Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist on What Makes Painting an “Urgent” Medium Today

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Painting has always served as a kind of laboratory for innovative ways of looking at the world, from the perspectival experiments of Alberti all the way to Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, abstraction,Minimalism, et cetera. Painters often saw themselves as an advance guard, pushing a kind of investigation forward in new terrain. Here, you’ve mentioned how in these shows artists were taking a variety of approaches simultaneously, with figuration and abstraction oscillating and with every sort of style going on at once. I wonder, when you were going through all that polyphony, looking at all these paintings from around the globe, was there any kind of forward progress that you could discern?

We live in a very nonlinear sort of period. So, I think it’s more a jumping universe. But obviously, I do realize there is certainly a progress in a sense, because there are still inventions of new rules of the game. It’s like what David Deutsch describes in his seminal book, The Fabric of Reality, where he talks about parallel realities that exist. I think it’s much more about these parallel realities than a kind of linear progress.

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Like LeWitt and his meticulous instructions for creating his works, Sandback didn’t so much make things (at least not the things he eventually exhibited) as plan them. His sculptures, when they left the studio, consisted of configurations, measurements, and ratios, along with specifications for the type and color of the yarn or elastic that would make up the physical incarnation of the work.

And like LeWitt’s wall drawings, Sandback’s artworks went up for an exhibition and then came down, the materials discarded. The actual piece of yarn or elastic didn’t matter. Posthumously, this process is carried out by a trained cadre of installers who travel the globe to re-create the works.

If Sandback’s sculptures aren’t purist or geometrical, then what are they?

David Hockney on what turns a picture into a masterpiece

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Rembrandt’s perfect drawing, Caravaggio’s invention of Hollywood lighting, Monet capturing a moment in time. David Hockney and critic Martin Gayford discuss the craft behind the greatest art.

David Hockney: The moment you put down two or three marks on a piece of paper, you get relationships. They’ll start to look like something. If you draw two little lines they might look like two figures or two trees. One was made first, one second. We read all kinds of things into marks. You can suggest landscape, people and faces with extremely little. It all depends on the human ability to see a mark as a depiction.

In a way, Vermeer and Rembrandt are opposites. But Rembrandt is the greater artist, I think, because he’s got more ingredients than Vermeer. Rembrandt put more in the face than anyone else ever has, before or since, because he saw more. And that was not a matter of using a camera. That was to do with his heart. The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart. I think that remark is very, very good. Two won’t do. A good eye and heart is not enough, neither is a good hand and eye. It applies to every drawing and painting Rembrandt ever made. His work is a great example of the hand, the eye – and the heart. There is incredible empathy in it.

Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?

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Dr James Fox has never really got conceptual art. And he’s not alone. Conceptual art has been treated with suspicion and incredulity by virtually everyone outside the art world for nearly a hundred years. Ever since Marcel Duchamp first displayed a signed urinal and claimed it was art in 1917.  So was he taking the piss?  Or was he on to something, creating a whole new approach to art that has now lasted a century?
Dr Fox embarks on an open-minded guide for the perplexed and asks ‘What is conceptual art?’ ‘How should we approach it?’ and crucially, ‘Why should we care?’.  Roaming between the past, present and future he examines a mind-bending selection of the most influential conceptual ideas and artworks, alongside meeting the leading movers and shakers of today. And who knows?  In the end, Dr Fox might find himself unexpectedly seduced by this trickiest of art forms.

Watch the BBC Documentary on YouTube video!

Abstract Expressionism review – crammed in a room with the big men of US art

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There are beautiful, marvellous and terrifying things in the Royal Academy’s much-trumpeted survey of Abstract Expressionism. What more could one ask in a show including the explosive and tender Jackson Pollock; De Kooning swerving and jumbling and dismembering his frightening figures of women; Rothko’s tangy brightness and trembling, tremulous darkness;Barnett Newman’s zips and planes and intervals; Guston’s dirty abstract impressionism in which figures wait to be unleashed. Franz Kline’s angled black and white incidents; Arshile Gorky’s quietly writhing accretions: they are all here. I wanted to be blown away, and to reconnect with a kind of painting that once had me in its thrall, and whose traces and impulses continue to be felt into the 21st century. I wanted to see it in some new and instructive way, but I didn’t.

