David Shrigley Fourth Plinth Unveiling Announced By Sadiq Khan’s Office

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David Shrigley the Turner Prize nominated artist unveils his new commission for the Fourth Plinth titled, ‘Really Good‘ on Thursday 29 September 2016. The work was commissioned by the Mayor of London as part of the Fourth Plinth Programme, Really Good is the eleventh sculpture to stand on Trafalgar Square’s celebrated plinth, and will be the first major public art commission to be unveiled under the auspices of the new Mayor for London Sadiq Khan.

Really Good sees a ten-metre-high hand giving a thumbs up. Cast in bronze, with the same dark patina as the other statues in Trafalgar Square, the thumb is disproportionately long. Shrigley’s ambition is that this simple gesture will become a self-fulfilling prophecy; that things considered ‘bad’ such as the economy, the weather and society, will benefit from a change of consensus towards positivity.

Kienholz’s Five Car Stud goes back on view in Milan

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For nearly 40 years, Ed Kienholz’s Five Car Stud (1969-72), a dark installation depicting a brutal racist attack, lay hidden away in storage in Japan. It is now on public view in Milan at the Fondazione Prada, which acquired the work in 2012, soon after it was restored by the artist’s widow and collaborator Nancy Reddin Kienholz.

“Five Car Stud is a terrifying scene that reflects the contradictions of a society that professes equality and freedom but does not accept the other,” the curator Germano Celant, who has organised the Prada display, told The Art Newspaper over email. “Kienholz seeks to break down the certainties and controlled state of mind of members of the art-viewing public. He is attempting to destabilise their emotions, inviting them to engage in a reflection at once social and noble with respect to racial violence.”

See the 6 Most Haunting Humanoids in Art

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This year’s Met Gala saw many of its high-profile attendees looking like cyborgs as its theme, Manus x Machina, commented on the growing influence of tech on the fashion world. But the impact of electronic media and technology on contemporary life is also being reflected in the art world. Over the past few years there has been a growing trend of artists experimenting with humanoid creations and more often than not, the result is nightmare-fuel.

We rounded up six of the most disturbing humanoids sighted in the art world recently.

David Hammons at Mnuchin Gallery: Sellout, or Seer?

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After entering a system as powerful and monied as the higher echelons of the art world, how do we gauge the threshold between subversion and endorsement?

On the one hand, the biggest beneficiaries of FIVE DECADES seem to have little relationship to or even awareness of the social justice movements and protests that have defined so many of the racial and class struggles we see today. So the work feels cheapened in a way, even as it grows in value.

On the other hand, he’s spent a lifetime using the streets, institutions, and biennials to present his art—so so what if he’s using a shitty upscale gallery? If you critique him, then the joke’s on you; but if you don’t critique him, then you don’t get it either.

Martin Creed @ Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset Gallery

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Immaculate in a grey suit, Martin Creed strides towards me in the car park at Durslade Farm, home of Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset gallery. He could be a businessman out on his lunch break on a spring day. Then I notice the spatters and whiplashes of paint all over his clothes, the splodges of colour on his plastic sandals. His hair looks a bit less of an Afro frizz than when I last saw him; now it is in a bun. His moustache makes me think he’s been holed up with a bunch of outlaws. It is an arresting look that Creed, who is 48, carries off with panache.

Can a Giant New Museum Make San Francisco an Art Capital?

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If you build it, they will come. Or that’s what the board at the San Francisco Museum of Art is betting on. This week, the 81-year-old institution opens its doors after a three-year renovation, gifting the West Coast with a world-class collection that would make MoMA blush. Sure, you can see Richard Serra in New York, but the man is from San Francisco.

The museum’s glimmering white 10-story expansion now soars above the city’s foggy skyline, a beacon sounding a calling to the art world: San Francisco is important too!

“It’s hard to beat the spaces given to Gerhard Richter, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin. Those three in particular are quite extraordinary,” said Mr. Benezra of SFMOMA. “If you’re interested in those three artists, you must come to San Francisco.”  Well, you can also see them in New York, we thought. But, what New Yorker doesn’t enjoy a weekend away in California?

 

American Beauty: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Case of the Missing Flag

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Robert Rauschenberg kept only one major example of his earliest, most influential body of work, the Combine paintings he made between 1954 and 1961. Short Circuit (1955) is similar to other works from the period; it incorporates sculptural elements with both painting and drawing and combines abstraction with images and objects plucked from the young artist’s world.

Short Circuit is made of classic Combine ingredients: thick brushstrokes, a lace curtain, a scrap of polka-dotted fabric, postcard images of a Renaissance painting and Abraham Lincoln, a word scramble, a program from an early John Cage concert, and a Judy Garland autograph, all affixed with paint to a chassis made of scrap wood and cupboard doors. Behind those doors Rauschenberg hid two smaller paintings, by two then-unknown artists: one was a landscape by his ex-wife, Susan Weil, and the other was a U.S. flag by his then-partner Jasper Johns.

