For more than a decade, artist Hito Steyerl has been writing—in biting, playful prose—about how images, technology, and politics are all interlinked. Her newest book on the subject, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, out from Verso, throws her consistent through lines into relief, and brings forward inconsistencies in her thinking too.

Steyerl’s first book, The Wretched of the Screen (2013), was perhaps her most rousing. “Free Fall,” a standout essay therein, interrogates the European construction of linear perspective as a means for “enabling Western dominance,” then pivots to the increasing ubiquity of aerial perspective—a militaristic, surveilling way of seeing that “projects delusions of stability, safety, and extreme mastery.” Another essay, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” urges artists to examine the exploitative politics of the art world itself, such as its reliance on under- or unpaid labor.

The artist takes to related topics in her visual work too, sometimes treating the material with an unnerving absurdity. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), one of her best-known works, navigates the question of invisibility in an increasingly surveilled world by satirizing the form of instructional video. Steyerl, the video’s protagonist, offers absurd suggestions for avoiding surveillance. Smearing chroma-key green makeup on her face, she “disappears” into the background; she also archly suggests being smaller than a pixel, being a woman over 50, and being a disappeared person as an enemy of the state. This jarring tonal contrast is emblematic of her work, the dissonance buffered by her focus on larger systems rather than specific scenarios.

Steyerl’s second book, Duty Free Art (2017), continues her project of highlighting how capital, exploitation, and art are intertwined, though it takes on a broader constellation of phenomena, including romance scams, freeport art storage, and the rise of fascism. Yet where in Wretched, the reader felt the keen glare of Steyerl’s concentration, in some of Duty Free Art’s essays, it’s hard to tell what’s fact or fiction, or just how serious Steyerl is about it all: As her international fame has risen, Steyerl has presented herself alternately as gadfly, critic, oracle of surfaces, and politically engaged artist. The opening anecdote in her 2014 essay “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise”—about smartphone cameras using algorithms and scans from a user’s camera roll to “create” images—sounds fantastically interesting, jaw-dropping if true. But Steyerl’s description of the technology proves far more fanciful than the paper she cites.

These fabulations, paired with Steyerl’s gliding, affectless authorial voice, contribute to a sense of disorientation. Nevertheless, Steyerl topped ArtReview’s 2017 Power List as the most influential person in the art world for her “political statement-making and formal experimentation.” Her best work merges these aspects: Any viewer of How Not to Be Seen will surely consider their vulnerability to surveillance, and feel the futility of escape. In a 2023 interview, journalist Philip Oltermann asked her if she “saw art as a way to point a finger at social injustices, to educate people?” Steyerl replied with a decisive no, saying “it would be pointless if art worked like that. If you want to make a difference with art, which is a motive I perceive as questionable, then the single most stupid approach would be to tell people off.”

IN HER LATEST BOOK, Steyerl returns to her familiar territory of war and violent conflict, updated for the era of Web3, and this time she expresses her stance more decisively and simply than ever before. Steyerl herself has relied on AI before, using it to generate animations and graphics; her deep interest in—and intimate familiarity with—new technologies is part of what allows her to see their potential for exploitation. In Medium Hot, she comes down hard on the so-called promise of generative AI, cryptocurrency, and the AI-fueled accelerationist fantasies of Big Tech investors. It’s exciting to see Steyerl take such a definitive position; yet in doing so, the book exposes a core inconsistency of her practice, a puzzling political lacuna.

Steyerl’s primary critique is that the industry surrounding AI and Web3 uses enormous amounts of energy and is wildly exploitative not only of the environment, but of human “micro-workers,” remote laborers paid not in wages but in tiny gamified increments, dependent on completed tasks. Crypto mining has thrived on the edge of conflict zones—as it did in Kosovo until it was banned in 2022—where political instability combined with formerly socialist infrastructure contributed to cheap energy that could immediately be put into mining. All this energy must come from somewhere: Earth itself pays the cost.

