everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. – Exhibition Brochure

everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. Henry

This exhibition of moving image installations, drawn from the Henry collection, spans a wide range of style and conceptual approaches. The title references Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal antiwar novel Slaughterhouse-Five, a non-linear, meta-fictional narrative in which the protagonist struggles to come to terms with the devastating realities of human existence. The author poses fundamental questions that we must all combat, ever more so in the present moment in history.

How do we deal with tragedy and pain? How do we explain it? Can we prevent it? Are there laws to life, and if so, do humans have any say in what these are? Does free will even exist?

Both satirical and yet deeply moving, the title phrase is imagined as the character’s epitaph and summarizes the contradictions of his individual experience as well as the fragile concurrence of our collective existence: it is both impossibly false and yet deeply true. everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. thus references a common thread running throughout this exhibition—the frailty, trauma, loss, and cruelty of the human condition that nonetheless is girded by an irrepressible desire for beauty, love, and connection.

Via a myriad of formats and approaches, the artists in the exhibition suggest that we, as human beings, are ultimately responsible to acknowledge the heart-wrenching truth of life and still strive to create meaning within it.

— SHAMIM M. MOMIN

The Dark Hearts, 2003 – 2004

Sue de Beer U.S., b. 1973

Two-channel video and sculptural installation

Henry Art Gallery, gift of Charlotte Feng Ford, 2021.61

Sue de Beer is an American artist whose work lies at the intersection of film, sculpture, and installation. In The Dark Hearts, de Beer has fused a two-channel projection with a makeshift pink convertible, inviting viewers into the space of her film. On screen, a teenage love story in four acts unfolds, a budding romance between a goth boy and a preppy girl. A sense of dread and possibility, horror and delight characteristic of teenage years pervades.

As American cultural critic Bruce Hainley has written: “The horror? The horror is the world they live in, which necessitates, instead of diary keeping, making ‘morgue entries’ to figure out their lives. This is the world that’s been left to them: darknesses transacting in between boy parts and girl parts, in between loving and leaving, in between teen loneliness and adult existence.”

Intermission, 2003 – 2005

Slater Bradley U.S., b. 1975

Single-channel video (black-and-white, sound); 7:03 mins. Henry Art Gallery, gift of Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson, 2016.229

Slater Bradley is an American conceptual artist whose work crosses disciplines and media, often referencing pop culture and exploring themes of youth, identity, and mortality. In Intermission, Bradley draws on American pop star Michael Jackson’s music and image to create a melancholy meditation on the fleeting nature of youth. Lyrics from Jackson’s 1995 song “Childhood” are used as text on intertitles that appear between segments of black-and-white film, recalling the conventions of silent films, while a figure with striking similarities to the famed musician is seen wandering through a bleak, snowy landscape.

La Lección Respiratoria (The Breathing Lesson), 2001

Dora García Spain, b. 1965

Single-channel video (color, stereo sound); 16 mins. Henry Art Gallery, Henry Contemporaries Acquisition Fund purchase, 2002.3

Dora García is a Spanish conceptual artist working in a variety of media, including drawing, film, installation, and performance. Her loosely-scripted narratives analyze (and often psychoanalyze) the impact of language on the social formation of identity. The Breathing Lesson consists of a teacher/trainer commanding a young girl’s breathing, both in rhythm and in manner. An uncomfortable witness to the process, the viewer is not included in the goal of this scenario—to help, hurt, instruct, control? García explores the tensions that arise between teacher and student, delving into the relationships between trust and domination inherent in instruction. A seemingly purposeless lesson, García invites the viewer into an unstable space between fiction and reality.

