What’s on the agenda?
Colin Chinnery on Art Parcours at Art Basel
After seeing what felt like thousands of artworks in hundreds of booths at the fairs, the feeling of walking around Basel’s old town in search of the nine individual art projects of Jens Hoffmann’s Art Parcours was a welcome hiatus from fair fatigue. But what made Parcours a coherent project was the difference in mentalities and attitudes between the various works, and the rhythm of mood that was created from one work to the next. Especially important was…
continue reading
Jennifer Teets on Goldin+Senneby at Kadist Art Foundation, Paris
The two-part installation is a smart setup intertwining their ongoing serial novel, a collaborative project called Looking for Headless (since 2007), within the fiction created in the exhibition itself. The murder mystery Looking for Headless has been written by one of Goldin+Senneby’s spokespersons, the self-deprecating author K.D. (and supposedly, one gathers from the correspondence with lawyers, a consultant of an offshore company).
continue reading
April Lamm on Art Basel 41
“Trust my own eyes” was the advice I would follow for myself while harrying through the halls of Art Basel. I decided to begin at random by seeking out a gallery where I know/love their artists but they don’t know me: Air de Paris (read: half-objective territory, impossible to be corrupted by the charm of words or personal relationships). First thing I saw was Bibliothèque du Paradise (2009) by Philippe Parreno, a work I had seen, or at least a similar one, in Paris…
continue reading
Quinn Latimer on Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Fondation Beyeler, Basel
It was a profoundly disorienting encounter: in a room of Picasso paintings at the Fondation Beyeler, I suddenly came across a tall, muscled, black man in a pair of silver hot pants dancing silently and joyfully to music on his headphones. This go-go dancer atop a small, square white platform—both clubby stage and arty pedestal—was ringed by a crowd of silver-haired Swiss art patrons, dazzled and confused. If the white, incandescent bulbs that neatly rimmed the minimal stage alluded to the gay clubs (and their cultural politics), they also conjured the artist behind them, who turned ordinary strands of light bulbs into a series of now seminal contemporary art works—at once formalist and conceptual, poetic and political—in the 1980s and 90s.
continue reading
Filipa Ramos on Paul McCarthy’s “Pig Island” at Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan
Solitude, abandon, restlessness, vulnerability: feelings a visitor might not expect to experience at the Palazzo Citterio. The refined 18th century rococo façade is at home in the elegant Brera district of Milan, but despite its chic external architecture, this sober face hides the perfect setting for Paul McCarthy’s delirious “Pig Island.” This exhibition displays iconic works from the Los Angeles artist together with new pieces, resulting in a complex installation that is a single, coherent articulation of McCarthy’s rhetoric and multifarious forms.
continue reading
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer on Rachel Harrison’s “Asdfjkl;” at Regen Projects, LA
The artist’s sometime habit of naming her constructions with famous proper names—as she does here with one brightly hued, amped up and coked out Pablo Escobar patterned like a tropical harlequin and hung with a matching cluster of glossy yellow, red, orange, and green fake chilies—further invites an anthropomorphizing projection of personality onto dumb and mute material heft. A simulated cartoon humanity convulses the sculptures’ bulky forms.
continue reading
Michèle Faguet on the 6th Berlin Biennial Part 1 and Part 2
Upon conclusion of the presentations—a Q&A session was attempted but swiftly and ruthlessly halted by Biennale Director Gabriele Horn after some particularly bizarre and inane questions were raised—we were ushered out and directed to Oranienplatz 17, a formerly empty industrial building in central Kreuzberg and the Biennale’s main venue. Just as Rhomberg stated, the venue is a significant element in the exhibition—its rawness and architectural details complementing some works while imposing themselves upon others (mostly those that belong to the not-so-interesting category and are thus unable to compete with the beauty of the space).
continue reading
Tyler Coburn, on “A Vernacular of Violence” at Invisible Exports, New York
The artists participating in “A Vernacular of Violence,” the ambitious group exhibition currently on view at New York’s Invisible-Exports, could be seen to share the supposition that violence — as empirical event and potential valence — has all but saturated contemporary parlance. Eric Baudelaire’s video Sugar Water (2006), for example, combines the aesthetics of urban terrorism and commercial advertising in delineating the contours of the post-9/11 era. Over the course of a single, seventy-two minute shot, set in a Parisian Métro station called “Pte. Erewhon” (an anagram for “nowhere” borrowed from the eponymous Samuel Butler novel), a professional billposter pastes four sequential images of a car exploding, one on top of the next, in a single billboard frame.
continue reading
Colby Chamberlain, on “Greater New York,” New York
At “Greater New York 2010,” the museum’s first major exhibition since the departure of its founding director Alanna Heiss and its re-christening as MoMA P.S.1, the emblematic piece might be Franklin Evans’s timecompressionmachine, (2010) which occupies the same first-floor corner gallery where Matta-Clark once sawed through the ceiling and floorboards. Evans has smothered the space with colored tape, mylar, canvas, and, most curiously, numerous press releases from recent gallery exhibitions. It’s the latter element that reverberates with GNY10 overall…
continue reading
Image above:
Martha Rosler, Fair Trade Garage Sale, 2010
Performance at the Museum of Cultural History