The cheap labor essential to “artificial intelligence” feeds on the exploitative conditions generated by political and economic instability. Steyerl highlights the example of Kurdish women workers in northern Iraq, who are hired to do ghost work tagging images for self-driving cars. Women often take these jobs because the work can be done from home; for some of them, home is a refugee camp where they have lived for 10 years. The irony, Steyerl points out, is that “self-driving cars were being trained by people who, in many cases, had difficulties accessing affordable transport anywhere—let alone enjoying freedom of movement across borders.”

These critiques aren’t necessarily new, but they are urgent; many opponents of AI—or rather, of its unrestricted and irresponsible use—have cited its exploitation of microworkers and its environmental harm. Steyerl makes a more novel, if subtler point when she describes how crypto art is responsible for “onboarding” people to Web3, its infrastructure “creating a new stage of financialization defined by massive waste of energy and an enormous carbon footprint.”

The NFT bubble has popped, of course. But many people have bought into this new technological environment, with crypto wallets and ChatGPT on their phones. The end result, Steyerl speculates, probably won’t be the singularity, but something much less interesting: newer and more invasive ways of getting ripped off by tech companies. For now, many AI services—Google search summaries, ChatGPT—are free. But what will happen when users become dependent on them? They’ll likely charge for subscriptions, scraping consumers’ data only to sell it back to them.
All, of course, as the world burns.

The rapid rollout of various generative AI apps—like DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Sora—has been accompanied by a hype cycle of publicity. Artists, of course, know that generative AI isn’t worth the hype: The images these tools create are universally shitty slop, scraped together from previously existing internet detritus. Yet, Steyerl argues, the breathless publicity around generative AI and its so-called creative applications masks its true, and perhaps only, utility: as a tool of dominance and warfare. Autonomous weapons and AI-driven targeting have been part of the global war playbook since at least 2021, with both Ukraine and Gaza becoming, she writes, “laboratories for testing AI warfare, very often by Western arms makers looking for a robust and regulation-free R&D environment.”

AS IN NEARLY ALL Steyerl’s work, Medium Hot is concerned with what happens in conflict regions. The book cites interviews with Kurdish workers in refugee camps, as well as conversations with recent immigrants to Germany; she mentions both the wars happening in Gaza and Ukraine. Yet, for a writer so interested in the systemic causes of exploitation and suffering, she refrains here from expressing a stance on any given global conflict, an omission that creates a strange lacuna—a kind of weightlessness that destabilizes the text.

Calling wars and genocides “conflicts”—a word that appears 21 times in the book—makes it easier to talk about their roles in systems, but it also has an alienating effect. Shouldn’t one care about the causes and conditions of those conflicts? They are not inexorable acts of machinery, their conclusions already forgone.

Perhaps Steyerl’s avoidance of taking sides originates from a formative experience. Two decades ago, she made a short documentary titled November (2004) that features clips from a shoot-’em-up Western film Steyerl made with her close friend, Andrea Wolf, when they were both 17. Only the men, the bad guys, draw weapons in the film; the women fight with their bare hands. These clips of fake violence are juxtaposed against found footage: In the 1990s, Wolf went underground to join the Kurdish Worker’s Party, or PKK. She was killed in 1998, possibly executed by the Turkish government. Wolf was made a martyr; November includes footage of protesters on the street carrying posters depicting her face.

The film, like the rest of Steyerl’s work, avoids neat narrative, yet it is profoundly about disillusionment—with armed resistance, with the hero’s righteous violence. The revolutionary desire that led Wolf to join
the PKK ended with her lying dead on a dusty road, though according to the German government, she is not dead—but merely disappeared. Steyerl acknowledges Germany’s support of the Turkish army; in her narration, she also notes that the PKK itself has committed violent crimes, including killing civilians. Clips show pro-Kurdish protests in Germany, one scene featuring a man declaring via microphone: “It is German tanks that are bulldozing Kurdish villages.”

In 2019 Steyerl protested in solidarity with Kurdish liberation, staging a performance, Women for Rojava, with three other artists. She called for Germany to stop show-ing her work “as part of its external cultural diplomacy,” continuing, “I am sick of my work being deployed to detract attention from the German state’s tacit agreement with displacement, ethnic cleansing, and warfare, and to lend it an aura of tolerance and inclusivity.” It’s impossible not to draw parallels between then and now, as US-made and German arms rain down on Palestinian refugee camps.

