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    A Portuguese Biennial Staged an Exhibition About the Country’s Legacy of Slavery. Then Its Host Venue Dismantled It

    At an exhibition staged by the Porto Photography Biennial in Portugal, visitors have been laying red carnations alongside artworks. The flower is a symbol of democratic liberation in the country and inside the Centro Hospitalar Conde de Ferreira, its presence is a protest against the decision to censor a multimedia exhibition.
    “Vento (A)mar,” a site-specific installation by Dori Nigro and Paulo Pinto, sought to spark dialogue on Portugal’s slave trafficking legacy inside a hospital bequeathed by a profiteer of the very industry, Conde de Ferreira. The exhibition, located across 10 rooms of psychiatric hospital’s panopticon, succeeded, though not perhaps precisely as the Brazilian artists had intended.
    View of Panopticon at the hospital. Photo: courtesy José Sergio.
    At the show’s opening on May 20, the hospital banned access to a room exhibiting mirrors etched with words challenging the legacy of Conde de Ferreira, including one that read: “How many enslaved people is a psychiatric hospital worth?” A week later, the room reopened with three works removed — all of which directly referenced the hospital’s founding patron. The work that remained was a sugar bowl with a portrait of Conde de Ferreira sat on a stool.
    In a statement, the hospital’s administrative board claimed to have been “affected” by the exhibition’s language, though insisted it remained committed to engaging its history “in an adequate way.”
    Room 7 of the panopticon at the Porto Biennial being closed. Photo: courtesy Porto Photography Biennial.
    The hospital’s move was unexpected and prompted the Porto Photography Biennial organizers to rapidly gather and come to a decision. Should they pull the show? Insist the censored works be remounted? Or continue with the censored version? The artists, curator Georgia Quintas, and the Biennial’s artistic directors decided to take the latter course staging “Vento (A)mar,” which means both “Wind at Sea” and “Wind to Love,” as altered by the hospital.
    “Continuing the exhibition in light of the act of censorship, gives voice to the issues raised in the exhibition,”Virgilio Ferreira and Jayne Dyer, co-artistic directors of the Biennial told Artnet News. “It offers time for reflection and a deeper examination and debate on the silencing of slavery which remains an open wound in Portuguese society.”
    The hospital’s censorship, the directors said, only further emphasized the need to offer space for the voices and perspectives of enslaved people and their descendants. “Slavery is embedded in the history of Portugal,” they said, “The exhibition reveals the sensitivity of the issue to recognize and deal with the consequences of this dark period in Portugal’s history.”
    After the mirror works were removed from room seven, a sugar bowl with a portrait of Conde de Ferreira remained. Photo: courtesy Porto Photography Biennial.
    The artists were taken aback by the hospital’s decision to censor the show, particularly given the accommodation they had received from the institution while setting up. They describe “Vento (A)mar” as a meditation on ancestral memory between Pernambuco, their Brazilian state of origin, and the city of Porto where they have settled. In response to the censorship, the artists will now collaborate with the Biennial on works that facilitate public debate and develop into longer-term projects.
    Currently in its third edition, the Porto Photography Biennial is presenting the work of 70 artists and 14 curators across 14 citywide venues, all open free to the public. “Vento (A)mar” is on view through July 1.

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    A New Show Pays Tribute to Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Fund With Works by Titus Kaphar, Faith Ringgold, and More

