Writing 2018

A tribute to Robert Morris (1931–2018)

Catherine Wagley, 5 December 2018

Felt covered the floor: thick but small red cut-outs, long rectangles of grey and black, big rolls of white. The artist Robert Morris, who died last week at the age of 87, sent these from his Hudson Valley studio to Castelli Gallery in New York City’s Bryant Park in early February 2018. Now, on the evening of 9 February, the artist and dancer Simone Forti was moving among them, holding pieces of red next to her cheek, swaying with the heavy rolls of white. Morris had meant to make it down earlier in the week, so that he and Forti – married from 1956 to 1962, the years that brought both of them into the New York art world – could consult each other as Forti rehearsed among his work. Instead Morris, recovering from pneumonia, missed the rehearsals and the first performance, in which the 83-year-old Forti caressed a red, rounded shape, and rolled on the floor beneath a sheet of grey while talking about intimacy and distance. ‘I don’t worry about the universe,’ she said. ‘I concern myself with my dear ones. That’s where I care the most.’

Deana Lawson

Catherine Wagley

In Deana Lawson’s 2017 photograph Nikki’s Kitchen, a woman kneels on an old wooden chair, hand under chin, staring at the camera with some defiance. She wears a leopard print jersey jumpsuit that falls off her shoulder and seductively contrasts with the Victorian wallpaper that only partially covers the walls behind her. Lawson made the photo with the help of her longtime best friend, Dana Brown, and in an interview published in Lawson’s new Aperture monograph, video artist Arthur Jafa – also a friend – asks about working with Brown. “How essential is that to your methodology and what you get?”

The Bold Refusal of lauren woods’s “American Monument”

Catherine G. Wagley, December 7, 2018

There is a room for reflection with plush fuchsia carpeting outside of American Monument, an exhibition by lauren woods (she always uses lower-case letters) at the University Art Museum (UAM) at Cal State Long Beach. woods designed it, placing deliberately empty vitrines against each wall, because, had her exhibition unfolded as planned, visitors may have needed a chance to breathe and think after listening to audio recordings of police officers and neighborhood watchmen berating black victims, or paging through police interviews and reports revealing the extent of systemic, racist violence in this country. But, since woods’s exhibition opened without either the audio files or documents on view, the room with the plush carpet feels ominous, its emptiness underscoring the silence and absence that now characterize the show.