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NFT Platforms Shift Strategy in the Wake of Crypto Slump

Ethereum, the crypto-currency on which most NFTs are minted, dropped below $1,800 Friday, its lowest value in over a year. It’s a far cry from its peak in the high $4,000s last November.

With the drop, the mourning has begun, even among a crypto-community used to weathering the asset’s volatility. NFT platforms, however, are not wading through the five stages of grief before taking action.

In quick succession, major NFT platforms like Foundation, SuperRare, and OpenSea have announced major changes to the way they run their businesses.

While none of these pivots has been explicitly labeled as a response to the market, the timing and nature of the new initiatives seem designed to make up for the lack of enthusiasm in the market currently.

Take Foundation, for example.

Foundation is an NFT platform known for its high quality and focus on one-of-ones, or single edition NFTs (as opposed to large PFP NFT collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club, or Crypto Punks). This was partly possible because, to sell works on Foundation, an artist had to be invited by Foundation or by other artists already using the platform.

In mid-May, Foundation announced that it would be doing away with their invite-only strategy, which they framed as a shift away from the gatekeeping mentality of Web 2.0 (the internet we have today) to the greater freedom and democracy of Web3 (an internet experience built off of decentralized technologies like blockchain).

Yet, Foundation’s tight curation was what made it different from platforms like OpenSea, which has made significantly more money but have also been plagued by scams, hacks, rug-pulls, and all the other risks that come with not verifying users. But, as the market changes, exclusivity could have presented itself as a threat to the scale needed to survive..

On the flip side, Foundation seems like it’s focusing more on a new operating system initiative called Foundation OS, whose motto is “The building blocks for a new internet.” The operating system, a kind of key service infrastructure, is built off of the data sharing protocol Foundation built for its marketplace. Leaning on infrastructural offerings may seem like a more sustainable aspect of the business to focus on when short-term trading isn’t in vogue.

Sunil Singhvi, chief business development officer at the NFT platform Rarible, said that in this moment, having this kind of diversity is key (Rarible has not announced any changes).

“The protocol has always been our business, and the marketplace was a shining example of what that protocol can build. But we have a whole raft of things we’ve built alongside the marketplace,” Singhvi told ARTnews.

Meanwhile, NFT platform SuperRare believes it has found a way to respond to the shifting market without changing the core aspects of SuperRare’s identity.

“SuperRare represents trust,” CEO John Crain told ARTnews. However, Crain said that the company knew it had to try something new.

“Just having a marketplace isn’t something novel anymore. Creating an NFT isn’t something to write about. So this moment is really pushing people to add value and push boundaries,” He said.

Similarly to Foundation, SuperRare was a place to discover artists selling unique works, as opposed to the collectible-type PFP NFTs. Furthermore, SuperRare has never been a secondary market. Now, SuperRare is exploring both PFPs and the secondary market.

In partnership with Async Art, an NFT platform that specializes in creating big, generative projects, SuperRare offered its first massive collection called Across the Face, made by Nigerian artist Osinachi. The series is inspired by Rene Magritte’s famous painting The Son of Man (1946) in which a floating, green apple obscured the face of a man in a fedora. In Across the Face, a black man’s face is obscured by a variety of objects: a dove, a book, a Rubiks cube, and so on, with randomly paired accessories and color backgrounds.

SuperRare usually mints 20-30 works a day, a SuperRare spokesperson told ARTnews in an email, but working with Async has allowed them to handle a much larger load. Async minted 1,000 NFTs and then these were sold on the secondary market through SuperRare. The move is one that was tightly controlled, allowing SuperRare to widen its range of offerings without suddenly flooding its own market. More large collections will be made available with Async in the future.

Unlike many NFT initiatives and platforms, SuperRare was in business before most people even knew what an NFT was, which meant operating on a shoe-string budget for years. For the many platforms that popped up during the 2021 boom, this may be their first time operating in a major downturn.

“In a bull market money is easy to get. But venture capital spending on crypto start-ups and stuff peaked in December,” Crain said. “In this market, investors are certainly going to be thinking twice about how they deploy capital, it’s not like, ‘Cool idea, here’s some money’ anymore.”

Whether or not these summer children-platforms will survive a crypto winter is a question no one can answer, especially when chasing the jagged peaks and dips of a market which promises to shoot up at the next moment.

But, if there is one platform that is too big to fail, it might be OpenSea. At a $13 billion valuation, OpenSea is undoubtedly the highest-valued NFT market around, but even this behemoth has been making some changes.

Unlike Foundation or SuperRare, OpenSea didn’t structure itself around exclusivity, but focused on getting the most amount of users possible from the get-go, which has helped OpenSea capture market share but has also meant sacrificing the quality of their service in the eyes of many crypto-enthusiasts. At this point, then, OpenSea didn’t have many options for how it could expand. In an incredibly savvy move, OpenSea is starting to open up its marketplace to NFTs minted on a cryptocurrency called Solana.

Like Tezos, Solana is a crypto infrastructure that is less energy intensive and is thus considered better for the environment. The same things that make it greener make it cheaper to use, meaning that gas fees on Solana, the fees that one pays when completing transactions (such as buying an NFT) are much, much lower than the gas fees for using Ethereum.

Solana is also valued much lower than Ethereum. Its peak price was around $200 and is now worth about $40. By offering Solana NFTs on OpenSea, the platform is enticing NFT collectors to keep buying without having to make the larger investments implicit in trading in Ethereum-based NFTs.

Solana NFTs on OpenSea are still in the beta phase, that is, still being tested.

Whether any of the changes that NFT platforms are pursuing will be effective is something that remains to be seen. Maybe the market will miraculously turn and none of this will matter anyway.

Or maybe not.

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How David Cronenberg’s Latest Film ‘Crimes of the Future’ Draws on Body and Performance Art

Early on in Crimes of the Future, filmmaker David Cronenberg’s newly released big return to body horror, a man named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has his chest opened up for a rapt audience. A machine with fast-moving scalpels pulls apart his stomach and reveals his innards to the crowd. Meanwhile, his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) paces around the room, fingering a squishy gadget with blinking lights to control this surgery, which serves no medical purpose. All the while, Saul moans and writhes, perhaps in pleasure, perhaps in pain, perhaps in a mix of the two.

Could this makeshift surgery be considered art? At least within the film’s world, yes. Caprice labels herself as a performance artist, though Saul is not merely her subject — he is a collaborator unto himself, and he considers his organs his creations.

While this may all seem rather strange, Crimes of the Future is, in fact, couched in recent art history. It draws on a kind of performance art in which artists use their body as their material, subjecting themselves to particularly painful situations that have involved bloodletting and the modification of their skin.

