Issue 45 £5.00 ‘It’s this very dangerous thing that these people are playing with… This list, it’s almost like the Nobel Prize’ Glenn Beck on the Power 100
Donald Judd with his work, Untitled, 1975, at La Mansana de Chinati/The Block, Marfa, 1982 Photo by Jamie Dearing. Judd Art © Judd Foundation. Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Courtesy Judd Foundation Archive and David Zwirner
Judd Foundation is now represented by David Zwirner
David Zwirner 525 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 212 517 8677 telephone 212 517 8959 fax www.davidzwirner.com
JOHN GIORNO EATING THE SKY 29.10.10 – 18.12.10 Almine rech GAllerY AbdijstrAAt 20 rue de l’AbbAye, brussels 1050 bruxelles t +32 (0)2 648 56 84 •
[email protected] www.Alminerech.com
CORYARCANGEL IMAGE IS EVERYTHING CORY ARCANGEL HERE COMES EVERYBODY NATIONALGALERIE BERLIN, HAMBURGER BAHNHOF 30 NOVEMBER 2010 – 1 MAY 2011
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Juergen Teller ·Texte und Bilder 17 Nov 2010 – 15 Jan 2011, Christine König Galerie, Vienna www.christinekoeniggalerie.com
h a u s e R & W iR t h
Jason Rhoades 1 : 12 PeRfect WoRld 24 sePtembeR – 18 decembeR london
subodh GuPta 25 sePtembeR – 13 novembeR ZüRich
louise bouRGeois the fabRic WoRks 15 octobeR – 18 decembeR london
monika sosnoWska 5 novembeR – 18 decembeR neW YoRk
chRistoPheR oRR 20 novembeR – 21 JanuaRY ZüRich
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Michaël Borremans Eating the Beard 21 October - 27 November 2010
Zeno X Gallery Leopold De Waelplaats 16 2000 Antwerp Belgium +32 3 216 38 88
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Gavin TURK EN FACE 30.10.10 – 18.12.10 Almine rech GAllerY 19 rue de saintonge, F - 75003 Paris • t + 33 (0)1 45 83 71 90
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PAOLA PIVI KAWS JIN MEYERSON 6 NOVEMBER - 23 DECEMBER 2010
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Peter Land The Road home 12 NovembeR - 15 JaNuaRy
Joachim Koester to n av i g at e , i n a g en u i n e way, i n t h e u n K n ow n n e c e s s i tat e s a n at t i t u d e o f da r i n g , b u t n ot o n e o f r e c K l e s s n e s s ( m ov e m e n t s g e n e r at e d f r o m t h e m ag i c a l Pa s s e s o f c a r lo s c a s ta n e da ) 1 2 N ov e m b e r - 1 5 Ja N ua ry
Yayoi Kusama Solo Presentation · New Works Stand B12 · Grand Palais
21 - 24 October 2010
Narcissus Garden, 1966 Jardin des Tuileries
Victoria Miro
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FIAC 2010
Contents
on the cover: artwork by Alexandre Singh, 2010
november 2010
DISPATCHES 31 Snapshot: Lucas Blalock Now See This: Rebecca Warren, Mark Grotjahn, Roe Ethridge, Hans Op de Beeck, Song Dong, Cosima von Bonin, Manifesta, São Paulo Bienal, Artissima, The Last Newspaper Columns: Paul Gravett on John Russell post-BANK collective; Joshua Mack on Vogue-ology; Raimar Stange worries Berlin has forgotten its artists; Marie Darrieussecq writes on reading The Free Lance: Christian Viveros-Fauné asks if change is an unobtainable goal London Calling: Save the Arts misses the bigger political picture, J.J. Charlesworth argues The Painted Word: Nigel Cooke takes on Toy Story 3’s Big Baby The Shape of Things: Pop goes the Popemobile, says Sam Jacob Hong Kong Diary: Mark Rappolt meets Baz Luhrmann Design: Decorative doesn’t have to be an insult, postulates Hettie Judah Top Five: The pick of shows to see this month as selected by Chris Dercon A New Concise Refererence Dictionary: Camp to cuts, defined by Neal Brown Consumed: Studio Voltaire presents the House of Voltaire, plus Tom Common, Ben Mclaughlin and Theo Simpson’s Dead-Ends, Marc Newson’s speedboat, Li Xiaofeng’s polo shirt and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, out now on VHS Digested: X’ed Out, David Batchelor, Super Sad
New on ArtReview.com News International art, design and architecture news, updated every day, as it happens
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True Love Story, Atlas of Remote Islands, Marian Bantjes, Fanzines
On View: Louise Bourgeois’s ‘fabric drawings’, as curated by Germano Celant; Mark Rappolt on the Arte Povera of Mario Ceroli
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Video John Russell creates a new work, Vermillion Vortex, specially for artreview.com; Mona Hatoum talks maps and her latest installation in our Close Encounters video series; we attend the announcement of the Jarman Award winner; and it’s off to the Frieze Art Fair, camera in tow Text Stewart Campbell on Centotto and Bushwick’s apartment show scene; Joshua Mack reviews Demetrius Oliver’s Jupiter installation on New York’s High Line; Laura McLean-Ferris heads to Ruth Proctor’s solo show at Hollybush Gardens; Oliver Basciano sees David Adamo inaugurate Ibid Projects’s new gallery space; and we blog ourselves to tuberculosis during Frieze week
H I rosHI sUGImoto t H e DAY A F t e r
November 6 – December 24, 2010 5 4 5 W e s t 2 2 ND s t r e e t, N e W Y o r k , N Y
NoW represeNteD bY
8 8 85 ) & 1" $ & ( " - - & 3: $ 0 .
Contents
November 2010
FEATURES The Power 100 93
ArtReview’s expert ranking of the most powerful people in contemporary art starts here. Find out who’s running the show and how they’re doing it. With commissioned portraits by Miles Aldridge and Nick Haymes, and new artwork from Anne Collier and Alexandre Singh
REAR VIEW 2010, again 176
A timeline of the year in art
106
we will survive 182
Gallery Grrrl’s six-step plan for riding out tough times and climbing the Power 100
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The Strip 186
John Russell’s work in this month’s Strip doubles as a trailer for his ‘drawn film’ Vermillion Vortex (2010), made specially for artreview.com
ON THE TOWN 188
Aaron Curry at Michael Werner Gallery at 20 Hoxton Square, London; Nathaniel Rackowe at Bischoff/Weiss, London; and Thomas Scheibitz at Sprüth Magers, London
OFF THE RECORD 190
Gallery Girl, pissed off with power, gets pissed for the powerless
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THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010 Guggenheim Museum Award Ceremony in November 2010 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
The Nominees
Cao Fei Hans-Peter Feldmann Roman Ondák Walid Raad Natascha Sadr Haghighian Apichatpong Weerasethakul
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ConTRIBUTORS
November 2010
Miles Aldridge
A regular photographer for Vogue Italia, American Vogue, Numéro, The New York Times and The New Yorker, Miles Aldridge is one of two photographers on this edition of the Power 100. Other projects this year include a collaboration with artist Chantal Joffe at Reflex Art Gallery in Amsterdam. His works are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A in London, and of the International Center of Photography, New York. Pictures for Photographs, a monograph of his photographic work, was published in 2009 by Karl Lagerfeld’s 7L imprint at Steidl.
Alexandre Singh
Creator of this year’s Power 100 cover, Alexandre Singh is known for his depictions of obscure and occult knowledge and power systems, and for employing archaic forms of display to do so. He recently gave a performance lecture at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and is exhibiting as part of Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain. He has upcoming exhibitions at Harris Lieberman, New York, Monitor Gallery, Rome, and Art:Concept, Paris, and is currently in group show Free, at New York’s New Museum.
Nick Haymes
Hailing from Stratford, England, photographer Nick Haymes moved to the US in 1999, where he began his career as a photographer. He has worked for I-D, Another, Index, Interview, Spin and Vogue, among others. His first book, Between Dog and Wolf (2007), documented the fragile relationships and emotions visible in teenage groups. This autumn sees his second book published. He currently resides in New York with his wife and two sons. 28
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Anne Collier
The New York-based artist Anne Collier has repeatedly returned, throughout her career, to photographing magazine and record covers as still life studies. In Artnews (2005), for example, she photographed the five issues of Artnews magazine to feature female cover stars during the 1980s. She has taken this approach to reviewing ArtReview’s past Power 100 covers in her photographs for this issue. Collier had a solo exhibition at Anton Kern gallery in New York this year and has an upcoming solo show at Nottingham Contemporary. Her work is included in the group show Fresh Hell, at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, from 19 October.
Raimar Stange
Curator and critic Raimar Stange, who writes a column from Berlin for this month’s ArtReview, is also (if not better) known as the bass player in the band Art Critics Orchestra. He has published monographic texts on the work of Franz Ackermann, Pierre Bismuth, Allora & Calzadilla and Olaf Nicolai, and he is also editor of The Evil (2007), a book considering artists’ responses to the media. He is a regular contributor to Kunst-Bulletin and Spike.
GARY SIMMONS DOUBLE FEATURE 17.09 06.11
SAKS
BEIJING 04.09.10 – 31.10.10 SHAN FAN HOMELAND: PAINTING THE MOMENT – PAINTING SLOWNESS BEIJING 13.11.10 – 16.01.11 LIU DING LUCERNE 02.10.10 – 04.12.10 AI WEIWEI
Ai Weiwei “Porcelain Cube” 2009, detail, porcelain, 115 x 115 x 115 cm
ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 02.12.10 – 05.12.10 HALL C, BOOTH A16
ARTISTS AI WEIWEI - CHEN HUI - DING YI - DU JIE - HE YUNCHANG (A CHANG) L/B - LI DAFANG - LI ZHANYANG - LIU DING - MENG HUANG NIE MU - QIU SHIHUA - SHAN FAN - ANATOLY SHURAVLEV TRACEY SNELLING - JULIA STEINER - NOT VITAL - WANG QINGSONG WANG XINGWEI - XIA XIAOWAN - XIA XING - XIE NANXING Beijing: 104, Caochangdi Cun, Cui Gezhuang Xiang, Chaoyang District, PRC-100015 Beijing/China Lucerne: Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne/Switzerland
[email protected], www.galerieursmeile.com
DISPATCHES november
Snapshot Now See This The Free Lance London Calling The Painted Word The Shape of Things Design
31 32 38 40 42 44
Top 5 A New Concise Reference Dictionary Hong Kong Diary Consumed Digested
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snapshot
lucas blalock
‘For me, snapshots are a form of note-taking. A way to fix a visual idea so that I can return to it later.’
ArtReview
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now see this words
Martin herbert
Rebecca Warren (Renaissance Society, Chicago, to 12 December, www.renaissancesociety. org) has gone from possessing a definite style – Over the last few years,
bulbous but assured unfired-clay figures of zaftig women, with art-historical overtones – to being a relatively unpredictable proposition. And, implausibly, she’s done this while becoming more successful. The English artist’s recent sculptures span painstaking arrangements of neon and detritus and spins to Richard Prince’s Nurse paintings: they’re must-have baubles. Takashi Murakami, who opened this gallery two years ago, evidently recognises a kindred spirit. And then there’s a third option: convert diversity
Roe Ethridge (Greengrassi, London, 23 October – 22 December, www.greengrassi.com) into a singularity. That’s how
operates. The Floridian, like Wolfgang Tillmans or Juergen Teller, acts as though the divides between editorial and art photography no longer pertain (because, thanks to these artists, they barely do): a model’s taut body or a white-stone graveyard, a
in vitrines to distended bronzes and an almost abstract cycle of clay busts, We Are Dead (2008), which come to life amid the viewer’s agitated attempts at reading them; what she’s arrived at since is anyone’s guess. Spotlighting a half-dozen new floor sculptures and nine unseen wall pieces, her first American institutional show embodies the answer.
Mark Grotjahn (Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, to 21 November, www. kaikaikiki.co.jp), by contrast, makes it easy to predict what you’re going to get – and to be comfortable with that. Grotjahn’s kaleidoscopic abstract paintings - and, here, drawings - whose outwardly radiating ‘butterfly’ pattern he has subjected to innumerable variations, read as meditations on the very idea of the artist’s signature (which often plays a graphic role in his compositions). At the same time, the American is evidently a smart cookie; because that very recognisability has slotted Grotjahn’s paintings into a line leading from Warhol to Hirst’s spots
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gas station or a bird are all equalised on the plane of his art’s remote panache, a consistent tightening and sharpening of reality’s contours that flips a horizontal line of prints into a story waiting to unfurl in the spaces between them.
clockwise from left: Rebecca Warren, Cube, 2003, bronze on MDF on wheels, 51 x 35 x 38 cm, courtesy Maureen Paley, London, and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Scarlet Lake and Indigo Blue Butterfly 826), 2008, coloured pencil on paper, 51 x 41 cm, courtesy the artist; Roe Ethridge, Mop Bucket, 2010, ink jet pigment print, 178 x 137 cm, courtesy Greengrassi, London
DISPATCHES
from top: Hans Op de Beeck, Extension (2), 2007, sculptural installation, mixed media, 550 x 350 x 190 cm; Song Dong, Jump, 1999, video, © the artist, courtesy Pace Beijing
John Russell John Russell was a cofounder and proactive member of BANK between 1991 and 2000, throughout assorted incarnations, group shows and publishing of a tabloid-style satirical magazine. Much of what Matthew Collings described in Art Crazy Nation (2001) as BANK’s ‘surly, self-destructive, self-conscious, introspective attitude – combined… with critical intelligence and a flair for spotting weaknesses in the art system’ persists in Russell’s wide-ranging post-BANK solo works, from his intellectually intense writings to grand hallucinogenic vistas in backlit digital prints on vinyl. In now addressing the visual-verbal interplays of comics, Russell has developed them into an arresting short ‘drawn film’ for ArtReview entitled Vermillion Vortex (2010), viewable at tinyurl.com/vermillionvortex. He largely shuns animation effects, aside from a few pans, zooms or sequences such as water in motion, in favour of a flow of dissolving, sometimes overlapping drawings, mainly kept raw and vivid, some laced with sinister Psycho-style subliminal flashes. He intersperses this image stream with bursts of narrative texts in bold capitals, some balloonish, graffiti-style or aggressively hand-drawn in marker-pen. “I was interested in the potential of drawing and the phrasing of comics”, says Russell. “More specifically, in a kind of cinematic phrasing and the way that a still image can stand in for a scene. Most of the scenes are in fact a kind of minimally animated still. Anime plays on this, as do comics, in the gap between frames.” Neither a comic nor an animation in their conventional senses, and perhaps closer to the halfway hybrid of ‘motion comics’, Russell’s film demands to be read as much as to be watched – as well as listened to, with the soundtrack similarly dissolving music and voiceovers. The result can be experienced as a time-based audiovisual piece like most animated films, but equally the pause and mute buttons let the viewer/reader/listener control it as in a comic. Russell suggests that his Strip for this issue serves as “a kind of trailer for the film”, but unravelling in reverse, starting with the ending. As the title implies, Vermillion Vortex ‘climaxes’ in a blood-red maelstrom, contrasting the antiseptic soullessness of the main setting nearby with expanses of multiple, rotting Golgothas. “The ending is a kind of ecstatic, holocaust-event and has nothing to do with the narrative as such. It ends the narrative and therefore renders the flow of events up to this point as establishing scenes, only more or less interesting in as much as they set up the situation where they can be ended”, says the artist. “And therefore, in the end is the beginning, as the narrative is retro-coded backwards by the end, from the end, to allow for the end… in the end… Amen. So ‘the end’ is the monster in this story.” words
paul gravett
Hans Op de Beeck (Ron Mandos, Amsterdam, to 20 November, www. ronmandos.nl) has similarly cast his net
wide, formally so: moving confidently between sculpture, video, drawing and animation over the past decade, he locates unity in an overwhelming tenor of melancholia and profound attention to the uses of artifice. When ArtReview ran into Op de Beeck in Basel recently, he was in the midst of a video project set on a cruise ship, for which the artist had even written the jazz music played by the
onboard band. He is not, in other words, a slacker: here he shows a video, Staging Silence (2009), which reconstructs memories of generic public places, and a new series of sculpted still lifes.
Song Dong (Pace Beijing, 30 October – 18 December, www.pacebeijing.com)
builds his work on a version of the butterfly effect: the hope that an individual’s small acts might affect society. An artist who skews closer to the spacious poetics of Felix Gonzalez-Torres than to many of his Western art-translating contemporaries, he has built miniature cities out of biscuits which viewers were invited to eat, videoed himself jumping in front of audiences and – perhaps most symbolic of transience of all – written in
DISPATCHES
A brief look at this month’s list of the 100 most powerful people in the artworld reveals a lot about what’s required to participate in influential circles. While not everyone on our list is absolutely loaded, most have access to cash through fortune or funding; most are white; and most are schooled in the Western tradition. These commonalities underlie a society bound by rituals of association – art fairs, exhibition dinners, auctions, committee memberships – which in turn reflect and reinforce shared assumptions of criticism and class. Of course you know all this, and most critiques of such closed cultural circuits – mine included – are really just cases of the children of privilege gazing at their own entitlement. So let’s look at something happening this month that concerns people excluded from the social mainstream by virtue of all the above criteria: Vogue-ology, an exhibition at Parsons the New School for Design organised by members of the sound collective Ultra-red in conjunction with members of the house/ballroom community. The latter (see the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning for a slanted intro) are mostly male-to-female transgender people of colour – many rejected by their own families – who create kinship associations known as ‘houses’ ruled by mentoring ‘mothers’ or ‘fathers’. The community’s ritual glue is walking in balls: highly scripted drag performances that mimic fantasies of privileged desire, eg, high-fashion spreads in Vogue. More than a cakewalk, this finds voguers subsuming a canon of beauty unreachable for all but the richest and most ‘perfect’ of women, and transforming it into a higher art. Voguers beat Vogue at its own game by becoming even more beautiful than its readers can. As a ball participant has written: ‘Beauty begets control. Artifice equals power.’ What these words mean to the speaker, however, are not necessarily what they mean to our Power 100, and the challenge for Ultra-red is how to reveal that significance. Thus the exhibition is conceived as part of an ongoing process of discussion and listening; its ultimate goal is the establishment of a house/ballroom archive organised around terms defined by members of the community. Situating these analytical criteria within the house mindset not only respects and reveals the community’s voice, but also – if successful – transcends the power relationships and social prejudices inherent in most mainstream analysis. These are the very assumptions of inclusion, entitlement and form which underlie the marginalisation of the house/ballroom community, among others, and which its participants, in turn, subvert and exploit in creating their own structures of aesthetics and power. Along the way, ‘we’ become the outsiders: a refreshing and thoughtprovoking turn of events. Vogue-ology, Parsons the New School for Design, New York, 17–30 November words
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JOSHUA MACK
Cosima von Bonin (Witte de With, Rotterdam, to 9 January, www.wdw.nl) turns something into nothing.
almost nothing,
In partly titling her show Cosima von Bonin’s Far Niente, referencing the Italian phrase dolce far niente, or sweet idleness, she puts an ironic spin on what is a seriously labour-intensive show. Occupying the entire institution with her characteristic stuffed animals, droll takeoffs of Minimalism, fabrics and other presciently postmedium
shenanigans that underwrite wild ambiguities of tone, van Bonin’s first major show in the Netherlands promises to do anything but underwhelm.
Manifesta (various venues, Murcia and Cartagena, to 9 January, www. manifesta.org) has always positioned itself at
interstitial points: sometimes disastrously so, as when the 2006 edition of the itinerant biennial imploded amid conflicts between the curators and the government in Nicosia, Cyprus. The last Manifesta, in 2008, on the Italian/Austrian border, was an understandably cautious affair. This one sees them back in Spain (where Manifesta 5 transpired), looking at the dialogue between Europe and North Africa. There’s a tripartite and hydra-headed curatorial team, a fairly hip/under-familiar list
Cosima von Bonin, Blue St Bernard with Box, 2008 (installation view, Le Printemps de Septembre, Les Abbatoirs, Toulouse, 2009), courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne & Berlin
New York
water. (No word yet if you should eat before visiting this show.) If Song makes something out of
of artists and the sort of structural interest in translocalism and nomadism which suggests that Nicolas Bourriaud’s The Radicant (2009) is popular among the thick-geometric-spectacles set. And if that leaves one feeling footloose, it’s time once
from top: Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, It Can’t Last: No Rush, 2010, curated by ACAF for Manifesta 8, photo: © the artist; Leya Mira Brander, Untitled, 1997–2008, photo: Amilcar Packer
Berlin Now that summer is over, the Berlin art scene is starting the new season with an ending. The Temporäre Kunsthalle, a feature of Schlossplatz for the past two years, has closed its doors for the last time. But our distress is tempered – no more than mediocre, its exhibitions programme ultimately seemed bereft of any real concept. And the closing exhibition – John Bock’s silly adventure-playground and group show FischGrätenMelkStand (Herringbone Milking Parlour) – did nothing to change that impression. And other Berlin institutions, Haus am Waldsee and the Nationalgalerie, for instance, are ailing again – the Bruce Nauman show at Hamburger Bahnhof, as unsurprising as you’d expect, is one of the few highlights at the moment. Nor do the galleries seem to have recharged their batteries during the short, much too hot summer – or have we had a surfeit of success lately? Too many collectors, too many art fairs, too many ‘gallery weekends’, but too few studio visits? Koch Oberhuber Wolff, for instance, is showing paintings by Chris Martin in which abstract ornament and colour patterns combine with photographs and fragments of text that mostly reference African-American music, playing down sensual-aesthetic purism in the hope of entering into dialogue with black pop culture. But to no avail: text and abstraction have long since come to an accommodation in painting, and the result here is not the hoped-for ‘rousing’ aesthetic enquiry. Nor is Neugerriemschneider, with its everso-respectable Pawel Althamer exhibition, putting its best foot forward. In something of a doll’s-house scenario, Althamer has recreated places from his own life: the apartment block he lives in now, the study he works in, a river landscape from his childhood. But where does this installation actually get us? Meanwhile, a similarly unexciting event is under way at Esther Schipper, which is presenting the ambitious project 80*81. With its multimedia setup, the show looks back to 1980 and 1981. Unfortunately the various media – a bank of monitors, slide projection, book and wall text, to name but a few – are the familiar accoutrements invariably used when art is pretending not to be art. It is probably not by chance that one shining beacon in the present array of Berlin exhibition spaces is wholly not-forprofit: at DAAD Galerie Tim Lee is showing Streichquartett Op. 1 (2010). This four-channel video installation shows Lee playing Glenn Gould’s String Quartet Op. 1 (1956), note by note, on all four instruments. Lee cut together minishots of his playing so that the four instruments of the ‘string quartet’ are finally heard together in the installation in a performance that judders more than it flows. In this piece Lee presents a detailed picture of the relationship between technology and virtuosity, a picture – where the instruments all scrape by with each other somehow – that also pretty much reflects the Berlin art scene at the moment. words
Raimar Stange
translated from the German by Fiona Elliott
São Paulo Bienal (various venues, São Paulo, to 12 December, www.fbsp.org.br), which also totes a again for the
hypertrophic guest list (some 160 artists), a heaving curatorial coven (two main curators, Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias, and several guest curators) and the wonderful title There is always a cup of sea to sail in. National pavilions, a former hallmark of the show, have been abolished; emphasis has been placed on South American artists and rationales for showing, say, North American ones; and there’s an overriding concern with politics – from which, reckon the organisers, art is inseparable. (And if you’re in São Paulo, the extraordinary Inhotim Contemporary Art Center – brainchild of collector Bernardo Paz, featuring installations by Matthew Barney, Chris Burden, Doug Aitken and more – is a convenient helicopter ride away. You do own a helicopter, right?)
DISPATCHES Artissima (Lingotto Fiere, Turin, 5–7 November, www. artissima.it), under the steerage of Italian
to cover art fairs, but
curator Francesco Manacorda, is converting itself into more than a fair. Besides a new venue, it’s adorning itself with art projects: a literary salon, a dance programme, lectures – hello, Hans Ulrich – and ‘an imaginary travelling university’. Also permeating the fair will be a typographical project by Dexter Sinister, and text-as-art is clearly in the ozone right now.
The Last Newspaper (New Museum, New York, to 9 January, www. newmuseum.org) muses on news, but less
apocalyptically than proactively: alongside artworks themed on how artists use and respond to broadsheet reports – by, among others, Andrea Bowers, Mike Kelley, Hans Haacke and Emily Jacir – there’s an actual newsgathering and free-weekly-newspaperproducing process going on here. But will there be an iPad version?
Paris When Nietzsche Wept (1992) by Irvin D. Yalom, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) by Rilke and La Carte et le Territoire (2010) by Michel Houellebecq are the last books I’ve read, proof of my higgledy-piggledy curiosity. It’s obviously rather unfair to read a certified masterpiece, Malte, sandwiched between two less-known writers who have the disadvantage of being alive. In France, a good writer is a dead writer. And it’s only in France that you hear people swear that Houellebecq doesn’t write literature. Take When Nietzsche Wept, a bestselling novel in France (as elsewhere) that sets an intelligent stage for the ‘invention’ of psychoanalysis. Here the reader has to put up with sentences such as: ‘Freud threw up his arms’ or ‘Breuer sighed deeply’. In short, if the ideas are audacious, the writing is conventional. You race through the pages, all the more so because you are never surprised by the words. Their substance seems to be ignored, and if not, it has to become as transparent as possible – so as not to disturb the language’s apparent function: to tell a tale. Houellebecq’s style is also very fluid; and yet the strange white calm of his narration doesn’t incite the reader the turn the page, but to linger over it. The temporal construction is bizarre, and certain images have to be read twice: ‘On the surface of the ground, irregularly disposed, from place to place, blocks of text in black letters form a design in slight relief…’ The hero dreams he’s in a book, and one is reminded of Rilke’s gripping description of a library: ‘Many people are in the room, but you don’t feel it. They are in the books. Sometimes they move about the pages, like sleeping men, and turn over between two dreams.’ I believe that words are not there to be read but to be heard, even when written. It’s not only about their consistency in sound – rhythm, alliterations, musical harmony, etc: the material of poetry. Words are perceived by all the senses, just as in art we are entirely in the presence of a work. Words are seen, heard, felt, breathed, absorbed, memorised and echoed in a complete virtual world by the organ of vision alone. Irvin Yalom is an excellent storyteller who writes pageturners (these expressions don’t exist in French). The great misunderstanding with the novel is that there are two publics: one for books of leisure and another for literary art. It’s rare (but possible) that a book meets with both, and when it does, literature sneaks in through the eyes. words marie darrieussecq translated from the French by Emmelene Landon
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ArtReview
Aleksandra Mir, Let’s Go Get ‘Em! (19 October 1996), 2007, marker, paper, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York
One more rebooted perennial: this column tends not
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The phrase ‘Change we can believe in’ is a slogan, a book and presently a laughingstock. Nearly two full years into the Obama presidency, Newsweek recently published an article titled, archly, ‘We’re No. 11!’ The piece went on to razz its already enervated readers: ‘Has the United States lost its oomph as a superpower? Even President Obama isn’t immune to the gloom. “Americans won’t settle for No. 2!” Obama shouted at one political rally. How about No. 11? That’s where the U.S.A. ranks in Newsweek’s list of the 100 best countries in the world, not even in the top 10.’ Settling is what many Americans appear to be doing today, and they are increasingly accepting a decline. Make what one might of Newsweek’s frontrunners in the ‘best country’ stakes – just the boredom, racial homogeneity and psycho suicide rates (much higher than America’s and Britain’s) of Finland (No. 1) and Switzerland (No. 2) should plonk them back into their incestuous, wrist-cutting aquavit-and-schnappspickled bogs – deep pessimism has set in throughout the heartland. Whether it be fact or fiction, Americans feel their fortunes sliding southwards. More important, the land of ‘We’re No. 1’ believes itself powerless to change or improve its course. As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai puts it, the capacity to aspire to a different future is crucial for the underprivileged to overcome their conditions. It stands to reason, then, that the same should be true for developed societies – and by extension, their own microsocieties or – ahem – in our case, miniclubs. With this thought in mind, and following some Friday night carousing amid chummy Chelsea galleries, I dragged my sorry carcass out one morning (on a Saturday!) to the New School’s Vera List Center for a mysterious programme titled ‘It Happened Tomorrow: Probabilities, Predictions and Prophecies’. Even after a Bloody Mary and a double Excedrin, there was literally no way I could forecast what I was in for.
