Brooklyn Rail Contributor

Ann McCoy

ANN MCCOY is an artist, writer, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail. She teaches in the Yale School of Drama, graduate design, and was given a Guggenheim Foundation award in 2019.



GUESTCRITIC

Wellsprings Reconsidered

By Ann McCoy

| Editor's Message

The idea for this issue of the Brooklyn Rail came from a conversation I had with Donald Kuspit regarding his book The End of Art, as well as discussions I have had with artist Michael Zansky, whose art begins with a Freudian perspective and travels into uncharted realms.

INCONVERSATION

NALINI MALANI with Ann McCoy

| Art

Nalini Malani recently flew to Japan to receive the Fukuoka Arts & Culture Prize and to open her solo exhibition at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. A book about her dOCUMENTA (13) installation: Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood with essays by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arjun Appadurai, and Andreas Huyssen was produced by Hatje Cantz last year.

INCONVERSATION

RAQUEL RABINOVICH with Ann McCoy

| Art

Ann McCoy met with Raquel Rabinovich at her Rhinebeck studio to view her work and archives. Rabinovich discussed her life in Argentina, a country she has had to leave twice for political reasons, her life as a world citizen in Paris, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, and New York, and her afternoons with Jorge Luis Borges.

INCONVERSATION

Helène Aylon with Ann McCoy

| Art

Helène Aylon sat down with Ann McCoy at the Brooklyn Rail’s Industry City headquarters to discuss her upcoming traveling exhibition, Afterword: For the Children (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and Kniznick Gallery, Waltham, Massachusetts, March 20 – June 16, 2017; Jerusalem Biennale, October 2017).

INCONVERSATION

LESLEY DILL
with Ann McCoy

| Art

“I believe language as song and as text possesses a kind of quietness, a space that allows words’ power to evoke and move emotions. I’m interested in the soft space behind language.”

Eating Apollo’s Cattle

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Hermes is a cattle thief, messenger, trickster, boundary crosser, and a god who represents a lot of artists.

MICHAEL ZANSKY: A Vacation on Mars with God

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Ann McCoy discusses Michael Zansky's show, A Vacation on Mars with God, on display at Stux Gallery.

AGNES DENES Living Pyramid

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

The monumental Living Pyramid rises from the lawn of Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City like a futuristic mirage, with a base thirty feet on a side. It marks a return to New York public art for this eighty-three-year-old artist.

SLAVS AND TATARS Afteur Pasteur

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Slavs and Tatars, perhaps the smartest artist collaborative around, have returned for their first New York exhibition since Beyonsense at MoMA (2012).

RICHARD LONG Crescent to Cross

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Entering the main gallery of Sperone Westwater, the viewer is dwarfed by Red Gravity (2015), a stunning, two-story-high, circular red clay drawing filling the height and width of the main wall. A suspended glass balcony allows the viewer to see the top half, which enhances the work’s scale.

DOUG WHEELER

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

There is nothing new about the idea of symbolic space. Doug Wheeler’s second installation at the David Zwirner gallery brings to mind the French Enlightenment fantasy architectural monument spheres of Étienne-Louis Boullée.

Recycling Religion

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Recycling Religion represents a missed opportunity for a necessary discussion of a complex subject. “Recycled Thinking” would be a more appropriate title for this mishmash of tired Pop art, simplistic religious clichés, gadgetry, and scatology, that comes across as a traveling promotional for Marat Guelman’s stable and his new museum complex in Montenegro.

YOAN CAPOTE Collective Unconscious

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

The Cuban artist Yoan Capote is an embodiment of the archetypal Hephaestus, the Olympian god of the hammer and forge, so undervalued in today’s art making. Capote builds much of his work using classical sculptural techniques, and represents the best of a Communist worker tradition.

BENJAMIN KRESS:
New Paintings

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Strange Muses I (2017) is remarkable on multiple levels. It was created not to show the here and now, but to take us into what could best be described as a liminal space...

JOYCE KOZLOFF

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

To capture the encyclopedic scope, breadth, and dimensionality of Joyce Kozloff’s exhibitions, a magic carpet is a prerequisite.

JOAN WALTEMATH:
M’s Crossing

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

The intangible mystery of this work transports this viewer to an archaic place in consciousness when nature and mankind were inseparably fused in peaceful coexistence and respect.

