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

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

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

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

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

slant November 2016

“Richard Prince: The Douglas Blair Turnbaugh Collection (1977–1988)”

ON JULY 28, 2016, Richard Prince retweeted an item from curator Marvin Heiferman’s feed about a $1 billion copyright-infringement suit that photographer Carol Highsmith had just filed against the stock-photo agencies Getty and Alamy, charging “gross misuse.” Earlier that day, Prince had tweeted a picture of a slightly enlarged black-and-white photocopy of his short 1977 text “Practicing Without a License.” He commented: “Feel like I got hacked. Or waxed. Or whacked. Mickie’d. Surprised they didn’t have my underwear on display. Shame.”

What instigated the Twitter outburst of Assange-ish lingo and

print December 2014

Bruce Hainley

“The essential signification I attach to my poetic activity,” Michel Leiris wrote in his journal in 1941, war soon everywhere, “is that of a refusal.” The autiobiographical Manhood (1963; first published in 1939 in French as L’âge d’homme), he continued, was “the negation of a novel.” Keep in mind this noble lineage of refusal and negation (luxury goods) when handling Derek McCormack’s incantatory contaminant The Well-Dressed Wound (pas de chance). Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln hold a séance to contact their recently dead fashionista faggot son, Willie; ghostly, AIDS-y mayhem ensues with spirit

film September 12, 2014

PrEP School

JACQUES NOLOT NEVER FORGOT how Roland Barthes introduced him to André Téchiné: “Je vais te montrer une roulure” [“I’ll show you a slut”]. A young and come-hither mec on the make, Nolot would only later become known as a writer or a filmmaker, or even the suave figure in films by François Ozon, among others. He commented, decades later, on the not precisely meet-cute in a bar with Téchiné, the director he would end up working with more than any other, both as an actor and screenwriter, and on Barthes’s exactitude: “That was true in a mythological sense: he who has no stable place.” When Pierre,

passages September 2014

Sturtevant

BRUCE HAINLEY: The Lady died. When I first heard the news about the sad, too-soon event, all I could think was: What a total drag. Not that the spaceship wasn’t going to come for her eventually, but I just couldn’t believe she wouldn’t stick around to cause double trouble at her exhibition this November at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Anything memorial strikes me as so antithetical to the forward movement of her every act of thinking, her art. We should open up a great Meursault in her honor and really get into it, since fresh, involved dialogue was one of her fortes.

CLAUDE WAMPLER:

print December 2013

Bruce Hainley

1 MAUREEN GALLACE (OVERDUIN AND KITE, LOS ANGELES) We live in a time of a lot of very bad art. (Has it ever been otherwise?) Not long ago, Frederick Seidel summed the situation up: so much “heat but no warmth.” He was alluding to empty sublimity that routs actual intensity. Gallace, however, makes some of the most intense paintings going. Luminous grays, gliss-andos of white, and auroral pinks and oranges dramatize her precise blues. In her “seascapes,” if that’s not too faggy a term, waves crash upon the shore and the horizons disappear—which is not a minor event for a painter who always

print May 2013

PAINTED VEIL: THE ART OF MONICA MAJOLI

FORGOING OUTRIGHT ATROCITY, of which there is so much—too much—right now, aren’t the “life,” “body,” and “face” of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century? (I use the tweezers of scare quotes to approach each of those precarious terms because I’m not certain I could handle them at all otherwise.) “His” face and its occlusion, in the final years, when any nose he had was entirely prosthetic (not to mention the permanent eyeliner and chemical bleaching), became a brutal inversion of all the solar joy he beamed as a young performer—that

previews May 2013

“An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and their Circle”

Finally, with Jay DeFeo’s epic work making a grand tour, a definitive edition of Robert Duncan’s The H. D. Book becoming available, and Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian’s recent collection of Jack Spicer’s poetry spiking the cultural punch, certain elemental structures of the San Francisco Renaissance are coming into focus. Using as its launchpad the dynamic domesticity of Duncan and his longtime companion, the still too little celebrated collagist Jess (Collins), this show of thirty-five artists from their magic circle—many too long in the

print December 2012

Bruce Hainley

Midwinter murder is in my heart

As I stand there on the curb in my opera pumps,

Waiting for the car to come and the opera to start,

Amid the Broadway homeless frozen clumps.