Negative Bunny, 1994

Nayland Blake

U.S.,

b. 1960

Single-channel video, (color, sound); 30 mins. Henry Art Gallery, gift from the Collection of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol, 2007.69

Nayland Blake is an American conceptual artist whose work addresses questions of sexual, racial, and queer identity. In Negative Bunny, a squeaky-voiced toy rabbit pleads unrelentingly with an unseen interlocutor, deploying a range of increasingly emotionally manipulative strategies to convince them to have sex with him. Blake’s bunny repeatedly proclaims that he’s negative—a reference to his HIV status. Made at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Negative Bunny attests to the profound risks of intimacy and high stakes of trust in the face of the mortal threat of HIV/AIDS.

The rabbit is a long recurring motif in Blake’s work and, often, a stand-in for gay men. Associated with promiscuity and fertility, it is also a mythological trickster, a reference to Joseph Beuys’s hare, and the iconic symbol of Playboy magazine. In Negative Bunny, the rabbit lends levity and accessibility to a then-taboo topic.

Stealing Beauty, 2007

Guy Ben-Ner Israel, b. 1969

Single-channel video (color, sound); 17:40 mins. Henry Art Gallery, gift of William and Ruth True, 2014.296

In Stealing Beauty, Israeli video artist Guy Ben-Ner stages a family drama in the format of mid-century sitcoms in the domestic interiors of IKEA, the ubiquitous Scandinavian home goods store. Filmed covertly at IKEA locations in New York, Berlin, and Tel Aviv, Ben-Ner, his wife, and two children play the part of a fictional family, performing small, domestic dramas in the public space of the iconic big-box store. The story’s central conflict revolves around the son’s theft from a neighbor boy and the daughter’s breaking of curfew. Discussion ensues between father and children around the origins of the term family, notions of private property, inheritance, and exchange, fusing sitcom with theory seminar. The film ends with a manifesto delivered by the two children alone, in which they reject the values imparted on them by their father, declaring: “Property is like a ghost, you cannot possess it without being possessed by it.”

What Are You Thinking, 2011

Lutz Bacher

U.S., 1943 – 2019

Single-channel video, (black-and-white, sound); 3 mins. Henry Art Gallery, gift of William and Ruth True, 2021.65

Lutz Bacher was an American conceptual artist whose diverse practice spanned a range of media and variety of approaches, defying easy categorization. Using a pseudonym, and withholding basic personal information, Bacher cultivated an enigmatic persona. Bacher’s work often employed everyday materials and sound, image, and text appropriated from a range of sources to create works with an enigmatic power of their own. In What Are You Thinking, Bacher clipped dialogue from the 1988 American film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which she combined with a projection that slowly fades from light to dark. First shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2012, this piece is displayed in conjunction with Baseballs II, in which hundreds of used baseballs, a uniquely American artifact, are scattered across the gallery floor.

Baseballs II, 2011

Lutz Bacher

U.S., 1943 – 2019

Baseballs

Henry Art Gallery, gift of William and Ruth True, 2021.22

Diorama (Miami Version), 2002

Candice Breitz

South Africa/Germany, b. 1972

Nine-channel video installation and furniture (color, sound) Gift of William and Ruth True, originally commissioned by Artpace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio, 2012.8

Candice Breitz is a South African artist primarily working in video and photography. Known for her multi-channel video installations in which she excerpts found footage drawn from mass media and popular culture, Breitz’s work investigates the way these exterior influences shape our understandings of self. In Diorama (Miami Version), looping clips of key characters from the American soap opera Dallas—which aired for fourteen seasons between 1978 and 1991—play simultaneously across nine television monitors scattered throughout a fictive domestic space.

To create this work, Breitz clipped phrases from Dallas that speak to themes of family, love, obligation, indiscretion, infidelity, and betrayal—all characteristic of the genre. Rapidly repeated and overlapped in the space, they create a mesmerizing cacophony that exaggerates the ordinary viewing experience. Breitz restages these clips in a space that recalls the aspirational interiors in which viewers, enamored with the lives of the ultrawealthy Texas oil tycoons Dallas portrayed, might have watched the show when it aired.