LUCY SKAER

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Two stunning simultaneous exhibitions by the Scottish artist Lucy Skaer give New Yorkers their most comprehensive view of the artist’s range to date. Skaer represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale, was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 2009, and has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.

Stations of The Cross

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

It is affirming to see an exhibition like Stations of the Cross, based on a Catholic pilgrimage and devotional practice, in a world plagued by attacks on both Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism.

GreaterNew York

MARY BETH EDELSON
My Favorite and Most Disturbing

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

What a celebration! Have we forgotten that before Nancy Spero was shown at MoMA, in 1976 she was picketing the place, demanding that an exhibition include fifty percent women?

PAUL LAFFOLEY and SUZANNE TREISTER

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Paul Laffoley and Suzanne Treister are two rare artists who don’t fit into the current art discourse focused on politics and critical theory. Laffoley and Treister are more suited to a gathering in the Samovar Tea Room at the Museum of Jurassic Technology than a Whitney lecture.

SUE COE:
Graphic Resistance

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

In 1986, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, as it was then known, held the first solo museum exhibition of Sue Coe’s work in New York. It was titled The Malcolm X Series. Thirty-two years later, as MoMA PS1, the institution now gives Ms. Coe her second solo exhibition in New York, Sue Coe: Graphic Resistance.

BRADLEY EROS:
All that is solid melts into eros

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

An elongated, “keystoned” vertical projection, updated daily and made from ash adhered to a slide, fills the gallery’s first wall.

Art in the Age of Vulnerability

By Ann McCoy

| Critics Page

Vulnerability implies that a greater force will threaten a more fragile one. As a woman I have been acquainted with the word since childhood. Women, small kittens, and sparrows fit the definition of the vulnerable.

What is Art?

By Ann McCoy

| Critics Page

When I think of art the Kwakiutl come to mind. The Kwakiutl had no word for art but art was everywhere, in all aspects of their lives. Every utilitarian object was a work of art, whether it was a grizzly bear or otter bowl, a whale spoon, or a heron fishhook.

INCONVERSATION

MICHELLE STUART with Ann McCoy

| Art

Michelle Stuart and Ann McCoy met at the Rail headquarters on a recent August afternoon to discuss the intersections of art, archaeology, exploration, and animism. Both daughters of the West, they also spoke about riding sidesaddle, synchronicity, and stupas.

INCONVERSATION

KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO with Ann McCoy

| Art

Ann McCoy met with Krzysztof Wodiczko at De Robertis Pasticceria & Caffe in the East Village—which has functioned since the ’80s as his studio and office—to discuss his video projections on statuary and some of the psychological aspects of the work.

INCONVERSATION

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE with Ann McCoy

| Art

William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments opened April 21 – 22, 2016, in Rome. On a 550-meter-long, ten-meter-high section of the Tiber embankment wall between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini, eighty figures, pulled by power washing from the grime on the walls, depict Rome’s greatest victories and defeats from mythological times to the present.

INCONVERSATION

EVE ANDRÉE LARAMÉE with Ann McCoy

| Art

Fresh off the plane from New Mexico, Eve Andrée Laramée sat down at the Rail headquarters with Ann McCoy to discuss art, science, alchemy, and the nuclear legacy they share.

INCONVERSATION

KRISTIN JONES with Ann McCoy

By Ann McCoy

| Art

Kristin Jones came by the Rail to discuss her collaborative project TEVERETERNO for the revival of Rome’s Tiber River with Ann McCoy. The artist has been working to adopt an 1,800-foot long stretch of the river, and turn it into a site for contemporary art, a first for Rome.

Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of MATTHEW BARNEY

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Subliming Vessel is the first major exhibition devoted to Matthew Barney’s drawings. “Vessel” references the alchemist’s flask, a container for the incubation of images and processes rooted in the unconscious.

Here and Elsewhere

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

The museum’s façade and lobby vinyls of “The One and Only Madinat New Museum Royal Mirage” luxury hotel are by G.C.C., a collective of eight artists with roots in the Gulf.

TONY OURSLER

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Tony Oursler: The Imponderable Archive consists of 680 items culled from 2,500 photographs, news clippings, books, and assorted objects from the artist’s collection.

MYSTICAL SYMBOLISM: THE SALON DE LA ROSE+CROIX IN PARIS, 1892—1897

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Joséphin Péladan’s (1858-1918) portrait by Jean Delville (1895) as “Sâr Mérodack,” white robed and posed like a Byzantine Christ Pantocrator “ruler of all” with an arm raised in benediction, greets the exhibition’s viewer.

Restoring the Minoans: Elizabeth Price and Sir Arthur Evans

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

The latter part of the Victorian era was a romantic age of celebrity archaeologists: Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb captured the public’s imagination, as did Leonard Woolley’s excavations of the burial pit at Ur. Sir Arthur Evans unearthed and restored Knossos, and Heinrich Schliemann excavated Mycenae—rescuing Homer’s lost civilizations from the mythological mists of time.

ALFREDO JAAR Shadows

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

To explore the profound impact of Shadows, one must begin with Alfredo Jaar, the architect. Jaar’s site-specific spaces at Lelong have no equivalency in contemporary architecture.

The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China opened in the midst of the mercantile Armory Show madness.

Making Space: Women Artists in Postwar Abstraction

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Making Space: Women Artists in Postwar Abstraction has work by many of the same artists as its 1995 predecessor Elizabeth Murray, Modern Women (1914 – 73)—work by seventy women from the MoMA collection.

Carolee Schneemann

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

In this time of war and uncertainty, Carolee Schneemann, the best artist embodiment of Aphrodite we have, has brought us two exhibitions that take us, with her uncompromising authenticity, into places rarely visited.

CHANNA HORWITZ

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Lisson Gallery has mounted a stunning, historically important, museum quality first New York solo exhibition of the work of Channa Horwitz, an artist who died in 2013 at the age of eighty.

Lenore Malen Scenes from Paradise

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Creation myths provide blueprints for their respective societies, on both a conscious and unconscious level. Lenore Malen, whose past work on utopian societies traverses history, in this exhibition takes us back to biblical Eden to ascertain where things went off the rails.

Archie Rand: Misfits

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Archie Rand glides onto the scene, part mystical rebbe, part Diogenes, carrying a lamp, by day, which he shines in our faces, in his search for an honest man.

HELEN O’LEARY: 
Home is a Foreign Country

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

Helen O’Leary’s work, which has its formation in Irish linguistics, gives us an inspired version of an Irish art rooted in a sense of place in rural Ireland. The late nineteenth century Gaelic revival (Athbheochan na Gaeilge), advocated for a return to the Irish language, and O’Leary’s psyche is firmly planted in that tongue. O’Leary’s art originates from a life lived on a farm in rural Ireland, and a spiritual connection to that land and rural way of life. In a time when many younger Irish artists have adopted critical theory, digital technology, and international styles severed from their cultural roots, O’Leary’s work possesses a life-lived authenticity and hands-on craftsmanship that sets it apart.

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

With this first American large-scale exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s profoundly moving art, it is as though a needle has been lifted from a well-worn record called “the entrenched history of abstraction,” and any attempts to place the needle back into the grove will henceforth prove difficult.

Nancy Holt

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

In his doctrine of anámnēsis, or recollection, Plato makes a distinction between eternal Forms and their resemblances in human perceptions.

Peggy Ahwesh: CLEAVE

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

In Verily! the Blackest Sea, the Falling Sky (2017), a two-channel video work, Peggy Ahwesh takes us on a journey from the ocean’s primordial depths, filled with squids and Leviathans, into the reaches of outer space.

JUDITH BERNSTEIN Hard

By Ann McCoy

| ArtSeen

1966 was a hard time to be a woman at Yale. There were perhaps three women students in a class of men, and no female professors.

Notes from an Old Maenad in the Trenches

By Ann McCoy

| Critics Page

At 68, I was part of the second feminist charge in Los Angeles. I was among the first group of women to gain anything resembling an equal share (thanks to Marcia Tucker) in the Whitney Biennial of 1973.

William Kentridge Takes New York

By Ann McCoy

| Theater

William Kentridge and his South African collaborative team have landed in New York City and New Haven this fall, leaving us with remarkable opportunities to see their work.

Table of Contents

Editor's Message

Art

ArtSeen

Critics Page

Theater

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SEPT 2019

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