NEW YORK — At nearly 80 years old, one of Ewerdt Hilgemann’s most striking attributes is his boundless energy—more indicative of someone decades younger. The German artist, who has called Amsterdam home since the 1980s, has brought that lively spirit, along with a series of sculptures, to New York City.

Four years after receiving an invitation, Hilgemann has realized seven stainless-steel pieces for his “Moments in a Stream” exhibition along Park Avenue. The ‘implosion’ sculptures are created using a unique vacuuming method developed by Hilgemann in the 1980s. The artist, with the help of his studio, creates perfect geometric forms then uses a process to suck the air out of the structures, harnessing the innate atmospheric pressure to collapse the pieces into their final shape.

“The air is my hammer. I am an ‘airsmith’,” Hilgemann told Blouin ARTINFO. “The air is hammering for me, sculpturing for me… I like the nature force.”

We spoke with him on a sunny day in August, shortly after the installation, in front of “Habakuk (Homage to Max Ernst)” on the median at 67th Street and Park Avenue. At 20 feet tall, the piece is a tribute to Ernst’s bird-like bronze sculptures of the 1930s.

Following in the footsteps of Keith Haring, Fernando Botero, Robert Indiana and more recently Alexandre Arrechea, Will Ryman and Alice Aycock, the remaining large-scale sculptures line the avenue to the south, as part of one of the city’s public art initiatives. They were formed in the artist’s Amsterdam studio before being transported to New York via shipping container. Hilgemann himself was on hand for the complex installation, which went late into the night over three days last month.

“It was so exciting for me,” he said of those sleepless nights. “The night on Park Avenue is magic.”

“Moments in a Stream” arrived in the city weeks before New York is introduced to Hilgemann’s teacher, Oskar Holweck, a cofounder of Germany’s ZERO group in the 1960s. Opening in October is the Guggenheim’s “Countdown to Tomorrow: The International ZERO Network, 1950s-60s,” the first large-scale review of ZERO. Years after his death, Holweck’s teachings and influence are not lost on the sculptor.

“[Holweck] was very important for me. The whole thing of ZERO, I am from that time. I am only a generation younger,” says the artist. “Without that education… I wouldn’t do [these] things now. It’s connected altogether.”

Hilgemann is also the subject of  “Freeze Frame,” a show at Magnan Metz in Chelsea where he is offering guests a deeper look into his creative process. In addition to a number of new works, on display are maquettes of all seven sculptures from the Park Avenue series  He treated visitors to a live implosion of three sculptures at the exhibition’s opening.

“Freeze Frame” is on view through August 22. “Moments in a Stream” can be seen through October 31.

Artists have long turned to the residency as a way to make work away from the pressures of the daily grind. There are coveted mainstays such as Yaddo and the American Academy in Rome; quirky outliers like Monteverdi Tuscany, a two-month sojourn in an Italian hotel; and innumerable pay-your-own-way programs, with their fair share of exploitive con jobs. Collector and art advisor Sarah Elson, however, has recently initiated a residency that is quite a bit more focused, and uncommonly personal. Dubbed “Launch Pad,” its ambition is to give emerging artists new to London a time to shine on the city’s stage — by bringing them into her private home to conceive and install their work. In many ways it’s less of a traditional residency and more of a choreographed professional relationship. “Collecting is one thing,” said Elson, “but commissioning is another, more intimate thing.”

Those relationships are forged in varying ways. In the case of San Francisco-based Josh Faught, who installed his text-and-textile pieces at her Holland Park house this summer, Elson had purchased one of his works through Lisa Cooley Gallery in 2009. The pair didn’t actually meet until March of this year, when Faught traveled to London to spend a few weeks living at Elson’s home, a circa-1860s structure whose interior was reimagined by architect Seth Stein. “One of the most fascinating aspects of my visit was understanding the inherent psychological and architectural conundrums surrounding Sarah’s house and the neighborhood,” Faught said. “I loved thinking about the shifting ways that one could assert their identity through decoration, particularly in a neighborhood like Holland Park, which is historically preserved and architecturally regulated.” Ideas and inspirations percolated, ranging from the implications of the color mauve to Faught’s own struggles with his allergies. The works conceived and installed as part of Launch Pad “conflated my own history, the history of Sarah’s house, and the history of London at the turn of the 20th century,” he said. (Part of his time in London included personal research trips to the V&A’s textile department.)  

While Elson encourages the commissioned artists to address their temporary home, she doesn’t want that to be limiting. “I encourage them to use the space of my house as a starting point,” she said, “but it’s not my intention to create a whole collection of site-specific works. I want each work to stand on its own, independent of its context, so that it could exist anywhere.” Elson, whose collection includes pieces by Robin Rhode, Isaac Julien, Do Ho Suh, Rose Wylie, and Philip Lorca di Corcia, relished the opportunity to move beyond simply acquiring art. “It’s very satisfying to play a role in the creative process, and it’s obvious to me that the best way to support artists is to give them time and space to make work,” she said.

