The Viennese modernist architect Adolf Loos often described his buildings’ exteriors the way he thought of fashion. “In its external appearance, a house can only have changed as much as a dinner jacket…[it] has to look inconspicuous,” he wrote in his 1914 essay “Regional Art.” Loos wanted the casings of his residences (like the unadorned English suits he coveted) to act as a “uniform” or screen to the outside world—bathed in white, devoid of ornamentation. What may come as a surprise to those familiar with the title of Loos’s lauded text “Ornament and Crime” but less acquainted with his architectural work is that his interiors are replete with luxurious finishes like walnut, mahogany, marble, and silk and that he went to great pains to create intimate environments inside the chambers.

The Brussels-based artist Lucy McKenzie inhabits Loos’s sensual hermeticism. In a solo exhibition that runs through September 22 at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, she presents his plans for the Villa Müller, in Prague, juxtaposing its aesthetic with that of the Moorish Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. These interior views, which move from cool archetypal planning to more personalized bourgeois compositions, will lay the groundwork for a third element of the exhibition explicitly dealing with the body and its representations, both public and private. For this portion of the show, McKenzie will include elements drawn in various ways from her explorations on the edges of art. A new collection of Atelier E.B., a small fashion and decorative-art outfit that she runs with Scottish textile designer Beca Lipscombe, will be on view. To display the collection, the artist is designing mannequins to contend with specific challenges posed in presenting the female body—how to represent its figure without idealizing or denying its form. Whereas Loos hoped to discreetly suit his interiors, McKenzie confronts the inverse task, how to fashion a suitable armature for her garments. Further complicating this meditation and drawing it closer to herself, she will conclude the installation with work that makes reference to an exchange concerning the appropriation of her image in soft pornography shot by Richard Kern in the late 1990s.

McKenzie has long espoused an interest in the outmoded and redundant, in materials that have been drained through time and reuse. Many of her earliest paintings reiterate the dead ciphers of Soviet Realism and 1970s Scottish Muralism, exposing the failures of these utopian political projects while sympathizing with their staunchly idealist aims. What these aims ultimately provide her is the power of an idea—through its strangeness or obsolescence—to challenge any number of orthodoxies.

Within the genre of quote-end-quote contemporary art, one could not think of a more outmoded approach than McKenzie’s use of craft-based painting applications, exemplified by her tedious faux reproductions of marble and wood, trompe l’oeil still life, grisaille, and hand-lettered signs. From 2007 to 2008 she studied at the Van der Kelen-Logelain, a private school for 19th-century decorative painting technique in Brussels. The school’s prizing of technical craft stood in stark contrast to the expressionist and deskilled ethos of contemporary methodologies. While what McKenzie refers to as the school’s “autistic standards of judgment” were lacking in intellectual appeal, the school made up for this by failing to burden her with the logics of art history, assuming that the way forward for art was necessarily connected to the recent past: “I do not reject criticality nor do I wish for a return to the ‘good old days,’ ” McKenzie says. “It is that I question the accepted norm that art, and specifically painting, must develop in a direct line from the avant-garde and 20th-century modernism.” To drive that point home, McKenzie recently took a post at the Düsseldorf Academy, where she teaches Madame Van der Kelen’s principles.

Since receiving her specialized training, McKenzie has focused on full-room installations that make use of these techniques, completing their detailed finishes by hand with the help of an assistant. This production process nearly always takes place on-site due to the scale of the works, effectively turning oversize exhibition halls, such as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, where she showed in 2009, into living tableaux of classical ateliers. Aside from an ongoing series of trompe l’oeil still lifes (which the artist prices according to Renaissance logic, by size, difficulty of application, and number of items), most of her painted works function as backdrops or near-life-size reproductions of architectural plans, with their scale and temperament adjusted to a particular project’s needs. Her early explorations with this format included semi-painterly reproductions of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s sketches in her exhibition “10 Years of Robotic Mayhem (including Sublet),” 2007. But her draftsmanship in recent years seems more detached and focuses on how images work within a given environment, rather than on their internal expression. Whether staged as rooms within rooms or painted directly on the walls, her scenes invite viewers to inhabit them, while enabling contemplation by way of an aesthetic distance.

Many artists repurpose paintings as props or background for other activities, shifting the emphasis from art as a self-contained gesture within a frame to its performative role among a range of actions. Dissatisfied with the nominal question of what makes a painting—much less the normative pondering of what makes a painting any good—artists are increasingly sensitive to how such a form might be used—to establish interpersonal or historic relations within the art context, to position artistic identity, or to infiltrate economic networks. All of the above aptly describe the expansion of McKenzie’s work in and out of painting. In fact, it is impossible to speak about her paintings without mentioning her other interests, including decorative art, fashion, and friendship.

McKenzie is committed to a set of creative intimates: artists and friends with whom she collaborates on projects, ranging from music production to fashion and fiction writing. She increasingly uses opportunities afforded through her painting projects in the art world to bring visibility to these pursuits, sometimes staging them within the art institution. For an exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich in 2011, for example, McKenzie dispensed with her solo platform in favor of a group exhibition with other artists and designers who work with textiles, showing their work alongside her paintings. She has invited her close colleague Alan Michael to join her in an upcoming summer residency on the Italian island of Stromboli, where they will be writing beach reads that can be enjoyed by others on the trip. The artists will make drawings to accompany the texts, which will be as much as anything an excuse to further an ongoing dialogue fostered through art production. There is no doubt that McKenzie is committed to both the theory and craft of painting. Yet to make the most of this format, she must find new ways to traverse the exchanges that arise to maintain the integrity of her artistic position.

McKenzie’s approach is risky in an art industry whose appetite for obscurantism has become a marker of success. In 2003 as a newly minted “young artist,” McKenzie sat on a panel in London to discuss the rise of the creative entrepreneur and the increasingly parallel worlds of art and advertising. “I wonder if integrity will be the new economy, another fetishized commodity,” she mused. One hopes that McKenzie’s artistic vision—something
deliberately outmoded, small scale, and stubbornly her own—will have the capacity to escape the art world while also living within it.

This article appears in the April 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

Long a hero to street artists, McGee has found acceptance from the mainstream art world, exhibiting at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, and Modern Art, in London, among other galleries. The artist who used to tag as Twist has two high-profile shows this spring: a solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and a midcareer retrospective at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. McGee never imagined himself reaching this point when he first began posting his work on the streets of his native San Francisco in the 1980s. And in some ways he still isn’t sure what exactly is the key to winning recognition from galleries and museums. Bryan Hood spoke with the artist about graffiti’s history and how it transitions into the white cube.

What is the idea behind your show in Fort Worth?

It feels the same as any other show to me, in some weird way. I’m doing an exhibition at a community college this month also, and I’m just as anxious about that as I am the others. I try to treat everything equally somehow. It’s new work for Fort Worth, pretty straightforward, three pieces in a mature setting. Sometimes it’s hard for me figure out how to edit. What goes in, what doesn’t. I just want to put in everything. I’m going to do drawing, painting, and sculpture. I’m interested in anything but installation right now. I’m intrigued by the idea of a painting or a drawing hanging on the wall, a sculpture sitting on the floor, with nothing else around to distract it, no videos, no environment. I’ve always done painting on the walls and then brought my entire studio and assistants into a gallery, but I’m interested in the complete opposite right now.

Your survey at ICA Boston is roughly the same show that was up at the Berkeley Art Museum, right?

Yes. It’s an edited version, but there will be some similar pieces. Berkeley lends itself to building bigger works and some environmental things. That helped illustrate some of the points better. In Boston it’s a more formal gallery setting with white walls. It might read better. I’m thinking in Boston it will seem more serious. The artifacts will look more like artifacts, whereas in Berkeley they just looked like garbage from the street. It fascinates me a little bit, the authority of a white room. A’m also going to do an outdoor project for the exhibition, somewhere along the freeway, which will take care of my desire to communicate to younger, more diverse people. I’ve always liked a mix of audiences, no matter if it was on the street or indoors. The walls along the freeways and the train tracks—I still think about locations like that. That’s the way graffiti works: It communicates to a different audience that something is in their city.

Do you worry that you’ll lose your grasp on street art as you get older?

I lost my grasp long ago! I haven’t given up on it; it still informs my work but not in the same way as when I was in my early 20s. There’s something about the street, a messiness or a fleeting moment that I still try to keep in my work.

What’s it like looking back on your earlier career now?

I have to be perfectly honest: It’s very difficult to look at some of that work, to be in the same room with it. That’s the thing about graffiti: Normally it gets painted over and there’s not a good record of what happened. I’ve always liked being in charge of what happens, that imagery. But with works that were made at that time it’s impossible. Someone can pull it off the street; it was just impossible to control where it went or how it would be reeled back into a show.

Early on, could you ever have imagined having a midcareer retrospective?

I was going to museums and trying to find a connection at that young age. I liked the challenge of it, but I found there was nothing that spoke to me about what my friends and I were doing. I didn’t understand how people got there at that point, what the process was to make it into a museum. I’m still not exactly sure.

Do you feel a responsibility to the younger generation?

There’s a history with graffiti that has to be shared. That sharing is done in different ways now, obviously, through the Internet. But to see a work that was part of something bigger, I think it can inspire kids.

Haruki Murakami’s latest best-seller, 1Q84, opens with the protagonist, Aomame, listening to Leoš Janácek’s Sinfonietta in a taxi on Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway. She’s late and the car is stuck in an epic traffic jam. Out of the blue, the driver suggests that Aomame escape the gridlock via the emergency staircase. “Please remember,” he says, as she prepares to leave his cab, “things are not always what they seem.” Descending the secret stairs, Murakami’s heroine unsuspectingly steps into another dimension, governed by mercurial Little People. 1Q84 is almost like 1984, the year she has just left behind, but not quite: Two moons hang in the sky; normality has tipped over.

Berlin-based artist duo Awst & Walther are just the sort of interdisciplinary operators who can make critical mouths salivate. Their heady studio practice puts out minimalist sculptures of a time-based variety and process-oriented paintings that reference colonization of the body by technology. Meanwhile, the two artists might also be preparing a dance, set amid gently arching neon tubes and the audience itself, for a European tour.

When Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther met, on New Year’s Eve of 2006, neither had ever truly made an artwork. Originally from the small island of Anglesey, off the Welsh coast, Awst had just moved to Berlin after graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in architecture. Walther, born in Dresden, was on a precipitous but increasingly unfulfilling fast track toward fame in Germany’s theater scene, having once been named the country’s top young director.

Since 2008 the two artists have been actively showing work under the moniker Awst & Walther, at the Hannah Barry Gallery, in London, as well as numerous other venues across the U.K. and the Continent. Their partnership has blossomed, resulting in a promising art career and a family. They now look back nostalgically on their early days. “We started dating and the dates became interventions in a strange way,” recalls Awst, 29. “A couple of weeks after we met, I created a situation for Benjamin: a found bath, an empty industrial room, lots of snow, and a small cooker. He took it as a challenge and created another situation for me.”

This artistic flirtation quickly gathered steam. “It was the start of an intense mutual creative energy,” says Walther, 34. “We never even really discussed working together; the challenges just turned into a practice.”

This reciprocal process allows their work to benefit from a seamless integration of their respective intellectual backgrounds, while also providing what they liken to a third life apart from their discrete biographies. Take Latent Measures (Component 11), 2011, formally, two black rectangles of industrial gelatin, each pierced through the middle with an aluminum pole and placed on a raised platform in the Hannah Barry Gallery. The length of each rectangle corresponds to the individual height of each artist. Conceptually, the piece draws from the theories of Czech architectural thinker Dalibor Vesely, who taught Awst at Cambridge. “He talks about this latent world, the silent backdrop that’s here and ever present, things as simple as the day being divided into light and dark, our physiology, the deep structures that hold everything together, that define how we experience the world,” Awst explains. “They’re completely obvious but not often considered.”

Gelatin, a substance that the artists often cast in sculptural forms, encapsulates this hidden duality owing to its composition from animal by-products, skin and bones mostly. “When it’s cast, you get these solid, strong architectural forms that are very shiny and seductive,” Awst says. “But when you realize what they are made out of, it’s repulsive as well. It also changes over time: It stiffens and becomes more like a relic or a fossil, almost a document rather than a piece itself.”

This emphasis on time factors greatly into nearly all their three-dimensional output. “With the gelatin, we’re not creating sculptural objects,” Awst says. And Walther concurs: “Latent Measures (Component 11) was about creating a space in which there was nowhere to hide. It quite directly mimics how we live in Western society. That is where the stage comes in, to exhibit the visitor as much as the object.”

As is the case with certain types of theater performances, the viewer is asked to react, to play a part. “Activating is really important,” Walther adds. “I understand Oblomov’s mode of just lying in bed and not doing anything, waiting until life comes to him,” he says, referring to the hamstrung character in Ivan Goncharov’s 19th-century novel of the same name. “But I also really like the concept of being active, to take life or a space on and alter it. In an ideal setting, the pieces offer a moment to stop, rest, and consider that something may be different from your habitual way of thinking.”

This tendency toward subtly challenging norms can also be seen in Latent Measures (Component 28), 2012, a series of polished aluminum poles that pierce the walls of six rooms in the recently rehung Boros Bunker, collectors Karen and Christian Boros’s private Berlin museum in a former World War II bomb shelter. The work perhaps dares viewers to climb on or touch it. Great comment has been generated by the marks of spackling left around the poles’ entries and exits into the concrete walls, which Awst likens to scars: “The poles are really sleek and polished, while the entrance marks give a certain contrast.”

“Imperfection speaks of process,” Walther adds. People don’t “want to see what goes behind the end result they’re presented with, but we find beauty in it.” Often an attractive veneer is a means to an end for the two. “Beauty is a Trojan horse,” he continues. “You need it to trigger something in the viewer in the first place, whatever the end result may be.”

Adds Awst: “The work can be appreciated on this purely visual level, but should you want to, you can start to unravel and go deeper and deeper.”

That unraveling might take the viewer though tomes of sociological theory or into a more personal deconstruction of experience, but it generally begins at an instinctual place. Inspiration for their recent “Biometric Paintings,” acrylic-on-paper layerings of the pair’s index-fingerprints arranged in a circle, came during the couple’s trip to New York in October 2011. This being Awst’s initial visit to the States and Walther’s first return in many years, they were surprised when U.S. Customs officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport demanded their fingerprints, a routine discomfort in the post-9/11 security climate. The artists began thinking about how it related to their previous works’ treatment of abstract bodily or societal traces. “I’m obsessed with these fingerprints as the most primitive form of mark making,” Walther says.

Awst is particularly fascinated by the increasingly intertwined nature of technology and biology. By incorporating something as accessible as a fingerprint, the works are opened up to many audiences: A child might relate to his kindergarten painting experiments; a convict, his incarceration; and a collector, the authorization required to access his Swiss account.

With each piece in the series, the artists present an analytical field for better understanding of social relations. For Awst & Walther, these artworks provide a chance to read, explore, and continue to challenge each other, and, as Walther puts it, jokingly quoting Lenin, the possibility of “learning, learning, learning.”

A year into their creating the biometric-oriented series, the two artists are now trying to conceive of ways to bring this concept off the paper. “We’re working on how those physical traces of the body can be brought out into space,” says Awst, adding that they have been looking to various 3-D modeling and printing techniques. “We’re starting with the same point, uses of the biometric, but looking also at how technology affects the way we experience space.” When considered as a representative case study of their practice, the paintings provide a rather apt summation. The pieces look simple, just as Latent Measures (Component 11) might look seductive. But viewing them can become a matter of going beyond the surface. As Awst puts it, “People want a product, but I don’t think our work is easy to consume. It needs a certain investment from whoever is looking at it. There might be a framework in which to see or understand the work, but it’s not prescriptive,” she says. “We don’t pretend to have answers.”

This article appears in the April 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

Keren Cytter just wanted to give some prisoners clay and let them sculpt things they coveted. Then she was going to take those miniature artworks and display them “in two big pyramids,” in a church in the town of Mechelen, Belgium, as part of this year’s Contour, a biennial dedicated to the moving image. Simple, except for a few hitches: The prison did not want the incarcerated men to have molding clay, since the self-hardening material might be used to make a cast for keys. Also, the prisoner-artists could not be paid for their labor. “So this idea is gone,” Cytter says, resigned. “And now I’m busy with something else.”

