Martin Herbert

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  print Summer 2005

  Rezi van Lankweld

  For the longest time, following the example of a writer I considered nearly infallible, I thought the adjective that defined the quality inherent in clouds, rocks, and so on that permits us to see various things in them—perhaps most notoriously the face of Christ—was “magmatic,” and that this word got at the shifting quality of their anthropomorphism. It’d be a fair descriptor of Rezi van Lankveld’s paintings, too, had I not just looked “magmatic” up and found that, oops, it pertains exclusively to the actions of magma. Even so, at a stretch into geological metaphor it fits the Dutch painter’s

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  print May 2005

  Milena Dragicevic

  Two or three things I know about Milena Dragicevic: She’s Serbian by birth, raised in Canada, and London based. She’s a twin, and her paintings have previously applied the no-doubt-peculiar feeling of observing something that looks like you but isn’t to the post-Communist East and West. A couple of years ago she made a few too many canvases that diagrammed fashionable nostalgia: Soviet-era modernist architecture floating over color fields or striped backdrops that resembled ’60s American abstraction at its Clem-pleasing zenith of flatness. But she had a sideline in cleverly composed portraits

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  print April 2005

  OPENINGS: HANS OP DE BEECK

  The scene is a dimly lit diner. Hemispherical lamps hover over tables whose generic salt and pepper dispensers could date from the ’40s or from today, and the menu—in an unreadable script—furnishes no further clues about where (or when) you are. In any case, the proprietor has shut the kitchen and gone home. Outside the picture window, night has fallen over a landscape bisected by a highway that curves away invitingly. Of course it’s too dreamy to be true, not least because no institution—including GEM in The Hague, where Hans Op de Beeck’s etiolated walk-in environment Location 5, 2004, was

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  diary March 22, 2005

  Hello to an Idea

  London

  One of very few publicly funded galleries in the East End, the Showroom has a civic remit that primarily involves giving deserving artists their first London exhibitions. Last year, though, it expanded its brief to include an annual conference, which is why, during last Saturday’s freakish burst of warm weather, several dozen delegates elected to sit in the gallery’s windowless, triangular back room and listen to Thomas Lawson and Nicolas Bourriaud debate the modernist tropes encoded in The Incredibles. OK, so this was an uncharacteristically light moment but permissible: The conference’s title

• diary January 24, 2005

  Picture This

  London

  A few days into rehearsals for Tino Sehgal’s Institute of Contemporary Arts show—which took place in the galleries, with staff and invited guests permitted a sneak preview—it was clear that not everyone appreciates the Berlin-based artist’s deployment of dancing, singing, and chattering humans (and nothing else) as art. Sehgal’s works, which seek to embody a categorical shift away from object-based art production, are never photographed or otherwise documented and are usually unencumbered by wall labels. This contributes to a certain mystique, but can also sow confusion. Unexpectedly

• previews January 2005

  The Triumph of Painting

  Ostensibly celebrating the Saatchi Gallery's twentieth anniversary, this exhibition opens with a cherry-picking of his collection—forty-eight canvases by Kippenberger, Dumas, Tuymans, and three others—to make the case that Saatchi always knew what was best in painting. Thus awed, we're set up to predict a lasting future for the younger artists whose work he will display in subsequent months.

  While ostensibly celebrating the Saatchi Gallery's twentieth anniversary, this exhibition (actually made up of three parts over the course of a year) looks more like an aggressive defense of the beleaguered adman's taste. It opens with a cherry-picking of his collection—forty-eight canvases by Kippenberger, Dumas, Tuymans, and three others—to make the case that Saatchi always knew what was best in painting. Thus awed, we're set up to predict a lasting future for the younger artists whose work he will display in subsequent months. Sceptics may wonder what

