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Video: Pakistani American Artist Shahzia Sikander On Reimagining Painting Traditions From Around the World

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In Houston, Witness drew the ire of Texas Right to Life, an anti-choice Christian group. Picking up on a description in the press of the coiled braids as horns and citing Sikander’s stated support for abortion rights, the organization called for a campus-wide protest “to keep the Satanic abortion idol out of Texas.” In response, the University scrapped a planned opening and artist talk, and decided not to present an accompanying video work by Sikander. There is no little irony in the situation. Witness exemplifies Sikander’s career-long effort to counter female invisibility in a world where images of female power are often seen as threatening and destabilizing. The calls to remove this proud symbol of female autonomy unintentionally underscored the reason Sikander had created it in the first place.

In between phone calls Sikander tried to put the controversy out of her mind as she donned rubber boots and an apron and proceeded with the painstaking work of spraying pigmented paper pulp over delicate stencils. Full figures, doubled figures, even closeups of the now-infamous coiled horns emerged kaleidoscopically in luminous layered compositions. During a break, Sikander mused on the complex symbolism behind Witness. Citing the visual history of Asia and Africa, she noted that similar images of braided hair can be found in early 20th-century Nigerian crest masks as well as in representations of the Buddha. And she pointed out that rams’ horns are a recurring motif in her sculptures, appearing also in NOW, a companion work that stands in front of the New York Appellate Division Courthouse. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” she remarked. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

This kind of reductive misreading is nothing new for Sikander. At the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 she was working on a mural for a law firm. She had been exploring a motif based on the Hindu goddess Durga, a female warrior embodying strength and courage, often represented by a woman whose multiple arms each bear a weapon. Sikander intended these as emblems of female protective power, but in the context of 9/11, the image was read as an incitement to violence. Not wanting to add to this confusion, Sikander withdrew from the commission.

Misreading extends as well to the way Sikander is perceived as an artist. In a career that spans three and a half decades, she has mastered painting, sculpture, animation, installation, and video. She works with glass, paper pulp, bronze, and mosaic. She juxtaposes imagery sourced from Indian court painting, Western Renaissance and Mannerist art, African tribal figures, Hindu and Persian legends, biblical narratives, and Western fairy tales. She melds figures drawn from the religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Her works deal with a multiplicity of issues, from female power to migration, trade, colonial history, and climate change. Her originality has earned her an international reputation capped by a MacArthur “genius grant,” and her retrospective is one of the official collateral events at this summer’s Venice Biennale.

Nonetheless, Sikander finds to her frustration that she is continually described as a Pakistani artist working in the neo-miniaturist tradition. “I’ve been living and working in this country for 30 years,” she said. She maintains a studio at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, but her project-based work allows her to move around. “My work is about wanting not to be boxed in to any stereotype, whether it’s on behalf of Pakistan or any culture or religion or non-white feminism or vision of tradition versus non-tradition. There are all these constraints. My desire is to escape imprisoning representations.”

THE UNFORTUNATE PIGEONHOLING OF Sikander’s work may have to do in part with the remarkable way she emerged as an artist. Born in Lahore in 1969, Sikander grew up in a multigenerational home, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. She describes herself as a quiet child, constantly drawing portraits, and enthralled by her father’s knack for storytelling. “I have memories of him enacting characters,” she said. “Reading books and giving me the idea of imagination.” Despite her love of art, she initially tried to follow a more conventional path. She received a colonial high school education at Convent of Jesus and Mary and then enrolled in the Kinnaird College for Women, where she studied math and economics in what she describes as a “waiting for marriage” culture.

But these were turbulent times in Pakistan. An erosion of women’s rights followed a coup that brought a military regime to power in 1978. Like many young women, Sikander was shaken by the changes, and took an internship with the Women’s Action Forum, an organization in the forefront of resistance to the regime. The group’s founder and Sikander’s mentor there, Lala Rukh, encouraged her to enroll in the National College of Art (NCA). “In that military environment, the art school was suspect,” Sikander said. “It had historically been full of thinkers and dissent. And it was [close to] 50 [percent] … female. It was so wonderful to be able to go there.”

At the NCA, Sikander could have followed the path taken by many of her fellow students who were looking at Western models of modernist art. Instead, she chose to immerse herself in the Mughal tradition of miniature painting. It was a surprising choice: At NCA, miniature painting was considered hopelessly retrograde. The Mughal Empire had dominated South Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries, spurring the spread of a signature art form composed of small jewel-like paintings of Mughal life and mythology. But by the 20th century, actual examples of such paintings were hard to come by in Pakistan, as the original manuscripts in which they appeared had been plundered, divided up, and sent to Western institutions. Further, works that carried on that tradition were considered tourist kitsch or dismissed as exercises in nostalgia. Even the term miniature painting was a catchall colonial construct, sweeping numerous artistic traditions under a single label. At NCA, miniature painting was seen as a dying art with little connection to the progressive agenda of an institution that was emerging as the premier art school in the country.

And that was exactly why Sikander found it interesting. She elected to work with Bashir Ahmed, a skilled miniaturist dedicated to preserving this disappearing tradition. “It was an attempt to engage with art historical visual traditions that were not the norm,” she said. “It was about looking at the pre-colonial era, looking at Safavid style, looking at Chinese history and Chinese scroll paintings, all kinds of things that were not necessarily in the books that we were studying.” Miniature painting was an outlier, and so in many ways was the teenage Sikander, a young woman driven to be an artist in a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian culture.

Sikander mixed paints from pigments, used tea stains, and learned the laborious process of painting with single-hair brushes to delineate tiny details. She spent 14 hours a day for two years completing her thesis project, imperiling her physical and mental health as she developed symptoms related to stress, prolonged sitting, and exposure to various chemicals. Although the thesis mandate was to create a series of notebook-size paintings, she employed the miniature technique to produce a single five-foot-long painting that she describes as an “epic poem.” Titled Scroll (1989–90), it unveils a panoramic view of an upperclass Pakistani home that has been opened up and spread out so that the rooms form a series of vignettes of domestic life. It is highly detailed, with a complex geometry that echoes the shifting perspectives in traditional Mughal painting. What ties it all together is the figure of a young woman in white, always seen from the back, who drifts through the house without ever actually interacting with the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. In the very last scene, she ends up outside in the garden where she stands before an easel painting a portrait of a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sikander. The figure is a bit of a cypher, guiding us through the complicated spaces, acting in part as the viewer’s eye. “It’s not necessarily a self-portrait,” Sikander said, “but at the age of 17 or 18, what else could it be?”

Scroll created a sensation, and Sikander won national attention as well as the NCA’s highest merit award. This acclaim encouraged the school to greatly expand its miniaturist program and helped spawn what is now known as the Pakistani neo-miniaturist school of art. But Sikander herself refused to see herself simply as a neo-miniaturist. “Even from the beginning I was experimenting with the miniature,” she said. “Once I had painted it, I would disrupt it, sometimes by pouring water or putting it under the tap or thinking of ways to intentionally disrupt its preciousness.” It was a traditional form that would be a continuing reference point for Sikander’s work even as she engaged in a restless, relentless experimentation with materials, and a desire to engage with a multitude of themes.

SCROLL ANTICIPATES MANY OF Sikander’s continuing concerns: It describes a female space, it highlights class and gender disparities, it is imbued with a sense of mystery, and it presents a fluid conception of time and space. But to discover her mature language, Sikander had to leave Pakistan for the United States. The spark was the unexpected perception of herself as an Other. In 1993 she enrolled in the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. It was a moment in the American art world when multicultural differences were being simultaneously fetishized and marginalized. Sikander recalled how a professor asked, “are you here to make East meet West?”

Her frustration with this narrow conception led Sikander to experiment with radically different imagery. “Certain forms started springing out, perhaps resisting this racial straitjacket,” she said. “But they were also kind of androgynous, not necessarily fully female.” This was in part a reaction to how art from her region was depicted. “Here I am looking at these big coffee table books on Islamic art or Indian art. And in there are these shadowless representations of different native cultures. These little characters are supposedly defining what I do, or who I may be, or what my work is about. They looked like they needed to escape those pages. So I started imagining them as little monsters that are going to walk off that page. And if they were, if they had little legs, or if they were going to literally crawl off, then what would they look like?”

The answer was the beginning of a lexicon of images that recur throughout her work. There is, for instance, the headless woman whose legs have become a tangle of roots. Sikander describes her as an emblem of the erasure of the feminine from religion and history. There are the flying gopi hairpieces, small winglike objects that have become detached from the heads of the female followers of Krishna. They become agents of disintegration and re-creation as they spin off like swarms of insects or birds. There are wheels of spinning arms that expand and multiply. There are androgynous creatures, like the veiled figure who confounds gender expectations by taking on the body of a male polo player.

Sikander’s explorations were aided by her reading of feminist writers and poets like Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Julia Kristeva, and South Asian thinkers like Kishwar Naheed, Parveen Shakir, and Fatema Mernissi. She remarks, “I have gravitated often to the literary space, because when we think of the representation of female protagonists, we think, who gets to write the stories? How do women themselves want to be represented?”

After graduating from RISD, Sikander secured a two-year fellowship with the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Ironically, given the current controversy over Witness, she credits her time there with opening her eyes to the diversity of America and to the connections between different histories. “Houston was so different from Providence,” she said. “Houston had Arab American diaspora histories, it had the large Indonesian Vietnamese communities, and it had a large South Asian community. So there was all these multiple spaces, but they don’t necessarily come together.” She began to draw parallels between the apparently different histories of displacement and migration that characterized the American South and her native South Asia. “It was really magical,” she said. “I was thinking how it was so foreign and so familiar at the same time.”

AN INVIDATION TO THE 1997 Whitney Biennial and a show at the nonprofit Artists Space brought Sikander to New York, where she has lived ever since. In the intervening years she has created a body of work that is breathtaking in its complexity and breadth. There are jewel-like paintings like Pleasure Pillars, 2001, her first work showing rams’ horns. Here, the horned woman is quite obviously a self-portrait surrounded by female figures from various Eastern and Western traditions. In an acknowledgment of the violence of 9/11, a tiny fighter jet approaches from the distance while a winged creature shoots fire from its hands. There are works created from ink stains that bleed into translucent tracing paper to create silhouettes of headless women. There are glowing mosaics that splinter the dresses of female figures into hundreds of shards of light and color. There is a multiscreen video titled Reckoning that flashed over Times Square every night at midnight for the month of September 2023.

Among Sikander’s explorations in sculpture are large public figures like Witness and its companion work, NOW, and smaller ones like Promiscuous Intimacies, which grew from a painting with the same motif. Both Intimacies and its inspiration envision the meeting of different traditions through the sensuous entwining of a truncated temple sculpture of an Indian celestial dancer and the twisting Venus of 16th-century Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino.

Sikander’s animations include SpiNN (2003), a critique of cable news in which an Indian ruler in a grand Mughal gathering hall is obliterated by flying gopi hair, and The Last Post (2010), which similarly disrupts the figure of a colonial-era East India company man. The monumental Parallax, created for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, is a mesmerizing immersive panoramic video that reflects on the role of migrant labor, oil, and violence in the tortured history of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow ocean passage between Oman and Iran.

One thing that unites these works is Sikander’s tendency to circle back, to rework previous motifs and allow them to absorb new meanings. Another is her focus on the disruption of fixed polarities like male and female, East and West, past and present, order and chaos. Collective Behavior, the retrospective currently on view in Venice, showcases all these aspects of Sikander’s work; it is organized by two Ohio-based curators: Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Emily Liebert, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Following its presentation in Venice, Collective Behavior will move to the curators’ respective institutions, where it will take a somewhat unconventional course. At Cincinnati, it will be fleshed out with other works, while simultaneously in Cleveland, related works will feature in dialogue with the museum’s storied South Asian collection.

Cameron has worked with Sikander on a number of projects, beginning in 2016 with the animation of an 18th-century North Indian manuscript at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She wants the exhibition to highlight Sikander’s ability to weave together diverse histories and traditions in ways that illuminate current dilemmas. “This is a really turbulent time,” she said. “Shahzia uses art to activate so many messages and to make it the center point for the conversations that we’re having, whether it’s gender and body politics or the histories of colonial India and South Asia. She reinforces this idea that art can be a catalyst for change.”

Liebert concurs. “Her art reflects on so many of the pressing issues of our time: gender relations, migration, climate, race. But she’s always thinking about those through the lens of history,” she said, adding that “in Shahzia’s work, there’s a suggestion that the past can inform our understanding of the present.”

For Sikander, the chance to present her work in Venice offers a remarkable synergy. She points to the history of Venice as a commercial and artistic center at the nexus of global trade. “When you’re in Venice, you can see forms that are understood as Venetian, but you can often see them as well in Islamic patterning,” she said. “There is this rich history of trade between Venice and Persia or China. It’s reverberating through the Italian Renaissance painting, the illuminated manuscripts of central South Asia, and the textiles in the Islamic world. But very rarely do you see this acknowledged, even in art history.” Once again, the notion of place—who belongs where, and how people define themselves—plays a role in her work. She added with a glimmer of mirth, “I think appearing in Venice is an amusing thing for an artist like myself. There are a lot of parallels that I can recognize. I guess what I’m trying to say is, for me, it’s a perfect location.”

“Liminal” is Huyghe’s most elaborate presentation to date, transforming cavernous spaces in the 17th-century Venetian customs house into a series of near-black rooms where various experiments in post-human and trans-species communication take place. The encounter begins with the show’s titular work, Liminal (2024), a huge video screen on which a faceless nude figure moves in response to sensors affixed to live humans standing mutely throughout the exhibition spaces. These movements, we are told, are part of a learning process by which the figure will acquire memories and a language that will evolve beyond human understanding. Elusive as it is to our consciousness, it is hard to know what, if anything, is actually happening.

More accessible is a 19-minute video titled Human Mask (2014). Shot in post-nuclear-disaster Fukushima, Japan, it follows the peripatetic movements of a macaque monkey outfitted to resemble a young girl in a dress, wig, and white Noh-like mask. Scampering through the kitchen and dining area of an abandoned sake house, the creature is the epitome of the uncanny. Its movements resemble by turn those of human and animal, and the expressionless mask invites the projection of human emotions like industriousness, wistfulness, and loneliness. The last is accentuated by intercut shots of the deserted storefronts and streets of the still-off-limits disaster area that give the film a post-apocalyptic ambience.

As it happens, the monkey was trained as a server, and in happier circumstances, had delighted customers at a Tokyo restaurant. Huyghe places the animal in a post-human scenario here in order to complicate assumptions about the distinction between human and nonhuman consciousness and understanding.

A second film, Camata (2024), raises similar questions about machines. Here, the camera pans around and above a human skeleton half-buried in sand, and bearing wisps of fabric from nearly disintegrated clothing. At times, the camera pulls back, and we see a strange machine whose robotic arms endlessly lift and place glass spheres in changing configurations around the bones. The setting is once again post-apocalyptic, this time featuring the arid landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The exhibition website explains that the film is “self-directed [and] edited in real time by artificial intelligence[, using] robotics driven by machine learning …” What we see here suggests a kind of burial ritual for the human species performed by machines that will outlast us.

Other works expand on the theme of nonhuman agency: There is a misty colored-light show created by a “self-generative system” (Offspring, 2018), as well as eerie-looking aquariums in which various small sea creatures live amid cast-concrete forms suggestive of human body parts (Zoodram, 2013). One gallery is devoted to UUmwelt-Annlee (2018–24), a revisitation of the anime character Annlee, which Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased in 1999 from a catalog and that Huyghe and other artists over the years have subjected to numerous permutations.

Annlee is a blank slate, hence an ideal subject for experiments with programming simulacra, among other things, of human-seeming intelligence. Here, Huyghe has created a kind of mind-meld between Annlee and a human subject by reconstructing mental images through a program that links a computer to the brain waves of a person imagining Annlee. The result is a phantasmagoric overlay of quickly shifting shapes and colors that, according to the brochure, are again “endlessly modified by several parameters linked to the surrounding conditions.”

Huyghe urges us to ask: What is consciousness? What is learning? Can machines learn? How do nonhuman creatures think? What would that mean for us? Does anything make humans special? These are questions that go to the heart of the Enlightenment consensus that elevated human reason above all other forms of life and nonlife. Huyghe’s work offers a glimpse of an alternative world where humans have been dislodged from their privileged place. However, the exhibition is not free of unresolved issues. There is for instance a tension between the regulated setup of the museum environment where chance events can’t easily flourish, and Huyghe’s desire to create human-free self-evolving systems. Even more striking is the tension between his vision of a non-anthropomorphic reality and his own role as an artist and creator. While his work centers on the denial of human exceptionalism, it is Huyghe who set these systems in motion. Stepping aside, he seems to adopt a role akin to that of the Divine Watchmaker, who sets the system in order and then disappears, that was critical to Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and other progenitors of Enlightenment thought. So Huyghe’s whole enterprise raises a crucial question: Can we ever really step outside ourselves? The effort to remove ourselves from the world ultimately seems as futile as the effort to show we can rise above it.

It wasn’t long ago that the mention of goddesses or matriarchy would have condemned an artist to the nether world of irrelevance. But now, Mutu emerges as one of the foremost practitioners of contemporary Goddess Art, and these become words of praise.

Though long stigmatized, the reputations of artists identified with the original Goddess movement of the 1960s—among them Mary Beth Edelson, Ana Mendieta, and Judy Chicago—have soared in recent years. The presiding spirit of last year’s Venice Biennale was Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, who identified the “greatest revelation of my life” as Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess, a study of mythology and poetry in pre-Christian nature-based matriarchies. The British Museum recently offered a mammoth examination of female spiritual figures across cultures and historical periods. And younger artists like Saya Woolfalk, Chitra Ganesh, and Lina Iris Viktor seem increasingly comfortable with invocations of female deities and spiritual powers.

What accounts for this sea change? Significantly, this renewed interest in icons of female power comes at a moment when political and social institutions are actively threatening female autonomy at home and abroad. Then, there is the fact that the original movement embraced a gender-fluid concept of the Goddess that resonates today. Meanwhile, the climate crisis underscores the urgent need for a different understanding of nature, progress, and technology. The Goddess movement’s holistic theory of nature is compatible with current developments in the fields of biology and ecology. And new scholarship in anthropology and archaeology lends support to the idea that early societies were, if not strictly matriarchal, at least matrilineal and matrilocal. In the art world, all this adds up to a growing awareness that many of the artists originally associated with the Goddess movement were unfairly maligned. Now, a group of younger artists is finishing what they started.

THE GODDESS MOVEMENT was born in the early 1960s, when second-wave feminists bolstered their indictment of toxic patriarchy with alternative visions of society, history, and gender relations. Many were energized by archaeological discoveries that pointed to the prehistoric existence of ancient matriarchies and to widespread worship of female deities. These ideas coalesced into the Goddess movement, a celebration of feminine spirituality that served as inspiration to numerous artists, scholars, and writers.

Critic Gloria Feman Orenstein surveyed the work of these artists in an essay in the spring 1978 edition of Heresies, a self-described “Feminist Publication on Art and Politics” that ran between 1977 and 1993. Issue #5, The Great Goddess, comprises a collection of poems, artworks, scholarly essays, and speculative fantasies that reveal the range and complexity of women’s views on the subject. It includes lists of megalithic temples associated with goddess worship, prescriptions for the creation of new rituals, explorations of Indigenous spiritual practices, and celebrations of menstruation and childbirth. Some contributors search for empirical proof of prehistoric matriarchies, while others regard such societies as simply metaphors or useful guides to thinking about a post-patriarchal future.

Orenstein’s essay includes Carolee Schneemann, who evoked the Minoan Snake Goddess by placing two snakes on her body for her 1963 Eye Body performance; Ana Mendieta merging her body with the earth; Mary Beth Edelson channeling ancient goddesses in ritual performances; Betye Saar creating talismans to honor Black Goddesses and Voodoo Priestesses; Betsy Damon bypassing the patriarchy in performances that assumed the part of a 7,000-year-old woman; and Judy Chicago crafting a creation myth with a goddess as the supreme creatrix.

Running through the projects presented in Heresies is a sense of excitement over the possibilities unleashed by these feminist challenges to the male-centric Judeo-Christian theologies that have dominated Western culture. But the contributors are adamant that they are not seeking a simple reversal of power. As religion scholar Charlene Spretnak remarked in her anthology, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality (1982), “no one is interested in revering a ‘Yahweh in a skirt.’” Instead, the Goddess emerging from Heresies is less a person or an individual agent than a nexus of nature, spirit, and body. She represents social cooperation and attunement to the forces of nature. While male power emphasizes domination and control, the contributors argue, goddess-inspired female power yields a more cooperative society, one that recognizes the rights of other people, other species, and the earth itself.

Heresies wrote revisionist histories, identifying precedents for this concept in early human societies. They found support from scholars. In Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1978),Spretnak revives an ecosystem of female deities that preceded the Greek Olympians. Artist and writer Merlin Stone’s 1978 When God Was a Woman documented the suppression of goddess societies in the Middle East by a triumphant Abrahamic culture. Cultural historian Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987) explored the tensions between two models of society—feminist partnership cultures versus patriarchal dominator cultures—that have persisted throughout human history.

A key figure in this rethinking of history was archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, a specialist in Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures. Her 1974 book The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe challenged standard accounts of European prehistory that suggested inequality was inevitable as societies scaled up, divided labor, and pivoted to agriculture from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. She posited the existence of cooperative, peaceful, female-centered social orders in the Neolithic era, and theorized that these were wiped out beginning in 4400 BCE by nomadic warring Bronze Age invaders. While other scholars had largely downplayed the significance of female figurines, dismissing them as mere fertility goddesses, she saw them as figures embodying the making and destroying of life whose powers were at the center of these societies’ female-oriented spiritual belief systems. She argued that the societies of Neolithic Europe were largely peaceful, “matristic” (a word describing their deference to female authority that she preferred to “matriarchal”), and attuned to nature and goddess worship.

Unlike subsequent patriarchal cultures that envisioned nature as an external entity and a resource to be dominated and exploited, these early societies, Gimbutas argues, worshiped the “unbroken unity of one deity, a Goddess who is ultimately Nature herself.” This concept of nature finds a striking parallel in the work of chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis who, in the early 1970s, developed the Gaia Theory. According to the Greek poet Hesiod, Gaia was the child of Chaos who brought the world into being and also produced such fearsome races as the Titans, Giants, and Cyclopes. As creator and destroyer, she was hailed as the Great Mother, the origin of life, and the personification of earth. Inspired perhaps by the Goddess vibes floating around in the 1970s, Lovelock and Margulis attached the name Gaia to their concept of the planet as a self-regulating system. They argued that living organisms evolve in response to their surroundings, both animate and inorganic, to maintain the conditions for the continuation of life. Gaianism paints a picture of the interdependence of life and nonlife that mirrors the beliefs of early Goddess societies.

Gimbutas’s work did not age well. While The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe became an important resource for artists and writers associated with the Goddess movement, Gimbutas’s academic fate suffered, in part due to her association with the Goddess artists. Once a towering figure, she was charged with the sins of essentialism and utopianism, and dismissed as a crank or fantasist. Academic rivals disseminated a caricatured version of her views, made light of her research and professional qualifications, and ignored the widespread respect her peers accorded her. Today, few archaeological texts cite her work.

In the 1980s, the Goddess movement took a hit. The idea of women building shrines to pagan goddesses, performing rituals to mark the phases of the moon, or conjuring the spirits of women burned as witches seemed anti-intellectual—and frankly, embarrassing. The Goddess fixation smacked of wishful thinking, of surrender to New Age fantasies of lost matriarchal utopias, and of a retrograde equation of women with nature. It seemed essentialist, ahistorical, and rife with cultural appropriation.

As the 1980s wore on, celebrations of matriarchy gave way to gender deconstruction. A feminist identification with Mother Earth was supplanted by Barbara Kruger’s cry, “We won’t play nature to your culture,” the title of her landmark 1983 show. Then, Donna Haraway declared in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

IT TOOK A RETROSPECTIVE of feminist art—“WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which opened in 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—to remind the art world of the original Goddess movement artists. The same year, “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum featured works made from 1990 onward, under the influence of a variety of transnational spiritual traditions. But there was still stigma. As art historian Jennie Klein noted in 2009, “the Goddess is the unacknowledged white elephant in the room of feminist body art.”

Alongside renewed interest in the original Goddess artists, new scholarship now supports Gimbutas’s account of Neolithic history. In The Dawn of Everything (2021), a monumental reconsideration of the origins of human society by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, Gimbutas reemerges as a visionary. The authors contend that “among academics today, belief in primitive matriarchy is treated as a kind of intellectual offence, almost on a par with ‘scientific racism,’ and its exponents have been written out of history.” Yet they point to new evidence of the relatively peaceful and egalitarian societies that Gimbutas described, and confirm that these were indeed, as she suggested, largely destroyed from 4400 BCE on by marauding Indo-Europeans whose societies were prone to violence, indifferent to art and nature, and dominated by men. Graeber and Wengrow argue that Gimbutas’s dismissal can be understood in part because she “was attempting to do something which, until then, only men had been allowed to do: craft a grand narrative for the origins of Eurasian civilization.”

Meanwhile, Haraway, once a goddess denier, has more recently embraced Lovelock and Margulis’s concept to describe the interdependence of organic, inorganic, and mechanical forces—including, famously, the cyborg. Today, the Gaianism movement holds an important, though controversial, place in discussions about biology, chemistry, genetics, and environmentalism. Proponents stress cooperation and revere mutualistic relations, emblematized by the holobiont—a unit made up of one host, plus the other species that live in, on, or around it. This idea encourages a kind of ecosystemic thinking—an awareness of and reverence for the other species surrounding us—that has had tremendous impact
on artists today.

Margulis, who in 1991 coined the term holobiont and placed symbiosis—mutually beneficial relationships—at the center of cellular evolution, was the presiding spirit over a recent exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Titled “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere,” the show focused on artists who explore instances of Gaianist mutualism. While these artists might not characterize themselves as goddess worshipers, their work expresses a vision of nature very close to Gimbutas’s “unbroken unity” of the Goddess. The artists probe various forms of symbiotic entanglement by introducing spiders into the gallery (Pierre Huyghe), interrogating the intelligence of bacteria (Jenna Sutela), transforming soil into currency (Claire Pentecost), and “painting” with freshwater algae (Anicka Yi).

MORE TRADITIONAL GODDESS IMAGERY is found in the British Museum’s recent exhibition “Feminine Power: the Divine to the Demonic.” But here too, it is clear that goddesses are not simply the obverse of a singular male creator god. Rather, female deities and demons play many roles in the creation and destruction of life. At one extreme is the rebellion against authoritarian male power embodied in Kiki Smith’s 1994 sculpture Lilith,which presents Adam’s disobedient first wife as a glowering she-demon crouching on the wall. Lilith exists on a continuum that also embraces the creative forces of nature, the maternal instincts of protection and nurture, and the reason-defying seductions of sexuality. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Lilith’s vengeful glare is a sense of solidarity and mutualism that reflects the entangled relationships between all life-forms celebrated by the “Symbiont” artists.

“Feminine Power” brings together secular and sacred artifacts from six continents dating from 6000 BCE to the present. Curator Belinda Crerar divides her selections into categories that stress creation, compassion, and desire, as well as disruption and force. She mingles contemporary works by artists like Kiki Smith, Alison Saar, Mona Saudi, Judy Chicago, and Wangechi Mutu with Cycladic fertility figures, Yoruban water goddesses, Tantric scrolls, Mesopotamian amulets, and Buddhist statues of Guanyin. Two striking themes emerge from this wealth of material: the transnational nature of goddess imagery and the widespread evidence throughout history of a gender-fluid concept of divine power. In many cultures, the earth divinity or creator deity displays masculine and feminine characteristics.

