EVERY YEAR EVERYTHING CHANGES FOR MIAMI ART BASEL AND ITS SATELLITE FAIRS AND MONSTER PRIVATE COLLECTION SHOWS AND SMALL BUT AMAZING MUSEUM SHOWS. This year may be more different than any we’ve seen since Fireplace Chats began going to Miami for Art Basel starting in 2005. First off is the return of the art fairs to from Miami to Miami Beach. The Pulse Fair is the most recent to decamp from Miami and will be centrally located south of NADA (which moved from Miami to Miami Beach a couple/three years ago). The Scope Fair is spending its second season in Miami Beach in South Beach; not far away is the Untitled Fair, which debuted on Miami Beach and remains there with an even more potent program than ever before. Art Miami and its Context Art Fair, and its Miami Beach fair – Aqua Art Miami, together offer over 200,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space for during Art Basel Miami Beach 2014. Miami Project fair still has serious game in Miami, and is joined this year by the newest Miami art Fair: Concept Art Fair. The guaranteed superb museum retrospective experience will be of the work of the leading abstract painter in South America, Beatriz Milhazes, at PAMM. The brand new ICA Miami, formed by the former board of North Miami MoCA, will have its debut show in the Design District. North Miami MoCA will have a show by a Nigerian artist curated by an African art scholar. According to the NYTimes, Mana (the massive full service contemporary art venture in Jersey City has invested in group of buildings covering five blocks, Mana will host an art fair in Miami in December. The several private collection exhibitions are described in the Art Basel Miami Beach 2014 press release:
“Reflecting the show’s long-term impact on the local art scene, South Florida’s leading
museums and private collections will again time their strongest exhibitions of the year to
coincide with Art Basel. Visitors from across the world will have an opportunity to view the
Public Opening Night, which is free and open to the public, will take place in Collins Park on Wednesday, December 3, from 8.30 pm to 10pm. The Public sector is free of charge and open to the public from December 4 to December 7. Tours will be offered daily at 10.30am, 11.30am and 12.30pm.
The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation
(CIFO) will show ‘Impulse, Reason, Sense, Conflict/Abstract Art in the Ella Fontanals-
Cisernos Collection’, featuring works exhibited for the first time at the CIFO Art Space.
‘Beneath The Surface’ at the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space will include
work by Félix González-Torres, Wade Guyton, Rob Pruitt, Dana Schutz and
Kelley Walker, among others.
The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse will celebrate
its 15th anniversary with an exhibition of work by Pier Paolo Calzolari, John
Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer,
Donald Judd, Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Mario
Merz, Joan Miró, Isamu Noguchi, Michelangelo Pistoletto, George Segal, Richard
Serra, Tony Smith, Do-Ho-Suh, Franz West and others.
The Rubell Family Collection
will present ‘Collection Overview/50 Years of Marriage’.”
looking forward to seeing you all there in sun and fun Miami Beach and Miami! Vincent Johnson Los Angeles http://www.vincentjohnsonart.com
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BROADWAY WORLD
Dominique Levy to Bring TRUE GRIT to Art Basel Miami Beach, 12/4-7
From December 4 through 7, 2014, Dominique Lévy will present the exhibition TRUE GRIT at Art Basel Miami Beach. With significant works created from the 1970s through the 1990s, the show is inspired by the potent themes that transformed Charles Portis’ 1968 novel True Grit – and the 1969 Academy Award-winning film based upon it – into bona fide milestones of American popular culture celebrated worldwide. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, and photography by Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, Gilbert & George, David Hammons, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Peter Regli, Thomas Schütte, Kazuo Shiraga, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Günther Uecker, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool.
The original story of Portis’ True Grit is told from the perspective of an Arkansas woman named Mattie Ross, who recounts the time when she was 14 years old and in search of retribution for the murder of her father by a scoundrel named Tom Chaney. She is aided in her quest by the tough U.S. marshal Rooster Cogburn and a young Texas Ranger called LeBoeuf, unlikely cohorts who nevertheless share with Mattie a single defining trait: “grit.” Literally a collection of small, hard, abrasive materials such as dirt, ground stone, debris, and the coarse surface of sandpaper, “grit” is also a marked steeliness of character – a mixture of determination, fearlessness invincible spirit, and willingness to be society’s outsider for the sake of a goal.
TRUE GRIT at Art Basel Miami Beach focuses on interrelated thematic threads harkening back to both definitions of the word “grit”, to unrefined materials and the archetype of the outsider. In a strictly black, white, and red color palette, the works on view have evolved specifically from artistic attitudes of true grit – unwavering consistency, fearlessness, and the willingness to tread untested turf conceptually and materially.
Among TRUE GRIT’s highlights are works made by Gilbert & George, David Hammons, and Keith Haring via materials and techniques that exude the grittiness of the pre-gentrification streets London’s East End (“The London Nobody Knows”) and New York’s East Village and Harlem in the 1970s and 1980s. Also on view are daring explorations of tough, untested industrial materials, such as Alberto Burri’s visionary experiments with acrovinyl and cellotex to create the “Crettos” that resemble the cracked surface of a desert floor. Günther Uecker’s obsessive hammering of oversized nails onto the picture plane and Frank Stella’s determinedly hand-built works from scraps of metal, industrial detritus, and car paint – rusty and sharp-edged – are primary examples of rough material investigation. Richard Prince, Sigmar Polke, and Christopher Wool have channeled the tough ethos of the of the streets with spray paint; Andy Warhol’s glitter-splattered “Diamond Dust Shoes” nods to the dark, hardened heart of a seductive downtown disco scene; and Richard Serra’s heavily applied paintstick drawings suggest an artist as craggy and indomitable as Portis’ Rooster Cogburn. Perhaps the pivotal work of the exhibition is Barbara Kruger’s large-scale photographic work “Cuando ellos hacen negocios hacen historia,” with its transgressive mantra linking business and history with the mise-en-scène of TRUE GRIT.
Gilbert & George declared in the 1980s, “We want to be completely outside with-whatyoucall-hooligans and tramps.” TRUE GRIT offers a glimpse of a group of exceptional artists’ explorations of the dark hero’s embrace of Portis’ declaration that “outside is a place for shooting.”
What began as little more than a swanky block party has grown into a major international art fair. Here, the major players discuss the rapid transformation.
It was the early 1990s when Art Basel began mulling an outpost stateside. The question was where to try out its offshoot.
Sam Keller, director, Fondation Beyeler, and founding director, Art Basel Miami Beach:The art market was very much down in the beginning of the 1990s, but when it came back, it was the American art market that was the strongest.
Mera Rubell, collector: Basel has similarities to Miami—Basel represents a neutral zone for a lot of Europe, and Miami does the same for North and South America.
Michele Oka Doner, Miami-born artist: Miami was like a blank canvas—pardon the metaphor. An art fair, unlike most industry gatherings, is focused on people coming there on vacation. If collectors are going to be spending their own money, and giving up their free time, it makes a lot of sense it should be in a place where people enjoy themselves.
Rubell: It took a lot of persuasion to make the Con- vention Center give up a week during the winter. The idea of an art fair was nothing special to them.
Craig Robins, CEO, Dacra Development; co-owner, Design Miami: In December, we have enormous hotel inventory; Miami is empty. It’s the only time that Art Basel would have worked.
After much discussion with the city, Miami was confirmed for December 12–16, 2001.
Keller:The right place at the right moment? It turned out to be the wrong moment, with 9/11 and the anthrax scares.
Robins:Forget about all the other issues—art could not be transported because it was uninsurable.
Angela Westwater, owner, Sperone Westwater: I got a call from Sam, and he said, “What do we do?” And I said, “I think you should cancel.”
As a makeshift alternative, local collectors like Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz and Don and Mera Rubell threw open their homes to showcase recent acquisitions—and inadvertently began a tradition.
Westwater: It’s kind of strange to say, but that first year when it was canceled was really memo- rable. None of us were in our booths, because we had no booths, and it was rather cozy.
After that fitful start, the fair debuted in 2002.
Westwater:In those early years, there was a marvelous opportunity to talk to collectors, have discussions about how the artist’s ideas fit into contemporary culture. That’s the way great collections are formed.
Teresita Fernández, Miami-born sculptor: At that point, in Miami, young artists were excited that people from elsewhere would come here.
Seth Browarnik, founder, World Red Eye: That first year? We shot 10 or 15 events, total. In 2013, we did close to 300.
Nadine Johnson, publicist: We knew we were onto something when an art reporter told me, “Nadine, I cannot believe this is going on. I saw my first transaction in cash [on a gallery stand].”
Browarnik:Early on, Karl Lagerfeld hired me to follow him around for a weekend. It was his first time in Miami since Versace was shot. He was locked in his hotel, and he wouldn’t come out without a bunch of security. He was freaked out he was going to get killed like Gianni.
Nonetheless, compared with the blockbuster show in Switzerland, it retained a small-scale focus relished by art world insiders.
Shamim Momin, former curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, and founder, LAND: I associate those times with staying up all night talking about art. We’d go sit on balconies with all the artists. I often recall Terence Koh, Javier Peres, Anne Ellegood, Agathe Snow, Dash Snow. It was a giddy feeling, all these art nerds in one place. It most definitely was not fantasy or fashion.
Sam Orlofsky, director, Gagosian Gallery: For the first few years, what was remarkable was the opportunity to have young European gallerists and dealers all together in one place. It was a valuable incubator for relationships with people like Martin Klosterfelde and Thilo Wermke.
As for Miami Beach, it offered the art world an enthusiastic, if somewhat haphazard, welcome.
Mark Hughes, art advisor and former director, Galerie Lelong: The first year? The Miami hotels seemed never to have had guests before. I was at the Beachcomber, and I got in the elevator and there was a quarter-eaten beef patty on the floor that had obviously dropped off a room-service tray. In the morning, it was still there.
By 2004 there was such cachet around the fair, VIPs were specially chartering jets. Henry and Marie- Josée Kravis, for example, received a preview before it opened in 2004 from Larry Gagosian, returning home within 24 hours.
Eric Shiner, director, Andy Warhol Museum: I remember opening days, when you watched the mad rush as people literally came running into the fair. There was this competitive mentality to get the good stuff, like at Filene’s Basement.
Keller:Jeff Koons was one of the first major artists to come down and bring his family. He didn’t stay for a couple of hours, but for several days.
Sara Fitzmaurice, U.S. representative of Art Basel; founder, Fitz + Co.: NetJets was there that first year, with a small space in the col- lectors’ lounge. Now it’s one of their top three events for takeoffs and landings.
As ancillary fairs, like Design Miami, began appearing—and succeeding—they helped Art Basel Miami Beach become a pop culture bonfire.
Johnson:It became a cross-marketing initiative. I got a call one day from a tech company, a month before, saying, “We want to be associated with Basel.” I don’t like sponsors—they give you five cases of Champagne and then bring 28 executives [to the party]. But this company offered $25,000 to have a logo on the invitation.
Orlofsky:There was a marked shift, three or four years in, when everybody in New York started to figure out it was a good excuse to get away for the weekend. That’s when it became a runaway train.
Rubell:It’s become like Burning Man, an adventure you have to take. People who don’t collect art are embarrassed to say they haven’t been. My attorney from Baltimore said, “Omigod, we’ve been thinking about going.”
Fitzmaurice:By 2006 or so, even the general public—the people who buy a ticket to come in on Saturday—had stopped mispronouncing it as “Bay-zull.”
Crowds swelled so much that some of the impromptu events of the earlier years were discontinued—notably some of the free public events.
Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, collector: We had a show of William Kentridge’s work, and 4,000 people came. I thought, “Wow, this is not going to happen next year.” An open party for everyone? Impossible.
Takashi Murakami, artist: The less serious it was becoming just made me want to be involved more. I love a good circus.
The fair, too, was booming—and attracting waggish stunts as a result.
Keller:One gallery said someone came in, in flip-flops, with children from the beach and asked about the Picasso [on their stand], a picture worth several million dollars. The next day, the woman came back and said, “If you can deliver it by January 17, I’ll buy it.” It sold.
Fontanals-Cisneros:I bought a piece by [Brazilian artist] Jac Leirner and then went for lunch with some friends. And one goes, “I bought this piece from Jac Leirner”—and it was my piece! I called the gallerist, who told me, “No, no, the piece is yours.” I was like, “Omigod, I won the lottery.”
Marianne Boesky, gallerist: It hit a crazy peak when I found Paris Hilton in an elevator drunk, and I thought, “This is not about art anymore.”
Jeffrey Deitch, founder, Deitch Projects: A friend of mine, Tara Subkoff, who’s famous for the fashion line Imitation of Christ, wanted to do an art performance under my auspices. She wanted to drop hot dogs from an airplane above the art fair audience, but I said, “I’ve got my hands full.” She was miffed, and got a bunch of white rabbits and somehow smuggled them into the fair. She released them, and each one had a sign on the collar: “Jeffrey Deitch says I’m not an artist.”
Just as the art world peaked during the boom of 2007, and Art Basel Miami Beach was cresting, Keller announced he was decamping to Art Basel founder’s Fondation Beyeler.
Marc Spiegler, former art journalist, now director, Art Basel: I was announced as the director in June [during Art Basel Switzerland]. There was a real crowd at the door, and it was impenetrable; I was with some friends, and we thought we could hop over the wall. We looked at each other and thought, “Oh, Marc can’t hop over the walls anymore.”
Under his stewardship the fair weathered the downturn, and further embraced the social element with which it had become synonymous.
Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn, owner, Salon 94: One thing that Marc has done quite well is under- standing there is this other nightlife he is creat- ing culture around.
Bill Acquavella, gallerist: The parties? Oh, I’m too old to go to all the parties.
Oka Doner:People are party animals. In a way, it’s seeing how many Medicis there are at this point.
Johnson:The hardest thing is to find your car— the valets usually bring you the wrong car.
Westwater:[White Cube owner] Jay Jopling’s parties are pretty great at Soho House. I remember celebrating with Damien Hirst as well as Theaster Gates.
Carter Cleveland, founder, Artsy: Our party with Chanel was wild. We underestimated how much awareness had grown, and it was not our plan to have people waiting in such a long line on the beach. There were women in $10,000 dresses almost falling into the ocean!
Boesky:Two years ago a friend and I walked out of the Convention Center on opening night and there was a little Cuban guy behind the wheel of a taxi. We asked, “Can we keep you for the night?” Our itinerary was 14 parties—something at the Versace mansion, couple of different private home parties. At the end of the night, we had 13 people stuffed into that taxi. She still talks about it.
No one’s Rolodex is more envied than Jeffrey Deitch’s, whose parties at the Raleigh Hotel on Wednesday after the opening, the only night when true VIPs are guaranteed to be in town, are the stuff of legend.
Keller:Jeffrey is the one who totally got it from the beginning. Not only did he do a great booth, but he also organized concerts and things.
Deitch:Our parties were like art performances. We didn’t bring Lionel Richie. I never had a promoter, a guest list, a consultant. It was our circle. The most infamous incident would be one of the gallery girls having a tumble under the stage with an art handler—one of my staff found them in flagrante.
Murakami: In Japan the art world is expected to be strictly academic, so the scale of the parties was beyond my imagination.
One major difference between the original Basel and its Miami outpost: the celebrity quotient, which impresses even art-world VIPs.
Greenberg-Rohatyn:A few years ago, I presented Nate Lowman in Alex Rodriguez’s batting café; we hung one of Lowman’s paintings of bullet holes and joked about Rodriguez hitting the baseball through one of the holes. The mix of people who came was Alex’s friends, the art world, young artists, a total mash-up. You could only do that in Miami.
Fitzmaurice: I walked Leonardo DiCaprio around last year for four hours—he was engaged, talked to dealers. But people kept trying to talk to him, when all he wanted to do was look at the art.
Boesky:I don’t get enamored with celebrities, but I gotta say: Meeting Jay-Z and Beyoncé was pretty awesome. They were walking around the fair, and I was just gawking at them.
Despite the star wattage, though, Art Basel Miami Beach has had a democratizing impact.
Greenberg-Rohatyn:People who might not have made the pilgrimage to an art fair come for the parties. They start out as lookers and become buyers. It’s reverse engineering.
Helen Allen, artist: It opened things up; it’s more than the one percent who go to Basel [Switzerland]. The art in Miami is different. It has more oomph—not from a conceptual standpoint, but from a visual one.
With its 13th edition looming, Art Basel Miami is firmly established and its local impact has been seismic.
Fitzmaurice:Many collectors have bought homes in Miami—look at the Faena residences. They’ve sold to a who’s who of the art world. Everyone got together and made Miami an art city now.
Fernández:When I was growing up, Miami had few cultural institu- tions—in high school, the thing was to go to the little divey bars along Ocean Drive with a $5 cover. It was not glamorous. In the last 20 to 25 years, Miami has turned into some- thing that looks like a real city.
Rubell:Sometimes it takes an outsider to make you aware of who you are. Art Basel profoundly in- troduced Miami to itself.
This year Art Basel Miami Beach will take place December 4 to 7; artbasel.com.
Miami’s top private collections
Miami’s Top Private Collections
Ty Cole
By Sue Hostetler
Sep-2014
Why the best contemporary art in town may not be in museums.
The best counterargument to the outdated canard that Miami is a sun-swept cultural desert is the passion of its private art collectors. Their contemporary holdings are arguably more comprehensive than the local museums’ collections—thankfully, many of them have dedicated spaces to show them off to the public—and their stamp of approval can help turn an emerging artist into a global star practically overnight (as Don and Mera Rubell did with Oscar Murillo). If Art Basel Miami Beach is widely regarded as the catalyst behind South Florida’s cultural renaissance, it was these collectors who laid the groundwork for it. In the pages that follow, Miami’s most influential patrons open their doors.
CARLOS AND ROSA DE LA CRUZ
“We have to remember Miami used to be a beach resort, and we are always trying to compare it to other cities with a rich history of museums and cultural institutions,” says Rosa de la Cruz. Ironically, her world-class collection and vociferous support of the contemporary art scene in Miami are among the reasons such comparisons are increasingly apt.
Rosa and her husband, Carlos, met as teenagers in their native Cuba. They left for Spain just after the revolution to seek political asylum. In 1975 they settled in Miami, where Carlos made his fortune in beverage distribution. The couple began collecting contemporary art about 25 years ago to decorate a new home, without ever dreaming it would turn into the full-fledged passion that it has.
Recently, the de la Cruzes have been taking local cultural institutions to task for becoming “banquet halls and country clubs” prizing elitist social functions over bringing art to the community. “The collectors in Miami realize the importance of opening our spaces to the public,” Rosa says.
For years they allowed visitors into their art-filled Key Biscayne mansion during Art Basel for legendary dinner parties. In 2009 the collection outgrew the home, and the couple opened the 30,000-square-foot de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space in the Design District. Open year-round and free of charge, the space hosts rotating exhibitions from their stellar collection (including names like Isa Genzken, Christopher Wool and Dana Schutz). “Our space is an extension of our home,” Rosa says. “No room is private. I like when visitors tell me they would love to live there!”
For Rosa, the acquisition of works is less rewarding than the ability to foster a thriving local arts culture. With that in mind, the de la Cruzes have also established residencies for artists and invited them to create site-specific installations. At 23 NE 41st St.; delacruzcollection.org.
DENNIS AND DEBRA SCHOLL
On their first day of law school at the University of Miami, in 1978, Dennis and Debra (née Schwartz) Scholl were seated next to each other, per the class’s alphabetical arrangement. Their foray into collecting began just as fortuitously as that first meeting. “During law school we needed a job,” recalls Dennis, “so we both worked in a gallery that sold art that matched your sofa! But that allowed us to learn a lot about what makes a great piece of art.”
Both practiced law, though Debra made a name for herself as one of the first historic developers of Art Deco buildings in South Beach, completing more than 20 restorations.
For 35 years the Scholls have earned recognition for their experimental collection and their generosity. Most recently they donated more than 300 works to the Pérez Art Museum Miami—with an emphasis on sculpture by artists like Olafur Eliasson and photography by Catherine Opie and Anna Gaskell.
Each year the couple selects a young guest curator to reinstall work from their 1,000-plus-piece collection during Art Basel, then opens their South Beach apartment to thousands of visitors. “Miami has a very committed group of collectors who are willing to turn their collections outward,” says Dennis, who is now the vice president of arts for the Knight Foundation.
Debra, who is the chair of the board of directors for one of the coolest alternative arts spaces in town—Locust Projects—finds Miami singular for its utter lack of pretense. “Miami is a very open city—you don’t have to be fifth generation to get involved on the highest level.” Collection viewing by invitation only.
MARTIN MARGULIES
“I don’t drink wine, so that wasn’t an option [to collect],” says Martin “Marty” Margulies. “And I don’t want to be reminded that time is constantly going by, so watches were out, too. I relate to the visual arts because of the great imprint art makes on your mind.”
Raised in Washington Heights, New York, Margulies moved to Miami in his late twenties after serving in the army and attending Wharton Business School to capitalize on the “virgin” real estate market and be near his retired parents. He began collecting modern and contemporary art in the ’70s and photography in the ’90s. The collection eventually grew so large that “my curator, Katherine Hinds, pointed out that we were running out of space in the apartment,” Margulies recalls. So, in 1998, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse was born.
Creating the 45,000-square-foot, Wynwood-based space accomplished two important objectives: “It allowed the collection to expand into new areas such as large-scale installations and video,” he says, “and we were able to use the Warehouse as a vehicle to educate young people.” He is particularly dedicated to opening the space to Miami-Dade County public-school students. As Hinds says, “Today contemporary art originates from every corner of the globe. The firsthand exposure to different cultures through great art is valuable and not available in the schools.”
Margulies feels that Art Basel’s coming to Miami was a no-brainer. “In the early days I got a call from the mayor of Miami Beach saying he was taking suggestions about the fair coming to town,” he recalls. “My response was, ‘Don’t listen to any suggestions, because Art Basel is the Super Bowl of the art world.’” Margulies doesn’t think that the subsequent cultural revitalization has been fully realized, though. “The current art scene here, contrary to public perception, is still in the very early stages,” he says. At 591 NW 27th St.; margulieswarehouse.com.
NORMAN AND IRMA BRAMAN
Over the last 30 years, Norman and Irma Braman have watched Miami transform from a drug-fueled dystopia to a top cultural destination. “In the late ’80s and ’90s, Miami had a terrible reputation worldwide,” Norman says. “The racial difficulties and crime against tourists…Miami was ripped apart in a Time magazine article called ‘Paradise Lost’ The art scene really was what revolutionized the city.”
As a major collector, Norman rightly claims some credit for that revolution. Both he and his wife, Irma, believed early on that bringing Art Basel to Miami would not only help solve the city’s PR problem but would also be good for business. “We thought it could be a very successful enterprise,” he says. “We kept speaking to [former director of Art Basel] Lorenzo Rudolf, who, after careful analysis and deliberation, persuaded the board in Switzerland to come to Miami. And now it is by far the most important fair in the States.”
The 81-year-old made his fortune selling pharmaceuticals and cars—his name adorns dealerships around the city. Outside Miami, he’s best known as a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles.
He and Irma began collecting in the late ’70s after visiting the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. They were so entranced with the works of Alexander Calder and Joan Miró that they returned five times in two years to see the changing exhibitions, finally deciding to buy a few Calders. Fast-forward nearly four decades, and their blue-chip collection—much of it on display at their spectacular Indian Creek Island residence—now includes the largest private holding of works by Calder. The 240-piece trove also contains works by Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns.
Married for 58 years, the Bramans reportedly have $900 million of their $1.6 billion net worth invested in art. In 2011 the Bramans announced that they intended to sell their collection to fund medical research. Collection viewing by invitation only.
DON AND MERA RUBELL
Perhaps no collectors loom larger on the Miami contemporary art landscape than Don and Mera Rubell. As they demonstrated in 2012, when they offered a residency to then-little-known Colombian artist Oscar Murillo—whose paintings now command hundreds of thousands—they have the power to anoint art royalty. (Murillo created 50 works during his five-week residency—the Rubells bought every one.)
The couple began collecting in the ’60s in New York City while she was a schoolteacher (earning $100 a week) and he was a medical student. “Our first impulse was to cover the holes in the walls of our Chelsea walk-up apartment with art posters rather than plaster and paint,” laughs Mera, who has maintained a teacher’s ability to communicate passion. “We met young artists in the storefronts around our neighborhood who were happy to work out long-term payment schedules for their original works. For some years, it was literally $5 per week per artist!”
The Rubells moved to Miami in 1992 because of the cheap and seemingly limitless real estate opportunities—and because their children were already there. “With little money, you could own amazing property,” says Don. “Virtually every building in South Beach was for sale.”
Mera continues, “As a collector, nothing is more frustrating than having your artwork in storage. The only way to experience our art was to follow it to places where it was being exhibited. Miami was such a wide-open frontier that we were able to buy a 45,000-square-foot former DEA facility,” which they converted into the Rubell Family Collection, “for less than it cost to get a storage space in Manhattan.”At 95 NW 29th St.; rfc.museum.
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Complex magazine
The Marina Abramovic Institute Announces Special Events for Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami/
Today in a press release, the Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI) announced a new series of “collaborative events and public installations” that will happen during this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami/ art fairs in December.
The first will be a collaboration with the Beyeler Foundation and will take place at their booth at Art Basel. Designed by Marina Abramovic, the event will involve attendees and what we are going to call #ArtBaselNaps. “Participants, guided by trained facilitators, will be encouraged to lie down, rest, and sleep with no time restriction,” reads the release. “This exercise will offer the public an opportunity to slow down within the lively, fast-paced environment of Art Basel.”
MAI will also present Abramovic’s Counting the Rice exercise, a long durational exercise that requires that participants separate grains of rice from lentils. on wooden tables designed by architect Daniel Libeskind in collaboration with Moroso, the Italian design company. The exercise will be presented in the Miami District as well as during Design Miami/. At the fair, two special design objects will be used: the Libeskind table and the Portal chair by Patricia Urquiola.
The Slow Motion Walk exercise will also be presented in Miami from Dec. 4 through Dec 7. at the YoungArts Jewel Box. The exercise will be facilitated by Abramovic collaborator Lynsey Peisingerand performance artistBrittany Bailey, and presented in collaboration with the National YoungArts Foundation.
The final announcement is that the IMMATERIAL Volume 1 ebook will launch at Art Basel on Dec. 1 to $2+/month subscribers at immaterial.org. That’s a lot to keep track of, so check outimmaterial.org and the MAI Hudson Tumblr, where photographs and updates will be posted from the coming events.
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Art Basel Miami Announces Public: 26 Sculptures Transforming Collins Park
19-11-2014
As a highlighted feature of Art Basel Miami 2014, 26 works by international artists will transform Collins Park into a sculpture garden. Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of Public Art Fund, returns for his second year curating Art Basel’s Public sector. Under the theme Fieldwork, Public will transform Miami Beach’s Collins Park into an outdoor exhibition space with 26 large-scale and site-specific installations by leading and emerging artists from 13 countries. Produced in partnership with the Bass Museum of Art for the fourth consecutive year, the sector will include work by Georg Baselitz, Lynda Benglis, Matthias Bitzer, Sarah Braman, Ana Luiza Dias Batista, Sam Ekwurtzel, Elmgreen & Dragset, Faivovich & Goldberg, Nuria Fuster, Ryan Gander, Jeppe Hein, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Alfredo Jaar, Gunilla Klingberg, Jose Carlos Martinat, Justin Matherly, Olaf Metzel, Sam Moyer, Ernesto Neto, Ugo Rondinone, Nancy Rubins, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Jessica Stockholder, Barthélémy Toguo, Tatiana Trouvé, and Hank Willis Thomas with Ryan Alexiev and Jim Ricks.
Focusing on the potential for public art to challenge artists and viewers, Nicholas Baume’s curatorial premise of Fieldwork will center on the idea of experimentation. In Collins Park artists will try out their ideas and verify them ‘in the field’. Public will include several site-specific works conceived especially for the exhibition by Ryan Gander, Sam Moyer and Jessica Stockholder. Some of the selected works will engage with the architecture of Collins’ Park, like Ugo Rondinone’s intervention on the Bass Museum façade or Alfredo Jaar’s on the park’s rotunda. This year, the sector will extend beyond Collins Park to include a performance-installation by Gunilla Klingberg on the nearby beach, where an intricate geometric pattern will be imprinted into the sand every morning, gradually being erased over the course of the day.
Both Lynda Benglis and Tatiana Trouvé will be represented with works that reconceive the classical fountain, while Nancy Rubins’ and Nuria Fuster’s works will give new meaning to found objects and scrap materials. Familiar images will shift scale and significance in sculptures by Yinka Shonibare MBE and Barthélémy Toguo, while perceptions of space and form will be challenged by Matthias Bitzer, Sarah Braman, Jeppe Hein and Jessica Jackson Hutchins.
On display will be one of Georg Baselitz’s rare bronzes; Ana Luiza Dias Batista’s scaled replica of a popular 1980’s Brazilian amusement park attraction; and Elmgreen & Dragset’s formal golden-bronze equestrian statue of a young boy riding a rocking horse, a scaled version of the artists’ Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Also on view will be nós sonhando [spacebodyship] (2014), a sculpture by Ernesto Neto that functions as a playful double hammock for two, giving visitors the opportunity to slow down and pause. Sam Ekwurtzel’s mole tunnels cast in aluminum and Jose Carlos Martinat’s cacophonous audio-mechanical installation will reflect on art history. History and politics will come together in Faivovich & Goldberg’s 3.6-ton sculpture composed of 12 fragments that render the contour of the Chaco province of Argentina, as well as in Olaf Metzel’s sculpture revolving around recent American history. Meanwhile, Hank Willis Thomas and collaborators from the Cause Collective will invite visitors to record their own truth within a portable and inflatable Truth Booth in the shape of a giant cartoon speech bubble.
As in the past two years, a selection of artworks will remain installed in Collins Park through March 2015 as part of tc: temporary contemporary, which is present by the Bass Museum of Art in partnership with the City of Miami Beach.
A series of live performances will be presented on Public’s Opening Night on Wednesday, December 3. Alix Pearlstein will invite actors carrying illumination panels to circulate amongst the crowd, at times spotlighting artworks and other objects. Ryan Gander will equip curator Nicholas Baume with two bodyguards, heightening the visibility and the actions of the curator. The boundary between stage and audience will be disrupted with Christian Falsnaes’ participatory collective performance, in which a large- scale structure is continuously spray painted, torn down, displayed and subsequently rebuilt. Liz Glynn and Dawn Kasper will transform the Collins Park Rotunda into a pulsating and animated geodesic planetarium, questioning how we locate ourselves within the vast universe of seen and unseen forces.
Public Opening Night, which is free and open to the public, will take place in Collins Park on Wednesday, December 3, from 8.30 pm to 10pm. The Public sector is free of charge and open to the public from December 4 to December 7. Tours will be offered daily at 10.30am, 11.30am and 12.30pm.
Collins Park is located between 21st and 22nd Street, in close proximity of the exhibition halls within the Miami Beach Convention Center and adjacent to The Bass Museum of Art.
On Friday, December 5, from 5pm to 6pm, Art Basel’s Salon program will see Nicholas Baume in conversation with Ryan Gander, Lyz Glynn and Nicolás Goldberg. Art Basel entry tickets include admission to Salon
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MANA MIAMI
Mana Miami:
Mana Monumental, Dirty Geometry, GLE at Mana
December 2 – 7, 2014
For its Miami art fair debut, Mana Contemporary presents a compilation
of special projects all reflecting an organizational mission of collaboration and community. Held on Mana’s Wynwood campus in a 140,000-square-foot facility spread over 22 acres, the shows will take place in conjunction with Art Basel Miami.
MANA MONUMENTAL
Featuring Aboudia, Doug Argue, José Bedia, Orit Ben-Shitrit, Stanley Casselman, Ofri Cnaani, Sante D’Orazio, Carole A. Feuerman, Kate Gilmore, Ron Gorchov, Kaoruko, KAWS, Ben Keating, Eugene Lemay, Alfred Leslie, Yigal Ozeri, Milton Resnick, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Ray Smith, Edvins Strautmanis, and Maxwell Snow.
Scale, spectacle, and community star in this staggering survey of large-scale works by twenty-one artists associated with Mana Contemporary. Titled Mana Monumental, the exhibition features projects that utilize colossal proportions as a means to connect with viewers in a personal, meaningful way — much like Jackson Pollock and Sol Lewitt, whose sizable work effectively enveloped viewers with the sheer experience of confronting them. For Pollock and Lewitt, as with the artists in Mana Monumental, scale contributes to meaning rather than the grandiose, and aims to create an elemental impact that is at once magnificent, heroic, and influential.
Mana Monumental also references Mana’s mission to foster a sense of community in the contemporary art world. By showcasing a diverse roster of artists who have a studio in, have exhibited at, or are otherwise connected to the bourgeoning arts organization, the exhibition acts as a platform that unifies and empowers its participants as group. The project is curated by artist Eugene Lemay, the founder and director of Mana, whose artwork doubles as visually engulfing displays that invite viewers to not only look at, but enter into, their enticing expanse. Through Mana Monumental Lemay, together with a talented troupe of peers, demonstrate the enduring relevance of Barnett Newman’s belief that, in a contemporary context where traditional art subjects and styles are made invalid, it is the sublime that will save us.
DIRTY GEOMETRY
Featuring Emilia Azcárate, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, Cecilia Biagini, Sigfredo Chacón, Emilio Chapela, Eduardo Costa, Willys de Castro, Diana de Solares, Marcolina Dipierro, Eugenio Espinoza, Jaime Gili, Mathias Goeritz, Juan Iribarren, Bárbara Kaplan, Ramsés Larzábal, Raúl Lozza, Beatriz Olano, César Paternosto, Alejandro Puente, Luis Roldán, Osvaldo Romberg, Joaquín Torres García, and Horacio Zabala
Curated by artist Osvaldo Romberg, Dirty Geometry showcases work that demonstrates what he sees as a rebellious attempt to separate itself from the tight, rigid theoretical framework perpetuated by traditional notions of geometry. The exhibition’s twenty-three participants, all Latin Americans working in geometric abstraction between 1950 and today, explore a kind of creolization of orthodox geometric style. They effectively reinvent geometry into a notion that is free from theory—a “dirty war,” according to Romberg. Like the controversial French philosopher Georges Bataille, who believed that “divine filth” leads to pure ecstasy, Romberg believes geometry can be made erotic through primal dirt.
Romberg’s Dirty Geometry subverts the strict, systematic, straightforward qualities of geometric forms pioneered by Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian artist and art theorist credited for creating the first purely abstract paintings. While a number of artists, including Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, have experimented with this bold approach, Romberg feels Latin American artists offer some of the most prominent examples of it.
By twisting and reinventing classic shapes using contemporary cultural prisms, the organic, pared-down works in the exhibition question the role of art in the human experience. Playful, colorful, and subtly sexy, the featured practitioners display a solid consciousness of artistic-cultural identity together with a sense of new possibilities.
RECENT PROJECTS BY GARY LICHTENSTEIN EDITIONS AT MANA
Featuring Bob Gruen, Charles Hinman, Robert Indiana, Richard Meier, Yigal Ozeri, and Jessica Stockholder.
Mana Contemporary is pleased to present GLE at Mana, an exhibition of limited-edition prints selected from Lichtenstein’s most recent collaborations made in his studio, Gary Lichtenstein Editions (GLE). Now based in a 10,000-square-foot space at Mana, GLE is dedicated to making high-quality, limited-edition prints. GLE at Mana features a selection of work made in collaboration with the visionaries GLE has attracted thus far, showcasing the venture’s creative potential.
Over the course of his forty-year career, Gary Lichtenstein has created a wide range of screen-printed images with industry legends. Known for his distinctive use of color, reflection, and light absorption, the artist’s experimental work is part of permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Chicago Art Institute, among others.
MANA SESSIONS
During Mana Miami, Mana Sessions will feature a daily program of roundtable discussions led by prominent art world insiders. These conversations grant visitors an in-depth analysis of critical and current issues facing artists and art professionals. The themes of the talks reflect Mana’s organizational mission of collaboration and community. A full program will be announced soon.
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ARTNET
Liz Glynn and Dawn Kasper Team Up for Public at Art Basel in Miami Beach
Sarah Cascone, Wednesday, November 19, 2014
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Visitors to Art Basel in Miami Beach planning their visits to fairs and parties have yet another great item to add to their itineraries. Twenty-six artworks will transform Miami Beach’s Collins Park into an outdoor sculpture garden for Art Basel Miami’s Public sector. Curated by the Public Art Fund’s Nicholas Baume, in partnership with the Bass Museum of Art, the show will kick off on December 3 with opening festivities featuring four simultaneously occurring performance art pieces from Ryan Gander, Christian Falsnaes, Alix Pearlstein, and a collaboration between Liz Glynn and Dawn Kasper.
For opening night, Glynn and Kasper have teamed up on a theoretical physics-based performance, titled cosmo[il]logical. The piece will take place in the park’s rotunda, which will be transformed into a planetarium under a dome structure installed by the artists which will emit both light and sound. It will project images of of the cosmos on the rotunda ceiling while the artists draw with chalk on the felt floor, which has been coated in chalkboard paint.
“The piece is kind of activated through the act of drawing,” Glynn told artnet News in a phone interview, “and the drawings accumulate over the course of the performance…. The performance explores different theories of perception.”
Going all the way back to the big bang for inspiration, Glynn and Kasper will discuss quantum mechanics and string theory in relation to visual art, drawing a distinction between “things that are visually perceptible and things that you believe in but can’t experience through sight alone.”
“In physics, when matter and antimatter collide they destroy each other,” said Glynn. “We go through the history of the origins of the universe and how we can kind of explain our position within it through physics.”
The artists have taken opposite sides in the debate, with Kasper taking the position of antimatter, which, according to Glynn, she has dubbed “invisible dark energy—all of the things that prevent you from getting out of bed in the morning.” Glynn, for her part, will take a more didactic approach. The divide is a reflection of their unique approaches to performance art. “I’m much more of a research-driven person,” said Glynn. “Dawn works much more with improvisation and sound, so it’s kind of the collision of our two practices as well.”
Gander’s suspended sculpture of plastic barrels and an etched metal plaque, titled Never has there been such urgency, or The Eloquent and the Gaga – (Alchemy Box #45), will be on view for the duration of the fair. He will also perform Thank you, but I am promised to the company of my artist this evening during the opening, a piece that centers around Baume, who will be followed throughout the evening by two actual armed bodyguards. As Baume crisscrosses Collins Park that evening, his comings and goings will be all the more noticeable thanks to the imposing presence of the guards being paid to protect him. In effect, curator will become a performer, a part of the very spectacle he is there to oversee, in a unique blending of art and life.
Pearlstein’s performance, The Shining, will also infiltrate the crowd, outfitting a roving group of actors with personal illumination panels, while Falsnaes will actively engage with the audience, encouraging them to participate in the repeated ritualistic building up and breaking down of a large-scale structure in his piece Front.
The full roster of artists, artworks, and galleries for Public 2014 are listed below:
Georg Baselitz, Louise Fuller (2013), Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Lynda Benglis, Pink Lady (2014), Cheim & Read
Matthias Bitzer, Sleep and echo (2012), Marianne Boesky Gallery, Almine Rech Gallery
Sarah Braman, Door (2013–14), Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Ana Luiza Dias Batista, Eva (Eve), 2014, Galeria Marilia Razuk
Sam Ekwurtzel, Incomplete Open Cubes (2014), Simone Subal Gallery
Elmgreen & Dragset, Powerless Structures, Fig. 101 (2014), Victoria Miro Gallery
Faivovich & Goldberg, Territorio del Chaco (2013), SlyZmud, in cooperation with Nusser & Baumgart, Munich
Nuria Fuster, Pump Iron (2014), Galería Marta Cervera
Ryan Gander, Never has there been such urgency, or The Eloquent and the Gaga – (Alchemy Box #45), 2014, Lisson Gallery
Jeppe Hein, Mirror Angle Fragments (3×60°), 2014, Johann König
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Him and Me (2014), Johann König
Alfredo Jaar, Culture = Capital (2012/2014), Galerie Lelong, Goodman Gallery, Galerie Thomas Schulte
Gunilla Klingberg, A Sign in Space (2012–ongoing), Galerie Nordenhake
José Carlos Martinat, Manifestos (2014), Revolver Galería
Justin Matherly, The degenerated instinct which turns against life with subterranean vengefulness; See you again in your muck of tomorrow (2010), Paula Cooper Gallery
Olaf Metzel, Untitled (2014), Wentrup
Sam Moyer, Zola (2014), Galerie Rodolphe Janssen Ernesto Neto, nós sonhando [Spacebodyship] (2014), Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Ugo Rondinone, Untitled (2014), Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Gladstone Gallery
Nancy Rubins, Our Friend Fluid Metal, Chunkus Majoris (2013), Gagosian Gallery
Yinka Shonibare, Wind Sculpture IV (2013), James Cohan Gallery
Jessica Stockholder, Angled Tangle (2014), Kavi Gupta Chicago/Berlin
Barthélémy Toguo, In the Spotlight (2007), Galerie Lelong
Tatiana Trouve, Waterfall (2013), Gagosian Gallery
Hank Willis Thomas with Ryan Alexiev and Jim Ricks, In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth), 2011, Goodman Gallery, Jack Shainman Gallery
Art Basel in Miami Beach will be on view December 3–7, 2014. A selection of works from Public will remain on view in Collins Park through March 2015 as part of “tc: temporary contemporary.”
OUR MEGA GUIDE TO ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2014: PART 1
by Gary Pini
Just six weeks until the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach! The 13th edition of the annual art fair — and all it’s satellite fairs, exhibits, museum and gallery openings (and parties) — begins on Wednesday, December 3rd and runs through the 7th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The city’s ambitious plan to build a new convention center has now been replaced with a simpler and cheaper “re-model,” but that won’t affect this year’s fair or the expected 75,000+ international visitors.For 2014, ABMB launches a new sector called Survey, featuring “art-historical projects” from thirteen galleries including two rare “Tir-Assemblages” by Niki de Saint Phalle, outsider art by Henry Darger, mid-twentieth century works by the Brazilian artist Alfredo Volpe and more. The original “sectors” will also return, including Nova, Positions and Kabinett; plus all the big outdoor, public art projects in Collins Park and the films in SoundScape Park and at the Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road.Due to an on-going fight between two factions of Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art (770 NE 125th Street, North Miami) several members of the museum’s board resigned and started a new museum called the Institute of Contemporary Art in the Moore Building (4040 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami) in the Design District. MOCA is still alive, and they’re having an opening reception for an exhibition called “Shifting the Paradigm: The Art of George Edozie” featuring works by the Nigerian artist on December 2nd at 7 p.m.Meanwhile, the Design District is rapidly morphing into “the luxury fashion district” with an incredible transformation of the entire area still underway. Lots of stores are already open including Prada, Marni, Rick Owens, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Louboutin, Cartier, Celine, Pucci, Dior etc. and many more are on the way. And there’s a new “Palm Court” featuring a Buckminster Fuller dome, an enormous underground parking garage and plans for a condominium building to be designed by Chicago starchitect Jeanne Gang. You can follow the progress HERE.To take advantage of all the “luxury” in town for ABMB, The New York Times is hosting an “International Luxury Conference” at the Mandarian Oriental Hotel from December 1st to 3rd with guest speakers including Francois-Henri Pinault, Diane Von Furstenberg, Frida Giannini, Tom Sachs, Diego Della Valle and many more. Tickets are $4250.
(The Edition hotel)
The third edition of the SELECT art fair is making a bold move up to North Miami Beach where they plan to set up a 40,000 square-foot tent to hold over 50 galleries on the beach at 72nd Street. They’ll also use the art deco amphitheater already on the site for installations, performances and exhibitions. Just a few blocks south at 67th Street and Collins Avenue, the NADA fair is back in the Deauville Beach Resort. The whole strip of Miami Beach from the W Hotel on 23rd Street up to the SoHo Beach House on 43rd Street is the hottest new, high-end real estate in town. This year should see the opening of Ian Schrager’s Miami Beach Edition hotel (rooms are over $1,000 a night during ABMB) on 29th Street; and construction is also well under way at Alan Faena’s massive $1 billion hotel, condo and art museum complex at 32nd Street with buildings designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA and Norman Foster. If your budget won’t cover any of these mid-beach, mega resorts, we suggest the super-cool and trendy Freehand Miami on 27th Street were a co-ed dorm room goes for around $115 per person a night.
Peter Marino
The Bass Museum of Art (2100 Collins Ave., Miami Beach) will be celebrating their 50th anniversary with a big gala on November 1st and, during ABMB, they’re planning an exhibition called “One Way: Peter Marino” curated by Jerome Sans. Marino is a renowned American architect and designer and this show will include art from his private collection plus site-specific installations, an opera collaboration and a series of his bronze boxes. The opening VIP reception is the evening of December 3rd and it will be open to the public from the 4th until March 29, 2015.
On Thursday, December 4th, the up-and coming UK singer FKA Twigs will be performing at YoungArts and on Friday, December 5th, they’ve booked the Grammy-nominated and Mercury Prize winning recording artist James Blake. Tickets are available HERE. Last year, the National YoungArts Foundation debuted their new home in the old Bacardi building on Biscayne Boulevard and now they’re moving ahead with plans to open a restaurant and performing arts space on the top floor called Ted’s. Philadelphia’s Stephen Starr Events will handle the food.
THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED ON OCTOBER 21, 2014 2:44 PM
Apparently there’s a VIP crisis at Art Basel Miami Beach — or maybe it’s just a clusterf**k. The problem is that too many people were being admitted on Wednesday, so they’ve made a big change this year. Instead of hosting the “Vernissage” during the evening of December 3rd, it will now take place on Thursday morning, with the general public admitted at 3 p.m. On Wednesday, “First Choice VIPs” will still get in at 11 a.m. and “Preview VIPs” at 3 p.m. with the doors closing at 8 p.m. The change will probably leave many people scrambling to find a way in before Thursday, but it should prevent another early shut-down by fire marshals as happened in 2011. Marc Spiegler, Director of Art Basel, explains: “We are confident that this opening structure will allow us to provide our galleries with the best opportunity to spend quality time with both existing and potential patrons.” Overcrowding — or shortage of “quality time” — has also become an issue at Basel in Switzerland and at FRIEZE London, with more VIP days and hours added to keep patrons and galleries happy.
Future Brown. (Photo by Christelle de Castro)
The Perez Art Museum Miami (1103 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami) celebrates the first anniversary of their new Herzog & de Meuron-designed home with exhibitions by Beatriz Milhazes, Mario Garcia Torres, Gary Simmons, Geoffrey Farmer and more. They’re also hosting a big party on December 4th, 8 p.m. to midnight, with the electronic supergroup Future Brown (Fatima Al Qadiri, Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda of L.A.’s Nguzunguzu and J Cush, founder of NYC record label Lit City Trax) along with special guests including L.A. singer Kelela, Total Freedom from L.A.’s “Wildness” parties, Ian Isiah andMaluca. The band will play on a special stage with an extreme-watersports performance on Biscayne Bay as the backdrop. The party is a DIS Magazine and THV Entertainment production.
The Wolfsonian-FIU Museum (1001 Washington Avenue, South Beach) takes a look back at how designers, artists and filmmakers responded to the First World War with an exhibition called “Myth and Machine.” The show is divided into three sections: “War Machines,” Unknown Soldiers” and “Loss and Redemption.” They’ve also got an exhibition called “Remembering Tokyo” featuring 30 woodblock prints made between 1928 and 1940 by Koizumi Kishio. Be sure to check out their cool gift shop when you stop by.
The Miami Project (NE 34th Street at NE 1st Avenue, Miami) satellite fair returns to Midtown Miami for a third go-round from December 2nd to the 7th. Their VIP Preview, sponsored by 1stdibs, is on Tuesday from 5:30 to 10 p.m.
Local Miami gallery, Locust Projects (3852 North Miami Avenue, Miami), is presenting Daniel Arsham’s first major exhibition in Miami since 2010. Called “Welcome to the Future,” the installation will included an excavation of the gallery’s floor, filled with thousands of “calcified, 20th Century media devices.” The opening reception is Thursday, December 4, 7 to 10 p.m. Meanwhile, check out James Franco while he destroys some artifacts HERE in Arsham’s new short film.
Untitled, 2012 from Paula Crown’s “Fractals” series
The Chicago/Aspen-based artist Paula Crown is working on a big, site-specific installation called “Transportation: Over Many Miles” in the Design District at 39th Street and 1st Avenue. The work includes a 25-foot-long sculpture on a 3,200 square-foot floor, all made from reclaimed wood, glass, Astroturf, metal, plants and sand. Theaster Gates Design Apprenticeship Program is assisting with the fabrication and Chicago’s Studio Gang is the architect. It will be up from December 1st through March 2015, and there’s an opening reception the evening of December 4th.
Fridge Art Fair returns for second year, this time at The 3rd Street Garage (300 SW 12th Avenue, Miami) from December 4 to 9. Their “Mega Mango Miami: The Great Opening” preview is on Thursday, December 4, from 2 to 8 p.m., with an afterparty at the infamous “den of iniquity,” The Ball & Chain (1513 SW 8th Street, Miami) in Little Havana starting at 9 p.m. This fair started in NYC’s LES in 2013 and founder Eric Ginsburg has the right attitude: “People should not be afraid to go and see art, and it should not cost a fortune.”
Perrier-Jouet launches a new, year-long collaboration with the Vienna-based art duo mischer’traxler(AKA Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler) called “Small Discoveries.” Their aim is “to tell the story of the magical dialogue between nature and mankind” and they’ve created a work called “Ephemera” that will be on view at Design Miami from December 2nd to the 6th.
A new fair called Concept will be held aboard the Seafair mega-yacht, docked downtown at Bayfront Park (100 Chopin Plaza, Miami) from December 3 to 7 with VIP previews on the 2nd from 6 to 10 p.m. Over 35 international galleries are expected.
KLIMA
Several new restaurants are expected to be ready by the time ABMB hits town. KLIMA will bring the gastronomy of Barcelona and the Mediterranean to a bi-level, indoor/outdoor spot on 23rd Street and Collins Avenue in South Beach. Their Executive Chef is David Rustarazo and Barcelona restaurateur Albert Ventura is advising. L.A Chef Danny Elmaleh launches a third version of his award-winningCleo restaurant in the Redbury Hotel (1776 Collins Avenue, South Beach). This one’s also “contemporary Mediterranean.”
The Gale Hotel (1690 Collins Avenue, South Beach) — that’s the spot that hosted PAPER’s “Tiki Disco” pop-up last year — will open a special “rooftop” edition of the Disaronno Terrace from 7 to 10 p.m. on December 4th. DJs are TBA.
Over at Wynwood Walls, they’re planning several new mural collabs featuring teams like Shepard Fairey X Cleon Peterson, Pose X Revok, Haas X Hahn and Faith 47 X Alexis Diaz. Also, Swoon and Case will each contribute solo works and Kenny Scharf is updating his existing mural.
Detroit gallery Library Street Collective will have a pop-up space nearby and they’re programming artist talks and a book/print signing fair. The blocks around NW 2nd Avenue and 26th Street have become a gigantic arty-party during the area’s monthly “Second Saturday” art walks, but the congestion has some Wynwood veterans seeking space elsewhere. Fredric Snitzer, owner of one of the only two local galleries showing in the convention center and who plans to move from Wynwood to downtown Miami, recently told Miami New Times: “Wynwood has become too hectic and lost its vibe.” Jessica Goldman Srebnick, Wynwood Walls’ chief curator and daughter of Tony Goldman, hopes their “Art of Collaboration” exhibition can “encourage and inspire greatness” and claims, “The growth of Wynwood as a mecca for the arts is the result of great collaborations.”
As we mentioned two weeks ago, the SELECT art fair is moving to a tent on the beach at 72nd Street and they’ve enlisted Solange to curate a bunch of performances — including one by herself — nightly from Wednesday thru Saturday, starting at 7 p.m. She’s expected to book several acts from her label,Saint Heron Records, that will appear in the on-site, deco amphitheater. The shows are open to the public and admission is FREE. When we hear who’s playing (and when), we’ll fill you in.
AB/MB and Performa are hosting an immersive performance by artist Ryan McNamara called “MEEM 4 Miami: A Story Ballet About the Internet” on December 3rd and 4th at 8 and 10:30 p.m. at the Miami Grand Theater at Castle Beach Resort (5445 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach). RoseLee Goldberg, Performa’s founder and director, describes the work by the Brooklyn-based artist: “This piece is far more complex than it first appears, because it unfolds as one surprise after another. The viewer is both totally in the moment and yet spends hours thinking about it afterward.” $30, tickets are available HERE.Note to VIPs: There’s also an “invitation only” preview on Tuesday.
The NADA art fair at the Deauville Beach Resort (6701 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach) will host their “invite only” opening preview on Thursday, December 4, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. After that, admission is free and it’s open to the public daily through December 7th from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. You can also preview the fair on Artsy. This year, they’ve partnered with Contemporary Art Daily, Print All Over Me and the 15th Artadia Award. Print All Over Me will be doing special “artist editions” of clothing using images created by Jose Lerma, Amy Yao and Sarah Braman.
Swiss watch manufacturer, IWC will be celebrating their new “Portofino” collection with an exhibition of photos by Peter Lindbergh on December 3rd at the W South Beach (2201 Collins Avenue, South Beach). Several of the celebs featured in the campaign including Emily Blunt, Karolina Kurkova and Adriana Lima are expected; and hosts for the night are DuJour magazine founder Jason Binn and IWC CEO Georges Kern.
On December 3rd, Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art (4040 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami) — the new spin-off from MoCA North Miami — is opening an installation/performance piece called “Sanatorium” by the Mexico-based artist Pedro Reyes. The pop-up “clinic” includes receptionists and therapists that will “help visitors with their individual needs” via everything from hypnosis to psychodrama to trust building games. The museum will also present new and recent works by the New York artist Andra Ursuta. Both will be up until March 15, 2015.
The PULSE fair is moving to Indian Beach Park (4601 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach) up by the Eden Roc Hotel for their 10th year in Miami. Their private preview brunch is on Thursday, December 4, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and then it’s open daily through the 7th. As part of their PULSE Projects, they are featuring a work by the Ontario-based artist Shayne Dark called “Tangle Wood” and also an audio installation by Jenna Spevack called “Birds of Brooklyn.” Their new media and video art section, PULSE Play, will be presented by Tumblr and curated by Lindsay Howard. Tickets are available HERE.
New works from PAPER faves Studio Job will be on view at Design Miami/2014 in the Carpenters Workshop Gallery. The Dutch/Belgian collective have re-imagined several global landmarks like the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower, and transformed them into incredible “functional” sculptures.
The Life and Death record label is hooking-up with PLOT and Miami promoters Poplife and Aquabooty for a big showcase/party on December 4th at Grand Central (697 N Miami Avenue, Miami) nightclub. The line-up for the night includes Dixon (Innervisions), Bob Moses (Domino Records), Recondite, Mind Against, Thugfucker (Life and Death) and DJ Tennis; plus the Miami debut of Vaal.Tickets are available HERE.
The third annual Miami Street Photography Festival will take place from December 4th to the 7th at Kike San Martin Studios (2045 NW 1st Avenue, Miami) in the Wynwood Arts District. This year’s featured guests include Magnum photographers Alex Webb, Susan Meiselas and Constantine Manos; poet/photographer Rebecca Norris Webb and National Geographic’s Maggie Stebber. The festival is a partnership with Leica Camera.
Several works by the Chinese-born artist Shen Wei — he was the lead choreographer of the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics — will be on view at downtown Miami’s Freedom Tower. The exhibition, “In Black, White and Gray,” includes paintings and site-specific performances and is the artist’s first U.S. museum show. The performances are on December 5, 6 and 7 and they are FREE, but you need to reserve a spot HERE.
Bally will be unveiling a house designed by Jean Prouve and Pierre Jeanneret in the garden behind The Delano (1685 Collins Avenue, South Beach). The house was originally commissioned by the French government in 1944 and recently underwent a 6-month restoration. During AB/MB it will be used for an art installation called “Triangle Walks” featuring works by Zak Kitnick and the art-duo,KOLKOZ, plus selected pieces from Bally’s collection of modernist furniture. There’s a VIP-only reception on December 3rd, but then it’s open to the public by appointment from December 4th to the 7th, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Design Miami returns to a tent behind the convention center at Meridian and 19th Street with their VIP preview happening on Tuesday, December 2nd, and then it’s open to the public from December 3rd to the 7th. This year’s “10th anniversary” pavilion was created by the Minneapolis-based designerJonathan Muecke and the fair will also be honoring Peter Marino with their first Design Visionary award.
The Thompson Miami Beach (4041 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach) is now expected to be open in time for AB/MB and we hear that Peter Brant, Stephanie Seymour and Jean-Marc Pontroue, CEO of luxury watchmaker Roger Dubuis, are hosting a super-private dinner and afterparty with Dom Perignon at the new hotel on December 3rd. In case you haven’t heard, Jason Pomeranc recently sold all of his interest in the Thompson Hotel chain — including the Thompson name — to John Pritzker’s Commune Hotels and the Pomeranc properties are now called Sixty Hotels.
Meanwhile over in the Design District, Miami’s new “luxury shopping” destination, a hybrid fashion store/design exhibition/art installation called “The World of Mr. Somebody & Mr. Nobody” featuringWalter Van Beirdendonck and Bernhard Willhelm will be open from December 1st to 15th, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily at 91 NE 40th Street. Fashion from the Belgian “mavericks” will be juxtaposed with photography by Miles Ladin, graphic works by Peet Pienaar and clothes by Superella in an extravaganza hosted by Craig Robins, Sharon Lombard and Cathy Leff. The VIP opening is on December 4th with music by Dirk Bonn and drinks by Chris Adamo.
Ryan McGinley, Prairie (Pond), 2014. C-print, 90 x 60 inches (Courtesy of the artist and Team, New York)
The UNTITLED 2014 art fair hosts their “by invitation only” opening on Monday, December 1st, from 6 to 9 p.m. in a tent on the beach just off Ocean Drive near 12th Street. The opening is a benefit for the AIDS research and education organization ACRIA and will be hosted by Ryan McGinley. The New York artist donated an edition of three prints of his large-format photo, Prairie (Pond), 2014, to the cause. ACRIA will also be offering other objects and prints for sale in a booth at the fair. The VIP preview is on Tuesday, December 2, 3 to 7 p.m., and then they’re open to the public from December 3rd to the 7th.
Scottish artist Georgia Russell — she’s known for slicing and dicing old books, newspapers etc. — is creating limited-edition “ornaments” to display bottles of Ruinart Champagne’s Blanc de Blancs that are inspired by the etchings in Maison Ruinart’s chalk quarries. She also crafted a large sculptural version of Ruinart’s 18th-Century ledger. The artist sees the works as “a continuation of my practice of cutting paper to bring the past into the present.” Ruinart Champagne and Public Art Fund are hosting a private brunch in her honor at Morimoto in the Shelborne Wyndam Grand South Beach(1801 Collins Avenue, South Beach).
The Miami Ad School (571 NW 28th Street, Wynwood, Miami) will be celebrating the grand opening of their new campus location in Wynwood on Friday, December 5th, 7 to 10 p.m. with a big party called “SoakUp.” There will be interactive installations and activities featuring several international street artists including Kislow, NYCHOS, Dome, Omen, Aber and others.
The Frost Art Museum (10975 SW 17th Street, Miami) will have several gigantic photo-murals on view during AB/MB in a show called “Adinfinitum” by the Chinese artist Wang Qingsong; plus there’s also a group show, “A Global Exchange: Geometric Abstraction Since 1950,” with over 30 works “integral to the development of geometric art.” Both are up until January 2015. The museum’s annual “Breakfast in the Park” will feature guest speaker Daniel Arsham in their outdoor sculpture park on Sunday, December 7th, from 9:30 a.m. until noon.
Gary Nader, Miami art collector and owner of the self-professed “biggest gallery in the world” in the Wynwood neighborhood at 62 NE 27th Street, has just opened a branch here in New York City on 57th Street featuring Latin American art. He has now announced plans to build a $50 million museum on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, designed by the Mexican architect Fernando Romero. A model of the museum, as well as several selections from his private collection, will be on view during AB/MB in the Wynwood space.
OUR MEGA GUIDE TO ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2014: PART 5
by Gary Pini
Tim Burton’s new film Big Eyes headlines the AB/MB film program with a special screening on December 5th, 8:30 p.m., at the Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road. It’s the story of Walter Keane, the mysterious painter of waifs with “big eyes,” who’s works turned out to have actually been made by his wife Margaret (played by Amy Adams). The screening is free, but get there super early. Many other films submitted by participating galleries will be shown in a new, specially-designed screening room inside the convention center and nightly in SoundScape Park outside the New World Symphony (500 17th Street, South Beach). The complete schedule is HERE.Russell and Danny Simmons celebrate the 5th anniversary of their “Artisan Series” with a big party for the 2014 finalists and winner — and a special performance by Miguel — at Soho Beach House (4385 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach) on Thursday, December 4th. Since 2010, they’ve searched for and helped emerging artists by showcasing their work during AB/MB. This year’s big winner will also receive a solo show during SCOPE NYC in March 2015. Bombay Sapphire has collab’d and sponsored since the inception.Our friends at GAYLETTER are having a big party called “Basel, Honey!” on Saturday, December 6th, 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., at TSL Lounge (167 NW 23rd Street, Wynwood, Miami) Co-hosts on the night are Miami Eccentrics and the Kodex Agency. Music by Kim Ann Foxman, Honey Soundsystem and Mystic Bill; plus there will be fab decor by San Fran’s Phillip Fillastre and crew.The fab Alchemist shop on level 5 of the Herzog & De Meuron-designed parking garage on Lincoln Road, is set to top last year’s cool Colette collab with a week-long installation called “AIRBALL.” They are installing a basketball court designed by Snarkitecture, where you can shoot some hoops or just chill to DJs and shop for new collabs from Rick Owens, Del Toro, Rochas and more. Alchemist and Snarkitecture host an “AIRBALL” party at the Delano on Friday, December 5th, with performances by Pusha T and Travis Scott, along with a DJ set from Virgil Abloh. Miami-based footware brand Del Toro( 2750 NW 3rd Avenue #22, Miami) is also celebrating the second anniversary of their Wynwood boutique on Thursday, December 4th, from 4 to 7 p.m.The Sagamore — aka Miami’s “Art Hotel” — just announced their latest exhibition, “Screen Play: Moving Image Art,” opening in November and on view throughout AB/MB. The show explores the moving image and it’s relationship to other media over a period of six decades via artists including John Baldessari, Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Merce Cunningham and others. It was curated by Lori Zippay of Electronic Arts Intermix. The Sagamore‘s (1671 Collins Avenue, South Beach) 13th Art Basel brunch is on Saturday, December 6th.The bragging rights for being Miami’s first art fair surely belong to Art Miami. Now in its 25th year, the fair also includes CONTEXT — dedicated to emerging and mid-career artists — and Aqua Art Miami, as well as the original fair hosting over 130 international galleries in their Midtown Miami location. The private VIP preview on Tuesday, December 2nd, is a benefit for PAMM and then it’s open daily through December 7th.Ian Schrager (and Marriott) launch their latest Edition hotel (2901 Collins Avenue at 29th Street) with parties from top to bottom. On December 3rd, there’s a private dance party with London’s Horse Meat Disco DJs in the basement in honor of the hotel’s designers George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg. And in the penthouse, Absolut Elyx will create an private, pop-up club called Casa Elyx with cocktail parties, book launches etc. happening all week. We can’t wait to check out this new hotel and are happy to hear that Ben Pundole is involved. Supposedly there’s a bowling alley in the basement.As usual, the Morgan’s Hotel Group has a super-busy week of events lined up including a Snarkitecture (Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen) installation in the lobby of the Delano (1685 Collins Avenue, South Beach) and Jen Stark and Misaki Kuwai’s “Teepee Project,” featuring their interpretations of historic teepee painting, at the Mondrian. (1100 West Avenue, South Beach) Le Baron — celebrating their 10-years-running Miami pop-up — will be in the Delano’s basement nightclub FDR nightly. There will also be an Art Markit pop-up shop and a Vanity Projects nail salon poolside at the Mondrian.
Miami Marine Stadium — designed by Hilario Candela and built on Miami’s Rickenbacker Causeway in 1963 — is raising money for a total restoration, and they’re having a big street art exhibition during AB/MB. Featured artists include: Ron English, Doze Green, Risk, Tristan Eaton, Crash, The London Police, Astrik and many more. The event is hosted by the Art History Mural Project, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, with proceeds from sales of one-of-a-kind works and limited editions going to the restoration. The show will be open to the public at 5 NW 36th Street, Midtown Miami, daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., from December 2nd to the 7th. There’s also an “invite only” reception on December 1st. The Miami Boat Show plans to move to the stadium in 2016.
Christie’s and the Marriott hotel group are hosting a pop-up gallery featuring original works by Andy Warhol on December 3rd and 4th in the JW Marriott Marquis Miami (255 Biscayne Blvd., Miami). All the works — including paintings, photos, prints and works on paper — are from the Andy Warhol Foundation, with proceeds benefiting their grant-making program. Stop by the hotel’s fifth floor and have a look between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. both days. There’s also a private VIP lunch and panel discussion on Tuesday.
If you’re heading down to Miami early in the week, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) plus FLAUNT and Paddle8 are having their big gala on Monday, December 1st, 7 p.m., at the Raleigh Hotel (1775 Collins Avenue, South Beach). They’ll be celebrating “innovative women in arts and culture” with dinner and dancing and a big auction of works by artists including Hernan Bas, Sam Falls, Brendan Fowler, Rashid Johnson, Raymond Pettibon and others. Tickets are available HERE.
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Pérez Art Museum Miami mounts colorful solo show from Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes
BY ANNE TSCHIDAANNE_TSCHIDA@YAHOO.COM
10/10/2014 6:13 PM 10/10/2014 6:13 PM
From left to right: ‘Férias de Verão,’ 2005. Collection of Catherine and Franck Petitgas. ‘Feijoada,’ 2010. Collection Beatriz Milhazes. ‘Chora, menino,’ 1996. Colección Patricia Phelips de Cisneros, Caracas and New York.
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From left to right: ‘Férias de Verão,’ 2005. Collection of Catherine and Franck Petitgas. ‘Feijoada,’ 2010. Collection Beatriz Milhazes. ‘Chora, menino,’ 1996. Colección Patricia Phelips de Cisneros, Caracas and New York.ORIOL TARRIDAS PHOTOGRAPHY
Story
Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico, Milhazes’ solo show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, is both a beautifully perfect title for the exhibit, and a misleading one as well.The Brazilian painter has been popular for a couple of decades in Latin America and Europe, but this is her first U.S. museum survey, making it a bit of a coup for both PAMM and Miami. The more than 50 mostly large paintings simply burst from the walls in the several galleries they cover, with their outrageously bright colors and tropical flora imagery. It does feel like you are engulfed in a botanical garden, surrounded by shapes and hues that seem to have an organic life of their own and spiwll out from their canvases.But these lovely paintings, with all their obvious decorative flourishes, start to become far more formal, less “wild,” when observing them closely, and especially as you move from early years to the most recent creations. The contrast becomes more intriguing as you dig deeper into Milhazes’ garden.She is in fact intentionally playing with tension. She’s embracing her tropical environment — Jardim Botânico is the name of her neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro — and heritage, which includes the unique Brazilian cultural mix that has resulted in the exuberant carnival traditions and vibrant music.But Milhazes is also schooled in the Modernist (and at times much more rigid and minimalist) trends that overtook European and Latin art during the 20th century. And then she plants textural, architectural and Pop culture elements into her yard, making her work more complex than what first meets the eye.That’s why botanical is an essential part of the title: Her works are a framed study of detailed, specific bits and pieces that make up a micro-world, and not really an overflowing bouquet or untamed landscape.The earlier works, made in the 1990s, start in the first room — where you can see the development of the mixture of abstract and literal detail colliding and taking on its own morphed form. Some of these can look like tapestries or jewelry — broaches and necklaces — with clear references to lace and ruffles and an almost Baroque-like imagery. One good example is Santo Antonio, Albuquerque from 1994; the pink, lavender and baby blue coloring is somewhat gentle, with a patterning that looks like doilies woven together with jeweled chains and interspersed with flowers and decorative knick-knacks.It was at this time that Milhazes was inventing her own technique to make these paintings, which while feeling loose with their hyper-bright color schemes and elaborate interpretations, were actually precise in their composition. She didn’t leave the signs of brush-strokes behind after she applied a decal-like process to the creation of her works: She would paint on plastic sheets and then transfer the image to the canvas, layering them one on top of another, as though leaving layers of skin on the final product. That small touch, adding the collage element to all of her works, is what makes them less free-form and exploding than it seems from a distance. They are specimens, both natural and man-made.Milhazes moved toward abstraction in the next decade, with circular and linear geometric designs becoming more prominent. Geometric abstraction has a long history in South America, so this too can feel part of an organic progression.Flores e Arvores from 2012-2013 is an almost 3D culmination of all these influences, the huge painting truly leaping from a wall that seems trying to hold this kinetic, kaleidoscopic vision in. There are vertical and horizontal lines crossing over spheres and bubbles with more distinct motifs still popping through, in turquoise, yellow, pink, orange and purple coloring. These later works are more mural-like than confined to framed painting.
Like in any other garden, botanical and otherwise, there are surprising imperfections that also appear, marring in a good way. Milhazes suggests with these intentional markings that, mirroring nature, even the most gorgeous creations have flaws.
If there is a flaw in this exhibit, it is that even the lushest of gardens often need to be trimmed; at some point the number of psychedelic canvases sprouting from the galleries gets a little redundant. But Milhazes’ style and culturally influenced aesthetics are a fine fit for Miami, which is one reason why PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander picked her for this high profile solo outing. Milhazes combines references that reflect those of the multicultural New World, from Colonial Baroque to African rituals, from formal European artistic traditions to North American Pop culture. It’s a mix that Ostrander thought would resonate well in this cosmopolitan capital on the Caribbean rim, filled with people from points all over, and growing as an arts destination.
In fact, this is the first major in-house exhibit organized by the new museum and not brought in from elsewhere, which is a welcome trend. It will be the featured exhibit during Art Basel Miami Beach.
On your way in or out, don’t miss the new installation at PAMM on the ground floor, taking over from the Hew Locke piece comprised of dozens of colorful model boats and ships that helped inaugurate the museum. Hard to fill those shoes. But the monochromatic pieces from Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes, so different in tone from both Locke and Milhazes, nonetheless tie into the vision of the museum.
Antunes based these minimalist sculptures made of dark wood, brown leather and brass chains, on Brazilian architecture both Modernist and Afro-Brazilian. The linear meshes, weaves and planks that come down from the ceiling form a subtle maze through which you can quietly maneuver. It becomes immediately clear what a nice dialogue this installation has with another art asset here — the superb architecture of the Herzog & de Meuron building itself. Without screaming, they both stand handsomely and inviting.
Appropriately enough, the installation is called “a secluded and pleasant land. In this land I wish to dwell.”
IF YOU GO
What:S ‘Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico’
When: Through Jan. 11
Where: Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
By Jose D. Duran Published Tue., Nov. 18 2014 at 11:30 AM
Courtesy of Robert Fontaine Gallery
Space Fruit, Still Lifes (Watermelon), Andy Warhol (1979).
If all you do during Art Basel Miami Beach is stick to the big fairs, you might as well call it a day and go back home.Seriously. Some of the best contemporary art we’ve seen during Art Basel has been away from the convention center and tents.
Local galleries feature both homegrown and international talent, including a mix of well-established artists and those on the cusp of greatness. And wouldn’t you rather have bragging rights that you saw so-and-so before they were big? (Basel is just one big bragging Olympics. Step your game up!)
That being said, there are way too may galleries to possibly feature them all. But we’ve picked out some of the best shows that coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, some of which are already exhibiting right now — because it’s never too early to start Basel-ing.
“Welcome to the Future,” Daniel Arsham at Locust Projects.
Design District and Upper EastsideKris Knight, “Smell the Magic.”December 1-15. Spinello Projects Pop-Up, 95 NE 40th St., Miami; 786-271-4223; spinelloprojects.com.
Tim Okamura, “Love, Strength, and Soul.”November 22-January 10. Yeelen Gallery, 294 NW 54th St., Miami; 954-235-4758; yeelenart.com.
Daniel Arsham, “Welcome to the Future.”November 15-January. Locust Projects, 3852 North Miami Ave., Miami; 305-576-8570; locustprojects.org.
“Art on the Move,” Ron Terada curated by Dominic Molon.Locust Projects, 3852 North Miami Ave., Miami; 305-576-8570; locustprojects.org.
Egan Frantz, “Monday and Friday, Tuesday and Friday, Wednesday and Friday, Thursday and Friday, Friday and Friday.”November 22-January 17. Michael Jon Gallery, 255 NE 69th St., Miami; 305-521-8520; michaeljongallery.com.
“Luxury Face.”Ida Eritsland, Geir Haraldseth, and Agatha Wara in collaboration with Bjørnar Pedersen. December 1-January 10. Guccivuitton, 8375 NE Second Ave., Miami; guccivuitton.net.
Robert Curran, “Anthology of 20 Years of Photography From Five Different Continents.”Robert Curran Gallery, 74 NE 40th St., Miami; robertcurranphoto.com.
Courtesy of Primary Projects
Cole Sternberg
Downtown and Overtown“International Friendship Exhibition.”Autumn Casey, Jim Drain, Gavin Perry, Asif Farooq, Magnus Sodamin, Cole Sternberg, Cody Hudson, and Michael Vasquez. December 1-January 30. Primary Projects, 151 NE 7th St., Miami; thisisprimary.com.
Fabian Peña, “Death of a Printed Story.”November 28-December 20. Dimensions Variable, 100 NE 11th St., Miami; 305-607-5527; dimensionsvariable.net.
Purvis Young, “A Man Among the People: A Purvis Homecoming.”December 4-March. The Historic Lyric Theater, 819 NW Second Ave., Miami; 786-708-4610; theblackarchives.org.
“The Avant-Garde and Latin-American Photography: The Poetics and Discourse of the Modern Gaze.”November 15-December 19. Centro Cultural Español, 1490 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 305-448-9677; ccemiami.org.
“Panting.”Gina Beavers, Aaron Bobrow, Van Hanos, Sadie Laska, Dean Levin, Jeff Tranchell, and Jeff Zilm. Organized by John Connelly. December 5. Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 1540 NE Miami Ct., Miami; 305-448-8976; snitzer.com.
Miami Beach
Jose Lerma, “Guaynabichean Odyssey.”December 1-Janaury 31. David Castillo Gallery, 420 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach; 305-573-8110; davidcastillogallery.com.
“Auto Body.”María José Arjona, Naomi Fisher, Paloma Izquierdo, Dana Levy, Alex McQuilkin, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Naama Tsabar, Agustina Woodgate, Antonia Wright, and more. December 4-7 Giant Motors, 1750 Bay Road, Miami Beach; autobody-movement.com.
Courtesy of Gallery Diet
In Anticipation of Women’s History Month, Rochelle Feinstein (2012-2013)
“Welcome to the Jungle.”November 14-January 2. Pan American Art Projects, 2450 NW Second Ave., Miami; 305-573-2400; panamericanart.com.
“4409.72 miles 9125 days: 25 Years of Art Discourse from Buenos Aires to Miami.”November 21-January 31. Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, 2043 N. Miami Ave., Miami; 305-576-1804;dianalowensteingallery.com.
Sebastiao Salgado, “Genesis.”November 6-January 10. Dina Mitrani Gallery, 2620 NW Second Ave., Miami; 786-486-7248; dinamitranigallery.com.
“Perspectives.”Chuck Close, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Nick Gentry, Anthony Lister, RYCA, David Walker, and more. Robert Fontaine Gallery, 2349 NW Second Ave., Miami; 305-397-8530; robertfontainegallery.com.
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SLATE MAGAZINE
An Artist’s Tribute to the Obsolete Gadgets That Fill Our Trash Dumps
Artist Daniel Arsham with his new installation, Welcome to the Future, which is designed to look like an archaeological dig of 20th-century media devices.
Courtesy of Daniel Arsham
Last weekend, just ahead of Art Basel Miami Beach, visitors to the Locust Projectsexhibition space got a glimpse of Welcome to the Future, artist Daniel Arsham’s ode to an archaeological dig full of reproductions of 20th-century media devices that clog our 21st-century landfills.
Arsham—who has a background in set design for Merce Cunningham and runs the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Snarkitecture—spent a year collecting some 3,000 boomboxes, electric guitars, SLR cameras, Nintendo controllers, push-button telephones, VHS tapes, Walkmans, film projectors, portable televisions, and other iconic objects that have lost their urgent utility to new technologies.
Courtesy of Locust Projects/Zack Balber with Ginger Photography
Close-ups of Daniel Arsham’s Welcome to the Future.
Courtesy of Daniel Arsham
But if the installation is a comment on planned obsolescence and the wreckage on landfills, it’s also a monument to the detritus produced by art exhibitions: Those objects, some of which were broken as well as outdated, were destroyed in the process of making the molds for the reproductions. Arsham experimented with casting techniques using ash, steel, obsidian, glacial rock dust, or rose quartz crystal to achieve a partially deconstructed effect that would nevertheless hold without crumbling. Then he dug a trench in the exhibition space’s concrete floor—25 feet in diameter and 3 feet deep—and set the objects amid the concrete chunks (some weighing up to 600 pounds).
“The trench presents the recent past as archeology,” says a press release about the installation, “a world of technological objects whose obsolescence was built into their design, preserved like petrified wood or the figures of Pompeii. Rather than regard these objects as individual sculptures, the artist presents them as a mass below our feet, producing a new narrative of production, history, and discovery.”
Courtesy of Locust Projects/Zack Balber with Ginger Photography
Ashram told the Miami Herald that he chose the materials in order to create a gradient from the darker outer edges of the installation to its pale center, with the darkest objects cast from volcanic ash, followed by ash and steel, obsidian, glacial rock, and finally crystal. He began experimenting with casting objects when he recreated Pharrell Williams’ first keyboard in volcanic ash.
Courtesy of Locust Projects/Zack Balber with Ginger Photography
“I went to art school, and you don’t learn how to cast ash in art school,” Ashram said. “I want [the sculptures] to appear that they are falling apart, but I don’t want them to fall apart. I want to keep them in a frozen stasis.”
