previews January 2020

Bunny Rogers

Curated by Thomas D. Trummer

Inside a folder labeled LAMB GRAVES on Bunny Rogers’s website everybodydiesbut.me is a seven-page spreadsheet that lists burial sites of children (BABES, OUR DARLING). Most entries include a thumbnail photo of the tombstone, its inscription (JUST ASLEEP, AT REST), the year of death, and the location. Elsewhere, in a folder called alternately IN HEALTH and HELL, Rogers has posted an obituary-like portrait of herself as a teenager. An expired countdown clock on her main site, meryn.ru, once ticked off the hours until Rogers would outlive those in the “27 Club,” including

diary December 19, 2019

Scene and Held

PRICED OUT OF THE LES, Ludlow 38 will shutter indefinitely. By now, this is too familiar a story to really be anything beyond a bummer, so last Thursday, on the night of the crushing UK elections, some friends of the gallery gathered to toast it goodbye at Nublu Classic, the Alphabet City bar. Guests of the “Too Faust Too Furious” party were variously scrounging for drink tickets and fretting about getting canceled in Texte Zur Kunst; Marie Karlberg was valiantly fighting a hangover from her opening at Tramps the night prior, which featured a sizable chunk of art-world players playing (basically)

picks December 09, 2019

Patricia L. Boyd

With an elegantly understated semiotics of the garden, Patricia L. Boyd’s exhibition here foregrounds the labors and failures of maintenance. In Unearthed, 2019, an array of weeds rest on a sheet of canvas; the artist’s mother snuck the flora, pruned from her garden, through US customs by dissembling them between yellow card stock and photographs of sundry English gardens she had visited. These pictures now grace the gallery’s walls, as does the video Sweepings, 2019, in which neglected to-do lists loop in a ceaseless tide: chicken liver / dust buster / more socks / emails / kevin’s memorial?

picks December 09, 2019

Ei Arakawa and Sarah Chow

“Occultism is the metaphysics of dunces,” once wrote Adorno, a “regression to magic . . . assimilated to late capitalist forms.” It’s no surprise, then, that astrology is alive and well in our century. It serves as the conceptual linchpin for “Moon Rehearsals,” an exhibition by VERTEX af (Ei Arakawa and Sarah Chow). A continuation of a project begun in 2018 at Düsseldorf’s Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, the show joins Arakawa’s superlunary LED-lit tapestries with Chow’s “Performance People,” 2018, a series of astrological readings of canonical art. For the latter—fifteen printouts

diary November 06, 2019

Seoul Cycle

ARRIVING OFF A FOURTEEN-HOUR FLIGHT from New York, I couldn’t remember the code to my grandmother’s apartment, until it came back like muscle memory: 1945, the year of national liberation for my grandparents, who were in middle school when the Japanese occupation of Korea ended. The persistence of the country’s ancient Confucian moral codes are refracted and jumbled through memories of imperial rule and aspirational neoliberalism in modern Seoul, and compounding deep-rooted hostilities against our former colonizer are the recent trade standoffs; the astonishing sense of kinship among Koreans

interviews October 29, 2019

Pat Steir

Since the late 1980s, Pat Steir has slung her paint from a loaded brush, letting oils arc and flow in a signature gesture of both creation and sublime surrender. For her latest exhibition, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the American artist has filled the building’s rotunda with a new suite of thirty paintings that, together, form a color wheel—an art fundamental that dates back to the early eighteenth century. “What Goethe was really pursuing was not a physiological but a psychological theory of colors,” Wittgenstein once wrote. The same might be said of Steir’s

picks October 08, 2019

Bernadette Van-Huy

In one of the two photographs from “Filler Stuff,” Bernadette Van-Huy’s solo exhibition here, we see painter Rita Ackermann sprawled back on a Twister mat–cum–picnic blanket (Blades of Grass, 2018). She may not be participating in “the game that ties you up in knots,” but she’s taking notes. Beside her are a nest of peanut shells, a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle, and a pair of binoculars. Maintaining a “nonproductive attitude,” in the words of artist Josef Strau, is hard work—and it’s a sensibility that Van-Huy has translated into an arrangement of sandbags with scribbled-on musical notes

interviews September 30, 2019

Tony Cokes

“Capitalism is profoundly illiterate,” observed Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Since the mid-1980s, Tony Cokes has been composing multimedia installations that collage pop music, archival film footage, and critical theory. While demanding close reading from viewers, his work also suggests the stakes, and even hazards, of legibility. For one of two commissions in his survey at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) at the University of London, Cokes quotes from filmmaker and scholar Kodwo Eshun’s 2018 Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture, which took place at the school around a year after

interviews July 23, 2019

Fiona Tan

Fiona Tan often reinterprets archives in her work, which incorporates video, photography, and installation to present an intellectual aesthetic history with an acute awareness of its own methodological limitations. “I am constantly reminded that all my attempts at systematical order must be arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and—quite simply—doomed to fail,” she has said. When the Ludwig Museum in Cologne invited Tan to devise an exhibition premised on the museum’s holdings of some seventy thousand photographs, she decided to focus on the advertising images of Agfa, the German photo and camera company.

diary June 29, 2019

The Custom of the Country

IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, society girl Lily Bart spends the “long gilded hours of the day” moving from one Hamptons estate to another, venturing out occasionally to a Monte Carlo hotel. Though impeccably trained to move among nineteenth-century New York’s upper crust, Lily cannot afford her lifestyle independently and must rely on the goodwill of better-endowed friends and sponsors. They, of course, expect certain favors in return, whether it’s writing letters or keeping a bothersome husband amused.

