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Called to testify in a 1981 lawsuit brought by a San Diego transit workers union against Aztec Bus Lines, photographer Fred Lonidier found himself explaining the finances of his art practice. The purpose of his testimony was to interpret some pictures he had taken of striking bus drivers to help determine whether the strikers had impeded access to a bus depot. The lawyer for Aztec asked whether he’d been paid by the union, and Lonidier said that he had not, that all the expenses came out of his own pocket. “I’m not engaged in a commercial endeavor in a straightforward sense,” he said. “I’m an artist. If my work ever sells, which it rarely does, it’s in a museum, a gallery, to a private collector…. Only on a very rare occasion does anyone ever buy a photograph from me.” 

Such occasions, it seems, are less rare now than they were in 1981. Over the course of five decades, Lonidier has produced a vast and idiosyncratic body of work, principally as a participant-observer in North American labor struggles. During the past decade, that work has appeared not infrequently in modish galleries and Kunsthallen, a far cry from the union halls, libraries, and universities where he previously exhibited (a fact often recited in the press releases and bios issued by his new urbane venues). Not that anyone could begrudge him this recent art world embrace, but it is hard to ignore a certain dissonance between the content and context, between images of organizing workers and a market that is a picture of their antagonists.  

Lonidier reproduced his testimony in the multi-panel photo-text installation AZTEC VS A.T.U. 1309: Long Ago In A Faraway Galaxy (1996), included in his recent exhibition at Michael Benevento in Los Angeles, a career sampler that comprised mostly lesser-known or never-before-exhibited works. Eighteen prints of the striking workers accompany as many panels of blown-up text from the artist’s testimony embellished with graphic design: highlighted passages, circled phrases and faces, and lines connecting bits of text and image. Annotations in a goofy faux-handwritten font say things like proof!; elsewhere, Lonidier calls his own testimony into question: so I say! amends an explanation of a particular picture. He seems to delight in the way the staid courtroom examination—with questions about his position relative to his subjects, how we can know what a photograph really shows or means—echoes the bugaboos of photoconceptualism. 

Lonidier has frequently employed this photo-text format in examining workplace injuries or the ravages of NAFTA. Examples on view here tend to be anecdotal: in 3 Art Talks (1975), he relates, among other experiences, attempting to take a picture at a Lee Friedlander lecture, before the famous photographer called Lonidier out for forgetting to remove his lens cap; a contact sheet with a black frame, followed by the back of a bald head, illustrates the incident. His is a charmingly casual, even artless approach to image, design, and language. We can see this anti-, or amateur, aesthetic as a tool for demystification of the sort that animated a number of students and teachers at the University of California, San Diego in the early 1970s. The group included Lonidier, who received his MFA and joined the faculty in 1972, as well as Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula. Galvanized by the anti-war and feminist movements, they sought to reconcile social documentary photography’s political engagement with Conceptualism’s scrutiny of the production and circulation of images. 

The other key body of work in this show comes out of Lonidier’s revisiting of his vast archive, much of it recording student activism and an atmosphere of experimentation from those early San Diego days. More intimate, Female Photo Resistance II (2022) is a video slideshow devoted to an unnamed subject who appears to be a photo student and Lonidier’s girlfriend. We see her in class, installing a show, lying in bed, and sitting on the toilet as intertitles narrate the power dynamic of artist and muse: “She didn’t like me to photograph her.” The self-criticism, tongue-in-cheek from the start, disappears in a profusion of images. A salient instinct in Lonidier’s art is to make space for irony and folly alongside serious political commitment.

A review of 96 artifacts from the Kingdom of Benin in Swiss museums found proof or strong evidence that more than half of the items were stolen by British soldiers in the 19th century.

A research report from the Swiss Benin Initiative (SBI) released this week found that 21 Benin objects in eight Swiss museums were looted based on written records or evidence like burn marks that “provide a direct link to the fateful events of 1897.”

Researchers found “strong evidence” of looting for 32 objects that did not have written evidence linking them to 1897 but were still considered to be court or royal artworks exclusively produced for the palace. “We may assume with considerable certainty that they were violently appropriated in 1897 when the palace was occupied and sacked by the British troops,” the report’s authors wrote.

For example, a brass hip pendant mask at the Rietberg Museum bears an inventory number of William D. Webster on its backside. According to the museum’s latest research, the London art dealer was tasked with the sale of the seized Benin artifacts on behalf of the British colonial administration.

The SBI report also says private collectors, as well as international and Swiss art markets, played a pivotal role in how the objects entered the museums’ collections.