Miami and Miami Beach Art Fair Guide Online Guide to Miami Art Week 2014
Information about the art fairs and art events taking place in Miami and Miami Beach between December 1 – 7, 2014. The week is commonly known as Miami Art Week. Approximately twenty art fairs participate, positioned in the area between Miami’s Wynwood Art District, Downtown Miami and Miami Beach. For the second year running, Art-Collecting.com will be offering a Day-by-Day Event Guide for Miami Art Week, with a wealth of information to make the experience fun, productive, and otherwise sublime. A special new section for evening and party planning will be included in the 2014 edition. The Day-by-Day Event Guide will become the “online go-to” guide for Miami Art Week! We’ll continue to update this guide and web page through November 29th. Below, you’ll find brief descriptions of the art fairs, including locations, hours, admission prices, and special events. If possible, plan on spending at least four days at Miami Art Week, as the week is flush with opportunities to mix, mingle; and, of course, feast one’s eyes on an incredible array of great art! Not only are the art fairs vibrant and engaging in of themselves, but related events occur at local art museums, private collections, non-profit art organizations, galleries and artist studios. An overview: Art Basel Miami Beach – held at the Miami Beach Convention Center is the largest art fair of the week, featuring more than 250 top galleries from around the world. Design Miami (a major design fair) takes place right next to Art Basel. Satellite art fairs: Scope Miami, Pulse, Select, NADA, and Untitled are also in Miami Beach and actually on or near the beach; enjoy the ocean view!. Hotel-based art fairs in Miami Beach include Ink and Aqua. Art Miami – held in Miami’s Wynwood Art District, is the most established art fair in Miami; it’s been around for years. Miami Project, Context, Spectrum, and Red Dot art fairs and many of Miami’s top art galleries are located in Wynwood. One can easily spend two days in the area and still miss a lot! Concept Fair is new for 2014 and it’s located at Bayfront Park. Miami River Art Fair is at the Miami Convention Center – James L. Knight Center, located in the downtown Miami. Free Shuttles – We highly recommend the free shuttle services offered by art fairs, especially when traveling between Miami and Miami Beach, and between downtown and Wynwood. Our Getting Around Town section in the Day-by-Day Event Guide will be the definitive companion for anyone navigating and schedule your weeks activities! Miami Beach Art FairsArt Basel Miami Beach | Aqua Art Miami | Design Miami | Ink Miami | NADA Art FairPULSE Miami | SELECT Fair | Scope Miami | Untitled.Miami Art FairsArt Miami | Art Spot | Concept-Fair | CONTEXT | Fridge Art Fair | Miami Photo Salon Festival | Miami Project | Miami River Art Fair | Red Dot Art Fair | Spectrum
Art Basel Miami Beach December 3 – 7, 2014 Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami Beach https://www.artbasel.com/ Art Basel Miami Beach is the most important art show in the United States, a cultural and social highlight for the Americas. Leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa show historical work from the masters of Modern and contemporary art, as well as newly created pieces by emerging stars. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, photographs, films, and editioned works of the highest quality are on display at the main exhibition hall, while ambitious artworks and performances become part of the landscape at nearby beaches, Collins Park and SoundScape Park. Art Basel is comprised of multiple sectors, each of which has its own selection process and committee of experts, who review applicants and make the final selection of show participants. The seven show sectors offer a diverse collection of artworks, including pieces by established artists and newly emerging artists, curated projects, site-specific experiential work, and video. Galleries: The largest sector with more than 200 of the world’s leading Modern and contemporary art galleries – from North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. They display paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, prints, photography, film, video, and digital art by over 4,000 artists. Nova: Designed for galleries to present one, two or three artists showing new works that have been created within the last three years, the Nova sector often features never-before-seen pieces fresh from the artist’s studio and strong juxtapositions. Positions: This sector allows curators, critics, and collectors to discover ambitious new talents from all over the globe by providing a platform for a single artist to present one major project. Edition: Leading publishers of editioned works, prints, and multiples exhibit the results of their collaboration with renowned artists. Kabinett: Participants are chosen from the Galleries sector to present curated exhibitions in a separately delineated space within their booths. The curatorial concepts for Kabinett are diverse, including thematic group exhibitions, art-historical showcases, and solo shows. Public: This sector offers its visitors a chance to see outdoor sculptures, interventions, and performances, sited within an open and public exhibition format at Collins Park (2100 Collins AVE) near the beach. Public Opening Night, Dec. 3, 8:30-10pm. A special evening program with live performances, as part of the Public sector. Film: The Film sector presents works in two venues: inside the Miami Beach Convention Center, and in the outdoor setting of SoundScape Park where works are shown on the 7,000-square-foot outdoor projection wall of the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center. Selections include works by some of today’s most exciting artists from Latin America, the United States, Europe and Asia. Survey: Survey presents precise art historical projects that may include solo presentations by an individual artist, or juxtapositions and thematic exhibits from artists representing a range of cultures, generations, and artistic approaches. Magazines: Art publications from around the world display their magazines in single-magazine stands or the collective booth. Editors and publishers are often present at the show. ADMISSION $45 (One Day), $100 (Permanent Pass), $32 (evening ticket after 4pm) $30 Students and Seniors with ID, and and Groups of ten or more $55 Combination Ticket for Art Basel and Design Miami HOURS Thursday December 4th, 3pm – 8pm Friday, December 5th, Noon – 8pm Saturday, December 6th, Noon – 8pm Sunday, December 7th, Noon – 6pm Art Basel Conversations | Daily at 10am Art Salon | Daily 1pm to 6:30pm EVENTS Visit the Art Basel Miami website for a full listing of daily Special Exhibitions and Events. Wednesday, December 3rd, 11am – 8pm Private View (by invitation only) Thursday, December 4th, 11am – 3pm Vernissage – Private View (by invitation only) Shuttle Bus Service The show has organized a shuttle bus service for visits to the museums and collections in Miami. The pickup location is directly across the street from Hall D of the Miami Beach Convention Center. https://www.artbasel.com/ Press and Media coverage about Art Basel Miami Beach None listed at this time
AQUA 14 Art Miami December 3 – 7, 2014 Aqua Hotel, 1530 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139 http://www.aquaartmiami.com AQUA 14 Art Miami will celebrate its tenth consecutive installment this December. It is one of the best fairs for emerging art during Miami’s Art Week. Over the years, the fair has been recognized for presenting vibrant and noteworthy international art programs with a particular interest in supporting young dealers and galleries with strong emerging and early-to-mid-career artists. Set within a classic South Beach hotel with spacious exhibition rooms that open onto a breezy intimate courtyard, Aqua’s surroundings will certainly be a favorite gathering spot not only for fun and relaxation during the busy week but also as a place to exchange and disseminate new contemporary art ideas. And with its close proximity to Art Basel and continuous shuttle service to Art Miami and CONTEXT Art Miami, Aqua Art Miami will transform into one of the top attended satellite art events for collectors, artists, curators, critics and art enthusiasts alike. Aqua Art Miami will feature 47 dynamic young galleries from North and South America, Europe and Asia; and innovative special programming including performance art, new media and solo installations. With this commitment to artistic excellence, along with building a dynamic young marketplace with new and increased opportunities around marketing and audience services, The classic South Beach boutique hotel has breezy, spacious rooms surrounding an intimate courtyard. A great place to relax and socialize during Miami Art Week. And Aqua Hotel is located within walking distance of Art Basel, just south of the bustling Lincoln Road restaurant and shopping area. 2014 Aqua 14 Exhibitors ADMISSION $15 One day fair pass (Aqua Only) $75 Multi-day fair pass (Aqua, CONTEXT and Art Miami) $10 Students 12-18 years and Seniors HOURS Thursday, December 4th, Noon – 9pm Friday, December 5th, 11am to 9pm Saturday, December 6th, 11am to 9pm Sunday, December 7th, 11am to 6pm EVENTS Wednesday, December 3rd, 4pm – 11pm, VIP Preview. Access for Art Miami, CONTEXT, and Aqua Art Miami VIP Cardholders & Press http://www.aquaartmiami.com Press and Media coverage about Aqua Art Fair None listed at this time
Design Miami/ December 2 – 7, 2014 Meridian Avenue and 19th Street, Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami Beach http://www.designmiami.com/ Design Miami/ is the global forum for design. Each fair brings together the most influential collectors, gallerists, designers, curators and critics from around the world in celebration of design culture and commerce. 2014 Highlights Will be added when then information is available. The program of exhibitions presented by carefully selected galleries from Europe, the United States and Asia will be enriched by a dynamic series of design talks, site-specific installations and satellite events. For details of Design Miami’s cultural programs, including Design Talks, Collaborations, and Design Satellites. Swarovski Crystal Palace will be back for the seventh consecutive year as a main sponsor of Design Miami/. ADMISSION General Admission: $25 Students and Seniors (with ID): $29=0 Combination Ticket for Design Miami/ and Art Basel $55 (at ABMB) Tickets are valid for one day only. HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd, 10am – 8pm Thursday December 4th, 10am – 8pm Friday, December 5th, 11am to 8pm Saturday, December 6th, Noon to 8pm Sunday, December 7th, Noon to 6pm EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, Noon – 6pm Collectors Preview Tuesday, December 2nd, 6pm – 8pm Vernissage http://www.designmiami.com/http://www.designmiami.com/designlog/ Press and Media coverage about Design Miami/ None listed at this time
INK Miami Art Fair December 3 – 7, 2014 Suites of Dorchester, 1850 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139 http://www.inkartfair.com INK Miami is a contemporary art fair held annually in December during Art Basel Miami Beach. The Fair is unique among Miami’s fairs for its focus on contemporary works on paper by internationally renowned artists. It is sponsored by the International Fine Print Dealers Association and exhibitors are selected from among members of the Association for their outstanding ability to offer collectors a diverse survey of 20th century masterworks and just published editions by leading contemporary artists. Since its founding in 2006, the Fair has attracted a loyal following among museum curators and committed collectors of works on paper. If you’re looking to purchase prints or works on paper, you should plan on attending this small art fair. This fair is located just a few blocks from the convention center and Art Basel Miami Beach. 2014 Ink Miami Exhibitors ADMISSION Free, No Charge HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd, Noon – 5pm Thursday, December 4th, 10am – 5pm Friday, December 5th, 10am – 8pm Saturday, December 6th, 10am – 8pm Sunday, December 7th, 10am – 3pm EVENTS Preview Breakfast, Wednesday, December 3rd, 10am – 11:30am http://www.inkartfair.com Press and Media coverage about Ink Miami Art Fair None listed at this time
NADA Art Fair – Miami Beach December 4 – 7, 2014 The Deauville Beach Resort, 6701 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33141 http://www.newartdealers.org Founded in 2002, New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is a not-for-profit collective of professionals working with contemporary art. Our mission is to create an open flow of information, support, and collaboration within our field and to develop a stronger sense of community among our constituency. NADA’s fair is held in parallel with Art Basel Miami Beach and is recognized as a much needed alternative assembly of the world’s youngest and strongest art galleries dealing with emerging Contemporary Art. It is the only major American art fair to be run by a non-profit organization. Our international group of members includes both galleries and individuals (art professionals, independent curators, and established gallery directors). The various perspectives and ideas offered by our diverse roster creates a network which, at its most basic, is a resource which people could contribute to and take as much (or as little) as they are inclined. The benefits for some may be a matter of business, for others a source of intellectual or aesthetic stimulation. To date, our initiatives have succeeded on two fronts: making the contemporary arts more accessible for the general public, and creating opportunities that nurture the growth of emerging artists, curators, and galleries. Our EVENTS have included: artist talks/gallery walks with critics and curators; benefits in support of charitable institutions; members-only seminars to stimulate dedication and ethics in our profession; and an annual art fair in Miami, which is held in December and is free and open to the public. Don’t plan on walking to this art fair, look for the free shuttle service near Art Basel Miami Beach. The pick-up and drop-off is at 17th and Washington, near the southeast corner of the convention center. Shuttle service begins each day at 10:30am. 2014 NADA Exhibitors ADMISSION Free and open to the public HOURS Thursday, December 4th, 2pm – 8pm Friday, December 5th, 11am – 8pm Saturday, December 6th, 11am – 8pm Sunday, December 7th, 11am – 5pm EVENTS Thursday, December 4th, 10am – 2pm, Opening Preview by Invitation http://www.newartdealers.org Press and Media coverage about NADA Art Fair – Miami Beach None listed at this time
PULSE Miami Indian Beach Park 4601 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL December 4 – 7, 2014 http://www.pulse-art.com PULSE provides a unique platform for diverse galleries to present a progressive blend of renowned and pioneering contemporary artists, alongside an evolving series of original programming. The fair’s distinctive commitment to the art community and visitor experience makes PULSE unique among art fairs and creates an art market experience that is both dynamic and inviting. The Fair is divided into two sections and is comprised of a mix of established and emerging galleries vetted by a committee of prominent international dealers. The IMPULSE section presents galleries invited by the Committee to present solo exhibitions of artist’s work created in the past two years. In addition, PULSE develops original cultural programs with a series of large-scale installations, its PULSE Play video lounge, the PULSE Performance events. The PULSE Prize is awarded in New York and in Miami to one of the artists presented in the IMPULSE section. 2014 PULSE Miami Exhibitors ADMISSION General Admission $20 Students and Seniors $15 MultiPass (4 day) $25 2013 HOURS Thursday, December 4th, 1pm – 7pm Friday, December 5th, 10am – 7pm Saturday, December 6th, 10am – 7pm Sunday, December 7th, 10am – 5pm EVENTS Thursday, December 4th, 9am – 1pm, Private Preview Brunch (Invitation only) Complimentary Shuttle Service: PULSE will offer a shuttle service operating between Art Basel Miami Beach and Pulse Miami Beach. Shuttles will run from 9am to 8pm http://www.pulse-art.com Press and Media coverage about PULSE Miami None listed at this time
Scope Miami Beach December 2 – 7, 2014 910 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139 http://www.scope-art.com SCOPE Miami Beach’s monumental pavilion will once again be situated on historic Ocean Drive to welcome near 40,000 visitors over the course of 6 days. Over 100 Exhibitors and 20 selected Breeder Program galleries will present groundbreaking work, alongside SCOPE’s special programming, encompassing music, design and fashion. Long-established as the original incubator for emerging work, SCOPE’s Breeder Program celebrates its 14th year of introducing new galleries to the contemporary market. VH1 will also be presenting the ultimate mash-up of music, pop culture and nostalgia for adults who still want to have fun. There will be some great music on Miami Beach. The tickets are difficult to get but you can sill enjoy the music from the beach for free. Juxtapoz Magazine will curate and present a selection artworks. Juxtapoz Presents galleries embody the New Contemporary that is SCOPE’s hallmark and add a singular dynamism to the Miami Beach 2014 show. Juxtapoz will also release a special edition SCOPE newspaper featuring coverage of the Juxtapoz Presents programming. Scope will also feature a curated exhibition of artworks from Korea. SCOPE Miami Beach opens on Tuesday, December 2, to welcome VIPs and Press at its First View benefit, and will run December 2 – 7, 2014. 2014 Scope Exhibitors ADMISSION General Admission $30 and Students $20 Free for VIP cardholders Brunch, Tuesday: $150 First View, Tuesday: $100 HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd, 11am – 8pm Thursday, December 4th, 11am – 8pm Friday, December 5th, 11am – 8pm Saturday, December 6th, 11am – 8pm Sunday, December 7th, 11am – 8pm EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, Noon – 4pm, Platinum VIP First View. Tuesday, December 2nd, 4pm – 8pm, General VIP and Press First View. Friday, December 5th, 8pm – 11pm The Official VH1 + Scope Party (by invitation and confirmed RSVP only) http://www.scope-art.com Press and Media coverage about Scope Miami Beach None listed at this time
SELECT // CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR 72nd Street and Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL December 2 – 7, 2014 http://www.select-fair.com SELECT is pleased to announce its new location at 72nd Street and Collins Avenue in a grand-scale 40,000 sq/ft tent structure. We have selected this location for its multi-use capabilities, which include an adjunct amphitheater for performance and nightly music programming. The fair will have ample parking across the street and is a short walk from the neighboring NADA art fair. SELECT will evolve its vision of presenting 50 + cutting edge international galleries through the curatorial direction of Tim Goossens. Previously the Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1, Goossens is the Curatorial Director of envoy enterprise in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a Curatorial Advisor at the Clocktower Gallery, and serves on the curatorial advisory committee of SoHO House New York. Additionally, he maintains a roster of independent curatorial projects. SELECT will be held at 72nd street and Collins Avenue, just three blocks from NADA along the sands of beautiful North Beach. Our location has perks such as, beach front views, an attached parking lot, and an amphitheater for music and arts programing. We are conveniently located at the end of the John F Kennedy causeway (route 934), allowing for easy visitor access for clients moving back and forth from the beach to Wynwood. Shuttle: Free shuttles will be running between SELECT (72nd and Collins) and the Convention Center (17th and Washington). 2014 Select Miami Exhibitors ADMISSION Free Entry HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd: 11am – 8pm Thursday, December 4th: 11am – 8pm Friday, December 5th: 11am – 8pm Saturday, December 6th: 11am – 8 pm Sunday, December 7th: 11am – 6pm EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, 4pm – 8pm, VIP and Press Preview www.select-fair.com Press and Media coverage about SELECT Art Fair None listed at this time
UNTITLED. December 1 – 7, 2014 Ocean Drive and 12th Street, Miami Beach, FL 33139 http://art-untitled.com/ UNTITLED., is a curated art fair and is back for it’s third year, running December 1 – 7, 2014, in the heart of Miami Beach’s South Beach district at Ocean Drive and 12th Street. UNTITLED., the international art fair launched in Miami Beach in 2012. UNTITLED.’s curatorial approach to the traditional art fair model places an emphasis on the viewer’s experience by contextualizing the artworks exhibited at each booth. The fair presents a selection of international galleries and not-for-profit spaces, positioned side by side to create a less segregated fair installation. UNTITLED. 2014 is presented in a temporary pavilion on South Beach designed by internationally recognized architecture firm K/R, led by John Keenen and Terence Riley. The 60,000 square feet floor plan complements UNTITLED.’s curatorial approach and creates an exceptional viewing experience with abundant natural light and an open ocean view. The fair is located directly on the beach in the South Beach district at Ocean Drive and 12th Street, providing a quintessential Miami Beach event. 2014 Untitled. Exhibitors ADMISSION General Admission: $25, 4-day pass $30 Discounted Admission (Seniors and Students): $15 Miami Beach residents: $15 Groups of 15 or more: $15 per person Children under 12: FREE HOURS Wednesday, December 43rd, 3pm – 7pm Thursday, December 4th, 11am – 7pm Friday, December 5th, 11am – 7pm Saturday, December 6th, 11am – 7pm Sunday, December 7th, 11am – 4pm EVENTS Monday, December 1st, 6pm – 9pm, Vernissage. Tuesday, December 2nd, 1pm – 3pm, Press Preview. Tuesday, December 2nd, 3pm – 7pm, VIP Preview. http://art-untitled.com/ Press and Media coverage about Art Untitled Art Fair None listed at this time
Miami Art Fairs
Art Miami December 2 – 7, 2014 Midtown Miami | Wynwood, 3101 NE 1st Avenue, Miami, FL 33137 http://www.art-miami.com Known as Miami’s premier anchor fair, Art Miami kicks off the opening day of Art Week – the first week of December when thousands of collectors, dealers, curators, and artists descend upon Miami. World-famous for its stylish gallery-like decor, its outstanding quality and extraordinary variety, Art Miami showcases the best in modern and contemporary art from more than 125 international art galleries. Art Miami maintains a preeminent position in America’s contemporary art fair market. With a rich history, it is the original and longest-running contemporary art fair in Miami and continues to receive praise for the variety of unparalleled art that it offers. It is the “can’t miss” event for all serious collectors, curators, museum directors, and interior designers providing an intimate look at some of the most important work at the forefront of the international contemporary art movement. Ample and convenient parking is available through the use of a four-story parking garage with 2,000 spots, located directly across the street from the Art Miami Pavilion as well as valet parking. A network of complimentary shuttle buses will run round-trip service between Art Miami, Aqua, and Art Basel Miami Beach. 2014 Art Miami Exhibitors ADMISSION $35 one day, $75 multi-day pass, $15 Students 12-18 years and Seniors A One Day Fair Pass provides admission to Art Miami and CONTEXT Art Miami Fairs. A Multi-Day Pass provides admission to Art Miami, CONTEXT Art Miami and Aqua Art Miami Fairs. HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd, 11am – 7pm Thursday, December 4th, 11am – 7pm Friday, December 5th, 11am – 8pm Saturday, December 6th, 11am – 7pm Sunday, December 7th, 11am – 6pm EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, 5:30pm – 10pm, VIP Preview (Access for Art Miami VIP Cardholders and Press http://www.art-miami.com Press and Media coverage about Art Miami None listed at this time
ArtSpot Miami 2014 December 3 – 7, 2014 3011 NE 1st Avenue at NE 30th St, Miami, FL 33137 http://www.aldocastilloprojects.com/ No details at this time. ADMISSION Not available at this time HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd Thursday, December 4th Friday, December 5th Saturday, December 6th Sunday, December 7th EVENTS None listed at this time http://www.aldocastilloprojects.com/ Press and Media coverage about ArtSpot Miami 2014 None listed at this time
Concept-Fair December 2 – 7, 2014 301 Biscayne Blvd. (Bayfront Park), Miami, FL 33132 http://www.concept-fair.com/ Inaugural Edition, Contemporary art fair featuring exclusively modern works from 1860-1980 including painting, sculpture, photography, design and objet d’art. Miami will focus on “fresh to market” blue chip secondary market works and modern contemporary masters. Limited to approximately 80 carefully selected dealers, it is designed as a sophisticated, elegant waterfront oasis for collectors during the frenetic Art Basel Week. This will be a fair for the serious collector and connoisseur presented in a relaxed, waterfront location adjacent to the Perez Art Museum Miami, Frost Museum in proximity to all major downtown hotels and the Brickell financial center, the second largest banking capital in North America. Our goal is to present a new fair at the “next level” from current December fairs. Uniquely, the hours will be until 9 pm creating a later “Miami Time” venue for collectors after the closing of other December fairs throughout the city prior to Miami’s later dining times. 2014 Concept Exhibitors ADMISSION One Day Ticket $15, Multiple Day Ticket $25 HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd, 1pm – 10pm Thursday, December 4th, 1pm – 10pm Friday, December 5th, 1pm – 10pm Saturday, December 6th, 1pm – 10pm Sunday, December 7th, 1pm – 7pm EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, 6pm – 8pm, Preview Tuesday, December 2nd, 8pm – 10pm, Collectors Invitational (Invitation only) http://www.concept-fair.com Press and Media coverage about Concept None listed at this time
CONTEXT December 2 – 7, 2014 Midtown Miami | Wynwood, 3101 NE 1st Avenue, Miami, FL 33137 http://www.contextartmiami.com/ CONTEXT along with the 25th edition of Art Miami will commence on December 2, 2014 with CONTEXT Art Miami’s highly anticipated Opening Night VIP Preview to benefit the Miami Art Museum (PAMM. The 2012 benefit preview attracted 11,000 collectors, curators, artists, connoisseurs, and designers and the fair hosted a total of 60,000 attendees over a six-day period. This immediately reinforced the CONTEXT fair as a proven destination and serious marketplace for top collectors to acquire important works from the leading international galleries representing emerging and mid career cutting edge works of art. The combined exhibition space of CONTEXT and Art Miami will increase the overall roster of galleries to 190 participants and cover 200,000 square feet. Ample and convenient parking is available for both fairs through the use of a four-story parking garage with 2,000 spots, located directly across the street from the CONTEXT and Art Miami Pavilions as well as valet parking. A network of complimentary shuttle buses will run round-trip service between Art Miami, CONTEXT, Aqua Art Miami and Art Basel Miami Beach. 2014 CONTEXT Exhibitors ADMISSION $35 one day, $75 multi-day pass, $10 Students 12-18 years and Seniors Tickets are sold online one month prior to Fair dates and onsite at the Box Offices during show hours. A One Day Fair Pass provides admission to Art Miami and CONTEXT Art Miami Fairs. A Multi-Day Pass provides admission to Art Miami, CONTEXT Art Miami and Aqua Art Miami Fairs. HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd, 11am – 7pm Thursday, December 4th, 11am – 7pm Friday, December 5th, 11am – 9pm Saturday, December 6th, 11am – 7pm Sunday, December 7th, 11am – 6pm EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, 5:30pm – 10pm, VIP Preview (Access for Art Miami VIP Cardholders and Press http://www.contextartmiami.com/ Press and Media coverage about CONTEXT Art Fair None listed at this time
Fridge Art Fair December 2 – 8, 2014 300 SW 12th Ave. (Corner of SW 12th Ave. & SW 3rd St) Miami, FL 33130 http://www.fridgeartfair.com/ Fridge Art Fair is pleased to announce that its second Miami edition will take place at the Good Wall / Conch Hill Market, 968 Calle Ocho, Miami, Florida from December 2 – 8, 2014, thanks to major sponsorship by the Barlington Group and media sponsorship by Miami Art Scene. Once again, Founding Director Eric Ginsburg, a noted painter in his own right (mainly for his soulful portraits of dogs), will lead the Fridge team. “People should not be afraid to go and see art, and it should not cost a fortune,” said Ginsburg. “I want people to be happy, we want everyone from all walks of life to come to this fair and say, ‘that was really cool!'” In that spirit he has subtitled this edition “De Staatliches Bauhaus Rijpe Mango Editie.” Cara Hunter Viera of Fridge will serve as producer, Miami Art Scene’s Kat Wagner joins Fridge as fair as head curator for the Miami Edition and NYC based curator writer and dealer Linda DiGusta, co-director of Fridge 2014 in New York, stays on the team as curatorial consultant. Major sponsors are the Barlington Group, an urban development company committed to revitalizing neighborhoods within Miami’s the urban core. And, The Miami Art Scene, an influential art portal covering local, national and international art news and information. Exhibitor applications still being accepted. ADMISSION Not available at this time HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd Thursday, December 4th Friday, December 5th Saturday, December 6th Sunday, December 7th EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, VIP Preview & Opening Gala, at the Ball & Chain – Miami’s Famed Cotton Club – Circa 1957 http://www.fridgeartfair.com/ Press and Media coverage about Fridge Art Fair None listed at this time
MIAMI PHOTO SALON FESTIVAL December 2 – 5, 2014 Cuban American Phototheque Foundation, 4260 SW 74 Ave. Miami FL. 33135 http://www.miamiphotosalonfestival.com/ Miami Photo Salon – December 2 to 5, is an International Fine Art Photography Festival that takes place yearly during Art Miami week. Local and international photographers will showcase and exhibit work in a salon-style venue, in Downtown Miami where foot traffic between 13 visiting art fairs will bring to the area 75000 visitors, meaning artists participating will get in front of a huge audience, at a time when Miami is hosting the most important international art event in the world. For those interested in collecting photography, artwork is of the best quality, as MPSF art fair committee had selectively invited excellent artists, and it is possible to attend a VIP opening night preview on December 1st. 2014 Miami Photo Salon Festival Exhibitors ADMISSION One Day Ticket – $15 Students and Seniors – $10 Preview Ticket and Multi-Day Pass – $50 HOURS Tuesday, December 2nd, 11am – 9pm Wednesday, December 3rd, 11am – 7pm Thursday, December 4th, 11am – 10pm Friday, December 5th, 9:30am – 7pm EVENTS Monday, December 1st, VIP Preview 6:30pm – 10pm Friday, December 5th, 6pm Award Ceremony and Closing Remarks http://www.miamiphotosalonfestival.com/ Press and Media coverage about Miami Photo Salon Festival None listed at this time
MIAMI PROJECT December 2 – 7, 2014 NE 29th Street and NE 1st Avenue, Miami, FL 33137 http://www.miami-project.com/ Miami Project will return to the Wynwood Art District from December 2 to 7, 2014. It will again present a selection of historically important and cutting-edge contemporary work side by side, with a unique emphasis on the strength of individual exhibitors’ programs irrespective of their primary focus. Sixty galleries from across the United States will show at the fair. Galleries that represent prominent estates like those of Larry Rivers and Robert Mapplethorpe will exhibit next to those showing today’s most exciting young artists. Work from the historic avant-garde will inform and contextualize the best examples of contemporary practice. Galleries are curated into Miami Project based on a serious commitment to important living artists; extensive involvement with remarkable estates; and the strength of their program generally. The fair’s emphasis on presenting quality works in an intimate setting won over its 20,000 visitors last year, and the 2014 edition will again be boutique-scale, allowing for comfortable viewing in a relaxed atmosphere. Miami Project is housed in a deluxe, tent with soaring cathedral ceilings erected especially for the fair. It will feature roomy aisles and extravagant lounges for a pleasant visitor experience. Located at NE 29th Street and NE 1st Avenue in Miami. Miami Project is presented with support from the Wall Street Journal, Luxe magazine, Perrier, the Midtown Doral, Porcelanosa, New Amsterdam Vodka, and Shellback Rum. 2014 Miami Project Exhibitors ADMISSION One Day Ticket – $25 Multi-Day Pass – $40 Preview Ticket and Multi-Day Pass – $50 HOURS Tuesday, December 2nd, 5:30pm – 10pm Wednesday, December 3rd, 10am – 5:30pm Thursday, December 4th, 10am – 7pm Friday, December 5th, 10am – 8pm Saturday, December 6th, 10am – 7pm Sunday, December 7th, 10am – 6pm EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, 5:30pm – 10pm, Miami VIP Preview http://www.miami-project.com/ Press and Media coverage about Miami Project Art Fair None Listed at this time
Miami River Art Fair December 4 – 7, 2014 Miami Convention Center @ James L. Knight Center Downtown – Brickell Financial Area 400 SE Second Ave, Miami, FL 33131 http://miamiriverartfair.com/ The third edition of the Miami River Art Fair, an international, contemporary art fair, will take place at the Downtown Miami Convention Center inside the James L. Knight International Center in Downtown. MRAF is providing a unique fair-going experience during the art fair season as the only waterfront art fair. Miami River Art Fair is featuring both an indoor booth setting at the Riverfront Hall of the Miami Convention Center and the one-of-a-kind Riverwalk Sculpture Mall, which is featuring monumental sculpture on the banks of the historic Miami River with a presence of monumental sculptures from Italy, France, Cuba, Colombia, Korea, Spain and a special presentation from Mexico. The Miami River Art Fair will feature galleries and projects with artists from all around the globe. The Miami River Art Fair paves the way for the arts in our financial district as the pioneer art fair of the Downtown Miami – Brickell areas during the winter art fair season. The City of Miami welcomes the Miami River Art Fair as a herald for the revitalization of the Lower Miami River district, the city’s waterfront destination of the twenty-first century. Please join us as we celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the Miami River Art Fair and the Opening Night Preview on December 4. Guests will enjoy Italian Limited Edition Organic Wine and exclusive performance uniquely created for the evening. Funds raised at the event support the Little Dreams Foundation who was established by Orianne and Phil Collins in February 2000. Its mission is to fulfill the dreams of young aspiring talent without the means to achieve their goals. Special Collectors’ Preview: December 4th, 4:00 – 6:00pm, $200 per guest. The exclusive first opportunity to preview and purchase works of art at the fair. Guests are also invited to stay for the Opening Night Preview form 6:00 – 11:00 pm. Opening Night Preview Benefiting Little Dream Foundation 6:00 – 7:00 pm, $100 per guest. Meet LDF’s celebrity mentors as Phil Collins, Romero Brito, David Frangioni among others godparents, sponsors and technical advisors. The 100% proceeds supports the Little Dreams Foundation The Miami River Art Fair 2014 is endorsed by the City of Miami, the Miami River Commission, the City of Miami Beach, the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Art Deco Preservation League. Miami River Art Fair complimentary Shuttle Service to transport passengers to other Art Fairs. 1) Every 30 minutes between The Miami River Art Fair and Miami Beach Convention Center. 2) Every 30 minutes between The Miami River Art Fair and Midtown Miami. Shuttle stop in front of JLK Center. 2014 Exhibitors – Not yet available ADMISSION FREE with online registration Complimentary Admission with Art Basel and Miami Art Fairs VIP Pass Complimentary group guided tour with online registration HOURS Thursday, December 4th, 7pm – 11pm Friday, December 5th Noon – 8pm Saturday, December 6th, Noon – 8pm Sunday, December 7th, 11am – 6pm EVENTS Thursday, December 4th, 4 – 6pm, Special Collectors Preview Thursday, December 4th, 6 – 11pm, VIP Opening The event will also support and raise funds for the Little Dreams Foundation, established by Orianne and Phil Collins in February 2000. Its mission is to fulfill the dreams of young aspiring talent without the means to achive their goals. http://miamiriverartfair.com/ Press and Media coverage about Miami River Art Fair 1) Virtual tour of 2013 edition of Miami River Art Fair 2) The Miami River Art Fair has been featured in over 50 international publications to date and in over 15 local, national and international local broadcasts, press interviews and video coverage segments. Here’s the link : http://miamiriverartfair.com/press-coverage/
Red Dot Art Fair December 2 – 7, 2014 3011 NE 1st Avenue at the corner of NE 31st Street, Miami, FL 33137 http://www.reddotfair.com/ Red Dot Art Fair is pleased to announce its 8th edition and return to the same prime location in Wynwood Art District in Miami, December 2- 7, 2014, concurrent with Art Basel Miami Beach. Building upon its reputation as a diverse fair, Red Dot will offer a unique selection of approximately sixty galleries exhibiting painting, sculpture, photography and fine-art objects. The opening reception on Tuesday, December 2nd, will benefit Center for Autism & Related Disabilities of Miami. Red Dot Art Fair strives to create a fair specializing in emerging, mid-career and established artists that present work of lasting value. The luxurious layout of the fifty thousand square foot tented venue will provide visitors with a sophisticated and friendly environment to view artwork presented by galleries and dealers. Red Dot is excited about being part of Miami’s vibrant art scene and its great fabric of galleries, museums and cultural institutions. 2014 Red Dot Exhibitors, not yet available ADMISSION One Day Ticket – $15 Week Pass – $25 HOURS Tuesday, December 2nd, 6pm – 10pm Wednesday, December 3rd, 11am – 5pm Thursday, December 4th, 11am – 6pm Friday, December 5th, 11am – 8pm Saturday, December 6th, 11am -8pm Sunday, December 7th, 11am – 6pm EVENTS Tuesday, December 2nd, 6pm – 10pm, Opening Reception http://www.reddotfair.com/ Press and Media coverage about Red Dot Art Fair None listed at this time
Spectum Miami Art Show December 3 – 7, 2014 3011 NE 1st Avenue at NE 30th St, Miami, FL 33137 http://spectrum-miami.com/ No details at this time. ADMISSION General Admission $10 Opening Preview + 5 Day Show Pass $25 VIP Special Events Evening Pass – Includes special events & drinks (Dec. 4, 5, 6 – 6pm-10pm) $10 Students/Senior Admission $7.50 HOURS Wednesday, December 3rd, 6pm – 10pm Thursday, December 4th, 1pm – -9pm Friday, December 5th, 1pm – 9pm Saturday, December 6th, 1pm – 9pm Sunday, December 7th, Noon – 6pm EVENTS Wednesday, December 3rd, 6pm – 10pm, Opening Preview http://spectrum-miami.com/ Press and Media coverage about Spectrum None listed at this time === MIAMI NEW TIMES
Art Basel Miami Beach’s 13th Edition Prepares to Break Records
By Carlos Suarez De JesusPublished Tue., Sep. 30 2014 at 1:15 PM
Courtesy of MDC Museum of Art and Design
Shen Wei will present his first U.S. museum show at MOAD.
This year, our fall Arts & Eats Guide lists all that’s timeless and fresh in Miami, from visual art to delicious food. Theater, dance, music, and drinks all make a much-needed appearance throughout the season as well. Pick up one of our printed guides Thursday, October 2, where you’ll find profiles, interviews, and detailed event calendars to guide you through the upcoming cultural season.When Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) blitzes into town December 4 though 7, the event will likely break attendance records. For its 13th edition, ABMB will boast 267 of the planet’s top international galleries, selected from 31 countries, that will exhibit 20th- and 21st-century works by more than 2,000 artists at the Miami Beach Convention Center and various venues throughout the city. The zenith of Miami’s cultural calendar, Basel transforms our peninsula into a rambling art installation, with upward of 20 satellite fairs and scores of related events, including outdoor murals, installations, and pop-up shops mushrooming from South Beach to Wynwood, Little Havana, and Pinecrest. See also: New Bass Museum Curator of Exhibitions Reflects on Miami’s Artistic BoomThe main event at the convention center, now recognized as the art world’s biggest block party, is expected to draw about 50,000 international visitors and generate close to a half-billion dollars in sales over its four-day run, according to experts. This year marks an increase of nine galleries from last year’s roster, including a whopping 90 galleries from New York City. By comparison, the Magic City’s booming arts scene will have a paltry presence, with the Fredric Snitzer Gallery returning to ABMB’s centerpiece Galleries section, while downtown Miami’s Michael Jon Gallery will make its debut in the fair’s Nova section at the convention center. It’s no surprise Snitzer’s gallery is returning. The owner has been a staple of ABMB since its inception and is a member of the fair’s selection committee. Michael Jon’s selection, however, has raised eyebrows among local dealers because the space is relatively new to a South Florida scene that, for the most part, is steaming over the repeated lack of local representation at ABMB. Also making its debut is Survey, a new sector of the fair boasting 13 select galleries that will feature art-historical projects ranging from solo exhibits to thematic showcases. New York’s Andrew Edlin Gallery will present a two-artist focus on the works of Henry Darger and Marcel Storr, ranking among the top offerings in the section. Special sectors will also showcase performance art, video art, public projects, and upstart galleries. The Positions section will feature 16 curated solo booths, including a meditation on “architectural destruction” by Syrian artist Hrair Sarkissian, who is represented by Greece’s Kalfayan Galleries. Among ABMB’s popular sectors is Public, an outdoor sculpture showcase organized by Public Art Fund director and chief curator Nicholas Baume, whose inaugural effort last year was hailed as one of the fair’s top attractions. Another returning crowd favorite is ABMB’s Film sector, in which curators David Gryn — the director of London’s Artprojx and Zurich collector This Brunner embrace the theme of playfulness for this year’s edition. Gryn will present more than 70 films and videos by an international compilation of artists. The works will screen at Miami Beach SoundScape on the 7,000-square-foot outdoor projection wall of the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center. This year’s satellite scene is expanding to downtown Miami with the inaugural edition of the Concept-Fair at Bayfront Park, where 80 exhibitors will feature blue-chip modern works from 1860 to 1980, including painting, sculpture, photography, design, and objets d’art in a tranquil setting far from ABMB’s more frenetic scene. The event will be housed in a $3 million spaceship-like circular tent with unobstructed views and a translucent ceiling designed to illuminate the artworks under South Florida’s tropical sunlight. Meanwhile, the 305’s top museums will trot out their best shows of the year to seduce visiting art-world cognoscenti and local Basel enthusiasts.
Art Basel Miami Beach at the Miami Beach Convention Center, 2013
For its first anniversary, Perez Art Museum Miami’s (PAMM) Basel bash December 4 will feature a time-based art presentation by Future Brown with Kalela, an underground DJ supergroup. The museum will also unveil a commissioned work by Mexico City-based artist Mario Garcia Torres, whose project “incorporates photography, film, and objects that explore notions of South Florida as a site for withdrawal from society for the purpose of artistic creation,” according to the museum.PAMM also will display “Jardim Botanico,” the first major retrospective of Brazilian abstract painter Beatriz Milhazes. The artist is known for her complex and disorienting compositions bursting with wild, decorative patterns typically rendered in a glowing tropical palette. Both the Frost Art Museum and Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) will showcase influential Chinese artists in their marquee matchups. The Frost has lined up Wang Qingsong, one of China’s top talents, who has earned international raves for his innovative approach to photography. The artist, who began his career as a painter, picked up the camera in the late 1990s and now works in documentary and staged photography, computer-generated images, and sculpture. His solo, “ADinfinitum,” will feature expansive images capturing his homeland’s epic transformation brought on by booming globalization. At the historic Freedom Tower December 5, MOAD will partner with MDC Live Arts to present “Shen Wei: In Black, White, and Gray.” The artist’s first U.S. museum show will be dedicated to a solo series of paintings in collaboration with site-specific performances. Chinese-born, New York-based Shen Wei is a choreographer, director, dancer, painter, and designer who achieved fame as the lead choreographer for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The artist, who has earned acclaim for his cross-cultural, bold movement-based spectacles, will premiere a suite of 11 theatrical and kinetic paintings while choreographing interpretive performances based on these works, resulting in a series of five public performances. If you visit the Bass Museum of Art December 4, you’ll have to navigate through a maze-like Gregor Hildebrandt installation made from hundreds of strips of tape gathered from video cassettes of the Jean Cocteau classic Orpheus. The meandering opus will be part of “One Way: Peter Marino,” a sprawling exhibit opening a window on the noted American architect and luxury designer’s multifaceted relationship with art. Marino, whose pioneering cross-disciplinary practice fuses art, architecture, fashion, and creative spatial design, has long been recognized for commissioning original artworks for his architecture and design. In addition to Hildebrandt’s shimmering tape passageways will be major installations by Guy Limone, Farhad Moshiri, Jean-Michel Othoniel, and Erwin Wurm. Works from Marino’s personal collection will include paintings by Loris Gréaud, Keith Haring, Richard Serra, Rudolf Stingel, and Andy Warhol. The exhibition will also feature sections dedicated to pop art, iconic portraiture, the German spirit, and photography. Marino worked closely with Jerome Sans, the exhibit’s curator, to strike a thought-provoking balance between his architectural work and designs, personal collection, and recent edition of cast-bronze boxes that will be showcased. Last year, North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) drew sizable Basel crowds for notorious British artist Tracy Emin’s first U.S. museum solo show. But this December marks a major litmus test for MOCA, which has been involved in a yearlong controversy. The museum’s board of directors filed a lawsuit against the City of North Miami in April before leaving MOCA with part of its collection and the city hiring a new director. On December 2, the embattled museum’s new administration will open “Shifting Paradigms: The Work of George Edozie,” signaling an institutional shift in focus while hoping MOCA’s fresh direction inspires crowds. Curated by Nkiru Nzegwu, professor of Africana studies at Binghamton University in New York, the exhibit seeks to “articulate and draw attention to the occurrence of a millennium shift in the epistemological paradigm of art-making and interpretation” while opening “MOCA, Art Basel, and the world to a new way of thinking and being in the world as truly universal,” says Babacar M’Bow, the museum’s new director. Edozie, a Nigerian artist who explores themes of identity in his narrative-based works, will present 50 works making their U.S. debut, including a series of freestanding sculptures constructed from fabric that will form his exhibit’s central installation.
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MIAMI NEW TIMES
Bass Museum’s New Curator of Exhibitions Reflects on Miami’s Artistic Boom
By Carlos Suarez De JesusPublished Tue., Sep. 30 2014 at 12:11 PM
Photo by Cristina Lei Rodriguez
Jose Carlos Diaz of the Bass Museum.
This year, our fall Arts & Eats Guide lists all that’s timeless and fresh in Miami, from visual art to delicious food. Theater, dance, music, and drinks all make a much-needed appearance throughout the season as well. Pick up one of our printed guides Thursday, October 2, where you’ll find profiles, interviews, and detailed event calendars to guide you through the upcoming cultural season. Jose Carlos Diaz is a pioneer. He helped transform Wynwood from a decaying warehouse district to a booming hothouse for creativity. Born in Miami, he’s one smart guy. In 2003 he turned his own apartment into the “Worm-Hole Laboratory.” It became a rehearsal space and home for cutting-edge art. Then he left town for five years, earning a master’s degree from the University of Liverpool and serving as a project coordinator during the 2010 Liverpool Biennial. In October of last year, he was named the Bass Museum of Art’s curator of exhibitions, just in time for the museum’s 50th anniversary. New Times recently caught up with the dark and handsome 36-year-old to ask about his new job and his views on how much the local art scene has changed. New Times: Where did you grow up?Jose Carlos Diaz: I was actually born in Miami and grew up in Northern California in Stockton. When did you become interested in art? My mother is an artist, so I have always been interested in art, but I also attended after-school art classes as a teenager. Visiting my local museum in Stockton ignited my interest in art and museums in general. You launched Worm-Hole Laboratory in 2003 in your tiny Edgewater apartment building [the Carolyn]. Can you tell us what inspired your mission and a little about the project? I had just finished my curatorial internship at the Rubell Family Collection. There I had learned so much about curating but did not have enough professional experience to become a museum curator or the funds to open my own gallery. The idea was to use my apartment as a rehearsal space. Miami is very entrepreneurial, so I just ran with it. Essentially, it became nomadic because I did not know how long it would last in the apartment or if other opportunities would emerge. One of the things I remember is that after you opened, you ran up a raft of shows in very rapid succession. How has Miami’s scene changed since then? Today it seems like there are so many galleries in Wynwood and the Design District, but it’s interesting to see how others have moved beyond these boundaries and are launching in downtown, west of Wynwood, and more northbound. It’s also amazing to see so many institutions celebrating anniversaries: the Bass, ArtCenter, Locust Projects, PAMM… Time flies, and it is great to see our roots grow deeper. Your apartment was so tiny. How did you manage to shoehorn group exhibits and other events into the space while continuing your daily affairs? I had an empty apartment, various part-time jobs, and lots of ideas! Miami has often had allure for young artists, so inviting someone to exhibit work in Miami never seemed to be a problem. I am not so sure I could do it now. Many of the artists you first exhibited at your space went on to become established Miami names. How did you find these artists? Who were some of the artists who caught your eye early on? I meet most artists through studio visits. I’m a natural people person, so if I connect with the art and the artist, often interesting ideas blossom. Diego Singh, Pepe Mar, and Cristina Lei Rodriguez were some core inspirations. Pepe and I both studied in San Francisco and we moved the same year. I met so many people from 2003 onward. Many artists I met back then are still making interesting work. I always admired the House and the artists involved. Actually, Martin Oppel and Daniel Arsham from the House launched Placemaker later. A decade later I have Martin in one of my shows, so that’s pretty cool.
Carlos Betancourt’s Amulet for Light in “Gold” at the Bass Museum of Art.
Some of your nomadic shows helped cement Wynwood’s nascent scene. How has the area changed since those times, and do you think it still has a future as an incubator for serious curatorial projects, or has that time come and gone? It’s really amazing to leave a transforming neighborhood and return five years later to see it as a true destination filled with galleries, restaurants, and people walking through the streets. Miami is always in motion, and spaces likeGucciVuitton are creating a lineup of shows that I would never conceive. I like that! They’re really thinking outside the box!Back in the early days of Art Basel Miami Beach, you curated a Christmas tree for the Frisbee art fair. Can you tell us about your artsy tree-trimming project? Not many people remember that! Jen Denike and Anat Ebgi, who were active in Miami, invited me to do a project. With little funds and the holidays approaching, I thought ornaments could be interesting since they are so sculptural. I bought a plastic light-up Christmas tree and asked artists to mail me their ornaments. I still use it as my Christmas tree. How has Basel changed since then, and what unifying or long-term impact has it had on Miami’s art scene? Art Basel Miami Beach continues to bring the international art world to Miami Beach. Satellite fairs, fringe projects, and exhibitions orbit that particular week, but I think since the earlier years, Miami is good at being active at showing great exhibits year-round. Lots of wonderful programming takes place too. In 2005 you co-curated “Hanging by a Thread” at the Moore Space, then run by Silvia Karman Cubiñá, who is now your boss at the Bass. What is it like working for her? I have always admired and looked up to Silvia as a mentor, so to work with her is really a dream come true. She has an impeccable eye for great art and curating excellent shows. I’m inspired! Before joining the Bass as the museum’s curator of exhibitions, you worked at the Tate Liverpool. Can you tell us about your experiences at that institution and some of the projects you were involved with there? I was quite lucky to move to a city that was once home to Henry Tate. Although Tate Liverpool is smaller than Tate Modern and Tate Britain, it presents world-class exhibitions, both modern and contemporary, and rotates works from the Tate permanent collection. I was able to work with the collection and also assisted on Charline von Heyl’s solo show and a special project called The Source, which was a large outdoor pavilion by Doug Aitken filled with his video conversations he recorded with leading figures in the creative sector, like Tilda Swinton and Jack White. It was a huge AV challenge installing the work, but very rewarding! From that I curated a show tracking the last 25-year history of Tate Liverpool. Your first curatorial effort for the Bass, “Gold,” marks the museum’s 50th anniversary and is currently on view. How long did you work on your official Bass debut show, and what are some of your favorite works on display? I worked on the exhibit for about a year. As you can imagine, I really love all the works! The online new-media projects, by Patricia Hernandez and Yucef Merhi, are always in a state of flux, and I love that. One continues to monitor the price of gold, and the other, by Patti, is selling a virtual island for bitcoins, a type of online currency unregulated by the government. Anyone can access these works from home [at simulatingvalue.com and quetzalcoatl2012.net]. Silvia has turned the museum’s profile around in short order, giving visiting and local artists a platform to exhibit projects in conjunction with older works in its collection. What’s the importance of this approach in terms of education? Our museum has a permanent collection that really allows us to go beyond and explore many areas. In fact, we have had real success focusing on fashion: Just last spring, Harold Koda curated a show about the subject matter found in Dutch vanitas-style paintings by pairing haute couture with contemporary works also addressing the same themes. What are some of your plans for the Bass, and what role does the museum fill on an institutional scene that has radically changed in the past year? I am working on some exhibitions and projects for the future. Many are a surprise! What can you reveal about yourself that readers might not know? I have a twin brother who won the Latin Grammy last year for best children’s album [Lucky Diaz and the Family Jam Band].
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ARTNET NEWS
Art Basel in Miami Beach Launches Art Historical Sector
Art Basel in Miami Beach (ABMB) has established itself as one of the world’s foremost art fairs for all things brand new and cutting edge, and now the mega-fair is carving out some space for art history with its new “Survey” sector. Set to debut during this year’s edition, running December 4–7 (see “Art Basel in Miami Beach 2014 Boasts an Intimidating 267 Galleries“), the Survey section will boast 13 mini art historical presentations, including 9 solo exhibitions and 4 thematic shows. The inaugural lineup of Survey presentations will highlight lesser-known artists and movements. São Paulo’s Galeria Bergamin will showcase the work of Brazilian painter Alfredo Volpi, who was especially influential in the middle of the 20th century. Paris’s Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois will showcase two sculptures from around the same period by Niki de Saint Phalle, while Garth Greenan Gallery‘s solo presentation of paintings and sculptures by Paul Feeley will span the early-to-mid 1960s. New York gallery Menconi + Schoelkopf is bringing photographs and paintings by the Canadian-born American Ralston Crawford, one of the leaders of the Precisionism movement. Another New York gallery, Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, will show pieces spanning the decade between 1969 and 1979 by conceptual, minimalist, and land art figure Michelle Stuart. Works from roughly the same period by the Chilean Lotty Rosenfeld, including photo, video, and slides, will be displayed by Valencia’s espaivisor. James Fuentes Gallery, meanwhile, will display Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’s Big Book, a walk-in, book-shaped installation that made its debut in 1966. Galleri Bo Bjerggaard will present an exhibition of the Danish sculptor Poul Gernes’s work, co-curated by Gernes’s youngest daughters. Rounding out the solo presentations is Japan’s Y++ Wada Fine Arts, which will show dystopic and melancholy paintings by Tetsuya Ishida. The group shows in Survey boast a similarly eclectic selection. Perhaps most intriguing will be Cecilia de Torres, Ltd‘s exhibition of Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s self-titled constructivist art movement and workshop the Taller Torres-García, which spanned the 40s and 50s. New York’s Broadway 1602 will bring together works by four women artists who got their start in the 60s and 70s: the late French conceptualist Gina Pane; the New York-based sculptor and painter Rosemarie Castoro; the Brazilian artist Lenora De Barros; and Lydia Okumura, the Japanese-Brazilian artist known for her minimalist site-specific installations. New York-based Outsider art dealer Andrew Edlin will present a two-artist show juxtaposing works by Henry Darger and Marcel Storr. And finally Vienna’s Charim Galerie will show works by three of the Vienna Actionists: experimental feminist filmmaker Valerie Export; conceptual artist Andrei Monastyrski; and early Action painter Alfons Schilling.
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ICA Miami Launch is Yet Another Reason to Leave New York in December
Just in case you needed an excuse to make a trip to Miami this winter, the new Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami will open to the public on December 2 with exhibitions by artists Pedro Reyes and Andra Ursuta. Ms. Ursuta’s collection of new work includes Soft Power1 and 2 (2013), huge sculptures of fists made from quilted comforters. Mr. Reyes’ installation, Sanatorium, will transform the museum’s second floor into a clinic where non-professionals will interview, diagnose, and provide visitors with one of 16 types of therapy, like Gestalt or hypnosis. First staged at the Guggenheim in 2011, it’s a “democratization of therapy, a ‘psychological first aid,’” according to a statement from Reyes on his website. The Mexico City-based artist will be on hand to train volunteer therapists and pass on suggestions for visitors’ treatment during the exhibition’s opening week, which coincides with mega-show Art Basel Miami Beach from December 4 through 7. “The exhibitions will seek to create a unique experience that’s both complementary to and distinct from the fair, and the city,” ICA Miami deputy director and chief curator Alex Gartenfeld told TheObserver. ICA Miami’s opening comes after a dramatic spat between the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and the City of North Miami. In August, some MoCA staff announced their departure from the museum and their plans to reopen as ICA Miami in the Design District’s Moore Building. Mr. Gartenfeld explained that ICA Miami hopes to set itself apart from the city’s art scene by focusing on emerging and experimental artists and commissioning new works. The opening exhibitions are also making use of the museum’s new 12,500-square foot space in the Moore Building, donated by Miami Design District Associates. Ms. Ursuta’s installations will be integrated into the architectural details found throughout the former furniture showroom’s atrium gallery, added Mr. Gartenfeld. Last week ICA Miami rounded out its leadership with the appointment of new interim director Suzanne Weaver, the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Ms. Weaver replaced Mr. Gartenfeld, who has moved into the position of deputy director and chief curator after previously serving as interim director of MoCA. The inaugural exhibitions will run from December 3 to March 2015 and will be free to the public. Mr. Gartenfeld wouldn’t give specifics on how long admission will remain free, but said only that visitors wouldn’t have to pay as long as the museum stays in the Moore Building.
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Exhibitions
Peter Marino, Still In Leather, Details the Mammoth Exhibition of His Collection
“One Way: Peter Marino” opens at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach on December 4.
It’s always nice to see someone like Peter Marino walk into a fancy party, like he did at a dinner in his honor given by Design Miami Tuesday night, with all the suits and swanky dresses. This is because Peter Marino—the architect responsible for dreaming up most of the world’s high-end boutiques, who is also a designer, muse, motorcyclist and major collector—eschews anything that could be called “fancy” in favor of leather on metal on leather. His outfit for the evening: a leather vest pricked all over with metal studs, leather wristguards with metal spikes, a leather hat with a metal skull, a strand of leather hanging from his neck which holds some metal knives, leather belt, metal belt buckle, metal knuckles with skulls, leather pants, leather boots. All the leather is always black. He’s a great person to honor with a dinner, because he comes complete with three different modes of personality. Sometimes he prefaces everything with a long “Dude…” and sometimes he affects a strong British accent for no reason in particular. He also likes to refer to himself in the third person—not as “Peter,” as one might think, but as “The Pedro.” And then there’s his art collection. He’s got a thing for Renaissance Bronzes—he’s got 36 of them. He’s bought scores of Warhols, hordes of Hirsts, and many, many Mapplethorpes. Peter Marino owns so many Anselm Kiefers that Anselm Kiefer refers to Peter Marino’s house in Aspen as “The Anselm Kiefer Museum.” And this—this collection as loud as his outfits—is the reason for the dinner where he can totally disregard any sort of dress code. In December, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami will open “One Way: Peter Marino,” the first major review of his mammoth collection and his contributions to the world of fashion, architecture, and design. More on that in a second, but first I have to describe my first interaction with Mr. Marino, at the dinner Tuesday. You see, the star architect was not always the jet-setting man in black, the dynamo creator of designer stores, the guy ensuring that the ritziest of retailers could corral the shopper’s eye directly to the products upon entering the store. He was once Pete Marino from Queens, living in squalor and worshipping Warhol, who gave him his first work and exposure. “Dude… I’m just inviting all my friends for a free meal!” he said, swinging one leather-clad arm toward the two tables. (This would be Dude Peter, but he switched to British Peter later in the night, and other people were worried if The Pedro would come out, too). “I just ate at Tad’s Steakhouse for 11 years,” he bellowed. “99 cents a steak! I would just inhale them, and then I would go and stuff them in my pockets, just stuffing all these steaks in my pockets. Here he made some furious swooping motions with his arms toward himself, as if stuffing his pockets full of steak. His current pants were way too tight to have pockets, but the extra-beefy mental image of steaks in leather pockets was a nice one. “When Tad’s closed, I starved for two years,” he went on. “Look, dude… when people ask, ‘Isn’t it nice to have money?’ I’m like, dude… that was like two years ago!” The dinner continued on well into the night, and then, the next morning it was more Marino: he gave a chat in the offices of Peter Marino Architect, which naturally is very, very high up in a Midtown East building. My ears popped on the elevator zooming up, then I was lead past Warhols and Tom Sachs-drawn guides and Han Dynasty vases and Richard Princes and so on and so forth. He was talking about “One Way: Peter Marino,” and once again he had on more leather than all the biker bars in Detroit, and once again he was surrounded by guys in suits, and it didn’t matter. At least he called upon British Peter for the occasion. (Wherever was The Pedro, I wondered.) It was an attractive room, with models and drawn plans for private home commissions—homes in Lebanon, Star Island, Southampton, Sagaponack—and a view of that much-questioned skyscraper, One57, as cranes bring materials up to its peak. Mr. Marino went about describing what sounds like it will be one of the most talked-about things going on during Art Basel Miami Beach. There’s a room of Marino-designed bronze boxes, the walls all made of black leather. There’s a multi-part opera that Mr. Marino made in collaboration with Francisco Clemente and Dior designer Raf Simons. Also in the mix was Jérôme Sans, the co-founder of Palais de Tokyo in Paris and former editor-in-chief of L’Officiel Art, who curated the show. He was video chatting in from France, as one does. “I’m going to give a physical walkthrough of the show and then Jérôme is going to make sense of it all,” he said. He began by showing off the catalog, which had along its spine—what else?—a black leather clasp studded with metal. “Just in case the people didn’t know who the show was about!” Mr. Marino said. There are five commissions in the show. The first is by Gregor Hildebrandt, and it’s on the outside of the building. “I was like, how can that go over the outside of the building? Because I’m not crazy about the way it looks,” he said, to the slight consternation of Silvia Cubina, the executive director of the Bass Museum, who was standing right next to him. The Hildebrand work is a giant portrait of Mr. Marino. “You’ll see it from airplanes 38,000 feet in the air,” he said. He ran through a few more plans for other rooms in the exhibition—a lot of Mapplethorpes, a skeleton wearing a lot of leather called Peter Marino in 100 Years—and then turned it over to Mr. Sans, who began speaking of the show in his own style, one that was slightly more elliptical than that of the punchy, loud Mr. Marino. “The show has this life, and this presence, this skin, and it is going into the future, and the future cannot exist without the past,” the floating head of Mr. Sans said. “I love hearing that the show actually makes sense!” Mr. Marino said at the end of Mr. Sans’ remarks. Then, before everyone was to walk back out through the Hirst-heavy hallways and pieces of antiquities at every corner, someone asked which artist he first bought when he began collecting. “Warhol,” he said, in that put-on British accent. “I know that sounds very chic and all, but I was working for him, and he gave me a painting. He helped me out. One day he gave me a check and said, ‘If you’re smart, you won’t cash that, because my signature is going to be worth more than the check itself.’ But I was broke, so I cashed it. And what do you know! Andy was right.”
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ARTNET NEWS
NADA Miami Beach 2014 Will Be the Anti-Art Basel
Rozalia Jovanovic, Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) has just announced its exhibitor list for the 12th edition of NADA Miami Beach. The art fair, which will take place from December 4–7 at the Deauville Beach Resort, will feature over 90 exhibitors with a little over 40 from New York, and including 36 international galleries, along with 15 exhibitors that are new to the fair. There are around twenty New York exhibitors that are not returning this year, including Churner + Churner, James Fuentes, the Hole, Horton (which merged earlier this year with ZieherSmith), Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Joe Sheftel, Kerry Schuss, Simone Subal, Kate Werble, Feature Inc. (the gallery’s founder, Hudson, died earlier this year), Andrew Edlin, Clifton Benevento, the Still House Group, Know More Games, Recess, and Devon Dikeou. Some, like Clifton Benevento and Simone Subal, are doing Art Basel in Miami Beach this year. Some are not making it to Miami at all this year. Kate Werble said she is attending two fairs in Europe in October—London’s SUNDAY Art Fair and the new FIAC satellite (Off)icielle—and her gallery just underwent an expansion. Some New York galleries that did not partake last year but are exhibiting this year are Bodega, Chapter NY, the Lodge Gallery, Grand Century, Koenig & Clinton, Kai Matsumiya, Simon Preston, Regina Rex, and Tomorrow. “Galleries apply to multiple fairs with multiple types of projects,” Maggie Clinton of Koenig & Clinton told artnet News. “The project we applied with to Art Basel Miami Beach was waitlisted.” While the gallery has participated numerous times in NADA Miami Beach, it did Art Basel Miami Beach last year. This year, it is participating in NADA and Untitled. But she said that their decision about which fairs to attend related more to the formats of the various fairs. “I think that NADA is an excellent format for emerging artists. Untitled is really great for curatorial projects. We have an artist that will be featured at the fair, and it’s the type of project that could not be shown at any of the other fairs.” Other advantages NADA has over the larger fair? “You’re not going to see way too much stuff,” Clinton said. “There’s not a huge discrepancy between larger booths and smaller booths.” While she noted the benefit of the larger audience at a larger fair, she said there was less chance of falling victim to so-called “fairtigue.” “You also have this moment in between, because of the architecture, to just have a coffee, and stop and see more art.” Without further ado, here is the list: Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada The Apartment, Vancouver Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn, Estonia High Art, Paris, France Future Gallery, Berlin, Germany Natalia Hug Gallery, Cologne, Germany, Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne Germany Linn Luhn, Dusseldorf, Germany Galerie Max Mayer, Dusseldorf, Germany Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt, Germany Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City, Guatemala Tempo Rubato, Tel Aviv, Israel Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy Frutta, Rome, Italy, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome, Italy Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg, Luxembourg Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico Rob Bianco, Oslo, Norway Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo, Japan Kayokoyuki, Tokyo, Japan Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, Japan Mujin-To Production, Tokyo, Japan XYZ Collective, Tokyo, Japan Roberto Paradise, San Juan, Puerto Rico Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Truth and Consequences, Geneva, Switzerland Glasgow International, Glasgow, UK Ibid, London, UK Kinman, London, UK Seventeen, London, UK Rob Tuffnell, London, UK Rod Barton, London, UK The Sunday Painter, London, UK Jonathan Viner, London, UK Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK 247365, New York, Brooklyn, New York Clearing, New York, Brooklyn, New York The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, New York Courtney Blades, Chicago, Illinois Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, Illinois And Now, Dallas, Texas Bill Brady Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles, CA Thomas Duncan, Los Angeles, CA Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, CA International Art Objects Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Overduin & Co, Los Angeles, CA Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Tif Sigfrids, Los Angeles, CA Young Art, Los Angeles, CA Locust Projects, Miami, FLA The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI David Peterson Gallery, Minneapolis, MN Alden Projects, New York American Contemporary, New York Nicelle Bauchene Gallery, New York Bodega, New York Brennan and Griffin, New York Callicoon Fine Arts, New York Canada, New York Lisa Cooley, New York Chapter NY, New York Independent Curators International (ICI), New York Eleven Rivington, New York Derek Eller, New York Thomas Erben Gallery, New York Essex Street, New York Zach Feuer, New York Foxy Production, New York Laurel Gitlen, New York The Lodge Gallery, New York Grand Century, New York Jack Hanley Gallery, New York Invisible-Exports, New York JTT, New York Karma, New York Koenig & Clinton, New York David Lewis, New York Magic Flying Carpets, New York Marlborough Chelsea, New York Martos Gallery, New York Kai Matsumiya, New York P!, New York Eli Ping Frances Perkins, New York Simon Preston, New York Regina Rex, New York Sculpture Center, New York Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York Tomorrow, New York White Columns, New York Creative Growth, Oakland, CA Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA ===
Suzanne Weaver Will Lead Miami’s New Contemporary Art Museum
Sarah Cascone, Tuesday, September 23, 2014 The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami, founded by the former board of trustees and staff of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami (see “MOCA North Miami Closes in Controversy“), is making a fresh start in its new Miami Design District home with Suzanne Weaver, who has been appointed the reborn institution’s interim director. A 20 year art world veteran, Weaver has previously held curatorial positions at institutions such as the Dallas Museum of Art and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Alex Gartenfeld, who had served in an interim capacity as director since September of 2013, following the departure of Bonnie Clearwater, has been promoted to deputy director and chief curator. He joined the museum in May of 2013 as a curator. The new ICA Miami looks to move past its troubled MOCA North Miami past, which saw the city fail to provide funding and led to a heated battle over museum leadership (see “The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami Sues City For Breach of Contract” and “Racist Taunts Escalate MOCA North Miami Feud“). It will open in the the Design District’s Moore Building in December, presumably just in time for Art Basel in Miami Beach festivities (see “Art Basel in Miami Beach 2014 Boasts an Intimidating 267 Galleries“). The interim space, provided rent-free by Miami Design District Associates while the board of trustees seeks a new permanent home, measures 12,500 square feet. “We are thrilled to be welcoming Suzanne Weaver as our new interim director, whose talent, enthusiasm, and professional experience will be an invaluable asset as the museum continues to grow,” said Ray Ellen Yarkin, co-chair of the ICA’s board, in a press release. “It is truly an honor to work with such a highly talented and committed Board of Trustees and staff to launch a new museum of contemporary art dedicated to quality, excellence, and rigor,” added Weaver. “Together, we will create an institution that will be an important addition to Miami’s dynamism internationally and make a lasting mark on the intellectual, cultural, and artistic life of the region.” ==
SCOPE Bringing 111 Galleries to Miami in December
Sarah Cascone, Friday, September 19, 2014 Not to be outdone by Art Basel in Miami Beach, PULSE, NADA, and UNTITLED., the venerable SCOPE art fair, now in its 14th year, has announced its exhibitors for its 2014 Miami Beach edition. A total of 111 galleries will be on hand, representing 27 countries and 48 cities. The fair runs December 3–7. With a focus on emerging artists, SCOPE will once again feature its Breeder Program, which provides an important showcase for new commercial galleries. The fair will also introduce a FocusKorea section, a collaboration with the Galleries Association of Korea sponsored by the Korea Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (similar to the Korean section at this summer’s Art Hamptons, as reported in “Hamptons Art Fairs Target Hipster Collectors with Edgy, Nostalgic Artworks“). This year, SCOPE will partner with Juxtapoz Magazine in what is being described as “an exploration of the New Contemporary.” As part of “Juxtapoz Presents,” Kimou “Grotesk” Meyer will design and create an interactive newsstand installation inspired by old Brooklyn, and based on Meyer’s 2009 cover for Juxtapoz. The stand will sell artist-made goods, magazines, as well as the new book, Juxtapoz Hyperrealism. Here is the full list of SCOPE Miami Beach 2014′s participating galleries:
ACE Gallery | Los Angeles Andenken | Amsterdam Art Park Gallery | Seoul Art Projects Gallery | Hong Kong Artside Gallery | Seoul Asterisk Projects | Brooklyn AUREUS Contemporary | Providence Baiksong Gallery | Seoul Barbarian Art Gallery | Zurich Galerija Bastejs | Riga Beautiful Asset Art Projects | Beijing Tally Beck Contemporary | New York Gallery Bhak | Seoul Gallery Biba | Palm Beach Black Book Gallery | Denver blunt | Toronto Bon Gallery | Seoul Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts | Binghampton C-Arte | Buenos Aires C.A.V.E. Gallery | Venice Beach Callan Contemporary | New Orleans Lawrence Cantor Fine Art | Venice Chalk Horse | Sydney Chandran Gallery | San Francisco CHUNG Art Gallery | Seoul Chung Jark Gallery | Seoul Dorothy Circus Gallery | Rome Elizabeth Clement Fine Art | Danvers & New York Ethan Cohen Fine Arts | New York Collage Habana Gallery | Havana Contempop | Tel Aviv Copro Gallery | Santa Monica Corridor Contemporary | Tel Aviv DECORAZON | London Dubner Moderne | Lausanne E3 {a small gallery} | Ostend Faur Zsófi Galéria | Budapest Fifty24MX | Mexico City The Flat – Massimo Carasi | Milan Forré & Co. Fine Art | Aspen Emmanuel Fremin Gallery | New York Fresh Eggs | Berlin Gallery G-77 | Kyoto Gana Art | Seoul Gauntlet Gallery | San Francisco Gallery Godo | Seoul Galerie Frédéric Got | Paris Joseph Gross Gallery | New York Mark Hachem | Paris & New York Hashimoto Contemporary | San Francisco Cheryl Hazan Contemporary Art | New York Kashya Hildebrand | London Kirk Hopper | Dallas Dan Hort Projects | New York Inner State Gallery | Detroit JanKossen Contemporary | Basel K + Y Gallery | Paris Kallenbach Gallery | Amsterdam Jacob Karpio Galeria | San Jose Keumsan Gallery | Seoul L’inlassable | Paris La Ira de Dios | Buenos Aires Labartino | Miami Jonathan LeVine Gallery | New York Life as a Work of Art | New York Long Sharp Gallery | Indianapolis Luster | Brooklyn Galerie Magenta | Antwerp Magpi Projects | New York Primo Marella Gallery | Milan Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art | Salzburg & Vienna Miami’s Independent Thinkers | Miami Mighty Tanaka | Brooklyn Mirus Gallery | San Francisco Mordekai | New York Leila Mordoch Gallery | Miami NextArt | Budapest NUNC Contemporary | Antwerp Ohshima Fine Art | Tokyo OTCA | London Galleri Oxholm | Copenhagen Pabellón 4 Arte Contemporáneo | Buenos Aires Paik Hae Young Gallery | Seoul Paradigm Gallery | Philadelphia Parlor Gallery | Asbury Park Pavleye Art & Culture | Prague Phone Booth Gallery | Long Beach Project Gallery | Los Angeles Pyo Gallery | Seoul RARE | New York Red Corridor Gallery | Künzell Red Truck Gallery | New Orleans Duane Reed Gallery | St. Louis Rush Arts Gallery | Brooklyn Gallery Shilla | Seoul Shirin Gallery | Tehran & New York Stick Together | Amsterdam StolenSpace | London TBD Independent Projects | Key Biscayne Thinkspace | Los Angeles Tribe13 Gallery | Redwood Valley Vertical Gallery | Chicago Vice Gallery | Miami Vogelsang Gallery | Brussels Gallery on Wade | Toronto Wallplay | New York Waltman Ortega | Miami & Paris Wanrooij Gallery | Amsterdam Wellside Gallery | Seoul White Walls | San Francisco Woolff Gallery | London Wunderkammern | Rome Yellow Peril Gallery | Providence 55bellechase | Paris == ARTNET NEWS
UNTITLED. Lines Up 96 Galleries for Third Edition
Sarah Cascone, Tuesday, September 9, 2014 As if Art Basel in Miami Beach‘s impressively long list of exhibitors wasn’t enough to look forward to this December (see “Art Basel in Miami Beach 2014 Boasts an Intimidating 267 Galleries“), there are also the event’s numerous competing satellite fairs, which are also beginning to announce their 2014 line-ups. The third edition of UNTITLED. (running December 3–7) has just unveiled plans to feature work from over 200 emerging and established contemporary artists represented by 96 galleries and non-profit art organizations from 18 countries, as well as 16 cities in the US. The fair will be hosted in a temporary beach-side pavilion designed by K/R architects under John Keenen. With a newly expanded curatorial team comprising artistic director Omar López-Chahoud and curators Christophe Boutin and Melanie Scarciglia, UNTITLED. will host a series of conversations, performances, and events, as well as special projects (see “Miami’s UNTITLED. Fair Adds Curators, Gets New Tent“). As part of the special projects series, Paul Ramírez Jonas will present his volcanic rock and cork sculpture, Publicar V (2010), while French conceptual artist Mathieu Mercier has created a series of new works for the fair, to be shown by New York’s Denis Gardarin Inc. New York non-profit gallery carriage trade will present Cutting Through the Suburbs, a multimedia project memorializing 1970s suburbia and featuring works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Bill Owens, and James Wines/SITE Architects & Howard Silver. The fair is also partnering with online art service Curiator, which will allow UNTITLED. visitors to peruse the fair’s offerings online, creating digital collections, both in the two-week period leading up to the annual event, for VIPs, and during its run, for all guests. Here is the full list of UNTITLED. 2014′s participating galleries: (+) R – Barcelona Ada – Richmond, Virginia Adn Galeria – Barcelona Andrew Rafacz, Chicago Arroniz – Mexico City Artag – Helskinki Art Nueve – Murcia, Spain Arts & Leisure Gallery – New York Asya Geisberg Gallery – New York Bitforms Gallery NYC – New York Bravinlee Programs – New York Carriage Trade – New York Carrie Secrist – Chicago Casa Maauad – Mexico City Cindy Rucker Gallery – New York Cirrus Gallery – Los Angeles, California Cristin Tierney – New York Curro & Poncho – Jalisco, Mexico De La Cruz Projects – San José, Costa Rica Diablo Rosso –Panama City Denis Gardarin Inc. – New York Denny Gallery – New York Document-Art Gallery – New York Espacio No Minimo – Guayaquil, Ecuador Formato Comodo – Madrid, Spain Fredericks & Freiser – New York Fridman Gallery – New York Galería Bacelos – Madrid Galeria Espacio Minimo – Madrid Galería Juan Silió – Santander, Spain Galería Nora Fisch – Buenos Aries Galeria Pilar – São Paulo Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran – Montreal Galerie Laurent Godin – Paris Galerie Richard – New York Galerie Thomas Fuchs – Stuttgart, Germany Gallery Sinne – Helsinki González Y González – Santiago Halsey Mckay Gallery – East Hamptons, New York Henrique Faria Buenos Aires – Buenos Aires Hionas Gallery – New York Inman Gallery – Houston Island Press – St. Louis Jack Bell Gallery – London Johannes Vogt Gallery – New York Johansson Projects – Oakland, California Josée Bienvenu – New York Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery – New York Koenig & Clinton – New York Kravets Wehby Gallery – New York Kristen Lorello – New York Lawrie Shabibi – Dubai Little Big Man Gallery – San Francisco Longhouse Projects – New York Lora Reynolds – Austin Lucia De La Puente – Lima Luis De Jesus Los Angeles – Los Angeles Lvl3 – Chicago Makebish – New York Maloney Fine Art – Los Angeles Marisa Newman Projects – New York Marso – Mexico City Max Estrella – Madrid Microscope Gallery – Brooklyn Mite – Buenos Aires Mkg127 – Toronto Monique Meloche – Chicago Mulherin – Toronto Narrative Projects – London Nathalie Karg Gallery – New York Nueveochenta – Bogotá, Colombia Parisian Laundry – Montreal Present Company – Brooklyn Projektrom Normanns – Stavanger, Norway Richard Heller Gallery – Santa Monica, California Rincón Projects – Bogotá, Colombia Romer Young Gallery – San Francisco Ronchini Gallery – London Royale Projects: Contemporary Art – Palm Desert, California Salon Dahlmann – Berlin Sandra Gering Inc. – New York Sic Helsinki – Helsinki Site:Lab – Grand Rapids, Michigan Steve Turner Contemporary – Los Angeles Steven Zevitas – Boston Susan Inglett – New York Taymour Grahne Gallery – New York Threewalls – Chicago Today Is the Day Foundation – New York Universal Limited Art Editions – Bay Shore, New York Upfor – Portland, Oregon Vigo Gallery – London Western Exhibitions – Chicago Y Gallery – New York Zieher Smith & Horton – New York Zürcher Studio, – New York ==
Announcing PULSE Miami Beach Artists and Exhibitors
PULSE Contemporary Art Fair is pleased to announce the artists and galleries exhibiting at PULSE Miami Beach 2014. The fair, in a new custom-designed venue on Indian Beach Park, will feature work from over 150 cutting-edge artists presented by a select group of exhibitors from Asia, Europe and the Americas.”As we move into the tenth year of PULSE, we are focused on celebrating artists, who are the core of the fair and the indeed the industry as a whole,” says Director Helen Toomer. “We are excited about our move to mid-Miami Beach and our newly-designed exhibition space that will compliment the presentation and discovery of these artists’ work and we look forward to welcoming the international arts community to our new home.” Read more about PULSE’s tenth year in Miami in the New York Observerand scroll down to read the full list of artists and exhibitors.
PULSE Miami Beach at Indian Beach Park. Rendering courtesy of PULSE Contemporary Art Fair.
PULSE Miami Beach 2014 Artists & Exhibitors – (Learn more here) Art Mûr, Montreal, Canada: Jinny Yu Ballast Projects, New York, NY: Russell Tyler (POINTS) Beers Contemporary, London, UK: Faig Ahmed | Janneke Von Leeuwen | Tony Romano | Pawel Sliwinski Black & White Gallery/Project Space, Brooklyn, NY: Michael Van den Besselaar Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York, NY: Yorgo Alexopoulos | Edward Burtynsky | Jim Campbell | Robert Currie | Airan Kang | Jimmy Nelson | Jose Parla Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York, NY: Yapci Ramos CC Gallery, Berlin, Germany: Maya Hayuk Danziger Gallery, New York, NY: Christopher Bucklow | Susan Derges | Hendrik Kerstens | Karen Knorr | Jim Krantz | Corinne Vionner Davidson Contemporary, New York, NY: Kiel Johnson | Darren Lago | Sam Messenger | Thomas Witte | Ghost Of A Dream De Buck Gallery, New York, NY: Simon Vega | XOOOOX De Soto Gallery, Venice, CA: Amelia Bauer | Brian Paumier | Ramona Rosales (IMPULSE) DIA Galería, Mexico City, Mexico: César López-Negrete | Ricardo Paniagua Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR: Ann Hamilton | Sean Healy | Isaac Layman | Julia Mangold | Anna Von Mertens Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn, NY: Mark Masyga | Sasha Bezzubov galerieKleindienst, Leipzig, Germany: Corinne von Lebusa | Christoph Ruckhäberle Galerie Simon Blais, Montreal, Canada: Jean-Sébastien Denis | Alexis Lavoie | Yann Pocreau Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, PA: Mia Rosenthal gallery nine5, New York, NY: Soojin Cha | Jessica Lichtenstein | Ignacio Muñoz Vicuña Gallery Poulsen, Copenhagen, Denmark: Barnaby Whitfield | Aaron Johnson | Jean-Pierre Roy | Eric White Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA: SuttonBeresCuller | Chris Engman | Margie Livingston | Whiting Tennis GUSFORD | los angeles, Los Angeles, CA: Genevieve Chua (IMPULSE) Heskin Contemporary, New York, NY: Doreen McCarthy | Jennifer Riley Horrach Moya, Palma de Mallorca, Spain: Aníbal López | Jorge Mayet | Joana Vasconcelos Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA: Jim Campbell | Jay DeFeo | Jutta Haeckel | Emil Lukas | Marco Maggi | Andrew Schoultz James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA: Karin Davie | Gary Hill | Alexander Kroll | Cameron Martin | Alwyn O’Brien | Akio Takamori junior projects, New York, NY: Guy C. Correiro | Stuart Elster (IMPULSE) LAMONTAGNE GALLERY, Boston, MA: Gil Blank | Jeff Perrott | Joe Warwell LA NEW GALLERY, Madrid, Spain: Cristina de Middel | Santiago Talavera | Jorge Fuembuena LMAKprojects, New York, NY: Jonathan Calm | Popel Coumou | Claudia Joskowicz | Erika Ranee LYNCH THAM, New York, NY: Carlo Ferraris | Walter Robinson (IMPULSE) MA2Gallery, Tokyo, Japan: Ken Matsubara Miller Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA: Evelyn Rydz | Nathalie Miebach | Deb Todd Wheeler New Image Art, West Hollywood, CA: Cleon Peterson | Retna | Maya Hayuk Nohra Haime Gallery, New York, NY: Natalia Arias Nuova Galleria Morone, Milan, Italy: Felix Curto | Mariella Bettineschi | Domenico Grenci | Sadegh Tirafkan Paci contemporary, Brescia, Italy: Michal Macku | Teun Hocks Patrick Heide Contemporary, London, UK: Pius Fox | Hans Kotter | Reinoud Oudshoorn | Dillwyn Smith Paul Loya Gallery, Los Angeles, CA: Tom Fruin Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO: Andrew Masullo | Gary Stephan | Chuck Webster | John Zinsser Purdy Hicks Gallery, London, UK: Sue Arrowsmith | Jonathan Delafield Cook | Claire Kerr | Susan Derges | Sandra Kantanen | Jorma Puranen Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA: Dawoud Bey | Joe Cunningham | Bovey Lee | Nathan Lynch | Vik Muniz Rick Wester Fine Art, New York, NY: Alyse Rosner | Laurie Lambrecht | Lilly McElroy ROCKELMANN&, Berlin, Germany: Florian Japp | Jeffrey Teuton (IMPULSE) Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica, CA: John Mills Rosa Santos, Valencia, Spain: Andrea Canepa SENDA, Barcelona, Spain: Oleg Dou | Anthony Goicolea | Sandra Vásquez de la Horra | James Clar Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA: Phil Argent | Kathy Butterly | Rachel Lachowicz | Izhar Patkin | Berverly Semmes | Michal Rovner | Kiki Smith Schroeder Romero, New York, NY: Lisa Levy Shulamit Gallery, Venice, CA: Kamran Sharif | Shahab Fatouhi | Tal Shochat Sienna Patti Contemporary, Lenox, MA: Lauren Fensterstock | Susie Ganch taubert contemporary, Berlin, Germany: Adrian Esparza | Markus Linnenbrink | Markus Weggenmann | Beat Zoderer | Jan von der Ploeg | Dionisio González | Sylvan Lionni Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, NY: Arahmaiani | Heri Dono | FX Harsono | Agus Suwage Uprise Art, New York, NY: Eric LoPresti | Erin O’Keefe Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA: Tm Gratkowski WAGNER + PARTNER, Berlin, Germany: Erwin Olaf | Mona Ardeleanu | Peter Dreher | Ruud van Empel WATERHOUSE & DODD, New York, NY: Kim Keever | Jean-François Rauzier | Xavier Guardans X-Change Art Project, Lima, Peru: Alessadra Rebagliati | Ana Cecilia Farah| Marian Riveros | MOHO Collective (POINTS) Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY: Marco Breuer | Lorenzo Vitturi | Alison Rossiter | Matthew Brandt | Assaf Shaham YUKI-SIS, Tokyo, Japan: Katsutoshi Yuasa | Kohei Kawasaki (IMPULSE) Zhulong Gallery, Dallas, TX: Alexander Gorczynski | James Geurts (IMPULSE)
WALL STREET JOURNAL
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Britain’s Royal Academy Surveys Anselm Kiefer’s Work Preoccupied by politics and history, the German-born Anselm Kiefer is getting a retrospective at Britain’s Royal Academy
Anselm Kiefer often uses unusual materials including straw and real blood to confront Germany’s past.DPA/Zuma Press
By MARY M. LANE CONNECT
Sept. 18, 2014 4:09 p.m. ET
The Works of Anselm Kiefer
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Anselm Kiefer often uses unusual materials including straw and real blood to confront Germany’s past. DPA/Zuma Press
In the late 1960s, when German artist Anselm Kiefer was in his early 20s, he owned recorded speeches by Adolf Hitler and other Third Reich leaders. The Allies had distributed the recordings after World War II in a move to encourage reluctant Germans to confront their Nazi past.
For Mr. Kiefer, now 69, the impassioned speeches acted as a trigger: He would use his art as a weapon to fight social amnesia. “Now you can turn on German TV and there’s likely to be a documentary about the war. When I was growing up in the 1960s you didn’t even talk about it,” says Mr. Kiefer.
In 1969, wearing his father’s military uniform, the artist had himself photographed giving the banned Nazi salute and bound the photos along with Nazi-themed watercolors into two cardboard books. The performance launched a career that would remain dominated by Mr. Kiefer’s preoccupation with Germany’s past and the nation’s politics.
Both books are part of a retrospective opening at London’s Royal Academy on Sept. 27 and running until Dec. 14. The exhibition documents how over 40 years the France-based artist has employed such materials as oil paints, straw and electrolyzed lead to convey his mostly grave messages.
The Nazi salute quickly disappeared from his work, and some art in the show touches on more neutral themes, such as “Osiris and Isis,” a large 1985-87 work of oil and acrylic emulsion exploring the nuances of ancient Egyptian mysticism. But Mr. Kiefer has kept returning to Nazi Germany, albeit often in oblique ways. ” Georges Bataille : Blue of Noon,” a new set of watercolors and pencil on plaster, alludes to a prewar erotic novella by the 20th-century French writer in which a group of Hitler youths plays a peripheral role.
“I hate that I’m using this clichéd phrase but he’s very much an ‘intellectual artist,'” says Kathleen Soriano, the show’s curator. Ms. Soriano, 51, says she decided against explanatory wall captions to avoid “hitting visitors over the head with all the meanings in the show” and limited such clarification to the catalog.
Visitors unschooled in the artist’s obscure references may be left to focus on the artist’s often unconventional materials, both Mr. Kiefer and Ms. Soriano say. In “Parsifal III,” a 10-by-14-foot work on paper from 1973, Mr. Kiefer used a mixture of paint and blood. This image, which addresses Wagnerian themes adored by Hitler, aims to “rehabilitate” artists like Wagner from the blemish of Nazi worship, Mr. Kiefer says.
A similar-size work, “Margarethe,” was created using gray and white paints mixed with straw Mr. Kiefer found in a cornfield. Mr. Kiefer says the work was inspired by the poem “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan, a Jewish poet jailed by the Nazis. “My art… changes not only because the materials like straw change over time, but also because since they concern themselves with history, the world views of those looking at it are unavoidably different as the decades pass,” he says.
Ms. Soriano says she’s dedicating two rooms in the show, including the first, to Mr. Kiefer’s delicate watercolors. Mr. Kiefer’s Paris-based dealer Thaddaeus Ropac welcomes the move. Mr. Ropac, 54, only offered one watercolor in his latest exhibition. It sold for $65,000, far below the $650,000 to $5.8 million for large paintings. “The watercolors are still such virgin ground,” he says.
As he awaits his retrospective, Mr. Kiefer says he can never begin to answer one question: Would he have been a Nazi? “Naturally I hope I would have said ‘I’m fighting against Hitler.’ But I can’t say for certain if I had lived then, what I would have done or decided.”
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All my doubts about Anselm Kiefer are blown away by his Royal Academy show
Plus: Why the Turner Prize should be abolished – and what could replace it
‘Winter Landscape (Winterlandschaft)’, 1970, by Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer
Royal Academy, until 14 December
The Turner Prize 2014
Tate Britain, until 4 January
In the Royal Academy’s courtyard are two large glass cases or vitrines containing model submarines. In one the sea has receded, dried up, and the tin fish are stranded on the cracked mud of the ocean floor. In the other, the elegantly rusted subs are mostly suspended like sharks in an aquarium: a fleet in fact, all pointed in the same direction.
These works are the visitor’s first sight of the vast and glorious exhibition by Anselm Kiefer (born Germany, 1945) currently occupying the main galleries of Burlington House, and they are apparently related to his interest in the Russian poet and futurist Velimir Khlebnikov. At once we are confronted by several Kiefer themes: war, poetry (he says poems are ‘like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the next …without them, I am lost’), and Mesopotamian clay tablets. His very particular mix of history, imaginative transformation and high culture is thus succinctly introduced.
There have been plenty of opportunities to see Kiefer’s work in Britain in recent decades (I well remember an impressive show of giant lead books at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in 1989), but I must admit that up to now I have remained equivocal about him. The Academy’s show has completely changed my mind. I have never seen Kiefer better presented, and in this exhibition his imagery and use of materials make perfect sense. The increasingly large works have been superbly laid out through the grand galleries, and their cumulative effect is not so much overwhelming as utterly convincing. This remarkable display makes a great argument for the monographic exhibition. Not all artists can survive this sort of exposure, some looking too repetitious or threadbare in extensive solo shows, but Kiefer’s work thrives on it, and the exhibition is a triumph.
The first couple of rooms offer a kind of prologue of early work, introducing Kiefer’s abiding passion (since 1968) for artists’ books, his drawings and watercolours, and the wood-grain ‘Attic’ series of the 1970s. The exhibition really catches fire in room 3 with the increased scale and texture of the paintings, the inventive use of materials (clay, ash, earth, straw, dried sunflowers, scorched photos) and a certain salutary grimness of subject. Here the aggrandising tendency of Nazi architecture is squarely faced, the neoclassical stone structures built to last (and make fine ruins), as against the bricks of straw and the writing on the wall of the artist’s alternative reality. If some of the paintings look like dried-up river beds, suggesting drought and starvation, this is the other side to handsome prisons of the spirit.
Kiefer uses the shape of a palette in his pictures to stand for himself, and I was reminded of Leonard Cohen’s lyric ‘like a bird on the wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir’ when looking at ‘Palette on a Rope’ in room 4, though there’s more than one bird on this particular wire, and they look decidedly flame-like. Room 5 contains just two enormous paintings: ‘Osiris and Isis’ on one side, decked out with copper wire and what looks like the fragments of a washbasin; ‘For Ingeborg Bachmann: The Sand from the Urns’ is on the other, an achingly beautiful, desiccated landscape. The theme is death and resurrection, just one of the great linked polarities that Kiefer rarely shrinks from addressing.
Burnt books, branches, roses — all are incorporated in one or other of the epic paintings on display here, many of which, despite their size, come from private collections. Kiefer has a genuine interest in the mystic life, and is as likely to explore the diamond-studded firmament as he is the fertile plain. In room 11, we find Kiefer in agrarian mode, evoking ‘a land, perpetually coming to harvest’ (Ronald Johnson: The Book of the Green Man). These intensely romantic images of fruitfulness are subverted by such things as a mantrap attached to the painting’s surface — a notable vagina dentata clearly echoing Courbet’s ‘L’Origine du Monde’ — old shoes or a set of primitive scales, along with volcanic stone and gold leaf. Since the death of the Catalan master Antoni Tàpies, Kiefer must be our leading artist-magus.
Some people complain that they’re overburdened by the weight of reference in Kiefer’s paintings, the history, poetry and philosophy that inform his approach. I can only say that the viewer does not need to know or recognise its presence, nor feel inadequate before Kiefer’s learning. There is much to enjoy in his work on a purely formal level, but if you wish to explore the manifold layers of meaning below the surface, there’s even more to intrigue and savour. Then there are those who think his pictures rather rudimentary, exploiting texture and simple perspective and owing more to the mud and muck of the farmyard than to any alchemical (or artistic) transformation.
Others admire his work but regret the industrial scale on which it now seems exclusively to operate, and suggest that you can get away with murder with an adoring international market and an army of assistants. But I have to say that such quibbles dwindle and vanish in the face of this beautifully installed exhibition. It is the art that has to convince us or condemn itself, and this is a breathtaking show, a real source of awe and wonder, probably the most astonishing event of the season.
And it can be a pretty silly season too, as demonstrated by the media circus which is now the annual Turner Prize. When the prize was founded in 1984, it seemed to offer some hope of promoting excellence with such artists as Malcolm Morley and Richard Deacon winning in early years. But since the millennium, it has increasingly become the resort of installation and multimedia artists, not painters and sculptors, and this colonisation has resulted in a tragic loss of credibility. The new conceptual orthodoxy is nothing more than a current establishment fashion but its perpetrators and propagators seem bent on excluding more traditional forms of art.
The problem is that the so-called experimental art showcased by the Turner Prize is so thoroughly passé that it merely recycles ideas thought new and original half-a-century ago. But the pundits of the media still find such stale stuff wonderfully controversial and diverting. To my mind, the unholy crop of films, wallpaper, slide projections, bad writing, flags, sociological reportage and relentless pretension that makes up this year’s shortlist is intensely depressing. The banality is unredeemed. Time to abolish the Turner Prize and inaugurate a Constable Prize for Painting, and perhaps a Henry Moore Prize for Sculpture.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 11 October 2014
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LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS/REVIEW OF ANSELM KIEFER AT THE RA
Anselm Kiefer first came to public attention in London in A New Spirit in Painting, the exhibition held in 1981 at the Royal Academy. It’s fitting, then, that this should be the venue for the first full retrospective in Britain, curated by Kathleen Soriano (until 14 December). Kiefer has always divided critics, some taking fright at his heavy Germanic imagery, others describing the experience of his work in religious terms. It has lost none of its ability to provoke in either direction. Visitors circulate unusually slowly, silently contemplating the works. Looming at the top of the Academy stairs is a big sculpture,Language of the Birds (2013), a pile of large books made of lead sheets, interleaved with metal park chairs, surmounted by a giant pair of outspread wings, also of lead. Made from elements familiar from Kiefer’s work over the past forty years, the sculpture signals the epic journey that lies ahead.
At the heart of Kiefer’s work is an idea and image of history. For the series of photographs entitled Occupations, which launched his career in 1969, he posed in different European locations dressed in military garb and performing a Nazi salute. The claim some have made that the photographs are evidence of fascist sympathies is bizarre – the satire is obvious. Although other German artists – Gerhard Richter and Markus Lüpertz, for example – had used military imagery, only Kiefer was reckless enough to portray himself as a Nazi. Kiefer was breaking a taboo about showing the recent past, but he was also saying something about the present – about the confrontation of generations that was then taking place in West Germany. Those who were too young to have taken an active part in the Third Reich (the ‘blessed’ generation in Helmut Kohl’s phrase), were confronted with a society still dominated by collaborators. The task was to hold a mirror up to West German society, to show what it had been, and to some extent what it still was.
Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Heroische Sinnbilder’ (1969).
In paintings and books made over the next few years Kiefer seemed to plunge further down into German history, into the constellations of art and culture that had become so problematically entangled with fascism. His art is in this sense a form of unravelling.Man in the Forest, for example, a painting from 1971, is one of the first statements of his fascination with the theme of the forest and trees central to the Nazi myth. In a picture recalling Caspar David Friedrich’s The Chasseur in the Forest, Kiefer paints himself in a white gown, holding a burning branch in a thick forest, the oil layered and dripping as if the work was itself the outcome of a pagan rite.
With Kiefer there is always a sense of meanings lurking just beneath the surface, of barely hidden taboos. Four paintings from 1973 on the theme of the Parsifal legend (three are included in this show) depict an attic space, in fact Kiefer’s studio at the time, the canvas dominated by the wood grain of the interior, done in charcoal on an oil ground. Inscribed on the canvas are the names of characters from Wagner’s opera and Gurnemanz’s line ‘Oh, wunden-wundervolles heiliger Speer!’ (‘Oh wounding, wondrous holy spear!’), which puts one in mind of Albert Speer. Also inscribed are the names of members of the Baader-Meinhof gang – Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin had finally been arrested shortly before Kiefer began the work. Half-buried in the wood grain effect (a Kiefer trademark), the combination of names suggests not only ‘difficult meaning’, but also the generational conflict which was to culminate in the events of the Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn) a few years later.
Kiefer is one of the few living artists who can work convincingly on a truly monumental scale, creating vast works that seem not merely to take up, but to activate the space around them. This is particularly true of his paintings based on fascist architecture. The vast canvas Ash Flower (1983-97) is more than seven and a half metres long, and almost four in height, and shows a large ruin of what had been a classical interior in plunging single-point perspective, clay, ash and earth forming the desiccated surface. An enormous dried sunflower is attached, inverted, in the centre of the canvas. Peter Schjeldahl saw an ‘energetic contradiction of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival vortex, or remaining on the surface of the canvas, seeing it as a physical object rather than an imaginary space. For perspectival recession read historical imagination, and for scarred surfaces read the historical present in which Kiefer was living and working, a Germany consumed with the task of reconstruction and, in its national life, the work of constant redefinition. According to Andreas Huyssen, this oscillation between past and present becomes a dilemma for the viewer, caught between the feeling of being ‘had’ and falling for the monumental aesthetic beguilingly presented as ‘art’. Hold onto the surface, remain in the present, if you can.
The final painting in the architectural series, Sulamith (1983), is one of Kiefer’s best-known works, and possibly his greatest. It shows a low-ceilinged vaulted chamber, based on the Nazi architect Wilhelm Kreis’s 1939 memorial hall for German soldiers. The charred walls and glowering atmosphere of Kiefer’s version, and above all the inscribed ‘Sulamith’ show that far from being a Nazi Valhalla this is a Holocaust memorial. The ‘ashen-haired’ Sulamith and the ‘golden-haired’ Margarethe are from Paul Celan’s Todesfugue; the loss of Sulamith is a symbol of the Holocaust. Political reunification in 1990 restored the former east, but the real ‘other half’ of German history, the Jewish part, could never be restored.
Kiefer’s range of subject matter and references is epic. Since the 1980s overtly Germanic themes – the forest, the Nibelungen, the Third Reich – have been joined by Mesopotamian history, Egyptian and Greek mythology, the Old Norse Edda and the Kabbalah. A summary of these interests is captured by The Rhine, an installation of monumental woodcuts displayed on free-standing screens: Goethe, Dürer, fascist architecture, the poetry of Celan, all hovering above an image of the longest German river. It is a testament to Kiefer’s tact that, despite the grandiosity of these themes, his work never feels overblown. At the heart of the Royal Academy display is an installation, Ages of the World, a title loosely translated from the German Erdzeitalter. A lofty, tapering stack of discarded canvases, stretched and rolled, interleaved with old photographs, rubble, lead books and more large dried sunflowers gives off a faint odour of the dust and solvent of an artist’s studio. Two works on the wall, large photographs of the sculpture overpainted with words, annotate the stack in terms of the strata of geological eras. At first it seems to be a monument to art’s failure in the face of history, or an attempt to escape history. The critic John Russell saw an earlier form of the work, titled Twenty Years of Solitude (1971-91) as a ‘portrait of the artist as Atlas, bearing upon his shoulders a whole world in epitome’. But despite this the mood remains somehow light, as though a burden has been shifted, a knot unravelled.
This (relative) lightness of mood is one of the most striking qualities of Kiefer’s monumental works. These have taken the form of vast crumbling concrete towers, libraries of lead books – or the two enormous studio complexes he runs in France (descriptions of visits to these studios to interview the artist are a sub-genre of the Kiefer literature). The effect can be seen in the large canvas For Ingeborg Bachmann: The Sand from the Urns, 1998-2009 (even the date range is epic) which shows a large brick structure, perhaps a tomb, barely visible beneath a surface of acrylic and shellac (who knows what else might be lurking in there), the whole thing encrusted in a thick layer of sand. The title refers to the two poets whom Kiefer holds in greatest reverence; when Celan embarked on an ill-fated affair with Bachmann, he inscribed his poem ‘In Egypt’ in his collection The Sand from the Urns for her: ‘Thou shalt say to the strange woman’s eye: be the water!’ The surface of the painting recalls Joyce – ‘These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here’ – but at the same time his citation from Celan counters the heaviness of the lead books, the pyramids, the halls of fame, with a dash of mysticism to suggest that there is something to be read in those leaden tomes after all. His schoolbook-like script (which strongly recalls the lettering Kitaj used on his paintings) adds to the sense of more simple histories and truths, and also reveals something of Kiefer’s sense of humour, which he has sustained since the absurdist satire of the Occupations photographs. An endearing crankiness helps his work to survive the grandiosity of its subject matter.
As a retrospective the Royal Academy show is far from definitive. A weighting in favour of recent works, including two large diamond-encrusted lead-sheet ‘paintings’, and a room of seven new paintings, characterised by their rich gilded surfaces and grouped under the title Morgenthau, gives the impression of a mid-career show, organised in a commercial rather than a scholarly context (although the catalogue is highly informative and contains a fine essay by Christian Weikop on Kiefer’s use of tree and forest symbolism). It offers an opportunity to marvel, but not to get beneath the skin of Kiefer’s work, or to see him alongside other artists. His considerable debt to Joseph Beuys, at one time his teacher, is a case in point. The dried roses Beuys stuffed in a piano in 1969 are surely the origins of Kiefer’s sunflowers; and where Beuys used felt and fat as his signature materials, Kiefer uses lead (salvaged, we are told, from the roof of Cologne cathedral). The use of inscriptions, and the sense that an attempt is being made to create allegories of recent history also joins the two artists, although there are many differences too: Beuys was not a painter, for example; and Kiefer, since hisOccupations photographs, is not known for performances. And in many respects Kiefer has gone beyond his former teacher in creating a body of work that captures the experience and memories of a German artist working in the wake of the Third Reich. But it isn’t his subject matter, or even its poetic transformation, that makes Kiefer’s work so beguiling, particularly when compared with that of artists such as Beuys or Georg Baselitz. It is something far more prosaic: the fascination of running one’s eyes over the intricate surfaces of his paintings, admiring the sense of design in his woodcuts, his skill in painting in watercolour, or ingenuity in recycling materials for sculpture – the pleasure of wondering how it was all done.
Anyone who knows even the smallest thing about Anselm Kiefer will have gathered that his ambitions are not ordinary. An old-school history painter, didactic and inescapably moral, he works on a grand scale in lead, sand, gold leaf, copper wire, broken ceramics, straw, wood and even diamonds, his ideas informed by, among many other subjects, the Holocaust, Egyptian mythology, the architecture of Albert Speer, German Romanticism and the poems of Paul Celan. He is the kind of artist whose physical presence – in his black T-shirts and rimless spectacles, he puts one in mind just lately of an executive from Apple – always comes as a surprise. How, you wonder, can a man who deals with so much weighty stuff have such regular-looking shoulders, such ordinary biceps? And why is he smiling? Doesn’t the darkness ever threaten to engulf him? Doesn’t his project – now more than 40 years old – sometimes pinch at his sanity?
Yet only with the help of a blindfold would you be able to wander the Royal Academy’s stupendous retrospective of his work and leave feeling anything less than drunk with amazement. However much you know about Kiefer, it’s impossible to be prepared for this show: for its scale, its pleasures, its provocations and – this must be said – its bafflements. This is a total experience. The work first speaks to the eyes, which instinctively scour every last corner of every painting, every sculpture. Then it calls to the heart, pulling from you all sorts of things Kiefer certainly didn’t intend (in my case: modern-day Syria; the 80s nuclear TV drama Threads; John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids). Last of all, it engages the head, as you attempt to unravel his complex, multilayered narratives. It’s certainly useful to know your history before you enter these spaces – and if you’re fluent in the language of Richard Wagner and Caspar David Friedrich, so much the better. But it isn’t necessary. In any case, mystification is half the point. No artist puts this much effort into the construction of their work without wanting their audience to linger over it, to try and fathom it out.
Ages of the World (Die Erdzeitalter), 2014 by Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy.Photograph: REX/REX
Kiefer was born in the Black Forest in 1945, a kind of year zero in terms of German history. And it’s this – the attempt to wipe out collective memory after the war – that has long been his creative wellspring (at school his teachers hardly mentioned the Third Reich). Taught by Joseph Beuys, the artist who helped Kiefer’s generation to reclaim much of the historical and mythological imagery rendered so toxic by the Nazis, his early work depicts himself, dressed in his father’s army uniform, taking the Nazi salute outside the Colosseum in Rome and elsewhere. The Royal Academy show, which works chronologically, begins with this zesty, youthful reappropriation. I was queasily hypnotised by the watercolour Ice and Blood (1971), in which an expanse of snow is scarred with pools of crimson and, far worse, a tiny, naive figure in a military overcoat, its right arm ominously raised. Before you get there, though, the Royal Academy reveals its breathtaking commitment to Kiefer with a little reappropriation of its own. The garish shop at the top of the gallery’s stairs has disappeared. In its stead is Language of the Birds (2013), a monumental sculpture comprising a pile of charred-looking books with a huge set of wings attached. Do these belong to a German eagle? Naturally, that’s what comes to mind. But I kept thinking, too, of the phoenix, a creature that speaks to Anselm’s preoccupation with myth, rebirth and the cycles of time every bit as loudly as the Reichsadler.
The phoenix rises from the ashes, and this, after all, is a show that is covered in clinker. Ash Flower (1983-97), made of oil, acrylic, paint, clay, earth, ash and – a recurring symbol in Kiefer’s work – a dried sunflower, is a seven metre-wide depiction of a ruin, the ruthless lines of a grand public building emerging through its murky surface like the prow of a ship through fog. Sulamith (1983), inspired by a Paul Celan poem, Death Fugue, which was written in a concentration camp (“your ashen hair Shulamite”), is a gloomy crypt rendered in oil, acrylic, woodcut, emulsion and straw, at one end of which a fire endlessly flickers. Untitled (2006-08) consists of a triptych of huge vitrines in which there resides a wintry graveyard of brambles, dead roses, more ash, and toppling concrete houses. Gradually, the work starts to talk to the future as well as the past. In the Royal Academy’s octagonal gallery is a new piece, Ages of the World (2014): a pile of abandoned canvases and rubble bedecked with an unhappy coronet of yet more dead sunflowers. It has a dystopian, post-apocalyptic feel: no culture, no hope.
All this is pitch-dark. But there is radiance elsewhere – and colour too. For Ingeborg Bachmann: the Sand from the Urns (1998-2009) is a depiction of a ziggurat in a sandstorm so astonishingly dynamic you’re almost tempted to squint, the better to protect your eyes, while the satirical Operation Sea Lion(1975) has toy battleships floating in one of the zinc baths that were given to every German home by the health-obsessed Third Reich, its water a horribly chipper shade of blue. Best of all there are Kiefer’s Morgenthau paintings from 2013, named for the US Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jnr – whose plan it was in 1944 to transform Germany into a pre-industrial nation as a means of limiting her ability to fight future wars – and crammed with impasto stalks of corn that sometimes blow and bend, and sometimes reach for the blazing sky. A note on the wall urges the visitor to note the crows circling above, a symbol of death and resurrection. But it isn’t these flapping shadows that keep you in the room; it’s the whispering grass, the beatific sunshine, the splashes of cornflower blue. Kiefer is that most resolute of artists. He has never turned away from the difficult and the sombre; his career is a magnificent reproach to those who think art can’t deal with the big subjects, with history, memory and genocide. In the end, though, what stays with you is the feeling – overwhelming at times – that he is always making his way carefully towards the light.
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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
September 19, 2014 6:38 pm
Interview with Anselm Kiefer, ahead of his Royal Academy show
By Jackie Wullschlager
Politics, history, money – and alchemy. The provocative artist gives our visual arts critic a tour of his studio
Anselm Kiefer in front of his work ‘Ages of the World’ (2014)
When I tell Anselm Kiefer that my favourite work in his forthcoming Royal Academy retrospective is “Tándaradei” – a monumental new painting in oil, emulsion and shellac where pink, red and mauve blossoms seem to burst into life, fade, wilt, all at once – the artist looks apologetic. “I put it out of the exhibition because it’s too beautiful. It’s too much. I couldn’t allow it.”
Painters have been quarrelling about beauty for centuries but Kiefer, born in southern Germany in the last months of the second world war, has rooted his life’s work in the urgent postwar anxiety about art’s role and future: Theodor Adorno’s claim that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz.
“You cannot avoid beauty in a work of art,” says Kiefer. He waves at a room full of richly textured works with scorched, barbed surfaces – built up from ash, lead, shards of pottery, battered books and broken machines – that evoke war-ravaged wastelands but have lyricism etched into the violence of their making. “You can take the most terrible subject and automatically it becomes beautiful. What is sure is that I could never do art about Auschwitz. It is impossible because the subject is too big.”
‘Morgenthau Plan’, 2013
Installation view at RA of ‘The Orders of the Night’, 1996
‘The Orders of the Night’, 1996
‘Black Flakes’, 2006
‘Interior’, 1981
‘The Rhine (Melancholia)’, 1982-2013
‘Heroic Symbol V’, 1970
‘Ages of the World’, 2014
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This is a conversation stopper because Kiefer has rarely made art about anything else. In the 1960s he made his debut as a performance artist: dressed in his father’s army uniform, he photographed himself making the Nazi salute in iconic European locations such as Rome’s Colosseum, confronting what his fellow artist Joseph Beuys called Germany’s “visual amnesia” about the Holocaust. Half a century later, at this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, he displayed a new painting “Kranke Kunst” (“Sick Art”), a lovely willowy reprise of a 1974 watercolour of the same name in which a landscape of the kind idealised by the Nazis was dotted with pink boils.
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Kiefer explains: “I like the double sense, first ‘Kranke Kunst’ is negative, it comes from Nazi censorship of entartete Kunst [degenerate art]. And then, it’s completely true because all is ill, the situation in the world is ill . . . Syria, Nigeria, Russia. Our head is generally ill, we are constructed wrong.”
What can art do?
“Art cannot help directly. Art is the way to make it obvious. Art is cynical, it shows the negativity of the world, it’s the first condemnation.”
Can art be celebratory?
“Matisse, he celebrates, but I see through this – to desperation.”
Kiefer says all this to me cheerfully, deadpan, over vodka at three in the afternoon in his 30,000 sq metre Paris atelier, a former warehouse of the department store Samaritaine. Another studio in Barjac, southern France, occupies a 200-acre estate but even the Paris one is so extensive that you need a car to cross it, past rusting tanks, containers with paintings left out to the chance elements of weather, and rose bushes planted by the artist. At one point we nearly collide with a crane hoisting a slab of lead. “For me, huge doesn’t exist,” Kiefer admits.
. . .
Tall and greying but lean and swift in white shorts and open shirt, the 69-year-old has fled preparations for the show in London – “It’s boring for an artist to do a retrospective” – but he offers a tour of the work here. Sculptures wrought from damaged bomber planes are strewn across one studio. Styrofoam towers from his nine-storey set for the Bastille Opera’s In the Beginning tumble and crumble in another. Hundreds of bleached-out resin sunflowers at three times life size, a comic homage to Van Gogh, stand guard at the gated entrance.
Sunflowers like these are coming to London, part of an installation, entitled “Ages of the World”, of unfinished canvases stacked horizontally into giant rubbish heaps that will occupy the RA’s opening central hall. I had interpreted an allusion to German history, the unhealable rupture imposed by the Nazi attack on degenerate art. Kiefer, however, points to monochrome gouaches that will surround his fallen canvases, which are scrawled with words referencing stratigraphy, palaeography, geology.
“Archaikum, mesozoikum,” he recites, drawing out the syllables like a line of poetry. He speaks English well but relaxes into real pleasure of expression when lapsing into German. “I like these words! How many million years are we old? You don’t know? You don’t know our age! I have all this catastrophe in my biography. That is what you see in ‘Ages of the World’. We go back much before our birthday. In our mind is inserted all this stratigraphy. Three hundred and fifty million years ago a meteorite touched the earth and 95 per cent of life was extinguished. Three hundred and fifty million years ago the dinosaurs – and lots of people – died. German history? It starts with Archaikum.”
In one of the most affecting paintings in the exhibition, “The Orders of the Night” (1996), there are also giant sunflowers, blackened, lined up in rows, menacing as soldiers, looming over a self-portrait of Kiefer as a corpse. And dried sunflowers mix with ash, clay and oil in the sombre, tapering interior, “The Ash Flower” (1983-87), the show’s largest painting at nearly 26ft wide.
At the Royal Academy, such ghostly interiors, echoing with references to Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, such as the chancellery in “To the Unknown Painter” (1983), will hang alongside desolate versions of the forests and fields of the German romantic imagination: landscape destroyed in “Painting of the Scorched Earth” (1974); deathly in the shimmering straw of “Margarethe” (1981), representing the blond camp guard; paired with the dark straw ashes of the victim of the furnaces “Sulamith” (1983); or inscribed with the poems of Paul Celan and studded with charred books in the more recent furrowed “Black Flakes” (2006).
When I got an early glimpse of the show, these struck me as the dark heart of Kiefer’s achievement I ask him if he feels that these were the works he inevitably had to make. “No, no. Perhaps I should have been a poet or a writer. You can never be sure because you make mistakes but the mistake becomes reality.” Poems, he says, “are like buoys in the sea. I swim from one to the next; in between, without them, I am lost.” He says Celan, a Holocaust survivor, “is the most important poet since the war. He puts words together as no one did before. He made another language, he’s an alchemist concerning words.”
Is alchemy a metaphor for what Kiefer does? “It is what I do,” he corrects. “Alchemy is not to make gold, the real alchemist is not interested in material things but in transubstantiation, in transforming the spirit. It’s a spiritual thing more than a material thing. An alchemist puts the phenomena of the world in another context. My bird is about that . . . ” He points out “The Language of Birds”, a new avian sculpture whose body is composed of burnt books, also to be completed for the London show. “It’s made with lead and strips of silver, gold. Its wings are lead and can’t fly, the books can’t fly, the metal is solid, but it changes.” He loves lead because “it has always been a material for ideas. It is in flux, it’s changeable and has the potential to achieve a higher state.” He grins: “And then, my paintings have a certain value, so I’m an alchemist.”
Art cannot help directly. Art is the way to make it obvious. Art is cynical, it shows the negativity of the world, it’s the first condemnation
Kiefer’s auction record is $3.6m, achieved for “To the Unknown Painter” in 2011, and he is represented by blue-chip dealers Gagosian, White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac; indeed, in 2012, both Gagosian and Ropac launched massive galleries in Paris with rival Kiefer shows, flaming criticism of overproduction and repetition. “Kiefer has become better and better at making Anselm Kiefers. In them grandiosity rarely takes a holiday,” wrote Roberta Smith in The New York Times of a 2010 Gagosian Manhattan show. In that exhibition, Next Year in Jerusalem, Kiefer’s references to Jewish mysticism and history, a strand in his work since the 1980s, attracted protesters against Israel’s blockade of Gaza; wearing T-shirts inscribed with the show’s title, they asked to stay in the gallery to continue discussions raised by Kiefer’s work. The gallery called the police, saying, “This is private property. We’re here to sell art.”
Was this a betrayal of Kiefer’s seriousness, an admission that 21st-century art is primarily a commodity? I can think of no other contemporary figure who operates at the interface of art, money, politics and history as prominently, and with such confident equilibrium, as Kiefer. It is undeniable, and borne out by unpredictable auction results, that the quality of his prolific output is uneven, sometimes top-heavy with portentous theme or occult narrative. On the other hand, the cohesion of ideas and tone in the RA show, Kiefer’s first retrospective, dramatises how the conceptual impetus underpinning his material endeavours mean that all his works belong together as a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk – or even as a performance piece in progress, which began with his solitary Sieg Heil in Rome half a century ago.
At his Wagnerian stretch, Kiefer is a very German artist, though he left the country in 1990, after reunification. He says: “Since I live in France it seems that I am more German. Thomas Mann wrote Buddenbrooks in Rome: when he was in Italy he became aware of being German. It’s clear that I am in the tradition of German art, Holbein, Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, but national character is no longer so present. The last time there was real distinction between French and German art was impressionism, which was French, and expressionism, which was German – then it was clear who was who. Now it’s not global but it’s European – if I take America as part of Europe, though they will not like that! In America and the UK it’s about the work. In Germany it’s always linked to some moral issue.”
It seems to me that there are two things that make the Royal Academy show significant beyond an account of one man’s vision. This autumn Kiefer is being shown alongside two German near-contemporaries, Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern and Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman’s new Mayfair space. Each came of age in a morally fatherless culture and had to negotiate positions vis-à-vis German history: Polke’s was fundamentally absurdist, Richter’s ironic, and Kiefer’s is broadly tragic. All are valid responses to Adorno.
But an RA show is also an institution boasting a centuries-old history of debate about the formal nature of painting. Kiefer follows exhibitions devoted to Anish Kapoor, who in 2009 drove a “paint train” through the galleries and shot pigment at the walls from a gun; and to David Hockney, who in 2012 challenged traditional painting with iPad sketches enlarged to enormous scale and film. Both artists proved that painting could rival younger media as spectacle, theatre, performance; this show will do the same.
Before I leave Paris, Kiefer shows me a group of green-gold paintings, encrusted with metal, polystyrene, shellac, sheaves of wheat, paint layered over photographs, a shoe, a pair of scales. This is the Morgenthau series, begun in 2012 and named after a leaked, abandoned wartime American plan to deindustrialise Germany. “A big present to Hitler,” says Kiefer, “because he was able to say, ‘If you don’t fight, this will happen to you. Fifty million Germans would have died – though that’s nothing [compared] to Mao.”
I could never do art about Auschwitz. It is impossible because the subject is too big
Kiefer has made some new Morgenthau paintings especially for Burlington House. Altogether there are a lot of them: an obvious glitzy currency for a widening collector base. They are also rather beautiful.
“I came to the title,” Kiefer explains, “because I so much like flowers and I painted so many flower pictures that I had a very bad conscience, because nature is not inviolate, nature is not just itself. So what to do with this beauty? I thought, ‘I will call it Morgenthau’, in a cynical way telling that Germany would be so beautiful without industry. This way of turning it round, it tells you the ambiguity of beauty.”
A smart conceptualist’s marketing strategy or an artist making peace with the tradition of painting? Kiefer pauses to marvel at an emerald hue while fingering the gold leaf, which he has layered on to sediment of electrolysis, an industrial galvanisation process to which he submits the works – a modern alchemy. “You cannot produce it, it’s such a powerful green, that’s the electrolysis, it changes the painting and when I see it, I am surprised. And that’s what I live for: to be surprised.”
‘Anselm Kiefer’ is at the Royal Academy, London, September 27 to December 14, royalacademy.org.uk
Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief visual arts critic. Read her review of Constable at the V&A
Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy, preview: Is he our greatest living artist?
Kiefer’s range seems limitless: the courtyard entrance to the Royal Academy will be dominated by his first ever vitrines for outdoor display, one containing ships, as it were, beached, the other with vessels afloat
The sunflowers are over for another year: the confident golden heads have drooped, their sunny countenances giving way to a black scowl.
It feels like a metaphor for the end of summer. But for the artist Anselm Kiefer, this is when sunflowers get interesting. Like his hero Van Gogh, he revisits the sunflower time and again, not for its buttery radiance, but for its blackened seeds. Sunflowers, in Kiefer’s work, are embedded into paintings, apparently dead, but bearing the potential for life.
The polarities of life and death, the heavens and the earth, micro and macro, are central to the work of the 69-year-old German painter and sculptor, described by the curator of a major retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy in London, opening this month, as “our greatest living artist”. Kathleen Soriano has worked closely with Kiefer, an honorary Academician elected by his peers, and while she has been selecting work from a career lasting almost 50 years, he has been making new pieces – 40 per cent of the work will not have been seen before, and much of it has been created with the architecture of the RA’s home in Burlington House in mind.
“One of the things that Anselm wanted to do was to respect the architecture,” explains Soriano. This is not simply an aesthetic response to a well-proportioned building, but a physical interaction with the bricks and mortar that can be both mankind’s triumph and its disgrace.
Kiefer, a child of the Second World War, was born into another polarity: on the one hand the grandiose, fascist buildings of architects such as Albert Speer, on the other, the rubble of bombed houses. On the day Kiefer was born, the neighbouring shop/house was destroyed, only a sewing machine propelled unbroken into the street, its isolation and solidity later echoing in works such as Black Flakes (2006), at first glance a desolate winter landscape, in which a book made of lead is embedded in the thawing snow.
Growing up with the heavy burden of his country’s wartime atrocities, Kiefer scandalised some when, early in his career, he produced images that were not only unacceptable but actually outlawed in Germany – depicting him, in a Nazi uniform, giving the Nazi salute. Due to feature in the first room of the exhibition, they force us to confront the past and raise the question of the role of the artist in the wake of a vicious regime. Though at the same time, Soriano says, “the work is as much about the present and the future … and the way he plumbs the past is always forewarning us about the evils of mankind.”
Kiefer wants to restore some of his country’s corrupted legacy, too. “The Nazis had tarnished so much mythology, and he wanted to reclaim it,” says Soriano. Much of that mythology lies in the woods and forests of Germany, which not only inspire the subjects of Kiefer’s work, but provide the materials. Going far beyond traditional oils and sculptural metals, Kiefer’s media for one work, based on the story of Isis reassembling her dismembered lover Osiris, reads: “Lead, concrete, roses, bramble, acrylic, emulsion, ash shellac …” Nothing is invalid as a material.
‘The Renowned Orders of the Night’, from the Seattle Art Museum
But even with the whole world as his supplier, Kiefer does not rest there. Another of the polarities that fascinates him is order and chaos. A completed work may, to him, appear too organised, and so he relinquishes it to nature – leaving it outdoors, allowing it to disintegrate. Curators and conservators have been known to retrieve flakes of paintings from the gallery floor, returning them to the artist, who incorporates them in other work. Sometimes he sets fire to his pieces; he has also shot at them. The ambiguity of fire intrigues him: it is cleansing and cauterising, but also disfiguring and destructive.
In contrast to the natural cathedrals of the forest canopy, Kiefer also paints vast, cavernous halls, but again he is drawn to extremes: on the one hand he admires their grand architecture; on the other, he is drawn to their simple building blocks. “He loves the idea of man making bricks as God makes stars,” says Soriano.
Kiefer’s range seems limitless: the courtyard entrance to the Royal Academy will be dominated by his first ever vitrines for outdoor display, one containing ships, as it were, beached, the other with vessels afloat. He is intrigued by the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov’s theory that history throws up a critical naval battle every 317 years. Even water, plain and simple, is ambiguous. When the Rhine, which forms a geographical border between Germany and France, flooded the basement of his childhood home, Kiefer wondered where the boundary lay then – in the midst of the swollen waters or in his cellar?
Landscape is important to him, and not only the golden lakes of sunflowers. The American Morgenthau Plan, devised in 1944 to strip a near-defeated Germany of its industry and turn it into a farm for Europe, is thought to have only strengthened the Nazis’ resolve, and cost more lives. Kiefer harvests the landscape in his own way, embedding straw in his portrayals of Margarete, a blond Aryan who appears in a series of paintings inspired by Paul Celan’s elegy to victims of the Holocaust, Death Fugue, alongside another figure from the poem, black-haired Jewish woman Shulamite.
Since 1968 Kiefer has been making books, the pages of which do not necessarily reveal obvious text and images: 48 will be on show at the RA, and the exhibition will conclude with a walk through the panels of a larger-than-life, concertina-like volume, called a leporello (after Don Giovanni’s servant, whose list of his master’s lovers that is so long he must fold it).
“People think of Kiefer’s work being so masculine and confrontational,” says Soriano, “and I don’t think they understand his gentle side. What I want people to take away from this show is not only the knowledge that he is a great painter, but also that he has great relevance.” Indeed Kiefer, she adds, is looking, like all of us, with great anxiety at today’s turbulent world. “He says you have to remember that history is cyclical.”
A visit to the Anselm Kiefer retrospective exhibition at the RA can be a daunting prospect for many reasons, the scale of the work, the complexity of themes and the sheer overwhelming volume of diverse media on display in this huge exhibition.
Kiefer has many interests among which German history, mythology, alchemy, poetry, ritual, metaphysics, cosmology, are explored and transformed into a special, unique vision of our world.
Kiefer was born in Germany on 8 March 1945 just before the end of the Second World War, so growing up in post-war Germany has been a major conditioning factor in his development and a defining influence in his practice.
As a young artist he found that there was a reluctance to acknowledge and confront the recent Nazi past and the damaging distortion that had been inflicted on German culture.
Reacting to this he made provocative photographs and paintings of himself wearing his father’s coat (he had been a Nazi party member) giving an illegal salute.
But in these images, the pose looks weak and limp and pathetic. In one painting there are references to Classical sculptures, favoured by the Third Reich, hovering in ghostly form in the sky above the saluting figure seen standing beside the Rhine. This painting, despite the unsettling subject matter is full of beautiful passages showing Kiefer’s command and expressive use of oil paint.
He is also a skillful and fluent watercolour painter exploiting the potential of the medium to great effect as seen in Winter Landscape 1970, where the delicacy of the paint starkly contrasts with the violence of the image. Any idea about watercolour being a soft medium used for pleasing subjects, easy on the eye and brain, will be rapidly dispelled here. It is this quality of employing seduction with repulsion that forms a consistent element flowing like the Rhine through the show.
A major characteristic of Kiefer’s work is the use of elemental materials that includes ash, clay, straw, wood, blood, lead, sunflowers, copper and recently, gold and diamonds.
The physical manipulation of materials has given him opportunities to explore his themes and concerns resulting in awe-inspiring work, gigantic in scale and ambition.
As his practice has developed over the years, the surface of the 2D work becomes increasingly 3D to the point where it seems as if a vertical canvas cannot support the weight of the material.
Because many of the materials employed are by nature fragile, paint and other additives trowelled on in heavy impasto, the monumentality of the work increases a sense of its precariousness and possible disintegration.
Kiefer apparently, is not worried by this possibility!
One of the preoccupations that recurs in the paintings is the forest. Being aware of recent history, these paintings can have different readings dependent on whether they are viewed as places of refuge or murder.
Kiefer’s understanding of the way in which paint behaves is seen here, dripping, contrasting thin with thick textures, implying spatial depth and volume. There is always an underlying sense of perspective in the composition of the visual elements giving, however obscured, structure to the painting.
The use of single point perspective is especially strong in the converging parallels employed in the huge paintings of the bombastic Nazi Neo-Classical architecture, destroyed in the war, but reimagined by Kiefer as charred ruins.
Railway lines and tracks in the landscape take us nervously towards an ominous vanishing point.
With his high status in the art world justifiably recognized he now has the power and means to do anything he dreams of, demonstrated by the increased use of very expensive materials and huge installations. I was left with the feeling that because he “can do” he “will do”.
Is there the possible risk that the priceless value of the materials will overwhelm us and act as a barrier in our ability to reach further into the meaning of the work?
Anselm Kiefer at Royal Academy of Arts: ‘images of elegiac power’
Bold and esoteric, the German painter’s latest exhibition is traditionally Kieferesque, but the Royal Academy of Arts offers a new perspective to his work, says Alastair Sooke
Anselm Kiefer, Heroic Symbol V (Heroisches Sinnbild V), 1970.Photo: Collection Wuerth / Anselm Kiefer
Not many artists could thrive by themselves within the lofty Beaux-Arts galleries of the Royal Academy, but the German painter Anselm Kiefer is one who can. In recent years, the RA has occasionally devoted all of its opulent main galleries to a single artist, including Kiefer’s compatriot Georg Baselitz, as well as Anish Kapoor and David Hockney. But none of them has filled the space with such confidence as Kiefer, whose operatic paintings demand a sufficiently grand setting.
Take one of the most imposing and impressive pictures in the show: Ash Flower, which is more than 7.5 metres wide, almost 4 metres tall, and dominates an entire end wall in the largest gallery of all. It is an epic undertaking that took Kiefer 14 years to produce: a vast, panoramic vision of an empty, echoing interior, caked with thick splodges of cracked clay, sunflower seeds and ash, as well as impasto oil, emulsion and acrylic paint. Attached to the centre of the canvas is a gigantic, desiccated sunflower, arranged upside-down like the inverted hanged man in a deck of Tarot cards. Here is the rubble and detritus of a wrecked civilisation – perhaps even the civilisation into which Kiefer was born, in the Black Forest region of Germany in the closing stages of the Second World War, when the depravities of the Third Reich had yet to be vanquished and expunged. Certainly, the neoclassical architecture evokes a style of building popular under the Nazis.
And yet the presence of the sunflower and its seeds, withered though they are, suggests that we will not be forced to linger forever in this sepulchral limbo. Rebirth and regeneration are both hinted at and promised. The world stands ready to rise, phoenix-like, from the miasma of ash.
See what I mean? This is painting reaching its full-throated potential. In a nearby gallery we come across two paintings of ziggurats in the desert. In one, Osiris and Isis (1985-87), which alludes to ancient Egyptian mythology, an old television circuit board occupies the tip of a stepped pyramid. Copper wires snake out of it like manifestations of the sun’s rays, attached to shards of pottery that litter the pyramid’s base. Dense with references, the cumulative effect is mind-blowing and difficult to comprehend, even as we sense its grandeur.
Black Flakes, 2006. Oil, emulsion, acrylic, charcoal, lead books, branches and plaster on canvas.
Opposite this we find another crumbly yet monumental edifice, semi-obscured by a sandstorm – the pictorial equivalent of Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias. Inspect the painting up close and you will find a dune’s worth of sand covering the jagged, bark-like layers of pigment and shellac, which jut out of the canvas more in the manner of relief sculpture than painting. Here is a soundstage for a sword-and-sandals cinematic epic. You could practically walk into its arid depths and become parched and lost amid the Saharan blizzard.
Kiefer’s ambition, then, is unabashed: he creates contemporary history paintings in the grandest possible fashion that could hold their own beside the behemoths of the French School on permanent display inside the Louvre. Alchemy, occult philosophy, poetry, Norse mythology, the history of Nazi Germany: all find their way into the deeply personal cosmology of his paintings, which he often leaves out in the wind and the rain, or bathes in acid, in order to achieve their battered, time-worn surfaces. (Over the years, he has cut into, burned and even shot at his canvases.) Cézanne once said that he wanted to create “something solid and enduring, like the art of the museums”. Kiefer strives for a similar effect.
Yet – and this is to the credit of its curator, Kathleen Soriano – the exhibition at the Royal Academy, the artist’s first major retrospective in Britain, also reveals some surprising sides to Kiefer’s art.
The show starts not with a bang and a typical widescreen landscape but in a side-gallery filled with early drawings, watercolours and books, as well as oil paintings, from the Sixties and Seventies. It is fascinating to note that many of the themes and motifs that would obsess Kiefer throughout his career are already here in embryo: the power of the forest, the purifying effect of fire, Wagner, the artist’s palette as symbolic self-portrait, even the Nazi salute. (In a series of provocative photographs, Kiefer appears dressed in his father’s army uniform with his right arm extended in the air.) I was most struck, though, by his tender, lyrical and colourful watercolours. These anticipate a later gallery displaying several recent books filled with watercolour-on-plaster sketches of models in erotic poses. Who knew that the painter of Ash Flower was capable of such intimate, personal and sexy imagery?
From the muted opening, we move into a gallery showcasing three paintings from Kiefer’s so-called “Attic” series, which he created in the early Seventies. Here, his bare studio in the attic of a former schoolhouse at Hornbach in the German district of Buchen becomes a stage for complex dramas fired by religious and Wagnerian imagery. It also offers an opportunity to explore the swirling optical effects of wood grain.
Anselm Kiefer, Interior (Innenraum), 1981. Oil, acrylic, and paper on canvas.
In the context of the exhibition, though, these confined interiors provide a claustrophobic antechamber before the enormous third gallery filled with bravura whoppers including Ash Flower. Moving from one space to the other is exhilarating, and a coup of organisation on the part of Soriano.
From this point on, we are in territory that many people will find familiar. There are lots of monochromatic paintings with impasto surfaces to which organic matter, including sunflower stalks and bundles of straw, as well as metal objects such as books made out of lead, have been attached. There are also glass-fronted cabinets filled with silvery, thorny branches that entangle derelict concrete towers and evoke some enigmatic fairytale in the manner of the magical boxes of Joseph Cornell.
Outside, in the courtyard, another glass-and-steel vitrine greets visitors. Filled with lead models of submarines floating in formation above a dry-as-dust “seabed” of grey clay, it looks like a war memorial erected by the losing side rather than the victor.
This piece is one of several examples of new and recent work in the exhibition. Introducing notes of colour including watery-greens, soft pinks and gold into Kiefer’s visual vocabulary, the “Morgenthau” landscapes (2013-14) are indebted to Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows – though one of the pictures, L’Origine du monde, offers a vicious spin on Courbet’s infamous 1866 painting of the same title.
In place of Courbet’s close-up of a woman’s genitalia, Kiefer provides a rusty, sharp-toothed mantrap in the middle of a field of swaying corn, beneath an ominous sky. What else would you expect? Kiefer belongs to a tradition of Romantic painters grappling heroically with the sublime – he’s hardly the sort of artist who would dash off a carefree vision of alfresco hanky-panky.
Not all of the new work is successful. Ages of the World (2014), a mixed-media installation in the octagonal central hall consisting of a pyre-like heap of old canvases to which Kiefer has added shrivelled sunflowers, lava and even meteorite dust, is typical of the way in which his work can overreach itself: by trying to encapsulate the “deep time” of geology and the history of Earth, this ill-formed piece becomes meaningless – saying everything and nothing at once.
This, of course, is the problem with Kiefer. His work can tip over into bombast and grandiloquence. It can also, if we are being honest, try the viewer’s patience. His interest in esoteric mythology as well as the arcana of alchemy and the occult can come across as pretentious. By continuously drawing upon cabbalistic mysteries that are only understood by a few initiates, Kiefer injects his work with a general atmosphere of poetry, even magic – but he does so at the risk of alienating his audience, who may have little concern for such matters.
Winter Landscape (Winterlandschaft), 1970. Watercolour, gouache, and graphite pencil on paper.
Too much of his work alludes explicitly to the recondite texts of others, such as the occult philosopher and English physician Robert Fludd. For me, this smacks of someone trying to prove his cleverness, which is not an appealing trait. One senses that there is little humour in this exhibition, and a lot of self-regard. It will be riveting to contrast Kiefer’s approach to 20th-century German history with that of his contemporary Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), who was much more irreverent and lighter on his feet, and is about to be the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern.
For all that, though, Kiefer is capable of summoning images of memorable, elegiac power, suffused with splendour and desolation at the same time. The show ends on a high, with a beautiful installation called The Rhine, a collage of black-and-white woodcuts on canvas with acrylic and shellac compiled over more than two decades, between 1982 and 2013. The various gigantic canvases of this compelling artwork have been arranged as interlocking screens, so that the viewer enters a maze-like forest with the waters of the Rhine visible in the distance.
In between the tree trunks stand the touchstones of Kiefer’s imagination: wartime bunkers, a blaze of fire, the polyhedron from Durer’s famous print Melancholia. It is as if one of Kiefer’s lead books has come to life and is embracing us within its pages.
Telegraph subscribers are invited to a private viewing of the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Royal Academy on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Click here for more information. Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition runs from Sept 27 until Dec 14. For more information contact 020 7300 8000.
‘Chris Ofili: Night and Day,’ a Survey at the New Museum
An Ode to Blackness
CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Chris Ofili makes paintings that will not let us be. For more than two decades, the work of this British artist has dazzled and discomfited, seduced and unsettled, gliding effortlessly between high and low, among cultures, ricocheting off different racial stereotypes and religious beliefs. His paintings mesmerize, whether with their opulent dotted surfaces or bawdy eroticism, their perfumed colors or their riffs on established masterpieces.
One example is “Rodin … The Thinker,” a black woman in garter belt, bra and bright orange wig. Another is a St. Sebastian in rusted bronze, reinterpreted as a dark-skinned martyr who, instead of arrows, is riddled with nails, conjuring a Congolese power figure. And then there are the eccentric materials, brightly colored map pins, glitter and — most famous — elephant dung. And always, through changes in subject, technique and style, Mr. Ofili never loses touch with his belief in painting as, foremost, a sensual, accessible experience meant to engross the eye before doing much with the mind. Sometimes he challenges the basic act of seeing.
“Chris Ofili: Night and Day,” the New Museum’s intoxicating midcareer survey of Mr. Ofili’s ambitious art, presents six distinct bodies of paintings and drawings across three floors. In a darkened gallery on the museum’s third floor hangs shadowy paintings whose images flicker amid dark metallic purples, blues and reds. This ambiguous perceptual experience is akin to looking at the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, the Abstract Expressionist master of abstract geometries enmeshed in barely differentiated shades of black. But Mr. Ofili’s fleeting motifs reveal themselves to include images, set amid tropical settings, of a hanged figure, soldiers brandishing bayonets, and a black man surrounded by white policemen.
Standing before this last, especially disturbing image, which is titled “Blue Devils,” you understand beyond a doubt that the through line in this beautiful show is blackness: as night, as history, as culture, as skin, as majesty, as terror, as paranoia, as myth. It is present in the show’s opening second-floor gallery, too, but with a playful forthright decorativeness: Here are over 100 small watercolor “Afromuses,” bust-length portraits of imaginary men and women in full face or in profile, that Mr. Ofili began in 1995. At once regal and cartoonish, they suggest an extended family of royal ancestors and a bottomless well of inspiration.
In the next gallery, a dozen paintings from the late 1990s line the wall. They depict raffish black superheroes, blaxploitation film heroines and a brown clown-faced phallus — curvaceous characters with layers of dots, glitter-strewn resin and exotic backdrops — especially the radiating loops behind the goddesslike “She.” All are surrounded by tiny collaged images from black music or pornographic magazines, and garnished with one or more clumps of elephant dung, shellacked and stuck with colorful map pins that form decorative patterns or state the work’s title.
Two additional clumps support each canvas as it leans against the wall like some icon or ex voto, reminding us that painting is a universal, not Western, art form. The only work lacking a central figure in this first group is “Afrodizzia,” a psychedelic masterpiece of jewel-colored streamers that pays homage to black musicians like Little Richard, Michael Jackson and Miles Davis, even while embellishing their images with comically enormous black Afros.
In the early aughts, summarized in an adjoining gallery, Mr. Ofili put a political symbol — the red, black and green of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African flag — to lavish use. The five paintings here, which represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2003, depict figures, tropical plants and flowers. In three of them, mysterious lovers (or entertainers), descendants of the Afromuses, appear in formal evening dress. In two others, female nudes recline before us. It is as if the black maid in Manet’s 19th-century landmark “Olympia” has assumed the place of her white mistress. In each of these exultant paintings, a richly decorated dung ball forms the center of an immense star that seems to bless the scene like the star of Bethlehem.
Outstanding painters inevitably expand the medium to suit their needs and the specifics of their lives, and Mr. Ofili is no exception. Born in Manchester, England, in 1968, to Nigerian parents, he emerged with the group of Young British Artists led by Damien Hirst who heated London’s art scene in the early 1990s. His approach lacked their Conceptual orientation, but this did not stop him from being included in “Sensation,” the exhibition of the advertising magnate Charles Saatchi’s collection of Young British Artists at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.
The rest is local history: Mr. Ofili’s painting, “The Holy Virgin Mary,” caused noisy outrage. Now displayed in the New Museum show, it depicts a black Madonna, a clump of elephant dung, shellacked and decorated as always in Mr. Ofili’s paintings, replacing her right breast, which is exposed in keeping with Renaissance tradition. She is also surrounded by little putti that on close inspection turn out to be images from pornographic magazines.
Mr. Ofili’s lack of Conceptual credentials differentiates him from American black artists whose art focuses on black identity, among them Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson or Kara Walker (although he shares Ms. Walker’s upfront bawdiness). Mr. Ofili has more in common with painters who couch blackness in a fierce visuality, namely Mickalene Thomas, Kerry James Marshall, Robert Colescott and Ellen Gallagher, and with more distant precedents such as the insistent colors and forms of the American painters Bob Thompson, Beauford Delaney and William H. Johnson.
On a larger stage, Mr. Ofili belongs to a multigenerational group of painters, black and white, born primarily during the second half of the 20th century, who have sidestepped several popular wisdoms. They dismissed Minimalism’s premise that art had to be abstract, laughed at the post-Minimalist belief that painting was dead and largely ignored the Pictures Generation assertion that the only good image was a photo-based one. (Among these artists are Carroll Dunham, Nicole Eisenman and Ms. Thomas.) They turned back to Pop Art, the unfinished figurative styles of early Modernism, or non-Western art, among other sources. Mr. Ofili also rejected the early ’90s contention that painting could not be political, making it so by making it fully “out of himself,” to paraphrase Barnett Newman. It is a demanding, if not excruciating process that most young artists today fail to grasp, much less to undertake.
Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s artistic director; its curator, Gary Carrion-Murayari; and Margot Norton, an assistant curator, the exhibition proceeds upward from the second floor with each gallery offering a very different experience. After the decorativeness of the dotted paintings, gears shift radically on the third floor, with the darkened canvases, sometimes collectively called the Blue Paintings, which were the first Mr. Ofili painted after moving to Trinidad in 2005. Here, he places his subjects even more deeply in the tropics, a locale already predicted in the red-black-green Marcus Garvey works, while also discarding the dots, glitter, map pins and dung. It was time to move on.
On the show’s final floor, which culminates in several new paintings, riotous color returns and a final surprise awaits: looming gallery walls painted with a lush jungle in spreading violets and pale pinks. Across this ravishing expanse, nine paintings proceed from 2007 to 2014, indicating an artist growing steadily while inspired by precedents that include Gauguin and the Symbolists, Picasso in his Blue Period, Matisse, Art Nouveau and the Color Field painters and Ovid.
Building on a version of stain painting and mostly depicting couples, these works start out simply with flat blazing color and move toward mosaiclike complexity. In “Ovid-Desire,” a creature in a diaphanous gown swoons in her partner’s arms on a pink-and-black dance floor. In “Frogs in the Shade,” bright trees cast leaf patterns on the skin on the bodies of a nude couple, a reclining male entranced by the woman dancing before him.
These paintings form an impressive demonstration of headlong development, but they suggest an artist still in transition, moving toward a promising future, which is exactly where Mr. Ofili, at 46, should be right now.
The Cedd Moses award winning bar, The Varnish, at the back of Coles, a restored century old formerly run down restaurant. We enjoyed a great hot pastrami sandwich at Coles just after it opened. The Varnish was recently named best bar in America.
Restaurant critic Pete Wells was kinda tough on New York restaurant’s bar programs in his New York Times column this week, saying that “an awful lot of the cocktails I’ve had in restaurants have landed with a splat in the ‘not good’ category.” So to convince Wells otherwise, Grubstreet came up with a list of New York restaurant cocktails “that don’t suck.” Surprisingly there were only 13 drinks.
Thirteen? L.A. could pass that in its sleep. In Los Angeles, many restaurants are taking their cocktail programs seriously. They’re hiring cocktail consultants or beverage directors, usually well-respected mixologists and bartenders, to build the bar program by handpicking the spirits, training the staff, and creating a drink menu to complement the food and the theme. Nowadays, a phoned-in cocktail menu of “classics with a twist” ain’t gonna cut it.
For this list, instead of calling out one cocktail from each restaurant, I decided to give a shoutout to restaurant bars that actually have drinks you finish involuntarily.
By the way, originally this list was up to 22 but had to whittle it down. Are there any restaurants that you think should have made the cut?
Rivera/Bestia/Acabar/Petty Cash: Julian Cox has the magic touch when it comes to bar programs. Trained by Sam Ross at Comme Ca, Julian’s drinks appeal to both teetotaller and pro drinkers. Unlike most restaurant cocktails which are light for fear of interfering with the food, his drinks are still flavorful and will leave liquor lovers sated. His bartenders are required to go through six weeks of training to earn a spot at one of his bars. Basically, when you see the Cox name on the menu, you know you’re good to go.
A.O.C.: Christiaan Rollich is also the man behind the bar programs at Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne’s other successful restaurants—Lucques and Tavern—but it was his creations at A.O.C. that helped put it at the top of L.A. Magazine’s 75 Best Restaurants list, at least for me. There he makes his own…well, everything, from coffee liqueurs to pepita syrups to even bathtub gin.
Brilliantshine: If Julian Cox can create such amazingness for other bar programs, you can imagine what he’s doing with his own restaurant, which he owns with his Soigne Group partner Josh Goldman. It’s like the best of Julian all up in there with cocktails inspired by his world travels. Best part, you can enjoy his drinks during a boozy brunch, late night or before and after dinner with food by Chef Richie Lopez. (During the meal, partake of Goldman’s wine list.)
The Corner Door: While this Culver City restaurant played musical chefs, head bartender Beau du Bois has been a stalwart fixture since the beginning, making it a go-to spot for cocktail enthusiasts who followed him from his days at M.B. Post. Plus, who can stay away from those fun cocktails with unusual flavor combinations like pineapple and cinnamon-infused Campari.
Crossroads: The fact that barman Jeremy Lake can create tasty vegan cocktails is a testament to his skills. Have you checked out his vegan hot buttered rum? Trained by Julian Cox, Lake consistently puts out imaginative drinks to complement chef Tal Ronnen’s animal-friendly cuisine.
The Eveleigh: Bar manager Dave Kupchinsky has singlehandedly turned the Sunset Strip, an area usually favored by tourists and the beautiful people, into a destination for craft cocktail enthusiasts. Every Monday features a different guest bartender, every Sunday a farmers-market fresh cocktail, and of course there’s D-Kup’s seasonally updated menu.
Gracias Madre: Another vegan restaurant with an impressive bar program. What are the chances? Only in L.A. At this West Hollywood vegan Mexican restaurant, beverage director Jason Eisner complements the fun fare by the Cafe Gratitude crew with build-your-own picklebacks, 24k gold-flecked cocktails, and boozy popsicles.
Ink: If you can’t get a reservation at Chef Michael Voltaggio’s hot West Hollywood adjacent restaurant, a seat at the bar with head bartender Gabriella Mlynarcyzk is in no way a consolation prize. She will wow you with her unique cocktails which make use of inventive ingredients like housemade IPA foam, chartreuse pixie dust, and chamomile vermouth. Or for something more familiar, check out her list of classic cocktails where a Negroni is made with rapid barrel-aged gin and the Dirty Martini has sake, umeboshe plums, vinegar, and celery bitters.
Petit Trois: It’s exciting stuff to be able to have cocktails with chef Ludo Lefebvre’s French bistro fare. For a long while diners could only enjoy BYOB wine with the pop-up king’s cuisine. But now for his second brick-and-mortar restaurant which features a full bar, bartender Danielle Motor (Hungry Cat) created food-friendly and Ludo-approved drinks.
Republique: I’m usually torn between barman Erik Lund’s cocktails and sommelier Taylor Parson’s wine list here but in the end it’s a cocktail for starters and wine for the meal. Lund’s short cocktail list–categorized by aperitif, traditional, and market–changes often, keeping up with chef Walter Manzke’s menu. So if you see something on there you like now better order it before it’s gone.
Scopa Italian Roots: What happens when two skilled barmen and a chef go into the restaurant business together? You get this Venice-adjacent eatery where everything you consume makes you happy. Steve Livigni and Pablo Moix (also co-owners of Santa Monica’s new Chestnut Club) created not only a stellar cocktail menu with instant favorites like Bullock’s Wilshire as well as one of the best Palomas I’ve ever had but a rich person’s drink list expertly using high-end stuff.
Tasting Kitchen: Barman Justin Pike has shaped the program of Chef Casey Lane’s Venice hotspot eatery since it opened in 2009. His drinks are simple, approachable and excellently crafted. Sure he’ll employ cocktail trends but because they make sense for his bar, and not because they’re crowd pleasers. Back when shrubs started to hit the scene, Pike made his own since he wasn’t a fan of the farm-to-glass trend. Shrubs were a good way to add the fruit component.
Bartender Jeremy Lake is living the dream. Over a year after taking on his first solo project creating the cocktail program at Chef Tal Ronen’s Crossroads, he teamed up with Ryan Floyd and Walter Schild of the David Myers Group (Hinoki & the Bird, Comme Ca) and partners Rhino Williams and Matthew Jacobs to open up Lost Property in Hollywood.
This brand-new whiskey bar is next door to 33 Taps on the historic Hollywood and Vine intersection. “I feel so blessed. I get emotional about it. It’s amazing,” Lake gushed. “I’m opening my own place and it’s on Hollywood and Vine.” The intimate bar takes over 33 Taps’ little-used event space which can hold 60 people comfortably. Its decor is timeless with blue couches, clean midcentury style tables and a crystal whiskey decanter chandelier. “You can come in here in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘80s, ‘90s, today and it will all look exactly the same,” said Lake.
And even though sports attire and flip flops may reign supreme at the adjacent two-level sports bar, Lost Property will have a “just look nice” dress code and a doorman to enforce it. There won’t be a password, though.
Now, the concept of a whiskey bar isn’t new. But a “lost and found” claim check system where you can “claim” (read: spend massive amounts of money on) lost and rare bottles of whiskey is. “We’ll advertise that we have a very rare Macallan coming in and you can buy the bottle if you want to and we’ll keep it in a bag with a ‘lost and found’ tag with your name on it,” explained Lake. “Whenever you come in, you pay a little corkage and you and your friends can sip on your bottle. It’s reserved for you.” The idea is that customers will have fun getting a sense of ownership, knowing that their bottle is waiting there for them.
For the opening, the whiskey list will start out with 50 different brands ranging from a $6 Evan Williams to a $40 rare rye from Northern California, which they only have one bottle of. However, it won’t get super nerdy here with tasting notes laid out in the menu. “A whiskey geek can come in here and I’ll make them a great cocktail and we’ll talk all day long about whiskey. Or a guy who doesn’t know anything about whiskey can come in and have a great time, too,” said Lake.
Cocktails off the standard list will be priced from $9 to $15 while Lake’s more decadent “Why Not?” menu, which spotlights cocktails made with his more high-end spirits, will range from $20 to $100. Another fun aspect of the Lost Property theme takes drunk shopping to another level. “Unclaimed” scarves, hats, sweaters, etc. will decorate the walls and if you see something that should be yours you can claim it.
Or you can turn it into a fun way to buy a drink for a friend who isn’t there. Pick a knickknack and buy a drink for your absentee buddy. The bar will affix a “lost and found” tag to the item and write down the drink. Then your friend can simply come in with their claim check stub to pick up their drink and found item. Don’t worry about missing out. The bar plans to replenish the fake lost items on a regular basis through estate sales and places like Jet Rag.
Lost Property’s grand opening is tomorrow starting at 7 p.m. Hours will be Thursday through Saturday from 7 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.
Lost Property, 1704 N. Vine St., Hollywood, 323-987-4445
Leave it to Jonnie and Mark Houston (Houston Hospitality) to constantly up the bar and nightlife scene with every new venue they open. I mean, wow, Good Times at Davey Wayne’s. Next Tuesday, however, the brothers aren’t adding yet another drink spot to their growing repertoire of themed delights but rather an old bowery-style New American restaurant called Butchers & Barbers. Complete with meat hooks and barbicide jars. Tucked between Houston properties No Vacancy and Dirty Laundry in Hollywood, the 1,200-square-foot, 50-seat restaurant will feature New American cuisine by Chef Luke Reyes (The Corner Door).
So why a restaurant now? Besides courting the challenge of the food biz, Mark said it felt like a natural next step for them. “As I get older I desire an environment where I can sit down and have a conversation,” he said. “I think the next thing is breaking bread with friends, having dinner, and genuinely get to know each other.”
The food menu accommodates every kind of appetite. For snacking at the bar, there’s popcorn seasoned with roasted garlic, rosemary, and thyme oil. For something absolutely indulgent and hearty there’s the 34-ounce côte de boeuf. And even though these are shared plates, they’re the hefty family-style portions. “You have to be very cautious about ordering too much,” said Mark. “You want to make sure you order and don’t overstuff yourself because you might not be open to going out after.”
To go with the dishes, Houston Hospitality Beverage Director Joseph Swifka didn’t just complement the masculine feel of the restaurant with the use of heavy, brown spirits but designed a drink menu of eight food-friendly cocktails. With house-made infusions and syrups as well as fresh produce, the drinks don’t overshadow the food yet still manage to have interesting, sophisticated flavors. “I wanted to have a couple of drinks with sherry involved just because sherry pairs nicely with food in general,” said Swifka. “There’s also on the lighter end of things, nice acidity to balance some of the flavors and to cut through richer dishes that we have.”
If you’re looking to do your own cocktail pairing with dinner, he recommends starting with the Lillian Gish (name may change) or the Good Ol Laurel, a take on a gin and tonic. Both have “a nice brightness and acidity to get your palate moving.” While the mellowness of the Ava Gardner, thanks to the toasted hazelnut and honey, makes it a fitting sipper during the meal. And to finish up, go for the Battle Potomkin which “could stand in the place of a very strong cup of tea or coffee.”
Groups of friends can order up a barrel of cocktail, which won’t be used to age but rather as a serving vessel for four people or so. “They’ll go out to the table and they’ll be able to use the spigots to pour their own drinks.”
In terms of the beer situation here, there are six beers on tap and only one bottle and one can as that space behind the bar is very tight. The selection, although limited, hits all the major notes, from a light white ale to IPA to richer, darker beers by producers like Angel City, Ballast Point, and Saint Archer. As for wine, the list is primarily made up of Rosenthal wines. “They’re mostly French right now, but again food-friendly but pretty elegant stuff,” said Swifka.
Butchers & Barbers will be open Tuesday through Sunday starting at 6 p.m.
With a new season comes the arrival of many recently opened places to quench our thirst, perfect for going classy in Hollywood, drinking seaside in Santa Monica or spending a late night in West Hollywood.
Whether you’re in the mood for fancypants cocktails, wines by the glass or beer on draft, here are the best new bars to spend a night out.
① Brilliantshine, Santa Monica
Most L.A. cocktail bars seem to start with Julian Cox. The barman behind Petty Cash, Bestia, Picca et al. recently debuted his Santa Monica flagship with partner Josh Goldman. The theme: seaside saloon. Grab a stool at the charming old-timey bar (think: vintage piano, brass fixtures) and order a Rome with a View ($10)—Campari, dry vermouth, soda and a lime wheel—or Spread Love, It’s the Brooklyn Way ($12) with rye whiskey, China-China bitters, dry vermouth and maraschino. There are Peruvian bites, too—we love the shrimp ceviche ($11) and lobster uni rice ($21). You can even post up for the night on the alfresco patio.
② Grandpa Johnson’s, Hollywood
Keep it classy with a taste of Old Hollywood. Blink and you’ll miss the unmarked entrance. Once inside, the Art Deco bar reveals wall-to-ceiling chevron panels, white marble tops, mirrored walls and a swanky 24-foot-long brass bar. The cocktails are just as fancy, dressed up in Darjeeling syrup, rose water and guava purée. Toast to T-Bizz ($14), named after owner Johnny Zander’s grandfather, made with bourbon, ginger syrup, apple cider, amaro, lemon juice, bitters and a lemon wedge.
③ The Nice Guy, West Hollywood
Continuing on the throwback theme, the Nice Guy serves cocktails with a side of mafiosa. Translation: red-sauce shared plates, old-school cocktails, booths (even a family chef’s table) and a sultry songstress. Go for a Moscow Mule ($15) served in a proper copper mug—you can upgrade to a punch bowl ($350) like a boss—or Mother’s Milk ($15), a frothy mix of vodka, house-made chocolate milk and soda water. Also of note: a dedicated whiskey menu, because that’s what men do.
④ Grain, Playa del Rey
As the name suggests, whiskey is the order of the day. Ask for it straight up, on the rocks or in a cocktail at Playa Provisions’ bar. Your evening will go something like this: oysters followed by clams casino and a lobster roll on an outdoor patio, then a visit to the back room for a night cap. There are more than 60 whiskies from 21-year Elijah Craig Kentucky bourbon ($22) to Nikka Taketsuru Japanese whisky ($28). And even bar bites are made with the brown spirit—don’t miss boozy bourbon milk and warm chocolate cookies ($8).
⑤ The Chestnut Club, Santa Monica
This Santa Monica bar is serious about one thing: cocktails. With Pablo Moix and Steve Livigni of Black Market Liquor as the duo also behind the scenes (err, bar), the drinks here are worth a visit alone. But the lofty, den-like watering hole also has a relaxed neighborhood hangout feel, with comfortable leather booths. The mixed drinks are simple: All 13 list no more than five ingredients. And beer geeks can get into the impressive craft brew list, ranging from local barleywines to double IPAs.
⑥ Murph’s, Sherman Oaks This Americana-themed bar is the latest to rouse the SFV after-hours scene. Designed to look like a 1930s gas station, Murph’s offers 11 local brews on tap (pulled from wrench handles) and even more by the can. If cocktails are calling, we suggest a standard Oil Change ($10)—a mix of bourbon, ginger and honey—or a rum-laced vanilla Coke float ($10) layered with bitters and vanilla liqueur. Fuel up with bro bar food such as a pimento cheese-topped burger ($14) and spicy fried chicken sandwich ($14). Bonus: Get $20 off your first Uber ride to make the trek back over the hill.
⑦ Bacari PDR, Playa del Rey
Winos can belly up and cheers at this beachside bar. And for good reason: Happy hour brings half-off wines by the glass and $10 liters of sangria, and “open bar” ($20) means 90 minutes of limitless red, white, champagne and sangria (and beer, too). If that doesn’t whet your taste buds, the kitchen slings grilled pizza ($8) and tapas-style cicchetti. Order individual plates ($8) or sample a trio of tastes ($21) ranging from crab crostini to lamb-stuffed eggplant with lemon garlic emulsion.
Refinery 29 – Best New Restaurants in Los Angeles, November 2014
Freds
Situated atop Barneys New York in Beverly Hills, Freds couldn’t have a more chic locale. The terrace offers top-notch views of the Hollywood Hills, while the menu sources local, fresh ingredients unique to California. In other words, you need to try this spot, pronto.
Butchers & Barbers
The brothers behind hot spots Pour Vous, Harvard & Stone, and No Vacancy have ventured away from the nightlife realm to open their first restaurant, Butchers & Barbers. Located smack-dab in the middle of Hollywood, the restaurant opened just last week. Hurry up and try it now — before word of its deliciousness gets out.
Butchers & Barbers, 6531 Hollywood Boulevard (near North Cahuenga Boulevard); 323-461-1464.
Kye’s
Whether you’re vegan, Paleo, gluten-free, or just appreciate a health-conscious meal, you gotta check out Kye’s in Santa Monica. The restaurant’s tagline — “Super tasty superfoods to go” — sums up the fare perfectly: It’s delicious, it’s healthy, and it’s quick. What more could you want?
Stir Market
A restaurant, market, wine bar, and cafe hybrid, this place is pretty much a one-stop culinary shop. Inspired by European food halls, Stir Market just opened its doors yesterday(!), so head over now to take the first peek.
Stir Market, 7475 Beverly Boulevard (at North Gardner Street); 323-879-8283.
The Springs
In addition to being a 100% raw, organic, and vegan restaurant, The Springs also boasts a yoga studio, wellness center, and organic juice bar. So, really, you can just chill here all day long.
The Springs, 608 Mateo Street (at Mesquit Street); 213-223-6226
Yellowtail Sunset Strip
From the Las Vegas Strip to the Sunset Strip: Well-known chef Akira Back has opened a sister location of his Las Vegas restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Expect the same high-quality Japanese fare and glam atmosphere of the original outpost.
Pete’s Los Angeles
The chef behind Baco Mercat and Bar Ama overhauled downtown spot Pete’s Cafe, and re-opened it last month as Pete’s Los Angeles. What’s different? A revamped, airy interior and a brand-new menu.
Pete’s Los Angeles, 400 South Main Street (at East Fourth Street); 213-687-7015.
Link
Artisan sausages? Yep, they’re a thing. This restaurant near the Beverly Center hand-selects organic ingredients for its nitrate-free sausages, which are made entirely in-house. Oh, and they serve Coolhaus ice cream sandwiches to boot.
Link, 8486 West 3rd Street (at South La Cienaga Boulevard); 747-221-6207.
The Oyster Gourmet
The newest resident of downtown’s Grand Central Market, The Oyster Gourmet comes complete with a crazy-cool, oyster-inspired bar that you need to see to believe.
The Oyster Gourmet, 317 South Broadway (near West 3rd Street); 213-624-2378.
Bowery Bungalow
Nosh on Mediterranean, North African, and Middle Eastern cuisine at this two-week-old Silver Lake spot, which is housed in a super-cute yellow cottage (complete with a white picket fence). Standout dishes include baba ganoush, chickpea falafel, and Moroccan couscous.
Bowery Bungalow, 4156 Santa Monica Boulevard (near North Hoover Street); 323-663-1500.
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L.A. Story: Where to Eat Now
The 10 must-try restaurants in the City of Angels this summer
What’s cooking at Roy Choi’s POT? Hot pots, of course.
From Roy Choi to Ludo Lefebvre, and from Downtown to Venice, Los Angeles is flush with new restaurants to try this summer. We’re crushing just as hard on Choi’s latest venture, the unpretentious POT, as we are on the impressive rotating chef lineup at Fifty-Seven.
Here are ten noteworthy spots worth braving L.A.’s notorious traffic for:
① POT, Koreatown
L.A.’s culinary hero, Roy Choi, continues to make headway with his sixth brick and mortar inside the Line Hotel. The Korean restaurant/bar/cafe is all about casual, unpretentious and fun. Diners tie on floral-patterned bibs and dig into one-dish hot pots—try the Boot Knocker ($25 small, $45 medium, $56 large) or seafood-loaded Fisherman’s Wharf ($39, $72, $96)—supplemented with more traditional dishes to share such as kimchi fried rice ($10). Bonus: The ’90’s soundtrack blares everything ffrom Boyz II Men to Bone Thugs.
② Night + Market Song, Silverlake
Part two of Kris Yenbamroong’s cult Thai hit, Night + Market. Here, the Northern Thai menu continues with classics such as sweet and spicy “party wings” and sour Isaan-style sausage. The family-style additions are just as spicy and bold: pork blood-flavored luu shuk ($10) soup topped with cracklings and crispy noodles; and Bangkok mall pasta ($14) charged with salted fish, garlic, bird’s eye chile and green peppercorn.
③ FiftySeven, Downtown
Inside the old Heinz loading dock, the restaurant and downstairs bar is home to a rotating list of in-residence chefs. It’s only been open since March, but this Arts District restaurant has already seen David Nayfeld of Eleven Madison Park and Thomas Keller-trained Joshua Drew at the helm. For the summer, Farmshop’s former executive chef uses farmers’ market ingredients in dishes like local, ink-braised squid with beet greens, green garlic aioli and puffed buckwheat ($14). (Look out for 15-year old wunderkind Flynn McGarry June 23, July 21 and August 11, when he’ll be cooking a nine-course dinner, priced at $150 per person.)
④ Faith & Flower, Downtown
On the other side of Downtown, this glam restaurant’s bar is a scene in and of itself. Suede banquettes and sleek touches pave the way for chef Michael Hung’s menu of French-leaning dishes. Unexpected surprises like deviled eggs with kimchi ($6) and confit carnitas pizza ($17) keep things fresh, while an extensive list of cocktails keeps the night loose.
⑤ République, Mid-City
The old Campanile space returns to its roots as a fine dining destination, serving beautiful dinners at night and equally beautiful baked goods from the bakery. Stop in mornings for viennoiserie, tarts and dough baked, rolled, fried and sweet; and start dinner with housemade bread with salted Normandy butter ($5) or, better yet, wood oven pan drippings ($5). The rest of the menu reads like a French bistro’s—escargots en croûte, steak frites—but with seasonal ingredients. It’s all made by the talented Walter Manzke, formerly of Church & State and Bastide.
⑥ Superba Food + Bread, Venice Superba Snack Bar expands its local approach to food, both in its ingredients and its devotion to Venice, with a restaurant-slash-bakery. The all-day menu options rotate from kaya toast and hotcakes for breakfast, subs and salads for lunch, a mid-afternoon selection of tartines, to a full menu of not-too-fussy large plates for dinner. Don’t miss weekly specials like rotisserie half duck with duck fat-braised radish ($29), and, of course, try the bread and pastries.
⑦ Ladies Gunboat Society at Flores, West L.A.
Chef Brian Dunsmoor of The Hart and The Hunter brings his Southern roots to plates like chicken-fried rabbit ($29) with spiced local honey, cilantro and sesame seeds, and Sea Island red pea and Carolina gold rice-mixed Hoppin’ John ($15). There’s also a fried chicken plus beer combo for happy hour, and a roster of stick-to-your-bones comfort foods (beignets, cornmeal pancakes) for brunch.
⑧ Pine & Crane, Silverlake
Pine & Crane keeps it in the family by using produce sourced from the owners’ own farm for its Taiwanese dishes. The service is fast-casual, which translates to unfussy food in a modest, minimalist setting. But the spot-on Chinese options mean legit dan dan noodles ($7.50) and pork dumplings ($5) without having to trek to the SGV.
⑨ Petit Trois, Mid-City Trois Mec may be the hardest (ticketed) reservation in town, but come mid-summer, Angelenos can stop into its sister restaurant from Ludo LeFebvre, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo (the duo behind Animal and Son of a Gun). The theme is classic French, with options like croque monsieurs, escargots, steak tartare and crème caramel. The look? That of a brasserie outfitted with an open kitchen counter, checkered floors, etc.
⑩ Alimento, Silverlake
Zach Pollack strikes out on his own from Sotto to the Eastside. Pollack sticks to what he knows best: handmade pastas, sugo and rustic Italian cooking. The indoor-outdoor space completes a nice trifecta of neighborhood food options—L&E Oysters and LAMILL are close by—come the end of June, when doors finally open.
The busy dining room at Josef Centeno’s new tasting menu only restaurant Orsa & Winston.
The last four months have been a boom time for the Los Angeles dining scene. The culinary wealth extends from LAX to downtown and hits appear at all price points, from breakfast sandwiches to a “super omakase” at an exclusive chef’s counter. We’ve done our homework. As in, eaten some serious meals. And with that here are 11 of the most promising openings from the past four months in L.A. County.
Orsa & Winston
Chef Josef Centeno, a well-known grinder who seems most comfortable in the kitchen, steps into the spotlight at Orsa & Winston, which features a refined combination of Italian and Japanese cuisines and a more open design that keeps the main man front and center. The menu changes daily and gets as ambitious as diners will allow, from a four-course family-style menu that costs $50 per person to seats to a “super omakase” meal at the chef’s counter. The menu is highly seasonal, but you might catch dishes like koshihikari rice with uni and Pecorino cream or pork loin with chicken liver mousse and huckleberries. Centeno already captured the attention of Angelenos with Bäco Mercat and Bar Amá in the Old Bank District, and Orsa & Winston is likely to keep it. 122 West 4th Street, Downtown, 213-687-0300, orsandwinston.com
The Factory Kitchen
This concrete and steel showpiece in the downtown L.A. Arts District features flashes of color from reclaimed wood tables and fire red chairs. Matteo Ferdinandi is running the front of the house while longtime Valentino chef Angelo Auriana is at the stove at this Italian-to-the-core restaurant. House-made pastas have been early hits, including marjoram-speckled corzetti stampati with veal and tomato sauce. Really though, plenty of people would visit just for the focaccia calda di recco al formaggio, thin focaccia stuffed with crescenza cheese and dressed with arugula and Ligurian olive oil. 1300 Factory Place, Downtown, 213-996-6000,thefactorykitchen.com
The Egg Daddy sandwich includes an all-beef patty and cheddar with a fried egg on a brioche bun.
Egg Slut
Chef Alvin Cailin and co-owner Jeff Vales generated plenty of interest by serving refined egg dishes from a truck. Now they’re running an open-air counter in downtown’s increasingly epic Grand Central Market. Sure, they’re still serving breakfast options like coddled eggs with bacon-braised cannellini beans and crostini. Also, The Fairfax — a sandwich with scrambled eggs, onions, cheddar and Sriracha mayo on house-baked brioche. But the duo’s also added steak and eggs served with crispy potato pave; egg salad tossed with honey mustard aioli and served with arugula on Texas toast. There’s even talk of a burger with coffee bacon jam…of course topped with a fried egg. Wonder if Burger Coffee Bacon Slut is going too far? 317 Broadway, Downtown, eggslut.com
L.A. Chapter
Sadly, Ace Hotel founder Alex Calderwood didn’t live to see the opening of L.A.’s Ace Hotel, which has inspired triumphant praise since reviving the United Artists building on the south end of downtown’s historic Broadway Theater District. On the ground floor, chef Ken Addington and business partner Jud Mongell of Brooklyn’s Five Leaves have opened L.A. Chapter, a two-tiered restaurant that features checkerboard tile floors, copper tables and serves three seasonal meals daily. Yes, they’ve imported the Five Leaves Burger, which hosts grilled pineapple, pickled betters, egg, harissa mayo and Lindy & Grundy beef. 929 South Broadway, 213-623-3233, acehotel.com/losangeles
LAX Tom Bradley International Terminal
A long LAX layover is no longer dreaded thanks to the influx of new dining options at the retooled Tom Bradley International Terminal. The multi-tiered deck in the Villaraigosa Pavilion food court, named for L.A.’s previous mayor, now houses chef-driven restaurants like Border Grill (modern Mexican from Mary Susan Milliken and Susan Feniger), Larder at Tavern (seasonal sandwiches and salads from Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne), and ink.sack (Michael Voltaggio’s reimagined sandwiches). Fast casual options include 800 Degrees (wood-fired pizza) and Umami Burger. Petrossian’s caviar emporium adds a luxe touch, and Vanilla Bake Shop delivers a sweet finish. lawa.org
Din Tai Fung
Persuasive developer Rick Caruso convinced Frank Yang to expand his family’s Taipei legacy at The Americana at Brand, a 15 1/2 acre mixed-used development in downtown Glendale. Din Tai Fung already dominates the doughy San Gabriel Valley arms race with weekend-only soup dumplings, pan-fried rice cakes, airy steamed buns and more. So it was good news when this location opened closer to downtown. In Glendale, Yang’s upped Din Tai Fung’s game with juicy pork dumplings studded with shaved Italian truffles, potstickers and a full bar. Poon Design has also cranked up the ambiance, including towering wooden doors, overhead wood slats, jumbo box chandeliers and an exhibition kitchen fronted by rings that resemble dumpling steamers. Thankfully, DTF kept playful touches like a cartoon dumpling character, which greets diners at the reception desk. 177 Caruso Avenue, Glendale, 818-551-5561,dintaifungusa.com
République already boasts one of the city’s finest selections of fresh morning breads and pastries.
République
Classically trained powerhouse Walter Manzke and talented chef/wife Margarita joined forces with restaurateur Bill Chait to replace famed Campanile with a multi-faceted restaurant and bakery. The airy space features a counter up front, which hosts pastries by day and oysters by night. High-top tables and detailed tile work give way to an open kitchen, communal tables and high ceilings. In terms of the menu, the well-traveled couple’s culinary offerings are by no means limited to France. République is already one of the best L.A. places to find morning pastries, seasonal salads, oak-cooked meats and inventive dishes like ramekins of escargots with puff pastry and garlic butter; or beignets with porcini mushrooms and Parmesan. Margarita Manzke’s desserts include stupendous panna cottas, tarts and bombolini. A seasonal bar program from Erik Lund and a varied wine list from beverage director Taylor Parsons rounds it all out. 624 S. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, 310-362-6115, republiquela.com
Mud Hen Tavern
Susan Feniger of Top Chef Masters, Food Network and Border Grill fame, joined chef/partner Kajsa Alger in flipping STREET into an everyday neighborhood hangout. The space now features an inviting patio, a more welcoming bar with high-top tables, comfortable booths, craft beer and cocktails. The menu still embraces global influences, including multi-textured tuna ceviche, and Greek-inspired lamb meatballs anchored in tangy tzatziki, though Mud Hen does feature a Cheeseburger with Lindy & Grundy grass-fed beef. After all, the name evokes Feniger’s childhood in Toledo, home of the Mud Hens minor league baseball team, so some things are all-American comfort. 742 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, 323-203-0500, mudhentavern.com
Scopa Italian Roots
A culinary wave is washing over the Westside, starting with Venice, and now extending to Marina del Rey. One chef riding the crest is Antonia Lofaso, who teamed with Black Market partners Mario Guddemi and Salvatore Aurora and bartenders Steve Livigni and Pablo Moix on Scopa, who draw on the chef’s Italian roots. The glass-fronted space features brick walls, communal wood tables, and a backlit bar. Of course the bar is clearly visible, since Livigni/Moix are one of the most accomplished bartending duos on the West Coast. Lofaso’s sprawling menu can get pretty inspired at places, whether it’s a stuffed shells flavor bombed with duck sausage, ricotta and tomato sauce. There’s also rigatoni with oxtail and bitter dandelion greens, as well as a seared T-Bone served with salsa verde. For dessert, request Livigni’s favorite Amaretto, which drinks like a liquid cookie. 2905 West Washington Boulevard, Marina del Rey, 310-821-1100,scopaitalianroots.com
Floral custom tile flooring and communal tables are part of the dining room at East Borough.
East Borough
Chloe Tran & John Cao have opened an upgraded “Fraîche Vietnamese” restaurant in Culver City with restaurateur Paul Hibler and chef Jason Neroni, partners in the American Gonzo Food Corporation culinary incubator. This builds on the success of Tran and Cao’s more casual and small Camp in Costa Mesa. Sandwiches and salads are featured at lunch, and more ambitious fare is available at dinner, including head-on blue shrimp with tart pomelo in a funky crab paste butter bath. Neroni, also the chef at Venice’s Superba Snack Bar, has finally brought phocatini to Los Angeles, al dente pasta dotted with fresh herbs, oxtail, hoisin, sambal and onion. A large format pork shank slow cooked with Vietnamese spices and served with Sriracha, butter lettuce and sliced pickles for wrapping. For dessert, think bittersweet Vietnamese coffee…budino. Tran, a longtime designer, built the space with floral custom tile flooring and communal tables. 9810 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, 310-596-8266, east-borough.com
Warren’s Blackboard
Until chef Warren Schwartz opens The Frontyard this spring in North Hollywood’s Beverly Garland Hotel, the accomplished chef (Saddle Peak Lodge, Westside Tavern) is operating a sort of food & drink workshop complete with blackboard menu at night. Popular early selections include popovers, based on grandma’s recipe, sliced open and layered with mushrooms, bacon and pencil-thin asparagus spears; a bone-in braised lamb shank with orange gremolata and house-made pappardelle. White Boy Fried Rice is stir-fried with Spam, broccoli, egg and sambal, just like Schwartz makes for family at home. 4222 Vineland Avenue, North Hollywood, 818-255-7290, warrensblackboard.com
Joshua Lurie is the L.A. based founder of Food GPS.
Downtown L.A. has been getting more love than usual, not just from Angelenos but the rest of the nation. (Thanks, GQ and Bon Appetit!) And amazingly it continues to grow and develop. To think it all really started gaining momentum back in 2007 when Cedd Moses first opened Seven Grand. Cut to seven years later and we have a boom of new watering holes, underground and overlooking the city, to add to the mix of already successful bars, sealing the deal that DTLA is THE place to do an epic barhop. Either take the Metro in or book a room at one of the many hotels.
✹ Bar Jackalope at Seven Grand: This new bar-within-a-bar, which opened in January, only accommodates 18 drinkers, emulating those intimate whiskey bars you find in Japan. In fact you can’t just saunter in from Seven Grand outside. Rather, you flick a light switch to get instructions on how to get in. Once in, enjoy the selection of 120 different whiskies, including rarities like Pappy and Balvenie Tun 1401 or the three classic whiskey cocktails. Ballers may choose to purchase a bottle of their own and store it in their very own whiskey locker at the bar.
✹ City Tavern DTLA at Figat7th: This downtown outpost is, frankly, bigger and better than its Culver City sister what with more space, more taps and a thoughtful and extensive cocktail program created by Brent Falco and Cari Hah (both formerly of Cole’s Red Car Bar). Thanks to their cocktail menu, you’ll probably end up staying here from happy hour, when you can get a decent cocktail for $5 to $6, through dinner for a desserty Grown-Ass Milkshake, to close with a flight of Manhattans.
✹ The Continental Club: From the folks who brought you The Room in Hollywood and The Association comes this basement bar which opened two weeks ago beneath Bar Ama. Meant to resemble the sort of gentlemen’s club you’d find in London it holds 300 stylish attired guests. Sip on fancy-pants cocktails like the Rolls-Royce or a “ferociously shaken” Sloe Gin Fizz.
✹ Crane’s Downtown: The first of two new downtown bars with “Crane” in its name, this one is where Crane’s Hollywood Tavern moved and opened in November. Take the steps down til you come across a massive door leading into an old bank vault. Thankfully, it’s not a speakeasy, but rather a chill, upscale dive bar. Here you get no frills, just straight-forward drinking.
✹ Honeycut at the O Hotel: True, this discotheque/craft cocktail bar opened in October of last year but it still bears mentioning. It’s where bartenders go to boogy down and lay back. With one room dedicated to a carefully crafted drink and the other a fun selection of cocktails on tap, you can’t go wrong.
✹ Nest at WP24: Wolfgang Puck’s new 4,100-square-foot venue, which takes the place of the WP24 lounge on the 24th floor of the Ritz-Carlton, opened just this month. Stop by for a bar bite like tiny dumplings or a dinner of crispy black pepper pork belly but definitely stay to explore the 300-wine list. Or there are cocktails like the Bourbon Buddha with sage, Buffalo Trace, Aperol, lemon juice, and simple syrup, and the Bird of Paradise with 209 Gin, lemon juice, orange wedge, simple syrup, and club soda.
✹ Peking Tavern: Rounding out the basement boozeries, this Chinese gastropub is located in the basement of NCT Lofts and boasts to be “Home of the Bai Jiu Cocktail.” For those unfamiliar with this pungent Chinese liquor, best tread lightly. Definitely an acquired taste but you can ease into it with their Peking Coffee, a mix of Bai Jiu, coffee and horchata liqueur. Or try out their Peking versions of an Old Fashioned and a Manhattan, both made with Peking bitters.
✹ Tom’s Urban: Taking the place of ESPN Zone in L.A. Live and opening just this week, this gigantic two-level sports bar is the place to go if you want to catch the game, any game, on one of the 80 TV screens. For your immediate drinking needs, there are cocktails on draft by barman Joel Black (Comme Ca).
✹ Upstairs Bar at the Ace Hotel: Everyone keeps talking about this gorgeously, romantic new poolside roof bar at the stunning Ace Hotel. It’s definitely THE place to take that special someone, aka the person you want to get it on with. Just make sure to come early to avoid the long line. The cocktails here are twists on tropical cocktails, showcasing aperitifs, gin and whiskey.
✹ Wendell: Former Bukowski dive bar hang Craby Joe’s was made new again, openinglast October. Even though it’s sleek with its dark wood and long, polished bar, it’s still all about chill drinking for the neighborhoodies rather than the next big cocktail trend. Settle in and order up a tasty craft brew or a canned Schlitz while pondering the fact that you’re under the roof where U2 filmed that “Where the Streets Have No Name” video.
✹ Wolf & Crane: This Little Tokyo bar, which opened in December, celebrates the Japanese trend of highball bars and features 10 different highballs, simple cocktails made with booze and soda. You’re in a hurry to get your drink on, then this is the place.
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LA DOWNTOWN NEWS
Restaurant NewsAs 2014 Arrives, Downtowners Hunger for These New Restaurants
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES – Foodies had plenty to chew on in Downtown Los Angeles in 2013, with a number of buzzed-about restaurant openings. It seemed that every time you threw a bread roll you hit a celebrity chef working on his or her own place in the Central City.
It appears that the momentum will continue in 2014. The new year is slated to feature fresh ventures from old faces, expansions of already popular L.A. joints, potential rising stars and everything else on the food spectrum.
In short, Downtown diners are already looking at a plethora of new eateries, even if some are still in the early planning stage. Here’s a look at some of the hottest restaurant arrivals slated for the coming year.
Lucky 57: Beau Laughlin has had plenty of success with West Hollywood gastropubs The Hudson and The Churchill. Now, he has set his sights on fine dining in the Arts District. Fifty Seven is scheduled to open at 712 S. Sante Fe Ave. — at the old Heinz loading dock, near Italian hotspot Bestia — in the first quarter of 2014. It will offer a unique conceit: The kitchen will feature a rotation of chefs from around the country who stop by, do their thing for a few months, then give way to the next big name. First up is David Nayfeld, a veteran of New York’s lauded Eleven Madison Park.
Market Madness: The Dec. 23 opening of DTLA Cheese at Grand Central Marketis just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the venue’s foodie revolution. Up next are three new eateries: Wexler’s Deli, Olio Pizza and Oyster Gourmet. The former comes from chef Micah Wexler and partner Michael Kassar (both from the shuttered Mezze in Beverly Grove) along with Pitfire Pizza co-owner David Sanfield. The restaurant is aiming for a February opening and will serve old-school deli classics such as house-made pastrami, corned beef and smoked salmon. Olio Pizzeria is an addition to chef/owner Bradford Kent’s restaurant of the same name in Beverly Grove, and will feature wood-fired pies and appetizers. Oyster Gourmet, meanwhile, is the brainchild of oyster expert Christophe Happillon. He has been wowing eaters with impeccable shellfish at pop-ups in several restaurants (including Downtown’s Perch) and farmers markets throughout Los Angeles.
Check, Please: It’s not every day that you eat a burger with ketchup “leather” and a kombu-infused revision of cheap American cheese. Then again, Plan Check isn’t your average restaurant. Come the spring, Downtowners will no longer have to trek to the Westside or Fairfax to get their hands on owner Terry Heller and chef Ernesto Uchimura’s inventive food. Instead, they’ll just head to 1111 Wilshire Blvd. in City West, where Plan Check’s third location will be on the ground floor of a recently opened apartment complex. Expect stellar burgers, beef-fat fries and smoky fried chicken.
Pub Love: Plan Check is not the only gastropub moving across town. Culver City favorite City Tavern will be opening in the FIGat7th shopping center by the end of January, joining a slew of new eateries; like neighbor Mendocino Farms, it will have its own large standalone spot near the mall’s bustling food court. This City Tavern will be twice as big as the original location, with enough space for a cocktail lounge and patio. The menu will feature comfort-food classics such as grilled pimento cheese sandwiches, along with new options, among them a selection of chilled seafood.
Flying High: From the we’ve-been-waiting-for-this-one-for-years corner, there’s Redbird. Chef Neal Fraser has long influenced the Southern California dining scene, both at his own restaurants (BLD and Grace, which shuttered in 2010) and at others through his consulting work. He’ll be returning to the kitchen at Redbird, which will open — at an unspecified date — in the rectory next to the old Vibiana cathedral. Fraser’s wife and business partner Amy Kroll took over management of the space last year and Fraser is partnering with Bill Chait (who helped open Bestia and Rivera, among others) on the venture. As for the food: “It will be as fine-dining as we can make it,” he told Zagat in April. “Not small plates, not a bistro, not a gastropub.”
Due (Middle) East: Bestia chef and co-owner Ori Menashe has made the Italian restaurant one of the toughest reservations in all of L.A., but he’s working on something decidedly different for his next project: He hopes to open a Middle Eastern restaurant, also in the Arts District, by the end of 2014. Though it might seem like an odd transition, the new joint will pay homage to his favorite comfort foods — Menashe was born in Los Angeles but grew up in Israel. Expect dishes with the rustic-but-modern aesthetic found at Bestia; Menashe has mentioned wood-fired tagines (stews), house-made pita breads and Middle Eastern-spiced charcuterie.
Where are the hautest spots to party in the City of Angels? It’s a tough job, but we’ve done the digging for you. With great fanfare, we present our picks for the top five nightclubs in Los Angeles. Get ready to put on your dancing shoes!
643 N La Cienega Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069 (310) 652-2012
1
Greystone Manor Supperclub
Hollywood’s hottest stars come to party at Greystone Manor. Dinner service from sbe’s executive Chef Danny Elmaleh begins at 6 pm, but late night is when the club is at its best. The beautiful people come out to play and party in the old Hollywood-style venue, whose interior can best be described as neo-Renaissance meets neo-Gothic décor.glamour and decadence. Like the best of its peers, its door is tight. Unless you’re one of the Hollywood elite, get there early for a shot at glory. Booking a table for dinner or reserving bottle service should also do the trick if you’re not into an early bird special.
9229 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069 (310) 274-7500
2
Bootsy Bellows
Bootsy Bellows is the best new club to hit Hollywood in ages. Under the direction of owners David Arquette and John Terzian, the Sunset Strip spot is a mixture of vintage cool and complete whimsy. It’s nearly impossible to get in the door, but should you be one of the lucky few, you’ll be guaranteed to have the best time of your life.
H.wood.group principals John Terzian, Brian Toll and Markus Molinari have created a brand new British-themed club called Hooray Henry’s, and it’s a smashing good time. As conceived by John Sofio of BUILT Inc., Hooray Henry’s is like an aristocratic English manor with the modern touches only an Angeleno could enjoy. Dance the night away while imbibing hip Brit-themed cocktails like the bourbon-based “Royal Fashion” and gin-soaked “Oxford Lad.”
1645 Wilcox Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90028 (323) 871-8233
4
The Sayers Club
The Sayers Club has credibility because it’s so unassuming from the outside. Though it’s hidden behind a hot dog stand, don’t be fooled: this hot spot attracts some of the biggest names — and DJ’s — in Hollywood. The nightclub is bigger and better after undergoing a revamp in 2013; it took over an area that formerly housed Papya King and converted the space into a dark and masculine den of relaxation with pre-party snacks for pizza lovers courtesy of its new wood-burning oven. Haute!
1601 N Cahuenga Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028 (310) 334-9619
5
AV Nightclub
AV nightclub may be located inside the historic 1920′s Marion building, but trust us, its interior is completely modern. There are three platforms for go-go dancers, aerial rigging for theatrical performances and staging for dancing behind each table. If you think this sounds like a party you want to be at, you’re right.
LOS ANGELES — Shannon Michael Cane knows he has big shoes to fill as the new director and curator of the highly anticipated second edition of the Los Angeles Art Book Fair (LAABF). “Taking over the fair from someone like [artist and curator] AA Bronson, who is a mentor to me, is a lot of pressure to see what you can do to improve it,” Cane told Hyperallergic.
A native of Australia, Cane has worked at Printed Matter in New York for the last six years after extensive experience as the independent publisher of They Shoot Homos Don’t They?, a cult classic zine that was part of the surge of queer zine making a decade ago. Cane was invited by AA Bronson back in 2007 to exhibit at one of the first New York Art Book Fairs (NYABF), and he found the experience exhilarating, as he was able to meet his zine and artist-book idols all in one place.
Cane is also a perfect spokesperson for the rise of a scene that is smart, diverse, and global. His enthusiasm for artist books and zines is obvious, and probably comes from his own experience of learning about the power of community through the page. ”I’m trying to keep what people love about the fairs that AA produced but slowly putting my spin on it,” he said.
While the New York incarnation of Printed Matter’s popular art book fair has continued to grow, attracting a whopping 27,000 visitors over three days in 2013, the Los Angeles fair is still coming into its own, even if it’s clear that Angelenos are hungry for the event (15,000 people attended last year). Roughly 650 applicants applied for the 260 spots available at the 2014 edition, and the publishers range from blue-chip galleries (including Gagosian) and antiquarian booksellers that have no websites or shops to the $150 zine booths that welcome exhibitors who would probably never have access to such a vast pool of potential readers in any other way.
What binds all these diverse exhibitors and visitors together is a love of books — more specifically, artist books and zines, or as Cane characterizes it, “art for the page.” ”Art books are retaliation towards the gallery system,” he explained, adding that people who can’t get gallery shows have often turned to alternative outlets to communicate with an audience. “It was a reaction against the gallery system, as artists said ‘I want something I can give to people — an object but it’s not a catalogue of my work. It’s more than that.’”
But book sellers will not be the only draw this coming weekend, as the 2014 LAABF will also feature an exhibition of queer zines curated by Philip Aarons and AA Bronson, Fabulousity, an exhibition of ephemera and photographs by Alexis Dibiasio about 1980s and ’90s New York club kid culture, a conversation between LA-based artist Piero Golia and Andrew Berardini for the duration of the fair (presented by Gagosian, the entire dialogue will be transcribed in shorthand by a court stenographer), and so much more.
One of popular features of the NYABF that’s coming to LA is the Classroom, which has a full schedule of programming organized by David Senior, bibliographer of the Museum of Modern Art library.
“The Classroom has functioned at the NYABF as a change of pace to the bustle of fair. People can listen for an hour to someone read or an artist’s talk about their practice or a recent work. It also usually has a few zany performances to keep things fun and irreverent,” Senior told Hyperallergic.
“In LA, I’ve sort of followed the same idea. We created a pretty packed program with a lot of different artists and publishers, while also emphasizing the community of people that are out here working with this genre of artists’ publications. And this takes on a wide range — I am excited to hear Martine Syms read from her screenplay Most Days on Sunday, as well as Anna Sew Hoy in discussion with the writer Laurie Weeks. These are some highlights that feature individuals from the LA community.”
Hyperallergic will be reporting from the LAABF all weekend, but until then we’ve compiled a short list of some choice events to check out.
Thursday, January 30
6:30–7:30pm: Donelle Woolford kicks off the 2014 Whitney Biennial (yes, seems random) with a re-creation of Richard Pryor’s 1977 comedy routine from his short-lived TV show.
7–8pm: Artist Jack Pierson signs his latest book, Tomorrow’s Man, Lynn Valley 9, presented by Presentation House Gallery and Bywater Bros. Editions.
Friday, January 31
1–2pm — Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW) leads a casual conversation (which I guess means it is non-hierarchal) about the use of the word “feminism” and why people shy away from it.
4–5pm — Artist Laura Owens will be in conversation with Ooga Booga’s Wendy Yao about their recent book collaborations. Owens is one of those rare artists who has fully integrated artist books as an important part of her body of work.
Saturday, February 1
11am — Dynasty Handbag, the performance-arty-leotardation-comedy-psychic-meltdown-voiceover-stretchpants/antipants-lezbiananationalarmy vehicle of Jibz Cameron, will put on a show that is sure to raise questions about the role of art and comedy … and probably make you laugh out loud.
2–3pm — Psychologist Dr. Alan Castel will discuss his research on human memory and why we remember some things while choosing to forget others. Related to the release of Michael Schmelling’s Land Line from J&L Books, Castel will also discuss metamemory (our thoughts about our own memory) and its influence on memory.
3–4pm — Johan Kugelberg, an author/curator and proprietor of Boo-Hooray, will discuss the problems and possible solutions of archiving counter-culture narratives. Kugelberg has created university archives for Yale, Cornell, Oxford, and Columbia on punk, hip-hop, May 68, Living Theatre, Larry Clark, and Angus MacLise, among others. He is currently working on the Printed Matter archive.
Sunday, February 2
1–2pm — Martine Syms‘s “Most Days” is what what she calls a “Mundane Afrofuturist sound work” that will be released on vinyl next month. The piece by an artist who considers herself a “conceptual entrepreneur” looks at “what an average day looks like for a young black woman in 2050 Los Angeles.” She will be reading from her sci-fi anti-adventure.
1–3pm — Artists and special surprise guests will read from More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari (eds. Meg Cranston and Hans Ulrich Obrist), a new two-volume publication from JRP | Ringier. This event requires an RSVP, which you can do here.
3–4pm — Aram Saroyan is most famous for his minimalist poem “lighght,” which caused NEA-related controversy back in the 1960s, and his four-legged “m” poem, which was cited by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s shortest poem. He will be launching the second edition of his Complete Minimal Poems, which collects his renowned works into one definitive volume. Saroyan will give a rare reading of these works at the LAABF.
Hyperallergic is a media sponsor of the LA Art Book Fair.
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The Best New Restaurants In LA, According To The Pros (PHOTOS)
With new restaurants popping up everyday, deciding where to eat dinner in LA is no small feat. So, we’ve turned to the pros! Ahead, six influential local foodies give us the scoop on their favorite new restaurants, which tasty trends are getting them excited, and why Los Angeles is such an exciting place to be hungry right now. We hope you’ve got an appetite…
Favorite new restaurant In LA:
“Connie & Ted’s is definitely my favorite restaurant! It looks like a giant boat parked in the middle of West Hollywood. The quality of the ingredients is at the level of Providence, but it’s way more casual.”
Food trend predictions:
“It seems like everyone is revolutionizing the typical ice cream!”
What’s most exciting about the LA food scene right now:
“The coolest thing about the LA food scene is how the farmers and their produce are becoming the stars.”
Favorite new restaurant In LA:
“Tar and Roses in Santa Monica! We’re both big fans of cheese and charcuterie, and this place definitely specializes in it. The space itself is cozy and the brick walls are a nice touch.”
What’s most exciting about the LA food scene right now:
“What makes the L.A. food scene so exciting right now — and always — is that it’s such a multiculturally influenced city that there are constantly new and different foods to try. It’s impossible to get bored with so many fun and unique options.”
Tar & Roses, 602 Santa Moinica Boulevard (at 6th Street); 310-587-0700.
Favorite new restaurant In LA:
“This is actually more of a shop/cafe, but I am over the moon for the new Moon Juice in Silver Lake. I love the celestial meets clean-hippy aesthetic and energy. The space is studded with crystals, there’s a refrigerated case up front with a rainbow of cold-pressed juices and nut milks in fun flavors like ‘tomato-watermelon’ and ‘pumpkin-seed ginger,’ and chef/owner Amanda Chantal Bacon is serving a sophisticated raw snackmenu with the likes of strawberry geranium bars. I am by no meats a raw foodist — or even a vegetarian — but her healthful snacks are the kind even carnivores will appreciate.”
What’s your favorite current food trend:
“I have to say, as over-saturated as the ‘cronut’ trend is at the moment, I love me some fried dough! My favorite iteration has been from ConfeXion in Pasadena. It makes a serious brioughnut, which is glazed and topped with maple bacon.”
Moon Juice, 2839 Sunset Boulevard (at Silver Lake Boulevard); 213-908-5407.
4. BAR AMA
Who: Matthew Poley and Tara Maxey, Chefs/Owners, Heirloom LA
Favorite new restaurant In LA:
“We love Chef Josef Centeno’s restaurants downtown, Bäco Mercat and Bar Amá. And, we can’t wait for his new place Orsa & Winston to open. His food is playful, but not experimental. It’s food you can eat everyday.”
What’s most exciting about the LA food scene right now:
“The fact that chefs are growing some of their own produce on their rooftops, in their parking lots, and even on their counters!”
Bar Ama, 118 West 4th Street (between Main and Spring streets); 213-687-8002.
5. THE HART AND THE HUNTER
Who: Talamadge Lowe, Founder and Drinkist, Pharmacie LA
Favorite new restaurant In LA:
“I love The Hart and The Hunter. Being from the South, I’m a sucker for fried-chicken skin and pimento cheese! And, even though it is a beautifully designed restaurant, it feels like a quiet little hole-in-the-wall discovery.”
What’s most exciting about the LA food scene right now:
“Two things: The availability of just about anything and everything from produce to sprits as well as the inclusive nature of the city’s bars and restaurants and caterers. It seems like everybody knows just about everybody. I love that!”
Who: Jenny Engel and Heather Goldberg, Chefs/Owners, Spork Foods
Favorite new restaurant In LA:
“Crossroads is our new fave. We love the space because it’s clean, modern, and elegant. It shows food lovers a mature side of vegan cuisine that Los Angeles hasn’t seen yet. The menu changes seasonally, which we enjoy!”
What’s your favorite current food trend:
“We are constantly inspired by DIY techniques, and have even experimented with making our own scorpion-pepper-infused vodka and home-made bourbon vanilla extract.”
Nobody likes a know-it-all. Unless that know-it-all is providing valuable information about five new LA spots you most definitely want to check out. Everybody likes that guy… right? RIGHT?! Check out the newest deliciousness to open in LA so that YOU can be that likable know-it-all…
Moretti Photo
643 North Chinatown
Gastropubbing-up the normally traditional Downtown ‘hood, this new hops-packed grubbery is letting you lay a base with fennel sausage pizza and ossobuco ravioli before you move onto craft beer flights… that ironically make it far more difficult for you to lift off the ground.
Philippe Beverly Hills
It’s ba-ack!! After closing its Mid-City location more than a year ago, the longtime power-meal Chinese resto’s back in Beverly Hills, serving up signature dishes like their Peking duck, pan-crispy salmon, and “nine seasons spicy prawns”, which’re delicious Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, and wait, what are the other five seasons? We didn’t pay attention in Earth Sciences.
Joey Maloney
Honeycut Downtown
This collab between the 213 dudes (Las Perlas, 7 Grand, etc.) and the NY bros behind Death And Co. is a decidedly Manhattan-esque underground lair sporting pool tables, an extensive cocktail list, and a second room with bottled drinks and a light-up dance floor… so tread carefully if you’re epileptic.
Orsa & Winston Downtown
The Bar Ama and Baco Mercat guy’s at it again, this time with a small, fixed-menu-only joint named after his dogs (but not his dawgs, ’cause then it’d be called, like, Ted and Brent’s). The menu’s got some Asian influences with dishes like rice w/ uni & Pecorino cream.
Stumptown Downtown
You know how anyone you meet from Portland’s all like, “we have coffee that’s way better than anything you’ve got in LA”, and you’re like, “there’s no way that’s true”, and then they make you some Stumptown and you’re bashed over the head with caffeinated amazingness? Yeah. Now they have a store here.
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The Best New LA Bars To Check Out This Fall/Winter
October 29, 2013 6:00 AM
Los Angeles is home to many bars, but finding the perfect watering hole to call your own is no easy challenge. Whether you’re looking to class it up with a view or just enjoy that classic SolCal vibe, we have a newly-opened bar that’s perfect for you. Be sure to check out our Fall E.S.P. Guide to guarantee a great night out on the town. By Rex Sakamoto
(Photo credit: Alen Lin)
Pearl’s Liquor Bar
8909 West Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069
(310) 360-6800 www.pearlsliquorbar.com
There’s nothing classier than a pearl, and this spot is nothing short of classy. A three-level, expansive slab of sophistication that’s straight out of the 1920’s, Pearl’s features a scenic front deck overlooking Sunset Strip and supreme handcrafted cocktails for which even Mr. Gatsby would travel to LA. Opened late summer. 8909 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA
(Photo credit: Alen Lin)
Warwick
6507 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
(323) 460-6667 www.warwickla.com
After opening last September 2013, this plush cocktail lounge is already the hottest place to be on Sunset Boulevard. What used to be a dingy lingerie bar has been transformed into a swanky space adorned with comfy leather couches, circular chandeliers and photos of naked ladies. Yep, the high brick walls are covered in artsy full frontal nudes of women. So grab your friends and join the party.
(Photo credit: Las Palmas Furniture Warehouse)
Las Palmas Furniture Warehouse
1714 N. Las Palmas Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
(323) 464-0171 laspalmashollywood.com
There’s always a party at this recently opened crazy neighborhood dive bar filled with remote controlled sumbarines, piñatas, glowing neon signs and Simpson posters. Imagine bashing a piñata, while sipping on a couple of beers. Pretty cool right? If you need to take a break from all the action, head out to the patio and enjoy a few mint juleps and Berry Manilows (blueberry vodka, soda, lime). With all the action, there’s never a down moment.
From the men who brought you No Vacancy & Pour Vous, the Houston Brothers bring you the brand new Dirty Laundry Bar. During the prohibition it served as the personal speakeasy for silent film actor Rudolph Valentino. In order to preserve the speakeasy atmosphere, the 1,500 square foot space hosts an exposed brick ceiling, deconstructed light fixtures and black leather couches.
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NYTimes T Magazine
Accommodations | A New Hotel in L.A. Celebrates its Koreatown Surroundings
Photographs by Adrian GautClockwise from left: Chef Roy Choi at Pot; a guest room overlooking Koreatown; the hotel’s sleek exterior.
A stately yet unstuffy hotel injects style into the vibrant Los Angeles neighborhood.
In L.A.’s golden age, when streetcars clanged past urban orange groves and Carmen Miranda was Hollywood’s nod to ethnicity, the high life thrived on a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard near Vermont Avenue. Today, a generation after gang wars and riots sapped the life out of this district, it has re-emerged as the lively epicenter of the city’s Koreatown, bustling with restaurants, nightclubs and shops. The area has long been off the tourist map, but this is about to change with the opening of the Line in November.
The hotel’s creator, Andrew Zobler, is the man behind the Beaux-Arts-style NoMad Hotel in Manhattan and the cheap-chic Freehand Miami hostel. But the Line, designed by Sean Knibb, is something different for both Zobler and Los Angeles. Korean-American culture — or at least a high-end permutation of it — is the 388-room establishment’s organizing theme. ‘‘There is so much good stuff coming out of Korea today, and nobody has really captured that in a hotel,’’ Zobler says. Setting out to educate himself on Korean culture, he encountered the celebrated chef Roy Choi, who will preside over the hotel’s two restaurants: Pot, which serves a new take on hot-pot cuisine, and Commissary, a vegetarian eatery. The 24-hour thrum of the neighborhood inspired Zobler to make the hotel an all-hours social hub. There will be a late-night bakery, a newsstand that never closes and a nightclub that stays open until the wee hours, called Speek, created by the twin brothers Mark and Jonnie Houston, who grew up just four blocks from the hotel.
A version of this article appears in print on 11/03/2013, on page M256 of the NewYork edition with the headline: The Scene: Koreatown Cool.
Los Angeles has long been marketed as the birthplace of the Moscow Mule, so perhaps its fitting that there are hundreds of fantastic drinking establishments here willing to help you make an ass of yourself. Unfortunately, the urban sprawl means a self-guided crawl is a dicey situation, which is why local editor Jeff Miller is here with his picks for the top places to get your booze on.
Best Club: Clubland is fickle around here. By the time you’re reading this, it could already be closed, but I was impressed when I was recently at The Emerson Theater, a glittery, gilded room that feels sufficiently majestic to justify the wallet-emptying cost of bottle service.
Best for Work: The Montage in Beverly Hills has a slightly-hidden bar called Ten Pound directly above Scarpetta. You should make a reservation first, but, once you’re in, it feels like an old boys’ club: huge leather couches, a massive Scotch menu (they’re exclusively Macallan, with all the pricey, ancient, partner’s-expense-account-ready blends that entails), and a private patio for making discreet calls.
Best for Partying: Hollywood’s recently renovated Three Clubs is an old-school gem: a two-pronged bar with a classic-feeling LA lounge on one side, and a darkened dance floor room on the other where DJs push everything from oontz-tacular electronic jams to 90’s hip-hop. It’s a great place to party because it walks the line: you can dance your ass off with a cute girl, then actually seal the deal next door. Bonus: no (or very cheap) cover.
Best Drink: I’m a big fan of letting bartenders go nuts, and no one does it better than the guys at The Varnish, who — through their booze-addled haze — have somehow retained an encyclopedic knowledge of alcohol and how to mix it. The only problem is that it’s different every time, and after you’ve had a couple it can be hard to remember what you drank and which one was better than the last.
Best Cocktail Bar: The Houston Brothers — a pair of identical twins — kind of have this category on lock. La Descarga is a rum-centric Cuban speakeasy with a cigar lounge; Harvard & Stone‘s rear R&D room’s where barmen from all over the world head to get nuts; and Pour Vous has an extensive list of fresh, fruit-forward cocktails and, um, an actual train in the backyard, so they all tie for first, second, and third.
Best Beer Bar: Another tie! Both Blue Palms and The Surly Goat are manned by hops lovers who’ll talk to you for hours about the difference between an IPA and a double IPA, if you’ll let them. Bonus points to The Surly Goat, though, as last time I was there the TVs were screening Reservoir Dogs.
Best Wine Bar: Though their Hollywood location didn’t make it (R.I.P.), the Westside is still lucky to call Bodega their own. Knowledgeable staff, heavy pours, and inexpensive options make this longtime favorite a, uh, longtime favorite.
Best Local Beer: I recently visited Angel City‘s now-open-to-the-public Downtown brewery and tried their Eureka! Wit out of the tap. It’s simple, it’s refreshing, and it has unusual complexity. They can definitely count me as a fan.
Best Brewery: No question on this one: Golden Road keeps blasting out winner after winner (their 16oz cans of smooth-drinking Hefeweizen are my favorite part of seeing a band at the Bootleg), and they’ve created a mini bar empire as well, as the owners are also the behind Tony’s Darts Away in Burbank, and Mohawk Bend in Silverlake.
Most Local Place (aka Where Locals Hang Out): Every single neighborhood in LA has at least one stellar dive where you can find 63-year-old wizened barflies and recent college grads discussing the best route for avoiding police checkpoints. The Drawing Room, Tom Bergin’s, The Backstage in Culver City, the Chimneysweep in the Valley — I could go on. But I won’t.
Best Place to Day Drink: I’m partial to the patio at El Coyote. They make a mean margarita, the tortilla chips and salsa duo never stop coming (insider tip: mix ’em together!) and they’ve got the perfect combo of shade and sun. That said, if you want something more unique than Cuervo and marg mix, the back patio at Eveleigh has wood tables, foliage on the walls, an odd birdcage in the back, and housemade cocktails on par with anything you’d find at a more dedicated cocktail bar.
Best Jukebox: Koreatown’s HMS Bounty isn’t just one of the best nautically-themed dive bars in LA — it’s also the only nautically-themed dive bar in LA. And it has a sick jukebox. Sinatra? Check. Obscure punk rock? Check? THE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK? Yep.
Best Outdoor Spot: On a sunny day, there’s nowhere I’d rather throw one or five back than Ray’s & Stark at LACMA. Their bar snacks — flatbreads, charcuterie, and more — are top-notch, their modern-artsy chairs are equal parts pretentious and lounge-y, the drinks are proper and strong, and their live jazz on Fridays is actually, like, bee-pop-a-bop good (as opposed to “wanka-blllepabap” unlistenable).
Hottest Girls: If I can jump to the conclusion that you like college girls (safe conclusion), then Happy Ending in Hollywood, The Lab at USC, and either location of Busby’s are sure bets for eye candy. If your tastes could be better described as “aspiring actresses”, The Churchill will do juuuuuust fine.
Easiest Place to Get Laid: Head West, for sure. The Basement Tavern in Santa Monica has a ventilation problem, which means that all the girls in there are shedding clothing and inhibitions nightly, and Venice’s well known cougar hangout James’ Beach is an in-at-1:15, in-and-out-and- well, you get the idea, by 2:15.
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10 Great Los Angeles Bars With Truly Excellent Food
By Erin Lyall
Published Mon., Oct. 7 2013 at 7:00 AM
Erin Lyall
Deviled Eggs at Library Bar
There’s a thin red line — or perhaps a fuzzy purple one — between restaurants with good bar programs, and bars with good food. This is a list of the latter: The following are drinking establishments in which you don’t feel guilty pulling up a chair just to have a drink, but where the food is much better than it needs to be. These are the perfect places to head after work when you’re starving — to meet up with your friend who already
ate. No one’s going to look down their nose at you if you just order a glass of wine and pick at your friend’s fries.There are a gazillion bars in town that serve a good burger. But on this list you’ll find burgers and dogs and nachos — as well as salads, sushi, mole and charcuterie. It’s bar food, elevated. And there’s a nice bonus when you eat dinner in bars: Happy Hour. Many places will slash prices on booze and bites, potables and provisions, spirits and snacks. Keep reading for the best of the bunch. We know there are more bars in town than days in the year, so if we’ve missed your favorite, add it to the comments section!
Chris Jolly
The interior at El Carmen
10. El Carmen
El Carmen is a tequila bar serving stick-to-your-ribs Mexican fare. The tables are bar-sized; the lighting is dim-to-dark; and the menu, a thick little booklet of 16 pages, only dedicates two of those to food (the rest is the tequila list). But the guacamole is top-notch, the tamales are rich and creamy, and the tacos (particularly the pork taco) more than serviceable.During Happy Hour here (Monday thru Friday, 5-7 p.m.) eleven bucks will get you a freshly squeezed margarita and a platter of tacos with rice and beans. Plus, this place is just cool. There are Mexican wrestling masks on the ceiling and Mexican wrestler portraits on the walls and you have to walk through a velvet bordello curtain to get in. It’s fun. You want to be there. So go. 8138 W 3rd St., Los Angeles; (323) 852-1552.
Erin Lyall
Greek Nachos at Pour Haus
9. Pour Haus Wine Bar
Tucked into the Warehouse District, just beyond the bistro fare of Church & State, you’ll find an industrial little wine bar serving food that’s filling and flavorful and far better than you’d expect from their teeny little kitchen. During Happy Hour (4-7 p.m. daily) there are six food options for five bucks: bruschetta, oxtail tacos, white flatbread pizza topped with artichokes and olives, papitas bravas (roast baby potatoes with aioli), a grilled vegetable sandwich, and the insanely addictive Greek nachos.Crispy pita chips are topped with melted feta, roast eggplant, tomatoes, olives and a tangy tzatziki sauce; you’ll wonder why no one thought of these before. Pour Haus serves beer and wine, including generously poured $10 wine flights, and every patron gets a bowl of truffled popcorn to start their evening. Come for a bottle, stay for a plate — the Mediterranean-influenced menu pairs beautifully with fermented grapes. 1820 Industrial St., Los Angeles; (213) 327-0304.
Erin Lyall
The deli counter at Spring St.
8. Spring Street Bar
Compared to so many East Coast cities, Los Angeles is woefully short on delis. Good news, meatball sub fans — one of our better delis is located inside a bar! Take that, New York! At Spring Street Bar, a high-ceilinged, casual spot of bar stools and communal high-tops, the back corner is dedicated to a cold cuts case and a toaster oven. From that humble spot emerge warm, crusty sandwiches like prosciutto and burrata, Cubano, roast beef, and a killer veggie melt of smoked cheese and avocado.You may not think you’re hungry but once the table next to you puts in an order, the smell alone will inspire you to get one of your own. Don’t worry, they’re big enough to share — but be aware, you need to order at the bar, and keep an ear out for the bell meaning your meal’s up. Wine, booze, and a good rotation of interesting draught beers will round out the experience. Ding! 626-B S Spring St., Los Angeles; (213) 622-5859.
Erin Lyall
Fried chicken at The Prince
7. The Prince
You have out of town guests staying with you for the weekend, and you want to show them something uniquely L.A.? Take them to The Prince. It’s got Hollywood street cred (with cameos on Mad Men, The New Girl, and Chinatown), it looks mid-century swank (with red leather banquettes, a horseshoe bar and funky carved lights), and it serves Korean food. No kidding. The thing to get here is the deep-fried chicken — fried Korean-style, with no batter. A whole bird is spatch-cocked and served with Korean chili paste and picked radishes, all crispy skin and moist meat and salt.Pair it with some kimchi fried rice, maybe a seafood pancake, and some galbi for a full meal. The Prince has beer and soju but also a full bar, and during Happy Hour (’til 8pm) all drinks are half off; be aware that like most Korean establishments in town, you’ve got to ring the tableside doorbell to get service. Bonus: This may be the one bar in town in which you can snack on spicy sea snails. How’s that for “Welcome-to-LA” impressive!? 3198 1/2 W 7th Street, Los Angeles; (213) 389-1586
Villains Tavern
Salad at Villains Tavern
6. Villains Tavern
The first time you drive up to Villains Tavern, you think you’re lost: it’s out in some weird Gotham City no-man’s-land that is kind of Little Tokyo and kind of Downtown L.A. and kind of the “warehouse district” but seems way too dark and scary and then BAM you arrive. And there is this strange place that looks like a circus-tent-slash-New-Orleans-Victorian bar and you’re like “what is this place,” but then you get one of their incredible cocktails (like the Bluebeard: Jameson, blueberries, lemon, cranberry and egg whites) and you’re like “OK, I can get behind this.”And then you look at the menu and order some things that sound interesting and then you are totally pleasantly surprised when a burger with bacon marmalade, spicy roasted corn on the cob topped with cayenne and cotija, and a bowl full of Bourbon-bacon caramel corn make their way to the table. And you eat your above average meal while listening to above average live music and drinking above average libations and you think “I’m in heaven” but then you look around at all the red lighting and steampunk décor and you wonder if maybe you’re just having a really good time in hell. 1356 Palmetto St., Los Angeles; (213) 613-0766.
Erin Lyall
Bacon-wrapped dates at Library Bar
5. Library Bar
Hidden behind Sixth Street Tavern, Library Bar has a speakeasy-ish vibe: dark, book-lined, candlelit, sultry. Cocktails, wine, and beer are top notch — muddled, mixed and poured by well-trained (and well-dressed) bartenders. Yet the beautiful people populating the mirrored bar and the leather couches are looking good and eating well – dipping into garlic fries, pork belly skewers, chorizo sliders.The bacon-wrapped dates are salty and sweet, oozing sharp blue cheese hot from the oven. There are deviled eggs, roast artichokes, and edamame tossed with lime juice and flakes of sea salt. Go big with a burger or pork belly sandwich, or go decadent with grilled cheese made with buttered raisin bread, apricot jam and three kinds of dairy. Just wipe your fingers before you start thumbing through those hardcovers on the shelves behind you. 630 W 6th St #116A Los Angeles; (213) 614-0053.
Adam O’Connor
The York
4. The York on York
The York just might be the Cheers of Highland Park. It’s the perfect neighborhood spot: there’s usually a game or an old movie on the TV, and there’s usually no trouble finding a seat. Local artists hang their work up by the bar, and it’s the kind of place where the bartender won’t just remember your name — she’ll remember your drink.But next time you pull up a stool for a beer (and they have a serious selection), do yourself a favor and pair it with an impeccable burger, juicy and oozy with melted cheese, or a bowl of mussels — spicy, garlicky, and served with grilled bread. Fries are crisp, hot, light on the grease, and ideal to share with friends (for a slightly more “healthful” snack, go for the fried garbanzos, tossed in cayenne and lemon). On weekends you can brunch to cure your hangover with croissant French toast or eggs Benedict — just don’t be surprised if you find yourself hanging out there all day. 5018 York Blvd., Highland Park; (323) 255-9675.
Erin Lyall
Grilled Artichoke at Laurel Tavern
3. Laurel Tavern
Bustling at nearly every hour of the day, Laurel Tavern is one of those great neighborhood joints that feels like the place to be. Once you’re in the door, the energy is infectious. It’s casual — you seat yourself, and have to walk up to the bar to order both booze and food — and convivial, with people chatting between tables and standing out on the sidewalk. They’ve got a dozen beers on tap, wine by the glass and craft cocktails; but pay close attention to the chalkboards on the wall.Listed there you’ll find a range of things to nosh on: from the light (a fabulous marinated/grilled artichoke, beets with burrata, grilled shishito peppers) to the substantial (chorizo fondu, patty melt, bbq ribs). They’ve got five yummy burger options, and claim to have the best one in the neighborhood: we’ll let you be the judge. 11938 Ventura Blvd, Studio City; (818) 506-0777.
Erin Lyall
Taco Tuesday at Mission Cantina
2. Mission Cantina
Mission Cantina is tough to characterize, but right there on their website they qualify themselves for this list: “The Mission is a bar with fresh homemade Mexican food.” Mission is in fact a tequila bar, an impressive gothic-looking cave with bottles stacked all the way to the ceiling. But it’s got some of the best Mexican food in this part of town, including chile rellenos, enchiladas (verde & rojo), and a rich chicken mole poblano, deeply flavored with chocolate, spice and spiciness.They also serve tamales on the weekend. But the day to go is (Taco) Tuesday — when their tacos are a dollar apiece: carne asada, carnitas, chicken, potato and veggie. Top a couple of those carnitas tacos with onions, cilantro and salsa, pair it with one of their top-notch jalapeno margaritas. Life doesn’t get much more bueno than that. 5946 Sunset Blvd, Hollywood; (323) 469-3130.
Erin Lyall
Trout Toast at Black Market Liquor Bar
1. Black Market Liquor Bar
This relative newcomer to Ventura Blvd. (opened in 2011) is fast becoming the local favorite, filling up quickly and staying busy ’til closing time — 2 a.m. every night of the week. The room is vaguely reminiscent of a tunnel, long and dark under a curved ceiling of inlaid brick. Candles flicker on every table, booths ring the walls, marble high tops cluster in the center of the room, and a polished wood bar hugs the length of the place. There’s a full bar, a list of “fancy drinks,” two-dozen beers and an interesting wine list — but the real stunner is the food menu.Follow your gut. Want a few beers and guy food? Dig into the homemade dill potato chips, the sweet-spicy kimchi chicken wings, or the highly addictive fried cauliflower. On a date? There is very little sexier than the ricotta gnudi, sautéed in a brown butter sauce (eaten over flickering candlelight with a few glasses of wine). Smoked trout toast is a thing of casual beauty — and a good indicator of chef Antonia Lofaso’s skill in the kitchen — open-faced baguette strewn with hard-boiled egg and pickles, served on a cutting board. Still hungry? They’ve got a deep fried fluffer-nutter for dessert. ‘Nuff said. 11915 Ventura Blvd., Studio City; (818) 446-2533.
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“Our place is more like a little kitchen,” Lefebvre says of the 900-square-foot open layout. ” (Vogue magazine)
Trois Mec is the hottest new restaurant in LA, with three superstar LA chefs at the helm.
Photographed by Austin Hargrave
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Create, a new 20,000 sq. ft. gallery in Los Angeles
Willie Jane, a beautiful new Southern style cooking restaurant in Venice, CA by Govind Armstrong.
Vanguard, a new nightclub in Los Angeles
Le Ka, a new French inspired artisan restaurant in downtown Los Angeles
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Much good news is on the way in terms of the continuing range of offerings in downtown Los Angeles. The Grand Central market already has six new vendors; several others are on the way, including Olio pizza, who is bringing in an oven from Italy and who will only cook by fire. The Medallion building, originally designed to showcase wholesalers and discounters, has changed course. Now they’re planning for ten restaurants to move into their 125 million dollar space, plus a 27,000 square foot farmers market, instead of trying to lure a supermarket. And check this out – the Alamo Draft House from Austin, Texas is opening an eight screen independent film showcase. You will be able to order food and drinks at your seat.
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Hinoku & The Bird has opened in a plus new Century City Los Angeles condo tower, whose penthouse is owned by Candy Spelling.
The New York Times did a phenomenal advance review of it in January 2013. It noted:
“The cocktails, by the Milk & Honey mixologist Sam Ross, are as refreshing as the food.”
Le Grand Fooding comes to MoCA Geffen from Paris in April, 2013.
Chi Spacca is the latest restaurant in the Mario Batali, Nancy Silverton, Osteria Mozza, Pizzeria Mozza LA Italian food empire.
BaryardRestaurant in Venice is one of the best new places that have opened in LA in 2013.
Barnyard Venice exterior. Its chef worked at the French Laundry in Napa.
Superba Snack Bar in Venice is also adding to the how new LA dining scene.
Bestiais one of the most months in advanced booked new Italian restaurants in California. Its in downtown Los Angeles.
A sample of Bestia’s in-house salumeria offerings.
A dish at Bestia.
Figaro Bistro has opened in downtown LA.
alma new american french 952 s broadway los angeles ca is getting superior reviews from LA’s genius restaurant critic Jonathan Gold. He says there is no one cooking like Alma in LA, its on its way to being a global destination restaurant.
An example of Alma’s cooking.
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Over 15,000 Attend Inaugural LA Art Book Fair at LA’s MoCA Geffen museum
Artist A.A. Bronson’s LA Art Fair was covered by the NYTimes T magazine. There were 220 exhibitors from 21 countries. There were small showcases of exceptional collections of art books that I found fascinating, particularly the one featuring Yves Klein and his International Blue. The LA books fair received a huge amount of press from New York.
The book fair attracted thousands of people from all parts of Los Angeles. (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic). The entire museum’s space was given over to the first annual LA Artist Book Fair. We went on Sunday afternoon and it was packed. Afterwards we ate in nearby at an amazing noodle bar. So many choices – most directly from Japan.
The main lobby of The Geffen, on the second day of the Book Fair before the rush (over 15,000 visitors in the three-day fair).
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In late 2012 and early 2013, LA will experience a new wave of most remarkable new restaurants.
Bestia, an amazing new Italian restaurant that will open in the downtown LA arts district. It will feature 30 kinds of salumi and an Acunto pizza oven from Naples, Italy.
The team have recently held their fourth annual New York event – this time with a focus on upcoming chefs and say that tell the LA Times that they picked Los Angeles because it’s just a lively as New York but still very different from the Big Apple.
Known for throwing quirky events that mix social and dining experiences perfectly with some of the worlds best chefs, Le Fooding has built a solid reputation over the years. With New York offices now opened and the announcement of an LA event in the works – it’s seem there’s a Le Grand Fooding revolution taking place State sid
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“Republique, a concept from acclaimed chef Walter Manzke and prolific restaurateur Bill Chait, will replace the Cal-Mediterranean restaurant at the landmark 1929 address originally owned by Charlie Chaplin.Beginning in 1989, chef/owner Mark Peel and his then-wife Nancy Silverton, who now nurtures industry hotbed Mozza not too far away in Hancock Park, helped define a quintessentially L.A. sort of white-cloth yet rustic Cal-Mediterranean menu that would eventually emerge as one of the most dominant trends in the city’s restaurant culture in the 1990s.”
the historic property was first built for Charlie Chaplin in 1929
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Jeremy Fox Launches Barnyard Restaurant In Venice
“Los Angeles, CA(July 17, 2012) – Chef Jeremy Fox, formerly of Ubuntu and Manresa, is readying Barnyard Venice for a 2012 opening. In his first solo project since Ubuntu, Fox’s Barnyard will showcase his own interpretation of peasant cuisine, offering shareable plates of rustic, seasonal fare. Says Fox, “Barnyard will be a product of everything I have learned on my cooking journey. Not only do I look forward to exploring the flavors of the Mediterranean and North Africa, and incorporating elements from my childhood in the South, but to continuing the voyage as the Barnyard menu evolves.” Barnyard is located at 1715 Pacific Avenue in Venice.””About Jeremy Fox
Jeremy Fox opened Ubuntu in 2007, where he was named a Food & Wine Best New Chef 2008, Bon Appetit’s 2009 Best Chef, and received James Beard Best Chef Pacific Award nominations in both 2009 and 2010. In Fall 2009, Ubuntu became the first modern vegetarian restaurant to receive a Michelin Star. Prior to Ubuntu, Jeremy spent five years working for his mentor, Chef David Kinch, at Manresa, eventually rising to the position of Chef de Cuisine. During his tenure, Manresa received two Michelin Stars and four stars from the San Francisco Chronicle. Fox has also staged at the Michelin three-star Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and the widely acclaimed St. John, both in London, as well as the Michelin two-star De Snippe in Belgium. Since leaving Ubuntu, Jeremy has been working on a vegetable cookbook for Phaidon Press and has consulted for restaurants including Plum, Tyler Florence’s Rotisserie & Wine, Freddy Smalls, and Paper or Plastik Cafe.”
Plan Check restaurant and Bar, West Los Angeles
Plan Check restaurant and bar just got the review of the century (10.20.2012) for its technology driven modernist cooking ultra burger by Jonathan Gold in the LA Times. Gold also mentions that Plan Check may have more Japanese whiskey than all of the other restaurants in LA combined.
“Plan Check (West Los Angeles) – Industrial atmosphere, small batch liquors, and wagyu burgers.” (Text and Photo by Blackbook/Los Angeles)
New Los Angeles restaurants and bars, July 2012
Kitchen 24 downtown LA (la.eater.com photo)
Perch restaurant and bar downtown LA (hooplablog.com photo)
The Parish downtown LA true 2 story gastropub (photo: Longrada Lor)
We went to The Parish for Sunday dinner at 6pm during opening week. The tomato soup and wonderful toast with Grafton cheese started the evening, along with cocktails. Broth infused tasty clams and other dishes followed.
The dining area is on the second floor of a Flatiron shaped building on South Spring street. The bar is also on the second floor and was packed even at this early hour.
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Departures magazine names n/naka one of the Top 1- World’s Top Tasting Menus for 2012
At n/naka, the tasting menu is modeled after kaiseki, the Japanese analogue to a multi-course haute cuisine dinner. Chef Niki Nakayama’s Modern Kaiseki is a 13-course affair that showcases her inventive twists on traditional kaiseki progression, which specifies a first course of “something common and something unique,” a second course of a “main seasonal ingredient presented as an appetizer,” a third course of sashimi and more. At n/naka, these specifications yield dishes like Maine lobster tartare with uni butter and California sturgeon caviar, and Muscovy duck houba yaki with foie gras. The meal comes with similarly diverse beverage pairings—sake to start, Portuguese port to finish and wines in between.n-naka.com.
2012
Stumptown Coffee is expanding to LA.
Pour Vous bar, Hollywood
“The space is separated into four main parts: a lengthy marble bar to the left, w/ antiqued mirrors and a steampunk-ified vintage espresso maker rejiggered to pour four tap beers; a sunken seating area to the right, w/ plush velvet couches and a fireplace under a domed skylight; a formerly working train trolley (!) that’s been refurbished into a backyard smoking area” Thrillist
oysters at Pour Vous
Wolfslair Biergarten, Hollywood
“This dark-wooded biergarten kinda feels like that taxidermy-wolf bar in Hostel where the kids talk about how much fun they are having in Europe before they have much less fun being killed.” Thrillist
The Wellesbourne in West Los Angeles
Picture brass reading lamps, a bar menu printed on textured paper, oversized bookshelves jammed with books and guest checks issued in miniature novels…”
Los Angeles Brewing Company—AV nightclub, Los Angeles / Photos: Genie Fitzgerald
The Blue Whale jazz club is LA’s hottest. Located on Astronaut street in Little Toyko.
Parc bar, Beverly Hills
“It’s that living room-y space located across from Scarpetta on the ground floor of the Montage in Beverly Hills with sweeping vistas of Canon Gardens. Each evening at Parq, different musical genre such as jazz, R&B or blues and a fresh lineup of talented local and regional artists are featured. From 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. nightly, you can settle in with a glass of wine, Champagne or a classic cocktail and enjoy house-made charcuterie, beef and Fourme d’Ambert sliders or fresh farmer’s market produce. Get this! They even offer fresh, hand-crafted sushi.”
RESTAURANTS
Black Hogg, in Silverlake neighborhood, Los Angeles from Chef/owner Eric Park (The Spotted Pig, Eleven Madison Park in New York City)
Little Bear Belgian beer bar in east of downtown Los Angeles is rolling. (Photo: Savory Hunter blog)
Umamicatessen’s Soft Opening, DTLA (Photo: Darin Dines/Eater National Flickr Pool)
Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg
Customers eat lunch at UMAMIcatessen in Los Angeles.
Beautiful Pork @ PIGG, UMAMIcatessen
TOP 1: Burgers Ozark (CA, MO)
2: Finchville (KY)
3. Iberico de Bellota (Spain)
Bottom 4. Iberico de Bellota paletta (Spain)
bacon and dipping sauce from PIGG. It has an off the chain selection of tastes of the worlds finest hams from Spain.
For years Water Grill was the only Michelin starred restaurant in downtown LA. Now its has completed a $1.5 million upgrade and is more fabulous and phenomenal than ever.
Fresh seafood displayed at the bar counter at the Water Grill in downtown LAGovind Armstrong’s new Post & Beam is the first truly upscale restaurant and cocktail bar in Central Los Angeles, south of the Santa Monica (10) freeway in a predominantly African-American community. Nearby is one of the wealthiest black communities in the U.S. in Baldwin Hills.
Pasta at Post & Beam in Central Los Angeles
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Beacher’s Madhouse at the Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood
“And fourth, saving the wildest for last is Beacher’s Madhouse — a revolutionary Vaudeville-inspired theater on the hotel’s lower level, with European influences and echoes of the Folies Bergére. The venue extends 3,000 square feet, featuring a mirrored passageway, a 1920s-inspired main stage, antique brass accents and red velvet curtains. Eighteen VIP banquettes of various sizes are available throughout the theater including an exclusive birdcage booth with seating for 20. Concessions and catering are offered to guests as they enjoy the performances and order drinks from the Beau Joie Flying Midget bartender mixing up cocktails at the fully operating Midget Bar.”
Beacher’s Madhouse Theater, Thompson’s Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
Artisan House joins Botegga Louis and many new restaurants coming to the quickly transforming Broadway corridor.
Artisan House
Officially opening today, this massive, high-ceilinged complex full of reclaimed marble on the ground floor of the Pacific Electric Lofts in the Historic Core is remarkably ambitious. The sit-down restaurant serves foie gras terrines just a block from Skid Row. The bar finds mixologist Elden McFeron III, a vet of The Bazaar, whipping up margaritas cryo-frozen with liquid nitrogen. And the market annex sells made-to-order deli sandwiches—as well as gelato, wine and more—until 2AM (and an hour later on weekends). 600 S. Main St., L.A., 213.622.6333, artisanhouse.net (Hollywood Reporter)
Oldfield’s bar
Pattern Bar opened in the fall of 2011 on 9th/Main in Downtown LA
Batch, a new gastropub in Culver City.
Batch Restaurant & Bar is now open in Culver City offering artisanal food and handcrafted cocktails in a sophisticated and lively environment.
Short Order is one of several new LA gourmet burger bars. They recently added a selection of savories by Walter Manszke, whose won restaurant, Republique, is on the most anticipated new dining destinations in LA. It will be downtown.
Chicago has seen the rise and collapse of brewpubs since the late 1980′s. The now famous Goose Island (an actual tiny island with a superb brewing facility and lively bar and restaurant in Chicago) hails from that time and is a standard-bearer today. The Chicago Beer Society’s Real Ale Festival started in 1996 and was closed in 2003, when the were forced out of business by the liquor commission who said they had to license the former steel factory they used each year as a year round tavern. The festival closed and relocated to San Diego. Chicago’s global beer bar – the Map Room – opened in 1992. The Chicago Beer Society was formed in 1977. Ray Daniels Cicerone Certification Program has so far produced 38 Certified Cicerone’s in Chicago and 8 in Greater Los Angeles. The 6,000 square foot The Publican (Belgian beer and grub bar, every waiter and bartender is a certified beer server (level 3 in the Beer Cicero education program, with Master Cicerone and Certified Cicerone being levels one and 2. There are now 2 Master Cicerone’s in Chicago). Unbelieveably, and unlike in the past, when major breweries were out to destroy the smaller breweries, Goose Island has been absorbed into Anheuser-Busch In Bev, yet Goose Island remains a true artisanal brewer with its full arsenal of flavors. Chicago is building neighborhood breweries to compliment the rise of their city’s culinary programs to being at the upper strata of American cuisine. Since it was city-based breweries that did not ship out their beer that were at the start of the American beer industry, what we have then is a return to the same place that the industry started, but this time, actually producing product in America that has already been on this planet for somewhere between 700 and 2000 years, depending on the place of the earth you choose as a starting point.
Ray & Stark bar, LACMA
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Cook’s country is one of the most rewarding new artisan restaurants in LA.
Handsome Coffee Roasters
A sneak peak at the new flagship store in LA’s downtown Arts District
For the last few months, the corner of 5th and Mateo in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles has been abuzz with activity as the WoodSmithe team puts the finishing touches on Handsome Coffee Roasters‘ flagship store. Handsome has made a splash in the specialty coffee world since they announced that Tyler Wells and Chris Owens would be teaming up with World Barista Champion Michael Phillips to launch the coffee company of their dreams.
With the space nearly ready to open its doors, the collaboration between the roasters and the builders—who also happen to be neighbors—seems like a natural one. Also in on the operation is Na Young Ma’s Proof Bakery, whose pastries will be served alongside the coffee.
“Current site photo via Culver City Times The Jazz Bakery is getting a new permanent home in Culver City and it’ll be designed by Frank Gehry, who we don’t often see around these parts anymore. The jazz nonprofit has been itinerant since 2009, when it lost its lease in the Helms Bakery complex, but about a year ago it got a $2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation and made a deal with the Culver City Redevelopment Agency for a piece of land on Washington Blvd., next to the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Last night, the city council signed off on the land deal (probably in advance of the redevelopment agency apocalypse going down tomorrow), reports the Culver City Times. The Jazz Bakery will get the land for free on the condition that it goes ahead with plans for a “premier live performance state of the art jazz venue with two hundred and fifty (250) seats, ground level lobby, a jazz museum, black box performance area and a bakery/café with outdoor dining,” as described by the staff report on the matter. The Bakery plans to hold about 250 shows a year. According to the CC Times, the whole project will cost $10.2 million, so the Jazz Bakery will be holding a capital campaign to supplement the Annenberg grant.” (Curbed)
The recently acquired ruby slippers are just one centerpiece for the future Academy museum.
“The Acad collection includes sketches from “There Will Be Blood.”
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences gathered for a recent staff meeting at the Pickford Center in Hollywood, the group had the opportunity to see a piece of movie history that impressed even the most senior executives: a pair of ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.”
It was the first time since AMPAS made the acquisition in February that anyone within the org had seen the shoes, and everyone celebrated with red velvet cupcakes embellished with tiny, garnet-colored shoes.
The footwear unveiling was a tangible sign of how much closer the org is getting to opening the decades-in-the-making Academy Museum of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the centerpiece of which will be Dorothy’s magical shoes. The Academy recently named execs to run the museum, which is targeted to open at LACMA’s May Co. building in 2016.
“The experience of seeing (the slippers), especially in a crowd, puts everyone in touch with their inner film geek,” said Anne Coco, graphic arts librarian.
The high-profile pair of shoes is just one of the recent additions to the Academy’s massive collection of scripts, press clippings, biographies, costume sketches, movie posters and personal papers, amassed over more than eight decades, that will provide fodder for a wide scope of exhibits when the museum opens.
The library is also processing late-2011 donations from producer Stephen Chin, who gave the library several kung-fu movie posters, and Chicago-based real estate developer Dwight Cleveland, who provided rare film posters from his collection.
“The library is the history of our country, the history of our culture,” Hudson explained.”
Berggruen builds collection for Los Angeles (excerpted)
The German collector shelves plans to build a Berlin museum in favour of long-term loans to the US
Berggruen is focusing on German and West Coast artists, including Chris Burden, whose Metropolis II (right) is already on loan to Lacma from the collector
The private collector and billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, son of the late German-Jewish art dealer and philanthropist Heinz Berggruen, is set to follow in the footsteps of the collector Eli Broad by sending several works on long-term loans to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), where Berggruen is a trustee. “I’m building up a collection for Lacma,” he says, “focusing on German artists such as Thomas Schütte, Martin Kippenberger, Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys.” Works by West Coast artists such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman and Mike Kelley from Berggruen’s collection are also due to end up at the museum. “Los Angeles is still a developing cultural centre and that’s why one can make a difference there,” he says.27 Jan 12
A ‘very special’ city.
“I find L.A. super vibrant. The city is not always considered a serious place, but it has a lot of serious creativity,” he added. “Notwithstanding its problems, California is the idea center of America. If you take away Hollywood and Silicon Valley for the last 20 years, you would have a different world. If you erased New York, I hate to say it, if you erased Frankfurt, even London, the world would not have changed.”
Get ready for MOCA TV! The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles has teamed with YouTube to create a new video channel for fresh contemporary art and culture programming. The online programming venture, part of YouTube’s new original programming push, is expected to debut in July with an identity designed by L.A.-based Studio Number One. “Contemporary art is the new international language, unifying leading creators across art, music, fashion, film, and design,” said MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who has always struck us as a natural VJ. “MOCA TV will be the ultimate digital extension of the museum, aggregating, curating, and generating the strongest artistic content from around the world for a new global audience of people who are engaged in visually oriented culture.” Slated for the MOCA TV line-up? Global art news briefs, programs focused on the latest collaborative projects (art and music, art and fashion), looks inside artists’ studios, the street art beat (natch), and an interactive education series called MOCA University. The musem has tapped social media company theAudience to help get the word out about MOCA TV as the launch approaches.
The re-model looks gorgeous, and I’m glad to see they haven’t lost their steam-punk circus vibe! They just added an old-school fortune-teller, a love-o-meter, and two skee ball machines that distribute tickets redeemable for drinks & food! And they didn’t leave out the grub, The Brite Spot guy will be slinging an extensive fried menu (corn dogs, sweet potato tots, funnel cakes, deep-fried Chocodiles, etc.) as well as share-eats like a reuben pizza with sauerkraut, corned beef, and thousand island.
The Escondite burger bar in downtown LA
United Artists Theater to Be Ace Hotel
photo by Gary Leonard
United Artists Theater
Posted: Monday, January 23, 2012 7:45 pm | Updated: 3:53 pm, Tue Jan 24, 2012.
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES – Oregon-based Ace Hotel has confirmed plans to open in the historic United Artists Theater on Broadway.
The hotel chain’s plan calls for 180 rooms in the former office building’s 13 floors, and it will include a 1,600-seat entertainment venue in the structure’s namesake theater. The plan also calls for a pool, restaurant and bar in the edifice that has not been fully activated in decades, according to the office of 14th District Councilman José Huizar.
The Broadway landmark had long been owned by the University Cathedral, a congregation made famous by its late founding pastor, Dr. Gene Scott. The church has maintained the building, which was built in 1927 by United Artists founders D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
The building was the tallest privately owned building in Los Angeles until 1956, Huizar’s office said.
King & Grove Coming to LA, Possibly with Two Hotels
Lanyard key chains at Ruschmeyer’s, a King & Grove Hotel in Montauk.
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Downtown LA blog Brigham Yen found out earlier this month that indeed King & Grove would open up inside the old Hotel Clark near 4th and Hill Streets in downtown’s Historic Core district (and just a few blocks away from the intended Ace Hotel.) A rep for King & Grove confirmed the scoop but was not able to release any further details. Still, Brigham Yen had noticed some renovations going on at the hotel including a new pool deck and some new orange curtains.
But one hotel might not be enough for King & Grove as the blog now says that the old Trinity Auditorium at 9th and Grand Ave in downtown could possibly be a second King & Grove hotel as well.
Breaking News: Hotel Clark to be Reborn as King & Grove Hotel in Downtown LA
“King & Grove is a new lifestyle hotel brand defined by modern luxury with eclectic influences. Dedicated to creating intriguing hotels that are sophisticated yet accessible, King & Grove is launching a collection of iconic destinations themed by a sense of nostalgia delivered through thoughtfully crafted environments. With an emphasis on immersive service, King & Grove hotels will feature honest and aspiring restaurants and bars, progressive retail, and unique amenities.”After sending an inquiry to King and Grove asking about their involvement with the Hotel Clark, I received a reply back from Jennifer Foley Shields, VP of Media Relations for King and Grove Hotels, “The Clark will become a King & Grove property, you are correct. At this point, I’m not able to provide any further detail.”Examples of King & Grove’s hotels:
King & Grove Hotel in Miami South Beach (Photo: King & Grove)
King & Grove Hotel in Montauk, New York (Photo: King & Grove)
King & Grove Hotel in Montauk, New York (Photo: King & Grove)
“NEW COCKTAIL LOUNGE THE AVIARY Calling The Aviary Chicago’s best cocktail lounge is needless and obvious, considering the oceans of ink already expended on this months-old Fulton Market bar, but it must be said: This brainchild of Alinea’s chef, Grant Achatz, and his business partner, Nick Kokonas, is the most ambitious, fully realized, innovative twist on drinking the city has ever seen. One sip of its take on an old-fashioned (In the Rocks, $18), which requires the drinker to crack a bourbon-filled egg of ice with a miniature slingshot, and we were hooked. Not to mention attentive, polished service; a gorgeous room blissfully devoid of false Old World charm; and finger food straight out of the Alinea playbook.”
Aviary molecular cocktail lounge from Chicago will be expanding to LA
Macao Trading Co. is one of New York City’s most fun bar.restaurants that is coming to LA
“Bagatelle has long been a St. Tropez-infused phenomenon in New York, feeding the city’s elite for years. Now emerging hospitality group Brand Essence and industry leaders The ONE Group will bring Bagatelle’s legendary dining experience to the West Coast with a multi-room indoor/outdoor establishment located in the heart of West Hollywood. Created by design firm Studio BRASA, the 2,700 square foot restaurant’s motif resembles the salon of the Parisian apartment of an international jet setter. Bagatelle’s patrons will be treated to seasonal, French-Mediterranean menu offerings by Chef Scott Quinn, whose inspiration and experience are sure to provide a lively and fine dining experience for L.A.’s globetrotters, foodies, celebrities and tastemakers.”
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2011-2012
Bardot supperclub at the Avalon in Hollywood
Bardot at the Avalon, Hollywood
The Spare Room lounge, inside the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel
A decade ago Los Angeles seemed unconcerned with the new American phenomenon of artisan and craft beer bars, Belgian beer bars, artisan cocktail bars, adventurous upscale dining. It was only six years ago that the Los Angeles Times ran articles where local restaurants said there were only 500 serious diners in LA, and that group moved from new restaurant to new restaurant, causing the recently hot place to go under. The same newspaper chronicled the rise into the heavens of the new Las Vegas restaurant scene, while slamming much the restaurant scene here at the time. Las Vegas,which is no doubt the most stellar today in the West at the uppermost levels of dining, as it now offers a dazzling array of European and America Michelin starred chef driven dining destinations, seems to have educated the palates of Angelinos as to the degrees of playful elegance that a truly global restaurant could offer its guests. Perhaps because of this influence of the Los Angeles palate, a new world of exceptionally good restaurants is now in Los Angeles as never before. Over the past couple years LA has gained authentic Noodle Bars from Tokyo, high-end steak houses and Italian eateries from New York, and finally we in LA now have several of the most coveted cocktail and beer bars in America, with several more planned, including one by a LA entrepreneur who promises to bring to LA a bar that he considers the best in the world. Los Angeles of course has benefited tremendously from the New York cocktail world expanding into the warm weather climate without a beach of downtown Los Angeles. I have to say that this is the first time I have been as excited about going out in LA to a great new bar or restaurant, as verses planning on have a phenomenal time in San Francisco and spending quiet evenings in LA to rest up for another trip to a mecca for entertainment like Miami Beach or New York City.
The Writers Room, enter via the back of historic Musso & Franks, Hollywood. The bar is named after the major fiction writer’s meeting place that the space once inhabited. (photo: Vogue Daily)
So here now refer to you some of my choices for the best of the new Los Angeles, 2011.
(Please note that this post will grow throughout 2011)
Downtown Los Angeles breaks into the extensive beers selection beer store with the beautiful and dark woods of 8th’s Street Bottle shop. “The 8th Street Bottle Shop will be housed just inside the entrance door at Golden Gopher whose rare 1903-issued liquor license provides for on site and packaged liquor to go sales. ” Beer Chicks Los Angeles
Sunset Beer in Echo Park promises to grow to over 1,000 different bottles of beer, giving LA a real neighborhood place to pick up something special, just like in Portland.
The sensational Total Wine and More has entered the Southern California adult beverage market
Total Wine and More has raised the everyday experience of buying beer, wine and spirits in LA/Orange County region. It has to be the case that the emergence of artisan and craft beer bars and haute cocktail lounges in Los Angeles over the past two years is the reason Total Wine and More saw there was a market in LA for their level of shopper. The largest store is in Tustin, at 50,000 square feet, yet even the Northridge store blows away every other place in town, from variety to price. Total Wine carries all the truly deluxe bottles of tequila, and has $2,000 gorgeous bottles of wine. The store has several hundred kinds of artisan and craft beer, possibly as much as the incredible Berkeley Bowl gourmet low-priced – yes – it’s true! supermarket in Berkeley, California, where we make twice a year trips just to shop and bring home countless provisions not available to us here in LA. When people here first visit Total Wine and More they start calling their friends and telling them they’ve got to get over there now! Total Wine and More has in store ads saying they are crushing another beverage store here, from the handsome look of Total Wine as compared to the LA low rent warehouse way of selling product, to astounding variety, to pricing that blows the competition away.
Steingarten in West Los Angeles has 20 beers on tap and a menu of exotic meats to devour
In the coming months watch for several new craft beer bars in LA, including Beer Belly in Koreatown, Mohawk, a 10,000 square foot bar in Echo Park, and Smith House, in Century City (West LA), which will have 120 beers on tap. Steingarten has opened in West Los Angeles. The LATimes reports that the Houston brothers will also be opening a German beer hall in LA.
Mohawk Bend, restaurant and bar interior, Echo Park
“The second venture from owner Tony Yanow and manager Paige Reilly of Tony’s Darts Away fame, Mohawk Bend debuts in April in newly hipsterized Echo Park. The 10,000-square-foot facility is an ode to beer and farm-fresh California cuisine, with half of the menu (and the kitchen) dedicated to vegan fare. (But don’t expect a pushy, green-fiend staff; “We like to open the vegan door but not push anyone through it,” says Yanow.) For herbivores, there’s mochi-crust pizza; meat-lovers will relish the duck-pork Dork Burger. Every palate will savor the whopping 72 taps—including five nitro faucets and two hand pumps—pouring strictly Cali brews, like house favorites Hangar 24 Orange Wheat. 2141 Sunset Blvd.“ (Draft magazine)
The Hemingway lounge in Hollywood has ten thousand books on its shelves and is known for its strong cocktail program. Future plans for this lounge are to open a Cuban coffee and African tea lounge next door.
Las Perlas, Cedd Moses mezcal and tequila bar in downtown Los Angeles
“Those who want ready-to-go ice for their cocktail should reach for Névé ice (available at Barkeeper in Silver Lake). Founded by former barman Michael Dozois of Seven Grand, Névé delivers perfect Collins and Rocks Glass cubes to consumers and bars anywhere in the United States.” (Seven Grand is also one of Cedd Moses’ collection of high quality LA bars.)”
Villains Tavern, on the eastern edge of downtown Los Angeles.
Villains Tavern opened in 2010
The Tar Pit opened in 2010 with beverage direction from the Pegu Club in New York. (Photo: Caroline on Crack)
The bar at the Tar Pit
La Descargas bar, on Western Avenue in East Hollywood, by the Houston Brothers. This is the first bar they transformed for LA.
Harvard and Stone bar, East Hollywood, by the Houston brothers, opened in March 2011
Library Ale House, Santa Monica, California
Wood and Vine, Hollywood
Stark bar at LACMA is one of the hottest new bars in Los Angeles
Bar concepts
Only about a decade after the Belgian beer bar boom happened in New York and San Francisco, downtown Los Angeles will finally be getting an authentic Belgian beer bar called Little Bear. Royal Clayton’s was in this space during the time that Walter Manske manned the stoves at across the street Church & State, which while he was there was the most sensation restaurant in Los Angeles. The bar will feature L.A.’s first certified beer cicerone. Chicago has three and also has a full on 3 tier cicerone training program that is providing core educations to hundreds of first tier Chicago bar helpers. (10.21.11)
The Gin Palace, a new bar planned for downtown Los Angeles
New York’s new gin palace will be fancier than this one.
“Ravi DeRossi, co-owner of an East Village mini-empire that includes Desnuda, Mayahuel, Cienfuegos, and Death & Co., is opening a new spot called Gin Palace, a spin on the original Victorian dive bars.
Gin Palace will be an upscale spin on the louche enterprises where Victorians boozed up. It will focus on gin, with a majority of cocktails made with the spirit. As for food, DeRossi says that he’ll offer “hundreds” of kinds of tea sandwiches, served on three-tiered silver platters.”
Legendary New York barmen Alex Day and David Kaplan, of Death & Co. bar NYC, have plans to open either an LA Death Co. or another establishment or both. They are already in Los Angeles, reconfiguring cocktail programs across the city.
By summer LA will have two authentic currywursts that will be open late for the all night party crowd.
Restaurants
Manhattan Beach Post gives LA its first authentic dining destination restaurant a block from the Pacific Ocean.
At Manhattan Beach Post, we loved out entire meal. This restaurant and Playa on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles gave us our two most rewarding meals in LA this year. Please make sure to order the cheese and bacon biscuits….
…and the asparagus dish – which transported us into Paris. One could only wonder what LA would be like were our oceanfront dotted with restaurants and bars of this caliber.
Son of a Gun restaurant, a new seafood palace, whose parent restaurant Animal received mountains of national press for its creativity with pork dishes. Bon Appetit just named Son of A Gun one of the top 10 new restaurtants in America for 2011.
Picca will be Richardo Zarate’s highly anticipate modern Peruvian restaurant.
Picca will be a “contemporary anticucho, ceviche, causa and cocktail concept.” We are certainly looking forward to this experience, especially because of the extraordinary food we had at Moi Chica on South Grand Ave. in South Los Angeles. Picca will be in The Townhouse, along with Sotto, in LA’s West Side. There are reports that Moi Chica, Zarate’s original LA restaurant sensation, will reopen in a downtown LA setting. We have waited years in LA to have upscale food of this kind.
Lukshon, the just opened luxury Pan Asian restaurant from LA’s first serious quality cult burger bar, Father’s Office. One of our favorite dishes is the spicy chicken pops, get some!
Lukshon, second interior
Playa, the global Latin cuisine inspired new restaurant on LA’s West Side. Its parent Restaurant, Rivera, in downtown LA, is just as memorable an encounter. (LATimes photo)
Sotto’s Ferrara pizza oven from Naples, Italy is only one of 10 in the U.S. It is the first in Los Angeles.
Lazy Ox Canteen, Little Toyko, downtown Los Angeles. Go for the lamb burger! This restaurant garnered major press in LA when it opened in 2010.
Waterloo & City, one of the top new gastropubs in Los Angeles, it serves a contemporary take on British pub food.
Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles is the best pizza we’ve ever had. It is one of the places that has brought LA to a new level of casual yet superior dining experience. At sometime this year, the third Mozza will open in Newport Beach. The image here is of a projected 3,500 sq. ft restaurant for Pizzeria Mozza Newport Beach. It will have all of what the LA version has, with an updated Mozza-to-go.
Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen food network television program will cause his soon to open LA restaurant, will make his upcoming LA restaurant an instant sensation. This television showing of his working method, his interest in employing the latest in food technology devices, and his excellence in transforming high concept into exquisite new dishes, will make his projected 60 seat LA restaurant concept fill up with reservations like few other places have experienced in Los Angeles.
The Daily Truffle reports that “Michael Ovitz will open Ink (with Michael Voltaggio of Top Chef) is his old restaurant space which housed Hamasaku.”
There are also reports that Thomas Keller will open his Ad Hoc restaurant in Los Angeles.
Bastide veteran Paul Shoemaker (the greatest restaurant contemporary LA’s histor with multiple star chefs) has announced plans to open an artisan pizza parlor and craft beer bar that promises to be “Father’s Office meets Pizzeria Biano in Phoenix”
The owners of Rustic Canyon and Huckleberry – perhaps LA’s best breakfast, certainly it is awesome! is opening an artisan pizza parlor and bakery in Santa Monica later this year. So of a sudden the West Side will have a real artisan pizza scene.
This coming July 2011, on Venice, California’s Abbott Kinney boulevard, already one of the hottest scenes in all of Los Angeles, Local 1205, a 3,500 square foot gourmet market. I spoke to my partner about how we in LA are not getting true gourmet food encounters like never, yet we still have miles to go before we catch up to San Francisco and the Bay area, whose restaurant, pizza and artisan cocktail bar scene is on fire. It will really be really nice to not have to go up Northern Cali to get some satisfaction.
“His partner is Steve Carlin, founder of the Bay Area’s Oakville Grocery and Napa’s Oxbow Market, and project manager of SF’s Ferry Building Marketplace and the recent organic market addition in the city’s airport.” (The Feast)
a nearly 24-hour emporium that combines retail and sit-down eat-in options. The 3500-square-foot space will have sidewalk seating, a juice bar, a patio, a raw bar, and will be similar to Dean and Deluca and other famed gourmet Bay area/New York City food emporiums.
“The food will be half organic/Slow Food movement, half rich, luxurious, snotty food”—by which he means oysters, caviar and foie gras. Smoked fish, bagels, charcuterie, cheese, Portuguese-style pizza, sandwiches, rotisserie meats, frozen custard, and flowers will also be on offer.” (The Feast)
Local 1205 will be at 1205 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, and will be open daily from 7 a.m. – 4 a.m.[The Feast]”
Ken Friedman, co-owner of New York’s West Village (with April Bloomfield), Michelin starred British gastropub The Spotted Pig, has promised his Mom who lives in San Diego that he will be opening a major seafood restaurant in LA by the end of the year. My partner and I fell in love with his white-hot restaurant in the Ace Hotel in New York City, The Breslin, which is named after the original name of the building that too cool The Ace Hotel now resides in. The hotel features a Stumptown Coffee café and a new seafood dream of a restaurant called The John Dory. I have covered this in another blog post about a trip to New York. By the way – the best slice of pizza I’ve ever tasted was a smoked black olive pizza that my daughter ordered at Pulino’s, which is a recently opened a Friedman establishment on The Bowery. As it turns out, Mario Batali’s restaurant group is also partnered in with Friedman and Bloomfield, which may explain why Friedman is expanding to Los Angeles at this time.
In a November 2007 New York Observer interview, Friedman said this about gastropubs: “Pub means public house. In England, it was where the poor people went, and the animal hanging outside the door [as it does at the Spotted Pig, in place of an actual sign] was because they couldn’t read. It was literally, ‘Meet me at the pig at eight!’
Friedman said this about his Los Angeles plans: “For some strange reason there are very few seafood places here even though we’re on the ocean. We’re at a certain point where we can open restaurants in places we want to be, like London or San Francisco or L.A.. ” (Paper magazine, April 2011)
Friedman also recently noted that Los Angeles is on the ocean, it seems to not be engaged in eating from the sea. Many others have observed this, but may not take into account the orgy of sushi bars in LA, that are part of growing LA’s fixation of Japanese products, from cars to sushi bars and now to robata bars and beyond.
GOURMET SANDWICH SHOPS
Michael Voltaggio’s ink.sack
NEW DOWNTOWN LOSANGELES RESTAURANTS IN THE WORKS (AS OF9.9.2011)
The Factory Place Arts complex will be expanded with 8,00 sq. ft. 140 seat restaurant space in a 1920’s warehouse called Republique that will be home to former Bastide Chef Walter Manzke. The bistronomy inspired Republique restaurant will have a curated good and full baking department via his wife, called the Factory Baking Co. The Los Angeles Times reported on August 22, 2011 that “The Manzkes took several Paris trips that included visits to restaurants such as Le Comptoir, Chateaubriand, Spring, Frenchie and Chez Dumonet.”
I went to The Tasting Kitchen for my birthday earlier this year. Both it and the next door Gjelina are two of my top special occasion restaurants in LA (actually on ultra cool Abbott Kinney in Venice Beach). So when I read that The Tasting Kitchen was opening what they are describing as “a true gastropub” – this got my attention on the spot and it will soon be on my dining calendar. Scheduled to open at the end of 2011. The Tasting Kitchen’s crew is from Portland. They ran the best restaurant in the city when they were in town, called Clark & Lewis. When their newest venture opens, it will mark the warehouse arts district downtown Los Angeles as a major new dining hotspot of LA.
NEW LOS ANGELES NOODLE BARS
From Chicago’s Bill Kim we have a noodle bar concept called Belly Pop that will open in downtown Los Angeles. Kim’s Belly Shack in Chicago was food world sensation when it opened, and has since garnered a Michelin Bib Gourmand award. Studio City has already been blessed with Ramen Jinya, an authentic noodle bar from Japan, which itself has expanded to the Japanese restaurants district of Sawtelle avenue in West LA, but this one has a liquor license. Nearby yet another direct from Japan noodle bar import has opened, called Tsujita LA Artisan Noodle. It is part of a Tokyo based chain and is the first U.S. location.
“if your craving for good noodles is as regular as ours, and you live in los angeles…lucky you! artisan noodle restaurant tsujita hails from tokyo and has just opened a rather spectacular new branch in california, the first one stateside. designed in a clean contemporary yet japanese style, tsujita’s most striking interior feature is an intricately designed ceiling installation of sorts.
crafted by japanese designer takeshi sano, it’s poetically inspired by clouds surrounding izumo shrine in japan’s shimane prefecture, using 25,000 drum stick-shaped wooden sticks. obviously tsujita serves noodles or ramen, but also a wide range of typically tokyo-style japanese fusion food. you just have to drop by and taste it yourself. location: 2057 sawtelle boulevard [west los angeles].” Superfuture magazine online
GOURMET BUTCHER SHOPS AND GOURMET EMPORIUMS
“Why did you choose L.A. for Lindy & Grundy?
Erika: Amelia is born and raised in Los Angeles, so we would come visit her family here a lot, and we saw that there was a great need for a whole animal, sustainable butcher shop. We try to source as close to L.A. as possible. Everything other than our lamb comes from a 150-mile radius of our butcher shop.” from Cool Hunting’s interview of Lindy & Grundy.”
Sabatino & Co. Roma supplied several of Americas top restaurants with truffles. Soon the store will open in LA and offer truffles as well as gourmet foods and products from Italy. This certainly makes up for LA/OC not having a Dean & DeLuccas
The news of the year in food for Los Angeles is that the world’s largest Italian gourmet food emporium, Eataly, will be opening in LA, in the Fairfax district. Eataly has several eating stations, and will be making fresh pasta daily. There will be an astounding array of prepared meats, wonderful rustic breads, and so much more. The NYC Eataly opened last fall. It has a free-standing restaurant that is mobbed. It is about to open its 4 part craft beer bar on the roof of its building on at 24th street and 5th avenue in Manhattan. It will be amazing to watch LA go from having none of the major gourmet markets to having one of the top places on earth. There are already three Eataly locations in Japan, and five in Italy. Perhaps now we’ll also get a Berkeley Bowl supermarket from Northern California, which would be a dream.
Eataly in Turin, Italy (AP Photo/Massimo Pinca)
Eataly NYC bread station
Eataly NYCs fresh pasta station (photo AliceQFoodie)
Performing Arts venues arts
In 2011 several new performing arts venues opened or broke ground in Los Angeles. Already the performing arts scene is more dynamic than ever, with several major events happening in a single month, so much so that LA now has a dedicated Dance Calendar. In the past two years alone I’ve seen Pina Bausch Dance Wuppertal, the Berlin Phiharmonic, the Munich Symphony, Kidd Pivot Frankfurt dance company, the Wooster Group at Redcat Disney (three different tremendous experimental theater plays!), and a lot more. With these new venues LA will be able to have wall to wall performances.
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, CA
Valley Performing Arts Center, Cal State Nortridge
Performing arts hall, Cal State Northridge
The Broad Stage, Santa Monica College
Artworld
3.21.11
New York’s Perry Rubenstein gallery has announced that it will relocate to LA into a 7,500 sq. ft space in fall 2011.
“I’m bringing to Los Angeles the perspective of someone who has lived and worked his entire life on the Atlantic seaboard,” says Rubenstein. “Los Angeles is a new center. It looks today the way New York looked compared to Paris after the war.”
Rubenstein is one of many New York art world personalities who is convinced that Los Angeles is post-war New York City. This is of course the time when NYC overtook the 300 year old Paris artworld and became the new center of Western world international art. What is interesting is that NYC has been talking about LA for over 60 years, first as a no place, then a place with potential that always seemed to fizz out. Now it is being seen for the first time as THE PLACE WHERE CONTEMPORARY ART COMES FROM IN AMERICA.
In 2011 LA’s first art parade will tale place in downtown LA, courtesy of West of Rome, the LA nonprofit visual arts presenter.
LA really separated itself from the rest of the West Coast in 2011 with recent announcements of their being the first LA Biennale in 2012. Yet the major news is in 2011, with LA finally getting a layer of its own art history on paper, with the 50 some exhibitions planned that open as early as late September 2011. The major shows will be at the Getty and MoCA, with several other equally significant but smaller group shows throughout Southern California in 2011 and 2012. In the fall of 2011 LA gets the first West Coast version of the Armory Show with Art Platform Los Angeles. The Pulse Fair of Miami and NYC is also expanding to LA and will put on a huge exhibition during the same time as Art Platform Los Angeles. There are also more powerful artist run spaces in Los Angeles than at any time in its history. These spaces are serving as both project spaces for artists yet serving as commercial galleries but without the backroom storage. They are promoting the artists they show to an international audience that now visits LA monthly, as LA is now unquestionably one of the most important centers of art production and exhibition in the worl
May 2011:
London based contemporary art collector and curator Kay Saatchi moves to Los Angeles to be at the forefront of the new LA art scene. Over the next month more press reveals her plans to create major exhibitions of LA art, which she also will be collecting.
