Professional Documents
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Modern Painters 11 2010
Modern Painters 11 2010
ERRERA
& Frederico Seve Gallery a tP:i:rl:ta,,: THE MODERN & CONTEMPORARY LATI N AM ERICA.N ART SHOW
November 11 - 14 Pier 92, New York City
Frederico Seve GaLLery
37 West 57th St. 4th Floor New York NY 10019
1 ~212~334-7813
www.latincollector.com
Kim Dorland
New Material
November 6, 2010 ~ January 8, 2011
Opening Saturday, November 6, 6 ~ 8 pm
Mike Weiss Gallery
520 West 24th Street New York New York 10011 tel 212 691 6899 fax 212 691 6877
email info@mikeweissgallery_com web www.mikeweis s gatlerv.com
Kim uonand I V/QI( j del~i! I 20"10 I oil, acrylic., glitter. screws end string on wood ;pane1 I 60 x 48 Inches
NOVEMBER
co
NTS
52
Features
46 In Character
Lucas Samaras returns to portraiture by Daniel Kunitz
Introducing
38 Richard Masse Should one beautify war? by AoiIe Ro.senmeyer
)(ayje'Q.slmme". lnio theNewSeo (Nolllod). 2010. C-prillt, JD'X 40 in.
52 Hot Shots Photographs by rising stars Simon Berg, Matt Lipps, and Xaviera Simmons.
42 Hilary Lloyd
An artists' artist comes out of her shell for her first major show in II years. by Coline Milliard
62 Talking Turkey Artists question
their national identity by Berin Golonu
ONTIiECOVU
LLJcas Sgmara $ Po~e 0320, 201 O. Pig men t prin t.
ArITINF{)'COM :"fOVE[ v lliJ:::~ 2010 MODEHN p,L\INTmS 5
NOVEMBER
CONTENTS
38
Rictund MO$$f!
LCl Vie en Rose, 201 0, Digilal C-print
110m color in r roreo O!m,nx90in,
I'foLI!LS_QlII
An u nfi ni shed ...... ork, GooclAcfvlce, 201 O. Aorvlic o nd an an corwos, 72 v: 7.2 in.
Ashar"'n"
Un titled, from "Dione Arbus Bkoteboords (D"lV~ng,) .. 20 I 0, Drowl n g on pho 1'0- graph. 91h:o; 11 in.
27
Amanda Ross-No in h@l"L.A_ studio.
Portfolio
Departments
22 Art & Life
Artists who tread journalism's territory by Tyler Green
27 Studio Check
Amanda Ross·Ho
Reports
68 Culture + Travel When in , . , Miami
l5 Newsmaker Peter Saul
17 Collector Michael Hoeh
18 Out There
Collage as photography
7l Reviews
"The New Boring: sex lor pay. playing havoc with abstract painting, and taxidermy in LA
80 How It Is
The Modem Painters guide to the evolving art world
3l Biopic
The story behind an artwork, by Malorie Marder
19 Cine-File
Porn by Merithew Barney, Richard Prince, and others
20 Curator's Choice Debra Singer
33 Books
Asher Penn; A Hedonist's Guide to Nt
Fairs, Auctions, Shows, Gossip, Party Pictures Modem Painters Web Exc:lusive; For a full Q&A WITh Peter Soul as vJel1 as a shdeshow of work b)'the photographers in this issue, visit artinfo.com.
ArITINF{)'COM :"fOVE[ v lliJ:::~ 2010 MODEHN p,L\INTmS 7
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CONTRIBUTORS II NOVEMBER
Simon Berg
The 27·year-old photographer Simon Berg nfot Shots," page 60),
of Giiteb()l'g, Sweden, is
a master of the dose-up, "1 prefer to treat my models as objects," he says. "The moustache,
the Bye, the hu mall body are all amazing items
to use in a s till life ."
His recent pictures are collected in the artist's hook Apal1. Ii!' n'idd (Blackhook Publications, 2(09) Berg has a lso
sold photographic
dinner plates and Tvshirts depicting
the male physique in uncomfortabl B detail. What does he think of photogra phy's future?
«It will develop, but not
in interesting ways.
How would the same discussion about ,niting look? 'What's next for writing' Well, there'll
be a lot of cool pens
out there, even digital ones, bitt they WOl.1't
ch ange a thing. ",
"The close-uo cortrbutes an alternate perspective. a second vew."
10 MODEIlN PAIN"IEJi!S NOVEMBER zoro ARIItfFO.COM
Berin Golonu
"Despite the fact that the art scene in Ista nbul is growing so rapidly, it still retains its edge," says Barin Golonu ("Talking Tmkey," page 62). "The work being made there is courageous and not afraid to pack a punch ," Born and raised in Istanbul and educated mainly in the U,S., where she is currently a doctoral student in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, Golonu has been making annual visits to see her family in Turkey fOT more than a decade. Over that time she has watched the Is tan b HI art seen e ri pe n, wi th gail eli es, museu 111 s, an d alternative spaces increasing In number and dynanrism every year.
"The work being made in Turkey
is courageous and no! afraid to pack a puncrt·
Matt Lipps
Matt Lipps ("Hot Shots," page 56) has a widerangin g passion for image." BefOl'e making the art-history- and
archi teet ure- inflected pieces presented in this issue, he experimented with quite different source material, such as male porn models in his series "'70s." "'It's funnywhen you asked how I view the male body in photographic terms, my first, immediate response was: with one hand;" Lipps says. His work
will be displayed in two solo shows in 2011~at J\Ial'C Selwyn Gallery,
in L.A., and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco-c-and in
a group exhibition of Southern Californian photographers at Fred Tones Collaborations, in New YOl'k,
'My relation
to the photograph'c a'lO wl'lh certain pllotog'aphs
is c uniquely romanticized and reciprocal relorionship-in my forsosies' anyway"
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Born in Belfast, Aoife Rosenrneyer studied humanities and culture at. the London Consortium and now lives in
Zurich. She interviewed photographer Richard Masse for this month's introducing column (page 38), "Richard's works testify to someone who is a hungry traveler and investigator, who
is aware of art discourse but can follow his own course with conviction," she says. Rosenrneyer writes for MAP Magazine and Art Reoieu: and participates in Art + Argument, a series of debates held in different venues,
" Ricllord's
works testify to someone who is a hU'lgry lmveler and nvestigator, who is aware of art discourse blot can follow his own coursewilh corwctiori.'
Xaviera Simmons
The New York-based
111 u] ti m edia artis t Xaviera Simmons ("Hot Shots," page 52) found early inspira tion in a walking tour retracing the transatlantic sla ve trade, which she took with a group of' Buddhist monks, Currently her work is putt of the gl'OUP show "The Record," at
the Nasher Museum of Contemporary Art at Duke University through February 2011 after which it travels to rCA Boston, Simmons is a [so preparing f01' "WoLf: A Performance Project," to appear at the Kitchen in New YOI'k in December 2011, Meanwhile, she is unearthing fresh material [10m photography's
past: "My newest. work
is thinking about Ansel Adams in America-chow to relate his projects to other histories.'
"Eve'l if ·t's smashing tne history of art. '[here still has to be sometrJing that's mysterious and evocative,"
o -c
"
hosfeltgallery.com
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EI N FLUSS: 8 from DUsseldorf Stefan ETTLINGER Luka FINEISEN
_~=~~~ii~~~~~~I!I~~~~r_L~1~_- 19 November - 15 January
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Part.2 - 18 December· 5·February
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WHEN WE DECIDED to spotlight photography in our November issue, some of us at Modern Painters fretted over what, exactly, the term means, Having gone decisively digita lover the past 10 years, the technology has diffused throughout society-into remote surveillance, into our computers and phones and music players-to a degree unimaginable at the time most of us were hom. Photographs are everywhere, and everyone, it seems, is a photographer,
Or maybe not, Like many people working in the medium today, Amanda RossHo, whose pieces MOl',']" included in its "New Photography 2010" exhibition and whose studio Catherine Taft visited for this issue, considers herself not a photographer but rather someone "who thinks photographically," In a sense, the categories photograph and photographer have become de-defined. Yet despite all the technological innovations, some important practitioners, like Malerie Marder, featured in our Bionic section, still use equipment that would have been familiar to Alfred Stieglitz.
To help us make sense of the state of photography, we wrote some friends of the magazine asking for their thoughts, Joao Ribas, curator at the Ml'I' List Center, notes that the di ffusion of photography "oddly
coincides with a process of its historicization, within the museum and the academy," and proposes "that the future of photography lies partly in the critical process of fully understanding its past" The photographer Tim Davis suggests that all shots, whether taken by "physical explorers of the outside world, red-eyed interpreters of' the Internet's auguries, or artsy-fartsy darkroom abstractionists," are ultimately "first-person accounts," They tell stories, in other words,
One of the stories told by the photographers included in this issue is of the vibrancy of the medium today. Witness Xaviera Simmons, who casts herself in ravishing tableaux; Matt Lipps, whose collages repurpose images from the past; and Simon Berg, who reimagines the advertising photograph. The power of these artists' work suggests that the crisis in photography is just a chapter in another, more general story-of the aesthetic crises that eventually bedevil every medium. Peter Saul, who gave a fascinating Newsrnaker interview this month, would probably agree, having survived the decadeslong dustup over painting. And the Turkish artists so knowledgeably introduced in these pages by Berin Golonn? Whatever their aesthetic concerns, theirs is a struggle of a different order, with a state seeking to curb their freedom of expression. Such political battles are, of course, not limited to Turkey-they're as widespread and deserving of our attention as the skirmishes over photography. But that's a story for another issue, THE EDITORS
LmER II NOVEM BEl<
Photography in Focus
12 MODEHN PAINTErlS NOVEMBER zmo A.rHlNFO.C·OM
LukeGiliord, "Discipline 01 ,- 2010,
"This piece is part of a new series in which I join studio phoroqrcphs from verI' formal 'how-to' books on hair braiding with low-res bonooqe irncqes from doting websites. I'm interested in how discipline and control are central to both practices. Marrying the two types of imagery Ilighlights their formal Similarities. while minimiz.ing their more conceptual dilferences~giving the images a new kind ot meaning and power when seen together. instead of seporotelv, in their original contexts.'
For mare on plwlography and callage, turn. 10 page 18.
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PETER SAUL ON 50YEARS OF PAINTING
Daniel Kunilz: Do YOIlI./"ampolinel.
PelerSalll: Yes, under normal circumstances three times a week maybe. Just age-appropriate things. No big dea 1.
DK; Tell me about the new painting».
PS; The idea is each picture is by itself; it's its own subject and its own purpose. Ice Box is" remake of pictures I made in 1960, '62, I wanted
to do it partly because I read that it is such a bad idea to revisit anything you've done. So I wanted to do it, J wanted to make this mistake. When something is being condemned in the arts, II ike to take p art in it.
DK; 1 jed that you> pain: hanciling now is
so milch more=youre going to hate the uord-« sophisticated than it was I:" the '60s.
PS: I think it is too. Well, I was very young-in 1960 I was only 26 years old, Now l'm 76, and obviously 1 can us", these paints. I know how to mix all the colors, and so I do.
OK; LeI~, talk about cartoons.
What Ii the appeal of cartoons fu/"you'l
PS; Firstof all I was very surprised. I thought cartooning was like the thing after Picasso, »
Ji,j:;!TI-N FO.CCh\' NOV~MBER :::::010 MoO D~Fi'N PA~ NTEJi!,s 1 S
iJiixtl&f.!3jjl
a way to make lise of freedom, of drawing, ThG; is way back in World Wm·lI times. I enjoyed cartoons. I never wanted to he a cartoonist, though. That didn't occur to me. What I liked was the stories, the freedom of the stories. Crime and punishment, war and hatred, all that kind of stuff-l loved it. Whereas the actual cartooning of those days was feeble. It was all sort of namby-pamby Walt Disney stuff-s-Bambi losing his mother. I llBV"'I' looked at that crap. I Was interested in crime, which was big news befor-e Wodd War II. Crime was the thing in the newspaper, Every day people were caught, trapped, cornered with machine guns, dri lled full of holes. Yeah, that's what
; ntereste d rn e.
I wasn't interested in formal cartooning.
No, I insist. on the freedom of cartooning. Show speed and distortion and urgency and weirdness-s-it's pa rt of the culture. Of course, I still read the current cartoonists, if I can. 1 don't read anything like Dagwood or-e-who's that little kid?-Charlie Brown. None of that cheerful daily stuff, I'm looking for gloom to
a great extent.
OK; You don'l seem Vel), gloomy.
PS; Gloom is probably my breakthrough, I think it's something that sepnrates me from other artists: gloom, agony, men's terror in the face of womeu= l love- that stuff As much as I can I've looked at that. Let's see, what else? Well, just gen era I i zed I ewdn ess, I though t I was influenced by Francis Bacon until I had my first show and dis cove red th at p so pie thou ght my work was funny instead of gloomy.
OK; Whal artiste do you look. at?
PS; These days I pretty much want to see my own pictures 01' the work of people I know, Because I'm 76 years old, and l just don't want to spend nlot of days looking at art that may be valuable, that may be- original, but why should I be-looking at it? I'm not look; ng for quality. I'm looking for something else, some kind ofn()velty is the closest word to it. r could look at Clyfford Still at the Met. You would've never thought that, looking at my paintings, but l read about this idea of de-skilled, and I thought, "Who is really de-skilled, first and completely?" A nd I thought of Clyfford Still. It looks like everything he did on the canvas is a big surprise, like, Whoooooops, there it is!
OK: Yourpain.tings arc not tic-shilied at all.
ps: No, not hy now. Actually, I'm quite skilled can even copy a photo pretty much.
OK; Doyou W017Y about copying yourself?
PS; No. Sally [my wife] worries about that. for me. l listen to Sally sometimes. Why not? She's her-e.
OK; You've done a 101 of poldiml paintings.
PS; Yes, I t's a good subject, which I lake to because it Was a banned subject, and so 1 just couldn't resist.
OK: You definitely g() ofter what"s 11.01 being dOM.
16 MOD EH N fA I NTlIlS NOVEMBER 2 mo Arm N FO.C·OM
"Everyday people were cauo~I' trappeo, coroereo wilh machine guns, dr'lled full of ~o es. Yeah,
that's whet nterested me
PelerSali1
Oedipus Jun;o, 1983, Acrylic ond oil on canva 5, 90 x 72 ln,
PS; I have to admit that a weak point fOI' me, psychologically, G; that I'm attracted to other people's bad art reviews. When I read them, I g-et jealous, A.-I News in 1953 trashed Larry Rivel', as A merica's worst artist, painting these historical pictures. Well, they really Were kind oflousy, But what I saw Was the review. and I was excited, The same goss for Francis Bacon. When he first appeared. people said, "Oh God, his cheap tricks-vusing religion; not letting the paint talk tor itself!" I Was attracted. I thought, "Oh boy, I don't want to let paint speak fOl" itself, I want to use cheap tricks!" I always regarded art. as a kind of misbehavior that you can get away with without intense pain. If you misbehave with traffic tules, you could he killed. 1 n ~ rt nothing happens, a bsolutely nothing. ThB WQ1'"t thing that can happen is no one will see it, look at it, or ta lk about it.
OK; Yo" have a.problem /.uithmahol'ity, don~yo,,? PS; I do, yea h. I don't like it.
OK; And yet you. laught: (01' a long lime. PS; Yes, 19 years.
OK; Do yOII thin" tha: hmi "ny effect all. your PS; It helped me a lot,
OK; Huw?
PS: Gift of gab, Because you're in the room with 17 people, and this is Texas, and they're just sitting there- sullen-you have t.o say something. lt taught me to say something.
OK: Do yml thinl: it kept yml fresh?
ps: No, no, because r rarely got to meet graduates. The people I taught Were undergraduates, who weren't planning 011 being a rtis ts anyway. And they WCl'G "Cl'Y easily discouraged.] couldn't keep them working, If they took the picture horne a nd a parent, boyfriend, girlfriend didn't like it, that was the end of it, They didn't even fin; sh it. They might even quit the- class just because some family member thought their work looked stupid. I mean, it's just hopeless. I came to the conclusion after teaching for Is years that it's a personality thing rather than a talent thing. Some people persist and insist that you look at what they've done, They won't let you out of the room without seeing it. Those am the artists. MP
"Peter Saul: 50 Yea,.s of Pa ;nting'" "'ill be on view at Haunch of F~n.isQn, Nelli Yor"h, November 5- Januars 8. 20 II.
Uncharted Territory
Evoking both the San Francisco psychedelic scene and the intricate canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, Dean Byington's art creates a selfcontained universe. His new show, "Black Maps." on view at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, in New York, nom November 4 to December 23, displays large paintings-made using a combination of found illustrations, hand drawing. and multiple silkscrecns+that refer to English and French fables, DOll Qwxote, Dante, and Johann Ridinger. The result is what Byington calls a "soup of images." Some of the fantastical scenes were doubtlessly inspired by the artist's own biography; his parents both assisted on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Byington applies a colored glaze over some pieces to add an additional layer of mystery:
"There's a feeling like an aquarium or fog-looking into this other world," -SCOTT INDRISEK
Oed n Byj ngton
Woler/Cllls, 201 0 (deloil). Oil on linen, 74x85in,
TR ENDS II SN EAK PEE KS II NEWS MAKERS II PORTFOLIO
IN FOCUS WITH MICHAEL HOEH
A Wall Street professional with a passion for photography, Michael Hoeh is a long-standing patron of the Aperture Foundation, as well as a mem ber of the Guggenheim's photo-acquisition team a nd the International Center of Photography's Library Committee. He lives in an expansive apartment in New York's Flariron District, where he showcases selections from his collection of more than 600 photographs and 100 pai nti ngs and works on paper, plus nearly 5,000 a rt books. When Modern Painters visited, pieces by the Polaroid master and nightlife chronicler ,Jel'emy Kost, the mixed-media artist Nari Ward, and the emerging photographer Melanie Schiff were all on display. A large-format Richa"d Mosse hung over Hoeh's bed, and shots by Wolfgang T'illmans, Nan Goldin. and Nikki S. Lee were in nearby rooms.
Do you remember the first picture you bought?
An Edward Weston, a classic image. An artist who got me to cross OYeI' int-o contemporary was David Wojnarowicz, One of the more outspoken gay artists in the fight against AWS. His images were used by ACT UP.
Do YOlilry to go to ony portlculor loirs or evenls?
The New York Art Book Fa i r is always great. A photo hook puts the artist's complete thought or message in a small, compact item that tells a whole story. Like Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sex (wi DependencY-it's an
incredible narrative of he!' project. Certa ina!' tists ~ re better book makers than they are photographers. Sometimes it's easier to buy a limited- edition book and have it as rL memory 01" 11 keepsake of the artistic product, Certain art you don't. necessarily want to hang on your wall and live with evei-y day. Larry
Clark comes to mind.
How do you feel oboul photogrophers who work in 0 huge formof?
The impact of their photos seems to derive from their scale, It's more about the concept behind it. Some artists have been really specific; The size is partof the work of art. Ryan
McGin lBY is a good example; each image is availableonly in a single size. 1n the modern world I think artists need to think, "Does it add anything?" Biggal' isn't always better. Printing an linage of" Cat' life- size-is til at any different from making it S by 10 inches?
Do you hove 0 desire to get
to know on ortist you're cQllecting? Does thot contribute to the work?
,Jtlst because you like all artist's work doesn't mean you're going to like the artist personally. You shouldn't confuse the two. Some critically acclaimed artists-you meet them and rea lize a lot of what they've done is just random darkroom work. This tend" to be the case in the abstract world: You look at some of these abstract images, and you want to read a lot into them, and really the artists were just experimenting. ThB image looked great, and so they printed it, and bam/-it Was a S 100,000 work of' ad,
HelVe you ever held Ihe ombllion 10 open el gollery?
No. Most of these gallerists are just scraping by, it's almost a charitable function, and they really m-e doing an amazing favor to the artists they represent as well as collectors,
AIHINFO.COMNOV3M3.ER 20lDMOOERN PAlNTE~S 11
PORTFOLIO II TRENDS II SNEAK PEEKS II NEWSMAKERS
iuii'ilii,IJ
THE NEW COLLAGE
How photographers are rewriting our stories.
Collage historically has used simu Itaneous viewi ng to belie the notion that photography is truthful. Mu ltiple photographs juxtaposed present multiple truths. The Internet, however, has scrambled the way we interpret the stream of images we encounter there. As Luke Gilford, a young California-based artist whose work incorporates the rephotographing of collaged elements, puts it: "H istorically, we've been interested in establish i ng [1 linear na native of singular i mages to tell a story. But th is idea of narrative has become increasingly disrupted, maybe even shuffled, by the ways in which We read and receive images cnline."
So when Sara VanDerBeek-who collages historical photographic images into sculptural forms that she then reshoots-c-keeps a lot of windows open on her computer screen, it.'s not from a sloppy d isregard for her desktop's overextended memory, Rather it reflects how she sees human memory functioning today. "Either we're traversing the city and experiencing these different glimpses of images at once; or most of our
com munication now is with a screen, with these different windows," VanDel"B~ek says. "It'll simultaneous viewing," That interpretation partly explains why she, and other photographers experimenting with collage,
i ncreasingly present smooth i nrlividual pri nts as slick, coherent faces for their ragged patchworks, The pieces in Van DerBeek's show at the Whilney Museum 01 American Arl, in New York, through December 5, some of which are also on view at San Francisco's Allman Siegel 'Gallery through December 23, include a series of photographs, inspired by Walt Whitmnn's Leaves 0/ Grass, of the decaying foundations of New Orleans buildings, plaster scu lptures, and image-based 3-D forms.
Dgniel Gordon adds a, further twist to collage and its relation to the Internet. HB culls photographic textures from Google Image and builds them by hand into fleshy limbs and weird worlds that he then photographs. "The seemingly seamless quality of the Internet is not what's interesting," says the arrtst, whose next. show is at. Chicago's Tony Wight Ggllery in January. "I'm mote interested in the mess of it. and also in showing my hand and lett; ng people see the; mperfection " H" likens hi, studio to a "physical manifestation of the Web" where belly buttons and hairy arms exist in an incoherent ju mble beyond the grasp of the viewer. =EMMA ALlEN
• Sa [a VcmDetSeek Song 01 Myself. 2010, C-print, 20x 16i".
'" Dania! Gordon R@dFocclt 2010. c-orrnt. 2A x20in,
18 MOD EH N PA.l N'TEI'I S NOV:::MBER 2 m []I Arm N F-O.C-OM
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Still from PUfsuivont 2010. Single-channel video n-stonotton.
Hlp .. HOP ROYALTY
Going medieval on video ..
Rasheed Newsome is a self-styled "composer" of wildly diverse cultural chords. Before Newsome, medieval heraldry and hip-hop had never met; now they're forever conjoined, thanks to "Status Sym bois," a gt'OUP of collages Irom Iast year, Heraldry is the centuries-old cl"aft of emblazoning Goats of arms. In Newsome's words, "it's a way of assembling symbols of power,"
H e has made music videos out of sampled bits of other videos and choreographed dances on a video-editi ng boa rd. POl' Shade Compositions he hacked a Nintcndo Wii controller and used it to record and remix the sounds of 25 Women sighing; snapping, and groaning-s-in real time, on stage, In his solo exhibition, "Honourable Ordinaries," at New York's Gglerig Rgmis Bgrquel from November 5 through December 18, Newsome presents something brand-new for him: an original SCOl'e, no sampling. Inspi ted by both classical compositions and hip-hop beats, the piece will be the audio track for a video in which the artist plays a young man going through the pl'ocess of becoming a herald. It wi II be screened within an altered 17th-c~ntury Neoclassical frame, Newsome's music will also be the backing track for a live 1'",,-1'01'mance by Mad Decent recording artist Maluca Mala, Her stage will be a section of the street marked off by contemporary symbols of power: Ferra ris, Larnborghi nis, and Porsches. -C;H .. ~m SCHUlTl
TRE N DS II SN EAK PEE KS II NEWS MAKERS II PORTFOLIO
RI!IIIm
PENETRATING INSIGHTS Artists get carnal.
If you've been holding your breath until bluechip artists start, rna ki ng blue movies, you can now exhale, Destricted, a compilation of eight sexually charged short til ms, is being released on DVD this month, The contributious, from the like, of Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, Larry Clark, and Marilyn Minter, are all distinctive interpretations of smut, And although this project could have turned into an NC-l7
disaster, it's actually a well-rounded, thoughtful, and moving look at human sexuality, Clark sets up a casting call for everyday guys who'd like to have sex with a "hot porno chick." The candidates-and their prospective professional mates-r-are so vu lnerable and honest that
the actual intercourse that follows the interviews is an, ahem, anticlimax. Barney' .. :; film, Hoiet=-er: excerpt trorn a longer movie made
in Brazil-s-involves a man, nude and slathered in various di rts and oils, pressi ng his engorged, member against. part of a Caterpillar construebon truck The Rio de Janeiro-based artist Tunga presents a surreal scatological gross-out that's simply beyond words-s-suffice it to say that phallic crystals and magic urine are both involved, Sante D'Orazio ta kes vintage footage of a lesbian threesome and scratches the negative to cover up the participants' eyes, as well as the sex acts themselves, The standout, though, is Richard Prince's Honse Cai; The artist retaped found porn footage from Teenage Bra Busters, eapruri ng (and replaying)
odd moments, such as an actress yawning and sneezing while massaging her extremely large breasts. Like many of the films, House Call complicate, the explicit image!")' with counterintuitive music, In this case, porn's typical cheese-ball funk ha. been replaced by a songnoisy and fragile and hauntingly simple-written and performed by the artist. The result is elegiac and weirdly spiritual, even with all the saturated close-ups of cunnilingus.
So is this fine art or just. a gussied-up Vel" sion of HI/sUer') POI' Neville Wakefield, eo-curator of the project, the line between the two isn't. so clear, '~Art that is made to masturhate to isn't always pornography any more than pornography that has been repurposed away from sexual efficacy is necessarily a rt," he says, "I don't think that the content of POI'nography is itself either positive or negative. Those things come from om' attitude toward it and the way it is or fa ils to be integrated in the culture. Which may be like saying of pernography what Keith Richards reputedly said of drugs: 'I don't have a drug problem, I have a police problem." -S!
uiuuo.destricted.com
Sante D"OtDzjn Scratch' This, 2'010. VidG!o. 12 min.
IUijW,iijjJ i ijJ
Mirroring Photography
To create the works on view at Sutton Lane in Brussels from November 4 through December 18, LIz Deschenes, known for her experimental and highly technical photographic processes, exposed photosensitive paper to ambient night light in the country, then coated it with a silver toner, The result is an uncanny sheen that reflects and distorts the viewer's likeness, other works in the gallery, and its architecture.
Mirrors are an essential element in photographic techniques and technology from daguerreotypes to reflex cameras, That Deschenes didn't use them in her process adds another conceptual echo to the room, -J4M~S CHilD H4NNII
,Liz.De."beneo tnstoucnon view. ·Right f Left.' October 22-November 28.2009. Sutton Lone, Pori s.
ARTINFO.COM NOVEMBER 2D1(] MODE-I1'N PAlNTERS 19
PORTFOLIO IITRENDS II SNEAK PEEKS II NEWSMAKERS
iijiiji-iUliii4:llit4i
DEBRA SINGER IS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR .AND CHIEF CURATOR OF THE KITCHEN. IN NEW YORK.
WhO' one work 01 orl would you own il spoce ond eesr were no object?
Walter De Maria's Ligh/.ening Field might. be a good choice-I would finally have a solid shot at seeing the work inaction on a stormy night. But if we are talking about something actually suitable f01' [1 domestic setting, I wou Id probably go for a
<lim Hodges chain-link spiderweb. Suspended discreetly, bigh up in a corner, it would not an nounce itself but just quietly lurk in the shadows, waiting to be discovered. Which ortist, living or deod. would you most like to have a drink with?
Marcel Ducharnp and Marcel Broodthaers come im mediately to mind, but also .lohn Cage and Yves Klein. My number-one choice, though, would probably be Dr. Seuss, Which ortist, c,itic, 0' arf world pe,sonolily. living 0' deod, would you most like to hove 0 splrlled orgument wi.th?
Donald .Iudd or Rohert Smithson. In either case I imagine I would end up digging my heels in and defending the work of a slew of younger artists from my generation, creating in their wake, against the elders' claims that they "already did that" OT that the new pieces seem "derivative" or do not go fa r enough.
What wos the lost g,eat book you reod?
The last book that I thought was great was one for the two- to eight-year-old set: The GniNalo by the team of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Lrecomrnend any book the duo haw done together. I also recently enjoyed reading the monograph on Martin Bane, the two recent books about Blinky Palermo, and rereading some writings by and about Jack Smith.
Whot's one ortislic hend you wish would dj~out?
We could do without those oveiproduced, large-scale debut performance efforts hy prominent visual artists with little to no prim' eng~gement with performance. The result." too often come off as somewhat embarrassing: bigbudget amateur night. AliI can
thi nk about is how that money could hnve been better spent. What things give you direction CIS 0 eurolor?
What interests me in the visual arts is always strongly influenced by a lot of dance, music, and experimental theater. I also read a lot of short stories and novels, and I 10"B Cabinet: magazine.
Whieh show that you've eu,ated in the pasttive yeo,s are you most proudot?
At the Kitchen. l primarily have
organized solo exhibitions that ate new commissions from artists-e-sc the results are really the artists' own accomplish, merits, hardly my own. One group show, though, that was very exciting to organize was 2007's "Between Thought and Sound Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music," which I co-organized with the Kitchen curator Matthew Lyons and the composer-eel listscholar A lex Waterman. It [eatured graphic scores by more than 30 composers and was accompanied by live musica I performances in the gallery.
Whal ore you working on now?
I'm organizing a show for our 40th·annivel",,,ary season, in spring 2011, of videos, audio recordings, posters, photographs, and paper ephemera from OUi" extensive archive dating back to 1971. Wh at excites me most is the incredible array of material that Was documented by so many amazing artists. even in the early years of the Kitchell.
