Related Articles

Photography in Fragments

Two Books about Art History Examine a Discipline in Crisis

Dillon begins with semantic negotiations. “How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities,” he writes. He describes affinity as “something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions.” Dillon’s brand of affinity goes deeper than the internet’s algorithmic recommendations, and is more authentic than the manufactured kinships trumpeted in marketing collateral. Affinity, he writes, is like fascination, but not. It’s a less sentimental sibling to appreciation: a term with the same bloodline but a different character. It’s beyond aesthetics. It’s impermanent. Ultimately, it’s not even thinkable—a “mode of dumb fascination.” Elsewhere in the book, he describes the attempt to anatomize affinity as “stupid” and “idiotic.” His thematic playground here is the gap between how art transfixes us and our inability to articulate that transfixion. (T.J. Clark’s 2006 book on Poussin, The Sight of Death, shares such language; he wonders if only “the physical, literal, dumb” act of looking can satisfy the mind.)   

It’s risky to structure a book as a kind of Wunderkammer—what if it dissipates into its own eclecticism?—and riskier still to feature artists who have been embalmed by decades of analysis. But Dillon’s accretive method is itself a textual demonstration of affinity that helps his various subjects cohere. Artists who have their own chapter reappear in chapters about others: William Klein is invoked alongside Arbus and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada; Claude Cahun is mentioned in connection to Dora Maar and Francesca Woodman. Chapters succeed each other in subtle embellishment, echoing or annotating earlier themes. In the first essay, for example, Dillon considers Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, the first book in English to present observations made with a microscope. “Among the better-known illustrations in the first edition of 1665 are those showing a fly’s many-faceted eye, the starry shapes of ice crystals and a prodigious bristling fold-out flea,” Dillon writes. This is followed by a chapter on Louis Daguerre’s Vue du boulevard du Temple (ca. 1838), a photograph of a Paris street that’s believed to be the first to depict living people: the smudged apparitions of a man and his boot polisher. Nothing links these two works except an analogy that Dillon leaves implicit: Just as a microscope reveals the invisible world around us, so can a photograph illuminate what we typically ignore.  

This understated approach is typical of Dillon. He writes atmospherically and impressionistically rather than critically. Here is how he describes a photo of dancer Loie Fuller: “She looks like a primitive aircraft coming apart, a soft disintegrated Blériot.” About the elderly subject of a 1970s Eggleston photo, whose particolored dress clashes with the floral cushion she sits on, he writes: “She holds onto her cigarette as if she might disappear amid all this patterned excess.” In Arbus’s ensemble of outcasts and misfits he discerns an “aristocratic distance”—an apt phrase whose accuracy doesn’t evoke any one image but the whole dispassionate vantage of Arbus’s work. 

As befits a book conceived during the pandemic, Affinities is introspective and fitfully elegiac, even as it seeks communion. In his chapter on Vue du boulevard du Temple, Dillion recalls walking around London during the spring of 2020. He notes “a category of city person who seemed suddenly more visible than before”—fellow housebound Londoners out for a stroll who, like Daguerre’s phantasmal figures from nearly two centuries earlier, are rendered newly vivid by their circumstances. A chapter about the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a monument in London whose plaques record stories of ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, begins as another pandemic scene before taking a more philosophical turn. “The things a nation may conceal from itself inside an idea of heroism,” Dillon muses, noting that many would-be plaques on the monument remain blank. Elisions, often conceptual, recur throughout the book, most pointedly in the final chapter, which lists “images that are not mentioned and do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind.” (Among the missing: French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s depiction of his cat catching a ball; filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroid of his wife and their dog standing by a fence in Russia.) 

These missing images parallel one of the book’s subtexts: artists’ oblique and unacknowledged relationship to modernism, which Dillon defines broadly as the aesthetic tendency toward ambiguity and formal experimentation. He suggests that the 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron might be considered a modernist, her blurred portraits and tableaux vivant representing “a deliberate effort to capture something evanescent but particular.” The French photographer and filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who made lyrical documentaries about aquatic life, is another modernist, one who attends “to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street.” (Note how gracefully Dillon posits additional affinities.) If part of Dillon’s project is to reclaim or excavate lineages of modernism, then another definition of affinity emerges. To be modern is to connect one thing to another. Affinity is connection; affinity is modern.   

But affinity is also, finally, a mood, as Dillon concedes. And the mood is intimate in two back-to-back chapters—the most moving in the book—that look outside the canon toward more workaday, even vernacular, imagery. In the first, Dillon considers a press photograph of a charismatic Christian congregation, shot in Dublin in the 1980s or ’90s. “Their faces compose a selection of mundane ecstasies, such as I know well from certain churches of my childhood,” he writes. His mother, plagued by depression and, later, a fatal autoimmune disorder, belonged to just such a congregation, a “rapt sorority of the unwell and the unhappy.” Dillon recognizes his mother’s ghost in the faces of these middle-aged pilgrims, one of whom offers her hands in a gesture that’s either beseeching or quizzical. In the following chapter, he writes about his aunt, whose paranoid grievances against her neighbors culminated in a series of reconnaissance snapshots taken around her property: of hedges, doors, windows. “You can pursue vigilance and attention into a kind of fugue state, almost hallucinatory,” Dillon writes. He’s referring to his aunt, but the line has a cautionary tone, self-conscious and chastened.  

