Illustrations by Franz Lang
My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May. The next day, in my apartment in Manhattan, I received an unexpected call—my mother never calls me—from a trauma ward in West London. “I’m in a lot of pain,” she said in a loud, anguished, slurring voice I hardly recognized, “but I’m in very good hands.” A few hours later, I was on a flight home.
When I visited her in the hospital, Mom asked me whether the show was worth losing her legs for. “No,” I told her, though at that point, I hadn’t seen it. When I did, two weeks later, my answer proved correct. Unravel featured tapestries, quilts, needlework, sculptures, and installations by modern artists, the majority of whom were of historically marginalized identities. The curators proposed that textiles themselves had also been marginalized, having been gendered as feminine and regarded as “craft” rather than “fine art.” As a result, the exhibition’s introductory text argued, the more politically radical aspects of textile making had been obscured. “What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance?” the text asked.
Hanging from the ceiling above the entrance were Native American–style garments by Jeffrey Gibson, a painter and sculptor who also represented the United States in the country’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Inspired by his Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, the pieces were adorned with rainbow-patterned patchworks printed with the phrases people like us, we play endlessly, and speak to me so that i can understand. Farther in, among other things, were a painted collage depicting a cheerful black woman in a bodega; small realist embroideries of drag and dyke marches in New York City; sculptures of cacti stitched from U.S. Border Patrol uniforms; and an image of a woman giving birth embroidered on blood-red silk, her vast womb radiating waves of energy. There were decorative knotted pieces, hand-stitched collages, abstract woven works suspended in air, and pillowy bundles of cloth.
The gallery was broken up by a series of empty spaces. Shortly after it opened, Unravel began to come slowly undone as a number of pieces were withdrawn in protest of the Barbican’s decision not to host a London Review of Books lecture series that was scheduled to include “The Shoah After Gaza,” a talk by the writer Pankaj Mishra that he later published as an essay in the magazine. The disappearances began when two pieces by Loretta Pettway, an elderly quilter from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, were removed by their lenders, Lorenzo Legarda Leviste and Fahad Mayet. Another lender and four prominent artists followed suit. Some of them wrote open letters alleging that the museum was censoring pro-Palestinian speech. In the words of the Lebanese painter, embroiderer, and video artist Mounira Al Solh, “speakers who are raising their voices for justice are being canceled.”
The Chilean poet and installation artist Cecilia Vicuña allowed her hanging woolen streamers to remain in the exhibition, but pinned a letter next to them declaring solidarity with her dissenting colleagues. Yee I-Lann—whose display of traditional Malaysian patterned mats with silhouettes of tables woven into them was meant to subvert the “power of the table,” apparently a symbol of Portuguese, British, and Dutch oppression—also declined to pull her artwork. Instead, she had a table (!) brought in from the Barbican’s administrative offices, on which was displayed a copy of the issue of the LRB in which Mishra’s essay was published. Pasted on the cover were two canary-yellow stickers displaying QR codes leading to an animated website with flashing boldface text by Leviste and Mayet that read:
censorship at the barbican
repression at the barbican
racism at the barbican
genocide at the barbican
It was the most depressing exhibition I had ever seen at the gallery, hardly worth a visit, let alone losing one’s legs. While Unravel pretended to be politically radical—even revolutionary—it didn’t seem to stand for much beyond liberal orthodoxy and feel-good ambient diversity. It offered fantasies of resistance, but had little to offer in terms of genuine, substantive social change or artistic experimentation. The works were almost entirely produced with traditional methods and materials, in recognizable aesthetics, and might as well have dated from half a century ago, if not much earlier.