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  print December 2004

  London

  UNLESS SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENS VERY SOON, 2004 will go down in the annals of British art history as the Year of the Momart Fire. And—without denying that the immolation of over a hundred artworks (including key pieces by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Patrick Heron, and Gillian Ayres) in an allegedly undermonitored East London storage unit is a disaster for all concerned—that’s a shame. Not only because it’s impossible, in retrospect, to separate the event from gleeful attempts by British mainstream journalists to spin it as a supremely appropriate Viking funeral for Young British

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  diary November 28, 2004

  Eastward Ho

  London

  If your evening of private views begins on the gleaming avenues of Piccadilly and officially ends with an undignified scrabble for the last lukewarm bottle of Rolling Rock from a plastic bucket, it’s likely you’ve been on an eastward trajectory. And on a night when the three most promising openings were spread across town, with the less formal East End shows tending to stay open later, there was really no other way to go. I headed first for Dryden Goodwin’s second solo at Stephen Friedman Gallery. A long-term fixture here, Goodwin exemplifies a classic predicament: potentially interesting artist

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  print September 2004

  the Turner Prize

  “EVERYBODY GETS A TURN. THAT’S WHY IT’S called the Turner Prize,” quipped Dinos Chapman to Time Out (London) last year, when he and his brother Jake were nominated for the UK’s most prestigious art award. There may be no love lost between the Chapmans and the Turner jury’s chairman, Tate director Nicholas Serota (it’s been widely bruited that the brothers’ public Tate baiting cost them the prize), but here’s one thing they can agree on: Everybody does get a turn. OK, not everybody—no doubt veteran protesters the Stuckists will once again camp out on Tate Britain’s steps during the show’s run,

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  print September 2004

  Material Witness: Santiago Sierra

  WHEN SANTIAGO SIERRA WAS INVITED to inaugurate the new exhibition space of London’s venerable Lisson Gallery in 2002, he was fairly well behaved for someone who, in Mexico City five years earlier, had flambéed a gallery’s interior with gasoline and a blowtorch. The Madrid-born, Mexico City–based provocateur merely blocked access to the building for three weeks (using a beautifully constructed metal shutter), leaving would-be private-view attendees stranded on the pavement sans the expected perks of alcohol and canapés. Still, it was too challenging for many, including one big-time collector who

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  previews September 2004

  Glenn Brown

  Since the early ’90s Glenn Brown has copied reproductions of paintings by Auerbach, de Kooning, Fragonard, and Dalí, as well as sci-fi book-cover illustrations, emphasizing the flaws in his source material (overripe color, weird cropping, flattened impasto—the latter rendered by Brown in spectacular trompe l’oeil) while seemingly equating grandness and schlock.

  Since the early ’90s Glenn Brown has copied reproductions of paintings by Auerbach, de Kooning, Fragonard, and Dalí, as well as sci-fi book-cover illustrations, emphasizing the flaws in his source material (overripe color, weird cropping, flattened impasto—the latter rendered by Brown in spectacular trompe l’oeil) while seemingly equating grandness and schlock. Yet he’s far from being just another frolicker at originality’s wake: The British painter’s increasingly unfaithful remakes suggest an interlaced articulation of subjectivity and deliberate misprision, while his vitrined objects smothered

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  previews September 2004

  Ian Davenport

  Ian Davenport tests the properties of household paint—pouring it, dripping it, blowing it, using electric fans, anything but brushing it. His recent fifty-nine-foot-long wall work at Tate Britain was a delirious multihued parade of syringed dribbles, and a similar centerpiece is planned for this, his first retrospective.

  “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” A proud example of the latter, Ian Davenport tests the properties of household paint—pouring it, dripping it, blowing it, using electric fans, anything but brushing it. He began this practice in the late ’80s and in 1991 became, at twenty-five, the youngest-ever Turner Prize nominee. Having perfected a mode of colorful post-painterly abstraction that winks to theory-heads and aesthetes alike, he’s lately gone gigantic: Davenport’s recent fifty-nine-foot-long wall work at Tate Britain was a delirious multihued parade of syringed