Art in America back issues from June 2009:
Art Basel and beyond.(FRONT PAGE)(art exhibitions)(Calendar)
Jun 01, 2009 ... While many in the art world are sitting out or cutting back on this summer's round of international events because of slashed travel budgets, fair organizers and art dealers are still banking on Basel. Some collectors, however, citing the global downturn, have observed that it feels ...
The earth sublime.(FRONT PAGE)(exhibition of earth art)
Jun 01, 2009; ... The terms environmental, earth and land art still powerfully conjure Michael Heizer's Double Negative, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels and other emblematic site-specific works from the '60s and '70s. Since then, the genre has radically evolved in its means and ...
A transformative experience?(FRONT PAGE)(Prada Transformer )
Jun 01, 2009; ... At a time when fashion uses art to transform itself into high cultural statement, and art uses fashion to insert itself into the broader commercial world, the Prada Transformer in Seoul perfectly captures the convergence of the two. It is a tetrahedral event space, a cross-shaped gallery, ...
Hermitage on the Amstel.(FRONT PAGE)(renovation of Hermitage Amsterdam )(Brief article)
Jun 01, 2009 ... The Hermitage Amsterdam is set to reopen in much expanded and renovated quarters in the 17th century Amstelhof, a former home for the elderly located on the Amstel River. The museum took up residence in a smaller part of the facility in 2004, but the approximately $50 million renovation ...
Seeing beauty in Venice's pollution.(FRONT PAGE)
Jun 01, 2009; ... While most visitors to Venice simply gape at the dazzling array of Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture, architect Jorge Otero-Pailos sees something more: the layers of history that have accrued on the buildings' surfaces. His project, The Ethics of Dust: Doge's Palace, ...
Idiot.(REVISION NUMBER NINE)(managing an art exhibitiono)(Essay)
Jun 01, 2009; ... MY DOWNWARD SPIRAL INTO IDIOCY began when I agreed to curate a small biennial at SITE Santa Fe in 2001. The process turned out to be an unremitting nightmare, mitigated by hiccups of ecstasy. I took the job on a lark. Five minutes in, I realized that my primary agenda would be to save ...
Left of the left.(Painting as a Weapon: Progressive Cologne 1920-33; Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis)(Book review)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Painting as a Weapon: Progressive Cologne 19220-33; Seiwert-Hoerle-Arntz, by Lynette Roth, Cologne, Museum Ludwig Koln and Walther Konig, 2008; 160 pages, $44.96. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis, by Nader Vossoughian, Rotterdam, ...
Proustian hues.(Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time )(Book review)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time by Eric Karpeles, New York, Thames & Hudson, 2008; 352 pages, $45. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It took me three years to read Marcel Proust's sprawling novel A la Recherche du temps perdu in translation ....
Santa Fe 09: guide to Santa Fe galleries and museums.(Directory)
Jun 01, 2009 ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 1. ARTISTAS DE SANTA FE 228B Old Santa Fe Trail, 87501 Tel: 505.982.1320 info@artistasdesantafe.com Exhibiting: Heather Bradley, Joy Campbell, Joan Heiden, Ann Laser, Lee McVey, Mary Neiberg, Mary Parkes, ...
A stone for unica Zurn: an artist of manifold gifts and a deeply troubled soul, Zurn was associated with the Parisian surrealists, by whom she was largely eclipsed, a current show brings her work to light.(WORKS ON PAPER)
Jun 01, 2009; ... UNICA HAS LONG BEEN a semi-mythical figure. Little known and in many ways unknowable, she is inevitably associated with the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, whom she met at a Berlin show of his work in 1953. Obsessed throughout his career with realistic female dolls whose body parts could ...
Moonlighting: backed by artists Robert Longo and Jon Kessler, who have led double lives as musicians, actress Barbara Sukowa fronts a band called the X-Patsys.(PERFORMANCE)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON A FRIDAY NIGHT in early March, the multi-guitar pounding of a G-chord rumbled louder and louder before taking possession of the underground performance space (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York's Greenwich Village. Against a shuffling backdrop of projected ...
In the studio Luisa Rabbia with Pieranna Cavalchini.(Interview)
Jun 01, 2009 ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WALKING INTO LUISA RABBIA'S SIMPLE STUDIO is like entering a white monastic cell, with a broad open window, gulls wheeling in the bright Brooklyn sky and the salty smell of seawater wafting in from afar. The indigo of Rabbia's porcelains and drawings, ...
Prints & editions.(Directory)
Jun 01, 2009 ... Crown Point Press 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: 415.974.6273 Fax: 415.495.4220 gallery@crownpoint.com www.crownpoint.com www.magical-secrets.com Through June 2: New color etchings by Chris Ofili June ...
Washington DC.(Directory)
Jun 01, 2009 ... Addison/Ripley Fine Art 1670 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, 20007 Tel: 202.338.5180 Fax: 202.338.2341 Website: www.addisonripleyfineart.com Tuesday-Saturday 11-6 pm Through May 30: Salmagundi: Donald Baechler, Chuck Close, Wayne Thiebaud, ...
New York.(Directory)
Jun 01, 2009 ... Bowery Gallery 530 W 25th St., 4th fl., New York NY 10001 Tel: 646.230.6655 Fax 646.230.6655 Web site: www.bowerygallery.org Tuesday-Saturday, 11:00-6:00 May 19-June 13: Janet Gorzegno, "Paintings: Soul Journey," intimately scaled ...
The Venice Biennale preview.
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON JUNE 7TH THE VENICE BIENNALE, mother of all recurring international exhibitions, will enjoy its traditional public opening, a festive Sunday ceremony aimed at welcoming the local community. (That community's patience, of course, will have been sorely ...
Ragnar Kjartansson the beginning of "The End".
Jun 01, 2009; ... When Ragnar Kjartansson came to Luhring Augustine, his New York gallery, last March to discuss his project for the 53rd Venice Biennale, he was wearing a dark pin-striped suit and a creamy retro-patterned silk tie--the look vintage dandy and something of a trademark. The charismatic artist ...
Bruce Nauman deft in Venice.(VENICE PREVIEW)
Jun 01, 2009; ... It's a long way from a horse ranch on the high plains of Galisteo, N.M., to the teeming multicultitudes of the Venice Biennale. There are 7,000 miles of continent and an ocean to leap, a gasp-inducing rise in population density after that, and, most important, the sudden presence of whole ...
Pascale Marthine Tayou: global villages.(VENICE PREVIEW)
Jun 01, 2009; ... "I am an explorer," says Pascale Marthine Tayou. He is explaining the genesis of a new sculpture to me. "This is yin-yang." It's about "the conflict between everyone--the struggle inside." The work in question is lying on a table in the small blue courtyard that links Tayou's home to a ...
Liam Gillick: practical considerations.(VENICE PREVIEW)(Interview)
Jun 01, 2009; ... For over 20 years, Liam Gillick has addressed the question of how art has been used to advance a broad range of social and ideological agendas, and to subvert and exploit the material and political structures that order contemporary life. During this time, he has developed a situated ...
Peter Forgacs: ebb and flow.(VENICE PREVIEW)
Jun 01, 2009; ... The first room of Peter Forgacs's installation in the Hungarian pavilion at the Venice Biennale will be lined with videos of faces set in ornate frames typical of a European portrait gallery--though that is where convention ends. In these video portraits, played in slow motion, the ...
Thai pavilion mental vacation.(VENICE PREVIEW)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Playing on its reputation as the fabled Land of Smiles, Thailand will this year transform its national pavilion into "Gondola al Paradiso Co., Ltd.," a fictive "tourism service company" created by Bangkok-based artists Michael Shoawanasai (b. 1964), Sakarin Krue-on (b. 1965), Suporn ...
Zero & friends: spearheaded by two artists based in postwar Dusseldorf, Zero was too dynamic and heterogeneous to be called a style. Its emphasis on light, movement and ephemeral phenomena attracted like-minded innovators throughout Europe.(Otto Piene and Heinz Mack)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE PAST SEASON IN NEW YORK was a particularly rich time for devotees of the movement Zero, whose reputation in Europe has been secure for decades. A motor of avant-garde activity centered in Dusseldorf from 1957 to 1966, Zero made important innovations in ...
Shirin Neshat.(Interview)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] OVER THE LAST 12 YEARS, Iranian-born Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) has produced a series of lyrical video installations that touch on such issues as gender politics, cultural self-definition and the authority of religion. Drawing on the artist's experiences as a ...
How German is it? A landmark exhibition of art in East and West Germany from the end of WWII to the fall of the Wall offers a fresh perspective on points of difference, and unity, between former Cold War antagonists.
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN HIS PROVOCATIVE BOOK The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship (1998), art historian Hans Belting considers the uneasy role visual art has played in German culture since the Renaissance. Belting describes the constant derailment of German ...
David Claerbout extrasensorial: having made his reputation with lengthy videos that challenge viewer endurance, Claerbout now manipulates the experience of light and sound to test the very limits of comprehension.
Jun 01, 2009; ... ANY DISCUSSION OF THE ATMOSPHERIC and engrossing work of 40-year-old Belgian artist David Claerbout inevitably begins with time, although there is much more to his practice than mere clock watching. Claerbout's videos and photography contend with cinematic time and time spent looking, as ...
Towering Wim Delvoye ambition: a conversation with Paul Laster.(Interview)
Jun 01, 2009 ... Celebrated or reviled for his "sex-rays" (X-ray images of sexual acts), tattooed pigs and digestive-tract machines that eat food and produce shit (Cloaca Machines), Belgian artist Wim Delvoye thrives at the center of controversy. Given the challenge of creating a monumental work for the ...
Sean Snyder: ICA.(LONDON)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The centerpiece of The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula's classic 1974 conspiracy thriller, is a montage of photographic stills shown to Warren Beatty's character to measure his emotional responses, and his aptitude for being an assassin. As the sequence ...
The Otolith Group: Gasworks.(LONDON)(Movie review)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Otolith (2003), the first film by the London-based Otolith Group (comprising Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, both born in London), starts in 2103. No longer able to cope with earth's gravity, humans live on the International Space Station. One of them, Dr. Usha Adebaran Sagar, a descendant ...
Bruno Gironcoli: Bernard Jordan.(PARIS)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Bruno Gironcoli's sculptures are unmistakable in their facture, iconography, complexity and obdurateness. Gironcoli, who was born in 1936, has been a crucial figure in Austrian art since the '70s, both as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna ...
Frederique Loutz: Claudine Papillon.(PARIS)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The refined and creepy drawings of Frederique Loutz have made quite a splash in the Paris art world over the past few years, where contemporary drawing has itself become something of a hot topic. Born in 1974, Loutz grew up in the culturally and ...
Bojan Sarcevic: Carlier I Gebauer.(BERLIN)
Jun 01, 2009; ... The issue of space has always been crucial to the medium of film in various ways. There are the perspectival spaces within the filmic image itself, the architectural context of the film's presentation (cinema, museum or gallery) and even the sculptural dimension of the projector's light ...
Artur Zmijewski: Daad Galerie.(BERLIN)
Jun 01, 2009; ... "The future belongs to crowds," wrote Don DeLillo in his prophetic pre-9/11 novel Mac II (1991). DeLillo's thesis--that the narrative role of the writer has been usurped by terrorists, whose acts are globally visible as televised spectacle--echoes Jean Baudrillard's radical contention that ...
Alterazioni Video: Prometeogallery.(Milan)
Jun 01, 2009; ... "I would prefer not to." Spelled out in a bright, warm yellow on the gallery's front windows, this text work by Alterazioni Video (which borrows a refrain from Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener) is a distillation of the collective's contrarian sensibility. Displayed to function as a ...
Qi Zhilong: National Gallery Of Indonesia.(JAKARTA)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] How much can pictures of pretty girls really matter? Quite a lot, it turns out, when the quasi-kitsch images represent a liberating, nationwide return of the repressed. Consider the 14 oil-on-canvas paintings by Chinese artist Qi Zhilong that curator Jim ...
Kenneth Anger: P.S.1.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON VIEW THROUGH SEPT. 14 Kenneth Anger has long been celebrated as an important avant-garde filmmaker and a seminal influence on everyone and everything from Martin Scorsese to MTV. But as is the case with so many groundbreaking artists, ...
John Stezaker: Friedrich Petzel.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... We expect collage to suggest multiplicity and fragmentation, but John Stezaker coaxes a rickety unity from disparate components. A small but terrific 2006 show at White Columns introduced New York audiences to this British artist's work, which was also seen last year in "Unmonumental" at ...
Candice Breitz: Yvon Lambert.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Though Candice Breitz's video works comprising snippets of Hollywood films are considered too facile or fawning by some viewers, the Berlin-based, South African artist purports to have a higher ambition than stargazing: to comment on stereotypical gender ...
Aaron Curry: Michael Werner.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Though it is wearying to track the dichotomies in the gleefully schizoid work of Aaron Curry, the artist presents them with undeniable panache. "The Colour Out of Space," this young but established L.A. sculptor's New York solo debut, opposes high and low, ...
Mungo Thomson: John Connelly.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Long interested in both the subtext and paratext of, well, everything--from Road Runner cartoons to NASA images of outer space--Mungo Thomson has built a career on pulling back curtains to reveal the mechanics of production and reception. For "The Varieties of Experience," the artist used ...
Younger Than Jesus: New Museum.(New Museum of Contemporary Art)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Marking the institution's 32nd birthday, the New Museum's inaugural "Generational" triennial showcases artists under 33--younger than the Savior when he ascended the cross. There are reasons to study this demographic, argue curators Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman. For ...
John Waters: Marianne Boesky.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Director John Waters's ascent from notorious creator of Pink Flamingos (1972) to toast of Broadway is as instructive a lesson in the meshing of high and low American culture as is his film Pecker (1998), a cautionary fable--set in the art world--of redemption. His connoisseurship of vulgar ...
Erica Baum: Dispatch.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Erica Baum's photographs look at first like digital collages. Colored stripes run vertically through compositions in which we catch an occasional glimpse of cut-off text or a grainy black-and-white photo of a former star like John Wayne or Brigitte Bardot. Only after a while do we ...
Luca Buvoli: Susan Inglett.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over the past six years, Luca Buvoli has been steadily augmenting his "Meta-Futurist" project--installations, drawings, books and animations that deconstruct F.T. Marinetti and the movement he founded a century ago. Entering Inglett gallery, one ...
Josh Smith: Luhring Augustine.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I used to think that this downtown painter's strategy of compensating with sheer quantity for what his paintings lack in quality was bound to fail. He has tediously mocked the authentic, "autographic" mark by repeatedly painting the letters of his name in ...
Brendan Cass: Stellan Holm.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For his latest exploration of the landscape's elasticity, painter Brendan Cass has landed upon a perfect psychic convergence of Jackson Pollock and PBS instructional painting guru Bob Ross. While the seven mostly large-scale canvases in the exhibition "New ...
Erik Parker: Paul Kasmin.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Cognitive psychologists tell us the mind processes information from remarkably few hints and that it does so very quickly. The 16th-century Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, for example, pressed our perceptual skills with his positively funky portraits ...
"Infinite Patience": Haunch of Venison.(NEW YORK)(James Drake, Kunie Sugiura and Stanley Whitney)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Infinite Patience" draws together three artists who have been developing their approaches and iconographies since the 1970s. What unites the trio--James Drake, Kunie Sugiura and Stanley Whitney--is a "not-quite" sensibility, a willingness to resist ...
Thomas Scheibitz: Tanya Bonakdar.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Real enjoyment of works by Thomas Scheibitz has always required some suspension of disbelief--as if one were living among master architects from the pages of Ayn Rand, titans at once modern and also somehow ancient. So the title of the artist's latest ...
Mike Womack: Ziehersmith.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... In "High-Grade Empty," his second solo exhibition at ZieherSmith, Mike Womack mined the tension between images and their material delivery by presenting three devices that utilize the mechanics of early television. In the past, Womack's interest in the optical properties of painting led ...
Lisa Kirk: Invisible-Exports.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Reactions to our dire current economic situation run the gamut from serious to mocking. The response of artist and sometime curator Lisa Kirk falls squarely in the middle. "House of Cards," her recent show at Invisible-Exports, a narrow gallery on the ...
David Diao: Postmasters.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] David Diao's recent exhibition was tightly focused and autobiographical. Thirty-five canvases of various sizes, all from 2008, filled the gallery's two rooms. Consistent with the artist's established idiom, the canvases are monochrome fields with added ...
Mira Schor: Momenta Art.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mira Schor's small, unframed paintings--oil on linen and ink on gessoed tracing paper--suggest the vulnerability of barely formed thoughts arising unbidden between waking and sleep. Hovering throughout her recent work are word-and thought-balloons that ...
Lee Waisler: Sundaram Tagore.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Very large close-ups of faces greeted viewers entering Lee Waisler's recent show. All are icons of 20th-century culture, and most are immediately recognizable--Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Gandhi--while a few are less familiar. Of the 20 or so ...
Serban Savu: David Nolan.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Within Eastern Europe, Romania was one of the last Communist strongholds. On December 22, 1989, its dictatorial leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, fled protesting citizens at the Central Committee building by helicopter, only to be captured and executed alongside his wife three days later. Serban ...
William Scharf: Meredith Ward.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Despite the consistent strength of his work, William Scharf has been flying under the art-world radar for most of his long and extraordinary career. The veteran Pennsylvania-born artist, now 82, was a young upstart on New York's Abstract-Expressionist scene in the 1950s. Between infrequent ...
Nancy Haynes: Elizabeth Harris and Lesley Heller.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... Like most really interesting things, Nancy Haynes's new paintings involve paradox and the unknown. They are not so different from her earlier work, but at the same time they are worlds apart. Having been for many years a postminimalist, nonrepresentational artist, Haynes successfully made ...
Leon Kossoff: Mitchel-Innes & Nash.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... For pure cussedness it's hard to beat the London painters who came to prominence in the wake of WWII. A generation younger than the Abstract Expressionists, artists such as Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud shared with their New York colleagues a sense of existential angst, ...
Frances Hynes: June Kelley.(NEW YORK)(exhibit entitled 'North Light')
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Frances Hynes supports the often panoramic stretch of her intricate, painterly abstractions with underlying grids, sections of which emerge within and at the margins of the canvases. The device draws the eye into and across each painting's field, and ...
Jane Freilicher: Tibor De Nagy.(NEW YORK)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At 84, Jane Freilicher understands more than most painters that the landscape, whether urban or pastoral, is humankind's living record. For over 50 years she has painted the vistas seen from her homes in Water Mill, Long Island, and Greenwich Village in ...
Carolee Schneemann: Carolina Nitsch and P.P.O.W.(NEW YORK)(exhibit entitled 'Performance Photographs From the 1970s')
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Carolee Schneemann's radical, body-centric performance art reached its apex with Interior Scroll (1975), in which the artist read aloud from a typescript she unspooled from her vagina, A documentation of the original performance in East Hampton, N.Y., in ...
Jason Middlebrook: University Art Museum: University of Albany.(ALBANY)(exhibit entitled 'Live with Less')
Jun 01, 2009; ... Jason Middlebrook's ambitious project "Live with Less" used as its basic material discarded cardboard boxes collected on campus over a two-month period. Many of them were recycled into the show's tour de force, Cardboard Stack (2009), consisting of 2 tons of the flattened stuff assembled ...
Eileen Neff: Locks.(PHILADELPHIA)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Eileen Neff's latest exhibition of new photography, "Things counter, original, spare," featured eight C-prints, ranging from 30 to 80 inches on a side, and a ninth work that is discreet but unmissable: a one-inch-wide laminated Mimaki print running from ...
Patricia Bellan-Gillen: Pittsburgh Center for The Arts.(PITTSBURGH)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Patricia Bellan-Gillen's arresting paintings juxtapose meticulously rendered and seemingly unrelated figures with atmospheric grounds. Her reliance on animal imagery prompted the title "Zoo Logic+" for this exhibition. But the roots of the 20 recent works ...
Jose Ferreira: Hyde Park Art Center.(CHICAGO)
Jun 01, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In "Anatomy of an Archive--the secret history of a material body," Chicago-based, Mozambique-born Jose Ferreira explored landscape as a metaphor for the body, while also invoking the 1879 Battle of Isandlwana, at which Zulu warriors defeated British ...