But Steyerl doesn’t. Though she has consistently—if with some affective distance—positioned herself as a champion of class solidarity and of the oppressed and exploited, she spoke scathingly last spring of pro-Palestinian activists who have been critical of Israel, whom she accused of enlisting “art as social media performance.” She has also critiqued the “English-language academic bubble” for, in her eyes, failing to fully comprehend Germany’s history and its commitment to defend against what it perceives to be anti-Semitism. Is Steyerl’s curious lacuna, as the deep ambivalence of November may indicate, a somewhat stifled call for nonviolence? Is it an act of self-preservation amid an increasingly bitter divide in the German art world? Or is it a stance of neutrality

Neutrality, after all, pervades Medium Hot, which, as its title suggests, frequently returns to the imagery of heat. There’s the effect of AI’s energy use on the climate, with Steyerl’s concern for the planet thrumming behind the text. It addresses as well the output of generative AI through temperature, describing how the process of statistical image rendering sees a clear image as “cool,” while adding noise creates “heat.” A new image is created by removing that noise, and therefore, Steyerl argues, these images have nothing at all to do with what is indexically “seen” by an eye, but rather what the AI model detects as hot and cold. In other words, these images are a “medium hot.” According to the laws of thermodynamics, energy is only possible when there exist regions of both hot and cold. The heat death of the universe thus occurs when neutrality has been achieved—when all temperatures are the same: when zones cannot be differentiated.

Near the end of the book, Steyerl references Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment from the early days of AI speculation. The question posed is: If you knew a superintelligent AI would eventually dominate the earth, would you support it now, or wait until you had no choice? But Steyerl knows the question is wrong, because it supposes too narrow, too dismal a future. “Maybe the thing that really exists in the future is not an autocratic, bullying basilisk but a commune or cooperative of red hackers who have finally realized a sustainable and fair economy,” Steyerl writes. “One might be bullied and threatened … but if anyone tells you that you have no choice, then you should say no.” If only she would.  

When terrible things happen in the world and people suffer, by what means is one moved to act? And in whose interest? Do we respond by what tugs most effectively at our hearts—and if so, should we not be suspicious of where our sympathies lie?

Imperfect Solidarities, an essay-length book by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza, puts forth an argument interrogating why we are moved to act in solidarity with others. Sparked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the surrounding social media commentary on all sides, D’Souza identifies the persistent—and misguided—belief in  empathy as key to political action in our neoliberal era. Empathy, she argues, values the emotional, atomized response of the individual witness over the systemic violence faced by the oppressed.

Empathy is a beguiling, buzzy term. Generally, and as D’Souza uses it here, it refers to this idea that we might understand the feelings of others—and perhaps even feel their emotions as our own. As embraced by pop-psychology and corporations alike, empathy is thought to promise a multitude of rewards: workplace advantages, strengthened relationships, and perhaps most enticingly, unity across difference. Moving the hearts of a compassionate public—the hearts of the hegemony, in other words—empathy, like its close correlate, love, is often positioned as the foremost force of revolutions.

D’Souza is wary of empathy as a political tool: too close to the ego, too satisfied by our own satisfaction, it prevents us from doing the difficult work of appreciating difference and challenge. In Imperfect Solidarities, D’Souza argues instead for a politics based in care. (One might also use the unglamorous term “duty,” though it does not appear in her book.) She writes: “I dream of a world in which we act not from a love of our fellow humans (and, for that matter, nonhumans), but from something much more difficult: an obligation to care for each other whether or not we empathize with them.” What would a political solidarity uninformed by understanding or agreement, and instead framed around a bare minimum of respect for life and dignity, look like?

D’Souza is first and foremost a critic, a writer deeply engaged with the visual arts. Her practice observes how contemporary art’s viewership, curation, and institutional housing—or lack thereof—intersect to provide a portrait of our times. Her book Whitewalling, published in 2018 by Badlands Unlimited, explored the relationship between art, race, and protest through three “acts,” or case studies: Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Whitney Biennial; a 1979 show at The Artist’s Space titled with a racial slur; and a 1969 show at the Met titled “Harlem on My Mind,” which featured no Black artists.