That tone recurs a few pages later, when Dillon confesses a suspicion that “nothing I write pursues an argument or is built to convince. Instead, I simply get into a mood about the thing I am meant to be writing about, and pursue that mood until it is exhausted or has filled the space it was meant to fill.” He’s right, of course, but he’s in good company: Wayne Koestenbaum, Maggie Nelson, Walter Benjamin, and, most emphatically, Roland Barthes all share Dillon’s dilatory, memoiristic method. Like those writers, Dillon revitalizes images by respecting their inherent ambiguities and enigmas rather than seeking to resolve them. (One more quote: Dillon calls the work of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi “a domestic photography, dedicated to an infinity of small things, impossibly tender and exposed.”) Dillon is acutely sensitive to the subfrequency of his chosen images, and he regards them with curiosity and sympathetic scrutiny.  

In one of the book’s late chapters, he writes about the final TV interview that British dramatist Dennis Potter did, in 1994, shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Potter remarks that impending death has made the world almost hyperreal—more radiant, more fully itself. Dillon achieves a similar miracle in these pages, the “mundane miracle of looking,” as he calls it. The images he contemplates become sharper and stranger, aligned in myriad inscrutable ways to each other and to the world. It’s an irreducible process that’s finally beyond our understanding but impossible to resist—something, perhaps, like love.  

As an art historian and freelance contributor of reviews and long-form articles to art publications, I’ve been watching with trepidation as the already limited media landscape contracts. Many of my PhD colleagues are firmly ensconced within academia or pursuing curatorial work, while I have been following my own path as a writer and erstwhile kundalini yoga instructor. Breath is important in yogic practice, and I sense myself suffocating from the lack of publishing platforms. I want to stretch my thoughts, but I feel cramped by the dearth of public space for critically erudite voices. Faced with ever-diminishing opportunities for enlightened art writing, I’m left wondering: Is it time to push aside my pen and concentrate on a full-time Ayurvedic practice instead?

You know, we sort of wonder the same thing. Why struggle to write about art for a living when you can have tight abs and paying disciples who also give holiday presents? You’ll earn way more lying on the floor than you ever would sitting at a laptop conjuring a synonym for fetid (try noisome). And yet, the impulse—nay, the desire—to write isn’t something one simply shakes off. Sure, you can hold a difficult pose using all your upper trapezius, but your biggest muscle is still your noggin. It’s time to decide if you want to be a brainy Branden W. Joseph or a brawny Joseph Pilates.

Yoga repairs the body and unblocks chakras, whereas art criticism feeds the mind and puckers the anus. No one has ever achieved nirvana by assessing the aesthetic qualities of Liam Gillick’s speculative sculptures, but they have realigned their spine by doing a Cat-Cow. Your yoga lessons improve the physical and mental well-being of your students in ways that resonate throughout all facets of their daily lives. Can the same be said of your footnoted rebuttal of Graham Harman’s specific strain of post-Kantian object-oriented ontology vis-à-vis contemporary art? This is a rhetorical question to which the rhetorical answer is a firm no.

Having a viable career as a critic has never been easy, but given your natural limberness and loquacity, there is no reason to quit writing. Why not deliver your aesthetic insights straight to readers via Substack? You’ll have all the yoga-mat space you need to maintain your writer-warrior pose, and best of all, you won’t have to bend over backward for hair-splitting editors who rewrite your carefully crafted words. A few friends may actually feel guilty enough to pay for it. Wouldn’t that be wild?

Last week I bumped into a former art school professor who I completely worship, and we quickly caught up on things. I gushed to him about my progress in the studio and how I’ve pushed my paintings into a new creative zone. Right before parting he asked if I’d dog-sit his pooch while he’s in Italy for the opening of his museum show. It was totally flattering to be asked, but his dog is an ugly, flatulent menace. He takes the mutt everywhere, and everyone pretends it’s the cutest, most lovable thing in the world. Even though I’m not supposed to have pets in my apartment, it feels like I can’t decline because this is a good opportunity to connect. Am I right?

It sounds like you two aren’t in close touch and he hasn’t seen your paintings in a while. The honor he dumped on you has less to do with your artistry than with your potential as a walking MFA pooper scooper. Taking this dog-sitting gig would make you the mangy mongrel on a short leash. What happens if you do a good job? Will he give you a bone? Lick yourself, tell him you are a cat person, and go hide in a corner. 

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

I’m inspired by the messaging and guerilla tactics of the climate change activists who’ve been smearing food on paintings. I want to do this same thing and already know what museum and artwork I want to attack, but to be honest, I’m scared. How much trouble could I really get in?

Activists are truly turning up the heat on museums with their push to get the public to chill the Earth before mass extinction. What’s the point of hoarding masterpieces when there won’t be anybody left to see them? That’s how much trouble we are actually in. Stop worrying about your personal safety and start perpetrating climate-action art spectacles that make a definitive difference. Perhaps you will find yourself: throwing warm sauerkraut at a Jordan Wolfson robot, Gorilla-Gluing your taint to a painting by Dana Schutz, splotching a cream cronut on a Chuck Close, or pointedly urinating on an Andres Serrano photograph. Keep your manifesto on-hand to shout at befuddled bystanders, or better yet: write it on your chest because you are about to be the main attraction at the museum.

