Ordinary, near ubiquitous, seemingly static or at least glacially slow-growing, and not particularly cute or charismatic, lichen are seldom observed consciously at all, much less celebrated, related to, or clearly understood. Like a riddle straddling the edges of the living and the physical environment—faint dustings of powder or inert, wispy fronds—lichen occupies a subliminal place in most other creatures’ perceptions and consciousness. A. Laurie Palmer’s The Lichen Museum endeavors to re-focus human attention on this hybrid lifeform as an act of aesthetic intervention. 

Raised in a number of languages, Mirene Arsanios floats through the spaces between them. Spanning significant personal and political changes, her latest collection of essays and stories explores the possibilities and limitations of the narrative form, the frailty of the human body, the pain of dislocation and the trauma of lost inheritance. Dina Ramadan talks to the author about the means by which “language is dissected, its innards turned inside out, its distortions and contradictions laid bare, messy, and tangled.”

This year’s Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival took place for the first time in the spring, befitting a rich slate of films that explored themes of renewal: of history, archives, and land. Loosely dedicated to emergent practices in the space where “cinema” and “artists’ moving image” intersect, BFMAF has since its inaugural 2005 edition taken as given the intertwinement of the aesthetic and the political, and refused antagonisms between fiction and non-fiction, shorts and features, old and new. Its eighteenth editionlooked to the liberatory capacities of narrative fiction and performance, as subjects and strategies of excavation.

“Video is everywhere,” begins the wall text at the entrance to MoMA’s largest video show in decades, as if on a cautionary note. Equally, to borrow an aphorism from Shigeko Kubota, subject of a recent MoMA exhibition: “Everything is video.” (It is worth noting that Kubota said this in 1975.) In tracing the evolution of video from its emergence as a consumer technology in the 1960s to its present-day ubiquity, “Signals” covers a dauntingly vast sixty-year span. A lot happened—not least to video itself—in the years separating the Portapak and the iPhone, half-inch tape and the digital cloud, and as the material basis of video changed, so too did its role in daily life.

In a 1988 catalog essay, the poet and critic John Yau sketched out the social dimension of Martin Wong’s painting and sculpture. A self-styled “representative of an economically oppressed urban class consisting largely of Blacks, Hispanics and Asians,” the American artist had been snubbed by curators and critics. A quarter-century after Wong’s death, this injustice has been corrected, and this Berlin retrospective of his antic, steamy, humane, and superlatively accessible take on Chinatown San Francisco and New York, from the 1970s to the ’90s, has been lauded. But there’s an anxiety buried in this enthusiasm.

A group show at LACMA presents art made when access to computers was limited to the military, well-capitalized conglomerates, and select universities. By settling its focus on the late- to mid-century era, the show evades both novelty and the obsolescence traps common when technology is the subject. During this period, the outputs of mainframe programs were constrained to paper printouts, plotters, or microfilm: not the media we might now associate with digital art. But traditional materials were no guarantee for overcoming future shock.

In many of Peter Wächtler’s video works, nothing much seems to happen. In Untitled (Vampire) (2019)—one of four such works on show alongside a series of gesso and bronze sculptures of planes and animals at Culturgest, Lisbon—a Nosferatu copycat, living within the dusty and humid confines of a mountain castle, spends his time writing letters to be delivered at the nearby village; kisses his undead wife on a balcony at night; sleeps with his arms folded over his chest; then goes back to writing letters.

Set to wander around the world for a decade before entering a museum collection, the Library of Unread Books consists of stacks of books donated by visitors on the condition that they have not been read. Inside the front cover, a stamp announces the book as part of the Library of Unread Books; the donor's name is written as well. Donating books is encouraged. Browsing reveals the ambiguous quality of the library: how much does one have to browse in order to convert an unread book to a read one?

It is widely accepted that propaganda makes for bad art. But propaganda is not always an Uncle Sam poster. Sometimes it is a towering, spectacular argument for the supremacy of the machine; an exercise in post-industrial American triumphalism, surveillance technology, and repressive deep-state R&D disguised as visually appealing, non-referential images. Perhaps the idea of propaganda is so thoroughly wedded to realism in the American imagination that MoMA’s collection seems unimpeachable.