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New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Is It a Mirror or a ‘Mirror'? Ask Joseph Kosuth.
It was 1965, and Joseph Kosuth was a 20-year-old undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts when he made the pieces that made his career. Their premise was simple enough: He'd take an object, like a crate, a wooden door, or a shovel, and either hang it on or lean it against a wall. To one side he'd place a life-size photo of that same object, as installed in that place, and to the other, a dictionary definition, enlarged and printed on poster board. The most famous iteration is 'One and Three Chairs,' consisting of a chair, a photo of a chair and the definition of 'chair,' which the Museum of Modern Art acquired shortly after it was made. But 'One and Three Mirrors' (1965), the version that appears in his current show, 'Future Memory' at Sean Kelly Gallery, is even better. It is as fresh now as the day it was made, and well worth revisiting, both because of its broad influence on contemporary art practice and because it offers such a clear example of the Conceptual approach. Joseph Kosuth, '#II 49 (On Color/Multi #1),' 1991. Credit... Joseph Kosuth; Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 2025; via, Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles Like the chairs, Kosuth's mirrors raise fundamental questions about art — is it an object, an image or an idea? It's easy enough to pose such questions, but realizing them in an artwork, with actual objects, gives them a special urgency, because they become practical instead of hypothetical. If you're standing in front of 'One and Three Chairs,' you have to decide what you're looking at: Is it a chair, or a 'chair'? Making the same piece with a mirror, which reflects you, your gaze and the gallery you're standing in, only adds to the categories being so thrillingly destabilized. Along with recent shows at Sprüth Magers in London and Almine Rech in Paris, and an upcoming exhibition at Lia Rumma in Naples, Italy, 'Future Memory' amounts to a kind of deconstructed retrospective for Kosuth, who just turned 80. It's the first gallery show he hasn't designed himself as an overall installation, and it includes a work from nearly every decade of his career, from the 1960s to the present. Installation view of 'Joseph Kosuth: Future Memory' at Sean Kelly; '#82 (O.M.),' 1990, appears in the upper left corner and 'The Question (G.S.),' 2025, in the middle. Credit... Jason Wyche; via, Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
‘Putting the unvarnished history out there': art and activism during the Aids crisis
In the 1980s, while the Aids pandemic ravaged the LGBTQ+ population of the United States, then president Ronald Reagan failed to help. He didn't even acknowledge the illness existed until 1985, four years into the outbreak, and research has shown that Reagan's government spent four times as much researching cures for Legionnaire's disease than HIV (in spite of the former having an infection and death rate that was dwarfed by Aids). In the vacuum formed by the failure of official government policy, on-the-ground activism by the LGBTQ+ community was essential. A substantial part of that activism was the Aids quilt. Originally conceived by Harvey Milk intern Cleve Jones, the quilt has gone on to become perhaps the largest community art project ever attempted, and panels are still being added to this day. In part to recognize the ongoing importance of the quilt, and in part to celebrate the activism that led to it in the first place, art exhibition To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live. comes to New York City's School of Visual Arts. The show, which includes documentary films on the Aids pandemic, archival posters from the 1980s, other artifacts of the era and an exhibition of contemporary art called Witness, pays tribute to the brave individuals who fought Aids when their government failed to, while highlighting how the pandemic is still active and dangerous in the United States. 'I've run into people who don't know what the Aids quilt is,' said Michael Severance, an organizer on the exhibit and operations manager with the School of Visual Arts. He believes that exhibitions like this one are essential ways to to tell the stories of the crisis and to put the history out there, especially for younger generations who did not live through it. Aids is still an ongoing problem, in spite of vastly improved medical options for those who have contracted HIV. Severance shared that the disease is particularly active in US south, and is in fact growing in that region. 'The largest proportion of people dying from Aids in America happens to be in the south,' he said. 'It's particularly bad among African-American men. There are a bunch of projects at the National Aids Memorial in San Francisco where they go in and display the quilt to try and bring education and knowledge around Aids.' Severance pointed out that the roots of the quilt were not about activism but rather memorializing the dead. Because in the beginning Aids primarily impacted communities with less public visibility and less access to resources, there were not as many ways of processing the grief of seeing individuals succumb to the disease. 