Astrid Wege

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  print May 2013

  John Kelsey

  “How much of the painting is already in the TIFF?” With this query, John Kelsey—author, gallery director, and member of the art collectives Bernadette Corporation and Reena Spaulings—began his 2010 essay “100%.” The question hints at a larger concern that remains central to Kelsey’s work: In the current age of hyperactive networking, to what extent is painting, or art in general, already digitally encoded as soon as it enters the space of communication, even if it cannot be reduced to a purely communicative function? Or, as Kelsey himself put it in the catalogue for the 2012 Whitney

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  print March 2013

  Henry Flynt

  The Kunstverein in Düsseldorf pulled off a coup with “Henry Flynt: Activities 1959–,” the “first institutional solo show” of the seventy-two-year-old artist, traveling from the kunstverein to ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (March 2–May 19). Flynt, who coined the term concept art in 1961, is one of the “best-kept secrets of contemporary art history,” as Kunstverein Düsseldorf director Hans-Jürgen Hafner rightly says. Philosopher, mathematician, scientist, musician, and artist, Flynt has pursued “activities” that were underpinned by more than just a discipline-bridging approach. His

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  picks July 14, 2012

  Yvonne Rainer

  The question of how time-based, ephemeral art forms—such as live performance and dance—can be adequately exhibited in museum contexts has been intensively discussed in recent years, alongside an increasing number of retrospectives that have examined work by major figures of 1960s and ’70s performance art. In these shows, whether they are purely documentary or attempt to reenact live work, there is always an implied moment of translation. “Space, Body, Language,” the first European retrospective dedicated to Yvonne Rainer, one of the central artists of US dance and experimental feminist film,

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  print Summer 2012

  Anna Jermolaewa

  Hung in a corner, the central picture in this show was easy to overlook. A small untitled black-and-white photograph, it shows five young women and one young man. Taken in 1986 at a high school for the arts in what used to be Leningrad, it shows Anna Jermolaewa with her classmates; the artist came across the picture years later on a social-networking site. In May 1989, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she had fled Leningrad as an eighteen-year-old opposition sympathizer. Settling in Vienna, she later became known for video installations that on first glance seem to show a

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  print February 2012

  Omer Fast

  Omer Fast’s film and video installations constitute one long reflection on media-based translations and abstractions of reality. Often he reuses motifs, producing variations on themes from previous works. His new two-part slide and video installation Her face was covered (Part One & Part Two), 2011, for instance, seems like an afterimage of another work from last year, 5000 Feet Is the Best, which stirred up a lot of excitement at the last Venice Biennale and was also shown here—along with Nostalgia, 2009, for which Fast won the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst (National Gallery

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  print October 2011

  Evelyne Axell

  Axell-eration is the title Evelyne Axell, who shortened her name to the gender-neutral Axell at the beginning of her artistic career, gave to one of her paintings in 1965, and now “Axelleration. Evelyne Axell 1964–1972” is the title of the first extensive solo show in Germany by this Belgian artist, who died in a car crash in 1972. The painting shows the pedals of an automobile being operated by a woman in red high heels. Several characteristics of Pop art come together here: the fascination with speed and the car as a symbol of a new modern lifestyle; bright colors and an emphasis on stencil-like,

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  print September 2011

  Mel Chin

  “I was wondering, how do you get an idea into a system, and let it replicate within that system,” Mel Chin once remarked in an interview. He was talking about In the Name of the Place, 1995–97, a project for which, in collaboration with the GALA Committee, he “smuggled” art objects into the TV series Melrose Place as props. They conveyed messages you wouldn’t expect to find in a prime-time series: A takeout container, for instance, bore the slogan HUMAN RIGHTS/TURMOIL in Chinese. A similar strategy of using forms and ideas as viruses to infiltrate representational systems could be seen at work

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  previews May 2011

  “Stephen Prina: He Was But a Bad Translation”

  Stephen Prina’s work is constantly undergoing “translation”; his own projects often take on various aggregate states, just as works of art and music history can serve as points of departure for appropriation, reprise, and interpretation.

  Stephen Prina’s work is constantly undergoing “translation”; his own projects often take on various aggregate states, just as works of art and music history can serve as points of departure for appropriation, reprise, and interpretation. In Cologne, Prina will combine his filmic reflection on the architect, painter, and musician Bruce Goff (The Way He Always Wanted It II, 2009) with a series of watercolors whose motifs nod to art history and with a room-size installation of blinds (Blind No. 9–17, 2011), while in the theater, a continuous chromatic

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  print May 2011

  Olga Chernysheva

  The title of this show, “In the Middle of Things,” reflected that this is where you inescapably find yourself when looking at Olga Chernysheva’s art. But the “things” commanding our gaze and attention are rarely spectacular. “I work quite consciously with unimportant things,” the artist said in 2009, “always drawn to places where an event either has already happened or has not yet begun.” In this way, Chernysheva—who sees herself as a collector of impressions and images in a Baudelairean tradition—uses her camera to record expeditions through the urban landscape of post-Soviet Russia:

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  previews January 2011

  Anri Sala

  Anri Sala became well known in the late 1990s for works that reflected on life in his native Albania, and he has had a remarkable artistic career since.

  Anri Sala became well known in the late 1990s for works that reflected on life in his native Albania, and he has had a remarkable artistic career since. His video installations capture allegorical moments, often casting the notion of time in a central role. This spring, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal is giving Sala his first solo show in Canada, with works made in the past eight years including the video installations Long Sorrow, 2005, Answer Me, 2008, and The Clash, 2010, and the percussive installation Doldrums, 2008, all of which foreground the experience of

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  previews January 2011

  KRIWET

  As Ferdinand Kriwet has often made clear, processes of reception rarely play themselves out in linear form.

  As Ferdinand Kriwet has often made clear, processes of reception rarely play themselves out in linear form. So perhaps it is fitting that the artist (known since the 1960s as KRIWET) would receive a major institutional retrospective in his hometown only after numerous substantial showings elsewhere. A pioneer of new-media art, this self-described concrete poet quickly expanded his range to involve explosive mixed-media image-sound collages in the public sphere utilizing mass-culture outlets ranging from wall painting, signage, and spoken word to radio, TV, and film. In

• print December 2010

  1st Ural Industrial Biennial

  Sean Snyder’s film Exhibition, 2008, appropriates footage from the Soviet propaganda film Noble Impulses of the Soul (1965). We see Ukrainian agricultural workers standing before reproductions of paintings from Dresden’s Staatsgalerie in the 1960s; a group taking part in a seminar discussing art; the director of a provincial museum declaring that creating art institutions is “not less significant than the construction of a factory.” Snyder has, however, eliminated the original film’s didactic elucidations and edited the historical material, and his film thereby manages to offer a startlingly