Art in America articles from December 2004

Art in America archives from December 2004

Ruscha to the rescue.(Front Page)(Editorial)
December 1, 2004... For a while, it was anybody's guess which would be found first: weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or an artist for the U.S. pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Long after other countries had announced their stars, the honor of representing...

Miami Beach in December: cool stuff.(Front Page)
December 1, 2004... The international fair Art Basel Miami Beach (Dec. 2-5) offers visitors multiple opportunities to view cutting-edge art. The principal venue is the Miami Beach Convention Center; a few blocks away, in "Art Positions," works by emerging artists...

Art history at a mouse click.(Front Page)
December 1, 2004... How many art historians does it take to write a timeline of art history? At least 100 if the project is taking place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Over the last five years, the education department at the Met has worked with...

Zesty Art Fairs in Paris and Cologne.(Front Page)(Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain )
December 1, 2004... FIAC: This year, organizers of Paris's Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain (FIAC) hired a new creative director, Jennifer Flay, to spice up the 31st installment of the venerable annual event. A New Zealand native and former Paris gallery...

Hot Frieze in London.(Front Page)
December 1, 2004... An estimated 42,000 visitors queued up for hours at the entrance to Regent's Park to visit a huge tent housing the second annual Frieze Art Fair, the hottest ticket in town Oct. 15-18. Braving chill, drenching rains and a $20 entrance fee, they...

Beyond minimalism.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, by Martha Buskirk, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2003; 317 pages, $39.95 cloth. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, by Suzaan Boettger, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002;...

Auction house follies.(The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby's-Christie's Auction House Scandal)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby's-Christie's Auction House Scandal by Christopher Mason, New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004; 406 pages, $26.95 hardcover. I recall sitting with a group of journalists at a Sotheby's...

Fields of light: an exhibition of photographs, video projections, prints and handmade books sets out the layered perceptual and conceptual concerns of Mike and Doug Starn.(Photography)
December 1, 2004... Attracted to light as moths are to a flame, Mike and Doug Starn have in fact spent much of the last 10 years photographing nocturnal moths approaching rural porch lights. During this protracted night watch, they employed a medium-format camera...

South by southeast: the 14th Sydney Biennale avoided many of the excesses typical of international art festivals by showing fewer artists and newer, often specially commissioned works.(Report From Sydney)
December 1, 2004... No longer quite so far away--22 hours from New York as Qantas flies--lies Sydney, Australia, where this past summer the 14th edition of the Sydney Biennale unfolded. The show was curated by Isabel Carlos, a Portuguese native born in Coimba in...

Manifesta 5: turning inward: although the Basque coast offered a spectacular setting for this itinerant European biennial, the organizers largely favored works immune to local site and circumstance.(Report From San Sebastian)
December 1, 2004... The strength of Manifesta has always been its nomadic nature. Situated each time in a different European city and, within each city, occupying both traditional and nontraditional sites, it adapts to new contexts within the geopolitical...

The year of living minimally: in response to several recent shows, the author rethinks Minimalism as the outcome of shifting formal imperatives, a global current, a forebear of postmodernism, a child of continental philosophy--in short, as anything but the monolithic movement its first exponents made it out to be.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2004... In March 1967, the cover of Arts Magazine posed the question: Would there be "A Minimal Future?" Thirty-five years later, we can give a definite answer: yes. Together with Pop art, Minimalism continues to provide the basic language of...

Royal visions; art of the Maya courts.(The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art)
December 1, 2004... Eighteen years after a landmark exhibition, "The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art" (1986), fundamentally changed our understanding of Maya historical iconography, a remarkable curatorial effort brings us closet' than we have ever...

Beyond translation: trained in France and based in Berlin, the Albanian artist Anri Sala specializes in films and videos featuring fraught situations in which language, and even light, can take us only so far.
December 1, 2004... Anri Sala's work has prompted numerous discussions as to whether he is a documentarian or a video artist, although Sala would argue that he is now firmly the latter. Just 30, the young Albanian can boast of an award-winning career as both,...

The world according to Solakov: working in an ever-proliferating range of mediums Bulgarian Nedko Solakov uses fiction, confession and equivocation to navigate a post-Soviet landscape of loose ends. Playfulness, his midcareer survey suggests, is the skeptic's best weapon.
December 1, 2004... ... [I]t is precisely this masquerade of fictions and ironies and fantastic scenarios that can draw us out and bring us close to ourselves. The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who...

