"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
New York City, 2021
I've been trying to learn from Agnes Martin1. She made big, abstract paintings, but without the drippy athletics associated with her abstract-expressionist milieu. So, I've been trying to learn: the not-knowing of it, the strands of longing and pain forming waves of oceanic peace, with a single human person as a (slightly reluctant) point of contact between heaven and earth.
The drawings of Susan Te Kahurangi King2 are (I think) about the parts of the body that are touched, or that want to be touched. The human body caught-up in print and broadcast media, melding with a cartoon body, or the various cartoons that inform our own sense of it, of what it is to have a body at all. There's Bugs Bunny at his most lascivious, and Donald Duck at his most agitated, and distended goblins from someone's vision of Hell.
Judith Scott's3 bundle sculptures are eternal, because they beckon to all these aspects of remembered life that can't be recorded otherwise. It's a mix of sensation and love, weights once held close to the body. There is so much value now in knowing that something existed in space and was touched by a human being, in knowing that it contributed in some instrumental way—witness, vessel, conductor—to an act of love.
I guess I've been thinking about touch a lot, and I've been really drawn to textures and surfaces lately; maybe it's somewhat of a pandemic thing: getting back to basics, focusing on what you can feel, smell, and taste. Martin Wong's4 paintings of the 1980s Lower East Side seem to happen in a world where the borders—between New York City and any individual resident—have dissipated into meaninglessness: the city like a winter coat, wrapping tightly around one's shoulders.
While Jay DeFeo5 was painting 'The Rose' (1958–1966)—a sort of celestial relief sculpture in oil and crushed stone—her studio space got coated in a skin-like accretion of white paint, as if this San Francisco apartment was a part of the artwork. We know this because, when she was evicted from the space, she had to move the 2,300-pound painting elsewhere, and the move was documented by Defeo's friend Bruce Conner6 in his 1967 film 'The White Rose.' We see 'The Rose' sitting snugly in an apartment alcove, with soft sunlight at its edges, and in Conner's inky 16mm—this is the painting in its most beautiful possible state, it has to be. We also see 'The Rose' being arduously lifted onto a truck, and hauled away by a group of laborers. So is it a vessel of the Heavenly sublime, or an ungainly and burdensome weight, or both? It's both.
Now I'd like to explain some details of a Douglas Huebler7 piece, because I really like it, and I don't think it's very easy to find online. The piece is 'Black Plane #2 (Study)' (1979), and it's comprised of two sheets of paper in a frame. The paper on the right is all black (I think it's covered in ink); the paper on the left says (typewritten):
TO THE EXTENT THAT THESE WORDS, AND THE
BLACK PLANE REPRESENTED AT THE RIGHT ARE
MOTIONLESS,
COLORLESS,
AND FULLY FRONTAL
TO THE PLANE OF THIS SURFACE, THEY ARE
PHENOMENALLY SIMILAR, BUT, IF CONSIDERED
ONTOLOGICALLY
THEY SHARE NO COMMON SENSE OF PURPOSE;
TRUE TO TYPE, THE WORDS ENGAGE IN A
COMBINED EFFORT TO FABRICATE MEANING
WHILE THE BLACK PLANE SIMPLY PRESENTS
ITSELF, SELF SUFFICIENT AND NATURAL,
SUBLIMELY INDIFFERENT
TO CULTURAL AMBITION
A lot of conceptual art of the '60s and '70s seemed to prod at limits—the limits of language, of representation, of knowledge—and one of the strange things about looking at it now, is realizing that we have not (and will never have, maybe?) expanded or transformed these limits in the past 50 years, not really. The particular forms of messaging are rigidly locked in time, though, and now part of the struggle for these works is to fight off a sense of quaintness, a generational fissure that settles like dust.
I was struck by the sense of rarity in Laura Aguilar's8 videos. Aguilar is remembered mainly as a photographer, but she made some remarkable video art in the mid-'90s: in blurry, desaturated footage, we see Aguilar herself speaking plaintively and generously about deep depression and suicide. I've seen a lot of videos in my life, but very few like this, and why is that? Aren't there bitter YouTube apologies, manic TikTok confessionals, desperate video/text messages, that sort of thing? There must be, but I don't see them, because they're not meant for me. Aguilar's videos feel raw and honest, and also they were made as art, which eventually means that I can see them and write about them. One of the irreducible elements of an artwork is the extent to which it was chosen to be shared with the outside world; it's a matter of intention and also of directionality. As Agnes Martin wrote, "There are two endless directions. In and out."
Lucy Raven's9 'Casters X-2 + X-3' (2021) is comprised of four bright spotlights attached to robotic apparatus; I saw it in a large, formerly industrial gallery space, where the rings of light moved slowly over patchy brick walls and worn wooden ceilings. And you know, when you think about it, electric light is a pretty new invention (by the time Thomas Edison patented incandescent bulbs, the world already had photography, telephones, stainless steel, and nitroglycerin). And I think that collectively we're still not over it; I'm definitely not. These widely available machines that allow us to speak in a language otherwise reserved for destructive gods: surely this must have been a sharp, schismatic break, right? The people who lived before electric light, and the people living in the years after. And now we have "light pollution," you see. We make so much light that it becomes, effectively, poisonous.
