Coming Face to Face With Jimmie Durham

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The sculptor’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum is a “brilliant, half-century-long act of politically driven self-invention,” our critic writes.

“I feel fairly sure that I could address the entire world if only I had a place to stand,” the peripatetic American artist Jimmie Durham said in the 1980s. Now he has that place: the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his magnetic traveling retrospective has arrived with a comet trail of controversy.

The controversy, like many attached to art are these days, is about identity and ownership: who has the right to do and say what. Mr. Durham, 77, is widely perceived as a Native American artist, maybe theNative American artist. He has often spoken of himself as Cherokee; his work has made frequent references to indigenous culture.

But when the retrospective, “Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World,” moved from its originating institution, the Hammer Museumin Los Angeles, to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, several historians raised objections to his ethnic claims, asserting that there’s no evidence that he is Indian at all.

Jeff Koons Gives it Up to The Masters

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Whitewall met with the artist in his sprawling Chelsea studio just days after his “Masters” collection launched for Louis Vuitton, a project he saw as quite public and accessible, too. The special line puts the work of Da Vinci, Titian, Rubens, Fragonard, and Van Gogh on accessories like bags and scarves, touting the name of each master in bold reflective metal type. So while perhaps the Louis Vuitton bags aren’t accessible in cost per se (albeit much more than an original Koons work), they will be seen on the street.

We chatted with Koons about his experience working with LVMH for the second time and about the connection between our cultural life and our biological makeup.

It’s about reaching the highest state of consciousness. I just saw a Twombly show in Paris at the Pompidou. It’s an amazing show. At the beginning of the show in 1953 there are a couple examples of Cy’s paintings. As you go through the show, you see the work developing. When you come to the last section of the show, where his late works are, you realize it’s almost like he prepared himself his whole life for his last works. These works are absolutely dealing with the sublime. And it’s like he’s on the other side; he’s there. It’s phenomenal.

I think Cy did it. Picasso did it. Picasso’s late works, I think, are this level of intuitive thought. I think both these people really ended up at the sublime. And we all can do it. Every individual has the freedom to exercise this power all the time.  I believe that on our deathbed, right at the moment of passing, that we may feel a sense of how easy it would have been to do all the things we really wanted to do. And think, “Oh, if only.” And I would like to do that now. I would like to achieve that level of understanding now. We have that freedom now, and we can exercise all this. So that’s why I make my work, to try to get closer to that level of consciousness.

Artist Stan Douglas: why I restaged the London riots

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Stan Douglas’s latest photographs recreate two key moments from the civil unrest of 2011. The artist talks racial profiling, riot porn and why he’s fascinated by ‘ruptures in the status quo’.

So how much of your work is really documenting the ineptitude of the police?” Stan Douglas is laughing at my question without completely avoiding it. “Well, the work can’t conceal the points at which they are out of their depth,” he says. We’re sitting in the Victoria Miro gallery in Mayfair, London, talking over the sounds of drilling as the artist’s latest large-scale works are secured to the wall next door.

The 57-year-old Canadian has spent the last 30 years making richly cinematic and allusive conceptual works that echo Hollywood noirs, westerns and cold war spy thrillers, Melville, Kafka and Hitchcock, while digging into deeper sociopolitical themes. His 2016 film The Secret Agent relocated Conrad’s novel, set in 1886 London, to Portugal after the 1974 carnation revolution. Disco Angola (2012) and Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) also explored historical moments of upheaval – what he calls “a rupturing of the status quo”.

An Eye-Popping Mid-Century Apartment Filled With Pollocks, Klines, and de Koonings

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If you had Ben Heller’s eye, you’d have picked 50 straight Derby winners, or signed 100 future Hall of Fame ballplayers when they were 17. “When I think of my old apartment on the Upper West Side,” says the tall, spry Heller, who is 91, “even I’m shocked.” In the mid-1950s, the talent he was spotting was Abstract Expressionist, and the art he amassed and later sold would be worth about a billion dollars today.

