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      At 91, Painter Sally Cook Has Finally Shed Her Outsider Status. Why Did the Art World Take This Long to Embrace Her?

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      In Sally Cook’s 1975 canvas Self Portrait Five Images, the painter and poet depicts herself in different decades of her life—one in the then-present, and two each in the past and future. The youngest version of the artist is the only one not shown standing inside her mother’s parlor; she is, instead, framed through a window: literally on the outside looking in. 
      “She’s the artist,” Cook, now 91, recently said of her younger painted self. “She’ll never get in.”  
      For a long time, that’s how Cook viewed herself in relationship to the art world: an outsider. She felt that way in the 1950s, as a woman trying to carve out a place for herself in New York’s male-dominated 10th Street scene, and again after moving back to her hometown of Buffalo, New York in the 1960s, when the city’s insular arts institutions disregarded her charming, domestic figuration as craft.  
      “I was treated like a non-person,” she said, chip still on her shoulder.   
      Self Portrait Five Images is one of several standouts in “Where Fantasy Has Bloomed, Painting and Poetry since the 1960s,” an excellent survey of Cook’s work on now through July 8 at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. Included is work from three decades of her career—a time period that saw her switch styles, cities, and priorities. It expands on an exhibition that opened at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries in mid-March of 2020, only to be shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic days later.  
      For Cook, who has not been the beneficiary of many breaks, the abrupt closure of the 2020 exhibition must have arrived like a devastating quietus to her career. But now, thanks to independent curator Julie Reiter Greene, who organized the current show, Cook finally got the victory lap she long deserved. “I hope it helps cement her legacy,” Greene said.
      Sally Cook, Self Portrait Five Images (1975). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
      The last time Cook showed in New York, she was living there, renting a room on the Bowery and frequenting the Cedar Tavern and The Club, where art stars like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning held court. Cook shared these artists’ interest in pushing the limits of abstraction, but not their egos or ambitions.  
      “I was interested in abstract expressionism as an idea, but the thing is, nobody wanted to talk about it! They just wanted to move as quickly as possible from 10th Street to 57th Street,” she said, referring to the group of old-guard, commercial galleries that gathered uptown. 
      After a pair of group shows, Cook had her first solo exhibition at Phoenix Gallery on 10th Street in 1959, then a second one there in 1961. Two abstract canvases from the latter exhibition are on view now at Eric Firestone: Opalescence and Liver of the Roses, both completed in 1960. They recall the floral palette and emotive gesturalism of Joan Mitchell, albeit with a density of composition that Mitchell didn’t embrace until later in her career. Cook, for her part, never left an inch of canvas unfilled. 
      Sally Cook, Opalescence (1960). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
      That wasn’t always a popular choice. She said it was these same stylistic flourishes that, back in the 1950s and 60s, irked her contemporaries—particularly those indoctrinated by the de rigueur formalism of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. “Why do you paint to the edge of the canvas? Why do you use so much color?” she recalled contemporaries asking of her work, her voice inflected with an imitative paternalism. 
      “Sally felt that there were rules in place—very dogmatic rules—that she had to follow, and that there wasn’t room for discussion on how to push those boundaries,” Greene explained, noting that Cook has “always been somebody who questions limitations and boundaries.” 
      After a third solo effort at Camino Gallery—another 10th Street fixture—Cook decamped from Manhattan to Buffalo. “I learned a lot,” she said of her New York experience, “enough to know that I wanted to leave.” 
      Sally Cook, The Bird Who Died From Sleeping Too Much (1967). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
      Back home, the artist’s work grew cleaner and tighter, evolving into hard-edged geometric abstractions. Graphic blocks of color filled her canvases, but even then you could see her fondness for figuration starting to peak through. Take The Bird Who Died From Sleeping Too Much (1967), also included in “Where Fantasy Has Bloomed.”
      Based on a recurring dream related by a friend, the painting features stacked gray triangles at its top—a blackbird deconstructed into shapes. Below it is a band of red paint—a “thin line of rage,” Cook called it. The painting is, in both color and tone, one of the artist’s darker works. 
      By the early 1970s, figuration fully entered Cook’s practice; so did a newfound sense of humor and intimacy. She began painting pets and friends and members of the Buffalo art scene, often situating her subjects in funky clothes amidst a rich tableau of personal effects: favorite furniture, books, rugs, art. Much like the theatrical paintings of Florine Stettheimer (who was also a poet), Cook’s portraits double as studies of class codes and social etiquette
      Cook also embraced her own avowed struggles with perspective, flattening her scenes to emphasize their uncanniness. In a commissioned 1970 portrait of collector Charles Penney, founder of Buffalo’s Burchfield Penney Art Center, the subject towers over his prized possessions, including Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, and Robert Goodnough. (Here again, Cook paints herself standing outside, framed through a window in Penney’s house.) 