A Change Is Gonna Come… Or Is It? If America now believes itself to be in decline, it’s going to take more than speeches and seminars to get the country – and its artworld – back on an upswing
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Presented by an ephebic two-woman artist collaborative called Lin + Lam, the event promised panels and the launch of an interactive website featuring nothing less than ‘an interdisciplinary array of cultural and historical predictive devices, appropriations from popular culture, historical sources, and academic scholarship, including original interviews with professionals from diverse backgrounds’. What it wound up delivering was a jargon-clogged, academically torpid, but nonetheless enlightening reflection on the kind of change few folks in any discipline seem capable of imagining at present. In such a blinkered scenario, extra credit goes to the people asking the right questions. Does change mean emergence or a Nietzsche-like eternal return? Can speculating on change be learned or transmitted? (The second part of this question is settled every time we open our email.) Will thinking about change lead to radical politics or aesthetics? And finally, what in the world enables future thinking? Part of a larger New School symposium titled ‘Speculating on Change’, Lin + Lam’s presentation (which can be accessed at www.changeencounters.com) invited evil thoughts about the artworld’s
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Christian Viveros-Faune
ingrained reluctance to push beyond its narrowly constituted self-interests. Arguably, that ingrained reluctance is today looking very much like a stye. While Lin + Lam’s website definition of change as ‘an encounter with difference that requires opening oneself to the unknown’ is overly simplistic – it recalls, among other winceworthy fads, the victimhood of 1980s-style multiculturalism – it does suggest an unexplored mountain of problems that both the country and its art scene have yet to face squarely. That is, namely, a values breakdown – a national epidemic of get-richquickism and something-for-nothingism that locusted everything from the real-estate market to auction house sales, leaving shuttered homes and empty galleries standing. The recession is its turd-blossom. But tell that to young artists who still expect to make fortunes on the back of JeanMichel Basquiat dreams and Larry Gagosian hype. Despite wishful thinking, these young Turks in hand-me-down duds embody conventionality like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sports ass tattoos and backwards trucker hats – as if in mirrored rehearsal. Today the pursuit of tabloid success represents neither change nor novelty, but its systemic opposite: the bankruptcy of business as usual. That’s right, I’m talking to you, Dan Colen.
Dan Colen, Meet Me Around the Corner, 2007, enamel on board, two panels, each 142 x 107 cm (142 x 214 cm overall). Courtesy Peres Projects, Los Angeles & Berlin
freelance
london calling
In the scramble for cash, art gets ugly
Another month, another desperate campaign to stop cuts in government spending on the arts. Three months into the UK’s wacky Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition, and with ministers threatening 25–30 percent cuts to the statefunded cultural sector, one group of visual-arts movers and shakers has weighed in with a petition under the banner Save the Arts. To kick off the campaign, artist David Shrigley has dreamed up a blackly comic animation in which a farmer and
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his son have a conversation about how brilliant the arts are, and how spending on the arts brings in money to the wider economy. Cheerfully, the farmer rounds off with the insight that we might as well support the arts, because, “let’s face it, we’re crap at most things these days, but we’re brilliant at the arts”. Big cuts are looming in the current Comprehensive Spending Review (reporting to Parliament on 20 October), and everyone seems to accept that such measures have to be taken. As long as they affect someone else. So those threatened are cranking up the apocalyptic rhetoric: Save the Arts declares that ‘25–30 percent cuts… would result in the closure of many smaller arts organisations and would also have a crippling effect on the functioning of the country’s leading arts venues’. Spending cuts on such a scale would indeed be rough. In September it was reported that Arts Council England (ACE) was considering cutting its £38m of funding to Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE), a quasi-nongovernmental organisation (quango) charged with developing educational collaborations between creative professionals and schools. Denying CCE’s claims that the decision had already been made, ACE stated that it would wait until after the Spending Review 40
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J.J. Charlesworth
which the DCMS is now tentatively initiating, proposing a reduction in the Big Lottery Fund’s share to 40 percent. But while it’s clearly time for some serious thinking about what culture quangos actually do, no one wants to give the government ammunition for further spending cuts. Yet that’s where some real political radicalism is needed, and where campaigns like Save the Arts are passively accepting rather than confronting the status quo: as Shrigley’s farmer fatalistically declares, “Because of those jokers in charge of the banks, the government is going to have to make some cuts. We all have to accept that.” But do we? The new coalition is happiest when presenting itself as solemnly, responsibly making cuts, yet it is silent – and largely unchallenged – on how it will kickstart the economy to bring greater growth and prosperity. While the various quangocrats jostle and manoeuvre over which slice of the policy cake they get left with, there is still little debate on what kind of funded arts culture is really worth the money, and even less on how we recreate the economic dynamism on which – in the end – all art and culture relies.
© David Shrigley. Courtesy Save the Arts, London
Save our Quangos!
to decide whether to go ahead with the cuts. Yet as the risk to CCE makes clear, ACE has for many years been doing a lot more than just funding art galleries and dishing out grants to artists. CCE’s slice of ACE’s government grant works out at 8.5 percent. CCE likes to think that it is terrifically good value for money, but the fact remains that its mission to raise educational attainment should really be the responsibility of the department for education. Yet under New Labour, culturecrats endlessly bigged-up the idea the arts could do everything: provide a new economic model, cut crime, raise educational standards… So what happened to ACE’s previously fondly held beliefs – has it suddenly discovered that its priority should be to fund artists and art institutions? Perhaps, but in the hysteria over a likely cut in ACE’s grant, it’s easy to miss the fact that almost 40 percent of ACE’s revenue comes from the National Lottery (£172m in 2009/10); and that ACE has been forfeiting some of its Lottery cash to the Olympic fund (an arrangement which will expire once the Games are over). But Lottery money is not part of the public finances, and ACE’s Lottery grant is a small fraction of the £1.24bn the Lottery generates, of which half goes to the Big Lottery Fund, a community-philanthropy organisation that is all about ‘community learning and creating opportunity, promoting community cohesion and safety, promoting well-being’. All very worthy, but again these are political objectives that should already be the responsibility of government rather than of yet another unaccountable quango. In other words, everybody’s promoting community and advancing education and opportunity – a sort of endless policy ‘mission creep’. What the proposed cutting of CCE demonstrates is how many quangos now crisscross and overlap in their policy objectives, and how a body like the Big Lottery Fund has survived on the basis of fuzzy sentiment – that it supports ‘good causes’ – rather than any realistic idea of whether it actually does any good. Redistribute the Lottery money, and funding to the arts could in fact increase, something
the painted word
Poor Big Baby
Toy Story’s newest character treads where artists dare not go
words
will tell you, it’s for this reason that dolls and teddies go on the as-yet-unwritten list of dead-end art materials, stuff so loaded with symbolism and references that it would take nothing short of mass pop-cultural amnesia for anyone to reuse them in any thought-provoking way. Dolls in art aptly illustrate the movement of kitsch – the bathetic slide from the genuinely affecting to the hopelessly and endlessly repeated. Although he connects with this cliché, Big Baby also goes way beyond it; Pixar has managed to turn this hackneyed visual trope on its head and achieve what art could not – an enduringly unsettling portrait of abuse and psychic anguish through the medium of the neglected baby doll. They do this by doubling up on the signifiers of neglect. Each mark and fault on the doll has a role as a sign both of entropic wear and tear, and of a troubled interior consciousness that’s prey to self-loathing and addiction. Witness the scribble marks – they leap out as tattoos, simply because of where they are placed. The smudges of dirt scan as bruises. The broken eye calls to mind the aftermath of a barroom brawl. And most unnervingly, Big Baby’s henchmanlike strong-arming of the other toys is accompanied by a babyish gurgling and the occasional “Mama”: by virtue of his size relative to the other toys, his is a child’s mind in an adult body. 42
ArtReview
Nigel Cooke
Here, the animism of the Toy Story concept functions on two distinct levels, corresponding to the respective experience levels of the two principal audiences addressed in the cinema: children and adults. With this simple move the film’s creators have put together a succinct portrait of abuse. Big Baby is the antithesis to the other characters’ honest playability, as every action and bodily inscription can be read in two ways. And even where the other toys are schizophrenically inseparable from their own merchandising, this uncanny sufferer maintains a more unsavoury relationship with his commercial identity. He becomes like the living dead, a toy hauled from the bin and put back on the shelf to be consumed all over again. The indifference of this market context to the anguish of the doll/ child may even lend the character some extra power here, in ways that would seem unbearably corny in the rarefied context of art. If anything, the successful doll art of McCarthy and others depends on indifference too, but directed towards the cloying sentimentality and faux meanings that come with doll imagery, which are surprisingly absent in Toy Story’s Big Baby. In the end, the film may well be about God, Marx or the Holocaust. But don’t miss the biting subtext of domestic abuse and psychic trauma, delivered by a grimy baby doll you wouldn’t want to take home with you.
Big Baby, from Toy Story 3, 2010, dir Lee Unkrich. © Disney/Pixar
At last – during the summer’s art hiatus and after 11 years in the making, Pixar’s hugely anticipated Toy Story 3 (2010) was finally released. With an incubation that long, it promised to be at least as ripe for allegorical interpretation as the other two; the artistically minded will no doubt start reading all kinds of nonsense into the plotline (‘it’s really all about God/Marx/Auschwitz’ – delete as interpreted). But not this ‘viewer’ – I was heavily prepared to go with it, swearing off subtexts and metanarratives for the time being – at least until the Frieze Art Fair. All that went out the window upon encountering one of the all-new characters in the film – the disturbing, moongazing baddie Big Baby, an infant doll with emotional issues. Originally of the Tiny Tears variety, he is here transformed into a traumatised and edgy outsider with a short fuse, thanks to having been left by the roadside by his previous owner. Now one of a gang of brainwashed, heartbroken and vengeful rejects, he spends his days swigging from his bottle and staggering in a way that lets you know it isn’t filled with milk. Thinking about this character in terms of art is unavoidable: his abjection immediately recalls the legion of artworks that use grubby dolls and the like ‘to make the viewer uncomfortable’. And I’m not talking about Hans Bellmer’s libidinous, sadistic corpse-dolls, or the later hybrids and amalgams of Paul McCarthy, Tetsumi Kudo and Cindy Sherman. Apart from such stellar exceptions, most art made with children’s toys has the same problem. The ‘sadness’ of the discarded teddy or doll remains, for some reason, unquestioned. Assumed to be a hotline to troubling content – omnipresent evil, domestic abuse, paedophilia, etc – a kids’ toy allows artists to lazily bootleg a back catalogue of unease, the supposedly innate suggestiveness of the thing requiring little intervention to complete the picture of foul play. As any art-school tutor
Jimmie Durham arts, media and sports SPROVIERI 7 October – 27 November 2010
Cinthia Marcelle Ilya & Emilia Kabakov Jimmie Durham Matheus Rocha Pitta Nan Goldin 29th São Paulo Biennial 2010 25 September – 12 December 2010
Jimmie Durham, second life (detail), 2010
“Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar” “There is always a cup of sea to sail in”
SPROVIERI 27 heddon street london w1b 4bj +44 20 7734 2066 tue – sat 10 – 6 new website sprovieri.com
the shape of things
Pimped no more
Why the Pope’s new ride will fail to procure him many new fans
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The Polish really knew how to do it. One of their versions looks like a military golf cart with a bright yellow flash down its side and sprays of flowers around its radiator grille. The Pope would stand in a kind of raised balcony (decorated by more flowers) framed by a tapestry held over him on thin rods. Another, even stranger incarnation looks like a bus stop or perhaps an office-partitioning glazing system. Above this floats a petrol-station canopy. And the whole apparatus sits on a rectangular plinth that has what appear to be very tiny wheels poking out from beneath it. There are, naturally, more sensible-looking variations – a flatbed with a large aquarium attached, or the cool jeep that looks like it should be driven by a hot archaeologist. Vehicle customisation, or ‘ride pimping’, as many now know it, is something that normally occurs as an instance of subculture vernacular – one thinks of Chicano lowriders, hippy convoy buses, even carnival floats. While today the Vatican may well represent just another one of these subcultures, it’s hard not to link all its aesthetic production to the exceptional quality of high Baroque Bernini and Michelangelo. In those old Popemobiles, you can still glimpse fragments – an embroidered canopy, a piece of iconographic livery – suggestive of the symbolism and iconography present, for example, in the papal robes; not so the current model, which feels part of the secular, modern world.
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sam jacob
There is a tension in those old versions: a struggle between the symbolic and iconographic traditions of Catholicism and the generic world of vehicle design. They display an attempt to invent a solution to the problem of how an object of the modern world might exist within the object realm of the Pope, in which every detail is part of a vast and complex choreography of ancient symbolism that adds up to a total universe of meaning. The Council of Trent had little to say about vehicle design. The problem of the Popemobile is that contemporary design can’t – or isn’t willing – to operate in that symbolic, iconographic way any more. The Pope’s current SUV sports the number plates SCV and SCV 1 – for ‘Stato della Città del Vaticano’. That doesn’t really cut it in the symbolism stakes – more boy racer than Holy See. It is this lack of exceptionality, this ordinariness, that is disappointing. It is not as though vehicle design is a semiologically barren activity. One only has to glance at a car advertisement to see how the deformations and inflections of metalwork, the play of chrome against panel and the lustrous sheen of paintwork are aesthetic manipulations that stir fundamental reactions. In fact, it is in the bodywork of cars – the rising waistline from front to back that gives a feeling of dynamic forwardness, the bowed reflection that sprawls over the bonnet or the starburstplastics of a brake light – and their direct appeal to our senses that we might find the only living inheritance of Rome’s seventeenth-century Baroque design tradition.
© Mazur/www.thepapalvisit.org.uk
I was more than a little disappointed by the Pope’s UK visit in September. Not because of the well-logged issues that currently plague the organisation he runs, nor because the expense of his visit was borne by the British taxpayer. It’s worse than that: someone’s screwed with the Popemobile. When Pope John Paul II visited the UK in 1982, he used two Popemobiles. One was a converted 24-tonne British Leyland ‘Constructor’ truck designed by Tom Karen. It brought with it stylistic tics recognisable from some of his other projects, the super-groovy Bond Bug car, the Raleigh Chopper and the Kiddicraft marble run among them. Karen’s Popemobile looked part Star Wars Stormtrooper carrier and part refuse truck, and had the kind of massiveness that made you think it could do some damage. John Paul’s other car was a Range Rover – one of those boxy early-1980s models (also, of course, in white) that Princess Margaret might have driven. Except the Pope’s transport had a large hump of extra Range Rover on its back, as though two Rovers were mating. Last month, Pope Benedict XVI flew over a pair of armoured Mercedes-Benz 4x4s from Vatican City. These, and more of the same model located around the world, now form a fleet of standardised Popemobiles in use since 2002. Based on the ML430 SUV, each has a viewing box fitted to the rear, and bulletproof windows, frames and undercarriage. The Pope’s central seat can be raised hydraulically. The standardisation of the Popemobile may well be neat and convenient, but its previous incarnation as a one-off, locally interpreted design seemed somehow to demonstrate ingenuity and originality wherever the Pope went.
fragrance takes to the wing
design
Pattern Recognition Long the art that dare not speak its name, decorative art is becoming hip
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museum of folk craft and history that commemorated the traditions of people who worked on the Netherlands’ vast North Sea inlet before the dykes and polders of the 1930s. Unlike that of the British Museum, its collection doesn’t reflect a history of kings and conquest (although the Zuiderzee itself was the source of much of the Netherlands’ wealth) but of hard work and simple lives. Over the last three years, however, the museum has collaborated with some of the best contemporary designers in the country to transform itself into an institution dedicated as much to the future as it is to the past. Next year Jurgen Bey will create a show about production; Joris Laarman has been
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commissioned to design a new machine inspired by the sea for the year after. Maarten Baas’s Zuiderzee clock, on display for the first half of 2010, arrived at the museum fresh from Design Miami, where Baas had just been named designer of the year. “Most of the visitors don’t know who Maarten Baas is”, admits director Michael Huyser. “But they love the clock.” The invigoration process at Zuiderzee has worked in two directions – the designers have been inspired by having intimate access to the collections, and their enthusiastic response has, in turn, brought a new audience into the museum. It also seems to be making decorative arts cool again – back in Milan this year, Scholten & Baijings presented a collection of hand-stitched fabric vegetables just, y’know, for the sake of it. The British Museum is riding high at the moment – the radio series, the planned extension and the £25m in bequests from two Sainsbury-related foundations. Could it take inspiration from the little Zuiderzee Museum, and invite some contemporary designers to get properly involved in the collection? It would put the museum in a perfect position to change the status of – cough – decorative arts in Britain.
© Scholten & Baijings, Amsterdam
I recently left a bowl of sloes out on the table. A friend shoved a handful into his mouth, thinking that they were blueberries. The expression on his face after five seconds of chewing reminded me uncannily of the look I got from an industrial designer once when I referred to his limited-edition works as ‘decorative art’. Decorative art is to the visual arts world what mime is to the performing arts: a long, important heritage that has translated in contemporary life into something naff and embarrassing. The very word ‘decorative’ has become a kind of insult, like ‘inoffensive’ or ‘pleasant’. The works that we now think of as decorative art – from Sèvres porcelain to inlaid cabinets to carved stone objects – are rarely decorative for their own sake. Decoration – whether military or domestic – is a sign of status, and where there’s status, there’s usually politics, intrigue, alliances and bloody struggle. Stories of poisoning, magic and sacrifice have peppered the BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects radio series (2010), produced with the British Museum, and no doubt contributed to its allure. When I spoke with the Dutch designer Carole Baijings (of the studio Scholten & Baijings), she told me that she was a huge fan of the series: I’d be interested (surprised, even) to hear whether any British designers have been similarly inspired by it. Baijings was probably predisposed towards museum-y subject matter; her studio has been working closely with the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen and over the last three years has produced works, ranging from willow baskets to glassware to decorative storage boxes, that relate to the practices and historical stories told by the collection. There is nothing obscure or retro or even kitsch about these pieces – they are gorgeous and exciting and wonderfully modern looking. (In the UK they are produced by Established & Sons, and you can buy them at Moss in New York.) Yet the Zuiderzee Museum, until a few years ago, was the kind of place to which children got dragged screaming on wet holidays – a
ANSELM KIEFER
ON TOUR WITH THE
8 October 2010 – 16 January 2011
Anselm Kiefer Palette, 1981. © Anselm Kiefer. ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Acquired jointly through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
BAL351
RECENT BRITISH SCULPTURE
RUPERT ACKROYD ATHANASIOS ARGIANAS CHARLES AVERY VANESSA BILLY MATTHEW DARBYSHIRE JESS FLOOD-PADDOCK BRIAN GRIFFITHS MICK PETER SAM PORRITT KEITH WILSON
27 NOVEMBER, 2010 - 6 JANUARY, 2011
Keizersgracht 82, 1015 CT Amsterdam, The Netherlands , Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat 23-25, 1072 BR Amsterdam, The Netherlands www.grimmfineart.com, Tel +31 (0) 20 4227 227, Fax +31 (0) 20 3301 965.
flavio de marco VEDUTE
21.11.2010 - 27.02.2011
via fratelli cervi 66 — reggio emilia — italy tel. +39 0522 382484
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Norman Catherine totem pole 200cm
THEN : NOW 9 November - 4 December 2010
work by: TAKASHI MURAKAMI MARLENE DUMAS WILLIAM KENTRIDGE ESTHER MAHLANGU ASHA ZERO ROELOF LOUW and others
GROUP EXHIBITION featuring work by International and South African artists
34FineArt.com
What to see this month by
Chris Dercon
Director designate, Tate Modern, London
1 Gabriel von Max Kunstbau at the Lenbachhaus, Munich 23 October – 30 January www.lenbachhaus.de Showing in my hometown, Gabriel von Max (1840–1915) was a star painter, a Spiritist and a Darwinist. His wicked 1889 painting Affen als Kunstrichter (Monkeys as Critics) is a true icon of latenineteenth-century German painting, mocking a conservative, bourgeois take on art. Von Max’s interest in the natural sciences, ethnology and esoterics is a true example of a romantic, dark conceptualism and a warning for those of us who believe in, say, biogenetics.
2 Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement Museum of Modern Art, New York To 3 January www.moma.org As the venue says, ‘This show presents eleven architectural projects on five continents that respond to localized needs in underserved communities’. One is a primary school in Gando, Burkina Faso, by architect Diébédo Francis Kéré; in 2004 he was awarded the Aga Khan prize for it. Kéré was also the architectcollaborator on Remdoogo, the so-called opera village near Ouagadougou, conceived by the late German artist-provocateur Christoph Schlingensief. And he recently redesigned the grounds of the amazing National Museum in Bamako, Mali: an architect to keep in mind.
3 Rene Daniels: Painting on Unknown Languages Camden Arts Centre, London To 28 November www.camdenartscentre.org The work produced by Dutch painter René Daniëls between 1977 and 1987 remains as intriguing now as it was at the time. Since his stroke at the end of 1987, the René Daniëls Foundation has been responsible for making known his highly personal, painterly interpretation of the legacy of Duchamp, Picabia, Polke and Broodthaers. His art functions like a manifesto on the many ends – and new beginnings – of painting. Young painters must see this show: very good bad painting! 54 ArtReview
4 Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 21 October – 9 January www.whitney.org ‘Small scale, big change’ could also have been a perfect title for my absolute favourite upcoming show, this retrospective of the late American artist. It’s never too late. (Can it be too early? When we showed Paul’s first retrospective at Witte de With in Rotterdam in 1995, nobody came.)
5 Marburg! The Early Bird Marburger Kunstverein 22 October – 9 December www.marburger-kunstverein.de Ydessa Hendeles, the only child of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, founded the legendary Ydessa Gallery in Toronto in 1980 before setting up the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, curating exceptionally precise as well as highly autobiographical exhibitions. She and her mother ‘commissioned’ Maurizio Cattelan’s child-size Hitler, Him (2001), and curated the legendary 2003 exhibition Partners (The Teddy Bear Project) at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, formerly Hitler’s private kunsthalle. Admired by curators such as Massimiliano Gioni and Jens Hoffmann, Hendeles – who curated this show, named after her hometown – keeps returning in her purchases, commissions and exhibitions to her unusual life and familial past.
from left: Gabriel von Max, Female Martyr on the Cross (St Julia), c. 1867, oil on canvas, Charles and Emma Frye Collection, Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Paul Thek, Warrior’s Arm, 1967, from the series Technological Reliquaries, wax, paint, leather, metal, wood, resin, Plexiglas, 24 x 99 x 24 cm, collection Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, photo: Jason Mandella, © Estate of George Paul Thek, courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York
top five
A New Concise Reference Dictionary
Cc camp to cuts
camp. See connoisseurship. cannibalism The most prevalent of the cannibalisms in contemporary art is autoconsumption by artists of their own blood, penis, faeces or other bodily materiality. The literal killing and eating of others is less common, although the blood, faeces or other bodily materiality of an artist may be offered to others to share. The radical transformations of the strategies of documentation are thus engaged in the reconstruction of a continuum: an operation in narrative time which is physically affected by memory and history, and where past and future are reconstituted as present. catalogue Publication with essay, illustrations, etc, published by a public or private gallery, the text written by a drudge. See madness. Because catalogues are an advertisement, they have a compromised critical independence. Where the artist is still alive, they have zero critical independence. This is compensated for by the universal truth that such essays are never read. See advertising. celebrity See buttocks. children’s and youth art Cheeky ‘East End Cockney’ gallery stallholders and young artists, many little more than children, may be seen dancing, selling art, eating winkles and sniffing cocaine powder from colourful baskets as they cry their wares in London streets. See Lionel Bart, Malcolm McLaren, Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. chimpanzee See also baboon. Humans share 98 percent of their DNA with the chimpanzee, but dealers will only share 50 percent plus framing costs. chora See ciborium. ciborium Liturgical vessel used to hold the Eucharist. cinema a) A cultural locus accorded reverence by theorists, in which the radical transformations of the strategies of documentation are engaged in the reconstruction of a continuum: an operation in narrative time which is physically affected by memory and history, and where past and future are reconstituted as present. b) A socialised architectural space showing a dull film in which wealthy celebrities mime having sex, in front of which audiences (sitting in dirt and darkness) consume fatty foodstuffs and expel foul fartage. classicism Certain formulas have been devised so as to attempt definition of this term whose normative value usage is a variable depending on historical and descriptive context. The radical transformations of the strategies of 56
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documentation are thus engaged in the reconstruction of a continuum: an operation in narrative time which is physically affected by memory and history, and where past and future are reconstituted as present. cliché Clichés tend to be ‘classical’ clichés, and are therefore important vocabulary modes. Without clichés there is no comprehension, and arts professionals would have no common language or ability to function. The radical transformations of the strategies of documentation are thus engaged in the reconstruction of a continuum: an operation in narrative time which is physically affected by memory and history, and where past and future are reconstituted as present. cluster fuck US military slang term for intractable disarray (often involving multiple deaths) now appropriated by practitioners of the hey dude style of art writing. In this way the radical transformations of the strategies of documentation are engaged in the reconstruction of a continuum: an operation in narrative time which is physically affected by memory and history, and where past and future are reconstituted as present. Note: there is a corresponding tendency for the military to borrow art-critical terms in return, such as ‘visual discourse’ – used to describe the aerial bombing of peasant villages. cock See connoisseurship. cocaine Benzoylmethylecgonine – a crystalline tropane alkaloid. An artist’s material unusually characterised by a transversality of disciplinarity specialisations. See toilet (Duchamp urinal). coda See absurd counterpoint. code See hidden key. colour A universal positive in visual art. With the exception, certain authorities claim, of most 1970s practice. conceptual art The relationship of the determined commodity object, or thought locus, within the statement terms of a directive authorial imprecation strategy. confessional art See vagina, anus, penis, drunk, snot. connoisseurship See cluster fuck, Lady Gaga, cocaine. craquelure See anus. critic See critical theory. critical theory The commonly accepted theory that art critics should write favourably about an exhibition on the basis of the written instructions of a press release. critique See hidden key. culture See cuts. cunt See chora. cuts A nonjocular political expediency locus term especially related to the arts in which the letter ‘n’ may be removed from the slang pejorative ‘cunt’ (see feminism), the word ‘cut’ itself then becoming a cut word (see pun, Derrida) as part of a fiscal transformation strategy terminology process in which the letter ‘n’ is removed by econometricians from certain words in order to save money. Such vigorously contested centrality purposes are not usually regarded as playful, except as seen in Orcinus orca (commonly referred to as killer whale), which will toy with a lacerated infant seal prior to killing and eating it. See banker, cannibalism, scream. Listen also to Cut by the Slits (1979). words
Neal Brown
HONG KONG diary
Wizards of Oz
In our third and final report from Hong Kong, we pick up some tips on improving next year’s art fair
It’s the final day of Art Hong Kong. And after the studio marathon, I’m meeting the fair’s celebrity turn: painter Vincent Fantauzzo and movie director (among other things) Baz Luhrmann. They’re in Hong Kong to display a multimedia collaboration titled The Creek, 1977 (2010), which has been put on by local gallery 10 Chancery Lane. The meeting itself is something of a marathon experience, with several false starts and a few phone calls of the ‘Can you be at the stand right now?’ ilk. Aussies Vince and Baz were wheeled out at the fair’s opening press conference to add a little Hollywood stardust to proceedings. I haven’t seen them since. But I have passed a number of dealers who’ve whispered that ‘Baz just came by’ or ‘Did you see Baz Luhrmann? – he’s here’. While those same dealers attempt to make it clear that they’re absolutely unimpressed by his presence, they resent the fact that a celebrity from another creative field is trying to muscle in on their (or more properly their artists’) territory. They don’t say it (except when they’re drunk, when they do), but you can see it in their eyes, which roll like fruit machine counters when you ask if they’ve seen The Creek, 1977. The installation is a collaboration in a real sense. Not because it’s a seamless and inseparable fusion of two minds working together (which tends to be the art critic’s default requirement for collaborative success). Rather because there’s no disputing that two people made this work. Fantauzzo’s Caravaggio-esque photoreal painting of the aftermath of a car crash (a scene evolved from Luhrmann’s childhood in Australia, and incorporating portraits of both the painter and the filmmaker) stands at the end of a long dark corridor lit by parallel rows of tea-candle-like lights regularly interspersed with the kind of photographs you’d expect to find in the Luhrmann family archive (which is where they’re from). The installation is the complete opposite of the brightly lit white booths it’s almost invisibly sandwiched between. Indeed, The 58
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Creek, 1977 seems designed almost to prevent or distract you from looking at the painting – suggesting that a kind of photographic evidence is required to prove the truth of the painted image. And there’s a certain discomfort in the obvious theatricality of the scene, and in knowing that you’re being manipulated in this way. Particularly when Vince points out that one of the photographs is in fact a painting. “All art lies to tell a truth”, Baz explains. He’s right. If the painting itself is photoreal, the installation as a whole renders it hyperreal. More than that, the installation is an intriguing mirror to the theatricality of the art fair as a whole, of the big shiny sculptures designed to draw you in, the posturing dealers and the collectors wandering around establishing their credentials as part of a cultural aristocracy. On the way to meet Baz and Vince, I pass a dealer who’s busy explaining to a prospective purchaser that “this painting is really special to the artist – it’s his absolute favourite”. I wonder how the dealer’s going to explain the paintings the artist doesn’t like so much, or if he’s ever tried the opposite tack: “This painting’s really special – the artist absolutely hates it”. But more than that, I’m thinking about how similar the narratives being spun into the fair to make the artworks (and more precisely the purchase of them) more real are to the performance of Fantauzzo and Luhrmann’s collaboration. We end up meeting in the fair’s café, which means that a few fans and well-wishers pass through our conversation, too. But Baz is relaxed about that, so Vincent and I are as well. In fact, he thinks art fairs could do with a more chilled-out attitude: “In Hong Kong you’ve got the wine fair, happening at the same time, and that’s great. You’ve got the auctions. But why not have the party fairs and the porn fairs, a real mix of high and low? A tribal blowing-out is a legitimate and thrilling part of the ceremony.” I know I’m looking forward to the Christy Canyon and Rocco Siffredi booths at Art Hong Kong 2011.
