Smashing Windows: Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Intersectional Feminism, and Black Empowerment

Never shy about her political stance, Beyonce openly endorsed candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, making clear her belief that the future is female. Her album Lemonade, which Beyoncé produced the same year and complemented with powerful video content, illustrates her feminist stance through explicitly political, but also personal references.

One of the most memorable scenes from Lemonade is the second song Hold Up.  Here, Beyoncé elegantly steps out of a neoclassical building followed by an overflowing mass of water. Then, she jubilantly leaps onto a street, where she takes a baseball bat away from a child and begins to smash the windows of the cars parked on the side of the street. This unexpected twist of tone departs from the innocent ecstasy evoked in the first scene reminds me of Pipilotti Rist’s 1997 video work Ever is Over All. Here, a woman in a blue dress gleefully walks down a street before,  all of a sudden, starting to smash cars’ windows with a long flower stem.

Left: Still from Rist, “Ever is Over All,” 1997; Right: Still from Beyonce, “Lemonade,” 2016.

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Art World Meets Instagram

Exhibition view of Stephen Shore Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art

In a gallery off to one side in the ongoing (through May 28, 2018) retrospective on the photography of Stephen Shore at the Museum of Modern Art is a row of iPads linked continuously to Shore’s ever-changing Instagram account. While Shore’s work has always strived to replicate quotidian experiences, it feels strange to scroll through the account while surrounded by his print-on-demand books of the same images, but also entirely natural. MoMA presents these digitally published and ‘hearted’ works as just another facet of the artist’s oeuvre, even including one of his old and cracked iPhones alongside his beloved Mick-a-Matic camera. While Shore’s use of Instagram feels like the 21st century version of the kinds of pictures he has been making through his entire career, other artists have taken up Instagram in ways that are challenging the art world at large.

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An Interview with Hu Xiangqian

Hu Xiangqian with photographic still from “The Sun” (2008) for the fall Duke House Exhibition “chin(A)frica: an interface” October 2017 – Feburary 2018

In early November, IFA MA student Cindy Qi interviewed Hu Xiangqian, whose work is currently exhibited at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU as a part of the fall Duke House Exhibition chin(a)frica: an interface, on view through February 18, 2018. Hu Xiangqian (b. 1983) was born in Leizhou, Guangdong Province and graduated in 2007 from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in New York City. Hu’s artistic practice is grounded in performance and video works featuring an intentional amateurishness and crudeness. Notable exhibitions include the Gwangju Biennial (2014) and the Shanghai Biennial (2016).  A photographic still of his durational performance piece entitled The Sun (2008) hangs in the Institute’s Lecture Hall. The interview was conducted in mandarin Chinese and later translated to English by Cindy Qi.

CQ: Having been in New York for several months now, do you have any discoveries or inspirations you would like to share? Have you decided what kind of work to make during your time here?

来到纽约这几个月你有什么启发或者发现呢？现在有没有构想出想做的作品呢？

HXQ: Yes, I have been preparing to get started in my studio. I live in Brooklyn and in my opinion, it’s a very isolated area that has nothing to do with art, but I like that place. It allows me to distance myself from all that is happening in Manhattan while also having the opportunity to be close to all of it. I really like this feeling of being able to pull away and engage at the same time.

我在我的工作室里准备啊，我现在住的地方比较远，在布鲁克林。 那个地方算是很荒凉的，跟艺术没有什么关系。但是我喜欢那个地方，所以我会在那里做作品。我还挺喜欢这种跟曼哈顿若即若离的感觉。

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Unpacking the Layers of Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined

When visitors step into the Whitney’s first-floor gallery, which currently houses Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined, they risk forgetting that they are standing in a museum. There is a softness to the space that distances it from the rest of the building, its warm lighting and the pink color of the walls evoking a feeling of intimacy that is both inviting and disorienting. A proclamation near the entrance, signed by artist Toyin Ojih Odutola in her role as “Deputy Private Secretary,” alerts viewers that the sixteen arresting works spread throughout the gallery are from the private collections of two aristocratic Nigerian families, the UmuEze Amara and Obafemi, connected through the marriage of the Marquess of UmuEze Amara, TMH Jideofor Emeka, and his husband, Lord Temitope Omodele. With this information, the intimate atmosphere is given context: it feels as if visitors have been transported to a private, family portrait gallery.

Toyin Ojih Odutola. Artist text. To Wander Determined. ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist.

If not for the aforementioned, rather official wall text bearing the families’ crests, viewers would not know that Ojih Odutola’s subjects were of such prestigious social standing. Even armed with this knowledge, they are confronted with an incomplete narrative, left to question the identities of the elaborately fashioned figures in each portrait. No names are provided, nor are there any indications of the lineage from which each subject descends. What remains in their absence is a vague understanding that the subjects are related, as well as a desire to know how. Perhaps in other circumstances it would not occur to visitors to scrutinize the figures presented to them, but the context both provided and omitted by the artist’s proclamation incites a curiosity that may never fully be satisfied. This is the challenge that Ojih Odutola sets forth for her audience.

