this week in art

ALFREDO JAAR EXHIBITION WALKTHROUGH: THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST

Alfredo Jaar, What Need Is There to Weep Over Parts of Life? The Whole of It Calls for Tears, neon, 2018 (photo courtesy Galerie Lelong)

Who: Alfredo Jaar, Carlos Basualdo
What: Exhibition walkthrough of “The Temptation to Exist”
Where: Galerie Lelong & Co., 528 West Twenty-Sixth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
When: Saturday, May 14, free with advance RSVP, 4:00
Why: Alfredo Jaar is one of the most provocative and innovative artists working today. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956 and based in New York City since 1982, the artist, architect, and filmmaker uses multimedia works to immerse viewers in the images and sounds of sociopolitical strife across the globe, exposing the lies associated with war, government control, rampant capitalism, and other issues. At the Whitney Biennial, people wait on line to experience his 06.01.2020 18.39, a video installation comprising footage from a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington, DC, on June 1, 2020, incorporating a bonus element that makes visitors feel like the helicopters are coming for them. His 2011 installation Three Women made a trio of female activists the focus of the media; it has since been expanded to thirty-three women. Neon projects declare, “I Can’t Go On / I’ll Go On,” “Be Afraid of the Enormity of Possibility,” and “This Is Not America.” Other potent projects include The Skoghall Konsthall, Culture = Capital, Shadows, and Lament of the Images.

His 2018 installation, What Need Is There to Weep Over Parts of Life? The Whole of It Calls for Tears, a quote from the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca, makes its New York debut on May 13 at Galerie Lelong as part of the exhibition “The Temptation to Exist.” The name of the show is inspired by Emil Cioran’s 1956 book of the same name; the Romanian philosopher wrote, “The universe is one big failure, and not even poetry can succeed in correcting it.” Dedicated to Italian photojournalist Letizia Battaglia, who passed away in April at the age of eighty-seven, “The Temptation to Exist” features lightboxes, ink prints, and such neon phrases as “Gesamtkunstwerk” and “Other People Think.”

For the exhibit, Jaar has also curated works from more than sixty-five artists seeking change in the world, creating what he calls “a space of resistance, a space of hope.” Among those included are Dawoud Bey, Luis Camnitzer, Lygia Clark, Valie Export, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Félix González-Torres, Hans Haacke, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Joan Jonas, On Kawara, Glenn Ligon, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Adam Pendleton, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Lawrence Weiner, and Francesca Woodman.

There will be an opening reception on May 13 at 6:00; on May 14 at 4:00, Jaar will hold a public walkthrough of the exhibition, joined by Philadelphia Museum of Art senior curator Carlos Basualdo. Admission is free with advance registration. Don’t miss this rare chance to witness art history in the making.

CAPTURING HOLBEIN: THE ARTIST IN CONTEXT

Hans Holbein the Younger, A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (Anne Lovell?), oil on panel, ca. 1526–28 (National Gallery, London)

CAPTURING HOLBEIN: THE ARTIST IN CONTEXT
The Morgan Library & Museum, Gilder Lehrman Hall
225 Madison Ave. at Thirty-Sixth St.
Friday, May 6, $30, 2:00 – 6:30
“Capturing Holbein: The Artist in Context” continues through May 15
www.themorgan.org

“Welcome to the house / to the Haus of Holbein / Ja, ooh ja, das ist gut / Ooh ja, ja / The Haus of Holbein,” the characters sing in the hit Broadway musical Six, about the six wives of Henry VIII, the king for whom Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543) was the court painter.

Hans Lützelburger, after designs by Hans Holbein the Younger, Death and the Judge, woodcuts, ca. 1526 (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1919)

Right now the Haus of Holbein is the Morgan Library, which is hosting the revelatory exhibition “Holbein: Capturing Character” through May 15. The German-Swiss Holbein was best known for his exquisitely detailed portraiture, including his remarkable 1527 depiction of Sir Thomas More, on loan here from the Frick. These portraits — A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (Anne Lovell?), A Member of the Wedigh Family, the miniatures Portrait of a Court Official of Henry VIII and Simon George, Roundel Portrait of the Printer Johann Froben of Basel, a painting of his early supporter Erasmus, which features the phrase “I yield to none” — go deep inside his subjects, becoming not mere representations in oil but a look into their souls. In her catalog essay “The Pictorial Eloquence of Hans Holbein the Younger,” J. Paul Getty Museum curator Anne T. Woollett writes that the exhibit “considers how the artist engaged with the philosophical debate about the superiority of the written word over the painted image to convey an individual’s interior qualities. Holbein’s masterful manipulation of the viewing experience emerges through close examination of his drawings, paintings, and related works of art such as portrait medals and symbolic jewels.”

But amid all this glorious work, it is Holbein’s 1524–25 print series, “Images of Death,” that is most memorable. A collaboration with blockcutter Hans Lützelburger and based on the medieval danse macabre, “Images of Death” is a startling narrative that follows the skeletal Death as he confronts royals and peasants alike, holding aloft an hourglass, engaging in battle, playing instruments, and leading people to their ultimate, inescapable fate, which comes to everyone regardless of their wealth or power.

On May 6 from 2:00 to 6:30, the Morgan is hosting the afternoon symposium “Capturing Holbein: The Artist in Context” in the museum’s Gilder Lehrman Hall; the program consists of six presentations in addition to the keynote lecture, “Becoming Holbein: Art and Portraiture,” by Jochen Sander of the Städel Museum: “Flexibility and Rapport: Holbein’s Working Method” by Woollett, “Inherent Ingenuity: Holbein’s Portrait of Georg Gisze (1532)” by Alexander Marr of Cambridge University, “Drawing in Time: Portrait Studies by Holbein and His Contemporaries” by the Morgan’s Austėja Mackelaitė, “The Contexts for Character in Holbein’s Narrative Prints” by Jeanne Nuechterlein of York University, “Metalwork Design Drawings from the Circle of Hans Holbein the Younger” by Olenka Horbatsch of the British Museum, and “‘Foolish Curiosity’: Holbein’s Earliest English Afterlives” by Adam Eaker of the Met.

Even if you can’t make the symposium — perhaps the Morgan will record it and make it available later online — be sure to see the exhibit, co-organized with the Getty, before it leaves town. As Morgan director Colin B. Bailey says in the above video, “[Holbein] was the greatest artist of the sixteenth century working in England but really one of the greatest artists of the European Renaissance. His works are rare, they’re fragile, they’re precious, they’re rarely lent, and that’s why this exhibition is such an opportunity.”

CHASING ANDY WARHOL

Audience members chase Andy Warhol through the East Village in immersive production (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

CHASING ANDY WARHOL
Astor Plaza, Broadway at East Eighth St.
Thursday, Friday, and Sunday through June 12, $80
online slide show
www.chasingandywarhol.com
www.batedbreaththeatre.org

The world has spent more than half a century chasing Andy Warhol. Our obsession with Drella, as he was known to his close friends — a combination of Dracula and Cinderella — developed quickly from his carefully constructed public image, his genre-busting films and Pop art, his (and our) fascination with celebrity, and the beautiful and unusual people he surrounded himself with, beginning with his emergence as an art superstar and fashion icon in the 1960s and continuing well past his death in 1987 at the age of fifty-eight.

In the last few years alone, works by or about Warhol, born Andrew Warhola Jr. in Pittsburgh, have been part of such exhibitions and films as “Andy Warhol: Photo Factory” at Fotografiska, the Todd Haynes documentary The Velvet Underground, “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,”“Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks at the Guggenheim,” and “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Met in addition to the brand-new Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries.

Now comes Chasing Andy Warhol, a guerrilla-theater-like immersive presentation by the Manhattan-based Bated Breath company in which an audience of no more than sixteen at a time follows Andy Warhol through the streets of the East Village, not far from many of his old haunts. The show begins in Astor Plaza, where you are given an old red plastic View Master to look at some photo collages to get you in the mood. Then an excited young “tour guide” (Jmonet Hill, Annika Rudolph, or Fé Torres; I saw Rudolph, who was delightfully energetic), carrying a small suitcase and a boombox (through which she blasts the soundtrack) and identifying herself as the world’s biggest Andy fan, is surprised by a pair of Warhols in blue dresses and heels — one of whom pops a small balloon that has the word “art” on it. They run off, and she sets out to find him.

As she leads us down Lafayette and Bowery to Great Jones and Bleecker, there are wigged Warhols in blue, black, and white everywhere (Kat Berton, Grayson Bradshaw, Alysa Finnegan, Teal French-Levine, Youran Lee, Marisa Melito, Luca Villa), but she is after the “real” one in red (Jake Malavsky, Brandon P. Raines, or Kyle Starling). The multiple Andys evoke Warhol’s silkscreen style of printing multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, flowers, Elvis Presley, and other subjects in different colors.

Along the way, as the tour guide shares snippets about Warhol’s life and art, we encounter a puppet of child Andy (operated by Taylor McKenzie or Kayla Prestel) watching Ginger Rogers (Finnegan) posing in an empty white frame; Warhol and the puppet looking into a mirror that describes one of his medical disorders, Saint Vitus’ dance, which affected his movement; Andy engaging in a flirtatious dance with a hot basketball player (Mitchell Ashe) involving a wheeled fashion rack; a movie star (Katherine Winter) posing for paparazzi in front of a Chase bank (Chase — get it?); a dance in an alcove of stone chess tables; and fated meetups with Valerie Solanas (Alessandra Ruiz, who also plays Warhol’s mother, Julia) — just wait till you see what she uses for a gun — and Edie Sedgwick (Antonia Santangelo) in a glittering short dress.

Andy is never without his camera, and the audience is encouraged to take photos and video, but don’t get too caught up in documenting it or you’ll miss lots of cute small touches and clever references. A significant part of the fun is also watching people on the street passing by, wondering what’s going on. Of course, they immediately know it’s Warhol — has there ever been a more recognizable figure in New York City? — and many of them stop and take pictures, big smiles on their faces. But as one of the lucky sixteen audience members, wearing a clearly visible yellow Andy sticker, you can’t help but feel special, like you’re part of Warhol’s inner Factory circle. And the cast, which performs the seventy-five-minute show in forty-five-minute overlapping intervals, deserves extra kudos for strutting their stuff on the sidewalks of New York, particularly during these fraught times, where anything can happen at any time.

Chasing Andy Warhol is created and directed by Bated Breath artistic director Mara Lieberman, with fanciful choreography by Rachel Leigh Dolan, jubilant costumes by Christopher F. Metzger, sets by Christian Fleming, Meg McGuigan, and Jerry Schiffer, lighting by Joyce Liao, and sound and projections by Mark Van Hare. I have to admit that I was disappointed in two of the company’s recent indoor productions, Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec and Beneath the Gavel, but now I’m kicking myself for having missed its immersive, outdoor, on-the-move Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec, which they staged during the pandemic.

Chasing Andy Warhol concludes in an empty bar, where Warhol’s legacy as the original social media superstar is briefly explored. Could there ever have been a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok without Warhol’s obsession with public image and infectious celebration of celebrity and oneself? And, in turn, our obsession with Warhol, who managed his public persona like no one else?

“I am a deeply superficial person,” Warhol said. He also pointed out, “It’s not what you are that counts; it’s what they think you are.” In Chasing Andy Warhol, Lieberman and her talented team delve into the complex enigmatic character in unique, spirited ways, without avoiding his blemishes, as they pursue the mystery that was, and ever will be, Andy Warhol.

THE YES MEN CLOSING RECEPTION / CATALOG LAUNCH

Gilda, Dow’s Golden Skeleton, is part of Yes Men retrospective at carriage trade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: The Yes Men
What: Exhibition closing reception and catalog launch
Where: carriage trade, 277 Grand St.
When: Friday, April 29, free, 6:00
Why: For a quarter-century, the Yes Men — Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (or Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) — have been confronting corporate greed and environmental neglect through “identity-correcting” hijinks in which they portray fake entrepreneurs and spokespeople at actual press conferences, conventions, and television news programs. They build realistic sham websites and use forged IDs to gain entrance to locations they have no business being at as they take on George W. Bush, Dow Chemical, the World Trade Organization, ExxonMobil, the New York Times and the New York Post, HUD in New Orleans, the US Chamber of Commerce, Shell Oil, VW, and, most recently, the United Nations COP26 summit. They pull off the pranks with ingenuity, bold daring, and a wild sense of humor, as evidenced by their hysterical “SurvivaBall,” which is on view at carriage trade’s small but terrific Yes Men retrospective.

The show, which has been extended several times because of popular demand, features Dow’s Golden Skeleton, named Gilda, a gold skeleton wearing a beauty contest sash that declares her an “acceptable risk”; a wall of fake Chevron street ads, riffing on the company’s “We Agree” campaign, making such claims as “I can see sludge & dead birds from my window” with a photo of Sarah Palin, “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow because there isn’t one” with a photo of Don Draper from Mad Men, “We lie and we don’t care — we love money — fuck the world!” with a photo of Jim Carrey from Liar Liar, and “To prove us likes you us will smash your planet” with a picture of Bizarro Superman; a vitrine of ExxonMobil Vivoleum phallus candles made from the skin of the “late” climate change victim Reggie Watts; and copies of a fake New York Times edition that proclaims, “Iraq War Ends,” “Maximum Wage Law Succeeds,” and “Ex-Secretary Apologizes for W.M.D. Scare,” which you can take home and read to your heart’s delight. There is also a case of newspaper and magazine articles and legal cease and desist orders sent to the Yes Men, a collection of fake IDs they’ve used, a pictorial history of the Golden Phallus stunt, and a room where twenty of their short and full-length films are on continuous rotation, from 1996’s Bringing IT to YOU! to 2021’s “Total Disaster” excerpt from The Fixers.

On April 29 at 6:00, carriage trade will be hosting the closing reception of the exhibition, along with the launch of the seventy-two-page catalog ($25; $20 at the reception). There’s no telling who might be there and in what capacity, so be ready for anything. (For more on the show, check out Montez Press Radio’s interview with Jacques Servin and carriage trade’s Peter Scott here.)

GALERIE LELONG: DIALOGUES — ANDY GOLDSWORTHY WITH BRETT LITTMAN

Who: Andy Goldsworthy, Brett Littman
What: Live and livestreamed discussion about new Andy Goldsworthy exhibition, “Red Flags”
Where: Galerie Lelong, 528 West Twenty-Sixth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., and Zoom
When: Saturday, April 23, free, 11:00 am (exhibition continues through May 7)
Why: In September 2020, Cheshire-born, Scotland-based environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy installed 109 hand-painted “Red Flags” in Rockefeller Center, replacing state flags and now featuring the color of the earth from each state. “Collectively I hope they will transcend borders,” he said when he started the project. “The closeness of one flagpole to another means that in certain winds the flags might overlap in a continuous flowing line. My hope is that these flags will be raised to mark a different kind of defense of the land. A work that talks of connection and not division.” He also compared the red earth to the blood running through our veins.

Installation view, Andy Goldsworthy, Red Flags, 2020 (courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York)

The installation has now been reconfigured as an indoor exhibit at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea — whittled down to fifty flags and accompanied by two related videos — where it will be on view through May 7. Goldsworthy’s work with natural materials is well documented, in such films as Thomas Riedelsheimer’s 2001 Rivers and Tides and 2016 Leaning into the Wind as well as Goldsworthy’s permanent Garden of Stones at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. “Red Flags may not have been conceived as a response to recent events, but it is now bound up with the pandemic, lockdown, division, and unrest,” Goldsworthy added back in September 2020. “However, I hope that the flags will be received in the same spirit with which all the red earths were collected — as a gesture of solidarity and support.”

In conjunction with Earth Day, the gallery is hosting a free conversation with Goldsworthy and Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum director Brett Littman, taking place in Chelsea and Zoom on April 23 at 11:00; admission is free in person and online. You can also check out a September 2020 virtual interview Goldsworthy did with the Brooklyn Rail about his flags project and career here.

GILLIAN WEARING: WEARING MASKS / DIANE ARBUS BY GILLIAN WEARING

Gillian Wearing, Self-Portrait, framed chromogenic print, 2000 (collection of Sherry and Joel Mallin, New York)

GILLIAN WEARING: WEARING MASKS
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Panel discussion: Thursday, April 21, free with RSVP, 2:00
Thursday – Monday through June 13, $18-$25, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-423-3500
www.guggenheim.org

In her five-minute 2018 short film Wearing, Gillian, British artist Gillian Wearing repeats, “I’m Gillian Wearing.”