    I’m still quoting a joke that arts philanthropist Agnes Gund made six years ago. Speaking about her Black grandchildren, she mentioned a pillow she has embroidered with the words along the lines of: “If I knew grandchildren were this much fun, I would have had them first.”
    The president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art delivered this line at an event at the New York institution inaugurating the Art for Justice Fund, a project of Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors that she generously supports and was created to fight the racist scourge of mass incarceration in America. With just 4.25 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. houses a fifth of the world’s prison inmates at an annual cost of about $81 billion. (Apropos of those grandchildren, Black minors are four times as likely to be incarcerated as their white counterparts.)
    Julie Mehretu, Rubber Gloves (2018). Photo by Tom Powel. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery and Ford Foundation Gallery.
    Now, the exhibition, “No Justice Without Love,” at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York celebrates the end of the six-year lifespan of the initiative, which focuses on bail reform, sentencing reform, and developing reentry opportunities for the formerly incarcerated.
    It features major figures such as Titus Kaphar, Julie Mehretu, and Faith Ringgold, along with artists on the rise like Jesse Krimes and Sherrill Roland, as well as collectives like For Freedoms and the People’s Paper Co-op. Some of the artists, including Krimes and Roland, were formerly incarcerated; Krimes just launched the Center for Art and Advocacy, dedicated to mentoring those formerly incarcerated, with money from the Art for Justice Fund.
    Bayete Ross Smith, still from How A White Mob Destroyed a City and Got Away With It, from the Red Summers 2021. Courtesy of the Artist and Ford Foundation Gallery.
    Curated by Daisy Desrosiers, director and chief curator at Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, the show includes works that visualize the mass incarceration system and its wide-ranging effects in various ways. 
    Some focus on infrastructure, at differing scales. At the show’s entrance, for example, is a video animation by Paul Rucker, Proliferation (2009), that shows the U.S. as if seen from a satellite, with glowing dots of various colors mapping the growth of the prison system, set to Rucker’s music. A 19-foot-tall print by Maria Gaspar reproduces the exterior of Cook County Jail at life size; next to it hangs a minimalist-looking sculpture by Roland that traces the mortar lines between cinder blocks that make up the walls of cells like the one where he spent more than 10 months for a crime he didn’t commit.
    Other works address the situation more obliquely: for example, Titus Kaphar’s 2019 painting From a Tropical Space, in which two Black women appear with strollers with white spaces where the children should be, as if stolen from them. Krimes’s quilt Marion (2021), meanwhile, depicts an outdoor scene of the type to which an imprisoned person might wish to return, made partly from used clothing collected from incarcerated people.
    The show partly aimed to answer the question, “How do you organize a show about a fund?” In partial answer is a “Call and Response” section, devoted to acknowledgements from cultural practitioners who have received support from the fund, in the form of letters, artworks, audio, and video. After the show closes, it will remain available on Art for Justice’s website.
    See more images from the show below.
    Jesse Krimes, Marion (2021). Courtesy the artist and Ford Foundation Gallery.
    Maria Gaspar, Unblinking Eyes, Awaiting (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Ford Foundation Gallery. Photo by Sebastian Bach.
    Sherrill Roland, 168.803 (2021). Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Ford Foundation Gallery.
    The People’s Paper Co-op in collaboration with Kill Joy and PPC Fellows: Faith Bartley, Nashae Cooper, Tinika Hogan, Ivy Johnson, Janaya Pulliam, My Power Within (2021). Courtesy of The People’s Paper Co-op.
    Titus Kaphar, From a Tropical Space (2019). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
    “No Justice Without Love” is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 E 43rd St, New York, through June 30.

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    A Dozen Drawings From Leonardo da Vinci’s 1,200-Page ‘Codex Atlanticus’ Will Go on View in the U.S. for the First Time

    A dozen drawings by Leonardo da Vinci will be on view in the U.S. for the first time in a show opening this summer in Washington, D.C. They come from the Codex Atlanticus, the largest collection of drawings and writings in Italian by the legendary polymath, which stretches across some 1,200 pages over 12 volumes.  
    Leonardo maintained the Codex Atlanticus from 1478 to 1519, the year of his death, and it has been held in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana since 1637.
    An array of subjects are included in the collection, such as botany, flight, mathematics, musical instruments, and weaponry. Engineers and designers have found rich material for their work in its pages. Art historian and Leonardo expert Carlo Pedretti dubbed the codex, which spans the artist’s entire career, the most important of the master’s manuscripts. 
    Leonardo da Vinci, Hydraulic pump and fountain within a building. ⓒ Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Mondadori Portfolio.
    “Imagining the Future—Leonardo da Vinci: In the Mind of an Italian Genius” opens June 21 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, in Washington, D.C. 
    Indicating Leonardo’s great ambition, one drawing explores the concept of perpetual motion without an external energy source, along with imaginative architectural studies. Another sheet testifies to the artist’s interest in underwater exploration, showing concepts for diving machines as well as water pumps. Another contains detailed diagrams and calculations exploring mathematical principles, such as the golden ratio, in their application to art and architecture.
    Some drawings in the show can be tied to modern mechanisms, the organizers point out: Leonardo’s study for a digging machine provided inspiration for the excavating machines of today; his design for a self-propelling cart has echoes in our self-driving vehicles; and his diving apparatus influenced underwater exploration.
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    Don’t Call It Lobby Art: A Manhattan Development Is Livening Up the Street With Larger-Than-Life Works by Christopher Wool and Charles Ray

