Tenet: Wall Begins to Know Itself. Curated by Maren Hassinger

TENET

CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001

TENET Wall Begins to Know Itself

March 5—April 2, 2022 CUE Art Foundation Curator-Mentor MAREN HASSINGER Essay by SARA GARZÓN

Installation Shot of “Vestigial,” 2018

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WALL BEGINS TO KNOW ITSELF Tenet

Wall Begins to Know Itself is a meditation on the relationship between humans and the built environment. More specifically, as architect, educator, and critic Susana Torre describes about her own practice, we too are “interested in the unresolved tension between the ever-changing process of dwelling and the finite condition of the architectural object that contains that process.”

Having lived and worked in New York City for the past couple of years, we have given much thought to the experience and effects of living in building stock and infrastructure (Dis)play, 2018 Soccer ball, soccer player figurines, turf, paint, hinges, mdf, 36 x 12 x 48 inches

intended for a different era and purpose. In our artwork, we are constantly exploring this notion of historical permanence versus renovation, of what gets altered versus what displays the traces of the past, of renovated design choices meant to signify luxury in a tenement apartment.

We see the city as an extension of our home and of ourselves. Our art explores this inextricable connection, while decomposing the imaginary boundary between private and public, past and present, functional and nonfunctional. In creating these hybrid forms, we propose new ways of looking at space - its uses, limitations, and contradictions - and how it is or should be altered to reflect how we live. ◔ 5

TENET is a collaboration between Julia Eshaghpour and Kevin Hollidge. Julia and Kevin live and work in Manhattan, NY, and both completed a B.A. in Fine Art from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN in 2017. Selected exhibitions include: “To Defeat the Purpose: Guerilla Tactics in Latin American Art” Aoyama Meguro Gallery, (Tokyo 2020), “Seen but Not Noticed” Institute for New Connotative Action, (Portland 2020), “Bubble: Presented by Joel Dean” Gern En Regalia, (New York 2019), “Sukkot” 211 Montrose, (Brooklyn 2019), “Vestigial” Biquini Wax, (Mexico City 2018). “No Más Antes Los Ojos” Tiro Al Blanco, (Guadalajara 2018). This is their first solo presentation in New York.

Untitled, 2018 Yarn, rope, metal hooks on pegboard and wood 18 x 12 inches

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Installation Shot of “Vestigial,” 2018

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Vessel 1, 2019 Mdf, clay, inkjet print, metal hooks, plastic bags, paint 18 x 12 inches 10

THE WALL Maren Hassinger, Curator-Mentor

In Vessel 1, which is part of the series Tenet calls Stones with Character, the appearance of the actual wall exposed within the frame of the piece is important because the wall becomes a part of the art. There’s no longer a difference between the surroundings and the object within the surroundings. It’s somehow a continuum, which suggests the nature of things in our world. It’s the way we experience our world.

What is interesting about Tenet’s work, particularly Vessel 1 and Wall Begins to Know Itself, is how the wall appears to weave in and out of each piece. The wall is an active participant. In the first piece it’s the literal wall that is there, and in the second there’s a wall of tile and wall of wood, and behind these walls we know there is the “real” wall that supports them. This talks about the relationship between actual things and made things, as Tenet shows the penetration of the existing wall into the added tile wall. There’s always a

conversation between what’s given in a space and whatever you put into it.

You’re always working back and forth between what’s on the wall, what you put on the wall, and the relationship between them. You’re always talking about what you’re seeing and what you’re given. Nothing exists without givens. Tenet deals with this both metaphorically and spatially. The wall is not just a surface that you put something on – it’s a surface that you have a physical relationship with.

You can’t talk about something without talking about the wall behind it. All artists do is talk about space.

But while most artists just use that space as a support system, as if the ground exists to support the sculpture, or the wall exists to hang the painting, Tenet takes the threedimensionality of the room and makes it a part of the actual art. It’s an attempt to bring the art closer to the reality we experience. I think this is the intention to which Tenet aspires. ◑ 11

MAREN HASSINGER has built an expansive practice that connects humanity to nature through a range of media. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, she has explored the subject of movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. In each context, the artist creates an eloquent response to timely issues regarding our relationship to the natural world and to each other.

A selection of recent solo exhibitions include The Window, at Dia Bridgehampton and We Are All Vessels, at Susan Inglett Gallery. Her public installations include Monument, in Washington D.C. through the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative and Nature, Sweet Nature, which traveled from the Aspen Art Museum to Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, Oklahoma City.

Hassinger is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts. Hassinger’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, among others.

Hassinger is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery in New York City.

Wall Begins to Know Itself, 2020 Tile, mortar, plywood, hardwood, plastic bottles, paper pulp 48 x 27 x 14 inches

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Ledge 1, 2020 Laminate, tiles, grout, paint, plastic bottles,sugar, pegboard, plywood 36 x 48 x 24.5 inches

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Fruit Pillar, 2019 Fruit, plywood, paint 54 x 24 x 26 inches

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Seen But Not Noticed, 2020 Papier-mache, cardboard, paint 20 x 14 x 14 inches

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Frame 4 (Stratum), 2021 21 x 16.5 x 2 inches

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Frame 3 (Dematerialized Access), 2021 Plywood, mortar, hook, inkjet print, plastic curtain, hooks, paint, towel 21.5 x 18 x 2 inches

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Left: Frame 2 (Hot Pipe/Transition Strip), 2021 Plywood, cherry wood, papier-mache, stones, mortar, paint, ink, vinyl sticker 17.5 x 21 x 2 inches Above: Frame 1 (Frontal), 2021 Plywood, tile, mortar, grout, papier-mache, cherry wood, paint 22 x 18 x 2 inches

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Untitled, 2020 Mdf, tile, grout, epoxy clay, oil paint, plywood, graphite 36 x 24 x 5 inches

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TENET: NEW YORK CITY’S SCULPTURAL ABERRATIONS Sara Garzón

Following the practice of a contemporary flâneur, the New York-based artist duo Tenet (Julia Eshaghpour and Kevin Hollidge) investigate the history, functionality, and taste of our contemporary built environment. Producing sculptures with unique yet recognizable iconographies, Tenet’s works incorporate elements of vernacular architecture, home renovations, and site-oriented narratives. Paying particular attention to found forms, Tenet’s artworks mimic the city’s collapsing architectural styles and spontaneously made structures, which are also characteristic of what Croatian artist Lana Stovicejic (b.

1990) termed the “Neo-ornament” – mass-produced plaster, plastic, or vinyl classically-oriented architectural motifs used to achieve an impression of high-end interior designs.

Tenet is drawn to NYC’s architectural history. In Wall Begins to Know Itself at CUE Art Foundation, the duo’s first solo exhibition in New York, their artworks focus on tenement buildings, which, albeit shadowed by the city’s renowned skyscrapers, lie

at the center of city life. Tenements emerged in the late nineteenth century and were designed as long rows of low-rise masonry buildings to house working-class, migrant, and minority populations, most commonly in areas such as the Lower East Side and Harlem.

Thanks to fast urban transformation and rocketing real estate prices, landlords have sought to maximize profit by conducting abrupt modifications to housing interiors that confine residents into evermore fragmented spaces. The exponential change to these interiors has led to the ubiquity of eclectic architectural motifs. Combined styles in domestic spaces now reflect vernacular sensitivities that collapse class aspirations and mobility with the materiality of Neo-Classical, Baroque, and even Rococo forms. In fact, the artist duo points out how these architectural palimpsests encapsulate the city’s identity, underscoring how the real character of NYC life can be found not in the city’s luxurious high rises but throughout public housing complexes.

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Tenet’s combined objects counter preconceived ideas of the built environment, blurring the lines between sculpture and architecture. In the three-dimensional piece Wall Begins to Know Itself (2020), the artists combined an artificially made tile wall with an encrusted wooden top that is simultaneously supported by two bulky yet stylized balusters. Molded in shaft, square, or lathe-turned forms, balusters were invented to hold and decorate staircases, parapets, and exterior patios.

