A NEW REALISM C U R AT E D B Y G L E N N A D A M S O N
FRIEDMAN BENDA 515 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10001
A New Realism By: Glenn Adamson
Worrying about the nature of reality used to be a job for philosophers. It was a specialist topic, to be interrogated through metaphysics and ontology. Most people—including those who believe the world to be shot through with the divine spirit—have gotten along just fine by trusting their own perceptions. To be or not to be may have been the question. But being itself? That was something you could rely on. Today is different. One might say that never has truth come more easily to our fingertips: seemingly any fact, even the most esoteric, can be called up at a moment’s notice; we’re swimming in information. Or are we drowning in it? People are increasingly distrustful of the evidence of their own eyes and ears, and for good reason. For the communication technology that furnishes us with all this data takes at least as much as it gives. It’s a sprawling manipulation machine. Pundits warn us of the ever-deeper fakes yet to come, simulations so captivating that we’ll no longer know (or care) whether what we see is “real” or not. Already, at what is presumably an early stage in the development of virtual worlds, stories and images are presented to us constantly filtered, optimized, calculated for effect. And—here’s the important point— we are all aware of that process. Contemporary culture is self-conscious, overdetermined by the dialectic between fact and fiction. We are ever more aware of our elastic relationship with reality; that the premises on which we distinguish truth from falsehood are becoming increasingly individualized. As we pick and choose the information we want to trust, consuming it like any other commodity, we end up creating a sort of epistemological mood board, our own personalized version of the real. There is no villain here, no one pulling the strings. It’s a maze of mirrors, in which there’s no monster to slay, and seemingly, no exit.1 All this has been long, long in coming. Fake news was born with the printing press. Perhaps never before, however, have so many been so aware of the contingent nature of their own perspectives. One word for it is relativism, and it’s a curse of biblical proportions: having bitten from this apple of knowledge, we can’t easily re-enter the garden of certainty. The natural consequence is to wonder how we might map the contours of this multilayered reality. This is where design comes into the picture. For its great potential, as a discipline, is to provide just that kind of definition: to clarify complex circumstances through objects. Things that we can actually grasp. 1 “I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist,” Samuel Beckett has Inez say in No Exit. “I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much.”
Design, at base, is simply a word for the rigorous processes of sorting, interpretation, decision making, and execution. Against the recent relativism, it is grounded in the conviction that arbitrariness can indeed be overcome through experimentation. Design is a practical discipline, but it does find analogues in philosophy: the Empiricism of figures like John Dewey, who embraced a notion of truth based in ongoing process (as opposed to fixed facts); the ambitious rationalism of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who sought to overcome the haphazardness of random experience by penetrating to the real nature of objects and their interrelationships. “A true idea,” he wrote, “means nothing other than knowing a thing perfectly, or in the best way.” As one might expect, designers are confronting the crisis of the real from numerous vantage points. At one end of the spectrum they are taking the plunge into the digital sphere, creating artifacts that can only be experienced virtually. At the other extreme they are dropping out of the matrix entirely, turning to archaic craft techniques as a sort of holding action. In the broad middle, designers are using digital tools to transmute matter in new ways, resulting in a great deal of innovation, often involving an oscillation across different technical repertoires. Yet do these strategies truly come to grips with our frictionless present? Or do they only glide across, or turn away, from the surface of the possible, rather than delving into its substance? What we need is a new realism. This exhibition aims to explore it. We have included nine participants, who represent a diverse range of perspectives, mediums, and concerns. They share two important traits in common. First, although most were initially trained as fine artists or industrial designers, all are now makers, and intensely so. They take individual responsibility for every aspect of their objects, allowing no intervening mediation—social, technological, or otherwise—into their creative practice. They control the means of production, as the saying goes, and this self-reliance affords them a certain autonomy. Yet none are in any sense traditionalists, treating craft as received wisdom. Their works, often realized through newly invented means, are thoroughly individualist, from their base materiality to their eloquent surfaces. A New Realism is an exhibition about process without preconception, about objects found in the act of making. Second, and in keeping with this approach, our nine participants are exploring subject matter in a very specific way, both subjective and factual. This is the essential formula of realism. The term is usefully distinguished from “naturalism,” which is more to do with verisimilitude: representing what’s seen, as accurately as possible. Realism, by contrast, is a much broader and more complex project, not to do with representation per se. It’s rather a matter of registering the material, psychological and political conditions of everyday life, as honestly as possible. Our new realists have no interest in conceptually elusive, open-ended “provocations.” They look things in the face, recording their own experiences and feelings without equivocation. Thus, they are realists
