Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2015 i ARTnews

BILL POWERS: YOU HAVE A WALL IN YOUR STUDIO WHERE YOU MATCH ART-WORLD FIGURES WITH THEIR CELEBRITY LOOK-ALIKES FOR YOUR INSTAGRAM. WHAT FAMOUS PERSON DO PEOPLE THINK YOU LOOK LIKE? Rob Pruitt: Somebody said Jim Carrey, but I don’t see it at all. BP: YOU CLAIM TO BE SHY, BUT I ONCE WENT TO A BOOK SIGNING IN NEW YORK WHERE YOU WERE NUDE EXCEPT FOR A STUFFED PANDA BEAR SITTING IN YOUR LAP. RP: I’m so deeply insecure about what I’m presenting to the public that I always feel like I need to go the extra mile, you know—gild the lily. Just sitting there signing copies of my new book would be boring. I’ve had this feeling since art school that the key to any good performance art is…

In the spring of 1968, I took the last course ever taught by the art historian Meyer Schapiro. I was, at the time, a junior at Columbia College, and it was a thrill to be studying with someone who could be so enthusiastic about the experience of looking closely at objects, ranging from Romanesque portals to Cézanne watercolors. Schapiro’s intended retirement had been announced, and we all realized that this “Survey of Abstract Painting” would be the final opportunity anyone would have to study with him. Then Columbia University was shut down by student protests. Schapiro met with us to explain that the classes could not continue, and he would not be able to give a final exam as he intended. Therefore, he told us, our entire grade for the…

“The sea, for me and for a lot of Cubans, was like a wall, more an image of isolation than a beautiful place,” said Yoan Capote. The 38-year-old Havanabased conceptual artist was in New York preparing for his current show at Jack Shainman Gallery. “I grew up with a frustration about the limitation and an obsession about crossing the sea,” he explained. When he had his first chance to travel to the United States in 2002, for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center facilitated by the American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba in New York, he fully intended to immigrate. “It was my opportunity to stay in the United States,” said Capote, who during his residency made In tran/sit, a cluster of eight flea-market suitcases cast in…

One expected to be disoriented walking into Lehmann Maupin’s new venue on West 22nd Street. It was formerly the Sonnabend Gallery, and a number of the artists in this imaginative show, curated by Manuel E. Gonzalez, had associations with both galleries. However, despite such familiarity, the gathering of new and old “friends” had a sparkle that only unanticipated relationships among them could trigger. Hanging on the wondrously white wall in the front space was an exceptional collage by Mickalene Thomas whose puzzle-like composition led to various spatial readings. It hung opposite Adriana Varejão’s wall piece Folds (2000–2001) in which brown entrails exploded out of a flat blue canvas uniting the elegant and the grotesque. Elsewhere, Juergen Teller’s C-print of a ravishing nude Vivienne Westwood as odalisque held court among a…

This timely exhibition presented a selection of contemporary artworks inspired by Walden—both the pond, located just two miles from the deCordova, and the book, published in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau about living “Spartan-like” in a one-room cabin on Walden’s shore. The 16 artists included in the show examined nature, culture, and community in the context of Thoreau’s project. Many works made reference to Thoreau’s close observation of the natural world. Spencer Finch’s large-scale collage Walden Pond (Morning Effect, March 13, 2007), 2007, for example, matches the color of the pond at different times of the day to hues in reproductions of Claude Monet’s landscapes. A thread of ecological anxiety runs through Deb Todd Wheeler’s underwater video Searching for Imposters (2014), in which undulating forms, recalling jellyfish, turn out to…

There were few art objects on view in this exhibition, which was spread out over three of Beijing’s biggest commercial galleries. Instead, curators Sun Yuan, Peng Yu, and Cui Cancan collected documentation and narrative descriptions of the activities of 34 Chinese artists, arts organizations, and collectives whose work, for the most part, entails not the making of images, but the infiltration of daily life. The show began at Galleria Continua with a group of older artists. They included Gu Dexin and Li Yongbin, both of whom have abandoned the art world. Li, who is best known for his haunting paintings of blurred faces, has since become a peasant farmer in Hebei province, believing that only by leading an unobtrusive existence can he repair his karma after art making. Li and…

