Over the past twenty years, Steve McQueen’s moving-image works have developed from his iconic silent videos to powerful sound-driven works. In his films, he establishes exquisite, visceral relationships between moving bodies and the architectural spaces that surround or confine them—relationships that are complicated by the presence of viewers in gallery spaces. Questions of politics, race, and societal traumas and conventions haunt his taut structural scenarios.

A standout in the 2015 Venice Biennale, Ashes presents footage of a handsome, young, carefree fisherman named Ashes balancing playfully on a pitching boat on one side of a screen. A second video, projected on the other side, provides the film’s soundtrack and chronicles Ashes’s unexpected fate. Some of the footage was made for McQueen’s previous project, Carib’s Leap, 2002. McQueen, who is of Grenadian descent, based Carib’s Leap on a tragic episode in Grenada’s history, when hundreds of native Caribs leaped off a cliff rather than submit to the invading French. While making that work in Grenada, McQueen met the charismatic Ashes and felt compelled to film him. Projected on both sides of the screen, the footage of Ashes is shot in grainy, lush 8mm film. Meanwhile, the footage chronicling Ashes’s fate is shot in 16mm film, which registers the scenes with factual precision. The videos conjure an easy vitality alongside the darker forces of society and destiny. McQueen has remarked, “Life and death have always lived side by side, in every aspect of life. We live with ghosts in our everyday.”

Ashes joins other works in the ICA/Boston collection that deal with the complex matrix of globalism, economy, and deeply entrenched societal problems with formal innovation, including recently acquired works by Mika Rottenberg and Kara Walker, and a group of important sculptures by Doris Salcedo. The work debuts in the US at the ICA in February 2017.

2016.02

Louise Lawler explores the changing context in which works of art are viewed and circulated. Since the late 1970s she has worked primarily in photography and has become best known for shooting art objects in collectors’ homes, museums, auction houses, commercial galleries, and corporate offices, whether installed above copier machines or piled on loading docks and in storage closets. In these sites, she frames the strategies of display—from the works’ labels to their location—to bring attention to the ways spaces shape the meaning and reception of art after it leaves the studio. Her work is often associated with institutional critique for its exposure of art world machinations, and with the so-called Pictures Generation, a group of artists that includes Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others, known for their strategies of appropriation. Witty and trenchant, Lawler’s photographs are more than mirrors in which the art world sees itself; they reposition the viewer to engage critically and affectively with art’s presentation and dissemination.

Grieving Mothers (Attachment) is part of a series in which Lawler documents casts of antiquities held by various international institutions. It depicts plaster casts of the wings of the Nike of Samothrace, c. 190 BCE, perhaps one of the most recognizable objects of Hellenic sculpture, in the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. To further complicate the idea of originality and reproduction, the original marble has missing portions filled in with plaster. Lawler shows the wings detached from the figure’s torso, the mechanism of attachment visible. Due to the close cropping and angled framing, the viewer can perceive the wings as sculptural objects divorced from their grand and dynamic referent. In such pieces, Lawler complicates our perception of authenticity and its relationship to form.

Lawler’s Grieving Mothers (Attachment) builds on the ICA/Boston’s holdings of work by contemporary photographers, especially those who came of age artistically in the 1980s, such as Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. Moreover, it adds to the group of works by younger photographers who explore the ways three-dimensional forms can be captured through photography, such as Roe Ethridge, Erin Shirreff, and Sara VanDerBeek, many of whom consider Lawler a key figure in the development of their practices.

2015.16

In 1969, Robert Rohm’s manila rope reliefs were included in three important group exhibitions: Lucy Lippard’s 557, 087 at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Seattle; Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and String and Rope at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. These three presentations defined the emerging movements of conceptual art, process art, and fiber art, respectively. In his rope reliefs, Rohm united the three currents by giving equal weight to issues of idea, process, and material. Knotted into grid shapes and darkened with a brown, oil-based wood stain, these netlike structures were nailed directly onto the gallery walls. Rohm then performed a sequence of simple, minimal interventions that drastically altered the appearance of the original grids.

