First Impression: Skin Fruit (Part 1)

Robert Cuoghi, "Pazuzu," 2008. Epoxy, solvent varnish, fiberglass, polystyrene, and steel. Installation view, New Museum, New York, NY. (Foreground: Urs Fischer, "Cioran Handrail," 2006. Epoxy resin, pigment and enamel) Photo: Kevin McGarry.

This morning I previewed the hotly anticipated exhibition at the New Museum of Greek collector Dakis Joannou’s art holdings, impishly titled Skin Fruit and curated by Jeff Koons. I’ve been looking forward to this show largely due to the controversy surrounding it and the intrigue presented by the curator/collector pairing. However, I’m happy to report that my journey up and down the museum’s galleries wowed me as a genuine art experience, independently of any provocations external to the art itself.

Beginning on the fourth floor via elevator, I was greeted to my right by a larger-than-life, mannequin-ish sculpture of a glamorously conservative blonde businesswoman by Charles Ray (Fall ’91, 1992). To my left, Liza Lou’s Super Sister (1999), nearly as tall, is coated in rhinestones and sports skin color, an afro, tight little clothes, and a gun. The two stand as polar stereotypes of empowered contemporary/American women. This slash between words points to a wide open but unresolved, era-defining ambiguity: which empire does the curator (does anybody) have in mind? Is it America, the international contemporary art world, or the latter as a product of the former? That is, visual culture as an iteration of the global corporate culture that has, if from one seminal place, radiated from the United States.

The other fully rendered figure in the room—elsewhere in the museum there are plenty more; the show is predicated on the human form in contemporary art—is Robert Cuoghi’s Pazuzu (2008), a mammoth casting of the Assyrian and Babylonian king of the demons best known for possessing Linda Blair in The Exorcist. This is according to the wall text, which also mentions that Pazuzu is a symbol both of hope and of powerful civilizations in final decline: fitting. I found its presence oddly captivating, and as the sculpture was blown up in size from a pendant forty times smaller, its preserved plainness of detail is frightening on a massive scale. Beneath it, the rest of the room is shaded by an abject, eschatological distress.

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Weekly Roundup

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.

Weekly Roundup

Barbara Kruger, "Untitled (It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it)", 1990. Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 143 x 103 in. Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about two anniversary exhibitions, 6,000 shapes upstate, masterworks in the Midwest, some road trip souvenirs, a whole lotta prints, and a sale you won’t want to miss:

• The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles celebrates their thirty year anniversary with Collection: MoCA’s First Thirty Years. The two-part exhibition is the largest-ever installation of MoCA’s permanent collection. Part one is on view at MoCA Grand Avenue and features works made between 1939 and 1979, beginning with Piet Mondrian’s Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III (1939). The second part, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, features works made since the museum’s founding in 1979. Included in Collection are Art21 artists Barbara Kruger, Mike Kelley (both Season 1), Vija Celmins, Gabriel Orozco, Kara Walker, Raymond Pettibon (all Season 2), Hiroshi Sugimoto, Roni Horn, Richard Tuttle (all Season 3), Lari Pittman (Season 4), Jeff Koons, and John Baldessari (both Season 5). The exhibition, which opened in November, is ongoing.

• Artinfo.com reports that Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) has won the University of Vienna’s Oscar Kokoschka Prize for 2010. The Kokoschka Prize is awarded to one contemporary artist every two years. Pettibon will receive a check for $28,000 in a ceremony at the university on March 1.

• Prints by Pepón Osario (Season 1), Kiki Smith (Season 2), and Mark Bradford (Season 4) are included in The Graphic Unconscious, the core exhibition of Philagrafika 2010, a new international festival in Philadelphia that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. The exhibit features 35 artists from 18 countries and is spread across five venues: Moore College of Art & Design; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Print Center; and Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. In Osorio’s installation, according to Philly.com, “he ponders his mother’s mortality and anticipates longing for her in a 12-foot-square bed of mostly black confetti on which he prints a blue X-ray of her skull with an ink-jet printer.” Philagrafika 2010 continues through April 11.

