![]() Its central film work walked the viewer through the environments of factory farming. Dean’s recent exhibition at the Renaissance Society, “Abattoir, U.S.A.!,” took the slaughterhouse as a way to examine the limits of subjecthood. This mildly cubic, contorted sculptural figure ( FIGURE A, Friesian Mare) appears to be cowering, its subject’s equine body nearly unrecognizable. An ambiguous gray sculpture-heavily textured, with densely packed contours that evoke layers of folded skin and the crushed musculature of a horse-sits on a wooden pallet at the center of the room. One enters Aria Dean’s exhibition “Figuer Sucia” through Pink Saloon Doors (all works 2023) that open onto a vaguely neo-Western mise-en-scène. ![]() (A show devoted to Graham’s Schema at 3A Gallery closed, coincidentally, several weeks before this exhibition opened.) Graham intended his work to be “completely self-referential” and meant to define “itself in place only as information.” Simply a text without … Rudimentary and improvisational, Hirschhorn’s patchwork of ideas and contexts places the works in the show under a utopian-communitarian umbrella-exemplifying David Joselit’s claim in his 2005 essay “Dada’s Diagrams” that “the diagram constitutes an embodied utopianism.” Hirschhorn’s Schema might usefully be juxtaposed with Dan Graham’s 1966 work of the same name-sometimes taken to represent the apex of early informatic anti-figural conceptualism. The show takes its title from Thomas Hirschhorn’s Schema: Art and Public Space (2016–22), an exuberant multimedia collage-manifesto. To call it expansive feels like an understatement. With an emphasis on painting, this meticulous grouping of fifty-plus artists undermines simplistic, outmoded art-historical binaries that oppose figuration and abstraction, conceptualism and expressionism, scientism and humanism. Despite the broad sweep of its title, the show is tightly curated and requires multiple viewings for its full scope to set in. This exhibition of diagrammatic works juggles some of the most contested categories in contemporary art-and manages to keep all its curatorial balls in the air. Along the way, Philbrick introduces a chorus of thinkers-theorists of community, theorists of in-operative community, theorists … ![]() Taken together, each pairing amplifies and extends the book’s central impulses to consider how groups assemble and disassemble. Each chapter pairs a “group work”-Simone Forti’s 1961 performance Huddle, Samuel Delany’s 1979 memoir Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love, Lizzie Borden’s 1976 film Regrouping, and Julius Eastman’s 1979 musical piece Gay Guerrilla-with contemporary works that re-imagine, re-perform, or dialogue with these experiments. Moving with these questions, the book turns to artists experimenting with novel group formations in dance, literature, film, and music in the 1960s and ’70s. How do we group, and how does that matter? What kind of good-bad thing is a group to do? He enters the text with a tentativeness toward groups, recognizing the ways that they are frequently viewed with healthy suspicion or uncritical celebration. Following a “desire for collectivity,” Philbrick takes the small-scale formation of “the group” as the locus of inquiry. At first glance, it’s a book of academic theory coming out of performance studies. There are many ways to move through and think alongside Ethan Philbrick’s Group Works. That conflict ended a year before the 1955 Bandung Conference, which sought to build cooperation … ![]() These capacities are most clearly articulated in The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), an immersive four-channel video installation about the descendants of the tirailleurs sénégalais-Senegalese soldiers conscripted to fight for the colonial French army in the First Indochina War who fathered children with Vietnamese women. After all, what are ghosts, if not simply our ancestors, and our memories of them, continuing to radiate their presence to us? What is remembrance if not simply a form of reincarnation? It’s the art of allowing ghosts to come back.” This assertion of film’s proximity to the spectral plays out across Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video installations, three of which anchor “Radiant Remembrance.” Blending animist beliefs held by Indigenous communities across Southeast Asia with the importance given to reincarnation within Buddhist theology, Nguyen uses film as a medium, not just as the material form of his art practice but as a channel through which to conjure forgotten pasts, narrate counter-memories, and confront historical violence and ecological destruction. ![]() In Ken McMullen’s experimental film Ghost Dance (1983), Jacques Derrida proclaims that “Cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms. ![]()
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