10 Extraordinary Sculptures That Tackle Life in the 21st Century

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Sculpture has gone through a plethora of transformations in the modern era, from Rodin’s emotionally charged, erotic figures in the 1880s, to Judd’s geometric, stoic forms of the 1960s, to the current anything-goes approach of contemporary sculptors. Naturally, the best (or at least best-remembered) artists use their work to respond to the pressing political and emotional concerns of their time. In these first years of the new millenium, sculptors have focused on issues including the ever-growing modern alienation, contemporary notions of gender, rising tensions related to global conflicts, global forced displacement, and even the medium of sculpture itself.

For Part 2 of our list of must-know recent sculptures, we’ve excerpted 10 notable works from Phaidon’s The Twenty-First Century Art Book that show how artists today are responding to our time.

Maurizio Cattelan America: New Site-specific Work Unveiled At Guggenheim NY

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Maurizio Cattelan’s new, site-specific work opens to the public at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum today September 16, 2016. For “America”, the artist replaces a toilet in one of the museum’s public restrooms with a fully functional replica cast in solid gold. Cattelan is often described as the art world’s resident prankster and provocateur; this installation is the first artwork he has produced since his 2011–12 Guggenheim retrospective, Maurizio Cattelan: All, which initiated the artist’s self-imposed exile.

The new work makes available to the public an extravagant luxury product seemingly intended for the 1 percent. Its participatory nature, in which viewers are invited to make use of the fixture individually and privately, allows for an experience of unprecedented intimacy with an artwork. Cattelan’s toilet offers a wink to the excesses of the art market, but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all, its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity.

Ryan Gander: “I’m Trying to Get Spectators to Not be Lazy”

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What is clear is that Gander’s become a powerhouse, with his works intriguing and baffling people in major shows throughout the world, and all this has made him something of a lodestar to young artists in England, a group he also supports by setting up art schools around the country.

Among Gander’s works is This Consequence (2005), where a museum guard is asked to wear a white Adidas tracksuit with two curious bloodstains on it. And then there is Thank you, but I am promised to the company of my artist this evening during the opening, a performance for the Public sector of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2014 in which he hired two enormous bodyguards to follow around the sector’s curator, Nicholas Baume. For Documenta 13,  I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull), 2012, consisted of just breeze blowing through a room, with the wind maybe aided by something of Gander’s making, or maybe not.

Gander’s Lisson show is called “I see straight through you,” and when I toured it with him recently, he made witty observations here and there, seeming like a very down to earth guy. Which is not to say that he explained things: the show as it stands a gleeful whoosh of mystery, an infusion of smirking doubt in the sea of bombast that is so many shows these days.

Floral Imperative

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WHETHER AS A CREATOR of ravishing bouquets and sumptuous textiles or as a curator of disparate but uniformly stunning objects, WILLEM DE ROOIJ has never shied away from beauty. But, as DANIEL BIRNBAUM argues in the pages that follow, de Rooij has been equally unflinching in his insistence on the political and historical dimensions of aesthetic experience, from imperialist tropes that have persisted across centuries to the modernist tension between allegory and abstraction. In advance of the Dutch artist’s exhibition at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst–MMK 2 next month—a show that will trace the arc of de Rooij’s career, from works he created with Jeroen de Rijke to his practice as it has unfolded since his collaborator’s untimely death in 2006—Birnbaum elucidates de Rooij’s seductive investigations of form, both its engagement and its autonomy.

Martin Creed on Bloomberg’s ‘Brilliant Ideas’

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With works spanning two decades that force us to pause, reflect, and see the world through fresh eyes, Martin Creed has challenged what it means to be an artist. Born in Wakefield, England in 1968, Creed grew up in Scotland where his father worked as a silversmith and lectured at Glasgow School of Art. Creed came to the attention of the wider public in 2001 when he won the Turner Prize with a work that consisted simply of turning the lights on and off. (Source: Bloomberg).

