Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2017 i ARTnews

December December Zaha Hadid Serpentine Galleries, London December 8 – February 12 The influential Iraqi-born British architect died this past March—too young, at 65—but her buildings and designs live on. From the beginning of her career, Hadid was ahead of her time, adopting computer-based methods long before they became standard. Organized with Hadid before her death, this show focuses on the paintings and drawings she made before the Vitra Fire Station in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany, the angular 1993 building that made her famous; it will be a valuable opportunity to reassess her Suprematism-inspired work. —Alex Greenberger Thomas Ruff 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan December 10 – March 12 It’s hard to believe that Thomas Ruff, the German photographer whose work is so central to how we understand the…

Jeffrey Deitch Dealer &Curator There is always something wrong with the art world. There was something wrong [with it] in 1874, when the Impressionists took on the official Salon with their own exhibition. Artists, writers, gallerists, and collectors who are engaged with the art of the present have a continuous mission to “fix” the art world. The next generation will then have to fix the problems that we are creating. The most challenging problem in the art world today may be the conflict between the enormous new global audience of visually fluent people versus the traditional art-world elites. Can a small group of influential people leading the major museums, galleries, auction houses, and art publications continue to define which artists will become celebrated? I remember how some of the establishment…

In 1977, Douglas Crimp, then a grad student at the City University of New York, organized a group exhibition called “Pictures” at the small downtown New York alternative gallery Artists Space. The show launched the careers of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith, who had in common their interest in appropriation (or, as Crimp put it in an accompanying text, “representation freed from the tyranny of the represented”) and who, in the years that followed, became known (along with others like Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince) as the “Pictures Generation.” So influential was “Pictures” that it seems only appropriate that Crimp should call his new memoir Before Pictures (Dancing Foxes Press and University of Chicago Press, 2016), as it recounts the events, and his experiences,…

Steven Stewart opened his gallery in 2011 in Tribeca and called it Kansas, a reference to his home state. He built a collector base, a following. In 2015 he moved across town to the Lower East Side to be in the thick of a district some see as New York’s most vital: a place where art dealers can focus on a single storefront venue, not on world domination, and survive by selling work by exciting artists that Chelsea mega galleries haven’t stolen yet. Kansas Gallery was a mom-and-pop space. After one year on Rivington Street, Stewart announced he was closing the gallery. The email was simple. It was just a picture of Barack Obama waving goodbye. “I’m not sick, I’m not broke, I’m just over it—you know, you can do…

JUNE 12 - AUGUST 28 Last winter in Los Angeles, city residents and their thirsty gardens eagerly awaited El Niño, the influx of warm ocean waters that brings the rain to the desert. But once again the rain did not come. After years of drought—clear skies, dry riverbeds, and brown lawns—Southern Californians crave greenery. It was surprising, therefore, that it felt like such a relief to encounter Mexican-American artist Rafa Esparza’s piece in “Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only,” the Hammer’s third iteration of its regional biennial. A tan-colored field of dry mud bricks, Esparza’s tierra (2016) nevertheless functioned as a kind of oasis: a true work of homegrown Angeleno art in an exhibition that claims to be L.A.-centric but—this year, at least—featured a number of globe-trotting…

Rather than publish a conventional year in review, we at ARTnews thought it made more sense to cap off 2016—a topsy-turvy year in most every regard—with a more ambitious project, by asking: What are the problems in today’s art world, and how might they be fixed? Broadly speaking, we are addressing the world in which contemporary art is made, displayed, and valued. A wide variety of responses to the question—from artists, curators, dealers, and others—appears in this issue. As ARTnews Co-Executive Editor Andrew Russeth writes in his feature on a new generation of institutional critique, one way artists can take on the art world’s problems is through their art practice; Maria Eichhorn, A. L. Steiner, Park McArthur, and Pilvi Takala are among those who are using their art to tweak…

In the Jorge Luis Borges story from 1945, “The Aleph,” we are told of a sphere, secreted in a dark cellar, in which all the spatial infinitude and plenitude of the world can be seen simultaneously, from every imaginable angle. In it, the world’s most vaunted treasures—and, presumably, its deepest horrors—are on display. Some have interpreted Borges’s Aleph as prophetic of TV and the internet. The Smithsonian’s spanking new National Museum of African American History and Culture also echoes Borges, framing infinity in a bubble—that is the mission found within the museum’s seven-story energy containment field. This Aleph attempts to provide nothing less than the total, complex, historical saga of African people as they have evolved and as they have expressively resisted racism in America over the past 400 years.…

This past June, Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) presented a major exhibition of the work of Robert Rauschenberg, pairing his 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981–98) with work he made during the 1980s in and about China. Concurrent with the exhibition’s opening, UCCA invited students of Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie from the School of Experimental Art, Central Academy of Fine Arts, to perform their new piece Somewhere Only We Know, adapted from The Peach Blossom Spring, a utopian fable by Chinese poet Tao Yuanming (365–427). The performance centers around Rauschenberg’s 1982 trip to a paper mill in Jingxian, but it also alludes to Black Mountain College and the work of John Cage, perhaps as a nod to the American golden age of avant-garde performance art. Performance…

JULY 9 - SEPTEMBER 11 “The heirs of Joseph Beuys are legion,” curator Robert Storr wrote in Art in America in 1988. Nearly three decades later, “A Joseph Beuys” at Galería Cadaqués offered an unorthodox take on Beuys’s influence, showing how it rippled beyond Germany and Beuys’s (mostly male) students, to today’s young Catalan artists. The gallery’s history with Beuys goes back to 1981, when it gave the artist his first solo exhibition in Spain. A fishing town on the Mediterranean between Barcelona and the French border, accessible only by a narrow mountain road, Cadaqués was a summering place for Marcel Duchamp, who went there from the late ’50s until his death in 1968. In the ’70s, some of the founding figures of Fluxus, Pop, and Conceptualism converged around…

Bill Powers: We’re looking at new plate paintings in your outdoor studio. One narrative appears to be a woman on the beach wrestling a giant lobster. Julian Schnabel: It’s from an image I found at the Fish Farm in Napeague taped up on their refrigerator. BP: Two other paintings are cropped landscapes with flowers. Does working outside have a direct impact on the imagery? JS: Well, I can turn around, and I’m confronted by nature. You see all the holes between the branches and the way the light hits the leaves. You realize it’s not just one green. It’s a million different versions of green and the organized chaos of nature. BP: To me, your new flower paintings hover between the feeling of a Japanese garden and Monet’s water lilies…

DIAMOND STINGILY WAITRESS Diamond Stingily makes sculptural installations from found and ready-made objects (a recent show at New York gallery Ramiken Crucible featured documentary video footage, old doors, baseball bats, and Kanekalon hair). She used to work in a pet shop; she’s now a waitress at Toad Style, a vegan restaurant in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. It helps that her managers, who are musicians, are supportive of her art career. “They really understand what I’m trying to do,” she says. For an emerging artist like Stingily, a reliable income and a flexible schedule are particularly important. But waitressing is not just a means to an end. “My job is a way of surviving, but that doesn’t mean I’m not informed or inspired by it,” she says. “I meet…

Ian Cheng Artist What state of mind are we looking at when we look at an artist’s artwork? And what game is that artwork persuading us to play? Here is a new map to get oriented. An artwork, and its artist, often journey through all quadrants in the process, but arrive at one psychological orientation in the end: as a retreat into tribalism (flag art); as an attempt at coherent meaningfulness (“good” art); as meaningless experimental play (“new” art); as an interface to feel the weird unknown (portal art). Every era implicitly asks of art to rebalance the cultural debts of previous eras, to cope with the times, to fertilize the institutions of tomorrow. In our time, when untamed reality leaks into our comforting certainties at rates that exceed our…

1793 The French revolutionary government opens the first public museum in France at the Louvre, a former royal palace in Paris. 1861 After protests by professional women painters, the Royal Academy admits 13 female students before voting once more to ban their admission. Finally, in 1936, a woman artist, Laura Knight, is accepted as a full member of the RA. 1863 The jury for the annual Paris Salon, held at the Palais de l’Industrie, rejects two-thirds of the paintings submitted, including works by Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Camille Pissarro. In response to protests by the artists and their friends, Emperor Napoleon III gives the rejected artists a show in a different part of the palace. Although generally dismissed by critics, the Salon des Refusés garners wide public attention for…

Why does Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation Performance make me cry? In Andrea Fraser’s 2006 essay, “Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?,” Fraser suggests that she was moved by her fellow artist’s extreme restraint, in which she sees “extraordinary generosity.” Ukeles has built her long career on a much more literal form of generosity: her commitment to acknowledging the people who clean up after us. Touch Sanitation Performance was the high point of the Queens Museum’s rigorous, and unexpectedly moving, ret Touch Sanitation Performance was the high point of the Queens Museum’s rigorous, and unexpectedly moving, retrospective of the work of this underrated artist, for the past 40 years the NYC Department of Sanitation’s artist-in-residence. The piece began with Ukeles’s vow to personally thank every DSNY employee in New…

JUNE 25 - SEPTEMBER 18 In a year of terrorist attacks, police shootings, and information leaks, it’s no surprise that a sense of paranoia has seeped into recent exhibitions in museums and galleries. It certainly pervaded “Invisible Adversaries” at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, where about 100 works—mostly from the museum’s collection, supplemented by a few loans—dealt with unseen threats from government surveillance to racism and sexism. Curators Lauren Cornell, of the New Museum, and Hessel Museum director Tom Eccles named the exhibition after a 1976 Valie Export film in which a Viennese woman becomes convinced that an alien species called the Hyksos have taken over the minds of ordinary Austrians. Superficially a Godardian take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the film is in effect an allegory…