A high court in South Korea ordered the return of a Buddhist statue that was stolen from a temple in Japan in 2012.

The statue, which is more than 450 years old, depicts the Kanzeon Bodhisattva. Kanzeon is known among Buddhist culture as the One Who Perceives the Sounds of the World and is said to “grant salvation to the suffering.”

The bodhisattva statue has been at the center of an international tug-of-war since it surfaced in South Korea, according to the Asahi Shimbun.

In 2013, the South Korean government arrested the thieves who looted the statue from the Kannonji temple in Tsushima, Nagasaki Prefecture. The statue was subsequently confiscated by the South Korean government. Shortly after, the Kannonji temple, with the support of the Japanese government, requested that the statue be returned.

But a temple in South Korea, Buseoksa, also claimed it had a right to the statue and demanded that it be granted ownership of the work. The temple says the Kanzeon Bodhisattva was stolen in the 14th century by a group of Japanese pirates known as “Wako” who sailed the along the Chinese and Korean coasts between 1200 CE and 1500 CE.

A life-sized statue of a Roman emperor depicted as the Greek hero Hercules was discovered near the Appian Way, ancient Rome’s first highway. The statue was recovered on January 25 during a sewer repair project.

The statue’s face emerged as a bulldozer was tearing through old pipelines. On-site archaeologists investigated the find.

The marble statue has Hercules’s trademark lion skin pelt and club, with frown lines on its forehead that are meant to indicate of a time of deep crisis for the Roman Empire. Its style is typical for 3rd-century depictions of emperors.

Archaeologists believe that the statue might be Emperor Decius, who ruled Rome from 249 CE to 251 CE. Decius was the first Roman emperor to be killed in battle by a foreign enemy. He died while fighting against the Visigoths in present-day Bulgaria, and was also responsible for the first organized execution of Christians.

The statue now exists as several broken pieces, as it sustained some accidental damage during its discovery. It is currently undergoing cleaning and restoration ahead of its public display.

This week, a French appeals court upheld the charges against Jean-Luc Martinez, the former president and director of the Louvre in Paris, for his alleged complicity in the trafficking of antiquities from Egypt.  

Martinez, who led the Louvre from 2013 to 2021, was charged in May for “complicity in fraud,” money laundering, and “facilitating” the purchase of artifacts linked to a vast trafficking ring that has been the target of a years-long police inquiry. French authorities suspect that the network of smugglers and their accomplices have sold art and relics to museums and galleries worldwide, including the Louvre’s Abu Dhabi outpost between 2014 and 2017. 

Martinez’s former colleague, the curator and archaeologist Jean-Francois Charnier, was also charged for his suspected involvement in the operation. Both are expected to appeal the ruling in France’s supreme court, per Le Monde. 

When Martinez and Charnier were first charged last year, the art community in Paris and beyond was stunned. Martinez, France’s current official ambassador for international cooperation on cultural heritage issue, had dedicated his recent career to the preservation of art in conflict zones and had authored a report that France presented to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization that detailed new strategies for deterring looting. 

In November 2022, the public prosecutor requested to have the charges against Martinez dismissed following a re-examination of the evidence against him. The prosecutor’s decision seemed to signal that Martinez, a trained archeologist, had been wrongfully implicated in the case. According to the French legal system, an indictment does not ensure the defendant will stand trial, and charges can be overturned by a special magistrate at any point in the investigation.

It may have been only a couple days since word leaked out that a long-awaited Anish Kapoor sculpture in New York was finally complete, but already, crowds have begun to form on a previously unremarkable corner on Leonard Street in Tribeca to see it. They’re there to greet a 19-foot-tall sculpture that resembles a legume being squashed by a luxury building, its steel form appearing to bulge out beneath the weight of a sleek outcropping.

The New Yorker once termed the sculpture, which is not yet titled, “the mini-Bean,” a reference to the nickname given to Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the work this piece is loosely based on. That Chicago sculpture, which debuted in 2006, is well-loved, both by locals and tourists, and its following may explain why this new Kapoor work has already attracted so many influencers and curious onlookers.

Yet this sculpture is no Cloud Gate, and personally, I wouldn’t mind if the building above it made good on its promise and crushed the thing altogether. Kapoor’s latest is a big, shiny, reflective object that feels like the final boss of ugly public art in New York—not that that will stop people from flocking to it.