      “The flatness is, for me, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Greene. “There’s an intentional deception and cheekiness. It’s tied to her play between surface and depth. You think you see everything about her work on the surface… and yet, there are so many layers and references and this absurdity and uncanniness to the way in which she’s capturing human experience.” 
      Sally Cook, Gypsy At The Carnival of Life (1976). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
      Cook’s efforts from this period seemingly shared little in common with her geometric experiments of the preceding years, let alone the all-over abstractions from her time in New York. Whereas those earlier artworks had only a distant, symbolic relationship to the world, her representational paintings felt almost defiantly idiosyncratic, the work of an artist whose search for meaning led her through the looking glass—and the gatekept enclaves of the capital A art world—back to her own life.  
      She began to center herself in the frame—often literally, in the form of self-portraits, but sometimes slyly too, through symbols encoded with personal meaning. Occasionally, she even included depictions of older paintings in new ones. That’s the case with her 1983 painting God Gave a Crow a Piece of Cheese; He Turned Around and Gave Me These. Named after a Chekhov story, it features Cook surrounded by examples of past work, many painted from memory. 
      “I stuffed into my painting as many of my works as I could recall,” Cook said in a story recounted by Greene. “While their colors and shapes jostle and create a community, I am alone. No one has ever given me any cheese. A bit of cheese can no doubt satisfy a crow, but this crow knows better than to depend on it.” 
      Sally Cook, God Gave a Crow a Piece of Cheese; He Turned Around and Gave Me These (1983). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
      “Sometimes she’ll depict herself, sometimes she’ll depict her paintings, but it’s all her,” explained Greene. “I think it was about legacy and the canon and wondering if her work would end up in museums, or if she would just need to keep presenting her own work, keep painting it back in to say, ‘Look at what I’ve been producing.’” 
      Cook pulled the same trick with Self Portrait Five Images, where early her abstractions Blue Green Forever (1960) and A Flag for Delores IV (1965) are shown hanging on the Pepto Bismol-pink walls next to the various versions of herself. (Those same paintings flank Five Images at Eric Firestone too—a clever installation trick from Greene.) 
      Though Cook may sympathize with the younger image of herself in that painting, it’s the oldest one she most resembles now—and not just because of age. With her hands at her sides and eyes fixed on the viewer, the elder figure is firmly—finally—on the inside.  
      When asked if she feels that way now, with a survey of her life’s work on view in the city where it started, Cook simply said, “Yes,” then paused. “Thank God I lived long enough to see it!” she added, only half joking. 
      “Sally Cook: Where Fantasy Has Bloomed, Painting and Poetry since the 1960s” is on view now through July 8 at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. 

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      The Venice Biennale Has Announced the Highly Anticipated Curatorial Theme of Its 2024 Art Exhibition

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      The curator and artistic director of the 60th Venice Biennale, Adriano Pedrosa, has announced the driving theme of next year’s exhibition. It will explore the notion of the foreigner, and center its focus on those on the margins, namely exiles, émigrés, and outsiders.
      The title and theme, “Foreigners Everywhere,” was announced today, June 22, in Venice by Pedrosa. The artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo hails from Brazil, and is not only the biennale’s first Latin American curator, but, more remarkably, its first to come from the Southern Hemisphere.  The mammoth art event in Italy is set to run from April 20 to November 24, 2024.
      The concept of the 2024 show has a dual meaning for Pedrosa. The planned theme not only suggests that wherever we go in the world we will encounter those that we perceive to be foreigners, but also that “no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly and deep down inside a foreigner yourself,” according to the curator. He added that artists are no strangers to this feeling.
      The title is borrowed from a series of works by the conceptual “collective artist” Claire Fontaine, which was founded in Paris in 2004 by the Italian artist Fulvia Carnevale and the British artist James Thornhill, who are currently based in Palermo, Italy.
      Their series Foreigners Everywhere consists of simple neon signs with the slogan written in different languages. In each case, the term carries a strange ambiguity over whether we should read the statement as fact or threat, although it was taken from the name of Stranieri Ovunque (as the phrase translates in Italian), a Turin-based anarchist collective known for its anti-racist activism in the early 2000s.
      Tourists and locals enter the Biennale’s Central Pavilion during the 59th International Art Exhibition on April 20, 2022 in Venice, Italy. Photo: Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images
      Pedrosa told press that “the backdrop for Claire Fontaine’s work is a world full of multiple crises concerning the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories, and borders, which reflect the perils and pitfalls of language, translation, ethnicity [in] expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, wealth, and freedom.”