That’s a bit of an understatement for one of the most aggressively prolific artists of her generation, a 35-year old Israeli currently based in New York, who makes videos (about 36 by now), draws, writes experimental novels, and organizes performances like Show Real Drama (staged last year at the Kitchen, in New York, and the Tanks, at London’s Tate Modern). She’s just returned from a research trip to Morocco, in preparation for her involvement in the 2014 Marrakech Biennale. In September she is staging a multimedia performance with the chaotic electronic band Marina & the Mirrors at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

In the meantime, Cytter is bubbling with additional ideas, one of which involves the takeover of the global photography market. This latest project is a plan to create a Museum of Photography (MOP) that, in a perfect world, would be housed in Norway, in an eagle-shaped ice building designed by Rem Koolhaas. Cytter has been taking hundreds of Polaroids, at home and on her travels. “I’ll flood the market with photographs and erase the history of photography,” she says. “I will be the market. It’ll be like the ’90s, when everyone had a black-and-white poster of that couple kissing in the moonlight.”

But at the moment, the “something else” consuming most of Cytter’s attention is the latest installment of Vengeance, a seven-part narrative epic that she’s halfway through shooting. (The early episodes, along with nearly all the rest of the artist’s oeuvre, are publicly accessible on her Vimeo channel.)

Cytter is offended, or at least pretends to be, when friends and critics compare Vengeance to a soap opera. Why not quality television, she wonders, like Breaking Bad or The Wire? She had the heights of HBO programming in mind while she wrote it—that and Russian literature. The end result is a hybrid of high and low, flush with intentionally cheesy effects, deadpan acting, romantic intrigues, backstabbings, and office politics. It’s as if Don DeLillo teamed up with Donald Barthelme and wrote an episode of Damages, the chronologically playful legal thriller, and then hired Hal Hartley to direct it. The series is addictively entertaining, which is not a term often used to describe video art—Ryan Trecartin and Alex Bag, notwithstanding.

Cytter exploits genre clichés then douses them with spurts of nonsensical weirdness. The characters in Vengeance cheat on their partners, coldly profess their love, and dirty talk like robots: “Are you getting wet?” one man asks. “Are you getting harder?” his paramour intones. The dialogue is alternately flat and manic. “This is the way Americans talk,” Cytter asserts. “With a bit of silly excitement.”

In some ways, Vengeance is a synthesis of certain of her artistic signatures: hyperbolic plots, ironic editing effects, and affectless dialogue that can give otherwise mundane non sequiturs the air of Zen koans. Like her previous videos, it constantly circles the drain of meaning, tantalizing with clues and echoed references that almost, but never quite, add up to a whole. “I’m not so sure I would enjoy my movies if I saw them,” she says, probably kidding. “I don’t like so much talking. I don’t like to think.”

If there is a unifying thread in Cytter’s work thus far, it is the primacy of language and its power to hypnotize, engage, illuminate, and obscure. Throughout her career, words have been central, especially the friction between speech and subtitle, the gap between lips moving and overdubbed voices, the distance between raw emotion and how we express it, and the swell of conversational rhythms that turn dialogue into a prose poem. Language arrives through layers of translation, in a literal sense; the artist speaks English and Hebrew but has made videos in Dutch, French, Italian, German, and Tsonga, as well.

Vengeance, however, is written entirely in English, with a structure that at least gestures toward something familiar. The majority of the action revolves around an advertising agency’s preparations for a shampoo campaign aimed at “everyone who has hair.” It’s a bit difficult to keep track of the protagonists, who occasionally seem more like placeholders for ideas and observations than individuals. “I’ll write a story and I won’t care about the characters,” Cytter says, “because I can’t be sincere and say, ‘This person is really existing and his mother really died.’ ”

But there is a plot, one that even makes sense, the artist promises. For the remaining episodes—“Wet Dreams,” “Matters of the Heart,” “The Daily Standard,” and “Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder”—Cytter has been focusing less on atmosphere, more on storytelling. “I was thinking of a series where you question its whole meaning,” she says. “But in the end, you do realize there’s logic to it.”

That questioning on the part of the viewer means that Cytter’s videos end up conjuring a state of pleasant disorientation. And it’s hard to escape a reference to dreams when reading commentary about her work. Her “storytelling reminds you of the structure of a dream or the way in which memory functions,” curator Beatrix Ruf notes. “It repeats; creates uncertainty about connections, time, and space; is self-referential; and blurs fact with fiction.” And indeed her videos have an elusive, meandering quality that, to her chagrin, many people often mistake for improvisation. “It’s quite insulting,” she says, “because I’m trying to do something so precise.”

Cytter shows me a few scripts for recent works; they are obsessively blocked out, with nothing left to chance. As a result, not much editing is involved since each moment, movement, and juxtaposition is delineated on page. “There’s a logic in my mind; the flow is important,” she says. “It needs to be stream of consciousness but not too theatrical; there needs to be some melodramatic stuff for volume and excitement. I’m not taking the plot and chopping it into pieces; it’s not so conscious.”

This approach is something Cytter’s oeuvre shares with a book like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which for all its highbrow references and footnoted loftiness is unabashedly fun and funny. Her videos veer from poetic trills to psychological ruminations, one-liners, and earnest voice-overs. They are difficult but entertaining, obtuse but never pretentious. Cuts are quick, at times jarring; the action loops back on itself. “When I’m writing,” she says, “I’m thinking, I need to add something to wake myself up. I hope people see my works more than once; I want them to stop and watch. That’s why I’m putting in lots of surprises—so they’ll be confused,” Cytter adds. “If I go see an exhibition and there’s a video, I’ll watch it until the point that I get it, and then I’ll leave. I’m trying to surprise the viewers so they won’t get it, and they’ll stay longer.” Such willful obtuseness can seem confrontational: You have to work for the reward and yet can still leave feeling lost, woozy from an unreliable narrative.

Cytter’s intriguing and disjointed novel The Man Who Climbed Up the Steps of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats, 2005, sheds further light on how she approaches a story arc. The novel is about a young woman watching a film in a theater; the projector breaks, segments are screened out of order, and the movie-within-the-book traverses various tones and styles: gritty coming-of-age tale, serial killer slasher, art
world satire, and conspiracy thriller.

Despite the similar sampling of genres in her videos, the artist claims not to “consume culture too much.” Nevertheless, her apartment is decorated with posters for Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Larry Clark’s “Tulsa.” She has acknowledged her affection for David Lynch. Dance International Europe Now (or D.I.E. Now for short), a performance and dance troupe she founded in 2008, cites inspirations ranging from Yvonne Rainer to Disney on Ice. In turn, given such an eclectic cultural diet, Cytter has generated an oeuvre that varies wildly in tone and aesthetic, from the Godard-inflected film essay French Film, 2002 (in which her parents raptly watch a pornographic movie involving anal beads) to the enigmatic mystery-thriller The Coat, 2010, a Hitchcockian riff that invests the game of sudoku with occult significance. Family, 2002, explores Freudian psychosexual clichés and incest taboos, employs an autistic acting technique, casts women in the roles of men, and vice versa. Many of her works include a Brechtian nod to the artifice of the narrative itself. There’s also an oddly high number of suicides, murders, and unexplained deaths in Cytter’s videos.

Such a madcap juggling of styles and mediums perhaps reflects Cytter’s life thus far, replete with its own stops and starts. She was born in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and moved to the city proper at age 19. Her parents, with whom she’s not exceedingly close, currently live in Brazil; one of her sisters is a doctor, the other is studying the sciences. Video art does not run in the family.

Cytter served eight months in the army before receiving a mental health–related discharge, then studied at Machon Avni, an art school in Jaffa—“the worst in Israel,” she claims—for a few years before being kicked out. She attended a better institution, Hamidrasha School of Art, for a single week; she’s yet to graduate from any art program. She has worked as a waitress at a strip club, as an art critic—and as a journalist, until she quit due to “not being interested in other peoples’ stories.”

At her debut solo exhibition in 1998, at Tel Aviv’s Gross Gallery, she showed a sculpture of a plant. Shot with a hand-held camera, her first video works, like the Friends series, consisted of gritty vignettes that mixed personal dramas with bursts of Janis Joplin karaoke and intentionally overwrought sentiment (“At the end of the day I find myself empty of all feelings, like a heavy parachute after a long fall”).

From Israel Cytter moved to the Netherlands, where she was accepted in the Ateliers residency program and worked at the notoriously scuzzy Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam. (She’s not fond of Dutch people. “I hate Holland with every bone in my body,” she says. “The people are awful; they’re racist. The buildings are awful; the weather and prices are awful.”)

After escaping the Netherlands, Cytter relocated at age 28 to Berlin, where she spent six years despite not speaking German. This was a productive time for her. She made several videos, including Der Spiegel, 2007, which was included in the New Museum’s “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” exhibition.

Cytter’s life and work were constantly overlapping. In 2010 she and a few friends staged a faux bohemian endurance art project, Mai Thai University, with the goal of indulging in the poet’s lifestyle: staying up all night, wearing black, ingesting drugs, sleeping through the day, and occasionally maybe writing verse. She invited five friends—one from Amsterdam, another from London—to live in her house in Berlin and engage in a three-day bacchanal. Each of the impromptu poetry students picked a patron saint—Cytter’s was Arthur Rimbaud—and the group members embarked on their substance-fueled journey.

“We were too old for it,” the artist admits. The first night they made it through dawn; after that, the level of debauchery waned. On the final day everyone sat down to write the poems. The experiment culminated in a reading at Berlin’s Sin Bar and provided fodder for Cytter’s later exhibition at Galerie Christian Nagel, including the related video Konstruktion.

The artist completed three other important works in Berlin in 2011: Avalanche, Video Art Manual, and Open House (3D). The latter aped the format of a promotional real estate video to satirize upscale urban living; she shot it using 3-D technology.

“My whole motto is to be like Jack London; I never want to be part of the group,” Cytter says of her decision to move to New York this year. “In Berlin I felt the group was a bit closed.” So now she’s here, living in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, recruiting a small crew to continue working on Vengeance. As a director, she’s not much of a democratic collaborator. Cytter handles the camera and all the editing; her dialogue is dubbed by actors after the shooting, which cuts down on production and location costs. A New York jazz musician provides most of the music in her recent work. She finds her actors and extras through friends of friends, sometimes using Facebook: “I feel sorry that they’re working for an art project, not in Hollywood, and me with my heavy accent. I don’t finish the final script until a week before shooting, and I don’t have the time to explain.”

So far, it seems that the production of Vengeance has reached near soap opera–level proportions. Cytter has lost a technician, and with him, the apartment she had been using as a set for one main character’s home, so she’ll need to rewrite. She had wanted to have that character’s clothing store burn down, but cinematic arson has proved to be outside budgetary constraints. When we last spoke, she was planning a trip to the gay bar Urge Lounge, to scout for talent; another actor had balked at showing his penis in a nude scene but agreed instead to play a Ku Klux Klan member. “It shows you,” Cytter wryly pronounces, “what the moral values of people are.”

To see images, click on the slideshow.

Inside a nondescript building in L.A.’s Chinatown, Liz Glynn apologizes for her studio being too clean. She prefers to work in a certain amount of disarray, but an acquisitions committee recently paid a visit, prompting the artist to tidy up the usual mess. Still, there remains ample evidence of previous and future projects spread between her two rooms: a discarded chandelier on the floor, charred ceramic vessels, a box of finished and unfinished bronze rings, books everywhere, and, tacked on the walls, drawings with arrows that Glynn calls maps of her thought processes for potential installations.

Objects — and the monetary and emotional significance we give them — are central to Glynn’s work. Previous exhibitions included her re-creating Viking hoards, buried Trojan coins, the city of Rome, and Rodin sculptures. “We arbitrarily assign value to things all the time,” she says. “Meanings evolve and become attached, and what we invest in certain things is disproportionate. Using ancient objects is sort of a pretext to point out that something we think is brand-new has actually been happening for a long time — like this larger history of profound desires around objects.” Her replications are purposefully imperfect, shaped by Glynn’s scrappy DIY attitude and her use of humble materials, including cardboard, plaster, shipping pallets, and papier-mâché. “I think about the way the fake is real. Histories are malleable and handmade and highly constructed.”

Clues to Glynn’s installation for Frieze Projects New York this month can be found in the Kafka and Borges tomes stacked on her desk. Glynn spends up to three months researching a project before she begins to work on it, and at the time of our interview, she was very much in the planning stage for her project at the fair. She proposes to build a bar within Frieze, behind a secret door, to which a random selection of visitors will be allowed entrance. This speakeasy’s layout takes the shape of a bank vault, with rows of safe-deposit boxes lining the walls. Each entry token will prompt bartenders to open a specific box, which will contain garnishes for cocktails and objects that relate to the Kafka and Borges texts. The contents of each box will prompt the bartenders to recount a story based on the readings.

The context of an art fair seems a natural fit for Glynn’s explorations of assigned value as it relates to commerce —“I can’t not respond to that in some ways,” Glynn says, laughing. Her proposal derived from “thinking about the era when business transactions were conducted over drinks. This era of the gentleman and going back to a gilded age before the crash.”

The Kafka and Borges stories are fairly bleak, and Glynn is contemplating what she wants to edit or add. Many of the sculptures she’s envisioning for the boxes will be based on architectural elements found in the texts. “In Kafka, there are tons of doors, but in Borges there are staircases. Borges I almost feel is the literary version of an M.C. Escher drawing — there are ways that the story leads back onto itself, and the spiral staircase, in particular, has that.” Similarly, Glynn imagines that the architecture of the bar will influence a complex experience, engendering its own social dynamics and creating, perhaps, a bit of welcome chaos. “The bar is sort of a pretext for this set of things to happen. The way these objects get activated through narrative and the idea of this being the inception of something. The sculptures don’t propose to be an end unto themselves. They’re woven into a larger history and they’re a starting point or a point along the way, but they’re never an end.”

Originally from Boston, Glynn studied at Harvard before moving to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts, where she received her MFA in 2008. She finds it an easy place to work on a practical level: There’s lots of space to be had and materials are plentiful. Yet her installations don’t always fit into the Southern California aesthetic. “I find there’s an earthy quality to the work that’s so not L.A. in a sense,” Glynn says. “It’s heavier. And I don’t do plastics either.” Despite this, one could say her inclusion as a Los Angeles artist became official last summer when her work was featured in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” exhibition, a survey of work being made in the city at the time by both established and emerging artists. The show drew attention for the Mohn Award, voted on by museum visitors, for which Glynn was a finalist. Glynn says the experience was so anxiety producing that she started going to the gym twice a day to deal with the stress. The way people “read the work is kind of the least interesting thing to me,” she says. “It’s much more about controlling the context around the work — the environment and the space.”

Glynn prefers to let the viewer take the lead, experiencing the work “in the first person.” For this purpose, her “Made in L.A.” installation subverted the usual institutional prohibition against touching artworks. Drawing parallels between objects locked away in the Great Pyramid of Giza and those confiscated from smuggling tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip, Glynn encouraged visitors to engage in their own version of trafficking: They could open the drawers in a large colorful chest to handle — or even walk around with — 
cast-lead sculptures of objects from the tunnels. These items ranged from the necessary to the sentimental, from garlic cloves to a wedding dress to recreational drugs. “What allowed me to feel I could do a piece that related to the Gaza Strip,” Glynn explains, “was the fact that it felt like the crisis is a human problem. With the smuggling tunnels, they have found a means to an end, regardless of the politics. Whatever way you want to describe the political situation, the fact is that it’s produced this whole other thing,” an alternative economy.

Glynn sees performance and participation involving the objects as crucial to her work; these are the elements that ultimately allow her sculptures to reflect their contemporary significance in the light of the histories of their ancient counterparts. “I can’t just walk in here and make a ceramic vessel,” she admits. “I’m interested in some sense of an embodied reality—what happens when events are made real in some way or you’re put in a position where your subjectivity becomes implicated. I want to give people space to walk around a world and decide how it should look.” 

To see images, click on the slideshow.

This article was published in the May 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

Jeremy Deller’s nomination to represent Britain at the 55th Venice Biennale didn’t come as a surprise. The 2004 Turner Prize winner has been a dominant figure on the British art scene for almost a decade, and his first retrospective, “Jeremy Deller: Joy in People,” has just finished touring Europe and the U.S. to great acclaim. Yet Deller is anything but the usual museum-type artist. Described by the British Council’s pavilion commissioner, Andrea Rose, as “a pied piper of popular culture,” he is at his best when working in the larger world, with people of all stripes. Procession, 2009, organized for Manchester International Festival, was a riotous celebration of the city’s diversity in the form of a parade, gathering participants as varied as the Unrepentant Smokers, the Carnival Queens, and the Adoration of the Chip group. Realized the same year, It Is What It Is cut closer to the bone. The New Museum in New York displayed the wreck of a car bombed in Baghdad, and an Iraqi citizen and a U.S. war veteran later toured with it elsewhere in America to continue the debate it begat.

