ART NEWS:April 02

Merce Cunningham’s dynamic artistic collaborations are the subject of a major interdisciplinary survey. Renowned as both choreographer and dancer, Cunningham revolutionized dance through his partnerships with leading artists who created costumes, lighting, films, music, and décor and whose independent creative instincts he held in the highest regard. The exhibition “Common Time” presents Cunningham’s work and that of his network of collaborators through rare and never-before-seen moving image presentations and installations of décor and costumes from the MCDC Collection as well as pieces by his lifelong collaborator, composer John Cage, and Trisha Brown, Tacita Dean, Jasper Johns, Morris Graves, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Isamu Noguchi, Nam June Paik, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, David Tudor, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol, etc. Info: Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, Duration: 28/2-30/7/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, www.walkerart.org

The collaboration between Joan Miró, Paul Éluard and the publisher Gérald Cramer to create their 1958 edition of Éluard’s “À toute épreuve” produced one of the most important of Miró’s artist’s books. The poems were the product of events of 30 years earlier that had passed into Surrealist myth: the breakdown of Éluard’s relationship with Gala, who left him for Salvador Dalí. They were first published by André Breton’s Éditions surréalistes. Working in intense team sessions, Éluard, Cramer and Miró re-imagined it as an entirely new object. It was Miró, looking back to Gauguin and Japanese print-making, who decided on the labour intensive practice of woodcutting in pursuit of a book as sculpture. The exhibition “À toute épreuve, more than a book” reconstructs the history of this artist’s edition. The project also aims to put the spotlight how Miró managed to accomplish something he had aspired to for years: the creation of a book-object that went beyond illustrating the words of the poet to become something close to a sculpture. Info: Curator: Christopher Green, Fundació Joan Miró, Parc de Montjuic, Barcelona, Duration: 30/3-2/7/17, Days & Hours: Tue, Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-20:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, sun 10:00-1:000, www.fmirobcn.org

The group exhibition “Biotopia”  presents a generation of artists who, mindful of the way in which people are controlling and threatening nature, are on a quest for alternatives to the evolutionary dead end. In their desire to distill essences and construct models which can serve as potential counter-concepts, or at least approaches for changing the way we think, the artists have made their way to the most distant corners of the earth, parts of nature that have hitherto been virtually unexplored. From the last-remaining sanctuaries of the jungle and the depths of the ocean, they have devised computerised simulations, biological experiments, and futuristic biofictions. They have chased down the paradox of an untouched nature created by humankind, mixing philosophically critical and animistic thought with elements taken from the life-sciences, bio-engineering, and geo-engineering. Info: Curator: Sabine Rusterholz Petko, Kunsthalle Mainz, Am Zollhafen 3-5, Mainz, Duration 31/3-30/7/17, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fri 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-21:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://kunsthalle-mainz.de

Anthony McCall and Massimo Bartolini present their first solo exhibition  at Lismore Castle Arts. Anthony McCall, presents seminal early works such as “Line Describing a Cone” (1973), alongside complex new works such as “Swell” (2016). Anthony McCall was a key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the ‘70s. His earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were celebrated for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire, in the work “Landscape For Fire” (1972) which also is on presentation. Massimo Bartolini​has created a new organ piece specially for the building. The piece takes the form of a “well” with a music box inside, the box plays the first ten bars of the John Cage work In a Landscape. Related to other organ works by the artist, it functions like a barrel organ which plays automatically. The air blown through the metal pipes first passes through the holes in the music roll, giving rise to variations in tone and length. The air passing through the mechanics also lends the work a strangely human quality, further referencing spiritual connections. The juxtaposition of a minimal, brutalist structure with such an intimate, fragile sound is central to Massimo’s practice. Info: Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Co Waterford, Duration: Anthony McCall: 2/4-15/10/17, Massimo Bartolini: 2/4-28/5/17, Days & Hours: Daily 10:30-17:30, www.lismorecastlearts.ie

