The new reissue of photographer Richard Billingham’s RAY’S A LAUGH (MACK, $80) declares itself a “director’s cut” and clearly embraces the spirit of that form. The original edition, published in 1996 by the now-defunct imprint Scalo, featured a tight edit of fifty-five wry snapshots, taken by a twenty-six-year-old within the confines of his family’s dingy, overdecorated flat. The book had no essays, no forewords, no information at all, really, save for a few lines from the artist and a punchy blurb by Robert Frank on the back. But it became an instant classic, and consecrated an unknown, working-class kid from England’s Black Country as the next big fine-art photography star. Billingham had “never looked at photo books before 1994,” lived with his parents, and worked at his local Kwik Save; within a year of Ray’s a Laugh’srelease, he was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography exhibition, awarded the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize, and given the January 1997 cover of Artforum. His inclusion in the famed Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art that same year added the young British artist to the roster of the Young British Artists. He soon quit his day job.
Nearly three decades later, Billingham is a bit more conversant in photography books, and has some misgivings about his first. Comparing Ray’s a Laugh old and new, he laments that the “first one doesn’t flow. It’s one image after another, put together in a very calculated way.” While this new version might still sequence one image after another, it shows a markedly different approach to the same body of work, assembled under very different circumstances. The first was superintended by two industry pros, Daily Telegraph photo editor Michael Collins and the photographer Julian Germain; Billingham was, of course, at the editors’ mercy. Now, MACK books has let Billingham take the wheel, and his new edit includes many more variations on the theme, with thrice the images of his family’s drunk and disorderly antics. It fleshes out the day-to-day of their poverty and alcoholism, trading the original’s coy précis for total candor. “I wanted everything in one place, I guess,” the artist tells the writer Liz Jobey, “once and for all.” Jobey edited a companion reader to the new volume, RAY’S A LAUGH: A READER (MACK, $25), and her introductory essay adopts the same tell-all, show-all ethos, building a bildungsroman out of Billingham’s early career. Her chronicle of the “relationships, and the conflicts, that brought the [first] book about” is equal parts diligent and dishy. Jobey unfurls the power dynamic among Collins, Germain, and Billingham, whose photographs they first discovered littered across his college studio’s floor, being used as studies for paintings. The nascent artist is airlifted to success, but these things are never not devil’s bargains. I won’t spoil the rest, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Billingham and Collins are no longer on speaking terms.
If you’ve ever cherished Billingham’s images of his down-and-out dad Ray, chain-smoking mom Liz, delinquent brother Jason, and their sizable troupe of pets, it can be thrilling to encounter previously deleted scenes of these characters, drinking and dawdling and squabbling amid the mess that they made back in the mid-1990s. The body of work’s brilliance lies in its ability to dispense misery and mirth in tandem without skewing too sentimental or—worse—sociological. Comedy and tragedy coexist under Billingham’s flash: Ray sporting a shit-eating grin as he unscrews the cap of a liquor bottle, shirtless in front of a green, grease-splattered kitchen wall; Liz eating dinner on the couch, her large figure wrapped in a pink polyester blouse and a Royal Stewart tartan skirt, holding a large piece of pork in her left hand as she fends off an encroaching cat; Jason leaning against the linoleum counter as he licks the lid of a generic Kwik Save yogurt cup. Ray and Liz fighting, Ray and Liz kissing. Ray falling out of his chair. Ray passed out on the carpet. Porcelain knickknacks crowded into glass cabinets, and chintzy, “oriental” masks arranged high up on another dirty wall, like dollar-store versions of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s all-seeing eyes. They, too, keep their vigil, while Billingham’s gaze maintains its own “peculiar intensity,” never looking away from his family already fallen.
Some shows need to be watched in small doses, and binging the entire book does invite some fatigue. In the first edition, vulgarity was counterweighted by determined restraint—the editors knew how to dole out enough images to get a buzz going while still leaving us wanting more. In the new issue of Ray’s a Laugh, one can sense that Billingham is keen to give it all away—to be done with the subject matter, as he put it, “once and for all.” And who could blame him? It’s been almost thirty years since he was first plucked from his university program by two elders and let them turn his pictures of Ray’s cloudy home brew into liquid gold. Freedom is everything to an artist, and there’s great liberty to be found in letting go. —Juliana Halpert
The membrane between the work and life of artist Barbara T. Smith is so thin that naming its themes—food, sex, spirituality, technology—hardly glimpses the hard-won manner with which she blended all of them into myriad forms of nourishment gathered under the aegis of “art.”
