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    A New Show in Frankfurt Surveys How Famous Artists Explored the Power and Peril of Plastic. See the Works Here

    Plastic was once seen as a major advancement for humanity thanks to its low-cost versatility—now, it feels like our undoing. Even as disturbing headlines warn us that plastic is now in our water, our air, and our bodies, we remain locked in an uncomfortable reliance on this potentially toxic, manmade material. We may fantasize about a zero-waste future, but the world’s consumption of single-use plastics is only growing.
    When artists first started experimenting with plastic shortly after its invention in the 1950s, however, the mood was one of excitement. The highly flexible, inexpensive material represented a world of new possibilities: it could be bent, cut, poured, or inflated, and came transparent or in any number of brilliant colors. It also carried associations of modernity and mass consumption that made it a quintessential symbol of its time.
    A new thematic show at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, titled “Plastic World,” features the work of more than 50 artists—including James Rosenquist, Eva Hesse, and Christo—in a major survey of the many ways in which plastic has been used over the years, as well as how its associations have evolved.
    Installation view of “Plastic World” at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2023. Photo: Norbert Miguletz.
    More than 100 works are made from media as diverse as acrylic, silicon, vinyl, styrofoam polyurethane, polyester, PVC, 3D printing and discarded objects, but each was made possible thanks to the cultural ubiquity of plastic. Among the international movements spotlighted are Pop art, Arte Povera, Minimalism, Finish Fetish, Nouveau Réalisme, conceptualism and the urgent eco-critical works of a younger generation.
    “What has now turned out to be an enormous burden for the environment denotes a huge enrichment for art as well as for architecture and design,” said the show’s curator Dr. Martina Weinhart. “A look at the extremely rich history of plastic as a material opens up a narrative full of ambivalences: of a future-oriented innovative ability and of seductive-seeming objects; of damaging effects, but also the question of new approaches to dealing with this material, which is here to stay.”
    Check out works from the exhibition below.
    Otto Piene, Anemones: An Air Aquarium (1976, new production 2023). Photo: Norbert Miguletz.
    Pascale Marthine Tayou, L’arbre à palabres (2023). Photo: Norbert Miguletz.
    Nicola L., Women Sofa (1968). Photo: © Design Museum Brussels.
    Installation view of James Rosenquist, Forest Ranger (1967). Photo: Norbert Miguletz.
    Installation view of César, Expansion works (1977). Photo: Norbert Miguletz.
    Gino Marotta, Eden Artificiale (1967-1973). Photo: © 2021 Marino Colucci, courtesy Erica Ravenna Gallery, Rome, Work of Art.
    Installation view of Pınar Yoldaş, An Ecosystem of Excess (2014/2023). Photo: Norbert Miguletz
    Exhibition view of “Plastic World: at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2023. Photo: Norbert Miguletz.
    César, Expansion à la boite d’oeufs (1970). Photo: © SBJ / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023.
    Christo & Jeanne Claude, Look (c.1965). Photo: ©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023.
    “Plastic World” is on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Römerberg, Frankfurt, through October 1.
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    Artist Sterling Wells Built a Floating Studio in Order to Paint the View From L.A.’s Ballona Creek. Then the City Demolished It

