You can see this in the canvases he made as he neared that surgery and post-op. Viewing a painting like The Japanese Bridge (Pont japonais), ca. 1918–24,one assumes that the vibrant chartreuse and heavy dabs of crimson must have looked slightly more naturalistic to the artist—they are so unusual, so different from his earlier, iridescent pastel palettes. In Weeping Willow (Saule pleureur), ca. 1921–22, gestural lines blur the image until it veers into abstraction. Without the title as a guide, the arboreal referents of his arching brushstrokes would hardly be recognizable.

In “Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape,” on view at the St. Louis Art Museum through June 25, the enduring impact of Monet’s vision hits hard. I mean both his literal and artistic vision—these were inextricable for the plein air painter. The show highlights the rhymes between his work and that of the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), focusing specifically on works both artists made in the gardens of Vétheuil, in northern France.

In the catalogue, curator Simon Kelly notes that Monet’s late work had a profound impact on Abstract Expressionism more broadly, prompting painter and critic Elaine de Kooning to coin the term “Abstract Impressionism.” The AbEx movement took off across the pond a couple decades after Monet’s death, and it’s clear that Monet charted some kind of path for the movement.

The connection is so strong, in fact, that in this show, guessing which paintings were made by whom is not as easy as you’d think. “Monet/Mitchell” ought to be in the curatorial handbook of how to make an argument with objects: their shared sensibility is wholly irrefutable the minute you enter the galleries, and its significance deepens the closer you look, the more you read. This is an elegantly pared-down version of an exhibition that premiered at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris last fall, where some 60 canvases portrayed their shared immersive and intuitive approaches to landscape.

Early on, Mitchell claimed a debt to Monet. Mitchell was born in Chicago and active in the New York AbEx movement in the 1950s, but after that, she worked as an expatriate in France for more than 30 years, arguably following in Monet’s footsteps, joining him posthumously in his garden. But eventually and understandably, she grew tired of being bombarded with lazy comparisons to a canonical male artist. In 1957 she stated with characteristic directness that she “liked late Monet but not early.” By this, she meant—whether she realized it or not—that she liked the paintings by the Monet whose vision had grown dull and blurry.

Both artists painted on big canvases, often polyptychs, using vibrant colors and gestural lines. For Monet, but never Mitchell, this sometimes meant muddying up the hues in a tumbleweed-like haze. By 1986, she was disavowing his influence, and declared him “not a good colorist.” The muddy blobs help her case. She was sure to heighten her colors: lemon yellow where he might have opted for gold, for example. And certainly, she was more comfortable with raw canvas than he (the Impressionists were always dodging claims that their works looked “unfinished”). To distance herself from him even further, she began to mispronounce his name intentionally, calling him “Monnet,” to rhyme with “bonnet.” Monet who?

Both painters nevertheless drew imagery from the same garden and deliberately abandoned horizon lines, that hallmark of landscape painting. They both created all-over effects, though with Monet, you might glimpse a fuzzy arch that’s supposed to be a bridge, or a hazy tree that orients you ever so slightly in space. It seems undeniable that Monet’s vision helped free him from some of painting’s conventions, the ones instilled in him during his time at the French academy, and that this freedom prompted Mitchell and her peers to forsake them more emphatically.

History rarely proceeds in a linear fashion that allows the tracing of cause and effect. Still, the question of whether a few visually impaired painters changed the history of art forever—remember Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas too!—remains a tempting one. The paintings here seem to make such a trajectory plain as day, and it matters because it has implications about disability I consider political.

Too often, the vital contributions of disabled people to history and society are overlooked, or considered exceptional rather than foundational. Too often, the history of innovations born of impairment—the telephone, the curb cut—gets forgotten, and ableism carries on, despite all evidence of its illogic. Too often, blurred vision like Monet’s is described as “bad” or in need of correction; it gets labeled a deficit rather than a valuable alternative perspective. And too often, we look for annals of disability in the margins, when time and again, they are right there, in the canon, altering art history’s course.