Imperfect Solidarities offers new modes of thinking—and methods for solidarity—through the lens of contemporary art. The work of engaging with art, particularly that which does not cater to easy narratives, with its lack of straightforward metaphor, its glancing, sideways purview, can ask us to think in more slippery, radical, connective ways. The book’s premise prepares the reader for the author’s excellent, incisive commentary, which—sardonic at times, earnest at others—encourages us to think wider, allusively, imaginatively, over borders and boundaries.

D’Souza divides the book into four chapters, each hinging on a key concept. Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies (2008) is enlisted to discuss the merits of mis- and un-translation. Candice Breitz’s 2016 installation Love Story, which sets the performances of Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore opposite the real-life stories from six asylum seekers from which the actors’ monologues are drawn, invites an exploration of how empathy is often angled toward white viewers. And in a useful turn toward the curatorial, the 1980 A.I.R. show, “Dialectics of Isolation,” curated by Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina Hashmi, evokes, along with its critical reception, a discussion of intersectionality and organizing across difference.

The book’s third chapter, “Connecting through Opacity,” is perhaps its most compelling: drawing upon the theorist Edouard Glissant’s writing on the sovereign subject’s “right to opacity,” D’Souza argues for the need to respect what in the other cannot be translated, spoken, or understood. What would it be like to not understand—and extend our hands in solidarity regardless? What would it be like to think of knowledge as no longer an extractive act, but a mutually respectful exchange, minimal as that exchange might be? Here, D’Souza references the artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Stephanie Syjuco as examples of artists interested in opacity. Syjuco’s photographic intervention upon archival photographs of Filipino “villagers” relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, to be exhibited in the 1904 World’s Fair, is particularly poignant. Syjuco’s hands, alive against the black and white archive, protect the faces of the photographed subjects, restoring their dignity, their private selves; the gesture reads simultaneously as a shield and a caress.

In its concision and power—nearly every sentence is a banger; whole swathes of the introduction in particular are eminently quotable—Imperfect Solidarities is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, which deals with similar questions, and was itself a response to Virginia Woolf’s anti-war pamphlet Three Guineas. Where D’Souza’s text provides a valuable addition to this canon is her specific perspective: critical of the white hegemony, and writing toward a different—and more diverse—audience than Woolf or Sontag were. D’Souza’s politics, rather than argue for what ought to be commonly held rights, take the dismantling of white supremacy and systems of oppression as their baseline.

The argument D’Souza proposes is stubbornly tautological: We must care for living beings because they are alive; we must care for this planet because it is our home. This care is stolid, unsexy, and unrewarding. Imperfect Solidarities does not necessarily imagine what is to come, but instead advocates for a means of relating that might prove flexible enough to withstand all events and consequences. Perhaps one way forward is to reject the calls from our egos, the parts of us that are most swayed and moved by ease and familiarity, in order to reject any system, however temporarily comfortably it may keep us, that does not allow for the flourishing of every living being.

The trouble with [AR]T—an augmented reality initiative produced by Apple in collaboration with the New Museum—began when I tried to get tickets. Because it was framed as a free public art experience, I thought that the [AR]T Walk would be easily accessible, like a drop-in guided tour at a museum. But Apple’s home page offered no information about the collaboration, and the project was eight slides deep in the New Museum’s front-page carousel. By the time I found the registration page in the bowels of Apple’s website, all tour slots leaving from the Fifth Avenue Apple store in New York were booked a month out. No matter: press access! But it does matter. As of this writing, all New York tours are full—likewise the Hong Kong, London, Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo ones—giving the international event the same veneer of exclusivity as a sneaker drop. Yet the project isn’t supposed to be exclusive, nor should it. “We hope attendees are inspired by the incredible AR creations in the [AR]T Walk and in-store installation, and we can’t wait to see what our visitors learn to create in the [AR]T Lab,” a press release says. If the point is really to inspire and increase access to new forms of creativity—albeit proprietary ones—it seems like a sold-out schedule should have led to more tours.