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The Usable Past

Black Mass, 1991, Annette Lemieux (1957-). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau © Annette Lemieux

The Usable Past: “The concept that a self-conscious examination of historical figures, moments, and symbols can shape current and future political formation.”[1]

This is how the Whitney defines the title of one of five galleries in their ongoing permanent collection exhibition An Incomplete History of Protest. The works in the gallery present memory and nostalgia as both powerful and yet often insufficient vehicles to re-experience the past. Sharing tropes of obfuscation and anonymity, the works materialize the incomplete nature of memory and documentation.

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960), Untitled (Speech/Crowd) #2, 2000. Screenprint ink, coal dust, oil stick, ink, graphite, and glue on paper, 40 x 54 in. (101.6 x 137.2 cm)

Annette Lemieux’s painting Black Mass (1991), in which she replaces the protest signs in a civil rights march with black, empty squares, hangs across the room from Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (Speech/Crowd) #2, a photograph of the Million Man March which Ligon has blurred and layered with coal dust. These works recall acts of censorship and evoke the fading hope of social change in a world where battles for civil rights must be repeatedly fought. However, the works in the exhibition that truly express the concept of “the usable past” are those which feature the museum as their main subject.

Lining the walls of the museum’s new Meatpacking building, a multiplicity of letters of protest written to the Whitney by artists and organizations related to the institution emerge from the Whitney’s archives. In a letter from 1971 addressed to former director John I.H. Baur, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition announced their opposition to the 1971 exhibition Black Artists in America and declared their plans to demonstrate on the museum’s premises. Their initial discontent stemmed from the Whitney’s seemingly empty promise to hire and consult with black art leaders for the curating of the show. The BECC’s correspondence with the Whitney attests to the fact that the institution has dealt with issues surrounding the cultural agency of marginalized groups in an art context. Alongside this letter, dozens of other requests from artists implore the museum to remove their work as acts of protest or solidarity during moments of political unrest, and urge the museum to take a stance on current socio-political debates.

The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Black Artist’s Correspondence, 1969-1971. Eight sheets. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives

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A Collection Out of Context?: Archer M. Huntington’s Hispanic Society of America in Spain

After drawing immense summer crowds, the most recent traveling exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Tesoros from the Hispanic Society of America, Visions of the Hispanic World, closed its doors. The show truly was a museum within a museum – a mise en abîme of the New York City-based Hispanic Society of America within the galleries of the Spanish Royal Collection. The Hispanic Society normally finds its home on the Audubon Terrace at the northwest corner of 155th Street and Broadway, but after the museum closed in January to undergo significant renovations, its jewels were packed and shipped for the journey to Spain, and from there around the world. For some of these objects this was a return visit, a long-awaited homecoming after nearly a century of American residence. For many others, the Tesoros show constituted their maiden voyage to the Iberian Peninsula. During my visit in August, the vibrant and nuanced nature of this exhibition presented many topics worthy of reflection.

The Hispanic Society is the pipe dream of Archer Milton Huntington – a man who loved art, who adored museums, and whose heart, much like mine, rested somewhere between Spain and New York. Furthermore, it was crafted by Mr. Huntington: he did not merely open his wallet to finance the collection, he also played an active role in the construction of his museum and the selection of the art that would fill it. The evolution of his collection has been dependent on his legacy and the explicit wishes that he expressed through his interpersonal communication and diary entries during his lifetime.

Rather than treasuring only a few masterpieces, Huntington spent his fortune assembling a diverse variety of objects ranging across periods and media – paintings, sculptures, ceramics, glassware, prints, drawings, and more. His aims are best expressed by Mr. Huntington himself, in a claim made in his diaries that was rewritten on the wall of the third floor gallery of the Jeronimos building of the Prado show:

The museum… it must condense the soul of Spain into meanings, through works of the hand and spirit… I am collecting with a purpose and you know that purpose quite well… I wish to know Spain as Spain and so express her – in a museum. It is about all I can do. If I can make a poem of a museum it will be easy to read.

The exhibition at the Prado beautifully translates that very poem Mr. Huntington aspired to create. A walk through the galleries encourages visitors to see, to look, to wonder alongside Huntington.

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Housewife: Jennifer Rubell’s Conceptual History of the Modern Woman

Jennifer Rubell’s Housewife, an installation at the Sargent’s Daughters gallery on the Lower East Side, attempts a conceptual history of modern femininity. In the simplest terms, the show is a meditation on the seeming universality of white, middle-class femininity. However, to critique Rubell’s stark visual vocabulary in this way fails to acknowledge that her work nevertheless touches a certain comprehensive psychological experience, which is both explicit and all-inclusive. From the 1950s housewife to contemporary dating and the difficulties of being a modern woman in the workforce, Rubell’s four pieces ­­– Pedestal, Vessel, Partition Paintings, and Threshold ­– visualize the precarious nature of a femininity defined and circumscribed by others.

