Spurred by recent elections in the US and abroad, there’s been a resurgence of interest by artists and critics alike in so-called “political art.” Today from our archives we bring you a review of Taravat Talepasand’s work at Beta Pictoris; author Jordan Amirkhani argues that Telepasand’s work operates much in the same way as Andy Warhol’s, wherein a cultural actor becomes a symbolic fetish to be reified, scorned, or even destroyed. This article was originally published on May 6, 2015.

Taravat Talepasand. Khomeini, 2015; egg tempura on linen; 48 x 36 in.

Taravat Talepasand’s work takes on the representational codes and image systems of the Iranian state: national currency, political propaganda, religious iconography, and gendered forms of identity making. The paintings in Not an Arab Spring open up the ideological assumptions that index Iranian identity, state power, and gender in order to consider how the body (male and female) comes to signify the state as well as rebel against it.

However, there is more to Talepasand’s practice than poststructuralist critique. By staging provocative encounters between aesthetic conventions, techniques, and traditions of European and Islamic art, Talepasand’s work challenges the viewer to uncover (and thus confront) the tricks and abstractions that coalesce into effective forms of image making and propaganda, and reorder the various disciplinary processes that continue to shape our understanding of “Eastern” and “Western” subjectivity and aesthetics. If anything, the exhibition is a recovery project of the material images of contemporary Iran, and a sophisticated détournement of state power. Of course, states and nations do not exist a priori, but are founded in reified objects, invented symbols, cultural traditions, material bodies, ideological apparatuses, and reflexively discursive acts that replicate and reproduce power relations and inform the visual and conceptual consciousness of real and imagined communities existing within and outside borders and national goals.[1] However, the ideological unification between the assumptions and condition of Iran’s theocratic government, the will of the public, and the messy history that ignited the constitutional revolution of 1979 can never be fully covered over, as Talepasand’s mockery of famous propaganda images makes clear.

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Edgar Arcenaux’s exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, Written in Fire and Smoke, is relatively modest in scale, occupying the List’s two main galleries. But while the exhibition is physically constrained, conceptually it is oversized—colossal, even. Written in Fire and Smoke is comprised of three bodies of work, all of which manifest through different material approaches. All, however, share the complexity that defines Arceneaux’s practice, a process that centers on research, layering, and remixing references and imagery from diverse parts of American culture and mashing them into sublime expressions.

Edgar Arceneaux, A Time To Break Silence, 2013; single-channel HD video with color and sound; 65 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

While Written in Fire and Smoke includes a variety of media, the pivotal pieces in Arceneaux’s show are the two film-based works, A Time To Break Silence (2013), and Until, Until, Until… (2015). The first of these is an hour long, and presents a bizarre layering of referents. The setting of the film is an abandoned Detroit church, littered in its grand chamber with bits of itself that have fallen or been ripped off of its bones. The light filters through the church’s large leaded windows, leaving the whole building luminous but ravaged, a bit like a picked-over rib cage, with its great arching lines framing the hollowed out interior.

Though this singular setting remains consistent, Arcenaux’s film seems split into three separate temporal registers—layers of time that sometimes overlap but seem not quite to blend. The first figure to enter this solemn space is an ape-like creature (a mass of hair and set of movements that some might recognize from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) huddling and bounding close to the floor, examining bits of detritus throughout the gutted church. With wild hair obscuring its face and white powder from the church’s mangled plaster clinging to its simian hands and feet, it is hard to tell if this is a creature from the future or past. Pre-human or post-apocalyptic?

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A comprehensive and long overdue exhibition of Beverly Buchanan’s work kicks off A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum—a yearlong program of ten exhibitions celebrating the first decade of the museum’s Elizabeth Sackler Feminist Art Center. In a time when voices of misogyny and white supremacy are gaining renewed validation in national political discourse, exploring assumptions around feminism and what feminist art can be is more vital than ever. Buchanan’s work highlights unmarked and under-recognized histories of African American life in the rural South. Her practice is redemptive and recuperative at its core—each piece a poignant gesture standing in resistance to the currents of history-writing that prioritize white male voices. Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals is a rewarding exhibition to see, for in addition to giving a much-undersung artist her due, it also reminds us that expanding access to the national historical narrative is a deeply feminist gesture.

