Lubaina Himid, Le Rodeur: The Captain and the Mate (2017–18)
Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Andy Keate
Anyone wilting from the torpor of a New York summer should flee to the New Museum, where a veritable fun fair of exhibitions deliver both mental and physical thrills and chills, along with a few body blows to cultural appropriation.
Heat is supposed to rise, but the museums fourth floor, commanded by the 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid, is cucumber cool, while shows by the New Yorker Mika Rottenberg and Argentinas megawatt performance pioneer Marta Minujín successively inflame the lower levels.
Himid, who came out of the British Black Arts Movement, created the sculpture and paintings in Work from Underneath expressly for this space. It has such enormously high ceilings that the volume can swallow up all that lies beneath. Not this time.
The brilliant colours of paintings depicting collectives of black male or female figures who speak to one another, and to us, in body language alone pop from walls painted deep grey. Legible from any distance, they read both as pictures of collective labour and as pointed rebukes to colonial powers that attempt to marginalise enduring native talents.
Lubaina Himid, Why Are You Looking… (2018)
Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Gavin Renshaw
The entire exhibition speaks to the power of nonverbal communication. Small emblematic paintings on metal squares that Himid fashioned after health and safety manuals frame various tools with patterns that she appropriated from kangas, scarves that East African women wear as skirts or sarongs with affirmations printed on their hems. But close looking is needed to make out details like the yellow pencils floating on an electric orange square above the stenciled instruction “Keep Moving Parts Lubricated”.
Thats what Himid does for the flow of history with her invasive and poetic sculpture Old Boat/New Money. It evokes the ghost of a slave ship in long grey planks studded with shells (once a currency) that are unevenly propped and fanned out against a wall, as if they have been torn apart and lifted by unseen waves.
Other forms of trade—and globalisms toll on the human labor it exploits—is a recurring subject for Mika Rottenberg, a New Yorker born in Argentina. Her surreal video installations impart the rippling effects of world economies by diving through microcosms of ceaseless and impenetrable networks that circle the planet like a vise and squeeze, hard.
Though there is no clear opening in it, the portal to the show, titled Easypieces, requires a lunge through a curtain of braided tinsel flowers that might hang in the doorway of a border town brothel. This splendid obstruction turned out to be the exit from the hallucinogenic installation Cosmic Generator as well as as a metaphor for the action onscreen, where manufactured goods easily cross borders and change hands—but people? Not so much.
Mika Rottenberg, still from Cosmic Generator (2017)
© Mika Rottenberg. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Made in 2017 for Skulptur Projekte Münster, where the artist set up in a claustrophobic storefront, the insane Cosmic Generator connects the ends of the earth by mashing together the business of a Chinese restaurant in Mexicali where male waiters are served up on platters as burritos with the transport of cheap plastic goods from a massive wholesale market in Yiwu, China. Viewers have more breathing room here, but the stranglehold that trade agreements have on daily life feels just as constricting.
Totally new is the dizzying, confounding Spaghetti Blockchain, where Rottenbergs camera jumps with no warning from a throat singer in Siberia to a potato field in Maine to the giant servers of an antimatter factory in Switzerland. Scenes change and morph kaleidoscope-style at the center of a rotating hexagonal stage where doors open and shut like those in a French farce and knife-wielding hands slice rolls of dyed slime that melt like the WiRead More – Source
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