Rigo 23. Autonomous InterGalactic Planetarium, 2009-12; installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Pedro Pica Piedra, Beto, Santiago Marcial, Monserrat Blanco, Gabriela, Marcos Sanchez, Domingo Santiz Ruiz, Mia Rollow, Paulina, Adrian Quiroz, Manuel Hidalgo, Ivan Pablo Soria, Pablo Milan, Miguel Hidalgo, Caleb Duarte, Jacobo Lagos, Erwin, Salvador. Photo: Scott Groller.

The Portuguese artist Ricardo Gouveia, or Rigo 23, might be best known for his series of larger-than-life, one-way-sign-inspired murals, painted on buildings across San Francisco, where the artist has lived since the 1980s. For the better part of the last decade, however, Rigo 23 has produced a series of projects with underserved and underrepresented communities. The latest of these, Programa Espacial Autónomo InterGalactico (Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program), has just docked at REDCAT, CalArt’s theater and gallery space in downtown Los Angeles.

The culmination of more than three years of coordination and labor by Rigo 23 and artisans from Chiapas, Mexico, as well as members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Programa Espacial represents a convergence of multiple worlds.¹ When Rigo 23 met with the members of the Good Government Junta of Morelia, Chiapas, to propose a collaborative art project between himself and artists from the region, he asked, “What would happen if they got an invitation to attend an intergalactic meeting somewhere other than the Milky Way; how would they travel?”² The junta members accepted this proposal but made it clear that the project was not a priority and would only be accomplished if he won the support of a local artist.

Because Programa Espacial is a collaborative project between an artist and various indigenous communities, and because those communities are under the jurisdiction of the EZLN, the exhibit brings up questions of commodification and appropriation, but these questions seem to have been of lesser interest to Rigo 23 than the question of positionality. The spiraling path a viewer takes through the exhibit evokes (within the limits of California’s fire code) the curve of a snail’s shell, creating interplay between a viewer’s sense of being sympathetically “inside” the EZLN looking out, or an outsider looking in.³

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Phyllida Barlow, untitled: 21 arches, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The majority of her sculptures are towering structures that dwarf the spectator as if one were standing in a forest. Barlow dilutes the nature of her mundane media by her exquisite use of color, whether included by virtue of fabric, electrical tape or spray paint. For siege, Barlow exhibits her characteristically massive structures as similar to pieces I have seen previously, such as untitled: 21 arches (2012) and untitled: crushed boxes (2012). In pieces such as untitled: balcony (2012) and untitled: broken stage (2012) however, she adds more of a tangible architectural thread that differ slightly from her conceptual-based sculptures. Her work mimics the urban environment in both materiality and the nature of the imposing structures that swallow – or impede upon – the viewer.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: crushed boxes, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

With pieces such as untitled: crushed boxes (2012) Barlow depicts weight through the manner in which her boxes pile upon a fabric cushion, thin or bulging in parts, depicting the sensation of being crushed. Her work maneuvers within a certain corporeal consciousness similar to the work of Eva Hesse or Robert Morris in which the weight – or the interior – of the body is made manifest through the use of material. With aspects of both Arte Povera and Minimalism, Barlow’s work is sensational in its rawness, and though I rather missed the space at Hauser & Wirth London that added an irreplaceable dimension to her work, Barlow’s structures are not to be missed in the immense setting of the New Museum’s spaces.

On the third floor, Tacita Dean’s (b. 1965, England) exhibition entitled Five Americans explores the theme of preservation and memoriam through filmmaking as it intersects with various artistic mediums such as painting, writing and dance. By way of 16mm films, Dean features five influential American artists spanning several generations: Julie Mehretu, Cy Twombly, Leo Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg and Merce Cunningham. Works such as Edwin Parker (2011) and Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011) follow artists Cy Twombly and Claes Oldenburg respectively in their studios, spaces that despite the aura attached to these renowned artists by name are places of quotidian banality of comings and goings.

Tacita Dean, Manhattan Mouse Museum, 2011, 16mm film, color, optical sound, 16 min, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London

There is an aspect of prescience in Dean’s works, as each are bound by a common thematic thread that deals with the notion of expiration. For instance in The Line of Fate (2011), Dean sits with art historian Leo Steinberg as he finishes his last book about Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo before his death months later, a fact unknown at the time when making the film. This is a similar case with Edwin Parker in which Dean films Cy Twombly in his studio amongst what would be his final artworks during his last months alive. Even in her other works albeit more subtle, the theme of preservation becomes contingent upon the cognitive artistic process that she poignantly captures.

The Parade presented by Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978, Sweden) with music by Hans Berg (b. 1978, Sweden) is found in the museum’s next-door space ‘Studio 231’. In an eccentric field of dazzling puppetry, a parade it is. A snaking trail made up of hundreds of exotic and fictitious birds scatter the floor under spotlights, frozen in mid-preen and warble. Each bird installation – whether sparrow or human-sized – has the craftsmanship of a Julie Taymor theater prop, with each muslin feather painted in an ombré of fanciful hues. Alongside her puppets, five animations are projected on the walls playing to the discordant melodies of Hans Berg’s compositions.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Immediately upon entering the space, the menagerie comes alive with the eerie tinkering of chimes, a soundtrack that gives life to the nightmarish aspect of Djurberg’s mad animals and sinister animations. Her animation videos typically depict women as the central character in an anti-heroic role, often times as victims of absurd cruelty flecked with sexual overtones. Her videos feature handmade puppets both animals and humans, crudely rendered from clay, fabric, string and dolls hair, with lumps, bumps, spidery limbs and clownish faces. The Parade as a body of work exists in a similar abject vein as her various other works, yet in this exhibition she focuses on the avian rituals of flocking, mating and pageantry. Her videos portray explicit aspects of cruelty, betrayal and greed, in which her characters – both animal and human – play out instances of physical and psychological savagery.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Djurberg’s work is brilliant in its manner of transparency. I am taken with the way in which she casts a light on the undesirable or abject aspects of human and animal behavior as the cynosure of her métier. And as usual, Berg’s musical compositions coupled with Djurberg’s claymation videos and theatrical installations presents a captivating mastery that dutifully emanates from their projects time and time again.

Phyllida Barlow’s siege runs through June 24^th, Tacita Dean’s Five Americans runs through July 1^st and The Parade by Nathalie Djurberg with Hans Berg runs through August 26^th. For more information visit the New Museum’s site.

