Ever since, Halaby has continued to push the limits of oil abstraction obsessively to capture and embody various sensory experiences. Early on, she focused on prismatic refractions. One work, Aluminum Steel (1971), showcases her ability to draw inspiration from rather quotidian sources and experiences. A large-scale meditation in oil on the eponymous material’s interactions with light, the painting asserts Halaby’s vision of metal as “the only substance with colored highlights.” She divides lenticular metallic planes into hundreds of thin bands of color, creating a complex geometric field. Nearby, a hand-painted tone study and framed pencil sketch reveal the careful planning that underpins the painting. The work is a monument to dedication and patience—qualities so evident in her art, that must also have served her well in her career. Like so many women artists of her generation, she has waited for decades for a show like this. And like so many women, she enjoyed institutional recognition as an educator before she received her due as an artist: in 1972 she became the first woman to be appointed a full-time associate professor at the Yale School of Art.

Surely such neglect could warrant a little bitterness over the course of a long career, but if resentment exists within Halaby’s private thoughts, there is no evidence of it in her work. Her experiments are brave and far ranging, and her appetite for formal exploration is voracious. All the while, her use of color is joyful and kaleidoscopic: Mother of Pearl II (2018) features every color of the rainbow in an abstract swirl of mosaic-tile-like shapes. In her hands, abstraction is not a tool for turning her subject into a cipher; rather, it allows the work to open toward something universal—perhaps owing to how Arab art resisted representation long before abstraction was welcome in the United States.

Until the mid-1970s, Halaby was largely preoccupied with diagonal line drawings. In 1976 she left her position at Yale and moved to New York City, where she is now based. There, she settled in with new tools, new perspectives, and a whole new arsenal of geometric forms. Pink Walking Green (1983) is a Tetris-like composition with colorful blocky shapes: Halaby described the work to curator Rachel Winter as an effort to capture the experience of watching a woman in pink walking along the green of her verdant street. By the ’80s, Halaby was working not from photo references or models, but largely seeking to re-create sensory experiences of life in her paintings, including attendant sounds, the feeling of the wind, and the visual interactions of shapes and colors.

Indeed, one is able to intuit a lively interaction in Pink Walking Green, just as Angels and Butterflies (2010) successfully imparts the movement of wings with nothing more than rays of color unfolding at sharp angles. Her interest in capturing motion led her to computational experiments in the mid-’80s: she enlisted Amiga, a newly available personal computer, to craft kinetic visual experiments. The resulting “Kinetic Paintings” (1988–ongoing) reveal an eagerness to try any tool that might unlock new possibilities in abstraction. In later compositions, more explicit figuration returns, but her interest in motion persists: Bamboo (2010) is a stunning and synthesized vision of gentle light seen through leaves and moving in every direction.

Not all the movements she captures are as whimsical as breezes and butterflies. The exhibition’s title derives from an inscription on a watercolor work, Occupied Palestine, that Halaby created during a 1995 visit to Jerusalem, her birthplace. It presents an abstract field of pastel brushstrokes and confetti-like sunbursts, overlayed with punctuating brown and black swoops. Though Halaby only rarely adds text to her compositions, this one bears a handwritten caption. “It is as though I am here to witness the last moments in the life of this beautiful and ancient city of Jerusalem,” Halaby penciled into the bottom margin of the image. “My Jerusalem is being murdered. And I make this painting feeling the pain and beauty of Jerusalem.”

Nearly 30 years since this witnessing, and the murder has only multiplied; meanwhile, in the US, Halaby is one of several artists to have faced professional consequences for taking a stance. “Eye Witness” was initially planned as one-half of a joint exhibition between MSU and Indiana University (IU), where she completed her MFA. But in January, IU abruptly canceled her exhibition, citing vague “safety concerns” and dismissing the artist in a two-line email. The cancellation followed Halaby’s post on Instagram decrying Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

The exhibition catalog, Centers of Energy, went to print before the cancellation, and shares a title with the aborted IU exhibition; it begins with a directors’ foreword cowritten by leadership of the two institutions. There is a tragic irony in the contribution of David A. Brenneman, director of the Eskenazi Museum of Art at IU; he asserts that the museum’s 2017 renovation, including the establishment of its first contemporary art department, advances its purpose “to spark reflective dialogue within our university community around artistic issues that include identity, changing cultural landscapes, and social justice.”

