diary January 04, 2011

Making History

DOHA, THE ISOLATED CAPITAL OF QATAR, is more a half-city than a city. Only partly built up. With a resort here and a luxury hotel there and long stretches of sand in between, the Persian Gulf lapping at its eastern side. I was there for the opening of the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, having landed a couple weeks or so after Qatar won the bid for the World Cup in 2022—an event that will quite literally make Doha. Over the next decade the workers will be brought in, the plots of land divided and subdivided, and this place at the end of the desert will materialize.

The people were visibly

film April 16, 2009

This Old House

NEW YORK IS ABOUT NOTHING if not the gamble of promise, the stakes that can put people in the jackpot or in bankruptcy. Stories unfolding here, however many their convolutions and fine points, are mainly pulled along by that idea of possibility on which the city was founded. What the characters Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, play out is the fear, constantly bracing New York, that to move away is to cut oneself off from possibility, to leave the dream stunted. But that is only partially the truth. There is a greater fear the story taps: that the dream is only a

diary February 10, 2009

Numbers Game

New York

TO A DISCOURSE often ranging between earnestness and dutifulness, Guy de Cointet’s nearly forgotten melodramas from a few decades ago sound new notes, but slip into the didactic key. At their best, they morph to the point of magic realism with a European playfulness and the tinny histrionics of Hollywood. (The late Frenchman lived in Los Angeles for the thrust of his career.) At their worst, they become language lessons the pedagogical insistence of which irritates in the manner of Sesame Street for grad students. The three performances staged Wednesday night at Greene Naftali, within an exhibition

previews January 2009

Luis Gispert

Luis Gispert's exhibition will trace a theme of “customization” through about thirty works made since 2002, many of which involve cars: photographs of tricked-out interiors, sculptures of lowriders, a film of a cheerleader lip-synching to an alarm.

In the mid-1970s the US economy was collapsing; in Miami, however, where the young Luis Gispert lived, cars costing hundreds of thousands of dollars were being bought with abandon, and fitted with bulletproof glass. That insular boom, produced by the cocaine trade, and the concurrent rise of hip-hop culture meet in Gispert’s work, which captures all the distortions of a city in which Art Deco confections house Burger Kings. The MOCA exhibition will trace a theme of “customization” through about thirty works made since 2002, many of which involve cars: photographs of

diary December 06, 2008

Fall from Grace

Miami

GRACE JONES was the event that night. But nobody, it seemed, not the crowds who came from the Deitch party, not Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, not even Yvonne Force Villareal, her vintage Halston caftan notwithstanding, was being admitted to the Delano basement for the performance. “You reach an age when you just can’t deal anymore with capacity,” Villareal exhaled to a friend after being given that classic doorperson line. People had steadily been dropping away, and, when she and Rohatyn did, many more figured the cause lost. “Now if those two can’t get in somewhere . . .” Nadia Gerazouni from the

diary November 17, 2008

Turin About

Turin

THAT EVERYONE WOULD SOON TIRE of those baggy exhibitions and themes, those endless fairs and “satellite projects,” was predictable. That their attitude would shift right around when the market did was predictable too. What was hard to foresee was that the market shift would produce a tidal wave bringing an electoral landslide for Barack Obama and then a dopamine flood overcoming the art world, significantly softening the economic blow. Some new words one heard at the second Torino Triennale (known as T2, like Judgment Day) and the fifteenth Artissima fair were manageable, sustainable, and

diary September 24, 2008

Doing Time

Yokohama, Japan

After a long silence, punctuated by nervous giggles from the audience, Beatrix Ruf—one of the five Yokohama Triennale curators working under artistic director Tsutomu Mizusawa—leaned in to her microphone and said carefully: “I think the quality of exhibitions in general is that you have to see them.” She was responding to an audience member’s charge, of the type often directed at these large international shows, that in necessitating being there—and perhaps more strongly than most exhibitions do, given the performance program spanning its eleven-week course—this third edition of the triennial

diary August 02, 2008

They Shoot Horses

Long Island, NY

To get to the Watermill Center from the Montauk Highway, you head north at the house with the white picket fence—away, that is, from the sand dunes and shoreline—and westward at the miniature windmill where Head of Pond Road forks. To people disciplined by the grids of Manhattan neighborhoods, directions like this can sound foreign to the point of seeming fantastical; they might as well be for Gliese 581 d (which is why so many of these same people do venture to places like Long Island, to seek out that alien form called “quaintness”). But those of us from New England are accustomed to the rural

diary June 08, 2008

Scandinavian Dasein

Stockholm

People were growing impatient, waiting to deplane at Stockholm-Arlanda as a faded red carpet was being unrolled, laboriously, across the tarmac. The preview of the Moderna Museet’s exhibition “Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age” would soon be starting, and I should have been on my way to the hotel, but I was still in seat 14B. Outside rippled an American flag. Two snipers were positioned on the roof of Terminal Five. Eventually a reedy man descended the portable staircase, and the passenger seated next to me whispered, “It’s the what’s he called? Like the president of the UN. That Korean guy.” It was

print Summer 2008

Blake Rayne

In planning the Blue Tower, a luxury-condominium complex on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Bernard Tschumi Architects faced, according to the firm’s website, a particular challenge: “to create an original architectural statement while simultaneously maximizing the zoning envelope.” To meet this challenge, the architects designed the structure to cantilever over the commercial space to the south so that its upper floors are larger than its footprint but within its sanctioned “envelope.” The Blue Tower thereby redefines a squat tenement-building skyline by pushing up against its confines. In Blake

previews May 2008

“After Nature”

Bringing together roughly ninety works made since 1894 that similarly evoke entropy and ruin, “After Nature” both anthologizes prophetic visions and produces its own.

Dystopian sentiments run through “After Nature,” a “visual novel” plotted around two other narratives: W. G. Sebald's 1988 prose poem that gives the show its title and Werner Herzog's And a Smoke Arose (2008), a reedit of one segment of his documentary Lessons of Darkness (1992), in which the Kuwaiti desert blazes in the 1991 oil fires like some strange planet. Bringing together roughly ninety works made since 1894 that similarly evoke entropy and ruin, the exhibition both anthologizes prophetic visions and produces its own. Here, marginal works come center: Eugene

print May 2008

Lutz Bacher

THIS IS BIEN HOA LOOKING AT IT FROM THE AIR BASE. THIS IS A PRETTY GOOD PICTURE. NOW DO YOU THINK THAT’S BEAUTIFUL? These sentences, written in blue ink by a man named Walter (presumably a US Air Force serviceman during the Vietnam War), accompany a black-and-white picture of a cluster of ramshackle buildings in one work from Lutz Bacher’s series “Bien Hoa,” 2006–2007, one of this exhibition’s two focuses. In each Bien Hoa, Bacher displays the often-annotated back of one of Walter’s original photographs, a cache of which she purchased from a thrift store, below her own larger photograph of its

Kyle Bentley