and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
No longer are we in Hong Kong, but somewhere in Tây Nguyên, located within the Southeast Asian Massif known as Zomia, its complex textures expressed by a chorus of sculptures, installations, and instruments created by Art Labor—founded in 2012 by artists Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung, and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran—and collaborators from the Indigenous Jarai community, with whom Art Labor have been working since 2016, alongside invited artists.
The causes of the 2011 unrest—police brutality, defunded social services, staggering inequality—were quickly forgotten amidst outrage at theft and “destruction of property” by those quickly labeled as rioters and looters. The current prime minister, Keir Starmer, was at that time head of the Crown Prosecution Service, overseeing 24-hour courts that handed out summary justice. Starmer’s government was elected just a few months ago on a slogan of “change”; he followed the same judicial playbook when dealing with the far-right, anti-immigration protests and riots that swept the country this summer.
Gregg Bordowitz has been writing, publishing, performing, and teaching consistently and prolifically since the early nineties in New York, making “agitprop” videos as an AIDS activist and member of ACT UP. Though his material output is slim, his wordcount is substantial. Rather than focus on the early activist works for which he is best known, this exhibition concentrates on writing as the core of his artistic practice, but also as a daily habit that becomes material testament to his ongoing presence, as a long-time survivor of HIV.
Just beneath Bliss’s heavily ironic skewering of the art world’s inflated, but insecure, sense of importance—easy fodder, I know—lurk signs of a fiscal bubble about to burst. […] the outside world seeps into the drama: Van Haas is described as “a phoenix rising from the ashes of 9/11”; her collages of embattled teen idols are dotted with magazine headlines, including “How to sell a war”; and everyone knows the entire operation is a glorified money-laundering exercise. As if foreshadowing the forthcoming economic collapse, the artist has an expletive-laced breakdown.
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.