June's Must-See Art Shows in NYC and Beyond

It’s a cliché of academic art writing that you can boil just about anything down to being about “bodies in space.” Sure it’s reductive and about as sensual as a doctor’s check-up, but what else is there? Even the most cerebral and impersonal work doesn’t take place in a disembodied vacuum. You still have to haul your ass across town to take art in with your eyeballs before you can fully let the conceptualism wash over you. And yet, if you want to situate yourself within your surroundings, why bother with an art gallery when you have the street? How can a sculpture make you feel any more embodied than doing sets at the gym? And wouldn’t running kill two birds with one stone?

I’ve been thinking lately about the spaces bodies take up in our imagination. I recently overcame a deep fear of doctors to learn I had a condition in my left eye that has hampered my ability to see clearly. What I’d dismissed as a slight astigmatism had degenerated over time into a constant and anxiety-inducing blur, putting a painful strain on daily life. I could tolerate the minor inconvenience of squinting at my computer and misreading street signs, but I couldn’t make a larger sense of the shame or fear this had caused me, that is until a painting helped put it all into proper perspective.

Self-Portrait During the Eye Disease (1930) is a later masterpiece by my favorite artist, Edvard Munch. The title is straightforward, but it captures a moment of panic as visceral and overwhelming as The Scream. Munch’s blindspot is a vortex of roiling purple, a malignant black spot that not only distorts but corrupts his field of vision. His signature broad, colorful brush-strokes take on a sinister new twist; no longer capturing the ambient trail of an image but casting crippling doubt on everything he sees. The walls cringe all around him. The rug on the floor disintegrates into multi-color lava. In this light he appears a zombified shadow of himself. He doesn’t simply want you to gaze out at the world through his broken eyes but to feel the panicked desperation of the man behind them. The urgency of this painting, of someone losing sight and committing himself to seeing anyway, came as a jolt and a rejoinder to finally seek treatment.

We all live with a certain amount of morbid self-delusion, ignoring warning signs as they flash all around us. “WE ARE INFLAMED ON EVERY LEVEL” reads a piece in Jo Shane’s new show at Blade Study, “We are politically and socially in a freefall of inflammation mired in an onslaught of endless information...” Shane’s work is about artificial longevity and inevitable decline, how our fixation on appearing young and fresh ignores the creep of corporate interests into our private lives. How do you resist this sleight of hand? You pay attention. How do you pay attention? By training your eyes and imagination. Lately I keep returning to Daniel Terna’s photographs of the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. Some of them are carnivalesque, like a scene out of an Ensor painting, but the ones that I find really striking are the interstitial moments: people catching their breath, washing tear gas out of their eyes, blood caked on their heads from police beatings. They’re painful to look at, but do an excellent job of situating where we are.