Winter preview 2005: three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between January and April.John Baldessari Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, and Kunsthaus Graz March 4-July 3 Curated by Rainer Fuchs (Vienna) and Peter Pakesh and Adam Budak (Graz) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A photo and a word. A four-by-five-foot stretched canvas with a deadpan black-and-white photograph printed on its acrylic surface, showing a lanky westerner west·ern·er also West·ern·er n. A native or inhabitant of the west, especially the western United States. Westerner Noun a person from the west of a country or region Noun 1. standing in front of a palm tree that seems to be growing out of his head, confronted by the single word WRONG neatly lettered below. Critics have come to see this 1967-68 work as John Baldessari's signature piece and taken it as a laconic la·con·ic adj. Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise. See Synonyms at silent. [Latin Lac gag, one of a series of droll droll adj. droll·er, droll·est Amusingly odd or whimsically comical. n. Archaic A buffoon. [French drôle, buffoon, droll, from Old French drolle Conceptualist con·cep·tu·al·ism n. 1. Philosophy The doctrine, intermediate between nominalism and realism, that universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality. 2. challenges aimed at the compositional standards of conventional photography. This casts Baldessari as a kind of Will Rogers of Conceptual art, and what kind of Conceptualism conceptualism, in philosophy, position taken on the problem of universals, initially by Peter Abelard in the 12th cent. Like nominalism it denied that universals exist independently of the mind, but it held that universals have an existence in the mind as concept. is that? California Conceptualism, for most of us, who saw it further develop with William Wegman's loyal Weimaraners, Robert Cumming's nutty installations, Eleanor Antin's "100 BOOTS" 1971-73, and Lowell Darling's political campaigns. Cartoon Conceptualism, for Joseph Kosuth, who preferred the turgid turgid /tur·gid/ (ter´jid) swollen and congested. tur·gid adj. Swollen or distended, as from a fluid; bloated; tumid. turgid swollen and congested. theorizing of Art & Language and his own pedantic pe·dan·tic adj. Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules: a pedantic attention to details. prose. But if Wrong is Baldessari's signature piece, is it as simple as an arrow directed at a meaning? Another work from around the same time (1967-68) casts doubt on this--a text piece that has lettered on its otherwise blank white ground A WORK WITH ONLY ONE PROPERTY. a claim that becomes absurd once you ask yourself what this one property could be, which might be that it's manifestly false, and then retreat to wonder if, in fact, the text presents a claim at all or merely an invitation to try to imagine a work possessing one property only--and its difficulties. The bluntness of this text's assertion, if it is an assertion, and its dubiousness connect it directly to Wrong, about which we can reasonably ask, "What's WRONG?" and answer, "You think you're looking at a photograph, but it's a painting." Or, "You think you're looking at a painting, but it's a painting." Or, "You think you're looking at a provincial artist in a drab little city cracking a joke at his situation." And you're RIGHT. But you're also WRONG, because he was employing a cutting-edge art-world strategy for attacking received meaning. So the artist's ploy of being WRONG for making a photograph and WRONG for making a painting was precisely RIGHT for making the kind of critical art that Conceptual art was claiming to be. It seems like we're dealing with another form of the Cretan Paradox--in which Epimenides tells you, "All Cretans are liars"; if he's telling the truth he's lying, and if he's lying he's telling the truth. So Wrong may truly be a signature piece, in that all of Baldessari's incursions into video, photography, and painting have been very obviously WRONG, because he stumbles as precisely as a silent-era film comedian into the orderly discourses surrounding the genres, leaving the kind of cheerful mess that is usually RIGHT. How RIGHT? Viewers of the forthcoming Austrian retrospective of Baldessari's work, the first since the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's 1990 survey, will find out. Mounted at two museums in two cities, the exhibition brings together some two hundred works in all media. In Vienna, MUMOK will show work made between 1962 and 1983; the Graz Kunsthaus picks up from there and brings us up to the present. So viewers in Germany and Austria should have ample opportunity to consider the meanings provoked by this California master of paradox. With luck, viewers in the United States will also have a chance to consider this retrospective at a later date.--David Antin [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] NEW YORK New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Thomas Demand Museum of Modern Art March 4-May 30 Curated by Roxana Marcoci Nothing is immediate in the work of Thomas Demand, the German artist who trained as a sculptor but is known today as a photographer. While the end result of his process may always be a photograph, Demand's laborintensive practice is nevertheless rooted in the sculptural. Rather than documenting the world as he finds it, Demand constructs and then photographs a life-size paper model based on a previous image--typically of a politically or historically charged site, like Jackson Pollock's studio. Although perfectly crafted, these models allow for a Brechtian moment disclosing that they are artifacts artifacts see specimen artifacts. (pencil marks here, wrinkled paper there). The nearly thirty works on view from the past decade mark Demand's largest US survey to date and may cultivate his reputation as a sculptor.--Daniel Birnbaum Daniel Buren Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: see Guggenheim Museum. March 25-June 8 Curated by Lisa Dennison, Susan Cross, and Alison Gingeras In 1971, Buren's contribution to the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition was removed without his consent before the show's opening. Now the French Conceptualist who taught us to be leery of museum display returns to the Gugg for a one-man event. On view are new site-specific works--a structure (one corner of an imagined cube) that rises in the rotunda rotunda In Classical and Neoclassical architecture, a building or room that is circular in plan and covered with a dome. The Pantheon is a Classical Roman rotunda. The Villa Rotonda at Vicenza, designed by Andrea Palladio, is an Italian Renaissance example. up to the sixth ramp and installations in the windows of two galleries--and roughly fifteen paintings from the early '60s. These projects promise to make plain the continuing relevance of Buren's investigations into the ideological workings of artworld institutions. A catalogue on the artist's past and current endeavors includes essays by the curators and Bernard Blistene.--Lisa Pasquariello [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Larry Clark International Center of Photography March 11-June 5 Curated by Brian Wallis At this point in his career, Larry Clark has two overlapping constituencies. First come the ardent devotees of his early photographs of adolescent drug abuse and raw sex, especially those in the books Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983), and, to a lesser extent, of his photo-and-text collages. The second (often no less groupielike) goes for Clark's film work, starting with the infamous Kids (1995), followed by the heroin fantasia Another Day in Paradise (1998) and the fan-fucking-tastic Bully (2001). The latest, Ken Park (2002), remains unreleased in the US and the UK (where Clark punched his UK distributor, who then refused to handle the film). This show of some two hundred photographs, videos, and collages from 1963 to 2002, with screenings of three of the films, should make everyone happy.