Bruce Nauman. Partial installation view of "One Hundred Fish Fountain," 2005. Courtesy the artist and Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.

In this week’s roundup, a chance to see Bruce Nauman’s famous fountain, Andrea Zittel is honored, Kerry James Marshall discusses the black aesthetic, and more.

• Bruce Nauman’s One Hundred Fish Fountain will soon be on view at the Gagosian Gallery (NYC). This sculpture, one of the largest artworks the artist has ever made, is a functional fountain comprised of 97 bronze casts of fish that are suspended throughout the air that noisily shoot water out of their mouths into a large basin below, occasionally coming to a complete halt. Robert Ryman‘s A Painting in Four Parts will also be on view at the Gagosian. Both shows will run July 30 – August 24.

• James Turrell’s Trace Elements: Light Into Space will be presented by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, in conjunction with an exhibition, Places Apart. Turrell’s sculpture is said to “exude such visual magnetism that viewers may believe they’ve died and gone to heaven.” The Fine Arts Center’s large second-floor El Pomar Gallery underwent a massive transformation to accommodate this work. The exhibition will be on display through September 30.

• Andrea Zittel has been awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts 2012. The international jury is paying tribute to Zittel as a “leading artist at mid-career, who is both influential and somewhat under-recognized.” She was selected primarily for her experimental and innovative work that has extended the dialogue of contemporary art and ideas.

• William Wegman: Hello Nature is now on view at Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, Maine). The show displays more than 100 works, including photographs, videos, paintings and drawings, from the artist’s personal collection. Also, the show includes examples of works not usually associated with William Wegman – i.e. paintings that insert postcards into a larger landscape, illustrations from nature books and collages. The show runs through October 21.

• Kerry James Marshall‘s recent interview appeared in the July/August issue of Art+Auction magazine. He discusses the black arts movement of the 1970s when African-American artists whose works were politically charged were largely marginalized, leading to what is now referred to as “post-black” art. A video clip of this interview is online.

• Allora & Calzadilla‘s work will be featured by Kaldor Public Art (Australia). Stop, Repair, Prepare will be performed on the hour, every hour, like the chiming of a clock. Commencing at 11am daily with final performances at 8pm Monday–Thursday, and 5pm Friday–Saturday. This performance will be on view in the Cowen Gallery at Melbourne’s State Library of Victoria from November 16–December 6.

• Richard Serra will present the Jeff Koons-designed “balloon bunnies” for the 2012 National Arts Awards that will be given to Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, Pop artist James Rosenquist, actor Brian Stokes Mitchell, musician Josh Groban, and philanthropist Lin Arison. The honorees will receive their awards amidst a special installation of works by Julie Mehretu. This event takes place October 15.

• Last Sunday’s New York Times featured an article about Alison Klayman’s documentary film on Ai Wei Wei. Klayman’s film, titled  Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry, opened in New York last Friday. You can read the online version of the article on the New York Times’s website here.

Maya Lin. "Dew Point 18 (detail)," 2007. Blown glass. © Maya Lin Studio, Inc., courtesy The Pace Gallery. Photo courtesy The Pace Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Maya Lin invites and challenges viewers, Alfredo Jaar makes history, Mike Kelley, Pepón Osorio, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jessica Stockholder explore everyday things, and more.

• Maya Lin recently launched What Is Missing?, as part of the fifth, and last, of her memorial projects, which began with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1982. The web-based, multimedia memorial coincides with her exhibition in the Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art. The show closes May 13.

• Mike Kelley, Pepón Osorio, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jessica Stockholder have work in Everyday Things: Contemporary Works from the Collection at the Rhode Island School of Design. This show features artworks that depict commonplace objects and imagery, utilize everyday elements in their construction, or serve as functional artist-made objects, including benches, chairs, and light fixtures. This work is on view through  February 24, 2013.