• Speaking of prints: If you attended Art21’s Culture Wars event last week, you’re already familiar with 20×200, the limited-edition print and photograph company that donated prizes for the winning team. (Congrats, @GlennLsApt!) On February 3 at 2pm (EST) 20×200 will release two works from Season 1 artist William Wegman. (We hear there’s one photograph and one painting.) 20×200’s mailing list subscribers will have the chance to purchase prints an hour or two before they are released on the homepage. Given their “ridiculously affordable” prices, we advise you to get on the list now!

• On February 3, Allan McCollum (Season 5) will speak at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. The event kicks off his project Shapes for Hamilton for which McCollum — working in collaboration with local residents, staff, faculty and students of Colgate — will create a unique shape for each inhabitant of the town. At the conclusion of the project, which will include an exhibition of the complete set of nearly 6,000 shapes, each resident will be invited to collect their own shape signed by the artist. The Shapes Project: Shapes for Hamilton will open March 8 in Colgate’s Clifford Gallery.

• On February 5 Max Protetch Gallery in New York will open Happiness is a State of Inertia, an exhibition of new work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4). Manglano-Ovalle will debut a major new sculpture, inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe, that functions as a working fish tank. The tank will be filled with Blind Mexican Cave Fish who make their way via smell and touch. Via the press release, “The object itself is profoundly transparent, but because it has been installed below eye level, and its inhabitants are blind fish, it inverts the notion of transparency, calling into question what true visibility looks like. In order to look inside the tank, a viewer would have to prostrate himself, offering a gesture of submission in exchange for verification of the seemingly transparent scene inside.” Happiness will be on view through March 27.

• Also opening February 5 is The Chemistry of Color: Contemporary African-American Artists at Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. This 60-year anniversary show chronicles “the accomplishments and struggles of African-American artists in the latter half of the 20th century.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in the artist roster along with Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Moe Brooker, James Brantley, Charles Searles, Sam Gilliam, and others.

• Works by Weems and Kara Walker (Season 2) are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in From Then to Now: Masterworks of Contemporary African American Art. This multigenerational show brings together, for the first time, holdings of contemporary African American art from collections in the region: Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Akron Art Museum, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Progressive Corporation, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Works by Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Lenardo Drew, Alison Saar, Willie Cole, David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, René Green, and Kehinde Wiley will also be on view. From Then to Now continues through May 9.

• The Bartram Project by Mark Dion (Season 4), which is on view through February 6 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine article titled “Art of the Road Trip.” Read it here.

Weekly Roundup

Paul Pfeiffer, "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (28)", 2007. Fujiflex digital. Chromogenic print 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Project, New York.

Sports, the human body and Gap t-shirts come together in this MLK day weekly roundup:

• Sports and masculinity are central themes of Hard Targets, an exhibition at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. Via the press release, “Hard Targets seeks to revise and complicate our time-honored stereotypes of male athletes and athleticism (as aggressive, heterosexual, hyper-competitive, and remote) by presenting alternative, possibly more democratic, interpretations of subjects frequently revealed to us only in authorized and frankly commercial images.” Works by Art21 artists Paul Pfeiffer, Matthew Barney, Collier Schorr (all Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4), and  Jeff Koons (Season 5), are included in the show. Originally organized by Independent Curators International, another version of Hard Targets was presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008/2009. The Wexner Center exhibition runs January 30 – April 11.

• Always After (The Glass House), a film by Season 4 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, will begin showing at the Art Institute of Chicago on January 21. The film (created between 2000 and 2006) is the fifth installment in a series of works meditating on the career of Mies van der Roe. The film was shot on location at van der Rohe’s old hangout, the IIT campus in Chicago and, according to the Art Institute, “obliquely documents the 2005 ceremonial dedication of the building’s renovation during which [van der Roe's] own grandson broke the windows with a sledgehammer.” Always After is currently being screened at Mass MoCA in conjunction with Manglano-Ovalle’s installation Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With. The film will show at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 31.