In this spare, at times esoteric show, Danh Voō returned to his favored themes of individual and collective histories and the global spread of images and ideas. Born in Vietnam to Catholic parents and raised in Denmark, Vo, who will represent Denmark in this year’s Venice Biennale,ōis a kind of conceptual scavenger who combines antique elements with more familiar bric-a-brac to create resonant objects and installations. In Your mother sucks cocks in Hell (2015)—titled after the line spoken by the possessed girl in the 1973 movie The Exorcist—a jury-rigged scrap-wood armature is used to join the head from a French Early Gothic carved Madonna and the legs from a late Roman marble statue of a child. A 17th-century oak cherub’s head gets a similar treatment in Untitled (2015); cut down…

In the summer of 2009, in the middle of a global recession, I opened a show at Rental, my gallery on New York’s Lower East Side, called “Don’t Panic I’m Selling My Collection.” As it turned out, the recession would affect the art market for exactly one auction season, but that summer, when everyone was selling whatever they had, the people like me who didn’t have as much knew it was a good time to buy. For the show, I was using a pulley system to haul canvases by Jack Goldstein and George Condo up the side of my building and into the gallery because they wouldn’t fit into the elevator. My director had taken sailing classes and had jury-rigged this system for me. Condo’s Large Reclining Smoker had sold…

“REVOLUTION OF THE EYE: MODERN ART AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN TELEVISION” JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK MAY 1 - SEPTEMBER 20 The Jewish Museum takes a look at how the modernist art of the 1950s and ’60s relates to the rise of American television in the same era. The show argues that television aided in the “promotion of avant-garde ideals and aesthetics” and became a “committed patron” of modern art. If nothing else, it’s a fine opportunity to catch Alexander Calder and Batman under the same roof. Lee Friedlander, Florida, 1963. JENNY HOLZER MUSEO CORRER, VENICE MAY 6 - NOVEMBER 22 As the art world prepares their best gondola outfits and descends upon Venice, American artist Jenny Holzer nabs a solo show at the prestigious Museo Correr. The exhibition features…

Brooklyn-based, artists C. T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska are representing Poland at the 56th Venice Biennale. Jasper, who works in a variety of mediums, focuses on video and film and is best known for his investigations of cinematic history laced with sociopolitical issues, as viewed through a skeptical but romantic lens. He is concerned with the role of film, science fiction, and avant-garde utopian discourse in the shaping of the collective consciousness and imagination. Erased (2013) and Sunset of the Pharaohs (2014) are two such recent projects, based on a meticulous and sophisticated process of intervention, altering existing films that are often of cult status. Malinowska, too, is adept in multiple disciplines, emphasizing sculpture, video, and performance. Her leanings are anthropological, art historical, and musical, with cultural collisions of particular…

In the 1960s, Renzo Piano met Louis I. Kahn at the home of French structural designer Robert Le Ricolais on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Piano, the son of a builder from Genoa, was working as an assistant to Le Ricolais, who taught in the university’s architecture department. At the time, Kahn was designing the Olivetti-Underwood Factory in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and needed someone to help him with drawings for the lighting of the open-plan factory. Within a week, Piano was installed making sketches for the project. Piano would work for Kahn intermittently for a few years before opening his own firm with Richard Rogers, with whom he won the competition to design Paris’s iconic Centre Pompidou. It was during the time that Piano worked for him that Kahn’s…

Born in Tel Aviv, raised in Copenhagen, Tal R emerged as a painter to watch early in this century. He paints as if he is starting over, not from scratch but from an amnesiac time warp with vague recollections of early modernists. Although he has been compared to Matisse, Dufy, Balthus, and late Picabia, his work in this show didn’t resemble any of theirs. Tal R’s canvases here veered between being much too pretty and being ugly in all the wrong ways. His colors were too light and shrill or too dense and heavy. But his paintings were suffused with a free-floating anxiety, vulnerability, and awkwardness that had little to do with the modern century and everything to do with our own confused moment. His art was weird enough to…

The show “Jon Kessler’s Gifts” was like a curiosity shop filled with strange kinetic items dedicated to the artist’s loved ones. The walls were painted a soothing gray, and spotlights shone down on modest yet rambunctious sculptures arranged on plinths. Small metal plaques served as old-timey identifiers for these personalized artifacts, which included The Lady—Juliette Kessler’s 16th Birthday Gift (2010), Sarah Hoover and Tom Sachs Wedding Gift (2013), and Siri Hustvedt’s 60th Birthday Gift (2015). Fun trinkets and toys merged with serious hardware, weights, and manipulated metal. Many of the pieces were precisely calibrated scales, with undulating metal wires serving as armatures for objects balancing on either end. In Barbara Sukowa’s 60th Birthday Gift (2010), the numbers 6 and 0, fashioned out of brass, are counter-weighted on the opposite side…

