In Terms Of

Author: Christopher Howard

  • The Body, Unrestrained

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Art Talk: Clarity Haynes
    Tuesday, October 13, 2015
    Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

    Willem de Kooning, Two Women in the Country, oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas, 46⅛ x 40¾ in. (artwork © Willem de Kooning Foundation)

    It was Willem de Kooning who once remarked, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”1 For artists from Peter Paul Rubens to Jenny Saville, this assertion is incontestable—there is no better way to portray human skin in the medium. De Kooning also said that “beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.”2 The visual thrashing ones sees in the Abstract Expressionist’s midcentury paintings of women is not what the New York–based artist Clarity Haynes has in mind for her Breast Portrait Project, an ongoing series of paintings of women’s torsos that take the genres of both portraiture and the female nude in new and unexpected directions. Her view is more sympathetic to the women she paints, though the works still make some viewers uncomfortable, including me.

    Over the past few years, Haynes has invited women from the New York LGBTQ community—typically her age or older—into her studio to pose. The smooth surface of her paintings, which have minimized brushstrokes that give off an airbrushed quality, belie the jagged topography of the people she portrays. The women are often large in size and in courage. Some bear surgical scars—such as those from mastectomy—and many have sagging skin, plump rolls, and stretch marks, conveying how the weathered body unravels after decades of living.

    Pinar Yolaçan, Boro, 2009, Lambda print, 20 x 18 in. (artwork © Pinar Yolaçan)

    Haynes gave an artist’s talk at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, focusing on the Breast Portrait Project, setting aside other types of work she does. The event was held in the context of Body Utopia, a group exhibition of six artists at Trestle Gallery, which comprised color photographs by Chitra Ganesh and Pinar Yolaçan, three framed charcoal drawings by Riva Lehrer, two videos by Sondra Perry, a sculpture by Constantina Zavitsanos, and a painting by Haynes. Body Utopia was a judicious selection of expertly installed works in diverse media by an intergenerational group of artists, all focused on “bodies of color, queer bodies, bodies with disabilities, [and] bodies that don’t conform to societal norms and conventions,” as described by Priscilla Frank in the Huffington Post. It was Haynes’s first outing as a curator, and the first time she contextualized her art with that of her contemporaries. For the catalogue she wrote, “The making of art is, for some artists, the making of a utopia, because it posits an alternative space, medium, and reality through which to explore our subjectivities and our bodies. In other words, we get to call the shots.”3

    During her talk, Haynes described the Breast Portrait Project and articulated her connections to feminism and to art history. She dates the project to the late 1990s, when she was regularly attending women-only music and cultural festivals like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Where Womyn Gather.4 After making a self-portrait of her torso (and later of several friends), Haynes decided to change her practice, which at the time was social action, studying film, doing murals, and “having every kind of job you could imagine—most of which involved wearing some sort of costume.” Anything but painting. At the festivals, which usually offered some sort of art activities, she would spend one to three hours, under a tent, drawing pastels of the exposed torsos of her fellow festival goers. Haynes would then give the finished work to the commissioning subject, but not before documenting it, and the person depicted, with a photograph and a written statement by the sitter. While the drawing left the artist’s possession immediately, Haynes has stayed in touch with several women from the festivals via Facebook, even though she may have only met them in person once or twice.

    Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed, 1828, watercolor on ivory, 2⅝ x 3⅛ in. (artwork in the public domain)

    While the origins of the Breast Portrait Project lay in 1990s alternative culture, it has personal precedents from art history, which Haynes articulated. In particular she cited two works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Sarah Goodridge’s Beauty Revealed, a miniature 1828 self-portrait of her bare breasts, intended only for the eyes of the American politician Daniel Webster; and a lover’s eye painting from the eighteenth century. Both pieces offer a fragmented part of the body and emphasize privacy and intimacy. The oversized scale of the figures in Haynes’s recent paintings correspond to the Buddha Mahavairocana (Dainichi Nyorai), a larger-than-life wooden statue from the twelfth century housed in its own room at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. When the artist revamped the Breast Portrait Project in 2009, she said, “I wanted to make feminist bodies that could be super large, super powerful.” These works, averaging five feet in height, were shown in 2011 at a solo exhibition at Tabla Rasa Gallery in Brooklyn, under the title Radical Acceptance.5

    Carlo Pittore, Portrait of Steve Nusser with Artist, 1983, oil on linen, 24 x 18 in. (artwork © Carlo Pittore Foundation)

    Haynes had decided to become an artist at age sixteen, and her lifelong interest in skin and detail is evident in a watercolor self-portrait from 1987. An early supporter of her resolution was Carlo Pittore, a New York figurative painter who had moved to Maine in the 1980s. It was Pittore who, over a summer they spent together and many visits after, encouraged her to have a strong work ethic, and to paint from life, as he did.

    When she was younger Haynes admired the early work of Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville, but she now looks to Ellen Altfest, Rackstraw Downes, Catherine Murphy, and Josephine Halvorson, painters whom she said “record the facts.” A turning point for Haynes happened during a lecture by Altfest at the New York Studio School in December 2012, where Altfest described the long process for making her detailed paintings. After this talk, Haynes let herself develop a single painting for one to three years. Because she works from life, she gets to know not only the bodies she depicts but also the person inside them, like the trans bodybuilder Roxanne, whom she finished painting in 2012. “I really enjoy the long process of slowly getting to know the body,” Haynes said, “the specific body.” She continued, “It’s emotional when it ends, because you’re not going to have that regular time of seeing each other.” The relationships continue outside the studio: Leonora, whose breast portrait was hanging in the Trestle Gallery show, was in the audience tonight.

    The general form of the Breast Portrait Project—frontal view, centered composition, neutral background, and a body cropped at the neck and waist—remains consistent. What varies is the shape, color, and texture of the woman, and also things like necklaces and clothing (pants). The artist realized the importance of such accoutrements after a year’s worth of comments by visitors to her studio.6 In each work Haynes includes a body’s changes over time, but she retains temporary details that she likes. “With Leonora’s tan lines, I was really having a hard time letting that go, because I really like those tan lines,” she said. “And there were times in the winter when they were not there, to the same extent.” Haynes’s subjects are sometimes solicited randomly: she found Leonora in a coffee shop, approaching the older, butch lesbian out of the blue. “Recently I met Dilma in the restroom of a doctor’s office. She was singing in the bathroom.”

    Clarity Haynes, Leonora, 2015, oil on linen, 58 x 79 in. (artwork © Clarity Haynes)

    A triptych Haynes made as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts depicted three classic stages of life: youth, middle, and elderly. “I … think a lot about age in my work,” Haynes said. “I think about how old women are portrayed in art history,” through tropes like the maiden, mother, and crone. The art historian Svetlana Alpers, Haynes said, “pointed out that there’s a history of gendered distrust of detail in art.” Michelangelo disparaged Flemish painting as inferior to the Italian, tempera-based variety, writing a long paragraph about how Northern painters paint and to whom it appeals (“It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young…”). If he spent all that time negating detail, Haynes remarked, it must have really bugged him.

    One of the Body Utopia artists, Riva Leher, who was visiting from Chicago, offered additional observations about how Haynes’s work relates to art history. Northern Renaissance art has “the sense of a luminous, permanent present,” Leher said. And about Haynes’s work she observed, “There’s an inner luminosity in how you’re painting the body…. There’s a slow sense that the painter is telling you that the person you’re looking at is utterly worth your attention, is worth your quiet attention.” In Lucien Freud’s bravado painting, “there’s always a scrim between you and the subject,” which Leher likened to the British artist’s inner struggle and his dialogue with art history. We don’t see “his desire to bring you the pure presence of another human being, unmediated.” While all art is mediated in some way—including the apparently transparent qualities of even  trompe l’oeil painting—such realism plays a significant role in Haynes’s work. The subjects of the Breast Portrait Project are older bodies that are neglected, if not unseen entirely, in not just contemporary art but also our culture at large.

    Installation view of two paintings by Clarity Haynes in a 2015 exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum called A Collective Body: Uncovered and Illuminated; the sculpture in the foreground is by Stacy Latt Savage

    Leher observed that Haynes’s work lacks blood, trauma, and other qualities that cause people to flinch. The artist agreed: “When people see a disabled body they see pain, and they will not [have] any other reading—they will see pain. I often find that if they see a scar, they see pain, and that’s not my intention, so it’s sometimes kind of frustrating. Because what I feel like I’ve learned … over time is that a trauma may or may not have been a physical trauma, depending on how people reacted, what the memory is.” For Haynes’s friend, a scar from open-heart surgery as a child was a good memory—everyone at the hospital treated her like a princess. Lehrer said that our society doesn’t have the language to approach scarring apart from the wounded warrior. During the last fifteen or so minutes of the talk, the artist and the audience had a good discussion about trauma, healing, and reclamation, about scars, intimacy, and body acceptance, and about gender and gender expression.

