Larry Sultan. Paris on My Parents’ Bed, 2007; archival pigment print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco.

Banality masquerades as sensationalism in the San Fernando Valley, a factory town for the entertainment industry. Having grown up there, Larry Sultan knew this well, and his theories exist around framing the mundane and seeing things before they register with our socialized meanings. Editorial Works, on view at Casemore Kirkeby through June 10, features Sultan’s works that collude with his current exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at Minnesota Street Project. The series shows the spectacle of commercial industry and, ultimately, the art that Sultan brought to his creative commercial endeavors.

The Valley, his collection investigating modern design through pornography production sets, was born in the throes of an assignment for Maxim called “Great Jobs.” [1] It was a small assignment on daily life in porn production, which often utilizes rented mansions in Glendale and Calabasas. After realizing he was shooting four blocks from his high school, he stayed in the region and began shooting the interiors of these mansions, often with the ephemera of porn included as ordinary details. For instance, when Wallpaper Magazine contracted Sultan to shoot a line of modern furniture, he insisted on shooting at the porn studio Vivid Entertainment, located in Studio City. [2] In Vivid Entertainment #2, a box of tissues and a teddy bear threaten a salacious story, but live as still life next to a mirrored table and a white leather couch with a very warped cushion. A warped sense of glamor and a twisted tale are common tropes of commercial photography, but instead of lounging in the sensationalism of sex and success, Sultan’s images fester in the postproduction of the spectacle.

When Sultan was assigned to shoot Paris Hilton, he chose his mother’s home as the location, bringing this New York heiress into his personal story.[3] By bringing her into San Fernando Valley, he included her in its factory-like industrialization and system of sensationalism. The lighting in the room is sparkling and enchanting, basking the bored heiress in Peter Pan and Wendy light.

Her limbs extend forward, bent at elbow and knee, and her head rests on a sore shoulder. Paris scrolls through something on her smartphone and wears a bathrobe, fully cognizant of the process of complex industries of which Hilton and Sultan both take part. Sultan seems to be aware of this unsettledness. He challenges commercial photography by showing how it is made; he knows how to do it, because that’s where he came from. Sultan, like any seasoned Valley employee, knows the creative value of waiting to be sensational, and harnesses the energy that sits in waiting, right before the image is fully ingested.

Larry Sultan: Editorial Works is on display at Casemore Kirkeby until June 10, 2017.

Courtney Trouble is a recent MFA grad from California College of the Arts specializing in photography and queer theory. They also own their own indie porn production company, TROUBLEfilms.

[1] “Larry Sultan.” Casemore Kirkeby. Accessed May 31, 2017. http://casemorekirkeby.com/exhibition/larry-sultan-editorial-work/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

Barkley L. Hendricks. Down Home Taste, 1971; oil and linen on acrylic; 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Office of the Dean of Students, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY).

Caricatures of the South as backwards, unsophisticated, and inherently conservative are dismantled and put to rest by the vast richness and diversity of work on display, with the list of included artists forming a “who’s who” of American contemporary art—from Kara Walker and Amy Sherald to Theaster Gates and Kerry James Marshall. Southern Accent avoids many of the tired and problematic themes that tend to romanticize the South and dilute the heterogeneity of its citizens by including works that expand our visual field of who, what, and where the South actually is.[2] Barkley L. Hendricks’s life-size portrait Down Home Taste (1971)—a confident celebration of the Black urban experience, style, and everyday life—affirms a more fluid, expansive understanding of Southern-ness. Hendricks’s paintings (including this one) are often portraits of the friends and strangers who populated his life in various cities across the 1960s and ’70s. Down Home Taste presents a fashionable man lighting a cigarette with matches from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the North Carolina corporation of Winston-Salem fame. Taste—whether sensory, aesthetic, or nostalgic—is something that defies and crosses borders, mixing and marking people, places, and their histories in overt and subtle ways.

The exhibition does not shy away from the legacies of slavery, segregation, and racism in the South, and their impact on regional and national politics and culture. Commissioned for the bicentennial commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase, Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic series The Louisiana Project (2003) provides a powerful account of the ways in which slavery and racism continue to hide in plain sight across the South, like so many ruins. Clad in a softly patterned white dress, Weems bears witness to the spaces and sites where Black people were made to work, suffer, live, and die—sites that now act as monuments, cleansed of their dark histories, for tourist consumption and pleasure. The image of the cemetery emphasizes this liminal space, where the past, present, and future of racial politics and history live above and below the surface of everyday life.

Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Woman Standing in Cemetery) from The Louisiana Project, 2003; gelatin silver print; 20 ¾ x 20 ¾ in framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery (New York City, NY).

In addition, the exhibition includes work dedicated to exploring and recognizing more recent changes to urban and rural demographics due to growing populations of Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, and other immigrant communities, while creating space for Native American, LGBTQ+, and women artists. Diego Camposeco’s Tabaco (Tabacco), from the 2015 series Diego Saves the World, articulates the ethical spectrum of human rights, environmental, and labor issues in the growing communities working in agricultural industries across the region, specifically in the tobacco fields of his hometown of North Carolina.[3] Overwhelmed and surrounded by green tobacco plants, the male figure of a worker stands in the landscape with his face masked by the children’s cartoon animal-rescuer, Diego, as a way to articulate the emancipatory power and growing presence of this marginalized community under attack by the current political administration.