• Richard Serra‘s, Kiki Smith‘s and Martin Puryear‘s works are currently on view in Inside|Out at the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY). The exhibition illustrates how art and nature connect at the “New” Speed when the Museum reopened after its renovation and expansion project. Inside|Out looks at sculptures and prints made by these artists, among others. The exhibition closes September 23.

• Jeff Koons lent his entire body of work to designer Lisa Perry’s latest collection of apparel and accessories. Perry’s art-inspired collection featuring Koons’s work is available at her boutique and on her website. Some of the proceeds will go to the Koons Family Institute, an initiative of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

• Alfredo Jaar is featured in Making History at Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany). The exhibition addresses how photographs shape our view of history as well as the images that are withheld from us. Jaar’s photographs investigate the potential effect and ideological power of published photographic icons in his work, as well as in a large-scale installation. This show runs through July 8.

• Barry McGee‘s stickers are featured in Stuck Up: A Selected History of Alternative and Popular Culture told through Stickers at the UGLYgallery and New Bedford Art Museum (Massachusetts). Contemporary artists not necessarily known for stickers, such as Jenny Holzer, are shown side by side with anonymous stickers peeled from the streets of New York City. This exhibition will run concurrently at the New Bedford Art Museum and UGLYgallery through May 4.

Laurie Simmons. "First Bathroom/Woman Standing" from "Interiors," 1978. Courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems and other Art21 woman artists explore postmodern issues such as feminism, politics, identity, and race – in different exhibitions and locations and more.

• Collier Schorr‘s photographs can be seen in Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex, a selection of photo-based works by seven contemporary artists, on view at The Jewish Museum (NYC) in the final gallery of its permanent exhibition, Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey.  The selected artworks engage and play with conventions of art history and forms of popular culture to focus attention on contradictions of identity and desire. The show closes on June 30.

• Work by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Carrie Mae Weems will soon be on view in The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991, a survey of leading women artists that examines the crucial feminist contribution to the development of deconstructivism in the 1970s and ’80s.  The exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will run from January 21 – April 15.

• Carrie Mae Weems‘s work is part of African American Artists from the Flomenhaft Gallery. Several of Weems’s pieces were borrowed by the Tate of Liverpool for an exhibit entitled Color; she also created a series entitled Colored People which emphasized the range of skin color hidden behind the color “black;” and the show includes a four-part suite from her Sea Island Series (1992). The exhibition with be on view until March 3.

• Jessica Stockholder and Catherine Sullivan will be included in the 2012 edition of Next Art Chicago, an exhibition series that will provide a unique visual and educational experience for fair attendees. The fair will create a digital, downloadable catalogue featuring information for every participating gallery. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago will host an exclusive preview event on April 26 and there will be another preview the evening before it opens to the public from April 27 – 29.

• There’s still time to see Doris Salcedo‘s Plegaria Muda, currently on view at Modern Art Centre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon).  Her sculptures and installations relate strongly with episodes of political violence, and will focus on some public tragedies experienced in recent history while calling attention to the personal trauma of the victims.  This show closes January 22.

• Time-lapse video portrays the four-day installation of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, on view at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.

Richard Serra. "7," 2011. Photo courtesy Qatar Museums Authority.

In this week’s roundup, Art21 artists in the Whitney Biennial, Cindy Sherman and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle receive awards, Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Serra are in Doha, Qatar, and more.

• Charles Atlas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Rashid Johnson, and Mike Kelley will all participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2012 Biennial, which will open March 1. The 2012 Biennial is curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator. The curators began working on the research and planning of the show in early December 2010. You can read the full list of 2012 Biennial artists here.

• Cindy Sherman was awarded The Roswitha Haftmann Foundation’s CHF Foundation Prize. The prize, created in 1999 according to the wishes of the late Roswitha Haftmann (1924-1998), is given to “living artists producing major works.” The first winner was named in 2001. It is the most generous such award in Europe. It will be presented to Sherman on May 12 at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

• Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was awarded United States Artists (USA) Guthman Fellow Visual Arts 2011 for his work in sculpture and video. Every year, the national artists’ advocacy organization USA awards 50 USA Fellowship grants to outstanding performing, visual, media and literary artists. In the last six years, USA has invested $15,000,000 in America’s most exceptional artists.

