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What I’m Looking At: Museum-Quality Malcolm Morley, Borna Sammak’s Beautiful Scenesters, and More More

A column of frosted glass has been installed in the center of a. SQUIRE in London. The device transforms the gallery into a different kind of space, a more intimate one that brings you up close to the works. The gallery becomes an extension of the rooms depicted in the surrounding frieze of paintings, which are full of concealment and display, exhibition and restraint. Ryan Huggins’s “Pluto” takes as its subject matter the eponymous bathhouse in Essen, regularly visited by the Dusseldorf-based artist, captured in sixteen oils on canvas.
Huggins’s wrap-around installation of paintings is divided into four sets of four canvases, each ‘phase’ mapped to a different part of Pluto’s sprawling architecture. The viewer is thus plunged into the subterranean atmosphere of the paintings, and the rituals of the bathhouse that have long been a staple of gay male culture. “Pluto” offers a kind of total immersion—fallen out of time, with no beginning or end —mirroring the saunaplex’s lack of natural light. The darkness provides a fragile and alluring ambience.
Installation of view Ryan Huggins, PLUTO, a. SQUIRE, London, 1 June–13 July 2024. Courtesy of the artist and a. SQUIRE, London. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards.
On entering the gallery, the left-hand series of paintings (all 2024) depict naked and solitary figures navigating Pluto’s initial floors. A lone man stands on a kind of balcony or dais, his shadowy flesh contrasted against two ivory-bright murals of classical male nudes. Another male figure attends to his locker, body frozen mid-movement like a dancer.
Ryan Huggins, PLUTO, Phase 1.: i. Entrance/Locker Room; ii. Pluto Bar 1; iii. Pluto Bar 2; iv. Main Shower(2024). Courtesy of the artist and a. SQUIRE, London. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards.
In the paintings that correspond to Pluto’s bar area, we see men—alone or in couples or trios—chatting and exchanging glances. You get a sense of roles being assumed in a place where fantasies are both interchangeable and easily thwarted. The brief intrusion of language, in signs bearing the sauna’s name or the slogan ‘Young Stars XXL’, appears all the more incongruous amid a sexual choreography that seems largely wordless.
In the main shower room, we see three figures depicted posing under the water like ancient Greek statues. In the adjoining painting, the tentative atmosphere of the dry sauna yields to the closer combination of bodies. Yet there’s something dispassionate about these scenes too. For all its hothouse avidity, the overarching communal model here seems to be about how to be together, alone. Indeed, the world of Huggins’s “Pluto” brought to mind a phrase from the great gay writer Edmund White: “a life devoted to pleasure is a melancholy one.”
Ryan Huggins, Detail of [Private Cabin] PLUTO, Phase 2.: v. Dry Sauna 1/Trocken Sauna; vi. Dry Sauna 2/Trocken Sauna; vii. Private Cabin; viii. Jacuzzi, (2024) Courtesy of the artist and a. SQUIRE, London. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards.In this show, ecstatic abandon is tempered by asceticism. A private cabin appears cell-like in its rigid geometry—a series of frames within frames. In another cabin, a man is fucked while watched hungrily by two onlookers; next door, within the same painting, a lone man lies spreadeagled on a cot, a pornographic movie of a man being penetrated playing on the screen above him. It is a moment of both solitude and expectation: fantasy taking its cue from familiar scripts. These scenes suggest the inherent theatricality of cruising, with its well-rehearsed gestures and codes of behavior, its drama of pursuit and withdrawal.
Ryan Huggins, PLUTO, Phase 4.: xiii. Rest Lounge; xiv. Swimming Pool 1; xv. Swimming Pool 2; xvi. Smoke Lounge (2024) Courtesy of the artist and a. SQUIRE, London. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards.
Huggins’s palette of blues is spectral, wintry. They shift from spangled and powdery to cloudy and muted. (Is there a queer lineage of blueness? Think Marie Laurencin’s turbid washes of turquoise; Derek Jarman’s 1993 meditation on death and desire). This coolness is casually interrupted by the pink tips of cocks, or by buttocks glowing pale like moths in the dark. Visiting “Pluto,” the viewer becomes part of this communion, another lonely hunter. During the private view, bodies jostled in the tight space, exchanging flickering glances, as if according to bathhouse ritual. Voices leaked from the street outside. Walking back out into the daylight, it felt like a dream dissolving, its secret intact.
Ryan Huggins, PLUTO, Phase 3.: ix. Wet Sauna/Cruising 1; x. Wet Sauna/Cruising 2; xi. Wet Sauna/Cruising 3; xii. Private Cabin with Glory Hole Labyrinth (2024) Courtesy of the artist and a. SQUIRE, London. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards.
“Ryan Huggins: Pluto” is on view at a. SQUIRE, London, through July 13, 2024. 
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World Traveler (2014) is displayed in an alcove at the heart of Melissa Cody’s assured solo show, “Webbed Skies,” at MoMA PS1 in Queens. The abstract wool wall hanging channel-changes between multiple patterns up and down its length. It plays with symmetry and rhythm—no two sections obey the exact same rules. In places it has an almost Op Art density, sometimes implying depth that draws the eye in, sometimes suggesting a flow that sweeps you left to right or up.