Here, in what the artists call a “sculptural aberration,” the balusters are integrated into an unexpected structure that looks either like a kitchen table, a bathroom, or an awkwardly angled wall. The white color of the baluster also emulates the off-white sheen of a marble carving.

Despite its luster, and upon closer look, the artificiality of the piece becomes quickly evident to a viewer, as the unpainted paper pulp surface exposes the faux motif.

The baluster is, by nature, an eclectic form. Depending on its purpose, the ornament combines shoulders and bold rhythmic shapes in a complicated mannerist base. While the sober top alludes to the forms of Neoclassicism, further referencing a Greek amphora, the distinctive twist-turned and saturated patterned designs in the body of the column can also be found in seventeenth-century oak or walnut Above: Tenet, Wall Begins to Know Itself, 2020.

Tile, mortar, plywood, hardwood, plastic bottles, paper pulp. 48 x 27 x 14 inches.

Below: Lana Stojićević, Betonicus, 2020.

Image courtesy of the artist.

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English furniture. The abundance of stylistic reference contained within the single feature, moreover, makes a forceful statement about class and taste.

Its unnecessary inclusion in modern furniture or architectural features makes the ornament serve its inherent function.

That is, lacking any real utilitarian purpose, the motif overpowers the gaze, demonstrating the luxury of its pointless excess. Like balusters, other classical elements such as Corinthian columns, friezes, and pilasters constitute the type of ornamentation revival used today to randomly, and at times awkwardly, decorate the interior of middle-class apartment buildings.

In a similar vein, Lana Stovicejic has humorously addressed the systematic expansion of classically styled plaster ornaments in contemporary housing and hotel constructions through a series of photo-performances such as Botanicus (2020). Mocking the commonness and arbitrary inclusion of these features, the neo-ornament proposed by Stovicejic points to a new architectural style, but one that simultaneously exposes the motif’s fakeness and anachronistic nature. In the case of Tenet’s Wall Begins to Know Itself and other artworks, the neo-ornament is evident in the visually intrusive and almost quaint aesthetics of affordable housing in New York City. To this, Tenet writes: “The classic tenement buildings that surround it [the city] are littered with motifs and ornaments of European Classicism, defining historic East Coast urban poverty. These tenements were controversial in their time, built using new machines to produce iconography,

which up until then were built only by skilled craftsmen for the wealthy. The exteriors of New York’s tenements were offensive, distastefully pastiche, but built by hustling immigrants aspiring to reach the new American dream as this was then a symbol of success.”1 The imitation of these materials, their colors, textures, and overall finish has become, nevertheless, pervasive in most housing constructions in metropolises worldwide.

In cities like New York, Mexico City, and London, assemblage-like structures emerge when corporate interests collide with individual tastes. That is why the incorporation of massively reproduced and cast architectural styles to decorate domestic interiors is not unique to tenement buildings in New York. Because the cost of highend materials such as stone, marble, and oakwood is an impediment to construction at all class levels, expert artists are commonly hired to build entirely faux neo-ornamented interior designs. The London-based Argentinian sculptor Ana Kazaroff (b. 1985) is one such artist. An active member of the City & Guilds of London Art School, Kazaroff has dedicated her training to replicating these interior motifs and styles, which are most typically employed by the British elite. In a prototype titled Russian for Free (2021), the artist demonstrates how materials, surfaces, and textured styles are all informed by the hybridization processes that happen when elements from one culture travel and are adapted to new ones.

Like Tenet, found images, memories, and objects in the urban space also 27

plywood mount with signature elements of eighteenth-century Grotesque ornamentation. Obscure human masks decorate the surface of the frame near the corners. Making strange gestures, the uncanny figures seem to embellish the otherwise plain surface of the brick wall and its unrefined frame. Produced using grout, the ornamental figures are also left bare and exposed on top of the wood. In fact, the unfinished neoornament recalls a cement gargoyle standing on the outer surface of a building, again blurring the lines between interiority and exteriority, design and architecture, classical ornament and modern eccentricity.

Ana Kazaroff, Russian For Free, 2021. Oil on wood. 8 7/10 × 3 9/10 × 7 1/2 in. Photo

by Damian Griffiths for Galería Kupfer.