The Creek, 1977 (detail), 2010. Courtesy 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong
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Walid Raad Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut) (detail), 1987-present. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut.
Walid Raad Whitechapel Gallery
Miraculous Beginnings 14 October 2010 – 2 January 2011
whitechapelgallery.org
dispatches
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Consumed The pick of things you didn’t know you really needed. Words Oliver Basciano
My first job was on the pen counter at WH Smith. ArtReview’s editor-at-large discreetly slipped porn mags inside the Sunday papers for the shadier customers of a local newsagent. And our editor just about wins in the cool stakes, having sneered repeatedly at the CD choices made by customers of a West London Music and Video Exchange. So we’re all well versed in shopkeeping. Which is just as well, as you may find some of us – along with the likes of International Herald Tribune design critic Alice Rawsthorn, Frieze Projects curator Sarah McCrory and gallerists Stuart Shave and Nicky Verber – behind the counter at the House of Voltaire pop-up shop this month, a project for which ArtReview is the media partner. It’s the idea of Joe Scotland, artistic director of nonprofit space Studio Voltaire (pictured here with, from left, artists Dawn Mellor, Anthea Hamilton and Julie Verhoeven, all dressing collector Valeria Napoleone, centre). The concept is a boutique of serene tradition, trading in stock specially commissioned from a roster of artists, all profits in support of the gallery’s programme. From its temporary base above Rupert Sanderson’s shoe shop on Bruton Place in London’s Mayfair, kitted out by gallery-architect favourite 6a (who was behind the refit of Raven Row and the South London Gallery’s extension), visitors can browse and buy a ready-to-wear range from Hamilton, T-shirts by Mellor or tissue boxes by Verhoeven. Stocked alongside these will be a whole heap of contributions by other artists, including prints by Donald Urquhart and David Noonan, block-printed tea towels by Mark Titchner, tops by Clunie Reid, bags by Matthew Darbyshire and wine from Marc Camille Chaimowicz. And while it’s not clear that the ‘personal services’ pictured here will be available to everyone, I think we can all agree it promises to be a step up from the Bic pens, smutty mags and scratched, secondhand copies of Whitesnake’s 1979 Lovehunter album of our respective youths. Although the editor would be first in line were the House of Voltaire to stock the last of those things. Studio Voltaire’s House of Voltaire is at 19 Bruton Place, London, from 11 November to 4 December. Photography: Stephanie Sian Smith. Postproduction: Andy D’Cruze, Darkest Star. Concept and styling: Dawn Mellor and Joe Scotland. Valeria Napoleone: dress by Erdem and shoes by Rupert Sanderson. Anthea Hamilton, Dawn Mellor, Joe Scotland and Julie Verhoeven: models’ own outfits, shoes by Rupert Sanderson
Consumed 03
£150
The pick of things you didn’t know you really needed. Words Oliver Basciano
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£6
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£1.5M
01 Titled Dead-Ends, this small low-fi book, in an edition of 400, is the result of a yearlong scavenging project by Tom Common, Ben Mclaughlin and Theo Simpson, who gathered job-vacancy slips littered around the local vicinity of three Sheffield unemployment offices. For many the unsuitable vacancy adverts are unwanted souvenirs of their fortnightly trip to sign on for the dole – Jobseeker’s Allowance. Documented here, creased and torn in their original found state, they are a poignant, political testament to frustration and purposelessness. www.deadends.info 64
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02 It’s a boat that fulfils all those 1970s James Bond (wet) dreams. I mean, this is sexy stuff, so sexy that even Kanye West wants one (it was on Twitter). It’s designed by Marc Newson for Riva and retailed by Larry Gagosian as a limited edition; and you’ll be looking pretty foolish speeding around the waters off the Maldives or Miami if you’re not one of the 22 people in the world to have laid his hands on this turquoise-and-mahogany little number. www.marc-newson.com
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03 When looking for an artist to collaborate with on a new clothing line, approaching a sculptor who works with broken fragments of ancient porcelain is an unexpected choice. Lacoste’s partnering with Chinese artist Li Xiaofeng has resulted in a surreal sculptural rendering of the classic polo shirt made out of china, which, though not the most wearable of items, we think is quite fantastic. Luckily Li (and Lacoste) will also be running off 20,000 cotton editions for men and women – all based on the textures and colourings of his original sculpture.
04 It watches like some terrible happy-slap caught on degraded videotape; one in which the depraved protagonists aren’t the youths of tabloid fervour, but a gang of latexclad elderly Peeping Toms terrorising suburban Tennessee. Harmony Korine (Kids, 1995) writes and directs Trash Humpers (2009), an unsettling film in which the director references William Eggleston’s 1974 Stranded in Canton. Released on DVD, as a limited-edition VHS (pictured) and as a verylimited-edition 35mm film print, it will cost you between £15.99 and £7,500.
www.lacoste.com
www.trashhumpers.com
10 November–9 December 2010
MARCUS HARVEY Tattoo
FAS
The Fine Art Society Est. 1876 148 New Bond Street London W1S 2JT +44(0)20 7629 5116 +44(0)20 7318 1895
[email protected] fascontemporary.com
dispatches
digested
It’s what we think you should swallow, or spit out
X’ed Out By Charles Burns Formatted (and in large part executed) in the classic Hergé style – Tintin’s Shooting Star adventure (1941), in particular, lurches to mind (as do some of the rhythms of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, 1986–7) – Charles Burns’s comic book is a bizarre cocktail of black cats, dreams, drugs, eggs, foetuses, aliens, filial relations, PopTarts, adolescent art, lust and William S. Burroughs. Burns, whose graphic style is instantly recognisable to anyone who reads The Believer magazine (for which he is the official cover artist) or who picked up copies of his award-winning comic series Black Hole (1995–2005), also illustrated the cover of the UK edition of Burroughs’s My Education, A Book of Dreams (1995). And in many ways – including a number of scenes reminiscent of The Naked Lunch (1959) – the half-man, halfalien that decorated My Education… is necropsied in the present volume, which describes its hero’s struggle to deal with the freakish waves of images that flood his mind in both its conscious and unconscious states. So far, so good. There is however a catch: while it may make sense in terms of marketing and nostalgia to issue Burns’s tale as a series of slim volumes (of which X’ed is the first), a side effect of this is that the publication feels as substantial as a movie trailer – by the time you’ve reached the end, you feel that you’ve had nothing more than a taste of something that may or may not be to come. Mark Rappolt Jonathan Cape, £12.99 (hardcover)
Super Sad True Love Story By Gary Shteyngart
Found Monochromes, Vol.1, 1–250 By David Batchelor Corralling hundreds of colourful objects as sculpture – plastics, fluorescent toys, bottles – is the work for which David Batchelor is best known. In these sculptures Batchelor treats colour as though it were the most important physical element, weightier than the object that carries the colour. This colourful work, however, has been accompanied by a long-term photographic study into what the English artist has termed Found Monochromes, which he has been documenting since 1997. These are rectangles of white found around the city – empty billboards, signs that have been bleached by the sun and A4 paper notes posted inside pub windows, their messages invisible to passersby. In this collection of 250 Found Monochromes, these white rectangles begin to seem like strange blanks or voids. Portals, even, to another dimension, tears in the real. As Batchelor puts it in an accompanying interview with Jonathan Rée, they uncannily suggest ‘errors in the visual fabric that have to be corrected’. It’s an inherent truism of the urban landscape that these white spots never stay clean for long. Laura McLean-Ferris Ridinghouse, £28/$50 (hardcover)
Set in the New York of the too-near future, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a world in which the ‘iPhone-ification’ of society has been stretched to its logical conclusion. The majority of people in this new urban landscape own a device known as an äppärät (the cutesy-chic of this product name is pitch-perfect), on which they stream words and images at one another, and are able to scan objects and each other for data. Books are obscene, archaic and smelly, and having a traditional, physical conversation (known as ‘verballing’) is uncommon and seen as almost rude. America is broke and angry, a violent one-party police state in an age of decline. Here we find Lenny Abramov, an oldfashioned, needy book-lover and verbose diarist, and the object of his love – the young, insecure, shallow Eunice Park, a beautiful Korean girl caught in the headlights of constant images and commerce. The pornification of Eunice and her friends’ fashions (transparent jeans, nippleless bras, pop-off panties called TotalSurrender) and their constant use of acronyms and jargon are believable, but also satirical of the present day, along with the jarring selloff of everything to the highest bidder and the relentless will-to-power of the media. It seems a shame, then, that at the halfway point a much-feared apocalyptic event does indeed occur, whereupon we embark upon an action-packed narrative squeezed into a novel already bursting at the seams. There’s so much clever, funny, deeply worrying stuff to deal with here already, and some finely drawn characters to explore it with, that this feels like a missed opportunity, but I’ve yet to read a more convincing set of fears about the world we’re headed for and a paean to the one – full of smells, books, carb-heavy pasta and long attention spans – that could one day be lost to us. LMF Granta, £12.99 (softcover)
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I Wonder By Marian Bantjes
Atlas of Remote Islands By Judith Schalansky Subtitled Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, Judith Schalansky’s beautiful gazette (designed and typeset by the author) is essentially her argument that cartography should be taken seriously as a form of literature. Schalansky sets the scene by telling the reader how, having grown up in East Germany, she could only ‘travel’ through the pages of her atlas. For her the world was a series of outlines, place names and mathematical measurements; and she left the DDR to visit these faraway places by booking trips with the travel agency of her imagination. So far, so clichéd. But don’t let that put you off. Schalansky is merely setting the stage (albeit in an almost incredibly clunky way) to posit an atlas as a ‘theatrum orbis terrarum, or theatre of the world’. The meat of the book is the gazette of (actual) remote islands, each accompanied by a short history or plain story, often relating to an episode of discovery, that Schalansky claims to be based on research in various ancient books but may, for all we know, simply be her (as opposed to someone else’s) inventions. However, that’s not important here. Following Schalansky’s argument, remote islands are no more than a stage for exaggerated, claustrophobic drama – rape, murder, cannibalism and various delusional activities – where ‘fact is fictonalised and fiction is turned into fact’. As evidence, she can cite everything from Robinson Crusoe to Marlon Brando’s musings on island life while playing Mutiny on the Bounty’s Fletcher Christian. But while the author is quick to invoke the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, her conceit is part of a much broader literary and graphic tradition that runs from the seventeenth-century Carte du Pays de Tendre (a map setting out the territory of love) via Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943), to the twentieth-century French literary group the Oulipo’s second collection, Atlas de Littérature Potentielle (1981), the title of which was suggested by group member Italo Calvino, whose novel Invisible Cities (1972) is another obvious precursor. Under scrutiny in all of these works are the relationships between mapping, storytelling and possessing a territory (both physical and psychological). It’s an investigation to which Schalansky’s attempt to animate (and perhaps elevate) cartography is a very welcome addition. MR
In her introductory essay, Canadian graphic designer Marian Bantjes notes that she has ‘never claimed to be a paragon of good taste’. On the evidence of I Wonder, a peculiar book of subjective personal musings structured through a wide variety of graphic and typological design styles, this is perhaps an understatement. It lacks the restraint that a Modernism-versed reader might expect, but the author tackles any objection on this front by likening the book (emphatically not a monograph, she insists) to a wunderkammer. The result is a visual dictionary of bizarre graphic possibilities in which everything from pasta shapes and ‘ugly’ vernacular signage to jewellery and kitsch Christmas cards are juxtaposed. Favouring form over function, this seemingly purposeful shortage of cohesion extends to the texts, which, though covering interesting subjects (the shape of stars, found photography), occasionally descend into rambling. Best kept as flip-through mood board, then. Oliver Basciano Thames & Hudson, £19.95 (hardcover)
Fanzines By Teal Triggs There used to be an ezine called The Brain Farm (1998–2002) that concentrated on the latest releases from any number of white guys playing guitars. It was written by kids obsessed with indie music – and I was one of them. Widespread Internet usage was a new thing at The Brain Farm’s inception – and it seemed an obvious choice to use it in the aid of blagging free CDs and gig tickets. This – and not, I’m sorry to say, an engagement in the vast, rebellious, history of DIY publishing – was my primary concern. Teal Triggs, a professor of graphic design at the University of Arts, London, is a woman who thankfully does know her history, and has produced this loving, subjective and much-illustrated history of fanzines and their contemporary offshoot, the ezine. So the zines that made it big are all here: Sniffin’ Glue (1976–7), When Saturday Comes (1986–ongoing), Shoreditch Twat (1996–2004) and Butt (2001–ongoing); together with a selection of the millions internationally that have popped up for a few issues with tiny print runs and promptly disappeared forever. Teen Fag Magazine (1993) and The Complete Soapmaker (1997) probably fit this category. OB Thames & Hudson, £19.95 (softcover)
Ben Turnbull A.C.M.E 1st to 22nd October 2010 Eleven at 37, 37 Kingsway, London WC2B 6TP Open Wednesday to Saturday 11am to 6pm
Kids Have Everything These Days (Grenade), 2010 Mixed Media 23 x 11 x 10 in / 58 x 28 x 25 cm
Rick Giles Unearthed 14th October to 20th November 2010 Eleven, 11 Eccleston Street, London SW1W 9LX Open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 11am to 6pm, Thursday 11am to 7pm, Saturday 11am to 4pm Godzilla, 2010 (detail) C-type print 30 x 24 in / 76 x 61 cm Edition of 3
Eleven 11 Eccleston Street London SW1W 9LX England T +44 (0)20 7823 5540 F +44 (0)20 7824 8383 E
[email protected] W www.elevenfineart.com
Future Generation Art Prize Shortlisted Artists Ziad Antar / Fikret Atay / Fei Cao / Keren Cytter Nathalie Djurberg / Simon Fujiwara / Nicholas Hlobo Clemens Hollerer / Runo Lagomarsino / Cinthia Marcelle Gareth Moore / Nicolae Mircea / Ruben Ochoa Wilfredo Prieto Garcia / Katerina Seda / Guido van der Werve Nico Vascellari / Jorinde Voigt Artem Volokytin / Emily Wardill / Hector Zamora www.futuregenerationartprize.org
30 October 2010 – 9 January 2011
PinchukArtCentre
pinchukartcentre.org Partner of PinchukArtCentre
C A P E TOW N J O H A N N E S B U R G
David Goldblatt, The ruins of Shareworld and Soccer City, Johannesburg, 6 June 2009
TJ Some ThingS old Some ThingS new and Some much The Same Joburg phoTographS by david goldblaTT GOODMAN GALLERY JOHANNESBURG 7 OCTOBER–6 NOVEMBER 2010 DAVID GOLDBLATT IS A 2010 LUCIE AWARD LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT HONOREE GALLERY HOURS: TUESDAY–FRIDAY 09H30–17H30 SATURDAY 09H30–16H00 | 163 JAN SMUTS AVENUE PARKWOOD JOHANNESBURG, 2193, SOUTH AFRICA P. +27 (0)11 788 1113 | F. +27 (0)11 788 9887 |
[email protected]| www.goodman-gallery.com
on view ArtReview This is the last exhibition of the artist’s work that Bourgeois was actively involved in. Can you describe the curating process, and what it was like working with her on the show? Germano Celant As a curator and historian of contemporary art I always pose myself the problem of making a new contribution to the interpretation of a period or an artist, so that the exhibition and its related publication add something to research. In Bourgeois’s case, we discussed with Louise and her assistant Jerry Gorovoy what part of her work was ‘unknown’, in the sense of not having been examined or presented on other occasions or in other studies. And so her ‘fabric drawings’ became the theme of the exhibition in Venice [where Fabric Works was on view over the summer, before travelling to London in October], surprising everyone with their freshness and intensity.
Germano Celant The curator of Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works speaks with ArtReview about bringing the artist’s abstract visual diary to light
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2005, fabric, 30 x 43 cm. Photo: Christopher Burke. © Louise Bourgeois Trust. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London
AR What were her, and your, aims for the exhibition? GC The interaction between people creates a meld of energies that finds expression first in a project and then in an event. The components are different, ranging from the works of art produced and selected with Bourgeois, to the venue, the Magazzino del Sale in Venice, redesigned by Renzo Piano, or Hauser & Wirth’s new exhibition space in London. These two elements have to find a ‘striking’ and communicative balance, one that enhances the effect of the work on the plane of the exhibition as well as that of the catalogue. In this sense, in the great cavity of the sixteenth-century Venetian structure, we worked on strengthening in parallel the sculptures and showcases on the one hand, and the imposing gallery of a hundred fabric drawings on the other. interview by
AR Bourgeois grew up surrounded by fabric in her family’s tapestry restoration workshop, and the fabrics she used in these artworks often came from her own or her family’s clothing: it clearly had autobiographical resonance for her. What do you feel were her aims – both for herself and for her audience – in working with this material? GC The force of memory and of the suffering that she went through in her adolescence have been a stimulus to her creativity. In the fabric drawings she carried out a sublimation, where the pieces of clothing and fabric are transformed, turning into an almost ‘abstract’ language, where the human traces of their use are present but everything is translated into images that speak of the course of her life, all the way up to its approaching end. AR Why do you think that Bourgeois turned to abstraction in making the fabric drawings, when her work had previously been predominantly figurative?
ARTREVIEW
one that is always connected with a ‘metaphysical’ condition. In Bourgeois this always remains sensual and tactile, but takes a less figural and narrative form. The account tends to dissolve into an iconography made up of simple and geometric shapes, even though in many of the fabric drawings the terrifying image of the spider returns in the form of a centrifugal expansion, and thus an osmosis between nightmare and nirvana. AR Much of this work has remained unseen and unknown until this show: why was it not exhibited before? GC The history of art is filled with ‘discoveries’ of unknown periods in an artist’s work. In the case of Louise Bourgeois, the fabric drawings can be taken as a visual diary of the last ten years of her life: something intimate and personal, but at the same time a ‘shroud’ of the last stage of her existence and her feelings. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works is at Hauser & Wirth Savile Row, London, through 18 December
GC At the end of an adventure of life and research, an artist tends to play down the tragic nature of his or her contribution. This translates into a vision of the absolute and the void, and ArtReview
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on view You can never escape your past, they say, but over the past 40 years or so, Mario Ceroli has given it a pretty good go. The Rome-based artist is best known for his association with Italy’s most famous postwar art movement, Arte Povera, and for a series of works produced during the 1960s, among them Cassa Sistina (1966), a wooden shed for which he was awarded the sculpture prize at that year’s Venice Biennale, La Cina (also 1966), a squadron of wooden silhouette figures, and a playful 1966 homage to Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Mobili Nella Valle (1927) in which the Surrealist’s slightly sinister interior scene is reproduced (with a few modifications) as a wooden set that looks at once incredibly ordinary (because of the everyday untreated wood in which it is produced, something of a Ceroli signature) and like it should be the setting (two chairs, one high-backed, one short, drawn close together in front of an armoire) for some terrible inquisition, not least a metaphysical investigation of de Chirico’s work. Indeed, in many ways it’s the big metaphysical questions that Ceroli’s work attempts to tackle: what’s out there and what’s it like? These investigations into people and objects, and into their surroundings, led the sculptor to produce sets for theatre, television and cinema, most notably in collaboration with directors such as Luca Ronconi (a 1968 production of Richard III) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Orgia, 1968), and on a production of Bellini’s opera Norma (1831) at Milan’s Scala in 1972. Then furniture, such as La Bocca della Verità, a pine bed produced by Poltronova in 1974. And more recently still, a series of public sculptures featuring those silhouette figures, such as Silenzio: Ascoltate! (2007), which depicts a series of Florentine heroes (among them Dante, Leonardo, Brunelleschi and Giotto) rendered in terracotta and marble, and located in the city’s Piazza Bambine e Bambini di Beslan. Other works use glass or sand, and range in style from Pop-inspired word sculptures to equestrian monuments, in a way that would be both baffling and annoying to those attempting to conveniently place the Italian within an easy art-historical bracket.
Don’t box me in
Mario Ceroli, star of Arte Povera, looks to the future by refusing to confront his past
Wave, 1992, wood, 175 x 390 x 200 cm. Courtesy Tornabuoni Art, Paris
words
Ceroli’s studio, located just outside Rome, is more like a complex – a cluster of buildings housing an archive of his work (including almost all those mentioned above), attended by a long-serving, chain-smoking assistant whose sand-filled buckets cum ashtrays decorate the studio like fire extinguishers might a major museum. It’s part Name of the Rose and part stage set for a Columbo mystery, with the silhouette sculptures huddled together like characters from a ghost ride or victims on a firing range. But despite that, Ceroli has not simply retreated into a remote landscape populated by his own creations. With a typically restless energy and no little sense of mischief, he boasts of closing the studio at eight in the evening and going out dancing “every night”. And despite the fact that he works in something not far removed from a museum, he says that he’s still more interested in the work he’s doing today than in the past productions on which his fame rests. “I don’t want to die”, he finally confesses as we switch to a more personal metaphysics, “and what I do tomorrow will live on in a new generation”. Perhaps it’s to hedge his bets in this afterlife that
mark rappolt
he’s also working on a commission for the Vatican. But ask him about young artists today, and he replies that there’s a “big, big crisis”. “The new generation”, he says, “doesn’t know how to break free. They may have the talent, but they don’t have the creativity to do it. I get the impression that collectors function as art critics and they suggest what artists should do.” For Ceroli, art must always have a forward momentum – a modernist attitude that seems so quaint and old-fashioned these days that it’s become inspiring to hear anyone say it. The exception to this assessment of the new generation of artists? Maurizio Cattelan – “He’s incredibly interesting, the only one with great talent and creativity”. For Ceroli, it seems, great art is as much about attitude as it is about objects, which presents an intriguing situation for an established artist at the end of his career. Work by Mario Ceroli is on view at Tornabuoni Art, Paris, until 11 December
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Chris Berens
leeuwenhart at roq la rue - seattle oCtoBer 22 - deCemBer 4 2010
amsterdam www.roqlarue.Com
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Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open Call for Proposals An opportunity for independent curators to work with the Zabludowicz Collection Projects will be realised July—August 2011 at Zabludowicz Collection 176 Prince of Wales Road London NW5 3PT Deadline for submissions: 1 December 2010 For further information visit www.zabludowiczcollection.com In association with:
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THE STATE
Works from The Farook Collection Abbas Akhavan Al Braithwaite Allora & Calzadilla James Clar Shezad Dawood Ayman Yossri Daydban Fouad Elkoury Monir Fatmi Daniel & Geo Fuchs Tarek Al-Ghoussein Ramin Haerizadeh Mona Hatoum Adam McEwen Andrei Molodkin Sara Rahbar Sama Al Shaibi 10 Nov 2010 - 22 Jan 2011 .HSSLY`0;YHMÄJ
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SPACE FOR IMAGINATION. PREMIO ITALIA/Italian Contemporary Art Prize 2010
MAXXI. A photographic tale
4 December 2010 – 20 March 2011
15 December 2010 – 6 March 2011
Contemporaneo.doc/DOCVA The archives of Careof & Viafarini
Michelangelo Pistoletto. From One to Many, 1956-1974 3 March – 26 June 2011
4 December 2010 – 27 February 2011
Spazio. From MAXXI’s collections of art and architecture Pier Luigi Nervi. Architecture as challenge Rome. Genius and construction
until 23 January 2011
15 December 2010 – 20 March 2011
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Sigmar Polke. Untitled. 1993. Mixed media on textile, 144 x 120 cm. Sale 3 Dec.
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the power 100
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This is the ninth time that ArtReview has had to introduce its annual artworld Power 100 list, and it has to admit that it’s running out of exciting new things to say. In fact, it’s got to the point where it’s tempted to introduce the theme of power by cobbling together various bits from past introductions, altering some dates and pressing ‘autosummarise’ until its Frankenstein text reaches the correct length. Because ArtReview watched Cleopatra recently, and knows that being powerful means not having to do everything for yourself. But ArtReview doesn’t want the competition (or its writers) to know the secrets of this magical ‘editing technique’. So, why does ArtReview do it? (the power list, not the editing – Microsoft Word does that). The primary motivation is to acknowledge the fact that the art we are exposed to doesn’t just hang, stack, dance or press play itself: someone – more often a group of people – is pushing the buttons (influencing which artist gets a museum show, which artist’s work ends up in which collection that’s then endorsed by or donated to a museum, etc). And at a time when the arts are facing major funding cuts around the globe (well, perhaps not in the Gulf states), knowing who those button-pushers are is perhaps more important than it has been before, both in the interests of transparency and so that you know who to call. ArtReview’s panellists (comprising 12 people spread across four continents, who remain anonymous to avoid social awkwardness and to save the postman from being herniated by all the begging letters) spent a long time worrying about money. Not just because ArtReview doesn’t give them any for their ‘services’ and they were seeking to punish it by rubbing its face into its power deadline; but also because the thumb-twiddlers couldn’t decide whether a recession made money more or less important in deciding who has the power: less, because more people didn’t have any money? Or more, for exactly the same reason? Ultimately the panel decided that money wasn’t a factor at all – they’d leave that to Forbes and The Sunday Times. What matters on this list is simply the consequences of people’s actions. And the Power 100 certainly isn’t all about being the biggest: Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, has a 66,000work art collection and doesn’t make the list; Eli Broad, with some 2,000 works of art, is No. 8. So, what factors does ArtReview take into account when compiling this list? Listed below are the main three: 1. How active you have been in the artworld over the last 12 months 2. Your influence over the type and kind of art that’s been produced during that period 3. And the extent to which that influence has been wielded on an international rather than local scale The only other rule is that museums and institutions are only allowed to be represented by one individual, in order to allow variety in the list. This year’s cover artwork – a pyramid of power featuring 100 elements and the relationships between them – was created by Alexandre Singh.
