By Kirsty Bell
Mark Leckey at WIELS, Brussels, installation shot.
A condensed list of highlights in the form of an old-fashioned top ten (almost).
~ Mark Leckey’s Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials at WIELS: a retrospective that felt like a wander through the artist’s mind, as if witnessing each thought as it takes shape in sound, film, or object form. Leckey gives us not only an infectious curiosity about how it is to be with things in the world, but also an astonishingly comprehensive cultural overview, poised in a highly activated present.
~ The persistent radicality of Sturtevant, whose Drawing Double Reversal at MMK in Frankfurt, showing five decades of graphic work, was raw evidence of the rigor and commitment of her critical overlay of conceptual art, pop and gender politics.
~ The persistent radicality of Dorothy Iannone, whose retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie, This Sweetness Outside of Time, showing five decades of drawing, painting, and video work, was graphic evidence of her rigorous commitment to the raw power of ecstatic love, despite censorship, ignorance and gender politics.
~ Two small studies hanging by the entrance door in the intimate show of Philip Guston’s late works at Auriel Scheibler in Berlin were such lessons in acute observation, visual economy and impact that nothing else was needed.
~ Trisha Donnelly at the Serpentine: mesmerizing and intangible, its fluid transmutations of sound to form, stone to shadow, light to vibration, rendered language utterly ineffectual, and photography equally so.
~ Parade the film by artist Shahryar Nashat, and Parade the dance by choreographer Adam Linder. Collaboration folds in on itself in Nashat’s film of Linder’s dance, for which Nashat himself designed the stage set. The signature of each is all over the work of the other but, remarkably enough, each version is an independent and powerful summation of the artist’s / choreographer’s work to date.
Parade _TRAILER from snarchive on Vimeo.
~ Praxes Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin: the shoe-string budget of this non-profit space is made up for by the consummate energy of its directors and carousel of associated editors, curators and collaborators. Their format of six-month long ‘cycles’, each featuring two artists who stage three consecutive exhibitions, shows a commitment to the messy range of an artist’s work, and to the exhibition as an exploratory and evolving format.
~ The welcome proliferation of artist books of all kinds, and particularly books of artists’ writings: a few recent favourites are Peter Wächtler’s Come On; Ed Atkins’ A Seer Reader; and Nora Schultz’s Portikus Printing Plant and Portikus Sounds– the last more exhibition catalogue than book of artists writings, but Schultz’s brief and perspicacious annotations of the installation images of her 2012 show at Portikus transform the book into a kind of storyboard, and deliver all the immediacy and contingency of the show’s original performances.
~ Finally, remembrance. Though the loss of artist, curator, writer and friend Ian White, who died last year, is still raw, I am constantly reminded of his integrity and influence, not only on a profoundly personal level, but also through the work of the many artists who worked closely with him in the LUX Associate Artists Programme he ran – James Richards, Laure Provost, Corin Sworn, Ed Atkins and Luke Fowler, to name just a handful. Ian’s collected writings, due to be published by LUX next year, is the book I am looking forward to most of all.