The Ghanaian American filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu blends whatever she needs to make her point—including found footage, narratives, and pop culture—into films that are by turns surreal and confrontationally explicit in their meditations. Below, Owusu looks back on the first decade of her career, a milestone marked by two upcoming projects: “Between Three Worlds,” a screening of her work at REDCAT in Los Angeles on May 6, 2019, and “Welcome to the Jungle,” an exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, which will be on view from May 9 through July 27, 2019. The

THIS YEAR’S JEREMY SCOTT­–FILLED MET BALL MOODBOARD seems to be confusing those who have yet to get through “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag’s six-thousand-word listicle. Will attendees be obliged to cover themselves with swans and safety pins? Is camp simply a bouffant of sky-high wigs and sequined shoes? Or is it some kind of insider code that fashion’s worst-dressed victims don’t understand yet seem to indulge in regularly? “The best gossip I’ve heard in LA is that celebrities are declining Met Ball invitations due to the ‘weird theme’ and ‘ugly clothes,’” Patrik Sandberg, creative director

ON FRIDAY, I FLEW TO CÔTE D’AZUR in a private jet, and I am happy to confirm that the Alps are still snowcapped—it’s not all over quite yet, then. The lunch excursion was to Art Monte Carlo, an event that inserts itself into Berlin Gallery Weekend by making available a private shuttle. A luminously beautiful girl who sat with me on the plane got several hundred likes for a selfie taken in its cream leather interior. “Instagram is like alcohol: It manufactures the lack that drives it,” said a Greek collector with indigo eyeshadow who otherwise kept quiet. Her gold bangles rattled as our Mercedes

“WE ARE GOING TO WORK TOGETHER,” she would tell me self-assuredly, whenever we met on various occasions. I often ran into her in New York, whether on the streets or at Electronic Arts Intermix, where she was perpetually, or so it seemed, editing the video of her 1964 performance Meat Joy. In the 1990s and 2000s, when I was a young curator beginning to explore experimental cinema and radical art by women, and later during my time as director of the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Carolee Schneemann was always on my mind. My earliest exposure to her work was Fuses, 1964–67, a silent 16-mm film shot

I FEEL THAT EVEN a dedicated special issue of Artforum would be insufficient to grapple with the loss of an artist of Carolee’s stature. Despite Kristine Stiles’s proclamation, more than a decade ago, that Carolee represented one of the “great women artists” for whom Linda Nochlin had longed, art history has generally failed to recognize the true breadth of her achievement. As was most clearly revealed to me while working with Sabine Breitwieser on the traveling retrospective “Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting” (2015–18), Carolee’s body of work was as intricately interconnected—recursively

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN WAS SUPER FAB! She made her mark early with her definitive performance pieces of the 1960s and ’70s. Her groundbreaking Interior Scroll detonated art history in 1975; it was first performed at the show “Women Here and Now” in East Hampton, New York. She asked Joan Semmel, who organized the exhibition together with Joyce Kozloff, if she knew which type of glue would work best with vaginal fluid. Joan did not have the answer!

Carolee’s work was undeniably outspoken and rageful. She gave birth to a literal and psychological scroll—it was a voice from within.

She was part of the

Tales of the Floating Class: Writings, 1982–2017, by Norman M. Klein. Valencia, CA: Golden Spike Press, 2019. 303 pages.

IS IT POSSIBLE for critical theory to be anachronistic and prophetic at the same time? Norman M. Klein’s Tales of the Floating Class: Writings, 1982–2017, a compendium recently rereleased by tiny Los Angeles–based publisher Golden Spike Press, compels an affirmative answer, with the ongoing duel—the small initial 2018 printing quickly sold out—between cultural memory and its constant erasure acting as a perpetual catalyst. In other words, the future would be clear enough if we

THE SNEAKERS, six pairs in all, are pink. Every actress who appears in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole (2019) wears them—with jeans, with scrubs, beneath petticoats. The anesthetized set, by Mariana Sanchez, is spare: A hospital bed, a reception desk, and a waiting area adorned with potted plants are surrounded on three sides by tiles that match, almost exactly, the color of the actresses’ shoes. Flattering, photogenic, and distinctively of this moment, the rosy shade nonetheless seems almost threatening, mutant, evoking the soigné efforts of corporate branding run amok.

Mournful bagpipes

THE ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE, that venerable body of forty “immortal” academicians charged with policing the French language to prevent the infiltration of Anglo-Saxon words and Gallic neologisms, has been in the news lately because of its inability to fill four of its seats—prized positions that Balzac, Zola, and Verlaine once pursued and were denied. Olivier Assayas, whose own passionate concern with the preservation of French culture is evident again in his new film, Non-Fiction, would recognize the académie’s crisis as the ancien régime succumbing to the inexorable advance of modernity. Ironically,

THE FIRST FEATURE-LENGTH WORK by the occasional collaborators Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, the delirious Diamantino (2018) centers on a disgraced, spectacularly dumb soccer superstar, his IQ not much higher than his body-fat percentage. The sports-celebrity-industrial complex is merely one target of this robust, rollicking satire, which exposes the idiocy engulfing the world—especially Europe—more nimbly and effectively than anything Michael Moore or the editorial board of The Guardian could ever concoct.

Although Diamantino premiered a full year ago, winning the grand prize at the

WE ARE THE GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHES YOU WEREN’T ABLE TO BURN, declared a banner at this year’s International Women’s Day march in Zagreb, Croatia. As if to illustrate this illicit genealogy, two schoolgirls, accompanied by their mother, carried a sign proclaiming, WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE RESISTANCE. These slogans handily describe the expansive oeuvre of Zagreb-based artist Sanja Iveković, who, unsurprisingly, was spotted among the event’s attendees. Since the beginning of Iveković’s artistic career in the 1970s in socialist Yugoslavia, she has sought to prevent the erasure of women’s

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. Her most recent novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Penguin, 2018), is about a woman who tries to hibernate. She also writes essays and screenplays. She lives in Los Angeles.