Diego Camposeco. Tabaco (Tobacco), from the series Diego Saves the World, 2015 (printed 2016); inkjet print. Courtesy of the Artist.

Our notions of how we think about the region, its culture, and American identity overall are put to the test in this exhibition—timely in the wake of one of the nastiest presidential elections in recent American history, and one that was shaped in part by a long-term rift between urban and rural regions. As the removal of monuments to the Confederacy across the South unearths deep-seated rage on both sides of the political spectrum, violence toward Black bodies continues to rage on, and attacks on immigrant communities escalate, how will we begin to address these issues in an era of national division? Leaving the exhibition, I realized that Southern Accent is not just a presentation of the long-ignored complexity of the South and its culture, but a resistance to a long history of geographical stereotypes that reproduce social divisions in American culture. The South is many things, and it is in “the many” that its richness is to be found.

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art is on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, through October 14, 2017.

[1] See Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” (1960), in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: The Library of America), 1988, 814–815.

[2] The Historic New Orleans Collection’s current presentation of rare guidebooks to houses of prostitution and directories for sex workers operating in the bayous of southern Louisiana, Storyville: Madams and Music, articulates the ways in which images of the Deep South have been mishandled by institutions of art and culture, often romanticizing and/or domesticating racial, gender, and class-based inequalities rather than critique them. See Pamela D. Arceneaux and Emily Epstein Landau’s accompanying text for this exhibition, Guidebooks to Sin: The Blue Books of Storyville, New Orleans (New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection), 2017.

[3] Diego Camposeco was featured in Jose Antonio Vargas’s article on testifying on behalf of undocumented immigrant rights in “My Family’s Papers” for the New York Times, February 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/opinion/my-familys-papers.html

Mickalene Thomas. Sista Sista Lady Blue, 2007; chromogenic print; 40 3/8 x 48 1/2 in. © Mickalene Thomas/Artists Rights Society, New York. Courtesy of SFMOMA, San Francisco. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel.

In the current political moment, in which women and people of color struggle (as always, but now even more tangibly) for visibility, Matisse/Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)—two canonical artists shown in cross-generational conversation—is a bit too pretty, perfect, and White-male-centered. Does Matisse need another show? Is this exhibition, heavily publicized by this major institution, relevant today? It’s a gendered imbalance of male painters of female subjects, again. As a Mexican female critic and artist, I enjoyed Matisse/Diebenkorn the way one enjoys art history that feels distant; like overhearing someone else’s conversation, I had the feeling of being somewhere I did not belong.

Yet, after I passed through the exhibition’s exit, one more room sparked my hope and excitement. Accessible without a surcharged ticket, this exhibition was also curated by Matisse/Diebenkorn curator Janet Bishop, and had its own wall text and title. M/D: Coda operates as a footnote—or even punctuation—to the main show, ending it with an ellipsis, rather than a full stop.

This appendix, which features Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Bechtle, Elizabeth Payton, Amy Sillman, Rachel Harrison, and Mickalene Thomas, brought Matisse and Diebenkorn’s influence into a contemporary dialogue by showing how their lineages extend to other artists across time. Most importantly, this gallery showcases artists of other identities. Whereas women are only subjects of representation in Matisse/Diebenkorn, M/D: Coda presents women as authors of images. Thomas’s Sista Sista Lady Blue (2007) struck me the most in this regard.

The photograph, a staged portrait, features a confident woman on a couch, surrounded by patterned textiles that create a soft, colorful setting. Her gaze pierces back at viewers. Another woman figure, reflected in a background mirror, also gazes back. This piece is unapologetic and empowering: a woman who looks back, a woman who stages representation, and a woman who quotes Matisse and updates his work to this time—a moment when a woman of color deserves her own construction of visibility.

Matisse/Diebenkorn’s relationship to M/D: Coda becomes a matter of real estate. Five artists are compressed in one last gallery—an exhibition that exists to make amends. Although I salute and value this coda, the distribution of artists could change even more, so that the distribution of representation appears to be more timely and balanced. Could we perhaps imagine a Mickalene Thomas solo show that ends with a small gallery with a few Matisse paintings?

M/D: Coda will be on view through May 29, 2017.

Carolina Magis Weinberg is a whether reporter, and a sight specific artist and critical writer. Her projects investigate discrete forms of otherness such as the accent, which she considers to expand from orality, becoming a visual form in the production of the migrating maker.

Richard Mosse with Trevor Tweeten and Ben Frost. Incoming, 2017; installation view, the Barbican, London. Courtesy of the Barbican. Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images.