    For years, artist Sterling Wells has made the urban waterways of Los Angeles an extension of his studio, drawn to the interplay of nature and the manmade, marine life and the detritus that inevitably collects in these oft-overlooked corners of the city.
    “I’ve never wanted to just paint seamless nature,” Wells told Artnet News. “I always want there to be the contrast between the soft fluid marks of nature and the hard edges and geometric shapes of architecture and graphic design.”
    Last month, in pursuit of that vision, Wells was out on Ballona Creek in Playa Vista on the city’s West Side. He was hard at work finishing the construction of a somewhat ramshackle floating studio where he planned to create work for his current solo show, “A New Flood,” at Los Angeles’s Night Gallery. Then, he heard the helicopter overhead.
    Local news outlet FOX 11 had caught wind of the unusual vessel floating in the waterway thanks to Reddit, and a reporter was coming to investigate concerns that the art project was a homeless encampment.
    Sterling Wells working in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    “I got a book from the library about how to build homemade house boats. The base has these beams in a grid that are supported by rain barrels that kind of act as pontoons. I bought them from this Mediterranean import company in Gardena and they’re actually barrels for pepperoncini,” Wells said. “I had been building it for three weeks, and had just brought all of my stuff there to start painting.”
    The goal was to use the raft to store his art supplies, but also to anchor in a fixed position so Wells could capture a single view over multiple days as the weather and water conditions changed.
    The watercraft also had bird blinds, to help the artist observe the local water fowl without disturbing them. And yes, he probably would have slept there sometimes, to help avoid the 40- to 90-minute drive back home to Highland Park, 15 miles away.
    Sterling Wells’s sketches of the raft and its bird blinds. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    They say no publicity is bad publicity, but the news story caught the eye of government officials. The next morning, officials from L.A. County Public Works arrived, damaged the raft pulling it out of the water, and forced Wells to apply for a permit for his waterborne studio. (The exhibition’s title is taken from the subject line of the city’s emailed response to Wells’s application, which read “A New flood—access Permit has been CREATED.”)
    Unfortunately, however, the city put the kibosh on the project. Wells never got a concrete reason why, but he suspects an angry local—who claimed to own the property and disapproved of the raft—played a role.
    “In one of my last conversations with L.A. County Public Works, I was told that according to the county code, people are not allowed to be in the flood control channel. I said, ‘you know, I’ve been painting at the site for a long time with no problem. Why can’t I just continue doing what I’ve been doing?’” Wells recalled. “And she said, ‘well, we weren’t paying attention to you—but now that we are, you’re not allowed to be there.’”
    Sterling Wells’s worksite in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Nevertheless, the artist continued to create on site sans barge, transporting it to the gallery, where it is now the centerpiece of his solo show. (The hope is to eventually have a permit approved and get it back on the water.)
    “The drama with the raft kind of was a big distraction from my actual paintings,” Wells said.
    To finish the body of work in time for the opening, Wells got a nearby motel room for five nights, wading into Ballona Creek each day to paint.
    Sterling Wells’s raft on view in “Sterling Wells: A New Flood” at Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    “I chose this site because it’s neglected and unmaintained. It’s not a nature preserve that’s cleaned up. There’s a bird’s nest right next to drifts of litter and garbage, and there’s dead birds and the seagull that has a fishing lure stuck in its leg,” he said. “I like painting the trash—the water bottles and accumulation of things that are floating by. Old bicycles and shopping carts and all these things that are on the bottom of the creek that are covered in barnacles and mussels.”
    The resulting works are Well’s largest paintings to date, painted not only en plein air, but while standing in the contaminated waterway. Each one captures the view of the surrounding salt marsh, but also peering into the shallows.
    Sterling Wells’s sketches of his worksite in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    “They’re about the transition of looking down at the water where it’s transparent, to looking across the water as it becomes an opaque surface. I’m looking through the water, at light hitting objects at the bottom of the creek, at light hitting the surface of the water, and at things floating inside the water column,” Wells said.
    That includes both the litter and the aquatic life that flows in and out of the creek with the ebb and flow of the rising and falling waters.
    “I got really into the tide and the marine ecosystem. It’s two miles from the ocean, and there’s kelp and seaweed and crabs and mussels and birds,” the artist added.
    With the raft out of commission, Wells worked instead with the smaller floating easels he had previously built using plastic bottles and milk jugs.
    A Sterling Wells painting being created on a floating easel in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    “To paint from observation, your head has to stay in the same position. And so the floating easel allowed me to work large, moving the paper around my body and up and down into the water,” Wells explained. “But getting these pieces of paper to stay upright out in the middle of the water in the wind is incredibly challenging. I mean, everything’s constantly blowing over and floating away.”
    Through that process, the creek becomes not only the subject of the work, but a physical part of the painting. The artist even mixes his watercolor pigment powders with the creek waters, allowing the process to manifest itself on the page as mud and algae splash onto the surface.
    “It’s depicting water,” Wells said, “but it also is water.”
    See more photos of the exhibition and the artist at work below.
    Sterling Wells working in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Sterling Wells working in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Sterling Wells working in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Sterling Wells working in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Sterling Wells working in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Sterling Wells’s worksite in Ballona Creek, Los Angeles. Photo by Nik Massey, courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Installation view of “Sterling Wells: A New Flood” at Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Sterling Wells’s raft on view in “Sterling Wells: A New Flood” at Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
    “Sterling Wells: A New Flood” is on view at Night Gallery, 2050 Imperial Street, Los Angeles, California, through September 9.
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    Architects Herzog & de Meuron, the Design Duo Behind Tate Modern and Scores of Other Museums, Are Themselves the Subject of a New Exhibition

    Celebrated for their iconic structures such as London’s Tate Modern, Beijing’s National Stadium (also known as the Bird’s Nest), Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, and San Francisco’s De Young Museum, the duo of Herzog & de Meuron are comfortably ensconced at the vanguard of contemporary design. The Swiss architects, who were awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2001, have pushed forward the architectural avant-garde through deconstructivist designs and innovative use of materials and geometries.
    Founded by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in Basel over 40 years ago, the architectural practice is now a sprawling international enterprise with five senior partners and over 600 employees working on (mostly, but not exclusively) large-scale projects—museums, hospitals, skyscrapers, and arenas—in nearly every corner of the globe. 
    Herzog & de Meuron, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. Photo © Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Royal Academy of Arts.
    Now, the Royal Academy of Arts in London will house an exhibition showcasing their most ambitious projects. Launching July 14, and in close collaboration with the architects, the exhibition unfolds in three distinct galleries. The first gallery brings a large portion of their “Kabinett”—an open storage and research area—from Basel to London. Around 400 objects, ranging from scale models to photographs and even augmented reality experiences, will be displayed on wood shelves for visitors to peruse.
    Herzog & de Meuron, extension of the Stadtcasino Basel. Photo © Ruedi Walti. Courtesy of Royal Academy of Arts.
    Research material from the duo’s better known projects are highlighted in this first gallery. For Tate Modern, Herzog & de Meuron repurposed the Bankside Power Station into a kind of vertical city. Their Elbphilharmonie project in Hamburg was informed by three archetypal spaces: the ancient Greek amphitheater, a sports arena, and a modern festival tent. The National Stadium in Beijing—conceived as a large public art sculpture—marked their first collaboration with artist Ai Weiwei, while the Lincoln Road project saw the architects reinvent an ordinary parking garage in Miami as open-air retail spaces and residences.
    The second gallery space assumes the form of a screening room. A central screen presents an edit of a new film, Rehab, created by filmmakers Bêka & Lemoine. It offers an intimate look at the daily life of their groundbreaking REHAB Clinic for Neurorehabilitation and Paraplegiology in Basel from the perspective of patients undergoing treatment, charting patients’ interactions with the structure at various stages of recovery.
    Herzog & de Meuron, REHAB Basel. Photo © Katalin Deér. Courtesy of Royal Academy of Arts.
    The third and final space focuses on a real project currently in development, the Universitäts-Kinderspital Zürich (University Children’s Hospital in Zurich), which came out of a competition in 2012 to redefine hospital architecture and healing spaces. The main feature of this room is an augmented reality mock-up of a patient’s room, rendered at full scale, delivering a near-tangible recreation of a humanized hospital environment. Visitors can virtually step inside a hospital room and observe 360-degree views of the streets, gardens, and public spaces ahead of the hospital’s completion in 2024.
    “Herzog & de Meuron” is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, London, W1S 3ET, from July 14 to October 15, 2023.

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    What I’m Looking at: Chryssa’s Sizzling Tribute to Times Square, the MyPillow Guy’s Office Paintings, and Other Things at the Edge of Art

    “What I’m Looking at” is a monthly column where I digest art worth seeing, writings worth consuming, and other tidbits. Below, thoughts from the first weeks of July 2023.

    Chryssa Gets Her Day
    I only really knew the name of Greek-born sculptor Chryssa (1933-2013) before this big show dedicated to her New York output, currently at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea (co-created with the Menil Collection in Houston, and on view through July 22, 2023). What fun to get a full sense of her! In the 1950s and ’60s, Chryssa breathed in New York’s energy, and breathed it out as art. She took inspiration from material that evoked the swirling, information-dense urban environment: newspapers, typography, neon signs. Then she stripped away their information-conveying function, distilling and abstracting their forms into reliefs and sculptures that become mysterious, austere, transfixing.
    Her act of going by the mononymn “Chryssa” itself mirrors her procedure of subtraction and abstraction: adding to a signifier’s evocative power by stripping it down and making it mysterious. It also suggests a certain swagger. The sculpture that probably best incarnates this appetite is her magnum opus, on tour here from the Buffalo AKG Art Museum collection: a 10-by-10 hulk called The Gates to Times Square (1964–66). It is a glorious abstracted “A,” in sizzling blue neon. It wants to stun you as a distilled version of the grandeur of New York’s commercial center, while also conveying the mystery of an altar of secret texts held just out of reach.
    Chryssa, Five Variations on the Ampersand (1966) in “Chryssa and New York” at Dia. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Chryssa, Classified (1960). Photo by Ben Davis.
    Chryssa, Cycladic Movement (n.d.) and Letter “T” (1959). Photo by Ben Davis.

