RIDER READER
RIDER READER (Various Titles)
Compiled by Jon Rider
Reading 1: To accompany Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 cycle of 15 paintings, recently reinstalled at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
DeLillo, Don. “Baader-Meinhof.” The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2002, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/04/01/baader- meinhof. Accessed 27, Feb. 2021.
Reading 2: To accompany the exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, originally conceived by curator Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), on view at the New Museum through June 6, 2021. Each of the artists below is included in the exhibition.
“Mark Bradford: The Information was Inside of Me (2010).” Interviewed by Heidi Zuckerman. Conversations with Artists, Aspen Art Press, 2017, pp. 72-80.
“Julie Mehretu: A very Personal Language (2006).” Interviewed by Heidi Zuckerman. Conversations with Artists, Aspen Art Press, 2017, pp. 161-169.
“Lorna Simpson: I Have to Pretend It’s Not Me (2013).” Interviewed by Heidi Zuckerman. Conversations with Artists, Aspen Art Press, 2017, pp. 241-252.
Reading 3: To accompany the exhibition David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979, on view at The Drawing Center through May 23, 2021.
“In Conversation: Linda Goode Bryant and Senga Nengudi.” Drawing Papers144: David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979, the Drawing Center, 2021 pp. 16-31.
Reading 4: To accompany the David Hockney: Drawing from Life, on view at The Morgan Library through May 20, 2021.
Hockney, David, and Thomas Williams. “Drawings Are the Top: They Are Just Magical.” Master Drawings, vol. 47, no. 1, 2009, pp. 3–16. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25609724. Accessed 27 Feb. 2021.
Discussion Questions
1. Don DeLillo’s short story “Baader-Meinhof” recounts two events: 1) a conversation between a woman and a man at MoMA looking at Gerhard Richter’s cycle of fifteen paintings titled October 18, 1977 (1988); and 2) the woman and man, at her apartment, and a sexual assault. DeLillo’s description of Richter’s paintings (as told by his characters) is about the opacity of the narrative and how it’s represented. Similarly opaque is the scene at the apartment; the woman in her bathroom cannot see what’s taking place just beyond the locked door. Discuss DeLillo’s use of opacity as a means of describing what’s taking place in Richter’s paintings and in the apartment.
2. October 18, 1977 (1988) currently on view at MoMA, and The Birkenau Paintings (2014) currently on view at the Met, both address twentieth-century German history—the former in a more “representative” way, the latter is completely abstract, though based on a photograph. How do you interpret Richter’s style, intent, and what you see in the paintings?
- Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor; Kara Walker’s depictions of slavery and systemic racism in the U.S.; Peter Saul’s acidic paintings of the Vietnam War; Cady Noland’s cult of antiheroes, namely Lee Harvey Oswald and Patricia Hearst; are all examples of fairly contemporary representational political work. Let’s identify artists who are using abstraction as a means of making politically-motivated artworks.
- Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, on view at the New Museum through June 6, brings together thirty-seven artists working in a variety of mediums who have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of racist violence experienced by Black communities across America. One of the standout works is Arthur Jafa’s much-lauded video Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2018) (here). WARNING: the video uses clips of explicit violence: viewer discretion is advised. I’d like to talk about Jafa’s video, YouTube remix culture, music videos, and why the piece resonates as much as it does.
3. Abstraction as a mode for Black artists to address politics (or not) was described as a divisive issue by former gallerist Linda Goode Bryant. What were the main ideological points of difference between NY/LA artists showing at JAM and why was Hammons in particular such a lightning rod?
4. Following the body prints, Hammons made a conscious decision to use found materials—things that couldn’t be bought at Pearl Paint. As Bryant says, “He [Hammons] became a catalyst—or that show became a catalyst for people questioning and then resolving that it was okay to make work with whatever you need and want to make work with.”
- The debate about artists using non-traditional art materials goes back to at least Marcel Duchamp and seems continuous. If so, do we (and/or does the market) prioritize certain materials, genres, and ways of working? If so, what is today’s hierarchy?
- Where do NFT’s fit in, which have been largely denounced by the gatekeepers of the contemporary art world?
5. Julie Mehretu’s drawings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, while (I find) her paintings to be overwhelmingly abstract, they occasionally employ elements of figuration. In her series Seven Acts of Mercy (2004), currently in her solo show at the Whitney, Mehretu utilizes the schemata of the sports stadium as the center of her swirling, layered drawing. Talk about how Mehretu and Zuckerman describe the associations of the stadiums post-Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Iraq War (began 2003).
- How did Mark Bradford address Katrina in his own practice?
6. How does language factor into Bradford’s and Simpson’s practices?
7. How does beauty shop culture influence both Bradford’s and Simpson’s work?
- I would also discuss Hammons’s Rock Heads in this context, in which he applied hair gathered hair from the floors of African American barbershops to head-sized rocks—the works are prehistoric, political, contemporary, aesthetic, timeless, etc.