Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2015 i ARTnews

CARSTEN HÖLLER HAYWARD GALLERY, LONDON JUNE 10 - SEPTEMBER 6 Carsten Höller will have his first UK retrospective, some of which might look familiar to anyone who saw the artist’s 2011 solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York. The show will include Höller’s enormous spiraling slides, which will be installed outside the Hayward. (Höller debuted this work in London, at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, in 2006.) Be warned: they’re not for the claustrophobic. Carsten Höller, Carousel Mirror, 2006. RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA GARAGE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MOSCOW JUNE 12 - AUGUST 20 Garage Museum’s new space in Gorky Park will kick off with a show by Rirkrit Tiravanija, known for his installation-cum-performance pieces that sometimes involve serving art connoisseurs plates of pad thai, for instance, or inviting people…

ARTISTS SPACE EXHIBITIONS & ARTISTS SPACE BOOKS AND TALKS MARCH 8 - MAY 24 With her mesmerizing post-digital videos and documentations of lecture-performances, Hito Steyerl proves herself one of the most intriguing and profound artists around. She deals with the circulation of data and images, the slippages between truths and fictions, the destabilizations of digital culture, the political implications of hypercapitalism, and the migration of found images across different contexts— and somehow makes it all fascinating. Her double survey at Artists Space included eight existing videos and one new work in an installation she conceived. Opening with Red Alert (2007), a computermonitor triptych that politicizes the monochrome, the show included In Free Fall (2010), which weaves a web of connections among a plummeting parachutist, Howard Hughes, the stock-market crash, the…

ACQUAVELLA APRIL 15 - JUNE 12 Jacob El Hanani’s splendid drawings suggest that all art is autobiographical and that abstraction is a part of human nature. Potentially paradoxical, these conjoined ideas are also linked to another contradictory pair: our simultaneous need to reveal and conceal ourselves. El Hanani’s meticulous penand-ink (his only medium) drawings are encoded self-expression, an aesthetic of secrecy. For example, The Hebrew Barbed Wire (2013) appears at a distance to be a mass of loosely woven barbed wire. We see the wire, and we see through the tangle. Inspected at close range the barbed wire turns into the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. To inscribe those letters is to evoke a millennial tradition; to turn them into barbed wire is to allude to past horrors and current…

TRESTLE FEBRUARY 20 - MARCH 27 Painter Arlan Huang expresses his artistic decisions in layers. This exhibition, titled “Swimming Awkward Moment,” featured very large canvases in pastel hues and a series of extremely small paintings on acrylic, both illustrating equally the impact of his technique. Swimming Awkward Moment (2014), measuring 80 by 90 inches, was a surprisingly strong image considering its predominantly pastel palette, punctuated in places by bright red. Huang randomly chose a dozen or so colors to work with, some of which he’d never used before, and then stood just inches from the canvas, painting thick lines that piled up as they curved and intersected. Huang uses this technique as a form of meditation. He raises his “chi,” or breath, to direct his lines around the canvas, even…

NEWARK MUSEUM NEWARK, NEW JERSEY FEBRUARY 25 - AUGUST 9 Britain consolidated the territories comprising present-day Nigeria in 1914; a newly independent Nigeria abolished monarchies in 1963. Yet the country’s regional kings (and queens) continue to exercise considerable power, if not in an official capacity, over kingdoms from Ife in the Niger Delta to Kano in the dry north. “Royals and Regalia: Inside the Palaces of Nigeria’s Monarchs” presents Nigerian photographer George Osodi’s sumptuous color portraits of these rulers, whose bearing reflects their traditional position of authority. In a 2012 picture, His Royal Majesty Agbogidi Obi James Ikechukwu Anyasi II, Obi of Idumuje Unor, 88, stares sternly from beneath a beaded crown. His red, green, and yellow patterned robe, printed with a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth II, appears…

WHITECHAPEL LONDON JANUARY 15 - APRIL 6 “Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015” opened with the painting Black Quadrilateral (ca. 1915) by Russian Polish artist Kazimir Malevich. An off-kilter black rectangle on a white field, the painting is small—a mere 6½ by 10 inches—and unassuming. Yet it was among Malevich’s works that inaugurated the Suprematist movement, whose artists were closely associated with the Russian Revolution. With over 100 pieces by 100 artists from around the world, the show examined modernism’s social legacy through the lens of geometric abstraction. Aleksandr Rodchenko’s radically cropped black-andwhite photograph Shukhov Tower, Moscow (1929), for example, speaks to the Russian avant-garde’s rejection of bourgeois figurative art, as does El Lissitzky’s abstract propaganda poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge! (1919–20). The…

ELEANOR ANTIN Born in 1935, lives in San Diego, California Several years ago I was on a panel at the home of a collector couple. They had a garden where they served food to a crowd of art-world people. It was all relaxed and nonhierarchical; the hosts sat in a corner and seemed to be having a good time. After the panel, a woman in the audience had a question. She was the director of the art gallery at a small college and wanted to do an all-women show, but there was protest about it and she didn’t know if it was a worthy thing to do. At that moment, our hostess leapt onto the stage and began to talk about how she and her husband had amassed a large…

JOSÉE BIENVENU MARCH 5 - APRIL 11 Simplicity and extravagance mingled in these works of surprising amplitude. Using only common paper objects and ambient light, Yuken Teruya created entire solar systems and life cycles. Laid out on a long, low white pedestal, nine yellowing issues of the New York Times comprised the medium and substance of “Minding My Own Business.” From the above-fold image on each front page, plants appeared to sprout, as if reclaiming the paper for the earth. These cutouts, arranged in relation to the images beneath—all documenting sadness or atrocities—created an otherworldly effect. In Constellation (2012), black luxury-brand shopping bags of various sizes are arranged into delicately balanced piles on wall-mounted shelves. Some bags show logos embossed on the thick paper; all are tipped horizontally to expose…

MONYA ROWE MARCH 1 - APRIL 12 Russian American artist Vera Iliatova’s surreal paintings in “For Now, at Once” compared plain-Jane teenage girls with superannuated still lifes. The centuries-old association between women and nature has been done to death, even more so the use of half-bloomed flowers as a metaphor for adolescence and growth. But Iliatova is a thoughtful stylist, and with the works in this show she was able to breathe new life into those clichés using her visually complex technique. These paintings took Jane Freilicher’s warm, peaceful flower arrangements and turned them dark and moody, using a confusion of space to make the bouquets appear as ’50s sci-fi monsters, threatening to abduct the girls who sulk and socialize around them. In Separate Ways (2015), a potted flower arrangement…

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART LOS ANGELES MARCH 21 - JUNE 28 William Pope.L’s enormous interpretation of the American flag fills the cavernous central space at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary with mesmerizing sights and sounds. Flaunting an extra star and unruly stripes whose tail ends are beginning to separate into frayed ribbons, the 16-by-45-foot flag billows and twists in a gale-force wind created by four large industrial fans. Klieg lights programmed to dim and brighten in the darkened gallery add to the drama. The artist calls the work—and the exhibition itself— Trinket (2008/2015), but the flag is anything but trivial. A spectacular evocation of an embattled democracy, unveiled in 2008 in Kansas City and making its second appearance here, the installation completely dominates the show. Born in Newark and based in Chicago,…

OCAT SHANGHAI MARCH 21 - MAY 24 It’s been 20 years since Beijing-born artist Wang Gongxin returned to China after a decade in New York City. In this solo exhibition, he reflected on the ideas and events that have shaped his work. The show opened with a series of photographs documenting Wang’s 1995 project The Sky of Brooklyn: Digging a Hole in Beijing, for which he dug a deep well in the courtyard of his house in China. At the bottom of the well he placed a monitor that played a video, made before leaving Brooklyn, of the sky in New York. Visitors to the courtyard were thus treated to the illusion of looking through the well to the other side of the world. A play on “digging a hole…

BILL POWERS: EASTMAN KODAK’S THE JOY OF PHOTOGRAPHY WAS PUBLISHED IN 1979, ALMOST TWENTY YEARS BEFORE YOU LOOKED TO IT FOR INSPIRATION. BY CONTRAST, RICHARD PRINCE BEGAN MAKING HIS INSTAGRAM PORTRAITS WHEN THAT PLATFORM WAS RELATIVELY NEW. MY QUESTION IS: HAVE GESTATION PERIODS SPED UP WITH THE RAPIDITY OF TECHNOLOGY? Piotr Uklanski: I don’t think you need to wait. The fact is that in 1979 I was 11 years old and didn’t know shit about photography. I had to learn. What I liked about the Kodak book is that it tells you how to make the photograph. I didn’t take any pictures from the book itself. I put myself in a submissive position. I was like a dumb Polack following instructions rather than some savvy conceptual artist with the wisdom…