• Richard Serra unveiled a new landmark sculpture titled 7 recently at the launch of the Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art‘s (MIA) new park.  Serra’s project began as a 200-feet long Shanxi Black granite extension to the crescent-shaped esplanade that runs from the MIA along the park. Built on the boulders and rubble left after the museum’s construction, the extension places 7 between the modern Arab-inspired architecture of the museum and the skyline of Doha, Qatar.

• Cai Guo-Qiang recently lit up the Doha, Qatar horizon with an “explosion event” that shot rainbow-colored gunpowder into the desert sky near the Arab Museum of Modern Art. The explosions, which are so intense that they sound like a racecars going around a track at full speed, are controlled by microchips.

•  Matthew Ritchie will soon collaborate with The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner for The Long Count.  Described as “an abstract orchestral-rock song-cycle” about Mayan ‘hero twins’ in the Popol Vuh, the Mesoamerican calendar, and the ‘rituals of baseball,’ the Dessners will perform as Ritchie’s animated film plays throughout the show.  This will be performed for the first time ever in the UK February 2 – 4, 2012 at The Barbican Theatre in London.

• Rashid Johnson is featured in Spotify’s Music Loves Art.  This is the first installment in which Johnson and Luis Gispert meet with legendary rapper Nas to talk about Nas’ seminal record, Illmatic, their creative processes, and the current state of art and music as 2012 approaches.

• Mark your calendars now for Rashid Johnson in conversation with curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm.  This event will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on Saturday, April 14, 2012, 10:30am – 11:30am.

Barry McGee. Mural installation at "Fifty Years of Bay Area Art," 2011. Image courtesy SFMoMA and the artist.

In this week’s roundup Barry McGee, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman make an impact, Laylah Ali draws inspiration from her notes, and more.

• For the Fifty Years of Bay Area Art retrospective, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) is displaying fantastic work by past SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) award winner Barry McGee (among several others), an artist who in recent years has had dramatic impact on contemporary art. A McGee video and mural is on display until April 03, 2012.

• Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman and 54 other artists contributed 140 works for Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977 at the Art Institute of Chicago.  These artists exploit the photographic image in every way possible: in books, slides, canvases, films, and room-size installations. The results liberated all the arts and made it possible for contemporary art to become a field without a medium.  This exhibition is on view until March 11, 2012.

• Laylah Ali: Note Drawings showcases 39 works of art by Laylah Ali now on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI.  The artist drew inspiration from and linked drawing, language and writing found in snippets of overheard conversations, media sound bites, and her own thoughts—all of which she collected on scraps of paper.  She then drew loosely-related or contrasting figures over the text, sometimes incorporating the written words in the drawing and other times obscuring them.  The exhibition closes April 1, 2012.

• The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) With Roni Horn pairs 83 of Evans’s Polaroids of American vernacular architecture—funerary monuments, faded Victorian gingerbread cottages—with photographs from “Bird,” a body of work made by Roni Horn between 1998 and 2007.  This show is at Andrea Rosen Gallery (NYC) and is on view through January 14, 2012.

• Rashid Johnson has been nominated for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize which is given to an artist whose work represents a significant development in contemporary art. The award sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, nationality, or medium, and the nominations may include emerging artists as well as more established individuals whose public recognition may be long overdue. The 2012 prize carries an award of $100,000.

• Watch as artist Richard Serra and Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, go behind-the-scenes of Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, on view at SFMOMA from October 17, 2011, to January 16, 2012.

 

Central Utah Art Center posted a A Mid-Opening Performance by Mariah Robertson, a video about Robertson playing with projections by parading a tabletop through the gallery space:

Do Ho Suh. "Fallen Star (sketch)," 2011. Courtesy the artist and The Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego.

