Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2015 i ARTnews

We are writing to thank you for being a loyal subscriber to ARTnews and to inform you that on July 28, 2015, ARTnews announced its merger with BMP Media Holdings, publisher of Art in America, The Magazine Antiques, and Modern Magazine. We would like to take this opportunity to assure you that the ARTnews publication schedule will remain unchanged through the end of 2015 and that, beyond January 2016, ARTnews will continue in print along with Art in America. Together with BMP Media Holdings we will be working hard over the next few months to develop a new integrated print subscription offer, one that will provide you with the maximum value for your money and the continuity of trusted brands that stand for top-quality art journalism and criticism. Please have…

The plan was that, on a Wednesday morning in July, I would take the bus to Southampton, New York, where a publicist would pick me up and drive me to the Watermill Center about five minutes down the road. There I would interview Robert Wilson, the center’s founder and artistic director, from 1 to 2 P.M., after which I would have lunch with the Watermill staff before taking the 3:15 bus back to Manhattan. The reason for interviewing Wilson was that part of his private art collection had just returned from France, where it had been on view at the Louvre. Wilson, 73, is the pre-eminent avant-garde theater director in the world. His admirers have included Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett, and Heiner Müller (from whom he inherited the mantle of…

Karachi-born Huma Bhabha continues to explore found materials, all kinds of mediums, and a global brew of sources with arresting results. From totems, masks, fertility figures, and other ritualistic objects to science fiction, horror movies, and more, her work is a skewed, compressed account of cultural and historical hybridization. In the gallery’s downstairs space, visitors were lured by Constantium (2014), one of Bhabha’s crudely powerful hieratic figures, with its creased face and blank and yellow-rimmed stylized eyes. It stood sentry over what suggested a votive chamber or crypt, inhabited by two other bronze works. One, The Escapist (2013), is a floor piece consisting of three strips of entwined bronze that replicate rubber-tire treads; the other, Friend (2015), is a white, stele-like form that evokes a figure, with rectangular cutouts that…

This engaging show assembled 45 figurative paintings by American artists, ranging from Benjamin West (b. 1738) to Grace Hartigan (b. 1922) and dating from 1766 to 1971. A 1953 untitled painting by Hartigan is a reminder that, even during the age of Abstract Expressionism, the figure often asserted itself. Between West and Hartigan came William Merritt Chase (b. 1849), here represented by Roland Dana Chase (1905), a portrait of his toddler son in a smock hitched up with a red belt. Roughly contemporary with Chase were American Impressionists Edward Henry Potthast (b. 1857) and Childe Hassam (b. 1859). The Ashcan artists were there, too: George Bellows (b.1882), Everett Shinn (b. 1876), and William Glackens (b. 1870). Representing the ’30s and later, Ben Shahn’s gouache-and-ink on paper Sacco’s Family after the…

“Stages” was the first substantial survey of Barbara Kasten’s work, which has recently gained new currency as a precursor of the set-up, abstract, and process photography now being made by such artists as Eileen Quinlan and Sara VanDerBeek. Although Kasten is primarily known as a photographer, the show also incorporated her work in other mediums, including textiles and installation. The assembled pieces here suggested that the artist’s primary subject is space. Photography’s ability to flatten, distort, and fragment space is exploited in works ranging from Kasten’s first staged photographs of objects—including her subtly colored “Constructs” of the early 1980s—to her remarkable pictures from later in the decade of corporate offices and museum buildings that, shot at night using gel lighting and mirrored props, resemble modernist opera sets. Elsewhere, physical space…

Ronald Davis was one of the leading lights of the distinctly California aesthetic, incorporating sleek surfaces, eye-popping color, and then-novel materials like polyester resin, that developed at roughly the same time as the more austere Minimalism did on the East Coast. This concise overview was a welcome chance to revisit his accomplishments. Works from the 1970s and ’80s showed Davis to have been a skilled printmaker, but he also experimented during this period with an acrylic medium called Cel-Vinyl. The imagery in both prints and paintings generally features a single, volumetric, and brightly colored geometric object viewed from many different angles. When these are seen suspended against a web of perspectival lines, as in Rotation-Tilt (1980), the effect is both hallucinatory and delicate, like a Piranesi drawing crossed with a…

This summer brought exciting news for ARTnews. Founded in 1902—as Hyde’s Weekly Art News—the magazine has entered a new phase, in a merger with Brant Publications, the publisher of Art in America magazine, as well as The Magazine Antiques and Modern Magazine. Since I joined ARTnews as editor-in-chief a year ago, I have worked hard, alongside my staff, to bring you the quality art journalism and criticism you have come to expect from the magazine; we’ve also introduced some changes to its appearance. I’ve watched the magazine’s web presence grow exponentially. We’ve attracted new readers to this venerable title by publishing—online and in print—timely and engaging stories like the ones in our current issue, and I’m happy to say that, under the merger, we will continue to do so. In…