Such retrospection was not limited to the Barbican. Just before my mother’s accident, I had gone to the sixtieth edition of the Venice Biennale, the longest-running regularly recurring survey of international art in the world. What I found there had been much the same: a nostalgic turn to history and a fascination with identity, rendered in familiar forms. This year’s Biennale, called Foreigners Everywhere, took four identities as its subjects—the queer artist; the outsider artist; the folk artist; the indigenous artist—and suggested that they were all foreigners because they were marginalized. It was a show of painted, handsewn, sculpted, photographed, and filmed portraits of such figures; naïve scenes of everyday life across the Global South, from Aboriginal Australia to the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon; and traditional pottery, wood carving, metal sculpture, and dyed fabric. There was a massive mural by a women’s collective from Bangalore; a contemporary dance interpretation of violence committed against Chinese migrants and queer people in the West by a millennial choreographer from Hong Kong; a text painting that read anonymous homosexual; and, on an outdoor patio, a bronze nude self-portrait of a transgender artist on a plinth that said, simply, woman.
In fact, every major biennial I have visited over the past eight years—from Germany to Greece, Italy to the United States, Brazil to the United Arab Emirates—has taken as its themes the deep richness of identity and the rejection of the West. These biennials have embraced overlooked artists from the twentieth century and exhibited recycled junk, traditional craft, and folk art. Their press releases have heralded the reclamation of precolonial forms of knowledge like indigenous thought and magic.
Only ten years ago, the art world was something very different: a globalized circuit of biennials and fairs that ran on the international trade of ideas and commodities. It was a space of spectacle and innovation, where artists tried out wildly different mediums and entertained radical ideas about what art could do and why. They were workshopping new cultural forms for a new millennium. Art was where experimentation happened, where people worked out what it felt like to be alive in this strange new century and how to give that feeling a form. Artists were researchers who were never expected to come to any conclusions. They had the freedom of absolute purposelessness.
But as faith in the liberal order began to fall apart around 2016, this conception of art no longer seemed relevant. As concerns over identity, social issues, and inequalities intensified, there was a sense that the art world had grown frivolous and decadent, that the proliferation of forms and approaches over the decades had reached its limit. Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity.
This turn was a consequence of the art world’s own exhaustion and overexpansion; here was a new direction for art, a belief system to follow that might restore some of its meaning and relevance, perhaps even a grand narrative and a purpose. The ambition to explore every facet of the present was quickly replaced by a devout commitment to questions of equity and accountability. There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn’t do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting.
The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto believed that art ended in the Sixties. From the late nineteenth century onward, there had been a churning succession of modernist movements, each reacting against the last and proposing its own answers to fundamental questions about what art should be. By the end of the Sixties, however—following the convulsive leaps forward of Pop Art, with its erasure of the distinction between artworks and everyday objects, and conceptualism, with its dissolution of objects into ideas—there was nowhere left for modern art to go, Danto wrote:
At first only mimesis was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. . . . It is the end of the story.
Like a Buddha that meditated too deeply and passed over enlightenment on the way to raving insanity, modern art had destroyed itself through excessive, nihilistic contemplation. There would still be art, Danto said, and it might even thrive, but the grand narrative of modernism was over.
To Danto, the closing of this narrative of progress was what made the “contemporary” possible. As art would no longer respond to itself, and no longer had any constraints, other human activities could be drawn from the world into its hungry maw. Art was no longer moving forward. Individual artists were free to consume the present, swallow other cultural forms, and twist them into new experiences.
Variety abounded: Cao Fei built a floating city in the virtual-reality world Second Life; Paola Pivi filled a Swiss Kunsthalle with three thousand cups of cappuccino and a leopard; Cai Guo-Qiang choreographed a fireworks display of a giant’s footprints running across the Beijing sky for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics; Wael Shawky filmed an adaptation of Amin Maalouf’s historical essay The Crusades Through Arab Eyes as a feature-length puppet cabaret epic; Philippe Parreno journeyed to Patagonia to tell two hours of rambling philosophical stories to a colony of penguins on the beach, taking only a single photograph as documentation; Carsten Höller kept a herd of reindeer in Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, fed half of them fly agaric mushrooms, and built a toadstool-shaped hotel room in which overnight guests could help themselves to the deer’s potentially hallucinogenic urine.