One can hardly think of an artist more perfectly poised fulfill this mission than Halaby, whose work so eloquently bears witness both to injustice and to everyday beauty. The IU cancellation is disturbing and disappointing. Yet it would be regrettable to allow this slight to overshadow the triumph of her MSU solo debut; here, the Broad allows Halaby to serve as a witness, and to be witnessed.

Maclay’s chart of Wain’s work

In Wain’s lifetime he wouldn’t only create cutesy illustrations but more psychedelic drawings full of bright colors and fractal patterns. Some say that these drawings were the results of Wain’s struggle with mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, as he grew older. For years a series of his drawings featured in psychology textbooks after the psychologist Walter Maclay arranged them in an order that revealed how the deterioration of a patient’s mental state could be tracked through changes in their artistic style. The first drawings on Maclay’s chart are of soppy-eyed kittens, but as the years go by, Wain’s drawings become more saturated and more complicated until they dissolve into a kaleidoscopic soup of repeating patterns, the image of the cat hardly preserved. Though this characterization of this so-called deterioration has been put into question as many of these works aren’t dated and could’ve been made at any point in his life, this chart has defined Wain’s life story. In a lecture, the psychiatrist David O’Flynn once called this series “the Mona Lisa of asylum art.”

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain grabs on to twin aspects of Wain’s life—his legacy as a painter of saccharine pictures and a man beset by mental illness—in the service of a predictable portrait of a mad genius. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wain, following his performances of other socially awkward yet brilliant Englishmen: Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (2014) and Sherlock Holmes in the BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017). The movie begins by introducing us to Wain as a gifted illustrator who is eccentric enough to get into a bull ring to get a better look at the bovine he’ll be drawing for a newspaper. Wain had a wide range of interests, from boxing to inventing (he had an obsession with electricity), but these passions would be curtailed when his father died when he was 20 years old and he was left to provide for his mother and five sisters.

Caroline, the eldest sister, takes charge of the house and begs Wain to focus on providing for his family, but his financial acumen is lacking and he spends the rest of his life struggling with finances. The other sisters are reduced to giggling background noise, but it is their presence that brings Emily Richardson-Wain (Claire Foy) into Wain’s life. Smart but plain (if only she’d take off her glasses!), she and Wain fall in love and get married, despite their differences in class and age, with Emily 10 years Wain’s senior. Too soon into their blissful conjugal life, Emily falls ill, and it is during her battle with cancer that she and Wain adopt a kitten, Peter, who first kindles Wain’s enduring love of cats.

Wain paints and draws Peter for Emily’s comfort and, after her death, begins publishing silly illustrations of kittens that find massive popularity. But his sister Marie was diagnosed with schizophrenia when Wain was 30, and between that and his scandalous marriage to Emily, the family’s reputation suffered. But Wain would continue to keep himself and his family afloat through his cat pictures and children’s books.

Over time, however, he became more and more unstable, and the film shows him experimenting with abstraction as he mutters his theories about electricity. Eventually his sisters could no longer handle his violent outbursts, and he was sent to live in a pauper’s hospital. Through donations from his many fans (including sci-fi author H.G. Wells), Wain was moved to a more comfortable asylum where he continued to draw and kept cats as pets.

By the film’s logic, Wain’s struggles are what sparked his genius to ever greater heights. As Wain scribbles furiously into his sketchbook, the movie’s narrator says,  “The more intensely he suffered, the more beautiful his work became.” In the end that’s all the movie ever amounts to: another formulaic story about a mad genius whose creations are the fruit of suffering.

