This week... Don't miss Peter Schjeldahl's breathless beatifying hyperbole on Philip Guston ("His climactic style now appears canonical, lording over other art of the late twentieth century as a consummation ... of modern art."), John Haber's classifications of age-appropriateness ("Damien Hirst is the eternal eighteen-year-old—proud of his independence and awe-struck at his discovery of mortality..."), Blake Gopnik's diagnosis of Koons as a Martian with a neurological disorder (a step up from Schjeldahl's nightmare), Richard Lacayo's likening of an Anish Kapour sculpture to the "Wagnerian" creation of a planet, and, best of all, Blake Gopnik's insightful comparison of Martin Puryear's "late abstraction" to a quadrille ("a dance that had military origins, but went on to be cherished for its well-ordered graces.") Also, check out James Kalm's rooftop interview with Jeff Koons on the art market.
Philip Guston at the Morgan Library (-Aug. 31)
"...packs a punch as ostensibly rough and actually exquisite as any one of the renegade Abstract Expressionist’s late, cartoonish images: slovenly still-lifes, geeky characters, chiliastic floods. Something has happened to those pictures lately—they’ve grown steadily, stealthily greater since Guston’s death, in 1980. His climactic style now appears canonical, lording over other art of the late twentieth century as a consummation (and consumption, bonfire-fashion) of modern art. ... His great subject turned out to be the collision of his masochistically vaulting artistic ambition (Piero della Francesca was his ideal) and his life as a doubt-ridden, suffering man. ...a marriage of high and low, reason and squalor, which amounts to a beautiful joke that’s as big as the world." - Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker
"This terrific show concisely charts how concentrated bouts of drawing re-energized the artist's broadly influential paintings. ... Guston filtered the classics through America's rough-and-ready culture and distilled 600 years of pictorial invention into an ever-intoxicating brew." - R.C. Baker/Village Voice
Heavy Light and Bill Wood’s Business at the ICP (-Sept. 7)
"Taken together, though, the two shows demonstrate how photography can survey society in ways that are at once panoramic and telescopic. ... Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan gathers the newest talent to hatch from the Japanese incubator - 13 artists in all, some focused on their nation's landscape, others on the idiosyncrasies of its people. The smaller but more fascinating Bill Wood's Business contains samples from the more than 20,000 pictures taken in the 1950s and 1960s by a professional photographer dedicated to serving clients in the provincial city of Fort Worth. ...the dirty secret of slice-of-life photography is that when life is sliced with too blunt a knife, the banal transcends its time and place. A cliché is for ever." - Ariella Budick/Financial Times
Bill Wood’s Business at the ICP (-Sept. 7)
"...Wood's photographs are striking, and a large part of what makes them so is that they contain both vestiges and prescient glimmers of art photography from the last century. ... Unlike the vast population of art photographs, what Wood's work offers is the insider's view. ... Wood's subjects, posed carefully in front of the camera—unlike straight photography's ostensibly unposed aesthetic—gaze tentatively, sometimes almost sheepishly, into the lens, as if to ask: "Am I doing it right?" Spend some time with these pictures and you'll begin to wonder: Is it fair to look back with the arrogance of historical hindsight and say no?" - Martha Schwendener/Village Voice
The Ideal Cloud at the ISE Cultural Foundation (-June 27)
"...the works offered by three contemporary artists ... are sprawling, mechanized sculptures. These pieces depart from the formalist foundations of art and technology by engaging with sentimentality. Ordinarily this would spell trouble, but whatever maudlin qualities the show might have had are offset by either the materials employed or the opportunity for audience participation." - Paddy Johnson/TONY
Paul Chan: The 7 Lights at the New Museum (-June 29)
"...the artist imbues the digital—that most affectless of mediums—with visceral and touching content. ...perhaps the artist is hinting at a moral cause and effect, portraying man and his achievements as deserving the random backlash of larger forces. Chan speaks to both the beauty of nature and the ills of technology, using the latter to show the delicate balance between hope and fear." - T.J. Carlin/TONY
Flow at the Studio Museum of Harlem (June 29)