    Is it possible that the secret to successful public art is commissioning artists who don’t ordinarily make it?
    That can roughly be described as the philosophy of Jacob King, the art advisor at the center of a new dual presentation of works by Charles Ray and Christopher Wool at the eight-acre commercial complex Manhattan West, owned and developed by Brookfield Properties.
    “My whole pitch to Brookfield from the beginning was that if you’re going to be doing commissions with artists for public places, I think it’s really important to work with artists that don’t do a lot of these,” King told Artnet News. “There’s a lot of great artists that do a lot of work in lobbies but when you put an artist in a lobby that people expect to see there, they often just ignore it. I think it’s much more challenging, but also much more rewarding, to try to work with artists who haven’t done works in this context before.”
    On June 5, the sculptor Charles Ray unveiled two stainless-steel, larger-than-life figures, titled Adam and Eve (2023), on the steps outside of the Manhattan West site. Hanging in the adjacent lobby is painter Christopher Wool’s monumental 28-by-39-foot mosaic made of Venetian stone and glass, which is visible from the street through large glass windows.
    Detail of Charles Ray, Adam and Eve (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Timothy Schenck.
    King, who has advised Brookfield on art for the past seven years, said that he thought Ray and Wool, stars of the contemporary art world, would be long shots for the commissions. But when he approached Ray a few years ago, the artist immediately agreed.
    Ray said that the pandemic affected his approach to the sculpture, as did his own injuries, including a broken neck sustained during a recent car accident.
    “At the same time, I was reading the Lost Books of Eden and a history of Adam and Eve,” Ray told Artnet News during an unveiling celebration. “As I was reading and thinking about it at the the height of the pandemic, older people were dying and it was horrible.”
    The resulting work depicts an elderly man and woman, rendered in the artist’s signature stainless steel in a larger-than-life scale. “I’m very interested in this location and the civic quality,” Ray said. “I know they have to interact with the vitality. They had to look out, but not compete with the buildings, and hold their own.”
    Installation view of Christopher Wool, Crosstown Traffic (2023). Photo by Timothy Schenck.
    Wool’s mosaic, the aptly titled Crosstown Traffic (2023), marks the first time the artist has accepted a public commission. “It was such an exciting idea, to be invited and considered,” Wool said at the event.
    It also marks the first time the artist—best known for his wry black-and-white text paintings and abstract canvases—has worked in the medium. “The challenge was the scale,” he said. “I had worked with silkscreen, which has allowed me to enlarge images, and right away I started thinking about different ways of blowing something up. Mosaic seemed perfect.”
    Wool based the mosaic, with its swirls of red and black lines against a dark, cloud-like abstraction, on a drawing. “The drawing took a day and figuring out the mosaic took a month,” he said, plus another four months to fabricate it. (Artisan Fabrizio Travisanutto in Spilimbergo, Italy, just north of Venice, took “what little I said and went with it.”)
    The finished work is comprised of 140 32-square-foot panels, interlocking pieces that were put together on scaffolding.
    Artist Charles Ray at the unveiling of Adam and Eve (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
    Sabrina Kanner, head of development, design, and construction for Brookfield Properties, said that the company saw the Manhattan West site as an “ideal place” for art.
    “If you look at the topography of the site, the way the grade sort of falls away as you’re going downtown, the grade of the plaza and this public areas created sort of a perch where you could easily see art as you’re driving down Ninth Avenue or as you’re coming across from Moynihan station,” Kanner told Artnet News.
    L to R: Artist Christopher Wool, Sabrina Kanner and Jacob King at the unveiling of Crosstown Traffic (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
    “So while we had not at that point identified what the work would be,  we had committed to having a major piece of work there.”
    “I give Brookfield so much credit,” added King. “They’re will to take risks. If you’re not willing to take a bit of a risk, you’re never going to end up with a really great artwork.”
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    Looking for an Art Excursion in New York This Summer? Here Are Four Perfect Itineraries That Combine Nature and Culture

    This summer, nature is in full flower at four major art institutions around New York City: Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Met Cloisters, the New York Botanical Garden, and Storm King Art Center north of the city. Just as important as the shows themselves are your activities before and after. Here’s our cheat sheet to navigating your way around them as you savor the dual experiences. Don’t forget your walking shoes!

