Echoing the murky sheen of sidewalk puddles, Salman Toor’s paintings revel in the absinthe-green palette of inebriation and hallucination. His compositions whisper of the dark delights of unlit alleyways, of clandestine trysts in the garden, or the unexpected thwack of a cricket bat against a stranger’s skull. Desire seeps through his canvases like spilled wine, but it’s the kind of longing laced through with recalcitrance, that sour taste in the mouth after a middling kiss.
In “Salman Toor’s Brown Boys,” the opening essay for NO ORDINARY LOVE (Gregory R. Miller & Co./Baltimore Museum of Art, $50), the catalogue’s editor Asma Naeem suggests antecedents for the artist’s paintings, reading them against selections from Pablo Picasso, Édouard Manet, and, for a more contemporary analogue, Bhupen Khakhar. But Toor’s paintings don’t need to be placed. Wallflowers in multiple senses, they hang back, sulking in hallways or shooting cautious glances off summer porches. Stylistically, Toor recalls Sanya Kantarovsky and Nicole Eisenman; his protagonists are marked by that touch of tragic buffoonery as they navigate the particular loneliness of crowds. (See the uncertain step of the bridal-white barfly in The Latecomer, 2021, or the come-hither resignation of the barkeep in The Bar on East 13th, 2019, a conscientious reworking of Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, 1881–82.) There’s a queasy prettiness to Toor’s scenes; just like in the exhibition’s title, something is amiss. —KATE SUTTON
“Every eye is the center of the world,” curator Chris Fitzpatrick writes in “Propinquities,” his essay on the Portuguese duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. And yet, this centrality does not equal omniscience. Vision is a highly imperfect instrument, susceptible to any number of manipulations. Fitzpatrick wagers that, for all its unpredictability, it is analog media—not digital—that hews closest to how the human eye actually sees. “Filming with an analog camera is an inherently speculative process,” he argues. “Sort of like cooking without checking the seasoning.”
Published on the occasion of the 2021 retrospective, JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO + PEDRO PAIVA: TERÇOLHO (Mousse Publishing, $45) lets readers into the pair’s proverbial kitchen, assembling the odds, ends, and images that have fueled their aesthetic flirtations with the psychological, the parascientific, the paranormal, and—to quote the artists—“abyssological.” Predating the visual hijinks of TikTok, Gusmão and Paiva’s films adhere to explicitly analog technologies, testing the limits of what can be recorded.
This volume supplements a selection of the artists’ own writings—a barrage of travelogues, anecdotes, and vignettes on topazes, lunar calendars, mermaids, and the peril of papaya skins on lazy stomachs—with contributions from curators Philippe Vergne and Anthony Huberman, who each take a fittingly elegiac tone for the collaborative practice, which has come to an end after nearly two decades. As the artists themselves write, “Whenever you decide to abolish the unspoken pact between film and reality, the image moves away from coherence and stops claiming to be man’s view of reality; it begins to travel down other roads.” Let this book be the travel guide through that parallel world. —K. S.
In the Doug Aitken monograph WORKS 1992–2022 (MACK, $140) there’s a description of the prolific artist’s conceptual film Eraser, shot in 1998, after the volcanic eruption at Montserrat. “Volcanic ash now covers abandoned offices and homes, telephone exchanges and airport landing lights, rendering the built environment of the island a tactile monument to the process of geological reclamation.” This untactile book, full of stills, interviews, monographs, and aperçus, doesn’t attempt to find a visual grammar to suggest the immersive, site-specific natures of Aitken’s installations: it’s more like a souvenir from the Montserrat gift shop.
You might expect an attempt at equivalence for revelatory multimedia works like electric earth, 1999; Interiors, 2002; Mirage, 2017; NEW ERA, 2018; and sleepwalkers, 2007. Definitely a challenge in terms of both intimacy and scale: the latter is a series of nonlinear films looped and then projected on the exterior of moma. The “work didn’t exist until it existed on the buildings, on the museum. It came to life the night that we started testing it outdoors.” Here, the images are nothing more than billboards. While Aitken is interested in billboards as a nexus of decay and absence, that’s not the intent of sleepwalkers, which aims to open an ambiguous urban window to the sublime.
Maybe a standard-issue “greatest hits” is not the place for innovation, but if the page isn’t adequate to convey the artist’s vision, perhaps we should be getting something in keeping in with his multimedia praxis: a Blu-ray disc, a flash drive, a link, a bus pass to a secret location? —HOWARD HAMPTON
“You do not have to know how to look at it,” John Yau writes of the eloquently giddy collages, paintings, drawings, assemblages, and whatnots displayed in JOE BRAINARD: THE ART OF THE PERSONAL (Rizzoli Electa, $55). “It is just there in front of you, direct, open, often funny and always good-natured, even when it is provocative and unsettling.” Starting on the cusp of 1960, when Brainard was still a high school art nerd in Oklahoma, through his rapid migration to and development in New York, Yau is thoroughly smitten with this mischievous kid who made a name for himself on the fringes—or hinges—of the art and literary worlds.
