Ann Goldstein

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  print May 2012

  Ann Goldstein

  ANN GOLDSTEIN

  MY MEMORIES OF MIKE KELLEY go back to my early days as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 1986, I was given oversight of an unprecedented $250,000 purchase fund for emerging and underrepresented California artists, called the El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art—one of those dream assignments—and Mike was among the eight artists in my first round of selections. Art historian Howard Singerman, who was LA MOCA’s publications editor and very knowledgeable about Mike’s work, advised me on the acquisition. We knew we wanted a group of

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  previews September 2011

  “David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East”

  The work of David Askevold was central to Conceptual art’s redefinition of what art could be, and it was—and remains—a rebuke to the movement’s stereotype as being merely dry and rational. Though clearly quite logical in structure, Askevold’s work is also peculiar, trippy, and unpredictable. He shows us another way of “living in our heads,” exploring how associative thoughts shift and play with meaning. This exhibition, organized by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and in development before the artist’s death in 2008, gathers forty examples from the full range of

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  print Summer 2010

  Ann Goldstein

  WHEN I FIRST JOINED LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art as a volunteer in 1983, I wanted to be part of a museum of a sort that didn’t exist when I was an art student in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Having only come to a consciousness of the contemporary art scene when I entered college in 1975, I had just missed the Pasadena Art Museum, which had been closed, for financial reasons, in 1974. (It reopened in 1975 as the Norton Simon Museum of Art, the Pasadena Museum’s holdings having been combined with Simon’s collection.) With the passing of that legendary institution, the absence of a museum

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  print December 2008

  Ann Goldstein

  ANN GOLDSTEIN

  1 Michael Asher (Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA) Asher’s tightly woven framework of metal studs filled the museum space to the point of near impenetrability, representing ten years of the institution’s temporary exhibition structures. But this was not simply a dazzling reconstruction of history: Asher used the museum’s architectural past to reframe. An artist whose entire oeuvre has been inextricably connected to specific physical, functional, and temporal contexts, Asher, through this remarkable project, demonstrates how history can, in fact, be repeated and recast in the present.

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  print December 2007

  Ann Goldstein

  ANN GOLDSTEIN

  1 Rudolf Stingel (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) This is what a survey should be: the opportunity to enter the artist’s practice on the artist’s kown terms. That can be a tall order for many American institutions, which must struggle to renegotiate a space between the needs of art and what they perceive to be the needs of their publics. In this exhibition, organized by Francesco Bonami, those publics could have their way with the silver-foiled atrium and could experience to the highest degree how an artist can collaborate with an institution, thus participating in the construction

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  passages February 2007

  Pontus Hultén

  To remember Pontus Hultén, legendary curator and director of six art institutions in Europe and America, Artforum asked three of Hultén’s colleagues to reflect on the man and his work.

  DANIEL BIRNBAUM

  AT A DINNER I attended some years ago, an artist friend of mine asked Harald Szeemann whether “Les Machines Celibataires” (The Bachelor Machines), a legendary 1976 exhibition inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass that treated the theme of obsession in contemporary art, hadn’t been a project by Pontus Hultén. Clearly pained at this younger individual’s mistake—the show was Szeemann’s own brainchild—the

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  print December 2005

  Ann Goldstein

  1 MICHAEL ASHER (ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO) For the Art Institute of Chicago’s 73rd American Exhibition, in 1979, Asher relocated a twentieth-century bronze cast of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s eighteenth-century statue of George Washington from the museum’s exterior to the eighteenth-century galleries. Twenty-six years later, at the invitation of James Rondeau, with Anne Rorimer as guest curator, Asher relocated it again, this time from the mayor’s office back to the AIC’s eighteenth-century galleries. By placing the work within its seemingly appropriate context, he has quietly shaken up the house.