Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2015 i ARTnews

JOSEPH CORNELL KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM, VIENNA OCTOBER 20 - JANUARY 10 Joseph Cornell’s assemblages are difficult to categorize, and that’s what makes them so thrilling. With their combination of painting and sculpture techniques, and their references to European art history and commercial culture in equal measure, they foreshadowed Pop art, Conceptualism, and Neo-Dada. No doubt Cornell’s influence on contemporary art will become even more obvious with “Wanderlust,” which brings more than 60 works together for the first-ever Cornell survey in Austria. Joseph Cornell, Untitled Object (Mona Lisa), ca. 1940–42. BEN VAUTIER MUSEUM TINGUELY, BASEL, SWITZERLAND OCTOBER 21 - JANUARY 17 In the ’60s, while George Maciunas and Yoko Ono staged absurd happenings in New York, Ben Vautier was painting simple phrases on wooden objects in France. “Ben is art,” the Fluxus…

One morning in mid-August, during a break from work in her Los Angeles studio, the artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby got to talking about Nigeria, where she grew up and lived until college. “I’m fascinated by those points where we have taken something inherited and run with it and found a way to make it our own,” she said by telephone, “either by exaggerating it or paring it down or creating a hybrid with something else.” Akunyili Crosby, who is 32, was referring to fashion, design, and even religion in her home country, but her own artworks are also glorious examples of that improvisational mixing. She makes vibrantly colored paintings on paper with charcoal, acrylic, and dense tangles of photographs that she transfers to the paper so intricately that they take…

Revolutionary War paintings, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, cryogenics labs, crushed berries, polar bears—all of these images and more have figured in Rachel Rose’s antic videos. It’s a vast spectrum. One difference between the 28-year-old New York–based artist and most of her peers is that Rose is having her U.S. solo debut not at a trendy Lower East Side gallery but at the Whitney Museum. On the 30th of this month, just a few weeks after her first solo show in London opens at the Serpentine Galleries, Rose will be presenting a multimedia installation titled Everything and More in the Whitney’s new Renzo Piano–designed building. When we spoke over the phone in August, as she was putting the finishing touches on a video for the installation, she seemed only slightly anxious…

Doris Salcedo views her elegiac outdoor interventions as sites of collective mourning for her fellow Colombians as well as people from any country where violence is routine and the process of grieving is forgotten. Her sculptures and installations, however, as seen in this retrospective, conjure a sense of loss and displacement that has yet to be mitigated by mourning or closure. Salcedo’s sculptures, many of them groupings of domestic furniture combined with concrete and steel, occupy the Guggenheim’s four Tower galleries. In these enclosed white spaces, the works evoke clusters of furniture typically found in old hospital wards and bureaucratic offices. Walking up from one Tower gallery to the next and seeing these somewhat surreal sculptures projects the eeriness of exploring an abandoned four-story house. A group of untitled works…

Leon Golub was one of the most outstanding figurative painters of the late 20th century. This exhibition, the artist’s first with the gallery, offered a mini–career survey. The monumental physicality and the powerful subject matter that characterize Golub’s oeuvre were set to stunning advantage in the domestically scaled spaces of the gallery’s elegant town house. Such intimacy allowed for a powerfully personal viewing experience and underscored the humanist content of the paintings. Installed roughly chronologically, the exhibition laid bare the themes and strategies that occupied Golub for over five decades. Napalm I (1969), the mural-size canvas at the entrance, marked the moment when Golub’s portrayal of war, violence, and suffering became a new form of contemporary history painting, with homage paid to battle scenes from classical antiquity to the Renaissance…

Some artists leave everything to chance, others, nothing: it’s improvisation on the one hand, premeditation on the other. De Wain Valentine falls into the second category. His works here, consisting of disks and obelisks that contain and reflect light, were produced in molds and then polished until translucent. They are unique in hue, light refraction, and even dimension. The material, a polyester resin Valentine helped concoct, enabled him to control and increase the scale of the work. Visitors to this spectacular assemblage of pieces from the ’60s and ’70s felt as if they were in a box of jewels, some of plausible size, others leaping up like skyscrapers. The work in this dazzling show represented an important chapter in the history of American art as it emerged from the restrained…

A puckish energy ran through this exhibition of video works and drawings by the Israeliborn, Brooklyn-based artist Keren Cytter. Made in an intentionally naive style, Cytter’s videos employ low-tech special effects (blood, bubbles) and the generic plotlines and clichéd characters of film noir and soap opera. While her films are threaded through with humor, absurdity, and human fallibility, they serve less to entertain than to play with viewers’ expectations. Both Four Seasons (2009), a spoof of a thriller, and the metanarrative Something Happened (2007) incorporate jump cuts and repetition instead of proceeding sequentially. In the latter video, characters recite stage directions, drawing attention to themselves as actors rather than as sympathetic characters. In Siren (2014), a dark tale of romance, the looping, disjointed action confuses our sense of time, and…

