Lauren O’Neill-Butler portrays the ten well-researched case studies that comprise her book on artistic activism, The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protests in America, as qualified successes. The working class late 1960s Women Artists in Revolution group, for example, had a formative influence on the more renowned Art Workers’ Coalition, though the former’s emphasis on women-only spaces at times risked becoming, in Adrienne Rich’s words, “an end in itself.” The 1970s Black Emergency Cultural Coalition pioneered prison arts programs more humane than many of today’s versions, yet the group didn’t prioritize feminist concerns. The prominence of artist Rick Lowe’s 1990s Houston social sculpture, Project Row Houses, accidentally ushered in gentrification during the ensuing decades. Which is all to say that even when activist artworks manage to effect change, there are caveats.
O’Neill-Butler’s caveats establish the critic as a fair-minded chronicler of an artistic mode that can attract Pollyannaish claims regarding its impact. She states up front: “my argument is not that artists are the solution” to the “various ills of society.” “What I aim to show,” she continues, “is that they have motivated change and left a major mark.”
But this measured approach raises the question: why do artists persist in mobilizing art for protest when the odds are low their efforts will have substantial effects? An artistic intervention into a systematic problem can feel like putting a fresh coat of paint on a car whose check engine light is on. Here a picture emerges from the book, which covers the post–Civil Rights era: politically inclined artists recognize that their work may have long odds or limited agency, but they also recognize that change is necessary when conditions are trying. So they respond using the tools they know best.
Consider the prescient guerrilla media collective Top Value Television (TVTV), whose citizen journalism documented the 1972 Democratic and Republican conventions, during a contentious wartime US Presidential election. Their films, The World’s Largest TV Studio and Four More Years (both 1972), were broadcast across the country soon after the conventions and showcased vernacular perspectives unavailable in contemporary network journalism. O’Neill-Butler explains TVTV’s techno-utopic hope that “in the future everyone might have access to a portable video camera and that the resultant proliferation of images would quickly change hearts and minds,” but concludes with a dark caveat: “TVTV essentially paved the way for today’s deluge of verité footage on social media,” even if the group “could never have imagined the outcome.”
This fascinating cross-era comparison highlights both the value and the limitations of The War of Art’s case-study structure. The book set out to connect the flurry of 2010s US artistic activism, which resulted in developments such as the New Museum’s staff unionization and Warren B. Kanders’ resignation from the Whitney Museum’s board, with that activism’s art historical antecedents. As the case studies unfold, the overarching theme becomes the ways that successive generations of artist-activists “sit on the shoulders of their chosen ancestors.” In consecutive chapters about two queer 1990s New York City collectives, fierce pussy and Dyke Action Machine!, O’Neill-Butler observes how their respective wheat-pasted poster campaigns not only prefigured New Red Order’s 2020s Indigenous agitprop but also drew on aesthetic tactics from the 1980s AIDS activist group ACT UP, which itself drew on 1960s and 70s civil rights and feminist movement tactics.
Yet O’Neill-Butler’s historical comparisons rarely delve into wherefores and whys. Instead, she seems content simply to point out how the formal tactics of one movement parallel those of another, sidestepping their differences in context. And she remains unwilling to theorize or define activist art. In the introduction, she contends, “it is generally not helpful to offer strict definitions of activism aside from that it is always a means to an end.” Instead, she believes that “the best way to answer these questions is not through theory or evaluative tools, but through case studies.” But the choice isn’t inherently either-or, as if theory and history were oil and water. Her reluctance to draw conclusions feel like missed opportunities to spell out takeaways from her research, given the considerable legwork she’s done. Potential caveats to her own project thus go unexplored, as when she asks, but doesn’t answer, if recent artists have “normalized” or “instrumentalized” the term “activist.”
Take, for instance, the separate chapters on ACT UP and on the artist Nan Goldin’s late 2010s Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) organization, which serve as the book’s opening and closing case studies respectively. In the former, O’Neill-Butler describes an iconic 1988 protest photograph of artist David Wojnarowicz, recently diagnosed with HIV, wearing a jacket that says: “IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA.” She views the jacket’s text and other ACT UP slogans, such as “Silence=Death,” as examples of what she calls activist art’s “take, copy, distribute” logic. But when, in the final chapter, she describes the “direct cue[s]” that P.A.I.N. took from “ACT UP’s media-savvy actions”— “speak[ing] through the media, not to the media”; staging die-ins—she stops short of considering the two eras’ dramatically different media environments. In the 2010s, the question wasn’t whether activist organizations spoke “through” or “to” traditional media outlets but how cannily they spoke outside them, using social media to parlay viral attention into institutional credibility.
In the TVTV chapter, O’Neill-Butler invokes artist Tania Bruguera’s concept of “political-timing-specific art” and quotes sociologist Stuart Hall on how such interventions can expose a culture’s “political, economic, and ideological contradictions.” The War of Art’s timing as a book inadvertently reveals similar tensions in our own artistic moment. The 2010s social media environment—which shaped so much recent discourse about the artistic activism that was this book’s impetus—looks quite different today, with many liberals retreating from X, and a general sense of fatigue with call outs and misinformation. Historical perspective is vital to understanding the present, and O’Neill-Butler does an excellent job chronicling recent artistic activism’s half-forgotten predecessors. But one moral of that history is to be careful what you wish for: even when it pans out, well-meaning citizen journalism or neighborhood revival art projects can have unintended downsides.
The word “fuck” in giant neon letters, (FUCK, 2020), greets visitors to the Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei,” the superstar artist’s largest United States retrospective ever. The glowing expletive about sums up the prevailing liberal mood in the country these days—though perhaps not in the way the show’s curator, Ping Foong, intended. Like the nearby sculpture of a human hand making the gesture, (Middle Finger, 2000), and the photographic series in which Ai gives the same to sites such as the Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Square (“Study of Perspective,” 1995–2011), FUCK is meant to convey defiance. Just as much, though, it conveys frustration, even impotence, in the face of abusive state power.
To be clear, Ai’s oeuvre repeatedly demonstrates his refusal to be cowed by the political persecution the Chinese government has inflicted on him, most famously his brutal 2011 arrest and detention on tax evasion charges. And many parts of that oeuvre bristle with poignance and wit. But as the second Trump presidency takes a wrecking ball to domestic institutions and civil rights, as well as to the post–Cold War international order, one might wonder what the artist’s strategies offer our current moment. Platitudes about raising consciousness and challenging authority will abound, but the most useful takeaways are subtler and stranger. “Ai, Rebel” holds a mirror up to recent liberal paradigms of political art, and unwittingly suggests their symbolism is in part compensatory, offering an aesthetic outlet for feelings of powerlessness.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Ai’s work, seen all together in one place, is how familiar, even unoriginal, it appears. Part of that is by design: Ai remixes the classics. Duchamp’s influence permeates everything, from a found mailbox (U.S. Mail, 2020), to a thicket of gnarled rebar salvaged from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (Forge, 2008–12). Many other works allude indirectly to readymades, as in his iconic cross-cultural mash-up Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (2011). Still others play with duplication, such as his replicas of ancient Chinese porcelain vessels, or his Warholian iterations of painted Mao Zedong portraits. Even his recent Lego works translate classic Western paintings, by figures such as Rubens and Munch, into blocky candy-colored versions of the originals.