'I remember losing lots of friends to Aids,' Severance told me, 'but I don't remember going to a lot of funerals.' Thus the quilt provided an important means of remembering the dead, while also building up a community of individuals impacted by the disease, be it by directly suffering an HIV infection or through connections to those who had become infected. From this communal form of grieving came projects bent more toward activism, which the quilt is now largely associated with. The exhibition includes original pieces by groups like art collective Gran Fury, which appropriated commercial language to fight for those infected with HIV, as well as a still from a Super 8 film by noted artist David Wojnarowicz. 'It's become this amazing form of activism and knowledge exchange,' said Severance. Over the years the quilt has grown and grown, from an estimated 12,000 panels in 1989 to over 50,000 today. A large part of the exhibition is sharing that legacy of community-building, art-making and organizing, and teaching people how to emulate it. To that end, a major part of this show will be two day-long quilt-making workshops, where members of the community can participate in creating panels of the Aids quilt. 'The quilt workshops are intended to be a space for people to heal and meet and learn and talk about what has been lost,' said Severance. He added the parallels between the dark days of the Aids crisis and the present-day crises being fomented by the Trump administration are quite apparent. 'There is all this homophobia and misogyny that comes with the disease. Those same classifications of people who were stigmatized for HIV are now again in jeopardy. Back in the day they were talking about internment camps for people with HIV/Aids, now we have Guantánamo being used for immigrants.' Severance believes that the legacy of Aids activism is crucial to this political moment, when trans lives are being erased by president Donald Trump's government, and when support for the broader LGBTQ+ community and communities of color are under assault. He did not expect To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live., which has been in the works for some time, to be so particularly timely, but that is where he finds himself. 'When we started planning this show, we didn't know where we would be in history at this moment,' he told me. 'With where things are going, it feels very important to me to tell these stories and keep these stories going before they get memory holed or erased.' As ever, breaking through cultural amnesia is key. Although Aids took hold in the US just 40 years ago, so much has happened since then that key parts of the story are not particularly well-remembered. Severance also indicated that in the time since, other infectious diseases – like Covid, Mpox, and even measles – have themselves become parts of community action. 'Right now, for subjects like these, there's nothing more important than putting the unvarnished history out there.' Severance hopes that the history of the Aids crisis continues to inspire and instruct, especially right when so many marginalized communities need forms of hope and resistance. 'We have so much to learn from history still,' he said, 'even as these histories become attacked.' To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live. is on show at the SVA Flatiron Gallery, New York until 5 April.
New York Times
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Mel Bochner, Conceptual Artist Who Played With Language, Dies at 84
Mel Bochner, an artist who produced heady and often witty work in a multitude of mediums, exploring the boundaries of art — and the power of language — in drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, books, installations and public art, died on Feb. 12 in Manhattan. He was 84. His death, in a hospital, was from complications of a fall, Lizbeth Marano, his wife, said. In 1966, Mr. Bochner (pronounced BOK-ner) was in his 20s, living in a cold-water flat in the East 70s in Manhattan, writing mini art reviews for $2.50 apiece, teaching art history at the School of Visual Arts and trying to figure out what it meant to be an artist. He was making what he thought was 'quite awful' work — triangles he cut out of Styrofoam, for example, and covered with fiberglass. The fumes from that process were awful, too, so he stopped. When S.V.A. asked him to organize a Christmas show of drawings that year, he reached out to his friends Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson as well as other artists he admired, like Carl Andre, and asked them for sketches of their works in progress. S.V.A. didn't have the money to frame the drawings, so Mr. Bochner photocopied them — the school had a new Xerox machine — and collected them in four binders, along with copies of articles from Scientific American, mathematical calculations and other bits of information. He set the binders on plain white pedestals and titled the show 'Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art.' It was an early salvo in the flourishing movement of conceptual art: the idea that an artwork didn't need to be an object. Some say it may have been the first conceptual exhibition. Firsts are hard to prove, but it was a watershed moment nonetheless, and Mr. Bochner's photocopied books inspired generations of artists. 'It was a breakthrough,' said James Meyer, the curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. 'Mel was a trailblazer in conceptual art. But his work also complicated the simplistic notion that the idea alone was the art. For Mel, the idea had to take material form. 