It’s been an unusual year, and this is an unusual version of my annual blog post about the best artworks I saw. Most are not really artworks at all, and I spent some time explaining my thinking around that in Part 1. Here’s Part 2:

6. Factorio

A few months ago a friend told me about a Czech computer game where you build endlessly complex factories. I was intrigued, so I downloaded the demo version and got hooked immediately. I’ve put nearly 80 hours into it at this point, and I don’t think I’ll stop any time soon. The premise of the game is that your spaceship crash lands on an alien planet and you need to find raw materials and craft them into tools, logistics systems, and eventually into a spaceship to escape the planet. There are big alien bugs that attack you and your base, so you need to build walls and gun turrets for defense. It’s a little like Starcraft and similar real-time strategy games, except that in Factorio, you (the “Engineer”) are always alone. You can’t train soldiers or work toward a better-equipped army to fight the alien bugs, because you’re on your own. The primary challenge is not combat strategy, it’s automation. How do you gather enormous amounts of resources and automate the production of more tools for more efficient automation?

The player gradually advances through a technology tree that provides a steady stream of upgrades and improvements. Conveyor belts, automatic part assembly machines, trains, nuclear power, drone-powered logistics networks, and on and on. I’ve enjoyed learning about the game and just nerding out in the online communities that have formed around it on Facebook and Reddit. People swap designs for advanced oil processing facilities with efficient throughput, troubleshoot faulty rail networks, and even share real world photos and videos of Factorio-like automated systems. One common refrain in these groups is “The factory must grow.” No matter how big and how efficient your factory is, it can always be bigger and more efficient. Even though the complexity is so vast, it’s also incremental. Each step along the way is a small, achievable step toward something much larger. It’s been my refuge from the chaos of 2020.

7. The Mandalorian

Everybody watched The Mandalorian, right? Spoilers ahead. I really love this show, I giggle with glee while watching it. Here I want to make two observations, one general and the other specific.

First, I love how it’s so episodic, and at times even low stakes. Yes, of course a series is going to be episodic, it has episodes. The Mandalorian is so refreshing because it shows the micro-dramas of the Star Wars universe that often have nothing to do with the epic, galaxy-altering struggles of Jedis and the Empire and all of that. Those elements are there, of course, but some of my favorite moments of the show are when we only get one, maybe two episodes with a given character or setting, then it moves on. It reminds me of Star Trek TV series. An episode consists of a new planet, a new side character or two, a new problem, and it’s all wrapped up by the end. I love it.

My second observation differs from the first in that it is about the epic, central story arch of Star Wars. In the final episode of the second season, the Mandalorian and his friends, including Boba Fett(!), are about to save Grogu (aka Baby Yoda) from the clutches of evil Moth Gideon. But powerful dark trooper droids are advancing on them and their weapons are powerless to stop them. Then, over the space station’s closed circuit television system they see a mysterious cloaked figure disembark from an X-Wing fighter and begin effortlessly slicing through the dark troopers with a green lightsaber. I knew it was Luke Skywalker the moment the X-Wing flashed by the spaceship’s window. This scene was a giant shot of nostalgic dopamine, it felt like I was physically, mentally, and spiritually transformed into an eight year-old for three whole minutes. But nostalgia is easy and art is hard. There is something about this scene that transcends nostalgia, however, and it has to do with the confluence of the way we (as the audience), and the characters (especially Grogu) witness Luke’s slaughter of the dark troopers. The security camera monitors on which they watch the Jedi’s advance are old cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, with hazy, analogue horizontal scan lines. CRT monitors are rare these days, replaced by sophisticated LCD screens. I think this choice of prop was very deliberate, Grogu and the others see Luke approaching through the grainy bands of a tube TV, not the warmth of celluloid film nor the crispness of today’s remastered digital streams. Grogu even reaches out his little hand and touches the screen, which was the moment it hit me: I also fell in love with Luke Skywalker through the flickering portal of a tube TV, watching a bootleg copy of Return of the Jedi over and over again.

