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A cheeky bit of chaos has descended on the Hamptons this summer, courtesy of the artist Liliana Porter. Her new installation, called The Task, takes up the ground floor of the Dia Art Foundation’s space in Bridgehampton. In her theatrical arrangement of miniature figurines amid detritus, tchotchkes, and other found objects, Porter creates one surreal scenario after another. There is no unifying size, context, or era among the curio. Taking the whole thing in feels like watching a hundred tiny comedic plays all at once.
“It starts with a woman sweeping all these things,” Porter, 82, tells me as we sit in her backyard in Rhinebeck, New York, ahead of the Dia opening. “And then as you get closer, there are these sub-narratives. Somebody’s painting. The scales are not consistent. That’s one of the things I’m interested in: things that don’t belong together.”
Other incongruous scenes of The Task include a miniature gardener watering the painted flowers on a porcelain plate; a face-off between two figurines of men, one 10 times the size of the other; and a toy soldier firing his weapon into a mirror. These kinds of absurd chores are a theme in Porter’s ongoing Forced Labor series. “It seems impossible to fulfill, but at the same time, the person, they look relaxed. They have faith that it will get done. They are thinking, This is normal,” says Porter. She pauses. “I think that’s what we all do in our life.”
Born in Buenos Aires in 1941, Porter has been making Pop-tinged conceptual art that deftly balances humor and emotion for the last six decades. She has worked in a wide variety of media, including printmaking, photography, drawing, painting, installation, theater, and video. She has exhibited all over the world, and her pieces are in the collections of museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate. She often collaborates with her partner, the artist Ana Tiscornia; a film of the play they co-directed at The Kitchen in 2018, called THEM, is screening at Dia Bridgehampton. (Several other video works by Porter are playing at Dia Chelsea until July 20, 2024.)
The Task, on view in Bridgehampton through May 2025, comes as Dia celebrates its 50th anniversary. In a nod to some of the icons of the Dia roster, Porter includes references to Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s 1970 piece of land art in Utah, and to Dan Flavin, whose work is permanently installed in the second-floor galleries of Dia Bridgehampton. The petite 1901 building has past lives as a firehouse and a Baptist church, and in 1983 reopened as the Dan Flavin Art Institute; the site’s name changed to Dia Bridgehampton in 2020.
Humberto Moro, who curated the Dia show and has worked closely with Porter for a decade, thought to incorporate historical works of Porter’s as well, nodding to the artist’s ongoing interest in collapsed time. Three photographs of different geometric shapes from 1973 are mounted along one wall. As a contemporary intervention, Porter drew the outline of a plinth atop each photo, extending the lines toward the ground. “The line starts in 1973 and continues in 2024,” Porter says.
Porter found her way to art at a young age. Her parents were writers; following a creative path seemed inevitable. “It would have been more strange to not be an artist,” she says. She went to art school in Argentina and in Mexico, where the family briefly moved for her father’s job. She was 17 when she had her first art show.
“I had very good teachers,” she says. One in particular encouraged her to go to Europe to see the museums. At a friend’s suggestion, Porter decided to stop by New York for the 1964 World’s Fair on her way overseas. She had “no art expectations” of New York, she says. “But when I went to the Metropolitan, I thought, I’m an idiot if I only stay a week.” She’s been here ever since.
Shortly after her move to New York City, Porter cofounded the influential New York Graphic Workshop along with two other Latin American artists. Porter had already been a printmaker, and it proved the perfect medium for a young, hungry, politically engaged artist in New York: the materials were cheap, and prints could be easily reproduced in editions. “You felt like you could do anything,” she says.
In the late 1960s Porter experimented with mail art. In one piece from 1969, recipients were mailed a piece of blank white paper with the instructions “To be wrinkled and thrown away.” She also mailed postcards with drawn-on shadows of olives or bus tickets, but without the shadow-casting objects themselves. “I imagined the person had to put the olive in front of it,” Porter says, lit up at the memory. “I like the idea of reversing time. First the shadow, and then the object.”
The year 1973, when she took the photos installed at Dia, was an important one for Porter. “That’s when you can see Liliana Porter really emerging,” says Moro. She was in a show at MoMA, curated by Howardena Pindell. She got divorced. She produced new art at a prolific pace, embracing a new way of working that emphasized ideas over the technicality of printmaking. (It’s a principle she brought to her 15 years as a professor at Queens College. “When I was teaching, I always insisted: Start with the idea.”)
She embraced her version of minimalism. “I started to think, What can you say with the least elements, and what is your subject? And suddenly I realized that there was this combination of the neutral space and real space, illusion and reality”—dichotomies Porter continues to play with today.
In Rhinebeck, Porter and Tiscornia share a studio, a two-story converted barn behind their house. On the second floor is Porter’s vast collection of figurines, miniatures, and other memorabilia she collects from flea markets and antiques stores. Porter has used these found trinkets in her assemblages and installations since the 1980s. Many of the objects she feels called to are vintage, often from the 1950s and ’60s. She’s also drawn to cult figures—Elvis, Mickey Mouse, Che Guevara, Jesus—whose images are so saturated in popular culture as to lose all meaning.
Moro recalls one of Porter’s brilliant critiques of an icon gone wrong. It was during the first show of Porter’s work he ever curated, at the SCAD Museum of Art in 2017. (That show, “Other Situations,” traveled to New York City’s El Museo del Barrio the following year.) One of the photographs in the show included an image of a brand of Brie cheese literally called Joan of Arc. “Imagine the layers of things that have had to happen for some historical martyr to become the name of the cheese,” Moro says. He remembers Porter visiting the museum and standing in front of each work, laughing especially hard at this take on the patron saint of France. “She told me, ‘This is what time does to heroes.’”
At this retelling, Porter is back in stitches. This is what Moro loves about her work. “The person that enjoys Liliana Porter’s work the most…is Liliana Porter,” Moro says. She is quick to second the notion. She creates for herself, and sees it as a bonus if others get a kick out of it too.
Porter is in her 80s but maintains a childlike wonder. “Who I was when I was 10, I am still also that,” she tells me. It’s less nostalgia, more about her embrace of nonlinear time—the way we all circle back to ourselves. Porter has worked for many years in different mediums, with an endless number of collaborators. Still: “I think you always have the same idea, but in different formats,” she says. The themes she’s getting at with 2024’s The Task—labor, conflict, absurdity, all through a feminist perspective—have been part of her work all along.
She tells a story from a time long ago, when she was married to her second husband. She was then a stepmother to a nine-year-old boy, Frank. “We were painting,” Porter remembers. “And I said, ‘Fantastic, Frank!’ And then he said, ‘I don’t understand, Lili. You think and think, and then you always end up doing exactly the same thing.’ And it’s true!”
“Liliana Porter: The Task” is on view at Dia Bridgehampton through May 26, 2025.