Louise Bourgeois working on Sleep II in Italy, 1967. Photo: Studio Fotografico, Carrara. © The Easton Foundation.

In 2004, two boxes of what have been labelled Bourgeois’ ‘psychoanalytical writings’ were discovered by her assistant in her Chelsea home, and a further two in 2010. These thousands of loose-leaf sheets of paper recorded Bourgeois’ inner conflicts, dream recordings and self-probing analysis, commencing during the period when the artist began undergoing intense psychoanalysis at the hands of Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a follower of Sigmund Freud.

Louise Bourgeois, loose sheet, 13 September 1957, 26.7 x 20.3 cm. LB-0219, Louise Bourgeois Archive, New York. © The Easton Foundation.

With these in hand, curator Phillip Laratt-Smith published a volume of Bourgeois’ writings, and conceived the exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed. Currently tucked away in residential North London, the works could not have found a more suitable site than The Freud Museum – a home firmly entrenched in psychoanalytic history, where both its patriarchal namesake, and his daughter Anna, remained until their deaths.

With Bourgeois’ writings, drawings and sculptures housed throughout Freud’s former possessions and collections, a challenging and quite perilous dialogue is created, laying the groundwork for a very dangerous obsession that may inextricably fuse Bourgeois to Freud.

Louise Bourgeois's bronze Janus Fleuri, 1968, suspended over Freud's couch at The Freud Museum, London. Courtesy The Easton Foundation. Photo: Ollie Harrop. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Hanging above Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, the original brought with him from Vienna, is a work by Bourgeois often referred to as a self portrait of the artist. The bronze sculpture Janus Fleuri is a ambiguous form with connotations of sexuality, metamorphosis, and struggle. Swaying above the place where free association was born, Janus Fleuri looks both to the past and to the future, and as Laratt-Smith has argued, embodies the artist’s Oedipal deadlock -  an unresolvable struggle between Bourgeois, her father and her mother, stalemated by her mother’s death.

Louise Bourgeois, Cell XXIV (Portrait), 2001, steel, stainless steel, glass, wood and fabric, 177.8 x 106.7 x 106.7 cm. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read. Photo: Christopher Burke. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Bourgeois’ work functions as an expression of her psychic unconscious – a way of giving form to anxieties she could not articulate, which she then subsequently analysed in her writings. While Freud focused on ‘the word’ – translating thoughts and dreams into articulations – Bourgeois moved freely between the two. Her writings reveal struggles, at times debilitating, to define herself within the roles of mother, daughter, wife and artist. And works like Cell XXIV (Portrait), embody this struggle. With three heads and three mirrors, Cell XXIV presents a multiplious identity further broken down by its external reflections – the kind of fragmented view of the self that Bourgeois struggled with throughout her life.

But it is this struggle, and her torment, that fueled her work. This Bourgeois understood well. Speaking specifically about Freud, Bourgeois wrote:

‘The truth is that Freud did nothing for artists, or for the artist’s problem, the artist’s torment - to be an artist involves some suffering. That’s why artists repeat themselves – because they have no access to a cure … the need of artists remains unsatisfied, as does their torment.’

While Bourgeois embraced Freudian psychoanalysis, she was aware of its limitations for herself as an artist. Her writings were not an attempt to cure herself or ease her suffering, but were rather used as fuel for the fire. And it is here, with Freud and Bourgeois under the same roof, that we find ourselves immersed in the realm of a very dangerous obsession.

Michel Auder, Cat Stranglers, 2009. Courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran.

I had a lazy Monday afternoon two weeks ago. A friend defended her dissertation and then we all migrated from the Inland Empire to my place, where I tried to show video art to one friend while another, the dissertation defender, slept. The internet connection was slow, and so we never finished watching any one work, but the sleeping friend woke and wandered into the living room while Kenneth Tam’s I no longer worry about shoes being worn inside the house was faltering along. “We’re watching two men do invented yoga-like moves,” I said. “But they didn’t know each other — they met on Craig’s List.”

“If they knew each other, it wouldn’t be video art,” she said. “It would be friends doing Yoga.” This was a joke, but one I thought about, because, off the cuff, I couldn’t name any art I’d seen and liked recently that dealt comfortably and explicitly with the familiar. In most new art that compels me, artist hurl themselves into the unfamiliar.

There’s Leigh Ledare and Michel Auder, whose recent, respective exhibitions at The Box L.A. and Kayne Griffin Corcoran mined the eccentricities of their own biographies. But those exhibitions confront you with an idea of intimacy that’s unsettling because of how confessional it is, and how near it veers toward psychological fiction. In some of Auder’s films, he uses hired actors; for some of Ledare’s photographs, he asked women he found through personal ads to pose and dress him so that he embodies their desires.

Robert Smithson, Ithaca Mirror Trail, 1969.

Then there’s Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at Regen Projects, which is delightful and refreshing, as her work always is, because it’s not at all high concept. Peyton’s portraits, of friends and pop culture icons, are just of people she likes. In her work at Regen, she depicts painter Alex Katz sitting with crossed arms on a couch, and a watery-eyed David Bowie staring  from a 14-inch tall panel. You leave thinking about people’s interior lives, of Peyton’s perception of herself and of others. Does Alex Katz really look as stoic and controlled as figures in his own paintings, or has the artist projected a bit? This question isn’t uninteresting, but it’s not an ambitious one either.

James Lee Byars, The Angel, 1989, 125 glass spheres. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery.

Could art about the familiar ever be really daring?

I came across a description of a work James Lee Byars did in tribute to Robert Smithson recently. The two artists, contemporaries in the New York of the 1960s, would have crossed paths and, I imagine, liked each other, but I don’t know how well they personally knew each other. In 1978, five years after Smithson tragic death in a Texas plane crash, James Lee Byars added up the dimensions of all the mirror Robert Smithson used during his career — Smithson used mirrors a lot, lining them up in the landscape to “displace” the earth perceptually or using them in gallery installation. The sum of all Smithson’s mirrors measure 1000 feet by 1360 feet. Byars then took the giant mirror to Smithson’s gravestone, and took a picture of the stone seen through the mirror. This would be “a mirror displacement of Robert Smithson’s soul.” Then Byars purportedly transported the mirror to the Utah desert — I do not know how, or whether any documents exist to prove this actually happened — and used a crane to shatter it across the desert floor. He collected the shards of mirror, packed them in a box embellished with gold leaf, and sent the box to Nancy Holt, who had been Smithson’s wife, as a token of his sympathy. Perhaps this is the ultimate example of the familiar taken to an extreme. Everything about Byars’ tribute speaks to how well he knew and loved Smithson’s art, yet the project is gapingly ambitious.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: cymbal (cast lead cymbal on stand). Image courtesy of artists.