Murillo has claimed that he doesn’t deal in the invention of forms. Instead, he sees himself as a recorder of affects. “Creating form in painting” is a “bourgeois idea,” he has said. The artist attempts instead to “frenetically download [his] physical energy and emotion onto the canvas.” This may seem to relate him to the Abstract Expressionists, but Murillo cites Jannis Kounellis as an influence for his use of paint as a material rather than a tool for creating illusions. Layering mark upon mark, Murillo intends each stroke to suggest the bodily movements that went into its making, and thus to be “factual.” That is, the marks are meant to register (not represent) Murillo’s mental state and physical exertion.

Murillo’s previous work, however, has been successful not when it actually achieves factuality or antiform, as Kounellis had it, but rather when the forms he has stumbled onto while ostensibly trying to abolish them interact with their own negation in interesting ways. His earlier “word” paintings are a good example: in Untitled (Drawing Off the Wall), 2011, he places two piles of black paint alongside the scrawled Spanish word pollo (chicken). The odd proximity of the nonsymbolic splotches to the unambiguously denotative pollo suggests a tenuous hint of signification for the former (might all this paint have something to do with chickens?) while the latter starts to seem like nothing more than lines on a surface.

Oscar Murillo: manifestation, 2020–22, oil, oil stick, graphite, and spray paint on canvas and linen, three parts, approx. 7 by 39 feet overall; at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

The “manifestation” paintings on view seem weak, then, because they’ve given up this tension. The undeniable verve of some of Murillo’s gestures is seldom conveyed through the whole work. In all the paintings, a large black mess of slashed lines and heavy blobs amasses somewhere central, or suffuses the canvas, generally either overlaid with or surrounded by streaks of color similarly scrawled and diffuse. In each piece too, bits of ground peek out amid thinner scribbled lines remaining from earlier works on these canvases that Murillo repurposed for this series. The size, density, and frantic energy of each painting’s field of black makes it sufficiently commanding that it could serve as a compositional core against which other forms’ qualities and locations might be calibrated. Instead, the blacks zig and zag and mass throughout each work with a disregard for the forms they’re layered on or moving among, which in turn take shape discretely, without relation, like a bunch of radios playing different stations simultaneously. The marks thus seem at once crowded and isolated, resulting in a stylistic aloofness at odds with the individual gestures’ inarguable physical directness.

A representative black mark in one “manifestation” begins in the upper right corner atop a field of dull red, and falls down the edge of the canvas over sections of nearly blank ground, scribbles, screen-printed floral forms, and close-set blocks of color. It doesn’t respond in its shape or thrust to those elements, but is simply laid over them. True, a simple laying on of paint is an important part of what vivifies Murillo’s “word” paintings; but the “manifestation” works fail to convey that sense of engagement, the embattlement and responsiveness of elements, that could make the overwhelming thereness of the paint add up to Murillo’s larger artistic program of protest.

In one “manifestation,” the word power in large block letters is almost entirely covered up by thick black strokes, its power to signify literally rather than metaphorically sapped by its placement on the canvas. The paradox here is that the paintings, in their failed jab at form, end up being extraordinarily hyperformal—they become nothing more than shapes and lines juxtaposed and overlapping on a flat surface.

Just one “manifestation” on view avoids this problem, Murillo allowing his marks there to act out a conflict against each other: each gesture seems to vie with the others to get to the front of the picture plane. A vibrant ball of orange, the painting’s nexus, overpowers a red splotch that recedes into a dense darker region. Some bald bits of canvas, showing through from behind, look exhaustedly thin, as though the support they’re providing the scene could easily give way. It’s in this sort of interaction that Murillo’s painterly mark-making finally rises to the level of genuine agon.

The men in these small, candid shots look back at us familiarly, frozen in their moment of capture. From the widely varied yield of their search terms—which included “gay interest,” “male affection,” and “close male friends”—Krueger has picked out a particularly joyful fraternity of ghosts indexing a range of intimacies not determined by overt eroticism or aggressive masculinity. Many of the images are from photo booths, picturing young men with tousled hair positioned cheek-to-cheek and smiling brightly, often in military uniform. Others, shot in what seem like backyards, show men in various states of tender, gleeful entanglement: carried on shoulders, arm-in-arm, seated close together with their legs gently overlapping. In all, their queerness is gentle, quotidian, and unimperiled. The collection—which the artist began amassing shortly after coming out twelve years ago—comes across as wishful, as an attempt to reimagine white male homosexuality without dominant cis-gendered frameworks, in which Krueger seems to feel implicated and also outside of. Here, then, is an impossible community fabricated from an ambivalent longing to belong but also be apart from. 