Rohm divided his rope sculptures into three categories based on the gestures he executed. He made the first set by stretching or relaxing the rope; the second, by cutting it; and the third, by piling it. Gravity is the common denominator in the three groups. Untitled, 1969, is a knotted grid that exemplifies the first body of work. For this piece, Rohm tacked a rectangular net along its perimeter to the wall and then removed the nails along the top and right edges. He had anticipated that this would result in a crisp diagonal as with folded paper; instead, the rope slouched into an asymmetrical catenary curve. As it so often did, the material behaved contrary to Rohm’s prediction, introducing the element of chance.

Chance was also a factor in Rohm’s second and most influential series—rope grids he cut at predetermined points, such as Untitled, 1970. These cuts nearly always followed a logical pattern he had plotted on a preliminary diagram. Paradoxically, these methodical, orderly cuts caused the loose ends to dangle and droop into irregular, and at times even chaotic, new compositions. Rohm created a tension between rationality and randomness; after the grid’s connections were severed, its organized, geometric pattern devolved into disarray, illustrating the law of entropy that preoccupied many American artists during the 1970s.  The configuration of each sculpture provides the viewer with enough visual information to identify where Rohm sliced the grid and to mentally reconstruct the trajectory of the rope’s descent. “Visually, if it’s clear enough, one would read that that’s what happened,” he explains in an Artscanada article. “It’s not an illusion, it’s what actually did happen.”

Due to the ephemeral, disposable nature of Rohm’s early media, most of those early pieces were recycled or discarded soon after they were made. Like many important examples of conceptual and process-based works of the 1960s and ’70s, these two Rohm sculptures exist as instructions until they are realized in rope. Working with Rohm, and later his widow, Candy Adriance, the ICA/Boston obtained both the specific instructions for the works and recommendations of rope type. These works join other sculptures in fiber in the collection by artists such as Françoise Grossen and Sheila Hicks that appeared in Fiber: Sculpture, 1960—present, organized by Jenelle Porter, former Mannion Family Senior Curator, and enable the ICA to give a more complete art-historical story about approaches to process and material in sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s.

2015.29

In 1969, Robert Rohm’s manila rope reliefs were included in three important group exhibitions: Lucy Lippard’s 557, 087 at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Seattle; Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and String and Rope at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. These three presentations defined the emerging movements of conceptual art, process art, and fiber art, respectively. In his rope reliefs, Rohm united the three currents by giving equal weight to issues of idea, process, and material. Knotted into grid shapes and darkened with a brown, oil-based wood stain, these netlike structures were nailed directly onto the gallery walls. Rohm then performed a sequence of simple, minimal interventions that drastically altered the appearance of the original grids.

Rohm divided his rope sculptures into three categories based on the gestures he executed. He made the first set by stretching or relaxing the rope; the second, by cutting it; and the third, by piling it. Gravity is the common denominator in the three groups. Untitled, 1969, is a knotted grid that exemplifies the first body of work. For this piece, Rohm tacked a rectangular net along its perimeter to the wall and then removed the nails along the top and right edges. He had anticipated that this would result in a crisp diagonal as with folded paper; instead, the rope slouched into an asymmetrical catenary curve. As it so often did, the material behaved contrary to Rohm’s prediction, introducing the element of chance.

Chance was also a factor in Rohm’s second and most influential series––rope grids he cut at predetermined points, such as Untitled, 1970. These cuts nearly always followed a logical pattern he had plotted on a preliminary diagram. Paradoxically, these methodical, orderly cuts caused the loose ends to dangle and droop into irregular, and at times even chaotic, new compositions. Rohm created a tension between rationality and randomness; after the grid’s connections were severed, its organized, geometric pattern devolved into disarray, illustrating the law of entropy that preoccupied many American artists during the 1970s.  The configuration of each sculpture provides the viewer with enough visual information to identify where Rohm sliced the grid and to mentally reconstruct the trajectory of the rope’s descent. “Visually, if it’s clear enough, one would read that that’s what happened,” he explains in an Artscanada article. “It’s not an illusion, it’s what actually did happen.”

