Author: ethokar

Tongue & Nails by Annette LePique In Iceberg Projects’ spring show “Tongue and Nail,” artist Tarik Kentouche’s sculptures of Carlo Mollino’s “Gaudi” chair inundated a gallery antechamber with surprising sinew and reaching, deceptively delicate, movement. Kentouche’s sculptures, in all their exoskeletal pleasures, brought to mind the chair-like apparatus at the heart of David Cronenberg’s film Crimes of the Future. In the film, humanity en masse seems to be changing; some can no longer eat food (instead hungering for plastic), feel pain, or have penetrative sex. How we relate to one another and how we relate to our surroundings is initially framed as inextricably, irreversibly alien. We soon align ourselves with one of the story’s protagonists, Saul. Saul is an artist who cannot feel pain and has intense difficulty chewing, swallowing, and digesting food. In order to eat, Saul utilizes a LifeFormWare digestion-assistance chair—a tendon-snapping machine that becomes both a part of his body, tongue and teeth, but remains something other, different than meaty gums and slick esophagus. The LifeFormWare chair and Saul are thrown into a liminal bond where the demarcations of Saul are blurred, the boundaries between his inside and outside merged.         Yet, isn’t that alienation, the sheer strange luck of inhabiting a body, the defining condition of flesh? Isn’t the very fact that flesh degrades, that it’s ephemeral, penetrative and porous, is what makes it possible to form the vocabulary of one’s existence?           Curated by John Neff and Daniel Berger, “Tongue and Nail” embraces the permeability between the horrors and sublime experiences of occupying a body, those sensations frequently being one and the same—the sensations that Cronenberg explores in his films. Taking the tongue as their touchstone from a viewing of Kate Bawden’s video piece Tongue Tie (2022) (alongside Kentouche’s sculptures), Neff and Berger assembled a cadre of artists—including Doron Langberg, Le Hien Minh, Jeff Prokash, David Sprecher, Tom of Finland, and Maggie Wong—whose work both expands and contracts notions of what a tongue is, to explore what it means to live within, to move within, to be a person within flesh.         Bawden’s Tongue Tie, a one-minute video piece, is one of the show’s catalysts. The work is projected on the gallery’s back wall, easily the first piece to catch one’s eye upon entering the exhibition. The video opens on a close up shot of a tongue. The tongue, bound by vertical and horizontal strands of twine, occupies the center of the filmic space, and the events of the film occur entirely in silence. The camera’s lens stays trained on this tongue, while the individual who possesses said tongue pulls tighter and tighter on the strands of twine. Their hands remain slightly off screen, as does the face of the individual. All viewers see throughout the video is this tongue; all we’re asked to see is this tongue. Rivulets of spit drip off the tongue as the twine contorts it into shapes both alien and familiar. The flesh is bound into pockets of soft, wet, meat.           In Bawden’s artist statement they write that they have an interest in interrogating the relationship between the body, time, and memory in the aftermath of traumatic experiences. There’s an implicit understanding that when a tongue is tied, it cannot aid in the act of speech. A subject’s ability to speak, to form consciousness through language, is hampered or otherwise slowed down. In Greek myth, Philomela is a young noble woman who was raped, and her tongue cut out by her assailant. Yet, there are many ways to speak, to communicate pain, pleasure, and the untold varieties of sensation that lie between the two. Philomela wove her story and sent the resulting tapestry to her sister to identify her attacker and seek revenge. I tell this story alongside Bawden’s artist statement as there is power in binding oneself, in giving up power freely on one’s terms. The body once again becomes one’s own, a teller of stories and those stories of infinite, untold variety. Such is the mark, the burden, the gift of being human.         The variety of pieces included in the show are wide ranging in material and subject matter. Some are non-representational, like Le Hien Minh’s wall sculpture, while others like Langberg’s paintings or Tom of Finland’s sketched scenes, portray couples in varying states of passionate embraces. There’s a unifying interest in what it means to be present in a body capable of giving and receiving pleasure, pain, and care. This is an investigation that transcends differences in material and form to make generative use of the unavoidable frictions that occur in such endeavors. For the tongue, the body, and the contours of one’s personhood are also landscapes of those friction-filled liminal spaces. It’s there you might not only find relief, but also understanding, a sense of self.   Annette LePique is an arts writer. Her interests include the moving image and psychoanalysis. She has written for Newcity, ArtReview, Chicago Reader, Stillpoint Magazine, Spectator Film Journal, and others.

