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From the start, Thomas Schütte was destined to be the next big thing, and he delivers big things as well. Now if only the little things mattered along the way. For conceptual art that keeps you thinking, turn instead to Rodney Graham. And I work this together with a recent report on Graham and another class clown, KAWS and the KAWS collection, as a longer review and my latest upload. Is Graham, too, just clowning around? I am not so sure, but first to Schütte.

One can hear the expectations in his titles—Large Wall, Large Wallpapers, Large Spirit, Father State, and Mother Earth. One can see it in his care to recycle his themes often enough to spread the word. One can hear it words, traced on the wall above the entrance to his exhibition at MoMA, through January 18. Alles in Ordnung, he writes in simulated jet trails, perhaps on his way to an international career. “All Is in Order,” which is only fair when all is in his hands. Once inside, things can only get bigger.

That large wall simulates a brick wall, interrupted by another wide passage between rooms, in simulated bricks akin to dozens of monochrome paintings. Just before it, the twelve and a half foot bronze of the father state faces visitors with an ample robe and impassive smile. Trust me, it says, but do not even think to get past me. Born in 1954, Schütte lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a larger state, with grand new construction and memorials to match. The artist has no patience for such politics, power grabs, and platitudes, but he matches them in every way. It is what makes his work conceptual but reassuringly material.

Schütte has not had nearly the presence in New York that he has found with European fairs and collectors. Even close followers of contemporary art may be surprised to find him in the museum’s largest exhibition space. His large work and frequent repetition make a visit quick and easy all the same. Works appear in no obvious order, least of all chronological, which is only fair. The greatest number date from close to when his expectations began. He painted and sculpted his own grave in 1981, with a death date of 1996, because he gave himself fifteen years to make it big, and that’s that.

He came up just when art was taking on its own new expectations, which could easily have excluded him, but Schütte caught on and made it his subject. For the curators, Paulina Pobocha with Caitlin Chaisson, art was seeing the decline of Minimalism and a surge of conceptual art, but plain old realism was just too appealing for him to pass up. Perhaps, but he could never let go of anything. He studied at the Academy in Düsseldorf with Gerhard Richter and a stellar cast, including Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth. Richter could have shown him how the lushest of paintings, abstract or representational, could pose intellectual puzzles. Struth showed how the art of museums could pose the same questions, Gursky how large projects could remake the human landscape.

He was fine all along with Minimalism, but it had to be at least halfway conceptual. He paints with a single color on swatches of fabric or plaster, and his wallpaper has delicate verticals that recall Daniel Buren, but with an overlay of stains and brush marks. He starts with more strictly conceptual art, but it has to be skillful as well. He gives himself a day apiece and no more for self-portraits, just as he gave himself fifteen years to succeed. He sketches Valium, like Andy Warhol with a heavier dose of anxiety and irony. Don’t worry, and for god’s sake be happy.

Still, he built his reputation on sculpture. Genzken had shown how portrait busts can look makeshift and sloppy, and Schütte fashions a man lost at sea from oozing polyester and clay. Almost immediately, though, busts acquire a fine polish in ceramics or bronze. Most are of women, with their heads down in a vain search for comfort and rest. Some are men, as Strangers or Jerks. Both are an assault on the pretensions of public sculpture.

Schütte is less well known for full-length figures like Father State and Mother Earth, but they, too, can look grand while refusing to play the hero. Some have a silvery finish on comic-strip body armor or bulging muscles, but in poses that all but shout torment. The busts can rest on pedestals or shipping crates. He has much the same love-hate relationship with architecture old and new, including models of museums and mansions that will never be built. A concrete cylinder could be a bomb shelter, but then it emits dog yelps like another kind of shelter entirely.

From realism and public works to conceptual puzzles and Modernism’s last gasp, Schütte is showing off. Long after his self-portraits, his real subject is himself. He obsesses over it, with no end of sketches and prints. Take what pleasure you like in oversized slices of watermelon as Melonely, and do not take too seriously the hints of melancholy and loneliness. Do take seriously or comically an artist at home and in his studio, with a clothes closet, a rack for socks, miniature easels, and pitifully small collectors. It is not easy being a great artist, but Schütte will do, he promises, whatever it takes.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Nour Mobarak may not sound like a candidate for nostalgia. Born in Cairo, she identifies as a Lebanese American, works (mostly) in LA, and seems no closer to settling down, no more than a sadly conflicted world. Among her media are fungi.

