The Brooklyn Rail

Flag Pillow (1989) is one of Hugh Steers’s most stridently political works. A small oil sketch on paper, the work’s central focus is a figure laying on a wooden floor, naked body exposed save for a pillow patterned with the US flag, draped over the subject’s face as would a death shroud. Alongside the body, a kneeling figure holds the hand of the departed—a comforting clasp, the way a mother assures a child. In the background, two suited figures loom over the scene, hands in pockets. Steers portray the “suits” from the neck down—the pair survey the scene from beyond our vantage, all-seeing but unmoved to act. One could imagine the look shared between them, apathy bound with resignation: What could we do about it?

The boots face the Pacific at Del Mar. From a distance, they have the appearance of matchsticks or standing stones. This image forms the opening salvo in Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, a two-year conceptual art project that began in 1971 and culminated in an exhibition at MoMA in 1973. During those two years, Antin arranged fifty pairs of black rubber boots in various formations—queuing, circling, perched in trees, marching up hills—at locations across California and, later, New York.

My mentor taught us the gravity of reading in a writer’s life, told us of how in graduate school, he had always held a book in one hand, stopping reading only to sleep or, of course, to write. In his office hours, he took interest in what I was reading, what I liked to read. He told me he loved the smart, weird girl narrator (who doesn’t) in a story I had written. And then, pulling a copy off his shelf, how he had a book I must read: Samantha Hunt’s The Seas.

The first time I saw Monk by the Sea (1808–10) was in Intro to Art History at Duke University in the spring of 1986. Tough to say how good a slide Professor Walter Melion had when he projected it on the screen in the East Duke building lecture hall—until recently it was still difficult to get a good image of it. I now realize that it is because it is largely unreproducible.

I try to make sense of the suddenness of color—chartreuse, canary, and cerulean—that unexpectedly follows the gray and beige work-a-day palette of the previous room as Sylvia shifts to landscape, painting a grassy lawn that stretches out to a coppice of golden trees. A low ridge rises behind them. Puffs of clouds, white, silver, yellow, and gray, drift through a perfect sky. I take it in for a moment, then inch closer. 

Japanese contemporary artist Genpei Akasegawa (1937–2014) created these offset lithograph editions of the Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note (Dai Nihon Rei-en Satsu or 大日本零円札) in 1967. This timing is significant, as Akasegawa had just appealed his criminal conviction, now art historically referred to as the Model 1,000-yen Note Incident...

Pope.L sits on his haunches alongside a building over the course of a few very hot and humid days in July. He is a curious sight—an unambiguously Black man with two jars and plastic spoons set before him. “Warm mayo?” he asks the passerby. “One hundred dollars a dollop,” he adds.

Here are five or more such objects in various states of assembly. The one that rises above the others may be finished: it offers a graphic representation of a seascape with windblown rain over choppy, curling waves.