But what happened to John’s missing U.S. flag …?

Q & A: Martin Creed (2014)

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When were you happiest?
Probably before I started thinking.

What is your earliest memory?
Throwing a cat out of a dormer window when I was three. It rolled down the roof, then fell one storey and landed on its feet.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Trying to control things too much and therefore sort of spoiling them.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
People trying to control me.

Herzog and De Meuron: Tate Modern’s architects on their radical new extension

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Jacques Herzog, the more talkative half of the pair of boyhood friends who founded the architectural practice Herzog & De Meuron, is worried about the world. “The things based on the five senses that we like so much, all these values – that we treat people well. They are in danger. There is such a threat around.” He is talking firstly about the threat to European urban civilisation from terrorism, followed some paces behind by his perception that “the middle class is disappearing”. He sees the loss of possibilities of common ground, of cultural experiences shared by different people. In which case Tate Modern, the vastly successful museum in Bankside, south London, might be considered a redoubt of this endangered world.

Herzog believes, architecture can “play a very good role” in challenging another threat to culture, which he calls “the negative side of the digital world”. Building is “very archaic still, and we’ve gone back to more archaic stuff – gravity, smell, finding roots, not giving pictures, fake images or illusions that you can get on the internet”. It is all part, in their view, of defending and nourishing what is good about civilisation.

Lessons in Gigantism: Richard Serra Makes It Work

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There’s never a shortage of mega-art in Chelsea: a stroll one morning this week encountered such gallery-filling works as Jordan Wolfson’s deranged, chain-operated marionette (“Colored sculpture,” 2016) at David Zwirner and Anish Kapoor’s mammoth, packed-earth “She Wolf” (2016) at Gladstone. And then there’s Richard Serra, whose double-gallery blowout at Gagosian is Exhibit A for material-intensity-meets-overwhelming-scale. There’s nothing else like it.

With this show, or rather, shows — the two venues are separately titled with the names of the sculptures they contain, NJ-1 and Above Below Betwixt Between, Every Which Way, Silence (for John Cage), Through — Serra is following the same playbook as his previous two-gallery presentation at Gagosian, which was held from October 26, 2013, to March 15, 2014: a walk-through sculpture on 21st Street and three others composed of enormous slabs of steel, standing and at rest, on 24th.

The false Gods of Dada: on Dada Presentism by Maria Stavrinaki

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A new book on the movement draws lessons on the dangers of eclecticism.

In the final chapter of the art historian Maria Stavrinaki’s new book, Dada Presentism, she imagines the origin of Dada as an immaculate conception. “Who, in fact, did invent Dada?” she asks. “Everyone and no one.” Amidst the devastation of the First World War, with Enlightenment optimism in ruin, Dada arrived as a miraculous redeemer. Stavrinaki echoes the German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, who wrote in his 1920 history of the movement that “Dada came over the Dadaists without their knowing it; it was an immaculate conception, and thereby its profound meaning was revealed to me.”

Antony Gormley, in Brooklyn Rail

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Antony Gormley’s career spans thirty-five years, beginning with his first solo exhibition, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, in 1981. With sculpture as a primary medium, Gormley’s work has explored the relationship of the human body to space and time, emphasizing the body as place rather than object.

Gormley:  I think it’s very important to realize that I don’t see my work as dealing with the figure. The figure comes with a whole load of baggage. Figure suggests figurative. Figure suggests figure drawing. Figure suggests the understanding of anatomy. It suggests putting the image of the body to work, in order to make a believable narrative.  The word ‘figure’ comes with a huge [baggage].  I went to the body as the found object that I happen to inhabit.

Richard Serra’s Steel Behemoths Get Into Your Head

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Richard Serra may have his ideological detractors, but he is certainly today’s greatest living sculptor of Minimalist abstraction. Exhibitions of new works occupying Gagosian Gallery’s two Chelsea display spaces find Mr. Serra at 76 still wrangling fundamentals of shape, space, gravity and time into objects and installations of thrilling severity.

The most arresting piece at West 24th Street is “Silence (for John Cage),” an 80-ton slab of forged steel lying flat on the floor. Knee-high and 29 ½ feet by 9 feet 2 inches, it astounds by virtue of its sheer mass, its rugged physicality intensified by contrast with the pristine white walls of the gallery.

It’s worth noting Mr. Serra’s titular dedication to Cage, the avant-garde musician whose most famous composition, for piano, “4’33”,” consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

Jordan Wolfson’s Creepy Robot Art Reboots Jeff Koons

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Jordan Wolfson’s art delights me a little—which may be a strange thing to say for an artist whose most recent installation centers on a human-like robot being brutally tortured for the entertainment of its spectators.

But Wolfson (b. 1980) delights me because I have this hypothesis that contemporary art—one of its strands, at least, particularly the neo-Koonsian strain of which Wolfson is an enthusiastic partisan—is developing an identity that can best be described as adult theme-park entertainment. And Wolfson’s creepy animatronic art happens to be a note-perfect illustration of how the circuit between the museum and the fairground will be closed.