It’s not just the contents of his works that appear familiar but also their forms, which span the repertoire of contemporary political art. There’s Conceptualist documentation that bears witness to catastrophe, such as Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation (2008–11), a sobering inkjet print catalog of the Sichuan earthquake’s 5,196 child victims. There’s performance documentation, as in the before, during, and after shots comprising his infamous triptych, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). There are impressive aggregations of emotionally freighted objects, including a 50-foot-long snake sculpture from 2009 comprising interlocking children’s backpacks to memorialize the Sichuan victims. The list of aesthetic moves—public art installations, documentary films, activist social media campaigns—could go on, and will be familiar to art audiences, even if viewers less acquainted with the canon might find more shock value in them.
At this stage in Ai’s career, the question is not whether these qualities make his work original or derivative, or good or bad. His oeuvre contains plenty of powerful work—my favorites are the spiky assemblages of things like furniture or bicycles—that does not purport to be unique in terms of art history (or is unique perhaps in the sense that he takes old ideas to new extremes). The question is what it reveals about the popular understanding of political art, given that his work epitomizes so many of the genre’s tropes.
At the literal and figurative center of “Ai, Rebel” stands 81 (2013), a reproduction of the solitary confinement chamber where the artist was detained by the Chinese government, in an undisclosed location, for 81 days in 2011. The room’s bare lightless interior feels claustrophobic, a sense exacerbated by the padding that covers the furniture to prevent self-harm. The sculpture’s exterior, left unfinished because the artist never saw the room from the outside, has an amnesiac feel. The forbidding artwork differs in tone from the trickster Conceptualism that characterizes Ai’s other work. Its starkness renders palpable its harrowing stakes, eliciting despair rather than defiance, and suggesting there’s nothing uplifting about the artist’s tribulations. Standing inside the sculpture feels like being a rat plopped down in a maze, and grasping—FUCK—that you have limited control over your fate.
That sense of curtailed agency forms the retrospective’s heart of darkness, even if it’s not the message you’re meant to take away from the show. 81 is situated in an exhibition section titled “Watching Ai Watching Power,” its strained bit of wordplay tiptoes around the displayed works’ existential and political binds. Bearing witness to state malfeasance is a necessary task, well-suited to art’s capabilities. But, even at its most poignant, that task has practical limitations; at its most flat-footed, it verges on farce. Ai’s awkward 15-by-11-foot Lego reproduction from 2019 of the Mueller Report cover page, for instance, strains after purpose, as if its showy size and materials could compensate for its toothless political gesture.
The retrospective’s bold four-letter-word of an epigraph also evinces showmanship. But it has a deeper meaning: the title FUCK references Ai’s Beijing design studio, FAKE, which can sound like the English epithet when spoken in Mandarin. This thinly veiled pun is, sure, a form of defiance, but not the truth-to-power kind. Instead, it hints at the way some citizens must speak in code under authoritarianism, at the ersatz facades they adopt to maintain plausible deniability against censorship or worse. The pun challenges authority but also recognizes the dangerous power imbalance inherent to that challenge. As a punitive political atmosphere looms over US citizens, “Ai, Rebel” provides uncomfortable glimpses of how things might come to look and feel.
As a critic myself, I get it. Most art exhibitions aren’t amazing. I personally think about gallery-going the way I do thrifting, even though I don’t buy art because it’s much more expensive than used clothing. At both galleries and thrift stores, I like to poke around in hopes of being pleasantly surprised. Most of what’s on display is, by definition, average: a pair of innocuous chinos; an abstract painting that would look nice above your couch. Some of it’s a bit cringe, the art equivalent of a tuxedo T-shirt. And some is interesting but just not your size or style. Only at rare moments, often when the search feels futile, do you stumble upon something incredible: a jacket or a sculpture that feels as though it exists just for you, whose improbability makes the discovery that much more meaningful.
All of which is to say that I’m suspicious whenever other critics complain that most art—or most movies, or most music—is bad these days. Most days, most work isn’t incredible. Combing through it all, fatigue is inevitable. But that fatigue causes some critics to mistake the rarity of aesthetic elation for a uniquely humdrum contemporary culture. One sign of this error is rampant nostalgia for the way things used to be—when the critic was younger, or else during an illustrious historical era.
This nostalgia pervades the work of several critics who’ve been grumbling that contemporary art is stagnant. Sean Tatol’s self-published Manhattan Art Review tosses off zesty negative reviews that stirred up productive interest in art criticism’s stakes throughout 2023. That same year, New York Times critic-at-large Jason Farago wrote the civilization-level version of a “kids these days” think piece, “Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill,” which argues that aesthetic style no longer advances and that perhaps “ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years.” Dean Kissick’s polarizing 2024 Harper’s screed, “The Painted Protest,” vents frustration with the curatorial paradigm shifts resulting from 2010s identity politics, and romanticizes the pre-Trump art world of its author’s early adulthood.
Art isn’t what it used to be, in good and bad ways, but every generation experiences a version of this phenomenon as it ages. What stands out about these critical complaints is their frustration toward how the world itself has changed, often in ways hostile to artists. Today’s technological and economic conditions exert novel demands on US arts professionals, creating an industry where overwork and precarity are the norm. It’s no surprise that artists have adapted to these conditions and it’s no surprise, if a bit cliché, that some critics wonder if that means art’s best days are behind it.
FARAGO’S “WHY CULTURE HAS COME TO A STANDSTILL” argues that Western culture’s best days have passed but that, once you accept the fact, you can have a more fulfilling relationship to what remains. The article asks “why cultural production no longer progresses in time as it once did,” and answers that phones and other digital tools create so much “chronological confusion” that the concept of aesthetic progress no longer makes sense. Instead, we have “a culture of an eternal present,” exemplified by Amy Winehouse’s hit 2006 album Back to Black, which sounds “neither new nor retro,” “as if it came from no particular era.”
The argument’s premises aren’t particularly objectionable; however, the conclusion Farago draws from them is silly. He contends that “the lexical possibilities of many traditional media are exhausted,” and thus no major stylistic innovations are possible within them. As a result, he believes audiences ought to let go of the lingering high modernist belief that “good art is good because it is innovative.” But you get the feeling Farago is less at peace with his cultural disappointments than he pretends, given that his subsequent reviews continue to dredge up examples of aesthetic stagnation, always linking back to this article.
