The show introduces Cassatt to a new generation. The curators, Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber, wanted to get closer to who Cassatt was, to how she wanted to be remembered, and to the legacy of her seemingly serene paintings. They do so by focusing on process. Cassatt, they tell us, was obsessed with work. She constantly worked, toiling to achieve her “casual” auras with light, glimmering colors, modern movement, and, above all, the private pensiveness of her women and her children.

Cassatt’s paintings convey a simplicity—here, now playful greens; here, now a girl in a buggy—but the show reveals that her method is by no means simple. It’s the same arduous careful fight for maximal directness that we see in figures like Marguerite Duras, Yasujiro Ozu, and Clarice Lispector. Cassatt achieved hers by changing mediums; by experimenting with colors; and by being perversely drawn to small-fry subject matter, then mining it from all angles. She mastered the work of printing too: bursting, colorful aquatints and fine drypoint are on display in her glorious “Set of Ten” (1891), 10 Japanese woodblock-inspired prints of Parisian women bathing, sending letters, caretaking.

After being in the presence of so many Cassatts at once—little Françoise reading, ladies at their toilette, boys strangled by loving arms, two girls peering into a map with invisible-to-us borders and oceans—you realize what it is to paint with levity. This does not mean the subject matter, children and opera-boxes and sleepy afternoons, is light.

Throughout the years, Cassatt has borne many labels, which are seldom useful when grappling with the material depth of one of her canvases. “Impressionist.” “Woman painter.” “American.” “Upper-middle-class white.” “Sentimentalist.” “Suffragette.” All these she certainly was. Yet what grabs us is how fierce her battle is for the shade of a dress: raspberry pink. It takes a lot of observation and patience on our part for the mourning-black of a stoic to emerge in Portrait of Madame J (1883)—blurry, as the stoic’s face is, behind a veil, concealing her grief behind still, bleary eyes.

But Cassatt’s interest in work—which means physical labor, yes, and also the hard work of noticing the scrunch of an ignored child’s face as she expresses desire for she-knows-not-what—is not the writhing, heavy work of Paul Cézanne, who was bitterly unsatisfied with his blocky, huffing-puffing apples and his apple-y Madame Cézannes until the end. Nor is it work in the Socialist/Realist sense of Gustave Courbet’s tillers and Jean-François Millet’s gleaners. Cassatt is mesmerized by an everyday labor hidden among the chaise longues, the work it takes to make sure a baby doesn’t die before its time. In other words: the work of attention and love. Perhaps this sort of love is overbearing. Good.

Deborah Solomon claims in her New York Times review of this show that Cassatt “belongs to the second tier of Impressionists” and that she “cannot be said to inhabit the same exalted plane as Degas or Manet.” This ranking business! It’s loathsome, tiresome. Arrêt!

This hierarchy is as boring as the insistence that Cassatt’s subject is as simple as mothers and children, that she knew what it was to be a mother and to draw it (she never had kids), or that “nothing,” outside the moneyed sphere, happens in her work. It is too easy to chide Cassatt for dabbing her birchwood brushes in one hand while stirring her silver teaspoons in the other. Yes, she was of the upper-middle-class American aristocracy, a stockbroker’s daughter. “Ordinary” bourgeois scenes: these were her specialty, that was the weird milieu she knew well. And she keeps it weird, perverting the ordinary. What she does with the subject, like her fellow Americans Henry James and Edith Wharton, is to take a limited perspective on the world and elevate the touched objects and buried feelings piling up around her as the source for unexpectedly subtle rhapsodies of a hierophantic order. Cassatt’s order transcends the mere social mores that serve as the downfall of a Countess Olenska or a Daisy Miller, but not of little Françoise, her child neighbor, reading.

Cassatt moves through her paintings without the touching neuroses of a James, without his curling smoke trails of clauses or qualifying commas. James is nervous he will never perfectly unravel the figure in the carpet, doomed completist that he is; Cassatt is assured, even comfortable, in the incomplete, the unknown of her thinking women. If we want to invest our own thoughts in the trauma of the everyday, if we want to meditate on our own money-love woes, our muttered complaints about cramped arms, we can go to Cassatt’s mother-like nursemaids bearing their baby-like crosses. These aren’t mothers or babies we see. They are the politics of care. Result: we don’t sweat words. We lose ourselves in pigments and blank space.