Deller never shies away from poking where it hurts. His notorious Battle of Orgreave, 2001—the reenactment of a 1984 confrontation between police and miners that emblematized Margaret Thatcher’s fierce handling of the strike—probed very fresh wounds in the British psyche. The artist, who held his first exhibition at his parents’ house in 1993, when they were on holiday (he only moved out at age 31), can also be tender in his quasi-anthropological approach. He records vernacular forms of artmaking in his longtime project Folk Archive, chronicles the life of the Klein gardens in Münster (Speak to the Earth and It Will Tell You, 2007–17), and has collected and displayed artworks made by fans of the band Manic Street Preachers. The artist met Modern Painters U.K. editor Coline Milliard to discuss his British Council commission.

Coline Milliard: Stuart Hall concludes his essay in the catalogue of your retrospective by saying that you give an “artistic form” to “politics for a so-called non-political age.” Do you recognize yourself in this description?

Jeremy Deller: Yes, I suppose I do. I’m not going to contradict Stuart Hall—why would you want to do that? I work with politics, political events, or politicians even, yes. I look at them in a different way, reimagine them.

CM: But you seem to have quite an ambivalent relationship to the political.

JD: You work with what you have around you. I’m not an activist, and I don’t join many campaigns—which is probably why I do what I do. I’m not very good at being a spokesman for something. Someone like Bob and Roberta Smith—he’s amazing the way he puts himself on the line and his heart on his sleeve. I can’t really do that.

CM: Why not?

JD: It’s not in my emotional or mental makeup. I’m not a join-in-er, I never have been. I find it really difficult being part of a group of people doing or saying the same thing.

CM: Yet the group or collaborations with groups are at the heart of your practice.

JD: Yes, I love groups of people. And maybe it’s because I have a fear of the group—fear is probably too strong a word—but an uncertainty about groups that I want to work with them, almost to help me get over that slight anxiety over group behavior.

CM: Do you see collaboration as an artistic medium?

JD: Yes. Or people as an artistic medium. And collaboration is a form of that.

CM: I was thinking about Sacrilege, 2012, your inflatable Stonehenge bouncy castle. This is quite different from your other projects. Although it is interactive, it is also very much a sculpture.

JD: It’s a big object; it weighs tons. It was just an opportunity to do a really stupid big thing, and I thought I should do it because it wasn’t going to happen any other time. I had the idea, and it took years to happen. It was mainly because of the Olympics that you could do things like this. It toured Britain. It’s a really big one-liner. But I don’t mind that, and it’s necessary sometimes when you are doing public projects.

CM: You also had the idea for a Stonehenge gateway at the Olympic park.

JD: Yes, they asked a lot of artists to come up with ideas for the park’s ceremonial entrance points. My idea was to make a version of Stonehenge or of other such structures around the U.K. I liked the idea of having those instead of something really new and shiny in the Olympic park, of having something that looked like it’s been there for 5,000 years. It didn’t get commissioned. Maybe they thought I was taking the Mickey out of the Olympics, which of course I was. People didn’t know if the Olympics were going to be a disaster or not. So they were overly worried about everything. That work was seen as potentially a critique, but in a way it was all about British identity, the changing nature of it, and the indefinable quality of Britishness.

CM: Like Stonehenge.

JD: Exactly, everyone knows what it is, they know where it is, but no one knows what it was for or who really used it, what the people were like, how they spoke, what happened there. A lot of people agonize about what Britishness is. There are conferences about it all the time, and yet it doesn’t matter because it can be many things at the same time. It’s constantly evolving, and that’s why it’s an interesting thing to play with.

CM: I’d like to pick up on this idea of the one-liner. It seems to have been running through your work from the start, from the posters and T-shirts you did in the 1990s to the Folkestone Triennial’s slapstick routines [Risk Assessment, 2008].

JD: It sounds like a criticism.

CM: I think of it more as a device.

JD: Well, it’s a very simple piece of communication, isn’t it? Some things I do aren’t one-liners, but a lot of them are. I like slogans. I like big bold texts on walls, on banners, on posters. It’s something that appeals to me: someone just saying what they think, what they believe, saying something.

CM: Even the bombed car [Baghdad, 5 March 2007, 2009] is a one-liner.

JD: Exactly, as an idea. Most of the ideas I have can be described in a sentence. But some are hugely complicated, potentially quite dangerous ideas to do, yet they can be easily understood. The complexity comes later.

CM: How do you feel about representing Britain in Venice? Do you think you’re the best person for it?

JD: Absolutely [laughs], there’s no one else who can do this job at this time. You become an artist to be challenged, to be stretched, and to have these opportunities. I can understand why people would turn it down, but for me it’s almost why I’m doing this thing, to put myself into situations where I wouldn’t usually put myself and to try to work them out. Especially the older you get, I suspect, you could rest on your laurels and take things a little bit easier, but of course it’s the last thing you want to do.

CM: How does one start on a project? Particularly within the framework of the Venice Biennale?

JD: You go to the building and have a look at it. I had been to the British pavilion twice, but both times it had been totally transformed by the artists, Mike Nelson and Chris Ofili. When the selection panel met, I suppose they could see that I was capable of doing a traditional exhibition, and I think they liked that. I never thought I could do an exhibition like I did at the Hayward, but I did do it and it gave me confidence. So you just go there, and you think about what you are interested in, things maybe you’ve wanted to do for years and were not able to do. I’m going to be using the space.

CM: So the pavilion is not something that you are having a problem with.

JD: No, absolutely not. I’m using it in its totality. The only thing I was told was, “Please don’t do something people have to queue up to get into.” So there won’t be any queuing. It won’t be very British in that respect. It’ll be more of an open show.

CM: Showing in a traditional setting is an ongoing conundrum for you, isn’t it? At the Hayward Gallery, you had a slide show, Beyond the White Walls, 2012, depicting your various projects with you explaining them in a voiceover—which worked very well.

JD: It was my way to try to get around that. To hear your voice all the time, when you are editing or when you are in the Hayward is just mortifying. But it worked and people liked that. The pavilion is almost the size of the Serpentine Gallery, so I think of it in those terms really. And it’s not going to be tailored to an international audience. I’m just carrying on doing what I’ve been doing before.

CM: What kind of relationship do you have with Venice?

JD: I find it very annoying actually. It’s a totally frustrating town. I find it quite difficult being there, but that’s probably my fault for going to the openings. It really puts you in your place as an artist.

CM: Your artistic trajectory has become a bit of a legend. Your early meeting with Warhol . . .

JD: Yes, this has become a story now, with the bedroom show at my parents’ house. The narrative has been set. I didn’t talk about the Warhol thing until about four or five years ago because I knew that would be a problem. But once you’ve let that slip, that’s it—the cat’s out of the bag. I didn’t hang out with him for weeks and weeks, but I was there and I did meet him a few times. It was very important for a young person who liked art to go and hang out at the Factory. It was a mind-blowing experience.

CM: During this formative period you approached artmaking from quite a tangential angle.

JD: Did I?

CM: You didn’t go to art school, for example. Do you feel that it somehow opened up what you feel art could be or do?

JD: Well, I never had those blocks that you were given at art college to question every action you make through theory. I don’t question myself enough, maybe. But I’m more of an instinctive person. I always say Alan Kane, whom I work with a lot, and I were never given the rule book. That was good actually. I think I’ve been quite lucky in terms of where I was at the time and the things that were happening.

CM: Your art is about everything but art.

JD: You’re right. The subject matter is not art or art history necessarily; it’s about other things. That’s how I work. I like documentary films. I like reading the papers. I like the news. So that’s a reflection of me as a person.

This interview appears in the May 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

Curiosity, as Brian Dillon notes in his introductory essay to the exhibition of the same title, has oscillated between sin and virtue across the years. Francis Bacon, writing in the 16th century, railed against the portrayal of curiosity by church authorities, who had equated it with “the originall temptation and sinne” that “hath in it somewhat of the serpent, and therefore where it entreth into a man, it makes him swel.” At that time, learning was seen to be the fruitless pursuit of vanity, something that would feed anxiety and atheism and fritter away a person’s abilities and virtue. Taking this transgressive history as a starting point, the exhibition “Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing,” conceived by Dillon—a Modern Painters contributor and U.K. editor of Cabinet magazine—traces the revival of curiosity, from the Wunderkammer through Victorian museum displays, and the critical and witty probings of contemporary artists. Together with a curatorial team consisting of Roger Malbert and myself from the Hayward Gallery, in London, and Lauren Wright of Turner Contemporary, more than 175 items have been assembled from historic collections and artists’ studios: each maker or collector intent on transgressing intellectual fields and furthering a sensibility centered on the pursuit of knowledge. But rather than offering a teleological sweep through the centuries, the show, which runs between May 25 and September 15 at Turner Contemporary, in Margate, is about unlikely meetings.

The Horniman Museum’s huge overstuffed walrus shares a space with Robert Hooke’s giant drawing of a flea. Early algae cyanotypes (essentially photographs made from cyanide) by Anna Atkins are shown alongside the uncomfortably disarming photographs of Czech outsider artist Miroslav Tichý, who created voyeuristic images of women in his town of Kyjov by surreptitiously snapping on a homemade camera fashioned from old bits of cardboard. The works frequently step across a green zone between art and science. Some are suffused with fetishism, others probe the natural world, while still others bring to light taxonomies latent within contemporary society. All share a thirst to gather, record, and question things that instinctively raise an eyebrow or somehow suggest lifting the lid on something else. Curiosity is a broad term. If we are not curious, then what are we? The following seven works and artifacts from the exhibition have been chosen to convey a sense of the historical vectors that run through the show and to point to the fictions, scrutiny, and lines of speculation practiced by artists today.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Alamos Rolodexes

The Center for Land Use Interpretation describes itself as a “research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface.” Since its founding in 1994 in Los Angeles, the center has amassed a vast archive of images, data, and source materials, which they use to interpret the human imprint on the landscape as a “cultural inscription”—evidence to be read, decoded, and understood. Drawing on the legacies of land art, as well as the aesthetics of bureaucracy, they undertake exhibitions, conduct tours and field trips, and share the information they gather through their website and archive.

For this exhibition, they present a series of Rolodexes from a Los Alamos lab containing business cards from suppliers and company representatives of the sort that a national nuclear weapons lab might need to call on. Recently acquired from the archive of nuclear-worker-turned-activist Ed Grothus, they date from the height of the Cold War arms race. Grothus worked as a machinist and then technician for 20 years but resigned in 1969 to operate a salvage company and thrift store, the Los Alamos Sales Co., better known as the “Black Hole.” Its object was to recycle nuclear industry cast-offs, putting them to use as agents of peace. “There is something poignant and compelling about the simplicity and directness of these business calling cards,” explains Matt Coolidge, the founder of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. “It comes down to people, with phone numbers. And it’s a snapshot of synergies between the business community and America’s atomic might, demand and supply. On one hand, it’s an indexical connection directly to the sources of building and operating the most sophisticated and powerful national defense technologies in the world. On the other hand, it is obsolete information, expired, a relic. It is rare, hard evidence of the links of the secret technological history of the nation, and also a dead end.”

Walrus (Odobenus rosmarus)

The famous overstuffed walrus of the Horniman Museum, in South London, was purchased by that museum’s founder, Frederick Horniman, in the 1890s. Having never before seen such an unlikely beast as a walrus, the Victorian taxidermists (like practically everyone else in Britain) were not aware of its characteristic folds of skin and instead continued to simply stuff and stuff the animal until it was fully and proudly inflated, as it now appears. It shares this aspect of mistaken identity and extrapolation about the unknown and exotic in nature with Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros, also on view in “Curiosity.”

Brought to London by the hunter James Henry Hubbard (who had hauled it from Hudson Bay in Canada), the walrus was first exhibited in the Canadian section of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886 in South Kensington. Horniman, the son of a wealthy tea trader, had set about collecting objects of natural history, art, and culture from around the world and later presented his cache to the public in the spirit of Victorian philanthropy and public education. He first opened his home to the public, dividing the exhibits into two categories: art and nature. After accommodating more than 40,000 visits in the first months, Horniman decided to construct the museum that exists today.

This exhibition marks the first time since the walrus’s purchase that it will leave the museum. The moving operation will take three days, as it needs to be delicately hoisted over a fortress of specially built vintage vitrines and into a bespoke traveling crate. Some years ago, a local schoolboy thrust a pencil into the animal’s leathery hide, providing the museum a chance to see what was inside (various bits of wadding, cardboard, and things that were lying about at the time). This represents a second and more managed opportunity for museum staff to take a look behind the smoothed-out folds, X-ray the animal, and discover if, behind the tusks, a skull remains buried.

John Dee’s Mirror and Crystal

Dee (1527–1609) was a mathematician, astronomer, and occultist who served as an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I and became renowned as one of the most learned men of his day. Alongside his work as a mathematician—in his early 20s he lectured on advanced algebra at the Sorbonne—John Dee was a practitioner of magic, astrology, and Hermetic philosophy, and was said to have had the largest library in Britain at the time. For Dee, the two strands of science and occultism were closely bound in the search for a transcendent understanding of what he called “pure verities”—divine forms that he believed underlay the visible world.

Writers and others then and since have remained fascinated by Dee: Shakespeare is said to have modeled Prospero in The Tempest on him, while 007—his code name in correspondence with Elizabeth I—was famously adopted by Ian Fleming for James Bond. More recently, Dee has figured in the writing of H.P. Lovecraft and appeared as the main protagonist in Peter Ackroyd’s novel The House of Doctor Dee, 1993. The rock bands Blue Oyster Cult and Iron Maiden have referred to Dee in songs and Blur’s Damon Albarn penned an opera about him. Dee is reputed to have used a black mirror and a crystal in his practice of scrying, whereby he predicted the future by looking at the glass and reflective surface for symbols or the “ghosts” of people. He claimed that the angel Uriel gave him the crystal, or “shew-stone,” in November 1582 and told him how to make the philosopher’s stone. The crystal, which he also used for healing, was later passed on to his son, who in turn gave it to Nicholas Culpeper as compensation for having cured a liver illness. A physician and alchemist, Culpeper attempted to incorporate the crystal into his medical practice until 1651, when he recorded that a demonic ghost burst out from it and “exercised itself to lewdness and other depravity with women and girls.”

The Animal Vomited by Mr. Lund, the Baker

This small etching and accompanying text describe an incident from 1681/82, when Mr. Lund, a baker from York, “vomited a thing exactly of this shape and bigness.” The incident was described in detail in a letter sent by York physician Martin Lister, who declared, “What this creature is, I dare scarce venture ... for that it is not like anything I ever yet saw in Nature.” He also noted that “when new vomited it was speckled like a toad,” and after being preserved in wine the matter turned to a “fleshy colour like unto raw veal.”

Lister sent his findings to Robert Hooke—famous for his enlarged engraving of a flea (in Micrographia, 1665, also in the exhibition)—who included an account and accompanying plate in his Philosophical Collections, a publication of the Royal Society, the following year.

The event prompted a fair degree of consternation and debate among the scientific community of the day. While Lund, the poor unfortunate victim, thought that the animal was a witch or evil spirit, scientists contended that he must have swallowed a frog or toad embryo, which grew in the stomach, finally gestating into the unlikely shape, or perhaps it was even the compound of a number of pond creatures. The incident and accompanying etching were enough to catch the attention of Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society, who subsumed it into his vast collection, which eventually formed the basis of the British Museum. The incident alludes to a moment when science and medicine augmented new belief systems but still were in relative infancy; it was a time when earnest reason collided with popular mysticism.

Toril Johannessen: Words and Years

Adopting empirical strategies to visualize natural and man-made systems and phenomena, Johannessen’s practice operates in a space between social science and art, between concept and credence. With the series “Words and Years,” 2010–12, Johannessen has charted the frequency with which certain resonant and contentious words, such as love, crisis, hope, and reality are used in publications like Time magazine or National Geographic, raising intriguing and often humorous links between the diverse lists. Hinting at secret cycles or unseen trends at work within society, the artist draws out poetic correlations between the natural and the economic through the editorial tendencies in magazine print.

The graphs are frequently lyrical, or tongue-in-cheek, such as her bar chart of mentions of hope and reality in the journal Political Science or the pie chart of greed and desire in Genetics. The viewer is drawn into the narratives that the graphs point to. For instance, studying how often the word crisis appears in the journals Nature and Science, one observes how the political climate at any given time seems to mirror the natural one. Yet it appears that the instances of miracles cited in the same magazines over the same period, remain at a low level throughout. So crises were common and miracles slight? Trawling back through periodicals since their inception and plotting their trends in this way, Johannessen establishes a mode of inquiry whereby fact merges with concept, offering clarity and haze simultaneously.

