This week, Ela Bittencourt takes a closer look at "Performative" at Sean Kelly Gallery, Tim Keane reviews a rare retrospective of Dorothea Tanning’s mid-career paintings, and more. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

New York

April 13, 2022 • View in browser

Marina Abramović Is Suspended Between Self-Sacrifice and Spectacle

Abramović’s art embodies a dark, personal truth: one overcomes punishment through self-sacrifice, denial, turning the hurt into a weapon of liberation, at times literally bought in blood. | Ela Bittencourt

The show at Sean Kelly bears out the extent to which Abramović has come to rely on apparatuses and film craft in ways that feel counterproductive to her performance principles.
The re-staging of “The Artist Is Present” is scheduled for April 16; what I saw at the gallery instead was the chair with a small contraption and drawer and two rows of video monitors replaying closeups of the artist’s and sitters’ faces… Here, the many monitors promise a spectacle but fail to convey the charged lull I felt at MoMA that made me think that each participant creates the performance for herself, with Abramović as a poltergeist.

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Transformation and Dreams in Dorothea Tanning’s Later Work

As Tanning took up midcentury painterly abstraction, key philosophical themes from her earlier phantasmal narrative paintings undergo transformations and reiterations. | Tim Keane

Tanning is not invisible within the decades-long turn into semi-abstraction represented by the often captivating works in Doesn’t the Paint Say it All? In fact, this exhibition shows that as the artist adopts the anti-narrative strategies of painterly abstraction, several works can still be read as formalist or poetic counter-statements to the naïve portraiture and phantasmal narrative paintings that had put her on the Modernist map decades earlier.

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