VVVIDE

Szara (1965), the feminine form of “gray,” in Polish, is the earliest work on view in this slender showcase of eight relatively small, sometimes minor pieces from different points in Magdalena Abakanowicz’s otherwise vast and marvelous career. Typical of her work from the ’60s and ’70s, Szara is made from sisal and horsehair—but as my friend, art historian Dorota Biczel, pointed out to me, less typical is its painterly approach, with a clear figure-ground relationship (natural fibers making the ground, fibers died black and gray making the “figure,” a glitchy abstract ovoid marred by woven seams). The ebony horsehair is bundled into ponytails cascading down its surface, begging to be pulled. In later works, like Vieux Rouge (1983), it’s all ground, or maybe all figure—the piece is entirely colored the deep reddish-orange of dried blood, with gashes through its surface on either side of a magnificent mane of projecting fibers protecting (or presenting) the vulva-like seam in its center.

Abakanowicz, who survived the war and Soviet rule, is famous for her textile works, especially her massive, swooping Abakans. She came to textiles to escape the demands of Soviet realism—a woman-coded craft, weaving avoided suspicion, allowed for experimentation, as no one cared to look too closely. The joke ended up being on the authorities, because by the 1970s she had become a wild success, exhibiting widely and internationally. Abakanowicz has said her works are about “ancient sensations and feelings,” history and “humanity prior to history,” and “the problems of mankind.” This little show, which also includes examples of the artist’s eerie figurative sculpture, seems to be specifically about one of mankind’s greatest problems: woman.

  —Ania Szremski

Impersonation and reenactment are staple modes in queer art. Beyond decades of celebrity drag, you could point to Rufus Wainwright’s recreation of Judy Garland’s legendary Carnegie Hall concert or Ron Vawter alternating as gay traitor Roy Cohn and avant-camp filmmaker Jack Smith in his 1992 double act. Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank? is a different sort of séance. Over the course of sixty-five minutes, the gangly, effusive comedian unpacks their obsession with “lost” gay comic Frank Maya, blending Maya’s jokes and their own millennial fame-lust in a giddy and (yes) frankly earnest study of ego and activism.

Before he died from complications related to AIDS in 1995 at the age of 45, Maya was poised to smash the lavender ceiling as an out, TV-ready stand-up comedian. Upon learning of this telegenic trailblazer from the ACT UP era, Bassichis (playing the fawning narcissist) thinks, “I’m going to win a Tony Award.” For Maya, berating the closeted Liberace weeks after the pianist’s death from AIDS and hungering for a cable special were one and the same goal: mainstreaming queer lives. Bassichis quotes poet Eileen Myles, “Frank was trying to make the world safe for Frank. He had a kind of selfishness to him that was political.” To which the latter-day stan adds, “Frank Maya wanted more, and I want more, too. I want to have sex with all of you!” Funnier than it is didactic, the show includes Bassichis’s wistful pop tenor and understated schtick, such as slinging the mic leash over one shoulder like they’re futzing with a strappy dress. Deftly staged by director Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary and The Rocky Horror Show), Can I Be Frank? had a much-lauded run last summer and returns for a Pride victory lap.

  —David Cote

No case ever needs to be made on behalf of obvious genius, and certainly not for one whose extraordinary gifts precisely matched his success; when Raphael died at only thirty-seven, he was already celebrated alongside Michelangelo and da Vinci as one of the titans of his time. Brainy, jam-packed and utterly entrancing, Sublime Poetry recognizes that no artist, no matter how seemingly sui generis, arrives (or leaves) via vacuum. Instead, the exhibition treats Raphael’s hand a bit like a point on a timeline, tracing the lessons he learned working under Perugino, his perfecting of Leonardo’s sfumato modeling, and his indelible influence on the artists who assisted him over the years. Perfection is a wholly human concoction, and Raphael’s pursuit of his version of it is mapped most clearly his drawings, which in moments dominate the gallery walls (not unhappily). By what other means of practice could he have arrived at Virgin Marys and Christs who look alighted rather than painted—or have delivered the subjects of motherhood, childhood, and divinity with such potency and utterly no pablum? He approached carnal desire in much the same way. A portrait of his mistress—perhaps caught in the act of seduction, perhaps having just been seduced—captures how sacred worldly love is too.

  —Jennifer Krasinski

It is routinely asserted that Marcel Duchamp is the most influential artist of the last 100 years. I’m not here to adjudicate that claim, though I can’t disagree with it. I mention his great significance because the absorbing but somewhat stodgy Duchamp retrospective at MoMA would have been that much better if it gave viewers a sense of the monumental impact of his career on his many, many admirers. The absence of the Duchamplitude (oof punning is contagious in le monde Duchamp) is especially notable given that several of his key works were either not available to travel from the Philadelphia Museum of Art—The Large Glass (1915-23), Étant donnés (1966)—or were not re-created for the MoMA show, like the coal bags Duchamp suspended at the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, or the twine maze he created for the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism show in New York. Wouldn’t Sturtevant’s recreation of the 1,200 coal bags installation be wonderful here? Or Joseph Cornell’s Marcel Duchamp Dossier, a boxed work riffing on Duchamp’s mini-retrospective Boîte-en-valise, the latter represented at MoMA somewhat compulsively as a vast room of vitrines filled with dozens of nearly identical versions? Or nearly anything by 1950s-era Robert Rauschenberg, paired with Duchamp’s groundbreaking 1918 “last” painting, the assemblage Tu m’? Or Bruce Nauman’s 1967 From Hand to Mouth, so obviously a homage to Duchamp’s 1959 With My Tongue in Cheek?

Duchamp essentially invented the role of the ironic artist, one whose insouciance, wry humor, and mischievous evasions were catalytic for the twentieth century’s fascination with what I will call the trickster critique: the recognition that producing art under capitalism means uneasily straddling roles of both insider and outsider. The implications of that semi-autonomy in the history of art have been seismic, and demand a follow-up investigation.

Titled Duchamplitude. You’re welcome.

  —Eva Díaz