This is the subject of a new book by art historian Claire Bishop, titled Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Bishop posits that our phones have become a kind of “prosthesis for viewing” art, and her book is about how artists are responding to this new normal.

Today, we often treat slow contemplation of a painting as a respite from the onslaught of everyday life, the museum as a rare site of reverent attention. But in her introduction, explaining her interest in attention, Bishop shows this wasn’t always so. Citing critic and historian Jonathan Crary, she writes that the very concept of “attention” emerged in the 19th century as a means of optimizing laborers at the onset of industrial capitalism. Soon, the world witnessed new methods for displaying art meant to focus that attention. By the 1870s, single rows of paintings punctuated by blank wall space replaced crowded salon-style hangs. That same decade, theatergoers began to find their seats facing the stage head-on—no longer arranged in a horseshoe shape offering views of audience and performers alike. And whereas, historically, theatergoing had been a decidedly social experience, talking to seatmates became rude. In theater as in visual art, viewing became a disciplined cognitive experience rather than a sensorial and social one.

As Bishop makes clear in her introduction, there was a classist element to all this. Gabbing peasants, unaware of the new etiquette, were snubbed. “Distraction,” Bishop writes, became “a moral judgment.” Taking this critique into the present, she takes issue with moralizing dismissals of artworks that encourage you to whip out your phone and take a picture, or look something up. It’s elitist, she says, to classify phones and TV as objects of distraction, and set aside art and opera as worthy of reverence.

The four chapters that follow were not originally intended as a book, but are rather four essays written over the course of 10 years; only later did Bishop realize they share the theme of attention. The first chapter, on research-based art‚ is the book’s most significant contribution to the field, and I say this leaving aside my feelings about her claim therein that “the genre has never been clearly defined—or, for that matter, critiqued.” (This magazine dedicated a whole issue to the subject last year, about which Bishop and I exchanged several emails.) Bishop argues that the genre is structured around ways that digital technology organizes information, and even thought: we might not remember the name of something, but we know where to look it up. She defines research-based works as relying “on text—printed or spoken—to support an abundance of materials, distributed spatially.” Typically, such works present viewers with more information than they can meaningfully consume.

For Bishop, Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93) is a formative example: with archival material on shelves and at viewing stations, visitors could research African diasporic culture, especially the reception of hip-hop in Germany. Green deliberately offered a huge quantity of information: she didn’t want her viewers to walk away feeling they had “mastered” the topic. In 1995, though, she created a CD-ROM edition, because viewers never seemed to have enough time in the museum.

Green’s decidedly post-structuralist proposition, Bishop argues, was a necessary move away from master narratives—and one that evinces digital technology’s impact on attention. But the writer is less convinced by later works of research-based art. She notes that Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center (2005–) similarly arranges articles and photographs in vitrines, all absent a grand narrative, or even an obvious theme. By the 2000s, she says, as internet use expanded, people began to feel overwhelmed by information all the time, and stopped needing artworks to reproduce that experience.

The trend of information overload took off, and viewers grew fatigued. The 2002 edition of Documenta featured more than 600 hours of video. Technically, it was possible to watch it all, if you devoted 6 hours per day to the task for all 100 days the show ran. Viewing art came to feel onerous. (If the research-based art trend was the shot, it’s not hard to see why today’s colorful painting became the chaser.) In lieu of information overload, Bishop finds herself “yearning for selection and synthesis,” and
here considers Walid Raad exemplary. Raad offers viewers compelling narrative threads in works that often concern Lebanese history, but he always makes clear his stories are one of several perspectives. There are multiple, but not infinite truths.

IT’S NOT JUST RESEARCH ART OR VIDEO ART presenting viewers with more than we can comfortably consume. Several recent major works of performance art have also done away with the idea of comprehensive viewing, and this is the subject of chapter 2. They might offer no seating, inhumane duration, and/or a looping structure so that viewers can come and go. Two examples Bishop cites are recent Golden Lion winners at the Venice Biennale: Germany’s Faust (2017), by Anne Imhof; and Lithuania’s Sun & Sea (Marina), 2019, by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė.

Sun & Sea (Marina) was a looping nonlinear opera about climate change; viewers could come and go, or simply stay and tune in and out, much as people both attend to and ignore the anthropogenic apocalypse every day. Faust, meanwhile, was a durational performance wherein hot “health goths” strike poses on a plexiglass platform that doubles as a framing device. If you weren’t in Venice that year, you probably saw it on Instagram. Here, Bishop rebuts simplistic critiques of that work as being “too Instagrammable,” effectively calling such dismissals snobby. She says the work instead reflects “a new form of hybrid spectatorship” that smart phones have produced.

But this begs a follow-up question: does Imhof tell us anything new or interesting about this spectatorship? Does merely indexing a condition make good art? One of Bishop’s more salacious arguments is one she makes matter-of-factly, and offhand: “In the twenty-first century,” she says, “works of art tend to be symptomatic of larger conditions, rather than anticipatory fortune telling.” Due to income inequality, she quickly argues, artists are no longer canaries in the coal mine. Even if I thought that characterization of recent art were true, I’d push (beg!) artists to do more than accept and reflect status quo.

Chapter 3 focuses on performance works that Bishop calls “interventions.” These works swap duration for disruption. Here, she makes a useful distinction between guerrilla interventions and institutional ones, Fred Wilsons’s Mining the Museum being the canonical example of the latter. In 1992 Wilson rehung rooms of the Maryland Historical Society with objects from the institution’s collection in a manner that lay bare the state’s history of slavery. It was a provocative piece—but rather than change the museum’s practices, the gesture, Bishop writes, “gave rise to a glut of compensatory invitations,” with institutions delegating critical gestures to artists rather than rethinking their own practices.

Bishop contrasts these interventions with guerrilla-style ones by the likes of Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei, who seized public space and attention without permission. While such works offer important political warnings, they are also symptomatic of a changing mediascape: going viral and making headlines is an important part of the strategy for works looking to generate “provocation, disruption, attention, debate.” In 2004 a member of the Yes Men went on BBC posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman to apologize for a deadly disaster the company had caused—then watched Dow’s share price plummet. What’s key here is not site specificity, as is often true for institutional gestures, but what Cuban artist Tania Bruguera calls “political-timing-specificity.”

Interventions, according to Bishop, “tend to foreground a model of authorship that heroicizes the artist … as a daring rebellious outsider.” There’s a reason, she adds, why many of the artists she cites are men: “this kind of intrepid assertion of the self in public space … privileges those who feel secure enough to penetrate that zone and claim it.” Continuing in this vein, she rebuts critics of Bruguera’s #YoTambienExijo project. Her 2014 performance involved asking Cuba to open up not only to free markets, but to free press and free speech. Because the project involved social media, it necessarily linked to an individual’s profile, even though it was a collective endeavor. Yet some complained that the project centered the artist rather than the cause. Bishop writes that such criticism is “much less frequently levelled at [Bruguera’s] male contemporaries like Ai Weiwei, who are more likely to be heroicized as dissidents,” rather than seen as attention whores.

The final chapter takes an unexpected pivot to the many artists today making work about Modernist architecture, a trend that Bishop argues is the product of the internet placing history at one’s fingertips. Such artworks are a useful case study for laying bare the many problems that artistic research can engender. In researching—or simply searching—online, it’s all too easy to strip objects from their context, and to depoliticize or romanticize them in the process. These works “produce historicity in a register of simultaneity,” Bishop writes, and produce the feeling of “everything everywhere all at once.”

Certain motifs can come to take on myriad meanings, with the “universalism” of the so-called International Style lending extra malleability. So much so that in 2009, curator Adriano Pedrosa organized a whole show of non-Brazilian artists engaging with Brazilian modernism; meanwhile, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20) has been refigured by the likes of Ai Weiwei, Michael Rakowitz, and the collective Chto Delat. Stopping just short of calling Modernist invocations cheap tricks, Bishop jabs that “mid-century modern became synonymous with grown-up good taste,” and adds that countless artists venerate modernism in “an appeal to ancestral spirits”—that its invocation automatically “lend[s] significance to the contemporary object.” Modernism already holds space in our collective attention, and artists reroute those symbols to new ends.

Somewhat unexpectedly, digital art is wholly absent from Bishop’s book: she argues that “the effects of digital technology upon spectatorship are best seen in art that, at first glance, seems to reject digital technology most forcefully.” For this reason, hers is a much more interesting and less obvious argument about the internet’s effect on art than many made by the preponderance of shows and articles in the 2010s. But the wholesale sidestepping of digital and post-internet art, as well as all the scholarship around it, still seems strange. I found myself eagerly awaiting her take on phenomena like immersive experiences—the apotheosis of blending digital viewership with traditional artworks—but it never came. Her brief mention of works by so-called post-internet artists feels cherrypicked in its focus on artists who reproduce the experience of information overload: she omits the many who warned (21st-century artists do warn!) of what was coming, for our attention span, for AI, and so on.

I suspect this omission is for one of two reasons: either Bishop didn’t consider digital art a subject worthy of attention—(would that not also be elitist, I genuinely wonder?)—or because the patched-together essays that constitute her chapters were, as Bishop acknowledges, never meant to form a master argument. Either way, ironically, I have to hand it to her: the elision proves her point.  

Russell’s book is not really about the internet, and it’s not really about appropriation. Black Meme is about virality, dispossession, and the complexities of being visible while Black. Russell asks what it is about Blackness that travels so far and wide. And why is it that images and videos of Black people dominate the visual field in such a way that white content creators feint at being Black to promote audience engagement? To answer these questions, Russell constructs a history that spans 19th-century postcards that commemorate lynchings to the first viral GIF.

Animating each of Russell’s case studies is her multifaceted definition of the “Black meme” as “the mediation, copying, and carrying of Blackness itself as a viral agent” predicated on the “promise of violence” and perpetual performance. The Black meme, she writes, is “as much about the transmission of Blackness as it is about the sight and viewership of Whiteness.” The Black meme shows us “that being seen and consumed does not correlate with being compensated.”

Russell’s Black meme does a lot of work to survey the point at which two major phenomena converge: debates about appropriation and the circulation of images and videos of Black people, often in moments of death or trauma. In Russell’s conception, to be perceived while Black is to be seen in pain, a pain that often acts as a trigger for justice. (She writes about well-known social crises surrounding figures such as Emmett Till, Rodney King, and Philando Castile.) What is agonizing about this is that images of Black pain continue to perform long after their political or social inflection point, in the sense that they continue to circulate and cannot reenter the communities from which they came and become private again.

The controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial is a prime example (and, like nearly all of Russell’s case studies, has been extensively picked over already). Who was Schutz, as a white painter, to claim the image of Till, and to recirculate such a moment of pain and mourning? Referring to the context in which Till’s image was first published in 1955 in Jet, a magazine that had a majority Black readership, Russell writes, “the circulation of Till’s image within a site intended to be engaged for and by Black readers established a radical enclosure of collective intimacy.” But that isn’t necessarily a definitive view. In White Negroes, Jackson argues that, after the white press refused to publish Till’s image, Jet took on the charge “to force America to witness the gruesomeness it had wrought.” In Jackson’s telling, Jet was not an intimate enclosure but a launchpad for intentional virality.

It will always be terrible that suffering has to be put on display to prompt even a modicum of care. So, the question becomes: can images of the kind Russell writes about ever be taken back?

IT IS EVIDENT THAT RUSSELL longs for a controlled space of circulation to emerge within the media ecosystem. Black Meme is most exciting when she suggests paths that might change the way we circulate content, especially in online environments, and analyzes the factors that have led the internet to allow for unbounded transmission. Following the legal scholar K.J. Greene, who wrote extensively on reparations for Black musicians in the context of the illegal downloading mania of the early 2000s, Russell makes the connection between existing legal conceptions of intellectual property law, the public domain, and open-source culture.

A particularly effective example of the threads she weaves together is in her approach to the legal case Lanier v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. In 1850 Swiss zoologist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz embarked on a research trip to the slave plantations of South Carolina, in search of what he called racially “pure” Africans to support the pseudoscientific theory of polygenism that claims different racial groups do not share common ancestry. Among the enslaved people that Agassiz visited were a man named Renty and his daughter Delia, both of whom Agassiz photographed. Agassiz used the resulting daguerreotypes in his report about polygenism, and they were later transferred to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; they were used to decorate brochures and other promotional and educational materials. More than 170 years later, in 2019, Renty’s descendant Tamara Lanier sued Harvard for unlawful possession of the daguerreotypes, claiming they had been taken without consent in the context of enslavement. Her demand was that the photos, thought to be the earliest known photographs of American slaves, be returned to Renty’s surviving family.

In 2021, after a county court granted Harvard’s motion to dismiss Lanier’s claims, she appealed, and the case was brought to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. As Renty and Delia were subjects and not authors, the court ruled that they had no property interest in the photo that Lanier could inherit. As it now stands, the physical daguerreotypes remain in the hands of Harvard, which has thus far made the images, both in physical and copied manifestations, available to the public.

The Harvard Law Review (HLR) suggested that the aim of the court was to allow the images of Renty and Delia to continue circulating, even as the judges recognized the context of slavery and expressed a wish for redress. As was stated in an HLR essay on the case, “what likely made the court wary to recognize some sort of property interest in Lanier was its fear that privatization of the daguerreotypes will result in lack of public access to all sorts of historical images.” But public access as a standard of fairness is something that Russell pushes back on, writing, “this exercise of ‘collective ownership,’ made possible by Harvard placing Renty and Delia’s images into the public domain, echoes the model of ‘open source’ that doubles down as a tactic of dispossession.”

Some internet history: In the early aughts, open-source movements popularized the norm of making code available for public use, and much of the development of Web 1.0 was credited to the free sharing of important knowledge. At the time, it was easy to position the open-source ethos as inherently radical, such that thinkers could write all moon-eyed about a budding high-tech gift economy founded on free labor, and free content as well. But this belief ignored the fact that preexisting power structures dictate who ultimately gets to profit from what is freely shared.

Greene wrote about this issue in the context of how innovations in music by Black musicians went unprotected and uncompensated while white musicians made financial killings. This was possible because Black musicians created wholly new styles, a category that is not covered by copyright law. In his 2008 legal article “‘Copynorms,’ Black Cultural Production, and the Debate Over African-American Reparations,” Greene wrote, “the work of Black artists was so extensively appropriated as to essentially dedicate Black innovation in cultural production into the public domain.”

In Black Meme, Russell applies this thinking beyond cultural production to Blackness in all its viral and visible manifestations. “When we engage Blackness as mythology,” the author writes, “it becomes open-source material, meaning that it can be hacked, circulated, gamified, memed, and reproduced. It is this open-source model that drives what social scientist Kwame Holmes expands on as a form of ‘necrocapitalism’—an extension of political theorist Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics—that makes ‘the value of Black death’ a fungible commodity, worthy of exchange.”

In a country where rights follow property relations, to claim distress without such relations is to be without recourse, grasping at what is “owned” but never recognized. The project of Black scholarship has often been to create a sense of boundedness around Black cultural production such that it might be recognized as something that can be not just compensated but claimed and protected beyond commercial ends. Factor in the internet, and the complexity of the situation soars.

As Russell writes, “To adequately address the economy of unpaid labor triggered by these transmissions on loop necessitates a breaking and remaking of digitality, one predicated on new definitions of authorship. The internet now is the largest institution of visual culture on earth. If this is the case, our very definitions of provenance must be better stipulated and restructured to encompass the study of Black movement and sound as they travel digitally.”

Russell’s plea is powerful, but she more or less stops there, at the point where such work could really begin. Black Meme mentions potential solutions, but mostly in passing. The book references but does not really explain writer Harmony Holiday’s concept of “mimetic emancipation.” And artist Rashaad Newsome’s FUBU (for us, by us) model of viral voguing, meant to renegotiate what Russell describes as “the exposure of queer and Black space as an encrypted third place,” isn’t developed in relation to the idea of the Black meme.

Instead, Russell mentions some of the obstacles to compensation for Black memes, among them the fact that experiences online are valued less than ones offline, even as the potential audience online is far greater. Moreover, certain creators like TikTok dance choreographers argue that they help popularize the music they use, such that these creators are “doubly overlooked” in terms of compensation.

NFTs are dismissed as a potential solution, for they represent “the master’s tools of capitalist monetization in minting their virality.” Because blockchain technologies merely reward attention and are not rooted in “Black, Brown, and queer movement or language,” they merely replicate the existing issue of white creators profiting from Black contributions to the meme pool.

Russell writes that creators of Black memes must “strike, rebel, refuse, mutiny.” She ends the book with powerful commands—“Reparations now! Free the Black meme!”—but these exhortations feel somewhat hollow in the absence of any action that could be connected to such phrases or any new adaptations to the fundamentally unique ways that the internet has changed how we circulate media, the kinds of pain we see, the effects of that pain, and the way we value (or fail to value) cultural production as it exists online. Russell’s contribution is to provide a clear history of how Black performance and pain have consistently molded cultural transmission and hyper-transmission. So yes, “Free the Black meme!” But how?  

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Art seems a poor tool to address these problems, and yet artists continue to make the attempt. Why, and to what effect? These are the questions that shape Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s new book, Beautiful, Gruesome, and True. Published by Columbia Global Reports, an imprint of Columbia University, it is not exactly a conventional art book, as it contains no pictures, and not exactly a piece of investigative reporting, as it presents no conclusions or solutions. Instead, it offers three carefully researched case studies of artists whose work has sprung from some of the most intractable conflicts currently underway throughout the world. In place of illustrations, Wilson-Goldie offers descriptions of works and referrals to websites where they can be seen. For the reader, the result is somewhat unsatisfying but may be a harbinger of a future where images are a luxury only mass-market books can afford. 

Typically, artists working in a political mode challenge social, economic, or civic institutions—including the institution of the art world itself—in the name of social justice. In these cases, they can still appeal to a widely shared sense of order, a set of principles, however tarnished. Wilson-Goldie has chosen to write about artists working in places where governmental institutions have collapsed or capitulated to outside forces, allowing criminality and violence to flourish. In such circumstances, Wilson-Goldie argues, art may operate as a proxy for political discourse that has otherwise been suppressed.

Wilson-Goldie, a Beirut- and New York–based art writer, weaves together biographical narrative, information about the sociopolitical context of artists’ works, and descriptions of specific projects. She writes in an engaging style, but her oddly shifting time frames can make the stories somewhat hard to follow. Each of her case studies involves artists moved to act by horrific events in their native countries. While all have subsequently garnered international art world accolades, acclaim seems beside the point. The work is driven by anguish, rage, and a desire to reach out to others who have also been affected by the evils pervading their world.

Amar Kanwar’s films and installations are created against the backdrop of India’s land battles. His galvanizing moment was the 1991 assassination of Shankar Guha Niyogi, a charismatic trade unionist whose efforts had brought together steel workers, Indigenous farmers, and contract miners in a formidable challenge to prevailing top-down models of rural and industrial development. With his death and the ultimate failure of authorities to bring his assassins to justice, his movement faltered. (The industrialists accused of ordering his murder were initially found guilty, only to have their convictions overturned by a higher court.)

Kanwar was a young filmmaker whom Niyogi had hired to document his activities; but instead of meeting his new employer, the artist arrived in time for his subject’s funeral. He remained to film the aftermath. Lal Hara Lehrake(1992), his short film documenting the outpouring of grief and anger over the murder, set him on a path to explore other collusions between government officials and masters of industry. He has examined such topics as the destruction of farmland and natural resources, land grabs by multinational companies, and the rise of resistance movements. While his immediate targets are specific acts of corporate greed and government corruption, his larger concerns encompass the social and political inequities and environmental devastation visited on rural communities by the global economy.

Kanwar eschews the role of muckraking documentarian, instead searching for a language that melds poetry with resistance. His films take a variety of forms. A Night of Prophecy (2002) carries us across India as individuals recite bits of poetry decrying both economic and caste-based discrimination. A Season Outside(1997) combines memories, dreams, archival footage, and reenactments to explore the scars of Partition, the 1947 division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.

An important early supporter was the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who commissioned A Night of Prophecy for his legendary Documenta 11 in 2002. Kanwar was included in the next three consecutive Documentas as well. His most ambitious project for that event was “Sovereign Forest,” a multimedia work for Documenta 13 in 2012. Its subject is the political and environmental conflict in the resource-rich and largely tribal Indian state of Odisha. The installation’s many parts include handmade books with films projected on their pages; maps; news clippings; samples of the huge varieties of native rice that have disappeared with the onset of industrial farming; and a 2011 film titled The Scene of Crime, which documents landscapes selected for impending industrial development. The work has evolved into an ongoing project that travels the world, as viewers contribute further evidence of the degradation of tribal lands.