    Metropolitan Museum of Art“Van Gogh’s Cypresses” More

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    Dive Into Environmental Artist Alexis Rockman’s New Show of Dazzling Watercolors Celebrating the Complexities of Ocean Life

    For its first contemporary art exhibition, “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus,” the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut invited the environmental artist to work with its resident scientists and curators to create a series of 10 new watercolors inspired by the complexities of ocean life. The level of detail in each piece warrants close attention, and a key describes all the real-life species—both endangered and invasive—that are depicted, sometimes symbiotically stacked on top of each other.
    At the center of the show is a monumental 24-foot-long canvas that explores the history of human interaction with the sea, from the first early sailors to travel in hand-hewn canoes to the football-field-sized container ships that throng international waterways today.
    Working with maritime historians like Michael Harrison of the Nantucket Historical Association and the Seaport’s curator of collection Krystal Rose, Rockman created a visual timeline of maritime technologies and activities. Dramatically lit photos of historic ship models from the Mystic museum’s collection, as well as a native mishoon, or dugout canoe, loaned by the nearby Mashantucket Pequot Museum, were used as references for the painting.
    “There are 18 of our boats in that painting,” Christina Connett Brophy, the institution’s senior director of museum galleries and senior vice president of curatorial affairs, told Artnet News. “But the models are not all the same scale—some of them are enormous, and some of them are really tiny. And so you see this magnificent big ship in the painting and realize the models are six inches long.”
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Each ship also carries its own important piece of history, from the famous slave ship Amistad, to the Thomas W. Lawson, a seven-masted cargo schooner that wrecked off the coast of Cornwall in the early 20th century, causing perhaps the first large-scale manmade oil spill.
    But perhaps Rockman’s closest collaborator for the show is James Carlton, a global expert on invasive species. “He had something to do with most of the paintings, advising on different animals to include and how things move around,” Brophy said. One of the watercolors, in particular, titled Transient Passages, shows various marine life hitching a transoceanic ride on a plastic bottle.
    “A few months after Alexis finished it, a big paper came out by Jim and several of his colleagues that look at the same themes,” Brophy added. “It proved that coastal creatures carried in water ballast and dumped in the middle of the Atlantic or the Pacific, where people think won’t survive because it’s not their habitat. They are doing just fine because of the plastic waste there.”
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Finding such a surprising note of optimism, in the face of environmental catastrophe, is an overall theme of the show, which also includes a side display on “blue technology,” or alternative maritime business models that are geared towards sustainability. Some examples include bio-plastics made from algae or designer shoe leather made from lionfish.
    “What I love about this series is that some of the themes are really difficult—I mean, they are extinct and invasive species, and oil spills and all kinds of things that are pretty tough—but the paintings are so beautiful and colorful. They seem almost celebratory of the animals that they’re depicting,” Brophy said. “And there are really smart people out there in the world who are trying to find solutions, and they’re doing amazing work.”
    Rockman and Brophy will attend a book signing for the exhibition catalog on World Oceans Day, June 8, at Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York.
    See images of the exhibition, as well as Rockman working on the centerpiece for show, below.
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Alexis Rockman, Oceanus (2022).
    Alexis Rockman, Benthos (2022).
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Alexis Rockman, Tsunami (2022).
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Alexis Rockman (center) with works from his “Oceanus” series in the studio.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Adam Reich.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” is on view at the Mystic Seaport Museum, 75 Greenmanville Ave, Mystic, Connecticut, through next spring.
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    The Noguchi Museum Paid Its Employees to Contribute to Its Summer Staff Art Show. See the Works Here