“Twenty years ago when I wrote this script, there were lots of performance artists of various kinds,” Cronenberg told critic Amy Taubin in an Artforum interview this week. “Once you have it in your head that something exists, that artists were compelled to make those performance works and that there was an audience for them, that frees you to invent what you’re going to invent.”

Orlan, The Kiss of the Artist, 1977.

Performing Surgery

Cronenberg’s latest is set in a not-far-off future in which human bodies have changed so much that some people can barely feel pain. Because of this, knives are wielded in the alleys of Athens by couples seeking semi-sexual thrills, and quasi-secret happenings such as Saul and Caprice’s have developed a loyal following. Throughout, characters make one repeated pun: performing surgery has become a kind of performance art.

Outside the film, in the real world, artists have undergone medical procedures in an attempt to propose new forms for the human body. Along the way, they have questioned gender binaries and sexual norms.

The French artist ORLAN, for example, has received plastic surgery, memorably giving herself curved lumps on her forehead that she still has today. (Midway through Crimes of the Future, Caprice gets a similar kind of plastic surgery.) ORLAN has been clear about the fact that plastic surgery is typically used to make bodies beautiful—and that in modifying her own body, she wanted to become less conventionally attractive.

“Working with my body was a political gesture,” ORLAN told Artnet News in 2019. “It was an act for the woman I was/I am/I will be, and all women, to claim their freedom, which was denied to them.”

Cutting, puncturing, sewing, and wounding flesh have been utilized widely by artists from the late ’60s onward, from Vito Acconci to Zhang Huan. But it is feminist art of the ’70s that seems to exert the greatest influence on this film.

Even before Crimes of the Future premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Caprice’s character had earned comparisons to the feminist artist Gina Pane, who ultimately stopped using her body in her work because her performances became so physically taxing.

For her 1974 performance Action Psyché, for example, Pane repeatedly cut her eyelids and stomach, leaving the incisions open so that they dripped blood. Her goal in doing so was to “reach an anesthetized society” — one with so much pain in it that there was no longer discomfort among viewers, similar to the world seen in Crimes of the Future.

Materials used in Marina Abramović’s 1974 performance Rhythm 0.

Creators and Creations

At a certain point in Crimes of the Future, it becomes clear that there are subversives seeking to create new bodies, and it is unclear whether the government supports this or not, given that there appear to be moles on the inside. A federal investigator visits the National Organ Registry in one scene. He lifts up his shirt, points to a mass on his chest, and asks if it may be art in the vein of Duchamp, who likewise didn’t create many of his objects. Everyone in the room seems dumbfounded by the question.

What the scene implies is that bodies can be art, and that the artists behind them are not just natural forces but also people who come in contact with them. Indeed, Caprice and Saul’s artistic relationship is likely to recall that of another famed performance-art duo: Marina Abramović and Ulay.

Prior to working with Ulay, during the early ’70s, Abramović gained international recognition for her “Rhythm” series of performances in which she would enact violent scenarios using her own body. In Rhythm 10 (1973), she played a hand game using 20 knives, stabbing herself repeatedly in the process. In Rhythm 2 (1974), she took medication typically used for patients suffering from catatonia and began to experience violent seizures.

The series culminated in Rhythm 0 (1974), in which audience members were invited to use objects on Abramović’s body, including a scalpel and a pair of scissors. At one point, one viewer raised a loaded gun to Abramović.

Ulay and Abramović never undertook anything quite so shocking together, but their performances blended aspects of their romantic and artistic collaborations in queasy ways. Their famed 1977 performance Breathing in/breathing out involved blocking their nostrils and exhaling into each other’s mouths until they nearly pass out. In exchanging breaths, the two use each other’s bodies to transform one another, creating and using each other’s creations in a vicious cycle.

While never explicitly invoked within the film, Breathing in/breathing out, with its odd erotic qualities, seems to hang over the scenes in which Caprice and Saul take part in what they call “the new sex,” or relations conducted primarily through surgery rather than intercourse. In one scene, the two disrobe and allow themselves to be repeatedly punctured by a machine.

Stelarc.

The Ear Man

Perhaps the most haunting scene in Crimes of the Future, when Saul visits a performance by an artist billed only as the Ear Man. It’s an apt name: this artist has sewn his eyes and lips shut, and adorned his arms, chest, legs, and head with extra sets of ears. He jerks his body around to an unsettling score while wearing only a small set of underwear.

The Ear Man’s performance appears to be a direct reference to a work by the Australian artist Stelarc called Ear on Arm. The work has involved placing a functional third ear onto his arm, and has taken Stelarc well over a decade to produce, partly because of the medical difficulties involved and partly because of the bureaucratic strictures that forbid surgeries of this sort in certain countries. He has stated that he aims for viewers to be able to hear what this ear does by tuning in online and on their phones.

Stelarc has said the performance is a reflection on bodies undergoing radical shifts in the digital age. “Certainly what becomes important now is not merely the body’s identity, but its connectivity — not its mobility or location, but its interface,” he has written. “In these projects and performances, a prosthesis is not seen as a sign of lack but rather as a symptom of excess.”

Although Cronenberg somewhat dodged Amy Taubin’s question when she asked about Stelarc, Crimes of the Future seems to eye the artist’s work with suspicion. Midway through the Ear Man’s performance, Saul is approached by a businesswoman who waves off the work as being bad conceptual art. He’s a better dancer than he is an artist, she suggests.

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Man Breaks Into Dallas Museum of Art and Smashes Artworks, Including Several Greek Artifacts

A man broke into the Dallas Museum of Art on Wednesday night, significantly damaging several artworks, including three Greek artifacts and a contemporary Native American piece.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Brian Hernandez, 21, shattered the museum’s glass entrance with a metal chair. Once inside, he began targeting the collection. Among the casualties of his vandalism was a 6th-century BCE Greek amphora, a ceramic vessel used to store liquids, and a Greek box dated from 450 BCE.

Police said Hernandez also destroyed a delicate bowl from ancient Greece decorated with vignettes of Heracles fighting the Nemean lion. A ceramic Caddo bottle depicting an alligator worth $10,000 was pulled from its displayed case and shattered on the museum floor. A dozen smaller objects also suffered minor damage.

“While we are devastated by this incident, we are grateful that no one was harmed. The safety of our staff and visitors, along with the care and protection of the art in our stewardship, are our utmost priorities,” the museum said in a statement.

Hernandez reportedly called 911 on himself while inside the museum before being apprehended by DMA security. He confessed to police and is currently detained at the Dallas County Jail on a charge of criminal mischief. In addition to the collection pieces, he is also accused of causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to museum property including display cases and furniture.

The Dallas Morning News reported that a DMA security guard told police that Hernandez said “he got mad at his girl so he broke in and started destroying property.”

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How Harper Levine Became the Go-To Dealer of Long Island’s Art Scene

Most New York gallerists who’ve opened spaces in the Hamptons got their start in the city and built up a network of artists and collectors before venturing out east. Dealer Harper Levine did the reverse. He started his gallery in East Hampton in 1997, tapping a rich community that would launch him from a rare bookseller to an established gallerist. Now, he has five spaces under his auspices, with three of them located in Manhattan.

This past weekend, Levine celebrated a major milestone, opening “25 Years,” a show in East Hampton that toasted the gallery’s 25th anniversary.

Dealer Jack Hanley and artist Cindy Sherman were among those who came this past Saturday to see the show, which includes work by Mark Grotjahn, Richard Prince, and Eddie Martinez. Artists Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler, who both have nearby studios and also have work in the show, were also on hand, mingling among artist Mary Heilmann and collectors Stafford and Laura Broumand.

“I want to celebrate the fact that I survived this for 25 years,” Levine said in an interview last week in the gallery space he opened in New York’s Chelsea art district in 2020. The anniversary show, he said, is “a celebration of my life and business and is a way for me to sort of commingle artists. [It’s] about believing in my own story and seeing what we’ve been able to do.”

In 2001, Levine, who was born and raised in Manhattan, was living in Minnesota when he decided to come back to New York and make a new start. As he puts it, “I had a hundred bucks.” But his trip back home ended up coinciding with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and, with a new baby in tow, he and his wife decided to instead settle in the Hamptons, where Levine opened a rare book store that eventually also became a gallery.

His goal in opening an art space of his own was to join a long art-historical lineage in the Hamptons. “The Hamptons has such a rich artistic history, with Jackson Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists, and over the years there have been some very serious galleries out there,” he said. “[Bookseller] Glenn Horowitz always used to describe [the area] as a butterfly net… a captive audience.”

Levine’s expertise eventually attracted figures like Richard Prince, who went to Levine in search of books. Gradually, Levine’s network of supporters in the art world expanded, slowly converting him from a book dealer to a gallerist who had a special ability to link artists from all over with Long Island’s monied collectors and art lovers.

“Working with Harper is such a dream,” said the Quebec-based painter Joani Tremblay during the reception of “25 Years,” where her abstractions are on view. “He’s a great gallerist, has all the connections, and is a sincerely nice person.”

For Tremblay, and the other artists who work with Harper, like Jennifer Guidi, Joel Mesler, and Frederic Tuten, having access to the Hamptons is an incredible opportunity.

“There are not many places where you can have a strong summer show,” Tremblay said, referring to the lull that hits the city once the warmer weather moves in. “Maybe you can get a group show or something small, but working with Harper essentially gives us an extra season.”

Having a space and network on the East End became doubly advantageous when the pandemic flushed the rich from Manhattan to their second (or third, or fourth) homes on the East End. There, Levine was ready to receive them, unlike other gallerists who scrambled to find space for pop-ups.

But it wasn’t always clear it was going to turn out this way.

“When the pandemic started,” Levine said, “everyone told me, ‘Fire your team.’” Instead, anticipating that collectors would come to their Hamptons homes to ride it out, he kept his team, and took on additional space in his East Hampton gallery’s building.

In an even bolder move, Levine then expanded to new spaces in New York and Los Angeles, marking Harper’s as a veritable empire.

While Levine’s East Hampton gallery will always be his home, these days, he is equally focused on his New York galleries. In March, he opened a second, larger space on 22nd Street. An artist friend of his was fond of saying that because of all the galleries opening in East Hampton, Newtown Lane, the town’s main thoroughfare, had become the equivalent of 22nd Street: Ross + Kramer, the Hole, Eric Firestone, a new Sotheby’s outpost, and other spaces dot the lane.

But Long Island’s art scene will never rise to the level of Manhattan’s, and Levine seemed to suggest that this isn’t a bad thing. Looking out his newest Chelsea space’s wide windows, the dealer observed, “22nd Street is 22nd Street.”

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Artworks Attacked at Dallas Museum of Art, Shanghai Arts Venues Remain Closed, and More: Morning Links for June 3, 2022

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The Headlines

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, a 21-year-old man was arrested for allegedly breaking into the Dallas Museum of Art and seriously damaging at least four pieces on display, including a Greek amphora from the 6th century B.C.E., the Dallas Morning News reports. Initial reports had placed the value of the damaged works at $5 million, but the museum’s director, Agustín Arteaga , said that the actual figure may be “a fraction” of that. The man was charged with criminal mischief of $300,000 or more, which carries a possible sentence of five years to life in prison, according to the Guardian. Dallas police said that the suspect told the guard who apprehended him that “he got mad at his girl so he broke in and started destroying property.”

CHINA DISPATCH. The exact date has not been announced, but Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said that the Hong Kong Palace Museum will be inaugurated this summer amid celebrations tied to the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, the South China Morning Post reports. Over in Shanghai, an intense Covid lockdown has ended, but cultural venues institutions remain shuttered, and there has been no word about when they will be allowed to reopen, the Art Newspaper reports. A rep for UCCA Edge, branch of the Beijing-based museum in the city, said that it will soon be able to install shows, which will ease reopening when that is allowed.

The Digest

Paul Gunther, a revered expert in arts administration who held posts at the Municipal Art Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, has died at the age of 65. [The New York Times]

The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London has quietly stopped billing its director as the “Sackler Director.” The move comes as many museums have removed the Sackler name from projects supported by the family, some of whose members have been accused of fueling the opioid crisis through the sale of OxyContin via their company Purdue Pharma. [The Art Newspaper]

Rich Aste, who has been at the helm of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, for almost six years, said that he will step down in January to become an executive coach at the University of California, Irvine, and start his own practice in that field. [San Antonio]

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has acquired its first painting by the pioneering African American painter Archibald Motley, who was the subject of an acclaimed touring survey in the mid-2010s. Tongues (Holy Rollers), 1929, is now on view on MoMA’s fifth floor. [MoMA Magazine]

ANOTHER STRONG DAY FOR INTERVIEWS WITH ARTISTS: Judith Baca is in the New York Times, Wangechi Mutu is in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Christopher Wool—making his second Breakfast appearance this week—is in the Guardian.

