Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2015 i ARTnews

BILL POWERS: THE LAST TIME WE MET YOU WERE ON YOUR WAY TO A JONI MITCHELL CONCERT. SHE WAS ALSO SILHOUETTED IN A PAINTING AT YOUR M.F.A. SHOW AT UCLA LAST MAY. Theodora Allen: It actually wasn’t a concert that night— just an event honoring her. I’ve loved her music for a long time. I was raised on it. But, yeah, the silhouetted figure from my thesis show—it’s from concert footage from the early ’70s. Her face is in profile, with head tilted, mouth slightly open, eyes cast downward. There’s a suggestion of emotion, but nothing about the look on her face is decisively Joni. There are a few profiles like this that I keep returning to. They’re unrelated images, but they share the same downcast eyes. It’s the despondency…

Over the past few years there has been a minor humor renaissance within the art world. Artists from a variety of backgrounds have been incorporating strategies cribbed from stand-up, operating in a cultural grey area that merges traditions and often attempts to create new categories altogether. Los Angeles artist Casey Jane Ellison considers comedy to be the basis of her practice, which also includes animation and video. Ellison is the host of an all-female panel TV series on Ovation called “Touching the Art,” where she explores a range of art-world topics with a deadpan demeanor that rests somewhere between disaffected ’90s MTV cartoon icon Daria and cantankerous PBS mainstay John McLaughlin. This was not an accident. “The Andy Warhol talk show was one of the images on our mood board,…

At a dinner party several years ago, a group of artists who emerged in the 1990s were talking shop. They traded stories about museum shows they’d seen as students. Each named an exhibition that later influenced the kind of artist he or she became. That conversation came to mind when I heard about the upcoming exhibition “Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s,” opening February 8 at the little-known Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey. The show’s curator is Alexandra Schwartz, who founded the hundred-year old institution’s department of contemporary art four years ago and has been researching this exhibition ever since. She borrowed its title from a popular song by Nirvana, that archetypal ’90s band from Seattle, capital of ’90s grunge. Schwartz conceived the show after noting…

PACE NOVEMBER 7 - JANUARY 10 This Richard Pousette-Dart show was a knockout. A founder of the New York School of painting, Pousette-Dart (1916–92) is best known for his earlier, imagistic paintings. The works here, fiercely concentrated in composition, were mostly from the 1970s through the 1980s and represented a departure. These two dozen or so paintings and works on paper were based on the centrally placed images of circle, square, and rectangle in various permutations, with black, gray, white, and red the dominant colors. But that says very little about their impact. Their real power lies in their insistent painterly presence—“Presence” is in the title of two of the paintings—and must be experienced directly. Often, their physicality approaches the three-dimensional, but that then shifts into less definable terrain. Bursting…

REENA SPAULINGS FINE ART NOVEMBER 1 - DECEMBER 7 The cumbersome sculptures in Klara Liden’s austere installation on the gallery’s second floor looked like high-end packing crates, but they were actually hefty benches and tables made out of wood originally used for scaffolding. Sawed into portions unable to stand on their own, they were supported by metal “crutches,” as balance was removed and then restored. Running over some pieces and across the floor, the remnants of a pair of fuzzy pink lines spray-painted over tape connected the work in a mazelike fashion. This weightless skein of absence reappeared on three illuminated plastic jugs hanging over a counter in an abandoned Chinese restaurant on the first floor. Chairs, tables, food, and people were the only things missing from the darkened dining…

MATTHEW MARKS SEPTEMBER 13 - OCTOBER 25 Alberto Giacometti’s attenuated figures must have presented a challenge to Rebecca Warren’s penchant for exaggeration. She has addressed more florid greats—Rodin, Degas, Boccioni, de Kooning—and Giacometti’s stripped-down vocabulary would offer her less to ridicule. But the allusion to Karen Carpenter in the exhibition’s title, “Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?,” revealed that eating disorders, not existential isolation, informed Warren’s take on the great Italian’s work—and that she continues to hammer away at the boundaries of taste. Clouseau and When Gauguin (all works bronze, 2014) have one, randomly hypertrophic breast, at groin height. Warren paints the lumpy surfaces of these undulating pillars with oils. Particularly skinny, Jeu Jeun (“fasting game”) rests on an expansive base slathered in chalky hues, exaggerating its pathos by emphasizing the…