"Political and cultural nightmares have not gone anywhere, but they hover quietly off-stage. ... As 'Flow' implies, art and lives are in transit, and the flow goes largely in one direction. It does not go easily either. ... Exile appears as a place as well as a journey—and an inhospitable one. ... If post-African identity sounds bleaker than Africa and the West put together, 'Flow' itself is not. All that reliance on indirection shows that people have a few ruses left. By sticking to just twenty artists, all under forty, the museum allows them space, too, including room for ambiguity." - John Haber/Haber Arts
© MURAKAMI at the Brooklyn Museum (-July 13)
"Hate museums? Too many memories of class trips to look at stuffy old art? Look no further than Eastern Parkway. This time, one pretty much gets the point halfway through the revolving doors. ... Murakami's version of the Yellow Brick Road has more colors than Dorothy's, welcomes you, makes the decisions for you, and pockets ten bucks along the way. ... One exaggerates a little in calling this a retrospective, when so much of Murakami's career dates from about five years starting in 1997. Evolution seems as irrelevant as it would to an episode of Loony Tunes. ... In a way, Damien Hirst is the eternal eighteen-year-old—proud of his independence and awe-struck at his discovery of mortality—while the Chapman brothers are always pushing fourteen, unshakably righteous and obsessed with sex. Murakami's art rarely gets past age eight... Eyes may show unalloyed happiness or anxiety, but never any real cause for concern, and a mushroom may evoke a mushroom cloud, but never a devastated or political world. ... Where last year the Brooklyn Museum cloyingly surveyed 'Global Feminisms,' now it has global infantilism." - John Haber/Haber Arts
Jeff Koons at the Met Roofgarden (-Oct. 26)
"...look at that suit... that suit is just about as shiny as his sculpture. ... This guy is really good at this. He's done this a lot. Would you vote for this man? I would. ... this is really flawless casting and polishing... beautiful... very durable... very pretty..." - James Kalm/Kalm Report
Jeff Koons at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) (-Sept. 21)
"...extraterrestrial origins might be the best explanation for his art. It is so compellingly, engrossingly strange that no other account fits. Even though Koons is one of the most famous and popular artists on this planet, familiarity doesn't make his work any easier to get a handle on. ... Where many of even today's best artists risk retreading well-trod ground, Koons takes us somewhere genuinely new. Whether we enjoy being there is almost beside the point. ... Koons, the Stepford Artist, spouts such a quantity of absurd, Pollyanna cliches -- 'the people who are involved in the art world really first and foremost care about people' or 'when someone views a work of art . . . it's always about them, about their potential' -- that it's hard to remember that he's the guy who posed having sex with his wife. ... When people profoundly misapprehend the world around them, neurologists call it 'agnosia' -- mistaking your wife for a hat being the famous example from Oliver Sacks. Koons turns agnosia into an artistic principle. And that has the effect of letting us see our world, and art, as profoundly other than it usually is. ... As reworked by the Martian Koons, 'Bunny' has lost all the good humor of the original toy and now feels like a totem for some sinister rabbit ritual. ... It's as though Duchamp's urinal-become-fountain-become-sculpture were uncovered eons from now, and reused yet again to house a sacred relic. Then buried. Then re-rediscovered and presented as superb ancient art." - Blake Gopnik/Washington Post
Martin Puryear at the National Gallery (Washington, D.C.) (-Sept. 28)
"...the sculptor Martin Puryear can be thought of as a past master of late abstraction. For more than 30 years, he's been making work that is gracious, persuasive and attractive -- if not completely of its time. ... The 46 pieces at the National Gallery are mostly carved or carpentered from wood, and are usually between the size of a pony and an elephant, with a couple reaching brontosaurian scale. ... There's a kind of distillation of heavy-duty function here, without the object actually being able to do anything. ... His sculptures are like found art that has been custom-crafted to be even more cryptic, poetic and potent than your average discarded artifact. ... Stylish, poetic, nostalgic -- Puryear's works are all of those. But very rarely challenging. That puts them right in line with most late-style art. ... Puryear's art can end up seeming more like a quadrille: a dance that had military origins, but went on to be cherished for its well-ordered graces. ... If Puryear's art represents a kind of tapering off for abstract sculpture, for craft it comes close to an apotheosis."- Blake Gopnik/Washington Post
Remix: New Modernities in a Post Indian World at the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.) (-Sept. 21)
