Bruce Hainley

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  print May 2022

  ROMÂNUL

   He’s spent his whole life waiting for luck, looking for signs of it with a kind of fatalism, and he supplements this fatalism with the best skills of a shrewd hunter and gatherer, picking up booty like me. 
  —Bruce Benderson, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession
  

  YOU COULD SAY, couldn’t you, that André Cadere’s métier was incompatibility?

  The incompatibility of the exile, of the emigrant?

  The incompatibility of border-crossing?

  Of trespassing?

  Of crashing the party?

  Incompatibility, even, with Romania, where he was born the son of a diplomat who was arrested in 1952, then convicted, without a trial, of

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  slant April 14, 2022

  The Nothing Special

  “When things actually do happen to you, it’s like watching TV,” Andy Warhol once observed. But what is that like? Last month, Netflix released The Andy Warhol Diaries, a six-episode adaptation of the eponymous 1989 book compiled by Pat Hackett, who received the artist’s dictations over the phone almost every morning during the last decade of his life. Unsure of what to make of this intimate, fragmented portrait, we invited Bruce Hainley and Kristian Vistrup Madsen to talk it out.

  KRISTIAN VISTRUP MADSEN: Episode 1 is haunted (first by the E! True Hollywood Story format of the interviewees, their

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  print February 2022

  LUNCH POEMS

  Awarded three Michelin stars and crowned World’s Best Restaurant 2021, noma is no mere notch on the belt for the destination diner. Founders René Redzepi and Claus Meyer are credited as two of the leading forces in New Nordic cuisine, an informal but influential movement that champions ethics of care, sustainability, and self-sufficiency. BRUCE HAINLEY and CHRISTINE PICHINI converse about their revelatory experience at noma on a wintry afternoon, having been served not only an exquisite meal, but also plentiful food for thought.

  BRUCE HAINLEY: We flew to Copenhagen for lunch. Three friends flew

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  print September 2020

  DEAR MARIE

  DEAR MARIE,
  I haven’t come across a single mention of what perfume you wore. Perhaps Le Rose de Nicole Groult or Le Bleu de Nicole Groult, scents launched by Nicole Groult in her (and your) roaring heyday, some in flacons designed by her husband for Daum? Hard to believe you wouldn’t know notes of either—lily of the valley, lilac—on your pulse points. Nicole Groult synchronized the beat for the happiest moments of your life, as her name does this letter.
  

  She dressed a staunch, arty syndicate: Dorothy Parker, Virginia Woolf, Sara Murphy, Olga Picasso, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Madge Garland; all

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  print November 2019

  ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS

  “THE MAIN SUBJECT IS THE SURFACE, which has its color, its laws, over and above the objects,” Pierre Bonnard declared in December 1935.

  I don’t know what I expected to accomplish by hauling my ass to Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum for the second stop of “The Colour of Memory,” the first globe-trotting Bonnard survey in twenty years. Concentrating on the artist’s later solar work, the splendid exhibition, arranged chronologically, stumbled only with a series of not-uninteresting but nevertheless wince-inducing “soundscapes,” about which the less said the better.

  I tried to take some

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  print Summer 2019

  Cady Noland

  1.

  ON SECOND THOUGHT: What was she thinking?

  What was she thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald or Charles Manson, Betty Ford or Jackie O.?

  What was she thinking about the old red, white, and blue? About violence? About American history?

  What was triggered in her thinking when it occurred to her (if it did) that Clement Greenberg curated both her mother and her father in their first big New York group show, “Emerging Talent,” in 1954, also the year Patricia Campbell Hearst was born—“Patty,” who emerges in the Museum für Moderne Kunst’s astounding survey “Cady Noland,” curated by Susanne Pfeffer in

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  print January 2019

  THE PICTURE OF LITTLE C.N. IN A PROSPECT OF HORRORS

  THE MUSEUM FÜR MODERNE KUNST (MMK) in Frankfurt is presenting a comprehensive survey of the work of Cady Noland through March 31. Curated by Susanne Pfeffer, the exhibition takes stock of how Noland’s work grapples over and over again with the American pathologies of capitalism, consumption, celebrity, and violence. Here, Artforum contributing editor Bruce Hainley considers how Noland’s art is also somewhat of a family affair.

