Art in America articles from June 2009

Art in America archives from June 2009

Art Basel and beyond.(FRONT PAGE)(art exhibitions)(Calendar)
June 1, 2009... While many in the art world are sitting out or cutting back on this summer's round of international events because of slashed travel budgets, fair organizers and art dealers are still banking on Basel. Some collectors, however, citing the...

The earth sublime.(FRONT PAGE)(exhibition of earth art)
June 1, 2009... The terms environmental, earth and land art still powerfully conjure Michael Heizer's Double Negative, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels and other emblematic site-specific works from the '60s and '70s. Since then, the...

A transformative experience?(FRONT PAGE)(Prada Transformer )
June 1, 2009... At a time when fashion uses art to transform itself into high cultural statement, and art uses fashion to insert itself into the broader commercial world, the Prada Transformer in Seoul perfectly captures the convergence of the two. It is a...

Hermitage on the Amstel.(FRONT PAGE)(renovation of Hermitage Amsterdam )(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... The Hermitage Amsterdam is set to reopen in much expanded and renovated quarters in the 17th century Amstelhof, a former home for the elderly located on the Amstel River. The museum took up residence in a smaller part of the facility in 2004,...

Seeing beauty in Venice's pollution.(FRONT PAGE)
June 1, 2009... While most visitors to Venice simply gape at the dazzling array of Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture, architect Jorge Otero-Pailos sees something more: the layers of history that have accrued on the buildings' surfaces....

Idiot.(REVISION NUMBER NINE)(managing an art exhibitiono)(Essay)
June 1, 2009... MY DOWNWARD SPIRAL INTO IDIOCY began when I agreed to curate a small biennial at SITE Santa Fe in 2001. The process turned out to be an unremitting nightmare, mitigated by hiccups of ecstasy. I took the job on a lark. Five minutes in, I...

Proustian hues.(Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time )(Book review)
June 1, 2009... Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time by Eric Karpeles, New York, Thames & Hudson, 2008; 352 pages, $45. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It took me three years to read Marcel Proust's sprawling novel A la Recherche...

Ragnar Kjartansson the beginning of "The End".
June 1, 2009... When Ragnar Kjartansson came to Luhring Augustine, his New York gallery, last March to discuss his project for the 53rd Venice Biennale, he was wearing a dark pin-striped suit and a creamy retro-patterned silk tie--the look vintage dandy and...

Bruce Nauman deft in Venice.(VENICE PREVIEW)
June 1, 2009... It's a long way from a horse ranch on the high plains of Galisteo, N.M., to the teeming multicultitudes of the Venice Biennale. There are 7,000 miles of continent and an ocean to leap, a gasp-inducing rise in population density after that, and,...

Pascale Marthine Tayou: global villages.(VENICE PREVIEW)
June 1, 2009... "I am an explorer," says Pascale Marthine Tayou. He is explaining the genesis of a new sculpture to me. "This is yin-yang." It's about "the conflict between everyone--the struggle inside." The work in question is lying on a table in the small...

Liam Gillick: practical considerations.(VENICE PREVIEW)(Interview)
June 1, 2009... For over 20 years, Liam Gillick has addressed the question of how art has been used to advance a broad range of social and ideological agendas, and to subvert and exploit the material and political structures that order contemporary life....

Peter Forgacs: ebb and flow.(VENICE PREVIEW)
June 1, 2009... The first room of Peter Forgacs's installation in the Hungarian pavilion at the Venice Biennale will be lined with videos of faces set in ornate frames typical of a European portrait gallery--though that is where convention ends. In these video...

Thai pavilion mental vacation.(VENICE PREVIEW)
June 1, 2009... Playing on its reputation as the fabled Land of Smiles, Thailand will this year transform its national pavilion into "Gondola al Paradiso Co., Ltd.," a fictive "tourism service company" created by Bangkok-based artists Michael Shoawanasai (b....