I keep returning to two paintings. The first is of her child neighbor, Françoise in a Round-Backed Chair, Reading (1909). It is an epitome of meditation. It’s not as radical, formally, as the other Cassatts, which typically render a face or hand in full, sumptuous detail, while leaving the rest of the body and background in a modernist, sketch-like state of incompletion. Nevertheless, Cassatt’s sublime incompletion rears its head when we realize that the book jacket on Françoise’s book is lost, so we can’t tell what she’s reading. Nor can we be sure that she’s even reading it: her eyes look off into an unseen corner of the frame, perhaps into our space. What does she see, if anything? Françoise wanders away from us, from the room, into her own thoughts, solemn yet full of gaiety.

The second is The Map (1890), a black-and-gray drypoint print in which two girls examine a map. Cassatt renders the map as a single line, so that the girls look down on what seems like not a map at all, but a blank piece of paper, even a table. The girls decode the map through a joint effort. And they do it in Cassatt’s unfolding calm.

Cassatt was prolific, creating many mini-worlds, each granularly distinct; within her houses, I want to sit in a chair and daydream. She realizes the advice Henry James theorized in his own preface to Portrait of a Lady—namely, to “place the center of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” in order to “get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish.” Cassatt, too, captures the unceasing mystery of a face that knows it can’t be known. You feel like you finally, paradoxically, know what it is to be with someone. To lie on the divan as you read and watch them read, or weave and watch them weave, or vibe and watch them be blank-minded, doing “nothing” (quite a whole lot, in fact), meditating. And feeling satisfied with this fragment.

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Second Impression: Berthe Morisot at the Barnes Foundation

Locke’s relationship with Hughes remains mostly outside of Once Again’s purview. The work centers instead on the philosopher’s thoughts regarding African art: its energizing effect on Black as well as White modernists, its subjection to primitivizing distinctions between African “artifacts” and European “art,” its risk of reduction to just another “exotic fad.” Locke arrived at some of these ideas through his correspondence with Albert Barnes, founder of the eponymous museum and an avid collector of West African statuary. Julien dramatizes these epistolary exchanges in the form of a politely disputative conversation between the two men (played by André Holland and Danny Huston) that was filmed in the museum’s galleries—spaces where, to this day, Christian carved-wood triptychs and paintings by Pablo Picasso hang side-by-side with Baule masks and Kota reliquary figures. For Barnes, it seems, the latter objects were a testament to the genius of cultures fundamentally different from his own, and an answer to the racism he condemned in the United States. For Locke, they represented something different: a trove of common ancestral heritage (a dubiously generalizing proposition, though one that held a certain currency within Pan-Africanist discourses at the time) and, more important, a key to diasporic cultural renewal in the present. “Nothing is more galvanizing,” we hear him declare in voiceover, “than the sense of a cultural past.”

Around this central encounter between Black philosopher and White collector, Julien weaves an elliptical text of both archival and original material that effectively reframes their discussion and its underlying power dynamics—which issue largely from the fact that Barnes, a millionaire, could acquire the objects of his enthusiasm in a way that Locke could not—with respect to larger conversations about cultural heritage, ownership, creativity, and desire. Footage from the Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo’s 1970 documentary You Hide Me, set in the British Museum’s storage rooms, anticipates a call for the repatriation of looted African objects by a fictional Black curator (Sharlene Whyte) at the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. An imagined sequence of erotic encounters between Locke and the sculptor Richmond Barthé (Devon Terrell), whose work Locke also championed, intertwines with an oneiric performance on the grand, dimly lit staircase of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts by songwriter Alice Smith, who sings a soulful if wounded refrain: “once again, I defend my open heart.” Locke’s attraction to Barthé’s art, Julien suggests, was inextricable from his enthusiasm for West African sculpture: both affinities were bound up with a larger yearning, at once personal and political, for novel forms of Black community and culture.