Four of the six paintings portray solitary subjects engaged in everyday tasks, such as sitting down to a meal (At the Table) or lolling on the lawn (Backyard at Night). The single multi-figure piece, Poolside, demonstrates many of the artist’s formal techniques. The claustrophobic scene is filled with burly bodies. A narrow strip of unshaded blue represents a pool and serves as the only indication of a wider space. Composed with a limited red-and-pink palette, the limbs of the huddled group of swimmers have a weighty and heavily modeled presence. The upper bodies of two figures, one of whom sits on a bright yellow bench while the other stands behind it, are cut out of the frame. Two other swimmers sit on the ground, on either side of the painting. The one on the right has her back to us, while the one on the left faces the viewer, reaching out to absentmindedly graze the gray-tiled ground––a subtle, inscrutable gesture that serves as the painting’s focal point, the only hint of movement in a scene of sculptural stillness. Kasey adroitly contrasts intimacy with alienation throughout the paintings. This crowded example seems to bring the figures very close to us, without ever letting us in.

Practicing Piano depicts a gray figure––bent over, lips nearly kissing the keyboard––passionately playing the instrument. The painting is almost overwhelmingly personal. Yet everything about the figure remains ambiguous. Kasey’s oneiric realism excludes signifiers for gender, race, and class, and any glimpses of individual identity. The inky black palette she used to render a figure sitting on the fluorescent green grass in Backyard at Night seems to impart little about race, but instead underscores the nondescript nocturnal scene’s melancholic or reflective mood.  

Kasey, who was born in 1985 and lives in New York, engages classical history in her work; the best formal historical parallel may be found in Picasso’s interwar Classicist Period. The squad in Poolside could be descendants of the Pygmalion-esque women who inhabit Picasso’s The Source and Two Bathers (both 1921). Picasso’s classicizing aesthetic was part of a broader “return to order” in the wake of World War I, when many artists abandoned the extremes of the avant-garde in favor of seemingly timeless, traditional forms. In the 1920s, this shift provided the foundations for Surrealism, a revolt against rationalism and societal rules. Kasey’s static, alien view of the present, where scenes of intimacy are opaque and unsettling, is a welcome complication of returning and order, past and present, backward and forward. 

“I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world,” Robert Rauschenberg said in 1964. Rauschenberg thrust items from the real world—shoes, electric fans, chairs, taxidermied animals—into his work relentlessly. No object was too humble or abject for his egalitarian compositions, which have had significant reverberations for generations. Tate Modern’s retrospective, jointly organized with the Museum of Modern Art, New York (where it opens in May), brings together more than 250 works from an extraordinary range of disciplines, spanning the six-decade career of the artist, who died in 2008.

What stands out most is Rauschenberg’s continual innovation and restless curiosity. Take, for example, his use of the tire—that symbol of America’s wealth and disposable consumer culture—to two very different ends. For Automobile Tire Print (1953), he treated the tire as a printmaking tool by having the composer John Cage drive his Model A Ford across twenty sheets of paper glued end to end, with one wheel leaving a dirt track and another leaving a trail of black paint. In Monogram (1955–59), he incorporated a tire as a sculptural component, placing it around a stuffed goat that, in the work’s final version, he stood on a collaged painting laid horizontally; the unexpected juxtapositions here are at once ludicrous and liberating and conjure associations of man versus nature, capitalism versus biology (though the artist himself refused to interpret the work, despite the title’s suggestion that the piece is a personal insignia).

