For a few weeks, I’ve been harboring a feeling that the American electorate was very angry. Not in the way it has always been, but in a deeply unsettled way that indicated they could lash out at a world that wasn’t hearing them. Voting, for all its faults, is one of the only direct ways that citizens of a democracy can voice positions and symbolically scream into a ballot box. People will read Tuesday’s election as an endorsement of Trump’s right-wing policies, but I’ve always sought a more tempered view of what voting means. I certainly think his positions are destructive, undermining our common good. But voting, I believe, means we want to exercise what little agency on the public stage that we have.
I also know that radicalism is in the soul of the United States, for better or worse. It is a flailing energy that lashes out periodically to till the soil and plant new seeds. At times it is a positive force, but often it is quite the opposite. That spirit also waters the art in this land, making it vibrant and complex.
Art, at its best, challenges me to reconsider my own relationship to others and the world, art such as Joyce Kozloff’s Collateral Damage paintings, which I encountered at the beginning of the year at DC Moore gallery. Their curious patchwork geographies suggest nation states stitched together without a clear sense of unity, while spirals and swooshes with god-like force cross borders at will. States, of course, can be understood abstractly, as states of being or mind that we superimpose atop geography. After all, aren’t all nations, big and small, simply abstractions of the world and the ways we choose to organize our communities?
A few months later, in April, I walked inside of Kozloff’s nine-foot-tall “Targets” (2000) on display at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Entering into the large spherical sculpture you are confronted by painted maps of places the US has aerial bombed, often rendered upside down or sideways, along with tactical information and oil field locations. It is a prescient work, one that can disorient you with its immersive beauty and engulf you in the luxury of seeing the world’s violence from a distance. For some of us that threat of danger seems like it is creeping closer; for others it is already all around. In art like this I feel implicated, and I wish more art accomplished that by highlighting our own complicity, even if it seduces us with gorgeous patterns before revealing darker truths.
If the gallery is where Kozloff sets her insights, some of the most radical aesthetic moments also occur at home. On that same trip to Wisconsin, one of the battleground states in this election, I encountered the Mary Nohl house in Milwaukee. In the small lakeside home, a woman who was often known as a “witch” by local children created a colorful and textured existence in a geography that failed to recognize her talents and insight. In the kitchen, as well as every hallway, room, and nook and cranny, she made her world anew, claiming space on a planet that harshly discounts women who don’t conform. In her house turned museum, I felt a clear refusal to settle for the space others had allotted her. She turned her isolation into something wondrous that bleeds into our own lives by following us home and allowing us to see new possibilities, perhaps in our own often mundane personal spaces.
Breaking the mold through clarity seems to have been a specialty of Elizabeth Catlett, who was also not one to conform. Her radical politics pushed her to move outside the US. She nurtured her own artistic development in Mexico while being informed by her ancestral roots — something that was a common strategy for artists of the era, as Alexandra M. Thomas notes in her recent review of Catlett’s current Brooklyn Museum retrospective.
While most major art museums largely overlooked Catlett’s work during her lifetime, today she seems more relevant than ever and institutions are trying to correct their lazy omissions. Institutions change slowly, if at all. Catlett didn’t wait, but the world caught up to her. It’s a familiar feeling.
“Political Prisoner” (1971) is one of the powerhouse works on display in her show. Made of cedar wood, it is based on a press image of scholar Angela Davis being led away by police in handcuffs. The torso of the abstracted female figure seems to open like a book, revealing the colors we associate with pan-Africanism. Something in that sculpture deeply resonates with me, suggesting that inside each of us, the spirit of resistence is psychically opened even during an act of confinement. Radicality, she reminds us, can be visceral.
A few miles north, in the same borough, Ai Weiwei’s solo show at the Faurschou foundation gallery in Greenpoint offers a more oblique radicality that grows like a branch through art systems. In “What You See Is What You See” (2024), the exhibition’s namesake work, the Chinese dissident artist has skewed a Frank Stella Protractor painting by rendering it at an angle in toy bricks (both Lego and the Chinese version, Lepin) using the same colors we see in Catlett’s human-scaled sculpture, but in this temporal context it takes on new meanings, including the colors of the Palestinian flag. No stranger to controversy, Ai consciously lets us wrestle with meaning, pushing us to assert our own agency in our interpretations. He’s aware that settling on a single reading can mislead us or distort our perceptions. I appreciate the rorschach quality of Ai’s visions, grounded in the wisdom that comes from bearing witness to a world that frequently goes mad before returning to sanity.
His Iron Trees sculpture series is on display in the same show, surrounded by images that suggest a waning of the American Empire and its power to assert control over a less unipolar world. The closing title of Charlie Chaplin’s satirical The Great Dictator (1940) hangs on one wall, while an image of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea and the last US soldier leaving Afghanistan are also nearby. Even the image of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)” (1912) is doing a flip flop so that it seems stuck in a cycle of descent and ascent, essentially going nowhere. Power in art is in the viewer, and here we’re left in shadows, where some of the best ideas and demons lie.
In her book Women, Culture, & Politics, Angela Davis writes about Reagan-era politics and those who benefit economically from oppression. She states, “After all, radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’” In his Iron Trees series, Ai has removed the roots, leaving us to contemplate leafless trunks. They’re rendered in a realist manner but feel stylized in their display. While they can also appear like scholar’s rocks, they feel disconnected and isolated too — yet they retain the timelessness of petrified wood, and its extraterrestrial quality.
What does radical mean in 2024? Perhaps it is in the studio that we find the best meanings. I know that many of you who create will be answering my question in the years ahead, and I will be around to witness your revelations as I sit here flipping through a book of Kozloff’s maps in Nohl’s kitchen, while Catlett’s forms remind me of our right to interiority, and the leaves I imagine on Ai’s iron trees rustle in the background. Our imaginations will free us.
