and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Prospetto a Mare
One of the fiercest critiques Baer elaborated in her break-up with abstraction and New York was toward her previous peers, the pioneers of minimalist sculpture, men whose names we know. By paring down and taking apart objects, they equated the mundanity of objects with objectivity, which in their reductive reasoning proposed to “contain the real.” This mix of purity and reality echoes as counterpoint to the also-well-known male critics of that time who proposed that the further art gets from an attachment to reference, the closer to perfection in form it could become.
I once met her, if you could call it that, for a few seconds at the Frieze Art Fair; she turned to the person who introduced us and asked: “Is he going to look after me?” She must have meant it ironically, because in 2009, a decade before she died, Agnès Varda was not only busier than ever—after photography and film, she had lately embarked on her “third career” as an installation artist—but honored as a New Wave instigator and a pioneer feminist director.
Metzger died in 2017, at the age of 90. When Hauser & Wirth started representing his estate three years later, it marked the first time that his work had been shown in one of the commercial galleries that he memorably described as “Capitalist institutions. Boxes of deceit.” Featuring works made between 1961 and 2014, the show positions the artist in its press materials as an advocate of “environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society.”
The main exhibition of the 15th Gwangju Biennale is entered via a gloomy “sound tunnel” filled with dissonant noise and leading into a silent room resembling an abandoned office space. The ceiling tiles of Cinthia Marcelle’s installation There Is No More Place in This Place (2019–24) are disarrayed as if by some natural disaster, and the scrambling of the senses effected by these two environments marks a promising start to an exhibition that pledges to “reflect our new spatial conditions and the upheavals of the Anthropocene.”
Braceli’s project advances the absent Reticulárea’s many lessons around collaboration, collectivity, and decentralization. Here is a model of planetarity and “deborderization” appropriate to an historical moment of profound polarization. Instead of self-sufficiency and permanence, both Reticuláreas—the one dismantled and sequestered, and the one produced by nomadic gestures that weave hybrid materialities—insist on the expansive net as an emancipatory model for a world in need of connections.
Fittingly for this month’s program, which features several pieces on how culture might foster solidarities without becoming exclusionary, the relevance of Reticulárea extends far beyond the borders of its homeland and the moment of its first exhibition in 1969. It offers a template for how art can hold people in relation even as the physical infrastructures of the society in which they live are broken down, and how the ideas and feelings provoked by those relations can move across nations and through generations.
Prospetto a Mare
