Raiding, Mining, and Resurrecting: Maurizio Cattelan at The Menil Collection
Maurizio Cattelan, "Untitled," 2003. © Maurizio Cattelan. Photo: George Hixson, Houston. Installation view, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX.
The current Maurizio Cattelan exhibition at The Menil Collection, Houston (February 12– August 15, 2010) marks the U.S. debut of recent large-scale works, site-specific installations, and four new works. Cattelan’s first solo show in this country since 2003 celebrates the artist’s return to sculpture after several years of publishing and curatorial work, including his 2002 co-founding of The Wrong Gallery in Chelsea, New York, his collaborations on Permanent Food (an occasional journal comprised of altered pages torn from other magazines) from 1996-2007, his co-editorship of Charley (a conceptual project and independent series on international contemporary artists) from 2002–present, and his curation of the Caribbean Biennial in 1999 and the Berlin Biennial in 2006. The notion of revisiting to give new life–suggested by Cattelan’s own turning back to his past artistic practice –is provocatively carried through the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Maurizio Cattelan: Is There Life Before Death? on a number of levels.
The exhibition consists of large-scale works first seen in Europe in 2007, along with recent sculptures, including works created in response to Cattelan’s site visits to the Menil that riff on the museum’s renowned Surrealist holdings. Organized by Franklin Sirmans, the Menil’s former Curator of Modern and Contemporary art, the exhibition juxtaposes a range of objects–mostly from the 1960s and 70s–that Cattelan, in collaboration with Sirmans, selected from the Menil’s large permanent collection. They are suggestively installed to create conversations with the artist’s own new and recent works. This installation strategy trips up the typical arrangement of a solo artist show—an arrangement that, more often than not, isolates the featured artist’s work from examples of artistic predecessors and contemporaries in order to foreground the sense of an internal, exclusively personal, development.
Rather than confining Cattelan’s artworks to a couple of galleries, the exhibition has examples of the artist’s works sprinkled throughout, even on the Menil’s main building. Some are buried in the intimate recesses of Antiquities and Surrealist galleries, others are more visibly displayed, including Cattelan’s Untitled (2003), depicting a “drummer boy,” which has been relocated from its usual position atop The Rachofsky House in Dallas to perch coyly upon the roof of the Menil’s Renzo Piano building.
Weekly Roundup
Art21 artist Barry McGee stands in front of one of his geometric creations. Courtesy Wallpaper.com.
From the west to the east coast and over to Taiwan, Art21 artists are involved in a number of new and large-scale exhibitions:
- Works by Barry McGee (Season 1) and Philip Frost are the focus of mindthegap, the inaugural exhibition of Prism, a three story gallery located on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Curated by P.M. Tenore, founder of RVCA clothing company and the associated publication ANP Quarterly, the display includes embellished baseball bat and surf board sculptures, paintings, film and interactive installations. Flip through images of the show at Wallpaper.com.
- Undercover: Performing and Transforming Black Female Identities is currently on view at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta. The all-star artist roster includes Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Cindy Sherman (Season 5), Renée Cox, Lyle Ashton Harris, Lauren Kelley, Mequitta Ahuja, Kalup Linzy, Wangechi Mutu, Lorraine O’Grady, Gordon Parks, Lorna Simpson, Renée Stout, and Mickalene Thomas. Undercover runs through December 5; a closing reception will take place December 10. Read Rebecca Cochran’s review of the exhibition for Artforum.com.
- Days and Giorni, two sound installations by Season 1 artist Bruce Nauman, are on view at The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) through April 4, 2010. These works made their international debut in Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens, the exhibition organized by PMA in conjunction with the Universitá Iuav di Venezia and the Universitá Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, to represent the United States in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Days and Giorni at PMA marks the first time in seven years that Nauman is showing new major installations in the United States. Film and video works made by the artist in the late 1960s — Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance); Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk); and Wall-Floor Positions — are also on view.
- In more Philly news, the PMA and the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) will present Fallen Blossoms, a multi-site exhibition of works by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3). A series of four gunpowder drawings and a sculptural installation will be on view inside the PMA in a presentation titled Light Passage. Two newly commissioned works, Time Flies Like a Weaving Shuttle and Time Scroll, will be on display at FWM. One of Cai’s signature “explosion events” has been commissioned for the exhibition and will take place at both sites on opening day, December 11.
- Hanging Out in the Museum is Cai’s second collaboration with the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan. The retrospective exhibition features new gunpowder drawings, and the site specific installation Cultural Melting Bath (1997), which invites audiences to join a medicinal bath located in the museum’s outdoor courtyard. Hanging Out in the Museum remains on view through February 1, 2010.
- Cleveland Cavaliers center Shaquille O’Neal has added curatorial work to his resume. His forthcoming exhibition Size DOES Matter will explore the idea of scale in contemporary art through works by Tim Hawkinson, Paul Pfeiffer (both Season 2), Fred Wilson (Season 3), Jeff Koons, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (both Season 5), among others. Hosted by the Flag Art Foundation in New York, the exhibition is scheduled to open February 19, 2010. In Lindsay Pollock’s report for Bloomberg News, O’Neal says, “As a curator, I have a responsibility to the artists, who are my ‘teammates.’ We all have to make each other look good — no different than what I do on the court.’’
- The new home of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) — designed by Season 2 artist Maya Lin — opened to the public in September. The 14,000 square-foot space incorporates environmentally sustainable design solutions, and features a sky-lit courtyard that “harkens back to the memory of a traditional Chinese courtyard house.” Lin says, “MOCA’s new space focuses attention on individuals and families of Chinese heritage who have made their homes throughout the country, and who are very much a part of the fabric of this nation. The space was designed to show the dynamic presentation of the Chinese American story, as an integral part of the greater, and continually evolving, American story.” Read more about MOCA’s new building here.
- Season 1 artist Richard Serra is included in the group exhibition 1969 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. Serra’s work was highlighted (along with Nauman’s) in Peter Schjeldahl’s review for The New Yorker. Schjeldahl states, “The year’s most original artists were the post-minimalists Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra…Nauman and Serra addressed a culture in which “artist” was becoming a job description, at once secure and drained of meaning. Having nothing to do, but having to do something, they made the situation clear and just a little bit dramatic.” Read the entire review here.
Weekly Roundup
Josiah McElheny, "Bruno Taut on Mies van der Rohe (1922), i," 2009. Drawing on silver gelatin photograph using color retouching pencil, 23 1/2 x 17 1/2 in., Edition variant 1 of 4 with 1 artist's proof. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery.
- New works by Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny are on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery through Oct. 17. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glassclad skyscraper. McElheny’s sculpture is an enlarged version of this original maquette that recasts Mies’s design in the spirit of rival architect Bruno Taut. Also included in the exhibition are a series of photo-based drawings inspired by a photograph Mies took of his skyscraper model in 1922. In each, the black-and-white photograph is highlighted, or defaced with photo-retouching pencil, thereby inserting Taut’s colorful ideas into Mies’s picture of purity and transparency.
- Works by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle are on view in the exhibition Pollution is Ecology also at Andrea Rosen Gallery through October 17. Visit Contemporary Art Daily to browse through images of Tuttle’s concurrent exhibition, L’nger than Life, at Modern Art, London.
- Season 3 artist Fred Wilson is recipient of the 2009 Cheek Medal from the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary. The Cheek Medal was created to recognize individuals who have impacted the fields of visual, performing and museum arts. A dinner and ceremony will be held at the Lake Matoaka Amphitheater on Sept. 18.
- Opening October 7 at the Museum of Arts & Design, Slash: Paper Under the Knife will explore the creative possibilities of paper through works by Kara Walker (Season 2), Oliver Herring (Season 3), Olafur Eliasson, Pietro Ruffo, Ishmael Randall, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, and others.
- Kara Walker (Season 2) will be the next artist in the Proposition seminar series at the New Museum. Inspired by the scientific method of hypothesis, research, and synthesis, these two-day events explore a topic of current investigation in the invited speaker’s own artistic or intellectual practice. On Sept 25 and 26 Walker will explore the object of painting and the concept of liberty.
- Mel Chin (Season 1) will lecture at Arizona State University (ASU) on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 7:30pm. The event is organized in conjunction with the Defining Sustainability season of exhibitions and projects at the ASU Art Museum.
- Dance with Camera is now on view at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Both an exhibition and screening program, Dance with Camera explores the crossover between artists, and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features works in film, video, and photography by artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Oliver Herring (both Season 3), Charles Atlas, Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, Bruce Conner, Tacita Dean, Luis Jacob, Joachim Koester, Elad Lassry, Kelly Nipper, robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner, Uri Tzaig, Flora Wiegmann, and Christopher Williams. On view through March 21, 2010.
Weekly Round Up
John Grande, "My Cindy, Your Cindy" (installation view). Courtesy Sara Nightingale Gallery.
