What we leave behind: How can we come together in an ever more splintered world? Walker Harris considers the role liberalism’s notion of tolerance plays in people coming apart, and whether true tolerance demands not personal laissez-faire, even for those closest to us, but instead intensifying personal and communal responsibilities towards one another. Meanwhile, Charlie Phelan investigates what value artistic writing has in the age of its AI reproduction through the reclusive and self-directed artist dotting the works of Don DeLillo and William Gaddis. Finally, in the year’s final response to the letters prompt “There’s nothing left to conserve,” Daniel Fabrycky impresses upon us, the next generation, that the towering monuments of intellect, tradition, and achievement left to us by our forefathers still remain of value today. In our era of iconoclastic naivete, it behooves to pay attention to what the past has given us and try, at least a little, to get our act together and preserve it.
Reilly Pryma, assistant editor
Untitled, uninteresting: Two weeks ago, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin concluded its exhibition of Klara Lidén’s Kunstwerke, a collection of works on the interaction of the body, architecture, and capitalism. The exhibition’s general idea was to demonstrate how the physical structures of capitalism—advertisements, highway signs, trash cans, and other man-made objects—orient our bodies into unnatural and harmful positions. Her project attempts to illustrate how we can re-appropriate privatized and urban spaces beyond aggravating a present capitalistic nausea.
Lidén’s exhibition, for example, includes a series of works centered on the overstimulating visuals of commercial advertisements titled “Untitled (Poster Painting).” The pieces in this series, a collection of posters, consist of layered street advertisements overlayed with a white sheet of paper. From the side, the spectator notes that despite how these posters flare out, crumble, or curl at the edges, they are held together by the bleakness of a white page.
These pages, as the KW puts it, leave “traces of their [the posters’] original message or function,” wrongly assuming that to diminish the commodity’s seductiveness lies in its vague antithesis—the sterile (dis)comfort of a blank sheet of paper. Lidén’s pieces predicate themselves on the idea that opposing the disorienting aspects of commercial life entails countering them with pure absence. This approach fails, for besides its aesthetic triteness, it reduces a space of potentially generative contradiction to a shortsighted, literally reductive framework. Working within these boundaries, Lidén does little to enact a proper critique of capital, inspiring, if at all, just more provocations to malaise.
Maximiliano Mendoza, contributing editor
Bleak house: After decades of planning, the National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) recently opened its doors at 919 South Ada Street in Chicago, not coincidentally the last remaining building of the Jane Addams Homes, one of the city’s pioneering housing projects.
With a mission to promote “the right of all people to a place where they can live and prosper,” the museum has taken on a decidedly activist stance in its public-facing messaging. This agenda is carried forward most positively through hosting soup kitchens and sheltering unhoused Chicagoans, but also in obfuscating the nuances of the history it is trying to tell. The inclusion of UCLA research on Los Angeles’ Echo Park Lake encampment framing the 2021 settlements as “an alternative world” which was destroyed when it “became a threat to the policed-propertied order of Los Angeles” may destabilize dominant narratives which criminalize the unhoused, but the pursuit of activism obfuscates key elements of the truth. The pamphlets fail to mention the four deaths which occurred in the park (one being an overdose) and the threats to public safety reported by those within and exterior to the encampment.
In other ways, the museum provides attendees with the tools necessary to avoid confronting the uglier parts of history under the guise of tolerance or accessibility—outside the museum’s vinyl library hang two pairs of noise-cancelling headphones for those who may be sensitive to auditory inputs or the “racially charged language or references to violence, sex, or substance abuse” contained within some of the records.
If a museum includes a warning label on the history that it presents, is it still providing an educational experience? If the museum provides viewers with the means to prevent encountering uncomfortable truths, can it still be said to be engaging in activism? The primary function of the NPHM may be to advocate, but its fundamental duty as a museum—to the public and itself—is to force us to look at the truth, as whole, uncompromising, and complicated as it may be.
Nora Holmes, contributing editor
Image: Childe Hassam, Rainy Day, Boston, oil on canvas, 1885 (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio).