THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 7
COURTESY THE ARTIST / VDB / MISHKIN GALLERY
Few people are better qualified to answer the question “Who Speaks for
the Oceans?” than David Gruber, a marine biologist and whale whisperer
who founded Project CETI—the Cetacean Translation Initiative. Gruber
is also a distinguished professor at Baruch College, where, during the past
three years, he joined a cohort of students, artists, curators, and faculty to
respond to that question of environmental empathy with a polyphonic ex-
hibition, installed at the college’s Mishkin Gallery through Dec. 9. (Alaina
Claire Feldman, the gallery’s visionary director, was his key collaborator.)
Among the art works on view are a new trio of incantatory drawings by the
category-defying legend Joan Jonas; a beguiling, Vodou-based sequinned
tapestry, made circa 2000 by the Haitian textile adept Myrlande Constant;
and plans for a subaquatic “Dolphin Embassy,” proposed, in 1968, by the
intrepid collective Ant Farm. Some of the most persuasive material here
is documentary, notably Roger Payne’s scientific field recordings turned
best-selling album, “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” which raised so much
awareness about nonhuman consciousness after its release, in 1970, that
it helped to ban commercial whaling in the U.S. The Swiss artist Ursula
Biemann’s mesmerizing eco-futurist video “Acoustic Ocean” (pictured
above), from 2018, stars the Sami singer and climate activist Sofia Jannok
as an Arctic aquanaut working in Payne’s wake, making psycho-sonic
contact with an unseen pod of sibylline whales.—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
proaches for a new work, “Céilí,” joined
by the musicians Dana Lyn and Kyle San-
na.—B.S. (Irish Arts Center; Sept. 29-Oct. 2.)
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A RT
“Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane
Arbus Retrospective Revisited”
Fifty years ago, a posthumous retrospective
broke attendance records for a one-person show
at the Museum of Modern Art. Crowds lined up
around the block to see a hundred and thirteen
black-and-white pictures shot by Diane Arbus,
a relative unknown whose brilliance was already
an open secret among her peers. (Before she took
her own life, in 1971, at the age of forty-eight,
Arbus had few collectors, but they included Rich-
ard Avedon, Jasper Johns, and Mike Nichols.)
The exhibition generated both rave reviews and
hot takes; dissecting Susan Sontag’s scathing
essay “Freak Show,” published in 1973, is now
almost an academic subgenre unto itself. The
Zwirner gallery, in collaboration with Fraenkel,
in San Francisco, has reunited the images in this
exhibition, which is accompanied by the new
publication “Diane Arbus: Documents,” a door-
stop scrapbook that reproduces a half century’s
worth of writing about an artist who, as Avedon
once observed, “made the act of looking an act of
such intelligence, that to look at so-called ordi-
nary things is to become responsible for what you
see.”—AndreaK. Scott (Zwirner; through Dec. 22.)
Matthew Ritchie
Have you heard the latest rumor that painting
is dead? The alleged crime scene was the Col-
orado State Fair, where a picture made by an
algorithm won a blue ribbon. For compelling
proof that painting is, in fact, alive and thriv-
ing in the age of A.I., see “The Garden in the
Machine,” Matthew Ritchie’s new show. The
strange, seductive oil-and-ink canvases were
painted this year by the Brooklyn-based British
polymath and conceived in cahoots with a form
of A.I. known as generative adversarial net-
works, which the artist fed a diet of databases
containing centuries of landscapes, portraits,
and more, much of it owned by the Met. (From
2019 to 2021, Ritchie was a visiting artist at
M.I.T.’s Center for Art, Science & Technology,
which has worked with the museum on ma-
chine-learning projects.) The results—primor-
dial-soup abstractions, rendered in the artist’s
hand on six-foot-wide surfaces, in a palette
of ectoplasm and viscera, with grace notes of
Eden—are haunted by their human ancestors,
from the anonymous sculptors who carved the
Green Man on medieval churches to the Ger-
man Surrealist Max Ernst, who shared Ritchie’s
obsession with science.—A.K.S. (Cohan; through
Oct. 15.)
Chiffon Thomas
In this breathtaking exhibition, Thomas’s al-
chemical, history-laden work stands, in part, as
a metaphor for trans embodiment and personal
reconfiguration. In the front room, intricate
assemblage-and-embroidery works hang on
the walls, encircling two large freestanding
sculptures inspired by a Gothic rose window
that towered over the main courtyard of a
public-housing complex on the South Side of
Chicago, where the artist grew up. (He is now
based in Los Angeles.) Made of weathered tin
ceilings, stair spindles, and torched columns,
the chimerical pair are at once architectural and
creaturelike, with apertures that suggest Cy-
clopean eyes. The sculptures also incorporate
drums, which Thomas, a trained percussionist,
will play throughout the show’s run. The instal-
lation in the next room is just as powerful: more
than a dozen miniature houses are suspended
in space, at various heights. Sutured together
from “bible skins” (salvaged leather book cov-
ers), these are delicate monuments to faith
and resilience.—Johanna Fateman (P.P.O.W.;
through Oct. 15.)
Paula Wilson
A colorful six-foot-long moth—a painted mo-
bile—hangs above the entrance to this New
Mexico-based artist’s salon-style installation
“Imago,” a title borrowed from two sources. In
entomology, it refers to the mature phase of a
winged insect’s development; in psychoanal-
ysis, it’s a mode of relationship therapy. The
works on view are hybrids as well, combining
painting, printmaking, sculpture, collage, film,
performance, and furniture design. Through-
out, Wilson cultivates an inviting domestic
atmosphere. A gracefully carved wooden floor
lamp—one of several pieces made in collabora-
tion with the artist’s partner, Mike Lagg—il-
luminates “Sunflower Night,” a dense, lushly
nocturnal canvas. The meticulously detailed,
doll-size sculpture “Microhouse” replicates a
modernist live-work cottage, down to its clay
pots, wind chimes, and sleeping loft. The high-
light of the exhibition is the short film “Life
Spiral,” starring the artist as an insect moving
through its life cycle, from egg to imago, in
brilliantly costumed, sun-flooded sequences.
In less than five enthralling minutes, Wilson
crystallizes her show’s many themes, under-
scoring that her everyday artistic existence is
inextricable from the rhythms of the natural
world.—J.F. (Denny Dimin; through Oct. 29.)