8. John Conway’s Game of Life

I first heard about the mathematician John Conway in April when he died of COVID-19. In 1970 he came up with a thought experiment / zero-player game called the Game of Life. It’s a simple set of rules that govern what happens to points on a grid over the course of generations, or cycles. It’s so simple, in fact, that I’ll list all the rules here. 

1. Birth Rule: An empty cell with exactly three filled neighbors becomes filled, it’s alive.
2. Death Rule: A full cell with zero or one full neighbors dies of isolation, while a full cell with four or more full neighbors dies of overcrowding.
3. Survival Rule: A full cell with two or three full neighbors remains full.

It’s a zero-player game, because once the initial conditions are set, the rules determine what happens next. The cycles can be worked out manually, but it’s also easy to get a computer to do it. This year I spent more time than I’d like to admit on playgameoflife.com, clicking out different starting designs block by block and watching them pulse, move, grow, or disappear. 

Some complex starting designs will reduce themselves to nothing in just a few cycles, while some simple arrangements will grow into shimmering mandala-like forms that will go on forever if you let them. In the 50 years since its creation, the Game of Life has given rise to a vibrant subculture of people who are obsessed with discovering new forms, both beautiful and functional. There is an enormous lexicon of known forms, including a “glider” which is a small blob of cells that survives while moving diagonally; and various “spaceships” which are large clusters of cells that hang together while moving. The discovery of designs that can generate, catch, and turn gliders has allowed people to make virtual “circuits” and then use those to design general purpose computers within the game. This means that anything a computer can do could theoretically be accomplished within the Game of Life. The potential complexity is infinite, and it can increase in complexity on its own.

There’s a dark metaphor here, of course. Conway was killed by this horrible virus. What is a virus, really? A self-replicating bit of RNA, a scrap of protein far simpler than multicellular giants like us. And yet, such a simple thing can glide into the world and have very complex ramifications. 

(While I was working on this post, The New York Times published a really nice piece about Game of Life.)

9. Reading Moby Dick in the Bath

This is an odd addition to the list, I’ll admit. I’m not even done reading Moby Dick yet (no spoilers, please). When the shutdown started in the spring I found myself taking a lot more baths. I usually take them at night, I play music quietly, I mix myself a cocktail, and I lay there for a long time. 

I’ve enjoyed reading in the bath for a long time, but Moby Dick seems particularly well suited to the ritual. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started the book, but once I was about 70 pages in and Captain Ahab hadn’t yet been introduced, I realized that this book wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, so neither should I. I’ll finish the book eventually, but that’s not really my goal. I’m trying to focus on relishing the images and language in each meandering chapter. It’s remarkable how certain sections can seem a little bloated and unnecessary and then suddenly turn a corner and offer a piercing observation. I’ve had several moments that were quite literally breathtaking.

Reading Moby Dick in the bath also has a way of tipping me into powerful trips of nostalgia, nostalgia that verges on an out-of-body experience. One time I figured that a dark and stormy was the appropriate maritime cocktail to pair with my tub reading. I don’t recall what part of the book I was on, but I got to thinking about this seafood restaurant in New Orleans called Seaworthy that I’ve visited a few times. They make a cocktail that’s not a dark and stormy, but it involves rum and a half-peel of a lime turned into a cup, filled with booze, set atop the drink and lit on fire. It’s ridiculous, but it’s amazing. I levitated out of the tub, floated a thousand miles away and several years back to re-experience long, hazy New Orleans nights. It was a good journey.

10. Bernie Sanders Rally at Calder Plaza in Grand Rapids on March 8, 2020

The other day on Twitter someone posted an image that looked almost exactly like my photograph above, along with the comment that it was the last time they were in a large crowd of people. I did a double take, at first I thought it was my photo. But no, this person was just standing near me at the rally. I realized that not only had I taken nearly the exact same photo, it was also the last time I stood in a large crowd of people. Within a week Bernie lost the Michigan primary and COVID-19 shutdowns began. The rest is history, as they say.

