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Art as Mobile Home
John Haberin New York City
After the Plaster Foundation: Where Can We Live?
Tishan Hsu and Jesse Wine
Caroline Woolard has been waiting a long time for this. She will just have to wait a little longer.
Her mobile home would definitely not make it on the luxury market. It might not even make it to the beach. It amounts to a cage on wheels, with barely room for a small mattress, and anyone else might feel trapped, but not her. It will be her first chance in years to sleep anywhere but in her studio, and that can only be healthy, right? She will have to wait, though, for the end of its stay at the Queens Museum, as part of "After the Plaster Foundation, or Where Can We Live?" Where indeed, and forgive not just an artist for asking. 
If their architecture leaves you less at home than with a creepy sensation under your skin, Tishan Hsu and Jesse Wine at SculptureCenter build that into their plans.
I'll let you know more soon . . .
Where indeed
Make that twelve artists, too angry to wait for an answer. First, though, they might have to put their finger on that "we." You know the story all too well by now. You have seen it repeatedly—from Soho and East Village art to Williamsburg, Dumbo, Bushwick, and the Lower East Side. Artists move in, in desperation or delight, in search of affordable living and workspace. Gentrification follows as the night the day, forcing them out along with older tenants, older businesses, and bare hopes of a racially, culturally, and financially diverse community. Should you blame the artists or share in their anger? Their answer is smug and confused but also challenging and entertaining.
The show's title rests on one such story. Jack Smith, the performance artist and activist, liked to call his loft the Plaster Foundation—all the more so after he was evicted. I think of him less as a vital figure on the margins than a marginal artist, but it is a good story all the same. Many a neighborhood has lost a treasured eccentric to gentrification or just old age, and Simon Leung documents another. His video has the added irony that its subject started life in a refugee camp in World War II. You will just have to live with not having heard of him either and unsure what you have missed.
The personalization of displacement continues with Betty Yu, and so does the mix of poignancy and confusion. She collects real-estate notices from her neighborhood, as part of her reflections on the survival of Asian Americans. On video, she testifies to disabling stereotypes and rising rents. She is also honest enough not to pretend that families like hers were the first to move in. Her time line extends all the way back to indigenous people. Still, like a show of "Reconstruction: Architecture and Blackness" coming soon, it might leave one asking just who is displacing whom.
One could ask the same about museums. "Making the Met," a show about a great museum's evolution, papers over its encroachment on Central Park. Early reviews compared the Whitney Museum by Renzo Piano to a prison. The Guggenheim Museum could serve as a symbol of displacement all by itself, in its defiance of the urban grid. No matter, perhaps, for the Frank Lloyd Wright architecture deserves a crowd, and the Upper East Side was never affordable. Still, museums since have worked hard to contribute more to the city than tourism.
The Brooklyn Museum has built its program on its connection to the community. And the Queens Museum goes one better, with a broader connection to New York. Built for one world's fair, in 1939 in Flushing Meadow Park, it served as the New York City pavilion in another, in 1964, when it unveiled its remarkable scale model of the entire city. A concurrent show models the borough's water supply and its rough terrain as well. Just off the museum's entrance, Mierle Laderman Ukeles is still crossing the city to thank each and every sanitation worker in person. Ulrike Müller brings her childlike but hardly negligible mural to Amy Zion's selection of children's drawings, too, as The Conference of the Animals.
Peter Scott makes the connection visible, but also visibly problematic. He covers museum windows with images of the park that the work blots out. It is welcoming, but an artificial welcome. It also gains resonance from Covid-19, in that the former main entrance beneath those windows is, for now, shut. Once again, the loss feels overwhelming while blame is hard to assign. Which is not to stop artists from doing their best.
Right at home
Scott continues the blame game inside, with photos of upscale housing marred by graffiti. If the housing looks impressive, it should, for the photos belong to real-estate ads—but the protest is all his, scrawled on the ads. It might be more unsettling if it gave the illusion of spray paint on the side of buildings, but the curators, Larissa Harris with Sophia Marisa Lucas and Lindsey Berfond, shy away from enigmas. Krzysztof Wodiczko rolls in a black tank with surveillance monitors, his Poliscar, but in real life it does not take arms to evict most people. A police car? Not in my backyard.
Still, who can say for sure where money ends and force begins? The Museum of Capitalism, a collective, offers such artifacts as a picket fence, its whitewash faded, barbed wire, and an old board game. The reminder of race and class divisions is chilling, and you yourself might have played a successor to The Landlord's Game, with Monopoly. Jennifer Bolande has a promising alternative to real-estate ads, with photos of globes seen through windows. She has gone from Saint Mark's Place to distant cities for her Global Sightings. She may never know whether she has made sense of home life or globalization.
Sondra Perry brings in not an army but an earth mover, with videos of idyllic landscapes and a close-up of human skin. You can feel in your bones what it takes to uproot or to create a community. The close-up could pass for abstraction, too, another reminder of the treachery of art. Other artists come closer still to installations, making you part of the community, too. Douglas Ross sets out a tapestry of rubble, dividing the galley like yet another barrier. He also alludes to the Jacquard loom as a model of automated labor or computer-driven displacement, but I forgive you if you see only the breadth of Asian painting in ink.
Leung also has a three-part video, behind angled blue walls, that has something or other to do with Edgar Allen Poe. Whatever. The best work, though, asks not just who we are but what is home. Ilana Harris-Babou, who appeared in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, sits at a makeup table to lament expectations for women. At least her person does on video where a mirror should be, but the sculpted table is real. The connection to the show's theme seems tenuous at best, but that, for all I know, is the point.
You may encounter the remaining two works first—and remember them the longest. They share the atrium, to ask still more what constitutes common ground. They both exclude you and make you right at home. Shawn Maximo surrounds store-bought shelves with plastic chairs that might well embarrass you, were you not so eager to watch flames on multiple flat-panel TVs, as his Pyre. Is his theater in the round the equivalent of a wood-burning fireplace, that staple of high-end living rooms, or a public burning? And Heather Hart has the most realistic home of all, but only its roof and attic, as Oracle of the Twelve Tenses.
Hart brought a similar work to Storm King in 2017, like a casualty of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. It might be rising up of its own volition or sinking into the ground. It may have nowhere to live, but you can walk or sit on its steep roof. (Who knew that tar offers so natural a foothold?) You may find it confining, too, but you can enter, and it offers a comforting reprieve from the housing crisis and museum lighting. As others have shown as well, art can serve as a public space if not always an affordable one, and that may have to do.
Public and private parts
Tishan Hsu has been at it for forty years, and he is still feeling his way around. He covers the partition separating the front desk at SculptureCenter from the galleries with a single work, but you are more likely to remember its many parts. They are not quite private parts, but they have the uncomfortable presence and isolation of hands, lips, and eyes. They may be feeling out the space, their own unseen flesh, or you. Together with Jesse Wine, he makes his surroundings hard to miss but a good deal less sensible.
Maybe you had not thought of that hefty partition before as an obstacle, but then Hsu tosses out another as well. Just out front, one massive object rests upside-down on another, its wheels up in the air, both in the color of brown leather. He might been moving sofas out of the way for his art. But then no one would mistake the great hall of the former trolley repair shop for a lounge, and the furniture has the hard, patterned surface of ceramic tile. It also contains a metal basin, like the remnants of a bath or kitchen sink. So much for cleaning things out.
More works inside suggest reconfigured bathrooms or swimming pools, in an appropriate sickly pink or green—although some have clay tops like arid landscapes. At least one has metal rails that might serve as towel racks or a ladder to climb out after a swim. As for the mural on the partition, it has the grainy background of old TVs. Other works pick up its unpredictable mix of fuzzy and crisp. Homer Simpson puts in an appearance, but otherwise the body parts and test patterns change little in forty years. Hsu might be feeling his way around, but he is still reaching obsessively for the architecture and for you.
Hsu in fact studied architecture at MIT before moving to New York and an art of closed spaces. He leaves it to Wine to make over rest of SculptureCenter as an imagined city. It does not look like much of a place to live. A white tower rises, windowless, its setbacks like clay blocks. Two umbrellas seem to come out of nowhere, as they often do here in the rain, but their bare metal offers no protection—and maybe a chain link or a poke in the eye. The artist, born in rainy old England, must have learned by now to endure the elements.
He has his share of fingers and toes as well, enough that wall text dares you to count them. An oversized chess piece in a garish orange feels or feels up itself. The sole recognizable human being reels back in ecstasy, but this (as a critic has written about Wine) is the ecstasy of cities. He names it for Saint Torig—whom an Internet meme has, I gather, designated the patron saint of Ikea. Elsewhere miniature trucks lie scattered, past more biomorphic pillars, unable to deliver the goods. No wonder Hsu has not cleared out the living-room furniture.
Both are out to reveal the private side of public spaces and the public side of private ones. For Wine, it comes without putting anyone on the spot. He loves the mystery of the Center's basement tunnels but never quite exploits them. The supposed chess piece looks more like a pawn, not to mention awfully cute, and it is only a pawn in his game. The trucks should suggest traffic hurtling along in an eternal night, but they look more like toys, and they are going nowhere fast. Hsu is going nowhere, too, even in a career survey, but with the passion of the single-minded and the ability to mix up media.
Could the times still be catching up to him? If Hsu has stopped out of the shower and onto TV, he anticipates, the show argues, the awful march of devices today. He calls a work Plasma, a term that belongs to bodies and flat screens alike. He emerged from Minimalism, but in the flesh. He emerged, too, as Neo-Expressionism was giving way to Postmodernism, but without the barest hint of irony or self-expression. He has had forty lean, repetitive years in the shadows, and the associations are at best his own, and yet they may hold the only remaining clues to the blue screen of death.
"After the Plaster Foundation" ran at the Queens Museum through January 17, 2021, Tishan Hsu and Jesse Wine at SculptureCenter through January 25.