Julien’s film unfolds in carefully choreographed counterpoint across the work’s five double-sided screens, which are angled to form, along with a set of distorting mirrors, a loose enclosure. Completing the installation are two groupings of thematically relevant statuary, assembled on either side of the central viewing area. Baule, Dogon, and Edo objects from the Barnes collection appear alongside a statuette and bust by Barthé. So do several West African sculptures encased in tomb-like bricks of transparent polyurethane resin, works by the contemporary artist Matthew Angelo Harrison. One of Harrison’s creations also appears onscreen in a luminous, slowly rotating shot, one of several dazzlingly beautiful moments that punctuate the film.

While Locke’s tone remains guardedly optimistic, Julien’s is predominantly elegiac. His film, among the few he has shot in black-and-white since Langston, is unified by imagery of autumn passing into winter. In one sequence, desiccated leaves blow through Pitt Rivers’s African galleries; a later shot frames Barnes’s neoclassical mansion within a snowy landscape. Though the seasonal conceit would seem to imply a progression with spring and summer on the horizon, the film itself and its mirrored installation adhere instead to a logic of doubling, repetition, and return. In the film’s penultimate tableau, for instance, flakes of snow slowly flutter over the figures of Locke and Barthé, posed in formal wear on separate screens. Then, in an almost imperceptible shift, the footage begins to play backward, sending the precipitation on an uncanny upward trajectory. Watching the particles’ otherworldly ascent through one of Harrison’s polyurethane prisms, I wondered: was this reversal an emblem of liberation, or of stasis? The redirection of time resonates with Julien’s larger project: a repositioning of several distinct historical and discursive moments to form a novel, politically charged constellation. It could also intimate a closed circuit, however: a hall of mirrors from which there is no escape.

Such questions bear obliquely on the sociopolitical issues that the work evokes, many of which have endured across generations and thus occasioned what can feel like cyclical discursive patterns. As viewers of Julien’s generation will likely recall, the question of modernism’s relation to the “primitive,” the issue with which we hear Locke critically engaging in the 1920s, controversially resurfaced in the mid-1980s. Nii Kwate Owoo’s 50-year-old argument for repatriation is today resurgent. Julien’s own gesture of reflexivity—his return to the 1989 work that in many ways launched his career—thus takes its place within a larger history of African diasporic identity formation in which the past is always present, “statues never die,” and elegy and creativity are inextricably entwined.

Earlier this year, I watched a remarkable film called Territories (1984) that Julien directed when he was still a student at Central Saint Martins, well before beginning Langston. (Both works were products of Sankofa Film and Video Collective, of which Julien was a founding member.) Billed as an experimental documentary about London’s Afro-Caribbean carnival tradition, the work layers commentary over clips of the event—including scenes of revelry and intimacy, as well as violent clashes with police officers—that form an increasingly fragmentary montage, ultimately condensing into a dense, hypnotic flow of recorded sounds and imagery, structurally akin to the engrossing dub mix that forms its sonic backbone. Several salient themes of Julien’s mature oeuvre are evident here: diasporic culture, queerness, power. Yet the result also stands apart from the artist’s work of more recent decades, not only in its comparatively unvarnished feel, but also in its sustained attunement to the practices of a specific, present-day community and the textures of a particular place. Watching Once Again, I marveled at how the artist’s scope of inquiry has expanded over the years (along with his budgets and his cinematographic prowess). I also wondered what a cross between the two approaches might look like: one that addressed the Barnes’s originary moment circa 1922 and its intersection with the advent of a diasporic modernism while being alive to, say, the everyday realities of contemporary Philadelphia, where the museum relocated in 2012, in the way that Territories was alive to the sights and sounds of London in the 1980s. After all, it is the constellation of voices past and present that gives Julien’s crystalline work its cutting edge.