For this show, “Tropical Urban,” the Indian-born, New York–based artist Rina Banerjee presented a group of sculptures, paintings, and drawings on the theme of self-invention. Populating all the works were mutant creatures—part human, part animal, part deity—who projected a cosmopolitan air. An underwater scene in oil on panel featured a trio of blue-skinned nymphs with seaweed hair, tentacle-like fingers and toes—and in one case, an extra limb sporting a fashionable platform shoe. One figure stretches a foot toward the rocky ocean floor; another drifts upward in pursuit of a school of sparkling jellyfish. Works on paper, incorporating delicate line drawing, rubber stamping, painting, and collage, depicted more hybrid beings, including a party-frocked Devi flirting with a muscled green demon and a giant dodo bird with the head of a woman…

The unexpectedly dramatic video at the heart of Erika Vogt’s exhibition “Slug” follows the creature of the title as it ripples over a patch of dirt. The film played on a monitor suspended by ropes from the top bar of a metal coat rack on wheels—one of seven parallel to one another down the length of the gallery. A translucent, two-sided work on paper featuring printed, drawn, and painted meandering lines (looking something like slug trails) hung from another coat rack, while each of the five remaining racks supported and framed a different enigmatic object cast in colored resin. These included a blue squiggle, a dark-gray latticed panel, and something resembling an industrial cutting blade. Textures imprinted on the objects’ facing surfaces—a basketweave pattern in one case, fine corrugations in…

After she began making prints herself, Queen Sonja of Norway established the biennial Queen Sonja Print Award in 2011. This exhibition, curated by Sune Nordgren, former director of Norway’s National Museum, included prints by the 2012 and 2014 prize recipients, as well as etchings and lithographs by the queen and artists Kjell Nupen and Ørnulf Opdahl, with whom she collaborated on a portfolio titled “Three Journeys, Three Landscapes.” Several of her other aquatints were based on photos she took on a trip to an ice cave in 2006 on the island of Svalbard. The “Foula” series captures the eerily beautiful landscape. Tiina Kivinen, the 2012 prizewinner, works in dry point, mezzotint, and monotype, portraying the subtle details of the Nordic landscape often overlooked in the snow and ice. In The…

Intermittent blasts of music from the suggestively named ’80s synth-pop band Soft Cell shattered the laboratory-like quiet of South Korean–born artist Anicka Yi’s MIT exhibition, “6,070,430K of Digital Spit.” They set the tone for Yi’s continued exploration of biochemistry as it intersects with money, power, race, and gender. Drawing in equal measure on strategies of abstraction and advanced scientific research, Yi’s installation subtly engaged the senses— particularly taste in its most expansive meanings. At the center of a darkened room, a circular pool filled with gallons of clear hair gel emitted a hypnotic glow. It resembled a human-scale petri dish, speckled blue, green, and yellow by several dozen cosmetic contact lenses and slowly oxidizing metal pins. Around it were three stainless-steel stands supporting a number of brownish, skin-like sheets of…

Formed in 1992, the Delhi-based group Raqs Media Collective consists of three artists: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Raqs, a name that plays on the Persian, Arabic, and Urdu words for a state of meditation, also forms an acronym for Rarely Asked Questions (as opposed to FAQs, or Frequently Asked Questions). “It Is Possible Because It Is Possible” was a substantial survey of the collective’s work in multiple mediums, much of it oscillating between historical reference and the idea of the contemporary body as both biopolitical worker-subject and desiring being. Central to the exhibition was the instrumentalization of both human and natural resources by capital. Time, the only truly determinable value of human life, was the subject of many of the works, including Now, Elsewhere (Escapement), 2009–2014, a…

The title of Hal Foster’s new book Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency is drawn from an oft-quoted maxim of Bertolt Brecht’s: “Don’t start with the good old days, but the bad new ones.” Contending that the last 25 years have been a period of continuous social crisis—hence the “emergency” of his subtitle—Foster considers what role art and criticism play following the “full dominance of neoliberalism” that has emerged since 1989 and the suspension of the social contract after 9/11. At a moment when the most institutionally hostile practices have been readily embraced, and when art seems given over to ballooning market values, corporate sponsorship, and blockbuster spectacle, is it possible to maintain faith in the idea of an avant-garde—or, for that matter, in the value of critique? However dire…

In 2004, John Riepenhoff, an artist recently graduated from college in Wisconsin, started the Green Gallery with some help from his brother Joe, in an attic in Milwaukee. The Riepenhoffs were outsiders in a city that is best known for its beer, but in the last decade they’ve expanded to two spaces in Milwaukee and a third in Oak Park, Illinois, and helped turn Milwaukee into the epicenter of contemporary art in the Midwest. Along the way, they’ve caught the eye of the international art world. “There’s really never been anything like the Green Gallery in Milwaukee,” said Nicholas Frank, who ran the city’s Hermetic Gallery from 1993 until it closed in 2001. “And I say that, you know, having run a contemporary gallery here that originally showed many of…