I attended an East Coast graduate school and lived in Brooklyn for almost a decade before moving to the Midwest to teach. Juggling work and a family means that I rarely have time or money to travel to see shows or old friends. My grad school alumni email list lets me keep tabs on my peers, but it also causes significant stress and insecurity, which is why I never post and rarely reply. The list occasionally falls prey to a handful of antagonistic people who love to stir the pot. I was especially bothered by a recent thread where an artist friend was attacked for having a show at a museum that has not been sufficiently decolonized. It was so accusatory and exasperating—exactly the sort of negative energy I don’t need to absorb. I want to unsubscribe from the list, but I fear that doing so will further cut me off from any sense of community and the art world in general. What would you do?

A recent pie chart published in MFA Life SkyMall Magazine shows that some 83 percent of art school alumni want to self-immolate when posting to email lists filled with heavy hitters, tired teachers, forgotten classmates, and total strangers. As for the rest, 10 percent love bragging about their accomplishments; 5 percent absolutely must ask inane research questions; and 2 percent are looking for a lift to Trader Joe’s next Tuesday. The good news here is that your feelings of resentment and shame solidly place you in the majority. The bad news is that, demographically speaking, jagoffs fall into every category and cannot be avoided, in the real world or in your inbox.

Alumni email lists provide space for colleagues to make announcements, celebrate accomplishments, and share relevant information. Most subscribers don’t post or reply because they have busy lives and careers. They stay on the list because, like you, they hope to learn about current exhibitions, get notices about grants, brownnose old connections, and track frenemies. Nevertheless, it is their silence that ultimately gives latent permission to blowhards, dimwits, and the attention-deprived to self-promote, brain-pick, finger-point, ass-kiss, and whine. Think about it: what would happen if you and the rest of the rankled lurkers on the list checked in to say STFU a little more often?

FOMO is justified given your level of remove, but letting a handful of domineering putzes keep you from getting a notice about a group show in Croatia that a rando has a collage in is plain ludicrous. Email lists typically have digests, so try changing your subscription to lessen the stream of messages. You can block the offenders who piss you off the most, but it’s just as easy to have listserv emails automatically go into a special folder that only gets checked when the urge strikes. And like everyone else, you can rush to delete the thousands of unread alumni messages when that warning pops up about needing to buy more storage space. Fuck Google.

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

Related Articles

Peter Schjeldahl, Art Critic Who Wrote with Unparalleled Elegance, Dies at 80

Tim Griffin Steps Down as Director of Celebrated New York Art Space with Experimental Tendencies

Bad Reviews contains facsimiles of more than 150 reviews selected by 150 artists, many very famous (Lawrence Weiner, Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter), who were solicited through a chain of invitations started by artist Aleksandra Mir. The prompt was to pick a “bad review” they had received, whatever “bad” might mean to them—poorly written, mean-spirited, misguided, wrong, negative, all of the above. There are examples of each from a full spectrum of outlets, from gallery roundups in the New York Times to a pan on the record-collecting website Discogs. The reviews compiled are often sophisticated responses to sometimes complex artwork—most offered in good faith. Writes Tim Griffin, the project’s coeditor and head of Artforum from 2003 to 2010: “A review can be bad in as many ways as the artworks it is critiquing.”

This is a review too—not a bad one, not a good one. Like many reviews, this is an attempt to figure out what I really think, how I really feel. To be clear, I’m not objective. I am a critic, and (although Roberta Smith claims the crown at 10 mentions) I appear in Bad Reviews twice—for one online Critic’s Pick of a show I didn’t like and one back-of-book review of a show I did. The table of contents is organized by year, then by artist. If I’d been in charge, I’d have included the critics—in a smaller font, maybe—but Bad Reviews is less about the critics than the artists and the barbs they’ve carried in their thickening hides for up to half a century.

The idea for Bad Reviews originated in 2015, though you have to wonder if the germ wasn’t planted in 2006 when Waldemar Januszczak in London’s Sunday Times lumped Mir into “a generation of paint-happy know-nothings brought up on hamburgers and porn, a talentless bloom of post-pop trailer trash.” The earliest entry, from 1963, is one notable artist’s first mention in the New York Times: “Carolee Schneemann’s assemblages are unforgivable,” penned John Cannady. (Schneemann acidly, accurately calls him the “then famous critic” in a note accompanying her submission.) Some artists deliver their bad reviews like mic drops—art history has done the work of repudiating their skeptics. Ed Ruscha contributes a 1963 rejection letter from the Library of Congress, which declined to accept a copy of his breakthrough artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

The best criticism can point out missteps or blind spots in an artist’s work—though, since these reviews are all volunteered by their subjects, there’s little of that here. The general feeling imparted is that the artists disagree with or are amused by their bad reviews, not that they’ve taken them to heart. If a review deploys the arch tone of old-guard critics and actually calls work “bad,” Bad Reviews holds it up for pillory—as when, in 2004, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight wrote of the Danish artist group Superflex: “It’s just about as bad as art gets these days.”

The book’s design can be dismissive, bordering on disingenuous. The editors splash pull-quotes like “DON’T GO” and “INTOLERABLY VOYEURISTIC” across Arlene Croce’s lengthy, thoughtful, and damning review of Bill T. Jones in the New Yorker. The subject in question? A performance piece featuring terminally ill people, about which the writer wrestles with the pertinent moral question of how or whether to engage what she calls “victim art.”

