Not much happens on time in London, let alone early. Switch House, the bold new Tate Modern extension opening on June 17, was originally planned for the end of next decade… ish.
Exploring Switch House, Tate Modern’s Ambitious Addition
To Martin Creed, Even a Shit Is Art
Everything is fair game for the Turner Prize-winning artist in a new show at the Park Avenue Armory.
The Turner Prize-winning British artist is known for his singular (sometimes gross) sense of humor, sparking debate with seemingly mundane, Duchampian conceptual actions and for nabbing Britain’s coveted Turner Prize by rigging a light switch with a timer. Now, he’s just opened his largest show in the U.S. to date, “The Back Door,” which runs at the Park Avenue Armory through August 7, and the jury is out on what New Yorkers will make of Creed’s Punch and Judy act.
The English-born, Scotland-raised artist (though he hesitates to call himself that) is the first to occupy both the building’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall and newly renovated historic rooms. But unlike many that have shown at the Armory before him, Creed has chosen not to fill the hall with a larger-than-life, flashy display of high production value—though he’s certainly capable of such work.
Martin Creed’s Anti-Spectacle at the Park Avenue Armory
A kind of extended happening, or maybe a series of short ones, has gently taken over the Park Avenue Armory, one of the architectural gems of New York. Numerous moving parts, animate and inanimate, are involved, and they are all the doing of the British maverick Martin Creed, the first artist to be given the run of the armory’s entire first floor, where he created an exhibition titled “The Back Door.”
In the past, artists have mostly been limited, if that’s the word, to the armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. There, with greatly varying degrees of success, they have tended to orchestrate elaborately kitted-out spectacles, heavy with noise, lights or high-tech wizardry.
Mr. Creed has done something quite different. A jack of all mediums, including music, he is part court jester, part circus master, part philosopher and also something of a Luddite. At 47, he has spent the past two decades setting off subversive vibrations along the fine lines between art and life, art and silliness, and art and provocation, melding Conceptual Art smarts and Minimalist literal-mindedness. Simplicity, modesty and obviousness appear to be his bywords, all the better to disturb the assumptions of preciousness, skill and aloofness basic to art.
Martin Creed Ranges from Scatalogical to Magical at the Park Avenue Armory
The Armory’s 55,000-square-foot central room must make artists who are commissioned to create work there break out in night sweats. Creed’s principal intervention in it, Shutters Opening and Closing (2016), is sure to make them jealous.
The darkened hall is nearly empty. The rolling garage door at the back of the space, which looks out onto Lexington Avenue, periodically opens for a few seconds and then closes. This simple act turns the everyday life outside, the passing cars and pedestrians, into a high-definition filmic study on the enchantment that can be found in the banal.
Though not as wondrous as the drill hall garage door, Half the Air in a Given Space (2015) is already tearing up Instagram. Fifty percent of the volume of one of the Armory’s galleries is taken up by large, white balloons; visitors are invited to walk through, and are at times completely submerged. “Every time you go to a gallery, it’s full of air,” Creed has said, and this idea is given sculptural form here. This piece will no doubt make major box office for the Armory.
Martin Creed Sneaks Brilliance in Through “The Back Door”
Although he can come across as almost pathologically ill at ease and underprepared, the artist is clearly not lacking in confidence. The Armory’s largest space is its drill hall, which actually earns the overused adjective cavernous. Instead of cluttering it with whimsies, Creed has installed a single huge projection of a new work: a music-video-slick film that primarily shows people opening their mouths to reveal various undefined junk inside. Intermittently, the film stops, and the hall is left completely dark. A loading door at the back of the room cranks open, briefly revealing a rectangular view of Lexington Avenue’s urban bustle. It’s a literalized slice of life, a view of the street as a readymade in its own right. Simple? You better believe it. But dumb? Not quite. Creed once again proves himself one of our finest, and wisest, idiots.
Martin Creed Unleashes His Demons in ‘Back Door’ at the Park Avenue Armory
“It’s pretty remarkable the armory is letting us do this,” observed Mr. Eccles, who assembled the exhibition in partnership with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London.
Actually, the exhibition is in the spirit of earlier armory shows spotlighting off-center artists like Paul McCarthy and Christian Boltanski — both of which Mr. Eccles was involved in producing.
“The Back Door” is also the title of Mr. Creed’s exhibition, a sprawling affair that occupies the armory’s entire main floor, including not just the drill hall and the small, bunkerlike rooms that flank it but the grandly decorated, late-19th-century period rooms on the building’s Park Avenue side. This is Mr. Creed’s biggest exhibition in the United States, although he won the Turner Prize in 2001 and his work has been shown extensively in Britain, with numerous solo shows at Tate Britain and a career retrospective two years ago at the Hayward Gallery in the Southbank Center in London.