Image courtesy of the artist.

influence Kazaroff’s artistic practice. In her artworks she makes unexpected associations to create new relationships with the fictions of these constructions.

Through an array of free-standing and high relief sculptures together with intimate studies of painterly assemblage-like structures, Tenet provides a variety of takes on the contrasting urban environment. In Henry St. Study (2020) the artist duo frames a fake brick wall. Emulating the unevenness of the brick color, different hues are used to mimic the wall’s natural deterioration. The frame, moreover, combines the simple molding of a cheap 28

A much overdue conversation on contemporary vernacular styles and domestic neo-ornaments, Tenet’s seemingly strange and even aberrant sculptures allow us a unique entry into our own homes. Their multimedia works offer us a reflection on the eclectic non-style, or rather anti-style, of New York City’s interior spaces. By bringing into view a collection of awkwardly cut furniture, as well as collaged and combined structures of varying sizes, they help us better understand the constant layering involved in the fabrication of modern taste, one that is everything but modernly styled. In their research process, Tenet’s embodiment of the flâneur underscores that ambivalent figure of the affluent modern urban subject who, by wandering detached from society, becomes an acute observer of our post-industrial contemporary life. ● 1. Tenet, “Seen but Not Noticed,” Institute for New Connotative Action Journal, (May 2021).

Henry St. Study, 2020 Mdf, epoxy clay, paint, and wood trim 56 x 27 inches

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SARA GARZÓN is a curator and writer based in New York.

Sara has worked as the Jane, and Morgan Whitney Curatorial Fellow as well as the Lifchez-Stronach Curatorial intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and before that was Audience Engagement Associate at the Brooklyn Museum. Besides museum appointments, Sara has curated a number of exhibitions and is also co-founder of the curatorial working group Collective Rewilding, which looks at the intersection between curation, ecology, and care. Sara has contributed to exhibition catalogs, anthologies, peer-reviewed journals, and art magazines including DASartes Magazine, Ocula Magazine, Terremoto, Hyperallergic, and others.

Mentor MÓNICA DE LA TORRE is a poet and essayist born and raised in Mexico City whose writing engages translation, performance, and the visual arts. Her most recent book is Repetition Nineteen, which centers on experimental translation. Other books include The Happy End/All Welcome—a riff on Kafka’s Amerika—and Public Domain. She has published several books in Spanish, including Taller de Taquimecanografía, written jointly with the eponymous women artists’ collective she co-founded.

With Alex Balgiu, she co-edited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79. Her work has appeared in Midst, Artforum, Granta, the Believer, the Paris Review, and NY Review, among other publications. She is recipient of a 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant and teaches at Brooklyn College.

This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors appointed

by AICA to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.

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CUE connects practicing artists and arts workers to essential resources and community. We exhibit new work, provide mentorship to under-recognized and underrepresented artists, build platforms to exchange ideas, create the context to develop peer-to-peer relationships, and educate a diverse next generation of artists.

Exhibiting artists are selected through one of two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual Open Call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and Open Call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing their exhibition. We are honored to work with the artist Maren Hassinger as the Curator-Mentor to Tenet.

STAFF

Corina Larkin Executive Director

Georgie Payne Programs Manager

Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director

Wendy Cohen Programs Associate

Cara Erdman Development Coordinator

Gillian Carver Programs & Comms. Coordinator

CUE Art Foundation | cueartfoundation.org 137 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 31

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Amanda Adams-Louis Theodore S. Berger Kate Buchanan Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison

John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan Rachel Maniatis Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock

Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sánchez Andrea Zittel Irving Sandler (in memoriam)

CUE Art Foundation’s programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals including: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Aon PLC Chubb Compass Group Management LLC DataSite ING Financial Services Merrill Corporation The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation William Talbott Hillman Foundation New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

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Cover: Cuidado con el Escalón que Pises (Be Careful on the Stairs by Which you Step), 2018 Turf, wood panel, paint, mdf, plants, 42 x 24 x 16 inches All artwork © Tenet unless noted otherwise Catalogue design by Wendy Cohen and Joshua Hauth

CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001