Bad Reviews can’t be bought. Framed as an art project, its 400 copies were distributed only to institutions and participating artists. Mir says that this is to skirt copyright issues. I suspect it’s also a way to sidestep expectations that the book make some sort of call—a judgment—about the state of bad reviews. On this point, the editors’ written contributions are ambivalent. Mir thanks the lovers and the haters with equal verve. Griffin is even more equivocal, praising the bad review as a fading style of discourse, a direct “response” rather than a passive forward or retweet, but stopping short of pining for the age when some people were paid a living wage for their bald opinions.

If the editors use the phrase “bad review” with a wink, not all the participants take the book’s premise lightly. As Mir writes, some artists (and their galleries, she speculates, fearing for their prices) declined to participate, perhaps because they would rather pretend their bad reviews never happened. Certainly, a few reviews I’ve written in the past haven’t made it on to the subject’s CV. Which is a shame. Even a negative or unflattering writeup usually comes from a general devotion to art and artists that compels writers of reviews.

Defining “quality” in terms of good or bad might be a useful way to evaluate clothing or wine or other commodities, but it is vanishingly useless for art. An artwork of “poor quality” can still be “good,” conceptually or emotionally or beautifully—just as a “bad” review can still be right. When it comes to art, certainty is rhetorical. Unresolved ambivalence is what I and many others find exciting about art. Likewise, this book achieves ambivalence around the idea of “bad reviews,” which makes it good art.

I’m a real estate developer with my own firm, and I also collect art. I hired a personal art adviser just prior to the pandemic and now see that our tastes are not aligned. Nothing I’ve acquired through her speaks to me in a deep way, and I’m skeptical that any of it will perform well for me. Walking the Armory Show together in September, she kept nudging me toward ultra-contemporary pieces that I simply don’t like. Nevertheless, everyone there knew her and it was incredible to get such instant access to major players. I want to get a new adviser, but don’t know the politics here. Will I be burning a bridge if I dump her?

Being a top executive, you’ve surely fired many employees. Maybe it was the klutzy estimator whose miscalculations skyrocketed your budget, or the creepy project manager who serially harassed the women on his team. You surely mustered the courage to axe an underling, but in this instance it’s almost as if you’re treating the adviser as an equal, or possibly even a superior. The art world operates on social ladders, and it’s clear that you would have replaced her already if you didn’t hold her contacts in such high regard. The adviser seems to have cast a spell over you, but the only proof of her prowess is a bunch of butt-ugly post-talent art that you can’t even offload to a charity thrift shop.

How is it that you can build corporate complexes and yet have a personal complex that doesn’t allow you to trust your own taste in art? Predicting how the market will perform is a crapshoot, but knowing what you like ought to be a lot easier. Do you let somebody order your food at a restaurant without looking at the menu? You should be engaged in a conversation with the adviser—don’t just let her put paintings on your tab. Maybe you’re intimidated and don’t want to be a party-pooper by saying no, or it could be that you two just don’t groove together, but the best way to avoid hard sells and rectify this relationship is to make sure she knows what you want. You seem to suggest that buying art is more than just financial speculation, which is true. It should be an emotional investment too.

Not being in touch with yourself is what led you to this adviser, so who’s to say that the next one will be a better fit? Remember that you are a walking checkbook and she’s a commission-collecting broker. You don’t need her to mingle with hungry art people who covet your money, especially if you keep buying directly from them. The biggest disadvantage to sacking her is that you will, for sure, keep snorkeling in the same petri dish that is the art world. You may suffer the slings and arrows of her gossip, but bribing city council members and indulging disgruntled architects with giant egos has prepared you for this battle royal.

During the NFT fervor last year, I left a solid job to go work for an NFT platform. It felt like a great fit because tech and art are my specialties. Many friends thought I was crazy, but I went for it in a pandemic YOLO moment. The NFT market tanked shortly after I started and we barely made a splash. My salary was paid in crypto and is now worth virtually nothing. Do you think I can get my old job back?

It appears that you’ve learned a humbling lesson about your own fungibility. We revere risk-takers who boldly leap into the unknown, but banking on the popularity of NFTs was a whopper of a mistake. You used to be the Big Mac, and now you are just plain Fuddrucked. Your old job probably isn’t available anymore, but given your yen for tech, webcamming is a growing field worth considering. If that isn’t your speed, we heard that the Geek Squad is looking for a technology curator at the Best Buy in Weehawken.  

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

Related Articles

Weeding and Seeding Histories: Walid Raad at Paula Cooper

Sharjah Biennial Names Over 150 Artists for Long-Awaited Okwui Enwezor–Conceived 2023 Edition

Art seems a poor tool to address these problems, and yet artists continue to make the attempt. Why, and to what effect? These are the questions that shape Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s new book, Beautiful, Gruesome, and True. Published by Columbia Global Reports, an imprint of Columbia University, it is not exactly a conventional art book, as it contains no pictures, and not exactly a piece of investigative reporting, as it presents no conclusions or solutions. Instead, it offers three carefully researched case studies of artists whose work has sprung from some of the most intractable conflicts currently underway throughout the world. In place of illustrations, Wilson-Goldie offers descriptions of works and referrals to websites where they can be seen. For the reader, the result is somewhat unsatisfying but may be a harbinger of a future where images are a luxury only mass-market books can afford. 

Typically, artists working in a political mode challenge social, economic, or civic institutions—including the institution of the art world itself—in the name of social justice. In these cases, they can still appeal to a widely shared sense of order, a set of principles, however tarnished. Wilson-Goldie has chosen to write about artists working in places where governmental institutions have collapsed or capitulated to outside forces, allowing criminality and violence to flourish. In such circumstances, Wilson-Goldie argues, art may operate as a proxy for political discourse that has otherwise been suppressed.