      For his curated exhibition, Pedrosa promises to focus on artists who are immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, exiled, and refugees, especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. As the Italian translation of “foreigner” as “straniero” shows, however, the word also evokes the idea of a stranger more generally. To this end, the exhibition will also include all manner of marginalized artists, including those that are queer, designated “outsider,” or indigenous and therefore “frequently treated like a foreigner in their own land.”
      For many artists, this status of “foreigner” drives the themes or narratives in their work, but Pedrosa was keen to note that other artists “delve into more formal issues with their own foreign accent.” Works that reflect this mode of innovation will appear throughout the exhibition, as will historical 20th century works from underrepresented modernist movements that flourished throughout the Global South. Finally, a spotlight will also be placed on the Italian artistic diaspora that emigrated to Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Arab world among other places, where they contributed to the development of modernism internationally.
      The Venice Biennale is the art world’s biggest international event—there were 80 national pavilions in 2022—and it is always welcoming new exhibitors. The Republic of Benin will participate for the first time at the 60th edition next year.
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      With Ceremonies and Rituals, the Liverpool Biennial Takes an Unflinching Look at the City’s Participation in the Slave Trade

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      Large identical steel structures, reminiscent of the bottom of a ship’s hull, tower over viewers in a dimly lit room at the Tate Liverpool. They are smooth at the bottom, with hollowed out centers, while their top halves are coarse, as if their maker had extracted these forms directly from the water.
      The trio of sculptures signify gateways, shelters, or sailing route between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas where up to 2.4 million enslaved Africans died. For many people visiting this year’s Liverpool Biennial, on view until September, this weighty artwork by artist Torkwase Dyson will be the first piece they encounter—and it sets the tone for the rest of the contemporary art festival.
      The 12th edition of Liverpool Biennial, titled “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Thing,” explores the dark relationship between Liverpool, slavery, and colonialism. While the U.K.’s history in the slave trade is far from unknown, many may be unaware that much of the wealth of Liverpool during the 18th century stemmed from its involvement with slavery, surpassing Bristol and London as the slave-trading capital in Britain by the 1740s. 
      For “uMoya” (which means “spirit, breath, air, climate, and wind” in isiZulu), South African curator Khanyisile Mbongwa has invited 35 artists from across six continents whose work, as she described it in her opening remarks, encompasses “emancipation practices.” The curator noted that the biennial is an attempt to return “that which has been lost and taken from those who have been silenced or forgotten.”
      Torkwase Dyson, Liquid a Place (2021). Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty
      Part of this return is the meaningful renegotiation of spaces with colonial histories. There is the Cotton Exchange, which was the epicentre of the global cotton trade, and the Tobacco Warehouse, a 14-storey building where imported rum and tobacco were once stored.
      From its first installation to its last, the biennial does what it set out to do: it reminds Britain and the rest of the world of Liverpool’s colonial past. It does this by showing work by a set of vastly different artists. That said, there are rare moments that probe the city as it is today. Melanie Manchot’s film project is one of the few moments where the exhibition deals with Liverpool’s contemporary issues: Using professional actors and people in the local recovery community, Manchot’s work STEPHEN (2023) explores mental health and addiction in the city through a series of works, which culminate in an hour-long final piece. 
      Among those artists at the Tate, one of the exhibition’s most well-known locations, is the towering British painter Lubaina Himid. The wall reserved for Himid is one of the few instances throughout the biennial dedicated to paintings that engage with subversive notions of the sea. Between the Two my Heart is Balanced (1991) reimagines a 19th-century James Tissot painting—instead of a white British soldier and two white women on a boat, we find two Black women ripping up maps. In Act One, No Maps (1991), two Black women at the opera look out onto a seascape.
      Edgar Calel, Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge) (2021). Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty
      Beyond this, much of the biennial is devoted to video and sculptural pieces that are often ceremonial in nature. In Guatemalan artist Edgar Calel’s installation, The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge (2021), various fruit and vegetables have been strategically placed atop stones as part of a private ritual that took place during installation.
      The public artwork at Liverpool’s historic Princes Dock, titled Ali sa be sa be (2023) (meaning “a large rock wall” in the Rukai language) by artist Eleng Luluan is inspired by the artist’s upbringing as part of the indigenous Rukai community in south Taiwan. The bulbous woven structure portrays the legend of the birth of the founder of Rukai, who is believed to have been born from a pottery jar protected by two snakes. 
      Before it was sent and after it arrived at its location in Liverpool, Luluan’s translator, Apple, says they performed a “ritual of incarnation” on the work. If you caught Luluan’s piece right after the U.K. side of said ritual, among other things, you’d find various grains, slightly singed cigarettes, and foliage in front of it.