Nina Canell: The New Mineral

The installations of Canell are “live.” Frequently, a stream of electricity will flow visibly through them, seen in the wobbling light of a delicately placed neon or the movement of a fan or sensor. As the critic Dieter Roelstraete has suggested, Canell is interested in “the alignment of electricity and female agency.” Electricity flows from the male to the female connector, and its history recalls the treatment for female hysteria, as well as the panoply of domestic appliances associated with the traditional image of the housewife. Electricity carries a hidden charge, an unseen power.

Canell’s works often show a sense that something is happening, albeit on a slow, almost imperceptible scale, for instance, a cloud of water particles that gradually turns a packet of concrete powder into hard concrete. If not experiments as such, her works are charged with a mental probing that is activated in the materials that comprise them. Yet behind the fragile low-key amalgam of slowly moving components, complex narratives are buried, enriching to those who probe.

The New Mineral shows a cluster of glass bulbs on broomstick handles. In the center, a light source feeds an assembled group of radiometers. The luminosity of this central light source slowly fades and brightens, prompting the radiometers, placed in similar glass bulbs atop the surrounding poles, to react accordingly, gathering speed relative to their given position and distance to the light source. Their mechanisms spin faster when the light is brighter and slow down when it’s darker. The work feeds on the legacy of William Crookes, the chemist and spiritualist who invented the radiometer. Crookes started out as a meteorologist; his interests soon took him into economics, publishing, chemistry, and psychic research. Crookes was a well-known personality in the late 19th century, famous for discovering thallium and isolating the first known sample of helium. Inventor of the cathode ray tube, he believed that he had discovered a fourth state of matter, what he called “radiant matter,” which formed a bridge between his scientific and spiritualist beliefs. Radiant matter is the throbbing crux of The New Mineral, as it gently, perhaps ironically, beckons viewers to discover this ethereal notion for themselves.

Laurent Grasso: Specola Vaticana

This suite of five images shows the unexpected and intriguing sight of popes and cardinals gazing at the night sky through giant telescopes. Each witty, fascinating, and surprising, the images were garnered from the Vatican archives during a residency there by Grasso. Who would have suspected that the papacy, with its history of persecuting those who questioned the heavens, would have had such a sophisticated observatory, updated through the ages with the latest telescopes? Grasso reinforces this dissimilitude by showing alongside the images a page from Galileo’s 1610 treatise Sidereus Nuncius (sometimes translated as Starry Messenger) depicting his observations of the stars. He was later sentenced as a heretic and placed under house arrest by his former supporter, Pope Urban VIII.

It is unclear what these images were for and if they were intended to be anything other than private records. Grasso carefully researched the printing method, using a vintage silver plate technique to blur their historical status. A similar historical mist encircles his closely related series of paintings, “Studies into the Past,” 2010–12 (also on display in the exhibition), for which Grasso engaged Old Master restorers to help create paintings in a Renaissance style. Using composite scenes from earlier works, Grasso introduces spectacular natural phenomena into the landscape, such as a comet or a large swarm of bats. The effect creates a disturbance, a “what if ” reinterpretation of history, in which extraordinary things of contemporary familiarity and understanding have been edited back into the past. These things could have happened, but would people have been so shocked that they ignored them? Grasso confronts the past with natural events so vivid and strange that if they had happened they could easily have been dismissed as dream apparitions or signs from above and buried for centuries in a distant collective memory. How curious can we really be without taking a leap of faith outside the known borders of our belief?

This article was published in the May 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images, click on the slideshow. 

Joel Wachs, the man in charge of distributing Andy Warhol’s fortune, met the artist only once.

It was in 1975, at Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles. Wachs was a 36-year-old city councilman and Warhol was signing copies of his newly published memoir, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again.

Most Warhol devotees managed to secure only a cursory autograph that day, but the platinum-haired Pop artist inscribed Wachs’s copy with a personal dedication and a sketch of a Campbell’s soup can.

Warhol never knew that the man before him would go on to become president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, devoting more than a decade to preserving the artist’s legacy. He had simply been thanking Wachs as a city councilor for pulling a few strings so that Margo Leavin Gallery could advertise his exhibition on a billboard above the Sunset Strip. (The major movie studios usually reserved such billboards years in advance.)

Wachs forgot about his brief brush with Warhol until he stumbled across the book more than 25 years later, while preparing for a move to New York to take over the artist’s foundation. And he is certainly not wanting for Warhol memorabilia now. Warhol originals line the walls of the foundation’s downtown headquarters; two leather armchairs facing Wachs’s desk hail from the last location of the artist’s fabled Factory. “I didn’t want anybody to take off the duct tape or fix any tears before they brought them here,” Wachs declares proudly. “So they look exactly the same as they did in the ’60s.”

Short, broad-shouldered, and quicker to smile than most art world power brokers, Wachs looks a decade younger than his 74 years. Since taking over the foundation in 2001, he has done more than give away Warhol’s money, preserve his legacy, and sit in his chairs. As the only former politician at the helm of a major art foundation, he takes a clear-eyed, unsentimental approach. He is not so quietly redefining the way a rapidly growing sector in cultural philanthropy, comprised of single-artist organizations, functions.

In his will Warhol specified that nearly all his assets, including thousands of paintings now worth billions of dollars, should go “to a foundation to be created to support the visual arts.” The barebones instructions—no strings, no elaboration—leave lots of room for interpretation. And Wachs has not been shy about seizing attendant opportunities.

Under Wachs’s leadership, the foundation has expanded its licensing program at an unprecedented rate, lending Warhol’s name and artwork to products as varied as Nars makeup, a banana-shaped body pillow, and real Campbell’s soup cans. The capitalist move—which some commentators criticized as disrespectful to Warhol’s legacy—has led to approximately $3 million being contributed each year to the foundation’s $225 million endowment. But the most radical and influential changes have come in the last two years.

“Joel has this idea of really examining the mission in an almost philosophical way,” says artist Jane Hammond, who has served on the foundation’s board for eight years. Two years ago Wachs set up a subcommittee charged with considering the long-term future of the organization. The panel sought to determine “who is really benefiting most from our activities” and to have “a discussion beyond simply ‘Who are we giving money to this year?’  ” Hammond recalls.

These conversations ultimately resulted in two of the foundation’s boldest moves. First came its dissolution of the Warhol Foundation’s authentication committee in October 2011, a decision that stunned the art world. The foundation had spent millions of dollars defending itself against lawsuits brought by disgruntled collectors who did not like the board’s decisions, Wachs explains. “We got tired of spending grant money on lawyers for a service that really only benefited wealthy collectors.” Within a year, the Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring estates followed suit.

“It would have been easy but wrong for a leader to freeze under the episodic but routine legal assault that the foundation experienced early in its existence,” says Kathy Halbreich, associate director for curatorial affairs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “But Joel seemed to get braver as the risks multiplied, and I think that captured Warhol’s spirit perfectly.”

Last fall, when public arts funding was at a historic low point, the Warhol Foundation raised eyebrows yet again, announcing it would immediately sell off its entire art collection, including thousands of screen prints, Polaroids, and a few paintings. (The organization had previously sold a handful of artworks every year, though it gave away close to 4,000 of its best items to establish the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 1991.) The first live sale, held at Christie’s New York last November, featured 354 lots and brought in $17 million. The auction house will hold four more online sales before the end of this year. In all, the Warhol Foundation collection is expected to yield at least $100 million.

Wachs says the proceeds will enable the foundation to give away $5 million to $7 million more in grants each year, over and above the $13 million allocation for 2012. (The move will save the organization almost $2 million a year on art storage costs alone.) Much of that extra money will fund a new program that funnels money into small arts organizations in communities where public funding has been cut.

Ruby Lerner, who is the president of Creative Capital, a foundation that supports artists with grants and professional development programs and shares an office with the Warhol Foundation, says Wachs “is accustomed to unconventional solutions. People who are in local politics don’t have the luxury of BS-ing their way through a problem.”

Wachs acknowledges that his journey to the Warhol Foundation was circuitous. “I wouldn’t suggest that anyone who wants to be the head of an arts foundation prepare for it by being a politician,” he says. But it is precisely that experience, his friends say, that makes him so good at his job. As one of the Los Angeles council’s youngest and longest-serving members, Wachs was instrumental in passing one of the strongest gay rights ordinances in the United States, in establishing the city’s first dog parks, and in creating affordable housing for artists. “Some visionaries don’t know how to deal with the day-to-day,” Hammond says. “He can.”

Before he ran the Los Angeles city council or became president of the Warhol Foundation, Joel Wachs was a frail boy growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, ran a grocery and butcher shop. Wachs often had hay fever so severe his parents would send him to the walk-in refrigerator—wearing a fur coat—so he would find it easier to breathe. When Joel was 10, his family moved to L.A. in the hope that the climate would improve his health.

After graduating from ucla, where he was president of the student body, Wachs graduated from Harvard Law School and earned a master’s degree in tax law from New York University. For five years he worked as a tax attorney in Los Angeles, but eventually quit and ran for public office because, as he told a reporter in 1991, he did not find satisfaction doing little more than coming up with ways for rich people to save money.

“He was our guy in city hall,” says Sherri Geldin, a former deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and now director of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. “Over the years he has been a real activist in his political life for all manner of causes.”

A fiscal conservative who started out as a Republican and became an independent while serving on the city council, Wachs often butted heads with other members of the council as well as powerful private interests. He opposed so many proposals—including taxpayer financing of the Staples Center and the 2000 Democratic National Convention—that some in the mayor’s office took to calling him Dr. No. Others accused him of grandstanding.

In 1999, during the last of three unsuccessful mayoral campaigns, Wachs decided to come out publicly on a local cable television show. Asked if he was gay, he answered simply, “I am.”

“Most people just assumed I was gay,” Wachs says now. “But I felt it was critical for both me and the movement to be clear about it.” (Since leaving government, he’s become a registered Democrat in part, he says, because the far right began “interfering with peoples’ right to live their lives in whatever way they choose.”)

Wachs was, without a doubt, a canny politician. In 1981 he became president of the Los Angeles city council after an 8–7 vote described by former council member Greig Smith in his 2010 book, If City Hall’s Walls Could Talk, as “the most politically intriguing moment of city council history.” Before the election, Wachs had promised in writing to cast his ballot for Pat Russell, a colleague on the council and the favorite in the race. Behind the scenes, however, her political opponent, the council’s departing president, John Ferraro, was engineering a coup: He wanted Wachs to succeed him instead. With the council divided, Wachs held the tiebreaking vote. And he used it. “It’s hard for me to imagine anyone not voting for himself,” Wachs says now.

Wachs’s relationship with the art community was a constant throughout his city council tenure. In 1993 a group of artists including David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein made limited-edition prints to support his second mayoral campaign. (Opponents complained at the time that the prints violated campaign finance laws, but the council never censured Wachs.) On the East Coast, Christopher Wool produced black-and-white campaign buttons.

One reason that artists liked Wachs so much is that he got them work. In the mid 1980s, he drafted Los Angeles’s “percent for art” law, expanding a practice common in only a handful of U.S. cities that government construction projects allocate a percentage of their budget toward public art. “We took the idea a bit further, extending it to private development in Los Angeles and not just new buildings but improvements to existing buildings that cost more than a certain amount of money,” Wachs says.

When a developer sought permission to build a $23 million row of high-rises on Los Angeles’s Grand Avenue, that law helped change the course of the city’s cultural history. “Instead of spending money on sculptures or artworks in these buildings, we said to the developers, ‘Why don’t you build a 50,000-square-foot stand-alone museum?’ ” Wachs recalls. It became the flagship location for moca.

“He saw everything,” says L.A. gallerist Margo Leavin of Wachs’s insatiable appetite for exhibitions. “He used to come to the gallery after work and stay until 7 or 8 at night just talking about art.”

And Wachs did more than talk. As a city councilman, Wachs spent a quarter of his salary on art. Now, as director of the Warhol Foundation, he expends about half. “I get two pay-checks a month—one goes to live on and one to buy art,” he says. Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, who famously amassed a world-class collection of Minimalist art on civil servants’ salaries, are Wachs’s role models.

“Since Joel looked at everything, he often was an early collector of artists’ work and he collected with unusual intelligence within a relatively constrained budget,” Halbreich says. “I am still coveting several armloads of work” owned by Wachs.

Wachs’s collection is heavy on photography and appropriation art—fitting for a president of the Andy Warhol Foundation. His holdings include work by Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Christopher Williams, Laurie Simmons, and Andrew Lord. Because of a promise he made to himself when he started to buy art, many of his purchases are now in the collection of moca.

“I began donating art from my collection in an amount equal to what I purchased each year,” Wachs says. moca now has more than 100 of his pieces, including John Baldessari’s famous silkscreen of a 1968 Artforum magazine cover, titled This Is Not to Be Looked At.

In 2002 a stretch of Grand Avenue between moca and the Walt Disney Concert Hall was renamed Joel Wachs Square by the city. The Los Angeles Times reported that Wachs spent most of the dedication “wiping tears from his eyes.” Of his devotion to the arts, Wachs says, “It’s not politically the smartest thing to do. But it’s where I was able to leave my mark.”

If  Wachs had been more successful as a politician, he would never have taken over the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 1999 the organization began looking for a replacement for its founding director, Arch Gilles, who was nearing retirement age. Wachs, who had landed on the foundation’s radar thanks to his local arts advocacy, had already served four years on its board.

Serendipitously, Wachs was unable to assist in the search because he was making his third and final bid for the Los Angeles mayor’s seat. After receiving only 11 percent of the vote, he was crushed.

As was the case during his sudden election as city council president, however, Wachs’s colleagues had other plans for him. After interviewing a series of uninspiring candidates, the search committee—which included Geldin, Gilles, and Halbreich—suggested Wachs. “I knew running the Warhol Foundation required ample amounts of diplomacy and, when that failed, a brilliant legal mind,” Halbreich recalls.

It didn’t take long for the rest of the board to agree. “It was two days after the election; I was home licking my wounds,” Wachs says. “And I got a phone call from Arch asking if I’d be interested in the job.” Almost without taking a breath, Wachs said yes. “I resigned from the council on Friday, got on a plane Saturday, and started working here on Monday,” Wachs says from his New York office. “I don’t normally make decisions that quickly. I lived in the same house for 30 years. I had the same job for 30 years.”

Wachs says he’s always felt great admiration for Warhol; perhaps that’s why the decision came so easily. “I lived through the ’60s, which I think was probably the most liberating period,” he says. “For better or for worse—and I think for better—most people’s lives are somewhat influenced by what happened in the ’60s. And Andy Warhol played a major role in that.”

Warhol “believed that being different, for example, was not something to be afraid of,” Wachs says. “He was really the one person in the visual arts field who had a remarkable impact on our culture and who affected my life.”

In interviews, Wachs often says the best thing about his job is being able to give away money instead of always having to ask for it, as he did during his politician days. Two weeks after superstorm Sandy hit, Wachs convened the foundation’s board for a vote on whether to allocate $2 million to a special fund to help artists and arts organizations recover from the storm. Still, his fiscal conservatism—a rarity in the art world—remains on display in the way he allocates grants and operates the foundation.

To mark the 10th anniversary of Creative Capital in 2009, Ruby Lerner requested a $1 million gift from the Warhol Foundation to help shore up its endowment. “It took Joel a while to get back, and when he finally did he looked at me and said, ‘You don’t want an endowment gift from us,’  ” she recalls. “I was really upset.”

What Wachs offered instead was a long-term commitment. If Creative Capital could raise $800,000 every year, the Warhol Foundation would donate $1 million each year for as long as nine years. For wiggle room, “he gave us an extra $1 million in a cash reserve fund, so if there were ever a year we didn’t get the $800,000 to qualify, we could draw on it,” Lerner says. Later on Wachs raised the stakes, offering to donate $1.5 million to Creative Capital for 10 years as long as the foundation raised $1.5 million annually on its own. Lerner agreed. “I was a little taken aback when he first made the suggestion, but ultimately I was so moved by how creative the financing was. It’s given us so much more freedom,” Lerner says. “It’s rare in the funding world to find that kind of partner.” 

There is a rather typical way that Baer has been introduced in articles and interviews over the last years. Yes, the 83-year-old artist was successful with her Minimalist art and hard-edge abstract paintings in the 1960s. Yes, she moved to a castle in Ireland and then via London on to Amsterdam, and in the ’80s she wrote, “I am no longer an abstract artist,” denouncing a style that had lost its power and become too decorative. Since then she has been known for works combining animals, bodies, objects, and erotic images found in early cave paintings. But in the end, what Jo Baer is and does are more than these oft-repeated tropes. She comes across as fearless but confides to being very anxious; she knows perfectly well what she does and why she does it but is still looking for the right words to capture it. Maaike Lauwaert met with Baer at her Amsterdam studio to talk about her two current shows, one at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum through September 1; the other, focused on older works, at Museum Ludwig, in Cologne, Germany, through August 25.