The art of the 1990s, 2000s, and early 2010s was pluralist in its intentions, forms, and subjects. Contemporary art took in such miscellaneous concerns as literature and poetry, avant-garde dance, theater, cinema, broadcast television, psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, politics, noise music, pornography, pole dancing, online abjection, ritual sacrifice, crucifixion, cannibalism, Thai cookouts, Zinedine Zidane playing a soccer match in Madrid, long-distance sailing, astronomy, industrial design, being a dog, biting people—everything. It could all be remade as art. The “contemporary” was eternally elusive, moving ever further away with artists in pursuit, an endless research project.
In those days, it was possible to feel part of a vanguard and—because there was a mania in the art world and a level of self-belief that moneyed people felt obliged to encourage—receive the support and resources to attempt the grandest projects. Contemporary art was fundamentally optimistic; there was a conviction that making art was a good in itself, that pushing its boundaries was a worthwhile endeavor, and that great leaps forward in culture were still possible. Theorists, philosophers, poets, and writers were lured in from other fields. The art world was where you would find the broadest remit to do whatever you wanted. It was where you could find the most unusual and preposterous ideas—and open bars, sex, and glamour too. This was the art world that I was drawn to.
Throughout my twenties, when I was studying art history and curation, interning at public and commercial galleries, and working at style magazines in London, art felt very important. It was moving fast—there was a constant flow of new artists and thinkers, and an obligation to keep up with them. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the preeminent Aughts super-curator, for whom I interned at London’s Serpentine Galleries in the summer of 2008, would always say that everything was “urgent”; it was urgent that the art crowd kept talking about art, urgent that they kept making it, and urgent that they kept seeing it. There were so many fascinating people to meet, so many ideas to explore, so many projects that needed to be realized—but so little time. Obrist used to host a series of salons, known as the Brutally Early Club, at cafés around London where writers and thinkers would gather to discuss their ideas at six-thirty in the morning. There was no time to rest.
Obrist was known to his friends and colleagues as “Hurricane.” He circumnavigated the world relentlessly, meeting everyone he could and introducing them to one another, in person or over email on his two BlackBerries, insisting on the urgency of their conversation. If the role of the contemporary artist was to consume the world, Obrist believed the role of the curator was to connect it, to become the conduit through which all twenty-first-century creativity and thought might flow. In attempting this, he may well have lost parts of his mind, as one understandably will, getting too little sleep, passing through too many time zones too quickly, sending and receiving too many messages, hearing too many foolish ideas from too many crazy people. (At one point, he had small therapy magnets taped to his temples.) He almost destroyed himself, as a committed early-twenty-first-century citizen should, in an orgy of connectivity.
Obrist’s frenzied devotion reflected his conviction that everything should be linked, his idealistic belief in the humanist possibilities of the internet and of globalization. He still dreamed that connectivity could bring everyone together, across borders and disciplines—that you could make friends with like-minded people around the world, bound by common interests. Art would be the gateway to every other form of culture and philosophy: a map of the present, a new universal language.
In 2013, at Marco Polo Airport, waiting for the flight home to London from that year’s Biennale, my friends and I sat around on the floor discussing what the best life might be. The life of an artist, we all agreed. Pursuing art was the way to be happy and free. Artists could do whatever they pleased; they were famous, respected, and sexually desirable; they could turn anything into art and create their own reasons for doing so; they made huge amounts of money for not doing very much. Surely there was nothing better. But nobody from that airport floor really made it as an artist. Some found success in more conventional careers, some grew staggeringly wealthy off early investments in Ethereum, some dropped out of society, and many I’ve forgotten were ever there in the first place. Slowly at first, and then all at once, the music faded, the guests vanished, and the party was over. Contemporary art had become so popular, so urgent, so cool, and so well-funded that a fall, in retrospect, was inevitable. As soon as it reached its peak, the height of its great flourishing, it had already begun its precipitous decline.
Early signs of a change could be seen in 2017. That year, Documenta—one of the world’s largest art exhibitions, which normally takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany—was subtitled “Learning from Athens” and opened in the Greek capital, chosen for its symbolic importance as a gateway from Europe to the Global South. Particular attention was paid to indigenous artists, such as the Kwakwaka’wakw sculptor Beau Dick, whose masks filled the first room, and various obscure historical artists, including an unexpected number of twentieth-century Albanian socialist realist painters. There was much to gain in the present, the artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, explained at the press conference, by turning to the past, by “unlearning” everything we thought we knew.