In this living room at 151 Central Park West — where Heller lived from 1959 to around 1975 he had three Jackson Pollocks and one Barnett Newman. In the dining room was a Giacometti sculpture, a Kline, and a Johns. Also hanging around were works by Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.

 

The Four Horsemen of America’s Apocalypse: Their Work Unearths the Seething Muck Beneath the Shiny Surface of American Culture

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The Apocalypse has long been a staple of American film, pulp fiction, popular culture, and high art and literature. Lately it has also been looming large in our political consciousness. From a presidential adviser who is convinced we have entered the fourth and final “turning” in human history to charges by environmentalists that our withdrawal from the Paris climate accord may push global climate change to a tipping point, the Trump era has so far been a time of dark forebodings and doomsday rumblings. At the same time, the art world has been facing its own version of Armageddon with the threatened demise of federal arts funding, the uncertain future of the NEA, and renewed attacks on the First Amendment.

Conner, Shaw, Pettibon, and Wojnarowicz burrow into moments in America’s recent past when the forces of darkness seemed ascendant. Conner’s reflections on the allure of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, Shaw’s fascination with religious sects that resist the pull of modernity, Pettibon’s exploration of the rubble left by the failure of the 1960s utopian dreams, and Wojnarowicz’s evocation of the AIDS catastrophe of the 1980s all belong to a tradition of anxiety rooted in Apocalyptic thinking. But they also remind us of the ambiguity at the heart of the eschatological narrative. The End looms, but there remains a large space for human agency. A sense of doom may be eternal. What matters is what we do about it.

Tehching Hsieh, extreme performance artist: ‘I give you clues to the crime’

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The Venice Biennale is hosting the biggest exhibition of work by the Taiwanese artist Marina Abramović calls ‘the master’.

“My impression of the Venice Bienniale is that it is the Olympic Games of the arts,” says Tehching Hsieh. “I’m in the category of marathon.”

If any artist knows about endurance it is is Hsieh, a Taiwanese artist who has created some of the most extreme performance art ever made. His work, mostly made in obscurity in a series of challenging one-year performances, was a precursor to the likes of Marina Abramović who acknowledges him as “the master”.

Recognition has come relatively late for Hsieh, who at 66 years old describes himself as “semi-retired”. Thirty years after his first year-long performance piece, his work was exhibited in 2009 in the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, and in 2014 he held an exhibition at Carriageworks in Sydney. In his most extensive retrospective yet, at this year’s 57th Venice Biennale, he is representing his home country Taiwan in a pavilion that records some of his most fascinating and thought-provoking works via an archive of documents, contracts, photographs and maps.

Rachel Whiteread Retrospective @ Tate Britain

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A metal sign among the found objects, tiny moulds, and notebooks, selected and arranged from across Rachel Whiteread’s 30 year career, reads: ‘Ancient Monuments Acts, 1913 and 1931. Any person who injures or defaces this monument may be fined and ordered to pay the costs of repairs or may be imprisoned.’ The display case is located in the foyer before the exhibition and, along with photographs of Whitereads public installations and a film documenting the construction and demolition of House (1993-4), sets up the retrospective as a study in sculpture as an interrogation of public structures and space. It’s not clear where the metal sign came from, or whether Whiteread found it or removed it from its monument, but either way its removal points to the ephemeral nature of public buildings. Decay, exposure to the elements, or vandalism mean that, Ancient Monuments Acts or no, any structure’s days are numbered.

Gerhard Richter: Brisbane show honours German master’s irony and influence

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The Life of Images offers a sweeping retrospective of a visionary photo painter whose work continues to resonate

To say that an international artist can be hugely influential in Australia, where their work has rarely been seen​, is to pay testament not just to the aesthetic qualities of their work but also to the appeal of the ideas behind it. 

