Soon enough, he started sculpting with beeswax instead of using it to make molds. And shortly thereafter, he began collaborating with bees directly. He built steel and wooden armatures, then covered them in beeswax, which naturally attracts honey bees. The insects then deposited wax and honeycombs of their own, building up the surfaces and forms. He had bees sent to him in the city, and told me that “before 9/11, you could ship 20 pounds of live bees by US Mail.” He called the finished works “apisculpture.”

Before he could even finish his MFA, the apisculptures made a splash. Works he showed in a 1985 group exhibition at Grace Borgenicht Gallery received a glowing review from legendary critic Gary Indiana, a write-up in People Magazine, and then, in 1987, had the honor of landing snapshots in a rare New Yorker issue to include photographs. The second apisculpture he ever made, at age 26, titled Mr. Zivic (1986), was promptly acquired by the Hirschhorn Museum. Gallerygoers were perhaps somewhat overexcited; a visitor took a bite out of a sculpture at that 1985 opening, hungry for honeycomb.

Now this was the hyper-commercialized and sensationalist art world of the 1980s. There was little room for work so subtle and sincere. “The gallery system … was like a treadmill,” Puett recalled. His dealer helped him figure out how to make the works more archival, more market friendly: once the bees were done sculpting, he started freezing and sterilizing the wax forms, then showing them in glass cases, where no one would mistake them for snacks. Suddenly, they were collectible. But still, Puett was showing and lecturing alongside peers like Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor, who made big shiny sculptures that gobbled up the art world’s attention.

When Puett’s dealer pushed him to work on the larger scale popular among his peers, he had to explain that that isn’t how bees work. A swarm of 100,000 bees is the size of a mini fridge, he told me. “That’s a lot of bees. That’s a lot of energy. Those little brains are, collectively, doing a lot of work.” Even if you get “a swarm the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, they won’t necessarily make something bigger or better.” He was also pressured to make the works more attractive—“they really do look like pieces of chicken,” he admitted—and to cast them in bronze. But this ran against the spirit of the project. Bees were his collaborators, not tools. “They might just swarm out and go somewhere else,” he said, and that’s their choice. Besides, these weren’t sculptures for the human eye alone. “They’re not meant to be beautiful.”

All the attention had seemed encouraging at first: Puett hoped that it might benefit the bees, and finally correct their reputation as vicious stingers. (This was before they’d been declared endangered, before they became a species to save.) Honeybees, he said, “are nice, fuzzy little animals” who sting far less frequently than people think. They are also the only insect that humans have domesticated, besides silkworms. He hoped too that his work might encourage urbanites to reconnect with nature. His apisculptures often took the shape of human figures because he wanted to create an image of the hive overtaking the individual, nature overtaking humans.

But then Puett learned that all the while, his art dealer had been getting “someone to fly over his whole [residential] compound and spray insecticide every spring … even as he was promoting a bee artist!” And with that, he left the commercial art world, participating only in the occasional museum project. In 1995 he gave up on New York, leaving his $400 per month waterfront Williamsburg loft for full-time beekeeping in Hawaii. He now operates one of the largest certified organic honey farms in the United States, caring for 2,000 colonies.

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, interspecies artistic collaborations have been few and far between. If such collaborations made headlines, it was for the shock factor, and more often than not, constituted outright animal abuse. The most notorious examples have enlisted not insects, but furry friends. In 1974 Joseph Beuys locked himself in a room with a coyote for three days for a performance that became iconic, titled I Like America and America Likes Me. Three years later, Tom Otterness shot and killed a shelter dog for a film before reinventing himself as a whimsical sculptor whose plump bronze figures now bumble about New York’s 14th Street subway station. Then, in 2007, Otterness apologized and called Shot Dog Film “indefensible.” The 2003 video Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu shows dogs harnessed on treadmills, trying to run toward one another; it was removed from a 2017 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum after protests led by animal rights activists. And Eduardo Kac claimed, in 2000, to have had a rabbit named Alba genetically engineered using extracted green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to make her glow. Alba was never seen publicly, so some are skeptical. Still, Kac was accused of “playing God.”

These works aren’t so much collaborations as efforts to enlist animals as artistic materials or playthings, as symbols serving human-centered narratives. But as the climate crisis lays bare the devastating consequences of this anthropocentric approach to nonhuman life forms, artists like Jenna Sutela, Beatriz Cortez, and Candice Lin choose methods more like Puett’s and other eco artists’: they invite other species in as contributors or collaborators who might add their own perspectives. They are working with other species in order to ask how we might ethically and responsibly collaborate and cohabitate.

Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis tends to get the credit for helping artists and thinkers understand just how urgent interspecies collaboration really is. She argued against Darwin’s theory of evolution—which hinges on the survival of the fittest—and showed that instead, life-forms have coevolved interdependently. We humans, for example, don’t make our own food the way photosynthesizing plants do. We rely on and enable the thriving of other species; we don’t just compete and conquer. Margulis was dubbed the “patron saint” of a recent exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere,” by cocurator Caroline A. Jones. In the catalogue, Jones asked: “If we are dependent on other living entities to survive, how should we acknowledge and honor that affiliation? How shall we live with responsibility and reciprocity in mind?”

“Symbionts” is one of several recent landmark exhibitions ushering in this new era of interspecies art. It joins blockbuster shows by interspecies artists like Tomás Saraceno and Pierre Huyghe. Anicka Yi’s breakthrough exhibition in New York at the Kitchen in 2015 involved bottled fragrances that the bio art icon made from swabs taken from 100 women in the art world. Yi merged bacterial cultures with high culture. And for the grand finale of the most recent Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, kudzu and sugarcane slowly enrobed sculptural figures in an installation by Precious Okoyomon that grew throughout the course of the show.

HUMANS HAVE BEEN OBLIVIOUSLY shaping the evolution of other species for millennia. Aurochs, the progenitor of modern cattle, are extinct, ironically due to diseases introduced by domestic livestock (not to mention hunting). Domestic felines learned to meow in order to catch the ear of human caretakers. And though lantern flies are labeled an “invasive species,” it is humans who, by cargo boat, brought them to the United States, where they now threaten trees and crops. Interspecies relationships enable life at all scales: each human carries around 10–100 trillion microbial (nonhuman) cells; they are our symbionts. Margulis and other scientists have argued that multicellular beings (such as humans) exist today thanks to ancient symbiotic relations among single-celled organisms that, by merging, created new species. This process is called “endosymbiosis.”

Which is to say that we are constantly collaborating with other species, whether we realize it or not. Interspecies relationships are scientific fact, but, being relationships, they are cultural and social too. That is why we need artists to help us navigate and model these emotional and relational terrains fraught with imbalance.

Among these artistic models, Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s stand out. Her work draws attention to the ways other organisms inhabit our everyday life. Growing up, Jordan “was always with animals,” she told me on Zoom. Now based in Berlin, she was adopted from Korea and raised in the German countryside, where she “didn’t like people so much, especially in the area I grew up in … they were really racist, and I was the only Asian person besides my brother.” Kids called her “rice-eater” and “slits.” So she hung out with the family dog and the chickens, and even befriended an injured wild crow. At 27, she enrolled in Berlin Kunsthochschule, where she studied under the climate artist Olafur Eliasson.

Before art school, Jordan, whose Korean name means “goddess of the sea,” worked as a rescue diver. Underwater, she grew fascinated by the sea cucumber—a scavenger that isn’t considered very intelligent, but is, in a sense, immortal. This is true in that there is no evidence that sea cucumbers die of old age, but only from accidents or disease. They have come to form symbiotic relationships with certain fish, who hide from predators in the sea cucumber’s anus. (Usually, the fish knocks before entering.)

Jordan was inspired by this kind of symbiotic relationship when she started her project “Disembodiment” in 2012. But instead of a fish, she chose to open her own anus to another species with whom she felt a kind of kinship: the potato. The crop, like the artist, thrives in, but is not native to, Germany. Spanish conquistadors brought the Incan crop to Europe, and during a 1774 famine, Prussian King Friedrich II introduced the root vegetable to the Germans; now, it is a dietary staple. Wanting to deepen their relationship based on shared experiences, Jordan made an animation that shows a potato growing in her butt. This followed a 2011 collaboration called Compassion, for which she grew potatoes that she watered not with H₂O, but with her own blood.

