Whitney Sampler

The 2008 Biennial, the seventy-fourth in the series of Whitney Annual and Biennial exhibitions held since 1932, presents eighty-one artists working at a time when art production is above all characterized by heterogeneity and dispersal. However, within the enormously differentiated field that we (perhaps absurdly) continue to yoke under the term “contemporary art,” certain prevalent modes of working and thematic concerns are particularly germane to the moment.

Many of the projects presented in the exhibition explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political, and economic contexts, often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market. Recurring concerns involve a nuanced investigation of social, domestic, and public space and its translation into form—primarily sculptural, but also photographic and cinematic. Many artists reconcile rigorous formal and conceptual underpinnings with personal narratives or historical references. While numerous works demonstrate an explicit or implicit engagement with art history, particularly the legacy of modernism, as well as a pronounced interest in questioning the staging and display of art, others chart the topography and architecture of the decentralized American city and take inspiration from postindustrial landscapes and urban decay. Using humble or austere materials or employing calculated messiness or modes of deconstruction, they present works distinguished by their poetic sensibility as they discover pockets of beauty in sometimes unexpected places.

There is an evident trend toward creating work of an ephemeral, event-based character, in the form of music and other performance, movement workshops, radio broadcasts, publishing projects, community-based activities, film screenings, culinary gatherings, or lectures. Such projects do not stand in opposition to institutions; rather, considering each of these multiple platforms equally important, artists show objects in the museum or gallery even as they seek ways to complicate and transcend its parameters. In this spirit, from March 6–23 the 2008 Biennial continues at Park Avenue Armory with an extensive program of events and performances. (Including a 26 minute video by Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge).

Across media, much work in this year’s Biennial concerns politics although its mode of address is often oblique or allegorical. Persistence, belief, and a desire to locate meaning threads through these many modes and activities rooted in what feels like a transitional moment of history. Rather than positing a definitive answer or approach, these artists exhibit instead a passion for the search, positioned in the immediate reality of our uncertain sociopolitical times.

The New York Times Review

Bert Rodriguez's Therapy installation (For five hours a day, until the end of the Biennial at the armory on March 23, Mr. Rodriguez is seeing patients inside his box at the armory, an installation called “In the Beginning... .”)

Julia Meltzer and David Thorne Video-sampling Syria

From New York Magazine The Facebook Biennial: How social networks have taken over this year’s Whitney festivities.

Cai Gou-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang, I Want To Believe at the Guggenheim thru May 28th.

New York Times review

Time Out: New York review

"CAI GUO-QIANG has literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time. Drawing freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, extraterrestrial observations, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, gunpowder-related technology, Chinese medicine, and methods of terrorist violence, Cai’s art is a form of social energy, constantly mutable, linking what he refers to as “the seen and unseen worlds.” This retrospective presents the full spectrum of the artist’s protean, multimedia art in all its conceptual complexity.

Born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, Cai studied stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute. In the 1980s he emerged as a member of the burgeoning experimental art world of China’s postreform era. After moving to Japan in 1986, Cai tapped into a rich vein of international 20th-century art and critical thought. While living there, he mastered the use of gunpowder to create his signature gunpowder drawings and the related outdoor explosion events. These practices integrate science and art in a process of creative destruction and reflect Cai’s philosophy that conflict and transformation are interdependent conditions of life, and hence art. At once intuitive and analytical, his gunpowder drawings and explosion events are intrepid, conceptual, site specific, ephemeral, time based, and interactive—performance art with a new matrix of cultural meaning.

Cai has lived in New York since 1995. While increasing his participation in the global art system of biennials, public celebrations, and museum exhibitions around the world, Cai’s social projects engage local communities to produce art events in remote, nonart sites like military bunkers, a socialist utopianism influenced by Cai’s experience growing up in Mao Zedong’s Red China and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. His recent work has expanded to include large-scale installations, allegorical and sculptural, that recuperate signs and symbols of Chinese culture and expose the dialectics of local history and globalization.

Designed by the artist as a site-specific installation, the Guggenheim’s exhibition presents art as a process that unfolds in time and space, dealing with ideas of transformation, expenditure of materials, and connectivity. The structure of Cai’s art forms are inherently unstable, but his social idealism characterizes all change, however violent, as carrying the seeds of positive creation. Subverting tropes such as East versus West, traditional versus contemporary, center versus periphery, Cai offers a new cultural paradigm for the art of a global age and expands the meaning of the phrase “I want to believe.”

