THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 5
LUCY R. LIPPARD PAPERS / ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Mail art, which requires neither exhibition space nor Zoom conferencing,
is poised for a comeback. The genre emerged, in the nineteen-sixties, as
a challenge to conventional art objects and hidebound institutions. It’s no
surprise, then, that much of the material in the Smithsonian Archives of
American Art’s exhibition “Pushing the Envelope,” winningly curated by
Miriam Kienle (and now on view at aaa.si.edu), comes from the papers
of Lucy Lippard, an influential theorist of the movement. One typescript
flyer, from 1971, was sent to Lippard by the revered late Conceptualist John
Baldessari, whose witty way with text lit a path for so many other artists.
Titled “The Best Way to Do Art,” it concludes with the wry observation
that it’s difficult to fit a Cézanne into a mailbox. A more visually dynamic
missive by the collective Les Petites Bon-Bons, sent circa 1970, is adorned
with fruit-shaped stickers and asks readers to “please imagine a Gay universe.”
From the Neo-Dadaist collage works of Ray Johnson to the Uruguayan
artist Clemente Padín’s agitprop, mail art is shown to be a powerful form for
pranks, political dissent, and forging networks outside the gallery system.
It still can be—as long as the Postal Service hangs on.—Johanna Fateman
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Kerstin Brätsch
How should a painting be? Given that this dar-
ing German artist, who calls New York home,
received the inaugural Helen Frankenthaler
Award, in 2019, one simple answer is: abstract
and colorful, like Brätsch’s extravagantly beau-
tiful, if deliriously weird, new series, “Fossil
Psychics for Christa.” But there is nothing
simple about Brätsch’s convention-defying ap-
proach. Where Frankenthaler’s stained surfaces
were whisper-thin, Brätsch pushes pigment to
behave with the physical oomph of geologic for-
mations—and she doesn’t do it alone. To deflate
the modernist myths of the solitary genius and
of the superiority of art over craft, Brätsch col-
laborates with artisans on her projects, in this
case with Valter Cipriani, a Roman specialist
in the seventeenth-century Italian technique of
stucco marmo. MOMA commissioned the series
for its new Terrace Café, an ideal context for
an artist who is adamant that art should never
be separate from the ordinary pleasures of life.
(The museum is temporarily closed, but its
Web site has several features on Brätsch, who
is also included in a virtual viewing room of the
gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.)—Andrea K.
Scott (moma.org and gavinbrown.biz)
“Radical Women”
The first season of the Getty’s “Recording Art-
ists” podcast is hosted by the renowned curator
Helen Molesworth, whose enthusiasm for her
subjects—six formidable twentieth-century art-
ists—is as illuminating as the audio interviews
at the heart of the series. In the first episode,
Molesworth describes herself as a “fangirl”
of the figurative painter Alice Neel, but she’s
erudite and critical, too. Lee Krasner, Betye
Saar, Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, and Eva
Hesse are each the focus of a subsequent epi-
sode. Molesworth deftly sets up the archival
recordings—conversations conducted by the
feminist art historians Cindy Nemser and Bar-
bara Rose mostly in the nineteen-sixties and
seventies—with lively biographical accounts
and commentary from an outstanding group
of guests. The artists Catherine Lord and San-
ford Biggers have refreshing takes on Ono; the
painters Amy Sillman and Lari Pittman are great
on Krasner. And it’s a treat, of course, to hear
the old recordings. In a memorable moment,
Frankenthaler, speaking of a studio visit with
the critic Clement Greenberg circa 1951, states,
as though it’s a matter of fact, that “to his aston-
ishment, I was knocking out paintings that were
pretty terrific.” The self-reflective insights and
smile-provoking swagger in the entire series are
pretty terrific, too.—Johanna Fateman (getty.edu)
Rhizome
In 1996, the American artist Mark Tribe rec-
ognized that the Internet is more than a vir-
tual showroom for conventional work—it’s an
artistic medium in its own right. He started a
Listserv for like-minded thinkers and named it
Rhizome, a botanical term (then in vogue with
semiologists) that describes an unpredictable,
always expanding network. Over the years,
Rhizome.org has grown from an upstart into
a stalwart nonprofit based in New York and af-
filiated with the New Museum. It commissions
and preserves digital art, and exhibits it, too,
notably in the continuing series “First Look:
New Art Online.” Curious how pixels stack
up to paint? Scroll through the eight-person
show “Brushes,” which ranges in tone from
airy and calligraphic (Laura Brothers’s “Deux
Blue”) to memelike and manic (Jacob Ciocci’s
animated GIFs). Binge-watchers can catch a
three-part musical episode of Shana Moulton’s
surreal pseudo soap opera, “Whispering Pines,”
whose housebound heroine indulges in self-care
routines that—spoiler alert—turn her into a
goddess.—A.K.S. (rhizome.org)
“Total Disbelief ”
When this fascinating fifteen-person show
opened, pre-pandemic, the derelict car with
grayed-out windows parked on the street in
front of the SculptureCenter might have been
mistaken for a prop from a sci-fi film shoot.
When the city was ordered to stay home and
spin its wheels, the ghostly untitled piece by
Devin Kenny and Andrea Solstad seemed eerily
prescient. The eclectic exhibition (whose illus-
trated catalogue is online while the nonprofit
remains temporarily closed) was thoughtfully
curated by Kyle Dancewicz, but the title he
chose for the show is misleading—its mood, far
from one of absolute incredulity, is fraught with
false starts and second-guessing. One standout is
the New Orleans-born, New York-based Emilie
Louise Gossiaux, who became blind as an un-
dergraduate art student and went on to earn an
M.F.A. at Yale. The centerpiece of her tenderly
