Year in Review: 2024

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.” 

D.H. Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover—in the public domain this year—was sold to me with the iconic pitch: “It’s not about Blackness basically at all, and the prose’s language was kind of offensive in this regard, but [Lawrence] does say ‘cunt’ more than any other book [they’d] read, which is paradoxically hot.” Suffice it to say, I agree; in Chatterley, contradiction amplifies desire. 

Oft-labeled as indulgent artistic depravity and scandalizing pornography, Lover is more a radical manifesto, tethered by the rebellious ideals of beauty, hope, and love. The central, delicious relationship—between an upper-class woman and working-class man for whom dialogue, equality, and self-pleasure overcome isolation—concludes irresolutely, suggesting that revolution is unrealized on this side of death, and yet we are bound to pursue fulfillment in what time we are allowed. The unexpurgated text won Penguin Books a landmark obscenity case in 1959/60, its bans for indecency and immorality exposing absurd oppositions: accessible pricing made the book favored by women and the working class. 

In a year of numbness and world-warring, yearning colored my daydreams, begging release—desperation for aliveness clung to each worried breath. I craved touch, bare witness; I claimed love-making as a methodology for world-building. No wonder that post/inter-war erotic fiction/s became a refuge—those years mirror our own: class conflict, lopsided decadence amid destruction, and repression of sex, gender, and bodily agency. Following a summer buried deep in the bellies of Anaïs Nin, Clarice Lispector, and Hélène Cixous, I burrowed face-first into an inquiry on (concealed, abjective, ambivalent, languaged) pleasure: its principles, yes, and its potentiality in tumultuous times. Even with its mishandling of Blackness despite other lush relevances, or perhaps in light of this persistent conflict, my most beloved work of 2024 remains the work of this lifetime: the modernist, humanist, revolutionary power of self-definition, anti-capitalism, and intimate solidarity to upend oppressive structures and self-liberate souls while delighting in the glory of land and flesh beyond its calculable value. Such is Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 

—Adrienne Jacobson Oliver

I recently attended a holiday party where a small fire broke out. Most of the guests were writers, editors, booksellers, or otherwise publishing adjacent. As we gathered outside and giddily replayed the events of moments earlier—our anxiety-to-festive-cheer ratio validated by the Division 426 fire chief’s confirmation that everyone was safe and the building likely to sustain only minimal(ish) damage—someone noted that, had the fire prevailed, a chunk of Toronto’s emerging literary scene would have been smote. 

In the cherry red glow of the fire truck lights, a sommelier-slash-grad student passed around bottles of Campari and red wine that she’d resourcefully grasped en route from the smoky apartment, and we discussed some of the party guests’ projects. Ally Shap had recently launched Dive Bar, a literary magazine, and Emma Olivia Cohen and Emily Wood have been organizing Pack Animal, a wildly successful reading series, for the past two years. Other guests were writing poetry, fiction, and essays, or photographing some of the aforementioned events.

As we returned indoors, the conversation lingered in my mind; I thought about other literary projects and communities that have sprung up. The rise of public readings is a well-documented 2020s phenomenon, and Toronto’s iterations are particularly encouraging, emerging despite the city’s increasingly unaffordability, arts funding cuts, and a creative community that can often feel hard to access.  

Toronto-based projects I’ve admired during the past year include (but are certainly not limited to!!) In the Mood Magazine, a film, television, and pop culture journal cofounded by Gabrielle Marceau and Sennah Yee; Tender Possibilities, a poetry reading group organized by Farhia Tato; Mixed Metals, an open mic poetry night hosted by SK Hughes and Joy Xiang; and Probably Poetry, organized by Laura Gallagher-Doucette and Dylan Tate-Howarth. I’ve also heard some great lectures at Trampoline Hall (though I’m confused why this long-standing series doesn’t pay its writers and curators), and I’ve been hugely inspired by the actions of the Toronto chapter of Writers Against the War on Gaza. Many of these projects are helmed by committed young people, but there’s also been refreshing intergenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations. For a city that often expresses a No thanks attitude towards culture, 2024 was a real Yes, and …! in the literary sphere. I, for one, hope that all of these projects continue to burn, sizzle, and crackle in the new year.    

