Pamela M. Lee

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  books December 2019

  Pamela M. Lee

  How to model kinship when Jim Crow demands otherwise? What constitutes intimacy for the legatees of race slavery and social death? The “revolution in a minor key” of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton) is not led by the proper names of history—traditionally a mythomaniacal retread of a heroic actor across the world’s stage. Instead, Hartman elaborates a counternarrative centered on young black women and genderqueers living in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century and forging their errant paths. For

• previews January 2018

  “Carissa Rodriguez: The Maid”

  Biographies of New York–based artist Carissa Rodriguez tend toward descriptions of an itinerant practice  encompassing the roles of writer, artist, and gallerist and moving from an early solo show at American Fine Arts (1996) and a stint at the Whitney Independent Study Program (2002) to Rodriguez’s position as director of Reena Spaulings Fine Art from 2004 to 2015. But just as “Reena” serves as the collective nom de plume of the artist’s close colleagues—who engage in a stealth interrogation of the terms of artistic identity—Rodriguez insistently reflects on the

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  previews May 2017

  “SETH PRICE: SOCIAL SYNTHETIC”

  In “Dispersion,” his influential open-ended essay begun in 2002, Seth Price poses a question animating his long- standing preoccupations with technology, digital culture, and the rituals of consumerism: “Suppose an artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur?” Featuring more than 150 works produced between 2000 and the present, Price’s Stedelijk retrospective will showcase the

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  print December 2015

  Pamela M. Lee

  This past year may well have been the annus mirabilis of the woman-in-rock memoir, with brilliant takes by the likes of Kim Gordon and Patti Smith appearing almost as fast as we can read them. (As of this writing, Carrie Brownstein’s much-anticipated book has yet to be released; Chrissie Hynde’s contribution, on the other hand, has garnered all the wrong kinds of attention). But my favorite of the genre by far is Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys Boys, Boys (Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin’s Press). As the guitarist for the Slits, the emblematic, all-woman band

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  print Summer 2015

  DOUBLE TAKES: THE ART OF JOAN JONAS

  IF THE WORD retrospective suggests a certain nostalgia, then it’s fitting that JOAN JONAS, in her celebrated showing at this summer’s Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale, has rejected the retrospective principle entirely. Her exhibition of new work in the US pavilion is not a career summation but a distillation of the tactics and sensibility that have made her a touchstone for generations of artists. Jonas’s amalgam of installation, drawings, video, and performance immerses the viewer in incantatory visual and sonic rhythms and specular fragmentations of space—an environment in which oppositions, whether between form and content or between humanity and its others, emerge as complex interrelations. Here, art historian PAMELA M. LEE considers the full breadth of a practice best understood not through retrospection but via the concept of revision, while critic JOHANNA FATEMAN zeros in on Jonas’s feminist fracturing of the closed circuit of self-surveillance.

  ON THE OCCASION of Joan Jonas’s 1980 retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum in California, Douglas Crimp wrote what would prove to be the most influential statement on an artist whose manifold practices—video, performance, installation, drawing—had long defied summation. Crimp identified a “single strategy, paradigmatic in this respect, [that] informs all of Jonas’s work.”

  “That strategy,” he asserted, “is de-synchronization, usually in conjunction with fragmentation and repetition.”¹ Crimp cited Jonas’s early outdoor performances as signal examples of this tendency. He noted that

• previews January 2015

  “On Kawara—Silence”

  From 1966 until shortly before his death last summer, On Kawara produced his best-known work, the unwaveringly steadfast “Today” series. The Japanese-born, New York–based artist rendered the date each canvas was painted in flat, uninflected type, following the graphic conventions of the place where he was working at the time. The relationship between time and place animates the entirety of Kawara’s itinerant career, which, if steeped in histories of ’60s Conceptualism, also suggests the emerging cultures of globalization. “On Kawara—Silence,” the

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  print September 2013

  Pamela M. Lee

  In the beginning there was no earth, no water—nothing. There was a single hill called Nunne Chaha. In the beginning everything was dead. In the beginning there was nothing; nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement, no breath. In the beginning there was an immense unit of energy. . . .