    With a self-identified affinity for women’s spirituality and body-image consciousness of the 1970s, Haynes offers work with a striking balance between social and aesthetic issues—hitting the mark in every way possible.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Willem de Kooning, quoted in Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 72.

    2 De Kooning, quoted in John Elderfield, “Woman to Landscape,” in de Kooning, a Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 277. Some sources give the quote as “Flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented.”

    3 Clarity Haynes, “Visionary Bodies,” Body Utopia (Brooklyn: Trestle Gallery, 2015), 3.

    4 Haynes projected a photograph of a 1994 protest march with Riki Wilchins, the author of Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (1997), and the transgender activist Leslie Feinberg when MichFest articulated an informal policy about only welcoming attendees who were born female biologically. The conversation touched on the tension between respecting the pioneers of the feminist movement and pushing against their resistance to trans issues.

    5 Haynes’s work has been chosen for the next Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In addition, Stout Projects in Brooklyn will host a solo show of her work in February 2016. Haynes is also scheduled to speak at the New York Studio School on December 8, 2015.

    6 I visited Haynes’s studio on April 14, 2014.

  • Nice Guys Finish

    A Talk with the Critics: Ben Davis, Carol Kino, Andrew Russeth, and Benjamin Sutton in Conversation with Sharon Louden
    Wednesday, September 23, 2015
    New York Academy of Art, Wilkinson Hall, New York

    The journalist Carol Kino (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Two years ago I stopped attending panels of art critics discussing the state of the field, mainly because the subjects such events would cover could easily be predicted: (1) money, and how there is little to be made writing about art; (2) a perceived loss of power in the art world, ceded to dealers, curators, and collectors; and (3) the differences between writing for print and online publications. Speakers overwhelmingly wrung their hands over problems that have existed for decades. The numbing repetition—I can’t even.

    I almost skipped this “Talk with the Critics” panel, part of a series moderated by the artist Sharon Louden on professional-development issues for MFA students, for fear of more of the same.1 But I was familiar with and respect the work of the four New York–based participants—Ben Davis, national art critic for Artnet News; Carol Kino, a journalist for the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers and magazines; Andrew Russeth, co–executive editor of ARTnews; and Benjamin Sutton, metro editor at Hyperallergic—and decided to give it a shot.2 The level of discourse was reasonable and pedestrian. That’s not surprising, considering Louden’s focus for the series is to demystify the work and approachability of critics for the academy’s graduate students. What follows are summaries of the major topics.

    Why Write Criticism?

    In college Russeth attempted to make art, unsuccessfully, so he studied art history. After studying with Rosalind Krauss, who “was a force of nature … [who] really made the stakes seem very high,” Russeth became attracted to what he perceived as the glamor of art criticism, deferring a halfhearted interest in law school. Sutton covered film, theater, and art for his school paper, and Kino came from a similar background—wanting to write about culture. Falling in with an art crowd in New York, she discovered she had a good eye. Davis, who studied cultural theory and philosophy in school, was introduced to the art world via Rachel K. Ward’s ill-fated group exhibition Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy Airport, where he met the artist and writer Walter Robinson, who invited Davis to work for Artnet Magazine, which he edited. Artforum had deceived Davis into thinking that art was a place for ideas: “The art world is where important ideas go to die,” he joked.

    Andrew Russeth on the left (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What Do You Look For?

    For Sutton, the lure to write about the big show was stronger when he was younger; now he finds it more rewarding, for example, to travel to out-of-the-way places and spend more time with fewer shows. Russeth aims to reset the balances where critical consensus is skewed or wrong, and also “to get people’s eyeballs on something new.” As a journalist, Kino looks for a good story, often on current events with “some meaty sociopolitical aspect.” “I look for a sense of contemporaneity,” Davis said, which he sometimes finds in older art, which can become relevant again.

    How Do You Find New Things?

    Louden tried to get a conversation going about Instagram, but the four critics had other ideas. “People drop casual comments at dinner parties,” Kino said; she also depends on friends who are artists and publicists. “The artists always know,” Russeth affirmed, identifying younger, plugged-in dealers and even collectors as those offering good recommendations. Davis rephrased the question to uncover the panel’s not-so-hidden motive: “How do you get written about?” Instead of boilerplate invitations, Davis said, write something personal, like “You may like my work for this reason.” Kino advised artists to time their pitches right for a publication—which may publish a review while an exhibition is still on view, or months later. She hesitates to carrying on correspondence with artists who don’t have galleries, or whose work isn’t appropriate for galleries, because her outlets are not interested in covering unusual situations. Sutton, who wades through press materials daily, recommended that prospective artists contact him by email, not phone or Facebook. Rather than brownnose with critics, Russeth said, he advocated artists to “start a gang,” reiterating an idea from Dave Hickey. “The best way to do it is to have a big group … have curator friends, have artist friends, have writer friends,” all of who can promote your work to others.3

    Can Critics and Artists Be Friends?

    Russeth has no problem with it, though unfavorable writing can lead to disappointment. Sutton finds it inevitable that artists and critics form relationships and views the separation between them to be old fashioned. Kino reminded us that an even older school—dating to the 1950s—fraternized comfortably. Davis cautioned against losing the balance between insight and embeddedness; he also recognized that “an honest review” in intimate art scenes outside New York “would mean severing all these relationships.” And then: “I don’t have a hard and fast rule except to be honest about it, if you’re writing about someone who you have knowledge of.” Regarding Robert Morris’s personal relationship with Krauss, Davis said, “A lot of art history formed by people who knew each other very intimately. You’d be foolish to overlook that as a source.”

    The contemporary Ben Davis (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What’s Up with Listicles?

    Louden identified lists, such as “6 of Our Favorite Hamburger-Themed Artworks for National Burger Day” and “14 Young Power Players Set to Become the New Art World Aristocracy,” as a recent trend in art writing. The format, Davis claimed, is cheap to produce and does well—much better than reviews of small shows in Bushwick. The BuzzFeedification of discourse has spawned the entertainment article about art, he said, adding that it’s new to have an audience “amused by art.” While ARTnews publishes intelligent lists, Russeth revealed that the well-researched article gets an audience over time. Sutton argued that a well-written listicle can be informative.

    What Are the Issues in Painting?

    The audience Q&A started with an inquiry about contemporary painting. Russeth singled out a couple of schools in play—the networked painting of R. H. Quaytman and postinternet art—and told us he has to argue for painting’s relevance when writing about the medium. (Really, still?)  Sutton seeks what looks new or demonstrates a variation, break, or improvement in any medium, and Kino digs for personal stories and avoids theoretical discussion.

    From the crowd, the art historian and critic Irving Sandler—who began writing in the 1950s and was friends with many Abstract Expressionists—pressed the issue further. Davis ducked the question to ask his own: “What is art?” Kino placed the burden on artists, while Sutton stressed the need to pay attention to art scenes outside New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Online publications such as Burnaway and Pelican Bomb do that well, he said. (Louden added Bmore Art.) Russeth argued that criticism can be a tool to counteract obscene amounts of money circulating in the art world, and also to upend male white dominance.

    What Do You Love and Hate in Writing?

    Sutton likes writing about art that he doesn’t get initially, that gives him a new perspective. Kino hates an opinionated reviewer’s personality coming through strongly. “I like original ideas, plainly stated—that’s pretty boring,” Davis said, noting that his monthly roundup of art writing for Artnet News demonstrates his interests—though I notice that he recently sought recommendations for the list on social media. Russeth loves criticism that lays it on the line—he wants opinion, writers coming out swinging and being risk takers. “That’s what leads to better art,” he declared.

    Benjamin Sutton on the mic (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What about Trends and Brands?