Painting is one of the few things in life for which youth holds no advantage. The diminutions wrought by aging—of muscle mass, stamina, hearing, mental agility (the list goes on)—are offset among painters by fearlessness, finely honed technique, and heightened resolve. A ticking clock focuses the mind. There’s a recurring narrative about late style in painting: from Rembrandt to de Kooning to, in our own era, Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly, the trajectory of the long-lived painter in the final decade or two reaches toward a greater openness and a simplifying of form, along with efficiency of execution. Muscle memory is the last thing to go. In this reading, a painter’s late work is characterized by letting go—the older painter needs do less. This effortlessness is also embraced by young…

Chantal Joffe’s “Night Self-Portraits” are as much about paint as they are about the artist’s bold and unflinching self-portrayals and psychological openness intensified by their lush textures and colors. Self-portraits have always been a staple of Joffe’s production. Now in her late 40s, she continues to breathe new energy into the genre. The 14 paintings here probed identity and self-representation as well as motherhood and femininity. Painted at night with spare backdrops, these works called attention to the light, the subjects’ gaze, and the materiality of the paint, defining and equating the surfaces of Joffe’s often-nude body with the neutral grounds of the paintings. Naked Self-Portrait with Esme in a Pink Nightshirt (2014), an 8-foot-high portrait of mother and daughter, is installed to breathtaking effect at the gallery entrance. Joffe’s…

An incisive and beautifully installed show by London-based artist Magali Reus was well served by SculptureCenter’s industrial ambience. Titled “Spring for a Ground,” the exhibition consisted of two series of sculptures that look like combination locks and street curbs, titled, respectively, “Leaves” and “In Place of ” (both 2015). The latter series, which might also be considered idiosyncratic still lifes, assembled fragments of the city made from mundane objects, street flotsam, or their facsimiles (cups placed just so, upright steel bars doubling as railings from which wire hangers dangled, slices of partially eaten, translucent bread made from resin, a plastic comb), was presented with surrealistic precision, imposing order on urban tumult. All low to the ground to force the eye downward, these sleekly designed “curbs” were strategically placed, loosely controlling…

Summoning up John James Audubon, Carl Linnaeus, and venerable field guides, these imaginative reconstructions of flora and fauna by self-taught artist, naturalist, and author James Prosek offered a tantalizing mix of abstract and realistic art, art history, and science. Perhaps the most eyecatching of Prosek’s works was the full-wall painting featuring black silhouettes of passenger pigeons, extinct since the early 20th century. Attached to the painting was a small panel near the bottom right displaying the birds’ splendid coloration. The work reprised a much larger version. In addition, there were little numbers placed throughout the work, as if referring to information about the pigeons, but none was forthcoming. Sculptures included sections of white birch shaped into a perfect circle graced with a few delicate, part real–part ceramic leaves, as in…

For the last 15 years, photographer Ken Gonzales-Day has been researching, and making art about racially motivated vigilantism in the American West. In past installments of his “Erased Lynching” series, he has used found images and archival materials to revive forgotten horrors. But for this exhibition of new work, the artist presented an original movie and related color prints in which actors re-create a 1920 lynching in Santa Rosa, California. The beautifully crafted film Run Up (2015) spares viewers the sight of Charles Valento, a Latino known as “Spanish Charley,” dangling from a tree. But with its images of silent observers exchanging knowing looks, it is nevertheless chilling. A nearby group of still photographs featured scenes from the film restaged as dramatic tableaux. In a separate room, Gonzales-Day brought his…

In David Ostrowski’s solo show “The F Word,” the artist simultaneously channeled Barnett Newman and John Bender, Judd Nelson’s character in John Hughes’s 1985 film The Breakfast Club. The eleven acrylic-and-lacquer paintings on view were severely reductive, in the tradition of Newman, but they emanated Bender’s emotional mixture of insolence and sensitivity. For example, in F (Data), 2014, an awkwardly off-kilter white shape in the center of a black field appears isolated and fragile. Other pieces seemed to be struggling to overcome authorial undermining. F (A thing is a thing in a whole which it’s not), 2014, consists of a white canvas with a slim, shaky, cobaltblue line spray-painted down its right-hand side. This marking occupies more space than the forms in most of Ostrowski’s paintings, and with its crisp…

1OO YEARS AGO “No Architectural Awards” September 18, 1915 The International Jury on architecture at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, which . . . awarded the Grand Prix to Italy, gold medals to the buildings of France, California and other countries and states . . . repudiated and cancelled all the awards. Some confusion of ideas has arisen in the architectural world through the announcement, after this negative action of the architectural jury, of the award of a gold medal to Cass Gilbert for the model of the Woolworth Building, N. Y., which he designed. This award was given in the Liberal Arts department and for the model of the building, not as an art architectural award. 5O YEARS AGO “The New York School Question,” by Barnett Newman September 1965 The “New…