Spring Break

at home, but with time for some art

Morning Feels

Hello People of Art and Wit,

This dispatch comes from the open-window apartment era that is Spring Break 2025. In case you haven’t already heard this, professors—especially adjuncts—still have work to do over the break. For example, I am giving feedback on a MA student’s thesis, revising an article, grading, doing some financial bullshit admin, and getting around to scheduling an appointment with an allergist. But I finally have some spare time to see some art, which I’ve been unable to do the last few weeks. Based on the small amount of what I’ve seen and read about the Anne Imhof performance, I’m glad that I missed it—I am not very interested in vaping fashionistas as a representative minority of today. Harsh?

Tuesday sounds like a good day for art, so does Friday.

Here’s my preliminary list:

1. Camille Henrot, Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street (so I guess I’ll also see that Laura Owens show people also like?)

2. Everything in Tribeca near the Canal R or Q stop (because that’s a quick commute for me and reliably fine)

   1. Swiss Institute counts!

3. Ebecho Muslimova & Maria Lassnig, Magenta Plains, more easterner on Canal (I fell in love with Lassnig’s animated films at Friedrich Petzel in 2011, so I know I might be disappointed with a show of drawings.)

   1. Maybe this could be my final stop on a gallery day starting up near 1st Ave, then traveling southward towards Delancey?

4. Kai Oh, Will You Marry Me?, Subtitled NYC (Greenpoint is no longer convenient for me, so I rarely get out there. Are there any other art reasons to visit Greenpoint, to spur me into action?)

Extra-special Section: Excerpts from a never-published review I wrote about Maria Lassnig in 2011. It’s not as bad as I thought it was those many years ago.

Maria Lassnig: Films

Friedrich Petzel Gallery

535 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

February 18–March 26, 2011

Previous retrospectives of Maria Lassnig’s work have focused on her paintings; however, this is only one part of the artist’s expressionistic flip-floppery between serious and grotesque portrayals of the human body. Simply put, she makes art about the body, but hers is a body that eats, caresses, and ages into experience—the body is a way to see the world.

Friedrich Petzel Gallery has presented exhibitions of Petzel’s work on numerous occasions, but this was the first devoted solely to Lassnig’s films. The 11 works shown in this exhibition span from the 1970s through the 1990s. Kantate (1991) shows the artist in various costumes as she ages from a schoolchild to her current elderly—yet vitalized—state. One moment, she’s an androgynous culottes-wearing child and then by the 1970s, she’s been changed into a leather-and-black-lipstick wearing punk rocker. Lassnig is the only “living” element to her videos; the backdrop, consisting of the various landscapes of her youth, float across the screen as she ages in energetic, bright colors and frantic lines. She sings a slow, rhythmic song about the repetitions of her life where too much remains the same. Despite the animated documentation of events dealing with love and loss, it’s only her surroundings and the fashions that change.

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However serious Lassnig’s portrayals of bodies in anxious and erotic peril, twisted around other similarly strained bodies, she alleviates any nihilistic overtures with humor. In Couples (1972), one of the films shown in this exhibition, two bickering couples at the precipice of ending their relationship, have been turned into cartoon turkeys lying in bed together. The bodies shown in her films, including her own, break down and turn into animals as well as inanimate objects, often when experiencing the torment of aging (and becoming physically undesirably) and the end of a romantic relationship.

How to deal with the strangeness of the unthinking world and uncaring others is another timeless debate that does not need yet another self-interested artistic interpretation. But Lassnig does something different: her films invigorate the impossibility of bodily redemption by implicating the technology she uses as a source of her figures’ discomfort. When the technologies she uses “break down,” like with the flicker stop-motion animation, so does her body. Despite the inevitable breakdown, it brings her closer to her chosen media/medium.