Wilson-Goldie, a Beirut- and New York–based art writer, weaves together biographical narrative, information about the sociopolitical context of artists’ works, and descriptions of specific projects. She writes in an engaging style, but her oddly shifting time frames can make the stories somewhat hard to follow. Each of her case studies involves artists moved to act by horrific events in their native countries. While all have subsequently garnered international art world accolades, acclaim seems beside the point. The work is driven by anguish, rage, and a desire to reach out to others who have also been affected by the evils pervading their world.

Amar Kanwar’s films and installations are created against the backdrop of India’s land battles. His galvanizing moment was the 1991 assassination of Shankar Guha Niyogi, a charismatic trade unionist whose efforts had brought together steel workers, Indigenous farmers, and contract miners in a formidable challenge to prevailing top-down models of rural and industrial development. With his death and the ultimate failure of authorities to bring his assassins to justice, his movement faltered. (The industrialists accused of ordering his murder were initially found guilty, only to have their convictions overturned by a higher court.)

Kanwar was a young filmmaker whom Niyogi had hired to document his activities; but instead of meeting his new employer, the artist arrived in time for his subject’s funeral. He remained to film the aftermath. Lal Hara Lehrake(1992), his short film documenting the outpouring of grief and anger over the murder, set him on a path to explore other collusions between government officials and masters of industry. He has examined such topics as the destruction of farmland and natural resources, land grabs by multinational companies, and the rise of resistance movements. While his immediate targets are specific acts of corporate greed and government corruption, his larger concerns encompass the social and political inequities and environmental devastation visited on rural communities by the global economy.

Kanwar eschews the role of muckraking documentarian, instead searching for a language that melds poetry with resistance. His films take a variety of forms. A Night of Prophecy (2002) carries us across India as individuals recite bits of poetry decrying both economic and caste-based discrimination. A Season Outside(1997) combines memories, dreams, archival footage, and reenactments to explore the scars of Partition, the 1947 division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.

An important early supporter was the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who commissioned A Night of Prophecy for his legendary Documenta 11 in 2002. Kanwar was included in the next three consecutive Documentas as well. His most ambitious project for that event was “Sovereign Forest,” a multimedia work for Documenta 13 in 2012. Its subject is the political and environmental conflict in the resource-rich and largely tribal Indian state of Odisha. The installation’s many parts include handmade books with films projected on their pages; maps; news clippings; samples of the huge varieties of native rice that have disappeared with the onset of industrial farming; and a 2011 film titled The Scene of Crime, which documents landscapes selected for impending industrial development. The work has evolved into an ongoing project that travels the world, as viewers contribute further evidence of the degradation of tribal lands.

WILSON-GOLDIE’S SECOND CASE STUDY is Teresa Margolles, whose work has evolved in the context of Mexico’s drug wars. These conflicts have empowered vicious cartels, engendered widespread military and police corruption, and turned the border between Mexico and the United States into a killing field. Again, globalism has been a contributing factor in this downward slide: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico, signed in 1994 as part of an effort to facilitate free trade among the three countries, inadvertently facilitated the illegal drug trade as trucks more easily crossed from Mexico into the US. In the process, it has decimated local economies in cities like Tijuana, Juarez, and Matamoros. In such border towns, the cartels have emerged as a kind of alternative government.

Margolles’s work makes the violence precipitated by this social breakdown visible to the world at large. Her materials comprise forensic evidence. She uses fabric soaked with the water used to wash corpses, mud from sites where cartel victims are buried, shards of glass from windshields shattered in drive-by shootings, and blood mopped up from crime scenes. While the materials are gruesome, the works themselves tend to be understated. A minimalist or conceptual aesthetic serves as a foil, making it all the more shocking to learn that a red flag is dyed with blood from execution sites or that a Richard Tuttle–like arrangement of strings comprises threads used after autopsies to sew up the bodies of persons who suffered violent deaths. Wilson-Goldie focuses in particular on Margolles’s contribution to the Mexican Pavilion for the 2009 Venice Biennale, where visitors were led through a series of galleries that distributed her unsettling works throughout the decaying 16th-century palazzo.

Margolles came to this work with a background in documentary photography and forensic pathology; but probably more relevant was her participation in SEMEFO, a Mexico City–based art collective that specialized in disturbing works employing such elements as animal cadavers and human remains. After the group’s dissolution in 1999, Margolles continued in a similar vein, while directing her work toward more explicit connections between violence and the global drug economy.

As Wilson-Goldie points out, there is a strong collaborative element in Margolles’s work. She collects her necro-based materials from families of victims and includes them in ritual actions and performances. Most recently, Margolles has been focusing on transgender sex workers, who are among the few denizens left behind in certain neighborhoods of Juarez in the wake of murders, violent crime, and the closing of the dance halls where they worked.

THE THIRD CASE STUDY BRINGS US Abounaddara, a Syrian film collective whose mostly anonymous members posted brief weekly videos on the internet between 2011 and 2017, during the worst years of the Syrian civil war. Wilson-Goldie begins her story in the early 2000s, when the death of Syria’s right-wing dictator Hafez al-Assad led to hopes of a more open and democratic society. However, after some initial reforms, these hopes were dashed when his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, proved equally repressive. Abounaddara emerged when a group of independent filmmakers came together to create short online videos. These were designed to evade official censorship by appearing to be simply trailers for films yet to be made.