    Figurative art has roared back over the past ten to fifteen years, Russeth pronounced, partly because critics and historians have broadened their view. “People like Joan Semmel, Martin Wong, Philip Pearlstein—I mean, they’ve never looked better, right?” He explained, “It’s no longer necessarily a zero sum game, which when I read art history, it kind of feels like it once was.” For Davis, “contemporary” has eclipsed terms like postmodern or pluralism, an issue he explored in his 2013 book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. When teaching painters, video makers, and performance artists, he observed, “The question, implicitly, that’s there, without being proposed, is, what are we all learning that’s the same?” Instead of having a unifying theory of it all, Davis detects a herd mentality in galleries, where “consensus about what was competent” has replaced “consensus about what was good and bad.”

    Sutton has witnessed an acceleration of branding in culture, when fashion crosses over into the hip, cool art world. The fast-fashion retailer H&M, he said, collaborated with Jeff Koons last year to produce a handbag. (Don’t forget about Takashi Murakami’s popular monogram bags for Louis Vuitton.) Taking a long view, Davis connected the early-nineteenth-century Romantic view of the artist with the Industrial Revolution. By the late 1990s, he sketched out, the fashion industry had evolved from producing couture for the few to cranking out ready-to-wear clothes for the masses, with designers producing sunglasses, cosmetics, and perfume. Huge conglomerates now use art to recapture high fashion’s exclusivity. “The whole point is that there’s a tension” between art and fashion, Davis concluded, not a synthesis.

    What’s Your Definition of Art?

    Russeth said that art, at its best, is a protected field to talk about things you can’t talk about elsewhere, in a safer and fuller way. He left out “through objects and images.” Sutton agreed but emphasized that art is not protected because it is permissive. Davis noted that art is a general term for excellence—an advertisement can be so good that it is art—so what is fine art? The tradition, the museum and gallery culture, and economically (a person with control over his or her labor). Earlier Kino had passed the microphone to Davis but got it back, saying “You know it when you see it.” She added that art constantly redefines what is art.

    In Terms Of count: 9.

    1 I spoke on a “Talk with the Critics” panel with Hrag Vartanian and Lily Wei in November 2013.

    2 Sutton was my editor at the L Magazine in 2011–12.

    3 Russeth misattributed the quote, slightly. Here is Hickey: “That’s why I still endorse Peter Schjeldahl’s advice on how to become an artist: ‘You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a scene, and turn that into a movement.’” What Russeth left out was the final step: “Then, I would suggest, when your movement hits the museum, abandon it.” Hickey, “Romancing the Looky-Loos,” Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 152.

    Watch

  • Language Is a Virus

    Spring with Dora Budor and Chrissie Iles
    Tuesday, September 8, 2015
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Dora Budor reads from her notes (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    This conversation between the Croatian-born artist Dora Budor, whose science-fiction-inspired installation Spring was on view in the Swiss Institute’s basement, and Chrissie Iles, a film curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, lasted only forty-five minutes. To some in the audience, it felt like an eternity. While the discussion started out informative—Iles sketched out a history of science fiction from its nineteenth-century origins in literature to its adoption by cinema in the twentieth—it slid steadily into unintelligibility. By the end of the event, Budor and Iles had made hash of potentially exciting topics, among them the relationship of human bodies to technology and the impact of computer-generated imagery (CGI) on perception, with maddeningly convoluted and directionless statements. It wasn’t pretty.

    It was funny, though, pitiably and perversely so. At one point Budor was expounding on the director David Cronenberg’s notion of cinematic bodies being or behaving like a virus, which he probably borrowed from William S. Burroughs, who described written language as a virus. “If you look at the virus, it’s just doing its job,” Budor insisted. “It’s just trying to live its life.” Cronenberg was among the many names she dropped; others were the German doctor and designer Fritz Kahn, the film theorists Darko Suvin and Donna Haraway, the artists Martha Rosler and Robert Smithson, the philosophers Manuel DeLanda and Slavoj Žižek, the interdisciplinary artists Lynn Hershman Leeson and Nam June Paik, and the filmmakers Aki Kaurismäki and Andrei Tarkovsky. Budor seemed more eager to cite other people’s ideas than to develop her own thoughts on art, film, and philosophy—to the extent that I wondered if all the theory she had absorbed has, like a virus, taken over her mind.

    For much of the talk, Budor and Iles read from, and based their comments on, written documents on the table in front of them. At times they seemed to be talking at each other. When the speakers went off script, they lost the plot entirely. Here is Budor toward the end of the conversation:

    In cinema [Žižek is] saying nothing is spontaneous and natural of human desire, that our desires are artificial, and instead of giving us what we want, the cinema teaches us, or tell us, how to desire. Desire in this way … inscribes itself onto reality and becomes another sort of protrusion or a wound of reality, and that’s where the art of cinema comes. It’s consisting of an arousing desire of playing it back.

    Just after that, Iles asked Budor something about eroticized machines, to which the artist responded: “Cronenberg always plays with this idea that something is protruding the body and creating another type of desire, another type of desire that might not yet exist,” which somehow relates to the cyborgization of the body. Iles had her own ideas: “Our experience of light—absorption of it, acceptance of it—is much higher than it was even ten years ago,” she astutely observed. “There’s also different ways in which light, be it intellectual or otherwise, has a very proper relation to the city, to architecture, and therefore different ways in which the body is constituted through that cyborgian relationship to technology and energy and, um….”

    Budor could not be stopped. Thinking of Kaurismäki’s description of analogue cinema being light and digital cinema being pure electricity, she announced:

    The electricity and how the intensity of the screen, the intensity of the light that you mentioned, has rose up so we can tend to consume more light, and there is way more entropy caused by that. So, what are the things which make cinema alive? This idea of pressing play or starting the machine—which will run, which will use electricity, which will use light to make something alive—is in a way very similar to all of our environments, of the light that is in this room, the hot water that we drink. The flows of energy are pretty much similar wherever you look, either in the fictional world or in reality. And the environments which we have created and animated, environments are created in a way looking at our bodies, so we can program the world around us to—in a similar way of the industrial palace functions—to program the world around us to actually correspond to the flows in our bodies.

    How did we get here? In her introductory remarks, Iles argued that failed political revolutions in Europe during the long nineteenth century caused people to imagine better, more humane worlds, first expressed through literature and then cinema. Time travel comes from an ideal, utopic way of thinking, Iles contended, and so we get things like H. G. Wells’s novella The Time Machine (1895) and Robert Zemeckis’s blockbuster film Back to the Future (1985). Not everything Iles said made sense. The popularity of science fiction, she told us, hot in the 1950s, declined significantly in the 1970s, and rose in the 1980s. If that’s true, how does she account for major films such as A Clockwork Orange (1971), Sleeper (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)? It was as if nothing between 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982) had any impact on culture. To her credit, Iles cited “climate science fiction” as a new genre about cataclysmic changes to Earth—no aliens or monsters there.

    Installation view of Dora Budor’s exhibition Spring at the Swiss Institute

    The sci-fi overview framed the discussion of Budor’s installation, which consisted of four sculptures in a brightly lit room whose floors and walls were partially covered with some kind of blobby black resin (in fact, flexible polyurethane foam with black pigment). The discrete pieces, titled Our Children Will Have Yellow Eyes, What Kind of a Person Does This, Slow Ticking of the Callous Mind, and One Million Years of Feeling Nothing (all works 2015), meld steel pipes, latex prosthetics evoking an organic body, and an epoxy clay lattice network that looks like a circulatory or digestive system—they’re very strange. Each sculpture has a found object—a “screen-used miniature”—that appeared in three vintage science-fiction-type films: The Fifth Element (1997), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Batman Returns (1992).

    Budor defined her approach as “not of making works but making worlds.” But her art doesn’t come from her imagination—it comes from other sources. While the presence in her sculptures of these miniatures, which studios typically sell after using them and which make their rounds at trade convention shows, may impress fans of the movies, they act as excess cultural baggage for works that ought to stand on their own merits, triggering their own associations. I’ve only watched one of those three movies, so learning the origins of the miniatures soured the exhibition for me. Visual elements that had briefly been full of interpretative possibilities were suddenly foreclosed.

    To Iles, the “sinister black goo” covering the wall and floor—a work in itself, called Chinchorro People—represents a contamination. Budor named the piece for the several-millennia-old Chilean mummies that have succumbed to decomposition that one scientist reports is caused by microorganisms activated by global warming. (Budor also said the alien virus called the black cancer from the television show The X Files informs her work.) The mummies are actually turning into black goo. So it makes sense that Budor identified infection, the reanimation of the body, and the body combined with inanimate matter, as central tenants in her show. Iles interpreted the black goo psychoanalytically and symbolically, saying something about how its ambiguity represents a collective fear of the power of technology blurring boundaries. Going deeper, she argued that cities are huge machines that constitute the organic human body and its subjectivity (huh?), and that Budor’s sculptures reflect this cyborg nature. And going even deeper than that, the miniatures in Budor’s installation reverses the flatness of the film screen, Iles said because we look at these objects frontally, not yet manipulated by camera placement, which make the miniatures appear larger and more impressive—precisely the reason why they exist in the first place.