In 1966, Smith, then a thirty-five-year-old Pasadena, California, housewife with a flipped bob, leased a Xerox 914 copy machine and placed it smack-dab in her dining room, whence, in her words, “It immediately took over my life.” She photocopied everything around the house: her kids’ toys, her body, her face, her hands. She wrote on the glass with lipstick, adding stickers and bits of imagery from magazines and assorted mail. The Xerox constituted a break in her life and work that would be the catalyst for their fusion. This explosion of self is sweetly embodied in a small paper work, Just Plain Facts (1966–67), a Xerox portrait of the artist, her face smooshed up against the glass, all lentigines and smiles. Between thumb and forefinger, she holds a watch face. In the tangle of her hair is the image of a house. In the lower right corner, a paper cutout of a cat, perhaps filched from one of her childrens’ books. Her radiant visage dwarfs these oblique symbols of proscribed female fear (cat lady) and desiderata (youth, real estate).
It is no wonder the curators of Proof, Smith’s 2023 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, chose Facts as the cover image for its catalogue. The pleasures of BARBARA T. SMITH: PROOF (Gregory R. Miller & Co./Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, $50) lie in the thick edit of Smith’s ephemera: everything from high school homework to performance notes, plus copious process imagery. Curator Pietro Rigolo’s essay on the personal nature of Smith’s archive could have been a toothless exculpation of a gendered theme, but he gets right into analyses of various works with a specificity that bears in mind the thinness of the life/art membrane with great care, like a rare textile conservationist tending a web. Soon after her Xerox breakthrough, Smith would divorce, enroll at UC Irvine alongside Chris Burden and Nancy Buchanan, and press her body against other bodies, not just glass. She would go on to pioneer a uniquely West Coast strain of what would, by the 1970s, be designated “performance art.” Guest curator Jenelle Porter has thanked Smith profusely and publicly for being a devoted archivist of her own work. Smith’s output is so prolific in degree and catholic in scope, that the bulk of the catalogue is organized chronologically, with text and image entries for nearly every year of her life, starting in 1931. For any other artist, such a presentation might seem conventional. For Smith, we’re all still catching up. —Christina Catherine Martinez
I call her “Saint Eva,” sometimes “Patron Eva” or “Lady H,” such is the hold Eva Hesse has on my material and formal psyche—her heavy tangles of ropes and wires, her pendulous lead-filled nets, her translucent fiberglass boxes and cylinders, her raucous paintings that sometimes sprout thick cord-covered steel tendrils, her latex hangings so fragile like flayed skin, like they are about to dissolve, like evidence of how fine and porous the line between art and life really is. As the artist said in a 1970 interview with art historian Cindy Nemser, “In my inner soul, art and life are inseparable.”
I opened EVA HESSE: EXHIBITIONS, 1972–2022 (Hauser & Wirth Publishers, $60), edited by Barry Rosen (who also put together the big, beautiful 2016 volume of her diaries), on May 29, exactly fifty-four years after the artist’s untimely death, age thirty-four, from a brain tumor. Happenstance, no doubt, and any day should really be a day to revisit Hesse’s work—the thrust behind this new tome, which charts and contextualizes five decades of posthumous exhibitions. Hesse made sui generis, uncategorizable art that she described variously as “absurd,” “not painting, not sculpture,” “non-work,” and “non art, non connotative, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing, everything, but another kind, vision, sort.” What, you might ask, does that leave, exactly? “It is something, it is nothing,” she said gnomically of how her art strove to reach beyond preconceptions and conventional logic.
It is perhaps for this yearning, restless, revolutionary reason that Hesse is such an artist’s artist, as well as a lodestar for art historians who have variously contended with “making an exhibition out of uncertainty,” as Briony Fer describes in one essay about a process-oriented show she worked on at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, 2009. The collected retrospective accounts of sixteen exhibitions by their organizers cover vast terrain: Hesse’s place in Minimalism and post-Minimalism; the later recognition of her paintings and drawings; the almost prohibitive fragility of the work; her use of textiles, seriality, and repetition; and the ethical considerations of biographical interpretation. In essays that plot the traverse of her oeuvre across the United States and Europe (including Hamburg, the place of birth she departed in 1938 on the Kindertransport), curators and scholars describe it as surprising, sublime, infinite. For some, it was a distillation of Jewish life in postwar America; for others, an archival challenge; for others still, a lesson in “mistrust of the perfect and the beautiful.” Helen Cooper’s essay about the 1992 show at Yale University Art Gallery begins, “I wasn’t expecting to fall in love”—a shared sentiment and a reminder that no art or life, no matter how truncated, is ever static. —Emily LaBarge
In the beginning, the women are practically interchangeable—tall, leggy, barely clad, and wholly depraved. This is the busy, lurid world of Hilary Harkness, and this is her early work, channeling Hieronymus Bosch, Helmut Newton, and Richard Scarry, in which rapacious female desire plays out in the male realms of battleships and submarines. Hallways, tunnels, galleys, infirmaries, and bathroom stalls teem with sex and violence. In virtuosic miniaturist detail, Harkness’s figures defile each other with staggering ingenuity. That the painter constructs these tableaus of plunderous sapphic desire as cutaways—essentially, vast peepholes—heightens the thrill. Imagine if Balthus made Advent calendars, every day a new debauch.
