The earliest work in the show lays out some stakes. In The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998), clips of Tom Cruise appropriated from Risky Business (1983) have the actor writhing on a couch in a continuous loop. Viewers become voyeurs of a bizarre suburban ritual. But Pfeiffer projects the scene on the wall at such close range that the image is mere inches in size, as if protecting Cruise or refusing to lull and seduce viewers. It’s an example of how the artist deftly manipulates scale, often to create a sense of dissonance.

Pfeiffer’s scale shifting recurs in Vitruvian Figure (2008), in which we see a 26-foot-wide model inspired by the 2000 Olympic Stadium in Sydney, the largest ever built, with 100,000 seats. The artist’s version seats a whopping one million spectators; it boggles the mind to imagine so many people attending a sporting event. Here, though, he turns the viewing apparatus into the object of the gaze: visitors approach the model from a winding ramp, then view the empty stadium from above, taking in the million seats he painstakingly constructed.

Starting in 2000, spectacle sports became one of the artist’s primary preoccupations. Several of Pfeiffer’s pieces in the exhibition isolate sports photographs and abstract them from their original context.“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (2000–ongoing) is a series of large C-prints of found photographs from which the artist digitally removes details like jersey numbers and stadium advertisements. In one image, a lone basketball player is captured mid-jump above a well-lit court, arms outstretched above him. Instead of a bold “23” or “30,” the athlete wears a plain white jersey. In the background, fans pack nearly eerie unmarked bleachers. A spotlight shines brightly in the distance, toward the camera, silhouetting the player. With this gesture, Pfeiffer emphasizes the figures in the photos, making them transcendent, as if revealing our culture’s new religion: athleticism and advertisements.

Elsewhere, instead of glorifying the players, he erases them.In each of the films comprising the trilogy The Long Count (2000–2001), the camera pans through a boxing ring. But there are no boxers, just a hyped-up crowd. The videos are taken from televised matches that Muhammad Ali fought against Sonny Liston (1964), George Foreman (1974), and Joe Frazier (1975). These iconic bouts were, even in those early days of television, watched by millions of viewers across the globe. In the videos, the boxing rings quiver with movement but reveal no fights. Pfeiffer edited footage of the empty rings, repeating segments on a loop so that each video runs for the duration of a match. There are no victories, no celebrations of champions—only the looping movement of the camera panning across each ring. Pfeiffer’s selective editing captures the setting, but erases the content it’s designed to house. Instead, we are left to ruminate on the environment, infrastructure, and audience. We witness the awe and anticipation of the mostly white observers who were presumably wealthy enough to afford the pricey tickets, only to watch Black and brown athletes entertain them, and the culture at large.

Pfeiffer reveals the many different systems by which spectacles are made, and chief among these, of course, are television and film. Self-Portrait as a Fountain (2000), a nod to the well-known murder scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, features a showerhead that continuously rains water into a bathtub. Meanwhile, six closed-circuit surveillance cameras are trained on the shower, mimicking the myriad angles used in the film’s iconic shower scene. And in Cross Hall (2008), a projector displays a livestream of a handsomely situated podium, as if awaiting a state official’s television address. But in the middle of the projection, a peep hole has been drilled into the wall, revealing behind it a darkened room and an open doorway. The camera, situated beyond the visible scene, is pointed at a diorama, streaming, it turns out, a podium in miniature. The work highlights the manipulability of media, and shows how some things are broadcast for all to see—often in the guise of transparency—and yet often, all this noise is really meant to distract from what goes on behind closed doors.

Throughout, celebrity culture meets surveillance, as it does in 24 Landscapes (2000/2008), a display culled from photographs of Marilyn Monroe at Santa Monica Beach, shot by George Barris in 1962, shortly before her untimely death. Having carefully edited Monroe out of the images, what Pfeiffer offers instead is a neutralized environment, an often-soft-focus gaze at the seashore, and an awareness of the tragedy that was soon to come. For Incarnator (2018–ongoing), Pfeiffer hired Philippine saint carvers, encarnadores, to render Justin Bieber in wood as a Christ-like idol. They meticulously carved a likeness, tattoos and all, then cut the sculpture into pieces that Pfeiffer has elsewhere shown assembled to form the whole, but here displays separately. Still, the pop star’s features remain recognizable. We are made to feel that we are in the presence of someone or something otherworldly, yet someone we have dismembered and greedily consumed. Perhaps, for a moment, we are who we are when no one is watching.

