A performance piece in DC by Jennifer Rubell, which features a performer dressed as Ivanka Trump endlessly vacuuming an expanse of floor, has drawn the ire of the first daughter. “Women can choose to knock each other down or build each other up,” Trump said online. “I choose the latter.” (more…)
Artists Guadalupe Rosales and Hank Willis Thomas have received this year’s Gordon Parks Foundation fellowships, Art News reports. “Both Guadalupe and Hank will engage the visual life of their communities through their work as artists, archivists, and photographers, and will explore completely distinct and individual narratives,” says executive director Peter W. Kunhardt Jr. (more…)
Cory Arcangel is opening a pop-up of his Arcangel Surfware brand at Dover Street Market Los Angeles this week, Art News reports. “The space that Dover Street Market has given me is about the same size as my shop in Stavanger,” Arcangel said. “It is also weirdly about the same shape, which is kind of trapezoidal.” (more…)
Wolfgang Tillmans, via Regen Projects
Taking a new spin on Art Week in the Californian metropolis, this week sees the inaugural edition of Frieze Los Angeles, a new fair opening under the sunny skies of the Golden State. Setting up shop at Paramount Studios, this week will serve as something of a victory lap for a city whose contemporary arts offerings have exploded in past years, and which has taken on the role of a cultural capital for both artists and the galleries representing them.
A group of protestors stormed the Guggenheim this weekend, raining down pamphlets criticizing the museum’s ties to the Sackler Family, part of artist Nan Goldin’s ongoing protests against the family behind the manufacture of OxyContin. “I want the Guggenheim and others publicly to disavow themselves from the Sacklers and refuse future funding from them, and I want them to take down the Sackler name from the museums,” Goldin said. (more…)
Installation view. All images via Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
New work by Charles Long, Paradigm Lost, is currently on view at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York through February 9. This exhibition brings together work that the artist has created over the past year, continuing the artist’s “investigation of the forms scattered on the shore of modernism’s receding wave.” For Long’s thirteenth solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist continues his long-standing exploration of the legacy and trajectory of modernism, pointing to the need to renegotiate and transcend its shortcomings. With reference to various figureheads of the 20th century, Paradigm Lost illustrates the casualties and excesses staged by the present moment’s patriarchal forbearers with nuance and play.
Installation view. All images via Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
As a resident of Mt. Baldy, California for over a decade, Long’s current work has been inspired by the deteriorating landscape, detritus and tree trunks, that he has encountered during his daily walks through this landscape. As trees die and other effects of climate change take hold, the village has become overrun with stumps and stacks of massive logs. For Long, the symbolic weight of this material resonates with the social and political consequences of the inheritance of patriarchy. In light of this, paradigm lost approaches Long’s role in these circumstances, taking into account his identity as a socially gendered being.
Installation view. All images via Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
In one work, Long replaced the concentric rings of a tree stump with a cross-section of the human penis. From this, a third association appeared. As the artist explains “The anatomical cross section oddly resembled a face or ancient mask that looked back at me with an expression of confusion or sorrow…The new works then spilled out from this tear in the fabric of my being in myriad images and forms of this open body, creating a mythological world, all of it bound of the sole motif derived from the anatomical cross section of the human male anatomy.”
Installation view. All images via Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Installation view. All images via Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Accordingly, Paradigm Lost seeks to offer a place to contemplate the “aftermath of a patriarchal apocalypse.” Though this collapse of the patriarchy is largely imagined in the space of the exhibition, the work therein seeks to create space to contemplate the effects and conditions that led to this hypothetical extinction. Long’s immersive exhibition creates space for mourning the planet, as well as the collapsing social and political systems that have failed, while remaining open to nuance and sardonic critique. Ultimately, the exhibition is a meditation on the future, hoping to set the stage for an unscripted performance that will usher in the new paradigm.
