NYRB's Art Issue: Tallman, Bell, and Salle

Arlene Shechet, Rapunzel (2024)

I just want to highlight three pieces in The New York Review of Books’ recent “Art Issue” that I enjoyed immensely:

1. Susan Tallman’s “String Theory”

This absorbing piece is a review of two exhibitions: the Museum of Modern Art’s Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art. It contains several wonderful descriptions of textiles. For example:

A rollicking pattern of orbs, blocks, and squiggles on a tunic from the pre-Inca Wari empire is so intricate it required six to nine miles of thread, and so jazzy in its peppering of orange, black, and magenta it might be fifty years old rather than a thousand.

In Hicks’s The Principal Wife (circa 1965), hanks of wool, intermittently wrapped in brilliant colors, fall in heavy arcs from a bar like the reins of some Brobdingnagian horse on a festival day. It takes discipline not to reach out and give them a tug.

In Eva Hesse’s 1966 Ennead, yards of brown cord sprout from a wall-mounted piece of plywood, like hair plugs aspiring to dreadlocks. Some drop straight down, while others travel in a sloppy catenary to a hook on the adjacent wall, then flop in a tangle to the floor. It is a work of inexplicable poignancy—the plain carpentry, the expansive eruption, the droop, and the casual splendor. The quixotically reinforced wire lattice of Gego’s Square Reticulárea 71/II (1971) is a lesson in distributed stress, gawky and graceful in equal measure. Alan Shields’s Shape-Up (1976–1977) occupies space in the manner of a minimalist painting, but instead of rigor we get an open crisscross of slightly slack ribbons, adorned here and there with a swag of beaded string, like postseason Christmas lights on an unkempt high-rise. Order and disorder check each other out, shake hands, and decide to get on. 

2. Julian Bell’s “Internalizing the Crises”

In this stimulating piece, Bell reviews Joseph Leo Koerner’s Art in a State of Siege. What’s it about? Bell tells us: 

The three artists on whom Koerner dwells in his highly wrought text—which was long in gestation before the advent of the forty-seventh presidency—occupy disparate historical worlds. He returns to Hieronymus Bosch, the subject of a 2016 book in which he paired and contrasted that astonishing innovator, working at the turn of the sixteenth century, with Pieter Bruegel, working some sixty years later. He crosses campus to Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum and ponders its most formidable holding, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) by Max Beckmann. Then, flying to Johannesburg, the renowned art historian hooks up with the yet more celebrated artist William Kentridge. Koerner’s salute to the achievements of this inspiring contemporary becomes warmly bromantic.

I’m interested in all three of these artists, particularly Bosch. Bell disagrees with Koerner’s interpretation of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1490-1510). First, he quotes Koerner:

The devil’s hatred of people, people’s hatred of other people, the Jews’ hatred of Christ and Christians, the hatred of Christians for their enemies, the hatred directed towards an “us” by an invisible “them,” and the wrath of God that consumes just about everyone: this global economy of loathing stands not just portrayed in Bosch’s pictures. It is performed in them, as if his brush were enmity’s instrument. Hatred contaminates. The aversion these images depict and enact defiles how we react to them. Uncertain whether they are for us or against us, we turn against each other. Bosch built his masterpiece to act like a time bomb set to detonate in every dangerous here and now.

Bell responds:

This is swaggering, adrenaline prose. Its assertions seem to me to fail the test of experience. Not defilement but diversion: to these eyes, that is what The Garden of Earthly Delights supplies. Its high, zinging hues go with its hilarity—the amorous sow in a wimple cozying up to one of its males, the flowers sticking out of another man’s bottom. Its crammed market stall of shape-shuffling caprices (ovoids, tunnels, shells, spikes, and soft flesh, vessels continually recombinant) offers a holiday from truth and necessity, one that allows us, in common with its earliest recorded viewer—writing a year after the painter had died—to revel without shame in “things so pleasing and so fantastic.”

Bell calls Koerner’s book “not an argument but an artwork.” I think I’ll check it out.

3. David Salle’s “ ‘Why Not All These Things at Once’ ”

This is a review of Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, an exhibition at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York. And what a review it is – one of the best of the year. Salle’s immense powers of art description are on full display. For example:

Bea Blue (2024) is a plump, rotund, pale blue, benign beast that appeared to be waddling down the mowed path on which it stood. From one side it’s a curvaceous, lumbering sumo knight holding a too-small shield; from the opposite side it’s an affronted pelican resting on a single skinny leg.

And:

The aptly named Rapunzel (2024), a beautiful shade of cobalt blue-violet nuanced by bright pale mauve accents, has something in common with both the Chicago Picasso (itself an essay in sculptural “hair”) and a playground slide or jungle gym. A flattened, shallow trough of metal swoops vertiginously from the apex, ending some feet above the ground. It’s tempting to want to slide down it. Viewed from the opposite side, the construction appears to be supported by a single giant foot. Up close, the tangled mass of wide, cake-pan cantilevered trough and narrow ribbon forms is turbulent, jumbled, almost menacing; from a distance it’s a slow-moving anteater in a purple coat.

And one more:

As April (2024) is a cluster of distorted rectangular shapes notched with semicircular removals, the planes welded together at perpendicular angles to make a top-heavy, squarish mass resting on a narrower base. It is painted in two shades of yellow—a warm cadmium yellow medium and a pale, cool, almost greenish lemon—and beribboned with unpainted metal extrusions. From certain angles the whole thing evokes an explosion in a plumbing supply house; the notched planes are interrupted here and there by flattened tubular forms, and a tangle of wires descends diagonally from a twisted spine. The construction appears to be going haywire. It’s either having a nervous breakdown or skipping rope, either high comedy or low clown (I can’t decide which), a slapstick gag in slow motion, a Beckettian tramp looking for a place to sit down. The crisp late fall day I visited, as the sun picked out the bright yellow notched shapes against the red-rust leaves of an oak, the vibrant ensemble felt satisfying, enlivening.

“A curvaceous, lumbering sumo knight holding a too-small shield,” “a slow-moving anteater in a purple coat,” “an explosion in a plumbing supply house” – Salle’s descriptions surprise, delight, and illuminate. I enjoy them enormously.