20 Moom N fA I NTEHS NOV3MBER 2 mo A.rHlN F{)'C·OM
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Cri,tical Moves
It's astounding that at age 75 the American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer is only now having her first European gallery exhibition. A key figure in
'iYonne Raine r
After Ivlon y a Summer Dies the S'~/J.:an: Hybrid, 20U2. Vi dec in stoll o:ti on, 30 mi 11.
American postmodern dance, Rainer studied with Meres Cunningham and in the '60s helped found the Judson Dance Theater, where she blended classical ballet with the motions of everyday life This survey, "The Yvonne Rainer Project," at London'sBFI Gallery from November 26 through January 23, zeroes in on the impact on her work of fellow choreographers and filmmakers (Vaslav Nijinsky, George Balanchinc) as well as canonized intellectuals like Freud. Rainer's 2002 installation After Many a Swnmer Dies the Swart Hybrid combines a dance choreographed for a Mikhail Baryshnikov project with texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein and other luminaries. Rainer turned to moviemaking in the 1970s-all seven of her feature films are being shown here-but recently she's gone back to choreography, and two important experimental pieces, RoS Indexical, Z008, and AG Indexical with a Little Help fwm H.M., 2007, appear as film projections.
-SMAH DOUGlAS
TYLER GREEN If ART & LIFE
22M OOEI:! N PA I NT'E.I~ S NOVEMBER 2 []I] 0 ArHi N FoQ_C OM
"Some ortists oe stylists,
I don't think of myself being one of them: sovs Mumford.'
Zoe Stmuu
eatnets on Beach with Boom 2010, Digilol imoge from 'On Ihe Becich,~
1~.(;Hr:
Sle\!,ft Mymrcrd
fM Accused. 2006, Oil on linen, 46 x 48 in,
TYLER GREEN II ART & LIFE
catastrophe, elicits,
Strauss's explanation brings to mind Ja~il"'s 2003 video installation Crossing SIII'cla, in which the Palestinian artist surreptitiously chronicles he!' [taught daily journeys [tom home to work. To get there and back she has to pass through an Israeli military checkpoint, au experience that is someti mes routine and sometimes terrifying. To make the piece, Jacil' hid a camera on her person and then edited the foot-
ag-e into a 132-minute nonnarrative reel. Using a hidden caruera to reveal sornething crooked is a well, worn jo urnalistic trope, but it also makes me think of Lucas Cranach's hunting scenes, which often show not just the kill at the end hut the pursuit. Whether she's on her way to teach a class at u niversity or on her way home, ,Jaci r's shaky-camera style en ables her to suggest that "he .~nd other Pa lastinians a re perpetually sta lked by the r sraeli army.
As a painter, Mum ford is even less tied to fa i thf ul rc pre s entation th an S tra u s s and .Iacir. "I do enjoy being reasonably accurate," Mumford says, "I feel like I have the privilege of having gone to these places,
Sa why nat try be fairly accurate. I think there are plenty of discrepancies that a soldier might see-a rifle or something like that-that. I wouldn't care about. I have my limits. But the emotional impact is what's P'; mary, Some artists are stylists. _[ don't think of myself being one of them. I want the painting to haw a sort of monumentality, drama, and artifice that pull the viewer into the nanarive that's going on,"
"There was clearly a want to record exactly the impact. Now you can't say
he recorded exactly the appearance, but
the feeling of the impact was there," says National Gallery of Art cu rater Arthur Wheelock. He isn't. talking about Mumford, however, He's dia ling back to severs I 17thcentury Dutch artists who strove for almost the same th ing that Mu mford and Strauss are striving 1'01' today,
Take two of the most significant disasters of the Dutch Golden Age: the fire that destroyed Amsterdam's old town hall in 1652 and the explosion of 90,000 pounds of gunpowder at the Delft magazine in l654, wh ieh killed hundreds of people, i nju ling thousands more and flattenin g the northeastern part of the city. Both events were com ill em orated by pa inters, notably .Ian Baerstraten a nd Pieter Saenredam in A illstardam and Daniel Vosmaer and Egbert van del' Pod in Delft. r l's not surprising that a rti s ts rush cd to record th e d i sa s tel's. Hut that's not to say they did so with any more interest in what we now call journalistic truth than their contemporary counterparts have, Beerstraten's famous picture of the town- hall fire depicts an impossible
24 MO'DEf.lN PAl m-'E.f.l S NOV2MBER 2!:HOArHlNF'O.COM
scene and viewpoint, and no one knows how accurate Vosrnaer's and van der Peel's paintings of Delft are. Because so many of the details in their paintings are similar, We can have some confidence that they recorded at least one view of the postcxplosion scene somewhat truthfully,
Looking at Vosmaer's and van del'
Peel's images of Delft citizens helping the wounde d and picking through the rubb le for belongings, one feels the emotional toll of the evenr; Across the centuries, Beerstraten, Vosmaer, van del' Poel, Stl'aUSS, and Mumford agree th at good art delivers feeling. And that's a key difference between prass-relea se a rt an d work t ha I. ta kes shared events as its impetus,
Both Mum ford and Strauss embrace
this relationship with art history in a much more direct way than .Iacir does in her work, Mumford's Prostitutes, 2009, shows twa women in a hotel swimming pool, a rmlitary installation visible just beyond
the wall, and men sitting around the pool, apart, The women are neither exotic nor exception a I. They would not be identifiable a" pro stitu tes ha d M tllll ford not in clu ded that information in stenciled gold lettering on the frame, Because the work Was motivated by a scene he witnessed in or near what used to be called the Orient, it's easy
I.."
to read the painting as an explicit rejection of Jean·Leon Gerome's Romanticism and exoticism. Mumford seems to be saying that whether in Baghdad 01' in Boise, a Sheraton is a Sheraton, and war sucks! as does simply being there in apparent comfort while conflict is going on around you.
SttTLUSS'S works ure plainly indebted
to Robert Frank's landmark series "The Americans" and the way in which Frank looked at America as an outsider traveling through. He)' work, however, has narrower, more i mmediately topical content. She hasn't decided how her Gulf oil-spill series, titled "On the Beach," will be presented, and she's inviting people to watch her
solve that question in real time on her blog (http://ollthebeach-zs,blogspot,com), but
it will likely be a multiyear project pub, Iished in book form. The most gripping of Strauss's pictures shows two boys, wearing only bathing suits, playing on an oilscarred beach while yellowish-brown water laps the sand behind them. She says it is an explicit nod to Paul CGzanne'., Bather, with the postapocalyptic present replacing Cezanne's quiet timelessness.
One reason artists ground their pisces about current events in art history is that this prevents their ad from becoming sta leo Perhaps because she is working on a major museum retrospective, Strauss is particularly aware of making something that will hold up decades hence. She notes that, like many other daily stories, the Gulf oil spill
d topped out of the news once the next crisis ca me a long. "But we fetishize art in a way that allows these th ings to remain relevant in museum collections for years and generations. r do think about how a public event cal! haw a certain kind of longevity within art collections, how artworks continue to move those specific moments to the forefront of thought even after the fact, which I think is kind of interesting."
It's more than interesting-it's how artists join the process by which h istory is remembered. "'.
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LUKE GRAY
DEEP SKI N AN D STROKEWORLD PAINTINGS
STROKEWORLD 0708, 2010, V~rlni$hed acrylic on canvas, 33" x 36"
NOVEMBER IS-DECEMBER II, 2010
OPE N IN G R ECEPT I ON Friday, November 19, 5:00-8:00 pm I A RT 1ST TALKS: Saturday, November 20, 1:00-3:00 pm
DIMITRI KOZYREV
LOST LANDSCAPES
LOST EOGE "22, 2008.
Acrylic. and oils on car-ves, 48" A 60 ....
DAVID RICHARD
DAVID RICHARD CONTEMPORARY
CONT E M PORARY
130 Lincoln Avenue, Suite D, Santa Fe, NM 87501 I P (505) 983-9555 I f (505) 983-1284 www.DavidRiehardContemporary.([email protected]
JOHN WA LACE
60 YEARS OF PAINTING
NOVEMBER 2 - 26
BLUE MOUNTAIN GALLERY
530 West 25th Street 4th Floor, New York, New York 10001 Tuesday - Saturday 11 am - 6pm
www. bl u e m 0 u n ta i n ga II e ry. org
(646) 486-4730
Western Connecticut State University, Danbury CT February 2011
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AMANDA ROSS-HO II STUDIO CHECK
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2. (8ELOW) DRAWERS OF GOLD JEWELRY ACQUIRED ON EBAY • "This is my rapidgo-to stuff. lt's supposed 1.0 be organized, but it's not. Th is consists of single earr-ings that have heen separated from their partners, hut I have eh~i ns too, ~ nd these have worked themselves into my palette. The jewelry I look for on eBay is mostly
sold in lots. The vendors are trying to get rid of it quickly, but thei 1" digital pictures end up being really beautiful. At first I was just pu lling the i mages but later I began buying the actual objects. Ebay is
1 ike thi s beautiful system that's set up for accessing physics lity through a picture."
3. (RIGI") DIGITAL MOCK-UPS fOR AN INSTALLATION IN MOMA'S 'NEW PHOTOGRAPHY 2,010" EXHIBITION, ON VIEW THROUGH JANUARY 10 • «Although I use. photography a lot, I'm not exactly a picture make!", 1 think my inclusion in this show is
as somebody who thinks photographically, but I also wanted to 'Hess with that a little bit. I want the whole th ing to look generic, like a textbook, One image is a portrait of my mom, and one. is a commercial photo that my dad took. lt's a good stand-in for the quintessential still life, but I love that it has a personal connection."
one meeting, and the gI'OUP neve!' really existed, but because we. had access to all
this screen-printing equipment, we made Tvshirts and other parapherualia. In 1998
I 'Hade a miniature version of the shirt for
a show on which I depicted the outfit [was wearing to the opening-very reflexive and 'just out of undergradThe origina) bec-ame a studio shirt and accumulated residue
from my worki ng on my thesis show and other project". I rea Iized that, as an object, it Was the fulfillment of the initial sentiment of ASTC, By existing in time the sabotage happened retrospectively. I produced a nine-foot version of the shirt fol' my show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash last year," MP
4. (AiKNE) ADMINISTERING SABOTAGE THROUGH CRAFT (ASTC) T-SHIRT. «The stOI'Y of this shirt is kind of epic: Around 1998 some WOmen classmates and I had this very 1908 idea to create a women's collaborative that was going to use craft as a way to ad minister sabotage. We only had
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JflSCJC administering sabotage through craft
'Ebov is this beoLJful svstem Ihar's set up for accessing phys'co'ily through
o pcture,"
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rer aftfelder
M I,MS~ u m K (ipp ~rS'iTl'i1h I e ~s d~l igh ted to receive Souppon:: from Evonfk.
MUSEUM KOPPERSMOHLE
BIOPIC
" <.
»
; ~ .,\.
"I remember a shower. There was b'oooono oher thirtgs."
Malaria Marder
Post Prese.~I. 2007. Archival pigment print.
AIH1NFO.COM NOVEM.B.En :20w MODI: 1'1 N PA[NTERS 31
. ,
Malerie Marder
The story behind an artwork. in the artisYs own words.
THE PICTURE WILLNEVIlR be the same a." what happened. The picture isn't a picture of evidence. It'." a re-creation of the aftermath of a real event. The person in
the picture isn't me. She's a friend. A standin for me. I was tired of being in my pictures. The violence that you see is not something that happened to her. It happened to me.
This is whaJ happened.
I was stay; ng at. a friend's house; n the middle of the woods. A rectangular modern place painted orange, a beacon on u hill made i ncongruously of concrete, plywood, and glass. WB had been to a dinner party,
Past Present, 2007, is {rom Ihe book Carnal Knowledge, which will be publi s hed by
Vio lette Ed; ti ons ; nearly 2011.
drunken charades, and went to bed late.
I woke up to go to the bathroom: It was 3 A.M., dark, and I was half asleep. I didn't see the open trapdoor along the path to her s unken bed 1'00 tn. I he ard the words «You fucked up." The last wooden step on the other side of the breach broke my fall, nine feet down onto concrete. When my friend saw me, her face looked as if she'd been snuffed out beneath a sheet. but she'd seen something worse than this before. It was a mistake-she didn't mean to leave the door open. Lremember a shower'. Thete was blood and other thinG'S The bruises, my real bruises, were black, no brown
auroras. They won ldn't have been believable on film-s-too dramatic for pictures. That morning in the emergency room, We watched U.S. soldiers on television pull Saddani Hussein out of u hole in I raq. I would have taken a picture of my injuries, a real picture, as 1 waited for that mystical moment of opt; mtsm to descend on me, but I was too concussed to care that the focus knob on my camera was broken. MP
THE GLCJJBAL FORUM
~t!:OR DESIGN
MIAMI BEACH
1.-5.
DECEMBER 2010
MIAMI BEACH
MIAMI BEACH CONVENTION CENTER P-LOT
MERI DIAN AVENU E & 19TH STREET
WWW.DESIGNMIAMI.COM
MD~Sim:! lam
I REVIEW II COMMENT II BOOKS
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I
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Theywhinge obouttne tyro'lnyof coolness,
a bloated market, the com_,ptlng impact of wealth
ImIm
Creative Excess
Hg2: A Hedonist's Guide to Art ANA FINEL HONIGMAN
ARTISTS GET ,IWAY WITH A LOT. According to the leading artists, curators, ami critics whocontributad to Hg2; A Hedonist's Guide to Art, the perks of creativity include scheduling work around hangovers, making deals in
hal's instead of board rooms, exploiting fuzzy definitions of confiict of interest, and partyi ng professionally. But most enviab le is the pri vilegc of claiming that it's all done for art's sake. This collection of Sfl-plus essays, edited hy Laura K Jones, is similarly self-indulgent. Instead of critiquing 01- mocking- the fluffier aspects of the art world, the book just demonstrates its pretensions.
In her London Dispatch column
on Artnet about the British capital's culture scene, and in her- personal essays elsewhere, ,Tone., shows ~ rea 1 flair for descr-ibing social outings sprinkled
with boldfaced na meso As an editor. however, she is overly permissive, fa i ling to elicit from her star-studded roster
of eonti-ihutors-c-i ncludi ng Gi lb ert & George. Will Self, Sarah Thornton, Sue Webs tel", Martin Creed, Walter Robinson, Anthony Haden-Guest, Lynn Barber, Tobias Meyer, Simon de Pury, HansUlrich Obrist, and Patrick Painter-s-the
spark Ie of her own efforts. Most seem
to be writing fat one another and themselves; many whinge uuconvinciugly a bout the tyranny of coolness, a rt trends. a bloated market, the corrupting impact of wealth, and art argot (a.k.a. "art bollocks"). Although each piece is only a few pages long, much of the satire seems forced and d rawn out.
The writers' most frequent complaint is that the art market is destructively decadent, According to Will Self, for instance, "inside his psychic garret [the
a rtist] C~)) tin u es 111 a n fu lly to su ffer existential ci-ises-s-and even to go
hungry; but on the outside he it; drinking Cristal, chatting amiably, ami accepting yet another canape." Brian Sewell convincingly argues that to find all artist with true talent, "the critic must walk
the wasteland . occupied half by the pretentious, boastful, and vai nand half hy those undone. by their hapless insecurity,'
On the upside, the companionship among an world denizens is beautifully evoked in some of the collection's best essays, like Patrick Painter's touching homage to his friend Felix G0)17a]ez· Tones. And although the conversation between Lynn Barber and Sarah Lucas
sometimes reads like the tra nscription of a cozy postparty exch ange, it conveys a genuine amity.