WILSON-GOLDIE’S SECOND CASE STUDY is Teresa Margolles, whose work has evolved in the context of Mexico’s drug wars. These conflicts have empowered vicious cartels, engendered widespread military and police corruption, and turned the border between Mexico and the United States into a killing field. Again, globalism has been a contributing factor in this downward slide: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico, signed in 1994 as part of an effort to facilitate free trade among the three countries, inadvertently facilitated the illegal drug trade as trucks more easily crossed from Mexico into the US. In the process, it has decimated local economies in cities like Tijuana, Juarez, and Matamoros. In such border towns, the cartels have emerged as a kind of alternative government.

Margolles’s work makes the violence precipitated by this social breakdown visible to the world at large. Her materials comprise forensic evidence. She uses fabric soaked with the water used to wash corpses, mud from sites where cartel victims are buried, shards of glass from windshields shattered in drive-by shootings, and blood mopped up from crime scenes. While the materials are gruesome, the works themselves tend to be understated. A minimalist or conceptual aesthetic serves as a foil, making it all the more shocking to learn that a red flag is dyed with blood from execution sites or that a Richard Tuttle–like arrangement of strings comprises threads used after autopsies to sew up the bodies of persons who suffered violent deaths. Wilson-Goldie focuses in particular on Margolles’s contribution to the Mexican Pavilion for the 2009 Venice Biennale, where visitors were led through a series of galleries that distributed her unsettling works throughout the decaying 16th-century palazzo.

Margolles came to this work with a background in documentary photography and forensic pathology; but probably more relevant was her participation in SEMEFO, a Mexico City–based art collective that specialized in disturbing works employing such elements as animal cadavers and human remains. After the group’s dissolution in 1999, Margolles continued in a similar vein, while directing her work toward more explicit connections between violence and the global drug economy.

As Wilson-Goldie points out, there is a strong collaborative element in Margolles’s work. She collects her necro-based materials from families of victims and includes them in ritual actions and performances. Most recently, Margolles has been focusing on transgender sex workers, who are among the few denizens left behind in certain neighborhoods of Juarez in the wake of murders, violent crime, and the closing of the dance halls where they worked.

THE THIRD CASE STUDY BRINGS US Abounaddara, a Syrian film collective whose mostly anonymous members posted brief weekly videos on the internet between 2011 and 2017, during the worst years of the Syrian civil war. Wilson-Goldie begins her story in the early 2000s, when the death of Syria’s right-wing dictator Hafez al-Assad led to hopes of a more open and democratic society. However, after some initial reforms, these hopes were dashed when his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, proved equally repressive. Abounaddara emerged when a group of independent filmmakers came together to create short online videos. These were designed to evade official censorship by appearing to be simply trailers for films yet to be made.

Wilson-Goldie focuses extensively on Maya Khoury, one of the group’s founders and one of the few members to emerge from anonymity. A self-taught filmmaker like many in the collective, Khoury was initially motivated by the desire to complete a project about an elderly clothmaker working in the Old City of Damascus. Her frustration with the distribution options available to her led to the formation of Abounaddara.

Pro-democracy uprisings roiled the Arab world in 2010 and 2011, leading to the short-lived hope for an “Arab Spring.” Following the crushing of these hopes, Syrians responded to brutal suppression with weekly Friday protests. This became the time frame for the release of Abounaddara’s films. These short clips, which remain available online, are deliberately fragmentary. They employ a variety of formats, including pop references, surrealistic juxtapositions, reportage, literary allusions, and brief interviews. While not explicitly political, all are tinged with the frustrations, dangers, and absurdities of the everyday life of ordinary Syrians making the best of an impossible situation.

Work produced by Abounaddara is less easily assimilated to art world institutions than that of Wilson-Goldie’s other case studies. This is in part because of the decentralized nature of the group, and probably also because their films are directed primarily at local rather than international audiences. As a spokesperson for the group explains: “Our priority is not to criticize the regime. We address our people with our images to prove to them that their experiences and their dignity matter.” Thus, though Abounaddara began to receive invitations to prestigious exhibitions like Documenta and the Venice Biennale in the second half of the 2010s, the collective ultimately resisted this notice. Its weekly films ceased in 2017. Plans for longer films petered out, with a feature film commissioned for the 2017 Documenta left unfinished, never making it past a rough cut.

In place of a conclusion, Wilson-Goldie gives us an epilogue in which she reports on the unraveling of Abounaddara, Kanwar’s participation in the selection of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa as the organizers of the recently closed (and very problematically received) Documenta 15, and Margolles’s commission to create a temporary public monument to transpeople in London’s Trafalgar Square. It seems telling that these stories end not with a report on their impact on their respective causes but with the varieties of art world attention they have received. As a result, despite these artists’ inspiring examples, one is left with a sense of the distance between the art world’s self-congratulatory embrace of such heroic activities and the gritty and seemingly intractable problems they address.

What good can art do? The case studies here leave one with the sense that art in the political arena operates as a means of bearing witness, fostering empathy, and engendering relationships among the victims of global power plays. In her preface, Wilson-Goldie remarks that while this work implicates everyone, it may have its biggest impact on the art world and its debates over who brokers power. That seems laudable, but is it enough? In the face of the horrific threats to individual and collective human survival documented here, one can’t help but wish for more. 

Curiously, given that Richter is by all evidence Buchloh’s favorite artist (or at any rate, the one who sustains the biggest share of his attention), their relationship has been marked from the beginning by profound differences of approach. Buchloh acknowledges that his leftist Frankfurt School orientation doesn’t jibe very well with Richter’s rather consistent conservatism. There’s also the further issue that Richter is a painter, whereas Buchloh, since the ’80s, has been one of the most acerbic detractors of painting’s post-Conceptual resurgence. All this makes for a book that feels almost as difficult to read as it surely was to write.

Gerhard Richter does not lend itself to easy summary. This is due not only to its length and the complexity of its arguments but also to its piecemeal genesis. Because much of the text was written decades ago, parts of the book have an uncannily anachronistic effect: issues from the 1970s discussed as if they were current; literature of the 1990s cited as if it were the final word. There are many repetitions, plus a few moments when Buchloh seems to contradict himself. (And some factual errors: a puzzling assertion that fashion photography, tourism, and advertising were all forbidden in East Germany is easy to disprove, for example.) Yet there is a remarkably constant if not exactly straightforward through line from front to back.

It goes something like this. Having abandoned a fledgling career as a Socialist Realist painter in East Germany, Richter arrived in Düsseldorf in 1961, by which point there was literally nothing left of the tradition of painting that could lay claim to historical legitimacy: neither the representational aims of pre-modernist art (or its zombielike revival in the official culture of the Eastern Bloc), nor the utopianism of the pre–World War II avant-garde, nor even the most recent attempts at regrounding modernism in gestural expressivity, literalist reduction, aleatory procedures, or naive technophilia. Every one of these models had been either corrupted by fascist or Stalinist totalitarianism, or recuperated by capitalist spectacle. Worse still, as Theodor Adorno famously said, and as Buchloh likes to remind us, making art or poetry at all seemed to have become irredeemably barbaric after Auschwitz. 

In the German context with which Buchloh is preoccupied, however, all these impossibilities were swept under the rug of “collective conditions of daily anomie, amnesia, and repression.” This was necessary for ordinary people (and artists) to get on with their lives after having committed, or at least having failed to prevent, the worst crimes in human history. As Buchloh tells it, most German art of the 1950s and ’60s contributed to that amnesia instead of countering it, acting as if it were possible simply to jump back into an international modernist mainstream as though nothing of importance had happened since 1933—as if abstract painting, for example, could just pick up where it had left off, when all the utopian intensity that had once been abstraction’s raison d’être had gone up in smoke. This was not an option for an artist of Richter’s intelligence.

So, what to do? For Richter, the answer was not to stop painting, but rather to paint his way through painting’s death. Richter found himself caught in a catch-22 that existing modernist strategies could not resolve. As we’ve already seen, according to Buchloh, at least, everything that had once been utopian or even just plausible in avant-garde art had lost credibility by 1945 or, in some cases, much sooner. At the same time, any return to pre-modernist representational aims—such as capturing the individuality of a bourgeois sitter in a portrait, or finding adequate means by which to represent collective experience through history painting—was even less of a possibility. Modernism had wiped the slate clean.

Buchloh is enough of a modernist to despise any “return to order.” Yet, for him, the loss of painting’s old powers was a real loss. It was a loss of experience, of memory, of the possibility of representing oneself and others as historical subjects rather than mere pawns of economic and political forces. By the end of the war, then, advanced art would seem to have been stranded in an unenviable position. But by fully acknowledging “the subject’s inevitable and eternal submission to political, social, economic, and legal and administrative control,” as Buchloh puts it a bit melodramatically, art could at least stay honest about its own extremely limited field for maneuver: it could avoid serving this miserable world as an imaginary escape from the inescapable.

One gets the sinking feeling that, for Buchloh, refuting the illusion of freedom is more important or at least more adult than trying to achieve freedom. Maybe the latter just isn’t on the menu. Yet, if done just right, art’s “mimesis of the hardened and alienated,” as Adorno put it, can flicker up as a minimal kind of resistance in its own right, to the extent that artistic mimesis of domination—refusing oneself the consolations of beautiful color, fine draftsmanship, and everything else that we typically enjoy in art—can function as a critical allegory of the historical forces that made such ascesis unavoidable. That is, reduced, disillusioned art such as Richter’s might provide an impetus to reflect on domination from a zone of irony or withdrawal that, all the same, doesn’t mistake itself for real freedom. 

For Buchloh, determining exactly what keeps you from being an autonomous subject might be the first step toward becoming one again. The following (which is only the second half of a sentence that does an excellent job of conveying the flavor of his prose) is how Buchloh ends a chapter on Richter’s dreary digitized “strip” pictures from the 2010s: “the fact that they enunciate the very aesthetic options resulting from the advanced conditions of a total desublimation of the subject within a new technocratic universe is paradoxically their singularly radical assault and their sole gesture of resistance.” To paraphrase, the fact that these paintings look like hotel-lobby art is exactly what makes them radical, inasmuch as they don’t pretend to be better than they are.