'No thought can exist without a sustaining support,' as he put it.' Mr. Meyer added: 'He always said his work was experimental. It was an investigation. It was about asking questions: 'If I did this, what would happen?'' Mr. Bochner began playing with language, making word 'portraits' of his friends. He rendered Ms. Hesse as the word 'wrap,' which he wrote in the middle of a circular sheet of graph paper, with synonyms for the word swirling around it. He and Mr. Smithson wrote and illustrated an inscrutable article that they conceived as an art piece — and a bit of prank — inspired by the Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. They titled it 'The Domain of the Great Bear' and convinced Art Voices magazine to publish it. For Arts Magazine, Mr. Bochner wrote an article about the Beach Boys in which he listed personal details about the band members, including their heights and weights. He was interested in philosophy and mathematics, space and repetition. In one early show, he outlined the walls of a Munich gallery in black tape, notching the tape at three-foot intervals. He once coated a gallery window with soap and then wrote the numbers 1 to 962 in the soap film. He arranged pebbles on gallery floors and wrote on gallery walls. He crumpled up pieces of graph paper and took photos of them. He assembled toy blocks into curious arrangements and photographed them, too. He deployed pennies, newsprint, chalk and masking tape — 'idiosyncratic, barely-there materials,' as the art critic Roberta Smith of The New York Times put it in a review of a retrospective of Mr. Bochner's early work at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1995. 'Coupled with his innately beautiful handwriting,' she wrote, those materials gave his spatial and philosophical explorations 'a wry and engaging visual life that undermined traditional notions of artistic permanence, craft and value.' 'For all its supposed cerebralness,' Ms. Smith concluded, 'Bochner's early work is adamantly resistant to linguistic parsing. He aimed his concepts almost exclusively at immediate perception, and his mind-twisting fusion of mental and physical space was, and still is, something new.' Melvin Simon Bochner was born on Aug. 23, 1940, in Pittsburgh, one of three children of Meyer and Minnie (Horowitz) Bochner. His father was a sign painter. Even as a child, Mel was a gifted artist, attending classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. He often assisted his father, from whom he learned to paint letters freehand. He received a scholarship to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he was classically trained. After graduating in 1962, he roamed around a bit, traveling to California and Mexico, working odd jobs, struggling to reconcile being an artist with his working-class background. He spent a few months in Chicago, auditing philosophy courses, before realizing, he said, that he didn't want to study philosophy — he wanted to make things. In 1964, he headed to New York City. His first job was as a guard at the Jewish Museum (Brice Marden had just quit, so there was an opening), but he was fired after a year when he was discovered napping behind a Louise Nevelson sculpture. (In those days, he would stay up all night making art and come to work exhausted.) In 2012, Mr. Bochner returned to the museum with 'Strong Language,' a show that focused on his Thesaurus paintings, enormous pieces he began making after the turn of the millennium. These were riffs on existentially urgent words like 'Money' and 'Contempt' and 'Old,' which he rendered gorgeously in bright neon colors, painting synonyms and phrases for each title that marched across the canvas, careering from the conventional to the vulgar. ('Old' concludes with the words 'Can't Get It Up.') The works are at once comical and profound. The show included a piece called 'The Joys of Yiddish,' a nod to Leo Rosten's classic book of the same name from which Mr. Bochner collected some of the most vivid and beloved slurs — 'nudnick,' 'schlemiel' and 'schmo' among them — and painted them in yellow on a black background. The colors reference not just classic street signage but, more darkly, the yellow armbands that Nazis forced Jewish people to wear. The words are separated by commas because, as Mr. Bochner explained, a comma indicates that a thought is ongoing. He was using punctuation to point out that antisemitism is never-ending. 'We're living through a comma right now,' he said at the time. The next year, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the neo-Classical museum built by the Nazis in 1933, invited Mr. Bochner to put on a show and to create a frieze of 'The Joys of Yiddish' for the building's front facade. 'Isn't this a kick in the pants?' he recalled thinking, delighted to fill what he described as a terrible hole in contemporary German culture. In addition to Ms. Marano, he is survived by their daughters, Francesca and Piera Bochner; three grandchildren; his sister, Rita Wolfsohn; and his brother, Arthur. 'In 1970, I wrote on a gallery wall, 'Language Is Not Transparent,'' Mr. Bochner told curators at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, when the museum held a retrospective of his work. 'It was a statement that all language has hidden agendas and motives. The first thing that power corrupts is language.' He continued: 'My work doesn't address political issues directly. In works like 'Exasperations'' — a series of etchings of phrases one might utter when exasperated, like 'So What' — 'I want the meaning to dawn on the viewer, not bludgeon them. But, at the same time, I do agree with Charlie Chaplin: 'If it isn't funny, it isn't art.''