--David Rimanelli Jean-Michel Basquiat Brooklyn Museum March 11-June 5 Curated by Fred Hoffman, Kellie Jones, Marc Mayer, and Franklin Sirmans According to Mayer, leader of this show's four-person curatorial team, Basquiat was "the last great modernist painter." How so? Because, "if we think of him as a painter of the School of Paris school of Paris. The center of international art until after World War II, Paris was a mecca for artists who flocked there to participate in the most advanced aesthetic currents of their time. , he was essentially a figurative and even narrative painter--but there's an extraordinary, breathless, endless reservoir of references in his work, as if he wanted his paintings to represent all of human history." If this sounds a little like saying that a camel is a giraffe giraffe, African ruminant mammal, Giraffa camelopardalis, living in open savanna S of the Sahara. The tallest of animals, giraffes browse in treetops at heights inaccessible to other leaf-eaters. A male may be 18 ft (5.5 m) from hoof to crown. , but has humps--be patient. A Basquiat retrospective (of some ninety works) with a real art-historical ax to grind is something we need to see. Travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles This article is about Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. For other Museums named Museum of Contemporary Art, see Museum of Contemporary Art. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum in and near Los Angeles, California. , July 15-Oct. 9; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Tim Hawkinson Whitney Museum of American Art Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City, founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. It was an outgrowth of the Whitney Studio (1914–18), the Whitney Studio Club (1918–28), and the Whitney Studio Galleries (1928–30). February 11-May 29 Curated by Lawrence Rinder In 1995, curious crowds lined the block to see Tim Hawkinson's first New York solo show at Ace Gallery, and chances are the LA artist's loopy, tinkerer-in-the-basement aesthetic will generate similar enthusiasm for his first major museum survey. Hawkinson's carnivalesque approach and carnal carnal adjective Referring to the flesh, to baser instincts, often referring to sexual “knowledge” subject matter are evidenced in the sixty works on view. Spanning nearly two decades, the diverse selection includes self-portraits cast from inflated latex balloons, tiny sculptures made from ground fingernails, and enormous wind instruments that mimic internal organs. Ancillary to the body theme is the pesky issue of mortality, clearly a consuming topic for Hawkinson (judging from the large number of functioning clocks in his oeuvre). Travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also known as LACMA, is the official and world-renowned art museum of the County of Los Angeles, California, located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. , June 26-Sept. 25.--Claire Barliant Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subcultures Japan Society and Public Art Fund April 8-July 25 Curated by Takashi Murakami Takashi Murakami's global empire keeps expanding, whether he's marketing riffs on Louis Vuitton or kiddie-party decorations for Grand Central Terminal. The next takeover promises to rival even Christo dimensions: transporting the high-tech universe of otaku--that infinite profusion of comics, video games, toys, and websites--to Manhattan, where a visiting delegation of Murakami's compatriots will present some two hundred works, immersing us in an ethos of game arcades and shop-window displays. These installations will turn up everywhere, from subway cars and Union Square's subway station to Japan Society's midtown facade (not to mention the show behind it). Watch out, Toys "R"Us!--Robert Rosenblum [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Max Ernst Metropolitan Museum of Art April 7-July 10 Curated by Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald Among the tales told of Max Ernst's stay in New York during World War II is that here he began to place canvases on the ground, allowing paint to drip from a can that swung on a string above the canvas's surface. Accurate or not--you guess the implications--the story is a tribute to a towering figure whose path through Dada and Surrealism abounds with technical innovation, from collage and frottage frottage (French; “rubbing”) Technique of obtaining an impression of a raised, incised, or textured surface by placing a piece of paper over it and rubbing it with a soft pencil or crayon. to grattage and decalcomania. Some 180 works made between 1913 and 1973 by this purveyor of the primal scene primal scene n. In psychoanalysis, the actual or imagined observation by a child of sexual intercourse, particularly between the parents. primal scene and shattered psyche (themes for both yesterday's tragedies and today's) are included in the late artist's return to Gotham--his first US retrospective in thirty years and one whose significance, with Ernst scholar Werner Spies involved, cannot be underestimated.--Tim Griffin Petah Coyne SculptureCenter January 16-April 10 Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon Returning to the SculptureCenter, host of her breakthrough debut in 1987, the queen of mixed media brings nearly two decades of prolific creation full circle. Laboriously constructed from hair, wax, chicken wire, silk, hay, tar, ribbon, and myriad other materials, her trademark hanging, spreading, or climbing tangles, lumps, and clumps--simultaneously repulsive and gorgeous--stage encounters with delicacy and ponderousness, purity and dreck dreck n. Slang Trash, especially inferior merchandise. [German, dirt, trash and Yiddish drek, excrement, both from Middle High German drec . With fourteen large-scale sculptures and eight dreamlike black-and-white photographs on view, this nineteen-year survey promises the quintessential Coyne experience. Travels to the Chicago Cultural Center The Chicago Cultural Center is a Chicago Landmark building that houses the city's official reception venue where the Mayor has welcomed Presidents and royalty, diplomats and community leaders. , May 14-Aug. 21; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art This article is about Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. For other Museums named Museum of Contemporary Art, see Museum of Contemporary Art. The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. , Kansas City, MO Sept. 17-Dec. 4; and other venues.