Daniel Birnbaum

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  passages July/August 2020

  GERMANO CELANT

  THERE ARE ENDLESS STORIES about Germano Celant, the truly imposing impresario who died of Covid-19 in April at the age of seventy-nine. Since his passing, he has been called the “North Star of contemporary art,” and “one of the last, if not the last, great myth-maker[s].” He has been compared to Zorro and dubbed a God. But he was also a contradictory figure. While some describe him as an extraordinarily sensitive curator, one who was always on the artist’s side, others saw him as an art-world player who could be utterly ruthless when pursuing his ambitions. “I don’t feel like a man of power,”

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  passages September 12, 2019

  Ronald Jones (1952–2019)

  HOW WILL ANYONE fill the void Ronald Jones leaves behind? The spaces he created could only be inhabited by him. Ron was an interdisciplinary experimentalist, a perverse conceptualist, a virtuoso educator. He was the most charming of mythomaniacs and a quintessential American who spent almost two decades in Europe, primarily in Stockholm and London.

  It was in New York in the late 1980s, however, that he gained prominence as an artist. In those days he was the “self-styled mayor of SoHo,” as one of his best friends put it, surrounded by admirers and closely connected to some of the best galleries.

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  previews September 2019

  “DANIEL STEEGMANN MANGRANÉ: A LEAF-SHAPED ANIMAL DRAWS THE HAND”

  Curated by Lucia Aspesi and Fiammetta Griccioli

  Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s work traces the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the human and the animal. This survey of the Catalan artist’s oeuvre will present almost two dozen of his key pieces from the past twenty years, many of which were inspired by the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1960s and ’70s. In Elegancia y renuncia (Elegance and Resignation), 2011, for example, he inscribes geometric shapes onto a dried leaf through which light is projected. The HangarBicocca’s vast exhibition spaces will be partitioned by transparent

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  print December 2017

  Daniel Birnbaum

  1 JASPER JOHNS (ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, LONDON; CURATED BY ROBERTA BERNSTEIN AND EDITH DEVANEY) Before I knew anything about Jasper Johns, I encountered his work in a class taught by the late, great Nelson Goodman, who seemed to appreciate the painter’s work mainly as a demonstration of the riddles at the center of his own philosophical investigations. The most dramatic of these concerned the legendary “grue paradox”: Professor Goodman would point at a projected slide of a green target painting and say something puzzling like, “All these paintings by Jasper could be grue,” explaining that grue

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  print November 2017

  WILDEST DREAMS

  FROM MUSEUMS TO HOLLYWOOD, visionary artists and filmmakers—Paul McCarthy, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Jeff Koons, and Marina Abramović, to name a few—are taking on ambitious virtual-reality projects. Writer and artist DOUGLAS COUPLAND—who has prognosticated some of the most critical generational shifts of our time—and curator DANIEL BIRNBAUM met to discuss these endeavors and the future of technology and desire.

  DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Have you seen anything memorable in VR?

  DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Yes . . . it was a beautiful summer evening three years ago. I’d invited a few friends over, and one of them arrived with the most recent Oculus Rift headset. I had two VR experiences. First, I flew over a Cajun swamp in pursuit of purple lights in the distance. Then I collected asteroids in the rings of Saturn. No sound.

  The twist was that when I removed the goggles, I looked at my favorite room in the world, filled with good friends on that beautiful summer evening, and I thought, Man, what a dump.

  The thing about VR is

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  print September 2017

  THINKING TWICE

  HELL IS FULL OF GOOD INTENTIONS, but heaven is full of good works: This maxim, attributed to a medieval French abbot, is one that contemporary curators should bear in mind. The team behind Documenta 14, earnestly dubbed “Learning from Athens,” has issued so many well-intended progressive statements and condemnations of the neocolonial, patriarchal, heteronormative world order that it’s hardly surprising the exhibition occasionally feels like a trip to quinquennial perdition. The good news: This Documenta is not a monolithically pious exercise, but a multiplicity of proposals. It involves radio

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  books Summer 2017

  Summer Reading

  GLENN LIGON

  Stuart Hall (1932–2014), the Jamaican-born British theorist who was one of the founders of the field of cultural studies, gave a series of talks at Harvard in 1994. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Harvard University Press), edited and introduced by Kobena Mercer with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr., draws from those lectures and promises to be essential reading for those seeking to understand Hall’s tremendous impact on scholars, artists, and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Glenn Ligon is a New York–based artist.