No matter race, age, origin, or legal status, while the human body performs the physiological processes that keep its vital functions intact, it radiates heat, thereby making it detectable to thermographic cameras like the ones used for military-grade surveillance. In Incoming, on view at the Barbican, Irish conceptual documentary photographer Richard Mosse repurposed heat-sensitive surveillance technology to create a powerful piece of humanist art: a portrait of today’s refugee crisis, registered in black-and-white signatures of relative temperature difference.

Flipping a dispassionate war mechanism to function as a subversive documentary tool, Mosse worked with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten to scan the land- and seascapes traversed by today’s staggering numbers of migrants: from Syria and Libya to Berlin; from Sahara Desert to the Calais camp. The photographic project is a chilling document of human suffering, yet resonates with a striking lyricism. The mesmerizing footage shows glowing ghosts—without identities, without origins—moving in slow motion through dark, otherworldly settings.

The exhibition’s titular piece is an immersive, multichannel video installation hidden inside the cavelike space of the Barbican’s Curve gallery. To arrive here, audiences move around the bend of the ninety-meter-long corridor, gaining an understanding of the thermal camera’s logic through photographic work that demonstrates how the device registers human activity with missile-like, depersonalized vision. Penetrating deeper into the darkened Curve, a contemplative quietude appropriately sets the tone–yet fails to prepare–for the horrors of Incoming’s main tour de force.

The large-scale video piece shows people clambering out of overloaded lifeboats, doctors trying to resuscitate drowned children, and rows of survivors traveling onward, their abstracted, spectral faces downcast in grief. The work’s most grueling scenes include dark, hypothermic bodies lying too still, or hot white hands zipping up body bags. Accompanied by composer Ben Frost’s highly effective score–which combines eerie ambient tones with the documentary noises of roaring helicopter blades, shouting rescue workers, and wailing women–the piece oscillates between documentation and abstraction, between intimacy and distance, making it ambivalent, unsettling, and highly effective.

The logic of the thermographic camera and its arresting aesthetic—abstracting, anonymizing, yet rooted in a universal, shared physiology—provides the crux to Incoming’s integrity and power. Mosse’s unique lens sets his work apart from the straight documentary images produced by mainstream media and makes viewable—palpable, even—the levels of human suffering we might otherwise wish to turn away from. Medium, content, and form present a piercing, ardent confrontation with the harrowing realities faced by fellow humans: their bodies warm, like ours, currently seeking refuge from inhumane conditions globally.

Richard Mosse: Incoming will be on view through April 23, 2017.

Eva Mak is an art historian and writer from Amsterdam, currently living in London. Her interests go out to politically engaged and challenging conceptual practices revealing both local and global perspectives.

Andrea Bowers. Throwing Bricks (Johanna Saavedra), 2016; archival pigment print; 77 1/2 x 57 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

As more feminist marches, protests, and gatherings organize in the wake of the new U.S. administration, critiques of contemporary feminist approaches also emerge. Two of the largest issues that feminism faces today are the exclusion of transgender and non-White cultural perspectives and representations. The Intersectional Self at 8th Floor Gallery answers the call for the need of these inclusions by assembling myriad identities to center the conversation around feminism and gender.

Andrea Bowers’ Trans Liberation: Beauty in the Street (Johanna Saavedra) (2016) photograph features Saavedra, a trans Latina immigrant activist, walking down a street in Los Angeles, throwing a symbolic brick. Its portrayal of a woman-identified person with multiple other melding identities is a striking example of communicating resilience and intersectionality. The piece, which recalls the Stonewall Riots, exemplifies that the ongoing fight for equality will not be forfeited until it is achieved for all.

The exhibition also utilizes a wide range of media, including video, photography, sculpture, collage, and printmaking, to explore how femininity and thus masculinity have morphed along with definitions of gender identity in recent history. A majority of the works in the show, whether representational or abstract, are self-portraits, hence the “Self” in the exhibition title. In Thump (2016), renowned feminist Martha Wilson dresses in drag as a sickeningly orange, vastly double-chinned Donald Trump. Giving the thumbs-up sign, while standing in front of a classical statue with the word “Force” engraved onto it, Wilson utilizes herself as a feminist icon to ironically subvert the image of the oppressor.

Ana Mendieta also manipulates the gender boundary through Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) (1972), in which she adheres a man’s beard to her own face as he shaves it off throughout a series of photographs, defying what is expected of male and female surface appearances. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s piece, My Funny Valentine (2013), depicts an ambiguous, kaleidoscope-like up-skirt shot in which red panties are remnant of a repeating heart shape. The inclusion of P-Orridge also promotes that gender and the body itself are not solidified concepts, but malleable vessels for the person, which exists only in the mind.

The Intersectional Self sets a precedent on how to present a feminist exhibition. The widely Instagrammed, White cis-woman in her bright pink Pussy Hat should not be the poster-image of the contemporary feminist movement. This exhibition addresses women who are trans, queer, immigrants, and of color as the engine of real change.

The Intersectional Self will be on view at 8th Floor in New York through May 19, 2017.

Jasa McKenzie is a curator and artist based in New York City. She is currently a fellow in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts.

Diane Arbus. Female Impersonator Holding Long Gloves, Hempstead, L.I., 1959. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC.