Rauschenberg’s experimental approach can be traced to his time, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina—a hothouse for vanguard artmaking that shaped much of America’s postwar art scene. There he encountered Cage’s multidisciplinary collaborations and participated in former Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers’s courses centered on assembling random materials to explore their relative properties, both of which would deeply impact his practice. The first room of the exhibition contains works from that period, including two important monochromes from 1951: a black textured painting composed of enamel and paper on four canvas panels, and a smooth reflective seven-panel painting from the series of White Paintings that Rauschenberg and his friends and assistants produced by applying paint to canvases with rollers. (Cage famously described the White Paintings as “airports for the lights, shadows, and particles,” and said they emboldened him to make 4´33˝, his composition consisting of the sounds of an auditorium.) Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)—in which he rubbed out all but a trace of a drawing reluctantly given to him by Willem de Kooning, whom he much admired—is also displayed in this gallery, as are four Elemental Sculptures he made in New York around 1953: simple combinations of natural materials and detritus, such as stones, blocks of wood, nails, and twine, that presage Arte Povera. Throughout the gallery, one witnesses Rauschenberg’s disregard for authorship—his brazen challenging of the dominant current of Abstract-Expressionist painting, which sought to transcend the everyday through personal expression.  

With the Red Paintings, Rauschenberg’s work grew more theatrical, subsuming ever-larger found items, often scavenged junk. These works crackle with energy, particularly the joyfully makeshift Charlene (1954), a multi-panel piece that incorporates a flickering light bulb, an undershirt, art historical reproductions, a mirror, and an umbrella, the whole slathered in warm hues of oil paint. The Red Paintings represent an important transition into the Combines: the artist’s landmark three-dimensional painting-sculpture hybrids. A slide projection on view shows dancers moving through and under one of the first Combines, Minutiae (1954), a freestanding assemblage that Rauschenberg created as a set for a performance by Merce Cunningham’s dance company.

The curators—Tate Modern’s Achim Borchardt-Hume and MoMA’s Leah Dickerman—have reunited many of Rauschenberg’s most celebrated Combines. The show presents iconic examples like the aforementioned Monogram; Bed (1955), in which a wall-mounted quilt and pillow are smeared with paint, nail varnish, and toothpaste; and Gift for Apollo (1959), which features a collaged door placed on wheels and chained to a metal bucket. Such Combines retain a vitality today that belies their age. Indeed, working forty years later, Young British Artists such as Tracey Emin, with her rumpled bed, and Damien Hirst, with his animal carcasses in formaldehyde, clearly owed Rauschenberg a sizable debt. 

Just when it looked as though Rauschenberg might be developing a signature style, he was off in another direction, this time creating transfer drawings by dissolving printed news images with solvent and rubbing them onto paper with pencils. The thirty-four illustrations of Dante’s Inferno that he made between 1958 and 1960 present a bewitching, fragmented picture of contemporary life, with sportsmen, politicians, and astronauts looming ghostlike out of the smudgy compositions. His large-scale silkscreens collaging contemporary and historical images extend the approach of layering old narratives with new ones. Retroactive II (1964) marries a news photo of John F. Kennedy with images of space travel, a military vehicle, and an old master painting. At the 1964 Venice Biennale, Rauschenberg exhibited his silkscreens and was awarded the Golden Lion, after which, to avoid getting trapped by a successful technique, he promptly had his assistant destroy the approximately 150 screens he had used to make such work.

This imperative to keep moving led Rauschenberg to collaborate through the ’60s with Bell Laboratories engineer Billy Klüver, with whom he founded Experiments in Art and Technology, a groundbreaking partnering of artists and technicians. With Klüver and a few other collaborators, he produced Oracle (1962–65), an exuberant junk-metal installation whose five components are placed on wheels and fitted with concealed remote-controlled radios. (One of them also contains a babbling water feature.) The rolling parts can be combined in multiple configurations, the installation seeming curiously animate, as if a harbinger of an automated future. 

In 1970, Rauschenberg moved to Captiva Island, off the coast of Florida, signaling a turning point in his production. He went back to basics, making simple wall pieces from cardboard boxes; sail-like textile sculptures he called Jammers; and, later, a series of assemblages from metal road signs and car parts that he designated Gluts. Although attractive, these various series feel largely derivative of his earlier works. For instance, the cardboard works, some of which incorporate materials such as rope and rubber hosing, are reminiscent of the Elemental Sculptures, while the Gluts recall the Combines, although the amalgamations are less startling.

