Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2015 i ARTnews

There have been two former attempts to translate the art world into a successful reality television series. Work of Art, which debuted in 2010 and ran for two seasons on Bravo, had up-and-coming artists compete for a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (“the world famous Brooklyn Museum,” in the show’s parlance) and a cash prize of $100,000. Each week, contestants made work focused on a theme (“Create a work of art based on your Audi experience,” etc.). A panel of judges that included the dealer (and contributor to this magazine) Bill Powers and New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz assessed their creations. The show was something of a rewriting of an earlier show, Artstar, in which artists competed to participate in a group show at the gallery Deitch…

Two thousand fifteen was destined to be the year of Robert Zemeckis since at least 1989, the same year a frizzy-haired scientist and his baby-faced protégé set the clock forward to October 21, 2015, defying the space-time continuum for the second time. While the date has come and gone without the flying cars and double neckties promised by Zemeckis’s Back to the Future Part II (hoverboards are kind of becoming a thing, though), the director’s prediction of a dystopian screen culture broadcasting the political ascent of a combed-over casino magnate turned out to be correct, not to mention an outcome far stranger than even he could have imagined: a Zemeckis retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The series, which opened on September 29 and is titled “What Lies Beneath”…

Inspired by a rare opportunity to acquire iconic Clyfford Still paintings, buyers made headlines in 2011 when Sotheby’s auctioned four Still canvases for $114 million, nearly twice the combined asking price. The most expensive paintings, 1949-A-No.1 and 1947-Y-No.2, sold for $61.6 million and $31.4 million respectively, well above the artist’s prior auction record of $21.2 million. Proceeds from the Sotheby’s sale went to support the new Clyfford Still Museum, which opened in Denver a week after the auction. Few collectors were aware that the new museum’s holdings included a replica of 1949-A-No.1 or that the $21.2 million painting sold earlier was one of three versions of the same composition. 1947-Y-No.2 is a replica as well. The artist, one of Abstract Expressionism’s most celebrated innovators, is now known to have produced…

Joseph Zito’s works are like dark koans. Concise, paradoxical, and meticulously composed, they grapple with a range of human emotions heavily weighted to the sorrow side. In this selection of pieces from the last 30 years, sculptures and works on paper addressed themes of death, loss, and suffering, but also, if you meditated long enough, hope. Zito’s watercolors here were psychologically disquieting—a ghostly white silhouette of a stark bedframe tumbling through an abyss of inky paint; a bloodred wing chair tipped sideways at the bottom of a blank white page—and his sculptural compositions no less so. In Stand Still Goddamn It (2012) crimson sand is trapped in the upper compartment of an hourglass, halting time even as it evokes thoughts of passion and rage. In Swimmies (2006) a sagging, baby-blue…

Marley Freeman’s show was bursting with color. Bright, brushy abstractions in pinks, oranges, mint, baby blue, and lemon were layered, filling six canvases edge to edge. The artist’s earlier experience with textiles and the decorative arts was especially evident in the way she quilted together patches of color in the paintings. One of the smaller canvases on view, Bacon (2015), creates a dynamic, even enigmatic composition by means of just three thick strokes sweeping across a bloodred canvas on a diagonal with a slight curve. A vibrant pink band crosses and connects the thicker marks. Resembling a tempting, fatty slice of bacon, it adheres to the horizontal wavy strips and seems to jump off the canvas. The four smaller paintings contained magnifications, or selections, from two of the larger works.…

Built up, scraped down, and gouged into, Los Angeles–based artist Mark Bradford’s paintings, generally created from house paint, found paper, caulk, shellac, and other non-art materials, have an insistent physical presence that telegraphs their emotional and political underpinnings. In “Scorched Earth,” his three-part exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Bradford presented a suite of new abstractions, a two-story-high mural, and a video-art installation, each informed by both his own history and that of his home city. In the museum’s lobby, Bradford—who came of age as an artist at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—had created a mammoth rendition of a map of the United States. Figures scratched into the map represented the number of AIDS cases per 100,000 people in each state as of 2009. Literally digging up…

This exhaustive survey of painter Agnes Martin’s career shows how she spent decades modulating the basic form of a gridded or banded square to achieve a vast range of aesthetic and emotional effects, from severe to sensual. Martin saw this style of clean abstraction as a route to profound emotional and spiritual truths, a way of “reaching zero,” she said. The exhibition presents her choice of artistic expression as an analog to her schizophrenia, which was only publicly revealed after her death. Born in rural Saskatchewan in 1912, Martin made her way to New York in the 1940s. Early paintings such as Mid-Winter (circa 1954), with its subdued interplay of brown and white, point to her interest in nature and landscape as well as to her debt to early modernist…

