
Sydney
Michael Stevenson
Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia
140 George Street
The Rocks
April 5–June 19, 2011
Curated by Glenn Barkley
As mercilessly as Stevensonpart cultural historian, part paranoid conspiracy theoristlampoons forgotten moments of artistic hubris, misjudgment, and parochialism, his nuanced pseudo-documentary installations and films belie a fascination with, even an empathy for, the romance of pretense and failure. Now the MCA Sydney has brought together some twenty of this New Zealand–born, Berlin-based artist’s works, including objects, drawings, installations, and films. Taken as a whole, despite shifts in medium and ambition, his career forms a consistent, if idiosyncratic, archive of subterranean currents of money and power as they have flowed through the art world over the past twenty years. Look elsewhere for cut-and-dried institutional critique, though. A catalogue with essays by anthropologist Michael Taussig and others accompanies the show.