— A. Corrigan
Related Links:
Exhibition page [Tanya Bonakdar Gallery]
Christie’s London will auction off the art collection of songwriter and singer George Michael this year, The Guardian reports, with the funds raised going to charity. “Philanthropic work was hugely important for George during his lifetime and it was his wish that this work would continue after his passing,” Trustees of Michael’s estate said in a statement. (more…)
The National Museum of Scotland has completed a fifteen-year renovation, Art Newspaper reports, repositioning the collection and allowing each part to be more focused. “It wasn’t clear what the museum was or what it was trying to be, which led to strange juxtapositions,” says director Gordon Rintoul. “On one floor you had British birds and on a floor above you had material from the Middle East—in an atrium space.” (more…)
JPW3 at Marc LeBlanc
Offering a counter point to the big budget proceedings at Zona Maco across town, Material Art Fair has once again returned to the spacious halls of the Expo Reforma once again (the first time in the same location as a previous edition), opening its doors this Thursday to strong attendance and interest from collectors and attendees. (more…)
Christie’s has achieved its highest ever sales total for 2018, with a final tally of $7 billion, bolstered by the sale of the Rockefeller collection. “Clients like to go to the platforms they have read about as being successful. Some of our clients preferred the US over the UK, but this is an American situation, not a UK issue,” says Dirk Boll, the president of Christie’s in Europe, the Middle East, Russia and India. (more…)
Two new films by Paul and Damon McCarthy will premiere next week in Los Angeles during Frieze Week. The works will screen at Montalbán Theater in Hollywood, and will feature the pair’s trademark approach to sexuality and violence. (more…)
Garage Magazine has a piece on Dan Colen, and his recent projects providing food from his farm upstate to those in need. “In 2012, I started talking to friends who knew about farming, and one of them started talking to me about ‘food deserts,’” he says. “The idea of Sky High Farm was to distribute sustainably grown vegetables and meat locally—we work with local food banks and Food Bank for New York City to bring good, healthy food to people without access to it.” (more…)
Simon Vega, Tropical Space Hostel (2019), via MAIA Contemporary
Zona Maco has opened for its 16th year, celebrating the milestone event today with the first day of its VIP preview, and a look at the stature of the fair in relation to the burgeoning artistic community in Mexico City. Once again taking over the expanses of the Centro Banamex, Zona Maco opened on a sunny, warm Tuesday, a much-needed relief from the brittle cold that has swept over much of the northern US and parts of Europe in the past few weeks.
Henry Timms, current head of the 92nd Street Y, will become the next president of Lincoln Center, the New York Times reports. “I don’t think you should ever pretend that there aren’t some real, and interesting, management challenges here,” Timms said. “But I think it’s the case that every constituent’s best interest is served in a collaborative culture.” (more…)
The City of Venice has approved a new fee for day-trippers to the lagoon island. “Finally, day-trippers will start paying their way,” says Claudio Scarpa, head of the Venetian Association of Hoteliers. “People who arrive in the morning and leave in the evening, contributing little economically but imposing a heavy strain on services, need to understand that not everything is free.” (more…)
Catherine Carver Dunn will take the helm as executive director of The Tate Americas Foundation, a charity working on funding and acquisition projects for the Tate. “Catherine has a proven record in key cultural institutions of implementing organizational strategy,” says Pamela J. Joyner, chair of the board of the Tate Americas Foundation. “I look forward to working with her to advance Tate Americas Foundation’s work to promote art and artists of the Americas. She will play the lead role in developing the talent and creative thinking necessary to make the foundation effective in the future.” (more…)
The heated divorce of Harry and Linda Macklowe has exasperated courts as the order to split up their famously impressive collection seems to have raised difficulties. “People in the art world don’t want to get in the middle of the divorce,” said lawyer Dan Rottenstreich. (more…)
The Met is teaming with Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create a series five digital prototypes that use artificial intelligence to work with images from the Met’s collection. “This is a conservative institution by nature,” says Max Hollein, the Met’s director. “We need to shake it up.” (more…)
The New York Times has a lengthy piece on the finishing touches of the MoMA expansion project, which will see the museum close for four months this summer and open in a completely new configuration. “A new generation of curators is discovering the richness of what is in our collection, and there is great work being made around the world that we need to pay attention to,” Glenn Lowry says. “It means that the usual gets supplanted now by the unexpected.” (more…)
The Desert X biennial, soon to open in California’s Coachella Valley, has placed a work by Jenny Holzer on hold after concerns over how her large-scale projection might affect a group of sick Bighorn sheep in the area of installation. “They’re in a fragile, fragile state,” says Wildlands Conservancy regional director Jack Thompson. “There’s potential, from what we’ve seen when the bighorn sheep are sick, for them to wander in places in proximity to people that they normally wouldn’t do because they’re ill.”
Read more at LA Times
The High Line will experiment with exhibiting painting this summer, showing a selection of works along the expanse of the elevated park. “Usually painting is not a medium that is associated with public art, so we wanted to challenge artists that we wouldn’t necessarily work with because they typically work with painting or two-dimensional mediums,” says curator Cecelia Alemani. “We wanted to bring those artworks into the parks and see what would happen.” (more…)
Roman StaÅ„czak will represent Poland at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Art News reports, and will turn an airplane inside out for the piece. “‘The scale of the undertaking and the boldness of the concept guarantee a monumental quality of the project and its visual appeal,” the jury said. “The artist is not afraid to see his statement associated with questions of fundamental importance for the divided political community.” (more…)
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Blind self portrait listening to the version of ‘Canción mixteca’ (‘Qué lejos estoy’) by Enrique “Chato” RodrÃguez, while tasting an unexpected spirulina ice cream at a Thai restaurant in Austin, after finishing a book about a guy selling snow balls in Manhattan, thinking on how specific needs generate diverse shapes in space… (2018), via Kurimanzutto
As the winter season winds slowly towards spring, the art world will look for its first taste of warmer climes for 2019, with the first major art fair of the year set to open in the sunny capital of Mexico. Running through the week, the Zona Maco and Material Art Fairs offer the first look at the market landscape for the global fair scene, and the increasingly strong influence of Latin America on the broader art market. (more…)