Elson came across the next Launch Pad resident, Brooklyn-based Rachel Foullon, at the NADA New York booth of her gallerist, Halsey McKay. (Foullon’s sculptural installation will be installed at the house in October.) Their relationship has grown along exceedingly 21st-century lines: Conflicting schedules made an in-person visit to London impossible, so Foullon got to know Elson’s space through FaceTime tours. The artist plans to install “Choker,” a massive fabric-and-metal sculpture, in the house’s mezzanine. (That work’s shape riffs on the contours of a collar, which Foullon thinks of as “a personal architecture of the self.”) The sculpture, she said, was partially inspired by the “duality between the house’s Victorian exterior and modernized interior.” Like much of Foullon’s sculpture, it will possess equal amounts elegance and cool, quasi-violent minimalism. “The piece consists of a gargantuan-scaled black velvet ribbon I’ve been constructing using theatrical stage-curtain fabric,” she said, “hung from an intricately cut steel form that resembles architecture as much as lace. The 40-foot length of velvet will be wrestled into a bow, on-site — hopefully appearing conflicted between being “perky due to tension from the knot, and morose due to gravity’s exhaustion under its own weight.”

Elson pays the production costs and a commission fee to the artists, and often buys the resulting works. She also provides a number of opportunities for her artists: Appointment-only viewings of the work; a celebratory dinner; visitors from Central St. Martin’s, the South London Gallery, and other London institutions. (Faught’s residency featured a roundtable, organized by Elson, which included Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick.) The goal is clearly to develop long-term relationships, and also to build upon what is often only an economic exchange. Through this framework, the collector becomes both a facilitator and a connector.

“It’s often the case that collectors only see work in a splintered form — through art fairs, online, or a show here and there,” Faught said. “I love that Sarah’s so committed, in this kind of old school way, to understanding the motivation and spirit behind the artists she supports.” That commitment and investment doesn’t come without its attendant anxieties. “The most challenging part of this process,” Foullon said, “is the inherent self-consciousness one feels while making something that you want this one particular person to love so deeply.”

The comedic actor Robin Williams, known for his television, film, and stage work, died on Monday at his home in Tiburon, California, reportedly from suicide. He was 63 years old.

Williams’s death came as a shock but not a surprise. He fought a lifelong battle, an unwinnable battle, against addiction and severe depression, a fight he was open about exploring and skewering in his work. As recently as the beginning of this year, Williams was reportedly reentering rehab to “fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment” to sobriety, which followed a 2006 relapse after 20 years free of substance abuse. But this kind of addiction never goes away. In a later interview with Diane Sawyer, quoted in the New York Times, he explained to the host, and presumably the audience, that his addiction and depression were not “caused by anything, it’s just there.”

I can sit here and think and write about how much I loved “Good Morning Vietnam” as a kid when it aired on local television, or how I later admired many of his darker roles, including “One Hour Photo” and “World’s Greatest Dad.” But we all know this. It doesn’t need to be repeated. What does need to be repeated is that depression and addiction are real diseases that need to be taken seriously, not dismissed as something that’s the result of a choice. There is no simple cause and effect when dealing with depression and addiction. It’s not a disease you give yourself; it’s a disease you have that requires you to fight against it.

When the news broke last night, an acquaintance said something that is unfortunately too commonplace in our understanding of depression and addiction. “He had children,” this person said, “and so much to live for.” We need to move away from this sort of understanding of depression and addiction, that somehow a happy family, or any marker of success really, is suitable treatment.

Depression is real, and something that many people struggle with. Success has nothing to do with it. All of this will undoubtedly recall Philip Seymour Hoffman, who passed away in February. Let’s not make the same mistakes we did in talking about him, another person who fought long and hard and did not win. There is nothing we can gain from reporting on his “final days of descent,” or from depicting Williams as the “sad clown,” as some news outlets are doing this morning.  

Many people will suggest that you watch one of Williams’s films, or listen to one of his great comedy albums. My suggestion would be to listen to his appearance on the comedian Marc Maron’s podcast, from 2010. In the episode, which you will find below, Williams is open and honest about his struggle and the constant fight it required. He will be truly missed, and the voice he gave to struggles with depression and addiction is one that we can’t lose. 

“Contemporary art is a relatively cheap way of criticizing the system,” wrote Russian artist and curator Arseniy Zhilayev in “The Lessons of the Biennale Season.” In one of several critical essays on the state of the Russian art world in the 2013 volume “Post-Post Soviet,” Zhilayev focuses his ire on the role of contemporary art in the machinations of a semi-authoritarian regime. “The authorities need a liberal façade to put up the appearance of democratic transformations, “ he explained, discussing 2009’s third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. By permitting small-scale political gestures within the art world, the Russian government could point to contemporary art as supposed evidence of its tolerance toward cultural and dissident activities.