Watch the video, make it LARGE and turn up the volume.

Public Talk: Collecting Contemporary Art

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“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” – Sir Winston Churchill

Join Laing Brown, a noted art collector, Board Member and Chair of the Audain Art Museum Acquisitions Committee, for a public multi-media presentation where he will discuss his Top 10 Collecting Rules for contemporary art. Laing will also address some complex art world issues including: What is Art?, 10 Ideas That Changed What Art Is, and Why Collect Contemporary Art.

Place: Audain Art Museum, 4350 Blackcomb Way, Whistler, B.C.
Date: Thursday, October 13
Time: 7 pm
Cost: Free for Museum Members or with purchase of admission.

Laing Brown is an External Advisor to the Acquisitions Committee of the National Gallery of Canada, Trustee of the Jack & Doris Shadbolt Foundation, past Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Vancouver Art Gallery, past President of the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver, and CEO of BrownArtConsulting, Inc.

Etel Adnan’s Vibrant, Visual Poems

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“Colorists are epic poets,” said Charles Baudelaire, and here at the Serpentine Gallery we have both: a painter of abstract landscapes and a poet, not to mention activist, scribe, and filmmaker. Described as a polymath by Hans Ulrich Obrist inthe exhibition’s catalogue, Etel Adnan certainly seems to be a woman of many talents. Born in Beirut in 1925, she has lived and worked in Paris and California throughout her life. She is primarily known as a political writer, first prompted to activism by the Algerian war, then Vietnam, and more recently the many troubles of the Arab world. In the ‘60s she taught Philosophy of Art at the University of California and the story goes that it was not until a colleague asked why she did not make art herself that she picked up a palette knife and began scraping color onto canvas.

Anish Kapoor Reveals His Hopes for Vantablack at Seoul’s Kukje Gallery

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At Kukje Gallery, three formidable, twisted mirrored columns display warped visions. “It’s a stupid, simple idea, but it does something—it becomes something else,” said Kapoor, by way of introducing the latest additions to his “Non Objects” series, which are the centerpiece of the current show. He was referring to the 90-degree twist, which transforms mundane columns into strangely unknowable objects with unexpected concavities and edges that seem to shift as you behold them.

For Art Dealers, the Place to Be Is Still London

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These are early days, but the Hieronymus Bosch vision of a socioeconomic apocalypse that many feared would follow Britain’s June 23 vote to leave the European Union has yet to materialize.  True, the pound has lost about 10 percent of its value against other major currencies, and a huge amount of political uncertainty still remains, but retail sales rose 1.4 percent in July, according to the British Office for National Statistics, and unemployment claims fell.

The medium and long-term challenges facing the British economy outside the European Union remain formidable, however, as do the questions hanging over the future of London as Europe’s unofficial capital of finance.

Dealers in high-end art, at least, remain confident that London will retain its mojo. At least four international galleries are investing in showpiece spaces in the capital.

A Bridge from Moscow to Paris: 130 Works of Modern Art

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This fall, “Icons of Modern Art” at the Louis Vuitton Foundation may be the show that takes Paris by storm. No fewer than 130 paintings by Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and Derain, among many others, from the collection of the renowned Russian cultural figure Sergei Shchukin will hang on the walls of this museum by Frank Gehry (itself designed like a building painted by Picasso). President François Hollande of France and President Vladimir Putin of Russia will open this exhibition in mid-October in a display of diplomatic handshaking: Culture remains a bridge connecting two countries that have not recently seen eye to eye.

The exhibition includes 30 progeny paintings by Russian avant-garde artists who studied the collection and produced similar work, or took steps beyond. These include Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun and Vladimir Tatlin, who invented worlds of pure abstraction beyond the still-representational work of Matisse and Picasso.  But the foundation show really belongs to Shchukin, and not just as a sentimental tribute to a cultural figure only recently emerging from repressive Soviet fogs.

