Artists Space

Four Shows thru May 12 2007 Opening Reception: Thursday March 30, 6-8pm

MAIN SPACE:
KIOSK (XIX) – Modes of Multiplication
Kiosk is a traveling archive of independent publication projects on contemporary art which is continually growing and changing and which currently comprises approximately 360 publishers, periodicals, zines, video and audio projects –– altogether around 5,300 publications.
Curated by Christoph Keller

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PROJECT SPACE: REALLIFE 1979-1990
Curated by Kate Fowle

REALLIFE Magazine: 1979-1990
When Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan started REALLIFE Magazine in 1979, they wanted to make a publication that would be "by and about artists." The magazine’s first issue was made possible by an NEA grant in art criticism, awarded to Lawson through Artists Space. During the 1980s, REALLIFE Magazine attentively addressed current art and its influences while continuously speculating about culture and questioning politics.
Curated by Kate Fowle, REALLIFE Magazine: 1979-1990 looks at the decade through the lens of this publication and its extraordinary roster of contributors—including Richard Baim, Eric Bogosian, Glen Branca, Critical Art Ensemble, Jamie Davidovich, Jessica Diamond, Mark Dion + Jason Simon, Jack Goldstein, Kim Gordon, Group Material, David Hammons, Michael Hurson, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Sol Lewitt, Robert Longo, Ken Lum, Allan McCollum, Paul McMahon, Matt Mullican, Adrian Piper, Richard Prince, David Robbins, John Roberts, Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith and James Welling.

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PROJECT SPACE: Hunter Reynolds Patina du Prey's Memorial Dress: 1993 to 2007
Curated by Cay-Sophie Rabinowitz and Christian Rattemeyer

Hunter Reynolds is a visual artist and AIDS activist. He was a an early member of ACT UP, and in 1989 co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group of ACT-UP to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts. For over twenty years, Reynolds has been using photography, performances, and installations to express his experience as an HIV-positive gay man living in the age of AIDS. Reynolds’ works address issues of gender identity, political, social, and sexual histories, mourning and loss, survival, hope and healing.
For his project space at Artists Space, Reynolds presents Patina du Prey’s Memorial Dress, a black ball gown onto which the names of thousands of AIDS victims are printed in gold. The dress stands on a stage rotating to music composed by Edmund Campion, while viewers are invited to write comments and the names of lost friends and loved ones into a memorial book.
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CAMPARI PROJECT SPACE:

Richard Massey Caution: Five hungry Soviet cows are in the garden
Curated by Christian Rattemeyer

For many years, Miami-based graphic designer Richard Massey has been researching the re-use of Modernism’s most iconic expressions for design applications. One notable example is his design for Cabinet Magazine’s logo, which is derived from the fragmented elements and ligatures of an early 20th century stencil often used in Le Corbusier’s architectural drawings and manifestoes.
In his new project at Artists Space—Caution: Five hungry Soviet cows are in the garden—Massey explores ideologies of neutrality in modernist type design.

Short Reviews

Nan Goldin at Matthew Marks (thru April 14), Josiah McElheny at the MoMA (thru April 9). Michael Landy at Alexander and Bonin (thru March 31), Jennifer Nocon at Tracy Williams Ltd. (thru April 21) and Leo Villareal at Gering & Lopez (thru April 28) are all reviewed here.

Global Feminisms

"In celebration of the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum presents Global Feminisms (thru July 1st), the first international exhibition exclusively dedicated to feminist art from 1990 to the present. The show consists of work by approximately eighty women artists from around the world and includes work in all media—painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, and performance. Its goal is not only to showcase a large sampling of contemporary feminist art from a global perspective but also to move beyond the specifically Western brand of feminism that has been perceived as the dominant voice of feminist and artistic practice since the early 1970s.This exhibition is arranged thematically and features the work of important emerging and mid-career artists."

Roberta Smith has a review.

Added April 23rd:

Peter Schjeldahl on "Global Feminisms"

Mark Stevens on The History of Herstory

Drawing Center

Two exhibitions at the Drawing Center.

Levity: Selections Spring 2007 (thru March 31st)
Esteban Alvarez, Ingólfur Arnarsson, Norma-Jean Bothmer, Anne Daems, Ivana Franke, Bill Gerhard, Kate Joranson, Irene Kopelman, Jiha Moon, Mio Olsson, Michelle Oosterbaan, Lisa Perez, Eduardo Santiere, and Rachel Perry Welty.

Yona Friedman: About Cities (thru April 7, 2007)
"Visionary architect and artist Yona Friedman is one of the most important and influential figures working in the fields of sustainable and self-initiated architecture. For his first U.S. solo exhibition, Friedman will present a spatial collage of his series of drawings from 1980, “A Better Life in Towns,” as well as re-workings of his noted “Spatial City” drawings from 1958. Utilizing simple, everyday materials, Friedman will create an installation in the Drawing Room in collaboration with Normal Architecture Office that foregrounds his concerns with flexible, utilitarian, and portable design."

Clyfford Still

Unfurling the Hidden Work of a Lifetime recounts the temporay viewing of Clyfford Still's estate.

"2,393 works [of Clyfford Still]— [have] been hidden from public view for decades. Most of it has never been seen by the public at all, thanks to the fierce privacy and bilious contempt for the art world of its creator, the Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, who died in 1980 at 75. Despite the relative obscurity of the work, art experts estimate that the collection could fetch more than $1 billion if it ever comes to market, which it probably never will.
The works in question make up the entire estate of this artist. He left behind a one-page will, nearly 95 percent of the work he ever made (he sold or gave away only 150 pieces in his lifetime) and a widow determined to follow his final testament to the letter. The demands were these: His estate could be bequeathed only to an American city, one that would build a museum to serve as a temple to his art and to nothing else. No works could ever be sold. No other artist could ever show a single piece alongside his. All Clyfford Still, all the time."

Jeff Wall

The Jeff Wall retrospective (at the MoMA thru May 14th, 2007) produces Arthur Lubow's lengthy article The Luminist and Mark Stevens' review from New York Magazine.

Gordan Matta-Clark

The Whitney exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark is on view thru June 3, 2007. "During the brief but highly productive ten years that he worked as an artist, and even more so since his death, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) has exerted a powerful influence on artists and architects who know his work. This retrospective will bring together the breadth of his practice to reveal the unique beauty and radical nature of his punnings, plans, performances, and interventions evident in the many media in which he worked: the sculptural objects (most notably from building cuts), drawings, films, photographs, notebooks, and documentary material."

Michael Kimmelman provides a review while Karen Rosenberg examines Gordon Matta-Clark’s "lost public art."

Plato

In Plato's Retreat, Mark Stevens investigates Rachel Whiteread's installation Untitled (Paperbacks) (on view at the MoMA thru April 9, 2007) and Family Pictures (featuring the work of Janine Antoni, Patty Chang, Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, Nathalie Djurberg, Anna Gaskell, Nan Goldin, Loretta Lux, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tracey Moffatt, Catherine Opie, Collier Schorr, Thomas Struth, Hellen van Meene, and Gillian Wearing) at the Guggenheim thru April 16th.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson Rendered is at Glyndor Gallery in the Bronx thru May 25th. Martha Schwender has a review.

This exhibition focuses on Emily Dickinson’s interest in gardening and observations about nature through her writing with works by Francis Cape, Lesley Dill, Peter Edlund, Valerie Hammond, Brece Honeycutt, Stacy Levy, Miranda Maher, Meridith McNeal, and Marina Zurkow.

Wack! on its way to PS1

Holland Cotter reviews "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles thru July 16th. It comes to PS1 in Queens next year.

Christian Moeller

Big Brother Armed With a Spotlight

A robot named Mojo will beam a spotlight on strollers in San Pedro later this month, whether they like it or not. What originated as a drawing titled “Curious Lightpost,” sketched by the artist Christian Moeller on a scrap of tracing paper in 2004, has evolved into an interactive sculpture that will soon go live in this harbor area 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

Why Art Is – and Is Not – the New Fashion

From the New York Times Magazine:

Anyone who would be so bold as to call attention to the fashionableness of contemporary art had better be prepared to duck an angry barrage of paintbrushes. (And anyone who would deny it should perhaps get in line now for a ticket to this weekend's Armory show on New York's Pier 94.) Certainly, the approach on the following pages — which includes a survey of the suddenly hot Chinese art scene, an intimate profile of the art instigator Francesca von Habsburg and a look inside a house designed to accommodate the life and work of a prominent art collector — is as deep as it is superficial. Context is all. Both art and fashion speak in a densely encoded visual language to a certain status, knowledge and taste. Roughly translated, that means an elitism that makes those who know the difference between, say, James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson (or, for that matter, between Prada and Lanvin) feel secure in their defense of social Darwinism. But the point that is not to be glossed over here is that like fashion, contemporary art has infiltrated all aspects of life, influencing the ways we travel, spend our time and increasingly our money, and the way we organize our surroundings. And if we can relax for a moment, we might find how much pleasure it brings. This thing we like to think of as art has as much to do with work hanging on a wall in a museum as fashion does with clothes on models walking down a runway. Which is to say everything and nothing. But how much more interesting to encounter it as it lives and breathes in its natural habitat -- Alix Browne

Three articles:

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
The new status symbol in the West is a work of art from the East.

We Are Not a Muse
Francesca von Habsburg did not become the art world's leading lady simply by sitting pretty.

Cool and Collected
In this modern Baltimore house, art and life find a happy medium.

Quick

Closed Circuit: Video and New Media at the Metropolitan thru 4/29.



Gordan Matta-Clark retrospective at the Whitney thru 6/3.



Joseph Beuys at Zwirner and Wirth thru 3/31.



Corban Walker at PaceWildenstein thru 3/10.





Gillian Wearing at Andrea Rosen thru 3/10.






Charles Miller at Think Tank 3 thru 3/15.

Stuff

A New York Times article about "... a growing number of private collectors have been opening all manner of exhibition sites — from casual warehouse spaces to full-fledged museums — to show off their holdings and assert their aesthetic views, often subsidized by enviable tax benefits. The trend has been hastened by an enormous flow of disposable income and an insatiable public interest in art (not to mention keeping up with the Joneses). And then there are the practical considerations: given that so many artists are now working on an outsize scale — room-size installations or attention-demanding video art — even a mansion doesn’t really cut it as an exhibition space."

Not For Sale

“Not for Sale" is an exhibition at P.S. 1 (thru 4/16) that is made up entirely of works that well-known artists have created over the years and then, for a variety of reasons, have decided they will not sell, no matter the price. The New York Times has a review here.

The artists in the exhibition are: Janine Antoni, John Baldessari, Jennifer Bartlett, Lynda Benglis, Cecily Brown, Chris Burden, Janet Cardiff, Christo, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, Luis Gispert, Peter Halley, Tim Hawkinson, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Byron Kim, Christopher Knowles, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler, Glenn Ligon, Maya Lin, Shirin Neshat, Richard Nonas, Dennis Oppenheim, Ellen Phelan, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, David Reed, Matthew Ritchie, Ed Ruscha, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Dana Schutz, Joel Shapiro, Judith Shea, Stephen Shore, James Siena, Shahzia Sikander, Mark di Suvero, Sarah Sze, Richard Tuttle, Lawrence Weiner, John Wesley, Fred Wilson, Robert Wilson, and Jackie Winsor.

More Ramirez

Another review (this time the Village Voice) of Martin Ramirez's exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum thru April 29th

More about Ramirez in this previous post.

Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1992-2007 runs thru April 1st at the Yale Center for British Art.

Michael Kimmelman has a review.

Plumb Rhapsody Horizontal

Lisa Hoke's "Rhapsody of Chaos" at Elizabeth Harris thru 3/10

Anthony Mccall's "You and Me Horizontal" at Sean Kelly thru 3/17.

Shannon Plumb at Sara Meltzer thru 3/17

Design

Design Life Now: National Triennial 2006 at the Cooper-Hewitt thru July 29th.

the 2006 Triennial presents experimental projects, emerging ideas, major buildings, and new products and media created by 87 designers and firms from 2003 to 2006. The exhibition features work by designers of any nationality who are producing work in the U.S. as well as American-born designers who are working abroad. They are practicing across numerous creative fields, including architecture, products, landscapes, interiors, graphics, film, animation, interactive media, fashion, robotics, and more.

The website features a blog, podcasts and interviews.

Hammons Fur

David Hammons at L&M Arts thru 3/10.

From the Village Voice " Like an ostentatiously spare boutique, L&M's front gallery is a desert of dark parquet floors and understated molding leading to a large showroom where five fur coats are on display; a lonely sixth dominates an elegant upstairs chamber. But something is desperately wrong: The backs of these luxurious raiment have been splattered with paint, save for the solitary chinchilla, which has been burned (imbuing the second floor with a faint, charnel-house stench). In an age when man-made fabrics keep Everest climbers toasty, fur coats rank with penthouses, and Maseratis as talismans of conspicuous wealth. Only "fine" art, devoid of the covering excuse of providing warmth, shelter, or transport, is a more outré certification of one's net worth. But while Matisse offered his sumptuous canvases as easy chairs for the tired "brain-worker," Hammons gives today's information class no comfort—his "paintings" (viscerally beautiful blobs of yellow on black mink, pink splatters on gray wolf, charred brown clots against black and white chinchilla) are draped over threadbare, stained, and battered dress dummies. As usual, Hammons is hammering away at the frontiers of perception, thrilling the eyes but challenging the brain and gut as well. You'll leave the gallery as flummoxed as a Fifth Avenue matron whose sable has just been vandalized by PETA guerrillas."