Weekly Roundup

Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:

• The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.

• On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.

• Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.

• Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.

• Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.

• Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.

• A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.

• John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.

The Puppy Wars

Jeff Koons, "Girl with Dolphin and Monkey" (The Whitney Museum of American Art 75th Anniversary Photography Portfolio), 2006. Courtesy Whitney Museum

The eerily small, closely watched world of New York art criticism experienced some infighting earlier this month, following the publication of February’s The Brooklyn Rail. “I think that there are some things you shouldn’t do, and promoting Jeff Koons is one of them,” wrote Rail editor John Yau, picking a fight with critic Jerry Saltz, who had championed Koons (featured in Season Five of Art:21) as “the emblematic artist of the decade” in New York Magazine’s end-of-the-00s issue. Saltz had also declared Koons’s work emblematic of America—it’s “crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized…” It’s this last part that Yau resented; he titled his editorial The Difference Between Saltz’s America and Mine. “In Saltz’s America,” he quipped, “Puppy is great public art and Tom Cruise is the good, handsome German with an eye patch, trying to save the world from Hitler.” Saltz retaliated via his Facebook page, calling Yau “dickish,” “incoherent,” “self-satisfied,” and “irrelevant.” It wasn’t a pretty moment for art writing.

Jerry Saltz. Courtesy Kevin Wick/Longview Photography.

John Yau, taken during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2003. Photo: Gloria Graham.

I care about what Yau and Saltz say — partly because I’m a writer, and knowing what other, more visible writers write is part of my job — but also because both of them have influenced me. Yau’s Corpse and Mirror gave me new entry into abstraction, while Saltz taught me that Charles Ray can be likable and that lush adjectives can join with austere conceptualism. A lot of other writers and artists care too. So much so that I’m noticeably late to comment on the Saltz-Yau tiff. Art21 contributor Hrag Vartanian “broke” the story; Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes spoke up for Yau; artist William Powhida invited the critics to debate at #class; C-Monster, art blogging’s straightest shooter, kept tabs on the squabble; poet Michael Leong wrote that Saltz hadn’t found “enough critical distance to say anything productive” (and received a retaliatory comment from Saltz). Some — Vartanian, Leong and Green in particular — did justice to the ethical problem Yau had with Saltz. But there’s another more frustrating ethical problem integral to all of this. This problem has little to do with either critic’s ultimate point. Those were actually reasonable: Saltz said that Koons embodied an era in American culture; Yau said Koons didn’t, and that saying so evidenced tunnel-vision. The problem has to do with how they went about arguing. Continue reading »

From Here To There (and Back Again)

Jeff Wall, “Citizen” (1996). Gelatine silver print on aluminium panel, framed, 192 x 244 cm. Photo: Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Martin P. Bühler, courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel, © Jeff Wall.

Collection shows, by their very nature, often feel more like “Best of…” CDs than a well-curated mix-tape. They usually feature the hits—a stripe-y Barnett Newman, an invariably awesome Pablo Picasso—but context and a coherent thesis is usually, almost inevitably, missing. How to connect the Picasso to the Newman without invoking a stutter and hiss on the tape (as elucidated by the invisible crease in the white wall they share), by which we know that one work really wasn’t supposed to follow the other, and that a lucid argument about their relationship might be lacking?

These were some of my thoughts, anyway, on entering “Holbein To Tillmans” (there’s a leap for you), the Schaulager’s summer show of some 200 works culled from the Kunstmuseum Basel’s deeply quirky collection (Holbein and friends, an orgy of Swiss Alpine landscapes, a remarkable group of Ab-Ex works bought in toto on a trip to New York in 1958) as well as a few others from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation.

Matching the Schaulger’s own improbably seismic concrete-and-concrete space, deftly orchestrated by local heroes Herzog & DeMeuron, the exhibition’s scope—the Middle Ages to the present—is large in the extreme. The curatorial premise, by necessity, is vague in the extreme: to look at all the works “with today’s eyes,” and to perceive the “world around us by looking at people or things.” If this sounds doubtful, the show succeeds by merit of the works themselves, as well as by odd and inspirational pairings that together advance a kind of humanist argument: everything’s linked—past, present, future—and we’re all in this together.

Rodney Graham, “Allegory of Folly: Study for an Equestrian Monument in the Form of a Wind Vane” (2005). Lightbox, two parts, each: 306 x 141 x 18 cm. Photo: Tom Bisig, Basel, courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel, © Rodney Graham.

Continue reading »

Chain Link Fence

Left: Karin Bubas, Lauren Crying (2009). Pastel on paper, 9.5 x 12.5 in. Right: Karin Bubas, Heidi Pouting (2009). Pastel on paper, 9.5 x 12.5 in. Both images courtesy Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver.

Some summertime offerings from the internets.

Pastels Not Dunzo: Joshua David Stein watches the cast of “The Hills” getting pastel’d.

“Chalk pastels are the soft focus of the art world — the Lifetime channel on paper — and for the characters of the notoriously high-definition, supersaturated “The Hills,” the medium is humanizing.”

Turn Your Back On Me: Jennifer Higgie turns her gaze on men who love women who turn away.

“She turns her back on you; this, it would seem, is her appeal. She’s been painted like this for centuries, and, more recently, photographed. Often she is naked, in a bathroom or bedroom, solitary, sleeping or day-dreaming….”

Pale Fire: Arthur Danto on Suzanne P. Hudson on Robert Ryman (Season 4) on everything.

“Suzanne P. Hudson’s Robert Ryman: Used Paint is the first book-length study of the artist’s achievement, and it comes with an interesting thesis, namely that his paintings exemplify what the author calls ‘embodied thinking,’ which I interpret to mean that his paintings are not the product of thought, but thought itself.”

Script Vicious: Lyra Kilston dissects Pablo Helguera’s panel freak-out.

“The play presents a public discussion between a cast of art world archetypes—curators, a collector, a thwarted artist and an arts administrator—as they meet to discuss the life and work of the artist Juvenal Merst, a character that Helguera named after the early second century Roman poet Juvenal, who is credited with developing the nascent genre of satire.”

Hey Papi: Ara Merjian takes to the work of Marco Papa.

“A hint of Joseph Beuys’s notion of ‘social sculpture’ perhaps echoes in Papa’s interdisciplinary, participatory affinities, as well as his investment in a kind of collective, symbolic catharsis around specific objects. But Papa steers clear of the specious naïveté that marked Beuys’s self-styled shamanism, with its quixotic faith in the autonomy of artworks.”

You Wish: Heike Munder assembles a list.

“‘Live in Your Head’ is a motto that could well serve to guide a revival of interest in processes, for the latter remain inconclusive, continually opening up new possibilities of interpretation. I should add the following keywords to my wish list: intellectually stimulating materials, forms and ideas.”

Soft Touch: Jorge Colombo’s iPhone finger painting archive. They’ve been the splash this summer, yes, but they’re just so nice.

Let Them Read Books/Play Records: Taschen, Plattfon, Stampa, Aniston

Spread from Helmut Newton's SUMO (1999). 464 pages. Courtesy Taschen, Cologne.

“This new edition is the fulfillment of an ambition conceived years ago. We jokingly referred to it as ‘Newton for the poor.’ ”

Oh, Benedikt Taschen, it’s quotes like these—and your line of über pricey, barge-like books like Helmut Newton’s SUMO, of which you speak—that always makes me wince at Taschen so. (Though, for us poor, there’s always been the oh-so-cheap stack of your invariably paper-thin monographs—Schiele or Klimt anybody?—in the remainder pile at bookstores everywhere.) Like some munchkin feather-weight wrestler, Newton’s original1999 monograph was two feet tall, with a weigh-in of 70 pounds. Mr. Taschen trumpets it as “The biggest and most expensive book production in the 20th century.” Today copies go for 10,000 euros. But in an ode to the book’s 10th anniversary, and with priceless recessionary timing, a smaller edition is about to be published for a mere $150, what Taschen reasons is “democratic dispersal.” Hmm.

If the publisher’s mania for printing books you can’t pick up and you certainly can’t afford (his editions for “the poor” notwithstanding) seems to auger well for the arrival of the recently released Kindle II (portable-to-the-extreme if not exactly cheap), I am not so convinced by his largess nor the technology that seeks to wipe it out. Nevertheless, with the constant heralding of the end of the publishing industry (despite Taschen, I don’t buy it) and the music industry (well, maybe) as we know them, I went to an opening last Friday night in Basel for a new record store cum art book shop cum gallery with the feeling that I might just be going back in time to a beautiful, beautiful place. Tonight there would be no Kindle, no online music downloading, just obscure CDs and LPs and posters and multiples and beautifully bound books with (printed!) text. Continue reading »

Ghost That Note: Harpstrings, Heartstrings, and Street Scenes

Rendering of "Ghost Notes, performance 1" (2009), Basel, Switzerland. Courtesy asiootus, Basel.

This past Sunday evening in Basel could have been like any other but it wasn’t. Not quite. My partner and I finished the strangely purple dinner I had crafted—beet pasta, plum tart—and rode our bikes over the Dreirosenbrücke, the wistfully named (and entirely rose-free) Three Roses Bridge that crosses the pewter-green Rhine into an industrial neighborhood of Northern Basel. There, at the dusk-darkened corner of Elsässerstrasse and Hueningerstrasse, we found ourselves watching a harpist perform from a precarious perch in the sky, just outside the fourth-story window of a pre-war building. The shadow of the harp loomed fairy-tale large against the building’s curvy façade. The delicate music—by Béla Bartòk, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Erik Satie, and others—fell like water over the street. A man leaned out the window above the harpist, as enchanted as the audience leaning against their bicycles below. Mercy.

With the whirr of children and trams running by and streetlamps softly aglow, the bright, buoyant tones of the harp turned the entire street scene into just that: a scene. As the music moved from cheerful to sentimental to anticipatory to menacingly minimal, the now surreally cinematic street, totally ready for its close-up, morphed from a Fellini-esque comedy to a Nora Ephron romcom to a French Connection–like thriller to something far more noir. The scene was so wondrous it verged on the precious. Thankfully, the tall, boxy basket crane (itself recalling the scaffolding of film sets) that held the musician and her harp added some necessary levity, as did the costumes of the audience: flip-flops, beer cans, orange swimming bags (readers, it is August hot here). Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Mary Heilmann, "Two Lane Blacktop" (below) and Tony Oursler, "Five Take Radius" (above), 2009. Courtesy of AIR, Art International Radio.

• Site-specific installations by Mary Heilmann (Season 5), Tony Oursler, Todd Eberle, and Sabina Streeter are currently on view at the Clocktower Gallery in Manhattan. This is the first group of installations at the space since it became the home of Art International Radio in January 2009. For Two Lane Blacktop, Heilmann has painted white lines down a black floor, turning a corridor of the Clocktower into “a displaced highway.” Just above her piece, Tony Oursler has lined the ceiling with eleven over-sized filament light bulbs that brighten and dim as recordings of the artist’s voice emanate from speakers overhead. The Clocktower is open to the public on Thursdays from 12pm to 5pm or by appointment.

• On the occasion of their 95th anniversary, Montclair Art Museum has mounted Out of the Vault. This year-long exhibition celebrates the Museum’s American and Native American art focus. Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in the 60 piece display.

• From August 25-November 21, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois will present Reflection, a one video per day program featuring works by five artists: Andrea Zittel (Season 1), Phyllis Baldino, Patricia Esquivias, Alex Hubbard, and Glenn Ligon. Each video is scheduled for a specific day of the week; Andrea Zittel’s Small Liberties will screen on Fridays.

• Kandors (2000), a video by Season 3 artist Mike Kelley, will be shown in Switzerland as part of the 10-day St. Moritz Art Masters contemporary art program. The festivities begin Friday, August 21. Kelley’s work will be the focus of a panel discussion on Sunday, August 23.

• A newly commissioned collaboration between Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, titled A Voyage of Growth & Discovery, will open September 13 at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens. The installation comprises a two-and-a-half hour six-channel video of Smith’s character Baby IKKI, which he has performed for over thirty years. This is the first collaboration between Kelley and Smith who have been friends since 1975.

• On September 12, Bruce Nauman (Season 1) will bring his project Untitled (Leave the Land Alone) to fruition. Between 11:30am-12:30pm, the words “Leave the Land Alone” will be written across the Pasadena, California sky. Read more about Nauman’s project in the Los Angeles Times.

• Proud Flesh, a new book by Season 1 artist Sally Mann, investigates the bonds between husband and wife. Mann’s sole subject is her husband of 39 years, Larry. This body of nude studies, photographed over a six-year period, will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York beginning September 15.

• The Wall Street Journal and Artinfo.com report that Polaroid’s art collection will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s. Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late last year. Their collection includes work by William Wegman (Season 1) who, like other well-known artists, used Polaroid’s large-format, 235 pound instant camera for special projects.

