Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i ARTnews

Kevin Beasley is an artist in his early 30s whose work with sculpture and sound has drawn on his upbringing in rural Virginia and, from his current home in New York, his communion with markers of African-American history, among other sources. Disused housedresses suggestive of empowered domesticity and abstract samples from the music of deceased ’90s-era hip-hop stars are just two aspects of his work’s evolving internal language. Kellie Jones is an art historian who grew up in the ’60s and the ’70s in New York with epochal parents—the writers LeRoi Jones (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka) and Hettie Jones—and whose work as a curator and scholar has focused in part on hidden histories of African-American art. Over dinner at Red Rooster in Harlem, Beasley and Jones joined ARTnews to discuss Jones’s new…

Samson Young In his studio in the post-industrial neighborhood of Kwai Fong, Samson Young was finalizing artwork to go to Italy for the Venice Biennale, where he is representing Hong Kong. His project “Songs for Disaster Relief” addresses the ’80s-era peak of charity music singles such as “We Are the World” as markers of a culturally transformative moment. About the Hong Kong art scene, he said, “I think things are getting better,” holding out hope for completion of the M+ museum scheduled to open in 2019 and a new wing of the Hong Kong Museum of Art. “There will be more spaces for emerging artists.” FEATURING Samson Young Kingsley Ng Chow Chun Fai Yuk King Tan The Office Winnie Siu Davies Eric Niebuhr Konstantin Bessmertny Artists in Hong Kong live…

“I follow the paintings—the paintings run to the door, through the door, around the corner, and I run after them.” In 2015 Stanley Whitney had his first solo museum show in New York—“Dance the Orange,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem—after a long career, much of it spent under the radar. The exhibition was widely praised as a revelation of sorts, introducing to a wider audience an artist who has been admired for injecting new life into abstract art’s potential. The 2017 Documenta in Athens and Kassel, Germany, will give us another chance to see a concentration of Whitney’s work. As he was preparing for that exhibition, ARTnews spoke with him in his studio in the Ridgewood area of Queens, New York. A few minutes into my visit, Stanley Whitney…

In May 2015, during a high-profile auction at the peak of the contemporary art market’s stratospheric rise, the bidding on Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) at Christie’s New York salesroom had slowed to a stop. Collectors including the casino magnate Steve Wynn had called in with bids, but after the work, painted in 1955, passed its $140 million estimate, the field of potential buyers had dwindled down to just two, each on the phone with one of Christie’s head reps: specialist Loic Gouzer and, as chairman and global head of the postwar and contemporary department, Brett Gorvy. With the room holding its collective breath, Gorvy offered a bid of $159 million, only to be quickly one-upped by Gouzer. The higher bid of $159.5 million seemed to be the knockout…

In a February presentation at KW Institute for Contemporary Art on fellow artist and expatriate resident Elijah Burgher, AA Bronson noted that “Berlin is about relationships. I think of galleries when I think of other cities, but when I think of Berlin, I think of a cast of characters.” Unlike more gentrified cit-ies, Bronson observed, Berlin remains a network of “risk-takers,” in which personal connections fuel expats’ and locals’ social and creative lives. Proving Bronson’s point were exhibitions and events throughout Berlin this spring that explored and cel-ebrated artists’ intimate bonds, dialogues, and long-term relationships with each other, their galleries, their artistic forebears, and the city itself. At his Side By Side gallery, Swiss- American photographer and gallerist Akim Monet paired four sculptures by Auguste Rodin and one by Rodin’s…

The retrospective “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends” that appeared earlier this year at Tate Modern, in London, and is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (May 21–September 17), led us to explore in the pages of ARTnews how Rauschenberg spread his collaborative fervor. We trace the observations of critics and artists over the years and note how his assemblages, which often include appropriated photographs, influenced a host of artists, among them Paul Ramírez Jonas, Ryan Trecartin, David Hammons, and Rachel Harrison. Our own retrospective begins with a review of Rauschenberg’s 1958 show at Castelli gallery by poet John Ashbery, who notes that the artist’s junk-covered canvases “look like walls in a house inhabited by very bad children.” In 1971, performance artist David Antin wrote about Rauschenberg’s E.A.T.…