Take My Picture by Rebecca Memoli  “Take My Picture” is the title of a photography exhibition at Wrightwood 659 and the prompt for how the photographs were created. Patric McCoy’s photographs provide an intimate view of Chicago’s Black gay community in the mid 80s. At a time of economic recession, the public perception of Black men was not favorable. The photographs on view, however, offer a different perspective of Black men than the stereotypes propagated in art and media. McCoy’s exhibition documents the lives of individuals, many of whom have been taken by the AIDS/HIV epidemic.         Coming from a line of photographers in his family, McCoy is self-taught. The project is not over conceptualized; it started as a written commitment McCoy made to himself, to take his camera everywhere and take a picture of anyone who asked. The trust these men have in the photographer is apparent. They are not set up nor are the subjects posed. They are not polished or pristine, but they are authentic. The moments McCoy has caught radiate through the dark shadows, or they have been arrested in the light of a flash.           Wrightwood’s small second-floor north gallery is packed with portraits hung salon style like clusters of memories. Many of the images were shot at the Rialto Tap, a gay bar in the South Loop. The Rialto was a haven for those who were not welcome in the northside gay bars in Chicago. McCoy and his camera became a staple at the Rialto and along his bike route. He would make prints and give them away if he ever saw the person again. In an interview with Assistant Curator Ashley Janke, McCoy discusses the desire to have a good photograph, “I think every individual has a hunger to be depicted in a recognizable and positive light. People want to see themselves and be represented. That’s why we go to museums to look at images. They help us reflect on who we are.”         Art photography from the 80s tended to be from a white perspective. The most notable gay photographers of that time were white—for example, Vincent Cianni, Peter Hujar, Robert Maplethorpe, Duane Michaels, Harvey Milk, and Stanley Stellar. Photography of Black men in the 80’s, and certainly gay Black men, examine and often eroticize their bodies. Robert Mapplethorpe’s stunning studio portraits examine the Black body in terms of form, tone, and contrast, but they do not give the viewer a sense of who the men are as individuals. McCoy’s photographs portray gay Black men in a much more nuanced way. The subjects are strong, confident, but not guarded, which reflects a unique relationship between McCoy and the men he photographs. They have asked to have their picture taken, and this initiation creates a unique partnership between photographer and subject.           The men in McCoy’s photographs are portrayed as complex individuals rather than exotic or dangerous. They are not all “hustlers” like in Philip Lorca DiCorcia’s 90s project, although some may be. DiCorcia’s subjects are solicited in the same way, and for the same price—sex. He directs his hustlers to look moody and forlorn. Each scene is designed with cinematic lighting, the images read more like romantic era paintings than photographs of an underground community. McCoy’s men in contrast engage with the viewer in genuine and often playful ways. Like in the photograph Five,a man sits perched atop a bench that reads “Rent Me I’m Ready!” with his fingers open, indicating five… something.           McCoy’s approach to sexuality is far less sensationalized than that of DiCorcia and Mapplethorpe. The section called “The Look” contains photographs that subvert the power of gaze. The photographer is offered “the look” and thus the viewer is “transformed from spectator to prey” creating a completely shifted dynamic. In the photograph Window Look the subject gives the look directly into the lens, illuminated by soft window light. The intimacy conveyed in the look makes it stand out from the other more street style images.           McCoy’s photographs of the gay community are far less sexualized than works by other photographers at that time. By exhibiting these photographs now, Wrightwood 659 is following a positive trend of bringing attention and voice to black gay artists. What is most exciting is the historical implication of the work. In the 80s and 90s it is not that intimate photographs of Black gay men were not being taken, they were just not being shown. Just as Blacks were unwelcome in white gay bars, the interest and inclusion of gay artists was still primarily from a white perspective. Now the art world is looking back and finding what it has left behind.   Rebecca Memoli is a Chicago-based photographer and curator. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MFA in Photography from Columbia College. Her work has been featured in several national and international group shows.   Editor’s Note: Patric McCoy is a member of the Board of the New Art Association, the publisher of the New Art Examiner. The reviewer has never met Mr. McCoy and does not know him.

Apocalypse Sky by Dominik Lombardi Co-curated by Hiram Perez and Elizabeth Nogrady, “Apocalypse Sky: Art, AIDS, and Activism in New York City, 1982–1992” brings us a glimpse of what the gay and lesbian community experienced from the early days of the AIDS epidemic, most specifically in New York City. Notably, the exhibition is comprised entirely of works selected from Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center collection, which has holdings of over 19,000 works that go as far back as the Head of Viceroy Merymose from his Outer Sarcophagus (1375 BCE) to the recent acquisitions from such contemporary luminaries as Martin Puryear.         With “Apocalypse Sky,” the specific works selected focus on the AIDS crisis, especially the mindboggling lack of recognition and support from the Ronald Reagan administration in the first three years of the epidemic. It’s hard to believe, looking back at President Regan’s behavior, that he would not utter the word AIDS until September of 1985, a delay that surely increased the severity of the crisis, a fact that is well documented in this exhibition with the video Be a DIVA!. Be a DIVA! was produced by the Damned Interfering Video Activists Television (DIVA TV), a group of independent artists associated with ACT UP. One main purpose of the video was to document the very troubling lack of urgency, as our government minimized early concerns for the epidemic, referring to it as “gay cancer.” In Be a DIVA!, there can be seen such things as the protests at New York’s City Hall, demonstrations on how to be safe during sex, plus other issues centered on the best ways to display civil disobedience while preparing those individuals for the resulting blowback from police and other groups prompted by fear from lack of information.         