Sugimoto at Four Venues

The traveling retrospective exhibition of works by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) is on view at the Museum of Art Lucerne in Switzerland through January 25, 2009. The artist has designed the exhibition, previously at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, specially for the conditions of the current venue.

Sugimoto’s work is also included in Modern Photographs: The Machine, the Body and the City, Selections From the Charles Cowles Collection, a collection of vintage and contemporary photographs at the Parrish Art Museum through November 30; and Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, an installation of works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Opening tomorrow at Gagosian Gallery in New York City, Seven Days/Seven Nights will display fourteen photographs from Sugimoto’s Seascapes series in an architectural setting of the artist’s own design. The exhibition closes December 20.

Watch Sugimoto discuss the series in this excerpt from Art:21.

Kelley and Pettibon in Political Correct

On view through October 25, 2008, Blondeau Fine Art Services(BFAS) in Genève, Switzerland presents the exhibition Political Correct. Taking Martin Kippenberger’s 1994 painting Ohne Titel (Political Correct III) as its starting point, the exhibition is comprised of works that might be deemed politically incorrect in content or just “tough to swallow.” Subject matter runs the gamut from war and genocide to sex and nudity, racism, and AIDS.

The 31 artists in the exhibition (mostly American) include Mike Kelley (Season 3), Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), Chris Burden, Sarah Charlesworth, Larry Clark, Michael Cline, Jason Fox, Group Material, Daniel Hesidence, Richard Kern, Edward Kienholz, Louise Lawler, Justin Lieberman, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jerry Phillips, Charles Ray, Matthew Ronay, Kay Rosen, Martha Rosler, Peter Saul, Stephen Shames, Jim Shaw and Ivan Witenstein, Adel Abdessemed, Maurizio Cattelan, General Idea, Erik van Lieshout , Dominic McGill, Jean-Luc Verna, and Johannes Wohnseifer.

Read the exhibition text by Hudson, from Feature Inc., New York here.

1968 | 2008

This is not the first time that Summer Olympics Games are embroiled in environmental and political controversies. In 1968, Mexico City, with its high altitude containing 30% less oxygen than at sea level, proved to be a controversial choice. The lack of air led to terrible results for some, while others were able to achieve world records. Forty years later Beijing is faced with massive air pollution as it completes the preparations for the Olympics. The world renowned Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie has opted out of running in the marathon noting “the pollution in China” as a threat to his health. It remains to be seen how the environmental pollution in China will affect the athletes and the Games’ results.China is also plagued with its outrageous treatment of Tibet, resulting in massive protests around the world. Protest was also seen in Mexico City during the medal ceremonies when the two Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos “performed their Power to the People” salute. Peter Norman, the Australian silver medalist, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge showing his support for Smith and Carlos.

Another athlete to cancel an Olympic Games participation was Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest chess players of all time, who passed away earlier this year. He had plans to play for the United States at the 1968 Chess Olympiad in Lugano, Switzerland and backed out when he saw the playing hall with its bad lighting.

As athletes were breaking records in 1968, artists were busy reshaping culture. Nancy Spero(Season 4) was working on her War Series (1966-70). Bruce Nauman (Season 1) produced his first video titled Pinch Neck. Romare Bearden, in addition to being involved in founding The Studio Museum in Harlem, also established Cinque Gallery with the help of Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow. Cinque provided support for younger minority artists.

1968 marked the passing of Marcel Duchamp and the coinage of “15 minutes of fame” when Andy Warhol stated “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Frank Zappa released his first solo album Lumpy Gravy and performed King Kong with the Mothers of Invention at BBC Studio in London. Chou Wen-chung, who had studied with Edgard Varese, completed Nocturnal (1961-1968), an unfinished piece by Varese.

In his 1968 Nobel Lecture, Yasunari Kawabata explained, “The excitement of beauty calls forth strong fellow feelings, yearnings for companionship, and the word ‘comrade’ can be taken to mean ‘human being.’ The snow, the moon, the blossoms, words expressive of the seasons as they move one into another, include in the Japanese tradition the beauty of mountains and rivers and grasses and trees, of all the myriad manifestations of nature, of human feelings as well.”

How will 2008 be reminisced forty years from now? What will be the low and high points in our cultural and social achievements? Will 2008 be a critical year marking a pivotal change in the way we treat the environment and each other?

China Haze. Credit. Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE