But is it art, or fashion? In FASHION WORK 1993–2018: 25 YEARS OF ART IN FASHION (Damiani, $45), Danish-born curator and critic Jeppe Ugelvig offers a refreshing take: that this question should not be framed in terms of aesthetic categories, but, instead, by social and material systems of production—that is to say, by work. The volume traces twenty-five years of hybrid fashion forms—and labor—through an impressive array of archival material, including backstage photos, notebook sketches, show invitations, and more. Ugelvig focuses on designers that critically engage with the labor conditions of their time, such as Bernadette Corporation, Susan Cianciolo, Bless, and DIS. These four are unique, he argues, because they took up serious work in the fashion industry while still a part of the art world, and paved the way for new forms of exchange between the two spheres. Ugelvig also responds to the idea that fashion is the art of modern capitalism, suggesting instead that “art and fashion have, in fact, developed in constant negotiation with—or negation of—one another.” —EMILY WELLS
Of all the photographs in Dorothea Lange’s recent survey at the Museum of Modern Art, the one that has stayed with me the most was, most likely, not taken by Lange: a small, black-and-white image of a man’s liver-spotted hands clasping someone’s back. That back was Lange’s, the hands those of her husband. When the young photographer Sam Contis discovered that Lange had included the intimate composition in a 1966 retrospective at MoMA under her own name, Contis decided to adopt a similar approach; her DAY SLEEPER (Mack, $35) appropriates images from the documentarian’s archive, sequencing rarely or never-before-seen photographs into an ingenious new monograph, plumbing the unconscious of Lange’s oeuvre to dream her work anew. Consult the meditative captions by Lange found in the book’s appendix, and Day Sleeper unfolds as a memoir, sparsely interleaved with blank spreads: lulls that remind us of how canons are shaped, and unshaped, by omission. From the cover shot—Lange’s son dozing with a shirt over his eyes, one of many nap time portraits—to southwestern landscapes, domestic tableaux, and street reportage, these pictures arrive to us today with a new immediacy, not least of all Lange’s records of economic injustice. But the volume impresses most in the unlikely relationships Contis builds between subjects, as when a mountainous Californian vista—a two-page bleed—precedes a small, half-shadowed hand, or how an eagle crucified on a barbed-wire fence is followed by a gentle, gauzy photograph of Japanese American internees weaving camouflage nets for the US military—an image both beautiful and appalling. There are endless ways to see something, Day Sleeper quietly insists. And to see how others saw, too. —ZACK HATFIELD
It seems unlikely that an art show about dance would transition gracefully into a book. But Nick Mauss’s ballet-centric exhibition at the Whitney in 2018 leaps nimbly onto the pages of TRANSMISSIONS (Whitney Museum of American Art, $35), its eponymous companion text. The project was something closer to a curated archive, culled from the dusty files of major museums and libraries, institutional collections, and artists’ trusts, pirouetting around the ballet scene of early avant-garde New York—the 1930s to the ’50s, by the artist’s account. Scores of photographs, magazines, sculptures, drawings, costumes, and other objects show how the performative dance, new to America, percolated through art and media when most mediums were still molten, slowly taking their modernist shapes. Photography, especially, found its footing in this terrain. George Platt Lynes’s silky studio photographs of New York City Ballet dancers, commissioned by the company and retrieved from the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, rejoice at an excuse to study the nude body. The images are full of fantasy and unabashedly queer. (This was decades before Mapplethorpe.) The dancers’ poses echo across ballet program covers and magazine advertisements alike. The Surrealists got the memo, too: In a photograph by Cecil Beaton, View editor Charles Henri Ford strikes the fourth position in a black unitard, adorned with small rubber gloves, designed by Salvador Dalí. Ford’s partner, the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, designed sets, costumes, and “choreographic fantasies”; Isamu Noguchi made ballet props that looked like sculptures, and sculptures that looked like ballerini. PaJaMa—the dancers Margaret Hoening French, Paul Cadmus, and Jared French—made the beaches of Fire Island and Provincetown their stage, balancing on scaffolding and posing with driftwood, purely for pictures circulated among friends. It’s a crucial example: No single art form, Mauss seems to be saying, is ever a solo act. —JULIANA HALPERT