In 2021 Jordan was invited to do a project at the reopening of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Like many others, she had serious reservations about the museum, which houses looted objects from around the world in an Imperialist palace, so she proposed a site-specific version of “Disembodiment” with a budget she said was “like three times higher” than the one allotted. She figured they’d turn it down, and was surprised when they agreed to the version she titled Culo de Papa, or ass of papa—in Spanish, papa can mean “father” or “potato.” She scanned and 3D-printed 33 copies of her own butt, then turned them into potato planters displayed outside the Humboldt Forum. She chose 33 because it is the most butt-shaped number.

The Humboldt Forum is housed in a palace once home to a number of Prussian kings, including King Friedrich II, aka the “Potato King” or “Frederick the Great.” Jordan’s project was a cheeky retort to the colonial histories of both the crop and the institution. At the end of the procession of potatoes was a kiosk that distributed postcards detailing the potato’s colonial history. “Visitors were shocked, and they started to scream at me!” she told me on Zoom. “They were like, how dare you! Don’t you know where you are?”

Jordan’s projects cleverly respond to a tendency in art and academic circles to privilege those creatures we consider worthy based on qualities valued in humans, like intelligence and productivity. Tuomas A. Laitinen, for instance, collaborates with puzzle-solving octopi, and Agnieszka Kurant made a series of sculptures with mound-building termites, in a gesture meant to highlight their collective intelligence—and to ask how we humans might learn from their cooperative model. Jordan, by contrast, takes care to honor species like sea cucumbers and potatoes that are regularly dismissed as banal, but are nevertheless worthy of care and attention.

Jordan, whose debut US museum show opens at The Bass in Miami December 4, is inspired, like many interspecies artists, by writer Donna Haraway. In 2019 Jordan made a video installation titled after Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble (2016). The artist’s version tells the speculative story of a five-generation, symbiogenetic relationship between monarch butterflies and humankind. Jordan’s communing with other species is echoed in Haraway’s influential 2007 book When Species Meet, where the author critiques philosophical, theoretical, and overly intellectualized accounts of interspecies relations that forgo everyday acts of care. She notes that in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer a theory of “becoming animal,” then add that “anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool,” as if interspecies care were too sentimental to be serious. She also pokes fun at Jacques Derrida, who once wrote a philosophical essay about his fear of being naked in front of his cat.

In an art world where interspecies collaborations get framed as intellectual or scientific endeavors, Jordan’s humble care for ordinary species stands apart. Her work is that of someone who has spent time with other creatures in everyday ways, like Puett with his bees. As it happens, Puett has decided to return to the art world. He has a new dealer—Jack Shainman Gallery—and plans to show new work next year at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, as part of the sprawling, multimillion-dollar Getty-funded initiative called Pacific Standard Time, with the theme “Art & Science Collide.” He’ll show 3D-printed armatures, and visitors will be able to watch the bees work throughout the show’s run, as they fabricate sculptures depicting humans carving sticks and making clay pots. “You know,” he said, “humanity before the algorithm.” 

There was the man who rudely broke up with her by email. She had this document analyzed by 107 women, including linguists, clairvoyants, and even a female parrot, then turned their annotations into an installation titled after its final line: Take Care of Yourself (2007). There’s the man, Monsieur Henri B., whom she followed to Venice for Suite Vénitienne (1980). And there’s Paul Auster, the male author who based a character off her for his novel Leviathan. Calle responded by interpreting his metaphors and hyperboles as literal instructions, adopting, for instance, a monochromatic diet (orange on Monday, red on Tuesday, and so on) turning it all into a work of her own.

Recently, the French artist was asked to take on art history’s least invisible man—Picasso—when the Musée Picasso in Paris approached her for a show. Tourists from across the globe flock to that museum, seeking masterpieces by the famed Spanish painter; this year marks half a century since his death. Calle decided to keep just ten of his works on view, but most are occluded. For her, the weight of his presence was intense enough without having to show her work alongside his. With the exhibition, she figures Picasso as a ghost who haunts the work of many artists.

The weight of Picasso’s legacy made Calle reflect on what, exactly, she will one day leave behind. And so, she moved everything out of her apartment and into the museum, asking an auction house to inventory all her belongings. She’s not calling it a retrospective, but in the museum’s galleries, viewers get a career-spanning survey of the ideas she spent her life generating.

In several cases, she refashioned old works for a new setting. Her site-specific 1991 intervention commemorating masterpieces stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is here reconfigured in a series called “The Phantom Picassos.” Five of his major paintings are covered with large curtains, then embroidered with descriptions Calle collected from museum staff memories while the works were away on loan. She also dedicated a floor to projects she never finished, and arranged works from her personal collection (by the likes of Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and Christian Boltanski) to approximate the dimensions of Picasso’s Guernica (1937).

With this show, as in all Calle works, absence is present—Picasso is in the basement, but his spirit is felt on all floors. Below, the artist talks about how her practice can veer into obsession.

With all of your stuff gone from your apartment, where are you living?

Right now, I’m in the Hotel Grand Amour, but I change every month. [The auction house] Drouot made my inventory; I didn’t decide which objects they’d take. I got the idea after going to a sale of furniture owned by a friend of mine. It included a table I’d eaten at for 50 years, and I realized I could not buy it for myself. Suddenly, it had lost its soul and become just another object. I felt similarly when I saw my objects installed—it was as if they were no longer mine.

I have a few months to decide whether they will come back to my house; currently, they are not for sale. For the show, I made several catalogues: one is the inventory, and another is the ghost of that inventory—a book that tells the stories behind the objects. Picasso once said that he wanted to show the paintings that are behind his paintings, and I wanted to do the same with my objects.

You’re often respond to terms laid out for you by someone else—often, a man—but always with a wink and a nod. Here, you’re borrowing cues from Picasso, but you’ve also pushed Picasso out of his own museum, and made space for Sophie Calle. Can you talk about that decision?

I pushed him out because I was afraid of him! He’s too much for me. I could not imagine my work hanging next to Picasso’s.

At first, I refused the museum’s invitation. But after I visited the Musée during Covid, when his paintings were wrapped and hidden to protect them from dust light, I realized, although I cannot face Picasso, maybe I can face his ghost. Soon, I couldn’t think about anything else. I made three floors of new work in two years!

I wanted to play with him and with his museum, so I looked through his quotes and his objects for things that connected with me. I titled the show “À toi de faire, ma mignonne,” which basically means “Okay, darling, baby, you want my museum? Take it, show me what you can do.” Or more simply, “it’s your turn, now show me.” It’s the most complex show I have ever made.

I think it’s funny that he is in the basement and I occupy this museum, but I cannot pretend that my initial purpose was feminist. I didn’t put Picasso’s work downstairs because I wanted to cancel him. I did it because I could not be next to him.

What was it about Picasso that made you consider your own legacy?

I had seen a vitrine that contained Picasso’s hair and nails. He kept everything! I am also a little obsessive like that; I keep a lot of things. But Picasso was terribly afraid to write a will because he said that writing a will attracts death. I am also afraid of death. But I stave it off instead by writing 500 wills. When you write so many, they start to become a joke.

Your projects always involve risk, and turning Picasso into an occasion to think about death and legacy seems like one way you made him riskier.

The other risk is that some people could not stand the fact that I’m putting Picasso in the basement. I was told that many Americans would be upset when they saw works by me instead of Picasso. So, I added a consolation room, where visitors can have a personal confrontation with a real Picasso. There are five works behind curtains and three self-portraits. The 10th piece is a goat sculpture [La Chèvre, 1950] that I wrapped in paper. Six are hidden, four are visible. I could see how saying “I’m putting Picasso in the basement and taking his place” could be badly received.

Do you like Picasso’s art?

Yes, I do. I wouldn’t have shown here if I disliked it. I don’t go to dinner at an enemy’s house.

After the 2007 Venice Biennale, and after the artist Daniel Buren said your shows look like books on the wall, you began to move away from your signature, deadpan photo and text combinations, and you started incorporating more objects and experiences. This show has hardly any photographs. How has your thinking about photography evolved?

I never really thought of myself as a photographer; I always needed text. At the same time, I was never a true writer; I always needed the image. But beyond that, I don’t notice these things much, because I’m not an art critic. I don’t look at my own work and analyze it with that kind of distance.

Tell me about the unrealized projects you’re showing on the third floor.

I was following the direction Picasso showed me. He kept everything; I showed everything.

I started wondering, what’s going to happen to my belongings when I die? My parents are dead. I have no children. Then, looking at all the objects from my house, I asked: what’s missing? What was missing was my studio and all the things I didn’t finish. I have tons of drawers and boxes with pieces of ideas, but I realized, if I die tomorrow, this will all disappear. No one else could understand those pieces of paper, those fragments of thought, those abandoned failures.

So, I started opening all my drawers and notes. I was cleaning my house, but also my thoughts. I’m showing 42 abandoned projects. For each, I wrote down the idea, then stamped it with the reason why I didn’t do it: too stupid, too time-consuming. Some projects still have hope; those are in a different room. Some projects I could not do for reasons I can’t control, like censorship or somebody dying. Now all those unfinished projects are, in a way, finished. If I disappear tomorrow, they have a life.

Can you describe some of the projects?

After Paul Auster wrote Leviathan using my character, I thought I would ask a writer to write a book, and then I’d take the book as a script for my life. It would be the reverse: Paul Auster took my life and transformed me into a character in a novel, but I wanted to take the character in the novel and make it my life. But all the writers I asked said no.

Another is a project I started with Wim Wenders. He asked me to wear these camera glasses and say everything I thought to the camera every day. But I realized, I would lose many friends if I did this. This one was self-censorship.

Another idea was to say yes to everything for one month, but I realized that my life was quickly becoming a complete nightmare. I stopped because I didn’t want to spoil my life completely.

In the past, you’ve been vulnerable about sharing romantic failures. But this time, you’re including some, shall we say, professional “failures.” I’m wondering if that feels different.

Often, failures in my personal life wind up helping my professional life. Plenty of the projects I made out of relationships were much more interesting than the relationship itself!

I don’t make these projects for therapeutic reasons. But anybody who is left in love will suffer less if she has a job than if she is stuck alone in her house. Some professional failures were sadder than personal ones and vice versa. When everything is going well, you don’t need to examine it. You just leave it alone. If I am happy with the man I love and with my friends, I don’t need to take distance and describe it. I don’t try to analyze my happiness.

Looking back on all your past work and thinking about your legacy, did you see anything different that you hadn’t noticed before?

I don’t know yet. I only know what I feel. After I showed Take Care of Yourself at the Venice Biennale, I thought that I would never do anything as exciting again. But I was wrong: I had that feeling again for “À toi de faire, ma mignonne.” It really became an obsession.

You commissioned an obituary for yourself, but then decided not to show it. Can you tell us about that, or at least about how it felt to read it?

I decided not to show it, but not because of what it said. It was a very professional obituary; the information was super banal and factual. The problem was how I felt when I read the verbs in the past tense: “she used to,” “she liked.” Suddenly, it all felt too real. I don’t know how I expected to feel, but I didn’t suspect that I’d refuse it. After all, it was my game.

You would be forgiven for overlooking the works’ brushlessness—Liu conceals and controls his experimental methods—and you could appreciate the simple elegance of his compositions and his mesmerizing color combinations all the same. But the magic is enhanced when you come to appreciate how he directs the swirling ink he uses when marbling—a technique that involves adding droplets of pigment to a vat of water, then dragging the paper across its surface. Whereas most artists turn to marbling to invite an element of chance, Liu approaches it as a challenge to prove his control.

Firmly committed to his brushless bit, Liu developed his own kind of cotton paper that leaves visible, linear fibers. When you see a white line in a composition of his, you can bet that he first stained the entire page and then removed a cotton strand, revealing fresh, unstained paper beneath. In fact, once you focus on the brushlessness, you might find yourself looking at each of Liu’s impressive paintings and asking: how’d he do that without a brush?

Liu is dedicated to painting nature, and his moon paintings—colorful orbs hovering majestically in commanding compositions—count among his finest works. He first started painting the moon and other celestial bodies after watching the 1969 Apollo landing and experiencing a decidedly modern strand of the sublime that landscape painters have tried to evoke for centuries. He returned to the lunar motif again in the 2000s, with works whose crinkled, then flattened paper came to represent the moon’s craggy surface.

But all this is more than just a cool trick: Liu rewards curious, meticulous viewers of both his work and the world. One benefits from looking at his work as he looks at the moon, for wondering: how does this work? He shows how the moon can be more magical when you know some of the math behind the mystery—when you appreciate, for instance, that the moon is both 400 times smaller than the sun and 400 times closer to the Earth. When his painting Midnight Sun III (1970) shows the trajectory of a fiery astronomical presence moving across a dark sky, it isn’t didactic and it doesn’t demystify; it invites more marveling.

Liu’s celestial paintings merge geometric abstraction with a glimpse into the infinite, expansive cosmos. In this way, the works speak across time and culture. But they also respond to and update traditions specific to Chinese ink painting. In the 1970s, Liu established a modern ink art curriculum during his tenure as chair of the fine arts department of Chinese University Hong Kong. Art historians such as Wu Hung credit Liu’s work as a teacher—in addition to a 1983 exhibition of his art that eventually toured 18 Chinese cities—with showing a generation of artists how to modernize Chinese ink painting. And when, in the 2000s, contemporary Chinese art had its global explosion, experiments in ink were central to the narrative—as seen in major shows like “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013.

Gazing at the moon can sometimes make the world and its attendant problems feel small. But looking at Liu’s lunar works—none of which I’d known before seeing his impressive retrospective in Singapore—I was instead reminded that the world is big and brimming with artists oceans away whose work I have yet to encounter.

When Schneemann made the film, she was making a bet that viewers would be so distracted by its content—the “genital heterosexuality”—that they would miss the artistry of it all: the form, the structure, the musicality. And that is just like what has happened to the history of feminist art: for so long, writers have fixated so wholly on the content of such work that, along the way, feminism’s many monumental formal innovations fell to the side.

That is the point of Schneemann’s film Fuses. A woman starring in her own artwork can have a hard time getting others to see more than her body: to move viewers beyond their animalistic impulses and perceive all the thought, the decisions, the commentary, the craft. Hannah Wilke once quipped that “people would rather look at women than … at art,” and Schneemann wanted her audience to reflect on that tendency.

Schneemann is one of the namesake subjects in Lauren Elkin’s new book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, which focuses on feminist artists such as Wilke, Ana Mendieta, Kara Walker, and Eva Hesse as well as writers like Kathy Acker and Virginia Woolf. The title comes from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, in which she writes, “my plan was to never get married. I was going to become an art monster instead.” Elkin also quotes Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning: “A woman had to be a monster to be an artist.”

By “monster,” they meant that women artists have long been considered in some way deviant, since, as women, they are expected to spend their time tending to other matters, like domestic and reproductive labor. Wilke offered one clever workaround in the ’70s when she created sculptures of vulvas out of lint that she sourced while doing laundry for her boyfriend, Claes Oldenburg. (As for me, I have dinner marinating as I type.)

Elkin’s aim involves “bringing touch and feeling back into our encounters with art, centering the body and its viscerality.” Think of those weighty knots Hesse tied, or the oozy pools of latex Lynda Benglis poured. Notice, however, that these works do not offer feminist narratives or depict women’s experiences, at least not in any direct way. The kind of feminist art Elkin advocates is “not always polemical but often provisional.” She champions art as “a way of exploring and not arguing … [since] epiphanies shift and change like the body itself.” To wonder what such work is about, she writes, is “like asking what the body means.”

ART MONSTERS shows the significant impact feminist art had on formal innovation, even as its burn was slow, wonky, and uneven. Many of the book’s key protagonists were active in the 1970s, but Elkin brings in plenty of other visionaries who, throughout history, offered ways of making that bring us back to the body, its enduring weirdness and vulnerabilities. Hesse’s materials, for example, decayed and discolored with time. Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron emphatically printed the fingerprints and stray hairs that found their way onto her negatives; as in Schneemann’s film, fleshy reality and the ocular image comingle.

Elkin briefly but importantly distinguishes such corporeal work from “textual and/or technological” feminist art that had its heyday in the 1980s, wherein content superseded form. Artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger turned to bold words to make their urgent messages unmistakable. Think of Holzer’s iconic Times Square billboard that read ^{ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE}, which makes the rounds on Instagram any time the art world witnesses another #MeToo scandal. These artists had urgent messages and were contending both with an increasingly saturated media landscape and rising Republican politics. They needed to speak loudly, clearly.