In a display case nearby is a grouping of items collectively titled Assorted Ephemera (1980s–90s). Gathered here is a good sampling of what was produced by artists and activists to raise awareness, including an image of Nancy and President Reagan laughing as they strike a pose mimicking Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) under a headline that refers to jellybeans (Reagan’s favorite snack). George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s V.P. and presidential successor did do more to bring AIDS forward as a serious concern while somewhat reducing the stigma attached to it, but unfortunately, when looking at his overall efforts, he was very lacking in such things as setting aside real money for research and development in the production of life saving drugs.         Dominating the gallery space is a collaboration between the iconic artist Keith Haring and the formidable, Beat Generation author William Burroughs. The Apocalypse Series (1988), which is composed of four pairs of texts and images, projects a dizzying apocalyptic view of their time. In one, the words of Burroughs begin the top row of the installation:         “Last act, the End, this is where we all came in. The final Apocalypse is when everyman sees what he sees, feels what he feels, hears what he hears. The creatures of all your dreams and nightmares are right here, right now, solid as they ever were or ever will be, electric vitality of careening subways faster faster stations flash in a blur. Pan God of Panic, whips screaming crowds, as millions of faces look up at the torn Sky: OFF THE TRACK! OFF THE TRACK!”.         Below it is Haring’s imagery; a red phallus splitting twin Mona Lisa reproductions sporting dead, exed-out eyes and culminating in an atomic explosion as deadly, horned sperm fan out to either side. The two together, Burroughs and Haring, create a vision that hits hard at a state of anger, exhaustion and desperation with no end in sight, implying if AIDS takes over the world, there is no need for history, art or beauty. It’s all over.           Billy Name, who was a collaborator with Andy Warhol at the time Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, has one photograph in the exhibition, Palladium, Backstage, NYC (1992). I was lucky enough to have met and known Name before he passed in 2016, and it is important to note how great a chronicler of the time of AIDS he was, capturing the vibrancy and vitality of the time, as well as the tragedy. In Palladium, Backstage, Name shoots from the hip, capturing a moment in a performer’s life where arresting thoughts override reality and time truly freezes.         There is an excellent image of Warhol by Ari Marcopoulis, the Dutch born photographer, who was also a collaborator with Warhol. In Andy Warhol (1981), Marcopoulis captures his subject in full makeup and wig holding a recorder and blankly staring into space. What looks like a bedsheet covers most of Warhol’s body, making the image all that more striking, even strangely angelic.         There are other intriguing photographs by Duane Michals, Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, but what really holds this representation of an era are the various posters that dot the walls. One of the more ubiquitous images was created by Gran Fury, a group of activists who built a very effective ad campaign that appeared on numerous New York City buses.  The 12- x 3-foot poster with the headline KISSING DOESN’T KILL: GREED AND INDIFFERENCE DO not only increased awareness of the AIDS crisis, it also pointed out how, as stated on the poster, that “Corporate Greed, Government Inaction and Public Indifference Make AIDS a Political Crisis.” The smart design of the poster, which at first looked like a current day fashion ad, caught the eye of everyone.           The main poster that really hit me in the gut at the time was SILENCE = DEATH. The subtext on the poster addressed the lack of response from the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and the Vatican, asking “Gays and lesbians” to “turn anger, fear and grief into action.”

Gabriel Orozco: “Spacetime” Marian Goodman Gallery     By Paul Moreno One of the most striking pieces in “Spacetime,” is Moon Tree, an example of a series of sculptures Mexican artist Orozco made between 1996 and 2010. An artificial ficus tree sits in a very ordinary pot one could find at any hardware store. The tree is nearly six feet tall, and, within its foliage, a majority of its plastic leaves have been intersected with white paper disks. The artificial tree per se is a bit banal, something that you might find in the corner of an office anyplace in the world. One easily assumes that Orozco found the tree at a home decor or office supply store. His intervention, the insertion of the white disks, does something interesting. First, it makes you look at the ficus, which, in an unadorned state, might not warrant a second glance. The white disks thicken the foliage with their delicate addition of mass and in the way they reflect light and create shadow. Placing an artificial ficus in a room, in most circumstances, would at best be a gesture of bland and easily overlooked elegance. Here it suddenly becomes a considered act. The white disks imply someone cared about this tree. The tree’s second effect is how it plays with the light in the room. The artificial tree, like a cucoloris, casts an organic shadow on the wall. That in itself is quite beautiful, but you might not even see it, because you are looking at the tree. It is as though the tree becomes a tool to make a painting in shadow. Gabriel Orozco, Light Tiger, Lac Du Bourdon Summer, 2010. Gouache, pastel on paper, (paper) 72 5/8 x 39 1/8 inches. Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery.         Behind Moon Tree, on the wall, in its shadow, hangs an aluminum sculpture, Modular Sequence: Caterpillar. This five-foot-long rod is formed from a series of alternating large and small shiny aluminum spheres fused together. The larger spheres are then ornamented with more small spheres. This brilliant caterpillar of so many gazing balls almost looks back at the viewer. It adds a depth and shimmer to the Moon Tree shadow.  A joke about a caterpillar in a tree makes itself and may or may not have been intentional. What does seem very intentional is that this work when photographed has always appeared to be a horizontal line and in fact appears so on the exhibition website. But here in the gallery, it is vertical. This simple and almost arbitrary decision captures the spirit of the work of Orozco as well as the alegría de vivir of “Spacetime.”         “Spacetime” has been open for nearly a year at the time of this writing. It is expected to be open until the middle of 2023. Its opening was quiet; the press was not alerted; there was no 6 p.m. reception with white wine. I discovered the show quite by accident when I went to see the Lawrence Weiner show upstairs in Marian Goodman Gallery. “Spacetime,” it should be noted, is also under the purview of Marian Goodman Gallery and is described as an an “off-schedule” exhibition. When another gallery vacated their space, Goodman took it over with the intention of using it for a back office. Orozco proposed using the space for the project that is there now. In the same way that Moon Tree plays with notions of natural (the way light falls through trees) and artificial (a tree made of plastic), in the same way that the Modular Sequence: Caterpillar is a horizontal that can also be vertical, “Spacetime” offers something like a small retrospective exhibition but not strictly so.         Throughout his career Orozco has made Working Tables. These works are accumulations of objects that the artist feels live well in each other’s company. It is difficult to say if any one thing belonging to a working table is an art item unto itself. These may include a number of small wax works the artist has playfully shaped; a collection of shells the artist has decorated with grids of graphite, a pyramidal plastic bag of seed pods, yogurt cup caps, models and maquettes for larger works, a pressed flower with a printed puffer, a lemon peel preserved in plasticine, experiments and ideas. Whatever is included is then artfully arranged on a large plinth. One room in the gallery seems to be an immersive and evolving example of this type of work.         Everything I have written about so far is found in just one room of “Spacetime,” ROOM TWO of four rooms that the show occupies.         Along with a number of sculptures and works on paper, the largest room, ROOM ONE, presently contains an example of Orozco’s signature paintings, Samurai Tree (Invariant 28L). All the Samurai Tree paintings are inspired by diagraming the Samurai opening in chess and the sequence of moves that follow it. All the Samurai Tree paintings are identical in composition and always only include the colors red, blue, white and gold—this is the rule. The paintings then differentiate from each other as variables are introduced: size of canvas and distribution of those four colors. Although these paintings are created from a system of rules, the results are paintings that possess a spiraling explosion of vivid color that feel as loose and organic as something that grows in nature; but the paintings also reminds us that nature does not spiral randomly, but in strict patterns. Games, rules, and rules’ exceptions are frequent themes in Orozco’s work. In the Samurai Tree paintings for example, there is a tension in material selection: humble matte tempera paint is the rule, luminous gold leaf is the exception.         Between ROOM ONE and ROOM TWO, a framed work on paper functions as a door. The work on paper, Light Tiger, Lac Du Bourdon Summer, is from 2010 and is part of Orozco’s Corplegados series. Meaning “folded bodies,” these door-size works on paper were made to be folded

Up Close and Impersonal“David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020”  at the Art Institute of Chicago by Evan Carter    Visitors to “David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020” are greeted by a television monitor affixed to a wall across from glass doors that open to a gallery featuring an exhibition of David Hockney’s recent digital renditions of bucolic Normandy France. Displayed on a loop, the monitor shows a time-lapse video with the centralized image of a tree. It begins as a series of lines making up its trunk and branches that gradually bloom dots of green leaves before the loop starts again. It is a forecast of the daffy celebration of Impressionism through the medium of new technology that is this exhibition. These digital renderings of trees, flowers, grassy hills, rain, sunrises, and sunsets evoke the subjects of Hockney’s impressionist forebearers but lack just about all of the subtleties that can be afforded by the human hand and eye as well as the medium of paint itself.         According to the Art Institute website “He had first explored the technology in 2011, but this time developed an app which was adapted and developed to his specific requirements with new brushes and shapes.” It may come as a surprise to some that Hockney “developed, adapted, and developed” this app because the work seems so utterly conventional in its use of digital tools and, at times, cartoonish in its execution. On this particular visit, walking through this rectangular loop of a gallery one could hear snickering laughter and see perplexed smiles on the faces of viewers. Certain images of raindrops hitting water are particularly silly in Hockney’s use of a curly-cued “v” shape representing each individual splash. These drawn forms are akin to what one might find in a child’s drawing where the sun is a yellow circle with lines pointing away from it or the sky is one blue stripe across the top of a page. Better brushwork can be seen in art made by artificial intelligence, which granted is still yet to work en plein air.           This is not to dismiss the value of childlike whimsy and wonder in modern art. It is just that in this case it does not seem intentional or affecting. Instead, it is a disappointing reminder of the limitations that have been placed on such a skilled, visionary artist as David Hockney by the chosen medium. It must be mentioned that all this artist’s gifts were not lost in this approach. One of the stronger pieces titled No. 340, 21st May 2020 is a firm reminder of Hockney’s skill as a colorist. The image depicts a cluster of lily pads floating on the surface of still water that reflects a pale blue sky, green leaves, both punctuating a murky brown that is familiar to anyone who has ever visited a pond. Unlike many of the sprawling vistas featured in “The Arrival of Spring,” No 340 feels like a discernible space. At a glance it has an almost photographic quality that, after one step closer, crumbles under the presence of the clunky lines and repeated brush patterns of the custom iPad app.         Consistently, this work teases the idea that we are looking at painting. Also from the Art Institute website; “…his iPad works possess all the qualities of his paintings on canvas….” In spite of the fact that Hockney himself clearly enjoys this digital medium, this statement is a reductive take on his career as a painter and artist as well as an insult to the intelligence of those who follow his work and view this exhibition. A more apt description would be that this series is another addition to the diverse body of work by an artist who has explored figurative and abstract forms across a range of media. To say that any artist’s work possesses all the same qualities of what they produce in a completely different medium is just lazy.           Hockney is known for his bold use of color which can be subdued and predictable like in 1967’s A Bigger Splash to the hyperbolically saturated landscapes such as Nichols Canyon painted in 1980. The colors in “The Arrival of Spring” are not only highly saturated, they are also highly predictable. Leaves are green. Tree branches are brown. The sky is blue. The grass is also green. Oh boy is it green. So much so that, well, let’s just take a moment for the color green. And what better way than with an anecdote.         In FX’s televised series Fargo, a criminal mastermind played by Billy Bob Thornton prompts Colin Hank’s naive police officer to answer a question: “why can humans see more shades of green than any other color?” Viewers are later treated to an answer stating that it is due to human evolution selecting our eyes to discern predators in the wild, thus lending us the ability to perceive more shades of green. Assuming this to be true, it is perhaps also what makes the excessive use of the “G” in RBG so oppressive to the eye in these…paintings? drawings? If we have evolved to be more sensitive to green, is it any wonder we see so little of it used on our illuminated computers, televisions, and phones?           Digital imaging relies on RBG color meaning red, blue, and green are the primary colors used to make all other colors we can see on a screen. However, these three primaries are not equally weighted. Green has a much higher mcd (millicandela) rating than its red and blue counterparts. This is presumably by design so that technology has an optimized starting point for color mixing, making that familiar neon green a gateway to so many other colors. But as many a graphic designer or digital artist can likely attest; it can be tedious to generate a shade of green that is

Myths of Ruin and Resurgence: Scott Hocking at Cranbrook Art Museum By K.A. Letts   …Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies…                                                         From Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley   Urban archeologist, historian of the transient and visionary lover of an once-and-future great metropolis, installation artist Scott Hocking tells the story of Detroit’s decay and rebirth in his mid-career museum retrospective. The elaborate constructs and documentary photographs in the exhibition go far beyond the voyeuristic photographs of urban devastation—often called ruin porn—that were fashionable in the early 2000s and to which they are occasionally compared. His thoughtful and empathetic examinations of the city’s abandoned spaces, augmented by built interventions and documented in all their precarity, have provided a conceptual template for projects beyond the city, in the artist’s native upstate Michigan, in Florida and New York and even further afield in France, Germany, Australia, Iceland and China.         Hocking’s work is difficult to represent in a museum setting, since his iconic installations are site specific, often monumental in scale and ephemeral—either by happenstance or by design. However, Cranbrook Curator Andrew Satake Blauvelt has managed to assemble an assortment of documentary photos of Hocking’s most memorable works, along with reconstituted installations and large-scale sculptures that accurately represent what the artist has been up to for the last 25 years. Hocking, a gifted writer, has also contributed a series of wall titles for the exhibition that provide eloquent commentary throughout. An accompanying 344-page catalog, with ample supporting text by Blauvelt, an interview with the artist by Laura Mott, Chief Curator of Cranbrook Art Museum, and a scholarly essay by Michael Stone Richards, rounds out a complete consideration of the artist’s accomplishments and projects to date. “Scott Hocking: Detroit Stories” will be on view at Cranbrook Art Museum until March 19, 2023.         A self-described working-class kid from Redford Township on the outskirts of Detroit, Hocking grew up in a modest home on a dirt road, near a railroad track. He became, early on, an intrepid seeker of grand, derelict spaces and structures in Detroit. As he explored the city on foot, he was one of the few to see something brave and worthy of salvaging in what most had dismissed as a failed city.             Hocking’s creative impulses have often begun with irritation—from his annoyance with the cute and kitschy public art animals painted decoratively in various cities in the early 2000s to his anger at the sheer waste of the once-opulent and now neglected buildings to which he is drawn. He scouts locations; in the past they have been grand and desolate urban structures where an atmosphere of privilege lingers. Responding to the residual beauty in these former showplaces, Hocking casts about the immediate environment for materials. Then, slowly and painstakingly, he reconstitutes them in new form in a process he describes as a meditation on post-industrial obsolescence.         One of Hocking’s early installations, Ziggurat and Fisher Body Plant 21 (2007-2009), both encapsulates and foreshadows the direction of his art practice in the years since. Ziggurat was a site-specific sculptural installation made from 6,201 square chunks of end grain wood the artist found within Detroit’s abandoned Fisher Body Plant 21. Vacant since the early 1990s, the enormous, 650,000 square foot FB21 had become a man-made cave, complete with stalagmites. Trees grew on the roof. “The Packard [plant] was (and is) seen as the big fat shining symbol of Detroit’s failures, the once-mighty auto capital turned into the shrinking city of the future,” he says in an interview. Scrappers had long ago stripped the factory, but the floor blocks remained. Inspired by the factory’s concrete-columned industrial architecture, Hocking began to imagine the interior, characterized by tranquil natural light and soaring space, as a sacred environment to house a kind of stepped temple. Beginning in August 2008, and for 18 months thereafter, Hocking gathered the scattered blocks and stacked them painstakingly into a pyramid. “I wanted to question the idea of a ruin versus a monument, building a ruin within a ruin and juxtaposing postindustrial ruination with the ancient past,” he explained. The structure lasted only a few months. He describes the fate of his ad hoc monument:         “It was destroyed when the EPA took over and cleaned out the hazardous creosote-preserved floor blocks. Five months later, the EPA was gone and FB21 was again reclaimed by scrappers. Since then, the site has been repeatedly boarded up and torn open, with occasional press declaring a potential renovation, a loft complex or a music venue, including the latest proposal to transform the beast into an apartment and retail complex by 2025.”         Ziggurat and FB21, like many of Hocking’s constructs, exists now only as a memory and a documentary photograph. The artist views the final state of his works to be large-format color photographs of the elaborate structures he has laboriously created. He has accepted both the intense labor required to alter his chosen settings and their ultimate impermanence as they become part of the perpetual struggle between human effort and natural forces.             One of Detroit’s most famous architectural ruins, Michigan Central Station, provides the site for another of Hocking’s best known built visions. In The Egg and MCTS (2007-2013), monumentality and ephemerality are conceptually balanced in a surreal, delicate and precariously balanced ovoid form. Temporary yet timeless, the installation and photography project was created on the eighth floor of an architectural ruin that had been vacant for over 20 years. In that time the interior of the building had slowly shed sheets of broken marble from its walls, providing the raw material for Hocking’s stacked egg. The artist described the

Jason Revok: Now You See Him, Now You Don’t  By K.A. Letts   What’s an artist to do when he loses faith in himself and in his chosen medium? Jason Revok claims to have spent the past ten years wrestling with this existential question. In that time, he has refashioned his identity as a well-known L.A. graffiti writer into that of an artist in good standing with the elite world of fine art. The results of his reported wanderings and questionings are on display now in his solo exhibition “Jason Revok: The Artist’s Instruments” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).         Born in Riverside California in 1977, Revok grew up suburban and working class. Art, he says, consisted of “album covers, skateboard graphics and comic books.” He discovered, and then embraced, the outlaw life of a successful graffiti artist, stealing paint from the hardware store, getting a rush of adrenaline from his unauthorized activities—and occasionally getting caught. But by 2009, the tagger reports feeling alienated and bored as he began to question the social pathologies associated with his chosen lifestyle. He explains, “I had designed my life over the years in a way where I could prioritize painting graffiti all the time. For years and years, I was basically a full-time career criminal, and as a result, I was getting exhausted with all of the stress and anxiety, not to mention the constant legal drama.” In 2010, he spent two months in jail for his illegal graffiti writing.           In his carefully curated autobiographical narrative, Jason Revok claims to have moved, in a more or less orderly way, from outlaw tagger into the art mainstream. The truth, as it emerges, is a little more complicated than that. Reliable rumor has it that he continues to write graffiti even as he has developed an art practice that features more gallery-friendly artworks. His upstanding public identity as a fine artist co-exists with his continued activity as an unrepentant graffiti writer still operating in the shadows.           Revok continues to use spray paint along with more conventional acrylics in his studio practice but began to work with lighter substrates in 2016. His experiments in working with home-made instruments, particularly improvised, single-use rastrums—think of the old-timey tool for drawing lines that music teachers used to draw staves on blackboards back in the day—result in parallel striped compositions moving wavily across stretched canvas in various patterns. This is Revok’s self-professed strategy for subverting the painterly gesture of his graffiti style while preserving the physicality of making marks. Several artworks produced by this method, such as K_Loop_XL_FlourRed_Blu_FlourYl_8/22, are on display in the “The Artist’s Instruments.” They are optically active, minimalist canvases, elegant and impressive in scale, but ultimately corporate, impersonal. They hang, humming on the darkened walls of the gallery, but no tune emerges.           Similarly mute are the three artworks entitled Selfportrait_A, B, C_2/21_9/22. Their thinly tinted colors are beautifully luminous, and the wrinkles and tears in the rough drop cloths—which are attached to painted and stretched canvas—add a pleasing physicality. Self-portraits are often the most personally intimate works an artist produces, but these formally exquisite paintings instead seem to be acts of self-censorship. His choice of title “depersonalization-derealization” for a 2019 exhibition featuring similar works, is telling. Clearly, he is hiding something.         Revok finally begins to reveal himself in the dark interior of a delivery truck parked in the gallery. In it, we find a video of the artist engaged in making his spirograph paintings, arguably the most personal, though still recessive, work in “The Artist’s Instruments.” Once again, it is a kind of mesmerizing choreography in the body of the artist as he creates, and we begin to see a ritualistic process at work while patterns emerge. A dozen of the smaller paintings hang in rows of six, one row on top of the other; we observe as they begin to glow and pulse. Some are incandescent on a black background, while others float against a rosy sky. There is a kind of transcendence here that almost justifies Revok’s refusal of the personal gesture. Almost.           In “The Artist’s Instruments,” Jason Revok has managed to keep his telltale fingerprints off the art, but perhaps he has succeeded too well. He has come up with a durable—and I’m sure, marketable—art practice, but the work is altogether too buttoned up. Now that he has learned to color within the lines, he will need to integrate the opposing impulses that coexist within him, to merge the appetite for risk and transgression of the street with the formal elegance and craft of his studio practice. K.A. Letts is the Detroit editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.     Additional Works by Jason Revok  

Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago By Annette LePique The exhibition “All that Glows in the Dark of Democracy” is a collaboration between the ACLU of Illinois and Weinberg/Newton Gallery, a noncommercial art gallery that connects artists and nonprofit organizations to promote public education and discourse. The group show serves as a landing stage for the ACLU’s “Engagement Series on Democracy: We the People.” The ACLU describes the series’ programming (community storytelling nights, readings and podcasts, and public talks with activists and scholars, in addition to the exhibition) as a way in which to counter and heal the growing divisions in America’s political climate. The exhibition asks of viewers, “Do not tell us what you are against; tell us what you are for.” If America shares any collective experience, it is the uneasy and often inexpressible sensation of the slippages between money, culture, race, and sex under “democratic” capitalism. The links between these matters are neither easy nor solid. Under the logic of the market, they are imbued with an uncanny power to become stand-ins for one’s humanity. This is a power to turn people into things to be bought, sold, and commodified. It is difficult then to understand what it means to talk about democracy and America’s democratic institutions in an era of rapacious neoliberalism, as there are major dissonances between those doing the buying and those forced to sell in the American market. Aram Han Sifuentes, The Official Unofficial Voting Station, 2016–present, detail. courtesy of WeinbergNewton Gallery; photo by Evan Jenkins. Why, then, are we here? What are the stakes for an exhibition of art that positions itself as a necessity to the public good, a democratic space? The answer here will dismay some but hearten others: this art will not save you. This art will not save America. No art will save this country. The road to an American society that is just and caring will be paved through painful, incremental progress won through collective organizing and action. This is a progress born of strike lines and protests, not a River West gallery. However, this is art that at its best cultivates a free exchange of knowledge and ideas. These elements are integral to the formation of connection and community, building blocks of material progress. While some work within “Glows” succeeds at this endeavor, the exhibition’s frustrating failures are unfortunate distractions—a fitting reflection of the conditions America’s institutions have wrought. There is value, then, in understanding how and why such failures occur in the exhibition, as it allows viewers to better glean Glows’ moments of inspiration. Hannah Givler, reverb damping sculpture, 2022. Installation view. Image courtesy of WeinbergNewton Gallery; photo by Evan Jenkins. Ariana Jacob’s The American Society for Personally Questioning Political Issues, staged in 2012 and 2022 as a series of public conversations, archived in newsprint and the project’s blog, is built upon an uninformed strain of liberal politics. Though Jacob categorizes herself as liberal in the project’s framing, she does little to either define the term or situate it within any concrete leftist framework (fitting oversights for this brand of liberalism). The project’s primary goal seems to ask the open-ended, unhelpful, and out of touch “can’t we all just get along?” For both iterations of American Society, Jacob traveled through towns in red states to find people who identify as conservative or libertarian to speak with her about their politics. While Jacob purposefully did not prepare for these conversations in the name of tolerance and neutrality, the project suffers from that lack of foresight. Jacob’s conversations routinely lose their focus, with both the artist and her conversation partner struggling to speak to one another. Even the project’s ephemera (lawn signs, banners, and fliers designed in the style of political adverts) suffer from vague and contradictory language. Throughout Jacob’s records of each conversation, she states a wish to know more, to have a better grasp of the economics routinely cited by project participants. I wish that Jacob, currently the Chair of Bargaining for her institution’s part time faculty union, would have heeded her own advice and entered the project’s conversations in both 2012 and 2022 with greater preparation. Jacob is doing vital work for her university community and could have continued that work in American Society, especially when the conversations turned to economic conditions. This is the key takeaway of American Society: a conception of broad-mindedness built upon platitudes serving no one. Rather, it is much more useful to think of broad-mindedness as an openness to learning and discomfort in equal measure. In contrast, Aram Han Sifuentes’ The Official Unofficial Voting Station: Voting for All Who Legally Can’t provides the opportunity for gallery visitors to share, learn, and grow from one another’s ideas. Voting Station makes space for the comfortable and painful in equal turn, all while providing concrete resources for visitors to contribute to the work of protecting collective voting rights. Han Sifuentes’s work is activated and enlivened by this democratic exchange; it sparks with hope and possibility. Their artistic practice as a whole is built upon social engagement and active community organizing; their past pieces include work on behalf of those impacted by police brutality and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Created in collaboration with Bun Stout, Jon Satrom, and studiothread, Voting Station consists of multiple voting booths constructed by the artist, where gallery visitors can cast their ballots. Ballots are available in both English and Spanish and ask visitors the issues they wish they could vote on within the local, national, and global levels. The ballots are collected with responses projected in the gallery and available to view at http://officialunofficial.vote. The resources Han Sifuentes’ provides on the work to protect state and national voting rights are both insightful and useful. Voting Station gives concrete steps to visitors to contribute time, money, and labor to safeguard rights that are regularly under attack by conservative and moderate forces. A common analogy found throughout democratic political theory is the image of the human body; democracy is imagined as a system of organization built from breath, blood, and electricity. Fragility also