Diane Arbus: In the Beginning is a meandering, somewhat maudlin journey through the subterranean layers of “unusual” midcentury American society. An endearing lack of mastery over the medium is apparent in the quality of the photographs, and it is important to note that the work constituting the majority of the exhibition (with the exception of a few canonical medium-format prints) is on display for the first time.[1]

Every canonical artist carries critical baggage. Arbus’ ethical intentions have been critically deemed exploitative[2], and the exhibition does very little to suggest an alternative perspective, as it does not reevaluate or grow the artist’s repertoire and only adds to its mass. With that in mind, the work that stood out to me is a scattered series of drive-in movie and movie-theater screens, taken mid-film, capturing an often-blurred moment of the cinematic narrative. While static portraits of circus clowns and peculiarly marked headstones strike a dissonant chord (curiously juxtaposed with numerous photographs of “female impersonators,” suggesting that these gender-queer individuals are to be considered among the grotesque), the frozen film stills speak much more evocatively to depiction and viewership as a dynamic relation. Many of the stills contain a horrific quality, such as a man being strangled, or a woman bleeding from her eyes. Arbus explores the representation of the macabre (as opposed to her greater body of work, which appears to be largely concerned with naming it as such). This work feels like the seed of Arbus’ inquiry into the representation of the surreal.

Several short quotes by Arbus herself are peppered throughout the exhibition in the form of wall text, the most striking of which was: “My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.” This quote is meant to illustrate an adventurous and free-spirited character, which perhaps Arbus was, in her own way. Leaving the exhibition and stepping into the streets of the Tenderloin, I am struck by the realization that to go where one has never been is a great privilege—which entails leaving behind where one has been. Arbus photographed those who inhabited the places she had “never been,” taking a memento of them away with her (one which eventually became commodified), while those same individuals did not share the same privilege of mobility, whether trapped in poverty, in a body they didn’t identify with, or on the silver screen.

Diane Arbus: In the Beginning is on view at SFMOMA through April 30, 2017.

Max Blue is in his third year at the San Francisco Art Institute, working toward a BA in the History & Theory of Contemporary Art, with a minor in Photography. He is a poet and critical-theory enthusiast.

[1] “Diane Arbus: In the Beginning” (exhibition summary), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, accessed March 4, 2017, https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/diane-arbus-beginning/.

[2] Susan Sontag, “Freak Show,” New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973.

Soukaina Joual. Halal, 2016; light panel; 13.7 x 13.2 in.

Soukaina Joual is not afraid of blood, and doesn’t understand why anyone else would be, either. I know this because I spent a weekend with her in Fes in Morocco for an arts conference, during which we joined an organized group tour at a local horse clinic. Joual is from Fes, where horses and mules play an essential role in the economic circuit of the city’s old Medina, one of the largest pedestrian-only areas in the world. Halfway through the clinic tour, I wandered into a stable to find the guide explaining an ongoing procedure in which veterinarians were amputating a horse’s tongue. Crouching in front of the horse, staring into the silver sea urchin of needles and instruments clustered in its mouth, was Joual.

Flesh and blood lend much inspiration to Joual, a 26-year-old artist whose first step in 2017 will be a residency at Rabat’s historic l’Appartement 22, which has seen the likes of Mona Hatoum and Adel Abdessemed cross its threshold. Her art spans multiple mediums and often invokes the raw, the red, and the repulsive. Because of its vivid imagery, it sometimes darts into the territory of gore; but what makes Joual’s pieces so provocative in particular is the playfulness involved. There is an underlying gesture in her oeuvre that swivels like a weathervane between the fake and the real. A piece like Saucisse may have all the similarities and texture of a sausage, but it is deceptive, a bloody ruse crafted from acrylic and clay. “It’s interesting—when people see meat, they have such a strong reaction,” Joual tells me. “It’s just something that exists beneath your own skin. I don’t think I’m using meat or this image of meat to shock; it’s a way of expression.”

Read the full article here.

Gertrude Abercrombie. The Courtship, 1949; oil on Masonite; 21 3/4 × 25 1/4 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Such cavalier unconcern is indicative of The Conjured Life, a restaging of an earlier show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, which posits the influence of surrealism on a disparate miscellany of contemporary works, almost completely fails in its promised “legacy.” I can accept Francesca Woodman with her disquieting photographs, or Jess, with his collages that begin where Ernst’s end, as inheritors of Surrealism. And Willie Cole, with a pair of 1992 assemblages made from old electric irons, plausibly makes the grade. But most of the more contemporary works indicate little genuine engagement with Surrealism’s theoretical underpinnings or even more generalized implications of Surrealist techniques or innovations. The worst offenders here—Buzz Spector’s Mallarme [sic] (1987–88), a curio cabinet with lines by its titular poet painted in gold leaf on the glass, or David Noonan’s untitled 2012 work, a monumental silkscreen on linen photo collage of a couple of goofy-looking dudes—smack of a fetishized craftsmanship utterly alien to Surrealism’s aspiration to pierce the boundary between art and life. Donald Roller Wilson’s use of Old Masterly oil technique in The Transformation of Helen’s Brother Larry (1980) achieves something of Dali’s grotesquery but none of his paranoid psychological depth or genius for trompe l’oeil; it’s just a fat kid in a monster mask and skirt. This is “surrealist” only if you take that as a synonym for “weird.”