twice over: once with their hands, once with their heads. Ultimately, it is the interaction between these two creative spheres that creates the possibility of insight. These makers are no different from anyone else, with respect to universal truth; their creativity gives them no superior vantage point. What they can do, however, is materialize their own perspective. Realism has a powerful history. It seems to emerge at moments of crisis, when academicism and idealism— accepted norms of precedent and propriety—seem inadequate. This occurred at various stages in the development of ancient art, and again during the Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth century, when Baroque painters like Caravaggio and Gentileschi brought a newly unvarnished observation to their scenes of violence and piety. It happened again after the revolutions of 1848, when writers like Flaubert, Zola, Dickens, and Eliot, and painters like Courbet, Manet and Millet, began attending to the real lives of the working class. Courbet’s Stonebreakers, painted in 1849, remains an indelible example (though it was destroyed in World War II, when a vehicle carrying it to safety was inadvertently bombed by the Allies). The painting showed two laborers clearing the way for a road, one too young for the work, the other too old. Courbet obscured their faces, perhaps to make them emblematic of a general condition—as undeniable as the rocks they are forced to crack and carry. A century later, in the years after World War II, the French critic Pierre Restany declared the existence of a “Nouveau Réalisme,” which engaged the designed environment through deconstructed readymades or posters (as in the work of Daniel Spoerri, Arman, César, and Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé). At the same time, in America, Leo Steinberg noticed the emergence of a new “flatbed” aesthetic—his way of describing the chaotic yet sensitive proto-Pop of artists like Robert Rauschenberg, who famously declared, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.” In Rauschenberg’s “receptor surface[s],” Steinberg wrote, reality was not so much depicted as indexed: “information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion… the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes.”2 Flip through this exhibition catalogue, and you’ll see all these previous realisms both reflected and refracted. Our nine realists summon up the Baroque theater of the everyday; Courbet’s emphasis on social conditions; Rauschenberg’s registration of a rich, complex social tapestry. But there’s also much here that is, genuinely, 2 Leo Steinberg, “The Flatbed Picture Plane,” lecture, 1968; published in Other Criteria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). See also Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). The breakthrough exhibition for American Pop Art, held at the Janis Gallery in 1962, was called “The New Realists,” in emulation of the French movement.
new. To begin with, this show is multi-perspectival, a diversity of voices that implies a radical de-centering of realist operations. It points to a non-competitive and inclusive model of truth-in-the-making, by all kinds of people, looking at one another in both wonderment and dismay. Relatedly, the nine practitioners in A New Realism are noteworthy for the eclecticism of their influences. Even a partial list of these would have to include constructed textiles and quilts, African sculpture, nineteenthcentury ceramics, the work of Isamu Noguchi, color field painting, Brutalist architecture, 1960s fiber art, postmodern design, and contemporary poetry. Each of these sources is, of course, a reality unto itself. And this, again, is where design comes into the picture. It bears repeating that not all the participants in our exhibition would necessarily identify as designers per se. But all of them do operate somewhere in the vast domain of material culture—those objects, functional and otherwise, that mix freely with people in space, rather than holding themselves loftily apart. There is a certain humility, behind all this work: a presumption that a creative work should not hold itself apart in judgment, but keep company with anyone, anywhere. Looked at like this, it seems almost obvious that realism’s destiny would eventually embrace the practice of design. After all, this discipline has always inhabited the gap between art and life. Design has always been poised at the intersection of aesthetics and functionality; has always provided the props for our individual, self-constructed narratives. Perhaps only now, when objects in general are defined against a virtual “other,” does this doubleness—the combination of personal subjectivity and concrete objecthood—come to seem like an urgent matter. Makers become our metaphysicians, things our best ontological tools. At time when truth is slip-sliding every which way, design gives us something to hold on to. Reality: check.
Installation view: A New Realism, Curated by Glenn Adamson, Friedman Benda, New York, NY, June 3 – July 2, 2021.
WORKS
Tanya Aguiñiga [American, b. 1978] Within/without, 2021 Dyed cotton rope, spaghetti straps, steel, synthetic hair 101 x 64 x 18 inches 256.5 x 162.6 x 45.7 cm
Ferréol Babin [French, b. 1987] NOISE n°1, 2021 Plywood, PVC, steel, Jesmonite 65.25 x 11.75 x 11.75 inches 166 x 30 x 30 cm
Ferréol Babin [French, b. 1987] NOISE n°2, 2021 Plywood, PVC, steel, Jesmonite 35.75 x 11.5 x 11.5 inches 91 x 29 x 29 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Always Light (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 15.5 x 7 x 8 inches 39.4 x 21.6 x 16.5 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] The Hill (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 15.25 x 7.5 x 6.25 inches 38.7 x 19.1 x 15.9 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Belly (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 16.25 x 7 x 9 inches 41.3 x 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Ferréol Babin [French, b. 1987] À LA DÉRIVE, 2021 Chestnut 17.75 x 86.75 x 25.5 inches 45 x 220 x 65 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Portrait III, 2021 Stoneware, slip 30 x 19 x 19 inches 76.2 x 48.26 x 48.26 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Big Head I, 2021 Stoneware, slip 31.5 x 15 x 21 inches 80 x 38.1 x 53.34 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Battered but Beautiful (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 15.5 x 7 x 8 inches 39.4 x 17.8 x 20.3 cm