Design and the Elastic Mind

Design and the Elastic Mind runs at the MoMA thru May 12, 2008

View the online exhibition

Pre- and post-visit materials for educators

View all related events

New York Times Review

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user's interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices.

Three

Jacob Lawrence at DC Moore Gallery thru March 22nd

Eleanor Antin at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts thru March 15th

Joy Garnett at Winkleman Gallery thru March 15th

NYT reviews Kahlo show at PMA

"PHILADELPHIA — You really should come down, a friend e-mailed me this summer from Mexico City. She meant, come down for the Frida Kahlo centennial, with a retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and displays of memorabilia at Casa Azul, the Blue House, Kahlo’s home. You should come, she wrote, not just for the art, which looks fabulous, but for the place, the people.

Tens of thousands of Mexicans, young and old, rich and poor, had been standing in line for hours to get a glimpse of Kahlo’s paintings and her personal relics: her snapshots, her brushes, her ashes, the steel orthopedic corsets she wore under her peasant blouses and skirts to hold a wrecked body together.

The celebration, one gathers, was not the usual Fridamaniacal crush. It was more a fiesta, a devotional jubilee, an hommage to a Mexican saint in the city where she was born in 1907 and died in 1954. I couldn’t make the trip, but suspect that the essential Kahlo experience is the same anywhere. Through her art, we travel her life, a shining path of high Modernist adventure and a Via Crucis of physical pain, political passion and amorous torment. Basically, she felt what we all feel, only hugely, terribly. This is what makes her the people’s artist she is. And what makes her, to those who don’t get her extremist vibe, a romantic cliché.

The lines are also long for “Frida Kahlo” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a distillation of the centennial show, with 42 of Kahlo’s small number of surviving paintings and a slew of photographs. As surveys go, it’s modest and compact, but for that reason quickly absorbed. That’s the way Kahlo enters your system, fast, with a jolt, an effect as unnerving, and even repellent, as it is pleasurable.

Organized by the Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera and by Elizabeth Carpenter of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the show opens with a single painting, “Self-Portrait With Monkeys” (1943). Kahlo presents herself in half-length, her now-mythical attributes precisely detailed: the handlebar eyebrows, the faint mustache, the dark hair pulled up in a sculptural pile. She’s coolly self-contained, but she has company: a quartet of puckish monkeys. One hugs her neck; another tugs at her blouse, as if feeling for a breast. She is unperturbed. She is a nature deity, mistress of beasts; these creatures are her subjects and children. They are also her equals, her friends. She is one of them." Read the rest here.

Barbara T Smith

From the press release

Barbara T. Smith on view through March 21, 2008

Maccarone Gallery is pleased to present, Barbara T. Smith, an exhibition of two not-widely-shown early works considered masterpieces of those years. Smith has become critically known within the trajectory and forefront of West Coast performance art of the late 1960's and early 1970's, and as a sustained contributor to the feminist movement. The projects on view at maccarone hold true to a rigorous practice based on the notion of experience and interaction, pioneering transitional works that broke with traditional form. As Smith's marriage and home life began to splinter in the 1960s, she transitioned to a lifestyle consumed by art making. Autobiography and the creation of community via relations with her audience and peers became vital to Smith's art, exploring themes of the body, ritual, nurturing, sexuality, female desire, spiritual transformation, love and death. This operative handling of the body and personal storytelling in contemporary art was an early challenge to the conventional patriarchal narrative.

The Black Paintings, a series from 1965 of primarily black surfaces under 3/8 inch-glass, each generate a striking reflection of the individual situated before its void. Faint minimalist shapes can be detected on each facade; a red triangle on the vertical edge or a white dot floating in space for example. By offering painting as mirror, Smith physically forces viewer into self-reflection, thus mandating an exploratory confrontation with the work and the locus of the art experience. In contrast to the archetypal act of the gaze, the mirror effect becomes so powerful that its renderings hinder access to the painting itself. In these "performative surfaces" the viewer concurrently acts as both a figure on the picture plane and one who is part of the surrounding environment.

