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The largest gallery at the Whitney just got bigger. It has knocked down nearly every wall, leaving a dance theater that Alvin Ailey himself could never have experienced. For a more impressive stage, he would have had to turn to New York itself.

It is also an exhibition space—as capacious, the museum hopes, as African American art. It sees Ailey as a guide to the story of that art, including art that he may never have known. It must sound ridiculous. Who would attempt to tell that story in an exhibition or even two, no more than the story of Western or global art? It risks condescending to black artists by pretending that it can. And yet it succeeds, for theater becomes art and art becomes theater, as “Edges of Ailey,” through February 9, while an Ailey veteran, Ralph Lemon, at MoMA PS1 reaches for the stars.

This is epic theater. Works from more than eighty artists, many as large as a human performer, take the spotlight before disappearing into a greater darkness. Some occupy islands within “Edges of Ailey,” and you can circulate around and between them. Right off, that knocks out any hope for a chronological exhibition or even a story, but do not despair. The rest line the walls, as you would expect, and articulate the show’s themes. Smaller spaces at each end of the floor tell Ailey’s own interdisciplinary story.

Born in 1931, he studied with Stella Adler—not a choreographer, but a renowned acting teacher. He acknowledged the influence of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Duke Ellington, and the show returns often to the Harlem Renaissance, painting and dance, black experience, and music, particularly jazz. He credited Geoffrey Holder as well, a friend who moved easily between the stage and art. Ailey founded the American Dance Theater in 1958, with thirty-two dancers and two directors. There, too, he was thinking of influence, collaboration, and community. He died in 1989 of AIDS.

The show includes publicity posters, playbills, and film clips culled from thousands of hours, and scheduled performance continues downstairs in the museum’s theater and on its roof as well. It has color photos of Ailey himself dancing, lingering on not just his movements, but his expressive face. Ailey made the scene in all sorts of ways. The ABT performed at the opening of Studio 54, the epitome of a club scene that would never admit you. And the show’s only window overlooks a Hudson River pier that served as a gay pick-up spot. The AIDS quilt bars the view.

Overhead on the show’s fantastic stage, choreography, too, lines the walls, in one long video collage spanning eighteen screens. It adds color, like the yellow robes of dancers. It provides a constant background of music, even if you look instead at the art. Mahalia Jackson introduces a work with music by Ellington, barely mentioning Ailey. This is his achievement all the same. It just happens to come down to two distinct exhibitions, for dance and for art.

The show is itself a collaboration, between the Whitney and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. Neither is willing to let Ailey’s work die with him. Nor are the curators, Adrienne Edwards with Joshua Lubin-Levy. They could have included only art that the choreographer admired or influenced, and perhaps they do. If so, he knew and influenced a lot. And that still leaves open just how present he is in the art—and I wrap this up next time with the art itself.

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

I could not make it to the Whitney at dawn, and I could not have entered if I had. Still, on a screen by the window, sunlight crossed the horizon and reflected on the water.

What could be more impressive than sunrise at noon—and more representative of landscape art? I should have read the title or, at the very least, noticed that I was facing west toward the Hudson. This is Artie Verkant’s Exposure Adjustment on a Sunset, and the sun’s hazy yellow sphere and broad band of white are equally an illusion. Give him a little time, and they will dissolve in pixels anyway.

The museum is out to alter the very idea of landscape in art, just as Verkant has taken it from painting to video. It sees contemporary art from its collection as “Shifting Landscapes” through January—and I work this in with earlier reports on two other landscape painters, Paul Paiement and Hilary Pecis, as a longer review and my latest upload. The Whitney’s seventy-five artists also dissolve the distinction between human and animal, artifice and nature. It is oddly insular all the same. Maria Berrio could be speaking for them all when she calls a painting Universe of One. Still, if it seems arbitrary and downright incoherent, there will always be another dawn.

You have seen this often enough before. A museum rolls out a genre from art’s history and modernizes it in the interest of contemporary art and diversity. It could be self-portraiture, the female body, art’s materials, or blackness. It risks becoming not so much a theme, since a show’s rooms will have their own themes, as a tic. Jennie Goldstein, Marcela Guerrero, and Roxanne Smith as curators take that model from the body into landscape painting. If neither landscape nor painting is all that evident, you will not be surprised.

That may be the Hudson out the west window, but this is not the Hudson River School. The very first room takes things off the canvas once and for all. Its theme of “Borderlands” makes sense when elections turn on immigration, but is art still crossing borders? Leslie Martinez applies pumice, paint chips, and rags, and you will just have to take her word for it that they reflect the accumulation of objects and cultures in a human life. Huge mossy creatures lie on a bed of turf for Amalia Mesa-Bains, while flames spread at night on a grid of ceramic chips by Teresita Fernández. She didn’t start the fire.