But while such clarity and urgency made for galvanizing rallying cries, art is unique for its capacity to engage contradictions and complexities that can’t be captured in words. Elkin writes about how good art helps us get past those binaries in which language gets trapped. She makes a case for the kind of feminist art that refused to cleave form from politics and saw them, instead, as bound together—art that refused the tidiness of an ’80s-style one-liner.

IT’S EASY TO SAY WHAT FEMINIST ART IS AGAINST—patriarchy, machismo, abuse—but harder to say what it is for. Critiquing misogyny does not free us from it, Elkin argues, but only binds us to it differently, in an antagonistic, rather than submissive relationship. Wanting to free feminist art from this trap of negation, which risks reinforcing the dominance of the patriarchal status quo, Elkin asks us to attend to art that doesn’t simply refute the male gaze but ignores it altogether. She privileges art that inhabits some separate sphere with feminism, not patriarchy, as its foundation. She describes the worlds that women artists have built more than the ones they have unbuilt, and the enduring impact of this constructive work.

The problem is, patriarchal values are so deeply instilled in all facets of society that ignoring them proves rather difficult.When Wilke set out to make liberated images of her own body—to try and see herself free from internalized misogyny—the task proved impossible: feminists Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewisfamously wrote that Wilke “ended up reinforcing what she intended to subvert,” and Lucy Lippard worried that the artist “hardly ever had the last laugh.” Later, Lippard recanted, and some 50 years on, critics and admirers are still grappling with the complexity of Wilke’s project.

Elkin’s writing on Wilke helped me see how, in the nudes the artist made in her youth, her attractive, white, nondisabled body was taken to signify “woman,” so other women weighed in as to whether she was depicting us fairly. Time and again, these pictures were not read to depict the fleshy existence of an individual, but as a symbol. Later, when Wilke documented her experience with lymphoma in photographs, audiences automatically saw her body as specific, as belonging uniquely to her. The only thing that changed, really, was how she looked. When she was a beautiful young woman, viewers felt a kind of ownership. When she was sick and old, they distanced themselves.

“IF HANNAH WILKE’S WORK IS THE PROBLEM this book poses,” Elkin writes, referring to attempts to liberate feminist narratives about the body from all their attendant baggage, “then Hesse’s is the answer.” Here, the author seems to suggest that clever Hesse found a way to make work that is nonrepresentational—coils, knots, tubes—but whose fleshy colors and vulnerable forms still evoke the body. The work doesn’t convey a legible feminist narrative, nor does it aim for something universal. Hesse’s sculptures are not polemical, but they are born of a specific point of view.

Or at least, I suspect this is what Elkin means. That problem-and-answer line, though evocative, begs for elaboration, especially as it stands alone in its own paragraph. In any case, Elkin does herself a disservice by so neatly dividing her monsters into problems and answers. Hesse’s work is certainly moving but seems no more resolved than Wilke’s, which is so successful because it captures complexities that continue to puzzle.

I sense that Elkin meant to privilege more intuitive encounters than intellectualized ones, but abstraction feels like too easy a solution. In fact, I’m skeptical of setting answers as a goal.

In Art Monsters, Elkin tries to evade the trap of the Kruger-esque one-liner or the art historical grand narrative by experimenting, like her subjects, with form. In her prose, she favors use of the slash, devoting the first chapter to the way it “creates a space of simultaneity, a zone of ambiguity.” Then, she endeavors to make an argument/leave space for unresolvable tension. The result is a book born from both body and mind: the author movingly describes how it evolved alongside her pregnancy, and how her own changing body impacted its final form.

But in experimenting with form, the book falls into a new trap altogether. Here again, it’s clearer what the book’s form is against than what it is for, and as a result, intriguing lines of argument get dropped before they are fleshed out. Where the book meanders instead of building momentum, it seems intentional: Elkin memorably quotes Kathy Acker who, writing on Goya, once said that “the only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.” But overly neat narratives still creep in, and it is not clear that the method she advocates in Art Monsters is as useful for the genre of nonfiction, or art criticism, as it might be for artists or poets.

The book does fill an essential gap by providing an outlet to continue processing feminist rage and trauma. But it avoids presenting yet another inspiring or retraumatizing feminist narrative, which is probably the last thing we need from art or art criticism. Though versions of such stories have made their way into popular music and onto the big screen, they have not eliminated unequal pay or rampant sexual harassment. We’ve heard so many by now that their repetition can be downright demoralizing.

Art Monsters succeeds in bringing up important issues without beating readers over the head with what they already know, in part by insisting that the “art monster” is not a “rhetorical flourish, or figurehead” but, rather, “a (once) living, breathing person.” Elkin embraces artists whose stories are too specific and complex to be affixed to feminist formulas—a lesson, I think, in the art that lives and lasts.  

This article appears under the title “Magnificent Monstrosity” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 48–52.

Her popularity has grown exponentially since. Her 2016 survey at the New Museum in New York broke institutional attendance records, and Beyoncé famously borrowed from Rist’s Ever Is Over All (1997) for the video for her 2016 song “Hold Up.” (In both, the respective artist wears a gown and a smile as she skips along the street and smashes car windows.) Rist’s breakout 2008 installation in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), was dismissed by some as a work in which visitors liked to lounge, practice yoga, and host playdates. But such criticism misses Rist’s genius: Pour Your Body Out managed to draw huge crowds and make them feel at ease despite its focus on a woman who is shown collecting her menstrual blood in a silver chalice. Rist insists on the importance and the centrality of the body in her work, especially those parts considered weird, gross, or taboo. With bright colors, alluring tempos, and lulling music, she’s made popular work out of an important feminist project.

Now, for a joint show opening November 9 at Hauser & Wirth and November 18 at Luhring Augustine—both in New York—Rist is debuting new furniture-sculpture hybrids, which marks a pivot for an artist who has until now worked with electronic and time-based media. Below, Rist talks about the transition leading up to the show, titled “Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon.”

Your work has long brought bright spots of color to a low-saturation art world, but color is growing more and more popular. Do you have any feelings about this?

You’re right—chromophobia is less bad than it used to be. But this development took a long time. Maybe you’ve read David Batchelor’s book Chromophobia (2000): he says that, for so long, black-and-white art was seen as more rational, while color was dangerous; as with music, you cannot control what you feel. This also gets linked with femininity: color gets described as something that might make you feel swallowed and seduced.

Another big problem is that color is often used in advertisements, and fine art wants to be distinct. Advertisements and prettiness are often perceived as dangerously seductive, or dishonest. My work often used to be perceived as childish, but this has really changed a lot. I haven’t gotten this critique anymore in the last few years. Though maybe that’s because I got older….

There’s this cliché of dressing in all black as if to say, “Oh, I’m so deep. I don’t need to draw attention to my outer side because my values are inside.” When I see people dressed in all black, I think about how a hundred years ago, it was only the priest and the teacher who dressed like that.

Tell us about your new glitter sculptures!

They are called “Metal Flake Milk Tooth” (2023), and they’re my first works that aren’t time-based. They have no video and no electricity; they’re a mix between sculpture and furniture. I think of every sculpture as, in a sense, un-useful furniture. They are made with layers of glittery lacquer, and the sparkles look different from every angle. They change as you walk around. It’s impossible to photograph the glittery effect, which I find very interesting. When you walk, in a way, you edit your own video.

Why are you splitting the show over two Chelsea galleries?

I consider Manhattan to be one museum, and I’m just playing in a few rooms. At Hauser & Wirth, I have two big new works you could call animated carpets. They’re both projections from above onto furniture and people. The light caresses everything with its beam. They are titled Welling Color West and Welling Color East: I’m not sure if “welling” works in English, but I like that I have some poetic freedom with my titles when I use a German way of speaking English. “Welling” has the double meaning of the well, with water that bubbles, but also alludes to this idea that the color might shower on people like a healing machine.

The other projection is two moving lights—big, round colors—called Petting Colors. I want to use electronic light to caress people and bring them together, whereas often, people watch videos at home alone. Visitors won’t be forced to look horizontally at walls. Instead, you can sit or lie on the carpet, or the sofa, or the bed.

You often re-create domestic furnishings—like your underwear chandelier (Massachusetts Chandelier, 2010) or oversize couch (Das Zimmer [The Room], 1994). And you often create comfortable surfaces for viewers to sit or lie down on while watching your videos. Thank you! What led you to meld the gallery and the home?