--Nell McClister [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] PHILADELPHIA Barry Le Va Institute of Contemporary Art January 15-April 3 Curated by Ingrid Schaffner With his 1960s floor distributions, Barry Le Va secured a place in the discourse on dematerialization For the phenomenon resembling teleportation, see, see . In economics, dematerialization refers to the absolute or relative reduction in the quantity of materials required to serve economic functions in society. In common terms, dematerialization means doing more with less. and process art. While he shared (anti-) formal concerns with his more celebrated post-Minimal colleagues Robert Morris and Richard Serra, Le Va implemented a priori a priori In epistemology, knowledge that is independent of all particular experiences, as opposed to a posteriori (or empirical) knowledge, which derives from experience. systems to create structured compositions. This retrospective--Le Va's first major US exhibition in over fifteen years--surveys the artist's oeuvre since the '60s by assembling ten sculptural installations, including one sound work and one new piece, as well as more than a hundred works on paper. Lesser-known photographic and book works also enliven the show. An illustrated monograph features essays by Schaffner, philosopher Paul Virilio, and art historians Pamela M. Lee and Rhea rhea, in zoology rhea (rē`ə), common name for a South American bird of the family Rheidae, which is related to the ostrich. Weighing from 44 to 55 lb (20–25 kg) and standing up to 60 in. Anastas.--Emily Taub PITTSBURGH Michael Maltzan Carnegie Museum of Art February 12-June 12 Curated by Raymund Ryan The qualities of movement, light, and surface essential to Michael Maltzan's work inspired Carnegie curator Raymund Ryan to organize the first exhibition dedicated to the California-based architect. Educated at Harvard Design School, Maltzan belongs to a generation of architects who relocated to LA from the East Coast. While his work is more restrained and less technologically and mathematically driven than that of his peers, his contextual and phenomenological approach--resulting in topological extrusions--is no less pertinent to contemporary discourse. Here, four spaces will hold more than two hundred sectional drawings, DVDs, and process and large-scale models (including those for MOMA QNS and the Fresno Metropolitan Museum) from the past decade.--Tina di Carlo [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BALTIMORE SlideShow Baltlmore Museum of Art February 27-May 15 Curated by Darsie Alexander Art has long deployed the slide, not only for Wolfflinian compare-and-contrast art history lessons and workaday documentation, but also as a medium in and of itself. Yet just last year, Kodak discontinued its Ektagraphic slide projector, forecasting its obsolescence ob·so·les·cent adj. 1. Being in the process of passing out of use or usefulness; becoming obsolete. 2. Biology Gradually disappearing; imperfectly or only slightly developed. in the face of digital technology. The BMA BMA British Medical Association. , however, is putting on its own slide show, in which nineteen artists from the last forty years commemorate the seemingly unassuming slide in all its vicissitudes vicissitudes Noun, pl changes in circumstance or fortune [Latin vicis change] vicissitudes npl → vicisitudes fpl; peripecias fpl . Projects by artists as disparate as Nan Goldin, Ana Mendieta, and Marcel Broodthaers are gathered together, while catalogue essays by Alexander, Charles Harrison, and Robert Storr help to further illumine il·lu·mine tr.v. il·lu·mined, il·lu·min·ing, il·lu·mines To give light to; illuminate. [Middle English illuminen, from Old French illuminer, from Latin the works. Travels to the Contemporary Arts Center The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) is a pioneering contemporary art museum located in Cincinnati, Ohio. The CAC is a non-collecting museum that focuses on new developments in painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, performance art and new media. , Cincinnati, July 2-Sept. 11; Brooklyn Museum, New York, Oct. 7-Jan. 8, 2006.--Johanna Burton WASHINGTON, DC Andre Kertesz National Gallery of Art February 6-May 15 Curated by Sarah Greenough Andre Kertesz (1894-1985), the Hungarian-born photographer who made his best work in Paris in the '20s and '30s and had a resurgence in New York in the '70s, was the master of a unique kind of lyrical Surrealism. His famous Melancholic mel·an·chol·ic adj. 1. Affected with or being subject to melancholy. 2. Of or relating to melancholia. Tulip, 1939, and Satiric Dancer, 1926, exemplify his knack for intensifying everyday subject matter, as do his autobiographical color Polaroids taken shortly before his death. Kertesz's work has not been shown much since a fullbore exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago Art Institute of Chicago, museum and art school, in Grant Park, facing Michigan Ave. It was incorporated in 1879; George Armour was the first president. Since 1893 the Institute has been housed in its present building, designed in the Italian Renaissance style by twenty years TWENTY YEARS. The lapse of twenty years raises a presumption of certain facts, and after such a time, the party against whom the presumption has been raised, will be required to prove a negative to establish his rights. 2. ago, so this retrospective of more than one hundred prints from 1912 to 1984 (with an emphasis on the autobiographical) will be a welcome sight. Travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 12-Sept. 5.--Andy Grundberg [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] MIAMI Miami, cities, United States Miami (mīăm`ē, –ə). 1 City (1990 pop. 358,548), seat of Dade co., SE Fla., on Biscayne Bay at the mouth of the Miami River; inc. 1896. Anne Chu Museum of Contemporary Art April 9-July 3 Curated by Bonnie Clearwater Anne Chu's work trucks in archetypes and symbols--the Knight, Bear, and Courtly Lady--but her often life-size sculptures always retain a tantalizing tan·ta·lize tr.v. tan·ta·lized, tan·ta·liz·ing, tan·ta·liz·es To excite (another) by exposing something desirable while keeping it out of reach. spark of ambiguity that forestalls easy conclusions: Are her spooky marionettelike figures derived from Tang dynasty China or from medieval Europe? Do they bode ill or well? Are they even human? MOCA's exhibition of thirty-five sculptures and thirty works on paper from 1998 to the present is the most in-depth presentation to date of Chu's work. Deftly carved in wood, cast in paper, wrought in gorgeous fabrics and other materials, her hybrid forms are easily among the most engaging figurative sculptures around. But please don't call them puppets.--Meghan Dailey CHICAGO Universal Experience: Art. Life, and the Tourist's Eye Museum of Contemporary Art February 12-June 5 Curated by Francesco Bonami "So sorry to hear that you are still not over us. Come back to Vietnam for closure!" It's estimated that, by 2010, the number of people who travel internationally will reach one billion, but, as Dinh Q. Le's sardonic poster implies, the relationship between traveler and destination remains unsettled. This show aims to illuminate our mediated interaction with the wider world, exploring the complexities of the tourist attraction. Bonami, who contributes to the accompanying catalogue-cum-guidebook, leads us through the work of some seventy disparate artists, from Kyoichi Tsuzuki's photographs of Japanese roadside follies to Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's sculpture Short Cut, 2003, a dramatic illustration of the urge to explore.--Michael Wilson [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] COLUMBUS, OHIO Landscape Confection con·fec·tion n. A sweetened medicinal compound. Also called electuary. Wexner Center Galleries at the Belmont Building January 29-May 1 Curated by Helen Molesworth The Wexner has aptly billed "Landscape Confection" as "whimsical and vividly colorful," but with artists like Kori Newkirk, Michael Raedecker, and Lisa Sanditz in the mix, the show also promises some slightly unsettling un·set·tle v. un·set·tled, un·set·tling, un·set·tles v.tr. 1. To displace from a settled condition; disrupt. 2. To make uneasy; disturb. v.intr. moments. About fifty works by thirteen artists--including Pia Fries's bright, topographical abstractions and Rowena Dring's stitched-by-numbers "paintings"--relate, in varying degrees of representation, to the landscape. All evidence the allure and durability of this ancient subject. The catalogue features an essay by Molesworth and entries by Wexner associate curator Claudine Ise. Travels to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston The Contemporary Arts Museum - Houston is a not-for-profit institution in Houston, Texas, dedicated to presenting the contemporary art of our time to the public. As a non-collecting museum, it strives to provide a forum for visual arts of the present and recent past and , July 23-Sept. 11; Orange County Museum of Art The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is a museum located in Newport Beach, California. External links
