The Brooklyn Rail

Years ago, I visited a collection of non-conformist art in Riga, Latvia. My first impression was one of incomprehension—I didn’t know a single one of the artists whose works were hung salon-style on sliding metal-mesh storage walls, and I was confounded by the idyllic figures, geometric color-fields, and steam-punk assemblages that looked like distant riffs on what I took for granted as art history. A lot of Matisseries had been committed under political duress, I thought cynically, only to realize later that my visual illiteracy in this context was a symptom of a cultural and ideological bias. Even if I knew that these works were radical acts of civil disobedience, defying the sanctioned stylistic mandate of Soviet art, I was aware of the fact that I could not see how the resistance was any more liberated. That paradigm shift has stayed with me as a counter-model to the idealized institution, and I wonder now what a museum of nonconformist art (and its counterpart, the museum of conformist art) would look like today, when the future is no longer at a safe distance.

It should be easy enough to pinpoint what is radical when tacit conservatism has gained renewed social traction. Recently, for example, an artist celebrated for her performative liberalism told me that she welcomed the backlash against US museums as a corrective to exhibition programming that was “overdoing it with woke politics.” In New York, where cognitive dissonance reigns, I saw the emergence of safe spaces for people to commune and lament the decline of beauty in art and other such straw men. Surprisingly few artworks have been able to speak to our present political moment without resorting to mock outrage or illustrative cliché. But to think of radical (by which I mean irresolvable) propositions, brings to mind the following:

Nayland Blake’s Equipment for a Shameful Epic (1993) may be a work of social sculpture, or even realism, per Linda Nochlin’s definition of a “truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life.” Made for another time, the costume-rack-as-sculpture has become even more relevant in ours. Though one’s mind gleefully leaps to assign its constituent Ronald Reagan mask, fairy wings, rubber noose, and diabolical scepter to functionaries of the current US administration, the truth of Blake’s work is that it is intended for perpetual use by everyone and that we all play unwitting roles in this work of living theater. Asses Together, the title of our speculative collective performance, is neatly typewritten on the bound script we could consult if we didn’t already know it by heart.

In her 2024–25 exhibition In·Visible Bodies at the Musée Rodin, the art historian and curator Marine Kisiel maneuvered her ostensible subject—Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of Honoré de Balzac’s dressing gown—as a Trojan horse brimming with questions around monumentality, representation, and the invention of the social body via nineteenth-century technologies for measuring, accounting for, and standardizing unruly human presence. In this master-class of deconstruction, which cleared away the “accumulation of misunderstandings” that Rainer Maria Rilke had observed in relation to Rodin’s fame, Kisiel narrated the contentious genesis of the Balzac monument and brought it down to earth, to the domain of what Warhol called “messy lives.” The exhibition felt simultaneously like the presentation of an audacious new exhibition methodology and an act of corrective removal.

Ken Okiishi’s The Chronicle of A.M. Bach (2025), a portrait of the dazzling harpsichordist Jean-Luc Ho, presents the complexities of “historically informed practice” as a negotiation with and against historic musical texts—in this case, the baroque keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. But like all of Okiishi’s films, Chronicle is also a meditation on social scripts and how they can never be properly inhabited—as seen here in Ho’s absolute refusal to perform historical reenactment or to play anyone other than himself, as well as in the casting of writer Jeanne Graff, whose performance is a cancellation of Anna Magdalena Bach as portrayed in the wooden Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet film of 1968. Okiishi’s long single take of Graff engrossed in the delirium of breastfeeding her daughter, in a room whose walls are covered in children’s drawings, as they listen to a radio broadcast of Ho playing the Goldberg Variations, depicts the life-world of motherhood as fraught, erotic, chaotic, and achingly tender. As Okiishi has said about his philosophy of working with actors, “in this film, casting herself in a role means not casting herself at all, but presenting who you are today—fully, developmentally, and without false coherence.”

Most recently, the dancing counter-tenor François Chaignaud and butoh legend Akaji Maro performed their earth-shattering GOLD SHOWER, an extended reciprocal tribute to each other’s distinct and incommensurable virtuosity. No ratcheting of hyperbole can do justice to the mere fact of their co-presence on a single stage. We are lucky to live at the same time as they are. Suspended in a seemingly endless state of play, an unspoken dialogue unfolds in gestural episodes of increasing madness and competitive stage extravagance. Invoking Busby Berkeley, reliefs on art deco vases, traditional Japanese theater, water sports, futuristic J. J. Grandville flower drag, and pavane for a dead princess via Isamu Noguchi, Chaignaud and Maro’s devotion is an act of mutual world-making that obliterates any need for camp.