A looming semicircle checkerboard at its center is a flourish, a statement of individual ambition designed to attract attention (making a curved border work is tricky in gridded fiber, let alone sixteen nested ones!). Check out the related works of Navajo/Diné weaving in the collection of the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, which owns the piece. There’s nothing else like it.
World Traveler is beautifully controlled chaos—a delightful, deliberate tour de force.
Melissa Cody, World Traveler (2014) in “Webbed Skies.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Cody, who was born in 1981, hails from a remote community in Arizona with the starkly evocative name of No Water Mesa. She comes from a line of weavers, including both her mother and grandmother. Her aunt, Marilou Schultz, was once commissioned to make a tapestry depicting a circuit board for Intel in the ‘90s (it was shown in Documenta 14 back in 2017).
Visiting “Webbed Skies” I learned some things about traditional Navajo/Diné symbols: the hourglass shape that symbolizes “spider woman,” the goddess associated with weaving; the serrated “eye dazzler” patterns that occur again and again, an adaptation of a traditional Mexican motif; and so on.
But the exhibition also shows an artist spinning up her own symbolism to capture her own experiences and feeling of the present. “Whereas I learned to weave with a more artistic-minded approach, my mother and other relatives learned by necessity—they had to clothe themselves and put food on the table,” Cody told Elephant earlier this year.
Melissa Cody, White Out (2012). Photo by Ben Davis.
A small work, White Out (2012), made during Cody’s formative studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, is a kind of mini manifesto in wool. It features a symmetrical, saw-toothed “eye-dazzler” in greens, oranges, and blues, interrupted by two stark cream-colored rectangles at the left. It feels like the impulsive clash of two systems, but of course it’s actually all one carefully executed design. The patches jut in to exactly the center as if to suggest not just disruption of convention, but an artist seeking a balance between disruption and convention.
“Webbed Skies” is not a large show (it began, incidentally, at the São Paulo Museum of Art as part of Venice Biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa’s year of culture dedicated to Indigenous artists from around the world). It contains just a little over 30 textile works, across three galleries, some of them imposing like World Traveler, some smaller, like White Out. Still, the show captures the sense of what is exciting to me about the current swell of international institutional interest in textile art—which has been so sustained that it can’t be called a trend, though it is not so widespread as to feel secure.
Installation view of “Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies,” on view at MoMA PS1 from April 4 through September 2, 2024. Photo: Kris Graves.
Textile art has met the moment for a variety of reasons—some of them contradictory. Textiles can connote connection to tradition and community. Their tactility and embodied relation to making appeals to a wide audience at a moment when creativity seems very dematerialized and disrupted.
But, as Brian Boucher found in a recent article, textiles can also be sold as the very template of an industrial art, with the punch-card operations of the Jacquard loom contextualized as the first computer. Cody made complex recent works in “Webbed Skies” remotely, sending digital patterns to high-tech looms in Belgium instead of using the traditional upright Navajo hand loom.
The gridded patterns of weavings can also be thought of as pixel art, avant la lettre—an association Cody embraces. In the audio guide, she talks about how the hints of spacey psychedelia in World Traveler deliberately tease memories of riding the “Rainbow Road” from Nintendo’s Mario Kart.
Artists can be simultaneously confined and empowered by the imagery of tradition—pressed to ditch it to develop an individual brand, while pressured to adopt it to fit some stereotypical idea of what “Native weaving” might look like. The turbulence from these competing demands probably intensifies as the world accelerates, as people, images, information, and artworks move around more rapidly and collide in new ways (the exuberant and ever-twisting obstacle course of the “Rainbow Road” actually is a nice organic symbol for this condition, now that I think of it).
Portrait of Melissa Cody. Melissa Cody Working in Her Studio. 2023. Courtesy Graham Nystrom. Photo: Graham Nystrom.
There’s a lot going on in “Webbed Skies.” Some experiments I like a little less and some a little more. I ended up being most drawn to World Traveler because it captures this core creative drama at the level of pattern.
The symmetries and repetitions of the traditional Navajo textile motifs contain plenty of room for expression and innovation, of course. But their ordered geometry intuitively conveys a feeling of preserving a worldview and a stable set of relations to a world—to the land, to community, to tradition.
World Traveler also expresses a mental map of relations in fiber. But it is, as the title suggests, about the sense of moving between different worlds and multiple patterns of life that pull at you. Cody captures the strangeness of this present, and the beauty that can come in navigating that strangeness, and she makes having that particular conversation in this particular medium look so natural.
“Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies” is on view at MoMA PS1 in Queens, through September 9.
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Perhaps it has happened to you. You are walking down a Manhattan sidewalk and catch sight of an intriguing artwork through an apartment window. I try not to be too weird about it. I slow down a bit and investigate, discreetly. What’s that on the wall? An early Robert Rauschenberg? An unusual Cindy Sherman? Alas, I can rarely tell. There is a lot of art in this world, and the finest stuff tends to hang in apartments far from the gazes of passersby.
Recently, though, there have been some excellent art shows in New York apartments operating as art spaces, accessible to the general public, no spying or special invitation necessary. They are reminders that all you really need to start a gallery is a clean, well-lighted place (which is the name that the writer Dave Hickey gave to his fabled Austin gallery in the 1960s, borrowing the title of the Ernest Hemingway short story).
Below are three such exhibitions, one apiece in Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. While they are modest in scale, don’t count that against them. Remember that, in 1957, the art dealer Leo Castelli converted a room in his Upper East Side apartment into an exhibition space. He went on to do some big things.
