ART NEWS:Nov.01
The seventh edition of the Performa Biennial takes place at locations throughout New York City. “Performa 17” presents commissions and projects that examine immediate and critical concerns confronting our urban centers, the shifting political and cultural currents of our turbulent world today, and ultimately the role of the arts and of artists within our communities. This edition of the Biennial will focus on the sociopolitical context informing contemporary art today, and how best to engage audiences in significantly understanding and absorbing its aesthetics and intrinsic values. For “Performa 17”, the historical research investigation is Dada, which RoseLee Goldberg regards as the “Big Bang” of interdisciplinary 20th Century art. With Performa 17, the Biennial seeks to question how artists, curators, and writers are approaching Dada 101 years after the movement began, and how it continues to reverberate in our cultural landscape. Info: Chief Curator: RoseLee Goldberg, Curators: Adrienne Edwards, Charles Aubin, Job Piston, Lydia Brawner and Andrew W. Mellon, Various Venues, New York, Duration: 1-19/11/17, http://17.performa-arts.org
In his solo exhibition “New Works”, Paul Noble show works, made since 2015. These works, unfold within flat, planar settings, devoid of the epic scale and spatial breadth that have characterized past drawings. Using language as image, and images as a grammatical system of signs, Paul Noble shows the malleability of all forms of syntax, a legible schema of interlocking words, drawings, and objects. Noble’s art presents a reality that appears recognizably of our world—but is not. His immersive realms seem to live on beyond their immediate visual impression. Each drawing contains encoded repetitions. Door handles are flat, open hands; keyholes take the same shape as the leg; the clocks mounted on walls and near closed doors all show the same time, 10:45, creating a physical pattern with the clock hands, like a sundial that neither moves nor marks real time. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, Duration 2/11-16/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
The exhibition “Living Proof: Drawing in 19th-Century Japan” explores the methods, techniques, and subjects of drawings during Japan’s late Edo (1603–1868) and early Meiji (1868–1912) periods, highlighting some key practitioners, as well as the primary role of drawing as the first step in the process of creating ukiyo-e woodblock prints. In so doing, the exhibition sheds light on a body of work that, while compellingly expressive and frequently virtuoso in execution, was not treated as an independent art form at the time, lacking even a uniform terminology to describe it. With nearly eighty drawings, on loan from Public and Private Collections, this is the first museum exhibition of its kind in over thirty years. In the small companion exhibition, “Rough Cut: Independent Japanese Animation” three independent animated films from Japan are interspersed among the exhibition’s nineteenth-century Japanese drawings, highlighting a continuum from drawings on paper to moving images. Info: Curators: Kit Brooks & Tamara H. Schenkenberg (Living Proof: Drawing in 19th-Century Japan) and Stephanie Weissberg (Rough Cut: Independent Japanese Animation), The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Duration: 3/11/17-3/3/18, Days & Hours: Wed & Sat 10:00-17:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-20:00, https://pulitzerarts.org
The exhibition “Like a Moth to a Flame” inaugurates the Visual Arts Program at the renovated OGR in Turin. The exhibition explores the eternal compulsion to produce and to collect works of art, displaying “objects” ranging from a 2nd century BCE Egyptian sculpture to works created for the last Venice Biennale, drawn together from Turin’s Collections of art and antiquities. “Like a Moth to a Flame” offers a portrait of Turin and its engagement with the world through the collecting habits of the city and its citizens. Assembling these objects provides an overview of the enduring appeal of art: its ability to renew ideas and generate fresh discourse. With rebirth and renewal in mind, the exhibition exploits the coincidence of one birth and two anniversaries:the inauguration of OGR, the 25th anniversary of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s Collection of Contemporary Art and the 60th anniversary of founding of the Situationist International . Info: Curators: Tom Eccles, Mark Rappolt with Liam Gillick, Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Corso Castelfidardo 22, Turin, Duration: 3/11/17-14/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 11:00-19:00, Fri 11:00-22:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, Sun 10:00-18:00, www.ogrtorino.it
Maria Thereza Alves’ “Seeds of Change: New York-A Botany of Colonization”, is Alves’ first presentation of for her long-term project “Seeds of Change”in U.S.A. The project studies colonialism, slavery and the global commerce of goods through the lens of displaced plants in ballast-the waste material historically used to balance ships in maritime trade. Dumped in ports at the end of passages, ballast often carried “dormant” seeds collected from its place of origin that remained in the soil for hundreds of years before germinating and growing. Alves identifies the seeds as she looks at how plants trace the displacement of lands and people from the transatlantic slave trades. The exhibition features a living installation or a “greenhouse” of more than 60 ballast plants, a list of flora and maps that highlight the species and areas filled in with ballast in the New York region. Info: Vera List Center, Parsons The New School for Design, 66 Fifth Avenue 13th Street, New York, Duration: 3-27/11/17, Days & Hours: Daily 12:00-18:00, www.veralistcenter.org