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM WASHINGTON, D.C. SEPTEMBER 26 - FEBRUARY 1 James Castle (1899–1977), who was born deaf in Garden Valley, Idaho, made captivating, often enigmatic drawings of farms, houses, and people. An autodidact, he eschewed professional art supplies and drew with a mix of stove soot and saliva on any printed ephemera he could get his hands on, including food labels, flyers, and box tops. Castle sold enough drawings in his lifetime that his relatives were eventually able to buy him a trailer, which he used as a studio on the family farm in Boise. His parents and sister and her family appear in some of his strangest drawings as stiff, blocklike figures standing in living rooms and yards. Other works show a breathtaking talent for economy and perspective,…

CASA DAROS, RIO DE JANEIRO SEPTEMBER 13 - FEBRUARY 13 “This is a mirror. You are a written sentence,” reads a 1966–68 vacuum-formed sign by Luis Camnitzer. The work makes an apt introduction to “Illusions,” a show of installations, videos, drawings, and objects from the Daros Latinamerica collection of contemporary Latin American art. In another piece by Camnitzer, from 1979, a collection of oddments is pinned to the wall, each paired with a handwritten word on a fragment of paper. A scrap of candy wrapper is labeled “the motive”; a bit of plastic, “the punishment”; a battered pen top, “the premonition.” They are random objects and arbitrary words, yet we scan them for meaning. That urge to make sense of things is thrillingly challenged in this exhibition, as the works…

The first real crossover art celebrity to come out of Los Angeles’s Chinatown was Eric Wesley, who showed at China Art Objects. The gallery’s owner, Giovanni Intra, was selling Wesley’s bronze casts of onion rings in neighborhood bars ($100 a ring, though the price quickly escalated to $200) and had placed Wesley in a show at Metro Pictures in New York in December 2002. Metro Pictures was one of the first galleries to open in Chelsea, now the city’s main art district, but then a barren wasteland of garages, taxi outposts, and S&M clubs. Landing an artist in a New York gallery was what every dealer in Chinatown—including myself—was hoping for. This was a sign that your gallery had made it—that you were a serious business. In the days leading…

“VAN GOGH TO ROTHKO: MASTERWORKS FROM THE ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY” CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS FEBRUARY 21 - JUNE 1 Crystal Bridges mounts an ambitious show that “traces the story of the avantgarde,” from early modernism through Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. There are 76 works by more than 40 artists, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Joan Miró, and Andy Warhol, all on loan from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. This is, according to Crystal Bridges, “the first time many of the works have toured in decades.” Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952, oil on canvas. “DORIS SALCEDO” MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO FEBRUARY 21 - MAY 24 Bogotá-based sculptor Doris Salcedo gets her first museum retrospective in Chicago, featuring work from her three-decade career, which often…

This February, the Israeli architect, artist, and designer Ron Arad will join New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery with a debut exhibition that will showcase his riffs on the Fiat 500. After ten years at Friedman Benda, Arad came to Kasmin looking for a new gallery following Barry Friedman’s retirement last year. He was drawn to Kasmin, he said, in part because the dealer wouldn’t pigeonhole him. “Frank Gehry had to stop making furniture to be taken seriously as an architect,” Arad said in an interview. “I don’t want not to do furniture so that people better understand my art.” People will make of it what they will. By way of example, Arad described a curved metal ping-pong table he designed and showed at the Royal Academy in London. “It slows…

The contemporary-art festival—biennials, triennials, quadrennials, and so forth—has a lot working against it right now. The main focus of these kinds of exhibitions is to offer a slice of what contemporary art is at a given moment in time—a basically futile task of taste and editing that can only fail in the eyes of anyone who pays attention to these things. And so the criticism—positive or, more often, not—tends to turn into a numbers game: Why so many painters? Why so few artists of color? Why the gender imbalance? These are all legitimate questions to ask of the art world at any moment, so these exhibitions become a useful blanket excuse to confront recurring dilemmas, get angry about them, and then move on until, two or three years down the…

MATTHEW MARKS NOVEMBER 8 - JANUARY 10 Martin Puryear’s first solo show with Matthew Marks was a virtuoso riff on the theme of the Phrygian cap, consisting of ten sculptures and two etchings that take the 18th-century symbol of liberty far beyond its political connotations. True, Puryear did discover, as he was at work on the monumental Big Phrygian (2010–14), an image of a black man wearing a similar red cap with the caption “Moi libre aussi” (I too am free), but there was no cause-and-effect relationship involved. The slave is evoked, but Puryear is not mounting the barricades. What he did do was transform the Phrygian cap into a leitmotif: every piece in the show alluded to it, but did so both seriously and playfully. This was especially the…

