By frieze
Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
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Jonathan Griffinis a contributing editor of frieze based in Los Angeles, USA.
Alex Israel, ‘Property’, 2010– ongoing, installation view at Museo Civico Diocesano de Santa Maria dei Servi, Citta’ della Pive, Italy, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Il Giardino dei Lauri.
Best of 2012
Two of my favourite recent shows I didn’t even see. Not in person anyway – more’s the pity, because, as it happens, they both took place in Italian Baroque churches. For ‘Treating Shadows as Real Things’, a project by Los Angeles-based Public Fiction (Lauren Mackler, joined by critic Andrew Berardini), the curators placed works by nine artists on a specially installed mirrored floor in Turin’s Church of the Holy Shroud.
Earlier in the year, Alex Israel was invited to produce an edition of his series ‘Property’ (2010– ongoing) in Museo Civico Diocesano di Santa Maria dei Servi, in the Umbrian town of Citta’ della Pieve. Beside the church’s 16th-century statuary, he installed objects including a Virgin Mary, a Greek Kairos and a dirty brown snowman, all made of fibreglass and rented from a Rome movie prop house. In photos, at least, Israel’s interventions look entirely at home.
‘B. Wurtz & Co.’, curated by Matthew Higgs at Richard Telles Gallery, was a rare treat, a tangled web that connected such artists as Vincent Fecteau, Judith Scott and Martin Creed to the underappreciated Wurtz.
A similarly adventurous group show was ‘Out of __________’, curated by Leila Khastoo at Benevento Gallery. (How many curators are brazen enough to put a TV show about an artist in their exhibition? Let alone including a piece of their own work!)
Out of __________’, exhibition view at Benevento Gallery
Pretty much everything The Box does exceeds the ambitions of any other commercial gallery in town.* This year we’ve been treated to important shows by Leigh Ledare, Paul McCarthy and Simone Forti.
In the ambition stakes, Blum & Poe also bowled everyone over with their masterful exhibition ‘Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono Ha’, curated by Mika Yoshitake. Artist Nobuo Sekine somehow balanced a granite monolith on top of a 10-foot tall mirrored plinth.
Some people complained that at Ali Subotnick’s Venice Beach Biennial you couldn’t tell what was art and what wasn’t. That’s why I liked it. Especially the oil-drum trash cans by Mark Grotjahn, painted with a portrait of the artist. Crucified. Crying blood.
Ricky Swallow and Leslie Vance were the first contemporary artists allowed to infiltrate Henry and Arabella Huntington’s Pasadena mansion in its 84-year history. Their joint exhibition at the Huntington Art Gallery reveals the married couple’s profound mutual influence.
Kenneth Tam’s exhibition ‘Two and a Half Hands’ filled artist Mateo Tannatt’s gallery Pauline, which must have been inconvenient for Tannatt because the gallery is also his house. Tam’s sculptures and video made hilarious and uncomfortable viewing.
Things to look forward to in 2013?
Loads. Ali Subotnick’s long-awaited Llyn Foulkes show at the Hammer Museum, James Turrell’s retrospective at LACMA, Piero Golia’s art members’ club Chalet Hollywood (opening at the back of L.A.C.E.), and Laura Owens’ self-curated solo show in an empty church in east Los Angeles (Owens’ first major show in the city since her acclaimed MOCA exhibition of 2003). This January, Night Gallery opens in new premises as a fully fledged commercial gallery. And in late spring, Hannah Hoffman will add to the growing cluster of Los Angeles galleries around Highland Avenue, with a solo show by Mira Schendel.
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Jenna Sutelaworks with words and structures in the fields of design and art. Based in Helsinki, Finland, she is currently preparing a publishing programme on a digital materiality at the Aalto University, among other things.
‘Unbuilt Helsinki’, installation view at The Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki. Photograph: Achim Hatzius
That euphoric feeling from moments of insight into something that still needs to be specified 2012:
- Kimmo Modig and I invited the artists Bill Drummond and Ingo Niermann, and their respective music projects, to Helsinki this autumn. ‘Sounds Like Work’, our event at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma featured Drummond’s The17, a choir of people that come together to imagine and enact music after the end of recorded music and Niermann’s Madgermany, a musical movement that transcends nations and humanity, possesses nothing and grants its members neither rights nor duties.
- ‘Tõnis Vint and His Aesthetic Universe’, a recent retrospective at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn and its accompanying publication present the first thorough survey of the visionary Estonian artist’s oeuvre from graphic works to studies and teachings on visual sign systems.
- During a visit to Index art space in Stockholm in October, I (finally) discovered OEI, a Swedish language magazine for experimental poetry and speculative sociology, among other things, that has been going since 1999. Since much is lost in translation, my reading of the magazine ironically adds to OEI’s preference for “friction over the smooth exchange of communication”. I also felt it in practice while carrying their 1280 page issue #56-57 on the notion of the magazine as an aesthetic medium with me to Helsinki.
- Graphic design collective Åbäke and artist Nene Tsuboi’s ‘Unbuilt Helsinki’ project gives a shape to a fantastic past with the purpose of expanding contemporary imaginations in and for the city. A series of promising yet unrealized architectural proposals and unfinished plans from the archives of the Museum of Finnish Architecture comes to life in a diorama of a Helsinki that should’ve/would’ve/could’ve existed (until February 25).
- This year in Helsinki, I have also been turned into a carrier of information about the key contradictions in the project SALONS: Birthright Palestine?, by Israeli performance group Public Movement for the New Museum’s ‘The Ungovernables’ exhibition. Debriefing Session, a series of performative one-on-one meetings conveyed the complex relations between cultural production, public and private funding bodies, political agendas and activism, as experienced during a mission of counter branding. Me, the receiver of information, and the informant and artist Dana Yahalomi met in a generic Finnish hotel bar, in the distinct presence of a guard, for an illuminating moment of reflection.
- Starting in January 2013, ‘The Anthropocene-Project’ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin confronts the “age of man” from an artistic perspective next to that of science. A series of dialogues and performances will be established to reconsider subject and object positions at a time when, according to Anthropocene theory, humanity forms nature. I am expecting more of what Vera Bühlmann, in her research on the design of mediality, describes in terms of ‘euphoric moments of insight into something that still needs to be specified’.
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Mitch Speedis a writer and artist based in Vancouver, Canada where, along with a group of 3 other designers and writers, he runs the publication Setup.
Marian Penner Bancroft, from ‘For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War’, 1977, 24 silver gelatin prints and 1 text panel, 20 × 26 cm each. Courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Marian Penner Bancroft – ‘Spiritlands:t/HERE’ Vancouver Art Gallery
This exhibition presented works made by Marian Penner Bancroft between 1977 and 1999. Since seeing it, images from a work entitled ‘For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War have looped in my head’. That work is comprised of twenty-five small scale, black and white photographs focusing on a period during which Penner Bancroft’s sister Susan, and her husband Dennis coped with Dennis’s battle with Leukaemia, and a short, typewritten text that wove together “just the facts” conceptualism with boldly emotive poetics. This is an artist who has bravely chosen affective subject matter, and who has skillfully engineered structures for that subject matter to move through. With their exploratory but determinate presentation formats – photos and graphite rubbings presented as the surfaces of legged blackboard structures and lecturns, for example – many works felt like they could have been produced just the other day.
Lisa Robertson – Nilling (Bookthug)
Nilling is a collection of prose essays released by Canadian publisher Bookthug, in 2012. In the first essay, ‘Time in the Codex’, Robertson uses prose written in point form to articulate her physical and intellectual passages through codex’s, and books. Lastingness: Rége, Lucrèce, Arendt explores the mechanics of Lucretius’s De rerum natura vis a vis various early translations of it, and the thoughts of Pauline Reage and Hannah Arendt. The book is mostly very difficult, but written in beautiful, idiosyncratically structured prose. Self-reflexive meditations on Robertson’s own struggles with reading difficult material are woven into some of the texts, so a willing reader can find the stubborn wanderings of their own mind reflected in those of the author’s. The book is at once an empathetic and a challenging gesture.
Frank Ocean – Channel Orange (Def Jam Records)
Frank Ocean’s voice, self described as a baritone with tenor moments, in swoon-worthy. At the same time, his music can feel languid. In Pyramids, Ocean lazily folds a verse’s narrative trajectory back on itself, by repeating lines at nearly arbitrary points. Delivered in an off kilter hybrid between R & B and slow rap, these kinds of interruptions conspire with the music’s sensuality to produce an uncanny listening experience. The designation uncanny is applicable to Frank Ocean, who as a gay black musician working in an urban milieu often associated with violence, misogyny and homophobia subtly undoes all of the same stereotypes. For more on that, listen to the aforementioned Pyramids which joins the strip club (a fixture setting of the genre) with invocations of Cleopatra – a character come myth whose attributes oscillate freely between the alpha and omega.
