6 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY
On March 30, An-My Lê took her wooden, large-format Deardorff cam-
era—the same make favored by Ansel Adams—to the Brooklyn waterfront,
to witness the U.S.N.S. Comfort sailing under the Verrazzano-Narrows
Bridge. The sweeping view in the resulting picture (above) offers no hint
of the complications surrounding the floating hospital’s time in New York,
unless you count the drama of a red windbreaker echoing the red crosses
on the Comfort’s hull. (Lê, who is a MacArthur “genius,” is an artist, not a
photojournalist, but an observer’s detachment is one of her trademarks.) This
isn’t the first time that the Vietnamese-American artist has photographed
naval vessels. From 2005 to 2014, she travelled to more than twenty countries
for her series “Events Ashore,” which, like all her projects, is entwined with
her personal history: in 1975, when she was fifteen, Lê and her family were
evacuated from Saigon by the U.S. military. A hundred per cent of the pro-
ceeds from this limited-edition photograph (available through the Marian
Goodman gallery) will benefit the nonprofit NYC Health + Hospitals, which
supports medical workers at the front lines of the pandemic.—Andrea K. ScottA RT FORRELIEF Allan McCollum
“Everything will be O.K.”—so say hundreds
of fictional characters (and President Barack
Obama) in this veteran conceptual artist’s online
slide show, which he began in 2015. Straightfor-
wardly titled “An Ongoing Collection of Screen-
grabs with Reassuring Subtitles,” its archive now
numbers twelve hundred closed-captioned im-
ages lifted from movies and TV. Slight variations
on those comforting words—“Look, it’s all gonna
be fine”; “It’s okay, alright”; “You’re safe”—are
spoken to frowning children, frightened patients,
skeptical participants in risky plots, and stunned
witnesses of crimes or supernatural events. Mc-
Collum is interested in the tension between
repetition and uniqueness in the age of mass
production; here, he considers minor variations
in an assembly-line cliché used in scripts from
“The X-Files” to “The Irishman.” The relentless
consolations are amusing and, cumulatively,
even improbably reassuring. (McCollum is
also the subject of a career retrospective at the
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which
can be viewed virtually on the museum’s Web
site.)—Johanna Fateman (allanmccollum.net/1/
everythingsok/ok/ok.html and icamiami.org)
Timothy Washington
This seventy-four-year-old American artist grew
up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles,
not far from Simon Rodia’s towers, and his own
intriguing assemblages suggest anthropomor-
phic offspring of those famous steel-and-mosaic
spires. Washington’s first show in New York,
“Pucker Up,” was installed at the Salon 94 gal-
lery in March, but it never opened to the public;
happily, the photogenic six-decade survey can
be viewed online. The heart of the show is a
procession of elongated figures on a turquoise
platform, exuding both totemic power and per-
sonal charm. “Love Thy Neighbor,” from 1968,
is an outlier made of metal and nails (Christian
themes mingle with Afrofuturism in Washing-
ton’s work); most of the other pieces are made of
glue-soaked cotton on wire armatures, encrusted
with ceramic fragments, jewelry, coins, buttons,
beads, toys, and even clock faces. Washington’s
heartwarming straw-into-gold ingenuity is es-
pecially evident in a colorful character with a
transparent, bauble-filled torso, whose title is
“I Love You.”—J.F. (salon94.com)
due respect to Sister Wendy) that artists are the
best guides to their own work. Maya Lin, Sally
Mann, and Kerry James Marshall were among
those who welcomed cameras into their studios
for the first season. So did the sculptor Andrea
Zittel, whose functional sleeping pods in the
California desert now look like enviable spots
to shelter in place. Today, after nine broadcast
seasons—a tenth arrives later this year—two
Peabody Awards, an Emmy nomination, and
many digital shorts produced for its Web site,
Art 21 is streaming more than five hundred films
at art21.org. Subjects range from household
names (Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei) to
young painters on the rise (Aliza Nisenbaum,
Avery Singer) to the Bay Area-based social-prac-
tice artist Stephanie Syjuco, whose latest project
is sewing COVID-19 masks for food-bank vol-
unteers, the families of medical workers, and
others in need. Art 21 also bundles its films
into visual “playlists,” with running times of
one to two hours; to combat cabin fever, watch
fourteen artists take to the open road in “En
Route.”—Andrea K. Scott (art21.org)works register as material propositions of cer-
tain principles—chiefly, openness and clarity.
They aren’t about anything. They afford no
traction for analysis while making you more
or less conscious of your physical relation to
them, and to the space that you and they share.
As installed by the curator Ann Temkin, with
perfectly paced samples of Judd’s major mo-
tifs—among them, floor-to-ceiling “stacks” of
shelflike units, mostly of metal-framed, tinted
Plexiglas, which expose and flavor the space
they occupy—the second of the show’s four big
rooms amounts to a Monument Valley of the
minimalist sublime. (MOMA is temporarily
closed; tour the virtual exhibition and listen to
twenty-one artists and writers respond to Judd’s
art on its Web site.)—Peter Schjeldahl (moma.org)
Art 21
Ten days after 9/11, when people’s spirits desper-
ately needed a lift, PBS aired the first episode
of “Art in the Twenty-first Century,” a fly-on-
the-wall documentary series that bet (with all
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TELEVISION
Killing Eve
This espionage thriller arrived as a bewitch-
ing oddity: a Euro-chic slash-’em-up that
decorated scenes of inventive slaughter and
sweaty investigation with blots of macabre
wit, and grounded them in personal frustra-
tion. The plot maneuvered a cop and a killer
into a codependent romance; last season left
off with the delicious villain (Jodie Comer, as
a soignée assassin) shooting and leaving for
dead the humble hero (Sandra Oh, as an M.I.
officer). For its next trick, “Killing Eve,” now
in its third season, cracks apart the genre it
invented. Eve, alive but spinning in a spiritual
limbo, is pulled back into a spy game that plays,
almost cohesively, as a moody subversion of its
sui-generis formula. Oh’s erstwhile agent col-
laborates with the editor of an investigative Web
site; Comer’s assassin, chipperly psychopathic,