The exhibition “Paintings from 1956 to 1999” presents important and historic works by Bernard Buffet, who remains one of the most controversial French artists of the 20th Century. While Bernard Buffet was once hailed as the next Picasso in France and internationally, the artist’s work has weathered dizzying cycles of acclaim and rejection. Immensely popular – and always commercially successful – at numerous points in his career, Buffet suffered long spells of vicious critical repudiation, when his work was considered the ultimate embodiment of poor taste. But curatorial attention has returned to his oeuvre in the years since his death, culminating in a major retrospective of his work at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2016. Info: VENUS, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration 5/4-27/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://venusovermanhattan.com

Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda in his solo exhibition “π, e, ø” focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as a unique artist working across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visual materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations. The cultural artifacts and remnants of earlier technologies belong to a technological continuum beginning with the earliest stirrings of coded communication. The memory of a song forgotten in the piano roll, is now only silence, absence. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House, London, Duration: 6/4-20/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.alminerech.com

documenta 14  opeed in Athens. “Learning from Athens” is extending over the city in more than 40 different public institutions, squares, cinemas, university locations, and libraries, over 160 international artists show works newly conceived for documenta 14. documenta 14 is founded on several important institutional partnerships in Athens and Kassel. Each of these individual relationships with institutions results in specific programming, research, and collaborative projects. Working together with partner institutions, documenta 14 points to a public sphere that is non-exclusionary and defined by encounters and possibilities—a public sphere in space and time. At the same time the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), with the new series “EMST in the World”, found within the working title “Learning from Athens” the opportunity to learn from Kassel and create a path for its contact with the world.Info: Artistic Director: Adam Szymczyk, Curators: Curator at Large: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, PhD, Curators: Pierre Bal-Blanc, Hendrik Folkerts, Candice Hopkins, Hila Peleg, Dieter Roelstraete, Monika Szewczyk, Duration: 8/4-16/7/17, www.documenta14.de

The exhibition “Craft becomes Modern. The Bauhaus in the Making” in the original setting, the weaving workshop in the Bauhaus building in Dessau, tells the story of the workshops from the perspective of craft—a discipline that was already pivotal to the foundation of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. That said, at the Bauhaus the concept of craft was more contentious than any other. In the microcosm of the workshop practice, the exhibition simultaneously explores these sites as reflected in their day as spheres in which the pressing questions of modern society were addressed. Through sketches, lesson notes, material studies, objects, photos and documents, visitors learn about design, making and production at the Bauhaus. Looms, workbenches, tools, material samples and machines from the weaving, wood and metal workshops will be on show for the very first time. Info: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Gropiusallee 38, Dessau-Roßlau, Duration 13/4/17-7/1/18, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-17:00, www.bauhaus-dessau.de

Titled “Pareidolia”, the solo exhibition by Shawn Thornton includes small-scale oil paintings, videos, and altar-like sculptures produced between 1995 and 2017. “Pareidolia” is a psychological term that refers to the human brain’s tendency to see patterns where none exist. Thornton’s intricate work references his own hallucinatory visions, the result of an undiagnosed brain tumor in his pineal gland, which he experienced for over a decade. He also employs a range of images and symbols that reference 16th-century Dutch painting, mandalas, hieroglyphics, and indigenous and mystical traditions, layering them into interwoven compositions that invite the viewer to approximate his otherworldly medical experience, and serve a mode of research into that experience. Thornton’s process is painstaking. He often takes over a year to finish a single piece, working with meditative deliberation to transform it into an object of shamanic power. Info: Curator: Tom Burckhardt, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, New York, Duration: 13/4-24/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat, 10:00-17:00, http://cueartfoundation.org

On 21-22/4/17 quintessential White Cube will be inaugurated on a former Unilever plantation in Lusanga, 650 km southeast of Kinshasa, Congo. Designed by OMA, this White Cube is a central element of the Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality (LIRCAEI). Located in the heart of the plantation system and at the crossroads of global inequality and climatological change, the research center aims to become a vector for a social and ecological shift. LIRCAEI is a joint initiative of the plantation workers’ cooperative Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise (CATPC) and the Institute for Human Activities (IHA). To mark the opening of the new research program centered on the definition and implementation of the post-plantation, CATPC is curating an exhibition on the interconnectedness of art, ecology, and the economy. Info: Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, Avenue Wagenia 1, Commune de la Gombe, Kinshasa, www.lircaei.art