LORETTA HOWARD AND PAVEL ZOUBOK OCTOBER 18 - NOVEMBER 15 One of modernism’s most durable dichotomies opposes nature to culture. Judy Pfaff ’s spectacular two-venue exhibition paid homage to the distinction between the forces of nature and the effects of human activity, but what was most strongly conveyed was the chaos that comes from their intermingling. The Zoubok show, titled “Second Nature,” employed natural and “unnatural” materials—insulation foam, resin, bone, leaves—to create wall-hung and suspended sculptures evoking unbridled nature, while a net of metal tendrils in the center of the gallery entangled two pieces of gnarled driftwood. Wall works evoked fantastic undersea landscapes or bizarre fungi, and large collages made reference to art history and 19th-century field guides and botanical illustrations. “Run Amok,” at Loretta Howard, investigated the experimental geometries…

GLADSTONE OCTOBER 31 - DECEMBER 20 Like other R. H. Quaytman shows, this one was site specific, except that the gallery where it was held was not the site. Rather, the permanent site will be Inhotim, a botanical garden in Brazil. This exhibition replicated how these 27 pieces were to be deployed in a pavilion designed by Solveig Fernlund, who had also reconfigured the gallery space for the Gladstone show. Setting aside the complex intellectual issues that Quaytman delights in (Fibonacci sequences, the golden spiral) and the autobiographical element (each of her exhibitions is a chapter in a book, this one chapter 27), the works are wonderful. The exhibition’s title, “O Tópico,” means subject or topic, but—especially in the Brazilian context— echoes the word trópico. Echoes and reiterations unify the…

ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES OCTOBER 30 - DECEMBER 13 This expansive, tightly curated show, which focused on Melvin Edwards’s engagement with Africa over the past half century or so, underscored the simple fact that the New York–, Dakar-, and Senegal-based artist, 78 next month, should be ranked as one of the key sculptors of the postwar era, a master using age-old means to achieve trenchant ends. He has spent his career creating assemblages wrought by welding together metal objects— hammers, locks, knives, screws—associated with violence and control, but also with creation, to make what he calls “Lynch Fragments,” many of which lined the walls here. These sculptures are dense with material (much of it sourced from Senegal)—as tangled up as any societal dispute, as tightly woven as any ideology—and they require…

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART BOSTON OCTOBER 1 - JANUARY 4 That repetition plays such a central role in art production from the 1960s forward recommends for serious art-historical consideration the largely overlooked contributions of fiber art, a heterogeneous field of textile-related techniques. Examining some 50 works by 34 artists, this well-conceived exhibition detailed fiber art’s postwar emergence and recent reclamation, and situated it in critical tension with canonized sculptural traditions, particularly Post-Minimalism. Opening with two towering “woven forms” (1961 and 1966) by Lenore Tawney, among the first to break from the planar basis of textiles, the show unfolded across several thematic groupings. With Elsi Giauque’s volumetric lattice, it demonstrated how color in fiber art inheres in the weave, rather than being applied retroactively, as in painting. Exploring the grid, structural…

After eleven years, the painter Scott Reeder has finally finished his first feature film, Moon Dust (2014), and recently screened it in New York City. “David Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead, took about seven or eight years, so I kept thinking, ‘I’m right on track!’” Reeder said over beers in Manhattan’s East Village. “It was kind of like building a cathedral out of matchsticks—I worked on it when I had the chance,” in between shows of his art, “when I had extra time or money.” The film is set on the moon, “in a resort that has seen better days, like Coney Island,” Reeder said. It’s a “retro, mid-century, ’50s kind of idea of the future.” Which is to say that it’s filled with boxy, rather flimsy-looking architecture and furniture painted…

Though Charles Atlas has worked in and mostly out of the art world for more than four decades, he still seems every bit the maverick. He has collaborated with Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, and Marina Abramović, as well as with Antony and the Johnsons, and Mika Tajima and the New Humans, spawning a new genre of “media dance” while creating many of his own live video performances. It now appears that Atlas, long a cult figure, has moved closer to center stage. This month, he will open a solo show at Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea with a nine-channel video work titled The Waning of Justice (2015). Incorporating footage of sunsets, which he shot while living on Captiva Island as a Rauschenberg Foundation artist-in-residence, the work is only obliquely political,…