Francesca Woodman. House #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1976; gelatin silver print; 8 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Yet however misguided its legacy claims, The Conjured Life succeeds in its substantial historical presentation of the international Surrealist movement led for over 40 years by poet André Breton. The cases devoted to Surrealist print culture—Stanford’s contribution to the otherwise visiting show—are compelling and thoughtful. In a section on precursors—a vital part of Surrealism’s self-conception—we find, for example, photographs by documentarian flâneur Eugène Atget (1857–1927); as I struggled to recall whether the group explicitly acknowledged him, my attention was drawn to the June 1926 issue of La Revolution Surrealiste, and behold, the cover featured one of the same Atget photos. The value of seeing issues of such magazines as View, Minotaur, and Medium firsthand cannot be overstated. The impact, say, of the Big Toe photographs (1929) by erstwhile May Ray assistant Jacques-André Boiffard is far more palpable seeing them occupy full pages of Georges Bataille’s dissident Surrealist mag, Documents, as opposed to their stingier reproductions in the secondary literature. Nestled among such items in the biggest case, Duchamp’s Boite (1941)—a box set of miniaturized reproductions of his most significant works to that point, including readymades and The Large Glass (1915–23)—underscores just how inventive the Surrealist sense of printed matter could be.

Enrico Baj. Angry General with Decorations, 1960; oil, fabric, leather buttons, medals, etc. on canvas; 51 × 38 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

No one’s going to drive to Stanford just for printed matter, so let me assure you that the actual Surrealist paintings in this show are well worth the trip. While it leads with The Wonders of Nature (1953), a nautically themed oddity depicting clouds and stone fish people by perennial crowd-pleaser Magritte, the show refreshingly relies on canvases of less-heralded figures like Enrico Baj—subject of one of Breton’s last major catalog essays (1963)—whose Angry General with Decorations (1961) features collaged elements of military finery (buttons, medals, epaulettes) painted into the canvas, with pigment serving as glue. The show includes substantial paintings by the likes of Paalen, Seligmann, Tanning, and Matta. But the most startling piece is Yves Tanguy’s Untitled (The Fluidity of Time) (1930), a singular oil-on-canvas piece for viewers familiar with his work; in place of his tonally graduated skies and unearthly landscapes inhabited by distant, inhuman figures, Untitled features an ochre yellow sky rendered in uncharacteristically vertical brushstrokes, with a single, large biomorphic abstraction in the foreground. The sheer unexpectedness of this canvas suggests our time might be better spent exploring Surrealism’s own less familiar depths than straining to find a link to contemporary figures where none exists.

Yves Tanguy. Untitled (The Fluidity of Time), 1930; oil on canvas; 47 1/8 × 39 5/8 in. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo: Garrett Caples.

The Conjured Life: The Legacy of Surrealism is on view at the Cantor Arts Center in Palo Alto, California, through April 3, 2017.

From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art, 2016; installation view, San Francisco, CA. Courtesy of the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Photo: JKA Photography.

Theorized by Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch, postmemory connotes the memories a latter generation maintains in relation to the events and traumas that preceded it. Emergent from Holocaust studies, postmemory frames the process by which experiences that are so affective and beyond resolve become transferred across generations as memories. Without their direct encounter, such memories are inherited through family stories and gifted objects, and might manifest in imaginations, specters, and projections. Postmemory presumes the ethical commitment of addressing the past as well as the educational responsibility necessary for its persistence in the present. Traversing various styles and media, the artists in From Generation to Generation—from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa—draw forth the inheritance of memory as contemporary art’s antidote to amnesia.

What unites the aesthetically and geographically divergent works is their investment in the affective power of (art) objects as bearers of memories. In Silvina Der-Meguerditchian’s photographic tapestries Families I and II (2013), found photographs of Ottoman Armenian families serve as records of a population prior to its persecution and genocide. The artist digitally printed, laminated, and wove the photographs together with fellow expatriated Armenians using a knitting technique the artist learned from her Armenian grandmother, who fled the Ottoman Empire to Argentina. The stories preserved in objects and reanimated through artistic labor form diasporic communities held together as inherited memories that are continually interwoven.

At the center of the exhibition is Chikako Yamashiro’s video, Your Voice Came Through My Throat (2009). The Okinawan-born artist interviewed elderly survivors of the 1944 Battle of Saipan, and their agonizing testimonies form the soundscape of the video. Framed as an extended close-up shot, the artist mouths the testimonies and cries directly into the camera. Oral history thus becomes audiovisually reenacted as the horrors of war are relayed into the museum space. The mimetic relation between the veteran testifiers and Yamashiro as witness is performatively doubled: The artist testifies and the viewer bears witness to the unbearable histories that emerge as voices of the past come through to the present.

