Exhibitions

Desert X, the open air biennial staged in California’s Coachella Valley, has run into roadblocks with another one of its projects. The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert has cancelled plans to host a site-specific smoke sculpture by artist Judy Chicago due to environmental concerns.
Chicago planned to release plumes of colored smoke at the foothills of Mount Eisenhower on April 9. But the work, titled Living Smoke, raised alarm among some local preservation and animal-rights advocates, and the Living Desert, a zoo and wildlife habitat dedicated to preserving the desert ecosystem and its flora and fauna, decided to withdraw its participation.
“Huge volumes of colored smoke would obviously have a frightening and unpredictable effect on wild and captive creatures,” said Palm Springs arts and environmental writer Ann Japenga, who spearheaded opposition to the project, in an email to Artnet News. “Two prominent local wildlife biologists confirmed that the event could endanger animals. It takes some serious mental gymnastics to pretend otherwise.”

The decision to scuttle the work came as a surprise to Chicago, who said she had worked for months to address any potential safety issues posed by Living Smoke.
“Of course [the Living Desert] had concerns, which I respected,” Chicago told Artnet News in an email. “We spent a considerable amount of time discussing how to bring my work to that landscape without disturbing the wildlife or damaging the environment.”
Last month, when she learned of Chicago’s plans, Japenga sent a letter to the artist, the Living Desert, and Sabby Jonathan, a former Palm Desert mayor and current councilman, among others. (Johnathan previously voted against the city’s sponsorship of the exhibition, according to the Desert Sun, due to last year’s controversial Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia.)
Japenga suggested that the piece was unsafe and should be relocated to a more appropriate venue. She included quotes from two local wildlife biologists she consulted, who had raised concerns about possible animal safety issues, including 11 bighorn lambs recently born in the area.
Shortly thereafter, the Living Desert pulled the plug on the project.
Judy Chicago, Living Smoke (2021). Photo by Donald Woodman, courtesy of the Artist Rights Society.

“Desert X is committed to protecting the desert landscape and its wildlife. We work with experts and follow recommendations to ensure our exhibition leaves no trace,” Jenny Gil Schmitz, Desert X’s executive director, told Artnet News in an email. “We are deeply disappointed that the Living Desert has reversed its decision to host Judy Chicago’s work after months of research and preparation to ensure the safety of the animals and their natural surroundings.”
The Living Desert did not respond to inquiries from Artnet News, but Gil Schmitz told the New York Times that the organization pulled out because “they didn’t want to be part of a controversy regarding their environmental preservation.”
Chicago says that ecological concerns are at the forefront of her “Smoke Sculptures,” as well as earlier series, “which were rooted in my desire to create an alternative type of Land Art, one that—instead of uprooting or bulldozing the environment—merged color, wind and landscape in order to illuminate the beauty of the world in which we live,” Chicago said.
Judy Chicago, Immolation (1972); from Women and Smoke (2018). Photo courtesy of Nina Johnson.

The ephemeral works always use non-toxic smoke. For the Living Desert project, Chicago planned to use an electronic trigger, eliminating the loud ignition noise to avoid startling animals. The Desert X piece would have marked the Living Desert’s 50th anniversary, and was being funded by collector Jordan Schnitzer, who acquired Chicago’s print archive in 2020.
But Japenga remained concerned about the press release’s promise to “transform a 1,200-acre desert landscape.”
“When [Chicago] did these pieces in the 1970s, they were small, spontaneous, and bohemian. Wonderful for all involved, I’m sure. I wish I’d been there!” Japenga said. “Judy’s smoke show is now a large-scale, slick entertainment spectacle.”
“If you look more closely, there is a lot of money behind the event,” she added. “Money and publicity tends to make people look the other way.”
Chicago responded that the press release did not mean to suggest that the entire landscape would have been covered with smoke. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Rather, we were speaking aesthetically. That is, by releasing short-lived smoke into the large desert landscape—where it would move and mix with the wind—the visual environment would be transformed by color.”
Judy Chicago. Photo by Donald Woodman, courtesy of the Artist Rights Society.

Environmental concerns also led to the cancellation of an artwork that was intended as part of the 2018 edition of Desert X. At the time, he local bighorn sheep population was suffering an epidemic, so the biennial moved to cancel a Jenny Holzer light projection piece. And this year, the exhibition has had to relocate an installation by Serge Attukwei Clottey due to concerns that it exploited local issues with tainted groundwater. The event has also had to contend with ongoing objections to its Saudi Arabia connection.
Looking ahead, Desert X hopes to find a new home for Chicago’s work. “We stand by Judy and all of our collaborating artists and are actively seeking alternative sites so that Judy’s work may be enjoyed peacefully and safely by a global audience as planned,” Gil Schmitz said.
In the meantime, Chicago stands behind her record as a supporter of the environment. Her critics “might have good intentions,” she said, “but given my decades-long commitment to environmental justice and animal rights, I am the wrong target.”
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The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, will reflect on the death of Breonna Taylor—who was shot by police in the city a year ago next month—in a new exhibition.   
The title of the show, “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” came from Taylor’s mom, Tamika Palmer. 
“Early in the exhibition planning process, I had a conversation with Ms. Palmer, where I asked her to share what this exhibition meant to her and her daughter’s legacy,” says Allison Glenn, who guest curated the show. “From her response, I developed this three-word title that spoke to the spirit of her reply.”
Details about who—or what—will be included in the show have not yet been announced, but it will open across five galleries at the museum on April 7. Entry to the exhibition will be free thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation. 
Curator Allison Glenn. Courtesy of the Speed Art Museum.