“Banal Presents” comprised four works by three artists: Cameron Rowland, Sable Elyse Smith, and Carolyn Lazard. Although physically small, the show was conceptually large. Examining themes of private property, incarceration, education, and medicine, the artists intervene in institutions that seem too big to touch—even while they intimately touch the lives of vast numbers of people. Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)—which consists of legal documentation concerning his purchase of one acre of land on former plantation property and placing a restrictive covenant on it so that its value was depreciated to $0—walks the line between conceptual art and political action. Smith, meanwhile, engages with the ways in which the cruel logic of incarceration affects children. The ICA show featured her Coloring Book 33 (2019), a screen print of a page from a coloring book offered to children visiting inmates. Above the instruction to “Draw your own picture,” Smith has drawn a sideways rainbow and written, in a childlike script, NOT MY FATHER, NOT MY BROTHER, NOT MY COUSIN, NOR A CHEAP FUCK, NOT FRIEND, TEACHER, NEIGHBOR, ACQUAINTANCE, NOT MY FICTION. Her Pivot (2019) is a sculpture in the form of a toy jack whose prongs, topped with blue powder-coated aluminum circles, resemble prison visitation stools. These seats can’t be sat on, the jack can’t be played with. Smith uses the aesthetics of games to insist that keeping people locked in cages is hardly a game.

Carolyn Lazard: Pre-Existing Condition, 2019, video, 15 minutes; at ICA Philadelphia.

Directly across the room, Carolyn Lazard’s fifteen-minute video Pre-Existing Condition (2019) brought the prison, university, and hospital into direct conversation with one another. The work draws on two sources: archival documents related to the research projects of Dr. Albert M. Kligman, a dermatologist who taught at the University of Pennsylvania (of which the ICA is part) and conducted experiments on inmates at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974; and the oral history of Edward Yusuf Anthony, a Holmesburg survivor. Struggling with illnesses related to long-term health effects of Dr. Kligman’s tests, Anthony experiences long days. “When I wake up, I have many pains, you know, my hips, my back, the arthritis—you know, I’m thankful. I’m thankful that I woke. But what I’m gonna do today? So I just get up and put out the trash, wash the dishes. Cook something for me and my wife, you know what I mean, turn on the TV, watch my favorite shows. Stuff like that,” he says. The juxtaposition between Dr. Kligman’s cold, typed black-and-white documents (shown on-screen as stills) and Anthony’s attention to the labor it takes for him to do basic household tasks—one after another, day after day—is jarring, and conveys how institutional malpractice plays out on the individual level. This last exhibition in the epic Colored People Time series seemed to suggest that, although the passing of time is universal, the present for black people is very specific: uneven, unavoidable, unrelenting.

This article appears under the title “’Banal Presents’” in the January 2020 issue, pp. 82–83.

The exhibition is distributed throughout PAFA’s historic American wing, a neo-gothic structure, where Banerjee’s installations disrupt—in welcome ways—the surrounding artworks and architecture. It is jarring, for example, to look through an archway bracketed by two monumental portraits of George Washington and see The promise of self rule . . . (2008), a work in which a parasol with only a quarter of its paper remaining is attached to a Victorian-era chair from which hangs a length of mesh netting festooned with feather fans and one curled cow horn. The seat of the chair is ringed with pink lanterns, and a trickle of glass beads sways beneath the feathers, conjuring the grandeur of chandeliers. Across the hall, near a nineteenth-century painting of American colonists encountering Native Americans, sits Her captivity was once someone’s treasure . . . (2011)—a sculpture that features a large birdcage serving as the scaffold for cornucopian clusters of shells and gourds.

Banerjee’s installations do not unify or sublimate their individual components. In the exhibition’s title work, from 2014, small objects overrun their lattice support yet remain legible and heterogeneous, each sea sponge, grapevine, and dangling tuber distinct. This strategy is echoed in the drawings (depictions of colorful fantasy figures) and videos (near-abstractions showing, for instance, kaleidoscopic street scenes in Chennai, India), although these works, exhibited on the periphery of the space, are overpowered by the spectacularly imposing installations. Banerjee has taken the logic of the historical cabinet of curiosity—with its conceit of imposing order on widely disparate natural and man-made specimens—and flipped it over, almost literally. The full titles of her works, which run fifty to 180 words but obey no unifying syntax, suggest a poetics of excess and irregularity. Consider the title of a massive 2013 installation in which the skeleton of a hot-air balloon fashioned out of wire and horns sways suspended over a topography of pebbles, coins, shells, sand, and more: A World Lost: after the original island appears, a single land mass is fractured, after population migrated, after pollution revealed itself and as cultural locations once separated did merged, after the splitting of Adam and Eve, shiva and shakti of race black and white, of culture East and West, after animals diminished, after the seas’ corals did exterminate, after this and at last imagine water evaporated . . . this after Columbus found it we lost it, imagine this.