Well, W magazine offers the following chirpy assessment of the meaning of Colored sculpture: “While the metal chains that drag the bot thrashing from floor to ceiling sure look painful, don’t worry, it’s all for a good cause: to land you a memorable Instagram.”

Collecting Contemporary Art

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A man paints with his brains and not with his hands – Michelangelo

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have – Andy Warhol

Art is anything you can get away with – Marshall McLuhan

A collector has one of three motives for collecting: a genuine love of art, the investment possibilities, or its social promise.  I have never known a collector who was not stimulated by all three. – EHT

Richard Serra’s 10 Most Expensive Artworks at Auction

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Iconoclastic American artist Richard Serra launched an exhibition of his latest steel behemoths at Gagosian Gallery in New York this past Saturday, featuring four new works: Above Below Betwixt Between,Every Which Way, Silence (for John Cage), and Through. It’s the thirtieth big show at the gallery for the artist, who splits his time between New York and Nova Scotia.

Suffice it to say, the artist, who had his first gallery show in Rome in 1966, is a big proponent of “bigger-is-better,” and is not afraid of taking on nature in the process. As he said in a 1996 interview with Gerard Hovagimyan: “I am interested in work where the artist is a maker of ‘anti-environment’ which takes its own place or makes its own situation, or divides or declares its own area.”

As one of the most influential working artists, artnet News took a look back at ten of Serra’s most expensive works at auction to date below.

Unpacking the MASH-UP

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In one epic exhibition, the Vancouver Art Gallery explores the history of the remix, from Marcel Duchamp to Danger Mouse.

For the epic exhibition “MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture,” on view through June 12 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the word [Mash-UP] has been wisely adopted to cover all the “mixing, blending and reconfiguration of existing materials (sounds, images, objects, events) to produce a new outcome,” writes VAG senior curator Bruce Grenville in the show’s dynamic catalogue. This game-changing mode of creativity has been driving avant-garde cultural production since the early 20th century, Grenville notes, but “MashUp” is the first major exhibition ever to cover the subject in such depth, or to put a name to it, for that matter.

A mind-blowing mash-up itself, the exhibition is the most ambitious the VAG has ever organized, filling all four floors of the museum’s building with nearly 400 works by more than 150 artists, designers, architects, filmmakers and musicians.

The Art of Larry Gagosian’s Empire

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“CAN WE QUICKEN this up?” It’s lunchtime in New York and Larry Gagosian is hungry. It’s time for supper—or at least aperitifs—in Europe, where he recently did a three-week working tour of France, England, Germany and Switzerland, and it’s breakfast in Los Angeles, where last week he hosted his annual pre-Oscars opening at his Beverly Hills gallery, followed by a bash at Mr. Chow. So when food appears, served in his office on delicate Japanese dishware from his restaurant, Kappo Masa, four floors below, he’s ready. “Here, I’ll do that,” he says, commandeering the water and pouring it himself into a pair of ridged tumblers.

As for whether the art he deals in will endure, Gagosian says, “It’s hard to say if in a hundred years that work’s going to be regarded as well as you hope it will be,” he says. “You just don’t know. That’s why we call it the test of time.” Meanwhile, he will be at his desk, on the phone, hard at work. “I’ve built this monstrosity of a business, and I’ve got no choice,” he says. “It’s like Sisyphus. I’ve got to keep pushing the rock up the hill—and some days the rock is pushing me and some days I’m pushing the rock. But I have to keep it going. And I love it.”

4 Ways Snøhetta’s SFMoMA Expansion Changes the Way You View Art

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SAN FRANCISCO — Viewed head-on, the newly-expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) presents an odd progression of landmark architectural styles in no chronological order. First up is SFMoMA’s original home, a 1995 postmodernist red-brick building by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. Behind Botta is San Francisco’s very first skyscraper, Timothy Pflueger’s 1925 Art Deco PacBell building. And now, rising up somewhere between the two is the museum’s Snøhetta-designed, 235,000-square-foot expansion that, following three years of construction, will finally open to the public on May 14.

By all counts, the expansion is weird: its all-white facade, comprising 700 individually-molded fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, ripples and curves in a way that is totally alien to the building in front of and behind it. This odd appearance, however, is a collection of carefully considered details that address the needs of a 21st-century museum in a way that Botta’s 1995 building did not.

Art Galleries Face Pressure to Fund Museum Shows

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Galleries have always provided scholarly support for museums exhibiting their artists’ work.  Now they’re expected to provide money, too.

In today’s exploding art market, amid diminishing corporate donations and mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more heavily on commercial galleries for larger amounts of money — anywhere from $5,000 to $200,000 each time — to help pay for shows featuring work by artists the galleries represent.

The increasingly common arrangement has stoked concerns about conflicts of interest and the dilution of a museum’s mission to present art for art’s sake. Such cozy situations raise the specter of a pay-to-play model and could give galleries undue influence over what the public sees.