    Chrissie Iles reads from her notes (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Neither Iles nor Budor could sufficiently explain the importance of revealing the mechanisms of Hollywood cinema, when everyone knows that special effects are designed to simulate a plausible reality, whether that’s a painted backdrop or pointy ears or computer graphics. Or an Instagram filter. “We are getting used to looking at unnatural, composite bodies,” Iles stated, “and at the same time we want our bodies to become also more perfect.” Discussions of this sort have taken place for decades; the difference now—which is true for any present moment in time—is that we are closer than ever to a normalized cyborg or android body. Contact lenses and organ transplants once wowed people. Now paralyzed people can move computer cursors with their mind, and 3D printers can generate customized artificial limbs. That’s progress, right? Similarly, Budor found it earth-shattering that movie franchises create their own character universes: “It’s interesting when fiction kind of totally loses its history in a way,” she said, “and starts finding that history in itself.” The notion of continuity between movies, as well as canon-formation across films, books, animated series, and the like, isn’t terribly hard to grasp.

    If my recounting of Budor and Iles’s ideas above makes sense, it’s because I listened to the audio of the conversation twice, after hearing it firsthand at the Swiss Institute. I don’t think difficulties arise because the artist and curator operate at a much higher intellectual level than me; instead, they exist because neither of the speaker had the ability to communicate coherently, much less effectively. They presented what are probably ordinary ideas with overblown rhetoric, backed by obtuse extractions from other people’s theories, that seemed to alienate the audience. It was telling when the Q&A session yielded no inquiries from the audience. None at all.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    Watch

    Swiss Institute, “Conversation: Spring with Dora Budor and Chrissie Iles” on Vimeo.

  • Needle on the Record

    Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution with Michael Denning
    Friday, September 4, 2015
    Interference Archive, Brooklyn

    “You might say that a people or a movement must be constituted musically before it can be constituted politically.” This was one argument among many declared by Michael Denning, a professor of American studies and English at Yale University, during a talk for his new Verso book, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. Denning, however, made it clear that the music culture during the brief period of time studied in his book—from the widespread use of electrical recording in 1925 to the early years of the Great Depression—was not revolutionary politically.

    Denning’s words were well suited for the summer exhibition at Interference Archive, if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance, which explored intersections of music and politics through record covers, song books, and music memorabilia, all with a predilection for insurgency. Most prominent were three walls of record covers, some from popular music, such as Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire, Meat Is Murder by the Smiths, and Bikini Kill’s self-titled EP. Revolutionary-minded jazz players Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk were represented, as were obscure proletariat titles like They’ll Never Keep Us Down: Women’s Coal Mining Songs.

    Drawing from the first chapter of his book, Denning provided ten instances of early electrical sound recordings from around the world. Before this technology, singers and musician performed live in front of a machine that cut grooves into a platter—the master recording of the session was a record. In the mid-1920s, engineers developed a more advanced method using microphones and amplifiers to electrically inscribe sounds onto a cylinder, disc, or film, which could be taken elsewhere for manufacturing. A son band was recorded in Havana in October 1925, followed by Louis Armstrong’s bands in New Orleans and Chicago a month later. In Cairo the legendary vocalist Umm Kulthūm recorded songs for a set of ten 78 RPM records in May 1926, and the Jakarta singer and dancer Miss Riboet laid down the kroncong classic “Krongtjong Moeritskoe” in November. Other recordings were made in Honolulu, Zanzibar, Accra, and Johannesburg—and Django Reinhardt in Paris. Denning played twenty to thirty seconds of each example to give the audience a taste of the explosion of music from back them. He also created a Spotify playlist for the book.1

    Michael Denning describes the early electrical recordings of Louis Armstrong (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Denning could not overstress the importance of colonial port cities, connected by steamships. After the invention of electrical recording, companies such as Gramophone in the United Kingdom, Victor in the United States, and Pathé in France, sent engineers around the world, usually twice a year, to port cities—Manila, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Tunis, Bombay—to record the locals in order to sell products back to the local markets. It was a commercial enterprise relatively unconcerned with preservation. One British music reviewer, Denning said, noted that even though England produced the physical records, they were imported quickly and therefore hard to find. In the United States, homegrown music was marketed as “race records” and “hillbilly” music, often become trendy in the metropolitan cities. Though the recordings of the electrical era came from all over the world, they were mislabeled as jazz, a catchall term for syncopated music that might actually be tango, rumba, or rebetika.

    In those port cities lived professional musicians who could read music, as well as those learned by ear. “You see it in Havana, you see it in New Orleans, you see it in Shanghai,” Denning said. “The mix of these two sets of musicians” produced localized—I hesitate to say indigenous—music outside the formal, orchestrated scenes in London, New York, and Berlin. Creating makeshift studios in hotel rooms, engineers would sometimes put up a sign that essentially said “We are recording and need musicians.” Other times they would locate performers on the edge of musical culture—those musicians who were trained but were part of the community—who would become musical directors that recruited from the local scene and even registered (or assigned) a recording’s copyright. In colonialism, he remarked, a class of subordinate elites served as intermediaries between the ruling class and the general population, and musicians could be found there. These musicians, Denning revealed, are the “key protagonists or heroes” of Noise Uprising.

    Installation view of one wall of if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some might see exploitative capitalism at play here, Denning took a deeper look. “These musics are best understood not as an emergence of the music industry,” he said, “nor was it simple popular music.” Instead, “it was a vernacular revolution,” not unlike the effect of the invention of the printing press on language. The author called the emergence of these records a “decolonization of the ear,” sparking a political unconscious in music that later would become conscious. The young intellectuals in port cities, he said, were drawn to their local music. Denning stated, “Political decolonization—the decolonization of territories, of legislatures—depended on a cultural revolution.” The creation and circulation of records from the late 1920s onward supported enfranchisement, he claimed, serving a role that books and newspapers once did. Denning commented that the record covers on the wall of Interference Archive, such as those by the politicized Nigerian bandleader and politician Fela Kuti, exemplify the evolution.

    In Trinidad, a song by the calypsonian Raymond Quevedo, better known as Atilla the Hun, called “Commission’s Report” responded earnestly to the official government report on the Butler riots. After the British cracked down on dissent, he recorded two more songs that were sympathetic to the replaced colonial leaders, and a third, called “The Strike,” that cheekily avoided direct commentary. The knowing wink became powerfully prevalent. “Often the most innocuous songs,” Denning said, “carry anticolonial and nationalist connotations in the eyes of the authorities and in the population.” In Hawaii, “the romantic lyric tribute to the land, built on the simple musicality of place names,” was a form a resistance. “What some understood as tourist picturesque actually signified colonial dispossession.”

    But what about the commercial exploitation and appropriation of the music? Many of the recordings were a mingling of Western and non-Western instruments, a hybrid evolution of styles that differed from music from isolated, rural locations, which relied on the oral tradition. Even though the folklorists find commercialism suspicious, Denning said, leading figures such as Alan Lomax came to realize the cultural and historical significance of the recordings. In a letter to the Library of Congress, Lomax claimed that the commercial companies did more of a service than the folklorists, who sometimes repackaged the old commercial recordings as indigenously authentic. Denning noted that much of Harry Smith’s celebrated collection , Anthology of American Folk Music, was drawn from early electrical records produced for the market.

    The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók sought pure folk music, Denning said, not the popular music played by gypsies for money. The search for authenticity or purity is short sighted, if not misguided, I think, because it fetishizes tradition and allows no room for development and change. In the early phonographic era, Denning said that the song was considered more important than the performance—improvisation was secondary. This attitude reversed. (Reinhardt, for instance, listened to and learned Armstrong’s improvisations.) In addition, a reliance on Western interpretations of exotic music declined. Before 1925, American listeners got Tin Pan Alley renditions of Hawaiian music. Folks no longer needed W. C. Handy’s written notations of the blues because, ten years later, they had the immediate gratification of listening to Armstrong and Bessie Smith. There may have been better trumpet players in New Orleans twenty or thirty years before Armstrong, Denning said, but we don’t have the recordings to prove it.