As viewers of contemporary art, our call to witness historical traumas and inherit their memories is the most exigent and connective experience of From Generation to Generation.

From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art will be on view through April 2, 2017.

Carlos Kong is an art historian and writer. He is from San Francisco and lives in London and Berlin.

Anahita Razmi. Middle East Coast West Coast, 2014 (video still); HD video; 23:04.

What was I doing near Trafalgar Square? I don’t know. Anahita was riding a bicycle, and I remember feeling very short in the presence of her and her boyfriend. Having downed a few beers and feeling the first pangs of hunger, Anahita suggested we look for some good old-fashioned Persian grub—if I knew where to get any nearby. I did, actually; there was one right under our noses named after a magical bird that served cocktails with names like “Caspian Breeze.” The evening, like most others, passed by in a blur, and as the train sped towards blustering north London, I thought of cream-coloured underwear.

Anahita Razmi’s got it all. She sells obscure Iranian underwear in Berlin, drives Paykans around the world, and dances on the rooftops of Tehran. She also happens to have one of the coolest tattoos I’ve ever seen. With snazzy awards under her belt and a career spanning a wide array of disciplines and themes, her work is currently on display at the National Gallery of Art in Zachęta, Poland. From the other side of the world, I got in touch with her to resume our conversation about Iranian underwear (in a broader context, of course).

Read the full article here.

Donald R. Blumberg. Untitled from the series Daily Photographs, 1969–1970; gelatin silver print; 16 1/2 x 23 1/2 in. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Much of the work in the show simply reproduces images from print and televised media, reframing them in subtle but meaningful ways. In the series Daily Photographs 1969–1970, Donald Blumberg photographs newspaper pages, focusing on images related to the Vietnam War while including surrounding text and advertisements. The works reveal the newspaper as a subjective nexus of interrelated information and opinions, instead of as an objective assemblage of discreet facts. His Television Political Mosaics and Television Abstractions (1968–69) are created similarly by photographing evening broadcasts on the television screen. Images of politicians, including Nixon and LBJ, are arranged either in orderly grids or in more chaotic compositions that threaten the intended stability of their original messages. In some works, Blumberg uses darkroom techniques such as solarization to give these familiar faces a more sinister appearance.

Japanese artist Masao Mochizuki also turns his camera towards the television, reproducing images on tightly composed grids in his Television series (1975–76). Mochizuki’s works, however, lack any of Blumberg’s authorial voice. With each frame taken at regularly timed intervals, his composite images do not discriminate between show credits, program drama, or advertisements. The images are all laid out as a constant stream of information and are reproduced at an intimate, miniature scale to draw viewers in, forcing them to actively gaze at content that might otherwise be passively absorbed.

Masao Mochizuki. The Air Power of the World from the series Television, 1976; gelatin silver print; 8 15/16 x 7 7/8 in. Courtesy of Osiris.

Produced thirty-five years after Blumberg’s photographs, Catherine Opie’s Polaroids are a departure from her highly polished portraits and landscapes. Snapped while watching TV, the photos reflect a raw immediacy and are tinged with frustration and humor. Opie assembles groups of Polaroids, mostly depicting newscasts of hot-button issues of the aughts (John Roberts’ Supreme Court hearings, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina), and arranges them to highlight certain themes, often counter to the original intent. In Terry Schiavo and Pope John Paul (2004–2005), she juxtaposes images of the brain-dead woman and the pro-life Pope, their faces contorted into similar grimaces.

One of the standout works from the exhibition is Omer Fast’s video CNN Concatenated (2002). Cutting and pasting from multiple news broadcasts, Fast takes one word each from a chorus of talking heads and strings them together to form direct, patchwork addresses to the audience, such as, “I need you to stop pretending to care, to get off your ass, and start acting like you do, all right? This is not a lot to be asking for, is it?”

Catherine Opie. Terry Schiavo and Pope John Paul from the series Close to Home, 2004–2005; dye diffusion prints; 15 1/2 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

David Lamelas and Hildegarde Duane’s 1978 video The Dictator is one of the only works that doesn’t appropriate already printed or broadcast imagery. Taking the form of a news interview between Duane’s Barbara Walters-like character and Lamelas’ newly deposed Latin American tyrant, the work has a dark humor that takes on a special relevance given our current president’s infatuation with the media, and vice versa. Despite Duane’s probing questions about human-rights abuses or plans for an anti-revolutionary coup, Lamelas’ character evades any judgment or condemnation, revealing the power of media appearances to legitimize the illegitimate.

In addition to the content of the news, some of these artists take aim to reveal its structure. Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham’s video Local TV News Analysis (1980) is a straightforward reminder that news is not simply facts, put out into the world, but part of a system of consumption that is assembled, produced, and packaged. The hour-long video work depicts a typical American family watching the evening news, while in the upper left corner is an inset video of the newsroom. The piece compresses into one scene: the message, medium, and audience.