There is an exquisitely fine line in most of Buchloh’s chapters between surrender and allegorical/mimetic critique. Sometimes he appears genuinely not to know which side Richter comes down on. Although the book is often positively didactic, Richter’s “simultaneity of conflicting impulses”—his seeming inability to decide, or at any rate to let the viewer know, whether he really believes in beauty, mimetic representation, and so forth—regularly leaves the author with few options but to note an aporia. A surprising number of chapters end with unanswered questions. But Richter throws a curveball into the melancholy dialectic of enlightenment that Buchloh has been explaining up to this point. The curveball is tradition.

Famously (or infamously), Richter’s work all but systematically revives the classical genres that dominated painting before the 20th century: landscape, still life, memento mori, history painting, portraiture. Buchloh asks himself several times if this isn’t just conservative. Does Richter really believe these genres still work as they’re supposed to? 

The answer, of course, is no: Richter approaches each of them as already and inevitably ruined. But that’s just the point. If portraiture, say, is obsolete, a residue of a type of well-rounded subjectivity that capitalist spectacle has done its best to eliminate, then continuing to make portraits after that subjectivity’s disappearance perhaps serves as a reminder that another world is possible—or at least was possible at some point in the past. As with portraiture, so with everything else: all of Richter’s work oscillates between a brutally secularizing destruction of aesthetic ideology and a Walter Benjamin-ish redemption of the obsolescent.

This endlessly repeated maneuver is indeed reminiscent of the Mechanical Turk in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”: “an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning move of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove.” As is often the case in dialectical thinking, the danger here is that of having your cake and eating it too. It feels as if Buchloh’s Richter can do no wrong. Either his art mimetically repeats and exacerbates (and thus “allegorically” criticizes) the total reification of the world, or it takes the Benjaminian tack of reviving obsolete forms as resistance against those same conditions. Buchloh has an ability to redeem even Richter’s most lugubrious projects as Germany’s quasi-official state artist (his giant German flag in the Reichstag; his window for Cologne Cathedral) as, precisely, redemptive—but not of the things they seem to be redeeming, namely German national identity and the Christian religion. This is thin gruel for a leftist art history.

The trouble is distinguishing between a good (dialectical) anachronism and a bad one (a “return to order”). The key idea is credibility. Buchloh often says that by 1912, or 1928, or 1945 (etc., etc.), a given kind of art had ceased to be credible or had lost its legitimacy. The task of responsible art, then, is to figure out exactly what has not become illegitimate and then pursue that as rigorously as possible. Richter does this in the medium of painting, according to Buchloh. If both modernist abstraction and premodern pictorial genres had become illegitimate after reaching their respective ends, the only way to keep doing versions of them would be under the cover of a deflating suspension of their former values (Jacques Derrida called this writing things sous rature): that is, an evacuation of old mythical content that nonetheless does not entirely let the redemptive flame go out from the heart of each canceled form. 

Richter’s famous paintings of his daughters are a good example of this (one of them is on the book’s cover). Buchloh obviously finds them grating in their surface-level sentimentality and vaguely Freudian hints of incestuous desire. At the same time, he argues that in the context of advanced capitalism, at least, the family itself—the most traditional of traditional institutions—might function as the “sole site of reconciliation and happiness” after any larger utopia has ceased to be imaginable. Accordingly, the family pictures might even function as a site of “critical resistance and countermemory.” All of this is hedged with question marks and scare quotes, to be sure—but the fact that Buchloh countenances the idea at all is extraordinary.

For Buchloh, the critical effect of such works is tied to the work of mourning that they perform. What they mourn is painting itself. But painting is on some level just a technology of a certain subject. And over the course of the book the subject that Buchloh has in mind is unmistakable: it’s the bourgeoisie. Although this is a disconcerting conclusion to find in a big, quasi-Marxist book, it follows logically from Buchloh’s macro-level perspective. The forms of experience that painting once mediated to its makers and viewers and that it lost in the 20th century are those of the 19th-century bourgeoisie. They’re the ones who kept portrait painting, still life, and all the rest alive. 

In a sense this is a tautology. Subjectivity for Buchloh is always bourgeois subjectivity,  because only the bourgeois were ever subjects; our very idea of what constitutes a subject is an ideology of this class. Richter looks back on painting’s bourgeois patrimony after “the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity (caused by World War II and the Holocaust as much as by the emerging powers of a universally controlling culture industry),” which is why his resurrection of bourgeois genres and representational ambitions retains some credibility, against all odds. If the bourgeois subject is dead, there can’t be much danger in recovering its cultural forms, the obsolescence of which might now provide some friction against the universal eradication of the “politically self-determining subject.”

For younger readers, especially, this may be the point where Buchloh becomes hard to take. The problem is right there in the book’s subtitle: “Painting after the Subject of History.” The subject? Might there be more than one? Even if 19th-century bourgeois consciousness, along with, say, the classical socialist movement, had been ground into dust over the 1930s and ’40s, does that mean there were no “politically self-determining subjects” in the decolonization struggles of the postwar era? What of the feminist movement a little later?  

Even bracketing these predictable objections, one might still ask why it’s so persistently the bourgeoisie for which Richter and Buchloh mourn, given that the “Subject of History” would also seem to be code for the Marxist collective revolutionary subject, the proletariat. For Buchloh, if ever there was a moment in which the proletariat was on the cusp of attaining world-historical subjectivity, it was over by 1921, with the advent of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (a partial restoration of the capitalist economy in the USSR). So, Buchloh’s subject of history is not only a ghost, but a ghost with a split identity: Richter’s mourning for that subject has to encompass both a destroyed bourgeois subjectivity as well as a never-realized proletarian one.

Hence the almost unimaginable weight that Buchloh puts on Richter’s head. Richter’s job is nothing less than to pick up the pieces of the “common ruin of the contending classes” that Marx saw as one of the possible outcomes of any social struggle and which Buchloh seems to take for the real outcome of the 20th century’s murderous first half. (Though it’s reasonable to ask if rumors of the bourgeoisie’s death might be exaggerated.) Aside from being incredibly depressing, this begs the question whether it’s possible to conceive other projects of mourning, even within Buchloh’s Eurocentric perspective. For example: The Aesthetics of Resistance (1971–81), Peter Weiss’s extraordinary three-volume novel about the exiles of young German leftists on the cusp of World War II, is also a monumental work of mourning, but for a proletarian subjectivity that was in fact much more the victim of Europe’s disaster than was the bourgeoisie. Ridiculous as it would be to ask Richter to be Peter Weiss, it’s worth speculating whether such a thing would even be possible in Richter’s medium, or whether painting is locked in a Totentanz with bourgeois culture in a way that novels aren’t. In which case maybe Gerhard Richter is as good as it gets. And if so, 650 pages is not disproportionate at all.

But there are further reasons for the intensity of the author’s investment. It’s worth remembering that Buchloh is a disappointed member of West Germany’s 1968 generation. This factor is unmistakable both in his admirably frank introduction to the book as well as in crucial chapters such as the beautiful, concise essay on Richter’s October 18, 1977 painting cycle, which reflects on the deaths in prison (officially by suicide) of the leaders of West Germany’s militant Red Army Faction. Buchloh’s work is so deeply entwined with his own personal and political trajectory, with postwar Germany’s larger political history—indeed with what I am a bit frightened to call his Weltanschauung—that it makes little sense to evaluate his claims as if they were being made in a contextless eternal now. Every page of this book wrestles with the long process of postwar German memory-work, and for that reason every page is partisan. But it’s a partisanship on behalf of a missing collectivity: if the subject of history is dead, maybe all that’s left is to remember it, in hopes that it might one day be resurrected. 

Buchloh’s war is an old one, then. It’s unclear what this book might offer to younger scholars or artists for whom historical prohibitions rarely look very binding. No matter. Some loyalties transcend instrumental reason. We can be glad that Buchloh continues his work, delivering briefs to a court of historical reckoning that just isn’t there anymore. 

This article appears under the title “History’s Painter” in the September 2022 issue, pp. 38–42.

Anna Watkins Fisher’s book Safety Orange, 2022, University of Minnesota Press.

“If the U.S. cultural present were a color,” Anna Watkins Fisher writes in her new book, “it would be Safety Orange.” The highly visible hue is the subject of a new 98-page volume, Safety Orange, which came out in January as part of the University of Minnesota Press’s reliably good “Forerunners” series. The book considers the color as an emblem of neoliberal “responsibilization.”

In Watkins Fisher’s conception, safety orange can be read as a tool that the government uses to warn everyday citizens of hazards and disrepair while placing the responsibility of safety on those citizens, rather than the municipal powers that be. Traffic cones and tape that prevent pedestrian access are mere stopgap measures that make passersby accountable for avoiding obstacles, regardless of whether a safe alternative route is provided. Flashes of orange on graphs and maps signal growing Covid hot spots without suggesting what might be done to dial them back to yellow.

Pick up Watkins Fisher’s book, and you’ll start seeing America through orange-colored lenses. Our last president was orange, while our current one deploys the color left and right as part of his bid to patch up crumbling infrastructure. According to the author, in at least eight states—Ohio, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Texas, and Florida—residents commonly joke that the traffic cone is their official state flower. And of course, nothing is truly American without a promise of a better future—so safety orange can also be a symbol, however unconvincing, that our streets are under repair and better buildings are on their way. Safety Orange epitomizes, as Watkins Fisher writes, “life lived in unsustainable conditions.”

Safety Orange couldn’t be more different from other books devoted to single colors like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009) and Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red (1998). Watkins Fisher’s chosen hue is bereft of romance, and her interpretation hardly hinges on metaphors. That safety orange is entirely manmade makes this a book of design history more than poetic pontification. The color, which first emerged in the U.S. in 1950 as a warning device in technical manuals and federal regulations, was engineered to contrast with any natural environment—blue skies, gray days, forest greens. Soon, hunters began wearing it to distinguish themselves from whatever else might be lurking between patches of leaves.

Though originally designed for a specific function, the semiotics of the high-visibility hue have grown complicated. Watkins Fisher writes that the color signals urgency “but is oddly unspecific,” and that it is “informational without being informative.” Its imperative to stay alert and cautious is undermined by its pervasiveness. If everything is an emergency, then nothing is. In this, way it reflects how threat today is “chronically immanent.”

In her scholarship, Watkins Fisher often turns to complicated strategies of subversive affirmation. A media scholar with a PhD from Brown’s storied Modern Culture and Media Department, she now teaches at the University of Michigan, and her theoretical writing often thinks through works of contemporary art. She has written about artworks that issue critiques by performing stereotypes or caricaturing cultural assumptions in excess, so as to point out how stupid or absurd those stereotypes and assumptions are. In her best-known essay, “Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle,” from 2012, she describes a tactic she calls “parasite feminism,” showing how both Calle and Kraus have each performed a kind of self-aware, stereotypically feminine needy helplessness. These two artists create characters who are so passive that they become needy, even threatening—especially in the eyes of the male figures whom they take as host bodies.

