Invisible Forces

8.17.22

I was finally able to catch the Whitney Biennial show recently and was pleased to find some artists whose work and career I’ve followed or known about for many years. In June, I immersed myself in the Venice Biennale and those of you on Facebook know that I loved it and the luxury of diving deeply into the art of so many women and artists of color. I loved the pairing of known and earlier feminist artists too, and the way that the curator(s) placed these in proximity, expanding my thinking about historic precedent and possible sources of the contemporary feminist work.

The main curator for the Venice show was Cecilia Alemani, who has also been the Chief Curator of the High Line Art, and launched the High Line Plinth. It featured the big sculpture Brick House by the formidable Simone Leigh, who had an entire US Pavilion at Venice to showcase her sculptures. I just loved them, including the fact that she recreated a Belgian Congo colonial house to make her sharp comments on that subject. I have relatives on my father’s side of the family who were administrators in the Belgian Congo, now Rwanda. I’ve read all about the colonial genocide led by King Leopold. I like the act of historic redress that Leigh did in Venice.

I saw so much art in Venice I didn’t think I could look at more. Well, I was happily wrong. Art continues to hold me in thrall, at least when it’s really good.

At the Whitney, whose overall theme was Quiet As It’s Kept, I saw a few pieces that made me stay and look longer. I’m not a fan of video in galleries, which my video artist friends consider very short-sighted and unacceptable, and I understand. I’ll watch film in other spaces though. But I’m happy to report that the standout piece in the Whitney to me was a short gorgeous video by the interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco, who is Cuban-American and a feminist. She’s been making compelling performative, often body-based and durational work, for many years. She’s often collaborated with Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Her themes have often focused on gender, colonialism and war, and identity.

At the Whitney, she presented Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, her personal, elegiac 2021 video homage to the unknown New Yorkers who died of Covid and are buried in unmarked graves in the public cemetery on Hart Island. It’s a famous pauper’s grave, set up in 1869; prisoners have been tasked to bury the dead. Over a million New Yorkers lie in its soil, some three to a grave. I didn’t know its history or location.

In it, the artist is seen rowing to the island and later releasing flowers in the water for the dead on the island. A drone image shows the cemetary from above, at various angles, and slowly, allowing us as viewers to take in the gravity and somber spectacle of mass lives lost to Covid. Coco Fusco bobs outside its perimeter, a small figure in a big landscape of water and sky. A voiceover, narrated by the poet Pamela Sneed, accompanies the video. In a program note, Coco Fusco explained the genesis of the work: “Feeling defenseless made me want to understand how others had responded to being overcome by invisible forces. I began to research how artists of other eras had visualized plagues and epidemics.”

I found myself drawn back to the video again and again, despite my general inability to watch longer videos in galleries. It was moving, and beautiful, and somber, and it has stayed with me. I thought about it last night. From some corner of memory, I saw the artist rowing in her boat, coming closer.  

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/04/01/whitney-biennial-coco-fusco-hart-island-covid-19

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2022-biennial?section=22#exhibition-feature

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_Fusco

There were some other works I especially liked, and I was happy to see Ellen Gallagher had a piece in the show. Back around 1993 or so, I launched a queerish arts and lit journal, x-x-x fruit, with my ACT UP pal, the artist Vincent Gagliostro, who also did some graphics for Gran Fury. We wrangled a lot of our friends in the arts and writing world to help or contribute. We only put out about four issues, but it was a great time. Ellen was one of the emerging artists we featured. And here she was, with a big Whitney piece. I thought, how fabulous. Like Coco Fusco, she has continued to make great work all these years. Her two big canvas pieces, titled, Ecstastic Draught of Fishes (2022), are terrific.

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I also really appreciated the work of Alejandro ‘Luperca’ Morales, entitled, Juarez Archive (7512 Maravillas Street (2020), which presented his pictures of his hometown on the border, Ciudad Juarez, seen through magnifying keychains. The format made you look close and focus more than a traditional frame. The work is part of the goal of the Whitney Biennial curators, Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin, to show works by artists working on the US borders.

Whenever I go to big shows like a Biennial/e, I write down the names of artists or works I like, then I look them up later to learn more. I tend to be up late, often, looking at art in shows around the world. Instead of a quick Netflix escape, I like to troll museums and read reviews, because I know I’ll never get to most of these shows, and I keep making discoveries of artists whose work I love. It’s not the same as seeing them in the flesh of their canvas or materials, but it excites me nonetheless.

So, I’m sharing some new artists, to me. One is Kay Gasei, who just had a little write up in Art Net, and is very well known in Britain, where he works, and in art circles. I’m still a relative tourist to the serious art world. I love his work. He’s a Zimbabwean-Brit painter, and, clearly, a fashion plate dandy, which also scores points with me. I love some personal style. I’ll include some of his works, below. Check him out and tell me what you think of all this work.

http://www.artnet.com/artists/kay-gasei/

After a little Internet art dive into his work, I stumbled onto an art podcast that I already know I’ll like, Private View, by the UK art critic Maeve Doyle. She does what I’ve fantasized about doing, which is visiting artists in their studios to talk to them about their work. I would visit writers, too. Such fun. I can already tell her podcast will further rob me of sleep after midnight.

Enjoy!