Yet she sees them as an emblem of the geopolitical struggles that divide but also give hope. They nestle in soil, laying down mycelium, much like roots. She must like it, too, that the word for its fibers, hyphae, nearly rhymes with Daphne Phono, her installation at MoMA, in its studio through January 8.

Her work stops just short of nostalgia, too. Who can remember when a proper home put a phonograph record on the phono—the “talking phonograph” that Thomas Edison invented long ago? Contemporary DJs and a retro admiration for turntables and vinyl cannot make the old vocabulary any more vivid. Yet Mobarak has many time frames, in a disorderly room of “singing sculpture.” And what they are singing is Dafne, a candidate for the first opera, nearly ten years before Monteverdi’s Orfeo. They may not sing in anything close to harmony or unison, but those are to be found as well. “These are,” she insists, “the cadences of life.”

The opera itself can claim a resolution, at the expense of its heroine, Daphne. And it, too, has widely separated points of origin. Greek myth spoke of the sea nymph, or naiad, and her pursuit by Apollo, but it has survived thanks to Roman poets long after like Ovid. It may have grown more wistful in the process. Greek gods, particularly Zeus, had a sorry habit of lusting after lesser beings, stirring up jealousy among the gods and wars among humans. Ovid’s Phoebus (or Apollo) cries out to Daphne. He means no harm, for he brings a god’s love.

In the end, he transforms her into a laurel, a symbol of Apollo himself. Could the transformation explain the contrast between Mobarak’s snake-like sculptures? The largest winds through the air, while a shiny green one lies flat to the floor. Do fungi contribute to either one? The first has a thick, mottled surface like discolored concrete, but its snaking and mottling could echo her dreams of roots. She describes it as akin to a biological system, a technological network, or linguistics.

I would add song. Not that Daphne Phono sounds the least like early Baroque opera. Unlike Monteverdi’s breakthrough from modal to tonal music, with key changes and a twelve-tone scale, it sounds more like an incantation. I am still uncertain what to make of it or to name its language. Museum displays of sound art run counter to the arc of musical theater anyway. You can, after all, enter in the middle and exit at will. For once MOMA’s studio takes down its front wall as if to encourage you.

The remaining objects, roughly pots and pillars, share the rugged shapes and colors of concrete or stone. Wall text identifies them with the other characters in the story, including Venus and Eros. (Hey, someone had to set off a tragic love.) Never forget, though, that Apollo was the god of light, music, and beauty, which the myth in turn brings to love. As war in the Middle East widens, Mobarak must hope that they will reach there as well. She gives peace a voice, if not any more of a chance.

To wrap up from last time on late work by Robert Frank, he photographs his friends at ease together. Others turn their camera on him, like Joan Lyons and Danny Lyon.

His most obvious collaborations, though, were on films, starting in 1959 with Pull My Daisy He conceived it together with Alfred Leslie, with a script by Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road. (Kerouac also supplies the voice-over narration.) It works through their shared ambivalence about their own creative past, with (as I put it in another past review), an undercurrent of humor and disturbance that art cannot resolve. It also moves between images of family life and the arts.

Some have found it formless, which misses its narrative, but also misses the point. It celebrates the lives of artists, including their spiritual life, but art that makes things up on the spot on the spot. And if it still seems formless, just wait till you see Frank’s other films. (MoMA gives them monitors rather than rooms to themselves.) Just wait, too, till you see the rest of his photography. He pops over to Coney Island for a shoot, but this will be one long roller-coaster of a ride.

His most persistent collaborator was his second wife, June Leaf, and their greatest collaboration their move from New York. They observe much the same scenes at Cape Breton, Frank in photography and Leaf on paper. She gives acrylic and ink the translucency of watercolor—to capture the light, but also to preserve in paint the spontaneity of drawing. She renders a hand, too, perhaps Frank’s own mark. They turn their thoughts most, though, to the space of a home. In years ahead, light can still penetrate, but little else.

They differ in one thing: where Leaf’s scenes are otherwise empty, Frank is still asking his neighbors how they live. He seems happy to have discovered Mabou, a small town on the Cape where he can know pretty much everyone. They and their homes look ramshackle and improvised. One seems to be sinking halfway into the sea. A Mabou Winter is just a half-covered eye.