In this week’s roundup Do Ho Suh addresses displacement and “home,” Bruce Nauman finds inspiration in Native America, Jason Schwartzman celebrates John Baldessari, and more.

• Do Ho Suh‘s Fallen Star is under construction at The Stuart Collection, University of California San Diego.  Fallen Star takes the form of a small house that has been picked up by some mysterious force, (perhaps a tornado) and “landed” on a building, seven stories up.  A roof garden is part of Suh’s design and will be a place with panoramic views for small groups to gather.  This can be seen as a “home” for the vast numbers of students who have left their homes to come to this huge institution, the university, which has nothing even resembling a home. A video detailing the installation process was commissioned by The Stuart Collection:

• Alfredo Jaar is one of a several participating artists whose works are on view in Being American at the School of Visual Arts’ Visual Arts Gallery (NYC).  The exhibition surveys responses by visual artists to some of the most pressing social issues in America today: from recent environmental catastrophes to the pervading effects of the economic crisis; from the long shadow of 9/11 and two overseas wars to the homefront debates surrounding religious tolerance, gay marriage, capital punishment and firearms possession.  This show closes December 21.

• Allora & Calzadilla’s third solo show, Vieques Videos 2003-2011, is on view at the Lisson Gallery in London. The artists contributed to the visual culture of this campaign with a long-term, multi-sited project entitled Landmark, which is informed by the following questions: “How is land differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? Who decides what is worth preserving and what should be destroyed? What are strategies for reclaiming marked land? How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land use?”  This show can be seen through January 14, 2012.

• Bruce Nauman‘s Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor), is part of a collection of modern works that are paired with Apache, Arapaho, Hopi, and Sioux art.  Native American Kindred Spirits: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art at Peter Blum Soho (NYC) focuses on a single subject: how modern artists found inspiration in the American landscape and Native American arts and crafts.  This work is on view through January 14, 2012.

• Drawings, an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery (Paris) introduces two new series of work by Richard Serra, July and Rifts. This is Serra’s first major drawing exhibition in Paris since 1995 and “provides a space, a place for me to go to where I can concentrate on an activity that is satisfying in and of itself,” says the artist.  This work is on view until January 7, 2012.

• John Baldessari is celebrated by actor Jason Schwartzman in this video produced for Pacific Standard Time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA):

• Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine was screened on Tuesday December 4 at Cornell University’s Willard Straight Theatre (Ithaca, NY).This documentary features extensive footage of Louise Bourgeois and was directed by art historian Amei Wallach and art documentarian Marian Cajori. It captures Bourgeois, a lifelong feminist, constructing some of her most influential installations.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko‘s works are currently on view at WORK (London).  The gallery is currently showing Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Abolition of War, an exhibition that invites the public to reconsider their understanding of the impact of war on veterans who have fought (or worked as medics) in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The two featured projects, The Flame and War Veteran Vehicle, bring into focus the post-traumatic condition experienced by returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. Both are based on a set of interviews conducted by the artist with anonymous war veterans and their families.  This show is on view until January 14, 2012.

• Keltie Ferris was interviewed for Metro Pulse during her artist-in-residence and exhibition at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  The exhibition is on view until December 9.

• Maya Lin spoke to a packed audience on October 24, 2011 in Mies’ S. R. Crown Hall, home of the Illinois Institute of Technology‘s College of Architecture. Lin spoke about environmental conservation and her ambitious landscape artworks. Check out this video for the full lecture.

• Paul McCarthy is currently exhibiting in London’s St James’s Park and at two Hauser & Wirth galleries. In a video posted by The Guardian, Adrian Searle discusses The King, an installation that pokes fun at ideas of self-aggrandisement and debunks the myth of the male artist as hero.

Robert Adams. "Arriba," 1966. © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery; "Longmont, Colorado," 1979. Yale University Art Gallery.

In this week’s roundup, a Robert Adams retrospective, Mark Dion’s site-specific production, Josiah McElheny’s abstract film reflections, new sculptures by Richard Serra, and much more.

• Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs at the Denver Art Museum offers a look at work that challenges conventional ideas of landscape photography.  Robert Adams‘ photos ask viewers to acknowledge and care for the world in all its imperfection.  This work is on view until January 1, 2012.

• Mark Dion: Process and Inquiry at University of Arkansas’ Fine Arts Center Gallery features selections from the world-renowned artist’s work, as well as related preparatory drawings, and works made as part of a proposal for a public art piece.  Mark Dion was selected to create a site-specific proposal based on his sensitivity to place and his profound investigation into the natural sciences and our understanding of it.  The exhibition will run October 8–November 18.

• Josiah McElheny has work at Gallery 2 of the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London). The Past Was A Mirage I’d Left Far Behind consists of seven large–scale mirrored sculptures arranged as multiple reflective screens, upon which Dion will project selected experimental abstract films. These sculptures will abstract the films by reflection and refraction of the imagery onto the gallery walls. Also, the artist has organized film presentations, lectures and events.  This work is on view until August 12, 2012.

• Lari Pittman is at Gladstone Gallery (NYC) with all-new works, which together reflect upon themes of musicality and time, intimately linking each within an engrossing tableaux of Dutch still-lifes, images of guitars, portraiture and words connoting musical styles. While Pittman’s visual vocabulary has continually tested the limits of metaphor, meaning and aesthetics, these works address an emotive intensity that is at once personal and universal in its meditation upon time, mortality, longing and loss.  The show closes October 22.

• Pepón Osorio‘s work is on view at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery (NYC).  Osorio contributes four new works in his first solo exhibition in New York since 2005.  In this exhibition, Osorio’s socially engaged art practice transforms real life stories, weaving together themes of psychological hunger and nourishment within the cultural context of class difference. The exhibition run until October 22.

• Richard Serra presents two new sculptures at Gagosian Gallery (NYC).  Junction/Cycle pushes the unique sculptural syntax that the artist developed over the last fifteen years to arrive at entirely new forms in two of his most complex and challenging works to date.  This work is on view until November 26.

• Do Ho Suh‘s dioramas and miniatures are currently on view at Lehmann Maupin (NYC) at part of Home Within Home.  Fallen Star 1/5 is a 1:5 scale version of the apartment where the artist lived while attending Rhode Island School of Design.  Home Within Home is a model of the artist’s Korean home that is housed inside the Providence building and glows like an architectural plan for the Emerald City.  This work can be seen until October 22.

• Mark your calendars for the transatlantic exhibition Paul McCarthy: The King, The Island, The Dwarves, The Train… at Hauser & Wirth, in different locations.  The show features McCarthy’s “sculpture machine,” Pig Island, which has given birth to numerous large-scale sculptures, including Train, Mechanical with figures that perform choreographed actions.  Two different exhibitions will be on view simultaneously at the New York gallery November 7–December 17 and both London galleries November 16–January 14.

Paul Pfeiffer. "Empire," 2004. Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s roundup Paul Pfeiffer and Cao Fei are exhibiting in Istanbul, John Baldessari is honored in LA, Andrea Zittel presents work from the Mojave desert, and more.

• Paul Pfeiffer‘s single-channel video Empire is currently on view at SALT Beyoğlu (Istanbul).  The once real-time video documented the three-month development and life cycle of a wasp nest. This work highlights the artist’s expanded use of original footage as a commentary on the analogies between the structure of our society and the process of the queen building her nest, laying her eggs, and becoming the matriarch of her community.  This video is on view until December 31.

• John Baldessari will be honored with Clint Eastwood at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Art + Film Gala on November 5. The evening will celebrate the art of the moving image and will bring together luminaries from both communities. Proceeds from the gala will be used to support LACMA’s initiative to make film more central to the museum’s curatorial programming, while also funding LACMA’s broader mission.