MINNEAPOLIS Shadowland: An Exhibition as a Film Walker Art Center April 17-September 11 Curated by Douglas Fogle and Philippe Vergne "Shadowland" aims to show how still and moving images have affected art-making and viewing over the past thirty years--a tall curatorial order, to which Vergne and Fogle take an open-ended approach. Their concept of the exhibition as a "movie without a camera" makes the viewer a flaneur-protagonist, ambling This article is about the four-beat intermediate gaits of horses. For more information on how horses move, see Horse gait. The term Amble or Ambling is used to describe a number of four-beat intermediate gaits of horses. among forty-three works by some thirty contributors, including cinematic mavericks (Chantal Akerman), Picture Theory progenitors
The Progenitors were a race of fictional beings in the Star Trek Universe created by Gene Roddenberry. (Richard Prince), agitators at video's spatiotemporal spa·ti·o·tem·po·ral adj. 1. Of, relating to, or existing in both space and time. 2. Of or relating to space-time. [Latin spatium, space + temporal1. limits (Doug Aitken), and just plain agitators (the Chapman brothers). Whether or not clear propositions emerge, the show should demonstrate that spectators themselves are the ultimate machines of the visible.--Elizabeth Schambelan HOUSTON Double Consciousness: Black Conseptual Art Since 1970 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston January 22-April 17 Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois described the African-American experience as one of "double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." A century later, his term continues to resonate, and CA curator Valerie Cassel Oliver has appropriated its connotations of invisibility and displacement as means to reevaluate conceptual strategies taken up by African-American artists over the past three decades. This exhibition of some thirty artists--Renee Green, Senga Nengudi, Adrian Piper, and Nari Ward among them--explores the ways Conceptualism has been recast to reflect and subvert deep-set social inequities.--JB [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] LONG BEACH, CA Candida Hofer California State University Enrollment  Art Museum January 25-April 17 Curated by Constance W. Glenn Around 1980, people started to disappear from Candida Hofer's photographs. If you look at her images long enough, writes poet Michael Kruger, you can imagine a world without humans. Best known for her interiors, from the Palacio Real Madrid to Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Hofer has traveled the world in search of architectures of extraordinary tranquility and silence. Her dedication to absence is perhaps the best indication of her training in Bernd and Hilla Becher's photography program in the '70s. Compared to classmates Gursky, Ruff, and Struth, she has gained relatively little attention in the US. That may change with this fifty-work career survey. Travels to the Norton Museum of Art This article is for the Norton Museum of Art in Florida. See this link for the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. The Norton Museum of Art is an art museum located in West Palm Beach, Florida. , West Palm Beach, CA, Oct. 15-Jan. 8, 2006; and other venues.--DB [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] LOS ANGELES THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles UCLA UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UCLA University Center for Learning Assistance (Illinois State University) UCLA University of Carrollton, TX and Lower Addison, TX Hammer Museum February 6-June 5 Curated by James Elaine, Aimee Chang, and Christopher Miles As LA MOCA MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA Multimedia over Coax MoCA Museum of Chinese in the Americas MOCA Minnesota Ovarian Cancer Alliance MOCA Montezuma Castle National Monument (US National Park Service) steadily pursues its excavation of mid-twentieth-century art, the job of examining the emerging generation has fallen to the Hammer Museum. The institution's third recent survey to focus on young artists, "THING" is both medium and location specific. Sculpture in LA is more a combinatory matrix than a discrete medium, and this is no doubt what the curators had in mind when they grouped Rodney McMillian's funk assemblage with the hallucinatory hal·lu·ci·na·to·ry adj. 1. Of or characterized by hallucination. 2. Inducing or causing hallucination. realism of Matt Johnson, and Taft Green's abstractions of exchange systems with Mindy Shapero's meditations on the ineffable. Three curators, twenty artists, forty-five sculptures, and a fully illustrated catalogue--this show should run the gamut.--Jan Tumlir [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Robert Rauschenberg Los Angeles County Museum of Art March 10-June 12 Curated by Carter Foster Rauschenberg is the most populist of the Pop artists, the one most interested in bringing all aspects of life and politics into his art. He is also the most experimental, always messing around with innovative ways to adhere images to various surfaces. Printmaking printmaking Art form consisting of the production of images, usually on paper but occasionally on fabric, parchment, plastic, or other support, by various techniques of multiplication, under the direct supervision of or by the hand of the artist. has long been an important arena for his experiments and also a means of turning out relatively low-cost objects for the public. At the extreme end of such production comes the mass-edition yet technically complex poster. This exhibition, organized by prints and drawings curator Carter Foster, brings together more than one hundred posters from the '60s to the present. While there won't be a catalogue, the artist is making a special poster for the show.