  CADY NOLAND’S infamous solo show at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery, March 26–April 23, 1994. American AF I am thinking. Closed not much more than seven weeks before O. J. Simpson rode the white Bronco into our current consciousness. 24/7 entertainment news. Celebrity media glare. Kommencement of Kardashianness. Bros before hos. Domestic violence the star-spangled ethos I am thinking. She found forms for that frenetic consciousness. C.N. saying, “I make an issue of the way things are connected.” When she makes an issue (not long before the show opened) of the way things are connected, I am

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  books Summer 2018

  THE SNOWBALL EFFECT

  David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale, by Elena Filipovic. London: Afterall Books, 2017. 160 pages.

  IN 1983, David Hammons held his Bliz-aard Ball Sale, which “probably didn’t bear that title, or any title at all,” as Elena Filipovic discloses in her amazing exposition on the artist’s chill maneuvers. Meanwhile, six months or so later, at a coven sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Rosalind Krauss informed the assembled that she—and here Filipovic quotes Adrian Piper’s writing on Krauss’s decree—“doubts there is any unrecognized African-American art of quality because if it

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  slant September 26, 2017

  Into the Storm

  APRIL 16, 2017 AT 2:24 PM EST

  Dearest Bruce,

  Today, a resurrection. 

  On Tuesday, as you recommended, I went to Light Industry to see Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield’s 1984 conversation, or portrait of, Craig Owens, part of Video Data Bank’s incredible interviews with artists and writers. This was some six years before he died, age thirty-nine, of—I rehearse the intolerable boilerplate—AIDS-related complications. 

  Eighty black-and-white minutes. Owens sits in a director’s chair in front of a makeshift backdrop—the zigzag of a wrinkled moving blanket. He talks and talks, always smoking. Or… he’s

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  print February 2017

  ON LONGING: THE ART OF HANNE DARBOVEN

  On the occasion of “Hanne Darboven: Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983” currently on view at Dia:Chelsea, New York, and “Hanne Darboven: Packed Time” opening February 25 at Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, contributing editor Bruce Hainley speculatively explores the artist’s epic activation of personal and political history.

  HANNE DARBOVEN’S FATHER, CÄSAR—trained as a chemist, heir to and head of his family’s coffee-roasting business, which expanded during World War II as the coffee supplier for the Nazi forces¹—“smoked some seventy cigarettes a day.”² His daughter equaled, or perhaps even surpassed, his daily habit: She was rarely seen or pictured without a cigarette in hand. Lawrence Weiner remembers Darboven smoking Salem menthols in the 1970s (“We constantly kidded her about it”).³ Was the preference merely funny? Perhaps it signaled other cultural echoes, other milieus, concerns, affinities, however

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  print January 2017

  OPENINGS: KENNETH TAM

  “CHILLING DISPLAY OF MASCULINITY”: The phrase is Jacqueline Rose’s, describing political posturing in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. Is there really any fathoming of Benjamin’s assessment “no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” without also feeling the brunt of such displays? Vengeful braggadocio has never been absent from world affairs, but the testosterone has been rank and rampant lately and shows no sign of abating.

  I mention to B. a sculpture by Kenneth Tam that I remember as a shelf of used men’s deodorants and soaps—Old Spice, Mennen Speed

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  performance November 25, 2016

  Thank You for Being a Friend

  November 21, 2016 at 8:54 PM EST

  Dear Mr. B,

  I’ve just come home from an event of much love at the Kitchen, part of the rollout of Douglas [Crimp]’s superb memoir [Before Pictures]. Three exemplary interlocutors from three different dance worlds: Adrian Danchig-Waring (New York City Ballet/Balanchine), Silas Riener (Merce Cunningham), and Yvonne Rainer (Yvonne Rainer). 

  A little asymmetrical, I suppose, since Rainer got to play herself, though everyone did a very good job representing. 

  Rainer, at the end, was trying to respond to a question from the audience, and failing a bit. She said her mind