These interviews will be published in two editions–check back in with us tomorrow for our interview with the artists from Back to the Things Themselves. This post features In the Shadow of the Hand which is on show at Market Gallery and presents new work by Sarah Forrest (SF) and Virginia Hutchison (VH). Reflecting on the process of evaluation and critique in the development of artistic practice, both artists create texts for each other that are cast in lead. The lead is then melted and recast into an object by each artist in response to the text, forming part of a series of exchanges exploring subjective responses to an objective call, and the relationship between object and text.

MC: Could you talk a bit about your individual practice? I saw Sarah’s work in the exhibition P is for Protagonist and couldn’t help but think of that exhibition when I entered gallery 1.

Virginia Hutchison, Excerpts from 7 sunsets (temporary intervention with gold leaf, IOTA public art projects, Inverness, 2010). Image courtesy of artist.

VH: A lot of my work is site or context-specific interventions in the public realm. Quite often it is objective or brief-led. Recent projects have required interaction between the work and people, and an exchange of skills. What has become more important for me has been the dialogue in the making of the work, for example with people installing the work and having conversations about the space and the work.  Through the conversations, I’ve become interested in the different roles, of whether I am the artist, or they are the artists because they help to make the work come to full cycle. That was what made us decide to collaborate. Both of us were dealing with relationships between viewer, artist, object, audience, and how all these roles shift. I was at the point when I was really quite keen to just reflect on all the work that I was doing.

SF: My practice is much more gallery-based and I do creative writing with texts published independently of the visual work. I was in an exhibition at Transmission Gallery and my starting point for my work was the voices of objects. In the run-up to the exhibition, I was undertaking a lot of research on the voices of objects and I became so lost in theory that I almost lost myself. The work I presented, Part 1: for the voice, was a white sculpture narrating with a pair of headphones. Everything had gone white, and it was about a voice that was missing. By that point, I had a desire to move away from intellectualizing, come back to a much more subjective space, and find different ways to talk about a creative practice. That was when we began speaking about evaluation and critique, in relation to the art object. I am interested in creative writing as a response to a visual experience and I think that’s when our conversation started.

Sarah Forrest, Part 1: for the voice, (2010), installation with a framed text, a monitor playing a video, a white sculpture made of plaster, paper, wire mesh and gloss paint which had headphones emitting a female voice attached to it. Duration 10.23 minutes. Exhibited in Days, a three-person show at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Image courtesy of artist.

VH: I haven’t done a lot of creative writing myself but what I like is how it made me think differently about the projects I was doing. I thought that it was important to find a way to present a narrative of the conversations I was having. When we started off, I thought it was going to be very linear, when we had text, object, text, object, and one would follow one from the other. In reality, when responding to Sarah’s text, I was thinking of my text, and I was also thinking of what object she might be making in response. So many things started to feed in, including our conversations.

SF: We started off with texts that each of us had written or appropriated that were cast into lead letters in Edinburgh. We would respond to each other’s text with an object.  The size and weight of the object was dictated by the size and weight of the texts. It was a really simple relationship between text and an object, and a playful way to work and structure a collaboration. There was a point when I was making a symbol that was in response to the the the and I was asking for advice. We spoke about ideas of repetition and rhythm, the the the being like a stutter almost, and talked about the idea of making an object like a stutter. We began to collaborate in the making of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: the the the (typeset text on paper). Image courtesy of artists.

VH: Even in the making of the work, we had to share our skills quite a lot. What I found healthy yet scary was letting go of ownership of something, as well as authorship. Although I know what texts I wrote and what objects I made, because Sarah has a text that sits with my object  – is it mine or her’s? Is it somebody else’s?

MC: I was interested in the decisions that both of you had decided to take, in relation to what you considered physical and immaterial within the exhibition space. The materiality of the objects could be very seductive just by looking at it. Yet these vanish into a two-dimensional screen. I personally found the texts very three-dimensional. One of the texts had instructions for a person to inhale and exhale and it made me feel my own body.

VH: From the standpoint of public art that I work in, issues of permanence are things I am always considering. What is permanent or temporary? It could be a day or 20 years. I like the swopping round, of the text becoming the object, and the object becoming quite two-dimensional. Once an object disappears, it has a different narrative.

SF: What is it that sticks with you when you’ve left the exhibition? What is the echo of the object and how do you narrativize that memory of the object?

MC: I think that because I’m unable to move around an object, it changes how my narrative of an experience is made. When the object is presented on a screen, perhaps it changes the way you remember it?

VH: I think definitely. Although it is projected on a lead screen, almost as the last remaining object…

SF: … and the size of the screen relates to the weight of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand (gallery image). Image courtesy of artists.

MC: An objective framework has a determined set of values. In shifting from objective to subjective evaluation, are there still values? For example, when you were talking about the conversations that had occurred, are you suggesting that for any kind of critique, there has to be a relationship between two people, or an emotional involvement?

SF: I think it’s a part of communication. For something to have value, there has to be a sharing of what is important and some kind of agreement on what things are important, which is what has happened in this whole process.

VH: I think you’re always going to have a relationship with somebody whom you’re critiquing or evaluating a piece of work. If it’s a media-driven thing then there is definitely a separation. I think that’s the problem – there is a separation when you are not encountering somebody on a face-to-face, real time situation. When you think about the context of making work, it might reveal a lot about the people that create it and how they have conversation with folk. Are they dominant in a conversation and does it reflect in their work? Does their work allow people to put their own selves into it in some way?

SF: That was always a concern with the project because it’s a call-and-response between us. We had to think about how it is interesting to someone else and not just about our personal relationship. The installation became important as a space where you can read and you can sit. I was quite aware of not becoming quite closed and this feels like an experimental exhibition. It’s the first time I’ve collaborated on an exhibition and the work, when presented, still feels very active. As soon as you present something as an exhibition it takes on a position, as a thing in the world.

