Moral Obligations
Sue Williams, Kara Walker, and the perfect Thanksgiving wine. Plus that goddamned Harper's essay.
On Saturday Chelsea smelled like sewage. I try not to capitulate to the pathetic fallacy in writing, but sometimes the jokes write themselves.
First I ducked into the WangShui show at Kurimanzutto. Their work has seemed interesting but oblique to me. Unfortunately I still don’t get it, even though—or more likely, because—the artist themselves was there in the exhibition space, conversing with the painter Maryam Hoseini for an audience of some fifty people. As I entered WangShui was saying something to the effect of painting is an act of love, which drained away all my curiosity. We were surrounded by scumbled aluminum panels with meager ink-wash abstractions, riskless over-the-couch retro midcentury modernism. My understanding of visually similar work by WangShui is that it entails a feedback loop between the artist and an AI interface. Unfortunately Kurimanzutto’s website doesn’t offer many details about the show, but possibilities of the technoerotic aside, it doesn’t sound a love story to me.
The rest of the trip was mostly like that. Olafur Eliasson, never my favorite, offered at Tanya Bonakdar a faceted spherical chandelier and a contraption that turns sound into wavering projected circles that resemble fertilized eggs through a microscope in a miracle-of-life documentary. Maybe I’m just jaded, but no technical feat seems notable in itself at this point, especially one that suggests a gloomy ’70s light show. The best thing about the show was that it reminded me to take a look back at the work of Jeremy Blake. At Matthew Marks’s two-by-two space, meanwhile, the Simone Leigh show had an inventory-clearing quality.
The trip was rescued by two exhibitions: Sue Williams at 303 and Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins. The Williams show was new work that has a deceptive scratch-pad quality, with small, linear shapes and figures painted from all orientations, as if the canvas had been spun on a lazy Susan. The panoply of images seems disjoint until you spend a few moments with them. Then you find that figures reappear and reverberate, with sashes of paint nudging collections of marks and images into occasional rhythms. Recurring characters include roads, tunnels, fences, and an inventory of anatomy—legs, feet, torsos, asses. There were bird-women, bugs, and horses. You get a sense of thought in the process of coalescing rather than formal statements, but the paintings are much cagier than that description might suggest.
Kara Walker, meanwhile, is doing something new—creating silhouette works where, for the first time, the cutouts are not strictly black-and-white but rather inked and watercolored in purplish browns, yellow, umber, orange, earthy green. That may not sound like much, but like any variation in a minimalist setup, it feels decisive, even a little shocking. The visual payoff is the creation of depth within Walker’s stringent means; the figures now exist in an ambiguous spatial zone, more alluding to than inhabiting illusionistic depth. The writhing, dancing, and general agonism of the forms is more mythological, less historically moored than usual, a tack reinforced by the presence of four classicism-conjuring bronze busts. My favorite of the collage works is the least figurative—The Garden of Mundane Eschatologists, an either/or show-stopper that rejects both positive and negative space, its dispersion akin to that of Williams but more like an explosion in freeze frame.
Walker’s works on paper, equally essential, recall in their facture her last Sikkema Jenkins show in 2021 but are far darker. Mostly they depict nightmare scenes: Black women and men mourning over devastated landscapes (Preaching to the Converted), supplicants worshipping strange gods (American Idol), oblique ceremonies (Entombed), caustic references to the American narrative of enslavement (Make Yourself at Home), and appalling psychic displacements of that history. Throw Me Anywhere shocks with a simple, terrible image: a giant black bird bloodily digs at the navel of a Black woman, nude. By uniting mystery and specificity, the scenes are potent but remain open—thankfully so, in contrast to so much work currently taking up gallery real estate.
Journalism
If you just can’t wait to relive the events of November 5, 2024, I did my best to pinhole-camera them for Cultured magazine’s new Critics’ Table newsletter. A snippet:
Around 6 p.m., I went to Gladstone Gallery, which had decided to host an extravaganza of readings and music inside Carrie Mae Weems’s video installation on 21st Street. The resistance-lib redolence of the event made me queasy. Rirkrit Tiravanija was slinging wok, Modelos sat ready for the popping, and an all-star lineup had been performing since mid-afternoon. Inside the blue-curtained cyclorama, like a geode with Weems’s shifting images glinting around its interior, Lynne Tillman was on the mic explaining why she prefers to French exit a party, which had something to do with her toilet training. After her, Anne Waldman, with her charismatic jet-black hair and Ginsbergian sprechstimme.
