Non-Specific Objects Carves Niches for Difference from Universality @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin

The title of Non-Specific Objects acts as a counterpoint to the ideas expressed in Donald Judd’s canonical 1964 essay Specific Objects. Seeing as Judd characterized specific objects as separate from either sculpture or painting, they were precisely themselves, emphasizing the very materiality of a specific object that lacked expressive or symbolic content, especially to embodied subjectivity. This universal space, which aimed to be all-encompassing, did not make room for gender, racial, and sexual difference. The artists in this exhibition work against the hegemonic universal, creating space for difference in their works by means of abstraction, referencing bodies both literally and metaphorically.

The selection of works collectively embodies the contemporary lived experience of those who occupy spaces outside the normative. While they often do not overtly mirror the human form, the works represent humanity through a lens of abstraction and resistance, inviting viewers to confront themselves and experience bodily otherness. From alienation and embarrassment to intimacy and desire, the artists offer both the possibility of self-reflection and shared moments of humor.

In focus is the abstracted body – be it the intimate nature, materiality, and particularities of the individual human body, the collective body that is built on shared historic experience, the extended and amplified body in an age of relentless augmentation, or the body that eschews realistic painterly modes of representation, opting for formally abstract or heavily stylized, sometimes nostalgic renditions of humanity. The diverse set of artistic practices does not adhere to strict principles of representation, but continually references the human, sometimes clearly and often obliquely. It highlights objects that refuse human form but relate to the human by embracing abstraction.

Non-Specific Objects is on view through February 24th at Capitain Petzel, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin.

Hugh Hayden Examines the Prosthetics of Power in Hughman @ Lisson Gallery

text by Tara Anne Dalbow

Upon entering Hugh Hayden’s Hughman exhibition at Lisson Los Angeles, you’re confronted by three interconnected rows of metallic stall doors, the same as you might find in a public restroom. The doors simultaneously invite you toward entry and expel you, intriguing as they are impersonal and ominous. Before you glimpse an object resembling art, you’re implicated in the hidden meaning, an active participant in its revelation. You’re immediately made aware of the physicality of your body, your relationship to the space, and the identity you present to the unknown system of order. Questions arise: Is this a gendered bathroom? Do I belong here? Who am I sharing the space with? The interactive element of opening and closing each door, maneuvering in, out, and between the confined, private spaces, renders engaging from a disembodied perspective nearly impossible. As the exhibition's title implies, there’s no leaving one’s hughmanity at the door.  

My initial impression of imposition and interest follows me into the first stall, where a carved commode sprouts a bramble of thorny fir tree branches. The protrusion of sharp limbs obstructs further inspection; the effect is claustrophobic and disconcerting, and I back out cautiously. Behind the next door, a baby’s crib constructed from barbed wire and chain link fencing; behind another, interlocking wedding rings with Descovy pills [HIV antiviral] where the solitaire would be; and behind yet another, a classroom desk consumed entirely by abrasive white nylon bristles. Each object offers participation in a facet of contemporary American life under conditions as unwelcoming, uncomfortable, and caustic as the specular toilet seat. 

The visceral materiality of the various textures, though not physically touched, commandeer the senses as the bristles scrape, the barbs prick, and the branches snag against your skin. Prongs, spurs, and skewers disrupt movement and threaten physical confrontation while also poking metaphorical holes in expectations and illusions. Here, the most fundamental promises of the American dream, like the right to an education, are rendered onerous, animating the question: for whom were these institutions made? If the skin you’re in determines your experience, and the object's surface or skin reflects the relative ease or distress of the encounter, then certainly not for the artist, a Black queer man, and by association, those like him. 

Hugh Hayden
Cleanse, 2023
High density polyethylene bristles, cast resin
66 x 38.1 x 35.6 cm
26 x 15 x 14 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Start 'Em Young, 2023
Chain link fencing and hardware
142.9 x 141 x 81.3 cm
56 1/4 x 55 1/2 x 32 in

© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Brainwash, 2023
PVC and nylon bristles
83.8 x 66 x 73.7 cm
33 x 26 x 29 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

 
 

As I continued around the room, the stalls began to feel more like dressing rooms with various identities available for perusal inside. Within one, a suit jacket and pants sewn from the rough and rigid bark of a cherry tree hang from a clothing rack. Elsewhere: a football helmet encompassed by boar hair, and still elsewhere: a bronze strap-on harness with a gun protruding from the crotch. The striking contrast between organic materials and those that are artificial and mass-produced recalls the antagonistic relationship between what’s natural and instinctual and what’s a consequence of sociopolitical structures. For whom are these spaces made? 