I made the oversize couch in reaction to the fact that, when we watch TV, reality seems to shrink in our perception. I wanted to do the opposite and expand reality. That’s why the monitor looks shrunken. The work is outdated now, but it’s still popular and still getting shown. I think it’s nice that younger people might learn about a time when families would fight over the remote control.

To me, all museums and all galleries look like living rooms. A hundred years ago, you had paintings hanging above each other on wallpaper in both settings, at least in the Western world. As the museum became a white cube, so did living rooms. The main difference is that museums don’t offer the possibility of rest. When people come to my exhibitions, I want their whole body to be welcomed, and in different postures. My second big wish is that viewers don’t ignore each other. When looking at a painting, if another person walks in front of you, it’s an inconvenience. But as soon as you give people the chance to lie down or sit, then suddenly, other people aren’t just a distraction but also part of the scene.

Is that why you moved away from making single-channel videos?

My mission is to use electronic light to bring us together. Single-channel videos are not in relation to a room; you can watch them anywhere. As a video artist, I want to give people something different than what they can watch alone in their bed, something that connects them with other people, too. But maybe I should make one again!

Some of your breakthrough pieces, like Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), were immersive video projections. But now, your immersive installations are starting to use colorful lights more than recorded images. Why the transition?

You’re talking about Petting Colors, and also Pixel Forest (2016). People don’t always realize that Pixel Forest is actually a three-dimensional monitor. I got the idea the first time I put on virtual reality goggles: I felt more isolated than ever! So I said to my friend, a lighting designer, can we put pixels in the air and walk between them, together? Pixel Forest is 3,000 dots, and it looks chaotic—but every pixel knows exactly where in the room it is. When I play a sharp image, it’s very hectic; with a softer image, the room almost pulsates. Every video is light, whether it’s on a monitor or a projector, and my wish is to free this wonderful light from the rectangle.

Video technology has changed so much since you started working. How have you thought about evolving alongside it?

I’m a walking technical history! When video evolved from analog to digital, it was a huge step. I think it’s important that young people understand that there used to be TVs in living rooms, and only certain people could send content to them; many people received this content. As the machines became smaller, and with the advent of the digital, everyone became a potential sender. It’s more democratic than it used to be.

Glitches are essential parts of some of your earlier works, but today, your works are smoother.

Analog glitches and mistakes are much nicer than digital ones. They are more physical. When we are nervous or angry, we also have these glitches. The analog is closer to our physical body than the digital. But I’m also finding nice mistakes in the digital world. It’s similar to painting: often, when your painting isn’t photorealistic, you can put more feelings and subconscious layers in. My theory is that the glitches are very similar to our subconscious. There is too much or too little wanted from us, and we react with psychosomatic problems. When our body glitches, it’s telling us we have to make a decision or change something. Embracing mistakes is important for me not only in a technical way, but also in psychological ways.

What’s your favorite work you’ve ever made?

I don’t know that I have a favorite work, but in honor of your question, I’d say Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava), 1994. [Editor’s note: It’s a small monitor installed under a floorboard and viewed through a hole. Originally shown at the foot of a Madonna and Child sculpture in Switzerland, it shows a woman drowning in flames and waving her arms, suggesting damnation.] It’s been on view at MoMA PS1 since it was in a group show in 2017, and at first, I was not aware that they had never taken it down. I saw it a year later, and I was surprised. But I said OK, I’ll do a long-term loan, though you have to clean it up. By then, it was full of dust.

I saw it again three years later, and suddenly, 40 guards were around me. They had gone around to tell each other, “She’s here!”—then got together to tell me how much they loved it. I couldn’t help but cry!

This article appears under the title “Pipilotti Rist Goes Glittery” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 26–29.

For an exhibition at moCa Cleveland, Brooklyn-based artist Finnegan Shannon has taken matters into their own hands, with a show that requires no walking and offers ample seating. After arriving via elevator, visitors are invited to sit on couches and chairs while a conveyor belt parades by them a rolling display of artworks by Shannon’s artist peers. The setup’s closest proxy is conveyor belt sushi—but this is a feast for the eyes, rather than the taste buds.

The soft seating feels decidedly more domestic than institutional; Shannon sourced the chairs and couches from local thrift stores. (They even found a small stool with a puzzle spelling out the first name of the show’s curator, Lauren Leving.) And Shannon tied it all together with some of their own homey touches, like embroidered pillows bearing fluorescent conveyor belts and cut-out cardboard letters on the wall spelling out phrases like _{^{DON’T MIND IF WE DO}} and _{^{WE BEING SILLY AND SERIOUS}}. Shannon further tends to their viewers’ bodies with DIY air purifiers made of duct tape and box fans that help alleviate Covid’s ongoing risk.

The show encouraged visitors to slow down. On the wall, custom clocks told the day of the week rather than the hour of the day, as if asking, what’s the rush? It’s a show about promoting rest and alleviating museum fatigue, but more specifically, it is born of the disability justice movement. It’s aimed explicitly at questioning the ableist valuing of bodily exertion, as well as at the exclusionary assumptions museums make about bodies. Shannon considers the exhibition a fulfillment of their long-held “access fantasy.”

Among the most charming pieces making the rounds are Emilie L. Gossiaux’s 3D-printed sculptures depicting various body parts of her guide dog, London—including a paw and a tongue. Also from Gossiaux is a journal full of hand-drawn illustrations of the color-identification system she created for herself after going blind, in which she associates colors with memories and feelings: a crayon that Crayola calls “purple mountains’ majesty,” for instance, is renamed “homecoming dress purple 2003.” Other pieces on the belt are interactive: visitors can lift them off and return them at their leisure. A card game by Jeffrey Kasper offers prompts for two players to engage in exercises promoting risk and intimacy. A Selection of Snapshots Taken by Felix Felix Gonzalez-Torres reproduces endearing correspondences, cat photos, and figurines that the late artist arranged lovingly on his pillows.

For some photographs in the Gonzalez-Torres book, we see not the picture, but the description he wrote on the back: like _^HOME or _{^{MIAMI LANDSCAPE, 1995, SUMMER OF LOVE}}. These image descriptions are echoed in the audio description track Finnegan made for the show, accommodating blind and low-vision visitors. For Shannon, the access itself is often the artwork, and items like tissues and ear plugs (for those seeking a low-stimulus environment) both circulate on the conveyor belt and appear on the show’s checklist. As ever, Shannon takes great care with the details: the tissue box is in a fabric cozy in the shape of a house, the artist having removed the stairs that made its entrance inaccessible, and lovingly added lavender to the bushes. Here as elsewhere, Shannon approaches access, to quote organizer Kevin Gotkin, as “radical hospitality.”

Implied in all this is the unseen effort that disabled artists often exert when working on an exhibition to make it accessible to our communities. Instead of keeping that work behind the scenes, Shannon compellingly makes it the subject of their debut museum solo.

Shannon is best known for their benches and cushions that appear in group exhibitions, bearing statements like _{^{THIS EXHIBITION HAS ASKED ME TO STAND FOR TOO LONG. SIT IF YOU AGREE}}., written out in the artist’s signature script. The bold capital letters are polished off with soft edges and a lighthearted informality that mirrors their twinned playfulness and criticality. Shannon’s work is always participatory: their “Anti-Stairs Club Lounge” comprised a series of interventions, including a protest at the opening of architect Thomas Heatherwick’s gargantuan Vessel in New York, a 150-foot-tall structure made of interlocking staircases. Before it closed, it glorified 154 flights while promising a premier view.

My own most memorable encounter with a Shannon intervention was at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, where I lay back in a cushioned chaise lounge to watch a gut-wrenching Nan Goldin slideshow, in which she relates how her sister’s institutionalization—and later, suicide—altered the course of her life. I became utterly engulfed, and started to wonder how many other treasures I’d skipped over because I hadn’t wanted to stand around, or squat on the floor, or sit on a hard, backless bench.

That work induced in me a longing to lounge in museums. It also underscored a key contribution of Shannon’s work: the artist doesn’t just point out the absences and assumptions normalized in museums, they also dream up solutions. Rather than institutional critique, you might call it institutional repair.

—Emily Watlington

This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue.