Wilson-Goldie focuses extensively on Maya Khoury, one of the group’s founders and one of the few members to emerge from anonymity. A self-taught filmmaker like many in the collective, Khoury was initially motivated by the desire to complete a project about an elderly clothmaker working in the Old City of Damascus. Her frustration with the distribution options available to her led to the formation of Abounaddara.

Pro-democracy uprisings roiled the Arab world in 2010 and 2011, leading to the short-lived hope for an “Arab Spring.” Following the crushing of these hopes, Syrians responded to brutal suppression with weekly Friday protests. This became the time frame for the release of Abounaddara’s films. These short clips, which remain available online, are deliberately fragmentary. They employ a variety of formats, including pop references, surrealistic juxtapositions, reportage, literary allusions, and brief interviews. While not explicitly political, all are tinged with the frustrations, dangers, and absurdities of the everyday life of ordinary Syrians making the best of an impossible situation.

Work produced by Abounaddara is less easily assimilated to art world institutions than that of Wilson-Goldie’s other case studies. This is in part because of the decentralized nature of the group, and probably also because their films are directed primarily at local rather than international audiences. As a spokesperson for the group explains: “Our priority is not to criticize the regime. We address our people with our images to prove to them that their experiences and their dignity matter.” Thus, though Abounaddara began to receive invitations to prestigious exhibitions like Documenta and the Venice Biennale in the second half of the 2010s, the collective ultimately resisted this notice. Its weekly films ceased in 2017. Plans for longer films petered out, with a feature film commissioned for the 2017 Documenta left unfinished, never making it past a rough cut.

In place of a conclusion, Wilson-Goldie gives us an epilogue in which she reports on the unraveling of Abounaddara, Kanwar’s participation in the selection of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa as the organizers of the recently closed (and very problematically received) Documenta 15, and Margolles’s commission to create a temporary public monument to transpeople in London’s Trafalgar Square. It seems telling that these stories end not with a report on their impact on their respective causes but with the varieties of art world attention they have received. As a result, despite these artists’ inspiring examples, one is left with a sense of the distance between the art world’s self-congratulatory embrace of such heroic activities and the gritty and seemingly intractable problems they address.

What good can art do? The case studies here leave one with the sense that art in the political arena operates as a means of bearing witness, fostering empathy, and engendering relationships among the victims of global power plays. In her preface, Wilson-Goldie remarks that while this work implicates everyone, it may have its biggest impact on the art world and its debates over who brokers power. That seems laudable, but is it enough? In the face of the horrific threats to individual and collective human survival documented here, one can’t help but wish for more. 

Andriessen sets up systems in which inorganic materials undergo chemical changes—crystallization, oxidation—and her arrangements are at once elegant and dystopic. These systems typically include ceramic forms that appear both bone-like and futuristic, as if reminding us that the materials she works with predate and will also outlast us. Her clay components are often accompanied by water pumps and stainless-steel armatures—industrial devices that suggest our species’ material legacy. They also enable the works to perspire and leak. Porous, unglazed ceramic surfaces absorb water that changes their appearance over the course of an exhibition, so Andriessen often designs elaborate plumbing systems in the gallery. You won’t necessarily see a piece changing in a single visit to one of her shows, but in works like BUNK (2021), crystalline deposits in shades of teal that have oozed, then dried up on the gallery floor attest to ongoing reactions involving nickel sulfate, which is listed on the wall label as a material.

Andriessen deflects technical chemistry questions, though. She received an MFA in 2015 from the Malmö Art Academy before immersing herself in physics and chemistry, mostly through YouTube videos. But when I asked her in a virtual studio visit how her pieces work, she told me, “It’s not that I speak of science. Maybe I just use science a little bit to tell my own story.” Her works help viewers conceive what will happen if our current environmental and economic conditions—for her, these are one and the same—continue or accelerate.

At the recent FRONT Triennial in Cleveland, the sculptor showed three works alongside prints and drawings by her father, Jurriaan Andriessen. His intricate, never-before-exhibited architectural renderings, made between 1969 and 1989, portray a fantastical anti-capitalist utopia in painstaking detail, including roadways that encircle post-and-beam skyscrapers like a roller coaster, and sustainable appliances that meld with and are powered by their users’ bodies. The juxtaposition highlighted how environmental science has impacted imagining the future in recent decades. 

Isabelle Andriessen’s worldview isn’t solely bleak, though, if you look at things from a nonhuman perspective—which she wants you to do. Yes, her sculptures evoke the ways that plastics and other synthetic materials are being absorbed into our bodies because we, like her ceramic pieces, are porous beings too. Yes, works like Tidal Spill and Terminal Beach (both 2018) refer to the blurring boundary between e-waste sites and natural landscapes. But Andriessen also asks us to acknowledge the vibrancy of various materials as the Anthropocene lays bare how life and nonlife are deeply entangled. She often uses biotic words to characterize her sculpture practice, describing, for instance, the relationships she is forging between metals and ceramics for new work in a group show at Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden, as “symbiotic.” “It’s interesting that nothing disappears,” she said, referring to the law of the conservation of mass. Substances of all sorts are entangled in convoluted systems, and with her art, Andriessen shows this fact at a scale we can more easily comprehend.

Work by Isabelle Andriessen is on view in the group exhibition “Twilight Land” at Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden, through Apr. 9, 2023.