—Esmé Hogeveen

You enter New Uncanny through a red side door. You climb stairs walled by sheets of flaking white paint. You are 19. The year is 1974. The year is 1996. The year is 2057. You aren’t supposed to be here, your parents don’t know you’re here and if they did they’d freak. The surfaces keep changing their minds: carpet, brick, cork, masonite, drywall, glass, concrete, plastic, drop ceiling, wood. If it was late enough, you would fall through the floor. Maybe you really shouldn’t be here. The filth, decay, and finger-deep dirt coating the first floor are nostalgic for times that have (yet) been sanitized. 

This cavern—thousands of square feet on the second floor of an industrial carpet cleaning facility in West Harlem—is a gem in hiding. Founded by Dahlia Bloomstone, Ilya Fedotov-Federov, and Dasha Aksenova in May 2024, New Uncanny conjures horny nostalgia for the colossal artist’s warehouse, though it’s (allegedly*) slotted for imminent demolition. 

The gallery’s first show, OVERLOAD, featured a long list of friends and collaborators from Hunter MFA, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and beyond, with particular focus on practices that (in the words of contemporary philosopher Olli Lagerspetz) relate to dirtiness as a contextual, relative “deviation from the ideal state of the object, the state of the object as it really is or should be.” 

I heard (you didn't hear it from me) that rent for the space was subsidized by paintings, an arrangement embodying its “specific interest in the intersection of gamification and contemporary art.”

I’m perched on stained and buckling slate-blue industrial carpet with Dahlia, drinking pink champagne and being any age. You come by and ask about the classified papers in the office cabinets, documents that could be remnants from when they filmed The Joker here (or could be real). I throw them into the air and they are the fluttering ghosts of secretaries. Is New Uncanny the space where it exists, or is its concept the declaration of its existence? If the wrecking ball swings upon New Uncanny, what will become of these crumbling angels? Where is her potentiality beyond her property? When is she ever not alive? 

*In the dungeon, anything can happen.

—Alex Schmidt

On a drab June afternoon, I wander through Dia Beacon’s expansive exhibition halls. The overcast sky dims the light that usually pours through the space’s massive windows, leaving me with a slight twinge of disappointment. A staff member, however, suggests I check out the real highlight: Bass, Steve McQueen’s immersive installation on the lower floor.

Descending into the 30,000-square-foot space, I’m struck by its sheer scale. Thick concrete columns frame the room where sixty ceiling-mounted LED lightboxes shift subtly through a range of colors—from deep red to orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and back. The transitions are so gradual that it’s hard to pinpoint when they occur. Deep, resonant bass notes hum through the air, vibrating outward from three stacks of speakers. The sound is physical, moving through my body in waves. 

Earlier this year, McQueen assembled a group of musicians—Meshell Ndegeocello, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, and Laura-Simone Martin, led by bassist Marcus Miller—to record an improvisation here, with minimal instructions. The musicians responded to the changing light in the space, creating a three-hour composition of layered rhythms and haunting tones. The liminal, suspended atmosphere of the dark, industrial basement recalls multiple temporalities: at first glance, it calls to mind an abandoned warehouse after a rave, or, as McQueen suggests, the hull of a ship during the Middle Passage.

This isn’t the first time McQueen has worked with light as a medium. His 2012 public intervention Blues Before Sunrise replaced Amsterdam’s Vondelpark streetlights with blue bulbs, imbuing the urban landscape with a sense of cinematic melancholy. With Bass, he deepens the interplay of light and sound to create an experience of profound emotional and sensory resonance. “Not often can something penetrate the armor we put up through sheer force of being,” McQueen has said of the work. “With music and sound, it can stir you inside.”

Bass is felt rather than heard. The interplay of light and sound transforms the basement into a living, breathing entity. It suspends time, inviting deep contemplation. At first glance, the installation seems abstract, even detached from specific meaning. But as I linger on, its elements—the instruments, the light, the space—converge into a profound meditation on place, identity, and the human condition.

—Caroline Whiteley

I walked into KW Berlin this past summer and found myself face-to-face with an image that still makes me furious, Jimmy DeSana’s Watermelon (1979): a white dude fucking a watermelon. Exhibited amid a genocide, in an institution complicit with Germany’s Staatsräson, which puts Israel’s perceived security above all else. Maybe only in Germany would a curator do that, maybe with a little grimace—business as usual for Berlin’s “fuck-fest” aesthetic that swallows everything in its path. 

Around the same time, I experienced Liina Magnea’s Wakey Wakey Sleeping Beauty, also at KW—another piece that had me reeling. In this performance, the artist dressed up as a police officer, storming through the audience, aggressively yelling at people in German. She got in my face, I flipped her off. Until that moment, I always found people who got easily triggered kind of ridiculous. But I was absolutely triggered—me, a Turkish person, confronted by a “German cop” YELLING at me. The more upset I got, the more she ramped it up. I left yelling back, “This performance sucks!” because in that moment, it really did.

Then this autumn, I saw Thomas Schütte’s Melonly (1989) at MoMA—another watermelon cameo, but this time it was sculptural and not sexual. I still wonder if the museum realized watermelons signal Palestinian solidarity for many. Maybe it was accidental solidarity by curatorial oversight. In any case, these watermelons probably wouldn’t be shown in Germany now. You can fuck one, though, and as much as you want.

The best thing that happened this year was Nan Goldin. Thank goodness she exists. At the opening of her retrospective This Will Not End Well at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Goldin delivered a speech, “Why can’t I speak, Germany?,” addressing the German state’s weaponization of antisemitism to suppress criticism of Israel. Behind the scenes, Goldin had faced pushback from the museum. A slide she had added to her iconic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—expressing solidarity with Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, while also naming Israeli victims—was initially censored. For an artist whose work has always blurred the line between activism and art, this disavowal was a deep betrayal. But Goldin, for her part, was clear: she did this show to make that speech. The exhibition was secondary.

—Alper Turan

There is no there there at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt was the third in a trilogy of exceptional exhibitions conceived of and (co-)curated by the art historian and curator Gürsoy Doğtaş in 2023 and 2024, all of which focused on historical and contemporary artistic production surrounding transnational histories of migration in Germany, from its postwar and Cold War eras up through its postmigrant present. There is no there there brought together an expansive selection of artworks by artists of non-German origin who lived and worked in former West or East Germany between the 1960s and the 1980s. These stylistically and geographically diverse artists came to West and East Germany for various reasons: as art students, to further their emerging or established art careers, as political exiles, or as labor migrants. Due to their proximities to migrant communities and degrees of intimacy with experiences of social marginalization, these artists produced formative bodies of work that often, but not exclusively, commented on the exploitation, discrimination, and racism of West and East Germany’s historical migration regimes. 

There were two distinct art historical contributions of the exhibition. By filling the museum with extensive bodies of work by individual artists—many of whom, like Hanefi Yeter and Vlassis Caniaris, are already canonical in their home countries—the exhibition revealed the provincialism, structural racism, and white gaze of Western art history, which has long excluded migrant artists and the lived reality of migration as a worthy artistic subject. Why was it that many of these artists were largely unknown in Germany, even to educated art publics? And by exhibiting artworks by artists from ethnic groups marginalized within diasporic communities, such as paintings by the Kurdish artist Rıza Topal and graphic works by the Palestinian artist Abed Abdi, the exhibition presented sensitive, differentiated perspectives on the realities of enduring oppression and hierarchies of transnational solidarity. Recasting migration history as constitutive of art history, There is no there there firmly cemented the lived realities of working-class migrants as well as political struggles around migration as central concerns for migrant artists in Germany, unmasking the monocultural myths that underlie the reprehensible demonization of migrants and those perceived as “foreign” across the political spectrum today. 

—Carlos Kong

George Miller’s 2024 sequel to the Mad Max franchise begins with a question that is less a product of science fiction than of reality: What happens when vital resources such as food, gasoline, or water become scarce due to nuclear war and environmental disaster? The film’s answer is as predictable as it is disturbing: Everyone and everything becomes a resource. Men become soldiers, women become birthing machines for future soldiers, scrap metal becomes makeshift weapons. This is the situation in the Wasteland, where warlords fight for supremacy over an already enslaved population intercut by spectacular car chases. Its utopian counterpart is the Green Place, a “place of abundance” in the middle of the outback, where the titular heroine, Furiosa, lives with her mother in a cooperative until it’s discovered by the people of the Wasteland.