EVERYTHING FOR YOU (Black Dog Press, $49), a lush monograph of the artist’s work with essays by Lynne Tillman and Ashley Jackson, charts the evolution of Harkness’s work, as the anonymous pillaging mannequins give way to figures with actual names, history, and the capacity for connection, specifically Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, along with Josephine Baker, Henri Matisse, and the disembodied head of Ernest Hemingway. Here, the military-industrial complex has been supplanted by absurd and tender vignettes of domesticity, but thankfully, no lesbian-bed-death jokes necessary. Harkness is much too playful, much too generous for that cliché.
One woman stands at the center of Harkness’s most recent work,“The Arabella Freeman Series,” envisioned as “a love letter, or bedtime story,” for the artist’s wife Ara, who is Black. Inspired by Winslow Homer’s 1866 Prisoners from the Front, Harkness composed a fictitious Civil War narrative about a prosperous, Black landowning family in Virginia. If her early paintings are studies of frenetic sexual compulsion, this is an exercise in voluptuous devotion and rapture, from the rippling brushstrokes in the bark of the trees to the consummation of forbidden desire between Arabella and a white Union general, complete with a gender-reveal twist. In this verdant pastoral fantasy of a queer, anti-racist past, bodice ripping is inevitable. And in Harkness’s world, it’s the general who surrenders. Free the nipple, indeed. —Liz Brown
Postcards from a Daydream Nation beach, Tony Caramanico’s MONTAUK SURF JOURNALS (Damiani Books, $55) is a painstakingly casual collection of collaged journals that make forty years of time fly by and stand still at the same time. Given just enough bare-bones context by editor Zack Raffin to get your bearings—or at least orient your disorientation—you will find page after funky page of oceanic washes of ink, scribbled notes, lists, reminders (take Fuzzy to the vet), ads large and small, labels, stamps, TV Guide listings, record sleeves, photos of surfers galore, travel brochure covers, snapshots of friends and strangers, clothing tags, and business cards. Headlines break up the pages like submarines surfacing out of a clear blue sea: “A Faded History of Land’s Decay.” “The Kingdom of the Wizard: CALYPSO WORLD.” “Child, 2, eaten by hyena.”
Caramanico apprenticed with the photographer Peter Beard—lived on Beard’s Montauk property, did odd jobs, started the journal at his request—but whatever Beard’s initial role was in inspiring, facilitating, and even coproducing these works, they took on a life of their own. Beard and Caramanico pulled all-nighters to prep “40 or 50 pages at a time for us to collage over.” It all seemed so well timed in its offhand pursuit of the sublime and the cheesy. The specter of a thirteen-year-old noodling in his notebook while tuning out sociology class is ever-present. Yet these are real-life testaments of a journeyman surfer—a mustachioed dude whose look at any given year slides along a beach-lizard scale from Harry Reems to Sam Elliott—who not only walked the walk but drifted the drift from the Bahamas to Borneo (where he dropped acid and ran into the jungle) to Tobago (where he made a second home).