• In October 2009, Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery opened the exhibition Vortexhibition Polyphonica, kicking off a year-long initiative to explore and display their collection in new ways. Henry curators selected objects to act as conceptual “hubs” around which larger themes were established and other objects revolved. This month, the exhibition was reshuffled by the Henry’s Chief Curator Elizabeth Brown. Works by Art21 artists Ann Hamilton, James Turrell, Richard Serra (all Season 1), Collier Schorr (Season 2), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), John Baldessari, and Cindy Sherman (both Season 5) are on view. According to the Seattle Times, this is the first Henry show to draw on the museum’s entire collection since their exhibition 150 Works of Art in 2005. Vortexhibition Polyphonica continues through March 2011.

• Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in The Human Touch: Selections from the RBC Wealth Management Art Collection at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. The title refers to both the ability of the figure to reflect the human condition and to the facility of artists to depict it. The exhibition explores images of the human figure and what they reveal or conceal about a person’s experiences, identity, or character. Works by Frank Big Bear, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, José Bedia, Lesley Dill, Jim Dine, Till Freiwald, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith are also on view. The Human Touch continues through April 18.

• Season 4 artist Lari Pittman is one of 65 artists selected to participate in The 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts. This multimedia “biennial invitational” features artists from across the United States such as Ghada Amer, Petah Coyne, Dana Schutz, Robert Yasuda, Chris Martin, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Nina Yankowitz, Barkley L. Hendricks, Cildo Meireles, Anna Lambrini Moisiadis,  Elise Engler, and Janet Ballweg. The 185th Annual runs February 17 – June 8.

• The Gap has partnered with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on a new set of artist t-shirts. The project is part of the museum’s 75th anniversary celebration. Season 1 artists Kerry James Marshall and Barry McGee have each contributed one of the eight graphic designs. SLAMXHYPE has the scoop.

• William Kentridge (Season 5) is featured in The New Yorker (Note: only subscribers can access the entire article online). According to writer Calvin Tomkins, an exhibition of the artist’s work will open on February 24 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And a Kentridge-directed-and-designed production of The Nose, a rarely performed opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, will première at the Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• Library of Water, a 2007 project by Roni Horn (Season 3), is discussed in the December/January issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

• Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists, a group exhibition at James Cohan Gallery featuring works by Shazia Sikander (Season 1) and Kara Walker (Season 2), is reviewed by ArtKrush.

• Ida Applebroog (Season 3), whose exhibition Monalisa opens tomorrow at Hauser & Wirth in New York, is featured in the New York Times.

Weekly Roundup

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21’s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!

Weekly Roundup

Kara Walker, "A Warm Summer Evening in 1863", 2008. Wool tapestry with hand cut felt silhouette figure, 5' 9" x 8' 2". Edition of 5. ©Kara Walker. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

This week in Art21 artist news we have two tapestry makers, a silk archway, the master of Cremaster, an artist who likes to do laundry, a magical sound installation, environmental issues, creative explosions, and more.

• Opening January 8 at James Cohen Gallery, Demons, Yarns & Tales features hand-woven tapestries created by thirteen contemporary artists: Kara Walker (Season 2), Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), avaf, Peter Blake, Gary Hume, Jaime Gili, Francesca Lowe, Beatriz Milhazes, Paul Noble, Grayson Perry, Fred Tomaselli, Gavin Turk, and Julie Verhoeven. The exhibition was created by the London-based art organization, Banners of Persuasion, who commissioned each artist to design a tapestry, a medium foreign to his or her usual practice. Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 uses an image published in Harpers Magazine during the American Civil War, captioned “The Destruction of the Coloured Orphan Asylum on 5th Avenue.” A black silhouette of a lynched female figure hangs in front of this scene. The exhibition will be on view through February 13.

• Renaissance Unframed, an exhibition at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in New York, consists of twenty-five encaustic drawings on muslin and two companion bronze sculptures by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle. Tuttle’s drawings “explore fabric as a medium to receive color and as a tool to direct its movement” and the bronze works “represent the antithesis of the fabric on the wall.” The fabric pieces are rotated every 2 weeks with only five works being shown at a time. The exhibition is on view through January 9.

