Luis Cruz Azaceta. Hell Act, 2009; acrylic, charcoal, pencil, and shellac on canvas; 72 x 160 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.

Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1942, Cruz Azaceta arrived in New York City in 1960 as an artist in exile—a political and psychological condition that has marked his work since the beginning of his career. Over the course of three decades he established himself with grotesque, existential canvases that spoke of the misery of new freedoms, urban malaise, and the diasporic experience. The central work of the exhibition, Hell Act (2009), seizes upon this subjective condition by representing the treacherous ninety-mile journey between Cuba and the United States as an enormous bathtub of refugees bobbing like toys in a pool of shark-infested neon-orange liquid. A direct attack on the inhumane choices and absurdities that define the balasero experience, which forces Cubans to leave and often never return, the painting speaks to the artist’s own struggle to define himself and his work through the liminal condition of in-between states, spaces, and memories.

Luis Cruz Azaceta. Evacuation-Highway, 2005; toys on wood; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.

A second move, to New Orleans in 1992, took his work into more local engagements with systematic poverty and urban violence—themes only intensified by the destruction experienced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The catastrophic process of evacuating the city in the days and hours before the storm is captured by Cruz Azaceta in a large floor construction of children’s toys on a wooden base, entitled Evacuation-Highway (2005). The incongruous dynamic between the benign nature of the assemblage and the panic of 100,000 people escaping from a city soon to be underwater undulates across the structure, the harsh breaks and cracks in the road a reminder of the large-scale impact of the storm on the city and on the collective unconscious of the nation.

Luis Cruz Azaceta. Surveillance, 2011; acrylic, pencil, shellac on canvas; 30 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.

While Cruz Aaceta’s focus on the conditions of exile and national tragedy are well known, this exhibition provides space for the artist’s more recent investigations into the effects of techno-social oppressions that intrude on our privacy. Surveillance and state-sanctioned human-rights violations are, of course, connected—a continuation of Cold War political practices that have forever altered the relationship between citizen and state—but it is Cruz Azaceta’s decision to ground this new work in the administration of social order and control that opens his oeuvre to novel interpretations. Surveillance (2011) presents a cleaner, more precise abstract style, with forms hanging somewhere between the organic and the hard-edged. Set in front of a brown, watery spread reminiscent of toxic smog or oil, the fantastical contraption of space-age centrifuges at the right are precariously linked to the Rorschach-like constellation of geometric patterns and bulbous shapes on the left. Thin lines sketched in pencil resemble the antennas and drone accessories that have marked the Obama administration’s unsettling response to global terror abroad. And yet, the ominous nature of this machine-like contraption, which spouts seismographic vector lines as if documenting the after-effects of tectonic movements, indicates that the shifting of planes is not just happening under our feet, but is also at work in the invisible, abstract strata of global finance, digital communication, and psychic tyranny.

Luis Cruz Azaceta: War and Other Disasters is on view at Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts in Birmingham, Alabama, through December 17, 2016.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.

However, due in part to the overwhelming volume of visual information to take in, the details take time to understand. And so it isn’t obvious at first glance that this is a completely constructed ruin. These collapsing structures aren’t the result of neglect or misfortune, but facades made from a lot of cardboard, tape, and paint. The tubes that cross through the space, along with the hundreds of bricks, collapsing flooring, suspended walls, and I-beams, are all constructed of cardboard, while hundreds of meters of knotted tan packing tape adorn the installation. Most of the cardboard is sprayed dark gray, but some areas have an additional white-painted brick motif. The grayness of the installation reinforces the overall bleakness of the collapsing environment, but the flatness of tone signals that this is an entirely invented space. It’s exactly the opposite of a slick Hollywood movie facade that looks real from a specific distance. It has more the light feel of a school fete in which the students have spent a week constructing a spooky funhouse out of available materials—albeit one that’s super-sized. It’s intentionally crude and still easily understood. The decay here is created, and it is clearly about facsimile.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.

The addition of used and discarded items such as toilets, portable oil-filled radiators, plastic deck chairs, army netting, and broken pressboard storage units give the show a postapocalyptic element. Copious amounts of silver ducting, strewn from all directions across the space in the same manner as half-hung bunting, complete the scene. Although these items make up less than fifteen percent of the installation, the used quality greatly contrasts with the painted cardboard and tape, and gives the installation the feeling that the space was once occupied. The human element pushes the coolness of the facsimile into something recognizably familiar and personal; this straddling of facsimile and the actual is the In-Between that gives the show its title. The moment in which a viewer could resolve the dichotomy between the two is the moment when the suspension of disbelief occurs and fantasy supersedes Hirschhorn’s construct. In juxtaposing the constructed facsimile with discarded items, Hirschhorn offers viewers the space to project their own specific fantasy of apocalyptic desire onto the artwork.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Mark Blower.