The second wooden case, standing beside the first like its other half, is titled For My People (Semiotics #1), and evokes the era leading up to the AIDS crisis. Real and photocopied pages from several texts—including Jonathan N. Katz’s foundational Gay American History from 1976, a 1991 issue of the now defunct queer Portland alt-newspaper Just Out, and images from Hal Fischer’s iconic 1977 annotated photographic series “Gay Semiotics”—overlap to form a chorus of declarations from the margins. WE’RE YOUNG, WE’RE QUEER, WE’RE HERE!! reads a headline in Just Out, while a Mattachine Society poster states HOMOSEXUALS ARE DIFFERENT. These words crowd around the center of the piece, where a silky red tie (a turn-of-the-century gay signal, prior to the “hanky code” Fischer diagrams) hangs next to an ACT UP protest poster bearing one of the movement’s emblematic slogans: KILLING TIME IS KILLING PEOPLE. In a small font beneath that slogan, a quote by David Wojnarowicz speaks to the “ten pounds of rage” replacing each T cell disappearing from his body and driving his nonviolent resistance to this “public and social murder.” While more didactic than its partner, this piece serves as a poignant and succinct synopsis of the despair and passionate will to survive that characterized much of gay life during this period.

Ryan Patrick Krueger, Dear David (Semiotics #2), detail, 2022, wood box, vernacular photographs, envelopes, postage stamps, photocopies, black sand, 45 by 75 inches.

The two-hundred-pound mounds of black sand beneath each of these sculptures nod to Felix González-Torres’s poetic piles of candy and suggest a body’s worth of ashes anchoring fragile, unprotected archives of unstable evidence. The wood boxes themselves call to mind the spare containers in which the bodies of those who died from AIDS in the ’80s—often estranged from those who were legally recognized as family, forced into indigence, or otherwise unclaimed—were buried in unmarked potter’s fields. They also evoke intimate world-building spaces or expressions of a kind of fandom—like Max Ewing’s legendary 1928 installation, “Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits,” a photo-covered walk-in closet—where queer life could be safely and semiprivately conjured and celebrated. 

On the walls opposite the sculptures are two large-scale horizontal adhesive pigment prints that feature, respectively, details from unspecified high school yearbooks from 1953 through ’64, and a black-and-white photo from an undated and unattributed negative. In the latter, a young man dressed in dark, wide-legged pants resembling a sailor’s trousers smiles broadly while carrying another man in his arms. In the former, the cropped yearbook shots locate potential indications of queer relations: a group of young men streaking at night across a lawn; portraits of four male students grouped on a page; loving inscriptions in which students wish each other “the best to you in the future.” Krueger zooms in on these nearly imperceptible moments as if to accord them overdue care and attention, while also underscoring their tenuousness, or the possibility that these relations may not be what they seem. A hand aiming a gun appears amid the selection—a jarring symbol presaging violence. The image forces us immediately out of the curated past and into the present, where “don’t say gay” and anti-trans bills are not headlines from faded clippings but the news of the day, like a gun handled by school boys and all too likely to fire. Mounted on top of both these works, black brackets hold lit candles, adding a memorial air.

“Break a contemporary museum into pieces with the means you have chosen,” reads another prompt from Ono’s iconic book, Grapefruit (1964). “Collect the pieces and put it together with glue.” These texts set the tone for a playful if unfulfillable exhibition, suggesting that large-scale transformation must begin with the imagination. In the next gallery, Franz Erhard Walther’s Trial Sewn Pieces (1963–2001) forms a lexicon of bold colors and architectural silhouettes: a deep-blue pleated textile square, parallel segments of burgundy and brown fabrics, a bright-red jacket crisply starched and folded. A selection of wearable elements from Walther’s related Werksatz (First Work Set), 1963–69, is available for visitors to try on in the carpeted “activation space” nearby. Many of the items require multiple people to perform an activity or become bound by the same cloth. They not only demand careful coordination but ask their wearers to consider the choreographies of their movements and perceptions, both within the context of the artwork and beyond it. Walther and Ono pose similar questions: How do we speak through our actions? What sort of structures do we inhabit and uphold? Contained in these questions is an invitation to communally conceive or enact new structures and alternative modes of coexistence. Interestingly enough, however, the works in “Assembly Required” that most poignantly capture this disruptive and speculative quality of participation are those that require no assembly at all—at least, not here, not now.

