curators turned over some of their usual duties to the A.I. tool. The experiment began with a joke: Marshall Price, the museum’s chief curator, offhandedly suggested the idea during a meeting this spring. Recent departures in the department had left him short-staffed at the time, and there was a hole in the fall programming schedule that needed to be filled. Why not outsource the gig? 
    To his surprise, his colleagues, Julia McHugh and Julianne Miao, jumped at the idea. They convinced Price, too. “We thought, what a great opportunity to see what this technology could bring to the curatorial process,” he recalled. “It was an opportunity for us to push the boundaries of curatorial practice.” 
    Installation view of “Act as if you are a curator: an A.I.-generated exhibition,” 2023 at the Nasher Museum of Art. Photo: Cornell Watson. Courtesy of the Nasher.
    After feeding it datasets and a series of iterative prompts, ChatGPT eventually suggested themes—“utopia, dystopia, the subconscious, and dreams”—and a title—“Dreams of Tomorrow”—for the show. It also spat out an attendant list of artworks culled from some 14,000 objects in the institution’s holdings. The selection is wildly diverse, with pieces ranging in date from 2000 B.C.E. to 2021. Some bear only the thinnest of connections to the exhibition’s themes. 
    On this point, our critic agreed. “This diversity raised questions about curation,” ChatGPT wrote in one of several automated reviews. “While the A.I. had undoubtedly produced many captivating pieces, there were moments when it felt disjointed. This lack of curation left the exhibition feeling somewhat fragmented and overwhelming.” 
    The program’s preferred artworks were pieces it invented. For example, the Nasher’s show includes prints by Salvador Dalí, Nicholas Monro, and Juliana Seraphim, but our reviewer was more interested in Ava the A.I. Painter’s Mosaic of Emotions and RoboCraftsman’s Sentient Sculptures. The latter body of work, per the program, “takes the concept of three-dimensional art to a new level,” with sculptures “that seem to breathe and transform before our eyes.” 
    “Act as if you are a curator” is not the first exhibition to be shaped by artificial intelligence. The 2022 Bucharest Biennial was led by an A.I. named Jarvis, while earlier this year the Whitney Museum teamed up with the Liverpool Biennial to launch a project that generates fake artists and curatorial statements. These efforts, like the Nasher’s own, leaned into a sense of playfulness designed to assuage anxieties around what this emergent technology might mean for jobs in the art world and beyond. They were crafted by humans to make A.I. look dumb, not the other way around.   
    But the stakes of this technology remain high, even if it’s far from being able to compete with real, human curators.  
    Nicholas Monro, Cosmic Consciousness (1970). Courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art.
    In 2021, the Istituzione Bologna Musei in Italy began using A.I.-controlled cameras to monitor visitors’ interactions. The goal, according to researchers on the project, was to determine “attraction values” for individual works of art, which the institution could later use in planning layouts and future exhibitions.  
    In a moment where museums the world over are struggling to remain relevant—and solvent—this is a unsettling proposition. Why would the Istituzione Bologna Musei or any other art organization need curators to organize good, thoughtful exhibitions when a computer could design bad ones that keep people coming back? 
    Eerily, our own A.I. experiments hinted at a similar feedback loop. In its reviews, ChatGPT’s favorite part of “Act as if you are a curator” was… that it was curated by ChatGPT.  
    One review called it a “thought-provoking dialogue about the future of art and its place in our increasingly digital and automated world.” Another dubbed it a “innovative showcase” that “offers a multifaceted glimpse into the evolving relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence, sparking profound questions about authorship, curation, and the very essence of art itself.” 
    Both pieces of criticism arrived at the same grade: four out of five stars.
    “Act as if you are a curator: an A.I.-generated exhibition” is on view at the Nasher Museum of Art, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, North Carolina, through January 14, 2024.
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    How Medieval Art, Music, and Memory Interplay in Diana Al-Hadid’s Sculptural New Works Centered on Her Heritage

    Syrian-born artist Diana Al-Hadid is known for her sculptures and two-dimensional artworks that transform the industrial materials of bronze, steel, fiberglass, and wood into evocative visions drawn from cosmology, cartography, folklore, and antiquity. The artist, who has lived and worked in Brooklyn for the past 16 years, has been a witness to the borough’s transformation over those years, and in many ways, her works are about time, its passage, and how that manifests in mark-making.