German-born Gerhard Richter is one such artist. Since the early 1960s he has explored a number of related themes and ideas, producing paintings and photographs that question the nature of the images that can be produced by both mediums. Through magazines and books, and later the web, Richter’s work has been the subject of intense interest by many Australian artists – even when access to it meant trips to galleries in Europe or the US.

 

What It’s Like to Live With Art That Doesn’t Love You Back

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At a time when art is as commodified as oil, a few collectors have chosen to buy works that are messy, perishable and threaten to take over their lives.

PAUL LEONG, A YOUNG banker who lives in downtown Manhattan, spends an unusual amount of time thinking about square watermelons. He wonders where to get them, how long they’ll last, when they’ll next be in season. This is because two years ago, Leong bought a work by the Los Angeles-based artist Max Hooper Schneider called ‘‘Genus Watermeloncholia’’: a bioengineered square watermelon in a glass case filled with water. The watermelon is connected to an LED sign that is positioned so that it appears to be transmitting the watermelon’s depressive thoughts: ‘‘This is all a mistake,’’ for instance. Leong doesn’t quite know why he bought it, only that he was curious how the work might look in his apartment, with its sculpture of a miniature tank by Lutz Bacher mounted to seem as if it’s driving up the wall over the entrance to his bedroom, or Stefan Tcherepnin’s life-size Cookie Monster statue, which dominates the guest room.

Duchamp’s Last Riddle

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By now, the story has become a legend: in 1917, artist Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, signed it with a pseudonym, and submitted it for an exhibition put on by the Society of Independent Artists—who rejected it. Fountain, as he winkingly titled the urinal, was one of his ready-mades: a manufactured object that he deemed artworks in an effort to throw off the yoke of what he called “retinal art” in favor of a more conceptual and cerebral one.

Duchamp was good at gestures. Just six years after the Fountain controversy, he announced he was quitting the art world and would devote the rest of his life to his other passion, chess. Most people believed he had. But when he died in 1968, at the age of eighty-one, his grandest gesture was revealed: Duchamp had been constructing an artwork in secret for twenty years. He left it behind in his studio on Manhattan’s East Eleventh Street—a mysterious, life-size tableau. It featured a realist sculpture of a naked woman lying on a bed of twigs and leaves with her legs spread open. She could have been dead or unconscious, except that her left arm held aloft a gas lamp, behind which glowed a landscape of colorful trees and a waterfall. The uncanny scene was visible through a cutout in what seemed to be a brick wall, which itself was fronted by an old wooden door with two peepholes in it. Looking through the peepholes was—and still is—the only way to see the tableau.

Who Are the Most Influential Artists of the Last Century? 26 Industry Leaders Weigh In

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Which artist defined the last 100 years—and continues to reverberate in the work of artists today?

In 2017, a century since Marcel Duchamp turned a readymade urinal into an artwork, we’ve wondered how to characterize the past 100 years in art, posing challenging questions to some of the industry’s brightest figures: What are this century’s most iconic works of art? Who were last century’s most trailblazing curators? Today, we finish our three-part series with perhaps the most daunting question: Who was the most influential artist in the last 100 years?

It’s not an easy question, and there is no perfect answer. But a group of leading curators, artists, critics, and dealers were equal to the challenge, weighing in with their choices for artists whose legacies have defined the last 100 years and continue to reverberate in the work of artists today. The resulting list (below) is nothing short of a survey of modern art history, ranging from conceptual art forefather Duchamp to the video pioneer Nam June Paik to modern masters of abstraction like Jackson Pollock and Agnes Martin—and, of course, Jeff Koons.

Does Monet Beat the Dow? How Artworks Perform as an Investment

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Everyone loves a story about collectors who bought art for a song and sold it for a million. Once in a blue moon, that actually happens. In the case of Impressionist art, though, dappled landscapes and dreamy portraits by Monet, Renoir, and Degas were oftentimes considered investments before the paint on the canvas had dried.   For answers, we turned to two artworks that will hit the auction block at the annual mega-sales in New York next month, then plotted their historical sale prices against the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The Takeaway

If you’d bought in 1962, you’d be doing great. If you bought after the 1980s, your returns against the Dow would be disappointing.