Yoko Ono: TYPESCRIPT FOR GRAPEFRUIT (detail), 1963–64, four typewritten cards with ink additions, 5 1/2 by 4 1/8 inches each.

On April 11, 2002, five hundred volunteers gathered at the base of a sand dune outside Lima, Peru. They were instructed to form a line and start shoveling sand in an effort to “move” the 1,600-foot dune over the course of a day. The remnants of this gesture, a collaborative performance by artist Francis Alÿs, are now exhibited as Cuando la fe mueve montañas (When Faith Moves Mountains), 2002–03. Our assembly is no longer required in this instance; the performance has been documented and canonized in the form of video footage, photographs, drawings, and correspondence. This distinction, combined with the simultaneously hopeful and Sisyphean nature of the original task, might spur viewers to think critically about the institution in which it is presented. While ambitious in scale, Cuando la fe mueve montañas represents a more realistic stance on collective action. Five hundred strangers may have come together to “move mountains,” but they did so knowing that the sand (and their efforts) would soon be swept away by larger forces. Any long-term change would require near-constant reinforcement, and even then, their impact would not be recognizable. The work is therefore as much about the limitations of participation as it is a heroic display of cooperation. It reveals the underbelly of participation in/as art; the sense of futility, reluctance, or inaction—perhaps even the twinge of cynicism—that may come with being asked to take part.

“Assembly Required” paints a wide range of artworks with a broad brush, making us acutely aware of their participatory elements but not much else. The result feels more didactic than transformative; it implies a level of agency, yet stops short of addressing the various conditions that facilitate or inhibit agency, and to what end. Countless social, political, and economic barriers limit some and enable others to show up, speak out, or move through space in any particular way. Walther, for example, grew up in Germany during World War II, while Alÿs’s work was conceived in response to corruption and human rights abuses in Peru at the start of the millennium. For the artists in “Assembly Required,” art has served as a vessel for resistance, participation as an exercise in world-making. But what function is it serving here at the Pulitzer today? Who is calling us to action, and in what way? Start with your gaze on the floor, the foundations on which you stand. Break a museum, and collect the pieces. How would you glue them back together?

A paradisiacal swath of blue sky and white clouds spanned the central wall of José Guadalupe Garza’s solo exhibition. Titled Sin Fronteras / Stateless (still from a nonexistent film), 2019, the nine-foot-long vinyl banner, scaled to cinematic proportions, operated as an elusive establishing shot for the show bearing the bilingual subtitle “Al principio, pensaras que estás alucianando. / In the beginning, you will think you’re hallucinating.” The stock image is internet-sourced—as its pixelated quality suggests—while the quote is from La región salvaje (The Untamed), a surreal 2016 art-house movie by Mexican director Amat Escalante about a complicated love affair between a woman and an alien. Around this scene, eleven other works by Garza montaged text and images from a personal canon of American and Latinx films, books, and historical events—high and low, earthly and other-worldly—to reflect their influence on his life and practice.

José Guadalupe Garza, Head Like a Hole (New Order/Megadeth), 2017, inkjet prints, 16¾ by 12¾ inches each.

Indeed, the legacy of US imperial ambitions in and hostile policies toward South America—including those of the last presidential regime—was felt in this show as a long continuum extending into the past and future. The cyanotype diptych Foreign Policy (Burn, Hollywood, Burn remix), 2021, juxtaposes a 1986 photograph of a smiling Ronald Reagan holding up a T-shirt that reads STOP COMMUNISM CENTRAL AMERICA with a still from the 1997 movie The Game, in which Sean Penn holds up a T-shirt that says I WAS DRUGGED AND LEFT FOR DEAD IN MEXICO—AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT. The work’s conflation of aggressive US political meddling with big-budget entertainment (both involving white male actors, one former and one current) is as crass as it is revealing. On the wall opposite this piece, in small framed inkjet prints, two red MAGA hats appeared with new slogans: MEGADETH and NEW ORDER, referencing both the ’80s metal and new wave bands, respectively, and the fascistic death-drive of the alt-right. Produced using a Trump hat generator created by the Washington Post in 2015, the piece doubles down on the irony of Foreign Policy while reinforcing the malignant persistence of Reagan-era politics.