I was alone when I saw Charles Atlas's10 'Angel Dust' (2021) (well, except for the gallery attendant, who had to turn it on for me), and it was almost like I dreamt the whole thing. It's a specially designed video projection onto a sandstone pleasure pavilion façade from early 19th-century India (part of a series of shows in which different artists worked with this odd, lovely piece of architecture). The arcs and corners of the façade were lit up in salaciously tacky colors, greens and purples straight off of the internet, with white-light borders drawn around the structure's large, empty windows. It was like two friends drunkenly smiling at each other from across the bar: a shared purpose, not harmful but somewhat mischievous, pleasure-seeking, unashamedly superficial, unmistakably human.
Again, I'm not sure how much of this is the pandemic, but when I think about art I saw in 2021, I remember a lot of pretty lights. Tacita Dean's11 16mm footage of a golden, glowing moon rising silently over a dark landscape. An-My Lê's12 tender, delicate black-and-white photos of bombs raining down on a U.S. Marine training ground. Ching Ho Cheng's13 exquisitely flat gouache paintings of sunlight through windows.
I also remember some vivid colors. Derek Jarman's14 feature-film masterpiece 'Blue' (1993) projected onto a large gallery wall, so that the space is given to the film's one and only image: a full, ponderous shade of blue. The honey-butter-pancake yellows and oranges of a sun-drenched erotic-art studio, as imagined in recent paintings by Lisa Yuskavage.15 The sickly-sweet pinks and blues of Wong Ping's digital animations.16 The shimmering, opaque yellow of a Rachel Whiteread cast-resin sculpture.17
I remember the pinkish-reds of Carolyn Lazard's18 video installation 'Red' (2021); I actually didn't like this piece at first, but it's different when I think about it now. For 'Red,' Lazard rubbed her finger back-and-forth over a smartphone camera, creating a pink-red-pink strobe effect; in the adjoining room, a separate video shows warning text when the strobe is on, and gives countdowns to when the strobe will start or stop. It's a piece that moves in several directions at once, and in all cases it moves with tension and conflict: the standardized motions of a mechanical "effect" and the faltering movements of a human hand; the social good of warning labels and the impish urge to create something dangerous for the hell of it; the great powers of media and the sad limits of language. And in my memory, too, there are conflicts: a piece of art that I didn't like before, but which I like now; a deeply complex artwork, which I remember mainly as a simple room full of red light.
Etel Adnan's19 landscape paintings seem to have very little conflict. They're complex, but no part disagrees with any other part: there's a sense of holistic unity, maybe best seen in her small paintings of palpitating, colorful suns. The idea of everything-in-its-right-place has a lot of reactionary potential, but the order here is not due to an authoritarian impulse, but instead to some gentle process of nature and time. Things just belong where they do.
I had thought that Jesse Murry's20 landscape paintings were full of conflict, but now I think it's probably more accurate to say that they've been witness to conflict. It's as if a terrible storm had been frozen in earth, like a fossil. There's a harsh materiality throughout—you can see the oil and the grit, you can make out every brushstroke—but isn't that just nature at work? It's as if each painting contains its own tiny hurricane.
Deana Lawson's21 'Boombox' (2020) is a hologram—not a regular photograph—and it's so important that it is. The piece shows a 1990s (I think) stereo system, a bit beat-up but it probably still works. The components seem to be stuck together with packing tape, and there are four price tags pasted haphazardly onto the speakers. Each of these details feels important, because the whole thing—the whole object—feels important. It's a physical site where music, touch, money, community, age, and time all have a presence, and the hologram has its own weird presence, seeming to jut out into the space of the gallery. You sense that everything—everything important—passed through this object: love and tenderness, fear and rage, gossip and art, and now you're walking in its light, taking up its space. You're passing through it, too.
| 1 | Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color; Pace, May–June 2021 |
| 2 | Parallel Phenomena: Works on Paper by Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Gladys Nilsson and Peter Saul; Andrew Edlin, May–July 2021 |
| 3 | Super-Rough; presented by the Outsider Art Fair, June 2021 |
| 4 | Martin Wong & Aaron Gilbert: 1981-2021; P.P.O.W., April–May 2021 |
| 5 | Bruce Conner & Jay DeFeo: (“we are not what we seem”); Paula Cooper, September–October 2021 |
| 6 | Bruce Conner & Jay DeFeo: (“we are not what we seem”); Paula Cooper, September–October 2021 |
| 7 | Douglas Huebler, Sherrie Levine, Walid Raad: No More Than Three Other Times; Paula Cooper, April–June 2021 |
| 8 | Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell; Leslie-Lohman Museum, February–June 2021 |
| 9 | Lucy Raven; Dia, April–December 2021 |
| 10 | The Pleasure Pavilion: A series of installations; Luhring Augustine, September 2020–July 2021 |
| 11 | Tacita Dean: The Dante Project · One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting · Pan Amicus · Significant Form · Monet Hates Me; Marian Goodman, September–October 2021 |
| 12 | An-My Lê: đô-mi-nô; Marian Goodman, June–August 2021 |
| 13 | Ching Ho Cheng (part of More Life); David Zwirner, September–October 2021 |
| 14 | Derek Jarman (part of More Life); David Zwirner, June–August 2021 |
| 15 | Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings; David Zwirner, September–October 2021 |
| 16 | Wong Ping: Your Silent Neighbor; New Museum, June–October, 2021 |
| 17 | The Pleasure Pavilion: A series of installations; Luhring Augustine, September 2020–July 2021 |
| 18 | Greater New York; PS1, October 2021–April 2022 |
| 19 | Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure; Guggenheim, October 2021–January 2022 |
| 20 | Jesse Murry: Rising (part of More Life); David Zwirner, September–October 2021 |
| 21 | Deana Lawson; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., May–June 2021 |