Then, via video, Eileen Myles, delivering an absolutely scorching poem about Gaza. It stripped off the veneer of pretense that this country is anything other than horrid to the core, no matter what happened in the electoral college.
Subscribe to the Critics’ Table! There are practically no credible outlets left for writing about art, and Cultured is making a run at filling the void—while paying writers an atypically respectable rate. The newsletter is usually paywalled, but my piece is available free, so you know it really speaks to the wounded soul of our nation.
Wine
Lucien Crochet La Croix du Roy Sancerre Rouge. Hot tip for Thanksgiving, if you celebrate: Sancerre Rouge.
When you say Sancerre, people typically think of a white wine prized for its exquisite minerality. So prized, in fact, that today they’re overpriced and overrated. In a restaurant, Sancerre is invariably a ripoff unless you’re paying a steep premium and have a server who won’t lie to you.
Sancerre is, however, not a specific wine but rather a region of France, and within it they grow not only the sauvignon used for the famous white but also pinot noir, which they turn into Sancerre Rouge. Crunchy and lean, it resembles neither leathery, earthy burgundies nor the glotty pinot noirs that emerge from the United States.
Without getting too deep into the forest, I’d say La Croix du Roy is less woody than woodsy and a little foxy, like a gland-rubbing on a gravel creekbed. The wine is sweeter on the tongue than you would expect, medium rich and mouth filling, with a tart swerve at the end and enough tannin to grab hold of whatever food you’re noshing on. It tastes more of plant matter as it opens up, like the greenery on my friend Lyndsy’s birthday cake a few weeks ago, which I realized was purely decorative only after I’d swallowed it. Still further on you get a pinch of some nose-tickling spice like cumin or cardamom. It’s a more ~sophisticated~ wine than you have any right to expect for $35 and will impress tablemates for the upcoming holiday or most any other occasion.
Clickbait
I have little interest in talking about the thesis or politics of the essay that recently appeared in Harper’s. In fact I had little interest in reading it, but people kept asking my opinion. How we thought leaders suffer! Having given the piece a look, I can say we’ve heard it all before and it can be readily disassembled, as has already been done all over Twitter.
Which was the purpose of the exercise, of course—getting clicks, garnering outraged responses for the author to screenshot alongside fawning ones. Dean’s great talent is for garnering attention from a relatively broad, less informed audience by advancing vaguely provocative opinions about art that nevertheless somehow reinforce “common sense.” In this case, knowing his audience allows him to among other things dupe them into thinking the art world equals museums and biennials while occluding how the market is sending the institutions he derides into eclipse.
A number of people took offense with the piece’s opening, sometimes in mean-spirited ways online. I’ll offer a rare defense. In 2024, readers expect critical writing to be in the first person, and I’ve certainly mentioned aspects of my family history in texts that were otherwise unrelated. As a writer, leveraging the accident that way seems like something I might do. Moreover the essay is so long that its effect dissipates quickly. I feel bad for the author and his mother, and I have much empathy for what his recent months must have been like.
What I will say about the deployment of personal detail, however, is that it crystallizes a feeling I’ve long had about Dean’s output but been previously unable to nail down: it exhales the sour perfume of midlife crisis. Usually his nostalgia is disguised in yearnings for cultural novelty, but here he helpfully cites specific moments that pinpoint the wellsprings of the author’s discontent. In my twenties, he says, art felt important. Back then, my friends and I knew that being an artist was the coolest and sexiest thing in the world, happy and free, and we made a solemn pact to live that way forever. But then they got jobs (or got rich investing in crypto; how sad!) and the party ended. The hero of my youth went mad because he was too brilliant for this cruel life. Now I am getting old, I know the world too well, its mystery and magic have departed, and I pine for the dewy thrill of my salad days.
Speaking from experience, such feelings get especially strong in proximity to mortality, when death can no longer be safely contained as an abstraction. And so, more than ever, the author wants to transcend, he wants to touch the beyond, he wants to escape petty reality and its fractious politics. Yeah, me too. Maybe we need to drink some hallucinogenic deer piss; that might do it. Personally, I’ve been thinking I should start stacking my chips for a Pascal’s wager. Perhaps the author and I can start attending mass together, if he moves back to New York. There you go, Dean, there’s your perfect bit to clip and post, readymade for a witty remark. Thank me in the pews.
Music
I’ve got some karaoke planned for this week and so for the first time in many months I revisited The Tortured Poets’ Department. Goddamn if I didn’t brainwash myself the first time around. If you see me Thursday night, get ready to meet Chloe, Sam, et al.