Of the fifty letter-size drawings of women’s faces in “I Live Alone,” only a few bear text. “Content,” states one, the letters articulating the neckline of a slightly dizzy visage. “Road Hard,” says another, the hair neat, mouth firm, and face sharply rendered. On each piece, Kit Keith has delicately applied small, watery strokes of black acrylic to dimpled onion skin stationery, a found material bearing the letterhead of a bygone Missouri circuit court judge as well as the official state seal and a St. Louis address. Produced daily over the course of three months, these direct, unlabored pieces feel diaristic; missives from the isolation of the pandemic, they also evince a mind familiar with self-assessment.

Kit Keith, Untitled, 2021, acrylic on found onion skin letterhead, 11 by 8 ½ inches.

Keith—white, female-identifying, bob-haired—resembles these women, versions of whom she’s been rendering for almost forty years. Why this compulsion toward veiled self-portraiture? As an artist whose career has been celebrated within the confines of the “local”—or, in other words, as an “outsider” to mainstream art culture—Keith has formed a body of work whose relation to her personal life has seemed largely out of her hands. A capsule version of her story goes like this: the youngest of four children, Keith was born to parents raised during the Depression—savers, scavengers, collectors. A few years later, Keith’s father, an itinerant sign painter, moved the family from Springfield, Illinois to Sarasota, Florida. There, Keith spent her early teens as a trapeze artist in the Ringling Bros. circus and worked alongside her father, restoring and painting signs. It was also in her late teens that Keith was diagnosed as bipolar, a condition she openly shares as having definitively shaped her life. After briefly studying at the Art Institute of Chicago during a period cut short by her illness, Keith moved to New York, where she and her then husband, a photographer, survived the thrills and ravages of bohemia for roughly a decade. She had solo shows at Ivan Karp’s legendary OK Harris gallery and Exit Art, and did a handful of illustration gigs for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. She then had a son, settled in St. Louis, and got a divorce—a series of experiences intermittently punctuated by debilitating depressive episodes. Here in her adopted city, she found that she could better balance her mental health, art-making, and motherhood.

Spector was born on Chicago’s Northside to a working-class Jewish family that prized books and reading. (His mother confessed to mild horror at his book-destroying art.) A prolific artist with an equally prodigious critical output, Spector co-founded and edited the legendary pocket-sized WhiteWalls: A Journal of Artist Writings (1978–87). Spector’s legacy as a critic, editor, and educator feels inseparable from his art. He has held more than fifteen teaching posts, his last being at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was known as a voluble supporter of artists both within and outside the university, at every stage of their careers; he retired in 2019.

“Alterations” at the Saint Louis Art Museum, on view through May 31, is Spector’s first solo museum exhibition in the city where he lived for over a decade. It gathers forty-four works spanning his career, beginning with pencil drawings from the 1970s, where the artist followed the wavering, torn edge of a page to create overlapping columns of hatched graphite marks, and concluding with more recent series in which Spector collages author photos from the dust jackets of mass-market books to deconstruct the writerly aura. The inclusion of so many early and rarely exhibited drawings is a pleasure to see. Their focus on the mark suggests a foundational connection between drawing itself, the gesture of the tear, and the acts of writing and printing.

Buzz Spector: Tower 2, 2016, collage of dust jacket elements and ink on paper, 52 by 38 inches.

But conspicuously absent are Spector’s most significant book alterations that refer to the history of the avant-garde, such the Broodthaers work or Malevich: With Eight Red Rectangles (1991), a white board with recesses that mimic a Suprematist composition paired with red-covered books matching the hollows in shape and size (this latter work is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago). “Alterations” does include some manipulated books. White Insistence (2009) is titled after a poem by Michael Burkard, in which the white poet reflects on the pervasive whiteness—hair, dress, shoes, words—of an old acquaintance. The text was reprinted by Spector, then bound and torn. Face to Face (2000) alters Japanese artist Ken Ohara’s 1970 book One, a celebrated work anthologizing close-cropped portraits of a diverse array of anonymous New Yorkers. Spector’s tears reduce the book’s imagery to a static, side-by-side display of two faces of indeterminate race and gender. A Passage (1994) contains a book page written by Spector in which the artist attempts to explain his art to an old friend from Hebrew school, who says the work reminds him of “a scholar so erudite” he knew where each letter fell on every page of the Talmud. To which Spector replies, “I’m no scholar, then . . . these books only show what I’ve forgotten.”