LETTERWhat better time than summer to turn our attention to a travel-themed issue? And for the art world, this is the perfect year to do it. This issue takes its name, “The Grand Tour,” from a convergence of contemporary art exhibitions—Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and Skulptur Projekte Münster—that take place at the same time every ten years. As it happened, our theme was an even more timely one than we expected, and in a discouraging way: we were hard at work on this issue when President Donald Trump announced his travel ban on visitors to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries. (Not long after that, he announced his intention to drop funding for the NEA and NEH.) As SculptureCenter curator Ruba Katrib writes in these pages, in a…

Ah, the Grand Tour. The more the art-world map expands, with festivals popping up in every corner of the globe, the quainter it seems. Back in the 18th century, the Grand Tour was the all but mandatory sojourn of every sophisticated upper-class British gentleman (yes, in those days they were pretty much all men), first imbibing the culture and mores of high society in Paris and then contemplating the ancient ruins in Greece and Rome. Britain’s country houses and art museums are rich in treasures collected on these trips, which lasted from a few months to a few years. The modern—or, depending on how you look at it, postmodern—version of the European grand tour was born in 1977. In that year, Documenta, in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale coincided…

Today art festivals—biennials, triennials, and so forth—are so pervasive, it feels as if a major one is happening each week. But even in the late 1990s, when biennial fever had yet to peak, there was malaise. ”Talk about other planets!” critic Peter Schjeldahl famously quipped in the New Yorker in 1999, referring to the biennial scene, and adding that at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the crowd ”stuck out like a sore asteroid.” The space metaphor is still apt—at times, it can feel as though these biennials are colliding galaxies, with solar systems of artists and curators orbiting each other. To illustrate the many connections between these curators, ARTnews surveyed 15 major international festivals over the past 25 years. Below, a map of the curator universe. 8 Biennials and triennials Hou…

Since the early 1970s, through her photomontages, photographs, videos, installations, and critical writings, Martha Rosler has explored what mass-media images and public spaces reveal about power and persuasion in late capitalist society. “In the Place of the Public: The Airport Series,” her photographic exploration of the airport as postmodern space, dates from 1983 to the present. While Rosler has not changed the focus of the series, which remains on the airports’ interior architecture, she has changed the photographs’ accompanying text to reflect alterations in how airports are designed and utilized post-9/11. Earlier this spring, she talked with ARTnews about the evolution of the series. I’ve never gone to an airport to take a picture. I take photos when I’m traveling, usually when I’m pushing a cart or dragging heavy luggage,…

After a three-year hiatus intended to allow Whitney Museum curators to break in their palatial new home in the Meatpacking District, the Whitney Biennial has returned in fine form, with an intensely satisfying display of 63 art-ists and collectives across two full floors and a few other spaces. The mood is by turns dark and guardedly hopeful. Everyone is on edge. The show presents a nation, and the sensibili-ties of its artists, in a period of transition, with violence cresting and everything in flux. Call it the biennial on the brink. This is a forward-looking affair—and a se-lective one. There is little abstract painting, few marquee names, and not one deceased artist, whose presence has been fashionable for these shows of late. There are some minor weak points, but the…

Freud used the term “Screen memo-ry” to describe a false or exaggerated recollection masking another, more potent one. In choosing the title “Screen Memory” for his group exhibition at Simon Lee gallery, artist-curator Eoin Don-nelly acknowledged the term’s original mean-ing but also used Freud’s theory as an analogy for the ways in which collective memories may occlude or “screen” individual experi-ence. In keeping with an alternative reading of the term—which now also conjures the screens, both large and small, that dominate our lives—most of the works on display be-longed to our digital era; however, a selection of earlier collages and appropriation works by Wallace Berman, Sherrie Levine, and Sturte-vant offered a sense of lineage. Allen Ruppersberg was represented by a work that looks older than it is. Poems & Placemats…

June “Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg”Museum of Contemporary Art, ChicagoJune 6–September 24 Takashi Murakami has to be one of the world’s most visible artists—between his near-constant shows at outposts of Galerie Perrotin, Gagosian, and Blum & Poe, his loud appearances at various art happenings around the globe, and his wildly popular fashion collaborations, the always-peppy Japanese mischief-maker seems to be everywhere. Despite all this frenzied activity, Murakami hasn’t had a museum show in the United States since ©MURAKAMI came to the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. That dry spell will end when “The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg” opens at the MCA Chicago this summer, bringing to the Windy City an exhibition that ranges from early works never before shown in the United States to outsize newer paintings…