Related Articles

Thinking Inside the Box: Q+A With Kaari Upson

German Feminist Icon Astrid Klein Gets Her New York Debut

These two short videos, looped with one other called Clit Wisdom (2019), play on a monitor on the reverse side of a hearth that Upson cast in urethane from the contemporary fireplace in Kris’s Las Vegas home; its negative space holds a pile of cast table legs. The uncanny spillage of limb-like forms recalls the sculpture of Robert Gober, while the replica of a childhood space conjures the work of Mike Kelley. Nearby sits a sofa from the set in Alex’s House; 3D-milled from wood, it was then layered with spray paint for a red patina. A paper version of this same sofa was once part of Kris’s dollhouse. Elsewhere in the gallery are a urethane cast of a plastic-wrapped Christmas tree and two bulky forms resembling the casts of wrapped presents in the video, one upright and the other on its side. These elements all seem at home in the illusion of the enlarged dollhouse; less expected are the giant 3D-printed clit rings sitting on the sofa and piercing the wrapped Christmas tree. The clit rings relate to a story Kris tells in Clit Wisdom, while sitting in a rocking chair, about getting a clit piercing that would have disgusted an ex. With or without that explanation, Upson unsettles, combining the classic space of childhood fantasy with a darker, more mysterious, and sexualized vision of domestic life. The narratives in her videos amount to a loose memoir, where Upson and Kris reflect on encounters and decisions that may be their own or invented for their characters, as a child might for a doll. Upson’s voice is doubled in an eerie echo.

Aside from psychological disturbance, the artist achieves material intrigue through the moiré patterning of her objects, resulting from her spray-painting and digital printing processes. She also creates tension by substituting one material for another: the couch looks soft but is hard, and the table legs should be rigid but appear somewhat flaccid. Upson’s previous work with pillows and sectionals established a basis for this exploration; in Aqua-Fresh (2014–16), for example, she cast a used mattress, adding color to evoke stains. Meanwhile, the videos reinforce discrepancies in scale, partly because they are nested in the fireplace fragment but also because they feature elements of the installation itself as set pieces. Elsewhere in the exhibition are drawings and paintings that similarly deal with scale and domesticity, such as the artist’s huge untitled graphite drawings; the lightly scrawled and heavily bolded phrases in those works experiment with language as a complex tool for personal expression: self seeding, pleasure / preoccupation with waste, over identification with incongruous fantasy. Taken as a whole, the exhibition—the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in her home city since her untimely death last year—reinforces Upson’s significance as a powerful and moving storyteller.

The exhibition press release, itself an artwork by Christina Catherine Martinez, applies this theme to matters of illness as they relate to habits of mind. It opens informally—“Isabel put together another sculpture show”—and then follows an associative path into a first-person story about medical anxiety and stress-induced periods. The text sets the tone for a show that repeatedly appeals to the viewer’s awareness of their own body, its health, and the tensions and desires that affect it.

Amanda Ross-Ho, Untitled Crisis Actor, (HURTS WORST 2), 2019, canvas, sequins, burlap, vinyl, batting, thread, and safety pins, 58 by 58 inches.

Several artworks in the exhibition explicitly depict the human figure, though in bits and fragments. The semi-carved block of alabaster in Nevine Mahmoud’s untitled tabletop sculpture (2021) has the smooth contours of a bare bottom. It evokes a classical nude study, but in a display of textural diversity, the stone rests atop a colorful laminate block. These mismatched materials are positioned on an unfinished wooden table. Amanda Ross-Ho’s Untitled Crisis Actor (HURTS WORST 2), 2019, hangs nearby, a circular tapestry embroidered with a cartoon sad face taken from a clinical pain scale. Yellin’s own wall-mounted sculpture, Gut Feeling (2021), gathers stuffed fabric tubes like an intestinal tract that weaves through a steel and fiberglass armature. The artist combines organic forms and inorganic materials to eerie effect. In Alison Saar’s Still Run Dry (2012), glass vials shaped like organs—intestines, the stomach, the heart, lungs, and a uterus—connected by copper and rubber tubing spread across the wall in a slightly sinister, post-human object theater.