It’s hard not to interpret the show’s selections and omissions as revisionist interventions intended to reframe Spector’s predominantly white, male Eurocentricity as an interrogation of the whiteness of systems of knowledge and their endemic nostalgias and amnesias. Two gallery walls lined with six works from Spector’s “Authors” series (1998)—in which he reprinted bound sets of found author photos that he then tore down to wedgelike glyphs and placed on wall-hung lecterns—confronts the viewer like an accidental Rorschach test: does one see in these white faces the oppressive homogeneity of the Euro-American literary canon or a venerable and enviable tradition?

Neither the exhibition literature nor Spector’s extensive reflections on his own work allude to social institutional critique as a key aspect of his practice. Rather, Spector usually positions the book as an object of longing and fetishization. He has eroticized books, analogizing them to vulnerable female bodies to be manipulated by the (male) artist. That tendency has mostly been left out of this show. The only vestiges appear in a small, hand-bound letterpress book entitled Between the Sheets (2003) and Encyclopedia (1982), a torn reference volume with an unmistakably phallic rock resting in its center crease.

Is this the “forgetting” implied in A Passage? The exhibition, in what it does and does not reveal, calls into question the racialized and gendered meaning of Spector’s performance of conceptual art tropes—which, in addition to being characterized by a desaturated “white” aesthetic, also traded heavily in language “perversions” in the form of misogynist double-entendres. A new, critical dimension emerges in “Alterations.” The show seems to argue that deconstructing systems of knowledge while overlooking how whiteness defines and wields the very notion of “knowledge” dooms one to wander the Library of Babel. I see in Spector a Gatsby-like character enthralled by self-invention, the possibility that the voracious consumption of the Euro-American canon could transform the hayseed Franklin (his given name) into the bona fide conceptualist Buzz. I’ve certainly fallen for this myth myself, and spent many years blind to its tragic nature. What makes this exhibition so important is the opportunity it provides for a reckoning, with the self or the institution, however thorny it may be.

Saydnaya (the missing 19db) was presented in a small, dark soundproofed room in the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’s showing of Abu Hamdan’s “Earwitness Theatre”—a touring exhibition for which the artist has been nominated for this year’s Turner Prize. The “earwitness” testimony employed in the installation is from a 2016 investigation into the prison conducted by the collective Forensic Architecture (of which Abu Hamdan is a member) and commissioned by Amnesty International. Because human rights inspectors and journalists have repeatedly been denied entry to the prison, Forensic Architecture interviewed five Saydnaya survivors, using their testimonies to create an interactive model of the prison. This research has figured in several Forensic Architecture exhibitions, an Amnesty International report concluding that the treatment of prisoners at Saydnaya constitutes crimes against humanity, and a legal case in Germany, as well as other artworks by Abu Hamdan included in “Earwitness Theatre.”

Initially, Abu Hamdan used available film sound effects as an aide-mémoire when conducting his interviews with former Saydnaya prisoners, but he found them to be insufficient. To help re-create the noises the interviewees were describing, he assembled his own set of custom instruments. The installation Earwitness Inventory (2018) featured an array of these items scattered across the floor of one gallery, intermixed with more common sound-effect instruments, like half-carpeted stairs, which can be used to produce sounds of people walking. Smaller tools were lined up on a metal shelving unit, including lengths of tubing and (to reproduce the sound of slamming doors, which prisoners had compared to that of a dropped stack of flatbread hitting the floor) a packet of pitas. While these items may have had functional value as investigative tools—used, for example, to ascertain how often detainees heard whippings versus beatings, or heard the trucks whose arrival signaled imminent executions—the installation presented them without context, so they appeared more like decorative props.