Recently, some of today’s most compelling artists and writers—ones who were big names in the art and tech scene of the 2010s, like Holland, as well as Hito Steyerl and Ryan Trecartin—have been questioning the ubiquity of seemingly inescapable consumer technology by looking to prehistory, on the premise that somewhere along the way, humankind messed up. They’re going Paleolithic, Amish, or back to the land. Holland’s 2015 solo debut at Transfer Gallery in New York, “Technophilia,” comprised a series of videos that she uploaded to a porn site and also showed in the gallery. In them, she toyed with the internet’s misogynistic logic: pornos with feminist plot twists, including one of Holland preparing to perform fellatio but instead turning to suck the camera: she consumed the gaze that was all set to consume her.

“Death Drive” marks a shift from toying with technology’s rules to plying them against technology itself: Holland describes the show as emerging from the pandemic, from experiencing mass death online in the form of Zoom funerals and depressing infographics. She became newly aware of the thousands, if not millions, of years by which these devices will outlive us humans, and decided to help expedite the process.

She also trained an AI to “grow” (generate images of) mold, which she printed on aluminum, her logic being that “by teaching an AI system to reproduce mold, it could also prepare the technology to imagine its own, organic death.”

In the 2010s, Steyerl and Trecartin were trying to carve out space for the democratic ambitions of the early-ish internet—harnessing this tool with the power to distribute access, information, and a voice in ostensibly equal ways—while also inviting skepticism toward the ways various platforms surveil us and can also reproduce inequality. Steyerl is considered an authority on the societal impacts of technology: in the 2010s, she produced conversation-changing films and essays that endeavored to show how opaque technological systems worked and the ideologies they embodied. Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s signature hour(s)-long multichannel videos captivated the art world around the same time with an energy so frenetic that viewers often feel exhausted just watching one. The duo’s practice captured how endless push notifications and umpteen open browser tabs can produce symptoms of ADHD in even the most chemically balanced of brains. They managed to convey the too-muchness of it all, and made viewers painfully aware of the fact that there is now more footage and data being captured and regurgitated online than the human mind can possibly comprehend. Perhaps it was inevitable that they would lead the way offline.

BUT AS THE DECADE came to a close, something shifted: critics, myself included, were flummoxed by Steyerl’s 2019 show at Park Avenue Armory, in which she appeared to play journalist in an installation about gun violence in the United States that featured figures familiar from the news. And as her writing began to blur absurdity and authority in ways that didn’t always translate—and felt irresponsible in the age of misinformation—an Artspace headline about her essays from the same year asked: “What Is She Talking About?”

Whether in response to such criticism or on her own accord, she changed things up dramatically. She’s abandoned that authoritative tone and returned to the absurdist roots found in her best works, like How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), and Liquidity Inc.(2014). In her new video, Animal Spirits (2022), a group of artists fantasizes about dropping out and becoming shepherds. They are inspired by Nel, a former historian who left the city to become a “quantum” shepherd (whatever that means) and an eco-influencer. Nel paints his face to avoid detection by autonomous surveillance drones, and goes on rants against eco-fascists, “Disney ecologists,” and NFT bros. Self described “desperate artists” convene on Zoom to commiserate as their shows are indefinitely postponed due to Covid-19, and as their interest in the rat race wanes. They lean into the more enjoyable aspects of lockdown life, like being alone and slowing down.

The group of artists—played by real artists Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Rabih Mroué, and James Bridle—conspires to audition together for a reality show called Shepherd School. Halfway through the piece, they’re all flatly rejected. Mockeries of the blockchain and the metaverse follow: In the metaverse, animals fight to the death, and “Each time an animal burns, an NFT is minted and recorded to the blockchain as a unique digital asset.” A group of shepherds gets fed up with “the shitshow of the animal gladiator metaverse” (and, it’s implied, the blockchain’s notorious environmental effects). So they create their own exchange system: Cheese Coin. A narrator “explains” that cheese is what happens when milk becomes stone and searches for immortality. Like many techno-spheres, it’s just its own circular logic, and it seems silly from the outside. At Documenta 15 and at Esther Schipper in Berlin, Steyerl showed the video as part of a trippy installation: herbs in dangling terrarium spheres were hooked up to sensors. When a visitor’s movement triggered a sensor, it told an AI to animate the Paleolithic cave paintings projected on the wall.

Even before Steyerl changed course, Trecartin and Fitch, in 2016, moved their studio from LA to rural Ohio, where they built a compound on a 32-acre property replete with a giant lazy river. Their exhaustion was palpable in “Whether Line,” their 2019 show at the Prada Foundation in Milan, where they put together a prefab barn inside the museum, leaving half the space empty. To get to the barn, you had to navigate meandering stanchions as if in a long line for a roller coaster, minus the crowds. Inside the barn, a video took viewers into some version of the artists’ Ohio life, where disillusioned tech dropouts, a rural queer community, and Amish neighbors bickered. (Trecartin plays a rural Amish woman named Neighbor Girl.) The various parties dispute things like loud music and property lines; one neighbor gets another registered as “historic,” as if she were a building. This means she must request a permit to change even the way she waves hello. It is not a romantic view of the simple life, but still, a pink-haired person explains, “that’s why we’re here in the country, to like, reverse the curse.”

THE BACKDROP TO these artists’ recent works has been a general disenchantment with technologies that have lost their early promise. The New York Times recently reported on the “Luddite teens” of Brooklyn, a group of young people leading the “smart phone liberation movement.” Twitter, whose predecessor is a DIY invention of protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention, is now the plaything of a billionaire, its content having degenerated from free speech to misinformation along the way.

At the same time Steyerl and Trecartin and Fitch were altering their trajectories, the author Tao Lin, who once turned tweets and emails into novels, was at work on his 2021 novel Leave Society—a piece of autofiction about recovery from the symptoms of “dominator society.” Lin borrowed the term from Riane Eisler’s 1980s classic book The Chalice and the Blade, which distinguishes partnership societies—early cultures that worshipped goddesses and nature—from dominator, or patriarchal ones like ours. (As it happened, in real life Lin did not leave society so much as get canceled—first for dubious behavior with a 16-year-old when he was 22, and again for anti-vax preaching on Twitter.)

Leave Society accuses Google of having “censored, shadow-banned, and blacklisted natural health sites because its parent corporation since 2015, Alphabet, had ties to pharmaceutical corporations,” and calls Wikipedia a tool for “aggregate[ing] the mainstream.” Lin’s protagonist, Li, decides to stop merely looking stuff up online after realizing that “at some point public education had taught him that everything was already discovered, that new discoveries would be on the news.” Instead, he tries approaching the physical and natural world around him with openness and curiosity.

Writing in the New Yorker, Andrea Long Chu accused Leave Society of a “naïve prelapsarianism,” an attitude David Graeber and David Wengrow parse brilliantly in their 2021 tome The Dawn of Everything, a search for the origins of inequality. The two anthropologists looked at anthropological studies of Neolithic societies like Çatalhöyük (a favorite of Lin’s too), and found examples of cities (not nomadic cultures) that thrived before implementing any hierarchical social orders. They conclude that, since the dawn of time, our ancestors were self-conscious political actors. Some narratives wager that when agriculture came along and brought with it the division of labor—meaning, not everyone had to spend their time securing food but were free to do other things, like make art—it brought about inequality, which is the unfortunate price of a sophisticated society. They argue instead that it was people—not agriculture, or any other invention—that caused inequality. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.”

Dream as we might of reverting human “progress”—and these artists are indeed offering dreams, for their projects still necessitate participation in the art world and collaborations with technology—there might be other, more feasible moves. If Graeber and Wengrow are right, technology doesn’t determine the course of history: people do. So long as the robots don’t go rogue…  

Don’t get me wrong: I loved her 2018 retrospective in Germany so much that I traveled to see it twice—and it was at the MMK in Frankfurt, arguably Europe’s most boring city. But one subway ride to Manhattan for the Gagosian show, which closes October 21, left me feeling unsatisfied.

This show is mostly new work, and as ever, Noland’s red, white, and blue sculptures made of resin and refuse chafe at the contradictions between the American dream and the American reality. There is, though, an untitled walker from 1986, wrapped in a leather strap and bearing a badge that says “special police.” It’s on view alongside sculptures that, pairing bullets and badges, invoke police brutality. Badges abound, but the walker’s is the only one inscribed with the word “special,” that grating euphemism for “disabled.” I can’t tell if the choice was intentional and insensitive, or just blithe and inconsiderate. But for decades, she’s shown assistive devices alongside grenades and can collections, as if she were equating disability with fates as tragic as destitution or death.