Jennifer Rubell, Pedestal, 2017. Photo courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters.
Jennifer Rubell, Pedestal, 2017. Photo courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters.

Three steps into the gallery space and the viewer is confronted by Pedestal, an industrial-quality vacuum cleaner placed next to a polished pair of red patent-leather heels fitted atop a heavy square platform. The glaring absence of the female form (the immediate assumption being that the empty space is, in fact, female), registers instantaneously. The effect is an invitation for the viewer to come closer, to slip on the heels, to grip the vacuum and fill that empty space. Although no apron or string of pearls is provided, the associations Rubell creates resonate with clarity. The piece references the commodified feminine ideal of the 1950s housewife who vacuums in her heels, has a hot meal on the table by six pm, and is ready for romance every night. However, because Rubell empties out that visual space, the viewer subconsciously fills it with her own form, which in return highlights the falsity and psychological dangers inherent in such mediating feminine perfection.

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Sondra Perry: Resident Evil

Resident Evil, Sondra Perry’s first solo institutional exhibition, fills the second-floor gallery of The Kitchen with a handful of video works made in the past year. Each is “immersive” in one way or another, deploying tactics of spatial activation and coercive, embodied viewing to force visitors into visceral engagement with the screens and their troubling content. These strategies of discord and discomfort mirror the works themselves, which center themes of police brutality and other racialized violence, examining how images and narratives of these issues circulate, distort, and abstract in the digital realm.

Installation view of Resident Evil at the Kitchen, New York, 2016. All works courtesy the artist. Photos by Jason Mandella.
Installation view of Resident Evil at the Kitchen, New York, 2016. All works courtesy of the artist. Photos by Jason Mandella.

The first work one encounters in the exhibition is netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr 1.0.3 (2016), set into its own tiny black box. In the video, Perry draws a provocative parallel between the “blue screen of death”—the infamous error screen in Windows operating systems—and the “blue wall of silence,” an unwritten oath among police officers not to incriminate one another in cases of excessive force, brutality, or even murder. At one point in the video, footage of Bill Gates and other Microsoft executives dancing on a convention stage is dubbed over with a deadpan, computerized description of the unwritten officer’s code of conduct (perhaps a double entendre with the computer code that later scrolls by). Another passage features images of women killed by police set to the same voice describing the blue error screens in banal terms. Though intentionally ambiguous, the video uses montage to suggest that capitalist systems and their technological agents are intimately connected with, if not responsible for, the violence wrought against black bodies in neoliberal America.

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Cecily Brown at The Drawing Center

Tucked away in SoHo, New York, The Drawing Center is a small museum founded by Martha Beck in 1977, explicitly dedicated to the medium of drawing. For the last few years, the creative minds behind The Drawing Center’s events and exhibitions have been working towards pushing beyond the traditional understanding of the term drawing, and opening it up to various applications and interpretations. Cecily Brown: Rehearsal, organized by the chief curator of the museum, Claire Gilman, is one such exhibition. It calls the viewer to contemplate the medium of drawing; from its materiality to its role in the artistic process of an acclaimed artist, Cecily Brown, which as a result creates a sense of intimacy throughout.

Cecily Brown, Untitled (after Bosch and Boldini), 2015. All photographs by the author.
Cecily Brown, Untitled (after Bosch and Boldini), 2015. All photographs by the author.

Brown is a British artist known for her tactual paintings, for which she draws influence ranging from old masters to the expressionism of the 50s. Drawing is a lesser known part of Brown’s practice and has not been seen before in the scale and context of a solo museum exhibition. The works on display inform on Brown’s practice by giving the viewer the opportunity to observe how the artist visits existing drawings again and again, each time unpacking something new until, as she notes, she understands it completely. In a talk that took place in the museum, Brown discussed how her drawings are fairly independent of her painting practice, serving a purpose of their own. The works in Cecily Brown: Rehearsal were selected, among other reasons, so as to accentuate this special role in her overall practice.

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The James Gallery: The House of Dust

CUNY’s James Gallery at The Center for the Humanities ushers in the fall semester with an exhibition based on Alison Knowles’s 1967 conceptual work The House of Dust. The show seeks to encompass the many limbed and generative nature of Knowles’s artwork by showing how it continues to stimulate other artists to explore its themes of translation, permutation, intentionality and inclusivity, bringing to light the work’s enduring relevance.

The House of Dust is a computer generated poem written in the programming language FORTRAN, which generates verses by randomly combining elements from four lists pre-determined by Knowles: each verse consists of four components including, and always beginning with, “a house of,” followed by a location, then a material, and finally a category of inhabitants. The poem repeats after 400 verses. In 1969, based on one of the verses, “A HOUSE OF PLASTIC/ IN A METROPOLIS/ USING NATURAL LIGHT/ INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE” Knowles constructed an actual “house” in Chelsea. The house was moved to Burbank, California when she took a teaching position at CalArts in 1970. Knowles also orchestrated several other projects using computer programs, involving students and community members with her house as the nexus.

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