Weekly Roundup

Walton Ford, "The Island", 2009. Watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper. Panel 1: 95 1/2 x 36 in. Panel 2: 95 1/2 x 60 in. Panel 3: 95 1/2 x 36 in. © 2009 Walton Ford. Photo: Christopher Burke Studio. via Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Tasmanian wolves, patented patterns, cartoon anthropomorphism, ancient mythology, portico projections, and a big gift:

• Bestiarium, a large-scale survey exhibition of watercolor paintings by Season 2 artist Walton Ford, is on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. His new large-scale painting The Island, recently acquired by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Betonville, Arkansas, is included in the exhibition. In this composition Ford presents, via the press release, “a writhing pyramidal mass of Tasmanian wolves (thylacines) grappling with each other and a few doomed lambs. The violent extermination of the thylacines, which were hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, calls into question who is hunter and hunted in this savage tableau.” Bestiarium is on view in Berlin through May 24. In June, the show will travel to Vienna’s Albertina Museum. This is Ford’s first show in Europe.

• Through March 21, Vancouver Art Gallery will project works from the exhibition CUE: Artists’ Videos onto the portico of their Robson Street facade. The show consists of more than 80 titles by artists from countries across the globe, such as Art21’s William Kentridge (Season 5). Cinematic language in video, and the unfolding of world events are some of the subjects covered in CUE. The videos have been arranged into seven thematic programs. Each program runs continuously on selected days between 5am – 2am.

• Works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view in the group exhibition Shudder at The Drawing Room in London. The artists in Shudder use animation to develop characters and investigate personal states of mind and relationships. Their works tap into, among other things, the cartoon tradition of anthropomorphism. Shudder will include a brand new piece by Pettibon titled Zephyr; the artist describes it as a baby playing with the wind and traveling in the sky. Zephyr continues the themes explored in Pettibon’s The Place, Where We Were created in 2008. Shudder continues through March 14.

• On January 27, London’s contemporary art gallery Sadie Coles HQ will open an exhibition of works by Season 2 artist Matthew Barney. Barney will present a new group of drawings related to his performance and film project Ancient Evenings, based on Norman Mailer’s bestselling novel by the same title. Mailer’s 1983 text reimagined ancient Egyptian mythology and ritual. Barney’s operatic performance (a collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler) occurs in seven acts symbolizing the seven stages the soul passes through after death in ancient Egyptian belief: Ren, Khu, Sekhem, Ba, Ka, Khaibit and Sekhu. The exhibition closes on March 6.

• Get a closer look at a new installation by Season 1 artist Barry McGee on the blog Arrested Motion. According to SLAMXHYPE, this installation — part of SF MoMA’s year-long Anniversary Show — is made up of many individual works created over the years including drawings, personal photos, and McGee’s iconic (and patented) patterns. The installation is on view through January 2011.

• Kelowna.com reports that Toronto art collector and philanthropist Ydessa Hendeles has offered to donate 32 Canadian and international works to the Art Gallery of Ontario. This would be the biggest single gift of contemporary art in the museum’s history. The donation includes works by artists Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3), James Coleman, Gary Hill, Thomas Schutte, Kim Adams, Ian Carr-Harris, Max Dean, Betty Goodwin, and Liz Magor. Plans are underway to exhibit the Hendeles donation within the next 18 months.

• Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) will participate in the panel discussion “Participatory Art: Creative Approaches to the Concept of Community“ organized by LaRete Art Projects and the Legislative Assembly of the Emilia Romagna Region in Italy. The event is part of Arte Fiera Art First 2010, Bologna, a yearly international art fair for modern and contemporary art. The event takes place Saturday, January 30 at 2pm.

Weekly Roundup

Cao Fei, "RMB City: The Fashions of China Tracy" Series, 2009. Clothes and Accessories: MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA Bracelet: Hermès Location: City Hall, RMB City, Second Life Deutsche Bank Collection.

The new year and decade are right around the corner and art spaces are gearing up for their first shows of 2010. This week’s roundup lists new and upcoming exhibitions featuring Art21 artists who envision utopia; manipulate patterns and dress; summon Baroque culture; and reflect on the intimate act of bathing.

