Good bye to 2023 and Hello 2024:
A year in review from being on the verge
The last year has been marked with blockbuster shows, the loss of several pivotal artists, and shake ups in the art world overall. Here is my year in review with a reflection on unionization efforts within the art world, as well as my top four shows and more.
A note on Pope L.
On December 28th news broke on social media that the performance-based, installation artist and painter Pope. L had passed away. My feed on Instagram was filled with heartfelt notes about the passing of the groundbreaking artists from Helen Molesworth, Stuart Comer, Theaster Gates and countless others. The news was officially confirmed by the Pope. L’s gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles late afternoon stating, “One of the foremost conceptual artists of our time, describing himself as a visual and performance-theater artist, as well as an educator, Pope. L fundamentally challenged and changed the last 50 years of visual art in the United States. His longstanding history of provocative and absurdist performances along with his wide-ranging oeuvre of installations, objects, and paintings undermined conventional notions of language, materiality, and meaning.”
Pope.L. Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece. 1978.
Pope. L defined a generation of performance artists and worked within a conceptual framework that sought to critique the larger social structures within the US through often provocative and challenging ways. Using his body as a medium often, Pope. L helped to deploy an absurdist framework that helped to shape the way that the art world came to think about language, and would be unmatched by others. He worked in a way that was beyond the times we live in given the way that he thought on multiple damsons and offered poignant and sharp criticism about the world around him. He died much too soon and had so much more work left in him and it is hard to imagine the world without. His work is currently on view in a solo exhibition entitled Hospital at the South London Gallery, London, UK. It is also in several major collections throughout the US including
Year in review for art unions
One of the biggest trends and changes I have been tracking over the last three years in my reporting is the rise in union efforts which reached record numbers in 2023. From the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, to the Screen Actors Guild (SGA) unions, made historic strides and this was also reflected in the art world. In an industry that has historically paid museum workers low wages because of the
Staff at the Brooklyn Museum last month finally reached their first contract which came the night before a planned strike. Workers at the Hispanic Society in NYC’s Washington Heights neighborhood launched a historic strike which lasted two months. At the time, this was the longest strike of its kind in over 20 years at a cultural institution in New York state, the only longer one being with MoMA staff in 2000 which lasted 134 days. They also helped to put art union workers on the map again by showing their dedication to their work and also fighting for fair wages, job security, and getting better benefit packages.
Additionally, following a number of institutional shakeups at the Guggenheim such as a half year search for a new museum director, staff there after tense negotiations for nearly two years were also able to ratify their first contract. Workers at the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh, which consists of over 500 people, also voted to ratify their first contract after 18 months of negotiations, making them the largest museum union in the US.
This trend was also reflected in the art higher education sector as well. Currently, staff at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia have been in negotiations for over two years and are still without a contract. In November, faculty readied themselves to strike and have engaged in multiple actions to move the university’s administration to reach a deal. The situation at UArts is ongoing and is one that will need to be monitored in the coming year.
Top 4 Shows for 2023
This year was also marked with major exhibitions, fairs, and lots of art news in general. While many people raved about the Judy Chicago show at the New Museum, her first major retrospective in NYC, it did not top my list for 2023. It certainly was a major milestone for the feminist based artist, who is someone that has deeply influenced me (her seminal work The Dinner Party is on permanent view at the Brooklyn Museum, and is something that I have seen countless times), it didn’t strike the same cord. Alternatively, here are four shows this year that stayed with me each for different reasons.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres at David Zwirner
Felix Gonzalez-Torres is arguably one of the most important major artists of the last 100 years. Working primarily during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gonzalez-Torres helped to center the lived queer experience while also making work that radically alternated the way people thought about loss and mourning and their interaction with everyday objects. The complex elegance of his work through the use of mass produced items such as fortune cookies, candies, newspaper, light bulbs, and even billboards. Through the use of these everyday objects, they become transformed into installations that occupy multiple damsons. One of which exists in the participatory aspects of his work through encouraging audience members to take a candy, newspaper etc which are replenished. This creates a tension within the audience action of taking one and challenges the traditional notions of “not touching the art.”
Installation detail of Felix Gonzalez-Torres at David Zwirner. Image courtesy of the gallery.
In 2023, mega gallery David Zwirner staged a show that helped to put the artist back on the map and spanned all three of the spaces in Chelsea. The show was massive, brilliant, and even included work that had been fully realized during the course of Gonzalez-Torres’s life. While this did create a bit of a problematic framework for me given what the artist might have wanted, it is still one of the best shows I have seen in years.
Chase Hall The Bathers at David Kordansky
While it's a widely known fact this year to my Substack readers that David Kordansky made me cry, he did manage to produce one of the best shows I have seen all year with the work of Chase Hall. The Bathers show stopped me in my tracks and it was both in the complexity of the subject matter and in the execution of the paintings themselves. Using generational trauma as a framing device, Hall looks at historical narratives and comes at them in arresting and nuanced ways that break down and reassess representation.
Chase Hall, Right, Under The Moon, 2022, acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas. Image still not courtesy of the gallery.
For the work that was on view at the gallery this past fall the paintings and the material were just as important as the images themselves. Using the black subject as the basis of many of his paintings as well, the variations of skin tone, color, and also the transformation of the material can be seen in each of these works. Using cotton and coffee which have a larger intricate history tied to place and geopolitics, Hall transforms the materials creating subversive messages into gorgeous paintings.
Puppies Puppies Nothing New at the New Museum
Currently on view at the New Museum, Nothing New is helping to put performance art at the forefront yet again. The work itself is by the artist Puppies Puppies aka Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo who has transformed the downstairs exhibition space into a kind of living quarters that the artist inhabits on a daily basis during viewing hours at the museum. Somewhere between a sociological experiment, and extreme performance art, Puppies Puppies has created a work that exists on multiple levels and also includes daily video recording of herself in the space which seems to also double as commentary on social surveillance and beyond. Viewers are also able to see a live feed of the artist on monitors which also further underscore these issues and others she has explored in previous works.
Exhibition view of Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, 2023. Image Courtesy of New Museum.
The installation space also includes a portion that is an almost exact replica of her bedroom. Performing daily mundane tasks such as sleeping, urinating, getting dressed, eating, taking prescriptions, etc the installation also serves as a critique of larger societal structures of ableism and sexual stereotypes. Puppies Puppies is one of the most provocative and interesting artists working today and the show which is on view through March 2023 is not to be missed.
The Body Regina José Galindo at the Watermill Art Center
Regina José Galindo has created art over the last twenty years that combines a performance-based approach that is infused with a larger message tied to social injustice and human rights issues. This past summer the Watermill Art Center in the Hamptons launched an impressive museum style retrospective that I still think about. The range of work spanned over the last two decades and even at the opening which is the annual gala, José Galindo brought the show down staging a performance in a police car that lasted the duration of the event, and involved over twenty mechanics taking the automobile apart in real time with her in the back.
Regina José Galindo - Rios de Gente, Guatemala, 2020. Commissioned and produced by Maiz de Vida. Photo by Juan Esteban Calderón, courtesy of the artist.
The dichotomy of that is an inherent part of the celebrated Guatemalan artist who uses her homeland and its larger complicated history with war and human rights violations as the basis of the work. She uses her body fully in almost all of the works on display and for me is also helping to put performance art center stage again.
These shows helped to both punctuate the year for me but also at their core, helped me to also center what is important to me about art and the artists who create it. There is much more to see in the coming year and I can’t wait to get back out there in my on the verge status.