Walker Evans, long a friend and advisor, stops by to take a look around. For MoMA, it is just one more sign of collaboration. Even fans have mostly given up on Frank after The Americans, and the curators, Joshua Siegel and Lucy Gallon, hope to change that. Something, though, has changed for good. There is no getting around that images become closer and closer to throwaways, much like the “scrapbook.” Still, Frank knew the pain of throwing things away.

What remains is a portrait of loss. His two children died young, his daughter very young, and he himself retreats further and further within. He had always worked on the cheap, but now he trades his Leica for Polaroids—as he put it, “to strengthen the feeling.” Life Dances On . . ., the 1980 print that lends the show its title, seems more and more a bitter hope. Leaf’s absences of life become prophetic, and a typewriter rests untouched. An interior becomes bare walls and a dusty square of light.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on late work by Robert Frank, that photograph of, just maybe, collaborators, should tell you something. They have been hanging out a long time now, and no one would dream of telling them how to pose.

Still, one appears behind the rest, on-screen or in a print, eager to join them but not altogether there. A couple hugs, but Frank stands apart at far right. He looks older as well, just short of sixty, with white hair and a scraggly beard. Hand-lettered labels below each person make them look like perps in police custody.

Frank was always restless. He had to hit the road for The Americans, and it testifies to a restless America. I caught up with him at the Met in 2010—and do check out my review then, which I would not dream of repeating. The series makes the perfect contrast to “America by Car” by Lee Friedlander, for no one had his feet on the ground as much as Frank. He stuck to the people he met and the symbols they embrace, in unsettled compositions. He was not going to wait around for photography’s “decisive moment.”

The book itself remained unsettled until practically the day of publication (in 1957 in Paris). Frank kept returning to his contact prints, circling and changing his choices. MoMA has it right when it includes contact prints among other discoveries, and it salvages film that he never released, too, as “scrapbook footage” in the basement theater. It boasts of its truth to Frank’s intentions by showing them in their entirety, but that has it wrong. He made his selections. He just kept changing his mind.

Born in 1924, he left Switzerland as a restless young man, and he could not sit still on his return to New York after The Americans. Sure, he could find a seat on the bus, but only to cross the city much as he had crossed the country—and to observe what he could from a window. From the Bus opens the show at MoMA, and it can be hard to know who on the street has made a decisive, theatrical turn and who has momentarily lost his way. Frank heads downtown soon after to what he could call home, east of the Village. He casts himself in a postwar scene that is giving America its integrity and its life. He still takes on commercial work, and MoMA includes a page from Mademoiselle, but with the freedom to say no.

He photographs artists, an incredibly young James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg, all of them friends. He could see Willem de Kooning at work from out his window, but he would rather photograph him up close. He spends an extended period with the Rolling Stones for what became his best-known group portrait. Naturally it is the period of Exile on Main Street. Still, he shies away from telling a story about psychology, creativity, and exile. He shoots painters without a brush in hand, Baldwin and Ginsberg without a typewriter.

Nor is he making a political statement. He has room even for a conservative icon, William F. Buckley. He must have known his own conflicting feelings about America. He had to keep moving, but he distrusted his adopted country’s restless spirit. To him it was the spirit of capitalism. It was time he refused to play the lone genius—a time for collaboration, and I continue next time with exactly that.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Are These Men Collaborators? It was 1983, and Joan Lyons posed the question in her title to a print. Robert Frank, among those posing for the camera, must have wondered as well. Among the greatest American photographers ever, was he fated to go it alone?

He must have wondered how much it was worth collaborating from the moment he arrived in New York in 1947, as a Jew from Switzerland. Not even a neutral nation could protect his family and community from the Nazis. He found work almost instantly, in fashion photography, first for Harper’s Bazaar—but was that itself a collaboration, with editors and professional models, or just a reminder of everything he mistrusted about America? He left almost as quickly for the road, for what became The Americans in 1958. It gave a face to Americans like no other work in photography, but were they, too, collaborators, or was Frank that much more in exile? Viewers ever since have wondered if this was their America, too.