Isabel Yellin, Gut Feeling, 2021, steel, fiberglass, spray paint, fabric, and stuffing, 24 by 11 by 36 inches.

Other works are dedicated to intimate and uncanny associations with the home. A delicate 3D-printed chair sculpture by Dwyer Kilcollin, Emergent Object: Chair IX (2015), almost appears to melt, as though assembled from sand and now returning to its earthen source. Anne Libby’s untitled sculpture of polished aluminum (2021) resembles Venetian blinds pulled to one side and frozen there. The metallic finish and dramatic angle render this quotidian home furnishing sharp and menacing. Kristen Morgin also refers to the household in unfired clay sculptures of mundane items like children’s books (The Velveteen Rabbit) and a worn DVD case for the action romcom Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Trulee Hall’s kinetic Humping Corn and Other Phallic Veg (2021) also features trompe l’oeil elements, fake ceramic vegetables both found and of her own making. The most overtly sexual piece in the exhibition, this installation suspends the sculptures within it, mostly ears of corn, from a motorized armature that makes them thrust back and forth.

Taken as a whole, “Psychosomatic” models the ways in which artists and viewers alike might use art to measure our sense of self, considering variable states of physical, mental, and sexual wellness. Coming on the heels of our tentative emergence from the apparent worst of the Covid-19 pandemic and quarantine, the show felt like a hospitable if trepidatious welcome into a new and different world.

The thematic core of the installation was the ocean, with large drawings of waves anchoring neighboring clusters of smaller images. In them, rhythmic strokes of blue, green, brown, and chartreuse articulate the concave span of ocean waves as intersecting currents peak in height. The waves are about to engulf the small gray figure of a surfer in No Title (Making a wave); in No Title (Str8 Line) and No Title (The Clear-cut brow), all 2020, only the boards appear, rendered as crescent slivers of bright red and yellow peeking through. Pettibon invokes the ocean’s allegorical intensity, the drawings hinting at everything from looming climate catastrophe to the experience of image and info saturation in a world increasingly lived online.

Raymond Pettibon,
No Title (Cancel the fake), 2019, ink, acrylic, and charcoal on paper, 22 1/2 by 30 inches; at Regen Projects.

At once spontaneous and studied, Pettibon’s pen-and-ink compositions evoke the caricature of Honoré Daumier, the comics of R. Crumb, and the late 1970s and ’80s second-wave Los Angeles punk era with which he is commonly associated. In 1976, he designed the iconic four-bar logo for the hardcore band Black Flag, whose founding singer, Greg Ginn, is the artist’s brother. Pettibon has often parodied the logo, highlighting both its renown and the ennui that accompanied its mass culture absorption. In No title (2019), the uneven bars appear to “brand” (in strokes of black ink) the buttocks of a cropped seminude female figure whose butt cheek also boasts a five-pointed-star tattoo. No title (I hate that), 2020, features five solid black rectangles of varying heights, resembling a bar graph. Topped by Pettibon’s signature all-capital lettering, each one seems to wage a complaint. One says, “I hate the squares”; another, “I can’t tell you how much I hate the word ‘image.’” At far right: “This is going to be a blockbuster.” The drawing speaks, self-reflexively and frankly, of the repetition—and the boredom—that goes into building a lasting cultural brand.

“Sometimes it’s not what you are saying but how you say it that really matters,” Pettibon commented in a 2017 interview. “The language is on fire and you just spit it out.” Left unframed and affixed to the wall with thumbtacks, the works’ display heightened this sense of immediacy. But Pettibon, who now lives in New York, felt less present in this show than in previous presentations, for which he has often spent extended time inhabiting the exhibition space, placing works directly, and sometimes drawing directly on the wall. The resulting energy and messiness were missing from this show, but the apocalyptic tone could not have been more apt for the present day.