      Eleng Luluan, Ngialibalibade to the Lost Myth, (2023). Installation view at Princes Dock, Liverpool Biennial 2023. Photography by Rob Battersby. Courtesy Liverpool Biennial
      Additionally, the British-Nigerian artist Ranti Bam’s sculptural series Ifa (2021-23) is soft in its expression but still powerful. The piece made for Our Lady and Saint Nicholas Church Garden—the burial location of Liverpool’s first Black resident, a former slave—uses abstract sculptures formed by hugging clay structures as they harden, a process which Bam told me began one morning when she fell onto her sculptures “in supplication.” 
      The name references two Yoruba words: ifá, a pre-colonial system of divination, and fa, which means “to draw” or “to pull” something. “These works conflate to mean drawing the divine close,” Bam said. Also subtle yet potent is Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s Respire (Liverpool) (2023) at FACT Liverpool, a multi-screen video work that commits itself to the idea of Black people breathing freely as a form of liberation by showcasing locals breathing through red balloons.
      In contrast, in the Tobacco Warehouse, The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu (2022), a performance by Albert Ibokwe Khoza, slaps you in the face. In it, Khoza exposes the shameful legacy of Black human circuses by tying up audience members and dressing people up in monkey masks while forcing them to dance. 
      Albert Ibokwe Khoza, The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu, 2023. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tobacco Warehouse. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty
      Khoza’s show is unpredictable, absurd and at points darkly humorous, with its only downfall being that most exhibition-goers will not be able to experience the hauntingly magnificent performance live. Instead, they will find remnants of the event as an installation, including a shrine featuring cow bones, photography on the walls, and tutus hanging from the ceiling. After fully experiencing Khoza’s piece, it’s hard to imagine that these leftovers will provide the same effect, but that’s an inevitable byproduct of such a masterpiece.
      At the end of the biennial, there are two questions still left unanswered. After all that has happened, where are we now? And, consequently, where do we go from there? Maybe that’s intentional. Perhaps those are ones for us to think about, now aided with knowledge of the city’s sordid hiwstory.
      The Liverpool Biennial runs until September 17.
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      Artechouse’s New Immersive Show Weaves NASA Imagery Into a Psychedelic Journey Through the Cosmos. See the Eye-Popping Art Here

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      Back in 2007, NASA TV released a video series called “Beyond the Light” to educate the public on the work of Chandra, its space-based telescope that used X-ray light to, as the narrator dramatically put it, “explore the most menacing and magnificent features of the cosmos and reveal what our eyes can’t.”
      Fifteen years on, NASA has a new multi-billion-dollar piece of kit orbiting earth, the James Webb Space Telescope, and its media output has been given a considerable upgrade. It’s unveiled a psychedelic new experience, courtesy of a collaboration with Artechouse, the multi-location immersive exhibition pioneer that boasts best-in-class projection technology.
      Debuting in the converted confines of Chelsea Market’s century-old boiler room, “Beyond the Light,” which runs through August 31, is the product of extensive collaboration between Artechouse’s audio-visual technicians and a range of NASA experts, including astrophysicists and those from its own visualization studio.
      Still from “Beyond the Light.” Photo: courtesy Artechouse.
      “We believe art, science, and technology can come together to offer a fascinating experience,” Sandro Kereselidze, Artechouse’s chief creative officer, said in a statement. “This exhibition takes science and data that already exists and brings it to life artistically in a way that’s never been done before.”
      The star may be the dazzling galatical data captured by NASA’s newest telescope, much of which is presented in a 25-minute-long video (or as Artechouse calls it, “a cinematic journey through a captivating audio-visual interpretation of how we have experienced light over time”). But the exhibition also takes an artistic approach to multiple aspects of the 65-year-old U.S. agency’s cosmic activities.
      This includes the cycles of the moon and mankind’s folkloric obsession with our nearest neighbor. There’s an exploration of how today’s technology-reliant world would be impacted by a major solar storm, or the Carrington Event as it is known by scientists in reference to the 1859 solar flare. Short answer: the electrical infrastructure collapses and people suffer.
      Still from “Beyond the Light.” Photo: courtesy Artechouse.
      Also of interest is an inquiry into the minds of the five Mars Rovers by generative artist Gene Kogan. During their missions, the planetary exploration devices were put to sleep so as to conserve battery. Kogan imagines what the machines might have dreamt of—a project with echoes of Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations.
      Artechouse has emerged strongly out of the pandemic launching a series of mega-sensory spectacles that have drawn crowds and considerable revenue (an adult ticket to “Beyond the Light” is $25). It has fallen prey in some corners of being an expensive place to snap social media photos (its most recent show, “Magentaverse,” explores the Pantone color of the year). Despite the detractors, its latest show is very colorful and looks cool.
      See more images from “Beyond the Light” below.
      A still from “Beyond the Light.” Photo: courtesy Artechouse.