    Today, Al-Hadid divides her time between the city and Upstate New York, where she purchased a home in 2019. Currently, she is also in the process of building a studio for that property. Al-Hadid is prolific. Currently, she is taking part in an ongoing residency with Brooklyn’s Dieu Donné, a non-profit cultural institution devoted to furthering hand papermaking processes in contemporary art. This November, the artist will present her anticipated debut exhibition “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things” at Kasmin Gallery in New York, showcasing a body of work over five years in the making. The exhibition, which will run from November 2 to December 22, 2023, promises to offer a selection of new work including a series of painterly wall-hanging pieces and totem-like sculptures that rise up in the same way they are planted down. Coinciding with the Kasmin exhibition, Al-Hadid will also be featured at the NGV Triennial, which opens on December 3.
    Ahead of these exhibitions, we visited Al-Hadid’s Brooklyn studio, a space awash with splashed pigments, sculptural detritus, and myriad other materials, and spoke to the artist about the throughlines in her practice and the ideas and experiences at play in her newest body of work. 
    Diana Al-Hadid, The Long Defeat (2017–23). Courtesy of the Artist and Kasmin Gallery. © Diana Al-Hadid. All Rights Reserved.
    Your work has been aesthetically consistent over the years, capturing your hand and mark-making over time. Can you talk about your interests and practice?I often think about the glacial pace that my work has—or the long arch of materials that I’ve been working with since grad school. There are basic constructions that coincide with our contemporary world in raw form. In some ways, I think there are some formal or maybe subconscious compulsions that have remained consistent [in my practice]. I work a lot with line and plane, pours, or drips, and things that happen over time. There are metaphorical concepts that I’m interested in, that we live with as a society.
    What do you mean when you say you’re interested in metaphorical concepts that we live with as a society?
    There are ways that we move, shape, and mold the world. We use wood, metal, steel, and contemporary materials, yet the processes are ancient in many ways. All my work looks back at art histories, narrative histories, and common tropes—ascensions, overground and underground. We sometimes understand metaphorical concepts as a cultural construct and sometimes as a body or cognitive construct. They are all cognitive. The show’s title is “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things,” which is inspired by a book first published in 1987, similarly titled Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff (b. 1941), an American philosopher and cognitive linguist. The book title comes from an Aboriginal dialect in Australia and is a reference to a word that describes women, fire, water, certain animals, and dangerous things. It offers an incredible shift in thinking regarding how we see the world and the language we use is intrinsically related and reinforced over and over. One of the metaphorical concepts that Lakoff explores is the notion that the unknown is up and the known is down. In the English language we might say, “What’s up?” or “It’s up in the air.” Language plays a role in how we experience our living bodies and how our society makes associations.

    Diana Al-Hadid, The Outside In (2023) at the Planting Fields, New York. Photography by Diego Flores. Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery and Diana Al-Hadid. © Diana Al-Hadid. All Rights Reserved.
    Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the different visual experiences that people have linguistically based on their native language and other written languages that they may or may not know. For example, even saying, “What’s up?” when translated into another language, may not carry the intended meaning. These lapses in understanding can also happen when talking about spirituality. 
    You are hitting all of my notes. This show has some elements of religion in it, and the reason that this book resonated so deeply in my bones is because of these irregularities between cultures and minds. We always want to try and make contact, to come close to something, to understand it. I was born in Syria, my mother tongue is Arabic, and I grew up in Ohio, a very Christian, white…but loving and wonderful place. I often look at works from the Middle Ages, both Islamic and Christian. I look towards the 1550s for many of my references and keep ending up there. At this moment, post-2020, I have a kid, I’m not an emerging artist anymore, and these are facts about me. Moving upstate [at this stage of my life] I’ve learned about plants, and I’ve learned about roots, and I’ve learned about trees. I listen to Arabic music constantly. Life is such a negotiation as an immigrant; finding out how much of yourself to make public, and how much of your history to hold on to. I returned to Syria at 13 years old and I often think about what you mentioned, that approximation, that missed connection in a conversation, and how language can lend itself to poetic and cultural insights that otherwise won’t be understood. I’ve constantly been made aware of that since I didn’t grow up there, even though it is my blood. It is something I always work in reference to. 
    Thinking about roots metaphorically and literally, all seems to make sense with your work—things that are earthbound. Do you also think about the absence of space? How do materials inform your process? 
    Yes, exactly that, spaces that are immaterial. I did a stint at the Smithsonian and spent time looking at Islamic and German miniatures. They are almost like fortune-telling devices—people could read their future in them. Now I’m at Dieu Donné in an ongoing residency and working with paper pulps is a huge part of the show. I’m working with bronze and I’m working with paper. I’ve never worked with paper before, I tend to make large-scale drawings on mylar.