Zhilayev’s concerns were sidelined when the Manifesta Biennial announced that it would hold its 10th edition in St. Petersburg, Russia, under the direction of curator Kasper Konig. Many Western commentators, evidently unfamiliar with contemporary art politics in Russia beyond the much-publicized incarceration of Pussy Riot, argued instead that art should criticize the system. Shouldn’t international curators and artists refuse to work in Russia, many asked, as acts of opposition to the state’s repressive LGBTQ laws and maneuvers in Ukraine? Wouldn’t it simply be better to hold the biennial elsewhere? Manifesta 10, which opened on June 28 at the State Hermitage Museum, proves that disengagement from Russia would have been a cop-out, akin to turning a blind eye while the country’s government spirals further into conservatism and militarism. The exhibition is a mixed bag — many such large-scale shows often are. But when artworks in Manifesta 10 do achieve critical ends, they succeed not by explicitly attacking contemporary Russian politics, but by illustrating through more suggestive mechanisms the disturbing state of political affairs and policies in the country.

Inside the General Staff building, newly restored on the occasion of the Hermitage’s 250th anniversary, Manifesta 10 presents the largest exhibition to date of international contemporary art in Russia. Across all four floors, special commissions by many leading Western names and pieces from a select few Russian artists purport, as per Manifesta’s manifesto, to interrogate the shifting boundaries of East and West in Europe. Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Abschlag” installation, which occupies the first room on the main floor, offers a lesson in how not to engage with the Russian milieu: the Swiss artist constructed part of a typical Petersburg apartment block out of cardboard inside the full-height space, ripped off its façade, and deposited the refuse at its base, revealing shabby interiors lined with original avant-garde masterpieces  (on loan from the nearby Russian Museum) by the likes of Malevich and El Lissitky. The references allude to a politically radical Russian past; the construction debris acts as a metaphor for history. Though Hirschhorn suggests a recovery of the revolutionary communist spirit of the 1920s, he falls prey to a historically revisionist fetish: citing the Russian avant-garde as a generative point for vanguard culture in the West, and offering it as a source for renewed progressivism in Russia. Hirschhorn seems woefully unaware of the Putin government’s branding campaign, one that aims to sell the Russian avant-guard as a nationalist movement in line with the regime’s own values (perhaps he didn’t watch the Sochi opening ceremony). Hirschhorn ultimately proves Zhilayev right — with its political pretenses, “Abschlag” aspires to make a grand gesture against conservatism, but fails because its critique has already been co-opted.

Dmitry Prigov’s “Installation with names of artists,” one floor up, offers an alternative treatment of the avant-garde legacy: blank canvases hang on three walls, accompanied by signs that announce in English, “There is Malevich,” “There is Rembrandt,” “There is Matisse.” The pieces in question are actually elsewhere — Malevich’s “Black Square” hangs on the opposite wall while Matisse hangs on the third floor and Rembrandt inside the Winter Palace — but the painters’ names and reputations, Prigov jokes, matter more than their art. Prigov, unlike Hirschhorn, knows that Malevich inspires stronger feelings in Russia’s elite art collectors than in its 21st-century would-be revolutionaries.

Prigov is but one of a small handful of Russian artists included in Manifesta 10. Though headline-grabbing names include the Kabakovs (who are long boring) and Pavel Filonov (who is long dead), the lesser-known Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe cuts the most impressive figure among the biennial’s artists, Russian and otherwise. A cross-dressing Marilyn Monroe impersonator, the photographer, performer, and video artist emerged in the midst of late 1980s perestroika chaos and became an icon of the St. Petersburg underground scene. Mamyshev-Monroe continued to play with the persona until his death last year under uncertain circumstances; many believe he was murdered.

His 1993 “Tragic Love” series of black-and-white photographs feature the artist dressed as Monroe, parting with a youthful paramour. Teardrops drawn by the artist onto the photograph and a dash of red pencil on her hat heighten Mamyshev-Monroe’s sardonic attitude toward the taboos of cross-dressing and gender bending. Despite its political imagery and implications, Mamyshev-Monroe’s work was never explicitly political; he dressed as Marilyn because of the deep personal appeal the actress held for him, not because he aspired to comment on the role of homosexuals in Russia by appropriating her as a gay icon. He stands against a backdrop showing the Kremlin wall, blowing air kisses in full-on Marilyn makeup in the 2005 photograph “Monroe,” from his StarZ series — playing with absurdist humor to reference homosexuality in Russia. His inclusion at Manifesta elevates Mamyshev-Monroe beyond the local underground, exposing a large and largely Russian audience to his work while bringing him into the narrative of international contemporary art history. His work eschews explicit references to homosexuality, making it acceptable — though just barely — in a setting as official as the Hermitage. An older tour guide leading students through Mamyshev-Monroe’s rooms curtly announced, “Moving on.” Yet some of the youth lingered, obviously intrigued.

Marlene Dumas’s watercolor paintings of famous gay men hang across the square inside the Winter Palace, where the Hermitage’s vast collection is on permanent display. The portrait series was commissioned specifically for Manifesta 10, and meant to address LGBTQ rights in Russia. Originally titled “Famous Gay Men,” the series appears in a third-floor gallery flanked by post-impressionist rooms on either side, with “gay” now removed from its moniker. The series retains its 16-and-up designation, however, advising parents to steer their brood clear of James Baldwin, Tchaikovsky, and their cohort. What, the visitor wonders, makes these steely images of “Great Men” inappropriate for children? Absolutely nothing.