Action Bronson – Blue Chips Mixtape (listen here)
No such social functions exist in Action Bronson. You could even say that his music embodies the exact qualities that someone like Frank Ocean works against. Bronson was born in Flushing, Queens to Albanian immigrants. His raps, effortless and laid back, emerge as the collaboration between a brain encased in a skull garnished with a billowing red beard, and a pair of lungs buried beneath a Jabba the Hut physique.
Being that Bronson is also a televised chef, it is unsurprising that lamb, fennel and fettuccine fill out the content of his songs. Most of the tracks on Blue Chips are orgiastic fantasies of food, sex and violence, in which puns and similes snap and bounce over up-tempo beats. Bronson treats words like ingredients – their audible comportments, as they tumble out of his mouth, are the textures, their associations the flavours.
Mark Leckey – ‘BigBoxGreenScreenRefridgeratorActions’, Walter Phillips Gallery – Banff AB
This exhibition was comprised of a state of the art Samsung smart-fridge placed upon a large green screen, a flat screen monitor playing a video, a very large and deadly looking slab of rough-hewn granite propped upright by an iron frame, and a stack of speakers encased in proto-minimal plywood boxes. Now and then, the speaker-box would “talk” to the slab of granite with a crushing wall of bass, mimicking the sound which would accompany the departure of the granite slab from the local mountain whence it came, and (more abstractly) those of the dance culture about which Leckey made his seminal work Fiorucci Made me Hardcore. My favorite work was the video, wherein the fridge was imbued with sentience by a slickly edited montage of its surfaces, and a reverb heavy voice that chanted it’s technical specs like a divine medium.
Oscar Pistorius aka The Blade Runner
Oscar Pistorius is challenging the boundaries that define competitive categories within sport. Dubbed the Blade Runner after the prosthetic limbs that have replaced his legs below the knees, Pistorius is now competing at an Olympic level against able bodied opponents. Mid race, Pistorius’s legs blur into the larger unit of his body. But watch him before the gun goes off. Standing idly, the cyborg-apparatus made from his muscular body and carbon fiber legs could be a 21st century manifestion of a Futurist fantasy. Crouching and setting himself into the blocks, Pistorius’s body appears to extend backwards as the mechanical legs join forces with the machinery of the aluminum starting blocks.
Joaquin Phoenix’s shoulders in The Master
The Master is P.T. Anderson’s loose adaptation of the mad and manipulative methods of Scientology founder El Ron Hubbard. When Anderson’s El Ron, Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), discovers the tortured, alcoholic, violent WWII veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), he resolves to soothe Quell’s soul. Unfortunately, Dodd happens to be an alcoholic power monger with a mean streak of his own, so it doesn’t take long before everything goes to shit. One of the primary forces that lends the story gravitas is Phoenix’s body. He moves with a brooding gait, neither slumping nor holding a straight posture. Rather, his shoulders make a constant, concave tightening around his chest. They contradict his physical power by shrinking his upper body, and fill out his violence with undertones of broken-ness. The character doesn’t glorify the brooding and violent male, because it is not sensational but real, and really scary. It is the revolutions between psychology and physicality made manifest.
Chris Kraus in Vancouver
On November 1, Chris Kraus’s early experimental films were screened at the Pacific Cinemateque in Vancouver, as part of an event organized by The Western Front Artist Run Centre. The films were short, and structured around stream of consciousness recollections, gender-fucking performances of texts, and stories leading into stories leading into stories. In Foolproof Illusion, Kraus, wearing a dominatrix-ish costume, knelt in the snow and delivered a schizophrenic monologue that segued through accounts of love, murder, and the narrator’s (whose identity I was unsure of, and still am) cosmological links to Artaud. How to Shoot a Crime was organized around footage obtained from a man who worked for New York’s police department creating photo and film documentations of murder scenes. In that work, Kraus provided visceral, visual experiences usually prohibited by basic rules of propriety. She supplemented the films – with their gritty mixture of deep philosophy and critical piss-taking – with candid and sincere conservation.
