This week, members of the NYTimes Dream Team are cranky. Ken Johnson spits out his second recent thumbs-down -- this time of P.S. 1's politically-themed "That Was Then...This Is Now." And Roberta Smith chastises the new crop of the Bronx Museum’s AIM students, writing "I think most of them should ask for their money back. On the evidence here, at least, they have only a meager understanding of what being an artist entails." Ouch! Across the pond, no fewer than seven reviews of the Tracy Emin survey in Edinburgh. Despite the artist's overexposure, most come out in her favor. These include Rachel Campbell-Johnston of the Times of London, who writes our Review of the Week, chosen for this memorable sentence: "I have grown sick of the whining of this now successful woman who sits at the centre of our culture parading her wounded psyche like some contemporary martyr; displaying her vagina as St James displays a cockle shell."
That Was Then ... This Is Now at P.S. 1 (-Sept. 22)
"Simplistic yet muddled, strident yet curiously tepid... ....an ambitious if disappointing effort to extend the activist spirit of the Vietnam War protest days into the Iraq war era. ...a confusing mix of politically motivated artworks from the 1960s to today by more than 60 artists... It was organized by the director of P.S. 1, Alanna Heiss; the center’s senior curatorial adviser, Neville Wakefield; and six other advisers. So many curators! Maybe that is why the show is so unfocused." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes
How Soon Is Now? at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (-Aug. 18)
"...almost nothing but symptoms reflecting almost nothing but failings. Yet this show of amateurish and derivative work by 36 emerging artists also says a lot about the competition among art mediums, the latest trickle-down trends in art making and the shortcomings of higher art education. In answer to the show’s catchy title, for many of the artists here, 'now' may never come. ...the 28th version of the annual culmination of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace, or AIM, program. ...in this rather undifferentiated morass of feints at video, photography, sculpture and above all earnestly political, identity-based Conceptual Art, the paintings spring out like little oases of personal thought, concentration and effort. ... Perhaps an overfamiliarity with Conceptual Art and especially the theories it inspired can leave young artists with no sense of how to make an artwork that holds together as an experience. You can sense the lack of connection to either materials or self in their statements, which appear on the wall labels beside the work. They mix overblown, one-size-fits-all artspeak with quite a bit of wishful thinking about their work’s impact, as if they could control the meaning or effect of their work. ... It does gives me pause that 26 of the 36 artists have master’s degrees in fine arts from respected universities or art schools. I think most of them should ask for their money back. On the evidence here, at least, they have only a meager understanding of what being an artist entails." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes
How Soon Is Now? at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (-Aug. 18) Eminent Domain at the New York Public Library (-Aug. 29)
"...market-oriented themes are employed by some of this year's crop of 36 AIM artists. ... This group photography show, typically well presented in the main library's soaring exhibition hall, focuses on New York City's ragged edges. ... This is Gotham without glitz or wealth, poignant in its quotidian splendor." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice
Kirchner and the Berlin Street at the MoMA (-Nov. 10)
"...a terrific visual wallop right at the start and then continues to reverberate. ...a set of seven paintings by the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner... Vigorously realized in jagged brushstrokes — lurid pinks, greens and yellows and shades of charcoal black — they depict stylishly dressed streetwalkers and furtive, darkly cloaked men on the nocturnal, vertiginously tilted streets of an infernal city... Kirchner was not a gifted painter, but his paintings have a bracing ugliness and a burning emotional intensity. Looking at his claustrophobic pictures is like seeing through the feverish eyes of a lost and tormented soul. Considered among the most important achievements of Kirchner’s career, the Berlin paintings are exhibited together for the first time here. ... There is an explosive tension in the works between male and female and between forces of disintegration and containment. ... But it is not too much of a stretch to see the Berlin street series as a desperate, last ditch effort to hold together, if only through the magic of metaphor, a world that was about to be blown to smithereens." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes
"Art tends to find itself in a lot of louche, exciting places just before the civilized world rears up and exterminates another two or three million people. After the rest of that generation dies off, we in the present get to view the remains of a moment’s anxiety and pleasure. ... In Street Scene, Kirchner’s swains dance down Friedrichstraße in the background like a line of Bob Fosse chorus boys, but the women with their feathered hats and voodoo masks would terrify Picasso. Kirchner had to paint fast and with an emotional reaction bordering on fear, lest his courtesans level his soul to dust. ... What they are is a snapshot of the great train to hell that never returns and never changes." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet
From Another Shore: Recent Icelandic Art at Scandinavia House (-Aug. 15)
"...a 21-artist survey of contemporary work from the collection of the National Gallery of Iceland. ... Neither show makes a case for Reykjavik as the next Leipzig. More to the point is the friction between global contemporary art and an island nation’s folk traditions, between urban hives and otherworldly landscapes." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
After Nature at the New Museum (-Sept. 21)
"...a little fever dream of a show that brings together works by 35 artists that either have a post-apocalyptic mood or that assume one by association with the other work in the show... more or less Germanic exhibition — Germanic in its Romanticism; Germanic in its post-Romantic apocalyptic nostalgia... ...Maurizio Cattelan, the Harpo Marx of contemporary art..." -Richard Lacayo/Time Mag.'s Looking Around
"Sure, seeing our environment as in crisis is not exactly a controversial position anymore -- like, the roof of the world is melting, after all. But the artists who made the 90 pieces spread over three floors here, most of them European and many never before shown in the United States, are about more than blighted landscapes. They detect a pollution of the soul, particularly the Western soul, in all these things. There's an exact copy of Unabomber Ted Kacynski's wilderness cabin, built by artist Robert Kusmirowski, on the third floor, for pete's sake. ... At the very top of the staggered New Museum building is a sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan, the artist famous for his realistic depiction of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, which consists of a stuffed horse with its head buried high up in the gallery wall, its hooves dangling ominously over your noggin. No longer a symbol of imperial power, this rearing horse is part ostrich, part idiot, and everybody in the art world knows which part of the horse's anatomy is meant to resemble American leadership. So there's an almost tribal feel to this exhibition, as if 'After Nature' represents a whole continent of white people going back to their roots in despair." -Dan Bischoff/Newark Star-Ledger
J.M.W. Turner at the Met (-Sept. 21)
"The show is both nerve-racking and thrilling: As presented here, Turner’s career resembles nothing so much as a massive storm seen from space, gathering speed and ferocity as it rages toward the unwelcoming shores of early Victorian Britain. ... The early years of the 19th century find him alternating between thunderous historical narratives and more quotidian subjects... Light and water increasingly became Turner’s great metaphors, and in his last works, many unfinished, the world is reduced to these two elemental forces. ... After Turner’s death, John Ruskin, his most enthusiastic supporter, would refer to him as 'faithless,' perhaps belatedly recognizing the notion of change without progress implicit in these later works. Some of these paintings—in particular, Peace-Burial at Sea (1842)—appear startlingly contemporary. And if, in their emphasis on uncertainty, contingency and temporality, they reflect views more widely accepted at the beginning of the 21st century than the beginning of the 19th, they still look radical." -Anne Doran/Time Out New York
"...used remorseless observation to move painting beyond fusty allegory and ponderous historical narrative. ... Like his sometime rival John Constable, Turner was forging an inseparable bond between his imagery and the physicality of his materials. Although he made detours into cumbersome history painting (an 1824 scene of the Battle of Trafalgar is stagy and leaden), Turner at his best stripped painting to its essentials. In 1834, he and thousands of other horrified Londoners witnessed the nighttime destruction of the Houses of Parliament, and his swift watercolors of the conflagration remain marvels of near abstraction. ... It's no surprise that this 'uncouth' visionary became the namesake for the coveted prize that young British artists strive for in our own day." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice
Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim Museum (-Sept. 28)
"For a self-styled matriarch, Bourgeois makes some of the most approachable art of the twentieth century. ...Bourgeois's sculpture seems soft where it should be firm and firm where it should be soft. Fabric lovers look like diving suits. Pink marble looks like resin. ... Born just months before Jackson Pollock, she falls between generations as between countries, but she spans them, too. Her husband, Robert Goldwater, argued for the relationship between primitivism and modern art. She has experienced Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and everything since at first hand. Increasingly, they knew her as well. ... She has the first solo exhibition covering sixty years that you or I may ever see. ... In fact, one can look at Bourgeois's entire long career either as constant repetition—or constant reinvention. It is not easy to decide, and the conundrum helps explain her psychological weight and range of influence. ... The Guggenheim has the advantage of twenty-five years since her MOMA retrospective. It has the disadvantage of little urgency, plus the biases of later years. The show, which originated at the Tate and the Pompidou Center, gives way too much space to the Cells. It runs away from the spiders as from a plague of locusts. The caged version remains at Dia:Beacon, and one could almost miss a large one out of its cage by the ticket counters. ... The ramp ends at the top of the rotunda, and one can imagine the artist still at work in the chamber behind the closed passage. It leaves her a riddle, which should make her very happy." -John Haber/HaberArts
Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s at the SculptureCenter (-July 28)
"In the 1970s, men were tearing the human landscape apart. They were burying a shed in earth, filling a lake with sand and stone, ripping deep into the land and piling it high, cutting through low houses and river skylights, and depositing the debris in bins on the gallery floor. And what were women doing? They were building, saving, planting, and growing. They were creating tunnels in the earth for sunlight to penetrate and platforms in the sky. They were binding trees and building stairwells for others to climb. They were leaving seeds and time capsules underground, waiting for recovery to unfold of itself. So, at any rate, argues 'Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s.' It asks whether recovery can still begin or has continued all along. ...extending the view of the same period in "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution," closing just up the street at P.S. 1. They could also be countering it, with continuities that the blockbuster leaves out. They could be insisting on feminist histories, like art histories, in the plural." -John Haber/HaberArts
Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting at the Guggenheim (-Sept. 14)
"...a small, engrossing, meditative exhibition... ...intense amounts of information with the dramatic pacing of an adventure story, and it is an adventure: after all, you are watching an object being taken apart, layer by layer, molecule by molecule, in an exhaustive, elusive and ultimately inconclusive quest for something — a living work of art — that may no longer be there." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
Home Delivery at MoMA (-Oct. 20)
"...reveals the history of prefabrication as veering uncertainly between utopian aspirations and crushingly anonymous standardization. The modernist dream of housing for the masses—combining aesthetic purity with supreme efficiency, affordability, and hygienic standards—could swerve and become a totalitarian nightmare: Witness the endless rows of Krushchovkas, the almost indistinguishable apartment blocks that covered the Eastern Bloc like a fungus, architectural symptoms of an ill society." -Leslie Camhi/Village Voice
Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven) (-Aug. 17)
"...back before the 18th-century Brits took matters in hand, watercolors were just used to tizzy up drawings, or to tint maps, prints, and drawings of architecture. By the mid-19th century, however, watercolor was deservedly regarded on equal terms with oil painting, and the achievements of British artists in the medium were a source of national pride. ... I recommend arriving in a mood conducive to the contemplation of landscape, because landscape - in an array of muted greens, grays, and blues - is what you get, and lots of it." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
Seascapes: Tryon & Sugimoto at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (-Jan. 25) Richard Misrach: On the Beach at the National Gallery of Art (-Sept. 1) (Washington, D.C.)
"To varying degrees, what Tryon, Sugimoto and Misrach are all confronting is the notion of the liminal, the threshold state between one place and another. Despite appearances, their subject matter isn't just the ebb and flow of surf on sand or that place where the ocean meets the sky." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post
Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) (-Oct. 12)
"For those who find consolation in visionary architecture, this city has always been a powerful antidepressant. Its wealth of 20th-century treasures, mostly private homes, reminds us that it is possible to find quiet corners of enlightenment in dystopian times. ...makes a strong case that Lautner’s role in forging that architectural legacy has been curiously underestimated. ...it presents about 120 plans, sections and renderings that counter his longstanding image as an architect who succumbed to Hollywood gaudiness and glamour. What we glean instead is a keen structural knowledge wedded to an environmental sensitivity — a seamless bond of nature, space and humankind. ... An impressive work of scholarship, this is nonetheless an oddly dry show that may bore the average viewer. ... His work is never a mere sculptural exercise; it always starts with an intimate understanding of the site, which prevents him from slipping into self-indulgence. That spirit of empathy, of context, unites all great architecture." -Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYTimes
Wilfredo Lam at the Museum of Latin American Art (Los Angeles) (-Aug. 31)
"...a handsome and long overdue survey... one of those second-tier Modern artists -- there are a lot of them -- whose work rarely fails to impress when it is encountered but isn't encountered nearly often enough. Out of sight, out of mind, his paintings have become perpetual surprises. ... The deliriously hybrid nature of Lam's art makes it of special interest to the way art has developed in the quarter-century since his death. Purity is out, hybridity is in." -Christopher Knight/L.A. Times
The Audubon Insectarium (New Orleans)
"...forces a confrontation with a segment of the animal kingdom before which Homo sapiens might nearly be humbled. This museum, billed as the first major new institution to open in post-Katrina New Orleans, has been created in a section of the United States Custom House by the Audubon Nature Institute, a nonprofit group that also runs a local aquarium, park and zoo (and has no relationship to the National Audubon Society). By rights, though, this shouldn’t be called an Insectarium at all, since it incorporates arthropods (900,000 known species that encompass insects, spiders, centipedes, millipedes and crustaceans) and annelids (segmented worms). ...at once bracing, unsettling and amusing... the double visions of respect and fear, amazement and shock, fascination and disgust, are woven throughout the exhibits; indeed, throughout human encounters with these creature." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes
Tracey Emin: 20 Years at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh) (-Nov. 9)
"Here are 20 years of self-revelation, self-dramatisation, self-this and self-that. Step into the first room and you're knee-deep in raw emotion: Emin's memories of growing up at the Hotel International in Margate; a tribute to her gran, who's with the angels now; a shrine to her Uncle Colin, who's also with the angels after a horrific car crash - and that's before you get on to her abortion, her mum, her tour of America, her abortion. Is there anything that has happened to Emin that she hasn't turned into a blanket, a neon, a drawing, a painting or a video? By the end of this show, I felt as if someone had been shouting at me down the phone for a couple of hours - a kind of emotional earache. ...in many ways Emin's achievement is the same as Caravaggio's: she rubs our noses in reality, in a way that subverts all our illusions, fantasies, snobberies and repressions, those barriers we put up between us and death. ... I've rarely seen an exhibition that so constantly changed my mind about an artist. ... Emin presents herself as an emotional artist, but her real strength is intellectual: she confuses art and life in a way that is profound, philosophical and has a core of greatness." -Jonathan Jones/Guardian
"Until I spent time with Tracey Emin, I had never thought of art as an instant route to depression. ...not so much an exhibition, more a cry for help. By the time we have suffered the artist's experiences of rape, adolescent sex, abortion (several), drunkenness, 'emotional suicide' and a seemingly never-ending list of failed relationships with exploiting men, we are left fairly close to death ourselves. ... Being with Emin and her art is like walking unexpectedly into the bedroom of a teenage daughter who is going through a bad patch. The room is a mess, the things she has scrawled on the walls don't bear looking at, and you can only hope that she will grow out of it. That many of her cries of rage and despair are appliquéd on to quilts, or stitched with some skill on to tapestries, does not alter the fact that they are ultimately banal, unrelieved by irony, unleavened by poetry or anything that reaches out beyond the confines of her own, tortured world."
"I would really love to hate Tracey Emin. Haven’t we heard too much about the abuse and abortions, the bullying boyfriends and self-abasing depressions? Haven’t we picked our way too often through the detritus of her despair? I have grown sick of the whining of this now successful woman who sits at the centre of our culture parading her wounded psyche like some contemporary martyr; displaying her vagina as St James displays a cockle shell. ... Tracey Emin: 20 Years feels about as fresh as a Friends repeat. And yet this show grabbed my attention and kept me lingering. ... Mad Tracey from Margate has become a caricature. But you can’t help but be struck by her courage. ... She mixes all the ingredients — the cult of personality, the unabashed self- promotion, the blatant commerce — to make something that shows us with a mixture of repulsive brashness and unbearable poignancy how sad and superficial and self-serving it all is." "Walking around the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, two things immediately strike you about her art. First, Emin is a writer as much as she is a visual artist: words feature prominently in almost every piece. Her best-known works - her appliqué blankets - are graphic banners blaring thoughts and slogans, like placards for some eccentric feminist demonstration. Second, her art is disarmingly direct: she has no need for pundits to explain her work. ... In this respect, she is democratic, just like Big Brother (her rise to celebrity has often been linked to our preoccupation with reality TV). ... If Emin has a presiding style, it is tentative and nervous. ... But Emin's faltering gestures are central to her art. The form of her work reflects the content of her life's project, examining the neuroses of a fractured and highly conflicted self. Anxiety and insecurity are things we can all relate to. Consequently many of her pieces, such as her suite of monoprints about abortion, have a heart-piercing power. ... Emin does have two big weaknesses: one for melodrama (when her unmade bed was originally shown in Tokyo and New York, she hung a noose nearby); the other for mawkishness (her ramshackle tree house on stilts, on show in Edinburgh, contains a sentimental video of her father offering a flower to the camera). Overall, I'm not a big fan of her splurging, self-revelatory art, mainly because visually I find it insufficiently stimulating. But I can't stop myself from warming to her as a person. And this makes me fear for the longevity of her work. What will happen when she is no longer around? Emin is her art to such an extent that without her backstory to hand, the half-life of the objects that she preserves and makes might quickly decay. This is the fragility of her celebrity: she is her most successful work of art." -Alastair Sooke/Daily Telegraph
"Is Tracey Emin a religious artist? Don't laugh. There is a certain amount of evidence for this admittedly improbable thesis in her new exhibition... The galleries are full of detritus from her ordeals. Some of these items -- for example, 'My Abortion,' containing among other things a plastic hospital wrist-band and a blood-soaked tissue -- have the same quality as saintly relics. ... And the Bed of St. Tracey? Is it a work of art or a pile of carefully conserved dirty linen, exhibited in public? As with other relics, how you view it depends on whether you have faith." -Martin Gayford/Bloomberg
"...it's not hard to find something to relate to in the highly personal and constantly intriguing inspirations that feed her art. ...the essence of Emin's personality – the intelligent, articulate and vital versus the bolshie, moody and self-centred – and it is what makes her and her work, so imaginatively presented in this important retrospective, worth our time and attention." -Lynne Walker/The Independent
"From beginning to end this exhibition confirms Tracey Emin as a passionate and compulsive exhibitionist, one of the great publicists of a self trapped in - and sometimes appearing to revel in - a raw, naked and intensely personal kind of hell." -Robin Blake/Financial Times
Correggio and the Antique at the Borghese Gallery (Rome) (-Sept. 14)
"...a gathering of 25 paintings and more than 30 drawings... Correggio’s love of feminine beauty and the sensuality often present even in his sacred paintings can be seen in his later mythological canvases. ... Many art historians have long recognized that Correggio both anticipated (by nearly a century) and inspired the Baroque. Nearly 20 years ago the historian Francis Haskell argued that Correggio changed the entire course of the history of art. This show highlights the depth and breadth of his long-term influence." -Roderick Conway Morris/NYTimes
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