David Shrigley, How are you feeling today? (2012), billboard, 25 x 75 feet, courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery

Running alongside Tenth Avenue for approximately twenty blocks in Chelsea, The High Line has become a household term amongst Manhattanites since 2009 when it first became accessible as a public park. Since then – and especially within the last year – The High Line has ignited widespread murmur relating to its breathtaking architecture, imaginative urban integration and more recently its emergence as the local gallery district’s – if not New York’s – most imaginative sites for exhibiting contemporary art.  Opening April 19^th was The High Line’s first ever group exhibition entitled Lilliput which included the works of Oliver Laric, Alessandro Pessoli, Tomoaki Suzuki, Francis Upritchard, Erika Verzutti and Allyson Vieira. Alongside this exhibition, Uri Aran’s sound installation opened on the same day only then to be followed by Alison Knowles’ public performance Make a Salad on the 22^nd. David Shrigley’s How are you feeling? (2012), presented as a giant billboard over West 18^th Street, and Sturtevant’s Warhol Empire State (2012), a video projection that starts at dusk of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) video, debuted earlier in the month to launch the Friends of the High Line’s 2012 Spring Art Program and High Line Commissions program for public art. The openings this month, surpassing the previous years in numbers of art pieces alone, has proven that this year’s arts program is making a vigorous effort to present art to the public with a bang.

Sturtevant, Warhol Empire State (2012), video projection, image courtesy of the artist

The High Line as we know it today exists upon the skeleton of a freight line that once was the manifestation of a public-private project called the West Side Improvement during the 1930s. However, that was the date that the freight lines were lofted 30 feet above street level after having existed as street-level railroad tracks some odd eighty years prior. During this time, The City and State of New York agreed to take on this massive industrial project due to the fact that Tenth Avenue became known as Death Avenue, a nickname indicative of the innumerable deaths caused between street traffic and the railroad. This was no small project, not least of all financially as it was quoted to be a $150 million dollar expenditure then, and that’s more than $2 billion dollars today.

Building the high line, November 20th 1932. Image courtesy of www.thehighline.org

Trains of food freight and both manufactured and raw goods ran until 1980 at which point the ensuing minimization of the railroad became obsolete due to redundancy and the upsurge of trucking transport. In the face of threatening demolition, Friends of the High Line was established in 1999 as a non-profit by Joshua David and Robert Hammond to preserve the historical lineage and neighborhood aura that the High Line had solidified. An all-star architectural and landscape design team made up of James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (along with a large selection of horticulturists, gardeners, etc) was chosen in 2004 and by June 9^th 2009 the first section (Gansevoort Street to West 20^th Street) of The High Line as a public park opens, with the second section (West 20^th Street to West 30^th Street) to follow in 2011.

Allyson Vieira, Construction (Rampart) (2010), Bronze, 14 x 14 x 18.5 inches, courtesy of Laurel Gitlen Gallery, New York

Since 2009, The High Line has become known as a trendy jaunt-spot in Chelsea where the ultimate people-watching activities and pleasure strolling can be had. This year the public will see the launch of a program called High Line Commissions with the opening of the first ever group exhibition Lilliput to be held on The High Line. This exhibition will present the works of six artists working internationally with, as the title would suggest, small sculptures placed along The High Line’s pathway. This title is taken from Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels in which the imaginary country of Lilliput is home to gnome-sized people no bigger than six inches. The various diminutive sculptures are set within the various niches of landscape along the park walk and offer a sort of Easter-egg hunt of sorts, inviting the public to uncover the various works of art.

Pieces such as Allyson Vieira’s Construction (Rampart) (2012) respond to the local vegetation and ecology of the area with her pyramid of bronze cast paper cups that fill with rain or fallen leaves from the garden bed above. Other works such as The Seduction (2012) by Francis Upritchard are less so adapted for the localized flora but speak to the Lilliputian theme of fairyland idols with two miniature-sized apes frozen in an explorative embrace. Also apart of this spring’s High Line Commissions is Uri Aran’s sound installation Untitled (Good & Bad) (2012) provides a spoken list of arbitrarily categorized animals into “good” or “bad” that billows from gardens below. Coming in May, a much anticipated installation of Thomas Houseago’s sculpture Lying Figure will be on view under The Standard.

Francis Upritchard, The Seduction (2012), Bronze, 18 x 9 x 8 inches, Courtesy of Kate MacGarry, London

Friends of the High Line have initiated other programs such as the High Line Performances, High Line Billboard and High Line Channel that serve as varying avenues whereby art mediums can be exhibited. Opening on April 5^th, David Shrigley’s 25-by-75 foot billboard How are you feeling? presents a short dialogue in black and white speech bubbles, hovering over a parking lot at West 18^th Street. Shrigley’s dry and melancholy humor severs the socially fabricated fluff in monotonous conversation and pinpoints exactly what we all may be feeling but are too nervous to say: “I’m feeling very unstable and insecure […] I am in a bit of a rut creatively as well”.

This year’s itinerary for the High Line Performances will include performances by three female artists (Alison Knowles, Channa Horwitz and Simone Forti) on and around the High Line, the first of which was preformed last Sunday April 22^nd by Alison Knowles’ Fluxus score Make a Salad. Originally performed in Baltimore, Maryland in 1962 has been performed several times around the world and includes the preparation of a salad for a large group of people. Launching the High Line Performances program, Knowles’ piece included the preparation of locally sourced salad ingredients tossed from the upper level to the lower level of the walkway and then served to the public. Though it was a rather cold and rainy day, otherwise unpleasant to be frolicking out of doors to eat a salad, the performance was lively and ignited a grouping of people of all ages in an appropriately themed Earth Day get-together.

Alison Knowles, Make a Salad (1962–present), Image: Tate Modern, London (2008)

I have to applaud the work and organizational efforts of the Friends of the High Line for their inception of the public art programs, and not to mention their unmentioned but as equally remarkable endeavors in the realms of music and food. The High Line as a public park has provided the support for not only a exceptional pleasure destination, but also a cutting-edge platform for contemporary art. I am always fascinated with the seemingly pervasive dialogue relating to the inaccessibility of contemporary art and thus I have always been an advocate for the commissioning of public art. Public art, as inconspicuous or ostentatious it may be, has the power to engage a public (a cross section in a vast demographic) who may not otherwise seek out an interactive relationship with art. Pieces such as the ones mentioned above all own that quality of engagement: the characteristic of calling forth a questioning, a reflection or even a happenstance double take, and sometimes that’s all an art piece needs to fulfill its role in the social sphere.

Please visit  www.thehighline.org/art for a schedule of past, current and upcoming exhibitions and performances on The High Line and additional information on artists. Please visit the site for further information regarding The High Line’s events, public programs, memberships and history.