Stephen Reily, the Speed’s director, approached Glenn, who is an associate curator at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas, about the show last fall. 
“We slowly started to think about how our museum, which is deeply committed to using art to serve the whole community, could respond,” Reily says. “What is the role of an art museum in serving a city and trauma? We had to ask ourselves the question: how would a museum even try to get this right?” 
In talking to colleagues and peers, Glenn’s name came up quickly, Reily says, noting that she’d previously worked with Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects in Chicago and Prospect New Orleans. “She’s someone who has deep experience working with great artists in response to real events in real places,” he says.
For this effort, Glenn convened a group of artists, scholars, and other experts to advise on curatorial decisions for the show. “I sought their consult on everything,” she recalls. “Everything.” 
Gates, who reinstalled the Cleveland gazebo where Tamir Rice was shot as a memorial in Chicago, was Glenn’s first call. Then came, in no particular order, artists Amy Sherald (who painted Taylor for the cover of Vanity Fair) and Hank Willis Thomas; multidisciplinary filmmaker and curator Jon-Sesrie Goff; art historian Allison K. Young; art strategist Mecca Brooks; art administrator La Keisha Leek, a cousin of Trayvon Martin; and retired military officer Raymond Green, who is a cousin of the late Alton Sterling. 
The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.

Together, they make up the show’s advisory panel, a group that Glenn likens to a “board of directors for the curatorial framework.” 
“These people really helped shape the truth of this all, which is that what happened is part of a national conversation,” Glenn says. “I really tried to make sure I was positioning myself in concert and conversation with many voices that I admire and respect before I brought any ideas to the museum or the local community.”
This, she added, was done out of “respect for the subject and respect for the year that Louisville had last year—and continues to have.”
Meanwhile, the Speed’s community engagement strategist, Toya Northington, convened a steering committee of Louisville artists, activists, mental health professionals, and other community members who serve as advisors on a local level.
“A museum like ours should never live in isolation from what’s going on in the city,” Reily says. “The killing of Breonna Taylor and the year of protests changed the course of our city. At the Speed, because we believe that great art and artists can help the city, we were hungry… to find a way to address it.”
“Promise, Witness, Remembrance” will be on view from April 7 through June 6, 2021 at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
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Angelo Plessas was doing plank pose in the narrow space between the foot of his bed and the hotel wall. Several of his quilted sculptures were spread out beneath him to soften the hard floor. Hotel staff dropped off warm meals several times a day.
“It is sort of like a residency,” the Greek artist told me over a WhatsApp call on day seven of his 14-day quarantine in an 18-square-meter room in Seoul. (The artist had been uploading the footage to Instagram as a kind of performative ritual.) Following his stay, Plessas planned to head to a sacred mountain to meet the South Korean shaman Dodam, with whom he is collaborating for the 13th Gwangju Biennial.
Production still from John Gerrard Mirror Pavilion: Leaf Work (Derrigimlagh) (2019). Courtesy of the artist.

It’s not exactly how Plessas imagined he would return to South Korea after an initial trip there in late 2019. Back then, a large group of international artists, shepherded by artistic directors Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, went on a series of site visits ahead of the esteemed exhibition—Asia’s largest and oldest. At the time, the virus was perhaps already somewhere in the world, but it was nowhere near their imaginations.
Since then, Gwangju’s organizers have had to delay, adapt, rethink, and rework to accommodate a constantly shifting public-health situation. After two postponements, the biennial is preparing, finally, to open on April 1. (South Korea has been praised for its response to the pandemic; its most recent seven-day case count came in at under 500.)
Yet the opening will look very different from the buzzy biennials of previous years. Of the 69 participating artists (who are responsible for 41 new commissions), only four individuals—including a two-person collective—were able to travel to South Korea to install their works in situ. 
Natasha Ginwala (R) and Defne Ayas (L). Photo: Victoria Tomaschko.