In some ways, it feels like a mistake to call Kapoor’s sculpture public art, however, since the structure above it is about as private as it gets. Designed by the starchitect firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building, known as the Jenga Tower, contains 60 stories of luxury condominiums, some of which even overlook the mini-Bean. (Kapoor bought one of those units for more than $13.5 million.) The tower rises so high, you can’t see its uppermost floors from the street, but if you were in an airplane, you’d notice that portions of them jut out like unevenly laid blocks.

This new sculpture, which may have cost as much as $10 million to fabricate, had always been a part of the building plan, appearing in reporting on the Herzog & de Meuron building as early as 2008. (The building itself was completed more than five years ago.) Manufacturing difficulties and the pandemic caused the piece’s years-long delay, and for a while, the mini-Bean existed only as a partially empty shell New Yorkers could see from the street. In 2021 Curbed New York made a plea for the piece to remain that way, arguing that Chicago’s Bean should be allowed to retain its glory, but alas, that was not to be.

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The Headlines

ARTIST MIRA LEHR, whose multifarious art tackled environmental issues, and who was involved in founding Continuum, a cooperative gallery in Miami Beach, Florida, for women artists in 1966, has died at the age of 88, Neil Genzlinger reports in the New York Times. Powerfully influenced by her participation in a 1969 experiment by inventor R. Buckminster Fuller that looked at how to allocate natural resources, Lehr made work in a variety of mediums—paint, video, gunpowder, and more—that addresses ecosystems, animal life, and other topics. While being profiled by the Times in 2020, Lehr said, “We have to think of the loss and destruction and that there is more of this to come.”

SHOWTIME. One of the most anticipated exhibitions of the season in New York has to be Sarah Sze’s outing at the Guggenheim, which will open in March. In WSJ Magazine, the wily installation artist spoke about what she has on tap—video projections on the outside of the building, for one thing—with journalist Ted Loos. “I wanted to make pieces you could only do at the Guggenheim,” Sze said. “The building became a tool for making the work.” Meanwhile, painter and musician Mike Henderson spoke with David Smith in the Guardian about his just-opened show at the University of California, Davis’s art museum. It includes his “protest paintings” from the 1960s to ‘80s, which look at racist violence in the United States. He knew they “weren’t going to hang in anybody’s living room but the paintings were coming through me,” he said. “There was a deeper calling.”

The Digest

The exhibition “But Tell Me, Is It a Civilized Country?” is the result of Max Guy’s deep dive into the Land of Oz, a territory the self-deprecating Witch of the North described as uncivilized because it harbors wizards and witches like her. The exhibition title—actually, the witch’s question to Dorothy about Kansas from the first Oz book, published in Chicago in 1900—brings to mind the racist and criminal inhospitalities of recent times, from Texas and Arizona governors’ callous shuttling of migrants north to Donald Trump’s question about why the United States would want immigrants from “shithole countries.”

For Guy, Oz is a mirror. In an artist talk when the show opened at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, he compared the interrelated Oz literature and films to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as one self-perpetuating franchise. Two keystones of this franchise, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Wiz (1978), play side by side in Guy’s silent video The City and the City, sixth cut (2022). The first effort features an Emerald City that feels at times like Chicago while the later rendition involves many New York filming locations. (Guy’s connection here: he grew up in New York and is now based in Chicago.) In its time, The Wiz suffered at the hands of white critics who questioned the need for revisiting Oz with Black actors, a new script, and new songs. Guy’s video suggests his own study of the changes. He has slowed down both films and plays them to end at precisely the same time, as if to put on equal footing Motown and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, an all-white cast and an all-Black one, and Dorothy as played by Judy Garland and by Diana Ross.

Guy’s cultural critique through juxtaposition continues in Emerald City Leperello (Featuring Pointless Rendering by Lorenzo Bueno), 2022, which stands open on a table at the center of the gallery. The pages of the giant book comprise eight vintage copies of a poster showing the Chicago skyline; the poster promoted a 1989 exhibition in which the Renaissance Society paired 24 of On Kawara’s deadpan “Date Paintings” with contemporaneous works by 24 artists, from heavyweights with minimalist and conceptual leanings, such as Jenny Holzer and Joseph Kosuth, to those associated with the Windy City, including the Hairy Who. At the time, this exhibition may have appeared far-reaching and representative for putting Kawara in dialogue with peers and local traditions, but in retrospect, the curatorial conceit appears exclusive. The artists were almost all white, and are now mainstream. Guy added a harlequin-pattern border and yellow, green, and black architectonic forms to the exhibition posters, making the cityscape look more like the Emerald City and implying that Kawara and the other artists could stand in the place of Dorothy and her famous traveling buddies—Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Whom would an artist choose to accompany them on the Yellow Brick Road as they create imagined worlds? Who is cast to walk beside them? If Guy had traveling companions, they might include the artist Lorenzo Bueno (mentioned in the book’s title), whose Pointless Rendering (2018) is part of a whimsical proposal to build an upside-down replica of New York’s Citigroup Center building right on top of the actual structure on Lexington Avenue. We can imagine that Guy likes how this ambitious-but-impossible proposition plays with monumentality and implies an alternate universe.