Maaike Lauwaert: Can you tell me what you are planning to show in the Stedelijk Museum this summer?

Jo Baer: There will be six new paintings. I started them in 2009 and then picked them up again in 2011. I have lately done only one painting a year. Finishing these paintings was very difficult and very hard work. I couldn’t go anywhere, didn’t see anybody. These are real big, honest-to-God paintings.

ML: Can you tell me about the stone with the hole depicted in the paintings?

JB: It was standing in a field close to where I lived in Ireland. It is a big, squarish stone with a perfect hole in it. It’s 8,000 years old! Why would there be a hole in it?

ML: And this stone was the starting point for all six paintings?

JB: Yes, I remained intrigued by this stone and went back to study it. There could be so many reasons why the stone is there. It could be the door of a tomb that no longer exists; it might be a border, a boundary line, a sign-post. There’s even somebody who wrote about it saying it’s a fertility thing, so there are pictures online of a man who put his penis in the hole. I think it’s so funny.

It’s a long story. The stone was part of a big traffic scheme: If you put your ruler on the map and draw a line from the stone and see where it goes, it goes all the way up to where the first farmers came to this part of Ireland, where the first and earliest tombs were built. And there are many more stones, a major river ford, and connections along its way. It marks an important highway. It’s very intriguing.

ML: So it began with this fascination with the stone.

JB: Yes, the result of this fascination, this mystery, is a series of modern paintings. It is not figurative work, mind you. I don’t know the words to use to say what these paintings are. If you want to make up an idea, a word for what I’m doing, please feel welcome, because I have heard everything from meaning art to Neo-Constructivism.

ML: You no longer use the term radical figuration that you coined?

JB: Ditch radical figuration; it’s a 1980s phrase. I don’t like the term anymore because it has the word figuration in it, and when you talk about figuration, narrative is never far away. My paintings are not narratives; they have a story, that is true, but they don’t tell that story in the way a narrative does. My paintings are made of constellations, but they are not assemblage or collage. Young people know what I am doing; they are doing it, too, now. It’s not portrait art, it’s not landscapes, it’s not pictures. Maybe it’s closer to abstract art—only with content and meaning.

ML: Are these new works different from the radical figuration paintings?

JB: Yes, I think these six paintings are very explicit. The ones from the previous 35 years were much more open and less formal, more layered as well. I decided to try to close the circle a little bit with this series. To some extent I am going back to the Minimalist look, giving more space to things, making the paintings less complicated, simplifying them. That was a deliberate choice. I looked at the paintings and felt I should hold back a little.

You see, the images used in the new paintings are from a distant past and they’re very mysterious. Since they are not so easily recognizable, I spread them out. I simplified. It’s not an aesthetic thing—it’s to do with their content and meaning.

ML: Your work has been hard to pin down, to frame.
JB: Yes. I wrote an article in the ’80s about why abstract art broke down. The main reason was that in the late ’60s and ’70s the vocabulary on which abstract art depended was destroyed. We lost our common language; we no longer shared one language that people understood. And once that happened, you had to go look for another language. Advertising, journalism, and Pop art became a new, shared language for a lot of artists. I wasn’t going that way. I am not interested in decorative or conceptual art’s propagandas.

ML: What drives you to make paintings?

JB: When I’m upset about something, it’s not very concrete. But if I am upset about something, there is always this drive to want to know more about it. I don’t know why I want to know this or that, and frankly I don’t care why. Why the hell would I want to make paintings about an Irish stone? A lot of people can’t make the sort of art I make, and I do not understand why I can, but this is a strength that emboldens me. Anything you can hold in your hand (or in your mind) can be the material to make beautiful, nontrivial paintings. The world is a rich and compelling place.

ML: You come across as very strong.

JB: I’m not strong. In fact I have a certifiably weak ego. I think probably all good artists are badly crippled in some way. If you think of me as brave, strong, and all those things, it’s not true. I don’t have a choice. It’s just the way it is. And I’m still alive and even sometimes happy.

This article was published in the June 2013 issue of Art+Auction.

It is easy to be cynical about the present relations between art and philosophy. Too often it seems that artists, critics, and curators want the same old things from thought as such and from certain star thinkers in particular: intellectual support for weak or overreaching work, conceptual appliqué on what is essentially consumer journalism, a resonant name to stick in your talks-program brochure. (Full disclosure: Like many art writers, I’ve been party to this last practice, and gladly: I interviewed Jacques Rancière at the Frieze Art Fair in 2005.) At worst, this situation makes for comically inflated claims about the art at issue, especially as regards its political import, and a good deal of bloviating by academics who are often coming touchingly fresh to contemporary art. And at best? Well, two recent volumes suggest some answers. In the past decade or so, Rancière’s work has provided the art world with a timely out from the seeming impasse of pre-millennial postmodernism and from troublesome complicity with now weakened but still disreputable market forces. The suspicious frequency and ease with which Rancière is cited, however, should not distract from the seriousness of his philosophical undertaking when it comes to art: Nothing less than a demolition of our familiar narrative concerning modernism and modernity and its replacement with a complex lineage of competing aesthetic-political regimes. At the heart of this new story is a protracted rupture of old artistic forms by scandalous forces: unruly bodies freed from the strictures of classical proportion, plebeian voices raised in aristocratic genres and milieus, a remarkable democracy of objects achieved in word, paint, and celluloid.

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art is an unexpected addition to Rancière’s project, in part because it starts from a somewhat antique formal and scholarly premise. The book is modeled on Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, a study of literary realism written by the exiled German scholar during World War II and published in 1946. Like Auerbach, Rancière begins each of his short essays (14 as compared with 20 in Mimesis) with a quotation that suggests a moment of innovation in the book’s historical span—in this case, 1764 to 1941. But whereas Auerbach was convinced of a type of progress (the advance of psychological realism, from Homer to Virginia Woolf ), Rancière presents a history of disruptions: from Johann Winckelmann’s description of the mutilated Belvedere Torso to the documentary experiment of James Agee in Now Let Us Praise Famous Men.

En route between 18th-century Dresden and New York of the mid 20th century, Rancière sketches, as his subtitle has it, a series of “scenes” in which good aesthetic form yields to the perspective of the common man (Stendhal), the profusion of common things (Emerson), and the transformation of sculptural volume into active surface (Rilke on Rodin). Frequently, these small but intricately drawn studies involve some defining paradox, as in the case of the valorization after the French Revolution of mundane subjects for painting—a move that has more to do with the institution of aestheticist indifference to subject matter than the revolutionary invasion of art by the figures of workers and beggars. If there’s a single exemplary instance among all these scenes, it’s the billowing form and force of the serpentine dancer Loie Fuller, described by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé as “classic insofar as entirely modern,” and the subject of Rancière’s most luminous essay.

Given Rancière’s insistence on these privileged moments in the history of art and art criticism, it’s tempting to read Aisthesis as a belle-lettristic addendum to his more sustained and systematic works, akin to the sort of essayistic volume that Verso puts out by others (such as Alain Badiou or Slavoj Zižek) when they are between magnum opuses. That would be a mistake. Such is the clarity and complexity of Rancière’s thought here, and so intimate is he with the writings excerpted and the works to which they refer, that one has to conclude that
this is a fundamental test of his broader conceptions of artistic, literary, and political history. The question is, why does the book end in the middle of the last century? Auerbach’s Mimesis concludes with a bravura reading of a passage from Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse—that is, with an advanced modernism that the war had interrupted. There’s no such declaration of contemporary allegiance in Aisthesis, so that the book practically begs for a second volume—and urgently.

If Rancière seems to falter before the recent past, the arrival of a contemporary, as opposed to modern, art after World War II is one of the starting points for Peter Osborne’s ambitious and frustrating book, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. The contemporary, he suggests at first, is not merely our vaguely defined present, but like the modern, a self-conscious and self-described period. Or is it? There are competing timescales, for sure: The contemporary may also have begun in the 1960s or following the convulsions of 1989. On the other hand, it may not be a period at all, but a state of complex self-involvement and self-difference. Contemporary art, writes Osborne, is post-Conceptual art—art that has learned from Duchamp and the Conceptualists of the 1960s, but more recently turned back, mostly via photography and video, to an “aestheticized” concern with the image as such.

Osborne’s critical throat-clearing here is reasonably engaging but also quite familiar, and it is hard to see it as the thorough going philosophy of contemporary art that he also announces in passing—still less as enabling the profound engagement with individual works that he asserts would be essential to such a philosophical criticism. When Osborne does turn to specific artists and particular works, the examples are again familiar. The Atlas Group is adduced, a decade after Walid Raad dissolved that conceptual-documentarist disguise, as a prime instance of the contemporary fictionalization of artist and subject matter. There are sections on Gerhard Richter and Robert Smithson that substantially overstate, in order to dismiss, weak readings of their work in terms purely of painting and sculpture. And there’s an egregiously throwaway passage that accuses Tacita Dean and others of mere nostalgia for the 1960s when they make work related to Smithson.

Throughout, Osborne insists that what we need is a new and properly philosophical art criticism—and he may well be right. But I have to say I doubt it will look much like Anywhere or Not at All, with its paltry roster of contemporary artists and its excruciating recourse to the usual tropes of academic prose: tin-eared word choice (“problematicity”); capricious, not to say demented, use of italics; and that odd proprietorial tone by which the author gestures in advance at what will have been argued by chapter’s end. That said, Osborne’s real and valuable insight in this book is one he shares with Rancière: If there is to be a new art criticism, it will need a new, or at least a reanimated, form. Both writers attempt a fragmentary structure that is as much indebted to Romanticism as to the avant-gardes of the last century; it’s just that only one of them has managed to fully conjure that form into being.

This article appears in the July 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

How does something very ordinary and banal, say a rock, become something extraordinary? If that rock were a piece of gold, it would be easy to say that its material properties aid such an advancement. Take for example how gold doesn’t really tarnish; it keeps its luster with a minimum of effort. Yet, beyond its mesmerizing glow, gold has another special property: Not only can it hold its brilliance; it can also be tested with a touchstone for purity.

For these and other reasons, gold became a standard for trade since its grade could always be calculated as a unit measure to facilitate symmetrical exchanges. Thus, gold became the first true commodity. But was this embedded quality its only means for evaluation? Or is there something more to be said about the psychological effect of its glow?

The question of whether objects—artistic or otherwise—are valued for some intrinsic objective reason as opposed to their potential to elicit subjective phenomenological responses is an old one. Plato posed this very quandary in the Euthyphro by asking, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Plato ultimately sided with the idea that the pious was autotelic. As such, he could conclude that values exist outside the individual perceptions of mind as a way to justify the ideal of a universal authority—be it called truth, god, law, or what have you. But for this to be the case, a given object, let’s call it object X, would have to have the same reading in all and every context. It would always manifest as X. A gold filling in a tooth, however, is not the same thing as a golden cross. So while both may rely on various performances of gold as a soft metal that is easily shaped, the setting and placement of that form is paramount. Even the same object, say a cross, has a different life in a church versus in a museum. Placement is a device with which to imbue meaning; only through a contextual demarcation can the everyday be parsed with the extraordinary.

Architecture of course is the art par excellence of ordering materials as a way to invent spatial interrelations. Consider a holy space, a cathedral, wherein basic stones and metals are wrought so as to produce a sacred experience. Although the wealth of materials used in such spaces is by no means simple, it is their juxtaposition that truly provokes feedback from the visitor’s psyche. This test is easy enough to witness with the more concentrated example of a museum vitrine, where artifacts are seldom placed in completely neutral settings. Often they are enhanced through the use of theatrical devices, such as lighting, plinths, or other installation means, which actually signify the import of the object just as much as the object itself may. This pairing of installation and scene provides manifold complex associations in order to mediate their reception. Amplifying these valence lines, architecture—as well as installation art—strings together chains of such presentations so that time and memory come into full play. Normatively, these edits can be called architectural procession, as the designer places one view after the next in a kind of abstract narrative of shapes and forms. And like a good story, such displays are best advanced through foreshadowing, flashback, and the like.

The Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier was a keen student of such scenarios. And as an apt pupil, the designer turned to history to investigate how to twin time and memory so as to charge space with a supersensory meaning—that is, how to transform raw materials into not only a space but also an emotive place of belonging. To this end, he famously went to Athens.

In his youth, Le Corbusier slowly walked through the Acropolis to watch how his changing views of the Parthenon began to create not a stone temple but a mental composite, which activated his imagination as much as it did his eyes. Key among these vistas was how the building was revealed or concealed with each step so that a kind of time travel could be felt. By taking in the view from various coordinates, noting how, for instance, the steps of the temple looked from below as opposed to how they looked up close, and superimposing such differing perceptions of the same object, he was able to project himself back to various points in time and sensation. In an essay on the architect’s work, the historian Colin Rowe proposed that such a layering of space, time, and memory could be called “phenomenological transparency.”

Unlike literal transparency—such as that of a glass window—a phenomenological perspective tasks a subject to see content relations not across immediately apparent lines but through diverse and discontinuous perceptions that are physically impossible to see. That is, these associations could exist only as a collage of memory and projection. This mechanism can be most easily observed in Le Corbusier’s noted early work, the Villa Savoye, outside of Paris.

At the villa, Le Corbusier found a trick that he would continue to employ throughout his oeuvre: What if you take a simple cube and from the center of it remove another smaller cube, so as to view the resultant four interior planes across this void as a network of actors between one another? A subject might encounter the bedroom by viewing it from the living room as a framed scene through strategically placed windows. Without the viewer’s physically being in the bedroom, a partial image of that space is nevertheless hinted at, but not disclosed in full, leaving the viewer to wonder what is outside this view, what are the atmospheric properties of being in that room itself, and so on. Inversely, when the guest moves from the living room to the bedroom, the image folds back on itself reciprocally as it now sets a new cast of the room she’s just left. More than just causing an aha moment, these slices bring together multiple impressions, as the image of the bedroom through the living room is wed to the experience of the view in the bedroom itself, not to mention the fact that a similar trans-position affects the idea of the living room itself.

This manipulation of image, time, and place could be called Le Corbusier’s kaleidoscope. More than just bringing about a change in the unfolding of the space, this recognition of the importance of position and demarcation within the space is what prompts variation. On the one hand, such calculated plays provide for a notion of order to comfort the guest by telegraphing a movement through an artificially constructed world aesthetically arranged for viewing texture and pleasure. And yet, any succession of images can, of course, provide the material for variation so that a guest need not blend the view of the living room with that of the bedroom, but with another view entirely: The “void” at the villa is in fact a terrace, which can also be occupied to afford a split middle view. It, however, does not act as an epicenter to render the final code with which to anchor all vantages. With such a displacement, no real hierarchy is imposed; instead of a kind of dialectical montage, these jumps and crosscuts elicit a craving in the observer to find new image relations voyeuristically. With such a perverse desire in the visitor to explore more and more perspectives, this simple box of glass and concrete becomes a kind of random scene generator teasing the subject to revel in the discovery of hidden spatial-temporal delights.

While the Villa Savoye is a rather abstract catalogue of perspectives, Le Corbusier’s later masterpiece, the monastery Sainte Marie de La Tourette, in the Rhône-Alpes, near Lyon, takes this idea of a superimposed narrative to its full conclusion by uniting procession with an actual iconographic rebus.

Like Villa Savoye, La Tourette is basically a square complex with a central court. Here, however, the square is fractured, as three sides are slightly set back from the fourth to essentially form two buildings in a pattern similar to a U capped by a straight line. Diagrammatically, this cleft separates the daily functions of the monastery: The U-shaped structure houses the monks’ cells and other domestic activities, while the other volume provides for the holy chapel. Beyond this division of purpose, each building is rendered with different forms and icons, which collapse into the grand conceit of the compound.

When viewing the chapel elevation from the entrance to the monastery, a pilgrim might notice that instead of being inside a tower, the church bell is housed in a concrete frame, essentially a plant box, cantilevered just off the side of the chapel structure. When the visitor scans this façade further, however, its few deviations from a flat plane resolve into a surreal canvas.

In the façade’s center, a large concrete quadrangle bulges forth, while a long rectilinear cut streaks across the upper portion of the building. Just to the side of it all, a smaller annex can be seen jutting off. The plan of this annex follows a deformed D shape, but the arc of the D is subdivided into a wave. Strikingly, this deformed letter looks remarkably like a cartoon ear, which itself becomes a clue with which to make sense of the rest of the various forms.

