Recent e-flux Criticism
Part of the critic’s task is to make the art world intelligible to itself: to render ideas developed by artists accessible to their peers and to a wider public. Recent years have shown how difficult this work has become.
The causes of this fragmentation have been widely discussed. But one principle undermined by algorithmically mediated channels is that a healthy discourse depends on exposure to new ideas and forms. By directing readers towards opinions they hold, and insulating one group from another, they narrow horizons and smother the exchange that stimulates progress.
Which means that the many co-existing “art worlds” risk becoming detached from each other and from the contexts that make sense of them. Which brings us to the Venice Biennale, and the opportunity to draw connections between the diverse forms and attitudes that are shoehorned into its creaking infrastructure (see the editors’ preview). Or, as Jörg Heiser more pithily puts it in his roundup of three standout national pavilions, to read it as “a puppet theater version of a much bigger mess.”
The international exhibition conceived by Koyo Kouoh proposed connections between artists and contexts based more on register and mood—specifically that of the “minor keys”—than on concepts or categories. It’s a commendable idea, writes Ben Eastham, but this delicate composition risks collapsing into incoherence in the absence of its chief orchestrator. That coordination between different parts of the art world is still possible was better evidenced by the strikes, withdrawals, and protests for which this edition will likely be remembered.
What identifies things—a person, a people, a country—and what unites them has been a theme of recent coverage even before they were brought into sharp relief by the Biennale. An interlinking installation of three major works by Mona Hatoum at the Fondazione Prada, for instance, is clear in its intention to undermine colonial systems of power and knowledge. And yet, writes Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Hatoum recognizes that to challenge entrenched prejudices does not preclude the possibility of making new connections.
In her review of Greater New York, the quinquennial survey of new art being made in the city, Katherine C.M. Adams anticipates Venice by noting that many large-scale curatorial projects are now organized around “moods” rather than “position.” “Themes are out,” she writes, “and temperature-checking is in.” The question of whether and how an exhibition can address issues of class and labor, and what it means to use that space to “rethink and recontextualize” their governing relations, nags away at R.H. Lossin even as she appraises a “really good show” at MIT List on those subjects.
A retrospective of Marcel Duchamp at MoMA prompts Barry Schwabsky, meanwhile, to wonder what can now be learned from a practice that was by its nature self-repeating. Contrary to the received idea of Duchamp as evasive of discrete meanings and identities, he discovers an artist whose “multiplication of the same always leads back to difference.” Here is a new angle on an oeuvre that might seem to have been exhausted.
Walking through Grant Mooney at the Museum Abteiberg—a blend of solo and group show that responds to the institution’s architecture—Jörg Heiser likewise reflects on the potential of referential art to express (or to efface) individual personality. In his latest novel, Transcription, Ben Lerner reflects on art, memory and identity through a fictionalized interview with a figure resembling the late Alexander Kluge. The sonata-like structure, writes John Douglas Millar, allows Lerner to propose fiction as a means both of expanding consciousness and bringing us closer to those we love.
Tacita Dean’s films at Marian Goodman also translate poetry’s effects into adjacent media, and Fanny Singer is enraptured by an artist at the peak of her powers. Music serves as analogy in Sara Nadal-Melsió’s analysis of the fragmentation of Europe, and Natasha Marie Llorens reflects on how the “wolf tone”—an unruly growl that emerges from the body of an instrument—might be used to refigure the idea of living “in harmony” with others. The early video work of artist, writer, and musician Johanna Hedva at TINA, meanwhile, revels in dissonance and cacophony even as it reveals how myth might be used to make sense of our chaotic world.
A dual presentation of the not-obviously-related bodies of work of Peter Hujar with Liz Deschenes at Gropius Bau casts both into unexpected and illuminating new light, writes Dominic Eichler. Hujar’s charged portraits of romantic bohemianism comes to seem “more analytical and sculptural,” while Deschenes’s conceptualism gains a “more lyrical” side. Here is an example of how connections between different worlds work to their mutual advantage.
D’Ette Nogle’s exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig is a sharp critique of the myriad ways that US imperialism shapes our world, writes Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov, but does it let Germany’s own institutions too easily off the hook? At the New Britain Museum of American Art, Pablo Delano’s archival installation makes no attempt to spare its audience. This pseudo-history of US colonial rule over Puerto Rico, writes Jared Quinton, indicts not only of the “policies and attitudes that have kept the island subjugated” but the role played by (even well-intentioned) museums in perpetuating stereotypes.
Reviewing an exhibition by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk at TBA21, Ben Eastham credits the reluctance of these Ukrainian filmmakers to pander to the expectations of European audiences. That their work is more complex, more conflicted, and occasionally more unpalatable than it might first appear is both to be admired and protected. The Greek artist Alexis Akrithakis (subject of a retrospective at the Benaki Museum) was, by temperament as much as by principle, similarly set against the totalitarianism embodied for him in the Greek junta. From his early paintings to his iconic “suitcase” works of the 1970s, every “incandescent” mark and gesture he left behind, writes Stephanie Bailey, serves as a call for individual freedom and collective solidarity. If anything connects the art we have recently covered, it is the relationship between those two principles and the possibility of reconciling them.
e-flux Criticism publishes three new reviews each week, delivering rigorous analysis of key exhibitions worldwide. To get these texts directly in your inbox, subscribe to the e-flux Agenda email list. Explore our full archive of contemporary art coverage and commentary at e-flux.com/criticism.
