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Symbiotic Art

With the rise of new materialism, the notion that nonhuman matter has its own meaningful agency has seeped into a number of disciplines. In the past several years, many artists hoping to think “with” their materials have turned to organic and living matter. Amid this surging interest in bio art, 15 Orient, in Brooklyn, mounted a miniature retrospective of German-born, Port Townsend, Washington–based artist Nöle Giulini, who has been working in this mode for the past three decades with little institutional recognition.

A number of the sculptures on view were made from brittle brown kombucha leather, a biomaterial that Giulini started using prior to its recent adoption by sustainable fashion advocates. Some works, like Vestige #2 (2004), from her “Incisions” series, are stringy cutups that resemble collapsing ribcages. Others, like the tubular sluglike Wurm (2005), are barnacled with bunched extrusions. The short video Kombucha Process (Culture), 1996, and accompanying photographic documentation offer a window into Giulini’s labor-intensive process. She adds a kombucha starter and feeding solution of sugar and black tea to a mold made from sand and plastic in a massive incubator in her backyard, gradually coaxing the kombucha to form a thick, fleshy membrane. She then uses a fishing net to lift the squelching sheet onto a drying rack, knotting the material with rubber bands, slicing it up, or sewing pieces together before treating it with frankincense and myrrh.

Under Giulini’s guidance, the kombucha cultures adopt forms that flirt with representation yet are ultimately unplaceable; for example, Hrdaya (2006), a wall relief titled after a Sutra that equates form with emptiness, features a smashed carob-colored mass that simultaneously evokes a painterly impasto and a strange fossil. In a world of matter in flux, all forms are provisional, which feels especially palpable in these sculptures because they could easily change shape and state if reanimated with tea, the substance traditionally fermented to make kombucha. The works’ conservation is thus riddled with problems and possibilities. When Borrowed Monk (2006), a kombucha leather cone abjectly sagging over a small wooden bench, needed repairs, Giulini applied wet strips of kombucha culture that grew into the existing leather.

Untitled (2003), a nub of this tough textile covered in gold leaf, suggests that the material is precious—even magical—to Giulini, and puts her in dialogue with other German artists interested in alchemy, like Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. Beuys and Kiefer have employed the language of alchemy to represent possibilities of spiritual metamorphosis: Beuys’s shamanistic transmogrification of profane materials like fat and felt into artworks, and Kiefer’s use of lead in heavy canvases grappling with Nazi history, express hope for transformation in German society. In contrast, Giulini’s exploration of fermentation, the alchemy by which a symbiotic culture turns tea into kombucha, is primarily concerned with transformation on a material level. The ideological project to which her work is loosely tied is that of acknowledging the complexity and dynamism of nonhuman life, which might erode the anthropocentric worldview that has ravaged the environment, though that connection is not made explicit. (Other thinkers have more overtly yoked fermentation to social transformation: for example, Lauren Fournier’s 2017 curatorial and book project “Fermenting Feminism” strove to “approach feminisms through the metaphor and material practice of fermentation,” a process described as embodying both preservation and transformation.)

Organic processes of transformation likewise drive Giulini’s Emperor’s New Clothes (1992), an orderly arrangement of decomposing fruits and vegetables sheathed in hard gelatin so that they resemble chrysalises. At once a memento mori—a reminder of our inevitable rot—and a celebration of the generative potential of that rot, the pedestal-mounted installation makes the chemical byproducts of the decomposition process visible: off-gas from the decaying produce has inflated the gelatin over time, causing units of the installation to subtly shapeshift.

Artist Statement (1991/2022) conveys, with playful concision, the depth of Giulini’s commitment to her materials. The work comprises sequences of colorful rubber bands of various sizes—the same bands she uses to shape the kombucha leather—draped on pins so that they resemble a written language, a secret dialect informed by years of intimate relation between human and nonhuman matter. The writing may be asemic, but it is anything but meaningless.

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How Brett Goodroad’s Paintings Became a Surprise Hit with the Art World

In 2021, writer and public intellectual Hilton Als covered Goodroad’s solo show at the San Francisco gallery Cushion Works for the New Yorker. Taken with Goodroad’s work, Als curated this first New York solo exhibition for the artist,at Greene Naftali. It features 15 unabashedly painterly—encrusted, scumbled, atmospheric, gorgeous—oil paintings. Conjuring craggy coastlines, patchy farmland, pooling water, and green-brown wilds punctuated by the occasional sunset, Goodroad’s frequently murky pictures hover between landscape and abstraction; linger a moment, and they dissolve into tracts of color, patches of texture, fields of forms, evocations of feelings. Untitled (lips part), 2022, for example, depicts reclining lovers as they embrace in quasi-abstract yellow forms that could equally be stretches of sand, over a strip of blue strokes. The image feels unmoored: representation becomes abstraction, figure becomes landscape, earth becomes water. All the canvases on view capture the beauty of shifting—the flux of our environments, our perspectives, our memories, ourselves. We are never quite sure what we see, and the kneejerk impulse to seek certainty seems beside the point.