• Season 5 artist Cao Fei will participate in Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The show, organized by Vivien Greene, curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art at the Guggenheim Museum, “examines a sequence of international case studies from the early nineteenth century through 1933, when the Bauhaus closed in Berlin and the ascendancy of Fascism and Stalinism curbed or negatively reframed artistic endeavors.” Utopia Matters also investigates the evolution of utopian ideas in modern Western artistic thought and practice.” The December issue of Art Mag, the online magazine of Deutsche Bank, takes this exhibition as its focus and features an interview with Greene, as well as an essay by Matthew Evans about Fei’s works held in the Deutsche Bank Collection. Utopia Matters opens January 23.

• Pattern ID, a group exhibition at the Akron Art Museum, calls attention to the complexities of cultural identity. Fifteen artists –including Mark Bradford (Season 4) and Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) — manipulate pattern and dress to define as well as expand their cultural identities.  Ellen Rudolph, the museum’s Curator of Exhibitions, says, “The artists use pattern and dress to take up the 21st century challenge of locating one’s place in society against the backdrop of globalization. Many of the artists in the exhibition have migrated from one culture to another, be it national, ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, political or religious. Rather than trade one identity for another, the artists in Pattern ID reveal ways in which identity can be cumulative.” On view January 23 – May 9, 2010.

• In October 2008, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was the only museum in the state of New York selected to receive a gift of fifty works of contemporary art from collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel (with the help of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services). Beginning January 22, audiences will be able to see this gift to the Albright-Knox Gallery in an exhibition entitled Fifty Works for Fifty States: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Gift. Artists include Richard Tuttle (Season 3), Koki Doktori, Edda Renouf, Larry Poons, Lynda Benglis, Richard Artschwager, and others. This gift is part of the national gifts program, which will distribute 2,500 works from the Vogels’ collection throughout the nation, with fifty works going to a single art institution in each of the fifty states.

• Intimacy! Bathing in Art opens at Berlin’s Ahlen Art Museum on January 31. As you might have guessed from the title, the show considers artistic reflections on bathing, as well as its historical developments and contextual significance. Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Gustave Caillebotte, Gregory Crewdson, Edgar Degas, Albrecht Dürer, Eric Fischl, David Hockney, and Bill Viola are among the 90 artists selected for this exhibition that spans from the late Middle Ages to the present day.

• Through April 15, works by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons (both Season 5), and Matthew Barney (Season 2) are on view at the Madre Museum in Naples, Italy in the exhibition Barock – Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Barock investigates issues that permeated the XVII century and shows how these themes of Baroque culture have been revived by contemporary artists.

Antidiets of the Avant-Garde

"Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art" cover art. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Some 30 years after the Italian poet and founder of the Futurist movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote The Futurist Cookbook (1932) and proposed a revolution in food, the European avant-garde artist Daniel Spoerri, who is closely associated with the Fluxus art movement, opened Restaurant de la Galerie J in Paris, a fully functional business with waiters from the art world. Four years later, in 1967, he opened Restaurant Spoerri in Dusseldorf, featuring guest chefs such as artist Joseph Beuys; and in 1970, established his now famous Eat Art Gallery upstairs.

Two recent events have brought attention to these landmark moments in food-art history: the Futurist theme of the 18-day performance biennial Performa 09, which, among other events, kicked off with a gala dinner based on Marinetti’s writings; and Eating the Universe, the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf’s latest exhibition, which traces the character of Spoerri’s Eat Art projects from its origins through to today. It seems the perfect moment, then, for Cecilia Novero’s new book, Antidiets of the Avant-garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art, due out in January.

Novero, a professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has written extensively on the cultural history of food, German and European film, Dada, Viennese Actionism, and most recently contemporary “animal art.” Below, she gives a glimpse into her forthcoming book, in which she focuses on the connections between avant-garde studies and the culinary field in 20th- and 21st-century artistic production.

The following excerpts are taken from an interview conducted via email.

Marinetti eating pasta at Milan's Biffi restaurant, 1930. Courtesy Estorick Collection, via Cabinet Magazine.

Nicole J. Caruth: How do you define “antidiet”? Is it synonymous with the rejection of “taste” in art (i.e. anti-taste) or related to the French idea of dégoût/disgust?