Edward Forrrieles, who violently
pulls off people's clothes as performance
a lot, continues the feel-good trend by demonstrating that one can be nice and incisive at the Same time" H is essay "Plastic Pellets" consists of dreamy, if random, ruminations on life. Fornieles veers [tom contemplations of mortality
to wondering whether the Vatican is all style and 110 substance to asking if electric toothbrushes are the sole remnants of modernist dreams for the future. He flips a blithe comparison between art and a
visit to the spa into a sweet definition of art as places that "can really change your 1)100d, put you into another headspaee:
They c-an uplift and rna ke you feel better about the day,"
In contrast. to the smug cynicism of the pieces by Self, Mat Collishaw, Susanne Oberbeck, and too many of the other contributions, Fornieles's section is a lovely and inspi ring reminder of the pleasures of being an ar-tist. when intellect-ual cnriosity and refreshing engagement with the world outside oneself justify hard work and encourage hard play. MP
Image courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato,Toronto.
Luis Jacob: Without Persons September 16-November 13, 2010
Art in General presents the artist's first solo exhibition in the U.S., featuring video, painting, and a new work from the artist's Album series,
Art
in General
Commissioning New Work Since 2()05:
Sharon Hayes Melissa Martin Lee Walton Alejandro Cesarco Xaviera Simmons Jihyun Park
Adam Simon
Andrea Geyer Bernadette Corporation Judi Werthein
Fawn Krieger
Little & Furgason
Chris Moukarbel
Carlos Motta
79 Wa I ker Street
New York NY 10013
Open Tuesday-Satu rday 12-6 pm
www.artingeneral.org
eteam Carla Herrera-Prats
Ayreen Anastas Jan Baracz
& Rene Gabri Dave Hardy
Alejandro Almanza Pereda Josh Melnick
Melanie Crean Julia Oldham
Shana Moulton Rancou rtlYatsu k Guy Benfield Redmond Entwistle Isola and Norzi Kambui Olujimi Brendan Fernandes Ohad Meromi Jason Bailer Losh Audint
Emily Roysdon Rob Carter
Arbus, Thrasher
Asher Penn shreds a photographic I,egacy. SCOTT INDRISEK
IT'S THE SORT OF WISEASS, lowbrow,
s~l f-tefetential idea that will make contemporary-art purists cringe. Asher Penn, a New Yorker by way of Vancouver, Canada, and a prolific photographer
and bookmaker, is debuting a new
series of work at Andrew Roth Ga llery
on November 4, to coincide with the opening of the New York Art Book Fa ir. ThB series co-opts classic Diane Arbus photogruphs and forces them into an unexpected and wonderful l'el ationsh ip with skateboarding culture.
Penn, a cofounder of 100%, an art" book publisher, is no stranger to offbeat appropriation: A previous body of work involved tracing Rorschach patterns atop Wolfgang Till mans photos of Kate Moss, He also had a youthful interest in skateboarding-e-a passion whose origin he says coincided with his first exposure to Diane Arbus's classic 1972 eponymous
monograph, published by Aperture,
The two disparate worlds collided and, voil:\.I-80 apptopriated Arbuses affixed to the g rip-tape side of 80 skateboard decks. (Penn does cit-e the precedent
of Supreme, a skateboard c-ompany
that h as commissioned such talents
as Marilyn Minter, Lairy Clark, and Geol'ge Condo t.o i.llustrate its decks.) Why Adn18, exactly? The ai-tist calls his choice "instinctual" but recognizes that the project could have gone in different directions: «1 can imagine Aug-ust
Sandel skateboards, Cindy Sherman skateboards, Ra lph Gibson skateboa rds.'
In addition to the decks, the exhibition,
REVIEW II COMMENT II BOOKS
"I can :mog'ne August Saider skateooards, Ci'ldy Srermon skolecoords. Rolph Gibso'l skateboards ,n
Asher Pftn 11
WOr'k, 'rom "Dione Arbus
Skatebo(lrc;fS.~
manufacture!', I nstead of an acc-ompanying cata logue, Pen 11 is issuing two full-color illustrated pamph lets, One, Ubiquitous
but Suspect, C;no.,-[y and Impolite, consists of a series of short essays by Ben Carlson ch art.in g previous Arbus appropriations
in popular culture, The other, Beautiful Ride, contains an interview that- Penn conducted with Patrick O'Dell, a renowned skateboarding photographer.
The artist sees a connection between his project and another book, recently issued by Roth's publishing imprint. In Killed, William E, Jones developed the rejected negatives made by the likes of Walker Evans under the Farm Security
"Diane Arbus Skateboards," will Administratiou, which hole-punched the
include a set of drawings for which Penn negatives so th at the images now resemble
"guillotined" a copy of Arbus's monograph accidental Baldessnris. "Both are an
and augmented the images with miniature attempt to reconsider an aspect of an
skateboards and the flaming-head established photographic history in a wry
logo of Spitfire, a popular skate- wheel personal way," says Penn, MP
Arnl!\iFO.COM NOVEMBEr.:: ?OlO IMODERt.J P,A,INiT~I<'S 35
2010 green r e ca noi.o qv / r nn nve r r nn
Max Almy Cavan Gonzales Ryan Henel Joel Hobbie
Chrissie Orr Rose Simpson
Beth Rekow Amy Schmierbach
Billy Valenzuela Ted Yarbrow
New Mexico Arts I Department of Cultural Affairs wwt'J.nmarts.org Coordinator, Eileen Braziel Photographer, Julien McRoberts
r ernp nr a rv InSTallaTIOnS rna n e For THE' e nvr ro nmerrr
INTRODUCING II RICHARD MOSSE
BY AOIFE ROSENMEYER
POOl of UclOy'5 Patoce. 20 ()9_ Di gi 10 I Ccprin I foce mounled 10 Plexigla,s, 72 x 96 in,
RICHARD MOSSE IS resting after two hectic yea rs, a whirlwind of work i I) locations including Iraq, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Congo funded by an A nnenbarg Fellowship from Yale School of Art; right now he deserves some time off, We rendezvous on a train trom Zu rich to Lausanne, where We will visit "l·~Generation2; Tomorrow's Photographers Today," an exhibition that includes his work at the Muses de l' Elysee. Masse is en route hom his parents' home in Kilkenny, Ireland, via Austria, to the raucous folk festival in Serbi an Guca, where he
38 M OOEI:! N PA I NT'E.I~ S NOVEMBER 2 mo ArHi N F.Q_C OM
Points of Conti iet
An artist goes to war.
hopes \.0 meet. some former fighters in the region's ethnic wars. His most recent series 1 "1 nfra," of photos taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has sparked criticisnr from photojournalists=-grist for the mill of an artist who operates at the point where art and journalism meet.
Now a resident of New York, Masse Was bam in Dublin in 1980 and moved to London to study English literature before shifting focus from words to images while completing his masters at the London Consortium. After a yea,' at Goldsmiths
College, he enrolled at Yale, where he earned an MFA, in photography in 2008_ He has already had solo shows at such venues as ,Jack Sh ainma n (who represents his work), in New York; the Fotofest 2010 Biennial. in Houston; and the Eigse Arts Festival, in I roland. His documentary prints, measuring a monumental SIX by eight feet, have portrayed pla ne wrecks, bombed buildings, and models built for airport fire-safety training, while his thoughtful investigative video works probe both the verbal and visual vocabularies of
politically fragile locations.
Tall and broad-shouldered, Mosse has the bearing of a man who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty, 1'01' years he has traveled to sites of conflict, drawn by the dense histories that. underlie so many disputes. Masse found compelling situations but was dissatisfied with images produced following photographic tradition "The ca meia's lens is brutally dumb. That dumbness is teri-ibly frustrating," he says, "but it's a lso a fabulous tool I'm' unpacking history," Mosse agrees with Susan Sontag-Is assertion that photojournalism compromises its output to make images audiences can assimilate,
In contrast, he is interested in the world as it. is, and he makes art, not journalism, tryi "g to access the sublime to convey invisible truths.
In 2009 he went to Iraq, where he was embedded with US. troops. The catalyst for the trip was a Neu: Yorker article in which Jon L~B Anderson described Saddam Hussein's palaces! Sl monumental compounds with which Saddam had studded the country to display his might and some ()f which he never set foot in, They are easily defensible and centrally located, and in 2003 the invading U.S, Iorces irnmea; ately occupied several of them. This struck Mosse as symbolically replacing a despot with an aggressor. "If you're trying to convince a population that you have
I iberatad them from a terrible dictator,"
he says! "why would YOILl then sit on his throne?" Thanks to accreditation from the Yale Daily News, he spent U month living with the troops, using any opportunity to document both the colossal structures and the camps that had been set up inside.
Mosse WrLS mindful of Jean Baudrillara's provocative claim, made in his essay «The Gulf Wal' Did Not 'fa ke I'lace,~ that the first Gulf conflict was actually a scripted media event. Prom the Sa me events that provided sound bites 011 intemationa I news channels during the second war, he created the 2009 "Breach," a series of immcdi ate and unexpected 1 mages of ornate if crumbling buildings and of soldiers marking time within them. Mosaics, chandeliers, and marble contrast sharply with an alfresco gym and the chipboard-divided accommodations, the internal military posters providing their own version of propaganda. The title could refer to the gap in Sadda m's defenses that the milita ry has
Ii Iled, the break with tradition, 01' a breach of faith. The photographs testify that the palaces, so long targets on the radar of
the lnteruatioual Atomic Energy Agency: remain rl representational minefield,
If Iraq's media profile is high, the Democratic Republic of Congo's is low. The turbulence of the past decades-so "immanenr," Mosse Sa}'S, "it infuses Congo and
m-OMTOP:
Genero/ Jonvie, 2010, Oigital C-print rrom corer tntrcreo film. 72 'X 90 in.
Masse ot work in Iraq, MOfCh 2009.
has dons for 60 yeal'Sn~1·enlain8 virtually unseen ill the West because of its complexity, our lack ()f interest, and the fact that it's convenient [01' us remain ignorant about the dubious source of the metals in our mobile phones. Mosse discovered that in the country itself the war is also, in a sense, invisible, conducted with so-called white. weapons, silent arms like machetes and dubs. The rebel Democratic Forces
(01' the Liberation of Rwanda live uornadically in the equatorial jungle that CO\'el'S the country and also swallows the traces of rape, murder, and pillaging, To capture this hidden conflict, Mosse used an unstable and almost defunct. photographic mediu mcalled color infrared, or fa Isecolor film, designed by Kodak in coniunc-
tion with the US. military, which allows shelters camouflaged in dense Iorest to be spotted from the air.
The result was "Infra," produced at
the close of his Annenberg marathon last summer, The aesthetic of color infrared has been employed by the likes of the Grateful Dead for album artwork, and some photojournalists accused Mosse of frivolity for using it to create his beautiful but threatening scenes; rendered In powdery pink. But he finds the charge absurd, given the history of the medium.
If the artificial prettiness of color infrared film helps him make the invisible more visible, all the better, Ulr.i mutely, he says, "naturalism has 1)0 greater claim to veracity tha II other strategies.' MP
.lJnlmO.COM NOVEMBER zmo MODI:I:!N PAINT:Ef.lS 39
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INTRODUCING II HILARY LLOYD
BY COLINE MILLIARD
HILARY LLOYD HAS a somewhat special status in the British art world. Her films, video installations, and slide shows are widely acclaimed by fellow artists, but they remain little known among- the wide,' public, an insiders' secret, Unlike he! generatioua 1 peel'S the notorious YB.'\s, the 4o-yeal'-old Lloyd has favored slow maturation and until recently has shied away from gallery representation. ~~ Hilary is an artist who is characterized by her particular relationsh ip to the art world," says Alex Sainsbury, the d uector of Raven Row, which this month is presenting a large solo exhibition of the artist's works, her first major presentation in London
42 MooeR N PAl NTII; ns NOVEMBER 2010 ,Ami !'oJ FO.C OM
I
Camera Eye
Hilary Lloyd maps space and light.
the equipment she uses. I n fact, it would make no sense to discuss her practice in purely filmic terms, in her installations, projectors and DVD players are tangible presences. In the 2009 fou r-screen Sculpture-tit'st shown at. Tramway, in Glasgow-two shots of a male pl aster bust, beamed onto side-by-side SC1'~Bns, are bookended by two other slides: of a Greek-looking statue on the left and of
a building on the right. Each projector hangs from the ceiling, positioned directly in the middle of its picture, pretty much at visitors' chest level. "You have to negotiate YOUI' way around the projector," Lloyd
tells tile, '\"1." a viewer, you become part of
since 1999, "She is, in the best sense, uncompromising." As her shows in Dijon and Glasgow demonstrated last yea!', Lloyd's production has grown in scope and ambition over the past decade. "She's a much more confident artist !lOW," says Sadie Coles, her gallerist since 2008_
In her studio-an all-white room with Gothic windows on the top ftoor of a for mel' nu uncry in the East End-boxes of slide trays are stacked in a corner. Three old computer monitors on a trestle table connect to a VCR and a DVD player. The room seems to encapsulate the technology of the past 15 years, and appropriately so, since Lloyd's work is directly informed by
OPPOSITE:
I nsto uctron vi0W of Column, 201)9,01
Gal e tie N e u. Berf n. March ]J-Aprilll, 2010,
;;WV6 H:iOt..·1 lEfT;
A scene from Studio ft2, 2009; Hil my LI ovd.
The 2007 Studio, a turning point in her practice, a 180 came into hein g by chance. While looking for a work space, Lloyd visited one with a paim·spattered floor and im mediately rent.ed it and started on a piece incorporating those spatters, The resulting two-screen projection breaks free from the static shots that defined many
of her earlier works. The camera follows imaginary verticals and horizontals, progressively mapping a landscape of stains lind hollows. The piece is totally abstract yet infused with a pictorial
sense that grounds it within Western art history, Jackson Pollock is an obvious reference, but there's also Aleksaudr Rodchenko, Paul Klee, Jean Fautrier. "Since Studio," Lloyd says, "there's been a lot more of me acti ng thing." out, It's much mote about the camera being moved and things being chosen" The artist's newly affirmed presence within the footage echoes some of the issues raised in the piece. Before Studio, Lloyd had always struck a detached, matterof-fuct stance, as a way, perhaps, to preserve herself fron: the camera, Here she reveals something paiticularly intimate, her own working space, and by extension some of her rnindscape too,
But maybe Studio Was a step too far towa I'Ll autobiography, As if to erase
her tracks, Lloyd sanded off her floor to produce SlUdiv #2, 200!'l, Ths seven-screen work, displayed in Dijon throughout six rooms, shows close- ups of silver Mylar film. Some projections look like liquid mercury, others like shards of glass,
and one depicts bright concentric ci roles reminiscent of 1960, psychedelia The piece is a rich collection of optic nuances; screens and gallery space dissolve in ir-idescent reflections, It could be seen as
a self-portrait viewed through a hall of mirrors, but this would distract from the artist's prunary conccrus: the unexpected beauty of found shapes, the precise composition of minute visual incidents, and film's constantly renewed ability to transform architectu re, MP
.o..lnINFO.COM NOVI~Mi3ER 20lQ MO·O~Rto.tPAI!>jH;RS 43
the installation" Sculpture is meant to he experienced physically, as a visceral. oneto-one encounter with the image and the unwieldy means of its manifestation.