Situated in the gallery's center is Smith's existing edition of the monumental sculptural project Field Piece, 1968/72, the artist's visualization of a giant field of grass. This highly labor-intensive sculpture in today's world appears industrially-made, however Smith and her team completed every element by hand. A sequence of tall, hollow grass blades made from colorful translucent resin function as an implication of infinity. If The Black Paintings contend with mental containment then Field Piece, in its assertion of an unbounded physical experience, performs in direct conceptual opposition. As the viewer moves through the work, each blade illuminates. Calling to mind Smith's performative actions using her own body as medium, with Field Piece the viewer is instantaneously the activator, affecting their surroundings and triggering light with their very presence. With this process Smith calls upon the viewer to participate and assume responsibility for his or her own art experience, and succumb to human vulnerability. The artist in this manner achieves one the most cherished and often unattainable 1960's utopian ideals; in Field Piece everyone is treated equal.

Barbara T. Smith studied painting, art history and religion as an undergraduate at Pomona College, and she received her MFA from University of California, Irvine in 1971 where she and fellow artists founded the notorious experimental gallery called F-Space. Recent exhibitions include "Barbara Smith" at The Box gallery Los Angeles (2006), "The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith", a retrospective shown at the Pomona College Museum of Art (2005), as well as several group exhibitions currently including "Art Since the 1960s: California Experiments" at the Orange County Museum of Art, "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" PS1 Contemporary Art Center, now on view thru May, 2008.

Amy Cutler

Amy Cutler Alterations at Leslie Tonkonow through April 5th

The enigmatic imagery of Amy Cutler’s paintings and drawings is transformed into three dimensions in her first major work of sculpture. Alterations consists of 120 cast and painted female figures placed on top of and around a long wooden table.

The figures placed along the perimeter of the tabletop were cast wearing corduroy dresses and clogs, sitting on round stools wrapped with braided hair, with their arms extended in front of them. A complex web of strings wrapped around their arms connects each sculpture to a corresponding unraveling figure on the floor. These hydrocal casts feature the exquisite detail characteristic of all of Amy Cutler's work. Having painted the individual faces in gouache, Cutler renders each with a separate character and expression. A solitary lamp hanging from the ceiling illuminates the emotional theater in this poignant interplay of shadow and form.

Alterations was commissioned by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and exhibited there from July 3 through September 10, 2007. The work will enter the museum’s permanent collection at the close of this special New York presentation. Four unique hand-colored lithographs, created for the installation in Spain, will also be on view.

The New York Times review at the bottom of this page.

Be Kind, Rewind...for real...thru March 22nd.

"Michel Gondry’s current exhibition at Deitch Projects in SoHo is more than an extravagant promotion for the new movie he wrote and directed, “Be Kind Rewind.” This project, also called “Be Kind Rewind,” is a serious but flawed effort to carry over into the real world the film’s idealistic, anti-commercial fantasy of do-it-yourself creativity.

In the film, ... a couple of dopey fellows played by Mos Def and Jack Black create their own wacky remakes of mainstream movies. (The tapes in the neighborhood video store, where Mos Def’s character is temporarily in charge, have been erased by the magnetized body of Mr. Black’s character.) Naturally, their remakes turn out to be a hit with the local customers.

For Deitch Projects, Mr. Gondry has built a system in which people can make their own communal movies in the cheerfully amateurish style personified by his cinematic heroes. In the gallery’s garage-size industrial space, behind a painted exterior replicating the film’s decrepit storefront, is a miniature version of a Hollywood back lot. Different sections mimic a doctor’s office, a restaurant, a junkyard and so on.

Groups of 5 to 15 people, who must register in advance, follow a structured program to complete a short movie in two hours. Mr. Gondry’s written step-by-step instructions direct the group first to appoint a leader and a camera person, then decide on the film’s genre, define its characters and determine the plot. Next, group members chart the action scene by scene and create signs for the titles and credits. Then they select props and costumes from a motley assortment on hand. Finally, using a small video camera provided by the gallery, they shoot their movie, editing as they go. Finished movies are added to the stock in the imitation video store at the front of the gallery, where they can be viewed by visitors on a widescreen television."

More here.

Bjarne Melgaard

Bjarne Melgaard at Green Naftali thru March 15.

"There’s a lot going on in Bjarne Melgaard’s third solo show in New York: neo-Neo-Expressionist painting and an extended image-text piece; modernist sofas and rustic Norwegian antiques; textile design and automatist drawing; weird sex (on video) and painted references to same; exuberance and tragedy. Above all, there are parody and sincerity so close together as to be indistinguishable.

