A new show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami explores the layered work of the American artist
Charles Gaines is the subject of a show that opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach this year. The survey, ‘Charles Gaines: 1992-2023’, focuses on the latter half of the artist’s career and brings together, for the first time, more than 65 works from 1992 to the present day. Among these are two monumental works recreated by Gaines himself – Falling Rock (2000–2023), a sculpture in which a 30-kilogram chunk of granite drops in a randomized and sudden fashion, and Greenhouse (2003–2023), a massive 3.66-by-4.88-meter sculptural enclosure wherein climate change data is used to obfuscate the trees within, a work not seen in 20 years.
Gean Moreno, the show’s curator and ICA Miami’s director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center, says the decision to focus on this later period of Gaines’s output emerged from a desire to showcase work that aligns with today’s demand for political engagement.
Before the 1990s, Gaines based his artwork on mathematics and photographs. However, ‘in the early 90s, he starts using things like Frantz Fanon’s writings or Kafka’s or the Black Panthers’ manifesto,’ works that become abstracted but at least begin in the recognizable world. ‘It’s drawing from the social field rather than formal experiments,’ Moreno says.
Gaines is a philosopher as much as he is an artist, and it’s important to keep that in mind as one consumes some of the works in the show, which look great but feel a little insane if you take them too literally.
Take Airplanecrash Clock, which debuted in 1997 and resembles the kind of architectural maquette made by a Miami real estate developer, with the important addition of a miniature plane that crashes the vibrant developing neighborhood on display. Then there’s Faces 1: Identity Politics, #5, Malcolm X (2018), which sees Gaines returning to the grid to create a colorful portrait of the civil rights leader inscribed within portraits of like-minded historical figures, among them Karl Marx, bell hooks, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Michel Foucault.
That series isn’t about race any more than Airplanecrash Clock is about 9/11. ‘He’s doing the forensic work of systems of taxonomy and classification writ large, not presenting a body or a thing,’ Moreno says. ‘It’s more about, “What is the scaffolding that allows us to hold all these conceptions?”’
The fact that Gaines’s work lies buried beneath so many layers has probably contributed to the fact that, for a while, the art world wasn’t sure what to do with him. He was championed by Sol LeWitt, presented at the 1975 Whitney Biennial, and shown by Leo Castelli. Still, in 2004, he was left out of a major survey of Black artists, perhaps because, Holland Cotter theorized at the time, he ‘is an African American whose work is seldom overtly about race’.
Today, such an oversight is unlikely. His work has been the subject of recent exhibitions at Dia: Beacon, the San Francisco Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Hammer Museum, and featured in the Venice biennales of 2007 and 2015. This newer popularity isn’t surprising because whatever else his work does, it also happens to look great.
‘One of the things about Charles’s work is that it’s so elegant, the way it’s put together,’ Moreno says. ‘It seduces you with its formal clarity. It hooks you with that before you have to get into your mental connections of what’s there, the text and the randomness.’
It can be a little insidious, Moreno says, because, like classification systems such as how we discuss race in America, it all feels great until you start to notice such aberrations. In all this, he says, Gaines hopes to teach us to see the flaws in those systems and how we can break out of them.
_____________________________________________
Charles Gaines is represented by Hauser & Wirth (Zurich, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Somerset, St. Moritz) and Galerie Max Hetzler (Berlin, London, Paris). ‘Charles Gaines: 1992-2023’ will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami from November 16, 2023 – March 17, 2024.
Dan Duray is a writer who lives in New York City. His work has appeared in 032c, The Art Newspaper, and The Economist, among other publications.
This article was originally commissioned for the Art Basel Miami Beach magazine 2023.
Leave a Reply