The notion of an encounter typifies not only the viewer-piece dynamic in Lloyd's work hut also the relatiouship between the artist and her subjects, She has Ii 1 med people she met in clubs and auto mechanics from a garage down the road from her house, as well as ordinary buildings and flowers she's chanced upon, "Quite a lot of things happened just because I Was walking around,"
she remarks, reflecting on the apparent simplicity of her method, This doesn't
mean that Lloyd forgoes research 01' preparation: she spotted the plaster casts used fol' Sculpture in Glasgow's School
of Art long before realizing the piece, "They were just standing there, being languorous and wanting to he filmed,"
she marvels. "It was a real gift" Lloyd finds such gifts everywhere: She shot the bright ora uge weeds in Plants, 2008, in a newly built park by the Thames; Columns, 2009, isolates and multiplies the lit-up monument of a public square ill Scotland, Once the objects have been captured by what Sainsbury calls Lloyd's "camera eye," their images exist in and of themselveswhat you see is all you need to know,
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Hf LUCAS SAMARAS of multitudinous self-portraits-e-the wiggy character with electroshock hair and forked beard, the pixilated Zeus, the oldster hippie hidden in psychedelic swirls, the irrepressibleecdysiast=-that man, I'm shocked to find, lives and works in an utterly nondescript high-rise in midtown Manhattan, It's the sort of structure "sua lly filled with corporate apartments, And, J soon realize, it provides exactly the right
sort of ca mouf age for Samaras, because you'd nBVB1' expect to find the notoriously reclusive artist, in such a palace of blandness,
His studio, a tiny techno aerie more than 30 stories above the city, is just large enough to contain a couple of i Macs, some high-end video equipment, thick tOWS of draped head necklaces curtaining one wall, some similarly draped power cords, and, a narrow galley kitchen, Prints for a new series of photographic poi-traits hang on the wall opposite the heads. Titled "Poses," the full set of more than lOO headshots will be on view at the Pace Gallery on 25th Street in Manhattan lrom NovemberD through December 24, The palette ranges from stark monochrome to blaring color, sometimes within a single image, And at first glance, the heads are a bit freakish. l'm particularly struck by one in which a man's mottled, radioactive-green skin half peels away to disclose his peachy, everyday face beneath, Before I
can begin interviewing Samaras about the work, he asks if I'Il sit Ior him. Who could say no to joining the pantheon of famous, powerful, or merely interesting visages he has assembled?
48 M OO~Rt.J PAiNTI;IH. NOVInABE:R 2010 AJn1N FO.CO M
The operation is simple and relatively brief. Samaras works as
he lives-alone, with \10 assistants. He asks if I wear glasses, No.
Do I have sunglasses with me? I do, He has me stand against the white wall, next to a l'OW of test prints. Using a small digita I Leica mounted 011 a tripod, he photographs me from a low (Ingle, first with the su nglasses perched towa I'd the tip of my nose, then without them, He knows exactly what he's looking for and directs me-chin up, Byes over here, and so on-silently, with hand gestures. AI' tel' five 01' six frames, he's finished,
The reason fm· the glasses is that when they're worn low and lit from below, the shadows produced create an effect like "devil's horns," he explains, adding that "some people get insulted if I ask, 'Don't you wear glasses?' Like [he names a megaeollector], when I said, 'Do you have glasses" He said, 'No,I' You know? The vanity,"
Samaras doesn't cater to vanity. In fact "PO,9:,ef/~ originated in an ego-puncturing proposal he made to Interuiens, a magazine dedicated to idealizing celebrities, for which he'd already shot Versace and Elton John, among others. "I called [then editor Ingrid Sischy] and said, 'I haw an idea of photographing people trorn below,' which I had done in my videos over the years, 'But instead of' doing the stupid stylist thing, [ want to make them like gargoyles' She was horrified.' Considering the portraiture he SaW in the world "either too designy," too much in
the Pop trudition, presenting faces as "facades with no indication of the psychology behind them," 01 "cutesy" and satirical-"negative stuff, like making fu 11 of" -he decided to go ahead with the project on his own
"That's the outside pa rt," hecontinues, seated on a swivel chair before the ban k of computers, his "pi nd ly legs outstretched. "The inside part is I have been living devoid of daily contact with, and nightly contact, with pecple-s-tota lly devoid, except tor what I see on television. But I think the mind, at wh ate ver age, cannot reject all the stuff that came i.n with this mind's upbringing, Heads or faces of people are important even if you reject them for 10, 20 years. So I said, 'Fuck it, I'll let them come in, hut in this way They come in, I photograph them, and 1 work on their faces foi hOUiS or a couple of days, And then I'll get to learn more about their faces than I would normally' ~ It's not difficult to understand why portraits have a greater significance for a man who lives as an urban hermit than for those used to daily socia lintel" action, nor why so many faces sudden ly thrust upon a loner might ta ke on a sinister 01' gargoylelike cast, Sti II, although some of the subjects appear devilish or demonic, what unites the disparate i mages in the series is a sense of theater, of dramatization.
Interestingly, the Samaras who greets hit; subjects at the studio door is not Asperger's-afflicted 01' furtive 01' especially odd; he's a witty and engaging conversationalist, a gracious host, Now a spry 74, he has man aged to remain at the forefront. of artistic innovation for some 50 years~"Do it first," he says, "or do it best." I n the late t 950s and early '60s, he participated in the in itial happenings. He made a floor-piece sculpture with interchaugeable parts some five years befm'e Cad Andre made his narne with one. HB created some of the ear· liest immersive environments. The altered Polaroid self-portraits of
his 1973-76 series "Photo-transformations" anticipated many effects later made possible by Photoshop, a tool he embraced im mediately. "I fBd connected to Photoshop," he says, "because l did stuff of a Photoshop nature 10 YBal'S before Photoshop came, so there's a kind ofrelationship, a family thing." He beg-an shooting digital a decade ago. His prestige is now great enough and his friendship (usually telephonic) sufficiently valued to lure such subjects for "Poses" as David Byrne, Glenn Lowry, Leonard Lauder, Cindy Sherman, Agnes Gund, Evelyn de Rothschild, Chuck Close, and Alex Katz,
MOST OF US ARE USED TO LOCATING all portraits somewhere on a scale between litem 1 likeness and idealization, which in photography tends to involve a lot of airbrushing and such, Samaras=-who not coincidentally studied acting with Stella Adler-i-invites us to consider the fictive, in the form of the theatrical as the best way to COlWBY psychological truth, His pictures implicitly reject the notion that who We are remains fixed from day to day, that a pose is any less true than whatever the opposite of a pose might be. He does not pretend to offer an objective, unadulterated image, nor is he trying to portray his subjects in their best light; rather he- provides a stage for them to act on. Jaspel Johns hams it up in five- of the pictures. Is the- stern Johns, peering over his glasses, his skin a zinc-gray monotone except, around the eyes and ears, where it glows radioactively, more real t.h an the benign,
fai ntly grinning, rosy-faced .Iohns?
In his 1978-80 series of photographic portraits "Sittings."
Ni<:clalla .... ll
Samaras asked his subjects to strip and present themselves as they wished and then jumped in the frame with them. The dramatic tension came from the ways in which his sitters offered or hid their
u "clad bodies, as well as from the contrast between the vulnerable naked subject and the clothed artist. The dra rna In "Poses" results partly from Samaras's directorial ability to elicit a performance from a sta tic su bject and partly from the theatrics I effects he adds later using Phot oshop.
If Samaras's portraits reject the notion of a fixed psychological essence, they implicitly accept physical mutability, the fact that from moment to moment, we never turn the same face to the world. Thus Samaras will not allow in his portraits "certain natu ral mi stakes" like pimples or scratches, both of which might be ti-ue to a person's likeness today but not that of yesterday 01' tomorrow, By not i ncluding transient blemishes that might call undue attention to themselves, distracting the viewer, Samaras hopes to impose a kind of
sea rnlessness on the act of viewing. Intrinsic oddities, "a nose too big or a crooked eys 01' whatever=-fhat's not a problem," he says, «as long as it's aesthetically pleasing to me."
What's important to understand is that Samaras's Photoshop interventions are in the service of neither literal representation nor idealization. He ai rns for drama and what he defines as nobility. "Any
50 MODI:I:!N PAINTfr.!S NDVE'JA.llE]~ 2010 AIlTINF.Q.COM
DonlelkuniU OPP{)SIToES<I,,,I,a Branl
face can give you a variety of psychological roles that it can play,"
he explains. "But sometimes you want to help them. You don't want
to express something that does not enrich them. I don't mind a face resembling a ga rgoyle as long as it's a grand gargoyle instead of a stupid gargoyle. As long as it's excellent and noble and not pedestrian" He hasn't, for instance, edited out the strands straying from Kim Levin's mop of hair 01' smoothed away the wrinkles in hal' neck, yet by placing her against a violet- background, highlighting the area around her intently gazing eyes, and emphasizing the ridges on her blouse, he points up her mournful grace,
Samaras's directorial strategies=-evetyth iug he does 1.0 enhance a su bject's perforrnauce-e-iange from the nea rly invisible to the ornate. From Evelyn de Rothschild he elicits sweetness, even comedy, merely by shooting him in extreme close-up, focusing on the nose and eyes. The Netc yo,.k Times writer Grace Glueck receives the full "grand gargoyle't=-or Grand Guignol=-treatment, with hornlike shadows and ],"1' face tinted in contrasting grays, silvers, and blacks that set off the green of he!' eyes and the carmine of her coat.
A POSB in common parlance suggests an affectation: something unnatural. With "Poses," Samaras seems to contend that there is no natural person to uncover, t-hat we are all horn actors, and it is in our disguises that we ate least concealed. MP
• X.AVIERA SIMMONS MATT LIPPS
• SIMON BERG
A selection from photography's new guard.
BELOW:
Xayje.ra..Sjmmons Composition One for Score A. 201 O. C~print ~O x 50 in.
OP,P()SITi!::
Xa_yjera..Simmons AM:)wEro Amedccmo #2. 200B. C-prinl. 20 x 30 in.
52 MODE~N PAINH:~S :"fDv£.MllEl~ 2010 IUHJNFO.COM
Xaviera Simmons
"My pieces are a little different than,
say, Cindy Sherman's."
"] DON'T CONSIDEH ANY OF THE J MAGES THAT T"M J N AS SELF"PORTRAITS 111 fact it really bothers me when people say they're self-portraits because you would never watch a film ami say. 'Oh, that's GSOl'g" Clooney!' You understand it's
the character he's portraying. My pieces are more about a nebulous narrative, or an unofficial narrative, or a nonlinear narrative. I'm always trying to figure out what's underneath what I see: Who are the characters underneath the landscape? How do you use the landscape as a character to evoke other' characters or to bring out other ideas?
«Rarely in a conversation about my work do I begin with direct. terms regarding the culture of African Americans. I am obviously an American of African descent, which means a person who has African, European, and Native American cultures all running through her, But how can we work with these construets and then move way past them? I'm interested iu the notions of American landscape and i n all landscapes, When you deal with t.he histories of America, you automatically
fall into the histories of immigrants and migrants, and that's how you can enter into other characters, narratives, and geographies. My love of landscape is a result of viewing pai nterly i mages-'Americanic imagery,' as I like to ca 11 it-hilt also of engaging the landscape through walking, which just slows your vision down so youcan take everytlring iu."
54 MO'O'ETlN P,A,IN:TE'I<'S NOVEMBER 2;)10 ARTIN'''O.COM
AI;iO' .... ~ fJQXOf Fonnor, 2'01 O. C-print. 30;.: 40 in.
c.woslr~: Around the Y. 201 O. C-pri~l. 40 v: 50 in.
ArHlNF<J.COM NOV.EMBE:X amo MODEHN PAINTH1'S 55
MaH Lipps
ABO''', Unfilled (lemClle heads). 20 I O.
C·print, 50 xLlO ill.
"'HORIZONlS'IS A HIS'h)RY PROJECTlNSPIRED IN PART BY AN ANSEL ADAMS PHOTOGRAPH-an image he took in 1933 inside the overstocked storage room of the De Young Museum, which housed multiple sculpture collections. Adams was allowed t.o photograph a single 1"00[11 containing a sculptural train wreck of objects from different centuries, geographies, and cu ltures, collapsing the history of sculpture into a single composition. This act is completely counterintuitive to the project of art history and, by extension, the museum, whose aim
is to make understandable a traiectory of art objects and movements, replete with heroic 'fathers' and 'pioneers' identified by these arbiters of taste and expertise, for a public to consu me chronologically 01' geographically,
"I happened across the image about two years ago and WaS blown away by the possibilities it presented for a photograph ie concept like Sculpture, so r cut it out and tacked it to my studio wa II. I'm a collector of
a'f'OSITE UNiNed (archileciure). 2010. C·print, 3D x40 ill.
ArmNFO.COM NOVEM83.R 2010 MOOE~N PAINlEI'IS 51
"I got out my X-acto knife and started liberating anything I wanted."
pi ctu res, fragments, and scraps. I keep things and organize them, only to reorgani ze them hy color, maker, mode 1, element. . I had saved a stack of Horizon, a hi monthly arts-and-culture magazine started in 1958. The sincerity of its voice, mixed with the beautiful printing and '60s palette, told an earnest (but dangerous) StOlY about a way of thinking within art history. I g-ol. out my Xvacto knife and started liberating anything I wanted and allowed the images to hit the table all at once to see what they had to say or what they could do witheach other
"The resulting photographs are my own remix of art history, gesturing toward a multiplicity of possible histories, but, in a way, similar to the notion of making yourself a mix tape to listen to while you drive or p\ltting- the iPod on shuffle by gen re."
5 8 MODE r.lN PA I NUl:! S NOV!EMB'ER :;:; 010' AIlTI N F.Q.C OM
,;IlOvE MaUllpps UnITtlecl (oor) 2008. C·prillt, 46 'X 36 in.
OPPOSHE Mlltuipps UnITIlfJcl (forlll), 201 O. C·prillt.50:.:-40 in.
ARTI NFO"COM NOVEMBER Z[Ha MO D E-I1'N PA~NTERS 59
Simon Berg
"If you're disgusted
by my work, you're disgusted by your own physical being."
"J LOVE ADVERTlSlNG AN[llTS MOTIVES. Everything is consumable and tltere to satisfy the needs and desires of
the beholder. . That approach makes advertising a bit too intense: 000 many colors, too much focus on one thing, no depth, In a way my images are produced as commercial images but with different intentions, They've got the colors, the simple geometric forms, but un like advertising they show things as they l'B"'!!Y are. Food, for example, is nothing pretty, It's both attractive and repulsive. At the moment I'm trying to figure out a good way to document the texture of the meat products avai I able at the butcher counter. When we see the texture of something, it loses its innocence-we see it for what it is. Whether it's furniture, food, 01' a person, the realization that everything is made of something is
i IT! P ortan t, and frigh tening.