Art and politics have a complicated relationship. I won’t attempt to fully untangle that here, except to say that a political rally is not an artwork, but art and politics are entwined in ways that make it impossible to engage one without brushing up against the other. The Bernie Sanders rally brushed up against art, quite literally. I spotted an audience member climbing Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse to get a better view. It was a striking reminder about the complicated legacy of Calder Plaza and its place in the history of Grand Rapids and public art more generally. I’ve written about this before in the catalogue essay for Project 1: Crossed Lines, a public art exhibition I curated for ArtPrize. Calder’s La Grande Vitesse is a triumph of 20th century sculpture, but it’s also situated in a plaza that was part of a 1960’s urban renewal push that razed blocks and blocks of what would now be an historic, dense, mixed-use urban neighborhood, if it had survived. The plaza fails as a public gathering space most of the time. To cross it in the summer feels like wandering the Bonneville Salt Flats. Heading across the expanse in the winter feels like battling for survival on an icy tundra. Usually when it succeeds in drawing a crowd it’s filled with tents, bandstands and bleachers, the temporary infrastructure that typically fills parking lots during traveling fairs and carnivals. 

Occasionally Calder Plaza works on its own, with very little adornment, and March 8, 2020 was one of those rare moments. What the space, and the sculpture, need is a genuinely big crowd drawn there for one purpose, with their attention focused on one thing. Although Sanders’ odds in the primary at that point were not great, he still had a path to victory. There was a real sense of possibility, but it was mixed with an uneasy foreboding about what lay ahead. There were hand sanitizer dispensers peppered throughout the crowd in a feeble attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19 among the almost entirely unmasked attendees. Having been to other events that draw a progressive Grand Rapids crowd, I also noticed that the attendees were almost entirely white. Not a good sign for someone hoping to win the Michigan Democratic Primary. Despite all that, the moment was still somehow both beautiful and achingly sad. It was our last chance to turn toward a truly different political trajectory, at least for now. It was our last opportunity to stand in a crowd, for the time being. Eventually we’ll gather at the foot of the Calder again.

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Every year at this time I write a blog post about the best art I saw throughout the year. This has not been a normal year, so this won’t be a normal list. I used to travel a lot, I’d see exhibitions all over the country and all over the world; New York, Miami, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Venice, Seoul… But this year the virus came and travel stopped. One by one all the big exhibitions and events I would have attended were called off. In 2020 I was slated to travel to Austin for SXSW, New York for the Frieze Art Fair, Burning Man in Nevada, Prospect 5 in New Orleans, Art Basel Miami Beach—I’m sure there would have been more—but they were all cancelled or postponed. ArtPrize was cancelled, too, and I lost my job. 

So what about art? Did I see any good art this year? The short answer is… barely. I saw a tiny bit. But the long answer is that I saw and experienced many amazing things this year, even if they might not have been art, per se. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to continue this tradition. I’m a believer that once art begins to teach you how to see, you’ll start to see things you missed before, both within art and without. I’m also a believer that the visual is only a fraction of what really great art does, even “visual art.”

The first international trip I took to see an exhibition was in 2012. I went to Kassel, Germany to see the 13th edition of Documenta, the uber-important contemporary art survey that happens once every five years. I know it sounds cliché, but it changed me. I never looked at art, or anything else, the same way again. That exhibition rewired me in some ways, I’m still processing it. In the main catalogue essay, at the beginning of a 767 page volume that now sits on my lap, the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev discusses her choice to include the output of biologists, economists, philosophers and anthropologists in the exhibition along with artists. She writes:

What these participants do, and what they ‘exhibit’ in dOCUMENTA (13), may or may not be art. However, their acts, gestures, thoughts, and knowledges produce and 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.

So, for 2020 my list of ten best artworks instead becomes a list of objects and experiences that are “readable by art.” I might like it better this way.