      A still from “Beyond the Light.” Photo: courtesy Artechouse.
      A still from “Beyond the Light.” Photo: courtesy Artechouse.
      A still from “Beyond the Light.” Photo: courtesy Artechouse.
      “Beyond the Light” is on view at Artechouse, Chelsea Market, 439 W 15th St, New York, through August 31.
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      In Pictures: Georg Baselitz Pairs His Paintings With Old Masters—Especially Nudes—for a Museum Show in Vienna

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      “Like wallpaper for the Old Masters, that’s what my pictures shall be,” painter Georg Baselitz said about his current show at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, in which he engages in a visual dialogue with artists including Lucas Cranach, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and the Mannerists (who painted at the court of Emperor Rudolph II, focusing on the nude figure).
      “The concept of the exhibition is also a new highlight in Georg Baselitz‘s exhibition history,” said director general Sabine Haag in a statement. “He immediately chose a direct encounter of his works with the works of the Old Masters, in particular Mannerism. Frame by frame, opposite, above and below each other, in the same rooms, in the same visual axes.”
      The German painter selected 73 of his own works, dating from the past five decades, to intersperse with 40 works from the museum. It includes loans from renowned institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Albertina, Vienna; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. 
      “Baselitz: Naked Masters” exhibition view. © KHM-Museumsverband
      “The works are about the nudity of the painter and his wife, Elke, who has always been his only model to this day,” curator Andreas Zimmermann said a press release. “They include the late pictures—up to four meters wide—that address physicality and age, which are striking in their concomitant fragility and monumentality. The works shown in the exhibition are also a document to the painter’s mutability: finger paintings, bold brushstrokes, pictures that are light as a feather, and, most recently, collages. The element of surprise, the perpetual re-discovery of the method of painting is one of the core structural principles in the artist’s oeuvre.”
      The show is open until June 25. See more images from it below.
      Frans Floris, The Last Judgement, 1565. Museum Vienna, Picture Gallery. © KHM-Museumsverband
      Georg Baselitz, Where To, 2017. Munich, Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds. © Georg Baselitz 2023, photo Jochen Littkemann, Berlin.
      Titian and workshop, Diana and Callisto, ca. 1566. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Picture Gallery. © KHM-Museumsverband
      “Baselitz: Naked Masters” exhibition view. © KHM-Museumsverband
      Georg Baselitz, Nylon Parade, 2022. Private collection. © Georg Baselitz 2023, photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin.
      Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Fall: Adam, 1510/20. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Picture Gallery. © KHM-Museumsverband.
      Georg Baselitz, Finger Painting – Female Nude, 1972. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. © Georg Baselitz 2023, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, photo: Finn Brøndum.
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      At the Sustainability-Focused Helsinki Biennial, Art, Tech, and the Environment Attempt to Coexist

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      As the worldwide craze for biennials shows no signs of slowing down, for many the urgent issue of sustainability remains an awkward afterthought. Not so for the Helsinki Biennial in Finland, which was founded with the mission of pioneering a new model for ecologically-conscious arts programming. Returning this month for its second edition with 29 participating artists, it hopes to build on its past successes—and setbacks.
      The exhibition returns to the archipelago island of Vallisaari but has also expanded to the mainland, with five works in the centrally located Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) and a few more scattered by the city’s main harbor. The title “New Directions May Emerge” this year, is borrowed from a quote by the American anthropologist Anna Tsing who has been hugely influential in the art world: “As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge.”
      For curator Joasia Krysa, who is best known for her work on Documenta 13 and the 9th Liverpool Biennial, the idea of contamination felt particularly pertinent. The Baltic Sea that washes up on Helsinki’s shores is among the most polluted waters in the world while the biodiverse haven of Vallisaari has been repeatedly taken over by military operations until it was abandoned in the 1990s.
      Adrián Villar Rojas, from the series The End of Imagination (2023). Photo: © HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Viljami Annanolli.
      The overgrown island is occupied once again, this time by 17 artworks and a steady stream of tourists arriving by ferry. The majority of the land is still closed off for conservation and the necessary facilities have been kept relatively minimal, with cafes, bathrooms, and a shop concentrated around two harbors. The site-specific exhibits are scattered along a pre-existing trail that loops around the island and they respond well to their environment, but do they justify our intrusion?
      One installation by Helsinki-native Alma Heikkilä works hand-in-hand with nature by changing slowly over the course of the summer. Coadapted with (2023) contains of a sculpture that gains its color as rainwater mixes with natural plant dyes and drips over the plaster. The Materia Medica of Islands (2023) by Lotta Petronella, from the island of Ruissalo, reintroduces age-old ways of living with nature, including an apothecary for alternative herbal medicines and essences made with foraged local flora. Pieces from The End of Imagination (2023) series by Argentinian artist Adrián Villa Rojas blur the line between artificial and organic. Embedded in the landscape, they occasionally catch the eye of passersby, pulling our attention back to our surroundings.
      Elsewhere, the dank gunpowder cellars left over from the island’s military past have been repurposed as eerie but intimate gallery spaces. Sealed off from the bright sun and visual clutter of the outdoors, they make the video installations within feel otherworldly and oddly transfixing. Among the highlights are Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė’s Hypoxia (2023), a semi-mythical meditation on the after-shock of oxygen depletion in the Baltic Sea, and the Sámi artist Matti Aikio’s Oikos (2023), a dreamy evocation based on childhood memories of reindeer herding.
      Matti Aikio, Oikos (2023). Photo: © HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Kirsi Halkola.
      Everyone wants to drink the kool-aid when it comes to sustainability pledges, but there are moments when the ambition feels far off. At the press preview, plastic bottles and disposable food trays are passed around at lunch and not one but two tote bags are foisted on me. Now they lie in a dejected pile of accidentally single-use bags in a corner of my room, forgotten until the next big clear out. These quibbles are a drop in the ocean compared to our flights to Helsinki and back. This year, the biennia opted not to offset flights, but to focus on reduction.
      The Helsinki biennial can, however, boast a range of initiatives implemented to reduce its environmental impact, like opting for second-hand equipment where possible, reusing discarded materials and prudent waste management systems. All the sites where artworks have been installed are checked by a conservation biologist and a Finnish heritage agency, and the area is continually monitored for signs of erosion. For the time being, these imperfect attempts at reducing impact seem to be the best we can reasonably hope for.
      Perhaps more radical, are the ways in which the island’s natural features and crude infrastructure have necessitated curatorial and artistic innovation. It proposes ways to adapt to the world, rather than relentlessly contort and control our surroundings until they become blandly ideal conditions. In doing so, we are rewarded by the irresistibly wild and beautiful landscape that envelops the works rather than having to face yet another white wall.
      Keiken, Ángel Yōkai Atā (2023). Photo: © HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Kirsi Halkola.
      Counterintuitively, the integration of emerging technologies is what has allowed many works to feel endlessly expansive without overwhelming the local ecosystem. On a land bridge to one of Vallisaari’s neighboring islands sits Ángel Yōkai Atā (2023) by the artist collective Keiken. The work was inspired by a visit to a magical spirit house in Thailand and, peering through the windows, visitors can glimpse a fantastical post-capitalist future for humanity that extends, via QR code, into an online interactive experience. The London-based artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley has also imagined an alternative realm, creating a new mythology for Vallisaari in Thou Shall Not Assume (2023), which invites participants to meet characters whose stories are further elaborated online.
      In the case of Berlin-based Jenna Sutela’s Pond Brain (2023), however, the ecological-toll of technology feels harder to dismiss. The pleasingly peaceful work is housed within a dark, disused building and combines audio from an A.I. trained on the polyphonic sounds of nature in harmony with the deep reverberations of a water-filled bronze bowl that hums in response to human touch. “Obviously there’s an environmental impact to any sort of computing, especially large models, but it’s not a crazy impact in the scale of things,” Sutela told Artnet News. “I can’t give exact numbers but that would maybe be good. I should check it.”
      Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Thou Shall Not Assume (2023). Photo: © HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Sonja Hyytiäinen.
      It is hardly unusual for strident curatorial mission statements to put on a good show of highlighting the importance of nature or the urgency of the climate crisis, but anything more concrete is complicated to calculate and all too easy to ignore. For their part, the biennial’s organizers are serious about this less exciting side to environmental commitments. A report on the biennial’s inaugural edition considered its impact according to the categories of waste, material purchases, energy consumption, logistics, and mobility.
      In 2021, waste volumes were measured as 37 tonnes of mixed waste, 7.9 tons of bio-waste and 2.5 tons of cardboard waste (these figures don’t include dismantling the event). Over the exhibition’s run, 235 MwH of energy was consumed from renewable sources, which apparently corresponds to the annual electricity consumption of approximately 16 Finns. Unsurprisingly, flights were the biggest contributor to the event’s carbon emissions. The total footprint corresponded to the annual emissions of about 100 Finns.
      Have these experiences of quantifying impact offered any hope that a biennial on this scale could be sustainable? The biennial’s environmental coordinator Kiira Kivisaar thinks so. “These events will always have some sort of impact. Maybe it’s about balancing out the positive and negative impact, because otherwise we would all just sit at home,” said Kivisaari. “Being aware of the impact and finding ways to make it as small as possible is probably the best way to go.”
      “Helsinki Biennial: New Directions May Emerge” runs through September 17, 2023.
