Sunday, May 15
> Buffalo
Kaplan Harris
Sarah Buckley
Getting on the road, I wrote on Facebook: “Turns out I am driving to Buffalo this very day. What sadness, so terrible. I am sure it is affecting everyone there.” After entering via the Peace Bridge, the first thing I saw was a block party in a Black neighborhood, conveying a somber tone of survival despite everything. Kaplan Harris and his partner Sarah greeted me with exceptional food and conversation, ranging from archives to prison abolition. Later, walking out in the Elmwood District, I wondered how it had been going in Buffalo since when. Everywhere is war, I hear the echoes of Bob Marley in my head as I walk by some loud partying. I exited next day through the fated neighborhood itself.
Monday, May 16
> Germantown/Brooklyn
Ann Lauterbach
Terrific storms accompanied my power drive through upstate New York, blasts of rain pelting in sheets creating maelstroms with each passing truck. Somewhere in the middle of the state, I stopped for gas to find an electrical glitch would not open the gas tank flap. There is no manual override. This event, dramatic perhaps only to myself, needed about an hour of phone calls to a long-distance service expert, after which I was able to re-set the circuit. Coming down the Hudson and into Germantown, the rain accelerated to the point of zero visibility, in buckets of slushy hail. In from the storm, Ann Lauterbach greeted me from the porch of her restored schoolhouse down the road. Our elegant meeting, with an Italian white and hors d’oeuvre something like a mozzarelline fritte, but with a thicker, seasoned crust (help me out on this one, Ann), led to serious discussion of the crisis of the academy, seen from the perspectives of a liberal arts college and a working-class university. Of the many fine editions on display, I admired chapbooks of Eliot’s Little Gidding and Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle (or was it Work in Progress—same thing). There was an altar to Ann’s friendship with Joe Brainard and portrait of her by Alex Katz. Back on the road, briefly clearing up, I had forgotten my umbrella. The Taconic Parkway beckoned to New York and the overpriced hotel, set between a dialysis center and U-Haul truck return, I had booked in Lower Park Slope.
Tuesday, May 17
> New York
Nora Turato, govern me harder @ David Zwirner
Paolo Nazareth, Nosotros los otros @ Mendes Wood DM
Naudline Pierre, Enter the Realm @ James Cohan
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, D.R.M.P. @ Bortolami
Daniel Buren, The Colored Mirrors @ Bortolami
Rosa Barba, Drawing the Infinite @ Luhring Augustine
Squeak Carnwath, Pattern Language @ Jane Lombard
Tom Waring, Ars Brevis @ Downs & Ross
Julia Wachtel, Fulfillment @ Helena Anrather
Vickie Vainionpää, Software @ The Hole
After breakfast at Daisy’s Diner (5th Avenue, Brooklyn), I had time for my favorite activity in New York, rapid scanning and conceptual bar-coding of new art. I would start with David Zwirner’s alternative space in the Soho-Tribeca nexus and circle around to the lower Bowery, with its second-floor walk-ups. Downtown, it seems, is now designated as the site for entry-level and mid career, supporting the hierarchical orders of Chelsea. Nora Turato’s govern me harder triangulated this new ground: language-based, minimal, culturally specific, raced. The press release reads: “The text in the exhibited works is set in the bespoke typeface, which redraws the paradigmatic Helvetica into bulging, seductive swoops and whorls and subverts the principles of so-called good typography by ignoring established guidelines for uniformity and size, in addition to those for kerning, leading, and tracking.” I liked it and took pictures, as I did with all the galleries listed above. Meeting Anselm Berrigan for beers at Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street, our first conversation as adults, we went deep into the lore of poetry and my contacts with his parents on arriving at Iowa in 1970—a brief phone call about an apartment with Alice Notley, who was just leaving town. From there to the present is an unfolding history of poetry still being made. An expensive cab in rush-hour got me to Lee Ann and Tony’s, where we had about an hour to take in as much of Chelsea as possible—well worth the hustle: Lee Lozano and Nicole Eisenman at Hauser & Wirth, Richard Serra at David Zwirner.