Using titles such as these, and materials that include Indian textiles, Chinese altar lamps, Texas Longhorn skulls, and sculptures made by Kenyans for tourists, Banerjee—who was born in Kolkata, raised in London, and now resides in New York—has spurred critical conversation about what a visual language for today’s postcolonial diaspora might look like. Viewing her work, however, can awaken a dangerous impulse to mentally repatriate the individual constituents, to assign them fixed origins and read them as material emissaries from faraway places. It is relevant to note here that Banerjee sources her materials largely on the internet rather than traveling to procure them. In an interview in the catalogue, she states, “People who think they’re from a culture, and feel stabilized by its security are not noticing how their own culture is constantly adapting to other cultures.” She wants her hybrid configurations of culturally diverse objects to shake loose attachments to notions of cultural purity.

Throughout his career, Mohamed Bourouissa has anchored his projects in collaboration with friends and strangers. His Barnes Foundation exhibition, titled “Urban Riders” and constituting his first solo show in the United States, comprised eighty-five works related to the time he spent with Philadelphia’s Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. In interviews, the Paris-based artist has cited Martha Camarillo’s 2006 photographs of this community of African American men as the catalyst for his own visit and his desire to explore the mythology of the American cowboy. Over the course of eight months in 2013, Bourouissa lived near, drew, photographed, and filmed the riders and organized a public riding pageant, for which the riders collaborated with Philadelphia artists to create costumes for the horses. In the years since, he has continued to make work based on the experience. 

The first gallery contained much of the preparatory material for the pageant, including copies of the event flyer; Bourouissa’s drawings of riding equipment, the neighborhood, and the riders; and a number of horse costumes hung on pegs or shown on wooden mannequins. Through particular installation choices—such as plastering one of the walls with the flyer and displaying an array of the drawings on freestanding panels of untreated wood, from which wafted the smell of sawdust—the first room had the feel of an active work space, an impression that highlighted the open-ended, collaborative nature of the project.

In the second gallery, the focus pivoted away from cooperative enterprise to the figure of the black urban cowboy. At the center, Bourouissa installed a viewing area for his two-channel film Horse Day (2015). The left channel shows footage of the club members riding around the city, and the right homes in on the public event and the field in which it took place. As most of the scenes on the left are shot at medium or close range, the riders and horses appear large-scale, pressed against the frame. In one breathtaking traveling shot, the camera, pointed out a car’s passenger seat window, follows a lone horseman along a city street for a moment before the horse, breaking into a full gallop, runs into a stretch of lawn, out of the camera’s tight frame. In contrast, the playback of the riding event features several sweeping views of the urban arena; one of the most memorable sequences in the film is an aerial shot for which the camera panned down as riders galloped across, and the grassy expanse gradually overtakes our view. 

The third and final gallery was devoted to a series, made by Bourouissa after he left Philadelphia, of large, wall-mounted assemblages of riding gear and scrapped car parts, the latter printed with photographs of the riders. It is a clever layering: cars and horses, with their speed and power, are central to a certain type of masculine mythology. Reminding us that these mythologies are double-edged, works like The Ride (2017), with its crush of ragged metal sheets roughly cut from different vehicles, fragment the images of the men and their surroundings as much as they hold them together. There are also moments of tenderness in the depictions. A rendering of a young man juts out from Keason (2017), the delicate curve of his back appearing vulnerable amid the clash of materials and images. As one of the last works encountered in the show, Keason left viewers with a sense of the ways in which toughness and gentleness can be inextricably entwined.

Bruce Nauman’s Contrapposto Studies, I through VII (2015–16) is part of his ongoing search for capaciousness in the particular. This seven-part video installation is split between two galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and is kin to his iconic 1968 single-channel video Walk with Contrapposto, owned by the museum and on display in an adjacent room. In Walk, a monitor presents a young Nauman strutting along a narrow corridor with exaggerated shifts of weight, simulating the contrapposto pose of Classical sculpture. Each of the new projections shows Nauman performing his walk against a white wall and comprises multiple video segments organized in horizontal bands. The segments are digitally stitched together imperfectly so that adjacent parts do not join neatly. Though the body is more or less contiguous, in some projections it appears especially faceted. 

Like Walk, Contrapposto Studies trains a camera on Nauman, yet the work’s particular significance lies in how the same action performed by the same body takes on different connotations at different times. Contrapposto Studies focuses on the imprecision of repetition, especially if that repetition attempts to reenact one’s former actions. Perhaps the most prominent demonstration of this occurs by way of Nauman’s aging body, which he presents to the viewer in a white T-shirt ridden with small holes—a wry counterpoint to the pristine one he wore in Walk. The artist’s tightly wound and slithering gait also has changed. He appears to roll his weight slowly between his feet and lands haltingly in contrapposto at the end of each step, occasionally faltering. In the more faceted projections, the body’s uneven tread and the disjointedness of the stitched video fragments make for a double destabilization. If Walk swipes at the artifice of contrapposto, Contrapposto Studies thwarts contrapposto’s timeless idealism by manifesting the stance in Nauman’s imperfect figure.

The installation elegantly confounds the passage of time. Because the views of Nauman are composites of several shots and asynchronously looped, the resulting images are unmoored from any specific moment. This sense is corroborated by the way the camera follows Nauman in each segment, zooming in and out and tracking his movement left and right, always keeping his body centered in the frame. Since the videos repeat, the artist never seems to arrive anywhere. Instead, he hovers indefinitely before our eyes, perpetually deferring conclusion. 

The traveling survey “Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis,” which premiered at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and opens at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 4, is a momentous revisionist effort, encompassing nearly one hundred works and spanning fifty years. It opens Lewis’s work to broader interpretation, revealing a more complex relationship between his art and politics than his own declarations indicate. Joining a short but potent list of Lewis surveys—including a 1976 show at the City University of New York (the only retrospective held during his lifetime) and the 1998 exhibition “Norman Lewis: Black Paintings 1946–1977” at the Studio Museum in Harlem—“Procession” offers a range of paintings, as well as rarely seen examples from Lewis’s forays into crafts, highlighting his handmade dolls that employ clay, weaving, and beadwork, among other techniques. Archival material from his trove of sketches, photographs, ephemera, and journal articles (written on subjects ranging from art history to anthropology and psychology) provides insight into his artistic milieu and interests and points to his acute awareness of the country’s racial injustices. 

The PAFA presentation unfolded through a series of irregularly shaped enclosures delineated by freestanding walls. Organized according to themes including the work’s relation to music, to natural forms, and to the Civil Rights Movement, the loosely chronological installation allowed viewers to make connections among paintings caught in their peripheral vision, which was an illuminating way to view an artistic corpus often described as heterogeneous. 

Early figurative pieces, which were in keeping with the Social Realism common among his peers, offer signs of Lewis’s abstract leanings. In Title unknown (Potato Eaters), 1945, the heads and torsos of five schematic figures cluster over a smattering of potatoes. A black line describing the edge of a table in the lower left sheds its illusionistic role as it rises into the border of a framelike device that encloses all but the head of the tallest figure. Participating in the figure group and the background, the black line functions on three levels: psychically, descriptively, and abstractly. Multifaceted connections among human forms and abstract lines deepen the experience of works like Congregation (1950), a small painting in which a spiral, articulated with lines and spots of pigment, emerges from a washy black ground. The linear tracery in the spiral suggests a succession of bending limbs and feet. 

The works in the “Civil Rights” section, especially, read against Lewis’s insistence that his art was entirely abstract. Seen together, paintings like Alabama (1960), Redneck Birth (1961), and Journey to an End (1964) reveal Lewis’s dexterity, as the formal dynamics of flat abstract color constitute the emotional motor of the compositions. In Journey to an End, made the same year as the Civil Rights Act was instituted, a starburst of white calligraphic brushwork and exposed canvas slices open a solid black field. It becomes difficult not to see referential cues in this painting. The stark clash of black and white maps onto national reports of racial tensions, and the starburst form can be seen as a person racing forward with pinwheeling limbs. In the abstractions from the ’70s, like Confrontation (1971) and Triumphal (1972), the aggregations of calligraphic, somewhat figural marks are as much about gathering and collective movement as they are about color and form.

