THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 5
OPPOSITE: TOON FEY / COURTESY RESONANCE RECORDS; RIGHT: ILLUSTRATION BY SOL COTTI
In 1971, the video-art pioneers Steina and Woody Vasulka opened a space
in the abandoned kitchen of a Greenwich Village art center. Visitors
were welcomed by a statement that started, “This place was selected by
the media god to perform an experiment on you.” The couple had been
using their loft for artists’ screenings, but the audiences grew too big.
The Kitchen’s mission soon expanded as well, to include live events by
such unknowns as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. One
early concert was so experimental that it was performed out of town and
allegedly shared by telepathy. Visual art thrived there, too. The Kitchen
gave Robert Mapplethorpe one of his first shows; Robert Longo was a cu-
rator. In 1986, the nonprofit moved to its current home, in Chelsea, where
it continues to make history and hatch new talent. The building is closed
for renovations until next year, but the media god is still on duty: the
artists (and Kitchen board members) Wade Guyton and Jacqueline Hum-
phries have curated an inspired benefit exhibition, “Ice and Fire,” in which
works by Mapplethorpe, Longo, Simone Leigh, Ed Ruscha, and many
others are installed unexpectedly throughout the space—a surprise that’s
viewable only online (at thekitchen.org through Jan. 31).—Andrea K. Scott
BEHINDTHESCENES
1
A RT
Sam Gilliam
Gilliam, who is still productive at the age of
eighty-six, is a leading light of what is termed
the Washington Color School of abstract paint-
ing. He broke ranks with the movement in the
mid-sixties, draping vast unstretched paint-
stained and -spattered canvases from walls
and ceilings—undulant environments that
drenched the eye in effulgent color. (Dia:Bea-
con, in the Hudson Valley, has on view a mag-
nificent example from 1968; exploring it is
peripatetic bliss.) Among the many revelations
in Gilliam’s powerful show of new work at the
Pace gallery is a series of large neo- or post- or,
let’s say, para-color-field paintings that owe
the ruggedness of their surfaces to the incor-
porations of sawdust. Bevelled edges flirt with
object-ness, but, as always with Gilliam, paint
wins. Your gaze loses itself in something like
starry skies: dizzying impressions of infinite
distance in tension with the dense grounds,
which are complicated by tiny bits of collaged
and overpainted wooden squares. Like every-
thing else in this show of an artist who is old in
years, they feel defiantly brand spanking new.
A dazzlingly stylish essay in the accompanying
catalogue by the extraordinary scholar and
poet Fred Moten is a literary work of art in
itself.—Peter Schjeldahl (pacegallery.com)
Samuel Hindolo
This young American painter makes a powerful
solo début in New York—and inaugurates the
new Jefferson Street space of Brooklyn’s 15 Ori-
ent gallery—with small, atmospheric canvases
in the mysterious vein of Vilhelm Hammershøi
and Otto Meyer-Amden. Although they’re not
overly detailed, Hindolo’s works are very spe-
cific about space and the act of looking; the
familiar becomes reformulated by his unusual
perspective. In the brightly colored painting
“Lip & Neck,” ecstatic ghostly figures have been
partially rubbed out or left to drip, but a still-life
of bottles to their right is rendered fully and
with great care. What does it mean that Hindolo
paints “Parts 3 & 4” under those figures, or that
the picture itself is divided into sections? The
beauty of the piece is that it lingers and coalesces
in the mind after you see it, carried along by the
wonderfully old-fashioned and welcome notion
that a canvas doesn’t have to make literal sense
to be successful—it has only to abide by its own
painting rules.—Hilton Als (15orient.com)
Harriet Korman
“Notes on Painting: 1969-2019,” as this cerebral
mini-survey at the Thomas Erben gallery is
titled, presents an invigorating motley crew of
abstract works, united primarily by Korman’s
disciplined refusal of art-world trends. The art-
ist’s staunchly playful formalism ranges from
loosey-goosey grids (such as one, from 1971,
scraped into snowy gesso to reveal crayon lines
underneath) to crisply shattered geometries
(including an earthy piece in stained-glass hues,
from 2001). As a colorist, Korman is full of
surprises, sometimes choosing beauty and some-
times rebuffing it. Her scribbly gestures and
marshy expanses can lend her confidently un-
fussy compositions a strange depth, but pictorial
illusion is never Korman’s objective. Her show
has an appropriately nonlinear feel—it charts a
five-decade career that has not so much evolved
as propelled itself forward with a series of boldly
fresh starts.—Johanna Fateman (thomaserben.com)
Héctor Zamora
For his solo début in New York, this Mexi-
can artist, who lives in Brazil, transforms the
roof of the Met with a curved sculpture that
both evokes the rhetoric of border-enforcing
structures and serves as a poetic retort. Made
of hollow terra-cotta bricks imported from
Mexico (handsome objects in their own right),
the expansive, eleven-foot-tall structure, ti-
tled “Lattice Detour,” is a freestanding screen
through which Central Park remains partially
visible. The bricks’ perforations cast an en-
chanting shadow, which morphs throughout
the day. Sunset might be the most dramatic
time to contemplate the installation—and not
just because the angle of the light can make the
bricks appear at their most opaque. By func-
tioning first as an obstruction, and then prov-
1
PODCASTS
Death in the West
A century ago, Butte, Montana, a.k.a. Dashiell
Hammett’s Poisonville, was the rowdy epicenter
of American copper mining; these days, it’s a
source of excellent local-history podcasts. “Rich-
est Hill” alchemized a toxic-waste saga into
riveting entertainment; the new, independently
produced series “Death in the West” unspools
the story of the murder of the martyred union
organizer Frank Little—still regarded by many
as a “recently passed comrade”—in 1917, when
Butte was “a city tailor-made for conspiracy
ing itself to be sublimely otherwise—porous,
graceful, and easily circumnavigated—Zamora’s
piece conjures a future in which the divisive
associations of borders and walls might fade
aw a y.—J.F. (metmuseum.org)