But who is Gillian Wearing? In the revealing exhibition “Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks,” continuing at the Guggenheim through June 13, the fifty-eight-year-old Turner Prize winner explores the idea of “Gillian Wearing” through film, sculpture, photography, painting, and installation, putting viewers in the position of asking themselves who they are as well.

Part of the Young British Artists movement of the late 1980s and early ’90s, Wearing focuses on self-portraiture very differently from such near-contemporaries as Cindy Sherman, who disguises herself as real and fictional characters in cinematic and art-historical tableaux as she explores gender and identity, and Lucas Samaras, whose vast output includes an endless array of self-imagery in multiple formats.

Wearing often uses masks — the show was conceived well before the Covid-19 pandemic — on herself and others to challenge who we are and how we are seen. “I do not like to be on this side of the camera. I’d much rather be on the other side of the camera,” she says in Wearing, Gillian. “Watching me being me alienates me from me, and I don’t recognize myself.” In the film, performers, and Wearing herself, wear AI digital masks of her face. “It’s really about putting myself on the line, and that comes from the risk of being judged and laying myself bare to people’s judgments, but . . . such is life.” Those kinds of feelings are not unique to Wearing, particularly in the social media age, when so many people can engage in sophisticated self-display, creating whatever image they want and hiding behind it for myriad reasons.

Gillian Wearing, 60 Minutes Silence, color video projection, with sound, 1996 (Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London)

Spread across four galleries, the exhibition welcomes you into Wearing’s intriguing world, where nothing is quite what it seems. For Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, Wearing asked strangers on London streets to write down something about themselves on sheets of paper and then photographed them holding up the signs, which now evoke early Facebook posts. “Everything is connected in life,” one man writes. “The point is to know it and to understand it.”

At first, 60 Minutes Silence might appear to be a photograph of twenty-six uniformed police officers arranged in three rows, but it is actually an hourlong video in which the cops try to maintain their position, moving as little as possible. It’s a kind of reversal, since part of a police officer’s job is to keep a close eye on the public, but now we’re watching them. In addition, seeing the 1996 piece in 2022 makes us think not only of the raging controversy over police brutality but also of diversity: We also can’t help but notice that there are only five women and two people of color. In Confess All on Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian . . . , people in masks and wigs share extremely personal stories on a split screen in a large booth, again presaging social media.

But Wearing most often is looking at herself. Me and My Ideal Self features photographs of Wearing placed under glass in a custom frame; on the front panel is an elongated photo of Wearing standing in heels on a wooden box, as if not wanting anyone to see what’s inside. She takes self-portraits of herself as her grandparents, her brother, and other family members, of herself at three, seventeen, and twenty-seven (portraits from fifty to seventy appear on the wallpaper), and of herself as seminal photographers Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Weegee, Claude Cahun, Henry Fox Talbot, and August Sander, the photographer who set out to document German society in People of the Twentieth Century.

There are also video portraits, a collection of masks, a pair of busts of Wearing nearly kissing each other, a prosthetic Wearing head dangling on an immense charm bracelet with other body parts, and Polaroids she took of herself in the 1990s, sans masks. Throughout it all, her eyes, or the eyes of others in masks of her face, are always visible, looking right at the viewer, a performative take on personal identity, memory, and connection.

On April 21 at 2:00, the Guggenheim will host the free, livestreamed panel discussion “Wearing Masks: The Performance of Identity in Contemporary Art,” with senior curator Jennifer Blessing, photographer and musician Farah Al Qasimi, visual artist Malik Gaines, and multimedia artist Colette Lumiere, moderated by Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva.

Given the coronavirus crisis and the ongoing debate over mask mandates as variants keep emerging, Wearing has revisited her 2013 Me as Mask, now taking that wax mask of her face, placing a black-bordered blue mask over it, and having it held up on a stick by a disembodied hand, hollow eye holes staring back at us.

“We all wear masks. We’re all actors,” she says in Wearing, Gillian. “Do you feel that you know me a bit now?” The answer is a rousing yes and no.

DIANE ARBUS
Scholars’ Gate, Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Central Park entrance, 60th St. & Fifth Ave.
Through August 14, free
www.publicartfund.org
online slideshow

In conjunction with the Guggenheim retrospective, Gillian Wearing has gone one step beyond her 2008 self-portrait as photographer Diane Arbus, using the existing photo of Arbus that inspired her picture and transforming it into a life-size statue for the Public Art Fund. The work stands at the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park, in Doris C. Freedman Plaza, on the pavement, not a plinth; she is one of us. The photo of Arbus is part of what Wearing refers to as her “spiritual family,” comprising artists that she has photographed herself in digital masks. As in the photo, the statue depicts Arbus with her medium-format Rolleiflex hanging from around her neck, looking for subjects; she is wearing a dark jacket and white shoes. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” Arbus said in 1971. Wearing now asks what kind of secrets a statue of a photo might hold.

In “An Interview with Myself,” Wearing’s catalog contribution to the Guggenheim show — which includes a thirteen-inch model of the statue and the Arbus quote “If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic” — she writes about portraying herself as others, “The whole process takes several months, and I liken it to how an actor gets into character. By the time I am in full costume, I lose my actual self a bit. It can be disappointing when the mask comes off and it’s my face again.”

In this case, the mask comes off and it is Arbus, a New York City native who specialized in capturing the daily reality of ordinary folk as well as sideshow performers, strippers, female impersonators, freaks, and others on the fringe. “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated,” Arbus said. That statement relates to Wearing’s work, and specifically her portrayals of Arbus, in beautifully complex ways.

JENNIFER PACKER: THE EYE IS NOT SATISFIED WITH SEEING

Jennifer Packer, A Lesson in Longing, oil on canvas, (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of Dawn and David Lenhardt. © Jennifer Packer. Photograph by Ron Amstutz. Image courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Corvi-Mora, London)

Who: Jane Panetta, Jennifer Packer
What: Video tour of “Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied with Seeing”
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art YouTube
When: Exhibition continues through April 17
Why: While everyone else is crowding into the Whitney Biennial, you should break away from the pack and check out one of the best exhibitions in the city over the last six months, the revelatory “Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied with Seeing,” on view at the museum through April 17. The Philadelphia-born, New York City–based artist uses painting and drawing to explore communal and personal memory through dramatic use of color while incorporating art historical tropes associated with portraiture and still-lifes.

In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in the catalog, Packer explains, “I like the idea that I’m the only one who can make a certain painting, and I tend to want to push that, whether it’s technically, conceptually, or emotionally. What I also like about painting is, if I say a word, I can make an image that pertains to that word, and that’s my ideal version. I can paint anything and see anything I’d like to see, even things that I’m not sure I want to see. I saw Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570–1576) when I was in Rome, where he’s strung upside down, and I was thinking about Titian painting this body and deciding how much care to give to Marsyas. I feel the same way: the idea of painting as an exercise in tenderness.”

In paintings such as The Body Has Memory, The Mind Is Its Own Place, Say Her Name, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), Vision Impaired, and A Lesson in Longing, Packer creates eye-catching imagery that demands careful attention from the viewer, as some mysteries are answered but many remain.

Packer, who had two works in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, continues in the interview, “I feel a kind of responsibility. Painting can go where photography cannot. I think my task as an artist is to be more attentive. Everyone should be attentive, but I ask myself to look and reap the benefits and witness pain with that consciousness. I think it’s impossible not to talk about politics, even in the most casual way. I’m thinking about Black representation in portraiture. I’m thinking about walking through the Met and looking at the Rubens, or any other large paintings of that nature, which are about a decadence that was funded through procuring riches from other parts of the world in questionable ways.”

Even if you can’t make it to the Whitney this weekend, there are several worthwhile videos available on YouTube that delve into the exhibit, including a thirteen-minute walkthrough with curator Jane Panetta and an hourlong conversation between Packer and Panetta from February. The title of the show comes from a quote from Ecclesiastes: “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” Packer’s extraordinary work goes well beyond both those senses.