Anselm Berrigan
Lee Ann Brown
Tony Torn
Cameron Martin, Parts to Whole @ Sikkema Jenkins
Richard Serra @ David Zwirner
Lee Lozano, All Verbs @ Hauser & Wirth
Nicole Eisenman, Untitled (Show) @ Hauser & Wirth
Book party for DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution
by Lance Scott Walker
In the company of Lee Ann and Tony, we next drove to a book party for the author of DJ Screw in Brooklyn, an oral history of the Houston rap artist and DJ known for slowing down—screwing and chopping—beats and samples to create an alternate sonic world that disconnects from mainstream rap and commercial music, around which a community arose defined by his style (and intake, but we won’t go there), the opposite of Detroit techno. I recalled Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style and wondered how the avant poetry community would match up in comparison to the Screw community. This was a world I knew nothing about; I must learn more about it.
Wednesday, May 18
Adeena Karasick
Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It’s Kept
@ Whitney Museum
This space, it seems, is the site for my review of the fiftieth Whitney Biennial. Send me the difficult jobs. I have been to many of them, and wrote art criticism for Artweek in the Bay Area before leaving for Detroit, where there was no possibility of continuing. Initial responses were good: the first floor, with its black walls and labyrinthine exhibition design, made each piece a resonant assessment of the cultural politics that have convulsed the art world, with the Whitney as center of debate, for two decades. I remember the scandal over Dana Schutz’s portrait of Emmet Till in 2017, but beyond that Larry Rinder’s breakthrough exhibition “The American Effect” in 2003—which got him fired. Taking it in with my friend, we road-tested each artist’s work for its performative values and micro-politics, finding much to like. Alfredo Jaar’s video of the anti-Trump/Black Lives Matter demonstration that was threatened with tear gas and a helicopter was a hit; the viewer gets to wear earplugs. This is hyperrealism, reproducing the event itself, but not all art can do that (a comment on art and revolution). There was also, much to my friend’s taste given the visual-verbal aspects of her work, a considerable amount of art using language. A slightly bizarre note was rung with Daniel Joseph Martinez’s oversized reprocessed digital head shots of film monsters and zombies, taking up a large wall, behind a white veiled curtain, with the walls painted white. Monsters, white, versus labyrinthine, black. Is it possible this was the curatorial intention? One began to read the exhibition, not the work on display. This reading, or readability, increasingly became the experience one was having. It took perhaps one third the time to road-test the second floor, which appeared to be a conventional art fair with a mix of recognized and emerging artists working in diverse genres, with specific cultural politics and aesthetic strategies. The connections between them seemed arbitrary; did not lead from one to the next; did not hold together. Friend and I accelerated through it, stopping briefly to make comments. The obligatory final floor was the education component, a group of photocopied readers prepared by Cassandra Press organizing up-to-the-minute cultural studies theory and practice for pedagogical use. There was an explicit interpellation in this reading room of the future. Since friend and I both teach and make our own readers, based on specific teaching situations and student needs, these materials seemed the opposite of open. The final gesture, then, was instructive: this is how to see this show. On the steps leading out of the museum, on the way to conversation less constrained by that instruction, my remark was, “The Whitney never gets it right.” On this occasion, naive curatorial overreach interfered with the horizons of the viewer’s experience, once again.