    The Berlin Scene
    The tightly packed one-room show dedicated to Warhol superstar Brigid Berlin does contain things you’d call art, ranging from Berlin’s raucous “tit prints” (made by dipping her breasts in paint and smooshing them on paper) to the needlepoints of lurid New York Post covers from her latter days. But “The Heaviest” at Vito Schnabel (on view through August 18), organized by Alison M. Gingeras, is really more akin to immersing yourself in a full “Brigid Berlin” exhibit at a museum of Downtown history.
    Along with the art, you get letters and pictures from her childhood as a rebellious heiress (her dad was CEO of the Hearst Corp.); newspaper articles about her as the flamboyant character that she still was in her post-Factory life; a video made with Warhol and Larry Poons documenting her breast-based art-making practice accompanied by her own gregarious, self-mocking commentary.
    It’s actually fitting that the show runs together Berlin’s art and material about her as a character, in a way. Berlin didn’t really seem to distinguish art-making from living an interesting life. This is probably best represented by her copious Polaroids of characters who lurked around the Factory, and in her recordings—which you can listen to at the gallery—of her constant phone calls with intimates and associates.
    The show’s a fascinating look at a life. As to the art as art, I’m of two minds, I guess. On the one hand, it does feel to me that Berlin’s output mainly depends on your interest in a certain form of micro-celebrity. But then this kind of self-mythologizing persona does feel very contemporary, with its indulgent eclecticism, its defensive bravado, and its melancholy undertones.
    Brigid Berlin material in “The Heaviest.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Four of Brigid Berlin’s “Tit Prints” in “The Heaviest.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    A Brigid Berlin Polaroid of Dennis Hopper in “The Heaviest.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Sampler by Brigid Berlin in “The Heaviest.” Photo by Ben Davis.

    Fun With Shirts
    I wandered, basically at random, into Fierman gallery to find a one-weekend-only display of Nora Griffin’s paint-on-vintage-tee-shirt art show. Griffin, a maker of wonky abstract paintings, deploys her groovy, whirling colors to various New York-themed vintage tees, all hailing from the pre-9/11 era, bringing a sense of a vanished era of the city into alignment with an approachable kind of thrift-shop creativity. The effect was to make you feel like you had time traveled momentarily to a simpler, sunnier, nicer scene, and one that you could walk away with a piece of.
    You missed the show, but the shirts have their own Instagram—so join the 1999 NYC Tee club while you can.
    Installation view of Nora Griffin’s “1999 NYC TEE” show at Fierman. Photo by Ben Davis.
    A Nora Griffin tee. Photo by Ben Davis.

    Threadbare
    As to things to read… I guess the art world is embracing Threads, according to Annie Armstrong’s piece on the Whitney’s gushy foray into the new social media network. So we have to deal with Threads. And I’ll say that Kate Lindsay’s post about the Threads experiment for the Embedded newsletter about internet culture is the best thing I’ve read on it.
    Pungently titled “Threads Is a Mecca of Millennial Brain Rot,” it sums up my experience of Meta’s new social media platform, and of social media altogether right now—everything feels like different flavors of desperate:
    When I first opened the app, I expected to see an early-Twitter copycat. Instead, I was met with a feed of users parroting robotic and emoji-laden prompts, the same four jokes about being “unhinged,” and, of course, a car giveaway from Mr. Beast. Given the opportunity to build the social media culture we say we’ve been missing, we immediately resorted to posting the worst clichés from today’s internet. Is this post from a person, or a brand? Because they’re both employing the same hokey syntax to post empty engagement-bait. 
    This behavior says something about how we view social media now. It’s not for connection, but performance. It seems that many of the people who rushed to download this app did so to get in early on a rush for potential new followers, and in so doing, adopted digital personas that bear no resemblance to how a single human talks in real life. After years of being subliminally nudged towards this behavior through algorithm changes on other platforms, when given the opportunity to do something different on Threads, we came running back to the bland platitudes and low-hanging fruit we’ve been conditioned to rely on for engagement.
    I feel it would be better just to admit that this form of communication has failed than to try to get back to some imaginary “good” version of it. But that’s me, and that’s probably not going to happen.
    Screenshot of a Threads post from the Whitney Museum using Allen Frame, Cady Noland, phone booth, NYC (1981) as a meme.

    The MyPillow Guy’s Art
    Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, Inc.—known around the web as the “MyPillow Guy”—is selling off his company’s stuff on K-Bid Online Auctions to raise money, having wasted his empire’s actual and reputational capital on trying to overturn the 2020 election. So of course, I went to check if there was any art. And there is, sort of.
    It’s a lot of framed images of plants and green landscapes and such. If you have a suburban bathroom to decorate, you have a week to place your bids.
    I do love this still-life, below, presented with no info on what you are looking at but with the accompanying detail shot of the signature to show the authenticity of whatever that is. I’ve always wanted to own a… “ufiloojp[??]”
    It really is like owning a piece of history: Offering random, blurry details to prove something is real is kind of what Lindell is known for now.
    Screenshot of an artwork being sold in the “My Pillow Surplus Industrial Equipment” sale on K-Bid Online Auctions.
    Screenshot of an artwork being sold in the “My Pillow Surplus Industrial Equipment” sale on K-Bid Online Auctions.