Those capable of comfortably wearing the prosthetics of power appear as idealized, neoclassical male torsos carved from white silicone. They wear their means for control where their sex would be; for two, cocked pistols; for another, an abject skyscraper. A fourth iteration sees the male body replaced by a miniature basswood model church whose phallic steeple hangs limply across the shingled roof. In a nod to the dominant enterprise in Los Angeles, a director’s chair projects tapered wood penises in every direction. The appendages appear to both protect the seat of power and stage an assault on the unendowed who come too close. Their audacious vulgarity tempers the violence of the cultural implications and satirizes familiar tropes like toxic masculinity and the male impulse to think with an organ south of the brain.  

When that door closes with a bang—emphasized by the acoustics of the room and made ominous by the presence of so many firearms—another door opens onto a bronze and acrylic sculpture of the waist and thighs of a man in navy uniform pants sporting a flashy leather belt, holstered gun, and handcuffs posed atop his white pedestal. Only when you move around the sculpture or are so moved by it do you see where the right side is sliced open to reveal beneath the uniform, armor, weaponry, beneath even the skin, the internal organs, veins, and bones within. The same veins in him that carry the red-blue blood between my heart and feet, the same stomach as the one that rumbles, hungry to be filled full when empty in Hayden, in him, in me. The man is twinned by another sculpture in the exhibition of a tree trunk spliced open to expose the biological contents of a womb carrying a luminous carved baby. 

Hugh Hayden
Real Tree, 2023
Cherry bark on Zegna Suit
Suit: 99.1 x 91.4 x 17.8 cm
Suit: 39 x 36 x 7 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Eve, 2023
Cherry Bark and acrylic on resin, Black Walnut
63.5 x 38.1 x 25.4 cm
25 x 15 x 10 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Their combined effect illuminates how stripped of societal status, we are of the same nature and origin and made from the same stuff. As intricately connected to one another as we are to the trees, the earth from which the trees grow, and the animals, like the stuffed buffalo in another stall, roam. Hanging together in a red-flocked closet, two raceless, genderless, crimson rib cages tenderly embrace—as the only forms made from material gentle enough to hold and be held. The fellow feeling carries me out of the closet, the stall, the gallery, and I re-enter the world a little more human than I was only an hour before.

Hughman is on view through January 13 @ Lisson Gallery, 1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, Los Angeles

 

Hugh Hayden
The Audition, 2023
Bald cypress, steel hardware and canvas
149.9 x 188 x 154.9 cm
59 x 74 x 61 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

 

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island Charts Coco Fusco's Radical Path of Social Reckoning @ KW Institute in Berlin

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, US). For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.

With her multidisciplinary practice, Fusco explores the ways that intercultural dynamics affect the construction of the self and ideas about cultural otherness. Her work is informed by multicultural and postcolonial discourses as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Her investigation of intercultural dynamics has led her to develop art projects about ethnographic displays, animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, labor conditions in free trade zones, suppressed colonial records of Indigenous struggles, and the military interrogation techniques used in the war on terror. Her more recent work focuses on the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The exhibition is loosely structured along these various interconnected themes. As such, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island shows the breadth of Fusco’s artistic practice that is highly relevant considering current political and cultural debates in Germany and beyond.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is on view through January 24th, 2024, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin at Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany

"AN ALL COLORED CAST" By Hank Willis Thomas @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran In Los Angeles

An All Colored Cast is an exploration of color theory, popular culture, the development of Pop Art, Color Field painting, Minimalism, and the Hollywood film industry. In this new body of work, Thomas examines the portrayals of gender, race, and identity through the lens of film, performance, and color motion pictures.

Using color theory and screen color calibration charts as an aesthetic starting point, Thomas re-examines the language surrounding “color correction” and “white balance” in order to demonstrate the charged language of color, particularly around the time of desegregation and the proliferation of Technicolor in America.

An all Colored Cast is on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran 1201 S La Brea Ave. Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon @ ICA In Los Angeles

For her first solo museum presentation in Los Angeles, Oakland-based artist Sadie Barnette (b. 1984) will reimagine the Eagle Creek Saloon, the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, established by the artist’s father Rodney Barnette, founder of the Compton, CA chapter of the Black Panther Party. From 1990–93 Barnette’s father operated the bar and offered a safe space for the multiracial LGBTQ community who were marginalized at other social spaces throughout the city at that time.

