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. 

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.

And yet, Dean herself can be hard to place, especially the Dean that in Geography Biography, a 2023 film installation she calls a self-portrait. Two side-by-side portrait-format 35mm films compile outtakes from more than 40 years of her own work, cut and collaged together in ways that emphasize the materiality of celluloid. Watching it can feel like getting lost: images and scenes recur but in different contexts, generating the disorienting sensation that we have been here before. Geography Biography was originally made for the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, and in responding to that building’s imperial architecture, Dean also tracked her own status as a British citizen in the wake of Brexit. The abstract terms of the title feel far removed from a vision of 22-year-old Dean, smiling on a quay in Falmouth, silhouetted against a postcard of a frozen Niagara falls, or a clip of Dean wearing a false beard against an array of European foresails (the British one notably obscured by her image). But it is here, in this gap between the deeply personal and the universally resonant, that Dean thrives.

Most often, she does this by making portraits of others—including a new film featuring artist Claes Oldenburg, comprising outtakes from her 2011 Manhattan Mouse Museum. The 20-minute-long 16mm piece shows Oldenburg drawing a slice of blueberry pie, carefully selecting his pencils and using his finger to blur the lines against the grain of the paper. Dean has made a number of films focused on individual artists (others include David Hockney, Cy Twombly, and Merce Cunningham), but she resists the term “film portrait.” Instead, she uses these particular studies to get at something shared. Another work in the show is a 2020 filmed interview between artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu, who share a birthday and would have a cumulative age of 150 in 2020 (hence the work’s title, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting). In the course of a roaming conversation, Hurtado—who was on the cusp of turning 100—remarks on the difficulty in being terrestrial.

Dean’s work too wrestles with terrestrial problems. A chalkboard drawing of a melting glacier could be a heavy-handed metaphor for the fragility of our environment, but in Dean’s hands, it becomes something far more poetic. The Wreck of Hope (2022)takes inspiration from Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of a capsized ship in a sea of ice. Paired with Chalk Fall (2018), a scene of dramatic white cliffs in the midst of collapse, the works make large-format, sublime landscape paintings feel surprisingly intimate. Textual annotations layered within the images indicate specific dates, names, events, and even temperatures. That those references are mostly illegible seems to be part of the point—our world is made of details that can appear insignificant on their own but that contribute to a much greater whole. She discloses in an interview that some of the dates in Chalk Fall refer to moments in her friend Keith Collins’s illness, which is to say she threads her diaristic account through a landscape showing not a distant (and thus avoidable) disaster, but a current reality, wrecked but not without hope.

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