Due to the ephemeral, disposable nature of Rohm’s early media, most of those early pieces were recycled or discarded soon after they were made. Like many important examples of conceptual and process-based works of the 1960s and ’70s, these two Rohm sculptures exist as instructions until they are realized in rope. Working with Rohm, and later his widow, Candy Adriance, the ICA/Boston obtained both the specific instructions for the works and recommendations of rope type. These works join other sculptures in fiber in the collection by artists such as Françoise Grossen and Sheila Hicks that appeared in Fiber: Sculpture, 1960–Present, organized by Jenelle Porter, former Mannion Family Senior Curator, and enable the ICA to give a more complete art-historical story about approaches to process and material in sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s.

2015.28

Sherrie Levine is a multimedia artist who works in photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, among other materials, to create pieces that challenge deeply rooted notions of artistic authenticity, originality, autonomy, the purity of medium, and immutability.

Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) is one of Levine’s series of knot paintings (the name is a pun on “not painting”). Each of these works uses the common building material of plywood, which is composed of many thin layers of wood glued together. Plywood is often used to build crates for artworks, though here the everyday material becomes the material support of a painting. Levine paints in gold over the naturally occurring knots within the wood, a process that again conflates high and low culture, granting a seemingly banal material aesthetic relevance and material worth.

Though fitting in with her oeuvre at large in its critique of modernist concepts, such as the end of painting, Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) complements the other works by Levine in the ICA/Boston’s collection by providing a modification of her signature strategy of appropriation. This piece is also an important reference for works by other artists in the collection, including Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, artists who, like Levine, are considered part of the so-called Pictures Generation, known for their appropriation of images and critical examination of popular culture and consumerism.

2015.19

Sherrie Levine is known for appropriating the work of canonical male artists in order to deconstruct accepted art-historical concepts like originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium and suggest their inherent mutability.

Over a decade after she began reproducing works by famous male artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Walker Evans, and Willem de Kooning, Levine created a cast bronze replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, one of the first readymade sculptures, a commercially manufactured urinal that Duchamp removed from a functional context and presented as a work of art. In Levine’s Fountain (Buddha), she recasts Duchamp’s work in a critical light, challenging the nearly universal acceptance and celebration of Duchamp’s early twentieth-century radicalism. Levine subverts the everyday quality of Duchamp’s readymade by casting the work in bronze, a valuable material with strong currency in the history of sculpture. Levine collapses multiple associations within this work, as the low-culture urinal is presented as a bronze masterwork. The title points to the visual similarity of the upturned urinal with Buddhist reliquary sculptures, offering many pathways for reconsidering the original work.

Fountain (Buddha) is one of several works in the ICA/Boston collection that critique accepted notions of artistic creativity, the authenticity and commodification of the art object, and the nature of the art-historical canon.

2015.18

An important female artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of what was later dubbed the Pictures Generation, Sherrie Levine is known for her appropriation of canonical work by male artists. In the words of Douglas Crimp, Levine’s layered works draw from “pictures whose status is that of cultural myth,” as the artist “steals them away from their usual place in our culture and subverts their mythology.”

In 1983, Levine began to re-create printed reproductions of works by male modernists, raising questions of originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium. Chair Seat: 7 binds together the flatness of modernist painting, such as Frank Stella’s “stripe paintings,” with a readymade material—here a store-bought chair seat—creating an awkward combination of high and low culture, the abstract and the everyday. While modernist painting aspired to visual flatness and disdained decoration, Levine undermines both principles by overlaying abstract painting on a three-dimensional surface intended for bodily use.

Chair Seat: 7 joins other works by Levine in the ICA/Boston’s collection to represent the breadth of this influential artist’s oeuvre in terms of media and technique. This piece also complements works by other female artists of the so-called Pictures Generation, including Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman.