Cecilia Novero: Antidiet is not always dégoût–that would work with Dada but not with Futurism. Antidiet is meant in the sense of anti-art, without being a synonym of it. If diet is a set of regulations that orders ways of eating, table manners, etc., the anti-diet counters these “bourgeois” and “Western” rules. For example, the ways in which we take pleasure, appreciate what is considered/constructed as the beautiful, and especially the ways we “taste” art and thus stop thinking about inherited concepts of beauty. In the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, anti-diet also refers to acquired notions of “progress,” hence traditional historicist approaches to art and civilization.

NJC: What are some of the topics and sub-topics covered in your book?

CN: Antidiets deals with Futurist cooking, Dada poetry and manifestos, the culture critic Walter Benjamin’s writing on food, travel and art, and the European artist Daniel Spoerri and his Eat Art Project, which involved many others (mostly those artists known as Nouveaux Realists in France, but also others such as Robert Filliou, Dieter Roth, Andre Thomkins and, marginally, Piero Manzoni). The epilogue briefly traces the differences in aesthetics between this anti-art of food and more contemporary examples of food in/through art, including Janine Antoni, Ben Kinmont, Rikrit Tiravanija, and Jana Sterbak.

The first chapter, like the last, is devoted to the more direct employment of food in art, namely to the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (1930), The Futurist Cookbook, and the Futurist restaurant, The Holy Palate (both 1931). In contrast, in Chapter Two on Dada (particularly the Dadaist artists in Zurich), and Three on Benjamin’s short texts on eating, the reader finds a rhetorical and performative use of incorporation [a term used by the author interchangeably with "devouring"]. One of the major suggestions of this study is that the antidiets, not just Spoerri’s, but also those of Futurism, Dada, and Benjamin, transformed some of the gastronomic principles of pleasure, taste, assimilation, and digestibility, as well as history, and mobilized those principles for a redefinition of art and the subject. Continue reading »

International Design Conservation: A Discussion with Tim Bechthold

Are the “Design Arts” the same as “Contemporary Art?” Is Jasper Morrison a contemporary artist?  Or is Jeff Koons a designer?  Art objects serve different functions than design objects, don’t they?

As an art conservator, my initial focus in any project starts with from what and how art is made. To this end, there really isn’t a big difference between, say, a toaster and a gigantic puppy made of flowers. But I must consider the intent or purpose—or maybe function—of an object when creating a conservation plan.

I had these questions and thoughts in mind last month when I departed from my fair Hoosier State to Munich, Germany, to attend a conference organized by conservators Tim Bechthold and Susanne Graner and hosted by Die Neue Sammlung, The International Design Museum Munich. The conference was called “FUTURE TALKS 009: The Conservation of Modern Materials in Applied Arts and Design,” and I wouldn’t have thought of making this trip three years ago, because back then the Indianapolis Museum of Art only had a few design objects in its collection. But now, all of a sudden, we’ve acquired hundreds of objects, recently co-organized and hosted the exhibition European Design Since 1985 (which will be traveling to multiple venues in the near future), and just this year we acquired the Miller House, one of the country’s most highly regarded examples of mid-century Modernist residences. It was designed by Eero Saarinen, with interiors by Alexander Girard and landscape design by Daniel Urban Kiley. Of course, this home is filled with design objects.

But I digress. The conference in Munich was excellent, and Die Neue Sammlung is a fantastic museum. To talk more about the conference and caring for design objects, I’ve invited Tim Bechthold, the Head of the Conservation Department Die Neue Sammlung, here for a conversation. Thankfully, Mr. Bechthold is not only good at organizing conferences and working as a conservator, but is also fluent in both German and English.

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Weekly Roundup

Julie Mehretu, "Berliner Plätze", 2008-2009. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 168 in. © Julie Mehretu

Where in the world are Art21 artists?

• In Germany — where the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today — a new suite of paintings by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu is on view at the Deutsche Guggenheim. This specially commissioned body of work, titled Grey Area, evokes the “psychogeography” of the city of Berlin and its past, raising matters of erasure, decay, and liminality. A number of programs will be held throughout the exhibition, including a lecture by culture journalist and author Magdalena Kroener; and a commissioned concert by Jochen Neurath based on Mehretu’s new paintings. Get the complete schedule here.

• Also in Berlin, an exhibition of works by John Baldessari (Season 5) will open at Sprüth Magers Gallery on November 20. In Hands And/Or Feet (Part Two) Baldessari takes these extremities as his focus in five large-scale diptychs of found photographs or media images, characteristically painted over and colored in by the artist.