Allegories of anarchy: part of a new wave of German painters, Daniel Richter, who is the subject of a current traveling show, creates large-scale pictures that combine political themes, Felliniesque fantasy and quasi-abstract elements.
December 1, 2004... "Pink Flag--White Horse," a traveling Canadian exhibition of about 26 large canvases by Daniel Richter, marks the first time that paintings by this 42-year-old German artist have been shown in North America (between venues, 12 of the works were...

David Ireland: the alchemist: San Francisco artist David Ireland transforms ordinary materials, such as concrete and domestic debris, into playful sculptural installations inspired by Zen precepts. A traveling show surveys his work since the 1970s.
December 1, 2004... When curator William Seitz popularized Dubuffet's term "assemblage" with the exhibition "The Art of Assemblage" at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1961, he wrote of "a truly magical transformation from banality and ugliness... to often...

Daniel Joseph Martinez at The Project.
December 1, 2004... Daniel Joseph Martinez's architectural installation The House America Built indulges the art world's current sober fascination with politics--albeit with a wry humor. Certainly not known for shying away from contentious issues, the L.A.-based...

Gareth James at American Fine Arts.
December 1, 2004... To prove that elaborate sculpture can, like origami, be made from a single sheet of paper, Gareth James cuts and folds large sheets of drafting paper and assembles them into recognizable objects. Each is modeled on a published photograph that...

Willard Boepple at Salander-O'Reilly.
December 1, 2004... Since the mid-1980s, sculptor Willard Boepple has been exploring the implications of human physicality, not by making images of the figure but by building three-dimensional metaphors for things we use or places we inhabit. His starting point...

Nari Ward at Deitch Projects.
December 1, 2004... Nari Ward didn't need to use actual, smelly codfish in order to make his first solo show in New York in eight years off-putting. But he did it anyhow. The Harlem-based artist--who grew up in Jamaica, immigrated to the United States at the age...

Martin Borowski at Stellan Holm.
December 1, 2004... Martin Borowski's paintings have the cool and detached quality of Thomas Struth's photographs of empty streets. In fact, Borowski, a German painter, uses photographic sources, most in the public domain, that he digitally tweaks. He aims for a...

Michael Brennan at Margaret Thatcher projects.
December 1, 2004... Michael Brennan has a knack for distilling contradictory impulses in his work and uniting those impulses in fresh, yet opulent, paintings. These eight new works (all 2004) are oil, wax and enamel on canvas, and measure--with one compact...

Richmond Burton at Cheim & Read.
December 1, 2004... In Pleace (2004), one of the signature oil-on-canvas abstractions in Richmond Burton's fourth exhibition at Cheim & Read, the painter again demonstrates his skill at eliciting a nearly limitless set of associations while conferring what appears...

David Row at Von Lintel.
December 1, 2004... David Row has spent over 20 years devising abstract paintings that seek to capture the tenor and grit of contemporary experience. In the early '90s, Row worked with abutted rectangular canvases onto which he painted curved bands immersed in...

Bill Henson at Robert Miller.
December 1, 2004... Bill Henson is one of the best known and most widely exhibited artists in Australia. He was that nation's representative at the 1995 Venice Biennale, and his gallery in Sydney is Roslyn Oxley9, which also shows the work of fellow Australian...

Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman.
December 1, 2004... Five of eight works (all dated 2003) in Jeff Wall's recent exhibition of color transparencies mounted on lightboxes seemed more concerned with the immediacy of circumstances than with the composed, labor-intensive mise-en-scenes for which he is...

Justine Kurland at Gorney Bravin + Lee.
December 1, 2004... It has seemed from the beginning of Justine Kurland's career, just a few short years ago, that she lives in a dream world, where everyone on both sides of the camera is young and success comes unnaturally early to all. True enough, though only...

Tracey Rose at The Project.
December 1, 2004... Tracey Rose is part of an exciting contingent of young cultural producers who are confronting Western notions about African culture. Often linked to the emergent discourse on African modernity and the diaspora, this South African-born...

Hans Accola at Frederieke Taylor.
December 1, 2004... Ever since Judd, artists have been leery of the word "sculpture"; Hans Accola refers to his new work, scruffy little plywood constructions that stand on the floor and are called "Logos Jigs," as a "series of objects invented while struggling...

