VVVIDE

Angels, dragons, and unicorns, of course, but also: peanut-men, potato-men, snake-women, lima-bean warriors, puffer fish–chickens, lion-eagles, plumed serpents, monk faces growing out of curling vines. In the gasp-eliciting Creatures of Myth and Imagination at the Cloisters, ivory, gold, silver, feathers, stone, paint, glass, and ceramics are among the materials transubstantiated into the most fantastical hybrid forms in completely different historical traditions (the show includes objects, from the larger-than-life to the tiny, made in Europe and the Americas almost entirely pre-contact, from about 500 to 1500 CE). But on both sides of the ocean, they tended to serve similar purposes: of metaphor and mythmaking, of proving devotion and illustrating power, of powerfully demonstrating the extraordinary capacities of their makers.

These wildly inventive creatures could often cross between human and spiritual realms in a way plain old humans could only dream of. See, in an upstairs gallery, the incredible and fabulous Tzinacantecuhtli, or bat lord, from central Mexico, dating about 800–900, a ceramic-and-slip humanoid figure taller than an NBA player with a bat head and leafy nose who could travel from the underworld to the heavens. Or, downstairs, the graphic stone depiction of the Aztec earth deity Tlatecuhtli, who could swallow the sun.

Wandering in and out of the exhibition, pausing to visit the Cloisters’ lovely terrace gardens, and then having a smoke perched on a stone wall outside, where I saw a greedy woodpecker and a curious rabbit, reinforced what these objects had most in common, perhaps: their expression of the universal human longing for the plants and the animals, to magically transcend our own limited human consciousness through them, to feel less alone among our own stupid boring species. —Ania Szremski

Lynda Benglis first came to prominence in the late 1960s for her poured latex or polyurethane foam floor sculptures that recall Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Soon after she also began employing lead, aluminum, and bronze to create works that capture the effects of gravity. Presenting lumps of material built up in time, those sculptures evoke enormous mounds of excrement or exotic wings of hardened lava. Countering Minimalism’s emphasis on seriality and the grid, she opened new ideas about the ways an object can not only represent the process of its own creation, but also its interdependency on its materials and environmental conditions.

Then, in the early 1970s Benglis moved into what I call her “glitter poop” era. Often wall-bound, these twisted lumps of chicken wire or other types of metal mesh are covered with plaster or handmade paper and are finished with metallic paints or encrusted with gold leaf, cast sparkles, or glitter. They look like, well, glittery poop, or sometimes, sparkly tapeworms, and several examples are on view here (among more recent works). This new direction was, and still is, both singular and vulgar—a flamboyant joining of the intestinal with the girly—almost pornographic. By betraying the industrial aesthetic of Minimalism and Postminimalism, the sculptures also reveal another, neglected (in art) set of manufactured materials: the glitter and sparkles marketed to girls, drag queens, and Mardi Gras crews. Avoided for their “tackiness,” her plastic and aluminum sparkles are merely a glammed-out version of the same materials used by other Postminimalists, and they are prescient given the amount of flash evident in contemporary sculpture. —Eva Díaz

Peter Hujar’s work has never looked more cinematic or attentive to everyday life than it does in this show. The roughly one hundred contact sheets on view feel like silent filmstrips ready for reanimation. In one from 1955, Daisy Aldan, the poet and Hujar’s high school teacher, reads from a book and extends her arms, as if attempting to illustrate the text. Another from 1972, a nude identified in Hujar’s notebook only as “Andrew, an English boy,” shows a soft-shouldered young man seated, then standing contrapposto, then scratching his back—attention given to his shifting gestures, value achieved in the sum of the parts rather than in a definitive image. These contact sheets are not quite artworks. They’re not exactly tools either. Akin to most programming at the Morgan, they’re more like manuscripts or drafts of screenplays. What Hujar bracketed, circled, or check-marked on the contact sheets isn’t always better than the alternatives; often, it just indicates a particular direction. In 1974, for instance, trees in a forest took precedence over images of Andy Warhol reading the newspaper.

Hujar’s cityscapes and pastures, which critics have struggled to situate within his oeuvre, appear here as establishing shots for the episodic narratives unfolding elsewhere—John Waters in the crowd hanging out at Christopher Street Liberation Day in 1973; Fran Lebowitz waking up in New Jersey in 1974. What is typically onstage or off, on camera or off, or edited out, remains connected, intact, and satisfyingly in frame. —Marcus Civin

This exhibition brings together the work of two artists connected by their friendship, their shared preoccupations (drapery, plant life, and the play between image and text among them), and their initials (R.M.). Rosemary Mayer’s watercolor drawings of flowers offer a foil to her small coiled-wire and wood sculpture Proserpina (1975), whose spiral form references the Roman goddess of spring but evokes Tatlin’s Tower, or the Monument to the Third International. Ree Morton is represented by cursive text paintings, sculptural bows hung on the wall, and lanky floor sculptures like Devil Chaser (1975), a sinuous scribble bedecked with wee ribbons. Three bureaucratic-looking plaques on its pedestal read:

TO REVEAL THE PRESENCE OF WITCHES

TO WARD OFF DESTRUCTION BY LIGHTNING

TO CURE DEMONIACS

The texts, from the book Wild Flowers Worth Knowing (1917), refer to traditional uses of St. John’s Wort. A copy of the volume is shown alongside archival materials that document the artists’ mutual preoccupation with flowers, as well as earlier permutations of the works shown. This inclusion of items from their personal records and sketchbooks is apt, since both artists prioritized the biographical, language, and memory; as Morton once phrased it, “I am my own picture-word history.” —Lisa Darms

A double impulse foot sealer, a tinting squeegee, a soldering paddle—these are among the hand tools you’ll encounter at THWACK, an exhibition installed in a gargantuan former fulfillment center at the Brooklyn Army Terminal that has sat empty for the past twenty years. The show heralds the skill and labor of the 3,500 craftspeople who work at BAT, making things “as diverse as the brain can imagine,” according to the introductory wall text.

The show’s ingenuity (created by artist and curator Alex Kalman) is to spotlight, not on the manufactured objects themselves, but the tools used to make them, captured in photographs blown up to fill canvases as big as king-sized bedsheets hanging throughout the 36,000 square-foot space. A viscosity calculator makes sure Japanese salad dressing is consistent; a jig shapes handmade guitars; a batter hopper molds ice cream cones. The flinty soldering paddle, a tool used to spread molten metal in the making of rocket ships, resembles a handmade prison shiv. At this scale, the tools take on mythic proportions. They are instruments of the gods, Hephaestus at this smithy.

It’s brain-tickling that MMuseumm, whose exhibitions are typically housed in a former elevator shaft in Tribeca, has commandeered a space the acreage of a Berghain stand-in from John Wick—all while maintaining its commitment to exploring everyday objects. For those of us who spend our days staring at Google docs and spreadsheets, there’s an element of indoor cat envy for the outdoor cat world of craftspeople. In that regard, the enlarged (engorged?) images of the tools of their craft are damn near pornographic, teasing us with the possibility of a more sensory  and tactile existence. It’s enough to make you want to thwack off. —Lisa Hsiao Chen

As the almost overwhelming array of ephemera in this show demonstrates, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) empowered more than 30,000 artists from 1974-81 and helped to employ them in nearly 200 cities. It represented “the most significant, if unintended, federal investment in cultural labor since the New Deal,” according to curators Molly Garfinkel and Jodi Waynberg. Though the act did not include provisions for artists specifically, local government and arts workers wisely used the funds for culture. An astounding number of projects devoted to public work and experimentation were funded by CETA—from Senga Nengudi’s Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978) in LA to the community film initiative Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, to the Baltimore Neighborhood Arts Circus, which employed dozens of performers in the city. And that’s just a small selection from the nine cities featured in this sprawling and jam-packed show. One wall is dedicated to Benjamin Wigfall’s Communications Village, where established artists and printmakers mentored local youth in Kingston, New York, thanks to CETA funds. In the San Francisco section, one learns that in 1976 Ruth Asawa cofounded SCRAP and hired CETA-employed staff to reclaim materials in a decommissioned military pier. Like Appalshop, SCRAP still is thriving—a testament of CETA’s reach and its relevance. —Lauren O'Neill-Butler

Asad Raza is a situationist. Not the Debord or Vaneigem type: he’s more liable to make you laugh. Case in point: He once rerouted a river so that it ran through a Frankfurt gallery. (Thirsty visitors could drink its filtered water.) He turned a sixteenth-century Milanese church into a tennis court. Mucking around with space, getting us to think about who—or what—goes where: the world feels softer, deeper, still worth believing in after you leave a Raza show.

Poor rats: they usually provoke disgust and screams. In Thigmotaxis (the rat show), he asks us to put aside repulsion. Using concrete and wood, he’s designed small sculptural toys for the rodents to explore, touch, and play with. On a wall is a piece that’s corrugated and striated, and that (should the mood take us) we can rub up against too.

Another room has video footage of the mini sculptures near New York’s stoops, garbage areas, court houses. It’s pixelated, mostly color-leached, voyeuristic. Echoes of John Carpenter movies, of Francis Alÿs’ The Nightwatch (2004), in which we get to view night-cam surveillance of a fox set loose in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Here the rats resemble thieves casing the joint, hanging around like post-club ravers, making sudden moves like parkour runners. They’re in the company of flies, spiders, birds. They’re sensualists who learn through touch. Though we may never love them, we would do well to learn from them. —Sukhdev Sandhu