“Reza Abdoh arrived like a rumor.” So begins the introductory letter from Bidoun’s Negar Azimi, Tiffany Malakooti, and Michael C. Vazquez, the editors of REZA ABDOH (Hatje Cantz/ARTBOOK DAP, $55), a riotous, near-narcotic immersion into the career of the taboo-breaking director, whose oeuvre mingled crucifixions, castration, capoeira, onstage sodomy, heroin use, Greek mythology, and a go-go-dancing George H. W. Bush, with actors often jarringly cast against race or gender. The rest of the five-hundred-plus-page tome attempts to collect the various myths, anecdotes, and gossip left after Abdoh’s passing, which came all too soon in 1995, when the director was thirty-two. As the artist forbid his plays from being restaged after his death, the publication and the accompanying exhibition that toured New York’s moma ps1 and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin relied instead on the bittersweet odds and ends that make up a life on the edge.
Critic Sylvie Drake described one of Abdoh’s plays as “hurling images and sounds at its audience like an automatic tennis server gone berserk,” and this book takes up a similar tactic. Interrupting the opening chronology is a chorus of witnesses—reliable or otherwise—tackling their subject’s personal mythmaking (such as the casual lie that cast his Persian mother as an “Italian” extra in Pasolini films). These voices are presented alongside the era’s cultural touchstones: the extravagant 1971 shindig at Persepolis, Reagan’s first mention of aids, and O. J. Simpson’s 1994 Bronco chase. Collages of oral histories from Abdoh’s friends, family, lovers, and collaborators operate almost like their own little plays, offering visceral insight into an artist who, according to Tobi Haslett, “ate camp and shat punk, his style a fizzing intestine stuffed with culture’s slime and scraps.” The rest of the publication careens between extracts of scripts, pages from Abdoh’s notebooks, family photographs, film stills, critics’ reviews, and new texts from Haslett, Charlie Fox, Dominic Johnson, Jennifer Krasinski, Nick Mauss, and Elizabeth Wiet. The abundance is dizzying and disorienting but, much like Abdoh’s productions, leaves little doubt to the mad genius behind the curtain. —KATE SUTTON
Working in crayon and marker on everything from shoe boxes to a Sara Lee cake lid, the self-taught, Georgia-born artist Nellie Mae Rowe was a skilled improviser, making dazzling art out of whatever was at hand. She imbued her portraits of human and animal worlds with bright blasts of life: blue dogs and red roosters, cool peacocks and proud pigs. In one chewing-gum sculpture, a mustachioed catlike mammal in pearls seems to have a lot to say, an admirable feat of animation—Rowe coaxed personality out of a medium best known for being spit out or stepped on. REALLY FREE: THE RADICAL ART OF NELLIE MAE ROWE (High Museum of Art/DelMonico Books/ARTBOOK DAP, $50) accompanies a survey at the High Museum in Atlanta, and the show’s curator, Katherine Jentleson, offers a comprehensive essay on the artist’s career: from Rowe’s “Playhouse,” the immersive environment she created in her home and yard, to her inclusion in “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980,” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1982. Rowe came to art late in life, creating in earnest in her sixties and having her talent spotted only in her seventies. By the time she was eighty, her compositions had become intricate and ornate, using every inch of the picture to demonstrate her mastery of color and composition, as if she were trying to cram a lifetime of ideas onto a single page. —DAVID O’NEILL
The traces our bodies leave behind rarely resemble clean silhouettes. In Liliane Tomasko’s early oil paintings of unmade beds, the sheets crest into ridges like arteries bulging on the back of a hand. Over the course of two decades, these detailed depictions give way to large, lurid abstractions, supposedly plucked from the dream state, that amnesiac other half of our existence. The artist’s new monograph, WE SLEEP WHERE WE FALL: PAINTINGS 2000–2020 (Hatje Cantz/ARTBOOK DAP, $55), plots this aesthetic trajectory.
In the first essay, Kirsten Voigt pinches a line from Robert Walser to describe Tomasko as having “an inner eye.” What the artist also has is a Polaroid, which she relies upon to filter her perceptions of her immediate surroundings. Her early paintings demonstrate a sustained attention to interiors, stripped mattresses on dusty floors, shirts crumpled casually on the back of a chair, or the deep shadows pooled along a windowsill. A section of the catalogue aptly titled “Dissolution” surveys the drawings and paintings made between 2009 and 2013. There’s a claustrophobic quality to these images. The stacked blankets look out of focus, as if the artist were too close to properly photograph them. The effect imparts the kind of wooziness that makes you want to open a window. Metaphorically speaking, Tomasko did just that with Linens, 2014, an airy tangle of bedsheets rendered purely in outline. In the paintings that follow, fleshy brushstrokes loop over patches of color, the lines thickening and eventually dissipating into transparent smears, as the painter dips deeper and deeper into dreams. —K. S.