Weston frequently incorporates imagery and elements from earlier projects into new work, rooting her practice in repetition. For an ongoing series of photographic abstractions, the artist printed installation images on large canvases. Using glass shards repurposed from studio accidents, she roughly etches into the printed surface, redacting imagery and transforming the original photographs into constructivist compositions. By returning to earlier works, Weston hopes to rearticulate questions the initial pieces addressed. She returns again and again to one question in particular, which she posed during our recent conversation: “How do Black people forge, retain, and protect spaces of intimacy and interiority in the context of the environment that we’re living in?”

Weston associates glass with “the atmosphere of risk and violence that Black people face.” Employing various strategies to manipulate the fragile, transparent material into something more opaque and resistant, she evokes a tension between the desire to share a story and to secrete it away from probing eyes. In early works, the artist used readymade glass panes, but in 2018 she began to experiment with the material’s fleeting malleability in its liquid state. To create the draped, bell-like forms in an appeal, but, in particular, very expressly, to (i sink) (2019), Weston slumped molten glass over upturned flowerpots, referencing the planters and washbasins enslaved Black people used to muffle their voices during clandestine meetings. For other sculptures, the artist bends, curls, and crumples heated glass, generating crevices that obscure the imprinted images and writings.

Weston’s current exhibition at the Queens Museum also contends with the symbolic links between glass and anti-Blackness. A new body of sculptures, and the pictures and poems seared into their glass surfaces, allude to “broken windows” policing, surveillance, and the loaded, pervasive media images of shattered and boarded-up shop windows during recent BLM protests. Several works draw on the historical record of an unrealized nonviolent direct action that the Brooklyn chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) proposed for the opening of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Demanding action on job discrimination, housing conditions, school segregation, and police brutality, the organizers called for motorists to stall their vehicles intentionally on the roadways leading to the fairgrounds. In the first of two galleries, Weston adopts a similar tactic of obstruction with her largest sculpture to date, suspending a 15-by-20-foot grid of smoky glass panes over viewers. Ominously hovering and dramatically pitched toward the passageway between galleries, it bars access and forces visitors to detour.

This tension between presentation and refusal is central to Weston’s practice, especially in her use of language. Circling around her most recent concrete- and lead-mounted sculptures—arranged at the Queens Museum on a multilevel plinth that keeps viewers at bay—we are aware of the inscribed texts but unable to fully absorb them. Intimate phrases faintly etched in her cursive stipple appear and recede from view; we catch only elusive fragments, like “a chromium-plated draw-near to neon plastic” or“such a jettison,” and strain to discern more. Weston’s multifaceted sculptures undermine the logic of a material associated with transparency to embrace the poetry of opacity, the power of resistance, and the value of withholding.  

Related Articles

Glenstone Becomes First U.S. Museum to Acquire Work by Hilma af Klint

The Best Art Books to Buy as Holiday Gifts

To anyone who reads German, I recommend Voss’s biography, and there is now a translation for those inclined to English. It is common for reviewers of translated nonfiction to pass over the fact that the text has been transposed from one language to another, but this will not be that sort of review. The reason is that Anne Posten, Voss’s translator, has cut some 170 pages from Voss’s biography and removed the work’s title, among other alterations. In her introduction to Hilma af Klint: A Biography, Posten alerts the reader that since the publication of the German original, “more information about the artist’s life and work has come to light.” However, we never learn what the substance of this new information is, even as we are told that an overhaul of the original text has been necessary. For example, Posten has converted the entire text from the present tense—very pleasant in the German, I have to say—to the past, because, as she writes, present tense narration is “inappropriate in English. But this is hardly the most eyebrow-raising of Posten’s conclusions. The original book fails, in Posten’s assessment, to meet the “expectations for the first scholarly biography of a subject of art-historical significance.” Of Voss’s prose, Posten observes,

In order to write about a subject whose worldview and artistic process were heavily influenced by the spiritual and supernatural, and who left copious records of her own spiritual development and experiences but virtually none about her day-to-day life in the material world, the author chose a style and tone that are often more casual and novelistic than in other comparable works.

Because this style and tone deviate from what she considers “standard biographical style,” Posten has “attempted a more sober tone” while excising a third of Voss’s text and flagging what she considers unverifiable speculation.

While this would be a harsh and possibly deal-breaking editorial response to any text, it is particularly strange to see this project undertaken by a translator, whose primary role is not to assess the work’s creative and scholarly merits. And given that Voss’s biography was widely praised, it seems counterproductive and frankly bizarre to reinvent it as some sort of scientific tome for a North American audience that is likely even more in need of accessible prose than readers in Germany.

Thus, it is a rather depressing task to review Hilma af Klint: A Biography. Its tone is indeed “sober.” While it provides basic facts about af Klint’s life, it is choppy and lacks the grace of Voss’s original. The best writing appears in later chapters, where some of the speculative mood has been retained. For example, given af Klint’s lifelong devotion to a mystical and highly personal form of Christianity that placed great value on revelation through communion with the beyond, we might wonder, did she think of herself as a saint? Probably not. Although she studied Catholic holy women and painted realistic portraits of nuns near the end of her life, she would have recognized that their stories ended “with the subject’s being silenced, locked in a cloister, and the narrative coopted by the church for its own purposes.” Voss (in Posten’s translation) dryly observes: “A useful lesson for Hilma, perhaps.”