Toward the end of the retrospective is a series of posters produced for the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), a program conceived by Rauschenberg through which, between 1984 and 1990, he traveled to countries where freedom of expression was restricted, such as China and Cuba, and made and exhibited artwork there. Some criticized ROCI as imperialistic and hubristic, yet, in its efforts to forge cultural dialogue across international boundaries, it can be seen as foreshadowing today’s globalized art world.

Rauschenberg’s achievements appear all the more far-reaching when considered alongside the work shown in the Abstract Expressionism survey held recently at London’s Royal Academy of Arts and on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao until June 4. Rauschenberg was instrumental in diverting the course of art away from subjective gesture and angst-ridden outpouring and toward an embrace of the real in multidisciplinary works. “My whole direction,” he once said, “has been to confront people with something that might remind them of their own lives, in some way that they might look at it differently.”

Manifesta 11’s Pavillion of Reflections.

COURTESY MANIFESTA

Bernini may have once shared a sketchbook with Pope Alexander VII in the gardens of the Vatican, but the German-born artist Christian Jankowski sought a more sensational collaboration when he alighted on the Holy See some centuries later. His 2011 reality television-style video work Casting Jesus enlisted Vatican staff as jurors selecting an actor to play the role of Christ. Relieved of the cassock of ideology, Jankowski’s is an art of deftly constructed capers that trade in an element of surprise. So it is with the artist’s first curatorial effort, the 11th Manifesta Biennale, in Zürich (on view through September 18), for which he commissioned 30 “joint ventures” between contemporary artists and the working professionals of Switzerland’s largest city.

Titled “What People Do for Money: Some Joint Ventures,” Jankowski’s turn at the helm of Europe’s itinerant biennial of contemporary art occupies four main locations in Zürich—three sprawling floors of galleries at the Löwenbräukunst complex in the deindustrializing Zürich-West neighborhood, the entire Helmhaus center in the city’s Old Town, a pavilion constructed of unpainted wood floating on Lake Zürich, and Dada birthplace the Cabaret Voltaire, as well as numerous satellite locations, where participating artists have embedded their projects in the working spaces of their professional collaborators. The first two venues, the biennial’s largest, display the outcomes of the collaborations as well as a parallel selection of historical art, organized by Francesca Gavin around the relationship between art and work. All told, there are 130 artists: 100 in the historical section (covering the past century, though heavily weighted toward postwar and contemporary work), plus those 30 commissioned by Jankowski.

These dispersed “joint ventures” form the biennial’s core, and through them Manifesta’s artists express assorted guises of art’s interdisciplinary, or at least inter-occupational, possibilities. Some treat the professions of their chosen collaborators as one might a spice rack in an unfamiliar kitchen, adapting new ingredients to existing artistic recipes, like photographer Torbjørn Rødland bringing his eye for tightly composed disequilibrium to a dentist’s office for the prints in Intra- & Extraoral. Others cede considerable ground to the domain of their professional interlocutor. Santiago Sierra’s intervention laid siege to the exterior of the Helmhaus venue, which, following the recommendations of “security advisor” Marcel Hirschi, he fortified with enormous sandbags, plywood, and barbed wire for the self-explanatory work Protected Building. (On a second visit to Zürich, in mid-July, this work had been taken down, apparently at the behest of local authorities who were concerned about pedestrian traffic.) In The Zurich Load, a day’s worth of the city’s human waste was processed for safe public display and arranged into a gridded rectangular expanse by artist Mike Bouchet and water treatment engineer Philipp Sigg. The gallery housing the resulting 80 tons of scatological minimalism delivers a maximalist olfactory thrill, industrial-scale ventilation notwithstanding.

Mike Bouchet in the Zürich sludge storage hall in 2015.

