Sanja Iveković, Paper Women, 1976–77, collage on magazine page, 9 x 12 3/8".

“Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence”

MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through March 26
Curated by Roxana Marcoci

A central figure in Eastern Europe’s long-overlooked history of astutely political Conceptual art, Sanja Iveković is finally getting her due with “Sweet Violence,” an exhibition of more than one hundred works spanning the Croatian artist’s career since 1974. For her photomontage series “Double Life,” 1975–76, Iveković matched photographs from her personal album with clichéd poses cut from women’s magazines, using mimicry as an incisive critical strategy (and notably predating Cindy Sherman’s 1977–80 “Untitled Film Stills”). Along with many other photomontage works and a number of early single-channel videos (such as the iconic Instructions No. 1, 1976, in which the artist defaces her own complexion, drawing and then smearing a diagram meant to chart a cosmetic facial massage), the show will gather principal examples of Iveković’s sculptures, drawings, performances, and media installations, tracing her pioneering practice up through more recent work concerning postsocialist society and the inequities that have belied the capitalist dream.

— Jessica Morgan

Asco, Termites y Guerrero, 1975. Performance view during Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), East Los Angeles, 1975. Photo: Ricardo Valverde.

“Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980”

VARIOUS VENUES
LOS ANGELES
Through April 1

What is the story of Postwar American art? When it’s told as a fabled West Coast–versus–East Coast matchup, Los Angeles is typically cast as a brash, vulgar upstart, pitted against a sleeker, more cosmopolitan New York. Familiar episodes are trotted out to emphasize an aesthetic of dazzle and doom ostensibly unique to Southern California—say, the early debut of Pop art, with Andy Warhol’s soup cans premiering at the Ferus Gallery in 1962; the finish-fetishists’ embrace of industrial luster; Chris Burden being shot in the arm. It has become a tired tale.

About a decade ago, in 2002, the Getty Research Institute decided to breathe new life into the study of local artistic practices. Building on its deep archival collections, it began a research initiative aimed at locating, preserving, and documenting a diverse array of Los Angeles–based art, architecture, and design. The project soon ballooned into an unprecedented venture involving a far-flung network of institutions, curators, art historians, decorative arts specialists, craft scholars, film archivists, architectural historians, and artists, who unearthed boxes moldering in basements, recorded oral histories, digitally remastered crumbling videotape, and restored faded snapshots.

This fall, prepare to sample—or even gorge on—the fruits of this labor: More than sixty exhibitions about art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980 will begin to open across the region. Corralled into the overarching rubric “Pacific Standard Time,” and launched with the assistance of some ten million dollars in grants from the Getty Foundation, it includes presentations of art, design, cinema, performance, and video at museums and art-related institutions as far south as San Diego and as far north as Santa Barbara. (Full disclosure: I wrote essays for two exhibition catalogues connected to “Pacific Standard Time.”) Venues include major museums as well as smaller spaces, such as ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. A performance and public arts festival this coming January, organized by the Getty Research Institute and LAXART, will include restagings of pieces from the 1960s and ’70s alongside newly commissioned work, bringing together historical figures with their contemporary progeny.

The roster of “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions indicates the ambition and the eccentricity that are Southern California hallmarks. There are monographic shows on designers Charles and Ray Eames, photographer Oscar Castillo, woodworker Sam Maloof, Conceptual-art gallerist Eugenia Butler, and enamelist June Schwarcz, to name a small sample. In addition, there are group shows organized along lines both thematic (“Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945–1982,” at the Palm Springs Art Museum) and medium-specific (“Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California,” at the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles). Focusing on subjects canonical and counterinstitutional, the exhibitions trace an enormous range of artistic innovation that includes women ceramicists, African-American filmmakers, Japanese-American activists, Chinese-American architects, and collaboratively made protest posters.

A few themes recur: the foundational role played by the region’s many art schools; the rapid institutionalization of performance and video; the impact of social movements such as feminism; and the efflorescence of noncommercial, artist-run ventures like the LA Woman’s Building. But the biggest revelation here is the centrality of nonwhite artistic production—most prominently, Chicano art, which is spotlighted in eight shows, including the first retrospective of the visionary Conceptual/performance collective Asco. The primacy of Chicano work has the potential to reorient histories of Southern Californian art away from comparisons with New York and toward tensions and affinities with the broader cultures of the US-Mexico border.

The “Pacific Standard Time” promotional slogan reads, “One era. A million moments of impact.” As marketing catchphrases go, it’s not bad, though it immediately raises some unanswerable questions. Can the unruly thirty-five-year swath from 1945 to 1980 be considered “one era”? And is there a whiff of old-fashioned municipal boosterism in the Getty’s touting of its hometown? More likely, in a time when all things global are the rage, “Pacific Standard Time” represents a serious attempt to forge a critical regionalism sensitive to specific, local conditions. Though it remains to be seen whether the responses to this massive endeavor end up consolidating the usual narratives, the wealth of material—familiar and obscure alike—will undoubtedly be a lasting resource for scholars and students.