Tisch Abelow’s Nuclear Family (2024) in ‘Nuclear Family’ in ‘Shoot for the Stars’ at Swanson Kuball. Photo courtesy Swanson Kuball.
A Family Affair in Long Island City
The most heartwarming show in town of late? A strong contender has to be “Shoot for the Stars,”  which featured five artists from one extended family at Swanson Kuball, the Long Island City residence of proprietors Laura Swanson and Greg Kuball.
The canny painter Joshua Abelow—a longtime New York presence who’s run an unusual space of his own upstate—delivered four spare, small new canvases, each with the silhouette of a man, faceless, seemingly on fire, and a few snapshots of suburbia. His sister Tisch Abelow‘s contributions included a meaty, cartoony portrait of the two artists as children with their (somewhat frazzled) parents. The Abelows’ late grandmother Paula Brunner Abelow was here, too, with vivid depictions of her husband, her children, and herself. The youngest participant was nine-year-old Lev Lazarus (the son of Joshua’s partner, Katya Kirilloff), who has a winning touch with pencils and markers, conjuring Minecraft figures and a grinning Joshua.
Kirilloff, for her part, sketched a faint self-portrait on a grocery bag—a mom enjoying a quiet moment—and painted a gouache of Lazarus that is disarmingly realistic, except for his two fanged teeth. Titled Vampire Boy (2023), it registers a dissonant note, alluding to familial power dynamics that tend to go unspoken and unseen.
Installation view of ‘Dave Miko: Welcome Weary Wanderer’ at Bill Cournoyer/The Meeting, with And Winter Roses (2024) at right. Photo courtesy the Meeting.
Scintillating Paintings in the West Village
New York has seen too little of the ace painter Dave Miko recently. “Welcome Weary Wanderer,” his current outing at Bill Cournoyer’s West Village apartment space, the Meeting, is his first solo show in the city in 10 years (R.I.P., Real Fine Arts) and his first solo anywhere in nine. Its 10 works are characteristically alluring, action-packed, slippery not-quite abstractions. The majority are oil on aluminum sheets (about square or oddly shaped), the approach Miko is known for, but there are also enamel-on-panel numbers. Looser and hazier, these could be spectral visions or close-ups of sprayed graffiti.
A faint melancholy lingers. Arrows swim around the green and copper Next to the Map (all works 2024). It’s a strong picture, but the best one here is the biggest, And Winter Roses. (A Hank Williams nod?) It’s 6 feet tall, a gray field bedecked with choppy black lines—you can just about hear Miko’s brush or knife sliding or skittering across the aluminum—that partially obscure large words. I can make out “solitude,” for one. Let’s hope there’s not too much of that. Miko, 50 this year, is making art that is at once plainspoken and otherworldly, thrilling and strange. You have until June 29 to see it.
Another view of Jacob Kassay’s show in Brooklyn Heights.
Mysterious Glass in Brooklyn Heights
Until New York’s 303 Gallery posted on Instagram late last month about artist Jacob Kassay‘s furtive project in a Brooklyn Heights apartment, news of its existence had been spreading only by word of mouth, like a rumor. A few days later, the by-appointment-only display closed. Titled “Khiropractik,” it was a kind of uncanny coda or reprise of Kassay’s solo show of the same name at Galerie Art Concept in Paris earlier this year.
The modest one-bedroom was bathed in red light—jarring at first, then serene, as in the Dream House (1969) of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Foreboding glass creatures, centipedes the size of small dogs, were (barely) present—one on a table, three on the walls—lurking, as if momentarily frozen or beaming in from another dimension. Each of their 23 pairs of legs were perfectly, awfully rendered.
A news release for the French show likens the sculptures to “optical instruments, and more metaphorically, cinematographic devices by proxy.” What do they show us? What do they allow us to see? Fragile and ingenious models of a species that is more than 400 million years old, they could be taken as memento mori (these things will outlive us), or simply as invitations to look and think about art from unusual angles and against various spans of time. It was an enigmatic exhibition with at least one crystal-clear message: superb art can thrive in any environment.
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Basel’s big museums tend to bring their best for Art Basel week, when the global art circus touches down in the placid Swiss berg. So, when the very biggest, the Beyeler Foundation, announced that its 2024 offering would be a group show, observers scratched their heads. Summer group shows are usually low-stakes placeholders. They don’t attract the buzz of a solo show celebrating a big name. To give you an idea of expectations, in 2023 the Beyeler brought out Basquiat; the year before, Mondrian.
Well, as it turns out, the Beyeler’s summer group show is getting plenty of buzz—enough, in fact, to legitimately be called “the talk of the art world.”
Observers are still scratching their heads though.
Because the show’s a weird one. It’s actually hard even to describe what it is. An experimental exhibition meant seemingly to inject novelty into every nook of the Beyeler, it is both over-stuffed with ideas and coyly under-explained—seemingly because the idea is to throw you off balance. Even the frickin’ title changes over time! It was being called “Dance with Daemons” when I was there, but is constantly renamed. A little accompanying booklet I picked up has a list of other titles including “Cloud Chronicles” and “The Richness of Going Slowly.” As I write this, the name online is “Echoes Unbound.”