Milan Klic at Reeves Contemporary.
December 1, 2004... Milan Klic was born in the Czech Republic but has lived in the Boston area since studying at Brandeis University in the mid-1980s. His recent show included several whimsical vehicles made primarily of bamboo, as well as mixed-medium wall...

Omer Uluc at Art of This Century.
December 1, 2004... Turkish artist Omer Uluc, for 20 years a resident of Paris, was last seen here in some depth as the subject of a 2001 exhibition at Trans Hudson Gallery. In a concurrent monograph, The Phantasmagoria of Omer Uluc, critic Robert Morgan referred...

Liz-N-Val at Tribes.
December 1, 2004... Crackpots or visionaries, art partners Liz-N-Val have spent more than two decades as fixtures on the international art scene. The duo, one of whose "public art projects" involved taking a "pet canvas named Woof" on walks in Berlin, New York and...

Varujan Boghosian at Washburn.
December 1, 2004... Varujan Boghosian takes surreal trips though the imagination in his mixed-medium constructions and low reliefs. Boghosian, active in the art world since the 1950s, is a former professor of art at Dartmouth College who continues to live and work...

William Kentridge at Marian Goodman.
December 1, 2004... For his most recent show at Marian Goodman, William Kentridge showed two 8-minute films from 2003, along with related charcoal drawings and a pair of very large (110 7/8-by-139 5/8-inch) multisheet letterpress prints. One of the films, Learning...

Simon Lewty at David Krut Projects.
December 1, 2004... Simon Lewty's first solo show outside the U.K. introduced a mesmerizing voice of rapture and reflection. Born in 1941 in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, Lewty has been integrating word and image in his drawings for over 30 years. Organized...

Helena Almeida at the Drawing Room.
December 1, 2004... One of Portugal's leading artists, Helena Almeida began to develop a hybrid of drawing, painting and photography as her native country loosened itself from postwar dictatorship in the virtually bloodless Carnation Revolution of 1974,...

Porfirio DiDonna at Wooster Arts Space.
December 1, 2004... The first of Porfirio DiDonna's 70 or so untitled drawings included in this posthumous survey establishes a reductive vocabulary based on the harmonious arrangement of architectural and natural forms. With the caveat that few dates are...

Amanda Guest at Kristen Frederickson.
December 1, 2004... At her recent exhibition, Amanda Guest showed 32 small works in handmade paper and stretched fabric that she stitches with thread or embeds with long strips of torn paper. Thread and strips become her lines, organized seemingly freehand into...

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at Sean Kelly and the Sculpture Center.
December 1, 2004... In 20 Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov produced, as if by magic, a brightly lit, white-canopied, music-filled dining hall within the specially reconfigured Sean Kelly Gallery. Once through a small...

Manfred Pernice at Anton Kern and Storefront for Art and Architecture.
December 1, 2004... Two concurrent exhibitions, involving recent furniturelike sculptures at Anton Kern and small-scale architectural models culled from the last 10 years at Storefront for Art and Architecture, underscored that German Manfred Pernice's combination...

Nzingah Muhammad at Esso.
December 1, 2004... In a study concerning perceptions and markers of race and culture, the 20-by-32-inch color diptychs that make up Nzingah Muhammad's "Objects of Investigation" series are culled from a larger body of photographs taken during a 2003 residency at...

Jean Lowe at McKenzie.
December 1, 2004... In her deadpan installation "Empire Style," Jean Lowe presents a new kind of terribilita, inspired by the voraciousness of American corporate expansion. The sublime is evoked not by the immeasurable grandeur of nature but by the awesome potency...

Judith Miller at Cheryl Pelavin.
December 1, 2004... This exhibition might have been titled "The Return of Judith Miller." The artist, who grew up in Ohio and currently lives in New York City, made a name for herself in the 1970s through photographically based Conceptual art (she was a featured...

Tyson Reeder at Daniel Reich.
December 1, 2004... Milwaukee's art museum has expanded, the university is hiring and, judging by the new work (2003-04) of resident Tyson Reeder, its skies are filled with the sounds of birds, children, and shimmering fragments of color and line. In one touching...

Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart.
December 1, 2004... Bill Scott has long admired the paintings of Berthe Morisot and Joan Mitchell. In addition to writing perceptively on both artists' work, Scott has often distilled their aerated, gestural brushwork into his own abstract responses to nature....

Claire Seidl at Rosenberg + Kaufman.
December 1, 2004... Claire Seidl's work is squarely in the early American modernist tradition. The antecedents of her paintings and photographs are the works of Marin, Hartley and especially Dove, whose experiments in abstraction seemed to strive for some...

Robert Yasuda at Elizabeth Harris.
December 1, 2004... Robert Yasuda's most recent paintings belong to the genus of things illuminated from within. Studiedly eccentric and also gracious in their shaping, each is made up of a finely crafted wood support, variously bowed, curved and rounded at some...

Albert Oehlen at Luhring Augustine and Nolan/Eckman.
December 1, 2004... These two exhibitions of recent work by the German painter Albert Oehlen arrived attended by the machinery of mythmaking; the artist's back story is even bigger than his paintings. Kingpin of the punk-era Hamburg School and leading proponent of...

Amy Pleasant at Jeff Bailey.
December 1, 2004... Taking her cue from film and animation storyboarding, Amy Pleasant, a young painter based in Birmingham, Ala., employs the classic modernist grid to chronicle everyday life. Using a palette of muted beige, ivory, black and pale gray, she breaks...

Matthew Brannon at John Connelly presents.
December 1, 2004... To "investigate alcohol's belligerent euphoria" figured among Matthew Brannon's stated ambitions for his first New York solo exhibition, "Exhausted Blood and Imitation Salt." He also reported that he intended to explore what he regards as the...

Rosalyn Drexler at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts.
December 1, 2004... As Rosenwald-Wolf's curator Sid Sachs says in the catalogue to this show, we may need to find an alternative to the term Pop art for Rosalyn Drexler's paintings. Wherever her work stands in relation to that movement--and she was undeniably...

Robert Sagerman at Marcia Wood.
December 1, 2004... New York-based conceptualist Robert Sagerman is a young artist with degrees in painting, art history and religious studies. Even without understanding his intensely contemplative painting practice, viewers can be hypnotized by his work's vivid...

Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe at the Palm Beach ICA.
December 1, 2004... Was it a coincidence that upon setting off to view the exhibition "Two Women: Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe" at the PBICA, which featured work by artists then unknown to me, I slipped a newly purchased, original cast recording of Hair (1968)...

Robin Griffiths at Dorsch.
December 1, 2004... Robin Griffiths activated the gallery's large, industrial space with a group of intense, beautifully crafted wooden sculptures. As a kind of sideshow, he added an installation meant to document his work environment. It included a tableau of 31...

Jane Lackey at Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Oakland University.
December 1, 2004... Jane Lackey's roots as a fiber artist (she is head of the fiber-arts program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art) were apparent in this selection of multimedium works made between 1999 and 2004. Lackey frequently draws on genetic code research and...

Bjorn Amelan at Dwight Hackett.
December 1, 2004... Bjorn Amelan's debut show was surprisingly resolved. Drawing on his background designing sets for the Bill T. Jones dance company, he fabricated 22 archaic-looking components--individual and serial pieces--which were presented in a single...

Yves Klein at the MAK Center.
December 1, 2004... A modest but tightly focused and enthralling museum exhibition, "Yves Klein: Air Architecture," centered on the artist's architectural projects, which preoccupied him from 1957 until the time of his death in 1962, at age 34. Curated and...

Donald Judd at Tate Modern.
December 1, 2004... This compact survey was almost perfect. Comprising some 40 works, the show opened, in its Tate installation, with paintings executed by Judd in 1961; 11 rooms later, it closed with a pair of wall stacks fabricated shortly before the artist died...

Albert Oehlen and Jonathan Meese at Max Hetzler and Contemporary Fine Art.
December 1, 2004... Among Berlin's most surprising recent exhibitions was this two-gallery show of collaborative paintings by an unlikely pair: Albert Oehlen and Jonathan Meese. Oehlen is an established figure who for more than a decade has shown virtuosic...

Yinka Shonibare at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen.
December 1, 2004... Raised in Lagos and now living in London, Yinka Shonibare is known for his eye-catching, good-looking, double-edged, figural tableaux, often using headless mannequinlike figures for his dramatis personae. Referring to specific Western cultural...