"...argues that for many young artists, being Indian does not necessarily wholly determine who or what they are and does not oblige them to work in a certifiably Indian style. To prove its point, the exhibition presents a mixed bag of works by 15 artists of at least partial American Indian descent. ... On the one hand, Indianness starts to seem nebulous: it becomes unclear what it means for a person to identify him or herself as Indian or as an Indian artist. On the other, the artists seem affiliated to what might be called art-school Postmodernism, relying on the appropriation and manipulation of socially charged signifiers." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes
Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (Washington, D.C.) (-Aug. 3)
"...a peculiar, partial triumph. At its best, in a dozen or so paintings and murals made almost entirely between 1927 and 1935, Douglas is revealed as a quintessential early American modernist, a Harlem Renaissance painter who successfully fused lessons from the American and European avant-gardes with American content and a lot of old-fashioned allegory. But the exhibition, curated by Susan Earle, also reveals Douglas (1899-1979) as a not-particularly-interesting traditionalist, a painter of shockingly dull landscapes and portraits. Finally, the biggest mystery is what happened to Douglas and his production after World War II. ... But those works from the Douglas peak decade are gripping. In painting after mural after painting there is optimism, triumph, achievement, promise and an insistence on arrival." - Tyler Green/MAN
Anish Kapoor at the ICA Boston (-Sept. 7)
"...an indispensable show... ...14 Kapoors dating from 1980 to the present into a single long gallery that's also something of a fun house, assuming that a fun house can be smart, subtle and even a little haunting. ...almost always playing with the threshold between the solid and the immaterial, the point at which a thing comes into being or dematerializes... ...it has debts to the blunt boxes of minimalists like Donald Judd and Robert Morris as well as to the weightless atmospheres of James Turrell. But the blend of heavy and vaporous, declaring and beckoning--that's all Kapoor's. ... It's art as metaphysical jujitsu. ... Wagnerian, mythic and muddy, it's something vast and strange being born, like a planet being fashioned out of primal elements and impersonal forces." - Richard Lacayo/Time
Personal Protocols and Other Preferences and I’ve Got Something in My Eye at the Center for Curatorial Studies/Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (Annandale-on- Hudson, NY) (-Sept. 7)
"The latest form of artists’ scrutiny of museums — widely known as institutional critique — seems to be congenial entertainment. Turn museums into places where fun happens, and where making art as well as looking at it is a form of play, not much skill required. It may not get to the roots of things, but it undermines art’s pretensions to seriousness, personal expression and permanence. Sort of. There’s quite a bit of fun to be had in the two summer shows... ...feature five little-known, often interesting artists from Europe and deftly float some ideas about collaboration, irreverence and artists as curators. Luckily there is just enough seriousness to go around." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes
Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA) (-Oct. 19)
"...a blissful exhibition of late-19th- and early-20th-century paintings and a serene new building by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando. ... Quiet, blurrily luminous scenes of natural calm by Whistler, George Inness, John Twachtman and Thomas Wilmer Dewing, among others, appear like mirages, as though they’d magically materialized on canvas. ... Many of the show’s paintings give the impression of under- or overexposed and poorly focused photographs. Were the soft painters influenced by photography? ... Built on a grassy hillside a short hike through the woods from the Clark’s main buildings, it is a two-story, 32,000-square-foot gray box of steel, cedar and glass. ...a blessed departure from the kind of showy architectural statements many art museums have been prone to in recent years." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes
55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (-Jan. 11, 2009)
"...very small list of engaging and on-message works. It seemed to me that this International couldn't make up its mind whether it was a survey of well-known and recognized current art or a biennial on a particular curatorial theme. In either case, I was dismayed at how little of the work seemed new, 'important' (a problematic term , I know), or communicative. ... One spectacular piece was Thomas Hirschhorn's 'Cavemanman' - a post-apocolyptic view of where we might live if society reduces us all to living like street people. ... Also impressive was Phil Collins video about the relationship between language and power."