• On January 13, Season 2 artist Matthew Barney will speak at the Detroit Institute of Arts and discuss his newest project Khu, a performance and film loosely based on Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. Barney updates Mailer’s plot from an ancient Egyptian narrative to a present day account of reincarnation and rebirth set in an American landscape. Each chapter will be set in a different city and correspond to the seven stages of the soul’s departure from the body according to Egyptian mythology. The first chapter was performed in Los Angeles in 2007. The latest chapter takes place in Detroit. Barney’s lecture begins at 7pm; a (free) pass is required and can be obtained here.

• Through January 17, work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall is on view at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in the exhibition Heartland. The show features site-specific installations and performances as well as drawing, photography, and video by artists and collaboratives working in, and in response to, Detroit, Kansas City, and other cities and rural communities across the region. Also included in the exhibition are artists Carnal Torpor, Compass Group, Cody Critcheloe, Jeremiah Day, Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, Design 99, Scott Hocking, Greely Myatt, Marjetica Potrč, Julika Rudelius, Artur Silva, Deb Sokolow, and Whoop Dee Doo.

• Gate (2005) by Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh is now on view in the Los Angles County Museum of Art’s Korean art galleries. Made of translucent silk, the piece is a full-size rendering of one of the gates to the artist’s childhood home in Seoul. Suh’s father, the artist and scholar Suh Se-Ok, built the house based on the design of traditional Korean architecture of the 1880s.

• Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change (part of the official culture program for the United Nations Climate Change Conference) is a collaboration of the National Gallery of Denmark, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, and Moesgård Museum. The exhibition includes more than 25 artists spread across the four venues. Each space is dedicated to a different theme: Relations, The Implicit, Kakotopia, and Information, respectively. At the Nat’l Gallery of Denmark, A Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear, a 2008 film by duo Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) presents viewers with three scenes: gently flowing images of a lush river landscape, a dilapidated interior in an abandoned house, and footage of a young man who drums rhythmically on the slats of a Venetian blind. The piece, shot in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Delta, draws attention to the remaining wreckage of Hurricane Katrina. A Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear is on view through April 5. (Note: each theme/venue closes on a different day; check the website for more information.)

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin unveiled her new video, Unchopping a Tree, in Copenhagen last week. This is the latest iteration of Lin’s larger and last memorial project, What is Missing? The video addresses deforestation prevention and sustainable reforestation to reduce carbon emissions and protect endangered species and habitats — watch it here.

• In Roberta Smith’s review of Days and Giorni by Bruce Nauman (Season 1) — two sound installations on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — she writes: “Each piece consists of 14 recordings of seven people reciting the days of the week. Their voices are broadcast from 14 wafer-thin white speakers, around 23 inches square, arranged in seven facing pairs, one for each person’s voice. Each speaker is simply clipped to two wires strung tautly from floor to ceiling. It’s like paintings by Robert Ryman hanging on Fred Sandback’s string sculptures, and the effect is magical. Read more here.

• “A countdown began two minutes out. 90 seconds. One minute. 50 seconds. 40. 30. And so on. And then: fireworks! And then: fire! The blossom burned, glowing orange against the museum and the now dusky sky, and dark smoke billowed into the air. The crowd oohed and aahed.” Click here to read more about the recent “explosion events” by Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang (as reported by Kris Wilton of Artinfo.com).

• Congratulations to Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2), and Judy Pfaff (Season 4) who have been granted the United States Artists annual award for $50k.

• Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has shared her morning routine, favorite household chore, travel rituals, and more with Times Magazine. Read her witty profile here.

• More on the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2): Man of the World, The New Yorker; Pic of the Day: Gabriel Orozco’s Home Run, Flavorwire; and Gabriel Orozco: The Art of the Readymade, WNYC.

Weekly Roundup

Matthew Ritchie, "Line Shot" Installation (detail), 2009. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery.

• The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host a talk with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie and brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner (of indie rock band The National) on Saturday, October 31 at 6pm. The event is held in conjunction with their collaborative performance The Long Count, which opens at BAM on Wednesday, Oct 28. Ritchie’s work is currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery in the solo exhibition Line Shot.

• Songs of Ascension by Ann Hamilton (Season 1) and Meredith Monk (also currently at BAM) was featured in a New York Times music review last week. Read the article here.