All this, however, leaves out one crucial component: You can’t wake up every day to admire a stock index above your dining room table.

The Gray Market: Why Museums Can’t Compete With Private Collectors (and Other Insights)

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FALSE EQUIVALENCE: Although I always advise caution about these reports, sales at this year’s freshly entombed Frieze and Frieze Masters were allegedly strong from the jump. Numerous exhibitors were eager to broadcast their results (or at least, pretend to) on VIP preview night. But rather than resurrect the issue of dubious honesty from self-interested actors in a consequence-free environment, I want to focus on a different dimension of the sales process this time: specifically, the growing imbalance between two types of buyers who used to be evenly matched.

The point? More and more, suggesting budget equivalence between an institution and a “serious collector” is like suggesting that building a campfire produces as much heat as torching a lumberyard.

The unsettling visions of Thomas Ruff

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From gender-swap portraits to blown-up images of internet porn and 3D craters on Mars, his photographs are perfect for the age of image overload. As a major Whitechapel retrospective opens, we profile an artist always ahead of the game.

Photography is a base passion that has taken hold of every continent and every section of the population,” wrote the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard in 1988. “Everyone wants to be portrayed as good-looking and happy, when they are in fact ugly and unhappy.”

That same year, Thomas Ruff was revisiting a series of portraits he had made of his friends in the early 1980s, producing new colour prints that were vast in scale and meticulous in detail. Thirty years on, hung in a brightly lit room in the Whitechapel Gallery, they retain their power to unsettle, not least because of their uniformity, their almost forensic detachment. Everyone looks ordinary, neither flattered by Ruff’s camera nor aggrandised by the monumental prints. If anything, his subjects’ shared middle-class conformity is emphasised by the scale and detail.

There is nothing straightforward about Ruff’s engagement with the medium. Instead, his images are often oblique, referencing art history from modernism to the present, and increasingly engaging not so much with photography as with the image culture that it is now enmeshed in. Like Christopher William, also the subject of a recent Whitechapel retrospective, Ruff makes photography about photography. Both his early interiors – functional, neat, inordinately tidy – and the Portraits series nod to the formal typologies of his art school teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, founders of the so-called Düsseldorf School, which Ruff – like Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer – has been bracketed under.

 

What Is the Most Iconic Artwork of the 21st Century? 14 Art Experts Weigh In

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How do you choose one defining artwork for a century still in its adolescence? Some of the art world’s leading figures take their best shot.

Want to make an art historian laugh? Ask them to name the most iconic artwork of the 21st century. Turns out, it’s not so easy to single out the most significant work of art created over the past 17 years. Nevertheless, some leading figures in the art world—from curators and gallery directors to artists and auction house executives—gamely agreed to try their hand at narrowing it down.  What single artwork defines this awkward, information-addled teenage century? Some simply couldn’t choose just one work, while others ultimately refused to answer at all. But many, to our pleasant surprise, told us exactly what they think. Below, 14 art experts weigh in on the 21st century’s most iconic artwork.

George Goldner, art advisor; former chairman of prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most iconic work from 2001–2017? A misuse of the word icon for a period that is destined to fade into oblivion. There’s no Mona Lisa, Raft of the Medusa, or Guernica to be found here.

The Guggenheim’s Alexandra Munroe on Why ‘The Theater of the World’ Was Intended to Be Brutal

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The curator explains the origins of the exhibition and the thinking behind its most controversial elements.

Now well ensconced at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as its Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art, Munroe is trying to repeat that feat with recent Chinese art history, working with two co-curators—the widely respected experts Hou Hanru and Phillip Tinari—to chart the arc of conceptual art in China between 1989 and 2008 in “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World.”

Now, a week before it opens to the public, the show is already proving problematic.