The sign-ups are necessary because the walk requires wireless headphones and iPhones provided by the store, as the augmented reality software used for the experience runs on a different operating system than the one currently available to the public. Tours are led by two employees of Today at Apple, the brand’s creative workshop arm. They cheerfully instruct visitors on how to “anchor” their phone cameras to geographic landmarks, much like one would focus on an object in an image. This provides visual data about the surroundings that allow the augmented reality layer to “lock” in place. Each art piece, tied to various locations in Central Park, is “activated” by a guide and lasts a few minutes. The walk is part tour, part tech demo, part art-appreciation seminar. At the end of each augmented reality vignette, the guides read from a slide deck of boilerplate facts about the artist and ask the visitors a series of questions to spark discussion.

A sample questions: “What kind of animal did you think that was?” It was asked in reference to Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s piece, the most successful of the six AR vignettes. Speech bubbles appear on-screen, ramping up the suspense, as they lead the reader toward an innocuous-looking tree. Locking onto the tree reveals an AR-generated hollow in the wood, where a tiny, genuinely touching scene plays out. The text of a poetic, nostalgic meditation on the enduring nature of selfhood appears in the speech bubbles, while a wolflike creature terrorizes a man in a bed to Berg’s soundtrack. The handheld scale of the animation makes it poignant—you lean in to look more closely. The two characters circle, race, and leap, contained in a hollow the size of an acorn.

The other [AR]T pieces are less successful precisely because of scale. Phone screens are small and reflective. Much of the work is carried by audio. John Giorno’s poem is affecting when read aloud by the author, but the flat graphics of a rainbow path overlaid with the poem’s text feel like an afterthought. Nick Cave’s contribution to the walk, a user-generated, sequin-patterned companion that bobs along the path, is playfully interactive. But the climax of the piece—the emergence of a shimmering dancer, clad in a costume that incorporates the characters designed by everyone in the tour group—winked out under the glare of morning sun on the Gapstow Bridge. Cao Fei’s dreamlike factory, a roller-coaster assembly line of boxes that goes nowhere, felt small and muted, overlaying my toes.

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The walk has its moments of physical joy. While chasing Pipilotti Rist’s deranged, screeching, rainbow-hued blob around Pulitzer Plaza, I realized that to outsiders I probably sported an smile just as wild-looking as Rist’s animation—but none of it felt as immersive, or transformative, or even just fun, as it could have been. Of all the pieces, only Carsten Höller’s, which prompts participants to find a randomly assigned partner among the others in the tour group, really takes advantage of augmented reality’s ability to, well, augment reality. It filters all visuals into grainy black-and-white, shifting a visitor’s sense of the world to encourage participation in the social experiment. The screen capture from Rist’s piece—a gooey mass of dish soap streaking across the sky—that has been used for much of the collaboration’s promotional material is exciting to look at, but it’s not true to the experience. The visual is far smaller on the iPhone screen than it is in on the Today at Apple website.

The screen muddles the encounter with art in another way. With a button for making screen captures and another for recording video both clearly visible at the bottom of the display, the interface encourages visitors to document the walk, forcing them into experience-optimization mode. The button freezes for a few seconds after each capture, so if you miss a shot, you don’t get another chance. With the exception of Cao and Höller’s pieces, which encourage interaction, the scenes play out in a linear fashion. There’s no rewinding. Foregrounding the process of capturing the experience means you miss the experience in the moment—instead of fully giving yourself up to the pops and whizzes of the AR technology, you’re too busy trying to nail a shot for Instagram. It’s less New Museum, more Museum of Ice Cream.

The [AR]T walk begs comparison to a much beloved, much more successful augmented reality initiative, Pokémon Go. Unlike [AR]T, which tightly contains its art experience within Apple store devices and guidance, users could play Pokémon Go on their own phones and on their own time, allowing for an expansive, layered experience that transformed the social, physical world. In the summer of 2016, it wasn’t unusual to see a small crowd of gamers clustered around the Hester Street Playground on the Lower East Side, and I often changed my walking path to stop by. Someone would place a lure—a pink, petal-cascading charm that attracts Pokémon—in the AR overlay of the park’s open space, and everyone gathered to play, catching the same creatures, covered in the same pink petals, sharing in a great, demographic-spanning, boundary-crossing experience. If my description makes it sound utopian, it’s because it certainly felt that way to me.