> Lewes, DE
Tom Mandel
Beth Joselow
On the New Jersey Turnpike, between the 90 minutes it took to get past the Newark Airport and the Delaware state line, I encountered an episode of road rage. In moderately thick traffic, I was unable to pass a number of slower trucks and cars; behind me I noticed a black SUV, also held up, that was being honked at aggressively by one of the numerous trucks. I let them go ahead. When I did, the truck began to swerve abruptly at the SUV, trying to cause it to crash. Failing that, it attempted to pin the SUV against the guard rail and drive it off the road. Both vehicles slowed down as this took place. I started to honk rapidly and pulled up behind them. The truck driver (Black, green shirt, dark pants, over 6′, 225 lbs.) got out and headed for the SUV. Did he “charge” the SUV; he seemed threatening. I got out my cell phone and started taking pictures, mostly to get the license plate (Florida QA5 5BY). But I also got a clear shot of the driver. Both the SUV driver and I had our cell phones out. The driver retreated back to the truck. The SUV and I drove ahead, pulled over. “Did you see that—he tried to drive you off the road.” The SUV driver, a well-dressed Black professional woman, was shaken. I was too. She said, “My father is the sheriff of this county and I’m going to report him.” “You should.” I gave her my contact info and said to be in touch if she needed me; I would be a witness. She shook my hand. The truck drive feigned to sideswipe my car as he took off. Adrenaline remained. This is a reflection on “the event”: how much one can recollect, how accurately. Then I reproduced it, trying not to exaggerate, in telling it over to Tom and Beth when I arrived. The topic shifted to trauma and creative writing in Beth’s practice; the pressures on authenticity; and what counts as a person. I offered that Tom counted as “person-centric,” defined as picking up a conversation where we left off, even after years in-between. The next morning Tom and I found ourselves at lunch with a well-heeled hotelier whose capaciousness also gave off an aura of personhood. Having a conversation with that kind of person is like having an experience of travel, I thought as I left for DC.
Thursday, May 19
> Washington, DC
Rod Smith
Hung Liu, Portraits of Promised Lands
@ National Portrait Gallery
Bridge Street Books
The goal of my road trip, which I had planned on over the past year, was the retrospective of Asian American painter Hung Liu at the National Portrait Gallery, before it closes this month. I had written about her work twice in the early 90s, when she emerged in the Bay Area. The encounter with her work, which processes her experience of emigration from Maoist China but also the Western gaze on China, was crucial for the cultural turn in my work. I am planning to present a paper on it, under the rubric “Diasporic Avant-Gardes,” at the virtual meeting of ACLA next month. To get to the several galleries devoted to the show, one passes through the famous (and not so remarkable) portraits of American presidents, from Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington to Chuck Close’s Bill Clinton and Shepard Fairey’s Obama. The politics of portraiture as American exceptionalism, indeed! The effect of Hung Liu’s decades-long work in the genre of the portrait, after this framing, is likewise exceptional. Four galleries were devoted, in turn, to “Migration,” “After [Dorothea] Lange,” “Family,” and “Women,” accompanied by examples of the genre from her family albums and Mao-era training. What makes Hung Liu’s work exceptional, a word I will continue to use, is her combination of styles, from expressivist/realist illustration to avant-garde distancing and defamiliarization. Her work, one sees clearly in retrospect, is the history of its making—a “Making of Americans” of the Asian diaspora. What distinguishes the cultural politics of this show from the curatorial aims of the Whitney was, in fact, its “organic” blending of both synthesis and alterity, against the conventions within which it was inscribed. Happy at having achieved my stated goal, I headed for the road—after an all-too-brief visit for beers with Rod Smith on break from Bridge Street Books. As usual I came away with a ton of books, before hitting the logjam on the beltway.
> State College, PA
Driving from DC to State College, the algorithm put me in David Lynch territory. Off the beaten track and up Stumpy Lane and down Grist Mill Road to Orbisonia, where giants and dwarfs prosper on the cabin and truck traffic. Six close encounters with deer and then the final 8% grade to Happy Valley, the destination. As were also Carla and Zephyr in an off-season Big Ten hotel room.
Carla Harryman
Friday, May 20
> Detroit
A road trip is a kind of geographical cultural scanning and bar-coding of “what’s out there.” Though some of it is what you read in the papers, it’s different up close. What I returned with was the degree of struggle among my friend circle, even as the so-called world returns to normal. It is of the highest necessity to be in real-time touch with it.
Notes
Image: Nicole Eisenman, Destiny Riding Her Bike, 2020. Hauser & Wirth New York. Photo: BW