GAGOSIAN NOVEMBER 10 - JANUARY 17 Aptly titled “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” Takashi Murakami’s first show in New York in five years was an absolute stunner, venturesome and dark. Murakami understands that if you’re going to spend serious cash making a show, you may as well go all the way. He opened with a 56-ton, 21-foot-tall replica of a Zen Buddhist sacred gate (complete with soaring wooden columns and a stone base), which gave way to a pair of 14-foot-tall karajishi, the lions that protect temples. They are devil-like and monstrous, equal parts mythical deities and ferocious action figures. They hold huge clubs, hungry for violence. Now comfortably mid-career, Murakami, 53, has always worked best on a grand scale, and a…

WALTER WICKISER NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 25 Here were shows by two artists, Meighen Jackson and Lauren Jones Worth, who, despite their interest in similar nature motifs, create very different work. Jackson’s mixed-media pieces, composed of ink on various kinds of paper, accented with photographs, foil, and rich swathes of pastel-hued paint, were both spare and poetic. Ghostly photographs of grasses and bamboo growing vertically across the canvases were painted over with thick, luxurious patches of black ink winding through the reeds like calligraphy. In Jacob’s Marsh (2014), the technique and imagery were fractured across six oblong canvases, spread across the white wall, resembling tree trunks in a forest. As our eyes trained over the panels and spaces in between, we could experience the illusion of motion. Lauren Jones Worth…

MURIEL GUÉPIN OCTOBER 10 - NOVEMBER 16 Works by the French artist Patrick Carrara and the Norwegian Inger Johanne Grytting represented two sides of the same coin. While both artists established their love of repetitive lines, Carrara used a stark black-and-white palette and a rigid structure, emphasizing masculinity, whereas Grytting employed loose, lighter-toned brushstrokes on top of a more vibrantly colored base, rendering her work softer and more nuanced. Carrara’s artistic progression was demonstrated here, with his earliest pieces consisting of straight graphite lines on paper, showing the depressions made by his pencil. Later, Carrara developed a layering technique by painting bold black ink on Mylar, building up rather than digging in. His most recent works jump into three dimensions—black threads binding square sheets of Plexiglas together. Grytting approaches line…

METRO PICTURES  OCTOBER 25 - DECEMBER 20 Trevor Paglen, who has advanced degrees in art and theoretical geography, usually works with telephotographic images. He is known for his observations concerning the clandestine global militaryindustrial complex and has presented evidence of a vast network of satellites and drones, black-op bases, and secret prisons in Afghanistan. He has ferreted out the emblematic patches worn by special forces and has contributed cinematography to Laura Poitras’s film Citizenfour. Paglen’s process of documenting what lies beyond the visible—“pushing perception as far as I can”—can be called extreme performance art. However, in Code Names of the Surveillance State (2014), his recent video installation, Paglen worked solely with words. On the gallery walls, 16 columns of alphabetized and deceptively senseless code names— ranging from Puffin Muffin and…

VARIOUS VENUES NEW ORLEANS OCTOBER 25 - JANUARY 25 “Prospect.3: Notes for Now” presented the work of 58 contemporary artists at 18 sites in and around New Orleans, from the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Contemporary Arts Center to college campuses, riverfront wharves, and art spaces in the city’s historic neighborhoods. This third iteration of the Prospect New Orleans biennial also included Prospect.3+, which featured the work of 250 local artists at 65 venues. Curated by Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Franklin Sirmans, P.3 brought together works that addressed contemporary power structures and social constructs as well as more existential problems of place, history, and identity. For instance, Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan’s 50-by-10-foot neon sign reading “You Belong Here,” set on a barge in the Mississippi River,…

CABINET, LONDON OCTOBER 11 - DECEMBER 6 A foreboding atmosphere permeates James Richards’s powerful seven-minute video, Raking Light (2014), the sole work in this show. Alternating positive and negative images of fire, water, and smoke are set to a portentous soundtrack, evoking a mood that verges on the apocalyptic, while the film’s more mundane passages— flocks of starlings, water fizzing in a glass, reflections in a puddle—have a quiet poetry. Crisply edited, the video combines found footage and passages filmed by the artist into a harmonious, abstract whole. We see a tree standing alone in a flooded field, windswept waves, and, most strikingly, flares or fireworks exploding in a forest. The sparks scintillate like diamonds before the scene is obscured by thick smoke. The video is shown on a continuous…