This was at the time a surprising approach—the shock of the old—because it abandoned contemporary art’s obsession with the present as well as the hierarchy that separated high art from folk traditions, throwing everything together into one sprawling show. The results were overwhelming. It was the first time I’d seen traditional, beautiful works like the Indian painter Nilima Sheikh’s suite of magic realist tempera-on-scroll landscapes populated with folkloric beings (titled Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams) given such prominence in a major show; the first time I’d seen the handwoven representation of a microprocessor that the Intel Corporation commissioned the Navajo textile artist Marilou Schultz to make in the Nineties; the first time I’d heard the Russian composer Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens, which was first performed on factory sirens, bells, navy foghorns, and artillery in Baku in 1922 to mark the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution.
The cumulative effect of these unexpected encounters with so many unfamiliar aesthetics and ideas was disorienting and thrilling. Szymczyk attempted to contain the whole world, its peoples, and modern history in forty-seven venues in Athens and thirty-five more in Kassel. Nobody since has dared to create an exhibition so ambitious or done anywhere near as good a job with this historical, nonhierarchical approach.
I went to Venice that same year. The Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto had collaborated with the Amazonian Huni Kuin people on a large crocheted ceremonial tent called Um Sagrado Lugar (“A Sacred Place”), which functioned as the centerpiece of the exhibition’s Pavilion of Shamans. During those balmy opening days, the Huni Kuin led dancing processions through the crowds of curators, critics, dealers, and socialites milling about the Giardini parkland as though they were actors in a Fellini film. Seven years later, at the 2024 Biennale, representatives of this indigenous people with a population of around eleven thousand still had the spotlight: the entire façade of the central pavilion in the Giardini was covered in a mural painted by the Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (MAHKU). Inspired by nixi pae (“enchanted thread”) rituals in which they imbibe psychoactive ayahuasca brew, recite songs led by their chant master, and experience hallucinatory ramibiranai (“emerging images”), the Huni Kuin artists channeled the perspective of Yube, the boa constrictor spirit of the forest, using painting as a way of recording their tradition. At the exhibition’s entrance, the story of the alligator bridge between Asia and the Americas—in which a giant alligator agreed to bring humans over the Bering Strait, only to submerge itself when they betrayed him—was painted across the colonnade in a coloring-book style of emotionless cartoon forms filled in with lurid, unblended pigments, which seemed less suited to the entrance of a major exhibition of contemporary art than to a kindergarten playground. It suggested a kind of missionary zeal in reverse: rather than crisscrossing the globe and stealing the natives’ souls with cameras, curators now bring painted images of more primitive ways of life back to the disenchanted West so that viewers might be healed by their embodied knowledge, or otherwise access a direct link to the time before the Fall, to a paradise unspoiled by Trump, populism, Silicon Valley, globalization, modernity, the Enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, whiteness, linear time, and the Agricultural Revolution. Our god might be dead, but there is a wish to rediscover other, older gods.
One might reasonably identify a return to tradition, a longing for the past, with the forces of political reaction. But if conservatives generally have little interest in novelty, neither does anyone else today. Everyone in the world of contemporary art wants to revive a tradition, however recent: Hellenistic Greek sculpture, the Roman cult of Adonis, ancient Nubian wedding ceremonies, Ancestral Pueblo pottery culture, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican song, Mapuche cosmology, Maya Tz’utujil weaving, Incan mythology, African mask-making and the early Cubist painting it inspired, Fifties Americana, the Sixties New Sacred Art Movement of the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Eighties Beijing migrant-worker cruising culture, late-Aughts contemporary art, etc. Everyone, it seems, wants to escape the present. We just long for different pasts.
