Kevin McGarry

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  interviews November 2019

  1000 WORDS: MATT WOLF

  IT’S DIFFICULT FOR ME not to think of Matt Wolf as a queer filmmaker, because he’s the first one I ever knew personally. He is also the first openly gay man I ever met. When I arrived in Manhattan from northern New Hampshire in 2001 at the age of eighteen, any notions I possessed of urbanity or sexual identity I had imagined in a bucolic vacuum. A chance introduction to Wolf, then a sagacious nineteen-year-old from San Jose, California, not only initiated my kinship with other flesh-and-blood homosexuals, but also affirmed the importance of an intellectualized communal identity. While Matt has

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  diary May 28, 2017

  Guest of a GUESS

  IT HAPPENED IN LA’S AFTERLIFE, last Saturday. After the opening of the Broad, after Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth, and even after some kickback to the fantasy of Los Angeles as art paradise (in small waves of transplanted New Yorkers and others returning east), another seismic contemporary art institution touched down on a heretofore native stretch of Wilshire Boulevard just below the tony flats of Hancock Park.

  Following a three-year renovation, the Marciano Art Foundation opened its doors in the former Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, designed by Millard Sheets, to immediately become one of

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  diary January 31, 2017

  Shadows and FOG

  BEFORE LAST WEEK’S POLITICAL STORM, one of the first art fairs to blow into 2017 was FOG Design + Art Fair in San Francisco. In theme with its atmospherically obstructive name, gale-force winds and torrential rain grounded a spate of incoming flights, among them my own. But as I touched down early the next morning, my phone perked up with tidings of prefair goings-on among local galleries. At my request, I received a pic of artist Nicole Wermers and dealer Jessica Silverman, framed by the clean red lines of a Shiro Kuramata unit whose shelves were loaded with sand in a work by Wermers included

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  print December 2016

  the 32nd São Paulo Bienal

  INCERTEZA VIVA means “live uncertainty” in Portuguese. As the title for Jochen Volz’s São Paulo Bienal, this phrase positions the show as the latest in a series of recent, loosely like-minded international exhibitions—from Nicolas Bourriaud’s 2014 Taipei Biennial, “The Great Acceleration,” to Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 Venice Biennale, “All The World’s Futures”—that have variously engaged the topics of eschatology and the Anthropocene. Although the most significant art-historical story of the past decade is the market’s supremacy over all aspects of contemporary art, the urge to intellectualize

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  diary October 18, 2016

  Taking It to the MAAT

  AS THE ECONOMY of the European Union’s arguably mellowest nation falters there are murmurs of a “Departugal” on the horizon. Nevertheless, 2016 seems to be the year that Portugal sashayed onto the runway of contemporary art. In March, a pilot edition of the ArcoLisboa art fair took place at the Fábrica Nacional da Cordoaria in the capital’s Belém neighborhood, and last week the Museu Arte Arquitetura Tecnologia (MAAT) opened just a few meters up the Tagus river. Helmed by Portuguese curator Pedro Gadanho, who left a post at MoMA for this homecoming, the museum is housed in a pair of buildings:

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  print September 2016

  Manifesta 11

  I REMEMBER WANDERING DOWN Zurich’s Bahnhofstraße late at night some years ago and thinking that if this was one of the most secure streets I’d ever been on, it was also possibly the most sinister. The flagship private banks interspersed among the avenue’s luxury boutiques looked like Olympian mausoleums. They were groomed, still, and fortified, better rooted into the foundations of neoliberal society than the governments that purportedly regulated them.

  Zurich, the site of this year’s Manifesta, is something of a departure from the exhibition’s previous farther-flung host cities, whose hybridity

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  diary June 12, 2016

  Drag Race

  STEPPING OFF MY FLIGHT from Los Angeles and into Tegel airport, my eyes serendipitously met the Aviator shades of artist-comedienne and fellow Angeleno Casey Jane Ellison. She was delighted to light a cigarette only feet from the arrivals hall. Extinguished, we got a taxi to Mitte while she explained the “Google Roast” she was in town to do, which was Not in the Berlin Biennale. That’s a proper designation for a series of acutely tangential performances and activities planned throughout Berlin this summer, which in fact are organized under the auspices of the DIS-curated ninth edition, #BB9, “

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  print Summer 2016

  the EVA International

  LIMERICK’S EVA INTERNATIONAL dates back to 1977, when it began as an annual exhibition of contemporary works from Ireland and abroad. The show’s curatorial roster would eventually include such luminaries as the Italian art historian Germano Celant (in 1991), the Spanish curator Rosa Martínez (in 2000), and the Chinese curator Hou Hanru (in 2008). In 2012, EVA commenced a schedule of alternating years and rebranded itself with the subtitle “Ireland’s Biennial.” This most recent iteration, EVA’s third as a biyearly event, was curated by Koyo Kouoh, the Basel- and Dakar-based founding director of

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  diary May 12, 2016

  Gold Standards

  ARRIVING IN NICE, I boarded a Tesla driven by a chauffeur who looked like a young Isabelle Huppert wearing a silk pantsuit and a five-hundred-dollar Hermès Kelly bracelet, named for Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco. This principality, the second smallest (after the Vatican) and second most densely populated (after Macau) sovereign state in the world—3/4 square mile holding forty thousand people—was our destination. After thirty minutes of whipping past palm trees lining an immaculate coast road, we finally reached a snarl of Italian sports cars, scaffoldings, and high-rises, upon which my driver

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  diary April 14, 2016

  Mi Oh Mi

  LANDING IN MILAN LAST WEEK for the twenty-first edition of MiArt, the city seemed lit by a new fire. Had last spring’s opening of the gilded new Fondazione Prada ignited a fresh fervor? Or had the influential galleries enlivening Italy’s financial center simply struck a golden mean between the historic and the contemporary?

  The excitement was more than evident among the crowd at Wednesday’s opening for Carsten Höller’s survey at HangarBicocca, the massive exhibition space in a former Pirelli plant on the far north side of town. I was practically swallowed up by the scores of locals queuing up to

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  diary January 19, 2016

  The Simple Life

  THE SUN NEVER SETS on the international art-fair circuit. In fact, in the southern hemisphere, it blazed down on the first such event of 2016: Este Arte, whose second edition opened a fortnight ago in an abandoned disco a mile or so inland from La Barra, a trendy village thirty minutes up the shore from Punta del Este. 

  Known as the Saint-Tropez of Uruguay, Buenos Aires’s Hamptons, and other glossy—I must say, accurate—blue-blooded superlatives, Punta del Este would seem to have the bare materials for sustaining a small fair: far-flung mystique, perfect weather, and, most important, a seasonal

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  diary December 07, 2015

  Liquid Assets

  ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS happened Thursday morning, something I look forward to all year. It wasn’t the breakfast celebrating Isaac Julien’s collaboration with Rolls Royce at the National YoungArts Foundation or the Alexandre Arrechea Kreëmart project at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. It was the naming of Pantone’s 2016 colors of the year: Rose Quartz and an ethereal cornflower blue called Serenity. 

  The announcement is a seemingly simple, top-down decision with massive butterfly effects, like the federal funds rate or the dimensions allowed for a photo posted to Instagram. It was the