In the large, colorful paintings, groups of priapic, noseless men are layered with thickly painted images of monsters and phrases like “Gay Mafia,” “Snuff Cube” or “Ben Gazzara.” Some of the monsters seem to be made of dozens of penises (or maybe they’re just cigarettes); the paint handling ranges from black lines that could almost be Warhol silk-screen to Schnabelesque masses of oozing color. If you wonder how they might look over the couch, Mr. Melgaard’s “sculptures” are luxurious sofas by the Viennese designer Josef Hoffmann and chairs by Frederick Kiesler. But they are upholstered with neo-Expressionist textiles of his design; two of the couches come with large mink throws.

The installation piece, “Greenland, a novel,” which has the feeling of a sad, art-house movie, is a fragmented tale of rape and bisexuality scrawled on torn pieces of paper. These — along with snapshots that focus mostly on a blond woman — are taped to a connoisseur-worthy cluster of beautiful Norwegian peasant tables and chairs that also display ceramics, painted boxes, wood coffee pots and carved Inuit figurines. The story is vague but larded with often wrenching physical detail.

Mr. Melgaard’s bad-boy reputation is working overtime in this mélange, celebrating and ridiculing art as painting, as design, as shopping and as life. It’s a big, beautiful, materialistic mess, with the “Greenland” installation providing an undertow of real feeling."

ROBERTA SMITH

Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975 at the Smithsonian

From the New York Times

"Starting in the late 1950s the great American art critic Clement Greenberg only had eyes for Color Field painting. This was the lighter-than-air abstract style, with its emphasis on stain painting and visual gorgeousness introduced by Helen Frankenthaler followed by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.

With the insistent support of Greenberg and his acolytes, Color Field soared as the next big, historically inevitable thing after Jackson Pollock. Then over the course of the 1970s it crashed and burned and dropped from sight. Pop and Minimal Art, which Greenberg disparaged, had more diverse critical support and greater influence on younger artists. Then Post-Minimalism came along, exploding any notion of art’s neatly linear progression.

Now Color Field painting — or as Greenberg preferred to call it, Post-Painterly Abstraction — is being reconsidered in a big way in “Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975,” a timely, provocative — if far from perfect — exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum here. It has been organized by the American Federation of Arts and selected by the independent curator and critic Karen Wilkin. She and Carl Belz, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, have written essays for the catalog." More here.

Podcasts—Larry Poons in Conversation with Karen WilkinThe American Federation of Arts produced a series of video podcasts to accompany the exhibition. Artist Larry Poons discusses his career, his influences, and reminisces about other Color Field painters in a series of eight interviews recorded in New York in 2007.

Loris Greaud

From the New York Times

"EVEN an artist who likes to fool around with spatiotemporal dimensions can get stressed out by a deadline. Last month technicians were working day and night to prepare for the opening of Loris Gréaud’s “Cellar Door” project at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, but Mr. Gréaud was visibly anxious that it would not be ready on time.

The strain was understandable. Mr. Gréaud, barely 29, is the first artist to take over all 40,000 square feet of this prestigious contemporary-art center. He has devoted two years to the realization of his exhibition, and the budget for the project has turned out to be double what any other show there has cost.

The director, Marc-Olivier Wahler, admitted it was an “all or nothing gamble” to give carte blanche to such a young and relatively inexperienced artist. Yet when the two started planning the undertaking, Mr. Wahler said, “it became clear that his project was so large and encompassed so many different systems, he had to have the whole space.” (Mr. Gréaud, his gallery and the filmmaker Claude Berri, who bought an artwork, helped defray the costs.)
What Mr. Gréaud has done with it is both enchanting and mind-blowingly conceptual. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, visitors enter through a black door that glides open automatically as they approach. Once inside they wander through the artist’s strange, dark universe, divided into various attractions called bubbles.

A vending machine sells candies that taste like nothing. A passage leads under a crumpled resin ceiling that was molded from the earth after a subterranean fireworks explosion — as Mr. Gréaud explained, a “celebration and manifestation of underground activity.” A steel-and-mesh structure reveals paintball warriors shooting at one another with pellets in the patented blue developed by the artist Yves Klein as the color of the immaterial.

Yet in a reflection of Mr. Gréaud’s artistic process, the work will change as it travels to other locations. It will remain at the Palais de Tokyo through April 27 and reappear in totally different forms at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Yvon Lambert gallery in New York, San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute and the gallery of Michael Benevento in Los Angeles."

More here.