Exactly which past artists long for largely accords with their own cultural heritage, the performance of which—engaging in the aesthetic traditions of their ancestors, producing literal representations of their communities and themselves, or simply making their identity and personal history their subject matter—is duly rewarded. One particularly popular genre consists of artists filming themselves wandering the rainforest or reenacting old rituals, making videos that exist somewhere between ethnographic documentary and TikTok dance. At this year’s Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than the Real Thing, in New York City, the Chilean Mapuche artist Sebastiana Calfuqueo filmed themself dragging a long trail of shiny blue fabric through the sacred Pehuén forest to a pool below a waterfall. For Unravel, Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín filmed himself in the Guatemalan wilderness wrapping a backstrap loom around a tree and twisting together a bright umbilical cord, in reference to the ancestral Tz’utujil cultural practice, passed down to him by his mother, of weaving as a way of preserving knowledge. For Foreigners Everywhere, the Sudanese-Norwegian artist Ahmed Umar filmed his performance of a traditional Sudanese bridal dance topless for the camera, having upped “his intake of Norwegian chocolates to enlarge his physical silhouette.”
At the Whitney Biennial in particular, many varieties of remixed neoindigeneity were on display. Eamon Ore-Giron’s paintings reimagined figures from ancient Andean folklore, such as the dragon Amaru and the great creator Viracocha’s double-headed rainbow, in the pastel shades and flat Corporate Memphis style of millennial-startup subway advertisements. Across the room, past Dala Nasser’s timber and clay-dyed fabric installation modeled after the Temple of Adonis, Clarissa Tossin’s video of performances by the Maya K’iche-’Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez and the Ixil artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal featured music played on 3D-printed replicas of Mayan wind instruments. Rounding out the grouping was Rose B. Simpson’s circle of life-size female figures made in the Pueblo ceramics tradition practiced by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. The statues were adorned with twine, lava bead, oshá root, and hide, and covered in mysterious painted symbols: pluses, diagonal crosses, columns of dashes, and spirals. Simpson describes her idols as:
tools to use to heal the damages I have experienced as a human being of our postmodern and postcolonial era—objectification, stereotyping, and the disempowering detachment of our creative selves through the ease of modern technology.
They are talismans that protect against the present.
The painter Louis Fratino was one of the youngest artists to be given substantial space at Venice. He also happened to be one of the few who is a bona fide star of the commercial art market. Like many of his contemporaries, Fratino, who is thirty-one, works in a notably conservative style despite his progressive subject matter: homoerotic scenes in the style of a mid-career Picasso. He works in modernist pastiche—or, as the catalogue puts it, “a visual vocabulary he synthesizes from art history’s greatest hits.” He’s a twenty-first-century gay American Cubist. Fratino rose quickly from obscurity at the end of the 2010s to become a market darling of the recent boom in figurative painting. His highest-priced work, An Argument—a dreamy domestic scene of two naked men sleeping, one on a living-room sofa and the other outside on the balcony, which sold at Sotheby’s New York for $730,800 in 2022—hung at the Biennale alongside other hits like Metropolitan and I Keep My Treasure in My Ass. While modernism was a conscious break with the past, Fratino’s paintings are something like a conscious break with the future; they are representative of today’s culture of spin-offs, remakes, quotations, interpolations, and revivals. In this respect, the art world is not so different from movie studios, fashion houses, or record labels—new culture is made from nothing but old culture.
Fratino’s new work for the Biennale, we were told, “carries an emotional weight that feels urgent, unveiling an additional layer of political response to the social climate queer people are facing everywhere.” While Obrist’s insistence on “urgency” came from the belief that making and discussing art was intrinsically important, the alleged urgency of Fratino’s work stems from the belief that, in these dangerous times, art can and should play an important role in resisting oppression. But it’s hard to detect any sense of political urgency in the tasteful old-fashioned aesthetic and aspirational settings of Fratino’s uniformly agreeable scenes of bourgeois gay life. Cosmos and Miscanthus is a still life of flowers in a vase, and below them, like fallen petals, some Polaroid nudes; April (After Christopher Wood), which borrows its composition from Wood’s 1930 painting Nude Boy in a Bedroom, depicts a naked painter in his apartment, the balcony door open to the trees in the garden; Wine warms a busy restaurant dining room with a half-drunk amber glow.