• In London, Stephen Friedman Gallery is displaying works by Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare. Several “meaty” images of Shonibare’s new photographic and sculptural series, which is based on both Arthur Miller’s protagonist Willy Loman, and an early photograph of a fatal car crash, are available on the gallery’s website.

• Circling around to California, beginning November 14 new paintings by Jeff Koons (Season 5) will be on display at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills. “At first glance,” reads the press release, “the works may seem abstract and gestural, but at the same time they are embedded in the traditions of figurative  painting. The brush strokes, which are photorealistic in their application, are actually fake brush strokes in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.” On view through January 9, 2010.

• Down in Atlanta, Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will deliver a lecture at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) as part of their inaugural deFINE ART festival, which celebrates the SCAD School of Fine Arts. The event takes place on November 11 at 7 pm.

• Here in New York there’s a lot happening as usual: On November 12 Stitches opens at Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery in  midtown. This large group exhibition, curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, will feature works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) and Kiki Smith (Season 2) among others.

• Opening that same day at Paul Kasmin Gallery (in the Chelsea art district) is an exhibition of new paintings by Walton Ford (Season 2). Works on view include In The Island, a painting conjuring the paranoia that caused Tasmanian settlers to hunt thylacines into extinction in the 20th century. The show continues through December 23.

• And last but not least, the exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum of American Art has been reviewed by Roberta Smith of the New York Times. She writes of Horn (Season 3): “She has expanded the art of drawing with works that swing dramatically between intimate and monumental. Her method involves splicing two or more smaller sheets with nearly identical images into a single very large one — a process that cannily combines carving, cartography and quilting. In breathtaking photographs she has documented the terrain, shoreline and geothermal wonders of Iceland, whose strange, isolated beauty is one of the mainstays of her art.” Read the entire piece here.

Weekly Roundup

Paul McCarthy, "(White Snow) Dwarf Heads (detail)", 2009. Set of 7 drawings, pencil on vellum, tape. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

• White Snow, a solo exhibition of work by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy, opens at Hauser & Wirth, New York on November 5. The gallery will debut pieces from a new body of work that draws upon the famous 19th century German folk tale Snow White (Schneewittchen), and comments on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney’s 1937 interpretation of the story. A reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, November 4, 6-8pm.

• McCarthy’s work is also on view at Dean Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. His 1995 video Painter, a satire of the artist as lonely genius in his studio, is shown next to the gallery’s permanent installation Paolozzi Studio, a recreation of Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi’s working space. By juxtaposing Painter and Studio, the gallery aims to “cast a second glance at how museums present the making of art.” Continues through February 14, 2010.

• Opening November 17 at Hauser & Wirth, London, After Awkward Objects brings together works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), Lynda Benglis, and Alina Szapocznikow. The exhibition is inspired by Awkward Objects, a presentation of pioneering women artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw earlier this year.

• Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis, at the newly remodeled El Museo del Barrio, highlights key artists from the Caribbean and Latin America who lived in New York City before World War II and participated in the development of the American avant-garde. A sculpture by Season 1 artist Pepón Osorio titled La Cama (The Bed) is pictured in the New York Times review. Nexus New York continues through February 28, 2010.

• The first major exhibition of works by Jenny Holzer (Season 4) to be held in a Swiss museum is on view at The Fondation Beyeler through January 24, 2010. The exhibition includes important works from various phases of Holzer’s career, but focuses on recent works, some of which will be shown in Europe for the first time. In addition to the museum space, the exhibition will extend to the public, with light projections planned for buildings and sites in Basel and Zurich.

• Moving in Place is an exhibition of 25 paintings by Season 3 artist Susan Rothenberg at the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, Texas. Though Rothenberg is best known for her horse paintings (the Obamas have borrowed one from the National Gallery of Art for the White House), the Modern’s Chief Curator, Michael Auping says, “Rather than focusing on Rothenberg’s famous early horse paintings as the beginning of a symbolic, figurative evolution, we are looking at the artist’s work from a more holistic, formal standpoint, identifying her unusual way of organizing pictorial space, regardless of the figurative content.” Continues through January 3, 2010.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Roni Horn (Season 3), Francis Alÿs, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Rodney Graham, On Kawara, Thomas Nozkowski, Laura Owens, Dieter Roth, and Franz West are included the exhibition Continuous Present at Yale University Art Gallery. Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe writes, “Everything that is most endearing about the current state of contemporary art and much that niggles rises to the surface of Continuous Present.” Read Smee’s review here.