The Kicker

GOOD ARTISTS COPY. An artist in the Czech Republic who was hired to create a reproduction of a 19th-century painting as part of a refurbishment of Prague’s famed Orloj clock, is being accused of deviating from the original, by Josef Mánes, the Guardian reports. The reproduction was unveiled in 2018, but a recent complaint alleges that the painter, Stanislav Jirčík , altered the clothing of figures and may even have inserted the faces of his friends. Jirčík has not commented. Adam Scheinherr, a local politician, told the paper, “I want to have a serious discussion with him and ask him about the quality of the painting, what was his inspiration, did he study Josef Manes.” [The Guardian]

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The Best Dry Erase Markers for the Studio, Classroom, and Office

Say goodbye to the days of dusty chalkboards and hello to the glories of dry erase. Dry-erase boards have become a staple in homes, schools, and offices, making dependable dry-erase markers must-haves. In the classroom, teachers hoard and treasure them. On the job, workers use them to quickly communicate ideas in meetings. Kids love to draw and write with them. While most dry-erase markers are made for whiteboards, you can also find dry-erase markers specially designed for use on glass. Perfect for brainstorming sessions in glass-walled offices, as well as writing on glass boards, windows, and mirrors, these markers lay down smooth, vivid color on glass without beading or streaking. Browse our selection of dry-erase markers for glass, below.

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Maya Maize God’s Severed Head Discovered in Palenque

A stuccoed stone head from a 1,300-year-old statue of an ancient Mayan maize god has been unearthed by archaeologists in Mexico.

The head was found among ruins in Palenque. Located close to the Usumacinta River, Palenque (or Lakamha in the Itza language) was a Mayan city state in southern Mexico that ultimately ceased in the 8th century CE. The ruins there date from roughly 226 BCE to 799 CE. The former city is known for its impressive Mayan architecture, sculpture, roof comb, and bas-relief carvings.

Archaeologists with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found the head while they were excavating a site in Palenque. While removing debris from a corridor connecting two sections of a palace complex, the team found inside a container with the head in a small pond.

Researchers believe that the pond was meant to symbolize the entrance to the Mayan underworld. According to Mayan beliefs, the universe was divided into three parts: the sky, the earth, and the underworld. In each were venerated locations that included caves and cenotes, which would have operated as a portal to the subterranean realm, Xibalba, ruled by the Maya death gods and their aids.

Arnoldo González Cruz, a researcher with INAH Chiapas Centre, told Heritage Daily, “The discovery allows us to further understand how the ancient Maya of Palenque relived the mythical passage about the birth, death and resurrection of the maize deity.”

The severed head sculpture would have been placed by the Maya on a tripod. It would have been positioned in an east-west orientation, making it so that the statue would face the sun as it rose. Its positioning was meant to allude to the sun’s role in growing corn plants.

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The Guggenheim is Making a Major Investment in Digital Art and Technology

The Guggenheim is committing to the burgeoning field of technology-based art.

The museum announced Wednesday the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative, which encompasses a new annual award program and the creation of a curatorial position dedicated to art that engages with virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, NFTS, and more.

The LG Guggenheim Award, administered by the Guggenheim Foundation, will recognize one artist every year for “groundbreaking achievements in technology-based art.” The award will be juried by an international panel of artists, curators, museum directors, and other art professionals, and carries an unrestricted prize of $100,000. The first recipient will be announced at next year’s Young Collectors’ Council Party.

The inaugural LG Electronics assistant curator will focus on “deepening” the Guggenheim’s ties to such artists, in the form of exhibitions, research, and education.

Naomi Beckwith, museum deputy director and chief curator, said in a statement that by “promoting scholarship and public engagement, the LG Guggenheim initiative will provide essential support to the visionary artists who inspire new understanding of how technology shapes and is shaped by society.”

The LG initiative is a significant step in the Guggenheim’s efforts to innovate its programming. In 2021, the museum debuted a series of installations titled “Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda”, that filled its central spiral with experiments in familiar art forms and cutting-edge technology. Its final presentation was Wu Tsang’s unearthly “Anthem”, a looped film projected on a long curtain suspended from the ceiling.

The program may also help the Guggenheim catch up to New York institutions with long-term investments in emergent art: Christiane Paul has served at the Whitney as adjunct curator of digital art since 2000. She was responsible for the museum’s essential exhibition “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018,” which tracked the history of technological art and attempted to imagine its future. The New Museum debuted an incubator for art, technology, and design in 2014.

Every institution, however, is still grappling with how nascent technologies like NFTs and the metaverse will shape the experiencing of art.

The LG Initiative, the Guggenheim said, “will provide essential support” to the “mission to collect, preserve, and interpret the art of our time.”

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Five Essential Paintings by Manet and Where You Can Find Them

These days, nobody gives much thought to the idea of artistic practice fitting into an overriding narrative of historical progress. The current scene is liberating if shapeless, as artists work from a Greek diner–size menu of options—one that would scarcely have been possible were it not for the 100-year period, beginning in the mid-19th century, when modernity birthed the tropes in use today. And no single artist was arguably as responsible for setting modern art in motion than Édouard Manet.

Manet (1832–1883) was born well-off in Paris to a mother of royal blood and a father who was a respected jurist. From childhood he harbored artistic ambitions, encouraged by an uncle who frequently took to him to the Louvre. By 13, Manet was taking drawing classes, though his father had other ideas for his son’s career, forcing him at one point into an abortive attempt to join the French Navy.

Manet père subsequently became resigned to his son’s aspirations, and Manet began formal training under the history painter Thomas Couture. He also traveled around Europe imbibing Titian, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Velázquez, who was an especially important influence along with another Spanish painter, Goya.

Following in the steps of Gustave Courbet, Manet began as a realist, but his loose brushwork, compositional simplicity, and abrupt tonal transitions drew the ire of critics and the French Academy which mounted the annual Salons. When he started to subvert art-historical conventions to the point of near parody, his trajectory as Modernism’s first great apostate was set in motion. Here are five essential paintings tracking his evolution, along with where you can find them.

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Nora Turato’s Epic Pitch

ENCOUNTERING HOMER’S EPICS in translation and in print—as most modern readers do—it’s easy to take for granted that the poems began in performance. To correct for that, a number of recent translators have endeavored to revivify the Iliad and the Odyssey in ways that echo the texts’ origin in song. The American classicist Stanley Lombardo does not read from his versions so much as deliver them, accompanying himself on a small drum in a nod to the lyres strummed by archaic bards. When British poet Alice Oswald recites from Memorial, her 2011 adaptation of the Iliad stripped down to its gruesome death scenes and extended pastoral similes, she does so from memory, staring out into her audience, as if in a trance. McGill University classics professor Lynn Kozak approached the same material more playfully when, from January to August of 2018, they translated, memorized, and performed, as a fully choreographed one-person show in a Montreal bar, one “episode” of the Iliad per week.

I was reminded of Homer and these contemporary interpreters while watching Nora Turato’s spoken-word performance pool 5 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this past March, in part because the work plays across the space between the written word and oral tradition. In her live renditions of found language, Turato, who was born in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1991 and has lived in the Netherlands since moving there to study graphic design in 2009, emerges as both an interpreter and an entertainer. She delivered her freewheeling twenty-five-minute monologue in MoMA’s live-event Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio a total of twenty-eight times in March, hers being the first performances there since the onset of Covid-19. (The space opened in 2019, and Turato was originally scheduled to perform the fourth installment in her “pool” series [2017-] there in May 2020.)

Turato performing pool 5, 2022, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Each pool takes two forms: a handsomely designed artist’s book with bold graphic layouts of text culled from a multitude of sources over a given period of time (she has called the pools “annual reports”), and an abridged version Turato then memorizes and performs. In the studio, benches along the three interior walls faced a shipping pallet supporting a plastic-wrapped cube of cardboard boxes, crowned with one unsealed and opened box. The boxes contained copies of the pool 5 book; the cube itself was addressed to a MoMA loading dock, while copies of the books were on view near the entrance and available for purchase in the museum gift shop. This lone set piece felt simultaneously provisional and decisive, even sculptural—the open box was positioned off-center, just so—exemplifying the performance’s polished disorder.

Costumed in what didn’t look like a costume (white bodysuit, starchy dark-wash jeans, blue-and-yellow Nike trainers), Turato walked on and began: “So I, I started, uh, this business, initially as an online shop . . .” The first part of the monologue touted the booming protein bars market, escalating in intensity and speed as Turato rattled off a litany of available flavors: “they got salty caramel, hazelnut fudge, crunchy peanut butter, toasted almonds and coconut, cashew crunch, cookie dough and chocolate chip, double chocolate fudge, extra big juicy and chewy chunks, lemon drizzle, cinnamon swirls, white-chocolate-chip-cookie-brownie-crunch.” The back cover of the pool 5 books boasts a line from this section—“you can have any snack you like as long as it comes with extra protein.” Even as Turato’s topics (and, presumably, her sources) shifted, often flowing seamlessly into one another, the opening established a continuing character: a salesperson hawking useless (or worse) wares.

Nora Turato: i sold it for million bells, 2022, vitreous enamel on steel, four parts, 94½ by 75⅝ inches overall.

While in past performances Turato has adopted the role of the intense or “hysterical” woman as a comment on misogyny—her fall 2020 performance wow this huge wooden horse is great approached the frenzy of Juliette Binoche in Ivo van Hove’s Antigone—her pool 5 persona feels distinctly masculine, the kind of showboating man who projects the opposite of big dick energy. Whether bragging about a hazing ritual that involves chasing shots of tequila with “scoops” of Albert Einstein’s embalmed brain, describing the satellite surveillance technology that allows the company Orbital Insight to estimate the volume of oil tanks around the world and then sell that data to speculators, or confessing the trade secrets of a retired “fraudulent fortune-teller,” the character Turato inhabits is always peddling something you don’t, or at least shouldn’t, want to buy.

Somewhat surprisingly, this turns out to be riveting. Turato, who performs with the confidence and poise of a stage actor, has undeniable star quality. Some of it might owe to natural charisma, but her apparent ease is the result of a rigorous process of training and rehearsal. Though her monologue maintained a wild, almost improvisatory energy, all the repetitions, stutters, and filler words—the features of real, rather than theatrical, speech—are actually scripted.

The artist has worked intensively with voice and dialect coach Julie Adams since 2021. After the original plans for pool 4 were scrapped, she devoted herself to her craft with an actor’s seriousness. Describing the process in a talkback with curator Ana Janevski after the final performance of pool 5 on March 20, Turato said she aimed “to really feel like I could do Shakespeare if I needed to.” Her sonorous voice still bears traces of an accent, though it isn’t, quite, her natural one (in conversation with Janevski she moved comically into an American accent, then a Slavic one, to illustrate the characteristic differences in their alignment). In performance, her command of timbre and breath approaches the operatic: at certain points in pool 5 she was practically singing. When she shifted into musical pitch to deliver the words “how do you close the deal? how do you close a deal?,” a touch of vibrato entered the long “o” in “close,” a vocal fermata.

Turato moves with an actor’s grace too, using her long arms almost as punctuation marks. Occasionally, she interacted with the box-plinth she circled throughout—she’d plant an elbow down, take a seat, or sling one leg over the side. At the first line to elicit laughter when I attended—“marketing brings people into the funnel”—she emphasized the final word by bringing her hands down on either side of her pelvis.

View of the installation and performance wow this huge wooden horse is great!, 2020, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

TURATO MINES MUCH of her text from the internet, but she’s less interested in online culture than in the way we process language as a subject and, certainly, as a medium. She’s always drawing from and recontextualizing the immense store of verbal data available on the internet at any given moment, in order to create forms that require her audience to meet her in place and time. Her choice of a theatrical framework for performance art—rather than the paradigm of “the body as installation” that, she remarked to Janevski, has prevailed in more durational approaches to the medium demands that people sit and listen for a designated period, thus committing the same kind of heightened attention that she herself pays to the language she collects. It’s this belief in the irreplicable nature of live experience, so essential to theater, that makes Turato resist documentation of her performances. She does, however, acquiesce to institutional demand when necessary; you can watch the final performance of pool 5 and the conversation that followed on MoMA’s YouTube channel. It’s worth viewing as an introduction, but the video also vindicates Turato’s insistence on live performance as her form of choice: some of the kinetic charge gets lost in translation. At MoMA, I was so riveted by Turato’s gaze that I could barely take notes. I was stunned, when she concluded, to find that twenty-five minutes had passed: I could—and would—have kept listening to her pitch.

The pool performances succeed in capturing the feeling of navigating the chaotic, confusing nonsense of the information age. The books, meanwhile, by fixing language largely drawn from the internet into hard copy, feel more like careful homages to fragments of language that many of us are quick to forget. Designed by Sabo Day, Turato’s friend from when they studied graphic design together at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, pool 5 doesn’t seem intended to be read in the traditional sense: the many hundreds of pages are not numbered, and the at times minimal contrast between the color of the words and their background renders certain spreads nearly illegible. Though the shapes and often bright colors against which the Helvetica text is laid out are beautiful, I found the volume better suited to games of bibliomancy—opening to pages at random and interpreting them prophetically—than a continuous reading experience. Turato’s conception of voice is not bound to the literal: as she explained in the talkback, she sees graphic design as “a type of voice,” a tool for modulating tone. The books have modest print runs of 500 copies each, which helps reproduce the “you had to be there” sensibility of her performances: by the second day of pool 5, MoMA’s copies of pool 4 had sold out.

WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS have to do with Homer? Epic poetry might be an unusual point of comparison for work that has no discernible hero or plot. And at least on its face, Turato’s project bears a greater resemblance to various other more recent literary movements that have carried the torch of modernism’s grand romance with appropriation. Both her procedure and embrace of comic juxtaposition are reminiscent of Flarf poetry, whose practitioners manipulated search engines in order to create irreverent, often bawdy poems in the early 2000s. But while the Flarf poets flouted conventions of acceptable language and subject matter, they still worked on the level of the poetic line to create works that were easily recognizable as poems. Turato’s pools, on the other hand, can come off more like commonplace books—journals of quotations that, as far back as antiquity, avid readers have kept as records of personal edification and inspiration. Yet it is precisely in constructing her poetic interventions through compilation rather than cut-ups, and in then making them public, that Turato steps into the tradition of the epic.

View of the installation and performance wow this huge wooden horse is great!, 2020, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The poet we call Homer was, of course, not a person in the strictest sense. Though scholarly debate has raged, Achilles-like, for centuries about the extent to which individual literary accomplishment figured in setting down the written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them, it’s now generally agreed that the poems at least arose from a long oral tradition, transmitted through culture and over time by bards in preliterate Greece—a hypothesis popularized by Milman Parry in the 1930s. Per Parry, the famously repeated epithets of the writer we call “Homer” (“swift-footed Achilles,” “cunning Odysseus”) were vestiges of this tradition, metrically fixed units that not only served as mnemonic devices but also allowed for improvisatory composition within the Homeric hexameters. Building on Parry’s comparative study of Homer and the extant oral tradition of South Slavic bards (guslari), the late scholar John Miles Foley went further in arguing that, for such preliterate bards, the concept of the “word” is not limited to single typographical units, epithets, or even metrical lines. As Foley saw it, writing in College Literature in 2007, the “logical constitutive unit” of epic poetry could be far more capacious: “the thought-bytes of ancient Greek epic are larger, composite units of utterance and meaning that take the form of recurrent phrases, scenes, and story-patterns.”

Turato constructs her pools using what might be the “thought-bytes” of our time: units of text quantifiable, in one way, by our desire to share them. Sometimes as short as 280 characters, but often longer—sometimes, but not mostly, sourced from a meme or viral post—Turato’s “units of utterance” are the sorts of passages we encounter while scrolling, reading, or watching a movie that induce in us some frisson of delight, disgust, and/or recognition and, along with it, the impulse to preserve it via screenshot or photograph or transcription so that we can post it to an Instagram story or message it to a friend. It’s the inherently social dimension of these thought-bytes—which Turato’s books and performances vigorously exploit—that make her pools transcend the genre of the commonplace book.

What surfaces in pool 5 is not a linear plot, but the collective story of a-year-or-so-in-the-life—of lock-down and protest—punctuated by time spent laughing at things on the internet. Turato has said that gathering the language that became pool 5 was an important coping mechanism for her during the standstill of the early pandemic. If pool 5 has a protagonist, it might be the prevailing mood of 2020-21 itself—at least as channeled by the artist. Just as Homer’s epics offer their audiences not only entertainment but also a prized record of the values and anxieties of the culture that produced them, Turato’s pools reflect our own time, in all its fragmented humor and horror.

It’s tempting to read pool 5 as a critique, since it often feels as if Turato is skewering her primary references: the language of marketing and media, the unctuous global authority of the English language, especially when paired with graphic design. But Turato is not quite playing the role of Cassandra, the Trojan princess cursed (though not in Homer’s version) to foresee the fall of her city and not be believed. Turato’s work is neither prophecy nor breaking news; “annual reports” are, after all, studies of the near past. Her approach to her material, and the collective portrait she produces from it, brings her closer to Helen, who is, in her own way, cursed: all she can do is document the war waged in her name. When Helen makes her first appearance, early in the Iliad, she is weaving a web that records all the Greeks and Trojans who have suffered, ostensibly on her behalf.

The character Turato assumes in pool 5, however, is neither clarion caller nor powerless victim. Cunning Odysseus—salesman of his own survival and star of his own epic—was the one who could talk his way into, and out of, anything. When, in her monologue’s final turn, Turato slips into the voice of Michael Lerner’s loathsome Hollywood producer from the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, she could be describing the situation of her own performance:

We’re only interested in one thing. Can you tell a story? Can you make us laugh? Can you make us wanna break out in joyous song? Is that more than one thing? Okay. The point is I run this dump and I don’t know the technical mumbo jumbo. Why do I run it? I got horse sense, goddammit. Showmanship!

Her audience at MoMA might well have been indicted in that “we,” but so, surely, was Turato’s own willingness to put on the show.

LIKE HER ARTIST’S BOOKS, the wall-based works in exhibitions like “govern me harder” Turato’s first solo gallery exhibition in the United States, feels like an extension of her work’s highest form as performance. She admitted as much in a recent interview. The show, which is dazzlingly installed at 52 Walker, the downtown David Zwirner outpost directed by Ebony L. Haynes, and on view through July 1, presents seven multipart vitreous enamel-on-steel panels that each feature a deftly designed phrase from pool 5. (Turato collaborated with Jung-Lee Type Foundry, with an assist from Sabo Day, to create two new typefaces for the exhibition: “Helvetica 52” and a dramatically distorted one Turato calls “Helvetica monster cut.”) A red, four-part panel resembling the front of a pack of cigarettes bears the same text, in mustard yellow, as the pool 5 book’s cover, “i sold it for million bells”—with “bells” in black, stretched to fill a black-bordered white rectangle at bottom, an approximation of a health warning.

All the walls except one, which is left white, are adorned with sequences of brightly colored floor-to-ceiling ovals of varying dimensions, some resembling stretched-out red-and-blue-striped basketballs. At first glance, these appear to be vinyl, but all are painted. For the installation, a stencil pattern for each elongated sphere was printed onto multiple sheets of paper, taped together on the wall, cut out with an Exacto knife, and then filled in with three to four layers of paint. The same process was used for each letter and every piece of punctuation in the three lines of text that run along the bottom of the walls. One line maneuvers around several small, sharp corners; another proclaims “horse sense, goddammit. showmanship!” Only upon close inspection of the shapes’ imperfect edges does one see that everything has been hand-painted directly on the wall.

