Johanna Fateman is a writer, an art critic, and a co-owner of Seagull Salon in New York. She is a contributing editor of Artforum.
1
UNIONIZING
“Against Artsploitation,” Dana Kopel’s widely circulated article published in September by The Baffler, is the most granular account of art workers unionizing I’ve read. Kopel, a former New Museum employee, describes the gulf between the institution’s progressive programming and its internal labor conditions, the 2018–19 union drive, contract negotiations, and a meeting with Hans Haacke at a Le Pain Quotidien. With last summer’s news that workers at New York institutions the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Hispanic Society had joined UAW Local 2110, perhaps we can hope for a greater confluence of organized labor and public protest as the outcry against a cabalistic philanthropist class continues.
2
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (TODD HAYNES)
I’m still under the spell of this hypnotically sutured, transcendently clamorous documentary about the legendary, paradigm-wrecking band. Haynes captures the alchemical processes and synced brain-states that produced the Velvets’ entropic, dirgelike grooves with delirious, precisely edited archival-footage sequences, unbelievably great interviews, and an ever-morphing split-screen device. Periodically, the film ripples outward to elucidate the cultural moment only to contract again, showing the volatile bonds and eccentric synergy of the unlikely bandmates, hapless and hopelessly ahead of their time. Like the group, the film sometimes seems on the verge of disintegration, held together by pure sound, the illusion making its beauty more exhilarating.
3
BRUCE CONNER, THE WHITE ROSE (PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK)
I could watch Conner’s 1967 film forever; luckily, the floor-to-ceiling projection played on a loop. A seven-minute platonic love letter to the great Jay DeFeo, it documents the deinstallation, crating, and carrying away of her fabled painting The Rose, 1958–66, a 2,300-pound canvas featuring a starburst of chiseled white paint. Part of a quiet show demonstrating the two artists’ symbiotic magic (through works on paper, mostly), the high-art home movie was beyond uplifting in the long season of the bad art friend.
4
“HIGHWAYMEN” (CHARLES MOFFETT GALLERY, NEW YORK; CURATED BY NINA JOHNSON AND CHARLES MOFFETT)
Before Bob Ross’s wet-on-wet vistas and Andy Warhol’s Factory, a group of Black painters in Florida, retrospectively known as the Highwaymen, adopted a speedy, sometimes assembly-line approach to production, cultivating a market (often from the trunks of their cars) for their abbreviated, decor-friendly tropical landscapes. This intimate presentation of eleven dusky or candy-colored renditions of coastal wetlands was revelatory for its focused reframing of the output of an aesthetic school historically segregated from the gallery system but gorgeously germane to an expanded understanding of postwar American art.
5
SOPHIE CALLE, THE HOTEL (SIGLIO)
A stunningly produced new book in English made from Calle’s 1981 project is a perfect opportunity to revisit—or introduce yourself to—the irresistible photographs derived from her masterful snooping. Working as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel, the French artist adopted a delicious practice of aimless, nationless espionage. Exquisite color explosions of floral linens and wallpapers and black-and-white still lifes of dirty laundry or personal effects scattered in open drawers are paired with unsparing, uninflected text: “The left pillow is stained. She drools a little bit at night.” The work would be unforgivable, maybe, if the guests were ever named.
6
ROSEMARY MAYER (SWISS INSTITUTE, NEW YORK)
Mayer, who died in 2014, was the most romantic and the most rigorous of Conceptual artists, charting an idiosyncratic feminist path for herself from rule-based painting to ephemeral sculpture events made of snow or balloons (“temporary monuments,” she called them). In particular, it’s her abstract fabric sculptures—floating feats of drapery and weightless volume in melting fairy-tale hues—that take my breath away. Here, the large-scale sea creature form Galla Placidia, 1973, is the dreamy showstopper, its tail pooling on the floor.
On view through January 9, 2022.
7
LUX MAGAZINE
Launched late in 2020, LUX, named for both Rosa Luxemburg and a radical reimagining of luxury, is a stylish, socialist feminist magazine with a global remit, offering exactly the articles I want to read. (It had me with Jennifer Wilson’s essay on the Soviet perfume factory New Dawn in its inaugural issue.) “It’s sex, with class” is the ingenious tagline. You should subscribe.
8
“SURREALISM BEYOND BORDERS” (METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK; CURATED BY STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO AND MATTHEW GALE)
André Breton is here, of course, as leader of the European Surrealists. But really this show wrests the narrative from him and, to some extent, from the capital-S movement in general. By extending the time line to include recent works and expanding the purview to forty-five countries, the show may appeal to people who don’t really like, or think they don’t like, Surrealism. The Puerto Rican painter Cossette Zeno’s Ni hablar del peluquín (No Use to Talk About the Little Wig), 1952, with its shadowy forms and dark fur, was one of my favorites.
On view through January 30, 2022.
9
“WORKING TOGETHER: THE PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP” (WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; CURATED BY SARAH ECKHARDT)
You could say Ming Smith’s casually militant image America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City, New York, ca. 1976, which uses reflections—in a young man’s glasses and a glass storefront—to graphic, psychedelic effect, echoes Herman Howard’s earlier flag-and-mannequin window display. But, ultimately, tracing possible influences in this unforgettable exhibition became less interesting than beholding the range of subject matter and formal strategies. The Kamoinge Workshop, a Black photographers’ collective founded in 1963, united a remarkable group of New York artists in a network of intellectual and material support. “Working Together” seemed to accomplish much—though it likely only scratched the surface.
10
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON (PERFORMANCE SPACE, NEW YORK)
A garden complete with a small waterfall and gravel paths appeared in the Keith Haring Theatre late last March—a reckoning as well as a springtime renewal. Okoyomon, who is a poet and a chef as well as an artist (they are a member of the queer-Conceptual cooking collective Spiral Theory Test Kitchen), pointedly incorporated into the environment the symbolically fraught material of incinerated kudzu. The invasive, devouring vine was introduced to the American South to mitigate soil erosion, particularly that caused by cotton crops; its presence on this continent is thus wedded to slavery’s legacy. The lush oasis memorial was an inspired metaphor for the Earth as a witness and a visionary example of art as an ecosystem.