Zero & friends: spearheaded by two artists based in postwar Dusseldorf, Zero was too dynamic and heterogeneous to be called a style. Its emphasis on light, movement and ephemeral phenomena attracted like-minded innovators throughout Europe.(Otto Piene and Heinz Mack)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE PAST SEASON IN NEW YORK was a particularly rich time for devotees of the movement Zero, whose reputation in Europe has been secure for decades. A motor of avant-garde activity centered in Dusseldorf from 1957 to...

Shirin Neshat.(Interview)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] OVER THE LAST 12 YEARS, Iranian-born Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) has produced a series of lyrical video installations that touch on such issues as gender politics, cultural self-definition and the authority of religion....

David Claerbout extrasensorial: having made his reputation with lengthy videos that challenge viewer endurance, Claerbout now manipulates the experience of light and sound to test the very limits of comprehension.
June 1, 2009... ANY DISCUSSION OF THE ATMOSPHERIC and engrossing work of 40-year-old Belgian artist David Claerbout inevitably begins with time, although there is much more to his practice than mere clock watching. Claerbout's videos and photography contend...

Towering Wim Delvoye ambition: a conversation with Paul Laster.(Interview)
June 1, 2009... Celebrated or reviled for his "sex-rays" (X-ray images of sexual acts), tattooed pigs and digestive-tract machines that eat food and produce shit (Cloaca Machines), Belgian artist Wim Delvoye thrives at the center of controversy. Given the...

Sean Snyder: ICA.(LONDON)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The centerpiece of The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula's classic 1974 conspiracy thriller, is a montage of photographic stills shown to Warren Beatty's character to measure his emotional responses, and his aptitude for...

The Otolith Group: Gasworks.(LONDON)(Movie review)
June 1, 2009... Otolith (2003), the first film by the London-based Otolith Group (comprising Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, both born in London), starts in 2103. No longer able to cope with earth's gravity, humans live on the International Space Station. One...

Bruno Gironcoli: Bernard Jordan.(PARIS)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Bruno Gironcoli's sculptures are unmistakable in their facture, iconography, complexity and obdurateness. Gironcoli, who was born in 1936, has been a crucial figure in Austrian art since the '70s, both as a professor...

Frederique Loutz: Claudine Papillon.(PARIS)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The refined and creepy drawings of Frederique Loutz have made quite a splash in the Paris art world over the past few years, where contemporary drawing has itself become something of a hot topic. Born in 1974, Loutz...

Bojan Sarcevic: Carlier I Gebauer.(BERLIN)
June 1, 2009... The issue of space has always been crucial to the medium of film in various ways. There are the perspectival spaces within the filmic image itself, the architectural context of the film's presentation (cinema, museum or gallery) and even the...

Alterazioni Video: Prometeogallery.(Milan)
June 1, 2009... "I would prefer not to." Spelled out in a bright, warm yellow on the gallery's front windows, this text work by Alterazioni Video (which borrows a refrain from Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener) is a distillation of the collective's...

Lee Waisler: Sundaram Tagore.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Very large close-ups of faces greeted viewers entering Lee Waisler's recent show. All are icons of 20th-century culture, and most are immediately recognizable--Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Gandhi--while a few are...

Pipilotti Rist is the 2009 recipient of the biennial Joan Miro Prize.(AWARDS & GRANTS)
June 1, 2009... Pipilotti Rist is the 2009 recipient of the biennial Joan Miro Prize. The $92,200 award is given by the Barcelona-based Joan Miro Foundation.

Robyn O'Neil is the winner of the $50,000 Hunting Art Prize.(AWARDS & GRANTS)
June 1, 2009... Robyn O'Neil is the winner of the $50,000 Hunting Art Prize, given to a Texas artist by the Houston-based oil services company.

2010 Liverpool Biennial.(PEOPLE)
June 1, 2009... Lorenzo Fusi, curator of SMS Contemporanea in Siena (formerly Palazzo delle Papesse-Contemporary Art Center), has been appointed curator of the 2010 Liverpool Biennial.