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summer, Picasso: The Mediterranean Years was a ridiculous affair. Put together (like Gogo’s previous show of the Spaniard’s work) by world-beating Picasso expert John Richardson, flashily lit and waistdeep in lesser-known but major work, it was partly about Pablo, but also about Larry: look what I can do, it said, and in this respect it was surprisingly close in tenor to the Dan Colen show that Gagosian opened recently in New York. Jerry Saltz, writing in New York Magazine, savaged the Colen show as vacuous but pointed out that, because it’s at Gagosian, it matters. (If this was a snow-to-Eskimos confidence trick, it worked: the show reputedly sold out.) Gagosian’s status, then? It’s complicated. Some of what he shows is extraordinary, but it’s increasingly served up with a side dish of arrogance. This is not appealing, but it’s the behaviour of power in excelsis, when all competition has vanished from the rearview.
(1) 2009 Nick Harvey/WireImage, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
L a r ry G agosi a n
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Gagosian has opened a new gallery. The space, a madeover hôtel particulier in Paris’s 8th arrondissement, opening in October with a Jean Prouvé show, makes nine Gagosian outposts in total – plus an office in Hong Kong and a shop on Madison Avenue. That’s compared to Hauser & Wirth’s five and David Zwirner’s three (soon to be four). Right now, 31 years into Gagosian’s dealing career, this isn’t about competition. It’s about outright demoralisation, and a business empire that’s the perfect example of how the contemporary artworld is a microcosm of capitalism itself: at a certain level, expansion is mandatory. And it’s about something else, too – a quality that only enters the equation when you are the world’s most successful contemporary art dealer. That is, swagger. Gagosian wants it all. He wants all the viable rungs of the market: at one point this spring, one of his New York galleries was showing Monet, a second had Roy Lichtenstein, a third featured Richard Prince and a fourth showcased Tatiana Trouvé. He wants to dictate terms to museums when his artists show in them, and to make them look cheap when they don’t. At the London gallery on Britannia Street this
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I wa n Wirt h
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H a ns Ul r ic h Obr is t
(2) © Wolfgang Tillmans, 2010; (3) Felix Clay, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London
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Given the pressure that cash-strapped institutions are putting on their curatorial departments, 2010 was never going to be ‘the year of the curator’ (as 2009 was, when our current No. 2 was No. 1 ). Hans Ulrich Obrist, though, can rest easy – or he could, if he ever did. This year, the Swiss dynamo kept up his main curatorial gig, together with director Julia PeytonJones, at London’s Serpentine Gallery. If perhaps the most Obristian project is October’s Map Marathon: Maps for the 21st Century, the fifth marathon he’s staged there (according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, these events are ‘as famous as pop concerts’; we think they must be confusing the curator with Art Garfunkel again, unless it’s the Huo with the Hoff), then the Christian Boltanski show had his fingerprints on it, too; and as the Serpentine looks set (according to rumours circulating at the time of going to press) to expand by 2012 into the Magazine, a former munitions warehouse being converted by Zaha Hadid, there’ll be more opportunity for him to spread his curatorial wings. In spare moments, meanwhile, he deepened his role as the artworld’s Studs Terkel – its default oral historian – with his interviews taking forms ranging from a video exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale to Volume Two of his mammoth Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews book series. (This year, too, saw a book about HUO: Obrist/O-Brist, a kind of visual portrait by none other than Gerhard Richter – beat that, other curators.) How does he do it all? Simple. As Christian Boltanski said recently, ‘He has no other life. I can’t imagine Hans watching TV or playing golf.’ Strangely enough, neither can we.
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Now that Wirth has reached forty, he clearly feels it’s time to get a move on when it comes to consolidating Hauser & Wirth’s position as one of the world’s leading galleries. Last September saw the opening of the gallery’s first New York space (he had operated previously out of New York, until June 2009, with the gallery Zwirner & Wirth, in partnership with David Zwirner). A year later the gallery launched a new space in Zurich (a move necessitated by the refurbishment of the gallery’s former home at the Löwenbräu building on Limmatstrasse) with a show by Subodh Gupta. And as we go to press, it is expanding into 1,800 sq m of space on Savile Row, in London’s Mayfair. The new gallery opens with the last show that Louise Bourgeois worked on prior to her death earlier this year: an exhibition of fabric works curated by Germano Celant (and reflecting once again – see No. 1 – that the bigger commercial galleries are now presenting the kind of curated shows that were once the preserve of museums). Almost incredibly, the gallery will retain its existing premises on Piccadilly as a ‘project space’ and continue to put on two contemporary shows per year at its shared space on Old Bond Street. Obviously you need art to fill all this territory, and accordingly the gallery has continued to expand its roster of artists, adding Monika Sosnowska (in the US), Phyllida Barlow and the estate of Dieter Roth (exclusively, worldwide). Meanwhile, as gallery artist Christoph Büchel was controversially installing a local swingers club in Vienna’s Secession, Paul McCarthy, who inaugurated Hauser & Wirth’s first London space with an installation titled Piccadilly Circus back in 2003, has also moved on to bigger things this year with his massive Pig Island installation for the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan.
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(4) Jason Schmidt, 2010; (5) Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
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Gl enn D. L ow ry
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Three New York gallery spaces might seem excessive, but it’s clearly not enough for the relentlessly expansionist Zwirner. This year he purchased a fourth: an $8m three-storey building on Chelsea’s West 20th Street for the secondary-market wing he formerly ran with Hauser & Wirth, due to open in 2012. Zwirner has other reasons to smile, too. While he got sued in March – a Miami collector alleged that Zwirner landed him on Marlene Dumas’s buyers’ blacklist – the case collapsed; and sweetest of all, the gallerist just picked up the Donald Judd estate. With Zwirner already representing On Kawara, John McCracken and the estates of Fred Sandback and Dan Flavin, his gallery is starting to look like the new home of all things minimal – except, of course, commercial and creative achievement.
Three million people visited MoMA’s exhibitions this year, and many of them were going to see contemporary art, from the populist Tim Burton exhibition to Marina Abramovic’s retrospective The Artist Is Present, which had a frenzy of visitors queuing to ‘sit’ with the artist. Director Lowry has said recently that he has been pushing MoMA away from being a ‘treasure trove’ towards becoming a ‘social space’, a move that is driving up visitor numbers but that has drawn some criticism. MoMA PS1 now has a new director, Klaus Biesenbach (founder of the KW Institute in Berlin and the Berlin Biennale, and a curator at MoMA for some time, formerly as chief curator of media & performance art, and now with the title chief curator at large), who has also been spearheading edgy programming that is performance- and event-based. As Lowry says: ‘If you’re going to follow the flow of contemporary art, you have to constantly tweak and adjust. You can’t lock it down and say this is what it should be for the next 10 years. Artists are moving much faster than that.’ Brave words. It’s likely that others will follow MoMA’s example.
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In order to keep the No. 1 spot open, this list has never attempted to take the measure of magazines, so up until now we haven’t had the chance to honour the longstanding influence of the assiduous Bice Curiger. One of Parkett magazine’s founders (in 1984) and its editor in chief, as well as the publishing director of Tate Etc, she has also been curator at Zurich Kunsthaus since 1993. However, she finds herself on – and near the top of – this year’s list as recently named curator of the 2011 Venice Biennale. Not for Curiger the overheated nownownow of what’s hot in contemporary art. She has developed a rather calm, distilled, long view of what is important, reflected in her articles and curatorial selections, which should be just about right for the current climate.
Last year we wrote that Sir Nick would have to spend much of this year chasing funding for the Tate Modern extension – and has he ever. Working doggedly with donors and campaigning for the museum and against funding cuts absorbs his days, but still, it seems likely that Serota will have to make some tough decisions in the year ahead. Additionally, it’s perhaps a marker of Tate’s powerful position in the public consciousness that the organisation has attracted a stream of criticism this year: over its associations with BP, over offering to host Tony Blair’s book signing. And when Tate Modern marked its tenth birthday, even its celebratory No Soul for Sale event in the Turbine Hall was complained about. Meanwhile, the institution has set up the post of Daskalopoulos Curator this year, funded by the Greek magnate and collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos (a post promptly filled by curator Jessica Morgan); it remains to be seen precisely what the ‘pro quo’ will be for that. But Tate keeps renewing itself: Penelope Curtis took on the directorship of Tate Britain this year, and Chris Dercon will do the same at Tate Modern in early 2011. The latter museum in particular deserves some celebrating. If it weren’t for Tate Modern, London wouldn’t be the art centre it has become. There would be no Frieze Art Fair, nor a culture showing signs of taking visual art seriously indeed. Chin up.
SIR Nic hol a s Serota
(6) © Mischa Scherrer; (7) © Hugo Glendinning
Bice Cur iger
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RoseLee Goldberg started commissioning performance because she felt that the scene was narrow and ‘stuck’. Six years after she founded Performa, a New York-based nonprofit ‘dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century’, the 2009 edition of the organisation’s flagship biennial, featuring work from Tacita Dean, Candice Breitz, Omer Fast, Dominique GonzalezFoerster and Mike Kelley, proved that it is anything but stuck. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the performance festival on the international art landscape. Museums the world over have united in the cry of ‘we’ll have some of that’. If further evidence of Performa’s influence is needed, consider that New York’s biggest institutions put on blockbuster shows of performance artists this year: Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim and Marina Abramovic at MoMA.
(8) artwork Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1966, © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc, New York; (9) Julie Beers
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Broad is indefatigably involved in LA’s art museums. An art collection worth more than $1b, a wing in LACMA, a $30 million investment in LA MOCA and his own museum aren’t enough. Broad (together with wife Edythe) wants to be the art angel in the City of Angels, creating press and fanfare whenever he gives. And give he undeniably does. There are fears being voiced from LA’s art community that Broad is having a significant homogenising influence on the city’s museums. Press coverage of Broad is filled with sideswipes and barely concealed irritation on the part of patrons, curators and museum directors (except those he supports or those waiting for a cheque). The truth is, however, that museums need Broad like never before: California has a 12 percent unemployment rate and a $20b deficit, and financial cuts are being made left, right and centre. Broad, with a fortune valued at $5.7b, has pledged to give 75 percent of it away. And the building of the Broad collection museum on Grand Avenue, designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which is now getting under way in earnest, should keep him busy for the time being.
RoseL ee Gol dberg
El i Broa d
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F r a ncois Pinault
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(10) Luc Castel
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A previous No. 1 on this list (in 2006 and 2007), François Pinault is the contemporary-art supercollector who took the game into a new league. Having made his money in fashion and luxury goods, he invested passionately in contemporary art, purchasing, along the way, Christie’s auction house and, via Christie’s, London’s Haunch of Venison gallery. With his collection, estimated to be worth $1.4 billion and featuring major works by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Robert Gober and every other major figure of the past 25 years, now on view in two Venice museums, the Palazzo Grassi and the recently opened Punta della Dogana, Pinault’s influence extends far beyond the commercial. In its first year alone, the Dogana had 375,000 visitors; combined numbers for the two sites were 1.3 million. Venice is now a contemporary art city permanently, not just when the biennales are on, and this is, for the greatest part, down to Pinault.
G e n d e r
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Male Female
72.2 27.8
75.7 24.3
N ati o n a l it y
2010
20 09
American British German Swiss French Italian Austrian Greek Chinese Mexican Russian Danish Japanese Lebanese Luxembourgian Serbian Slovenian South African Swedish Thai Ukrainian Venezuelan Canadian Emirati Finnish Palestinian Indian
29.3 16.8 15.8 6.5 5 5 2 2 1.5 1.3 1.3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.3
41.3 16.5 12 4.5 5 6 1 1 2 1.3 0.3 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 -
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Despite a recent survey by ArtTactic predictably naming Ai Weiwei as the Chinese artist with the likeliest market longevity, the spotlight this year has centred on his activist work, which is reanimating the relationship between artist and audience. Ai remains a thorn in the side of the Chinese authorities. Having alerted the world to his brutal assault at the hands of the police via Twitter last year, the artist suffered a similar run-in in August. These attacks seem only to have galvanised Ai, who in March gave a rare lecture in the US on the subject of censorship and installed a monument to the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake on an Austrian mountainside, an act that must be viewed in light of the artist’s ongoing efforts to investigate and publicise the possibility that poor construction standards increased the earthquake’s death toll. Whether this commendable political bent will continue in Ai’s Tate Turbine Hall commission (opening as we go to press) remains to be seen, while another question hangs over his seeming ubiquity on the gallery circuit: can he maintain viewers’ interest, or is he in danger of overexposure?
Ag nes Gund
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A i W ei w ei
Few museum appointments can have produced as much debate as the hiring of longtime New York gallerist and art impresario Deitch to the top position at LA MOCA. Why the surprise? If your entire art career has been about serving the interests of a particular group of artists and a particular group of collectors, can you really acquire overnight the disinterest that most people expect a museum director to pretend to have? But as those groups include the kind of people he’ll be asking to donate money to his new institution, there’s a certain logic to it all. Deitch’s energetic presence and savvy (an attentiongrabbing collaboration with actor James Franco, for example) are probably what the ailing MOCA needs right now: nearbankrupt after financial mismanagement and the credit-crunch caught up with it, MOCA was bailed out by a $30m donation plan from billionaire MOCA trustee Eli Broad. Deitch’s appointment probably won’t appease those who worry that Broad is too dominant on the LA art scene, or the artists who wonder why this museum director is hanging out with actors instead of seeing what’s happening in their studios, but when you’re on your knees, it’s hard to be too demanding. If Deitch makes a success of this, it may become a model other museums will want to follow.
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‘Her importance to the contemporary art world has been enormous’, no less a figure than Jasper Johns told W magazine in a feature on New York’s most ubiquitous arts philanthropist. President emerita of the Museum of Modern Art (she was president from 1991 to 2002) and chairman of its International Council, Agnes Gund, whether through her occasional blog at The Huffington Post, her continued support of the Studio in a School (which she founded in 1977 and which brings artists into New York public schools), her financial, emotional and moral support of various of New York’s art institutions, or her continued collecting of both emerging and established artists, remains a central figure for art in New York.
(11) photo © Dawoud Bey, artwork © Sol LeWitt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; (12) Tyler Coburn; (13) courtesy Ai Weiwei; (14) Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
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A critically acclaimed biennial, solid programming and a smart new website, yes – but the big Whitney Museum news is that director Adam Weinberg’s plans to expand the New York institution beyond its beloved, Marcel Breuerdesigned building are finally under way. Although the poor economic climate has reportedly made fundraising difficult, it has also reduced the cost of construction; at any rate, the museum committed to breaking ground at its new downtown site, in the Meatpacking District, earlier this year. Building is expected to begin in 2011, though $215m must still be raised to meet a fundraising goal of $590m (construction costs alone are estimated at about $200m). This expansion, the latest in a long line of unrealised projects, is under intense pressure from every angle, and architect Renzo Piano has been shifting his designs continually to adapt to changing financial conditions. The Whitney received a huge gift this year, however, from longtime trustee Emily Fisher Landau – several hundred works, including major pieces by, well, you name ’em: Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, Andre, Eggleston, Ruscha…
Jef f rey Dei tc h
A da m D. W einberg
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El iz a bet h dee
portfolio by NICK HAYMES
Ph otog r a ph ed i n n e w yo r k Septem b er 10 –17, 2 010
RIC H A RD C H A NG
k l aus biesenbach
ROSEL EE GOLDBERG
S tefan K a l ma r
A nne Pas ter nak
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There are few artists who genuinely earn the title ‘iconic’ during their lifetime. Nauman is one. Even before last year’s Golden Lion-winning suite of exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (and Nauman already had a gilt paperweight from the 1999 edition), the New Mexico-based artist was consistently one of the top-ranked practitioners on this list. Why? Because he was a pioneering explorer of many of the media and techniques (he’s pretty much probed them all) that result in what we’ve come to call contemporary art. And just in case anyone forgot, he popped out a massive exhibition, Dream Passage, at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, which was on show for almost five months over the spring, summer and early autumn. A man for all seasons.
Ma rc Gl i mc h er
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The artworld’s inbox would be a lot emptier without New York’s e-flux. For a decade this artist-run project, headed by the tiny collaborative team of Vidokle, Aranda and Kuan Wood, has been putting museums, public galleries and nonprofits in touch with e-flux’s 50,000 subscribers, for a fee. And that revenue has formed the basis for e-flux’s various art projects, which each take a critical view on the ideologies and economies that shape the artworld, most recently Time/Bank. But as the volume of artworld communication increases, e-flux is having to expand to keep ahead of the curve – developing its own journal, and pushing into art-criticism territory with its own show reviews, on Art-Agenda.
BRUCE NAUM A N
A n ton V idok l e , Jul ieta A r a n da & Br i a n Ku a n Wood
After ten years at the Pompidou’s helm, director Alfred Pacquement realised a longstanding dream this year with the opening of Pompidou-Metz, an outpost of France’s great modern and contemporary art museum. Many hopes are pinned on such regional branches, and the distinctive building – notably near the German border, designed by Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines, with a roof resembling a fallen net – is meant to beckon tourists on looks alone. It duly attracted 100,000 visitors in the first four days it was open. As well as an ongoing scheme to use vacant space at the Palais de Tokyo to show work by midcareer artists, Pacquement has announced plans for a ‘pop-up’ mobile Pompidou centre that will further the brand’s expansion. Oh, yes, and bring more art to the people. When it comes to world domination, it seems funding (currently holding up Pompidou Mobile) is the only thing standing in Pacquement’s way. That and the strikes which recently closed several of France’s leading museums for several days.
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A l f red Pacque m en t
(15) Georges Méguerditchian; (16) courtesy e-flux; (17) Courtesy and © Jason Schmidt; (18) © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 2010
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It’s been a momentous year for Marc Glimcher, president of Pace: not only is the gallery celebrating its 50th birthday, but it’s doing so all on its lonesome, having demerged the PaceWildenstein partnership Glimcher’s father, Arne, forged 17 years ago with Old Master and Impressionist specialists Wildenstein & Company. The split was seemingly amicable; Arne explained it simply as ‘We are not exchanging clients in the way we once were’ (although hundreds of millions of dollars are said to have exchanged hands by way of buyouts and inventory division). Marc (whose wife Andrea has also long been involved in the familiy business) has used this period of transition to investigate new ways of operating – see revamped website and artist-developed apps – mentioning that ‘the idea of (gallery) networks is just now taking root’. That said, bricks and mortar are still important: Pace added a fourth New York gallery space to its holdings in September, maintains a fairly autonomous operation in Beijing, has a newly appointed representative in the Middle East and is developing plans to expand to Shanghai and Hong Kong.
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It can’t be so bad being Marian Goodman. This year alone you could watch your gilded inventory of artists dominate the world’s institutions (via touring retrospectives by Gabriel Orozco, William Kentridge and Thomas Struth, plus Tino Sehgal’s much-praised stint at the Guggenheim), and you’d have the satisfaction of premiering Marcel Broodthaers’s installation Section Cinéma (1972) in the US, 33 years after opening your New York gallery with a show by the Belgian artist. Goodman, who has also successfully run a gallery in Paris since 1995 – no small thing in itself – may be the most elegantly Europeanised of American dealers, as well as one of the best. Her USP? As the aforementioned Struth has said, ‘It is simply fun to work with her’.
Ma r i a n Goodm a n
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Iwona Bl a z w ick
Jeffrey Deitch isn’t the only New Yorker making a move on LA’s art scene. In September L&M Arts launched a new gallery at a former power plant in Venice, with local hero Paul McCarthy’s first gallery exhibition in his hometown in more than a decade. Speaking of the move, Lévy recently stated that she ‘felt that the old, postwar pole of Paris–New York had become Berlin–Los Angeles’. Like many of the galleries that have been able to expand through the recent economic chaos, Lévy and Mnuchin (a former equities trader and director of the New York Stock Exchange) split their operation between the secondary and primary markets, with the LA space their biggest statement yet of an intention to dominate the latter in the way they already dominate the former.
Thanks to the fanfare surrounding the reopening of London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2009 – following an expansion programme that almost doubled its floorspace – director Iwona Blazwick shot up a dizzying 67 places in last year’s Power 100. While the Whitechapel’s extensive publishing programme and Blazwick’s ongoing support of prizes for filmmaking (the Jarman Award) and women artists (Max Mara Prize) continue to make her a dominant force on the London scene, and while the institution has promoted female artists (this year shows for admittedly established names such as Elizabeth Peyton, Sophie Calle and Alice Neel), other areas are filled out by budget-friendly British Council collaborations or, more awkwardly, private collections – currently that of Dimitris Daskalopoulos.
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(19) © Mathias Braschler; (20) Richard A. Smith; (21) courtesy Whitechapel Gallery, London; (22) courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Beatrix Ruf has earned the position of anointer: if she takes an artist seriously, the rest of the world shortly will too. At Kunsthalle Zurich (normally located in the Löwenbräu building but showing work out of Zurich’s Museum Bärengasse during the complex’s refurbishment and expansion this year and next) Ruf has overseen a tight, critically acclaimed programme for nine years now as director/curator, including, this year, shows by Elad Lassry, Rosemarie Trockel and Christodoulos Panayiotou. She works very closely with the two Swiss collectors on this list, Maja Hoffmann and Michael Ringier, and continues to keep a hand in writing and editing projects (she has recently published texts on the work of Seth Price, Ugo Rondinone and John Baldessari). Her expertise is frequently called upon by others: this year alone she was a judge for the Prix Lafayette, and the Enel Contemporanea and LUMA prizes, and she is on the panel that will decide the fate of the Grand Palais in Paris. But it’s her curatorial acumen that’s decisive here: where she goes, others follow.
Dom inique L ev y & Robert M nuc h in
Be at r i x Ruf
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M ik e K el l ey
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With a stellar list of artists, and galleries in New York and Brussels, Gladstone is already a busy woman, but she’s about to get busier still. After executiveproducing Shirin Neshat’s award-winning movie Women Without Men in 2009, she’s seen Rosemarie Trockel get retrospectives in Basel and Zurich this year, and Matthew Barney get his Schaulager retrospective and carry forward his ongoing Norman Mailerinspired Ancient Evenings project in Detroit. Up next year, she has Allora & Calzadilla’s American and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Swiss pavilions for the 2011 Venice Biennale to look forward to, plus construction work on Anish Kapoor’s £19m Olympic sculpture in London and much else besides.
Although many people like to think that Jay Jopling’s White Cube has not really evolved its programme beyond the YBAs for which it became famous (Hirst, Hume, Emin, the Chapmans) and art’s established heavy-hitters (Gormley, Gursky, Kiefer, Baselitz), there’s no hiding the fact that it remains a dominant force in London, with a suitably big exhibition space (at Mason’s Yard) to keep those big names happy. Look down the list of the 50 or so artists the gallery represents and not only is it far more diverse than people imagine, but almost every single one of them has had or been part of a major museum show during the last 12 months. And for the gallery’s doubters, it’s presenting its first exhibition with LA-based Mark Bradford during Frieze
Jay Jopl ing
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Ba r ba r a Gl a ds tone
Ma rc Spiegl er & A nnet te S c hon hol zer
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(23) Courtesy Art Basel; (25) Johnnie Shand Kydd
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Art Basel scores Spiegler and Schönholzer’s place on the list because, frankly, it knocks the world’s other fairs into a cocked hat. Ask any collector, curator or gallery to name the most important art fair in terms of sales, contacts and artworks, and the answer is always the same. Though journalist Spiegler and the fair’s long-term show manager, Schönholzer, took the reins at a tricky moment for global finances (in 2007), they have proved a success, in no small part due to their efforts to keep improving both Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, in terms of architecture, reshaping the fairs, emphasising projects such as the continually bold Art Statements and events such as this year’s Art Parcours around the city of Basel, curated by CCA Wattis’s Jens Hoffmann.
Turning his hand to whatever medium he likes – over the past 12 months he’s mounted a painting show at Gagosian and delivered a noisy performance at Performa, for example – Mike Kelley continues to make his punkish presence felt, revealing America’s creepy underbelly in a way that looks as easy as pumpkin pie. This year Kelley had his first major exhibition on home turf in LA for nearly ten years, when A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, his collaborative exhibition with Michael Smith, toured to public space West of Rome. Mobile Homestead (2010), an ambitious public project that will see a replica of his childhood home make a journey from midtown Detroit to the suburbs where Kelley grew up, is the artist’s first public project anywhere in the world to result in a permanent installation. It’s proof of his continuing ability to remain on the perceived fringes while creating work that is undeniably significant, and which has a wide and lasting influence.
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The New York Observer recently suggested that Gavin Brown might fill the Jeffrey Deitch-shaped hole in the New York art scene. The comparison is rather pointless; suffice it to say that Gavin Brown’s Enterprise already has a big presence in the city. The gallery has doubled in size since Brown extended into the butcher’s next door, the gallery’s major painters, figures such as Peter Doig and Elizabeth Peyton, are critical successes and big sellers, and Brown’s gang contains more than a few cool kids: Rob Pruitt, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Mark Leckey and Martin Creed, among others. Brown’s name was dragged into talk of favouritism at the New Museum this year (four of his artists have shown there in two years; he has strong connections with its curators). But for the dealer, who views himself as a ‘lobbyist’ as much as a gallerist, this may just be a job well done.
(27) Mark Seliger, courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; (28) Ilias Anagnostopoulos; (29) Markus Rössle
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While the Los Angeles Times’s Christopher Knight may affectionately portray Franz West as ‘Benny Hill with brains’, he remains one of the most influential artists of our times. For critic Peter Schjeldahl, West’s exploration of audience interaction in his work of the 1970s and 80s ‘anticipated – and considerably outshines – the recent vogue for “relational aesthetics”’, while artists such as Rachel Harrison, Sarah Lucas and Paul McCarthy are quick to acknowledge the Austrian’s influence. At the beginning of the year, West’s first European retrospective opened at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, before going on to Naples and Graz. By the end of it he’d also racked up solo shows at Almine Rech in Brussels and Gagosian in Rome as well as producing a new work for the Liverpool Biennial and the Hayward Gallery’s New Décor summer show.
G AV IN BROW N
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Whatever the pitfalls of staging a large survey show that showcases the vast private collection of one of your own trustees and is curated by one of said trustee’s favoured artists, this spring’s Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection – picked by Jeff Koons and hosted by the New Museum in New York – confirmed that the Greek Cypriot billionaire’s major-player status is not just based on money. Joannou’s DESTE Foundation, its associated prize for a Greek artist and the Hydra project space (which this year displayed work by another of Joannou’s artist friends, Maurizio Cattelan) likewise stretch his influence beyond his considerable spending power and into the upper echelons of institutional and curatorial sway.
F r a nz W es t
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Is it just us, or was this the year that Cindy Sherman settled into her position as one of the most important female artists in recent history? Having previously kept her rather private persona hidden behind her many prosthetics and disguises, she has engaged this year in collaborations with the likes of fashion label Balenciaga, who are long-term admirers of the artist, and who lent clothes for her most recent series of works – none-too-kind, discomfiting images of ageing rich women. While that series wowed New York’s ironic fashionistas, Sherman also won the Man Ray award at the end of last year, awarded by the Jewish Museum for artists who investigate identity through photographic means – just about made for her, then. However, the encomiums will surely crescendo in 2012, when she will have a major exhibition at MoMA.
Da k is Joa nnou
Cindy S h er m a n
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Sales of Takashi Murakami’s LA-friendly art no doubt had a major part to play in financing Blum & Poe’s move to a sleek gigantic new space a year ago. Such is the perceived power of the gallery, housed in a 1,950 sq m space in LA’s Culver City, that the city’s other commercial galleries have flocked to its side for security. Murakami himself has been busy taking over the Château de Versailles this year, of course, while the rest of the gallery artists, among them Slater Bradley, Lee Ufan and Yoshitomo Nara, bring in a steady stream of collectors, even in straitened times. Blum & Poe considered opening an additional new space in Berlin or New York instead of expanding, but decided to stick with LA. ‘We like LA’, they say. LA clearly likes them back.