By the end of “Procession,” the viewer has the sense that the observational, the figural, the abstract, the formal, the psychic, and the spiritual accumulated as strata in Lewis’s body of work. The richness of these layers rewards the viewer’s repeated return.

It is challenging to choose terms to describe the works in Jennifer Bartlett’s recent show at Locks, titled “Hospital.” We are told in press material that the show’s 10 oil paintings, all 54 inches square and made in 2012, are based on snapshots Bartlett took during an extended stay at a hospital overlooking the East River in Manhattan. These intimate details create delicate terrain, where terms like “illness” and “anxiety” are appropriate but could easily be applied too heavily. Likewise, it would be unduly sentimental to view the paintings as straightforward illustrations of autobiographical incident. Yet the series undoubtedly conveys restricted movement in confined spaces, the surprising proximity of fear and banality, and the struggle to comprehend time. These paintings represent and abstract Bartlett’s hospital stay through the use of three layers of visual information, all the while alluding to their own expressive limits.

One layer consists of representational scenes derived from the snapshots: empty hospital corridors or cityscapes at different hours of the day. The views, largely absent any human presence, seem both momentary and prolonged. In this representational register, time is elastic and indeterminable. Space, too, warps as wavering orthogonal lines and tilting buildings destabilize the viewer’s perspective. In an extreme example—a painting of a night scene—the city and its buildings are nearly hidden in a flattened and inscrutable field of black paint.    

Additionally, the canvases all contain the word “hospital” somewhere, painted in tidy capital letters in ghostly white. More than naming the domain in which these paintings were conceived, the recurring word is a reminder of the capacities and failures of language as expressive form. Here, “hospital” indeed totalizes an event, and yet is incapable of elaborating on what transpired during Bartlett’s stay. After one sees all the paintings, the word loses its sharpness, becoming naturalized, peripheral. In a limpid blue view of the sky and buildings between two dark window frames, the white letters of “hospital” overlap a cloud, and are thus especially easy to overlook.

The third register is a wobbling line, a bit over an inch thick in a single opaque color, that moves across each painting from edge to edge. The lines appear to be relatives of the curled long marks found in Bartlett’s painting installations like Rhapsody (1976) and Recitative (2009-10). In the “Hospital” paintings, the lines are simultaneously the most abstract and the most corporeal feature. Though they carry no particular signification, one can sense the duration of their execution, an arm-span in length, and perhaps, in their wavering, the rhythm of breathing. The lines contain the immediacy and presence that the modes of representation and language struggle to index. 

This is not to say that Bartlett’s painting project gives manifest privilege to any single expressive mode. Painted in retrospect, the “Hospital” works struggle to parse and convey the past in the ongoing present. With complex visual syntax, the paintings suggest the very simple impulse to make sense of lived experience through any and all means possible.

The ground floor galleries of the Institute of Contemporary Art currently house “Stages,” the first and sorely overdue survey of Barbara Kasten’s photography-based, multi-medium practice. As a prismatic allusion, the show’s title bundles the themes of the exhibition: the theatricality of Kasten’s expansive process, the iterations of her always playful engagement with surface and space, and the phases constituting her lengthy career. The show ties together some 50 years through roughly 80 works—predominantly photography, though video, installation, sculpture and painting are also represented—masterfully maintaining a visual density that alternately teases and rewards a curious eye.

“Stages” contains a number of pieces from Kasten’s iconic photographic series “Constructs” (1979-86), displayed alongside examples from the more recent series “Studio Constructs” (begun in 2007). Both bodies of work involve a combination of performance and installation. For each piece, she placed a camera in front of an arrangement of objects in her studio, including handmade props in plaster and wood, and industrially manufactured items like mirrors, rods, and aluminum siding. Instead of manipulating the camera, she animated the grouping either by physically guiding the objects’ postures or by varying the light and color with gels or scrims. The resulting images are pleasurably disorienting. The coyly wavy line that slices diagonally across Construct XXVII (1984) does not immediately yield its source (prop, texture, shadow?), nor do the stacked peaks of black and white triangles (reflection, light, pigment?) in Studio Construct 8 (2007). Strong and nuanced exemplars of Kasten’s pictorial grammar, the two series destabilize our assumptions about the visual properties of mass and light, reflectiveness and transparency, surface and edge—all the while indulging in the expressive potential of these qualities. 

