Roni Horn

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum of American Art, November 6, 2009–January 24, 2010 

From the website:

“For more than thirty years, Roni Horn (b. 1955) has been developing work of concentrated visual power and intellectual rigor, often exploring issues of gender, identity, androgyny, and the complex relationship between object and subject. Because the artist chooses not to privilege any one medium, Horn’s art defies easy categorization. Materials—often used with remarkable virtuosity and sensitivity—take on metaphorical qualities and relate key themes with great visual power. Horn’s interest in doubling and identity, for example, is central to understanding her approach to the genres of portraiture and landscape. Image-specific photographic portraits and ethereally beautiful abstract cast glass sculpture relay aspects of both. Similarly, Horn’s intricately cut and pigmented drawings suggest something of the elemental nature of the earth that relates in turn to how the landscape of Iceland, where Horn has traveled and made work since 1975, has informed her practice.

Throughout the exhibition’s installation at the Whitney, the integration and cross relationships among the mediums in which the artist works will be fluid, and the presentation on two floors will explore structurally the crucial concept of doubling in Horn’s work. Included in the exhibition are approximately seventy works, varying in scale from small drawings to room-sized photographic installations to sculptures weighing several tons. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated two-volume publication: a catalogue with an introduction by the three curators, and an essay by Briony Fer, and a subject index, a second volume in the form of a glossary that is devoted to important ideas in Horn’s practice or that relate to individual works.

Jointly organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Tate Modern, Roni Horn aka Roni Horn is the most comprehensive overview of Roni Horn’s work to date. The curators, who are working in close collaboration with Horn, are the Whitney’s chief curator and associate director for programs Donna De Salvo and curator of drawings Carter E. Foster, and Mark Godfrey, curator at Tate Modern. Following the Whitney’s presentation, it travels to The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where it will be on view February 19–June 13, 2010.

Read the New York Times review here.

 

Pipilotti Rist

From The New York Times Magazine:

“In a dark, silo-shaped room in the upscale Jardim Europa neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil, last month, an impassioned aesthetic debate was underway, though it would have been tough for anyone walking into the room to tell. I was at a place called the Museum of Image and Sound, lying on my back with seven other people, all of us completely silent in brightly colored hammocks that had been hung around a circular scaffolding. Our feet angled together toward the center of the room and our heads radiated out like lotus petals. We were all staring up at the ceiling, where two video works were being projected, both featuring a pale, red-headed woman who looked like a Nereid sprung to life. In the first video, she navigates her way through a candy-colored world — a birch forest; a long airportlike corridor; a leaf-strewn sidewalk that the camera scuttles along low and fast, as if from the vantage point of a bug.

In the second video, pieces of which would have been instantly familiar to anyone who visited the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York last winter, the same woman crawls naked through the grass, and super-zoomed-in images of her apple-stuffed mouth alternate with that of a fairly nasty-looking black pig’s. The sequence ends as the woman rises from a body of water with menstrual blood dripping from the crotch of her white underwear, turning the water — and thus the whole screen and the room — a deep crimson.

Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss artist from whose overflowing mind and cameras these images came, finally got up and walked around, and so did everyone else on her creative team, a group that functions like a close-knit family, with Rist as the cool but fiercely involved mother. They had been in Brazil for almost two weeks at that point, installing what amounted to a mini-retrospective of Rist’s career in two small contemporary art spaces in São Paulo, one of which was this small, scrappy museum housed in a handsome white Modernist building that was once a private house.

The disagreement that morning — one that had been building for days — was whether to leave the circular room with the single video installation originally planned for it, a piece from 2005 called “A Liberty Statue for Löndön”; or to add the second one, a newly conceived work that Rist had been editing at a furious pace from footage she first used in “Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters),” her multi-projection installation that became a huge hit last year at MoMA. That work, a video-in-the-round immersion, transformed the museum’s ungainly atrium into what one critic described variously as a bordello, a pleasure dome and an opium den, a work that seemed to cause the masculine-feeling museum to (at least metaphorically) ovulate. Read the rest here.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

From the New York Times:

“FROM a young age Wes Anderson has felt proprietary about Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” “It was the first book at our household that was considered to be mine,” he said. “I was obsessed with anything involving hidden passageways or underground tunnels.”