The challenges posed by the lockdown era have rushed the biennial circuit into a future that many were already discussing. Had the daring, female-led show in South Korea intended to be a spectacle reminiscent of biennials past, it likely would have been rendered moot by the pandemic.  
But neither Ayas nor Ginwala wanted to continue with “this machine of biennials,” as Ayas put it. Instead, they sought to offer an antidote to it, by exploring spirituality, resistance, and community healing. The events of 2020 gave those themes a new sense of urgency.
“We were ready to debunk the biennial format and stretch it, but we did not know we would be stretching it this much,” Ayas said with a laugh from her own room a few floors above Plessas. “The cracks we were looking into just got deeper.”
Video still from Theo Eshetu’s, Ghostdance (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

Hive Mind
The biennial, titled “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning,” comes at a moment when loss, grief, and separation are globally felt. And so the duo has gravitated toward two seemingly disparate themes: shamanism, a dominant form of spirituality in South Korea, and technology. A form of cosmic gravitas pulses through the exhibition’s preamble of essays, talks, and online programming.
The surreality of the enterprise was clear from conversations with a number of participants who traveled to Gwangju for the opening. All were performance artists whose works could not be presented remotely. Plessas, who came from Athens, shared his hotel wall with Canadian conceptual artist Judy Radul. They would see each other for brief moments when they picked up their food in the hall.
The show’s co-curator Defne Ayas, meanwhile, was in her room on video calls with Ginwala, who was already on the ground helping to install the show. It will be set across four locations over a now-shortened four weeks: a historic theater, a sacred mountain, a classical biennial hall, and the Gwangju National Museum. One could consider the Internet the fifth, unplanned venue.
Still from Judy Radul’s Good Night Vision (2013). Courtesy the artist.

Artists in Quarantine
For the artists who did travel to Gwangju, the mandated pause was surprisingly welcome. “There is something special about stopping just before you make an artwork and waiting for two weeks, having the time to just keep thinking about it,” Radul said. 
Ahead of the trip, she worked closely with two South Korean musicians on her eerily prescient commission. With help from Gina Hwang, who plays a geomungo (a plucked guitar-like instrument), and Hannah Kim (who plays the more percussive janggu drum and gong), Radul created a psychedelic, folkloric soundscape that she plans to record live inside a historic theater. 
To film it, she long ago decided to use heat-tracking cameras—a medium she began exploring in 2013—that will record the heat imprints created by the musicians. Another camera will be pointed at the audience, should there be one come April. There is, of course, a certain irony to preparing this work in a world where free movement is contingent upon body temperature. (Radul was having her temperature taken at the hotel every few hours.)
“Proximity, touching, creating sound in a room together—all of this has shifted,” she said. “The questions around biennials, where we just drop in and drop out, have been posed for years now. It does make you wonder what you will do for art. We are finding out right now what artists actually bring to a scenario when they show up or don’t show up.”
∞OS Session, 2019, V.A.C. Foundation, photo: Marco Franceschin.

Participation in the show has been challenging even for artists who could not show up in person. Korakrit Arunanondchai’s new video, Songs for Dying, reflects on his own losses this past year, including the death of his grandfather. It pairs footage drawn from pro-democracy protests in Thailand (where Arunanondchai moved from New York at the beginning of the pandemic) and the 1948 Jeju Island massacre in South Korea with the minutiae that comes from witnessing the death of a loved one. His incisive editing—moving between surrealism, the news cycle, and a very personal narrative—feels fluid and familiar after the past year.
The artist directed the South Korea portion of the video—which captures a shaman conducting a ritual for the dead on Jeju Island—remotely after it became clear he would be unable to travel. “It was hard,” he said. “I work with hidden narratives to begin with. And often, the thing that pulls you in is not what you can find on the internet.” (The film’s second chapter, Songs for the Living, will be shown at the Migros Museum in Zurich in September.)
Video still from Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for Dying (2021). Courtesy the artist

The Future Forum
While the biennial plays an important role in the region—it was created to process and memorialize the Gwangju Uprising in 1980—attendance will necessarily be limited. Then, there is the so-called art world to consider. The traveling band of curators, writers, collectors, and art dealers that would normally attend will also be in absentia. Even the participating curators and artists will have packed up and left.
That’s where the fifth venue, the online forum, comes in. Artists have generously shared their processes and created new online commissions. The catalogue chronicles a year-long conversation that was once meant for Gwangju, but which has now become more global. 
Ayas spoke of a “mad loyalty” that the artists and curators have for one another and for the project. All that matters, she says, is that it “installs itself” in people’s minds in some important way. “Small is beautiful, and more meaningful,” she added. 
Emo de Medeiros, Kaleta/Kaleta (2016). Courtesy of theartist.

Her conviction begs the question: how much did we really see of these massive shows when we were running around previews trying to take it all in? Perhaps the slow and virtual drip of “Spirits Rising, Minds Tuning” offers a teachable moment. Maybe we do not need to see the whole in order to be touched by a part. 
“This biennial was prophetic, in a way, because it was predicting the penetration of the virtual and this post-human feeling of virtuality,” Plessas said from his hotel room. “It will be interesting to see how it will be remembered.”

The 13th Gwangju Biennale is on view from April 1 to May 9.
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