Celebrations of identity made in such deeply traditional styles are progressive in content but conservative in form. They offer a détournement of cultural appropriation by trying to atone for the sins and omissions of the past with a series of art-historical pastiches: canonical art remade by artists with minority identities. Figurative artists of the past pieced together ideal bodies, took up motifs from the Bible and from mythology and history, crafted portraits of the ruling class, captured close likenesses, and conjured figures as emblems or expressions of the spirit of their age; today’s trending figurative painters make images of themselves. Once, we had painters of modern life; now we have painters of contemporary identities. And it is the fact of those identities—not the way they are expressed—that is understood to give value to our art.
The extent to which the art world has taken up these concerns raises another question: When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized? They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed; it no longer needs to be museums’ main priority and has by now been hollowed out into a trope. These voices have lost their own unique qualities. In a world with Foreigners Everywhere, differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief. We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.
Great art should evoke powerful emotions or thoughts that can be brought forth in no other way. If art merely conjured the same experience that could be attained through knowledge of the author’s identity alone, there would be no point in making it, or going to see it, or writing about it. If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.
At the Whitney this year, art’s socially conscious turn attempted to claim every gesture as a kind of resistance or critique. One of the few works I enjoyed at the Biennial was Dora Budor’s playful experimental film Lifelike, which takes the viewer on a tour of Hudson Yards, the oft-maligned Manhattan megadevelopment a short walk up the High Line from the museum. Shot on a gimbal-mounted iPhone with a vibrator stuck to it, the video shows the new district shimmering like a mirage, the lights tracing circular trails, the architecture humming. It makes for pleasurable, comforting viewing, like visual ASMR, but what does it really have to say about the estranging effects of New York City real estate development? How is it that when Budor placed vibrators inside small, elegant wooden sculptures, as she did at the 2022 Venice Biennale, the work “interrelates industrial production, the privatization of pleasure, and the mechanics of biopolitical control,” whereas here “a vibrating pleasure device attached to the camera disturbs . . . serenity, suggesting an alienation commonly experienced in cities increasingly dominated by corporate architecture and gentrification”? How many forms of late-capitalist disaffection can one Magic Wand express? And isn’t Hudson Yards already a metonym for the dispiriting, suicide-inducing effects of corporate architecture? Isn’t that the most obvious observation, in fact, that one could make about it?
When people from other walks of life used to tell me that they did not understand art, I would always reply that there is nothing to understand, there is no hidden meaning there to be deciphered. Lately, however, it has come to seem that there is. Budor’s room was adjacent to Charisse Pearlina Weston’s postminimalist suspended smoked-glass ceiling, which, the accompanying wall text explained, evokes “the ‘stall-in’ planned by the Brooklyn and Bronx branches of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to protest the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair” and explores “tactics of Black refusal.” Budor’s room led to Cannupa Hanska Luger’s upside-down hanging tepee, which, by “upending our grounding in time and space makes way for imagined futures free of colonialism and capitalism, where broader Indigenous knowledge can thrive.” Later on came Dionne Lee’s slapstick lo-fi first-person footage of herself walking hurriedly through a field with a dowsing rod. North American landscape painting has “typically taken a very broad view, with a distant horizon suggesting both optimism and colonizing force,” the wall text said. But Lee’s video “refuses that convention in favor of a more personal point of view, one that centers Black experiences of survival and the land.” Elsewhere was Karyn Olivier’s assemblage of found lobster traps from Maine, pot warp, and buoys hanging from a rope made of salt, which “invokes a memory of the work’s oceanic origin but also of the practice of trading salt for enslaved people in Ancient Greece.”
Needless to say, it was hard to glean any of these alleged meanings from the works themselves. Rather, they could be discovered only from the descriptions on the wall, which read like the everything-is-connected code-breaking ravings of an overeducated cabal convinced that a hidden semiotic language of resistance lies below everyday objects, camera angles, orientations, and gestures made so very many times before.