''I'm definitely a fan of William Eggleston and. love Los A lamas, so there's an obvious connection between his use of warmer tones and my own W01-k. Another great source of inspiration is t.he Russian constructivist EI Lissitzky, who made a poster called Beat the Wh,:te with the Red Wedge, It's the best example I've ever seen of how to use color and shape. It. almost gets physical for me, and that is what I try to accomplish in my WOlke a picture that will hit you in the face because of your brain's underlying love for forms and colors."
60 MOD EH N fA I NTEHS NOV3MBER 2 mo Arm NF{)'C·OM
/\1:10' .... 1:: Trons9res~iofl. 2010. Digilol C~prinl. 35V~ x 27¥2 in.
OPPO~.IT[~: Tronsgr@ssion. 2010. Digital Ceprlnt. 141/.11 19Y~ in.
AI1TI N F-O.C·OM NOVEMBER :2010 MOD EHNlIPAI mERS 61
;I
AI;iOV~ AND OPPOSITI;:
InolEvlne, Unlilled.2009.
Aervl i C 0 nd sl lkscreen on canva 5. 7~n~ X ? 8% in.
62 MODEHN p,L\INTmS NoV:E:MBffi :20[0 ARTIN'FO.COM
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Talking Turkey
Two generations of artists question their national, and international, identity. by Berin Golonu
ARfINF.o.COM ~OVEMBER :2Cll!H"OOEI:!N PAINUf.lS 63
Turkish art has come into its own, An essay by r.he scholar Ahu Antmen in the recently published Unleashed. Contemporary Art from Turlecy (Thames & Hudson, 2010) states that after two centuries in which Turkish a rtists looked to the West ["" new developments, one can now claim that
the Western art establishment is looking to Turkey, as well as other parts of the Middle East, for a sense of what is to come. And in the country itself. despite the growing pains that have accompanied its advances, the rapidly expanding popu Iation and economy have fostered a new generation of art collectors dedicated to supporting Turkish artists and heightening their profiles a broad.
Artists have played an essential role
i n movi nil' Tur key's de mOC1'a ti za ti on forwa rei, often acting as the country's conscience. The politics of representation is a delicate topic
in Turkey, and many artists take significunt risks in flouting censorship to counter socially sanctioned norms as well as to question statesponsored historical narra tives about national identity. Questions of representation are
also complicated when Turkish artist~ present their works abroad: They either face prejudice because of their background or (U"" expected to correct inaccurate notions about their culture through their work. The artists discussed here each push the boundaries of what it means to claim the identity of H Turkish artist.
Some of the most powerful work in Turkey is being made by women, and
the rnidcareer artist Inci Eviner is among the most accomplished of that gl'OUP, Born
in Ankara in 1956, Eviner combines drawing, painting, silkscreen, and video in elaborate compositions that address gender relations and cu 1 turn 1 differences in a postcolonial context. At play are the power dynamics
that accompany desire, The psychological subject rna tter she explores deals with the formulation of personal identity in rela tion
to cultural, ethnic, and religious differences, As if in an effort to highlight the Iabricated nature of selfhood, she is constantly tearing down the borders that delineate individual forms, as well as those that separate
64 MooeR N PA I Nn: R.S: NOV~MBER 2010 A ~nt.J FO.CO M
Hg'l II A!1i ndere
Two still-s from Mirage. 2008. DVD. 7 minutes, 20 seconds.
aesthetic tradit.ions, media, and most important, the self from the other Halfanimal, half-human figures painted in black and white ink commingle with silkscreens of segmented body parts that morph into lush floral patterns. The thick vegetation that winds through Eviner's works often evokes the exotic foreign setting of the colonialist imagination,
Nouveau CUoyen, 2009, a three- channel video installation in the permanent collection of the J sta nbul Museum of Modem Art, compares three Eastern and Western colonialist patterns commonly found in textiles and on ceramics and wall tiles. Sections of each turn into animated women's faces and torms, some ofthem hybrid or two-headed mons tel'S sprouting- grotesque appendages. The Women engage in manically obsessive acts nod masturbatory gestures, exhibiting a dangerous sexuality 111 defiant opposition to the rules of decorum suggested by their elegant surroundings,
Similar figures appear in Eviner's Harem,
2009, but their setting is Antoine Ignace Melling's late l Sth-eentury Oriantalist drawing of a sultan' harem. The harem was a favorite subject of Oricntalist painting because it was a space forbidden to male Western visitors. Although it. tries to pass itself off' as a factual study, Melling's work
is a voyeuristic fantasy of the mysterious goings on in this sanctum, depicting various scenes of harem life within an elevated building plan. Eviner has replaced Melling's women engaging in domestic chores and expressions of piety wi th ones performing more indelicate actions. A roomfu 1 of women praying in the earlier piece, for example, have been transformed into female acti vists carrying placards. I n other scenes, Women devour and destroy one another 01' engage
in lesbian acts, By highlighting the sexuality and violence of life in the harem, Eviner
is not just critiquing the Ottoman power dynamics that kept women in a position
of servitu de but also pointing out that the
w.u..rm ond! Linda 'Gig "'jian
NovelSleme (Giibek fOOl) [oetc!l]. 2010. Printed' ceramic lila. wood olotrorm,
21 x 74x74in,
Western colonialist demystification of foreign landscultures was driven by
a desire to physically and sexua lly dominate their people. Eviner is currently working
on two new videos dealing with the difficulties immigrants face in moving up through Europe's social hierarchy, which will be unveiled in an exhibition at the M usee d'Art Moderne de Ln Ville de Pnris in J anuary 2011.
A discussion of diversity within Turkish society inevitably brings to mind the state's repression of minority ethnic STOUPS and cultures in an effort to present a coherent nationa I identi ty. H alil Altindere, one of the most provocative and prolific artists in the country today, has used his work to criticize the elitism and hubris associated with
this identity and the violence employed in constructing it.
Raised in southeastern Turkey, where he was born in 1971, Alnndere appeared on the Istanbul art scene in the mid l.990s with pieces that. debased beloved national
symbols to comment on governmental abuses of power. This work W'~" fueled not only by his minority statu, as someone
of Kurdish descent but also by the state's eviction of Kurds from their villages in southeastern Turkey during those years, Altindere's memorable pieces from this em include an image of a banknote on which the representation of Ataturk-« Turkey's founding father and most revered JiglU"e-is covering his face with his hands, as if
in shame; fake postal stamps showi 111; photograph." and names of Kurds who disappeared in Turkish police custody; and reproductions of Turkish na tiona! identity cards bearing in flam matory photos like shots of topless men and women, the latter particu lady arousing the wrath of religious conservatives in Turkey, who accused the artist of obscenity,
Altindere has been arrested and tried for making art deemed dangerous to society. In 2005, when he curated an exhibition titled
"Free Rick' for the ninth International Istanbul Biennial, he was charged tinder the controversial Article 301 of the Turkish penal code with showcasing work that publicly denigrated the TUrkish republic (the charges Were later dropped). In 1998 he came close to being sued by another Turkish artist, Esat Tekaud, after spray painting
a dollar sign on a Tekand painting for which the artist had appropriated imagery from a .Ioseph Beuys performance, which Altmdere saw as a com modification that drained
the Beuys piece of its radical intent. More recently, Altrndere's public sculpture in Berlin of a German police cal' overturned on the street angered conservati VC Germans. At the ninth Sharjah Biennial, in 2009, his painted portrait of one of the U AE's most respected sheiks, hung ill front of but not quite concealing a wall safe, garnered him threa ts of p hysica I harm,
In an effort to expand what is acceptable within the Turkish art world, Alnndere
ArtTINF-O.COM ~OVEMBER :2(]1 n MOOEI:!N PAINT:Ef.lS 65
fROM ~J.:':T .Ellf Uras.
I r-sto Ilotion vievJ. "Poncromo Arcode." Coterlst. rstonbuf. 2009.
Pink Belly, 201)'1.
tan i k \~;O rc, POIYCh rc m o underqloze on, frilware, 231;1 x 1 P/~ in,
has undertaken various side projects, such as founding- the a,.I·I:51 Con.Iemporary Art magazine and publishing the book User's Manual: Contemporary A,.t in. Turkey 1986"- 2006. His em-atocia! Pl'O] ects, which bear provocati ve titles like "l'rn too Sad to Kill You," "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible,' and "When Ideas Become Crime," bring together antia uthoritarian works by artists from rural parts of Turkey who have, until now, been peripheral ,0 Istanbul's art scene. A lnndere's critiques of various entrenched systems, whether state repression 0,' the depoliticizing tendencies of the art market, have set a new progressive standard in Turkish art.
the social makeup of Istanbul, shifting
its cl ass structure, greatly increasing its popu Iation, and ulti mately creating a greater discrepancy between the rich and the poor. It also spawned interesting class tensions, such as that between the newly wealthy religious merchants and the old secular elite, with their Western ideals.
Uras's pieces contrast modernity with tradition. She recently started working with a ceramic studio in Iznik, where some of
the most refined ceramics of the Ottoman Empire were produced. She upends tradition, however, by using the uonfigurative patterns of Isla mic tiles to decorate huggable-size vessels whose forms suggest voluptuous
Eviner has replaced women engaging in . domestic chores and expressions of piety WIth ones performing more indelicate actions.
Elif Uras belongs to a growing grou p of Turkish artists li ving abroa d whocomplicata and enrich their Turkish identity by blending different cultural influences in their work. Born ill Ankara in 1972, Uras now claims both Istanbul and New York as her home,
Ha ving studied la IV and economics before
h e co min gal) a rtis t, sh e takes as th e rna i n subject mn tter of her paintings and ceramics Turkey's swift trnnsition in the 1980s
from a state-controlled to a free-market economy, This transition profoundly altered
66 MODI:~N PAINHHS NDVE"JA.llE]~ 2010 A.rITINF{).COM
female figures, such as belly dancers or bronzed babes in string bikinis lounging on Turkish beaches,
For the gl'OUP exhibition "Blind Dates." opening this month at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, in New York, Uras collaborated with the Armenian-American artist Linda Ganjiau on a sculptural installation titled Navel Stone (GObeil Tas I.) , Urns and Ganjian each created a set of ceramic tiles that they'Il hring together on a gobeli taei a
lou nge platform that traditionally forms
the centerpiece of a Turkish bath. Uras's tiles, produced in Iznik, illustrate tales from Ottoman history in which Armenians played a prominent role. In he,' tiles Ganjian-> working within the aesthetic tradition of Kutahya ceramics, which gained prominence late in the Ottoman empire and were produced mainly by Armenian craftsmeu-> depicts a narrative interweaving the history of her own Inmily's exodus from Turkey
with their craft traditions. The two women's collaboration examines the traumatic break: between Turkish and Armenian identity in the early 20th century ill an effort to imagine a harmonious coexistence in the future,
Many artists who identify as Turkish voice the need to place their work outside
the framework of Turkish art. It's a natural enough impulse, especially I'm' those presenting their work abroad. But it risks leaving in place the restrictions that define the framework they're rejecting, If this framework were modified to allow a diversity of viewpoints, couldn't it afford a buffer against the homogenizing influences of the global market? In making work about issues pertinent to Turkey and its immigrants abroad, artists like Eviner, Uras, and Altmdere help expand notions of Turkish identity ~ presenting them as. evol ving rather than fixed. Theil' art not only holds its own internationally but also helps create within Turkey a cultural transformation that is felt beyond its borders, Having a rigid framework to rebel against instills the urgency to move this transformation forward, MP
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MIAMI
for ART BASEL
Between the beaches and bars, Miami is full of distractions. But culture takes center stage in early December, when the city plays host to the largest concentration of art and design fairs in the world. The main attraction is Art Basel Miami Beach, which has not only survived the economic downturn but reinvented itself as a showcase for up-and-coming talent.
68 MOO!:f.lN PAl NTIEIlS NOVEMBER 2CllO ArrrIN FO_C,o M
GO
ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH
WHAT: The tcrernost winter g atherl n g of th e contemporary-art world in the tropical zone. WHEN: December 2~5 WHERE: Miami Beach Convention Ce nter HIGHLIGHTS: This year the more tha n 250
part lcl patin g g allerle s from 29 cou ntrles wi II be ex h i b iti ng' the i r works within an entirely redone floor plan that one 01 the fair's CO - d i rectors, Ma rc Spiegler, likens to Manhattan·s grid,. The Art Pos iti ons secto r, now a platform for 14m ajor projects from 1 ~ art lsts repress n tin 9 7 countrl es, has moved to a Co rn er
of th e hall. • Ocea nfront Nights. cu rated by Creative Time, will present music. perterrna n ce S I and v ideos from a diFferent c Ity~ Be rlln. Detroit, G lasg ow,
and MeY leo C Ity~ each evenin g. Art Fi I m,
org an I zed by the Zu ric h film connoisseur This Brunner, will feature the documentary Wast .. Land, whic h to llows the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz to the world's largest garbage dump .•
Co in Did ing with Art Basel Miami is a lull menu of othe r events, in olud i n 9 the srna II er NAOA, Pulse, Scope, Ink Miami, and Design M I am I fairs. Pulse has a new director,
Corne II DeWi tt, an d for the first ti me Des ign Miami will be located close to the Conventi on Cente r. • Outs Id e Ih e Canyon Ranch Hotel and Spa. the art-archltecrure coil aborative Sna rok ltectu re will I nsta II Sphere. a ball pit for ad u lts. (0 anie I A rsh am. the art 1st hal f of Snarkitecture, will have a solo show at Galerle Emmanuel Perrotln's Miami branch in December) Fans of Jeftrey Deitch·s openlnqnight be ach blowouts, wh lc h always offer
mu s leal ante-ria i n me n t, need not fear: Although he's now ensconced out west at ",OnA, he'll be throwing' his party=wlth LCD Soundsystem
prov I ding' the muslc~
at the Ral eig h on December 1.
artbasel miami beach .com
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most of the guests here are looking for~a pretty place to park their luggage while they hit the town.
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PICTUR NG AMER CA
William Christenberry:
Photographs, 1961 ~2005 OCl16,1O - JAN.9.11
Wjlliom C~".I"'nberry. PI-ro/C1g/"CIp~,. 1961 - 2005 Or~1 rli.l'3ci D( Apr II It?
P e-St=-llllig ... r nso
h Gll":'ro;O r'} F"u\d1Jlfj1
Winslow Homer:
From Poetry to Fi etian OCT. 29.10 - JAN. 2.11
Remembering a House Divided:
Rober!" King1s Photographs of Civil War Reenoelors sePT 25.10 - JAN.2.1 1
Rememberma a Hause D,vJded. Rober! !<lng', Phologrophs
of Gvj I Wor R""nac/C1f5.
