Barbara Kruger, "The Globe Shrinks" (video still), 2010. Dimensions variable, Four-screen digital video installation. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery.

• A new video installation by Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger is now on view at the Chelsea location of Mary Boone Gallery. The Globe Shrinks (2010) is a multi-channel piece that, according to the press release, “continues Kruger’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address, and the unspoken in every conversation.” The Globe Shrinks continues through May 1.

• Through August 15, photographs by Kiki Smith (Season 2) are on view at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. I Myself Have Seen It: Photography & Kiki Smith shows how photographs play a central role in the development of Smith’s work. The exhibition features hand-made composites, diaristic snapshots, video collaborations, and the artist’s unique takes on computer-based techniques. Read about the show in the California Literary Review.

• Women of the Chrysler: A 400-Year Celebration of the Arts, now on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, celebrates the role of women in the arts. Drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection, the show comprises more than 150 works by women painters, sculptors, photographers, silversmiths, glass artists, and printmakers. Through four chronological sections and three centerpiece installations, the exhibition traces the course of women’s ever-expanding contributions to the arts worldwide. Work by Season 5 artist Cindy Sherman is included in the section on modernist women in the age of feminism. Women of the Chrysler closes July 28.

• Galerie Lelong in New York is displaying new sculptures by Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard in the solo show ERRĀTUS. The exhibition title means “wandering” or “roaming” in Latin. Among the works on view are Blackened Word (2008), an undulating, free-standing wall that stands nearly seven-feet tall; Unraveling (2007), an elaborate wall “drawing” in cedar; and the wall piece Splayed (2009), made of cup-like shapes that protrude and drape. ERRĀTUS closes May 1.

• Mark Dion (Season 4) and Robert Williams have organized An Ordinall of Alchimy, the first in a series of exhibitions presented by the art journal and gallery space Cabinet. Artists are invited to assemble work under one condition: everything installed in the gallery must have been acquired on Ebay for a total of less than $999. When the show comes to an end, its contents are offered for sale as a single item, once again on Ebay. Dion and Williams, along with their students at the Pennsylvania artists’ colony Mildred’s Lane (Matt Bettine, Joey Cruz, Kathryn Cornelius, Gabriella D’Italia, Scott Jarrett, Aislinn Pentecost-Farren, John Wanzel, Laura E. Wertheim, and Bryan Wilson), used the invitation from Cabinet as an opportunity to explore the theme of alchemical transformation. An Ordinall of Alchimy comprises the objects they assembled. The exhibition opens March 30 at Cabinet in Brooklyn, New York.

• James Turrell, Bruce Nauman (both Season 1), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in the first Biennale for International Light Art, Open Light in Private Spaces. Staged in the eastern Ruhr metropolis, and held in conjunction with the annually designated European Capital of Culture celebration/RUHR.2010, the Biennale presents works in sixty residential and private spaces in the cities of Bergkamen, Bönen, Fröndenberg/Ruhr, Hamm, Lünen and Unna. Open Light in Private Spaces continues through May 27.

• Season 1 artist Mel Chin is in Baltimore with his Fundred Dollar Bill project. The artist will lecture about art and social reform at Maryland Institute College of Art on March 31, and present two workshops on April 1. Chin will return to Baltimore the second week of April to present at the National Art Education Association’s national convention at the Baltimore Convention Center, as well as to pick up the local Fundreds in a celebration and parade titled Fundred Extravaganza. Read more about Chin in the Baltimore City Paper.

• The Gibbes Museum of Art has announced the Short List of Finalists for the third annual Factor Prize, an annual cash prize award of $10,000 to an artist whose work demonstrates the highest level of artistic achievement in any media while contributing to a new understanding of art in the South. Sally Mann (Season 1) is among the six artists short-listed this year.

• Summer Nights, Walking, the Robert Adams (Season 4) exhibition now on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Critic Richard B. Woodward says: “Mr. Adams is our leading photographer of landscape because he doesn’t ignore the human hand in its shaping and maintenance…His is a more realistic view of our role as custodians of the planet, even when we fail at the task, than one that yearns for wilderness in its prelapsarian state. He sees that even the suburbs, those most loathed of real-estate developments in postwar America and elsewhere, are nature preserves of a sort.”

• Calvin Tomkins has profiled Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu for The New Yorker.

• Visit PortlandArt.net to read a two-part interview with Season 4 artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle.