    Michael Denning gives the thumbs up (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some may prize the work of the anonymous collective over the individual or stars, the early electric recordings featured individuals who were stars. Denning argued that the cult of the popular bandleader was not dissimilar to those for charismatic political figures in the decolonization era. The leaders of newly free nations often sponsored the work of musicians to establish not only a national identity but also a national industry. Import substitution is the concept of manufacturing and selling goods within your own country to obviate the need to buy from others. Some musicians were even encouraged to sell their records in New York and London, not just in Lagos.

    Denning pointed out the social and sexual contradiction in music. The division of labor was traditional: men are instrumentalists and women are singers. At the same time, he said, women were able to perform in public for the first time. From 1925 to 1930, Denning told us, musicians were not trying to revolutionize music for politics. Records reinvented daily life, making music regular, not occasional. At the time, he continued, music was associated with vice (drinking, drugs, prostitution), with carnival and military marching bands, and with vaudeville and theater. In the port cities, Denning noted, working-class musicians played for working-class people.

    Denning compared the early electrical period to the dot com boom of the late 1990s: internet companies had no idea how to make money, but investors poured millions into ideas for websites. In the mid- to late 1920s, record companies recorded anything and everything, because the technology to produce and consume music was so new. Ten to fifteen years later, and after the Great Depression, they knew how to market music and make money. Denny, though, reminded us to focus on the music, not on the industry. The energy of labor precedes capitalism’s capture, Denning said. He urged us to transcend the leftist critique of industry and get to the powerful human impulses to make music—and also to have it heard and shared.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 During the audience Q&A, an attendee was curious about Denning’s relationship to archives. “In many ways I feel like my archives have been that world of collectors and discographers on the internet,” citing the blogs Excavated Shellac and Haji Maji. Record collectors are the true archivists, he said. Those who collected Robert Johnson records in the 1960s found that, by the 1980s and 1990s, these became too expensive. The collectors turned elsewhere, to the world music that Denning’s book is about.

  • The Butcher, the Baker, the Exhibition Maker

    Theater of Exhibitions with Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann
    Wednesday, August 5, 2015
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Jens Hoffmann, Theater of Exhibitions (2015)

    Theater of Exhibitions, a slender new book by Jens Hoffmann published by Sternberg Press, offers fifteen brief chapters on curatorial work. While Hoffmann, a 41-year-old curator, writer, and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum in New York, rarely mentions specific works of art, he discusses his own exhibitions and criticizes—in a casual way—the alliance between museums and the wealthy, the blandness of international biennials, the overproduction of artists, and the extension of curatorial work into publications, conferences, screenings, and workshops. Unlike Hans-Ulrich Obrist, whose recent reflections on the profession were published in Ways of Curating (2015), Hoffmann is not a storyteller. Instead he writes gently provocative essays that immediately make you agree or disagree with him. Theater of Exhibitions summarizes his thoughts on recent history of curatorial work, with his academic background in theater in mind (but the text make relatively few connections between curating and the dramatic arts).

    For a book launch at the Swiss Institute, Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, asked Hoffman point blank: “What drove you to write this book?” The curator traced his inspiration to a class he taught at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, which provided students with a history of exhibitions and practical curatorial knowledge. The experience led to the organization of Exhibition Squared (2001) at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, which took twelve shows of the 1990s as its subject. I wondered if Exhibition Squared was also the inspiration behind Hoffmann’s previous anthology, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014).

    Jens Hoffmann and Jessica Morgan in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Morgan observed that Hoffmann’s shows unfold over time, which harmonizes with the tempo, dramaturgy, and setup of theater. He said he did “small things in a very small theater in Berlin while I was still studying” in Berlin and felt an affinity with the live-action works of Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, all artists who use the exhibition as a medium. Morgan quizzed Hoffmann about working with designers. Hoffmann said communications such as graphic design often become invisible because we are used to it. Design can give form, shape, and consistency to an exhibition, he said; it is also a tool, like analogue film or a type of camera lens. Hoffmann said he has collaborated with the same designers on his shows, which makes sense considering his long-time stints at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–12) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003–7).

    Do you encounter resistance from artists, Morgan asked Hoffmann, who is known for strong thematic shows. “I’ve never heard about any complaints,” he replied, “but you never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Everyone laughed. Artists appreciate him doing something different, such as when he offered a trilogy of Wattis exhibitions based on classic American novels—Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum—that were “very heavy on the staging.” For instance, he said, the Moby-Dick exhibition included audio recordings of the filmmaker Orson Welles reading excerpts from the book at several points as a narrative device.

    Museums front and center (elevation illustrations by A Practice for Everyday Life)

    Blaming the self-sustaining machinery of Big Academia hinders the evolution of the curatorial profession, Hoffmann suggested that students get doctorates philosophy, anthropology, and art history instead of the ubiquitous master’s degree in curatorial studies. He isn’t aware of any graduate program in curatorial studies that does not focus on contemporary art, yet he conceded that the most growth and most creative exhibitions involve exactly that. The journal Hoffmann founded, the Exhibitionist, first published in 2010, initially attempted to start conversations about exhibition making of all types and eras, but Hoffmann discovered that readers and writers lacked an interest in older art. “That’s a big barrier that has to be penetrated,” he said, “or maybe not.” I agree with the former: curators should look at not only displays of historical art but also those in museums of fashion, science, natural history, and the like.

    Morgan questioned Theater of Exhibitions (exceedingly banal) promotional phrase, “art after the end of art,” which surprised me since the book’s largely resists affirming art-world trends and myths. Nevertheless, he cited Arthur C. Danto’s and Hans Belting’s writing on the subject from the 1980s as a source but then asked, “Why are we still looking at fairly traditional artworks in 2015?” Because, Jens, such proclamations about the end of art, painting, history, irony, or whatever, are always overstated.

    Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The curatorial role in museum acquisitions is not discussed as frequently at public-facing exhibitions. Hoffmann criticized Dia’s elitist approach for collecting only “ten genius artists” who make Minimalist and Postminimalist work that is alienating to audiences. To her museum’s defense, Morgan argued that Dia:Beacon’s cavernous space is more inviting to skeptics. What concerns her is how institutions collect contemporary art without an endpoint, and how these objects will be shown or stored. When the art world was smaller, Morgan and Hoffmann determined, museums had less product to choose from and as a result were more selective. With MFA programs releasing hundreds of artists into the world annually, that is not the case now. Hoffmann argued that some artworks have temporary relevance, such as Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings, which can be shown in temporary exhibitions and then returned, while Prince’s Marlboro Man photographs have lasting value and belong in a museum collection.

    In the Exhibitionist, curators evaluate their past work, responding to their exhibitions years after they closed. Yet these essays, as well as Hoffmann’s Theater of Exhibitions, don’t consider external assessment in the form of published criticism—and the exhibition review in particular—as if written responses to exhibitions from the interested public do not matter. An artist, musician, or actor may decide not to read reviews, but a curator ought to consider them essential to their professional growth.

    In Terms Of count: 4⅔.

  • Where All the Action Is

    Lee Lozano Drawings and Paintings: A Conversation with Jacqueline Humphries, Jutta Koether, and Bob Nickas
    Wednesday, July 22, 2015
    Hauser and Wirth, 511 West 18th Street, New York

    In her notebooks, Lee Lozano asks herself, “WILL I ‘GO BACK’ TO ‘JUST PAINTING’?”

    I first discovered the work of Lee Lozano (1930–1999) in 1997, when reading the reprint of Lucy R. Lippard’s classic chronology of Conceptual art, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The descriptions of Lozano’s experientially based art from the late 1960s, including Dialogue Piece, General Strike Piece, and Grass Piece, were among the most compelling in the book. Because of the radical nature of these works—making art from talking, from art-world protest, and from the desire to “stay high all day, every day”—I thought everyone knew about her.1 So when Lozano was rediscovered in the early 2000s, having left the art world for good thirty years earlier in her infamous Dropout Piece (initiated in the early 1970s), I was surprised. But upon reviewing the artist’s slender exhibition history and bibliography during the eighties and nineties, her omission from the historical record was clear.2

    The first question posed by Robert Nickas, the moderator of tonight’s conversation at Hauser and Wirth, was this: When were you first exposed to Lozano? The painter Jacqueline Humphries said she first saw Lozano’s work in the traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975, organized by Katy Siegel and David Reed, at the National Academy Museum in 2007. Humphries had also read Siegel and Reed’s conversation about the artist, published in Artforum in 2001. The conversation’s third participant, the artist Jutta Koether, became acquainted with Lozano’s work “as a concept, as an idea” in the 1990s—through Nickas, actually. Strangely, based on her words and expressions, it seemed as if Koether had never actually seen Lozano’s work in person before tonight.

    The painter Jacqueline Humphries (center), flanked by Robert Nickas and Jutta Koether (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Tonight’s conversation was held in conjunction with an exhibition of five large paintings and numerous tiny drawings from 1964 to 1966, Lozano’s fourth solo show with the gallery since 2007. Despite Nickas’s unconventional approach to curatorial work and criticism, and despite his longtime support of Lozano’s work—he organized Lee Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961–1971 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2004—he framed the discussion around clichés: the death of painting, the artist as outlaw, the inadequacy of categorization, the goodness of failure, the performative turn, and, of course, the rediscovery of forgotten artists. Doing so produced a mostly stilted, directionless talk—the speakers missed the mark, and not positively so. Maybe they just didn’t prepare ahead of time. In spite of these obstacles, the talk had numerous moments of interest.

    Koether is attracted to Lozano’s multifarious practice: her process, her being female, and her “antagonistic propositions about failure and rejuvenance [sic] of painting.” Hauser and Wirth’s current exhibition created a “highly problematic proposition about Lozano” that interrupts her unified idea of the artist. “There’s not one Lee Lozano,” Nickas reminded her, briefly describing each of her five periods, such as the Tools works, the Wave paintings, and the written conceptual pieces, which came quickly over her ten-year career. Humphries said that museums often misrepresent an artist’s diverse body of work with an authoritative, streamlined version, and most artists she knows do a bunch of stuff. Well, duh.

    Why did Lozano paint, Nickas asked, when she could have done anything? “Is painting acquainted with winning [more] than any other practice?” he wondered. Looking around the room, Humphries saw something unique in the paintings that viewers, both then and now, can’t come to grips with. “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” she said. “They do something else.” Lozano wasn’t reliant on anyone, Koether conjectured. “She would want to paint because people told her not to.” Koether then launched into a meandering filibuster that barely made sense, followed by a similar monologue from Humphries. The group was at its weakest when discussing the physical qualities of the paintings in the room, yet Nickas didn’t bring the conversation back to earth.

    Jutta Koether (right) talks about rough sex (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In the late 1960s, Nickas claimed that Lozano interacted with sculptors and artists who worked with language—Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Dan Graham—rather than with painters. He also positioned Lozano’s work (e.g., depictions of hammers and drills and of shapes with volumetric forms) as masculine—a gendered view that Humphries challenged. “I never knew what that meant,” she firmly stated, noting that nobody calls out men who paint pictures of women for being feminine. Nickas fumbled with a definition of masculinity as portraying toughness and violence and mentioned that Lozano, in her art and writing, had a man’s voice. Koether explained this observation as a symptom of the time. “It’s like really rough sex … all the time,” she said. “It’s brutal—it’s very hard and super desperate.” While Humphries recognizes the “unbelievable force” in Lozano’s work, the artist is also cheeky and, formally speaking, was addressing mainstream issues in American painting at the time, such as mass and scale, in spite of the radical qualities that people usually ascribe to her work.

    Nickas was refreshingly skeptical about the performative aspect of contemporary art—he said “there’s not a lot behind it”—but Lozano is the real deal, especially regarding her Wave series of paintings, one of which was completed after fifty-two consecutive hours of work. The real topic of discussion, however, was Lozano’s social relationship to the New York art world and how she integrated social performance into her studio work, which Humphries attributed to the emancipatory politics of the 1960s. Representative works are Dialogue Piece (1969), for which Lozano invited people to her SoHo loft for a conversation whose content would remain private, and Drop Out Piece, for which Lozano withdrew from the art world and eventually left New York, later settling in Dallas to live the life of an acid casualty.

    Most contentious was Lozano’s Boycott Piece (1971), which comprised her refusal to speak to women for two months—though apparently the work continued until her death. Tonight’s speakers felt uncomfortable with this resolution, which the curator Helen Molesworth has called “consummately pathological” and “incredibly disturbing,” though they understood how Lozano was critiquing institutional sexism, both within and outside the art world.3 Koether identified the problem of Lozano trying to be more revolutionary than the revolution, and Boycott Piece has affected the way she understands the artist’s entire oeuvre.

    Though Koether finds Lozano’s position to be “nonreconcilable,” I can’t help but think of other controversial artists who push moral and aesthetic boundaries, such as Santiago Sierra and Adel Abdessemed. Though their strategies and results are questionable, it’s generally a good thing to see artists like them working with contentious subject matter and pushing liberal attitudes. After all, it was Lozano who wrote “‘SEEK THE EXTREMES, THAT’S WHERE ALL THE ACTION IS.’”4 Nickas more or less accepted that testing limits pushed Lozano beyond painting, and beyond the art world. Humphries said we will never know her reasons for dropping out—especially since, Nickas added, “it’s a world people want to drop into.” Koether postulated that acting crazy and aggressive might be the only way out of an enduring problem of sexism.

    “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” Jacqueline Humphries said of the paintings on view (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Nickas detected rage, not anger, in Lozano’s work, based on her written statement: “I am not angry at anyone or anything but I feel rage.”5 Koether agreed, seeing rage in the tight control of the paintings hanging on the gallery walls around her. Moments later, during the audience Q&A, an attendee refuted that idea. “One person’s rage is another person’s tranquility,” he shrugged, adding that, when considering the brownish-orange color in one painting, “rust isn’t rage—it’s slow deoxidization.” Koether was unmoved: “I still think they’re very angsty.” Humphries called the paintings austere, not minimal, and Nickas compared Lozano to contemporaneous Californian artists, calling her “the Light and Space artist of darkness.” Humphries concurred, stating that the works on view contain neither air nor figure-ground. Lozano had a sensibility, she continued, not a style; Humphries believes Lozano made works that she wanted to see for herself. Nickas said that one of Lozano’s goals was to “picture time and space, expanding and contracting. It’s improbable, but you just have to accept it.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 101.

    2 The Lee Lozano revival can be traced back to an exhibition of her work at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1998.

    3 Helen Molesworth, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: The Rejection of Lee Lozano,” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 65, 70.

    4 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, April 24, 1969, in Lee Lozano: Notebooks, 1967–70 (New York: Primary Information, 2009), unpaginated.

    5 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, Book #5, December 29, 1969, in Barry Rosen and Jaap van Liere, Lee Lozano: Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press; New York: Hauser and Wirth, 2006), unpaginated.

    Watch

  • Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

    Gendered Expectations: The Representation of “Girls” in Contemporary Art
    Sunday, June 7, 2015
    NEWD Art Show, Brooklyn, NY

    Cindy Hinant, Celebrity Grid (The Rich Kid), 2013, ink, Mylar, and magazine page, 11 x 8½ in (artwork © Cindy Hinant)

    The artists Alex McQuilkin and Cindy Hinant and Kathy Battista, director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and senior research fellow at the University of Southampton in England, met at the NEWD Art Show, a small art fair that coincided with Bushwick Open Studios, to discuss art that deals with “girly” aesthetics. The panel’s teaser offered this: “From makeup to celebrity culture, these artists mine “girly” motifs—often ignored or dismissed as flippant and unserious by the art world—to explore issues of gendered expectations and pressures women face through representations of women in the media and culture at large.”

    But what exactly is a “girly” aesthetic, anyway? On a casual level, Hello Kitty and Holly Hobbie come to my mind, as do princesses, pink dresses, tea parties, heart-shaped cupcakes, fruity cocktails, playing dress-up—and actually dressing up. I’m sure you could come up with your own list. Yet for a panel that implicitly set out to challenge stereotypes, the speakers didn’t try hard to debunk this aesthetic ghetto or even define it. It would have been enlightening if they had pointed out when images of stereotypes are innocuous or dangerous, but they didn’t I suppose we can use Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s helpful rule of thumb of “I know it when I see it,” but such an approach can reinforce faulty preconceptions. Instead, McQuilkin and Hinant gave brief presentations of their work, followed by a discussion about feminism with Battista.