©MIKE BOUCHET

“Ideologies have no part to play in my preparations; I trust in the artists and the art,” Jankowski writes in the catalogue’s introduction. The notion of unfettered play that Jankowski favors, particularly in the context of a European biennial enlisting the participation of white and blue-collar workers in Switzerland, emits more than a whiff of ideology. As The Zurich Load demonstrates, the constraints of the biennial mean these collaborations have little breathing room to explore the durational aspects of “what people do for money,” let alone the negation of doing in refusal or strike. Despite being a yearlong project and an impressive logistical feat, Bouchet’s project dead-ends with an auratic object. Unlike Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s decades-long engagement with the New York City Department of Sanitation in the name of what she terms “maintenance art,” Bouchet’s assimilation of technical expertise, like much of the work in the biennial, enforces an artistic authorship at arm’s length from so-called specialized labor. And no matter how fun or interesting, these agreeable transactions between artists and professionals have undeniable advantages in terms of satisfying a general audience’s desire for relatable novelty while pleasing governmental and institutional patrons eager to see art orchestrate harmonious social encounters.

This isn’t an accusatory observation. The catalogue does, after all, include a tract by the Marxist theorist Franco Berardi, who notes that “the social order based on salaried work is already vanishing” and argues in favor of a Swiss universal basic income, a proposal rejected by 77 percent of the electorate in a referendum that coincided with the biennial’s opening days. Nevertheless, Georgia Sagri was the only participating artist to turn her attention to the assumptions of Jankowski’s scenario. She did so both in the work she produced, Documentary of Behavioral Currencies, two identical installations (one shown in the exhibition space, the other at the office of her collaborator, a female private banker), and in her participation in the show’s catalogue and its campy “making-of” documentary, which screened daily at the lake pavilion. “I question Manifesta 11’s curatorial approach, which defines a profession as a de facto process for the construction of identity,” Sagri writes. “Work is not the decision of a free person, of a free will. On the contrary, it is a barrier to living freely.” For her own part, the banker with whom Sagri worked, Dr. Josephin Varnholt, observes that “Georgia was as organized as a chief executive. Professional, well prepared, like a businesswoman.”

Sierra’s Protected Building.

COURTESY MANIFESTA

Sagri’s calculated disruption of Jankowski’s curatorial scheme was unique among her cohort, but it should be noted that some of the most insightful material to emerge from Manifesta at large is to be found in the organic written reflections on each “joint venture” offered by the collaborating professionals in the catalogue. Indeed, much of the biennial’s discursive force is generated not by art professionals but by the gainfully employed citizens of Zürich, some of whom have also been invited to give weekly gallery talks. Even the more anodyne commissioned efforts—like novelist Michel Houellebecq’s decision to have himself medically imaged and analyzed in “Is Michel Houellebecq OK?”—are redeemed, at least partially, by the opportunity to open the catalogue (displayed at some of the satellite venues) and read about the work from an informed critical perspective distinct from that of the artist or curator. (“Beforehand I was told that Michel is pretty special,” Dr. Henry Perschak writes. “That was hardly necessary: as a doctor I’m used to dealing with all sorts of people on a daily basis.”)

Connections forged between art and specialized fields of work have come with varied and mutually incompatible effects. There has been collaboration but also antagonism, cobranding as well as critique. Employees of the RAND Corporation told John Chamberlain to “GO TO HELL MISTER!!” during his 1970 residency there, as Elvia Wilk notes in a relevant recent essay that touches on past outcomes of such encounters. This dynamic range, absent in the mostly congenial content in Manifesta 11, is sampled but not digested in the biennial’s sprawling historical component, “The Historical Exhibition: Sites Under Construction.” Sharing the galleries with the biennial’s new works in the two main exhibition venues, this element of Manifesta avers that it “eschews a fixed narrative,” which simply means that the curatorial project doesn’t reference important precedents, like Helen Molesworth’s 2003 exhibition “Work Ethic” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and that its works are presented in only a loosely thematic way. Despite the absence of practitioners who may trouble the orthodoxy of productive labor—like Claire Fontaine and Mladen Stilinović—key works by the Artist Placement Group, Oscar Bony, Louise Lawler, Sharon Lockhart, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jill Magid, and Sophie Calle make the cut all the same.