• For Performa 09, Mike Kelley (Season 1) will present three short dance/performance pieces inspired by his film and video installation Day Is Done (2005). These performances bring to life some of the characters featured in the film, all of whom are based on found photographs of extracurricular activities from American high school yearbooks. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns. Kelley’s show runs Nov 17 – Nov 19 at Judson Memorial Church. Purchase tickets here.

• Between Being Born and Dying, a site-specific installation by Barbara Kruger (Season 2), is on view at Lever House through November 21. Bloomberg.com describes the installation: “Kruger’s aphorisms are written in massive black-and-white letters all over the Lever House’s atrium, both inside and outside. They are printed on vinyl panels covering the floor, windows, walls and columns. The results are striking but disorienting. The 17-foot-tall letters are so big you can’t take it all in at once–or at all.”

• Season 2 artist Paul Pfeiffer has created a special project for the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The project opens with Vertical Corridor, in which Pfeiffer encourages the viewer to peer through a tiny peephole in the wall of the gallery. The peephole is the only access to an immense space, and questions “the validity of the spectacle … reminding the viewer that every such spectacle must bow to the limits of one’s perspective.” This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Russia.

• Kara Walker (Season 2) will introduce a screening of the 1926 film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York on November 11. Directed by the German animator and film director Lotte Reiniger, it is the earliest feature-length animation still believed to exist, and considered one of the greatest animated films of all time. The program — part of MoMA’s To Save and Project festival — begins at 8pm.

• Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock will speak at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai on Tuesday, October 27 at 5pm. Two print portfolios Fix (2007) and The Ossifies Theosophied (2005) will be on display in conjunction with the event. Hancock is featured in the exhibition Young Americans at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai through November 15.

• Mirror, Mirror: Contemporary Portraits and the Fugitive Self, a new exhibition at the Brigham Young Museum of Art in Utah, features works by 32 artists, including Oliver Herring (Season 3), Rebecca Campbell, Hasan Elahi, Harrell Fletcher, Douglas Gordon, Nikki Lee, and Takashi Murakami. The exhibition explores the influence of rituals, facades, social media, and the family on the formation of individual identity. On view through May 2010.

• Art critic Tyler Green talks to MoMA curator Connie Butler (organizer of the feminist exhibition, Wack!) about Season 4 artist Nancy Spero, who passed away last week. Read the interview on Green’s blog Modern Art Notes.

• Work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) is included in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Learning Modern: Bauhaus Legacy in Downtown Chicago. Building on the legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Learning Modern features projects by artists and architects who continue a legacy of interdisciplinary innovation for better living, while exploring the central role of experiential education in the modern vision. Continues through January 9, 2010.

• Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall, the fifth exhibition of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, is on view through November 20. The earliest known documentation of a fatal car crash provides a pictorial metaphor for Shonibare’s new body of photographic and sculptural work. Photographed in 1898, the image records death as a spectacle for the first time; a crowd surrounds the carcass of a motor vehicle. Shonibare has created a similar scene in the gallery, a sculptural dramatization of the death of Arthur Miller’s infamous protagonist, salesman Willy Loman. The installation suggests a parallel between Miller’s 20th century examination of greed and the human condition, and the present day.

• Now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Focus on Artists celebrates the museum’s 75th anniversary, and its close ties with modern and contemporary masters as demonstrated by works from their collection. SFMOMA holds a number of sculptures by Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo; pieces from her Unland (1995–98) and Untitled “Cabinet” series (1989-present) will be on view. Continues through May 23, 2010.

• On the occasion of Grey Area, a new work by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, the current issue of ArtMag (the online art magazine of Deutsche Bank) focuses on artists who investigate urbanism and cultural identity. Joan Young, curator at the Guggenheim Museum, has contributed an essay about Mehretu’s recent work. Read it here.

Weekly Roundup

John Baldessari, ”How We Do Art Now”, 1973. Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY.

• Vital Signals: Japanese and American Video Art from the 1960s and 70s is a three-part screening program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Presented in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix, the series focuses on artists experimenting with video in both the United States and Japan. On October 20, early videos by Art21 artists William Wegman (Season 1), and John Baldessari (Season 5), will be screened along with works by Joan Jonas, Mako Idemitsu, Norio Imai, and Hakudo Kobayashi.