Even when a title seems to name Goodroad’s subject, this sense of perpetual unfolding persists. Approaching the assertive scale of history paintings, two works titled At the Depot appear to commemorate Goodroad’s regular visits to storehouses. In the earlier At the Depot (2021–22), measuring roughly 6 by 5 feet, a cartoonish, faceless figure beside a red block—a tractor, perhaps—extends a gloved hand toward blue and green mounds; the sky is a medley of blue, brown, and sunflower yellow strokes, while russet clumps along the bottom edge of the frame sprout greenery. Executed in a kindred palette, the later At the Depot (2022) interprets the same event in a nonrepresentational manner: abutting a rectangular expanse of yellow and blue, a stippled navy cascade cuts through scratched brown passages situated among a wet walnut splotch, a green crescent, and a zone of red exactingly detailed with black tildes.

These larger paintings are interspersed with intimately scaled pieces such as an untitled work from 2022, featuring a patchwork of sgraffito and scumble in predominantly earthen hues (greens, yellows, browns), and Untitled (After Dael), 2021–22, a portrayal of what appears to be a deciduous tree in rural surroundings. Rendered gesturally in a damp green-brown palette, the latter scene is difficult to discern, a quality heightened by Goodroad’s decision to paint on copper panel, a support popular in Italy and the Netherlands in the early 17th century, to a flickering effect. Describing himself as an “intuition-absorbed practitioner,” Goodroad often experiments with materials: While the majority of the works here are painted on linen or canvas, a number were executed on copper, silk, and even flannel, a trucker staple that pills under layers of pigment. The designation Untitled (After Dael) may nod to Flemish old master Jan Frans van Dael, but in visual terms, John Constable’s Romantic oil sketches of the English countryside, Barbizon School painter Jules Dupré’s moody renderings of the Normandy coast, and Hudson River School painter George Inness’s Tonalist woodlands seem the more obvious influences. Goodroad yokes landscape’s grand aesthetic traditions (a Romantic stroke, a Dutch Golden Age palette) to his personal experience of his environment, which is inextricably linked to his position as a produce truck driver.

References to the Western history of landscape painting are not purely visual but also political; the genre has long been tied to imperialist, capitalist, and nationalist projects, as W.J.T. Mitchell and other scholars have outlined. In the United States, landscape painting emerged in dialogue with Manifest Destiny, as expansionists readily co-opted the Hudson River School painters’ omniscient, panoramic views of sublime landscapes. (Some artists, like Inness and Thomas Moran, were even employed by transcontinental railroad surveyors to participate in expeditions westward.) Goodroad eschews such magisterial visions, which imply that the job of representation is to depict the land as clear, knowable, and mappable, that painting is an act of possession. Contrary to and countering those settled or sure historical images, Goodroad’s pictures of the American West fog and flicker, congeal and dissolve, advance and retreat. They resist a sense of ready access, or easy comprehension, suggesting that the landscape painter’s task may be instead to unsteady the viewer’s footing.

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Order and Chaos: From the Diaries of Eva Hesse

Standing more than 10 feet tall and, when fully extended, 30 feet wide, the accordion-like sculptural scrim comprises 13 rubberized panels made by brushing liquid latex onto pieces of cheesecloth that are suspended between upright poles handcrafted from reinforced fiberglass. Though it alludes to domestic or theatrical drapes, the work highlights materiality with its intrinsic colors and textures. Infusing monumentality with indeterminacy, Expanded Expansion is adaptable not only in width but in orientation: at the Guggenheim, it was propped gingerly against the wall, but it can also lie on the floor or span a corner.

Hesse, who died from a brain tumor in 1970, was already ailing when she sculpted the work in February and March of 1969. In the decades since, the latex has embrittled, the uneven sequence of pale membranes stiffening into ocher hides. The museum’s conservation team bandaged the panels with polyester and tenderized them with heat, reshaping them to mime their original relationship with gravity. Hesse repeatedly asserted that she knew latex and fiberglass would break down; it is less clear whether she would have wanted her work to be conserved. Perhaps the equivocality introduced by material transformation is the means by which Hesse’s experiments continue to unfold, her process expanding beyond the studio, even beyond her lifetime, into the present, where it pushes up against museological impulses toward stability, control, and completion.