James Lee Byars, "La figura de la pregunta," 1986.

Unless you really take Lent seriously, and I don’t know many Protestants who do, Easter is a quick event. It’s especially so if you consider all it encompasses: betrayal on Thursday, death on Friday, mourning on Saturday, new life on Sunday. To condense all this into one weekend feels very Christian. We’re fixated on efficiency and the finite. The world is 6,000 years old and the rapture will probably come soon.

The Easter service I attended this April started at 6:30, but should have started earlier. “Pretend it’s still dark out,” said the pastor before asking the music leader to light the logs in the fire pit. “Someone more coordinated should do this,” said the music minister, passing the matches on to a young man in a windbreaker. It was an outdoor service, held in the backyard of a Presbyterian cathedral on Wilshire Boulevard, and they must have known not many would come out so early, because the nomadic, participatory itinerary would have been unwieldy with many more. We’d progress from one station to another, starting at a fire pit like the one the disciple Peter must have sat at when he infamously denied the newly condemned Christ: “I don’t know him.” In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s version, Mary Magdalene, the prostitute Jesus mentored, calls him out: “Peter, don’t you see what you have done, you’ve gone and cut him dead?” “I had to do it, don’t you see,” Peter replies, his singing voice whiny and fearful, “or else they’d come for me.”

Our fire pit must have already burned out all traces of denial, because we used it to light the big Paschal candle (“So much wax,” said the girl next to me), a stand-in for Christ as light of the world. Then, from the Paschal candle, we lit little candles for each of us to hold. We proceeded over to a wooden cross leaning against the easternmost fence. Someone had thought to wrap fishing wire around this cross, and we took turns sticking lilies through the wire after the gospel reading. Some of us tried to slide flowers through with candles still in hand, and hot wax dripped on our fingers.

We moved finally to the baptismal station, where more gospel was read and the Paschal candle officially baptized, bottom down so as not to put out the light of the world. Then we all baptized our small candles in the same manner, and put holy water on each other’s foreheads, saying “may you have new life” while making the sign of the cross with our fingers. A few of these rituals had roots in something traditional; others were likely invented that morning.

James Lee Byars taking questions on TV in Brussells, 1969.

The James Lee Byars exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Hollywood opened on Easter, which seems appropriate. Byars, a nomadic artist who lived in L.A., Germany, Japan, Egypt, and elsewhere understood sacredness as powerful. During Lent in1995, two years before his death, he installed The White Mass in the Church of St. Peter in Cologne. It consisted of a white ring right in the middle of the altar and then four marble pillars with signs inscribed on them: Q.R., I.P., O.Q., Q.D. Each set of letters stood in for a tenet of Byars’ Philosophy of Questioning, a belief system that really did just center on the conviction that questions — not answers — were all we humans had to push us onward. Q.R. meant “The Figure of the Question is in the Room” while O.Q. referred to “The Figure of the One Question.” No one could enter the installation unless they were participating in the mass.

James Lee Byars, "The Chair for the Philosophy of Question," 1996. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

At Overduin and Kite, a collection of marble “books” shaped like sun and stars and encased in glass are like relics from some tasteful, medieval cult. In the adjoining room, a gold nail hammered into the wall recalls the crucifixion, and the Chair of the Philosophy of Questioning is installed inside a red silk tent. It’s not clear what one would do if sitting in that ornate chair; I suppose one would preside over the question-asking of anyone who ventured into the tent. “Basically I try to solve essential questions with questions,” Byars once said. But that makes his questioning feel particularly ritualistic; he’s living out his religion by refusing to ever answer.

Zhan Wang, My Personal Universe, Video still, 2012. Image courtesy of UCCA, Beijing.

In The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss made a case for “the intrinsic value of a small-scale model” of art, legitimising the art of the miniature because it “compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions”. The miniature or the microcosmic representation is, as Lévi-Strauss rationalised, a schematic reduction permitting immediate intelligibility, because it essentially constitutes a bona fide experience between viewer and work on a metaphorical level.

Zhan Wang, 2012, My Personal Universe, Installation and Video View. Photo: Courtesy of UCCA, Beijing.

My Personal Universe (2011-12) at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing was Chinese conceptual sculptor Zhan Wang’s endeavour to do just that, in a re-imagination of the first millisecond of the universe’s genesis to its present evolved state, articulating this momentous event in an exhibition through an artistic process whose scale seemed to mirror its colossal significance. As the dominant scientific explanation for the origin of the universe, the Big Bang theory hypothesises that all matter and energy existed in an infinitely small point of infinite density, and in an inexplicable moment, began to expand outward continuously, forming the vast cosmos as we know today. Drawn to the concept of initial states of being, Zhan sought to evoke the earliest moments of our universe through a carefully planned explosion of a boulder in China’s mountainous Shandong province, recording the blast and its aftermath in a two-minute film capturing the event in extreme slow motion. Collecting all 7000 fragments of pulverised rock, Zhan made stainless steel replicas of each one, suspending them in the exact formation in which they landed after exploding.

Zhan Wang, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, image courtesy of STPI.

Zhan’s Universe (2012) at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute is materially and thematically fashioned after My Personal Universe, employing – in a vastly scaled-down version – similar artistic processes and reiterations of the physical dimensions of shattered rocks. Lacking the flashy pizzazz of its predecessor and constrained by certain spatial parameters, the mode of production and the materials differ in this show; rocks were shattered with a sledgehammer instead of a dynamite, and later re-assembled as aluminium-coated replicas on paper slabs and on highly polished mirrors. The original rock fragments were pounded by hand into fine sediment and mixed with cotton pulp to produce a solid paper base; the resulting effect is one which reveals the natural mineral pigments of clay, slate and granite.

Zhan Wang, 小宇宙 My Universe 27, 2012 © Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

In both iterations, Zhan’s works encapsulate energy in its basest, most raw form at the moment it is discharged, serving as the genesis metaphor for the conceptualisation of art: the primordial, choatic sea of colliding ideas on which artistic process and practice are established. Universe is not a crystalline model of time or one that demands a fixed vision of scientific history; it is rather, focused on an infinitesimal moment that has no witnesses but about which countless speculations have abounded. Zhan’s works are also built on a premise that is inherently contradictory: he destroys only to (re)create; the resulting assembly of rock fragments are near-negligible visual cues demonstrating an outcome of a significant event – the cosmos that we understand today – to the audience. However, it is the scientifically unrecorded events – the existing theoretical conjecture surrounding the details of the universe’s formation – that force us to delve deep into the universe of our own imagination.