“Icons of Modern Art” makes the case that Shchukin himself was an artist, that his collection was his masterpiece. He painted with paintings, lining his neo-Classical Trubetskoy Palace, creating environments of color and energy.

An Artist’s Plot to Unlock Luis Barragán’s Archive with a Diamond Made from His Ashes

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In a multiyear project that has exploded beyond any one gallery space, New York’s Jill Magid has reactivated the legacy of Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragán. Beyond a call for access to a one-of-a-kind archive, Magid’s work with Barragán is literary stagecraft that implicates a cast of characters involved in mysterious multinational negotiations, as well as legal and narrative ambiguity. Magid’s unsuccessful attempt to access the architect’s professional archive — cryptically stored away in the basement of a Swiss corporation’s headquarters — culminated in Barragán’s ashes being made into a blue diamond and set into a wedding band. The artist created an action much bigger than herself in which viewers don’t know where the truth ends and fantasy begins. In exhibitions at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland, Mexico City’s LABOR gallery, and soon at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), Magid weaves a spellbinding web of documents, letters, sculptures, and near-copyright infringements.

Jill Magid’s Ex-Voto continues LABOR (Gral. F. Ramírez 5, Daniel Garza, Mexico City) through September 3; The Proposal was on view at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (Davidstrasse 40, St. Gallen, Switzerland) through August 21 and will be on view in the Walter and McBean Galleries of the San Francisco Art Institute (800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, California) from September 9 through December 10.

How Abstract Expressionism changed modern art

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What did the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism do so differently? And how is their work still relevant today? As the first survey of Abstract Expressionism for nearly 60 years is staged in Britain, co-curator David Anfam answers key questions.

1. How was Abstract Expressionism different to what came before?

Crucially Abstract Expressionism, or ‘Ab Ex’ (as I always call it for short), happened at a juncture when nearly all the major movements of the first half of th.e 20th century had more or less run their course. I’m thinking particularly of Cubism, Surrealism, German Expressionism, Fauvism and Neo-Plasticism. Furthermore, New York in the 1930s and 1940s offered extraordinarily rich opportunities for the emergent artists to come into direct contact with the artworks of these earlier movements.

Read on …

Robert Rauschenberg: the leader of American art’s great ménage à trois

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The dazzling, haunting ‘combines’ at the heart of Tate Modern’s forthcoming retrospective were part of a private game between Rauschenberg and his peers and sometime lovers, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns.

Robert Rauschenberg’s 1954 work Untitled is an upright wooden box supported by a white, colonial-era table leg over an open stage-like enclosure in which a stuffed Dominique hen struts next to a nostalgic photograph of a tall man in a white suit. Walk around this oddly compelling array – every surface of which is covered in old pictures, newsprint and smeared paint – and you find a pair of shoes, painted white. Do they belong to the man in the portrait? Who was he? Why does this constellation of stuff trigger such an undeniable, unforgettable sense of mystery?

All the art movements that have appeared since the 1950s were anticipated by Rauschenberg and co, often in collaboration with their composer friend John Cage. Rauschenberg helped to invent conceptual art when he borrowed a drawing by Willem de Kooning and promptly erased it. His 1961 “portrait” of the gallerist Iris Clert is a telegram that simply states: “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.”

Apocalyps Now: MoMA’s Bruce Connor’s Show is Mind-Blowingly Good

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The Museum of Modern Art has wisely advertised its Bruce Conner retrospectivewith an image of Bombhead, a 1989/2002 print in which an army general’s head is replaced with a mushroom cloud. This is a show that promises to blow your mind, and it lives up to that threat. Trippy, disturbing, entertaining, and whimsical all at once, “Bruce Connor: It’s All True” is a marvelous look at a figure whose gleefully anarchic work called for the end of culture as we know it.

Like any great show about a great artist, this retrospective—which is curated by Stuart Comer and Laura Hoptman, of MoMA, and Rudolf Frieling, Gary Garrels, and Rachel Federman, of SFMOMA, where it will appear next—makes you wonder how its subject escaped from art history. Perhaps Conner’s inability to be categorized kept his work in the shadows.