Whatever her medium, Turato seems to relish creating, then breaking, the illusion of ease. This ethos might apply to her work’s frequently comedic effect as well. Her quip “i sold it for million bells” could simply refer to the unit of currency in the game Animal Crossing, which exploded in popularity during quarantine, but here, Turato poses it as a line of poetry that asks us to consider what a million bells could be worth, whether it was a bad deal or a very good one, what it might mean to make music instead of money. Turato’s work speaks in an ironic vernacular that’s all too familiar, but sidesteps the nihilism in which irony often dead-ends. Meticulous as Helen and tricky as Odysseus, the artist invites us first to misread the slick surfaces and humor of her works as effortless, then forces us to attend to the laborious practices they belie, the histories and possibilities of that effort. Getting someone’s attention is easy; sticking in their memory is harder.

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Pioneering Filmmaker and Artist Isaac Julien Knighted By Queen of England

Isaac Julien, a filmmaker whose work has explored intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class across the years, has become one of the few Black artists to be knighted by the Queen of England.

On Thursday, the Queen revealed her 2022 Birthday Honours List, which includes news of members of all sectors of British society who have received special honors. Julien was knighted alongside the crime writer Ian Rankin, and Arlene Foster, the first minister of North Ireland, was made a dame.

Among the other art-related figures to be knighted was Nicholas Coleridge, who is currently chairman of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Meanwhile, Cornelia Parker, a sculptor with a retrospective that just opened at Tate Britain, was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and Nadia Samdani, a Bangladeshi collector who ranks on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

Julien is among just a handful of Black British artists who have been knighted. The status has been fraught among some members of their community, with the poet Benjamin Zephaniah rejecting the award in 2003 because of the word “empire” in the title, which he said he associated with “years of brutality.”

Since then, however, filmmaker Steve McQueen and painter Frank Bowling have both received the award. Both have explained that they considered it a major achievement because they consider being British to be a core component of their respective identities.

Over the years, Julien has become widely known across the world for his technically complex multiscreen installations that have drawn heavily on the theories of Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and others. Early on, he gained recognition for his films and videos about his identity as a Black gay man from London. Since then, he has turned his focus global, training his camera on recreations of Frederick Douglass’s life and a visions intended to evoke a 2004 flood that killed 20 Chinese cockle pickers in England.

Seemingly in recognition of the intersectional qualities of Julien’s work, the Queen’s Birthday Honours List noted that Julien had received his knighthood for “Diversity and Inclusion in Art.”

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myartnation · 2 years

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Network of Hidden Passages Uncovered Beneath 3,000-Year-Old Peruvian Temple

A network of hidden tunnels was discovered by a team of archaeologists beneath the 3,000-year-old Chavín de Huántar temple complex in the Peruvian Andes. The tunnels contain earlier forms of construction made by the Indigenous Chavín people that have not previously been observed.

The pre-Inca site was constructed by the Chavín people, originally from the Peruvian highlands, who first appeared in the Mosna Valley around 900 B.C.E. and remained until roughly 250 B.C.E. Across the Ancash region, the complex once operated as a major religious and administrative hub.

The Chavín de Huántar temple complex has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.

In 2019, archaeologists from the the Chavín de Huántar Archaeological Research and Conservation Program at Stanford University in California began exploring these passages through a small duct with a robotic camera. Using this technology, they found a gallery and chamber with an object in the center.

Studies were delayed, however, as a result of the pandemic. It wasn’t until last month that archaeologists could explore the gallery and a system of 35 interconnecting tunnels. According to archaeologist John Rick, who worked on the excavation team, the tunnels may have been built before the temple’s main galleries.

“It’s a passageway, but it’s very different. It’s a different form of construction,” describes Rick in a video for Reuters. “It has features from earlier periods that we’ve never seen in passageways.”

The passages would have been constructed between 1,200–200 B.C.E. at 3,200 meters above sea level in the foothills of the Andes.

Additionally, the object seen in the 2019 survey was discovered to be a stone bowl with a three-dimensional carving of a condor head projecting from its side. The bowl and galleries would have been used for ceremonial purposes.

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myartnation · 2 years

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Frieze Los Angeles Relocates, Mayan Statue Discovered in Mexico, and More: Morning Links for June 2, 2022

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The Headlines

CLEARED FOR LANDING. Those attending the 2023 edition of Frieze Los Angeles will need to head to the Santa Monica Airport, the Los Angeles Times reports. The fair giant plans to construct a tent there for its February run that will be designed by Why Architecture’s Kulapat Yantrasast with Mark Thomann , who also handled the tent for its stand this year in Beverly Hills. “We were so pleased with the Beverly Hilton, but the owners of the space will be breaking ground for a development that’s been planned for a number of years, so we can’t stay there,” the fair’s director, Christine Messineo, told the paper. In other airport-and-art-related news, the new Delta Air Lines terminal opening on Saturday at New York’s LaGuardia Airport features work commissioned by Delta, with the Queens Museum, from Virginia Overton, Rashid Johnson, Fred Wilson, and more. Reporter Hilarie M. Sheets took a look inside for the New York Times.

BUCKLE UP! It is a banner day for artist profiles. Shahzia Sikander was covered by Naib Mian for the New Yorker. Daniel Boyd is in the Guardian via the writing of Steve Dow. And Shuvinai Ashoona, who is having a moment at the Venice Biennale, is in a New York Times story by Patricia Leigh Brown set in Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada. Grab a hot cup of coffee (or a cocktail, depending on your local time), and enjoy.

The Digest

Archaeologists in Palenque in southwestern Mexico have unearthed a statue of a Mayan maize god that is believed to date back some 1,300 years. [AFP/France24]

David Kordansky Gallery, of Los Angeles and New York, now represents Odili Donald Odita, the painter “known for his dynamic abstractions that pulse with energy,” Maximilíano Durón writes. The Philadelphia–based artist will continue to be repped by Jack Shainman Gallery. [ARTnews]

The Brooklyn architecture firm SO-IL has been tapped to build a new home for the formidable Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The new structure is slated to be finished in 2026 or 2027. Its design will be completed next year. [The Art Newspaper]

Efforts to create a statue for telegraphy pioneer Guglielmo Marconi in Cardiff, Wales, are being reviewed, and may be canceled, after the inventor’s support for Benito Mussolini was raised. The proposed piece would commemorate Marconi sending a radio signal across the sea, from Wales, in 1897. [BBC News]