Manifesta succeeds in these particular moments when it reflects the cultural and political conditions under which it operates. “Are things so bad that Manifesta 10 might be considered a positive, ‘civilisational’ event no matter what its content, by sheer dint of taking place in a country plummeting into the abyss of militarist aggression, obscurantism, and proto-fascist nationalism?” critic and curator Ekaterina Degot asked in a recent essay. Throughout the Hermitage halls, the answer appears to be yes. Open, public discussions of sexuality, gender norms, Ukraine — and other hot-button issues like migrant worker abuses — appear largely unacceptable in today's Russia. In broaching, if not comprehensively addressing, these issues, Manifesta 10 speaks to two audiences. For many international visitors, the lack of openly critical works might be the richest critical position in the show; for local viewers, suggestive works like Mamyshev-Monroe’s might inspire reflection. Yet the most telling measure of this biennial’s success will come in its aftermath. Contemporary art can’t change the political system in the country, but perhaps it can give citizens a clearer picture of their surroundings. And while that’s only a start, it’s much better than nothing. 

For his solo exhibition opening September 7 at Boesky East on the Lower East Side, Adam Helms says he’s making work inspired by found imagery and film stills that “explores psychology, identity, male positions of power, powerlessness, and perhaps self-portraiture.” Here, the artist — known for stark, conceptual drawings and silkscreens that pull from shadowy histories, pop culture, newspaper archives, even sports iconography — shares his not-for-the-faint-of-heart playlist. 

“Post Collapse,” Demdike Stare

“This is one of three self-released cassettes this Manchester duo has put out that is really something akin to their own version of a mixtape. Seventy minutes of a mix of noise, electronic jams, post-punk, and even a sampling of Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five.’ Listening reminds me of when I used to make mixtapes back in the days of yore: high school and early college. Maybe I was a little ADD back then, and liked to let the jams have some arcs, ramping up and down. Could be that I still am that way, but now I can let these guys take the reins, letting the hauntological mania grip my work in the studio.” 

“Abaxial Masks With Sockets Closed to Hide the Face When the Destoryer Comes Alive,” Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement

“This sounds like the soundtrack to ‘The Heart of Darkness,’ or what Charon would listen to as he leisurely navigates the trip down the River Styx. There is something deadly yet primordial and sublime within the electronic sounds. As I look around the walls of my studio and see the images from ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ this track makes sense.”

“Not the Son of Desert Storm But the Child of Chechnya,” Vatican Shadow

“Pounding and relentless, this builds in intensity and then abruptly ends, like a sonic bomb eviscerating its target. It’s the final track on a four-song EP remixed by Juan Mendez (who records as Silent Servant), so this track is even more snarling than Dominick Fernow can be in his other Vatican Shadow recordings. His subjects on all his releases are American military adventurism and the ethos of terrorism and war in the Middle East.”

“I Know Myself,” Amen Dunes

“It’s not always heaviness for me. At times, the air needs to clear and some levity is in order. If Syd Barrett and the 13th Floor Elevators had a musical child, that lad would be a l’enfant terrible named Amen Dunes.”

Soundtrack to “Big Trouble in Little China,” John Carpenter and Alan Howarth 

“Carpenter’s films have always helped to focus the prism through which I understand the world. And Carpenter made the music himself for the majority of them. This version also has Howarth’s unreleased score for a film call “Backstabbed” and a previously unreleased outtake track from “Escape from New York”! What else can I say? A day without hearing this is like a day without sunshine.”  

— Artists Own Brooklyn Bridge Flags: Berlin-based artists Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias Wermke have taken credit for the two bleached American flags that were mysteriously raised above the Brooklyn Bridge earlier this summer. While the stunt seemed politically motivated at the time, the artists had no such intentions. They claim that the white flags were meant to honor the anniversary of the death of the bridge’s German engineer, John Roebling, who died on July 22, 1869. Turns out the NYPD’s hunch that the event was “somebody’s art project” turned out to be true. [NYT]

— Brant Nabs De Maria Home: Billionaire art collector Peter Brant has purchased the late Walter De Maria’s home and studio in the East Village for $27 million. Some are speculating that the Brant Foundation may transform the four-story building and adjacent lot into a Manhattan outpost. The foundation has declined to comment. [The Real Deal, Gallerist]

— National Portrait Gallery Installs Robin Williams Tribute: Following the death of Robin Williams on Monday, the National Portrait Gallery in DC has installed a 1979 photograph of the comedian by Michael Dressler for Time magazine. [Art Daily]

— Robots Roam the Tate: Starting tonight, art lovers can log onto Tate’s website and use four robots to take late night tours of the museum’s art. [The Guardian]

— Meet Save the Corcoran: The latest article in the Washington Post’s extensive coverage of the hoopla surrounding the Corcoran merger is a profile of the people behind Save the Corcoran, the group that hopes to keep the institution intact. [WP]

— Trash Problems for George Lucas: Turns out the Lucas Museum site that the city of Chicago is leasing to George Lucas for $1 per year used to be a garbage dump. [Chicagoist]

— The British Council has named Ciaran Devane as its new CEO. [Art Daily]

— Michael Anderson will be the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s new film curator. [News OK]

— Curator and art historian Richard D. Marshall has died. [Artforum]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

Sarah Elson’s London Launch Pad

Remembering Robin Williams

Manifesta’s Subtle Manifesto

Oscar de la Renta Retrospective Opens at the Bush Center

Studio Tracks: Adam Helms’s Playlist

Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

There is a moment in a 1998 episode of the French documentary series “Cinéastes de notre temps” that I always think of whenever I’m thinking about the filmmaker Philippe Garrel. The interviewer, from behind the camera, asks his first question: “What is cinema?” Garrel, spottingly making eye contact, dryly responds: “Why do you ask me?”