For all of its projected menace, the show is a lot of fun to walk through. There is a sense of playfulness in its manic construction that isn’t usually seen in a Hirschhorn exhibition. In the time it took me to view the show, three different sets of children came through, and separately each found great joy in counting the toilets. These kids immediately understood the element of play that is often lost in the grandiosity of Hirschhorn’s heavy-handed gestures. In this case, the intimate scale of the South London Gallery makes it possible to see the lighter aspects of wonder in the work. While large enough for Hirschhorn to be his maximalist self, the installation reveals the subtler detail of his practice that would be missed in a larger space. Within this scale, children and adults alike connect to the work and engage in their particular reveries. Hirschhorn’s mastery isn’t with craft or object making, but he infuses a sense of wonder and play into his installation that enables the viewer to project past the actual physicality of the work. So the facsimile is two-fold: the installation’s construction of ruin, and the viewer’s projection. Even with this realization, it’s still incredibly hard to shake one’s own projection of apocalypse and only consider what is physically present.

Thomas Hirschhorn: In-Between is on view at South London Gallery through September 13, 2015.

William Binnie. Flame as Flag. installation view, Paul Loya Gallery.

Binnie draws his subject matter from documentary images of riots from around the world. His selections suggest equivalences between a car set alight by Islamists in Pakistan and a church burned by black metal enthusiasts from Sweden. If his interest is in “locating the social embedded in his chosen materials,” he seems to be identifying a global trend of disaffected subjects of all political stripes finding solidarity in acts of property destruction, rejecting both a culture of accumulation and the rule of law. The bleached cotton ranges from cool to warm tones, producing a surprisingly effective representation of the flames’ intense warmth. The materialistic architectures of the city dissolve in the glow. The best works, such as Untitled (Church) (2014), allow these structures to all but disappear. The weakest, such as A Flag (The Flag) (2012), suggest a teenage rebel’s denim jacket, long outgrown.

William Binnie. Untitled (Church), 2014. Bleach on denim. 24 x 18 in. Courtesy Paul Loya Gallery.

Binnie applies bleach directly to cotton denim in order to create these works, which retain the brushwork and object-hood of painting in a color palette reminiscent of early cyanotype photography. The conceit of painting in negative is clever, and the technique, which derives from DIY punk fashion, is used to elegant effect. Combined with the source material, the style transcends gimmick, though it is difficult to imagine it working as well with any other content represented. Even so, the work feels superficial, informed more by the rebellious (and misnamed) nihilism of Johnny Rotten than the socially conscious anarchism of Antonio Gramsci.

William Binnie. Car Bomb, 2014. Ballpoint pen on paper. 9 x 12 in. Courtesy Paul Loya Gallery.

A series of ballpoint pen drawings reverses the white-on-blue palette of the paintings. The works titled Car Bomb (2014) appear like flesh wounds or moon craters within the field of the page. More images of tattered flags again lack the subtlety of the other works. Flame as Flag is a compelling idea when applied to the notion of individuals rallying around acts of arson as a politically unifying tactic. That power dissipates when the flag becomes literal.

William Binnie. A Flag (The Flag), 2014. Ballpoint pen on paper. 12 x 9 inc. Courtesy Paul Loya Gallery.

Rauschenberg used lighter fluid as the medium to transfer photo emulsion onto the surfaces of his paintings, immolating images in potentia that were incendiary in their queer sensibility. Warhol showed us the violence of the state—race riots, the electric chair—as a national pastime, an electronic gallows in the town square. Both artists retained an edge in their works that Binnie is not able to achieve. Perhaps the contemporary moment is so media-saturated that such images no longer have an effect. Or perhaps the paintings’ bleach-and-denim materiality is too apparent to recede behind the subject matter. Maybe radical art needs the official context of the art museum to push against, and a commercial gallery simply feels too safe. The revolution, after all, will not be on consignment.

William Binnie. Untitled (Pakistan), 2014. Bleach on denim. 54 x 54 in. Courtesy Paul Loya Gallery.

William Binnie: Flame as Flag is on view at Paul Loya Gallery in Culver City through March 7, 2015.