--Thomas Lawson The Arts and Crafts Movement Arts and Crafts movement English social and aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century, dedicated to reestablishing the importance of craftsmanship in an era of mechanization and mass production. in Europe and America, 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World Los Angeles County Museum of Art Through April 3 Curated by Wendy Kaplan Exploding the notion of a singular Arts and Crafts arts and crafts, term for that general field of applied design in which hand fabrication is dominant. The term was coined in England in the late 19th cent. as a label for the then-current movement directed toward the revivifying of the decorative arts. ethos, this exhibition is the first to demonstrate how the movement was customized for a variety of regional agendas. The show features more than three hundred objects and two re-created interiors and includes an impressive array of furniture, ceramics, metalwork metalwork. Copper, gold, and silver were probably fashioned into ornaments and amulets as early as the Neolithic period. Goldwork and silverwork have since employed the talents of leading artisans and artists in making jewelry, plate, inlays, and sculpture. , textiles, and prints. While good design today seems only a trip to Target away, the integration of art and life promised by the Arts and Crafts movement has exceeded our grasp. And while this show may reconsider the material culture of an earlier era, the questions it raises are entirely contemporary. Travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art Located in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, the internationally renowned Cleveland Museum of Art has a permanent collectionof more than 40,000 objects in 70 galleries. , Oct. 16-Jan. 8, 2006.--David Spalding SAN FRANCISCO John Szarkowski San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a major modern art museum and San Francisco landmark. It opened in 1935 under founding director Dr. Grace Morley (Grace L. February 5-May 15 Curated by Sandra S. Phillips John Szarkowski, who eloquently and often maddeningly set the tone for art photography at SF MOMA Moma (mō`mä), town, E central Mozambique. It is important mainly as a harbor for the export of tropical produce. from his nearly thirty-year perch in the museum's photography department, was a picture maker before he became a curator and has become one again since his retirement in 1991. His images from the '40s and '50s dote rigorously on Louis Sullivan buildings and vernacular architectural subjects; the recent ones are more rural, landscape oriented, and reflective. How these poles make sense as a career--and how Szarkowski's photographs might have shaped his curatorial work, and vice versa--is the crux of this seventy-five-print exhibition. Travels to the Center for Creative Photography The Center for Creative Photography (CCP), established in 1975 and located on the University of Arizona (Tucson) campus, is a research facility and archival repository containing the full archives of over sixty of the most famous American photographers including those of Ansel , Tucson, June 11-Sept. 5; Milwaukee Art Museum The Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) is located on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The museum's history began in 1888 when the Milwaukee Art Association was created by a group of German panorama artists and local businessmen; its first home was the Layton Art Gallery. , Sept. 30-Jan. 1, 2006; and other venues.--AG [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] RIO DE JANEIRO Rio de Janeiro, city, Brazil Rio de Janeiro (rē`ō də zhänā`rō, Port. rē`  thĭ zhənĕē`r Nelson Felix Paco Imperial March 16-May 22 Curated by Gloria Ferreira Since the early '80s, Nelson Felix has been making sculptures and installations replete with formal intelligence, conceptual concerns, bodily references, and oblique narratives--they're typically Brazilian, at its very best. For this show, Felix has taken up the challenge of completing what he regards as three (until now) "incomplete trilogies" related to "bodily voids," time, and the form and concept of the cross. The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the artist, includes some fourteen large-scale works encompassing installation, sculpture, drawing, and photography from 1986 to the present. A catalogue features six years of interviews between Felix and Ferreira. Travels to the Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo, June 12-Aug. 16--Adriano Pedrosa LONDON Anthony Caro Tate Britain January 26-April 17 Curated by Paul Moorhouse Marking Anthony Caro's eightieth year, this retrospective charts the sculptor's career across fifty works, beginning with early figurative pieces, made in the shadow of Henry Moore, and his celebrated aluminum-and-painted-steel sculptures of the '60s. The latter works represent Caro's contribution to the debate over the viability of late-modernist painting and sculpture and remain the basis of his considerable reputation. Seeing this work alongside recent pieces--abstracted table sculptures that reveal their inspiration in seventeenth-century painting, object-environment hybrids he awkwardly refers to as "sculpitecture," and sculptures that reference classical Greek style--should provide a welcome opportunity to judge Caro's subsequent contribution to sculptural practice.--Michael Archer [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Tomoko Takahashi Serpentine Gallery February 22-April 10 Curated by Rochelle Steiner Does Tomoko Takahashi think she can play games with us? Apparently so: Her teeming teem 1 v. teemed, teem·ing, teems v.intr. 1. To be full of things; abound or swarm: A drop of water teems with microorganisms. 2. , sprawling, 3-D improvisations--epic accumulations of everyday stuff--are irresistible invitations to engage in a kind of pingpong of the imagination. After much scrabbling at car-boot sales and London's recycling depots, Takahashi will monopolize mo·nop·o·lize tr.v. mo·nop·o·lized, mo·nop·o·liz·ing, mo·nop·o·liz·es 1. To acquire or maintain a monopoly of. 2. To dominate by excluding others: monopolized the conversation. the Serpentine with a commissioned installation comprising thousands of games, toys, and found objects. Events are planned: Artist Leafcutter John will convert sounds made from items in the show into a musical piece; on the front lawn, Takahashi and Simon Faithfull will reprise it, 1999, an after-dark game of tag that's open to all; and on the final day, visitors can walk off with whatever object they fancy. Serpentine chief curator Steiner referees.--Rachel Withers withers the region over the backline where the neck joins the thorax and where the dorsal margins of the scapulae lie just below the skin. fistulous withers see fistulous withers. The Triumph of Painting Saatchi Gallery January 26-May 31 Curated by Charles Saatchi While ostensibly celebrating the Saatchi Gallery's twentieth anniversary, this exhibition (actually made up of three parts over the course of a year) looks more like an aggressive defense of the beleaguered be·lea·guer tr.v. be·lea·guered, be·lea·guer·ing, be·lea·guers 1. To harass; beset: We are beleaguered by problems. 2. To surround with troops; besiege. adman's taste. It opens with a cherry-picking of his collection--forty-eight canvases by Kippenberger, Dumas, Tuymans, and three others--to make the case that Saatchi always knew what was best in painting. Thus awed, we're set up to predict a lasting future for the younger artists whose work he will display in subsequent months. Sceptics may wonder what proportion of Saatchi's acquisitions these historical hits represent, but his rampant and scattershot scat·ter·shot adj. Covering a wide range in a random way; indiscriminate: "his habit of scattershot comment on whatever issue catches his eye" Howell Raines. purchasing here reveals an upside: Whatever medium takes precedence next, Saatchi will most likely be able to say he was there first, too.--Martin Herbert [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] LIVERPOOL Richard Wentworth Tate Liverpool January 21-April 24 Curated by Simon Groom This show marks Richard Wentworth's most comprehensive exhibition to date, giving viewers the chance to see forty works from the past thirty years, as well as three or four new sculptures. Yet it seems wrong to call it a retrospective. Wentworth's sculptural instinct has always favored the antimonumental: Through low-tech, intimate, and often humorous manipulations of everyday things (books, plates, buckets), he reveals these objects as instances of condensed con·dense v. con·densed, con·dens·ing, con·dens·es v.tr. 1. To reduce the volume or compass of. 2. To make more concise; abridge or shorten. 