• Andrea Zittel has a completely new and large-scale piece on view at Magasin 3 (Stockholm).  Lay of My Land is a sculptural installation–a dramatic topographical figuration of the landscape that surrounds her site A-Z West in the Mojave desert.  An extensive new monograph on the artist accompanies the exhibition.  This work is on view until December 11.

• James Turrell is at Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Santa Monica, CA.  The gallery is presenting a selection of Turrell’s works, including Present Tense, a space division construction dating from 1991, and Yukaloo, an installation that shows off the artist’s glass works. Each piece of the latter work contains an LED, which is carefully programmed to evolve with the colors of the sky as the day progresses. This exhibition closes December 17.

• Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra are featured in Extended Drawing at Bonnefantenmuseum (The Netherlands). It shows works in which line and drawing are taken beyond their original boundaries.  Nauman used the outlines of the bodies of himself and his wife, in different colors indicating where neon is to be used.  Serra’s paintstick drawing enabled him to work large surface areas with a single movement. The exhibition closes January 15, 2012.

• Pierre Huyghe‘s Influants is at Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin.  The artist continues to inquire into the way we relate inside and outside of the exhibition context. Arriving in the gallery space, a male door attendant loudly announces the visitor’s name and surname (in a piece titled Name Announcer). At first sight, the rooms look empty, but in reality live insects and contagions abound.  Fifty live spiders move towards the corners of the ceiling, captured by CCTV security cameras.  This work is on view until October 22.

• Cai Guo-Qiang: Move Along, Nothing to See Here is on view at Brown University’s Cohen Gallery (Providence, Rhode Island).  Cai Guo-Qiang‘s inaugural exhibition celebrates The Year of China, a series of public lectures, cultural events, academic conferences, and multimedia activities focusing on the history, politics, culture, arts, and economy of China and its rapidly growing global impact.  This show closes October 28.

• Walton Ford‘s exhibition of nine new, large-scale watercolor paintings will soon be on view for the first time at the Paul Kasmin Gallery (NYC).  Of the works on display, one comprises three portraits of King Kong and the other six meditations on a passage from the memoirs of the ornithologist John James Audubon. Both series were painted in 2011, and are consistent with Ford’s practice of expanding the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting.

• Cao Fei‘s Cosplayers is now on view at YEM Building-Industrial Center (Istanbul).  This work is part of the Space Invaders: Video Game Art and Environment exhibition that explores the connection between video games and art, as well as to what extent games and art are intertwined.  The work is on view until September 23.

Albrecht Durer, "Pictures for Geometry" (2), 1525

Language draws an imaginary line around objects. That demarcation follows through in all the lines in our lives: the Morse code of a Risk board’s borders, anticipatory lines dragged across the icing of a cake, the dotted line around a coupon in a newspaper. These lines define the edges of something real, something made distinct and separate by words (“Argentina”, ‘my slice,”’”12% off fireworks”). When those lines fail – when things overspill their borders, when the separation of things becomes compromised – language falters too (if this isn’t the USSR any more, then what do we call it?). Conversely, when the rigidity of a line is used to limn something imaginary, something beyond language, the effect is uncanny and somewhat disquieting. It’s like that in Fred Sandback’s string pieces: taut lines of coloured yarn, used to describe semi-architectural spaces that provoke an internal dialogue between mind and body. Why can’t I walk through that empty space? What stops me?

Fred Sandback, "Untitled (Sculptural Study, Seven-point Triangular Construction)." Courtesy Fred Sandback archive and Whitechapel Gallery.