The interviewer presses once more: “What is cinema?”

“Why do you ask me?” Garrel responds, refusing to meet eye contact. The interviewer, pressed, asks again: “What is cinema?” The silence is uncomfortable. “It’s a way of making a living,” Garrel finally answers, “if you believe you are different when you are young.” The interviewer decides on a different approach. “Is cinema the art of survival?” Garrel is quicker this time. “Yes, because the camera can also protect you.” He unnervingly looks almost directly at the camera, and in turn the viewer. “Behind a camera you are safe.”

It’s a small moment that would typically go unnoticed, but one that has always rattled around my brain and I find is useful in thinking and writing about Garrel’s films, which are amazingly consistent but very hard to describe. Over the course of 30 films — his latest, “Jealousy,” opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on August 15 — Garrel has constructed an aesthetic of fleeting moments, personal and unvarnished yet shaped and protected by the structures of narrative cinema. Dave Kehr, writing in the New York Times in 2009, aptly described Garrel’s films as “attempts to seize a sloppy, unmediated reality,” with performances that contain “a raw, unmodulated quality, as if everyone were simply pouring out their thoughts and feelings.” The result is a hovering tone of melancholy, sometimes awkward and stumbling but always moving in the smallest, most unnoticeable ways.

“Jealousy” opens with its most dramatic moment right at the beginning. Louis (played by the director’s son, Louis Garrel), a struggling theater actor, leaves his wife and young daughter. There isn’t an explosion of emotion, crying or pleading. He simply says he can’t be there anymore and he isn’t. He moves in to a small apartment with Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), a talented actress who has been having difficulty getting the roles she desires. The film charts the oscillation and eventual disillusionment of their relationship and the despair that follows.

Garrel is open about the film’s biographical roots. The main character is based on his father, the actor Maurice Garrel, who left their family when Philippe was very young. The main actor is his son, and his daughter has a small but crucial role, playing the sister in the film of her actual brother. Their names have not been changed. In addition, Caroline Deruas, Garrel’s wife, co-wrote the script. It’s a family affair, a group therapy session that attempts to reconcile their own deeply felt and uncomfortable truths. By expunging the fine line between art and life, they cement the bonds between them.

The results aren’t solipsistic. “Jealousy,” like so much of Garrel’s work, is handled so tenderly that its intimacy doesn’t feel like intrusion. You’re not watching but feeling what is on screen, each scene unfolding not like a grand opera — all dramatic peaks and valleys — but a piano balled, simple and elegant with depths of emotion welling up below the surface.

A.L. Steiner is having a good year. At the Whitney Biennial, she unveiled a new photo installation and related multichannel video exploring the overlays and connections among personal histories, family histories, and the social history of radicalism. Perhaps the most intellectually and formally multi­faceted work she’s made to date, it was singled out by critic Jillian Steinhauer as being “one of the few pieces in the biennial that pulls you in with a seductive complexity.” A month after the works’ debut in March, the Los Angeles-based artist was back in New York to participate in a panel on art and porn at the Museum of Modern Art, which has acquired Community Action Center, 2010, an explicit sociosexual film that Steiner made with A.K. Burns. Two days later she was at Harvard as part of a presentation by artists engaged with feminism. With typical wit, she read some of the letters then on view in a show she co­curated with Nicole Eisenman at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, offering them to students who could guess the authors. And amid it all, she has been planning another of the wall collages she builds from her ever­expanding photo archive, this one to be featured in the “Made in L.A.” exhibition opening this month at the hammer Museum.

Yet as we sat in her Boyle Heights home talking about these latest breakthroughs, Steiner was clearly feeling conflicted
 about claiming the spotlight. “I’m still grappling with the request to be presented alone as a solo artist because these identities perpetuate themselves as branding within institutions, which then reifies the marketplace,” she says. “The other names on the labels with my installations are also makers of the works.” Her concerns are not merely academic, because collaboration pulses at the very heart of Steiner’s wide­ranging practice, which encompasses photography, video, performance, curation, and publishing. In addition to work with long­running collectives such as Chicks on Speed and Ridykeulous (formed in 2005 with Eisenman), she has teamed up with other artists—including A.K. Burns, Zackary Drucker, and Narcissister—for short­-term, often performance­-based projects. Steiner is resolute that even the photographs most clearly identified with her solo career are never her work alone. “To me, portrait photography is 100 percent collaborative,” she says. “The person pictured in the image that I present under my name has as much to do with making that image as I do, and it’s insane for photographers not to think that.”