With the D considered as an ear, the chapel itself becomes a kind of head fashioned with a nose (the triangular bulge) and an eye (the bell tower). With a nod to cubism, the ear has to be rotated from a plane to a section so a viewer can see these details. No ordinary face, the ribbon strip across the top can be envisioned as a monk’s tonsure. Likewise, the larger U-structured building, set on the opposite side of the chapel from the annex, becomes the second ear—requiring a rotation as well. Tellingly, this disguised ear metaphor takes on another character, as Le Corbusier stated he wished “to give the monks what men today need most: silence and peace. … This Monastery does not show off; it is on the inside that it lives.”

Once inside, a monk must first course around the U-shaped building to get to the chapel, the now literal and figurative “head” of the clerics’ activities. It becomes clear, as a second order of revelation, that the noselike bulge on the outside of the chapel’s facade is the housing for the organ, while the tonsure cut affords a clear story, capping the interior of the chapel with a halo of light. This doubling of images can in turn be seen as a kind of fictive double entendre since the outside view presents a mortal monk’s head, while its interior presents the metaphysical realms of the speculative and spiritual mind. Even though this assembly area is set for Mass, participants usually remain in silence. The only time for utterance becomes the climax of this procession of spaces. Sliding through the chapel, a monk comes to the door of the annex ear. He enters, and upon looking up, three private chapels, complete with long drumlike skylights, provide altars from which to whisper privately and speak to the unknown. In the end, privacy and silence might be the truest measure with which to contemplate Le Corbusier’s environments or to gauge any installation that aims for supersensory meaning. When his designs are reconfigured not as mere spaces, but as islands unto themselves, the logics of these worlds foster a special accompaniment, the ability to exist only in the mind of the beholder through the prompts of objects and their orientation.

This article was published in the July 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

On a July morning in 1973 a pilot, a photographer, and an artist flew a Beechcraft E55 Baron about 15 miles northwest of Amarillo, Texas, to survey a partially prepared site for a large-scale earth sculpture. Measuring 140 feet in diameter and emerging from an artificial lake, it would have echoed the design of pieces the artist had completed in the Netherlands and the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Amid the controlled banks that allowed the team to observe the recently staked-out design, the plane lost power in one engine, leaving insufficient thrust to keep the dual-prop plane out of a “mush stall.” The ensuing crash 40 years ago this summer might initially seem to amount to the terminal myth of Robert Smithson, the 35-year-old artist onboard that plane who had already engaged in quite a lot of mythmaking in his truncated career. Since his death, however, critical and curatorial appraisals of the artist’s influence have forcefully resurfaced, not unlike his signature work, Spiral Jetty.

This acclaim is fairly widespread and distributed across Smithson’s signature acts, from his prodigious yet idiosyncratic criticism to his white cube–busting advocacy for a more problematic, less passive status for the art object. His large-scale elemental works are for many the epitome of land art, arguably the most romantic and evocatively performative art movement of the paradigm-changing 1960s and ’70s. Eventually Smithson expanded the scope of his practice to include science and industry to establish a more transdisciplinary artistic terrain. Still, landscape is where we tend to site him; maybe the terms land art and earthworks still imply that Smithson’s later site-based practice was mostly about rocks and dirt, even when contained in the machined geometries of his non-site sculptures. Yet his increasing exploration of architectural vocabularies (both material and verbal) leaves persuasive evidence that his foremost legacy is to architecture, both in an exploratory renewal of its archetypal elements and in testing its tolerance for radical possibility. In any ode to an artist who dies young, there remains the pang of what might have been; Robert Smithson’s trajectory looks like it would eventually have left “art” itself behind.

What contemporary architects and landscape architects take from Smithson reveals an influence that’s less literal (if seen strictly from a form-and-materials view) but more pervasive than some might have expected. The Smithson touch is felt in projects that reclaim post-industrial dross space for ambitious new contexts; espouse modes of practice that nimbly skip across scales; and incorporate a hip skepticism toward their own agency, acknowledging time and entropy as creative forces that will transform and subvert their best efforts.

Smithson was key in “extending attention away from the scenically beautiful,” says landscape architect James Corner of James Corner Field Operations, “toward a more authentic, durational sense of landscapes caught in process over time.” We can also find a few overlaps between his designs and those of practitioners today, separated by contexts and decades. Smithson’s 1966 maquette for the unbuilt public work Tar Pool and Gravel Pit strikes me as an uncanny precursor to Michael Arad’s depressingly awesome and subtly terrifying 9/11 memorial. Even without much basis for comparing their rationales (this was arguably Smithson’s first land art proposal, basically a very large non-site, and Arad’s gesture of water falling into volumetric subtraction is a monument in reverse), the dark, concentric squares common to both projects embody and contemplate the Void.

Left: The 9/11 Memorial (Photo by Joe Woolhead) 
Right: Robert Smithson's "Tar Pool and Gravel Pit," 1966 (© Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA)

Smithson’s architectural proposals originated with his consultancy for the architectural engineering firm Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton in 1966. The firm was preparing studies for the future Dallas-Fort Worth airport, a large-scale project to build an international hub for the region, and wanted to collaborate with artists whose visions could be integrated with the creation of new typologies of space.

Smithson met monthly with the architects and started consuming the voluminous maps, aerial surveys, and data that were being generated. The relationship lasted just under a year, and ultimately his ideas were not incorporated into the airport. (One of his proposals included four clusters of low-slung, differently colored earthworks to be spread across the airfield, views of which were to be piped into the terminal on video.) But the experience yielded Smithson research and a new impetus to work at a mega scale that he redeployed into numerous future works. Faced with such a huge project that resulted in the kind of anonymous “non-place” typical of late modern transportation architecture, Smithson underwent a huge conceptual shift.

As he wrote to critic Rolf-Dieter Herrmann in 1970, “All the tiers and platforms became the potential center of a kind of busy tedium full of vaults and waiting rooms, the empty stillness of ‘clear zones’ near the runways began to exude the obvious public function of the terminal. Those nondescript regions at the circumference of the project led me to the earth itself. What was to be ‘the biggest airport in the world’ became a speck in the Texas prairie. The architecture could have been any architecture—a building in the distant past or distant future; it became what I am tempted to call the ‘entropic scale’ of time and space.”

More projects would engage these conflations of scale and program, each in its own way a wry affirmation of the radical human alteration of the landscape and the inexorable passage from a wheezing industrial century to a future that seemed to be less about the speed and sheen of technology than a critical convergence of landscape, space, form, and site. For a 1973 proposal, Smithson imagined four huge jetties extending across the pool of polluted water at the bottom of the Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, famed as the deepest open-pit scar in the world. Seen from an aerial perspective (a view Smithson increasingly privileged in his later works), the work would suggest a massive malignant vortex.

Adopting the concept of reclamation, Smithson produced projects with more contentious stances toward the environment. The ecological basis of land art was widely assumed, but Smithson’s position on environmental issues was not blithely pro-conservation. The last piece he published in Artforum, a long-form essay titled “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” and the positions he stakes out there do not assign a negative value to human impact on the environment. Central Park is a radical imposition of design onto what once was “real” nature; Smithson dryly cites the photographic evidence that it was a man-made wasteland during the transition to parkland. He saw Olmsted as an agent of creative destruction—engineer, maker, doer: “Olmsted made ponds, he didn’t just conceptualize about them,” Smithson stated.

In 1970, Smithson came close to realizing an ambitious project called Island of Broken Glass. Aiming to replicate on a larger scale a sculpture he had installed in a New Jersey parking lot, Smithson secured an islet in British Columbia’s Strait of Georgia, with the intention of covering it with 100 tons of pulverized glass. Environmentalists noisily objected, citing the potential impact on the island’s wildlife, especially the migrating cormorants. Smithson acquiesced and instead proposed a “dearchitecturalized” broken concrete work that would encourage wildlife habitation and indeed result in “a monument to ecology,” as he termed it. But by then even such a moderated intervention did not gain approval.

As his reputation grew within and beyond the art world, Smithson became increasingly self-assured in his communications as he navigated proposals, licenses, and permits with government agencies and industrial corporations. The spreading awareness of a global ecology movement provided Smithson a well-publicized platform for speculation at the intersection of landscape and industry. Emboldened to proclaim that “aesthetic impact needs to be dangerous,” he directly approached resource-extraction companies to pitch collaborations. His confident appeals at times included statements so polemical they would not have been out of place in one of his numerous critical writings.

In a 1972 letter to Allen Overton Jr., president of the American Mining Congress, “regarding my relationship to the mining industry as an artist,” Smithson grandiosely declaimed about his work’s transformational nature: “I am developing an art consciousness for today free from nostalgia and rooted in the processes of actual production and reclamation.... Industry cannot afford to view my kind of art as a luxury, but rather needs to view it as a necessary resource. My earth sculptures are of primary concern, not secondary. A dialogue between earth art and mining operations could lead to a whole new consciousness.” All of this points to a voraciously inclusive practice whose correspondence to architecture as a form-generating practice is perhaps peripheral. Smithson did more proposing of ambitious landscape-altering concepts than were ultimately built—and much the same can be said about the architecture industry today. Following a period of global recession that has precluded, deferred, or canceled a lot of architectural projects, studios have switched into research mode and deployed their powerful digital rendering tools toward hypothetical projects. Alluring structures with radical forms still fuel the press release–driven trade press, but some architects are working in sophisticated speculative zones, where they can project scaled-up concepts that integrate and blur architecture, landscape, and industry, much as Smithson did late in his career.

When Oregon-based architect Brad Cloepfil saw the posthumously realized Smithson work Floating Island, a tug-pulled barge landscaped with trees and shrubs that cruised the waterways around Manhattan in 2005, he felt reaffirmed by Smithson’s singular—and, in this case, rather deadpan—vision. Cloepfil’s Sitings Project, an early manifesto and proposal for enigmatic structures across the Pacific Northwest, bears distinct traces of this type of extra-architectural inspiration. The sole built work from the concept, the Maryhill Overlook at the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state, is a 150-foot-long, 8-foot-wide extruded concrete bunker form through which, Cloepfil says, “the inherent architecture of [the] landscape is revealed.”

Even as Floating Island circled Manhattan, Cloepfil’s firm, Allied Works, engaged in the controversial renovation of Edward Durrell Stone’s colonnaded building at 2 Columbus Circle (now the home of the Museum of Arts and Design). “Smithson and the installation artists of that period basically saved me from what at that time was a kind of commercialized neoclassicism,” Cloepfil says. “He showed me that architecture had a kind of alternate, aberrant past. He really kept me believing in architecture.”

A more conceptual, multimedia studio, such as MOS Architects in New York uses the physics simulators that game designers program for consistent rule-bound game play to explore and subvert traditional architectural forms. Principal Michael Meredith calls the process by which these multihued agglomerations of geometric forms result as “pouring blocks into spaces to see what happens, pouring digital asphalt on a hill, then changing the gravity slightly…really Smithson plus video games.” The software research informs some of the firm’s projects that can be realized in real space but that retain a critical edge: Thoughts on a Walking City, MOS Architects’ entry for the 2012 MOMA exhibition “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” sites a rambling, metastasizing mixed-use development in the street spaces that exist between residential and industrial blocks. The project is volumetrically reminiscent of the strewn prisms of peat in Smithson’s 1971 drawing Peat Bog Sprawl.

"Peat Bog Sprawl" (1971) — © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA 

Beyond the daring (yet anticipated) experimentation of recent expo pavilions—from Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s Blur Building, a massing of mist at the 2002 Swiss National Expo, to Heatherwick Studio’s Seed Cathedral of 2010 in Shanghai, a semisolid studded with fiber-optic rods—architects may be working more like environmental installation artists than ever before. London-based architect Asif Khan debuted Cloud, floating bubbles that slowly amass into a canopy, at 2011’s Design Miami/Basel. That same year, Khan and Pernilla Ohrstedt created Future Memory Pavilion in Singapore, commenting on the history of its host city-state in evocative construction materials: sand and ice framed in a tensile structure of rope and steel.

Smithson toted around a 1965 Brian Aldiss sci-fi novel prophetically titled Earthworks on his famous peregrination through the detrital industrial “monuments” around Passaic, New Jersey. As the reality of our world resembles in ways the pitiless dystopias in stories by Aldiss and J.G. Ballard—the science fiction writers of the British New Wave that Smithson read—these once exotic encounters between built form and landscape seem less like conceptual exercises and more like survival strategies. The emerging conditions facing the city today include the proliferation of remnant spaces (even as cities become denser) and interstitial sites that sample residential, commercial, and industrial programs. The new ideal sites for Smithson’s brand of exploration have returned from the hinterlands to be folded into the urban fabric.

One need look no further than a project that exemplifies the sunny marriage of industrial reuse, landscape architecture, and public space: New York City’s popular park, the High Line, shows that what once might have been a larky, radical conjecture is now the new normal. In a space ambitiously adapted by James Corner Field Operations (project lead) with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Piet Oudolf, families and tourists now mass to behold the sensitively curated local flora threading throughout the paved-over elevated track.

More epochal in every way is Corner’s planned transformation of one of the world’s largest landfills, the notorious Fresh Kills on Staten Island, into vast parkland (more than three times the size of Central Park) with a revitalized ecosystem, over the course of the next three decades. The “danger” of Smithson’s most audacious visions may have been neutralized, but in almost every other respect, it’s his world and we just live in it.

Haruki Murakami’s latest best-seller, 1Q84, opens with the protagonist, Aomame, listening to Leoš Janácek’s Sinfonietta in a taxi on Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway. She’s late and the car is stuck in an epic traffic jam. Out of the blue, the driver suggests that Aomame escape the gridlock via the emergency staircase. “Please remember,” he says, as she prepares to leave his cab, “things are not always what they seem.” Descending the secret stairs, Murakami’s heroine unsuspectingly steps into another dimension, governed by mercurial Little People. 1Q84 is almost like 1984, the year she has just left behind, but not quite: Two moons hang in the sky; normality has tipped over.

It’s hard to believe, but Doig—born in Edinburgh, Scotland—has never had a proper large-scale exhibition in the country of his birth. That changes on August 3, when a survey of more than a decade of his paintings opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The show will later travel across the pond to the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. Michael Werner Gallery will also present comprehensive shows of Doig’s work this fall in both their London and New York spaces. From his studio in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Doig spoke to Modern Painters editor in chief Daniel Kunitz.

DK: This is your first time showing at a major institution in Scotland, I gather?

PD: I know Edinburgh well from my childhood, and I was born there. I did a two-person show there some years ago, at the Fruitmarket Gallery. But that was nothing like this, which is of paintings from 2000 until now.

DK: Do you feel the work has changed in significant ways over that period?

PD: 2000 was the year that I first started visiting Trinidad. I came here on a residency, and that’s where I am now. The method of painting changed; the paintings became a little bit more expansive, maybe more fluid, less involved with the minutiae of surface. I’m still very interested in surface but not in the same way that I was.

DK: Do you think of yourself as Scottish?

PD: I can’t help but think of myself as a Scot. But I’m part of the Scottish diaspora; a lot of people of my generation emigrated postwar with their families or sought opportunity elsewhere, outside of Scotland and the U.K. I left when I was about two years old, but I visited there a lot as a child and as a teenager.

DK: Now you’re based between London and Trinidad. Do you feel that you paint differently in each city?

PD: I think the paintings are different in Trinidad because the environment is so different—the atmosphere, the heat and the humidity, the type of studio I have here. It’s in a warehouse, a much more open space than I would have in London. The actual surface of the paintings is different. I paint on rabbit glue on linen, and for some reason it doesn’t set in the same way as it does in England or in the States. I think it’s to do with the level of moisture in the air here. So the canvases are different. They absorb paint a lot more. It’s almost like painting on bare canvas.

DK:I’m amazed that you are able to work in that environment because it seems so idyllic—conducive to being outside and not working.

PD: Yes and no. It’s very hot here so you don’t really want to be in the sun particularly, unless you go to the beach every day. But you get bored of that pretty quickly. My studio is in a really industrial part of the city of Port of Spain, which is big, almost a million people. If I showed you a picture of my studio now, you’d think it could easily be in London or New York. It doesn’t look or feel tropical.

DK: What draws you to live in Trinidad?

PD: Access to nature, and the city itself is very vibrant. It is a country that is in flux in a way, and that’s very exciting.

DK:Are you athletic? I’m thinking about the subject matter of the paintings.

PD: I played ice hockey for years; that was my sport—and skiing. My sporting life is very sort of northern, winter-based. I do swim, but I don’t “go swimming.” I just swim when I can. It’s a genuine interest; let’s put it that way. It’s not like someone who paints sports from an observer’s point of view.

DK: You can tell; there’s a physical engagement in the works.

PD: The paintings are quite physical themselves, too; they require some physicality to make them.

DK:What keeps drawing you back to landscape as a subject?

PD: It’s like painting space—it gives you room. There are areas where you’re not constricted by detail. You can kind of make it up, and there’s an abstract quality to it.

DK:What tends to prompt a painting?

PD: As a painter, you are always seeking something to paint. I’m thinking about it constantly. I’m taking lots of pictures—I’ve always done that, long before the time of digital photography—not just in the landscape or in the city but also taking pictures of pictures in magazines, of postcards, taking pictures of fragments of things. It’s a slow process of the time being right for something to emerge into a painting.

I went to the zoo the other day. They just acquired three new lions and I took my son. The lions were caged in a pretty mean enclosure, I thought—not a very nice enclosure. But the enclosure reminded me of other paintings I’ve made. Now I’m thinking about making this painting with a lion in it, which also in a way connects to another painting I made, which had a lion from a flag on it. There are all sorts of connections. It’s often seeing images or situations in the real world that remind you of your own work in a funny way. Once you’ve been painting for so many years, it’s rare that you take something completely cold and say, “I’m going to make a painting out of this.” It usually has some reference to something you’ve done before, and that’s why you’re attracted to it. Of course there are one-offs that come into play, and that’s also very interesting. But they don’t come about so often.

DK:Do you draw?

PD: I sketch crudely, thumbnail sketches that might be the beginning of something. I don’t sit down and draw things from nature; it’s more about drawing ideas.

DK:Are you ever tempted by other media—to make something that’s not a painting?

PD: I sometimes think about it, but I’ve never really gotten beyond that. I collect driftwood and I think, Maybe I’ll make a sculpture. But then in the end it just remains driftwood; it looks too good as it is.

DK:Can we talk about the painting of serial motifs, recurring subject matter that both you and someone like Edvard Munch use?

PD: Years ago I read an essay by Peter Schjeldahl called the “Greatest Hits of Edvard Munch.” It was quite interesting, the way that Munch basically had his stock images that he would go back to; he couldn’t escape them. He was obviously drawn to specific photographs. He went back to the same ones. I can empathize with that. Only certain things are important to the individual artist.

DK:What things?

PD: I’m thinking about in Munch’s case and also in mine. For instance, my painting Lapeyrouse Wall, of a guy walking along a wall with an umbrella—there are other ways I could have done that. And I did approach the figure in different ways, in a lot of the studies. But when it came to the final painting or etchings—and I’ve done a few versions of the painting too—I tend to use that same exact pose because it’s the one that I thought said it for me. There’s so many ways to draw a figure, so many different poses, and body language in painting is so important.

This article was published in the July 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

By using such elements as testosterone-laden car logos, lingerie-clad mannequins, and burnt American flags, German-born artist Josephine Meckseper sets herself up to be many things—a commentator on gender, a political activist, a critical outsider, a soothsayer, even an archaeologist. The latter designation is the one she prefers. “My motive is to capture our present in some form that people can relate to as if they’re looking at an archaeological display of what life was like in 2013,” she says.

A woman of slender frame with piercing green eyes, Meckseper is laconic when asked to explain her work. Her reticence perhaps explains why so many critics incorrectly read bold political statements into that work. German curator Heike Munder compared her practice to the writing of radical liberal intellectual Noam Chomsky. In a catalogue essay for Meckseper’s solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in 2007, Okwui Enwezor wrote, “Meckseper’s artist’s projects have stringently focused on addressing the politics of power and violence that undergird the current global imperium.”

When asked if her work is actively political, Meckseper replies, “My work is not really political because there’s no message. There’s political content in it, and I reference politics but the work itself is not political.” Dissecting what she means takes some effort. To begin, it’s important to understand that Meckseper derives much of her thinking from Michael Asher, who was her professor when she was a graduate student at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1990s. She describes his oeuvre as archaeological; he clinically examined institutional behavior to understand how galleries and museums fail both artists and viewers. “He was one of the founders of the notion that the exhibition space is not actually a neutral ground, that you have a political responsibility when you show there,” Meckseper says.

As cool as her approach to her practice is—the role of the archaeologist is, after all, ultimately neutral, disclosing facts but not offering prescriptive solutions—the art Meckseper makes is heavily steeped in a Marxist critique of consumer culture.

In installations for her 2007 Kunstmuseum Stuttgart show, Meckseper filled glass cabinets that resembled shop windows with images of women in lingerie beside toilet plungers, photographs of riots, and pretty mannequins wearing kaffiyehs, the Arab scarf commonly associated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Other display cases held bath mats, perfume bottles, treatises by Jean Baudrillard, jeweled pendants, and packed dress shirts. One room featured abstract paintings resembling works by Russian Constructivists like Kazimir Malevich—hung across from photographs of street bombings. In Meckseper’s supposedly neutral works, one message becomes clear—all commodities are equal enough in social value to be placed in the same exhibition space, and conversely are all equally worthless.

Her later work seems to be more directed at critiquing the American government and what Meckseper suggests is its insatiable hunger for oil and war. For 0% Down, 2008, which has been widely shown, Meckseper mashed up clips of American car commercials with “Total War,” a soundtrack by experimental sound artist Boyd Rice, to create a short black-and-white film that reads like a propaganda piece for the air force of the government in The Minority Report. For a 2011 exhibition at the Flag Art Foundation, in New York, she assembled an array of objects that summed up the typical American man—or at least the one idealized by hip-hop culture. Gleaming chrome tire rims rested on tables with reflective surfaces. A slat wall—ordinarily used to display merchandise in industrial retail stores—was composed of red, white, and blue mirrors. On it hung, among other objects, a screen print of twin Ford Mustang Shelby GT500s and a rack of silver necklaces with pendants depicting a bald eagle and the Mercedes logo. The look of the exhibition was both sleek and sort of tacky; in another venue, it could have been a shrine to a pizza delivery boy.

The 2012 Manhattan Oil Project, for which Meckseper installed two 25-foot-high oil pumps at the corner of 46th Street and Eighth Avenue in New York City, is perhaps her most overtly political work to date. The pumps bobbed up and down as if drawing oil from under the sidewalk; in actuality, they were just sculptures. Her intention was to make a statement about how oil fuels America’s appetites, though perhaps the most powerful statement made was that passersby largely ignored them. Someone digging up such artifacts 100 years from now would not necessarily get an unbiased view of society—for instance, where is the Internet in all this?—but she would certainly surmise that people today were patriarchal, patriotic, self-destructive, and marked by a fairly disturbing predilection for ugly objects.

Not all of Meckseper’s work, however, ignores the aesthetic. In her studio, we sit in a corner wedged between a desk with an Apple computer and an elegant glass case that Meckseper says references Mies van der Rohe; the great father of modernist architecture plays a central role in both her exhibition that opened in June at the Parrish Art Museum, in Water Mill, Long Island, and her solo show this fall at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. The vitrine pairs the ass of a plaster mannequin with a totem resembling Constantin Brancusi’s vertical sculptures. “Van der Rohe built a lot of structures for art collections,” she says. “So I see these as display sculptures for small art collections.” A characteristically opaque response.

It isn’t until the very end of my visit that Meckseper loosens up. “Your studio is so neat,” I comment, as I wander around the meticulously clean space, lined with large canvases (based on photographs of Bernhard Hoetger’s Expressionist outdoor sculptures) that will appear in the Andrea Rosen exhibition. “It’s the German in me,” Meckseper says, smiling slightly. Although Meckseper has called New York her home for the past 18 years—“I always miss it when I’m gone, whether it’s dirty and rainy or sunny and hot,” she says—she was born in Lilienthal, Germany, in 1964. Her parents considered themselves anarchists but were well connected nonetheless; Meckseper’s father was a friend of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They hailed from the German intellectual avant-garde—her great-granduncle was Heinrich Vogeler, who founded Worpswede, a Weimar-era utopian artists’ colony, with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, among others. And Worpswede is where Meckseper spent much of her childhood. Rather than watching Sesame Street, she watched movies like Alain Resnais’s Holocaust film Night and Fog.

At the Parrish, as part of the institution’s new Platform Series, Meckseper’s pieces have the opportunity to interact with the permanent collection; she has created installations that directly engage in conversation with the institution’s new Herzog & de Meuron-designed building, unveiled last fall. The structure, which resembles two barns stretched horizontally, evokes both the clean, light-filled buildings of Van der Rohe and the pavilion-like car dealerships across from the museum along Route 27, the clogged single-lane highway that equalizes all who visit the Hamptons, even the wealthiest. Given Meckseper’s fixation on automobile culture and the great modernists of the Weimar Republic, the marriage between her and the Parrish seems predestined. On the exterior of the main entrance lobby, visitors are greeted by a glass vitrine that Meckseper modeled after Van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion at the 1929 World’s Fair. Just beyond, in the interior space, lies Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow It Down, 2009, a chrome conveyor belt with three tires placed on a mirrored panel on the floor, in front of a mirrored panel on the wall behind. Next to the conveyor belt sit two television sets, one playing 0% Down and the other running Shattered Screen, 2009, a continuous video of shattered glass. “In the mirror, you see the cars driving by reflected in it, and it looks as if they are driving into the mirror,” Meckseper says. “It’s not necessarily about seeing the reflected wealth or glamour of the Hamptons, but more about Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend and being stuck in traffic.” In Weekend, 1967, a vacuous French bourgeois couple abandon their car in traffic en route to a holiday and find themselves immersed in a surreal kind of civil war. As they traverse the bucolic landscape, they encounter burned cars, dead bodies, and a gang of cannibals who eat British tourists. Despite the carnage, the duo’s main concerns include making sure that their Hermès bags are not destroyed. Meckseper’s installation replicates the traffic in the film right before the violence erupts. When viewers turn away from it, they may find themselves in the museum—or immersed, as Godard’s couple discovered themselves, in a class struggle they can no longer ignore. (One hopes for the latter, especially if they’ve spent a Friday afternoon on Route 27.)

Four other works by Meckseper at the Parrish also employ mirrors, as well as images of cars, American flags, and ties. They reflect the art installed alongside them—pieces by John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Keith Sonnier, and Dan Flavin. Like Meckseper’s shop window installations, all the objects captured within the piece are effectively equalized: The exorbitantly expensive works of the great Minimalists are humbled alongside overblown Jeep logos. One can read it as a familiar critique of the art world—the auratic object has become just a commodity like any other. Or it can be taken as Meckseper herself might describe it—an archaeological display of what life is like in 2013, albeit for a privileged group of people, of which the artist herself is a member.

This article is published in the July 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

Installation view of "Manhattan Oil Project," 2012 / James Ewing, Josephine Meckseper,
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart, and Andrea Rose Gallery, New York

In recent years Simon Denny has gained attention for his investigations of the waning of television, both in terms of its physicality—the flat screen replacing our old cathodes—and its withering domination as the prevalent method of information dispersal in Western society. The most obvious art historical analogue to Denny’s tech-centric sculptures, canvases, and expansive installations is the work of Korean video art pioneer Nam June Paik. This may seem like an easy association; both artists use the television as a sculptural element. Yet, as is the case for fellow video art greats Dara Birnbaum and Ant Farm, Paik—and to some extent, Denny—is interested in challenging television broadcasting’s corporate capitalist entanglement.

But while earlier generations directly critiqued, through video itself, the firm hold that corporations had on television—ensuring its continued existence as a one-way mode of address despite its potential to become more—Denny appropriates corporate logic and its chilly rhetoric to explicate its functionality. A few of Denny’s exhibition titles reveal his adoption of corporate language, including some that are a direct appropriation of lines from trade magazines or corporate buzzwords (“All You Need Is Data,” 2013; “Envisaging Vocational Rehabilitation,” 2012; “Corporate Video Decisions,” 2011; and “Introductory Logic Video Tutorial,” 2010).

It goes without saying that Denny works in a societal moment very much unlike the 1970s and ’80s heyday of video art. But, just as his predecessors investigated how television’s omnipresence indelibly changed society’s fabric, Denny shows corporations’ sway over media. He examines how the increasing sophistication of new technology—specifically the Internet’s two-way communication—has changed us in equal turn. Denny lays bare the fact that our contemporary moment is largely defined by global economic woes and the expansion of corporations’ control over mass audiences, often through their analysis of Big Data, made possible by progressively intelligent technology.

The concept of progress as it relates to technology, as well as to television and analog broadcasting, was the subject of Denny’s “Channel Document” at Art Basel’s Art Statements in 2012. A New Zealand native now based in Berlin, Denny focused on the recent redesign of the country’s passport, as well as the controversial 2012 withdrawal of public funding and consequent shuttering of the short-lived public-service, ad-free television channel TVNZ 7, founded just four years earlier. “Channel Document” is a large-scale mixed-media installation comprising found objects (such as a Pirates of the Caribbean TV promo and a Metallica New Zealand tour T-shirt) and Plexiglas “canvases,” printed with digital compositions relaying the chronology of TVNZ 7’s short life. These compositions juxtapose Apple’s skeuomorphic calendar icons, TVNZ 7 logos, and informational tidbits rendered in distressed fonts to communicate the conflict between TVNZ 7 supporters and a new, more conservative New Zealand government in a faux-positivist manner.

Denny also commissioned a New Zealand video journalist to produce a documentary about the nation’s passport redesign, which was prompted by new international biometric travel document requirements. The redesign features the usual gamut of wildlife native to the nation along with an account of the nation’s bicultural history and a chuckle-inducing narrative about the way the country came to develop navigation technology because, well, Kiwis have a knack for travel since New Zealand is in the middle of nowhere. Shot in the style of TVNZ 7 programming, the film is shown as part of “Channel Document.” The installation reflects the artist’s broadening network of references and movement toward working in a documentary format, including the use of elements typical of museum display and its systems for arranging knowledge, like the chronological timeline, the documentary video, or the vitrine. While a viewer might initially find it difficult to wrap his or her mind around the breadth and tone of information presented in the work, it considers the value and continued viability of noncommercial information dissemination. And it simultaneously critiques the capitalist, techno-logical-determinist outlook that to refresh, revitalize, and up-date is tantamount to propelling society forward.

In a similar fashion, “All You Need Is Data,” Denny’s 2013 show at Kunstverein Munich, parodied and chronicled Digital-Life-Design (DLD), a rather exclusive technology conference that takes place in Munich every January. One can think of DLD as an amalgam of TED and a tech-heavy trade conference with a dash of cultural programming. Speakers have ranged from Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg to the artist Olafur Eliasson. Denny’s exhibition chronicled the events of DLD12 rather than the entire history of the conference, and re-creates it a year after its initial occurrence. This shift in temporality carries a tacit critique insofar as the product purveyed at the conference is up-to-the-minute, forward-thinking information by global industry leaders. And it serves as a prescient reminder that the millions of dollars poured into these conferences pay for information with the relative life span of a fruit fly, along with a plutocratic, “exclusive” experience. (In a gross analogy, it’s like the leftovers of a Michelin-starred meal the night after.)

The museum’s foyer greets the viewer with a collection of awkwardly hung banners previously used to guide visitors to and demarcate spaces at DLD12. The main gallery features a maze of canvases printed with digital compositions. Similar to those featured in “Channel Document,” these pieces take the branding associated with DLD12 and recap the conference event by event. (There’s even a canvas for lunch.) Yet the quotes Denny has pulled from each of the recapped talks are telling; they range from informational buzz phrases to embarrassing outtakes. The canvas with the words “Mobile Facts” at its head reveals the platitude “Apple is really leading in mobile,” whereas the composition titled “Entrepreneurial Capital” features the cringe-worthy statements, “We’ve been pushing Washington to not overregulate public companies” and “Silicon Valley is just this incredible machine of strength.” Rendering words of the leaders of many tech-related industries in what appears to be an Apple version of Comic Sans typeface—an, um, less than authoritative font that the conference participants likely had a hand in implementing—prompts viewers to reconsider the humanity and humility of the speaker in a setting as alienating as a technology conference, a setting in which a forced optimism is imperative.

For the current Venice Biennale, Denny reformatted an earlier piece shown as part of the exhibition “Remote Control” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; it consisted of plopping inside the museum the giant analog machinery responsible for broadcasting BBC’s Channel Four to East London households. In an exhibition opening July 4 at Mumok, in Vienna, Denny is restaging the lair of Megaupload founder and public enemy Kim Dotcom, where he was famously placed on house arrest—replete with a gargantuan, custom-built horsehair bed and rife with bad art.