It is sometimes assumed that feminist art—the art made in the heyday of feminism’s second wave in the 1960s and ’70s—was monolithic. Nothing could be further from the truth. While there was general agreement about the existence of gender disparities, artists, like activists, differed widely in how they addressed them. Just as there were and are many feminisms, there were and are many branches of feminist art. Even today, one of the most fractious issues within feminist political and artistic circles is the question of pornography and the politics of erotic representation. While much feminist art has been integrated into mainstream art history, artists who embraced a sexpositive attitude in their work have been systematically excluded from important exhibitions and catalogues devoted to women’s art. This subset—what I like to…

MAURA REILLY: AT WHAT POINT IN YOUR LIFE DID YOU REALIZE THAT THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS INEQUALITY BETWEEN THE SEXES? Linda Nochlin: I remember vividly my first act of protofeminist critique in the realm of the visual. I must have been about six years old when I performed this act of desecration. Slowly and deliberatively I poked out the eyes of Tinker Bell in an expensively illustrated edition of Peter Pan. I still remember my feeling of excitement as the sharp point pierced through those blue, long-lashed orbs. I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated Tinker Bell—her weakness, her sickening sweetness, her helplessness, her wispy, evanescent body (so different from my sturdy plump…

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH JANUARY 29 - MARCH 7 Nancy Graves—the youngest artist and fifth woman ever to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney—burst onto the scene in 1969 with three improbable handmade life-size camels that hovered between taxidermy and simulacra. Her work carried Post-Minimalism, conceptualism, and process art into unexpected maximal territory that extended from Paleolithic creatures and environmental issues to the very new science of hard data. This astonishing exhibition was not just a reminder of another neglected major woman artist, but an affirmation, on the 20th anniversary of her untimely death, that her work was so far ahead of its time, it is, even now, at the cutting edge. Inside-Outside (1970), a dismantled camel skeleton constructed from steel, wax, acrylic, marble dust, fiberglass, animal skin, and paint,…

SCULPTURECENTER JANUARY 25 - MARCH 30 TYLER ROLLINS FINE ART FEBRUARY 19 - APRIL 11 In these two shows, Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook used video and sculpture to ponder the role of women in Thai society as well as the life cycle, canine psychology, and Jeff Koons’s pornographic “Made in Heaven” paintings. The SculptureCenter’s mid-career survey showcased Rasdjarmrearnsook’s more somber side. Much of the work tackled death in some way. In three videos from “The Class” (all 2005), Rasdjarmrearnsook gave Joseph Beuys–like lectures about death to real cadavers. While these required some knowledge of Theravada Buddhism, the most popular religion in Thailand, for full effect, they hit on something that transcends all cultures—the human desire to know what happens after life. Animals, both living and dead, appeared often in these…

CHAMBERS FINE ART FEBRUARY 26 - MAY 9 Arthur Waley, a 20th-century English translator of Chinese and Japanese literary classics, never visited China. When asked why not, he said he preferred the China of his mind. While artist Yan Shanchun actually lives there, he also seems to prefer an imagined China, specifically his native city, the beautiful Hangzhou, and more specifically, West Lake, the subject of his current exhibition. In Yan’s nearly blank paintings, or so they seem at first, panoramas emerge slowly, sensuously from creamy surfaces layered with paint, magically conjured by a suggestive stroke of blue here, a smear of black there, color kept at a minimum. His landscapes are the stuff of dreams—indeed, the title of one ghostly work is West Lake in My Dream #1 (2009)—and…

ISRAEL MUSEUM JERUSALEM FEBRUARY 11 - AUGUST 29 This presentation of new work by six contemporary artists marks the start of the Israel Museum’s 50th anniversary celebrations. While the participating artists were all born in Israel, their projects, mostly taking a conceptual approach, were created in far-flung locations. Gilad Ratman, for example, orchestrated an event in Romania inspired by the American rock group Metallica’s concert in Moscow in 1991, only months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ratman’s film shows five heavy-metal bands performing in a field, their amplifiers buried in a pit. Distorted sounds erupting from the earth when they play prove an imaginative metaphor for the clash between Western freedom of expression and the stifling of speech and action in 20th-century Eastern Europe. Uri Gershuni’s print series…