May 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Speaks Freely?: Art, Race, and Protest By Aruna D'Souza One year after protests and counterprotests erupted around the exhibition of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial, Aruna D’Souza investigates the fraught history of artists, curators, and institutions invoking free-speech discourse in the interest of entrenching whiteness. Parker Bright, Confronting My Own Possible Death, 2018, mixed media on paper, 19 in. x 24 in. Courtesy the artist. To say that I watched the protests around Dana Schutz’s Open Casket with interest would be an understatement. The decision by the curators of the 2017 Whitney Biennial to include a painting by a white artist depicting the brutally beaten body of the young Emmett Till in his coffin set off debates on social media and in real life, and I watched my Facebook feed fill with both angry condemnations and passionate defenses of Schutz, as well as thoughtful analysis, hilarious and problematic memes, and knee-jerk “get off my lawn you whippersnappers”–style screeds. It was messy, loud, and at times hugely illuminating. What to many seemed a cut-and-dried argument over artistic freedom and free speech was anything but; in fact, if anything, the controversy revealed quite starkly that such values, far from universal, are doled out unequally and provisionally. Especially when the free speech in question comes in the form of protest. For many of the (largely, but not exclusively) young African American artists, writers, and art historians who first raised the alarm around the painting, the issue was whether it was appropriate for a white artist who had never before grappled with issues of racism in her work to suddenly take up an image that loomed so large in black American experience, and which was also a signal event in the civil rights struggle. What did it mean for Schutz to paint Emmett Till and for the curators to include her work in one of the most-watched exhibitions in the U.S.—especially at a moment when black people are still subject to extrajudicial violence, meted out not only by vigilante mobs operating with the tacit approval of law enforcement, as they did in Till’s day, but also and increasingly by law enforcement itself? Read More
May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Light Effects: On Miyoko Ito’s Abstract Inventions By Dan Nadel Center Stage, 1980, oil on canvas. In the fifties, when she was in her early thirties, Miyoko Ito was “called an old lady painter, passe.” She recalled the slight when she was sixty and nearing the end of her life, yet still decades away from recognition. Now, thirty-five years after her death, her work looks positively avant-garde for any time. Paintings from her most inventive period, the seventies and early eighties, were recently the subject of “Heart of Hearts” at Artists Space in New York, curated by Jordan Stein. (The show originated at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.) Ito’s work is brilliantly sui generis: it touches on the familiar styles of surrealism, minimal abstraction, and synthetic cubism to create meditative color spaces of intermingling forms that allude to landscapes, sexual organs, and urban architecture. For decades, Ito, who spent her adult life in Chicago, has been a kind of cult figure for certain painters and critics (myself included). She was an outlier: Ito made abstract paintings at a time when her adopted city was mostly interested in figuration, and unlike many of her younger peers, she did not exhibit with a consistent group of artists. She also made her finest work at a time when painting as a medium and surrealism as a mode had been critically discredited. Read More
May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Gets to Be “Brooklyn Born”? By Naima Coster I am looking for a place to live. I’ll be moving this summer, and in my wildest fantasies, I’m headed somewhere I can afford both a mortgage and my steep student-loan payments. I know New York City isn’t that place, but I continue kicking around the idea of a return—Brooklyn, in particular, haunts me because it once felt like home and then didn’t anymore. Perhaps I wrote my first novel, Halsey Street, about gentrified Bed-Stuy, because I wanted to have a kind of ownership of Brooklyn on the page, if not in deed. For the last few years, I’ve been in Durham, North Carolina. This city is undergoing its own gentrification. I’ve seen all the telltale signs: new breweries and hotel bars, the influx of money and affluent patrons. One café downtown even sells “Brooklyn drip,” four dollars for a large. In Durham, I’m aware of the renewal and displacement, but I spend far less time thinking of how I fit in. When I run into New Yorkers who fled the city for North Carolina, we wind up talking about Brooklyn or the Bronx, the difficulties of life there. Maybe it’s because for us, Durham is still affordable compared to New York, or else because it’s easiest to mourn the displacement that displaced you. It’s been unsettling to notice in myself the same kind of relative apathy and self-interest that, in my novel, I wrote into the characters who move from the West Village to Bed-Stuy. Read More
