Archival documents “are not items of a completed past, but rather active elements of a present,” writes Ariella Azoulay. As e-flux Criticism takes a break from publishing new material in August, the editors have selected a few pieces from our free-to-access archive of more than 1,700 articles that might relate in new and unexpected ways to the moment. Search the archive yourself by clicking here.
“Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s” by Barbara Casavecchia
Moving behind the camera was for actress and activist Delphine Seyrig “a revelation, an enormous pleasure, an incomparable revenge,” writes Barbara Casavecchia in her review of this 2019 exhibition at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Showing how feminist collectives in France took inspiration from the revolutionary postcolonial filmmakers of the Global South, the show challenges the model of vanguard art beginning in the west and being adapted elsewhere to local conditions. Here as throughout the history of modern and contemporary art, the opposite is true: the example of the “margins” electrifies a moribund “center.”
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze by R.H. Lossin
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “The Last Cruze” documented the fate of laborers at a GM plant that had recently been “unallocated” through portraits, personal testimonies, and essays. In her review of this influential photobook, R.H. Lossin notes Frazier’s rare ability to depict both the private and public effects of the destruction of working-class communities while steering clear of the sometimes “fetishistic and exploitative” tendencies of socially engaged photography. The artist’s work is currently the subject of a survey at MoMA, New York through September 7.
Marwan Rechmaoui’s “Chasing the Sun” by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
The concurrence of the Paris Olympics with the specter of a wider regional war in the Middle East makes it worth revisiting Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s review of Marwan Rechamoui’s recent show in Beirut, published on May 29. Its reflections on how the idea of “play” extends beyond sporting prowess and childhood sociality to arenas of human activity ranging from poetry to politics and conflict—whether real or sublimated through athletic competition—shines a new light on the conditioning of human behavior.
Chris Marker’s “Koreans” by Stephen Squibb
A 2014 exhibition of photographs by Chris Marker allowed Stephen Squibb (in a review first published on October 9 of that year) to reflect on how the great filmmaker, like Brecht, showed “individuals negotiating a social landscape littered with contradictions.” The purpose being not to drive a wedge between people but “between all humans, on the one hand, and the instituted narratives that would divide us—by reference to our ostensible freedom, our race, or our nationality—on the other.” A decade later, Marker’s loss is ever more keenly felt.
Cécile B. Evans’s “Amos’ World” by Chris Sharratt
In 2018, Cecile B. Evans introduced audiences to Amos, a hand-puppet described by Chris Sharratt as an “amalgam of twentieth-century starchitects.” Evans uses the character to draw a brilliant analogy between the failure of modernist architects to consider the needs of “undeserving” residents when constructing utopia with the hubris of the tech entrepreneurs shaping our contemporary experience of the world. Although the show has come and gone, “Amos’ World” can still be viewed via the artist’s website. This review was first published on February 8, 2019.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “FEAR EATS THE SOUL” by Media Farzin
Hidden inside the Whitney museum is a functional indoor orchard. The late Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison conceived this indoor citrus grove, in 1972, as a sustainable food system that could outlive the collapse of farming. Their pioneering work resonates today with the work of artists such as Saskia Noor van Imhoff, who in 2021—as Tom Jeffreys wrote in another review—purchased a derelict dairy farm and renewed it. As the Whitney hosts one of a slew of ecologically themed exhibitions in New York this summer, all of which seek to redraw the hotly contested boundary between art and life, it might be worth revisiting Media Farzin’s appraisal of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “hospitable art-making,” with its focus on conviviality, food, and community.
“The Casablanca Art School” by Oliver Basciano
The “Casablanca School” of painters channeled their anger at colonial atrocities in the Middle East and North Africa into paintings that belie the lazy assumption that abstraction must be apolitical. With a major survey traveling this summer to Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, now is a good time to revisit Oliver Basciano’s appraisal—first published on June 21, 2023—of their collective “act of resistance against… capitalist internationalism.”
Etel Adnan by Steffen Zellig
In her recent review of Caragh Thuring’s highly mediated representations of Mount Tamalpais, Fanny Singer invoked the great Lebanese-American writer and artist Etel Adnan, whose paintings of the same mountain, made over decades, have become iconic. In his 2012 review of a show of Adnan’s mountain paintings in Beirut, Steffen Zellig reflected on how and whether an artwork can speak beyond its creator’s biography and the historical contexts of its production. “You might think that love of nature is harmless,” he quotes Adnan as writing, “but no love is harmless. It can compromise the whole of existence and indeed it does.”
Matthew Barney’s “Facility of DECLINE” by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
Matthew Barney’s recent show at Gladstone Gallery explored the limits of the body by pushing the boundaries of his materials. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve’s response to his 2016 show at the same venue—which “mirrors but does not reproduce” the 1991 show that transformed Barney’s reputation—offers a nuanced overview of a career characterized by continual reinvention that comes from repeated return to a creative source. Barney’s new video installation SECONDARY is on view at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris through September 8.
Martine Syms’s “Loser Back Home” by Juliana Halpert
“Opacity is the name of Syms’s game,” writes Juliana Halpert in her review of Martine Syms in Los Angeles, published last year. Syms’s works in different media, Halpert notes, asks viewers to join the dots between them. That exhibition was “a vast constellation of meaning, scattering countless allusions across its night sky.” The review is worth returning to for anyone hoping to navigate Syms’s “Present Goo,” a new solo show centered around three new video works, opening this September at London’s Sadie Coles HQ.