THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 7
© JA’TOVIA GARY / COURTESY PAULA COOPER GALLERY
Early in her rhapsodic forty-minute film, “The Giverny Document
(Single Channel),” from 2019, the American artist Ja’Tovia Gary is
seen standing on a street in Harlem asking women, “Do you feel safe in
your body?” (A still is pictured above.) One answer declares a collective
truth: “It’s already not easy being Black.” These cinéma-vérité interviews
flow in and out of dreamy direct-film animations, indelible self-portrait
tableaux staged in Claude Monet’s garden, and extensive found footage,
including scenes of Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, and the fatal police
shooting of Philando Castile, captured by his fiancée, Diamond Reynolds.
The intricate subject of Gary’s moving-image mosaic is Black women’s
lives—and the faith that pain can transform into power. Reconfigured
into three parts in museums and galleries—and accompanied by two
altars to African goddesses—the piece has made Gary a rising star in
the art world. Earlier this month, she released the film on YouTube. “I
wanted as many Black women as possible to be able to view the film
without having to negotiate access with institutions,” she recently told
me. “People who I am making the work for, who I am in direct commu-
nication with, need to have an immediate link to it.”—Andrea K. Scott
A RT ONLINE
glory—perhaps the artist is even paying re-
spect to the humble, hardworking carriage
horses perpetually waiting nearby, on Fif-
ty-ninth Street.—Johanna Fateman (Doris C.
Freedman Plaza)
Leidy Churchman
Is there anything Leidy Churchman can’t
paint? Among the subjects of the twenty-
one paintings in the New York phenom’s
show at the Matthew Marks gallery, which
was interrupted by the pandemic, are a fe-
ver-dream bedroom, a moonrise, a girl on a
bike, a rose garden, a monkey-filled forest
from the Ramayana, hypnotic abstractions,
and a laundry-room sign. The palette runs
from monochrome black to hot purple and
pink; dimensions change from a scant dozen
inches to more than ten feet. The only logic
at work is intuitive, even oracular. The mood
is less image-overload restless than it is op-
timistically omnivorous—Churchman seems
hungry to paint the whole world in all its
mystery and ordinariness, two categories that
often collide here. In Churchman’s deft hands,
a cropped closeup of an iPhone 11 assumes
a third-eye mysticism worthy of Hilma af
Klint. (The exhibition is now open to the
public, by appointment only, through July
31; Churchman’s paintings remain on view
on the gallery’s Web site.)—Andrea K. Scott
(matthewmarks.com)
Mike Nudelman and
Sophie Varin
Fortnight Institute unites two far-flung art-
ists—Nudelman lives in Santa Fe, and Varin
is based in Brussels—who share a fondness
for working small and for channelling the
otherworldly. (The gallery is now open by
appointment, but the intimate nature of both
shows also makes for rapt viewing online.)
Many of Nudelman’s subtle ballpoint-pen
drawings are based on photographs taken
in the nineteen-seventies by Eduard Albert
(Billy) Meier, a Swiss man who believed
that he was documenting U.F.O.s. Nudel-
man renders the saucerlike forms, visible
in the distance through bare-branched trees
and above rolling hills, with a light touch
and a meticulous hatching technique that
suggests a grainy Kodachrome lustre. Sim-
ilarly seductive hazes grace Varin’s thinly
painted, matchbook-size canvases. In one
of her landscapes, a golden body of water
and blue cliffs above a cove are pushed to
the edge of abstraction by the inclusion of
peach and cadmium-red stripes. Elsewhere,
tiny figures seem to float in shimmering
fields of vibrant color. The only portrait in
Varin’s show, a closeup titled “Inquiet,” has
an ethereal chartreuse face (think little green
men) that echoes Nudelman’s extraterrestrial
theme.—J.F. (fortnight.institute)
“Vida Americana”
This thumpingly great show at the Whitney,
subtitled “Mexican Muralists Remake Amer-
ican Art, 1924-1945,” picks an overdue art-his-
torical fight. The usual story revolves around
young, often immigrant aesthetes striving to
absorb European modernism. A triumphalist
tale composed backward from its climax—the
postwar success of Abstract Expressionism—it
1
MOVIES
The Lenny Bruce
Performance Film
Lenny Bruce’s performances—such as this, his
penultimate one, from 1965, in San Francisco—
reflect, in wild comedy, his own stringent moral-
ity, which starkly contrasted with the morals of
the time. The previous year, he’d been convicted,
in New York, on charges of obscenity; he could
perform in California because he’d won an ob-
scenity case there. His time in court sparked his
obsession with the law; in his terrifying journey
through its labyrinths, he became a standup
Kafka. In this show, the transcript of the New
York trial is his script, and he performs it with
gusto. His confrontation with authority is his
master plot—his quest to speak freely about
sex and politics, and his paradoxical view of his
persecutors’ passions. Indeed, Bruce, who was
Jewish, launches into a profound, uproarious
brushes aside the prevalence, in the thirties, of
politically themed figurative art: social real-
ism, more or less, which became ideologically
toxic with the onset of the Cold War. What
to do with the mighty legacy of the era’s big
three Mexican painters, Diego Rivera, José
Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Sique-
iros? As little as possible has seemed the rule,
despite the seminal influence of Orozco and
Siqueiros on the young Jackson Pollock. But,
with some two hundred works by sixty art-
ists and abundant documentary material, the
curator Barbara Haskell reweaves the sense
and sensations of the time to bring it alive.
Without the Mexican precedents of amplified
scale and passionate vigor, the development
of Abstract Expressionism lacks crucial sense.
As for the politics, consider the persistently
leftward tilt of American art culture ever
since—a residual hankering, however sotto
voce, to change the world. (The Whitney
is temporarily closed, but a selection of the
show’s works and related videos is available
online.)—Peter Schjeldahl (whitney.org)