Would it have been so hard to make an [AR]T app that ran on a regular phone? Imagine a crowd of tourists in Central Park’s Grand Army Plaza, pairing up for conversation through Höller’s social experiment. It’s hard to ignore how proprietary of an attitude Apple has taken with this collaboration. As critic Ben Davis notes, this isn’t an exploration of augmented reality in general, but augmented reality as it exists within Apple’s corporate framework. Participants sign up on the Apple website, meet for tours at the Apple store, wear wireless Beats headphones and use borrowed models of the latest iPhones. Even though Cave’s in-store installation doesn’t require the borrowed tech, you still have to download the Apple Store app and be physically present in a brick-and-mortar store. There’s no reason to limit the range of that piece in such a way—it runs on the standard operating system already on your iPhone, and the architecture of the stores doesn’t feel particularly integral to the experience; it could work in any indoor setting. The whole endeavor feels like an insidious reminder of how our everyday lives have become intimately entwined with a handful of corporations that collect increasingly more data about our lives and our movements. Rather than provide a truly public experience, Apple in particular seems insistent on replacing the commons and becoming a universal, inescapable privatized framework. And it’s not even that fun. Why not just go for a walk in the park?

In an interview with Modern Painters, Eric N. Mack described “Misa Hylton-Brim,” his 2018 solo show at Simon Lee Gallery in London, as an outfit: “a diaphanous dress paired with a supportive combat boot.” Hylton-Brim, the stylist who put together iconic looks for rappers Missy Elliott and Lil’ Kim, is widely considered to be responsible for the eclectic, futuristic, Versace-influenced hip-hop style of the 1990s. Mack’s homage to her reflects his interest in styling and fashion, a preoccupation that guides much of his work. Though Mack describes himself as a painter, his primary medium is fabric. One might say he works in the tradition of Robert Rauschenberg, who expanded painting’s formal range to include collage and experiments with textiles, or Sam Gilliam, who paints on lengths of unstretched canvas. Working with polyester-cotton–blend moving blankets, delicate sheets of silk and organza, thrift-store garments, and found scraps of denim, cotton, and leather, Mack sews pieces together to produce unexpected compositions and configurations. Some works, hung on the wall, echo the rectangular shape of a traditional canvas, while others—draped, stretched, and flexed on wires—refer to traditions of sculpture or installation. But perhaps his most important mode of working is selection: combining fabrics and items to create a specific “look” from an existing material lexicon—the artist as stylist.

The “combat boot” in “Misa Hylton-Brim” was the moving blanket, the sturdy, quilted fabric designed to protect furniture from damage in transit. Mack used several of these as supports for collages of magazine clippings and other printed matter. The blankets that Mack uses can arguably be called paintings, in that they are stained with fabric dye in patches and streaks. On one such work, (Menagerie) The Thorn / The Veil / The Face of Grace (2018), two icons of ’90s rap and R&B make an appearance: a glowing Mary J. Blige gazes from the cover of Pulse, and a Rolling Stone cover featuring Lil Wayne has been rotated a quarter-turn and splashed with red dye. Paired with a cover of the Harlem Times, featuring Essence editor-in-chief Susan L. Taylor with the cover line “Women Going Strong,” the collection of portraits—all famous black creatives—lends the piece a sense of sparkling confidence and pride, though the work’s title, in its use of “menagerie,” also ambivalently speaks to the way that the work of black artists is often tokenized in its consumption by white audiences.

Another moving blanket painting, The Brazen Image / The Thief of Sleep (2018) features a spread of runway looks. The models are photographed mid-stride, an array of glamorous automatons. In that same piece, also streaked with red dye, a New York Post cover screams bloody lies! The headline is from a 2010 story about supermodel Naomi Campbell, who denied knowingly receiving a gift of blood diamonds from Liberian president Charles Taylor. Elsewhere on the blanket’s surface, a photojournalistic portrait of a black man, captioned sheer terror, is paired with a black-and-white photograph of a black person in indigenous makeup and jewelry, like a classic National Geographic shot. The juxtapositions highlight the reductive mode in which the media so often depicts blackness. The mood generated here is less celebratory, more sinister: pairings of beauty and terror, beauty and deceit. In these moving blanket collages, Mack seems to ask: With all these images saturating the visual environment, how are black people allowed to be? What restrictive narratives must be transcended? What can be celebrated? United on the blankets under layers of dye, the collages seem less adhered than embedded—as though Mack were describing something not merely superficial but in fact deeply rooted.