Garry Neil Kennedy – The Last Art College (MIT)
In 1967, a 32 year old Garry Neil Kennedy became president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. During his 23 year tenure, he helped to bring the college into step with modern art, and attracted a who’s who list of faculty and guest faculty, who used the college as a site for the production of now canonical works. In 2005, Neil Kennedy was approached by MIT press to edit a history of the school. This book, built over a chronology compiled by Canadian artist David MacWilliam, is the response to that request. Neil Kennedy’s writing* is both informed and readable. I haven’t gotten through nearly the entire thing, and given its scope and detail, would be slightly afraid of anyone who has. The book’s title is both cinematic, and mildly depressing. It is also unfortunately prescient.
Liz Magor, ‘I is being This’, Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
I is Being This is the first exhibition by Liz Magor at Vancouver’s Catriona Jeffries Gallery. Magor’s work often deals with the desire ridden emotional ether that both separates and links bodies and materials. Recently, she has focused on binges and their by-products – think stacks of empty party platters strewn with candy rappers and the bodies of rodents. This exhibition was the product of the artist’s binge-like accumulation of sculptural materials, which were also the cast off residue of shifting appetites for fashion.
The gallery’s walls had been dressed with a grid of white boxes, overspilling with tissue paper. In each box was a coat, jacket or sweater – from the designer variety to more lowly coverings – decorated with smatterings of sewn on bric a brac – broaches, crests, logos and labels – plucked from the bottom to the top of socio-economic spectra. Some pieces were dressed in layers of slinky mesh, which functioned as carriers for caches of cigarettes and candies. Here, the free and easy use of collage resulted in objects that were often ugly, and were freighted with an aura of gross neurosis. At once large and small, it was probably the best show Vancouver saw in 2012.
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Barbara Casavecchiais a contributing editor of frieze. She lives in Milan, Italy.
Naoya Hatekeyama, Imaizumi area of Kesen-cho, Rikuzen Takata City on April 4, 2011, 2011. Included in ‘Architecture in the Wake of Disaster,’ the Japan Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale.
Open questions:
The Japanese Pavillion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Toyo Ito, was awarded the Golden Lion. In a small video near the entrance, Naoya Hatakeyama (whose photographs wrapped up the space at 360 degrees), talked about the experience of taking pictures of what was left of his hometown, entirely wiped out by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which also killed his mother. His questions about the sense of producing images (and building architectures), and the possible good of it, kept coming back for a long time.
*Touching Reality* by Thomas Hirschorn at La Triennale in Paris, for its literal brutality.
‘Slideshows’, an exhibition by Massimo Grimaldi held at the reopened Museo di Villa Croce in Genoa (curated by Alessandro Rabottini), brought together for the first time all the works of an ongoing series, started by the artist in 2003. Each slideshow consists of a collection of images (initially web-collected, more recently shot by the artist during his visits at the hospitals run by Emergency, an Italian medical NGO operating in war zones across the globe). Grimaldi presents them on two screens, side by side, on the last Apple model available for purchase at the moment of completion, so that the quick obsolence of the ‘new’ and the commodity fetishism are pushed to the limits. The photos are post-produced to be picture-perfect, sentimental, devoid of violence and visually captivating, like the quintessential Apple ads. Furthermore, Grimaldi uses the slideshows as ‘promotional’ presentations of his work: whenever asked to participate in a prize or to provide a project, he proposes to invest over 90% of his budget on the construction of a new Emergency’s hospital – a conscious ‘moral blackmail’ to push the choice between art and life (and communication).
Bill Bollinger, left: Untitled, 1970 (2002), right: Cyclone Fence, 1968 (2012), installation view at SculptureCenter, New York. Courtesy SculptureCenter; photograph: Jason Mandella.
In no particular order:
dOCUMENTA (13) and the (impossible) Book of Books
Bill Bollinger’s retrospective at SculptureCenter in New York.
Ed Atkins’s solo show ‘Us Dead Talk Love’ at Chisenhale, London, and his reading during frieze week in October.
‘En todo y en todas partes’ at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, with works by Karla Black, Marieta Chirulescu, Babette Mangolte and Susanne M. Winterling, in response to Edward Krasinski’s legacy.
