This large-scale exhibition surveys nearly three decades of work by William Kentridge (b. 1955, South Africa), a remarkably versatile artist whose work combines the political with the poetic. Dealing with subjects as sobering as apartheid, colonialism, and totalitarianism, his work is often imbued with dreamy, lyrical undertones or comedic bits of self-deprecation that render his powerful messages both alluring and ambivalent. Best known for animated films based on charcoal drawings, he also works in prints, books, collage, sculpture, and the performing arts. This exhibition explores five primary themes in Kentridge’s art from the 1980s to the present, and underscores the interrelatedness of his mediums and disciplines, particularly through a selection of works from the Museum’s collection. Included are works related to the artist’s staging and design of Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, which premieres at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in March 2010. Read the New York Times review here.
Roberta Smith reviews the season’s New York museum exhibitions.
“TO paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there is a whole lot of art making going on right now. All different kinds. But you’d hardly know it from the contemporary art that New York’s major museums have been serving up lately, and particularly this season.
The current exhibition of Gabriel Orozco at the Museum of Modern Art along with the recent ones of Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum and of Urs Fischer at the New Museum have generated a lot of comment pro and con. So has the Tino Sehgal performance exhibition now on view in an otherwise emptied-out Guggenheim rotunda. But regardless of what you think about these artists individually, their shows share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note. After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and Conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.
The goal in organizing museum exhibitions, as in collecting, running a gallery and — to cite the most obvious example — being an artist, should be individuation and difference, finding a voice of your own. Instead we’re getting example after example of squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous takes on that unruly early ’70s mix of Conceptual, Process, Performance, installation and language-based art that is most associated with the label Post-Minimalism. Either that or we’re getting exhibitions of the movement’s most revered founding fathers: since 2005, for example, the Whitney has mounted exhibitions of Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan Graham. I liked these shows, but that’s not the point. We cannot live by the de-materialization — or the slick re-materialization — of the art object alone.
After 40 years in which we’ve come to understand that dominant styles like Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop are at best gross simplifications of their periods, it often feels as though an agreed-upon master narrative is back in place.
What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.
Why hasn’t there been a major New York show of Philip Taaffe, whose layered, richly colored paintings are actually taking the medium of painting in a direction it hasn’t been before? Why has a retrospective of the painter Chris Ofili — with his volatile mix of color, pattern, popular culture and identity politics — opened at the Tate Britain but not yet been scheduled for a New York museum? And why not see what a survey of the work of an artist as endlessly varied and yet dauntingly consistent as Joe Zucker — a veteran of the Post-Minimalist outfield — might look like? If the public can handle an empty museum as art, it can deal with some paintings made of cotton balls. I, for one, would rather see a tightly organized overview of Mr. Zucker’s work than Marlene Dumas’s warmed-over Expressionism, which was recently displayed in bulk at the Museum of Modern Art.
How did we get to this point? In the 1970’s the Whitney used to be committed to showing artists from across the United States; they were called regional artists in those days. That term has thankfully fallen out of fashion, but the artists have all but disappeared from museum walls. The Modern, for its part, used to present several works each by 10 to 15 artists under the rubric of its “Americans” show.
But a combination of forces threatens to herd all of our major art institutions into the same aesthetic pen. The need to raise and make money sends curators hunting for artists with international star power who work big at least some of the time, deploy multiple entertaining mediums and make for good ad campaigns (like the self-portrait featured in the MoMA ads for its coming exhibition of William Kentridge). The small show devoted to an artist who doesn’t have an immense reputation and worldwide market becomes rarer and rarer.” Read the rest here.
In this exhibition, acclaimed artist Kiki Smith presents a unique, site-specific installation exploring ideas of creative inspiration and the cycle of life in relation to women artists. Kiki Smith: Sojourn draws on a variety of universal experiences, from the milestones of birth and death to quotidian experiences such as the daily chores of domestic life. An important eighteenth-century silk needlework by a young woman named Prudence Punderson, The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality (Collection of the Connecticut Historical Society), which provided original inspiration for Smith’s installation, is included in the exhibition. Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period—marriage, family, and domestic life—this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work. Read the New York Times review here.
Roberta Smith examins Swagger and Sideburns: Hirst, Gelitin, Ruby, Violette, Drew, El Anatsui and Haring.
“Judging from a number of overbearing, obstreperous and generally large works by male artists that command gallery space right now, it seems to be bad-boy week on the New York art scene. Isn’t every week, you ask? Maybe, but some are more emphatically so than others.