This attitude may have been able to take root in part because Steiner never had the “hierarchies of artistic genius,” as she calls them, drilled into her at art school. Although her mother ran a gallery and gave her an early education in art history, she chose to major in communications as an undergraduate at George Washington University. After graduating, Steiner received what she considers a form of master’s education via an early 1990s immersion in activism with such groups as Queer Nation, the Women’s Action Coalition, and the Lesbian Avengers. Throughout these years, although she still didn’t consider herself an artist, she was taking photographs and building darkrooms in her apartments as she moved from Washington to San Francisco to New York.

This combination of experience led Steiner to her first real job, as photo editor at Out magazine, then a radical experiment in treating gay and lesbian culture as just another part of the mainstream. “It was an incredible opportunity for a kid of 25 to be in charge of creating that imagery for these normative structures that were at the same time queered,” she recalls. “And along the way, it taught me everything I needed to understand propaganda.” after four years at Out, Steiner decided to shift to freelance work to make time for her artistic practice. Through the rest of the ’90s she continued to hone her understanding of how mass media uses imagery at publications put out by Condé Nast and others, including Fairchild, GQ, and O: The Oprah Magazine. But the activist in Steiner chafed at both the corporate structure and
the underlying purposes of publishing. “I was fading out of that because I felt like I could not legitimize making these disposable products,” she says. “I got fired from Condé Nast when I wrote
to Si Newhouse asking him to improve his use of resources in his offices and in his printing.”

She found a way to convert those personal and professional frustrations into art when Onestar Press asked her if she would create a publication for them. She agreed to the project on the terms that the edition be limited and that it be printed only on demand, so that no unwanted copies would be generated. Stop (Onestar Press), one of Steiner’s only photographic projects not built around portraiture, takes a critical look at the environmental impact of publishing. An opening section with lyrical pictures of trees gives way to documentary photos of the papermaking process taken at a mill in Alberta, Canada; they are followed by imagery of printed pages that fade to show the blank paper of the book in hand. It is a pointed indictment not only of the publishing industry but also of the press that reached out to her. Call it biting the hand that feeds her, or institutional critique.
having produced this coda to her publishing career, Steiner began teaching at the School of visual arts in New York in 2000. She was eventually invited to UCLA, and in 2011 joined the faculty at USC, which led her to move to the West Coast. She now serves as director of the Master of Fine arts program at USC. A founder of Working artists and the greater economy (W.A.G.E.), an activist group dedicated to seeking remedies to the gross inequalities of the art economy, Steiner laments that “the sale of art is not a reliable way to make a living, even for people who have garnered a ton of cultural capital.” But she is quick to point out that teaching is not just a job. “Pedagogical relationships are a huge part of my work,” Steiner says. “I feel as passionate about the students I work with as I do about my work. Taking an authoritarian role is antithetical to me, so teaching is as much a collaboration as other work I participate in.”
Although her role at USC is itself now a full­time occupation, the switch to teaching initially gave Steiner more time to focus on her art practice, and she achieved a number of milestones in the years that followed.

Early in the decade, Steiner’s understanding of her own photography came into focus for her as a holistic practice, whose meaning rests in the context of the full body of work rather than the individual image. She first tried to express this in 2004 by presenting her overflowing flatfiles in “1 Million Photos 1 Euro Each” at Starship in Berlin. The images she had created until then had not yet reached a million, but the title indicated its potential, while, in a sly nod to the distorting market imperatives, visitors could pick up any one for a euro. In successive years she re­staged the show at art Cologne and John Connelly Presents in New York. The amended title “1 Million Photos 1 euro each (minimum order)” indicated that an institution could purchase only the full archive, including all images she would make and continue to add in the future. “I had nibbles from some institutions,” she says, “but then they bought something easier, less cumbersome.” For a final presentation at Yale in 2008, she allowed that visitors could choose any image and have it for free, but they had to tell
why they chose that image. “It was an incredible project,” says Steiner. “It was one time where I was allowed to understand 
a lot about the people looking at my work. That’s invaluable.”

By the middle of the decade, Steiner had joined the art collective and band Chicks on Speed, which moved performance to a more central place in her practice. Steiner recognizes
that for many art institutions, the term performance carries
a restrictive set of expectations. “One of my favorite reactions to a performance followed a Chicks on Speed show as part
of an exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. The show was called ‘the Making of Art,’ so we made some art
for our performance,” Steiner says, laughing. “At one point we were naked and we wanted to paint some people. We didn’t know if they were more scared of us because of our bodies or because of the paint. But afterward, the curator said, ‘that
 was not fun.’ But in performance, one point is that the experience is different for everyone in that space.”

For Steiner, performance is to be understood as both signifying and expressing the “realness in the relationship between people.” Connie Butler, the hammer curator who selected Steiner for “Made in L.A.,” sees this capturing of authentic interaction as key to Steiner’s larger project. “A social practice is a central part of her work,” Butler notes. “The work is not unrelated to Larry Clark and Nan Goldin in that the act of photographing is very close­up, intimate, and from within a community.”