6.20.11
The Swiss/US based HUB Foundation announces an exciting new exhibition program in Los Angeles that will use multiple venues in winter 2012. (from the Artnewspaper, London)
6.29.11
LA Art collector Dean Valentine launches Bowmont Art, in 7,000 square feet of space at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. Initial plans are to showcase his collection, and to have performances, talks and other programming.
summer 2011:
L&M Arts talks about their expansion to Los Angeles (from Artinfo)
“Why did you open in LA
DL: There’s a creative energy there right now, and a fabulous number of talented artists living there. Not just young ones. If you think of the living established artists there, you think of Ed Ruscha, Baldessari, Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Kruger—they all live in LA. There are museums with an energy that’s quite unique. The creativity is comparable to what New York was like at the time of the [abstract expressionists]. Plus, we found a gorgeous building—it’s very beautiful.
RM: I was there last week, I was so proud of just standing in front of that building. I felt like it was one of my kids.
And the focus of the LA gallery is the primary market?
DL: Absolutely. It was a natural evolution of the gallery. There’s always been a major interest in contemporary art. We had done some primary shows: Bob was the first to do a major Jeff Koons show. But in New York, the market is saturated. You have to enter into a big fist fight to work with some of the artists. In LA, that happens less.
How is the market in LA?
RM: The only totally honest thing to say is that we see a tremendous amount of interest. We did one traditional show just to give a feeling of the range of what we do: a De Kooning show that I’m very proud of with great works on paper from 1947-52. But nothing was for sale, so the market could have been phenomenal and we wouldn’t have known one way or another.”
New York/Miami art fair veteran Fountain Art F announces it’s participation in Pacific Standard Time. Art Platform LA Weekend for 2011.
The Broad Contemporary Art Museum, to be built in downtown Los Angeles, opening in 2013
Art Platform Los Angeles will be the first major new art fair in LA. It is the creation of the same folks who own and put on The Armory Show in New York City, and the Volta Show. It promises to be an exciting time, from its gala opening on September 30, through the shows closing October 3, 2011. It opens along with Pacific Standard Time, which will see over 60 California arts institutions showcase the history of the Los Angele art scene from 1945 through 1980. This is an unprecedented event for Los Angeles. The Getty museum’s history of LA painting and sculpture of the aforementioned period will be traveling to the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. The Blues show at MoCA on historical African-American artists in Los Angeles will travel to three other venues and will have a full compliment of ancillary events and a catalog. With Art LA 2011 providing showcdates, this brings the total number of artfairs that will be in LA in the fall of 2011 to four.
“artLA brings the experience and knowledge of the Los Angeles landscape garnered over the past two decades, to the service of its exhibitors and collectors.
The Marriott Ritz Carlton at LA Live is nine blocks from Art Platform-LA and overlooks the Pulse tent on LA Live’s parking structure. The breathtaking fourth floor lobby atrium frames the entrance to artLA. We offer 25,000 square feet of column-free floor space with 25’ ceilings joining with 15,000 square feet of additional exhibition space which will house anchor booths, installations, book publishers, museum and vendors in addition to a private café for the fair.”
THE LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR
This is one of my personal all-time favorite photos, which I took in Santa Monica one morning a while back.
What I love about it is that it captures the concrete reality and the ephemeral at once. It shows an image of California that one can actually experience here when driving, which is that the road in front of you has disappeared or ends abruptly. It also recalls the theme of solid and air, density and atmospheric. All of the man-made signs, street markings and street signs, street lamps, speak of an effort to create the possibility of order. The rising, undulating street appears to possibly be a bridge rising to allow ships to pass underneath it. Yet the movement is illusory. Life is both real and a dream.
Private home, Pasadena, California, 2005g
In the year 2001 I returned to my project that began in 1995, of photographing Los Angeles, without concern to subject. I would merely take pictures of any and everything I found visually intriguing. Between 1995 and 2007 I would take over 25,000 photographs in the Los Angeles region. I began to categorize the works over time, and then to focus on particular areas, such as Los Angeles vernacular architecture, and photographing LA at night.
I am currently going through my archive. I’ll post more photographs as time allows.
City park, Santa Monica, California, 2005
Parked Cadillac, Los Angeles, 2005
Under the Hollywood Downtowner neon sign, Hollywood, California, 2005
Adventurer motel, near LAX Airport, Los Angeles, 2005
Royal Roost, named after the legendary jazz club in NYC, South Central Los Angeles, 2005
Bitter Redhead bar, Santa Monica, California, 2005
Liquor store, San Fernando Valley, California, 2005
Valley Ho Liquor store, Van Nuys, California
Strip club billboard sign, Van Nuys
Automotive parts store, Van Nuys
Drapery store, San Fernando Valley
Jolly Jug liquor store, North Hollywood
Roofstack, South Central Los Angeles
Motel Tangiers, San Fernando Valley
Market Sign from 1950’s Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley
The Primitivism in 20th Century Art exhibition at MoMA in 1984 that became a break through moment in how art from Sub-Sahara Africa was perceived by the New York art world powers. It was attacked by Thomas McEvilley in Art Forum magazine over a series of combative letters written by MoMA’s William Rubin in response to McEvilley’s charge that MoMA was perpetuating a mythology of superiority of Western Art that drew upon Dark African Art. McEvilley’s “Heads Its Form, Tails Its Not Content” attacked the underlying ideological position imbedded in Clement Greenberg’s formalist theories.
Over time this post will delve into the arguments made and positions defended in essay form. For not this is a placeholder for the research on this 1984 MoMA exhibition and its remarkable responses.
In some ways, art historian, critic, teacher, translator, and studier of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and classical philosophy Thomas McEvilley started multiculturalism as we know it in the art world. In 1984, MoMA organized “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. In a series of brilliantly reasoned scathing letters to the editor of Artforum, McEvilley blasted MoMA, all museums of modern art, and the entire art-historical infrastructure as it then existed. His claim, which was then correct, was that European and American art history was using third world art and artists as footnotes to Western art history without recognizing the primacy of these formal cultures. Asian and African works were rarely not seen in lower hierarchical position to western art — which played the role of masterpiece and genius to tribal art’s perpetual role as influence or antecedent. McEvilley’s role as spokesperson was elevated to general in the war on cultural imperialism when, to everyone’s surprise, the show’s curators answered back in Artforum. For a few issues the art world watched and read a war of words take place.
The establishment was being intellectually challenged by an upstart rebel leader. In those letters in Artforum, it was like the walls were crumbling. In a way, the crucial thing was really just watching this battle play itself out in public and to feel like “our side” was winning. It was like McEvilley was Bob Marley. I have a memory of yelping in glee at McEvilley writing about the curators as “bears coming out of the woods.” Within a few years, there ensued numerous investigations of indigenous cultures and of contemporary African, Indian, Southeast Asian, Latin American, and Native American art and other excluded traditions. Along with the various liberation movements, multiculturalism was one of the biggest blasts of fresh thinking of the last half of the twentieth century.
That wasn’t all. McEvilley was also a major player in post-modernist art history and a great voice in the old “painting is dead” debate. He loved painting but also saw why it could be said to be dead. If you want to read about monochrome painting, he’s your man (“Seeking the Primal Through Paint”). One of my favorite of his essays is “On the Manner of Addressing Clouds,” in his book Art & Discontent: Theory atthe Millennium. Here, McEvilley radiantly deconstructs layers and layers of deep content in the all-white paintings of Robert Ryman. I never met McEvilley. Until 2006. Sheepish about having no degrees and wanting to learn more, I wrote to ask him if I could sit in on his lectures at the School of Visual Arts, where I also taught. He agreed. I went for two years. About twelve students sat enrapt around a large boardroom table and he’d hold forth. In my three notebooks full of class notes, which I have since kept at the ready on the shelf in front of my desk, I now see that he covered how God’s commandment not to make any “graven images” relates to modern art; monotheism and iconoclasm; the burning of the Library at Alexandria; Plato echoing God in saying that representation misleads; lots about Kant that I never understood; Hegel which I somehow did; Marx; perspective on Greek pots; the cruelty of conquistadors; and Paleolithic art. I never spoke once in any of those classes. All I did was take notes madly, always feeling like a freshman getting the education of a lifetime from a very sage old soul.
—
October 28, 1984
GALLERY VIEW
GALLERY VIEW; DISCOVERING THE HEART OF MODERNISM
By Michael Brenson
”’ Primitivism ‘ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” is an immensely important show. The relationship between modern and tribal art is so loaded that trying to sort it out means asking the most charged questions about 20th-century art and life. Whatever its weaknesses – which include a perspective on contemporary art that can not account for the glut of totemic imagery in recent painting and a renewed interest in direct carving – this is a show that leads into the heart of modernism and beyond, toward impulses and aspirations that may be shared by art in general.
The exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 15, was organized by William Rubin, the museum’s director of painting and sculpture, with the collaboration of art historian Kirk Varnedoe. Like other great exhibitions masterminded by Mr. Rubin, the installation can be characterized as inspired didacticism. ”Primitivism,” he states in the catalogue, is an ”aspect of the history of modern art, not of tribal art.” Determined to ”understand the Primitive sculptures in terms of the Western context in which modern artists ‘discovered’ them,” the exhibition juxtaposes tribal and modern objects that are both similar and inalterably different. The juxtapositions, some of them explosive, may indicate an ”influence,” meaning that the connection can be documented with reasonable certainty, or an ”affinity,” which means that the similarity between the tribal and modern objects, however startling, is fortuitous.
The exhibition argues against the widely held view that Primitive art changed the course of modern art. ”The changes in modern art at issue were already under way when vanguard artists first became aware of tribal art,” Mr. Rubin says. In fact, disgust with the trappings of society and longing for an art that is more direct and essential than inherited artistic and cultural values has been part of Western art, in one form or another, at least since the Industrial Revolution. The Neo-Classicism of Jacques-Louis David, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, all shared the ”primitivist” determination to strip the fat off reality and arrive at a more basic and pure artistic expression. The ”discovery” of tribal art gave this drive a raw, physical potential that was appropriate to the violence and upheaval of this century. By now, the resistance to conventions and preference for the raw over the cooked that led Gauguin to Tahiti and directed Picasso, the Fauves and the German Expressionists to tribal art have been so thoroughly ritualized into the posture of revolt that is automatically assumed by just about every Western adolescent, that it may be necessary to remind ourselves just how jarring early 20th-century ”primitivism” was.
One reason why the exhibition and its huge catalogue, which includes remarkable essays by Mr. Rubin and Mr. Varnedoe, are seemingly inexhaustible is that they raise as many questions indirectly as they do directly. Because the ”affinities” in the exhibition can be at least as provocative as the ”influences,” for example, the show also draws attention to its own art historical orientation. If we do not have the means to explain the profound but coincidental ”affinity” between Max Ernst’s ”Bird-Head” and the mask from the Upper Volta, then to what degree can a science of art history enter the deepest levels of human influence and communication? The exhibition evokes the mystery of what Mr. Rubin calls ”artistic transmission” and, in the process, becomes itself an indication why the artistic search for intuitive, non-systematic modes of responses goes on.
The show would not have such impact if many tribal objects were not spectacular. The Goddess Kawe from the Caroline Islands presides over the entrance to the exhibition like a combination of protective spirit and bouncer. The God A’a, from the Austral Islands, with all the creepy-crawly progeny figures doubling as facial features and clinging to the god’s body like leeches, seems to turn the heart of the installation into the pocket of a swamp. After experiencing sculptures like these, as well as the spiky dog fetishes from Vili, the skulls of the Epke Society emblem from the Cameroon and the Mumuye from Nigeria, the tribal version of Darth Vader, it is possible to leave the show repeating after Picasso: ”Primitive sculpture has never been surpassed.”
There are reasons, however, why we should be wary of this kind of hyperbole. The Primitive objects in this show are, in many instances, the cream of the crop. With few exceptions, the Western objects are not. Furthermore, when objects are presented in such a way that they are seen in the context of other objects, as the modern works are here, only the very best will not appear second- rate and derivative.
There is also a more important reason. We, in American culture especially remain intensely ambivalent about the self-consciousness and doubt that are among our greatest strengths. The immediate, expressive, frontal presences of tribal art underline the groping and questioning in the modern works, at times making them seem fragile – just as someone who rejects systems can seem weak alongside someone who has one. Would Primitive Art, and indeed Oriental art as well, look as good without our ambivalence about ourselves?
To say that ”primitive sculpture has never been surpassed” is ultimately absurd. Recognizing that tribal art, which Mr. Rubin clarifies as ”iconic,” not ”narrative,” has genius, and that it combines the rational and the magical in the most provocative way, is one thing. To say that any object or group of tribal objects in the show can be on the same level as works that are both iconic and narrative, such as the pediment at Olympia, or Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel, not to mention certain monuments of Asian sculpture, is to overcompensate for previous neglect and guilt and to lose sight of the richness of our own complexity.
With these reservations in mind, it is important to understand why Primitive Art can have such power. The Goddess Kawe is a force. The figure has a tremendous sense of sculptural volume; it seems as if it is in the process of expanding, even rising off the ground. The sculptural life depends upon a tension between the upward pull of the torso, shoulders and head and the downward thrust created by the correspondences between the triangular chin, breasts and genital area. This stretching enables the figure to occupy space, to be sculpture in the fullest sense.
Primitive Art meant so much to artists like Picasso and Giacometti in part because of this kind of spatial impact. The Kawe figure is far more relevant to Giacometti’s standing woman, which is pulled taut between the huge swollen foot and the tiny arrow-shaped head, than the more literal elongation of the Tanzanian wood figure that stands beside it. For these two artists, among the few Western painters and sculptors who hold their own in the show, tribal art provided a key to a dramatic sculptural volume that had been characteristic of someone they both admired – Michelangelo. In the painting styles Picasso reacted against in the first decade of the century, and in the sculptural alternatives Giacometti rejected in the 1920’s, this kind of intense sculptural energy was all but absent. For artists like Picasso and Giacometti, the journey through Primitive Art led them back to something essential in their own artistic tradition.
Another reason for the impact of Primitive Art is the way in which violence and obsession are accommodated within a rational framework. In the sculpture of the God A’a, for example, which had such an effect on Victor Brauner and Picasso, the head, torso and squatting legs are composed of full, rounded geometric forms. Almost every part of the body, however, is covered with tiny figures, upside down, right side up and on their sides. What makes the work so disturbing is not only that these figures are the God’s eyes, ears and mouth, but that inside an austere, geometrical structure, a miniature army or tribe seems to be running amok. Within the authoritative frontal structure of many tribal figures, there is a sense of something beyond reason and control.
This leads into what may be the most essential reason for the Western fascination with tribal art. In his impressive discussion of the ”Demoiselles d’Avignon,” which Picasso later described as his ”first exorcism picture,” Mr. Rubin cites the artist’s statement to Andre Malraux that tribal masks were ”intercessors. . . against everything – against unknown, threatening spirits.” ”If we give a form to these spirits,” Picasso said, ”we become free.” The moment Picasso had the revelation that Primitive art was apotropaic (”designed to avert or turn aside evil”), he had a liberating insight into himself.
The question of the apotropaic intention of Primitive art is as knotty as it is with Western art. Certainly a good deal of tribal art was not intended for this purpose. If it is true, however, that almost every human word and gesture has some apotropaic function – is, in some way, an attempt to relieve anxiety, to court, coax, cordon off, confront or pummel the powers of darkness – then, whether or not an object is intended to be apotropaic may not be the main issue. What may matter more is the effectiveness with which an object responds to one of the most compelling of human needs.
Certainly the frontality and distortions of Primitive art have been experienced by Western artists and members of the art public as ways of naming the unnameable and therefore, at least for a moment, keeping it at bay. Western artists throughout this century have been in search of pictorial and sculptural mortar solid enough so that the artistic mirrors they hold up to the Medusa will not shatter. It is a rare exhibition indeed that leads into these kinds of human and artistic questions.
Photos of sculptures
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ART REVIEW MAGAZINE LONDON
State of the Art
If we want the global artworld to be inclusive, is it reasonable to expect it to promote difference?, from the December 2013 issue
2014 is the 25th anniversary of the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, an ambitious attempt to articulate a vision of contemporary art that was truly global in scope. Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, the exhibition was, in part, a reaction to a much-talked-about exhibition organised by William Rubin, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, which had taken place five years previously at New York’s MoMA.
Rubin’s exhibition focused on the visual similarities between tribal art and the modernist works of the likes of Picasso and Matisse, and was accompanied by the explicit acknowledgement by Rubin that he was not interested in the tribal works in themselves, but only in the way they acted as inspiration for the Western avant-garde. Rubin’s approach was heavily criticised, most prominently by Thomas McEvilley in Artforum, who argued that the exhibition glossed over the appropriation of tribal art by Western modern artists by sheltering under the wishful idea of ‘affinity’.
WHERE NON-WESTERN FORMS OF MODERN ART HAVE APPEARED, IT IS CLEAR THAT ARTISTS WERE LOOKING CLOSELY AT THE DOMINANT FORM OF MODERN ART AS ARTICULATED IN PARIS AND THEN NEW YORK
McEvilley concluded, ‘“Primitivism” lays bare the way our cultural institutions relate to foreign cultures, revealing it as an ethnocentric subjectivity inflected to co-opt such cultures.’ Magiciens de la Terre wanted to avoid this quasi-imperialist attitude by utilising an approach that would place non-Western artworks, a number of which occupied a midground between cultural artefact and work of art, on the same footing as Western artworks. This led to juxtapositions such as a Richard Long mud painting sited next to a floor-based traditional Indigenous Australian ceremonial ground painting.
Martin’s approach also ran into a barrage of criticism, from Benjamin Buchloh, for example, who accused Martin of an ethnocentric approach to selecting the non-Western objects in the show. Buchloh argued that Martin selected non-Western objects because they looked as if they would fit in with Western contemporary art – so the Aboriginal floor piece was there becausethere were visual continuations with the neighbouring Richard Long. Disarmingly, but perhaps naively, Martin agreed with Buchloh’s criticism, admitting in an interview with the German art historian that he avoided non-Western works that ‘do not communicate sufficiently well in a visual-sensuous manner to a Western spectator’.
The two exhibitions mark the beginning of a period in which the artworld started to deal with globalisation. In retrospect, the controversy that both exhibitions generated was down to the simple matter of how the exhibits looked, and more specifically the extent to which the non-Western exhibits in each exhibition looked too similar to the Western artworks. Rubin’s method offered a seamless path from African masks to Picasso, conveniently ignoring social and political history around colonial exploitation. Martin’s method seemed to revel in the happy coincidence of visual similarities. To critics such as Buchloh and a number informed by postcolonial theory, cultural difference was suppressed where it should have been flagged up.
THIS IS THE COMPLAINT PRESENT RIGHT THROUGH THE EMERGENCE OF A GLOBALISED ARTWORLD: WORK FROM ELSEWHERE OUGHT TO LOOK MORE DIFFERENT
Fast-forward 25 years, through a period when globalisation has taken hold both economically and culturally, and one might have expected the debate about art and globalisation to have moved on. However, this is not the case. The anxiety about things looking too similar pervades contemporary art’s thinking about the global. So, American curator (and 2007 Venice Biennale director) Robert Storr’s verdict on the state of today’s globalised artworld, given in the October issue of The Art Newspaper, is blunt: ‘The ecosystem of the “global” artworld is like that of the planet itself – overheated and dire.
Rather than expecting a cleansing cataclysm, we can look forward to a relentless melting of aesthetic distinctions, dissolving of institutional barriers and fusion of cultures, resulting in a sludgy, sulphurous magma laced with gold.’ Storr is not alone in the view that increased globalisation in the artworld has resulted in the levelling out of culturally specific forms. In the last issue of this magazine, ArtReview’s J.J. Charlesworth argued that globalisation has resulted in the production of a form of contemporary art that is visually homogeneous, created that way in order to be consumed easily around the world in biennials and fairs.
He characterises this as ‘an artworld Esperanto’ that is ‘legible, understandable and, ultimately, commercially exchangeable’. For Storr and Charlesworth, cultural specificity would have a significant element of the illegible, unconsumable and incongruous: a viewer in Rio should not be able to understand significant elements of an artwork made in Jakarta. For both critics, art should speak principally to the locality in which it was made.
By the 1960s modern art was synonymous with the New York School. Subsequent rejections of Modernism by the neo-avant-garde to begin with, and then a number of competing and sometimes overlapping movements such as Minimalism and Conceptualism, were to greater or lesser extents articulated in opposition to a high Modernism which had reached its apex in New York.
Paris became the undisputed centre of modern art at the start of the twentieth century, and while there were competing senses of what modern art might be during the 1930s (particularly in 1920s Berlin and Moscow), abstract art emerged as the dominant form of modern art as the Second World War took hold. As Paris fell to the Nazis, modern art emigrated to New York through the movement of artists and through the frameworks constructed by figures such as the curator Alfred Barr at MoMA and the city’s dominant critic, Clement Greenberg.
Storr’s and Charlesworth’s view rests implicitly on art scenes springing up organically in different localities around the world and, as a consequence, each developing with their own specific traits. However, this ignores the way that modern art spread around the world. Put simply, modern art was articulated by European artists after the First World War as a response to the conditions of modernity and in reaction to the perceived straitjacket of academic art. It was a culturally specific set of forms that was rooted in the legacy of the Great War in Europe, industrialisation and modern life.
Storr’s and Charlesworth’s arguments are not significantly different to the critical hostility that met ‘Primitivism’… and Magiciens…: that everything looks too similar. There are not enough markers of cultural specificity and the untranslatable. This then is the complaint that has been present right through the emergence of a globalised artworld: work from elsewhere ought to look more different. To this, a counter-question might be posed: when it comes to contemporary art, why expect difference, locality, the untranslatable and the culturally specific at all?
Critical reevaluations of this account have produced more multivalent accounts of the story of modern art, and of course postcolonial academics have attempted to rewrite it entirely. But while the accounts of those academics, such as that contained within Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj’s Modernity and Difference (2001), might be theoretically neat, they fall apart entirely when it comes to discussing (on the rare occasion they try) actual artworks. Where non-Western forms of modern art have appeared, it is clear that artists were looking closely at the dominant form of modern art as articulated in Paris and then New York.
So when the Progressive Artists’ Group announced itself in India in the 1940s, they did so via that most European of forms, the manifesto. Modern form was adapted to local circumstance in Latin America (think of Wifredo Lam reworking Cubism). These regional Modernisms were, and continue to be, framed in relation to a dominant orthodox Modernism, a canonical Modernism, if you like.
So Indian modernists are still seen as vaguely provincial because of their inability to become fully abstract, while Latin American modernists are seen as more accomplished thanks to the emergence of Geometric Abstraction – a set of views that relies on the Greenbergian idea that abstraction is the highest form of modern art. In short, a dominant paradigm was absorbed, aspired to and reacted against by artists from around the world, many of whom upped sticks and moved to New York, Paris or London.
The narrative for what came after modern art is not much different. Movements such as the neo-avant-garde, Minimalism, Conceptualism and Neo-Expressionism were articulated by artists who were reacting against high Modernism, but by doing so were still part of Modernism’s endgame. There was still a coherent narrative to react against. As Francesco Bonami put it in an article on the ‘problem’ of criticism published in Frieze in 2011, ‘Once upon a time – say 20 years ago – everything was crystal clear in the art world.’
Bonami (seemingly arbitrarily) pinpoints the appearance of Jeff Koons’s series Made in Heaven (1989) as the moment at which the grip of the modern is loosened ‘[marking] the end of by-laws and the beginning of critical chaos’. But Bonami’s choice of date might be telling in another way: 1989 was the year of the Berlin Wall coming down, and in the artworld it was the year of Magiciens de la Terre. Modernism might have been over, but it was not necessarily postmodern relativism that replaced it, but globalised neoliberalism. Indeed Bonami describes the emergent language of art that replaced modernism as ‘so-called global aesthetics, which is, ironically, a Western construction’.
THE ANXIETY ABOUT THINGS LOOKING TOO SIMILAR PERVADES CONTEMPORARY ART’S THINKING ABOUT THE GLOBAL
For Bonami, like Storr, this move towards global aesthetics has negative connotations. Bonami paints a picture of critical chaos caused by the breakdown of what he terms the ‘unwritten by-laws conceived at the beginning of the twentieth century’. In turn, Storr suggests ‘aesthetic distinctions’ are collapsing. While it would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that either Bonami or Storr is a fully-paid up Greenbergian modernist, both their positions imply that there was a consensus for understanding twentieth-century art, most commonly articulated through a series of movements, or ‘-isms’, from Cubism onwards, a more nuanced version of Alfred Barr’s now infamous diagram.
Nonetheless, critical or canonical consensus here is cast as a shared set of beliefs about which works fit into the narrative of modern and the avant-garde artwork of the 1960s and 70s. As Bonami puts it: ‘Everybody knew the difference between, for example, an Alberto Giacometti and a Fernando Botero… the Manichaean difference between good and bad art.’
Non-Western practices tended to be positioned as external to this narrative of Modernism, acting as precursors (in Rubin’s vision) or nonart practices (in Martin’s articulation of the idea of ‘magician’ rather than artist). The key shift happens with the rise of what Bonami terms ‘contemporary global aesthetics’, an all-encompassing idea of contemporary art that includes non-Western practices on a much larger scale than Modernism allowed. Contemporary art might be a category that operates on a geographically wider scale than Modernism, but according to Storr and Charlesworth, it tends to result in more homogeneous work.
The reaction to this unexpected homogeneity is a desire for work from outside the West to go back to productively occupying a space outside the category of contemporary art, and ideally for it to become untranslatable again. As Charlesworth asks: ‘What would it mean to assert a local that is opaque to the global, that was resistant to its forms of translation?’
The accepted answer from a globalised, postcolonial perspective is to dismiss this desire as not only nostalgic but also impossible. Once any practice has been identified by the contemporary art world, that act of identification in itself begins the process of translation of that identified object into the uneasy catchall category of ‘contemporary art’. From this viewpoint it is more logical to accept the all-pervasiveness of ‘contemporary art’ as a category and celebrate its global inclusivity with the added rejoinder that there is nothing wrong with having a dominant language of what contemporary art is and can be.
After all, non-Western artists who aspired to be seen as modern artists had no desire to knock down the central tenets of Modernism. Instead, artists like F.N. Souza, Aubrey Williams or Wifredo Lam wished to be seen as having fully entered and become participants of canonical modern art. By logical extension, artists today from around the world who wish to be seen as making ‘contemporary art’ should be allowed to do the same, to become participants of a shared language that is far more welcoming than Modernism.
Of course this openness is very important for artists from outside the traditional centres of art production. However, the robust, if politically correct rejoinder to the likes of Storr, Bonami and Charlesworth does not quite fully add up. Contemporary art is increasingly propagated around the world by the market, rather than by curators or writers. It is auction houses, art fairs, collectors and art magazines on the hunt for new advertising opportunities that open up ‘emerging’ art territories, and these uncritical mechanisms are not necessarily the best for discovering radical practice that looks very different from contemporary art being made in London, Berlin and New York.
There are two possible solutions: firstly to disengage the yoking together of looking for the different with looking at the non-Western. In other words, perhaps the start for the search of the radically different should begin with looking within the traditional centres of art production. This avoids the accusation that it is always the non-West that gets hit with the demand to be different. Secondly, look beyond mechanisms associated with the market (auction houses, collectors, fairs, magazines and even biennials) when looking for radically different practices outside the West. Contemporary art might look the same wherever it is made, and there might be no way round that (indeed, depending on your perspective, this might be a cause for celebration).
The radically untranslatable could be out there, both within and outside the West, but it’s going to take some experimental models of curation and critical thinking, and the ability to take the inevitable potshots that follow, to unearth it. Twenty-five years on, a successor to Magiciens de la Terre, with all its barmy optimism, is sorely needed to balance out an articulation of global contemporary art that is in danger of being flattened by market forces.
This article was first published in the December 2013 issue.
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William Rubin, 78, Curator Who Transformed MoMA, Dies
William Rubin, an art historian and curator who, as director of the Museum of Modern Art’s prestigious department of painting and sculpture, played a crucial role in defining the museum’s character, collections and exhibitions in the 1970’s and 80’s, died on Sunday at his weekend home in Pound Ridge, N.Y., the museum said. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
William Rubin at a 1996 Picasso exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.
He had been in declining health for several years, said his wife, Phyllis Hattis.
An imposing man with a barrel chest, roughly chiseled features and a booming voice, Mr. Rubin was tenacious as both a scholar and a personality, and at the height of his power more or less spoke for the Modern. Above all, he played a central role in championing the historical narrative of modernism that MoMA came to be identified with and is now seeking to move beyond.
He brought to his mission an art historian’s training and experience as a private collector of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art, which he installed and reinstalled in a loft he lived in decades ago on lower Broadway.
John Elderfield, the current chief curator of the department of painting and sculpture, said that Mr. Rubin built on the legacy of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s first director, who famously diagrammed the evolution of modern art starting with Neo-Impressionism.
But Mr. Rubin “was the one who really brought to it the historical positivistic sense of order, and the notion of the great unrolling of the modern movement,” Mr. Elderfield said.
His legacy is a complex one. Mr. Rubin might have contributed almost as much as Barr to building the Modern’s unparalleled collection of early modernist works. He was known for his indefatigable energy in wooing collectors and negotiating with dealers once he had zeroed in on art that he felt the Modern should own. His acquisitions for the museum include emblematic works like Picasso’s “Charnel House” (1944-45), Miró’s Surrealist “Birth of the World” (1925) and two 1950’s cutouts by Matisse, “Memory of Oceania” and “The Swimming Pool.”
He gave the museum “Australia,” a seminal 1951 sculpture by David Smith from his own collection. But he was probably proudest of landing Picasso’s “Guitar,” a groundbreaking metal-construction sculpture from 1912-13 that the artist handed over to him on a sunny winter day in the south of France. (Mr. Rubin had offered to trade a small Cézanne painting in MoMA’s collection for it, but Picasso donated the sculpture instead.)
He also greatly expanded the museum’s holdings in Abstract Expressionism, an area that Barr was sometimes thought to have neglected, with major works like Pollock’s “One: Number 31, 1950” and Barnett Newman’s 1950-51 “Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” and opened it up to Color Field painting and the work of contemporary artists like Anthony Caro and Frank Stella.
Mr. Rubin continued the museum’s practice of pruning weak or redundant works from its collection – by dead artists only – to help finance new acquisitions. In a move that raised some eyebrows in the art world, he instituted the practice of taking sealed bids from dealers when selling a work, which worked to the museum’s advantage.
And he organized many influential exhibitions, starting with “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” in 1968, and including shows of late Cézanne, two surveys of Mr. Stella’s work and a parade of Picasso shows.
Among these were an enormous 1980 Picasso retrospective that filled the entire museum; “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” of 1989, with its vivid sense of two competitive innovators working side by side; and, eight years after Mr. Rubin’s retirement in 1988, an exhibition of Picasso’s portraits that was criticized by some art historians for being organized by the artist’s successive relationships with women.
Some critics faulted Mr. Rubin’s exhibitions and research for only rarely venturing beyond the parameters established by Barr, suggesting that this had a chilling effect on his department’s involvement with new art and often made the museum seem obsessed with its own history. His painting and sculpture installations were generally formalist and chronological, with an emphasis on masterpieces, great artists and the French.
Yet Mr. Rubin’s painstakingly worked-out presentations, especially those prepared after the Modern’s 1984 expansion, told its version of modernism with a clarity and level of detail that many curators still consider unmatched.
He emerged in an age when the heads of the museum’s departments ruled their individual fiefs like titans, but his fief was the biggest, and so, perhaps, was his ego. According to a 1985 New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins, he once complained to John Hightower, then the museum’s director: “I’m sick of the prima donnas in this place. I’m a prima donna, but I deserve to be one.” He sounded much like the orchestra conductor he had once hoped to be.
William Stanley Rubin was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 11, 1927, the eldest of three sons of Mack and Beatrice Rubin. His father, the son of immigrants, was a textile merchant who began with a pushcart and ended up owning several factories, and eventually moved his family to Riverdale in the Bronx. Mr. Rubin and his brothers attended the Fieldston School, each of them serving as captain of the football team in his senior year.
While at Fieldston, Mr. Rubin became close with one of his teachers, Victor D’Amico, who was the director of education at the Museum of Modern Art. He began spending much of his free time at the museum working on special projects with Mr. D’Amico.
He entered Columbia University and, after interrupting his studies to serve in the American occupation forces in Europe, earned a bachelor’s degree in Italian language and literature. He studied musicology at the University of Paris for a year with the thought of becoming a conductor. At its end, he set aside that ambition and returned to Columbia for graduate work in history. A course in medieval art taught by Meyer Schapiro, a popular teacher whose other big area of expertise was the New York School, inspired him to shift to art history.
During the 1950’s and 60’s, Mr. Rubin taught art history at Sarah Lawrence and City University of New York, worked as an editor for Art International and became a busy collector of postwar art. He bought works by many of the Abstract Expressionist painters and by younger artists like Jasper Johns and Mr. Stella, but he later said that once he began working on MoMA’s collection he lost interest in collecting for himself. At the time of his death, he was completing a book on the works he acquired for the museum.
Mr. Rubin, whose first three marriages ended in divorce, is survived by his wife and their daughter Beata; and his brothers, Richard of Purchase, N.Y., and Lawrence of Milan.
Mr. Rubin became friendly with Alfred Barr in the late 1950’s and 60’s, frequently inviting the curator to lecture his classes at Sarah Lawrence, and taking his students on field trips to the Modern. In 1957, Barr invited Mr. Rubin to organize a small exhibition of the work of André Masson at the Modern; in the mid-1960’s, he asked him to oversee the Modern’s big Dada and Surrealism survey in 1968.
Mr. Rubin joined the museum’s painting and sculpture staff as curator in 1967 and immediately made an impact by persuading the art dealer Sidney Janis and his wife, Harriet, to donate their collection, with its five Mondrians, to the Modern. He was named chief curator of painting and sculpture in 1969, and director of the department in 1973.
In the 1980’s, the aura of infallibility that had surrounded Mr. Rubin began to dissipate. He came to feel that the museum’s inattention to new art was a “failing,” as he told The New York Times in 1985, and began a search for a younger curator more in touch with the times.
Still, some of the most vociferous criticism was drawn by a 1984 exhibition – “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” organized with J. Kirk Varnedoe, the art historian whom he selected as his successor. (Mr. Varnedoe died in 2003.) Some art critics complained that this show, pairing works by modern masters with examples of the African and Oceanic art that had influenced them, took a purely formalist approach that stripped the non-Western works of their original contexts, meanings and purposes. A sharply critical review in Artforum set off an exchange between Mr. Rubin and its author, Thomas McEvilley, that stretched into two issues.
As Mr. Rubin explained later to Mr. Tomkins: “The notion that you can look at a work of art as pure form strikes me as idiocy. If the work comes at you, it comes with everything it’s got, all at once.”
In a Magical Manhattan Exhibit, MOMA Curator William Rubin Brings Primitivism Right Up to Date
By Joyce Campbell
Pablo Picasso was a restless young artist of 25 when he first saw examples of African and Pacific Island sculptures in a Paris museum. The “shock” and “revelation” radically altered his approach to art and in 1907 gave rise to the fusion of his precubist work with tribal art. “What really interested him about all primitive art was the notion of art-making as a magical process,” explains William Rubin, director of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “Picasso felt that art had to get back to being the kind of thing that did not mirror the world but changed the world, changing the man who made the art as well as the people who looked at it.”Rubin’s thesis is no mere speculation. His second home is located near Plan-de-la-Tour in the south of France, a 50-minute drive from the town of Mougins, where Picasso lived. “I got to know him quite well,” Rubin says of Picasso (who died in 1973). “He didn’t like to talk about his art so you would have to slip in questions slyly.”
How well Rubin succeeds in finding answers is reflected in a stunning MOMA exhibit titled “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. To make his point, Rubin’s show dramatically juxtaposes 147 works by such modern masters as Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and Brancusi against 218 examples of African, Eskimo, Oceanic and American Indian art (see following pages). Assembled on a budget exceeding $1 million, the exhibit will be at MOMA until Jan. 15, moving then to the Detroit Institute of Arts (Feb. 27-May 19) and the Dallas Museum of Art (June 23-Sept. 1).
Accompanying the show is a two-volume, 700-page MOMA publication of the same title (cloth, $80; paperback, $30 until Jan. 30, $40 thereafter), edited by Rubin, 57, a onetime clarinetist who describes himself as a “disappointed orchestral conductor turned art historian.” After earning a Ph.D. from Columbia, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College for 16 years (“Jill Clayburgh was a student of mine”) before joining MOMA in 1967. Among his major exhibits was the acclaimed Picasso retrospective four years ago.
For the current Primitivism exhibition Rubin assembled pieces lent by museums and private collectors from around the world. “This is probably the first time a large number of tribal objects has been collected by someone whose interest is purely aesthetic rather than anthropological,” Rubin says.
A dozen of the tribal works are from Picasso’s own collection, much of which was of marginal quality in Rubin’s view. “Picasso was not a big spender even when he became incredibly wealthy,” Rubin says. “He rather liked the idea of getting something on the cheap. Of course, an object could be important to Picasso and not be a particularly good example of its type. As he said to me, ‘You don’t have to have a masterpiece to get the idea.’ ”
There is one striking counter-example to the recent skeptical claims about the reach of art writing. Soon after 1979, when Ingrid Sischy became editor of Artforum, she asked Thomas McEvilley to write for her. That was surprising, for he, trained as a classicist, didn’t have a background in art history. Shortly thereafter, in September of 1984, the MoMA presented an ambitious survey exhibition titled “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, which included 150 modern art works and some 200 tribal artifacts. The then New York Times critic, Michael Brenson, admired the show. McEvilley, however, took issue with the exhibition publishing his now infamous review, “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief.” At that moment, as Holland Cotter noted recently in his Times obituary for McEvilley (who passed away in early March), everything changed. Once the implications of this account were understood, it was impossible to think of “primitivism” in the same way. Although the MoMA curators protested in long letters to Artforum, the more they said, the less convincing their case was.
The argument of “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief” was simple and convincing. The curation of “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art displayed tribal art, without labels or explanatory wall text, alongside modernist pieces in order to show its influence upon modernism as a movement. In doing so, the museum refused to take this “primitive” art seriously, refusing to consider how these artifacts were understood by their creators. The exhibition merely affirmed the superiority of Western culture. Indeed, even in calling tribal artifacts “art,’ so McEvilley observed, already begged crucial questions, for much of this “primitive” art originally dealt with religion or magic and not the sphere of art history. The exhibition, he wrote:
shows Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and souvenirism. The Museum pretends to confront the Third World while really co-opting it and using it to consolidate Western notions of quality and feelings of superiority.
Within the academic world the most influential art critics of the 1980s were associated with October: Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss. But nothing they wrote had the larger resonance of McEvilley’s treatise. When, for example, Krauss defended Richard Serra’s “Titled Arc” (1981–89), she didn’t take seriously the concerns of people outside of the art world. As a publication, October developed a style of theorizing which even academics find difficult to understand. McEvilley’s argument didn’t invoke any abstruse philosophical claims. And it wasn’t just a critique of one exhibition—what he offered was a convincing indictment of our most important museum devoted to modernism.
I would love to say that “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief” immediately changed how I wrote art criticism. In fact, however, only much later, after I traveled to China, did I respond. The aesthetic theorizing of my teachers, Arthur Danto and Richard Wollheim, claimed to be universal, although it relied exclusively on examples from American and European art. It took me a long time to realize that their way of thinking was problematic—philosophers only very belatedly have responded to multiculturalism. But by 2006, when McEvilley was Chair of the program devoted to art writing at the School of Visual Arts, I was prepared. When invited to give a lecture on world art history, I plunked down his masterpiece, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies on the podium. And thanks to his support, I published A World Art History and its Objects (2008). “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief” has had a long shelf life—it truly changed the intellectual art discourse. Before McEvilley wrote for Artforum, that journal focused on art made and displayed in Western Europe and the United States. After the publication of “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief” (although he parted from that journal in the 1990s because it would no longer support his agenda), the situation changed dramatically. Now survey exhibitions like the Carnegie Internationals, worldwide Biennials, and shows at New York galleries and museums (including MoMA) often feature art from outside the West, as do many journals and books devoted to contemporary art. And we hesitate to use the word “primitive”—even with scare quotes. That nowadays we devote serious sustained attention to visual art from Africa, China, and India—from everywhere outside of the West—is due in large part to McEvilley’s influence.
Respecting Non-Western Sacred Objects: An A:shiwi Ahayu:da (Zuni war god), the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Art
By Cécile R. Ganteaume, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
For the last few weeks, American Indians, the international art world, U.S. State Department officials, indigenous rights activists, and intellectual and cultural property rights lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic have been discussing the proposed sale of Hopi Katsina “friends” (often mistakenly called masks) at a Paris auction house. The Hopi, who live in northern Arizona, and their supporters tried to delay, if not halt, the sale. Hopi Katsina friends are among the most sacred Hopi ritual objects. Katsinam (the plural of Katsina) are spiritual beings that live in the peaks of the San Francisco Mountains and bring blessings to the Hopi. When worn during Kastina ceremonies, the friend—the spirit of Katsina—is united with the spirit of man. On April 12, 2013, a French judge ruled that “the claim that Hopi cultural patrimony is exclusively their property has no legal basis according to French law” and that the auction house could proceed with the sale..
The Hopi effort is the latest prominently reported instance of an American Indian tribe trying to regain its sacred objects from the international art world and market. American Indians have been seeking the return of their sacred objects since well before the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), the federal law that helps enable the return to tribes of certain categories of objects including sacred objects, held by U.S. museums.
Almost thirty years ago, on September 27, 1984, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City opened a highly anticipated and soon to be celebrated exhibition. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern was curated by William Rubin (1927–2006), then MoMA’s esteemed director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, in collaboration with Kirk Varnadoe (1946–2003), a professor within the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. On display in the exhibition was to be an A:shiwi (Zuni) Ahayu:da (war god) borrowed from the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, (now the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin). The MoMA exhibition, and its multi-authored, two-volume catalogue, explored the influence of tribal art and culture in modern art’s development “from Gauguin at the turn of the century to the Abstract Expressionists around 1950.” When the exhibition opened, the New York Times heralded it as “an immensely important show.”
“People are talking about: The man from MoMA” by Barbara Rose in Vogue (August, 1984. Vol. 174(8), pages 357–361 & 416) with illustrations of the A:shiwi (Zuni) Ahayu:da (war god) in the collections of the Museum für Völkerkunde and the Paul Klee painting, Mask of Fear. Page 357 @ Condé Nast. Used with permission.
In one of their exhibition galleries, the curators planned to juxtapose the painted wood Ahayu:da “sculpture” with a Paul Klee oil painting, Mask of Fear (1932), to discuss what they found to be the striking affinity between the “primitive” and “modern” “works of art.” The Museum für Völkerkunde acquired the Ahayu:da in 1880, and Klee, the Swiss-born artist closely associated with the Bauhaus movement, was known to have visited the museum several times while the Ahayu:da was on display. Like many avant-garde artists of his time, Klee was keenly interested in the formal vocabulary of the visual arts of non-Western peoples; he wrote on the subject more than once. William Rubin was convinced that Klee was familiar with the Museum für Völkerkunde Ahayu:da and that it “consciously or unconsciously” influenced his Mask of Fear. In the catalogue essay, “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” Rubin wrote of the works’ “striking similarities,” comparing the oval-shaped heads; the single arrow projecting from the top of each head; the long, narrow noses and absence of mouths; and the horizontal line crossing each forehead. He suggested that “the curious multiple legs” protruding from Klee’s head were a transformation of the feathers projecting from the Ahayu:da’s chin. Klee’s painting was “a modernist transformation,” Rubin wrote, of the A:shiwi Ahayu:da “sculpture.” And this was how the curators intended to display the A:shiwi Ahayu:da from the Museum für Völkerkunde in “Primitivism” in the 20th Century: as a “primitive sculpture” with “conceptual complexity and aesthetic subtlety” whose exhibition and publication in the West, along with the appearance of other “primitive” works of art, had a great impact on Modernist aesthetic sensibilities. (See William Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 1. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984, pages 29–32.)
But as it happened, by 1984 the A:shiwi were already actively pursuing the return of their Ahayu:da—all wrongfully removed from shrines on their reservation. Cared for by A:shiwi religious leaders, Ahayu:da are powerful guardian beings who protect the A:shiwi and their land from harm. Their acquisition by European and European–America individuals and institutions broke all A:shiwi religious and cultural protocols. Their dispersion was the result of large-scale historical events that brought non-Western peoples, ideas, and practices to the Americas and led, in a myriad of ways and places, to the wrongful alienation of Native peoples’ religious patrimony.
The A:shiwi began their efforts to recover their Ahayu:da in 1978, twelve years before Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to provide a process for museums and federal agencies to return to Native Americans and Native Hawaiian organizations certain cultural items—human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony. The A:shiwi were in the vanguard of Native peoples seeking the return of sacred objects from museums, galleries, auction houses, and private collections. Buttressed by the newly legislated American Indian Freedom of Religion Act (1978), intended to protect American Indian religious liberties that had long been infringed upon and even prohibited, the A:shiwi campaign helped make it possible for other tribes to recover their own sacred objects. As T. J. Ferguson, an anthropologist who aided the A:shiwi in their efforts, has written, A:shiwi religious leaders were not only resolute in their pursuit, but most importantly were “morally persuasive” in their conversations with museum curators, administrators, and others in the art world elucidating the importance of returning Ahayu:da to A:shiwi shrines. (See T. J. Ferguson, “Repatriation of Ahayu:da: 20 Years Later.” Museum Anthropology, vol. 33, 2012, pages 194–95.)
During the summer of 1984, I was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation, the forerunner institution to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. As such, I was very much aware of the increasingly vocal opposition of Native peoples, including the A:shiwi, to having their sacred objects displayed as “art” in museum exhibitions—in fact, to having them housed in museum collections at all.
It is important to bear in mind that in Western art history, the term “sacred art” is used to refer to (what might be called in this specific context) ancillary objects used in religious ceremonies and buildings, such as Byzantine chalices and other Christian liturgical vessels; or medieval or renaissance paintings bearing religious iconography, such as Hieronymus Bosch’s extraordinary altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi; or, much more recently, certain abstract works with fields of luminous color, such as Henri Matisse’s stained glass windows in the Dominican Chapelle du Rosaire in France. In other words, in Western art history the term is used to refer to artistic creations depicting, expressing, or evoking religious subjects and a realm of reality beyond that ordinarily encountered in daily life. It is used to refer to artistic works intended to speak to the hearts, minds, and spirits of those contemplating the divine.
Importantly, it is not used to refer to, for example, a host consecrated by an ordained priest during the Eucharistic service of a Catholic Mass. A consecrated host has never been considered “art” by museums. Yet objects held by American Indians to be spiritually sentient were. And they were displayed in museums throughout the U.S. and Europe for reasons that had nothing to do with (read: without any understanding of) their deeply held spiritual reality, and without any awareness of, and consequently regard for, the religious practices and tenets of contemporary Native peoples.
Museum of Modern Art members’ newsletter (no. 32, Jul–Aug, 1984) announcing the upcoming exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.
I learned that the Museum of Modern Art planned to include an A:shiwi Ahayu:da in“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art through a preview in MoMA’s members’ newsletter. I shared this newsletter with the MAI–HF curators, and in particular with Brenda Shears (then Holland), who in turn shared it with our assistant director, George Eager. (Roland Force, director of the MAI–HF, was out of town.) After staff worked their networks to gather salient information, Eager wrote a letter to Richard Oldenburg, director of the Museum of Modern Art and a long-time colleague, advising him that A:shiwi Ahayu:da were “the most sensitive of Native American religious objects” and should not be put on display. He informed Oldenburg that museums throughout the country were in fact removing Ahayu:da from exhibition for this very reason. Eager went on to explain that any Ahayu:da out of A:shiwi possession were considered stolen objects, illegally removed from shrines on the A:shiwi reservation. In no small measure because of this letter, MoMA removed the Ahayu:da borrowed from the Museum für Völkerkunde from “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. (See James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” In Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, pages 351–68.)I have never forgotten the pivotal role that the MAI–HF played in this incident, nor the experience of being a direct witness to a sea change in museum practice. MoMA’s decision represents one of the first times that an eminent institution at the center of one of the cultural capitals of the world removed a sacred American Indian object from display, let alone from such an important (and highly publicized) exhibition. It was, in fact, an historic act that helped focus worldwide attention on the inappropriate display of sacred American Indian objects and on the responsibility of museums to respect Native religious traditions. Cécile R. Ganteaume is the curator most recently of Circle of Dance, an exhibition on view at NMAI–New York. She is also the curator of the exhibition An Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian also on view at NMAI–New York, and the editor of the accompanying book. She is a recipient of a 2011 Smithsonian Secretary’s Excellence in Research Award. She joined the staff of the museum when it was established as part of the Smithsonian. Photo by R.A.Whiteside, NMAI.
The exhibition which the Museum of Modern Art has mounted this fall under the title, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art,” is an event of unusual interest.[1] Even before one has entered the exhibition itself, one is struck by something odd and interesting in its title. I refer to those highly suggestive quotation marks which hold the word “Primitivism” so visibly in their grip, appearing to separate it from its customary associations while at the same time nudging it (or so it seems) in the direction of irony and doubt, and thereby alerting us to a possible shift in historical perspective. As a result of those insistent quotation marks, one is more or less obliged to enter this exhibition with a large question on one’s mind—a question not only about the phenomenon of primitivism itself and what it meant before it sprouted this newly acquired grammatical encumbrance, but about the exact relation that is now thought to obtain between this new and, as it were, problematical “Primitivism” and the older, more familiar, un-bequoted primitivism of yore.
Yet, though the question is posed in the title of the exhibition, it remains resolutely unanswered, if not indeed unanswerable, in the exhibition itself. To understand the decision, obviously a carefully considered one, to enclose the world “Primitivism” in those unexpected quotation marks, one must therefore turn to the weighty, two-volume publication that does not so much accompany the exhibition as supply it with its all-encompassing raison d’être.[2] In fact, one must study this two-volume work, with its nineteen essays written by a formidable team of scholars, in order to understand the exhibition itself and not just those pesky quotation marks. (The latter, by the way, pretty much disappear in the body of the book—a subject to which I shall return.) And this alerts us to another odd and interesting thing about this exhibition. It appears to have been conceived as a contribution to thought, and not as just another exhibition tracing the course of a familiar artistic development. What it attempts is nothing less than a full-scale study of the multiform role—aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual—played by the art of primitive peoples in the artistic achievements of the modern era. Thus, whatever the exhibition may offer us in the way of visual delectation—and parts of it certainly offer a great deal in this respect—its principal goal lies elsewhere. For this is an exhibition designed, above all, to illuminate the place occupied by certain ideas in shaping a large area of the cultural terrain in which our artistic aspirations and accomplishments have had their genesis.
This, it seems to me, is a commendable ambition. Modernist art is, by and large, an art of ideas. It remains an art of ideas even (or especially) when it turns against the inherited modalities of Western thought in favor of those that are understood to be of a more primitive origin, and the trouble with a great many exhibitions devoted to modernist art is not that they tell us too much about these ideas but that they tell us too little. As a result, the objects on view tend to be denuded of the intellectual impulses that are very often central to their conception. On the other hand, the kind of ambition which this particular exhibition has set for itself is extremely difficult to implement. The museum exhibition format does not easily lend itself to the exposition or exploration of ideas. The temptation to simplify complex issues is all but irresistible, for there is a limit as to how much thought the visitor to an exhibition can be expected to absorb in his encounters with the objects on display. In the end, ideas must be “packaged” for quick consumption, and this inevitably leads to a superficiality, if not an outright distortion, that is likely to subvert the seriousness of the entire enterprise. Given the conditions of contemporary museology—most especially, the need to attract large box-office revenues in order to amortize and/or justify the large expense involved in producing such exhibitions—the problem would appear to be an insoluble one.
The solution that has been attempted in the case of the “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” exhibition is not, I think, a success. The contribution to thought which the exhibition was clearly intended to embody is largely confined to those two hefty volumes which the museum has published in lieu of a catalogue. And it is not a question, in this installation, of allowing the objects to speak for themselves. Almost nowhere in this exhibition are they permitted to do so. Much of the show is presented to us in a rigidly didactic format. The atmosphere of instruction is often heavy and unremitting, with a great many objects juxtaposed and illuminated in display cases very much as if they were pairs of slides projected on a screen in a classroom. Even the lights in the galleries have been dimmed to underscore the slide-lecture atmosphere, yet the “lesson” to be derived from the spectacle proves to be elusive. Those two big volumes run to hundreds of pages of text, augmented by hundreds of notes (some of them miniature essays in themselves) and hundreds of glossy illustrations (many of them devoted to objects not included in the exhibition); yet only a kind of caricature of this impressive compendium of history, analysis, and reflection survives in the lengthy explanatory labels which importune the visitor to the exhibition at every turn, telling him exactly what to make of what he is looking at. Despite the fact that we are almost everywhere treated as beginning students for whom the visual attributes of every object and the “affinities” linking one with another must be pointed out and their every “meaning” explicated and summarized, we are allowed to leave this dazzling survey with only the dimmest notion of what its true significance may be.
The truth is, this exhibition is often a mere shadow of the book that has occasioned its organization, and much that is important in the book—and important to the subject—is either scanted or omitted in the exhibition itself. For example, the essay on “German Expressionism,” written by the late Donald E. Gordon and included in Volume II of “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, is not only a brilliant analysis of the crucial role played by primitive art and primitivist ideology in the development of the Expressionist movement; it is probably the single best small-scale account of Expressionism as a European cultural phenomenon any writer has yet given us. It also has the virtue of illuminating a good deal more than the subject of German Expressionism. Professor Gordon had pondered this subject for many years, and he had a deeper grasp of it than any other American art historian. What he had come to understand was “that primitivism affected Expressionism in two ways: both as life idea and as art idea,” and he set himself the task of illuminating this double allegiance, which stands in such marked contrast to the more purely aesthetic manner in which the discovery of tribal art afFected the artists of the School of Paris.
In Germany [writes Professor Gordon in this essay].. . Expressionists discovered in themselves a kinship with agrarian peoples. It was easy to idealize such peoples around 1910-11, during Germany’s rapid urbanization, or again around 1919-20 after a dehumanizing, mechanized war. In city studios artists re-created the imagined environment of tribal life. And in the countryside the life style of peasants was appreciated for its own sake. Some artists even “went native” during summer vacations, living in the nude with their models and practicing a sexual camaraderie that paraphrased—so they thought—the supposed instinctual freedom of tribal life.
As with life style, so with art style: German artists emulated Primitive example. The prototypes ranged from the flat and silhouettelike painted reliefs of Palau to the powerful, three-dimensional forms of Cameroon sculpture. There is a hardy “look” to much Expressionist art—angular in shape, geometric in detail, stubby in proportion—that is unthinkable without the Primitive precedent. Vitalism was also important: Eyes, mouths, breasts, genitalia were all given expressive prominence. Even in repose the Expressionist face and figure seem packed with energy. These are all German derivations from tribal art.
Yet, despite their profound debt to primitive art and a primitivist ideology, the Expressionists remained firmly attached to one of the most deeply entrenched traditions of Western thought—the romantic tradition that invoked the purity and vitality of nature as an alternative to the moribund forms of inherited culture. It was part of the paradox of their situation that it was, however, by way of culture—specifically, the writings of Nietzsche and Walt Whitman— that they came to their appreciation of the primitivist ideal. “Thus the Expressionist [writes Professor Gordon] was engaged in a very particular kind of enterprise. He was conducting a dialogue between Urnatur and modern art, a dialectic between primordial nature and advanced culture …. What Expressionists added to this romantic tradition, however, was an understanding of consciousness as the link between nature and art. For them the issue was how the mind translated instinct—the mainspring of nature—into art as the high achievement of culture. Expressionists faced the issue as Nietzsche had, by demonstrating a tie between the primitive and the modem mind, between the ‘savage’ storyteller and the modern artist-dreamer.”
This, it seems to me, goes to the heart of the matter that is ostensibly explored in the “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” exhibition, and there is no way for the subject to be fully grasped without according to the Expressionist movement a major role in the exhibition itself. It was the German Expressionists, after all, who adopted certain views (most especially the view of primitivism “both as life idea and as art idea”) first broached in the life and work of Gauguin, with whom this exhibition begins chronologically, and made them central to their entire artistic and spiritual mission. And it is in the ethos, if not the aesthetic, of the Expressionist movement that we find the most vivid foreshadowing of that concern for primitivism “as life idea” which looms so large in the “Contemporary Explorations” section of this exhibition, the section dealing with art since 1970. Between the ideas of the Expressionists and those of the artists represented in the “Contemporary Explorations” section there are indeed many important resemblances, for in its ideological outlook—though seldom in the art which resulted from it—the Expressionist movement anticipated a great many of the beliefs that dominated the radical counterculture of the late Sixties and thereby came to play a transfiguring role in the neo-primitivist art of the Seventies. There is thus, in spiritual terms, a direct line of descent that can be traced from Gauguin to Expressionism to the neo-primitivist outlook of the Seventies. It differs greatly from the more purely aesthetic line that leads from Gauguin to the Fauves and to Picasso. It constitutes, in fact, one of the major revolté traditions of cultural life in this century, and one naturally expected it to receive appropriate attention in an exhibition called “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art.”
Yet what do we find in the exhibition itself? Not for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art, the whole Expressionist movement is relegated to a more or less marginal position—almost, indeed, a position of inconsequence.[3] In the so-called “History” section of the show, we are offered a miserly selection of objects shunted into a mean, corridorlike space that has the effect of belittling, if not actually obliterating, the entire subject. There is simply no way for the uninformed visitor to the exhibition to acquire, from either the works on view or the labels serving as a guide to them, any real sense of the Expressionists’ contribution to the history being recounted here. And the Expressionists suffer an even worse fate in the introductory section of the exhibition, called “Concepts,” from which they have been totally excluded. In this section of the exhibition, space has somehow been found for the work of Max Weber, an American painter whose oeuvre had only a passing relation to the subject, whereas a major Expressionist like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose work is central to it, has been omitted. And in the little throwaway booklet which the Museum provides for those visitors—the majority, of course—who cannot be expected to read those two big volumes, there is likewise no trace of the Expressionists’ contribution. There is instead a silly little warning about a possible “misreading” of an Ibibio mask in relation to an Edvard Munch print. Exactly what Munch’s The Shriek is doing in this exhibition remains something of a mystery, in any case, for it is only in the generation following Munch’s that the Expressionists begin to interest themselves in primitive art.
One can only conclude that the prejudice against Expressionism is now so deep-seated at the Museum that the actualities of art history are no longer allowed to make themselves feit. This being the case, I suppose we should be grateful for the merciful exception that was made in the case of Professor Gordon’s essay. What this means, however, is that the art historians and other specialists who read through Volume II of “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art will know the truth and the larger public seeing the exhibition will not—a curious state of affairs, to say the least. The whole issue remains a disturbing and perplexing one, and the exhibition has been seriously damaged by the way it has been handled.
One could scarcely make a complaint of this sort about the treatment accorded to Picasso in this exhibition. The attention lavished on Picasso is so comprehensive, in fact, that much of this show consists of a protracted hommage to the master, making it in some respects yet another pendant to the mammoth retrospective which MOMA devoted to the artist in 1980. There is ample reason for this, of course. In his essay on Picasso for Volume I of “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art—an essay, incidentally, that runs to over one hundred pages and constitutes a major monograph in itself— William Rubin writes that “In no other artist’s career has primitivism played so pivotal and historically consequential a role as in Picasso’s.” In accordance with this view, Picasso emerges as the dominant figure in the exhibition, and the principal revelations of the exhibition are, in fact, revelations about Picasso and the use he made of primitive art at crucial moments in his own artistic development.
The case that Mr. Rubin is concerned to make on this score is greatly strengthened by the abundance of material he has been able to marshal for this exhibition. A great many tribal objects from Picasso’s own collection have been brought to the museum, and others that the artist would have seen on the occasion of his historic visit to the Trocadero in Paris in 1907—the year that he completed the final version of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—have also been brought over. Many drawings from this period have also been gathered for the exhibition, including a good many not previously exhibited. We are thus in a position to see exactly what it was in these tribal objects that made so fateful an impression on Picasso’s sensibility at a critical juncture in his development. The conjunction of these tribal objects and the drawings related to them, all seen now in the presence of Les Demoiselles, leave one in little doubt about the depth of Picasso’s response to what was then a new and profoundly shocking artistic experience.
It is Mr. Rubin’s belief that this encounter with tribal art had the effect of altering not only the forms and even the color Picasso then employed in the completion of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon but something much more fundamental in his artistic outlook—his sense of what the very function of art might be for him. Picasso later spoke of Les Demoiselles as his “first exorcism picture.” To André Malraux, he referred to the tribal art he saw at the Trocadero as “magical objects .. . intercessors . .. against everything—against unknown, threatening spirits … . They were weapons—to keep people from being ruled by spirits, to help free themselves.” For Mr. Rubin, then, the really crucial change that occurred as a result of Picasso’s initial encounter with these tribal objects is to be found in the artist’s effort to appropriate for his own purposes something akin to the “magical” powers he felt he had glimpsed in the art of these primitive cultures.
To support this view, Mr. Rubin is more or less obliged to speculate about exactly what it was that Picasso was so determined, at that crucial juncture in his life, to be free of. The answer that he proffers to this question—that Picasso was deeply involved in a private ritual designed to free himself of his fear of women and his fear of death—is not altogether unpersuasive. We have long known that Picasso’s art was profoundly autobiographic from the outset, and there is no reason why Les Demoiselles should be exempted from occupying an important place in the long “diary” of private emotions that his oeuvre is now often taken to be. Yet I wonder if I am alone in believing that this facile Freudianizing of Picasso’s art—earlier on, Mr. Rubin speaks of Picasso’s “precocious oedipal triumph” over his father in the Nineties—has the effect of trivializing the work in question? It certainly has the effect of overlooking, or at least diminishing, what it was that Picasso had in common with so many other modern artists when he looked to primitive art for inspiration. Surely we are not being asked to believe that the entire primitivist phenomenon in twentieth-century art derives from a fear of women ? There are, to be sure, certain feminist art historians who have been attempting to promulgate precisely this view, but I doubt if Mr. Rubin counts himself among them. In any event, if it was Picasso’s aim in painting the completed version of Les Demoiselles to overcome his fear of women and his fear of death, he must finally be judged to have failed in that endeavor. Sexual rage remained one of the enduring leitmotifs of his art during a very long career, and death too continued to occupy a significant place among his themes. The “magical” properties Picasso so much admired in the art of primitive peoples were not, after all, something that an avant-garde artist working in Paris in the twentieth century could hope to appropriate. Their magic was not to be his. The real question is: what did his consist of?
We shall be a good deal closer to an answer to this question, I believe, if we abandon the attempt to provide Les Demoiselles d’Avignon with a Freudian interpretation and shift the discussion back to where it belongs—to the life of forms in art and to the role played by radical changes in form in giving expression to an altered consciousness of civilization itself. Can anyone still doubt that the whole primitivist phenomenon in twentieth-century art was, at least in one of its important aspects, an outright attack on the conventions and assumptions of Western cultural life as they had come to be seen in the established values of advanced industrial societies? In this respect, certainly, Picasso—at least in the period of Les Demoiselles—was indeed attempting to effect a revolution in cultural consciousness.
That the culture he set out to attack and transform proved to be more resilient in its response to this assault than anyone at the time had reason to expect; that it showed itself capable of absorbing such assaults and profiting from the lessons to be learned from them—this, I should have thought, would now, in the next to last decade of the twentieth century, have become an acknowledged datum of critical intelligence. In his opening essay for “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, called “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” Mr. Rubin observes that “The Cubist artist’s notion that there was something important to be learned from the sculpture of tribal peoples—an art whose appearance and assumptions were diametrically opposed to prevailing aesthetic canons—could only be taken by bourgeois culture as an attack upon its values.” Yet it remains unclear whether or not Mr. Rubin believes this was an attack on bourgeois culture. I believe it was. I also believe it was an attack that profoundly altered the values of bourgeois culture, making it more receptive to alien modes of consciousness than it would otherwise have been. In the legendary conflicts between the avant-garde and bourgeois culture, we have tended to assume that it was the avant-garde alone which provided the dynamic element and that bourgeois culture remained fixed and adamantly resistant to change. But this was not the case, and it is bad history to think so.
What I find sadly and conspicuously lacking in the hundreds of pages of text offered up to us in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art—which, for very good reasons, is bound to remain the classic scholarly work on this subject for many years to come—is any serious account of the way bourgeois culture responded to this primitivist assault on its values. That is a story yet to be told. It was to be expected that it would be omitted from the exhibition, but it is a special disappointment that it has also been omitted from a publication so evidently designed to provide a comprehensive account of its subject. By and large, the contributors to “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art tend to steer clear of the social and political implications of their material. The outstanding exception, however, is Kirk Varnedoe’s essay on the “Contemporary Explorations” section of the exhibition. There at last, in the con eluding pages of Volume II, we are finally brought face to face with what Professor Varnedoe characterizes as the “dark side” of the primitivist phenomenon:
But there is a dark side to this issue as well [he writes], and it has to do with more than just bad art or even overtly pessimistic art. It has to do with primitivism per se, and it involves politics. All the questions [about] . . . collectivity versus individual experience, of controlling order versus instinctual liberty, translate eventually into larger political implications. Inasmuch as it has been by definition a critique of modern Western society, all primitivism has always had such implications, and they reverberate through good and sensitive art as certainly as through the broad range of neo-tribal agitprop that the last two decades have witnessed. The latter work, in which political concerns have been aggressively self-conscious and specific, most quickly forces to the fore uncomfortable questions about the ultimate content of all ideals that propose escape from the Western tradition into a Primitive state.
This entire “Primitivism” project—both the exhibition and the book—would have been a very different event, and a far more interesting one, too, I think, if it had addressed itself to this issue from the outset and not left it to the end. But one is grateful, all the same, for Professor Varnedoe’s eloquent analysis of it.
As it happens, there is to be found in one aspect of this event a telltale sign of what the current response of bourgeois culture is to the primitivism phenomenon—I refer, of course, to those curious quotation marks which enclose the word “Primitivism” in the title of the exhibition and to which I alluded at the start of this essay. These quotation marks, it turns out, have nothing to contribute to our understanding of the subject under study. Contrary to the expectation they arouse when we first encounter them, they neither cast doubt on the concept of primitivism nor attempt to give it an ironic interpretation. As I mentioned earlier, they pretty much disappear from the body of the book once their use has been explained. Their purpose, to be blunt about it, is political. They have been introduced into the title of this exhibition in the hope of forestalling criticism from those in the Third World and elsewhere who look upon the term “primitive” as a pejorative characterization of their cultural heritage. Mr. Rubin devotes a great many words to explaining why the term is necessary, and why it—and the term “tribal”—should not be regarded as in any way invidious. He does not want it to be thought that he is one of those terrible people who regard Western civilization as somehow “superior” to the cultures of primitive peoples. Yet when all of his ingeniosities on behalf of this dubious proposition have been concluded, he allows the word primitivism to slip right back into its standard usage. He is right to do so. But in this public display of nervousness and defensiveness, now made permanent in the title of this exhibition and its book, he has told us something important—and not something good —about the relation in which our culture now stands to the primitivist ideal.
“‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” directed by William Rubin in collaboration with Kirk Varnedoe, opened at the Museum of Modern Art on September 27 and remains on view through January 15. It will then travel to the Detroit Institute of Arts (February 27-May 19) and the Dallas Museum of Art (June 23-September 1). The exhibition includes approximately one hundred and fifty modern European and American works and more than two hundred tribal objects from Africa, Oceania, and North America. Go back to the text.
“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art edited by William Rubin. The Museum of Modern Art (distributed by New York Graphic Society Books). Two volumes, 689 pages. Hardcover, $80; softcover, $30 until January 30 and $40 thereafter. Go back to the text.
For a discussion of the way Expressionism has been slighted in the new installation of the Museum’s permanent collection of painting and sculpture, see my essay, “MOMA Reopened” (The New Criterion, Special Issue: Summer 1984, page 29). Go back to the text.
Pinault and Arnault invitation to view Fiac ahead of VIPs pays dividends
By Gareth Harris. Web only
Published online: 22 October 2014
The 41st edition of Fiac (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain) at the Grand Palais in Paris
“For me, Fiac is like the Frieze Masters of contemporary art; you can, in the main, be assured of the quality of the works,” said an anonymous US dealer attending the 41st edition of Fiac (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain) at the Grand Palais in Paris. The French billionaire Francois Pinault, whose collection is housed at two galleries in Venice, also put his faith in the French fair; he bought 30 works at Fiac and its new satellite event, (Off)icielle, at the Docks-Cité de la mode et du design.
The roll-call of curators, artists and collectors reflected the fair’s prestige, with the British artist Tracey Emin, the French artist Bernar Venet, the president of the Centre Pompidou, Alain Seban, and Beatrix Ruf, the newly appointed director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in attendance. Sources on the floor said that Pinault and Bernard Arnault, who is due to open his Fondation Louis Vuitton museum in west Paris later this week, entered the fair at a special pre-arranged time; a fair spokeswoman said that “out of discretion, both men came through a separate entrance a little earlier”.
The Paris-based art advisor Laurence Dreyfus said, however, that “there are not many spectacular works at Fiac this year, except perhaps for the Olafur Eliasson pieces on the stand of Neugerriemschneider gallery” (the German dealer’s solo presentation of works by the ubiquitous Danish-Icelandic artist proved popular, especially Dew Viewer, 2014, a cluster of 212 glass spheres; prices for the works were undisclosed). But a UK collector was overheard on the fair floor saying: “Fiac always plays it safe”.
Other art world professionals were evangelical about the elevated profile of the Paris fair. The dealer Michel Rein, who runs galleries in Paris and Brussels, said that Fiac has shed its reputation for being “too French”. There are 46 French galleries out of 191 galleries in total. “Of course Fiac is truly international,” said Rein who has participated in 23 editions of Fiac. “Why would you fill the fair with French dealers anyway?” he added. A 24-carat gold ATM by the Bulgarian artist Stefan Nikolaev on Rein’s stand, entitled Cry Me a River, 2009, was a hit, with two editions of the piece selling for €15,000 each. Nikolaev said that the work is “a comment on our relationship with money”.
A selection of works by Roni Horn at Hauser & Wirth gallery, especially a series of photographs of the French actress Isabelle Huppert, was also a draw (Portrait of an Image with Isabelle Huppert, 2005, $425,000). A gallery spokesman said that museums have expressed interest in the other Horn works, including one of the artist’s famous glass drums (I deeply perceive that the infinity of matter is no dream, 2014, $3.5m).
The VIP preview also proved profitable for the London- and New York-based gallery Skarstedt. It sold at least four works including a large-scale wall piece incorporating everyday detritus, such as buttons and beads, by the late US artist Mike Kelley (Memory Ware Flat no, 10, 2001) for “more than $1m”, said Bona Montagu, the director of Skarstedt London. “We’re seeing a lot more Americans here,” she said.
The younger galleries housed upstairs in the Salon d’Honneur section seem keen to graduate to the main floor of the fair where the established galleries showcase their works, but the mid-career dealers on the first floor still reported strong sales. The London-based gallery Campoli Presti sold two works by the US photographer Eileen Quinlan priced at $15,000 each.
But the final appearance of the veteran Paris dealer Yvon Lambert at Fiac struck a poignant note. Lambert will close his Paris gallery in December and plans to launch a new business next year devoted to art books and exhibition catalogues. The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, toured Lambert’s stand with the newly appointed culture minister Fleur Pellerin, giving Lambert the state’s stamp of approval before he bids adieu to the Parisian art scene.
Mike Kelley’s Memory Ware Flat no, 10, 2001) sold for “more than $1m” with Skarstedt
THE MOTHER OF ALL FRENCH MARKETS: THE INCANDESCENT FIAC 2014 PARIS
by Sylvia Edwards Davis
October 23, 2014
FIAC 2014 opened at the Grand Palais in a shimmering flurry of celebrities, dignitaries, and VIPs.
One of the leading international art fairs, FIAC was founded 40 years ago to bring a curated exposé of contemporary art to the public. It was born as an event “by gallerists for gallerists” and gradually expanded to a mainstream audience, welcoming around 80,000 visitors at the capacious Grand Palais main venue. It has also sprouted numerous extramural sites and events, including installations in public spaces such as the infamous sculpture by Paul McCarthy. Set up in the swish Place Vendome, the giant green shape –some saw it as a Christmas tree, most identified it with a sex toy – was vandalized, causing it to deflate (there’s an irony somewhere in there) and had to be taken down.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, Minister of Culture Fleur Pellerin (right)
Gilbert and George, as if they had just jumped out of their picture
Artist Tracey Emin catching up with friends Georgie Hopton and Hikari Yokoyama
FIAC is not a museum exhibition, it is a bustling market. The main distinction is that the art on display is bought and sold right then and there. The whole art world stands to notice when a piece or a particular artist is attracting interest at FIAC, and eager collectors elbow their way through the doors on preview day to scoop up their next treasure. The continuing success story of FIAC will start a new chapter in March 2015 with the debut of FIAC Los Angeles.
For emerging young artists, being noticed here can be the fortune cookie that presages an auspicious future. To underline this incubator effect and promote the next generation, a new addition this year is the (OFF)icielle art fair held at the Docks, presenting 68 newcomer galleries from 14 countries.
The sense of occasion on the vernissage came from the tour of the exhibits by Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Minister of Culture Fleur Pellerin, as well as the presence of celebrated artists likeGilbert and George and Tracey Emin, who stood out for being eminently gracious, meeting and greeting, chatting to old friends and generally having a grand time.
For all the fond handshakes and champagne clinking, there’s serious business swiftly moving on in the background, which makes the energy of the FIAC particularly seductive. Sales appeared to be ticking along nicely as we witnessed, just during our brief visit, the red dot going up on Jean Dubuffet’s L’Heure de Pointe, priced well over 530,ooo euros, by Waddington Custot gallery, and brisk interest in a striking 2.9-million-euro Basquiat at the Van de Weghe booth.
FIAC, however, is not an exclusive playground for the elite collector. While the main statement pieces are intended to attract attention, and priced accordingly, galleries offer a wide selection of new art, prints, or limited series – items that are within reach of every art enthusiast. FIAC is a great place to start a collection. With 191 galleries from 26 countries there’s bound to be something that catches your eye, and gallery representatives are approachable and passionate about the art they bring to the show. If you find a piece you love, you could be taking back home the ultimate souvenir from Paris, one that will ignite memories and inspiration for years to come.
FIAC Paris is held every year in October.
FIAC 2014 Grand Palais Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris 8th October 23-26 Noon to 8pm – Until 9pm Friday Métro: Champs-Elysées / Clemenceau Admission including catalogue €60 – Children under 12 free www.fiac.com
FIAC, the Paris Contemporary Art Fair, Is Adding Satellite Events
Photo
“À votre avis,” by Amadou Sanogo, is being shown at the FIAC in Paris as part of the art fair’s (Off)icielle satellite event.CreditAmadou Sanogo/Galerie Magnin-A, Paris
PARIS — As the art world continues to boom and expand, there can be little doubt that, in order to survive in it, size helps.
In recent years, major galleries have compulsively opened outposts worldwide: Gagosian alone has 14 galleries, with another set to open in London next year; Emmanuel Perrotin has four; David Zwirner, three. Around 200 art fairs are crammed into the calendar, with the major ones like Art Basel and Frieze London also holding international sister events (Miami Beach and Hong Kong for Basel; New York for Frieze).
As the International Contemporary Art Fair in Paris prepares to open its 41st edition on Oct. 23, it appears clear that this event is happy to play with the big boys.
Under the guidance of Jennifer Flay, the fair’s general director since 2010, the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, or FIAC, is extending its reach in multiple directions. Its first international event, FIAC Los Angeles, will be held next year at the Convention Center from March 27-29. This year the Paris fair is effectively doubling, with the opening of a new satellite event, (Off)icielle, that focuses on emerging galleries.
“Since 2006 there have been up to six or seven different ‘offs’ around the FIAC, but, with respect, none of them really made the standard,” the New Zealand-born Ms. Flay said during an interview this summer in her office here. “So yes, we decided to do it ourselves.”
Before Ms. Flay was named artistic director of the FIAC in 2003, the fair was considered a fusty relic on the art fair circuit: “too boring and too poor,” as Ms. Flay put it. Today, it has standing as a major international event that has injected new life into the French art scene.
As usual, the fair, which this year runs through Oct. 26, is being held in locations across Paris. Its main gallery base is in the Grand Palais, with events in the Tuileries, the Jardin des Plantes, the Place Vendôme and on the banks of the Seine. The spread of the FIAC is so extensive that this year it has organized shuttle boats along the Seine that can serenely transport ticket holders from the Grand Palais to the Cité de la Mode, where (Off)icielle is being held, avoiding the frenzy of the Paris Métro.
Such is the draw of the FIAC that many Paris art institutions synchronize their calendars with its opening. This year, happily timed events include the reopening of the Picasso Museum on Oct. 25, the inauguration of the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton on Oct. 20 (opening to the public on Oct. 27), and the reopening of La Monnaie de Paris on Oct. 25, with a major exhibition dedicated to the American artist Paul McCarthy. Celebrations are also being held by the Fondation Cartier for its 30th anniversary.
Photo
“Joel,” 2011, by Omar Victor Diop, part of the (Off)icielle event at FiAC.CreditOmar Victor Diop/Galerie Magnin-A, Paris
The Grand Palais will hold stands from 191 galleries from 26 countries, including Turkey, Mexico, Norway, India and South Korea. Most galleries, as in previous years, hail from France, the United States and Germany. Major dealers include Hauser & Wirth from Switzerland; White Cube from Britain; Paula Cooper and Gagosian from the United States; Sprüth Magers from Germany; and from France, the cream of the Paris galleries, including Perrotin and Marian Goodman.
It will also be a last FIAC for the legendary French dealer Yvon Lambert, who confirmed this summer that, at 68, he will be closing his Paris gallery in order to focus on books and literature.
The Grand Palais will be divided into sections, with established galleries in one area and newer galleries in another. There will also be a space dedicated to the works of the nominees for the Marcel Duchamp prize, one of France’s most prestigious contemporary art awards. On the shortlist this year are Théo Mercier, Julien Prévieux, Florian and Michaël Quistrebert, and Evariste Richer. The winner will be announced on Oct. 25.
The work of 3,430 contemporary and Modern artists will be on sale, including established names like Marina Abramovic (Krinzinger Gallery); Zeng Fanzhi (Gagosian); Nan Goldin (Matthew Marks); Ai Weiwei (Lisson Gallery and Continua); and Dan Flavin (Pace). They will be alongside rising stars like the 35-year-old British painter and sculptor Lydia Gifford (Laura Bartlett); the multidisciplinary Indian artist Asim Waqif (Nature Morte); and Cyprien Gaillard, the 34-year-old French multimedia wunderkind, whose work will be on show at Bugada & Cargnel, Sprüth Magers and Gladstone Gallery.
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“Installation View, Drawn,” by Lydia Gifford.CreditLydia Gifford/Laura Bartlett Gallery
(Off)icielle, the new satellite fair, runs from Oct. 22-26 at Paris’s new City of Fashion and Design, known as Les Docks, which opened in 2012 in the 13th Arrondissement in the city’s southeast quadrant. Sixty-eight galleries from 13 countries will be showcasing works there in a vast, 3,700-square-meter space.
Fringe events are not new to art fairs, a recent example being Frieze Masters, focused on historical art, which opened in London in 2012. But rather than scanning the past, Ms. Flay wanted (Off)icielle to highlight up-and-coming dealers, or galleries that might have been overlooked.
“It’s not some little thing we’re doing on the side, it’s absolutely a part of FIAC,” said Ms. Flay, who, having run her own gallery in Paris from 1990 to 2003, understands the importance of art fairs for dealers.
Galleries showing at (Off)icielle include the London-based Limoncello, with works by the young Israeli artist Yonatan Vinitsky. From Paris, galleries include Magnin-A, which focuses on contemporary African art and is showing works by Omar Victor Diop and Amadou Sanogo among others, and Semiose, which includes the multimedia artist Sébastien Gouju. From the United States, LTD Los Angeles is showcasing the 25-year-old Argentine-born artist Amalia Ulman, while Zink Gallery from Berlin brings the 23-year-old Russian video artist Aslan Gaisumov.
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“Untitled (video still),” 2011-2014, by Alsan Gaisumov.CreditCourtesy of Aslan Gaisumov and Galerie Zink, Berlin
Ms. Flay said that in holding the satellite event, she also hoped to provide an accessible entry point to the art world for aspiring collectors. “There is something about being surrounded by these younger galleries that is so much less intimidating than the context of the Grand Palais,” she said. “We’ll be creating a different atmosphere.”
While the FIAC offers private gallery tours and exclusive events for its V.I.P. guests, (Off)icielle is channeling an edgier vibe. Les Docks has impeccable hipster credentials: The former industrial warehouse holds the ultratrendy bar-cafe-nightclubs Nüba (run by the Baron nightclub crowd) and Wanderlust (part of the Silencio bandwagon), where (Off)icielle will hold screenings and events. In keeping with the urban vibe, street food will be available.
Another new event at this year’s FIAC is a collaboration with the Austrian crystal maker Swarovski. As part of the Hors Les Murs section— the showcasing of art outside of the Grand Palais — the house is sponsoring a new work by the French sculptor Didier Marcel, which will be in the Jardin des Plantes in the Fifth Arrondissement. Mr. Marcel, who won a competition to create a work “inspired by Swarovski,” is creating “Rosée” (Dew), described as a scattering of drops of crystal throughout the Jardin’s Rose Garden.
Meanwhile, a Hors Les Murs feature, “Tree” by Paul McCarthy in the Place Vendôme, will not be visible during the fair: The 80-meter-high inflatable sculpture was deflated by vandals the night of Oct. 17, and Mr. McCarthy and local authorities said he would not seek to re-inflate it. The lime green sculpture was described by the artist as a Christmas tree, but critics said looked like something much more prosaic: a sex toy. “After the violent reactions, the artist was disturbed by the potential impact of the work,” according to FIAC officials.
Doreen Carvajal contributed reporting
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ART MEDIA AGENCY
Paris makes a comeback
PARIS | 23 October 2014 | AMA | |
The one domain that seems to have been saved from the culture of “French bashing” is art. The sudden yet spectacular revival of the Parisian art scene and the multiple events and inaugurations of international recognition taking place day by day across the capital have not gone unnoticed by the Anglo-Saxons, who this week pay testimony to this resurgence in the media with an unusual enthusiasm that deserves to be recognised.
It is in this resolutely optimistic context that the 41st edition of FIAC opens this year, a time when Paris offers art amateurs a myriad of spaces and events, some public — the reopening of the Musée Picasso and Monnaie de Paris — and others private, such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Paris: art capital?
The pick of Paris museums remains, without a doubt, one of the richest in the world, with tens of millions of visitors arriving every year; however, France’s place on the global art market has been in constant recession over recent years. It is in London (where the majority of important collectors live), New York or Hong Kong where most high-value transactions take place.
The French art scene is obviously not the most profitable in the world, yet France and Paris can nevertheless count on their different qualities. As Anny Shaw underlines in The ArtNewspaper:“London might appeal to the business head, but it seems that Paris appeals to the heart, and never more so than this year.”
Conversely to many perceptions, and despite Paris’ ‘sleeping beauty’ image, we have recently seen the giants of contemporary art (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the equally famous Gagosian gallery) invest in the Parisian suburbs with the opening of vast spaces in the towns of Pantin and Le Bourget respectively. The inauguration of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the heart of the Bois de Boulogne and the proliferation of new projects elsewhere in Paris, for the most part private, are also consistent with the notion that the decided attractiveness of the capital is only waiting to be exploited.