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    An Illuminating New Show Celebrates the Life and Art of Brigid Berlin, Daughter of High Society and Friend of Andy Warhol

    Brigid Berlin was a debutante, a rebel, an artist, a muse.
    She is not a familiar name to many, even today, but in the downtown demimonde of the 1960s and ‘70s, Berlin became a cult figure, famed as Andy Warhol’s rollicking Factory sidekick, his muse, and the star of his 1966 experimental film Chelsea Girls. She was also an intriguing artist in her own right, who many say picked up the Polaroid before Warhol himself, and was a collaborator with a number of the leading artistic names of her era. Berlin, who died in New York City in 2020 at the age of 80, was in many ways a consummate contradiction, and the scope of her heady, and at times fraught, life and legacy are still coming into focus. 
    Now, “The Heaviest,” a new exhibition at Vito Schnabel’s downtown space, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, is putting the spotlight on Berlin as an artist with a complex, ahead-of-her-time practice, and introducing her provocative legacy to a new generation. The exhibition is a dizzyingly intense portrait of a creative force, and follows from Berlin’s childhood as a daughter of New York high society, through her famed years in Warhol’s Factory circle, to her independent artistic career and exhibitions, and well into the latter years of her life when she returned to the monied circles of her childhood. This full-circle presentation brings together Berlin’s work in Polaroids, audio recordings, and even needlepoint. 
    Brigid Berlin, Mr. and Mrs. Brigid Pork. © Vincent Fremont/Vincent Fremont Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
    Much of the work included in the show is on view for the first time; Gingeras spent several years planning the exhibition, tracking down materials in artist archives and through Berlin’s estate. The idea for the exhibition first sparked while Gingeras was writing an essay for the 2019 catalog Warhol’s Women. “I was researching these women who were major agents of creative exchange in Warhol’s life, and I realized how much of Brigid’s own contributions as an artist have been read through the lens of Warhol. It rubbed me the wrong way,” she explained. “This exhibition really became an opportunity to look at her in a holistic way both in a biographical sense and as a deeper dive into her relationships and her position in the art world especially in the 1970s.”  
    Berlin was born in 1939 the daughter of sought-after socialite Muriel “Honey” Johnson and Richard E. Berlin, the chairman of Hearst’s media empire for over three decades. Her father’s powerful position placed the family at the height of upper-crust society—Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, and the Windsors were all family friends who sought his counsel. But Berlin’s want-for-nothing childhood was anything but idyllic. The exhibition begins with staged saccharine childhood photographs and Christmas cards of Berlin and her sister. These perfected images are juxtaposed with vitrines of letters exchanged between Berlin, at boarding school, and her mother; often wrenching, the letters document her mother’s merciless scolding of Berlin over her weight (her mother infamously fed Berlin amphetamines as a child in an attempt to control her figure), but also hint at Berlin’s rebellious nature. One letter from Berlin’s schoolmaster details a night of drinking gone awry in sordid and comical detail.
    Brigid Berlin, Untitled (Tit Print) (1996). © Vincent Fremont/Vincent Fremont Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
    “Her family’s shaming around her body was the catalyst that catapulted her into the so-called rebellion that brought her to the doorstep of the Factory,” Gingeras said, walking through the exhibition.
    The Factory and Warhol, the father of Pop, are certainly present in “The Heaviest” but here Warhol is pictured through the eyes of Berlin, rather than the other way around. A selection of Berlin’s many thematically compiled photo books of Polaroids is on view, including one with “Mr & Mrs. Brigid Pork” embossed on its cover, a reference to the pet names the friends kept for each other. In this book, Berlin and Warhol are presented in photographs side by side, a creative dyad rather than an artist and muse.
    But while the Factory can certainly be felt, it’s Berlin as an autonomous artist who is the exhibition’s primary focus. Perhaps the birthright of her high-society background, Berlin, the exhibition makes clear, had a way of permeating many worlds. While Warhol might have been her most famed companion, she was embraced by the hard-drinking macho “heavies” of the art world and counted Willem de Kooning, John Chamberlain, Larry Rivers, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, James Rosenquist, and Brice Marden among her friends. These artists, too, all appear in her Polaroid photo books, and their friendships are detailed in exchanged letters, postcards, as well as in portraits of Berlin herself, including one by Ray Johnson, on view in the show. 
    Cassette tapes from Brigid Berlin Audio Archive. © Rob Vaczy and Pat Hackett. All rights reserved.
    Though Berlin often focused her lens outward, when she looked toward herself her work feels especially satisfying. Among the most evocative works in the exhibition are Berlin’s so-called “tit prints,” which, as the name would suggest, are colorful prints the artist created using her breasts. For a figure who was so often judged, these prints feel wonderfully embodied. “Body positivity did not exist then and she really brazenly embraced her body as a creative tool,” Gingeras explained in conversation.
    Berlin’s fascination with the body expanded beyond her own, however, and certainly the most irreverent work, and outright funny work in the exhibition is her infamous “Cock Book.” Made between 1968 and 1974, Berlin carried around a notebook embossed with “Topical Bible” on the cover, and asked mainly male artists to depict their penises in its pages. Filled with drawings, photographs, and collages, the book’s numerous contributors include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dennis Hopper, Cy Twombly, James Rosenquist, Ray Johnson, Cecil Beaton, and Robert Smithson, among dozens of other familiar names. 
    Installation view of “Brigid Berlin: The Heaviest,” curated by Alison M. Gingeras. Photo: Argenis Apolinario. Courtesy Vito Schnabel Gallery.
    While the ephemera of these friendships function to locate Berlin at the heart of the artistic scene of the era, the exhibition is right to point out that her recognition as a bonafide artist came from dealers, as well. In 1970, Berlin was the subject of a solo exhibition at the famed Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Cologne, Germany—her first solo and one that showcased her audio tapes and Polaroid photographs. “The Heaviest” is remarkably the first exhibition since that seminal show to present these recordings, which encompass calls and conversations between Berlin and those close to her. The recordings are startlingly transportive. In one, Berlin’s mother lambasts her for her association with the Factory milieu, accusing Berlin of using drugs. In another, Warhol pleads with Berlin, when she says she’s torn up her Polaroids, and he offers to pay her a penny a piece for them (and then, when she hesitates, three pennies). These tidbits are oddly prescient of our contemporary fixation on reality entertainment, and wholly absorbing.  
    Brigid Berlin, Untitled (Jasper Johns Flag) (ca. 2002). © Vincent Fremont/Vincent Fremont Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. Collection of Vincent and Shelly Fremont, New York.
    Perhaps what makes Berlin so intriguing as a creative force is her simultaneous adherence to and transcendence of the norms of her time. While she eschewed her conservative childhood, she sought the approval of male artists, what Berlin calls her “internalized misogyny.” Her political views could be anything but polite. Later in her life, Berlin fully abandoned the downtown sphere, moving into an uptown apartment. A bright coral wallpaper lines the walls of the gallery—it’s a custom recreation of the same wallpaper that decorated Berlin’s home—and hints at a country club conservatism that is garish in its own unique way.
    In these later decades, Berlin didn’t give up art-making entirely. Among the highlights of the show are several needlepoint pillowcases she made in the early 2000s—some recreating New York Post covers, covers which Berlin said reminded her of her father; another mixes Jasper Johns’s Flags with jingoistic language that can feel as American as a can of Campbell’s soup—the darker side of the American dream. The exhibition closes with a collection of artistic tributes to Berlin, from Kate Simon’s striking 2008 portrait of the artist to a recent painting by Elisabetta Zangrandi—the interpretations are varied and appear like offerings left at the reliquary of a mythic creative life. 
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    A Fixation With Non-Conforming Bodies Is Pervading Contemporary Art. Here’s How Two Shows in London Capture the Trend