The flames may refer as much to climate change as to borderlands, and the next section speaks to the altered landscape. Robert Adams photographs industrial sites in Colorado. Dance for Nicole Soto Rodríguez alludes to sites and customs in Puerto Rico, but as performed on video and on a luxuriant staircase at home. What, then, could show the land’s transformation better than New York? Cityscapes here just may not have much to do with the urban landscape. They make room for Keith Haring, of all people, and (New York New Wave) Jean-Michel Basquiat.

See a pattern here? On the one hand, seemingly anything fits. On the other hand, pretty much anything that you might expect does not. That includes the entirety of history. This is not about mixing old work and new for fresh perspectives on both. Painters and photographers from the Ashcan School and the Harlem Renaissance to William Klein and Ming Smith have immersed themselves in the city, but not here. Just a floor below, a show for Alvin Ailey has ample space for the African American South. All “Shifting Landscapes” can show is a lone Gees Bend quilt and some cluttered assemblage.

The recent past does enter a room for earthworks—and just as quickly withdraws. Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria are nowhere to be seen, but Nancy Holt is, with the field locator that showed her the way. So is Agnes Denes, with photos of her wheat field in Battery Park City, seen from an angle that leaves their setting and subject a mystery. Maya Lin has her Ghost Forest of cedar stumps, but one would never know her concern for climate change. One would never know, too, how much she has reshaped urban spaces, from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington to museum architecture in New York. While hardly earth art, Gordon Matta-Clark does get to climb a tree and to call it a dance.

A final section, the curators argue, makes explicit the humanity of nature. If this, though, is “Another World,” can it show humanity or nature? The title may sound like Surrealism or science fiction, but it also looks suspiciously like self-portraiture. It does, though, allow Firelei Báez to float amid flowers. And is that a furry black bear beside her? A living landscape need never be a universe of one.

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

Every self-portrait is a boast—a double boast. Yes, says the artist, I am a worthy subject, and yes I can pull it off with my art.

With “What It Becomes” at the Whitney, make that a triple boast, through January 12. Yes, its adds, I am worth hiding as well. There was more to me than you saw all along, and it is up to you, the viewer, to find it. As David Hammons has it, Close Your Eyes and See. .

Self-portraiture’s dual or triple nature goes back to its origins, in the Renaissance. An artist like Albrecht Dürer could boast not just of his skill, but of a new-found status relative to his patron as well. For Dürer in silverpoint at age thirteen, he had not yet even earned a patron. With “Hidden Faces,” covered portraits of the Renaissance at the Met last spring, every portrait was also a mask. Its sitter, after all, had an image to convey, too. By the end of 1960s, though, when the Whitney begins, the mask itself became a place to hide.

“What It Becomes” does not speak of masking. It calls art a way “to reveal the unseen” and to “make the familiar unrecognizable.” In other words, it is about self-creation. The curator, Scout Hutchinson, also speaks of art’s material presence, even in a space largely dedicated to works on paper from the museum’s collection, just outside the education department. It is about “inscription, erasure, and tactility.” It is a vanishing act all the same.

Presence is as presence does, starting with David Hammons. His body prints put himself into the act, but not to show his face. A famously reclusive artist, he reveals nothing, least of all his skill in drawing. They might as well be tire treads. He confronts, too, a black man’s invisibility to white eyes or, worse, violent removal. Body prints by Yves Klein in blue, not in the show, seem an empty boast by comparison.

The small show could be a catalog of strategies for vanishing. Some play the part of others, like Darrel Ellis in black wash, posing after a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Wendy Red Star leaves herself out entirely in favor of a leading Native American around 1880. The same red outlines in ink-jet prints frame her text and a hatchet in his hands, both as weapons. Toyin Ojih Odutola gives black skin to “famous whites.” Jim Hodges works with his own saliva, but the results look more like pond scum than a portrait.

Naotaka Hiro promises to Map His Body, with pretty enough colors but not much else. Others appear explicitly, but masked. Rick Bartow takes on the teeth and smile of a wild animal, in pastel and pencil. Maren Hassinger takes pains to apply her mask, like a woman applying makeup, but as blackface. I cannot say for sure whether her video celebrates, defies, or condescends to gender and race, but it resonates. Blythe Bohnen acquires her mask simply by time-exposure, so that the blur of her features serves as a beard.

Catherine Opie hides behind nothing more than her back and its blood-red incisions. And Ana Mendieta, never one to hide, brings one last strategy for vanishing. She sets an effigy on fire, leaving her very body image in flames. Self-portraits have become all but a ritual these days, as an affirmation of personal and cultural identity. These eleven artists look back to a time after Modernism when such things came with irony and pain. For all their flaws, they could still mean more than what it all became.