A nne Pa s ter na k
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Cohen is one of the world’s richest men, responsible on some days, at the height of his trading (through hedge fund SAC Capital), for up to 3 percent of everything bought and sold on the New York Stock Exchange. He is also one of the world’s most active art collectors. And he was briefly a significant owner of Sotheby’s stock, during which time 20 works from his collection were shown by the auction house (whatever the agreement there, when the stock rose sharply a short time later, Cohen promptly dumped it). This year, among other purchases, Cohen acquired a 1958 Jasper Johns Flag painting for a reported $110m. Still, it’s a shame when you’re so busy you can’t enjoy your own collection. He recently mentioned retiring to ‘just watch a fucking movie, or hang with my kids’. OK, he forgot to mention ‘and stare at the fucking Flag’, but we’re pretty sure he meant that, too.
T i m Blu m & Jeff Poe
Categor y: Collec tor – Nationalit y: American – L ast year: 2 2
S tev en A . Coh en
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Peter F is c h l i & Dav i d W eiss
(31) Philippe Pavans de Ceccatty, © Peter Fischli & David Weiss, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; (33) Tim Blum photo: Margarete Jakschik, courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; (34) Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
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This year, when Fischli/ Weiss were awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize at the Museum Ludwig, the jury identified them as ‘among the most influential and perhaps ingenious artists in Switzerland’. Try ‘the world’. The pair’s 30-year, dazzlingly diverse enquiry into how we interpret reality has spawned countless direct and indirect imitations internationally, though few can match Fischli/Weiss’s knife-edge balance of humour and seriousness. Institutions worldwide love them, too: at the time of writing they have overlapping retrospectives in Munich and Kanazawa. Meanwhile, a new work made for the Ludwig – excerpts from live radio edited into a single faux-broadcast that steadily baffles its listeners – suggests they’ve hardly lost their touch vis-à-vis marvellously absurdist hermeneutics.
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Creative Time produces the kinds of public projects that have the ability to utterly transform the relationship New Yorkers have to their city. Key to the City, a project by Paul Ramírez Jonas earlier this year, involved the ceremonial handing out of keys to members of the public, each of which opened locks at sites across the five boroughs. Creative Time also partnered on the first two commissions for the city’s new High Line park, by artists Spencer Finch and Stephen Vitiello. And the organisation has provided support for groups such as antiestablishment cool-kids Bruce High Quality Foundation and their antiuniversity, BHQFU. Though New York-based, Creative Time, headed up by Pasternak since 1994, makes waves beyond the city – most recently commissioning Danish-Icelandic artist Jakob Boeskov to create a short ‘art-action’ video with Nigerian director Teco Benson in Lagos and producing Pae White’s luminous Self Roaming (2009) installation on Miami Beach. The annual Creative Time Summit, the first of which took place last year, is establishing itself as a fountainhead for debate about participatory practice, and Creative Time has established the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, which acknowledges achievements in that field.
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Victor Pinchuk only started collecting art five years ago, but his spending power is enormous – he was valued at $3.1 billion by Forbes in December, and this during a rocky period in the fortunes of Interpipe, his pipe manufacturing business – with his interest traditionally concentrated on blue-chip artists bought in bulk. (Pinchuk reputedly owned half the work shown in last year’s Damien Hirst show at London’s Wallace Collection, for example.) This year he has widened his influence by joining the board of MOCA in Los Angeles and establishing the Future Generation Art Prize, an international prize based on the one for young Ukrainian artists the collector already operates through his Pinchuk Art Centre gallery in Kiev. Attracting a jury that includes Daniel Birnbaum, Robert Storr and Ai Weiwei, the biennial prize will see an artist under thirty-five (from an already published shortlist) awarded $100,000 this December.
Eugenio L opez
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V ic tor Pinc h uk
As public purses tighten all over Europe, many an art institution is coming to rely on the generosity of its richest patron – Bernard Arnault, the man at the top of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH. Louis Vuitton did much during the boom years to matchmake fashion and art, a relationship that now runs far deeper than Murakami-designed handbags. Louis Vuitton initiatives such as the YArts Project in London, in which five major institutions work together with young adults, and countless sponsored exhibitions have suggested a new commitment to art. Arnault, whose own collection includes major installations by Olafur Eliasson and Vanessa Beecroft, will not be outdone by No. 10 François Pinault and his Venice museums for long. The former is finally set to achieve one of Pinault’s dreams by opening a major collection space in Paris, Frank Gehry’s 8,900 sq m, $127m ‘floating glass cloud’ situated on a site within the Jardin d’Acclimatation adjacent to Paris’s Bois de Boulogne.
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Soft-drinks tycoon Eugenio López’s Mexico-based Colección Jumex has long been held to be the most significant holding of contemporary art (ranging from Warhol to Orozco) in Latin America. In the past 12 months, however, López has decided to make it ‘bigger’ and send it on tour around the rest of the world: at the end of last year, Where Do We Go from Here? went on show at Miami’s Bass Museum, and by the time you read this, it’ll be at the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati; another selection, Interstices, was on view at Vienna’s MUMOK earlier this year. And while he was doing all that, López also sponsored June’s Francis Alÿs exhibition at Tate Modern, which travels on to WIELS in Brussels and then MoMA, New York.
(35) Reto Guntli; (37) Sergei Illin, © Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev; (38) Colección Jumex, Mexico City
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Hard work can pay dividends in the power game, and Marina Abramovic’s 700 hours of motionless staring seems to have raised her already elevated status considerably. The Artist Is Present, which found her facing members of her public one by one across a table in MoMA, was the eponymous centrepiece in this year’s crowd-pulling, much-written-about tour de force of a retrospective. Visitor numbers are a great guarantor of museum funding and with 500,000 visitors and a further million watching the performance online, the exhibition can claim dramatic success – despite, that is, curator Klaus Biesenbach’s odd insinuation that Abramovic’s eyesight is too poor for her to look at anyone properly, and a couple of instances of visitors getting a little too excited over Imponderabilia, the doorway occupied by nude models that one was encouraged to squeeze through.
Ber na r d A r nault
M a r ina Abr a mov ic
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The Frieze Art Fair has pretty much wiped out any competition it may have faced in previous years – if the satellite fairs surrounding London’s October jamboree could be called competition in the first place. There was a definite lack of Supermarket Sweep-style shopping apparent at last year’s fair, but sales remained steady and the big names seem committed to their annual trip to Regent’s Park. Meanwhile Slotover has become an increasingly influential voice in the London art scene, keeping his fingers in various other pies, mostly political ones – be it the Save the Arts campaign or lobbying the London mayor’s office and old school-chum and new arts minister Ed ‘Lazy’ Vaizey (at whom, confusingly, Save the Arts is partly directed).
Ok w ui En w ezor
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As well as masterminding the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), generally acknowledged as one of the world’s outstanding collections of Latin American art, Cisneros, who sits on MoMA’s board of trustees and the Tate’s Latin American Acquisitions Committee, has during the past 12 months endowed a $1m professorship in Latin American art at Manhattan’s Hunter College, supported and coproduced an ongoing seminar series at Bard College, further up the Hudson, published A Constructive Vision, a catalogue documenting her collection, and underwritten the catalogue for Guillermo Kuitca’s recent touring retrospective.
M att h ew Sl otov er & Am a n da S h a r p
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Pat r ici a Ph el ps de Cisneros
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Ta k a s h i Mur a k a m i
(39) Florian Kleinefenn, Château de Versailles, courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris; (40) Mauricio Donelli; (41) Linda Nylind, courtesy Frieze, London; (42) Flora Hanitijo/Arise Magazine, London
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The French may not love Takashi Murakami – his current 15-room installation at the Château de Versailles has drawn flak from rightwing groups, even though he’d edited out the ejaculating anime figures – but the Japanese artist doesn’t care. (He is, he says, used to ‘Murakamibashing’.) Also this year, while his art factory, Geisai art fair and Kaikai Kiki gallery and art production company rolled relentlessly on, Murakami unfurled his latest collaborative collection with Louis Vuitton, Cosmic Blossom, and also styled the Richard Prince-photographed Britney Spears cover of Pop magazine. ‘He is a genius!’ squealed Spears. His market may not be what it was, but certainly the masscultural mainstream is a more interesting place with Murakami kicking down its walls. Next stop, New York: look out for 12metre-high, fang-sporting Murakami inflatables in November’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
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Okwui Enwezor’s bigshow curation, critical writing and teaching have been a potent mix since 2002’s Documenta 11, and the Nigerian-born curator has become a key figure in discussions on contemporary African art, and on how the dynamics of globalisation have transformed the art of the developing world. The last 12 months have seen the publication of his Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (with Chika Okeke-Agulu), and Enwezor is now working on an ambitious exhibition project, Meeting Points 6, which will take place in nine Middle East, North African and European cities, from Ramallah to Tangier to Berlin, starting in Beirut in April 2011.
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Monik a Sprut h & Ph il om ene M ager s
A collector and philanthropist, Hoffmann is founder of the Swiss-based LUMA Foundation, which supports and promotes cultural and arts projects worldwide (notably New York’s New Museum, for which Hoffmann is also a board member, and Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies). Hoffmann is also vice president of the Council of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation in Basel (of which cousin Maja Oeri is president) and president of the Kunsthalle Zurich Foundation. In connection with that institution, she’s currently working on the completion of Bau West, a new wing within Zurich’s Löwenbräu complex (home of the Kunsthalle and a number of private foundations and commercial galleries). As if that wasn’t enough, this year she became a Tate trustee, produced the documentary film Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010) and, at the Venice Architecture Biennale, unveiled the Frank Gehrydesigned plans for LUMA’s Parc des Ateliers, a utopian arts campus to be located in Arles, France, due to be commenced next year.
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‘The real power game – which is at the high price level’, Monika Sprüth told The Art Newspaper in June this year, ‘is generally played by men’. In partnership with Philomene Magers and via a museum-size space in Berlin, together with a more conventionally sized gallery in London, she’s spent the last 12 years trying to prove herself wrong. Home to European giants such as Fischli/Weiss and Andreas Gursky, Sprüth Magers is also the European gallery of choice for a selection of top-drawer Americans: Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Stephen Shore, who sit alongside the younger talents of Cyprien Gaillard, Thea Djordjadze and Sterling Ruby. Major exhibitions of work by Baldessari and Rosemarie Trockel are currently and persuasively touring the world’s kunsthalles and major museums, while Cindy Sherman goes to MoMA in 2012. It seems likely that the many stars in their stable will rise higher and shine brighter, as behind the scenes Sprüth and Magers lightly and unobtrusively pull a few necessary strings.
(45) courtesy Todd Eberle, Arles, 2009; (46) Dagmar Schwelle, courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin & London
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If performance is the artistic medium of recent times, its cynosure is surely Tino Sehgal. Here’s what you can do with no art objects whatsoever: at New York’s Guggenheim this year – with the help of a relay-race arrangement of progressively older volunteers (kids to grandpas) quizzing viewers sincerely about ‘progress’ as they ascended the spiralling architecture – Sehgal turned Frank Lloyd Wright’s building into a free-floating metaphor for the life cycle, for Modernism, for the human drive towards advancement. He also created a model of open-ended human engagement in the art that, gratifyingly, was spun by us, the visitors. Plus, Sehgal manages to sell works like this and get praised for not being naively antimarket; and when the market spirals down, his austere yet generous procedures look like a perfect response. Can you be inimitable and paradigmatic at the same time? Sehgal’s whip-smart art says yes.
M a ja Hof f m a nn
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Curator, artist, critic, publisher… auctioneer? In April, Matthew Higgs took on the last of these roles in the latest of White Columns’s benefit auctions, whose artworks – by names such as Tomma Abts, Maurizio Cattelan and David Byrne – are a marker of the New York nonprofit space’s indestructible cred. Higgs focused on his day job this year, downplaying his main sideline as a maker of wry text-based art, but he remains a bastion of engaged, skewed, extraartistic curating – as witness White Columns’s recent exhibitions dedicated to Sonic Youth kingpin Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal and AIDS-related activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Coming up for a decade since he moved from the UK to America, Higgs continues to justify the existence, since 2006, of Harlem gallery Triple Candie’s honorary Matthew Higgs Society. Name us another curator who has one of those.
T ino Se hg a l
M at t h ew H iggs
C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 2 9
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C a t e g o r y : A u c t i o n H o u s e – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h /A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 2 6
Between them, the artists Sadie Coles represents have given her a busy year in terms of London museum shows: Elizabeth Peyton at the Whitechapel, Florian Hecker at the Chisenhale and John Bock at the Barbican. When you factor in the major international museum shows Coles has had to deal with – among them Urs Fischer at New York’s New Museum and Matthew Barney at the Schaulager, Basel – it’s easy to see why her gallery programme is one of the most impressive in town. In September, Fischer inaugurated Coles’s new London space – a 450 sq m gallery off Savile Row, next door to fellow heavyweights Hauser & Wirth – which will operate in tandem with the gallery she already operates at Mayfair’s South Audley Street. Also representing artists such as Carl Andre, Matthew Barney, John Currin, Richard Prince and Ugo Rondinone, Coles has become one of the main players on the London scene.
Bret t Gorv y & A m y Ca ppel l a zzo
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 8 4
Sa die Col es
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 9 6
Nic hol a s Logs da il
C a t e g o r y : A r t i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 1 3
JEF F KOONS
(47) courtesy BMW, Munich; (48) courtesy Lisson Gallery, London; (49) Juergen Teller; (50) Christie’s Images Ltd, London, 2010
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Jeff Koons became a grandfather this year, and 2010 saw the artist slip into elder-statesman mode, cherry-picking pet projects: curating friend and patron Dakis Joannou’s collection at New York’s New Museum, accepting the BMW Art Car commission and doing charity work: brightening up various children’s hospital wards and via his continued support of the Koons Family Institute on International Law & Policy (set up following the loss of his son to the child’s Italian mother). This mellowing has proved problematic, however. The Joannou show, Skin Fruit, was labelled ‘puerile and old hat’ by ArtReview’s Joshua Mack, ‘rudderless’ by ArtReview’s Christian Viveros-Fauné (writing in The Village Voice) and ‘shapeless’ by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine; the car took on an unsubtle theme of orgasmic creation; and the charity works seem incongruous next to Koons’s increasingly worn-out shtick of subversion within a consumerist aesthetic.
For a time there it looked like Nicholas Logsdail’s Lisson was treading water, but the addition of members of a younger generation of artists is starting to give the gallery a new vigour. Cory Arcangel and Ryan Gander (who currently has a Public Art Fund commission in Central Park) joined last year, and the gallery took on Haroon Mirza – included in this year’s British Art Show and up for the Northern Art Prize – this year. Of course, these relative young’uns are all very well and good, but Logsdail’s power still primarily lies in his relationship with an older generation – and in particular this year, Marina Abramovic (who’s also recently joined the gallery) and Anish Kapoor. With a new gallery in Milan and an office opening in New York shortly, expect to see Logsdail nudge himself further up the list in 2011.
The contemporary art auction market took a big hit over the past two years, with Western Contemporary dropping an estimated 20–30 percent (according to research conducted by Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics). Although things seem to be on the up this year, the market hasn’t yet recovered. The first six months of 2010 saw Christie’s rake in $461m dollars from its Post-War & Contemporary sales, an increase of 140 percent on last year. Sales in new markets such as Dubai and Hong Kong are also on the rise, pointing towards a more healthy 2011.
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portfolio by Miles Aldridge
Ca ndida gertl er
Ph otog r a ph ed i n LO n do n a n d ro m e Septem b er 11 –24 , 2 010
Po ju & A ni ta Z a bludow icz
Photographed at the Hotel Majestic, Rome. Makeup: Pierre Orlando at Face to Face Agency. Thanks to Umberto Cicci
M a r ina A br amov ic
M a rgot H el l er
nic hol a s l ogs da il
A nis h K apoor
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In the sense that there’ve been no newspaperhogging auctions or switches of direction, Damien Hirst has had a relatively unassuming year. Which means numerous exhibitions: at L&M Arts in New York, Gagosian in New York, Galería Hilario Galguera in New Mexico and Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum. This last retrospective not only found Hirst partying with Albert II, the principality’s crown prince; it also included spot, spin and butterfly paintings, all series which, he announced at the Gagosian show (entitled End of an Era), he would no longer be producing. This may to some extent slow the shrinking of Hirst’s market – down by 93 percent last year and bound to be lower this annum – and allay the artist’s detractors, who in August reiterated and expanded on accusations of plagiarism. A charge Hirst branded ‘gibberish’. Still, Hirst isn’t one for cooling his heels. His Murderme art collection grows apace, his Other Criteria publishing wing and retail outlets continue to turn out books, sell multiples and support exhibitions – and he’s rumoured to have a longterm gig booked in: a retrospective across both Tate’s London galleries, coinciding with the Olympics.
Emm a nuel Per rot in
C a t e g o r y : A r t i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 4 8
Da m ien H ir s t
This has been the year that Ann Philbin and the Hammer Museum were rewarded for their canny financial management and steady growth. Throughout turbulent financial times, and as its LA neighbours peaked and troughed, the Hammer has stayed solvent. The big news this year, however, is the Hammer’s recently announced founding, in partnership with LAXART, of a Los Angeles Biennial, which will begin in 2012 and feature artists from the city and surrounding areas in institutional and found spaces. (Given this supportive emphasis, it’s unsurprising that Philbin describes the Hammer’s primary audience as artists.) Though region-based selections may have their problems, in a period in which there are fears about the homogenisation of the LA museums (due to the growing powers of Eli Broad and MOCA), the Hammer and LAXART will help to guarantee a strong homecity scene.
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He may have put one of his gallery spaces – the Miami outpost – up for sale this year, but as many a snide critic has noted, Emmanuel Perrotin seems to have gained the Château de Versailles in its stead. Two of the three contemporary art exhibitions held at the French palace have been from Perrotin’s stable: Xavier Veilhan in September last year and Takashi Murakami this year. Reports from the Murakami opening noted François Pinault, Eli Broad and Adam Lindemann as all in attendance (with Pharrell Williams performing) and placed Perrotin at the centre of attention. Whatever the truth of the relationship, the Murakami show at Versailles (which will move on to Qatar) has topped Perrotin’s stellar year, in which he also opened a 300 sq m extension to one of his Paris galleries, and cemented his position as the leading French gallerist
(51) Dominik Gigler, courtesy Sotheby’s, New York & London; (52) courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (53) David Bailey; (54) Guillaume Ziccarelli, courtsey Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
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C a t e g o r y : M u s e u m D i r e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 2 8
In February this year Walking Man I, a rare sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, sold for £65,001,250 (including buyer’s premium) at Sotheby’s in London, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. ‘I’m afraid the Giacometti price will tip the balance back again in favour of the auction houses’, gallerist Iwan Wirth commented. ‘We had a buyer’s market, but it didn’t feel like a buyer’s market any more at the Sotheby’s sale.’ In its first-half results, Sotheby’s reported that revenue from Impressionist and Contemporary sales increased 154 percent on last year. Much of that was due to the first rather than the second category – less than half the lots in London’s June Contemporary sale exceeded their estimates. So, are the auction houses back? It’s too early to say.
A nn Ph il bin
C a t e g o r y : A u c t i o n H o u s e – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : 2 7
Tobi a s M ey er & C h ey enne W es t ph a l
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C a t e g o r y : M u s e u m D i r e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : 5 4
When it comes to chips, they don’t get any bluer than Matthew Marks’s. There’s a section on the gallery website that lists all the museum shows the gallery’s artists are currently participating in, and with Charles Ray, Robert Adams, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns and Andreas Gursky among the artists he looks after, you can guess it’s a pretty big one. This year Marks added the estate of Anne Truitt to the list. That said, the gallery isn’t averse to occasionally stepping beyond such safe territory: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, better known as fashion photographers, and product designer Roy McMakin are given a home by Marks, together with new additions Paul Sietsema and Vincent Fecteau; and the dealer, who has operated out of New York since founding the gallery in 1991 (and where he currently has three outlets), plans a new space next year in Los Angeles.
Udo K i t tel m a nn
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 3 0
M at t h ew M a r k s
C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : Fr e n c h – L a s t Ye a r : 6 8
Nicol a s Bour r i aud
C a t e g o r y : A r t i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : 5 7
Ger h a r d R ic h ter
(55) Hubert Becker; (56) Mikael Olsson; (57) © Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; (58) Sandra Steins, © Bundesregierung
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Gerhard Richter doesn’t rest on his laurels. As if being massively influential and constantly exhibiting and working were not enough, he also has the most extensively detailed website we’ve ever come across – on which you can see the entire provenance of every single work, cross-referenced with any relationship to his vast Atlas collection of photographs, and a selection of microsites for series such as 4900 Colours and Sinbad. That’s not all: his team are very active on Twitter, on hand with characteristic efficiency to keep you up to date on Richter’s progress, and even offering a ‘work of the week’ for your perusal. Richter turns eighty in 2012, and will have a major exhibition at Tate Modern to coincide with this big birthday, which is to be cocurated by none other than Sir Nicholas Serota.
A year has passed since Nicolas Bourriaud curated the Tate Triennial and, with it, introduced his catchall title for forward-thinking contemporary art; so far, though, ‘altermodern’ hasn’t caught the collective imagination in the way that Bourriaud’s meme for the sociable art of the 1990s, ‘relational aesthetics’, did. Admittedly, the French curator slightly muddied the waters by swiftly minting a second neologism for the same type of nomadic, hybridist, fusionist art – ‘radicant aesthetics’ – with his theory book The Radicant (2009). Nomenclature aside, though, in that book in particular the French curator convincingly articulates an immediate future for the globalised artworld: modernist in energy and curiosity, and characterised by rampant back-and-forth aesthetic exchanges and interfusions across the globe. When the dust settles, it may well appear that Bourriaud was right (again).
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Udo Kittelmann’s arrival as the director of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, in which capacity he holds the reins to five separate museums, was remarkably well timed for this former apprentice optician. Berlin’s growing status as a commercial art capital, as well as being a site of production, has only increased his influence. The Neue Nationalgalerie is garnering critical respect with a show for Willem de Rooij, while the Hamburger Bahnhof staged the first Bruce Nauman retrospective in the German capital – a sure crowd-pleaser, albeit one that relied heavily on the collection of controversial long-term patron Friedrich Christian Flick.
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C a t e g o r y : Artist – N a t i o n a l i t y : British – L a s t Ye a r : Reentry (96 in 2006)
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It is hard to believe that the committee in charge of commissioning an ‘iconic’ landmark for the 2012 Olympic site in London were ever going to go for a submission that did not primarily use the material of the project’s main patron, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. And it’s really hard to imagine that they could not have expected the pasting the design got from public and critics alike. However, there’s no doubting Kapoor’s popularity or his prolific output: in addition to a solo show at the Guggenheim Bilbao, his Royal Academy exhibition (the first granted to a living British artist) got 277,473 visitors, making it into the top three of London contemporary art shows last year. He is now preparing for his first major exhibition in India, the country of his birth, across two venues: the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and a Bollywood film studio in Mumbai. And he’s got Paris’s Grand Palais to fill in 2011. He’s one of only a few artists who can pull off so many major commissions, and with such precision.
(59) Christian Lanz; (60) Roman Mensing, courtesy Museum Ludwig, Cologne; (61) Albrecht Fuchs; (62) Johnny Shand Kydd, 2003
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Ask curators which gallerists they admire and Daniel Buchholz’s name will come up pretty quickly. No wonder: Buchholz, who dealt contemporary art out of Cologne for two decades before opening a second space, in Berlin, in 2008, traffics in an elegant blend of cerebral and commercial, European and American – a hard-to-emulate approach that his galleries’ recent and forthcoming showcases for Michael Krebber, Reena Spaulings, Danh Vo and Wolfgang Tillmans might effectively sum up. A good number of kunsthalle directors, it would appear, are simply donning blindfolds and throwing darts at Buchholz’s list of artists. Are we complaining? Hardly.
A nis h K a poor
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Da niel Buc h hol z
C a t e g o r y : M u s e u m D i r e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : 6 0
K a sper Konig
Owner and chairman of international media company Ringier AG, Michael Ringier also holds one of the most important contemporary art collections in Switzerland, curated by Kunsthalle Zurich’s Beatrix Ruf (who in turn curates Ringier AG’s annual reports, a hybrid of accountancy and artist project, executed this year by John Baldessari). Six years ago, Ringier bought into Verlag JRP (‘just ready to be published’), which has gone on to become one of Europe’s premier art publishers. He also owns the German-language art magazine Monopol, and is a regular attendee of the Bilderberg Group conference for people of great influence.
Kasper König doesn’t have a CV so much as a catalogue of bragging rights. He worked with Warhol in the Factory, was curating museum exhibitions at the age of twenty-three, cofounded Skulptur Projekte Münster, mounted the landmark German Pop show Westkunst in Cologne in 1981 (introducing Franz West to the world), cofounded Portikus gallery and has sired a dynasty of gallerists in the shape of sons Leo and Johann. Having directed Cologne’s Museum Ludwig since 2000, König recently renewed his contract – which had been due to end this year – until 2012. If the description ‘curator’ no longer does him justice, ‘force of nature’ might.
M ic h a el R ingier
C a t e g o r y : C o l l e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : S w i s s – L a s t Ye a r : 5 6
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C a t e g o r y : C o l l e c t o r s – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : 6 9
As far as big-reputation international exhibitions go, few are bigger than Documenta, the megasurvey of world art that takes over the German town of Kassel every five years. Documenta 13 will open its doors in June 2012, and curator ChristovBakargiev, almost two years into her post (she was appointed in December 2008), has already unveiled the exhibition’s first artwork, Giuseppe Penone’s bronze and stone sculpture Idee di Pietra (2004/10), and launched the first of a series of publications, an artist’s book by Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg. A former curator of Turin’s Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, onetime curator at New York’s PS1 and artistic director of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Christov-Bakargiev has continued her globetrotting ways when presenting her plans for Documenta, with lectures in Kabul, Sydney, New York and New Delhi.
C h r is t i a n Boros & K a ren L oh m a nn
C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 8 0
Ca roly n C h r is tov-Ba k a rgiev
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 9 4
Toby W ebs ter
C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : S w e d i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 4
Da niel Bir nbaum
(63) Julia Ziegler; (64) Porter Hovey; (65) Ryszard Kasiewicz, © Documenta Archiv; (66) courtesy Boros Collection, Berlin
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After curating the Venice Biennale to record-breaking attendance in 2009, Daniel Birnbaum has had a homecoming year: in 2010 he took up the directorship of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and its orange-clad new outpost in Malmö. The move has seen Birnbaum shedding his previous commitments left, right and centre, resigning as rector of the influential Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and as director of the exhibition space Portikus in the same city this April, both of which positions he’d held since 2001, as well as making an exit from the board of Manifesta, on which he’d sat since 2002. That said, he found time between CV-building to sit on various juries, including Victor Pinchuk’s Future Generation Art Prize and the inaugural Absolut Art Award, which he chaired – and which was won by Keren Cytter, a favourite of Birnbaum’s. And he remains one of the most erudite philosophers to tackle aesthetics and contemporary art practice.
Given the calibre of the artists that Toby Webster’s Modern Institute works with (Eva Rothschild, Martin Boyce and Luke Fowler, to name just three), the Glasgow gallery in the flesh was disarmingly lo-fi and tucked away. This year, befitting an outfit that boasts the most recent Turner Prize-winner, Richard Wright, on its roster, the Modern Institute has moved to a pristine street-level space sited within a former bath house, the inaugural Jim Lambie solo show coinciding with Glasgow International. As if to demonstrate his dominance in the UK art scene’s second city, Webster threw not one but two parties in celebration – a cooling for the former space and a warming for the new – the queues for which stretched down the street.