- On view through October 4th at the Katonah Museum is Dress Codes: Clothing As Metaphor. 36 artists tackle wide-ranging issues from feminism to globalism using clothing as the medium. The list includes Art21’s Louise Bourgeois, Oliver Herring, and Do-Ho Suh.
- Closing this week at the Berkeley Art Museum is Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye, curated by Lawrence Rinder. The museum’s director has selected a number of works that survey the evolution of the institution’s holdings, from Albert Bierstadt, to Hans Hofmann, to Barry McGee (Season 1). Through August 30.
- Extended Family is currently on extended view at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition looks at the loose establishment that has come to define “family values” and the art world, which reaches beyond geographical and blood lines. Extended Family is culled from the museum’s permanent collection and highlights a host of artists, including Ghada Amer, Nick Cave, Vera Lutter, Louise Bourgeois(Season 2), and Fred Wilson (Season 3).
- In its 40th year, the venerable Rencontres d’Arles photo festival is up for a few more weeks until September 13th. Known for championing the art form that is photography, this year’s edition features a special exhibition curated by Nan Goldin, as well as this solo exhibition by Roni Horn (Season 3).
- Have you ever wondered how the art world would shake up if Cindy Sherman (Season 5) were a male painter, making the same images except on large scale canvases using paint? Enter John Grande, whose solo show posits this exact scenario. My Cindy, Your Cindy is up through September 3 at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Shelter Island.
Fred Wilson at 92nd Street Y
Photo: Trong G. Nguyen
The 92nd Street Y continues its excellent conversations program this Thursday night with Art and Insight: Fred Wilson. The Season 3 artist is best known for works that blur the boundaries between the artist and curator, gaining acclaim in the 1990s for his museum installations that rearranged displays of that institution’s existing collections to highlight the history of African Americans in colonial America. Wilson was the U.S. representative at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
Donna De Salvo, Associate Director for Programs and Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will moderate the discussion. For further information, click here.
Top Billing at the Guggenheim
I’ve been reading a few reviews of the Guggenheim’s anyspacewhatsoever exhibition recently, including Merrily Kerr’s insightful take a few days ago. Coupled with the launch of Flash Points and its first-column focus on “controversial art,” I wanted to extend the conversation and chime in.
Last week I took in the show and was particularly excited to see Philippe Parreno’s light whirling, blank Marquee installed outside the museum entrance. Expectations met, as it is easily the best work in the show. With heavenly fluorescent lights and ethereal glowing chains, the sculpture is a minimal and decadent take on Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. If Marquee is Dante’s inverted heaven at the museum’s entrance, then the rest of the works inside the Guggenheim represent circles of the Inferno, where the usual suspects have apparently been consigned to several levels.
From the banality of Douglas Gordon and Liam Gillick’s signage systems to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s glorified rainstick, the exhibition inside could have used a dosage of less conscientious humor and more serious introspection. Moving past the third ramp-circle of hell, Angela Bulloch’s infinite color audio piece lacked in scale what Jorge Pardo’s abused (did they both shop at U-line for this show?). At the bottom of the ramp—now we are in Purgatory, I suppose— even the usually dependable Maurizio Cattelan’s drowned Pinocchio appeared a bit flat, buoyed (literally) by the name on the marquee alone.
A fifty-foot King Kong (or Zwang Huan’s sitting Giant) standing asleep in the Guggenheim rotunda chained to the permanent collection is what I would have preferred to see. Well, there’s always Netflix.
Relational Aesthetics, that favorite branch of contemporary art, doesn’t make a bold case for itself here in theanyspacewhatever. Slated as a show of artists who contend with the exhibition itself as work of art, the majority of these works and artists, who have all collaborated with each other inonewayoranother (couldn’t help it) in the past, seems misplaced contextually.
Unless one has uncanny aim, the handle of Relational Aesthetics can be very problematic. By definition, Relational Art is concerned with the social context of the artwork, whereby social activity and collective experience replace the singular viewer/object dynamic. Thus the work itself can be the act of creating a social environment in which people come together as opposed to forming imaginary and utopian realities.
The fallacy in this is the fact that, as Baudelaire observed, “even in the crowd, especially in the crowd, we are alone.” The viewer/object relationship then is never truly abolished. Rather, the audience outside one’s self becomes part of the object, temporarily or not, within an exhibition or not. To isolate the social experience and call it art, yet confine that activity inside a museum space, defeats the purpose of Relational Art’s desire to take the object’s social context outside of an independent and private space. As a result, any redeeming quality of newness of experience and subjective risk-taking attributed to the work are immediately thwarted. Relational Art, while it may bemuse the viewer, doesn’t appear capable of maintaining its conceptual integrity inside the architectural cloister that is the museum.