    Alex McQuilkin, Sweet Sixteen, 2003, C-print, 20 x 24 in. (artwork © Alex McQuilkin)

    McQuilkin made her video Fucked (2000), a three-minute clip of the face of a young woman—the artist herself at age 19—putting on makeup while (apparently) being fucked from behind. The work caused a sensation when the gallery Modern Culture showed it at the 2002 Armory Show. (I was among those who saw it there.). Explaining the piece, the artist said that Fucked demonstrates how physical appearances alienate a person from the world, and how an image can be greater than the experience. Ironically, she always gets asked if the sex in Fucked is real or simulated, a fact that for me is ancillary, and not integral, to the work’s meaning. That didn’t matter when Fucked was pulled from an exhibition in the Netherlands for being child pornography. The edition sold well at the Armory, McQuilkin said, and one creepy collector even permanently installed it in his bedroom. She knows this because he showed her the room.

    Alex McQuilkin describes the motivations behind her work (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    More recently McQuilkin has been drawing the likenesses of Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve in their prime, but with blank spaces where their faces should be. “They’re made for us to project ourselves onto,” she explained. McQuilkin noted that Bardot felt that she had scored her first serious role as an actor when cast for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, but the American trailers pimped her babeness instead her professional chops, offering sexy shots of Bardot that were not in the film.

    Another recent work is Magic Moments (Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl) (2013), a video comprising appropriated clips of young, white fashion models from television commercials and online advertisements, moving in slow motion to the soundtrack a woman singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”1 We are comfortable looking at the women, McQuilkin observed, adding that she gets the “feeling of ‘I want what they have.’” It’s the classic male gaze. Combining ubiquitous images with national pride and naturalizing both, Magic Moments is not dissimilar from what you might see on a billboard-sized television screen in Times Square or in a display in a retail clothing store—delightfully blurring the division between art and commerce. The lack of a clear position—critical or complicit—seems to be McQuilkin’s point.

    Hinant admitted having a love/hate relationship with popular culture and cosmetics. For The Sephora Project (2012), she visited branches of the cosmetic-and-perfume chain store across Manhattan, filling out comment cards that detailed her interactions with staff and other shoppers. Her exhibition Aesthetic Relations at Joe Sheftel Gallery in 2012 addressed the right of publicity and agency: celebrity sex tapes, up-skirt photography, and revenge porn—what Hinant succinctly called the “aesthetics of violation.” Another body of her work reacts to paparazzi photos and Instagram feeds that show celebrities without makeup, with the former genre mocking their looks and the latter resisting the beauty myth. She explained that “‘without make-up’ is code language for ugly,” though it seems as if the famous are trying to dispel that thought. Inherent in Hinant’s conception of celebrity is a process of identification with, and rejection of, both yourself and the object of your fascination. Whether or not this experience is just part of growing up, she didn’t say.

    Hinant screened an early work, The Kissy Girls (2006), a kind of home movie that interviews her 11-year-old sister, who admitted to kissing at least ten boys. The video also showed Hinant’s sister—who perhaps exemplifies the sexually precocious “knowing child”—teaching the artist how to dance to a Missy Elliot song. In another series of works, Hinant overlaid grids of ink and Mylar on pages taken from trashy magazines like Us Weekly, pages that show photographs of the former child stars Tori Spelling, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, and Amanda Bynes, as well as the those of television personalities Kourtney and Khloé Kardashian. “The grid is a utopic space,” Hinant said mysteriously, “where one line does not have more value than another.”

    Cindy Hinant, one image from Women, 2011, C-print, 5 x 7 in. (artwork © Cindy Hinant)

    As moderator, Battista tried to create a conversation around art, gender, and fashion, and on the body as a site for consumption. In the mass media “we see images not of girls,” she said, “but of capitalism.” McQuilkin’s students at New York University believe that we live in a postgender time, but she still finds images as problems, which she attributed to being older and wiser. Hinant pointed out sexism in measures of artistic success: “If Carolee Schneemann wasn’t a babe, she wouldn’t have made it in the art world.” (In 2011 Hinant made C-prints of cropped appropriated images of the bare breasts of artists such as Schneemann, Yoko Ono, and Hannah Wilke.) Battista argued that male artists Richard Phillips and Richard Prince make work about female celebrity and noted that the singer and producer Pharrell Williams organized an exhibition called G I R L for Galerie Perrotin in Paris, on view when his “date rapey” song with Robin Thicke, “Blurred Lines,” became a smash hit. Though Williams publicly calls himself a feminist, Battista said, he practices “strategic misogyny” elsewhere.

    Kathy Battista (left) moderates the conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the audience Q&A, someone said that, when understanding feminism, some take a strictly economic view, which demonizes mothers who stay at home to raise children. An audience member made a comment that I interpreted as “It’s 2015—what the fuck.” Battista said that having children takes years off the lives of artists and academics, based on anecdotal, personal experience. Both artists recoiled at the term “girl” when asked to participate on today’s panel, but in 2006 interview McQuilkin was much more forthcoming with her attraction to adolescence—but she also said that she has moved on.2 The only time the “girl versus women” debate surfaced what when McQuilkin said she had no problem referring to a male-dominated art world as a “boy’s club” because the power dynamic is different.

    If I were moderating the discussion, I’d ask the artists about authenticity, imaginative play, and feelings of immortality, among other topics. For instance, can older men to portray girls in contemporary art without being total creeps? Are depictions of girls by women the only acceptable kind of representation? Growing up, McQuilkin lived in a bedroom “curated “by her mother, like a dollhouse. By contrast, her brother taped Metallica posters to his walls. “The maid didn’t go in there,” she said, without irony. How are gender roles inscribed across race, class, and nations?

    Adolescent studies in disciplines like psychology and sociology are rich, and so is literature—Lewis Carroll’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955) are touchstones. But the subject has been little examined in visual art apart from a collection of essays in Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art (2011), edited by Catharine Grant and Lori Waxman. The book argues that the art world’s fascination in girls peaked in 1999, the year in which a photography exhibition called Another Girl, Another Planet took place at the gallery Lawrence Rubin-Greenberg Van Doren, yet interest in young women in popular culture—from songs by the Beatles (“I Saw Her Standing There”) and the Rolling Stones (“Stray Cat Blues”) to the Larry Clark film Kids (1996) to Lena Dunham’s television show Girls—is decades old and continues to grow.

    Anna Gaskell, untitled #26 (override), from the series wonder, 1997, chromogenic print, 19 3/8 x 23 ⅝ in (artwork © Anna Gaskell)

    I would argue that the same is true in the art world, but the panelists neglected to discuss other artists making work about girls, such as Anna Gaskell (who once assisted Sally Mann), Laurel Nakadate, Collier Schorr, and Sue de Beer (for whom McQuilkin has worked). There’s something repulsive in how Erin M. Riley cranks out tapestries of scantily clad teen girls taking selfies in the bathroom mirror, but images of them are hugely popular on Instagram. What about historical figures such as Balthus and Edgar Degas, or contemporaries like Ryan McGinley and Richard Kern? As an artist who specializes in nude pictures of young (but legal) women, Kern practically lives Matthew McConaughey’s famous line in the movie Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older; they stay the same age.” Should why is the representation of “girls” in contemporary art a subject stuck in perennial adolescence?

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 McQuilkin cited the book Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999), written by a collective of French artists and activists under the name Tiqqun, as an influence.

    2 Ana Finel Honigman, “Overwhelming Life,” Artnet Magazine, March 29, 2006.

  • Much Detachment, Very Labor, So Painting

    The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness
    Thursday, June 4, 2015
    Jewish Museum,     Scheuer Auditorium, New York

    Isabelle Graw speaks on “The Economy of Painting” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social, economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the primacy of the medium.

    Step One

    Graw’s term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is irrelevant to this concept.

    Sigmar Polke, The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969, lacquer on canvas, 59 1/16 x 49 7/16 in. (artwork © Estate of Sigmar Polke)

    One would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it painted itself.

    Step Two

    Graw stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is painting?”1 For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920). Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work, Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s quest for information.”2

    Installation view of Sigmar Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jill Krementz)

    Graw cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in them, or not.

    Step Three

    Graw discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after? I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.

    Step Four

    Graw reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and descriptive—seriously?

    Isabelle Graw at the Jewish Museum (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Step Five

    Graw decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have subjectlike power—a power that she  repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant. Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky ground.

    Step Six

    The American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she apply the same logic to photographers?

    Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1992, oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm (artwork © Martin Kippenberger)

    Step Seven

    A painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide (including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting. (Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.

    After Steps

    The Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how, and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse: painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Her exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion of painting?”

    2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.