Robert Heinecken. A Case Study in Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman (A CBS Docudrama in Words and Pictures) (detail), 1984; dye bleach prints; 44 1/4 x 42 1/2 in. Courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Robert Heinecken—an artist who is famous for adeptly reflecting and refracting media images—offers a parodic take on the search for the perfect newscaster with his multi-panel text and image work A Case Study in Finding an Appropriate Newswoman (A CBS Docudrama in Words and Pictures) (1984). By layering images of different broadcasters over each other, Heinecken creates a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, pointing out the absurdity of prioritizing the person delivering the news over the news itself.

Breaking News provides a well-rounded and focused, if not comprehensive, survey of artists who question the media’s subjectivity, using its own images and words to do so. The one missed opportunity is that by featuring works that engage primarily with print and broadcast sources, the exhibition stops too soon, overlooking the way almost all of us get our news today, with tweets and Facebook posts becoming as important as long-standing journalistic institutions. This does, however, leave room for another, more contemporary look at artists examining the current, arguably more fraught state of journalism.

Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media is on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles through April 30, 2017.

E. Jane. Notes on Softness, 2016; NewHive site.

Ashley Stull Meyers: You’ve catalyzed the internet so well in both your work as an artist and in personal efforts to talk about problems in Contemporary Art. Can you talk about the importance of the internet as a platform for you? Is it the best mode for visibility and reach, or is your love for it something else entirely?

E. Jane: In some ways the internet has always been my primary platform for communication. I’ve been on a computer since I was four, and I think I came to consciousness there. I think the internet makes reality feel malleable or shapeable in some way; platforms like newhive are making it easy to express art ideas on the web without needing to code.

ASM: Conceptually, though, is it a large part of your thinking? You’ve housed several projects on Instagram, and hashtags like “#cindygate” and “#notyetdead” have crowdsourced a discourse for the issues you raise in a way that may not be as far-reaching otherwise.

EJ: The internet is a site to think,  and I do think about its role in my work and in our world, but it’s more embedded into my reality than something I think about daily. I think about the internet as a site to make work and the abilities that that space allows, as well as its limitations. Early on in grad school, I had more hope about the internet as a safe space, but the safety there is contingent on so many things—security settings, offline networks, etc.—and so, I’m still searching for that real safe space Black women and femmes can go, while also utilizing the internet as a place to disseminate certain works and ideas rapidly.

Read the full article.

Tsunehisa Kimura. Americanism, 1982; photomontage; 15 1/4 x 19 1/4 in. Promised gift of a private collection to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © Estate of Tsunehisa Kimura.

When viewing any retrospective of work, patterns emerge. Visiting Japanese Photography from Postwar to Now, it was starkly apparent how entrenched the residual effects of World War II remain in Japanese culture. Indeed, much of the work in the exhibition evoked Americana. Fetish, in the sexual sense, emerged as one noticeable pattern in the exhibition, such as in Kiyoji Ostuji’s Objet, which portrays a faceless, nude woman, her body-as-parts isolated and fetishized, and Nobuyoshi Araki’s series, KaoRi by 20 x 24 Instant Film, which read, on a certain level, as glamorized pinups. What does this fetishization show us about the intersubjective gazes of artists and beholders in postwar Japan?

The exhibition positions photography as an index of Japanese culture after World War II, one rife with the traumas of military violence, which have become as inscribed as the patriarchy under which those traumas persist. Photography, as a medium, lends itself to laying bare the psychological topography of photographers as they curate the environment that they choose to depict, including and excluding elements of the world. Oppressive military and patriarchal infrastructures are not so far removed from one another, and in this exhibition we see photographers inhabiting and responding to those structures.

Shomei Tomatsu’s Coca-Cola depicts a bottle of Coca-Cola resting beside a pair of scissors on a stack of newspaper on the carpet, while a woman’s face wrapped in her own black hair consumes the foreground, her mouth stretched wide in an ambiguously orgasmic or terrorized moan—perhaps both. Coca-Cola suggests a relationship between personal sexual submission and dominance and the systemic structures at play in cultural relations between Japan and the United States after the war, the pop bottle itself operating as disruptive phallus in the photograph’s composition. Much of Tomatsu’s work revolves around the intersection of Americana and cultural and political power dynamics, including a series titled Chewing Gum and Chocolate, two significantly Western treats brought to Japan by U.S. troops, and photographs such as Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation, and Fire, Nagasaki.

Tsunehisa Kimura’s photo collage, Americanism, calls the values and morals of American wartime life into question. The piece, collaged from WWII-era half-tone photographs, depicts a smiling couple sitting with their arms around each other on a hillside, sipping Coca-Cola and watching a nuclear detonation in the distance. This is no celebration of American ideals, but a brutally ironic critique in which weapons of war disrupt the idyllic lovers’ sense of security.

As I walked throughout the exhibition, taking notes and seeding the ideas that grew into this piece, I felt that I too, alongside the military and psychological occupations of the United States and the male gaze, was acting without consent, as a voyeur. Perhaps these photographs are intended to subvert Americanism; if so, in what ways does the celebration of such imagery in a “white” space, at an American institution, support or undermine the work? To fetishize these works in an American museum setting at the hands of a capitalist market perpetuates some of the very power structures the photographs seem intended to question. Would it be immoral to say that I liked it?

