Night has nearly descended, and the new Marian Goodman Gallery building on Broadway is almost empty of visitors. Inside, before we journey through the inaugural exhibition, I chat with gallery president Philipp Kaiser about Goodman’s noted lineup of artists while we stand in a spacious, dark viewing room on the ground floor. Right in front of us, dressed in black, actor Harvey Keitel tautly plays out a scene from Oedipus Rex against a minimal, pallid set in James Coleman’s video Retake with Evidence from 2007. His performance reminds me of the rather timely lesson that fate will likely fall despite—or too often because—of our attempts to thwart it.
Around the corner, in a small bright room, Kaiser and I peer at Dara Birnbaum’s Mirroring from 1975/2004. On a flat-screen monitor floating over a mounted mirror, a black-and-white video plays of the artist approaching a mirrored image of herself. The adjacent mirror reflects and connects us, the work’s viewers, to the artist’s act—and to ourselves. It also reflects the other art around us, providing a context for how we see and what we look at. A few yards away, our eyes lock on a piece by cherished Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers entitled Alphabet, a limited-edition wallwork made of vacuum-formed plastic from 1969. It presents a simple, black, text-wrapped, Latin-script alphabet on a rectangular white background, punctuated by periods between each letter—except two large white relief forms: an exclamation mark and a comma that quietly disrupt the expected order of the piece’s lettered rows. A sober, curious and funny piece, it seems to ask questions about the foundation of language and how we use it. Like much of the other art in “Your Patience Is Appreciated,” it doesn’t dazzle with florid force or fanciful themes but asks that audiences think for an extended moment as they absorb what they see.
“What’s really interesting about Broodthaers’ art,” Kaiser tells me, “is its conceptual underpinning—but also the wit, the humor, the poetry of his practice. These threads run through the whole Marian Goodman program in a way.” Broodthaers was a key driver in opening the original Marian Goodman Gallery on West 57th Street. “Marian told me once that she was looking for a gallery to show Marcel Broodthaers’ art, which she loved—but no one was interested. So, in 1977, she did it herself.” There’s pride in Kaiser’s voice. At the time, very few women were opening fine art galleries, and while you could say that Broodthaers is the godfather of the gallery’s philosophy and stable of artists, without the vision and determination of Goodman, we wouldn’t be standing here.
As we head to the third floor on the elevator for a top-down tour, Kaiser says he appropriated the name of the gallery’s new exhibition from the 1988 Louise Lawler piece we’re about to see, Air de Paris. It’s a small black-and-white photograph of Modernist giant Marcel Duchamp’s 50cc of Paris Air, an “empty” glass ampoule that made a gift of the intangible to a wealthy collector and friend who had everything. In Lawler’s nod to Duchamp, the image is rotated counterclockwise, appearing knocked over—which actually happened to Duchamp’s original work when exhibited, breaking it open and letting the air out, deflating its magic. Lawler, challenging the institutionalization of Duchamp’s anything-is-art use of the readymade, points out that once subsumed, classified and preserved in a museum, even radical conceptual work—like Duchamp’s—begins to seem familiar. The text on the mat board around her photo accordingly reads:
“This ready-made no longer looks ordinary.
Preserved, repackaged, reclaimed: it does.
YOUR PATIENCE IS APPRECIATED”
Perhaps the all-caps PATIENCE she suggests is the same one required to persistently examine and review the ongoing evolution of what constitutes art and life—as well as our perception of them. While “patience is a virtue,” we’re told, and Michelangelo declared it “eternal genius,” others have positioned patience as a passage to the present, which we desperately need now—but seem to eschew in our very virtual world, which swings hastily from the nostalgia of what-was to the anxiety of what’s next.
But right here and now, across 35,000 fresh square feet of the gallery’s stellar exhibition and viewing areas, there’s a ton more to see, so Kaiser and I get a move on. Everybody who’s anybody making relevant art today—or just a few generations prior—seems to be represented. There’s a gorgeous, mired, stripy ink and acrylic work, Filmstrip-Black Monolith of the Levant by heavy-hitter Julie Mehretu; Tacita Dean’s dreamy, pink, penciled, cherry-blossoming Sakura (Konpira); an unexpected, minimalist, ziggurat wall work, Untitled, from 1966, hand-made of sheet metal by the late land art icon Robert Smithson; and a sea of top-form works by many other worthy makers. Whew!
I take a steadying deep breath, and then I spot other eye-and-mind-catchers like a pair of shiny, steely, amorphous abstract sculptures by English artist Tony Cragg; sketch work and nifty notebook-jotted ideas by concept connoisseur Dan Graham; Annette Messager’s playful-but-purposeful, feminist stuffed-fabric sculpture Malicieuse (Mischievous), paired with her laser print uterine wallpaper installation; and Thomas Struth’s full-color photos of highly wired ATLAS particle and multi-dimension detector stations—harbingers of technological things to come.
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Quick sidebar: Many of the works in the “Your Patience Is Appreciated” have been created in limited editions—from 4K videos like Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s On Breathing, 2024, to large photographic works like Rineke Dijkstra’s The Buzz Club, Liverpool, 6 March 1995. As we look at some of this art, I ask Kaiser about an important strategy Goodman played several decades ago to make some works by noted artists much more accessible than typically higher-priced centerpieces destined to hang on museum walls. Kaiser tells me about Multiples, an initiative Goodman began by selling existing editions of artists’ works in the late ‘60s before starting the gallery. “She was very passionate about it,” he explains. She later worked with artists both on and off-roster to develop new limited editions—and not just easy frameable prints. She ventured into the 3-D media realm, too, but phased Multiples out in the early 1990s. By the time Kaiser became involved with the gallery as a special project curator, he knew it was important to pick it up again. “We did a multiple with Bruce Nauman on iPads that came out in an edition of fifteen in early 2023. With that project, I felt I wanted to go back to it. We most recently did a multiple with Giuseppe Penone in an edition of 17. It’s a sculptural clay piece gripped and imprinted by the artist’s hands—fired and painted. Each one is unique. They’re wonderful. We put them in a show in Paris and you know what,” Kaiser asks and answers, as he snaps his fingers, “they sold out—just like that!”
Before I say goodbye to him, I spy a plasterboard and plywood circle cutout by Pierre Huyghe. While seemingly incidental—just casually leaning against a wall—it’s also a remarkable little piece of history. As I approach the side of the work, I see the time-telling sedimentary strata of paper, board, lumber and pigment. There’s also a wear mark in the middle of its front face that reveals multiple layers of years gone by in paint: white, gray, blue, etc. This piece—and another similar work by the artist leaning against the opposite side of the same wall, one floor below—were cored out of Marian Goodman’s old gallery. Like bookends, they help to frame the works in the inaugural show while bringing in eternally shaped circular remnants of the old and beloved building—and its spirit—into a new era.
When all is said and seen, the uncanny, prescient, idea-based objects for the ages beautifully displayed at Marian Goodman in “Your Patience Is Appreciated” are, in a word, extraordinary. But you won’t gather that with a cursory glance. Instead, patience is your friend here, and if you give your time and attention to the heady, connected work and the sparkling space where it resides—and think about it—it’ll grace you tenfold outside the gallery rooms into your world beyond, where you need it the most.
“Your Patience Is Appreciated” is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery through December 14.
