Writing 2017

She Wanted Adventure: Dwan, Copley, Butler, Mizuno.

Catherine Wagley, December 5, 2017

“Everyone wanted to show at Riko Mizuno,” artist Jack Goldstein recounted, reminiscing in 2003 about the early Los Angeles scene. But he found the collective reverence for Mizuno somewhat baffling—he “could never figure her out[…] She never did anything; she just sat in the back and drank coffee.” 1 That she “never did anything” seems highly unlikely: she stayed in the business from 1966 into the 1980s, hosted performances that resulted in arrests (Chris Burden), and helped artists cut holes in her walls and ceilings (Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin).

Everybody Knows: Prada Foundation’s Stylish Cynicism

Catherine G. Wagley, November 23, 2017

The last time Leonard Cohen appeared on her radio show in 2006, Fresh Air host Terry Gross told him she wanted to play “one of your very cynical songs.” She meant Everybody Knows, from 1988. Cohen told her he’d started writing the song in a café in the Paris neighborhood of Montparnasse. “I don’t know who I thought I was at the time,” he said. “But as I was sitting there, I was the guy that you couldn’t put anything over on.” After he died, on the day of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, journalist Cory Doctorow called Everybody Knows exactly the song for our Trump-in-White-House, gentrification-riddled, resurgent rightwing times because, in it “inequality perpetuates itself, meritocracy is a delusion.”

Spoiled Roots: Mark Bradford and the Erasure of Community

Catherine G. Wagley, September 20, 2017

Artists tasked with filling the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale have often poked at its resemblance to Monticello, the plantation designed by the slave-owning third U.S. president. “Mini-Monticello,” Sarah Sze called the pavilion in 2013, commenting on how awkward its smallness made its grandeur. Vito Acconci wrote a scrambled, sprawling consideration of Thomas Jefferson’s architectural legacy, wondering how often Sally Hemings, the president’s slave and mother of six of his children, had access to the main house. Mark Bradford, whose work currently occupies the pavilion for the 57th Biennale, closed off the front entrance. Staffers smoke in front of it on their breaks. Visitors enter from the side, where slaves might have entered (as I heard one attendant explain to a confused viewer), and immediately encounter Spoiled Foot (2017), a painted, room-sized collage that looks like a boil growing down from the ceiling.