After the Second World War, the battle of the political systems also embroiled the arts and culture in a symbolic arms race. One example of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization founded in West Berlin in June 1950 by a group of writers driven to consolidate an “anti-totalitarian” intellectual community. From its headquarters in Paris, the CCF subsidized countless cultural programs from Latin America to Africa and Southeast Asia, developing a network of journals, conferences, and exhibitions that advanced a “universal” language of modernism in literature, art, and music. By 1967, it was revealed that the CCF was secretly bankrolled by America’s espionage arm, the CIA. The CIA scandal confirmed that the CCF had been enlisted in shoring up an anti-Communist consensus in the service of U.S. hegemony during the cultural Cold War. The exhibition “Parapolitics” brings together artworks from the 1930s to the present by artists that prefigure and reflect the ideological and formal struggles arising from the cultural Cold War, but also works by contemporary artists critically reassessing the normalized narratives of modernism. Info: Curators: Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, and Antonia Majaca, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, Berlin, Duration: 3/1117-8/1/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 11:00-19:00, http://www.hkw.de/en/index.php
Caroline Woolard’s “Carried on Both Sides” is the first of a three-part immersive exhibition and collaboration between Caroline Woolard, Helen Lee, Alexander Rosenberg and Lika Volkova that uncovers the history of the @ symbol. The installation presented at Lesley Heller directs attention specifically to our contemporary digital world and the imperial residues that exist in it; chiefly the ubiquitous @ symbol. For “Carried on Both Sides”, the four artists worked together to collectively investigate the material history of classical shapes from the Roman Empire as they have come to structure our online world and our current economic environment, which social theorist Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism.” If in the 19th century, the capitalist imperative was to “produce”; today it is to “communicate.” Online has now become omnipresent. Using the legacy of the @ symbol as a provocation, these artists have crafted new imperial artifacts. The project consists of three exhibitions over the next year. Info: Lesley Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard Street, New York, Duration: 4/11-16/12/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.lesleyheller.com
Two solo exhibitions “Miguel Rio Branco: Out of Nowhere” and “Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: The Garden of Delights” are on presentation at Christopher Grimes Gallery. In the main gallery, Miguel Rio Branco presents selections from his photo-essay, “Out of Nowhere”, which portray the boxers of the infamous Santa Rosa Boxing Academy in Rio de Janeiro, named for the devotionally extravagant patron saint of Latin America, where former prostitutes, street youths, and people of all backgrounds would flock to train. The photographs, which were originally captured in the early ‘90s and were first exhibited at the 1994 Havana Bienal, depict the boxers at the academy while focusing on the pervading transcendental atmosphere of the space rather than the individual subjects. In the South Gallery, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle presents a selection of works from the “The Garden of Delights” series, an early body of work made from the DNA samples of forty-eight participants – sixteen chosen by the artist, each of whom invited two additional participants with whom they would comprise a triptych. Produced as digital prints, the series challenges the idea of identity both aesthetically and socially. Info: Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica, Duration 4/11-29/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, www.cgrimes.com
“Accidental Records” is Ellen Gallagher’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Comprising a suite of new works that includes paintings and drawings, the exhibition finds Gallagher returning to and building upon themes and motifs at the center of her practice. These works extend her exploration of the complex histories of the Black Atlantic and the afterlives of the Middle Passage. Widely acclaimed for her own genre of history painting, Gallagher questions accepted geographies. The layered surfaces of her works become a kind of reckoning, evoking, in the artist’s words, ‘the way sailors mark their location at sea, determined by return. Info: Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, Duration 4/11-17-28/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com
Nicholas Crombach in his solo exhibition “Behind Elegantly Carved Wooden Doors” has mined art historical tradition, assembling a body of work rich in citation. The visual language of sport hunting over the course of history informs much of the work; incongruities exist within existing art historical traditions, and too, manifest in the reconfiguring of forms and tradition that plays a role in Crombach’s practice. Nicholas Crombach graduated from OCAD University’s Sculpture and Installation program. He works predominantly with human and animal figures, creating narratives including mundane objects, suggestive titles and abnormal scenarios within his work. Crombach is the recipient of numerous awards including the Hayden Davies Memorial award and the Samuel Lazar Kagan award. Info: Art Mûr, 5826 Street, Hubert, Montréal, Duration: 4/11-20/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, http://artmur.com
Publishing has developed a favorite site and medium for aesthetic and artistic experimentation. It has also become an alternative space for promoting unrestricted individual or collective discourse. The multi-part exhibition project “Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017” explores the potentials of publishing – in the form of books, magazines, journals, artistic interventions, websites and to produce art. Instead of looking at the already historicized and analyzed period of the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition highlights how a recent generation of artists use publishing as a productive tool for their practice. The focus lies on the period from 1989 until 2017, taking 1989 as symbolic date to underline the shift from analogue to digital. On a political level, 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall marks a significant date. On a social level, it is an important year as it indicates the invention of the World Wide Web. Info: Curator: Luca Lo Pinto, Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 8/11/17-28/1/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.kunsthallewien.at