Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 i ARTnews

The peculiar appearance of Forrest Bess, the “pseudohermaphrodite” painter, at the 2012 Whitney Biennial still stands out in my memory. The eleven paintings were vivid and haunting, and his story of genital self-surgery, with accompanying photo-documentation, was even harder to forget. In a further strangeness, his work and personal effects were presented not by the show’s official curators—Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders— but by a fellow artist, Robert Gober. Of course, the most startling eccentricity was that Bess was in the biennial in the first place, having been dead for 35 years. Bess wasn’t the only dead artist making a cameo in the hands of a living artist. In that same biennial, Werner Herzog gave the work of Hercules Segers, who died in 1638, a soundtrack from the (living) Dutch…

Few humans maintained a courtship with death as intimate and prolonged as that of William S. Burroughs. Despite a decades-long addiction to heroin, numerous run-ins with the law, and an unabashed love of gunplay, the author of Naked Lunch (1959) died in 1997, at the age of 83, outliving his wife, Joan Vollmer; his son William S. “Billy” Burroughs Jr.; and his fellow Beats Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, though they were more than a decade younger. Add to that list Howard Brookner, filmmaker and fellow denizen of the Lower East Side, who died of AIDS in 1989, at the age of 34, after completing only three films. Brookner’s first film, Burroughs: The Movie (1983), is the only documentary about the 20th century’s most literary junky produced during the writer’s…

This past September, Noah Horowitz, clean-cut, in his mid-30s, and with a mild professorial mien, arrived on time for our interview at Cookshop, a restaurant in the heart of New York’s Chelsea art district. He unbuttoned his suit jacket, sat down, and ordered a lemonade. We were meeting to talk about his new gig, director of the Americas for Art Basel, the world’s largest and most prestigious contemporary-art fair—a role that could be instrumental in shaping how the global art market advances into new corners of the world. By further establishing its hold on emerging artist-dealer-collector cottage industries in, say, South American boomtowns, Art Basel can ensure that dealers in those cities stay dependent on the fair’s four-day sales saturnalias—whether it’s the 45-year-old flagship event in Basel, Switzerland, the recently…

“Trauma” is the operative word in Alberto Burri’s retrospective “The Trauma of Painting” at the Guggenheim. One of the most innovative outliers in the field of postwar abstraction, the late Italian modernist sought out unconventional industrial materials when other artists were stuck on paint, and he didn’t hesitate to refer to the body when others were trying to erase it from art. Burri started experimenting with art making while in a Texas POW camp after having been captured in Tunisia in 1943. He’d been an officer in the Italian medical corps, and the sutures, scars, scabs, skin grafts, blisters, and burns he witnessed all made their way into the visceral abstractions that curator Emily Braun gathered for the show. But it is the trauma that he inflicted on his materials—melting,…

How we construct history is the primary subject of Lebanese artist Walid Raad’s conceptualart projects. Using photography, video, performance, and text, Raad doesn’t try to document the actual history of his country’s extended civil war; instead, he fabricates faux archives, mimicking the conventions of academic research and journalism to trap viewers into believing his vivid accounts, which may in fact be closer to truth than the mere presentation of facts. The Atlas Group, for example, is a project created by Raad that ran between 1989 and 2004. It consists of an imaginary archive of diaries, photographs, notebooks, films, and artworks related to the Lebanese Civil War. In one instance, based on “facts” that may or may not be true, Raad covers black-and-white photographs of Beirut sites with color-coded dots, specifying…

A fortuneteller unexpectedly set up shop in Chelsea’s bustling gallery center—although a reading from this woman, clad in a cloudpatterned suit, did not concern itself with the future. Using huge “tarot” cards, bearing such words as “unsubscribe,” “delete all,” and “two people like you,” Ofri Cnanni gave visitors a different sort of reading. She interpreted the words on the card, the subjects’ demeanors, and the objects with which they presented her—one personal and two selected from her large stash, stored on a wall. Combining the high-tech, the low-fi, and the occult, Cnanni assembled collaged portraits of her customers based on that face-down card and the selected objects. The result was one of the more exciting meldings of conceptual and performance art to have appeared this season. The artist constructed these…

It seemed as if Orchard Street had been struck by disaster. Martin Roth’s “Untitled (debris)” transformed this gallery’s two levels into a wasteland of sorts, resembling a recently demolished building. At the same time, it could have been viewed as the site of a soon-to-be luxury condo. In context, though, Roth presented the grimmer reality of how many buildings are reduced to rubble. The misshapen chunks of ashen concrete masonry, complete with discolored sand, were culled from near the Syria-Turkey border. Roth heightened this sense of disorientation by adding 25 brightly colored parakeets that mainly perched on the gallery’s exposed piping. These new tenants, rescued from an online shelter, were at once cheerful, their shimmering plumage contrasting with the desolation below, and ominous, as if threatening to swoop down at…