Writer-academic Tiana Reid describes Darrel Ellis’s visuals as having “a telltale mood: weathered, textured, exposed,” revealing “the multiple faces we carry around with us.” Indeed, DARREL ELLIS (Visual AIDS, $50) addresses the myriad components of identity through patrimony, race, self-perception, and aesthetic tampering. These themes appear throughout Ellis’s figurative work (executed in gouache, charcoal, wash, and ink) and experimental gelatin-silver prints, as well as in the book’s accompanying texts. The publication is part of Visual AIDS’s initiative to champion overlooked artists who died of the illness; Bronx-born Ellis is one such tragic example (he died in 1992, at age thirty-three). His work was safeguarded by a hopeful friend-curator, despite “not knowing when or where this body of work might find its place in the world.” Theorist Derek Conrad Murray interprets the art’s often-obscured visages or garbled-looking surfaces as brash defiance: a Black artist navigating “an art world that demands the right to look (to gaze upon), but not to fully acknowledge or appreciate.” In this way, “Ellis directly resisted that transparency through a series of striking formal refusals.” Artfully skewing his materials was a cornerstone of Ellis’s work. He often repurposed negatives and photographs shot by his father, who was murdered by the police before the artist was born. Ellis altered these images using projectors and other indirect interventions, preserving the originals. Revisiting these paternal annals imbued them with new power, as artist S*an D. Henry-Smith writes: “The thing that is so rich about all Black family archives is that we’re in control of these narratives. . . . They show ourselves to ourselves.” —SARAH MOROZ
The NSA are mere hacks compared to Sophie Calle, the industrious artist whose body of work is rooted in lo-fi surveillance and interpersonal forensics. For three weeks in 1981, Calle posed as a cleaner in a Venetian hotel and took portraits of the guests in absentia (she hid her camera in her mop bucket), gleaning what she could of their personalities by photographing what they left in their rooms. Previously included within the 1999 edition Double Game, THE HOTEL (Siglio Press, $40) is now a stand-alone book with a fresh redesign—the pages are edged in gold—and a selection of previously unpublished images. Playing with voyeuristic curiosity (and destroying any naive belief in privacy), Calle compiled a vast collection of color and black-and-white images along with written observations like, “The memory I will keep of them is the obscene image of the pajama bottom, lying on a chair.” With a clinical eye, she recorded the quotidian goings-on in the twelve rooms on her circuit: orange peels in a garbage bin and an attempted crossword puzzle sitting expectantly on a bedside table; used towels in a forlorn lump and half a denture from H. W. Goodman Dental Laboratories; reconstructed bits of a ripped-up postcard (Saluti da VENEZIA) and dangling pearls. Calle loves to decode the lives of others, and there are certain data that only an artist can collect. On her last day at the job, she construed a hotel pillow slouching sideways to be “a farewell signal.” —S. M.
A book in two volumes, plus a book about the book in the form of a folder with two parts: elaborate as it is, CHIZU (MAQUETTE EDITION) (Mack/New York Public Library, $150) is the presumably definitive reissue of a legendary photobook by Kikuji Kawada, first published in Japan in 1965, and known in English as The Map. In 2001, the New York Public Library acquired Kawada’s hand-constructed maquette for the book, and that artifact, rather than the first edition—which turned out quite differently in ways the artist later came to regret—has been the basis for this publication. The dense, dark, full-bleed black-and-white photographs in the first volume—well, much more black than white—consist entirely of what appear to be mineral surfaces, perhaps time-worn walls stained and battered by the elements or maybe the weathered walls of cliffs or caves; occasionally a blank white spread creates a pause, not so much an emptiness as a space of resonance. Volume 2 of Chizu encompasses a mix of imagery, much of it practically illegible, though we catch glimpses of a ruined building, many framed photographs of men in uniform, and all sorts of debris: a flattened packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes, a bunch of Coke bottles scattered on the ground. Here, seeing anything familiar comes as a relief, because almost everything looks so strange and eerie, in part thanks to Kawada’s use of extreme contrast and general visual noise. To know that the “stain” photographs were made in Hiroshima, specifically at the Genbaku Dome—the remains of an industrial exhibition hall that partly withstood nuclear destruction—the innocent reader would have to delve into this edition’s third component, which (along with a “map” charting the parallels and divergences between the maquette and the 1965 edition) includes texts by Joshua Chuang, the NYPL’s photography curator, and researcher Miyuki Hinton, as well as their interview with Kawada. Then one might wonder if the stains themselves are traces of vaporized humans, or if the uniformed men in part two, sometimes pictured next to their airplanes, are kamikaze pilots.What emerges from the photographer’s thoughts in retrospect is an idea of abstraction as a mode in which facts, in becoming image, transcend themselves. “The viewer,” he says, “is led inside of the image.” One is asked, not to look at anything, but to look into the void of the visible. —BARRY SCHWABSKY