    Something radical is taking place at the Noguchi Museum in Queens. Gallery attendants, curators, project managers, handlers, educators, and registrars have taken over to stage an onsite exhibition of staff artworks. What’s more, they’re getting paid to do so.
    To say the more than two dozen works on show at “A Living Mechanism,” ranging from paintings to experimental installations to intricate sculptures, are good seems a disservice, as if to ignore the well-known reality that American museums are staffed full of jobbing, hopeful artists (indeed, most everyone on display here holds an arts MFA). But yes, the works are strong and as diverse in scope and subject as the individuals who make the Noguchi tick.
    It’s certainly a show art institution laborers deserve. Amid the George Floyd Protests of 2020 with many museums enduring lockdowns, institutions affixed socially conscious statements to their websites and beamed out Zoom seminars on matters of inclusivity and equity. Change was coming. Gatekeepers, it seemed, might loosen their grip.
    Not that “A Living Mechanism” is some good will gesture from on high. It was negotiated and fought for by the museum’s Anti-Oppression Committee, a process co-curator Orlando Lacro said proved shockingly successful. “I have never heard of a museum paying participants to do a staff show,” Lacro told Artnet News. “It’s not a performative gesture by the museum; it was a gallery attendant project, fought for by gallery attendants. We were handed a budget with no strings attached, full creative and logistical control. It’s an example of how the staff makes the museum what it is.”
    The show’s name not only speaks to the collaborative manner in which it was conceived and executed, but also the spirit in which Isamu Noguchi worked. From Greenwich Village to the hamlet of Mure in Shikoku, Japan, Noguchi was forever in search of collaborators—indeed, the museum held a focused exhibition on the subject in 2010. Shamysia Waterman, the show’s co-curator, said Noguchi’s ability to connect with a wide range of people explains the diversity of the art and its appeal.
    “’A Living Mechanism’ harnesses Noguchi’s ethos of relying on every part of space in order to create a harmonious environment,” Waterman said. “His essence lives on.”
    Here are five artists on display at the Noguchi Museum.

    Harumi Ori, I am Here @ Green St & Spring St, New York, NY (2021)
    Harumi Ori, I Am Here at Green St and Spring St New York NY (2021). Photo courtesy the Noguchi Museum.
    In New York, orange is the color of steam cones, a portion of the city flag, a dubious slice of pizza. But in Japan, the color is sacred and for the past two decades, Ori has been playing with this contrast. In sparse yet detailed works, she repurposes orange industrial mesh to capture single moments on New York streets. “The connections between individuals and groups, and the landscapes they pass through and share are revealed,” Ori said. “It is the beauty of these relationships that I wish to express.”

    Shinsuke Aso, Getting out of a rut (2023)
    Shinsuke Aso, Getting out of a rut (2023). Photo courtesy the Noguchi Museum.
    Aso has an eye for photographing the humorous side of everyday objects. His collage works are equally playful and bring together discarded objects in pieces that ask viewers “open-ended questions.” Getting out of a rut places a watch, an oversized playing card, and a plastic hanger on sections of acrylic paper—objects all found onsite at the museum, where the Japan-born artist works as a shop associate.

    Jared Friedman, Withdrawal (Automated Teller Machine 1) (2023)
    Jared Friedman, Withdrawal Automated Teller Machine I (2023). Photo courtesy The Noguchi Museum.
    Forget the city’s postcard architectures; Friedman focuses on the curious shapes of the small, the overlooked, the boringly familiar. On canvas, rug, and astroturf he paints ubiquitous toilet cubicles, white cardboard takeaway boxes, four leaf tile vents. The hope, he said, is to question our sentimentality. It’s easy to picture the bodega street corner onto which his grotty ATM machine is fixed, its blue screen light luring, its stickers illegible.

    Johnathan Glass, Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn (2022)
    Jonathan Glass, Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn (2022). Photo courtesy The Noguchi Museum.
    Glass is a particular sort of jazz aficionado. He knows his way around the club circuit (Village Vanguard is his favorite) and boasts a tasteful collection of records, but what he loves best are the frenetic pen and ink drawings he sketches in real time at shows. For Glass, capturing sound means mimicking the movements of the musicians themselves. It’s all there, the straggles of hair, the concerted expressions, the eye contact, the wobbling strings. Here, he shows two works: Robert Glasper’s Dinner Party and Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn.