Lily falls from society’s grace when she ceases to be useful and overstays her welcome,

picks June 18, 2019

Rosa Aiello

As an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith story, Rosa Aiello’s video The Coquette, 2018, promises to end with murder and without justice. The twenty-four-minute satire noir follows a doomed young woman who flirts with and eventually spurns a suitor in an arc delivering us to the seemingly inevitable: Yvonne is brought to her demise by two resentful admirers, to whom the judge grants lenient to zero sentences (because they went to the same prep school—classic!).

A backstory describes how, at the age of ten, Yvonne lost her virginity to a thirty-year-old man; her mother still blames her for seducing

picks May 22, 2019

Robert Bittenbender

The 2003 Lifetime TV movie Homeless to Harvard tells “the inspiring true story” of a young girl who escapes her drug-addicted parents and destitute childhood by making it to the Ivy League. Captivatingly played by Thora Birch (of 1999’s American Beauty), Liz Murray lived this classic American tale of rags-to-riches reinvention, one Robert Bittenbender presumably riffs on in his assemblage Homeless to Haverford (all works 2019), one of five such pieces in this exhibition, “Space Vixen.” There are also two digital videos in which pages from friends’ unpublished novels run on a loop (The Blond

interviews May 07, 2019

Anna K.E.

That harmony, like beauty, often comes from invention within repertoire and constriction is reflected in the Tbilisi-born artist Anna K.E.’s work, which is marked by the gestures of a ballerina and the design of a choreographer. For the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, K.E. will bring together performance, video, sculpture, and hieroglyphs from Asomtavruli, the original Georgian alphabet, in a single architectural environment for the Georgian pavilion, curated by Margot Norton. Below, she discusses REARMIRRORVIEW, Simulation is Simulation, is Simulation, is Simulation, 2019, which will be on view

interviews April 30, 2019

Ser Serpas

The materials for Ser Serpas’s latest body of work were sourced locally from the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, where they will return at the end of her first US institutional solo exhibition. For Serpas, the show serves as both a homecoming and a farewell to the city she is leaving, after living there for six years, for Switzerland. “Against Attachment” opened April 25 and is on view through June 2, 2019 at Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies, Ludlow 38, in New York.

FINDING OBJECTS AND RECOMPOSING THEM comprises a lot of my art, just going on walks and asking, “Is this anybody’s

picks March 28, 2019

Fin Simonetti

The title of Fin Simonetti’s exhibition, “Pledge,” evokes the ways we are taught—practically from birth—the supposed virtue of belonging to and believing in things, such as clubs, cherished political leaders, and social scripts that dictate who plays perpetrator or victim, top or bottom. Here, the artist has carved various protective objects and symbols from alabaster, including ear plugs, candles, a fire extinguisher, dog paws, a lock, and genitalia. But Simonetti knows that what we turn to for safety can often lead, rather than deliver us, from violence. Rendered life-size and in uncanny

interviews March 21, 2019

Ben Morgan-Cleveland

The New York–based artist Ben Morgan-Cleveland is perhaps best known for co-owning the Brooklyn gallery Real Fine Arts, which closed last year. His work has been exhibited at Shoot the Lobster, Eli Ping Frances Perkins, 15 Orient, Greene Naftali, and elsewhere. His upcoming solo show, “Gallery with Words,” will be on view at Kai Matsumiya in New York from March 22 through April 27, 2019. Here, Morgan-Cleveland discusses the sculptures he’s been making in the commons of a New York City park.

I’VE BEEN MAKING WORDS out of branches in a quiet part of Prospect Park. There’s a lot of rearranging, an

interviews March 12, 2019

Bunny Rogers

Bunny Rogers’s preferred email sign-off is a sentiment that rings true to her work: Sincerely. It is the slipperiness of connection, however, that allows her to calibrate so sensitively the inner illogic of our own narratives and memories in her practice, which spans sculpture, performance, coding, and writing. “Pectus Excavatum,” her solo exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, revisits familiar motifs from past work—animals, toys, mops, and ribbons—to excavate sites of personal and mass media mythology. The show is on view through April 28, 2019.

I’VE MOURNED THE LOSS

interviews February 19, 2019

Keren Cytter

One feels continuously jolted by an element of disjunction in Keren Cytter’s work. In her videos, for instance, subjects interact with each other, but the potential for intersubjectivity seems simultaneously to be stripped away. Things happen, sometimes over and over, but never within the breadth of typical temporality. Bringing together a selection of her videos, children’s books, animations, and drawings, Cytter’s solo exhibition at the Museion in Bolzano, Italy, “Mature Content,” is on view through April 28, 2019.

I MADE THREE ROOMS at the Museion in which to show my films, with the entrances

picks February 12, 2019

Doris Guo

Doris Guo’s exhibition is solemn, as if one has been summoned to a church or a graveyard for prayer. Here, a funereal series of Chinatown restaurant chairs are nestled within wooden, coffin-like receptacles. Though the chairs appear to be upright, the artist has amputated their back legs, giving us only a truncated front view. (They won’t be seating anyone for a happy communion anytime soon.) These innocuous objects are meant to, both literally and symbolically, contribute to the circulation and consumption of Asian food, yes, but also bodies, capital, and a certain kind of aesthetic. They are

interviews February 01, 2019

Dora Budor

Dora Budor’s current exhibition at 80WSE in New York blends historical fact with fable to tell the building’s story of transformation, reflecting a fascination with the ways in which subjectivity is inflected by reactive, evolving environments. Originally built in 1879 as a residence exclusively for single men, primarily artists, the so-called Benedick Building—nicknamed after the bachelor character in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing—was bought in 1925 by New York University, and turned into offices and dormitories as part of its accelerated expansion. Here, Budor speaks about starting with

Hiji Nam