Luis Caruncho at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea.
December 1, 2004... Now 75, Luis Caruncho has been the key proponent of geometric abstraction in his native Galicia, although he is probably best known in Spain as a tireless arts advocate. He has served in countless capacities over the years--as the director of...

Art services.(Directory)
December 1, 2004... ADVERTISING DESIGN PRINTING Dynacolor Graphics Inc. P.O. Box 699037, Miami, FL 33269-9037 800.624.8840 ext. 322 Web: www.dynacolor.com Dynacolor Graphics is one of the fine art industry's leading printers of full color...

Vero Beach Museum of Art in Florida.(People)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Lucinda Heyel Gedeon, director since 1991 of the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., has been named executive director of the Vero Beach Museum of Art in Florida.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Michael R. Taylor, acting curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum since November 2003, has been named the new curator of modern art.(People)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Michael R. Taylor, acting curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum since November 2003, has been named the new curator of modern art. David L. Barquist, formerly acting curator of American...

The J. Paul Getty Trust recently announced its fellows and scholars for 2004-05.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The J. Paul Getty Trust recently announced its fellows and scholars for 2004-05. The artist recipients include Joan Jonas, Klaus Rinke and filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer. Scholars grants were awarded to Melissa Chiu, Susan Galassi,...

Carnegie Prize.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Kutlug Ataman is the winner of the $10,000 Carnegie Prize, given to an artist in the Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. His work, titled Kuba, is a 40-channel video installation focusing on the residents of an...

Tate Britain.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The shortlist for the 2004 Turner Prize, given by the Tate Britain, was recently announced. The artists are Kutlug Ataman, Jeremy Deller, Langlands & Bell and Yinka Shonibare. Their work is on view at the Tate through Dec. 23, 2004. The winner...

Obituaries.(Artworld)(Obituary)
December 1, 2004... Richard Avedon, 81, Manhattan-based photographer and portraitist, died Oct. 1 of a cerebral hemorrhage while on assignment in San Antonio for the New Yorker magazine. Well known as a fashion and celebrity photographer, he was also highly...

Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
December 1, 2004... Jacques Derrida, 74, philosopher, died Oct. 8 in Paris of pancreatic cancer. In the course of his prodigious, influential career as a thinker and writer, Derrida turned his attention to visual art on a few notable occasions. The 1978 volume La...

Getty director steps down.(Artworld)(Deborah Gribbon)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Deborah Gribbon, director of the Getty Museum since 2000, resigned her post on Oct. 18 citing "critical differences" with Barry Munitz, president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust. According to press reports in both the New York...

Airport art show grounded?(Artworld)(Terminal 5)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... "Terminal 5," an art exhibition installed throughout the former TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York [see "Artworld," Oct. '04], was shuttered by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey within days of its debut because of damage...

Clark prize for arts writing.(Artworld)(Sterling and Francis Clark Art Institute)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., is gearing up for its 50th anniversary in 2005-06 and has announced the establishment of a new annual prize for arts writing. It is intended to recognize work that bridges...

Gehry tapped for ground zero.(Artworld)(Frank Gehry)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Joining the list of world-renowned architects working on rebuilding Lower Manhattan, Frank Gehry was recently chosen to design a new performance center for Ground Zero. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation selected him from among 10...

Fiat sells Palazzo Grassi.(Artworld)
December 1, 2004... The Palazzo Grassi, the 18th-century palace on Venice's Grand Canal that has been a prime exhibition venue for 17 years, was sold in mid-October by the financially troubled Fiat corporation to the Venice city council for $31 million. Fiat will...

New home for Samsung's Art.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The South Korea-based technology giant Samsung has a new public venue to display some of its extensive corporate art collection. The Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, which opened Oct. 13 in Seoul, is a complex of three interconnected buildings,...

Witte de With.(People)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Hans Maarten van den Brink was recently named general director of the Witte de With, the contemporary art center in Rotterdam. The managerial change, made at the request of outgoing director Catherine David, allows David to focus on curatorial...

Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Vasif Kortun, director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, have been selected as co-curators of the Istanbul Biennial, Sept. 16-Oct. 30, 2005.(People)(appointments)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Vasif Kortun, director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, have been selected as co-curators of the Istanbul Biennial, Sept. 16-Oct. 30, 2005. Concurrent with...