In a similar spirit, the final chapter of Safety Orange is devoted to art projects that retool the rhetoric of the titular hue by appropriating the color as “a way to force the state to make good on its promise of public safety.” The author considers works—by Amanda Williams, Object Orange, and Michael Rakowitz—that use orange to show who public safety is really intended for in a state founded on and structured by anti-Blackness.

Michael Rakowitz: A Color Removed, 2015-18.

The most compelling example is Rakowitz’s A Color Removed (2015–18), for which the Iraqi-born artist proposed displacing all uses of the color orange from the city of Cleveland to a gallery in protest of the killing of Tamir Rice. The two officers who shot 12-year-old Rice claimed their actions were justified because the toy gun he had been playing with did not have an orange cap. They said that, without this cap, they were unable to recognize the child as “safe.” This argument helped both of them get acquitted.

Rakowitz’s installation, which he created for Cleveland’s 2018 Front Triennial, includes an arrangement of orange toys on poster board by Rice’s mother, Samaria Rice, alongside donated orange objects from the community—traffic cones, Halloween decorations, Cheetos wrappers. In her reading of Rakowitz’s work, Watkins Fisher shows that when the state applies safety orange to Black people, it often frames them as crises to manage more than people to protect. Similarly, incarcerated people are often marked orange so that they remain visible to their captors, and the same plastic barricades that can be used to warn of obstacles can also be wielded to contain protestors in pens.

In an age when so many books of aesthetic and critical theory feel not only dense but several degrees removed from things that matter in daily life, Safety Orange stands apart. It’s a convincing kind of argument that makes you see things differently, be they artworks, the United States, or urban detritus on your daily walk.

Recently, though, the quest to interpret Kafka reached a point most decidedly un-Kafkaesque: a promising new development. Before he died, Kafka left his writings and drawings to his friend Max Brod with instructions to burn them. Brod refused, bless him, and arranged to publish the writings almost as soon as he could, but most of the drawings stayed in limbo, neither destroyed nor displayed, until Brod’s death in 1968, at which time they passed into the hands of his heir, Ilse Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe died in 2007, they became the subject of a legal scuffle between Hoffe’s descendants and the National Library of Israel (another of Brod’s heirs) that ended in 2019 with the Library acquiring 150 Kafka drawings only a handful of people had ever seen. (Here, one pauses to consider how much art lawsuits have kept from the public, and how many Kafka-level talents’ papers are currently feeding termites in somebody’s basement.)

Franz Kafka: The Drawings, edited by Andreas Kilcher, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2022; 368 pages, 240 color illustrations, $50 hardcover.

One thing I should say up-front about these drawings, the subject of a new monograph published by Yale University Press: they’re not great. This is not the same as saying that they’re not worth your time. Not-greatness can help you understand the raw material from which greatness is built; it’s like visiting the Great Wall of China and looking down at the rock under your shoe, then looking up again and realizing that both are made from the same stuff. In the case of a discussed-to-death, hidden-in-plain-sight writer like Kafka, it’s a worthwhile exercise. The better you understand what’s missing from the drawings, the more you appreciate what’s piquantly present in the stories.

When this book was first announced, I pictured something like the following: stick-men (not women) with long, flailing limbs and tiny heads, adrift on empty pages lacking either color or warmth. This, as it turns out, is pretty much how the drawings do look. Every dozen pages or so, the artist attempts a full-fledged face complete with eyes, mouth, expression, etc., but most of the figures in this book have dark featureless heads that are no more or less expressive than their shoes or arms. The figures that are evidently male tend to have thick eyebrows, gnashing mouths, and dark, pointy beards, while their few evidently female counterparts have big hairdos and swishy dresses, more fluff than flesh—a child’s baffled view of the grown-up world. Kafka didn’t draw many animals, but he made human beings look so inhuman that, in a way, he did.

Kafka: “Martha reading,” ca. 1901–ca. 1907; pencil on paper. The Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

Kafka didn’t draw scenery, either; most of the bodies in these pages just float there, neither inside nor outside. This corresponds neatly to Kafka’s fiction, in which there is almost no scene setting, no paragraphs about weather or buildings or family trees. In general his drawings are so of a piece with his writings in theme and tone that it’s tempting to treat the one as a version of the other. In their essays for the Yale monograph, the book’s editor, Andreas Kilcher, and theorist Judith Butler surrender to this temptation so fully that you could almost forget the writings are triumphs and the drawings are trifles.

Kafka: Man in tuxedo, ca. 1901–ca. 1907; pencil on paper. The Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

Kafka: Sketchbook, ca. 1901–ca. 1907; pencil, India ink, and ink on paper. The Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem

Forgetting this requires some curious mental contortions—reading Butler’s analysis in particular, you’d think Kafka sweated over each sketch for thirty years instead of thirty seconds. Of number 117, a man with a stick, she has this to say: “The feet balance the body with balletic precision—accompanied by a walking stick, a vertical line that does not reach the ground and, because it cannot possibly offer support, proclaims, as it were, its lack of utility.” Cannot possibly, proclaims, precision: if these keywords are any indication, the possibility of a coincidence doesn’t occur to Butler. Her hopes are too high. She wants Kafka’s drawings to be sites of resistance to “the laws of gravity” and “the laws of writing,” and perhaps they are—or perhaps Kafka was doodling one afternoon and his pen tip didn’t make it all the way to the bottom of the page.

And maybe it’s naive, with Bob Dylan’s matchbooks on display in a shiny new museum in Tulsa, to say that some ephemera is just ephemeral. But if you deny this, you’re ignoring one of the most important things about Kafka’s prose. The miracle of The Metamorphosis, the critic William Deresiewicz wrote, is that the author was able to commit wholeheartedly to his own ridiculous premise—if he’d lost his nerve for even one sentence, the whole thing would have fallen apart. There’s probably enough raw material in Kafka’s drawings to assemble into another Metamorphosis, but he doesn’t commit all the way: his lines shake or sputter out; he tries crosshatching here and reverts to stick-men there; he loses his nerve, or at least his interest. In short, he fails to convince us that each drawing couldn’t have looked any other way.

It strikes me that this sense of inevitability, missing from the drawings but unmissable in the writings, is as essential a part of the Kafkaesque as bureaucracy or giant bugs. Understood this way, Kafka’s gift wasn’t that he could imagine things the rest of us can’t (any jumpy eight-year-old can picture a giant bug). Once he’d imagined them, however, he believed in them so zealously he convinced the rest of us to believe, too. He never winked. This is why it’s worth being blunt about the mediocrity of his drawings, and why, mediocre or not, it was worth publishing them after all this time: they throw the brilliance of the stories into sharper relief. And if not even Kafka managed to be Kafkaesque all the time, there’s still hope for his imitators.

Dark Mirrors by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, London, Mack Books, 2021; 240 pages, $35 paperback.

Wolukau-Wanambwa begins his illuminating introductory essay, “Times Like These,” by noting that books on the theory and history of photography now vastly outnumber books of photo criticism. “What is lost” in this relative neglect of photo criticism, he writes, “is a peopled space of thinking critically together, in the moment, about the specific aims and effects of the work that we see and share.” As Wolukau-Wanambwa outlines, the backdrop for the book’s essays is the tumultuous events of the past decade, from the 2014 Ferguson protests to the 2021 Capitol riot, in which the fragility of the social order becomes evident. “It is essential to account for the conditions of my viewing, to acknowledge and to seek some measure of the broader moment in which that viewing has unfolded, and to think through its effects on—or segregation from—my, yours, or perhaps our everyday experience.” The social and political conditions at the time of the image’s creation must be considered alongside the conditions at the time of writing. Dark Mirrors encourages the reader to do the same legwork of asking how images travel to them and when.

Wolukau-Wanambwa attends in particular to ongoing liberation struggles—like the Movement for Black Lives and those for Indigenous self-determination across the world—to guide his work within the “precincts” of art photography. He takes on these movements’ demands to question the practices of major institutions, especially how they have answered calls for racial justice by mounting monographic exhibitions of African-American artists like Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems. While such exhibitions are undoubtedly well-deserved and necessary, the solo show format plucks individual luminaries from their rich histories and thematic contexts, while distracting from institutions’ records of ignoring the artists they now celebrate. Monographic exhibitions, he argues, “simultaneously feign responsiveness to and defer a broader engagement with subaltern histories and experiences.” Such exhibitions also put pressure on an individual to represent a diverse demographic, while also assimilating artists into an undisturbed photographic canon. For institutions to truly engage critically with the work of Black artists, he argues, “requires an engagement with the aesthetic and political, the creative and conceptual worlds from which such art has emerged, and in relation to which it has flourished.”

Jason Koxvold, Untitled, from the series “KNIVES,” 2017.

A number of the book’s essays are concerned with white photographers—including Katy Grannan, Dana Lixenberg, and Rosalind Fox Solomon—who use the camera “to describe people from whom they are individually distinct along lines of race, gender, sexuality, or class, underscoring a willingness not to treat our disparate demographic inheritances as pre-determined destiny in our art.” This environmental portraiture reckons with the shared, albeit differently experienced, embeddedness of racism in everyday life in the U.S. One such essay, titled “The Projects,” is devoted to Dutch photographer Lixenberg’s now out-of-print book Imperial Courts 1993–2015, which comprises 393 photographs documenting the community of Black and brown residents of the eponymous housing project in Watts, California. Wolukau-Wanambwa points out that Lixenberg’s project began in the wake of Rodney King’s assault and the resulting insurrection in Los Angeles and concluded at the time of the Freddie Gray uprisings in Baltimore. He suggests that projects like Lixenberg’s, which embrace the tensions inherent in the confrontation of a white photographer from another country and Imperial Courts’s residents offer a complicated and necessary rebuttal to the saturation of violent images that crowd our daily lives. To Wolukau-Wanambwa, the portraits answer the question “what is it to be black in America” with a sense that it is to be “wary of white attention, wary of exposure, circumspect about a reciprocal encounter between strangers, even within the precincts of one’s own home.” Throughout Dark Mirrors, he trains the reader away from easy identity equations in photographic representation toward practitioners whose ultimate goal is exposing and challenging the conditions that buttress racial, gender, and economic inequality.

Another essay, “Spectacular Opacities,” takes up the work of Paul Pfeiffer, best known for series like “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (2003−18), in which Pfeiffer alters saturated color press photos of high-profile NBA games to isolate individual Black athletes. By erasing teammates, coaches, and referees from the image, the artist captures singular athletes in dramatic moments of action as they jump off the court, while the crowds appear as blurry dots. Though Pfeiffer has received significant critical attention for such works over his twenty-five year career, Wolukau-Wanambwa points out the near absence of engagement with the way Pfeiffer’s specific focus on Black male athletes constitutes a case study of racial capitalism, highlighting how the  hypervisibility of the athletes’ bodies is at the center of the extractive industry of professional sports. Wolukau-Wanambwa praises Pfeiffer’s work as a model of how to depict and disrupt structural violence, which is designed to be hidden and unquestioned. Pfeiffer’s 2015 solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in the Philippines, “Vitruvian Figure,” for example, centered on a diorama and videos of empty, jumbo stadiums. Wolukau-Wanambwa situates Pfeiffer’s fascination with representing the stadium in the context of billions of dollars of federal funding in the United States that fuels stadium construction, while residents of the surrounding areas are pushed out.

While Wolukau-Wanambwa abstains from direct reflection on his own photography practice in Dark Mirrors, he shares Pfeiffer’s concern with creating a stage out of our very acts of looking and thus knowing. He offers his readers and viewers ways of noticing the underlying structures of white supremacy and patriarchy that shape how images come to live in our psyches. This is evident in his installation in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York,” on view through April 18, in which Wolukau-Wanambwa sets up tense conversations between found objects, archival images, and his own recent large-format photographs of mysterious exteriors in public space.

View of Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s Fractions (2021) in “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, 2021.

Within the sprawling group show, Wolukau-Wanambwa painted his portion of the gallery matte black, referencing a black box theater. Flush against one wall is the sculpture Gun Hill (2018–21), a single brick emblazoned with the word “LYNCH.” The brick’s blunt command is positioned upside down and backward (akin to the way a negative must be placed in an enlarger to be exposed so that text reads left to right). A second sculpture in the installation, Fractions (2021), is a pair of white plaster dismembered fingers, pointer and middle, evoking a “fingers crossed” position, as if a commentary on inactive hopefulness as a cover for liberalism’s denial of the brutalizing forces of white supremacy.

Four of Wolukau-Wanambwa’s photographs tower over these objects. The artist uses a 4 x 5 camera, which allows him to print large photographs with sharp details. In the corner of his installation hangs Mask(s), 2021, a close-up photograph of a commercial cigarette receptacle. Shadows from two small trapezoidal cutouts for used cigarette butts on the ashtrays resemble the triangular eye cutouts of KKK masks. At the far end of the gallery is Skins (2021), another life-size black-and-white photograph, featuring a tightly cropped depiction of the poised backs and legs of two chiseled male nude figures, one of which has a handprint in black paint slapped on his right butt-cheek in a familiar defacement of the juvenile variety. Both these photos present commonplace symbols within daily life in the United States, but they echo the centuries-old systems of power the artist draws attention to, in the hopes that they might be dismantled: an ashtray invokes a chain of associations leading to the predatory tobacco industry and the institution of chattel slavery that built America’s vast wealth. A statue in a public park, reversed to show its less than honorific backside, warns against heroic depictions of white masculinity that cultivate and protect that same wealth.

Installation view of work by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa in “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, 2021.

In addition to the photographs he takes himself, Wolukau-Wanambwa collects large-format negatives from sellers of discarded image archives. He scans and prints these found images, originally made by small-town photojournalists or studio portraitists who, like Wolukau-Wanambwa, used large-format cameras and black-and-white film, but for commercial ends. Sometimes he inherits biographical information about the subjects of these images; sometimes their captions are lost. Separation(s), 2021, for instance, is a triptych of three identical framed headshots of an anonymous suited bald white man, suggesting a businessman or a politician. AMWMA (2021), by contrast, the title of which is a palindrome for the initials of actress Anna May Wong, consists of a freestanding wall with seemingly identical life-size photographs of Wong hanging on both sides. She appears to be rehearsing a protective movement, an outstretched arm reclaiming her personal space. Upon closer inspection, however, the images differ slightly: one is a picture of her facing a mirror, and the other is a picture of her reflection in that mirror.

Wolukau-Wanambwa is concerned with reflections, as indicated by the title of this book, and as prompted by this mid-century film actress who is not a household name but was conscripted to play stereotyped roles. The relationships among the elements of Wolukau-Wanambwa’s installation at first seem defiantly oblique—almost as disparate as the essays in Dark Mirrors—but they call on viewers to recognize and reckon with the signifiers of white supremacy that govern daily life in the U.S. Wolukau-Wanambwa sets up dialogues, whether between reader and text or image and viewer, to dramatize these tensions, so that our line of questioning is slow and uncomfortable. By blurring the distinctions between, even equating, found images and objects with his original photographs, Wolukau-Wanambwa squares off with the very act of selection in photographing the visual world. He is a documentarian who never escapes the images already populating the built environment. He must talk to them directly.

I’m not sure if Gary Indiana has reached this point. But he seems to be close. It’s hard to think of another living critic who has hated and loathed so much, and with so much swagger, for so long. Indiana has been at it for decades, and if contemporary literary and art criticism in America is often dismissed for its tendency toward meekness and puffery, then one solution might be for more critics to read Indiana. When he’s revved up, his prose is a machine for annihilating clichés. It’s dark, sensual, and grotesque. He likes words like “oozing,” “membrane,” “greasy,” “sybaritic,” “gruesome,” and “rebarbative.” You might even call him a voice for our so-called “age of anger,” ready to unveil anything that’s festering in the American psyche.

Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021 by Gary Indiana, New York, Seven Stories Press, 2022; 368 pages, $23.95 paperback.

There’s been a recent “Indiana renaissance,” as critic Tobi Haslett put it in the Paris Review last year. Since 2015, Semiotext(e) has reissued Indiana’s trilogy of crime novels, originally released between 1997 and 2003, and published a collection of his plays, short fiction, and poems, as well as a compilation of his columns for the Village Voice, where he was a senior art critic between 1985 and 1988. Another two novels, Horse Crazy (1989) and Gone Tomorrow (1993), were recently reissued by the publisher Seven Stories, which is now bringing out a new collection of Indiana’s work, Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021, with an introduction by critic Christian Lorentzen.

The book is a salmagundi-style gathering of thirty-nine pieces—political reportage, quick reviews, rangy travel stories, art and film and literary criticism—culled from almost three decades of Indiana’s nonfiction. The collection lurches around in time: a report on the 1992 presidential election is sandwiched between an essay about the Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, and a piece about seventeenth-century witch trials and the Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, Norway. There are also essays on Barbara Kruger, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Soviet cooking, and Anthony Weiner’s “dong.” The last of these, inexplicably, begins in a Bulgarian car park, pivots to a phone call in Bucharest with a Chase Bank representative, and dedicates its third and final act to the former congressman’s penis.

If there is one thing that Indiana hates more than anything else, it is probably America: a uniquely powerful and filthy corporate hellscape that has excelled, he says, at genocide, exploitation, and limitless surveillance, and keeps much of its population in a near-constant state of anxiety through policing and prisons. It also produces a glut of terrible culture. The guilty parties here are not just the power brokers but the citizens themselves. (“Power,” Indiana writes, “requires the acquiescence and complicity of multitudes.”) This makes it easier to understand why he typically sees Americans as cow-eyed sacks of flesh that have become little more than extraction sites for labor, data, and capital. On a single page of the book, one man is described as having “the jowly potato face and put upon, porcine expression of a slow-witted high school bully,” another wears “a bad haircut settled above the cringing mug of a malefic toad,” and another “suggests what the mating of Don Rickles and Mussolini might look like.”

These descriptions are from a tour de force piece of courtroom reporting written about the Rodney King trials, and Indiana reserves his most cutting words for the defense team and its clients (the police officers responsible for King’s beating). In another essay, about Branson, Missouri—a midwestern town whose streets are lined with souvenir shops, family restaurants, gaudy attractions, and gun-toting tourists—he describes the town as a “metastasis,” suffering from “architectural melanoma” and “huge gouts of forest,” filled with people who seem robotic and amphetamine-fueled but are actually just racist and homophobic Christians who also happen to be anti-Semitic. For Indiana, these are not “real people.”

Having read his work before, I was surprised how much it reminded me this time of John Jeremiah Sullivan, the Southern essayist and short-story writer. Like Indiana, Sullivan has written essays about Christian happenings and Disney-themed attractions in recent decades, and stylishly chronicled the weirdness of American culture. That’s pretty much where the similarities end. Indiana is a seventy-something grandee of the legendary New York “downtown” scene; a queer playwright, actor, novelist, and leftist gadfly, who is unregenerately Francophilic, Slavophilic, and high-culture-philic, and doesn’t seem to have any fondness for his small-town roots. Sullivan, on the other hand, has a folksy and salt-of-the-earth braininess (or presents that way), and is pretty allergic to East Coast snobbery.

The comparison is instructive because both are well-read and gifted writers, who fashion a very funny sort of manic prose; yet when it comes to the way they write about their country, they couldn’t be more different. For Sullivan, a report on a Christian rock festival becomes a transformative exercise in immersion and empathy. For Indiana, a report on Branson is a withering portrait of obese and bigoted Middle Americans who come to town “with the love of Jesus and the Right to Life and a hatred of gun control throbbing in their plaque-encrusted arteries.” It’s not an even-handed piece of reportage but rather, like much of Indiana’s work, a polemic against idiocy. The idea that the point of writing is to tell the stories of other lives, or to be subtly persuasive, is not his game.

The anti-idiocy campaign reaches a sort of peak in what might be one of the most brutal takedowns in a major American magazine from the past decade. (If anyone was under the impression that Indiana’s tone was a kind of youthful insouciance, something to be grown out of, they would be mistaken.) In a 2020 Harper’s review, republished in Fire Season, Indiana calls Blake Gopnik’s biography of Andy Warhol an “elephantine, ill-written, nearly insensible” book that amounts to “an incredibly prolonged, masturbatory trance of graphomania,” filled with “a dense lard of fatuous pedantry and vapid generalizations,” written in “squirmy, sophomoric prose that deadens everything it touches.” If another writer used the phrase “deadens everything it touches” about anyone’s prose, the editor would likely: a) think the critic was being an asshole, and b) delete it from the piece. In Indiana’s hands, the insult feels earned, and arrives like a ceremonial and natural beheading. He starts the essay with a lively portrait of Warhol, then surveys the existing literature, and it is only when we get to paragraph fourteen that he tears into Gopnik. By this point you’ve been so thoroughly lulled into the essay’s rhythm that you’re already aligned with Indiana and ready to start throwing vegetables. It’s easy to criticize and censure—to rant, gripe, take down—but much harder to make a reader feel that what you’re doing amounts to a kind of justice.

In an interview, writer William Gass once said, “I write because I hate.” With Indiana, it’s hard to tell if he writes because he hates or in spite of it. Signs of personal suffering and pain flash up a few times in Fire Season—meltdowns and depressions alluded to—but Indiana never tells us what happened. The pain just sits there under the essays like an undetonated bomb. (He has written about himself in memoir and autobiographically inflected fiction but usually in elliptical and slanted ways. “The conventional memoir,” he writes, “is a tidy bundle of lies, crafted to market a particularized self in a world of commodities. . . . Behind its costume of authenticity lies the mercantile understanding that a manufactured self is another dead object of consumption.”)

But one wonders how much of this bitterness grows out of the deep wounds he’s mentioned in passing, or whether what spurs him on, in the case of the Warhol essay, for instance, is a fierce love of the art—an uncompromising devotion. You can see it in his essays on Renata Adler, Barbara Kruger, Louise Bourgeois, and Sam McKinniss, among others. Adler is a “cartographer of surface disturbances”; Bourgeois’s observations “cut through the grease of small talk.” It’s the same unchained style—scholarly, degenerate, and politically alive—but turned on an object of affection. Finally, there is something worth admiring. 

Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of
Postcolonial Defeat by Bénédicte Savoy, Princeton University Press, 2022, 240 pages, 11 color and 6 blackand-white illustrations, $29.95 hardcover.

“FOR APPROXIMATELY SIX YEARS, a spectre has been haunting European museums,” began a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung news article in May 1979. That specter, which still haunts today, was the question—and eventually, the slow-moving process—of restitution that had recently been initiated by several African countries. The article explained that the issue evoked “extremely intense emotions” in European countries, whose ethnological museums were being accused of unjustly collecting African cultural artifacts. Taking stock of the struggle’s early trajectory almost half a century later, Bénédicte Savoy’s new book, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, tracks a contentious discourse from the first calls for repatriation in 1965 up through an exhibition by Nigerian archaeologist Ekpo Eyo that traveled to Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum in 1985. The show was not a triumphant culmination—rather, in the 1980s, the debates fizzled out and all but “disappeared from collective memory.”

In the book, Savoy, a French art historian, defeatedly recalls a history of largely unsuccessful petitions and campaigns for plundered art objects. The book comes on the heels of the landmark 2018 report she co-authored with Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr. Known as the Sarr-Savoy Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, Toward a New Relational Ethics, the project created a roadmap for public institutions in France, informing them how to create inventories of their archives and determine which items require repatriation. It was commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron following a 2017 speech in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in which he discussed tenuous historical French-African relations and charted a path for future French policy concerning the continent. Stating that he could not “accept that a large share of several African countries’ cultural heritage be kept in France,” he pledged to create “the conditions . . . for temporary or permanent returns of African heritage to Africa” within five years. Africa’s Struggle for Its Art is a kind of prehistory to the Sarr-Savoy Report: it describes the foundational battles between newly independent African states and former colonial powers over artifacts acquired during the era of imperial conquest and rule, as well as the decades of African activism that made such a commission possible.

The volume is divided into sixteen chronological chapters, each representing one noteworthy year between 1965 and 1985. The “apex” of this discourse, Savoy says, took place between 1978 and 1982. The first chapter, 1965, begins with a polemic by Beninese poet-journalist Paulin Joachim titled “Give Us Back Negro Art.” Published in January of that year in Bingo, a Francophone magazine circulated in Paris and Dakar, it was the first widely circulated call for restitution. The 1960s witnessed mass decolonization on the African continent, including the United Nations’ adoption of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which committed the international body to supporting political and cultural self determination for newly independent states. The declaration was animated by the growing momentum of anti-colonial international developments around the world, including the Afro-Asian alliances at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955 and the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists the following year. The latter group, considering the impact of colonialism on cultural heritage, sought to assert a Black consciousness that transcended national and ethnic identity.

The significance of some of the other bookmarked years is a little less clear, and the choppy chronology unfortunately disrupts the book’s ambitious framing—Savoy attempts to tell “the coherent story of postcolonial defeat,” but her story feels scattered. While she clearly and unequivocally supports repatriation, she presents a fairly dry, factual chronology rather than a forceful rallying cry that reflects the issue’s urgency and meaningfulness. Although the discourses—from African and European sides alike—broadly fall into the pattern of African request and subsequent European rejection, the book, which purports to narrate a continental struggle, primarily describes the activities of West African nations. The majority of its pages are devoted to Nigeria, a political and cultural powerhouse whose Benin Kingdom bronzes have become emblems of African repatriation struggles. The book’s hurried and purely factual summary focuses on the section of the continent that first gained independence, beginning with Ghana in 1957. Senegal and Nigeria followed suit three years later. Naturally, repatriation attempts by these three nations have a more substantial history than those of, for instance, Namibia, which gained independence from South Africa only in 1990 (and thus falls outside the book’s scope). It’s also true that Western museums have collected more art from West Africa than East. Nevertheless, it doesn’t feel accurate to say Savoy’s book represents Africa as a whole.

The author’s narrow focus in the northern hemisphere is even more surprising, but also usefully revealing. Savoy writes that it is within the Federal Republic of Germany “that the debate was most intense . . . and most enduring, spanning museums, politics, administration, media, and television.” Though the most visible and more recent debates concern France and Britain, her account centers on Germany, as did activists in the 1960s through ’80s. In fact, the Christian Science Monitor in 1976 called the global ordeal a “German debate.” And though Savoy examines German museums for historical reasons, her focus is perhaps most compelling because of its implications in the present. While it’s true that Germany had far fewer colonies than Britain and France, and was a colonial power for only around three decades—facts often trotted out to deny culpability—the country was active in numerous plundering expeditions that went hand-in-hand with the foundation of the discipline of art history itself.

The book details dozens of instances of anti-Black racism, cultural imperialism, and condescension in Europe’s repeated rejections of repatriation requests. But its most damning revelations concern the roles that former Nazis played in German museums. Savoy’s prime example is Hermann Auer, a former physicist who faced difficulty finding work as a university lecturer after World War II owing to his membership in the National Socialist Party and other Nazi organizations. Eventually, in the 1950s, he landed a job as academic director of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, one of the world’s largest science and technology museums. Then in 1968 he became president of the German department of the International Committee of Museums. Ironically, the postwar policy barring former Nazi Party members from positions of power forced them to assimilate into seemingly benign roles in places like museums. A decade into his tenure, Auer penned a letter to the German ministry of the interior on the problem of restitution. His comments reflected the unintended consequences of West German denazification efforts and a narrowing view of Nazi racist ideology that neglects its anti-Black dimensions. Echoing his prewar views, Auer wrote that restitution debates were being driven by nations with “low material and economic potential” attempting to “consolidate their national importance,” and he accused them of misstating the means by which Europeans had obtained their treasures.

View of the exhibition “Open Storage Africa: Appropriating Objects and Imagining Africa” at the Ethnological Museum at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin.

SAVOY CASTS THE RESTITUTION DEBATE as a story of political entities, with both colonizers and colonized endeavoring to narrate their own national saga. Regardless of country, context, or year, newly independent African states consistently positioned stolen artifacts as an invaluable part of their cultural histories—narratives they were scripting on their own for the first time. In his early manifesto, Joachim described “the battle for the recovery of our artworks” as integral to the formation of African futures.

In response, European states repeatedly unleashed a motley of rebuttals, several of which, in addition to outright lies about provenance (for example, Auer’s false claim that most of the African objects in Germany had been exported “after the ‘decolonization’ of these countries”), are still deployed today. The most common charge was that Africa lacks adequate storage facilities—though pro-restitution advocates rightfully point out the irony that colonial extraction (and then neoliberal austerity) bears the blame for most major infrastructural shortcomings on the continent. Another argument was that Europeans are simply superior stewards. In 1978, Wolfgang Klausewitz, then president of the German Museum Association, claimed that “most Third World countries” lacked any connections to their cultures and natural environments. This lack of faith that African states could, or want to, preserve their own cultural artifacts was repeated by a chorus of museological figures, including Gerhard Baer, director of the Museum of Ethnology and Swiss Museum of Folklore. He claimed, in 1979, that if the objects had not been brought to Europe, it is “certain” that they would “have long been destroyed, lost, and forgotten.”

In the book’s preface and epilogue, Savoy explicitly contrasts “European museums’ disavowal and arrogance” in the past with what she hopes will be a new era in institutional policy and curatorial practice in the present and future. While some major repatriation efforts have been initiated since 1985, the debate has not changed much at all. Last summer, the Humboldt Forum, a controversial institution that incorporates the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art, finally opened its doors to the public. Described as the German counterpart to the British Museum, the Humboldt Forum occupies the reconstructed Berlin Palace, the historical residence of German emperors and Prussian monarchs. Savoy resigned from the museum’s advisory board in 2017, citing a lack of transparency regarding the provenance of the permanent ethnological collection. She stated that without publicly acknowledging “how much blood is dripping from each artwork,” neither the Humboldt Forum nor any other ethnological museum should open. And in her book, she duly challenged narratives of Germany as somehow less guilty of violent plunder than Britain or France by challenging many of the state’s bogus claims of legitimate acquisition. In one instance, she quotes Friedrich Kussmaul, an anthropologist who, in the 1970s, claimed that the majority of West German museum holdings were acquired “under perfectly legitimate circumstances at the time” (emphasis mine) and that looting expeditions rarely occurred in German colonies, if they occurred at all. Yet “at the time”—during Germany’s brief period of colonial conquest from 1884 to 1915—museums and German military forces worked together to collect cultural objects and even human remains. Even before Germany formally established its colony in South West Africa (present day Namibia), officials at the Royal Museum of Ethnology (the ethnological collection now housed in the Humboldt Forum) instructed German naval forces to collect everything they could at the ports where they docked. In an 1897 letter from that period, the director of the Ethnological Museum admits that it was “quite difficult to obtain an object without using at least a little bit of force.”