Because of Steiner’s deliberate shifting among partnerships and mediums, it had been easy to see her as an unsettled theoretician, dissecting one concept before moving on to something else. But her recent photocollage installations have created a perhaps unexpected unity among all these notions—the sense of personal history and social activism
 as not only intertwined but equivalent; the belief that each image really exists only as part of a larger ongoing archive; the idea that in performance and the documentation of performance, we are able to glimpse real intimacy.

A still from A.L. Steiner's multichannel video installation, "More Real Than Reality Itself" (2014)

When we spoke in April, Steiner was still in the preliminary stages of planning the framework for her installation at the Hammer. Harking back to her encounter with the firm that printed her indictment of publishing, she would offer only that she was thinking she needed to explore activism in relation to occidental Petroleum, the multinational corporation whose headquarters house the museum, and whose former CEO was the art institution’s namesake philanthropist. “There is a long story there,” she notes. “it is not a neutral space for me.”

A version of this article appears in the June issue of Modern Painters magazine. 

Summer’s almost over, and the New York art world returns with a vengeance early next month. To whet your appetite, we present a necessarily incomplete list of a few of the exhibitions we’re most excited about as the fall kicks off — from porn-inflected conceptualism to Satanic ceramics.

Nick Cave at Jack Shainman Gallery (513 West 20th Street and 524 West 24th Street)

September 4-October 11

If you didn’t venture up to Shainman’s new Kinderhook, New York outpost The School, here’s your chance to see some of Cave’s stunning new sculptures in Manhattan. The pieces — many featuring simple, racially-charged tools, like shoe-shine brushes — are a visceral counterpoint to his omnipresent Soundsuits.

Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash (534 West 26th Street and 1018 Madison Avenue)

September 4-October 11

For her solo exhibition at the gallery’s Chelsea location, Kurland is showing a series called “Sincere Auto Care”: photographs shot across the country over the course of three years, focusing on tricked-out cars and the mechanics that keep them running. Uptown, Kurland curates “Days Inn,” a group show that brings together Mamie Tinkler, Gillian Wearing, Virginia Overton, Jay DeFeo, and others.

Johannes VanDerBeek at Zach Feuer Gallery (548 West 22nd Street)

September 4-October 4

The artist presents sculptures as well as sculptural paintings (composed of materials like Aquaresin, clay, and silicon) whose fields of abstract marks resolve and dissolve with each viewing — turning what seemed like a landscape of trees into a soft explosion of random gesture and pattern.    

Despina Stokou at Derek Eller Gallery (615 West 27th Street)

September 5-October 4

This Berlin-based Greek artist jam-packs her collaged canvases with words — sometimes found text, other times lists of things crowd-sourced from her peers. This solo show is called “Only Tomatoes and Horses.” Stokou is probably not being entirely literal there, but you never know.

Adam Helms at Boesky East (20 Clinton Street)

September 7-October 5

This New York artist’s career has taken some interesting detours over the years, from early scenes of enigmatic militiamen to lightbox works incorporating found imagery, paintings of deconstructed football team logos, and silkscreen or charcoal portraits of women, or terrorists. He inaugurates Boesky’s brand new L.E.S. space with gouache drawings (and one laser etching on paper), many of them based on film stills.  

Strauss Borque-LaFrance at Rachel Uffner (170 Suffolk Street)

September 7-October 19

The artist makes his debut with Uffner, transforming the bi-level space with two- and three-dimensional works and aiming for “a peculiarly disjointed domestic mise-en-scene.” Included will be a series of what he dubs “Vacation” paintings, hazy and hypnotic works incorporating Plexiglas, plastic mesh, and spraypaint that conjure an aesthetic “somewhere between smartphone screens and store vitrines.”

Darja Bajagic at Room East (41 Orchard Street)

September 7-October 5

Anyone strolling down Orchard Street this summer likely noticed “DevilGirl Lilly Roma,” a strikingly out-of-place image featuring the titular adult-film actress by Bajagic that hung in the front window of the gallery as part of its “Abnormcore” group show. The artist layers similarly X-rated images into minimal compositions and collages; in her video works, pornographic photos accrete and layer, interrupted by the occasional cartoon bug or smiley-faced balloon. Expect to be titillated and confused in equal measure.

Ian Tweedy at UNTITLED (30 Orchard Street)

September 7-October 19

This Brooklyn-based artists’s works — often painted on book covers, or using found canvases — are eerily evocative. The new series in this show, “Descent,” circles around the story of Joseph Beuys’s 1944 plane crash.

“Satan Ceramics” at Salon 94 Freemans (1 Freeman Alley)

September 7-October 25

Hungry for fired clay, perhaps with a cheeky reference to the Lord of Darkness? Thankfully, this quartet of collaborative makers — JJ PEET, Mary Frey, Pat McCarthy, and Tom Sachs — are more than willing to satisfy your unique dual craving. Objects promised to be on view include urinals, skateboards, pentagram-ornamented cups, Simpsons plates, and a range of work “bound to the framework of [McCarthy’s] pigeoning practice.” (Meanwhile, stay tuned for the October issue of Modern Painters, which includes a very heady discussion between PEET and Sachs about ritualized cups).