3. Physics a. thought. Similarly startling star·tle v. star·tled, star·tling, star·tles v.tr. 1. To cause to make a quick involuntary movement or start. 2. To alarm, frighten, or surprise suddenly. See Synonyms at frighten. examples of this economy of means and gesture are recorded in a group of prints from "Making Do and Getting By," Wentworth's ongoing photographic sequence begun in the '70s. The catalogue contains essays by Groom, curator Roger Malbert, and writer Michael Bracewell.--MA PARIS Dionysiac: Art in Flux Centre Pompidou February 16-May 9 Curated by Christine Macel The French have an unmatched record when it comes to wine and women (if not, perhaps, also to song), so this uninhibited uninhibited /un·in·hib·it·ed/ (un?in-hib´i-ted) free from usual constraints; not subject to normal inhibitory mechanisms. celebration of devil-maycare excess and subversive laughter is opening in exactly the right place. With work by fourteen international artists including Thomas Hirschhorn, Fabrice Hyber, Keith Tyson, Paul McCarthy, and ubiquitous prankster Maurizio Cattelan, the show aims to evoke the hedonistic he·don·ism n. 1. Pursuit of or devotion to pleasure, especially to the pleasures of the senses. 2. Philosophy The ethical doctrine holding that only what is pleasant or has pleasant consequences is intrinsically good. spirit of the ancient Greek deity by way of mostly brand-new installations, films, performance, and a sound room. Oh, and a conference. In addition to contributions by the artists, the catalogue, conceived by Macel with Christophe Brunquell, features essays by Jean-Pierre Criqui and Barbara Stiegler, as well as by the curator herself.--MW [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BARCELONA Josep Lluis Sert Fundacio Joan Miro February 25-June 12 Curated by Jaume Freixa and Josep Maria Rovira Will this timely retrospective of Catalan modernist Josep Lluis Sert successfully resuscitate re·sus·ci·tate v. To restore consciousness, vigor, or life to. the legacy of the neglected and underrated postwar architect, best remembered for designing a studio and foundation for Joan Miro? After all, Sert's low-key buildings lack the robust bravura bra·vu·ra n. 1. Music a. Brilliant technique or style in performance. b. A piece or passage that emphasizes a performer's virtuosity. 2. A showy manner or display. adj. 1. of those designed by his more celebrated European peers like Marcel Breuer and Eero Saarinen, who also settled in the US and crafted concrete-and-glass institutional buildings during the 1960s and '70s. With drawings, photographs, models, and videos related to ten projects, this show offers an occasion to reappraise re·ap·praise tr.v. re·ap·praised, re·ap·prais·ing, re·ap·prais·es To make a fresh appraisal or evaluation of. reappraise Verb [-praising, -praised Sert's urbane buildings--each derived from a subtle yet sophisticated retooling of the internationalist vocabulary of his mentor, Le Corbusier, and adapted to a particular region or site.--Joel Sanders BOLOGNA Josef Albers Museo Morandi January 28-April 30 Curated by Peter Weiermair and Giusi Vecchi Jasper Johns once took a color test designed by Josef Albers and reported back: "Mr. Albers, I took your color test and got all the answers wrong." Albers beamed, "Dot's vunderful. You got 100 percent." One by one, the famous "Homage to the Square" paintings are easily dismissed as Albers-the-artist's brainy brain·y adj. brain·i·er, brain·i·est Informal Intelligent; smart. brain  i·ly adv. illustrations of Albers-the-teacher's color theories. En masse, they confound more than explain. Curators Weiermair and Vecchi assemble thirty-five "Homages" along with some forty other paintings and photo collages for Albers's first monographic show in Italy. Go test yourself.--Christine Mehring [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] PRATO Robert Morris Centro per I'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci February 25-May 29 Curated by Jean-Pierre Criqui While engaging with multiple movements in multiple mediums, Robert Morris consistently addresses the problematics of perception. For this show, Criqui amasses seventy-five of the artist's "Blind Time Drawings," dating from 1973 to 2000--the first time so many will be exhibited together. Morris executed the drawings with eyes closed, exposing the distance between his intentions and his body's limitations. An exhibition catalogue, on which Morris collaborated, is devoted primarily to the drawings. The show also features two films and nine early sculptures--including Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961, and the large installation Threadwaste with Mirrors, 1968--that further represent Morris's efforts to overcome the privileging of vision.--Emily Taub ATHENS Lucas Samaras National Gallery, Alexandros Soutzos Museum April 4-June 30 Curated by Katerina Koskina Just a year back, the Whitney Museum ran a big show--over 350 works--on self-portraiture in the work of Lucas Samaras. That show, partly funded by the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation--its mission "the preservation and promotion of culture and civilization in Greece [and] abroad"--necessarily presented Samaras Samaras is the name of:
adj. That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. be staged as homecoming king.--DF [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THUN, SWITZERLAND Pierre Bismuth bismuth (bĭz`məth) [Ger. Weisse Masse=white mass], metallic chemical element; symbol Bi; at. no. 83; at. wt. 208.9804; m.p. 271.3°C;; b.p. about 1,560°C;; sp. gr. 9.75 at 20°C;; valence +3 or +5. Kunstmuseum Thun April 21-June 21 Curated by Madeleine Schuppli Pierre Bismuth's first comprehensive solo exhibition traces the Paris-born artist's wide-ranging thoughts through works on paper, installations, videos, and wall drawings. He is particularly interested in globalization globalization Process by which the experience of everyday life, marked by the diffusion of commodities and ideas, is becoming standardized around the world. Factors that have contributed to globalization include increasingly sophisticated communications and transportation and its ability to throw into question linguistic and iconic codes, especially their ability to divide or unite. Among the thirty works on view are his 2002 multilingual version of Disney's Jungle Book, with a Hebrew-speaking Baloo the Bear and an Arab Bagheera the Panther, and his new project IBHAYIBHILE. Taken from the Xhosa word for "bible," this piece collects as many translations of the Good Book as possible, making it a monument against the nationalistic strain of Christian fundamentalism.--Hans Rudolf Reust Translated from German Iry Sara Ogger. VIENNA Piet Mondrian Albertina Museum March 11-June 19 Curated by Antonia Hoerschelmann Dealing the latest blow to the old idealist account of Mondrian's abstraction, this retrospective of some one hundred paintings and rarely exhibited large-format drawings (all made between 1989 and 1943) foregrounds the mutual imbrication imbrication surgical pleating and folding of tissue to realign organs and provide extra support, e.g. chronically stretched joint capsule. Flo imbrication of the two media in the artist's spectacular oeuvre. This issue has been tackled before, most provocatively in a 1994 retrospective cocurated by veteran Mondrian specialist Joop Joosten (author of the present show's catalogue) that devoted a whole section to an elucidation of Mondrian's working process after 1920. What's new at the Albertina--apart from being the first time Vienna will see Mondrian en masse--is a detailed consideration of drawing's fundamental role in the painter's passage to abstraction in the 1910s.