Curated by Cristina Ricupero and Alexis Vaillant
From Yale’s president-spawning Skull and Bones to that mythical “invisible world government” the Illuminati, secret societies exert a powerful grip on the imagination. The Schirn Kunsthalle’s show isn’t an exposé, though. Rather, it proposes contemporary art itself as a seedbed for clandestine coteries, exacting codes of behavior, and diverse methods of evasion and exclusion. Here, within an appositely labyrinthine display designed by Fabian Marti, more than one hundred works by nearly fifty artists—including Kenneth Anger, Joachim Koester, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Lisa Yuskavage—will offer entrée to their hermetic milieus or, perhaps, stonewall viewers unversed in the correct secret handshakes. (Expect, say the organizers, “a certain level of occultation.”) For conspiratorial crib notes, consult the catalogue essays by Ina Blom, Michael Bracewell, Gary Lachman, Marco Pasi, Jan Verwoert, and the curators.
