Martin Herbert

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  print May 2010

  OPENINGS: JOS DE GRUYTER AND HARALD THYS

  FOR ALMOST A DECADE, Jos de Gruyter worked at Ten Weyngaert, a Brussels community center that began as a utopian experiment in the 1980s. Intended as a place that citizens could visit in order to freely express their creativity—a latter-day Esalen—the center is now frequented, de Gruyter says, by disaffected individuals: failed artists, retired yoga instructors, and so on. These denizens often partake in art therapy programs there; when invited to access their imaginative inner worlds through such sessions, they often become confused, angry, or depressed, and the ensuing atmosphere of silence

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  print April 2010

  THIRD LIFE: THE ART OF JOHN STEZAKER

  FOR SOME LUCKY PHOTOGRAPHS, there’s an interval between disfavor and disposal—a hiatus that offers a second chance at life. In our disembodied age, this purgatory is usually the wilds of eBay, although prints and reproductions also linger on in actual flea markets, antiquarian bookstores, and thrift shops. Few photographs, however, are discarded and restored more than once—unless they happen to be swept up in the vicissitudes of John Stezaker’s forty-year career. Some of the pictures the artist has used have inhabited this liminal state multiple times, their drift and resurgence tracing an

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  previews January 2010

  Ceal Floyer

  This survey, collating some twenty works from 1992 through the present, accordingly promises plenty of practiced bait-and-switch, with cerebral pleasure giving way to rippling disquiet.

  Ceal Floyer has a mathematician’s brain, a phenomenologist’s eye, and—belying the apparent reticence of her Minimalist-Conceptualist amalgams—a conjurer’s showmanship. Moving fleetly between formats (sculpture, video, drawing, photography, sound), the Pakistani-born, London-raised, Berlin-based artist specializes in elegant, witty, circular proposals that could almost be one-liners if they didn’t open onto questionings of perceptual habit and expectation. A bucket, seemingly catching a leak, conceals a speaker playing dripping sounds (Bucket, 1999); a performance is

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  print December 2009

  Martin Herbert

  MARTIN HERBERT

  1 “Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!” (Whitechapel Gallery, London) A double event: One of London’s best-loved institutions reopened, and this stellar retrospective—the renovated Whitechapel’s inaugural show—landed in the East End like a disheveled but highly advanced spacecraft. This was a public service to most of us, who had previously been unable to consider Genzken’s achievement at full historical stretch. Curated by the Whitechapel’s Andrea Tarsia and by Kasper König and Nina Gülicher of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the show connected the dots (and illuminated the leaps)

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  previews September 2009

  Gustav Metzger

  Leading off with early paintings, the Serpentine will feature Gustav Metzger’s notable metaphors for our ineluctable journey on the Oblivion Express.

  Capitalism, to Gustav Metzger, has always looked like a handcart to hell—so it’s apt that this extensive survey of the Nuremberg-born, London-based, officially “stateless” octogenarian’s six-decade career follows a global economic upheaval. Leading off with early paintings, the Serpentine will feature Metzger’s notable metaphors for our ineluctable journey on the Oblivion Express—his notorious “auto-destructive” pieces (disintegrating sculptures, acid-splashed canvases) begun in the late ’50s—in addition to

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  print May 2009

  OPENINGS: GUIDO VAN DER WERVE

  FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, starting on April 28, 2007, our blue planet went one way and Guido van der Werve went the other. Compressing that day into eight minutes and forty seconds of time-lapse photography transferred to high-definition video, Nummer negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world, 2007, shows the black-clad Dutchman standing on tundra at the North Pole, dwarfed—in the static composition—by blank icescape and endless blue sky. Making gestures that semaphore frozen discomfort, the artist slowly shuffles clockwise. Meanwhile, as evidenced by the sun’s accelerated passage from left to

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  previews January 2009

  “Altermodern: Tate Triennial”

  A dozen years after he minted the term relational aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud has a new buzzword: altermodernism.

  A dozen years after he minted the term relational aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud has a new buzzword: altermodernism. For the influential French curator and critic, this is what comes after postmodernism; a renewed response to reality, in which artists consider our globalized moment—hallmarked by ubiquitous communication, travel, migration, and standardization—via work that is postmedium, interdisciplinary, puckishly drawn to deceptive fictions, and eco-friendly. And intercontinental: In Bourriaud’s iteration of the fourth Tate Triennial—an event doubling as his latest

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  print January 2009

  OPENINGS: TRIS VONNA-MICHELL

  TRIS VONNA-MICHELL’S PROJECTS invariably develop from something seemingly inconsequential: a stash of old family photographs; the late French poet Henri Chopin’s taste for quail eggs; Germans named Hahn or Huhn. By the time the British artist is done, however, he’ll have traveled to other countries and explored the possibility of knowledge emerging from the intersections of personal experience, history, and coincidence. And by the time the audience hears about it, it’s usually in a fractured, postmedium manner. There are performances in which Vonna-Michell first sets (or asks the audience to

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  print November 2008

  OPENINGS: KATERINA SEDÁ

  ONE SUNNY SATURDAY IN MAY 2003, the majority of citizens in the Czech Republic village of Ponětovice (population approximately three hundred) went shopping at exactly 7 am and spent ten crowns each on their groceries. They opened their windows at 9, swept their houses at 10, cycled around town at 10:30. At noon they had dumplings with tomato sauce for lunch. At 5 pm they all met up for a beer. And at 10 pm, in a final flourish of civic synchrony, they flipped off their lights and went to sleep. Why? Because Kateřina Šedá, then a student at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, asked them to. Or told

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  print October 2008

  Manifesta 7

  MANIFESTA HAS ALWAYS come across as a complexly sensitized biennial, reactive not only to the morphing state of post-Wall Europe—the crucible in which it was conceived in 1991—but also to itself. The so-called European Biennial of Contemporary Art has leaped, in its itinerancy and self-reinvention, from the city of Luxembourg’s affluent avenues (Manifesta 2, 1998) to Ljubljana, Slovenia, then in proximity to ethnic violence (Manifesta 3, 2000). It has temporarily abandoned, at different points in its history, its theme-driven approach (Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, 2002) and its overwhelming

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  print September 2008

  “Experiment Marathon Reykjavík”

  INTRODUCING “EXPERIMENT MARATHON REYKJAVÍK,” a two-day event that took place this past May in the Hafnarhús, the Icelandic capital’s contemporary art museum, artist Olafur Eliasson described the occasion as “a parallel parliament that includes disagreement, a parallel Western democracy.” Presented to a near-capacity audience, this alternative legislature was about to become manifest in the form of thirty-six fifteen-minute-long presentations from artists, architects, scientists, and theoreticians. First, however, Eliasson’s collaborator in organizing the event, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, reframed

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  previews September 2008

  John Stezaker

  Not long ago, John Stezaker was better known as a teacher (the inspirational “Stez” of London’s Royal College of Art) than he was for the frequently marvelous neo-Surrealist photocollages he has been evolving since the 1970s—mysterious inverted landscapes, deft physiognomic hodgepodges, silhouettes with miniature worlds inside them.

  Not long ago, John Stezaker was better known as a teacher (the inspirational “Stez” of London’s Royal College of Art) than he was for the frequently marvelous neo-Surrealist photocollages he has been evolving since the 1970s—mysterious inverted landscapes, deft physiognomic hodgepodges, silhouettes with miniature worlds inside them. Happily, a recent string of profile-raising gallery shows has made the British artist’s implausible prestidigitations with film stills, postcards, and children’s books fashionable once more. Featuring sixty-eight works from 1976 to the