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, from ‘Reperti per il prossimo milione di anni’, (detail), 2012, silver gelatin print, 113 × 56 cm
An Italian round:
Paola Pivi’s recent exhibition ‘Tulkus 1880 to 2018’, at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (and soon at Witte de With, Rotterdam). Installed in the Manica Lunga, as if mimicking the original quadreria of the castle, it included around 1,000 photographs of tulkus, i.e. powerful Tibetan Buddhist masters who are recognized as reincarnations of previous masters. Tulkus are believed to have the capacity to reveal the place of their next birth. Mysticism aside, this survey on the presence, disappearance and eventual survival of a culture worked quite well also on a non-metaphorical level.
Gina Pane’s great retrospective ‘E’ per amore vostro: l’altro’, curated by Sophie Duplaix at Mart, Rovereto, with an impressive array of works. Pity that Pane’s several exhibitions in Italy and the critical studies they triggered were somehow marginalized. Anyway, chapeau.
‘disegnare disegnare ridisegnare il pensiero immagine che cammina’, Marisa Merz’s exhibition in random order and without labels at the family-run Fondazione Merz in Turin was a brilliant, unguided tour de force of her private world.
Zoloto, Roberto Cuoghi’s monumental, self-critical and at times exhilarating ‘retrospective’ take on the issue of identity, at Massimo De Carlo, Milan.
Luca Vitone’s two joint summer exhibitions: ‘Monocromo Variationen’ at Museion, Bozen, and ‘Natura morta con paesaggi e strumenti musicali’, at the Brodbeck Foundation in Catania, for their subtle reading of the Italian landscape.
Hat tip also to a couple of upcoming Sicilian galleries: Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica, and collicaligreggi, Catania.
Rome-based Nero Magazine just restyled itself as ‘a publication that collects other serial publications in it’. Check it out, free-download: www.neromagazine.it
‘Reperti per il prossimo milione di anni’, the first gallery show by Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, at Federica Schiavo, in Rome – a very mature exhibition, for an absolute beginner.
As to Milan, my hometown, it shows some signs of recovery from its late atony, nevermind the crisis. In February, artists Mario Airò, Diego Perrone and Stefano Dugnani opened their studios to host ten artists from the last generation, to grant them room and a chance to produce new works. In June, Valentina Sansone from the Swiss Institute curated Bureau for Art Nerds, a lively series of events bringing together a group of young Swiss artists (Fluck / Paulus, Curtat Tunnel, Hannah Weinberger, Hotel Palenque) and Milanese artist-run or independent spaces, such as Anonima Nuotatori, Carrozzeria Margot, Gasconade, Dafne Boggeri’s Full Moon Salon. The list of off-spaces for the local scene now includes also Lucie Fontaine, Marselleria, Spazio Morris, Spazio Cabinet. On the institutional side, Palazzo Reale got back on the map with the solid Fabio Mauri. The End, as well as with a rich, though jumbled survey on the Seventies: Addio Anni Settanta: Arte a Milano 1969-80, curated by Francesco Bonami and Paola Nicolin (the book produced on the occasion, with reproductions of hundreds original catalogues, fanzines, mags was a small treasure. Not so small, in fact: 474 pages, Mousse Publishing). Ongoing is the neat first mid-career show by Alberto Garutti at PAC, Didascalia, co-curated by Nicolin and Hans Ulrich Obrist, which highlights also the artist’s pivotal role as a teacher at Brera art academy. A possible history of Italian art beyond the labels of Arte Povera or Transavaguardia, for a change.
Looking forward to:
The next Venice Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and – for the first time ever, since its start – even its Italian Pavillion, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, the current director of MACRO, Rome.
And also the new directorship of Andrea Viliani at the MADRE Museum in Naples, back on track. The times they are a-changing.
Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian’s new film, coming soon: their exhibition NONNONNON at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, was wonderful.
Giuseppe Gabellone at GAMeC, Bergamo.
The Città delle Culture, set to open in Milan in 2013 (in the ex-Ansaldo factory, redesigned by Chipperfield). More of a ‘Haus der Kulturen der Welt’, than a museum of contemporary art, but maybe getting closer?
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Raphael Gygaxis an art historian and curator at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland.