I’ve decided to split it into two parts so it’s not too long. Here are the first five, in no particular order.

1. Watching The Host (2006) while flying home from South Korea

I did take one trip in 2020, before the Great Shutdown, to Seoul, South Korea. It was my second trip there and the culmination of a year and a half of planning. For ArtPrize I hosted an event in Seoul called ArtPrize Gangnam Showcase, where five Korean artists were invited to give short presentations about installations they hoped to present at ArtPrize, then I and some other judges picked which one would receive a grant to travel to Grand Rapids and create their project. Obviously, the second part of that did not happen.

It’s a little hard to remember pre-virus 2020 at this point, but it did happen! If you recall, South Korea was having a bit of a moment in early 2020 because Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director in early February. I couldn’t go to Korea without having seen it, so I downloaded it and watched it on the flight over. The country was bursting with Parasite pride, and rightfully so. But the experience that really sticks with me is the movie I watched on the flight home, an earlier Bong Joon-ho masterpiece called The Host. I saw it shortly after it came out over a decade ago, and I remembered it as a very inventive monster movie with a surprisingly tender family drama at its center. That’s all true, but what I had forgotten is that The Host is also a movie about a pandemic, and how the government’s ham-handed attempt to manage the crisis is made worse by American imperialism.

It was a perfectly erie time and place to watch that film. At that point COVID-19 had spilled out of Wuhan and was running rampant all over mainland China. There had been a small number of cases recorded in South Korea, along with a handful in Seattle, Washington. It was apparent, however, than Seoul was far, far more prepared for what lay ahead than we were. All public buildings had guards stationed at the doors with thermal cameras reading the temperatures of all guests. Many people sitting near me on the plane while I watched The Host were wearing masks. That was February 14. Two weeks later, South Korea recorded over 800 cases in a single day, the peak of its first outbreak (a number that pales in comparison to what the US is experiencing now). One month later the ArtPrize office closed for good, my kids’ school went entirely online, and the world changed in ways we’re still trying to comprehend. All in one month. 

I heartily recommend you drop what you’re doing and watch Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, but brace yourself.

2. David O’Reilly’s Corona Voicemails

David O’Reilly is an artist, animator and game designer (Mountain, Everything). Shortly after COVID-19 shutdowns began in the spring, he set up a phone number and asked people to call in and leave voicemails about their experiences during the pandemic. The result is three short films that pair audio from anonymous voicemails with pulsing, mandala-like animated visuals. The videos were posted between April 8 and April 20, they are titled STAYING HOME, SUDDEN BLACK HOLE, and QUARANTINE DREAMS. 

I am transfixed by these films. They do such an incredible job capturing the unease of the early days of the pandemic. I really think these films will be seen as important historical documents 20, 50, or even 100 years from now. 

I’m also amazed that such a tonally perfect series of artworks about a crisis were created during the crisis. That rarely happens, usually such things need to gestate for a few years, artists benefit from hindsight. I’m sure there will be plenty of artworks of all forms in the future that will process what happened this year. For my money David O’Reilly added to the canon of coronavirus artworks in the first month of the crisis. That is remarkable.

3. SiTE:LAB – CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE | Kyd Kane poetry presents: Challenge Privilege w/ Liquid Courage

This was one of the very few cultural events that I attended this year. SiTE:LAB, the deeply collaborative artist-run nonprofit brought together familiar faces and new voices for a poetry reading / concert / printmaking demonstration / outdoor happening. The event was headlined by poet Kyd Kane with a supporting cast of musicians and DJs. Brewery Vivant hosted and provided a custom beer, “Challenge Privilege.”

I’ve been to many SiTE:LAB events over the years, and this one was similar in some ways but also very, very different. Advanced tickets were required, sold in groups of four that entitled you to a circle in the parking lot to place your lawn chairs away from other guests. We visited the bar then sheepishly pulled up our masks to drink. It was odd, but it worked, it was reassuring to know that gatherings like this could still happen safely. 