The highlight and thematic spine of the show is the aptly named video installation Axis (2015), an ICA commission, which is 30 feet tall and projected into the corner of a gallery. Here, white geometric shapes—a pyramid, a cube or stacked cubes—rotate around an axis that aligns with the corner seam. There is an elegantly simple optical illusion at play: the shapes distort as they turn, their faces stretching and receding along the adjacent walls. Axis thus makes its viewer a witness to the beautiful slippage between opposites, a circumstance that underlies Kasten’s practice. This installation also functions as a formal and conceptual tether to other works on view. Its revolving motion is echoed in the video of a performance titled Inside/Outside: Stages of Light (1985), created in collaboration with the choreographer Margaret Jenkins, during which performers twirl around a geometric set built by Kasten. Axis also finds a sibling in Photogram Painting Untitled 77/22 (1977), a surprisingly sculptural, human-size photogram, which is divided into three sections and hinged to stand like a screen. Spatial contortions extend to the reflections and interruptions created by the mirrors Kasten uses in her photographs for the “Architectural Site” series (1986-90). 

The ultimate accomplishment of “Stages” is that it provides a narrative arc through Kasten’s career. Though she is best known for photography, she originally studied textile arts and painting, and the exhibition contains a cluster of her early works: creaturelike “Seated Form” sculptures (1971-72), in which chair frames are draped with colorful woven textiles, and “Photogenic Paintings” (1974-77), cyanotype contact prints bearing the impressions of flowing fabric. While this phase of Kasten’s career is sometimes considered a prologue to her photography, seeing these works in the presence of their later peers suggests otherwise. From the beginning, Kasten has been drawn to testing the corporeality of a plane and the witty errors of depth perception. “Stages” gives her the space to enunciate her contributions to larger interdisciplinary conversations and to demonstrate the internal continuity of her practice.

Easternsports

The colors of Easternsports function as formal properties as they always do in the work of Da Corte, who is known more for sculpture than video. Like so many sculptors now, he aggregates readymades, but unlike most, who thread their jumble with an inscrutable network of references, he delights in the abstraction of detail. The rhyming parts of a sculpture’s pieces cohere in a singular impression, as can be seen in the sets of Easternsports, multiplied across the channels and put in motion. Da Corte frequently collaborates but he isn’t promiscuous with his vision. He swallows other artists in it, as if they were readymades too. So it is with Musson, who wrote the subtitles. His contribution, like most of his work, is a joke about the art world. The effect of his text is to mimic highbrow video art, a touch of self-aware humor to relieve an ambitious project of its own seriousness. It works, but the more substantial contribution to Easternsports is Dev Hynes’s soundtrack, lush with vibraphones, inflected with the obsessive insistence of Philip Glass or John Adams, as invasively immersive as the pink light.

Neither subtitles nor soundtrack align with the video’s parallel processions of slo-mo tableaux. Here’s a description of one: a man uses peanut butter as mortar to build a brick wall that’s used as a puppet theater during his smoke breaks. Da Corte’s scenes blend menial tasks and artistic activity in a playbor—both play and labor but neither—an aestheticized analogue to, say, scanning Buzzfeed at the office, where the operation of mouse and keyboard do work for a paying employer and Buzzfeed’s data farmers alike as the body is entertained and bored. Easternsports, perhaps more than his earlier works, presents Da Corte’s sculptural method as a beautiful echo of urban and online vistas where content’s abundance has less to do with communication than with form.

Postscript: A month after Easternsports opened, the Gap released a YouTube ad—a Hynes music video directed by Da Corte. Short, with singing and vivid color, it’s easier to consume than the art, yet anyone who saw Easternsports would recognize it in the video’s reds and purples, striped to offset each other’s power, and the use of a mop as both tool and prop to put chore in choreography. It speaks to the scalability of vision of an artist who can also function as a platform.