Mike Nelson’s cluttered world took to the beachfront in the narrative-provoking show “Gang of Seven.” Alluding to every possible pirate and shipwreck adventure story—to Robinson Crusoe and Riddley Walker, and to the impossibility of not inventing your own universe when forced to do so—this show was witty, energetic, sad, and unsettling. Composed of materials from the Pacific Northwest coast, the show featured impromptu shrines to the Group of Seven landscape painters of the early 1900s and to a friend, Erlend Williamson, who died climbing the Scottish Highlands. The work is deeply personal, and many of the materials had been accumulated by Williamson. There was something touching and inviting as viewers passed through swinging wood barroom doors into an enclosed private world of story-telling, debauchery, and ribaldry, and then found themselves…

High-impact color and clean forms, a combo of baroque and minimalist impulses, characterized this elegantly installed exhibition. While Stephen Antonakos (1926–2013) is best known for his neon projects, he also produced a sumptuous series of multimedia works on paper titled “The Cuts,” early examples of which accounted for the bulk of this show. This body of work, rediscovered last summer, fleshed out a project that intrigued Antonakos until 2012. It represents a less familiar aspect of his multifaceted production, consisting of pieces flaunting China marker–ed and penciled grounds that are mostly monochrome with some surfaces cut to create spare and intricate geometric patterns. Best, however, were the works in black and white, white over color, and pure white on white, making their taut structure even more apparent. Recalling Lucio Fontana’s…

Israeli artist Yael Bartana is best known for her video trilogy, And Europe Will be Stunned (2007–11), that chronicles a fictional movement to bring Jews back to Poland. In two new videos, she continues to play with transplanted traditions and hybrid identities, but this time, mixing more fact with the fiction. True Finn (2014) is an engaging work that documents a social experiment in which eight Finnish residents— a Somali Muslim immigrant, a native of Japan, a Roma woman, and even a couple of native-born Finns—come together to explore the question, Who is a true Finn? This has gained urgency as rightwing nationalists attempt to exclude “outsiders” from Finnish citizenship. Mixed with clips from vintage Finnish films brimming with ethnic stereotypes, the film concludes that nationality is more a matter…

There were many beautiful and poignant moments in “Intervals,” a two-venue exhibition of recent work by the Puerto Rico−based collaborative duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. There were just as many moments when it was frankly a chore to sit through pieces that were resolutely esoteric, glacially paced, and ending, as they started, with a whisper, a tsk-tsk, a screech, or a growl. The artists, who are known for their research-based projects, here employed objects, films, live performances, and sound to invoke the span of geologic time and our own place within it. An installation of individual dinosaur bones resting on clear acrylic bases occupied an entire floor at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. While this piece reiterated themes found in the rest of the show, it seemed dull and…

On the morning of the last day of winter, the artist and poet John Giorno buzzed open the gate on the ground floor of the hulking Bowery building that he has called home for 49 of his 78 years and met me on the third floor, where he lives. I was there to talk to him about his upcoming exhibitions, a solo show at New York’s Elizabeth Dee gallery and a retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. On the second floor of the building is William Burroughs’s old apartment, which Burroughs called the Bunker. Giorno took over the space after Burroughs died in 1997. He meditates for a couple of hours each day. Giorno’s been a Tibetan Buddhist since the early ’70s and has filled the Bunker with…

There’s a long tradition of artist-led bands— including Destroy All Monsters, Talking Heads, Theoretical Girls, and Sonic Youth—that blur the line between popular music and contemporary art. The only thing these bands have in common, besides art school and perhaps a certain affinity for dissonance, is that they all defy easy classification. To this small canon add Chloe Maratta and Flannery Silva, who together comprise the Baltimore duo Odwalla88. “They’re very, very special,” said the artist Brendan Fowler, who recently launched a nontraditional record label called VR/DM8H943 with “Lily 23,” an Odwalla88 full length, released in the form of combination embroidered patch and USB drive. “They’re the kind of thing that only comes along very rarely. “I would say that they’re easily among the top five best things I’ve ever…

In late February, while in the throes of preparing his project for the 56th Venice Biennale, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was just as purposefully going about daily life at his home in the South of France. As we spoke via hiccuping cellphones, he was preoccupied with getting to town to pick up the chicken he would cook for his son’s sixth birthday party (his other three children are girls). He let on with amusement that the cake, which he wasn’t baking himself, was to be a giraffe. For Boursier-Mougenot, 54, life and art and thought are consonant, and that is echoed in his complex artworks, which more often than not have a life of their own. Three months before the Biennale’s May opening, he was plotting the final details of the installation…