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 be applied to 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 »

Ida Applebroog, "Group A #9", 1969. Ink on paper, 10 5/8" x 8 1/4". Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

This week Art21 artists depict nether regions, play with light and space, bundle and fuse old toys, mirror the dandy, reimagine rooftops, photograph electricity, and display cookie cutters by the thousands:

• Beginning January 19, a new body of work and major installation by Season 3 artist Ida Applebroog will be on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York. Central to the exhibition, titled Monalisa, is a collection of more than 160 drawings of the artist’s crotch based on reflections of herself in a mirror. Applebroog made the drawings in 1969 during her nightly bath ritual. Packed in a basement and forgotten until studio assistants discovered them in early 2009, they are now key in her Hauser & Wirth installation. Applebroog has created a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than 100 new drawings made from her original vagina images, which she has scanned onto handmade Gampi paper, enlarged, digitally manipulated, and enhanced with washes of color. The exhibition will also include a selection of the original drawings. Monalisa will be on view through March 6. Read more about the exhibition here.

• The Visible Vagina, on view concurrently at David Nolan and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art galleries in New York, is inspired by Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. As the exhibition title suggests, “the show is designed to make visible a portion of the female anatomy that is generally considered taboo―too private and intimate for public display.” Works by Art21 artists Jeff Koons (Season 5), Kiki Smith (Season 2), Laurie Simmons, and Nancy Spero (both Season 4) will be included. The Visible Vagina is on view January 28-March 20. A panel discussion with artists in the exhibition, moderated by Anna Chave, will be held at David Nolan Gallery on January 30.

• Through February 6, works by James Turrell (Season 1), Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine are on view at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery. Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970 surveys the diverse art practices that flourished in 1960s California and are often placed under the umbrella term “Light and Space.” The selection of works in this show are intended to capture some of the more specific aesthetic qualities of the Los Angeles scene during the 1960s. A guided walk-through of the exhibition with co-curator Tim Nye will take place on January 23 at 11:30am.

• Two sculptures by Season 2 artist Maya Lin made from recycled toys (titled Toy Asteroid: Boy and Toy Asteroid: Girl) are included in Animamix Biennial: Visual Attract and Attack at MoCA Taipei. The exhibition presents the most recent developments and trends in Animamix art, or “contemporary comic aesthetics” from across the world. Featuring works by nearly 300 artists, Animamix Biennial is hosted simultaneously by three other museums in China and Taiwan: MoCA Shanghai, Today Art Museum Beijing, and Guangdong Museum of Art. Visual Attract and Attack, according to the New York Times, only features about 50 artists, not all of whom are from Asia. Other artists hail from Japan, Italy, France, Israel, Russia and the United States, showing “the international spread of the Animamix language.” The exhibition is on view through January 31.

• Shapes from Maine (2009), a project by Season 5 artist Allan McCollum, is included in the exhibition Vertically Integrated Manufacturing at Murray Guy Gallery in New York. Shapes of Maine is an extension of an earlier Shape project, for which McCollum developed a system to generate over 30 billion unique shapes, at least one for each person on the planet. McCollum worked over the internet with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly’s Copper Cookie Cutters, a home business in Trescott, Maine, to create this installation of over 2,200 one-of-a-kind works. Vertically Integrated Manufacturing brings together works by artists who, like McCollum, respond to changing processes of labor. Continues through February 20.

• Since the 1980s, a number of Art21 artists have been commissioned by The Stuart Collection to create permanent works for the grounds of University of California San Diego. Most recently, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh proposed Fallen Star — his first major permanent outdoor installation in the United States — for the Collection. At the center of his proposed piece is a small house which has been picked up by some mysterious force (such as a tornado) and has “landed” seven stories up atop the Jacobs School of Engineering. The house is cantilevered out over the edge of the building and can be entered from the roof, or roof garden (also part of the artist’s design). The actual structure might serves as a student/faculty lounge or meeting room. See images of Fallen Star here.

• Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui: From Shop Window Mannequin to Media Star, on view at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, reveals concepts and strategies developed by nineteenth-century dandies in the work and attitudes of contemporary artists. The curator considers how iconography and themes of dandyism remain significant. The show takes George Bryan Brummell, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde (with passing references to Jules Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly, the Countess of Castiglione and Joris Karl Huysmans) as its point of departure. Season 5 artists Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE are included in a roster of more than 40 artists. Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui runs January 15-March 21.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) is featured by Wired Magazine Online for his new series of electricity volt photographs, while his seascape photograph on the cover of U2′s album, No Line on the Horizon, has ranked #48 in Art Vinyl’s annual album cover awards.