The video installation Walled Unwalled (2018) takes the form of a TED talk–style lecture. It’s a slick, breezy production, with long tracking shots of Abu Hamdan delivering a presentation on several court cases that hinged on questions concerning the permeability of walls. In one segment, he discusses the case of South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, who shot his girlfriend through a locked bathroom door. Pistorius claimed that he thought she was an intruder, while the prosecution argued that her voice could have been heard through the wall. Abu Hamdan diagrams hypothetical trajectories of the sound waves to back up the prosecution’s (ultimately successful) case. Another segment of the video focuses on Danny Lee Kyllo, a marijuana grower in Oregon who was arrested in 1992 after police took thermal images of his house without a warrant. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the right to privacy extended to the molecular level. 

Though Abu Hamdan’s work is undoubtedly compelling, it’s worth noting the dangers of uncritically accepting the sort of evidence he presents, especially given the current climate of fake news. The works in “Earwitness Theatre,” co-commissioned by several art institutions, were intended for the transnational art stage, but the investigative material that underwrites them is increasingly being treated as admissible evidence at the International Criminal Court. Is this art in the service of forensic investigation and systemic justice, or the other way around?

This article appears under the title “Lawrence Abu Hamdan” in the October 2019 issue, pp. 92–93.

Álvarez Bravo (1903-93) is often overlooked, while her husband Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002) is acclaimed. In 1997, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a large retrospective of his work, curator Susan Kismaric hailed Manuel as “one of the inventors of the modern vocabulary of photography,” citing his early experiments with abstraction as well as later works, praised by European Surrealists, that made ordinary scenes look extraordinary.

Manuel was indeed a major talent in avant-garde art, which flowered in Mexico after the revolution of 1910–20, but Lola—as the Pulitzer’s exhibition demonstrates—was a seminal figure, too. She learned the rudiments of photography from her husband and was an integral part of the circle that included innovative photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and André Kertész, who flocked to Mexico City in the 1920s. After the couple separated in 1934, she became a professional photojournalist, traveling throughout Mexico to capture images of Indigenous people and architecture for photo essays published in leftist periodicals.

The nearly fifty works on display range from experimental to documentary images and showcase Álvarez Bravo’s keen eye and skillful use of unconventional framing or cropping to emphasize line, shape, and the play of light and shadow. Everyday life in Mexico was a particular inspiration for her non-commercial work, which she referred to as mis fotos, mi arte.

When it suited her, Álvarez Bravo defied reigning avant-garde conventions. One example is Plant Sex (ca.1948), a tightly cropped shot of a maguey plant, a type of agave. Influenced by Weston and Modotti’s sensual closeups of peppers and calla lilies, Álvarez Bravo focused on succulent’s fleshy central stalk and surrounding leaves, transforming it into a simulacrum of both male and female genitalia. In printing the image, she ignored the prevailing ethos of straight photography advocated by revered artists like Cartier-Bresson, who inveighed against manipulating or editing a picture in reaction to the darkroom tricks and soft focus of Pictorialism—considered “feminine” and too painterly. Daring to differ, Álvarez Bravo rotated the negative ninety degrees clockwise, complicating a reading of the photograph by introducing a seemingly impossible light source below the plant.

The regime that took power after the Mexican Revolution saw art as a means of unifying a country with an illiteracy rate of nearly ninety percent. Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco—all men Álvarez Bravo knew well—were commissioned to paint monumental murals glorifying peasants, the working class, and revolutionary heroes. Álvarez Bravo worked on a smaller scale, producing documentary photojournalism for the state. Even in this genre, her work was less didactic and more formalist than that of her peers. The Washerwomen (ca.1940) portrays laundresses as tiny figures, seen from the rear, engulfed by raking shadows that propel the eye from the back to the front of the picture. In the debate about the camera as either an objective recorder of reality or tool to express an artist’s subjective vision, Álvarez Bravo chose suggestive expression.

The exhibition is organized thematically, with images grouped by subject—landscapes, architecture, laborers, and so on. One section collects Álvarez Bravo’s best-known work: portraits of famous artists. Rivera works at a table in his studio. A dapper Cartier-Bresson aims his Leica at an unfinished mural by Siqueiros. The architect Félix Candela sits in a Bertoia chair. Hanging beside this pensive portrait is Álvarez Bravo’s Untitled, 1954, which presents the Candela-designed Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal as a purely formal arrangement of slanted pillars and billowy inverted cones—geometry enlivened by tonal contrasts.