This autumn, the rich public programming and the good health of FIAC have created an almost euphoric feeling. So what to make of it all? “Paris is suddenly in a very good mood for art,” said Jean-Philippe Billarant, an industrialist and longtime collector who plans to give tours of his collection, housed in a converted silo, during FIAC week. Le Silo sits 30 miles northwest of Paris. “The atmosphere of Paris reminds me of Chelsea 30 years ago, and that’s interesting.”
This enthusiasm is shared by Sunny Rahbar, co-director of the Third Line Gallery and exhibitor at FIAC where he is showing work by Ala Ebtekar, Amir H. Fallah, Farhad Moshiri, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Rana Begum and Slavs & Tatars. The gallerist explains, “I can say that the fair has gone from strength to strength. We have participated for the last 3 years now, and every year we meet more and more collectors. And yes, it does feel that the market is getting stronger for sure. I feel the future for the market is only going to get better and stronger as there seems to be a renewed interest and a good energy around the fair here and contemporary art in general.”
Focus on FIAC
Since Jennifer Flay took over FIAC, media and art professionals alike have said that the fair has taken on a new life. The efforts made to drag the event from the drowsy atmosphere in which it found itself in the early 2000s seem to have paid off. With an obstinate desire to internationalise, the New Zealander has, over the years, drawn some of the biggest galleries in the world and their precious collectors to Paris. Whilst many fairs have taken off across the world and the competition is intense between the leading events, today FIAC is hot on the heels of competitors such as Frieze and Art Basel.
The 41st edition sees its doors open on 23 October into a more or less serene atmosphere, the rejection of subjecting works of art to wealth tax having arrived just in time to reassure French collectors.
Internationalism is the key word for Jennifer Flay. This year 191 galleries originating from 26 countries come together at the Grand Palais; amongst these, only 65% are European (compared to 73% in 2013). Featured are 48 French galleries, 26 German, with galleries from Norway and Portugal making their debut appearance, whilst 45 North American galleries are to exhibit (four from Brasil and four from Mexico). Furthermore, for the first time, we see the participation of Japan and Saudi Arabia.
Amongst new participants, and also those returning, include: Helly Nahmad Gallery (New York), Hannah Hoffman (Los Angeles), Antoine Levy (Paris), Vera Cortês Art Agency (Lisbon), Cory Nielsen (Berlin) and Wallspace (New York).
Artists at the Grand Palais
In light of this 41st edition, Artprice has released precise information on the key players at this event. This year we will see no less that 1,451 artists. Whilst big names such as Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter will be on display, one will be surprised to find that contemporary Chinese artists, on the other hand, are rather underrepresented: Luo Zhongli, Chen Yifei and Zhang Xiadong — amongst the ten most popular artists in the world — will not be exhibited at FIAC.
From international galleries to international names; amongst the 84 nationalities represented, American artists take the lion’s share with 25%, followed by Germany (12%), France (11%), the United Kingdom (9%), Italy (3.3%), Switzerland (2.9%), Belgium (2.8%) and China (2.7%).
Recent figures on exhibiting artists show that more than 80% of exhibited artists are still alive, the average age being 50 years old. The doyenne of this selection is Cuban Carmen Herrera, aged 99 years old, exhibited by Lisson Gallery London. As for the youngest, they are just 25 years old: Lucien Smith at Skarstedt and Phillip Timischl at Neue Atle Brucke.
The next step: go international
If the scale of the event has undoubtedly risen over recent years, the ambition of becoming a rival to Art Basel is still a target to reach for.
Whilst it is certainly globalised, the art market is not totally closed off to locals. Yet we must wonder if the small number of high-level collectors residing in France (the consequence, as we saw above, results in the lack of luxury sales on French soil) does not represent significant obstacles for FIAC.
Despite a visible effort to strengthen their image as an international fair, a process which inevitably comes with a reduced number of French galleries, FIAC is still a long way from the renown of Art Basel, which remains unrivalled, except perhaps by the presence of Frieze, which is of course a younger fair; both of these events have successfully expanded to the United States (Art Basel Miami and Frieze New York) as well as Hong Kong (for Art Basel). So FIAC will take up residence in Los Angeles from 27 until 29 March 2015. The outcome of this Californian adventure is yet to be seen…
Around FIAC, and (OFF), and other offsite events
Amateurs and collectors, often weary of well known names who are mostly inaccessible for the majority of buyers, will this week have a wide range of coinciding events. With seven in total, the big newcomer this year is the launch of l'(OFF)icielle de la FIAC, taking place at the Cité de la mode et du design, in the Jakob + MacFarlane building. Jennifer Flay has highlighted that she wanted “a new event entirely, not just another satellite of the FIAC,” much in the same spirit as Liste, the much-valued event that takes place every year alongside Art Basel.
In the media space that FIAC and its surrounding events must share with the inauguration of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the appearance of l'(OFF)icille raises many questions. For the 60 participating galleries, the success of a newly-created event is in no way assured, even if the opening on 21 October seemed promising.
Does the appearance of this parallel fair — equally as reliant on the powerful Reed Exhibition’s organisation — not risk suffocating a still-hesitant market, rather than leaving the competition in the same segment, leaving them in pieces? Furthermore the stand tariffs at l'(OFF)icille and its mother festival barely seem to differ (€445 against a Grand Palais’ €494 to €545), despite the huge difference in reputation. However, it is worth mentioning that these tariffs are often subject to negotiations. One may wonder if the aim of Reed Exhibitions, in the creation of this new event, is to partially open up FIAC to galleries who have for many years dreamed of participating and to let them in through a side entrance.
As for these external events, despite the cancellation of Cutlog (the director of which accused Reed of monopolising all available locations across the market and thus saturating it), the choice remains varied.
The event considered to be the most important of fairs “off-not-officielle”, is YIA — Young International Art Fair — taking place at the Carreau du Temple in the heart of the Marais quarter, from 23 until 26 October.
Claiming the need to mix up young galleries and more well-established players, YIA’s founder Romain Tichit refuses to deliberately be considered as an “off” event. Betting on the originality and creativity which, it is said, are at the heart of its success, the objective taken up by YIA is to set themselves apart, establishing their own identity in an environment which is, at best, more conservative. This proves a considerable challenge when the YIA has often been accused of unequal selection.
Not far from the Grand Palais, in Hotel le A, rue d’Artois, the first French edition of the Outsider Art Fair will take place. The fair, which was founded in New York 20 years ago, demonstrates the important position of Art Brut today, and more widely that of what Anglo-Saxons refer to as ‘Outsider Art’. Coincidence or not, the event takes place for the first time this year whilst Bruno Decharme’s key abcd collection is on display at Maison Rouge.
Other noteworthy events include Art Elysées (Champs Elysées, from 23 until 27 October) and Design Elysée which, having focused on the particular segment of ‘classic’ Modern and contemporary art and historic design from the post-war period, are also looking to make their mark.
Another fair working in the less competitive, but perhaps more difficult, sector of the avant-garde is Variation, formerly Show off, which takes place at the Espace des Blancs Manteaux from 21 until 26 October. This fair centres around contemporary digital creation, via the work of 40 artists who present photography, videos, 3D printing, sculptures and prototypes.
A sign of the desire for renewal and dynamism which can be noted in today’s atmosphere, the Slick Art Fair has also opted for a name change, rebranding itself this year as Slick Attitude. For its 9th edition, the event will take place underneath Paris’ Pont Alexandre III, bringing together 30 galleries with one common objective: to promote the young international art scene in France and to emphasise the work of new galleries which aim to research and uncover emerging talent.
Finally, new arrival Fair In Off, which is also to take place at the Espace Commines between 23 and 26 October, will try to grab the attention of amateur art-lovers in a landscape which already leaves very little room for competition. According to organisers, it is to be a “complimentary initiative”, bringing together 14 emerging artists standing staunchly at the fringes of traditional fairs. Fair In Off proposes to “bring the public closer to the process of artistic reflection.”
Frieze Special Projects and beyond: You Can Dance
Fleet-footed, catch-it-if-you-can kind of work isn’t what you expect from an art fair. At this year’s Frieze Art Fair in London however, dance was dominant. The fair’s Special Projects fully embraced their not-for-profit status with a slate of live commissions that won’t be hugging the walls of collectors’ homes.
Nick Maus for instance, had the Northern Ballet’s unitard-clad performers strutting in loose formations to a moody, improv soundtrack composed by Kim Gordon and Juliana Huxtable, from an unembellished rehearsal space to the fair’s crowded corridors.
The show-stopper though came from Adam Linder, exhibiting with Berlin’s Silberkuppe, as part of Frieze Live, six galleries focusing on performance art. A former member of Michael Clark’s company and the Royal Ballet, Linder glide danced around the confines of the gallery booth. For anyone not familiar with hip-hop choreography, it’s like Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, but more ethereal and graceful, as if he were literally dancing on air. Linder was working more than mesmerizing moves however. His choreographies were an embodiment of art writer, Jonathan P Watts’s observations of the crowds and art at the fair.
At the Fair: Smile Please
Solo presentations are the obvious way for galleries to stand out within an art fair’s visual clamor. While you can always trust the Megatron of blue chip operations, Gagosian, to stay ahead of the pack, this year Carsten Holler’s Gartenkinder provided an unexpected moment of reprieve from the seemingly endless rounds of air kisses and deal brokering. The delights of his play area included a giant dice that concealed a climbing frame accessible only to the very small, a vast mushroom that emitted tinkly music when rocked and a scarlet rubber octopus. It was as big a hit with grown-ups as the kids, whose pure enjoyment of this wonderland was a neat reminder of the pleasures of imaginative play.
Salon 94 went for a similarly feel-good vibe with its Smile Face Museum. Acid yellow dominated curator Mark Sachs’s ever-expanding collection of smiley face ephemera, from furry slippers to key rings, which offset work by a wide array of artists playing with the superficial cartoon cuteness of the universally recognized symbol for happiness. Works that mined its double-edge veered from faces created with cigarette burns to bright, flat paintings of squiggly lines and dots that reveled in surface.
Beyond the fair: The Kids Are Alright
A Frieze week, “one to watch,” Ed Fornieles’s first big show, “Modern Family,” in a UK public gallery, left you in no doubt that the young British artist’s heart now belongs to L.A. Two of the presiding gods of the West Coast art scene, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, had evidently left their mark on a deliriously messy installation that invoked the city of dreams with film set lighting, jiggling pornstars on flat screens and a bubbling Jacuzzi, as well as gross food and an obscene mash-up of cuddly toys.
This was very much an orgy of pop culture for the Internet age however. Loosely themed around a family picnic and home, works unfolded with the surreal logic and speed of an internet search from giant headstones embossed with flowers, fruit, and apple pie coated in a gelatinous resin goo, to sturdy translucent legs filled with Cheerios and a fountain where the statue of a mother and child playing are rudely punctured by grey pipes. Throughout a day of special performances, a family of young actors struck tableaux vivants, bringing the collision between online unreality and lived experience home.
Best Bash
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s biggest film project yet, Hermitos Children 2, at the not-for-profit stalwart Studio Voltaire in South London, was one of the week’s highpoints. Renowned for her carnival-esque performances that rethink high art and pop culture with a troupe of delightfully disheveled performers and homemade props, Chetwynd’s work is always about doing things your own way. In a gallery decked with loose, giant paper prints that featured clowns, leopards and bikers, her sex crime detective show unfolded on a stack of boxy old TVs, with plenty of cross dressing, crazy dancing and a sinister dildo seesaw.
Guests at the gallery’s celebratory dinner at patron Valeria Napoleone’s regal home on Kensington’s Palace Green were treated to a night of Italian home cooking surrounded by her collection of all-woman art, including Helen Marten’s voracious assemblage sculpture, Ida Ekblad’s urban expressionism and Julia Wachtel’s cartoon characters. In the crowd were designer and artist Julie Verhoeven, who created a number of Chetwynd’s costumes, Chloé director Clare Wright Keller and the artist and her face-painted collaborators.
The New Art Hangout: The Rosewood London’s Mirror Room
Since it opened last fall, in a 1914 Belle Epoque building boasting a grand, seven-story marble staircase, Rosewood London fast gained a reputation for timeless glam. Owned by the brand behind New York’s Carlyle, its décor, from the colored glass and polished red leather that dominates the dining room to the wood paneled bar full of Gerard Scarfe cartoons, is aimed at discerning tastes of all ages. It has also become the theatre crowd hang-out thanks to the likes of Kevin Spacey and The Old Vic hosting the 10th anniversary party for its 24 Hour Plays Celebrity Gala there.
The close of Frieze week bucked this trend, with Art Review magazine’s party in the Mirror Room, cohosted by the young Hong Kong billionaire collector Adrien Cheng. The throng, including artist Michael Elmgreen, Art Basel director Marc Spiegler and artist-filmmaker duo Forsyth and Pollard, fresh from the success of their recently released Nick Cave film, 20,000 Days On Earth, knocked back Absolute vodka cocktails while sizing up their post-fair state in the mirrored ceiling and walls.
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Bloomberg News:
Collectors Get Big Playground at $2.2 Billion Frieze Week
By Mary RomanoOct 12, 2014 4:00 PM PT
Source: Gagosian Gallery via Bloomberg
Gagosian Gallery at the Frieze Art Fair will show “Gartenkinder,” a children’s playground by Carsten Holler. The… Read More
Source: Frieze, Linda Nylind via Bloomberg
Attendees view works of art during Frieze London on Oct. 19, 2013.
Source: Christie’s via Bloomberg
Peter Doig’s vibrant green basketball court titled “The Heart of Old San Juan” is estimated at 4 million pounds to 6… Read More
Source: Otto Naumann via Bloomberg
Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man With Arms Akimbo” has an asking price of $48.5 million at Otto Naumann’s booth at Frieze Masters.
London’s Frieze Week, the biggest seven-day concentration of art events in Europe, begins tonight and will feature auctions, galleries and fairs offering as much as $2.2 billion of works in a market showing no sign of cooling.
Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park opens tomorrow to select wealthy collectors seeking to snap up artworks by contemporary stars and Old Masters from a Cy Twombly canvas for $24 million to a Rembrandt portrait for $48.5 million.
Coinciding with the fair, Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s will auction 972 works at their day and evening sales estimated at as much as 264 million pounds ($426 million), or more than double the 118 million pounds of art that was sold at the equivalent auctions last year. New buyers “from all pockets of the world” are purchasing art and pushing up prices, said Suzanne Gyorgy, head of art advisory and finance at New York-based Citigroup Inc.’s Citi Private Bank.
“In 2008, when certain parts of the art market were hit hard, the high end still did very well,” Gyorgy said. “Private sales carried on. A lot of wealth is still being created and more wealthy people are becoming collectors.”
The artworks offered at Frieze, auctions, galleries and a half-dozen satellite fairs in 2013 had been estimated at as much as $2 billion last year. Values probably will be about $2.2 billion, or 10 percent higher, this year, according to insurers.
Robust Market
“The contemporary art market is very robust, and the active buyers of art are heavily engaged,” in spending money on these works, said Andrew Gristina, national fine art practice leader at Travelers Cos., which is insuring a number of galleries at Frieze. “The fair remains a popular event and you would expect an equivalent amount of pieces of high quality to be brought there.”
Contemporary-art sales at public auctions globally totaled 1.5 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in the 12 months to July 3, up 33 percent from the previous year, according to a report by Paris-based arts data researcher Artprice. The figures don’t include commissions. Similar sales in 2000 were less than $90 million, Artprice said.
“Contemporary art, which used to be the weak link in the art market, is now almost as important as the modern art segment,” Thierry Ehrmann, chief executive officer of Artprice, said in an e-mail.
Frieze, which started in 2003 and expanded to New York in 2012, was the seventh-most attended art fair in the world from the fall of 2013 through June 30, with 70,000 visitors at the London event, according to a report by Skate’s, a New York-based art market researcher.
Giant Mushroom
Frieze said it expects attendance this year to remain at 70,000, with 162 galleries at the main fair. Frieze Masters, a sister event also at Regent’s Park that shows modern and historic works, will have 127 galleries. Last year 152 galleries exhibited at Frieze and 130 at Frieze Masters.
At the main fair, Gagosian Gallery will offer “Gartenkinder,” a children’s playground by Belgian artistCarsten Holler. The installation includes a large-scale die that children can play inside and a giant mushroom that rocks like a toy. Gagosian declined to give a price.
Tanya Bonakdar gallery, based in New York, has a large-scale painting by Danish-Icelandic artistOlafur Eliasson priced from 150,000 euros to 200,000 euros.
Some galleries are likely to get a business boost from artists who have simultaneous museum shows.
Rembrandt Portrait
Eliasson, who created public waterfalls at four sites in New York in 2008, is showing other works at Tate Britain that are inspired by the paintings of J.M.W. Turner. David Zwirner’s booth at Frieze has an $800,000 cloth work by American sculptor Richard Tuttle, whose new piece featuring vast sways of fabrics will be shown at Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall starting tomorrow.
One of the most expensive works at Frieze Masters is a Rembrandt 17th century portrait of a man with arms akimbo, being offered at New York’s Otto Naumann gallery for $48.5 million. A Twombly paint, crayon and graphite canvas from 1959 is at Van de Weghe Fine Art for $24 million. A 7,000-year-old figurine of an Aegean neolithic idol is at Rupert Wace gallery for 450,000 pounds.
The major auction houses will offer works by postwar and contemporary masters.
Christie’s kicks the auctions off this evening with the sale of 44 works from the Essl Collection of contemporary art in Austria, expected to fetch as much as 56.8 million pounds.
Richter’s Abstract
The works come from Karlheinz Essl, the founder of hardware store chain BauMax AG, and include coveted German postwar artists. Gerhard Richter’s 1985 red, yellow and green abstract is valued at 7 million to 10 million pounds. Sigmar Polke’s 1975 fiery red portrait “Indian With Eagle,” is estimated at 1.5 million pounds to 2 million pounds. Martin Kippenberger’s 1992 self-portrait is valued at 2.5 million pounds to 3.5 million pounds.
In a separate evening sale on Oct. 16, Christie’s will offer 46 lots with a high estimate of 47 million pounds. Peter Doig’s oil on canvas of a vibrant green basketball court titled “The Heart of Old San Juan” is estimated at 4 million to 6 million pounds.
Phillips’s evening sale on Oct. 15 will be the first in its new London home at 30 Berkeley Squarein the wealthy Mayfair neighborhood. Phillips, owned by Moscow-based Mercury Group, said the sale of 47 lots, featuring works by Christopher Wool, Richter, Damien Hirst and Richard Prince, is estimated to fetch as much as 23 million pounds. Wool’s untitled alkyd and acrylic on aluminum image of black birds is estimated at 1.8 million to 2.2 million pounds.
Sotheby’s evening sale on Oct. 17 has a high estimate of 35.1 million pounds for 59 lots. AFrancis Bacon portrait of a man in a suit is valued at 1.5 million to 2 million pounds.
Eight Photo Discoveries to See at Frieze London and Frieze Masters
Keiji Uematsu, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates
Stone/Rope/Man II, 1974 – Fortuitously, the Japanese sculptor, who is known for his installations that appear to distort gravity or depict magnetic forces, was at the gallery booth as I approached it. Keiji Uematsu said of his photographic work: “I’m interested in changing the relationship of an installation using my body. I want to create work where a lack of a single element will cause the entire structure, the invisible existence of things and their relationships to collapse like a cosmos.” I do hope, that when the relationship between stone, string and motion collapsed, the stone didn’t fall on his head.
Plaster Your Head and One Arm into a Wall, 1973 / 2009 – Walking into the Mark Wallinger curated Hauser & Wirth booth A Study in Red and Green is like walking into a house party. All that is missing are the cocktails. You have the dude who has fallen asleep (Christoph Büchel’s sleeping museum guard), you have throngs of people chit-chatting, you have Martin Creed cacti in one corner of the room and a stretched Louise Bourgeois bronze arched over a day bed as if a sensual calamity of the party. But at the entrance you are greeted by two Paul McCarthy photographs: Plaster Your Head and One Arm into a Wall. These images, by an artist interested in themes of dislocation, disorientation and alienation, would of course be funny anywhere, but they worked particularly well as the opener to this innovatively-curated space that had you asking: “Where am I?”Read more: Eight Photo Discoveries to See at Frieze London and Frieze Masters – LightBoxhttp://lightbox.time.com/2014/10/16/eight-photo-discoveries-to-see-at-frieze-london-and-frieze-masters/#ixzz3GJaDbeAt
Just like every year at Frieze London, the majority of fairgoers were dressed in the obligatory art-fair black. And just like every year, the bigwigs of contemporary photography Wolfgang Tillmans, Ellad Lassry, Ryan McGinley, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall, and Thomas Struth were strutting their stuff on the gallery walls. But, among the best-selling greats, were also some unexpected gems – some well-known, others less so. Frieze Masters, showcasing art from ancient to modern and only in its third year, was perhaps the biggest tour de force, with four dedicated photography galleries enticing audiences with works by Lionel Wendt, Keiji Uematsu and Charles Sheeler among others.
“With Frieze Masters we decided from the outset that we would give photography the same platform as painting, drawing and sculpture,” says Victoria Siddall, director of both London-based Frieze fairs. “We felt it was very important not to put the photography dealers into some kind of ghetto as they sometimes are at fairs.”
In this slideshow, I present my favorite picks from across both fairs.
Anne-Celine Jaeger is a contributor to TIME LightBox and the author of Image Makers, Image Takers, published by Thames & Hudson. She previously wrote for LightBox about Jean-François Leroy.
London-based designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby are directing their creative talents to a new interior scheme for this month’s Frieze Art Fair in London and a variety of other projects
DESIGNING MEN | Edward Barber (left) and Jay Osgerby, seated on the Tip Ton chair they designed for Vitra, in their newly expanded Shoreditch offices. Photography by Thomas Giddings for WSJ. Magazine
EDWARD BARBER AND JAY OSGERBY met in 1992 as first-year architecture students at London’s Royal College of Art and became friends almost immediately. A little bored and more than a little underfunded, they jumped when an acquaintance put them up for some freelance work designing a bar. Soon they were skipping classes and running on adrenaline and cigarettes and the occasional round of drinks with the bar owner. (“He was sketchy,” says Barber. “The whole thing was sketchy, actually.”)
Their routine eventually caught up with them.
“I remember one course where we had a morning crit on a project, and we’d been up all night doing the bar,” Osgerby says. “Both of us were standing there, and it was like the firing squad—literally bang, bang, bang. It was awful. Not only did our teachers want to get rid of us, so did everyone in our class. We had jobs, you see.”
They’re still getting the jobs. Since co-founding Barber & Osgerby in 1996, two years after graduating from RCA, the duo, both 45, have maintained one of the more active design offices in London. Fueled by curiosity about how objects are made and used, they’ve produced a range of work—like the bent-plywood Loop table for Cappellini, the perforated torch for London’s 2012 Olympics and the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch, with its convivial, rabbit-hutch lobby—that, while stylistically diverse, always manages to look original and somehow inevitable. Their enthusiasm for research and craft has endeared them to industrial design giants such as Knoll, Vitra and B&B Italia, and the furniture they create for these companies possesses a lucid, streamlined beauty.
FINE LINES | From left: B&O’s projects include a current installation at the V&A Museum’s Raphael Gallery and a limited-edition Iris table for Established & Sons. Courtesy of Barber & Osgerby
Clockwise from top left: Frieze Art Fair; Loop table for Cappellini; coins commemorating the 150th anniversary of the London Underground Courtesy of Barber & Osgerby (loop table, coins); Courtesy of Universal Design Studio
From left: Interior at the Ace Hotel Shoreditch and solar-powered lamp for Louis Vuitton Courtesy of Barber & Osgerby (lamp); Photograph by Mads Perch, Courtesy of Universal Design Studio
This is a busy moment for Barber and Osgerby, with a full spectrum of their work on view across London. First is a new interior scheme for the Frieze Art Fair, held each October in a tent among the ancient oaks of Regent’s Park. Over on Exhibition Road, London’s Science Museum launches Information Age, a 27,000-square-foot permanent gallery, four years in the making, that traces the history of communication over two centuries, from the earliest telegraph receivers to the Soviet BESM-6 supercomputer. Next door at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the designers have temporarily turned the barrel-vaulted Raphael Gallery into an engine room for art, where a pair of massive whirring blades mounted above visitors’ heads reflects Renaissance paintings to the crowd below.
The first two projects are the work of Universal Design Studio, a division Barber & Osgerby launched in 2001 to handle their architecture and interiors practice. In 2011 they complemented Universal with MAP, an industrial design consultancy focused on strategy and innovation. From the beginning, the two have pursued jobs that overstep the neat boundaries of industrial design work, and the firm’s tripartite structure lets them take on projects up and down the supply chain, from conception and planning (the Google Chrome Web Lab in 2012) to the end user (solar-powered lanterns for Louis Vuitton the same year). “In a nutshell,” says Osgerby, “MAP is about thinking, Universal is about building and Barber & Osgerby is about making.”
All three divisions, employing some 60 people, occupy a newly expanded Shoreditch office that meanders through a former warehouse building on Charlotte Road. The principals share a desk in each of the three studios, though they can often be found in one of the basement rooms devoted to model making, a passion for both of them since boyhood. At RCA they developed the habit of drawing opposite each other at the same desk and sequentially folding heavy card paper into experimental shapes. “It was really fraternal,” Osgerby says. “It still is. We both come from families with three boys—I was the oldest and Ed was in the middle—and I think that’s how we’ve managed to get on the way we have.”
Outside the office their lives are notably different. Barber is unmarried, a voracious traveler and a photographer. Osgerby has a wife and three young children and regularly bikes the six miles between the office and his home in Greenwich. And yet they are on a plane together almost every week, sporting identical brown beards and dressed as though from the same closet: jeans, sneakers and loose cotton blazers. (When a new acquaintance mixes them up, Osgerby, the more diminutive, volunteers the mnemonic that “Jay” is shorter than “Edward.”) They juggle factory visits, exploratory meetings and promotional trips, using the travel time to evaluate new jobs and chart the studio’s professional course. As their opportunities have grown, notes Barber, their goals have become more far-reaching. This is especially true in product design: “If you can reinvent an archetype for its function, and not just in a styling way, that’s really something,” he says. “Like the soda bottle to the can—same function, new take. That was reinventing the archetype. That’s big.”
This past summer the studio won a competition for its most ambitious project to date, one that will expose several archetypes to re-examination—the Crossrail train, part of a new high-speed transport line that will hurtle east–west through London and its suburbs in under an hour. It’s a quintessential Barber & Osgerby job: The studio will conceive of not just the train and its contents, but the travel experience as a whole, including acoustics, signage and how people enter and exit the cars.
The Frieze tent, temporary and sprawling at 215,000 square feet, offers an intriguing set of opposites: It’s about creating engagement, not about passing through, and the commission has a budget that is “hilariously small,” notes Frieze co-director Matthew Slotover. It also targets the chauffeur-driven cultural elite—a group the designers have never sought to cultivate—rather than commuters.
“We haven’t wined and dined the art world,” Osgerby says. “We’ve never hung out and been part of the clique—in fact, we’ve never done that with any clique. We’ve just set out to do our own thing.” Perhaps because of that, and despite accolades within the design community (not to mention OBEs bestowed on them by the Crown in 2013), Barber and Osgerby haven’t attained the level of fame that some of their RCA classmates—architect David Adjaye and fashion designer Christopher Bailey, for instance—have.
This doesn’t concern them. They’re less interested in courting status than in the opportunities that tend to float by in its wake. Deyan Sudjic, head of the London Design Museum, believes the pair will make a lasting contribution to the design landscape in a decisively modern way. “They demonstrate a certain pragmatism that was perhaps shaped by their early experiences as students,” he writes in his foreword to the duo’s 2011 monograph.
The designers might put it differently. “We’re over there, beavering away,” Osgerby says. “And people are finally curious.”
As the art world congregates in London for the Frieze art fair, fashion businesses stand to profit.
Frieze art fair | Source: Courtesy
LONDON, United Kingdom — In 2003, the Frieze art fair launched as a modest event in a large tent in London’s Regent’s Park. But twelve years on, the fair and its sibling event, Frieze Masters, attracts 70,000 visitors from around the world and has become the centrepiece of a week-long, city-wide programme of art events. Any cultural organisation that aspires to international status will hold a launch of some kind this week, from the unveiling of Richard Tuttle’s monumental installation at Tate Modern to fly-by-night events in derelict office blocks. As gallerists, collectors, curators, critics, artists and curious civilians converge on London for private views, talks and parties, it can be easy to forget that the increasingly buzzy atmosphere surrounds a marketplace. Frieze exists for the buying and selling of art — and, as it grows, the acquisitive urge of those it attracts has been flowing out of the fair and into the city’s fashion retailers.
“Our customers always love our events during Frieze. It’s our busiest time of the year,” says Adrian Joffe, chief executive of Dover Street Market, whose original store is positioned on Dover Street, in London’s Mayfair, a stone’s throw from a number of blue-chip art galleries. Unlike London Fashion Week, which brings with it an entourage of press and store buyers, Frieze attracts an aesthetically sophisticated, wealthy clientele that makes for an excellent fit with the store, which is run by a subsidiary of Comme des Garçons. “Our customers during Frieze are like the ones that come to us all the time — fashion-forward, independent, creative, curious, cool, strong, interested in art and design, daring, lovely and wonderful — there are just more of them about during Frieze,” added Joffe.
Dover Street Market actively tempts Frieze-goers with a richer-than-usual programme of exhibits and events, which this year includes installations by French artist Nicolas Buffe and designer Ann Demeulemeester, as well as the unveiling of Louis Vuitton’s Icons and Iconoclasts collection, featuring a collaboration with the artist Cindy Sherman.
The Frieze private view on the Tuesday night of the fair often more closely resembles a long snaking catwalk — or perhaps the red carpet of a film premiere — than an art gallery, peppered as it is with the gorgeous, the extravagant and the brilliantly peculiar. Under the flooding white lights of the big tent in Regent’s Park everyone is on display. But it’s not all about billionaires’ wives wearing 12cm heels and 10cm skirts as they eye up the Oscar Murillos and ponder which will best match their carefully curated scatter cushions. The Frieze effect is also important to fashion brands that court those working in the creative industries.
“Our heads of design Karin Gustafsson and Martin Andersson are always at the fair,” says Atul Pathak, head of communications for COS. “We find that we are fortunate enough see a lot of our collection represented in the outfits of the people in the fair itself. It makes us feel that we are talking to the right audience.” In previous years, COS has supported Frame, a section of Frieze dedicated to young galleries. “We think our customers have a strong interest across the design world and in contemporary art — it feels like it’s integral to the brand.”
For the last few years, the family-run, Italian luxury goods company Etro has launched artist collaboration projects to coincide with Frieze week. This year, they are unveiling an accessory collection created with the Japanese artist Mika Ninagawa, accompanied by celebratory events aimed at those in town for the fair. “We are keen collectors of contemporary and ancient art,” explains creative director Jacopo Etro, adding that, as a house known for its prints and patterns, his family’s interest in art provides it with an important source of inspiration. For Etro, Frieze carries “a particular atmosphere, a moment of sharing and joyfulness, spreading energy and positivity all around the city…. You can feel excitement in the air.” Whilst the house’s artist collaborations are meant to represent a celebration of creativity, Etro is happy to say “that these kinds of projects have a good impact on sales as well.”
The relationship is, of course, a reciprocal one, benefiting not just retailers, but also the participating artists. “The art scene in Britain has changed a lot in recent years,” notes Linda Hewson, creative director of Selfridges. “The fact is that the arts need public and commercial support now more than ever to ultimately reach as wide an audience as possible.” This year, Selfridges’ Old Hotel will act as an off-site project space for Frieze and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, with live events staged by performers including Korakrit Arunanondchai and Boychild. “We go to Frieze every year and have done since its launch,” says Hewson. “It’s part of our cultural research into the global art scene, market and trends. The fair is an important moment on the cultural calendar in London because it creates a buzz of peripheral art happenings and openings.”
Selfridges first hosted an ICA off-site project last year and it drew thousands of new visitors – a much larger audience than would generally visit the cerebral, iconoclastic ICA’s comparatively diminutive galleries on the Mall. Positioning itself somewhere between the glitz of Frieze and the grit of the ICA suits Selfridges well, explains Hewson: “If you consider Frieze as aspirational in terms of the cultural elite who attend and spend, then there is an overlap with our international clientele. If you consider the ICA as being on the knife’s edge of contemporary creativity then perhaps the more pertinent overlap is with our savvy London clientele who relate to such art forms more. But good, even great, exciting art draws audiences from all walks of life.”
Such off-site projects, performances and events are of increasing importance because the consumer who attends Frieze is, as Hewson notes, looking for something that is one-of-a-kind, unique, experiential.Alexander McQueen, which first became an official sponsor of the fair in 2013, is, this year, putting its name behind Live, Frieze’s inaugural performance art programme. And, for the first time, this year, Gucci is one of the sponsors of the Frieze Masters fair, which is held on a separate site and focuses on historical art.
For both brands, the choice of association is telling. Gucci has allied itself with the talks programme of Frieze Masters, which features names that may be familiar to the brand’s customer base, including South African artist William Kentridge and best-selling author and ceramicist Edmund de Waal. Meanwhile, Alexander McQueen is stepping up to support challenging live art, including an explicit critique of lifestyle branding by the New York-based collective Shanzhai Biennial, which tallies well with the house’s history of spectacular and often provocative shows. “Performance art has had its highs and lows in terms of acceptance and popularity, but it’s certainly the most experimental art practice and there’s a new and rejuvenated energy,” notes Jonathan Akeroyd, chief executive of Alexander McQueen. “As a brand, Alexander McQueen has always been at the forefront of pushing boundaries.”
In describing the fair, Akeroyd makes an important distinction between the convivial, welcoming atmosphere of Frieze and the comparatively quiet formality that many associate with galleries and museums. Part of his intention in supporting Frieze is to help broaden the audience for contemporary art, as well as profit from the crossover potential with the fashion industry. In addition to showing works from the Sadie Coles gallery in a glass vitrine in their Savile Row store, Alexander McQueen will host events that bring together key players from the art and fashion industries.
“Lee McQueen was a big collector and Frieze was always a highlight of his year; he would also ensure that he was always one of the first to visit the fair on the opening day,” explains Akeroyd. “Obviously being a creative company pretty much all of our staff have a high level of interest in the art world and it is great that we all now feel more connected to the fair through our involvement.”
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e!-online
NEWS/
Beyoncé and Jay Z Match During Date Night in London: See the Cute Coordinating Couple!
The 33-year-old “Flawless” singer and her 44-year-old hubby stepped out in London Wednesday night dressed in coordinating black and white outfits.
For their date night, Bey looked super fashionable in a black and white polka dot skirt and a black and white patterned blouse under a black motorcycle jacket. Beyoncé completed her monochromatic ensemble with black sunglasses, black and white striped heels and hernew blunt bangs. And for her man, he sported black pants and a white hoodie under a black jacket.
Talks about one cute coordinating couple!
Neil P. Mockford/GC Images
As for their outing, Bey and Jay attended the annual Frieze Art Fair together in London’s Regents Park.
Earlier today, Beyoncé and Jay were spotted leaving an art gallery together looking cute and colorful. Bey looked chic in a white skirt that featured a black, orange and blue pattern paired with a black and white top, sunglasses and black heels. Her hubby followed behind her wearing black pants and a gray designer hoodie.
Beyoncé has been out and about a lot since debuting her new bangs the other day. Bey stepped out in Paris Tuesday morning with the surprising new ‘do.
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BLOOMBERG NEWS
Bloomberg News
Hirst Tops Sales as Buyers Pick $2.2 Billion Frieze Art
By Mary Romano October 15, 2014
Mnuchin Gallery sold one of four sculptures from the 1955 “Forgings” series by American sculptor David Smith for $2.5 million at Frieze in London. Source: Mnuchin Gallery via Bloomberg
Damien Hirst, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol works sold for more than $3 million each as wealthy collectors got first dibs at the opening of the Frieze Art Fair in London.
Select guests including billionaire Indonesian collector Budi Tek, who opened a private museum in Shanghai in May, actress Sienna Miller and architect Zaha Hadid packed 162 galleries this week at the main contemporary art fair in Regent’s Park and 127 booths at Frieze Masters, a sister event showing modern and historic works.
Frieze Week is Europe’s biggest concentration of commercial fairs, public sales and gallery shows, offering as much as $2.2 billion of art. Frieze, whose organizers expect 70,000 people to attend the two fairs, runs through Oct. 18; Frieze Masters closes Oct. 19.
“There’s so much going on in London this week for art,” Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum in New York, said as she toured the booths at the Oct. 14 preview. “People really converge here.”
Contemporary-art sales at public auctions globally totaled 1.5 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in the 12 months to July 3, up 33 percent from the previous year, according to Paris-based arts data researcher Artprice.
Dealers reported brisk sales in the first two days of the fair. Within the first hour of the Frieze Masters preview, Mnuchin Gallery sold one of four elongated varnished steel sculptures from the 1955 “Forgings” series by U.S. sculptor David Smith for $2.5 million to a private collector.
Promoting Smith
“Americans know David Smith, but we need to broaden his audience,” Robert Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive whose New York gallery specializes in postwar art, said of the artist who died in 1965. “I’ve already had a lot of interest from non-U.S. collectors.”
Many of the bigger sales were at Frieze Masters, which had booths showing works by Francis Bacon, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens.
Warhol’s “The Scream (After Munch),” a 1984 work inspired by the Norwegian artist, was sold by Skarstedt Gallery for about $5.5 million to a private collector.
Picasso remains popular as his “Tete de Mousquetaire” crayon and black ink on board went for $4 million at Van De Weghe Fine Art. The artist’s 1964 “Le Peintre au Travail” lithograph on paper sold for 2 million pounds ($3.2 million) at Dickinson’s booth. A small Henry Moore bronze sculpture of a reclining woman with a child sold for as much as $500,000 at Richard Green gallery in London.
Formaldehyde Fish
At the main fair, Hirst’s “Because I Can’t Have You I Want You,” a 1993 diptych of glass-enclosed fish in formaldehyde, fetched 4 million pounds at White Cube within minutes of the opening preview. The gallery, with branches in London, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo, also sold a 2001 piece composed of an electric microphone, metal stands and electrical cords by David Hammons for $4 million.
“I can’t keep up with the sales,” said David Maupin of Lehmann Maupin, which sold British artist Tracey Emin’s embroidered calico of a reclining woman in a price range of 120,000 to 175,000 pounds. The New York and Hong Kong gallery also sold Mickalene Thomas’s 2008 work composed of rhinestone-encrusted portraits in the 60,000-to-100,000-pound range.
Hauser & Wirth’s booth at the main fair was an installation inspired by Sigmund Freud’s study in London’s Hampstead neighborhood. The booth features works by 20 artists including Louise Bourgeois and Phyllida Barlow with themes representing Freud’s conscious and unconscious. A 2012 work by Anna Maria Maiolino, “Between Inside and Outside,” made of plaster with acrylic resin varnish on a metal table, sold for $120,000 and Rashid Johnson’s 2012 red oak daybed with zebra skin went for $90,000.
Kaws’s Creature
“Final Days,” an almost 7-foot-tall black sculpture of a creature with big feet, hands and ears by Brooklyn, New York-based artist Kaws sold for about $300,000 at Galerie Perrotin, which has galleries in New York, Paris and Hong Kong. An almost 10-foot-fall 2014 bronze sculpture of a standing sausage by Erwin Wurm sold for 250,000 euros at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, which is in Paris and Salzburg, Austria.
Sigmar Polke’s untitled 2003 gouache on paper abstract, sold for $800,000 at Michael Werner Gallery of New York and London. New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery sold drawings and a sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid, who was born in Syria and lives in Brooklyn, made of stainless steel treated with plaster and fiberglass at prices from $20,000 to $120,000.
“It’s been a good morning,” Adrian Turner, senior director of Marianne Boesky, said at the VIP preview.
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COMPLEX MAGAZINE
STYLE
Interview: Frieze London’s Deputy Director Jo Stella-Sawicka Discusses This Year’s Art Fair and Beyond
BY ANNA MCNAY
2 DAYS AGO
Image via Black Frame
This feature is part of our week-long coverage of Frieze London art fair 2014, which runs from October 15-18 at Regent’s Park and contains art from over 160 of the world’s most exciting contemporary art galleries.
As Frieze London revs up for its 2014 edition, there has been a lot of talk about the recent announcements regarding staffing changes at the top, as well as about the new Artist Award and Live section dedicated to performance art. With hosting three international fairs annually and a seemingly ever expanding remit, Frieze is undeniably becoming a brand—so much that this even forms the basis for one tongue-in-cheek performance work this year.
Jo Stella-Sawicka, deputy director of Frieze London since 2011, is unashamed, however. “Of course Frieze is a brand,” she exclaims proudly. The former director of London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery and one time art curator for British fashion chain Monsoon, Jo found some time on the eve of the fair’s launch to talk about all we have to look forward to, both this coming week and beyond.
You’re coming up on four years working with Frieze now. What have you seen change during your time with the fair?
Well, we’ve launched Frieze New York, which was obviously a major expansion for the company, and Frieze Masters, as well. At the same time, we’ve gone from producing one event a year to three. As a result, our activity is much more global. Also, we’re working with galleries that have to do with ancient art, medieval art, and modern art, as well as contemporary art, so we’re working across the entire spectrum of 7,000 years of art-making.
With Frieze Projects, Frieze Film, Frieze Talks, Frieze Video, Frieze Sounds, Frieze Sculpture Park and the new section, Live, dedicated to performance art, Frieze London is much more all-encompassing than just visual arts to hang on a gallery wall. How would you define its scope and ambitions? Where is Frieze London looking to go in the coming years?
All of those activities were always part of the fair. Frieze Projects is our non-profit arm. It has always existed in London and was very much a part of our vision when we set up in New York. It’s an opportunity for us to commission artists alongside the commercial side of the fair. Basically, the Frieze Projects curator will work with artists in different ways, so sometimes there might be a film program or a sound program. This year, the French choreographer Jérôme Bel is bringing his disabled theater group to London, which was a highlight of last year’s Documenta. All that curatorial activity has always been very much a part of our vision.
What is new this year is the Live section, where we are providing space for galleries to bring experimental work to the fair, which is based on or includes performance. It’s about supporting performance practices, performances, and performance-based work. Often these are positions that can be very hard for galleries to represent at art fairs, because they are not so explicitly commercial. Increasingly, however, because Frieze is such a curatorial environment, we see galleries wanting to participate, showing the most ambitious work they can. In this climate, it’s much harder for the younger and mid-career galleries to do that. They don’t have the same resources as the more established galleries. This section is 100% subsidized, so it was incredibly competitive, and we were able to select several really strong projects, including new commissions by young artists, as well as two major re-stagings of historical works.
I think anybody who visits the fair this year will see in our new design by architects Universal Design Studio that we’ve taken an entirely different approach to the fair. We’ve really looked to improve its environmental aspects, so that it’s really the best place to look at and experience art, as well as a really comfortable environment for our exhibitors and our public. Because we’re a pop-up event, Universal Design Studio have also looked at how we can introduce materials that suggest more durability. So there’s a lot more attention to detail with the finish of certain areas: our restaurants feel like real restaurants, and our VIP room feels like a real destination. There’s a wholesale change of direction in the look and feel of the fair this year, and we hope it’s going to make a really big impact on the public who visit. Really the focus these days is on quality and making sure Frieze is bringing and showing the public the most interesting and experimental artworks and positions that are taking place worldwide.
In the Focus section, which is our section for the young and emerging galleries, we have what I think is one of the strongest groups of young galleries active globally, with participants from Berlin, L.A., Shanghai, Mumbai—an amazing global reach. The projects that the galleries have brought are, in some cases, museum quality. There’s a project by Dan Gunn Gallery from Berlin, for example, recreating a really important Michael Smith work from the 1980s calledGovernment Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snackbar. He’s a seminal artist who has recently received a lot of attention, and this is a major piece that belongs in a museum. Leo Xu Projects from Shanghai is showing a major piece by Michael Lin, which is a temporary home for migrant workers, and the actual architectural project is completed by the migrant workers, contributing to it as an artwork. Again, it’s not only a big, substantial work, it’s also a major work that you would equally see presented in a museum. Then there are some other younger galleries who are taking a more experimental approach, but also, in Focus, you can find important works by historical artists, so it really encompasses a wide range of different things. I think it’s probably one of the most exciting areas of the fair.
The number of art fairs taking place around Frieze has grown exponentially over the past few years, leading to many people losing their faith in the purpose of the art fair and seeing it purely as commercial hype. Shanzhai Biennial’s performance piece specifically re-conceives Frieze London as a lifestyle brand…
Yes, and that’s really interesting. The Shanzhai movement in China is basically a kind ofcounter-cultural, counterfeit movement—the idea that you can buy knock-off goods that are brands themselves. Nike trainers are called Mica trainers, and they have their own cult following. So Shanzhai are using our branding and logo to create a range of merchandise, and they’re also going to be using Frieze as a platform for selling things other than art, including real estate. It will be up to the public whether they can figure out if this is an authentic Frieze environment, an artist’s détournement, or a rethinking of what we could possibly be doing as a brand. We’ve also located the Shanzhai Biennial on the entrance corridor, so it really falls into that slippage between where it lies as an experience: is it real, is it artificial?
Do you conceive of Frieze as a brand?
Of course Frieze is a brand! Frieze is a global brand. We’re working across many different territories. We’ve got an office in Berlin, we’ve got an office in New York, we’re a publisher, we have three magazines, publish e-books, publish catalogues—it’s a brand.
To go back to another of the Live pieces, you’ve got the Japanese siblings, United Brothers, producing a soup made from vegetables grown in the region of Fukushima, the scene of the 2011 nuclear disaster. The piece, called Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent?, will be available for visitors to sample.
Yes, that’s where they grew up, and that’s where their mother lives. Their mother is here for Frieze, and they’re cooking noodle soup to give to the public. The region was devastated by the nuclear disaster, but people still live there and grow and eat vegetables, which areauthorized by the Japan Farmer’s Union. Obviously it will be up to the public…how they feel about participating in this generous act of sharing.
Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover recently admitted his uncertainly as to whether or not he’d be up for trying the soup. Will you?
Yes, for sure. They don’t look radioactive to me, and I like the look of it. I think if they’re coming all the way from Japan to do this for us, then I think it’s only right that we also take part and sit down and enjoy some food with them.
This year sees the introduction of the Frieze Artist Award, established to enable an emerging artist to present a site-specific work at Frieze London. Does Frieze seek to represent a balance between emerging and established artists?
The award has had different names over the past few years, depending on sponsors, and this year it’s called the Frieze Artist Award, and Mélanie Matranga is the winner. The wonderful thing about Mélanie was that when the jurors selected hers from the many hundreds of applications, it was a unanimous decision, and they didn’t know about her. She wasn’t a represented artist, so it was truly a jury discovery, and they felt really compelled by her vision. I think it is really important that the fair can provide a platform for young artists, because young artists provide the lifeblood of the fair, and it’s where the regeneration of the fair comes from, with younger artists graduating through different sections each year, growing from an emerging to an established artist. My feeling is that people come to Frieze for discovery. They know that they’re going to see an awful lot and learn a lot.
What do you think of the public response to Frieze Masters over the past couple of years?
I think there’s been a very good, positive response to Frieze Masters. It’s a unique concept in that you can experience historical art through a contemporary lens, and I think it’s also unique, in that, for a secondary market fair, there’s a huge amount of curatorial engagement. That’s partly because we program a very interesting body of artists’ talks, with contemporary artists talking about historical artists who’ve had an influence on their own practice, which I think everybody’s always interested to hear about. There’s also the Spotlight section, which brings together a group of undiscovered 20th century artists who have either been overlooked or overshadowed in the past and are being reconsidered now. I think those two aspects really make it a very interesting fair for connoisseurs, but also for the public alike.
It has recently been announced that Victoria Siddall, who has been director of Frieze Masters for the past three years, is now to take over from founders Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp as director of Frieze London and Frieze New York. Slotover and Sharp are to attend to “new projects.” Can you tell us anything about what these new projects might entail?
No. They’ve got a long list, and they want to go away and research them and figure them out. It’s too soon to talk about them, I’m afraid.
Additionally, you have been named as artistic director to oversee Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and Africa. What will this new role mean for you?
I think it’s an extension of what I do already, because my job really is very closely involved with the curatorial program of the fair, working with all our curatorial advisors. I think my remit just expands to incorporate historical galleries in certain territories, and I’ll be working with Victoria to support the development of the fair as it evolves.
Finally, Sophia Al Maria’s Frieze project questions what an art fair is really saying to its visitors. What do you think—or hope—that Frieze London is really trying to say to its visitors?
Frieze says to come with an open mind and really experience some of the world’s best art. The level of energy and ambition that galleries put into making very special and significant projects for Frieze is unparalleled anywhere in the world. It’s an amazing resource. So come with an open mind and open eyes.
What is artistic research today? At present no one seems to know an answer to this question. Artistic research is treated as one of the multiple practices which are defined by indefinition, constantly in flux, lacking coherence and identity. But what if this view were indeed misleading? What if we actually knew more about it than we thought? In order to discuss this proposition, let’s first have a look at current debates around artistic research. It seems as if one of their most important concerns is the transformation of artistic research into an academic discipline. There are discussions about curriculum, degrees, method, practical application, pedagogy. On the other hand, there is also substantial criticism of this approach. It addresses the institutionalization of artistic research as being complicit with new modes of production within cognitive capitalism: commodified education, creative and affective industries, administrative aesthetics, and so on. Both perspectives agree on one point: artistic research is at present being constituted as a more or less normative, academic discipline.
A discipline is of course disciplinarian; it normalizes, generalizes and regulates; it rehearses a set of responses, and in this case, trains people to function in an environment of symbolic labor, permanent design and streamlined creativity. But then again, what is a discipline apart from all of this? A discipline may be oppressive, but this is also precisely why it points to the issue it keeps under control. It indexes a suppressed, an avoided or potential conflict. A discipline hints at a conflict immobilized. It is a practice to channel and exploit its energies and to incorporate them into the powers that be. Why would one need a discipline if it wasn’t to discipline somebody or something? Any discipline can thus also be seen from the point of view of conflict.
Let me give an example: a project I recently realized, called The Building. It deals with the construction history of a Nazi building on the main square in Linz, Austria; it investigates its background, the stories of the people who actually built it, and also looks at the materials used in the building. The construction was performed by partly foreign forced laborers and some of the former inhabitants of the site were persecuted, dispossessed and murdered. During the research it also actually turned out that some of the building stones were produced in the notorious quarry of concentration camp Mauthausen, where thousands of people were killed.
There are at least two different ways of describing this building. One and the same stone used for the building can be said to have gained its shape according to the paradigm of neoclassicist architecture, which would be the official description given on the building itself. Or it can be described as having probably been shaped by a stone mason in concentration camp Mauthausen, who was likely a former Spanish Republican fighter. The conclusion is obvious: the same stone can be described from the point of view of a discipline, which classifies and names. But it can also be read as a trace of a suppressed conflict.
But why would this very local project be relevant for a reflection about artistic research as such? Because parts of this building also coincidentally house the Linz Art Academy. This building is a location, where artistic research is currently being integrated into academic structures: there is a department for artistic research inside this building. Thus, any investigation of the building might turn out as a sort of institutional metareflection on the contemporary conditions of artistic research as such.
In this sense: where is the conflict, or rather what are the extensive sets of conflicts underlying this new academic discipline? Who is currently building its walls, using which materials, produced by whom? Who are the builders of the discipline and where are their traces?
Discipline and Conflict
So, what are the conflicts, and where are the boundaries then? Seen from the point of view of many current contributions, artistic research seems more or less confined to the contemporary metropolitan art academy. Actual artistic research looks like a set of art practices by predominantly metropolitan artists acting as ethnographers, sociologists, product or social designers. It gives the impression of being an asset of technologically and conceptually advanced First World capitalism, trying to upgrade its population to efficiently function in a knowledge economy, and as a by-product, casually surveying the rest of the world as well. But if we look at artistic research from the perspective of conflict or more precisely of social struggles, a map of practices emerges that spans most of the 20th century and also most of the globe. It becomes obvious that the current debates do not fully acknowledge the legacy of the long, varied and truly international history of artistic research which has been understood in terms of an aesthetics of resistance.
Aesthetics of Resistance is the title of Peter Weiss’ seminal novel, released in the early 1980s, which presents an alternative reading of art history as well as an account of the history of anti-fascist resistance from 1933 to 1945. Throughout the novel Weiss explicitly uses the term “artistic research (künstlerische Forschung)” to refer to practices such as Brecht’s writing factory in exile. He also points to the factographic and partly also productivist practices in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, mentioning the documentary work of Sergei Tretjakov, among many others. Thus he establishes a genealogy of aesthetic research, which is related to the history of emancipatory struggles throughout the 20th century.
Since the 1920s, extremely sophisticated debates about artistic epistemologies were waged on terms like fact, reality, objectivity, inquiry within the circles of Soviet factographers, cinematographers and artists. For factographers, a fact is an outcome of a process of production. Fact comes from facere, to make or to do. So in this sense the fact is made or even made up. This should not come as a surprise to us in the age of poststructuralist, metaphysical skepticism. But the range of aesthetic approaches which were developed as research tools almost 100 years ago is stupefying.
Authors like Vertov, Stepanova, Tretjakov, Popova and Rodchenko invent complex procedures of investigation, such as the cine-eye, the cine-truth, the biography of the object or photomontage. They work on human perception and practice and actively try to integrate scientific attitudes into their work. And scientific creation is flowing as a result of many of these developments. In his autobiography, Roman Jakobson describes in detail how avantgarde art practices inspired him to develop his specific ideas on linguistics.
Of course throughout history many different approaches of this type of research have existed. We could also mention the efforts of the artists employed by the FSA (Farm Security Administration) of creating essayistic photojournalistic inquiries during the Great Depression in the US. In all these cases, the artistic research is ambivalently co-opted into state policies – although to a different extent and with completely different consequences. Around the same time Tretyakov got shot during the Stalinist terror, Walker Evans had a solo show at the MoMa.
Another method of artistic inquiry, which is based on several related sets of conflict and crisis is the essayistic approach. In 1940, Hans Richter coins the term film essay or essay film as capable of visualizing theoretical ideas. He refers to one of his own works already made in 1927 called Inflation, an extremely interesting experimental film about capitalism running amok. Richter argues that a new filmic language has to be developed in order to deal with abstract processes such as the capitalist economy. How does one show these abstractions, how does one visualize the immaterial? These questions are reactualized in contemporary art practices, but they have a long history.
The essay as filmic approach also embraces the perspective of anticolonial resistance. One of the first so-called essay films is the anticolonial film-essay Les statues meurent aussi, by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, about racism in dealing with African art. The film is commissioned by a magazine calledPresence africaine which counts as its editors people like Aimé Césaire or Leopold Senghor, main theoreticians of the so-called negritude movement in the 1930s. Only a few years later Theodor Adorno’s text, The Essay as Form, appears in which he ponders on the resistant characteristics of the essay as subversive method of thought. To Adorno the essay means the reshuffling of the realms of the aesthetic and epistemological, which undermines the dominant division of labor.
And then we enter the whole period of the 1960s with their international struggles, tricontinentalism and so on. Frantz Fanon’s slogan: “…we must discuss, we must invent…” is the motto of the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema, written by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in 1969, in a context of dictatorship in Argentina. The relation of art and science is again explicitly mentioned in Julio Garcia Espinosa’s manifesto For an Imperfect Cinema (1969). Other methods of artistic research include situationist derive and workers inquiries, constructivist montage, cut ups, biomechanics, oral history, deconstructive or surrealist anthropology, the diffusion of counterinformation as well as aesthetic journalism. Some of these methods are more easily absorbed into the art mainstream than others. Especially strongly dematerialized practices with pronounced modernist features are quickly absorbed into information capitalism because they are compressed, quick to absorb and easily transmitted.
It is no coincidence that many of the practices mentioned here have been dealing with classical problems of documentary representation from very different perspectives: its function as power/knowledge, its epistemological problems, its relation to reality and the challenge of creating a new one. Documentary styles and forms have forever grappled with the uneven mix of rationality and creativity, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the power of creation and the power of conservation.
It is no coincidence either that many of the historical methods of artistic research are tied to social or revolutionary movements, or to moments of crisis and reform. In this perspective, the outline of a global network of struggles is revealed, which spans almost the whole 20th century, which is transversal, relational, and (in many, though far from all cases) emancipatory.
It is a coincidence, however, that Peter Weiss´ Aesthetics of Resistance also mentions the main square of Linz: the site of The Building. He describes a scene in which members of the International Brigades in Spain listen to a broadcast of the enthusiastic reception for Hitler and the German troops on Linz’s main square in March 1938. But Weiss’ protagonist notices a very small (and entirely hypothetical) moment in resistance pointed out by the radio journalist: some of the windows on the square remain unlit, and the journalist is quick to point out that the flats of the Jews are located there. Actually during the research it turned out that one of the Jewish families living there had dispersed to three different continents and two members of the family had been murdered. One of the latter was a person called Ernst Samuely who was supposedly a communist. After many ordeals, he joined a Jewish partisan group on the Polish border before disappearing. So, if we look at the Linz building from this point of view, we see that it dissolves into a network of international routes and relations, which relate to oppression but also to resistance: it relates to what Walter Benjamin once called “the tradition of the oppressed.”
The Perspective of Conflict
If we keep applying the global and transversal perspective to the debate around artistic research, the temporal and spatial limitations of contemporary metropolitan debates are revealed. It simply does not make any sense to continue the discussion as if practices of artistic research do not have a long and extensive history well beyond conceptual art practices – which is one of the very few historical examples to be mentioned, although very rarely. From the point of view of social struggles, the discontinuous genealogy of artistic research becomes an almost global one, with a long and frequently interrupted history. The geographical distribution of artistic research practices also dramatically changes in this perspective. Since some locations were particularly affected by the conjunction of power and knowledge, which arose with the formation of capitalism and colonialism, strategies of epistemic disobedience had to be invented.
A power/knowledge/art, which reduced whole populations to objects of knowledge, domination and representation, had to be countered not only by social struggle and revolt, but also by epistemological and aesthetic innovation. Thus reversing the perspective and focusing on discipline as an index of conflict also reverses the direction in which art history has been written as an account of peripheral artists copying and catching up with Western art trends. We could just as well say that many contemporary metropolitan artists are only now catching up with the complexity of debates around reality and representation that Soviet factographers had already developed in the 1920s.
Specific and Singular
In all these methods, two elements collide: a claim to specificity clashes with a claim to singularity. What does this mean? One aspect of the work claims to participate in a general paradigm, within a discourse that can be shared and which is manufactured according to certain criteria. More often than not, scientific, legalistic or journalistic truth procedures underly this method of research. These methodologies are pervaded by power relations as many theorists have demonstrated.
On the other hand, artistic research projects in many cases also lay claim to singularity. They create a certain artistic set up, which claims to be relatively unique and produces its own field of reference and logic. This provides it with a certain autonomy, in some cases an edge of resistance against dominant modes of knowledge production. In other cases, this assumed singularity just sexes up a quantitative survey, or to use a famous expression by Benjamin Buchloh, creates an aesthetic of administration.[1]”
While specific methods generate a shared terrain of knowledge – which is consequently pervaded by power structures – singular methods follow their own logic. While this may avoid the replication of existing structures of power/knowledge, it also creates the problem of the proliferation of parallel universes, which each speak their own, untranslatable language. Practices of artistic research usually partake in both registers, the singular as well as the specific; they speak several languages at once.
Thus, one could imagine a semiotic square*, which would roughly map the tensions which become apparent during the transformation of artistic research into an academic and/or economic discipline. Of course, this scheme is misleading, since one would have to draw a new one for every singular point of view which is investigated. But it shows the tensions which both frame and undermine the institutionalization of artistic research.
Artistic Research as Translation
The multilinguality of artistic research implies that artistic research is an act of translation. It takes part in at least two languages and can in some cases create new ones. It speaks the language of quality as well as of quantity, the language of the singular as well as the language of the specific, use value as well as exchange value or spectacle value, discipline as well as conflict; and it translates between all of these. This does not mean that it translates correctly – but it translates, nevertheless.
At this point, one should emphasize that this is also the case with so-called autonomous artworks, which have no pretense whatsoever to partake in any kind of research. This does not mean they cannot be quantified or become part of disciplinary practices, because they are routinely quantified on the art market in the form of pricing and integrated into art histories and other systems of value. Thus, most art practices exist in one or another type of translation, but this type of translation does not jeopardize the division of labor established between art historians and gallerists, between artists and researchers, between the mind and senses. In fact, a lot of the conservative animosity towards artistic research stems from a feeling of threat, because of the dissolution of these boundaries, and this is why artistic research is often dismissed in everyday practice as neither art nor research.
But the quantification processes involved in the evaluation or valorization of artistic research are slightly different than the traditional procedures of quantification. Artistic research as a discipline not only sets and enforces certain standards but also presents an attempt to extract or produce a different type of value in art. Apart from the art market, a secondary market develops for those practices which lack in fetish value. This secondary value is established by quantification and integration into (increasingly) commodified education systems. Additionally, a sort of social surplus embedded into a pedagogical understanding of art comes into play. Both combined create a pull towards the production of applied or applicable knowledge/art, which can be used for entrepreneurial innovation, social cohesion, city marketing, and thousands of other aspects of cultural capitalism. From this perspective, artistic research indeed looks like a new version of the applied arts, a new and largely immaterial craft, which is being instituted as a discipline in many different places.
Radiators
At the end, let me come back to the beginning: we know more about artistic research than we think. And this concerns the most disquieting findings of the project around The Building in Linz. It is more than likely, that after the war, radiators were taken from the now abandoned concentration camp Mauthausen and reinstalled into the building. If this plan documented in the historical files was executed, then the radiators are still there and have quietly been heating the building ever since. A visit with an expert confirmed that the radiators have never been exchanged in the Eastern part of the building and that, moreover, some of the radiators had already been used, when they had been installed around 1948. The make of those radiators corresponds to the few radiators seen in contemporary photos of concentration camp Mauthausen. Now, of course, radiators were not in use in the prisoners barracks. They were in use in some work rooms, like the laundry room. They were in use in the prisoners office and the prisoners brothel, where female inmates from another concentration camp had to work.
But what do we make of the fact that the Department for Artistic Research (its coordination office is located in The Building,according to the website) could soon find itself being heated by the same radiators, which were mute witnesses of the plight of female inmates in the concentration camp brothel? To quote the website of the Linz art academy, “artistic-scientific research belongs to the core tasks of the Art University Linz, and artistic practice and scientific research are combined under one roof. The confrontation and/or combination of science and art require intense research and artistic development in a methodological perspective, in the areas of knowledge transfers and questions of mediation. Cultural Studies, art history, media theory, several strategies of mediation as well as art and Gender Studies in the context of concrete art production are essential elements of the profile of the university.” What are the conditions of this research? What is the biography of its historical infrastructure and how can reflecting on it help us to break through the infatuation with discipline and institutionalization and to sharpen a historical focus in thinking about artistic research? Obviously not every building will turn out to house such a surprising infrastructure. But the general question remains: what do we do with an ambivalent discipline, which is institutionalized and disciplined under this type of conditions? How can we emphasize the historical and global dimension of artistic research and underline the perspective of conflict? And when is it time to turn off the lights?
[1] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions”, in: October, Vol. 55. (Winter, 1990), pp. 105-143.
From the militarization of social media to the corporatization of the art world, Hito Steyerl’s writings represent some of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary cultural criticism today. As a documentary filmmaker, she has created multiple works addressing the widespread proliferation of images in contemporary media, deepening her engagement with the technological conditions of globalization. Steyerl’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including documenta 12, Taipei Biennial 2010, and 7th Shanghai Biennial. She currently teaches New Media Art at Berlin University of the Arts.
Marvin Jordan I’d like to open our dialogue by acknowledging the central theme for which your work is well known — broadly speaking, the socio-technological conditions of visual culture — and move toward specific concepts that underlie your research (representation, identification, the relationship between art and capital, etc). In your essay titled “Is a Museum a Factory?” you describe a kind of ‘political economy’ of seeing that is structured in contemporary art spaces, and you emphasize that a social imbalance — an exploitation of affective labor — takes place between the projection of cinematic art and its audience. This analysis leads you to coin the term “post-representational” in service of experimenting with new modes of politics and aesthetics. What are the shortcomings of thinking in “representational” terms today, and what can we hope to gain from transitioning to a “post-representational” paradigm of art practices, if we haven’t arrived there already?
Hito Steyerl Let me give you one example. A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer in Holland. He was working on smart phone camera technology. A representational mode of thinking photography is: there is something out there and it will be represented by means of optical technology ideally via indexical link. But the technology for the phone camera is quite different. As the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to define the picture from within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes. In short: it creates the picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. It does not only know what you saw but also what you might like to see based on your previous choices. In other words, it speculates on your preferences and offers an interpretation of data based on affinities to other data. The link to the thing in front of the lens is still there, but there are also links to past pictures that help create the picture. You don’t really photograph the present, as the past is woven into it.
The result might be a picture that never existed in reality, but that the phone thinks you might like to see. It is a bet, a gamble, some combination between repeating those things you have already seen and coming up with new versions of these, a mixture of conservatism and fabulation. The paradigm of representation stands to the present condition as traditional lens-based photography does to an algorithmic, networked photography that works with probabilities and bets on inertia. Consequently, it makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult. The noise will increase and random interpretation too. We might think that the phone sees what we want, but actually we will see what the phone thinks it knows about us. A complicated relationship — like a very neurotic marriage. I haven’t even mentioned external interference into what your phone is recording. All sorts of applications are able to remotely shut your camera on or off: companies, governments, the military. It could be disabled for whole regions. One could, for example, disable recording functions close to military installations, or conversely, live broadcast whatever you are up to. Similarly, the phone might be programmed to auto-pixellate secret or sexual content. It might be fitted with a so-called dick algorithm to screen out NSFW content or auto-modify pubic hair, stretch or omit bodies, exchange or collage context or insert AR advertisement and pop up windows or live feeds. Now lets apply this shift to the question of representative politics or democracy. The representational paradigm assumes that you vote for someone who will represent you. Thus the interests of the population will be proportionally represented. But current democracies work rather like smartphone photography by algorithmically clearing the noise and boosting some data over other. It is a system in which the unforeseen has a hard time happening because it is not yet in the database. It is about what to define as noise — something Jacques Ranciere has defined as the crucial act in separating political subjects from domestic slaves, women and workers. Now this act is hardwired into technology, but instead of the traditional division of people and rabble, the results are post-representative militias, brands, customer loyalty schemes, open source insurgents and tumblrs.
Additionally, Ranciere’s democratic solution: there is no noise, it is all speech. Everyone has to be seen and heard, and has to be realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight: you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear. There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface. Whatever there is — it’s all there to see but in the form of an incomprehensible, Kafkaesque glossiness, written in extraterrestrial code, perhaps subject to secret legislation. It certainly expresses something: a format, a protocol or executive order, but effectively obfuscates its meaning. This is a far cry from a situation in which something—an image, a person, a notion — stood in for another and presumably acted in its interest. Today it stands in, but its relation to whatever it stands in for is cryptic, shiny, unstable; the link flickers on and off. Art could relish in this shiny instability — it does already. It could also be less baffled and mesmerised and see it as what the gloss mostly is about – the not-so-discreet consumer friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.
MJ In your insightful essay, “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation”, you extend your critique of representation by focusing on an irreducible excess at the core of image spam, a residue of unattainability, or the “dark matter” of which it’s composed. It seems as though an unintelligible horizon circumscribes image spam by image spam itself, a force of un-identifiability, which you detect by saying that it is “an accurate portrayal of what humanity is actually not… a negative image.” Do you think this vacuous core of image spam — a distinctly negative property — serves as an adequate ground for a general theory of representation today? How do you see today’s visual culture affecting people’s behavior toward identification with images?
HS Think of Twitter bots for example. Bots are entities supposed to be mistaken for humans on social media web sites. But they have become formidable political armies too — in brilliant examples of how representative politics have mutated nowadays. Bot armies distort discussion on twitter hashtags by spamming them with advertisement, tourist pictures or whatever. Bot armies have been active in Mexico, Syria, Russia and Turkey, where most political parties, above all the ruling AKP are said to control 18,000 fake twitter accounts using photos of Robbie Williams, Megan Fox and gay porn stars. A recent article revealed that, “in order to appear authentic, the accounts don’t just tweet out AKP hashtags; they also quote philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and movies like PS: I Love You.” It is ever more difficult to identify bots – partly because humans are being paid to enter CAPTCHAs on their behalf (1,000 CAPTCHAs equals 50 USD cents). So what is a bot army? And how and whom does it represent if anyone? Who is an AKP bot that wears the face of a gay porn star and quotes Hobbes’ Leviathan — extolling the need of transforming the rule of militias into statehood in order to escape the war of everyone against everyone else? Bot armies are a contemporary vox pop, the voice of the people, the voice of what the people are today. It can be a Facebook militia, your low cost personalized mob, your digital mercenaries. Imagine your photo is being used for one of these bots. It is the moment when your picture becomes quite autonomous, active, even militant. Bot armies are celebrity militias, wildly jump cutting between glamour, sectarianism, porn, corruption and Post-Baath Party ideology. Think of the meaning of the word “affirmative action” after twitter bots and like farms! What does it represent?
MJ You have provided a compelling account of the depersonalization of the status of the image: a new process of de-identification that favors materialist participation in the circulation of images today. Within the contemporary technological landscape, you write that “if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation. And then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and instead becomes participation.” How does this shift from personal identification to material circulation — that is, to cybernetic participation — affect your notion of representation? If an image is merely “a thing like you and me,” does this amount to saying that identity is no more, no less than a .jpeg file?
HS Social media makes the shift from representation to participation very clear: people participate in the launch and life span of images, and indeed their life span, spread and potential is defined by participation. Think of the image not as surface but as all the tiny light impulses running through fiber at any one point in time. Some images will look like deep sea swarms, some like cities from space, some are utter darkness. We could see the energy imparted to images by capital or quantified participation very literally, we could probably measure its popular energy in lumen. By partaking in circulation, people participate in this energy and create it.
What this means is a different question though — by now this type of circulation seems a little like the petting zoo of plutotechnocracies. It’s where kids are allowed to make a mess — but just a little one — and if anyone organizes serious dissent, the seemingly anarchic sphere of circulation quickly reveals itself as a pedantic police apparatus aggregating relational metadata. It turns out to be an almost Althusserian ISA (Internet State Apparatus), hardwired behind a surface of ‘kawaii’ apps and online malls. As to identity, Heartbleed and more deliberate governmental hacking exploits certainly showed that identity goes far beyond a relationship with images: it entails a set of private keys, passwords, etc., that can be expropriated and detourned. More generally, identity is the name of the battlefield over your code — be it genetic, informational, pictorial. It is also an option that might provide protection if you fall beyond any sort of modernist infrastructure. It might offer sustenance, food banks, medical service, where common services either fail or don’t exist. If the Hezbollah paradigm is so successful it is because it provides an infrastructure to go with the Twitter handle, and as long as there is no alternative many people need this kind of container for material survival. Huge religious and quasi-religious structures have sprung up in recent decades to take up the tasks abandoned by states, providing protection and survival in a reversal of the move described in Leviathan. Identity happens when the Leviathan falls apart and nothing is left of the commons but a set of policed relational metadata, Emoji and hijacked hashtags. This is the reason why the gay AKP pornstar bots are desperately quoting Hobbes’ book: they are already sick of the war of Robbie Williams (Israel Defense Forces) against Robbie Williams (Electronic Syrian Army) against Robbie Williams (PRI/AAP) and are hoping for just any entity to organize day care and affordable dentistry.
But beyond all the portentous vocabulary relating to identity, I believe that a widespread standard of the contemporary condition is exhaustion. The interesting thing about Heartbleed — to come back to one of the current threats to identity (as privacy) — is that it is produced by exhaustion and not effort. It is a bug introduced by open source developers not being paid for something that is used by software giants worldwide. Nor were there apparently enough resources to audit the code in the big corporations that just copy-pasted it into their applications and passed on the bug, fully relying on free volunteer labour to produce their proprietary products. Heartbleed records exhaustion by trying to stay true to an ethics of commonality and exchange that has long since been exploited and privatized. So, that exhaustion found its way back into systems. For many people and for many reasons — and on many levels — identity is just that: shared exhaustion.
MJ This is an opportune moment to address the labor conditions of social media practice in the context of the art space. You write that “an art space is a factory, which is simultaneously a supermarket — a casino and a place of worship whose reproductive work is performed by cleaning ladies and cellphone-video bloggers alike.” Incidentally, DIS launched a website calledArtSelfie just over a year ago, which encourages social media users to participate quite literally in “cellphone-video blogging” by aggregating their Instagram #artselfies in a separately integrated web archive. Given our uncanny coincidence, how can we grasp the relationship between social media blogging and the possibility of participatory co-curating on equal terms? Is there an irreconcilable antagonism between exploited affective labor and a genuinely networked art practice? Or can we move beyond — to use a phrase of yours — a museum crowd “struggling between passivity and overstimulation?”
HS I wrote this in relation to something my friend Carles Guerra noticed already around early 2009; big museums like the Tate were actively expanding their online marketing tools, encouraging people to basically build the museum experience for them by sharing, etc. It was clear to us that audience participation on this level was a tool of extraction and outsourcing, following a logic that has turned online consumers into involuntary data providers overall. Like in the previous example – Heartbleed – the paradigm of participation and generous contribution towards a commons tilts quickly into an asymmetrical relation, where only a minority of participants benefits from everyone’s input, the digital 1 percent reaping the attention value generated by the 99 percent rest.
Brian Kuan Wood put it very beautifully recently: Love is debt, an economy of love and sharing is what you end up with when left to your own devices. However, an economy based on love ends up being an economy of exhaustion – after all, love is utterly exhausting — of deregulation, extraction and lawlessness. And I don’t even want to mention likes, notes and shares, which are the child-friendly, sanitized versions of affect as currency.
All is fair in love and war. It doesn’t mean that love isn’t true or passionate, but just that love is usually uneven, utterly unfair and asymmetric, just as capital tends to be distributed nowadays. It would be great to have a little bit less love, a little more infrastructure.
MJ Long before Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations reshaped our discussions of mass surveillance, you wrote that “social media and cell-phone cameras have created a zone of mutual mass-surveillance, which adds to the ubiquitous urban networks of control,” underscoring the voluntary, localized, and bottom-up mutuality intrinsic to contemporary systems of control. You go on to say that “hegemony is increasingly internalized, along with the pressure to conform and perform, as is the pressure to represent and be represented.” But now mass government surveillance is common knowledge on a global scale — ‘externalized’, if you will — while social media representation practices remain as revealing as they were before. Do these recent developments, as well as the lack of change in social media behavior, contradict or reinforce your previous statements? In other words, how do you react to the irony that, in the same year as the unprecedented NSA revelations, “selfie” was deemed word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries?
HS Haha — good question!
Essentially I think it makes sense to compare our moment with the end of the twenties in the Soviet Union, when euphoria about electrification, NEP (New Economic Policy), and montage gives way to bureaucracy, secret directives and paranoia. Today this corresponds to the sheer exhilaration of having a World Wide Web being replaced by the drudgery of corporate apps, waterboarding, and “normcore”. I am not trying to say that Stalinism might happen again – this would be plain silly – but trying to acknowledge emerging authoritarian paradigms, some forms of algorithmic consensual governance techniques developed within neoliberal authoritarianism, heavily relying on conformism, “family” values and positive feedback, and backed up by all-out torture and secret legislation if necessary. On the other hand things are also falling apart into uncontrollable love. One also has to remember that people did really love Stalin. People love algorithmic governance too, if it comes with watching unlimited amounts of Game of Thrones. But anyone slightly interested in digital politics and technology is by now acquiring at least basic skills in disappearance and subterfuge.
MJ In “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” you point out that the contemporary art industry “sustains itself on the time and energy of unpaid interns and self-exploiting actors on pretty much every level and in almost every function,” while maintaining that “we have to face up to the fact that there is no automatically available road to resistance and organization for artistic labor.” Bourdieu theorized qualitatively different dynamics in the composition of cultural capital vs. that of economic capital, arguing that the former is constituted by the struggle for distinction, whose value is irreducible to financial compensation. This basically translates to: everyone wants a piece of the art-historical pie, and is willing to go through economic self-humiliation in the process. If striving for distinction is antithetical to solidarity, do you see a possibility of reconciling it with collective political empowerment on behalf of those economically exploited by the contemporary art industry?
HS In Art and Money, William Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog, and Christophe Spaenjers conclude that income inequality correlates to art prices. The bigger the difference between top income and no income, the higher prices are paid for some art works. This means that the art market will benefit not only if less people have more money but also if more people have no money. This also means that increasing the amount of zero incomes is likely, especially under current circumstances, to raise the price of some art works. The poorer many people are (and the richer a few), the better the art market does; the more unpaid interns, the more expensive the art. But the art market itself may be following a similar pattern of inequality, basically creating a divide between the 0,01 percent if not less of artworks that are able to concentrate the bulk of sales and the 99,99 percent rest. There is no short term solution for this feedback loop, except of course not to accept this situation, individually or preferably collectively on all levels of the industry. This also means from the point of view of employers. There is a long term benefit to this, not only to interns and artists but to everyone. Cultural industries, which are too exclusively profit oriented lose their appeal. If you want exciting things to happen you need a bunch of young and inspiring people creating a dynamics by doing risky, messy and confusing things. If they cannot afford to do this, they will do it somewhere else eventually. There needs to be space and resources for experimentation, even failure, otherwise things go stale. If these people move on to more accommodating sectors the art sector will mentally shut down even more and become somewhat North-Korean in its outlook — just like contemporary blockbuster CGI industries. Let me explain: there is a managerial sleekness and awe inspiring military perfection to every pixel in these productions, like in North Korean pixel parades, where thousands of soldiers wave color posters to form ever new pixel patterns. The result is quite something but this something is definitely not inspiring nor exciting. If the art world keeps going down the way of raising art prices via starvation of it’s workers – and there is no reason to believe it will not continue to do this – it will become the Disney version of Kim Jong Un’s pixel parades. 12K starving interns waving pixels for giant CGI renderings of Marina Abramovic! Imagine the price it will fetch!
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Politics of Truth
Documentarism in the Art Field
Hito Steyerl
Documentary strategies are among the most important features of contemporary art. Since the early nineties there as been a succession of various waves of an adaptation of documentary techniques in art, which have also been integrated in the mainstream with documenta X and 11. Especially in the context of institution-critical practices, a revival of forms arose in the nineties, which were developed primarily in the seventies and based on practices such as research and journalistic techniques. At the same time, although there has so far been little theoretical treatment of it, a zone emerged of an overlapping of video art, cinema, reportage, photo essay and other forms, in which various existing genres and formats intersect and constantly change their stylistic devices in the form of audiovisual, film, video and installation works. Didactic and realistic works alternate with reflexive documentary productions, with visual machines, which reflect on the organization of documents and organize the subjectivities thus produced. An interest in the formal specific characteristics of the documentary form in the art field has only recently begun, for instance with exhibitions such as “True Stories” [1] at Witte de With in Rotterdam or “It is Hard to Touch the Real” [2] at the Kunstverein Munich – but has hardly taken place yet at the theoretical level.
Truth of Politics or Politics of Truth
Documentary forms in the art field are currently assuming primarily two contrary functions. First, they represent a strategy of authenticity, which is intended to ensure the claim of artistic works to contact with an auratized field of the social or the political. The formal devices employed here are often social-realistic and attempt to remain as transparent as possible. Examples are art documentations, in which performances or interventions are depicted and which illustrate certain effects in the social field. Here the documentary moment is used as proof of social relevance and evidence of an »organic« relationship to the field. In this perspective some forms of art documentation represent one of the currently most widespread strategies of authentication in the art field by cultivating the Rousseauan myth that there is an art actively embedded in local practices and communities, which is absolutely uncorrupted by any art market that first produces it through its demand. In their function of structuring and intervening in the social field, these documentary forms assume biopolitical tasks.
Authenticity becomes a vitalistic ideology here, which is chosen as the desired raw material of difference, particularly also in the context of globalization. It is nourished from the myth of the genuine and different local, which is currently reproduced in post-ethnographic and neo-culturalist exhibitions. [3] The documentary is intended to depict a certain truth of the political here, an authentic and “genuine” core of the social, which is reproduced, according to Marina Grzinic, in “flat documentaries”. [4] Grzinic claims that the “flat documentary style” forms a model (which works according to the logic of cloning), with which given local situations can be fed into the global art field: through an ambivalent procedure that makes authenticity ripe for global serial production. This can be reproduced through reportage-like forms of recording, which transport quasi-sociological knowledge, or conversely through very personal, “intimist” forms. A striking example of the biopolitical aspect of the “flat documentary style” are the works by Santiago Serra, whose hyperrealistic and naturalistic displays of so-called concerned persons [5] represents a drastic form of misery-voyeuristic exhibitionism. The “flat documentary style” arises most of all from the decontextualization and draining of the authenticity-objects to be transferred, as a quasi biotechnical product. Here the myth of the authentic that forms the vistalistic fetish of documentary discourse proves to be a sophisticated, hybrid and artificial product of palatable difference and repetition.
In contrast to this, there is another, more reflected current of the documentary, which perceives its own devices as socially constructed epistemological tools. In these works there is no intention at all of depicting the authentic truth of the political, but rather of changing the “politics of truth” on which its representation is based. The visual and epistemological formations of the documentary themselves are thus defined as functions of the political. The term “politics of truth” [6] is originally from Michel Foucault and designates a social order of truth, which generates the acknowledged techniques and procedures for producing and determining this truth, and which is always linked to specific power relations. Power and knowledge interlock in the organization and production of facts and their interpretations. It is in this indissoluble tension between power and knowledge that the concept of the document also moves. This concept is derived from legal discourse and represents a technology of truth [7], in other words a recognized procedure for the production of truth. Other codified procedures of truth production include witness testimonials, the integration of historical documents, the talking head format, etc.
Thus the question posed to documentary works in the art field can in no way be limited to the appropriateness or accuracy of the respective representation, but must instead be directed to their internal politics of truth. Which politics of truth are articulated in documentary images and sounds? Which strategies of authenticity are applied to support their assertions? Which rhetorics of truth, sincerity, objectiveness or genuineness are articulated politically? How do documentary works refer to reality or truth? Which role do social agreements on the status and production of truth play in this? How is their interconnection with power relations and the production of subjectivities to be understood? Which technologies, practices and rhetorics of truth are developed in the process? What is their connection with institutions, political discourses, and social or biopolitical technologies? What impact do they therefore have on the intersections between power and subjectivity that Foucault called “Gouvernementalité” [8]? The concept of governmentality that Foucault developed defines a specific form of exercising power, which operates through the production of truth. [9] Documentary forms can also assume this function of governmentality through truth. [10] For documentary images are historically connected with technologies of control, surveillance, normalization and other police techniques. [11] Colonial or fascist regimes produced their own “documentalities”, which were closely linked with ethnographic gaze regimes, the production of racist knowledge and military technologies. Photographs of colonial peoples circulating around the world contributed to the spread of colonial “knowledge”, just as fascist “documentalities” endeavored to make Soviet prisoners of war, among others, appear “subhuman”. [12]
This intersection between governmentality and documentary truth production can be termed “documentality”. Documentality describes the permeation of a documentary politics of truth with superordinated political, social and epistemological formations. Documentality is the pivotal point where forms of documentary truth production turn into government – or vice versa. It describes complicity with dominant forms of a politics of truth, just as it can also describe a critical stance towards these forms.