--Maria Gough [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Willem de Kooning Vienna Kunstforum January 13-March 28 Curated by Ingried Brugger and Florian Steininger De Kooning would have turned one hundred last year, but it has been twenty years since his work was seen in depth in Europe. Though comprising only fifty-two works, this show surveys de Kooning's entire career, including its final, still-controversial decade. The exhibition's innovation is the inclusion of nine contemporary painters--among them Brice Marden and David Reed--whose work resonates with that of the Dutch Master. There are risks involved. In the '50s, the most dangerous place to be for a young artist with a subtle wrist was anywhere near de Kooning. Meanwhile, one wonders what effect these self-conscious studio practitioners will have on our view of a man who claimed never to "sit in style." Travels to the Kunsthal Rotterdam, Apr. 17-July 3.--Robert Storr LINZ, AUSTRIA Leo Leo, in astronomy Leo [Lat.,=the lion], northern constellation lying S of Ursa Major and on the ecliptic (apparent path of the sun through the heavens) between Cancer and Virgo; it is one of the constellations of the zodiac. Schatzi O.K. Centrum centrum /cen·trum/ (sen´trum) pl. cen´tra [L.] 1. a center. 2. the body of a vertebra. cen·trum n. pl. cen·trums or cen·tra 1. fur Gegenwartskunst March 18-May 8 Curated by Martin Sturm Leo Schatzl became the popular favorite at the 2004 Bienal de Sao Paulo with his rotating VW Beetle. As an interdisciplinary conceptual artist, this Austrian Tatlin undermines social systems and suggests, not least by engaging in collective practices, alternatives to the career paths commonly found in the art world. The artist's first large solo show presents playful, subversive investigations that combine technical setups, everyday objects, and experimental parameters involving time, movement, and speed--a car shot off a ramp into wet concrete, for example. Including photographs, installations, and videos made since 1991, the fifteen works on view are timely examinations of wastelands and taboo zones, studies of the untouchables untouchables: see Harijans. Untouchables lowest caste in India; social outcasts. [Ind. Culture: Brewer Dictionary, 1118] See : Banishment of public space.--Brigitte Huck huck n. Huckaback. Noun 1. huck - toweling consisting of coarse absorbent cotton or linen fabric huckaback toweling, towelling - any of various fabrics (linen or cotton) used to make towels Translated from German by Sara Ogger. BRUSSELS Rene Magritte and Photography Palais des Beaux-Arts February 23-May 15 Curated by Patrick Roegiers "He is never entirely invisible," wrote Rene Magritte of his pulp-fiction idol Fantomas. And neither was Magritte, despite his popular reputation as a publicity-shunning, Surrealist homebody home·bod·y n. pl. home·bod·ies One whose interests center on the home. Noun 1. homebody - a person who seldom goes anywhere; one not given to wandering or travel stay-at-home : A 1938 photograph shows him mugging alongside The Barbarian, his 1928 homage to the antihero of French thrillers. Now, a coproduction with the Magritte Foundation probes the artist's life via thirteen of his films and some 330 photographs from 1898 to 1967 by Magritte and other artists, as well as by family members and anonymous snappers. Magritte the photographic subject (subtly posing, turning his back, hiding behind his paintings) looks set to emerge as a specific, unforeseen object of critical scrutiny in its own right. Travels to the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris, 2006.--RW [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BERLIN Jackson Pollock Deutsche Guggenheim January 29-April 17 Curated by Susan Davidson First there was Jackson Pollock, brooding and libidinal existential action painter, all grimace grimace Neurology A humorless facial 'mask' typically seen in Pts with catatonia. See Amimia. and sad cigarettes. Then came Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried's preternaturally pre·ter·nat·u·ral adj. 1. Out of or being beyond the normal course of nature; differing from the natural. 2. Surpassing the normal or usual; extraordinary: modernist Pollock, who rubbed up against the performative per·for·ma·tive adj. Relating to or being an utterance that peforms an act or creates a state of affairs by the fact of its being uttered under appropriate or conventional circumstances, as a justice of the peace uttering Pollock of Allan Kaprow. This incarnation ceded, in turn, to the desublimated Pollock of Rosalind Krauss. Now, with this tightly focused show that brings together over forty "paintings on paper" for the first time since 1980, we'll have Pollock as consummate draftsman. Experimenting with watercolor, gouache gouache (gwäsh): see watercolor painting. gouache Opaque watercolour. Also known as poster paint, designer's colour, and body colour, it differs from transparent watercolour in that the pigments are bound by liquid glue, which is , India ink, and crayon crayon, any drawing material available in stick form. The term includes charcoal, conte crayon, chalk, pastel, grease crayon, litho crayon, and children's wax colors. , the graphic Pollock examined in this exhibition and its catalogue (with essays by Davidson, David Anfam, and Peggy Ellis) is well worth another look. Travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a small museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. It is one of several museums of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Containing prinicipally the personal art collection of Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), a former wife of artist Max , Venice, June 4-Sept. 18.--Suzanne Hudson [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition Kunst-Werke Berlin January 29-May 16 Curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin After several delays and heated debates, "Regarding Terror" is finally set to proceed. Judging from the uproar over the exhibition, West Germany's period of national terrorism--dominated by the media machine of the Red Army Fraction, or Baader-Meinhof gang--remains a sensitive topic, even three decades after the events. Curators Blumenstein and Ensslin (son of RAF member Gudrun Ensslin) selected historical and contemporary works from the past thirty-two years in various media, from Hans-Peter Feldmann's archive of terror victims to Andree Korpys and Markus Loffler's study of interior designs in RAF hideouts. Travels to Neue Galerie Graz, June 24-Aug. 28.--Jennifer Allen [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] GRONINGEN, NETHERLANDS Hussein Chalayan Groninger Museum April 10-September 4 Curated by Sue-an van der Zijpp When a maverick designer straddles the line between art and fashion, he is apprehensively embraced by both industries--and often backed by neither. Unless he's Hussein Chalayan, the Cypriot wunderkind wun·der·kind n. pl. wun·der·kin·der 1. A child prodigy. 