Women at the MoMA

Where Are All the Women? On MoMA’s identity politics. By Jerry Saltz

"Each fall since MoMA’s reopening in November 2004, I’ve gone to these two floors, counted the number of artworks on view, tallied the number of women artists included, and then pitched a fit in print. So many women artists had come to light over the past few decades that MoMA’s reopening in 2004 became an enormous opportunity to alter its monolithic version of modernism. There was ample evidence that MoMA wanted to do so in 2000, when the permanent collection was totally rethought. Even the usually conservative chief curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, admitted that previous MoMA installations had been “less real than ideal,” adding that the museum now wanted to investigate “multiple narratives.” It sounded as though the institution was on a slow but steady road to equal time."

More from New York Magazine. Plus, Is MoMA the worst offender? Tally of how women fare in six other art-world institutions.

Times

Three articles from the New York Times



A Broken City. A Tree. Evening.
Holland Cotter writes about Paul Chan’s production of “Waiting for Godot,” set in the badly damaged Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.

You Can’t Hold It, but You Can Own It
Tino Sehgal's art is completely immaterial; it can be bought and sold without involving any objects whatsoever. Mr. Sehgal creates what he calls “staged situations”: interactive experiences that may not even initially declare themselves as works of art.

Shh! It’s a Secret Kind of Outside Art "Since James Turrell bought the 400,000-year-old, two-mile-wide crater in 1979 and began moving tons of earth to carve out different kinds of viewing chambers and tunnels — making his art of light, sky and astronomical events instead of, say, paint and canvas — anticipation has been building. Writers have compared it to Stonehenge and the Mexican pyramids.

The question is when will it be finished. After early reports that it would be completed in the late 1980s, that date has been pushed back several times for financial and artistic reasons. Some suspect that the monumental work will be “finished” only with the artist’s death."

new New Museum

The New Museum moves to the Bowery

From New York Magazine

"I can’t remember there ever being more hope and goodwill toward an art institution than there is right now for the New Museum, as it moves into its new $64 million building on the Bowery. Partly this is because the New Museum, despite having been something of a local mascot over the 30 years since its founding, has never quite hit its stride; it has usually bounced between being audacious and being annoying. Partly it’s because other New York museums have been so uneven about contemporary art. MoMA is adrift, the Guggenheim’s leaders continue to make terrible decisions, and the Brooklyn Museum is a giant wasted opportunity. The general feeling is, this is the New Museum’s last best chance to get it right."

The New York Times also reviews the new building as well as the opening show, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century.

Art in Review

The New York Times reviews ....

Charles Ray at Matthew Marks Jan 19th

George Baselitz at Gagosian (24th Street) thru Dec 22nd

Adrian Paci at Peter Blum and Smith-Stewart

Duke Riley at Magnan Projects and Magnan Emrich Contemporary thru Dec 22nd

Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon

Self-Portrait of You + Me, After the Factory

Gagosian Gallery Through Dec. 15

"Unlike “24-Hour Psycho,” a signature work in which Douglas Gordon slowed down Hitchcock’s classic horror film to create a glacially paced but mesmerizing spectacle, here he resorts to splashier measures. Mr. Gordon has taken commercially available posters of Warhol’s icon paintings, burned them and mounted the remains on mirrors.

The initial impression is of a Warhol-besotted art school project that borrows heavily from the slash-and-burn aesthetic of punk. The cringe factor increases as the checklist describes the materials with apparently unironic pretension as “smoke and mirrors.” The grotesque leanings recall Dada collages or the work of Linder, a British punk and postpunk singer and artist who had a retrospective this summer at P.S. 1. But when you walk into the main gallery, painted and carpeted in black, and witness a few dozen of these charred Jackie, Elvis, Marilyn and Muhammad Ali images — as well as Warhol self-portraits — staring back at you with your reflection in the mirrors, the effect is oddly powerful, like a glimpse into the blaze as a contemporary Rome burns.

Does it matter that Mr. Gordon is a Scotsman? Not really. The question is whether, in borrowing from Warhol, Mr. Gordon adds enough to make the exchange worthwhile. Warhol’s icon paintings themselves functioned as burnt-out shells, holding up a mirror to the country at perhaps its most Narcissus-like moment. Mr. Gordon’s show feels gimmicky, leaning heavily on the tired legs of Warhol and punk subversiveness, but the installation does offer an over-the-top nihilist update." MARTHA SCHWENDENER, New York Times.

The Risk of Serious Injury or Death

"Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown’s Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while.

A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor. A sign at the door cautions, THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH; intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch their way around the hole. Fischer’s pit is titled You, and it took ten days to build, costing around $250,000 of Brown’s money. (Heaven only knows what his landlord thought of it.)"

Runs thru December 22nd

The New York Times also has a review here.