A more recent work that problematizes this multiple political function of (in this case historical) documents is the installation “Searching for my mother’s numbers” by Sanja Ivekovic, which was also shown at Documenta11. Three video projections flank an installation arranged like an archive, which is intended to be used for research on the prisoner’s number of Ivekovic’s mother in the concentration camp Auschwitz. In the video tapes the various functions of documents are investigated along with their different forms of writing and recording. Official documents like endlessly bureaucratic forms, on which a pension for the mother is denied by the responsible Yugoslavian agencies, are contrasted with another document, namely the mother’s handwritten diary laconically recounting her arrest and liberation. The interview with contemporary witnesses that is otherwise conventional in this context is dispensed with entirely in this work. Instead the focus is on the documents in their material reality, which are (partially) read in a voice-over. On the one hand they function as instruments of repression and the non-acknowledgment of historical facts, as in the official correspondence. On the other hand, though, a document such as the mother’s diary can also bear witness to a writing of history that not only “rescues” marginalized facts, but also forms a laconic counterpoint to the depiction of helpless and intimidated concentration camp victims. In this case, the document is not the basis of a historiography permeated by power, but instead becomes a monument to the “tradition of the oppressed”, of which Walter Benjamin speaks in his theses on the concept of history.[13]
Another example of the problematization of the status of historical documents is the short video “Schwarz auf Weiß” (Black on White) by the artist group Klub Zwei. “Schwarz auf Weiß” concentrates on the question of the photographic document – specifically by means of a radical withdrawal of the images of the Shoah that are spoken of in the voice-over. While the supervisor of a photo archive raises questions on memory, image and history, all we see are written plaques on black and white. Despite their principle technical reproducibility, images change, according to the thesis. Grey tones disappear with every generation of the photographic print; what remains in the end are the hard contrasts of black and white. It is particularly by withdrawing the pictures that are spoken of, however, that a reflection is set off about what distinguishes their status as historical documents. It is not exclusively the face of the pictures of obliteration, which are often used purely symbolically, but rather the inconspicuous back with its stamps and remarks, which first gives the pictures their historical context and thus also their significance, as Klub Zwei argues. The use of pictures as icons, on the other hand, frequently leads to their use as mere illustrations of authenticity. In contrast, “Schwarz auf Weiß” insists on perceiving photographs as something we have given up “reading” (Walter Benjamin) [14]. The video is positioned within a debate that attempts to carry out a critical reading of pictures – yet without rejecting every representation altogether as a purely social or media construction containing no truth. Unlike many media-critical approaches of recent years, this reflection therefore does not lead to an endless, circular and narcissist self-reflexivity, but rather to an ethical-political stance.
For the reflexive documentary forms there is also always the danger of generating a kind of idling reflexivity, which cringes before the ethical dimension of the themes treated in favor of the comfort of unresolvable ambivalence and the task of claiming any kind of truth. This tendency is articulated for instance in a meanwhile almost ornamental form of apparatus criticism, as it is evident in the reflexive integration of satellite images, surveillance pictures, flow charts and network surfaces in documentary works. Amateur material that is often realistic and sensationalist is garnished with elements of self-reflexivity here, which have themselves congealed into cliched and affirmative phrases of global mediality. These forms additionally develop interesting affinities with more recent television formats such as “Big Brother” and other Reality-TV shows, in which it is specifically the aspect of the constantly concurrent self-reflexivity of the media that conversely achieves the greatest authenticity effect. [15] The result is an exponential realism that only differs from classic strategies of realistic authenticity by degrees. This form of idling reflexivity is anticipated by the documentary film theorist Bill Nichols: Although it may contain a political position at the content level – it has none for the viewers themselves, who are held in a zone of inescapable ambivalence. [16]
With the import of documentary forms into the art field, new versions of the classical problems of the documentary appeared there too – the linking of documentary forms with political and social power relations and with the major power/knowledge complexes of law, science and journalism. Yet the gaze regimes of the documentary, their connection with forms of control, objectivization and categorization are also imported into the space of art. One of the new aspects of documentary approaches in art space is its spatialization in installation form, which also generates new forms of the “attention economy”, according to Tom Holert, as well as new diagrams of visibility. This goes hand in hand with a change in the arrangements of the gaze from central-perspective perception situations to spatially heterogeneous arrangements working with various media and forms of presentation. This in turn affects the relationship of the duration and space of the documentary ensemble. What is articulated in the classical documentary film as duration and thus as intensity in its perception, is now articulated conceptually in many documentary installations and thus formulated as an idea, for which the documentary picture material in part only supplies the illustration or the proof. Many documentary installations thus function less through the articulation, organization and intensification of duration, but rather through a synecdochic compression of a situation in space, which can be captured to a certain extent in a memorable image (of a plot). In the new documentary conceptualism the documentary image thus functions as a technology of truth and as proof for a proposed hypothesis as well.
In between biopolitical realism and idling reflexivity, between documentary conceptualism and a precise reading of gazes and images and the ethical-political negotiation of their claims to truth, there are the most diverse documentary approaches, which are not only articulated through various documentalities, but also represent various forms of a politics of truth. Thus it is particularly the questions of truth, ethics and reality that have been increasingly banned from theory in the last twenty years, but which are now raised in a new form due to the emergence of documentary works in art space.
Translation: Aileen Derieg
1 True Stories; Jean-Pierre Rehm, True Stories, 24 January to 30 March 2003. Flyer, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2003
2 Soren Grammel: Es ist schwer das Reale zu berühren. Printed material, Kunstverein München, Spring 2002, p. 44-45
3 See for instance: Boris Buden: Da bumst der Wahnsinnige den Verwirrten, in: springerin 2/2003
4 Marina Grzinic: Global Culture, Biotechnology, Imperialism. Unpublished manuscript 2003
5 For example in “Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to their Skin Color”: “He positions 30 people of different ethnic origin according to the color of their skin along the front of the completely closed exhibition space. [&] Sierra often employs radical means: by making workers execute certain things in museums and galleries, he turns them into exhibits. Transferring them into the system of art and explicitly presenting them, he utilizes the methods employed in the sphere of economy. This is why he often provokes protests with his projects, as for example when he paid people for agreeing to being tattooed a black line on their backs. He has also highlighted the ambivalent situation of political refugees in Europe who are forbidden to earn any money by paying them to crawl under cardboard boxes and hide there for several hours. Part of the provocation is certainly based on the obvious absurdity of the assignments and their unproductive character.” (Announcement text Kunsthalle Wien, September 2002)
6 Pasquale Pasquino, Allessandro Fontana: Wahrheit und Macht«. Gespräch mit Michel Foucault vom Juni 1976, in: Michel Foucault: Dispositive der Macht. Berlin 1978, p. 51
7 Michel Foucault: Technologien der Wahrheit, in: Jan Engelmann (Ed.): Foucault Botschaften der Macht. Reader Diskurs und Medien. Stuttgart 1999, p. 133-144
8 Media forms as forms of gouvernementalité are also described by Toby Miller: Technologies of Truth. Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media. Minneapolis 1998, p. 14-18
9 Thomas Lemke: Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft. Hamburg1997, p. 32.
10 On these terms, see also Lemke 1997, p. 31
11 Martha Rosler: Drinnen, Drumherum und nachträgliche Gedanken (zur Dokumentarfotographie), in: Martha Rosler: Positionen in der Lebenswelt. Wien, Generali Foundation 1999, p. 105. Cf. also James R. Ryan: Picturing Empire. London 1997
12 See for example the exhibition “Beutestücke Kriegsgefangene in der deutschen und sowjetischen Fotografie 1941-1945” at the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, 14 June to 14 September 2003
13 Walter Benjamin: Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen. Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze. Frankfurt 1978, p. 84
14 Walter Benjamin: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt/Main 1966, p. 64
15 Cf. also “Das Authentische ist Produkt einer Laborsituation”. Judith Keilbach in Conversation with Wolfgang Beilenhoff and Rainer Vowe, in: nach dem Film, 12/00,http://www.nachdemfilm.de/no2/bei01dts.html
16 Bill Nichols: Representing Reality. Bloomington/Indianapolis 1997
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Interview // Hito Steyerl: Zero Probability and the Age of Mass Art Production
Interview by Göksu Kunak in Berlin; Tuesday Nov. 19, 2013
Hito Steyerl – “I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production” Lecture‐Performance (2013); copyright Marcus Lieberenz / Haus der Kulturen der Welt
In the lecture performance I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production (2013), writer and artist Hito Steyerl introduces us to the new Misérables of our era, while asking the pertinent question: Why are there so many art projects today? The absurdity of funding applications, the condition of the wretched who wait to be chosen or the link between museums and firearms industries – as in Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013) − are some of the contemporary issues that Steyerl excavates. As always, she criticizes the burdens of our world with vigorous humour. In the following interview, Hito Steyerl shared her opinions about her interest in the missing (leading to her many depictions of disappearance), the latest protests, heroes of our time and the plight of interns…
GöKSU KUNAK: In your essays, works, and lecture performances it seems like you are somehow searching for the missing: the hope of visibility, the invisibility of knowledge, finding those missing points and also connecting them from unexpected points of view, the lack of the real, the probability of nonexistence. Seeing traces, but somehow on the verge of being erased. In your works like How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File(2013), Zero Probability (2012) with Rabih Mroué, Lovely Andrea (2007), and November (2004), there is always a search for the missing. Why? What is it that attracts you to the vanished, or missing?
HITO STEYERL: In all these works I am drawing implicitly or explicitly on the same example: my friend Andrea Wolf who disappeared in 1998 as a member of PKK [Parti Karkerani Kurdistan] in the region of Van. The fact that she has not been found and that there are no official efforts to clarify what happened to her or the several thousand others missing proves that the state of zero probability is widespread and a hardly acknowledged condition of our time. In the state of zero probability, whatever is impossible – like people being swallowed from the face of the earth – happens all the time and nobody thinks twice about it. The state of zero probability potentially exists everywhere, on a battlefield, in a museum online store, as point cloud or data crop cycle. It opens up whenever anyone asks: is this really happening?
This condition opens up within and by means of an avalanche of digital images, which multiply and proliferate while real people disappear or are fixed, scanned and over-represented by an overbearing architecture of surveillance. How do people disappear in an age of total over-visibility? Which huge institutional and legal effort has to be made to keep things unspoken and unspeakable even if they are pretty obviously sitting right in front of everyone’s eyes? Are people hidden by too many images? Do they go hide amongst other images? Do they become images?
Hito Steyerl – “How Not To Be Seen A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File” (2013) 14 mins; copyright Hito Steyerl, image courtesy of Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam
GK: Do you believe the latest worldwide movements and protests are changing how we live and, as a result, our encounters or the way we perceive images? In this sense, what would be the new way of using the transformed image? Or is it merely another image spam?
HS: The new movements are a consequence of very radical changes by liberals and neo-conservatives, which have taken place over the last 40 years. These changes have transformed the way many people see the world – technologically, ideologically, visually and on many other levels. The proliferation of images is one of these aspects. It has both devastating and paradoxical consequences. An image is more than ever defined by its momentum, drive, or quantity: less by its “content,” scarceness or singularity. It becomes meaningful rather by being shared and participated in than by being contemplated at a distance.
On the other hand, I also recently thought that probably a number of protesters during recent protests were digital images that walked across the screen to join in 3D protest. Images are being filtered, blocked, censored online all the time. There are those which are shared and enhanced, but also those who remain completely unseen. Probably quite a number of them have had enough and walk off the screen to protest.
But much more generally, I think that a vast number of contemporary protesters are not living the old online vs. offline divide anymore. They are fully digital creatures, but also navigate 3D offline space. Or, as protesters in Brazil recently put it: “We are the social network”.
GK: In your essay Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life you mention that life is occupied by art and that leads to gentrification or other problems. The reality is that we are, in your words, in the era of mass art production, in which almost everyone has an art project. What are the consequences of this in the long term? How will this transform?
HS: I have no idea. But it is an interesting development. Franco Berardi (Bifo) claimed that 25% of German youth want to be artists. A real challenge: how to base a viable economy on art production? Does it imply the existence of a 1% regime of super rich oligarchs? Or is it simply a short term effect of a bubble economy, which is so unstable that art paradoxically appears to be a rather safe investment? It could be quite short term. It could also be the emergence of a new paradigm of labour: just as specialists or engineers were an important paradigm of the 20th century, artists might become contemporary specialists for event-based attention economies. But it´s more realistic that prospective artists are being lured through years of debt: their ambitions are commodified and their liabilities packaged as garbled financial product. And once they are completely dispossessed, once they have become the “Wretched of the Canvas”, they might have to reassess their situation.
GK: At one Mauerpark karaoke session, a young guy who was about to sing was asked what he does for a living. The answer was that he is an intern. The person who was in charge of the session advised him to be honest, and to feel ok about doing unpaid labour, by stressing that it is what most people in Berlin do: internships, working for free. How do you foresee the future of interns? Will super interns, heroic interns pop-up? Do you believe that the “heroes” of our times are the interns?
HS: I don’t believe in heroes. In heroines, perhaps. After all interns in form of wives, moms and other unpaid (domestic) labourers have existed for a long time. I think that Hannah Arendt‘s distinction between the public and the private sphere still holds many interesting contradictions. The private – or sphere of the oikos – means internment in the house, or the back of the house as Japanese wives call it. It is the sphere of slaves, foreigners, interns and domestic workers of all kind that do not get paid.
GK: An artist friend of mine recently mentioned that she doesn’t want to apply to anything anymore: the burden of applications makes her sad. You also stressed this problem in your lecture performance I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production by describing the contemporary Misérables. Casted, auditioned; the reality that the artist must apply, show, present her/himself to the juries, make the others choose her/him by being the object and the subject at the same time and the burden of submissions… How will the group of, in your words, “educated poor” evolve?
HS: I see this group growing. It is an actor within contemporary protest movements. And it might become a strong social actor because at the end of the day people need sustainable livelihoods. A part of the population is working for free. Perhaps I am optimistic but I don’t think this works in the long term. Or perhaps we are moving full speed into an age of institutionalised serfdom and voluntary slavery in which it will be safer for people to belong to someone who guarantees their most basic needs than to keep fighting it out on the market.
Recently it became clear to me that one of the most successful moves of neoliberalism was to turn debt bondage into a business opportunity. It means people not only have to get into debt to get an education/housing or just to live, but that debt is a profitable market in its own right. The economy moves from providing livelihoods through work to making destitution profitable. Ask Deutsche Bank, who were named by US Congress as one of the main debt pushers to bring about the massive global redistribution from the public to the private sector commonly known as the financial crisis.
Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle in Berlin recently staged a public call for artworks to be exhibited for one day within their premises and hundreds of people lined up for hours on end, carrying canvasses, creating a wonderful PR opportunity. This is what I mean: debt and unemployment create great business opportunities. All these artists queuing up for hours in order to work for free on the faint and improbable hope of being “discovered” within a bizarre Deutsche Bank salon hanging. It´s like singing in an idol contest!
The long lines of artists queuing up reminded me of similar lines of unemployed in the 1930s, lining up around Berlin’s job centres. They were traditional workers though, or employees. Today, they are artists clutching canvasses. And thinking back to what became of those people queuing up back then is kind of sobering. Most probably most became fascists a few years later. We see this kind of development happening in many European countries already, in Hungary where it´s become quite mainstream, but also in Greece. I hope this doesn’t happen, but it is a realistic possibility, if social divides keep increasing.
GK: What do you think about the fact that people, especially in the art scene, are more interested in the videos in white cubes and biennials about human rights violations, suppression or wars than the real thing? For example, they might be interested in an art work about sectarianism in Beirut but not the issue itself.
HS: There are several aspects to this question. First, if this is the case, there is probably a reason. One reason – among many others, including artworld jadedness and cynicism – might also be that generic information about “real” events is usually already ideological, commercial, and framed in a way that perpetuates the framework of the conflict by its conceptual categories.
In contrast, some artworks – especially those of the Beirut school – frame events in an unexpected way, that most importantly include the possibility of not only telling these stories differently, but also that things could be different in the first place. They do so by conjecturing, speculating, fictionalising, over-bureaucratising, and so on. There is a very valid reason for artworks about “real” events to be more interesting than generic news reports. People are interested because they can’t stand vapid and meaningless news jargon any longer.
But another aspect is even more interesting to me: what is the relation of art spaces and battlefields apart from showing works about conflict zones? How are they not only connected by way of potentially showing works about military violence, but by being based on military violence much more structurally? One work of mine called Guards interviewed U.S. army veterans and former police officers who now work as museum officers. Their experiences of combat and law enforcement are now a part of art infrastructure, an underpaid, strongly racialised and mostly disavowed part, which nevertheless is a vital component of museums being included into homeland security infrastructure.
But the military-industrial complex is also involved in financing and sponsoring art spaces to the point at which museums are becoming parts of battlefields in much more direct ways. Is the revenue from the battlefield sponsoring the museum? Or maybe the other way around? If you start looking at this connection, it turns out that this kind of sponsoring exists more or less everywhere.
Is there a statistical coincidence between military invasions, civil war and the explosion of art markets a few years later? How can we think about post-civil war art market booms as indirectly fuelled by the cheap labor of displaced populations? Is the museum a battlefield?
Göksu Kunak is a writer based in Berlin. Besides working in the editorial team of quarterly interview magazine mono.kultur, she is one of the team members of Apartment Project Berlin. Göksu has contributed to several magazines and blogs such as frieze d/e, Ibraaz, Freunde von Freunden, crap=good, e-skop, The Carton, Don’t Panic Berlin and wecelebrate. Concurrently, she is working on her book project abandonedxmastrees
Who does the lamp communicate with? The mountain? The fox?
Walter Benjamin
What if things could speak? What would they tell us? Or are they speaking already and
we just don’t hear them? And who is going to translate them?
Ask Walter Benjamin. In fact he started asking those quite bizarre questions already in 1916 in a text called: “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”. Of all weird texts by Benjamin, this is definitely the weirdest. In this text he develops the concept of a language of things. According to Benjamin this language of things is mute, it is magical and its medium is material community. Thus, we have to assume that there is a language of stones, pans and cardboard boxes. Lamps speak as if inhabited by spirits. Mountains and foxes are involved in discourse. High-rise buildings chat with each other. Paintings gossip. There exists even, if you will, besides the language communicated by telephone a language of the telephone itself. And, according to Benjamin’s triumphant conclusion, nobody is responsible for this silent cacophony but G-D himself.
But, you may ask: what is the point of this eccentric plot? Lets pretend that the point is translation. Because obviously, the language of things has to be translated in order to become intelligible for those of us who are dumb for its silent splendour. But the idea of translation, which Benjamin has in mind, is a completely different concept of translation than the one we are used to. Because, from the most ordinary to the most sophisticated translation theories, one thing is usually taken for granted: that translation takes place between different human languages or the cultures, which are supposed to nurture them. Thus, languages are assumed to be an expression of different cultures and nations. This combination is hastily identified as the political aspect of translation and even language as such. And on this level standard translation theory is always already implicated in political practice and governmental strategies.
But Benjamin’s idea of translation – at least in this text – boldly ignores this obvious and perhaps banal feature of translation. And thus, an entirely different concept of a politics of translation emerges. Instead of national languages, which are only mentioned passingly in this text, he focuses on what I would call languages of practice: the language of law, technology, art, the language of music and sculpture. And more importantly: translation doesn’t take place between them, but within them. That is: between the language of things and the language of men, at the base of language itself. Thus, a few very important modifications are introduced with regard to traditional translation theory: firstly language is defined not by common origin, belonging or nation, but by common practice. Secondly, translation primarily takes place within language not between languages. And thirdly, translation addresses the relationship of human language and thing language.
Since Benjamin was perfectly aware of the romantic translation theories, which focussed on concepts like the national spirit, his feigned ignorance has to be seen as more then a bold political statement. It is a blatant declaration of irrelevance of culturalist approaches. Instead of nations and cultures, his perspective on translation takes matter and God as first reference points. And this theologico-material concept of translation radically shifts the definition of a politics of translation. It does not hover around organicist notions of community and culture. But it bluntly locates translation at the core of a much more general practical question: how do humans relate to the world?
Instead of a politics of the original content – like the nation state, the culture, the Volksgeist or national language – Benjamin argues for a politics of form. And the form will decide about the politics of language as such. Potestas and Potentia
But what exactly are the political processes involved in this type of translation? Lets look at it more closely. Two languages are mediated within this process. The language of things is an inherently productive language – according to Benjamin because it contains the residue of the word of God, which created the world by talking. On the other hand there is the human language, which can either try to receive, amplify and vocalise this language by naming things, or else classify, categorise, fix, and identify its components in what Benjamin calls the language of judgement.
If we were to map this juxtaposition on more recent debates, we could also say that translation can take place within the two different spheres known as power and force – or more pompously potestas and potentia. While the language of things is full with potential, the language of humans can either try to engage in this potential or become a tool of force. And thus translation takes place in the mode of creation as well as of force, and usually both modes are mixed with each other.
And thus, politics are played out in the forms in which the translation between the language of things and the language of men takes place. In the worst case, this relationship can take on the form of an epistemological dictatorship. That humans decided to rule over things and to disregard their message led to the disaster at Babylon. To start listening to them again would be the first step towards a coming common language, which is not rooted in the hypocrite presumption of a unity of humankind, but in a much more general material community. In this case, translation does not silence the language of things but amplifies it potential of change.
It is now clear, that in this perspective translation is highly political, because it directly addresses issues of power within language formation. It concerns the relationship of humans to the world as a whole. It addresses the emergence of practice and the languages, which correspond to it. Thus, Benjamin relates translation directly to power – by looking at the form of the translation, not its content. The respective form of translation will decide, if and how the language of things with its inherent forces and energies and its productive powers is subjected to the power/knowledge schemes of human forms of government or not. It decides, whether human language creates ruling subjects and subordinate objects or whether it engages with the energies of the material world.
While this may still sound completely unpractical for anybody, the contrary is the case. One might even say, that most human practice is constantly engaged in this process of translation. Let me give you now one very obvious example of such a translation from the language of things into the one of humans. And that is the example of the documentary form. The documentary form as translation
A documentary image obviously translates the language of things into the language of humans. On the one hand it is closely anchored within the realm of material reality. But it also participates in the language of humans, and especially the language of judgement, which objectifies the thing in question, fixes its meaning and constructs stable categories of knowledge to understand it. It is half visual, half vocal, it is at once receptive and productive, inquisitive and explanatory, it participates in the exchange of things but also freezes the relations between them within visual and conceptual still images. Things articulate themselves within the documentary forms, but documentary forms also articulate things.
And it is also obvious, how Benjamin’s politics of translation functions with regard to the documentary image. In documentary articulations, things can either be treated as objects, as evidence for human plots, or they can be subjected to the language of judgement and thus overruled. I have once referred to this condition as documentality, that is the way in which documents govern and are implicated in creating power/knowledge. Or else, the forces, which organise the relationships between them, can be channelled in view of their transformation. The documentary form can also let itself be seduced and even overwhelmed by the magic of the language of things – although we will see, that this is not necessarily a good idea. But basically, this is how the relation between potestas and potentia is articulated within the documentary form. It is the relationship of productivity vs. verification, of the asignifying vs. the signified, of material reality vs. their idealist interpretation.
But let me make one thing very clear: to engage in the language of things in the realm of the documentary form is not equivalent to using realist forms in representing them. It is not about representation at all, but about actualising whatever the things have to say in the present. And to do so is not a matter of realism, but rather of relationalism – it is a matter of presencing and thus transforming the social, historical and also material relations, which determine things. And if we focus on this aspect of presencing instead of representation, we also leave behind the endless debate about representation, which has left documentary theory stuck in a dead end. The power of things
But why, you may ask, is Benjamin so in love with the language of things in the first place? Why should anything that things have to say be so special? Lets simply disregard the reason, which Benjamin himself gives in his text: that the word of God shines forth through the mute magic of things. While this may sound poetical, it is rather an expression of Benjamin’s pompous perplexity, then a convincing case.
Lets instead remember the role that material objects took on in Benjamin’s thought later on, when he started deciphering modernity mainly by sifting through the wake of trash it left behind. Modest and even abject objects became hieroglyphs in whose dark prism the social relations lay congealed and in fragments. They were understood as nodes, in which the tensions of a historical moment materialised in a flash of awareness or grotesquely twisted into the commodity fetish. In this perspective, a thing is never just something, but a fossil in which a constellation of forces is petrified. According to Benjamin, things are never just inert objects, passive items or lifeless shucks at the disposal of the documentary gaze. But they consist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, which keep being exchanged. While this opinion borders on magical thought, according to which things are invested with supernatural powers, it is also a classical materialist one. Because the commodity, too, is not understood as a simple object, but a condensation of social forces. Thus things can be interpreted as conglomerates of desires, wishes, intensities and power relations. And a thing language, which is thus charged with the energy of matter can also exceed description and become productive. It can move beyond representation and become creative in the sense of a transformation of the relations, which define it. While Benjamin seems to hope for this kind of event, he also foresees a darker possibility of its realisation, which he calls conjuration.1 If there is so to speak a white magic of things, bristling with creativity and power, there is also a black one, charged with the dark powers of the taboo, illusion and the fetish. The power of conjuration tries to tap into the forces of things without proper reflection, or as Benjamin calls it: without interruption by the inexpressive.2 And it is on these unmediated and uninterrupted chaotic powers, that capitalist commodification and general resentment thrives. And to come back to the documentary mode in which those forces of conjuration can be unleashed by as well: propaganda, revisionism and relativism are all examples, of how conjuration – that is creativity without reflexive interruption – functions within the documentary form. They engage with the forces of resentment, hysteria, individual interest and fear, which are all powerful, unmediated urges. But they do so to speak without proper translation, and thus contaminate all modes of communication with their malignant drive. The non-public public sphere
We have seen several modes of how an internal politics of the translation affects the documentary form. How do humans relate to things? What does creativity mean in this regard? And why is it not necessarily a good idea, when it comes to documentarism? But there is also an external aspect, which is relevant for the discussion of the documentary form as translation. And this aspect addresses the documentary form as an example of a transnational language of practice. Because, although the documentary form is based on translation, in a sense it also seems to have moved beyond translation. Its standard narratives are recognised all over the world and its forms are almost independent of national of cultural difference. Precisely because they operate so closely on material reality, they are intelligible wherever this reality is relevant.
This aspect was recognised as early as the 20es, when Dziga Vertov euphorically praised the qualities of the documentary form. In the preface of his film „The man with the movie camera“ he proclaimed, that documentary forms were able to organise visible facts in a truly international absolute language, which could establish an optical connection between the workers of the world. He imagines a sort of communist visual adamic language, which should not only inform or entertain, but also organise its viewers. It would not only transmit messages, but connect ist audience to an universal circulation of energies which literally shot through their nervous systems. By articulating visible facts, Vertov wanted to shortcircuit his audience with the language of things itself, with a pulsating symphony of matter.
In a sense, his dream has become true, if only under the rule of global information capitalism. A transnational documentary jargon is now connecting people within global media networks. The standardised language of newsreels with its economy of attention based on fear, the racing time of flexible production, and hysteria is as fluid and affective, as immediate and biopolitical as Vertov could have imagined. It creates global public spheres whose participants are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual excitement and anxiety. Thus the documentary form is now more potent then ever, and in a sense precisely because it conjures up the most spectacular aspects of the language of things and amplifies their power. At this point I would like to come back to the cautious remark made earlier: to tap into the language of things is not always a good idea and its potential is not necessarily a potential for emancipation. The asignificant flows of compressed information translate without interruption and reflection. Their forms completely ignore the different languages of things. If they are not culturally specific, they are not specific to different material realities and practices either. They only translate the requirements of corporate and national media machines.
But does this form of documentary translation have any other political potential then the one for propaganda and product placement? Yes, and here we are back to the point of the beginning. The documentary form is no national language and not culturally specific either. Thus it is able to sustain non-national public spheres and therefore also the seeds for a political arena beyond national and cultural formations. But at the moment this sphere is entirely controlled by the dynamics of a general privatisation. It is as Paolo Virno has recently argued: a non-public public sphere.
But this does not necessarily have to be the case. And we see in experimental documentary production, that different relations to things and the social conditions in which we relate to them are possible. The reason is very simple. The rise of importance of global documentary jargons rests on the material base of information capitalism, which is defined by digitalisation and flexibility. And any documentary form, which really articulates the language of those things, also articulates precisely these conditions, that is the conditions of precarious symbolic production. The new documentary forms of production with home computers and unconventional forms of distribution thus can be understood as articulations, which reveal the outline of new forms of social composition. This form of image production is largely based on digital technology and thus tends to merge more and more with other fields of mass symbolic production. They represent so to speak a negative of a coming public sphere, which has to be developed, in order to become functionable. This form of the public has left behind its entanglement with local and national mythologies and is characterised by similar precarious and often transnational forms of work and production. And the political articulation or social composition of these mostly still dispersed and wildly heterogenous points of view and groups is anticipated in the complex montages and constellations of contemporary documentary experimental forms.
But again: their politics are not determined by content but by form. If they just try to mimick the corporate standards of the large capitalist and national affective machines, they will also to a certain extent take over their politics. As Benjamin would put it: their modes of translation are at once to immediate and not immediate enough. Only if documentary forms translate the incongruities, the inegalities, the rapid change of speed, the disarticulation and dizzying rhythms, the dislocation and the arythmic pulsations of time, if they mortify the vital drives of matter and deaden them by inexpressiveness, will they engage with the contemporary community of matter. Only if this form of translation is being achieved, will the documentary articulation reflect and thus amplify the language of those things, which are dragged across the globe on road to commodification at neck breaking speed or again tossed away and discarded as useless junk. And by reflecting on the conditions of production in which this documentary translation is being achieved, new forms of a-national public spheres and postcapitalist production circuits might emerge.
Obviously, whatever I said does not apply only to the documentary form but also to other languages of practice. One might make a similar argument about the practice of curating, which could translate the language of things into aesthetic relationalities. And we have also seen these past decades, how the fetish of the art object has been deconstructed and traced back to social and other relations. But in this field, a cautionary remark applies as well: to simply represent those relations in the art field is not enough. Translating the language of things is not about eliminating objects, nor about inventing collectivities, which are fetishised instead. It is rather about creating unexpected articulations, which do not represent precarious modes of living or the social as such, but rather about presencing precarious, risky, at once bold and preposterous articulations of objects and their relations, which still could become models for future types of connection.
If Benjamin’s concept of translation could tell us one thing, it is that translation is still deeply political, if we literally put it to practice. Only that we need to shift our attention from its content to its form. We need to shift the focus from the languages of belonging to the language of practice. We should stop to expect that it should tell us about essence but instead about transformation. And we need to remember, that the practice of translation only makes sense, if it leeds to much needed alternative forms of connection, communication, and relations – and not of new ways of innovating culture and nation.
—
1 Walter Benjamin, ” Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, Selected Writings 1913 – 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press (Bellknap), 1996, pp. 297 – 360.
In speaking about the critique of institution, the problem we ought to consider is the opposite one: the institution of critique. Is there anything like an institution of critique and what does it mean? Isn’t it pretty absurd to argue that something like this exists, at a moment, when critical cultural institutions are undoubtedly being dismantled, underfunded, subjected to the demands of a neoliberal event economy and so on? However, I would like to pose the question on a much more fundamental level. The question is: what is the internal relationship between critique and institution? What sort of relation exists between the institution and its critique or on the other hand – the institutionalisation of critique? And what is the historical and political background for this relationship?
To get a clearer picture of this relationship we must first consider the function of criticism in general. On a very general level, certain political, social or individual subjects are formed through the critique of institution. The bourgeois subjectivity as such was formed through such a process of critique, and encouraged to exit the self-inflicted immaturity, to quote Kants famous aphorism. This critical subjectivity was of course ambivalent, since it entailed the use of reason only in those situations we would consider as apolitical today, namely in the deliberation of abstract problems, but not the criticism of authority. Critique produces a subject which should make use of his reason in public circumstances, but not in private ones. While this sounds emancipatory, the opposite is the case. The criticism of authority is according to Kant futile and private. Freedom consists in accepting that authority should not be questioned. Thus, this form of criticism produces a very ambivalent and governable subject, it is in fact a tool of governance just as much as it is the tool of resistance as which it is often understood. But the bourgeois subjectivity which was thus created was very efficient. And in a certain sense, institutional criticism is integrated into that subjectivity, something which Marx and Engels explicitly refer to in their Communist manifesto, namely as the capacity of the bourgeoisie to abolish and to melt down outdated institutions, everything useless and petrified, as long as the general form of authority itself isn’t threatened. The bourgeois class had formed through a limited, so to speak institutionalised critique and also maintained and reproduced itself through this form of institutional critique. And thus, critique had become an institution in itself, a governmental tool which produces streamlined subjects.
But there is also another form of subjectivity which is produced by criticism and also institutional criticism. For example, most obviously the political subject of French citizens was formed through an institutional critique of the French monarchy. This institution was eventually abolished and even beheaded. In this process, an appeal was already realised that Karl Marx was to launch much later: the weapons of critique should be replaced by the critique of weapons. In this vein one could say that the proletariat as a political subject was produced through the criticism of the bourgeoisie as an institution. This second form produces probably just as ambivalent subjectivites, but there is a crucial difference: it abolishes the institution which it criticises instead of reforming or improving it.
So in this sense institutional critique serves as a tool of subjectivation of certain social groups or political subjects. And which sort of different subjects does it produce? Let’s take a look at different modes of institutional critique within the artfield of the last decades.
To simplify a complex development: the first wave of institutional criticism in the art sphere in the seventies questioned the authoritarian role of the cultural institution. It challenged the authority which had accumulated in cultural institutions within the framework of the nation state. Cultural institutions such as museums had taken on a complex governmental function. This role has been brillantly described by Benedict Anderson in his seminal work Imagined Communities, when he analyzes the role of the museum in the formation of colonial nation states. In his view, the museum, in creating a national past, retroactively also created the origin and foundation of the nation and that was its main function. But this colonial situation, as in many other cases, points at the structure of the cultural institution within the nation state in general. And this situation, the authoritarian legitimation of the nation state by the cultural institution through the construction of a history, a patrimony, a heritage, a canon and so on, was the one that the first waves of institutional critique set out to criticize in the 1970ies.
Their legitimation in doing so was an ultimately political one. Most nation states considered themselves as democracies which were founded on the political mandate of the people or the citizens. In that sense, it was easy to argue that any national cultural institution should reflect this self-definition and that any national cultural institution should thus be founded on similar mechanisms. If the political national sphere was – at least in theory – based on democratic participation, why should the cultural national sphere and it´s construction of histories and canons be any different? Why shouldn’t the cultural institution be at least as representative as parliamentary democracy? Why shouldn’t it include for example women in its canon, if women were at least in theory accepted in parliament? In that sense the claims that the first wave of institutional critique voiced were of course founded in contemporary theories of the public sphere, and based on an interpretation of the cultural institution as a potential public sphere. But implicitly they relied on two fundamental assumptions: First, this public sphere was implicitly a national one because it was modeled after the model of representative parliamentarism. The legitimation of institutional critique was based precisely on this point. Since the political system of the nation state is at least in theory representative of its citizens, why shoudn’t a national cultural institution be? Their legitimation rested on this analogy which was also more often than not rooted in material circumstances, since most cultural institutions were funded by the state. Thus, this form of instutional critique relied on a model based on the structure of political participation within the nation state and a fordist economy, in which taxes could be collected for such purposes.
Institutional critique of this period related to these phenomena in different ways. Either by radically negating institutions alltogether, by trying to build alternative institutions or by trying to be included into mainstream ones. Just as in the political arena, the most effective strategy was a combination of the second and third model, which claimed for example the inclusion into the cultural institution of minorities or disadvantaged majorities such as women. In that sense institutional critique functioned like the related paradigms of multiculturalism, reformist feminism, ecological movements and so on. It was a new social movement within the arts scene.
But during the next wave of institutional criticism which happened in the Nineties, the situation was a bit different. It wasn’t so much different from the point of view of the artists or those who tried to challenge and criticize the institutions which, in their view, were still authoritarian. Rather, the main problem was that they had been overtaken by a right-wing form of bourgeois institutional criticism, precisely the one which Marx and Engels described and which melts down everything which is solid. Thus, the claim that the cultural institution ought to be a public sphere was no longer unchallenged. The bourgoisie had sort of decided that in their view a cultural institution was primarily an economic one and as such had to be subjected to the laws of the market. The belief that cultural institutions ought to provide a representative public sphere broke down with Fordism, and it is not by chance that, in a sense, institutions which still adhere to the ideal to create a public sphere have been in place for a much longer time in places where Fordism is still hanging on. Thus, the second wave of institutional critique was in a sense unilateral since claims were made which at that time had at least partially lost their legitimative power.
The next factor was the relative transformation of the national cultural sphere which mirrored the transformation of the political cultural sphere. First of all, the nation state is no longer the only framework of cultural representation – there are also supranational bodies like the EU. And secondly, their mode of political representation is very complicated and only partly representative. It represents is constituencies rather symbolically than materially. To use a German differentiation of the word representation: Sie stellen sie eher dar, als sie sie vertreten. Thus, why should a cultural institution materially represent its constituency? Isn’t it somehow sufficient to symbolically represent it? And although the production of a national cultural identity and heritage is still important, it is not only important for the interior or social cohesion of the nation, but also very much to provide it with international selling points in an increasingly globalised cultural economy. Thus, in a sense, a process was initiated which is still going on today. That is the process of the cultural or symbolic integration of critique into the institution or rather on the surface of the institution without any material consequences within the institution itself or its organisation. This mirrors a similar process on the political level: the symbolic integration, for example of minorities, while keeping up political and social inequality, the symbolic representation of constituencies into supranational political bodies and so on. In this sense the bond of material representation was broken and replaced with a more symbolic one.
This shift in representational techniques by the cultural institution also mirrored a trend in criticism itself, namely the shift from a critique of institution towards a critique of representation. This trend, which was informed by Cultural Studies, feminist and postcolonial epistemologies, somehow continued in the vein of the previous institutional critique by comprehending the whole sphere of representation as a public sphere, where material representation ought to be implemented, for example in form of the unbiased and proportional display of images of black persons or women. This claim somehow mirrors the confusion about representation on the political plane, since the realm of visual representation is even less representative in the material sense than a supranational political body. It doesn’t represent constituencies or subjectivities but creates them, it articulates bodies, affects and desires. But this is not exactly how it was comprehended, since it was rather taken for a sphere where one has to achieve a hegemony, a so to speak majority on the level of symbolic representation, in order to achieve an improvement of a diffuse area, which hovers between politics and economy, between the state and the market, between the subject as citizen and the subject as consumer, and between representation and representation. Since criticism could no longer establish clear antagonisms in this sphere, it started to fragment and to atomize it and to support a politics of identity which led to the fragmentation of public spheres, markets, to the culturalisation of identity and so on.
This representational critique pointed at another aspect, namely the unmooring of the seemingly stable relation between the cultural institution and the nation state. Unfortunately for institutional critics of that period, a model of purely symbolic representation gained legitimacy in this field as well. Institutions no longer claimed to materially represent the nation state and its constituency, but only claimed to represent it symbolically. And thus, while one could say that the former institutional critics were either integrated into the institution or not, the second wave of institutional criticism was integrated not into the institution but into representation as such. Thus, again, a janusfaced subject was formed. This subject was interested in more diversity in representation, less homogeneous than its predecessor. But in trying to create this diversity, it also created niche markets, specialised consumer profiles, and an overall spectacle of „difference“ – without effectuating much structural change.
But which conditions are prevailing today, during what might tentatively be called an extension of the second wave of institutional critique? Artistic strategies of institutional critique have become increasingly complex. They have fortunately developed far beyond the the ethnographic urge to indiscriminately drag underprivileged or unusual constituencies into museums, even against their will – just for the sake of „representation“. They include detailed investigations, such as for example Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, which connects a phenomenology of new cultural industries, like the Bilbao Guggenheim, with documents of other institutional constraints, such as those imposed by the WTO or other global economic organisations. They have learned to walk the tightrope between the local and the global without becoming either indigenist and ethnographic, or else unspecific and snobbish. Unfortunately this cannot be said of most cultural institutions which would have to react to the same challenge of having to perform both within a national cultural sphere and an increasingly globalising market.
If you look at them from one side, then you will see that they are under pressure from indigenist, nationalist and nativist claims. If you look from the other side, then you will see that they are under pressure from neoliberal institutional critique, that is under the pressure of the market. Now the problem is – and this is indeed a very widespread attitude – that when a cultural institution comes under pressure from the market, it tries to retreat into a position which claims that it is the duty of the nation state to fund it and to keep it alive. The problem with that position is that it is an ultimately protectionist one, that it ultimately reinforces the construction of national public spheres and that under this perspective the cultural institution can only be defended in the framework of a new leftist attitude which tries to retreat into the ruins of a demolished national welfare state and its cultural shells and to defend them against all intruders. That is – it tends to defend itself ultimately from the perspective of its other enemies, namely the nativist and indigenist critics of institution, who want to transform it into a sort of sacralised ethnopark. But there is no going back to the old fordist nation state protectionism with its cultural nationalism, at least not in any emancipatory perspective.
On the other hand, when the cultural institution is attacked from this nativist, indigenist perspective, it also tries to defend itself by appealing to universal values like freedom of speech or the cosmopolitanism of the arts, which are so utterly commodified as either shock effects or the display of enjoyable cultural difference that they hardly exist beyond this form of commodification. Or it might even earnestly try to reconstruct a public sphere within market conditions, for example with the massive temporary spectacles of criticism funded let’s say by the German Bundeskulturstiftung. But under the ruling economic circumstances, the main effect achieved is to integrate the critics into precarity, into flexibilised working structures within temporary project structures and freelancer work within cultural industries. And in the worst cases, those spectacles of criticism are the decoration of large enterprises of economic colonialism such as in the colonisation of Eastern Europe by the same institutions which are producing the conceptual art in these regions.
If the first wave of institutional critique, criticism produced integration into the institution, the second one only achieved integration into representation. But in the third phase the only integration which seems to be easily achieved is the one into precarity. And in this sense we can nowadays answer the question concerning the function of the institution of critique as follows: while critical institutions are being dismantled by neoliberal institutional criticism, this produces an ambivalent subject which develops multiple strategies for dealing with its dislocation. It is on the one side being adapted to the needs of ever more precarious living conditions. On the other, there seems to have hardly ever been more need for institutions which could cater to the new needs and desires that this constituency will create.
Many recent works of art hold undoubtedly close ties to anthropology, resembling reverse ethnography or neo-ethnography, taking the form of research that embraces anthropology’s sociological methods, adopting documentary techniques or borrowing from such genres as the travelogue. Anthropology, on the other hand, is currently engaged in renewed debates over the discipline’s roots as reflected in its contemporary “politics.” These controversies, involving politics, ethics (both disciplinary and individual), and image strategies, were sparked by the death of “human terrain” researchers in Afghanistan—anthropologists embedded with the U.S. military to help tacticians in the field navigate local customs and codes.1 Claiming not to militarize anthropology but to anthropologize forms of violence, these practitioners have eroded a border that, given the colonial roots of the discipline, was before only notionally in place.
This is the first in a series of articles concerned with a specific site of convergence between contemporary anthropology and contemporary artistic practice, namely, their concern for boundaries, whether territorial, epistemological or conceptual; and of which the question of collaboration and entanglement of forms of knowledge production (and operation) is only one aspect. Certainly, many works of art that appropriate elements of anthropology are doing so in awareness of the history of the discipline, but many also assume its problems. Anthropologists, on the other hand, as Hal Foster observed some time ago, often look with a certain envy at artists, and the capacity of aesthetic strategies to relate to, and particularly to transgress, boundaries.2 But Foster’s critique remains within the representational logic of the self/other dichotomy, and consequently he is concerned with the problematic of identification and the question of either “too much” or “too little” distance. Much of the discussion since has remained within these parameters, leaving aside the historical nature of aesthetic transgression, that is, the way modern boundaries are established as well as crossed through the use of images and their placement within artistic strategies.
Which borders, however? And how does transgression affect them? These questions are of some urgency, particularly with regard to art that we perceive to be “politically engaged.” The transgression of political boundaries has largely been perceived as a form of negation, one that could effectively be used to build up an oppositional position. This approach to transgression could be termed “dialectic,” since it mobilizes that which is excluded in a regime of inclusion and exclusion. But this mobilization must have as its prime target those representations that are employed to legitimize such exclusions.
There are two familiar problems with the “dialectic” approach. One is that, when taken to be an exception, the critique often retains, or even confirms, the paradigms on which the original law or boundary is modeled. The other problem is that the strategy applies only to borders modeled on dichotomies (such as linguistic binaries) that are at least theoretically symmetrical, constituted by a de jure symmetry that can therefore be politically claimed where a de facto asymmetry rules. This applies to the borders of the modern disciplinary regime, such as the nation state and its institutions, or to gender division, to name but a few. The “modulated” boundaries in the “society of control,” however, pose a different challenge, for not only do they incorporate plurality effectively, they are scattered, evasive, and themselves transgressive, mobilizing the power of images by shifting the static logic of representation to the dynamic and the performative.3
Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cube, 1974, baked enamel on aluminum.
A Sleight of Hand
An understanding of the operational modes of both types of borders—borders modeled on theoretically symmetrical dichotomies, and “modulated” boundaries—depends on a grasp of their historical genealogy. Across several fields, an overwhelming amount of the critical engagement with modernity and modernism in the past decades has questioned the conceptual separations on which modernity is modeled, separations which constitute modernity’s sources of authority. If we are, as Bruno Latour claims, no longer able to be modern and yet not able to be anything else (which also characterizes much of the situation in the arts), this is certainly connected to the erosion of the power of the first type of borders, those modeled on more or less static conceptual dichotomies.4 With regard to the technologies of power they have enabled, however, the “rationality” of these dichotomies so crucial for the self-understanding of modernity has always had a mythical side to it, in which the first type of border division is always already connected to the second. This concerns the original separation on which any rational dichotomy must be built, based on a paradoxical inclusion of that which it excludes, thus performing a dialectical twist or proper reversal, which the work of rationalization must later mask in a magical sleight of hand.
This is the prevailing question in the context of the political debates on the “exception as rule.”5 However, it is less the question of sovereignty than the “sleight of hand” that interests me here, as this is what potentially has the furthest-reaching consequences for the role aesthetics holds in both transgressing and constituting the modern border-space. This sleight of hand is what I wish to discuss here under the guise of the “rationalist veil.” Any sleight of hand, as is well known, relies on the complicity of its audience; the “rationalist veil,” as the belief in the “rationality” of modern power as modern myth, is what constitutes this complicity. It places rationality always already on the side of the moderns, rendering its power a self-fulfilling prophecy—a necessity exempt from any qualification beyond just what is rational and what is not. If we are no longer modern, but still unable to be anything else, it is perhaps because the residual “rationalist veil” constitutes a form of continuity that binds the present to the modern past.
In what follows, I turn to the work of anthropologists Michael Taussig, Johannes Fabian, and later, Bruno Latour, to sound out this proposition. These authors prove especially helpful because of the particular ways they relate to modernity against the backdrop of struggles within their own field(s), of imperialism and colonial heritage, and of their concern for how conceptual dichotomies have become actual boundaries. Their work touches upon aesthetic questions in different ways, directly and indirectly, but even where the place of aesthetics is left almost entirely unacknowledged, as in the work of Bruno Latour, there is much ground offered for a historically grounded discussion of aesthetic strategies in the modern border topography, particularly with regard to its paradoxical reversals.
What I wish to suggest with the term “rationalist veil,” however, is not merely another gesture in the great machine of critique, an unmasking of the rational as really irrational, for example, or an embrace of the irrational that positions it against modern rationality. The point is to sound out historical layers within the modern rationale—the emancipatory promise entailed in the triumph of reason over superstition and the “irrationality” of religious violence—in an examination of both its rationalizing of what it rendered irrational in the first place, and its production of that which is exempt from rational scrutiny withoutbeing a danger to the rational order, on which the order in fact relies. The point is to locate the smooth shifts and displacements between such seemingly distinct, even irreconcilable categories. The “rationalist veil” is a privileged site of a particular modern practice aimed at creating continuity, blending systemic knowledge, belief, and the power of imagery.
Insofar as art has developed a political consciousness vis-à-vis these problematics, it has struggled with its place and participation in the logic of boundaries. Modern art, for instance, variously problematizes the line of distinction between the rational and irrational; through negation, affirmation, and dialectic exposures, it participates in the common conceptions of what constitutes the rational and the irrational. Alongside the apparent advocacy of the rational in art (e.g., the iconoclasm of modern architecture), there was equally a mobilization of irrationality in movements as diverse as Romanticism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Primitivism, and Art Brut. Appearances notwithstanding, those strands of modern art that embraced rationality for their own distinct purposes also, upon closer investigation, reveal an essentially “irrational” core. Rosalind Krauss’ book The Optical Unconscious, to give just one example, makes such a case for High Modernism.6 In recent exhibition-making and critique, one often encounters Sol LeWitt’s statement that “conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.” Suggesting a possible reconciliation between the rational and irrational, the notion seems to appeal to contemporary artists, in particular to those contributing to a renewed interest in the obscure and the occult, for whom this reconciliation is a formal loophole through which one can remain formally agreeable without resorting to subjective mythology.
Jimmie Durham, Xitle and Spirit , 2007. Volcanic stone on automobile, 200 x 350 x 160 cm.
Primitivism
A paradigmatic case is the “Primitivism” debate that had such a profound impact on the course of recent art history following the critique of the “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” exhibition at MoMA in 1984. It is worth recalling how influential that exhibition became through the criticism it sparked. It informed the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1989, where the criticism was renewed and sharpened, and without which neither documenta X nor documenta 11 would have been possible in their scope. The debate evolving around the MoMA exhibition exposed the very category of the “primitive” as a Western fantasy and master narrative projected onto its colonial others firmly situated in a spatial and temporal outside. The exhibition took place at a time when this category could no longer pass uncontested. In the preceding decade, art had increasingly taken its cue from theoretical attacks on modernity’s system of imaginary oppositions. The notorious dualisms had already been under attack.Feminism, queer studies, and postcolonial theory, among others, drew attention to just how these (often linguistically rooted) dualisms resulted in confining border regimes. Whether it be children, the insane, “primitives,” the colonial other, women or gays, the differences monitored by the border regime and its respective institutions in each case fundamentally relied on inscribing and subsequently rationalizing the “irrational.” In a similar pattern of “inclusive exclusion,” the “primitive” was exposed as subjected to a dialectics that simultaneously split and locked the subject rendered “other” within a confined place.
In her book on cinema as modern magic, Rachel Moore makes the distinction between three kinds of primitivisms, with each corresponding to a different level in the modern border topography.7 The first sees primitivism as a neutral term denoting a lack of sophistication, an “artlessness” which, in the hands of modern artists, also becomes an effect. The second refers to primitivism as the use of artifacts or the appropriation of forms from non-Western “native” people. In the third sense primitivism refers to the “repressed” of modernity. This is where irrationality develops a rationality of its own; nonetheless, it must stay symptomatic, as it is always a compensatory expression, a “displacement.” The third primitivism, however, exceeds the aesthetic by far and instead refers to a persistent modern boundary in which the question of binary rationales is always already turned on its head. This is the Western mythology of savagery as a self-fulfilling prophecy, a “savage imagination” of repressed contents projected onto the “other” that not only legitimizes, but necessitates terror in building order on disorder. This primitivism played itself out on the colonial frontier. The colonial frontier is a site where the original separation of building order on disorder takes place. On the frontier, rationality thus acts through irrationality, in a paradoxical intertwinement of systematic arbitrariness, where power is the power to induce separation, physically and socially. The frontier exchanges means for ends, things for people, terror for law, but these exchanges happen in the name of people and the law.
While the three primitivisms listed above have been the subject of much work and debate, it has historically been difficult to get beyond the problem of “projection” in the case of the third. This is the limit established by the “dialectic” approach, except that here a simple dialectics gazes only into mirror images, into self-fulfilling mythologies, or into the “irrational.” Thus much work has dealt with the problem of “otherness.” However, it is precisely the frontier as the original separation and, thus, as boundary paradigm of modernity, that needs to be grasped aesthetically, if it is no longer the rationalist boundaries that are at stake, but their irrational underside. Not unlike the evasive boundaries of global capitalism today, the colonial frontier cannot be represented by taking one’s distance from it. It seems to draw any representation, any image, into its logic, thus reproducing itself. But if images hold such a privileged place in the “original separation,” what accounts for this history? Is there any history of the frontier in the arsenal of modern imagery? It is to be found in the modern understanding and positioning of images themselves, I suggest—but in order to dwell on this point, the frontier needs further attention.
King Leopold’s Rationalist Veil
The first mass human-rights movement in the first years of the twentieth century makes for an interesting case. It was what today can be considered global in scale, and it involved not merely reports, but photographic evidence of crimes reproduced in widely circulating newspapers in both the industrialized world and in the colonies; thus was initiated a form of activism in which both the evidence and the effects of empathy produced by pictures of atrocities for the first time occupied a central place, thus mobilizing public opinion in novel ways, instituting the mediascape of modern democracies. I am referring to the protest movement against King Leopold’s regime in his private colonial possession, the Congo Free State, where he had set up a forced-labor system for the extraction of the natural resources of the Congo, in particular rubber, necessary for, among other things, automobile and bicycle tires. The death toll associated with the rule of the Belgian King, “enthroned” at the infamous 1884 Berlin conference, is today estimated to have been between five and thirty million people.
The protest movement had its origin in the port of Antwerp, where a British then-clerk named Edward Morel confirmed the practice of slavery in the Congo based on trade records. The campaign against slavery led by Morel proved successful largely thanks to the eyewitness accounts of British diplomat Roger Casement, who had been sent to the Congo to assess the human rights situation, not least because the British government objected to Leopold’s de facto trade monopoly. The Casement Report was delivered in 1904 and sparked a public outcry as well as petitions to Parliament that became instrumental in turning the Congo into a “normal” colony four years later, which was then the limit of the imaginable.
In clarifying the wicked dialectics established by the “rationalist veil,” Leopold and the activism of the Congo Reform Association are of particular interest for three reasons. The first concerns the veil of deception set up by Leopold himself, which, until Casement’s report, had systematically spoiled attempts to reveal the truth of his corporate terror regime. Under the guise of the International African Association, ostensibly a scientific and philanthropic association, Leopold represented his Congo activity as a civilizing mission all the way up to the end. He was a gifted public relations manager. In the book that in 1998 ended the “Great Forgetting” concerning the Congo atrocities since it had become a “normal” colony, Adam Hochschild reports that there is no evidence of a single journalist, diplomat or even outright opponent ever leaving a personal audience with the King without becoming complicit in his veil of deceptions and lies.8 That veil, however, was operative only because its rationale conformed with the practice and beliefs of the day; its real scandal was that it was private terror and profit, not the state, which then as today was the impersonal guarantor of reason and rationality.
The second lesson to be drawn from Leopold’s case concerns aesthetic consequences and responses to “the veil,” and their historical resonance. In his groundbreaking 1987 studyShamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, anthropologist Michael Taussig examines the economy of terror and the colonial “space of death” in the Putumayo region in Colombia, where Casement was sent in 1906 after his engagement with the Congo, once again to report on atrocities connected to the rubber economy.9 The civilizing order brought about by the original settlement of British rubber barons in the Putuyamo is described by Taussig as
a society shrouded in an order so orderly that its chaos was far more intense than anything that had preceded it—a death space in the land of the living where torture’s certain uncertainty fed the great machinery of the arbitrariness of power, power on the rampage—that great steaming morass of chaos that lies on the underside of order and without which order could not exist.10
Taussig calls on us to understand the quickly achieved hegemony of a small number of white Christians over the “irracionales” by thinking-through-terror, that is, through the “space of death where the Indian, African and white gave birth to a New World.”11 Taussig invokes a different aspect of what James Clifford famously has termed “ethnographic surrealism,” namely, the long history and rich culture of the social imagination of the “space of death,” in its Western genealogy the space of negativity, branded as underworld and evil, and the space of transformation and metamorphosis, too, the latter becoming the starting point for Taussig’s examination of healing as that which mobilizes the dialectical imagery in the space of death.12
Sol LeWitt, Corner Piece No. 2 (from Cube structures based on nine modules), 1976. Painted wood, 43.3 x 43.3 x 43.3 in.
The Business of Mimesis
Previously in the Congo, Casement had met Joseph Conrad, who had embarked on that infamous steamboat journey on the Congo river, on which Heart of Darkness was modeled. This “trip” into the reality of the “colonial unconscious”—“The horror! The horror!”—is used by Taussig to confront the problem of aesthetics, of perspective, of complicity in the rationale representing the brutality and irrationality of colonial reality that evades explanation. Casement, according to Taussig, in writing his reports, was torn between his own Anti-Imperialist views (based on his Irish Nationalism, for which he would later be hanged), and the obligation to comply with the common sense of political economy that ruled in British Parliament, the rationality of business, which was the way to make sense of reality there, if there was any sense to be made of it at all. Just as in the famous case recalled by Jacques Rancière, also in this instance the politics of aesthetics found the patricians simply unable to understand what the plebeians in their uprising were exclaiming, until the latter had begun to imitate the former, in a mimetic appropriation that is also telling with regard to the limited resources in positions from which one can speak at all.13
To claim the rationality of business for this is unwittingly to claim and sustain an illusory rationality, obscuring our understanding of the way business can transform terror from a means into an end in itself. This sort of rationality is hallucinatory like the veil that Conrad and Casement faced earlier in the Congo, where . . . Conrad abandoned the realism practiced by Casement for a technique that worked through the veil while retaining its hallucinatory quality.14
In order to be understood at all, Casement clothes his report in the rationale of business, for the reality of what he was reporting would otherwise not have been comprehensible. Through the language of business, a political stage is created, and the colonial subjects acquire a “voice” and enter the “picture”—at the price, however, of affirming the rationality that rendered them mute in the first place. The veil produces necessity in forging an impossible choice: the other option, for Casement, would have been merely to speak the language of that which was already rendered irrational, and British Parliament surely would have declared him mad.
Conrad, instead, embraces the veil, and exposes it from within. Taussig sees here “a twofold movement of interpretation in a combined action of reduction and revelation—the hermeneutics of suspicion and of revelation in an act of mythic subversion inspired by the mythology of imperialism itself.”15Heart of Darkness, a cornerstone of modernist literature, to be sure, does not rationalize the border away, but leaves it in place. It accounts for the economy of projection and mimicry by which the colonists enact the very savagery that they impute to the natives. But is such a “twofold strategy,” which brackets the twisted dialectics of framing and becoming what has first been established as “other” and properly “negative,” capable of moving beyond the closed circuit of “projection,” the modernist self-reflection of modernity? Is it capable of conceiving of a different political stage? Taussig, while endorsing Conrad’s aesthetics and its ambiguities, maintains that it was Casement’s reports, not Conrad’s semi-documentary fiction, which had forced political responses.
Caspar David Friedrich, Mann und Frau den Mond betrachtend, c. 1830-1835. Oil on canvas, 34 × 44 cm.
Rational Imperialism
Another influential anthropologist who wrote about the problem of writing across the veil, also attempting to cope with its mythological dialectics of rationality, was Johannes Fabian. In Out of Our Minds Fabian examines the travelogues of Western explorers, as well as the anthropological practice of fieldwork premised on them, engaged in a re-reading of how the question of rationality, of rational detachment as opposed to sensual experience in particular, is posed therein.16 The mythical image of the explorer is of a heroic figure “guided by self-denying missionary zeal and philanthropic compassion, as well as a taste for travel and adventure, often combined with scientific curiosity.”17 This was the image, too, that most explorers, often equipped with remarkable skills in self-marketing, were careful to present of themselves. Faith and reason, as well as political and economic imperatives, supposedly determined their encounters. However, as long as this determination is accepted, writes Fabian, the conclusions drawn from their accounts remain entirely predictable and inescapable.
In seeking a writing mode that contests the myth—capable of speaking of the conditions of anarchic irrationality, of ecstasy and outright delirium for which he finds much evidence beneath that mythological veil—without falling into Western rationality’s self-fulfilling prophecy, he writes:
One strategy adopted in recent years to counteract that self-fulfilling prophecy is to accumulate evidence for resistance to conquest and to write about that. This is a necessary task, and much more needs to be done to carry it out. But what will such efforts show? That imperialism was weaker than the image it liked to project, or less organized, or less rational? . . . Even if we can point to deception, misrepresentation, and perhaps blindness in these encounters of exploration, conquest and exploitation, that is not likely to shake in any fundamental way the belief in the basic rationality, and hence necessity, of Western expansion.18
In the context I wish to invoke here, I take this to be not merely a historical question on the retroactive legitimization or deconstruction of imperialism. It is indisputable that historical interpretations—the articulation of a rationale—have far-reaching consequences for the present, depending on the context in which they are made intelligible. The invocation here is primarily targeted at the border technologies that we have inherited from modernity and imperialism, and which, by way of their simultaneously evasive and imperative nature, constitute a continuity in hegemony, and concern the establishing of indisputable background conditions and thus of the “political stage.” It concerns particularly the mechanisms by which the “original separation” that marks this stage embraces what it formerly established as its “outside.” The “accumulation of evidence” was surely a successful strategy in contesting the separations that have structured the stage set up by Western modernity internally; however, if the background conditions, the border of the political as such, is at stake, different strategies are necessary, strategies in correspondence with the twisted economy of the frontier. And it is because of its dialectically twisted structure that “critique,” itself a modern practice, has entered into the often lamented crisis we currently face, foregrounding its complicities in upholding the power of the critiqued, corresponding to the specific ways in which transgression confirms, rather than undoes, the law of boundaries. However, rather than conclude, from the realization that the “outside” of modern critique was nothing but a pretense and phantasm, that there is “no more outside”—and thus only “insider” positions, varying by degrees of consent—it is theproduction of an outside through the economy of the frontier (ranging in scope from conceptual divisions via political separations to the act of killing) that provides the historical backdrop to the contemporary challenge. Thisrequires a different optics than those of modern critique. It requires that one think-through-terror—as Taussig demands in his study—the world that is already-upside-down.
×
In a following text, I will attempt to trace some conjunctions between the economy of the frontier and the logic of the imaginary.
Taussig calls on us to understand the quickly achieved hegemony of a small number of white Christians over the “irracionales” by thinking-through-terror, that is, through the “space of death where the Indian, African and white gave birth to a New World.”11 Taussig invokes a different aspect of what James Clifford famously has termed “ethnographic surrealism,” namely, the long history and rich culture of the social imagination of the “space of death,” in its Western genealogy the space of negativity, branded as underworld and evil, and the space of transformation and metamorphosis, too, the latter becoming the starting point for Taussig’s examination of healing as that which mobilizes the dialectical imagery in the space of death.12
Sol LeWitt, Corner Piece No. 2 (from Cube structures based on nine modules), 1976. Painted wood, 43.3 x 43.3 x 43.3 in.
The Business of Mimesis
Previously in the Congo, Casement had met Joseph Conrad, who had embarked on that infamous steamboat journey on the Congo river, on which Heart of Darkness was modeled. This “trip” into the reality of the “colonial unconscious”—“The horror! The horror!”—is used by Taussig to confront the problem of aesthetics, of perspective, of complicity in the rationale representing the brutality and irrationality of colonial reality that evades explanation. Casement, according to Taussig, in writing his reports, was torn between his own Anti-Imperialist views (based on his Irish Nationalism, for which he would later be hanged), and the obligation to comply with the common sense of political economy that ruled in British Parliament, the rationality of business, which was the way to make sense of reality there, if there was any sense to be made of it at all. Just as in the famous case recalled by Jacques Rancière, also in this instance the politics of aesthetics found the patricians simply unable to understand what the plebeians in their uprising were exclaiming, until the latter had begun to imitate the former, in a mimetic appropriation that is also telling with regard to the limited resources in positions from which one can speak at all.13
To claim the rationality of business for this is unwittingly to claim and sustain an illusory rationality, obscuring our understanding of the way business can transform terror from a means into an end in itself. This sort of rationality is hallucinatory like the veil that Conrad and Casement faced earlier in the Congo, where . . . Conrad abandoned the realism practiced by Casement for a technique that worked through the veil while retaining its hallucinatory quality.14
In order to be understood at all, Casement clothes his report in the rationale of business, for the reality of what he was reporting would otherwise not have been comprehensible. Through the language of business, a political stage is created, and the colonial subjects acquire a “voice” and enter the “picture”—at the price, however, of affirming the rationality that rendered them mute in the first place. The veil produces necessity in forging an impossible choice: the other option, for Casement, would have been merely to speak the language of that which was already rendered irrational, and British Parliament surely would have declared him mad.
Conrad, instead, embraces the veil, and exposes it from within. Taussig sees here “a twofold movement of interpretation in a combined action of reduction and revelation—the hermeneutics of suspicion and of revelation in an act of mythic subversion inspired by the mythology of imperialism itself.”15Heart of Darkness, a cornerstone of modernist literature, to be sure, does not rationalize the border away, but leaves it in place. It accounts for the economy of projection and mimicry by which the colonists enact the very savagery that they impute to the natives. But is such a “twofold strategy,” which brackets the twisted dialectics of framing and becoming what has first been established as “other” and properly “negative,” capable of moving beyond the closed circuit of “projection,” the modernist self-reflection of modernity? Is it capable of conceiving of a different political stage? Taussig, while endorsing Conrad’s aesthetics and its ambiguities, maintains that it was Casement’s reports, not Conrad’s semi-documentary fiction, which had forced political responses.
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Anselm Franke
Introduction—“Animism”
For the Summer 2012 issue of e-flux journal we are very pleased to present a special “Animism” issue guest-edited by Anselm Franke, curator of the exhibition by the same name. Even if you missed Animism on tour in Europe since it began at Extra City and MUHKA in Antwerp in 2010, you have probably learned of its encompassing mobilization of the systems of inclusion and exclusion defining “science” and “culture.” The various stages of the exhibition have shown the discourse of animism to be a crucial skeleton key for releasing the deadlocks formed by the repressed religious, teleological, and colonial foundations of modernity—the hysteria within its narrative that continues to shape the exhibition formats and sensibilities we are tethered to. The fifth iteration of Animism is now on view at e-flux in New York until July 28.
—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
A ghost is haunting modernity—the ghost of animism. It awaits us everywhere when we step outside modern reason’s cone of light, outside its firmly mapped order, when approaching its frontier zones and “outside.” We find it in the imagined darkness of modernity’s outside, where everything changes shape and the world is reassembled from the fragments that reason expels from its chains of coherences.
The task is to bring those constitutive others at the “dark” side of modern reason—like “animism,” but also the “imaginary,” the “negative,” “otherness,” or even “evil”—back into the relational diagram of modernity. To take those universalized sites of otherness that receive names such as “a universal tendency of humankind” or even its “origin,” and bring them back into history, would be perhaps the only way to account for the relational constitution of the present, to face the sorcery of its double binds. To embark upon this task is thus to understand these are never given “universals” of the modern, but its very relational products. They are the sites that modern history is silent about, to the extent that the very narrative of the “the modern” is built upon this silence as its fundament. The narrative-imaginary vacuum of the present is the direct outcome of this silence. This silence tells us that it is actually not animism, but modernity that is the ghost—halfway between presence and absence, life and death. And the future grand narratives of modernity may well speak of this ghost from the perspective of its other, from its “animist” side.
We see signs of this happening already, for it is now clear that the modern arrow of time has changed directions. The future is no longer a white sheet of paper awaiting our projective prescriptive schemes and designs, and the past is no longer the archaic animist “stage” of multiple contagions and mediations which must be surmounted as “entry” condition into the hygienic order of modernity. The future is now behind us, and the past approaches us from the front. The specter of animism is no longer one that returns from the past, for the reversal of modern temporality has announced itself for some time in the ability to challenge monolithic modernist narratives with a multitude of other modernities that ultimately expose and highlight those contagions, hybridities, and mobilities that oppose the foundational modern acts of separation, inscription, and fixation. Here, animism shifts to become the experience of the event and experience that sets in when a naturalized, fixed order of signs is de-stabilized and opened up towards possible transformation, like a map covering the territory that is lifted to unveil multiple movements below what had appeared to be stable ground. Animism is thus no longer historical but is rather the ground upon which history is placed.
Today it is no longer the reified script modernity that we are enacting, but that of the “self.” No longer unrestrictedly exporting its discontents into an imaginary primitive outside and other dumping grounds, the new site of export and displacement of social conflicts is interiority at the frontier of subjectivity. It is at this frontier where the double bind of imposed choice and the deadlock on the imaginary currently hits, as a conflation of difference between system and subject whence the subject must keep this difference up.
And we find the opposition to this experience in anarchic dialogism, one that resists all imposed or supposed possible closures of the field of dialogic subjectification. It is through animism that this possibility today becomes thinkable, while at the same time making a concrete history available to it. The history of animism is above all one of closure and division, but also a history of ontological anarchy—where exclusions become increasingly intelligible through their symptomatic displacements in the economy of desires, in the genres of fiction, in psychopathologies, and so forth. It is important to mention here that anarchy in this sense does not find its horizon of agency in a historical void or a tabula rasa known as the future. It does not seek an absence of power, but rather the insistence on the right and possibility not to be subjected to power. It finds its field in the immediate actuality of that which offers itself to dialogic contestation and engagement, in the permanent modulated exchange between the implicit and the explicit—or, in aesthetic terms, between what constitutes “figure” and what constitutes “ground” in any mapping that implicates us.
It is through this figure of ontological anarchy that we find ourselves in a time at which it is ultimately urgent to “understand”—in order to step beyond and unmake—the magic circle of double binds. But this time it is not the sorcery of the animist other, but the modern and “capitalist sorcery” (Isabelle Stengers) that keeps us spellbound, trapped within a set of false choices, within a systemic closure that suggests no alternatives, and does not cease to assimilate into clinical management its other and its outsides. Understanding the “modern” sorcery that crystalized in the concept of animism is the present issue of e-flux journal’s common denominator.
A significant share of the contributions to this issue of e-flux journal are based on the contributions to a conference co-organized with Irene Albers and the Freie Universität Berlin. It accompanied the opening of the exhibition Animism in Berlin at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in March 2012, which preceded its current installment at e-flux in New York. Previous chapters of the Animism exhibition where presented in 2010 at Extra City Kunsthal and MUHKA in Antwerp and the Kunsthalle Bern, and at the Generali Foundation, Vienna in 2011. My sincere thanks goes to all collaborators who have made this long-term project possible and who have contributed to it to date.
The Whole Earth: In Conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke
“The Whole Earth,” whose first iteration can be seen at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, is a project by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke that takes as its point of departure the Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand. In 1966, Brand initiated a campaign for the release of satellite images of earth that he believed NASA possessed, and which he felt would be a powerful icon for the notion of a shared human experience and destiny. One such image graced the cover of the catalog and came to be know as the Blue Marble; it showed the earth as a glowing blue and white globe against a pitch-black background. Brand was also instrumental in bridging the gap between traditionally opposing social groups, like the military—responsible for the space program—and the budding ecological movement. He also forged an alliance between the California counterculture and the emerging fields of cybernetics, computer science, and information technology.
Following in the footsteps of “The Family of Man,” the Whole Earth Catalog testified to the kinship of Mankind, transcending all borders and class distinctions. But the image of the blue planet had a dark side. The Whole Earth Catalog was also used as a tool for anti-Soviet propaganda and gave rise to the lifestyle industry. The California dream was a weak utopia that simply denied political difference and substituted feedback for dialectics. Cybernetics—which had been briefly outlawed under Stalin for conflicting with Marxism-Leninism—extended the presuppositions of thermodynamics to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology. Thermodynamic systems are not subject to dialectical tensions. Nor do they experience historical change. They only accumulate a remainder—a kind of refuse—or increase in entropy. In the 1960s, this refuse surfaced as the Manson Family. At present, the rejects of globalization remain the subject of the global war on terror.
—Ana Texeira Pinto
Ana Teixeira Pinto: Perhaps we could start by introducing the concept of “whole earth,” on which “The Whole Earth” exhibition is based.
Anselm Franke: “The Whole Earth” is an exhibition about the ideas and ideologies that emerged in the wake of the first photographs of the planet earth. The concept of whole earth is also, historically, about the last universalist claim and the last universalist program: the whole earth—this is, the biggest possible frame, allegedly something for the entire “Family of Man.” In our project, we identify three decades, from 1968 to 1998, that stood under the sign of the “blue planet.”
ATP: When you say “blue planet,” you mean the image of the earth as seen from outer space?
AF: Yes, the images of earth viewed from space that emerged around 1968, the most famous of which were made by Apollo 8 and Apollo 17. This turning of the gaze back towards earth signified a change of direction: the expansion-geared, outwards-directed frontier imaginary folding back on itself, in a 180 degrees turn. Ever since, we have been living in this period of interiorization. Nowadays, most accounts of the Space Age—and the Apollo missions in particular—are rife with quotes, especially by astronauts, who claim the whole fuss of the Space Race was worth it because “man” gained a new image of earth, of the planetary condition.
Diedrich Diederichsen: Above all, I think the image of the earth became an argument for a discourse of legitimation and political reasoning. Take the color, for instance. Viewed from down here on the surface, the color of earth was brown, green, even black—it was a dark color. Then all of a sudden, the earth was blue. And blue, up to that point, was the color of the far-away—of the oceanic, of distance, of escape from earth. Blue was the opposite of earth. All of a sudden, these two opposites became one. This constituted a great reversal. Suddenly, the earth meant “planet” instead of the ground beneath our feet.
Front cover of Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, Fall 1968.
ATP: Did this image, the Blue Marble, which emerged out of the space program and the first moon landing, bring about a conceptual shift?
DD: From that moment onwards the concept of earth changes in several ways. It becomes simultaneously the starting point and the goal, the far-away place and the familiar. It is blue but also still brown. It is only one planet among millions of others, but at the same time, it’s the only planet we have. The earth becomes more valuable because it can be exhausted. All of these contradictory concepts are perfectly illustrated by this image, which emerges in a specific historical context: at the climax of the Cold War—or one could say, at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. It also emerges at the beginning of the age of immaterial production and digital culture. All of these things were around at that time.
ATP: There is also a correlation between the notion of “system” as it arises from cybernetics and systems theory, and the way the earth starts to be represented as a system in the sense of a self-sealed entity.
DD: It’s important to mention the historical parallel between, on the one hand, the growth of systems theory and cybernetics, and on the other, the development of space travel. Another point is the conceptual similarity between a planet and a system, or rather between the image of the planet and the system. The image of a planet, just like a system, is something you watch from the outside. But at the same time, you’re also inside it. And this is the aporia of the system, because the system always tells us: you can’t look at a system when you’re part of it. But you’re always part of it. And it’s the same with the planet. There is a strong analogy between system thinking and planet thinking.
Adrian Piper, LSD Womb, 1965. Acrylic on canvas. Collection Emi Fontana Milano/Los Angeles. Photo: Roberto Marossi.
ATP: I gather that the notion of closure is also important?
AF: We address the motif of closure in the section “The End of the Outside,” which is also the subtitle of the exhibition: “California and the End of the Outside.” This is a trope with many different meanings. Our project sets out to map how these different meanings are conflated in the cultural imaginary of the present, and to help untangle these conflations. Closure as a motif is of course akin to the older notion of naturalization. Regarding the image of the blue planet, one can say that it has both a strong mobilizing capacity and a great ability to naturalize. This produces an interesting paradox: seen from the outside, the image of earth tells us that there is no more outside. To add a wild association: maybe it’s worth drawing an analogy between the aporia that Diedrich mentioned and schizophrenia, which was of enormous significance in political philosophy at the very time when the blue planet image was produced.
ATP: You mean the correlation between capitalism and schizophrenia.
AF: Yes, but it’s not only Deleuze and Guattari who are reconceptualizing schizophrenia at the moment when this image emerges.
DD: LSD use was described as artificial psychosis and artificial schizophrenia. The higher consciousness of the LSD-enlightened person was regarded as an artificially induced schizophrenic state. The new humans, who took LSD, were all happy schizophrenics.
ATP: Can you elaborate a bit further on the connection between the whole earth and the notion of the split subject?
AF: The image of earth is, in many ways, a paradoxical one. And one paradox—or aporia, as Diedrich pointed out—is the position of viewing from the outside a system to which we are at the same time immanent. That is, whenever you look at or talk about this image, you are actually surfing a sort of schizo-meridian, a borderline between being part of it and being on the outside of it.
DD: The position of whoever took the photo of the planet while looking at it from outer space is like the voice that you hear in your head when you are schizophrenic. You don’t know where it’s coming from. Of course, the voice that you hear is nothing but your own thinking. Yet your own thinking seems like a voice from afar uttering commandments. That’s exactly the situation with the concept of the “visible planet.” I think that’s a very fitting description.
Eleanor Antin, Merrit from California Lives,1969; replicated 1998. Gasoline can, bush hat with “peace” decal, metal comb, and text panel. Dimensions variable. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
AF: In our project, we operate with a couple of fictions, a set of hypotheses. One could be described as follows: let’s say that the image of the earth carried a message, which had a very strong influence and reached a lot of people whose diverse worldviews assembled around this image. Let’s say that Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was its official medium, because Steward Brand appointed himself as the messenger. Everything the image had to say was then written in the pages of the catalog. This is how the image of the blue planet gets grounded in the concrete environment of California and the historical momentum of the Cold War and the counterculture. This image also anticipates the end of the Cold War. In it, the earth is already whole, without boundaries or borders, analogous to post-1989 global capitalism and the oceanic, interconnected globe of the 1990s. After 1945, the blue planet replaces the mushroom cloud as a universalist icon. Under its sign a new period begins, a new world order. Our aim is to inscribe this new planetary systemic paradigm into several historical continuities: above all, into the continuity of the Western-modern-colonial frontier, which, contrary to the common impression, does not disappear, but rather becomes a universal—that is, a permanent—condition. This is very different from believing that, like the Berlin Wall, all “old divisions” will soon disappear. Another noteworthy continuity is that this image is actually the product of Wernher von Braun’s invention, the V-2 rocket. The V-2 rocket is the first man-made object in space, and it has a television camera on it. That is, in terms of its technology, the birth of the Blue Marble was in complete continuity with the program that von Braun took to the US, where he developed the rocket program for the military. The first images of earth are, literally, V-2 images.
DD: Through his insistence on the photograph of the blue planet as an element of theWhole Earth Catalog, Steward Brand also appropriated space travel and NASA and astronauts for the counterculture, while at the same time reconciling the romanticism of the counterculture with advanced technology. Needless to say, this reconciliation between romanticism and futurism becomes the basis of digital and internet culture. On the other hand, the image of the blue planet was also tied to early rocket science, which had already made this connection between reactionary romanticism and novel technology. This is present, for instance, in the idea of bringing people back to live on their homeland, conquering the earth that belongs to them, and all these kinds of racist German projects. One could say that Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow comes back, in a way, through the Whole Earth Catalog.
AF: It is especially interesting to follow this connection throughout the 1970s, because this alliance between technology and romanticism was always a very fragile one. In the short period when Steward Brand acted as an official advisor to California Governor Jerry Brown, they organized a “Space Day” financed by California’s aerospace industry. Space Day featured astronaut Russell Schweickart, who had famously said, “From up there, there are no frames, no boundaries.” Schweickart sat next to Jerry Brown, Carl Sagan, and Gerald O’Neill, who was a major advocate for space colonies. Stewart Brand managed to stir a huge debate among his readers, who were the core of the California environmental movement. The technology/nature divide, and the question of whether to act outside or inside the system of big business and the military, broke open, only to close again shortly thereafter. It’s an odd mix. In the environmental movement, many hated the space colony stuff. For them, it was big industry, it was everything they were fighting against.
DD: Timothy Leary was very much in favor of space colonies. Though society in general mocked it, Timothy Leary supported the idea.
ATP: So the Blue Marble functions like a tangled skein out of which one can pull several threads?
DD: One important point is the conjunction of these discourses, which are usually contradictory. Another important point is that this conjunction of binary opposites has something to do with the structural oddity of photographing, or observing, the territory that you are, at the same time, inhabiting. That is, you direct the gaze of desire—which, in relation to territory, always meant colonial desire—towards the place on which you are already standing. This is the formal reason why all these binary oppositions collapse, or mingle, or develop a dialectical synthesis. In one way or another, the culture has to process this problem. Whatever you project upon this image, it will behave accordingly. And then it’s up to the specific propagandists and cultural activists to do something with it.
AF: I think the biggest question is how to find a narrative to account for this synthesis, this reconciliation of binaries, this conflation of opposites, which is still going on. This appears as a historical process with its own logic and necessity, and I suppose it’s worth wondering about the underlying structures that create this necessity. There is a larger narrative at work in the whole earth project: the narrative of the general cyberneticization of the epistemological-technological apparatuses of Western modernity after 1945. It is, in a way, a slow embrace of what was previously excluded from the constitution of the modern social and epistemological order: the irrational, the mimetic (contagious or playful), the animistic. These become the new resources. There is a structural affinity between the synthesis of opposites—or the desire for such a synthesis—that occurs under the aegis of the blue planet, and what Freud and anthropologists like Edward Tylor used to describe as the animism of pre-modern people. Both involve a conflation of binaries. The cyberneticization of the world also becomes its re-animation, a project of undoing alienation, a desire for immersion and enchantment. The once fixed, objectified, reified world begins to be dynamic, talkative, and transformative again—but at the price of immersive adaptation to systemic conditions. This results from transporting cybernetics from the fields of mathematics and computing into social theory, and—after cybernetics was made credible via psychedelic experience—into the world at large. This leads to such things as the immanent mind and a conception of nature as an animated information system. The counterculture also becomes depoliticized to the degree that it embraces visions of spontaneous harmony and neo-animistic conceptions of the whole. All of this was derived from the new cybernetic reality principle: communication, the medium, the in-between.
Öyvind Fahlström, Section of World Map—A Puzzle, 1973. Silkscreen on vinyl, magnets and enamel on metal plate. Copyright: The Öyvind Fahlström Foundation / VG Bildkunst. Courtesy Aurel Scheibler. Photo: Simon Vogel.
ATP: Would you say that feedback shares a kinship with animism?
AF: Yes. There is a structural affinity.
ATP: If I get what you’re hinting at, one could say that cybernetics mirrors the main insight of structural linguistics: that language can be interpreted as a formal system of differential elements, which is also how Lacan addresses desire.
DD: Let me put it like this: when systems theory tries to solve the problem of epistemology, the major structural question it asks must be answered both at the level of content and at the level of fantasy, the imaginary. Lacan looks at desire as a structural dilemma, the same way systems theory looks at science and cognition. There are two ways to respond to this: one is embracing the paradox, the other is getting rid of the subject and letting cybernetics take over.
ATP: In systems theory and first order cybernetics, you might say that information is the coefficient of freedom. Mathematically speaking, the freedom of choice is between a 1 and a 0.
DD: But what Anselm was describing—the origin of all these ideas of harmony and conservation—has a lot to do with the notion of desire in the sense of not having a choice. You don’t even have a small choice. It’s what humans have to want. It’s not what we want. We have to want. We have to love each other. It’s not that we really do. But we have to. And hippie culture is about how we actually do love each other. Come on people now. Smile on your brother. Everybody get together. Try to love one another right now. Try to, but …
Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1988. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy: Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium. Copyright: We Document Art.
AF: Cybernetics also entails a transformation from static to dynamic, from linear to circular models. Before the word “feedback” came into being, it was called “circular causal relations.” This phrase was used at the Macy Conferences. The introduction of the circle is basically what culminates in the Blue Marble. The entire process that produces this new ideological matrix is structured upon a transition from linearity to circularity. That which is one-directional becomes the devil. This ranges from hierarchy to the scientific understanding of cause and effect. With cybernetics—particularly when cybernetics steps into the social sciences and humanities—you have an interesting witch hunt starting, an anti-Cartesian witch hunt, a general anti-dualist witch hunt. This culminates in the fall of the Berlin Wall, which stood as a mega-symbol for the bifurcated, linear, static, objectified world. The point now is to see and focus on the dialectics of this process—the degree to which the doors that were opened eventually closed upon themselves, the degree to which dynamization produced new static fixities.
ATP: Anselm, I believe you used this image of the closing door to illustrate how, when you see the earth from outer space, just at the moment when you would expect a door to open towards the expanding universe, it suddenly slams in your face.
DD: In Roberto Bolaño’s last novel, the protagonist, who has been a heterosexual man all his life, finally discovers his homosexuality. The chapter in which this occurs is called “The Fall of the Berlin Wall.”
ATP: Couldn’t you also say that the Cold War is the perfect expression of a cybernetic model? Cybernetics defines itself by establishing an operational dichotomy between system and environment, which, in turn, gives rise to the concept of “information” as what the system extracts from its environment. The field of game theory, for instance, is based on the psychology of the Cold War: two players, one on each side, neither of whom knows what the other is thinking. For each player, the other is the environment from which they aim to extract information, forming a perfectly enclosed feedback loop.
AF: There’s a great book on that called The Closed World. But there are two lines of inquiry here which we can interestingly juxtapose. One is the RAND Corporation game theory model, which is based on the mimetic economy of war. But this is old stuff. Clausewitz already described this strategic guesswork—how you necessarily become like the enemy, which generates a closed system. But then there’s the other model, this planetary unity fantasy, where there are no more opponents—an oceanic mimetics, not an antagonistic mimetics. In that sense, the Blue Marble anticipated the end of the Cold War, or induced it with the principles of sympathetic magic.