4. LATTERDAYS by Big Red Machine, performance video

In the weeks leading up to the November election, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and his collaborators at the Eaux Claires Music Festival produced a string of performance videos and events in an effort to raise money and get out the vote in Wisconsin. Perhaps it worked, Biden won Wisconsin by a hair. But that outcome was by no means guaranteed, and the sense of foreboding and dread leading up to the election is something I’ll always remember about 2020 (and 2016 *shudder*).

In this video Justin Vernon performs a song called “Latterdays” on a rooftop in Milwaukee at dusk, which he wrote with Aaron Dessner (The National), and Anaïs Mitchell, working under the name Big Red Machine. The audience, if you can call it that, is just two people politely sitting on chairs. Vernon projects his falsetto through a mask that slowly slips off his nose, while panoramic drone shots show the Milwaukee skyline looking serene and still. The lyrics at first center around preparing for a storm, then allude to vague memories of being young and dealing with use (or overuse) of certain substances. 

I’m not normally a big fan of concert films or videos of live performances, and I think the reason is that they usually seem like secondary artifacts. Performance videos with a raucous crowd just remind me that I’m not in the crowd, I’m watching a video instead, there’s a layer of removal. I love live music, I’ve had life-altering experiences standing in a crowd, so I don’t usually care for being reminded of the experience I’m not having. But the “Latterdays” video is different. Live music is one of many casualties of this pandemic, so watching the video of Vernon playing on the roof feels like the primary way to experience this song, not a secondary experience. There is no sense of “you had to be there,” almost no one was there. We are where we need to be, staying home, staying safe, and watching this video on our various personal screens. Everything about it—the music, the lyrics, the cinematography—all seem attuned to that reality.

The lyrics are wonderful, and capture something specific about the fall of 2020, particularly in the midwest. In the weeks leading up to the election the pandemic was surging in Wisconsin, there was a point where the rate of new cases was as bad there as anywhere in the country. Wisconsin, like Michigan, went red in 2016 and it was really unclear whether it would swing back in 2020. The song is not directly about the pandemic or the election, instead it’s about preparing for a storm, which functions as a metaphor for both. One hallmark of this moment is the maddening way in which our fellow Americans refuse to take the pandemic seriously, misplacing blame and condemning us to scores of unnecessary deaths and months upon months of lockdowns. Nothing captures my lament at that foolishness quite like these lines:

You were stocking up before the storm
Stacked yourself against the odds
Talkin’ back to an act of God

5. Jill Magid’s Tender

I normally follow a rule when I make these annual lists of artworks that the entries can only be things that I saw and experienced myself that year. These posts are never an attempt to list the best artworks of a given year, because I could never see enough to make such a list comprehensive (even when travel was possible), and I don’t want to rely only on documentation of an artwork. I’m making an exception here. 

In September the conceptual artist Jill Magid worked with Creative Time to launch a project called Tender. She altered 120,000 US pennies to contain a tiny etching along their edges that read, “THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE.” The total value of the coins is $1,200, equivalent to one COVID-19 stimulus check in the first round of direct relief. They were wrapped in special coin rolls and distributed to bodegas in all five boroughs of New York City. The length and spread of the project is not determined, the coins will continue to circulate indefinitely. You might end up with one someday. 

This project is one of my favorite, even though I haven’t seen any of the pennies, I’m not sure there’s even a way to do that. I suppose you could shop in lots of New York bodegas with cash and hope to get lucky, but realistically you’ll never see one of these pennies. That lack of direct experience actually makes the work stronger. In a press release about the project, Magid says, “Tender pennies enter the local economy quietly, and travel like rumor.” They also travel like a virus. There’s no way to know if you’ll ever see one of these pennies, but you know they’re out there. Tender is about transmission and exchange, the tension between strength and vulnerability in our interconnectedness, both economically and biologically.

The Best Art I Saw in 2020 (sort of), part 2

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