Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2021 i ARTnews

AROUND TWO YEARS AGO, Wong Ping took an interest in varicose veins. Bored one day while riding an elevator, he noticed them on a passenger’s legs. “I could see them very clearly,” he said from his Hong Kong studio during a recent Zoom interview. He began researching online, reading about gels that alleviate the discomfort they cause. What would it be like, he wondered, to be a varicose vein? That inquiry wound up forming the basis for Wong’s latest video, which debuted this past June in his first United States survey exhibition, at the New Museum in New York. His practice involves applying dream-world logic to real-world scenarios. “[I’m] interested in something that’s a mixture of weirdness and the real world, or something out of this world happening in real…

In 1971, an exhibition in a city far from the art centers of New York and Los Angeles made history. “The DeLuxe Show,” organized by artist Peter Bradley, took its name from its venue, a dilapidated movie theater in a primarily Black neighborhood in Houston, Texas. Bradley wanted to speak directly to the city’s inhabitants, and that meant showing work not only by white artists but by Black ones too. The show is now recognized as the first integrated art exhibition in the U.S. With financial support from Houston collectors Dominique and John de Menil, Bradley tapped some of the day’s most cutting-edge artists. Appearing alongside the era’s celebrated white artists were Black artists whose accomplishments the mainstream art world had yet to fully register, like William T. Williams, Ed…

LAST YEAR, WHEN THE pandemic hit, shuttered art institutions the world over were forced to pivot to the internet—it was the only way to maintain connection with their audiences. Museums organized online curator talks and walk-throughs, auction houses livestreamed sales. Art fairs set up viewing rooms—and so did their clients, the galleries, in some cases collectively. Today, as the pandemic fades in some places and lingers in others, questions remain about how commercial galleries will survive, especially small and midsize enterprises that were struggling to stay viable before the global health crisis and its attendant shutdown. The answer to providing long-term support for galleries and their local art scenes may, in fact, lie in those collective digital initiatives. One early effort to keep galleries going during Covid originated in May,…

NICHOLAS GALANIN x YA TSEEN Sound has long been among the many materials favored by Nicholas Galanin, whose multivalent art ventures into painting, sculpture, textiles, totems, and just about any medium imaginable. But music rises to the top in Ya Tseen, a band with which he recently released an album on the venerated indie-music label Sub Pop (home to Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, Beach House, Shabazz Palaces, and numerous other notable acts). Though Galanin, a citizen of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, has released music previously under aliases including Silver Jackson and Indian Agent, Ya Tseen’s album Indian Yard marks a next step for him in terms of musicianship and as a new nexus for the kind of work that his art-world followers have come to recognize. “Music has always been there,…

RUANGRUPA x THE WORLD Organizers of Documenta, the highly influential art festival that takes over Kassel, Germany, every five years, usually have to wrangle millions of dollars in funding, coordinate with hundreds of artists, and interface with countless administrators and politicians. By its very nature, the task has required willpower, decorum, and control. But the curators for the next edition—a nine-artist Indonesian collective called ruangrupa—have so far been given leeway for a more free-form approach to planning. “A lot of the meetings are not productive—or not as productive as they could be,” said the members of ruangrupa, who prefer to be quoted as a single entity. “It’s really hard for us to have proper meetings. And then it’s frustrating as well for people to be in our meetings.” Rather than…

Shortly after Hamilton premiered, Lin Manuel Miranda told Smithsonian magazine that the musical was “not a singular art form—it’s 12 art forms smashed together.” What he loves about collaboration, he said, is that “working with other people just makes you smarter” and “you can build things so much bigger than yourself.” These days, more and more visual artists are having that same experience: reaching outside their discipline for input from other fields and creating things they couldn’t have imagined alone. In this issue, we celebrate collaborations of all kinds—between art and fashion, art and music, art and science, art and food, and, of course, artists and other artists. Nowhere are artist collaborations more numerous, fruitful, and lucrative than in the world of fashion. In these pages, we trace the trend…