The painter Jan Frank has a reputation as a harddrinking, if not hard-fighting, downtown playboy. He is known for his sharp suits and smoky drawl, his alpaca coat, and his fondness for the racetrack (he names his paintings after favorite horses). He tap-dances in his studio, painting to Al Green, Barry White, and Minnie Riperton. He trained among conceptual artists and now makes abstract art. He was a 1970s radical and has largely maintained that lifestyle while living on one of the most expensive blocks of real estate in New York City. He is known by the right people, but not by most people. “If I had to get a tattoo,” said Frank’s friend and supporter the style writer, man-about-town, and onetime Warhol buddy Glenn O’Brien, “I’d probably reproduce a…

The chronological span of the 22 works—paintings and sculptures—in this superb exercise in connoisseurship is 1960 to 2007. The artists included were all contemporaries, known to one another and sharing at least some artistic points of view if not a codified aesthetic. This explains why a John Chamberlain crushedautomobile wall piece would fit comfortably in close proximity with two Carl Andre floor sculptures. Some secret kinship reconciles Andre’s Minimalism with Chamberlain’s abstraction in the same way that Brice Marden’s Shunt (1972) complements Robert Ryman’s 1960 Untitled: each sculpture and painting represents a different dialect of a single artistic language. Each explains the others while remaining independent. Nowhere was mysterious affinity more in evidence than on the gallery’s second-floor rotunda, where a super-refined Donald Judd wall piece, Untitled (Bernstein 78-70), 1978,…

I dris Khan came to prominence as a photographer, although his photographs have always been experimental, pushing the medium, as in his videos, paintings, and sculptures. He juxtaposes the conceptual with the painterly, the mechanically or digitally reproduced with manual interventions, language and its slippages, and the theoretical and the political, as this show demonstrated. Of the more than two dozen new works, many were large-scale ink on white or gray gesso on aluminum, with the remaining pieces mostly photographic. The imagery in almost all the pieces was constructed from countless lines of finely printed text, overlaid so that they appear illegible except at the peripheries. An idiosyncratic cross between minimalist and flamboyant, they are neither the one nor the other. Khan adds, reveals, and erases according to his own…

This excellent summer show took its title from the idea of a Grateful Dead drummer that the band was in “the transportation business”: “We move minds,” he said. Curated by Gregory Volk, the exhibition was packed with trippy works that certainly took viewers on adventures in perception. The paintings, much like road maps of psychedelic journeys, led the way. German multimedia artist Ati Maier contributed a dynamic airbrushed painting, Possibility of Perception (2011), which offered up cloverleafs and roadways zipping through space, while Sarah Walker visited the depths of outer space with the mesmerizing Voyager (2015). Bruce Pearson’s Free Getaway (2015) was a highlight, with its dyslexic grid of orange and yellow triangles literally popping off a surface of turquoise and green. The duo Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner used…

The Philadelphia Museum of Art was the final and only U.S. venue for “Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting,” an exhibition celebrating this remarkable French art dealer. Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922) not only played a major role in bringing public attention to such artists as Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but he developed an international market for their paintings. The show, which featured over 80 artworks, offered a portrait of a savvy entrepreneur, whose strategies— opening branches of his gallery abroad, mounting solo exhibitions, and offering his artists stipends in exchange for the exclusive right to sell their work—anticipated those of current art-market heavies like Larry Gagosian. Durand-Ruel inherited his parents’ Paris art gallery in 1865. For the first five…

It is difficult to pin down in a word the protean French Chilean creator Alejandro Jodorowsky. A theater and movie director, artist, writer, self-titled psychomagical advisor, and Twitter star, his work has influenced several generations of artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Curated by CAPC’s director María Inés Rodríguez, and staged by Greek artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis, this well-researched exhibition spanned 50 years and succeeded in the difficult task of summing up Jodorowsky’s multivalent career. It conveyed as well something of his psychic topography by transforming the museum’s vast central hall into a complex of discrete spaces and environments. Structured as an initiatic ascension (a very Jodorowskian motif in itself ), the show included original drawings, paintings, and cartoons, as well as documentation of Jodorowsky’s work with Panic Movement, the post-Surrealist…

“JOHN BALDESSARI: THE STÄDEL PAINTINGS” STÄDEL MUSEUM, FRANKFURT NOVEMBER 5 - JANUARY 24 To mark the Städel Museum’s bicentennial, California Conceptual artist John Baldessari has produced a new series of works based on masterpieces owned by the museum. Baldessari, known for his wry art about art, will take on work by such artists as Dirck van Baburen, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Maria Lassnig. In a typical move for Baldessari, the large-scale collages that result will pit text against image, likely with more than a hint of sardonic humor. “ANOTHER MINIMALISM: ART AFTER CALIFORNIA LIGHT AND SPACE” FRUITMARKET GALLERY, EDINBURGH NOVEMBER 14 - FEBRUARY 21 With so many artists using light in large-scale installations, it’s high time an exhibition took a close look at the influence of artists like Robert…