    What does a human body look like, and how is it meant to feel? This question serves as the lynchpin for two exhibitions currently on show in London—”Support Structures” at Gathering (until July 21) and “Unruly Bodies” at Goldsmiths CCA (until September 3)—both of which celebrate contemporary artists that look far beyond conventional understandings of our flesh.
    At Gathering, the show’s title serves as an umbrella for ideas of nurturing and care, as well as the physical sensation of being in our bodies.
    The show opens with a sculpture by Berenice Olmedo, a Mexican artist whose practice is informed by her work at a Mexico City children’s hospital. Isabela (2020) is named after the child who once wore the leg brace that forms the majority of the piece. The medical equipment is suspended as if a pair of human legs occupy it, in a ghostly balance of fragility and utilitarianism. Lilac-colored straps and a polka-dotted pattern soften and gender the object, something that Olmedo compounds by adding a pair of pointe ballet shoes—surely the most unnatural manifestation of beauty.
    Berenice Olmedo, Isabela(2020). Courtesy the artist and Jan Kaps, Cologne Photography Sprengel Museum.
    Physical aids are also prominent in several prints by Louise Bourgeois. A crutch is seen holding up the bent and falling branches of a tree, and again supporting a faceless amputee. These etchings allude not only to memories of her sister’s physical impairments, but the complexities of the artist’s relationship with her family, which caused considerable mental anxiety.
    Alina Szapocznikow also grapples with the existential challenges of sickness in her photographs of the sinewy, elastic remnants of chewed gum. These works were made soon after the artist was diagnosed with breast cancer and convey the inextricable nature of our physical and mental self, something that is often compartmentalized within medical care.
    Redefining what a body actually means naturally leads to the boundless possibilities of science fiction. An early work by Nam June Paik conceives of a “robot brain” formed from an old diary and a rudimentary computer, while an enormous—and rather chilling— sculpture by Ivana Bašic presents a vaguely humanoid figure with a yolk of blown glass for a head. The piece is reminiscent of HR Geiger’s xenomorphs, with a body that is held in a foetal state, as if it could animate at any moment. The title, I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms, is sensual and caring, seemingly at odds with this nightmarish vision. Perhaps this figure isn’t so horrifying after all?
    Installation view, “Support Structures,” Gathering, June 22 – July 22, 2023. Photo © Gathering (Grey Hutton).
    At Goldsmiths CCA, the tenets of sci-fi serve as equally vital source material. The principle of the show explores “monstrous” visions of the body, as symbols of resistance and non-conformity, where our physical selves are not defined by a smooth, conventional exterior.
    An entire room is given over to Giulia Cenci’s eerie sculptural creatures, which exist as featureless heads attached to dead tree roots, old tubes and moulds of human bones. Presented in a blacked-out interior, with each ‘figure’ housed in a cell formed from reclaimed shower cubicles, this is a chilling vision that speaks to the shadows of trauma and the power of our own dark imagination.
    Camille Henrot’s bronze Mon Corps de Femme (2019) is another standout piece. She manipulates a material historically used to render the hard, imposing symbols of masculine dominance, yet here it conveys the fleshy folds of a postpartum body, where recognizable elements of a belly give way to an empty cavity. The entire piece is shot through with an electrical cable, in an allusion to the currents of our nervous system, not to mention the medicalization of birth.
    Installation view, “Unruly Bodies,” Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (June 30 – September 3, 2023). Courtesy Goldsmiths CCA. Photo by Rob Harris.
    Elsewhere, the idea of ritual performance and literally “embodying” folklore and myth is explored in Anna Perach’s surreal, tufted costumes. These wearable sculptures extend and confuse conventional proportions, blurring the lines between interior and exterior flesh through enormously tactile and joyfully adorned textural surfaces. These pieces are designed to be worn for performances, but they are just as alluring as inanimate objects.
    The notion of clothing the body is also a central concern for Paloma Proudfoot, whose background in pattern-cutting informs her new ceramic commission for this exhibition, The Mannequins Reply (2023). Each piece of this incredible tableau fits together like an articulated doll, complete with golden pins. These figures upend the symbol of the shop dummy, which is defined by unrealistic proportions and a rigid passivity, in favor of a sinister and sensual agency. Both a hairy torso and a flayed, muscular back are rendered gorgeous through glossy glazes, as well as full breasts and a belly that have broken the threads of their body suit.
    The presence of enormous sewing needles, complete with a rope of red thread, might be tinged with violence, but it ultimately alludes to a space of corporeal care, repair and collaboration. In this work, the words of the academic Susan Stryker that inspired this exhibition feel fully realized: “I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself.”
    “Unruly Bodies” is on view at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, through September 3, 2023.
    “Support Structures” is on view at Gathering, London, through July 22.
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    Doug Aitken’s New Video Work Visits a Middle American Oil Town and Delivers a Searing Comment on Climate Change

    “What should the future look like?” is a central question occupying the minds of scientists, economists, artists, and politicians debating in important forums daily. However, another set of questions loom, which are just as important, and which often determine the first: “Who gets asked?” The other one, which folds into it: “Who gets to decide?”
    Rarely are such questions about the future put to citizens of small rural communities, even though they may be in some cases most affected by climate change and economic and industrial shifts. This seems to be on the mind of the conceptual California-based artist Doug Aitken when he took his camera inland to an unnamed U.S. oil town and started filming his conversations with the locals.
    In their arid dust-bowl of a town, huge pump jacks dot the horizon, pulsing in and out of a bone dry desert landscape to extract oil, which seems to be the main source of income of the town and also its raison d’etre. The new video, called HOWL, premiered in his solo exhibition at Eva Presenhuber, Zurich last month (it is on view through July 22), and it juxtaposes these rhythmic, unforgiving fracking machines against the voices from the people who coexist among them. The short film and adjacent exhibition that shares its title propose an unsettling view of a climate emergency punctuating our present, and offers a strong dose of angst about the future.
    Doug Aitken, HOWL (film still) (2023). © Doug Aitken.
    “We wanted to give a voice to the people that were there and allow their expression to become the narrative of the work,” Aitken told Artnet News. “It wasn’t a piece that I had a plan for. I did not have a script or a thesis. The work made itself over the time.”
    In HOWL, juxtaposition of the two groups of main protagonists, humans on the one hand, and these massive rhythmic machines on the other, has been formed into a 15-minute narrative across three channels in a darkened room in the gallery. The work, though drawn from real footage filmed across a year, is far from a documentary. Instead, the mood is surreal, with fragmentary glimpses into a polyphony of realities and viewpoints that constitute this anonymous place, which Aitken sees as an allegory for many places in the world that are suffering due to post-industrialism and climate change.
    A woman living in her car in a parking lot speaks about utopia and her ideals for the future, for example. In an abuse shelter, another woman speaks in subtle shifts about physical, emotional, and climate abuse. A group of beauty pageant contestants don oil-black costumes, and all of it is intercut with shots of boarded-up strip malls and empty parking lots. There is a moment of a town brass band parade, which seems to reach to the ghost of some former glory such places once had.
    “At first, I was drawn to this hallucinatory landscape of fracking and drilling and crushing and looking at this activity as the arteries and veins of the body, and this activity as the extraction of the blood from landscape,” Aitken said. “As the journey of creating it progressed, it became equal parts that and a conversation with the people inhabiting the space.”
    Elsewhere in the gallery are individual wall sculptures with single words drawn out from the themes of the film: “howl,” “contact,” “drama,” and “unreal.” These pictographic-like pieces, layered on top of wallpapers of landscapes, and mirror works that cut up your reflection as you pass by, create an immersive space that is as uncanny is the film, except one is a constructed reality and one is tragically real.
    See a clip of the film below.