Willcrn Ch'loI,Ienbe, 1. AlrMYimtl, e 1Q30. o.'d 11DW1!1, lirot ~t, jJ:(j~~ 196d OVIIIllf'/'fI n'll!l<o~b:!I")', hOM VVllllt'lm Ck.I!Ji!uml)' ~1tJI~ ~I W1nsk:..... ~I, Arr.BrkXl~, 1 Bl&PQl(l, t=i'!'l!!'1 App.1:"I\ frcm Ot.o- ~'b r[}l\~, A,q.i1(1, 18~B Wood ~"UCM'lJ. CO!.JlI~,..,d CO~I~~OI'y'md ~In PiI,rl ShilJtliOlit ~003"1 nIiS./Ij·'liI!.lIt[]ll, r. 19tJ1f' B:::..*' dN"'_!;,QUIJ'Y ~'itJ.:~. 'Ic~ ~ 11~IITrJ, Nc~~l1bco' fI,~. Dylid ~_'p' ... 1 ('_ru~!yd t~ cl~1If
EUROPE 1/ AMSTE RDAM II LON DON
NORTH AMERICA II ASPEN II MIN NE50TA 1/ NEW YORK II LOS ANGELES
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REVIEWS
ASIA II BEIJING
2 i5
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I "e-Z va"" Lamsweerde
& VlnQQdb M-atgd I n Anostasto. 1.994. Pigmenlprinl, 391" x 44% in.
EUROPE
AMSTERDAM
Inez van Lamswee rde & Vinoodh Matadin
Foam. FOlografilJ.muS(1!(rll II JURI!. 25-S(!p~em..bel" 15
THE PHOTOGRAPHEI!.'l Inez
vall Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have spent the past 25 years shooting spreads and editorial portraits fat' many
of the top fashion magazines and producing advertising campaigns f01" luxury brands Iike Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. But Lamsweerde ami Matadin have always maintained a second career in the art world, exhibiting
in solo and group shows at major museums around the world and retaining top- notch representation at Matthew Marks Gallery, in New York, and at the Parisian gallery Air de Paris.
For this survey at Foam Fotografiemuseum, in Amsterd am. ti tie d "Pretty Much Everything," the pair teamed up with the French »
ARTINF"O.OOM NOV.EMBI:R 2(]10 MOOI:I1'N :PAII'IfTE:RS 71
REVIEWS
design duo MfM Paris to
con stru ct a la byrin th of S 111 a II hallways and moms in which to display 300 photographs, videos, and mixed - me dia
p ieces varying in size fro m
t he rninia ture to th e massive. The diverse imagery reveals the artists' fascination with duality and a111 biguity, fantasy and fetishism, Surrealism
and Goth. A stunning blackand-white portrait of Biork
for a 2009 issue of Intercieui is overlaid with multiple eyeballs
ffiOMLEFT;
In .. ZJIDIlJ.<! 1Il5Yi",,!de lie Vinoodh Matadin Joo,,,,,,, HeN/~ LegerCompo/gn. 1995, Pigment print. 55,72%i n,
dripping colored tears within teal'S, The actor ami director Clint Eastwood's rugged face emerges from a delicate cloud of smoke 111 a 2005 New Yorh Times Magazl;".e picture, while the fashion designer Alexander McQlleen wears a skeletal mask over half his mouth and neck in a 2004 photograph
for V magazine. Stranger yet, the digitally altered Thank
YOll Thighrnoster. Britt, 19£13, merges a III odel wi th a life-
size doll-woman, and the 2003 God presents the holy one
as a bearded lady, Arranged achronologically, each image
1 ead s to th e next, every ou e of them powerfu 1. Seven years in the planning, the exhibitioo
is th B firs t p ublic exposure
of "Pretty Much Everything" before its p u blication as a
T Maheu book in 2011.
-Paul Laster
.sJJlliI~ ZWischen Lenggrles unO' Sr;:hw,,~ V,
201 0, Photo colla ga. 23~h x 19112 in.
72 MOOE:n'N :PAINTE1!':!S NO'\;"'D,.1HR.-:<.: :20]0 AP'fIHIFO.COM
lONDON
Sinta Werner
YOU HAVE TO STAND at a very specific spot to experience Sinta Werner's latest installation, Along tile Sight Lines, 2010 From there, the gallery
looks double exposed, as if an image 01 it from a different viewpoint had
been superimposed onto the actual space, One step to the side is enough
to shatter the illusion; the fictive gallery turns out to be so much canny paintwork on the walls and floor. But it is at this precise moment of disillusion that the piece starts to fully function, playing on the constructed nature of perspective, architectural or otherwise. Once inside the installation, viewers meander through a bare room adorned with broken lines that appear to be abstract patterns of a large mural devoid of coherence.
Here, as in most of her installations, it is the space itself that the Berlinbased Werner exposes, The borders between artwork and venue are so tenuous that they verge on collapse. To look at Along tile Sight Lines is to look at the mechanisms allowing its display Yet the artist seems less interested in endorsing a latter-day breed of institutional. critique than in testing the possibilities of architecture. In her series of black-and-white photographic collages "Constructing Visibility," pictures of high-rise buildings are cut up and rearranged in unsettling constructions defying gravity and logic, These images share with MG. Escher's etchings a combination of the familiar with the impossible characteristic of dreamscapes
Until now Werner has generally scrutinized urban or interior situations.
Tile exllibition at Nettie Horn opens a new line of inquiry: landscape. In her "Milos" series, tile artist has excised tiny parts from photographs of mountains and rocks, creating small windows that reveal other pictures, other dimensions, often more complex than the surfaces In Milos I, 2009, the torn-out side of a sand dune discloses a three-dimensional structure
of quadrilateral modules, a sort of machine that could be governing nature above it. There is a certain ingenuousness to Werner's obstinate poking through the visible, a refusal to accept reality's limitations, but that is what accounts for much of her work's freshness Beyond appearances, the artist
suggests, another world awaits discovery -Coline Milliard
NORTH AMERICA ASPEN
SergejJensen
Aspf!.n Art M!tseu.fn 1/ J.«(. IS-Odobec 10
SERGE-J JENSEN PLAYS havoc with the concept ofabstract painting, ill thequietest manner possible, Still, walking through his exhibition at r.he Aspee Art Museum, Jensen's first solo show in a U.S. institution, is like breaking tha soun d barrier: You exit with a sonic boom. In a video made for the show, the a rtist, who Was hom in Denmark and resides in Berlin, explains that he tries to avoid painterly
ges tures, preferring to find "other ways than the obvious ways," To make his pictures he
seizes whatever is at hand, and hen ever throws anything away If extra canvas spills past Ute support once it's been s tretched, he sni ps it off and uses it to make another work; if some studio grit finds its way from the floor onto the canvas, he allows it to become part of the work's imagery.
Untitled (AK#S877), 2()05, one of the 23 pieces displayed at the Aspen Ad Museum, consists of two fabric remnants-with wavy, multicolored Pucci-esque
lin Bs-affi xe d to s tretche d brown burlap, It looks like an abandoned Frank S tella sketch. Similarly, the stripe zipping d.OWI' the length of Curtains, .2004, could have been applied by a tipsy Barnett Newman but is instead a
ri vulet of c h lorine bleach tha t JenSBn has wielded like paint on unprimed canvas. At first, and second, sight many of
th sse pictures S Bam to re fer to the work of earlier abstract
painters like Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, and Brice Marden .. Jensen, however, is devoted less to Minimalism than to economy of means. In Blessed, 2008, for instance, the texture and b I u ish coloring of two swathes of stretched cashmere sewn together
cons titute th e "imagery" of the picture.
For all his simplicity, Jensen is devoted to eccentric materials, Mussel-shell beads spread like a delta of water
da III age from the up pel' left edge of the raw-silk support in Untilled, 2008, while distinctly nonlustrous diamond dust provides sorn e gra nulari ty to the white acrylic on the shaped canvas of Ugly Diamond, 2009. The baroque (for Jensen) patterning of Japonais 3,
2009, results from gesso seeping through fabric, fot, we're looking at the back of a stretched and traditionally prepared canvas, The yellow. gold flee ks animatin g a w hite oblique triangle jutting into the center of Werewolf, 2003, are grains of saffron.
Jensen's thrifty aesthetic extends co the installation of his work. He tends to employ whatever walls, carpeting, and lighting he finds in a gallery, usually as it was left From the previous show. If the modesty of this approach accords with pieces composed with humble materials, it should be noted that the compositions themselves are exquisitely
o b served, arranged with delicacy, poignancy, and a subtle sense of balance. Indeed Jensen's work is nothing' if not su btle, reveling ill the minutest shifts of tone and
tex ture, By II S illg gen eric lighting and found color on the walls, neither of which can be counted on to highlight or enhance the viewing
experie nee, he forces us to attend even more ca refu Uy to the quiet choices he makes,
And the choices add up. One hushed note after another, they build to ravishing
crescen des . Jen sen may be austere, he may submit his efforts to demanding economies, but his pictures ape not at all stingy in the pleasures they afford,
-Daniel Kunitz
MINNEAPOLIS Pennacchio Argentato
.A1.i.dway C(mtp.mpQI,(,1,r-y AI'~ 1/ J. uti 1'7-A''l!'ISt 20
THERE ARE THREE concrete arcs on view at Midway Contemporary Art under the title "The New Boring." They CUl'Ve up from wller'€ they are moored, bending li ke Richard Serra walls turned into tidal waves or a John McCracken plank suddenly made to wilt like a flower petal. And they tilt as they rise, as if throwing a punch or bra cing fat a hit on the football field, Think Joel Shapiro: Minirnalisrn anthropomorphized and made [ust a little bit silly.
These agile, oddly nimble sculptures are the work of Pasqu al e Penn aoch io an cl
Ma risa Argentato, two Naplesbased artists operating here, in their U.S debut, as Pennacchio Argentato, On the wa 11 nex t to every arc, the pair bas hung a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Be antily clad, with muscles bulging, shot decades before his move into politics. Alongside the well-oiled Arnold, the artworks seem
more human, a hit more comical. They could he posing for their own photo shoot 01' tracing the shape of the model's bicep.
Affixed to the back of each sloping mass of concrete is a set of dollar-store handles that transforms it into a site for action, a concrete pommel horse awaiting all avant-garde gymnast. The pieces suggest
1 i II ks to oth er hody- ac tivated sculptu re favored by American curators and art historians in recent years; Franz West's portable props, Charlotte Posenenske's mutable units, and Franz Erhard Walther's quirky wearables. Unlike those examples, though, Pennacchio Argentato's works are solidly secured, and anyone grabbing the high-up grips would find his body forced into an odd curve
rui micking the shape of Schwarzanegger's hypertrophied tOl·SO. The invitation to pa rtrcipa te th LIS
a mounts to a t Base and perhaps a parody of such
gcstu res, so often rif., with childish op ti mis In.
If "The New Boring" mocks such sunny naivete, though, it doesn't take itsel f seriously either. Look again at the
FROMLEH:
SArgel JeUseD Porlroit Dr., 2005. Goua che 0 n II nen I 29V, X 23'1> In.
pennaccblo A rgen!ato Untm"d. ~Ol O. loser print. concrete. plywood. wood. screws. steel ho r"Id roll. 16.11'" in.
one 71 ,37, 311n.
73
REVIEWS
strange tilt of that concrete, those Bed Bath & Beyond handles, and the eminently likable bodybuilder smiling for the camera. Beginning with a Minimalist form, feinting at interactivity, and throwing in
a dash of heady, ironic Pop splendor, the duo is attempting 1.0 b ore out of conte mpora ry sculpture's Postminirnalist prison. And here, at least, they ha ve succeeded.
-Andrew Russeth
LOS ANGELES
_._ .. -~-'" .-~-.-.--.~-, ._._ .. _.'.--.-', ,-~"
Carlee Fernandez
Acme Gallery II September ll-Ocwber !J
RQOMLEFl:
Ql:I,1g FJ! rna.ndlt> Derek's Plan I, 201 D. StlJlred be boot s, redwood, pion L 84,33 x371n.
THE BRITISH ARTIST Damien Hirst once told the New Yorker art writer Calvin Tomkins that "death is an unacceptable idea, so the only way to deal with it is to be detached or amused," Thus, with his preserved tiger sharks and chainsawed calves, Hirst intends viewers to engage with his art by feeling disturbingly disengaged from its subject matter. A contrary tack is taken by the Los Angeles-based artist Carlee Fernandez. Her taxidermy sculptures in the exhibition "World According to Xavier" are intricate tributes to mortality that encourage not detachment but engagement. They explore how death and life interweave in nature and human experience,
The show is distinctly feminine, interpreting animal, plant, and human forms through the prism of motherhood-the pieces, according to Acme's press release, are "gifts" to Femandez's son, the Xavier of the title. In To Xavier, ] Love You, 2010, the artist delicately entwines stuffed and mounted birds-swan, peacock, and domestic goose-producing a sort of
sur really beautiful interspecies mating dance. In Derek's Plant, 2010, leaves sprout from the melded bodies of two bobcats, suggesting rebirth: life from death, growth from decay.
Both Hirst and Fernandez flout mortality. But where he enlists technology-chemical preservation, glass, and steel-she invokes reproduction, the infinite cycle of mother and child. Where his philosophy is one of detachment, Fernandez's stresses devotion to life.
-Kit Warchol
Sjln",,__g~g Acto 1. 2008. B!aok·ond·white photograph, 55,98in.
74 MObEI:! N' PA'I Nn:.ns NO\fiMBER 2"010 A'lnl N ro.co M
NEWVORK Santiago Sierra
Team Gallery II September 19- October 23
THE SPANISH ARTIST Santiago Siena is a season ed inciter
of controversy, but it would
be a mistake to view his first 8010 show at Team Gallery as superflcial shock art. Sure,
the central subject here is interracial anal sex=for money-but Sierra takes that purposefully edgy setup and conjures 8m11 ething th at's
bath conceptually and visually intriguing, The artist hired various nonprofessionals to engage in (protected) rearentry intercourse while being videotaped and photographed. Hecourted both black and
wh ite pat'ticipants, pairing them in eight combinations: black men with white women, white women with white men, black men with white men,
and so on. He staged the art orgy in a r ented warehouse
in Ba r celona and filmed. everything on Dia de Ia Raza, Spain's equivalent of Columbus Day. Somehow the aesthetics
of tile resulting 49·minute video and photographs prove more interesting than their conceptual uride r pinnings (although it's undoubtedly good
fun 1.0 engage ill a spi rited discussion of who's fucking and who's getting fucked,
in geopolitical terms}. All a
rep r esentative fl'0111 Team remarked when I visited, there's a certain resonance with Minimalisrn ill. "Los Penetrados," the title of both the show and the project, Before YOl\ start Iaughiug-« and while Donald Judd rolls over in his gt'ave-she's
light. The works' beauty lies in Sierra's almost obsessive, pyramidal arrangement
of the 10 blankets-dark rectangles bisected by two vertical stripes-on which all this sBX occ II 1'5 (for certain
of th ~ co m bi nations, such as black women with white men, Sierra failed to find 10 willing participants, so SOUle of the blankets are unoccupied), This elegant geometry is, enhanced by the symmetry of the actors and their reflection in two
wa lis of III irrors, wh ich p 1 -ovida intere sting va u tage poin ts, in that one couple glimpsed i.n silh ouette is also visible fro III other, less fluttering angles (the participants' faces, and some of their tattoos, are pixilated out). The effect. is like observing an alta!' in some
o b S cure church ded ica ted to sodomy.
The show's large-scala
black-and-white photographs are fine works; 11 their own right, studies in pat tern and reflection ("Espaldas de los Penetrados," a SBCOlld series of photos-55 shots of the backs of penetrated subjects-s-is
less interesting), and the video complements them. Watching so much on- screen coitus call get boring, but one starts to observe the stylistic divides among couples-the
; ncrem ental d ifferences in how backs are arched, for instance, or variations in tempo and enthusiasm. When one of the males achieves climax, the pair remain 011 their blanket, waiting a bit awkwardly lor the penetrator to resume action .. (Quit blushing-this is high culture we're talking about.)
Perhaps more than Minimalism, Sierra's stunt here is a form of endurance art, using other people's bodies as raw material. He's done the same thing before, of course, hiring workers in Italy, for example, and having them
bu ried up to their [leeks in dirt. This sor t of a rt is eas y to dismiss as mainly intended to i 11 fu ri ate the cons ervati ve t'igbt wing, but Siena's provocation clearly has goals greater th an si m p ly e lieiting disgust or titillation.
-Scott Iud rtsek
ASIA BEIJING
Yu Hong
OUens C~nt:er [ar ConU~mpctl·ar:,.. Arl /1 Ju.ly 1'7-SlJ.ptr!.lnber 15
YU HONG IS often compared to Lee Krasner, destined to labor in the shadow of her famous husband, fellow painter Liu Xiaodong, Liu's realistportraits of society's margi n al ized announead thamsel ves as sam e· thing spacial at their first appearance, in the semina] "China I Avant-Garde" show in Beijing in February 1989. He went 011 to beeom e one of the great figures of the Chinese at t scene, even as he stayed true to his original subjects. and his vi l'i le, al most rough style of painting.
At the time of the '89 show, Yu was already man-ted to Lin, having met him when
they were both students lit the Central Academy of Fine Art.s in Beijing, China's leading art school, where they both teach today. She has been tagged ever since as the wife of Liu Xiacdoug. It hasn't helped that their approaches to pai nting are in many ways similar: Like he)' husband, Yu is devoted
to realism and to port.rayi n g the ordinary people she sees around her.
Nonethelesa, over" steady if never stellar ca reer, Yu Hong has sa rn ed critical respect and is now routinely named among
China's Ieadi ng female artists. In recent ye ars she h as also explored a style that is more distinct from Lin's, while not abandoning hm' natural subject matter. This new approach is on display in "Golden Sky."
Considering that she has stt1.l.gg led so hard to escape the shadow of another artist, it is Cll!~OUS that her new oeuvre actively invites comparisons. Each of the four works in the show-all strikingly hung overhead so that viewers must look up at them as at frescoes in a ch 1I rch or a p alace-s-is based on an acknowledged masterpiece, two from the West and two from China. The most successful, Alrium, was inspired hy Giuseppe Maria Cres pi's Tr ionfo d i Ercole, which adorns the ceiling of the Palazzo Pepoli, in Bologna. Two of the others invoke the Buddhist frescoes in the caves of Dunhuang !I11d Kizil, in
far western China, and the fourth recalls Goya's etching Ridiculous Folly.
Yu places contemporary people in the settings
su ggested by th e s e works, rendering then' against a golden background fit for an icon. In doing so, she
su ggasts that we look more closely at those around us. And by making us look up
at the pictures, she forces us to actually contemplate the
S ubj ects, father than give them
't.u.!:Iao.g
Atrium_ 2010. Acry:lic On co rwcs. 161'> x 19'M in.
a casual sideways glance, as we might if the works were hung at eye level,
So what do We see? One thing that is immediately evident is that Yu has spent more time capturing her subjects' individuality than getting her technique absolutely ti ght, Th e viewer feels a des; re to know many of the people portrayed, and when a young woman reaches out to pluck fruit from a tree 01' a young
boy walks the railing around Atrium as if it were a tightrope, w« an" elated by their attempts, But occasionally the painting seems rushed, ma king the
POt traits car toonish,
In Natural Selection,
which, building on the Goya etching, depicts groups of predominantly young women disporting themselves in
the branches of a tree, Yu portrays herself, palette in hand.xiecorat.ing the torso of
a sensual figure resplendently naked and free. It is hard
to read the faces of her tree dwellers: One moment they look like bag people living rough, the next like frolicking picnickers. Perhaps that is part of the point, that it all depends on your perspective,
In tbe context of Yu Hong's ca reel', the new work suggests a eonfi dence that bod es well for her work's finally being considered entirely 011 its
own terms. -Madeline O'Dea
75
\",V\v. rozi ~dil\{;a ns.co III
THE ARTIST'S STUDIO
spec i al aevernsl ng seen on
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the Universidad Na clonal Autonoma dH Mexico. NOIfflmbar 6 thl'dllgli December 18. Gue~t Curators: fulrtha Aguilar; Alejandra: Olvera and Sandra Zsnna The exhibitkln Waf; ooneelved.en d developed a s an academic postqraduate sa mi nar conductatl by leading schoJars from the U'1ive~[dad Aul61lQtTls de Me:,;iro: Deoora h Dnrolinsky, Rita
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Amsterdam Whitney Gallery
511 We~t 25th Streal
New York, New York
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Damlen Hirst. Msdicf~ Cabinets. lhrough DecemQ"f 11, Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 1O·5;30p.n1
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24 West 57th Sireet
New York,. New York
+1212 977 7160 [email protected] www.mariangoodman.com
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Marlborough Chelsea
545 West 25th Street
New YQr~,. New York
+1 212 4638634 [email protected] www.marlboroughgallery.com Claudio Bravo, Rec8~t Work. Ihrougl1 November 27
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New York, New York
+1 212541 4900 mny@marlboroughgallery,com www.marlboroughgallery.com
Main Gallery; Tt:Uerry W 'Despont, Tapestries; Small Gallery: RsfaeICidon<.>hs, Drawihgs through Ocl\:iber 23 Main Gallery: Jacques Lipchilz, Beyond Bible and Myth; Small G13llery: Aic~rdQ Maffei, III rough November 27
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118·128 North Broad Street Ph'iladeJphla, Pennsylvania +1 215 972 7600 www.pafa.'org
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Primavera Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue at 25th Street SUite 800, 8th FloQr
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There has never :MElfl a better tlme.to vis~ Primavera Gra~efY, Our new acqu~itrans in 20th century furniture. jewel ry, decoralive obj&cts; and works on paper include works of important designers and IBsSElr·kr,O'M1 yel equally slgnm~anl artists E~pect to' see. the very best of the leading, 20th and 2151 century de~[g ners like Chateau, Arbus, Evans, Dupa's. and exqUisite jewels by Cartier, Templier, Belperron and rnahy others
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Through NOIIl!mber 21, Ronnie
WOOd: Paintings. Drawings and Prints (Youngstown). As an ongoing part-ot
his multi-career, he paints and draws the musicians with whom he pl.,ys, documenting. hJs worlD tours and recoo::Jing Sessions In vibran1 a clion portrait S. Through November 28. Sidney Cash (Borman; Gallsry, Eloochsf Center Wing. YoungstQlNr1J. This exhibition features SC\J]pttJre in which glass
panels act as lenses that has reflectJve 5i lver and/or capper Imagery. Now OJ] view. Pierre Soulages 1~ May 1968 (Trumbull branch, HOVIIland), Thro~g~ November .28. Frank Ge hry: 'Prints (Youngstown). This emibi~on of wOi1ks 'Qn paper, feature some 1Jf Genry's most renOl'lMd wort<s of architectlllB, as well as subjects that inform his monumental achiavernents
west
L&MArts
660 Venice Boulevard Venice, Caillornia
+1 310 821 6400 [email protected] www.lmgallery.com
Paul Mcbarthy,lhrough November 6. Willem de Kooning: Figure and LilJht, NOV<;lmber 11 thtoug h Jan uary 15e Hours;l'ueSClay through Saturday, to- 5,30pm
Mlchaan's Auctions 2751 Todd Street Alameda .. Ca'lifQmia +1 510 740 0220 [email protected] www.michaans.com
Appraisal Events EVery Wednesday. Es!ale Auc~on: November 7, 2O!h C!lmUry Decoratilffi Mrs: NovanToor 8, Estate Aucllon: December 5. Fine Art, Furniture, Deoora1iv!l Aroo Md Jewslry Auction; December 6. Fine Asian Art Auction: December 1.3,
EUROPE
united kingdom
Alexia Goethe Gallery 7 Dover Street
London
... 44 20 7629 0090 info@aiexi">loe!nef]allery.com www.alexiagoethef]alls.y.com Alexender de Cadenet, Ufe-Force; through November I g. Popu lar fjym ns with the American's Peers and Thl! Young British Gerer13\ion, November 26 through January 2 1. H au rs: Monday through Friday 1 (}'6p.ln and Saturday 1!-4pm
louise Blouin Foundation 3 Dial Streel
London
+44 20 7985 9600 [email protected], www.ILbfoundalion.org
The philooophy of\he Foonda!ion Is experlmentetion, questioning, debate, and leaming, and thera·are tWb focuses 01 activity. lhe first is to present Ihe work of ind lvldual a rtlsts I hroug h tempora<y exh Ibftlons, I nstali:atlons, psrtormanc:e-s and screenings. We also promote a
Ii \/ely ptog tamme of events su ch as lectures, debates, workshops, think ranks and summits t>llaled ID ihe Foundation's areas ofintet!lSt
austria
Ga'ierie Thaddaeus Ropac Miraoellplatz 2
Salz.burg .
+43 662881 398 [email protected] WVlrW.hlpaO.Fiet
Arnulf Rainer 8. DialS r R[}th, KoItaboratlonen 1971-1978; ArrllJlf Rainer, Kreuze m79-19S9, until NoVember
20. Jack Pillrsoo, until Novsmbllr 2Q. H;;Ilie, V"f)iusstras~ 13, li020Salmurg', SttJrtevartt, urtlil NOVEll'tloor 20. Malt:
Brandenburg, opening N0V6I11ber 27. HaJI<l, VlJnil-lSslr;Jli"'" 13,5020 Salzburg. Lori Hersberg€t, opening November 27. Hours: Tuesday through Riday. 10- 6p.lTI. and Saturday 10-2P.m.
france
Galerie Patrick Seg.uln 5 rue des Talllandlars Paris
+33 I 4700 3235 info@pal'rickseguin.com www.patricKsegliln.com
Jim Lambie curated by par Sadie Coles, October 21 lh rough NOvember 27. Jean Prouva-Ferembal house, 1948/Adapl"ti,m Jean Nouvel FI AC Jardin d<:s
T ui lelies, Or:lojj8r ,,13 thl1lugh NOIitlrrib.er 10. Je;J n Plouve-Ardli!ecture curarec by Galene Patri"k Seguin. Gaqosian
G aflery/Pari s Project Space. October 20 through December 23. Hours: T ue~day lhl1lugh Saturday m-7p. m
ASIA
china
Pekin Fine Arts
No. 2'41 Cao Chang 01 Village Cui Ge Zhuang
Chaoyang District
BellIng
... 861 0 5127 3220 [email protected] www.pekintinearts.com
History lessons, G mu p Exh ioilian, September 4 through Nowmber 15. Artists; Chsn S~aoxiong, Uu Di, Llu Zhsng, Shen Llanq, 5hl Xi nn lng, Wan;g_ Jln, Wang Qingoohg, WassinkLunclgren, Wang Zivlel. Yiln L." Hours: WedneEiday Inrough Sunday, 10-6pm; Monday and Tuesday, by appointment o~ly
ART SERVICES
spec i at aevernsl ng seen on
Clatsop Community College 1653 Jerome Avenue
Astoria, Oregon 97103
+1 503 3.3B 2472
ksh a uc [email protected] www.aunaturelastorta.cor»
Au Natural: The Nude ih the 21 SI Century, an [nte rnational jUlied competition, FebrUary 17 thrqugh April 14,2011 at Ihe,CI1!tsop CDmmUnity COllege Art Center Gallery in Astoria, OR. $1000 in cash prizes, up to $2000 In purc:11 ase awards, solo show award, arid a select numbsr ot workshop awards. Juror:
Jane Beebe of POX Contemporary Art, Open to all artists working in two-dirnensional drawing, !'lalnting, and p(intmak-
i ng roodl a with a focus on the nude burna n figure as subj~ct matter in any form using the hanclmMe maIl< and ranging from represerjtetlonal tcabsfract, Deadline: November 7,2010. $35 1m lh_ entries. Contact; kshauck@Clatsopcc. edu, Website; www.aunafurelastorla com. Prospectus: h!tp;//Www.clatsopcc. edu}PRj201 O/JU Nlaunaturel.html
conferences
College Art Associat'ion 275 Sevenlh Ave
New York, New Yock
+1 212 691 1051
nyoffi ce@CD'llegear!.o<g
www.cOllegeart.org
CAA 99th Annual Conference end Ce~ienniaj Kick Off, New York, February 9 th rough 12, 2011: CAA hosts the world's largest an nual il athering of artists and arts p rol'essionals.lor lour days of events, panels, and exhibmons. Join Us lor a .ksynote address by eco-art pioneers NeWlon and Helen Mayer Hamson, a party atthe Metropolitan Museum 01 Art, and over 100.se sslons on topics as diverse as Henry Dargl'lr, The All oj Pranks, and the Msrlboroogh Mail to Gothic Replilse hta tion and Renaissance EJihibilion. Visit CollegElArt.mg
lor reg istranon and eV<;lnt i nlormation.
Re gistration opens October 4
spape available
GALLERY RENTAL-MADISON AVENUE in the iOs; Prestigious gaJlery space aV;;lilable for short or lo~g term rental.
C OI11pLJt8rized lig hong and hu midiflca· lion system. Arakawa pi cnre ·hanging system, security system and top of the
I ioo details. Email: gall@ryr8ntal@aol. com
To be included in Modern Painters pai d listings, contact Co nn ie Goon at +1 646 753 9090
art schools
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
11B·128 N.orth 610ad: Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19102 +1 215 97.27600
www.pala.e(lu
PAFAis !he nation's firs! school 01 fine arts and museum. wiih a unique program that emphasizes skill~ in drawing, artmskl ng techniques, and a thorough trsining in the line art disciplines of painting, soulpture, and WDrkS on pap8l:, its graduates go on to esteblsh su 0-. oessful careers as Ii nearnsts. Fearnn ng a I argeand diverse facu Ity of WDrki Flg arnsfs, first class faciimes, inc:fividual studios for advanceu students and
a location in the thriving art scene of Phila(lelphls, PAFA is devoted entire Iy to 1M training of ~ne Mists
artists wanted
Art Publl s he r Seeks Artists
20 1 0·201 j edmon of New An I mernationa! For brochure and entry lorm go 10' www.bookar!.colTI or send SASE to:
Book ArtPress, PO 90)( 57, Woodsfock, NY 1249B
call for artists
Amsterdam Whitney Gallerv
511 We'sl25lb Street
New York. NY 10001,
+1 2122559050 AmsterdamWhitney@aol.~om www.AmslerdamWhIlneyGallery.com Dear Artists, AMSTER.DAM WHITNEY OAUERY, known as The Most Beautiful Gallery in Chelsea, invi tss you to visit our distinguished museurn-cellber, Cont<;lmporar)i Masters' rnuseurn-curated exhibitions. You am welcome to submit y<lur Portfolio to Amsterdam Whitney Gallery
HOW IT IS // NEW MEDIA AND OlD
The Modern Painters guide to the evolving art world.
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