A year ago, in a former bank in Brooklyn, RoseLee Goldberg hosted a postmodern fundraiser featuring a “special food performance” by artist Jennifer Rubell. The event was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Performa biennial, founded in 2004 by Goldberg, a scholar of performance art, to raise awareness of the art form. Meanwhile, across the East River from Performa’s feast, Sean Kelly Gallery was presenting the most recent exhibition of the world’s best-known performance artist, Marina Abramović. For the show, the artist had visitors don blindfolds and noise-canceling headphones and then wander for as long as they wished through a vast, empty exhibition space. Arguably, Performa and Abramović have achieved more over the past decade to raise the profile of performance art than anyone or anything else. This month,…

Excuse Me!?!...I’m looking for the “Fountain of Youth,” Michael Smith’s impressive installation, was an autobiography of sorts, that unfolded gradually. Bringing together the artist’s droll performance personas—the sad-sack “Mike” and the infantile “Baby Ikki”—it skewered the absurdities of TV culture and the American Dream of eternal youth. For an artist who’s been doing narrative performances since 1978, it was a grand if premature summary of his tragicomic oeuvre. This multipart, multimedia installation also transferred a characteristic state of befuddlement from the artist’s personas to its spectators, who found themselves in a faux-medieval hall. Heraldic banners bore unfinished Sudoku puzzles. Videos showed the hapless Mike fiddling with a cell phone and an eyeglass case. A large handwoven tapestry presented a digital collage of childhood drawings (Smith’s own). The centerpiece: an iconic…

“Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television” opened with Barbra Streisand prancing through the Philadelphia Museum of Art and ended with Andy Warhol performing on Saturday Night Live. In between those historic moments viewers witnessed numerous connections between modern art and early television. The exhibition was best when it drew attention to indisputable links—for example, a spinning disk at the beginning of The Twilight Zone so obviously similar to a “Rotorelief ” by Marcel Duchamp. More than just a show about aesthetic affinities, “Revolution of the Eye” also showcased artists’ participation in network television in the ’60s. John Cage appeared on CBS’s game show I’ve Got a Secret, slamming objects into a bathtub, and Warhol acted in a commercial for Braniff Airways before making his…

Epic is the word for Wael Shawky’s brilliant video trilogy Cabaret Crusades (2010–15). It is narrated in Arabic with English subtitles and has a running time of three-plus remarkably fastpaced hours. It is as sweeping as any Hollywood spectacular, complete with rich period costumes, clever scenography, and a pulsing, propelling musical score. But it is smarter and more politically complicated—with no heroes. The saga of the Crusades, it begins in the eleventh century and is told from a non-Western point of view (based on Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf ’s book The Crusades through Arab Eyes); in it, Christians and Muslims are equally condemned for unspeakable barbarity and treachery to friend and foe alike. Broken alliances abound; fathers murder wives, children, and vice versa; entire cities are torched; and religion is…

Titled after a book by Martinican author Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), this exhibition proposed a connection between Miami’s multicultural society and the larger history of global migrations. Works by six artists addressed the subjects of transience, belonging, and loss using powerful visual metaphors, many taken from the landscape and culture of the Caribbean. They included Xaviera Simmons’s In the Lushness of (2015), a wall of hand-lettered English, Spanish, and Creole texts describing Caribbean water, winds, and light; Tony Capellán’s ocean-hued Mar invadido (2015), a wall-to-wall installation of personal possessions found washed up on the beaches of Santo Domingo; and Hurvin Anderson’s Country Club: Chicken Wire (2008), a painting of a fenced-off tennis court that contrasts tropical vegetation with a relic of British rule. Elsewhere were Ledelle Moe’s massive concrete heads, resembling…

Exploring issues of oppression, dislocation, and conflict, Mona Hatoum’s sculptural and conceptual works in various mediums are often seen in relation to her by now well-known biography. She was born to Palestinian parents in Lebanon; in 1975, while visiting London, she found herself unable to return home due to the Lebanese Civil War. She resided in London for many years after. Hatoum’s Paris retrospective included the works for which she is best known: installations and sculptures featuring such allusive objects as cages, barbed wire, and maps. Most interesting, though, were her early 1980s performances, which were here represented not just by grainy black-and-white video documentation, but also by archival images, sketches, and writings by the artist, describing these dramatic pieces in a laconic manner. In Don’t Smile, You’re on Camera…

Fifteen small wall sculptures—or more accurately, three-dimensional collages—constituted the bulk of Vincent Fecteau’s first solo show in Switzerland. They continued the San Francisco–based artist’s recent revival (after more than a decade of non-imagist work) of the small-scale tableaux, incorporating prosaic found images, that he began making in the late 1990s. As in the past, home-decor magazines were the source of many of the cutouts in these assemblages. Combined with pieces of black-painted wicker basketry and other ready-made elements, tiny views of luxe interiors evoked decorators’ maquettes, or even miniature stage sets— part Billy Baldwin, part Joseph Cornell. A particularly theatrical work featured four photos of sofa cushions “illuminated” by a picture of three recessed ceiling spots and set within a cardboard frame-within-a-frame as if they were props (or perhaps actors)…