Part of Farago’s complaint is that digital dissemination reduces art to mere content: “In the 20th century we were taught that cleaving ‘style’ from ‘content’ was a fallacy, but in the 21st century, content (that word!) has had its ultimate vengeance, as the sole component of culture that our machines can fully understand, transmit and monetize.” The digital revolution has had seismic implications for the production and distribution of culture, similar to that of the printing press centuries ago. So it’s bizarre—and laughably premature—to speculate, as Farago does, that “we are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.”
What’s actually happening is that culture as Farago knows and prefers it is changing as a result of techno-economic pressures. In recent decades, cultural platforms have undergone transformations even more dramatic than the content they showcase, with profound effects on how and why artists operate: from becoming content creators, to collaborating with AI. As a staff writer for the paper of record, at a time when such jobs are near-extinct and the term “paper of record” feels like an anachronism, Farago is aware of the changing status quo. He just chooses to cling to yesterday’s norms even as he pretends to let them go.
Kissick, on the other hand, laments that his youthful optimism about art’s potential led to disappointment. Like Farago, Kissick believes contemporary art feels exhausted because it fixates on historically marginalized identities and folk knowledge, especially in major biennials. Also like Farago, he’s tired of how art relies on the same type of “spin-offs, remakes, quotations, interpolations, and revivals” omnipresent in the movie, music, and fashion industries. Unlike Farago, Kissick feels less willing to accept a diminished role for art.
When “The Painted Protest” was published in mid-November 2024, shortly after the United States presidential election, everyone had an opinion about it. The piece received recognition for articulating that a cultural moment has passed—the identity politics that predominated as “faith in the liberal order began to fall apart around 2016”—and it received criticism for its tendentiousness and misplaced romanticism. Kissick’s characterizations of 2010s cultural liberalism traffic in straw men and overstatements (art “amplify[ing]” historically marginalized voices “shouldn’t, it seemed, be inventive or interesting”). But his core argument captures how efforts at greater inclusivity in the fine arts shifted, over the past decade or so, from an institutional critique to the institutional norm. He asks, “When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?” And answers that the project of inclusion “has been completed,” even “hollowed out into a trope.”
This passage’s false dichotomy flattens nuances: a voice can be centered by cultural institutions yet remain politically or economically marginalized. But it puts a finger on why the 2020s anti-woke sentiment, though it often lapses into petty grievance, has had counter-hegemonic appeal not just to some arts audiences but also to a segment of the US electorate. These recent tugs-of-war over cultural power, which go back further than Kissick’s article acknowledges, feel fraught not only because social media inflames conflict but also because there’s so little actual power available to most participants, owing to unequally distributed resources.
OVER THE PAST HALF-CENTURY, US neoliberal austerity has exacerbated pressure on artists, curators, and arts writers, making institutional success feel increasingly zero-sum. At the same time that middle class creative and intellectual career paths have grown more precarious, the costs of housing, health care, and college have risen faster than wage growth. The art market, where idealistic press release rhetoric often runs cover for the machinations of extreme wealth, renders these material disparities conspicuous. For artists and culture workers without a financial safety net, these conditions discourage taking aesthetic or personal risks and encourage play-it-safe professionalism.
That’s why, for all its controversy baiting, the most telling section of “The Painted Protest” is a head-scratching paean to mega-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, also known as “Hurricane” HUO. Kissick interned for Obrist in 2008 and fondly recalls the latter’s frenetic lifestyle: “He circumnavigated the world relentlessly, meeting everyone he could and introducing them to one another, in person or over email on his two BlackBerries, insisting on the urgency of their conversation.” Obrist “almost destroyed himself,” concludes Kissick, “as a committed early-twenty-first-century citizen should, in an orgy of connectivity.” This rose-tinted portrayal feels jarring, given the extent to which Kissick romanticizes the transgressive bohemian freedom of a life in the arts. Yet Obrist’s pathological overwork was the prototype for digital hustle culture, for the always-on professionalism that many in the arts today adopt out of financial necessity, a sense of self-importance, or both.
I stopped visiting thrift stores in my 30s, around the same time I started visiting art galleries routinely. In some ways, I substituted one hobby for another; both scratch a similar itch. The lifestyle change was also pragmatic: the more I wrote about art professionally, the less free time I had for other things, and thrifting is an inefficient way to build a wardrobe. In fact, to free up energy in my overscheduled life, I adopted a personal uniform for each season and social or professional occasion. This HUO-style life hack made my days more efficient but also made thrifting for unique items moot.
The physical exhaustion that Obrist normalized laid the groundwork for the aesthetic exhaustion these 2020s critics decry. Culture workers are conditioned to believe they can’t get ahead, so they live frenetically, fueled by the fear that they’re falling behind. There’s more than a little truth to that belief. But it’s worth considering the role that overstimulation and burnout plays in declaring so much work uninspiring. Most arts professionals are overworked and underpaid, and confronted, as on dating apps, with a buffet of cultural options whose sheer quantity dulls the luster of every individual possibility.
In this light, the recent curatorial vogue for artistic folk wisdom looks not just like an effort to center the historically marginalized, but also a longing for “simpler,” less networked, times and places. Nostalgia for one’s youth à la Kissick, or for the great eras in art history à la Farago, might differ in content but not in form. As Kissick puts it: “Everyone, it seems, wants to escape the present. We just long for different pasts.”
I still long to be pleasantly surprised, but it gets harder as you get older. What would surprise me right now are critics who articulate positive visions of the art world they want to see, rather than grouse about what’s dull or different. But those kinds of articles are harder to write, and receive less attention, than sensationalized negativity. Farago and Kissick, in those aforementioned articles, actually do include lists of their contemporary aesthetic pleasures; Tatol, too, consistently reviews exhibitions he loves (though there are fewer of them than ones he hates). The bright spots in these critics’ fields of vision contravene their gloomy theses about art’s exhaustion. Incredible work still happens, about as often as it always has; our jobs and our phones are creating new obstacles, as well as new opportunities, to make and find it.
Since the 1960s, Carl Cheng has sometimes worked under the alias “John Doe Co.,” a sly response to his accountant’s suggestion that his art practice become a business. This coy refusal is perhaps one of several reasons why his ingenious work has yet to receive the art historical recognition it deserves. Another is the way his kinetic, ecologically minded sculptures play with their own impermanence, from machines designed to erode rocks (“Erosion Machines,” 1969–2020) to those that create contoured shapes in the medium of sand (“Santa Monica Art Tool,” 1983–88). Yet another is his extensive work in public art, a genre neglected by critics and museums. Underlying it all is a tinkerer’s DIY ethos, which manifests a refreshing indifference to careerism.