The small installation of Sandback’s work, currently on view in a single room at the Whitechapel Gallery, is the best example of the late artist’s spatial alchemy you’re likely to see in the UK. Sandback needs space, and a lot of it, despite his work’s modest (and physically feather-light) qualities. He’s best showcased at Dia:Beacon, where he effortlessly steals the show from his more heavy-handed minimalist compatriots. A huge rectangle of blue yarn, nailed invisibly to the concrete floor at an angle to its insertion in the wall, becomes a vast and flawless sheet of glass, leaning gently, worryingly. Sandback’s work, like that of Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, and Richard Tuttle, is a reminder that the physical experience of art trumps its intellectual unravelling every time. Language pales in comparison to that stomachy leap of fear and pleasure. As Sandback himself put it in 1975: “I don’t have an idea first and then find a way to express it. That happens all at once (…) Ideas are executions.” And: “Fact and illusion are equivalents.”

Sandback’s Untitled (Sculptural Study, Seven-Point Triangular Construction) dominates the Whitechapel installation. Seven equilateral triangles of black yarn stretch floor to ceiling, the nails in their bases and apexes hidden, so that they act like apparitions. Each is separated by about three feet of space, enough to walk between the shapes; the triangles’ sides climb and drop at either side, like the walls of a valley, and you feel your body respond accordingly, in and out of enclosure (that slight loosening at the top of the spine). Walking through the triangles feels, oddly, like a kind of violation: you brace instinctively for the glass to smash. The experience is physical without being sensual, thoughtful without being cerebral. Transfixed for longer than you’d expected by an almost laughable modesty of means, it’s your body’s mind doing the thinking. You’re paying attention.

Fred Sandback, "Untitled (Eight-Part Vertical Construction)," 1992. Courtesy Zwirner and Wirth.

Sandback’s work belongs in a tradition of the line as purveyor of illusory magic. In the early Italian figuring-out of spatial recession, the parallel lines naturally occurring in classical architecture formed the axes of new creative territory.  Sandback’s triangles might be the ghosts of Palladian pediments, his shafts of vertical thread the trace memory of fluted columns. Lines, whether in a drawing by Paolo Uccello, a zooming grid in Tron, or a soaring geometric form by Sandback, create a framework for imaginative play, a kind of playground of the mind. And yet, in Sandback’s devotion to everyday reality (the ordinariness of that fuzzed thread, with its associations of domesticity and repetition), there’s something more: a poetic reminder, as in the coloured lines on a map, that you are here.

Leonardo da Vinci, "Study for the Adoration of the Magi," 1481. Courtesy Uffizi gallery.

Margaret Kilgallen, "Untitled," c. 2000. Courtesy Ratio 3.

In this week’s roundup, Margaret Kilgallen summer selections, Mark Dion in the Netherlands, Kiki Smith in conversation, Laurie Simmons, virtually, and much more.

• Margaret Kilgallen: Summer / Selections is now on view at Ratio 3 (San Francisco).  This includes works on paper and paintings on canvas, some never before seen. The work emphasizes Margaret Kilgallen’s resourcefulness and economy of materials and features the artist’s iconic motifs such as leaves, trees, topography, and female figures, This exhibition closes August 5.

• Alfredo Jaar and Krysztof Wodiczko have work in Galerie Lelong’s (NYC) Interventions in the Landscape, a collective exhibition of photos and films exploring the landscape as a medium for social discourse.  As an activation of an array of sites charged with social and political connotations, these artists give voice to the terrain, allowing it to enter into an exchange with the subject and viewer.  The exhibition will run until August 5.

• The Bronx Museum (NYC), a friend of Art21, presents Taking AIM: 30-Year Anniversary Exhibition. The Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program has helped to demystify the often opaque professional practices of the art world for artists at the beginning of their careers and has introduced their work to the public.  The exhibition features sculptures, works on paper, video installations, photographs, and other works by 72 participants in AIM 2011.  The show closes on September 5.

• Mark Dion is among 100 international artists whose work has been selected for viewing in the Deichtorhallen (Netherlands).  The works show the many different layers of two private contemporary art collections as well as the various unknown aspects of them.  The exhibition will run until August 21.

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