• On October 8, Tim Gunn of Project Runway (a former student of Anne Truitt) will moderate a panel discussion at the Hirshhorn Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Season 2 artist Martin Puryear, filmmaker Jem Cohen, and photographer John Gossage will also be on hand to discuss Truitt’s installations. The event begins at 7 p.m.

• Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth is launching Ecstatic Peace Library (EPL), a boutique publisher of art books. A catalog listing the publisher’s first releases was available at the New York Art Book Fair this past weekend. If you missed the event, the information will be available on the EPL website beginning January 1. Moore plans to release books in tandem with recordings from artist-authors, including Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). Read more on the LA Times blog.

• A New Literary History of America, an anthology edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, comprises 219 essays that, together, give a picture of U.S. history and culture. The book begins in the year 1507 (when “America” appeared on a map), and concludes with Obama’s election last year. This final entry features a six-page illustration by Kara Walker (Season 2).

• Wind Shadow, a new piece from Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-Min and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, is at the Barbican Theatre through October 10. Lin has collaborated with Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang on the set, which the Barbican describes as “projections of Cai’s gunpowder drawings that merge into silhouettes and form a moving art installation within which the dancers engage.” See a clip of the performance here.

• On Thursday, November 19, 2009, Season 2 artist Kiki Smith will be honored by the Brooklyn Museum at their seventh annual Women in the Arts luncheon. An exhibition of Smith’s work will open in the Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on February 5, 2010.

Weekly Roundup

Mark Bradford, "Red Painting", 2009. Mixed media collage on canvas, 101.75 x 143.5 in. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

• Season 4 artist Mark Bradford has been awarded the 2009 MacArthur “Genius” Award. The MacArthur Fellows Program, as it is also known, awards unrestricted fellowships to individuals who have shown “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” The Foundation recently released a YouTube video of Bradford. Watch it here.

• The Japan Art Association has announced the winners of the twenty-first Praemium Imperiale, an international arts prize that celebrates the human spirit as expressed by the world’s artists. This year’s recipients include Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), Richard Long, and Zaha Hadid.

• Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (In Stage Setting) is the first ever tableau vivant created by Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The installation will be unveiled at Sprüth Magers London on October 12, the day before Baldessari’s retrospective opens at Tate Modern. Central to this piece is an ear-shaped sofa, on which a model sits, flanked on either side by a pair of nose-shaped wall sconces. Inspired by Art Deco aesthetics, the sofa is framed by a large decorative semi-circular arch. The gallery’s storefront window will be shrouded by a sheet of sheer stretched silk. The exhibition was developed by Baldessari in collaboration with production designer Naomi Shohan, whose credits include work on American Beauty; I Am Legend; and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

• Andrea Rosen Gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of work by Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie opens October 23. Works include Line Shot, a one hour animated feature film; Haruspex, a series of collaborative drawings; and The Dawn Line, a modular structure that is part of a larger architectural, film and musical collaboration. The exhibition is held in conjunction with The Long Count, part of the Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.

• A new single-channel film by Catherine Sullivan (Season 4) is on view at Metro Pictures.  LULU – Or: To What Ends Does the Bourgeoisie Need Despair is based on the 1978 affair between silent film star Louise Brooks and British theater critic Kenneth Tynan who was also the creator of the musical review Oh! Calcutta! Runs through October 17.

• Illusion of Childhood, an assemblage of bicycles, toys and other objects by Season 3 artist Cai Guo–Qiang is included in the exhibition Bikes Rides at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Organized with help from bicycle enthusiast David Byrne, the show features approximately thirty works from around the world, from functional cycles to bicycle-inspired sculpture and video. On view through January 2010.

• Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will curate the Dakis Joannou Collection exhibition at the New Museum that is scheduled to open late February 2010. This will be the first time Dakis Joannou, a New Museum Trustee based in Athens, shows his collection in the U.S. The collection contains major holdings of works by Koons, Kara Walker, Kiki Smith (both Season 2), Pawel Althamer, Maurizio Cattelan, Nathalie Djurberg, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober, Chris Ofili, and Charles Ray among others. Read more about the exhibition 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.