Denny’s ability to operate within the organizational logic of the content that he mines is unique. Whether it be a trade magazine, passport redesign, or technology conference that he’s riffing on, all of these exist within the umbra of corporate alienation. He pushes against such alienation by revealing the obfuscated humor within their aesthetic output, reconfiguring it to be just a tad too extreme, a little embarrassing, and very human.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

This article was published in the July 2013 issue of Modern Painters. 

ARGENTINA

BRAGA MENENDEZ
Buenos Aires
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Javier Barilaro, Eduardo Capilla, Sibyl Cohen, Edgardo Gimenez, Sebastiano Mauri, Claudia Mazzucchelli, Miguel Mitlag, Rafael Gonzalez Moreno, Andrés Sobrino, Chino Soria, Laura Spivak, Lorena Ventimiglia, Rob Verf, Juan Andrés Videla

PRAXIS INTERNATIONAL ART
Buenos Aires, Argentina; New York, U.S.
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Arturo Aguiar, Sol Aramendi, María Berrio, Julián Brangold, Daniel Callori, Darlene Charneco, Priscila De Carvalho, Tulio de Sagastizabal, Inés Drangosch, Ana Eckell, Shaun El C. Leonardo, Margarita García Faure, Ignacio Iturria, Andrea Juan, Martín La Rosa, Federico Lanzi, Elena Nieves, Esteban Pastorino, Romina Salem, María Santi, Agustín Sirai, Augusto Zanela

BRAZIL

A GENTIL CARIOCA
Rio de Janeiro
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: José Bento, Carlos Bunga, Evandro Machado, Matias Mesquita, Rodrigo Torres

Located in the historic center of Rio de Janeiro, in the neighborhood that hosts the largest outdoor market in Latin America, A Gentil Carioca was founded in 2003 by artists Marcio Botner, Laura Lima, and Ernesto Neto. Shows from the last year include “Sensor,” featuring collages by Brazilian artist Rodrigo Torres, as well as “Under Construction,” a multimedia installation of works by Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga. Another highlight was the eighth edition of “Abre Alas,” a project staged every year on the eve of carnival, in which the gallery features work by unestablished artists from all over Brazil.

ANITA SCHWARTZ GALERIA DE ARTE
Rio de Janeiro
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Niúra Bellavinha, Ana Holck, Maria Lynch, Ivens Machado, Antonio Manuel, Wagner Morales, Abraham Palatnik, Wanda Pimentel, Nuno Ramos, Estela Sokol, Gustavo Speridião, Angelo Venosa, Daisy Xavier, Carlos Zilio

CARBONO GALERIA
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Waltercio Caldas, Carlito Carvalhosa, Marcos Chaves, Antonio Dias, Iole de Freitas, Artur Lescher, Paulo Pasta, Caio Reisewitz, Jose Resende, Sergio Sister, Edgard de Souza, Angelo Venosa, Laura Vinci

CASA TRIANGULO
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Daniel Acosta, Albano Afonso, assume vivid astro focus, Eduardo Berliner, Flávio Cerqueira, Alex Cerveny, Sandra Cinto, Yuri Firmeza, Vânia Mignone, Valdirlei Dias Nunes, Nazareth Pacheco, Mariana Palma, Joana Vasconcelos, Marcia Xavier

GALERIA FORTES VILACA
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Barrão,
Leda Catunda, 
José Damasceno, Iran do Espírito Santo, Lucia Laguna, Jac Leirner, Rodrigo Matheus, Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Damián Ortega, Sara Ramo, Marina Rheingantz, Adriana Varejão, Erika Verzutti, Luiz Zerbini

GALERIA LEME
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: AVPD, David Batchelor, Luiz Braga, Sebastiaan Bremer, Felipe Cama, Paulo Climachauska, Ana Elisa Egreja, Sandra Gamarra, Candida Höfer, Mariana Manhães, Milton Marques, Flavia Metzler, Marcia de Moraes, Marcelo Moscheta, Patricia Osses, Mauro Piva

GALERIA LUISA STRINA
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Caetano de Almeida, Tonico Lemos Auad, Laura Belém, Alexandre da Cunha, Marcius Galan, Carlos Garaicoa, Fernanda Gomes, Laura Lima, Renata Lucas, Antonio Manuel, Marepe, Cildo Meireles, Pedro Motta, Edgard de Souza

GALERIA MARILIA RAZUK
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: José Bechara, Debora Bolsoni, Cabelo, Amilcar de Castro, Claudio Cretti, Mariana Galender, Raquel Garbelotti, Hilal Sami Hilal, Vanderlei Lopes, Germana Monte-Mór, José Resende, Mariana Serri, Wagner Malta Tavares, Marina Weffort

GALERIA MILLAN
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Rodrigo Andrade, Artur Barrio, Lenora de Barros, Rodrigo Bivar, Tatiana Blass, Sofia Borges, Felipe Cohen, Nelson Felix, Anna Maria Maiolino, Rubens Mano, Lais Myrrha, Emmanuel Nassar, Paulo Pasta, Thiago Rocha Pitta

GALERIA NARA ROESLER
São Paulo, Brazil
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Antonio Dias, Cao Guimarães, Vik Muniz, Abraham Palatnik, Hélio Oiticica

GALERIA RAQUEL ARNAUD
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Waltercio Caldas, Carla Chaim, Sérvulo Esmeraldo, Célia Euvaldo, Carlos Fajardo, Daniel Feingold, Romulo Fialdini, Iole de Freitas, Marco Giannotti, Geórgia Kyriakakis, Cassio Michalany, Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro, Arthur Luiz Piza, Carlos Zilio

GALERIA VERMELHO
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Jonathas de Andrade, Dora Longo Bahia, Rodrigo Braga, Leya Mira Brander, Cadu, Chelpa Ferro, Carmela Gross, Clara Ianni, André Komatsu, João Loureiro, Cinthia Marcelle, Rosângela Rennó, Nicolás Robbio, Daniel Senise, Ana Maria Tavares

LUCIANA BRITO GALERIA
São Paulo
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Marina Abramović, Lucas Bambozzi, Fabiana de Barros & Michel Favre, Geraldo de Barros, Ricardo Basbaum, Rafael Carneiro, Saint Clair Cemin, Waldemar Cordeiro, Rochelle Costi, Leandro Erlich, Paula Garcia, Gaspar Gasparian, Alex Katz, Anthony McCall, Mônica Nador, Liliana Porter, Tobias Putrih, Caio Reisewitz, Eder Santos, Regina Silveira, Tiago Tebet, Héctor Zamora

YBAKATU
Curitiba
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Claudio Alvarez, Marcus Andre, Ligia Borba, Sebastiaan Bremer, Alex Cabral, Fernando Cardoso, Alex Flemming, Rogerio Ghomes, João Loureiro, Fernanda Magalhães, Marta Nevez, Yiftah Peled, Isaque Pinheiro, Sonia Navarro, C.L. Salvaro, Washington Silvera, Tatiana Stropp

ISRAEL

DVIR GALLERY
Tel Aviv
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Adel Abdessemed, Miroslaw Balka, Mircea Cantor, Latifa Echakhch, Ariel Schlesinger, Miri Segal

When Dvir Intrator set up
his gallery in 1982, his mission was to support the careers
 of Israeli artists at home and abroad. Now spread across two spaces in Tel Aviv, Israel’s leading gallery also facilitates projects with overseas
 artists as part of its residency program, created more 
than a decade ago. Last year Dvir hosted the first solo show by New York–based artist Tavares Strachan, featuring work that’s showing at the 2013 Venice Biennale under the aegis of the Bahamas pavilion. “Je suis innocent,” a 2012 survey show of work by Adel Abdessemed at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, attests to the gallery’s efforts to promote its artists beyond the region.

NOGA GALLERY
Tel Aviv
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Lea Avital, Joshua Borkovsky, Ori Gersht, Talia Keinan, Jossef Krispel, Oren Ben Moreh, Orit Raff, Alexandra Zuckerman

SOMMER CONTEMPORARY
Tel Aviv
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Boyan, Michal Helfman, Gregor Hildebrandt, Ugo Rondinone, Christoph Ruckhaeberle, Netally Schlosser, Guy Zagursky, Thomas Zipp

LEBANON

SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY
Beirut, Lebanon; Hamburg, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hans Haacke, Sol LeWitt, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Wael Shawky

After founding her gallery in 1985 in the German town of Kiel, Andree Sfeir-Semler decided she needed a bigger audience for her minimalist and conceptual artists. That led her to Hamburg, and in 2005 she opened what is likely the Middle East’s largest commercial art space, in Beirut. Recent highlights include Walid Raad and Gabriel Kuri’s Beirut exhibitions.

SAUDI ARABIA

LAM ART GALLERY
Riyadh
Focus: Middle Eastern contemporary
Artists: Mohammed Farea, Fahad Al-Gethami, Corrine Martin, Hussein Al-Mohasen, Bassem Al-sharqi, Talal Al Zeid, Camille Zakharia

TURKEY

GALERI NON
Istanbul
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Meriç Algün Ringborg, Gökçen Cabadan, Asli Cavusoglu, Annika Eriksson, Extrastruggle, Sefer Memisoglu, Erdem Tasdelen, Günes Terkol

RAMPA GALLERY
Istanbul
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Nevin Aladag, Hüseyin
 Bahri Alptekin, Vahap Avsar,
 Ergin Cavusoglu, Cengiz Cekil, Inci
 Furni, Leyla Gediz, Hatice Güleryüz,
 Selma Gürbüz, Nilbar Güres, Bengü Karaduman, Servet Koçyisit, Ahmet Oran, Güçlü Oztekin, Erinç Seymen

One of the biggest galleries in Istanbul, Arif Suyabatmaz and Leyla Tara Suyabatmaz’s endeavor is situated among the newly renovated Akaretler Row Houses in the glitzy Besiktas district of Istanbul. Rampa’s 900-square-meter space holds large-scale installations; another room is designated for special projects. Both serve as venues to promote Turkish artists and have hosted works by Servet Koçyigit and Inci Furni.

RODEO GALLERY
Istanbul
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Mark Aerial Waller, Emre Hüner, Iman Issa, Gülsün Karamustafa, Ian Law, Shahryar Nashat, Eftihis Patsourakis, James Richards

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

AYYAM GALLERY
Dubai, U.A.E.; Damascus, Syria; Beirut, Lebanon; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; London, U.K.
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Sadik Alfraji, Safwan Dahoul, Samia Halaby, Nadim Karam, Afshin Pirhashemi, Khaled Takreti

Despite its international expansion, Ayyam Gallery’s main ambitions are fostering a contemporary art scene in Syria and, more recently, globally promoting talent from the broader Middle East region. Cousins Khaled and Hisham Samawi first set up shop in Damascus in 2006 and later opened spaces in Beirut and Dubai. This year, Ayyam extended its presence to London with a show by Nadim Karam, and also
 to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a show of work by Mohannad Orabi. With the ongoing conflict in Syria, the gallery has converted its Damascus space into a studio 
and sanctuary for artists.

CARBON 12
Dubai
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: André Butzer, Gil Heitor Cortesão, Ghazel, Sara Rahbar, Anahita Razmi

In the words of founders Kourosh Nouri and Nadine Knotzer, Carbon 12’s emphasis has remained “firmly global” since the gallery’s inception in 2008. The pair was among the first in Dubai to set up a decidedly international platform, introducing the region to worldwide trends and encouraging artistic exchange. With over 34 exhibitions to date, Nouri and Knotzer have assembled an impressive roster of artists who have exhibited in museum shows at institutions like the Palais de Tokyo and Centre Pompidou in Paris and Australia’s Queensland Art Gallery. Recent highlights at Carbon 12 include Olaf Breuning’s Middle Eastern debut and the first commercial show by Anahita Razmi, who will also be showing at the 55th Venice Biennale.

GALLERY ISABELLE VAN DEN EYNDE
Dubai
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Lara Baladi, Shadi Ghadirian, Nargess Hashemi, Aisha Khalid, Idris Khan

Committed to supporting up-and-coming as well as established talents from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, directors Isabelle van den Eynde and Barrak Alzaid have zealously promoted emerging figures such as Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian and Lebanese-Egyptian artist Lara Baladi. Rokni Haerizadeh, an Iranian painter also backed by the gallery, has been selected to participate in the 2013 Carnegie International, a contemporary art exhibition in Pittsburgh showcasing 35 artists from around the world, and Mohammed Kazem, another artist in the Van den Eynde stable, is representing the U.A.E. at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

GREEN ART GALLERY
Dubai
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Shadi Habib Allah, Kamrooz Aram, Seher Shah, Hale Tenger, Alessandro
 Balteo Yazbeck

With a focus on Arab talent, Green Art Gallery has been dedicated to nurturing the careers 
of U.A.E. artists—including established players like Fateh Moudarres and Ismail Fattah—since founder Mayla Atassi opened its doors 
in 1995. When Yasmin Atassi came on as director in 2010, the gallery moved to a 3,000-square-foot warehouse space on Alserkal Avenue and revamped its curatorial vision to consciously present more ambitious projects. Last year the gallery welcomed New York–based artist Seher Shah and Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck into its fold.

GREY NOISE
Dubai
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Fahd Burki, Ehsan ul Haq, Mehreen Murtaza, Iqra Tanveer, Michael John Whelan

Before relocating from Lahore, Pakistan, to Dubai in 2012, Umer Butt’s gallery had already established itself as 
a venue for conceptual art from South Asia and Europe. Despite the migration, the focus has remained on promoting conceptually provocative and experimental art in the Middle East. Standout shows from the past year include “Understanding Magnetism,” Michael John Whelan’s Middle Eastern debut, and a retrospective of Iranian-born, Australia-based artist Hossein Valamanesh’s work, another first for the region.

THE THIRD LINE
Dubai, U.A.E.; Doha, Qatar
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Arwa Abouon, Rana Begum, Hassan Hajjaj, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Huda Lutfi

Sunny Rahbar, Omar Ghobash, and Claudia Cellini set up the Third Line in the Al Quoz 3 area of Dubai in early 2005 and recently opened a second space
 in Doha, Qatar, spreading the gallery’s influence across the region. In addition to its commercial programming, the Third Line has established not-for-profit programs that promote and support Arab literature, contemporary Middle Eastern crafts, and Arab filmmaking. Last year’s highlights include the Middle Eastern debuts of Ebtisam Abdulaziz and Maha Saab, and new work by Hayv Kahraman.

SOUTH AFRICA

BAILEY SEIPPEL GALLERY
Johannesburg
Focus: African photography
Artists: Bob Gosani, Ranjith Kally, GR Naidoo, Cedric Nunn, Sam Nzima, Paul Weinberg, Bailey’s African History Archive

DAVID KRUT PROJECTS
Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa; New York, U.S.
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Faith47, Frank Auerbach, Ryan Arenson, Bruce Backhouse, Willem Boshoff, Marlene Dumas, Johan Engels, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, William Kentridge, Maja Maljevic, Chris Ofili, Julian Opie, Luc Tuymans

EVERARD READ
Johannesburg
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Paul Augustinus, Wayne Cahill Barker, Sidney Beck, Francki Burger, Phillemon Hlungwani, Carl Jeppe, Dylan Lewis, Paula Louw, Anton Momberg, 
Jacob Hendrik Pierneef, Adrian Steirn, Irma Stern

GALLERY MOMO
Johannesburg
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Faisal Abdu’Allah, Sammy Baloji, Patricia Driscoll, Dumile Feni, Ayana V. Jackson, Theresa-Anne Mackintosh, Aïda Muluneh, Rodney Place, Lyndi Sales, Mary Sibande, Ransome Stanley, Andrew Tshabangu

GOODMAN GALLERY
Johannesburg and Cape Town
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ghada Amer, Candice Breitz, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Kendell Geers, David Goldblatt, William Kentridge, Hank Willis Thomas

ROOKE GALLERY
Johannesburg
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Roger Ballen, the Bang Bang
 Club, Zander Blom, i-jusi, Stefan Krynauw, Frank Marshall, Garth Meyer

STEVENSON GALLERY
Cape Town and Johannesburg
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Zander Blom, Wim Botha, Meschac Gaba, Ian Grose, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Hylton Nel, Odili Donald Odita, Deborah Poynton, Jo Ratcliffe, Viviane Sassen, Penny Siopis, Frohawk Two Feathers, Kemang Wa Lehulere

Michael Stevenson opened his eponymous gallery in Cape Town in 2003. Following a merger with Johannesburg-based gallerist David Brodie, the gallery was relaunched in 2008 as simply Stevenson, with a focus on the work of South African artists. Important shows of the last year include a presentation of new paintings by Zander Blom and the first solo exhibition of works by photographer Guy Tillim in Johannesburg in a decade.