  —Grosse Fatigue, 2013

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE DESKTOP. So commences Grosse Fatigue, Camille Henrot’s thirteen-minute video based on her residency at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, a place in which the imperial claims of scientific knowledge find diverse expression in the world’s

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  print November 2012

  the 11th Havana Biennial

  “REVOLUTION IN RETREAT.” So blared the cover of the March 24 issue of The Economist, a “special report” on Cuba and the dawning capitalist prospects of the only Communist state in the Western Hemisphere. With Fidel Castro’s health in precipitous decline, the progressive lifting of travel restrictions between the United States and the island nation, and some 313 new economic “guidelines” approved by the Communist Party last year, there’s little wonder that the article described Cuba’s path to capitalism as all but “irreversible,” if with the inevitable provisos regarding the old-guard faithful

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  print September 2012

  MEDIA SPECIFICITIES

  THOUGH IT MAY LOOK LIKE an abstract play of shadows, the image on the cover of Artforum’s 1962 debut issue is, in fact, a kinetic sculpture—a jittery, vaguely anthropomorphic contraption of springs and spare parts—by the Swiss artist-provocateur Jean Tinguely. Why would the editors of an ambitious new art magazine choose an image of crepuscular ambiguity when the occasion seemed to call for perspicuous assertion? Considering this question, art historian Pamela M. Lee proposes that ambiguity may have been the point. Tinguely’s automatons spoke to the rise of a hybrid technological media,

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  print May 2011

  OPEN SECRET: THE WORK OF ART BETWEEN DISCLOSURE AND REDACTION

  With its blurry photocopied type, its rubber-stamped admonitions—CLASSIFIED, it may say, or SUPPRESSED—and its thick lines of black marker obliterating everything we really want to know, the redacted document is a paradox, an iconic representation of that which is withheld from view. As such, it embodies what Pamela M. Lee terms the open secret: a visible invisibility, an essentially aesthetic phenomenon that functions less to reveal than to declare the prerogatives of those who conceal. Suggesting that the transparency of the WikiLeaks era is illusory, Lee proposes that it is the open secret that actually governs the politics of information today. Here, she looks at the practices of two artists, Jill Magid and Trevor Paglen, who, in very different ways, explore the workings of the open secret, and locates the roots of their strategies well beyond the pale of art. It is in the cold-war think tank, secrecy’s ostensibly impregnable redoubt, Lee argues, that we find the template for Magid’s and Paglen’s subtlety and stealth, their oscillations between the seen and the unseen, and their tactical elisions of fiction and fact.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPORARY SECRET

  Daniel Ellsberg may be forgiven for anointing Julian Assange his heir apparent—as he did in December 2010, when he defended Assange against accusations of treason and terrorism and explicitly compared himself to the WikiLeaks impresario. As the catalyst behind the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s highly classified “secret history” of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg is renowned as a staunch crusader for the freedom of information, so it stands to reason that he would view Assange as a kindred spirit, the standard-bearer for a new

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  print October 2009

  HOW TO BE A COLLECTIVE IN THE AGE OF THE CONSUMER SOVEREIGN: THE ART OF RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

  AT THE CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF DEVELOPING SOCIETIES, an independent research institution located in a leafy neighborhood in North Delhi, a clock with a curious face hangs on the wall of the library, portending an uncertain future as it presides over the reading room. Its numbers have been switched out for a list of emotions oscillating among the disquieting, the banal, and the revelatory: ANXIETY, DUTY, GUILT, INDIFFERENCE, AWE, FATIGUE, NOSTALGIA, ECSTASY, FEAR, PANIC, REMORSE, EPIPHANY, reads the litany.

  Established in 1963, the center supports collaborative and interdisciplinary research

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  print Summer 2009

  Sharjah Biennial 9

  “PROVISIONS FOR THE FUTURE,” the ninth edition of the Sharjah Biennial, raised a host of unsettling if necessary questions typically repressed by the protocols of the global biennial circuit—though in light of the stated ambitions for the show, this might not at first appear to be the case. Organized by artistic director Jack Persekian and chief curator Isabel Carlos, “Provisions for the Future” seemingly mined familiar thematic terrain, and with a deceptively optimistic inflection. “The pursuit of happiness,” Carlos writes in the rainbow-colored tome that is the catalogue, “is an important