• Over the weekend, Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3) was also featured in the Boston Globe for his video installation, The Veterans Project, at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. Wodiczko has focused on veterans engaged in active combat in Iraq, as well as Iraqi civilians, looking at their shared experience of chaos and confusion brought about by the war. On Veterans Day, November 11, ICA Director of Programs David Henry will moderate a discussion between Wodiczko and project participants.

• Five Themes, a solo exhibition of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, opens at the Norton Museum of Art in Miami on November 7. This comprehensive survey gathers nearly 75 works of animated film, drawing, print, sculpture and other forms, and is structured around five primary themes in Kentridge’s work, such as apartheid and imperialism. Co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), a web-based interactive for the exhibition is available on the SFMOMA website. Five Themes is on view at the Norton through January 17, 2010.

Inside The Artist’s Studio: Joulia Strauss

Joulia Strauss at MYLIVINGROOM studio in Athens, Greece

It would be an oversimplification to introduce Joulia Strauss to you as a Russian visual artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Joulia is a Mari, from the Mari El Republic located in the eastern part of the East European plain of the Russian Federation, along the Volga River, right where the Ural Mountains begin. This small community of approximately 600,000 people has a rich tradition in the performing arts, and Joulia grew up in the middle of this, with two of her family members at the helm of the Mari National Theater in Yoshkar-Ola.

She got an admirable start in the art world by studying at the Platonic New Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg (founded in 1989), alongside artist and founder Timur Petrovich Novikov. This evolved into the Neo-Academism art movement in the 1990s. In my discussion with Joulia, you’ll see how she entered into the exclusively all-male New Academy, finding herself at the heart of the intellectual elite and queer culture of St. Petersburg at the time.

Classically trained as a sculptor, she creates works reminiscent of an antique and neo-classical idealism, always aiming for harmony, perfection, and beauty with a contemporary twist. She continued to be a member of Neo-Academism when she decided to pursue a fine arts degree at the University of Berlin. Being a skilled craftsman on her own, Joulia soon became fascinated with technology, science, and mathematics. By finding a lot of her answers in science (with the help of prominent thinkers in Berlin), her work began achieving the rigor for which she strove. She founded an artist-run space called art_science for gatherings of critics, scientists, artists, philosophers, in order to enable vital exchange outside of their own networks.

Joulia is highly politicized and conscious of the changes our society is undergoing. The sight of last December’s riots in Greece all over the media literally shook her. Joulia’s deep love and appreciation for ancient and contemporary Greece inspired her to come to Athens on a residency at MYLIVINGROOM in Metaxourgio, to observe and begin decoding the active role of artists in contemporary Greece.

Having taken September off, I am very pleased to return to my column and to you with this Joulia Strauss interview.

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Scenes from a Globalized Art World

Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

I’d like to start my guest blogging with Art21 by bringing up a series of questions surrounding globalization and artistic representation. My primary research interest is in the art market and the forces that shape it. With a background in cultural studies, I tend to approach the market through multiple lenses—analyzing it through its cultural, economic, and social contexts and impacts. In the next few weeks, I hope to present some interesting talking points surrounding this very issue, explore how arts communities are built, and feature artists working in exciting, new ways.

Not only can art expose the norms and hierarchies of the existing social order, but it can give us the conceptual means to invent another, making what had once seemed utterly impossible entirely realistic.

— Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Artforum, October 2009.

Last week, the San Francisco Art Institute hosted a panel discussion titled, “Global Art in the Downturn.” Panelists included Hou Hanru and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. My first question upon coming across the announcement was, what is the definition of “global art”? This is exactly the question that was first addressed by moderator, Dominic Willsdon of SFMOMA. The agreed-upon definition during the panel discussion was that “global art” included the genres and forms of art that are more popular across the globe, and that it is work presented in biennials, art fairs, and internationally-known institutions, and publications.

There are no set terms or definitions or categories for the levels at which artwork is produced, but what became clear to me in my two years of researching art world ecosystems for my master’s thesis is that artists make conscious decisions about how they want their work to be seen and by whom. At the same time, their agency is limited or co-opted by other art world players, such as curators and dealers who control access to major institutions and exhibitions.

There is no doubt that globalization, or the more nuanced French term mondialisation, has affected the art world as a whole—from the expansion of new markets, to the ability for artists to more easily travel, explore, and present a wider range of ideas, or to the proliferation of biennials and art fairs. How, then, does defining “global art” as the work endorsed by the international art community affect how non-endorsed works or artists are read within a globalized art scene?

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Weekly Roundup

James Turrell, "Ganzfeld Piece (Modell)", 2008. Courtesy of Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg © James Turrell. Photo: Zooey Braun

• A new installation by James Turrell (Season 1) — a light-filled space in the tradition of his Ganzfeld Pieces — will open at the Wolfsburg Art Museum in Germany on October 24. The Wolfsburg Ganzfeld Piece is the largest installation ever implemented by the artist in a museum, measuring 700 square meters, and comprising two rooms (Viewing Space and Sensing Space) that merge into each other. The exhibition runs through April 5.

• A video and sound installation by Paul Pfeiffer (Season 2) is also on view in Germany at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. Titled The Saints, the piece is based on original film and audio material from the 1966 Football World Cup, “the most important sporting event in postwar European history.” Continues through March 28.

• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has announced six finalists for the 2010 Hugo Boss Prize, including Season 5 artist Cao Fei. Read more about the prize in the New York Times.

• Zig Zag, a group exhibition at Sperone Westwater, features works created between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Taking its title from a 1966 sculpture by Alighiero e Boetti, the show spotlights the activities of a generation of American and European artists whose work reflects a similar rejection of traditional aesthetics in favor of new forms and process. Sculpture by Bruce Nauman; and a selection of black-and-white photographs by William Wegman (both Season 1) are included. Runs through October 31.

• Through December 30, The Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C. is exhibiting work by the South African artist William Kentridge (Season 5) and Russian artist, Oleg Kudryashov. Kentridge and Kudryashov: Against the Grain consists of 40 to 50 objects drawn from D.C. area collectors.

• I Am Also Not My Own Enemy, an exhibition of new work by Season 1 artist Shahzia Sikander opens at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London on October 16. Sikander’s latest video Bending the Barrels (2009); a large-scale multimedia work consisting of text upon a pictorial surface; and a selection of paintings and drawings form the show. On view through November 21.

• According to The Art Newspaper, Whitechapel Gallery in London will devote the next series of displays in its Collections Gallery to works from the Dimitris Daskalopoulos Collection. Artists in the collection, which consists of over four hundred works, include Matthew Barney, and Louise Bourgeois (both Season 2).

• Season 5 artist John Baldessari has written a piece for the travel section of The Guardian. This list of the artist’s favorite spots in his hometown of Los Angeles begins with hidden gems in area museums. Read the article here.

Looking at Los Angeles: Berlin Wall Falls in L.A.

Days before the Berlin Wall is torn down, Germans gather at it, 1989. Photographer unknown.

Tuesday night, former U.S. Ambassador Richard Barkley called East Berlin a “profoundly boring place,” drab and depressing compared to other places he’d been. His callous observation loosely framed a panel discussion at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, in which Barkley, German diplomat Michael Ott, and dramaturge Uta Schorlemmer remembered the fall of the Berlin Wall. All three of them had lived in Berlin (Ott in the West, Barkley and Schorlemmer in the East), and all three had felt the exuberance that swelled in the autumn of 1989.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, the Wende Museum has arranged to rebuild the wall in Los Angeles. Called “The Wall Across Wilshire,” the new structure loosely separates East and West L.A., though it’s too far from the city’s actual cultural battle lines to make anything more than a symbolic statement. It goes up in the evening of November 8 and ceremonially falls at midnight on November 9 (with such quick turnaround, the obstruction of Wilshire, a Los Angeles thoroughfare, won’t cause much frustration). A second structure, “The Wall Along Wilshire,” which includes a Border Tower from the original Berlin Wall, will run alongside the street from October 17 - November 14.

The Wende Museum organized Tuesday’s panel at the Hammer as a nuanced, interactive introduction to the Berlin Wall’s history. And what the three panelists told us, albeit indirectly, was indeed nuanced: they fleshed out a legacy more visual than political, a story full of unresolved colors and symbols.

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