It’s hard to say exactly what qualifies an artist for “bad boy” status. Is it a matter of social swagger and conspicuous display? Extroverted self-indulgence and a tendency to revel in unholy messiness? A penchant for extra-large sinister-looking objects that are the sculptural equivalent of long sideburns? All this and more, certainly, awaits your scrutiny in a few of these shows, which exemplify different stages of bad-boyness: beginner (there’s still time to turn back), over the top and over the hill. Others give hints of a change of tune or even redemption. They adopt the scale but not the macho; they add parodying overtones or elegiac undercurrents; or they exercise restraint, delicately explore touch and even broach maturity.” Read the rest here. Slide show here.
Dorothy Spears writes about Luc Tuymans for the New York Times.
“DURING a visit to New York late last fall, the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans sat on a couch in the dimly lighted lounge of the Bowery Hotel and recounted a disturbing childhood memory. One evening when he was 5, he said, his family was gathered around his paternal grandparents’ dinner table. His mother’s brother was leafing through a picture album when a photograph of one of his father’s brothers — his own namesake, Luc — fell to the floor. The photo, Mr. Tuymans said, showed this uncle as an adolescent performing the Hitler salute.
“This was totally unexpected,” said Mr. Tuymans, 51, explaining that his mother’s family had been active in the Dutch resistance and in hiding refugees. For the first time, he said, his father admitted to her that two of his brothers had trained as Hitler Youth in Germany. After that, the artist said, the issue “was always looming” in his parents’ home. The marriage was not a happy one, and with his mother more and more outspoken on the subject and his father increasingly introverted, Mr. Tuymans said, “I learned to eat very fast and get away from the table.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Tuymans — whose first major American retrospective opens this weekend at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, after an initial showing at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio — has become known for examining the visual residue of trauma and the collective desire to forget. Some of his best-known paintings deal with the Holocaust, the post-9/11 social and political climate in the United States and the legacy of the Belgian colonization of Congo — and with the ways such things linger, or don’t, in the collective consciousness.
“Luc’s paintings call us out on our relative amnesia around important issues,” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, a co-organizer of “Luc Tuymans,” as the current show of 75 works is called, and the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where it is scheduled to arrive in October. “They shame you into looking.”
Mr. Tuymans is particularly interested in how the contemporary experience of history — through Web sites, for example, or the media — often involves bits and pieces of the historical record presented out of context. Even as the widespread availability of information has made this “a time when we’re re-evaluating moments of historical importance,” he said, “I am quite distrustful toward ‘evidence’ as such.” His art, he said, aims to “make people reconsider what they’re seeing.” Read the rest here.
The New York Times profiles British artist and movie director Steve McQueen
“If a single word can be used to characterize the British artist and movie director Steve McQueen, it is probably “particular.” Curators often invoke it when describing the way he insists on presenting his enigmatic, carefully wrought films and videos: with every detail of the installation precisely specified, down not just to the dimensions of the screen and the viewing space, but also to the finish on the surrounding floors and walls.
Mr. McQueen sometimes uses the word himself, as he did recently when talking about his early career, in the 1990s, when he refused to use anything but film. “I was a bit of a snob,” he said, chuckling, in a recent interview. “I was very particular.”
To ensure that viewers experience his work correctly, Mr. McQueen has even restricted access to it. Last summer, when he represented Britain at the 2009 Venice Biennale, he showed “Giardini,” a 30-minute meditation on the festival grounds in winter, with its shuttered national pavilions suggesting a haunted ruin. To see the film, viewers had to line up for a time-stamped ticket, and get back in line if they arrived after it had begun — a fate that reportedly befell Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art.
“I wanted this piece to have a beginning and end,” Mr. McQueen explained. “Otherwise people cannot appreciate the piece.”
He had agreed to let a visitor preview “Static,” which was shot from a helicopter and stars the Statue of Liberty. In it the camera circles counterclockwise around the monument for seven minutes, alternating between breathtaking distance shots that show her looming over docks and buildings and riveting close-ups that seem to capture every detail, from the striated rust of her gown and limbs to the tiny people standing in her crown.
Presented in a smallish space, so that watching it makes you feel both exhilarated and trapped, the film raises more questions — about freedom, security and nationalism, for example — than it answers. Yet to every one (even the most innocent, like “When did you finish editing?”) Mr. McQueen responded simply, “No!”
“I will not talk about new work,” he said gruffly, glowering from behind black spectacles. “I thought it was understood.”
Frustrating as it may be, this stubborn particularity has helped Mr. McQueen become one of Britain’s most highly regarded artistic talents. Now 40, he began attracting notice soon after he finished art school at Goldsmiths College in the mid-’90s, largely because of his degree film, “Bear” (1993).