Women Impressionists at the Legion of Honor (San Francisco) (-Sept. 21)
"...a blissful exhibition of late-19th- and early-20th-century paintings and a serene new building by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando. ... Quiet, blurrily luminous scenes of natural calm by Whistler, George Inness, John Twachtman and Thomas Wilmer Dewing, among others, appear like mirages, as though they’d magically materialized on canvas. ... Many of the show’s paintings give the impression of under- or overexposed and poorly focused photographs. Were the soft painters influenced by photography? ... Built on a grassy hillside a short hike through the woods from the Clark’s main buildings, it is a two-story, 32,000-square-foot gray box of steel, cedar and glass. ...a blessed departure from the kind of showy architectural statements many art museums have been prone to in recent years." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes
55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (-Jan. 11, 2009)
"...very small list of engaging and on-message works. It seemed to me that this International couldn't make up its mind whether it was a survey of well-known and recognized current art or a biennial on a particular curatorial theme. In either case, I was dismayed at how little of the work seemed new, 'important' (a problematic term , I know), or communicative. ... One spectacular piece was Thomas Hirschhorn's 'Cavemanman' - a post-apocolyptic view of where we might live if society reduces us all to living like street people. ... Also impressive was Phil Collins video about the relationship between language and power."
Women Impressionists at the Legion of Honor (San Francisco) (-Sept. 21)
"The collation of some 140 paintings, drawings and prints is the museum equivalent of a holiday from dark and troubling matters. ...this exhibition devotes the dominant portion of its real estate to name-draws Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. The expected is here in abundance - an entire room largely given over to Cassatt's mother-and-child paintings and familiar prints and a generous display of Morisot's alluring, brushily painted women. ...invites a certain kind of inquiry in the viewer. Gender is the inevitable open-ended question. Did these female artists paint in a certain way because they were women?... Choice of subject is one clearly unifying factor. To an overwhelming degree, the pictures on display depict women, mostly at home or in garden settings." - Steven Winn/SF Chronicle
Frida Kahlo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (-Sept. 28)
"...stunningly emotional and visionary work. ...permitting shockingly personal depictions of her physical and psychological pain to bleed into the iconography of Mexico’s Aztec, colonial, and revolutionary history. ...a courageous eloquence all her own, and that deserves mad respect." - Juxtapoz
Inspiring Impressionism at the Seattle Art Museum (-Sept. 21)
'There's nothing new in the premise of art coming from art, but given flesh as an exhibit, it's a window on a wider world. Instead of one more show featuring paintings with bulletproof crowd appeal, Seattle Art Museum's 'Inspiring Impressionism' offers a respectable if not entirely major sample of that work within the contexts that gave it root. ... Impressionists compete with the power and glory of 17th-century Spanish and Dutch art, as well as the somber still lifes and silky romance of 18th- century France. ... Edouard Manet could not have envisioned that his slapdash, unfinished 'Portrait of Isabelle Lemonnier' from 1879 would one day hang beside El Greco's "Lady in a Fur Wrap" from 1577- 80. ... The Monets in this show are fine, especially in the context of Dutch landscapes. Next to him, these Dutch seem fussy." - Regina Hackett/Seattle PI
Mundaneum (Mons, Belgium)
"...a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet. In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or 'electric telescopes,' as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a 'réseau,' which might be translated as 'network' — or arguably, 'web.' ... Although the museum has consistently managed to secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors." - Alex Wright/NYTimes
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