Álvarez Bravo was not only a pioneering photographer; she was also an early exemplar of la chica moderna, the modern woman, in a time when women were just beginning to abscond from the domestic sphere into professions. Álvarez Bravo was one of the first successful female photojournalists, leaving the studio to trek throughout Mexico. In a country of oppressive and virulent machismo, she faced much discrimination because of her gender and was often mocked by male reporters. But, as she told an interviewer in 1979, “I wanted to be something, to find out what is my truth.”

That truth was multifaceted. Besides her work as a photographer, Álvarez Bravo was also an art teacher, a gallerist, a curator, and the co-founder of the first film society in Mexico City. She gave her friend Frida Kahlo her first solo show in Mexico shortly before Kahlo died. Álvarez Bravo’s portrait, Frida Kahlo (on her bed), 1940s, shows the painter in folkloric costume, her face half in shadow. Perhaps the photographer was alluding to Kahlo’s life in the shadow of her more famous husband—a life Álvarez Bravo knew from personal experience.

Álvarez Bravo’s career intersected with a period during which Mexico was transformed socially, economically, and politically. She not only documented those changes but played a significant role in shaping her country’s post-revolutionary culture. As she modestly said in the introduction to a 1982 monograph, “If something useful results from my photographs, it will be as a chronicle of my country, my times, my people, how Mexico has changed.”

The Fagus facility carries historical weight not only because it brings together a century’s worth of manufacturing techniques, but also because it was designed by Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Brown shoots Gropius’s distinctive yellow-brick buildings with a seductive, sleek style of cinematography. Midway through the work, several beautifully composed shots present glass curtain walls reflecting a cloud-speckled sky. Even more striking is a rotating, low-angle pan taken from the interior of one building. The structure’s glass-and-steel frame appears to twist on-screen, producing a disorienting play of light and form. In this moment, the viewer can lose awareness of the larger edifice, instead focusing on the geometric patterns of its elements. It seems appropriate, then, when a calm male voice intones: “It’s best to continue to let your attention rest with your senses, letting the eyes stare softly into the image.”

The voice belongs to a hypnotherapist, Daniel Ryan, who guides viewers throughout the video. At the beginning of the work—before the Fagus buildings or the lasts inside are introduced, when the screen displays only the faintest glow—the focal point is his voice. He leads a relaxation exercise replete with instructions to take deep breaths, relax muscles, and expand awareness. As a montage of archival photographs of the factory plays, he moves into a brief treatise on memory, accompanied by a soundtrack of New Age pulses and hums. He explains the process of “memory reconsolidation,” by which the mind routinely alters memories and restabilizes them to create new mental images, despite our sense of memories as authentic and immutable. He also discusses ways of sharpening memory by using “architectural mnemonics,” or creating imaginary “memory palaces” modeled on real, meaningful places. From there, he begins to deliver a 101 on the factory—its location, designer, function, and notable architectural features—as Brown’s footage of the facade fills the screen.

Just as the glass and steel begin to rotate in the aforementioned shot, however, Ryan’s narration returns to the mode of guided meditation that opens the film. “During this exercise,” he says, “the intention is to let your own memory naturally provide places and experiences that will be the framework of your memory palace.” This directive hangs in the air as the camera moves through the Fagus facility—first the handcraft workshops and then the automated production facilities, the administrative offices, and the cafeteria. Ryan asks the viewer to create a memory palace from whole cloth, but the details of the Fagus spaces invade the mnemonic architecture as it is constructed.

In the video’s penultimate section, the cinematographic tour reaches a showroom and museum, revealing that the production facility is also a UNESCO World Heritage site and tourist destination. The in-house exhibitions at Fagus appear to center on the facility’s architecture, twentieth-century shoe production, and canonical design history. Fagus is, among other things, a place of history—a site of institutional authority where narratives of production, nationalism, and modernity are disseminated. Brown is interested in the ways this history is variously embodied and represented in the spaces he documents, but is even more intrigued by its mutability. Early in the video, Ryan states that “new learning can be integrated and old learning can be reframed” during memory reconsolidation. Navigating the landmark industrial palace not as a repository for a fixed historical narrative but as something slightly more open—an organ of collective memory—Brown insists that the meaning of the place can be changed and restabilized to create new forms, at least for those prepared to see the exercise through.