To some extent, the resulting effect of the Universe series is one that seems to casually pitch the presumptuous confidence of scientific authority against the deep uncertainty and unknown variables yet existing in the vastness of space – that yet lies beyond humanity’s comprehension. If Universe then, strives to unhinge the rote dependence on scientific observations and hypotheses for explaining natural phenomena, its subtle emphasis on creating a framework which allows ambiguity is a seductive idea because it leaves the mysterious where it needs to remain: in an inscrutable realm of wonder and reverence.

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Conceptual Sculptor Zhan Wang (b.1962, Beijing,China), graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture) from The Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries across the world including the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Saatchi Gallery, London; Kunst Museum, Bern; MoriArt Museum, Tokyo and the Asia Society Museum, New York.

Universe will be on show at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute until 28 April 2012.

Nina Katchadourian, "Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #18-19," 2011. C-print. Edition of 8. Diptych: 7.157 x 6 inches each.

The thing about traveling on an airplane is that we take for granted how phenomenally absurd it is. There we sit, unfazed, hurdling through space at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal tube, surrounded by complete strangers whom in all likelihood we will never see again. There is also the unspoken airplane etiquette that we all hope the stranger sitting next to us will follow: please don’t talk, don’t move, don’t get up…basically please do everything you can to appear as though you don’t exist. With these restrictions, an airplane in flight is a very difficult place to do anything more than sleep, read, stare out the window or watch movies with only the most watered-down content. Unless you are Nina Katchadourian.

For Seat Assignment, her fifth solo show at Catherine Clark Gallery, Katchadourian culled from a body of work made on more than seventy flights over the past two years. Now, artists reading this might be terrified by having their workspace confined to the miniscule square-footage of an airline seat and the plane’s lavatory. For Katchadourian, it is a pragmatic opportunity to bring her “studio” with her. Using only her camera phone and the materials at hand, she creates everything from improvised classical Flemish self-portraits to miniature composed landscapes and worlds.

Nina Katchadourian. Excerpt from the Extreme Sports series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

As its title suggests, the series Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style uses objects such as inflatable neck pillows, napkins, bits of plastic and whatever else Katchadourian has on hand to make self-portraits in the style of classical Flemish paintings. Window Seat Suprematism references the fundamental geometric forms of the early 20th-century Russian movement. The images in the series, taken of the planes’ wings through the window, create compelling minimalist, geometric compositions that even Malevich could approve of.

Nina Katchadourian, "Meteor," from the Disasters series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

In-flight magazines supply some of the most fruitful material. One work from Landscapes uses black sweater lint to turn a snow-covered mountain into a smoldering volcano. In Disasters, pretzel crumbs become a devastating landslide off mountain road. Black lint makes another appearance, with the addition of other various detritus, in Birds of New Zealand, adorning the heads and bodies of exotic birds and giving them an even more elaborate flare. The strangest thing about these images is how believable the compositions are. While it may be obvious that the pretzels on the road are indeed pretzels and not rocks, or that a bird does not have a cashew shaped appendage on its head in real life, the objects give a genuine moment of pause, plus the feeling that while absurd, it could be real.

Nina Katchadourian, "Wigeon" from the Birds of New Zealand series, 2011. From the Seat Assignment series.

Katchadourian views a situation that most of us find claustrophobic, boring and tedious as a challenge to highlight both the fantastic and mundane aspects of air travel. The sense of humor and improvisational genius that make up Seat Assignment exemplify an artist setting certain parameters for herself and successfully working within them to create work that is both complex and light hearted.

Seat Assignment will be on view at Catherine Clark Gallery until May 26, 2012.

B. Wurtz & Co. at Richard Telles Fine Art, Installation View

Two years ago, I met this guy, an artist from New York who was in L.A. to collaborate with an Indie rocker. I met him the day I was rendezvousing with someone I’d met through Twitter — we both wrote about art-like things, had similar taste, knew some of the same people and kept responding to one another’s tweets. So we thought we should meet in person. The Twitter friend had blogged about this New York artist (the one collaborating with the rocker) once and so the New York artist texted the Twitter friend to say, “Hi, I’m in L.A. Want to meet up?” The Twitter friend thought the New York artist was someone else, someone he knew better, and invited him to breakfast. After he figured out with whom he was breakfasting, and after they’d finished their meal, the Twitter friend, whom I had yet to meet in person, brought the New York artist with him to rendezvous with me. By the end of an afternoon spent gallery hopping in Culver City, the New York artist and I were convinced we’d met before. “Maybe at an opening or a party,” he said. “It’s a really small world we traffic in,” I said, meaning the art world is small. “I know,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”

B. Wurtz & Co. at Richard Telles Fine Art, Installation View

I thought he was right: it is embarrassing to go to a meeting, reading, or opening and recognize half the people there. It impoverishes the world’s bigness and, sometimes, makes my own likes and interests seem about as wide and deep as a cocoon. But sometimes it also feels cozy.

B. Wurtz and Co., the show that’s up now at Richard Telles’ West Hollywood gallery, feels cozy. It’s about B. Wurtz — the New York-based artist who has been working since the 1970s, making delightfully, elegantly underwhelming art out of raw wood, plastic bags, wire hangers, stray socks and the like — and how he resonates with other artists who do or have worked in similar veins. The curator, Matthew Higgs, directs the New York alt space White Columns and chose the show’s title because he liked the title of a 2001 photography show that started at MoMA and traveled to The Getty: Walker Evans & Co. This earlier show delved into resonances between Depression-era documenter Evans, his contemporaries and his successors. Of course, Wurtz is different than Evans, in that he’s less famous and probably less immediately legible, but still, writes Higgs, the “serendipitous correspondences – both formal and psychological” between his work and the work of other artists are worth noting.

B. Wurtz, Untitled, detail, 2012, wood, plastic bags. Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art.

When you walk in, you see plastic bags of staggered heights hung on thin wood poles attached to a wood stand by B. Wurtz. You see a pyramid of cobbled-together cat photographs by Vincent Fecteau on one wall and, on another wall, strips of rubber, locks of hair and paper twisted together by Richard Hawkins cascading down toward a shoe box on the floor. There is a framed collage of coin package wrappers lined up by Gabriel Kuri. Found objects are carefully re-purposed and composed in formally intelligent ways. Nothing even veers toward maximalism; this is minimalist abstraction made out of what you’d find blowing through the streets. It’s easier to appreciate if you’ve seen what minimalist abstraction looks like when it’s highly, expensively fabricated and commanding. This work commands and demands nothing; it’s happy to just exist for those who care to notice.

