In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

Shiraga’s approach verges on parody. Rather than pushing around paint with a brush in hand, he laid his canvases on his studio’s floor—a deliberate allusion to Jackson Pollock’s technique—and pulled around brown and maroon gobs with his feet. Set against white backgrounds, these shit-like messes of color are chunky and thick—so viscous that one can even sometimes spot the ridges formed by Shiraga’s toes. The dance-like choreography needed to make these abstractions replaces the fine motor skills associated with handiwork with more bumbling footwork—but the results don’t betray any lesser command of his materials. 

The Fergus McCaffrey show is titled “Plus Minus,” a reference to Shiraga’s assertion that his and Kanayama’s paintings were opposites. Kanayama’s paintings were “cold,” Shiraga said, while his were “hot.” And it is clear, based on this show, that Kanayama’s cold canvases went one step further past the Abstract Expressionist paradigm. Enlisting a little motorized vehicle, these paintings did away with the pretense of sublimity altogether. 

If Shiraga’s abstractions ultimately resemble those produced by some New York School artists, Kanayama’s appear totally anathema to the beefy abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. An untitled painting by Kanayama from 1965, included in this show, is composed of a lumpy circular form onto which a flat bed of red squiggles has been overlaid. Despite the blazing brightness of its hues, the painting does not inspire much in the way of transcendence. Instead, its strokes evince a mechanical quality. That is no accident. 

Kanayama’s paintings, as well as a few pen drawings that he also made with a remote-controlled car, look forward to questions being asked right now, during a time when AI is raising questions about our species’ role in the process of creating. Early on, Kanayama’s paintings asked these questions as almost everything was being made with the aid of a mechanized counterpart. But rather than stoking existential anxiety, automation seemed to bring the artist a kind of lightness and freedom. For him, it was a way to needle the centrality of human emotion that was so integral to modern art. Tellingly, many of his paintings bear affectless titles. Most of the ones in this show are simply called Work. 

In the 1970s, Semmel’s subject of choice, sex, and her medium, painting, were both taboo for feminist artists. The former was too risky at a time when women were asking not to be objectified. The latter was too commodifiable, and too burdened by centuries of patriarchal convention and bourgeois trappings to be useful as a tool for the feminist struggle. But Semmel didn’t care.

“I loved painting. It’s as simple as that,” she said this past October, sitting on a couch in Alexander Gray Gallery, where an enchanting 4-foot-square self-portrait, In The Pink (2004), hovered above her. Looking back at age 91, she recalled her defiance. “To give it up because someone told me it was dead seemed stupid.”

It was a bout of serious illness, in 1957, that first emboldened Semmel to disregard the expectations of others. That year, she spent six months in the hospital with tuberculosis—a traumatic experience, especially given that she was a new mother. And yet, suddenly she found herself free from the daily pressures of family. She read a book a day, and reflected on what exactly she wanted to do with her life, with newfound urgency.

Before getting sick, she had gotten a certificate from Cooper Union (the New York art school did not yet grant degrees). After recovering, she was determined to go back to school and get her BFA, so she enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Soon after graduating, she followed her husband to Spain, where he’d just gotten a job as a civil engineer, but not long after their second child was born, they split. Divorce was not yet legal in Spain, and a woman was forbidden from renting her own apartment without a husband or father on the lease. She started to see and feel the ways her “personal dissatisfactions stemmed from political structures.”

It was then that Semmel decided to stop caring what society expected her to do as a woman, and with that, she started to feel freer as a painter too. While in Spain for the next eight years, she worked mostly in the Abstract Expressionist vein that many of the New York painters of her generation had been schooled in. But like so many feminist artists of the era who started out in abstraction—Carolee Schneemann, Maria Lassnig, Joan Brown, Judy Chicago—she soon grew frustrated, and felt sidelined within a genre that was supposed to be “universal” but in reality kept privileging white men. At first, she said, she didn’t want to be called a woman artist. But soon, she found that her “way to resist” would be to embrace her identity. “I decided to say ‘Yes, I am a woman. And yes, I paint like a woman.’”

BY THE TIME SEMMEL RETURNED to New York in 1970, she was working in figuration. Women were the protagonists of her paintings. She wanted her work to help “change the way women understood themselves and understood sexuality,” and she didn’t see how she could do that through abstraction. “I didn’t see how anyone could deal with those issues without painting the body,” she said. Still, abstraction had its role in her work. Her “Sex Paintings” (1971) offer glimpses of bodies engaged in erotic acts, the scenes teetering into abstraction: brightly colored blobby stains threaten to bleed together but remain discrete. There are glimpses of bodily contours, but most details are left to the imagination.