In its Great Goddess issue, Heresies sought a cross-cultural approach, with essays on Native American spiritual practices, West African secret female societies, and Indian Goddess worship. Nevertheless, like second-wave feminism generally, the Goddess artists of the 1970s presented a largely white demographic. Gimbutas’s focus on Old Europe may have contributed to the Eurocentric orientation of many of the artists for whom she was a guiding light.

Contemporary Goddess artists—Mutu chief among them—share their predecessors’ desire to use icons of female power and divinity as a springboard to envision new futures. But the new and more diverse generation brings a wider range of cultural references to the table. Mutu contributed an unsettling female figure composed of soil and ornamented with charcoal, oyster shells, feathers, hide, porcelain, and hair to “Feminine Power.” In the catalogue, she describes the work, Grow the Tea, then Break the Cups (2021), as a guardian figure endowed with a feminine intelligence. The artist elaborates: “I feel that in general women think about the future, different species, more than men. Women’s intellect, instincts and intuition are essential if we want to continue living in this world.” The Kenya-born artist’s current retrospective offers perspectives on East African creation stories and Caribbean mythology.

Not content with the essentialist conflation of women with life-giving forces of goddess art past, artists like Morehshin Allahyari and Chitra Ganesh don’t shy away from the less savory implications of gender-fluid divinity. Not all their goddesses play nice. Ganesh’s monumental 2015 Eyes of Time installation at the Brooklyn Museum paid homage to Kali, Hindu goddess of destruction and rebirth. Tri-breasted and multiarmed, Ganesh’s Kali has a clock in lieu of a head. The clock signifies that we have now entered a period called Kali Yuga, the final tumultuous age in the Hindu cosmic cycle in which the destruction of our world will herald the beginning of a new Golden Age.

New York–based Iranian artist Allahyari has been engaged in a multiyear project similarly dark in tone, using 3D printing to revive a coterie of fearsome jinns—shape-shifting spirits from Islamic literature and pre-Islamic legend that Allahyari reimagines as nonbinary, proto-feminist figures. One of her recurring characters is the jinn Huma, traditionally depicted as a demon with three heads and two tails. In pre-Islamic and Islamic mythology, Huma is responsible for human fevers; in Allahyari’s formulation, the spirit presides over the planet’s fever in the form of global warming. As the artist told an interviewer for Hyperallergic, “I’m not interested in the motherly goddesses. I’m only interested in the dark ones and the monstrous ones, and the cruelty of each of their powers that will take over something.”

For this new generation of feminist artists, Goddess imagery offers a language for exploring concerns like environmentalism, indigeneity, and gender fluidity. While they share the original Goddess artists’ worship of the feminized values of care and cooperation, the new generation also reflects our era’s anxiety and apocalypticism. In place of uplift, they are conscious of the potential for civilizational collapse. Climate change suggests that the nature goddess can take as well as give. While the original Goddess artists emphasized the nurturing side of female deities, it must be remembered that goddesses like Ishtar and Kali were both makers and destroyers of life. Adopting the language of Gaianism, Mutu suggests what is at stake today, remarking: “Building on the backs of other human beings by ravaging, squandering and pillaging depletes the earth and us all. The planet is intelligent and alive and constantly reminding us what it can be like, if we treat each other fairly.”  

On the occasion of the December 2022 print edition of A.i.A., the Religion Issue, we revisit this article from February 1997 that also explores how religion can play a significant role in shaping artists’ world views and artwork. In this case, Eleanor Heartney considered the link between Catholicism and four artists—Robert Mapplethorpe, Kiki Smith, Andres Serrano, and Joel-Peter Witkin—who became favorite targets of the political and religious right in the 1990s.

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DESPITE THE FACT that the modernist creed was often framed in quasi-theological terms, contemporary artists have tended to be squeamish about religion. Professions of religious belief have seemed somehow antithetical to the individualistic, socially progressive mentality that pervades the art world, an antithesis apparently confirmed by the virulent “culture wars” between artists and Christian fundamentalists. Polemical language aside, few art worlders would disagree with the dichotomy assumed by Pat Buchanan when he railed against the “nihilist, existential, relativist, secular humanist culture” and opposed “those who believe in absolute values such as God and beauty” to “those who believe in existential humanism.”¹

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So what are we to do about the fact that so many of the political and religious right’s favorite examples of “secular humanist culture” were raised as Catholics? Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley and David Wojnarowicz, all vilified in public controversies initiated by right-wing politicians, come from Catholic backgrounds. Of course, what distressed the self-appointed guardians of American morality was not these artists’ Catholicism per se, but their focus (inspired or reinforced, it will be argued here, by that religious background) on the body and its processes, on sexuality, carnal desire, transgression and death. If one casts a wider net, beyond those who have been demonized by the Christian right, it turns out that quite a few other artists of similar sensibility share a Catholic or partly Catholic background, including Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith, Janine Antoni and Joel-Peter Witkin.

Is there something about the Catholic perspective that pushes certain artists toward the corporeal and the transgressive? And if so, does that fact cast a different light on the culture wars? What would happen if the battle were redefined not as a standoff between believers and atheists, but between a Protestant, puritanically inclined fundamentalism and a more sensual and complex Roman Catholic-based culture?

A stress on the physical body has long been a key element in Catholicism. While Protestants view the kingdoms of God and Man as essentially separate, Catholicism stresses the continuity of the divine and the human.² All the major mysteries of Catholicism—the Immaculate Conception, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Transubstantiation of the Host into the Body of Christ, the Ascension and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary—emphasize the role of the human body as vessel of divine spirit.³ In his famous study of the sexuality of Christ, Leo Steinberg recognized a connection between Catholic doctrine and the focus on the physical body of Christ in Renaissance representations of the Madonna and Child. Steinberg argued that the many images of the Virgin Mary pointing to or otherwise emphasizing her child’s penis were intended to stress the Catholic doctrine of the humanity of Christ.⁴ Given this history, it’s no wonder that art made to convey Catholic doctrine should represent the human body with such explicit physicality; and it’s no wonder that such physicality has served as a source of inspiration for many contemporary artists.

This article will examine how the residue of a Catholic upbringing influences the work of four highly visible contemporary artists: Andres Serrano, Kiki Smith, Joel-Peter Witkin and the late Robert Mapplethorpe. It will also suggest that such new interpretations have implications for current political debates over religion’s place in American society. None of the artists under review are ( or, in the case of Mapplethorpe, were) practicing Catholics. Instead, Catholicism pervades their work as a more-or-less conscious undercurrent. Frequently it emerges in a mixture of the sacred and profane which may appear as blasphemy or sacrilege to fundamentalist viewers.

THE CATHOLIC QUESTION HAUNTS writing about Mapplethorpe. But although commentators have long acknowledged that the artist’s Catholic background is important to an understanding of his work (Mapplethorpe’s parents were church-going Catholics, and religion classes played an important role in his upbringing), they seem unable to pinpoint exactly why that might be so. The artist himself was not terribly forthcoming on the subject, though in a 1988 interview with Janet Kardon he acknowledged the formal impact of Catholicism on his work: “I think . . . that being Catholic is manifest in a certain symmetry and approach. I like the form of a cross, I like its proportions. I arrange things in a Catholic way. But I think it’s more subconscious at this point.”⁵ In the same catalogue, Kardon argues that Mapplethorpe’s flower photographs offer the greatest evidence of his Catholic background. “Because [Mapplethorpe’s] flowers are presented in a state of absolute perfection,” Kardon writes, “they suggest a realm more sacred than profane. These blossoms seem to emerge from a rarefied atmosphere in which Nature, like Heaven, is in array.”⁶ The quest for perfection Kardon perceives in the flower photographs is also visible in many of Mapplethorpe’s figure studies in which he seems to promise his subjects (Lisa Lyon, Thomas, Ken) a kind of photographic immortality through images that emphasize the magnificent perfection of their bodies, which he lights and poses like pieces of classical statuary. Later, their bodies will decay, but these glossy prints have preserved them in a modern version of eternal life.

In his interpretation of Mapplethorpe’s Catholicism in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, Dave Hickey seems closer to the mark when he suggests that Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio” (1978 ) demands of the viewer an “aesthetic submission” analogous to sexual and spiritual submission.⁷ Arthur Danto, in his 1995 study of Mapplethorpe, finds Catholic content, as well as form, in one of Mapplethorpe’s most notorious photographs. Danto analyzes the infamous image of Jim and Tom, Sausalito (1977), a triptych depicting one man urinating into another man’s mouth, in terms of the Baroque theme of “Roman Charity” in which a daughter gives her breast to her shackled father so that he will not starve. Despite the initial incongruity of the two themes, Danto’s comparison allows us see how the daughter/father pairing of “Roman Charity,” a scenario not without its share of transgression, is strangely refracted in Mapplethorpe’s tableau of unorthodox sexual pleasure. Danto strengthens the argument for linking Mapplethorpe’s work to the history of religious art by noting how the triptych format in this photograph recalls traditional altarpieces. He also points to the near Baroque theatricality of the light in which Jim and Tom, Sausalito has been shot.⁸

Both Hickey and Danto have seized on important pieces of the puzzle but, ultimately, such formal and iconographical interpretations alone do not fully explain the impact of Catholicism on Mapplethorpe’s art. Danto points beyond iconography when he reminds us that on being asked what was sacred to him, Mapplethorpe once replied, “sex,” an answer which Danto insists must be taken completely seriously.⁹ He’s right: sexuality was so sacred to Mapplethorpe that he allowed it to subsume his reputation, his art, his life. And here we arrive at the radical collapse of the spiritual and corporeal realms that is the ecstatic essence of Mapplethorpe’s work.

This collapse deserves the label “radical” because it exhibits a brand of ecstasy that runs counter to so much in American spiritual life. A number of factors have tended to undermine our recognition of the ecstatic side of religion. These include America’s Puritan heritage, with its focus on self-control and self-denial; the persistence of utopian ideals which “rationalize” religious life by locating the extremes of good and evil outside the ordinary human condition; and the secularization of daily life. Despite some notable exceptions ranging from Southern Baptists to Hasidic Jews, American religious practitioners tend to shy away from the release of intense emotions.

Nor do they seek the dissolution of individual consciousness into a larger oneness with God, nature or the universe. What America, at least fundamentalist America, finds impossible to tolerate in Mapplethorpe’s work is not just his celebration of sexual practices which embrace physical pain, submission and degradation, but the state of quasi-religious ecstasy that his subjects appear to thereby achieve.

From this point of view, the emphasis in Mapplethorpe’s work on sadomasochistic eroticism can be read as a mutation of the great mystics’ ecsta­tic submission to Christ (a condition nowhere better personified than in Bernini’s sculpture of Saint Theresa, where the saint’s expression is one of orgasmic bliss as the angel’s golden spear is about to pierce her heart). Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic imagery also contains a distorted reflection of the Catholic belief that mortification of the flesh purifies the soul, a point driven home repeatedly in the early years of the Catholic Church when gruesome accounts of the sufferings of the martyrs were circu­lated as a means of unifying the faithful. With this in mind, the images in the “X Portfolio” of fist fucking, flesh piercing and the paraphernalia of S&M begin to acquire surprising echoes of the art and literature of Christian martyrdom and of the practices of contem­porary self-flagellating sects such as the Penitentes of New Mexico.

By escaping the banality of daily existence through images of extreme acts of submission and physical perfection, Mapplethorpe replaces God with sex, creating a universe whose order is sustained through sexualized rituals of obedience and surren­der. As if to underline God’s absence, Mapplethorpe gives over the rule of his realm to a rather whimsical Devil, a role the artist played himself in self-portraits that show him adorned with horns or a bull-whip tail.

DESPITE THE FACT that Piss Christ (1987) was interpreted by U.S. politicians and others as a denunciation of Christianity, Andres Serrano appears less conflicted about his Catholic back­ground than Mapplethorpe. In the 1990s, Serrano has moved from early works which overtly con­demned the politics of the Catholic Church (among them Heaven and Hell, 1984, a well-known photo­graphic tableau which features a grim Leon Golub in a cardinal’s garb and a nude, blood-streaked woman with her hands bound above her head) to works, mostly of portraiture, which explore a far more per­sonal vision. This move away from polemical content has helped make it clear that Serrano’s attraction to Catholicism tends to be visual and esthetic rather than philosophical. Serrano is the first to acknowl­edge that he gravitates toward Catholic imagery rather than its theological complexities. A recent remark confirms his scant interest in questions of Christian doctrine: “I’ve heard that the Bible is a damn good book,” the artist says, “but I’ve never read it.”¹⁰ Yet even as he denies familiarity with the Bible, Serrano makes work that is permeated with Christian themes of redemption and transcendence.

Although as a child growing up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn Serrano attended catechism classes, his upbringing was not particu­larly devout. By his own account, his interest in Catholicism lay dormant until about 10 years ago, when Catholic imagery began emerging in his work. Curiously, the controversy over Piss Christ intensi­fied his involvement in Catholic themes and imagery. Five years ago this interest spilled over into his per­sonal life, as he began transforming his Brooklyn apartment into a kind of shrine. Today Serrano, the man Jesse Helms accused of “insensitivity toward the religious community,” lives surrounded by eccle­siastical furniture, Russian icons, Church statuary (including a large wooden carving of Saint Anthony), stained-glass windows and a wall of crucifixes. Serrano’s persistent subject is not, as many think, abjection. Viewed by series, his work reveals itself as concerned with transfiguring the mundane, the base and the profane. His 1986-89 photographs, which range from minimalistic monochrome images of milk or blood to Piss Christ, used bodily fluids, including an image of semen at the moment of ejaculation, to “paint” with light. Serrano originally thought of these photographs primarily in terms of abstraction, though he also had in mind Barnett Newman’s merg­er of the spiritual and the abstract. “The fluid works only became Catholic to me when I started to sub­merge religious objects in them,” he remarks. “As a Catholic, I was taught that the crucifix is just a sym­bol. We were never taught to fetishize it as the critics of Piss Christ did.”

These works were followed by two portrait series: “Nomads” (1990), monumental photographic images of homeless people done in the manner of Edward Curtis, and “Klansmen” (also 1990), pictures of high­ranking members of the Ku Klux Klan in their ceremonial robes. Citing the influence of Renaissance painting in which “there is more con­cern with light and the way it fell across the robes than with the faces of the figures,” Serrano points to the religious content of the photographs: “I saw the Klan in those robes and wanted to show how they see themselves as religious figures.”

After the “Nomads” and “Klansmen” series came “The Church” (1991), a series of photographs, never shown as a group in New York, of Catholic churches, priests and nuns in Italy, Spain and France. In these photographs priests and nuns appear as emissaries from an earlier time. Serrano has accentuated this metaphysical atmosphere by concentrating on sym­bols of his subjects’ vocations—robes, tabernacles, rosaries and other devotional objects. In a number of images he crops out the head entirely and zeros in on hands, religious accoutrements or the robes the nuns and priests wear. For instance, in The Church (Soeur Yvette II, Paris), the nun’s face turns away from the camera so that the photograph focuses on the flat black form of her draped veil. While The Church (Father Prank, Rome) does include the sit­ter’s face, the real point of the image is the red cross stitched on his black robe.

Serrano’s interest in the transfiguration of the abject is most clearly revealed in his series called “The Morgue” (1992). These extreme close-up frag­mentary views of the corpses of people laid low by such grim ends as drowning, rat poison, gunshots and AIDS, are infused with a gorgeous luminosity. Many evoke religious paintings of the Renaissance, and all the images radiate a beauty that may have eluded their owners in life. “I never saw the bodies as cadavers or corpses,” Serrano says. “I called them my models, my subjects. I was interested in the way they still had a human presence, that something of their soul was still intact.”

While it is impossible to deny the element of provocation in Serrano’s choice of subjects, the power of his work derives largely from his ability to take the basest of subjects—body fluids, abandoned corpses, Klansmen, homeless people—and enact an esthetic transformation which lifts them into the realm of spirit.

WHILE SERRANO, HAVING LEFT behind the anger of his early work, seems to have made peace with his Catholic heritage, Joel-Peter Witkin mounts a radical challenge to the Christian belief in resur­rection and an afterlife, bespeaking a spiritual despair. The child of an orthodox Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Witkin was raised as a Catholic (although he has retained a fascination with aspects of Jewish mysticism). Witkin has been extremely vol­uble about the influence of Catholicism on his work. His master’s thesis for the University of New Mexico, completed in 1976 and reprinted in the catalogue for his 1995–96 retrospective (seen in Italy at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and in this country at the Guggenheim Museum), is titled “Revolt Against the Mystical.” It chronicles Witkin’s desire to “bring God down to earth” by creating photographic images that make the invisible visible.¹¹

Unlike Mapplethorpe, who sought to capture an eternally frozen perfection through photography, Witkin uses the camera to enthusiastically depict the deformities and inevitable decay of the physical body. Instead of flawless physiques, he prefers models who are deformed, maimed, tattooed, obese, insane. He is particularly fond of bodies which suggest dual realms-hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, fetuses, corpses. Witkin’s work stakes out the threshold between life and death, which for a Catholic believer provides the ultimate border between the human and the divine.

From a Catholic perspective, there is almost too much material in Witkin’s oeuvre. An early series from 1974 carried the title “Contemporary Images of Christ” ( one of the photos addressed the theme of “Christ Mocked” through a Christ-like figure wearing World War II kamikaze goggles and women’s high heels), and Witkin has frequently based works on Christian iconography, albeit bizarrely transformed. In one photograph, a crucified nude man, masked and pierced with what appear to be threads, is flanked by two smaller crucifixes suspending the bodies of dead rhesus monkeys, tattooed for labora­tory experiments. The work is entitled Penitente, New Mexico (1982), an allusion to the New Mexico sect which every Easter reenacts Christ’s flagellation and crucifixion. Another work, which shows a man’s severed head on a plate, refers unmistakably to the martyrdom of John the Baptist, while an image depicting a hooded nude woman surrounded by tor­ture devices is titled Choice of Outfits for the Agonies of Mary, San Francisco (1984).

Yet for all its profusion, such iconographical evi­dence does not firmly establish Witkin’s interest in Catholic themes—the images could be seen as a subset of his larger interest in re-creating motifs from Western art history, as in his hermaphroditic version of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Instead, the key to Witkin’s despairing, pessimistic Catholicism seems to lie in the ambiguous course of his search for the sacred. In his 1976 thesis, he tells how, at age 17, he sought out a rabbi who was report­ed to have seen God. In what would prove the first in a series of failed efforts to make direct contact with God, Witkin found only “a tired, sleepy, little old man sitting in a comer of a large dusty study.”¹²

The black humor which runs through Witkin’s work is an expression of the artist’s rage at God, who not only refuses to show himself but dispenses death and deformity among mankind. In his master’s the­sis, Witkin alluded to his feelings toward God—a “love-hate would manifest itself in all the visual work I would create.”¹³ By reveling in the monstrous and repulsive, Witkin mocks God’s supposed mercy and challenges the promise of universal redemption.

WOMEN WHO PARTAKE of a Catholic sensibility often seem to approach Catholicism in a very different way from men. The sources of such differ­ences have been elucidated by historian Caroline Walker Bynam, who holds that the Western associa­tion of woman with flesh and man with mind or spirit, equations whose vestiges continue to haunt us today, was tempered in medieval Catholicism by an identification of woman with the body or humanity of Christ. Bynam offers this symbolic identification as one reason women were more susceptible to mysti­cal visions.¹⁴ She also cites the connection of women and Christ’s body in explaining medieval Catholicism’s hospitality to religiously inclined women. This corporeal symbolism is especially strik­ing when compared with later, Protestant versions of Christianity which relegated the human body unam­biguously to the realm of base matter, carnality and sin.

For certain contemporary women artists, Catholicism’s vision of continuity between the corpo­real and the divine seems to offer an alternative to ’70s-style feminism with its insistence on what now seems a false dichotomy between female and male, body and mind, nature and culture. The legacy of Catholicism’s female mystics also offers an alterna­tive to more recent feminist stances which assert that gender is simply a construct and that represen­tations of the female body are merely reinforcements of patriarchal power. Such notions dissuaded a gen­eration of theoretically inclined women artists from considering the body as a source of knowledge and meaning. The work of Kiki Smith provides an exam­ple of a woman artist who has found a middle way between these two extremes. Not surprisingly, one of her sources is Catholicism.

The daughter of a nonpracticing Catholic father raised by Jesuits and a mother who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and later became involved with Hinduism, Smith freely admits her attraction to Catholic imagery and themes. She notes that many of her works draw on religious iconogra­phy. “One reference for the body parts is the reliquary,” she remarked in a recent interview. “And the fluids I refer to—blood, milk and tears—are made holy in Catholicism. And, of course, once I started making sculptures of whole bodies rather than just insides, my main models were dolls and religious statues.” The impact of religious statuary was evident in her fall ’95 show at PaceWildenstein Gallery in New York, where one of the exhibited wall sculptures, a female figure with extended arms, was based on traditional representations of Christ’s descent from the cross. Other Catholic subjects that Smith has taken up include Mary Magdalene (shown covered with hair and attached to a chain to reflect her status in German art as the wild woman of early Christianity), the Holy Spirit rendered as a glass dove and the Virgin Mary. The latter two figured in her 1993 New York exhibition at Fawbush Gallery. Envisioning the gallery space as a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Smith centered the show on a life­-size bronze depiction of the Virgin with her skin stripped away. Speaking about this écorché figure, Smith says she was thinking about how Mary’s role as a bodily vehicle for God’s will essentially robs her of her own flesh.

While Smith feels deeply con­nected to Christian symbology, she also shares her mother’s ecu­menism and willingly draws imagery from other belief systems into her pantheon. Thus, her Fawbush “chapel” show also included figures drawn from European folklore, Classical myth and the Old Testament. For Smith, these forms, which includ­ed an assortment of faeries, the Greek nymph Daphne and Lot’s Wife, embodied different kinds of “female God attributes.” Appropriately, she found a differ­ent material for each sculpture: the Faeries were small winged figures of tin, the plaster figure of Daphne sprouted branches of blue glass, and Lot’s Wife was made of plaster and salt.

As in the work of the other artists discussed in this article, iconography doesn’t tell the whole tale. Smith’s Catholic roots are most strongly revealed not in her borrowings from art history, but by her attitude toward the body as a vessel of the soul. While Smith, like Serrano, has made works dealing with bodily flu­ids, she seems more interested in the problems of the flesh. Underlining this point, she observes, “Catholicism is a ritual religion, and as such it romanticizes the pain of flesh.” There is a markedly visceral character to her late-’80s representations of body fragments, works which include red-soaked paper shells resembling flayed fragments of human bodies, severed hands made of latex, as well as bronze and ceramic replicas of internal organs (wombs, hearts, stomachs). Despite the almost clini­cal tone of such works, the delicacy with which they are fashioned out of diverse materials precludes any suggestion of the medical school or the operating room. While insisting on the corporeal basis of our common humanity, Smith’s sculptures are touched with both pathos and a peculiar allure.

Smith also draws upon what she calls the “pagan side” of Catholicism: modern survivals of belief in the magical power of faith such as the wearing of medals and scapulars to ward off evil, votive candles lit for the dead, money left on the statues of saints as a plea for heavenly intercession, crutches thrown away at pilgrimage sites. In a sense, she sees her works as carriers of this kind of magical force. Just as the human body, fragmented or whole, is a vessel of tran­scendental spirit, the work of art preserves the miracle of creativity. “I’m an idol worshiper,” Smith says; “I believe objects hold power, that they retain the energy you put into making them. That’s why I’m an artist.”¹⁵

WHY SHOULD WE CARE about Catholic references or themes in the work of these four artists? There are several reasons to insist on its significance. First of all, it helps us understand why works like Piss Christ and the “X Portfolio” were considered so inflammatory. In Catholicism, the continuum between body and soul, earth and heaven, human and divine, suggests an inevitable corollary—a link between the sacred and profane. Earthly pleasures may be man’s downfall, but they also allow glimpses of heavenly ecstasy. Although by no means the exclusive domain of Catholics, such themes as the extremes of human sexual expression, the horrors of decaying flesh and death, and the forthright depiction of the body’s excretions and physical processes are especially well­-suited to the Catholic imagination. This is not to deny the social and political conservativism of the Catholic Church as an institution or its stand against abortion and homosexuality, as well as pre- and extramarital sex. The point, rather, is that Catholicism encourages a multilayered view of the world, a view that tends to persist even if an individual has discarded the Church’s orthodox doctrine.

Contrast this with the literalism of Protestant fundamentalists, for whom symbols and representa­tions are indistinguishable from the things to which they refer. It was such literalism which contributed to the controversy around Piss Christ in which politicians and members of the Christian Right seemed unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between a plastic crucifix and Christ the saviour just as other kinds of fundamentalists have confused the American flag with the United States and porno­graphic images with acts of physical violation). It is telling that Serrano’s work, even at its most provoca­tive, was never condemned by the Catholic Church. In fact, during an interview with a highly placed church official, Serrano was informed that Piss Christ presented less of a problem than his more abstract ejaculation photographs which ran counter to Church interdictions about the unnecessary “spilling of seed.”

Pondering the Catholic roots and controversial works of contemporary artists such as Serrano, Mapplethorpe, Witkin and Smith, one is inevitably led to consider larger political questions. As religion remains high on the national agenda, many funda­mentalist Christians would like to inscribe their moral vision as the law of the land. Their vision is one that reduces the complex and conflicting demands of religious belief, political discourse, social identity, economic striving, cultural expres­sion and individual relationships to a simplistic formula summed up in the phrase “family values.” It erases all shades of gray in the determination of good and evil, finds corporate-sanctioned media vio­lence acceptable but artistic representations of consensual sexual activity reprehensible, and mis­takes image for action, imaginative play or artistic interpretation for real life.

In this climate, the battle between the avant­-garde and the religious right has a significance which extends far beyond the cultural sphere. What is potentially at stake is the power to turn sectarian morality into the law of the land. The religious right’s success in presenting itself as the moral arbiter of society has unsettling implications for cur­rent debates over a range of issues including the regulation of pornography, the legal status of abor­tion and the death penalty, and the place of prayer in the schools, as well as more general issues like the equitable allocation of resources and the mean­ing of social justice and personal responsibility.

An acknowledgment of the religious roots of vari­ous controversial works of art might help us challenge the reductive tendencies of fundamental­ist morality. By the same token, an awareness of the influence which religion has had on certain highly visible artists might explode the myth of the neces­sary hostility between religion and contemporary art. While conservative politicians and pundits wage war on contemporary culture in the name of purity and innocence, artists nurtured in a Catholic tradi­tion have much to teach about the dark side of desire, the inseparability of body and soul and the necessary complexity of moral judgment. □

This article originally appeared in the February 1997 issue of Art in America.

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Art seems a poor tool to address these problems, and yet artists continue to make the attempt. Why, and to what effect? These are the questions that shape Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s new book, Beautiful, Gruesome, and True. Published by Columbia Global Reports, an imprint of Columbia University, it is not exactly a conventional art book, as it contains no pictures, and not exactly a piece of investigative reporting, as it presents no conclusions or solutions. Instead, it offers three carefully researched case studies of artists whose work has sprung from some of the most intractable conflicts currently underway throughout the world. In place of illustrations, Wilson-Goldie offers descriptions of works and referrals to websites where they can be seen. For the reader, the result is somewhat unsatisfying but may be a harbinger of a future where images are a luxury only mass-market books can afford. 