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      in Exhibitions

      Bernie Krause’s Revelatory Touring Sound Exhibition ‘The Great Animal Orchestra,’ Highlighting the Plight of Species, Touches Down in San Francisco

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      “A picture may be worth a thousand words,” Bernie Krause is fond of saying, “but a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.” The sound artist and bioacoustician has been tirelessly researching and recording the soundscapes of the natural world for the last 50 years. Trekking around the planet, he’s captured every wild sound imaginable, from charging elephants and clicking whales to chattering monkeys and trilling birds. Lots of birds. 
      Krause has coined a scientific term for these wildlife concerts: biophony. Krause’s recorded biophonies—more than 5,000 hours from 15,000 species in 2,000 habitats, terrestrial and marine—are now part of a new art and sound exhibition in San Francisco called “The Great Animal Orchestra.” It’s a stirring show to see in person, not only for its life-affirming aural environments and dazzling data-driven displays, but also for the emotionally charged—if inconvenient—truth that animal numbers are in steep decline in every ecosystem around the globe. 
      Bernie Krause. Courtesy of the Exploratorium.
      Named after Krause’s book of 2012, the powerful show runs through October 15 at the Exploratorium on San Francisco’s Embarcadero. (The science and technology museum was the first of its kind when it was founded in 1969 by physicist Frank Oppenheimer, who studied museums in the U.S. and abroad on a Guggenheim fellowship before conceiving it.)
      The brainchild of Hervé Chandès, artistic managing director of Fondation Cartier, “The Great Animal Orchestra” began its world tour in 2016, becoming part of the foundation’s collection. For its Paris debut, Cartier commissioned an original work by the New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, as well as photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Manabu Miyazaki. The exhibition has since traveled to Seoul, Shanghai, London, Berlin, Sydney, and New York.
      “This moment is very touching for all of us, and especially me,” said Chandès at the San Francisco opening, via video from Paris. He explained that it was through reading Krause’s book that he was inspired to create the immersive exhibition and support it through Cartier. “Aesthetics are the gateway to knowledge and ‘The Great Animal Orchestra’ is a meeting point of art, science, beauty, knowledge—and, of course, a warning about the decline of the wild world, biodiversity, and the beauty of life itself.”
      The San Francisco stop is the West Coast premiere and the nearest to Krause’s home in Sonoma, northern California. That’s where Chandès visited Krause and his wife Katherine in 2014, auditioning samples from the couple’s vast archive of animal sounds and first imagining the format for “The Great Animal Orchestra”—which, he mused, amounts to “the art of paying attention.”
      View of the exhibition “The Great Animal Orchestra” by Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists. Courtesy of the Exploratorium.
      The show’s centerpiece is a stunning immersive installation by United Visual Artists. The London-based collective worked closely with Krause to convert his field recordings into life-size visualizations, or spectrograms, in effect creating a three-dimensional environment that envelops the viewer. In a darkened room at the center of the exhibition, these spectrograms flicker on as an animal chorus becomes audible, lighting up the walls of the space with detailed visual representations of sound—the upper registers populated by birds and insects, while mammals and natural elements such as wind or water occupy the middle and lower registers, respectively. The spectrograms are reflected in a pool of water to complete the meditative sensation of communing with nature.
      For Krause, the moment he equated assorted animal calls to an orchestral arrangement was profound, hence the title of the show. “The idea that these are proto-symphonies, proto-orchestrations has been revelatory to me,” he told Artnet News. “If you look at a score by [classical musician Pierre] Boulez, for instance, it doesn’t look a lot different from the streaming spectrograms in the exhibition, particularly where the habitat is healthy.”
      However, as the exhibition illuminates over and over, the world’s habitats are not all healthy. The reason for that has to do with another term Krause has coined: anthrophony. Human encroachment has led to a dramatic loss of animals in the wild, and therefore a steep drop in their corresponding sounds on Krause’s recordings.
      A display showing the biophonies in various parts of the world. Courtesy of the Exploratorium.
      Naturally, that has been disturbing for Krause, who interprets the few remaining animal sounds on his recordings as a cry for help. “We’re doing our best to help them,” he explained. “One of the reasons I’m working with the art world is because if I write a scientific paper and it gets published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, where I had one published last month, six people are going to read it. In the seven or eight venues that ‘The Great Animal Orchestra’ has been exhibited so far, a million and a half people have seen it.”
      Krause has always been interested in sound; early on, it was in music that he heard his calling. In the 1960s, he performed with the Weavers, alongside folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger, and later formed a group called Beaver and Krause. The duo helped introduce the Moog synthesizer to pop music at the time, contributing the machine’s whirs and whizzes to songs by the Doors and the Monkees. Then even they came out with an album, In a Wild Sanctuary, that incorporated Krause’s earliest efforts at recording soundscapes. 