A list of things I’ve seen / heard / read / done in 2012 that lifted my spirits:
Nicole Eisenman, The Breakup, 2011, oil and mixed media on canvas, 142 × 109 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photograph: Robert Wedemeyer
- Sibylle Berg’s novel Vielen Dank für das Leben (Hanser, Munich, 2012); no review will ever be able to catch the spirit of this book.
- Nicole Eisenman’s painting The Breakup (2011) at the Whitney Biennial; after seeing it I was in good mood for the whole day.
- Beach House’s album Bloom (Sub Pop, 2012) has helped me to get over my anxious moments at the airport and other unpleasant situations this year.
- Erna Ómarsdóttir’s dance piece We Saw Monsters; rooooar!
- Willie Doherty’s film Secretion (2012) at dOCUMENTA (13); I watched it twice – and afterwards I left Kassel.
- 7th Berlin Biennale; I really liked the character of this test field (and I didn’t like most of the reviews about it)
- Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony of the London Olympics; what a lovely spectacle.
- Encounters (dinners, studio visits, drinks etc.) with artists including: Ai Weiwei, Patterson Beckwith, Spartacus Chetwynd, Maria Eichhorn, Agnès Geoffray, Teresa Margolles, Nicola Martini, Sara Masüger, Lucy Stein, Julie Verhoeven, Silke Otto-Knapp, Virginia Overton, Loredana Sperini, Lily van der Stokker; thank you all!
- Some shows of dead female artists like: ‘Evelyne Axell. The Great Jouney into Space’ (Broadway 1602, New York) or ‘Sylvia Sleigh’ (Kunst Halle St. Gallen)
- More shows: ‘Carol Rama: Spazio anche piu che tempo’ (Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin), Shana Moulton’s solo presentation at Liste 17 (Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich), ‘Rita Ackermann: Fire by Days’ (Hauser & Wirth, London)
- OK – also some shows by male artists: ‘Marc Bauer’ (Freymond-Guth, Zurich / Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz), ‘Doug Aitken’ (Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich), Martin Soto Climent (Kunsthalle Winterthur / Karma International, Zurich)
A list of things that I hope to do in 2012 that will cheer me up:
Kelly Nipper, Black Forest, 2012
See the premier of the Ciné-Concert Der Architekt (The Architect) scripted by Marc Bauer and with accompanying music from Kafka (January 18, La Comédie de Clermont, Clermont-Ferrand), the premier of Sibylle Berg’s play Angst reist mit (March 23, Schauspielhaus Stuttgart), the exhibition of Kelly Nipper’s work (including her performance Black Forest, which premiered at Glasgow International Festival in 2012) alongside drawings and watercolours by Rudolf von Laban at Kunsthaus Zurich (April 5 – June 16,); Do the art things in Berlin, London, Paris, New York, Venice, Zurich, Basel plus a research trip to Dublin; Go to Iceland (holidays); Participate at the Second Swiss Congress for Art History (Lausanne); Finish my PHD (fingers crossed)
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Chris Wileyis an artist, writer and curator based in Los Angeles, USA.
Los Angeles
Living in and around New York for my entire life, I never thought I’d be writing high praise of Los Angeles, that much maligned city choked in smog, where I heard tell that pedestrians were shot with impunity for there perambulatory transgressions. LA was, in my mind, nothing but an urban planning nightmare, teeming with New Age yuppies, industry flame-outs, gang bangers, and a terrifying, militaristic police force that seemed to hurt as often as it help. Earthquakes, wild fires, landslides, Charles Manson, race riots, reality television, vegan cafés where your order has be made as a statement of doe-eyed affirmation (“I am vivacious”; “I am dazzling”): surely it was a city that augers the end of days. But, like many of my fellow defectors from New York and elsewhere, the city has gotten its hooks in me. I find that it has afforded me the time a space to think, read, and work, absent the buzz and heat of New York, which, though occasionally stimulating, can too often prove to be an existential merry-go-round—a ride that is loud, colorful and fun, but which spits you out in essentially the same place that you began. This is of course to say nothing of the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene, where the static charge of possibility still hangs in the air. New spaces and new tendencies seem to be springing up here at a quickening pace, and the future looks bright indeed.