—Frederick Seidel, “Midwinter”

I’VE BEEN HEARING ABOUT art as social practice for a while, but this year there was truly no escaping it. Not clear what the phrase really means, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include most of what Martha Stewart still intrepidly serves up in Living. Although, since most of that magazine shows people actively effecting some kind of exchange with one another, seemingly quite seriously and/or

previews October 2012

“Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective”

The late Ken Price was the hairy potter our greed-driven times needed—one who conjured wonder from base materials.

With his “Snail Cups,” 1965–68; “Curios” (cabinets), 1972–78; and a quarry’s worth of psychedelic philosopher’s stones, the late Ken Price was the hairy potter our greed-driven times needed—one who conjured wonder from base materials. The wand that chose him was a paintbrush, and the canvas (or support) he championed—bowing to and freaking with influences and peers as various as Antoni Gaudí, Magritte, and John Altoon—was fired clay. Let’s just hope, for an artist who so exuberantly shrugged off the quandary of craft versus art, that LACMA’s exhibition,

print March 2012

FIRST POSITION: THE EARLY PERFORMANCE WORK OF STURTEVANT

WE CAN'T GET ENOUGH. We love to rediscover STURTEVANT, to relive her relentlessly recombinant logic. We love the way her work multiplies, whether as hyperspeed sexed-up video clip or scandalously wholesale copy or the readymade we never really knew. And we’ve probably reinterpreted the legendary Paris-based artist as many times as she has reinterpreted the work of others. But over the past several years, Sturtevant has seemed to outstrip even the manic proliferation suggested by her reproductions of Warhol Marilyns and factory-line sex dolls. Her recent videos and theatrical environments unleash

books November 2010

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979, translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 2010. 272 pages; Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 2010. 256 pages; Roland Barthes, Incidents, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. New York: Seagull Books, 2010. 184 pages.

“HOW CAN YOU LIKE THAT SILLY HOMOSEXUAL?”

So Helen Vendler sets the scene for her defense of Roland Barthes, six years after his death in 1980, with the question she was asked “by an eminent literary critic in tones of impatience and revulsion,

diary October 24, 2010

Clements’s Time

THERE WAS NO ONE who looked remotely as compelling as George Clements at the opening for Richard Hawkins’s first American museum survey at the Art Institute of Chicago, so I’m skipping any rundown or namechecking of supposed hoi polloi. Many will not know who George Clements is or why, if he’s of such aesthetic consequence, so Jean-Paul Belmondo–esque, he wasn’t actually present. Of course, George in all his complicated Georgeness very much was present, but “in” the art and not “on” the scene. I was going to use that fact to let loose on why I think there’s so much diarrhetic diarizing on the

print April 2010

OPENINGS: DIANNA MOLZAN

Place: A drawing room.

Time: Right about now.

CYRIL: Ekphrastically, before taking up some of their core concerns (frame/picture, support/color, individuality/variety, expressiveness/reiteration—although they trouble any rote opposition suggested by the forward slash): Molzan’s paintings launch into a rousing version of “Dem Bones” as if covered by Bryan Ferry.

VIVIAN: Ekphrastically, really?

CYRIL: Why not? They eschew anyone else speaking for them. Like most compelling art, they’re already in advance of the broken arm of any possible philosophical systemization, which often ends up hobbling,

print May 2009

THE PRIME OF MISTER LARRY JOHNSON

Ookinglina for alltina arkdina +

andsomehina. Not into ealthhina

oodfina, into ampagnechina.

Ollegecina ucatededina.

Okingsmina or icotinenina

ansdermaltrina ystemsina.

Enjoys onglina alkswina on

eserteddina eachesbina, eoplepina, Eoplepina,

Arstina Ektrina: The Extnina

Enerationgina + atscina. Into

usicmina + orshipswina at the

teralina of Ourtneycina Ovelina.

Ajormina obbieshina cludeinina

onglina alkswina on eserteddina

eachesbina, itingwrina

emiautobiographicalsina

arritivesnina + Adonnamina

ashingbina.

—Larry Johnson, from Untitled (The Perfect Mensa Man), 1994

ARE YOU TALL, DARK, AND HANDSOME?

print May 2008

George and Mike Kuchar

From Auguste and Louis Lumière and Warner Bros. to Ethan and Joel Coen and the Farrellys, brother acts have had a mighty influence on the history of film. Commandeering the foundational basement of the frat house of cinema, twins George and Mike Kuchar have long wreaked havoc, creating fetid splendors too numerous to list, the titles of some of their earliest collaborations (The Wet Destruction of the Atlantic Empire, 1954; A Tub Named Desire, ca. 1956; and Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof, 1961) providing only a glimmer of the kind of sexy delirium that would influence Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, John