Mr. Anderson’s live-action films have always existed in parallel realities — elaborately storyboarded, art-directed parallel realities, no less — and so it is not too great a leap for him to be conjuring a world from scratch for his stop-motion animated version of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (opening Nov. 13).

Controversy flared recently when some crew members grumbled to The Los Angeles Times about Mr. Anderson’s absence from the film’s London set during the shoot. He has acknowledged that he did much of his work from Paris, where he has an apartment, sending detailed instructions, photos and videos to the animators. In any case, the finished film, which he wrote with the filmmaker Noah Baumbach, suggests that Mr. Anderson was anything but hands-off. This may be his first animated film, but his fingerprints are everywhere, from the dollhouse cross sections to the funny-sad family dynamics to the belief that production design is intimately linked with character.

Like this season’s other adaptation of a kid-lit favorite, Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is more concerned with naturalism than most movies with talking creatures. The anthropomorphic foxes (George Clooney and Meryl Streep provide the lead voices) have real fur. The look of the film — more redolent of the warm, homey Donald Chaffin illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dahl’s 1970 book than the spiky Quentin Blake drawings in the more familiar paperbacks — is rooted in concrete details (Mr. Fox’s dapper corduroy jacket, for instance, is a miniature of one of Mr. Anderson’s). “Wes wanted everything to come from something in life,” said the film’s production designer, Nelson Lowry. “Even the simple things were researched and referenced.”

At the same time, Mr. Anderson said, he knew that the movie had to exist in “a zone of artifice.” For one thing, he kept to a strict autumnal palette of ochers, siennas and umbers. “I didn’t want any blue skies and I didn’t want any green grass,” he said. “And since the whole movie is in fields, having no blue and no green radically transforms your sense of what is natural.”    Read the rest here.

Slide show here.

Three Subjects

Deconstructing Cinema in Order to Reveal It : Manohla Dargis on Ken Jacobs

“ONE Sunday last month, I visited the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his wife, Flo, in the top-floor loft they rent on Chambers Street in Manhattan. The plan was for Mr. Jacobs to show some work he will present during a weeklong series of programs in Los Angeles that starts Monday. As I neared the top of my four-flight climb, the walls became more cluttered and lived in, as if announcing the residency of the last bohemians in TriBeCa.

That evening, after some conversation and homemade sorbet, I watched a world of wonders unfold on a screen hanging from the ceiling. As the recorded sounds of city traffic and a distant voice filled the air, sharply etched black-and-white geometric shapes of undecipherable provenance begin to rotate on screen first right, then left and back, creating what looked like shifting whirlpools. Parts of the image pulsed and eased in and out of focus. I thought I was looking at oil on water, flowing lava, lichen, dying embers or a reference to 9/11, which had happened five blocks away. My eyes searched for something familiar. I tried to grasp the story. My eyes started watering, less from emotion than strain.

“I have no idea what I’m watching,” I scribbled into my notebook. I was more right than I knew.

What I watched was beautiful, hypnotic, mysterious and as close to a representation of three-dimensional imagery as I’ve ever seen without wearing funny glasses. It was pure cinema. As it happens, it was so pure that no celluloid had threaded its way through a projector. I hadn’t been watching a film, after all, or digital images, only light and shadow. Using an illusion machine of his own invention that he calls the Nervous Magic Lantern — an apparatus containing a spinning shutter, a light and lenses that he hides behind a black curtain when he isn’t performing what he calls “live cinema” — he had taken the experience of watching moving images back to its origins. We weren’t watching shadows on the cave wall, but we were close.” Read the rest here.

At MoMA, ‘Permanent’ Learns to Be Flexible: Ted Loos profiles chief curator Ann Temkin 

“THE European tourists, students with sketchpads and others who throng the painting and sculpture galleries of the Museum of Modern Art every day may not notice anything out of the ordinary in Room 19 on the fourth floor, but visitors who know the place and its paintings well surely do. The walls are still arrayed with large canvases by Abstract Expressionist masters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, but where once these works were surrounded by simple wooden frames, they now hang naked, their rough, paint-splattered edges and rusting staples on view to the world.