The show’s mission is “to stimulate artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange, and collective responsibility,” with its conception credited to no less than seven collaborators: Sam Keller, Mouna Mekouar, Isabela Mora, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, and Tino Sehgal. Instead of too many cooks spoiling the broth, it feels as if they have made some weird new flavor of exhibition—though it must also be said that this offbeat museum-as-living-thing brew is also just a throwback to the “relational aesthetics” moment that brought some of the bigger artists here to fame, when quirky science-project art and poetic scrambling of audience expectations were the rage.
Now that I think of it, if you wanted to state plainly what this show was “about,” it might be relational aesthetics nostalgia—Rirkrit Tiravanija offers the terrace as a space for cookouts, while Carsten Höller is offering a gallery in the museum to book for psychedelic sleepovers (there’s a holographic flying mushroom in the room). Nevertheless, for my money, the loose-limbed 2000s vibe feels suddenly fresh again, at a time when more market-driven art channels (galleries, fairs) aren’t really supporting much experimental work, and the less market-driven ones (museums, biennials) feel forlorn and at sea.
A detail of Precious Okoyomon’s the sun eats her children (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
Almost everything here challenges the audience to try to inhabit the museum in some kind of fresh way, engaging the senses as well as the brain. You’ve got a whole greenhouse-as-installation by Okoyomon, which is enchanting—there are butterflies!—but gets sinister when you realize it is all various poisonous flowers (there’s also an unsettling animatronic bear, like something out of Five Nights at Freddy’s). You’ve got Parreno’s techno-mythological tower, rising like some kind of alien artifact in the lawn, pulsing with movement and lights in an otherworldly way. You’ve got venerable Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s “sculpture” consisting of jets of mist that are periodically unleashed, swamping the landscape around you. And that’s all before you even get inside the actual museum.
Within the tony galleries of the Beyeler, you discover that this contemporary art show is not, in fact, all about contemporary art. A big portion is devoted to showing off the famously astounding Beyeler permanent collection—but the curation has been helmed by Tino Sehgal, an artist known for staging “constructed situations” using performers in museums (he also has a charming performance work here, This Joy, featuring three dancers in shimmying, improvisatory formations doing semi-musical vocal riffs on Ode to Joy, among other tunes). True to form, Sehgal has turned his art curating into a performance: the installation is being remixed and rehung constantly so that you feel as if you are always in a show that is midway through being installed. You’ll see art handlers moving paintings often.

An install of artworks in the Beyeler Foundation’s summer show. Photo by Ben Davis.
When I passed through, Sehgal had placed highlights together in uncomfortably intimate, wonky proximity. An example: the central panel of a Francis Bacon triptych, hung cheek to jowl with a Rudolf Stingel abstraction, with a life-sized Alberto Giacometti figure placed as if it were staring into it. The gesture does make me viscerally feel why you don’t normally display art like this—what you gain in playful connections in the present you lose in focus on artists’ actual visions. But taken as an artistic performance, Sehgal’s curating is a truly memorable flex.
There are little experimental flourishes everywhere, but the bulk of the contemporary part of the show is a more conventional, one-artist, one-room kind of thing. The chosen works are united by suggesting the possibility of unexpected experience and encounters, from an evolving A.I.-generated video of a turtle by Ian Cheng, to impressively weird sculptures that incorporate a washing machine and refrigerator by Adrián Villar Rojas.
A sculpture by Adrián Villar Rojas at the Beyeler Foundation. Photo by Ben Davis.
It is not all jocular riffing. Arthur Jafa’s almost-abstract black-and-white film, LOML (2023), is a tribute to his friend, the late, great music critic Greg Tate, who passed in 2021. It is just fuzzy shapes, like a memory of some kind of powerful force being called upon, wrestling against oblivion. You might also sense here how the show’s larger spirit of playful juxtaposition can be salutary. For a work that could convey utter melancholy, the experimental context draws to the surface how the film’s ghostly, semi-abstract collage soundtrack has a warmth to it—the side of the work that is not just longing for a lost friend, but paying homage to the delight in musical invention that defined Tate’s writing.
I could name other highlights, but I’ll just end by mentioning the one that made me know I wanted to write about the show: Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry (2024), a half-hour 3-D film.
The danger of all this experimental interventionism is that it comes off as a gimmick, novelty for novelty’s sake. And 3-D is a perennial film gimmick. But like this show as a whole, Gaillard’s piece transcends that criticism with dispatch. Palpably the product of an artist with access to top-of-the-line tools and explicitly an exploration of their potentials, it is the best artistic use of 3-D I’ve even seen (and, yes, I am including the “space whale revenge” sequence from Avatar 2: The Way of Water).
A crowd watches Retinal Rivals (2024) by Cyprien Gaillard.
Almost narrative-less, it takes us drifting across features of the German landscape and its monuments, often dwelling on the slightly cruddy sides of hallowed things: majestic buildings caked with construction scaffolding, dusty and neglected museum interiors, the dramatic views that inspired Caspar David Friedrich turned to tourist attractions. The imagery feels at once quotidian and meticulously composed, filmic paintings that use depth as one of their colors, putting 3-D’s jewel-box effect to work making you see what you are seeing in a new way.