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

It would be terrible to leave you this week’s review of Robert Frank at MoMA, in collaboration and alone, without the context of his greatest work. Let me, then, offer a taste of my review from 2010 of The Americans at the Met, with a link to more. I have also written about something closer to his present show, the mayhem of Frank’s contact sheets.

In 1955 a Swiss immigrant set out to discover America. He almost found it all on a streetcar in New Orleans.

Robert Frank chose it for the cover of The Americans, his eighty-three photographs published in this country in 1958. Trolley–New Orleans alone holds a cross-section—male and female, black and white, young and old. Its windows run parallel to the picture plane, like the cells of a contact sheet. Frank in fact winnowed the book from hundreds of rolls of film and twenty-eight thousand shots. It is an emblem of life on the road, a portrait of the artist as an American.

It is also an image of perplexity. The horizontal of that streetcar runs askew. None of the eyes or social strata make contact, with each other with or the photographer. Still others lurk in the fog of its upper windows. Within the book, the image directly follows one of a Fourth of July picnic, dominated by an American flag worn almost to transparency. For blacks on or off the streetcar, so had the American dream.

They are Americans in motion, just as the streetcar is moving past. They love cars, and they love the movies. The Met describes Hollywood here as an elite—Marx’s opium of the people. Frank will not condescend to the masses even to that extent. One really can identify the photograph of the streetcar with his art form and his art form with motion pictures. Andy Warhol, Warhol’s influence on Pop Art, and sly takes on commercial photography by Alfred Gescheidt were erupting at around the same time, and they were tracking the same upheavals.

One can see the entire book as a movie, with an enigmatic beginning and a happy ending. As it opens, two women watch a parade from separate windows. An American flag hides one woman’s face, and Frank’s point of view masks the other in darkness. Frank’s final scenes include sunbathers or drifters in a public park, and a wedding at City Hall. By the end, too, blacks get more screen time, as well as the book’s sole exchange with the photographer. A black couple turns to glare back, and young blacks in a car grin broadly.

All along, the same devices that create a distance between people also create ambiguity and humor. A black nurse holds a round-faced white infant, like a Renaissance prince. A man’s tuba obscures his face and makes a mockery of his celebration, but it also gives him a smiley. A photo booth invites people to remember their loved ones for sixty-nine cents, and maybe they will. Jack Kerouac, the beat writer, loved the free associations, like the turn from decorative stars to a starlet—as he termed it, “potry.”

Frank promised the Guggenheim that his project would be “sociological, historic, and esthetic.” He belongs at once to documentary realism and the Beats, but also to postwar formalism, escapism, and the triumph of a very American esthetic. Does that leave him in a strange middle ground, with unanswered questions about art and America? In the very last photograph, Frank steps out onto the road to shoot his wife, in the confined space of the car and at a perilous angle. Is an American journey a gesture of abandonment or of love?

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

You may find yourself counting the seconds at the Whitney, but why bother? Mark Armijo McKnight counts them off as no impatient human ever could. Who knows what that will leave a gay artist or the viewer when it is done? McKnight’s film makes his gender as hard to pin down as his landscapes, but everything counts—and I work this together with a recent report on a show at Wave Hill of queering nature as a longer review and my latest upload.

Dark clouds loom over a full wall, as ominous accompaniment. Will it ever end, and will the darkness? And then at last, after a totally black screen, the shot comes to rest on an otherworldly landscape and a metronome. It is McKnight’s coming to be as a gay male and an American artist. It is also his “Decreation,” through January 5. He just happens to leave something temptingly incomplete along the way.

McKnight takes his title from Simone Weil, who began as an activist and ended as a mystic. As a mere child in a Jewish family, she spoke out against World War I. Through a lifetime of poor health, she stood up for trade unions and, like Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. In the end, though, she had a vision of the loss of self before a Christian god. It was as if her entire life had been shot out of the barrel of a gun, never to return. A photo from McKnight could well depict just that.

In reality, its puff of smoke belongs to clouds, wispy bright ones, as does a trail of smoke. It evokes Western skies in a great tradition of American art, of Ansel Adams in photography or paintings and drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe. A dreamer might say that it belongs, too, to the promise of an expanding nation—and an activist to its violence against Native Americans. McKnight could well identify with them all. The curators, Drew Sawyer with Nakai Falcón, surround the film with just half a dozen large photographs and two sculptures. They fall somewhere between a single installation, a premature retrospective, and the decreation of the artist’s dreams.