The endless procession of figures in South African artist William Kentridge’s 8-screen, 14-minute animated movie, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), is part parade, part danse macabre. The piece was one of several that made up the exhibition “If We Ever Get to Heaven,” which also included the film installation I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine (2008), created for Kentridge’s production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera, and the charcoaldrawing animation Other Faces (2011). More Sweetly Play the Dance, however, commanded center stage. Commissioned by the EYE Filmmuseum, it brings together many, if not all, of the aesthetic modes Kentridge has employed in his 40-year career: charcoal drawing, ink painting, shadow play, film, dance, theater, and music. Making reference to the reaper who appears…

Video art has come a long way in its few decades of life. Since Nam June Paik made his first buzzy, overloaded image streams, video has proved itself a flexible medium in constant transformation. Video artists may work with more or less the same tools, but they use them to go off in totally different aesthetic and conceptual directions, as much as in any other medium. Into this context of permanent change and endless possibility, enter Ed Atkins. The British artist has broken new ground with his computer-generated young men who sing, smoke, cry, and pout with a vulnerable air. Forget Max Headroom or other disembodied faces. Crisply life-like and imbued with human voices (often Atkins’s own), the men who populate Atkins’s works seem somehow too real to be real.…

The Met did the art world a great service with this show, revealing John Singer Sargent’s complexities in a way that a more tightly focused exhibition could not. We saw him here as artist and man, partaking of the practical, the romantic, and the aesthetic—indulging in commerce and high art. He was of two worlds—Europe and America—and his commissioned works, though lucrative for him and aesthetically pleasing for many, fall well beneath the brilliance of the probing portraits of such creative and intellectual luminaries as Monet and Rodin and the British lesbian fantasist writer Vernon Lee. The show was organized by Sargent’s grandnephew Richard Ormond with Elizabeth Kornhauser and Stephanie L. Herdrich of the Met. Society portraits and familiar impressionistic scenes much in evidence here, including the hyper-cool Madame X…

Robin Rhode’s wall drawings and installations give little sense of the physical effort involved in their making. Photographic documentation, however, turns out to be more revealing, as these two engaging exhibitions demonstrated. In “Borne Frieze,” at Lehmann Maupin, Rhode, a Berlin-based South African artist of mixed race, dwelled on the social and political turmoil that shaped him growing up in Johannesburg. (He was born in Cape Town in 1976.) The mostly black-and-white works bore inescapable intimations of apartheid. Evidence (2015), a black-vinyl cutout of a skeleton hanging beneath a long strip of barbed wire amid vigorous charcoal drawings of coat hangers, took up an entire wall in the front gallery. In another, darkened room equipped with blinking strobe lights, two enormous lightbulb sculptures lay on the floor; one was coated…

Maureen Chatfield’s resplendent abstractions on view at the latest incarnation of the legendary Rosenberg gallery felt quite at home in this intimate town-house setting. Chatfield’s paintings have the same DNA as Rosenberg’s long line of modernist masterpieces, stamped by the influence of Picasso, the School of Paris—in particular, Nicolas de Staël—the Abstract Expressionists, and the Neo-Expressionists. A natural colorist, Chatfield fearlessly mines the spectrum, from the gorgeous reds of Matisse to the rich blacks that conjure Franz Kline’s swashbuckling brushwork and Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic to the muted, nuanced shades of Richard Diebenkorn. Some of the most recent works are more overtly landscapes. Nevertheless, all adeptly balance the ratio between abstraction and representation, and all are a celebration of nature. Chatfield’s mood swings in these two dozen…

Though Alex Katz is known primarily for his large, sparsely detailed portrait paintings, “This Is Now” offered a compelling look at his landscapes. Featuring 60 paintings and collages made between 1954 and 2013, the exhibition was monumental in both scope and effect: by showing a less frequently seen side of Katz’s work, it prompted the viewer to reconsider the artist’s overall project, now well into its sixth decade. Like his portraits, Katz’s landscape paintings combine a painterly directness with a condensing of representational detail. However, they generate quite different results. To begin with, the lack of a horizon line in many of the landscapes exerts a gravitational pull even as it unsettles, as in Black Brook 11 (1990), with its slightly left-of-center focal point. The way Katz toggles between flat…