Typically, artists working in a political mode challenge social, economic, or civic institutions—including the institution of the art world itself—in the name of social justice. In these cases, they can still appeal to a widely shared sense of order, a set of principles, however tarnished. Wilson-Goldie has chosen to write about artists working in places where governmental institutions have collapsed or capitulated to outside forces, allowing criminality and violence to flourish. In such circumstances, Wilson-Goldie argues, art may operate as a proxy for political discourse that has otherwise been suppressed.

Wilson-Goldie, a Beirut- and New York–based art writer, weaves together biographical narrative, information about the sociopolitical context of artists’ works, and descriptions of specific projects. She writes in an engaging style, but her oddly shifting time frames can make the stories somewhat hard to follow. Each of her case studies involves artists moved to act by horrific events in their native countries. While all have subsequently garnered international art world accolades, acclaim seems beside the point. The work is driven by anguish, rage, and a desire to reach out to others who have also been affected by the evils pervading their world.

Amar Kanwar’s films and installations are created against the backdrop of India’s land battles. His galvanizing moment was the 1991 assassination of Shankar Guha Niyogi, a charismatic trade unionist whose efforts had brought together steel workers, Indigenous farmers, and contract miners in a formidable challenge to prevailing top-down models of rural and industrial development. With his death and the ultimate failure of authorities to bring his assassins to justice, his movement faltered. (The industrialists accused of ordering his murder were initially found guilty, only to have their convictions overturned by a higher court.)

Kanwar was a young filmmaker whom Niyogi had hired to document his activities; but instead of meeting his new employer, the artist arrived in time for his subject’s funeral. He remained to film the aftermath. Lal Hara Lehrake(1992), his short film documenting the outpouring of grief and anger over the murder, set him on a path to explore other collusions between government officials and masters of industry. He has examined such topics as the destruction of farmland and natural resources, land grabs by multinational companies, and the rise of resistance movements. While his immediate targets are specific acts of corporate greed and government corruption, his larger concerns encompass the social and political inequities and environmental devastation visited on rural communities by the global economy.

Kanwar eschews the role of muckraking documentarian, instead searching for a language that melds poetry with resistance. His films take a variety of forms. A Night of Prophecy (2002) carries us across India as individuals recite bits of poetry decrying both economic and caste-based discrimination. A Season Outside(1997) combines memories, dreams, archival footage, and reenactments to explore the scars of Partition, the 1947 division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.

An important early supporter was the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who commissioned A Night of Prophecy for his legendary Documenta 11 in 2002. Kanwar was included in the next three consecutive Documentas as well. His most ambitious project for that event was “Sovereign Forest,” a multimedia work for Documenta 13 in 2012. Its subject is the political and environmental conflict in the resource-rich and largely tribal Indian state of Odisha. The installation’s many parts include handmade books with films projected on their pages; maps; news clippings; samples of the huge varieties of native rice that have disappeared with the onset of industrial farming; and a 2011 film titled The Scene of Crime, which documents landscapes selected for impending industrial development. The work has evolved into an ongoing project that travels the world, as viewers contribute further evidence of the degradation of tribal lands.

WILSON-GOLDIE’S SECOND CASE STUDY is Teresa Margolles, whose work has evolved in the context of Mexico’s drug wars. These conflicts have empowered vicious cartels, engendered widespread military and police corruption, and turned the border between Mexico and the United States into a killing field. Again, globalism has been a contributing factor in this downward slide: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico, signed in 1994 as part of an effort to facilitate free trade among the three countries, inadvertently facilitated the illegal drug trade as trucks more easily crossed from Mexico into the US. In the process, it has decimated local economies in cities like Tijuana, Juarez, and Matamoros. In such border towns, the cartels have emerged as a kind of alternative government.

Margolles’s work makes the violence precipitated by this social breakdown visible to the world at large. Her materials comprise forensic evidence. She uses fabric soaked with the water used to wash corpses, mud from sites where cartel victims are buried, shards of glass from windshields shattered in drive-by shootings, and blood mopped up from crime scenes. While the materials are gruesome, the works themselves tend to be understated. A minimalist or conceptual aesthetic serves as a foil, making it all the more shocking to learn that a red flag is dyed with blood from execution sites or that a Richard Tuttle–like arrangement of strings comprises threads used after autopsies to sew up the bodies of persons who suffered violent deaths. Wilson-Goldie focuses in particular on Margolles’s contribution to the Mexican Pavilion for the 2009 Venice Biennale, where visitors were led through a series of galleries that distributed her unsettling works throughout the decaying 16th-century palazzo.

Margolles came to this work with a background in documentary photography and forensic pathology; but probably more relevant was her participation in SEMEFO, a Mexico City–based art collective that specialized in disturbing works employing such elements as animal cadavers and human remains. After the group’s dissolution in 1999, Margolles continued in a similar vein, while directing her work toward more explicit connections between violence and the global drug economy.

As Wilson-Goldie points out, there is a strong collaborative element in Margolles’s work. She collects her necro-based materials from families of victims and includes them in ritual actions and performances. Most recently, Margolles has been focusing on transgender sex workers, who are among the few denizens left behind in certain neighborhoods of Juarez in the wake of murders, violent crime, and the closing of the dance halls where they worked.

THE THIRD CASE STUDY BRINGS US Abounaddara, a Syrian film collective whose mostly anonymous members posted brief weekly videos on the internet between 2011 and 2017, during the worst years of the Syrian civil war. Wilson-Goldie begins her story in the early 2000s, when the death of Syria’s right-wing dictator Hafez al-Assad led to hopes of a more open and democratic society. However, after some initial reforms, these hopes were dashed when his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, proved equally repressive. Abounaddara emerged when a group of independent filmmakers came together to create short online videos. These were designed to evade official censorship by appearing to be simply trailers for films yet to be made.

Wilson-Goldie focuses extensively on Maya Khoury, one of the group’s founders and one of the few members to emerge from anonymity. A self-taught filmmaker like many in the collective, Khoury was initially motivated by the desire to complete a project about an elderly clothmaker working in the Old City of Damascus. Her frustration with the distribution options available to her led to the formation of Abounaddara.

Pro-democracy uprisings roiled the Arab world in 2010 and 2011, leading to the short-lived hope for an “Arab Spring.” Following the crushing of these hopes, Syrians responded to brutal suppression with weekly Friday protests. This became the time frame for the release of Abounaddara’s films. These short clips, which remain available online, are deliberately fragmentary. They employ a variety of formats, including pop references, surrealistic juxtapositions, reportage, literary allusions, and brief interviews. While not explicitly political, all are tinged with the frustrations, dangers, and absurdities of the everyday life of ordinary Syrians making the best of an impossible situation.

Work produced by Abounaddara is less easily assimilated to art world institutions than that of Wilson-Goldie’s other case studies. This is in part because of the decentralized nature of the group, and probably also because their films are directed primarily at local rather than international audiences. As a spokesperson for the group explains: “Our priority is not to criticize the regime. We address our people with our images to prove to them that their experiences and their dignity matter.” Thus, though Abounaddara began to receive invitations to prestigious exhibitions like Documenta and the Venice Biennale in the second half of the 2010s, the collective ultimately resisted this notice. Its weekly films ceased in 2017. Plans for longer films petered out, with a feature film commissioned for the 2017 Documenta left unfinished, never making it past a rough cut.

In place of a conclusion, Wilson-Goldie gives us an epilogue in which she reports on the unraveling of Abounaddara, Kanwar’s participation in the selection of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa as the organizers of the recently closed (and very problematically received) Documenta 15, and Margolles’s commission to create a temporary public monument to transpeople in London’s Trafalgar Square. It seems telling that these stories end not with a report on their impact on their respective causes but with the varieties of art world attention they have received. As a result, despite these artists’ inspiring examples, one is left with a sense of the distance between the art world’s self-congratulatory embrace of such heroic activities and the gritty and seemingly intractable problems they address.

What good can art do? The case studies here leave one with the sense that art in the political arena operates as a means of bearing witness, fostering empathy, and engendering relationships among the victims of global power plays. In her preface, Wilson-Goldie remarks that while this work implicates everyone, it may have its biggest impact on the art world and its debates over who brokers power. That seems laudable, but is it enough? In the face of the horrific threats to individual and collective human survival documented here, one can’t help but wish for more. 

In his curatorial statement, Tan asserts that the Triennial is designed to unveil the way people, objects, and events “are linked in a complex web of ties, associations, and relationships,” thereby attesting to “the power of art to resist our urge to silo during these uncertain times.” That this admirable sentiment is vulnerable to oversimplification is evident at the outset of the event’s titular exhibition at Asia Society. A pair of matching sculptures by Xu Zhen® guard the show’s entrance. Each comprises a headless copy of a traditional Cambodian sculpture grafted—vertically, neck to neck—onto a headless copy of a classical Roman figure, thus announcing the curatorial premise that in a globalized context all cultures are hybrid. Further amplifying this idea, the treacly strains of the Disney anthem “It’s a Small World” waft through the second-floor galleries. The soundtrack’s source is an installation by Ken and Julia Yonetani. Not surprisingly, the Yonetanis employ this tune ironically as part of a critique of the twentieth century’s misplaced confidence in the benefits of nuclear energy. But the song inevitably colors all the surrounding works, enfolding them in a soporific plea for cultural harmony.

Natee Utarit, The Dream of Siamese Monks, 2020, oil on canvas, six panels, 74 3/4 by 70 7/8 each; at Asia Society.

Selections both reinforce and push back against this narrative. Natee Utarit’s painting The Dream of Siamese Monks (2020) provides a textbook illustration of hybridity. Based on a nineteenth-century Thai painting, it is a mishmash of images of colonial architecture, neoclassical sculpture, Western tourists, and a Buddhist monk pointing toward a giant lotus. More intriguing in its cross-cultural references is a special project by Xu Bing and Sun Xun, “We the People.” Guest-curated by Susan L. Beningson of the Brooklyn Museum, the installation suggests the interplay between Chinese and American political thinking. An official nineteenth-century print of the American Declaration of Independence anchors the project. Xu presents a silkworm-infested copy of The Analects of Confucius, an ancient text on familial duties and good government that influenced several Founding Fathers. Sun contributes a long scroll painting that mixes traditional Chinese characters and motifs with broken fragments of the Statue of Liberty. Handwritten denunciations of tyranny from the Declaration of Independence imply a damning judgment on the recent politics of China and the United States.

At times the exhibition stretches the geographic definition of Asia almost to the breaking point, thus undermining the promise of common cultural inheritance. The Syrian-born artist Kevork Mourad emphasizes regional differences in Seeing Through Babel (2019), a model of the fabled Tower of Babel constructed from hand-drawn architectural cutouts. Minouk Lim’s Running on Empty, on the other hand, presents three totemic sculptures surrounding a video assembled from a 1983 broadcast documenting efforts to reunite Korean families torn apart by the Korean War. The faces of hopeful, despairing, and—in a few cases—joyfully reunited family members speak to the particularities of Korean history without having to belabor the work’s relevance to the current issue of family separation at the US-Mexico border.

Kevork Mourad, Seeing Through Babel, 2019; at Asia Society.

The second exhibition, “Dreaming Together,” at the New-York Historical Society, gives visitors a glimpse of what the originally envisioned civic extravaganza might have entailed. Culling works from the collections of Asia Society and the Historical Society (where she is curator of American art), Wendy N.E. Ikemoto has created interesting conversations across cultural and historical divides. The first of the show’s four thematic sections, Nature, includes such delights as a pair of meticulously realistic nineteenth-century still lifes by Martin Johnson Heade, set alongside Zhang Yirong’s exquisitely executed ink-on-silk Spring Peony III (2014). The People section pairs works like George Henry Boughton’s 1867 painting Pilgrims Going to Church and Stafford Mantle Northcote’s 1899 Hi Hee, Chinese Theatre, Pell St., New York City. While the former’s somber pilgrims reinforce the founding mythology of a white Protestant America, the latter’s depiction of a performance of Cantonese opera in Lower Manhattan suggests the nation’s more diverse reality. In City, visitors find such matchups as photographs by Zhang Dali showing the abrupt modernization of Beijing juxtaposed with shots of urban decay in Harlem by Marc Winnat. The Protest section includes poster images by Kalaya’an Mendoza and Kenn Lam advocating Asian/African American solidarity.

But overhanging all these mini-stories was a larger narrative suggested by the inclusion of the Historical Society’s celebrated painting cycle “Course of Empire” (1833–36) by Thomas Cole. These five tableaux chronicle the rise and fall of a great civilization. Placed at the outset of the exhibition, they set an elegiac tone that is picked up by references in various works to the destruction of the World Trade Towers, the demolitions wrought by gentrification, and the destruction of political monuments. Matching Cole in epic ambition was Lotus, a 2014 video animation by Shiva Ahmadi that depicts the transformation of a peaceful Buddhist kingdom into a dystopia of war and destruction.

The Asia Society Triennial suggests the evolution of pan-Asian exhibitions. After a hiatus during the market-driven years of the early twenty-first century, explorations of identity in art and art criticism are back in full force. But identity takes on a new complexion in a world shaken by financial crises, pandemic, right-wing nationalism, and, in the US, unapologetic racism. The 1990s discourse on the “Other” assumed a binary opposition between mainstream and margin, which served to implicitly elevate “non-Otherness” as the norm. By contrast, twenty-first-century identity emphasizes hybridity, intersectionality, and the leveling of hierarchies. But is this just another soothing myth?

While “We Do Not Dream Alone” conveys a hopeful message about multiculturalism, “Dreaming Together” suggests that our commonalities are less about shared cultural traditions than about a collective potential for universal annihilation. In that sense, a “small, small world” is a terrifying prospect.

This article appears under the title “Asia Society Triennial” in the March/April 2021 issue, pp. 63—64.

Cover of the book “Poor Richard,” 2020, D.A.P./National Gallery of Art.

Cover of the book “Philip Guston Now,” 2020, D.A.P./National Gallery of Art.

Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, et al., Philip Guston Now, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, and New York, D.A.P., 2020; 280 pages, $60 hardcover.

Philip Guston, Poor Richard, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, and New York, D.A.P., 2020; 96 pages, $14.95.

“What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” As we hunker in lockdown, chafing at the restrictions imposed by a pandemic whose effects have been magnified by the incompetence of our leaders, this comment by Philip Guston hits a nerve. What should art be when the world seems to be collapsing around us? Is it ethically and morally responsible to try to escape the madness by withdrawing into the solace of aesthetic pleasure?

When Guston spoke these words, he was nearing the end of a life that had spanned some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century, among them the Depression, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the struggle for civil rights, the debacle of the Vietnam War, and the duplicity of Richard Nixon. His response to these events was full of rich ambiguity. He famously careened from early Social Realist figuration to Abstract Expressionism and finally to the darkly humorous Neo-Expressionism that earned him the enmity of his contemporaries and the passionate embrace of younger artists. Guston was never simply a political commentator, but his work is permeated with a sense of unease rooted in an awareness of his own and society’s complicity in evil. Since his death in 1980, his late paintings, with their jumbles of shoes and bottles, bare bulbs, bloodshot eyeballs, and cigarette-smoking Klansmen have continued to electrify and influence successive generations of artists.

Philip Guston: The Return, 1956-1958, oil on canvas, 70 1/8 by 78 3/8 inches; at Tate, London.

Philip Guston Now is the catalogue for a traveling exhibition that was supposed to open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this summer. Though that may yet happen, what we have for now is a lushly illustrated book with scholarly essays on various aspects of Guston’s work by that exhibition’s four curators. It is accompanied by Poor Richard, a slim volume containing a selection of Guston’s satirical drawings of Richard Nixon, created in the summer of 1971, two years before Watergate; this publication honors the promised gift of the Poor Richard drawings by the Guston Foundation to the National Gallery of Art. Together, the two books emphasize Guston’s intense involvement in the world outside the studio. In the main catalogue, the National Gallery’s Harry Cooper provides an overview that stresses the political undercurrents in the work and the thematic continuities between the two figurative periods. Mark Godfrey, from Tate Modern in London, teases out the Jewish themes that permeate the late work. Alison de Lima Greene, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, focuses on the early work, discovering an ongoing preoccupation with masks that extends beyond the Klan figures to images of clowns, children, musicians, and commedia dell’arte characters. And Kate Nesin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, provides a more formal analysis, with a detailed study of the role of space and horizons in the artist’s late work.

Poor Richard, meanwhile, lets the work speak for itself. In a brief afterward, Cooper—the sole commentator in this volume—notes that Guston arranged these seventy-three (out of 164) Nixon drawings to evoke a wordless narrative in the manner of a graphic novel. The book introduces the future president as a young boy, sleepless in bed as a belching freight train passes his window. The subsequent pages take him to adulthood and his political career, touching on real events like Nixon’s overtures to China and his role as part of an unholy trinity that included Henry Kissinger and Vice President Spiro Agnew. Among the images, which are included separately in the exhibition, are fantasy tableaux showing the trio outfitted in Klan hoods or peering into bleak landscapes scattered with the rubble and artifacts familiar from Guston’s late paintings. As Cooper remarks, the similarities suggest Guston’s equation of the self-identified Artist in the paintings with the darker aspects of Nixon’s soul.

Philip Guston: Legend, 1977, oil on canvas, 69 by 78 1/2 inches; at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

But as Cooper argues in the main catalogue, “perhaps the best commentary has been the work of other artists, who picked up on Guston’s late work long before most critics, curators, and collectors did.” In keeping with this idea, interspersed within the curators’ texts are statements by ten contemporary artists who reflect on Guston’s diverse output in light of their own concerns. These practitioners offer some of the most thought-provoking takes on the midcentury artist and his creations.

Trenton Doyle Hancock and Glenn Ligon zero in on the Klan theme that appears first in the 1930s and then reappears in the 1970s. Hancock offers a perceptive analysis of an early drawing for a lost 1930 painting called Conspirators; the drawing foregrounds an apparently dejected Klansman as a group of his cohorts huddle under a lynching and a crucifixion. Hancock notes that this work inspired his own painting narrative, which pits his alter ego against a threatening Klan figure. He remarks, “Guston often spoke of ‘ghosts’ in the studio, voices of predecessors requiring exorcisms. At some point you have to stop the chase and confront those voices.” Ligon expands on the same 1930 Klan figures and their later reincarnations. He contends that this motif enabled Guston to “dive into the muck and mire of the American experience, allowing him to tell the truth of what it meant to be a citizen reckoning with a particularly turbulent moment in the nation’s history.”

Philip Guston: Drawing for Conspirators, 1930, graphite, pen, ink, colored pencil, and wax crayon on paper, 22 11/16 by 14 9/16 inches.

Other artists concentrate on the more subjective qualities in Guston’s work. Amy Sillman waxes lyrical about the quotidian imagery in late Guston’s self-portraits, remarking, “the worried guy in Guston’s pictures, smoking, eating, and watching, is a guy who both reveals and repudiates time; doubt regenerates him.” David Reed recalls the advice Guston proffered his art class during a student crit: “To live in the world as painters, we had to go into the life we were living and find what disturbed us.” Dana Schutz echoes those sentiments in an assessment that stresses Guston’s empathy even for the most unredeemable of his characters: “More than any other artist, Guston renders the messy contradictions and heartbreaking ambiguity of what it is to be a person.”

For other contributors, Guston’s work offers affirmations of their own often idiosyncratic paths. William Kentridge analyzes Guston’s hooded self-portrait as “an example of the work of the studio, which is to take the fragments of the world, rearrange and transform them, and send them back out into the world (here as a painting).” Art Spiegelman notes how Guston’s willingness to cross the high/low divide empowered a generation of comics artists like himself. Both Tacita Dean and Rirkrit Tiravanija celebrate the freedom that erupted when Guston turned his back on the approval of his peers. Dean celebrates his embrace of the company of writers and cartoonists, while Tiravanija admits to being more interested in the stories of Guston’s rejection by the art world than in his formal innovations. And Peter Fischli confesses that his fascination with Guston stems from the great difference in their world views: Guston, as a modernist, embraced the drama of the artist’s struggle in the studio; Fischli, as a postmodernist, implies the absurdity of that struggle.

Philip Guston: Black Sea, 1977, oil on canvas, 68 1/8 by 117 inches; at Tate, London.

These commentaries help us see why Guston persists when the work of so many of his contemporaries is now tinged with the musty odor of art history. Guston’s enduring appeal rests in the permissions he offers artists. He encourages them to drastically change their work in midstream, to examine their personal relationship to evil, to embrace discredited styles and genres, and to accept and even revel in their own ambivalence about the meaning of art. Their responses vindicate the renegade modernist who declared in 1970: “I got sick and tired of all that Purity! Wanted to tell Stories!”

Both the environmental movement of the 1970s and the emerging feminist revolution rejected social and scientific models based on domination in favor of an approach to society and nature that emphasized interconnection. Both sounded alarms about the continuation of the status quo. Both called for a radical reordering of human priorities. The two came together in a philosophy of ecofeminism that paired the liberation of women with the restoration of the natural environment.

Ecofeminism was powerfully articulated in Carolyn Merchant’s 1980 book, The Death of Nature. A historian of science, Merchant took a skeptical view of the Scientific Revolution, which lies at the heart of the prevailing narrative of Western progress. Instead of regarding the ideas of Descartes, Hobbes, and Bacon as laudable advances in human civilization, she linked them to the triumphal subjugation of nature and a more general paradigm that extended to the treatment of women. She described how the organic, female-centered vision of nature was replaced by a mechanistic, patriarchal order organized around the exploitation of natural resources. And she advocated holistic approaches to social organization that reflected the principles of the then-new science of ecology.

Concepts such as these galvanized artists. It is striking how many pioneers of Eco art are also deeply committed feminists. They pursue a feminism that is less about breaking the glass ceiling than about reordering the systems that perpetuate inequity. Their feminism centers on the interconnections of society, nature, and the cosmos. It expresses itself in artworks that make these connections legible.

The Harrisons: The Garden of Hot Winds and Warm Rains, 1996, from the project “Future Gardens,” 1995–. This drawing compares the potential for harvesting two biodiverse botanical groupings, which are adapted to temperature rises in wet and dry climates.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles came to environmentalism through her roles as artist and mother. She suggested that the practice of “maintenance” commonly associated with domesticity and “women’s work” might serve as a constructive model for the larger social, economic, and political systems that support contemporary life. This conviction blossomed into her life’s work as the unsalaried artist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, where she works to dramatize the part played by waste management and recycling in sustaining a healthy city.

Agnes Denes, also a New York–based artist, was deeply involved in the activist feminist community in the 1970s. She was a member of the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, which pressured museums to show more art by women, and a founding member of A.I.R., the first women’s co-op gallery in the United States. During those years, she also developed the complex body of work recently presented in a retrospective at The Shed in New York, which featured, among other pieces, documentation of her 1982 Wheatfield, planted on two acres of soil that had been excavated to build the World Trade Center. The iconic photographs of this project, with yellow wheat swaying before Manhattan skyscrapers, served as a reminder that even the mightiest urban system could not survive without the ancient art of agriculture.

Ukeles and Denes share a systemic understanding of reality. “No element of an interlocking cycle can be removed without the collapse of the cycle,” Merchant wrote.¹ Ecofeminist artists espoused a sense of the earth as a living thing and explored Indigenous practices that predated the Scientific Revolution. Ecofeminism did not exclude men. Echoing ideas expressed as well by such visionaries as the famous naturalist John Muir and the futurist Buckminster Fuller, ecofeminism presented a vision of society that leveled hierarchies and emphasized cooperation and collaboration over individual action. In doing so, it set the stage for tendencies such as social practice art, relational aesthetics, and ecological activism that have become widespread today.

Helen and Newton Harrison worked together as a husband-and-wife team from 1970 until Helen’s death in 2018. Their collaborative process has provided one of the most influential models of Eco art practice. Drawing on Conceptual art’s use of documentation and charts, the Harrisons combined maps, sketches, and aerial photographs in blueprints that suggest system-wide approaches to specific ecological situations. Accompanying texts include factual descriptions of problems and strategies along with poetic dialogues blending diverse quotes from planners, ecologists, botanists, and foresters with the artists’ own voices. The Harrisons saw themselves as instigators rather than conventional art-makers. They used their position as informed outsiders to insert ideas into policy discussions about land and water use here and abroad. While their proposals have rarely been adopted in toto, their principles have made their way into numerous city plans and environmental projects. A series of proposals for restoration of the damage done to the watershed by the Devil’s Gate Dam in Pasadena, California, ultimately informed the 1993 design of the 1,300-acre Hahamongna Watershed Park. The plan incorporates such Harrison proposals as recreation areas, flood management, and habitat restoration.

Newton was a sculptor and Helen an English teacher in the New York City school system when they married in 1953. Before they were Eco artists, the Harrisons were political activists. Helen was the New York coordinator for the 1961 Women’s Strike for Peace, which targeted nuclear weapons testing. Later, as part of the protests against American intervention in Vietnam, the duo helped form the Tompkins Square Peace Center. By 1972, they were gaining renown for their environmental work. That year they exhibited at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, the legendary art center cofounded by Judy Chicago, after Arlene Raven overruled other members who resisted participation by a team that included a man. Then, as now, it was difficult to disentangle the Harrisons’ individual contributions to their collaborative work.

The Harrisons: San Diego as the Center of a World, 1974, a drawing comparing possible outcomes of global cooling and warming due to human intervention.

The Harrisons’ language is relational. Asked in a 2010 interview about her overall perspective on the planet, Helen replied: “As we destroy the earth, the ocean, the air we are inevitably destroying all that makes life possible for ourselves.”² To counter this destructive ethos, the Harrisons proposed a gestalt shift: instead of seeing the field of ecology as a small area of human activity, they proposed that humans be viewed as small figures within a larger system of natural forces. From the late 1990s onward, they rethought the scale of their projects, drawing up sweeping plans that regard national borders as artificial boundaries, and piece together formerly separated watersheds, mountains, and land masses to form coherent ecological wholes. Each such work provides a feasible map for the ecological reclamation, restoration, and reinvention of specific watersheds or environmental systems.

For instance, a 2001–04 project titled Peninsula Europe redrew the map of the continent, eliminating political borders so that the natural system of drain basins and forests can be seen as a whole. This chart forms a backdrop for the artists’ suggestions of transnational strategies to establish green farming, restore biodiversity, and redirect irrigation systems. The Harrisons invoke metaphors to dramatize their ideas. Casting a Green Net: Can It Be We Are Seeing a Dragon? (1996–98) imposes the visual image of a dragon over a map of Northern England to present its estuaries as an interconnected whole.

As the devastation created by climate change escalated, the Harrisons’ warnings became sharper. Their last big initiative, an ongoing project begun in 2007 and continued by Newton after Helen’s death, is named The Force Majeure, after the term for extraordinary circumstances that can nullify a legal agreement. Sometimes described as “acts of God,” such conditions are considered beyond the control of the parties involved. The Harrisons use the term to express the forces unleashed by climate change to which we must learn to adapt.

This project introduces a planetwide approach. The Harrisons’ ideas have a utopian tinge that they argued is necessary, given the scale of the dangers. Newton characterizes recent proposals made for Sweden, Scotland, and the Mediterranean under the aegis of Force Majeure as “counter-extinction work.” They involve relocating whole ecosystems, adapting those that remain to the new conditions, creating fully self-sustaining “green cities,” establishing cooperatively owned agricultural commons, enhancing the landscape’s ability to hold water in drought-prone areas, and fostering systems that reverse the entropic loss of carbon dioxide from soil. To implement such plans on the scale necessary, the Harrisons concede, would require radical limits on growth, development, and population.