Barnette engages the aesthetics of Minimalism and Conceptualism through an idiosyncratic use of text, decoration, photographs, and found objects that approach the speculative and otherworldly. Barnette’s recent drawings, sculptures, and installations have incorporated the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her father and references to West Coast funk and hip-hop culture to consider the historical and present-day dynamics of race, gender, and politics in the United States. Using materials such as spray paint, crystals, and glitter, she transforms the bureaucratic remnants from a dark chapter in American history into vibrant celebrations of personal, familial, and cultural histories and visual acts of resistance. The New Eagle Creek Saloon is a glittering bar installation that exists somewhere between a monument and an altar, at once archiving the past and providing space for potential actions. During the run of the exhibition at ICA LA, the installation will be activated by performances, talks, and other social events. The New Eagle Creek Saloon is on view through January 26, 2020 at ICA LA 1717 E. 7th Street, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Lorna Simpson Presents "Darkening" @ Hauser & Wirth In New York

Debuting a suite of new large-scale paintings, Lorna Simpson’s Darkening finds the artist returning to and building upon themes and motifs at the center of her practice: explorations focused on the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history. For more than 30 years, Simpson’s powerful works have entangled viewers in an equivocal web of meaning, drawing upon techniques of collage through the use of found materials, often culled from the pages of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines. In ‘Darkening,’ Simpson continues to thread dichotomies of figuration and abstraction with vast and enthralling tableaux that subsume spliced photos and fragmented text, abstracted beyond comprehension. Equally arresting and poetic, the paintings engage viewers with layers of paradox, capturing the mystifying allure of an arctic landscape in inky washes of blacks, grays, and startling blues. Darkening will be on view through 26 July at Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Adrian Piper's 'Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016' Opens @ Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 is the most comprehensive West Coast exhibition to date of the work of Adrian Piper (b. 1948, New York). It is also the first West Coast museum presentation of Piper’s works in more than a decade, and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale of 2015 and Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2018. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, this expansive retrospective features more than 270 works gathered from public and private collections from around the world, and encompasses a wide range of mediums that Piper has explored for over 50 years: drawing, photography, works on paper, video, multimedia installations, performance, painting, sculpture, and sound. 

Piper’s groundbreaking, transformative work has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the 1960s, exerting an incalculable influence on artists working today. Her investigations into the political, social, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art frequently address gender, race, and xenophobia through incisive humor and wit, and draw on her long-standing involvement with philosophy and yoga.

For this exhibition, the Hammer is partnering with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) to present Piper’s work What It’s Like, What It Is #3, a large-scale mixed-media installation addressing racial stereotypes. Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 in on view through January 6 at Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.


Gillian Laub 'Southern Rites' @ Benrubi Gallery in New York

Benrubi Gallery, in collaboration with the International Center of Photography, presents "Southern Rites," the new exhibition from award-winning photographer Gillian Laub, whose previous exhibition at the gallery, "Common Ground," dealt with the relationship between Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians. With "Southern Rites," she again takes on a story steeped in generations-long tensions, and tells it with power, sensitivity and enduring poignancy. "Southern Rites" is a provocative twelve-year visual study of one community’s struggle to confront longstanding issues of race and equality. In 2002, Laub was invited to Mt. Vernon, Georgia, to photograph its segregated homecoming celebrations. She kept returning to the community and in 2009, The New York Times Magazine published a photo-essay by Laub titled, “A Prom Divided,” which documented Georgia’s Montgomery County High School’s racially segregated prom rituals. Laub’s photographs ignited a firestorm of national outrage that, remarkably, led the community to finally integrate the proms. Laub continued to travel to Mt. Vernon to document the aftermath, which was welcomed in some circles and decried in others. In 2011, amid newfound hope, the murder of a young black man (portrayed in Laub’s earlier prom series) by an older white town resident reopened old wounds. Through her intimate portraits, first-hand testimony, and video installation, Laub reveals in vivid color the horror and humanity of these complex, intertwined narratives. Southern Rites will be on view until June 27, 2015 at Benrubi Gallery, 521 West 26th Street, New York. You can also purchase a monograph (Damiani) of the work here.