Whatever factors contribute to Cheng’s relative obscurity, his cabinet of curiosities-like retrospective, “Nature Never Loses,” at the Contemporary Austin, can only enhance his reputation as it tours the United States and Europe through 2027, stopping at the Institutes of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, as well the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Netherlands, and the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. The exhibition and its catalog culminate four years’ research by curator Alex Klein, in collaboration with Cheng. This recuperative feat consolidates the 82-year-old artist’s hitherto scattered archive, rendering his eclectic and ephemeral oeuvre easier to apprehend, and showcasing its bricolage charm.
Cheng has an insider’s pedigree and an outsider’s sensibility. While attending UCLA in the mid-1960s, his backgrounds in industrial design and fine art photography led him to create three-dimensional molded plastic photographs. The maudlin objects were included in MoMA’s 1970 group exhibition “Photography into Sculpture,” the first substantial recognition of Cheng’s work, which don’t feel at home in either genre. Their blobby forms depict things such as a nuclear explosion on an empty road (“Nowhere Road,” 1967) or a group of elderly wheelchair users (“V.H.,” 1966) who appear uncomfortable in their own skin.
The artist’s early 1970s travels to India and China clarified his sense of purpose. Cheng was struck at how the public shrines in both countries—elephants, sphinxes, buddhas—were anonymously authored and incorporated into civic life in the utilitarian manner of a park bench or a table. This insight encouraged him to deemphasize the role of authorship in his own practice and design use-value into his array of invented “art tools.” His series of wooden “Art Tool Paint Experiments” (1972), for example, look like crosses between shoeshine kits and sewing machines that, when activated, drag and drip paint onto a support. Cheng considered the machines’ practical functions more important than any incidental sculptural or performative qualities they might possess. This value system, together with the artist’s willingness to surrender to processes of nature or chance, lends his work an endearing humility.
Yet in the gallery, audiences can’t easily experience the art tools in their activated states. Cheng’s ambitious first public artwork, The Natural Museum of Modern Art (1978), makes this discrepancy clear. The self-initiated “museum” was installed in a condemned building on the Santa Monica Pier and contained a large table of sand with a room-size mechanized rake. Boardwalk passersby encountered a coin-operated kiosk containing 10 dioramas made from organic materials; when they inserted a coin into a kiosk slot, the machine activated an organic stylus (such as a seashell or a pelican beak) that made imprints on the sand. The artwork’s conceit and extant artifacts remain inspiring, but museological documentation can’t replicate the strange thrill beachgoers must have experienced in stumbling upon the installation.
A fanciful streak pervades both the methods and outputs in Cheng’s artworks, even the notionally utilitarian ones. The speculative implements comprising his “Emotional Tools” (1966–2024) series adopt semi-recognizable forms, recalling objects from styluses to condoms, without adhering to those forms’ typical functions. His kooky “Avocado Laboratory” (1998–2024)—hundreds of resin-sculpted avocado parts, displayed in a greenhouse—contrasts organic decay with museological fixity. His “Alternative TV” series (1974–2016) situates rock- and plastic plant–filled water tanks inside TV chassis, contravening expectations about home entertainment. His “Emergency Nature Supply Kit/Subway Wormhole Project” (1970/2015) imagines a dystopian sci-fi scenario in which a dose of nature provides respite for its human user, yet the kit contains only artificial grass and a battery-powered speaker playing recorded birdsong.
The retrospective’s title might seem to suggest that humans can’t get the better of nature, though the work itself is irreverent toward any distinction between the two categories. For Cheng, humans and their zany creations are both parts of nature, same as beavers and their dams. His irresistible artworks, which teeter between utility and whimsy, model how our species’ efforts to shape the world to our purposes always contain the seeds of their own undoing. Nature may never lose, and sand drawings may remain lost to art history, but what would it mean to win anyway.
IF YOU ARE A MILLENNIAL AND ART WORLD ADJACENT, chances are you’ve come across the Instagram posts of artists Brad Troemel or Joshua Citarella. Originally famous for artistic gags and trolls, these days, Troemel posts curated selections from TikTok that he appends with ironic captions referencing aspects of contemporary internet culture: hustle porn, new age manifestation, or therapy talk, to name a few. Citarella, meanwhile, posts about his research into niche online political identities, from graphs analyzing where Gen Z falls on the political compass test to his own artworks’ meme-like iconography. Both figures use their social media accounts as portals to Patreon-funded content that takes such forms as videos, podcasts, newsletters, livestreams, and private chat servers, all scrutinizing trends in contemporary art and technology.
Their online presence marks an intriguing shift from post-internet artist to content creator. The two artists were closely associated with the post-internet scene, that notoriously amorphous movement from the 2010s whose predominantly millennial practitioners were “extremely online” at a time before that condition became an epidemic affecting almost all the 40-and-under population. Before finding their focus on Instagram and Patreon, Troemel and Citarella regularly exhibited in brick-and-mortar galleries. For a 2016 New York show at the now defunct gallery Feuer/Mesler, Troemel created sculptures following Pinterest tutorials. For Citarella’s 2015 show at Higher Pictures in New York, he created photographic and sculptural works playing with the dual meaning of rez—gaming slang for “resurrection,” though for most people online, just short for “resolution.” The two also collaborated on projects seeking alternatives to the aesthetic and economic paradigms of the “trad art” gallery realm. Together, they ran the influential Tumblr group called the Jogging, which posted manipulated photographs and memes from 2009 to 2014, and in 2015, started the direct-to-consumer online art store, Ultra Violet Production House.
Since the beginning, the pair has had a somewhat polarizing reputation as artist-provocateurs. When the New Yorker profiled Troemel in 2017, in a piece titled “The Troll of Internet Art,” the artist claimed that the duo’s best-selling item was the NADA Spiders for Change Fund (2016). For every $1 donation, they claimed they would release six poisonous spiders at the 2016 New Art Dealers Alliance Fair. In exchange for receiving photographic proof of a spider found at the fair, they said they’d donate $100 to charity. The work was a frat house prank, presumably unrealized, wrapped in fine art packaging.
“WHERE ARE YOU NOW?” was the title of Orit Gat’s look back at the post-internet movement last year in Frieze. In April, video artist Andrew Norman Wilson gave one answer in the form of an extended personal essay for the Baffler. There, Wilson recounted in unsparing detail his seemingly unending financial precarity, despite his apparent success by traditional art world markers, among them acquisitions and commissions from MoMA, the Getty, and the Centre Pompidou. The story’s particulars are specific to Wilson (a bizarre house-sitting arrangement involving a horny tortoise; chronic, undiagnosed illness) but its general patterns (underpaid gig work; high student loan debt; inadequate health insurance) are all too familiar to Millennials who don’t come from wealth and chose to pursue a creative career at great personal cost.
All post-internet figures have had to adapt, and only some—such as Cory Arcangel, Hito Steyerl, and Simon Denny—remain in the art world. In this magazine last year, Emily Watlington argued that the rise of NFTs and AI caused many in the post-internet movement to abandon digital art and go back to the land. Other post-internet artists pivoted to different cultural pursuits in response to the economic conditions Wilson’s essay details. Amalia Ulman, for example, known for her 2014 Instagram performance art hoax “Excellences & Perfections,” continues to show work in galleries but has also branched out into the film industry. Artie Vierkant, known for his “Image Objects” series in which he printed digital images then fitted them onto 3D sculptures, now cohosts a leftist podcast, Death Panel, and in 2022 coauthored the book Health Communism, published by Verso.
Troemel and Citarella, meanwhile, shifted to content creation (though Citarella continues to exhibit in galleries and museums). Call it the post-post-internet hustle, if the original movement’s name isn’t confusing enough for you. For artists who amassed sizable social media followings in the 2010s, monetizing their practices this way makes sense both as a bulwark against art market vicissitudes and as proof of concept that their practices can operate outside the art world institutions they were bent on critiquing. It also highlights the difficulties of maintaining an anti-capitalist practice in an industry where stable employment and livable wages are scarce.
HOW HAS THIS SHIFT to content creation impacted the work? Troemel’s practice has mellowed with age. His principal output now comprises the aforementioned “reports,” which, when not abridged as social media posts, take the form of 30-plus-minute-long video essays about contemporary arts culture, available to his Patreon subscribers. Wearing a T-shirt and gray Yankees cap, Troemel narrates heavily researched videos on topics such as the culture wars, celebrity art, and AI, while slideshows illustrating his points play onscreen. The tone is equal parts anthropological and bemused, as though Troemel were cataloging online arts discourse so as to marvel at its excesses.
For example, in the Cloutbombing Report (2023), he argues that early 2020s media schadenfreude toward the Dimes Square art scene’s mythos was motivated by “culture industry Millennials [who] were forced, for the first time ever, to confront a scene distinctly younger than themselves.” He calls this confrontation with aging “a wound to the ego everyone is forced to experience,” and adds, as a tweak, “no matter how much they’re babied.” Yet his critique omits the simplest explanation for why Millennials and others remained wary of the Dimes Square scene, which is that they disagree with its post-left politics. Troemel’s digs at what he calls “Millennial cultural liberalism”—2010s efforts toward greater inclusivity on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and disability—are common in his reports. He sides with fellow Dimes Square edgelords in believing that such inclusivity values art solely for its moral instrumentalism, “rather than [to] nudge viewers toward asking their own questions.”
Viewers would do well to ask their own questions about Troemel’s reports. These first drafts of art history, written by a participant-observer, contain useful syntheses of recent zeitgeists. But they can be surprisingly moralistic—calling out call-out culture, in essence—and he often cherry-picks evidence for inflammatory effect. In the Cloutbombing Report, for instance, Troemel decries the “unrealistic behavioral and communicative standards” of online discourse, as a decontextualized July 31, 2023, post from @thefatsextherapist’s 150K-follower Instagram account appears on screen. “Don’t call it feminist art,” reads the post about that summer’s Barbie movie, “if there are no meaningful representations of fat people in the body of the work.” Troemel uses the post to argue that IRL human interactions require conflict negotiation skills that URL ones don’t, but the original post’s comments section shows users exercising precisely those skills, sometimes with considerable nuance. What’s more, a public post that readers can engage with invites more opportunities for negotiation than a private video monologue.
Troemel’s daily compilations of TikToks and memes, which decontextualize user-generated content from niche communities, pair earnest videos about mental health or trauma with overheated cringe, such as a clip of a shirtless male nutrition guru purporting to drink “aged urine” from a mason jar. The absurdist captions are stuffed with buzzwords from the Discourse: “The best healing remedies come from inside your own body; your waste contains everything you need to become your best self.” While it’s unclear what critique, if any, Troemel is making in such moments, his caricatures of the internet’s innumerable micro-trends perpetuate the same engagement bait dynamics as the original content.
Compare Troemel’s treatment of niche online content to Citarella’s 2020 book 20 Interviews, which contains Q+As with members of online political subcultures, a practice Citarella continues to this day on his podcastDo Not Research. The subjects are young adults trying out niche political identities gaining new traction on Instagram, such as anarcho-primitivism, techno-libertarianism, and fully automated luxury communism. While Citarella’s interviews bear similarities to Troemel’s reports in their anthropological curiosity about online behavior, they are more neutral and respectful in tone, even when the subjects’ beliefs conflict with Citarella’s social democratic ideology.
Citarella approached his spoofy-sounding 2021 auto-ethnographic project, “Auto Experiment: Hyper Masculinity,” with similar open-mindedness. The artist undertook a year’s worth of manosphere diet and exercise regimens, from eating raw eggs to weightlifting programs, to see if they would change his left-wing politics. He didn’t become a rugged individualist, but he does continue to lift weights. With newfound common ground, he’s discovered that young men online who were predisposed toward right-wing politics became more willing to listen to his differing views—and in some cases even change their minds. Like Troemel, Citarella believes that in the past decade, too much emphasis has been placed on cultural inclusivity; in his case, on the grounds that it distracts from society’s underlying class inequities. But rather than sneer at caricatures of liberalism, he endeavors to create space for intergenerational leftist solidarity.
Citarella chronicles others’ behaviors so as to open lines of communication between siloed constituencies, whereas Troemel maintains an us-versus-them gadfly mentality whose core ideological commitments remain vague beyond the schadenfreude of mocking his over-earnest foils. Regardless, both men have found that “shitposting doesn’t scale,” as Citarella once put it. The trolling that he and Troemel utilized when younger, among friends and peers, doesn’t translate as their audience grows and their context collapses. The shifts in both artists’ practice—from provoking online arts discourse to chronicling it—are responses to these conditions.
AS THE YOUTHFUL AMATEURISM of online culture has calcified into atomized professionalism, some tech-minded artists have responded by pursuing alternative paradigms to platform capitalism. The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, published in 2024 by Metalabel, a digital space for the cooperative release of creative work, provides a handy introduction to these ideas. The title concept comes from Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler’s May 2019 newsletter and is adapted from Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel, The Dark Forest. Strickler’s basic point is that, as social media and other public online platforms (called “the clearnet”) grew in prominence during the 2010s, many people retreated to private, curated digital enclaves (called “dark forests”) organized around shared interests. If you weren’t already attuned to such communities, the dark forest concept likely flew under your radar.