The publisher’s website says: “These legible journals provide a unique window into the day-to-day of a traveling surfer.” But legible isn’t the mot juste. Barely decipherable scruffiness is the point. Maybe the portmanteau “pyroglyphics” would fit the bill. Would that suggest a charmed amateurishness, dappled light playing off a sturdy board with journal images baked into it? —Howard Hampton
León Muñoz Santini and Jorge Panchoaga’s OMEN: PHANTASMAGORIA AT THE FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION ARCHIVE, 1935–1942 (RM/Gato Negro Ediciones, $50) features images by Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, and Jack Delano. Santini and Panchoaga selected the photos during the COVID-19 lockdown, peering at a cache of 40,000 digitized images made available by the New York Public Library, taken between 1935 and 1942 for the US federal government, which wanted a visual record of the nation’s rural devastation. As Lucy Ives points out in her accompanying essay, this is a visual record that is already, at least vaguely, familiar to the general American viewer, but in Santini and Panchoaga’s fluid refashioning and remixing of these photographs, the lie of that received record is revealed and troubled. Their editing does more than recontextualize this history, though; these images—of Black farmers and soldiers; dying and dead emaciated bodies, human and animal; children in varying degrees of awareness of their circumstances—also point forward, to a history-to-come of disastrous industrial farming practices, of cyclical economic collapse, of persistent systemic racial violence. In Omen, documentary photographs are not only imprints of something once present, now lost, but also portents of futures near and distant. Santini and Panchoaga show how, to paraphrase the theoretical physicist Brian Greene, time is not a river flowing in one direction, but a frozen lake, where past, present, and future all coexist, forever. Or maybe a tornado—a maniacal, sublime, eternal swirl. —Ania Szremski
This year Jimmy would be one hundred, though he’s been dead in the flesh for nearly forty tours of the sun. Ambivalent about whether to grieve or celebrate the landmark, we evaluate the vanities and hypocrisies of our love for him. GOD MADE MY FACE (Dancing Foxes, $40), curated by Hilton Als, is an attempt to dignify the commemorative impulse with lash and limerence, evidence of a collective yearning to be haunted by Baldwin. Within the first few sentences of his introduction to the book’s collection of photographs and paintings, Hilton calls Jimmy a “faggot” in that cruel-to-be-familiar undertone idiomatic of Jimmy’s own practice of blurring the hard R to create a softer translation from slur to slang, nigga or otherwise, guttural and elegant. He could use the two versions of that contested term in unison, with his impeccable elocution, and we cannot ascertain which way he would transcribe his spoken use of it on any given day. It likely depended on his mood and his audience. When he sat under the bright scream of television-studio lighting and announced, You’re the nigg(aher) baby, it isn’t me, he called you both. Hilton names this ability to carry shade without being shady, to court the shadow and the light as ensemble, “high-faggotry.” This is an instance of the lash, the love tap, the devotion that pretends to be preoccupied with identity to subdue its intensity, its unrequitable love. And in that sense it’s beautiful, like a scar worn just right. Also outrageous, like when I was at a party a few weeks ago and a man who had met Jimmy called him ugly, bluntly as a punchline, as if he’d landed on a clever revelation cleaving the famous writer from his reputation. Imagine that to be loved you have to overcome being half-dismissed as an ugly faggot by associates, half-cherished for the same reason. And all this even after you’ve thrown yourself at them verbally in every manner available, begging to be taken in and considered. This is where the masochism of Baldwin’s stunning beauty retaliates, as armor and mercy and silence, against indulgent speculation about his private mannerisms in life or on the page.
Jimmy employs pain as a great silencer, the way Miles Davis, who was a friend of his and often visited him in the south of France, uses the mute of his trumpet. When Jimmy plays the low tones, he’s rebutting triumph and its attendant scrutiny to invent his blues, the version of him he swears nobody knows or loves. In search of this version and our ability to love it, all black writers seem to go through a phase where we need to discover and proclaim something about James Baldwin that we imagine he didn’t apprehend about himself. We borrow his own epiphanies from him, deconstruct them, and return them disinherited. It’s a rite of passage, a funny valentine, which is what this book pantomimes, a disaffected love note brimming with anxiety of influence.
These essays become love letters plucked from under the skin of scars on the ego, attempts to romance Jimmy into alignment with the collective inability to overcome liberalism. Hilton points out that Jimmy learned how to write as if he was singing, in gospels turned jazz and blues. Darryl Pinckney remembers reading Giovanni’s Room on a family road trip to Disneyland. Jamaica Kincaid recalls being a “servant in a household” where Baldwin was an esteemed guest before she had read his work. Later she’s inspired by him to write. Finally, she finds herself wishing that he could focus on dreams and surrealistic inventions instead of martyring his gifts to sociopolitical nightmares. It’s Jamaica who sends us to the mirror. Jimmy didn’t dash off to France or Turkey as some of us might get to, for residencies or on a work assignment; he was running for his life. He was not a black liberal aspirant, even if his deeply interior radicalism was often belittled as affect. Photos and paintings and ephemera with him as muse or model tell us what cannot be admitted in words in this tome made of writers trapped between tender envy, ecstatic love, and patricide—that James Baldwin was too beautiful to behave like the symbol many now ask him to be. He possesses too much dimension, spills beyond our limits and swarms us with the parts of him we wish to deny. He’s more alive than most of the living writers we know, his torch is still lit and cannot be passed. Nevertheless, we keep going to meet him, we keep letting him down from the pedestal just to send him back up there alone like our perfect black Sisyphus. What we say about him reveals us. —Harmony Holiday