| |
|
Summer in the City. It's a chance for galleries to show some odd and off the wall work that might not have a broad appeal, but just might take off as well. Do you feel the need to gaze at a yellowing or slightly creased xerox of the typewritten directions for a conceptual performance? THIS is your time, especially if you speak Czech or Georgian or Esperanto. In fact I'll go as far to say that all the readers of this column owe me big this time around, because I had to read all of the curator statements and press releases twice to make sense of them.
There are a whole lot of historic shows on display, mini-retrospectives, and the life's work of some academic who probably isn't a hit at dinner parties: I had never heard of the Tbilisi Avant-Garde, but there it is at Casey Kaplan! There are a few summer blockbusters - Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, James Ensor at MoMA and Yinka Shonibare at The Brooklyn Museum. A few very clever themed shows are worth seeing: White Noise at James Cohan, a twenty-year gallery retrospective at Nicole Klagsbrun, and The Young and the Restless: Part 2 at Michael Steinberg. Also, start listening to Art International Radio, Alanna Heiss's new station on the internet that streams amazing music and conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians.
Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare MBE
Brooklyn Museum
through September 20
I still enjoy Shonibare's photographs the most of all his work. The games he plays by positioning himself as the other in Victorian England, a bizarre black dandy in the midst of Oscar Wilde and Dickensian narratives, and then, by the very BBCesque drama appearance of the images, obviously reflecting it back on contemporary culture. It passes judgement on the largely one-sided "historical" dramas of which we're all so very fond. The headless mannequins garbed in African textiles are a lot blunter and disturbing, but are beautiful expressions of the colonialist foundations of western culture.
Your Gold Teeth
Marianne Boesky
Through August 15
This is a fantastic mish-mash of artworks, arranged as objects that have a common, if very tenuous thread running between then. The curator, Todd Levin, makes some claim to the elevation of craft above the contemporary atmosphere of sloppy and lazy art. While I don't entirely disagree with him (I think he has it backwards - most things have gotten too slick), I can see where he's coming from. There's something very hand-made about all the works on display - you can see the artists in the work. It is a very eccentric and atypical curation of some very well-known artists, from Joseph Cornell to Mary Heilmann and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Yoko Ono. You probably won't get to see all these people together again.
Zarina Hashmi
Zarina Hashmi: The Ten Thousand Things
Luhring Augustine
through July 31
Hashmi's personal yet minimalist works require ample time for meditation and reflection. She has an architectural sensibility for simplicity and diagram, but invokes it with a quiet and sweet longing. In an art scene obsessed with size and magnitude, she has the courage to maintain a human scale to her work that mirrors the idea behind the art - of her travels through India, her fascination with her native tongue, Urdu, and with the transience of life. It is also a pleasure to see an artist working in the medium of woodblock printing, yet seeming fully a part of contemporary art currents.
Captain Nandor Andrasovits
The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River
Peter Forgacs
The Jewish Museum
Through August 2
Seems that with all these brainy shows on right now, it sometimes becomes more about the curator than the art, about the theme rather than the images. Though that can be dangerous and riddled with pitfalls, sometimes the result is exactly what good curation (or in this case good documentary filmmaking) is about. Some coincidences seem pointless, others are dripping with meaning. This installation at the Jewish Museum focuses on a ship's captain, Nandor Andrasovits, and a river, the Danube, and follows two groups of refugees, one set Jewish, running from the Germans, the other set Germans running from the Russians, as they traverse the Danube on Captain Andrasovits' boat. Probably the most spectacular coincidence of all was that the Captain was an amateur filmmaker himself, and captured all of the irony and tragedy he experienced firsthand, and, in the hands of Peter Forgacs and The Labyrinth Project, the result is sublime.
Vito Acconci
Works on View
Jack Shainman Gallery
Through August 7
I remember reading with jaw-dropping disbelief the description of Vito Acconci's project where he pretends to be a woman by pushing his penis between his legs, and then gets a female assistant to put it in her mouth from behind. Jack Shainman has the photographs of Acconci's project, and yes he actually did do that, and it's in a gallery, so it's art, I guess. Lee Lozano's narrative description of a performance piece involving smoking up and remaining high for thirty days is by far the most entertaining work in the show; equally entertaining is the disappointment involved with the sister performance in which Lozano refrained from smoking up for the thirty days following the initial piece. Talk about sacrifice!