This Anthology should help change that. It presents a genealogy of ideas responding to Strickler’s initial essay, from writer and consultant Venkatesh Rao’s May 2019 concept of the “cozyweb,” to designers Arthur Roing Baer and GVN908’s February 2021 explanation of modular “moving castles.” Contributions from visual arts–oriented content creators include two essays from New Models (Caroline Busta and Lil Internet) and one from Do Not Research (Joshua Citarella). Cumulatively, the book makes the case that niche digital communities not only provide bastions of “safety, meaning, and context” within today’s adversarial clearnet but may also form the basis for tomorrow’s social and professional institutions.
These counterinstitutions are emerging both from financial necessity and from fatigue with the polarization of online discourse during the Trump presidency and Covid years. Subscribers pay for access to both content and community, as exchanges on dark forest platforms experience less context collapse—less bad faith antagonism—than exchanges on clearnet platforms. But curiously, these concerns with safety and visibility motivating dark forest withdrawals from the public fray echo liberal language concerning the safety and visibility of people with historically marginalized identities. This parallel is at odds with the reservations expressed by many dark forest community leaders, like Troemel and Citarella, who both operate communities through Patreon about 2010s-style identity politics.
This tension says something about where Millennials are now, in the arts and beyond. After a decade and a half of unprecedented access to everybody else’s takes—or at least the performative versions of those takes—it’s become easy to find your digital people, but hard to feel like you can be left in peace with them. The clearnet attention economy’s context collapse makes even historically centered individuals feel overexposed. You can retreat into a like-minded enclave, and participate in the group’s flourishing or ressentiment, but a big part of doing art and politics, and many things in between, involves sharing its fruits with strangers. For that, you need to open lines of communication and build a culture, maybe even an economy, that others like you, as well as others different from you, also want to see.
Michelle Segre’s offbeat sculptures made from yarn and wire borrow from a range of artistic and cultural forms that coalesce in singular works. The eponymous centerpiece of her recent exhibition, “The Enfolding,” is a large ovoid textile knit from black and blue yarns and finished with a lion’s mane of fringe (all works 2022). In its center hangs an abstract painting done on cheesecloth, with a soiled yellow background and splotches of red and blue. The entirety is suspended via four loosely knit appendagelike forms pinioned to the gallery’s walls and ceiling. Spanning more than 10 feet in height and length, the sculpture, in its materials and construction, conjures a plethora of associations—from dreamcatchers to psychedelia, black holes to starfish, Senga Nengudi to Isamu Noguchi—without resembling any one in too literal a fashion.
Related Articles
The show’s title alludes to science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 2005 novel Amnesty, in which “Communities” of plantlike alien organisms “enfold” living human bodies in their midst: “Being enveloped by a Community,” explains the book’s narrator, “is like being held in a sort of … comfortable strait jacket, if you can imagine such a thing.” The passage suggests how viewers might experience The Enfolding and, especially, the caught-in-a-spider’s-web tangles of the exhibition’s two small freestanding sculptures, Social Space and another untitled. The former features a paper wasp nest hanging amid a cat’s cradle constellation of midnight-blue yarn, while the latter contains snarls of metal, wire, and thread, as well as natural and synthetic objects (beeswax, a reishi mushroom, clothespins), dangling within the hollow of an arched support.
Yet the composition of The Enfolding doesn’t convey as strong a sense of envelopment as the smaller sculptures. The tautness of its stretched appendages may evoke the straitjacketed sensation Amnesty’s narrator describes, but the colorful painting at its center suggests a cosmic portal more than the lumpy, cocooned forms suspended within the others. Far from a shortcoming, this minor disconnect between artwork and idea typifies Segre’s loosey-goosey approach to conceptualization across her oeuvre. The idea of enfolding functions here as a jumping-off point for artistic creation rather than a schematic for audience interpretation. This open-ended quality of Segre’s practice bestows a titillating sense of permissiveness to the viewer’s experience. Meaning feels up for grabs, ambiguous, a surprise that’s almost, but not quite, within reach.
One such surprise awaits in the adjoining back gallery space, which contains a sepia photograph of an owl, Boswell (1969), taken by 19th-century businessman Morgan Bulkeley III, along with a hallucinatory 15-minute video, The Owl. The video features long takes of an owl perched on a tree branch, as well as spiraling drone footage of two people holding one of Segre’s yarn sculptures in a forest clearing, tilting it toward the sky as though performing an occult ritual. Throughout, the bright, impressionistic color schemes shift and change as though a restless teenager were fiddling with her phone’s camera filters. The work’s materialist sensibility—with visual effects akin to those of Stan Brakhage’s colorist film experiments—shows Segre applying her eccentric formalism to the medium in ways both familiar and novel. The beguiling result makes plain the joy of sitting back and letting the artist’s poetic flights take you wherever they’re going.
Across Zoe Leonard’s wall-size grid of 34 photographs, “From the Los Ebanos Crossing” (2019/2021), a helicopter plays peekaboo with the viewer, changing positions as seen from slightly different ground-level vantage points. The grainy, black-and-white gelatin silver prints depict the chopper circling above, and occasionally disappearing behind, a nondescript tree line. For the most part, though, the empty sky dominates the image, while the aircraft remains distant and mysterious. Given the project’s subject—the Río Bravo / Rio Grande where it demarcates the Mexico-US border—one might assume the copter is engaged in surveillance. But these scenes from the artist’s most recent project, “Al Río / To the River” (2016–22), are cryptic when it comes to interpretive clues.
Hauser & Wirth’s concise presentation of Leonard’s ambitious project does a lot with what seems like a little. From the Middle of the Bridge (2017/2022) shows a broom and dustpan leaning on a bridge’s concrete barrier below a plaque, created by the International Boundary and Water Commission, that designates the Mexico-US divide. A suite of five images, “From Casa de Adobe, Ciudad Juárez” (2018/2022), depicts families frolicking in the river in the shadow of an arid mountain range. Another five-image suite, this one untitled (2020/2022), traces a flock of birds taking flight from waterlogged farmland. The solo shot From the Puente el Porvenir (2019/2022) centers on a lone tree separated from nearby buildings by the prisonlike bars of President Trump’s infamous border wall. Though some of the works’ titles specify geographic locations, the images themselves call attention to the topographical indistinguishability of the border’s two sides and the arbitrariness of human territorial claims more generally.
The ruminative “Al Río” landscapes prove a welcome counterweight to sensationalist portrayals of the southern border. In particular, the scarcity of people feels conspicuous. Whereas US media images fixate, with muckraking pathos, on throngs of migrants, Leonard zooms out and situates her few human subjects as just some of many elements in the landscape, no more important or remarkable than the animals that dot some of the series’ other vistas. The human species makes itself known here predominantly through its material traces: architecture and engineering projects that appear alien to their desert environs; stray bits of trash beside the road; tire tracks left in the dirt. This interplay between presence and absence recalls the unpeopled landscapes of Dawoud Bey’s “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2017), a fictive reimagining of Underground Railroad sites, in that both series achieve narrative poignance, with conceptual economy, through compositional innuendo.
Leonard’s project also achieves this effect through her signature use of iterative display. “You see I am here after all” (2008), an earlier project not in this show, features 4,000 vintage postcards of Niagara Falls mounted on the gallery walls in gridded clusters by vantage point. The smaller image arrangements of “Al Río” have a more chronological bent, documentary vibe, and minimalist sensibility. Their dramatic sequences register, given the vast setting, as blips in geological time. Leonard’s aesthetic restraint, her willingness to stand back and simply frame the environment, demonstrates quiet confidence in her artistic abilities. It also evidences her caution regarding the all-too-human political complexities our species imposes on one river in the Southwest.
Piero Gilardi’s signature “nature carpets” don’t appear credibly natural or carpet-like, which is part of their quirky charm. The artworks are sizable rectangles of polyurethane foam, into which the artist has carved intricate, earthy tableaux before saturating them with synthetic pigments, and sometimes appending other, smaller foam sculptures. The works depict contoured segments of land or, in a few cases, sea: a beach strewn with driftwood and lily pads; a mossy forest trail marked by felled tree branches; roiling ocean water with seagulls flying close to the surface. In “Tappeto-Natura” at Magazzino Italian Art, the artist’s first museum exhibition in the United States, curated by Elena Re, the twenty-five selections turn the gallery floor and walls into a cornucopia of tiled terrain.
Take Sassi (Rocks, 1967), an approximately five-foot-square nature carpet whose bumpy surface was sculpted to appear as though covered in stones. Each of its hundreds of stones is rendered in realistic detail, with pocked and craggy textures, and blotchy coloration. Yet the piece as a whole creates the impression of artifice, given the abrupt contrast between its borders and the surrounding floor. It’s as though the artwork were an excerpt or quote from nature, a peculiar cross between a fabric swatch at a furniture store and a diorama at a natural history museum.
Piero Gilardi, Papaya e pitaja, 2018, polyurethane foam, 59 by 59 by 5⅞ inches.
Piero Gilardi, Mais, 1966, polyurethane foam, 59 by 59 inches.
Whereas Sassi’s fake stones appear credible, most of Gilardi’s nature carpets contain fanciful touches. Mais (Corn, 1966) depicts dozens of cartoonishly angular corn cobs, all in carrot orange, alongside a crude wooden rake. Papaya e pitaja (Papaya and Pitaya, 2018) centers around a papaya tree whose shrunken proportions, splayed fruit growth, and spread across the floor (rather than upright) are unnatural. The composition, warped to fit the nature carpet format, eschews the pretense of verisimilitude. This tendency is most pronounced in the nature carpets fabricated between 2018 and 2020, which are grouped together on one wall at Magazzino and whose bright, tropical environs celebrate their own artifice more than their predecessors. The decision to display these works on the wall may seem strange but isn’t new: not long after Gilardi began to make nature carpets in the 1960s, they became collector’s items too precious to subject to the wear and tear of an actual carpet.
Gilardi intended the nature carpets to be usable interior design pieces that he believed could break down barriers between art and life. This gesture can be understood as a precursor to immersive and relational aesthetics, influenced by the artist’s ties to the incipient Arte Povera movement. Gilardi’s decision to work with polyurethane—a synthetic that became commercially available in the 1950s, and used in such things as sofas and car seats—likewise embraces the movement’s preoccupation with quotidian materials that complicate the nature-culture binary. Many of the nature carpets were originally rolled up on large spools and sold by the yard, like industrial goods: one example, Terreno di montagna (Mountain Terrain, 1966), stretches across Magazzino’s floor like a stuck-out tongue.
Piero Gilardi, Terreno di montagna 1967, polyurethane foam, 39⅜ by 157½ by 5⅞ inches; at Magazzino Italian Art.
Though the nature carpets garnered considerable, immediate recognition, Gilardi’s aesthetic and political concerns with anti-capitalist collectivity led him to withdraw from mainstream art-making by the early 1970s. During the next decade, he directed his energies toward writing and a wide range of artistically inflected civic activism, from street theater to art therapy for psychiatric patients to factory demonstrations and nuclear protests in Italy to community outreach programs in Africa and the Americas. When Gilardi resumed more institutionally recognizable art practices in the early 1980s, he pursued interactive new media initiatives such as the unrealized Ixiana Project, a plan for an immersive artistic-technological environment in Paris’s Parc de la Villette. In the 2000s, these efforts culminated in Turin’s Parco Arte Vivente, or Living Art Park, a collaborative open-air exhibition site initiated by Gilardi, whose grassy central knoll—a compound containing a museum and laboratory focused on bio art—looks like an earthwork nestled in an urban neighborhood.
One question the exhibition might prompt is why Gilardi intermittently resumed making new nature carpets throughout his career, given his environmentalist leanings. The reprises feel aesthetically redundant and materially wasteful. Yet in interviews, Gilardi has been refreshingly honest about how periodically producing new nature carpets has enabled him to finance the more idealistic aspects of his practice. The shifts in the carpets’ appearance and usage—from low-key to over-the-top artifice; from utilitarian to decorative objects—make the most sense when understood in the context of the artist’s career.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that the nature carpets were Gilardi’s probing first steps toward a more expansive vision of what art can be and do. The paradox is that, in a career dedicated to moving beyond visual art’s conventional values and uses, the carpets bear the closest resemblance to traditional artistic output, and thus more readily lend themselves to museum display than the less object-focused aspects of his practice. This makes the exhibition an effective, if necessarily partial, introduction to an underappreciated artist: an incitement for visitors to see and learn more about an oeuvre whose ambitions are starry-eyed even as its politics remain down-to-earth.
The renovation underway at Ulterior’s new, roomier gallery—on Broadway, half a block north of Canal—is also an artwork. In the middle of the space, artist Sam Spillman has built additional walls to create a freestanding 7-by-12-by-7½-foot room whose two interior chambers are identically sized. In addition to fabricating this structure, Spillman has been refurbishing the surrounding gallery in three phases, transforming the former apartment into a space more suited to exhibiting art. Now, numerous white walls and doorways partition off the main gallery, an office-space-cum-auxiliary-gallery, and a storage area. When completed, the main alterations, minus the central addition, will become permanent features.