The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently showcased photographer Nicholas Nixon’s most famous series, “The Brown Sisters,” group portraits of his wife and her three sisters taken annually over several decades. Although intended as a tribute, that show had the effect of narrowing the museum-going public’s view of Nixon’s art. This career survey studiedly excluded “The Brown Sisters,” though Nixon’s wife, Bebe, appeared in it affectingly several times, both alone and with him. “Nicholas Nixon: About Forty Years” delivered on the promise of its title’s ambiguities. It comprised work dating back to the mid-1970s, whose variety shows an artist probing for images or frames of reference to evoke an individual’s, a family’s, or a society’s historical moment. These included portraits of intimates and strangers (including Robert Sappenfield and…

Artist Charlotte Salomon was born into a middleclass German Jewish family in 1917; she was killed at Auschwitz in 1943. Salomon produced “Life? or Theater?” (1940–42), a lightly fictionalized autobiography told through a series of vivid gouache paintings, while living under false papers in southern France. Shortly before she was arrested and deported, she entrusted the entire cycle to a friend. Her instructions: “Keep this safe. It is my whole life.” The three-part work is structured like a play or a film, with each section laid out scene by scene in storyboard fashion. It consists of a prologue describing Salomon’s family, her Berlin upbringing, and the suicides of her mother and aunt; a main act telling the story of her passion for the musician Alfred Wolfsohn; and an epilogue recounting…

BILL POWERS: THE INCLUSION OF ANIMALS IN YOUR NEW PAINTINGS WAS A SURPRISE TO ME. Carroll Dunham: It’s almost like animals allow me to represent personality. The horse, some birds, a dog—it’s not that I have a zoological obsession with the animal kingdom, but after I finished these paintings, I realized that the animals appear to have more of an inner life than the people do. It’s given me a lot to think about. BP: MAYBE BECAUSE ANIMALS DON’T HAVE A DEVELOPED LANGUAGE THE WAY THAT WE DO, SO THERE’S MORE INVESTED IN THEIR EXPRESSIONS. CD: Also, their absence of language allows you to project onto them. I’ve always been interested as an adult in thinking about how animals behaved in the cartoons I watched as a kid. Bugs Bunny…

As the sun went down one evening this past autumn, the New Orleans musician Quintron performed an improvisational set inside of Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn alongside a number of other musicians. The jam was centered around an unlikely bandleader: not a human but rather a synthesizer, which had a leader of its own—the weather. Some clarification might be needed. The Weather Warlock is a synth built by Quintron, who has been making and showing his own instruments for decades now, most notably a device called the Drum Buddy, which is a light-sensor-controlled drum machine he plays at shows, often alongside his wife, the puppeteer Miss Pussycat. Using sensors, the Weather Warlock responds to weather conditions (half of it sits outside) and, when on, creates a continuous stream of music.…

There are major streets in downtown Miami that have been effectively hollowed out by development, impossible to traverse and made useless in the name of progress. It is a city of luxury high-rises and scaffolding. On a recent trip, at my hotel—a construction site itself five years ago, rising from the site of downtown’s first luxury hotel, the Royal Palm, completed in 1897—the receptionist checking me in said she had a room available with a “beautiful view of the city.” It looked out on another construction site. The Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum Miami of Miami-Dade County occupies an important position in the changes downtown. PAMM is situated at the top of the former Bicentennial Park, which was, until quite recently, a place of such disuse that the nearby station…

Archibald Motley (1891–1981) painted Chicago’s African American street life with a vivid palette and stylized flatness that crosses Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Reginald Marsh, and Grandma Moses. He glamorized black culture of the ’30s and ’40s, but he also satirized it. Into his busy street scenes he sometimes inserted coal-black characters with bulging eyes and red, exaggerated lips. Today they stare out at us like corrosive jokes, begging for backstory. This retrospective, a traveling show curated by Richard J. Powell that originated at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art and ends at the Whitney, provides a piece of that. Before the colorful genre scenes, Motley produced finely observed portraits of his many-hued family members and models. Given the years—mostly the ’20s—when Motley painted them, one might dismiss these works as academic throwbacks.…

Ulrich Rückriem has a surprising way of rendering Minimalism warm and sensitive. His materials, including stone, metal, and wood, which by nature should be hard and unresponsive— that is, declarative—are worked with a subtlety that leaves the art open to questioning and ambiguity. Why the pieces are constructed as they are, and how, are the main subjects under consideration. A thin square slab of steel curls slightly upward at the edges; three metal rectangles in shades from silver to taupe to black are pressed not quite smoothly together. Although clearly in the family of Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre, these have a softer, more speculative, possibly poetic intention. A magnetism characterizes the sculptures and the drawings: spaces promise completion; circles don’t close; the geometric figures suspended in the…