      But, Krause lamented, “When I was working in the music world, I was always in enclosed rooms without any windows. I never saw the outside, and that made me really depressed, and also quite sick.” So he pivoted to Hollywood, producing the soundtrack for major films like 1979’s Apocalypse Now. This, too, proved to be a letdown. He said he and others were hired and fired by the director, Francis Ford Coppola, multiple times, leading to low morale on the set.
      Disenchanted with Hollywood, Krause went back to school, earned his Ph.D. in creative sound arts and entered the realm of soundscape ecology, with the aim of conserving species. “It’s a struggle to be good animals,” he said, “but life demands that of us.”
      “The Great Animal Orchestra” by Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists. Courtesy of the Exploratorium.
      At the crux of Krause’s work is a holistic approach to recording animal vocalizations. That is to say, in unison rather than isolation. “One of the things that Bernie does when he’s building an archive of sound,” said his wife, Katherine, on hand for the Exploratorium opening, “is to try to viscerally connect with the world that those creatures live in—a world we really will never be fully privy to.”
      “We need a Rosetta Stone to make that leap,” interjected Krause. “And we’re looking for that. I think we’re probably very close.” Turning philosophical, he continued, “You know, I’m reminded of a discussion I had with [experimental musician] John Cage in 1989. We were talking about animal sounds, which he likened to found art, and he said, ‘Transformation is the key to life and its expression through art. That is the real mystery of the creative nature.’”
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      in Exhibitions

      Takashi Murakami Channels His Love for NFTs in a New Show of Pixelated Portraits and Anime Avatars. See Them Here

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      In the late 1980s, Mike Kelley unsettled audiences from Chicago to Los Angeles with his provocative site-specific work Pay for Your Pleasure. Kelley funneled visitors through a colorful corridor of 42 cultural icons each affixed with a quote celebrating rebelliousness. The work mocked society’s assumptions that artists were pure, their work liberating.
      For his new show at Gagosian, Takashi Murakami openly riffs off Kelley’s work exchanging creatives for economic figures and poster art aesthetics for pixelated computer graphics. On a technicolor timeline, we meet the likes of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.
      The images began as pixelated portraits for Murakami’s OpenSea account, but now, with the quotes attached it’s hard to tell the meaning, particularly given Murakami’s ongoing market dominance and engagement with NFTs.
      Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
      “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” which is presented at Gagosian’s Le Bourget location on the outskirts of Paris, duly stages some of Murakami’s blockchain-related ventures, even if his large-scale paintings dominate the gallery. Most hyped is “Flower Jet Coin NFT,” a pixelated version of Murakami’s classic smiling flower, minted and gifted free of charge to visitors on the opening day of the show.
      “I think NFTs can be a token for people to enter my world and feel closer to my art,” Murakami told Artnet News, noting he’d done something similar with miniature sculptures in gum machines. “To me, it is really important for people to experience my worldview, and not just through my paintings and sculptures. I need different forms for people to experience my work.”
      Gallery view of Murakami’s NFT paintings. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
      The Tokyo-based artist also presents his inversions: physical versions of works he originally created digitally as NFTs. Murakami entered the NFT market a matter of weeks after the $69 million Beeple sale at Christie’s, though the artist equally credits the influence of watching his children enter the world of the metaverse through gaming.
      His superflat aesthetics and cutesy characters have been a hit with the Web3 crowd. Among his most popular drops was 2021’s Clone X NFTs, a collection of 20,000 algorithmically generated characters built for the metaverse. At Le Bourget, Murakami presents two of the anime-esque avatars in offline works on mirror plates.
      Despite these ongoing forays into the realm of NFTs, most of the show stands firmly on long-established ground—in one instance quite literally with Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue, a 12-foot-long work from 2010. Dwarfing the indigo dragon in scale is a new work based off the stage curtain Murakami created for Tokyo’s main Kabuki theatre. Commissioned by director Takashi Miike, the 75-foot-long acrylic on canvas is something of a celebration of giants from Japan’s art, film, and theatre worlds.
      Takashi Murakami, Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue (2010). Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano, courtesy Gagosian.
      There’s something of everything at Murakami’s latest Gagosian show (or should we call it a drop) and this aligns with an artist who sees the worlds of crypto, NFTs, and art merging.
      “One of the goals of NFT art is really to expand the cognitive dimensions of value,” Murakami said. “To challenge the concept of value and what it is. This is understanding the new cognitive domain.”
      See more images from Murakami’s show below.
      Takashi Murakami, The Name Succession of Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, Hakuen, Kabuki Jūhachiban (detail) (2023). Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
      Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
      Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
      Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
      “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain” is on view at Gagosian Paris, 26 avenue de l’Europe, Le Bourget, through December 22.

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