Possessed, 2001

Shirin Neshat Iran/U.S., b. 1957

Single-channel video (black-and-white, sound); 9:30 mins. Henry Art Gallery, gift of William and Ruth True, 2012.7

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian American visual artist working in film, video, and photography. In Possessed, Neshat worked with a professional actress, Shohreh Aghdashloo, to create a film that explored and revealed the protagonist’s state of mind—one of seeming madness, the only way to express herself in a socially repressive society.

As Neshat notes, this condition “makes direct reference to the Iranian culture, where one lives under constant social control. Therefore, the notion of individuality does pose a threat to the order of society, as it might provoke others to demand the same right. In the film, once the woman enters the public plaza and becomes the focus of attention, she immediately disturbs the space and divides the public into two groups: those who support her and her freedom to behave as she desires due to madness, and others, furiously insulted by her presence, who demand her immediate removal.”

10-16, 1997

Gillian Wearing England, b. 1963

Single-channel video (color, sound); 15 mins. Henry Art Gallery, gift of William and Ruth True, 99.2

In 10-16, English conceptual artist Gillian Wearing amplifies the voices of seven children, aged ten through sixteen, by filming adult actors lip-synching audio from recorded interviews. The adult actors in 10-16 mask the identities of the actual speakers, endowing them with a degree of seriousness usually reserved for adults while also preserving their anonymity as they confess some of their most intimate concerns. The content of these interviews ranges from mundane accounts of everyday pleasures to wrenching confessions of abuse and addiction, capturing a broad range of lived experience.

As Wearing has remarked, “We know children have interesting things to say and use language in a rich way, but when you channel this through an older body, then all of a sudden there’s a pathos and you’re transforming how people look at that.” The disconnect between young voices and adult bodies lends an uncanny aspect that heightens the viewer’s attention.

Black and Blue, 2021

Rashid Johnson U.S., b. 1977

Single-channel video (35mm film, transferred to video); 7:50 mins. Henry Art Gallery, purchased with funds from the Rothschild Family Foundation for the Henry Art Gallery’s Collection, 2021.64

Rashid Johnson is an American artist working in photography, film, and sculpture, among other media. Often autobiographical in nature, Johnson’s work explores race, class, and African American history. Shot on 35mm film during the COVID-19 pandemic, Black and Blue traces the daily rhythms of Johnson’s domestic life over the course of one day. Interspersed throughout the film—either within the domestic environment, or as brief flashes on screen—are the rich range of references that inform Johnson’s work: African sculpture, major photography books, significant literary works by African American writers, and artworks by his peers. The work takes its title from (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, a 1929 jazz standard originally composed by legendary jazz musician Fats Waller and later popularized by Louis Armstrong, which Johnson’s son plays on the piano in the film.

Split Eye, 2012 – 2017

Kaari Upson

U.S., 1972 – 2021

Single-channel video (HD video, color, sound); 33:44 mins. Henry Art Gallery, purchased with funds from The Buddy Taub Foundation, 2020.6

Chandelier Inversion, 2011

Kaari Upson

U.S., 1972 – 2021

Mixed media

Courtesy The Art Trust created under Kaari Upson Trust and Sprüth Magers

Kaari Upson was a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist best-known for The Larry Project, her extended and obsessive investigation into the life of a man she never met, comprised of works in a variety of media and spanned two decades.

In this installation, Upson combines film and sculpture, projecting her haunting film, Split Eye, against the backside of Chandelier Inversion. A sense of imminent threat and claustrophobia pervades the enigmatic film that references Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s 1929 Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, as well as modern psychoanalytic theory through its use of twinning and mirror images. The sculpture itself is part of The Larry Project, an inverted reconstruction of a chandelier that hung in Larry’s home that was made according to photographs Upson took in the private, domestic space before it was destroyed in a fire.

everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs. Support for this exhibition is provided by a gift from Charlotte Feng Ford. Media sponsorship provided by The Stranger.

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