Barnaby Furnas’s abrupt turn to landscape in this dynamic six-painting show was by no means an abandonment of his signature narrative and graffiti work. Furnas channeled Cézanne’s transformation of Mont Sainte-Victoire and in so doing took the master’s geometric harnessing of nature one step further. Where Cézanne used a traditional horizon line to guide the viewer’s gaze, Furnas transformed the line into a division between image and reflection. In all six paintings the upper section of the canvas is replicated in the lower, as if in a reflecting pool. In, for example, the large, 99-by-104-inch The First Morning (Fire Toads), 2015, this semblance of mirroring creates the effect of art contemplating itself. Precisely the point: the artist Narcissus fixes his gaze and imposes his vision on nature. Furnas did that…

Martine Syms’s show “Vertical Elevated Oblique” began with a sour joke: “Everybody wanna be a black woman but nobody wanna be a black woman.” Using that as her inspiration, Syms took an incisive look at how black women are represented in the media. The central work here—a ten-minute video, Notes on Gesture (2015)—derived its aesthetic from the Internet. The video shows an anonymous black woman with cherry-red lipstick, gold hoop earrings, tattoos, and dreadlocks making extreme facial expressions and hand gestures. Superimposed text loosely explains some of them. For example, “When the Weed Hits” is accompanied by the woman’s eyes glazing over. Gestures are repeated by means of jerky edits, causing them to look like GIFs. Then, as if the video had exploded into the gallery, Syms installed the rest…

“Strange Currencies: Art & Action in Mexico City, 1990–2000” brings together works by 28 artists who were living and working in Mexico City in the 1990s—a decade marked not only by escalating violence, pervasive government corruption, and increasing income inequality, but also by the city’s rise as a center for adventurous contemporary art. The exhibition’s best moments include Sofia Táboas’s Anillo-vitamina-champú (1994), a work consisting of 100 plastic jewelry boxes, each containing a ring, a shampoo packet, and a multivitamin—according to the artist, all that “is supposedly vital to go into the world as a woman.” More disquieting is a pile of 120 car stereos accompanying the video A propósito (1997) by the artists Miguel Calderón and Yoshua Okón, who after being the victims of several crimes themselves decided to…

Originally an abstract painter, New York artist David Diao has spent the last 30-plus years dissecting the discourses around the art of his time, from the politics of Abstract Expressionism to identity politics, often rendering them as witty infographics. It was a little disconcerting, then, to encounter his paintings in a Beijing museum, where many of his references were likely to be lost on viewers unfamiliar with recent Western art history. This retrospective brought together over 100 of Diao’s paintings and spanned all phases of the artist’s career. The show’s high points were the works in which Diao turned his gaze toward his own life and art, as in Résumé (1991), a canvas listing his complete exhibition history from 1969 and 1991, and a series from the 1990s exploring his…

Ever since his graffiti around Beijing propelled him to fame in the late 1990s, Zhang Dali has been a central figure in Chinese contemporary art. Nevertheless, his sculptures and photographs still carry a sting, as evidenced by the fact that his first retrospective is being held in a provincial museum, far from the view of the censors (or a wider audience). “From Reality to Extreme Reality: The Road of Zhang Dali” begins with Zhang’s early Socialist Realist pieces and ink paintings. Both fueled his photographic projects, which are truly his strongest work. In his 1998 “Demolition” series Zhang drew mammoth outlines of his head on walls near imperiled historic sites throughout Beijing and then photographed them. In Second History (2003–6) he paired 130 propaganda photos from the Cultural Revolution with…

ANSELM KIEFER CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS DECEMBER 16 - APRIL 18 Anselm Kiefer’s rugged canvases and Holocaust references are still as brutal, tender, and confounding as they were when the German artist began producing his large paintings in the late ’70s. This retrospective, Kiefer’s first in France in 30 years, brings together 150 of the artist’s works. Among them are the more obscure, though no less effective, photographs, films, and installations to show an artist dealing with memory and trauma in multiple mediums. “A LABOUR OF LOVE” WELTKULTUREN MUSEUM, FRANKFURT DECEMBER 3 - JULY 24 With the recent art-world interest in contemporary African art, it’s become obvious that the Weltkulturen Museum, which acquired 600 South African works in 1986, was ahead of the game. Now the museum has asked South African…

The curators of a new exhibition titled “Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age,” which runs at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst through April 30, aim to do no less than “revise the history of painting since 1960,” as they write in the catalogue. “Hubristic, I suppose,” one of those curators, art historian David Joselit, said, laughing, as we sat in his office at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he teaches. “You know, why not try?” For years, many serious-minded academics specializing in postwar art ignored the medium when not outright attacking it. “There have been so many ways of marginalizing painting theoretically,” Joselit said, “as a neo-avant-garde, as though it’s repetition, that it’s a market figment, that it’s a regression, that in some sense the…