For most of my life, no one really seemed to care that I am Syrian. Early on, whenever I was singled out as an Arab, it was usually by people who didn’t know much about what that might mean. As a kid, I was embarrassed when friends came over to my house—worried that my dad would be wearing a caftan or my mom could be making kibbe or ful, food that smelled strange to American kids. Classmates in school would sometimes call me “camel jockey,” “towel head,” and “sand nigger”—not in a mean way, necessarily, but in a mocking tone that I would laugh off for social survival. While it never felt like more than childish name calling, I always wondered how kids knew those terms while still in their…

Equipped with a blowtorch and propane tank, Julian Charrière stood atop the jagged Icelandic peak, vainly trying to melt the stubborn ice. Accompanied only by an Icelandic rescue team member and a photographer, Charrière, who had trained for a week preparing for the frigid climb, patiently worked at the iceberg for eight hours. Some sort of heroic rescue mission? No, just another extreme trip in the oeuvre of the 29-year-old artist. Such far-flung exploits are typical of Charrière’s practice and aesthetic; he has traveled the globe, from the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia to the Canadian Arctic Circle, and usually accomplishes his mission. In this case, though, the point wasn’t so much actually to melt the ice, but to document a futile effort of man against nature. The result was a…

Visitors these days at any of the many art galleries and institutions that dot Istanbul’s iconic Istiklal Avenue are likely to pass dozens of armed policemen. They stand guard in front of the street’s prestigious Galatasaray High School and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic church, and near a congested stretch of storefronts where a suicide bomber killed four tourists early last year. The police drive down the pedestrian-only thoroughfare and park some of their vehicles in front of the Russian consulate, which has been on high alert since the country’s ambassador was shot dead in December at the opening of a photography exhibition in Ankara. If pedestrians look closely, they might also notice the eyes of officers monitoring nearby intersections through small holes cut into construction tarps. The sense that…

“They decide on their own comfortable positions,” Yuji Agematsu said of the bits of detritus—candy wrappers, rubber bands, feathers, rat bones, string—that coalesce in his otherworldly art. “My duty is just to help fix them in place.” Made with findings collected on wide-eyed city strolls, the artist’s oftentimes micro-scale sculptures double as moving monuments to decay, their materials transfigured through reverence for their peculiar beauty. Agematsu was in his studio on the outskirts of Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, where boxes line the walls, each marked with ranges of dates going back decades. Within the boxes are the artist’s discoveries from the streets he tends to favor around New York. These treasures are meticulously logged, first in notebooks, where he records his daily perambulations with hand-drawn maps, and then in archives, where…

This past February, two promi-nent New York institutions an-nounced moves within days of each other that respond to the status of the public domain and the politi-cal economy of people and goods under the shadow of an accelerating so-called isola-tionism on the national stage. On Febru-ary 3, on the heels of the contentious and ultimately failed first White House execu-tive order restricting travel and revoking visas from seven Muslim-majority nations, the Museum of Modern Art in New York unveiled a protest rehanging of its fifth-floor permanent collection. Although such presentations are often premised on narra-tives and artifacts of Western modernism, the museum chose to respond swiftly to the administration’s directive with a coun-ter geography highlighting seven works by artists hailing from those nations targeted by the travel ban. An eighth…

In 1997, “The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Curated by Mark Francis and Margery King, it traced Warhol’s fascination with glamour and its effects from his early years as a fashion il-lustrator to his involvement with New York City’s downtown scene of the 1960s and the celebrity culture of the ’70s and ’80s, present-ing his paintings in tandem with such personal and cultural ephemera as publicity photos of movie stars, magazines, scrapbooks, and snap- shots. Art historians like Thomas Crow and Anne Wagner had already begun to rescue Warhol from critical opprobrium, but “The Warhol Look” met such disdain head on, as-similating exactly the kinds of influences that once diminished Warhol’s reputation into the very heart of its claims for his achievement.…