At moments, the landscapes of Retinal Rivalry inspire a kind of dark awe about the scope of human impact on the world (the opening scene presses you up close to a huge-feeling mass of discarded glass bottles, only to watch them slither away from you as a chute opens, plunging into a dump far below—an extraordinary effect). At others, it made me chuckle (a shot centering on the giant, cartoonish nose of a sculpture, the camera moving in and out so that the schnoz looms at you comically). In still others, it gave an unexpected, visceral rush (the sequence that floats in on an outdoor wall plastered with Immersive Van Gogh posters, then plunges backwards along its length as if going into hyperspace—almost as if Gaillard were saying, “here, Immersive Van Gogh, let me show you how something really cool is done”). Like this entire experimental Beyeler exhibition, it’s a work of fluid connections, technical bravura, and a surprising emotional range.
The first of the two times I watched through Retinal Rivalry, a fellow viewer, a Swiss woman wearing a “RAISED BY THE STREETS” shirt-dress, was so distressed at how passive the audience was that she was telling everyone, “You’ve got to move around! The effect is better when you move around!” Helpful tip! As she exited, she said to her companion, “It’s really cool—but they haven’t realized it yet.” I feel like she was really getting into the spirit of this show.
The Fondation Beyeler’s summer show is on view in Basel, Switzerland, through August 11, 2024.
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Without hosiery, contemporary art would be a great deal poorer. For decades, Senga Nengudi has stretched pantyhose into inventive sculptures, Sarah Lucas has dressed uncanny human figures in stockings, and Ernesto Neto has filled hose with all kinds of spices to build beguiling installations. Now those garments, in some sense, have inspired a spirited group show, “Means of Production,” at a warehouse on the edge of Queens with more than 70 participants—a few established, most emerging. You should see it.
Amid boxes, art delights await.
First, some backstory: The building, a short walk from Forest Park and various cemeteries, is home to two enterprises—the exquisitely named Sheerly Touch-Ya, which deals in existing and up-cycled deadstock hosiery, and Shisanwu, which fabricates sculptures for many notable names. Sheerly Touch-Ya was started in 1992 by James Chang, an immigrant from Taiwan, and Shisanwu was co-founded in 2018 by his daughter Serena Chang, a veteran of Urs Fischer’s studio, with Aric Grauke.
An untitled work by Yitian Yan from 2024.
The exhibition’s curators—a collective called Lunch Hour comprised of Lily Jue Sheng, Do Toung Linh, and Serena Chang—have scattered works throughout the warehouse, amid an unfathomable number of boxes of leggings, tights, pantyhose, and the like. Finding them becomes a kind of treasure hunt. It may also elicit some of those precious “is that art?” moments that sharpen the senses.
The trio of clothing racks adorned with jewelry and fabric? Those are three artworks, by Vy Trinh, a discreetly placed label notes. The styrofoam surfboard leaning against a wall? Not an artwork. It belongs to the surfboard-making Alex Ito, one of a few artists with a studio here.
Alex Eagleton’s painting Dolt Bolt Wallop (2024) sits beneath a wall-hung piece by Darren Bader. At left is a kinetic sculpture by Kao Pham.
A good number of artists have produced their contributions with materials from the premises. A spherical lamp by Yitian Yan, hanging within a dimly lit shelving unit, is encased in white Sheerly Touch-Ya hosiery, while Ioanna Pantazopoulou wove those products into alluring sculptural tapestries. Yu Rim Chung built a kind of miniature abstract architectural model of a city or a garden with debris from their studio and 3-D–printed bits from Shisanwu projects. Becky Kolsrud, meanwhile, offers a characteristically charming painting of legs in tall checkered socks.
Yu Rim Chung, polyethylene layer cake, 2024
The art here is a mixed bag, but the show’s overall effect is heartening. Artists and curators have gotten together to do something unusual in an unusual space, many of them using only what was readily at hand. It’s an exhibition about things that often go unseen and unmentioned (art fabrication, unsold inventory), and as its name, “Means of Production,” suggests, it has a political undercurrent, with some pieces that address labor issues. Sierra Pettengill presents footage of the 1926 fur-trade workers strike that won a 40-hour workweek, while Jen Liu’s video The Machinist’s Lament (2014) examines industrial production by way of surreal collage and a Theodor Adorno-quoting voiceover.
Becky Kolsrud, Red Heels, 2024.
On June 8, as part of this experiment, the space will host an “Art Workers’ Town Hall” that will take up ways of “resisting extractive labor practices, divisions of labor, and institutional/systemic racism within our workplaces.” Who knows what that might inspire? Things are bleak in many parts of the art industry right now. Small and mid-size galleries are closing, and salaries (and artist’s fees) are stalled. The other day, an artist acquaintance reeled off for me the day jobs that a bunch of recently celebrated mid-career artists are currently doing to make ends meet. As the international art market becomes ever more top-heavy, corporate, and unequal, this smart and scrappy production is registering the pervasive discontent—and modeling another approach.
“Means of Production,” which is open only by appointment, runs through July 31 at 74-12 88th Street, Glendale, New York. See more photographs of the show below.
Jacob Kassay, Case, 2021.
Serena Chang, Us, 2024.
Natalie Skinner, Untitled (crying cat), 2024
Footless tights by Sheerly Touch-Ya: queen-size leggings with capri lace.
Anjuli Rathod, Net, 2024
Three 2024 works by Vy Trinh.
Work by Thuy Nguyen, top left. Photo by Ben Davis.
Poyen Wang, Endearing Insanity, 2022.
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Something I’ve noticed: Almost a decade on, the Berlin art scene is still haunted by its 2016 biennale. The DIS-curated show enters the room whenever “post-internet art” is referenced, or during any discussion about the state of culture in the 2010s, and it rattles the picture frames when one of its artists has an exhibition here. It haunts the art scene because there is still no settled consensus on whether it was good or not. “These artists seem to want to have their fun and still get credit for topicality, but let’s get real: I have seen spambots with greater sensitivity,” wrote critic Jason Farago in the Guardian at that time. “Try being sincere; try believing in something,” he cautioned before taking himself to the opera.
So when the group show “Poetic Encryptions” opened in February with a handful of the same artists as the DIS exhibition—with post-internet art among the leitmotifs on view at KW Institute of Contemporary Art, which was one of the Berlin biennale host venues—it was inevitable that people would draw comparisons with the earlier exhibition. Yet, in spite of a few crossovers (Jon Rafman, Simon Denny, Trevor Paglen), the state of play feels different. That abject irony that embodied this art scene around the 2016 Berlin Biennale, so cozied up it was with corporate slang and a flip of the hair, seems to have bled out—a feeling of real stakes has emerged.
Installation view of the exhibition Poetics of Encryption at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2024; Photo: Frank Sperling
Spread across four floors, “Poetics of Encryption,” which runs through the end of May, is part of an ongoing project by KW’s curator for the digital sphere, Nadim Samman, that looks at how virtual life has been shaped by and is shaping climate collapse, artificial intelligence, online micro-ideologies, and Pepe the Frog. It casts a wide net, prodding some unwieldy topics: including omnipotent algorithms, data banks on which our identities are swiped, doxed, and recorded, often with little consent, as well as the endless strings of code that underline contemporary life.
As such, darkness—a sense of non-permeable black zones—pervades the spaces by way of black walls and dim lights (so dim it makes the didactic panels too hard to read in places). It does make it hard to remember the sterility that can be associated with post-internet art. A phantasmagoric cat reappears in two transfigurations, once with eight legs and, later on, two. Both artworks by Eva and Franco Mattes, these taxidermy sculptures are based on memes called “panorama fails”—warped images that distort figures. The show, in moments, feels like one of these pictures, where works seem to echo and repeat, though I am not sure it is always intentional. Warehouse-like PVC curtains recur in several rooms with a plasticky stench, recalling industrial factories, an architectural intervention by the architect Jürgen Mayer H.
Installation view of the exhibition Poetics of Encryption at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2024; Photo: Frank Sperling
“Poetics of Encryption” has little of the standoffish aesthetic that was a prototype for the art scene and DIS-era art scene of a few years ago. The tone of that biennale on the whole (there were many compelling works), which came to be the emblem of post-internet art—largely cynical, apolitical, typified by a bit of smugness—has lost an edge. And actually, it would seem crass in the world of 2024. (Although there is Tilman Hornig’s 2013 Glassbooks, a bunch of glass MacBooks arranged on a table that recalls the merchandising of an Apple Store.)
Instead, the ethos of many artists in “Poetics of Encryption” strikes me differently from that 2016 moment—there is less celebration or naïve curiosity about digital life or the libertarian merits of crypto and online networks. One has a sense of moving through a techno-industrial landscape that meets a speculative museum of post-nature. Romanticism and, that pining sense of longing or maybe even mourning, is present in works that consider environments in states of entropy. Julian Charriere’s sculptures—faux meteorites made from trash—speak to this kind of yearning.
A.I. feels like some kind of endgame in Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025 (2023) by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, which places it within a 500 years-long mind map, an expansive two-part flowchart pasted on a pair of walls that attempts to visualize the complex intertwining systems of innovation, colonialization, and technology. Carsten Nicolai’s mysterious all-black sculpture engulfs an entire gallery, driving home a feeling of ominousness, mystique, and low-level anxiety.
Installation view of the exhibition Poetics of Encryption at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2024; Photo: Frank Sperling
But if this version of the future feels burdened by the past, it’s because it is. The anti-industrialist, anarchist, and murderer Ted Kaczynski, who died last year, is embodied by Freedom Club Figure, a 2013 work by Daniel Keller that includes on a slender mannequin wearing Kaczynski’s backpack, which the artist allegedly purchased from a United States government auction.
Installation view of the exhibition Poetics of Encryption at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2024; Photo: Frank Sperling
Rather than driving around the dubious detritus of the web, the group show steers right into it, and some of the most interesting works looks unflinchingly at the darker corners of the internet.
Dylan Louis Monroe, of the right-wing conspiracy movement QAnon, is not on the artist list but his deep state maps are on view, shyly relegated to a hallway, maybe because they are a bit too real. A cluster of computers reminiscent of a dank internet cafe includes several online-platform works, one of which is the very dystopian PMC Wagner Arts, a surreal (and fictional) company populated by a board that includes Peter Thiel, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and Julia Stoschek (speaking of real, the latter is actually a KW board member). A work by the art collective ubermorgen, PMC’s two-bit website veiled with corporate lingo, a very 2016 technique using a very 2024 cast of ambiguous characters.