Ranging from the sexually explicit to the vulgarly materialistic, the subjects of Steve Gianakos’s recent works are women in a variety of situations that many artists might consider taboo. Gianakos, however, has never shied away from lewd imagery, which he charmingly juxtaposes with almost child-friendly cartoons. Executed primarily in black and white, the works in this exhibition were divided into two parts—images of women in compromising positions with male figures, and those of women wrapped up in fashion and consumed with their own appearance. In She Was in No Hurry to Be Married Again (2013), a woman in some version of reverse cowgirl sticks her tongue into the mouth of a demonic gray creature. The title of the work adds to the deadpan ribaldry of the scene. An equally witty…

At once sensual and restrained, the paintings in Swedish artist Mamma Andersson’s show “Behind the Curtain” were beautifully rendered. There were eerie surrealist-tinged interiors with objects and furnishings from the 18th century to the present. Lightly brushed-over areas of thick impasto were juxtaposed with stained sections. The rich browns playing off glowing whites created surfaces that were satisfyingly tactile, yet never overworked. The titles set up menacing implications for ostensibly innocent subjects. A theatrical domestic setting was implied in some paintings, with allusions to costume changes. But the mise-en-scène was lifeless and silent. Even the two women dancing in Ceremony (2014) seemed lost in a trance. The compact black feline in Lyckokatt (2014), however, looks back at the viewer with steadfast golden eyes. In Hangman (2014), a figurine suspended by…

The central image was searing, its brilliance both blinding and revelatory. Housed in an enclosed, darkened space within the gallery, the picture of two young women was taken by Dutch photojournalist Koen Wessing (1942–2011) during the 1978 Nicaraguan revolution. Chileanborn artist Alfredo Jaar blew up the image and made it the linchpin of his installation Shadows (2014), accompanying it with six light-boxed transparencies of the same event also captured by Wessing. Here Jaar shows the women emerging from a pale ground, coming slowly into sharper focus, running home. Their bodies are torqued in raw, unmistakable grief; they’ve just learned about the assassination of their father. As the image becomes brighter and brighter, the figures coalesce into a white silhouette, and then everything dissolves into a whiteness that assaults the eyes,…

Tyson Reeder’s lightly gorgeous landscapes, cityscapes, and interiors are marked by an unpretentious innocence and a wildly beautiful color sense. This show’s unlikely tour de force was a painting of a shoe store, with glowing yellow shelves holding flats and heels of shocking pink and lavender, deep bluish purple, and bloody red. Benches are a piercing lime green, and the floor’s pale-blue and aqua squares evoke the sea and sky. A fascinating chromatic relationship extended from this painting to the others in the gallery. Unexpected visual glory could also be found in a painting of a motorcycle with an extended front wheel. Posed in front of a row of gold-and-tan checkerboard skyscrapers against a black sky, it rests on psychedelic orange-and-lavender pavement. In another work a van adorned with a…

In MALBA’s permanent collection is a 1934 painting by Antonio Berni (1905–1981), titled The Demonstration. It depicts a group of protesting Argentine workers as a sea of blazing faces. Executed in social realist style, it is almost unrecognizable as being by the same artist as the one whose work formed this exhibition at the same museum. Convinced that painting could not sufficiently portray the plight of Argentina’s working class, in the late 1950s Berni abandoned painterly realism for realism of a very different sort: works that instead of merely depicting the trash heaps of Buenos Aires’s slums, for example, actually incorporate real trash. Over time, this detritus evolved from scrap metal and rags in the 1950s to brightly colored consumer packaging in the 1970s. Consisting of over 150 works, “Juanito…

No matter how many you’ve seen, Richard Serra’s huge works in forged or rolled steel still stop you in your tracks. Although it included only four sculptures and one work on paper, this exhibition showed the artist covering a wide range of forms and spatial relationships. Ramble (2014) is a thicket of upright steel slabs staggered in rows that only slowly reveals its logic. The title could refer to a country walk or perhaps to a popular cruising area in New York City’s Central Park—the piece certainly conjures associations of forests, wind-ruffled water, and surprise encounters. Dead Load (2014) was the weightiest object here, although it is far from inert. Consisting of two massive oblong blocks, one—slightly larger— set atop the other, it resembles the sarcophagus of a leader lying…