Titles speak of The Black Space, matter, sleep, and dreams, and McKnight writes of the “queer refusal of the disinterested gaze.” More than one photo shows naked bodies entwined and out of doors. They are all but indiscernible from strangely biomorphic hills—or an animal’s corpse in the dried grass and weeds. The photos stick to black and white, the film to sixteen millimeters, as if caught in an embodied world before the digital. Anti-Matter, also a photograph, looks all too material. Even the sculpture, concrete blocks with serious chips at their base, might be coming apart.

The film is in a tradition of lushness and austerity. It is going nowhere fast, like films by Michael Snow or the Empire State Building for Andy Warhol. The relentless ticking of a metronome recalls Minimalism in music and the refusal to make music at all in John Cage. McKnight says that he drew on György Ligeti, the Hungarian-Austrian composer of “micropolyphony.” While the film closes in on just one metronome, one can hear many more through speakers high on the facing wall. He swears that one could see them all if only the camera drew back.

Things happen when they happen and no more. The ticking continues, loudly, and comes to an end as abruptly as it began. Circles, incised in concrete and crossed by diagonals, could each belong to a clock face lacking numbers. Like the film, they gesture to passing moments but refuse to tell time. I cannot swear what “Decreation” has to say about mysticism, gender, the environment, or the United States. Still, it speaks loudly, and McKnight can claim the lushness and austerity as his own.

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

It was 1972, and environmentalists were desperate. At least Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison were, and they sought a “survivalist alternative” where you might never expect it, in a work of art—and I work this together with past reports on summery sculpture indoors and out in Harlem Sculpture Gardens and by Alexis Rockman and Tiril Hasselknippe as a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

Their Survival Piece (the fifth of seven) made its debut that year in the gallery at Cal State Fullerton. In its Portable Orchard, nature had an assist from recycled redwood and artificial light. Now the Whitney recreates it, through January 1, and one can hear their urgency. “To survive as a species,” they wrote, “we are going to have to learn how to grow our own food and take care of ourselves.” So why has it gone all but forgotten? And why does it look so calm, so composed, and so green?

The Harrisons were themselves survivors. Like the fruit of their “sustainable food system,” they lived to a ripe old age. They would be in their nineties were they alive today. Their indoor citrus grove includes all that one might wish, including lemons, limes, grapefruit, and naval and mandarin oranges, each carefully labeled. On the First of July, just days after the opening at the Whitney, young fruit had already begun to appear. As if to proclaim their eco-friendliness, they were all still green.

To appreciate it, though, you may have to get past the rhetoric. The enterprise sounds not just urgent, but downright bureaucratic. It speaks of not natural farming, which in any case takes more land to feed the millions, but natural farming practices—and they are not just obsolete, but “cannot be taken for granted.” You must get past the contradictions as well. This may be sustainable agriculture, but not for eating. If it makes you think of Rirkrit Tiravanija, “relational esthetics,” interactive art, free food, and sharing, forget it, and do not touch.

Perhaps the contradictions come with the territory, where fears mix with love. The Whole Earth Catalog appeared in 1972, Silent Spring was ten years old, and the Whitney has copies of both. Like the EPA, established in 1970, they attest to urgency, but also to hope. Artists may have felt a sense of desperation as well, as late modern art gave way to criticism and chaos. Besides, fears are easier to understand than ever in light of climate change. Yet artists like Maya Lin do not just conserve the environment, but transform it.

The orchard flourishes all the same. The Whitney has removed its eighth-floor partitions, leaving a wide-open room with planters in neat rows. They share their redwood hexagons with parallel light tubes directly above. As trees grow, their peaks extend into those upper hexagons as well. Other survival pieces included a hog pasture, a fishery, and an entire farm, all portable. Here a uniform design and strong colors carry the day.

It is tendentious all the same. This is not the future, sustainable or otherwise. It is art, and a true New York landmark shows what that might mean. Back from college in the 1970s, I was rediscovering the city, its neighborhoods and its architecture. The Ford Foundation on East 42nd Street offered a glorious respite from my minimum-wage job barely a block away. Like the Harrisons, it, too, took nature indoors and artifice into nature.

Finished in 1967, its twelve stories of offices surround a soaring atrium—a place for walking, sitting, and contemplation. Greenery blossoms out from the balconies and rises from the floor. A collaboration between Dan Kiley, the landscape architect (whose other landmarks include Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis), and Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo (who also designed the Met’s American wing), it brought a temperate environment and a seamless flow of plants, trees, pink stone, and rusted steel. It has its surfeit of good intentions, too, no doubt. It has after all, been the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice since restoration in 2019 (and I described it at greater length then). Still, by comparison, that citrus grove is a lemon.

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