While the image on a stretched canvas seems to float in space, Mack’s work has weight and wear to it. You could take one of his blanket paintings off the wall and wrap it around your shoulders. The materiality of the work is emphasized by the imperfect, not-quite-square shape of the thick textiles and their still-visible chevron-patterned stitching. Mack cites Robert Morris as an influence, especially his felt sculptures, which turn flat pieces into three-dimensional forms that come off the wall in slices, folds, and drapes. Morris’s influence is apparent in Mack’s paintings such as The Brazen Image / The Thief of Sleep, where the work extends from the wall to the floor. In Wide Necklace (2017), included in a 2017 group show at Simon Lee’s New York outpost, Morris’s influence is even more obvious. A horizontal strip of fabric with a large gingham print in yellow and beige serves as the back “collar” for the wall-size titular necklace. A kimono-shape patchwork of brick red, seafoam green, and black-and-white striped fabric hangs from the horizontal strip, attached only by its upper left and right corners, the center sagging to form an opening. The rest of the fabric trails onto the floor. The work’s shape suggests both a statement necklace and a human form with arms outstretched, perhaps in crucifixion. Its construction evokes colorful handmade garments, yet the way it hangs is uneasily tense. The slash of the neckline and the way the piece reaches into the viewer’s space recall Morris’s work, but Mack, through his choice of patterns and bright colors, conjures a figure with personality. Wide Necklace is a metonym. It represents both jewelry and the resting dancer who wears it. Where the uniform felt of Morris’s sculptures emphasizes their symmetry, Mack’s work feels highly specific, encoded and personal. His pieces are less an experiment in form than an attempt to tell a story or convey a mood.

 

I MET MACK as he was installing “Lemme walk across the room,” his solo exhibition currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. Wearing a boxy, distinctively patterned outfit that looked to be directly in dialogue with his paintings, the thirty-one-year-old artist was soft-spoken and slightly under the weather, but eager to talk shop. “Fabric is so known,” he said. Everyone has immediate associations with a set of scrubs or a ball gown. Meaning can be found in the heft and weave of a textile as well as its mass-produced (or bespoke) print. In Implied Reebok or Desire for the Northeast Groover (2016), the logo on an inverted Reebok windbreaker is recognizable but disorienting at first glance, like text seen in a mirror; layered with a crystal dragon appliqué, a humble pair of checkered kitchen pants acquire a glitzy club look. Mack wants to keep his work democratic, and so prefers to use magazines, streetwear, and pop culture as his reference material, speaking especially to viewers who understand, appreciate, and perhaps even formed their identities within black American culture. He consistently explores how we build our sense of self within given systems through our choices of music and clothing.

In contrast to the heavier “combat boot” moving blanket paintings in “Misa Hylton-Brim,” sheets of semitransparent fabric were draped and stretched in the gallery’s open spaces. They were the other half of the look, the diaphanous gown Mack envisioned. In Blue Duet I (2018), two blue panels ripple at the seam that binds them. The difference in the weights of the two elements creates the impression of movement in a still object, as if the wind were caught in these kitelike shapes. The show’s pleasing polarity opposed delicate and tough, extending an ongoing inquiry into textiles and their character. As a student at Cooper Union, Mack realized that the mechanism of painting can easily be perverted, and through his MFA studies at Yale, he explored the question of painting’s materials. Instead of the cotton duck canvas most commonly used by his peers, he worked with linen, silk, and jute. Each substrate, Mack understood, related differently to what was placed on its surface. From there, the possibilities spun out: why not use patterns? Why not repurpose garments and explore all kinds of fabrics? “I was always surprised by painting,” Mack said, a note of awe in his voice. “I think I still am.” Mack’s exploration of painting takes two straightforward components of the medium—the flat surface, the use of color—and replaces the standard materials,
eliminating any resemblance to traditional painting while continuing to grapple with its questions.