    Yali Romagoza, Pain of Cuba, Body I am (2022)
    Yali Romagoza, Pain of Cuba Body I am (2022). Photo courtesy Noguchi Museum.
    The Cuban-born interdisciplinary artist Yali Romagoza has an alter-ego and at the Noguchi Museum, it’s laying on a bed of sand staring at the ceiling. Above it, the sounds of lapsing water and poetry accompany a video projection of a restless body awash on a darkened shore. It’s Romagoza’s response to the disorientation she has experienced since moving the U.S. in 2011 and the enduring longing she feels for home.
    “A Living Mechanism: The Noguchi Museum Staff Exhibition” is on view at the Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Queens, New York, through June 15.
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    Art Duo Komar and Melamid Were Laughed Out of the Soviet Union. Are They Having the Last Laugh on Us?

    Going into the large Komar & Melamid retrospective currently at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers, I already knew the wily, proto-postmodern art style that this artist duo brought with them when they emigrated from the U.S.S.R. at the end of the 1970s. Above all, I knew such calling-card projects as “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” and “The People’s Choice,” characterized by a spirit that is brainy and satirical in a way that at times almost becomes a kind of deadpan wackiness.
    But I’m not sure I understood the overall nature of the game. I’m not sure I got that their humor wasn’t just their way of making a serious point, but might well reflect an unnerving skepticism that there were serious points to make.
    For me, seeing the twists and turns of the Komar & Melamid corpus surveyed overall (the duo broke up in 2003 and they now work separately) is something like a moment of zooming out from a maze, seeing it from above, and realizing suddenly that there is no way out.
    Signing Slogans
    The legacy of the Cold War makes the “dissident artist” narrative an appealing hook for any writing on Komar & Melamid. It was certainly part of what made their careers in the States. The catalogue of this show even suggests that the duo’s signature jokes about government propaganda “produced a strong undermining effect on the prestige of Soviet power and advanced its fall.”
    This is a bit much. They certainly were stifled by the authorities (they were part of the infamous “Bulldozer Exhibition” of ’74, when authorities demolished an exhibition of non-official art in a park). But an essay in the catalogue for a previous Zimmerli exhibition, Moscow Conceptualism in Context, states plainly that the small independent scene of non-official artists—very much including Komar & Melamid—was “largely invisible to the general public until they started to be exhibited in the West in the early 1980s.” As a consequence, it says, they “should not be equated with the Soviet dissidents, who relentlessly publicly opposed the Communist authorities.”
    Komar & Melamid, We Were Born to Make the Fairytale Come True (from the “Sots-Art” series) (1972). Photo by Ben Davis.
    Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid met studying at the Stroganoff Art Academy, both graduating in 1967. At the time, a relative thaw let news of developments in Western contemporary art seep through. Komar remembers getting a sense of Conceptual art “based on scattered quotations from Joseph Kosuth and Lucy Lippard” and “Soviet publications that criticized decadent Western movements.” (The crushing of the Prague Spring in ’68 produced a fresh crackdown on information.)
    In 1972, Komar & Melamid’s first and still most-generative creation as a duo would be a movement they styled “Sots-Art.” In a nutshell, the idea was to reframe state propaganda in the same way as Pop art reframed ads and comics—a great formula, you have to admit. But whereas Pop art was embraced in the U.S. as a frolicsome affirmation of the vibrancy of the post-war consumer society, Sots-Art remained utterly marginal in its homeland.
    Its materially modest vibe reflects this. It is represented in the Zimmerli by a room of funny little paintings, inserting images of the artists and their wives that goof on the idea of Soviet Man and Woman, plus stark white-on-red banners with slogans like “OUR GOAL IS COMMUNISM!” and “WE WERE BORN TO MAKE THE FAIRYTALE COME TRUE.”
    The key detail of these latter works is that Komar & Melamid stamped their own names beneath these arid exhortations, transforming them, through the magic of artistic irony, into arch works of word art. The joke, of course, is these kinds of slogans, which were everywhere in the streets, were so aesthetically flat and ideologically hollow that no one would ever want to claim them. (“The paradox consists in the fact that the only slogans that have survived from the Soviet period are slogans that are signed ‘Komar and Melamid,’” Komar remembers wryly.)
    Pretty funny! But who, finally, were these subversions aimed at within the tightly controlled civil society of the U.S.S.R.? Melamid puts it bluntly, in an interview printed in the new catalogue: “We were addressing the West. We weren’t talking to the Soviet people.”