    Watch

  • Hot or Not

    “Aesthetics” of “Female” “Attractiveness”
    Friday, May 15, 2015
    Frieze Talks
    Frieze New York, Randall’s Island, New York

    “I sense some confusion,” observed Casey Jane Ellison, an artist and comedian who hosted a panel called “‘Aesthetics’ of ‘Female’ ‘Attractiveness’” at Frieze New York. Like a daytime talk-show host, she began with a monologue of observational humor—which included a fear of going bald and the dating scene for bulimics—but the audience didn’t laugh. Full of disconnects in timing, diction, and subject matter, her introduction desperately need an applause sign, if not a laugh track. Ellison placed the blame on us: “Art audiences are just kind of like—don’t touch me—you know what I mean?” No, I don’t. “It’s like, get involved,” she implored. “This is about all of us.” Ellison’s awkward monologue made me appreciate the jump-cut edits in her online television programs such as What the F*shion? The non sequiturs were making things slightly better: “Does the truth set you free? No, it will set you on fire.” And, closer to the panel’s topic: “We live in a postmodern world. Are we posthot?”

    Casey Jane Ellison speaks

    Ellison introduced the speakers one by one, as they took the stage: the artist, activist, and filmmaker Leilah Weinraub; the writer and activist Grace Dunham; the activist and writer Reina Gossett; and the blogger Karley Sciortino. The host’s first questions to them were “Are you feeling safe?” and “How fat do you feel today?” The speakers answered stiffly, probably feeling like the audience did during the monologue. Her next question was more promising: “What was the first object or product you bought that propagated your own objectivity?” Ellison got the conversation rolling with her own experience. As a little girl, she faced with a snack choice at a 7-11 convenience store, choosing a protein bar over candy—even though the caloric intake was (presumably) the same. Perhaps misunderstanding Ellison’s question, Gossett said that paying for school defined her objecthood, and Weinraub came to a similar realization when she “became a vaccinated citizen of the world.” (Her hippie parents apparently didn’t get her shots for mumps and scarlet fever.) Understanding the question way too literally, Dunham said she was born an object and argued that culture objectifies us. Fortunately, Sullivan played the game, describing how she intentionally dressed provocatively in her late teens to early twenties to make herself a sex object, for validation.

    The panelists’ responses set the tone for the next hour, with the four guests dodging Ellison’s seemingly random inquiries. “Are you earning enough, as a woman,” Ellison asked. Dunham replied, “Nobody actually asked me my gender identity,” and the host responded, “Can I explain? It doesn’t matter—do you know what I mean?” Weinraub was thankful for her access to resources; Sciortino mentioned something about making money peeing on submissive men. For a while Gossett tepidly criticized economic sexism and enforced gender binaries. It didn’t seem like the conversation was going anywhere until Sciortino cited studies revealing that physically attractive people—the hyper feminine and masculine kind—are perceived by many as better at doing their taxes, more honest, and able to get better rates on loans.

    Ellison segued into a segment called “Do You Trust This Face?” for which the panelists responded to images projected on the screen behind them. Weinraub compared a photograph of young Hillary Clinton with the female robot from the film Ex Machina and and riffed on artificial intelligence. While she looks forward to machine realizing a mind of its own, Ellison was skeptical and offered ways to fight malevolent machines: “You just unplug the thing,” she interjected. “They’re battery powered … then you don’t charge the battery.” Ellison then asked the panelists to rate their hotness on a scale of one to ten. While Dunham unsurprisingly resisted the notion of “setting yourself up for a system you don’t want to be in,” Gossett admitted to wanting to be told she looks good. Sciortino considered herself an 8.5 in Manhattan’s East Village, which she said translates to 9.5 in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Dunham eventually gave herself a zero—a number lower than the scale’s minimum—because she wanted to choose an extreme. Despite her nonparticipation, she brought up an excellent point: many individuals are less than desirable and invisible in culture, such as the disabled, people with AIDS, prisoners, homeless people, transgendered people, and other gender-nonconforming people. Weinraub likewise disagreed with Ellison’s game and awarded herself a zero; she got a high five from Dunham.

    Casey Jane Ellison asks the important questions

    The blonde, busty, and leggy Sciortino observed that appealing bodies are changing. During her high school years in the early 2000s, the “super pro ano” body type of Calista Flockhart, the Olsen twins, and Mischa Barton reigned. “You could see everyone’s backbone on the red carpet,” Sciortino commented. In pornography, though, she has observed a trend toward natural, flat-chested, confident women actors, identifying Sasha Grey, Stoya, and Tori Black as owners of slim bodies that aren’t blonde and busty, which contrasts the norm. Watching porn, Sciortino admitted, has helped her with own body image. “Things bounced around. I was like, that’s hot.” For Sciortino, the newest wave of feminism is defined by individuality. Since there are no more magazines to emulate, she said, women should be the best “you” they can be. Instead of appearing masculine intentionally, as feminists did in the 1970s, women are free to be whatever they want, including wearing “the sluttiest microdress you can find.” Sciortino joked: “No matter what we look like, someone wants to watch you have sex.”

    Agreeing with Sciortino’s views on porn, Gossett identified a “trans moment” in which fashion models appear in editorial spreads, though she noted that murder rates for this population are still high. Sciortino noted members of this group are sacrificing their privacy and safety to become accepted into mainstream culture, not unlike how gay men in the 1950s came out and were harassed, a move that slowly led toward their acceptance into straight society decades later. Dunham warned against outsiders assimilating into a culture that had previously rejected you. It was curious that no one mentioned the recent announcement of the former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner revealing himself as a woman, Caitlyn.

    “What is a whore?” Ellison inquired, but no one responded, so she moved onto a game called “There’s Suffering in That,” for which the panelists briefly responded to seemingly random photographs pulled from the internet. Everyone missed the crass American patriotism in an image of a woman’s hand, wrapped in red, white, and blue beads and holding up her index finger in a “We’re Number 1” way. Weinraub said the image made her happy, but I couldn’t help but picture a crowd of drunken bros at a sports bar chanting USA! USA! USA! The panelists somehow found suffering in two photos of cute dogs wearing sweaters. Weinraub experienced numbness and deep pain in a photo of a cake pop, but a seaside resort photo appealed to her “maximalist nature.”

    A family with fame and success: Carroll Dunham, Grace Dunham, Lena Dunham, and Laurie Simmons

    With time running out, Dunham read a short text that she and Gossett wrote together (read the transcript at Slutever). Being hot means having value, the statement began, which can be marketed, assessed, and branded. It can also reflect power and capital. Dunham acknowledged her privileges and advantages: being white, being relatively famous (her parents are artists Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, and her sister is Lena Dunham), possessing a vagina but having sex with women, and having power through association, via her relationship with black trans man. This relationship to power, fame, identity, and marginal authority, she said, makes her critique legitimate. “Those are the reasons why I’m hot,” she concluded. “That’s how hot I am.” The way Dunham reconciled contradictions of value and power without irony or haughtiness impressed me. But she dug deeper, saying that everyone longs for feelings of being known or being loved—which doesn’t necessarily mean being hot physically or aesthetically—and that compliments from the dominant system can make us feel good. An important distinction should be made, Dunham continued, between the self and the evaluated market value of the self. Further, fame can isolate people and push intimacy away, and a longing for fame can be harmful.

    Dunham said that people complain about art fairs and culture—“This fucking art fair,” she hilariously quipped—but at least at Frieze New York the financial aspects, the “economies of evaluation” in her words, are laid bare. (She declared that she was paid $500 for her panel appearance.) Art fairs, Dunham continued, allow people to fill the holes in their hearts, to reproduce the culture of evaluation, for better or worse. What is it about dealing art that makes you feel better or worth something,” she asked art dealers rhetorically. And of others: “Why am I valuable? Who do I want to be? How do I want to be loved?” After hearing this, I felt that we didn’t need Ellison’s faux talk show. Dunham could have read this piece onstage and left it at that.

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    Read

    Zoë Lescaze, “On Porn and Poodles: Casey Jane Ellison, Grace Dunham and Company Talk Sex, Gender, Art,” ARTnews, May 18, 2015.

    Listen

    http://friezeprojectsny.org/talks/aesthetics-of-female-attractiveness/

  • Interview in Art Practical

    In the newest issue of the online journal Art Practical, the artist, critic, and publisher Dushko Petrovich conducts an email interview with Christopher Howard about his experiences publishing In Terms Of. The interview joins other essays and interviews that address the theme of “Free Speech in the Art World.”