Johanna Fateman is a writer, a musician, and a co-owner of Seagull Salon in New York. She writes art criticism regularly for 4Columns and the New Yorker and is a Contributing Editor of Artforum. She is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee and is currently at work on a novel.
1
MARTHA ROSLER (JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK; CURATED BY DARSIE ALEXANDER WITH SHIRA BACKER)
Rosler’s unmatched ability to wield consumer culture’s opulence against itself made for a visually festive retrospective. But sober critique unites the Semiotics of the Kitchen star’s half century of uninhibited Conceptualism; her early photomontage series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home,” ca. 1967–72, with its plush interiors and window views of carnage, still stuns.
2
SIMONE FATTAL (MOMA PS1, NEW YORK; CURATED BY RUBA KATRIB WITH JOSEPHINE GRAF)
Horses, bridges, lions, long-legged figures, and assorted vessels appear ancient and absurd in Fattal’s alluring ceramic world of barely formed things, elegantly presented in this exhibition spanning five decades of brilliance. The great Lebanese-American artist’s light touch keeps her sculptures embryonic, slapdash, liminal, and rudimentary; glaze makes them sublime.
3
ANOHNI, SHE WHO SAW BEAUTIFUL THINGS (THE KITCHEN, NEW YORK, APRIL 19–22, 2019)
“A hermaphrodite searches for her parents in an apocalyptic landscape,” reads the plot summary for this profoundly moving neo-Dadaist stage drama, which conjured a Monday night at the Pyramid Club, circa 1994. An astonishing cast—Johanna Constantine, Charles Atlas, Laurie Anderson, Lorraine O’Grady, and many others—dazzled at every turn.
4
ISAAC JULIEN (METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK)
Julien’s video installation Lessons of the Hour is a lush period piece exploded across ten screens. Excerpts of speeches written by Frederick Douglass, the once-enslaved abolitionist philosopher—brought to life through reenactments and juxtaposed with static shots of haunted landscape—are more riveting than a plotline.
5
SIMONE LEIGH, BRICK HOUSE (THE HIGH LINE, NEW YORK)
With Brick House, a towering bronze bust that gazes, without eyes, down Tenth Avenue, we find that Leigh’s well-honed hybrid lexicon scales up spectacularly. The magnificent figure, which draws on African diasporic sources, is part woman, part architectural form—a radical hiccup in the glass-and-steel skyline.
6
ALVIN BALTROP (BRONX MUSEUM, NEW YORK; CURATED BY SERGIO BESSA)
Baltrop labored in relative obscurity during his lifetime, capturing the piers running down Manhattan’s West Side from the Meatpacking District to Christopher Street in the 1970s and ’80s—a site for gay cruising—with a battered camera. His exquisite shots of public sex among the ruins are now treasures of queer history; this survey is an understated marvel.
On view through February 9, 2020.
7
NAILED IT! (NETFLIX)
Now in its third season, this masterpiece of reality television pits amateur bakers against one another in a competition to replicate professionally decorated cakes. Judges Nicole Byer and Jacques Torres pair camp delirium with a sophisticated appreciation for the contestants’ wild-eyed improvisation and radical reinterpretation. To nail it is to thrill the world with your failure.
8
ALES “MAXI” ZUPEVC, MELANIA TRUMP (SEVNICA, SLOVENIA)
Maxi totally nailed it with his powder-blue chainsaw sculpture of the First Lady. Perhaps he tried his best at a likeness (the work’s implicit satire originates with the commissioning artist Brad Downey), but I like to think he adapted for himself the Trump cabal’s winning formula. It is only malevolence in concert with ineptitude that bears such cursed results.
9
NANCY PRINCENTHAL, UNSPEAKABLE ACTS: WOMEN, ART, AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THE 1970s (THAMES & HUDSON)
Behold Princenthal’s deep dive into the generative, fractious, often-overlooked moment when second-wave-feminist artists began to grapple with rape. Unspeakable Acts is an invaluable, detailed art-historical account of struggles to represent sexual violence, especially what’s indelible only in the hippocampus.
10
HANNAH BLACK, CIARÁN FINLAYSON, AND TOBI HASLETT, “THE TEAR GAS BIENNIAL” (ARTFORUM.COM)
This devastatingly eloquent and matter-of-fact text written in protest of Warren B. Kanders’s position on the Whitney’s board did not alone force his resignation. But it served as a catalyst and is now a symbol of a moment when artists, activists, and workers at last nudged art institutions down what some see as the dreaded slippery slope of transparency, accountability, and ethical standards—that is, onto an encouraging path—vis-à-vis the dirty hands that feed them.