Another sort of inversion happens when viewers look up to see a gigantic, multicolored flag draped across the immense ceiling of the Renaissance Society. It’s called Dargerino (2022) and intends to summon and perhaps commune with Henry Darger, the legendary Chicago outsider artist who worked alone in a tiny apartment, sometimes under the influence of Oz, and was undiscovered until the last year of his life. The flag’s colors represent the regions of Oz, though the flag adds an extra point to the usual Emerald City star, making it more like the six-point stars of the Chicago flag. What if Chicago were Oz? Or, what if we made Chicago into a kind of Oz? Guy proposes that we would then have to distinguish meaningful gestures from small arrogant ones. In his artist talk, when discussing Dargerino, Guy referred to the colossal torn American flag sculpture Trinket (2008/15) by William Pope.L, who told Artforum that his sculpture refers to “our mouse nature” and “how we blot out the sky with our paw and think we’ve vanquished the sun.”

Chicagoans dye their river bright green every year on St. Patrick’s Day. Guy captured this bizarre tradition on video for Chicago (2022). In the context of this exhibition, the festivities appear so entirely out of this world that they could almost have taken place in Emerald City. In so many ways, we mortals create and re-create highly developed worlds, determine their strange rituals and exclusive memberships, and exalt them. In The Wiz, the denizens of Emerald City extol green as the height of fashion until The Great and Powerful Oz declares green dead, and endorses red. “I wouldn’t be seen green,” the chorus sings. By bringing Oz into the present, Guy’s smart show prompts the question: With the forcefulness of the collective imagination that we regularly display and sometimes shift at the drop of a hat, how can we reimagine, stand on end, and remake the careless, rough, stained, and unwelcoming parts of our world?

An open letter voicing support for Manuel Borja-Villel, the former head of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, is circulating amid Spain’s election to appoint a new director for the state-backed museum. Borja-Villel abruptly stepped down on January 20 from his post after 15 years with the institution.

In an open letter first published by e-flux, artists, scholars and museum leaders in Belgium, Germany, and Luxembourg published their support of the recently-departed Borja-Villel. The former museum leader has faced criticism in the Spanish press as a result of what the letter contends is a growing right-wing political movement in the country. The signatories called for Borja-Villel’s legacy of bringing progressive arts programming to Madrid to continue even as Spain grapples with a so-called “culture war”.

The letter’s stakeholders voice concern over the museum’s uncertain future and call for the preservation of the “inclusive” model that Borja-Villel established during his tenure at the institution. They also condemned the “attacks” that Borja-Ville has received from far-right media pundits, including a Spanish media outlet that labeled the museum’s exhibitions under his leadership “political propaganda”. The same news organization alleged the Reina Sofia violated codes when it renewed Borja-Villel’s contracts in 2013 and 2018. (Borja-Villel has denied the accusations.)

The letter, which has drawn 1,700 signatories, says that Borja-Villel made the museum into a place that “allows us to talk about justice and correction,” and described it as a center for “historiographical reflection”.

After taking up the position in 2008, Borja-Villel drew acclaim from Madrid’s art community for expanding the once modern-focused Reina Sofia into a contemporary art hub. Under his direction, the museum revamped its permanent collections and tripled its visitor foot traffic, reaching a milestone high of 4.5 million visitors in 2019.

The historic center of the Ukrainian Black Sea port city Odesa has been added to UNESCO’s list of endangered World Heritage sites. 

The key strategic port city, known for its cosmopolitan history and architectural landmarks, has been the target of Russian bombing since its invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. Last October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a formal appeal to the United Nation’s cultural organization to place the city center under its protection—a move which offers Odesa additional international aid along with potential consequences for its destruction.

“I’m grateful to partners who help protect our pearl from the Russian invaders’ attacks!” Zelensky tweeted after UNESCO voted in favor of the inscription during a special meeting of its World Heritage Committee on January 25.

In a statement, Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, described Odesa as “a world city, a legendary port that has left its mark on cinema, literature and the arts”. 

“While the war continues, this inscription embodies our collective determination to ensure that this city, which has always surmounted global upheavals, is preserved from further destruction,” she said.