Justine Kurland spent the tail end of the stranger-danger era driving cross-country in a van and casting schoolgirls as runaways in a series of staged photographs. This is not a cautionary tale: GIRL PICTURES (Aperture, $50), first shown in 1999, established an enduring aesthetic of girlhood, since played upon by many artists, including Sofia Coppola and Petra Collins. The new edition includes previously unpublished photos and essays by Kurland and writer Rebecca Bengal. The work is evergreen—maybe because coming-of-age stories are a hand-me-down genre, or because Kurland’s references are themselves throwbacks. The gang’s all here, and multigenerational in the extreme: Greek myths, Victorian children’s book illustrations, frontier photography, and Huckleberry Finn all inform Kurland’s worldview. It’s a separatist Edenic dreamscape where preteens equally at home at truck stops or seashores survive on ketchup sandwiches and soft serve. No boys allowed on this Big Rock Candy Mountain, unless the girls are in the mood for torture. They travel in packs like Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls, braid each other’s hair, do a cowboy standoff, spit-roast a pig. Kurland frames the mini-dramas in natural light: a levitating Hula-Hoop, a glob of spit about to make contact, a shirt hiked to upper rib cage. Nobody ends up dead in a ditch—except the hitchhiker from Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, whom Bengal invokes as another touchstone. Today, the American road still breeds fantasy, but Kurland’s is a welcome reminder that van life doesn’t have to generate sponcon. —LIZZY HARDING
Considering how relatively straightforward it is to describe the elements Lee Ufan’s sculptural assemblages comprise—“a rock resting on a metal plate,” for instance—it is surprisingly difficult to articulate exactly how these pieces operate as artworks. Recalling at once American Minimalism and Japanese rock gardens, Lee’s masterful arrangements of raw or only slightly mediated materials strike an unlikely harmony between organic and manufactured elements. The weight of stone and steel holds the objects firmly in place even as the composition itself seems to expand into the space around it. When speaking about his sculptural practice, the artist prioritizes open-ended words like encounter or relatum, a term that signals that his works exist within myriad embedded relationships, leaving gaps for, as Lee puts it, “the wind of the world to enter.” In keeping with his association with Mono-ha (“school of things”), a movement that emerged in Japan in the late 1960s, Lee puts a premium on materials over their manipulation. He considers his materials to be “borrowed” from nature, with an understanding of their eventual return—a fluidity that sets him at odds with the twentieth-century fetishism of the art object. There’s no small irony, then, that an artist famous for penning a text titled “Overcoming the Modern” might be pitted against a temple to the modern, in the form of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. And yet his current exhibition manages another unlikely balancing act, with an outdoor installation of ten sculptures, whose curved steel plates read as if the cylindrical facade had somehow shed peels of its pristine surface. LEE UFAN: OPEN DIMENSION (Smithsonian Books, $50), the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition, reprints three of the artist’s own texts alongside a conversation with museum director Melissa Chiu and essays by curator Anne Reeve and art historian Miwako Tezuka. The true delight, however, is in the lush installation shots, whose sublime framing makes it nearly impossible to say where each work ends and begins. —KATE SUTTON
Nominally authored by “A Square,” Edwin Abbott’s satirical 1884 novella Flatland crafts a pseudo-memoir of a hapless parallelogram whose perception of the world around him is upended by a chance encounter with a sphere. It’s no surprise that this book has had an impact on Tauba Auerbach, an artist who actively courts the fourth dimension, whether in her art objects or through her publishing imprint, Diagonal Press. Her investment in texture might at first seem to align with the recent trend for process-based painting; Auerbach’s endgame, however, is not the creation of a perfect surface, but rather its rupture. (Forcible, if necessary.) Sometimes this happens literally, as in her series of “Folds,” pigmented canvases that document their material history of manual manipulation; other times, the break is staged thematically, like in her monumental mural 2020, 2019, with its trompe l’oeil rectangular prism seemingly protruding from a marbled vortex; in still others, it is sublimated through motifs like meanders or helixes, geometrical gestures that signal hyperspatiality. With sixteen distinct subsections collating as many years of work, the monograph TAUBA AUERBACH—S v Z (ARTBOOK DAP/SFMoMA, $50) was intended to accompany the artist’s long-awaited midcareer survey at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition now postponed until 2021. Created in collaboration with graphic designer David Reinfurt, the catalogue is a work in and of itself, with an aggressively slanted font (modeled after the artist’s own handwriting) that gradually rights itself as the pages progress, only to then start tilting toward the opposite side. A nod to the artist’s obsession with chirality (which likewise manifests in the near symmetry of the enigmatic title), the effect calls to mind a Rorschach test, as if the two halves of the book were wrenched apart in inverse reflection. Texts by curators Jenny Gheith and Joseph Becker and art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson help guide readers through Auerbach’s interdimensional optical experiments, leaving the reader feeling, like Abbott’s square, staggered. —K. S.
