Tom Holert

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  previews May 2016

  “Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck—Urban Now: City Life in Congo”

  Urbanity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is marked by a precarious entanglement of colonial past and globalized present, of decrepit infrastructure and formidable social resilience. This spring at Wiels, Congolese artist Sammy Baloji and Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck will team up to tackle these incongruities. Investigating what sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone has called “people as infrastructure,” fifty of Baloji’s photographs will illustrate the ways city dwellers organize in and around the seemingly dysfunctional environments of Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, and

• previews September 2013

  “Isa Genzken: Retrospective”

  From the retro-Futurist Ellipsoids of her first solo show in 1976, when she was still a student at the Arts Academy in Düsseldorf, to her newest expansive, mannequin-filled installation Schauspieler (Actors), 2013, German artist Isa Genzken has reanimated sculpture in strikingly revisionist ways. Genzken quickly departed from her early negotiations of Minimalism and post-Minimalism to hybridize the languages of modernist abstraction and the crass materialism of vernacular culture, exemplified by the aptly titled

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  print May 2013

  INFORMATION SOCIETY: THE ART OF LES LEVINE

  TWO MEN PEER THROUGH the glass panes of a revolving door, the lights of a nocturnal Manhattan street visible behind them. The man on the right, sporting a fedora and a blank expression, is instantly recognizable as Andy Warhol. The man on the left, looking through horn-rimmed glasses directly at the camera, is less familiar. But back in February 1969—when this photograph appeared in New York magazine, illustrating the article “Plastic Man Meets Plastic Man” by David Bourdon—many readers would have recognized Warhol’s bespectacled double as Les Levine.¹ In fact, between 1967 and 1970,

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  print March 2013

  BURDEN OF PROOF: CONTEMPORARY ART AND RESPONSIBILITY

  Art, today, has the task of answering to this world or of answering for it.
  
  —Jean-Luc Nancy

  ONTOLOGICAL TROUBLE

  In our age of fatigue and collapse, it is harder than ever to know what we mean when we speak about “art.” Art has always been entangled with power, its autonomy and self-definition thus perpetually troubled. But today, as finance capitalism displays a baffling and disastrous vitality in the face of its triumphant failure and annihilates its last vestiges of moral legitimacy, the art world’s deep interdependence with the sectors of society benefiting most from the crises caused by

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  print April 2012

  TEST SUBJECTS: THE ART OF JOSEPHINE PRYDE

  WALKING ALONG DÜSSELDORF’S GRABBEPLATZ toward the grim gray Brutalist building that houses the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, visitors to Josephine Pryde’s current retrospective were confronted with an image of disturbing cuteness—or, perhaps better, with a cute disturbance. An enormous poster, mounted prominently on the facade, stamps the show’s ingratiating if ultimately inexplicable title, “Miss Austen Enjoys Photography,” over a black-and-white photograph of a guinea pig, staring unblinkingly at the camera—close-up, unavoidable, irresistible in its cunning vivacity.

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  books February 2012

  Judith F. Rodenbeck’s Radical Prototypes

  Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings, By Judith F. Rodenbeck. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 312 pages. $35.

  FEW COULD QUIBBLE with Allan Kaprow’s laconic definition of Happenings in 1966, when he spoke of them simply as “collage[s] of events in certain spans of time and in certain spaces.” But at the time, the question of what a Happening actually was—eight years after the term had been coined by Kaprow in his groundbreaking essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”—had become something of an obsession. In 1965, Al Hansen had spoken of the “confusion about the

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  print February 2011

  JOINT VENTURES: THE STATE OF COLLABORATION

  THE UTOPIA OF TRULY SHARED, communal, multiple authorship always seems to be receding from sight. But the dream won’t die: Collaboration continues to be held up as a means of escaping Western, patriarchal mythology and power structures as well as the art-market matrix of originality and authorship. Collectives and collaboratives are still assumed to be intrinsically liberating. Their emancipatory dimension is linked with the elevation of co-labor, of working in teams rather than lingering in the solitude of the studio. According to Mira Schor, the feminist artist and former coeditor of the

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  previews September 2010

  Cosima van Bonin

  Continuing a labor-intensive series of ambitiously scaled shows that began in July with “The Empire Fatigue” at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, von Bonin now embarks on the “Lazy Susan Series”—a “Rotating Exhibition” (like the title’s rotating platter) starting at Witte de With and “looping” through 2011 at Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery, Geneva’s Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, and Cologne’s Museum Ludwig.

  Continuing a labor-intensive series of ambitiously scaled shows that began in July with “The Empire Fatigue” at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, von Bonin now embarks on the “Lazy Susan Series”—a “Rotating Exhibition” (like the title’s rotating platter) starting at Witte de With and “looping” through 2011 at Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery, Geneva’s Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, and Cologne’s Museum Ludwig. Across the four turns, the Cologne-based artist will engage themes of indolence, exhaustion, and boredom, deploying sculptural and painterly strategies

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  books Summer 2010

  art schools

  Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy, edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2009. 234 pages. $25.

  Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited by Steven Henry Madoff. Cambridge, MA, And London: MIT Press, 2009. 268 pages. $30.

  “IN FACT IT MUST SURELY BE FACED that the now conventional means of justification of ‘art education’ in general must be abandoned or at least stringently reviewed,” asserted the late Charles Harrison in a 1972 Studio International essay. Harrison was prompted to

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  print September 2009

  Tom Holert

  IN 1826, VENICE’S TEATRO GOLDONI, a venerable establishment near the Rialto Bridge, obtained the first gas chandelier in Italy. With this bit of history in mind, the theater seemed just the right place to host No Night No Day, 2009, an “abstract opera” created by artist and filmmaker Cerith Wyn Evans and sound artist Florian Hecker. Chandeliers, particularly those made of Murano glass on the Venetian island of the same name, have been components of Wyn Evans’s work for the past few years: Since 2002, the Welsh artist has deployed light that is reflected in pendants shaped by Murano masters and

• previews September 2008

  “Cult of the Artist”

  Taking full advantage of Berlin’s centralized museum system, Peter-Klaus Schuster, general director of the city’s public museums and head of the Nationalgalerie, celebrates his impending retirement with a colossal “Ring” of ten large exhibitions all centered on the cult of the artist.

  Taking full advantage of Berlin’s centralized museum system, Peter-Klaus Schuster, general director of the city’s public museums and head of the Nationalgalerie, celebrates his impending retirement with a colossal “Ring” of ten large exhibitions all centered on the cult of the artist. (The Wagnerian echo is clearly intended.) Hans von Marées, Beuys, and Warhol are the first of the (exclusively male) artist-heroes receiving personal surveys; subsequent shows are dedicated to Giacometti, Klee, Koons, and a double bill of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the poet Clemens

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  print May 2008

  LEARNING CURVE: RADICAL ART AND EDUCATION IN GERMANY

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 22, 1967, Joseph Beuys called a surprise press conference at the Düsseldorf art academy, where he announced the founding of the German Student Party (DSP). It was only twenty days after a policeman had killed student Benno Ohnesorg during a demonstration against the shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin—a pivotal moment in the political mobilization of students in West Germany and one that would culminate in the protests of 1968. Amid this turmoil, a photograph from the meeting shows Beuys and his students sitting and looking down with a deliberate air of circumspection