A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See Tina Campt (The MIT Press, $29.95) • Tina Campt’s incisive writings about the African diaspora and the nature of photographic images have inspired numerous artists in recent years, including Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Simone Leigh. In this book, she uses artworks by Arthur Jafa, Okwui Okpokwasili, and others to define the “Black gaze,” a way of looking at the world that is very much shaping how art is being made today. Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman (Verso Books, $19.95) • Is it art or investigative journalism, or both? Artists like Hito Steyerl and Lawrence Abu Hamdan regularly prompt such questions with work researching political leaders and global conflicts. A leading practitioner of…

TBA21-ACADEMY x OCEANS TBA21-Academy, the ambitious ocean-going research platform affiliated with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, continues in its mission to find ways that art and science can work together to survey the effects of climate change as the world’s seas rise. For her solo exhibition as part of the two-year program “The Soul Expanding Ocean” at Ocean Space, TBA21-Academy’s home base in a centuries-old Venetian church, the Sydney-based artist Taloi Havini created Answer to the Call (2021), a 22-channel “sonic sculpture” that includes sounds from recordings taken around the Great Barrier Reef, sonar data used to measure the depths of the ocean floor, seafaring chants, and an instrumental piece composed by musician Ben Hakalitz. The project is, in part, a response to the practices and damages that colonization has brought to…

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR visitors to Dia:Beacon to fall for Sam Gilliam’s vibrantly colored abstract painting Double Merge (1968), an enormous canvas cascading from the ceiling, when it went on display two years ago, on long-term loan from a private collector. “It is beloved by our audience,” said the museum’s head, Dia Art Foundation director Jessica Morgan, who herself was taken with the piece. “I think with so many things in Dia:Beacon, once you install them you realize all the ways in which they’re opening doors and avenues for potential within the collection, and witnessing relationships between works that you hadn’t imagined were there before,” she said. “It just became even more urgent for us to think about how we could bring this work into the collection.” Gilliam’s work…

Paintings by the late Jean-Michel Basquiat have been resetting the auction market after it took a 25 percent dip in sales in 2020. At Christie’s New York in May, casino mogul Steve Wynn snapped up Valentino cofounder Giancarlo Giammetti’s 6½-foot-tall skull painting In This Case (1983) for $93 million. That’s shy of the Basquiat record of $110 million, set in 2016 when Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa bought a skull painting from 1982 at Sotheby’s. (It’s shown at left, in the Basquiat retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris in 2018, where it hung alongside Giammetti’s, as well as the third great skull painting, at right, which is in the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection.) This past May, another 1982 painting sold for $50.8 million, and in June, a triptych that…

VAGINAL DAVIS x BREAD At this year’s Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, a large loaf of bread hung on the wall of a room bathed in pink light. From a distance, it resembled a bulbous lute or a thick bodyboard; up close, it revealed itself as a baked good whose undulating crust suggested the presence of eyes, a nose, a mouth, and two breasts. This was the work of Vaginal Davis, who over the course of a four-decade career has put out punk records, made movies, performed as a drag queen, run a storied apartment gallery, drawn with makeup and food coloring—and also made the occasional bread sculpture with the help of various bakeries. “My late mother, Mary Magdalene Duplantier, wasn’t an artist but made art objects from bread and…

“THE BERLIN ART SCENE has been paralyzed, yet people are still sticking to the old familiar dates,” artist Henning Strassburger wrote this past April in the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. And he was right: as much of the global art world persisted in its pivot to digital, Berlin continued to delude itself into thinking a return to normal was just around the corner. As we should have learned by now, neither approach works. Earlier this year, emails were sent out to save the dates for the last weekend of April, when the annual Gallery Weekend in Berlin typically takes place. Despite ongoing lockdown measures and a slow vaccination rollout, there were no digital initiatives announced—until a week before the press preview day, when I received a message with the subject…