2015.17

Sherrie Levine is known for her strategy of naked appropriation. Since 1983, she has used photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture to reproduce in full the work of canonical male modernists. A member of the so-called Pictures Generation, Levine employs what Douglas Crimp called “processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging” in layered works emblematic of a critical style of postmodernism.

In After Henri Matisse, one of many similar works made from the eponymous artist’s work, Levine constructs her re-creation with ink and graphite. Here, the contours of a woman’s face, abstracted by Matisse, are copied exactly by Levine, the repetition bringing the work into a new context to illustrate how art accumulates meanings and interpretations over time.

Though Levine is best known for her photographs and multimedia pieces, this work on paper adds a dimension to the ICA/Boston’s holdings of her oeuvre. Taken together with works in the collection by Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, Levine’s works are representative of a late 20th-century paradigm in artistic production that has both historical and contemporary relevance.

2015.20

The figurative works of Chantal Joffe reveal the artist’s keen observation of everyday life and her active engagement with the medium of painting. Often large in scale and boldly colored, her paintings depict female figures in a wide range of poses and couplings. Joffe culls her subjects from photographs and fashion magazines, isolating and intensifying aspects of the images—from the textures of the clothing and details of the accessories to the poses of the models—through the process of painting. Constructed with blocks of brilliant color in thick, wet paint and quick strokes, her paintings appear both carefully composed and rapidly executed, exuding the immediacy of daily life.

Self-Portrait with Esme combines two staples in Joffe’s production: the self-portrait and the subject of mother and child. In this painting, a mother leans over and tightly embraces a small child. The two bodies—dressed identically in simple white underwear and painted in the same pink-tinged cream—appear to become one, an effect deepened by the strong outline around the figures posed against an indistinct background. The focus is on the intimacy of this quotidian scene, an intimacy conveyed not only through the subject matter but also through the proximity and visual unity of the two bodies in space.

Self-Portrait with Esme contributes to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of portraits of women by women, including important examples by Marlene Dumas, Alice Neel, Dana Schutz, and Lisa Yuskavage, and extends an inquiry into the subjectivity of identity by artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier and Cindy Sherman. Joffe’s major painting also corresponds with the ICA’s collection of Nan Goldin photographs, which Joffe has frequently cited as a major inspiration for her work.

2015.08

Over the past two decades, Ellen Gallagher has built a body of work that confronts the history of black representation. Gallagher rose to prominence as a painter of minimal paintings that straddle the line between figuration and abstraction, works with which she sought to subtly undermine the perceived narrative limits of abstraction. Since the late 1990s, she has pivoted toward a more appropriative methodology, using historical vernacular imagery to explore how a history of representation manifests itself in the lived condition of blackness in America.

DeLuxe is a piercing visual investigation of the multivalent and complex role that hair, as both object and stand-in for the body, occupies in black culture. In this suite of sixty prints, Gallagher employs a panoply of mediums, techniques, and processes to alter magazine prints, incorporating collaged elements from popular black culture magazines such as Ebony and Black Digest dating from the 1930s to the 1970s. The images are sourced primarily from advertisements promoting cosmetic “improvements,” such as wigs, skin-whitening creams, hair straighteners, and hair pomades, that support the agenda of modifying black bodies to conform to white archetypes of beauty. Gallagher alters the form and content of these images through a laborious process that involves drawing and redrawing, cutting and layering, and the addition of exaggerated features, text, and non-art materials such as modeling clay, glitter, toy eyeballs, and coconut oil. These manipulations reveal the elusiveness and misguided purposes of the advertisements.

One of the most ambitious works by this important artist, DeLuxe is a central piece in the ICA/Boston’s collection of works on paper and is in dialogue with collage-based works by artists such as Arturo Herrera, Gilbert and George, and Wangechi Mutu. Moreover, it accompanies others by such artists as Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, and Lorna Simpson in the ICA’s ever-growing collection of works that directly acknowledge and investigate the history of race in America.

2015.24.1–60