More than a quarter of the world’s top 200 art collectors maintain their own museums or exhibition spaces, according to ARTnews. Microsoft’s co-founder, Seattle billionaire Paul Allen, is now a member of this elite coterie. After his propitious launch of the international Seattle Art Fair in August, Allen announced the debut of his first exhibition space devoted to visual art, Pivot Art + Culture, which opens to the public this month. Allen is already a founder of two Seattle museums, the Frank Gehry–designed Experience Music Project Museum and the Living Computer Museum, as well as the Flying Heritage Collection of historic, ready-to-fly aircraft in nearby Everett. His empire also includes the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Allen Institute for Cell Science, SpaceShipOne (the…

Trisha Baga’s busy, multifaceted show “Orlando” featured one text projection, two 3-D video installations, five portraits composed of seeds, 56 ceramic sculptures, and a mind-numbing array of visual information. For a show that was a metaphor for how, in the digital age, we want to have it all, the presentation felt only right. The setting was an imagined scenario in which Orlando, the Florida city, has been flooded and destroyed by an environmental disaster. Baga, who is never content to let one idea mean only one thing, also used the show’s title to refer to the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name. That book is about a hermaphroditic English poet, who was depicted here in the form of a glazedceramic sculpture. Each of the ceramic works resembled an uncovered…

Like much of the world in 1968, Japan had its own student protest movement, directed primarily against the Vietnam War and U.S. military presence within its borders as well as conformity and repression in the post-war era. The impact of this period on artists and photographers was profound. This thoroughly researched and at times stunning exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, sets out to show how photography was the perfect medium to capture the changes in Japanese society and to reflect those changes through experimental techniques. Toshio Matsumoto’s film For the Damaged Right Eye (1968), at the Japan Society, is an apt place to start, with its collaged footage of Tokyo nightlife, popular culture, and psychedelic effects. Matsumoto’s work appears in both venues. Then there is Daido…

These 13 new oil paintings by Maureen Gallace were small—the largest just 10 by 13 inches— but surprisingly powerful. Mostly seascapes and landscapes, they were quaint and beautiful yet often tumultuous, with occasional hints of darkness—much like the sea itself. Here, beaches, sites of joyful, leisurely play, were wild, frothy expanses. The waters are rendered in brushstrokes that are at once impassioned and thoughtful, as though the artist’s hand, poised above the canvas, controlled the entire ocean. A jagged line of spray and eddy bisects the canvas in Beach/Wave (2013), dividing land from sea. In Storm (2015), tempestuous skies stir overhead; clouds roll in from a dark horizon. Small, spare cottages, in the woods or near the shore, are painted with smooth, velvety surfaces, straight, soft edges, and oddly few…

In a video from the mid-1980s, Knowles hammers away at a typewriter, as if playing piano. The hypnotic sound of that action becomes a visual effect marked in ink. From a distance, the resulting “typings” appear as pixilated images—an alarm clock, a rooster shaking a man’s hand, the cover of Life magazine—or abstract diagrams. Knowles composes these images by repeating a single letter, name, or line from a song, inserting phonetic fragments into the forms. His use of algorithmic structures is frequently ascribed to his autism, an essentializing view downplayed in the present exhibition. Knowles has been dissolving boundaries between sound, language, image, and gesture since his early teenage years, when Robert Wilson inducted him into a circle of avant-garde artists in New York. (Wilson and Philip Glass used his…

This illuminating alternative history of Pop shows how little-known artists, from Latin America to the Soviet bloc, adapted the movement’s eye-catching, accessible language for their own ends. Pop in the late 1950s was mainly confined to white, male U.K. and U.S. artists fascinated with consumer society and the American dream. A decade later, artists around the world were employing Pop’s bright colors and simplified forms to protest military juntas, the Cold War, gender inequality, Vietnam, and totalitarian repression. Many of the 64 artists exhibited here considered themselves adherents of new realism or new figuration rather than Pop artists, regarding Pop as uncritical of capitalist culture. While not included in the show, iconic works by Lichtenstein and Warhol appear as appropriated elements in the Spanish art collective Equipo Crónica’s painting Social…

In “The Right to Clean” Israeli video artist Nira Pereg continues to explore the behind-the-scenes life of sacred places, this time the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, venerated as the site where Jesus was crucified and resurrected. The title of this multichannel video installation refers to the boundaries dividing control of the building (including its cleaning) among various Christian denominations. The piece tracks the church’s mundane ceremonies, its flow of tourists and believers, and the activities of a nun called Clare, who is seen sweeping its halls and scrubbing its Stone of Unction. As always, Pereg presents her documentary footage in a thoughtful way. The sound is edited so that some noises—the susurration of a broom, the sound of a cloth caressing stone, and the snapping of tourists’…