U.S. Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
Tino Sehgal
SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through March 10
Curated by Nancy Spector
A show with no catalogue, no documentation, and no objects—for Tino Sehgal, it’s simply business, or the lack thereof, as usual. With an unconventional background in dance and economics, and a conviction that the world is already too full of things, Sehgal reimagines the museum as a choreographed agora, a stage for interpersonal scenarios that lay bare the animating mechanisms of exchange between viewer and artwork. In quintessential Sehgalian fashion, his infiltration of the Guggenheim is preceded by a conspicuous lack of specifics, other than that he will be creating two ambiences for the main space—an “arena for spectatorship” on the ground floor of the rotunda and a scenario involving “direct verbal interaction between museum visitors and trained participants” on the spiral ramp. Don’t miss it: If you do, it won’t exist.
— Jeffrey Kastner
Man Ray, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, 1916, oil on canvas, 52 x 72 3/8".
Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention
THE JEWISH MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through March 14
Curated by Mason Klein
Man Ray’s art demonstrates remarkable heterogeneity: Along with the photographs for which he’s best known, the artist made paintings, drawings, sculptural assemblages, films, even the stray book. According to curator Mason Klein—who assembled the two hundred–some works in the artist’s first US multimedia retrospective in more than twenty years—much of Man Ray’s disparate output reflects an ongoing concealment of his Russian-Jewish roots, a project epitomized by his adoption of a pithy nom de plume in lieu of his unmistakably ethnic given name, Emmanuel Radnitzky. While a provocative gambit, using the stratagem of identity politics is a risky move: Will Klein’s presentation result in a more nuanced appreciation of this avant-garde icon or manufacture a smoking gun that simplifies Man Ray’s protean oeuvre?
— Margaret Sundell
Nina Hoffmann, Untitled (KS) (detail), 2009, 35-mm black-and-white slide projection, dimensions variable.
“Leopards in the Temple”
SCULPTURE CENTER
NEW YORK
Through March 30
Curated by Fionn Meade
Fifteen artists—most of them young and European—infiltrate SculptureCenter this winter wielding highly divergent practices: Aleana Egan translates facets of the built environment into pared-down sculptural abstractions; Patrick Hill slathers concrete onto canvas and dyes it a playful red; Nina Canell makes diminutive constructions that emit light, sound, and mist. Meanwhile, Anthology Film Archives will screen collaborative shorts by João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva and by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer (working as Nashashibi/Skaer). Knit loosely together by Kafka’s parable about leopards who break into a temple, lap up the sacrificial wine, and do so with such regularity that they become part of the ceremony, the show holds within its own chalice a series of aberrations—subtle propositions that may reshape the norm.
— Bartholomew Ryan
Tim Burton, Mars Attacks!, 1996, still from a color film in 35 mm, 106 minutes. Martian girl (Lisa Marie) and President James Dale (Jack Nicholson).
Tim Burton
MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through April 26
Curated by Jenny He, Ron Magliozzi, and Rajendra Roy
The Museum of Modern Art’s Tim Burton retrospective includes screenings of his entire corpus of film features, from Peewee’s Big Adventure (1985) to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), as well the early shorts Vincent (1982)—a black-and-white stop-motion film about a young boy obsessed, like Burton, with Vincent Price, who provides the narration—and Frankenweenie (1984), starring Shelley Duvall. These shorts presage Burton’s preoccupation with the bizarre and the “gothic,” as well as his predilection for oddball stars, not to mention his flair for mordant comedy. The exhibition also assembles more than seven hundred drawings, paintings, storyboards, maquettes, puppets, production ephemera, etc. Some of the director’s favorite films, from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu to Mark Robson’s Earthquake, will be showcased in an accompanying series, appropriately titled “The Lurid Beauty of Monsters.”
— David Rimanelli
Ari Marcopoulous, Detroit, 2009, still from a color video, 7 minutes 32 seconds.
Whitney Biennial 2010
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
NEW YORK
Through May 30
Curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari
The seventy-fifth installment of the Whitney’s signature series will be housed entirely in its familiar HQ, incorporating a fifth-floor presentation of the greatest hits from previous Biennials (procured from the museum’s collection). If this backward glance results in accusations of penny-pinching or conservatism, the curatorial duo of elder statesman Bonami and relative novice Carrion-Murayari will try to counter them with a main event that features an eclectic, multigenerational lineup of fifty-five artists. Both curators are familiar with the Whitney way—2007 saw Bonami helping to organize its Rudolf Stingel retrospective and Carrion-Murayari, a five-year veteran of the institution, assembling the video exhibition “Television Delivers People.” The question of whether the Eurocentric Bonami in particular will deliver a credible survey of American art at decade’s end should make this, as ever, one to watch.
— Michael Wilson
Rachel Whiteread, Study for Wax Floor, 1992, correction fluid, ink, and watercolor on graph paper. 17 7/8 x 12".
“Rachel Whiteread Drawings”
HAMMER MUSEUM
LOS ANGELES
Through May 2
Curated by Allegra Pesenti
Given the monumentality of her celebrated poured-concrete and plaster sculptures, few people would think of British artist Rachel Whiteread putting pencil or brush to paper. This survey brings into focus her variegated two-dimensional output with more than two hundred drawings made over twenty years (alongside ten sculptures). Not just mere studies, Whiteread’s drawings constitute a parallel practice that helps her to “dream” other pieces into being, and her use of gouache, correction fluid, acrylic, silver leaf, and collaged photographs evinces the artistic interests for which she is known: texture and surface, presence and absence, and the traces of human life in the material world. A “visual essay” by Whiteread, along with texts by curator Allegra Pesenti and the Tate’s Ann Gallagher, appear in the accompanying catalogue.