Giving a full consideration to the richness of these offerings might depend on how much gas you’re willing to burn, how much traffic you can withstand, and how many days off work you can afford to take. If you live in the area, lucky for you—take advantage of it. One hopes viewers’ individual courses through this terrain will reveal surprising resonances and omissions ripe for further research. Even if they don’t, “Pacific Standard Time” is already an impressive achievement, with a scope as vast, sprawling, and dynamic as the city of Los Angeles itself.

— Julia Bryan-Wilson

Mark Handforth, Rolling Stop, 2008, aluminum, vinyl, acrylic, 96 x 96".

“Mark Handforth: Rolling Stop”

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NORTH MIAMI
MIAMI
Through February 19
Curated by Bonnie Clearwater

In 1996, MoCA, North Miami launched a program meant to raise the profile of emerging local artists. The first installment was a solo project by Mark Handforth. Since then, Handforth’s work has garnered international recognition, yet he has chosen to remain in Miami, participating in the city’s increasingly dynamic contemporary art scene. This fall, the museum will host its second exhibition of the artist’s work, promising a presentation appropriately larger in scope and ambition, including forty sculptures made since the mid-1990s. Viewers will be afforded the opportunity to connect with the humor and pathos that Handforth brings to vernacular urban materials—from lampposts and street signs to fluorescent light fixtures and metal trash cans—and to enjoy the romantic levity he so slyly smuggles into the formalism of abstract sculpture. A catalogue with an essay by curator Bonnie Clearwater (who brought Handforth to the museum fifteen years ago) and an interview with the artist by Tom Eccles accompanies the show.

— Anne Ellegood

Dana Schutz, Autopsy of Michael Jackson, 2005, oil on canvas, 60 x 108".

“Dana Schutz: If the face had wheels”

MIAMI ART MUSEUM
MIAMI
Through February 26
Curated by Helaine Posner

Dana Schutz paints with directness and expediency, and her work has an exhilaration that comes from giving form to internal feelings. She is an American symbolist who is sometimes mistaken for a realist. Her paintings often depict scenes that are absurd, goofy, or grotesque: things seen in the mind’s eye. A woman eating her own arm, a nude man lying prone in the desert, someone caught midsneeze— the pictures revel in the power of pictorial visualization. Schutz has a winning curiosity about strange forms that the self, and self-destruction, can take; you can imagine her saying, “Nothing human is foreign to me.” This survey, with more than forty paintings and drawings made over the past decade, will prove Schutz to be that rare thing: a maverick leading the way in the mainstream.

— David Salle

Francesca Woodman, Self portrait (Talking to Vince), 1975-1978, gelatin silver print, 10 x 8".

Francesca Woodman

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
SAN FRANCISCO
Through February 20
Curated by Corey Keller

Thirty years after Francesca Woodman’s suicide at the age of twenty-two, her oeuvre is being comprehensively presented in its first American exhibition in twenty years. Woodman’s photographs—with their reframing of the relationship between the body and space, and their hybridization of photography and performance—have helped to redefine parameters of feminist art history as well as lead the medium of photography into an expanded field. This retrospective will free Woodman’s work from its habitual imprisonment in agenda-driven discourse by exposing it to a broader viewership, posing new interpretive possibilities. Comprising short video pieces, two artist’s books, and more than 170 photographs, many drawn from the Woodman family collection and some seen for the first time, the exhibition will be complemented by a catalogue with essays by curator Corey Keller, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Jennifer Blessing. Travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Mar. 15–June 16, 2012.

— Jaleh Mansoor

Look from Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall/winter 1991–92 “French Cancan” collection. © Patrice Stable/Jean Paul Gaultier.

Jean Paul Gaultier

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART
DALLAS
Through February 12
Curated by Thierry-Maxime Loriot

Remember the ’80s? No, not the art, but what you might have worn to the art openings and the clubs, the bars, the chichi restaurants: the whole glittering, louche shebang. For many who aspired to cutting-edge glamour, this meant wearing Jean Paul Gaultier. Applauding one of fashion’s most enduring enfants terribles, this retrospective, subtitled “From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” will parade nearly 130 ensembles from the designer’s many couture and prêt-à-porter collections from as early as 1976. Supporting materials will abound, including sketches, as well as photographs and videos of runway shows, dance performances, and the like. Along with opulent illustrations and an essay by Suzy Menkes, the catalogue offers interviews with a band of Gaultier’s muses and collaborators, from Madonna to Martin Margiela, as well as with the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Valerie Steele and the consummate showman himself.

— David Rimanelli