    All Wrong
    The meretricious nature of official Soviet culture is part of any Western observer’s latent understanding of culture behind the Iron Curtain. What’s more interesting to me is how the work of Komar & Melamid also expressed alienation from the imaginable alternatives to state-sanctioned Communist art.
    Importantly, in their most generative early-‘70s period, Komar & Melamid were mocking critics not just of official art in Moscow, but also—and maybe especially—of the handfuls of active non-conformist artists (most notably the recently passed Ilya Kabakov) who formed an alternative scene. What makes Komar & Melamid unique is just how deeply they imbibed and embodied the cynicism nurtured in the clunky, bureaucratic world of Breshnev-era Russia during the so-called Era of Stagnation—cynicism that metastasized into a disidentification from any positive ideology for art at all.
    Komar & Melamid despised the apartment-bound intellectualism of its non-conformist art scene, with its posture of ethereal spirituality. They mocked spiritual claims for art in works like Circle, Square, Triangle (1975), which took the ideal abstract geometry of the square, triangle, and circle, and presented these with goofy texts advertising their magical healing abilities.
    Komar & Melamid, Post-Art #2 (from the “Post-Art” series) (1973). Photo by Ben Davis.
    For that matter, remarkably, Komar & Melamid were suspicious of big, optimistic claims about Western art as a progressive force as well. Such a sentiment that finds programmatic expression (almost too programmatic) in their “Post Art” series. Made in the early ‘70s while still working in the hermetically sealed Moscow semi-underground, these depict Pop art works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as flaking, fallen frescos, as if viewed from a future where their glamor had turned to dust.
    Men of the Zeitgeist
    In the late ‘70s, Komar & Melamid made the jump out of their home country, first to Israel (after a period of being held in bureaucratic limbo) and then to New York, where they continued spinning out new projects at a brisk clip.
    There’s a moment in “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” the late Janet Malcolm’s long, biting New Yorker essay on Ingrid Sischy’s tenure as editor of Artforum, in which Sischy takes Malcolm to visit Komar & Melamid’s studio to show her the deeper end of the New York art scene, why it all matters. Here is the passage I always remember:
    They start another animated debate, one that soon gets into art theory, the condition of art today, the situation of art in New York. As this argument, too, begins to peter out, Melamid sighs and says, “We sit here, and we talk, and I think, ‘Where is life in all this? Life! Life!’ We go at things obliquely, to the side,” making a gesture of ineffectuality with his hand, “instead of straight, like this,” pounding his fist into his palm. He continues, emotionally, “Last year, I woke up in a hotel room in Amsterdam. There was a woman in my bed. I looked in the mirror and saw that my eyebrows were gray. I saw that I was forty.”
    “You got that from Chekhov, you faker,” I say to myself. I am no longer charmed by this pair. I find their performance tiresome, calculated. I look over at Sischy, who is enjoying herself, who thinks they are “great,” and I ponder anew the question of authenticity that has been reverberating through the art world of the eighties.
    The assessment is biting. But also, to call Komar & Melamid fakers… well, I can’t help but think that Malcolm didn’t quite get the nature of the phenomenon she was dealing with.
    Of course, a New Yorker writer, and the U.S. public in general, wanted from them a performance of Russian intellectualism and dissident authenticity. Perhaps that was a role they were playing for Malcolm and Sischy.
    But in Russia, as they themselves remembered, they were known as clowns: “‘It’s a joke, it’s amusing—they’re funny guys—but it’s not art’—that was the general opinion,” Melamid remembers. The lesson that Komar & Melamid brought with them to New York from Moscow was that all postures of artistic authenticity were a pose, a posture, a game.
    In general, one of the things the Zimmerli show makes vivid is how Komar & Melamid willfully refused to ever repeat themselves, abandoning each new art-game as soon as they created it. It’s a tic probably to the detriment of building a “Komar & Melamid” art brand—but that was the point in a way: It emerged from how they generalized their contempt for the deadness of the art-ideologies all around them in Moscow into a sense that being committed to any one art-ideology was inherently deadening.
    Socialist Un-realism
    At the time of the New Yorker article, Komar & Melamid were at the peak of their relevance, with their “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” series launching that year at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. These were adroitly painted, pokerfaced spoofs of the Old Master manqué style of Socialist Realism.
