The following essay is the poet and critic Maggie Nelson’s response to “Rachel Harrison Life Hack,” the first full-scale survey of Harrison’s work, which appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 25, 2019, to January 12, 2020.

Installation view of “Rachel Harrison Life Hack” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020). From left to right: Dinner, 1991; I Like What’s Nice, ca. 1995; Leaktite Luck, 1995. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

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Look, you’re going to be confronted with the remains of a dinner Rachel Harrison had twenty-eight years ago at Flamingo East in the East Village. (No, the restaurant isn’t there anymore.) First the dinner became leftovers in ziplock baggies and then it became leftovers spawning maggots in ziplock baggies and then, after complaints about flies, the baggies went into Ball jars. And here they are.

It’s pretty gross, without a doubt. You might be forgiven for feeling as though the crudeness were at your expense in some way, but I would encourage you to let go of this feeling. (The feeling that some kind of joke is being played, but with no clear object or vector, may recur; my advice is to float in this feeling, allow a degree of surrender to it.) For Dinner surely started, like all of Harrison’s work, as a gesture or experiment of interest to her, one whose reasons may have been inscrutable even to herself. Think about it: she bagged this food one night twenty-eight years ago, with no foreknowledge of this moment we now share together. It was, you might say, an intuition.

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Harrison’s work doesn’t just rely on intuition. It showcases it, elevates it to a category of ontological fascination. Why, why, why? you might ask, in front of a Harrison sculpture; eventually your own questioning may turn into a kind of music—the music of thinking—playing alongside hers. Your thinking may or may not have content; it is unlikely to land upon answers. Indeed, Harrison’s sculptures are remarkable for their capacity to stir up the primal agitation at the root of cognition and analysis, the whir of thinking. Read More

When the photographer Sayuri Ichida moved to New York in 2012, she found herself plunged into an ice bath of alienation, depression, and regret. Born and raised in Japan, she struggled to settle into a groove in this unfamiliar city. Ichida’s friendship with the New York Theatre Ballet dancer Mayu Oguri, who also hails from Japan, bloomed out of a shared sense of displacement. Featured in the Fall 2019 issue, their ongoing visual collaboration sees the performer assuming ballet positions throughout the city—a clever take on the experience of immigrants trying to find their place in a foreign country. Below, a new set of images shows Oguri, thirty-three weeks pregnant, venturing out into the city once more.

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Few bodies of work represent the splintering of the twentieth-century Western psyche like the collages of Max Ernst. Striking and playful, the German surrealist’s clipped-together creations, produced throughout his life, attest to a roving eye for materials and a deep curiosity about harmony and dissonance. The art historian Werner Spies has said that “collage is the thread that runs through all of his works; it is the foundation on which his lifework is built.” A new exhibition of Ernst’s collages (on view at Paul Kasmin’s 297 Tenth Avenue location through February 29, 2020) presents approximately forty of them, some of which are being displayed for the first time. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Max Ernst, Deux jeunes Dames, 1972, gouache, pencil, ink, and collage on paperboard, 9″ x 11 3/4″ x 1 1/2″, framed. Courtesy of Kasmin, New York.

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The artist Jack Whitten, who died in 2018, approached his practice with the curiosity of a scientist and the playfulness of a jazz musician. Many of his paintings are the result of a careful aesthetic hypothesis unleashed upon the canvas and then transformed by improvisation. The works at the center of “Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey.” (on view at Hauser & Wirth through April 4) display a delightful agnosticism regarding medium and material. In one, he splashes a paper collage with calligrapher’s ink and acrylic paint; in another, he seems to conjure the farthest reaches of space on a single sheet of blotter. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Jack Whitten, Space Flower #9, 2006, acrylic, pastel, and powdered Mylar on rice paper, 7 1/4 x 8 1/4″. © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

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For the avant-garde playwright, puppeteer, critic, novelist, artist, and cyclist Alfred Jarry, life was a series of artful acts. Perhaps best known in his day for the controversial play Ubu Roi, Jarry is often credited with helping spark the fires of surrealism, Dada, and futurism. “Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being” (on view at the Morgan Library and Museum through May 10) is the first major U.S. museum exhibition of his work; it demonstrates the breadth of his artistic practice. A selection of images from the show—including photographs of Jarry’s experiments with typography and woodblocks—appears below.

Alfred Jarry, Les minutes de sable mémorial (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. Photo: Janny Chiu.

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Installation view: “Utopian Imagination,” Ford Foundation Gallery, September 17–December 7, 2019. Photo: Sebastian Bach.

On my way to see “Utopian Imagination” (on view through December 7), the final installment of the artist and curator Jaishri Abichandani’s trilogy of shows at the Ford Foundation Gallery, I passed a group of Lyndon LaRouche acolytes. LaRouche, known over the last forty or so years as a convicted criminal, conspiracy theorist, and perennial candidate for president, died earlier this year, but his fringe beliefs live on through these dutiful members of his movement. They were handing out flyers such as INTERNATIONAL CALL TO YOUTH: The Age of Reason Is In The Stars!, which describes the climate activist Greta Thunberg as a “hedge-fund cover girl” for Wall Street, and Some Plain Facts Bearing On the Impeachment, which proclaims: “Remember, the oligarchy’s spokesman, the British House of Lords, have already instructed their assets in the United States that under no circumstances can Donald Trump have a second term.”

It used to be easier to dismiss fringe narratives like these, but things have changed: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushes anti-vax claims, Edgar Welch shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria looking for an alleged (and quickly debunked) child-trafficking ring, and the aforementioned Thunberg gets picked on by President Trump for speaking about the realities of climate change. It’s a hard time not only to be sure of a narrative’s veracity but also of how to tell a better, more hopeful one. The pieces collected in “Utopian Imagination” provide glimpses of different futures, ones more joyous and inclusive. Read More