In an interview B.Wurtz may have conducted with himself (I have yet to confirm this, but the questions were certainly posed by someone particularly familiar with the artist), the interviewer asks where Wurtz made his work for a 1998 show. Wurtz answers, “in my apartment, the roof of my building, my studio, or a close friend’s garden. I saw no reason to go further.”

Alice Shaw. "Gum Print," 2012; archival pigment print, 20.5 x 28.5 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

The profusion of works and materials in Alice Shaw’s Landscape Update at Gallery 16 leaves viewers with the impression of a frenzy. The twenty-six works on view are made from an exhaustive array of media: paintings of oil and dye on linen; sculptures of cast bronze and concrete; photographs, including pigment, Van Dyke brown, and gelatin silver prints; and drawings or hybrid works of charcoal, ink, and gold leaf. Though the artist’s goal of exploring the landscape through various methods and materials is admirable, the effect is less comprehensive than it is schizophrenic. There are moments when Shaw’s depictions of a natural world sullied by human presence do shine, but overall the exhibition could have been improved by the notion that less is more.

Despite the show being weakened by the surfeit of approaches, there are many works that are intriguing and funny. Gum Print (2012) is a close-up, black-and-white photograph of a tree trunk that nearly blocks the view of the wild valley and pine-studded ridge beyond. The proximity of the trunk provides rich details of the rugged bark, showing bits of moss and an old bent nail stuck amongst its crevices; the image is so crisply captured that a viewer can almost feel the rough textures. However, the print is contaminated by a wad of actual chewing gum stuck nonchalantly to the center of the trunk: a rose-pink blot of detritus that undercuts the serenity of the scene. The wad is in a rounded, larval shape that could be an organic part of this natural scene if it weren’t for its man-made color. From an oblique angle, a viewer can see threads of sticky pink residue that stretch from the print to the inner surface of the framing glass—the same way that trodden gum stretches from the urban pavement to one’s shoe. For Shaw, no pristine vista will remain untouched by human carelessness.

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Who’s Bad?, 2012, single-channel video, 10:44 (looped).

Alan and Michael Fleming come to play in their show GAME ON at Chicago’s threewalls gallery. Working as a collaborative team, the identical twin brothers frame their practice within their genetic and fraternal relationship in order to create a variety of thought provoking gestures about similarity and difference, friendship, and the creative potential of games.

Many of the pieces in the show were created during a yearlong separation in which the brothers, while spending 2011 living in different cities – Alan in Brooklyn and Michael in Chicago – used their time apart as a springboard for a series of conceptual projects. Psychic Color Calendars (2011), for example, tests the twins’ long-range telepathic abilities. For each day in January, the Flemings would try to think of the same color, red, blue, yellow, black, or white, and record the results on their respective calendars. Out of thirty-one days, they were successful only three times. The results were predictable, but enjoyable nonetheless in that they reveal the creative options available when success is an impossibility.

Throughout the show, simple instructions, like the rules to a game, create spaces for variation and play. In a series titled Correspondence (2011), the artists mailed each other absurd instructions written on tourist postcards featuring their respective cities. One postcard reads, “Move an object that is bigger than your body.” The object chosen was a dumpster, documented slightly askew in a Polaroid snapshot accompanying the postcard. The instructions are all fairly simple and silly, like the challenges children might pose to one another, testing the bravery and creativity of a surrogate body.

Rock Paper Scissors, 2011, hydrocal, 3" x 36" x 20".

The mail also factors into a piece titled A Sea Shanty (2011), which consists of a six inch cubed cardboard box that the brothers mailed back and forth to each other throughout the year they were apart. Like a long range game of catch, the act of sending and resending the package provided the artists with a simple ritual capable of fortifying their relationship. Fittingly, the box was empty; a true gift in the sense that it was the gesture of sending something and the consideration for one another that was the purpose behind the package. The object itself could act as a substitute visitor when Alan and Michael were unable to make the journey to meet one another, the meaning of the box developing out of a shared sense of longing.

The poignancy of the brothers’ connection is further illustrated in Conjoined Chairs (2011). Here, each artist set out on the same day to purchase a chair at a thrift store in his respective neighborhood. The chairs were then cut in half down the middle and reassembled to create two new chairs that mirror one another. There is something tender about the way the chairs suggest comity within the nature of the brothers’ identities; that half of one is contained within the structure of the other and vice versa. The chairs also serve as an allegory of artistic partnership as the suturing together of ideas.

United again in Brooklyn, where the artists now live, the Flemings created a second body of work for the show utilizing strategies from the 2011 projects. Like Psychic Color Calendars, the video Psychic Color Pour (2012) employs chance and a limited color scheme in a new game of telepathy. In the piece, each brother takes a turn sitting in a chair trying to guess the color of six buckets of paint held above him one at a time by the other brother. Answer correctly and the paint is set aside. Answer incorrectly and the paint comes showering down. Consequence and reward, trust, and just a hint of malice are inserted into the Flemings’ themes of play, collaboration, and impossible expectations.

Installation View.

Physical abilities are also tested and measured. A video piece titled Who’s Bad? (2012) features the artists attempting to perform a dance sequence from Michael Jackson’s music video “Bad” on the same Brooklyn subway platform where Martin Scorsese directed the original. Mimicking the internal process of becoming a trained dancer, Alan, who has studied hip-hop and break dancing for several years, coaches his untrained brother Michael through the series of movements. While Alan moves through the choreography with confidence and obvious skill, Michael appears hesitant and is always just a step behind, revealing the distance between the twins’ physical abilities.

The dance steps in Who’s Bad, like the simple instructions and systems used in projects throughout the show, are similar to the ways in which children’s games rely on rules to create spaces of imagination and play. In the spirit of cooperation, the artists rarely push these spaces to dangerous, destructive, or malicious places. Instead, a sense of camaraderie and friendship pervades the show, offering a catalogue of what is possible between two artists generously open to pursuing each other’s creative impulses.

GAME ON is on view at threewalls in Chicago through April 21, 2012.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, "The Banquet of Cleopatra," 1740s. Courtesy National Gallery of London.