Half a century ago in these pages, Tom Wolfe complained that, as modern art became more abstract and de-objectified, and its interpretation more tightly prescribed by the era’s leading critics, the work’s appearance grew subordinate to the theory that purported to explain it, to words on a page. In the decades that followed, critics, artists, and curators alike began to frame contemporary artworks in relation to more or less every subgenre of contemporary philosophy—deconstruction, poststructuralism, speculative realism, accelerationism, pataphysics, psychogeography. Now, as the scope of art has narrowed dramatically, so too have the theoretical frameworks used to interpret it, and descriptions of work are dominated by the language of decolonial or queer theory.
Critical claims have ceased to be about the art itself—as they were in Wolfe’s day—and now concern art’s capacity to drive political change. Not only has the art world embraced the magical spiritualities of the elders, but it has also returned to an old view that artworks can possess a mysterious, world-changing power; according to the texts issued by art institutions around the world, society’s ills might be healed through inclusivity, symbolic representations, and arcane, coded gestures. Reparations can be paid in images, guilt sloughed away with incomprehensible signifiers of accountability.
We lie to one another and to ourselves that all this humdrum work is inspiring, that it has an influence on how opinions are formed and hearts are won, but, of course, it doesn’t. Nobody cares, which is partly why the exhibitions feel so lifeless. Few can even be bothered to protest the Whitney Biennial anymore, to call for the destruction of its paintings or the dissolution of its board; protesters don’t even bother to glue themselves to contemporary paintings to protest the oil industry—it wouldn’t draw enough attention or ire, so they target the old masters and the stars of modernity. Curators keep fighting a culture war that has already ended in the world outside.
When I worked for Obrist, he held a twenty-four-hour marathon lecture series in which philosophers, industrial designers, historians, ecologists, novelists, landscape architects, and filmmakers would come and speak for fifteen minutes each. Back then, there was someone turning up at highbrow art events across London and throwing his shit at important people. It was my job at the lecture series to make sure Obrist remained excrement-free. Today, it’s impossible to imagine anyone wanting to do such a thing to a curator, to imagine anyone caring enough or even knowing whom to aim for.
Despite my jaundiced view of contemporary art, I do still encounter works that take me right out of the world. At Venice this year, I loved the installation artist Massimo Bartolini’s Italian Pavilion—one of the dozens of national pavilions at the Biennale that are curated independently of the large international group exhibition—featuring original compositions by musicians Caterina Barbieri, Kali Malone, and Gavin Bryars. Passing through the cavernous warehouse space, at the very end of the Arsenale shipyard, I heard a low hum coming from a handmade wooden bass organ pipe that ran most of the length of the brick-and-stone floor. Then, through a doorway, an automated organ-like music machine played a plaintive ambient lament through scaffolding pipes that extended into a fifty-meter-long mazelike installation. At its center was a circular pool filled with pulsating water; outside in the garden, a choral arrangement by Bryars and his son Yuri sounded from the trees. It was a marvelous experience and an unusual one, unlike any other I have had in the thousands of exhibitions I’ve visited in my life. It felt like a reverie, or a Paolo Sorrentino scene about the ecstasy and sadness of life. Bartolini’s architecture was irreducible to social or political messaging, and I found myself wishing there were more attempts to create utopian spaces or communities, to open minds up to new possibilities, and so make life feel more expansive.
There were some extraordinary artists in the main exhibition, too: I felt transported by Rember Yahuarcani’s threatening mythical visions of pert-breasted rainforest creatures fucking one another while lynching songbird avatars of the European Union and the United States from their treetop gallows. His father, Santiago Yahuarcani, who like him comes from the White Heron clan of the Uitoto Nation, was also included in the show, and I admired his wild-all-over paintings of tribespeople seduced by many-titted Amazon mermaids blowing smoke into their mouths or devoured by chimeric animal spirits. This work, for me, brought to mind Giovanni da Modena’s extraordinary early-fifteenth-century fresco in Bologna’s Basilica of San Petronio depicting the devil and his demons eating sinners in hell. I was moved also by the crazy-eyed batik-dyed figures that Susanne Wenger drew with cassava-starch paste, attempting to give a form to Jungian archetypes, after studying in Vienna in the Thirties and immigrating to Nigeria in the Fifties, where she was initiated into the Yoruba religion. I relished the lush neon sensuality of Xiyadie’s paper-cut watercolors, his rapturous gay orgies in Beijing in which bodies are chained together like angels on a garland, and his unsettling self-portrait depicting his penis sewn up with rose-pink thread that grows into blooming flowers.