Ken Price at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Zizi, Ken Price, 2011, fired and painted clay
, 42 × 61 × 43 cm
Though it saddened me to think that Price’s retrospective was only very narrowly posthumous, the exhibition itself was suffused with such lavish and energetic displays of color and form that any hint of dourness was quickly swept away. Price proved in this exhibition (as he had throughout his career) that ceramics could be pulled out of the crafts ghetto and fixed in the firmament of fine art, much as his mentor Peter Voulkos had bade him to. But more importantly, the exhibition also stood as a testament to a figure whose obdurately weird work bucked trends and categorizations, but left next to no one questioning its place in the art world. Price was a consummate insiders’ outsider, and his renegade example is an essential one for an art world that finds itself too often mired in rhetorical and aesthetic feedback loops.
John Houck at Kansas Gallery
In his debut solo exhibition at New York’s Kansas gallery, John Houck proved that investigations into photography’s digital life need not be dry, even when they are strongly analytical. The anchors of the show, were Houck’s beguiling, optically flummoxing works from his ‘Aggregates’ series, in which he exploits his skills as a high-level computer programmer to agglomerate exhaustive, moiré-patterned configurations of colored pixels hewing to a set of pre-determined parameters—sometimes allowing for hundreds of thousands of configurations in a single piece—which are generated in the computer, printed, folded, photographed, and folded yet again, so that the final piece resembles nothing so much as a pieces of Op Art origami. They are beautiful objects, but behind their elegant veneer their exhaustive combinatory logic speaks of the ever-shifting sea of pixels that has become the substrate of our contemporary image world.
Barney Kulok at Nicole Klagsbrun
Kulok’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, which was accompanied by a handsome book published by Aperture, consisted of a collection of stunningly rich black-and-white photographs, taken during the construction of Louis I. Kahn’s great unrealized monument to Franklin D. Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island. (In a cruel twist of architectural fate, Kahn died in the public toilets of reviled, then-recent reboot of New York’s Pennsylvania Station, and is said to have had the plans for the monument in his briefcase.) However, Kulok’s photographs, which, more often than not, take the form of horizonless details of building materials and surfaces, are not mere documentation; they take into obvious account the art historical precedents of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, with a deftness that has had few parallels since the work of Lewis Baltz. Like Baltz, Kulok reminds us—in light of the recent vogue for self-reflexive investigations of photographic materiality and the emphasis placed on studio practice—that photographs made out in the world at large can still present novel aesthetic propositions, even as they speak, however modestly, of the life outside the darkroom and away from the glare of the studio lights.
The paintings of Tala Madani
Tala Madani, Chinballs with Flag, 2011, oil on linen, 41 × 31 cm
Though I was familiar with her work before, by way of my work on the New Museum’s first Generational Triennial ‘Younger Than Jesus’ in 2009, I have become re-acquainted with it this year as a result of the fortuitous proximity of our Los Angeles homes. Her paintings are a portal onto a world populated exclusively by men, who almost always appear to be of Middle Eastern descent, and who display a gleeful penchant for psychosexual depravity that recalls both the Abu Ghraib prison photographs and childhood games gone horribly awry. Initially characterized by a loose, exuberant facture that verged on the slap-dash, Madani’s restlessness and versatility has led her to further elaborations of her stylistic vocabulary. Recently, this has meant the addition of a more controlled, sharply delineated vein to her painting, with some works coming to resemble demented editorial cartoons. Whatever the manner of their making, however, all her paintings cut close to the bone, reflecting some of the more unseemly, yet undeniably enticing aspects of our collective ideations and desires.
Breaking Bad
Television in the past decade has continued to defy the clichéd notion that it exists only to stupefy the cowed masses, a medium that can be coupled with “real culture” only as an object of campy appreciation, or by way of the winking appropriation by those cultural mandarins who would transmute low culture into high, under the guise of erasing the distinction between the two. Increasingly, it appears that television has entered into its golden age, offering us the moving image equivalent of the 19th century novel: intricate, twisting plots, a complex panoply of characters, high drama, potent social commentary, and popular appeal.
Perhaps the most obvious current exemplar of this turn is AMC’s Breaking Bad, which has, for the last five years, followed the ignominious rise of Walter White (Brian Cranston) from his beginnings as a terminally ill high school science teacher who turned to cooking meth in order to leave an inheritance for his family, to his current incarnation as rapacious, ruthless drug kingpin. This year’s truncated season, which was perhaps the darkest of an already jet black series, has seen the show continue to defy the law of televisual entropy, which the most astute, masterful programs of the past have tended to fall victim to as the years wear on. (Even the faithful must admit that the beloved series The Wire jumped the shark a little in its fifth and final season.) If the show can keep up this momentum, it will stand as significant cultural achievement, a Shakespearian tragedy for our times.
