| Responding to the psychedelia and social turmoil of the early 1970s, Belgian artist Sophie Podolski—gifted, schizophrenic, and suicidal—produced a memorable burst of hybrid “graphic poetry” before her death at age twenty-one. To make her poems and her drawings, she used the same type of pen, a Rapidograph, so her works in both mediums resonate with each other. “The speed and nerve of her language is matched by the unruliness of her line, which seems to shift and shape spontaneously, proposing strange juxtapositions and hybrid creatures,” writes Nicole Rudick in our June/July issue, on the occasion of a recent catalogue collecting facsimiles of Podolski’s work and critical responses to it, highlighting her importance to Roberto Bolaño and other key figures of ’70s counterculture.
Candice Lin hoped that visitors to Spice, her installation at Ludlow 38 that closed this past weekend, would purchase her mixes of California poppy, damiana, and mullein and ingest these herbs by smoking them or brewing tea with them. The components “are intended to act on both the viewer’s body and the sociopolitical relations at play in and around the exhibition space,” writes Dana Kopel in a review of the show for our site. Lin treats drugs and chemical reactions as ciphers for questions of purity, intoxication, and toxicity that have long pervaded white, Western conceptions of racial difference. Kopel sees the store-like installation as a response to the controversy around Omer Fast’s 2018 exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, around the corner from Ludlow 38, which was criticized for making light of Chinatown’s gentrification. As Harry Burke wrote in this magazine, galleries “trade in global markets to support emerging artists while availing themselves of the low rent and cultural cachet of long-neglected neighborhoods.” Lin recognizes these problems but employs the same strategies anyway, using them to elucidate deep-seated relations of imperial power and commercial exchange. With Spice, Kopel writes, Lin “has produced an installation in which everything is potentially intoxicating, laced with latent violence and the myth of authenticity, anything but pure.” |