Part of me was pleased to see mass disablement included as one of the machinations of American neoliberalism for once. Inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable nutritious foods, gun violence, and an environment rife with disabling toxins are eroding American health (and, as the theorist Lauren Berlant argued, preventing our uprisings).

But another part of me saw Noland’s walker stumbling clumsily into a paradox, one that disability theorist Jasbir K. Puar articulated in her 2017 book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Puar describes mass disablement and injury as deliberate tactics of policing, writing specifically about the Israeli Defense Force. Then she asks: how do we hold space for rage at this reality alongside our longing for disability pride?

But with Noland, instead of pride, all we get is pity.

Is that pity the artist’s or America’s? As ever, she’s just tracing the impact of the unseen forces of American neoliberalism on ordinary objects, without ever offering clear commentary. But still, she gestures at a bigger, bleaker truth: that the neoliberal state benefits from discourses of empowerment, which conveniently place responsibility on the individual rather than the government. (Remember that our hard-won, landmark legislation—the 1990’s Americans with Disabilities Act—was signed into law by George H. W. Bush, who saw granting rights as a tool for getting more disabled people off welfare.)

But I also wonder to what degree Noland included assistive devices simply because they look like her sculptures already. The walker is shown next to Polaroids of older works rife with grab bars and scaffolding that echo the walker’s aluminum tubing.  

These new works, all crammed into a small space, feel formulaic, as if the artist were cleaning out stuff that’d been kicking around in her studio for decades. (After all, she uses Budweiser cans that, as my colleague Alex Greenberger points out, are no longer in circulation). But the weirdest, and maybe the best, update is that some of the resin blocks now sit on lucite tables, as if the art objects were extensions of fancy furniture. Was that choice about meaning or materials? Here, since it’d be a contradiction to offer class commentary in the form of a luxury good for sale at Gagosian anyway, I like the ambiguity.

At 88, Rainer is touring a new dance, Hellzapoppin’: What about the bees?, that she is calling her last. It marks the end of a long impressive run: most dancers retire in their 30s. “I just don’t have any more choreographic ideas,” she told me. She went on to describe dancing Trio A in her 80s, when getting up off the ground had started to become more difficult, and wondering to herself, “Why isn’t this way of getting up just as good as the original?” She added, “Historically, what [dancers] are able to do in their continued body consciousness is not appreciated.” 

Rainer is the daughter of two anarchist vegetarians who met in the 1920s at a San Francisco Bay Area raw food restaurant. They named their kids Yvonne and Ivan. Yvonne’s father introduced her to “art-house movies” in her teens. Her mother—the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants who, according to Rainer’s 2006 memoir, Feelings Are Facts, “had working-class aspirations to … ‘the finer things’”—introduced her to ballet. Her parents, who were also landlords, sent both children into and out of “foster homes? orphanages? boarding schools? child depositories?—places to which we were sent” for reasons that remain mysterious.

Two traumatic experiences kept young Yvonne from continuing her ballet lessons. The first occurred when she was meant to walk herself to class from a Palo Alto group home, but got terribly lost along the way. The second occurred in class. All the girls were able to touch the backs of their heads with their toes except Yvonne. When the teacher lent an assist, she let out a mortifying fart. “I had a particular body that didn’t measure up to certain standards. So I had to create my own,” Rainer said in the 2015 documentary Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer, where she describes wanting to “make something out of this recalcitrant, undancerly body.”

Rainer began dancing “in earnest” at 24, as she puts it in Work (1961–73), a book of dance-related documents first published in 1974 and reissued by Primary Information in 2020. She moved to New York (after lasting only a week at the University of California, Berkeley), where she took three classes a day—two at the Martha Graham school, the other more traditional ballet—after asking her mother for some money to study (“not telling her that it was also for an abortion”). But that was the late ’50s; she reflected that “most dancers today can’t afford to take three classes a day.” In a dance composition class taught by Robert Dunn and inspired by the ideas of avant-garde composer John Cage, Rainer had what she described as her aha moment: “We were in a fifth-floor studio, and we would go to the window and watch what was going on in the street.” She observed people “stand and shift from foot to foot… or pick up things,” and started incorporating that into her work, deciding that “everything is a performance if someone is watching.” (Eventually, the world would catch up with her: theorist Judith Butler put forth the idea in 1990 that gender is always a performance, and not long later, social media made it obvious that we’re all always crafting performative personas.)

In the early ’60s, Rainer was hosting weekly workshops and critiques, with dancers as well as filmmakers and visual artists, in her studio. But the group soon grew too big, so they started gathering in Judson Memorial Church in the West Village. There, they expanded what their respective disciplines could be as they comingled with Fluxus artists—Rainer performed at Yoko Ono’s loft. The prevailing sentiment at the time was that dance is dance, theater is theater, and both fall under the umbrella of “performing arts.” At Judson, “performance art” was born, as figures like Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Trisha Brown, and Simone Forti intermingled.

In 1966 at Judson, Rainer premiered her magnum opus, or, as she modestly described it, “maybe one of the few things I’ll be remembered for.” Trio A is a 10-minute piece marked by squatting, crouching, and reaching. There’s no music, no climactic moment, and barely any flow. The dancer’s face does not emote. She does not make eye contact with the audience. Her clothes are ordinary. She does not leave the stage. Rainer reflected that she was saying no to “everything that I could think of that theatrical tradition was based on.”

Describing her dance movements literally strips them of their oddly mesmerizing effect. As dancer Lucinda Childs once recalled, “If you had said this girl is going to walk around and do this thing and talk, I would think you were kidding—or crazy. Instead, it was completely spellbinding.” When Rainer describes her movements from her own vantage, you start to get the point a bit more: often, they have everything to do with effort. She once called Trio A “a dance where you really have to lug your weight around.”

The intended effect of Trio A was not to entertain, but rather to make people think. Dancer Emily Coates has described it as the “quintessential example of choreography as theory.” Academics have responded to Trio A with copious writing on the political implications of boringness, the refusal of the spectacle, and the democratic effects of “de-skilling” dance. In her memoir, Rainer thanks scholars of her work for the ego boost, but warns that “if you’re interested in Plato, you’re reading the wrong book.” Rainer’s own writing is, like her dances, straightforward, unpretentious, often funny. In her 1964 “No Manifesto,” she says “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity…. No to moving or being moved.” But she complained to me that this essay has dogged her forever: “I never meant it as a rule of thumb to govern anything I did in the future,” she said. “But most writers bring it up immediately.”

Many artists who saw the original Trio A live were deeply affected by it. When Rainer danced the piece as part of The Mind is a Muscle in 1968, the young Conceptualist Adrian Piper was so impressed that she attended all three nights. But only later did Piper feel the piece’s full effect. “It wasn’t until I saw Yvonne perform Trio A separately at a later event that I even began to comprehend what I had witnessed in The Mind is a Muscle,” Piper said. That iteration included an audio recording of an intimate conversation between Rainer and Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, who was Rainer’s partner at the time. That version, Piper continued, “draws all of the disparate activities happening onstage into mutual connection.” (Piper created her 1974 sound piece Stand-In #1: Rob (1974)—in which the artist argues about philosophy with her boyfriend, then nags him to take his vitamins—as “an homage to Yvonne, otherwise known as shameless plagiarism of her ideas.”)

Trio A has impacted a whole generation of artists who weren’t been born in time to see Rainer dance the original live. “There are some old-timers who are coming to dances and my films these days, but mainly, it’s a younger generation,” Rainer said. “I’m kind of amazed people are still with revving up the ’60s like it’s this seminal decade.” In 2017 Adam Pendleton made a 14-minute video titled Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer. At a New York diner, Pendleton asks Rainer to read a script that mixes quotes from her own writing with those from the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. The diner scene, shot in black-and-white, is intercut with archival footage of Trio A. MIT art historian Caroline A. Jones wrote that the enigmatic video invokes Rainer’s “stature as the radical conscience of that mostly male and predominantly white movement [Minimalism].” Jones goes on to describe Pendleton as part of a new generation of artists confronting Minimalism’s legacy, adding that Rainer explicitly questions the movement’s “commitment to a (tacitly white, male, upper-class, hegemonic) universal body.”