Savoy is unwavering in her condemnation of the moral stain represented by the theft and hoarding of African artifacts. She calls “to incorporate the present restitution debate in the longue durée of historical processes,” including both African activism and the violence of colonial institutions, but throughout the book, a political energy is notably absent from her straightforward assembling of historical facts. Savoy has elsewhere been active and vocal in her criticism of the Humboldt Forum and other institutions. But she seems to draw a clear division between her work as a historian and material, anti-colonial transformations of museum institutions. In the statement accompanying her departure from the Humboldt Forum, she called for more adequate public acknowledgment of provenance, but stopped short of advocating repatriation, never mind reparations. Similarly, her book relegates engagements with the present to a mere four-page epilogue. It’s true that acknowledging wrongdoing and spotlighting long-denied historical facts are the necessary first steps to righting historical wrongs. But acknowledgment is not nearly enough, and can in fact obscure the urgency of material recompense.

Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern by Charles Dellheim, Waltham, Mass., Brandeis University Press, 2021; 672 pages, 24 color and 95 black-and-white illustrations, $40 cloth.

Dellheim doesn’t tell this story to imply that spending time with the Bernheims and their fiancées made Renoir less disposed to anti-Semitism. Like dozens of similar anecdotes found in the pages of Belonging and Betrayal, the tale of the engagement portraits reveals the complex negotiations, spoken and unspoken, that structured social, economic, and political life for Jews in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western Europe. Despite implicit stereotyping as well as overt discrimination, Jews rose to positions of prominence across virtually all industries, including the art world. At the same time, their newfound achievements gave them unprecedented visibility, which often proved a liability.

The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France by James McAuley, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2021; 320 pages, 30 color and 47 black-and-white illustrations, $30 hardcover.

Belonging and Betrayal seeks to explain how Jews found significant, if precarious, success in the European art world during this period. It traces the emergence of Jewish art dealers in France and Germany, and to a lesser extent, Austria, Italy, and the United Kingdom, from the 1880s until the 1940s, when Jewish cultural life across Europe was arrested by the Nazi regime. Joining Dellheim’s study in this mission is James McAuley’s House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France, a book more narrowly focused on a small group of extraordinarily wealthy Jewish French collectors—the Camondos, Rothschilds, Ephrussis, Cahen d’Anvers, and Reinachs—who ultimately became an extended family through generations of intermarriage.

Belonging and Betrayal and House of Fragile Things describe a moment of tremendous upheaval and expansion in Europe’s metropolises, especially Paris, where the Jewish population grew swiftly, arriving from Eastern Europe and historically Jewish regions of France like Alsace. With its promise of economic opportunity, social mobility, and a particular brand of French universalism, Paris was an ideal home for those seeking freedom, tolerance, and greater prosperity.

The upending of social and economic hierarchies in nineteenth-century Paris opened new horizons for both the artistic avant-garde and newly arrived Jews. Belonging and Betrayal explores the intersection of these two worlds, telling the story of enterprising middle-class Jews—grain traders and horse dealers by profession—who became so enamored of the art they saw on trips to the Louvre that they eventually switched careers, tying their trade to their passions, and trying their luck in the burgeoning art market. Almost none of these first dealers, such as Nathan Wildenstein and Ernest Gimpel, were formally trained in art or art history. Instead, they relied on skills developed in their previous occupations: a good eye for quality, solid business acumen, and the ability to negotiate with buyers and sellers. Jewish dealers were drawn to modernism for practical and aesthetic reasons. They found success within the emerging market for modern art, which, because it was new, had a less established structure and therefore less discriminatory hurdles for them to clear. At the same time, Dellheim suggests, their love for art allowed the first Jewish dealers in Paris to take great risks in an uncertain new market above and beyond economic considerations. He shows how these dealers proved their commitment to modern art and artists in the face of potential financial instability and public derision.

Exterior of the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris

McAuley’s House of Fragile Things, on the other hand, looks at the Parisian art world of this period from the perspective of its most exclusive Jewish circles. It focuses on how those patrons, most of whom made their fortune in the world of international finance, later dedicated their lives to cultivating a sense of national belonging, only to be betrayed by fellow citizens who would deny first their Jewish countrymen’s Frenchness, then their humanity. Rather than follow the emerging avant-garde, these collectors tended toward French art of the ancien régime as a matter of both taste and national pride. Their aesthetic preferences were remarkably shared by some of the most anti-Semitic thinkers of fin de siècle France, Édouard Drumont and Jules de Goncourt, who argued that the era directly preceding the French Revolution most embodied the French national spirit. Their biting attacks against Jewish collectors illuminate how even the most privileged israélites, French-born Jews, were not immune to slander and scorn: Drumont, author of the anti-Semitic screed La France juive, wrote of the opulent Château de Ferrières, built by James de Rothschild in north central France, “it’s a mess, a train wreck, an incredible junk store,” but that in the manse’s Louis XVI salon “in the middle, like a trophy, there is the incomparable harpsichord of Marie-Antoinette, which is heartbreaking to find in this house of Jews.” Collectors like the Rothschilds were excoriated for having bad taste, on the one hand, and on the other for “stealing” French patrimony. Despite the slander, these collectors considered themselves both patriots and custodians of French culture, and many of their collections were bequeathed to the state. Moïse de Camondo, for example, donated his house and collection to the state upon his death; the museum is named after his son, Nissim, who was killed fighting for the French during World War I.

Interior of the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris

Both books historicize the rise of Jewish art dealers and collectors (and to a far lesser extent, artists and art historians) in western Europe, but their definitions of Jewishness, and their portrayals of its centrality to their subjects’ identities, remain deliberately open. Both authors thankfully avoid characterizations of Jewish identity that present these collectors’ late arrival to the art world in essentialist terms, i.e., as due to some kind of inherent Jewish aversion to graven images. They also take pains to chart the wide range of beliefs and religious practices among their subjects, from those who remained stalwarts of the Jewish community to atheists and everything in between: Moïse de Camondo’s Louis XVI–inspired Parisian mansion included a kosher kitchen, while his daughter, Béatrice, converted to Catholicism. Moreover, there is no monolithic “Jewish art world” in either account. By no means did Jewish collectors purchase exclusively Jewish art—indeed, McAuley emphasizes how Jewish collectors in France strove to project Frenchness over Jewishness in their collecting practices. Nor did Jewish dealers necessarily go out of their way to seek out emerging Jewish artists. Jewishness, while an indelible marker of identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western Europe, defined neither taste nor business practice for the protagonists of these histories.

That said, McAuley and Dellheim’s books are definitively social histories not art histories; artworks serve as illustrations to emphasize a collector’s refined taste or a dealer’s bold vision. For instance, Dellheim recounts how Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who would become one of Cubism’s great champions, offered to buy Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (then known as The Philosophical Brothel) on the spot when he first visited the artist’s studio in 1907, even though he found the painting practically incomprehensible. Jewish artists active in Paris at the time, such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Chaim Soutine, are similarly ancillary figures in both texts. Even though details on Jewish artists are scarce, such omissions ultimately prove the authors’ point about the heterogeneity of these collectors and dealers, and indeed, their desire to assimilate into the European cultural milieu writ large.

While Nazi looting and destruction of cultural property are not their sole focus, both books inevitably conclude with the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish lives and material culture. It is no secret that anti-modernism and anti-Semitism went hand in hand in Europe, a fusion on spectacular display at the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibitions held in various German and Austrian cities beginning in 1937. While an attack against all forms of modernism, these shows separated the Jewish artists from the rest, singling them out for their double “degeneracy” by placing their works in their own gallery near the entrance. Even though these artists—Jankel Adler, Chagall, Hanns Katz, Pissarro, Gert Wollheim, and Ludwig Meidner—represented a small fraction of the 112 artists in the original Munich exhibition, many more non-Jewish artists were derided for their apparently “Semitic” mindset. Dellheim points out that these sentiments, despite being raised to a dangerous fever pitch by the Nazis, were not at all new in Germany, or indeed in Europe in general. Especially after World War I, the German public greeted modernist art with an added degree of nationalist hostility for its presumed Frenchness—that many of the dealers bringing this work to the public were Jewish only increased its presumed foreignness.

Paul Rosenberg at his gallery on 21 rue la Boetie, Paris, 1920.

Jewish response to discrimination by their countrymen, and later to persecution at the hands of the Nazis, was as diverse as the collections, careers, and desires chronicled in these two books. Some Jews detected the incoming threat and mobilized their resources and contacts to act quickly. Dellheim writes that Paris-based dealer Paul Rosenberg escaped in 1940 with his family via Portugal, heading to New York, where he established an eponymous gallery on 57th Street. After the war, he spent his final years attempting to recover his looted art collection, which had been dispersed across Europe—a protracted legal fight continued by his heirs to this day. Others never quite seemed to grasp the extreme danger they faced. McAuley attempts to reconstruct the last days of heiress Béatrice Reinach (née Camondo). She remained in Paris, writing to a friend in September 1942, “I am certain that I am miraculously protected,” believing her Christian faith, perhaps along with her vaunted family name, would offer salvation. Three months later, she was arrested along with her daughter and sent to the Drancy internment camp, where they were soon joined by her son and ex-husband, who were detained during an attempt to cross the French border into Spain. They later all perished in Auschwitz.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Portrait of Irène Cahen d’Anvers, ca. 1880, oil on canvas, 26 by 21 inches.

One of Reinach’s most prized possessions was an 1880 Renoir painting of her mother, Irène Cahen d’Anvers, as a child. La Petite Fille au ruban bleu or La Petite Irène was confiscated by the Nazis, and was for a time part of Hermann Göring’s personal collection. After the war, Irène—who had survived in hiding in Paris—had the painting repatriated. However, she kept it only briefly before selling it to Emil Georg Bührle, a Swiss arms manufacturer who amassed extraordinary wealth during the war by supplying weapons to the Axis powers. La Petite Irène remains a highlight of the E.G. Bührle collection in Zürich today. McAuley’s last chapter highlights this painting’s disturbing afterlife in the collection of man who profiteered from its former owner’s murder. If that feels unsettling, it should. The effects of Nazi looting and dispossession linger in museums and private collections across the world. As much as McAuley and Dellheim seek to recover histories effaced by the Holocaust, they emphasize that these histories persist in our present.

This article appears in the March 2022 issue, pp. 30–34.