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Christian Boros’s roles as art collector (together with partner and adviser Karen) – with their 3,000 sq m private foundation in a former Berlin S&M club – and media magnate collided this year with the cofounding of the Distanz Verlag, an enterprise in which the pair are joined by Uta Grosenick, former editor of Taschen’s Art Now book series. No vanity project, the start-up has Angelika Taschen herself coming onboard next year – leaving the company that bears her ex-husband’s family name – and has already issued a catalogue of assiduously designed and manufactured survey and monograph hardcovers. Meanwhile, Lohmann has joined Art Basel as its VIP coordinator in Germany, and the brutal environs of the Berlin gallery, which showcases just some of the couple’s sculpture collection, continues to attract a steady stream of prebooked visitors.
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C a t e g o r y : C r i t i c – N a t i o n a l i t y : R u s s i a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
This year Neo Rauch celebrated his 50th birthday with not one, but two simultaneous largescale retrospectives. One was at the Museum der Bildenden Künste in his hometown of Leipzig – a city now as famous for the school of painting Rauch pioneered as it is for being the final resting place of J.S. Bach – the other at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Commenting on the honour, news service Deutsche Welle barked, ‘He is one of the country’s most important living painters, and a de facto ambassador for modern German art’. On the commercial side, with Rauch’s work breaking its record price at auction (his 1999 painting Stellwerk sold for £892,450 in December), the artist is busy giving it away: donating 40 works on paper with a value of $130,000 to Aschersleben, the city of his grandparents. Rauch has promised to follow this initial bundle by giving away all subsequent work in the same medium to the city, with a view to a permanent exhibition opening there in spring 2012.
Bor is Groys
C a t e g o r y : A r t i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : R e e n t r y (6 6 i n 2 0 0 6)
Neo R auc h
C a t e g o r y : A r t i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : I t a l i a n – L a s t Ye a r : 7 1
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The fact that there was so little comment on Maurizio Cattelan’s carte blanche to juxtapose works by an older generation of artists with his own during the Italian artist’s Menil Collection retrospective in Houston this year – Warhol and Rauschenberg included – is telling. It suggests that Cattelan will enjoy a similar durability to these artists, and this implicit esteeming may have influenced the decision by Milan’s city authorities to green-light Against Ideology (2010), a sculptural one-finger salute in the direction of the Italian Stock Exchange, sited outside Cattelan’s four-work show at the Palazzo Reale Museum this September. All of which demonstrates that the artist is of such a standing that he gets whatever he wants: dangerous territory for a notorious prankster.
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Having come to attention for his incisive rewriting of the history of late-Soviet art, the Russian art historian Boris Groys has become one of the most influential theorists of the post-Cold War artworld, bringing fresh and controversial attention to the way in which images, technology, politics and power interweave. A prolific essayist and lecturer, Groys is happy to embrace the media he critiques, taking over the art gallery to present video lectures about the power of video, for example. How he takes to his new role as curator of the Russian Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale will definitely be one to look out for.
(67) © Nanda Lanfranco; (68) Pierpaolo Ferrari; (69) Gregor Hohenberg
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M aur izio Cat tel a n
Most people would be happy to take credit for exhibitions at either New York’s Guggenheim museum or Milan’s Prada Foundation: Germano Celant, senior curator at the former and director of the latter, can do both. This year he curated Louise Bourgeois’s final exhibition (she died in May, the show opened in Venice in June); next year the forwardthinking seventy-year old will be burnishing his legacy, as he looks back to the movement whose name he coined in 1967. 2011: Arte Povera in Italia, which involves five museums across the country, is a massive undertaking – even though Celant directed the Venice Biennale in 1997, this show looks like it could be his magnum opus.
Ger m a no Cel a n t
C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : I t a l i a n – L a s t Ye a r : 6 3
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This onetime LA Weekly art critic and director of San Francisco’s CCA Wattis is now into his fifth year at London’s Hayward Gallery, and has done much to revive the gallery as one of London’s most popular venues for contemporary art. Enormous installationbased group shows are now its stock-in-trade, overseen by Rugoff and chief curator Stephanie Rosenthal. The sprawling tableaux and ‘artists do the craziest things’ exhibitions are starting to wear a little thin, however. The gallery has been refurbished recently, and now Project Space curator Tom Morton has his own spruced-up space upstairs, too. Along with the rest of England’s public spaces, however, the Hayward hangs on the tenterhooks of the government’s financial decisions, and it’s too early to say whether the public’s recent affection for the shows there will be a supportive long-term love affair that can sustain the gallery through meagre times.
V ictor i a M iro
C a t e g o r y : M u s e u m D i r e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 3 3
R a l ph Rugof f
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : A u s t r i a n – L a s t Ye a r : 76
T h a dda eus Ropac
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
H el g a de A lv e a r
(71) Luis Asín; (72) W. Schweinöster, © Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris & Salzburg; (73) Kieron McCarron; (74) © Suki Dhanda
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A collector with pockets deep enough to keep artists, dealers and even, it has been said, the occasional art fair afloat, German-born de Alvear is also Spain’s most prominent gallerist. And she’s just endowed a foundation in her adopted country’s Cáceres with a 2,500-strong collection of, well, you name it: Flavin, Judd, Smithson and a raft of international and Spanish artists working today. She’s as likely to buy works off a neighbouring Art Basel stand as to crow about her gallery’s own significant successes, and she has a fiercely loyal following among artists – witness the roll call of contemporary stars who showed up for a weekend of celebrations at her foundation’s opening in June, led by the Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich Obrist and shadowed by the Beyeler Foundation’s Sam Keller. But behind all this love and fellow-feeling lies an unshakeable belief in her own taste: ‘I collect with my eyes, not my ears’. And she’s no pushover: Cáceres’s city fathers won’t be getting the bulk of her collection until they commit to a new Mansilla & Tuñon-designed home for it. Just give her the building, we say.
It’s been a busy 12 months for this onetime intern to Joseph Beuys, and we’re not just referring to Ropac’s time spent shuttling between his galleries in Paris and Salzburg. Last November he donated 25 works from his own extensive collection to the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, while in March of this year he opened Halle, a 2,600 sq m space on the city’s outskirts, featuring a 400 sq m exhibition space to supplement his existing Salzburg gallery spaces (a main gallery, project space and editions showroom). Too big, you say? Actually, perhaps not big enough for a gallery that represents more than 50 major artists ranging from Rosenquist, Baselitz, Kiefer and the Kabakovs to Fleury, Gormley, Violette and Slominski. No surprise then that Ropac is rumoured to be planning further expansions. After all, he also represents Erwin Wurm, the artist who swallowed the world.
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Victoria Miro’s successes this year have been largely away from her expansive London space. Ironic given that it was the gallery’s 25th birthday in July. Chris Ofili had his much-applauded Tate Britain solo show; the late Alice Neel bagged new fans through a touring retrospective; Elmgreen & Dragset are up for London’s Fourth Plinth commission; Isaac Julien’s epic Ten Thousand Waves (2010) is currently at London’s Hayward; and Phil Collins’s Marxism Today (Prologue) (2010) was a standout success at this year’s Berlin Biennale. Back at the gallery, there were shows for William Eggleston and Yayoi Kusama, and a group show demonstrating the worth of Alice Neel (just as her retrospective pulled up at London’s Whitechapel). When Miro introduced new talent, it was the easy-onthe-eye work of Brazilian Maria Nepomuceno that got its first London showcase.
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C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 8 7
A well-known photograph of Italian dealer Massimo De Carlo shows him gaffer-taped to a gallery wall for the sake of a work by Maurizio Cattelan (Dealer, 1999). His gallery is a particular kind of powerhouse: one replete with contemporary art’s biggest names (Cattelan, Höller, Elmgreen & Dragset), but also artists who are inclined towards extremes, to pushing a project or a work to its very limits. De Carlo’s not relaxing on the spoils of his strong past decisions, however, and has been quick to support and represent younger talents such as Elad Lassry and Roberto Cuoghi. Slow and steady international expansion is coming, too: De Carlo’s year-old London space, while small, is getting off the ground in its own right.
M aureen Pa l ey
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : I t a l i a n – L a s t Ye a r : 9 1
M a ssi mo De Ca rl o
C a t e g o r y : C o l l e c t o r s – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h / Fi n n i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 8 1
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Ask any emerging or midcareer artist in London, and it’s this pair’s collection they have their eye on getting into – in part because the Zabludowiczes have been unwaveringly supportive of emerging art, through good times and bad. Exhibiting both works from their collection and independently curated shows, the couple’s 176 space has had a bumper year; and judging by Anita’s increasingly widely read blog, it seems a natural extension of her marathon appetite for studio visits and private views. Her schedule makes for exhausting reading, and that’s before you’ve considered the support the couple give to the Frieze Art Fair’s new satellite, Sunday, to the RCA and Goldsmiths curating courses, to Tate (on whose Foundation Committee Anita sits), to the 176 / Zabludowicz Collection Future Map Prize and to the Zabludowicz Curatorial Open, aimed at young curators, which is launching as we go to press.
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Maureen Paley has been busy expanding her roster this year, the most notable coup being getting Liam Gillick onboard. She also welcomed Romanian twins Gert and Uwe Tobias, signing them as they were given their first UK solo show (at Nottingham Contemporary). Wolfgang Tillmans, whom she has worked with since 1993, had an extensive solo show at the Serpentine Gallery (and makes his own debut on the Power 100); while the critically lauded Lars Laumann, a rising star signed by Paley in 2008, was given a whole gallery at the Liverpool Biennial. Aside from the gallery itself, Paley sits on the selection committee at the Frieze Art Fair and supports various London institutions along the way.
(75) Jerry Saltz in Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, courtesy NBC Universal, New York; (76) © David Bebber, courtesy the Zabludowicz Collection, London; (77) Alessandro Zambianchi; (78) Armin Weisheit
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A ni ta & Po ju Z a bludow icz
Jerry Saltz loves this list. It’s the New York Magazine art critic’s favourite moment of the year, he says. So here you are, Jerry, comfortably nestled between Victoria Miro and the Zabludowiczes. Saltz’s artworld power is a slippery thing this year, given that he’s spent much of it cultivating mass appeal – both through his appearances as a judge on the Bravo reality contest Work of Art (2010) and in the slow buildup of his Facebook and Twitter tribes. Whether this populist approach has diluted his critical standing within the industry is not yet clear: he’s certainly picked some fights in his postings – with Robert Storr (over the Guggenheim’s YouTube biennial) and Klaus Biesenbach (calling the latter ‘a dick’ for his ‘pretty boring program’) – but made a lot more friends in doing so: 3,963 at last Facebook count.
Jer ry Sa ltz
C a t e g o r y : C r i t i c – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 7 3
the power 100
81
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t s – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
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Whatever your opinion of Charles Saatchi, his approach to the artworld is never boring. While his relaunched Saatchi Gallery has been cranking out voluminous attentiongrabbing shows from the collection, the former ad man has found time to author an art-school realityshow contest, knock out a second book of quitefunny answers to interview questions and once more ruffle the official art establishment’s feathers, this time with an offer to donate his collection to the nation. In July, Saatchi announced plans to turn his gallery into ‘MoCA London’, gifting £25m of work to the UK, but the Arts Council has reportedly baulked at the condition that the gallery be able to sell from the collection to fund acquisitions. As we await the next chapter, Saatchi is still, entertainingly, throwing his weight around.
T i m Neuger & Bur k h a r d R ie ms c h neider
C a t e g o r y : C o l l e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 7 2
C h a rl es Sa atc h i
C a t e g o r y : C r i t i c – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : 6 1
Roberta Sm i t h
N a t i o n a l i t y : C a n a d i a n/ G e r m a n – C a t e g o r y : C o l l e c t o r s – L a s t Ye a r : N e w E n t r y
Ya na Peel & Ca ndi da Gertl er
(79) Courtesy Montblanc, Hamburg; (80) courtesy The New York Times; (82) Pawel Althamer, dla tima i burkharda, 2004, clay, wire, paper, paint, thread, fabric, 47 x 27 x 19 cm, photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, courtesy Neugerriemschneider, Berlin
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When Yana Peel and Candida Gertler set up the Outset Contemporary Art Fund in 2003, they injected a largely missing element into the hitherto dusty activity of arts patronage: a bit of fun. Originally set up to acquire work from the Frieze Art Fair for Tate Modern, the group (whose membership and funding comprises a diverse collection of individuals) takes donors on studio tours, private receptions and international trips. Outset has since expanded its influence, incorporating production funds, part bankrolling the British Venice Biennale pavilion, setting up branches in Munich and Israel, and donating to pretty much every London institution, notably funding to the South London Gallery’s new extension this year. Gertler sits on the Tate International Council, as does Peel, who also advises St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, is a trustee for the Moscow Biennale and Hong Kong’s Para/Site space, and cofounded Intelligence Squared Asia.
For the New York Times’s senior art critic, 2010 has been about staying abreast of the gallery and museum scene’s postcrunch vagaries while keeping a calm eye on the latest developments in art itself. Smith has taken a pragmatic, hopeful approach to recession trends – giving a cautious welcome to the appointment of New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch as the new director of crisis-ridden MOCA LA, for example. In terms of art criticism, among her standout commentaries was the assertion that painting isn’t dead; she has also been taking to task the ‘squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous’ products of fashionable postminimalism and Eurokunst ‘relational aesthetics’. Mildly conservative, pluralist and suspicious of hotheaded extremes, Smith remains the Big Apple’s bastion of responsible art criticism.
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If the German commercial art scene has shifted to Berlin in the past decade, this is in no small part down to Neugerriemschneider, a high-end gallery whose roster of artists seems like it should buckle under the pressure of so many heavyweights: Franz Ackermann, Simon Starling, Pawel Althamer, Olafur Eliasson and Jorge Pardo, to name a few. Tim Neuger and Burkhard Riemschneider, who founded the gallery in 1994 (Neuger previously worked for Galerie Max Hetzler, Riemschneider for publishers Taschen), have long set the pace in Berlin, and continue to do so. When they began representing Billy Childish, for example, institutions that had long ignored him were forced to sit up and take note. The gallery has weathered the financial storms, which now appear to be abating. ‘Believing in idealistic gestures’, Neuger recently said opaquely, discussing the market, ‘is once again becoming reality’.
C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r s – N a t i o n a l i t y : C h i n e s e/ B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 9 8 ( H s u)/ R e e n t r y (C h a n g Ts o n g - z u n g – 7 1 i n 2 0 0 3)
Joh ns on C h a ng Ts ong-zung & Cl a ire Hsu
C a t e g o r y : P u b l i s h e r – N a t i o n a l i t y : L u x e m b o u r g i a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
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The New York/Berlin publishing house Sternberg Press was set up out of the publishing house Lukas & Sternberg – founded in 1999 by Caroline Schneider – with the aim of addressing ‘blind spots’ within contemporary art publishing. It has maintained a small, tight operation since. In a sea of monographs, exhibition catalogues and academic theory writings that find a narrow readership, Sternberg’s particular niche in recent years has come to be an important home for well-chosen artist book projects, long-form essays and creative, readable writing that one can’t imagine being published elsewhere, such as Nicolas Bourriaud’s The Radicant (2009), Bettina Funcke’s Pop and Populous (2009), Isabelle Graw’s High Price (2010), Céline Condorelli’s Support Structures (2009), Keren Cytter’s film scripts (2010) and Dexter Sinister’s Portable Document Format (2009).
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(83) Ela Bialkowska; (84) Juergen Teller; (85) Belaid le Mharchi, courtesy Sternberg Press, Berlin & New York; (86) © Asia Art Archive
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Johann König is the kind of gallery that gets included in trendier fair projects such as New York’s Independent while showing up the road at the Armory at the same time. The power of the Berlin-based dealership is to consistently straddle various worlds – high-end museum shows, highly covetable and sellable work, clever artists with critical punch and sleek, almost chic wares. The gallery’s artists, including Tatiana Trouvé, Jeppe Hein and Kris Martin, have had a generous serving of major institutional shows this year, and the gallery continues to stake out a secure place for itself, influencing commercial and critical agendas internationally.
Ca rol ine S c h neider
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : 8 8
Joh a nn Konig
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t s – N a t i o n a l i t y : I t a l i a n – L a s t Ye a r : 9 2
M a r io Cr is t i a ni , L orenzo F i a s c h i & M aur izio R igil l o
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Galleria Continua’s rather eccentric portfolio of locations includes Beijing, Boissy-le-Châtel, near Paris; and San Gimignano, near Florence, where the three friends set up their first venue in 1990. Since then Continua has taken on several major artists (Daniel Buren, Kendell Geers, Anish Kapoor, Hans Op de Beeck) while consistently adapting and changing as an organisation. Pioneering contemporary art in unusual spaces (Sol LeWitt or a group show of Chinese artists in San Gimignano, for example) as well as forging relationships between artists, countries and markets: these are the feats that mark this trio out as relentlessly inventive. It is their passion and interest in artist-focused projects, however, which have garnered them such a fine reputation among artists.
Hsu and Chang Tsongzung founded the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive (AAA) back in 2000. The former is director and the latter sits on the board. Their shared entry reflects their combined importance to the Asian art scene rather than reflecting their working relationship. A critic, curator, art adviser (to many collectors, among them David Tang) and director of the Hanart TZ gallery (which he founded in 1983), Chang Tsong-zung has acted as a mentor to a new generation (among them Hsu) who are now building on his work to introduce the Southeast Asian art scene to a global audience. Boasting more than 22,000 items, the AAA maintains one of the most comprehensive collections of documentary material relating to contemporary art from the region – from magazines and catalogues to video interviews and archival material from artists’ studios.
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C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r s – N a t i o n a l i t y : E m i r a t i/ P a l e s t i n i a n – L a s t Ye a r : R e e n t r y ( H o o r A l - Q a s i m i – 9 9 i n 2 0 0 3)
C a t e g o r y : A r t i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
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Tillmans used this summer’s expansive solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London to foreground his abstract works, taken without a camera but incorporating photographic materials, to a UK audience. (Close to 200,000 people turned up to see the show during its 12-week stint, a record for the Serpentine.) It’s a direction he’s been pursuing for a while now, a conscious effort, perhaps, to move his reputation beyond the nudity and biographical subject matter of the photography which so titillated the reviewers of his 2003 Tate Modern solo show. That said, Tillmans – who has held a seat on the Tate’s board of trustees since last year – remains committed to his medium, exhibiting 65 prints in a packed show at New York’s Andrea Rosen in January and keeping his German gallery Daniel Buchholz happy with a show there in the same month.
H. H. S h eik h a Hoor A l-Qa si m i & Jack Per sek i a n
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Once the poster boy for ‘relational aesthetics’, Rirkrit Tiravanija is these days an artist uncommonly unconstrained by categorisations. While he continues to make sociable, topical exhibitions – this year, the Argentina-born Thai artist’s first exhibition in China offered visitors tofu soup, brick-making equipment for homebuilding (in reference to the country’s hyperactive growth) and bamboo models of highrises filled with birds (‘It’s about choices’, he said at the time) – it’s Tiravanija’s extramural activities that increasingly fascinate. Alongside the Land, the alternative-energy-powered rice farm and art project he cofounded outside Chiang Mai in 1998, his publishing company Plan B and his text-free O Ver magazine, he’s lately helped relaunch Bangkok’s Gallery VER: Tiravanija’s energetic generosity clearly isn’t restricted to his art.
Wol fg a ng T il l m a ns
C a t e g o r y : A r t i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : T h a i – L a s t Ye a r : 9 3
Although he’s a trustee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, on the Leadership Council of the New Museum and a member of Tate’s International Council, until this year very few people were familiar with Greek entrepreneur Dimitris Daskalopoulos. (Having made his fortune in the food industry, ‘DD’ is currently chairman of the board of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises and on the board of directors of the National Bank of Greece.) Now his name is everywhere – in London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, for whom Daskalopoulos curated a room in its summer show; in the Whitechapel Gallery, which is currently hosting the second in a quartet of exhibitions drawn from his collection (which includes around 400 works ranging from what is believed to be the last Marcel Duchamp urinal in private hands to Christoph Büchel’s 450 sq m installation Unplugged (Simply Botiful), 2006–7); on Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan’s business card (she’s now Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art); and ultimately on this list. Meanwhile he’s planning to open a foundation in Greece.
R ir k r i t T ir ava ni ja
C a t e g o r y : C o l l e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : G r e e k – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
Di m i t r is Da sk a l opoul os
(87) Trevor Leighton; (88) courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London; (89) courtesy Maureen Paley, London; (90) courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation
the power 100
Founded in 1993, the Sharjah Biennial has become one of the defining events in the Arab cultural calendar. Hoor Al-Qasimi has been director of the biennial since 2002 and is largely responsible for shifting its focus from traditional arts to contemporary productions. Persekian, artistic director of the 7th Biennial in 2005, is currently director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, which seeks to expand and build on the cultural legacy of the biennial through residencies, production and education programmes. The Sheikha is also a patron of Art Dubai, and between them they are establishing a position as gatekeepers to the riches (both intellectual and financial) of the Arab art scene.
90 ArtReview 145
146 ArtReview
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C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : G e r m a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
It’s been business as usual at Nicolai Wallner’s 800 sq metre space in Copenhagen, albeit with a recent programme that has erred on the side of caution, giving not unwelcome turns to local boy Jeppe Hein and American Richard Tuttle, for instance. Outside the industrial environs of the gallery (a former Carlsberg warehouse), Wallner has been busy engineering a renaissance in the Danish capital’s art scene, with plans for a second kunsthal – offering an alternative to the grandiose architecture of Charlottenborg – slowly maturing.
S tefa n K a l m a r
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : D a n i s h – L a s t Ye a r : 8 9
Nicol a i Wa l l ner
‘Lots of people have their eye on Hong Kong, it is the best-performing market and China’s bonded warehouse’, Iwan Wirth told The Art Newspaper earlier this year. Magnus Renfrew, director of Art Hong Kong, is rapidly establishing himself as one of the gatekeepers of this haven for tax-free art sales. While it’s still very much in the process of bedding in, the fair – now in its third edition – attracted 46,000 visitors this year (up 60 percent on last year), major galleries (Gagosian, White Cube, Hauser & Wirth, Arario, Pace, Perrotin, Boesky, Lisson, Cohan, Castelli, etc) and most important, sales. Whether the fair can maintain its position as the meeting point for East and West is one of the challenges facing Renfrew in the years ahead.
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Expectation met Stefan Kalmár at the door when he took over New York institution Artists Space, an underachieving potential melting pot of independent curatorial activity and artmaking that escapes the worst of commercial interest. After overseeing a few years of strong programming at Kunstverein Munich, however, the confident Kalmár (who has published a large book project documenting his curatorial approach in Munich) took the whole thing in his stride. In the name of transparency, he is opening up the loft space where the staff work, and he has already brought a decidedly European style of curating to New York with his first exhibitions there – the first institutional Marc Camille Chaimowicz show in the US, for example, and a Charlotte Posenenske exhibition that is reconfigured every few weeks by gallery staff or other artists. Kalmár’s fascination with the 1970s suggests an interest in the underground cultures that flocked to Artists Space around that time. It’s more than likely that he will try to place the organisation back at the heart of the New York scene.
(91) Selva Barni; (92) courtesy Hong Kong International Art Fair; (93) Ariel Wallner
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C a t e g o r y : A r t Fa i r D i r e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
Hyperactive Italian Gioni might not have enough time to be pleased with himself, but it’s been a pretty good year for the curator. This spring saw Gioni engineer the epic Paul McCarthy project Pig Island for Fondazione Nicola Trussardi (where he is artistic director), while September saw him curate the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, putting him up there with alumni such as Harald Szeemann and Okwui Enwezor. And his role at New York’s New Museum has just been expanded from that of curator of special projects to associate director of the museum and director of exhibitions. His reputation as a consummate artworld networker, it seems safe to say, is assured.
M ag nus Renf rew
M a ssi m il i a no Gioni
C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : I t a l i a n – L a s t Ye a r : 5 0
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97
C a t e g o r y : C o l l e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
There are certainly galleries in New York that turn over more money than Elizabeth Dee – ones that have bigger artists and can guarantee themselves a presence at Art Basel – but Dee has nevertheless had a busy year wielding influence in an altogether less establishment manner. The X Initiative in the old Dia building wrapped up at the end of 2009, having provided a temporary creative hub for New York’s art scene to gather round: a positive project during a pessimistic year. In 2010, Dee and Darren Flook, of London’s Hotel gallery, used the same space to offer an alternative to the Armory in the hybrid form of Independent, an art fair that aped an exhibition and attracted participation from an international array of commercial galleries. Back at her Chelsea space, meanwhile – and talking of hipsters – OMG it has been all about Ryan Trecartin this year. Like, literally.
R ic h a r d C h a ng
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : A m e r i c a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
El iz a bet h Dee
C a t e g o r y : G a l l e r i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : S l o v e n i a n – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
Gregor Podna r
C a t e g o r y : C u r a t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : L e b a n e s e – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
C h r is t ine Toh m e
(95) courtesy Christine Tohme; (96) © Jane Stravs, 2009
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As director of the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts (Ashkal Alwan), the arts nonprofit she cofounded in 1994, Christine Tohme is the the driving force behind Beirut’s Home Works Forum. Ashkal Alwan staged Home Works I in 2002, gathering artists, cultural activists and writers for ten days of exhibitions, performances, lectures, video screenings, artists’ talks, workshops and publication launches. Since then, five editions of the forum have run ‘about every other year’ – unexpected wars and such can throw a spanner into scheduled international arts events – making it the Beirut Biennial in all but name. In 2006, Tohme was awarded the Prince Claus Award in recognition of her contributions to Lebanese culture. In addition to staging Home Works 5, Tohme’s 2010 has been devoted to mobilising financial and professional resources for the Home Works Academy, her latest Beirut project. This multipurpose space devoted to artistic practices and interdisciplinary arts education is scheduled to open in spring 2011.
Gregor Podnar started out as a curator in the early 1990s, founded his gallery in Slovenia in 2003 as part of the cultural production organisation Association DUM and eventually opened a second and more conventionally commercial space in Berlin, now his primary base, in 2007. In moving to a commercial gallery, Podnar wanted to provide Eastern European artists who had institutional success with commercial support that was then lacking. His programme remains focused on artists from Eastern Europe, among them Attila Csörgö, Vadim Fiškin, Alexander Gutke, the Slovenian collective IRWIN, Dan Perjovschi, Goran Petercol and Tobias Putrih, but also includes young international artists such as Magnus Larsson and Ariel Schlesinger.
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Tate Modern’s Frances Morris was there, so too the Guggenheim’s Richard Armstrong and businessman David Tang. A quick look through the guest list for the VIP opening of Roundtrip: Beijing–New York Now, a selection of works (among them commissioned pieces by Terence Koh and Matthew Day Jackson) from Richard Chang’s Domus Collection, which was at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing last May, is enough to tell you that this ChineseAmerican collector is one to watch. Chang, who splits his time between New York and Beijing, sees his collection, which features a mix of leading Western and Chinese artists, as helping to foster a two-way dialogue between artists and audiences in both regions. A MoMA trustee for PS1, he also cosponsored this year’s edition of Greater New York at the museum. Chang sits on the International Council and Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee at the Tate, and made his presence in London further felt when he acted as lead sponsor for Anish Kapoor’s popular Royal Academy exhibition.
The South London Gallery, with its Victorian picturegallery proportions, has long been one of the best architectural spaces in London for contemporary art, and a favourite with artists. Its programme, recently including Omer Fast, Ryan Gander, Tatiana Trouvé and Alfredo Jaar, has been consistently strong, and now, following a major extension and refurbishment by 6a, the London art scene’s architectural practice of the moment, it has added several new strings to its bow. With a major residency programme that will involve artists living in an artist’s flat above the gallery, and new domesticscale gallery spaces, this is sure to cement up-andcoming Peckham as a locus for contemporary art production and energy. You might argue that South London Gallery is equal to any number of European kunsthalles, but Heller’s inclusion represents a larger paradigm shift in a scene that has, up until now, been dominated by the Tates and Whitechapel in London, towards artistcentric activity south of the Thames.