Terri Friedman [American, b. 1962] You don’t get to know, 2021 Cotton, wool, acrylic, chenille, and metallic fibers 78 x 68 inches 198.1 x 172.7 cm
Terri Friedman [American, b. 1962] Enough, 2021 Cotton, wool, acrylic, chenille, hemp, and metallic fibers 90 x 75 inches 228.6 x 190.5 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Vessel III, 2020 Stoneware, slip 21 x 15 x 15 inches 53.3 x 38.1 x 38.1 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Vessel I, 2020 Stoneware, slip, soda-fired 29 x 10 x 10 inches 73.7 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Vessel IV, 2021 Stoneware, slip 22 x 8.5 x 12 inches 55.88 x 58.16 x 30.48 cm
Carl Emil Jacobsen [Danish, b. 1987] Dark Red Powder Variation #2, 2017 Acrylic, fiber concrete, pigments from crushed bricks, polystyrene, steel 33.5 x 23.75 x 23.75 inches 85 x 60 x 60 cm
Carl Emil Jacobsen [Danish, b. 1987] Wood to Stone Bench, 2020 Wood, stone, steel 22 x 99 x 10 inches 56 x 251.5 x 25.5 cm
Fernando Laposse [Mexican, b. 1988] Agave Cabinet, 2021 Birch plywood, sisal, steel mesh, kiln dried Canadian maple 76.75 x 45.25 x 34.25 inches 195 x 115 x 87 cm
Fernando Laposse [Mexican, b. 1988] Agave Sconce, 2021 Sisal, steel, LED bulb 14.25 x 21.75 x 21.75 inches 36 x 55 x 55 cm
Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Slugger, 2020 Birch, curly birch, varnish, pigment, linseed oil paint 52 x 32.25 x 11 inches 132 x 82 x 28 cm
Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Yes there is, David Bowie, 2020 Curly birch, varnish, pigment 19.75 x 12 x 12 inches 50 x 30 x 30 cm
Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Telemachos, 2020 Curly birch, varnish, pigment 14 x 8.75 x 13 inches 36 x 22 x 33 cm
Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Spinal Spiral, 2021 Curly birch, varnish, pigment 51.25 x 39.5 x 13.75 inches 130 x 100 x 35 cm
Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2021 Blown glass 17 x 8.75 x 7 inches 43.2 x 22.2 x 17.8 cm
Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2021 Blown glass 18.5 x 7.5 x 13.5 inches
Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2021 Blown glass 15.75 x 6 x 7.25 inches 40 x 15.2 x 18.4 cm
Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2021 Blown glass 19.25 x 10 x 10 inches 48.9 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Tanya Aguiñiga In November 2020, in the midst of everything that was happening both for the world and for her personally, Tanya Aguiñiga managed to pull off an exhibition. Titled Estraño—the word can mean both “strange” and “missing”—it consisted of vibrant fiber forms, materializations of joy at a time that was sorely needed, an attempt to “provide relief among the ashes of what once was.” At this time her usual practice, which is as much social as aesthetic—involving a community of makers who are also her allies in various forms of justice work, addressing the myriad oppressions and abuses that occur at the US-Mexican border – had been totally disrupted. She had converted her studio into a school, both for her own child and those of other families, many of whom are in economically precarious situations and had no other recourse for childcare. Somehow, Aguiñiga kept creating. She developed simpler procedures, compatible with chasing kids around a room, constant Zoom meetings, and the occasional clogged toilet. Aguiñiga’s realism, then, is not of the theoretical kind. Every day she confronts what it is to be a person of color in America, dedicating herself to making a difference. If she has one overarching subject, it is “the beauty of things I have learned from other brown people.” That principle shines forth in the work that Aguiñiga has made for A New Realism, titled “Within/Without” It is one of the first things she’s been able to realize after reconverting her studio to its usual use. The kids were back in school, people were vaccinated, and not a moment too soon, given that she had four exhibitions coming up. She brought in her “special ops team” and they went right back to work. Weaving in the morning, advocacy and activism in the afternoon. Formally, “Within/Without” recalls American fiber art in its glory days, by figures like Sheila Hicks and Claire Zeisler. Aguiñiga made it from synthetic “spaghetti straps” bought in bulk from warehouse oversupply in Los Angeles (a typical example of her pragmatic approach). Other, natural fibers are colored using a technique called ice-dyeing, in which the material is laid under a layer of crushed ice, which is then sprinkled with pure pigment; the color seeps in gradually, without mixing. This process imparts a further 1960s counterculture vibe.
Even so, the sculpture could not be more present in its connotations. It is built over a frame that has been “hanging out” in Aguiñiga’s studio for years (a holdover from her activity as a furniture designer; like many of the participants in A New Realism, she was trained in one field but has sought out another). This tubular structure gives it the contours of neon signage—she jokes that “it’s what Bruce Nauman would make, if he were a craft señora”—underlining the work’s fundamental identity as a communicative act. This work signifies. And it does so despite the fact that its specific cultural origins, the experiences of the four women who made it with Aguiñiga, and indeed Aguiñiga herself, are left mostly tacit. That encoding allows for a bit of breathing room, perhaps. Enough breath to laugh: imagine the work’s creators congregated around it, fingers flying, along with their talk. Imagine a scene of joy, despite all the difficulties. Then you’ll understand Tanya Aguiñiga’s particular sort of realism.