A More International Tate Modern
When the new 10-story museum opens June 17, it will boast a huge performance space, rooftop terrace and more geographically diverse collection.
In a year of glitzy museum openings, from New York’s Met Breuer to San Francisco’s sleek SF MoMA, London’s Tate Modern is upping the ante. On June 17, the museum will open the doors of a new 10-story building, complete with refurbished underground oil tanks for live performance, a rooftop terrace with panoramic views, and a 22-foot tree sculpture by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
The new building, called the “Switch House,” is the culmination of a 12-year £260 million ($375 million) expansion project that will add 60% more gallery space. Curators have seized on the occasion to mount a soul-searching “rehang” of the institution’s entire collection, which has grown significantly since the museum’s opening in 2000. Three quarters of the work on display was acquired in the last 15 years, with an estimated 30% to 40% never previously exhibited.
The fascinating tale of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain
Photographed, then subsequently thrown away, by Alfred Stieglitz, urinated on by Brian Eno and sometimes cited as the work of a Bauhaus baroness rather than the man it is most commonly associated with, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is arguably the first piece of conceptual art ever, certainly the most famous ready made in art history, and has inspired countless artists from Grayson Perry to Damien Hirst, Richard Hamilton to Richard Wentworth and inspired many others to ‘interact’ with it in the most obvious way in gallery and museum settings…
A Movement in a Moment: Land Art
Discover how a generation of artists swapped pencils for dumper trucks as they made the world their canvas.
In the summer of 1967, while hitchhiking his way from St Martin’s School of Art to his home city of Bristol, the British art student Richard Long stopped in a field in Wiltshire, and walked repeatedly in a straight line, until the passage of his feet had made a visible mark in the grass. Long photographed the line, before thumbing another lift home.
Around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another twentysomething artist, Robert Smithson, was photographing his hometown of New Jersey, enamored by the modern, primitive majesty he found in the region’s mining trucks, which shipped and tipped tonnes of earth and rocks around.
Ai Weiwei and Warhol, Together Again
“I remember going to a gallery opening and hearing people say ‘Andy is here, Andy is here,’ and suddenly I saw him through the crowd,” Mr. Ai recalled this week, walking through “Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei” at the Warhol Museum here. “It was incredible to be in the same room, but I was a nobody.”
In the 25 years since he abruptly left New York to tend to his ailing father in China, Mr. Ai has become a somebody. Wily provocateur, enemy of the state and media-savvy advocate for the disenfranchised, he is a darling of the global contemporary art world, a bona fide celebrity whose burly, bearded presence invariably draws admiring crowds.
Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei, it turns out, have plenty in common.
Installation of Richard Serra’s Sculpture “Sequence” @ SFMoMA
Follow Richard Serra’s to it recent installation at SF MoMA.
Watch the video – make it BIG and turn on the volume.
Martin Creed interview: ‘Art is anything used as art by people’
I meet Martin Creed more than a week before his retrospective What’s the point of it? opens at the Hayward. The gallery is full of 25 years’ worth of improbable, witty, uplifting art; I am especially gladdened by a wall covered in 1,000 prints of broccoli.
But the show is not ready yet: the atmosphere is of playful disarray. There is a display case in which there is a crumpled sheet of A4 paper (a 1994 Creed provocation). On top of it, someone from the gallery has placed a sticky note that warns ART WORK! – to passing cleaners. One of the things that makes Creed controversial is that he does not draw a line between art and life. He says: “Anything is art that is used as art by people.”
Architect Annabelle Selldorf on Why Mega-Galleries Are Transforming Into Mini-Museums
If you are even a casual appreciator of art in New York, the chances are that you have stepped into one of Annabelle Selldorf’s spaces, and been entranced. Perhaps the most coveted architect among the minimalistically inclined art elite, Selldorf has designed a broad spectrum of the city’s art sites, from theNeue Galerie uptown, steeped in Old World splendor, to the galleries of blue-chip titans like David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth, where her tautly balanced settings at once put the viewer at ease while calling them to attention. Her buildings are special places, where one wants to return.
One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence
The drab free port zone near the Geneva city center, a compound of blocky gray and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence, looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than a million of some of the most exquisite artworks ever made.
As the price of art has skyrocketed, perhaps nothing illustrates the art-as-bullion approach to contemporary collecting habits more than the proliferation of warehouses like this one, where masterpieces areincreasingly being tucked away by owners more interested in seeing them appreciate than hanging on walls.