On July 14 NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured the first close-up pictures of Pluto. Timed to coincide with the flyby, Annika Kahrs’s solo exhibition of video works included a recent piece about the dwarf planet, solid surface, with hills, valleys, craters and other topographic features, primarily made of ice (2014). In the video a spotlight plays over a starry sky, exposing it as the dome of a planetarium. As the lights come up in the planetarium, a voice-over offers a speculative description of Pluto’s surface. The cosmos depicted is only a simulation, and Pluto a chimera within it. A shot of a mountain range and a ruddy sun in Sunset-Sunrise (2011) fades to white as the camera zooms out. This image, too, is only a mirage—a projection on a lecture-hall…

Hard-core punk is probably not the first thing most people think about when looking at the image of a quaint tree-lined ranch house, but thanks to the artist Marc Fischer’s internet-based project Hardcore Architecture, that may soon change. Fischer found the suburban abode in question by entering into Google Street View the mailing address listed under a 1980s Maximumrocknroll (MRR) review of forgotten Indianapolis band Source of Violence’s cassette “Human Sponge.” In the review the quintessential Bay Area punk zine describes the release as “very abrasive hardcore with a completely atonal guitar sound that resembles a broken Cuisinart.” The crux of the Hardcore Architecture project lies in the dissonance between these two things—a Google Street View photo of a house and a Maximumrocknroll review of the band that received it’s…

Earlier this year Jasmin Tsou, proprietor of the downtown Manhattan gallery JTT, bought an Artforum magazine subscription for Marlon Mullen, an artist who had recently joined her stable. The magazine would be used as source material: Mullen’s acrylic paintings on canvas or board are based on pages and covers of art and cultural magazines (including ARTnews). Using straightout-of-the-tube color, he transforms these appropriated images and headlines into boldly graphic abstractions reminiscent of Clyfford Still or Forrest Bess. Mullen, born in 1963, makes his paintings and drawings at the Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development (NIAD) Art Center in Richmond, California, the nonprofit organization for artists with disabilities that initially encouraged and exhibited his work. He is autistic and does not communicate verbally, so Tsou is reluctant to project her perceptions onto…

Just ten days after the show opened, the photographs in Sage Sohier’s “At Home with Themselves” felt surprisingly dated—and not just because of ’80sera fashion and hairstyles. This dated feeling had to do with something more profound: the Supreme Court’s landmark June 26 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which extended full marriage rights to same-sex couples. The hidden America portrayed in these images has more confidently come out of the shadows to proudly proclaim that love is love. But it is these shadows that Sohier so beautifully explores, capturing her subjects, who seem safe in the comfort of their homes, where there was no need to be guarded. These photographs, however, do not outwardly present the sense of tension prevailing at the time; they show instead a different side of…

In contrast to her earlier vibrant, pigment-printed collages on canvases, for which she is best known, Gwenn Thomas’s new works in this six-piece show were considerably less assuming, yet equally beautiful. Quiet, unadorned photographs, they offered a rare and satisfying study in proportion, light, and perspective. Thomas’s “Moments of Place” series takes a simple rectangular two-paned window as its subject. The resulting images, captured at different times of day over the course of many months, elegantly underscore the banality of the window. The row of differently sized and colored photographs took on an almost sculptural form. At the same time, the flatness of the picture plane and the depth of color called to mind the formal and subtly expressive qualities of painting. One work in particular, titled Moments of Place…

The body as a delicate negotiation between inside and out, container and contained, may be the central concern of Arlene Shechet’s influential, materials-based practice. This came to light in “All at Once,” the artist’s first survey exhibition, a spacious and informative presentation of more than 150 objects, dating from 1993 to the present, in cast paper and plaster, blown glass, and glazed ceramic. Casting techniques have long proved generative for the artist, from her paper vessels of the mid-1990s to Building (2003), an abstract cityscape of porcelain vases made in the wake of September 11. In an immersive installation documenting her 2012–13 residency at Germany’s Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, founded in 1710, several dozen dreamlike amalgamations of 18th-century figurines and tableware reinterpret porcelain slip-casting by foregrounding its molds. In one emblematic…

Between 1951 and 1953 Jackson Pollock made about 40 paintings in black enamel paint. These “black pourings” had a big impact on other artists, who were fascinated by the way the industrial paint stained and caked on the unprimed canvas, yet critics and buyers dismissed them as clotted, awkwardly figurative diversions from the colorful, all-over drippings that had made Pollock famous. A large group of them was shown at an unsuccessful exhibition in New York in late 1951, and then they were mostly forgotten. Organized by the Dallas Museum of Art, where it will open in November, this exhibition resurrects 20 of the pourings, recasting them as a short-lived series in which Pollock distilled his gifts before losing his mind to alcoholism. By opening with a group of Pollock’s earlier…