    A longtime New Yorker, Diana Al-Hadid recently completed a permanent installation for MTA Arts & Design, The Time Telling (2023). Photography by Diego Flores. Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery and Diana Al-Hadid. © Diana Al-Hadid. All Rights Reserved.
    Does this mean that before making a sculpture you don’t sketch it out first?The sculptures start in a very casual way. There is a work that is intended for the show that is a very small piece that will be bronze. It’s jasmine roots. Jasmine is the flower of Syria and it’s very nostalgic. All of my aunts have jasmine and I had jasmine plants that died. I took what remained in the pot, the roots, and dipped them in wax and hung it. I’ve had so many plants that are root-bound and learned about how these roots would push to the edge [of a pot] and become encased. It struck me as a metaphor for the immigrant experience, these tightly wound roots where you have to learn how to grow in a new territory, new soil. It felt so core for me. 
    That is beautiful. The roots can be confined or allowed to spread if planted in the ground. What else can we expect from the show? 
    The show pulls from so many sources, but I think there are some common historical threads, including Medusa, as inspired by Greek mythology. To return to the idea that the unknown is up and the known is down, the gallery is a cavernous, nearly underground space. A stacked and towering sculpture will be installed in the main gallery, reaching upward and another will be on the roof, an ascension of sorts, an unexplained narrative.
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    Scottish Artist France-Lise McGurn Has Created a Vivid Tribute to Her Mother With a Joint Exhibition of Crochet and Paintings

    Scottish artist France-Lise McGurn told me that, growing up, her family had a running joke—if you sat still for too long, their mother would crochet over you.
    “Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” a new exhibition at New York’s Margot Samel, offers a window into the artist’s relationship—as a daughter and a creator—with her mother Rita McGurn, a mother of five, and a set and interior designer who spent decades making delightfully idiosyncratic crochet figurative sculptures, as well as paintings, drawings, and fiber objects in their Glasgow home. 
    Rita, who passed away in 2015, rarely showed her creations in her lifetime, and only ever locally. “She didn’t think of them as artworks in a traditional sense,” France-Lise explained. This marks the first time the McGurns have had their works exhibited side-by-side and the first display of Rita’s works in the United States, offering insights into the complex and even unconscious ways Rita’s creative spirit shaped her daughter. 
    France-Lise McGurn and Rita McGurn, installation view of “Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” at Margot Samel, 2023. Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy of Margot Samel.
    But this isn’t a maudlin tribute. Decidedly not. “My mother didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body,” said France-Lise, speaking to me at the gallery. Her mother’s delightfully colorful and idiosyncratic crochet figurative sculptures crowded around us as though listening in. “She’d find all this art talk very pretentious,” she said with a wry smile, “She loved me and worried for me, but talking about art wasn’t part of our mother-daughter relationship.” 
    The title of the exhibition hints at Rita’s winkingly down-to-earth spirit, too; in the 2000s, a young France-Lise returned to Glasgow from a trip to New York with a black star tattoo, one that matched her mother’s own. Rita looked over at the tattoo while cooking, and said, “‘Matching mother-daughter tattoos? Charming,’ with lighthearted practicality. “She was not impressed,” laughed France-Lise.  
    Portrait of France-Lise McGurn. Photo: Amy Gwatkin.
    In eschewing memorial indulgence, “Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” instead offers something quite lively, full of color and movement. The exhibition has the buzzing electric feel of an apartment party or a full family house. A floor-to-ceiling mural fills the gallery walls. France-Lise painted it over three days. “My mum would not have liked a very clear, austere art gallery setting. She would have absolutely painted over the whole thing. We wanted it to be very playful,” she said.
    Known for her free-flowing compositions in vibrant, quasi-Mannerist hues, the younger McGurn works intuitively and often in sweeping gestures. Her works have earned her shows at London’s Simon Lee Gallery and have entered the collections of Tate Modern. Here, androgynous figures dance across the gallery’s walls. New paintings, made specifically for the exhibition by France-Lise, are installed atop the mural, as are two paintings by Rita from the 1990s. These paintings are distinguished not only by Rita’s distinct painterly hand but also by their decorative frames that hint back to the domestic sphere she so loved.
    France-Lise McGurn and Rita McGurn, Glasgow, 1980s.
    Rita’s crochet sculptures and carpet, all of which are untitled, are arranged in groupings throughout the gallery. One sculpture, larger-than-life-size and in a purple and blue swimsuit, is situated by the gallery window like a benevolent sentry over this familial space. These works are just a drop in the bucket of her oeuvre. “She was the most prolific artist I’ve ever met. It was a compulsion,” said McGurn. 
    When asked about the motivations or meanings behind her mother’s work, France-Lise hesitates. “I wouldn’t attach too much explanation of mine onto individual works of hers. It’s very difficult for me to talk about how she thought,” said France-Lise. “She never talked about it.” Then turning back to the bathing-suited sculpture by the gallery window, she noted, “Well, this one has a mannequin inside, so the feet pop through occasionally. That shows something of her process. She would have gotten that mannequin and she would have humped it up the street and then covered it. Everything was material for her.” 
    An untitled sculpture by Rita McGurn. Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy of Margot Samel.
    France-Lise McGurn, Zoflora, the midnight blooms (2023). Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy of Margot Samel.
    While she won’t speak for her mother, France-Lise does have her own suppositions. “My mum was an orphan, raised by her gran. She had a rough childhood,” she explained. “In my childhood memories, she just seemed to be filling her life up with people. Either she was having them, or she was making them. Or she was inviting them over. But she was never, ever, alone. She was just populating everything all the time and always cooking.”
    Rita started making her sculptures in the ‘70s, before France-Lise’s birth, building into a height of creative output in the ‘80s and ‘90s. “I’m attracted to that period of Glasgow in my work, too, but also, psychologically, it’s quite an important period for me,” said France-Lise “It’s a time I remember my mum. It’s quite interesting to see works from the ‘90s, right next to all my work which is made in the last couple of months.” 
    Portrait of France-Lise McGurn. Photo: Amy Gwatkin.
    France-Lise believes the very busyness of her parents’ home pushed her toward art-making. “Which way round is it? Are you alone a lot because you’re a painter? Or is it actually why you’re a painter? Because you like to be alone?” she thought. “I was always trying to be quiet, away from all the madness.” 
    Unlike Rita, who never titled her works, France-Lise’s titles offer clever, even cheeky, insights into her thought process—and her humor. The sides of her canvases are often filled with title ideas written in paint and crossed off. Music—particularly from her childhood and teenage years—is a major inspiration and so is that childhood home. The painting Zoflora, the midnight blooms (2023) hints at both. The painting shows a woman in pink and purple blues, with her legs pulled up. The title comes from a popular Scottish cleaning product of the same name—famed for its distinctive indigo hue, similar to the painting’s background. While that painting recalls a certain domesticity of housekeeping, it also hints at the era when France-Lise was throwing events at late-night clubs, when she herself was a kind of night-blooming flower.
    Installation view of “Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” at Margot Samel, 2023. Photo by Lance Brewer. Courtesy of Margot Samel.
    Two works—80s Mirror and 90s Mirror—more directly reference her childhood home, picturing a giant mirror her parents had in the living room.
    But more than ornament or object, Rita’s primary influence on France-Lise seems to be in the spirit of constant evolution, of embracing change. “Creating for her was all an ongoing project that she didn’t really want to anchor down. She lived with these objects and she did go back and make changes to them. Nothing was ever finished. As soon as you said something was good, she would almost immediately change it,” France-Lise recalled. On one occasion, she even remembers coming back from college to find her mother had painted over one of her own paintings. “I said, that painting looks oddly familiar,” she remembered, with a laugh. “And It is strange to see these objects from her life in a frame or a gallery. It’s a little bit like seeing our childhood car in a gallery.” For France-Lise, who has been shepherding much of her mother’s artistic estate, the process is complex, not without its gray areas.
    “Things change. This exhibition is about time in a way,” she said, “This mural I painted wouldn’t be the same mural if I painted it next week. And when this exhibition ends, it will go, and there will only be the memory of it. And that’s as it should be.” 
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    ‘Art and Confection’: Mexican Designer Bárbara Sánchez-Kane Upends New York Fashion Week With Her Sartorial Surrealism

    Bárbara Sánchez-Kane revels in the kind of artful provocation that comes from appropriating and dismantling prescribed notions of gender roles, dress codes, and beauty standards. The Mexican artist and fashion designer takes every opportunity to skewer patriarchal norms, riffing on the “collapse”—a word she often uses—of traditional gender expression in the pursuit of radical self-invention. That Sánchez-Kane prefers the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘he’—used interchangeably—is likely a provocation in itself. Why not?
    If Marcel Duchamp’s ironic readymades come to mind, or the Surrealist objects of Meret Oppenheim, or the conceptual fashion collections of Martin Margiela, or the clothing-cum-furniture of Hussein Chalayan—whom Sánchez-Kane cites as inspiration—you’re on the right track.
    Bárbara Sánchez-Kane. Courtesy of Kurimanzutto.