What makes these artists great is not that they are foreigners, but rather that their visions are so foreign. They are self-taught outsiders who don’t neatly fit into any high-art or folk traditions: Santiago and Rember Yahuarcani’s imagery derives from indigenous folklore just as MAKHU’s alligator-bridge mural does, but while the latter is rendered in a childish, generic style, the White Heron clan painters combine mastery of technique with great formal experimentation, conjuring feverishly inventive beings that grow out of, and recede back into, their paintings’ energetic, patterned surfaces and structurally confusing dream spaces. Each shows us scenes from another world entirely, in a highly developed style that is entirely their own. All four of these artists have committed themselves to their very weird, singular visions, which are rendered with a palpable intensity that fills their crowded images from edge to edge. They create strange, dark fantasy scenes of violence, terror, lust, and perversity—the kinds of repressed and unspoken human desires that have appeared in art for thousands of years, but which are, for the most part, no longer welcome in the galleries. You can tell by looking at their works that they are searching for the something else.
In the Nineties, when I was a student at a Christian boys’ school in Oxford, the art teacher showed us a video of a Viennese Actionist performance by Hermann Nitsch’s Das Orgien Mysterien Theater (“Theater of Orgies and Mystery”). As I remember it, the participants were naked, wrapped in white sheets, soaked in the blood of cows they had sacrificed, performing rituals in their commune in the Austrian countryside, accompanied by music, singing, dancing, and feasting. That’s how I came to understand the idea of modern art as transgressive.
The performances of Das Orgien Mysterien Theater had nothing to do with personal identity or the imparting of information. They were, rather, attempts to leave social norms and Apollonian rationality behind and to embrace Dionysian chaos in the hopes of achieving catharsis. Artists have gone from trying to destroy reality, as in the days of the Dadaists, to attempting to reassert it and restore order today. But it is far too late. Consensus reality is gone. We are blessed to live now, in the West, in a strange world without common sense. As fact grows stranger than fiction, we should embrace the surreal and try harder to imagine more outlandish fictions. We might begin by accepting that we are being lied to all the time, that most of what we hear and see is an illusion, misrepresentation, or performance—and that’s fine. Life has in many ways become a fiction, reality is vanishing under its own representations, we are suffering from collective delusions, we are teetering on the precipice of the real, with a multiverse of fantasies spinning out beneath us—and that’s okay, that’s fine. Reality is gone, and the art crowd keeps trying to recover it, keeps claiming, “Oh, we can find it again, we can hold on to it, if we just keep exhibiting ceramics, if we just keep making paintings”—but we cannot!
The unreality of the present moment should be a boon for artists and all who deal in the imagination. I don’t particularly care to have my awareness raised; I’d rather view art that tears open my consciousness, that opens portals into the mysterious. I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject. Stop making so much sense. Art should do more than communicate: it should move us; it should make us weep; it should bring us to our knees. It is, along with music, the purest expression of the human spirit. It is an important part of what makes us human—the most important part—and constitutes a continuum of yearning passed down the centuries that can be felt in every great museum or Renaissance chapel.
Art is often best when it’s absolutely deranged. We are irrational, incoherent beings, and artists and writers should embrace this once more. If you believe that artworks cast spells, you should use that magic for greater causes than propagating a polite, liberal American sensibility or evading the effects of modern technology. You are free to dream anything. To build different worlds, to whisper enticements in many ears, to try to destroy reality; these are prospects that artists have dreamed of for centuries. There is still so much to imagine.
