previews May 2014

“Walid Raad: Preface”

“Preface,” Walid Raad’s first major exhibition in a French museum, conjoins the refined research the artist has conducted as the Atlas Group (regarding the real and representational violence of Lebanese civil wars) and Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, his ongoing investigation, begun in 2007, into the suspiciously vigorous appearance of Arab modernism in global art institutions. On display will be new Atlas Group works that give form—that of the assassinated body—to Raad’s prior preoccupations with the abstractly

print February 2014

“The Way of the Shovel”

MORE THAN MOST EXHIBITIONS, “The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology” aspires to give material form to a theoretical argument. Its curator, Dieter Roelstraete, has long been interested in the relation between art and historical excavation, and the show takes both impetus and title from a polemical essay he penned in 2009. This titular echo raises fundamental questions about the relationship between text and object, writing and digging: There is, indeed, a marked difference between Roelstraete’s verbal and curatorial formulations. Whereas the essay decried what he lamented as art’s “historiographic

previews January 2013

Shirin Neshat

This midcareer retrospective offers a chance to reframe Shirin Neshat’s work.

The inked-over countenances of women holding, hiding, or otherwise harnessing guns in Shirin Neshat’s “Women of Allah” series, 1993–97, have become emblematic of art from a place all too easily amalgamated as the “Islamic world.” While themes of oppression and revolution in these arresting portraits have been well plumbed, the images’ more profound valences (regarding love and other matters more philosophical) warrant further consideration. This midcareer retrospective—featuring two extensive photo projects (“Women of Allah” and the recent “Book of Kings,” 2012) as

print Summer 2012

“This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s”

IN SEPTEMBER 1983, Lorraine O’Grady made good on a decades-old avant-garde bromide and brought art to the street. Or rather, she reframed the street as art—literally. For her work Art Is . . . , O’Grady mounted an elaborately oversize golden frame atop a float set to proceed along Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in the annual African American Day Parade. The caption ART IS . . . , handwritten on the skirt that wrapped around the base of the float, confirmed that the ever-shifting vistas of urban life and public spectatorship isolated by the frame were indeed “art.” Dancing around

previews September 2008

Jacques Villeglé

Singularly consistent in his media of choice since the late 1940s, when he first collaborated with Raymond Hains to produce work made from already-torn posters, Jacques Villeglé considers himself a history “painter” for the twentieth century, his oeuvre as a chronicle of our “collective reality” honed at the intersection of urban space, commodity culture, and political history.

Singularly consistent in his media of choice since the late 1940s, when he first collaborated with Raymond Hains to produce work made from already-torn posters, Jacques Villeglé considers himself a history “painter” for the twentieth century, his oeuvre as a chronicle of our “collective reality” honed at the intersection of urban space, commodity culture, and political history. To distance this practice from an art backdrop dominated by the readymade and its inheritors, the retrospective positions the artist’s ongoing engagements with music and film as well as his less

previews September 2007

André Cadere

Nominally the most important and least known French artist of the 1970s, institutional provocateur André Cadere has thus far eluded dominant accounts of European Conceptualism. This retrospective aims to redress that omission by exhibiting a staggering sixty of his signature barres de bois rond—totemic handpainted wooden rods—alongside film and photographic documentation of his promenade-performances, which feature the artist carrying and sometimes depositing the sculpture-paintings into a range of public and art-world sites, usually uninvited. Re-creations of

print May 2007

SOUND TRACKS: THE ART OF ALLORA AND CALZADILLA

AS SOMETHING LIKE THE SPRING BREAK OF THE ART WORLD, Art Basel Miami Beach is the kind of give-’em-all-you-got occasion where one expects to see more than just the occasional over-the-top flourish or media-friendly stunt. Perhaps it was this very context that made Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s installation Clamor, 2006, shown during the fair last December at Miami’s Moore Space, seem such an uneasy spectacle: a hulking fiberglass structure—pale gray, topped by domelike convexities, and with a peculiarly terraced facade of jutting rectilinear slabs—embedded in a sculptural outcrop

previews May 2007

Allora & Calzadilla

Having devoted more than a decade to a collaborative practice that combines pointed critique of socioeconomic inequity with humorous détournement and rigorous formal experiment, (Jennifer) Allora & (Guillermo) Calzadilla are primed for their first comprehensive solo exhibition. Among the works on view will be recent sound-sculpture installations about ordinary life’s relationship to global militarization and violence, including Clamor, 2006, in which the artists pipe a cacophony of war songs from various historical periods and geographies from a bunker-like, “morpho-illogical”

print April 2007

Rudolf Stingel

THE AUSTERELY MINIMALIST interior of Chicago’s Josef Paul Kleihues–designed Museum of Contemporary Art may never have looked so good as when lit by the fluorescent hues of Dan Flavin’s neon retrospective in 2005, but until now—that is, until the arrival of Rudolf Stingel’s current installation—it had never been put to such good use. For this, his first large-scale survey exhibition in the United States, Stingel seems intent on emphasizing the distinction between the logics of appearance and purpose. (It is precisely this dialectic that has motivated his twenty-year investigation into

print Summer 2006

DESERT OF THE REAL: THE ART OF MAI-THU PERRET

THAT THE ART WORLD has something of a schoolgirl’s crush on utopia is yesterday’s news—but the infatuation shows no sign of waning. Aesthetics, we keep being told, are either complicit or relational, never somewhere in-between, a formulation that makes reconciling contemporary art and its oft-presumed preoccupation with social change very hard work. For Mai-Thu Perret, a Swiss-born artist (she now divides her time between New York and Geneva) who wants to distance herself from ideological absolutes without falling prey to empty relativism, this “gap between what art can do and what we wish it

passages February 2006

Raymond Hains and Arman

LAST FALL, WITHIN A WEEK and across an ocean, the careers of two of the last living artists associated with what Pierre Restany in 1960 christened “le Nouveau Réalisme” came to an abrupt halt. Cancer claimed the seventy-six-year-old French-American sculptor Arman in New York on October 22, and self-proclaimed “citizen of the world” Raymond Hains died in Paris on October 28 at age seventy-eight. That the former’s death was mourned as the loss of a “tireless creator” by French President Jacques Chirac and the latter’s passing was lamented by the venerable office of the minister of culture not only

Hannah Feldman