Max Blue is in his third year at the San Francisco Art Institute, working toward a BA in the History & Theory of Contemporary Art, with a minor in Photography. He is a poet and critical-theory enthusiast.

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Harumi Yukutake. Paracosmos, 2016; glass mirrors; site-specific installation. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

The biennale’s apt but campy title, An Atlas of Mirrors, is an illustration of the many artworks’ disappointingly myopic and literal takes on the exhibition’s moniker—the core theme of which is art’s capability to reflect, inflect, refract, magnify, and project alternative viewpoints onto what is current, traditional, and expected.[1] Through the sheer repetition of motifs, it is impossible to miss the extent to which the curators wish their audiences to be cognizant of the fact that there exists a lexical map of gateways, mirrors, and journeys, on both physical and socioeconomic levels, that needs to be constantly (re)examined, more so now than ever.

Yet An Atlas of Mirrors is also a title that speaks of broad, interlinking possibilities that do not point us in any particularly original direction. If this theme of embracing contemporary realities and mirroring them might appear so extensive as to be confounding, it is only because of the broad structuring of the show into nine conceptual zones—space, time, memory, nature, boundaries, agency, identity, displacement, and absence (each under a curatorial director with overlapping ideas)—that results in a more mystifying than elucidatory experience.

Qui Zhijie. One Has to Wander Through All the Outer Worlds to Reach the Innermost Shrine at the End; 2016; ink on paper, glass, and stone. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Solidarity, interdependency, and ties are forged by a sense of history that can be reclaimed—this much is evident. It is the rhetoric constantly reiterated in this region that has as much a political sheen as it is an aesthetic to which the governmental institutions certainly subscribe. For instance, Fyerool Darma’s The Most Mild Mannered Men (2016) questions the writing of Singapore’s early modern history with sculptures of two key figures, while Nobuaki Takekawa’s playful installation of maps, tables, and board games underscores the societal issues that contemporary Japan still faces for its inability to confront its part in the second World War. As both Darma’s and Takekawa’s works suggest, the burdensome sense of history cannot—or should not—be shrugged away easily; instead, it has to be internalized, ruminated upon, then reproduced.

Titarubi. History Repeats Itself, 2016; gold-plated nutmeg, copper-plated wood, nickel-plated wood, burnt wood, sampan, wood, aluminum, copper, soil, light and nutmeg perfume. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

The ships and ominously preaching missionaries in Titarubi’s History Repeats Itself (2016) are perhaps the Biennale’s most visceral representation of the legacy of conquest in this region. The specters of the past in gold-plated nutmeg robes recall the lucrative spice trade that European powers had sought to control. Constructed out of jackfruit wood with woodworking craftsmanship, Bui Cong Khanh’s Dislocate (2016) contains all the elements of a traditional Vietnamese home, yet its central sculpture contains carvings of a Vietnamese military jacket, American G.I. helmets, and missiles. At best, both Bui’s and Titarubi’s works intimate that history’s indelible stains are part of the quotidian, participating in part of a larger discourse that has to do with the currency of collective memory.

Pola Pothupitiye. Other Map Series, 2016; archival digital print, acrylic, ink, pencil on paper and canvas. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

An Atlas of Mirrors is a show that attempts to find new ways of telling the same broad story that resonates in Asian contemporary art: a continual engagement with the international art world, but never without a foot firmly planted in the geopolitical structures of a region that cannot—or would not—quite step away from shrugging off its colonially inflected narratives. This is the sort of contemporary reality that’s continually espoused in contemporary Asian art. If this biennale is any indication, it’s also a didactic trend that, despite the tendency for it to get repetitive, will continue for the foreseeable future.

In the exhibition’s catalog, mirrors are positioned as the standpoint, or a “counteraction on the position that [we] occupy,” as “spaces of other spaces,”[2] as allegorical validation of how sites, context, and histories are connected to each other. They offer complex levels of representation that emerge out of reciprocal visibility, explore the notion of the roving, unstable gaze, and exhibit plurality in powerful ways, but they also have the tendency to lead us back full circle to the primary image. Yet it’s a framework of interpretation that leaves questions unanswered: Should we see ourselves or the Other (or both, for that matter)? What can they possibly reflect that could ignite a debate that has not yet already encompassed rehashed ideas of identity, shared histories, and co-dependency? Ultimately, the mirrors, both physical and metaphorical, behave like passive objects, defused of their power because of their inability to engage.

An Atlas of Mirrors: Singapore Biennale 2016 is on view at several museums in the Civic District, Singapore, through February 26, 2017.

[1] Susie Lingham, Our Fractal Realities, in An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Biennale catalog, p. 17.

[2] Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (1967). The section on heterotopias is also referred to briefly in the catalogue, p. 114. I refer to Foucault’s postmodern analysis of Las Meninas (1656) in The Order of Things (1966), where complex levels of representation and the gaze are highlighted.