Almost every year I write a big long post here about the best art I’ve see in the year. Back when I worked for ArtPrize I would travel regularly to art events and art destinations like New York, the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, etc. So my lists would be filled with highlights from those trips. Now I work for Grey Matter Group, a marketing and video production firm. I still travel quite a bit, mostly to make videos about scholars studying art and cognition. On these trips I still see quite a bit of art (I make it a point to), but I usually miss the big events on the national and international contemporary art calendar. (I do write freelance, of course, so if anyone wants to send me to those big art events to cover them as a critic and/or reporter, please reach out!)
The following items are not ranked, they’re listed in the order in which I saw them.
- Agnes Denes, Matrix of Knowledge, 1970, LACMA, Los Angeles
In February I saw Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, at LACMA. It was an expansive and varied show of early computer art, some made on computers and some made about computers. Agnes Denes’ Matrix of Knowledge was the latter. It’s a hand-drawn cyanotype diagram that speculates about eventual capability of computers. In a year where AI is becoming rapidly more semantic, widespread, and powerful, Denes’ 53 year-old rumination felt prophetic. The drawing explores the idea that computers could one day navigate complex webs of concepts, rather than just run through linear and logical instructions. Denes seems to have understood that computers held the promise of condensing a great deal of knowledge and navigating through it in a way that feels intuitive and meaningful, rather than simply running calculations. Her matrices remind me of this recent visual explainer of the inner workings of large language models like ChatGPT.
2. Shahzia Sikander, Havah…to breathe, air, life, 2023, and NOW, 2023, Madison Square Park, New York
The public art program at Madison Square Park is always excellent, but Shahzia Sikander reached beyond the park to the courthouse across the street. Havah…to breathe, air, life and NOW, was a multipart installation that consisted of two similar sculptures of mythical golden female figures, one on the lawn of the park (Havah) and the other on top of the Courthouse of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court (NOW). I traveled to New York specifically to see this pair of sculptures. Before that I was in Philadelphia interviewing Dr. Jamal Elias of UPenn for a video I produced about research he’s doing into the role of the arts among American Muslims, in which he’s collaborating with Sikander. The video is one of many I produced for Templeton Religion Trust this year through my work for Grey Matter Group, and it can be seen here.
As Dr. Elias explains in the video, Sikander’s project began when she noticed that the old courthouse was adorned with a series of sculptures of famous law-givers throughout history, save for one empty plinth. That spot once belonged to a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad, which sat atop the building for decades before someone in the 1950s realized that including the Prophet was not an honor, but was instead a blasphemous provocation against Islam. The sculpture was quietly removed and nothing was put in its place, until now. Sikander’s figure considers the role of female law-givers, and opts for a more universal and mythical figure instead of an individual from history. I love this work because it reveals the histories that are written into the structures that shape our lives, both physical and conceptual: architecture, law, religion, and gender.
3. Philip Guston Now at The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
This Philip Guston retrospective was originally supposed to happen in 2020, but it was postponed in the wake of the George Floyd protests. There was a fear that Guston’s images of the KKK would be read the wrong way and lead to protests. The postponement wasn’t as long as originally planned, and the protests never happened. The show is now on to its fourth and final stop at the Tate Modern in London.
I love Guston. He made one of these best of the year lists before when I saw Philip Guston and the Poets at Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. The way he renders people is simultaneously goofy and grotesque. I think the delay of this show was based on a fear that making the KKK into cartoon characters might mute their horror or normalize their hatred. But Guston wasn’t the one making these monsters into cartoons, he made pictures that confronted the extent to which this kind of evil was already sanitized by mainstream American discourse. His work resonates more now than when he made it. As I write this, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination is echoing Hitler in campaign speeches. I’m afraid that Guston painted both the horror he saw and what was to come, and it would be a mistake to look away.
4. Bill Viola, Visitation, 2006, Uppsala Cathedral, Uppsala, Sweden
Uppsala Cathedral is a gorgeous 15th century brick behemoth located about an hour north of Stockholm. I was in town to shoot another video, and in my spare time I visited the cathedral for the architecture and morbid reliquaries, I wasn’t expecting to find contemporary art. I was pleasantly surprised to find a Bill Viola video, owned by the church, playing on a large screen in one of the side chapels.
Walking over the stone covers of tombs whose inscriptions are worn away by centuries of footsteps, on the way to ancient sarcophagi of kings and queens, it’s a hard environment for contemporary art to hold its own, and video can seem particularly flippant in a setting like this. But Bill Viola makes it work, and the fact that he’s using video makes it even more remarkable. Viola’s videos show that video is a ghostly medium. To capture the light of someone and replay their movements forever on a loop, potentially long after their bodies are dead and gone, is a far more spiritual artistic practice than creating a likeness of a body in stone or pigment.