The specific materialism with which Miller stages the dystopia of a world after social, ecological, and economic downfall—with green-screen set-pieces and theatrical monologues—is convincing throughout this steampunk version of a post-apocalyptic road movie. Even more remarkable, however, is the dialectic of the various rebellions and counter-rebellions. For example, when Furiosa joins forces with Immortan Joe to defeat their common enemy, Dementus. Immortan Joe is evil personified—a cold-blooded dictator—in the film’s comic logic and opposed by his oblivious brother, who paints Pre-Raphaelite murals. Meanwhile, Dementus’s Trumpian populism (“Big shots rule only because you choose to follow!”) represents an even more insidious dimension of oppression and is a subtext the film develops through camp extravaganza, both comically and as a feminist counter-narrative. Cutting off the teddy bear he wears around his loins as a reminder of his own murdered family, or inserting a seed that will grow a tree in place of his penis and bear fruit for future society—Furiosa’s ways of castrating Dementus for killing her mother are as varied as they are hilarious. Miller’s cinema of attractions is thus the effect of a well-calculated economy of punchlines, a resource in itself, as Dementus knows: “The question is: do you have it in you to make it epic?”

—Katharina Hausladen

Over the years, I've tried and failed to watch the more nuanced films from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's overwhelming oeuvre. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in its slow burn camp, beauty, and melancholy is one thing, for instance, but the bleak fifteen hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz is another. It isn't that I don't like Fassbinder but that he is hard to love—perfectly illustrated by the fact that everyone I've known who does adore him is also equally insightful as they are exhausting. I had all but given up until I began reading Ian Penman's experimental biography, Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors this past summer between swimming, basking, and ignoring emails for six weeks straight.

In 450 notations, Penman unfolds a series of short meditations that weave in and out of Fassbinder lore, musings on cinematic theory, and postwar German history. While it is enthralling to a niche kind of reader, the meta-slippage of the author's self is inevitable; he begins to question why one would dedicate such time and energy to another person—someone long dead, no less. While Fassbinder was a filmmaker's filmmaker, an actor's actor, a writer's writer, he was also notably cruel and brutal to those closest to him, often parlaying their masochistic adoration to his sadistic satisfaction and an audience's entertainment. Penman speculates and considers the possibility of a childhood marred by tensions, a sexuality repressed and then over-expressed, intermixed with an addictive personality hellbent on fiendish efficiency—a codified German, in any case. Maybe he really was just purely symptomatic of the twentieth century. 

I had wanted a safe distraction from the past spring but what kind of person runs to Fassbinder, however unconsciously, to solve their existential grief? Ultimately, the reader is left on the philosophical hook of what it is we want out of an artist’s biography while the author reckons with the quixotic futility of writing one. Now I wonder about the act of mourning one. In this book, as in any text that demands reflection or recollection, the attempt to rationalize why we choose an artist, author, or artwork to admire (especially after death) is an act of inversion and envelopment. There are no safe distractions.  

—Brit Barton

Any reader of The Public Review will know that the present editor is obsessed with art that engages, relates to, or is invested in the public sphere. I find that this kind of public artwork is rare, as is institutional infrastructure for it. Dia has been hosting a series of “Activations,” though, which it describes as “interdisciplinary workshops designed by artists in response to civic spaces in New York.” I went to Alix Vernet’s iteration in September at the Chelsea Recreation Center (operated by New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation) on West 25th Street. 

I was already familiar with Vernet’s practice from her 2022 show at a New York gallery, where she exhibited sculptures cast from the streets—monuments, memorials, building facades—and photographs of the casts being made. For the Dia Activation, Vernet developed a low-tech version of her casting process. Instead of preserving forms in time-/ labor-/ skill-intensive materials—latex or clay—Vernet equipped us with rounds of filter paper, stiff-bristled brushes, and spray bottles filled with water. The directive was to look at and engage with the built environment in new ways. The procedure was to pick a subject, put the filter paper over it, spray spray spray it with water until it’s drenched, and then smack it with the brush until the paper conforms to the surface’s grooves. Leave to dry.

I went with two friends and we wandered around Chelsea making impressions of street grates, cracks in the sidewalk, brick walls, gas line covers. This particular mid-September Saturday was warm and sunny, and occasionally the process would activate the stench of piss—arguably a quintessential part of New York’s public spaces. There was no skirting the fact, though, that we were at the threshold of the global center of art’s most privatized form; we received many disdainful looks from gallery employees. We took pleasure in the collage of drying filter paper along those blocks marking what’s not theirs. Back at the Rec Center, there was pizza provided by Dia, and we chatted with other participants—mostly curious Chelsea residents—comparing stories of our adventures in reclaiming (and preserving!) public space.

—Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov