Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2017 i ARTnews

In 2008 New York feminist artist Judith Bernstein was having her first show in decades at Mitchell Algus Gallery, presenting her iconoclastic “Horizontal” series, large-scale drawings of phallus-like screws dating back to 1966. By coincidence, Los Angeles art provocateur Paul McCarthy had come to the gallery to meet with Algus about another under-known artist, the late Robert Mallary. McCarthy instantly remembered Bernstein’s work, her scatological humor and in-your-face courage; he brought word of her show back to his daughter, Mara McCarthy, with whom he had recently opened the Box LA, a gallery devoted to showing historic work by artists who may not have received the sustained attention they deserved. “That transformed my life,” said Bernstein, 74, speaking from the Chinatown loft where she has lived for 40 years, making—but rarely…

Aliteral reading of the two Latin words from which it is derived—fictilis, “made of clay,” and fictor, “molder, or sculptor,”—would suggest that fiction is something made by hand. Expanded into the process of making a photograph, fiction might mean the hand holding the camera, the hand applying chemicals in the darkroom, the hand selecting, superimposing, cropping, animating, and colorizing. In this sense, the documentary photographs and videos in “Recent Histories: New Photography from Africa,” a group exhibition at the Walther Collection’s New York Project space this past fall, could be considered—at least in part—fictional objects. The five artists on view—Simon Gush, Délio Jasse, Lebohang Kganye, Dawit L. Petros, and Zina Saro-Wiwa—variously use intertitles, staging stop-motion animation, and painterly and digital effects, among other means, to convey truths not easily communicated…

This past November, Shanghai’s art season opened with a week of frenzied activity that comprised more than 60 events, all timed to coincide with the Shanghai Biennale, now in its eleventh edition. Among those events was the third iteration of the tony West Bund Art + Design Fair; the second Art021 art fair; a pop-up retail store opened by MadeIn Company (an “art creation” concern whose only “product” is the artist Xu Zhen); the opening of blue-chip gallery ShanghART’s new space in the up-and-coming West Bund art district; Martin Creed’s performance at Qiao Zhibing’s nightclub following the opening of Creed’s solo show at Qiao Space; curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Amira Gad’s art salad of an exhibition combining New Zealand artist Simon Denny’s work with that of 11 China-based artists;…

A s 2017 opened and we at ARTnews began putting to bed this issue focusing on underrated, undervalued, and underappreciated artists, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz published an article arguing that galleries and museums should be moving away from exhibiting revivals. “For the last decade or so,” Saltz wrote, “we’ve been engaged in an intensive art-history rebalancing act. The post-crash years have been a period of a great looking backward to what was missed, passed over, undervalued, geographically shunted aside, or shunned altogether in generations before. Everyone was sifting through histories; rediscovery was the new discovery; course correction was the new staying the course.” Now, Saltz argued, galleries and museums need to focus more on art being made today. “It’s the only way to discern what so-called Art…

POLLY APFELBAUM MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES CHRISTOPHER WILMARTH DORIS SALCEDO NALINI MALANI WILLIAM LAMSON JORGE PANTOJA LEE GODIE LORRAINE O'GRADY ALICIA McCARTHY HELEN FRANKENTHALER NASREEN MOHAMEDI GRETCHEN BENDER NANCY SPERO DARIO ROBLETO ANNE TRUITT LOTHAR BAUMGARTEN CHRISTINA RAMBERG SHEILA HICKS JIMMIE DURHAM LEANDRO ERLICH NANCY GROSSMAN DAVID WOJNAROWICZ GUIDO CAGNACCI ANNE CHU LEE BONTECOU SADIE BENNING ALICE AYCOCK CATHERINE MURPHY DONA NELSON JUDITH BARRY ALMA THOMAS NAYLAND BLAKE HOWARDENA PINDELL LEE KRASNER CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN TIM ROLLINS & K.O.S. BETYE SAAR DAVID HAXTON RITA MCBRIDE SAMSON KAMBALU MATHIAS GOERITZ CHARLOTTE MOORMAN DARA BIRNBAUM THOMAS DEMAND ROSIE LEE TOMPKINS IAIN BAXTER& For the third time in two decades, ARTnews approached a cross section of museum directors and curators to opine about one of their favorite subjects: Who are the most underrated artists today,…

A week before the 2016 presidential election, Hauser & Wirth gallery opened the exhibition “Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975.” Organized by Sally Radic, of the Guston Foundation, and Musa Mayer, Guston’s daughter, the show included scores of ink drawings—and one remarkable painting—lampooning Richard Nixon. Guston made the works in two extended bursts of activity: the first in 1971, when Nixon was in his prime and gearing up for reelection, and the second in 1975, the year after his shameful, post-Watergate resignation. In Guston’s hands, Nixon’s jowls become unmistakably testicular, and his nose takes on the shape of a bulging phallus, which he is constantly sticking somewhere he shouldn’t—between two butt cheeks labeled “U.S.A.,” for example, or through the neck and into the hollow head…

Atopless woman suns herself on a beach, eyes closed. She has an A-list body, slim and toned. Yet her sagging jowls, the deep brackets around her mouth, and the gray in her bobbed hair give her away as middle-aged. Elsewhere, a pretty, bikini-clad woman plays a flute on what may be the same beach; like the first woman, she is shapely, but her limbs and belly are swirled with cellulite and wrinkles. Her opened-legged pose is seductive, but who is she trying to seduce? “Cougar,” the title of Milly Thompson’s solo painting exhibition at Westminster Waste, is slang for a sexually aggressive older woman. If this term is usually used derogatively, Thompson reclaimed it with these canvases. The artist has long been interested in women’s desire as represented in fashion…

From George Inness, who “translates just the light and feeling of a fixed hour,” to Vincent van Gogh, whose cypresses are like “voices of aspiration, joy or fear,” to Jackson Pollock, who, Robert Rosenblum wrote, “evokes the sublime mysteries of nature’s untamable forces,” artists continually try to capture and replicate the awe-inspiring and the invisible. On the occasion of the show “Beyond Stars: The Mystical Landscape” at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay (March 14–June 25), we perused ARTnews articles from 1911 to 2015, and found the yearning for the spiritual not only among traditional landscapists but also among contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Bill Viola, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Rachel Rose. All pursue enlightenment in the transcendent. —THE EDITORS MARCH 4, 1911 That which is remarkable above everything else in the art…

MARCH Sharjah Biennial Various venues, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates March 10–June 12 An exhibition spread out over time and space, the Sharjah Biennial 13, organized by Lebanese curator Christine Tohmé, began last October and will run through October 2017, with projects in Sharjah, Dakar, Ramallah, Istanbul, and Beirut. The main exhibition, which opens in Sharjah in March, will include a mix of local and international artists, including Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, who makes huge abstract architectural sculptures, Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani, noted for her delicate, political narrative drawings, and Emirati conceptualist Abdullah Al Saadi. Utilizing existing institutions and informal networks, Tohmé’s biennial considers the role of art in an increasingly interconnected world. —Barbara A. MacAdam Whitney Biennial Whitney Museum, New York March 17–June 11 Since it began in 1932, the…

The New Museum in downtown New York turned 40 at the beginning of this year. P.S. 1, an upstart art center with similarly progressive roots, marked the same occasion in 2016. Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the New Museum, has worked there since 2006; he also marshals projects on his own, one of which was curating the 2013 Venice Biennale. Alanna Heiss, the erstwhile director of P.S. 1—and later MoMA PS1, the moniker it adopted after merging with the Museum of Modern Art—founded the institution in the wake of an inaugural exhibition in 1976. (She also continues work with her nonprofit arts organization, Clocktower Productions, and, last year, curated “Forty,” an anniversary celebration of P.S. 1, featuring artists like Carl Andre, Nancy Holt, and Gordon Matta-Clark.) On a chilly afternoon…

Artists are famously ambivalent about showing up at art fairs. John Baldessari once likened the experience to that of a kid walking in on his parents having sex. But showing one’s art at them is de rigeur. Fairs—evolved from bazaars stocked with secondary-market material to, now, meccas for the new—are an integral part of the art ecosystem. In recent years, some have sprung up that try to improve on the trade fair model. Independent, founded by Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook in New York in 2010 and since expanded to Brussels, is one such fair. A “curated” event, it is clubbier and more intimate than most art fairs—booths tend to blur and blend together, and the art leans toward the cool and critically lauded. This year’s hometown edition, at Spring…

“H ow it got going was when the Sam Francis exhibition traveled to the Menil. I did the show for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and at first, Walter was the only one interested in taking it. It’s tricky when your exhibition goes to somebody else’s museum. I went down, but I left it to Walter to hang the show. And I never thought about him being good at that—he was deified for a lot of things, but not for his installations—but it was amazing to watch him work. He hung the paintings at a particular height; he fussed with the lights; he obsessed over every detail. And in the end, I saw, the more you do, the less it’s noticed. For my catalogue essay for the show,…

KEY Chicago Imagism (1970s) Revived in several New York galleries lately. Its exotic cartoon figuration redounds in the work of countless young artists. Pattern and Decoration (1975–85) Its commitment to craft remains a touchtone for feminist artists. Supports/Surfaces (Early 1970s) Groovy downtown New York gallery Canada gave it a group show in 2015 and Roberta Smith noted its focus on painting’s bare essentials is “timely” in an age when abstraction is in “back-to-basics mode.” Independent Group (1950s) The London artists, designers, and architects have long been a footnote preceding Pop, but their zany approach to commerical culture anticipates the advertising- and meme-filled internet. Neo-Expressionism (1980s) Very male, very white, very derivative. And yet, some of its exponents—Martin Kippenberger, Julian Schnabel—hold profound sway over superb emerging artists. Stuckism (Late 1990s) An…

In the most dazzling sequence in Damien Chazelle’s film La La Land, a man and a woman become a movie. A few hours earlier, they’ve met for their first date, a screening of Rebel Without a Cause at a Los Angeles theater. The woman arrives late; on the big screen in front of her, James Dean is pulling up to Griffith Observatory in L.A. for Rebel ’s climactic showdown. Not long after the woman sits down with the man, the film gets stuck in the projector and the frame starts to burn, so they go to the observatory to complete the movie. When they get there, they dance into the stars, from real life to reel life La La Land is a fantasy, but it plays well in our current…