The Brooklyn Rail

The point is to attempt to recognize what is at the edge of things; to see if there’s a language to be found in the glow of its aurora. The term avant-garde undermines its own capability. It implies a linear progression of time while also invoking the thin posturing of a guilty bourgeoisie. Avoiding the question has been rendered its own cliché. As far back as the 1960s, it has been dismissed as something dead and gone.

I would rather consider the way Gilles Deleuze spoke about exhaustion. In his essay on Samuel Beckett, he described it as a way of clearing out the present to give space for new futures to form. “The tired can no longer realize, but the exhausted can no longer possibilitate.” With no possibility, we are returned to an open field–a software reset on reality. It is not a march towards a destination, but the flickering of lights in the distance, or a deep algae bloom. It is faint but we are able to recognize it by its resilient posture—how it opposes the center and all of the inertia that affirms it.

The more indirect this exhausted periphery is experienced the more substantial it feels. Its edge is shaped by hearsay and the excitement in the voices of others who were there to see it. I remember Angela Dufresne telling me about a talk that Ralph Lemon gave to her students—when he showed them the images that informed his choreography—a choreography raveled with the history of violence perpetrated against Black men and women in the last century. I remember her saying how deeply affected the students were. I remember thinking about how his body bore history’s weight, but his movements didn’t. It erases passivity—like how you entered into Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition at the Punta della Dogana in Venice by walking down these steps with an audience of viewers looking up at you. I remember the sculptor Vadislov Markov telling me how it wasn’t until you joined them at the bottom of the stairs and looked behind you that you realized they were not looking at you, but watching a video by Huyghe that you were unable to see on your way down; how you knew what it was like to be looked at first, before you joined in looking.

It was hard to know what was or who was or where was the work when Kevin Beasely staged a performance last summer on the Lower East Side, how indistinct it felt when he mic’d certain performers and objects in the crowd. I remember feeling similarly when I visited Marni Kotak and Ajax Kotak Bell when they were living in Microscope gallery for a month—and thinking about how the urgency to document ourselves can so easily trouble every aspect of us. Or there was Tolia Astakhishvali’s recent solo show at Sculpture Center—with the bagged up architectural models, the junkpile of engines rattling and ticking on, and the sound of a glass harmonica or church bells occasionally breaking through. I remember how she used the corners and cleavages of space to store the collections of childhood toys, costume jewelry, broken plates, and other things that saw margin as its own form. Or I think about the annihilation of time and labor in Arthur Jafa’s ***** (2024). It took years to remake the final scene of Taxi Driver the way that it was originally intended—to represent the Black victims of Travis Bickle’s white rage.

There is an immediate existential threat to artists of this century, nearer than the global and political disasters we face, and it’s our lack of refusal. Social media generates a fantasy of participation with culture that moderates behavior and makes artists into proxies of culture’s affirmation. It is already blurring the distinction between the artist and the influencer by aligning their ideas of success as a mutual interest in the expansion of their audiences. It is a killing field of the periphery and of resistance. There is no counterculture possible on the platform. It is frontal—an impossible egress. We are online or off. Each form of difference is monitored for its engagement and then fed back to us as shimmering Pop. This has made culture not something to oppose, but something to fantasize about controlling. Our new Academic art is the market obsession and algorithm chasing. Style has become an obsession of artists, and the obsession is increasingly dictated by an algorithmic swarm.

Which is to say, if we can acknowledge new challenges, we must do the work to adjust our eyes to the lowlight of the periphery. Within sculpture, Anicka Yi translated the language of sculpture from object to instrument. Anna Uddenberg has found new forms within that she has excavated from the banality and repressed erotics of exploitative labor in final stage capitalism. Candice Lin’s ability to trouble a mythology between genres, between physical and virtual reality, and also trouble the distinction between diaristic fantasy and deep cultural research feels like an outpost. Adrian Villar Rojas has found a way to merge the non-hierarchical divisions between virtual and physical spaces into sensile taxonomy; and has found a way to access and articulate the ability of information to self-reproduce through physical form. Nikita Gale and Elaine Cameron Weir are reinventing base materialism in very different ways, but they share an interest in sparseness that feels like it has given room to other artists to explore after them.

Then there’s another pattern that cultivates something out of provisional scale and collection, owing its impulse to Yuji Agematsu’s collected gestures and Arthur Simms’s tethered forms. A recent show at Foreign & Domestic, curated by Greg Carideo, felt like it gathered some of these gatherers, like Yasue Maetake and Umico Niwa. Kristin Walsh doesn’t immediately seem to fit within it, but there’s something about the way her objects feel like they have developed a language or religion or a user’s guide of their own inaccessible subjectivity. In Walsh’s Engine No.11 (2024), the sculpture would randomly magnetize to flip matchsticks into a standing position–a small miracle produced at the expense of an intense amount of work and exceptional craft. A parallel can be made to the impossibility of getting paid appropriately for our work, or the dumb and useless subjectivities that are left over from the internet of things.

In painting, I think of Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. Each painting is trying to be four or five things at once, and made up of sewn and collided materials that play out strategies within larger fields. The different passages suggest a singular work, but also a hypertext, and a refusal or uncertainty of concluding itself. It’s multivalent, a kind of open painting. Open painting asks for a little more time, more possibility (or a continuance to possibilitate as Deleuze might say). Beaux Mendes keeps it open through material, and has shown an ability to shift images into form and back again through a material topology of swell and bend. There is also the scattered density of Ryan Foerster, specifically his works The University (2012–14) and Natural History Printing Plates (2012–14) and his show Zoltog99 back in 2020. The way that a distant epistemology or way of returning memory back to us is suggested but never concluded. Or how Helen Marten’s wall works are finding new space beyond Polke to visualize the production and material presence of images, a kind of texture-wrapped painting that extends the messy Pop of Rauschenberg into an unfamiliarized RGB territory of screens and display—Dropbox frescoes stuck in their sequence of production. These feel different from transitive painting because of their refusal. There isn’t anything to annotate anymore. Instead it is the feeling of a linking archive without its protocol—a forensic and accumulative circuitry of sensuous impulses and materials.

There’s the very real possibility that this exhausted periphery is always somewhere else and something we are arriving too late to see ourselves. It’s entirely possible that it is diminished by our closeness to it. Maybe it is a horizon that can’t be reached because it retreats at the mirrored speed of our approach. The reality is that the periphery’s methods are responsive. It must adapt to the changing shape of Omnicrisis, which cannot be handled through simple responses; and that might mean rejecting Style, which makes morphology difficult but necessary. Language is needed to come alongside those who operate outside of artistic practice like The Black Quantum Futurists and Forensic Architecture have. The periphery seems charismatic in that way. In the Pentecostal church the miracle of speaking in tongues is only confirmed when someone else is able to translate it back into language. The exhausted periphery requires the exhausted interpreter to search for it. It requires the exhausted storytellers, those following the distant lights of Irving Sandler, Barbara Rose, Lucy Lippard, Jesse Murry, and others who learned to see forms within the edge. It requires us to allow ourselves to imagine that our crises cannot be generalized, nor our moment, nor our answers to them.