    Sánchez-Kane has been mining this wink-nudge terrain since at least 2016, when she founded her eponymous clothing line, which goes well beyond antiquated terms like ‘non-binary’ and ‘unisex.’ Of late, Sánchez-Kane has been moving more into the art zone, showing his sartorially based, queer-inflected artworks at Kurimanzutto gallery in Mexico City. There, whether through fashion, installation, sculpture, painting, performance, or poetry, the artist resists hegemonic masculinity and its many guises. The resulting objects invite interpretation, but conform to none. She refers to them as “art and confection.” They’re now on display in her first-ever New York solo exhibition, “New Lexicons for Embodiment,” at Kurimanzutto in Chelsea, which opens today and runs through October 21.
    Sánchez-Kane has made a name for himself as an outlier in fashion with deconstructed Catholic school uniforms, conceptualized cowboy gear, and army fatigues exposing red lingerie in the rear. Recent experiments in masculine-feminine juxtaposition include a corset made of vinyl boxing gloves; shirts made of stiff rawhide; and boot spurs with a spinning wheel of high-heeled legs (the brand’s logo), like something from a mudflap. Bjork recently performed in a blue ‘calla lily’ hat by Sánchez-Kane, crowning the singer’s head like a Mayan headdress jeujed into a mulleted bouffant.
    Silver spurs by Bárbara Sánchez-Kane. Via Instagram.
    On a gallery visit leading up to opening night of September 14, Sánchez-Kane was busily preparing for what amounts to a fashion happening—staged at a gallery, sans runway. “It’s like a reconstruction of a fashion show, with what looks like a backstage but at the front of the gallery,” he explained, looking impishly chic in a casual tux jacket and chunky silver rings. It is a staged tableau vivant intended to befuddle guests before beguiling them. “Guests outside might even wonder if they’re permitted to come inside.”
    Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, untitled (2023). Courtesy of Kurimanzutto.
    In the stateside debut—an anti-fashion show during New York Fashion Week—Sánchez-Kane offers a fresh visual vocabulary in a series of new works at the intersection of art and fashion, where functionality is rejiggered into enigmatic, irreverent forms. Deconstruction followed by reconstruction followed by more deconstruction, there is a perpetual regeneration in these works, such as solid-bronze pumps with a reclining Christ as the sole. (The artist is sure she’ll get an earful from her devout mother for the droll foray into footwear blasphemy.)
    The artist buzzed about the space amid the hum and occasional thud of construction work, darting from one sculpture to the next, most of them already installed on the gallery’s walls and plinths. At the front of the show hangs a sculpture of interlacing belts that can be pulled to form a bow—“a girl thing,” mused the artist, “but giving the materiality an active rather than a passive role.” Several amorphous aluminum sculptures—created as a reaction to dress forms, used in the industry to calculate body types—loom in the back.
    Flip flops as trowels. Courtesy of Kurimanzutto.
    Shoes are of special interest to Sánchez-Kane; several pairs turn up in the show. Loafers have been fastened at the tongue like a coin purse or adorned in the front with two real Mexican coins, slightly bent to conform to the foot’s curves. Elsewhere, metal flip flops have been fashioned out of trowels (and suitably rest upon a cinderblock). “I was an engineer before I studied fashion,” she said, explaining that she built houses in Yucatán, where she was born and raised. “All of us working on the houses were wearing flip flops because it was so hot.”
    Some objects lean into humor, even schadenfreude, such as a heavy leather suit pressed into the undulating shape of an egg carton. The artist had placed a smiling metal egg in one of the slots. Another heavy suit is partially made from clear plastic and will be worn, sans underwear, by a live model at the opening. “It’ll definitely be warm and sweaty inside,” she predicted. The exhibition will also serve as boutique where visitors can buy items from the very collection the gallery is exhibiting, ranging from accessories to full looks. It’s difficult to know where art ends and commerce begins—and that is precisely the point.
    Egg carton-shaped military uniform in green lambskin leather. Courtesy of Kurimanzutto.
    Though Sánchez-Kane has been somewhat disillusioned by the fashion industry, he hasn’t walked away from it altogether. It’s just that he no longer identifies with certain dynamics that strike him as dated or démodé, such as the standardization of body sizes, the superficiality of trends, the toxicity of fast fashion, the crassness of mass consumption. “The fashion system was not working for me,” she said, “but I’m still trying to find new ways to confront the body.”
    “New Lexicons for Embodiment” by Bárbara Sánchez-Kane runs from September 14 to October 21 at Kurimanzutto, 520 W. 20th Street, New York.
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