Much as the recent Whitney Biennial erred with its selections of artists who underwhelmed the already overwhelming Armory space, the heavily text-based works in theanyspacewhatever miss the point of the museum as having a unique context. (It couldn’t have hurt to include the work of Fred Wilson (Season 3), whose omission is a bit perplexing in my opinion, to amp up and rework the museum’s wall labels for this one.)
For example, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s and Carsten Höller’s works suffer from the art world’s greatest unseen conceptual virus, “killer context.” While these gift economy-type works are intended to possess an underlining of edge and controversy, they suffer the fate of their own enclosure within what is essentially a protective white cube space. That is to say, they are the right works in the wrong place.
Museum-goers do not need to be given Tiravanija’s free cappuccinos or bean-bag chairs for comfort (though of course I partook), nor do they need to be spending one night alone at the museum as part of Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room. Both of these works could have been, pardon the pun, better served had they been located outside the Guggenheim in the real world.
Homeless people need hot coffee and a place to rest more so than the well-off who can afford to even attend a museum show, let alone fork out $700/night to be alone inside one. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper and easier to employ them as a security officer for the night, alone but pretending the crowd is all around?
Unfortunately for these art world insiders, what other critics have called “mundane” and “devoid of ideas,” does indeed fit the bill outside.
A new reason to go to M.I.T.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has an amazing program where students can borrow a framed work by major artists from their List Visual Arts Center’s collection for an entire academic year. The Student Loan Art Program was founded in 1996 and boasts of over 400 pieces with which your dormroom can be beautified. There are plenty of big names on the list including Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Sol LeWitt, and Ed Ruscha to name a few, as well as many Art:21 artists like Allora & Calzadilla, Ida Applebroog, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Susan Rothenberg, Collier Schorr, Laurie Simmons, Nancy Spero, Richard Tuttle, and Fred Wilson. At the top of my own M.I.T. wishlist would be Bernd & Hilla Becher’s Cooling Tower. Learn more about the Student Loan Art Program here.
Above, from the M.I.T. Student Loan Art Program’s collection: Alex Katz’s Portrait of a Poet : Kenneth Koch, 1970
Expanding the Definition(s): Some Days Are Easier Than Others
Many thanks to those who have helped get the Teaching with Contemporary Art column off to a smooth start! Recently, a few friends and colleagues have mentioned (even e-mailed) about the fact that, well, while Season 4 of Art:21 has won quite a few prestigious awards, the selection of artists chosen can be difficult to transition into the classroom. As educators, how do we get our collective heads around teaching with Season 4 artists such as Mark Dion, Alfredo Jaar, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Laurie Simmons? These aren’t artists that lend themselves easily to K-12 or university-level curriculum, particularly if the course is production-based. How can artists like these, as well as artists such as Ann Hamilton (Season 1), Martin Puryear (Season 2), and Fred Wilson (Season 3) help us work with students in our classrooms?
First… they can help us redefine and expand on what art is and what it’s becoming in the 21st century. There aren’t too many neat little projects that fit perfectly with what some of these artists do, but the segments and related materials on art21.org help us work with students to consider new possibilities for subject matter and ways of working with traditional and non-traditional media. These segments can inspire writing in the classroom just as well as Elizabeth Murray may inspire students to paint in new ways. They can be the catalyst for spirited debate much like Trenton Doyle Hancock can act as a starting point for understanding cartooning or how artists develop/illustrate alter-egos. Mark Dion can teach about the relationship between art and ecology, as well as blurring the line between artist and curator. Alfredo Jaar can teach about public art and how contemporary art often needs a particular setting much like a great work of fiction. Ursula von Rydingsvard teaches how an artist today can create work that relates to landscapes, the human body and psychological states… sometimes simultaneously. And Laurie Simmons can teach that there is a difference between photographers as artists and artists that use photography as a tool.
While it’s hard to incorporate the ever-increasing number of artists that can meaningfully inspire and help guide students, it’s hard to NOT include artists that will help them open up definitions and engage in dialogue about what art is and what constitutes an artist to begin with. Bringing these artists into discussions and/or socratic seminars in the art classroom can have surprising and wonderful benefits. Is it easy? Never. Some days are easier than others. But it’s always worth it. I can tell you stories…..
Image: Untitled Hot Glue Drawing by Karyl DelMundo