Tanya Aguiñiga [American, b. 1978] Within/without, 2021 Dyed cotton rope, spaghetti straps, steel, synthetic hair 101 x 64 x 18 inches 256.5 x 162.6 x 45.7 cm
Ferréol Babin Designers today face an unprecedented range of options to materialize their ideas. Some of these possibilities come close to fulfilling the science fiction of earlier generations: just press the button, and watch the object grow. In practice, it’s never really that simple. 3D printing, CNC carving, and the various rapidly evolving branches of bio-design all have their own complexities and limitations. But a new era is nonetheless upon us. Surely with such means at our disposal, we should be able to determine ever more effective, ever more efficient production? Ferréol Babin wants no part of that. “From the very beginning,” he says, “I knew I wanted to produce the pieces myself, with my own hands. I really need to learn by making.” Though trained initially as an architect and product designer, he found himself antagonized by routines of optimization, balancing out function, cost, and other factors. That seemed to him a narrow pathway, which took him away from the object, not towards it. Time spent at Nagoya University, in Japan, helped send him in a different direction. Settling into a rural studio in France has confirmed it. There, he first deliberately tooled down, concentrating on carved spoons, bowls, and other simple yet nuanced forms; then scaled up again gradually, expanding the studio itself, and arriving at the impressive furniture works that he makes today. They express a realism of touch, of immediacy: an encounter with materiality, unmediated. Babin works with wood, locally harvested, and left unadorned. The chips leftover go into his vegetable garden. And his creations in this medium can seem positively ancient (they are somewhat reminiscent of the earlier works of French designer-artisan Alexandre Noll, who was influenced by Surrealist ideas about primitivism). But he’s no romantic. Alongside these apparently essentialist creations, Babin also works in Jesmonite, an acrylic-based casting compound used in construction and set design. He typically applies it over a substrate, like a thick paint, in alternating layers of black and white. The result is like the static on a non-functioning TV screen, and assertively “fake,” though in fact no less artisanal than his carvings. Babin’s use of these contrasting materials implies a far broader spectrum, from the organic to the synthetic, the primordial to the postmodern. He sees his objects as “speaking to each other, like a family.” And the
conversation is mutually clarifying. The carved wood draws out the organic irregularity of the Jesmonite; the Jesmonite reminds us of the sheer human force (source of all that’s artificial) that must be imposed on the wood. Babin may have purposefully turned his back on the apparatus of contemporary technology. He’s nonetheless showing us, in a focused form, the real condition of contemporary design: its roots in material, thought, and action.
Ferréol Babin [French, b. 1987] NOISE n°1, 2021 Plywood, PVC, steel, Jesmonite 65.25 x 11.75 x 11.75 inches 166 x 30 x 30 cm
Ferréol Babin [French, b. 1987] À LA DÉRIVE, 2021 Chestnut 17.75 x 86.75 x 25.5 inches 45 x 220 x 65 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye What are the key sources for realism, its essential strategies? That depends on where you stand. For Ebitenyefa Baralaye, realism is grounded in the traditions of Africa and its cultural diaspora. (Now based in Detroit, he was born in Nigeria, and spent his early childhood in Antigua.) Baralaye observes that in African sculpture, one might perceive elements both of abstraction and naturalism—but these are not conceived as oppositional, as they conventionally are in the Euro-American context. Instead, as he puts it, “the real is understood as perspectival and experiential, how things are lived with and through.” This insight lies at the heart of Baralaye’s most recent body of work, which consists of tall vessels, all of which are at least implicitly anthropomorphic; some are shaped into the guise of a face. It is tempting to see them as charting a developmental arc, with the basic vessel form gradually taking on human features. In fact, such a progressive framework is far from his intentions. He rather sees each object as an incarnation of bodily presence, expressed in its own lexicon. Technically speaking, the works do not sit at various points along a single spectrum at all: Baralaye has variously employed techniques of throwing, coiling, modeling, and surface embellishment, all of which afford their own specific possibilities of “building intuition into the work.” There is a clear reference, in these works, to the typology of the African-American face jug, which dates back to the mid-19th century; it was likely derived originally from ritual figures and containers made among the Kongo peoples of Central Africa, forcibly brought to America. With this allusion comes a huge weight: enslavement and its attendant tragedies of suffering and erasure. Baralaye is facing up to this history. But he is also looking outward, and forward. “I have been thinking about the encoded nature of faces,” he says, “the way facial features represent not just one person, but a community, a society, and a culture.” These objects, then, are portraits on multiple registers simultaneously—of the self, of family, of the Black community at large. Ultimately, they address the very notion of identity formation, which may be specific (he acknowledges a correlation between his use of dark, iron-rich terracotta and the Black body) but is also transcendent, a shared human experience, beyond racial and cultural difference. “We have become more aware of collective consciousness than we were previously,” he says, “The choice of being with other people is being weighed in a context, the very possibility of exchange of ideas.”
Baralaye’s work has always been concerned with the overlaps and slippages between material and concept. But perhaps only now, in response to the realities of the pandemic and a long-deferred reckoning with pervasive racism, has he become a realist. His subject has become the imprint of experience, and the difficulty, and necessity, of its true expression.