Installation view of the exhibition Poetics of Encryption at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2024; Photo: Frank Sperling
Several works analyze political and cultural compasses retooled by algorithm and a changing society. The collective Clusterduck’s The Detective Wall (2020–24) provides a physical visualization of a thousand memes in thematic clusters, with red threads (I do appreciate the meta comment on the Pepe Silvia meme) building out a pictorial universe. According to the press text, it references Aby Warburg’s visual mapping of culture, but I might not go so far—however, I appreciate the tactile, zine-like aesthetic. Joshua Citarella’s flag series E-DEOLOGIES (2020–23) hangs in an atrium at KW, with various political insignia overlaid and reimagined as flags. His project—to crystallize a new constellation of mutating political ideologies that have emerged in online micro-communities (“Under no pretext shall we be tread on” is apparently the motto of a very emergent “Anarcho-Collectivist Capitalist Mutualist” group) codifies a political spectrum that is unraveling and rethreading itself in surprising ways.
Given the themes of this show—the web, politics, and our collective psyche as a shifty feedback loop—it is notable, then, that ubermorgen’s work caused controversy on social media when a preview of it was posted on KW’s Instagram as part of show promotion in March. It seemed to offend enough followers (who condemned the references to Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries) that KW removed the post. For a show that muses on the internet and changing society, this online spat felt ironic. How often it can be forgotten that the problems of the world rarely stem from art.
I wonder also if, maybe, the anger could have in part been a projection given what was happening in real-time: KW board member Axel Wallrabenstein resigned in February after inciting anger over his commentary on Twitter, which some saw as a trolling rhetoric about the Israel-Gaza war; many were infuriated by his posts, which included heart eyes and an Israeli flag accompanying footage of Israeli soldiers smashing shops and humiliating detained Palestinians.
Installation view of the exhibition Poetics of Encryption at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2024; Photo: Frank Sperling
In that fray, some of the most powerful moments in the show are not representative. American Artist and Morehshin Allahyari decided to remove their work from “Poetics of Encryption,” crossing out their names from participation as a part of strike against German institutions. “The aggressive censorship and suppression of critical voices by the German government and the support of genocide in Gaza is something I cannot tolerate,” American Artist wrote on Instagram when announcing their respective withdrawal.
This is where a struggle with media or post-internet art—how to bring the digital into the analog space in a convincing way—succeeds in the most concrete terms. There is one blacked-out screen among a series of works by other artists where Allahyari’s should have been (that said, I ran into someone who thought that screen was simply broken). In another gallery lies a crate that holds the sculpture American Artist chose to not unpack. What a shame to not be able to see the work Mother of All Demos III (2021), a computer of dirt, old parts, wood, and asphalt—a symbol of eroding modernity.
Against the backdrop of a brutal conflict in Gaza, and in the midst of a wretched German political arena marred by censorship, and a psychodrama online where artists have been canceled by institutions for comments, likes, and reposts, a question from DIS’s 2016 curatorial text, dripping as it was then with irony, comes to mind: “Are we at war?”  Standing amid the hum of servers and screens at “Poetics of Encryption,” which only hint at the surrounding chaos, we can now answer from the future, this time with sincerity: yes.
The group exhibition “Poetics of Encryption” is on view at KW Institute of Contemporary Art until May 26.
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In a recent recital in the auditorium of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, violinist Marina Chiche plucked at her instrument with a flurry and tempo that echoed the brisk brushstrokes in the blockbuster exhibition upstairs, “Paris 1874: Inventer l’impressionnisme” (“Inventing Impressionism”). The piece she played, a sonatina by Pauline Viardot, may very well have inspired the Impressionists themselves, along with other writers and artists of their day, who gathered in Viardot’s illustrious salon in the 1870s.
The concert is part of an ambitious museum program that plunges visitors into the historical context that led to the birth of one of the most beloved but also misunderstood artistic movements. Co-organized with the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C., where it will travel in September (under the title “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment”), the show is not alone. It is the defining apex of a slew of ambitious exhibitions around the world, particularly abundant in France, which is re-examining ingrained myths around these artists, along with some of the movement’s overlooked contributors, in celebration of its 150th anniversary.
As widely loved as Impressionism remains today, its overexposure has some rolling their eyes at museums now rushing for the opportunity to spotlight what skeptics tend to reduce to “pretty pictures” and “a plaything for rich people and fancy museums,” as Mary Morton of the National Gallery put it.
That response is not so different from some of the criticism directed against the Impressionists 150 years ago. Journalists in the late 1800s feared that then-emerging artists like Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro were “imposing an art of pure enjoyment” to the detriment of more serious painting about historic events typically selected for the official, state-influenced Salon exhibitions, notes an Orsay catalogue essay by art historian Bertrand Tillier. They went further, mocking the informal group for their unfinished, sketch-like painting style, considered “unhealthy” and even “insane.”
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (1871). Photo: Musee d’Orsay. © Musée Marmottan Monet / Studio Christian Baraja SLB.
The Impressions About Impressionism
Famously, the name “Impressionist” stuck to the group after writers led by Louis Leroy used it to insult, not praise, Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), which became the center piece of that first Impressionist show, held in a former photography studio in Paris’ Opera district. In Leroy’s piece, which nevertheless helped push the movement to the fore, he said Monet’s roughly brushed rendering of the sun rising over the industrial port in Le Havre, done in foggy shades of periwinkle electrified by an orange sun, was less complete than “wallpaper in its embryonic state.”
