Matthew Biro

• 

  picks April 29, 2019

  Daniel Arsham

  Given its more than one-hundred-year history, the ready-made’s novelty and ability to shock spectators has substantially faded, but occasionally artists still manage to employ the device in illuminating ways. At Cranbrook, multimedia artist Daniel Arsham presents “The Source: A Catalog of Late-20th-Century American Relics,” a new collection of weathered objects cast from mass-produced commodities that allegorize the contemporary moment from the perspective of a future observer. Monochromatic reproductions of sneakers, basketballs, Blockbuster videocassettes, and slab-like Source magazines are

• 

  print April 2018

  Danielle Dean

  Danielle Dean’s solo show “True Red Ruin” consists of a two-channel video set above a display of multicolored cardboard cutouts, surrounded by drawings and sculptures used in their making. Simultaneously visceral and abstract, the installation explores black identity in relation to capitalism and colonialism through an uncanny superimposition of the histories of these two systems upon the present day.

  Dean’s subject is Elmina Castle, the Portuguese trading post erected in 1482 in West Africa, which later became an infamous node in the Atlantic slave trade. The castle was also the first prefabricated

• 

  print October 2017

  Charles McGee

  Over the past few years, Detroit icon Charles McGee has become one of the public faces of a resurgent Motor City. McGee, now ninety-two, has been painting large-scale, black-and-white murals and installing sculptures throughout his hometown since the 1970s, but these works have recently begun to appear more frequently and prominently. McGee’s biomorphic polka-dotted and striped sculpture of a group of dancing figures, United We Stand, 2016, greets visitors at the entrance of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. His similarly vibrant eleven-story mural, Unity, 2017, a dynamic

• 

  print April 2017

  Albert Oehlen

  “Albert Oehlen: Woods near Oehle” was the latest selective survey by the shape-shifting German artist, and the largest exhibition of his work ever presented in the United States. Comprising thirty-six works, it spanned more than three decades and focused on the artist’s long-standing interrogation of painting via a practice that oscillates between representation and abstraction and locates the medium within an expanded field. The show also featured eleven works by other artists—including two sinuous canvases by de Kooning (Untitled, 1987, and Untitled XIII, 1985)—suggesting lines of

• 

  print October 2016

  Esther Shalev-Gerz

  Walter Benjamin never visited Detroit, but his thinking is applicable to the city’s contemporary condition. The critic’s melancholic fixation on ruins—as well as his desire to unearth revolutionary possibilities in frozen moments of time—resonates with this postindustrial metropolis as it struggles to rebuild itself. The Motor City is, thus, an apt site for a survey of Esther Shalev-Gerz’s work, which seems permeated with concepts drawn from German philosophy. “Space Between Time” brought together a selection of work produced between 1998 and 2016, including some of the artist’s

• 

  print December 2015

  Nick Cave

  Nick Cave’s work moves fluidly between sculpture, performance, and social practice and explores the African American body as a site of tragedy, as well as a catalyst for change. Focusing primarily on the artist’s work from 2014 and 2015, the Cranbrook Art Museum presented a powerful demonstration of Cave’s incisive critical take on the current sociopolitical climate, while simultaneously evidencing his efforts to assemble alternative communities.

  The show, curated by Laura Mott, opened with a selection of twenty-nine Soundsuits, Cave’s signature wildly decorated dreamlike armatures, whose stitched,

• 

  print September 2015

  Jack and Leigh Ruby

  Jack and Leigh Ruby’s Car Wash Incident, 2013–15, directed by the Rubys and produced by Eve Sussman and Simon Lee, is a looped two-channel video that blurs the line between reality and fiction. Installed on hanging screens in the middle of Michael Jon Gallery’s recently opened Detroit space, it was based around a staged aerial photo from 1975—depicting three people, a station wagon, and a car-wash sign at a dilapidated urban intersection—which the directors had originally fabricated as supporting evidence for an insurance scam (the two worked as a brother-sister con-artist team from

• 

  print December 2014

  Bruce Weber

  In its simultaneously celebratory and critical framing of stereotypical Detroit in its current, postindustrial state, Bruce Weber’s recent exhibition was a welcome visualization of the Motor City. Comprising more than eighty mostly black-and-white medium- and large-format photographs and a ten-minute video (also shot in black-and-white), the show presented cityscapes and portraits taken by the New York–based fashion photographer when he visited the shrinking metropolis on assignments for W magazine in 2006, and for Shinola, the luxury Detroit watch manufacturer, in 2013.

  Weber’s representations

• 

  print Summer 2014

  “What Is a Photograph?”

  This exhibition was intended to explore experimentation in photography since the 1970s. As is inevitably the case with any such endeavor, particularly one that covers its sprawling subject with only seventy-two works, it is easy to quibble with its inclusions and exclusions. To do so, however, would be to overlook the exhibition’s importance. It smartly investigated the flowering of formal and material experimentation after the advent of digital photography in the 1990s and tracked the dialogues between that field and painting and Conceptual art. Curated by Carol Squiers, the show comprised

• 

  print February 2014

  Jessica Frelinghuysen

  Covering 138 square miles, Detroit is a spread-out, low-lying municipality. Motor City residents today thus face increasing isolation, as a shrinking population occupies an incommensurately massive, partially abandoned urban infrastructure in which the car is the primary mode of transportation. Not surprisingly, participatory art—often performance- or object-based work designed to produce active and cocreative audiences—has become the antidote of choice for young, local practitioners concerned about this city’s devolving social sphere. There is an artistic emphasis on community building

• 

  previews January 2014

  “Robert Heinecken: Object Matter”

  With the revived currency of appropriation in contemporary art, the work of Robert Heinecken is once again undergoing reassessment. Arriving eight years after his death in 2006, MoMA’s survey of the artist’s photography-based practice is the largest since his retrospective in 1999 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. “Object Matter” includes approximately 140 works from the early 1960s to the late ’90s—the breadth of the LA artist’s darkroom experimentations and extensions of the photographic medium into sculpture, painting, printmaking, collage,

• 

  print October 2013

  Mike Kelley

  Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, 2010–, opened to the public in its permanent location in midtown Detroit this past May, a little more than a year after the artist’s untimely death. The edifice, a full-scale simulation of his childhood domicile in Detroit’s working-class suburb Westland, stands as a (anti-) monument to Kelley as well as to the contradictory, financially depressed city that it engages. Commissioned by Artangel and initially comprising the facade and front third of the Kelley family’s ranch-style house, the fragmentary homestead was for two and a half years either being transported