It is a 10 ½-minute, black-and-white collage of shots filmed from different angles, in which two naked black men — one of whom is Mr. McQueen — approach each other in a menacing fashion, as if to brawl, and end up in an nearly erotic embrace. By re-envisioning the well-worn cinematic cliché of two fighters squaring off in a ring, Mr. McQueen had somehow made physical many of the shifting and subtle emotions surrounding subjects like masculinity, sexuality and race.
“What struck me was the film’s incredible elegance and visual power,” said the curator Okwui Enwezor, who saw the piece in a London gallery in 1996 and promptly put Mr. McQueen in the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial. “Here was this artist I’d never heard of, but with an incredible self-assurance in his own capacities and his own intellectual exploration of cinema.”
Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, was drawn to “the extraordinary intensity of his vision,” he said. “And the subject matter, with its very strong psychological elements but without a full narrative was always very compelling. It simply made you think.”
Three years and several short films later, Mr. McQueen won the 1999 Turner Prize, Britain’s most prominent art award, in part for “Drumroll” (1998), a massive three-screen video that puts viewers in the midst of urban cacophony. He made it by attaching three cameras to an oil drum and rolling it down Fifth Avenue; he once called it “a musical.”
Mr. McQueen is also one of the rare artists who has successfully crossed over from the gallery world into the trickier business of feature films. His first movie, “Hunger” (2008), focuses on a decidedly noncommercial subject: the death of the Irish Republican Army bomber Bobby Sands in a hunger strike in Maze prison in Northern Ireland. With its unflinching exploration of the effects of imprisonment and physical abjection on prisoners and guards alike, the film invokes the specters of Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, but also of political ideology run amok.”
“I first encountered Tino Sehgal’s work under ideal conditions: total ignorance. Happening to be in Berlin in 2006 at the time of the city’s art biennial, I heard from an art-dealer friend that there was one exhibition not to miss. “I won’t tell you anything more,” he said, as he walked me to the site and bid me farewell. I trod up a creaking staircase in a building from the turn of the last century and entered a decayed ballroom, its ornate moldings and gilt mirrors testifying to a more glorious past. Lying on the floor, a man and a woman, fully dressed, were embracing languidly. There was no one else in the room. My presence went unacknowledged. In a state of mounting confusion and embarrassment, I stayed until I could stand it no longer, and then I retreated down the staircase. Out on the street, I sighed with relief, because I once again knew where I was.
Had I remained longer, I might have recognized that the two were re-enacting the curved-arm caressing gesture of Rodin’s marble statue “The Kiss,” as well as poses from other osculatory works, some less widely known but in their own way iconic, like Jeff Koons’s ceramic sculpture series “Made in Heaven.” And eventually I would have heard one member of the intertwined couple speak these words: “Tino Sehgal. ‘Kiss.’ 2002.” But I didn’t need that information for the piece to linger in my memory and arouse my curiosity.
I knew the name of the artist, and I watched for him. Although Sehgal was very busy, thriving in the incubation culture of art fairs and international exhibitions, he did not surface in New York until his inaugural show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in November 2007. This time when I walked into the exhibition space, I had more of an idea of what to expect, but once again I was knocked off-balance. “Welcome to this situation,” a group of six people said in unison to greet me, ending with the auditory flourish of a sharp intake of breath; then they slowly backed off, all the while facing me, and froze into unnatural positions. At which point one of the group recited a quotation: “In 1958, somebody said, ‘The income that men derive producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence.’ ” Jumping off from that statement, the conversationalists — Sehgal refers to them as “interpreters” — began a lively back and forth. Occasionally one of the six might turn to a gallery visitor and utter a compliment or say, “Or what do you think?” and then incorporate that person’s comment into the exchange of words. Mostly they seemed content to natter at high velocity among themselves. It all continued until the moment when a new visitor arrived, an event that acted as a sort of rewind button. “Welcome to this situation,” they chanted again, breathing in and backing off as they had done before and then assuming another stylized stance. A new quotation was dropped and another discussion commenced. Just as in Berlin, I felt a battleground developing in my mind, between a fascinated desire to stay and a disquieted urge to flee.
If you are not a devotee of the cult of contemporary art, especially its Conceptualist cadre, you may feel a whirring sensation beneath your eyelids starting up right about now. Your skepticism isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of “Is this art?” Almost a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp aced that one by attaching titles to everyday objects (a urinal, a bicycle wheel) and demonstrating that anything can be art if the artist says it is. Nevertheless, the ineffaceable critical question remains: “Is it good art?” Later this month, when Sehgal’s one-man show takes over the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda for a six-week run (New York Times review here), thousands of noninitiates, many no doubt having come to see the Frank Lloyd Wright building without any advance notification of what art exhibitions are on, will be able to decide for themselves.” Read the rest here.
Leopards in the Temple is a parable by Franz Kafka that reads as follows:
“Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”
The group exhibition of the same name focuses on moments of metamorphosis, paradox, and formal adjacency, borrowing from the parable an ability to promote multiple readings of succinct forms and extraordinary occurrences. Protean moments where materials elide, transform, and overlay take place in the work of Lothar Baumgarten, Nina Canell, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, and Kitty Kraus, while the rules of image production are triangulated and problematized in the painting configurations of Patrick Hill, Lucas Knipscher, and Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder’s DAS INSTITUT. Kathrin Sonntag and Nina Hoffmann (working in collaboration) and the collaborative duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva present slide and film projections that explore the uncanny through acts of magnetism, doubling, and transference. And sculpture is framed and distributed as an effaced and often fictional artifact in the work of Latifa Echakhch, Aleana Egan, and Lucy Skaer. Gathering together an international group of artists, the works in this exhibition share an extra-linguistic interest in moments of translation and a resistance to fixed forms.
Leopards in the Temple offers an unusual opportunity for New York audiences to experience the work of a number of increasingly prominent European artists, including 2009 Turner Prize Nominee Lucy Skaer, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, who together represented Portugal at the most recent Venice Biennale, Nina Canell, the winner of this year’s Bâloise Art Prize at Art Basel 40 | Statements, along with Kathrin Sonntag, recipient of the 2009 Swiss Art Award and Kitty Kraus, recipient of the 2008 Blauorange Prize. The exhibition represents the first New York exhibition for a number of the participating artists.
As a complement to the exhibition, SculptureCenter and Anthology Film Archives will present screenings with Nashashibi/Skaer, an ongoing collaboration between artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer on Monday, January 18, 2010, at 7:30 PM and João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva on March 8, 2010, at 7:30 PM at Anthology Film Archives.”
An exhibition of keynote works by Vik Muniz and new works from Alexandra Mota de Aguiar, Mattias Ericsson, Wojtek Doroszuk, and Zhou Tao
Curated by Claudia Calirman
through March 6, 2010
HOURS: Tuesday-Saturday 12–6 PM
Yes, But… explores works that dwell in the borderline between real and fictional, process-based and result-oriented, temporal and permanent, literal and metaphorical, orderly and undisciplined. Within the fabric of these works lies an array of artistic choices that emphasize contradictions and ambiguities, playing games upon the viewer at every turn.
Yes, But… features works by Vik Muniz (b. Brazil; works in New York) together with artists currently in residence at Location One: Alexandra Mota de Aguiar (b. Portugal), Wojtek Doroszuk (b. Poland), Mattias Ericsson (b. Sweden) and Zhou Tao (b. China).
Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)
January 15—June 6, 2010
The ICA presents Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World), the first major museum survey of the work of Maira Kalman. An illustrator, author and designer, Kalman illuminates contemporary life with a profound sense of joy and unique sense of humor. Like a gift, her work appears to lift the spirits, no matter how ordinary or overwhelming circumstances may be. This exhibition features a selection spanning thirty years of original works on paper and design production, along with less widely seen aspects of Kalman’s work in photography, embroidery, textiles, and performance. As a context for this survey, Kalman is creating a special installation. The space will be furnished with chairs, ladders, and “many tables of many things”—such as fezzes, bobby pins, balls of string, things that have fallen out of books, lists, moss. Expressive of Kalman’s habits as a collector, traveler, reader, and avid walker, this installation offers a view of how she sees the world, both in and outside of the studio.
VIDEO ART: REPLAY, PART 2.
EVERYDAY IMAGINARY
January 15, 2010 – March 21, 2010
ICA is pleased to present Video Art: Replay, a year-long, three-part exhibition offering a snapshot of current video art, on view September 11, 2009-August 1, 2010 in ICA’s Project Space. Centered around three themes prevalent in video art—documentary (Part 1. Asking Not Telling, September 11-December 6, 2009), animation (Part 2. Everyday Imaginary, January 15-March 21, 2010), and comedy (Part 3., April 23-August 1, 2010); will further focus the wide-ranging field of single-channel, projected video.
Artists include: Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Rob Carter, Martha Colburn, Kota Ezawa, Aurélien Froment, Cao Guimarães & Rivane Neuenschwander, Alex Hubbard, Ezra Johnson, Robin Rhode, and Shahzia Sikander.
OPEN VIDEO CALL:
SELECTED WORKS 2009-2010
ICA’s annual Open Video Call is an opportunity to see new works on video by Philadelphia area artists and filmmakers. The works on view have been selected by a panel of local new media curators.
SculptureCenter is pleased to present 
Current 