Rightly so: John Ashbery’s sobriquet for Brainard’s tiny cohort of Okie expats (Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Dick Gallup) as the “soi-disant Tulsa School” auxiliary to the New York School has a magical ring to it. Traversing the aesthetic airs of Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, Warhol and Larry Rivers, Brainard found his own path channeling older weird spirits: Dada, Duchamp, Joseph Cornell. He made all kinds of beguiling art out of anything—works that were more like an ever-expanding galaxy than an oeuvre, pinwheels of radiant perception that might take the form of poetry (I Remember, 1970), mock-comic-book collaborations (Jim the Sheep and Banjo Bar, 1964, with Kenneth Koch), or mixed-media collages (the eye-popping Madonna with Daffodils, 1966). He might paint scallions, do book covers, assemble a Japanese City out of knickknack talismans, or invoke cultural figures from the funny papers (Nancy) and motion pictures (Marilyn).
Big or small, these objects erase the distance between the private and the universal. Their joy and poignancy are made all the more emphatic by Brainard’s decision to quit the commercial art world around 1977 (he died in 1994). Yau makes a lovely case for him as a singularly diverse and unorthodox postwar American artist. There’s a little outsider sentimentality in such a generous assessment, but lots of truth too. —H. H.
For most viewers, Walker Evans will always be a man of the 1930s, an era-defining genius who lost his way as life changed. Yet his late work—and particularly the images he made using a Polaroid SX-70 in 1973–74, just before his death in 1975—has had admirers, passionate but rare. One is Jerry L. Thompson, an ex-student and assistant who in 1997 published The Last Years of Walker Evansand who finds in the Polaroids “the direct, instinctive, bemused sensuality of the eye in play.” Thompson may not have succeeded in making many converts to the late Evans, but now comes another attempt, this time from scholar Michael Lesy, WALKER EVANS: LAST PHOTOGRAPHS & LIFE STORIES (Blast Books, $45). Lesy may have a personal motive for wanting to rescue his subject from a too-exclusive focus on early work: despite a career full of honors, Lesy himself has never repeated the rapturous success of his astonishing first book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). But more important, no doubt, is that Lesy counts himself, along with Thompson, as the last of the childless Evans’s chosen sons.
While Lesy agrees with Thompson in his appreciation of Evans’s late Polaroids, seeing in them the vision of a world “scattered with objects on their way to oblivion,” caught in mid-passage—and while he reproduces a few dozen of these images—Lesy has surprisingly little to say about them. Maybe that’s because he is at heart a storyteller, and the Polaroids’ poetics of transience points to the dissolution of narrative. The greater part of the book is covered by the second part of its title, “Life Stories”: it mainly consists of informal biographical essays on people of whom Evans made portraits, from the 1920s onward. Many are famous: Ben Shahn, Lincoln Kirstein, James Agee. One learns a lot from Lesy’s observation that in his relations with Kirstein, “Evans was more evasive than demonstrative, more cunning than confrontational.” But equally fascinating are passages on now-forgotten figures who passed through the photographer’s life and left their mark—materials, one could imagine, for an unfinished biography.
While many of the Polaroids, too, are portraits, Lesy is mainly uninterested in their subjects, “women (mostly young) he met at parties,” and men, too, from Evans’s milieu at Yale, where he taught late in life. So Evans’s late work still awaits its effective champion, though the reproductions prove they deserve one. Flat, deeply shadowed, eerie, they resonate with a desperate immediacy that seems more in keeping with contemporary sensibilities than does the classical austerity of the more renowned work of four decades earlier. —BARRY SCHWABSKY
The late artist Jack Whitten told a studio visitor: “The old symbols that we had from previous established religion, they’re not workable anymore for this society. We have to invent new symbols.” New symbols, new techniques, and new tools—what Whitten needed didn’t exist, so he had to devise it. He might slice tesserae out of thick paint and tile the squares like a mosaic or drag a self-fashioned twelve-foot rake through a wet painted surface. No standard monograph could quite hold Whitten’s artistic imagining, so JACK WHITTEN: COSMIC SOUL (Hauser & Wirth Publishers, $45), by Richard Shiff, reimagines the art book as something that feels improvisatory and free, letting Whitten’s six decades of art roam aside commentary that keeps up rather than corrals. Essentially an extended meditation on Whitten’s singular greatness, Cosmic Soul unfolds across four essays and more than three hundred pages, richly illustrated with about 150 color plates of Whitten’s divine, mostly abstract paintings, and his visionary figurative sculpture. Shiff goes deep, emphasizing “Jack’s art, thought, and feeling” rather than his history, on our earthly plane, or his career “highlights” (because it’s all highlights). In a video shot for Frieze, Whitten holds a thick, jellyfish-like hump of acrylic paint, what he called a “slab,” an uninspiring gob to most, but “elemental matter” to the artist: “With this, I can build anything I want.” —DAVID O’NEILL