Aviva Rahmani: Blued Tress Symphony, 2015. The painted trees form the opening bass chords, with the rest of the performable score superimposed on a photo of a forest in Oneida County, New York, where Dominion Transmission has planned to expand its natural gas pipeline.

Artist Aviva Rahmani also makes use of legal ideas. Her Blued Trees Symphony (2015–) is a performance work made with a forest by painting a musical score on the trees. The project poses the question: can the copyright law that protects art be used to protect land in danger of seizure under the rule of eminent domain? Like the Harrisons, Rahmani has deep roots in both feminism and environmentalism. In 1968 she founded the American Ritual Theater to present performances about rape and domestic violence. Then, in the 1970s, she undertook her first works with nature, photographing sunsets and making exchanges between the water from the taps at CalArts in Valencia, California, and the Pacific Ocean. She used plastic bags to transport tap water to the ocean, and replaced it with salt water that she flushed down the toilets at the school.

The various iterations of Blued Trees Symphony are designed to slow the construction of oil and natural gas pipelines across the country. In recent years, there have been numerous demonstrations against such projects, the most prominent being the Dakota Access Pipeline protests staged by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Rahmani decided to take a different tack, inspired by Canadian sculptor Peter von Tiesenhausen, who copyrighted his entire ranch as art in 1996 to forestall the intrusion of a pipeline. The company withdrew its claim before the artist’s gambit could be tested in court.

Maquette of an installation inspired by a court transcript of Aviva Rahmani’s mock trial, featuring suspended translucent panels and painted branches.

Rahmani went a step further. Instead of copyrighting a single plot of land, she conceived of Blued Trees Symphony as an infinitely expandable artwork. She pits the principle of eminent domain, whereby private land can be claimed in the name of public good, against the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. That piece of legislation protects the moral rights of artists, notably by preventing an owner of a work from altering or destroying it while continuing to display it under the artist’s name. With this in mind, Rahmani has composed a “symphony” whose score is literally written on trees growing on property in danger of being appropriated for a pipeline. She works with landowners and teams of volunteers to mark trees with sine waves in nontoxic blue paint. Each tree represents a note and each cluster of trees a chord. Each third of a mile constitutes a musical measure.

Visitors to the woods can imagine the symphony as the whisper of wind and twittering of birds among the painted trees. Or the symphony can be played on-site by musicians and singers who perform the painted score as they move through the forest. The work can also be realized digitally by feeding aerial GPS images from Google Earth into MuseScore software. Rahmani sees the project as giving trees a kind of agency. Linked together through the symphony, they communicate with each other and with humans.

A Blade of Grass, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that supports activist art and social practice, organized a mock trial to test the legal standing of Rahmani’s work at the Cardozo School of Law in 2018. The judge ordered an injunction against a hypothetical corporation. Earlier, in 2015, the Spectra Energy Corporation had defied a cease-and-desist notice from Rahmani and cut down the painted trees in Peekskill, New York. Undeterred, she has continued to create iterations of the symphony in Upstate New York, Virginia, West Virginia, and Saskatchewan. “All combined, any such litigation slows the corporations from cutting down the trees while other litigation by activists compounds to make it an expensive legal process for them,” Rahmani says. “At the very least, we contributed to drawing attention to the problems.”³

Rahmani recently responded to a call from Native American activist Winona LaDuke to come and help combat a major new oil pipeline designed to transport oil from Canada’s tar sands across Lake Superior. She has plans to add a new one-third-mile-long measure to her project in Minnesota.

Betsy Damon’s art practice embodies a stark philosophy, as she explains: “Nothing is worth saying unless it acknowledges interconnectivity.”⁴ This principle has guided her work since the 1970s, when she put on interactive street performances in New York, handing out pouches of flour as the 7,000 Year Old Woman (an age chosen because it supposedly predates patriarchy) and, as the Blind Beggarwoman, crouching over a begging bowl and asking passersby to share stories. In 1985, when she cast in handmade paper 250 feet of a dry riverbed in Castle Valley, Utah, Damon realized she wanted to create work with a more direct impact on the ecosystem. Since then, she has focused on water, celebrating it as a living thing, a source of life, and a foundation of health.

Betsy Damon: 7,000 Year Old Woman, 1977, performance, New York.

In 1991 Damon founded Keepers of the Waters, a nonprofit organization that serves as the umbrella for her diverse activities. Though she also creates water-
related drawings and paintings, Damon’s primary aim has been to educate the public about the nature of living water systems and their potential restoration, defining those systems as water deriving from natural sources and flowing exclusively through streams and rivers fashioned by nature. One recurring theme in her projects is water’s ability to cleanse itself when unimpeded by development and industry. Her work has taken her across the United States and to China and Tibet, where she collaborates with local artists, residents, and government officials.

Much of Damon’s current work evolved from a project in China. In 1995, when the country was still sensitive to public assemblies after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, she found herself in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province in southwestern China. Overcoming official suspicion by avoiding explicit political messages, she organized a two-week series in which a group of artists produced temporary public artworks and performances that dramatized both the history and consequences of the industrialization of the Funan River. The success of this venture led to a return invitation, this time to create a city park that she dubbed the Living Water Garden. The six-acre site, which opened in 1998, includes a natural wetland that acts as a water cleaning system, an environmental education center, an amphitheater, and interactive water sculptures, including a giant fish that symbolizes regeneration. The Garden’s purpose is to demonstrate the use of natural processes to cleanse water. As with the earlier festival, it was the product of extensive community meetings and discussions about local water conditions.

Damon has taken this model to other locations. She characterizes Keepers of the Waters as a catalyst: while letting control remain in local hands, her organization brings together community leaders and experts, and helps them brainstorm solutions. The point is to facilitate change rather than author a specific solution. Sometimes the process is frustrated by local politics. This was the case in a similarly motivated project in the disadvantaged Larimer neighborhood of Pittsburgh in 2012–16. There, Damon worked with a community group to hammer out creative plans to address local water problems. Among the ideas proffered were redirecting rainwater to mitigate flooding and creating a cistern as a centerpiece for an urban park.Despite the enthusiastic input of local artists and residents, Damon said, the project came to naught when it was abruptly canceled by funders seeking a more top-down approach.

One of Damon’s current efforts involves a cleanup of the Mississippi River. Again, the project involves bringing affected parties together—this time with a focus on taking down dams, restoring water flow, and reconnecting small creeks and rivers. Damon’s work routinely involves a wide-ranging educational effort. Her website, blog, and newsletter detail the latest news from scientists, artists, and other activists on issues ranging from the toxicity of tap water throughout the United States to green solutions like reforestation and eco-friendly lawns. She is currently completing a memoir-cum-tool-kit titled A Memory of Living Water that chronicles her journey, lays out her philosophy, and evaluates the activist approaches she has explored.

Like Damon, Bonnie Ora Sherk came to Eco art through performance. In the 1970s she undertook a series of works in San Francisco that questioned human dominance over the natural world: she sat in an evening gown in a flooded highway interchange; she turned derelict public spaces into temporary Portable Parks, creating the astonishing sight of farm and zoo animals communing on concrete islands adjacent to a freeway offramp; accompanied by a caged rat, she ate lunch in a cell at the zoo while the tiger next door looked on. She created an entire ecosystem in a museum gallery, complete with trees and various animals, and allowed the constituents to interact. These works culminated in a seven-year project titled The Farm (1974–80), located at the intersection of freeway overpasses in San Francisco—a more expansive, longer-term correlate to the Portable Parks. The Farm comprised organic gardens, an animal sanctuary, art exhibitions, and performance spaces for musicians and actors.

Bonnie Ora Sherk: A Living Library & Think Park, Bryant Park, New York, 1981–83. International Banners surrounding the park to be presented in three different languages.

This led Sherk to her current work, a series of projects under the title “A Living Library.” In 1981 she envisioned the first one next to the New York Public Library in Bryant Park, which at the time was a drug haven nicknamed Needle Park. Her idea was to create a series of Gardens of Knowledge analogous to the information shelter provided by the nearby library. Gardens around the periphery and in the center featuring different kinds of flora and fauna were to have been the basis for a variety of interactive educational and cultural programming. There were to have been gardens with themes like Mathematics, highlighting patterns in nature, or Religion, exploring the symbolism of various plants. Though the project was never realized, it provided the spark for her current work.

“A Living Library” (Sherk notes that the acronym A.L.L. sums up her ambition to address all living systems) is now a loose set of initiatives in various locations that Sherk hopes will develop into a global network. Supported by grants, the Libraries transform blighted areas by engaging schoolchildren and community members in nature walks, gardening, restoring native plants, and implementing rainwater harvesting systems. These activities are incorporated into educational programs for the local schools’ curricula.

One Living Library is located next to a branch of the public library on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Begun in 2002, the work creates community-run gardens and learning zones in a thirteen-acre park on this island in the East River not far from the United Nations. Programming includes workshops on everything from worms and seed-saving to food security and food sustainability. In San Francisco, A Living Library in Bernal Heights is the beginning of a park that will span the eleven neighborhoods that are part of the Islais Creek Watershed. The project includes the first leg of a nature walk that will link schools, parks, streets, housing development campuses, and other open spaces. Already, the project has transformed a previously barren hill, whose runoff once exacerbated local flooding and sewage overflow, into a lush garden full of native trees and plants.

Bonnie Ora Sherk: A Living Library & Think Park, Bryant Park, New York, 1981–83. Entrance to the Bryant Park Living Library.

Today, a burgeoning Eco art movement owes many of its assumptions and approaches to the ecofeminist orientation of pioneers like these. Recent MacArthur fellow Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991–) uses targeted plantings to cleanse soil of heavy metals—an iconic example of “green remediation.” Nils Norman has created communal urban farming parks. Amy Balkin seeks out legal ways to make parcels of land and air part of the public domain. All these artists rely on a critique of the instrumentalist ideology of modern capitalism and technology that harks back to Merchant’s analysis of our problematic fixation on progress. Yet recent museum shows by Denes and Ukeles notwithstanding, this kind of art often fails to register in the mainstream art world. Eco art projects typically engage large groups of collaborators from outside the art world, meld art with other forms of cultural expression, blur aesthetic and practical considerations, and generally defy existing commercial and critical frameworks. But as the climate crisis deepens and we look for answers, this may be the art that matters most.

¹ Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New York, Harper Collins, 1980, p. 293.
² Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, interview by Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, “The Harrisons,” SexEcology, July 4, 2010, sexecology.org.
³ Aviva Rahmani, quoted  in G. Roger Denson, “Earth Day EcoArt by Aviva Rahmani Confronts Deforestation, Fracking, Nuclear Hazards in Eastern US Woodlands,” Huffington Post, Apr. 21, 2016, huffpost.com.
⁴ Betsy Damon, “Public Art Visions and Possibilities: From the View of a Practicing Artist,” A Memory of Living Water, forthcoming.

This article appears under the title “All or Nothing” in the May 2020 issue, pp. 40–49.

Marcia Tucker Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker, eds. Lisa Phillips, Johanna Burton, and Alicia Ritson, with Kate Wiener, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, and New York, New Museum, 2019; 288 pages, 41 color and 10 black-and-white illustrations, $40 paperback.

In 1985 I published an article on the New Museum for the late, lamented New Art Examiner magazine. The museum was just nearing its tenth anniversary, and the article, titled “Can the New Museum Buck the ’80s,” attempted to assess its place in the New York art ecosystem. Looking back, I’m immediately struck by the emphasis that I and the people I interviewed all placed on the New Museum’s outlier status. Both sympathizers and detractors pointed to its focus—at a moment of relentless market ascendance—on polemics, intellectual rigor, and sociopolitical issues. The museum’s maverick founder, Marcia Tucker (1940–2006), wanted to rethink everything from the role of art in society to the organization of the institutions that support it. Ned Rifkin, a former New Museum curator, put the case succinctly: “Marcia’s disposition is to take an adversarial position. That spirit is what informs the avant-garde and also, I think, the museum itself.”¹

So it is fascinating to revisit Tucker’s thoughts and agenda as they are laid out in Out of Bounds, a recently published sampling of her essays dating from 1969 to 2004. One of the most striking aspects of the book is how unexceptional so many of Tucker’s positions now appear. She advocates ethnic, racial, and gender diversity; revision of the canon; and an acknowledgment of the role of class and ethnocentrism in cultural judgments. She calls for museums to become more accessible to general audiences and valorizes the participatory aspects of art. Once heretical, such ideas are now commonplace.

Readers who know only the New Museum’s current sleek incarnation on the Bowery may be surprised by the humble nature of its origins. In 1975 Tucker was fired from her position as curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, following what New York Times critic Hilton Kramer termed the “debacle” of her Richard Tuttle show. Kramer sniffed, “How anything so egregiously subordinate to the most minor of minor art could be misconstrued as ‘major’ is a problem I am content to leave to metaphysicians more gifted than I am at fathoming the ineffable.”² Not content to lick her wounds, Tucker gathered a tiny team in a rented office with donated furniture and started the New Museum. It was originally going to be organized along socialist lines, with equal pay, shared duties, and a focus on the challenging new art that all the other museums were ignoring. While the other notions proved impractical, the last became its raison d’être.

Out of Bounds contains the extended article that Tucker wrote for the catalogue that appeared after the Tuttle exhibition opened. Tucker notes that she held off writing the piece until the show was installed, because Tuttle’s work depends so much on context and because she was an active participant in the execution of the works. While today such a delay is not uncommon, especially for exhibition catalogues about installation art, in 1975 it drew the ire of critics and contributed to her dismissal.

The Tuttle essay is interesting for a number of reasons. Tucker uses it to explore ideas about art as a phenomenological experience and to stress the act of seeing over merely digesting information about an object. She also sets out her curatorial philosophy:

“I have always considered that there are two basic reasons for doing an exhibition: The first is to illustrate and share with the public something one has discovered, that is, something already known. The second is to discover or explore something which is unknown in order to find out for yourself what it is about.”

Tuttle and Tucker clearly shared the latter goal.

James Albertson: Sex, Religion and the Good Life, 1976, oil on canvas, 39 by 48 inches; shown in “Bad Painting” at the New Museum, New York, 1978.

Out of Bounds is divided into three sections. The Tuttle piece appears in the first, comprising primarily museum catalogue essays dealing with single artists. The second section presents, with the exception of an article on the tattoo as art, catalogue texts for some of the most important exhibitions Tucker curated at the Whitney and the New Museum. The final section offers her thoughts on the institutions of art, including midcareer reflections as well as articles and lectures from the period after she stepped down from the directorship of the New Museum in 1999.

The middle section traces Tucker’s evolution as a curator. While still at the Whitney in 1969 she curated “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” the first large show of process art in an American museum. One sees her struggling to develop language for an art that defies all established aesthetic norms:

“The pieces shown cannot, therefore, be precisely understood in terms of our previous experience of ‘art.’ They are not attempts to use new materials to express old ideas or evoke old emotional associations, but to express a new content that is totally integrated with material.”

In 1978, early in the New Museum’s life, Tucker again drew the ire of conservative critics with her provocatively titled “Bad Painting” show. In what now feels like a foretaste of postmodernism, the works in this exhibition mixed art historical styles, popular genres, pseudo-naive techniques, and deliberate appeals to bad taste. While few of the show’s artists are household names today, the idea of “bad” painting has become a critical fixture, intermittently revived in discussions of artists ranging from Picabia and Guston to Dana Schutz, Martin Kippenberger, and Jim Shaw.

By the 1980s, Tucker was trading in references to phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty for more directly political themes. Under her direction, the New Museum was among the first institutions to champion art that explored gender identity and fluidity. Out of Bounds reprints Tucker’s 1987 essay for “The Other Man: Alternative Representations of Masculinity,” which flipped the then-current idea of femininity as a construct to explore masculinity as masquerade. But even more influential was the New Museum’s 1994 exhibition “Bad Girls.” In an essay for the catalogue titled “Attack of the Giant Ninja Mutant Barbies,” Tucker considers the histories of carnival, burlesque, parody, and minstrelsy as precursors to the (mostly) female artists’ use of humor to deflate patriarchy. Running as a constant through all these essays is a critique of the power and authority embedded in the art world’s conventional hierarchies of value and judgment.

The third section of Out of Bounds speaks most directly to today’s concerns. In these essays, a number of them never before published, Tucker returns again and again to questions of institutional inequality, to the underrepresentation of women and minorities in exhibitions and collections, to the corrosive effect of money on art inside and outside the museum, and to the need for systemic change. “Women in Museums,” a lecture from 1972, outlines the grossly unequal status of women administrators, curators, and artists, using talking points that would not be out of place today. “A [Re]Movable Feast” from 1997 mulls over questions of quality and taste and the distinctions between high and popular culture that dogged her curatorial career.

Marcia Tucker being tattoed by artist Ruth Marten at her loft in Manhattan, ca. 1970s.

One of the most prescient pieces is “Close Encounters: Defensive Driving on the Digital Highway,” an unpublished lecture from 1994. Before the era of smart phones and social media, Tucker already sensed some of the dangers inherent in the nascent new technology. She foresees the virtual world’s capacity for control and surveillance, social life shrunk to the dimensions of a screen, and society—divided into entertainers and entertained—governed by an information elite. As always, her concern is with insidious hierarchies: “We seem to have bought the fiction that technology ‘empowers.’ But who does it empower? Why should we automatically equate technological developments with emancipatory social practices? Not everyone will have access, and access is the new power base.”

Out of Bounds concludes with a somewhat anomalous essay written for the 2004 compilation Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, edited by curators Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob. Tucker discusses the work of her “favorite artist,” Tehching Hsieh. This Taiwanese performance artist undertook—or, as such actions are now often described, “endured”—yearlong apparently pointless performances (such as punching a time clock every hour of every day) that exasperated many art commentators at the time. Tucker remarks, “One striking parallel between Buddhist practice and artistic practice is that both can jolt us out of our habitual ways of looking at and thinking about the world.” She extols the kind of concentrated attentiveness she finds common to both activities, coming full circle to the Tuttle show at the Whitney, where she once—with life-altering consequences—found herself defending just this kind of perceptive seeing.

Back in 1985 when I wrote my New Art Examiner article, I was new to the New York art scene. Reading these essays reminds me how much Marcia Tucker and the museum she founded shaped my thinking about art and its place in the world. And not just mine, it would seem. The concerns that emerge constantly throughout these essays continue to resonate in the world of #MeToo, “toxic donor” protests, decolonization, museum unionization, and other forms of social activism. 

¹ Quoted in Eleanor Heartney, “Can the New Museum Buck the 80’s?” New Art Examiner, December 1985, p. 24.

² Hilton Kramer, “Tuttle’s Art on Display at Whitney,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1975, nytimes.com.

This article appears under the title “New Again” in the April 2020 issue, pp. 30–32.

In particular, the story of midcentury abstraction is coming up for reassessment. Figures like Lee Krasner, Carmen Herrera, Norman Lewis, and Al Loving—who were marginalized because of their race or gender—are being inserted into the canon. Figurative, political, spiritual, and social approaches to art once dismissed as reactionary by the acolytes of abstraction are getting renewed attention. Even the museums most responsible for the midcentury consensus are making room for new ideas.

This summer, the Guggenheim Museum in New York turned its collection over to six artists whose selections deliberately recontextualized both recognized and under-known artists. One of the most provocative installations was conceived by Richard Prince, who challenged the story of American triumphalism with international examples—among them Georges Mathieu, Judit Reigl, and José Guerrero—that questioned the uniqueness of Abstract Expressionism’s guiding lights. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has promised a radical new hang when it reopens its doors in October, an exhibition devoted to the cultural impact of curator Lincoln Kirstein unearthed works from MoMA’s collection that reveal the museum’s early interest in performance, figuration, magic realism, queer art, and other modes at odds with its later formalist focus.

Thus the moment seems ripe for a reconsideration of the work of Hyman Bloom, an artist who has long lurked on the margins of the Abstract Expressionist saga. Bloom, a Boston-based painter active from 1945 until his death at age 96 in 2009, was deeply admired during his lifetime by critics and fellow artists. Boston painter Bernard Chaet reported that both Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock told him that they considered Bloom the first Abstract Expressionist.¹ Bloom’s other champions included painter Elaine de Kooning, art historians Barbara Novak and Thomas Hess, and MoMA curator Dorothy Miller, who launched his career by including nine of his paintings in her influential survey of new art, “Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States.” However, while the other Abstract Expressionists soared in repute, Bloom fell into obscurity. Instead of mingling with the New York School, he remained in Boston during a period when George Harold Edgell, the director the city’s premier art institution, the Museum of Fine Arts, chose to refocus its mission away from modernism. Prior to this, the museum had been deeply committed to contemporary art and to local artists. But this is only one of many reasons for Bloom’s neglect.

As a Jewish immigrant from a part of Latvia that is now in Lithuania, Bloom frequently incorporated explicitly Jewish themes. He painted rabbis, synagogues, and torahs at a moment when critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg were valorizing the universality of abstraction. And Bloom had a decidedly ambivalent attitude toward success. Visitors reported that he would turn his paintings to the wall prior to a studio visit, and seemed reluctant to expose them. He seldom attended his own openings. For ten years, from 1962 to 1972, he chose to subvert his growing reputation as a painter by producing drawings almost exclusively.

“Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death” is curator Erica E. Hirshler’s bid to reevaluate Bloom’s art. The show, which appears at Boston’s MFA, the museum whose indifference helped dampen his career in the 1950s, is a tour de force. Hirshler has chosen to highlight some of the most difficult works in Bloom’s oeuvre. She centers the exhibition around paintings and drawings of cadavers based on Bloom’s visits to a Boston morgue and hospital autopsy room. These works gained him notoriety when they were first shown in 1946. His own dealer refused to place certain of the works in the main part of his gallery for the show, relegating them instead to a back room. Trustees of what was then called the Albright Art Gallery, in Buffalo, removed the paintings from his 1955 retrospective.

Even today it’s easy to understand why some viewers might have been repelled. While lush expressionistic brushstrokes somewhat obscure the grisly details of putrifying flesh, disemboweled torsos, and bones protruding from masses of muscle peeled back, these works retain their ability to shock. But at the same time, they are undeniably beautiful. Bloom himself voiced surprise at the negative reactions to these works, noting that his intention was to unify “the harrowing and the beautiful.”² And indeed the works are full of both. The Hull (1952), for instance, presents a supine cadaver whose rib cage has been extracted from the surrounding muscle by a pair of hands wielding a surgical knife. The cadaver’s head lolls off to the side, almost invisible at first glance. Instead, the focus is on the ribs that rise up, as the title suggests, like the frame of a ship’s hull. As with many of these paintings, the palette is a rich blend of reds, yellows, oranges, and deep blacks—with occasional highlights of blue. One could easily get lost in the abstracted play of color and light. But equally arresting are the art historical echoes. The expository position of the surgeon’s hands brings to mind Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. The saturated shades of crimson and amber evoke Soutine’s paintings of animal carcasses. Also lurking somewhere is Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. More indirectly, the upward thrust of the ribs as they pull away from the ashen head recalls the sweep from death to life in the figural composition of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. There is a connection to Francis Bacon’s twisting carcasses and distorted bodies as well, a resemblance acknowledged by Bloom’s contemporaries when the two artists were paired in a 1960 exhibition at the Art Galleries of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Other works present full bodies pictured from above on a table as if from the anatomist’s eye view. One of the most startling of these is Corpse of Man (1944), in which the partially eviscerated cadaver seems to be standing upright with his genitals still intact and his powerful body poised with shoulders back like a prize fighter. There are also numerous depictions of severed limbs. A Leg (1945) features a rotting, ulcerated leg imbued with an almost jewel-like radiance. While Bloom’s subject here is death, these cadavers never devolve into mere meat. Even the 1953 Slaughtered Animal, a painting of a beef carcass particularly evocative of Soutine, includes a partially severed head whose bulging eye seems to be directly addressing the viewer. In all these works, the roiling surfaces and dynamic brushwork belie the finality of death.

The cadaver paintings are supplemented by a number of related works. These include several still lifes of turban squashes that quiver with the same life as the extracted viscera, two oddly sepulchral brides, and a remarkable painting titled The Harpies (1947) in which a swirling mass of red and black eventually resolves into a depiction of birdlike creatures tearing a corpse apart. Hirshler has also included several paintings based on plans of ancient ruins from archaeological publications. These are among the most abstract of Bloom’s works, full of glittering shapes in which he draws a line from the excavation of the earth to the excavation of the body.

Along with the paintings, the exhibition includes a number of large-scale drawings that attest to Bloom’s skill as a draftsman. Several early drawings of the torquing figures of boxers and athletes bring to mind not only Michelangelo, but also such contemporaneous artists as Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Pavel Tchelitchew. Drawings in red crayon offer alternate versions of some of the paintings, often with a somewhat more literal representation of sliced flesh. In this context, two gorgeous drawings of the entwined branches and roots of primeval trees suggest parallels between corporeal and botanical forms. These were inspired by Bloom’s experience in the woods of Lubec, Maine. They date from the period in the 1960s when he set painting aside to concentrate on drawing. The delicacy of the lines recall Dürer’s etchings, while the movement of the leafless shoots seems to be another statement about life in death.

The cadaver theme has a long pedigree, going back to the medieval tradition of memento mori and Renaissance anatomical studies. Greenberg and Hilton Kramer, among others, interpreted Bloom’s cadaver paintings as references to the Holocaust. Bloom denied that, instead describing these works as a search for “a door into what is beyond.”³ In the 2019 multiauthored book Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom, art historian Marcia Brennan places the cadaver works in the context of Bloom’s lifelong interest in “ritual boundary crossings.” This is suggested by paintings inspired by séances as well as drawings meant to depict the astral plane, that zone between life and death that is the focus of many esoteric religions.⁴ Bloom had a well-documented interest in mysticism, kabbalistic themes, and the continuity of life and death. He was an active member of the Boston Theosophical Society and the Vedanta Society. He also experimented with LSD in an effort to transcend the limitations of the material world. His preoccupation with the abstracted beauty of the putrefying corpse is of a piece with his immersion in the physicality of thick gestural strokes of paint. Both submerge one so completely in the world of matter that ordinary reality seems to disappear. What remains is something ineffable—a glimpse of the realm of spirit. In the cadaver paintings, form and subject matter combine to demonstrate his belief in “metamorphosis as the nature of being.”⁵

Ten years after his death, this may be Hyman Bloom’s moment. Along with the MFA show and Modern Mystic, an exhibition of his paintings at Alexandre Gallery in New York, on view through Oct. 26, confirms the continuing power of his themes: the vulnerability of flesh, the exploration of the spiritual through art, and the conviction that change is the essence of reality. Bloom’s reemergence coincides with the reassessment of other artists—Morris Graves, Hilma af Klint, Carol Rama, and Grant Wood—associated with spiritual and figurative traditions spurned by mid-twentieth-century critics. Bloom’s achievement is further proof of the inadequacy of the established canon. And it raises the question—how many other Hyman Blooms are out there awaiting rediscovery by art history?

This article appears under the title “Mortal Remains” in the October 2019 issue, pp. 48–53.

Endnotes

1. Erica E. Hirshler, “A Body of Work,” in Erica E. Hirshler, ed., Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death, Boston, MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2019, p. 36.

2. Harold Bloom quoted in Noami Slipp, “Painting the Dead,” in Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death, p. 25.

3. Bloom quoted in Hirshler, p. 20.

4. Marcia Brennan, “A Half Smothered Glow to Light a Very Small Museum,” in Henry Adams and Marcia Brennan, Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom, New York,  D.A.P., 2019, p. 144.

5. Bloom quoted in Henry Adams, “The First Abstract Expressionist?,” in ibid., p. 19.