  ASMA NAEEM

  Because of Deepak Unnikrishnan’s

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  print May 2017

  the Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, and Skulptur Projekte Münster

  RUMORS BEGAN SWIRLING this winter about the two processions with horses that would launch Documenta 14 in April, with all the exhibition’s previous directors volunteering to participate in a ride from Athens to Kassel to inaugurate this year’s iteration. Originally, the Athens parade, modeled on a procession found on one of the Parthenon’s friezes, was to include miniature Skyrian ponies, which sounded rather unheroic, but apparently Greece’s Central Archaeological Council intervened and normal-size horses were ridden by all. Another favorite speculation was whether the Greeks should be grateful

• previews May 2017

  “MICHAEL RIEDEL: CV”

  Frankfurt-based Michael Riedel is the creator of a parallel universe replete with artworks, artifacts, and cultural situations that look just like their counterparts in our own reality, only subtly distorted. Taking the résumé as both material and structure, “CV” will cover the period from 1994 to 2017 and will include barely known early works that anticipate the artist’s more visible artistic projects involving publishing, recordings, gastronomy (the Freitagsküche in Frankfurt, for example), and the restless activities in the studio/performance space Oskar-von-Miller-Straße

• previews January 2017

  Philippe Parreno

  With this retrospective, Philippe Parreno returns to Porto, the city in which he created the large Earthwork that appeared as an extraterrestrial landscape in his film C.H.Z. (Continuously Habitable Zones), 2011. Curated by the museum’s own Suzanne Cotter, the exhibition will include major works from almost three decades, including the installation Quasi Objects: Marquee (cluster). Disklavier Piano. My Room is a Fish Bowl, 2014, in which floating fish appear to control an intricate choreography of light and sound. Like many of Parreno’s works, it suggests a synthesis,

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  print December 2016

  Daniel Birnbaum

  1 PHILIPPE PARRENO (TATE MODERN, LONDON; CURATED BY ANDREA LISSONI WITH VASSILIS OIKONOMOPOULOS) Parreno has turned the Turbine Hall into a mesmerizing machine producing light, sound, cinematic effects, and choreography: Inflated fish float in the air, huge planes reminiscent of Russian Constructivism ascend and descend inscrutably in the semidarkness, and a flickering apparatus seems to send out signals that trigger reactions throughout the entire museum. There are echoes of Duchamp and Cage, and even more obviously Richard Hamilton. But this expansive machinery goes beyond such precursors in

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  print September 2016

  FLORAL IMPERATIVE: THE ART OF WILLEM DE ROOIJ

  WHETHER AS A CREATOR of ravishing bouquets and sumptuous textiles or as a curator of disparate but uniformly stunning objects, WILLEM DE ROOIJ has never shied away from beauty. But, as DANIEL BIRNBAUM argues in the pages that follow, de Rooij has been equally unflinching in his insistence on the political and historical dimensions of aesthetic experience, from imperialist tropes that have persisted across centuries to the modernist tension between allegory and abstraction. In advance of the Dutch artist’s exhibition at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst–MMK 2 next month—a show that will trace the arc of de Rooij’s career, from works he created with Jeroen de Rijke to his practice as it has unfolded since his collaborator’s untimely death in 2006—Birnbaum elucidates de Rooij’s seductive investigations of form, both its engagement and its autonomy.

  IN THE LATE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, Dutch artist Melchior d’Hondecoeter painted a suite of curious avian fantasias. These pictures, whose extravagantly plumed subjects are depicted in elegant gardens or unspoiled wilderness, have lost none of their charm, but viewers today may feel a certain uneasiness in their contemplation. If you are used to thinking about art in terms of its historical and political contexts, you can hardly help noticing that in these beguiling scenes we find European and “exotic” birds improbably commingling under the dominion of the Western eye. Though d’Hondecoeter’s artistic