Torbjørn Rødland, Intraoral no. 3, Löwenbräukunst.

© MANIFESTA 11/WOLFGANG TRAEGER

“Artists have been in the dog salon, with the police, with the fire brigade,” Jankowski reflects in the catalogue, surveying the labors of his commissioned artists. “They have collected sewage sludge, given citizens therapy, looked for death, life, the perfect orgasm.” The late critic Leo Steinberg described the identification of art with other domains of work in his well-known 1968 essay “Other Criteria,” framing a dominant impulse in postwar American art with a fusillade of bracing declarations: “Not art but industry”; “Not art but technological research”; “Not art but objects.” What “was once an exceptional manifestation” in the polymathic interests of Renaissance artists, Steinberg stated, “has now become institutional within the field.”

Neither hermetic nor “de-skilled,” artists under the influence of the postindustrial West have long mastered the flexible managerialism Jankowski espouses, what the banker who worked with Georgia Sagri observed in surprised metaphor. While Manifesta doesn’t add much to the longstanding identification of art with “non-art” subjects, it does offer a rare opportunity for those subjects to talk back. This is no small thing: that identification may be open-ended, but it still privileges the artistic, its discourse remains generally top-down. The exceptional authorial role accorded to the biennial’s “non-artists,” though relegated to the catalogue, occasionally threatens to upstage Jankowski’s entire project. Writing about the artist who had chosen to work with him, Jorinde Voigt, whose piece concerns an historical account of Rousseau meditating on freedom upon a Swiss lake, the boatmaker Melchior Bürgin delivers an elegant and devastating rejoinder:

Presumably Rousseau lay in a fishing boat, not a racing boat like the ones we produce. My work has to do with competitions, with team sports, collectives who strive towards their goal. How to reconcile that with the self-imposed isolation of Rousseau is something that Jorinde will have to resolve in another work. I won’t have anything to do with that. I formulate my thoughts more prosaically: I try to build a boat. And that boat needs to float. That in itself is fascinating.

Throughout his memoir, Indiana launches diatribes—some as short as a sentence or two, others as long as an entire chapter—against his mother and father (“a swamp of human wreckage tainted by alcohol”), David Lynch (“I disliked [him] immensely”), Charles Bukowski (“his books are—there’s no polite way of saying it—shit”), Ernest Hemingway (“a malicious, unscrupulous, pig-headed bully”), several former friends (“a seriously destructive person,” he says of one), Los Angeles (“a city of false starts”), Cuba (“a feeling of evil spreading everywhere”), and, most importantly, himself. “I’m almost sixty-five,” he says of himself in the books epilogue, “I still have practically nothing of my own, and could very well end up on the same trash heap where most old people in America get tossed, regardless of whatever ‘cultural capital’ I’ve accumulated.” It does not make for friendly reading, but what carries the book is Indiana’s humanity—he may not be sweet, but he is never soulless. I find it telling that Indiana dedicates the book to his friend of 30 years Tracey Emin, whose explicitly sexual art is angry, shocking, and above all weirdly compassionate.

For people familiar with Indiana’s writing, that angst won’t be surprising. Many of his novels feature disillusioned unnamed narrators who wander the streets of downtown Manhattan and mull over the death they see around them. Their New York is not one of possibility and bright lights, but instead, a city of loneliness and impending disaster. Indiana’s New Yorkers are annoying, but they have every right to be. They’re mean because they’re alienated, and they’re alienated because they, like Indiana, are marginalized by the status quo.

Memoirs are usually about overcoming that kind of thing. Indiana’s is not. Many of his books are only now coming back into print, courtesy of the small press Semiotext(e), after being neglected for too long. His art, though curated into last year’s Whitney Biennial, remains largely unknown. His career, he writes in the book’s epilogue, has hardly been “an unmitigated triumph over adversity.”

I Can Give You Anything But Love begins at the end, with a sixty-something Indiana in warm, sunny, unhappy Cuba, where he has lived on and off for the past 15 years. “Cuba hasn’t been part of the modern world in a long time, marooned in a Marxist-Leninist time warp of sluggish totalitarianism,” Indiana writes as an introduction to the country. Only after he unromantically beds Abdul, a 20-year-old Cuban with an attitude, does Indiana get to his traumatic childhood. Even then Indiana leaves out the details one might expect from a memoir. There is none of the usual information, like the fact that Indiana was born in Derry, New Hampshire, in 1950, or the names of his parents, or how old Indiana is in the first memories he presents in the book.

I Can Give You Anything But Love is more experimental, leaping between the present and the distant past—and cutting out most of the time between the two. Indiana only writes about the first three decades of his life, which means that he completely leaves out the part where he became an art critic for the Village Voice from 1985 to 1987. (He looks down on people who know him only for his art criticism, describing his Village Voice writing as “a bunch of yellowing newspaper columns I never republished and haven’t cared about for a second since writing them a quarter century ago.”) Indiana doesn’t mention writing his first novel, Horse Crazy, in 1989. Only in the memoir’s final pages does Indiana even describe leaving Los Angeles for New York, in 1978.

What Indiana does write about, however, is a bleak overview of his early years and a possible explanation for his worldview. When Indiana was a child, his father gambled and drank constantly while his mother looked the other way. When he was a boy, for no apparent reason two lifeguards at a lake tied him up and left him adrift alone on a raft. Years later, as a teenager, he passionlessly gave blow jobs to his schoolmates. Then, after having experienced student counterculture at UC Berkeley and subsequently dropping out, he lost his virginity, at age 19, as part of what was more or less a prostitution deal. That same year, he was raped by a member of the Hells Angel at a party. He slid into depression. “There is a threshold of self-neglect I can’t cross without getting locked up,” he writes. “I have to carefully gauge how much unhappiness I can manage, as I seem to be a glutton for it, and still function.”

A lot of Indiana’s writing is about breakdowns—of systems, of minds, of relationships, or law and order itself. In Horse Crazy, it’s New York gay culture coming apart as the AIDS crisis changes everything people thought they knew about love and sex. Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard appear in his writing about art and film, tearing apart the values of the ’60s. Indiana’s crime trilogy—which includes the novels Depraved Indifference (based on Sante Klimes, who murdered two people with the help of her son) and Resentment, which Indiana wrote after covering the trial of the Menendez brothers, as well as the quasi-journalistic Three Month Fever, about Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace’s killer—are about the breakdown of civilization itself at the end of the 20th century. In I Can Give You Anything But Love Indiana looks inward, documenting a kind of perpetual personal breakdown of memory. It is perhaps his most stylized book—its time jumps, unconventional sentence structures, and frequent digressions illustrating a narrator trying and failing to remember his past.

As the book progresses, it becomes less linear and more episodic. Everything begins to blur until one night, in 1978, after drinking too much and taking a drive on a Los Angeles freeway, Indiana quite literally hits a wall. His car tumbles off the road, and, much to his own surprise, he climbs out alive. He knows something has to give.

As the book moves from the ’60s, through the ’70s, and toward the ’80s, the world changes along with Indiana. At a screening of Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, a friend named Ferd tells Indiana, “There aren’t going to be any more highs.” To which Indiana writes: “In that remarkable moment, a switch was thrown in my brain. I suddenly knew that I had expected, for years, the bleak atmosphere of the 1970s to blow away one sunny day, and the good good times of the 1960s to roll in… Deluded as Ferd often was, I recognized that he’d said something true.”