After the “Sex Paintings” came the series widely considered her most important, the “Erotic Series” (1972), paintings of models who would have sex in her studio. Intimacy-Autonomy belongs to that group of paintings, all of them sexual scenes rendered realistically and lovingly, but in unexpected colors, and with unusual compositions that betray Semmel’s background in abstraction.

Those paintings, which today are in high demand, couldn’t find a dealer to show them at the time. “Nobody would touch them,” Semmel said. It’s a surprising story, and yet, one all too familiar for women artists. Undeterred, she took matters into her own hands. Using her savings, she rented a storefront in SoHo and then came in every day to be her own gallery attendant. This meant she got to watch all the visitors’ reactions, whether it was the critic for the Village Voice, who loved them, or “working people coming in on their lunchbreak”—SoHo was still a factory district at the time. “People were shocked,” she told me. Still, she was uncompromising and determined. “I had something to say,” she said assuredly.

Semmel’s message was that “women needed to acknowledge their own sexuality, acknowledge their own desire, and not always deny it, not always be passive.” Historically, the nude was a genre that catered to male pleasure, and taught women acceptable ways to express their sexuality. Semmel wanted to center a woman’s pleasure.

Examples of erotic art by women a generation before Semmel are couched in enough metaphors to give them plausible deniability: Georgia O’Keeffe insisted her flowers were not vulvas. For years, Louise Bourgeois described herself as “inhibited,” saying any erotic connotations in her work were “unconscious.” But Semmel was painting in a New York that was home to Studio 54 and Times Square sex clubs, in a mediascape now saturated with pornography. Subtlety wouldn’t do. She distinguished her work from centerfolds by using unusual hues—greenish gray for the figures in Intimacy-Autonomy, chartreuse and tangerine for those in Indian Erotic (1973)—because “I was so afraid of being called a pornographer. I was insisting it was art.” Half a century later, her “Erotic Series” still feels unusually tender for sex scenes, testifying to the ongoing necessity of her message.

AFTER FINISHING THE “EROTIC SERIES” Semmel started painting herself. Starting in the 1980s, as she neared 50, the men in her canvas disappeared—though she insists these works are not self-portraits. Rather, she started using herself as a model because she “wanted to avoid the objectification issue.” She also “didn’t want to speak for other women. I was speaking from my own experience.”

To paint her own body, Semmel often works from photographs. For this reason, the bodies in these paintings are often seen from the vantage of the figure herself, head cut off. In Sunlight (1978) and in Spaced Out (2019), the view is looking down at a body the way the artist looks at herself. She takes care to make this perspective unmistakable. In her series “With Camera,” the image reflects the camera in a mirror, which means it’s also pointed at the viewer. In each case, she’s making sure you know you’re seeing the artist through her own eyes.

Semmel has been painting herself for decades now. She knows that all too often, images of women are taken to signify women in general, not a specific human being. Depicting the same woman again and again, she doesn’t let her viewers make that mistake. Her subject is a constant, but her style is ever-changing. “It was always about making painting interesting to me,” she said. She has continued to combine expressionism and realism, figuration and abstraction in infinite configurations.

As a colorist, Semmel is skilled enough to dispense with any signature palette: “I’m rather catholic with my color choices,” she explained. “I’ll try one [palette] for a while and work through it, and then I get bored.” Her latest show, “Against the Wall,” which was on view last fall at Alexander Gray in New York, was full of lemons and lavenders, hot pink and chartreuse. Meanwhile, paintings like The Unchosen and Transformations (both 2011) feature an iridescent palette dominated by icy blues. In lieu of reliable hues, then, her hallmark is a delicate balance of unlikely combinations.

Another hallmark of her paintings is her doubling of figures. When a few works from the “Erotic Series” sat around in her studio unsold for a couple decades, she eventually painted new, looser figures right on top of them for a series called “Overlays” (1992–96). Sometimes, she echoed the figures she had painted decades before. Sometimes, she layered newer ghostly ones over them. “I was never interested in depicting a narrative or telling a story,” she said of this doubling effect. “I wanted the image to feel like an icon, but an icon that isn’t static, that doesn’t stay still.”

WHAT SETS SEMMEL’S WORK APART from that of other feminist artists is the way her paintings are acts of world-building. When she started out, most of her peers—Hannah Wilke, Judy Chicago—were making work protesting patriarchy, work that makes clear what the artist is against, rather than what she s for. Semmel told me she wanted to make work that was “not pedantic to the audience,” that was “not a “journalistic diatribe. I wanted you to experience the art object, not to just have it talking at you.” 

Semmel’s version of feminist art is also striking for the way it makes you feel, not just think. This she often achieved by delicately balancing opposites: man and woman, intimacy and autonomy, and more often than not, reds and greens. These opposites feel neither in tension nor resolved: instead, they simply coexist.

But Semmel’s most crucial contribution to feminist art might be the way she finds strength in vulnerability—“Vulnerability cannot be denied, and should not be denied,” she stressed—and it is easiest to see that embrace of vulnerability in the arresting self-portraits she has painted as she has aged: the images of her graying hair and wrinkling body have been regularly praised as brave in the way they refuse a life in the shadows, into which so many aging women are thrust. (Look no further than the recent Sex and the City reboot for proof of our culture’s deep discomfort with aging women: the show made every effort to hide the protagonists’ wrinkles, sags, and grays even as it attempted to be “woke.”) Semmel said she “never thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to work on aging now.’ It’s just that my body changed.”

“If we’re lucky,” she added, “we get to age.”

Sometimes, however, these paintings garner praise that verges on objectification. In 2011 New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote of a show of Semmel’s: “With her unlined face and only slightly pendulous, full-figured body, she appears, at 78, a figure of remarkably undiminished erotic appeal.” This kind of response is exactly why feminist critics feared the nude was not a viable political strategy: in 1976 critic Lucy Lippard complainedthat the most iconic works of feminist body art still centered women who were conventionally attractive. But in Semmel’s work, pleasure is unspoiled by power.

Then there are the loyal Semmel fans who engaged with her work long before its recent leap to popularity alongside the current trend for figuration. In 1999 artist Robert Gober curated a group show at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York that featured two paintings from the “Erotic Series,” alongside work by seemingly unlike artists including Cady Noland and Anni Albers. At that time, Semmel’s work, like that of many other figurative painters, was far less visible than it is today. Looking back at that show, Gober said he thought Semmel’s paintings “were powerful and unique, canonical but oddly ignored” and that he felt “they should be seen by another generation and fresh eyes.” Quietly championing women and queer artists for decades now, Gober also included the paintings in his 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, marking Semmel’s MoMA debut.

Figurative painting has since become the splashiest artistic movement of this century, especially those works representing and memorializing the experiences of long-marginalized groups. These days, Semmel’s work is seen as trailblazing by younger figurative painters like Jenna Gribbon, a New York artist who paints intimate scenes of herself and her wife. “Joan Semmel is a giant,” Gribbon told me just after meeting the artist for the first time, at the opening for a show—“Making Their Mark” at the Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg Foundation—that included them both. “Her work is very generous and very powerful. My work is obviously indebted to her.”

Over the past decade, figurative painting has become almost too popular, catnip for a speculative art market. I asked Semmel what it was like to watch the tide turn so dramatically: in her day, she was practically peerless. She reflected that “before the ’80s,” artists hardly imagined receiving “fame and money” from their work. But soon enough, “the incentive for people to enter the field changed.” As for Semmel, she did it “with or without acknowledgment. Making art is a compulsion.” 

I use myself as a model, but I don’t think of my works as self-portraits. Portraits talk about characters in more specific ways, whereas I just use myself as the model because it’s convenient, and because I don’t want to objectify anyone else. In this particular painting, I used two versions of the same model. The couch image has usually been seductive in nature, with a nude spread out and being relatively sexy. I’m painting myself, an older person, in contrast to that. One image is of my older body in a seductive pose, but the second image, [the one on the cover], shows me in a much more defensive posture. The figure is holding her arm up, almost as if warding off the viewer. 

The painting is a kind of play on vulnerability and power. This has everything to do with how the image of the female in art—in the past and even in the present—has always played on issues of vulnerability and seduction. But rarely does that woman have agency in any of that. She’s shown as passive. I’ve been interested in reversing some of that power dynamic.

I handled one body in a relatively realistic way; the other one is more expressive. I’ve always been interested in finding ways to use various styles without conforming to any one stylistic model. In Couch Diptych, I’m handling the paint in an expressionistic way and also in a more restrained way, trying to make them work together. At six feet high, this painting is pretty much within the scale that I typically work on, except because it’s a diptych with two panels—it’s double the width. I like painting my figures larger-than-life because I’m interested in iconic figuration rather than narrative figuration. I’ve always wanted my figures to feel iconic rather than to tell a story. 

By doubling the figure, I’m trying to break down the static nature of figurative painting. When you see one image superimposed over another, you start to feel motion and time. I don’t want to create static images that get imprinted as some kind of definition of an individual. Paintings are always an image of that individual in one moment of time. Time is built by layers of images, one over another.   

—As told to Emily Watlington

There are echoes of Semmel’s story in that of another figure of her generation, Chicago artist Alice Shaddle. As Jeremy Lybarger writes in this issue’s “Spotlight” column, Shaddle struggled, living in the shadow of her art impresario husband—a contemporary critic who characterized her as “one of those riley, resentful ladies”—but was similarly determined, and in 1973 cofounded the feminist art co-op Artemisia Gallery.

Women artists of the past and present are benefiting from rehangs of museums’ permanent collections, a topic that Alex Greenberger explores elsewhere in this issue, with the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 rehang providing a template. More institutions rotating artworks more frequently—and being more inclusive in the process—is exposing audiences to a more generous art history, one that no longer ignores the contributions of women and artists of color.

Rewritten histories influence art made by younger artists and the kinds of work that is curated into major exhibitions. This spring is a good time for a litmus test: the Whitney Biennial opens in March and the Venice Biennale in April. (Our “Battle Royale” feature pits the two iconic events against each other—and provides a cheeky guide to both.) One of the Whitney Biennial artists, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, is featured in a profile by Maximilíano Durón in this issue’s “New Talent” section, where he describes a work he is making for the Biennial with amber secreted by trees, a material he sees as a healing agent. In a remark that could just as well describe the limited canon the new art history is trying to expand, Aparicio tells Durón: “That’s how memory works, how time works: you forget about it, archives are erased or destroyed.”

FEATURES

Recycled Art
As the planet fills with trash, artists reconsider the ethics of making work from scratch.
by Emily Watlington & Andy Battaglia

Sheida Soleimani     
The Iranian American artist talks about how simple gestures inform perceptions. A special pull-out print accompanies the article.
by Tessa Solomon

Painting Pleasure
In her prismatic portraits, Joan Semmel builds feminist worlds.
by Emily Watlington

Perpetual Motion
No longer static monuments to an outdated art history, museums’ permanent collection displays are more dynamic than ever.
by Alex Greenberger

Witnessing Grief
Käthe Kollwitz’s melancholy works, the subject of a MoMA retrospective, capture the sorrow of daily life in wartime.
by Faye Hirsch

Nature Is Mind Made Visible
German exhibitions celebrate Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday and his iconic visions of people confronting nature.
by Kelly Presutti

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
A gallerist pines for press, and an aspiring curator ponders a “curatorial intensive.”
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Curator Kathleen Ash-Milby tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Inquiry
A Q&A with Kay WalkingStick about her layered landscape paintings.
by Alex Greenberger

Object Lesson
An annotation of Hayv Kahraman’s Loves Me, Loves Me Not.
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale
Whitney Biennial vs. Venice Biennale—two banging biennials face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Indigenous art.
by Christopher Green

Appreciation
A tribute to Pope.L, a trickster-artist who offered lessons as to what was and was not real.
by Christopher Y. Lew

New Talent
Sculptor Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio captures the materiality of disappearance and resistance.
by Maximilíano Durón

Issues & Commentary
Why is Thomas Heatherwick the architect most beloved by billionaires?
by Andrew Russeth

Spotlight
Chicago artist Alice Shaddle was hard to classify—and all the better for it.
by Jeremy Lybarger

Book Review
A reading of Legacy Russell’s Black Meme: The History of the Images that Make Us.
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Cover Artist
Joan Semmel talks about her artwork featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Shanghai
Shanghai Diary
by Emily Watlington

Montreal
“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia”
by Barry Schwabsky

Miami
“Charles Gaines: 1992–2023”
by Maximilíano Durón

Los Angeles
“Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”
by Liz Hirsch

Munich
“Meredith Monk. Calling”
by Emily McDermott

Sarasota
“Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories”
by Glenn Adamson

Minneapolis
“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s”
by Alex Greenberger

“El Playon” of the work’s title refers to a black scar that a volcanic eruption left in the earth more than a hundred years ago, just outside El Salvador’s capital city. The same area was used as a dumping ground for the bodies of the disappeared during the country’s 1980–92 civil war. Matching the shape of El Playon, 601ft² comprises some 1,500 pounds of molten amber that mimics flowing lava as it’s poured over a collection of various objects: volcanic stones, specially fabricated ceramic bones, and various items found in MacArthur Park, a main hub for the Salvadorean community in LA. It also includes letters and newspaper clippings related to the civil war that are difficult to read through the amber shell. After the show opened, Aparicio learned that the body of his half-sister had been discovered in El Playon by their father, artist Juan Edgar Aparicio, who fled El Salvador shortly afterward.

Now, Aparicio is working on a new amber work for this year’s Whitney Biennial. He is drawn to amber that trees secrete as a healing mechanism. But he also plans eventually to reiterate 601ft². Each new version will be, literally, darker: the artist plans to add a new layer of poured amber, further obscuring the documents and objects. “This is the most visible it’ll ever be,” Aparicio said. “That’s how memory works, how time works: you forget about it, archives are erased or destroyed.”

This impulse to capture something before it’s gone also appears in another ongoing series, “Caucho (Rubber).” In 2016 Aparicio started casting the bottom portions of Ficus trees, a non-native genus ubiquitous across LA, where, for decades, it has been subject to removal efforts. He applies a layer of rubber made from the Indigenous Salvadorean Castilla elastica, or Panama rubber tree. Aparicio leaves the rubber on the tree for several weeks before slowly pulling it off, creating a realistic impression of the tree’s bark: the knots and whorls, man-made carvings and graffiti, the discoloration from car exhaust and other pollution. At first, the “Caucho” works were faithful reproductions of the trees that hung from the wall like unstretched paintings. More recently, they are becoming more sculptural, as he’s started to incorporate new elements in them, like shards of glass or ceramic thorns. Now, he’s painting on their surfaces and stuffing some with the cotton fibers from ceiba (kapok) tree seeds.

These works powerfully evoke the unique Los Angeles cityscape. Aparicio was “interested in levels of human interaction that are recorded on the surface,” he said. Most of the trees he cast have since been cut down, and these works now serve as the only record of their existence, their previous lives, the marks imprinted on them. Ficus trees still abound across Los Angeles. There’s a municipal waiting list for the trimming of Ficus trees; the wait is upward of 10 years. The wait for tree removal is much longer. Aparicio added, “All to say, they can’t get rid of us even if they wanted to.”  

A drone from above slowly spins as it sets its focus on an abstract emanation from the ground. A tessellated pattern is small enough at the start to barely merit attention, but its design takes shape as the camera zooms in on what reveals itself to be a public address system for emergency management. More visceral than the visual, however, is the sound: a tense, tangled mass of microtonal music made with (as the credits later divulge) “astronomical planetary data” and “electronics.”

The sound by composer Laurie Spiegel, an important early figure in computer music who made her name at Bell Labs, opens Preemptive Listening, a new documentary about sirens and the state of the world in which they resonate. A voiceover sets up the premise near the start: “The siren is an interruption, a jolt, a wakeup call that points to the possibility of escape, a threat that has erupted into the present.” Some more: “These are vibrations at the edge of danger.” And still more: “Each siren is a tombstone for a past trauma.”

Preemptive Listening—premiering Friday at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival—is less a didactic documentary than an essay film that follows poetic cues. The soundtrack is full of full of notable names from the realms of music and sound art: in addition to Spiegel, contributors include Moor Mother (poet and member of the fiery free-jazz band Irreversible Entanglements), Debit (who will be part of this year’s Whitney Biennial), Raven Chacon (Pulitzer and MacArthur winner with a show up now at the Swiss Institute), and Kode9 (DJ/producer and author of the 2012 book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear). All of the 19 artists involved were invited to “reimagine the sound of the siren, to think of it as a prompt: a call to attention, a call to action, an instruction towards the possibility of the future.”

The sounds created for the film accompany director Aura Satz, who, in voiceover narration, thinks out loud about sirens in discursive ways. Over impressionistic footage from a siren factory and sites full of flashing lights (strobe warning!), she nods toward the history of sirens as industrial-age warning systems and traces their genealogy back to such things as church bells, shepherd’s horns, and town criers blowing bugles to capture the attention of the masses. The sounds of sirens accompany all manner of crises, from accidents that call for immediate alert to disasters that play out at planetary scale. Earthquakes, floods, and catastrophes related to climate change count as points of focus in the film, which includes travelogue footage from ominous locales such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan and a volcano-monitoring station in Chile.

Sirens’ presence in social disorder figures prominently too. Passages in the film are given over to meditations by Khalid Abdalla, an actor and activist in the Arab Spring; two co-creators of Mental Health First, a non-police-response initiative for mental health intervention; organizer and police-sound-weapons scholar Daphne Carr; Maori law scholar Erin Matariki Carr; and anthropologist and environmental philosopher Arturo Escobar. Each speaks about sonic warning signs and states of disquiet that often follow in their wake.

Preemptive Listening is a heavy film, but it also makes space for hope. One of the Mental Health First founders flips the foreboding mood of the script when, thinking about conflict resolution, she wonders what could happen “if we saw the siren as an opportunity instead of a crisis.” And Escobar, the anthropologist and philosopher, connects the notion of emergency with the chance for different kinds of emergence it allows. He posits, intriguingly, that “when there is a breakdown, possibility also arises.”

After a visit to Mexico, I often return to the immortal words of Gloria E. Anzaldúa, whose groundbreaking 1998 essay-memoir-poetry collection Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza articulated what it means to be Chicanx and live on the US-side of the US-Mexico border. “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them,” she wrote nearly three decades ago. While a border serves as “a dividing line,” a borderland is “a vague and undetermined place,” one that is in “a constant state of transition.” 

What does it mean to be in diaspora when one’s ancestral land is so close it can be in spitting distance? And what does it mean to return to that land? In a way, that is the premise of a two-person exhibition at Commonwealth and Council gallery’s location in Mexico City (away from its home base in Los Angeles). For a show titled “WACHA: viajes transtemporales” (on view through March 30), rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales, both raised in LA and now based there, consider their respective relationships to Mexico for a collaboration, their second in the past six months. (With Mario Ayala, they mounted a joint exhibition at SFMOMA that looked at their relationship to cruising, both in low riders and of people.)

Memory plays a key role. The exhibition opens with a two-panel painting on adobe by esparza titled Colosio en lomas taurinas, despues del guardado (2024). The dense composition depicts Mexican politician Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta during a 1994 presidential campaign rally in the Tijuana neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas. A joyous crowd looks at an empty silhouette suggesting the presence of Colosio, who was assassinated that day and whose death was deeply felt on both sides of the border. Is the scene in the painting the moment right before joy turns into terror? esparza leaves it vague. All that remains is the ghostly specter of Colosio’s silhouette.

For her contribution, Rosales presents two stunning photographs of the hoods of souped-up low riders that double as hard-edge abstractions in dazzling colors and glitter. The edges of the cars, the pavement below, and the reflections of palm trees onto their glimmering hoods are visions that caught the artist’s eye, something she wanted to remember. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Rosales shows her recent turn to sculpture, including X100PRE (2024), which collages together archival materials beneath a sheet of red plexiglass that is emblazoned with the word FOREVER and topped with eight pairs of black sunglasses arranged in a ring.

The show’s most touching piece is another adobe painting by esparza. Unlike Colosio, it is mostly raw adobe, an empty expanse of brown that frames, at the work’s center, a rendering of a wallet-size photograph showing esparza with his brother and sister as children. His sister died during childhood, and this is a photograph that he carries with him daily. The painting’s title is Y los restos de tu pequeño rostro serán mi conexión más profunda a México (And the remains of your little face will be my deepest connection to Mexico).

In another room by itself is a joint installation that pairs Rosales’s hanging mirrored-glass disco ball in the shape of two pyramids (shipped from her installation in the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made in L.A. biennial) with a collaborative sculpture below. In that piece, a hand-like armature, made from silver buckles and braided fabric belts, rises from tiles of black obsidian that look like a pool surrounded by a terrace of adobe bricks. Engraved on the obsidian is the work’s title: Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente. Literally, it translates to “Eyes that don’t see, heart that doesn’t feel.” But it can be interpreted in other ways, like “What they don’t know, won’t hurt them” or “Out of sight, out of mind.” When thinking of Mexico and the artists’ relationship to this ancestral land, both make sense—hauntingly beautiful sense.

And so, a mural Edades painted with Galo B. Ocampo and Carlos “Botong” Francisco—Mother Nature’s Bounty (1935)—opens “Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America” at the National Gallery Singapore. The show surveys shared formal and political sensibilities in art from the two tropical regions, all made in the 20th century. This trio painted the Philippine revolution, borrowing motifs from the Mexican muralists with whom they share a colonizer: Spain. Both groups painted scenes packed with workers, whose bodies are rendered sturdy and statuesque, forming all-over compositions.

This mural hangs near Pobre Pescador (Poor Fisherman), 1896, by Paul Gauguin—the notorious French painter of Tahitian scenes. Gauguin, “Tropical” argues, planted stereotypical images of the tropics in the minds of many—images of a peaceful paradise, endless summer, lazy natives, and free love. That last one, “free love,” is a grating contortion, coming from a man whose muse was his child bride. But instead of canceling Gauguin fully, “Tropical” positions his work as the problem so many tropical artists were working against. Eat Pray Love, the best-selling memoir Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about finding herself in Bali in the wake of a divorce, is included for similar reasons in a library of tropical literature presented as part of the show.

Many paintings here contend with the way pastoral imagery was entwined with various projects of colonialism, which used images of verdant land brimming with untapped resources as justifications for occupation. A group of these landscapes is hung on apparatuses designed by the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, an icon of tropical modernism who, for a museum she designed in São Paulo, placed paintings on clear vertical planks stuck in blocks of concrete. She wanted to arrange works not linearly, but in what she called “a marvelous entanglement.” On these devices, labels are placed behind the paintings rather than next to them, so walking about, you’re forced to delay categorizing the mixture of works into their respective regions. Instead, you’re left attending to their affinities—chief among them their jewel-toned palettes, with rusty oranges and royal blues extending from verdant emeralds.

Mostly, these works refute ideas of untouched lands full of lazy natives with scenes showing workers, bustling streetscapes, and active human beings. Vibrant street scenes by S. Sudjojono, a founder of Indonesian modernism, stand out: he insisted on the political power of painting, always reminding people that the medium was no master’s tool, since it began not in Europe, but rather Egypt.

The most provocative pastoral riff is by Semsar Siahaan, whose 9-foot version of Manet’s Olympia shows a nude blonde woman lounging in sunglasses and heels, sipping from a coconut decorated with flowers. In Siahaan’s rendition from 1987, dozens of locals surround her, flocking from the surrounding land to dote, point, or stare. A brown foot extends from under her bed, right next to her suitcase, as if the man who carried her luggage also offered himself as an ottoman. Another work by Siahaan is a suite of sculptures the Indonesian artist burned: they were first made by his teacher at the Bandung Art Academy, fusing traditional techniques with European ones. Siahaan protested this effort to “modernize” Indonesian art by setting the wooden works ablaze.

In addition to subversions of stereotypes, there’s a section dedicated to self-portraiture. Here and throughout, art historical icons are paired with under-recognized artists. An especially striking pairing includes a 1945 picture of Frida Kahlo in which the Mexican artist is embraced by a monkey: the pair of primates wears matching chartreuse hair ribbons. Kahlo’s painting is shown next to Patrick Ng Kah Onn’s 1958 self-portrait, wherein the Kuala Lumpur–born artist, a Chinese male, depicts himself as a Malay woman in a provocative meditation on identity, one rare for its time. The works rhyme visually, sharing browns and golds, and both artists stare straight-on, framed by their bushy eyebrows.

Another memorable moment of self-representation comes in the form of a filmed 1960s interview with Ni Pollok, an Indonesian dancer who was the muse—and later, wife—of the Belgian artist Adrien-Jean le Mayeur de Marpès, who painted idyllic Balinese scenes with her dancing in the center. We see not his canvases but an interview with Pollok who, in a scene that sums up the show, is asked whether she considers Bali a tropical paradise. “No,” she replies. “I was just born here.”

Akeem Smith gathered this footage as part of his experimental archive of all things dancehall-related. It includes a party that took place on September 10, 2001, then extended into the morning. About 20 minutes into his edit, the sun rises, and twin images of towers clouded in smoke flank the dancers. The attacks have begun, but news hasn’t yet reached the partyers.

The work, titled Social Cohesiveness (2020), is on view in an exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin. Here, for the first time in decades, footage of September 11 feels shocking again.

Smith’s work is part of an exhibition titled “Unbound: Performance as Rupture” that surveys performances, from the late 1960s to the present, that are meant for (or completed by) the camera rather than a live audience. There are no live performances, no dry documentation of works once staged before audiences. What we get instead is a grouping of works in which cameras serve as choreographic collaborators, or live pieces that are fully realized only after a visit to the editing suite.

Sanja Iveković’s Personal Cuts (1982) is on view next to Smith’s Social Cohesiveness, and uses a similar editing technique. Wearing black pantyhose over her head, Iveković cuts holes in the dark membrane, then intercuts that footage with scenes sampled from Yugoslav television. As with Smith’s work, the piece resonates for the way it oscillates between the personal and the political: subjects experience their own bodies and, simultaneously, larger sociopolitical contexts. Cutting from establishing shots to close-ups and back again, Smith and Iveković emphasize and obliterate the gulf between them.

It’s one of several intergenerational pairings on view here. Another strong one is the opener, which pairs Peter Campus’s iconic Three Transitions (1973) with Sondra Perry’s Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I & II (2013). The former shows the artist painting his face chroma-key blue before a video camera, which causes it to disappear. Forty years later, Perry filmed two Black performers dancing frenetically in front of a white background. The blurring of the figures in this two-channel piece owes not only to the speed of their movement, but also to the use of an editing tool something like an AI eraser. The result explores the twinned hyper-surveillance and invisibility of Black people in white spaces, Perry’s gesture of opacity serving as counterpoint to Smith’s voyeuristic view.

These pairings of video art icons alongside a younger, more diverse generation of artists helps craft a lineage and a formal vocabulary. They also show how early experimental techniques are now being updated and wielded to new ends.

The youngest artist in the show is Panteha Abareshi, who in Unlearn the Body (2021) enlists assistive devices to contort their bandaged body: a walker becomes a pull-up bar; the padding of a crutch cradles their neck at an uncomfortable angle. Abareshi recorded it all on Super 8, then edited the footage in a manner that betrays the medium’s materiality: the artist has memorably likened the beautiful defunctness of analog media to the experience of being disabled. Mechanisms might work differently, or less efficiently; sometimes, there is elegance in the glitches that ensue. Near Abareshi’s work, a photograph shows Joan Jonas contorting elegantly in a hula hoop, her body illuminated by a TV monitor. Another print shows Valie Export bound around the base of a column, back arched.

All this reminded me of a helpful schema that artist Dara Birnbaum charted out in video art’s early days. She noticed that documentation of performances by the likes of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Joan Jonas, tended to be done in black-and-white. Meanwhile, works engaged with critiquing mass media—several of Birnbaum’s own, as well as those by Antoni Muntadas and Dan Graham—tended to be in color. The artists in “Unbound,” break down this binary, since soon enough, it became impossible to understand oneself as wholly separate from mass media anyway.

That might sound like a somewhat loose theoretical idea, but the show in fact assembles a tight group of works. The line of thinking is much easier to follow than MoMA’s “Signals,” last year’s sprawling intergenerational video art exhibition. What’s more, “Unbound” hosts twenty something works in video, but paces them expertly so it all feels watchable—a curatorial feat I had previously thought impossible. Seating helps.

“Unbound” also includes performances so difficult to capture with a camera that the challenge becomes a creative prompt, as in Algerian artist Lydia Ourahmane’s In the Absence of Our Mothers (2018). The story behind that work begins in 2014, when Ourahmane bit into something soft and lost a troublesome tooth. The next year, she learned moving details about the life of her grandfather, who decided to pull out all his teeth in an act of self-mutilation that rendered him decidedly unfit to fight in World War II. Not long after, the artist met a man at a street market in Oran who tried to sell her a gold necklace, one he said his mother gave to him to sell to support the family. She bought it, then had it melted down into two teeth: one lives in her mouth, and the other on the wall next to a photograph of sorts—a dental X-ray the artist had taken. It’s a wild story, but here, the photograph becomes a kind of proof, all the while insisting this is more than a dental intervention: it’s a meaningful homage.

“Unbound,” then, is a show about the ways the personal and political intersect; about those places where bodies meet technology, but also ideology; and how the everyday rubs up against larger historical narratives. As we once again try to go about our daily lives while learning of relentless horrors through screens, this subject couldn’t be more timely.

Toward the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, there’s a long take in which the camera roves around Brigitte Bardot’s nude body. We listen as her character takes stock of her shoulders, her mouth, her eyes, her nose, her ears, as she asks her lover if he admires them all. “Yes,” he responds. “I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.”

The German artist Astrid Klein also appears to love Bardot totally, tenderly, tragically. In her piece Untitled (je ne parle pas…), Klein offers two-rephotographed images of a vampy Bardot strutting her stuff. Blown up to a scale that recalls advertisements plastered across city streets, these perfect pictures start to come apart, their Ben-Day dots made visible.

In disturbing the veneer of these glamor shots, Klein suggests that it’s impossible, actually, to adore every part of Bardot. All we know of the actress are representations, not the real thing. Klein is exposing the limits of the former, making these images of her oblique and mysterious.

Untitled (je ne parle pas…) is one of a handful of “photoworks” from 1979 by Klein that are currently on view at Sprüth Magers in New York. The show marks the German feminist icon’s debut in the city—which is shocking, given that the photoworks dovetail so neatly with contemporaneous photography by Cindy Sherman. Klein, like Sherman, evokes images of women in films and advertisements, only to lend these images an opacity that denies easy readings.

European arthouse cinema of the postwar era, with its impenetrable women and ambiguous plots, is a touchstone for Klein. Monica Vitti, Michelangelo Antonioni’s frequent leading lady, has recurred throughout Klein’s work. Vitti appears at Sprüth Magers in a still Klein re-photographed for her 1979 work Untitled (powerless…). In it, Vitti appears beneath a translucent sheet of archival paper that partially shields her from leering eyes while emphasizing what film theorist Laura Mulvey would call her “to-be-looked-at-ness.”

But is Vitti truly powerless, as the photowork’s title implies, or does she, in her apparent passivity, possess a different form of control? Klein seems to be asking that question, placing two seemingly opposed adjectives onto the archival paper she has photographed: POWERLESS and REBELLIOUS. Typewritten in Courier font, these words repeat amid strings of x’s, as if context has been redacted, suggesting they may have belonged to a fuller sentence whose meaning remains unknowable.

Klein continued to enlist cryptic text in her paintings from the late ’80s and early ’90s, a few of which are in the backroom of Sprüth Magers. The paintings have a nice sheen to them, thanks to the quartz, alabaster, and zinc enlisted in their making. The text is painted onto these abstractions—in one, the phrase “tragicmagic” is repeated over patterning recalling a bunched curtain—but, with little to grab onto, the words prove overly elusive. The inscrutability of the textual fragments in the photoworks, on the other hand, lends them a certain tension the paintings lack—tension arising between the words and the pictures, which form an unstable relationship.

Take Untitled (paint my life…), which features a woman whose mouth hangs open as she stares outward amid the titular typewritten words, PAINT MY LIFE. Her made-up face invites more looking, but this is simply not possible: a white veil-like blur covers most of her face, obscuring one eye. In much the same way that Klein asks you to fill in the gaps between words and texts, this veiled woman gives you little information, then asks you to fill in—or paint in—the rest. Here is another reminder that, too often, we think we know people in pictures, and just as often, we are simply projecting.