The word stature is one of those that’s meaning and sound do not completely agree. Say “stature,” and it sounds like you mean something serious, like stature is the same as status: “Her stature alone commands attention”; “He was a man of great stature.” But of course, someone could have small, wimpy or weak stature. When writer Judith Thurman reviewed a Cleopatra exhibition the Guggenheim hosted in 2007, she wrote, “There have been other great queens, but none of [Cleopatra's] stature.” Then, in the next paragraph, she wrote, “That stature was petite — aristocratic women of her time were about five feet tall…”

So she was small, maybe even femininely delicate, but still commanding enough to prompt the Romans to inscribe on a stele carrying her depiction, “The queen himself.”

I have been thinking about stature because Michael Heizer, an artist of great stature (who is significantly taller than Cleopatra probably was) known for his earthworks and his secret City in Nevada, is making a work of stature. This work, if you have not heard, will be on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s campus and will involve a rock of great stature — 340 tons — that recently had to be moved from its point of origin in Riverside to L.A. This move, of course, involved street closure and hassle and quite a bit of spectacle. By the time it reached it’s destination, tens of thousands had come out to see the rock, which will ultimately sit behind the museum above a big concrete slot that viewers can descend into.

Night view of Michael Heizer's rock in transit, about to leave the Bixby Knolls neighborhood of Long Beach.

The rock has prompted extraordinary amounts of media coverage, but very little art criticism yet, understandable seeing as the work isn’t quite built. Christopher Knight of the L.A. Times finally did stick his neck out and offer some art critical thoughts on the rock and related fanfare. He’d wanted to dispel some of the rock-associated economic frustration, as the price tag hovers somewhere around $10 million — no taxpayer dollars were spent, LACMA and city officials assured the public as the route wound through the region. After making his money point, Knight wrote, “Besides money, what else draws easily distracted eyeballs toward budding celebrity? Ask Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Sex, in the case of the rock, requires a bit of explanation.” By “budding celebrity,” he meant the 340-ton rock; he referred to the whole transport as “the boy-toy.” He continued,

As a source of public fascination, art’s psycho-sexual position in American life matters. Art has a gender in popular consciousness, and that gender is female. Like it or not, art is presumed to be feminine, not masculine. Under those circumstances, if art in a patriarchal society is to have a prominent public life, femininity just won’t cut it.

His was a sort of vague argument, but the gist was this: if you were to assign gender to artworks, most would be girls. Unfortunately, femininity can’t hold its own out in public, however, which means all artists commissioned to make public work on LACMA’s campus were male: Chris Burden, Robert Irwin, Heizer, James Turrell and perhaps Jeff Koons. He called the boulder “just about as butch as it gets.” But I wonder if that’s true.

Michael Heizer, “Double Negative,” 1969. One of two slots in the Mormon Mesa.

The earthworks artists, their own gender aside, seemed always to be interested in crevices and nuances and indentations and interventions, even if they sometimes acted upon the landscape in  megalomaniacal ways (Heizer blasted out tons and tons of sandstone to make Double Negative, two deep slits in the Nevada desert). In contrast, Chris Burden’s recent sculptures have been interested in “erecting”–erecting cities or lampposts–and Jeff Koons makes aggressive stand alone work that has no interest in crevices. Heizer’s rock, despite it’s stature, has idiosyncrasy. Slated to hover over a deep dip into the ground (albeit a concrete-constructed one), it feels more gentle.

Gail Devers in Athens

Do you remember track star Gail Devers, with her absurdly long nails? I noticed her for the first time in Atlanta, on television during the 1996 Olympics, where she one her third gold. Then, her nails were painted gold to match the medal she had yet to win. Eight years later, in Athens, her nails were blue. That she had those nails at all made her seem smarter than her competitors, like she alone had figured out how to bend norms and regulations to make her body entirely her own. “I run with my feet,” she once said, meaning it didn’t matter what flourishes she had on her hands.

I thought of Devers when I read that Caster Semenya, the 2009 World Champion in the 800 meters race who was hindered from competing in 2010 when huge improvement in her time and her butch appearance made officials and others question her gender, has a new coach, a woman from Mozambique. She will no longer be working with the men who managed her as her career began, when she was often going off with other racers to prove to them her femaleness: ‘”They are doubting me,’ she would explain to her coaches, as she headed off the field toward the lavatory.”

Semenya has long nails, too, or at least she did when writer Ariel Levy tracked her down for a brief moment in 2009, not long after she had been subjected to a series of uncomfortable, publicly debated gender tests. “She wore sandals and track pants and kept her hood up,” said Levy. “She didn’t look like an eighteen-year-old girl, or an eighteen-year-old boy. She looked like something else, something magnificent.”

She looks magnificent in the photo artist Adam McEwan used in one of the fake obituaries he made in 2011, too: her face seems calm and unfazed but her right pointer finger is up, signalling, it seems, that she is number one. It’s perhaps the crudest of the obits by McEwan, who pieces together news articles about people who are actually still living but leads in to them with the words “has died,” then prints his “reports” on a large scale. He completed Semenya’s when the runner was barely 20 and controversy still surrounded her. The lead said, “World Champion middle distance runner whose gender came under intense public scrutiny” and descriptors throughout were painful: “even when young teachers sometimes thought she was a boy because of her liking sports and their company,” “she was considering boycotting the presentation of her metal to protest her treatment. She had to be persuaded…”, “It was unclear if she would have run professionally again.”

McEwan never specifies a cause of death, and it is impossible not to imagine that, had it been real, her death would have been somehow a result of the “intense public scrutiny” and the crassness of officials, especially as Semenya comes from a place where gender deviance is often seen as criminal.

When Levy tracked down Semenya that day in 2009, she told the runner she was writing about her. Semenya wanted to know why:

“Because you’re the champion,” I said.

She snorted and said, “You make me laugh.”

An exhibition in Chinatown right now captures this conflict between performance and personhood in a quiet, compelling way. You walk in to see images of women high jumpers mid-air, their backs arched and their knees parallel to or above their heads, which arch back toward the camera, so that the intense, sometimes pained focus of expressions is unmissable. The images hang on the wall, over string that’s threaded across the room, or suspended inside wooden hoops. Another series of images is domestic: a dog, a cityscape, a bedroom, a bowling alley, another bedroom. Text that accompanies the installation, a collaboration at Young Art between Cara Benedetto and Davida Nemeroff, refers to “a game that wont stop no matter how many tests are changed” and stats that “become important when we number pain.”