The squat, rough-hewn structure, loosely resembling a mausoleum, makes for a mysterious focal point during the gallery’s transition. Its two shadowy, half-open doorways—which visitors are not permitted to enter—reveal glimpses of identical bedrooms, each with the exact same items (nightstand, mirror, bed, sleeping bag, pair of men’s dress shoes, floor lamp) in mirrored positions. Wood paneling and dark, hotel-style patterned carpeting make the quarters feel that much stranger, as though they were a set in a David Lynch film, or a shrunken version of the former living quarters. Piped in from the ceiling, a barely audible soundtrack, in which two voices whisper conspiratorially, adds to the beguiling atmosphere.
View of “In Case of Sam Spillman,” 2022, at Ulterior.
Though the rooms’ contents are fictional composites drawn from Spillman’s childhood memories of living in nearby Tribeca, they’re far from homey. Instead, they evoke a sense of claustrophobia characteristic of the artist’s other DIY architectural interventions, from an underground hallway built into a locker door (under, in-between, 2018) to an abandoned summer camp bunkhouse reassembled, with its roof inverted and floor incomplete, on the site of a manmade pond (Bad Mouth, 2021). This structure’s cramped interiors contrast with the spaciousness of the surrounding gallery, which during phase one was empty save for a staticky flat-screen monitor situated, unexplained, face up on the floor.
While the meaning of such details is elusive, visitors to the exhibition, titled “In Case of Sam Spillman,” don’t particularly need or want explanations, in part because the installation’s evolving architectural elements are so materially compelling. The central structure’s walls are layered with textured fabric and acrylic paint, resulting in skin-like, scabby textures. The spatial dynamics nod to the closet-like feel of Ulterior’s previous home on Attorney Street, on the Lower East Side. Similarly, the two-birds-with-one-stone conceit of turning the new location’s renovation into its inaugural exhibition testifies to the resourcefulness required of small and midsize galleries to survive in an industry dominated by wealthy apex predators.
For a gallery to ask an artist to execute this manual labor could potentially have been exploitative; and for an artist to agree to this conceit could have seemed merely performative. But both parties here approached the project with thoughtfulness and integrity, from the compensation agreement to the collaborative decisions regarding the renovation’s details. Spillman studied architecture and worked in carpentry and construction before he switched to art, spending more than five years as cofounder of BUILDlab LLC, a green building and design firm currently based in Dryden, New York. His art practice draws on that technical knowledge and takes inspiration from his early childhood memories of distinctive architecture, from the industrial streetscapes of 1980s SoHo and Tribeca to the dilapidated nooks and crannies of the former blacksmith shop in Brooklyn where his family subsequently moved.
Knowing Spillman’s background helps make sense of the exhibition’s title, which seems oddly focused on the artist for an installation so specific to the gallery. But Spillman’s story and skill set makes the whole conceit possible. The contents of “In Case of Sam Spillman” might seem a commentary on the tradition of artistic interventions addressing the supposed neutrality of the white cube, from Marcel Duchamp’s spidery twine to Michael Asher’s drywall studs. Yet its context makes clear that the exhibition also addresses the art industry’s role in the recent transformation of Tribeca into a gallery neighborhood, and similar transformations in other New York neighborhoods across generations. Spillman’s work is a case study in how it looks and feels to be acted upon by history as, in your own small way, you act upon it in return.
A fuzzy green carpet of radish sprouts covers large expanses of the gallery floor in Mimi Park’s exhibition “Dawning: dust, seeds, Coplees,” at Lubov in New York. Planted as seeds in recycled paper during the show’s installation in February, the sprouts appear lush in some places and bedraggled in others. The seedlings’ pulpy white substrate lend the whole arrangement, enthusiastically titled Play Humming Planting (all works 2022), a craft-like feel, as though it were a scale model of parkland. Inside and around it are congeries of homespun, sometimes zoomorphic, sometimes kinetic sculptures: a creature whose body is a bowl filled with water, with feet made of circuit boards affixed to toilet scrubbers (Bristle Bot); a tall plastic rod adorned with a hand-knit sweater and topped with a baseball, evoking a torso and a head (Long Person); a group of tiny insectile widgets whose bodies are fabricated from toothbrush heads, pipe cleaners, and motors, the last of which cause the sculptures to skitter across the floor like warming popcorn kernels (Coplee Swarm).
These varied, irresistible droids are the exhibition’s titular Coplees: unexplained fictional beings that populate Park’s wide-eyed artistic world. Though not alive like the radish sprouts, the whimsical sculptures animate the exhibition; yet for all their playful charm, the Coplees exist in a curious state of disrepair. Their repurposed materials, as well as their DIY construction, lend them a provisional, threadbare feel. Their circuitry is exposed, from the coverless battery packs strapped on their bodies to the skeins of wire connecting them to wall outlets. Indeed, among the dozen or so kinetic sculptures, dysfunction turns out to be the rule as much as the exception: when I visited the show, half the creations were temporarily out of commission. The most prominent functioning one, Duet Dance—in which vibrations picked up by a microphone cause a small motor to clatter inside a plastic goblet, as a headless toy robot sways atop a shared platform—regularly emitted a tinny death rattle.
Mimi Park, Studio Room, 2022, dimensions and materials variable.
The installation’s malfunctions, as well as its maintenance, are part of Park’s master plan. In an adjacent room, she installed the remarkable Studio Room, an array of materials and tools laid out on the floor, quasi-taxonomically, in a manner that recalls the ready-at-hand way unlicensed street vendors display goods on the sidewalk, as well as the tradition of artists, such as Gala Porras-Kim, riffing on the conventions of museological display. The items encompass everything from glue guns to tweezers, yarn balls to battery chargers, and their layout on the floor is consistent with how Park organizes supplies in her actual studio. Throughout the exhibition’s run, the artist has visited regularly to patch up the main installation—fixing mechanical breakdowns, mending rips and tears—using the auxiliary installation as her toolkit. This reparative bent makes her scrappy artistic world feel all the more poignant.
Park’s dual roles as the installation’s demiurge and maintenance staff encapsulates the work’s humility. Dawning operates primarily at knee height or below, which, from another artist, might have conveyed deific omnipotence, as if the Coplees and their environment were mere playthings, but from Park conveys a down-to-earth outlook. Unlike so many other artists engaged in world-building projects, she makes no lofty claims for the endeavor’s importance, only shoestring affirmations of tenderness and care. Park’s background in expressive arts therapy (since 2020, she has led workshops under the auspices of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the largest LGBTQ youth service agency in the United States) no doubt informs her sense of compassion. It also helps account for the disquieting gravity of such a fanciful-seeming installation. Everything it contains is in the process of coming apart or being put back together, such that, as in the real world, it is hard to tell which parts are in what state.