Now MoMA picks up the story, with photography and film from the rest of his life, through January 11. It follows him through two marriages, both to artists, and to New York in the excitement of Beat poetry and abstract art—and with an emphasis on collaboration every step of the way. It takes him and his family to Nova Scotia, where he moved part time in 1970. He loved not just sky and sea, but even more his new neighbors. By his death in 2019, his circle had shrunk, as he spent more and more time not just in Cape Breton, but in his house alone. MoMA sees a turn after The Americans to work with others, but its poignancy may lie instead in how much he had to leave behind. Still, as the show’s title has it, “Life Dances On,” and I get started in earnest with an extra post tomorrow.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

“My back is scarred by the lash—that I could show you. I would if I could make visible the wounds of this system upon my soul.”

Frederick Douglass made the wounds of slavery visible for a generation of white Americans, starting before the system itself came to an end in the Civil War. Making visible is also the business of art, and Isaac Julien recreates an address by Douglass in all its eloquence, on “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” And what is it, Julien asks implicitly, to African Americans today? The address provides the framework for an intimate look at the speaker’s life as a free man, on video at MoMA. In the exhibition’s title, it poses Lessons of the Hour, through September 28. It asks, too, whether a divided nation can ever escape slavery’s lessons.

This could be Julien’s year. Douglass escaped slavery in at age twenty-one, in 1838, and Lessons of the Hour takes its title from a speech in 1894, a year before his death. Again on video, in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Julien brings to life the Harlem Renaissance and its leading sculptor. He also curates an exhibition of that sculptor, and I bring together my reviews of that exhibition and Julien’s video as a longer review and my latest upload. As I wrote then, there is nothing savage about the art of Richmond Barthé—and, if there were, he would be the first to tame it. If you have any doubts, head right for Feral Benga, in a gallery retrospective of a thoroughly sophisticated artist.

“I have watched from the wharves,” Douglass said, “the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with its cargoes full of human flesh. . . . In the still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door.” His words evoke pictures, and so does Isaac Julian, but less painful ones. He opens to trees, to a gentleman’s study and a woman sewing, and to the man himself, slowly leading a horse. He follows Douglass on the train, looking inward and perhaps creating those words in his head. He ends with Douglass standing tall on a mountain’s peak, like the statue of a hero.

He works in film, transferred to video, for the epic clarity of its color. It runs from day into night and from introspection to fireworks on, of course, the Fourth of July. It includes shots of an hourglass marking the hour, if not its lessons. Still, time and history have a way of playing tricks. Day breaks again after the fireworks, on its way to the mountain. The sands of time sometimes flow and sometimes stand still.

Julien hopes to encompass both reality and hope, especially when they collide. A hand picks cotton, but it might almost be picking white flowers for their beauty, with echoes soon after in yellow glistening on a tree. The audience for oratory files into a Methodist church with the bare architecture of an arena today. It includes blacks and whites, men and women—some in the fashion of the day, others in the present. Other clips borrow police surveillance tape of protests against police murder, although I somehow missed them. The video runs just under half an hour, but one can enter as one pleases and, in time, see the loop begin again.

I first encountered the artist, born in England, in London in 2003, already moving in and out of history. Two videos placed him both within a Trinidad community forty years earlier, after a poem by Derek Walcott, and a contemporary city much like Baltimore, where Douglass lived as well. When I caught up with Julien again, with Playtime in 2013, I worried that he fixed all too easily on his heroes and villains. (Do read my review then, for a fuller picture.) Has he finally found the hero he deserves? Has his hero found the response he deserves, in fireworks and, in church, applause?

As Douglass, Ray Fearon makes his character nuanced, steady, personal, and profound (and I wish that the museum took more care to credit him). Then again, I may have sold Julien short all along. Ten Thousand Waves, in 2010, already has many messages and many channels to mess them up. His latest video, a highlight of the Biennial, comes closer still to an installation and a hall of mirrors. It also moves easily in time, back to the Harlem Renaissance. Now MoMA presents Lessons of the Hour, first shown in 2019, as a historical document itself.

Douglass was the most photographed American of his time. And the curators, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi with Erica DiBenedetto, set out photos, publications, and newspaper clippings, floor to ceiling and in cases. They also include the handwritten text of a speech on the role of images of black and white America. Is blackness once again “going dark,” feared by or invisible to white eyes? For Julien, Douglass speaks forcefully but never gets over his introspection, his memories, and his pain. “Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.