Derrick Adams at Tilton Gallery (8 East 76th Street)

September 10-October 18

The artist — whose collages often mash up anatomy, architecture, and domestic interiors — presents a series of new works: Wildly patterned scenes caught on television. 

Stephen Shore at 303 Gallery (507 West 24th Street)

September 11-November 1

The photographer presents two groups of color photographs that are more than a bit timely: one shot in Israel, the other in Ukraine.

Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures (519 West 24th Street)

September 12-October 25

New paintings from the former Destroy All Monsters member, in an exhibition titled “I Only Wanted You To Love Me.” According to press materials, references in the works will include Farah Fawcett, the Seven Dwarves, Wagner, Jimi Hendrix, and Mt. Rushmore. 

“Broadway Morey Boogie,” on the Broadway Mall (Columbus Circle to West 166th Street)

Opening September 17

Marlborough Chelsea helms this public art outing from a dozen artists, including Sarah Braman, Davina Semo, and Dan Colen. Devin Troy Strother will bring his ecstatic Afro’d women outdoors, and Tony Matelli will install a hyperrealist dog (perhaps a safer bet than “Sleepwalker,” that infamous sculpture of a mostly nude man that basically ruined Wellesley College forever.)

“Fire!” at Venus Over Manhattan (980 Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor)

September 18-November 1

The ceramics revival keeps burning up at Adam Lindemann’s space, where the confusingly named de Pury de Pury curates a show dedicated to the medium, with artists including Friedrich Kunath, Rosemarie Trockel, Sterling Ruby, Josh Smith, and many others.

“Cast From Life” at Skarstedt (20 East 79th Street)

September 18-October 25

A sculpture survey with an impressive roster, including Fischli & Weiss, Isa Genzken, Robert Gober, Rachel Harrison, and Franz West. There’s a bit of bronze (Jeff Koons, Thomas Schütte) and a little yarn for good measure (Mike Kelley’s 1989 “Manly Craft #4”).

Orly Genger and James Siena at Sargent’s Daughters (179 East Broadway)

September 19-October 19
Genger is best known for ambitious public works like “Red Yellow Blue,” installed at Madison Square Park last year. This exhibition leaves the rope behind and pairs the artist’s drawings, which resemble kinetic cartoon fistfights, with minimalist works on paper by Siena made using a typewriter.

“Thread Lines” at the Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street)

September 19-December 14

A bit of textile magic, with fabric-centric works by Louise Bourgeois, Sheila Hicks, Jessica Rankin, William J. O’Brien, Sam Moyer, and others.

Andy Coolquitt at Lisa Cooley (107 Norfolk Street)

Opens September 7

Coolquitt’s is an art of doodads and cast-offs, orbiting around kindred spirits like Duchamp, B. Wurtz, and Haim Steinbach. His previous shows here have turned the space into an all-encompassing environment, shot through with color and oddball objects. More recently Coolquitt was a Chinati Artist in Residence down in Marfa, so perhaps his new work in New York will retain some of that weathered, Texan flair — lots of worn wood and rusty metal. 

— Phaidon May Buy Artspace: Last week there were rumors that German auction site Auctionata was in the final stages of talks to buy New York-based online art seller Artspace. Now, talk has shifted to favor Leon Black’s Phaidon Press as the purchaser. According to an inside source, an agreement is expected to be reached by the end of the week. [Bloomberg]

— Digitization Saves Warhol Films: A new collaboration between the Andy Warhol Museum and MoMA will digitize 1,000 fragile rolls of Andy Warhol’s films, most of which have never been screened extensively due to their condition. “I think the art world in particular, and hopefully the culture as a whole, will come to feel the way we do,” said Warhol Museum deputy director Patrick Moore, “which is that the films are every bit as significant and revolutionary as Warhol’s paintings.” [NYT]

— Yvonne Rainer Plans New Piece: On October 3 and 4, Yvonne Rainer will present a new dance work-in-progress at LA’s Getty Center. Part of the Getty Research Institute’s exhibition “Yvonne Rainer: Dances and Films,” the work is titled “The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move?” [LAT]

— World Trade Center Debuts Logo: Port Authority has unveiled a new minimalist logo for the 16-acre World Trade Center site and it is steeped in symbolism. [NYT]

— LaChapelle Sues Torres: Photographer David LaChapelle is suing his former dealer Fred Torres for $2.8 million. [Artnet]

— Online Sales Without the Premium: Paddle8 and Dreweatts & Bloomsbury are teaming up for four online sales with no buyer’s premium, a significant step away from the traditional model. [TAN]

— Vassar College professor Andrew Tallon is making a 3-D map of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. [WP]

— Bay Area veteran curator Renny Pritikin is raising the profile of the Contemporary Jewish Museum with some buzzy curating. [SF Chronicle]

— Here’s the trailer for “Mortdecai” — that movie where Johnny Depp plays an art dealer. [Apple]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.