Indeed, one important part of Rainer’s legacy involves teaching certain Minimalists how to dance. Art historian Rosalind Krauss discusses Rainer’s work at length in her influential Passages on Modern Sculpture (1981)—which is notable, since Rainer is not a sculptor. Still, through collaborations and with her work, she asked fellow artists to pay attention to the body and the way it moves around. One example Krauss cites is Robert Morris’s role in Rainer’s Parts of Some Sextets (1965)—a formative experience for an artist who would make sculptures that prompted viewers to walk around and navigate the gallery space. (Krauss would know, because she dated Morris after he and Rainer split.)

A FEW YEARS AGO, the independent curator Risa Puleo brought my attention to the fact that works like Convalescent Dance (1967) and Hand Movie (1966) are, effectively, works of disability art. In the former, Rainer adapted Trio A to a slower pace, while experiencing a period of illness. She had just gotten out of the hospital, but wanted to participate in an artist-led Vietnam War protest called Angry Arts Week. In an essay for Art Papers, Puleo argued that “pain and illness ebb and flow throughout Trio A’s history as Rainer healed and relapsed,” pointing also to the 2010 version, Trio A: Geriatric with Talking, where Rainer talked about “age-related inadequacies” as she danced.

Hand Movie, meanwhile,is a 6-minute choreography for one hand that she filmed from a hospital bed while recovering from abdominal surgery. She stretches and folds her fingers with trepidation, as if just waking up, then wiggles her middle finger up and down, with erotic repetition. I tried dancing along on YouTube, thinking the movements were simple enough, but was surprised by how tired my hand muscles quickly became. Rainer’s pieces reveal that dancing, like illness, results in knowing your own body intimately.

Her health issues progressed throughout the 1960s, so in the ’70s, Rainer decided to take a long hiatus from dance. She turned instead to film, in part because she wanted to address politics, which she found difficult to do in dance. “The kind of dancing I did was just references to dance history,” she told me, “but I wanted to deal with the environment and with current events.” I told her that, since the history of dance is so exclusionary and ableist, I considered her retorts political indeed.

Early on, her films were very dancerly, marked by tracking shots that followed bodies as they edged out of the frame. Increasingly, they became more narrative. A Film About a Woman Who (1974) explores her own unsatisfying heterosexual relationships under patriarchy and her subsequent rage. Few women had opportunities to make films at the time, and those who did, like Rainer, did so on shoestring budgets. This meant she had to enlist her own brother to shoot a scene in bed, where Rainer appears in a green sequined bra. She knew he was good at memorization, and figured he could learn the lines.

After Rainer won a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1990, she used the money to make a big-budget autobiographical film about coming out as a lesbian. Murder and Murder (1996) is a tragicomic feature about middle-aged lesbians, with lines drawn verbatim from Rainer’s diary and memoir. In an opening scene, one smiling woman tells another, “never in my wildest dreams, in my most far out fantasies, did I ever come close to imagining that one day I would be able to say, with the utmost conviction… I love eating pussy!”

Her joy is contagious, but as in most of Rainer’s films—all of which were recently restored by New York’s Metrograph theater—Murder and Murder gets at the awkward ways that politics chafe against everyday life. The women are liberated—or as Rainer puts it in the narration, “evolved”—but still bicker with one another over what to have for dinner. And, once again, matters of health enter the frame. When one nutritionally minded lesbian suggests dining on tempeh and kale, she explains that as “an ex-dancer and a survivor of multiple medical crises, I monitor my body like a piece of fine machinery.” Later, in a moving monologue, Rainer appears in a tuxedo sliced down the middle, her mastectomy exposed, and observes that “women don’t often murder each other … but there is murder and there is murder … murder by homophobia … by DDT …” A list of other societal factors goes on.

RAINER KNEW SHE WOULD NEVER again have the same kind of budget for film. Besides, she said, “I loved being alone in the editing room, but I didn’t enjoy the production process,” adding, “I’m a technical asshole.” Conveniently, one day in 1999, Mikhail Baryshnikov called her. (“I believe I said, ‘Who?’” she recalled, with a laugh.) Baryshnikov had recently stepped down from his post as artistic director of the American Ballet Theater, and he asked her to choreograph something for his new company, White Oak Dance. He was known for choreography with virtuosic leaps, but by then, he had compromised his knees, and had come to relate to Rainer’s work in a new way. She didn’t hesitate. “I’ve been making dances ever since!”

When she emerged back on the dance scene after a three-decade hiatus, museums were offering themselves as institutional homes for the performance art that had once been relegated to downtown lofts and church basements. In 2003 Tate Modern in London began a performance-focused initiative called “Live Culture,” and 2005 marked the launch of Performa, New York’s performance art biennial. That edition’s lynchpin was Marina Abramović’s weeklong series at the Guggenheim, “Seven Easy Pieces,” which “emphatically confirmed the incursion of performance into the space and logic of the ‘high art’ museum,” as art historian Amelia Jones put it in this magazine, “for better or for worse.”

Rainer confronted this changing landscape for performance art firsthand when she began working with MoMA to choreograph a response to Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy (1897). She identified the painting as her favorite in the museum’s collection when she first arrived in New York in 1956. It shows a Black woman resting supine in the desert below a full moon, a lion standing nearby. Sleep is a recurring theme in her own work, one that Rauschenberg commemorated in a 1965 combine, Sleep for Yvonne Rainer. Her original idea was to sleep in front of the painting, next to a stack of handouts.

But two curators warned that the piece felt too similar to Tilda Swinton’s 2013 MoMA intervention, The Maybe, for which the actress slept in a glass case on random days for all to see. When Rainer googled photos of Swinton, she found herself, as she wrote in Triple Canopy, “aghast at the blatant voyeurism of the onlookers who pressed their noses up against the glass cage that enclosed the glamorous celebrity.” Rainer’s ideas about pedestrian movement had gone mainstream, and paradoxically, become a kind of spectacle. Marina Abramović’s blockbuster 2010 MoMA exhibition, “The Artist Is Present,” for which she stared at length into the eyes of willing visitors, epitomizes this trajectory. When I asked Rainer what she thought of Abramović, she replied, “I respect her, but I’m not very interested in her work,” adding, “she has a whole different relationship to doing nothing.”

In recent years, Rainer has been reconstituting old works in addition to creating new ones. “There’s a whole generation who hasn’t seen” many of her pieces, she said. In 2019 she restaged her classic Parts of Some Sextets for Performa. The piece had never been filmed, so Rainer drew from stills and cryptic notes that say things like “pelvis whack,” “6 counts of romantic poses,” and “dead pose.” The choreography is meant for 10 dancers and 12 mattresses; the dancers—including Rauschenberg and Morris in the original, but Coates and artist Nick Mauss in 2019—lug around and lean on them. Rainer was drawn to the mattress for its “many connotations: death, sleep, illness, daily life, sex … whatever.” It is not, in fact, a sextet; Rainer just “liked the corny pun on sex.”

Rainer’s latest piece, Hellzapoppin’: What about the bees?, which debuted at New York Live Arts last October, grapples with the fate of being, as Rainer put it, a “permanent recovering racist.” It draws from a scene in a 1941 film with the same title, where “Black performers do this acrobatic Jitterbug.” Rainer said she “worked with dancers who range in age from 30 to 65 and couldn’t do what these dancers in their early 20s do.” She slowed down the film to study it closely, and used it as the “main source” for her choreography. The narration is by the sun god Apollo Musagète, who descends from Mount Olympus to observe the “rampant racial injustices” endemic to the United States. An unhelpful white lady interrupts to ask, “But what about the bees?!”

It’s a difficult work that has garnered mixed reviews. Here again, Rainer confronts the contradictions between political ideas and daily life, recalling in the soundtrack that even her anarchist parents kept Black housekeepers. “In this moment in our culture, people are often trying to get things right,” MoMA curator Thomas (T.) Jean Lax told me. “But Rainer remains committed to a deeper, or more challenging, set of artistic questions.” Anyway, she was never going to give her audience a grand finale.

When I asked her what she’s up to now, Rainer said, “I don’t know.” Then her dark eyes lit up as she described a Japanese detective series she was watching with her partner, Martha: they had two episodes left, and were hopefully about to get answers. She told me about a book she is reading, I Will Bear Witness, the diaries of a German Jew named Victor Klemperer, who was married to an Aryan during the Nazi era and thus spared deportation to the concentration camps. Throughout our conversation, Rainer never used the word “retiring”: for her, distinctions between what we think of as rest and what we think of as action remain irrelevant.