This review appears under the title “Raymond Pettibon” in the January/February 2021 issue, pp. 73—74.

Perhaps to test this dysfunction, Ehrlich reversed the familiar trajectory of an artwork made, displayed, sold, and then situated at the behest of its owner. Ahead of the exhibition, he temporarily installed a number of the pieces in the homes of writers in his Los Angeles community. This entailed ongoing conversations with each participant and an organic match-making process to determine which piece they would temporarily live with. Some of the writers composed short reflections on the experience, published in an illustrated pamphlet accompanying the show.

Assembled in an almost circular configuration, suggesting both conversation and the allure of a showroom, the works were characterized by simple, slightly irregular geometries, the juxtaposition of disparate textures, and flashes of solid red, green, blue, or yellow. In nearly all of them, hard, smooth, and finished surfaces are combined with salvaged timber. In Untitled (table/footrest), 2019, a laminated beam supporting a cantilevered glass tabletop juts out of a notch in a raw wood beam placed on the floor, while in Untitled (side table), 2019, a rectangular pane of glass vertically bisects a hunk of eucalyptus wood. The room was full of alternating sharp and curving edges: the pointy laminated triangle in Untitled (Variability table), 2019, for instance, is joined to a parallel laminate disk by a coil of black metal tubing. Turned on its side, it is a table that could seat no one.

Ken Ehrlich: Untitled diptych (Judith Rodenbeck), 2020, inkjet print.

The scale and postures of the works make them appear almost creaturely. Various writers in the pamphlet remark that they seem to be in the company of something quasi-sentient, with which they have a sometimes antagonistic relationship. Andrew Culp and Eva Della Lana, who lived with Untitled (shelf), 2019, liken it to both a guest and a ghost, writing: “What we did not anticipate was how it would startle us.” On the walls, photographic diptychs portrayed the pieces both with and without their human hosts, souvenirs of their time together. These images add warmth and intimacy when reproduced alongside the text contributions in the pamphlet, but as framed photographs in the exhibition, they were one layer of meta-commentary too many.

The furnished interior is inevitably an expression of social class, a dimension Ehrlich explores through social reproduction theory. He shared several texts with his writer-collaborators that he identified as sources of inspiration for the project: essays on the relationship of design to everyday life by Italian designers Gae Aulenti and Enzo Mari, and a canonical Marxist-feminist text by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1972). Because Dalla Costa and James associated the domestic interior with the role of housewife—someone who delivers the conditions that make all other social life possible, typically without recognition—they viewed the traditional family home as a site of oppression. In turn, they argued for a refusal of domesticity equivalent to a strike. Ehrlich’s dysfunctional furnishings take up this idea of a disruptive potential within the material experience of home, attempting to revive these politics for a different place and time.

This article appears under the title “Ken Ehrlich” in the April 2020 issue, pp. 86–87.

Siah Armajani, Elements Number 30, 1990, diamond-plate aluminum, painted steel, and mirrors stained with translucent color, 9′ 5″ x 53⅞” x 7′. Museum of Modern Art.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, GIFT OF AGNES GUND, ANNA MARIE AND ROBERT F. SHAPIRO, JERRY I. SPEYER, AND THE NORMAN AND ROSITA WINSTON FOUNDATION, 1991

This past February, two prominent New York institutions announced moves within days of each other that respond to the status of the public domain and the political economy of people and goods under the shadow of an accelerating so-called isolationism on the national stage. On February 3, on the heels of the contentious and ultimately failed first White House executive order restricting travel and revoking visas from seven Muslim-majority nations, the Museum of Modern Art in New York unveiled a protest rehanging of its fifth-floor permanent collection. Although such presentations are often premised on narratives and artifacts of Western modernism, the museum chose to respond swiftly to the administration’s directive with a counter geography highlighting seven works by artists hailing from those nations targeted by the travel ban. An eighth work, Iranian-American Siah Armajani’s Elements Number 30 (1990), was positioned prominently in the museum’s entrance foyer. Armajani’s arrangement of slender steel and aluminum fixtures balanced in a tentative equilibrium gives a quixotic nod to vernacular building construction. Slightly beyond human scale, it resembles an impromptu shelter, or a rampart: stable but tinged with the aura of imminent collapse. Visually and structurally the work embodies extemporaneity.

Within a week of MoMA’s reinstall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled “Open Access”: a shift toward becoming an ostensible museum without borders, wherein the digitized catalogue of all public domain artworks from its collection, totaling more than 375,000 images—from Japanese woodblock prints, to studies by American modernist painter Arthur Dove, to Eugène Atget’s gelatin silver prints of a Haussmann-izing Paris—are now accessible and downloadable to anyone with an Internet connection, anywhere, at any time. Made possible under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), this initiative represents yet another techno-utopic step toward the re-materialization of art objects (and “objects” feels like the operative term, given that so many of the CC0-friendly works consist of pottery, textiles, costumes, and other functional objects often individually unattributed and classified as decorative arts) as virtual assets, freely shared and distributed. “We’re privileged to serve over 30 million visitors on our website each year,” writes Chief Digital Officer Loic Tallon in the museum’s news release, adding, “but if we want to connect the collection to three billion individuals around the world, we know that they’re never all going to come to metmuseum.org.” Hence, the museum announced related partnerships with platforms such as Wikimedia, Artstor, Pinterest, and the Digital Public Library of America. The democratizing gesture amounts to a considerable gain for audiences and researchers worldwide, while it simultaneously raises questions about the wholesale translation of artworks to data streams.

Not long afterward, art dealer Andrea Rosen announced that she would close her eponymous Chelsea gallery after 27 years in the business, and share representation of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres estate—which she had overseen since the artist’s death in 1996—with the much larger David Zwirner gallery. Rosen’s news shocked the art world here not only because of the high esteem in which the gallery is held by so many, but also because of what this signals about the possible fate of the mid-level gallery in the wake of other recent closures (Murray Guy, Lisa Cooley, and Feuer/Mesler, for example) as artists and capital consolidate into the hands of fewer and fewer commercial operations. Gonzalez-Torres himself had formulated a brilliant theoretical approach to the circulation of images, objects, and ideas, based on a model of virality, that incisively responded to the horrors of the AIDS crisis while accurately predicting the terms of our current cultural epoch. Gonzalez-Torres—continuing to interrogate in the 1990s the power of ideological packaging as his appropriation-era forerunners had done during the 1980s—tested the possibility of releasing biting social commentary into the routine channels of American consumer society, attuned to the manner in which social transgression can gain traction and circulate just below the level of consciousness. He wanted his ideas to travel. At the same time, his theory of dispersal was predicated on carefully considered conditions, which his estate has taken pains to maintain in the two decades since his death, and which we can only hope will remain safeguarded.

Installation view of “Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise,” 2017, at SculptureCenter, New York.

KYLE KNODELL

These three New York stories, happening in quick succession, touched on larger questions of how images, ideas, and resources are contained and circulated in the new millennium, both within and without the art world. Such questions were front and center in SculptureCenter’s presentation of works by members of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League (CATPC), a collective of worker-artists based in Lusanga, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The exhibition, comprising drawings, contextualizing videos, and a reading room, is anchored by a central hall of figurative sculptures by artists Cedrick Tamasala, Mananga Kibuila, Djonga Bismar, and Thomas Leba, positioned on raw MDF plinths. Sculpted by hand from local clay, the works had been 3-D scanned in Africa, 3D printed in chocolate in Europe (I am reminded, particularly within the SculptureCenter’s cavernous postindustrial setting, of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety,” her 2014 monumental sphinx made of sugar, sited within the disused Williamsburg Domino Plant), and shipped to the United States. Appearing at times in duplicate or even triplicate, they had migrated great virtual and actual distances.