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Portrait III, 2021 Stoneware, slip 30 x 19 x 19 inches 76.2 x 48.26 x 48.26 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Big Head I, 2021 Stoneware, slip 31.5 x 15 x 21 inches 80 x 38.1 x 53.34 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Vessel III, 2020 Stoneware, slip 21 x 15 x 15 inches 53.3 x 38.1 x 38.1 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Vessel I, 2020 Stoneware, slip, soda-fired 29 x 10 x 10 inches 73.7 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Ebitenyefa Baralaye [Nigerian, American b. 1984] Vessel IV, 2021 Stoneware, slip 22 x 8.5 x 12 inches 55.88 x 58.16 x 30.48 cm
Paul S. Briggs “Once you’re in, you’re in, even when you’re out.” Paul S. Briggs is speaking, here, of the lasting effects of mass incarceration. In an earlier stage of his life, he was a Baptist pastor. Part of his mission was to work with imprisoned men and women, and the experience marked him deeply. In 2019, inspired in part by Michelle Alexander’s important book The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay’s documentary film 13th, he committed himself to an exploration of the subject. The works, which he entitled Cell Personae, are modular, box-like structures inhabited by a desperate snarl of knots, expressing the psychology of confinement. There is a lot going on in these works, though, beyond simple symbolism. First of all, they are made of clay slabs and coils. It’s not necessarily clear whether they have fronts or backs (though he has displayed them hanging on a wall: “I wanted you to meet them there”). So, one might read them as vessels, and like all clay vessels, as meditations on interiority and exteriority. Or, alternatively, as architecture. Six by nine inches in size, they could be scale models of jail cells, one inch to the foot. They relate, too, to Briggs’ interest in ancient pyramids and other structures, which despite their overwhelming physicality were also intended as diagrams of a kind, mapping spiritual and cosmic realities. From such deep roots, Briggs has formulated his core artistic principle: to “philosophize concretely.” In this spirit, the Cell Personae are also linguistic. The varying compositions of coils, given their calligraphic curves, suggest phraseology; even if they cannot be literally read, they are certainly articulate. In his most recent body of work, featured in A New Realism, Briggs has brought out this latent writerly aspect through explicit allusion to poetry. This shift in his practice marks a moment of potential transformation, both personally and politically. “It could have been a turn to blues, gospel, rap,” he says. “I was looking for some hope.” Briggs reflects on several poets in the series, among them Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton. Like so many in America and beyond, he was deeply moved by Amanda Gorman’s performance at the January 2021 inaugural ceremony and has given her a particular place of honor. Gorman’s key image of “The Hill We Climb” is represented through ascendant forms, with the coils that had signified the bars of a cell now transmuted into the rungs of a ladder. They are also like the lines of a poem on a page—perhaps especially like these lines:
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: That even as we grieved, we grew That even as we hurt, we hoped That even as we tired, we tried That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious Gorman here expresses her own kind of realism, a wisdom, not at all beyond her years (for it is perhaps her youth that gives her such clarity), compounded of the pain and promise of the Black experience. She finds a way to put it all into the world. So too with Briggs. His newest works show themselves, structurally; their function of containment is “refuted,” as he puts it, a pastor’s word. There’s nothing easy about them. No sense that the place we’re at, collectively, is the place we ultimately want to be. Far from it: yet if Briggs has been looking for hope, he’s found it. “I opened the space up,” he says, “to let in the light.”
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Always Light (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 15.5 x 7 x 8 inches 39.4 x 21.6 x 16.5 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] The Hill (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 15.25 x 7.5 x 6.25 inches 38.7 x 19.1 x 15.9 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Belly (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 16.25 x 7 x 9 inches 41.3 x 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Battered but Beautiful (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 15.5 x 7 x 8 inches 39.4 x 17.8 x 20.3 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Bridges (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 16 x 6.5 x 9 inches 40.6 x 16.5 x 22.9 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963]
Crystal Stair (Poetry Series, after Mother to Son–Langston Hughs), 2021 Glazed stoneware 15.5 x 6.5 x 8 inches 39.4 x 16.5 x 20.3 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Bread and Roses, 2021 Glazed stoneware 17.5 x 8 x 9 inches 44.5 x 20.3 x 22.9 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Shade (Poetry Series, after The Hill We Climb–Amanda Gorman), 2021 Glazed stoneware 16.5 x 7.5 x 9.5 inches 41.9 x 19.1 x 24.1 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Systemic 2 (Refuted Vessel Series), 2021 Glazed stoneware 13 x 7 x 9.5 inches 33 x 17.8 x 24.1 cm
Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Untitled (Refuted Vessel Series), 2021 Glazed stoneware 13 x 9 x 8.5 inches 33 x 22.9 x 21.6 cm
