By Sam Thorne
‘Manet: Return to Venice’, Palazzo Ducale, Venice
Sam Thorneis an associate editor of frieze, the co-curator of ‘Schizophonia’ (currently on view at CAC Synagogue de Delme, France), and a co-founder of Open School East, an art school and community centre in London.
My highlights of 2013, in alphabetical order:
A
Artist-curated shows: they were everywhere! Trisha Donnelly’s picks at MoMA, Cindy Sherman’s uncanny collections at the Venice Biennale, Alex Katz’s selections from the Tate collection at Turner Contemporary, plus touring shows devised by Rosemarie Trockel (‘A Cosmos’, organized with Lynne Cooke), Mark Leckey (‘The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things’) and Jeremy Deller (‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’).
Rosemarie Trockel, ‘A Cosmos’
B
British architecture criticism: this year saw a garrulous essay collection from Jonathan Meades (Museum Without Walls); Owen Hatherley editing a new edition of Ian Nairn’s Britain’s Changing Towns (1967); Observer critic Rowan Moore’s book Why We Build; and plenty of smart writing from recently appointed Guardian critic (and occasional frieze contributor) Olly Wainwright.
C
Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland: in the summer I visited this pioneering Californian art organization – it works with adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities – for the first time. In a year when ‘Outsider Art’ was the subject of several large-scale exhibitions (as well as much handwringing), Creative Growth’s 40 years of work felt more crucial than ever.
D
Dean Blunt, The Redeemer: frazzled Gainsbourg, a curious and addictive concept album from one half of Hype Williams, who had an equally curious exhibition at SPACE, London, in March.
E
EPs: this was a good year for short-format releases. I came back over and over to things by FKA Twigs (EP2), DJ Rashad (Rollin’) and Nguzunguzu (Skycell).
F
FT: the newspaper’s long-running series of interviews, ‘Lunch with the FT’, is just about the only reason to buy it every weekend. My favourites from this year were lunches with Jeremy Deller, Kim Dotcom and education reformer Michelle Rhee.
G
Grizedale Arts, Lake District: my late-autumn visit was a head-clearing couple of days of honesty shops, Ruskin, home-cooking and an ill-prepared hike. To paraphrase the title of their 2009 book, Grizedale are continuing to add complexity to confusion (or should that be the other way around?) in the best possible way. Also check out their contribution to ‘Museum of Arte Útil’, currently at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Home Workspace Program, Beirut
H
Home Workspace Program, Beirut: September saw the third year of Ashkal Alwan’s art school, an open curriculum organized by resident professors Anton Vidokle and Jalal Toufic, plus an Adam Curtis retrospective curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. As vibrant an art school as I saw this year.
I
Ibrahim Sonallah, That Smell: a new translation of the Egyptian writer’s coruscating novella from 1966, accompanied by his prison notes.
J
Jai Paul, leaked demo tapes: it was hard to get to the bottom of what went on here – a stolen laptop? A feud with the record label? Either way, hidden deep below unmixed queasiness, this was some great off-kilter R&B in a year that was awash with the stuff.
K
Koya: maybe the best udon in London?
L
Lofoten Islands: in September it took me three flights from London to get to this archipelago off the north-north coast of Norway, way up in the Arctic Circle. The nearby whirlpools were the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström’, while the islands themselves have hosted the teeny-tiny biennial LIAF since the early 1990s. A compact exhibition about crisis, on Europe’s furthest edge.
M
‘Manet: Return to Venice’, Palazzo Ducale, Venice: Olympia hung next to Titian’s Venus of Urbino? Makes the Giardini hard to remember.
N
Numbers titles: Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 and Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class are both slim, urgent books about an increasingly standardized, commodified life, while in Madrid the Reina Sofía’s revelatory survey ‘1961’ gestured back to a time when the avant-garde still seemed to promise a way out.
Pierre Huyghe, Centre Pompidou, Paris
P
Pierre Huyghe / Philippe Parreno, Pompidou / Palais de Tokyo, Paris: concurrent museum shows from two former collaborators, ex-Relational Aesthetics poster-boys, also provided two completely different ways of thinking about what a mid-career retrospective might look like. The flickering lights! Human the dog! The secret Merce–Cage show!
Q
Queens Museum, New York: next year I can’t wait to visit the newly reopened Queens Museum, who are marking the way for how an arts institution thinks about community – not outreach, but organizing.
R
Renata Adler, Speedboat (1976): much of the best fiction I read in 2013 didn’t at all resemble fiction. Written by the onetime New Yorker staff writer, this novel in fragments – for which David Shields was a major cheerleader – was republished by New York Review Books, who have had a pretty much peerless year.
S
Sturtevant: the summer saw a smartly put-together show of mostly recent work at the Serpentine, a warm-up to Bruce Hainley’s dizzying, recursive biography-cum-essay-collection about this most difficult of artists, Under the Sign of [sic], published by Semiotext(e).
T
Tinashe, Black Water: a beautifully produced mixtape, the third from Tinashe, one of the best in that post-Weeknd / alt-R&B / what do you call it? scene.
U
Unknown artist: listening in the dark. So much in my iTunes library has no metadata, a lot of the time I find myself wondering not only who something is by, but where it’s from and when.
V
VIRGINS by Tim Hecker: yet more perfection from the Montreal-based musician.
W
‘Wenu Wenu’: the single from Omar Souleyman’s eponymous new album stretches out to seven minutes, and is as riotous as usual, but its precision and sheen – c/o production from Four Tet, a safe pair of hands – is new for Omar.
X
XLR8R podcasts: particularly Oneohtrix Point Never’s sprawling two-hour mix, which stumbles from classic house to Wu Tang and Meredith Monk, introducing me to early computer music guy Paul Lansky’s remarkable track ‘Notjustmoreidlechatter’ along the way.
Y
Yosi Horikawa, Vapour: full of warmth, the debut LP from this Japanese producer shaped field recordings into gorgeous new shapes.
Z
Anna Zemánkóvá: the Czech artist’s botanical drawings were some of the many wondrous things that were new to me in Massimilano Gioni’s Venice, an exhibition that – despite my misgivings, and I had a lot – was probably the year’s most important. With Okwui Enwezor at the helm in 2015, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for a format that in recent years has felt like it’s been running out of steam.