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power facts
C AT EG O RY S PL IT
2010
20 09
Gallerist Curator Artist Collector Art Fair Critic Auction Publisher Website Talkshow Host
28 26 19 17 3 3 2 1 1 -
27 26 21 15 2 5 2 1 1
top tr u m ps
New Entries 2010 28%
New Entries 2009 23.5%
Highest Artist 2010 Ai Weiwei
Highest Artist 2009 Bruce Nauman
Highest Gallerist 2010 Larry Gagosian
Highest Gallerist 2009 Larry Gagosian
Highest Curator 2010 Hans Ulrich Obrist
Highest Curator 2009 Hans Ulrich Obrist
Highest Museum 2010 MoMA
Highest Museum 2009 MoMA
Highest Collector 2010 Eli Broad
Highest Collector 2009 François Pinault
(99) Courtesy Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York; (100) Simon Parris
C a t e g o r y : M u s e u m D i r e c t o r – N a t i o n a l i t y : B r i t i s h – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
M a rgot H el l er
C a t e g o r y : A r t i s t – N a t i o n a l i t y : U n k n o w n (A m e r i c a n - b a s e d ) – L a s t Ye a r : N e w
Bruce H ig h Qu a l i t y F oun dat ion
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The irony of Bruce High Quality Foundation’s inclusion on a list such as this has not escaped us. The Power 100 operates as a hierarchy and as a mechanism for promoting personalities – and even, perhaps, celebrity. Forming BHQF in 2003, the collective of five to eight core artist members – most of them graduates of New York’s Cooper Union School of Art (though many others are involved) – remains assiduously leaderless and anonymous. Their activities have ranged from exhibitions and a ‘Brucennial’ to publicity stunts, filming a zombie flick and staging a musical. This plurality within practice offers a model away from the market and the assumed mechanisms of production, a method that BHQF seemingly wishes to disseminate, recently collaborating with Creative Time to set up a university.
the power 100
T h e top
10 0
20 09 1. Hans Ulrich Obrist 2. Glenn D. Lowry 3. Sir Nicholas Serota 4. Daniel Birnbaum 5. Larry Gagosian 6. François Pinault 7. Eli Broad 8. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood 9. Iwona Blazwick 10. Bruce Nauman 11. Iwan Wirth 12. David Zwirner 13. Jeff Koons 14. Jay Jopling 15. Marian Goodman 16. Agnes Gund 17. Takashi Murakami 18. Alfred Pacquement 19. Peter Fischli & David Weiss 20. Mike Kelley 21. Barbara Gladstone 22. Steven A. Cohen 23. Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin 24. Adam D. Weinberg 25. Marc Glimcher 26. Amy Cappellazzo & Brett Gorvy 27. Cheyenne Westphal & Tobias Meyer 28. Ann Philbin 29. Matthew Higgs 30. Matthew Marks 31. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe 32. Gavin Brown 33. Ralph Rugoff 34. Liam Gillick 35. Anne Pasternak 36. Dakis Joannou 37. John Baldessari 38. Isa Genzken 39. Paul McCarthy 40. Michael Govan 41. Eugenio López 42. Cindy Sherman 43. Ai Weiwei 44. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 45. Annette Schönholzer & Marc Spiegler 46. Diedrich Diederichsen 47. Richard Prince 48. Damien Hirst 49. Bernard Arnault 50. Massimiliano Gioni
51. Amanda Sharp & Matthew Slotover 52. Joel Wachs 53. Victor Pinchuk 54. Udo Kittelmann 55. Marina Abramovic 56. Michael Ringier 57. Gerhard Richter 58. Richard Serra 59. RoseLee Goldberg 60. Kasper König 61. Roberta Smith 62. Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 63. Germano Celant 64. Emmanuel Perrotin 65. Peter Schjeldahl 66. Beatrix Ruf 67. Okwui Enwezor 68. Nicolas Bourriaud 69. Karen & Christian Boros 70. Isabelle Graw 71. Maurizio Cattelan 72. Charles Saatchi 73. Jerry Saltz 74. Jasper Johns 75. Louise Bourgeois 76. Thaddaeus Ropac 77. Mera & Don Rubell 78. Thelma Golden 79. Sarah Morris 80. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 81. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz 82. Paul Schimmel 83. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi 84. Sadie Coles 85. Daniel Buchholz 86. Victoria Miro 87. Maureen Paley 88. Johann König 89. Nicolai Wallner 90. Maria Lind 91. Massimo De Carlo 92. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo 93. Rirkrit Tiravanija 94. Toby Webster 95. Long March Space 96. Nicholas Logsdail 97. Harry Blain & Graham Southern 98. Claire Hsu 99. Peter Nagy 100. Glenn Beck
at a glance
2010 1. Larry Gagosian 2. Hans Ulrich Obrist 3. Iwan Wirth 4. David Zwirner 5. Glenn D. Lowry 6. Bice Curiger 7. Sir Nicholas Serota 8. Eli Broad 9. RoseLee Goldberg 10. François Pinault 11. Adam D. Weinberg 12. Jeffrey Deitch 13. Ai Weiwei 14. Agnes Gund 15. Alfred Pacquement 16. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood 17. Bruce Nauman 18. Marc Glimcher 19. Beatrix Ruf 20. Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin 21. Iwona Blazwick 22. Marian Goodman 23. Marc Spiegler & Annette Schönholzer 24. Barbara Gladstone 25. Jay Jopling 26. Mike Kelley 27. Cindy Sherman 28. Dakis Joannou 29. Franz West 30. Gavin Brown 31. Peter Fischli & David Weiss 32. Steven A. Cohen 33. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe 34. Anne Pasternak 35. Marina Abramovic 36. Bernard Arnault 37. Victor Pinchuk 38. Eugenio López 39. Takashi Murakami 40. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 41. Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp 42. Okwui Enwezor 43. Matthew Higgs 44. Tino Sehgal 45. Maja Hoffmann 46. Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 47. Jeff Koons 48. Nicholas Logsdail 49. Sadie Coles 50. Brett Gorvy & Amy Cappellazzo
51. Tobias Meyer & Cheyenne Westphal 52. Ann Philbin 53. Damien Hirst 54. Emmanuel Perrotin 55. Gerhard Richter 56. Nicolas Bourriaud 57. Matthew Marks 58. Udo Kittelmann 59. Michael Ringier 60. Kasper König 61. Daniel Buchholz 62. Anish Kapoor 63. Daniel Birnbaum 64. Toby Webster 65. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 66. Christian Boros & Karen Lohmann 67. Germano Celant 68. Maurizio Cattelan 69. Neo Rauch 70. Boris Groys 71. Helga de Alvear 72. Thaddaeus Ropac 73. Ralph Rugoff 74. Victoria Miro 75. Jerry Saltz 76. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz 77. Massimo De Carlo 78. Maureen Paley 79. Yana Peel & Candida Gertler 80. Roberta Smith 81. Charles Saatchi 82. Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider 83. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo 84. Johann König 85. Caroline Schneider 86. Johnson Chang Tsong-zung & Claire Hsu 87. Dimitris Daskalopoulos 88. Rirkrit Tiravanija 89. Wolfgang Tillmans 90. H.H. Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi & Jack Persekian 91. Massimiliano Gioni 92. Magnus Renfrew 93. Nicolai Wallner 94. Stefan Kalmár 95. Christine Tohme 96. Gregor Podnar 97. Elizabeth Dee 98. Richard Chang 99. Bruce High Quality Foundation 100. Margot Heller
ArtReview 149
THE POWER PRINCESS PHOTOSHOOT Princess wears Adidas courtesy Adidas Photographer Vincent Dolman Love u Mama & Jess & Chloe & gk xx Assistants Amber and Violetta Hair Simona Make Up Charlotte My Boys courtesy David Bennie Mohammed Abdoun X - Dyal - Raf Rza Fellner Skout Lo - Benji - Mosie - Tom - Jasper wearing vintage Adidas courtesy Lexington Bey love peace & dollar xx
STVOL ALEX BLAGOV EGOR TATARENKO MAXIM TKACHENKO
Curated by Ludmila Bereznitsky
20 Oktober - 20 November Andriivsky Uzviz 2b 04070 Kiev +380 44 425 03 20 Ukraine 28 Kollwitzstrasse 10405 Berlin + 49 176 612 65 960 Germany www.bereznitsky-gallery.com 2010
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firstsite, opening in Colchester September 2011 New commissions, exhibitions, artists in residence, public programmes
IMMA
Starting from €200.00
Thursday 28— Sunday 31 October 2010 Spinningfields, Manchester
For 2010 the second edition of The Manchester Contemporary continues its commitment to encouraging and developing a market for critically engaged contemporary art in the region. For the full list of participating artists and talks programme visit themanchestercontemporary.co.uk Curatorial Coordinator for The Manchester Contemporary 2010: The International 3
Arcade Bureau Ceri Hand Gallery David Risley Gallery Faye Fleming & Partner Man & Eve Mermaid & Monster Nettie Horn
themanchestercontemporary.co.uk
Funded by:
Supported by:
Seventeen The International 3 Workplace Gallery WORKS|PROJECTS and Emin International Plus projects and partner presentations from Axis, Castlefield Gallery, Chinese Arts Centre, Corridor8, Contemporary Art Society and Eastside Projects.
Sponsored by:
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LIMITED EDITIONS
Marcelle Hanselaar Biting the Bullet
MILLENNIUM Str eet an Pol, St . I v e s, C o r nw a ll, T R 2 6 2 DS T: 01736 793121 , E: m a il@ m ille nnium g aller y.co.uk www.millenniumg a lle r y. c o. uk
23RD OCTOBER TO 15TH NOVEMBER ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE AVAILABLE
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is delighted to welcoming you at the art fair Kunst Zürich, november 11 - 14, 2010 with works by, among others,
Tina Ber ning a nd Michela ngelo di BaT TisTa Mirte, China Ink and Crayon on Ditone Print, Unique Print, 2010
JUSTIN SIDNEY Beautiful Decay
r oB e r T P ol i d or i C ha mbre du Capit a i ne des G a rdes, C hat eau de Ver sa i l les, 2 0 0 7
2-7 November 2010 Tues, Wed & Fri 11am-6pm, Thurs 11am-9pm Sat 11am-5pm, Sun 11am-4pm Vyner Street Gallery, 23 Vyner Street London E2 9DG www.justinsidney.com
[email protected] Listings Museums and Galleries UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON Alexia Goethe Gallery 7 Dover Street London, W1S 4LD T +44 (0)20 7629 0090 www.alexiagoethegallery.com Alexander de Cadenet: Life-Force 24 Sep –19 Nov Albemarle Gallery 49 Albemarle Street London W1S 4JR T +44 (0)20 7499 1616 F +44 (0)20 7499 1717
[email protected] Lee Jaehyo Solo Exhibition The Force Of Will: The Force Of Nature 15 Oct - 6 Nov Edel Assanti 276 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 1BB www.edelassanti.com SUPERUNKNOWN 6 Oct - 13 Nov Hotel Gallery 77a Greenfield Road London, E1 1EJ T +44(0)20 7247 8625
[email protected] Alan Michael - Solo Show 19 Nov – 18 Dec
SPROVIERI 27 Heddon street London, W1B 4BJ T +44(0)20 7734 2066
[email protected] sprovieri.com Jimmie Durham: “arts, media and sports” 7 Oct - 27 Nov
UNITED KINGDOM
Somerset House Strand, London WC2R 1LA www.somersethouse.org.uk T +44 (0)20 7845 4616 F +44 (0)20 7836 7613 Breon O’Casey 20 Oct - 30 Jan 2011
CIRCA Contemporary Art Projects Stephenson Works, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 3PE www.ccaprojects.org.uk Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere; Stuart Pearson-Wright, Henry Coombes, Lu Chunsheng 20 Nov – 9 Dec
SOUTH LONDON GALLERY 65 Peckham Road London SE5 8UH www.southlondongallery.org T +44 (0)20 7703 6120 Tatiana Trouvé 1 Oct - 28 Nov The Agency 66 Evelyn Street London, SE8 5DD www.theagencygallery.co.uk
[email protected] Dan Coopey: Position 1 29 Oct – 16 Dec
Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House, Piccadilly London W1J 0BD T +44 (0)20 7300 8000 www.royalacademy.org.uk Treasures From Budapest 25 Sep – 12 Dec
The Fine Art Society 148 New Bond Street, London W1S 2JT T +44 (0)20 7318 1895 F +44 (0)20 7491 9454
[email protected] Henry Krokatsis: Like a Gang of Virtue 13 Oct – 4 Nov Marcus Harvey: Tattoo 10 Nov – 9 Dec
ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART Kensington Gore London, SW7 2EU www.rca.ac.uk Shi Shaoping: The Metamorphosis Series 13 – 18 Oct, 11am – 7pm daily
Timothy Taylor Gallery 15 Carlos Place, London, W1K 2EXT T +44 (0)20 7409 3344 Jessica Jackson Hutchins 13 Oct - 6 Nov
Sadie Coles Gallery 69 South Audley Street, London W1 Tues-Sat 10-6 www.sadiecoles.com T +44 (0)20 7493 8611 ANGUS FAIRHURST 12 Oct – 27 Nov
VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY 16 Wharf Road London N1 7RW T +44 (0)20 7336 81090 www.victoria-miro.com Isaac Julien Ten Thousand Waves 7 Oct – 13 Nov
Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010 A Foundation 67 Greenfield Street Liverpool, L1 0BY www.newcontemporaries.org.uk to 13 Nov
CoExist Galleries & Studios,TAP The Old Water Works North Road, Southend, Essex, SS0 7AB www.coexist.co.uk Phyllida Barlow & Fiona Macdonald 8th Oct – 5th Nov LEAMINGTON SPA ART GALLERY AND MUSEUM Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade, Leamington Spa, CV32 4AA T +44 (0)1926 742700 www.warwickdc.gov.uk/ royalpumprooms Touch: an installation by Lyndall Phelps 18 Sep – 28 Nov NATIONAL MEDIA MUSEUM Bradford, BD1 1NQ www.nationalmediamuseum. org.uk T +44 (0)844 856 3797 Fay Godwin: Land Revisited 15 Oct – 27 Mar Sideshow 1 Thoresby Street Nottingham NG1 1AJ www.sideshow2010.org Sideshow Wunderkammer 22 Oct - 14 Nov The Manchester Contemporary 28-31 October 2010 Spinningfields, Manchester Register for free tickets online at themanchestercontemporary. co.uk
The Modern Institute 14—20 Osborne Street, Glasgow, Scotland G1 5QN T +44 (0)141 248 3711 F +44 (0)141 248 3280 Dirk Bell from 28 Nov United States, New York David Zwirner 525 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 T +1 212-517-8677 Open Tue-Sat 10-6
[email protected] www.davidzwirner.com DOOSAN Gallery 533 West 25th Street NewYork, NY 10001
[email protected] Open Tue-Sat 10-6 Insatiable Appetite, Sang-ah Choi 18 Nov- 18 Dec L&M ARTS 45 E 78th St.New York, NY 10075 T +1 212 861 0020 Open Tue – Sat 10
[email protected] lmgallery.com Damien-Hirst: Medicine Cabinets 28 Oct – 11 Dec Michael Werner Gallery 4 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10075 T +1 (212) 988-1623 www.michaelwerner.com
[email protected] Marcel Broodthaers: Major Works to 13 Nov THE Pace GALLERY 32 East 57th Street T +1 (212) 421 3292 Tues-Frid 9:30– 6 Sat 10-6 www. thepacegallery.com Robert Irwin: Way Out West 12 Nov- 24 Dec THE PACE GALLERY 534 West 25th Street T+1 (212) 929-7000 Tues – Sat 10 – 6 Lucas Samaras: Poses 9 Nov- 24 Dec THE PACE GALLERY 545 West 22nd Street T+1 (212) 989-4258 Tues- Sat 10 – 6 Hiroshi Sugimoto: The Day After 6 Nov- 24 Dec
ArtReview 171
United States, New York (continued) THE PACE GALLERY 510 West 25th Street Tues-Sat 10-6 T +1 (212) 255-4044
[email protected] Thomas Nozkowski: Recent Work 22 Oct – 4 Dec AUSTRIA Christine Koenig Galerie Schleifmuehlgasse 1A 1040 Vienna Austria www.christinekoeniggalerie.com Ai Wei Wei to 6 Nov Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 www.ropac.net Arnulf Frainer & Dieter Roth Sturtevant (Halle space) Jack Pierson (annex space) to Nov 20 GALERIE HUBERT WINTER Breite Gasse 17 A-1070 Wien T +43 (0)1524 09 76 www.galeriewinter.at MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien Belgium Galerie Almine Rech 20 Rue de l’Abbaye B-1050 Brussels T +32 26 485 684 www.alminerech.com Taryn Simon/John Giorno Oct 29 - 18 Dec ZENO X GALLERY Leopold De Waelplaats 16 B-2000 Antwerp T +32 32 161 626 www.zeno-x.com Michael Borremans 22 Oct - 27 Nov
DENMARK LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Gl. Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk Winter 2010: Anselm Kiefer GALLERI NICOLAI WALLNER Ny Carlsberg vej 68 OG 1760 Copenhagen V Peter Land Joachim Koester 12 Nov – 15 Jan 2011 FRANCE FIAC Grand Palais & Louvre, Paris 21 – 24 Oct www.fiac.com Fondation Cartier 261 Boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris T +33 1 42 18 56 50 www.fondation.cartier.com Moebius to 13 Mar Galerie Almine Rech 19, rue de Saintonge 75003 Paris Tel +33 1 45 83 71 90 www.galeriealminerech.com Gavin Turk - En FAce 30 Oct - 18 Dec John Giorno - Eating the sky 29 Oct - 18 Dec Galleria Continua Le Moulin (Paris) 46, rue de la Ferté Gaucher 77169 Boissy-le-Châtel Seine-et-Marne T +33 1 64 20 39 50 www.galleriacontinua.com “Sphères 3” 23 Oct - 11 Jun 2011 Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin 76, rue de Turenne & 10 Impasse St Claude , 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 16 79 79 www.galerieperrotin.com Paula Pivi/Jin Meyerson 11 Nov - 23 Dec Galerie Laurent Godin 5, rue du Grenier St Lazare 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 71 10 66 www.laurentgodin.com Claude Closky/Laloli to 16 Oct David Kramer 21 Oct – 12 Dec
Galerie ThaddAeus Ropac 7, rue Debelleyme 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 72 99 00 www.ropac.net Liza Lou 21 Oct – 20 Nov Cory Arcangel/Ali Banisadr 24 Nov – 24 Dec
VW (VENEKLASEN/WERNER) Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26, 10969 Berlin T+49 30 81 61 60418
[email protected] www. vwberlin.com Open Mon– Fri 10-6 , Sat 11-6 Markus Lüpertz: New Paintings Opening 18 November
LE GRAND CAFE Centre d’Art Contemporain Place des Quatre z’horloges F 44 600 Saint-Nazaire T+ + 33 (0)2 44 73 44 00 www.grandcafe-saintnazaire.fr Hans Op de Beeck 8 Oct - 2 Jan 2011
Greece
MYRVOLD > MYWORLD PIA MYRVOLD 15 rue Sambre et Meuse 75010 Paris T +33607968552 By appointment. www.pia-myrvold.com Exhibiting at Atelier Clot Bramsen 19 Rue Veille du Temple Paris to 23 Oct
Holland
GERMANY CAMERA WORK AG Kantstraße 149 10623 Berlin www.camerawork.de DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 20 2093 www.deutsche-guggenheim.de Color Fields 22 Oct – 10 Jan 2011 JOHANN KÖNIG GALLERY Dessauer Straße 6-7, 10963 Berlin www.johannkoenig.de Manfred Kuttner 30 Oct - 8 Jan 2011 me Collectors Room Berlin me Kunst GmbH Auguststraße 68 10117 Berlin www.me-berlin.com Ouyang Chun – Painting the King 2 Oct - 9 Jan 2011
Frissiras Museum 3 Monis Asteriou Plaka, Athens T +30 2103 234678 or +30 2103 316027 www.frissirasmuseum.com
GRIMM FINE ART Keizersgracht 82 1015CT Amsterdam www.grimmfineart.com Recent British Sculpture from 27 Nov Jaski Art Gallery Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 29 1017 DB Amsterdam www.jaski.nl ireland IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) Royal Hospital, Military Road Kilmainham, Dublin 8 www.imma.ie
[email protected] T +353-1-612-9922 The Moderns 20 Oct – Apr 2011 ITALy Alfonso Artiaco Piazza dei Martiri 58 80121 Naples T+39 0814976072 alfonsoartiaco.com Ann Veronica Janssens ARTISSIMA 17 Turin www.artissima.it 5 – 7 Nov BRAND NEW GALLERY Via Farini 32 20159 Milano T +39-02-89.05.30.83 www.brandnew-gallery.com Anton Henning 12 Nov - 22 Dec
listings: museums and galleries
Cardi Black Box Corso di Porta Nuova 38 20124 Milan T+39 0245478189 www.cardiblackbox.com Painting Extravaganza - Group Show, October Francesca Anfossi - Petrified Paper - solo project LevelOne Collezione Maramotti via fratelli cervi 66 Reggio Emilia T +39 0522 382 484 www.collezionemaramotti.org Kara Tanaka 24 Oct - 31 Jan Fondazione Prada Via Antonio Fogazzaro, 2 20135 Milan T+39 02 54670515 www.fondazioneprada.org John Baldessari 29 Oct - 31 Dec Galleria Continua Via del Castello, 11 53037 San Gimignano T +39 0577 94 31 34 www.galleriacontinua.com Kiki Smith/ Michelangelo Pistoletto/Pascale Marthine Tayou 25 Oct – 22 Jan GALLERIA PACK Foro Bonaparte, 60, 20121 Milan T +39 02 86 996 395 www.galleriapack.com Matteo Basilé - this humanity 9 Nov - 15 Jan 2011 MAXXI- Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo Via Guido Reni, 4A 00196 Rome T +39 06 32101829 www.maxxi.beniculturali.it Various, see website for details Pinacoteca Agnelli Via Nizza, 230 10126 Turin T+ 39 011 0062713 www.pinacoteca-agnelli.it China Power Station 11 Nov - 27 Feb Riccardo Crespi via Mellerio n° 1 20123 Milano T +39 02 89072491 www.riccardocrespi.com Maria Laet 11 Nov - 12 Dec
monaco
BRAZIL
South africa
Monaco modern art 27 av Princesse Grace 98000 Monaco T+377.92.16.71.17 www.monacomodernart.mc Philippe Pastor
Galeria Fortes Vilaca Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500 05416-001 São Paulol T +55 11 3032 7066 www.fortesvilaca.com.br
34FINEART Second Floor, The Hills Building, Buchanan Square , 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock
[email protected] T +27 21 4611863 www.34fineart.com Lionel Smit 12 Oct - 6 Nov Then / Now 9 Nov - 4 Dec
SPAIN GALERIA HELGA de ALVEAR c/ Doctor Fourquet 12 28012 Madrid T +34 91 468 0506 www.helgadealvear.com Helena Almeida to 30 Oct Katherine Grosse 11 Nov - 9 Jan 2011 MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Castilla y Leon Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 24008 León T +34 987 09 00 00 www.musac.es SWITZERLAND GALERIE BERTAND & GRUNER 16, rue du Simplon, 1207 Geneva T+41 22 700 51 51 www.bertrand-gruner.com
Galeria Luisa Strina Rua Oscar Freire 502, 01426000 São Paulo/SP T +55 11 3088 2417 www.galerialuisastrina.com.br CUBA Galeria Habana Subasta Habana 2010 ed. Cuban Art & Decorative Arts Sala Taganana, Hotel Nacional de Cuba Calle O esq. A 21, Vedado, Ciudad de La Habana 4 Nov 2010 Hong kong Tang Contemporary Art - HK Basement, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan T+ 852 2544 9918 / 9919 tangcontemporary.com japan
Galerie Urs Meile Rosenberghöhe 4 6004 Lucerne, Switzerland T +41 (0) 41 420 33 18 F +41 (0) 41 420 21 69
[email protected] www.galerieursmeile.com
KAIKAI KIKI GALLERY Motoazabu Crest Bldg. B1F, 2-330 Motoazabu, Minato-ku,Tokyo 106-0046 T +81-(0) 3-6823-6039 www.gallery.kaikaikiki.co.jp Twitter.com/G_Kaikaikiki_Jp
MIGROSMUSEUM FüR GEGENWARTSKUNST /Hubertus Exhibitions Albisriederstrasse 199a CH – 8047 Zürich www.migrosmuseum.ch
TOMIO KOYAMA GALLERY 1-3-2-7F Kiyosumi, Koto-ku Tokyo 135-0024 T + 813-3642-4090 tomiokoyamagallery.com Frieze Art Fair 2010 14 - 17 Oct FIAC 2010 20 - 24 Oct
turkey SAKIP SABANCI MUSEUM 1Sakıp Sabancı Cad. No:42 Emirgan 34467, Istanbul T +90 212 277 22 00 www.muze.sabanciuniv.edu
korea ARARIO GALLERY #149-2 Sokyuk-dong, Jongro-gu, Seoul, Korea T +82 2 723 6190
[email protected] Open Tue - Sun 11- 7 arariogallery.com
Goodman Gallery JOHANNESBURG 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg, 2193, South Africa T +27(0)11 788 1113
[email protected] www.goodman-gallery.com David Goldblatt 7 Oct–6 Nov Stefanus Rademeyer 1 3 Nov–10 Dec United Arab Emirates Carbon 12 Dubai A1 Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Warehouse D37, Dubai UAE
[email protected] carbon12dubai.com T +971 50 46 44 392 Skype: carbon12knf www.twitter.com/ carbon12gallery Open Sat - Thur 11.30- 19 In Decay- New works by Ralf Ziervogel 5 Oct - 20 Nov SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION PO Box 19989, Sharjah United Arab Emirates T+971 6 568 5050 sharjahart.org Sharjah Biennial 10 : Plot for a Biennial 16 Mar- 16 May 2011 TRAFFIC #179, Umm Suqeim Road, Al Quoz Industrial 4. P.O Box 6716, Dubai T +971 (4) 3418494 Open Sat – Thur 10 -6.