At any rate, af Klint was privy to “a broader cosmos described by spirals, snails, swans, letters, and abstract figures,” animated by spirits with names like Ananda, Asket, Gregor, and Vestal. She was hardly a doctrinaire Christian. When we come to a notebook from the same period as af Klint’s studies of Christian visionaries, in which she recorded explanations of the notations in her abstract paintings—“A for ‘Akab,’ meaning ‘the search for the substance of love,’” for example—Voss seems to thrill at the alterity of af Klint’s methods and themes. These materials cannot be rendered entirely systematic, or parsed objectively. “The meaning multiplies like a flock of birds that scatter in every direction when one tries to approach,” Voss writes, in a simile not redacted by Posten despite its liveliness.

It is important that a biographer aid the reader in grasping the larger implications of an individual life. But it is a tricky matter to understand how young women who wanted more for themselves would have approached adulthood in turn-of-the-century Sweden, given that all social life was directed toward the project of marriage, and examples of women leading successful professional lives were exceedingly few. Art school was clearly a crucial resource for af Klint. And there was mediumship, something that came to af Klint via her painting studies: in a notebook she states that she had her first supernatural experience in fall of 1891, when a female artist named Valborg Hallström introduced her to a device called a “psychograph,” by means of which one might spell out messages from beyond. A transmission told af Klint to “go calmly” on her way through life. That this curt advice was enough to spark a lifelong commitment to transcribing fugitive words and images expressed by invisible beings gives some sense of the possible antagonism of visible, living people known to af Klint. But we can’t be sure. It is also likely that af Klint consummated passionate relationships with multiple women during her lifetime, though the evidence falls short of absolute proof here as well.

Reviewing af Klint’s archive, one becomes conscious of how its lacunae become points of focus, to the detriment of what was her unusual but nonetheless very probable experience. We know that af Klint and the women she associated with developed complex, esoteric linguistic and visual systems for understanding the world and for sharing thoughts and feelings with one another. Were these systems a form of coded communication, possibly regarding erotic and/or romantic entanglements? Again, this is uncertain. It is, however, clear that af Klint’s male contemporaries were far more able to speak freely in public, and to record their personal lives in private writings. Meanwhile, to know Hilma af Klint, we frequently have to guess.

Voss is therefore wise to set much of Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen “in Possibility,” as Emily Dickinson wrote. Voss’s use of the present tense keeps the biography’s focus squarely in the moment of the book’s very composition. Voss constructs af Klint’s experiences in a sort of real time, allowing the reader to take into account the fact that some degree of speculation must necessarily accompany this enterprise. Saidiya Hartman has described the importance of “critical fabulation,” a kind of historical writing in which fictive or imaginative modes are selectively employed to bridge gaps of missing or irretrievable information, so that a narrative can form in spite of loss and erasure. Far from representing sloppy scholarship, Voss’s book carefully approaches a tricky archive and makes of it something rich and accessible. It tells a sort of history that has largely been excluded from the official record—one of queerness, of female domestic life in the absence of men, and of celebration of love as a form of magic. It cannot and should not make use of the techniques and standards associated with pre-feminist histories; an ambition to “scholarly” objectivity, so called, would make it a far worse book.

The redaction of Voss’s innovative writing in the English version of af Klint’s biography would be disheartening in the context of any artist’s life history, but I think it is particularly so in the case of af Klint. Posten’s commentary about the unreliability of Voss’s account, along with her characterization of the artist as “a subject whose worldview and artistic process were heavily influenced by the spiritual and supernatural,” repeat terms long used to dismiss af Klint’s achievements. In a 1987 review of the exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hilton Kramer described the exhibition’s comparison of af Klint’s paintings to those of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, and Kupka, all of whom also had works in the show, as “absurd,” given her beliefs and methods, concluding that she “would never have been given this inflated treatment if she had not been a woman.” Here, Kramer uses af Klint’s vulnerability to historical erasure against her, informing us that a male af Klint obviously would have been excluded from the LACMA show, because his work would have been given proper consideration in the past and presumably rejected, like that of any man of her limited talents, and saved us all a lot of time. This ridiculous and harmful logic is similar to one arguing that writing about af Klint cannot be included in her biography if it does not describe actual, provable events. On these terms, since we cannot prove many things about af Klint, and since she herself communicated with spirits whose existence cannot be proven, there is very little that can be written about her at all. We would need her to be a different sort of person—probably a man who did not believe in spirits—to write anything of “scholarly” value about her.

Still, it is hardly too late. Someone who clearly anticipated resistance during her lifetime, af Klint took steps to reproduce her work photographically and in miniature, creating a series of albums that might function as a “suitcase museum,” to use Voss’s phrase, so that she could personally communicate her undertakings to the spiritual leader Rudolf Steiner, whom af Klint sought, with very limited success, as a possible ally. These reproductions also have a more general preservative function, allowing us to see those works af Klint considered among her most important, along with their dimensions, titles, and intended orientation for display. The hopes of the painstaking suitcase museum are reflected in, and happily superseded by, the seven-volume catalogue raisonné now released in full by Bokförlaget Stolpe and the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. The books in this series are finely bound, and gorgeously and exhaustively reproduce af Klint’s life’s work. While any biography is necessarily subjective and selective, the appearance of the catalogue raisonné will continue the process of sharing af Klint’s multifarious image-based mythology, and surely inspire new writing about her. We are clearly only at the beginning of Hilma af Klint’s reception. 

This article appears under the title “Medium Specificity” in the November 2022 print issue of Art in America, pp. 34-36.