This list makes no attempt to identify the ten most influential or historically important works of contemporary art over the past decade. This list is much more personal and haphazard than that. Rather, these are ten works from the past ten years that have, for one reason or another, gotten under my armor and stuck with me. They have repeatedly come to mind and slipped into my conversations, and in several cases have elicited fairly extensive thinking and writing.
William Kentridge, The Refusal of Time (2012).
This five-channel video installation is a meditation on the human ambition to measure, standardize, and manage the flow of time. Opening with a chorus of metronomes, the videos and accompanying voiceover invoke several late nineteenth-century technologies for the standardization and internationalization of Coordinated Universal Time, including the mass synchronization of clocks throughout Paris in the 1870s (achieved by pumping regular bursts of air through copper pneumatic tubes under the city’s streets), etc. In the center of The Refusal of Time is a “breathing machine” with constantly pumping bellows that Kentridge calls “the elephant”—a reference to Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times(1854), which describes a factory machine moving “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” As the work unfolds, several different forms for marking and scaling time are superimposed, often contrasting (or conflating) the human movement (walking, breathing, speaking, playing a tuba, etc.) with mechanical movement. Of particular interest to Kentridge is the idea that the flipside of our inability to master time is a universe that records everything contained in it, the fabric of spacetime constituting an ever-expanding “universal archive.” And this contains both the beautiful and the tragic: in the voiceover Kentridge wonders how to “undo, unsay, unremember,” how to make the violence and disasters of history “unhappen.” In the endless expanse of the “universal archive,” we hear Kentridge’s voice making its inscription: “Here I am. . . here I am. . . here I am.”
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/499717
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Kris Martin, For Whom (2012).
This 3-ton bronze church bell was originally cast in the year 2000 for a church in Germany, commemorating the beginning of the new millennium. Due to an engineering failure, it was never installed in the church’s bell tower. Martin bought this mute, homeless bell and mounted it to a steel mechanism on which it swings silently, without a clapper, at the top of every hour. For Whom takes its title from John Donne’s famous “Meditation 17” (1623), a profound statement of faith and human solidarity in the face of death. It is thus, on one hand, a haunting emblem of human mortality. On the other hand, it is also a powerful image and artifact of post-Christian Europe: this traditional ecclesial form (by which Christians have marked the meaning of human living and dying) is displaced from the body of the church and functions without any audible public voice or resonance, but it remains intact nevertheless. It is precisely this compromised but enduring meaning that Martin is particularly interested in: “We all share the same thing. We all have questions about religion, about death, about the end, about life after death. I mean we all face the same problem: that it’s just a big question mark… But you cannot step out of religion, because you are a religious being anyway.” Some form of the question is, as he says, unavoidable: “you cannot avoid the biggest question in life—the meaning of it.”
https://walkerart.org/collections/artworks/for-whom-dot-dot-dot
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Doris Salcedo, A Flor de Piel II (2013–14).
Salcedo’s artistic career is an extended lamentation over the brutal, decades-long civil war in her native Colombia. This particular work is a memorial to one of the more than 92,000 people who have been “disappeared” in the conflict: a nun who was kidnapped and tortured to death, and whose body was never found. A Flor de Piel II is a massive “shroud” for her (and those who have suffered like her) made of thousands of rose petals that have been specially preserved and sutured together by hand. This meticulous, extremely labor-intensive act of mourning is, according to Salcedo, a “solitary liturgy” meant as “an attempt to perform the funerary ritual that was denied to her.” And as her studio assistant points out, it is also “an act of faith”—a protest against the evils of history and a wager that peacefully, lovingly remembering the delicate dignity of human life is in itself a means of standing against those evils.
https://imma.ie/whats-on/doris-salcedo-acts-of-mourning-exhibition/
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Moffat Takadiwa, Son of the Soil (2019).
This work is part of a stunning series of large tapestries made entirely of plastic waste—desktop computer keys, toothbrush heads, toothpaste tubes, aerosol bottle tops, soda bottle caps, dish soap bottle tops, etc.—all of which are culled from the streets and landfills of Takadiwa’s home city of Harare, Zimbabwe. The forms he makes invoke a wide range of associations: beautiful ceremonial robes and headdresses, landscapes, waterfalls, drainage, seeping wounds, cancerous growths, etc. And his found materials address at least two situations at once: (1) They are artifacts of a massive waste management problem in Harare, compounded by Zimbabwe’s protracted economic and political crises. And (2) this waste is almost entirely composed of Western consumer products, emblemizing the global flow of disposable plastic goods. Takadiwa has referred to himself as “a spiritual garbage man,” deciphering a pantheon of gods in what we throw away.
http://www.nicodimgallery.com/exhibitions/moffat-takadiwa-son-of-the-soil
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Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013).
The “space” in which this 13-minute video unfolds is a computer desktop, wallpapered with an image of Andromeda, our nearest neighboring galaxy. The work begins with a Google search of “history of the universe” and then launches into (sometimes rapid) sequences of images and phrases, all accumulating as artifacts pertinent to such a history. Numerous video windows appear and overlap, displaying image searches, online videos, footage of biological specimens in the Smithsonian archives, etc. Meanwhile, the voiceover audio strings together numerous fragments of ancient creation narratives, each marked by an “In the beginning…” The voiceover then cascades through the development of the creatures of the earth and begins listing the ever-expanding bodies of knowledge by which humans study, describe, and make sense of the world. Ultimately, the voiceover breaks into song (or chant) about the end of things. It’s a work about the needs for, and the inherent limits of, accounting for who, what, and where we are.
https://www.camillehenrot.fr/en/work/68/grosse-fatigue
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Jesse Darling, The Ballad of Saint Jerome (2018).