Beverly Buchanan. Untitled (Double Portrait of Artist with Frustula Sculpture), n.d.; black and white photograph with original paint marks; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

Born in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, Buchanan spent a lot of her upbringing on the campus of South Carolina State University, where her great-uncle was the dean of the School of Architecture. She went on to earn master’s degrees in both parasitology and public health from Columbia University before working as a public health educator in New Jersey. While in New York, she studied with the painter Norman Lewis at the Art Students League, and found a mentor in Romare Bearden. Buchanan was a visible and known figure in New York’s art scene throughout the ’70s and ’80s until she felt drawn back to the South and resettled in Macon, Georgia.

Her practice traverses sculpture, earthworks, photography, and drawing. While certain bodies of work bear formal and conceptual connections to Post-Minimalism and Land Art, others share more in common with outsider and vernacular art that have drawn inspiration from Buchanan’s native rural South. Despite the range and resistance to classification, a clear through line is the artist’s commitment to testimony: her need to record, mark, and memorialize sites in the US landscape that are embedded with suppressed or little acknowledged legacies of racism, violence, and neglect. Ruins and Rituals reminds us of the thousands of stories that remain untold in our national consciousness—some lost forever.

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Today from our sister publication Art Practical we bring you Aruna D’Souza’s reflections on Mierle Laderman Ukeles at the Queens Museum. This article was published as part of Art Practical’s issue 8.1: Art + Citizenship. D’Souza states  “[Ukeles] work, and the role of the artist that her work inscribed, makes a powerful argument for the artistic possibilities of citizenship—and the responsibilities, obligations, and collective pleasures that go along with it.” This article was originally published on November 10, 2016.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Sanitation Celebrations: Grand Finale of the First NYC Art Parade, Part I: The Social Mirror, 1983; garbage collection truck, tempered glass mirror, and acrylic mirror; 28 x 8 x 10 1⁄2 ft. Created in collaboration with DSNY. Courtesy of the Artist.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, at the Queens Museum (on view through February 2017), is the first museum survey devoted to the artist. Over the course of her five-decade-long career, most of which was spent as artist-in-residence with the City of New York Department of Sanitation, Ukeles mapped out a practice that seems to place her somewhere between the late-20th-century strategy of institutional critique and the current vogue for social-practice art. The former is one in which the artist carves out, no matter how provisionally, an outsider position from which to shine light on the biases and inequities institutions enact and reproduce. The latter involves a participatory, collaborative, socially engaged immersion into a field, usually undertaken with an activist intent. If neither of these labels seems quite the right fit for Ukeles, it is because she neither considered herself an outsider to the systems she was operating in nor an activist. Instead, her work, and the role of the artist that her work inscribed, makes a powerful argument for the artistic possibilities of citizenship—and the responsibilities, obligations, and collective pleasures that go along with it.

Read the full article here.

While nation-states elect or appoint internationally recognized power brokers, real politics emerge on the ground in the lived experiences of our communities, in the polis. In the face of shifting national and international politics, local communities must commit to uphold human rights. In that spirit, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors recently dismissed threats of funding cuts by the President-elect and affirmed the city’s commitment to human rights. Beyond this important resolution, artists will continue to shape civic resistance to inhumane policies. In one such example, La Polis Imagi-nada, a group show at El Quinto Piso in Mexico City, interrogated power structures shaping the city and showcased artistic resistances to those structures. This article was originally published on December 9, 2015.

Cecilia Barreto. http//www.möbius.10, 2015 (detail); mixed media on canvas; 140 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and El Quinto Piso, Mexico D.F. Photo: Jorge Gomez del Campo.

What is a city? How can it be conceptualized? How does one create oneself within that geographic and symbolic space? These questions frame the most recent show at El Quinto Piso, La Polis Imagi-nada. The curatorial statement talks about the polis and civic participation in theoretical terms, but the exhibit situates these concepts firmly within the symbolic and geographic realities of Mexico City. El Quinto Piso is a vast gallery space located on the top floor of a parking structure in the historic downtown. It is raw and unfinished, with exposed wires and very little light. It feels impermanent, as if it could be closed down at any moment, and many of the works in this show feel improvisational, perhaps even unfinished. But this is an appropriate response to the social and political concerns of contemporary life in Mexico City.