Terri Friedman ENOUGH. UNCERTAINTY. Separately or together, those words make a lot of sense right about now. They are worked into the two large weavings that Terri Friedman has contributed to A New Realism. In the first case, a shuddering NO occupies the middle of the composition; with its big blue E at the top, it’s rather like an eye chart, testing the clarity of our vision. In the second case, the beyond-vivid You Don’t Get to Know, the letters UN… CER… TAIN… TY are jostled about, and sometimes nearly obscured, by surrounding pictorial incident. This non-sequential way of writing is in keeping with the overall logic of the composition (verging on illogic, but not quite tipping into it). The regulation inherent to textile—that shuttling, steady, side-to-side motion—is everywhere disrupted. In its place, Friedman offers a different rhythm, dark and ecstatic. Though made on a loom—and hence, slowly—Friedman’s works possess an urgency that is rare to find, even in painting. That was her original métier (“honestly,” she has said, “I just wanted to make hairy voluptuous paintings and fiber was the obvious direction”) and she has the chops that only long experience in imagemaking can bring. Her compositions do that push-pull, dynamic thing that great abstraction so often does. Visually, some passages assert themselves frontally on the picture plane, while others plunge backward vertiginously. On the more detailed level of mark-making, the shift to textile has, if anything, only enabled her to be more expressive. Friedman’s “yarn paintings” come on strong at first, and then just keep on coming, delivering a suffusion of materiality, color, and sheer force of will. Friedman has inherited some of that unrepressed energy from historical fiber art, by figures like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sheila Hicks, Ed Rossbach, and Lenore Tawney, as well as tapestries designed by fine artists like Joan Miró. Stand back far enough, and you might also notice an affinity to Pop Art graphics, of the Sister Corita Kent variety. Despite all these evident sources, however, her work radiates contemporary energy: that peculiar, contradictory blend of restless anxiety and righteous declaration that seems to characterize our times. Her core tactic—hurling a single, powerful word into a fragmentary, radically contingent image field—may well prompt thoughts of a protest march, the raucous spectacle of public rage and hope, all unfurled. She’s giving us allegories of 21st century culture, complete with the open rifts and unexpected junctions, the looming threats and boundless joys, that arise when people of infinite diversity all try to live together in one place and time. We hear a lot about the state of our social fabric. Friedman is actually making it. It’s an explosive mixture, and it just about holds together. And is it realism? HELL. YES.
Terri Friedman [American, b. 1962] You don’t get to know, 2021 Cotton, wool, acrylic, chenille, and metallic fibers 78 x 68 inches 198.1 x 172.7 cm
Terri Friedman [American, b. 1962] Enough, 2021 Cotton, wool, acrylic, chenille, hemp, and metallic fibers 90 x 75 inches 228.6 x 190.5 cm
Carl Emil Jacobsen Lift something up and put it down again. Then ask yourself what you have learned. That exercise, simple as it may sound, helped Carl Emil Jacobsen along his creative pathway. This was a few years ago, now. At the time he was sculpting objects that could suggest a chunk of tree, or the torso of a person. These “body-objects,” as he describes them, were geared to human scale; they were intended to externalize our subjective experience, so that it can be looked at from the outside. Jacobsen often picked them up, simply in the process of making them and carrying them round the studio. And it got him thinking. “If I lift a heavy stone,” he says, “I learn something about my own body. It’s soft. The stone scratches my underarms. I can feel my bones. And stone is very old, you feel quite young when you come into contact with it—you are just a soft blob that handles it for a second, then you are gone.” Notice the child-like tone of wonder that Jacobsen summons when discussing the most basic of experiences. It is a form of realism, to be sure, premised on the value of direct encounter. An emperor-has-no-clothes variety, which prizes the value of clear-eyed innocence. Jacobsen called one of his previous exhibitions Don’t Know What Shape I’m In. The phrase was an anti-manifesto, announcing a suspension of belief, a deferral of easy answers, so profound that it reopens even the most basic questions. The objects that Jacobsen is showing in A New Realism give shape to this idea. There is, first of all, a bench constructed of wood and two differently colored types of stone, the three materials setting up a steady rhythm along its horizontal axis. The surfaces are left rough, tool scrapes and scoring clearly legible. Like Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, which it superficially resembles, one can imagine the bench carrying on in both directions; what we see is a cross-section of Jacobsen’s making, a marking out of his time with these materials. Jacobsen also contributes examples from his Powder Variations series, which look like ceramics but are made from totally different materials. The surfaces are achieved with pigments from crushed stones and bricks, sometimes processed through burning, and sometimes mixed with other materials like chalk and powdered clay, all put over a substrate of carved polystyrene smeared with fiber concrete. As this formula suggests, the objects appear solid—anchors in space—but they are actually rather provisional. They allude to functionality in general terms, without suggesting any particular use. And, while articulated into definite volumes and voids, they seem to greet whatever space they’re in rather experimentally. Pick one up, if only in your imagination. Test its contours. And let it test yours in turn.
