Judith Rodenbeck

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  previews January 2016

  “Yoko Ono: Lumière”

  The remarkably resilient Ono is currently experiencing yet another career revival as her compositional and musical experimentation is discovered by a new generation. On the heels of her solo show at New York’s MoMA, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon will stage a massive survey—the artist’s first in France—of more than one hundred pieces from the six-decade career of the Fluxus maven, post-punk diva, and vital octogenarian. The show and nearly five-hundred-page catalogue will present instructions, scores, paintings, objects, performances,

• previews January 2014

  “Allan Kaprow: Other Ways”

  In Kaprow’s words, actions are not “re-performed” but “reinvented,” and choreography is communicated not by “score” but as “recipe”—that is, as instructions for how to “cook” a work. Kaprow designed this culinary metaphor to evoke the everyday action of “just doing.” In this career-spanning show, however, expect to sample some of the artist’s best molecular cuisine, which, spread across sites throughout Barcelona and elsewhere in Spain, is set to include ten to twenty major works, including the reinvention of Kaprow’s signal piece from 1959,

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  previews May 2011

  Yayoi Kusama

  Now at the age of eighty-two, the maverick Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama will be the subject of a 150-work retrospective.

  Now at the age of eighty-two, the maverick Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama will be the subject of a 150-work retrospective. Organized as a series of ambient clusters, the show presents different aspects and periods of Kusama’s six-decade career. Wols-like works from the late 1940s, the magnificent “Infinity Net” paintings of the late ’50s, “accumulations” and “self-obliteration” projects of the ’60s, a new mirrored “infinity corridor,” and other images made just this spring, rounded out by carbuncled furniture, painted bodies, visionary writing, scrapbooks, photographs,

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  previews September 2010

  Artpark 1974-1984

  In its early years, Artpark successfully melded a populist mission with rambunctious artistic experimentalism, at one point drawing fifteen thousand visitors per week.

  Artpark, located on spectacular grounds just a few miles from both Love Canal and Niagara Falls, was founded in 1974 as a state-funded laboratory for impermanent art. In its early years, the park successfully melded a populist mission with rambunctious artistic experimentalism, at one point drawing fifteen thousand visitors per week. “Artpark: 1974–1984” traces its vibrant first decade, covering more than two hundred projects ranging from poetry to direct environmental interventions, flicker films to freeform radio, painting to performance. Documentary materials,

• previews September 2008

  Christoph Büchel

  Recuperated from the debacle at Mass MoCA last year, Maximalist bad boy Christoph Büchel brings his sedimentary dystopias to Kassel for newly appointed curator Rein Wolfs’s first exhibition at the Fridericianum.

  Recuperated from the debacle at Mass MoCA last year, Maximalist bad boy Christoph Büchel brings his sedimentary dystopias to Kassel for newly appointed curator Rein Wolfs’s first exhibition at the Fridericianum. The Swiss artist’s immersive environment, Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), attempts to address no less than the history, society, and politics of Germany; befitting such grand ambitions, Büchel will engage the entirety of the kunsthalle’s exhibition space (though the show has been “pared down” to a mere five large-scale, interrelated installations). The

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  print Summer 2006

  ALLAN KAPROW: LIFE LIKE ART

  Allan Kaprow’s death this spring at age seventy-eight, a profound loss by any measure, is all the more impropitious given the recent upsurge of interest in his work and the growing awareness of his contemporary relevance. While his happenings gained widespread notoriety in artistic circles and mass culture alike during the ’60s and ’70s, his evolving critical writings and activities both then and in later years resonate strongly within the context of today’s vital considerations of performance and spectatorship, aesthetics and politics, and private experience in an age of spectacularized commerce.

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  print Summer 2006

  Judith Rodenbeck

  SITTING AT a Howard Johnson’s in New Jersey in 1957, artists Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts, and George Brecht drafted a grant proposal that might be seen as a programmatic statement of the direction advanced art would take over the coming decade:

  In all the arts, we are struck by a general loosening of forms which in the past were relatively closed, strict, and objective, to ones which are more personal, free, random, and open, often suggesting in their seemingly casual formats an endless changefulness and boundlessness. In music, it has led to the use of what was once considered noise; in painting