Intending to show how artists captured the violent change and bestial tumult of the two decades charted by the show—set in motion by the shattered hopes and bloodshed of Tiananmen Square and capped by the controversial Beijing Olympics, which announced both the undeniable ascent of China as a world power and its retreat from international humanitarian norms—the curators included several works that involved animals menacing or even killing one another.

And read the article following, discussing the withdrawal of three artworks central to the exhibition, including the namesake of the exhibition, “Theatre of the World“.

Where the Wild Things Are: China’s Art Dreamers at the Guggenheim

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BEIJING — The signature work at “Art and China After 1989,” a highly anticipated show that takes over the Guggenheim on Oct. 6, is a simple table with a see-through dome shaped like the back of a tortoise. On the tabletop hundreds of insects and reptiles — gekkos, locusts, crickets, centipedes and cockroaches – mill about under the glow of an overhead lamp.

During the three-month exhibition some creatures will be devoured; others may die of fatigue. The big ones will survive. From time to time, a New York City pet shop will replenish the menagerie with new bugs.

In its strange way, the piece, called “Theater of the World,” created in 1993 by the conceptual artist Huang Yong Ping, perfectly captures the theme of the exhibition: China as a universe unto itself, forever evolving and changing into a new order. It also sums up a sense of oppression the artists felt from 1989 to 2008, as they were making these works.

Let This Be Your Guide: 7 Famous Artists Describe Their Favorite Artworks at The Met

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When a single work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art catches your attention and stops you in your tracks, it can feel like you’ve unearthed a hidden treasure. In Phaidon’s upcoming book The Artist Project: What Artists See When They Look at Art, over 100 artists reflect on this same experience—the moment when an artwork from the Met’s collection overwhelmed their senses, inspired their practice, or changed their view on art making in general. The next time you visit the Met, use the excerpt below as your tour guide, and allow these seven artists—John Baldessari, Eric Fischl, Ann Hamilton, Jeff Koons, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Hank Willis Thomas—to lead the way to their most cherished works on view in the two-million-square-foot museum. 

Jenny Holzer: Words of Conflict

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As three new commissions open this year in the UK and Abu Dhabi, the US artist reflects on the continued dominance of war as a theme in her work and says she longs for Trump to be “in the past tense”

Jenny Holzer has put words in unexpected places for nearly 40 years. Her texts have been flyposted across buses and boats, flashed across electronic billboards and, when she was the first woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale in 1990, engraved into the US Pavilion’s marble floor. The Ohio-born artist has projected verses of poetry onto the banks of the Tiber, inscribed accounts of sex crimes in ink onto human skin and engraved them into silver bands attached to human bones. In recent years, she has also returned to her earliest artistic roots by making paintings that meticulously reproduce declassified and often redacted US war documents concerning Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now Holzer has been commissioned by the Blenheim Art Foundation to make work for Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, UK, which is itself a spoil of war, given to John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, as a reward for defeating the French at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Holzer has also made works for the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the new US Embassy in London, both due to be unveiled later this year.

Rachel Whiteread review – accentuate the negative

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Tate Britain, London
Whiteread’s inside-out casts of everything from hot-water bottles to chicken sheds are poised between banality and a spellbinding poetry of the past.

There is a small white shack on the lawn in front of Tate Britain. It looks exactly like the very thing it is, namely the concrete cast of a chicken shed. The windows are blind and the door could never open to let the birds out, for the object is a solid block, heavy and impenetrable, unlike the airy structure it repeats. And yet it is still, first and last, a chicken shed.

Or is it? The art of Rachel Whiteread turns things inside out. This piece – hailed as a major new work at Tate Britain, though it’s anything but, and the artist calls it “shy” – is a cast of the space inside the shed. There’s a clue in the fact that the window frames are indented, instead of standing out. But so what? The object on the lawn – literal, stolid, untranslated – retains the form of the shed. It is a sculptural tautology.