2. A person of remarkable talent or ability who achieves great success or acclaim at an early age. who, since starting his women's line in 1994, has transformed runway shows into Conceptual-art performances and merged torqued dress lines with postmodern readymades. This retrospective surveys his output thus far and includes as many mannequins as it does sculptures, installations, and film works. Chalayan seems inspired less by Gucci sex romps than by politics and architecture. Consider a 2001 show in which models wearing sugar glass shattered their dresses with hammers. Sometimes revolutionary and wearable can spring from the same tailor.--Christopher Bollen DUSSELDORF Darren Almond K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrheln-Westfalen February 26-May 29 Curated by Julian Heynen and Stefanie Jansen As a young trainspotter in Britain, Darren Almond became intimately acquainted with the world of clocks and timetables. Perhaps that's how his obsession with time started. Involving slow-motion and real-time transmissions, many of his works elicit intensified experiences of temporality tem·po·ral·i·ty n. pl. tem·po·ral·i·ties 1. The condition of being temporal or bounded in time. 2. temporalities Temporal possessions, especially of the Church or clergy. Noun 1. : the chronology of the body as well as time measured by clocks. In fact, Almond's works make duration viscerally felt, by turns painful and soothing. The largest show of the artist's work in Germany to date, this survey comprises some twenty films, photographs, and sculptures from the past eight years. Also included are Almond's films made during recent trips to Antarctica and the Arctic, those axes of time and space.--DB Inflamed with Art: Dubuffet and Art Brut Museum Kunst Palast The museum kunst palast is an arts museum in Düsseldorf, Germany. History The museum kunst palast was founded as Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, a typical communal arts collection in Germany. February 19-May 29 Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, Lucienne Peiry, Michel Thevoz, and Mattijs Visser Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), who amused himself at times by reading the comedies of Terence in the original Latin, nevertheless asserted that he preferred the inventions of art brut to the "parrot-like processes" of "cultural art"--a torturous but fruitful aporia a·po·ri·a n. 1. A figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question. 2. An insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text's meanings. that occupied him for much of his life. The largest show of art brut to date, this exhibition allows comparisons between 117 of Dubuffet's own artistic productions and those of some fifty brut Brut, Brute (both: br  t), or Brutus (br artists, from the Swiss Aloise to Henry Darger by way of other less famous but equally enigmatic artists. Also included is a selection of works from the collection largely assembled by German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, author in 1922 of Artistry of the Mentally Ill.--Jean-Pierre Criqui Translated from French by Jeanine Heman. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BADEN-BADEN Georg Herold Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden March 5-April 10 Curated by Matthias Winzen Georg Herold is a determined desublimator, continuously casting doubt on the structures of value and valueproduction both within and outside of the art world. In the late '70s and '80s, he participated, along with Kippenberger, Oehlen, and others, in a post-Beuysian micromovement against an all-too-easy German neoexpressionism. His trademark deployment of poor and "stupid" materials (bricks, wire, underpants) explores the perception of art and the basic rules of social interaction. This twenty-six-year retrospective of seventy sculptures, photographs, objects, and paintings begins as a dadaist detournement of arte povera gestures and develops into a multimedia study of elitism, etiquette, and exclusion. Travels to the Kunstverein Hannover, Apr. 16-May 29; and other venues.--Tom Holert HAMBURG Martin Munkacsi Deichtorhallen Hamburg April 15-June 26 Curated by F.C. Gundlach, Klaus Honnef, Enno Kaufhold, and Ulrich Ruter "All great photographs today are snapshots," Martin Munkacsi (1896-1963) announced in 1935, and he had plenty of convincing evidence right at hand. For more than a decade, the self-taught Hungarian photographer had been enlivening newspapers and magazines in Budapest and Berlin with pictures that combined modernist innovation, graphic sophistication so·phis·ti·cate v. so·phis·ti·cat·ed, so·phis·ti·cat·ing, so·phis·ti·cates v.tr. 1. To cause to become less natural, especially to make less naive and more worldly. 2. , and the punch of a knockout sports photo. When he followed other Jewish exile artists to New York in 1934, Munkacsi brought the same anything-goes exuberance and spontaneity to his work with Harper's Bazaar and Life. With more than 350 photos, many previously unpublished, this retrospective should help explain why both Cartier-Bresson and Avedon cited Munkacsi as a key influence.--Vince Aletti MOSCOW First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art Various venues January 28-February 28 Curated by Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, Rosa Martinez, Iara Boubnova, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist The specter of yet another biennial is haunting Europe. Under a nebulous Hegelio-Adornian banner, "Dialectics of Hope" aspires to "reintegrate re·in·te·grate tr.v. re·in·te·grat·ed, re·in·te·grat·ing, re·in·te·grates To restore to a condition of integration or unity. re contemporary Russian art into the international art world" by joining the biennial parade. The six curators, each with high-profile experience (Manifesta, Sao Paulo, Venice, etc.), introduce some forty artists, including such putatively hope-full international participants as Jeremy Deller and John Bock, to a Moscow audience. The smaller Russian and "nonconformist" Soviet contingent, like the Blue Noses Group, may attract the tourists that the curators are counting on to flock to Moscow in the middle of winter. Talk about hope springing eternal.--Nico Israel [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] SYDNEY Bill Henson Art Gallery of New South Wales The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) located in The Domain in Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia, is the most important public gallery in Sydney and the second largest in Australia after the National Gallery of Victoria. January 8-April 3 Curated by Judy Annear Although Bill Henson's photographs transform fragile teenagers and fraying landscapes into fever-pitch museum art, they've never been seen in any depth outside Australia. Solo shows at the Denver Art Museum The Denver Art Museum is an art museum in Denver, Colorado located in Denver's Civic Center. It is known for its collection of American Indian art, and has a comprehensive collection numbering more than 55,000 works from across the world. in 1990, the 1995 Venice Biennale, and LA's Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in 1999 haven't compensated for this art-museum inattention in·at·ten·tion n. Lack of attention, notice, or regard. Noun 1. inattention - lack of attention basic cognitive process - cognitive processes involved in obtaining and storing knowledge , especially since Henson, a virtuoso technician, sometimes masses his photographs in vast installations that require museum-size spaces. A pity, then, that this retrospective of 350 photographs from the past thirty years won't travel to the US or Europe, though the sumptuous publication, with essays by a raft of writers including novelist David Malouf, certainly will. Travels to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Apr. 23-July 10. --Charles Green |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion