Chiharu Shiota

From New York Magazine.

"The Japan-born, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota has made a strong U.S. solo debut with Waiting, an entangled installation of wool thread and the charred remains of wooden chairs, at Goff + Rosenthal through March 10. Spider-Man-gone-bad in appearance, a bit haunting in feel, the work brings to mind cobwebby attics and the ruins of postwar Germany (another version is installed permanently in the Museum für Neue Kunst in Freiburg). Plus it’s one of those obviously labor-intensive pieces of art that make some viewers scratch their heads in wonder and say, how on earth? We asked Shiota to explain for us.

1. The Thread“In 1992, I used threads for the first time,” says Shiota. “I was studying painting then, and used the black wool for drawing in the air … If I weave something and it turns out to be ugly, twisted, or knotted, then such must have been my feelings when I was working.”

2. The LatticeworkIn terms of shape, Shiota finds triangles to be most effective. “A line is too clear,” she says, “too visible. Triangles upon triangles become complicated, hiding some things from the eye.” Her webs are not unlike the intricate rope systems used in Japanese gardening to shield trees from snowfall. “When I walk in the park and look at trees in the wintertime it always seems like my work,” she says. “It looks similar, but has a different meaning.”

3. The RelicsFor the German Waiting, the burned chairs came from a girls’ school built in 1902; these, which Shiota wanted to be “more neutral,” came from Bushwick’s Green Village Used Furniture & Clothing, a.k.a. Sidney’s. The concept harks back to a childhood memory of a neighbor’s burning house. “The chairs have no function, but their existence is stronger than before. They are still waiting for someone to sit down.”

4. The Corner SpaceUsing a corner of the exhibition space has prompted much art-world discussion in the past, as it’s considered difficult to manage. (An entire exhibition at Andrea Rosen last month was devoted to corners.) Though the Freiburg version of Waiting is positioned in the center of the gallery, Shiota chose a corner here to create the illusion of depth and to establish distance between work and audience.

5. The Charring“In Berlin, Chiharu just made a pile of chairs outside of her apartment, burned them in the street. It was no big deal,” says Mike Egan, director of operations at Goff + Rosenthal, who helped fabricate the piece. “If I tried to do that here, the FDNY would probably take me out.” Egan blackened this group of chairs safely away from the city, at a friend’s ranch upstate.

6. The Onsite WorkWorking with one assistant, Shiota spent two and a half days completing Waiting. Her process of gluing, knotting, and tacking down threads is often regarded as performative in nature. As Berlin curator Steffi Goldmann has said, “Perhaps her production is sustained by a desire to contain her own inner perturbation and her often overpowering anxiety.”

Barbara Bloom

Now at the International Center for Photography:

The Collections of Barbara Bloom thru May 4. Read the New York Times review here.

"Photographer, designer, and installation artist Barbara Bloom (b. 1951) has built her career out of questioning appearances, exploring the desire for possessions, and commenting on the act of collecting. This retrospective will explore all aspects of her oeuvre, and includes works from past multi-media installations and newly made pieces, as well as objects from her vast personal archives of ephemera and advertisements. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations and adds new elements, resisting the delineation between past and present in her work. She often integrates her photographs with furniture to create compelling scenes, as with the installation Greed (1988) from the ICP collection, comprised of a chair, an empty frame, and her own photograph of a museum gallery showing a guard in a chair. An example of one of her "collections" is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov's writings, with all the book covers redesigned by Bloom. This refers not only to herself as collector, and Nabokov as collector (he obsessively collected his own books), but herself as artist."

Cristina Lei Rodriguez

From Time Out: New York:

"If you didn’t get enough of the latest in funky new sculpture at the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” show, you’re in for a treat with Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s debut solo exhibit at Team Gallery. Her outsize assemblages employ seemingly discarded materials, just like Isa Genzken’s colorful, haphazard pieces—only Rodriguez uses artificial foliage and paint to evoke a tropical forest gone haywire.

“Overrun” is a series of treelike sculptures, the largest of which are 12 feet tall; they’re coated in several layers of vibrant epoxy paint and shiny plastic jewels, including hanging strands of gold chains. Another group, “Contained,” consists of six Plexiglas boxes installed on a wall, each filled with fake ferns and other plants. From a distance, the cases look like toxic terraria, but on closer inspection, it’s easy to identify their phony nature."

Read the rest here.

Four Reviews

Read here for reviews of the following four shows.

Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through March 1.

Richard Morris Hunt’s Architectural Drawings from the École des Beaux-Arts and the Gates of Central Park at the National Academy Museum through April 20.

Mark Bradford at Sikkema Jenkins & Company through Feb. 23.

Larry Poons at Jacobson Howard through Feb. 25.

Jasper Johns: Gray

February 5, 2008–May 4, 2008 at the Met.

"The exhibition examines the use of the color gray by the American artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) between the mid-1950s and the present. It brings together more than 120 paintings, reliefs, drawings, prints, and sculptures from American and international collections. Johns has worked in gray, at times to evoke a mood, at other times to evoke an intellectual rigor that results from his purging most color from his works. This exhibition is the first to focus on this important thematic and formal thread in Johns's career and includes some of the artist's best-known works, such as Canvas, Gray Target, Jubilee, 0 through 9, No, Diver, and The Dutch Wives, as well as works from the artist's Catenary series and new paintings never before exhibited.Accompanied by a catalogue."

View images from this exhibition. Read the New York Times profile and review.

Welcome to New Mexico. Now Create.

From the New York Times:

"These tourists had not come to New Mexico on vacation but on something of a creative mission: to develop site-specific projects for the 2008 Site Santa Fe Biennial, works that will be installed either in the exhibition’s 15,000-square-foot main gallery or around town this summer. Although the exhibition does not open until late June, the creative process began this month, as 22 artists from almost as many countries converged on Santa Fe for a week of reconnaissance.
They were here getting to know the Site team, one another and the region, complete with its picturesque architecture — one artist called it “Santa Fake” — and its multicultural history. (Only two artists in the show were not able to make the trip. They will fly out later this winter.)"

Read the rest here.

Archive Fever

From the New York Times

"After an autumn of large, expert, risk-free museum retrospectives, the time is right for a brain-pincher of a theme show, which is what “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” at the International Center of Photography is.

Organized by Okwui Enwezor, an adjunct curator at the center, it’s an exhibition in a style that’s out of fashion in our pro-luxe, anti-academic time, but that can still produce gems. The tough, somber little show “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” at the Museum of Modern Art last year mixed grand paintings with throwaway prints and demanded a commitment of time and attention from its audience. The payoff was an exhibition that read like breaking news and had the pull of a good documentary. It was the museum’s proudest offering of the season."

Read the rest here.

Artists include:

Organized by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art will present works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists' shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.

Artists include:
Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jef Geys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Craigie Horsfield, Lamia Joreige, Zoe Leonard, Sherrie Levine, Ilán Lieberman, Glenn Ligon, Robert Morris, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Lorna Simpson, Eyal Sivan, Vivan Sundaram, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbona, Andy Warhol.

Last Year at Marienbad

"WHEN Alain Resnais's gorgeous puzzle box of a movie, ''Last Year at Marienbad,'' [reopened at] Film Forum ..., New York cinephiles [may have found] themselves as mystified and delighted as their counterparts were when the film first reached Manhattan in 1962. ''Marienbad'' either does or does not tell the story of what may or may not be a love triangle that does or does not end violently, though the movie could also be presenting shards of a dream, a memory or a fantasy. What transpires among the three nameless principal characters is, the filmmakers have always maintained, up to you to figure out.

The visual style of ''Marienbad,'' with its use of glamorous, glazed-looking actors framed in mannerist poses within the glittering, implicitly decadent mirrored salons of a luxe European hotel, may no longer dazzle audiences that have seen it cribbed (and spoofed) by countless perfume ads and rock videos. But the movie's nightmarishly looping, repetitive semi-narrative, drenched in incantatory voice-over and toxically discordant organ music, is as disturbing as ever and retains its power to frustrate anybody who hopes to shake loose some answers after 93 minutes. The people who walked out (literally) of ''Inland Empire,''David Lynch's ''Marienbad''-influenced 2006 film, saying ''What was that all about?'' will find similar though more elegantly concise cause for discomfort here. "

Read the rest here.

Accidental Modernism

Diana Thater at David Zwirner gallery thru February 9th.

" For her fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Diana Thater has created two room-size installations that examine the intangible and dimensionless relationship between humans and the natural world through the ancient art of falconry. Emerging with the birth of civilizations - with origins in the Middle East and Central Asia, hunting with trained birds of prey flourished in the courts of medieval Western Europe and Great Britain, carrying with it enormous cultural and social capital. Divorced from its symbolic articulation of social and political power, the practice survives today among a small yet dedicated population of falconers. Committed to working within local environments, Thater invited fifteen California falconers to a stone amphitheater in the Santa Monica Mountains, where she documented the diverse and personal bonds between the falconers and their individual birds. Filming from above, the crane-operated camera surveys the arena while the avian participants remain grounded. Along with this footage, Thater will project large-scale still images of the sun and moon. Just as expectations of movement are reversed with the flying camera and stationary birds, Thater defies color conventions by tinting the sun blue and the moon gold. "

Read "The Ritual of Chess, a Decoder of Life" here.

Emerging

From New York Magazine:

"One of the good things about the supposedly evil art boom—setting aside for the moment the notion that it may be destabilizing right now— is that underknown mid-career artists are getting second chances at recognition. In November, Mary Heilmann, who is 67 and whose work has always been respected but never A-listed, scored the covers of Artforum and Art in America simultaneously. Today, she’s the subject of a traveling retrospective, selling paintings for upwards of $200,000. Amy Sillman, 52, made the cover of Artforum last February, and her prices have reached $85,000. After decades of neglect, Marilyn Minter, now 59, not only ended up in the last Whitney Biennial; her work was featured on the cover of that show’s catalogue, and her paintings now sell for more than $130,000. Recent seasons have seen the reemergence of Robert Bechtle, Olivier Mosset, and Michael Smith, all of whom, along with Heilmann, will be in this spring’s Whitney Biennial." read the rest here.

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat at Barbara Gladstone Gallery thru February 23.

"In adapting the magical realism of Parsipur’s fantastic retelling of the 1953 coup d’etat in which the CIA reinstalled the Shah of Iran, Neshat continues a project she began in 2003. Neshat dissects the individual narrative threads of Parsipur’s interwoven tale of five Iranian women as they each seek freedom from their oppressive lives. Their struggle parallels that of their nation, a country in crisis fighting for a sense of independence from foreign forces. Neshat’s project is two-pronged, consisting of a feature length film as well as a series of video installations exploring the psychologies of the five main female characters."

Time Out: New York reviews it here.