William E. Jones David Kordansky Gallery, New York By Paul Moreno Before seeing “Survey,” a selection of films by William E. Jones, at David Kordansky Gallery, the word “survey” conjured a vision in my mind of a warren of small, partitioned spaces, each with a monitor of some sort showing a piece of video art that one would stand and watch, at least in part, before shuffling on to the next nook of the warren. I was rather surprised, then, when I arrived at the gallery and parted the heavy black velvet curtain that shielded the exhibition space from the light and sound of the lobby. The exhibition took place in one large open space. Three Nelson benches were strategically placed throughout. On the right side of the gallery, a wall-height projection played a silent, black-and-white film that took the entire day to see in its entirety. On the far wall, opposite the velvet curtain, played a programmed series of films, with sound, each about five to 20 minutes in length, taking about an hour. When it was complete, another one-hour series of films began on an adjacent wall. When the second sequence was complete, the whole thing started again. This presentation allowed the viewer to enter at any moment, and, if they were willing, to sit and watch all two hours of work and leave when they had completed both loops. In all, there were 12 film works in the show. The daylong video, Rejected (2017), consists of a montage of more than 3,000 images commissioned—and later “killed”—by the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. Each image has a visible hole punched in it that the camera zooms into. For a split second there is only darkness, and then we zoom back out to a different image with a black circle where the photo has been punched. The images change, but the black dot maintains its size and position, and immediately the zoom into darkness reoccurs; the visual swooping repeats and repeats, always providing glimpses of new images, sometimes in full, sometimes in part, determined by where the image has been punched. The grand size of this moving image on the wall, the tension between the viewers’ desire to spend time with the images and the images’ fleeting quality, and the playground swing movement of the film, all create an exhilarating experience. This video exemplifies two important elements in the show. One is the work’s reliance on found material that the artist manipulates in ways that displace the found material’s intents. The other is about how one experiences an art film and how it functions in the art space. The film work Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012) is one of the films in one of the one-hour sequences. The film is derived from a law enforcement training film intended to teach officers to determine when to fire a gun at a suspect. A voice-over describes variations on an evolving scenario, involving the observation of a man who fits the description of a “known wanted felon” as he crosses a city street and heads toward a movie theater box office. The voice-over, at moments, asks the viewer if they should shoot the man in question. The man in question, it is important to note, is Black. The suspect moves down a sidewalk through a small crowd of white folks. This was a choice made by the creator of the original film. We are immediately struck by the implicit racism of this choice made some 50 years ago. We know the choice was made some 50 years ago because of a detail the original creator probably didn’t consciously choose: the theater across the street is playing Watermelon Man, Melvin Van Peebles’s 1970 film about a white man who overnight becomes Black and suddenly experiences what his whiteness has protected him from. In one sequence of Jones’s Shoot Don’t Shoot, the suspect does turn and fire a gun at the viewer. It is hard to know if this isn’t just a fear fantasy within this make-believe scenario. In the final sequence the suspect just buys a ticket and enters the movie theater. The voice-over never says it is okay to shoot. It is notable that Jones’s Shoot Don’t Shoot was made the same year as the 2012 Aurora, CO movie theater shooting— one of a long series of mass shootings that fueled the hamster-on-the-wheel discussion about gun control in America. I do not mean to imply that the video was made in reaction to that shooting—I don’t know if that is true or false. That context, however, provides an opening for consideration of an important quality of Jones’s work. It does not pander to simple ideas but lays out complex cultural phenomena. For example, Shoot Don’t Shoot does not simply moralize that guns are bad. Rather, Shoot Don’t Shoot exemplifies how issues of public safety serve only certain members of the public. It does not ask, are you racist? Rather, it asks, what is your relationship to race? It asks us if, in some way, guns in the hands of certain people make us feel safe. It presents a discomforting notion that America’s problem with guns is a problem rooted in us, if we are American. Shoot Don’t Shoot is one of the shorter films in “Survey.” I have taken a deep dive into it because it demonstrates how I feel Jones’s films reframe our forgotten or disposable media to provoke thought. It is also a good example of how his work formally activates the art space. This is a distinguishing criterion for video art. We often look at painting or photography without thinking about the space it is in. Sculpture and—even more so—installation ask us to consider the art’s environment. I feel that film, in the gallery setting, often has the burden of having to be an event in the space, to fill the space, to not just be an art object but to make the viewer its subject, to entertain you like TV, to swallow you like cinema. In this way, “Survey”