[email protected] viatraffic.org The State 10 Nov - 22 Jan Hit Me With Your War Tune 10 Nov – 30 Dec
ArtReview 173
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2 010 , Agai n – Th e S tr i p – O n th e Town – O ff th e R eco r d
ArtReview 175
Tate appoints Simon Baker as its first curator of photography An exhibition of Tim Burton’s work opens at MoMA, and shortly becomes the museum’s third-most-visited exhibition of all time
Oc tober 2009
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford reopens after a multimillion-pound refurbishment Berlin and the world commemorate 20thanniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
Photographer Irving Penn dies age ninety-two
Dia Center for the Arts announces that it will return to a space in New York’s Chelsea
Isa Genzken wins the Yanghyun Prize Richard Rogers wins the RIBA Stirling Prize for architecture
Kazuyo Sejima is appointed director of the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, the first woman in the role
A fire destroys more than 1,000 Hélio Oiticica works in Rio de Janeiro
Agustín Pérez Rubio is appointed director of Spain’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC)
Groundbreaking American feminist artist Nancy Spero dies age eighty-three Carol Bove wins the inaugural Prix Lafayette in partnership with the FIAC art fair
Media spat kicks off in New York over the New Museum’s decision to exhibit the collection of trustee Dakis Joannou
Klaus Biesenbach named director of MoMA PS1 and chief curator at large, MoMA
Nadav Kander is awarded the Prix Pictet photography prize for environmental sustainability
176 ArtReview
Keren Cytter is awarded the first Absolut Art Award Rob Pruitt’s star-studded Art Awards takes place at the Guggenheim in New York Philosopher and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss dies, age one hundred
Nov e m ber
Ryan Trecartin wins inaugural – and as it turns out, only – $150,000 Wolgin prize
Penelope Curtis is appointed director of Tate Britain
ARCO announces electronic arts prize LA MOCA celebrates its 30th anniversary with a celebrity fundraising ball, raising over $4 million Installation artist and Christo collaborator Jeanne-Claude dies age seventy-four Scott Rothkopf, senior editor at Artforum, is appointed as a curator at the Whitney Museum Ceal Floyer, Eun-me Ahn, Seung-taek Lee and Robert Adrian X awarded 2009 Nam June Paik Award
Ja nu a ry
Rear View: 2010, AgAIN
Dece m ber
Sixth ArtLA fair is cancelled – economy and new competition cited Richard Wright wins the 2009 Turner Prize
Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, opens in Dubai
Victor Pinchuk Foundation launches a $100,000 Future Generation Art Prize
Boris Johnson officially breaks ground on the Tate Modern extension Christian Boltanski to represent France at the 2011 Venice Biennale
Christie’s records the highest total for an Old Master auction
Building begins on the Louvre’s new outpost in Lens, northern France
Photographer Larry Sultan dies age sixty-three Pompidou workers strike for 24 days in protest to job cuts
Lisa Dennison, Chairman, sotheby's north anD south ameriCa anthony Grant, exeCutive viCe presiDent, sotheby’s miChaeL Lynne, owner, beDeLL CeLLars reQuest the pLeasure oF your Company at noon For a
LUNCH
Tuesday 1 December 2009
FEATURING THE ARTIST LABEL WINE COLLECTION OF BEDELL CELLARS inCLuDinG ross bLeCkner, ChuCk CLose, eriC FisChL, apriL Gornik anD barbara kruGer
American painter Kenneth Noland dies at the age of eighty-five
NOON TOUR OF THE YAYOI KUSAMA EXHIBITION
Five North Korean artists are refused visas by the Australian government on the grounds that their work is propaganda Douglas Gordon vows never to accept a public commission in Scotland again after falling out with Edinburgh University over a public commission
FoLLoweD by LunCh prepareD by Guest CheF MICHELLE BERNSTEIN FairChiLD tropiCaL botaniC GarDen
10901 old Cutler road, Coral Gables, Florida 33156 enquiries +1 212 606 7390 please reply by 25 november
Jeffrey Deitch is appointed director of LA MOCA Libia Castro & Olafur Olafsson to represent Iceland at the 2011 Venice Biennale Helen Molesworth is appointed chief curator at the ICA Boston The V&A announces plans to build an outpost of the museum in Dundee Catherine Ince appointed curator at London’s Barbican Art Gallery
Eungie Joo appointed curator of the New Museum’s Generational triennial, scheduled for spring 2012 Arts funding in New York State faces a cut of $9.6 million under a proposed 2010–11 budget Pavel Büchler is announced as the winner of the Northern Art Prize Panic on the streets of London (well, not quite), as it’s announced that the ICA may be forced to close by May due to financial difficulties Raymond Pettibon is awarded the 2010 Oskar Kokoschka Prize Francesco Manacorda announced as the new director of the Artissima fair, in Turin Woman falls through a Picasso painting at the Met, New York Plans are announced for Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit, a 400-foot tower, to be built on the London 2012 Olympic site David Blandy wins the Times/South Bank Show Breakthrough Award Art on Paper announces closure after 40 years
M a rc h
Hauser & WirtH
The Directors of Hauser & Wirth invite you to celebrate the opening of an exhibition by
BHARTi KHeR Private View, Friday 19 March, 6 — 8 pm 196A Piccadilly, London W1j 9Dy Followed by a party at Home House 20 Portman Square, London W1H 6LW RSVP Rosa M Rego by Tuesday 16 March
[email protected] +44 (0) 207 478 1780
Hauser & Wirth announces plans to open a new gallery space in London Giacometti’s L’Homme Qui Marche (1961) sells at Sotheby’s in London for more than £65 million, the record price for any artwork sold at auction X Initiative closes in New York, as founder Elizabeth Dee and Hotel gallerist Darren Flook announce Independent, a ‘hybrid forum’ fair to take place during the week of the Armory SF MOMA announces plans to expand Hamza Walker and Artur Zmijewski win Ordway Prize
F ebru a ry
Ai Weiwei makes plea to Google not to self-censor in China Fashion designer Lee (Alexander) McQueen commits suicide, age forty The Rubells announce plans for a museum in Washington, DC Wangechi Mutu selected as Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year
Ai Weiwei is announced as the artist of the next Unilever commission for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall ICA curator Mark Sladen leaves amid a storm of controversy and rumours of rows with director Ekow Eshun and chairman Alan Yentob Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann are appointed curators of the 2011 Istanbul Biennial
Suzanne Cotter and Rasha Salti are announced as curators of the 10th Sharjah Biennial Sophie Ristelhueber wins the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize New York art dealer Lawrence B. Salander convicted of fraud
Southampton City Art Gallery scraps plans to sell parts of its collection to fund a maritime centre, after protests and interventions from leading museums
Karola Kraus is named new director of MUMOK
Ernst Beyeler, art collector, dealer and founder of Art Basel and Fondation Beyeler, dies age eighty-eight
Mike Nelson is to represent Britain at the 2011 Venice Biennale
The second edition of the New Orleans biennial, Prospect.2, is postponed for one year, until 2011
Andrea Büttner wins the Max Mara Art Prize at the Whitechapel Gallery, London
GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN APRIL 30 – MAY 2 2010
M ay
Rear View: 2010, AgAIN
The record for the world’s most expensive artwork is broken once again, as Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932) sells for $106.5 at a Christie’s auction in New York Daniel Birnbaum is the new director of Sweden’s Moderna Museet PaceWildenstein announces plans to demerge
Middlesex University says it will close its world-class philosophy department
Artist and impresario Malcolm McLaren dies age sixty-four
Michael Darling is appointed chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
A plane crash in Russia kills the Polish president and several ministers, including the culture minister Michael Asher awarded the Bucksbaum Award at the Whitney Biennial Karla Black is to represent Scotland at the 2011 Venice Biennale
A pr il
Claire Gilman is announced as curator of the Drawing Center, New York
Michelle Kuo is named as the new editor of Artforum
Marina Abramovic’s retrospective The Artist Is Present closes after attracting half a million visitors to MoMA, 1,565 of whom ‘sit’ with the artist over the course of 700 hours between March and May
Bice Curiger is named director of the 2011 Venice Biennale Simon Fujiwara is named Cartier Award artist and commissioned to make a work at the Frieze Art Fair Yael Bartana is awarded the fourth Artes Mundi Prize The Whitney Museum announces plans to expand to New York’s Meatpacking District MAXXI Rome, 12 years in the making, finally opens Japanese art critic Ichiro Hariu dies age eighty-four Artist Louise Bourgeois dies age ninety-eight
Mark Sladen is announced as director of Kunsthal Charlottenborg A Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government comes to power in the UK after the general election results in a hung parliament
lou is vuit ton new bon d stre et
er the dis cov tto n you to Louis Vui d to invite iso n ase are ple nd Street Ma New Bo y th Ma ay 26 esd We dn 5 pm do n W1 am till eet Lon Fro m 9 w Bo nd Str Ne om 17-20 vuitto n.c rs@ uk. l.myne 26 RSVP 9 40 39 0207
A volcanic eruption in Iceland causes flight bans and chaos as people are stranded the world over
ArtReview 179
Outset wins the Montblanc prize for art patronage, €15,000, which it donates to the South London Gallery Charles Saatchi announces his intention to gift his gallery and part of his collection to the nation
The British Library acquires the J.G. Ballard archive German artist Sigmar Polke dies age sixty-nine Chris Dercon is appointed the new director of Tate Modern At Art Basel, the Baloise prize is awarded to Simon Fujiwara and Claire Hooper The Guggenheim announces the YouTube Play biennial, an open-call exhibition via YouTube Arts Council England details the first of expected deep cuts to come as government funding is restricted
June
James Franco films General Hospital with Jeffrey Deitch at LA MOCA
Philip Glass is given lifetime achievement award from the US National Endowment for the Arts Victoria Noorthoorn is appointed curator of the 2011 Lyon Biennial Following the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tate summer party is attacked by demonstrators throwing molasses in protest over Tate’s sponsorship by BP
July
Harry Blain and Graham Southern, founders of Haunch of Venison, announce that they are to leave the gallery, which is now owned by Christie’s
Manifesta 8 postpones its slated opening date to avoid clashing with a national strike in the host country of Spain Villa Reykjavík, an art festival involving 14 European galleries, takes place in Iceland
Jean Nouvel’s pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery opens in Hyde Park British cultural leaders, including museum directors, begin to plead in earnest with the government to spare them proposed 25 percent funding cuts The British government announces that the UK Film Council and the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council are to be scrapped
Rear View: 2010, AgAIN
media invitation Office hours: 020 7983 4070 Out of hours and weekends: 020 7983 4000 www.london.gov.uk GLA/2010 July 2010
New proposals for the Fourth Plinth to be unveiled at St Martin-in-the-Fields The Mayor of London invites you to the unveiling of the six shortlisted proposals for the new commission for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.
The event will take place on Thursday 19 August 2010 at 9.00am in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London WC2N 4JJ.
The exhibiting artists are Allora & Calzadilla; Elmgreen & Dragset; Katharina Fritsch; Brian Griffiths; Hew Locke; and Mariele Neudecker.
Notes to Editors 1. The selected artist is due to be announced by the Mayor of London next year, with the artwork being installed after the current work, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare, has been taken down. 2. The Fourth Plinth Programme is funded by the Mayor of London and Arts Council England and sees new artworks being selected for the vacant plinth in a rolling programme of new commissions. The first new commission for the Fourth Plinth under the auspices of the Mayor of London's Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group was Marc Quinn's sculpture, Alison Lapper Pregnant, unveiled in a public ceremony in September 2005. It was followed by Thomas Schütte's Model for a Hotel in 2007 and by Antony Gormley’s One & Other in 2009. Yinka Shonibare’s sculpture Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle is currently on the plinth and will remain there through 2011. Previous commissions have been Ecce Homo by Mark Wallinger (1999), Regardless of History by Bill Woodrow (2000) and Monument by Rachel Whiteread (2001). Arts Council England has been a funding partner supporting the programme since 2003.
Follow the Mayor on: Twitter – http://twitter.com/mayoroflondon Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/MayorsOfficeLondon City Hall, The Queen's Walk, London SE12AA Enquiries: 020 7983 4100 Minicom: 020 7983 4458 www.london.gov.uk
Sep te m ber
RSVP Tamsin Selby, Bolton & Quinn
Allora & Calzadilla to represent the USA at the 2011 Venice Biennale
Augus t
Hammer and LAXART announce plans for an LA biennial for 2012
Tabaimo to represent Japan at the 2011 Venice Biennale
Steven Shearer is to represent Canada at the 2011 Venice Biennale
Turning Point Network, an organisation with the backing of major artists and institutions in the UK, launches Save the Arts campaign, petitioning the government to maintain funding levels for the arts
Ai Weiwei claims that he has been assaulted by Chinese authorities once more
Japanese filmmaker and artist Satoshi Kon dies age forty-six
French New Wave director Claude Chabrol dies age eighty
Ekow Eshun and Alan Yentob announce their departure from London’s ICA
Keith Coventry wins the John Moores Painting Prize
LAXART appoints Malik Gaines as curator
Anne Barlow appointed curator of the fifth Bucharest Biennale, 2012
Please join Montblanc for an evening in honour of a British Contemporary Legend of Music Serpentine Gallery
Sadie Coles announces her new space on Burlington Place, London
Bahrain wins the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale
The British literary critic Frank Kermode dies age ninety
Photographer Corinne Day dies age forty-eight
A group of blue-chip galleries announce the first major online art fair, the VIP Art Fair
SAVE THE DATE Tuesday, 14th September 2010
Kensington Gardens, London 7.30 - 9.30pm Further details to follow Enquiries: 020 8332 4574
Warner Bros donates $5m to the Smithsonian, Washington, DC Christie’s appoints Steven Pleshette Murphy, a businessman from outside the artworld, as its new chief executive Thomas Hirschhorn named as Swiss representative to the 2011 Venice Biennale
Christoph Schlingensief, the German director and artist, dies age forty-nine
ArtReview 181
the power 100
wo r ds : G A L L E RY G R R R L
To s ay it ’s b e e n a ro lle rcoas te r co u p l e of yea r s fo r t h e g a ll e ris t s , a r tis t s , c u rato r s , m use u m d i re c to r s a n d co ll e c to r s w h o g ra ce t h e A r tReview Powe r 10 0 is so m et h i n g of a n u n d e r s tate m e nt . M a r ket s a re yo - yoi n g a ll ove r t h e p la ce , g ove r n m e nt s a re cra ck i n g d ow n o n p u b lic f u n d i n g fo r t h e a r t s a n d m a ny co m m e rcia l ga lle ries h ave b e e n u n d e r s ta n d a b l y j it te r y a bo u t t h ei r p rosp e c t s . To h e lp t h ese p oo r so u ls nav ig ate a n ot h e r yea r a n d su r v i ve t h e sli n gs a n d a r rows t h e wo r l d e co n o my w ill u n d o u bte d l y h u r l t h ei r way, we’ve p u t tog et h e r a h a n d y se r ies of six- p oi nt g u id es .
182 ArtReview
G A L L ER IS TS
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Go big! Now is the time to expand – your rivals are suffering, so put your boot on their throats and dance the lambada. In this one swift move you can destroy their tenuous grip on reality forever. Remortgage everything, hoik all the stuff you can on the nefarious secondary and with the cash stuffed behind the bubble wrap in the storage room (don’t trust the banks), prepare to go mega-statement gallery. The nerves might hit when you get the keys to your new 1,400 sq metre emporium, but keep calm and think of your despairing rivals while you fumble for the light switch through your tears. Close. The above won’t work for you because you have no money and the only paintings you have to hoik on the secondary are Day-Glo canvases by a recent West London graduate with a coke problem and celebrity mates – and thus, alas, entirely worthless. But remember, don’t say you’re closing; instead send out an email saying that you’re concentrating on ‘private dealing’. Decide to become a museum director – go all Jeffrey Deitch and claim that at heart you’ve always been an academic. When safely ensconced in the institute, bring the trustees to their knees with inappropriate exhibitions of daubings by hip-hop stars. Remember – if you don’t know what you’re doing, how will your opponents?
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Get rid of all those artists you’ve never really liked. Here’s your chance – you might still go bust, you might still end up begging your only remaining couple of clients to remember the good times and throw you a crust. But at least you get the satisfaction of finally chucking out those artists you’ve always hated on several different levels (but mostly because they are richer than you).
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Relocate to a second-floor space in an old European capital and insist that you are only dealing in firstgeneration conceptual art. The advantage here is that most of the stuff can be stored in a couple of filing cabinets (or in the case of Art & Language, actually takes the form of a couple of filing cabinets). Spend the immense stretches of free time that open in front of you by reading Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1915–62).
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Check into a shared room at El Misti Hostel Copacabana (€12 a night) and tell everyone back home that you are now exclusively focusing on Brazil.
Start painting! Put away your shaky 16mm film camera or those bits of MDF stored for your latest lo-fi sculptural installation and try to remember how to paint. It was hard enough to sell installation and film in the boom times, but now art fairs are almost bereft of such media, aside from the kooky experimental sections where young galleries jostle to look serious. If you want to earn a living, get out Julian Schnabel’s underrated Basquiat (1996) and lock yourself in your gallerist’s basement, armed with oodles of chang and a couple of large canvases.
Curators
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Give up painting! Put away those dodgy oils and learn how to make proper cinema films. It worked for big Julian. And Kathryn Bigelow used to be a dauber before working out that it would be more profitable to cast Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent posing as a surfer.
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Start selling your work to celebrity clients! As bankers get cold feet about ploughing their bonuses into art, now’s the time to find yourself some stars. Jay-Z and Beyoncé have often been seen strolling around Art Basel Miami Beach, Lady Gaga is hot on Francesco Vezzoli and even Christina Aguilera is partial to a Banksy. And over in London we’ve got Elton John and that bloke from Razorlight.
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Go political. Now that no one is selling, it’s time to unleash the inner critique of late-capitalist culture that has been brewing away since your early student days. Make agitprop posters in unlimited editions. Or deliver mysterious performances with no documentary photography allowed. Join a collective with like-minded desperate fellow artists. This is your chance to get really angry and make regular appearances in committed art periodicals – if things work out well, you can even make money out of this as a biennial regular.
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Spend 20 years in obscurity battling against the commercial gallery system before being rediscovered in 2030. Reenter the artworld with a triumphant if baffling show before appearing on the cover of ArtReview, preferably surrounded by buff assistants.
A RT IS TS
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Move to Amsterdam – the only place left in the world where the government doles out cash to artists. Meet like-minded artists, get stoned and cycle round on oldfashioned bicycles while wondering why the concentric canals are driving you slowly insane.
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Competition is intense out there, the pay is lousy and jobs are being culled. Your safest bet is to become a celebrity curator – hop around the world to every biennial, triennial and special external project going, and eventually you will appear in Artforum’s ‘Scene and Herd’ gossip column enough times to persuade punters that you are in fact incredibly famous. Give up working for your institution and become the in-house curator of a rich collector. Not so easy these days, as old-school collectors are getting twitchy – but there are plenty of new collectors in the booming newer economies. Again, a frequent flyer card is needed, as is the ability to ditch the critical theory for working out which works of art match the grand dining room’s wallpaper. Teach curating. Curating itself is hard work (okay, it’s not that hard, but it’s work… just) and poorly paid, but if you stack up a load of teaching jobs at the curating courses popping up, the chances are that you won’t have to do any actual hands-on curating. Instead immerse yourself in books about curating and pick a handful of shows that happened in the pre-Internet age to rhapsodise about as if you’d really been there. On no account commit anything to writing, as this is an easy way of being found out. Write a tome about curating! The books out there are so lousy that any old dreary collection of great shows in the past is sure to sell in bulk to the eager young curating students out there. Choose a simple narrative arc, for instance one that goes from André Malraux’s ‘museum without walls’ straight through to Manifesta 8’s engagement with North Africa and just put down the first thing that comes into your head. Become an art historian. Admit it, you and your curatorial colleagues currently haven’t got the foggiest about art history and think that COBRA is a poisonous animal with a funny hooded head. This route won’t make you any money, but when the long recession is over in 2017 you will reemerge rich in knowledge and in the ability to put on exhibitions that convincingly link Max Ernst’s The Blind Swimmer (1934 – see? knowledge) to Frank Stella’s Avicenna (1970) – marvellous!
the power 100
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Museu m Directors
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If that’s too horrifying a prospect for your delicate curatorial heart, why not fall back on that old warhorse of raising institutional cash: the ‘gala dinner’ with accompanying auction conducted by an auction bod doing an ironic turn with the gavel (at least we think it’s ironic). The only problem is auction fatigue seems to be setting in: a misfiring auction at London’s ICA was blamed by its outgoing director as in part triggering the institution’s economic crisis, so this might not be a total banker. There’s always an even older horse to be flogged: special museum limited editions. It’s an old trick, but remember, there are always new young collectors who think that a framed photocopy signed by one of the programme’s illustrious alumni is worth a few hundred quid. It’s a lowdown manoeuvre and won’t earn you much, but it’ll pay for the staff Christmas party. Merge a few of the curatorial departments. Or even better, get rid of them. Do you really need nineteenth-century specialists? Or performance art experts? This stuff is readily available on the interweb, so call in a few of those so-called experts who look sullen at general staff meetings and set them free – they can now become ‘freelance curators’ (ie, unemployed) and your wage bill will be trimmed in no time. Fire the finance staff. They got you into this unholy mess, so let’s make these glorified accountants pay! Take control of the budget yourself and divvy it up among your salary, the cost to hire a couple of shows in from an obscure kunsthalle and some petty cash to pay the security guards, cleaners and curators. How hard can it be? Reallocate the carefully built up reserves to a new account called ‘cash for immediate spending’. When the board complain, attempt to fire them all. If they point out that you can’t fire them, throw away the key to the boardroom you’ve just locked all of you in and subjugate the fuckers to your own recreation of Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll. Eventually they will do what you say.
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Don’t listen to the doom-mongers – this is a great time to be a collector. Swagger around the fairs demanding 30 percent discounts. Target galleries whose sectors have been overheated – like the young contemporary folk – and then be fist-pumpingly aggressive at their experimental booths in the groovy bits of fairs that pretend that they’re not about filthy lucre. Of course they’re about filthy lucre. It’s an art fair! Chuck in a few cancelled sales at random to give these upstarts a lesson in who’s boss.
2
Get angry! Basically all that stuff you’ve bought on whims at art fairs is now worthless, as the bottom has dropped out of the market you’ve been speculating in. Those deliberately bad paintings, those installations of MDF and a found photograph of Alain Robbe-Grillet are destined for the tip. Storm into art fairs, find the fuckers who sold you this so-called ‘art’ and give them a good going over. Demand your money back on the spot, loudly and repeatedly until you are hauled out by security.
3 4 5 6 Collectors
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Get a collector to ‘curate’ a show, or if that’s too queasy, ‘curate’ a collector’s private collection in your own museum. Who cares about ethics and all that nonsense that Fred Wilson and the Guerrilla Girls used to bang on about? This is the twenty-first century, and more important, your institution is going down the tubes with your pension attached. If you really want to go hog-wild, offer said collector and his chums places on the board.
Renounce the market and become a philanthropic sort. This is easy – museums are desperate for cash. Sponsor a dinner or two, chuck their curators a bit of money to go shopping at art fairs, sort out tours of their collections with your chums – it will earn you respect in a world where respect is the only currency left. Let it be widely known that you welcome the correction in the marketplace and shake your head sadly at the speculators who did so much damage to the precious object that we call the artworld. Stop buying your food at Selfridges’s deli counter and survive on gallery dinners. Granted, this is a short-term solution best deployed at art fairs. But have some respect – when you find yourself stuffing your holdall at a Jennifer Rubell performance, you know it’s time to stop and head to Lidl. Find a disused warehouse space and open a private museum to hang all those mysterious works you’ve bought over the years. Do you remember buying it? Any idea who might have made it? If not, this isn’t a problem – hire a couple of young bucks to scour the interweb and catalogue for you, and then allow them to ‘curate’ a few shows out of it. If you’re feeling particularly in need of liquidity, charge an entry fee. Punters might never return, but eventually those eight-quid tickets will add up to, erm, around £72. Cancel all your patron schemes and ask galleries to take you off their mailing lists – it’s time to give up. The promise that the artworld would give your otherwise turgid social life a bit of a bohemian lift was simply the smoke and mirrors of those evil dealers who were after your cash. We’re all going down. Read Richard II and weep like the wretch you have become. Promptly donate everything to the nation (just leave it on the steps of the ArtReview office and we’ll sort out the technicalities) and write a confessional warts-and-all novel about your descent into the artworld. In the blink of an eye, return as the founder of a charity enabling the work of community artists in inner cities and burble about the Big Society. It’s a new dawn!
ArtReview 185
The strip: John RusselL
186 ArtReview
on the town: 19 September Aaron Curry, Michael Werner Gallery at 20 Hoxton Square, London
16 September Nathaniel Rackowe, Bischoff/Weiss, London
16 September Thomas Scheibitz, Sprüth Magers, London photography IAN PIERCE
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Aaron Curry 1 Artist Hurvin Anderson, with 20 Hoxton Square’s Alexander Dellal and Adam Waymouth 2 Aaron Curry 3 Michael Werner’s Kaydee Robbins and Gordon Veneklasen 4 Artists Thomas Houseago and Michael Craig-Martin
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Nathaniel Rackowe 5 Nathaniel Rackowe 6 Gallerists Paola Weiss and Raphaelle Bischoff
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Thomas Scheibitz 7 Folkestone Triennial’s Andrea Schlieker, Drawing Room’s Kate Macfarlane, artist Cornelia Parker and artist Jeff McMillan 8 Camden Art Centre’s Anne-Marie Watson and Ancient & Modern’s Bruce Haines 9 Camden Arts Centre’s Jenni Lomax and journalist Louisa Buck 10 Anthony Downey of Sotheby’s Art Institute London 11 Hauser & Wirth’s Damian Brenninkmeyer and James Lavender 12 Artist Maaike Schoorel and Hayward Gallery’s Stephanie Rosenthal with friend 13 Drawing Room’s Mary Doyle, curator Stephen McCoubrey, Thomas Scheibitz, Drawing Room’s Kate Macfarlane 14 Camden Art Centre’s Jenni Lomax, writer Sarah Thornton and Thomas Scheibitz
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Monday, October 4, 2010 16:17 Subject: off the record Date: Monday, October 4, 2010 16:16 From:
[email protected] To: Conversation: off the record
Power. Everybody’s obsessed with it. ArtReview Towers has been deluged with phone calls, emails, gifts, PowerPoint presentations, flower garlands, money in large brown envelopes, graphs (I kid you not), Book Tokens and all sorts of bogus statistics by the good folk of the artworld desperately trying to get onto that power list. Sitting perched on the office’s Eileen Gray Monte Carlo sofa watching the Power 100 judges bent over the Isamu Noguchi coffee table inexplicably passing each other a rolled €500 note while laughing manically, I felt a terrible sense of emptiness. I left the office and, zipping up my Peter Pilotto cropped jacket against the morning chill, meandered through the streets of Clerkenwell thinking of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI: ‘Pull down thy vanity, it is not man / Made courage, or made order, or made grace / Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.’ For what is power? After all, as Ezra memorably noted, ‘The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world’, and you, eager young gallerist, are merely a front-desk bitch in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s world, if you get my drift. So as I meandered into St John for my morning sharpener of two parts Fernet-Branca and one part crème de menthe over ice (thank you, Fergus!), I decided to pen an hommage to those in the artworld who historically have shunned this baseless thing called power. First on the list was so totally my favourite artist, Bas Jan Ader. With his black polo-neck sweaters, mysterious death at sea, wavy hair and intense handsome looks, Bas has been my hero long-time. He spent his artistic life exploring failure by falling off roofs, cycling into canals and DJ-ing hard trance in the gritty clubs of Schleswig-Holstein. Tragically he died when his speedboat ran over Gloria Estefan while they were on a collectors’ retreat thrown by prominent Greek collector Thokos Fokoffolios. Knocking back the first drink, I stood up and, to an empty bar, toasted Bas aloud: “You spurned power with the same force that I spurn this ludicrous floral trend that D&G and Erdem are pushing.” Second on my list are all those artists who have renounced the ego of the artist’s individual identity and merged into a collective. The Guerrilla Girls, Art & Language, Liam Gillick, BANK and then, confusingly, Banksy. It’s like the world of pop: for years there were no Nellies, and then Nelly Furtado and the other Nelly, who was known only as Nelly, turn up almost at the same time. I remember the good times at Charlie Wrights in my House of Jazz lime-green playsuit; in a very real sense it was indeed ‘hot in herre’. Anyhow, back to the egoless collectives, I raised a toast to them as well – although I was now onto the 2008 Anjou Blanc, which was certainly lifting my spirits. Thirdly, a toast to all those international curators who have handed the reins of power over to their supposed rivals in the spirit of collective generosity. For the 2003 Venice Biennale, Francesco Bonami stepped aside from the solo curatorial magisterial voice and instead put together a Band Aid-type collective of the world’s groovy international curators – Hou Hanru, Daniel Birnbaum, Bono, Catherine David and Hans Ulrich Obrist were some of those who were metaphorically bellowing, “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time, wooo-ah yeah”. The result was generously described as ‘multifaceted’. The toast for this one was easy; as I raised my glass of 2007 Meursault Rouge to the chefs and bellowed: “Here’s to them underneath that burning sun” (the Africans, that is, not the curators). And then the whole restaurant joined me in a final toast. A small glass each of Rogomme du Quercy to all you out there, dear readers, who never made the list, never have wanted to make the list, never will make the damn list and who are currently tearing the list out and throwing darts at it. The damn shallowness of so-called power! As Pound’s old buddy T.S. Eliot wrote, borrowing from Baudelaire: ‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’ Although obviously I’m hoping for a place in the high 70s next time round… Book Token anybody? GG
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