The Thousand and One Nights
Postmasters
Through August 8
This thoughtful exhibition highlights the fact that anyone who thinks that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a simple black and white, right/wrong situation is a moron. Regardless of what side of the fence you fall on, the art in this exhibition - photographs, video, and print - express the sheer weight of the burden of living in a war-torn region, in which a simple straightforward solution will probably never be possible. Sagacious is a word that would describe the work, and we need more of this stuff rather than all the polemical crap that's popular nowadays. Featuring work by Taysir Batniji, Hannah Farah-Kufer Bir'im, Shadi Habib Allah, Shuruq Harb, Jumana Manna, and Sharif Waked.
As Long as It Lasts
Marian Goodman Gallery
through August 28
In line with the mostly introspective and depressing nature of the shows on this summer (try not to go gallery hopping on an overcast day - you may end up hanging yourself) Tom Eccles has curated a group show pondering the transience and impermanence of life and the immanence of death. The title is based on a work by Lawrence Weiner. Some works in the show, like the empty Bic pen by Maurizio Cattelan , or "Nummer Acht; everything is going to be allright," in which the artist Guido Van der Werve is followed at dangerously close proximity by a massive ice-breaking ship, are witty, and sort of comforting versions of the vanitas genre. Others like the Kentridge "Tide Table" are poetic and tragic, while Oliver Babin's "Perfect day" explores reincarnation on the level of an artwork itself and is uplifting. Other artists featured in the exhibition are Tacita Dean, Pawel Althamer, Thomas Struth, Pierre Huyghe's, Johanna Billing, Artur Zmijewski, Lars Laumann, Gabriel Orozco and Gerhard Richter.
Dorothy Iannone
Dorothy Iannone
Anton Kern Gallery
through August 14
Dorothy Iannone's paintings/drawings have a boundless energy that is infectious. Yes, they are erotic and have titles that might figure pretty handily in the letters section of Hustler, but they are so cheerful and upbeat, they are very far from being "dirty" or obscene. Iannone's cheerful approach to sexuality is a high point in what generally tends to be the incredibly boring and unarousing world of erotic art. The singing piece in the corner is my favourite.
Jiri Kovanda
Jiri Kovanda
Andrew Kreps Gallery
Wallspace Gallery
Through August 14
Much of the Kovanda exhibition at Andrew Kreps is concerned with performance actions which took place in the 60s and 70s. It's asking a lot to expect many of the visitors who weren't even born then to stare at small black and white photographs of a man waiting for the phone to ring or bumping into passersby, and gain some greater understanding of the art, but if you take the time it is worth it. For one thing, the later works - Kovanda's singular take on the Duchampian readymade - explain the earlier works in a very tangential but meaningful way. The idea of finding something that is there already, be it an assemblage of people, things or ideas, and creating a work of art from that raw material, strikes right at the heart of conceptual art, and is what makes Kovanda so brilliant.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through August 16
I saw Sacha Baron Cohen's 'Bruno' recently, so let's talk about pain and alienation. It may seem that Cohen's movie marks some kind of milestone in the general liberation of society - it may seem that now certain things are acceptable to society and we can even laugh at them, but it's largely superficial. Go look at Francis Bacon if you want to understand what pain and alienation are, and that they still exist and are everywhere. Bacon is a great painter. He questions the medium as much as he pours out his own demons and desires. My father hates Bacon, he thinks that the baboon in the tree is a one-liner, a very shallow assessment of the human condition. I think it's important to be reminded that for all the art we make, there is a lot more blood and bared teeth to humanity than creativity. Every one of his portraits is two-faced, the onlookers at his crucifixions are harpies and vultures, not mourners. He is unrelenting in his brutality but he reminds us how horrible it was, and can still be, to be outside the norm. |
| |
)
Will Corwin is an artist and curator from New York City, recently based in Beijing doing a residency with the Red Gate Gallery. He has curated visual art exhibitions for the AugustArt art festival in New York and the Flushing Town Hall in Queens, a Smithsonian Affiliate. He has shown at the LaMama Gallery in NYC, Gallery Aferro in Newark, and has done site-specific projects with chashama and the Theater for the New City in New York, The Taipei Artists Village, Taipei, and Red Gate Gallery and the Pickled Art Center in Beijing. He is also involved with Smartspace NYC. He currently teaches with the Meet the Met program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. |
| |
| Published on 18-07-2009 |
|
|
| |
| click here to go back to magazine home | click here to post a comment on this entry
|
|
|