“The art must be able to leave the DRC,” writes the exhibition’s curator, Ruba Katrib, in a recent Sternberg Press monograph on CATPC, “even if the artists can’t.” Dutch artist Renzo Martens, who initiated the project alongside local Congolese social activist René Ngongo, claims cognizance of the ethical quagmire he’s elicited. His ambitions to “gentrify the jungle” have caused critics to liken him to the madman played by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo. His initiative strives to address the violence of economic oppression through resource extraction wrought by the historical Belgian presence in the Congo; through redirecting art sale earnings to support workers and worker-owned cacao gardens, the project incrementally reverses control of the means of production and materially re-invests in the local Congolese economy, with some success thus far. Plans are now in place for OMA, the firm of architect Rem Koolhaas, to design a white cube CATPC museum for the Lusanga rain forest. Despite the undeniable quality of some of the work on view in the exhibition, particularly the drawings, one struggles to read the project as post- rather than neocolonial, a reenactment rather than a reversal of colonial power despite the directional flow of global capital.

Mary Beth Edelson, Red Kali, 1973, oil, China marker, and ink on gelatin silver print, 10″ x 8″. David Lewis.

MAX YAWNEY

David Lewis gallery on the Lower East Side offered the opportunity to consider power imbalances as perpetuated or refuted by image economies in relation to the oeuvre of under-recognized artist Mary Beth Edelson, a pioneer of the 1970s feminist movement. The show opens with “Woman Rising,” a 1973 suite of gelatin silver prints that portray the artist “power-posing” naked atop a sand dune, legs apart, arms up and bent at the elbow, and hands forward with open palms. Each print has received a hand-painted alteration, reimagining the artist in various guises drawn from a range of cultural sources: Wonder Woman, the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, the Hindu goddess Kali, and the Irish Sheela-na-gig, among others.

Similarly capitalizing on shared visual tropes, an ongoing series of collages begun in 1973 wound across the walls of the spacious main gallery, highlighting the malleable potency of female subjectivity as well as Edelson’s approach to mass-media representations as a resource for extraction. In these collages, printed images of serpents, insects, bats, and birds, together with portraits of Edelson and people from her artistic milieu, are severed from their original contexts, multiplied, and recombined into intoxicating spirals that here ebbed and flowed rhythmically around the perimeter of the room. The pieces commanded varied registers of viewing: taken in together from a distance so as to comprehend them as an absorbing panorama, yet inspected almost microscopically to appreciate the intricacy of their facture. The individual likenesses (artist peers like Faith Ringgold and Nancy Spero were joined as the decades progressed by icons of pop culture such as Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, and Faye Dunaway) dissolved into a complex biomorphic hallucination. As emphatically analogue and even vegetal as it appeared, the installation also spoke to the digital lifestyle; the viewer was surrounded by clusters of images that scrolled and meandered without fixed starting or end points.

Edelson’s solo show coincided with two nearby gallery presentations designed to recover and re-situate work by less well-known practitioners of photo-conceptualism since the 1970s: prints by Vikky Alexander at Downs & Ross simulated the commercial advertising trope of the white female seducer, while Lynn Hershman Leeson’s generous survey at Bridget Donahue blended examples of her video/sculpture hybrids, among them the tenderly appointed living room from her work Lorna (1979–84). Each artist contends with the implications of female embodiment and social perception, and they share an overarching contention that public persona as commodity, however you valuate it, is regularly exchanged in the contemporary marketplace.

Vikky Alexander, Portage Glacier, 1982, digital print on Moab Slickrock metallic pearl acid-free paper mounted on Dibond, 18″ x 40″. Downs & Ross.

FRAN PARENTE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DOWNS & ROSS, NEW YORK

While Edelson, Alexander, and Hershman Leeson focus largely on the female body, Graham Anderson’s figurative paintings, which were on view at Klaus von Nichtssagend, dissolve the nude male into a decorative abstraction. Anatomically, these specimens resemble the idealized physiques of Robert Mapplethorpe’s bodybuilders; but Anderson’s compositions are de facto de-compositions: dissecting both physical anatomy and the deeply ingrained cultural convention that limits the display of vulnerable male bodies for public consumption. Stylized musculature emerges through an alternation of solid shapes and contours, and patches of dotted color, more Ben-Day than pointillist. Simple, handcrafted “viewing devices” constructed from birch plywood confined two of the paintings. Like filigreed screens or vertical blinds, these handsome accompaniments offer distorted and partial views of the canvases through identical vertical slats. Outfitted also with operable drawers, these devices transcend visual primacy and become functional storage for personal items, quite literally objectifying the silhouetted male forms.