For this installation at Tate Britain, Darling revisited the legendary story of St Jerome and the lion. Jerome, the fourth-century theologian who translated the Bible into Latin, is often depicted in Western painting either as immersed in his scholarship or as a penitent in the desert striking his bare chest with a stone—and in either case he is almost always accompanied by the lion who, according to legend, became his companion after Jerome healed its wounded paw. Darling homes in on the relation between the theologian and the lion, rereading the legend as a story of radical empathy, even as a kind of love story between two wounded creatures, but with the threat of violence and domination lingering everywhere. Figures of the lion and/or its wound appear throughout the exhibition, as do allusions to the scholarly Jerome in the form of 2-ring binders, often filled with paper-size concrete blocks. The vitrine cases holding many of these binders, each titled Epistemologies, reveal their own compromised state—buckling, collapsing, propped up with crutches. At the center of the exhibition is a “cave” in a forest—a wall with a hole smashed in it in a shape strongly reminiscent of the penitential self-inflicted wound often depicted on St Jerome’s chest. In Darling’s rendition, both the lion and the theologian are wounded creatures with every reason to fear each other.
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/jesse-darling
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Andrea Büttner, Beggar (2015).
Büttner’s Beggar is a series of nine large woodblock prints based on Ernst Barlach’s small sculpture depicting a Veiled Beggarwoman (1919) with head covered and hands outstretched. Büttner reprocesses Barlach’s figure into something larger, flatter, more ambiguous, more anonymous, more plural, transforming it into a kind of icon of empty-handedness—an emblem of living in a state of deficit before the faces of others. For Büttner, however, this empty-handedness isn’t simply about destitution and suffering; she is interested in the possibilities of voluntary poverty and willful renunciation that involves turning more attentively and openly toward the world and the lives of others. And this is part of a broader exploration of littleness and lowliness, drawing from many points of reference, including strong influences from Franciscan theologies of poverty, Simone Weil, and especially the “little way” of St Thérèse of Lisieux. The kind of openhandedness Büttner is particularly interested in is one that reveals a more fundamental poverty, wherein one finds oneself in deficit at a more existential level, recognizing the sheer givenness of the world and oneself as inexplicably given to the world.
https://artviewer.org/andrea-buttner-at-kunsthalle-wien/
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Tacita Dean, Quarantania (2018).
This large seven-panel photogravure depicts Jebel Quarantul, the mountain in the Judean desert where Jesus was tempted by the devil, who offered him absolute power over “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (Mt 4:1-11; cf Lk 4:1-13, Mk 1:12-13). Dean has scrawled numerous fragmentary phrases into the landscape, as if ruminating over the narrative and reconnecting it to its geography: at the base of the mountain we read “forty days and forty nights” with stones numbered for each of Jesus’ days without food; near the top is “3rd temptation (desire for power)”; over the distant distorted hills is scrawled “kingdoms in the sky (of the world)”; and so on. In one sense, this work is mulling over the particular logic of Jesus’ renunciation of power, but it also pulls toward something more personal than that: a summons into the desert to confront our own temptations and capitulations to the demonic lure of power.
http://nielsborchjensen.com/project/11664/
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Danh Vo, We The People (2010–14).
This colossal sculpture is a full-scale 1:1 replica of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, produced in a Chinese factory in about 250 individual pieces, using the same copper material and fabrication techniques as the original. Installed in various locations around the world, these pieces are never fully assembled or exhibited all together. As such, We The People—which takes its title from the preamble of the U.S. Constitution rather than from Bartholdi’s statue—exists as a duplicate of America’s iconic symbol of freedom, a double that is horizontally distributed in fragments.
https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/danh-vo-we-the-people/
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Theaster Gates, The Dorchester Projects (2009–ongoing).
Gates’ work is a multi-faceted convergence of object-making, performance, and social practices—or as he has described himself: “I think of myself as a full-time artist, a full-time urban planner, and a full-time preacher with an aspiration of no longer needing any of those titles.” Throughout the past decade, The Dorchester Projects has been one place where these have powerfully converged, which has (under the umbrella of his non-profit Rebuild Foundation) been remaking abandoned buildings on Chicago’s South Side into community gathering places, libraries, sound and film archives, a black cinema, a soul food kitchen, a housing collective, and so on—all utilizing repurposed materials from Chicago and all centered on the social connectivity and the cultural activity of the local community. The stated core values of the project are: “black people matter, black spaces matter, and black things matter.” In a 2015 interview, Gates asked, “What if I were to say that I’ve underplayed the fact that I’m actually a Benedictine monk and that I just happen to be the most extroverted and undisciplined of them, and that this work that I’ve been doing, that we’ve all called art, was just a by-product. . . ?”
https://www.theastergates.com/project-items/dorchester-industries