‘New Pictures of Common Objects’ at PS1 MoMA
Recently, the artistic tendencies that have been slowly coalescing around concerns with digital media, branding, corporate culture, and the commoditization of everyday life, have been marked by an obsession with the texture and psychic character of the new world of objects that these technological and cultural phenomena have engendered. PS1’s ‘New Pictures of Common Objects’, which was organized by Christopher Lew, and comprised small solo showings of works by Trisha Bagga, Josh Klein, Lucas Blalock, Margaret Lee, and Helen Marten, represented a modest, yet important step towards pinning down the peculiar, yet strangely consistent artistic response to the material cosmos that we have wrought, which, like the works in the exhibition itself, manages to be both alienating and beguiling all at once.
Things to look forward to in 2013
Owen Kydd at Nicelle Beauchene (January 24 – February 24)
A recent graduate of UCLA’s Masters of Fine Arts program, Owen Kydd will present his first solo exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene’s new space in New York this January. Like Jeff Wall, with whom Kydd worked for many years before moving to UCLA, his work straddles the line between photography and cinema, but in a literal way: his video-photographs are presented on monitors, and shot with a high-end digital video camera. The resulting images, whose subtle movements paradoxically serve to heighten their sense of stillness, are strikingly beautiful and pregnant with mystery.
55th Venice Biennale (June 1- November 24)
Full disclosure: I am working on the next Venice Biennale, both as a curatorial advisor and writer for the catalog. However, as a person with intimate knowledge of the show, and as someone who has worked closely with its curator, Massimiliano Gioni, for many years, I can confidently say that this will be an iteration of Venice that is not to be missed. Unfortunately, I have been informed that I will be summarily executed if I say any more. Mums the word.
Lucas Blalock at White Cube’s ‘Inside the White Cube’, London (May – June)
Lucas Blalock, Gaba with Fans, 2012, chromogenic print, 148 × 118 cm
Though only in his second year of his UCLA Masters of Fine Art, Lucas Blalock has been popping up in group shows all around the world this year, and has had solo presentations of his work at Frieze London and MoMA PS1. Next May, Blalock will be the subject of a solo exhibition at London’s powerhouse gallery White Cube, as a part of their regular ‘Inside the White Cube’ series, which recently gave a sizable boost to the career of another photographic rising star, Elad Lassry. Like Lassry, Blalock is a master of the photographic still life, though he has recently taken his talents to the streets, adding another layer to his already diverse practice. He has also begun to push his energetic digital manipulations in evermore baroque and ambitious directions: ‘Gaba with Fans’ (2012), shown at both PS1 and as a part of his Frame project at Frieze, is a discombobulated nude that could almost hold its ground against Picasso.
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Michelle Cottonis senior curator at Firstsite, Colchester, UK.
Gerard Valcin, Simbis Voyageurs. Courtesy Collection Gallerie D’Art Nader
My picks are as follows:
‘1917’, Centre Pompidou-Metz
Paul Sietsema– both exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel and the Drawing Room, London
Graham Sutherland, ‘An Unfinished World’ at Modern Art Oxford
‘Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou’ at Nottingham Contemporary (until January 6)
Alex Katz, ‘Give Me Tomorrow’ at Tate St Ives and Turner Contemporary, Margate (although I only made it to Margate) (until January 13)
Philip Lai, Stuart Shave, Modern Art, London
*Nick Relph, Raining Room, shown at Herald Street as part of Feature, Art Basel*
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, SAP, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Next year I look forward to seeing:
‘1913: The Shape of Time at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds’– already open but I haven’t made it there yet (until February 17)
Jessica Jackson Hutchins at Hepworth Wakefield (group show with Alice Channer and Linder Sterling; February 16 – May 5)
‘Eduardo Paolozzi: Collaging Culture’ at Pallant House, Chichester (July 6 – October 13)
‘Mark Leckey: The Universal Addresssability of Dumb Things’ at the Bluecoat, Liverpool (February 16 – April 14) Nottingham Contemporary (April 27 – June 30) and the De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill on Sea (July 12 – October 20)