“It was convention to have the frames,” Ann Temkin explained recently as she walked around the gallery and stopped in front of Kline’s “Painting Number 2” (1954). That convention, Ms. Temkin felt, had domesticated the paintings in a way that obscured how radical they were, what a “profound break with the past,” and last fall she ordered the frames removed in one of her first acts as the Modern’s new chief curator of painting and sculpture.

“Now these strokes explode off the canvas,” she said happily, pointing to Kline’s signature black slashes. “It has a freedom now.”

In the year and two months since she succeeded John Elderfield in the job, Ms. Temkin, 49, has been working to break with the past herself — most surprisingly, perhaps, in her approach to the so-called permanent collection. Ranging from van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889) and Matisse’s “Dance (I)” (1909) to de Kooning’s frenzied “Woman, I” (1950-52) and Andy Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” (1962), this collection — or rather a selection from it that has been on view for decades — has done more than any other to define modern art and shape the public’s understanding of its history. The 26 rooms of the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Painting and Sculpture Galleries, which have housed these highlights of the collection on the fourth and fifth floors of the Modern’s “new” building since it opened in 2004, might reasonably be regarded as sacrosanct: the heart of the museum and of modern art generally.

But under Ms. Temkin, the permanent collection display is quickly becoming less permanent. Galleries that once changed only when works were loaned out are now subject to frequent renewal. For the first time, media other than painting and sculpture appear frequently throughout the Barr galleries. Artists who never quite made it into official “schools” are getting more play, and schools that the museum once passed up are getting pride of place.

Even small changes, like swapping out a single well-known artist for another, can make for major shifts in the museum’s familiar and stately narrative of modernism’s progress. The fourth floor, covering the early 1940s to the early 1970s, used to begin with Jackson Pollock’s “Stenographic Figure” (1942). Now Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture “Quarantania I” (1947-53) sets the tone for the entire era.” Read the rest here.

Creatively Committed to Cool: Gia Kourlas profiles coreographer Karole Armitage

“Choreography — even for someone as skilled as Ms. Armitage, who has been creating dances since the 1970s and was recently a Tony Award nominee for “Hair” — doesn’t get easier with experience. She described “Itutu,” which will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starting Wednesday, as an African ballet and “one of the biggest challenges of my life.”

Part of the struggle has to do with the free-spirited sensibility of her musical collaborators. The production features music written and performed by the West African pop-electronica group Burkina Electric and the composer Lukas Ligeti, who is a member of the band.

“One day a song is five minutes, and the next day it’s eight minutes,” Ms. Armitage said. “And still to this day, they don’t understand how difficult that is for us. It’s kind of hilarious. But we’ve figured out this elaborate cuing system.”

“Itutu” translates as “cool” in Yoruba. For the work, which includes 15 dancers (11 from her company and 4 musician-dancers from Burkina Electric), Ms. Armitage was inspired by the art historian Robert Farris Thompson’s notion that itutu is related to the American aesthetic of cool.” Read the rest here.

 

Performa 09

Performa 09, the third edition of the internationally acclaimed biennial of new visual art performance, will be held in New York City from November 1–22, 2009, showcasing new work by more than 150 of the world’s most exciting contemporary artists. Presentations will include 11 new Performa Commissions and, for the first time ever, a Performa Premieres program of 6 remarkable pieces that have never been seen in New York. For Performa 09’s opening benefit gala, renowned hostess, hotelier, food writer, and conceptualist Jennifer Rubell will present Creation, a unique dinner sure to be like nothing guests have ever experienced before.

Over its three week-run, Performa 09’s innovative program will break down the boundaries between visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, film, television, radio, graphic design, and the culinary arts, presenting over 110 events in collaboration with a consortium of more than 80 of the city’s leading arts institutions, 40 curators from around the world, and a network of public and private venues throughout the city.

The New York Times has a preview.

Damian Ortega

Damian Ortega: Do It Yourself at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston thru January 18th

“Born in 1967 in Mexico City, Ortega is one of the most prominent artists of the new Mexican generation. This exhibition, the first-ever survey of Ortega’s work, will show the arc of his artistic output with a range of sculpture, installation, video, and photography. 

In Ortega’s work, objects are never allowed to rest—they are pulled apart, suspended, or rearranged, calling attention to the dynamism of the world around us and the hidden poetry in the everyday. A former political cartoonist, Ortega brings a subtle, incisive wit to his surprising manipulations of familiar, humble materials—bricks, old tools, Coca-Cola bottles,  tortillas, and even a Volkswagen Beetle are assembled and reassembled in playful and imaginative ways.”

Read the New York Times review here.

1969

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents 1969 (On view October 25, 2009 – April 5, 2010), a large scale exhibition occupying the entire second floor with works drawn from every department of The Museum of Modern Art. Exploring a cross section of art made during a period marked with revolution and socio-political tumult, this exhibition also will embrace five interventions by a current generation of artists whose work reflects the concerns of 1969 and brings the exhibition into the present. These younger artists will be given free reign to respond to the works on view and to the time period in general.

1969 is organized by a team of curators representing both institutions and includes MoMA’s archivist. One of the questions that shaped this exhibition early on was whether the customary curatorial approach of P.S.1, with its fast-paced process and focus on living artists as well as the rustic architecture of the former schoolhouse, would offer a different visual setting for work ordinarily seen in the minimal white galleries of MoMA. This exhibition includes examples of painting, sculpture, photography, print, illustrated books, design, drawing, media, and film as well as a wealth of documents drawn from MoMA’s archives.

Read the New York Times review here.

Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty is on display through Feb. 7 at the New Museum.

From their website…”For his first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum, Urs Fischer has taken over all three of the New Museum’s gallery floors to create a series of immersive installations and hallucinatory environments.

The exhibition “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” is the culmination of four years of work. Neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective, the exhibition features new productions and iconic works combined to compose a series of gigantic still lifes and walk-in tableaux. Choreographed entirely by the artist, the exhibition is a descent into Fischer’s universe, revealing the world of an artist who has emerged as one of the most exceptional talents working today.”

Read reviews from The New York Times and New York Magazine.

Gorky

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

Philadelphia Museum of Art

October 21, 2009 – January 10, 2010

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (about 1902–1948), a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art. This exhibition, which includes about 178 works of art, surveys Gorky’s entire career from the early 1920s until his death by suicide in 1948. The retrospective includes paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings—some of which are being shown for the first time—and reveals Gorky’s development as an artist and the evolution of his singular visual vocabulary and mature painting style.

Read the New York Times review here.

Genesis

The New York Times on R. Crumb’s illustrated version of the Book of Genesis

“CONSIDERING that barely a word has been changed from the original, the warning on the cover of a new, illustrated version of the Book of Genesis — “Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors” — might seem surprising. Until, that is, one reads the name of the illustrator: R. Crumb.

Mr. Crumb is known almost as much for his bawdy underground comix featuring characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural as he is for “Crumb,” the 1994 documentary about him. But he has been driven less by his sexual impulses in recent years and more by the 45 minutes he spends in seated meditation every morning in the medieval town house he shares with his wife, Aline (they became grandparents this month), in the south of France.

One day 15 years ago, for no reason he can remember, Mr. Crumb decided he wanted to read the myths of ancient Sumer. Eventually he found a scholarly work that said some of the myths were similar to the stories in Genesis. He read Genesis closely, and the idea of illustrating it clicked. He told a literary agent friend that if he could fetch a big enough advance, he’d do it. W. W. Norton & Company came through with $200,000, which seemed enough; Mr. Crumb thought he could bang out the project in a year or two. It took four.

As unlikely as it may seem, Mr. Crumb has become something of a Bible scholar. In a telephone interview from France, he bristled at a description of his book by his British publisher as “scandalous satire.” “I had no intention to scandalize the Bible,” he said. “I was intrigued by the challenge of exposing everything in there by illustrating it. The text is so significant in our culture, to bring everything out was a significant enough purpose for doing it.”

See a slide show here. More here.