Today as well, not all responses have been positive (though most have) to the Orsay’s exhibition, which seeks to reproduce a selection of the iconic 1874 show and compare it to the official Salon held simultaneously. (It is seconded by a parallel VR experience.) The Times, for instance, interprets the Orsay show as suggesting Impressionists lacked daring for focusing on the safer “world of dance and theatre, parks and rural idylls,” rather than subjects like the horrific Franco-Prussian War and subsequent civil war which had brought the city to its knees just a few years before. The writer visits the low-income northern Paris suburbs of St. Denis, calling it “a far cry from the romanticized Paris of the impressionists, but it’s that half-seen reality that captivates tourists,” she adds. “By downgrading their radicalism, the Musée d’Orsay is giving a bit of a dressing-down to Degas, Monet and the rest of the gang, but it certainly needs their box-office appeal.”
On the Orsay press opening day, there were also early signs of some grumblings to come, when a French journalist asked the curators, Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins, whether “the public will be a little disappointed, when, expecting to see a lot of Impressionist paintings, they instead discover other paintings we don’t talk about that much today?”
The curators are in fact hoping to demonstrate that the movement’s first exhibition included a more eclectic mix of artists than commonly thought, mostly united around economic motivations and a yearning for a measure of freedom from the Salon’s grip on who was able to show art. Yet theirs was not a cohesive rebellion against the powerful Salon, as long taught, and the Orsay shows there were significant overlaps between the two exhibitions, their participants, and the types of works shown.
Claude Monet (1840 -1926) The Poppy Field near Argenteuil (1873) Oil on canvas. 50 x 65,3 cm Paris, Musée d’Orsay © RMN -Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
From 1874 to 2024
The 1874 exhibition featured only a minority of Impressionist works. A mere seven out of 31 artists and 51 out of 215 artworks in the show, organized by a group of the so-called Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs were later dubbed Impressionist. The rest included odd, etched portraits of dogs, classicizing sculptures and a Renaissance-style enamel portrait, all by mostly forgotten artists.
So what are we celebrating 150 years later? The Orsay curators, along with Morton and Kimberly Jones at the NGA in Washington, did take a risk when they aimed to bust some long-perpetuated inaccuracies of the David-and-Goliath type, which continue to cling to Impressionists.
“This black-and-white narrative keeps being repeated in every art history class I ever took, and so people just assume that narrative is true and accurate, but it’s a gross oversimplification of reality,” said Jones. “We want to complicate the narrative, pull apart some of the tidiness, to get to the actual truth.”
The 1874 show “was far from being uniformly radical, so there’s a need for nuance and re-examination,” added Robbins at the opening. But that doesn’t mean the event was anything short of groundbreaking. “Among the artists who exhibited in 1874, there is a core, a kind of sub-group of artists, who are doing other things… and this is the moment this new painting begins to crystallize,” she said.
In addition to the strange animal portraits and academic sculptures, the show also featured some masterpieces, which, for those looking carefully, did—and do—stand out as astounding and new.
Paul Cézanne’s A Modern Olympia, Sketch (1873-74) of a nude prostitute observed by a fully dressed man, is beside Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle (1872), a gestural masterpiece of a mother observing her sleeping baby, by the only woman in the 1874 exhibition. Nearby, there is Edgar Degas’s Laundress (1869), a woman slouched over her ironing board rendered in agile, limited strokes, or Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (1873-1874), showing the modern, newly built street. We also see what some have called “pretty” things: a field of red flowers almost engulfing a woman and child in Monet’s Poppies (1873). And back to Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), no industrial port ever looked so stunning.
These works and the other Impressionist paintings were “sources of scandal” because of how swiftly they were executed, and the decision to “paint the world around them,” said Patry. This, she said, “spurred a sense of shock.”
Paul Cézanne, A Modern Olympia (detail), (1873-1874). © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN -Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt.
The nascent Impressionists were neither blindly romantic nor “safe,” as some critics are still saying. They were depicting their times, and, in a major break from the past, they did so without the moralizing, academic history paintings that official Salon juries had traditionally praised—though several modern and, yes, radical works, particularly examples by Manet, did also pass Salon muster, as intelligently shown in the Orsay exhibition.
Context, in short, is key. “Many of the artists are responding to the traumatized citizens of Paris after ‘l’année terrible’ [“the terrible year,” as Victor Hugo called the violent series of conflicts rocking Paris from 1870-1871], and you cannot have what people think of as Impressionism… without considering what happened three years earlier in the capital, which was horrific,” said Morton.
As a result, the Impressionists felt a “need to move forward, to forge a new path, and not be mired in the past, to move beyond all the trauma,” added Jones. “We’re presenting this so people understand what they’ve lived through, and why this art is forward-thinking, and why there is a degree of optimism in this.”
There are “edgier, tougher things” in the first Impressionist show, said Morton. “Paul Durand-Ruel was their dealer, and he packaged the Impressionism that we think of today, which is pretty pictures… but these exhibitions were never just that. They were more complicated, more diverse, and edgier.” Degas, for instance, “is the great portrayer of the dark side of Victorian femininity,” and Camille Pissarro “paints from a position of paint and instability… He paints to survive. He paints for joy,” she said.
As the world they knew shifted beneath them, the Impressionists, aware that all could have been lost in the recent destruction, took a leap and began showing the poetry and significance of a fleeting moment. Their rapid painting technique was ideally suited for this, allowing them to seize an ephemeral impression of light, or any simple act of daily life. This was indeed radical, and far from frivolous. It was life-affirming, and, for some, a mechanism for survival.
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