Several of the works address the current climate of political and structural violence. Cecilia Barreto’s painting, http//www.möbius.10 (2015), shows the city as a mediated battleground. The painting is composed of dozens of black silhouettes of activists, riot police, and police dogs against a mostly red background. Texts and icons, like a prominent Facebook thumbs-up, situate these scenes on social media. All of this is rendered with painterly marks on a medium-size canvas.

Simulacro (2015) by David Camargo also situates political violence as a mediated spectacle. However, in this case the artist creates a video-game caricature. Onto a geometrically simple 3D model of a soldier’s head, the artist video-maps scenes of fire, computer glitches, and a skull. The work suggests a relationship between the commonplace political violence in Mexico City and virtual realities. If Barreto’s work emphasizes political struggle as Facebook activism, Camargo places it firmly in the world of the video game.

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Rachel Wolfson Smith’s pencil drawings of motorcycle and car crashes seem to memorialize modern epics. At once glorious and kitschy, these homages to what the artist calls “Renaissance battle paintings” capture moments of intense struggle, dialed up to eleven: they border on the farcical but maintain an undeniable gravitas. The monochromatic graphite tones and occasional gilt highlights situate the drawings in a context of glorified opulence while the aggressive pencil strokes emphasize the dynamism of the depicted collisions. The total effect is a self-reflexive body of work that acknowledges the seductive, even mythic, quality of large-scale contemporary violence.

Rachel Wolfson Smith. Carnival, 2016; graphite and gold leaf on paper; 15 x 15 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Smith’s murals are cinematically obsessive and scopophilic in their visceral rendering. The sheer size of a work like Uccello II (2016) actively pulls a viewer into the scene of the drawing, asking that one bears witness to a fantasy of extremity. There is something revelatory about the multiplication of crashing bodies, mechanical parts, numbers, and symbols. By depicting such excess in tactile, monochromatic graphite—each stroke, smudge, and shadow visible—Smith produces a sense of solemnity that appears earnest, yet the straight-faced presentation is jarring in relation to the subject matter. An approach once employed for grandiose representations of legendary battles is here used for crashing motorbikes and cars, well recognized symbols of phallic power. While a viewer perceives the tropes of this style, the works seem to take an almost silly pleasure in such over-the-top imagery.

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Phantoms of Latin American conflicts loom in Spectres, an exhibition by Fredi Casco, Teresa Margolles, and Rosângela Rennó at Mor Charpentier gallery in Paris. Inspired by Roland Barthes’ seminal text Camera Lucida, the exhibition organizes itself around the concept of the spectrum, as understood by Barthes—who wrote the book while trying to symbolically conjure the presence of his recently deceased mother—as the object pictured in a photograph and a word that brings to mind one of photography’s strongest effects on a viewer: “the return(ing) of the dead.”[1]

Rosângela Rennó. Exhibition view with (left to right) Los Angeles (Lori Shepler, Los Angeles Times); Senador Camará (Wania Corredo, O Globo News Agency); Assunción (Ruben Alfonso, Reuters), 2009; Digital print, inkjet, on Hahnemülle Photo Rag 308 paper; 
66 x 44 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In Body of Soul (the state of the world) (2003-2016), Rosângela Rennó amplifies and digitally modifies newspaper pictures that document a diverse range of public demonstrations. From a distance, Rennó’s three large-format photographs show crowds, but are zoomed in to focus on one person who stands holding a small portrait of, presumably, a lost loved one. From afar, the images are crisply legible, but sharpness dissolves as viewers approach the images and the halftone dots that were hard to distinguish from a distance appear outsized when up close. It becomes evident that the dots are not uniformly distributed; there are different densities deliberately arranged throughout the image, with tighter and smaller dots composing the image of the loved one, thus rendering it visible from all distances.

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