DD: I think the Cold War already contains the end of the Cold War. It’s a permanent element of it. You can observe it now. The situation in Korea in a kind of grotesque reenactment of the Cold War. You had the same situation in the Cold War, in that it had all these components of communication, which were basically symbolized by the red telephone: the symbol of the notion that communication would prevent the Cold War from becoming hot. The bottom line of the Cold War is that it’s cold which is to say that war is not happening. And war is not happening because of communication. So communication can also lead us out of any war situation. That is why the whole feedback idea became such a glorified element of countercultural lifestyles, theories, pedagogies, psychologies, and music: there was nothing people liked more than a long feedback loop—which, at a concert for example, became a moment of total communion for all the bodies in the audience.
But my favorite example is the story of the blues. Under Jim Crow in the US, there was, of course, segregation. There were radio stations for black music and radio stations for white music. But then the counterculture brought in all these white musicians who adopted black music. Certain black stars also played at white festivals. Around 1969, the major record companies adapted to this new situation, assuming that they no longer had racially separated markets. CBS did a huge double-album compilation with white and black musicians. It was called The Blues. And what was on the cover of this album? The Blue Marble. Because it’s blue? No. Because it could express the idea of overcoming a distinction.
AF: It’s the universal formula for overcoming distinctions.
ATP: Speaking of which, I would like to go back to the idea of the American frontier or the space frontier as the capitalist frontier. How is the moment of primitive accumulation continuously actualized in these iterations of the frontier imaginary?
Mother Earth News, January 1970. Reprinted with permission by Mother Earth News. All rights reserved.
AF: In the 1890s, the Census Bureau of the United States announces the closure of the frontier. Around the same time, the colonization of the world elsewhere is basically complete. The scramble over Africa is over. This closing of the frontier concerns the entire globe. All of this also happens at the same moment as the Chicago World’s Fair. It’s not the first World’s Fair, but in a strange way, it’s the first to embody this moment of a planet-wide closure of the modern, Western, colonial, capitalist frontier. It also announces a period of intensification for electricity and communication technologies. At the same time, the conservation movement begins to see nature as no longer an inexhaustible resource, but as an enclosed “outside” to be protected and conserved—a big shift in attitude. Freud and William James conceive of the psyche and the mind as closed systems without an outside: the unconscious and the irrational are part of the system. They are inside the circle. In the 1960s, the outside is a utopian site: outside of “the system,” outside of the “technocracy,” outside of alienating, conformist mass society and its “objective consciousness” and hierarchies. The outside—the imagined, produced, or actually remaining outside—becomes the source for the transgressive ideas of the counterculture. Hippies call for a return to nature. The psychedelic counterculture, the Human Potential Movement, and the anti-psychiatrists attempt to liberate the self by embracing the irrational and setting it free, rather than trying to control or repress it. Another paradigmatic outsider of Western colonialism—the “native”—is embraced in the form of neo-primitivism. The American Indian, for a short time at least, is hailed as a role model for non-authoritarian, harmonious, and tribal forms of community. But the most important point is to see that with the closure of the frontier, there is a passage from the linear to the circular.
DD: This is similar to the idea of circulation—capitalist circulation—in Marxism.
AF: The period between 1890 and 1960 was also the period when the idea that capitalist modernity would turn souls into mere things—the idea of reification—was most viral.
DD: Or what the situationists called “the critique of separation.” If all these leftists are criticizing capitalism via a critique of separation, voilà: here’s a whole.
ATP: I have a question concerning the political aspects of this shift. There’s basically one epistemological model to explain historical change, and that is dialectics. I have always thought of cybernetics as a reversal of dialectics: although feedback and dialectics represent motion in similar ways, dialectics implies a fundamental tension, an unresolved antagonism from which a novel system may emerge, whereas feedback knows no outside or contradiction, just perpetual iteration. One could say that feedback is dialectics minus communism. That is, feedback, if seen as an epistemological model, precludes change on a material, political level—or better put, change can only appear in terms of (self-)adjustment. In other words, cybernetics provides for a smooth transition from political philosophy to economic theory.
DD: Yes, but cybernetics is really a non-historical model of change. It doesn’t distinguish between historical situations. It distinguishes between states. It only has states. Things are in certain states. But since they form only one part of a network, the whole will not change. By definition it cannot change. It can only be in different states.
ATP: It’s a recursive system. Change can only be represented as iteration.
DD: It will iterate, iterate, and iterate, and it will never be different. But we’re describing first-order cybernetics. Once we introduce the problem of the observer, it’s not that easy anymore. I would say that in late systems theory, and late Niklas Luhmann, that blind spot becomes more than just a technical blind spot. It becomes dramatized—when he finally realized, for example, that there was more than Europe.
ATP: How do you position yourselves critically towards cybernetics and systems theory?
DD: We frame it as ideology, and we locate this ideology historically. You could even call it a superstructural phenomenon—although it’s more than a superstructural phenomenon, because it creates material reality. Basically, it’s the beginning of post-industrial capitalism.
Cover for Stewart Brand (Ed.), Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, Fall 1968.
AF: Returning to the beginning of our conversation, I think it’s important to contemplate where the Blue Marble has led us. I want to insist on this ambivalence between being both a structural critique of something and a symptom of something. There is this cover of Wiredmagazine from 1997. It’s ugly, like most covers of Wired magazine. It shows a huge smiling blue marble and has a headline that says “The Long Boom.” The corresponding article inside predicts twenty-five years of global unity, prosperity, and growth. When you read it, you realize what the Nineties made of the ideas of the Sixties: they turned them into visions of magically expansive and self-balancing technological, biological, financial, and social systems—it has all become one and the same. In retrospect, the Sixties looks like an attempt at self-therapy, an effort to recover from the huge trauma of planning. The trauma of linear planning in the twentieth century was so strong that this California avant-garde embraced everything that had to do with feedback and emergence, as if this was their pharmacon against planning. Even when it became clear that they could not overcome the problem of political planning by just embracing systems rhetoric and mimetically likening society and technology to an ideal system-built nature—even in the moment when this became clear, they went one step further into a kind of beyond/delirium mix, deeper into the fantasy of a completely organic capitalism. This is the power of the call to move beyond binaries. It’s a tendency that tries to forget the schizoid condition that prevails: namely, that you are supposed to attain a condition of dynamic immersion, which at the same time has been declared as already universally existing. The point today is to see how the program of opening doors has actually closed them, to see how systems can act in conservative or demobilizing ways.
ATP: This IT ecological fantasy is also connected to the denial of materiality. When one says that the digital era has outflanked industrial production, one always speaks as if digital technology has no material aspect, as if no labor or resource exploitation are involved.
DD: It’s not only the digital. The entire California fantasy deals heavily with immateriality, especially with immateriality understood as spirituality, where the opposite of the material is not immaterial labor but spirituality—which is, of course, a form of immaterial labor, but glorified and ideologized. I think the question is: What is the leftover from that idealization and ideologization? Where is the symptom produced by the failure of this maneuver? Before one can know the answer to this question on a political level, it will emerge on a symptomatic level, or in the acts of individuals. I’m referring, of course, to people like Charles Manson—not so much the real Charles Manson, but the mythical Charles Manson as he appears in Neil Young’s song “Revolution Blues.” The first-person narrator in the song is precisely the leftover of the California ideology, and he has identified two enemies: the computer and the culture industry, represented by the stars who live in Laurel Canyon. He wants to kill them. And he has an army with rifles and dune buggies in the mountains who come down to do it. That, I think, is the leftover, the material basis.
The exhibition Animism sets out to provide a different context for reflecting on an old topic in the theory of art, one that has considerable reverberations in the present: the question of animation. Rather than investigating the effect of animation merely within the registers of aesthetics—for instance, by presenting a collection of artworks exemplifying different ways of achieving the effect of life or the lifelike within a field demarcated by the dialectics of movement and stasis—this exhibition tackles the unquestioned backdrop against which the aesthetic discussion of such effects normally takes place. This backdrop is usually taken for granted or carefully kept at a distance, but the works in this exhibition seek to bring it into the light. While the evocation of life is a well-known effect in animated cartoons and digital animations, and in more delicate ways, in painting and sculpture, outside the territory of art and mass media animation has been a disputed problem—one that leads to core issues in current debates about modernity. When animation is taken outside the field of art, it turns into an ontological battleground. Far from being a matter of abstract considerations, this is a battleground at the frontier of colonial modernity, and in the context of contemporary politics and aesthetics, it concerns the urgent question of the transformability and negotiability of ontologies, where claims to reality and the ordering of the social world are at stake. On this battleground, the problem of animation was given the name “animism” by nineteenth century anthropologists aspiring to see their work incorporated into the ranks of science.
Ken Jacobs, Capitalism: Slavery, 2006. Film still from video projection, color, silent, 3 min,
transferred to DVD.
I.
I should begin by mentioning the degree to which animism has continued to pose, despite all attempts at scientific explanation, a serious riddle to Western epistemologies, and also a provocation to our embodied everyday perception and rationality. That inanimate objects and things act, that they have designs on us, and that we are interpellated by them, is a quotidian reality that we all implicitly accept—just as we accept, and indeed are animated by, the very milieus and contexts in which we operate. But to acknowledge, articulate, and conceptualize this fact is apparently a wholly different issue, which is problematic on all levels. The provocation embedded in the notion of animism is that it demands us to confront just that. Imagining animism therefore takes on the shape of the extreme, such that animism assumes the form of a caricature-version of the reality we normally take for granted: If things become active, alive, or even person-like, where does this leave actual humans? Animism in this sense is greeted by the Western mindset as the threat that we must exchange positions, for now we can only imagine ourselves as annulled, in the role of the inert, passive stuff that was previously the thing-like “matter” out there. And the provocation reaches further. Its echoes can be heard in the question, “So, do you reallybelieve?” For what is at stake here seems to be of a confessional nature, such that if one would dare to answer “yes,” one would no longer be an accepted member of the modern community.
This project does not intend to answer this question with either “no” or “yes.” Instead, it seeks to bypass the choice altogether and treat animism not as a matter of belief, but rather as a boundary-making practice. It seeks to shift the terms away from a contaminated terrain and uncover in this terrain a series of a priori choices embedded in the modern imaginary.
Indeed, the very mention of animism provokes immediate reactions of border-defense. A famous example of such a defense-reaction, on the level of affect and aesthetics, is the Freudian sensation of the “uncanny,” in which something is either more alive than it should be, or exposed as “merely” mechanical. In both cases, we reassert the “proper” boundary between self and world. The question of animation—what is endowed with life, the soul, and agency—seems inevitably and immediately to call for distinctions and boundaries: between animate and inanimate matter, primitive and civilized, subjective perception and objective qualities, the colloquial perception of the real and the merely fictive or imaginary, and last but not least, between interior self and exterior world. And it would indeed be presumptuous to demand that contemporary viewers abandon such distinctions altogether, and, for instance, take the aesthetic effect of a cartoon to be reallife. In our everyday perception, there is nothing that we identify more readily as fictional and as make-believe. And the project does not issue such a demand, nor does it devote itself, in a fashionable way, to the hiddenlife of images and things. However, it is in the readiness with which such distinctions are made that it identifies a colonial mechanism deeply ingrained in our everyday perception and our capacity to make sense of the world. Hence, the project refrains from postulating a life of things or images, not because this would go too far, but because it would not go far enough. The Animism project was built upon the conviction that what must be mobilized are the very grounds on which such distinctions are made.
Vincent Monnikendam, Mother Dao, the Turtlelike (Moeder Dao, de schildpadgelijkende), 1995. Film, 35 mm, color, sound, 88 min, transferred to DVD.
What is at stake in putting those grounds at our disposal? At stake is the question of whether we are able to step outside the matrix of modern dichotomies—not by abandoning them, but by regaining our capacity to act on them, and to transform what presents itself to us as “given” reality. This ability is also the measure of all attempts to decolonize the modern colonial imaginary. This project argues that in the question of animism lies a kernel of colonialism. Across the registers of common sense and everyday perception, from aesthetic reflection to the most abstract conceptual distinctions, this kernel stands for a mechanism that has served to legitimize colonial subjugation, often in ways not immediately perceptible, precisely because it has become naturalized as part of how we perceive, experience, and relate to things. Animism apparently cannot be defined within modern terminology without applying to it a set of unquestioned assumptions that are the fundaments of modernity, and in whose matrix we necessarily operate as long as we assume that the question is one of determining the “correct” distinction between life and non-life, self and world. These assumptions are already manifest when it is described, in a seemingly neutral terms, as the belief of some cultures that nature is populated by spirits or souls. The very meaning these terms carry within modernity imply that such belief is at worst mistaken—that is, failing to account for how things really are—or at best symbolic representations of social relations projected onto a natural environment that is indifferent to them. When we use the term animism, we have thus already entered into the narrative structure and self-mythologies of modernity. And these narratives cannot but deny reality to what they construct as modernity’s other. Mobilizing the grounds would require that we question the very meaning of terms such as “belief,” “spirits,” ”souls,” “projection,” “fiction,” and even “life,” as well as the historical role they have played in Western modernity as part of a disciplinary system of divisions that organize a modern “reality principle,” ghettoizing modernity’s discontents as “fiction,” “aesthetics,” or “primitive animism.”
The measure for un-disciplining the imagination is the ability to stop “playing the dividing game” in order to look at the very practices that organize and police the divisions. This exhibition is not about animism, as if it were an object. Instead, it is about the making of boundaries—those boundaries that decide, in the last instance, the status of things within a social order, decide actual in- and exclusions. Boundaries are never given to us in the form of a priori categorical separations. As so many critical theoretical efforts of the recent past have shown, borders are never “natural,” they never precede their making—they are always the products of practices that organize them, depending on the order of knowledge, technologies, and politics. Representations, aesthetic processes, and media images consolidate, reflect, and reach beyond these boundaries. They are the very expression of the liminality of all things, including the liminality of all subjectivities. All social practice is, in these terms, boundary-practice, although every boundary is organized and conceived differently. The precondition for bringing these differences into view is the imaginary and conceptual ability to un-map the borders in question. This exhibition was conceived in those terms, moving between the inscription and the un-mapping of those boundaries through their transgression and negotiation at the limits.
II.
In order to meet the demands of un-mapping and un-disciplining, it is necessary to create an alternative narration, an alternative frame—which is at the same time an anti-frame—which can account for the phenomena of animation in terms beyond the taken-for-granted division. At the same time, this alternative frame must not fall into a terrain of indifference, as if all borders and hierarchies were already ultimately abolished. The first premise of the Animism project is that the fact of animation and the event of communication are one and the same. There is no being-in-communication that is not also a form of animation, even if this is a negative animation, the absence of a certain sovereignty and agency, as in the case of “objectification” or “reification.” Animism then becomes the point of departure, the most common thing in the world—a world in which there is nothing outside of the relations that constitute it. Where there is communication, there is animation. Animation is always a form of entanglement with an environment and with otherness. This otherness is incommensurable and can never be fully objectified; it always escapes positivist knowledge to some degree, implicating such knowledge instead within situated practice. This point of departure hence also suggests that there aren’t—there cannot possibly be—non-animist societies. Animism is a different name for the primacy of relationality, for social immanence. To conceive of this immanence not as closed and fundamentally undifferentiated is a current political task, the reason for the necessity of bringing boundary-making practices in the widest possible sense into view. Yet, however canalized by distinct border-practices, animism as such may well be irreducible. It stands for the demand that relations must be, and always are, expressed. The discontent of a relational diagram (its foreclosed, excluded, muted part that is rendered negatively) will always be recoverable in a displaced, symptomatic elsewhere from where it will issue its claims—the site of desires, fictions, divinities, symptoms, or ghosts. Dealing with these phenomena requires that one does not address them by these names; it requires that images in the widest sense of the word be read against the grain, against their classification, such as when fiction becomes documentary.
The dramaturgy of the Animism project furthermore followed the speculative hypothesis that in the modern Western worldview, the always-already-animist “meridian line” of communication and mimetic engagement has turned into a “negative horizon.” A negative horizon is a horizon that one leaves behind: hence to become modern, we have to cease being animists. We must leave behind a projected animist past, always in danger of returning. Furthermore, “animism” was the name given to the vanishing point situated on this meridian line at the horizon. Within a pictorial plane organized according to the central perspective, the vanishing point is the central spot on which the entire projective construction depends, but it ultimately is also the spot where all the lines that open up the space in the first place, and hence all its differences, conflate and fall into one. Hence animism was always imagined in terms of the absence of those distinctions on which modernity rests—for instance, as a “state of nature” in which there is no difference between the interior and the exterior world, between culture and nature, or between natural things and social signs. The vanishing point is also a tilting image, a negative, upside-down mirror that shows the non-self as a projection of self—as in the image of animism as a “natural condition” in opposition to “modern civilization.” The upside-down mirror-screen is an instrument of an imaginary appropriation of otherness conceived in one’s own image. It is the site of an export—hence the common accusation that so-called animists “project” their sense of self into the environment, while it is really those who label them animist that project themselves and their own normative distinctions onto others and the world.
Animism is a “multistable picture” (a figure in which figure/ground relations are reversible, with two mutually exclusive motives making equally strong claims on the perception), always unexpectedly switching between a positive and a negative, between figure and ground. Hence in the modern mindset animism is always conceived as either negative—that is, as a barbaric absence of civilization—or positive—as a quasi-paradisic condition in which the painful separations that characterize modernity do not exist. It is in the moment of the reversal that this exhibition attempts to grasp the “making-of-boundaries,” in suspending the either/or structure that characterizes the “multistable figure” just as the logic of boundaries, aspiring to substitute the enforced choice (a double-bind really) for a stereoscopic gaze that arrives from the meridian line, from the vanishing point. A generalized asymmetry took hold of the modern worldview, resulting in an inability to recognize a multistable figure as such. This is perhaps a perfect description of dualism, in which the imposed choice of the multistable figure is not traversed to interrogate the moment of encounter and untranslatability at the meridian of mediation, but instead is lifted to become a schizophrenic either/or principle. This leads to serious trouble with media and especially states of mediality. In the dualist multistable picture, everything at the end comes down to the question of agency and determinism, of just what and who is actually acting and what is acted upon—such as in the quarrel of matter versus spirit, body versus mind. The modernist subject preferred to conceive of itself as the active figure facing apassive world of matter that it acted upon. What constitutes a problem in this structure is the inverse, the fact that we do not only make, but are also fundamentally made—not in the material determinist sense, but in the sense of our relational environments and milieus and the vectors of subjectivation they contain. This passive increasingly escapes the modern framework, and it is actively excluded and stigmatized. To be made, to be animated, to be moved—those phenomena have no claim to reality other than in the ghetto of subjective emotion or aesthetic experience. Consequently, the most abject figure of savagery to the modern subject—the symptom of the exclusion and asymmetry—was “possession,” the condition of passive experience where the subject fully became a medium, and was fundamentally made, animated, and moved. To break open the double bind surrounding the modern relation to mediality requires that the active/passive nexus is conceived as a two-way street, a multistable picture whose figure/ground relations must at all times be available for inversion and the stereoscopic gaze. This exchange of perspectives is a historiographic challenge, for it demands that our historical narrative be measured against the meridian where such reversal becomes possible, where the ability to imagine the reversal ultimately translates into actual possibilities to act on history. In the light of a contemporary situation that sees the displacement of boundaries from disciplinary institutions into the subject, this ability to account for and act on the active/passive nexus is perhaps a political demand par excellence.
Jimmie Durham, The Museum of Stones, 2011/2012. Installation consisting of various stones and other materials, measurements variable. Photo: Arwed Messmer.
III.
The Animism exhibition begins with a constellation of works that bring to light the paradoxical position of the medium of the exhibition and the institution of the museum. What is a museum if not a grand de-animating machine? Life—animation—is subject to permanent transformation in time, and it is precisely this transformation that the very institution of the museum is directed against. Whatever enters the museum is subjected to de-animation in this very basic sense, as it becomes an object of the very conservation that is the purpose of museum’s existence. Whatever enters a museum must also be positioned within a classificatory order of knowledge through which the object is fixed and identified. A handy example is the butterfly, a symbol of psyche and of metamorphosis since the ancient Greeks. The acts of conservation, fixation, and identification are all present in the single gesture that pins down the butterfly with a needle in its rightful place within a taxonomy. Museums have also frequently been compared to mausoleums. But do they not yield their own paradoxical forms of animation? Museums make objects to be looked at by subjects—and this is already a “relational diagram” in which one side talks about the other. But how do they “speak back,” and how does the very relation produced here become articulated? Is it not that the de-animated objects are now what animates the very order of knowledge at whose service they have been installed? And does not the museum as mausoleum, moreover, produce a particular—perhaps compensatory—phantasy of re-animation, as the very expression of said relation? Why would hundreds of thousands people go to stare at mummies or dinosaurs if it wasn’t for the uncanny phantasy of them coming to life again? Do museums, particularly in their popular and populist forms, not produce a specific kind of spectral animist imaginary through which “history comes alive”?
With regard to animism as a subject matter, this productive paradox needs further examination. For a basic assumption of this project is that animism is not an object, but the very set of practices that resist objectification. An exhibition about animism is hence impossible—simply because these relations cannot be exhibited. They resist the particularform of objectification that is the precondition for something to be exhibited. And putting artifacts in the place of the practice would give rise to a different problem: whatever way an object may have been animated in its original context, it ceases to be so in the confines of a museum and exhibition framework, where they are perhaps no less animated, but certainly in very different ways and to different ends.
This part of the exhibition has thus been devoted to reflection on the institution of the museum and the medium of the exhibition in relation to animism. Here the film Les statues meurent aussi (1953) by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais is on view. This is a film that follows the fate of “tribal” African sculptures. It is a narrative mapping of, on the one hand, the different forms of animation and de-animation that these sculptures undergo as they become specimens of the “primitive arts” in Europe’s ethnographic museums, and on the other hand, of the uncanny animation they are endowed with as they become commodities in a new marketplace. This section of the exhibition also displays a series of photographs by Candida Höfer from her ongoing series on ethnographic museums around the Western hemisphere. These are portraits of the architecture of those spaces—including the world’s most renowned ones—that seek to dissociate themselves from both time and space. The photographs chart the various axes of distance that are inscribed into the architecture of those institutions, and foreground their representational gesture, as well as the enormous machinery in their “backstage” that is needed to fight the inevitable disintegration of their objects. One photograph acts as a multistable figure par excellence. It shows two conservators at work wearing full-body white suits in front of vitrines packed with ethnographic artifacts. Faced with this curious picture, we wonder: What it is about these objects that draws so much attention? Or is there perhaps a danger of some viral contamination, from which these suits ought to protect those that have been assigned to interrogate the objects scientifically? Who protects themselves from whom? And what is the relation that we, as visitors, are allowed or prescribed to enter into with whatever objects are on display?
Next to these photographs are a series of vitrines that contain a collection of stones. The installation The Dangers of Petrification (2007) looks much like a classical display from a museum of natural history, except that the labels next to the stones are handwritten, and many of the stones look rather ordinary. The writings on the labels identify these stones aspetrifications of things such as a piece of bread, an apple slice, a salami, or even a cloud—the latter’s petrification, it is stated, was the product of extremely rare weather conditions that would sometimes occur just above the ocean’s surface. And in the moment that one begins to smile at these descriptions, the whole dispositif of the museum looks back at us. The way the Western tradition uses stone to symbolize its desire for eternity and, in the form of carvings, to document its understanding of mimetic representation is here turned on it’s head. Against the understanding of mimetic representation that immortalizes the transience of life, here we have the mimicry of such mimesis presented as a natural, rather than a cultural, process, short-circuiting the entire scenery of the opposition. At stake here is also the metapsychology of the gaze and its mystification from religious art to minimalism, the very meaning of what it means for a work of art to “look back at us.” And last but not least, it is possible to read into this work and its mockery-staging of natural mimesis and “primitive animation” a model for an alternative understanding of the subject-object dichotomy; what is staged here is not objects subjectified or subjects objectified, but nothing other than a short-circuiting of different temporalities—the short life and unstable condition of matter such as “bread” and the extremely long process of things-turning-to-stone. What remains, however, are not oppositions but rather a mimetic continuum in which “subject” and “object,” “life,” and “non-life” have become relative extremes—every “accident,” as other works by Jimmie Durham frequently foreground, brings the precarious balance of subjects and objects, mobiles and immobiles, out of joint. The next work continues this line of thought, as it looks at one of the registers through which the boundary between persons and things is brought about and negotiated.
The archival installation Assembly: Animism (2011) by Agency displays a selection of its vast collection of court cases in which legal disputes around copyright, authorship, creativity, and agency turn into forums that negotiate the very boundary between humans and objects: a snapshot of just how the border between “nature” and “culture” is drawn by one of the clusters of disciplinary institutions, the judiciary, as inherently fragile claims on “authorship” and “creativity” are granted or denied.
Installation view of “Animism”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Photo: Arwed Messmer.
IV.
There are usually two additional things I mention when presenting the next part of the exhibition. One concerns the Western history of the concept of the “soul.” It was only in medieval scholastic theology that the soul was imagined as something firmly situated in the interior of a subject, and hence something that could be owned. Descartes later declared the soul to be substance—although a substance without extension, whose precarious status needed to be compensated for by a relative increase in transcendent stability. Aided by what Foucault described as “technologies of the self,” a new home—the inner self—was given to what had previously been exiled from exteriority. Following Christian theology, the soul-as-substance is given to individuals. The body is the container that receives a transcendental soul at the beginning of life. The soul is then the stage of a lifelong drama shaped by the forces of good and evil.
The Western tradition of theological and philosophical “soul-design” conceived of the soul as something that is owned by a subject, as its essence, and is enclosed within its interior. No wonder that when anatomists opened the body to look for the soul, they did not find it. What if the soul is not a substance, not a “thing,” but a function (not unlike the “zero” in mathematics)? What if “soul” (anima in Latin) is another name for the very medium that makes reciprocal exchange possible, for what happens in the very in-between, the event of communication? Would that not also change the very meaning of what it means to animate?
When people ask me at this stage to explain once more what this exhibition is about, I answer that it is about two things: firstly, the fact that all of us are perfectly capable of distinguishing an animated conversation from a non-animated one, and yet few of us are able to explain this difference in any precise or meaningful way. As crucial as this difference is to our everyday lives, it constitutes a blind spot in our conscious knowledge, and hence of what we are able to openly negotiate. Secondly, I also answer that this exhibition is not about answering the question of whether some “thing” possesses an anima, subjectivity, or life as a property or quality, but about the silence of our classification systems regarding the event of cross-animations and reciprocal, dialogical relations, and above all, about what it means for us to be animated, to be acted upon, or to be mediums of our environments and milieus. In my own work on the subject, I have always been more interested in this dimension of mediality and passivity—how to articulate the designs that the world has on us—than in the question of, for instance, the agency or subjectivity of “things.”
Installation view of Roee Rosen’s “Vladimir’s Night” by Maxim Komar-Myshkin, 2011/2012. Gouaches and text on paper.
V.
The next part of the exhibition introduces the concept of animism historically. It begins with a vitrine-display of a number of key texts from 1871 to the 1990s. Animism as a term was coined by the anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his seminal work Primitive Culture (1871), which gained him an academic chair in anthropology, the first position of its kind. Tylor aimed to articulate a theory of the origins of religion, and he found this origin in what was to him the primordial mistake of primitive people: the attribution of life and person-like qualities to objects in their environment.1 Tylor’s theory was built on the widespread assumption of the time that primitive people were incapable of assessing the real value and properties of material objects. Animism was explained by a primitive incapacity to distinguish between object and subject, reality and fiction, the inside and outside, which allegedly led primitive people to project human qualities onto objects. The concept was inscribed into an evolutionary scheme from the primitive to the civilized, in which a few civilizations had evolved, while the rest of the world’s people, described by Tylor as “tribes very low in the scale of humanity,” had remained animist, thus effectively constituting “relics” of an archaic past.
This evolutionary, anti-animistic scheme that placed the rational subject and the scientist at the top of the evolutionary ladder would soon be taken up by psychology on its own terms; psychology would go on to assert that every human passes through an animist stage in childhood, which is characterized by the projection of its own interior world onto the outside. Thus, next to Tylor’s Primitive Culture are displayed two key texts by Sigmund Freud: Totem and Taboo (1913) and The Uncanny (1924). It is in Totem and Taboo that Freud makes an extraordinary calculation—one that helps us a great deal in mapping the landscape of institutions and disciplines of knowledge that are the result of the modern dichotomies. Freud, building directly on Tylor’s theory of animism, explains this “stage” as a form of narcissism by means of which consciousness is projected onto the external world, and ideal connections (as established in one’s thinking) are mistaken for real ones—that is, a connection established in one’s thought is assumed to exist in the outer world.
In his attempt to dissociate inner projections and outer reality, Freud, like Tylor, is an inheritor of the basic program of the Enlightenment, which in turn has been the secular-intellectual successor of the Christian war waged on “superstitions” and idolatry. In this process, outer reality comes to be defined in terms of an objectified nature—that is, as a nature uncontaminated by social representations, symbolizations, and projections. But if the holy task of modern knowledge was to calculate away from the outer world that which humans had previously projected onto it (thus initiating the Cartesian legacy), then where did the contents of such projections go?
The nineteenth century positivist mechanical world picture made no room for these projections—and hence they led a delirious, symptomatic, and anarchic life in the realm of the fictional, in the works of the Romantics, in the phenomena of the mediumistic and in the pathological. In Totem and Taboo, Freud explains that whatever had to be extracted from the proper exterior world (from nature and its laws) must now be given a home—the field of psychology. For what is the terrain and subject matter of psychology? It is everything that “primitive men” had projected outwards into the world, and that subsequently had to be “translated back into psychology.” The “psyche” thus constitutes itself as the byproduct of the very categorical distinction made by rationalist science. It is the very field that administers whatever is left on the dubious subject-side when the proper calculations have been made. Freud’s genuine contribution was that he actually assigned to those phenomena a territory where they could once again be recognized as an irreducible part of reality.
In the essay The Uncanny—his most distinct contribution to aesthetics—Freud comes close to suggesting that it is in the experience of the uncanny that the unconscious reveals its animistic and social, collective roots. Uncanny experiences are those that fracture the very border between self and world, between past and present, and between life and non-life. Freud finds two explanations for uncanny experiences, two ways of explaining away the collective, immanent dimension of an animism that has become the modern unconscious: they are either a matter of “reality-testing,” insofar as they are vestiges of animistic beliefs from our ancient past that we have already successfully surmounted; or they are the return of something repressed—and since Freud’s conception of the unconscious is not social, not collective, not historical, but confined to the private individual’s family history, it must be something repressed from childhood experience, rather than the discontents of any given or historical “relational diagram” in which the possibility to speak back, and negotiate the situation as such, has been foreclosed.2
It is through the Freudian conception of the aesthetics of the uncanny, nevertheless, that we can grasp the degree to which this very border—on which our identity as “modern” depends—is a question of aesthetics, that is, of sensuous perception, and that it is in aesthetics that this border is frequently negotiated and transgressed. But is there not a similar “agreement” around the designation of something as “aesthetic”? Is the aesthetic not a kind of “safety valve,” as Fredric Jameson suggested, “a kind of sandbox to which one consigns all those vague things … under the heading of the irrational … [where] they can be monitored and, in case of need, controlled”?3 And is “art” in this landscape of modern territorial and disciplinary demarcations and border-regimes not yet another safe enclosure, such that Freud can claim in Totem and Taboo that it is in art—and in art alone—that modern civilization has reserved a place where animism is allowed to survive? And what is the price paid for this right to remain animist, if not that art has no claims to make on reality?
The autonomy of modern art was achieved at the price of becoming fictional, which meant it had to become politically inconsequential, a merely subjective expression. Of course, this very contract that lies at the foundation of what we call “art” today, this magic circle that unhinged art from the collectivity of life and rendered it fictional, was like the red rag in the eyes of the bull called the avant-garde. Wave after wave of avant-garde artists attacked this shameful line that was drawn around art. They wanted to bring art back into life, back into politics, back into practice, often drawing up their own obscure horizons of animistic utopias. Or they had arranged themselves within the magic circle drawn around art as a preserve for animistic relations, and fashioned that preserve not as a realm of autonomy, but of superior sovereignty, a realm in which the very contradictions and alienations of modernity could be overcome.
But what happens with animistic relations when they cannot be contained by the subject through repression or through reality-testing, and when they cannot be successfully relegated to the field of aesthetics or art? In this case, the division of labor among the designated territories always proved to be a merciless regime, for the only categories left were those of “the primitive” and of psychopathology. And it is indeed possible to read all the mental disorders known to Freud as disorganizations of the very boundary between inside and outside, to which psychology owes its very existence, the very boundary whose assumed absence earned itself the name “animism.”
Tylor and his contemporaries had successfully exported this animism—and the neglected social dimension of relationality for which it stands—to the spatio-temporal outside of an imaginary archaic past whose remnants could be found among contemporary primitives, the common name for non-modern irrational societies that found themselves under the rationale of colonial subjugation. Freud’s invention of the unconscious, too, is an export operation of this kind, but it is the paradoxical export into an inside.
But we may wonder today how successful those export-operations actually were. Would it be going too far to speculate that they instead announced the coming impossibility of an export that was once far more operational? For one cannot but wonder at the importance of the vague term “projection” in both anthropological and psychological theories. “Projection” indeed is a term that ultimately leads into a cabinet of mirror effects. Recent anthropological critics have noted that it was in fact those very theoreticians who accused primitives, children, and the insane of projection who were guilty of the very process they attempted to debunk. The theory of animism with respect to non-modern societies is the product of those theoreticians projecting their notion of objective reality and their sense of self onto the people they accused of reading their own selves into others and the environment.4 But was not the period of European colonial expansion guilty of precisely such narcissism and ignorance? Did it not consist of the successful export of violence to the colonial frontier, where Western scientists imputed to others the very savagery they themselves enacted?
Victor Grippo, Tiempo, 2da. versión, 1991. Potatoes, zinc and copper electrodes, electric wire, digital clock, painted wooden base, glass vitrine and text.
VI.
Next to the vitrine with the excerpts from Tylor and Freud’s texts there is a series of collages by Leon Ferrari called L’Osservatore Romano (2001–2007). The collages are made of articles—mostly their cover pages—from the Vatican’s newspaper of the same name that address issues of Christian morality in today’s world. On top of these articles, Ferrari brings together images of the torment of the damned from the canon of Christian iconography with scenes of the ecclesiastical torture of heretics. These images from the Western imagination of evil and damnation, of violence, transformation, and metamorphosis, become depictions of what was systematically destroyed by the reality of terror lurking beneath the surface of Western reason; images of an economy of terror and of a world that comes into being through the destruction of bodies and cultures—from the Inquisition and colonial South America to recent military dictatorships and Abu Ghraib. These collages are meditations on what anthropologist Michael Taussig has called “one of the great unwritten histories of imperialism”—the “blending” of the “great signifiers of death and the underworld” (in the case of South America, of Spanish-Christian, African, and indigenous New World origin) in the formation of the “culture of conquest.”5 But prior to such “blending,” do these collages not point to the one-to-one export of an imaginary of negativity, a translation of the iconography of evil from Europe into a colonial reality?
Compared to the anthropological theory of animism—which certainly also served to legitimize what Leon Ferrari calls “European barbarity”—was the prior export of images of evil by means of which indigenous people around the world could be assimilated to the picture of the idolater and the Anti-Christ not a far more mobilizing, far more numbing, operation? For the anthropological theory of animism put forward by Tylor already contained a grain of that very recognition whose denial was indispensable for the colonial project in its genocidal continuity, where it was not a question of where to draw boundaries around the soul, but a question of who possessed a soul and could thus be regarded as human. Tylor’s book, in this respect, was perhaps more a failed attempt to retrospectively rationalize and legitimize capitalism and the use of religious warfare—an attempt, as I will argue later, that set in motion an unstoppable and ongoing process concerning modernity’s ontological fundaments. Rather than exporting animism, Tylor opened the door to uncovering the modern export mechanism, and all attempts to contain that opening later could only do so by covering up the issue of animism.
In his psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, Freud came close to opening this door entirely, by conceiving of the unconscious not as a private, individual affair, but as an “extension of animism.” When he states that “the psychoanalytic assumption of the unconscious … appears to us a further development of that primitive animism which caused our own consciousness to be reflected in all around us,” one could wonder whether he is not suggesting that psychoanalysis—perhaps the very process of therapy, including those mediumistic phenomena like transference—could be seen as re-instituting animistic relations between the subject, the foundational encounter with otherness, and the world. However, this was not the path that Freudian psychoanalysis would pursue. It was the Freudo-Marxist tradition in critical theory that attempted to open up the unconscious to the dimension of the social, conflating it with the entire realm of production, and it was in this context that aesthetics was interrogated as the very bridge between psyche and society.
In the vitrine next to Tylor and Freud there lies a page from the Dialectics of Enlightenmentby Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—a book in which animism figures most prominently as a decisive and ultimately ambiguous hinge. Adorno and Horkheimer, however, in arguing that the Enlightenment must come to terms with its own “regressive element,” stay firmly within the modern matrix, where that which is repressed is not sensuous mimesis—and hence animism—for the sake of bringing to light the sovereignty of modern thought, but the constitutive role of terror in colonial modernity. And like Adorno and Horkheimer, their successors in the Freudo-Marxist tradition have failed to theorize animism in relation to the modern colonial narrative. This is all the more surprising given the key role it plays in their critique of “alienation,” “reification,” and the “uncanny animation” of the commodity in the capitalist world—which are all terms that in the last instance derive their meaning from a hidden horizon and referent.
Installation view of Vincent Monnikendam’s video Mother Dao, the Turtlelike (Moeder Dao, de schildpadgelijkende)and Al Clah’s film Intrepid Shadows, 1966/69, from the series “Navajo Film Themselves.” Photo: Arwed Messmer.
VII.
The next work in the exhibition is a film that documents the colonization of what is today Indonesia. Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao, the Turtlelike (1995) is the outcome of six years of work with more than 200 hours of found footage shot from 1912 to 1933 in what was then the Dutch Indies. That practices upholding inherently social relations with the natural environment were always a crucial feature of the cultures of the Indonesian archipelago is not the main reason for the inclusion of this film, which is otherwise the only “ethnographic footage” in the exhibition. (It is worth noting that the Indonesian government’s attempt in 2006 to recognize “animism” as an official religion alongside Islam failed due to the resistance of Muslim clerics.) MotherDao is rather a story—a myth-of-origin—about de-animation by the coming-into-being of the colonial world.
The film, which takes viewers through Indonesia under the colonial regime, shows images that were originally shot to promote colonialism to Dutch audiences. However, Monnikendam’s montage is an attempted reversal of the relations of power thus inscribed into and by the camera gaze. It is not merely the montage that tells a story different from what public opinion in Europe then predominantly thought about the colonial enterprise; it is equally the omission of the usual commentary, and a different narrative framing, through which these images begin to speak a different language. For Monnikendam uses a creation myth from one of the islands of West Sumatra to frame his counter-epic. The myth tells of the coming-into-being of the world through Mother Dao, who is called “the Turtlelike” because the shell of a turtle resembles the curved horizon. And the soundtrack adds to this reinscription of the images; it is interlaced with poems and songs from Bahasa Indonesia, which tell of the suffering of workers and peasants, of famines and deaths by smallpox, of betrayal, deceit, and profit-making, of the destruction of language, of the falling silent of the world under the burden of the terror of “primitive accumulation,” of capitalist exploitation, and of colonial administration, adding up to a rather different version of the modern epic of the “disenchantment” of the world.
The exhibition continues with another vitrine in classical museum-design. This work too, like the one by Jimmie Durham that it mirrors, is a mediation on matter and time—and energy. Victor Grippo’s Tiempo (1991) consists of a digital clock that gets its energy from a battery consisting of four potatoes and a combination of copper and zinc. During the exhibition, as the time on the clock continues to run, the potatoes gradually decompose and regerminate. But not only are these potatoes in conversation with Durham’s stone regarding different aggregate conditions of matter and energy. They also mark the passage, within the logic of this exhibition, from the concept of an anonymous animating force as found in the once enormously popular and vague anthropological concept of mana, to its modern equivalent: electricity.
For what animated the modern age, aside from the free flow of capital was the electrical current. And electricity has an undeniable relationship to the phantasmagoric image-culture of the modern age and the rise of technological media. Here are vitrines that display illustrations of “galvanized corpses” coming back to life, posters from Frankenstein movies, an advertisement for the 1891 Chicago World Fair and its “Hall of Electricity,” a stereoscope and several short movies by the infamous inventor Thomas A. Edison, including Execution of Czolgosz, with panorama of Auburn Prison (1901) showing the reenacted execution of Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist who attempted to assassinate US president William McKinley in 1901. Made by the camera that was invented by Edison’s company, this reenacted execution was meant to promote yet another of its inventions, the electric chair. Within the logic of the exhibition, the electrocution in the prison is an instant of “objectification” But as Avery Gordon suggests in her text written for the exhibition catalogue, it was above all an example of electricity in the service of the restoration of a social order momentarily disrupted by the killing of the President of Progress, Industry, and Empire by a self-proclaimed anarchist … By the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, grievously troubled over his usurpation of the divine powers of creation, has been replaced by Edison’s Tower of Light, blinding in its scientific harnessing of what Henry Adams called electricity’s “occult mechanism” to capitalist expansion and social order. Electricity was a key technological and symbolic medium to modernity’s presumptive progress. Cinema played an important role in justifying and normalizing this way of life.6
There is another Edison film on display, with potential reverberations that exceed all that can be said here: the Sioux Ghost Dance. Shot in 1894, the year that the Kinetoscope first made a massive profit for Thomas Edison’s company, the movie shows a group of American Indians performing the “Ghost Dance” in “Buffalo” Bill Cody’s infamous Wild West Show. The show was a theatrical, carnivalesque dramatization of the American frontier, mystifying as heroic struggle the war of white settlers against the inhabitants of the continent.
The Ghost Dance originated in the 1860s as a revitalization movement of Native American resistance. In 1889, the Paiute prophet Wovoka had a messianic vision of the restoration of Indian culture, the return of the murdered ancestors, and a future world without the whites. This peaceful transformation was to be brought about by spiritual renewal, by abstaining from fighting hopeless battles, and by practicing the Ghost Dance. The movement spread quickly across North America, and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs banned the dance. Edison’s movie was shot only four years after the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 1890, in which the 7th Cavalry of the US Army murdered some three hundred Lakota Sioux men, women, and children, which ended the Indian Wars and buried Wovoka’s vision of an Indian renaissance. The massacre happened after Chief Sitting Bull, an eminent leader of the resistance supporting the Ghost Dance, was shot dead during an attempt to take him captive. Sioux leader Big Foot surrendered shortly thereafter. His followers were brutally massacred during the subsequent disarming, after a medicine man began practicing the Ghost Dance.
The “dancer” on the celluloid of this motion picture is the ghost of genocide, the ghost lurking behind the triumph of white European conquest that turned the continent into a permanent colony. In the decades preceding 1890, largely in the shadow of the Civil War, this history culminated in the Indian Wars and the creation of the reservation system that still exists today. But the “Ghost Dance” here has yet another meaning that exceeds its particular context. It does not only stand for the genocidal continuity of colonial modernity, but also for the continuity of repressing the mimetic faculty, and hence of animism-as-social-practice. For it is these kinds of “ecstatic rituals”—circular dances being emblematic of them—which stand for a tradition of collective mimesis that had been exiled from Europe in early modernity7—and which only shortly afterwards, European colonists, missionaries, and travellers alike would encounter around the globe.
Mirroring this “Ghost Dance” are examples of chronophotography and the “graphic method” by infamous physiologist Etienne Jules-Marey. These “inscriptions of life” were not only a defining source of modernist iconography, since many artists saw in them an expression of the dissolution of the unity of time and space. As inscriptions of the essence of life—motion—they also turned into notations and scripts through which new choreographies of movement could be planned and controlled. Chronophotography was not merely a decisive step towards the animation of images. It was equally the basis for the animation of the Taylorist factory regime.
Ken Jacobs’s video Capitalism: Slavery (2006) overlays the technique of animating pictures with the monotonous, standardized movements of plantation and factory work. Ken Jacobs is a filmmaker whose work systematically explores the intersections between the human sensorium and technologies. He is perhaps best characterized as an archaeologist of media, and not only because he works extensively with found footage and archival materials. His works are, in their very form, meditations on and revisitations of those “revolutions” of which we have no explicit memory, since they have become embedded in the ways we now sensuously perceive the world: the encounter with modern technologies, with machinery and media, and the profound impact they have on the coordinates of time and space and on human experience.
Capitalism: Slavery (2006) is based on a stereographic image of labor on a cotton plantation. The stereographic image is animated digitally by alternating between two images, as if to reproduce the standardized monotonous gesture of the slave laborers, while the stroboscopic flickering of the video draws us into its image space. In the backdrop of the image, we see the white overseer on horseback looking in our direction, his controlling gaze uncannily communicating with the disembodied camera lens, both producing and controlling space. Animation here is flipped on its head and becomes a form of evocation, turning the spectral presence of a foundational scene of capitalist modernity into an innervating experience, a ritual of actualized remembrance, an unearthing of the original encounter, an archaeology of how the link between sensorium and technology brings into being new worlds and rewrites both “nature” and “humanity.” Jacobs thus adds to our understanding of media the other, frequently forgotten half: the innervation where body and mind act as a medium, the way we are “hypnotized,” mesmerized, affected, and moved, the way technologies channel desires and keep us under their spell. His forays into the history of media explore the link between the libidinal and production, between desire and capitalist modernity, between the factory and image technologies, between rationalization and standardization, mobility and immobility.
Installation view of Len Lye’s film, Tusalava, 1929, and Walt Disney, The Skeleton Dance, 1929, from the series “Silly Symphonies.” Photo: Arwed Messmer.
VIII.
Next in the exhibition there is a larger section devoted to animation and what Marina Warner has termed the “logic of the imaginary” (a “logic” that must by all means be taken out of the ghetto of the “merely imaginary” to become a dialectic picture of actual history). A key figure in this section is Sergei Eisenstein, although nothing of his own work is on display here save an excerpt from his textual analysis of the works of Walt Disney. Eisenstein, within the script of this exhibition, holds the place of the paradigmatic “modernist” artist for whom animism appeared to become an issue at the horizon of his aesthetic practice and political project. Eisenstein appears in this exhibition rather than Picasso, Braque, Gauguin, or Kandinsky because in his eyes the medium of cinema was the “synthesis of all art of the time,” and because he was a paradigmatic “researcher-artist” with an extensive output of theoretical work, much of which takes up the question of animism.
In Eisenstein’s work the question of animism appears in the form of the Grundproblem, the basic problem of the relation between rational thought and sensuous thought that he believed structures all works of art. Eisenstein characterized Disney’s animations as an embodiment of animism through “formal ecstasy,” as a revolt against “metaphysical inertness”—but a revolt that is merely “a sweet drop of relief,” a revolution that “lacks consequence.”8 Is this—as Theodor Adorno would claim in a somewhat charged debate with Walter Benjamin—because Disney’s aesthetics of all-encompassing metamorphosis fuels alienation by reconciling it with the order that it aesthetically negates? And is not the very critique of “regression” itself bound, as Isabelle Stengers notes in her text accompanying the exhibition, to the primitivist notion of “stages” within a “triumphalist and thoroughly anti-Darwinian evolutionary story of progress?
On view next to this vitrine is The Skeleton Dance (1929), the first episode of the Silly Symphonies series produced by the Walt Disney studio. This animated short represents the essence of the art of cinematic animation perhaps more than any other work. It can be regarded as an exemplary articulation of the very laws of the genre. In Skeleton Dance, Disney reworked the ancient motifs of the danse macabre and the Ghost hour, thus making the crossing of the border between life and death his point of departure. Skeleton Dancecelebrates the victory of life over death, in a carnivalesque spectacle that may be likened to the infamous Mexican celebrations of the Day of the Dead. But here, what is being celebrated is the literal victory of the animated drawing over the static picture that fixes life and movement in a standstill—the victory of metamorphosis over stable form.
The trope of the Ghost hour furthermore suggests that Disney alludes to the animistic quality of animation as the return of the repressed, as embodied in gothic imagery and the aesthetics of the uncanny. Skeleton Dance unfolds in the contrast between the plasmatic, metamorphic line and the rigidity of the skeleton—and this very contrast is not merely the content of the work but crucially also the very principle of its composition: Skeleton Dance is choreographed to the music (composed by Carl Stalling, presumably based on Edvard Grieg’s March of the Trolls and Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre), and its basic principle is that each bone is equated with a musical note—a principle perhaps best expressed in the scene where one of the skeletons is turned into a xylophone by another. Along with the principles of surprise (everything is always more alive than one thinks) and of the exaggeration of cause and effect, Skeleton Dance articulates a fundamental “law” of the fictive animated universe: its many voices must be integrated into one single “song” or tune along a musical “carcass,” the source of the “enchantment” on which the effect of animation relies. But the effect is only one side of the coin of the actual animation that takes place here, in the process of our becoming-immersed, “attracted” and affected by the animation, a process that is a mental and corporeal event of mediality on the cerebral and cellular level.
Disney’s film is juxtaposed with another work from the same year. Len Lye’s film Tusalava, an animation made of five thousand single drawings, is, like Skeleton Dance, a study in morphology. It demonstrates that animated film always contains a contagious exchange of sensorial becomings on the “pre-logical” level, as Lye himself would characterize it. (In this regard Lye was a typical primitivist.) The mutating cellular shapes in the film slowly give rise to an enigmatic protoplasmatic scenario from which more distinct shapes emerge, resembling the penetration of a body by a virus, with this body being reminiscent of “totemic” imagery. Influenced by aboriginal art, Tusalava is indeed a primitivist work of sorts, while expressing the fundamental animistic qualities of its medium through its imagery.
The works that follow this constellation further elaborate on the question of figuration, morphology, and sensuous-mimetic exchange. The first series of works deal with the destabilization of social morphologies. There is Hans Richter’s film Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927), a lesson, so to speak, about the symmetrical constitution of the social order and the order of things, as the anarchic revolt of things disrupts, in the same stroke, all social hierarchies. There is a series of paintings, conceived as an album, made by Roee Rosen under a pseudonym, which depict—in the visual language of Russian Constructivism, political caricature, and Soviet children books—a revolt of things against Vladimir Putin in his house outside of Moscow—a work in which the derangement of the “order of things” is folded onto the psychopathological conditions of individual psychosis just as much as on the uncanny histories of power. These works are juxtaposed with Marcel Broodthaers’s slide show Caricatures – Grandville (1968). In the slide show, Marcel Broodthaers uses images from J. J. Grandville’s book Un Autre Monde (1844), along with nineteenth-century caricatures and illustrations by artists such as Honoré Daumier, including scenes—proclaiming “Liberté”—from the French Revolution.
Broodthaers juxtaposes these images with newspaper photographs of the student revolts of May 1968. Un Autre Monde is among the most powerful and bizarre of Grandville’s works: the collective phantasmagoria here becomes the objective property of things. This phantasmagoria is exhibited formally, by continually blurring the boundaries and upsetting the orderly hierarchies between people, animals, and things. Broodthaers described Grandville’s book as a “satiric phantasmagoria that one of these days will come into being.” “The romanticism of the nineteenth century already contains this fantasy that we now confuse with scientific reality,” wrote Broodthaers in an article about the Atomium, the landmark building from the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and the symbol of perhaps the last of the world expositions that worshipped the nineteenth-century dream of techno-scientific progress—fashioning itself in the romantic image of universalism enveloped in a mythological cloud of imperial grandeur.9 In this slide show, Broodthaers takes Grandville’s images literally, by using Grandville’s “types,” “characters,” and “figures” like “text.” He thus reveals the fundamental ambivalence in the phantasmagoric objectification achieved by the caricatures as they “exhibit” a collective dream-image of an epoch through, for example, masking humans as animals and thus unmasking human society as “natural.” At the same time, this phantasmagoria is also a symptomatic, uncanny depiction of the objectification of both nature and human society in the world of modern science and capitalism. The relation between text and image is a key theme in Broodthaers’s work—the dissolving of text into image, and the becoming-text of images. Metaphoric figuration occupies the unstable space between image and text, the literal and the visual. One need only think of Broodthaers’s extensive use of the abbreviation “fig.” for “figure,” and the way it is used in his fictional museums to systematically subvert taxonomic orders of knowledge. Given the centrality of figuration, one could speculate about whether Broodthaers’s interest in Grandville lay in the latter’s use of the “animal metaphor.”
The animal-as-metaphor is a figuration of anima—understood as states of consciousness and modes of being turned into images. And such metaphoric figuration, it has been suggested, is at the root of language. As John Berger claims, language is made of “fossilized” images, tropes, and metaphors: “The first subject matter for painting was animal … It is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal.”10 Berger suggests that Grandville’s work is a prophetic, uncanny depiction of a grand transformation in our relation to animals, leading to their imprisonment by society and, ultimately, to their disappearance. The modern phantasmagoric dream space invoked by Broodthaers quaGrandville may thus well be an image of disappearance and catastrophe, announcing a new subjugation of both “nature” and “humanity.” For Walter Benjamin, the “secret theme” of Grandville’s art was the “enthronement of the commodity.” Benjamin holds that the cynical and utopian element of Grandville corresponds with the commodity fetish, which demands to be worshipped by fashion: “Grandville extended the sway of fashion over the objects of daily use as much as over the cosmos. In pursuing it to its extremes, he revealed its nature. It stands in opposition to the organic. It prostitutes the living body to the inorganic world.”11 It’s worth nothing that Grandville’s work was a major inspiration for Walt Disney. However, Broodthaers inserts into the slide show some images of May 1968 in Paris, thus making us wonder who (or what) is in fact the subject of the dream or phantasmagoria enacted here.
The film The Love Life of the Octopus (1965) by pioneering filmmaker Jean Painlevé is both a document of ethology and a surrealist film. It portrays the titular octopus as a personification, and in so doing, it destabilizes presumptions about “nature,” including those essentialist tendencies found in some of the previous works, which like to transform the mimetic exchange of self and world into a scientific method. In Painlevé’s film, the dreadful allegation of anthropomorphism is systematically pushed to its tipping point, enabling the recognition of the otherness (and striking personality) of the octopus, and therefore also breaking open the narrow confines of anthropomorphism. The work of subjectification, Painlevé demonstrates, does not consist of “projection” but rather of knowing-through-engagement, of making contact with difference. As a movie, furthermore, this work is a formidable introduction to the very morphology of becoming that characterizes animated film, and the more-than-aesthetic power derived from conflating appearances with essences. Didier Demorcy’s slide show Vital Phantasy (2010) subsequently takes us on a journey through evolutionary morphology and the “adventure” of life on earth, traversing the boundaries of species and ultimately pointing to play as a form of communicative exchange.
Installation view of Animism, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Photo: Arwed Messmer.
IX.
The following works delve deeper into the realm of mimetic and morphological figuration, as well as the interconnected dissolution of boundaries, difference, and form. The film Self-Obliteration (1968) documents a happening created by Yayoi Kusama wherein bodies commune ecstatically with nature and one another. The happening acts out the very dissemination of the self that is characteristic of Kusama’s work—a theatrical mimicry, a folding out of interiority to become exterior, devouring the environment by total immersion in it and vice versa. There is a distinctively ecstatic quality to her work, a systematic transgression of the boundary between body and environment, between mind and physical space. Her destabilization of the seemingly fixed border between psychological “inside” and social, physical “outside” is a way of assuming autonomy precisely by abandoning it—the subject reacts to invasion by way of a countergesture of abandoning its own border, by folding the inside out, collectivizing and spatializing individuality, culminating in installations where self and environment interpenetrate.
Kusama has suffered from hallucinations since early childhood, and likens these hallucinations to a sort of “cannibalizing” of the self by the outside. Her “theatrical dissemination” can thus be regarded as a “countercannibalism” acting against, by way of countermimicry, the pathologization of mental disorder—the latter consisting precisely of an assumed “disturbance” of the “given” (conformist) boundary between self and world. Then there is a slideshow by Ana Mendieta entitled Alma Silueta en Fuego (Silueta de Cenizas) (1975) in which we see the artist’s silhouette impressed into the ground, inscribing herself as a negative into nature. Mendieta frames her explorations of body and self and its relation to earth explicitly as a search for the “bonds that unite her with the universe,” while alluding to ritual practices of West African, Caribbean, and Cuban provenance. In their time—the 1970s—these works subverted and redefined the accepted frame of how art was conceived. Together with several other artists, Kusama and Mendieta worked against the commodification of art and began to establish an understanding in which the work is conceived less as a product of an artist-subject than as a process that creates the subject, or oscillates between making and unmaking subjects and objects alike. Luis Jacob’s workTowards a Theory of Impressionist and Expressionist Spectatorship (2002) shows the interaction of children in whole-body suits with several Henry Moore sculptures—a strange sort of theater of mimetic cross-animation, the creation and conflation of difference. In most of these works, animation happens in the shadows and while the outright transgression of taxonomic boundaries happens in the revolt against positivist objectification and fixation in the rationalist order of knowledge, or in the queer subversion of the power of musealization.
In Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s installation Empire of the Senseless II (2006), we enter into such a classification machine ourselves. This double projection, in which two images are projected onto each other so that they overlap completely, is installed in such a way that the visitor must step into the projection and cast his or her own shadow onto the image. One of the overlapping images is a blue background, such as that projected by default if no signal is available to a projector. In the middle of this is projected the second overlapping image, a computer-generated succession of text. The blue background against which we cast our black shadow thus acts as a “blue screen”—a technology for dissociating figure from ground, scene from context, since the blue can later be replaced with any “background” in the editing room.
The projected text in Haghighian’s installation is taken from the novel Empire of the Senseless by American experimental and feminist writer Kathy Acker. Acker’s novel, like her other work, takes the conventionalized modes of representing gender, class, sexuality, and individual psychology in the “empire” of the bourgeois white male and pushes them to the point of linguistic implosion. The novel is a Franz Fanon- and Wilhelm Reich-inspired cyberfiction situated in revolution-shaken Paris. It is a monstrously luminous vision of the turbulent return of the repressed—the id, the female, the black, the “Third World,” and the outcast. Haghighian’s installation takes all the words used to address and interpellate people in the novel and makes out of them what can be called a “border machine” of the representational field. Only as we enter into the projection do the names—previously indecipherable due to the overlap—become readable: one on our back, and the other in front of us. It is our presence, physically, as an empty shadow profile and as what is named, that mounts and upholds the field of knowledge and representation—the very order and border of society. But this installation creates not only the experience of being “installed,” immobilized, subjected, and framed within this order. It also evokes—by means of both the changing names and the playful uncanniness of the shadow—the aesthetic, figurative possibility of all kinds of “crossing.”
X.
“Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps dance,” said Herbert Marcuse, who was a major inspiration for the countercultural movements of the 1960s.12 It is not only in works like Ana Mendieta’s slide show that we can sense the presence of animism not as a negative but as a positive horizon—the beyond of an immobilized order and an outside where something lost can allegedly be retrieved. JoachimKoester’s film My Frontier is an Endless Wall of Points (2007), an animated short created from drawings made by Henri Michaux under the influence of mescaline, equally addresses this horizon. However, it conflates this imaginary with structural film, thus pointing, simultaneously, at a growing divide between the representable and non-representable, symbolic structure and imagination. In so doing, Koester displaces some of Michaux’s key concerns.
The exhibition also presents a film made by Michaux with Eric Duvivier called Images du monde visionnaire (1963). Commissioned by the pharmaceutical corporation Sandoz, where Albert Hoffmann synthesized LSD in 1938, the film was meant to portray the effects of acid. In this aim it must ultimately be regarded as a curious failure. Walon Green’s filmThe Secret Life of Plants (1979) was far more successful in a somewhat related attempt. This film is a document par excellence of a then-popular form of “rediscovering” animism as the alterity of a faulty modernity, drawing on the romantic and primitivist traditions, bridging New Age spirituality and science. What is striking about the film is not only its use of the language of both scientific and spiritualist universalism, but also the contrast between the supposed immediacy of an animated cosmos and the scientific instruments and laboratory technology that are used to gain access, to “translate” and recognize what then appears as the genuine utterances of plants.
Indeed, the film’s narration and commentary ignore the role of this technology entirely, even though it acts as the bridge through which we enter the supposedly newly discovered animate universe. This somewhat schizophrenic stance toward technology is symptomatic of the romantic imaginary and its mystification of “nature” as an unmediated and technology-free “authentic” realm, to which humans could “return” to overcome their alienation caused by modern civilization. So much for antimodern romanticism and the primitivist stance: it is precisely because the mediating technologies of both non-modern cultures and modernity remain deeply un-understood that “animism” can become the horizon of an imagined immediate, authentic oneness with “nature.” This “economy” or “logic” of the imaginary employs animism as an alterity of modernity in ways that must therefore remain under the spell of the modern boundary regime—a negation that falls prey to affirming, in the last instance, what it negates, reproducing its mythology on a higher plane rather then shifting the grounds.
Daria Martin’s film Soft Materials (2004) intervenes in and displaces this schizophrenic stance toward technology, as she upends the technophobic imaginary that serves as an inexhaustible resource for so many products of popular culture. Soft Materials is the document of an encounter between human bodies and decisively non-anthropomorphic machines, showing a curious, sensuous interaction between people and robots shot in a well-known artificial-intelligence laboratory.
What is un-made here, among other things, is the categorical division between the mechanic and the organic—we are indeed looking at a rather different “frontier” of the human/non-human assemblage. Assemblages (2010) is a multiscreen installation and research project by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato. It follows the intellectual trajectory of Félix Guattari, philosopher, activist, collaborator of Gilles Deleuze, and institutional psychotherapist. It brings together the two strands that structure this exhibition: the relations between self and world and between humans and nature. InAssemblages, what is still a “border” that needs to be bridged and transgressed in documents such as Walon Green’s film is transformed into a psychogeography of polysemic, transindividual “enunciations” of partial subjectivities, described by the notion of the “machinic assemblage.” Toward the end of his life, Guattari investigated animist societies in his attempts to overcome the Western paradigm of subjectivity and further articulate this notion of the assemblage. The work, drawing on archival material and discussions as well as newly produced material, follows Guattari to the Clinique de La Borde in France, which sought to practice “institutional psychotherapy,” a different form of psychiatry in which the patient/agent vector of the institution is reversed. The work follows Guattari’s interest in animism, which was mainly sparked by his engagement with colleagues in Japan and Brazil. The materials produced in those countries inscribed the anti-institutional psychiatric practice and the search for a different articulation of the concept of subjectivity into the historical geography of colonial modernity.
XI.
The Animism exhibition is conceived as a topography of the “middle ground” that opens up if we suspend the division between the “Great Divides” of modernity. The works of art in the exhibition are like “crossings,” as they pass from one side of the abyss to the other, from object to subject, from one “subject position” to the next, or from one ontological register to another. They “map” what happens if the iron cages of subject and object are broken open. From there, the exhibition suggests, we can begin to understand what happened to this middle ground throughout modernity. Only if we cease to take the splits for granted can we grasp that it is in the logic of the divide that modern power manifests itself. Through the generalization of the logic of the divide, this middle ground becomes something like the “included-excluded,” an “outside” that is already enclosed and policed. It is where all the substantial political choices are made, even while their making is also what is obscured.
Through this kind of inquiry we can begin to imagine how the middle ground became what Michael Taussig has called the “epistemic murk,” the “negative,” “irrational” other of the positive enlightenment, and how it “fell,” like Eve and Adam from their infamous paradise, into the abyss and there turned into the imaginary stage for the “archaic illusion,” where moderns began to nourish their fantasies about the primitive other, mysterious communications, mimetic contagions, spirits, enchanted nature, and so forth. We can begin to imagine the very forms that deviations from the norm assumed—for instance, the creation of an autonomous zone of art, in which all those “crossings” between ontological registers could take place at the price of being neutralized in the ghetto of exceptionalism ever since called “art.” And how the very same deviations, in the “real” world, would ultimately be rendered as pathologies. We can begin to imagine that what Freud called the “unconscious” really is that very murky, old middle ground that is now newly “discovered”—the product, not least, of the bracketing off from reality of all non-linguistic communication (for the empire of signification was for the moderns the only legitimate way to “cross” the abyss), and thus the displacement of affect, emotion, imagination, mimesis, and so forth into the transformative darkness of the “unconscious.”
Candida Hõfer, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin III, 2003. Copyright of the artist Candida Hõfer, Kõln, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2012.
XII.
Today, “animism” is no longer what is repressed in order to install in its place a Cartesian regime of disciplinary identification and boundary policing. Rather than providing the justification for colonial subjugation, today it provides the justification for the biopolitical mobilization of the individual psyche. In his BBC series The Century of the Self (2002), Adam Curtis partially traces this development by investigating what Western politicians throughout the twentieth century have made of Freudian ideas. In the marriage of digital communications technology and 1960s counterculture (in whose hippiesque imaginary “animism” played the role of a redemptive alterity and outside), the modern frontier has folded in on itself and has become intensive rather then extensive. The unconscious no longer needs to be repressed, as long as it can be successfully contained by the self-management of individuals and prevented from becoming a collective affair. Ever since this epochal shift, we—as self-realizing, self-animating subjects—have lent capitalism our human face.
Complementary to the big, depressive cybernetic machine, the “self” has become the very frame (or profile) in which the old oppositions and divides are masked and seemingly reconciled. Century of the Self could be read as suggesting that the only substance that is left of the old order, and on which its continuity now largely rests, is paradoxically the autonomous individual that must be realized. If for Freud psychology was founded on “calculating” out of reality and into the psyche what we had “projected” onto the world, popular psychology now implies that it is on us to reverse the calculation once again. We must subjectify, and thus animate, our world and milieus, and in the process “positivize” and naturalize the regime. It is now on us to undo the very “alienation” that capitalist modernity induces. The structural discontents and exclusions thus become increasingly unspeakable, as the losses are effectively privatized. And for those who fail to comply with the task of self-management in this paradigm, the old disciplinary regime always awaits.
It is impossible to get past this impasse of contemporary politics without reclaiming autonomy on a different plane, where autonomy resides in the ability to articulate relationships and collectivity. And this requires us to “pass through” animism, in order to reclaim the imaginary—without the qualifier “merely”—as the space of the political, where we can break open the logic of division, not in order to realize the utopian image of a “borderless world,” but to bring into politics the very border-matrix which was categorically hidden, as the unquestioned background condition against which modern politics unfolded. This results in a particular plea for a continued modernization—if one irreversible aspect of modernity is the explication of previously implicit background conditions, the turning of ground into figure. The background that now must become a “figure” is the history of boundary-making practices, not as “past,” but as the dialectic picture through which the actual “relational diagrams” of the present can be grasped and un-mapped.
In contemporary art, photographical elements are often integrated into installation works or being used as a means of archiving. VOP interviewed Anselm Franke, curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012 to talk about the topic of the biennial, ‘Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction’ and specific photographic works that will be shown in the exhibition. (中文版訪談請見VOP第六期 : 反叛〈怪獸的歷史想像辯證 : 專訪2012台北雙年展策展人安森法蘭克〉)
Interview by Sylvie Lin / Photograph by Wei-I Lee (訪談 / 林心如 . 攝影 / 李威儀)
VOP / Please talk about your past curatorial experiences.
Anselm Franke / Originally, I used to work in the fields of theatre, film and television with artist/filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief ; he passed away in 2010 and represented Germany in the Venice Biennale in 2011. From 2003 to 2005, I collaborated with architects in making exhibitions. We didn’t look at the architecture as design but more as planning processes and political geographies. What was important for me in my collaboration with architects is that it is a way to think political questions and the organization of the space. Since 2003, most of the projects I was involved with were collaborations. We shared a common interest in ‘borders’, not only physical borders (of the buildings or the states) but rather social and political borders and borders of the imagination, the way images take part in creating limits. The way we are now trying to use the figure of the monster for the 2012 Taipei Biennial also has to with this interest: the monster is always a limit figure or a liminal figure. There are various forms of monsters, beyond the borders of the human, of the normal, of the laws of reality, etc. Most of these borders and limits appear to us more or less “given” or even natural. The curatorial task is to open up and de-stabilize this understanding, to show how limits are constructed, what is the role of culture, technologies and non-human factors in their making.
Another important experience is that I’ve worked with film for a long time. In 2005, with Stephanie Schulte Strathaus, we founded the Forum Expanded, a section for art and film within the Berlin International Film Festival/Berlinale. Since then, every year, we organized sections on artists’ films, and filmmakers who do installations in the context of the Berlinale.
VOP / Please talk about your ‘Animism’ project. Is it connected to the Taipei Biennial 2012 in certain ways ?
AF / ‘Animism’ was conceived as a project to question the story we tell about modernity. What is modernity? What are normally the sort of images and stories that we connect with this idea? ‘Animism’ used to be a concept used by European anthropologists to describe what was at the opposite of modernity. If you are not modern then you are animist. We used the concept as mirror not to look at the so-called ‘animist’, neither did we intend to make an exhibition ‘about’ animism. Rather, we used the history of the concept to look back at the ideas of those who called others ‘animist’. Again, it’s very much about borders. Because the way European scholars described the animism of peoples in South America, Africa, Siberia, Japan…was always as the absence of the same distinctions that modern people do, such as between a pure subjective inside and an objective nature that follows all the natural laws.
In animism, you have a different relationship to things, to nature; you don’t treat them as just “dead matter” that is indifferent to humans. Therefore, it is also about borders: it’s about drawing certain distinctions differently, and this concerns literally everything: everyday experience just as much as the definition of what is a ‘subject’, a ‘self’, or a ‘legal person’. Then, when other people make those distinctions in a different way, you call them ‘pre-modern’. So modernity is always about borders, and what we were trying to do is develop a curatorial ‘frame’ that de-colonizes the imagination, and shows how these borders are implemented and policed, but also how they can be conceived differently.
Based on this question of modernity, we try to elaborate in the Taipei Biennial what many people around the globe now perceive as the urgent need to break free from the ‘frame’ of colonial modernity and its narratives, its way of describing the world, and the need to tell different histories of modernity, to break open this modernity question and its notorious self-reproducing mythologies, to re-describe our immediate histories under terms that do not automatically reproduce those ‘borders’. This is part of what we are trying to do with the monster ‘Taowu’ proposed by David (Der-Wei) Wang as a means to write modern Chinese history. (Editor’s note : See Wang Der-Wei, The Monster That Is History. History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China)
VOP / How did you get to know the work of David Wang ?
AF / I read a lot of books about the relation between historical experience – especially history about violence – and fiction. Violence is something that is difficult to remember. It destroys memory and cultural continuity itself to a certain degree. These memories come up in fiction. For example, you could say there are many great American novels for the past thirty years. They are not so much the bestsellers but those that take a certain tradition of novel-writing. They deal with American histories of slavery, of racism, etc., things that are very important in the collective memory but very difficult to address, other than through fiction : it’s not about the facts, the dates and so on but the way they form and haunt people in the present that needs to be described through fiction.
This sort of interest in the relation between history and fiction was something that I shared with couple of writers and artists. The task is to read fiction against the grain, not as make-believe, but as a form of documentary of that which escapes positivist historical accounts. In 2006, we have also made an exhibition around the question, it bore the title ‘No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossings Occur at Night’. David Wang’s book was something I came across in this continuous research and interest. Also, I found there is a big need here to analyze and narrate Chinese modernity in its own terms. That is what is so valuable about David Wang’s attempt. He writes a kind of a history that has a certain proximity to Benjamin, Derrida or even Bataille. But he doesn’t use this as a theoretical framework. It’s something that is familiar but it doesn’t imply reading Chinese histories of violence, external and internal colonialism and modernization. Instead, he uses the frame of this ancient mythology. That creates a certain image of the contemporary situation in relation to the past, which is very strong. It’s more about an image created in the imagination. We are not making a biennial about literature but about the imaginary in a wider sense. The idea is to make an exhibition that shifts between fiction and historical analysis, just as the identity, or face of the “monster” in this exhibition constantly changes.
Chang Chao-Tang, New York, USA, 2011. Copyright and Courtesy the artist
VOP / Among the artists who will present photographical works in this biennial, we find the Taiwanese photographer Chang Chao-Tang (張照堂). How do you understand his work ? What works will be shown and how will you present them in the context of this biennial ?
AF / He is one of the several chroniclers of post-war Taiwan. The amazing thing is that his work covers a period from the late fifties till today. So it’s basically more than half a century. It was important for us to have somebody whose photographic work can mirror a lot of different periods in Taiwan’s history. In his work, there is something that people are familiar with yet you can always find some moments of strangeness particularly in his photographs.Also, there are periods where he is more experimental. I first knew him through the catalogues of his works. Until I met him personally, I learned that he was a journalist and a reporter. Photography was always a side activity for him. This characteristic of being in-between, not being the sort of artistic photographer per se is interesting. You can sometimes read the images as almost journalistic images and then as totally aesthetic images. What I like in his work is that you can move between these poles of extreme. Then you have this sort of images that are very well-known, like the image of the self-portrait without a head, with just a shadow on the wall. It is an image that allows many possible readings. When he was experimenting photography he was also reading Sartre, so there is all this existentialist influence in it, which is interesting in terms of the global importance Sartre had at the moment. These are the moments when the images of Chang Chao-Tang open themselves to different readings and place Taiwan in such a context. It becomes local again because his images sometimes have this sort of universal look of the ‘Family of Man’ exhibition. I like this movement in his work.For the Taipei Biennial, we will make a selection of all the five decades. We’re still working on the presentation but basically we will show them in a sort of condensed overview. There would be a lot of images together. What we are thinking about would be more like Peter Brook’s style. Images will be grouped based on their motifs and in blocks. There is no strict chronology but more jumping among motifs, like this movement I just described : making something very specific localized, and this attempt of universalization, this movement between ‘reportage’(Editor’s note : The French term means ‘report’ in English) and aesthetics. We try to make movements between these categories rather than going from 1959 to 2006. But of course, there will be dates connected to all the images.
VOP / What are other photographic works in the biennial ?
AF / A part of the photographic works in this biennial is based on archive photos, like the project of Maryam Jafri and that of the Otolith Group. Each of the two projects consists of around fifty images. Maryam Jafri’s project is called ‘Independence Day’. It’s a collection of photographs from the moments of the founding of new states during the period of de-colonization, mainly in the 1960s. When we look at the images today, there is a historical distance of what has happened since. A project like this certainly takes on a very particular reading in Taiwan. We found it interesting to see how meaning changes when the images are being shown today – when we have a slightly different view on the expectations that ‘independence’ carried back then, before the historical experience of neo-colonialism and ‘globalization’. What is also present in these images when presented today is what happened after them – in terms of the histories that ‘power’ has written, but these are stories we normally don’t really know how to tell well. You can’t help but asking yourself in front of these images: What story do I have? Do I have a narrative for the past 50 years, for its aspirations, disappointments and novel monstrosities? And it is interesting to show those images here in Taiwan, with its undecided status.
The Otolith Group’s project in the biennial is called ‘Daughter Products. It’s basically from the family archive of one of the group members. It shows a delegation of Indian women who are communists. You see them in different settings, visiting other countries. It also belongs to this internationalist moment aspiring a different kind of universality that is now largely dead: you see them in China, Russia and also in areas that were not socialist. It is very much complementing the ‘Independence Day’ project of Jafri. It shows another moment of aspiration when a certain scheme of modernity was still working, like the idea of progress, division between the socialist and the capitalist worlds : these are ghosts from the Cold War era that are not quite silent ghosts which are being spoken about in this project.
Daughter Products, (ca.1952-1962), 2011, by The Otolith Group. Copyright and Courtesy the artists
The biennial will also show Joachim Koester’s work. His work is not so much about what you see, but what you don’t see in this reading. In all his work, he sets up a certain research, like a historical research. Then the research or the story and the image become two components ; there is a tension between what you know, the story you tell and the image you see. For the Taipei Biennial, his research is about opium. One part of the story is trying to find the traces of opium trade in Calcutta which was the main base for the British-East India Company for the opium trade. He found almost nothing except a building called ‘Nanking Restaurant’. You see a photo of this restaurant. Another photo is the poppy flower with which we make opium. Along with the series of images, there goes a text describing the sort of relation between the terror in modernity : the colonial terror or the terror of opium that were part of the history, and its relation to the delirium of smoking opium. What he is interested in is the technology of photography on the one hand and the inscriptions into the mind on the other hand. What are the dreams that you dream under the influence of opium and what is the kind of the shape of dream that has to do with what you see and don’t see in a photograph? The work consists of very few photographs and a text.As for Luis Jakob, he makes collections of images, like series of collages made with found images, It is called ‘Album’. He has created about ten such ‘Albums’ ; each one consists of about fifty pages. They have certain focuses such as the expressive body. The pages will be shown in a long series on the wall. It’s this kind of catalogue of gestures, but the gestures bring every attempt at classification to its limits – they are ecstatic in a certain sense, and can help us understand the body as a social body, as a collective body. But there is never any specific story. You are left to your own associations and finding different connections between motifs.
Joachim Koester, Calcutta, Copyright the artist, Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum
VOP / Today, many artists don’t work solely with one medium. Regarding photography, it is often integrated into installation works or as a means of archiving. For you, what is the role or place of photography in contemporary art ?
AF / For me, where photograph becomes always interesting in relation to artistic practice is this ambivalence that you can read it as an indexical trace of something, as a sort of document, but also as the exact opposite. The tradition of the latter would be the surrealist magazine called ‘Documents’(Editor’s note : The original French title means ‘Documents’ in English)founded by Bataille and his friends. Rather than confirming an evidence, the way they used photography reveals to the viewer something in all photography that disturbs the very idea of reality and its ‘order’. It’s always about putting everything into question. Today, many conceptual photographic practices can also be traced back to certain photographic traditions. For example, some people claim that Chang Chao-Tang is conceptual artist. His pictures in the 1970s represent a certain conceptual photography. I still think that there is a lot to explore in terms of this conceptual photography : creating a context for an image and perceiving how the image changes in it. We can think of photography’s role as similar to that of the imagination: it is not to settle and fix the fleeting moment or the imaginary, but to make the settled and fixed strange, and imaginative again. This is where the politics of art is to be found: in the conditions of fixation and change.
—
Anselm Franke is an independent curator and freelance writer based in Berlin. He worked in the fields of theater, television and film and has collaborated with Christoph Schlingensief who represented Germany in the Venice Biennale in 2011. As a curator, he owrked for KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2001-2006) and was director of Extra City Kunsthal Antwerp (2006-2010) and co-curated Manifesta 7 and the 1st Brussels Biennial. He is the editor of several publications and artist books, and a contributor to e-flux journal. Since 2005, he has been co-curator (along with Stephanie Schulte Strathaus) of the Forum Expanded of the International Film Festival Berlin.
From December 4 through 7, 2014, Dominique Lévy will present the exhibition TRUE GRIT at Art Basel Miami Beach. With significant works created from the 1970s through the 1990s, the show is inspired by the potent themes that transformed Charles Portis’ 1968 novel True Grit – and the 1969 Academy Award-winning film based upon it – into bona fide milestones of American popular culture celebrated worldwide. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, and photography by Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, Gilbert & George, David Hammons, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Peter Regli, Thomas Schütte, Kazuo Shiraga, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Günther Uecker, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool.
Meanwhile, the Design District is rapidly morphing into “the luxury fashion district” with an incredible transformation of the entire area still underway. Lots of stores are already open including Prada, Marni, Rick Owens, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Louboutin, Cartier, Celine, Pucci, Dior etc. and many more are on the way. And there’s a new “Palm Court” featuring a Buckminster Fuller dome, an enormous underground parking garage and plans for a condominium building to be designed by Chicago starchitect Jeanne Gang. You can follow the progress 
To take advantage of all the “luxury” in town for ABMB, The New York Times is hosting an “
(The Edition hotel)
Peter Marino
Future Brown. (Photo by Christelle de Castro)
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Untitled, 2012 from Paula Crown’s “Fractals” series
Perrier-Jouet launches a new, year-long collaboration with the Vienna-based art duo 
A new fair called 
KLIMA
The Gale Hotel (1690 Collins Avenue, South Beach) — that’s the spot that hosted PAPER’s “Tiki Disco” pop-up last year — will open a special “rooftop” edition of the 
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On December 3rd, Miami’s 
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The third annual Miami Street Photography Festival will take place from December 4th to the 7th at Kike San Martin Studios (2045 NW 1st Avenue, Miami) in the Wynwood Arts District. This year’s featured guests include Magnum photographers Alex Webb, Susan Meiselas and Constantine Manos; poet/photographer Rebecca Norris Webb and National Geographic’s Maggie Stebber. The festival is a partnership with 
Several works by the Chinese-born artist Shen Wei — he was the lead choreographer of the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics — will be on view at downtown Miami’s Freedom Tower. The exhibition, “In Black, White and Gray,” includes paintings and site-specific performances and is the artist’s first U.S. museum show. The performances are on December 5, 6 and 7 and they are FREE, but you need to reserve a spot 
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Meanwhile over in the Design District, Miami’s new “luxury shopping” destination, a hybrid fashion store/design exhibition/art installation called “The World of Mr. Somebody & Mr. Nobody” featuring
Ryan McGinley, Prairie (Pond), 2014. C-print, 90 x 60 inches (Courtesy of the artist and Team, New York)
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Tim Burton’s new film 
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The bragging rights for being Miami’s first art fair surely belong to
Ian Schrager (and Marriott) launch their latest 
Miami Marine Stadium — designed by Hilario Candela and built on Miami’s Rickenbacker Causeway in 1963 — is raising money for a total restoration, and they’re having a big street art exhibition during AB/MB. Featured artists include: Ron English, Doze Green, Risk, Tristan Eaton, Crash, The London Police, Astrik and many more. The event is hosted by the 
Christie’s and the Marriott hotel group are hosting a pop-up gallery featuring original works by Andy Warhol on December 3rd and 4th in the JW Marriott Marquis Miami (255 Biscayne Blvd., Miami). All the works — including paintings, photos, prints and works on paper — are from the 
Art Miami December 2 – 7, 2014 Midtown Miami | Wynwood, 3101 NE 1st Avenue, Miami, FL 33137 
CONTEXT December 2 – 7, 2014 Midtown Miami | Wynwood, 3101 NE 1st Avenue, Miami, FL 33137 
Just in case you needed an excuse to make a trip to Miami this winter, the new Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami will 
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Photographs by Adrian GautClockwise from left: Chef Roy Choi at Pot; a guest room overlooking Koreatown; the hotel’s sleek exterior.
Artist A.A. Bronson’s LA Art Fair was covered by the NYTimes T magazine. There were 220 exhibitors from 21 countries. There were small showcases of exceptional collections of art books that I found fascinating, particularly the one featuring Yves Klein and his International Blue. The LA books fair received a huge amount of press from New York.
Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg
Govind Armstrong’s new Post & Beam is the first truly upscale restaurant and cocktail bar in Central Los Angeles, south of the Santa Monica (10) freeway in a predominantly African-American community. Nearby is one of the wealthiest black communities in the U.S. in Baldwin Hills.
Batch, a new gastropub in Culver City.
The recently acquired ruby slippers are just one centerpiece for the future Academy museum.
“NEW COCKTAIL LOUNGE THE AVIARY Calling The Aviary Chicago’s best cocktail lounge is needless and obvious, considering the oceans of ink already expended on this months-old Fulton Market bar, but it must be said: This brainchild of Alinea’s chef, Grant Achatz, and his business partner, Nick Kokonas, is the most ambitious, fully realized, innovative twist on drinking the city has ever seen. One sip of its take on an old-fashioned (In the Rocks, $18), which requires the drinker to crack a bourbon-filled egg of ice with a miniature slingshot, and we were hooked. Not to mention attentive, polished service; a gorgeous room blissfully devoid of false Old World charm; and finger food straight out of the Alinea playbook.”
Frieze art fair | Source: Courtesy
Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cube, 1974, baked enamel on aluminum.
Sol LeWitt, Corner Piece No. 2 (from Cube structures based on nine modules), 1976. Painted wood, 43.3 x 43.3 x 43.3 in.
Eleanor Antin, Merrit from California Lives,1969; replicated 1998. Gasoline can, bush hat with “peace” decal, metal comb, and text panel. Dimensions variable. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
Victor Grippo, Tiempo, 2da. versión, 1991. Potatoes, zinc and copper electrodes, electric wire, digital clock, painted wooden base, glass vitrine and text.
Candida Hõfer, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin III, 2003. Copyright of the artist Candida Hõfer, Kõln, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2012.
Culture Night Los Angeles 
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