Carl Emil Jacobsen [Danish, b. 1987] Dark Red Powder Variation #2, 2017 Acrylic, fiber concrete, pigments from crushed bricks, polystyrene, steel 33.5 x 23.75 x 23.75 inches 85 x 60 x 60 cm
Carl Emil Jacobsen [Danish, b. 1987] Wood to Stone Bench, 2020 Wood, stone, steel 22 x 99 x 10 inches 56 x 251.5 x 25.5 cm
Carl Emil Jacobsen [Danish, b. 1987] Green Powder Variation #3, 2021 Acrylic, fiber concrete, pigments from crushed bricks, polystyrene, steel 15.75 x 15.75 inches 40 x 40 cm
Fernando Laposse You could argue it’s the least a designer should do—but it’s so, so much. Over the past six years, Fernando Laposse has been undertaking a recuperative strategy among indigenous communities, with his energies concentrated primarily on the Mixteco village of Tonahuixtla, located in the Yucatán. Historically, farming served as the basis of the region’s plantation economy; after the Mexican Revolution, large estates were broken up into ejidos, owned communally and worked independently, family by family. This fragile arrangement has been devastated by a climate change, resulting in wildfires and erosion, and displacement in the market by nylon and other synthetics. Farming, never an easy life, became unsustainable. Communities were gradually depopulated by economically motivated out-migration. Enter Laposse, fresh from his experience in London (first training at Central St Martins and then working with Faye Toogood, among others). He asked himself how, as a designer, he could actually change the world for the better; and determined that collaboration with indigenous people was the answer. What he had in mind was not the “parachuting” strategy so common in contemporary design, anchored on a salable product line, here today and gone tomorrow. No: he would invest in communities holistically, seeking not just to create employment opportunities, but to restore biodiverse ecosystems of land, craft, and people. He originally began his work in Tonahuixtla using multicolored corn husks to make a marquetry veneer for furniture. He was also developing ways of working with the fibers of the agave, a type of cactus used in the production of tequila and mezcal. The leaves, which are discarded as a byproduct from this industry, yield a resilient fiber called sisal. Laposse began his involvement with this material in collaboration with nearby Mayan communities, which traditionally cultivated the plant for use in textiles. Now he has introduced agave fibers to Tonahuixtla, as well, bringing in waste from the mezcal industry. Currently, he is leading an extensive planting of agave—18,000 plants and counting—in order to fight erosion, both literally and metaphorically, restoring a viable agricultural base to the community. The cabinet and light that Laposse has contributed to the present exhibition—shaggy, friendly, and monumental—only take on their full meaning against this backdrop. The objects are as much ethical objects as aesthetic ones and pose as many questions as answers. There is, above all, the problem of scale. When Laposse first began working within artisan communities, he figured his goal was to help as many people as possible. Rapidly, he realized that would be irresponsible: that truly empowering a community takes time and tremendous focus.
Today, Laposse’s work in Tonahuixtla involves members of about 15 families, providing financial support for forty or fifty people. “These people were not artisans,” as he points out. “They were farmers, and there was no history of working with cornhusk marquetry or agave fibers; these are all techniques that I have developed and passed on to them.” This engagement in rural communities undoubtedly has a ripple effect, encouraging related economic activity and renewed local pride. You could still say he’s making only a small impact, in the grand scheme of things. Or, more justly, you could conclude that for any one person to take on responsibility for the wellbeing of a whole community, and to treat them as true equals, is breathtaking in its ambition. What if all the design graduates from every school in the world, all those thousands of talents, were to set out to accomplish something comparable, equally generative and non-paternalistic? For certain, it would be a different world, and quite likely a better one. Is such a prospect “realistic”? Again, you might think not. Laposse is here to show you otherwise.
Fernando Laposse [Mexican, b. 1988] Agave Cabinet, 2021 Birch plywood, sisal, steel mesh, kiln dried Canadian maple 76.75 x 45.25 x 34.25 inches 195 x 115 x 87 cm
Fernando Laposse [Mexican, b. 1988] Agave Sconce, 2021 Sisal, steel, LED bulb 14.25 x 21.75 x 21.75 inches 36 x 55 x 55 cm
Mattias Sellden Just a few planks of painted wood apiece, Mattias Sellden’s objects nonetheless feel like us—like people, that is. Quite how he does this is hard to say. It has something to do with stance: his creations stride forward, or slouch slightly to one side in contrapposto, their weight disposed asymmetrically in space, or plant themselves emphatically, arms uplifted. All just as a human body does. Yet the anthropomorphism of Sellden’s designs is not just a matter of posture. It’s also to do with process. He was trained in interior architecture and furniture design at Konstfack, Sweden’s leading art school: an education in “drawing things to be produced rather than producing myself,” as he puts it. But this academic approach left him dissatisfied; he was antagonized by constantly being asked—as teachers tend to do of their students—“what do you want to communicate?” To answer that question in any direct form, he felt, was likely to yield little more than a witty one-liner: “If one reduces the object to a means of communication, it becomes obsolete as soon as the beholder has understood the message.” Gradually, he felt his way toward making a kind of object that was “practical, sensorial and physical… that exists in its own right, not as a vessel to communicate an idea of metaphysical or political nature.” In practice, this impulse has led Sellden to an experimental way of building, totally hands-on. He keeps an ever-evolving but restricted quarry of planks on hand, about twenty at any given time. He treats the material, he says, “as a living thing (which of course, it is),” arranging each new piece intuitively, maintaining the planks’ natural topology and features, using relatively simple joinery, and adding surfaces in variously opaque or transparent paints, as feels right to him. Each object then leads to the next, in what he describes as a “self-rewarding system.” In comparison to other forms of woodworking—which can be an extremely technical, indeed fussy, discipline —this is obviously a very direct, pared-down methodology. It keeps him directly in touch with what he’s doing. And while in no way traditional, it does hearken back to an earlier attitude to making. Sellden explains this by way of an essay by the late critic Sara Sanius, in which she discusses old cookbooks that often included directions for preparing an animal carcass. Gradually those instructions have disappeared: “the flaying of hares and the killing of eels disappear, butchering charts change from pictures of animal parts in full color to abstracted 3D-meshes.” Design history has undergone a similar transit, away from broad-based material intelligence, towards specialization and separation, a distinction between those who plan and those who execute. This centralized
system is powerful, not least because of its flexibility; as Sellden puts it (here paraphrasing the work of media theorist Lena Andersson), “what happens in the computer is always in flux, everything is always in a state of becoming, rather than a state of being.” It’s not just the 3D rendering that is abstracted in the process, though; so is our relationship to the built environment. Sellden’s objects, in their immediacy, snap us out of all that. It’s important that they are like us, like people, because we can see ourselves in them—a little of how we once were, and perhaps could be again.
Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Slugger, 2020 Birch, curly birch, varnish, pigment, linseed oil paint 52 x 32.25 x 11 inches 132 x 82 x 28 cm
Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Yes there is, David Bowie, 2020 Curly birch, varnish, pigment 19.75 x 12 x 12 inches 50 x 30 x 30 cm
Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Telemachos, 2020 Curly birch, varnish, pigment 14 x 8.75 x 13 inches 36 x 22 x 33 cm
Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Spinal Spiral, 2021 Curly birch, varnish, pigment 51.25 x 39.5 x 13.75 inches 130 x 100 x 35 cm
Thaddeus Wolfe “Brutalism” is a term that’s come up a lot in design circles recently, often in ways that escape its original narrow field of reference. Back in the 1960s, its meaning was limited to architecture: paradigmatically, the concrete buildings of Peter and Alison Smithson in the UK, or Paul Rudolph and Marcel Breuer in the USA; and more generically, the unyielding tower blocks that came to dominate social housing in this period. If you Google the term, the search engine will auto-suggest the query “why is Brutalism hated?” For most observers, the style has become the very quintessence of modernist over-reach: what happens when architectural form tramples the nuanced requirements of the built environment. The cast and altered glass vessels of Thaddeus Wolfe have often been described as Brutalist, though they are the very opposite of domineering. One can see why the comparison has arisen: his objects alternate between textured masses and lighter passages, rather as a modernist building’s thick walls are penetrated by windows. They often feature bold cantilevers and angled steps, again reminiscent of 1960s architecture. But the comparison is only a superficial one, unless we remember that the origin of the term Brutalism lies in Le Corbusier’s béton brut—literally, raw concrete. It’s the rawness that matters. Wolfe’s objects are like exposed nerves, picking up both the intentional and happenstance aspects of their making. Technically, we can say that they are “indexical” (as a print in sand is an “index” of a foot), registering their own history in exquisite detail. This gives them a factual quality, the very antithesis of what one often sees in studio glass, which tends to be either extravagantly extroverted, like a candy-striped hot rod, or else consumed with its own internal refractions. Wolfe’s objects, by contrast, neither impose themselves on their surroundings, nor absent themselves through introverted visual display. They rather sit within and alongside other things in the world, projecting an attitude of relaxed yet insatiable curiosity. “My goal,” he says, “is a synthesis of visual input and ideas from the natural and unnatural worlds into something more complex and abstract, which does not necessarily reference any one specific thing.” This position has led him to describe his works as “assemblages”—a term borrowed from 1960s art, made under the influence of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines. Again, this historical comparison rings true. What Wolfe makes is typically integral, not patched together from different materials, but the way that he goes about making his vessels (a complex process of depositing a stratigraphy of glass layers, and then partly excavating it through cutting and polishing) does continue the tradition of the assemblage, shifting into a new key. Wolfe thereby extends the key insight of all artistic realism. The world is a messy place. To show it as it really is, you can’t just stand back and look. You just have to let it in.
Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2021 Blown glass 17 x 8.75 x 7 inches 43.2 x 22.2 x 17.8 cm
Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2021 Blown glass 18.5 x 7.5 x 13.5 inches 47 x 19.1 x 34.3 cm
Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2021 Blown glass 15.75 x 6 x 7.25 inches 40 x 15.2 x 18.4 cm
Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2021 Blown glass 19.25 x 10 x 10 inches 48.9 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm
A NEW REALISM C U R AT E D B Y G L E N N A D A M S O N
Design by: Olivia Swider Photography by: Gina Clyne, Jeppe Gudmundsen Holmgreen, and Joe Kramm. Published by Friedman Benda 515 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel. + 1 212 239 8700 www.friedmanbenda.com A very special thanks to Glenn Adamson, Tanya Aguiñiga, Ferréol Babin, Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Paul S. Briggs, Terri Friedman, Carl Emil Jacobsen, Fernando Laposse, Mattias Sellden, Thaddeus Wolfe, David Klein Gallery, Galerie Maria Wettergren, and Volumes Gallery. Published on the occasion of the exhibition, A New Realism, curated by Glenn Adamson, Friedman Benda, New York, NY, June 3 – July 2, 2021. Content copyright of Friedman Benda and the artist.