In “Private Matters” at Essex Street, Jason Loebs took on the issue of eminent domain. The artist filmed three separate sites of government land seizure for the purposes of corporatized development, including the nearby megaproject under way at Essex Crossing; the resulting smartphone footage was shown on three elegantly assembled AV setups on low pedestals. Real-time recording of the playback by another phone (notably in each case the “source” phone is a Samsung while the secondary “feeder” is an iPhone; two different makes corresponding to distinct proprietary controls in their settings) was projected onto the walls at relatively close range. This light stream, ostensibly the vehicle of the work’s content, polluted the immediate optical field, so that the “feeder” camera struggled to calibrate its mark. The resulting video image was poetically displaced and refracted through a chain of reframings, a metaphor for the destabilization of the commons under neoliberalism. The visitor was welcome to take a rest in any of the six Herman Miller wheeled Aeron chairs placed around the gallery in pairs (three sculptures total, each comprising two chairs). Not unlike New York’s CitiBikes, their quasi-public counterparts, they had predetermined operating specificities, tethered in each instance at the arm rest by plastic zip-ties, each rotated in a different orientation with respect to its neighbor. Bodily comportment thus became another dramatized element in a room of semi-inert negotiation. The choreography of objects and images, echoing and amplifying discursively, created a visually and acoustically interesting environment. Regrettably, though, technology found its Anthropocene other in a large sculpture of a phallus, a copy of a Paleolithic fetish, cast from local dirt and displayed as though it were a relic.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Batman was nowhere…), 1986, ink on paper, 8½” x 11″. New Museum.

COURTESY DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK

At the New Museum, Raymond Pettibon’s retrospective showcased his prolific and singular graphic style over the last three decades. The undertaking was extraordinary, spanning three floors and spilling into the lobby with pictures and texts partly painted, partly scrawled across the surface of the elevator banks. An introductory section dedicated to reworked drawings from Pettibon’s childhood was a special treat, rendering the frequent museum survey teleology of the evidence of childhood “genius” into a perverse yet satisfying exaggeration. The gallery dedicated to a salon-style tiling of the artist’s “surfer” drawings amounted to the Rothko Chapel of Pettibon, but the museum faltered in its lumping of motifs. Themes that surge and coalesce over decades appear repetitive and routine—valueless, in other words, in the economy of viewer attention—when rationalized. Walls of mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud, Gumby after Gumby, numbed the senses to Pettibon’s variegated critique of pop culture. Instead of the variances or evolutions of each iconic fragment (a riposte to the consumer dogma of logo or brand consistency) we were offered a monotone. This pseudo-algorithmic sorting—not so distant from the filtered metadata of the Met’s “Open Access”—presented the work in a way that feels contrary to the artist’s modus operandi.

A.K. Burns, Living Room (production still), 2017–, two-channel HD video, 36 minutes. New Museum.

EDEN BATKI/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CALLICOON FINE ARTS, NEW YORK

On the New Museum’s fifth floor, elevator doors opened directly onto “Shabby But Thriving,” a commission by A. K. Burns. The project premiered the 2017 video Living Room, which weaves scenes of physical and affective labor, adolescent surreality, and a subterranean dance sequence by choreographer NIC Kay together with Geo Wyeth’s soundtrack; the images adroitly conjure personal metamorphosis alongside apocalyptic dread. In one scene, the artist A. L. Steiner makes a bathtub cameo as a present-day revolutionary à la Jacques Louis David’s legendary painting of Marat. Dilapidated architecture and furnishings that appear within the film were matched by sculptural elements outside it; visitors pushed the entropic register as they tracked dirt from leaking bags across a carpeted floor. The space felt enlivened by an energy that seemingly couldn’t be contained by infrastructure—neither physical nor social. In the adjacent Fifth Floor Resource Center, a zone separated from the main exhibition space by a glass wall, a punching bag hung from the ceiling. The visitor was invited to strap on a pair of gloves and have at it.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of ARTnews on page 118 under the title “Around New York.”