Visitation shows a wall of falling water in a dark space. Two women approach the water in slow motion and gradually pierce the barrier, coming beyond the watery veil where we can see them more clearly, before returning. They seem to briefly cross the barrier between the living and the dead. Reading their wet faces, the experience looks exhilarating and terrifying. Isn’t this why we go to church?
5. Multi-faith and Contemplation Room, Tate Modern, London
This is not an artwork, but it is in an art museum. In June I visited Tate Modern for the first time, and honestly I was a little underwhelmed. The famous Turbine Hall was empty because it was between exhibitions, and not much else really caught my eye. However, as I walked through the galleries I noticed a strange door on a white wall with no handle and a minimal sign that said “Multi-faith and Contemplation Room.” I sheepishly pushed open the door to see a small Muslim prayer mat, perfectly angled toward Mecca, along with a sign instructing me to take off my shoes.
At first I genuinely thought this was an art installation, until it became clear that it was really a Muslim prayer room. What struck me about it was that the museum had gone through all the trouble of serving this particular audience without actually saying what they were doing. It felt like the Tate wanted to serve their Muslim guests while also maintaining institutional deniability by labeling the room as “multi-faith.” I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing several leading scholars of Islamic art this year, and a big part of what’s so beautiful about Islam is its aesthetic and historic specificity. Islam, like all religions, is a particular way of contending with the world and what lies beyond.
There’s this quote from the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev that I return to often, where she’s explaining why she included non-art objects in an exhibition. She says that these things “are produced by circumstances that are readable by art, aspects that art can cope with and absorb. The boundary between what is art and what is not becomes less important.” Seeing the minimal, “multi-faith” Muslim prayer room in a museum made the strange contradictions of this space readable by art. I’m not sure we can expect religion to survive institutional sanitation without being altered beyond recognition.
6. LA VIE EN ROSE. BRUEGHEL, MONET, TWOMBLY, Museum Brandhorst, Munich
I was in Munich to (you guessed it) film another video. I had a little extra time, so I wandered into Museum Brandhorst, not knowing anything about it or what to expect. Wow. WOW. This was one of the best museum experiences I can remember. It was relatively small, there were three floors, and each had stunning exhibitions.
On the top floor they were presenting La Vie en Rose, a painting show about flowers that coincided with a citywide flower festival. That sounds like such a weak premise for a show, but somehow this exhibition was an absolute stunner. It was structured around the museum’s seemingly endless supply of huge paintings by the late Cy Twombly, all of which the museum owns, and all of which depict flowers (more or less). The color and the action and the drippiness of these paintings was overwhelming. There are multiple qualities of these canvases that cannot be captured in photography of any kind. Something was happening in Twombly’s bluish-purple “Untitled (Roses),” 2008, that I don’t think computer screens can reproduce. Go ahead and click the link to see the painting, but know that you are not really seeing it, sorry.
But it wasn’t just the Twomblys, the rest of the show was through the roof. Monet’s water lilies? Probably the best one I’ve seen. Warhol’s iconic screenprint of four flowers? Yup. A melancholic Gerhard Ricther of a broken flower in a vase? Yes. Those Georgia O’Keefe flowers that look kind of like genitalia? They had them. Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s 16th century portrait of a person made of flowers? Yeah they had that. Ellsworth Kelly drawings of flowers? Of course. Dutch Renaissance flower still life masterpieces? Yes. Isa Geztken sculpture? Also yes. Brueghel? Hell yeah.
Twombly images occasionally circulate on social media along with incensed comments like “Can you believe this scribbled mess sells for MILLIONS? Modern art is a scam!” I’ve always loved Twomby, but this ridiculously stacked show about flowers, packed with masterpieces from the last 500 years, made me remember how much I love the full breadth of painting as a tradition. There are so many ways to paint a flower, and they can all be so good! Who’s better, Brueghel, Monet, or Twombly? The answer is yes.
7. Nicole Eisenman, What Happened, Museum Brandhorst, Munich
Still at the Brandhorst in Munich, I went downstairs and saw a mid-career retrospective of American artist Nicole Eisenman. This show is coming to MCA Chicago in April of 2024 and I suggest you go see it. Eisenman is one of a few painters who picked up where Guston left off, employing loose, cartoony figurations to render scenes that are both touching and terrifying. This retrospective includes jarring recent sculptures and early drawings exploring the artist’s lesbian identity that are both humorous and morbid. More than anything, the paintings really sing. Somehow, she weaves together a loose, joke-y sensibility with a seriousness that’s both tender and deadly serious. Figures are transfixed by their phones in mesmerized stupidity. Two half-naked women share a tender embrace in the glow of a projected computer home screen. A motley procession of characters fill a canvas that’s both somber and somehow celebratory. This is post-post-painting. I’m not sure how canvases can hold this much narrative, emotion, and inventiveness, but under Eisenmann’s brush, they do.
8. Alexander Calder, Cactus Provisoire, 1967 with blue fence, Trinity College Dublin
In September I found myself in Dublin, on the half neoclassical/half brutalist campus of Trinity College to film yet another video. I toured the gorgeous library and saw the Book of Kells (9th century), but what really stuck with me was a faded black Calder stabile called Cactus Provisoire in the middle of a campus green. The sculpture is fine. There are a few remarkable Calder stabiles, like Grand Rapids’ La Grande Vitesse (1969), and then there are many more that are only OK. This was one of the latter. But what made it stick out was this ludicrous temporary blue fencing that surrounded it for some reason. Was it due to be repaired or repainted? No current maintenance was evident. Were the barriers there to prevent enthusiastic, art-loving students from climbing or otherwise defiling the piece? It seems possible. In any case, the presence of the bright blue fence was unavoidable and it utterly transformed the work into something else entirely. This kind of public art, uncharitably called “plop art,” has the power to transform and activate the public space in which it’s installed. For better or worse, this means that the surrounding negative/physical space around the work essentially becomes a part of the piece. Which means that if you place a bright blue fence closely hemming in the matte black sculpture, those barriers become a part of the work, whether you like it or not.
This weird abomination (or perhaps improvement?) of Calder plop art caught my eye because I have a bit of personal experience with the Calder Foundation, and I happen to know that they are very particular about how the work is preserved and presented. I expect that Trinity College will be receiving a terse letter from Calder’s grandson Sandy.
9. Thomas Couture, La Peinture Réaliste, 1865, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
This is a small painting, and it seems unremarkable at first. It shows an artist working in his studio, drawing the head of a pig from observation. But there’s more going on here, the details help the satire become clear. The choice of subject, a severed pig’s head, is pretty grotesque. The artist’s stool, which he’s not paying attention to, is a marble head of a classical Greek sculpture. On the wall behind him hang other potential still life subjects: an old boot, a head of lettuce, a candlestick. The title, “The Realist Painter,” gives a clue to what Couture was satirizing, but to today’s audience the term “realist” might be misleading. How could Couture be mocking realist painters, wasn’t he one as well? This picture looks realistic, after all. But no, Couture was a history painter, steeped in the French Academy, and definitely not a realist. What he was mocking was a radical new group of French painters, called the Realists, who were led by Gustave Courbet. Courbet rejected idealized depictions of history, mythology, and the Bible that painters at the time were expected to portray. He committed himself to painting only what he could see, confronting subjects like poverty and sexuality in a way that was shocking at the time (and is still a little shocking now, frankly). Academics like Couture hated this, of course, and he accused the Realists of turning their backs on classical beauty–by using a classical sculpture’s head as a stool, for example–only to give artistic attention to crude subjects like a pig’s head.
As art history played out, it turns out that Courbet won and Couture lost. Courbet opened the door for the radical truth-telling of avant-garde art, the Impressionists soon followed along with everything else we now know as modern and contemporary art. Earlier I mentioned how Cy Twombly is often mocked on Twitter by a certain type of traditionalist (read fascist) account. These accounts often have avatars that look like the stool in Couture’s painting. Couture, like those culture war yahoos on Twitter, was fighting a battle he already lost. I really admire La Peinture Réaliste, just not for the reasons Couture intended. Paint that pig’s head, man! Art can tell the truth!
10. Lauren Lee McCarthy, I heard TALKING IS DANGEROUS, 2020, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids
For my money, Lauren Lee McCarthy is one of the best artists working today. In the fall she gave a lecture at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, along with Ben Grosser (who was on my Best Of List last year). McCarthy’s lecture was good, but what I really loved was when the talk became a performance of sorts, as she demonstrated a 2020 work called I heard TALKING IS DANGEROUS. The piece reflects on the restrictions of Covid lockdown. Given that talking could potentially spread the virus, McCarthy made an app that used text to speech on a smartphone to communicate without speaking. She would then go to the doorsteps of performance participants and converse with them in this strange way, each using their phones to talk. At the lecture we all activated our phones and played along with a kind of call and response.
This work is only three years old, but it already feels dated. I think that’s a good thing. Covid was a truly jarring experience. I think it was the most that norms have been upended in my lifetime. I appreciate the artists who engaged with it directly at the time, and I think those works are worthy of reflection now, even as things have returned to “normal.”
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