For “Lemme walk across the room,” Mack has chosen an installation approach that directly engages the site’s architecture. Mack’s upbringing has shaped his interest in art’s relationship to space and surroundings: his father worked as a display expert at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The young Mack grew up not only surrounded by art but with the behind-the-scenes knowledge that its presentation, too, is a craft, from the construction of a vitrine to the color choice of a background. In Mack’s latest show, one long, gauzy strip of white fabric, intersected by another, shorter one divides the Brooklyn Museum’s Great Hall with an X. The two long sheets are streaked in a red, green, and black tartan pattern by large paper cards that were soaked in dye and dragged across their surfaces, creating a stroke reminiscent of a giant fabric marker. Above, a slowly oscillating wall-mounted fan makes the fabric gently ripple. This diagonal barrier has the effect of occluding the exhibition’s introductory wall text. In order to read about the show, visitors must walk, counterintuitively, between the sheet of fabric and the wall toward a dead-end corner where the two long sheets intersect. This narrow passageway creates a zone apart from the work: the institutional text is blocked off from the installation, suggesting that Mack intends visitors to develop their own interpretation. “Lemme walk across the room,” Mack explained, is “more of a closet,” as compared to the outfit of “Misa Hylton-Brim.” He listed its components: “Some jewelry, a jumpsuit. A pair of shoes. And definitely a hat with a brim.” Indeed, at the center of the show, a white cowboy hat dangles off the edge of a pipe, above an inside-out red-and-orange plaid bedskirt, which spills across the ground like the ruffled hem of a woman’s evening gown. The sculpture, resting on the armature of a metal stepladder, also features a crumpled metal chain-link fence, bent and warped to resemble the undulation of water. Titled The opposite of the pedestal is the grave (2017), the piece looks both barbed and costumed, conjuring the ping-pong between conditions—life and death, elevation and failure—that the title implies. The cowboy hat lends the sculpture a playful posture, like a performer taking a bow, and the skirt has a kind of regal yet folksy grace. But the sharp edges of the crushed metal fence give the ensemble the spiky double valence that characterizes much of Mack’s work. A stepladder may take one up to greater heights, but a height is still a place to fall from.

One wall in the Great Hall features a large collage on oilcloth, less textured than Mack’s moving blanket pieces but with a similar mix of magazine clippings worked over with streaks of fabric dye. Kelis poses on the cover of the Fader, while Courtney Love (styled to look like Marilyn Monroe), Janet Jackson, and an advertisement for the West African airline Afrik Air also make appearances. The airline ad is a reminder of the distance that separates immigrants from their home countries and families, but it also serves as a symbol of how ideas and images travel; together, the set of references conjures the experience of identity formation, of mixing and meshing cultures to find a personal style. On another wall, sheets of paper hung salon-style, edges curled from dye, offer a new element to Mack’s work, and are the artist’s most traditionally painterly pieces. The paper cards, colored and streaked with gradients, were used to dye the tartan-patterned fabric divider. They are the byproducts of making the work. In an installation, they feel slightly unfinished: while the upturned edges speak to Mack’s interest in punctuating space with form, the cards as a whole offer little more than color. Nevertheless, they suggest a compelling direction for Mack. One wonders what other artifacts of his process could be put on display, and how.

As a closet, rather than an outfit, “Lemme walk across the room” feels like the beginning of something new. It’s an array of Mack’s tools, a dressing room with clothes and jewelry laid out, displaying what the young artist can do, and indicating that more is to come. Mack collaborated with fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner in 2018 to create a backdrop for her London Fashion Week men’s show, and when we spoke, he mused on how his work at the Brooklyn Museum could similarly function as a set for a party or other gathering, bringing club vibes to the space and transforming the museum. He envisioned a live performance that could be recorded and played back through the show’s duration, adding another dimension of experience to the work—a fitting choice for an artist who works with layers of material and cultural meaning.