Before Joan Didion died in 2021, she and her friend, fellow writer Hilton Als, discussed a possible “exhibition as portrait” that would put visual art in conversation with her writing. The resulting exhibition opened at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) this fall, and the catalogue, JOAN DIDION: WHAT SHE MEANS (DelMonico Books/Hammer Museum, $40), includes many of the pieces on display. Didion’s time in New York City, where she worked for Vogue in the 1950s and early ’60s, is represented by some iconic Arbus, Avedon, Hopper, and Warhol images, and by lesser-known works such as Helen Lundeberg’s Studio—Afternoon, 1958–59, an example of California abstraction representing Didion’s ties to her home state.
She moved to Los Angeles in the mid-’60s and stayed for twenty years, writing for the movies and composing the pieces for her collections of journalistic essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979)—a stage of her life represented here mainly by works that play with the idea of documentary, from Noah Purifoy’s Watts Uprising Remains, 1965–66, a found-object charred chunk of wood embedded with a Bible, to Ed Ruscha’s 1966 photographs of buildings along the Sunset Strip. The final segment represents Didion’s move in 1988 back to New York with somber-toned works; her last two memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011), were about the death of her husband and daughter. Photos from a 1976 installment of Ana Mendieta’s “Silueta” (Silhouette) series show waves overtaking a shape in the beach that looks like a grave. Ghostly blue figures stand throughout En el Laberinto Ultravioleta 1, 2012, by the Salvadoran artist Ronald Morán.
The range of artworks presented here is impressive, and the depth of Als’s friendship with Didion is evident in his curation and in his introductory essay, in which he writes, “Didion always admired those artists who represented
or tried to understand that which could not be understood.” Taken together, along with three pieces of Didion’s writing—an article for Life about being a working mother, a commencement address, and her ruminations about adapting The Year of Magical Thinking as a Broadway show—these artworks suggest Didion’s lifelong quest to understand what she’d experienced. As she warns students in the commencement speech, “We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what’s really going on.” —FRAN BIGMAN
Mitch Epstein, a student of Garry Winogrand, captured America’s urban restlessness in the mid-1970s. Although he traveled widely, photographing “in New York in the seventies was serious fun,” he writes in his introduction to MITCH EPSTEIN: SILVER + CHROME (Steidl, $80), because it was “a jittery city” and “defiantly nonconformist.” Thirty Kodachrome color visuals are interspersed with twenty-two black-and-white images: this street photography is some of Epstein’s earliest work. Color photography was still disdainfully considered “commercial” rather than artistic—yet Epstein found that “Kodachrome transparency was a photographic readymade.”
Bold ’70s fashions dominate: plaid pants, fur-trimmed coats, floral dresses, teased hair—an aesthetic extremism underpinning the pandemonium of an agitated era. Within any given photograph, multiple figures operate in their own worlds without truly intersecting—even as they share proximal space. Fifth Avenue was the ultimate pipeline: a teen boy in a yarmulke—clutching the Star newspaper with a scream-y headline about Joan and Ted Kennedy—is ensconced in his reading amid passersby and a flashy Charles Jourdan store backdrop; two women wearing leopard-print coats with matching hats are centrally framed; they’re shadowed by a man wreathed in a billboard calling for “Husband Liberation” to “Help Preserve the Male Species.” Epstein’s eye homes in on marvelous theatricality: a giddy ensemble you couldn’t orchestrate, but an anti-choreography you can marvel at, if you’re quick enough to catch it. —SARAH MOROZ
Besotted with Los Angeles’s radiant sunshine and pastel-hued architecture, George Byrne began obsessively photographing his adopted home in 2010. By 2014, the Australian transplant had turned to medium-format cameras like the Mamiya 6 and Pentax 67, which the images gathered in GEORGE BYRNE: POST TRUTH (Hatje Cantz, $70) derive from (though many are digitally altered). Shot between 2014 and 2021, the sixty-eight works selected for this volume are but a fraction of Byrne’s output, serving instead—like the images themselves—as a distillation of the artist’s vision. What emerges is Bryne’s uncanny ability to transform LA’s ubiquitous sidewalks, strip malls, low-rise buildings, palm trees, stucco facades, and gradient skies into cubist candy-colored reveries. Patently contrived yet wholly familiar, they have a nostalgic, retro vibe, recalling Memphis-Milano design, David Hockney pool paintings, and the Deco-inspired sets of Miami Vice.
There are almost no cars or people in Byrne’s manufactured streetscapes, and their color-block cut-ups of space and place are, as Ian Volner aptly describes in the accompanying essay, “full of confounding and often misleading information.” Scrubbed clean of dirt and grit, their pristine geometries and sunny salmons, lemon yellows, and aqua blues sparkle with a sleek glamour that is quintessentially LA by way of Beverly Hills and Melrose. The best images, though, are marked by signs of organic life—the feathery shadow of a skyduster palm, the ombré undulations of the Santa Monica Mountains, a lone figure gazing at her phone. Without them, Byrne’s abstract fantasies devolve into a bland artifice that is also quintessentially LA. —JANE URSULA HARRIS
In 2015, artist Bani Abidi embarked on The Man Who . . . After Ilya Kabakov’s “The Man who flew into space from his apartment” a suite of understated, darkly humorous watercolors of men attempting to set Guinness World Records for obscure accomplishments, à la The Man Who Yawned Continuously for 5 Weeks or The Man Who Walked Around in Circles for Three Months. In its subtitle, the work pays explicit tribute to Ilya Kabakov’s 1985 installation. The absent protagonist was one of the only of Kabakov’s Ten Characters to ever get anywhere.
In her new monograph, BANI ABIDI: THE ARTIST WHO (Hatje Cantz, $50), Abidi goes people-watching in what Dipesh Chakrabarty famously dubbed “the waiting-room of history.” The book teems with gridded film stills tracking the needling rituals of would-be visa applicants or a city street brought to a halt by a passing motorcade—storyboards that never get to the plot. The artist infuses her work with a humor more bitter than sweet. (For instance, her 2016 series of watercolors capturing softly rendered citizens mid-belly-laugh is sharply undercut by its title: “And They Died Laughing.”) In keeping with this chameleon tone, editor Saira Ansari approaches the rest of the book as a kind of “alchemy,” fusing snippets from Abidi’s practice with contributions from writers including Adania Shibli, Abeera Kamran, and Sarnath Banerjee. —KATE SUTTON
Before “Sexy RBG” costumes were a thing, Halloween kicks meant bowls of peeled grapes and cold spaghetti, laid out for the dipping of intrepid fingers. Mika Rottenberg’s work yields a similar sensory thrill; you can know the chemistry and still not understand the effect. Her films play like amped-up ASMR, slick with the sounds of the body at its humblest: the indignant squishes of sweaty flesh, the doughy suction of a tongue along the gumline, acrylic nails rattling along countertops. It’s not the kind of work that translates easily to the page. In MIKA ROTTENBERG: BOWLS BALLS SOULS HOLES (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, $40), produced on the occasion of the artist’s solo survey at the famed Denmark museum, images are spare and willfully obscure, with no immediate descriptions to guide the uninitiated. Instead, a conversation between Rottenberg and curator Anders Kold precedes a short overview by William Pym, who speed-reads some of the artist’s more convoluted plotlines. In the interview, Rottenberg confesses that she is “uncomfortable with language,” preferring pre- and even post-verbal communication. The images that follow offer tutorials on what that might look like. On one page, impasto paint spreads in slabs like mayonnaise on Wonder Bread. On another, sweat beads on luridly lit skin. Another image shows a man with his face clipped in colorful clothespins, like the love child of Hellraiser’s Pinhead and a Koosh ball. That these visuals elicit such visceral reactions is a testament to the power of the films, with or without their soundtracks. —K. S.
In the winter of 1977, photographer and scholar Marilyn Nance traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, for FESTAC ’77, a festival of Black and African arts and culture. Some of her 1,500 images from the pivotal gathering in Pan-African history are presented in MARILYN NANCE: LAST DAY IN LAGOS (CARA/Fourthwall Books, $45), edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo. FESTAC ’77 included 17,000 participants from more than fifty-five countries and has remained, as Julie Mehretu notes in her foreword, “an important marker of the 1970s, and a symbol of the Black imaginary on the continent.” Nance shot the opening ceremonies, rehearsals, performances, and one-on-one portraits, staying in the country for five weeks. In an interview with Onabanjo, Nance describes the festival as “the Olympics, plus a Biennial, plus Woodstock. But Africa style. . . . It’s hard to describe, and people have positioned it as science fiction, but it really did happen.” —DAVID O’NEILL
Author and artist Glenn Lutz’s new book, THERE’S LIGHT: ARTWORKS & CONVERSATIONS EXAMINING BLACK MASCULINITY, IDENTITY & MENTAL WELL-BEING (LIORAFFE, $70), presents artworks and interviews with psychologists, filmmakers, activists, musicians, and artists such as Wyatt Cenac, Damon Davis, Brontez Purnell, Open Mike Eagle, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and many others. As its title suggests, this volume radiates hope, but of the hard-won variety. Lutz writes in the book’s preface that he was inspired by Sol LeWitt’s maxim, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Here, that idea was a question: “What does it look like when Black men come together to open up and share their experiences, with the intention of personal and collective healing?” The answer takes many forms in the included artworks, from photographs to paintings to posters to installations by Lutz, Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis Thomas, Pope.L, and others. But it is best exemplified by the candid and insightful conversations, in which Lutz asks focused questions grounded in his subjects’ specific practices and histories. That informed specificity allows the interviewees to disregard limiting societal scripts—especially the one that directs successful people to be stoical. Here, they talk about their work and their lives, and, crucially, about where those two realms overlap. Lutz asks about bad reviews, being assaulted by the police, depression, suicide, spirituality; he wants to know how making art about difficult subjects affects daily life. Reading the dialogues, I wondered why conversations like this weren’t happening every day. But that’s only because Lutz makes having difficult conversations look easy. There’s light in this book, and real heat, and heart. —D. O.
“What is an appropriate subject for art?” asks Errol Morris in his foreword to ROSAMOND PURCELL: NATURE STANDS Aside (Rizzoli Electa/Addison Gallery, $65). “I’m partial to death and deliquescence.” This morbid domain is Purcell’s field of operation, and her particular territory is the natural-history museums where she documents the corpora of the formerly living: birds, eggs, shells, bats, butterflies, monkeys, moles, and lizards. Her high-contrast color photos feature straightforward, portrait-style compositions—as if a group of Javanese wattled lapwings were posing for their high school club photo. There’s no need to defamiliarize a mastodon’s molar or the corpse of a pig-footed bandicoot. But this directness with its seeming lack of aesthetic inflection is deceptive. By prizing clarity and detail over compositional finesse, Purcell emphasizes the strangeness of her subjects even as her clinical approach lends an ordinariness to the viewer’s experience. Certainly, Skeleton of Conjoined Twins, photographed at the University of Bologna, is initially disquieting. But that eeriness diminishes as we attend closely to the texture and color of the bones, the intricate design of the skeletons, and the precise way they interlock. Purcell invites us to the laboratory rather than to a haunted house.
Nature’s profligacy isn’t her only interest. There are images of broken windows, decaying books, apothecary bottles, and dice. Until the middle of the last century, dice were made of cellulose nitrate and, over time, decomposed and imploded. Pictures of magician Ricky Jay’s collection reveal their surprisingly organic properties as they change hue, grow fuzz-like crusts, and fracture. The paradox—taxidermized birds and beasts are relatively safe from disintegration while inanimate objects fall victim to atrophy—is one the photographer allows to emerge without pressing the point. Indeed, despite her choice of inherently compelling objects (after all, most of them have already been selected and put on display in museums), Purcell depicts them with what feels like reticence, as if she doesn’t want to interfere with their visual emanation. The image Arm Holding the Vascular Tissue of an Eye, from the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, could easily have been conjured by any early-twentieth-century Surrealist. But Purcell doesn’t attempt to hide the preservative-filled glass jar containing the arm. This isn’t the stuff of dreams, she implies, but rather another specimen on a shelf of specimens in a building brimming with them. In the volume’s interview, speaking of her collaborative work with paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Purcell describes their search for “the eloquence of the fragments of collected science . . . those broken bits hidden from public view.” Whether fossilized ammonites or a two-headed sheep, Purcell grants them expressive presence. —ALBERT MOBILIO