May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Why Are We So Fascinated by Cults? By Kirstin Allio Still from Wild Wild Country. In March, I sent an announcement around to friends and colleagues: watch out for my new novel, Buddhism for Western Children. It’s a spiraling story of a powerful, manipulative guru versus a boy who must escape to recover his will, I wrote, and it profiles Western lust for Eastern spiritual mystique and tradition. I got a lot of wonderful goodwill in response, and also quite a few, Wait—is this like Wild Wild Country? What was Wild Wild Country? I don’t watch TV, a habit left over from my antiworldly, culty childhood, on which my novel is loosely based, but now, obligated, I turned on Netflix. Like so many others, I was hooked, and I began to wonder anew why accounts of cults—novels, movies, docudramas—titillate and resonate time and again. Read More
May 18, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Garbage Gods, Bachelors, and Doinks By The Paris Review “Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder,” 2018. Installation view. Photo: Lance Brewer, courtesy of Red Bull Arts New York. © The Rammellzee Estate 2018. I first learned about the artist Rammellzee from Dave Tompkins’s book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, and I saw his Letter Racer sculptures in an exhibition a few years ago (which Tompkins wrote about for the Daily). Rammellzee is easily one of the most unique and most overlooked artists of the past fifty years, but until seeing the survey “Racing for Thunder” this week at Red Bull Arts New York, I hadn’t realized the extent of his genius. It’s impossible to sum up the breadth and depth of his Ikonoklast Panzerism (in which language is armored for protection) and the prophetic Gothic Futurist project in a few sentences—overlapping modes of music, graffiti, collage, performance, sculpture, writing. He worked according to faith and intellect and intense creativity. Included in this show are his Garbage Gods, intricate costumes constructed from material found on the streets of New York. (His loft-studio, the Battle Station, was on Laight Street in Tribeca.) Each figure is composed of and encrusted with myriad small objects—belt buckles, calculators, radio antennae, jewelry, lots of random plastic stuff—but the individual items disappear into the form of the structure; the whole is the sum of its parts. In these costumes, the fluidity of Rammellzee’s vision is most apparent: in a bit of discarded nothingness, he saw not just a larger creation but a world, a system, and a future. —Nicole Rudick Read More
May 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Arshile Gorky’s Muse Recalls Their First Date By Mougouch Fielding Gorky and Fielding at an early stage of their relationship, taken by her brother on a beach near Norfolk, Virginia, in 1941. Image courtesy the Arshile Gorky Foundation. Like most troubled romances, that between the famed Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky and Agnes Magruder (who later became Agnes Gorky Fielding) began with a misunderstanding. In February 1941, Willem de Kooning and Elaine Fried, themselves soon to be wed, encouraged the pair to attend a party so that they might meet. Gorky was expecting a blond, Agnes an extrovert, and though their expectations were initially disappointed, they quickly fell in love. He called her “Mougouch” (little mighty one), which she took as her name, and she moved into his apartment within the month. She became his muse, and together they had two children. Her life, in the years that followed, became consumed with housework, an occupation she resented with increasing disdain. Soon, things took a dark turn: the barn that housed Gorky’s paintings burned down; he was diagnosed with rectal cancer and underwent a colostomy; she had an affair with a Surrealist; he had a car accident in which he broke his neck and temporarily paralyzed his painting arm; she tried to soothe him; he pushed her down the stairs. When she and their children fled for her mother’s in Virginia, he hanged himself in a shed. She continued to shepherd his legacy, arranging exhibitions and sales of his work. Here and in Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song, edited by Matthew Spender, she recounts her initial meetings with him. Read More