    Doug Aitken, HOWL (2023). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna © Doug Aitken.

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    A New Immersive Experience Celebrating Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary Is Headed to New York’s Hall des Lumières

    A new immersive exhibit will take over the 30,000-square-foot Hall des Lumières in New York City to celebrate 50 years of hip-hop culture with never-before-seen and archival footage of the genre’s most prominent figures.
    The exhibit “Hip Hop Til Infinity” was developed to “recontextualize” how people look at culture and music, and to highlight the genre’s development in a nontraditional way, according to Jon Colclough, vice president of creative strategy at Mass Appeal, which is producing the show.
    “We wanted to raise the profile around the culture and to place it in a place like Hall des Lumières showcases how far hip-hop has come in 50 years,” Colclough told Artnet News.
    Colclough described the experience as a “visual mixtape” in tribute to the genre that will be educational for casual followers, but filled with “easter eggs” for die-hard fans. It will include unreleased images shot by photographers like Joe Conzo, once described by The New York Times as “the man who took hip-hop’s baby pictures,” as well as unreleased footage from Sony’s archives.
    “We hope that this appeals to everyone, not just hip-hop purists. But if you’re just a casual fan, you’ll walk away with some educational knowledge,” he said.
    The Hall des Lumieres in New York City. Photo courtesy of Alexander Paterson-Jones for Hall des Lumières.
    Hip-hop developed as a musical genre and culture after a birthday party DJ Kool Herc threw in the Bronx borough of New York City in August 1973. Mass Appeal has spent the past five years developing a platform called Hip Hop 50 to celebrate the genre’s legacy.
    “Hip Hop Til Infinity” is just the first version that Mass Appeal intends to take elsewhere and focuses “more on domestic storytelling around hip-hop in the United States,” said Colclough.
    “You wouldn’t expect to see hip-hop in a place like Hall des Lumieres,” he added. “I don’t think people understand that hip-hop is a global phenomenon and not just music.”
    Colclough said the visuals in the show last about an hour, while noting that 50 years is a lot to cover in that time. The producers of the exhibition worked with DJ Clark K on the musical score, with physical objects set to complement the visual images.
    He added that the benefit of having an immersive exhibit—typically reserved for the likes of Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt—is the ability to “transform people across time and space.”
    “We can take them to the West Coast. We can show them the 1970s and what was going on at the birth of hip-hop to how people collaborate now to make music,” he said. “It’s an amazing medium. It’s a little bit of a choose-your-own-adventure. This is not meant to be a historical look back.”
    “There is something beautiful and irreplaceable about being able to recreate how a person heard their favorite song for the first time,” said Caitlin Jackson, the marketing director at Hall des Lumières. She added that tickets will be timed every half hour, though guests are welcome to stay as long as they like.
    “We hope people are here at 9 a.m. dancing through the space, taking everything in and moving through it,” she said. “If you linger in one area, you’re going to miss the beautiful content and photography throughout the space.”
    Mass Appeal has also partnered with Sotheby’s to auction a diamond and ruby ring designed by rap legend Tupac Shakur, which is expected to fetch at least $200,000.
    “Hip Hop Til Infinity” is on view at Hall des Lumières, 49 Chambers St, New York, July 26–September 16. Tickets are now on sale.

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