Negotiation with others, and with the nonhuman other, is at the core of Candice Lin’s new exhibition and its companion publication, CANDICE LIN: SEEPING, ROTTING, RESTING, WEEPING (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts/Walker Art Center, $30). Lin puts the “cat” in “catalogue”: here, the animals become a portal to new post-pandemic worlds built around touch—although, at first, she didn’t consider the feline-focused works she produced during the COVID-19 pandemic to be “serious” art. A temple-like tent at the center of the show is surrounded by cat demons inspired by tomb-guardian figures in Fuzhou, her father’s hometown in China. Visitors are invited to enter and relax on rugs, fondle biomorphic sculptures at a “Tactile Theater,” follow along with a cat-demon instructor on a Qigong fitness video, and handle pages from Lin’s “Cat Demon Diary,” her “Journal of the Plague Year.” Lin’s Natural History: A Half-Eaten Portrait, an Unrecognizable Landscape, a Still, Still Life, 2020, is a funerary sculpture of herself accompanied by aquariums in which beetles eat Lin’s sloughed-off skin; in “Pigs and Poison,” 2020–21, Lin explores the idea of immigration as contagion. Ultimately, this catalogue demonstrates how Lin’s work explores, in her own words, the capacity of animals “to erode our human sense of mastery, control, and subjugation.” —FRAN BIGMAN
Instead of one of her transfixing portraits, the cover of DEANA LAWSON (ICA Boston/MoMA PS1/Mack, $40) depicts two brown banquettes beside floral wallpaper. The flash shines off the mottled vinyl surface and knocks diagonal shadows to the floor. Just off-center, a triangular tear gouges the seat, revealing springs, wood, and an empty darkness. Lawson titles this image Portal, suggesting that a sacred space lies just beneath, or beyond, everyday surfaces.
This album-like monograph—with texts by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Greg Tate, and others—accompanies the first museum survey of Lawson’s work, a traveling exhibition that opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston this fall. Throughout her career, Lawson has celebrated the Black figure in mesmerizing, disarming ways. Do viewers find familiarity in shared identity? Or, as Tina M. Campt writes, do they experience “discomfort in embracing Black life imaged so unapologetically on its own terms.” Working in locations from Ghana to New Haven, Connecticut, Lawson collaborates with models to create a regal feeling in ordinary settings with her distinctive color palette, lighting, and idiosyncratic domestic details. Women pose in living rooms, confident in their bodies. Couples embrace on the grass. Crowds celebrate on a Brooklyn street. Her work includes births, deaths, and rituals: The Beginning, 2008; Monetta Passing, 2021; Danto Sacrifice, 2012. Lawson’s approach to these rites of passage is philosophical. As curator Peter Eleey writes, the artist “has repeatedly described her desire to ‘reactivate’ and ‘reinvigorate’ the diasporic imaginary, to ‘create this metanarrative that’s about family, but also going across time and space.’” Works like Messier 81, Return of the Dove, 2018, make this theme explicit; a distant galaxy seems to bend and warp. A tiny Polaroid group portrait is tucked into the upper-left corner of the frame, dwarfed by the glitchy scanned image.
One of the book’s standout pieces, the ongoing Assemblage, began as an inspiration board on Lawson’s studio wall, with images from family albums, newspapers, and archives evolving into an installation of more than five hundred four-by-six-inch prints. In this volume, these pictures—of Lawson and her twin sister, Tupac Shakur, Whitney Houston, public-school classes, National Geographic photography, museum objects—are spread throughout, emerging as periodic counterpoints to Lawson’s more formal, large-scale portraiture. Taken together, these myriad depictions of Black identity propose a possible answer to a question Lawson once posed to artist and curator Deborah Willis: “How can the Black female be the center of philosophical and existential thought? And how do we make that change via photography?” —CHANDRA GLICK
Alex Katz, the ninety-four-year-old Brooklyn-born artist, is irascible in real life, with no time for foolishness, but affectionate and tender in his art, particularly in the hundreds of portraits of his greatest subject, his wife, Ada, a former research biologist whom he married in 1958. ALEX KATZ: BEAUTY (Karma Books/Lococo Fine Art Publisher, $40) is short and sweet: one-hundred pages, twenty-one images, two brief texts (by Carter Ratcliff and Jarrett Earnest). If Katz is an artist of distillation, this volume may be the purest shot yet. Known for a refined color palette and a talent for natural light and shadow, he has gone for undiluted black and white here, stark marks on the page delimiting the human face without shading it or setting the scene. Like fashion illustrator René Gruau, Katz conjures a real person, one with style, from just a few elements: the arch of an eyebrow, the line of a chin, maybe a sprig of eyelashes, if you’re lucky. Katz is celebrated for his meticulous, luminous, large-scale paintings of his friends (many famous) and family, and his moody landscapes. These are immortal performances, perfectly composed. But this book shows that the most memorable acts of beauty are unpremeditated. —D. O.