    You see, for instance, fatherly tyrant Joseph Stalin being visited by a flowy-haired nude muse tracing the shadow of his profile on the wall. That’s an allusion to the classical myth of the origin of art from Pliny, and the large canvas is called The Origins of Socialist Realism (1982-83).
    Paintings from Komar & Melamid’s “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” series. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Robert Hughes praised the show in Time for nailing the “correct borsht-and-gravy colors of official Soviet art of 30 years ago.” Yet the truth is, Komar & Melamid’s tenebrous paintings looked nothing much like the sunny romanticism of the classic period of Socialist Realism. Nor did “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” satirize then-contemporary official art in the U.S.S.R., which had adopted the so-called “severe style.”
    Basically, this suite of paintings has to be seen as the equivalent of Melamid calculatedly channeling Chekhov’s “The Looking Glass” for Janet Malcolm. “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” is a canny game played with the Cold War U.S. audience’s ideas of Russian art. As with a lot of Komar & Melamid’s work, when you really look into it, its ironies somehow turn back on you for having expected something serious.
    Poll Workers
    Another example of the same nesting-doll irony: In the 1990s, Komar & Melamid would realize their most-widely known work, “The People’s Choice.” These were paintings based on a series of polls, where they gathered data about the most-liked and least-liked kinds of art from publics in various countries, and then created works that gathered together all the best and worst traits. (By this method, almost all countries end up preferring figurative art where a historical figure is near a body of water, and hating some form of geometric abstraction.)
    Study for Komar & Melamid, The People’s Choice: Canada (1995-97). Photo by Ben Davis.
    I think of “The People’s Choice” as the ultimate distillation of the best of Komar & Melamid: needlingly funny, possessed of a kind of canny and theatrical cynicism, and inhabiting artistic styles as a series of strategic games.
    It hails from the End of History, post-Cold War era. It can be, and has been, read as carrying on a joke about the illusion of a “People’s Art” from Soviet times. But it maybe even works better as being about the globalization of corporate-optimized, focus-grouped market culture in the Neoliberal ‘90s. It is thus a nicely plastic vehicle for the duo’s all-sided skepticism.
    But, as with “Nostalgic Socialist Realism,” when you really think about “The People’s Choice” your sense of the exact point that it is making starts to slip away.
    Is it about the silliness of mass taste, mocking the comedy of lowest-common-denominator art? Plenty of people read it that way! Or is it, on the contrary, making fun of experts trying to discern the “people’s” taste? After all, the images it conjures of what different national publics might want are clearly based on weird extrapolation and wishful amalgamation.
    History Lessons?
    You get a feeling that some of the animating specificity of Komar & Melamid’s work vanished as the Cold War context faded into the rear view. A series from 1999 making fun of the tropes of patriotic American art the way they had with “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” doesn’t really land. Meanwhile, once the end of the Soviet Union made “dissident Soviet artists” less of a hot topic, some of the interest in Komar & Melamid vanished as well.
    So, what do we do with this body if work now, some two decades after the curtain came down on the Komar & Melamid Show?
    The Zimmerli retrospective was originally going to be called “You Are Feeling Good!”, a title that captures their humor (it’s from a slogan they ironically appropriated for one of their first Sots-Art banners). Instead, the exhibition arrived as “A Lesson in History,” with this more sober tone reflecting today’s renewed geopolitical conflict with Putin’s Russia, and the need to pre-address any questions about showing Russian artists by framing their work in relationship to the legacy of totalitarianism.
    For myself, I do think that there is a lesson to be drawn from this history, I just don’t think it’s this one.
    Asked about final meaning of their work in the catalogue, Melamid volunteers this: “Everything is meaningless.” If the Komar & Melamid corpus resonates now, it won’t really be because it shows us some tradition of heroic satire in Russia. I’d think the better shot would be because people in the U.S. might actually identify with the feeling of being in a world of stagnation, where the ruling ideologies feel arbitrary and senseless, the opposing ones feel cloistered and self-indulgent, and as a consequence the thought that “it’s all a game” becomes more and more seductive.
    “Komar & Melamid: A Lesson in History” is on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J., through June 16, 2023. 
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