Elsa Åkesson and Rachel Esham have been named the winners of the $50,000 Gavel Prize, which is given annually to entrepreneurs who are current or former students of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Åkesson makes art packaging under the brand Spongy Bags, and Esham runs the SideArt sales platform. [Financial Times]

A building that Marcel Breuer designed to be the headquarters for the Armstrong Rubber Company in New Haven, Connecticut, has just reopened as a Hilton Hotel. Fans of artist Tom Burr may recall that he used the structure as an exhibition site in 2017 via Bortolami gallery’s “Artist/City” program. [Architectural Digest]

The Kicker

THE SCOREBOARD. Artist Tracey Emin, who is one of the most quotable people on planet, gave a characteristically candid interview (death, menopause, etc.) with Artnet News on the occasion of her current show at Jupiter Artland in Wilkieston, Scotland. She senses critical taste coming around in her favor. “As an artist, it’s been really difficult for me,” Emin told the outlet. “I think a lot of people misjudged me, got me wrong. But I think I feel slowly things are changing for me. People are starting to realize that I wasn’t a screaming banshee. I actually was making some really good points.” [Artnet News]

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Odili Donald Odita, Painter of Dynamic Abstractions, Joins David Kordansky Gallery

The Los Angeles–based David Kordansky Gallery, recently opened a New York space, will now represent artist Odili Donald Odita, who is known for his dynamic abstractions that pulse with energy. Odita will continue to be represented by Jack Shainman Gallery. He will have his first show at Kordansky next year and will feature in the gallery’s booth at Art Basel in Switzerland this month.

Odita’s paintings and large-scale wall installations are defined by their bright colors arranged in dazzling compositions. These abstractions address some of today’s most pressing issues, like the rise of the alt-right and the relationship between the separation of migrant families at the U.S. border and the country’s history of Japanese internment.

“The work is coming out of these ways of thinking, and abstraction is then another way of being able to communicate these very complex conditions,” the Philadelphia-based artist said in a recent interview. “For me the abstract is real. There’s no sense of it being divorced from reality or divorced from the present or divorced from human emotion or feeling of thinking. It becomes a form of expression or defining a moment or finding meaning.”

He added, “It’s not just about creating a beautiful painting. What is the beautiful painting saying and doing in the process of being beautiful? Abstraction has allowed me to go beyond the limitations of presentation.”

‘Something Beyond the Ordinary’

Born in Nigeria in 1966, Odita has been drawing and making art for as long as he can remember. His father was an artist and a professor of African art and archaeology at Ohio State University and his childhood home was filled with art books and African art and objects, as well as a few pieces by his father.

His father had collected a series of black-and-white prints. One day Odita sat down and began to copy the stack of prints to improve his drawing skills. “I remember sitting at a table and drawing one after the other until I woke up with my face in my drawings,” he said. “It was like just an automatic action just to experience the work by redrawing it.” (He also copied from Marvel comic books, including those featuring Thor, the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.)

When he was around eight years old, Odita began to help his father stretch and gesso his canvases. That experience he said continues to influence how he approaches “structure, shape, and color” in his own work. He added, “It’s things like that that make me think there is something beyond the ordinary with my connection to art.”

Odili Donald Odita, Cracked Actors, 2022.

He had entered college at Ohio State as a figurative painter but slowly gravitated toward abstraction after trying to emulate the work of an M.F.A. student who encouraged him “to do your own thing.”

He continued, “It made me really think about what I want to say. From there on, my work started going toward abstraction in its own way. I started to really engage with what space and time and meaning could be in that format and this kind of thinking.”

Though he almost exclusively works in abstraction now, Odita said he doesn’t see his work as that far removed from the figurative works he had made when he was an art student, or from figuration in general.

Odili Donald Odita, Future-Tense, 2019.

“If I’m an abstract artist, but I’m looking at the corners of ceilings and the light shift in a room or a set of steps, am I truly abstracting something? Or is it still a form of representation, of engaging in the real? These are questions I have for myself,” he said. “This distinction between abstraction and figuration is just really a superficial one. It’s all about how you’re engaging the world.”

Another impactful experience came when he moved to New York in the early ’90s after getting his M.F.A. at Bennington College in Vermont. He began working at a dot-com company that did desktop publishing imagery and quickly learned how to use the initial versions of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

“We were at the forefront of this digital space, not knowing really how to define it yet,” Odita said. “And from there with the computer screen, I started to really formulate my idea of what space could be.”

That early digital space—’90s screensavers in particular—reminded him of the SMPTE color bars that would appear when you turned on a television when he was growing up. That’s been essential to how he organizes the structures of his canvases, where color represents “that space before language,” he said, adding, “color becomes that force that transcends time and transcends the limits of space.”

Odili Donald Odita, Divide, 2017.

Abstracted Reality

Around this time, Odita met curator Okuwi Enwezor and artists Olu Oguibe and Iké Udé. “It was like the world just exploded, and I started to realize my own identity—the things I couldn’t say but felt about myself and my experience in the United States being in this Nigerian bubble,” he said.

Those meetings allowed Odita to think about how he could adapt the formal concerns in his art to address his own identity through abstraction. In his work, particularly his paintings featuring zig-zag patterns that adapt similar ones seen in African textiles, Odita is “fusing these two realities—an African reality with an American reality—together, representing these two different sides within this one space, called the painting,” he said.

He continued, “I’m also thinking about Blackness and what it means to be Black in America, what it means to be a Black male in America. That’s always a changing concept because of the ways in which we thought about it in the ’90s is different from how we think about it today.”

Odili Donald Odita, Firewall, 2013.

One of those differences has been the blatant rise of the alt-right and the resurgence of fascist ideologies from those seeking or holding political office, in the U.S. and other parts of the world. “Right now, I’m engaging with power and the idea of what power represents itself as a populist force and the way that it structures space,” he said, referring to deconstructing and abstracting swastikas.

Another recent body of work presents abstracted variations of flowers. Odita said it’s a clear reference to Warhol’s prolific take on the subject matter, though he also wanted to create a parallel between beautiful flowers and how everyday people are attracted to populist fascist ideologies. In nature, he said, “the most colorful, powerfully decorative flowers are the ones that are most poisonous and the most dangerous to wildlife as they attract to kill.”

With solo shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2021 and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 2020 and work in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Odita’s work is constantly in a state of invention and reinvention, always with the aim to think through the world we live in today.

“To be an artist, it’s a process of growth and the process of transformation in which you are continually trying to better understand the world you live in and better understand what you’re communicating through your method of art-making,” he said. “I want to be able to make a painting that makes sense of all this different information—through the process of abstraction, which is to be able to understand the world in the most rigorous way.”

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