With their controlled climates, confidential record keeping and enormous potential for tax savings, free ports have become the parking lot of choice for high-net-worth buyers looking to round out investment portfolios with art.
Jordan Wolfson’s Hypnotic Abuse At Zwirner
Here are a few negative things you could say about Jordan Wolfson’s show: It’s dumb. It’s a spectacle. It’s loud. But you know what? This dumb, loud spectacle is one of the more thoughtful, oddly contemplative experiences you can have in Chelsea right now. During my visit the kinetic piece (titled, with sarcastic nonchalance, Colored sculpture) attracted a small crowd of hushed spectators. We stood, somewhat awkwardly, as Wolfson’s doll-like assemblage (“Chuckie!’ yelled out one ’80s-nostalgic viewer) was hoisted, jerked, and dropped; a dopey marionette thanks to a series of automated metal chains.
We loved this installation! Check out BAC’s Instagram of this piece to see it in action – and turn up the sound!
Why Museums Are Granting Google Free Access to Their Collections
Google Cultural Institute recently revealed that it has engineered the creatively named Google Art Camera: a custom-built camera intended to capture “ultra-high resolution ‘gigapixel’ images” of artworks in museums around the world. It also sharedabout 1,000 of these photographs online that allow anyone with internet access to zoom in closely to examine the originals — or rather, representations of the originals — in staggering detail. This collection will continue to grow as Google plans to send its 20-strong camera convoy to museums around the world. It also means that Google is increasingly receiving and compiling a ton of data for free (it doesn’t pay the museums) — so we were curious: what are the benefits museums receive by showcasing their collections on another platform?
What is perhaps the most obvious answer is the one every museum representative I spoke with provided: that placing an institution’s artworks on Google grants museums’ collections much more visibility and public access — which, for many of them, constitutes a central objective.
First look: inside the Switch House – Tate Modern’s power pyramid
Among the shafts of luxury flats sprouting up along the south bank of the Thames, from Battersea to Bermondsey, there is one new tower unlike the others. It is made of brick, not glass, and stands as a squat, truncated pyramid, twisting as it rises. Punctured only by thin slit windows, Tate Modern’s new extension rears up like a defensive watchtower, there to ward off property developers from encroaching any further on the former Bankside power station.
“We realised we were getting vulnerable in terms of what we could do on this site,” says the Tate director Nicholas Serota, explaining the £260m expansion, which has been in the works since the mid-2000s. “There were some substantial buildings arriving, so we would soon have a lot of neighbours who would oppose us doing anything of any scale.”
It was a smart move. The result is a powerful addition to the city, an unsettling presence that is at once seductive and forbidding, an appropriately challenging container for the work that lies within.
The power of Piero Manzoni and his Merda d’Artista
In January 1957 the 23-year-old aristocratic Italian artist Piero Manzoni visited an exhibition of Yves Klein’s blue paintings at Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. Manzoni had been a fairly conventional painter up until this visit. Yet, Klein’s display of canvas after canvas of unfaltering blue altered the way the young Italian saw and made art.
If Klein’s blue paintings worked as art – and they certainly had the desired effect on Manzoni – then why couldn’t other plain, apparently lowly creations also serve as a freer kind of art?
“Why not empty this receptacle, free this surface, try to discover the unlimited meaning of total space, a pure and absolute art?” he later questioned. “Expression, illusion, and abstraction are empty fictions. There is nothing to be said. There is only to be, there is only to live.”
Can an Art Fair Be a Political Act? Roman Dealer Paola Capata on Making Granpalazzo the World’s Most “Italian” Fair
Located in the 16th-century Palazzo Rospigliosi in the rustic country village of Zagarolo, a short drive outside of Rome, Granpalazzo is unlike any art fair you’ve seen before. Instead of traditional booths, there are curated presentations of individual artists, elegantly spaced throughout the historic building. The walls are covered with historic frescos, the conversation is amiable, and the pace is as relaxed as the gauzy light filtering through the palms outside. Call it an art fair, Italian style.
Capata, who opened her gallery in 2003, sees it as a corrective to an art market that has tilted its emphasis too heavily on the “market,” and away from the “art.” For her, it’s a banner in a cause worth fighting for. To understand more about what, exactly, Granpalazzo is, Artspaceeditor-in-chief Andrew M. Goldstein spoke to the dealer about the ideas behind her unorthodox fair.
Simon de Pury on Charlie Rose
Watch the Video, about 21 minutes