The cosmology of German artist Rosemarie Trockel is a constantly shifting inventory, substituting iconographic, linguistic, and material transformations 
for the expected guises of identity and representation. Advertorial images and pop figures exist alongside typologies and taxonomies culled from history, the natural sciences, cinema, anthropology, and the artist’s own hybrid index of drawings, collages, and moving images. And yet to Walt Whitman’s biological envisioning 
of self and world, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” Trockel’s incisive productivity might offer Emily Dickinson’s rejoinder 
on creativity: “Don’t you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to language?”

As “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” opens at the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid this summer — it will travel to the New Museum this fall, where it will be her first New York museum exhibition in a decade — her last institutional show in New York continues to reverberate and give insight into an 
indelible approach to exhibition making, for Trockel repeatedly finds abundance 
in the wilderness of no. “Spleen,” presented in 2002 by the Dia Art Foundation in their former Chelsea venue (and organized by then curator Lynne Cooke, also the co-curator of “A Cosmos”), followed 
the character Manu through a series of five episodic videos projected onto separate freestanding sculptural walls. A provisional muse, Manu and her confines 
are a fitting cipher for stepping further into Trockel’s unique fashioning from out of negation.

On the reverse of each partition were hinged aluminum plates of black, orange, yellow, silver, and white that were flexible enough to respond to the movement of passing viewers. Providing a contour of hypersensitive vulnerability mixed with Minimalist cool (and a distant nod to Blinky Palermo’s painting installation “To the People of New York City,” 1977, in Dia’s collection), the walls’ paradoxically hard fragility bulwarked the looping videos 
and animated a tension between precise architectural framing and a parodic relationship to narrative, figure, and genre central to “Spleen” and Trockel’s oeuvre.

Tall and beautiful, Manu is easy to recall, walking nonchalantly through a graveyard with two hip companions in “Manu’s Spleen 1,” 2000, until she lies down next to an inert man’s body in an open grave that the trio happens upon. Her two friends move the body aside to make room for Manu. Rehearsing death and resurrection, the scene extends just long enough 
for Manu’s consorts to smoke a cigarette, take a cell phone call, and begin to feel 
the discomfiting elongation of time. As Manu finally awakes and is helped out of the shallow abyss, exiting the graveyard unscathed and seemingly a bit bored, her characteristic split between comic timing and uncanny melancholia asserts its grip.

Within “Spleen” Manu is a composite persona, role-playing gender, donning and discarding narrative expectations, and readily masking appearances (all strategies that extend to Trockel’s survey exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich, “Deliquescence of 
the Mother,” 2010, and the Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels, “Flagrant Delight,” in 2012). Manu is a meme for Trockel’s long-standing, polymorphous use of media — which mutates to include sculpture, painting, video, drawing, collage, furniture, book design, and architectural-scale performative collaborations. To follow Manu’s splenetic path is to run squarely into Trockel’s collapsing and reversing of character as a unifying dynamic and analog for the larger practice: Manu is a proxy activist protesting the proposed demolition of the Cologne Kunstverein and Kunsthalle; Manu is a wealthy young woman raising a toast to her own pregnancy, only to pop the balloon beneath her dress to riotous laughter; and Manu is a gag performer holding a written placard 
up to an elephant asking the whereabouts of a Mr. Comes. Each Manu is resolutely partial, reacting to the fragility of the exhibition’s swaying, responsive architecture. Any cathartic release the spectator might desire from Manu — the spleen is traditionally held to be the seat of emotions and passion — is dispersed. This split nature of narrative, self, and figurative form culminates in “Manu’s Spleen 4,” 2002, in which Trockel parodies the infamous role of Mother Courage in a compressed six-and-a-half-minute pantomime of Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 antifascist play.

Modeled on a 1949 postwar performance by Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, Trockel’s mise-en-scène adopts the neutrality of a soundstage to enfold a high-fashion Mother Courage/Manu constantly primping in the reflection of a frying pan — and occasionally dancing to music — while a cast of historical caricatures populate the rotating grist and grind of the scene: Jackie Onassis drags a phallic cannon about, obsessively burnishing its reflective shine; Joan of Arc tunes in to a boom-box collage of intermittent pop music and historical snippets culled from Vietnam-era speeches and McCarthyist interrogations; a pair of young male attendants with flaccid penises sewn to the outside of their flesh-colored costumes pull Mother Courage’s cart, and two Brigitte Bardot–like talking heads pantomime the role of commentators and chorus.

The sculptural framing of “Spleen” plays host to a constant upheaval and inversion of character and style. Enacting what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has termed “serious parody” in his 2007 book of essays, Profanations, Trockel simultaneously invests in and mocks her own obsessions — most obviously in the risible conflation of BB from Bertolt Brecht and Brigitte Bardot (a hybrid reference that reappears elsewhere in Trockel’s repertoire). Elaborated from Italian literary critic Franco Fortini’s use of the same term to describe Pasolini’s writings and films, there is a constant “being beside itself” to Trockel’s work that goes to the metaphysical heart of parody. Prying apart and emptying out stylistic investments, critical prompts, and theoretical lines of inquiry in order that they be revitalized with a restless comic gravitas, Trockel’s is arguably the “para” practice par excellence of our time. As she offers in a rare interview with Cooke published to accompany “Spleen,” “the question of the model in terms of what engagement could mean these days is contradictory and ambiguous. It is also affected by our points of view. Models are a matter of one’s own work. There is no model for how to deal with a model. One is never on firm ground.”

Indeed, Trockel has been giving shape to this line of self-questioning and interrogation throughout her career via formal, material- and medium-specific partial investments. To briefly outline the etymology of parody as it relates here, parodias were once inserted in between the rhapsody or recitation of Greek drama. Performers would enter to ridicule and quickly overturn all that came before. Speaking beside the conventional text, serious parody therefore has its descendants in the entr’acte and intermezzo of theater and opera, relying upon and using preexisting styles and genre forms but without fidelity to them — contingent and yet morphing away. To quote Agamben, “unlike fiction, parody does not call into question the reality of its object; indeed, this object is 
so intolerably real for parody that it becomes necessary to keep it at a distance. To fiction’s ‘as if,’ parody opposes its 
drastic ‘this is too much’ (or ‘as if not’).”

Within Trockel’s “as if not” approach, there is one additional moment from “Spleen” to consider. Displayed in a small corner of the Dia exhibition was a vitrine presentation of book cover proposals shown for the first time. Subsequently termed drafts in Trockel’s most recent survey exhibitions, the book covers and proposals span decades of ideas that exist in unfinished form. Included in “Spleen” was a draft that featured a 1993 zine-like, spiral-bound blue cover showing a photo of Trockel as a teenager sitting in her older sister’s bedroom, celebrity photos from the 1950s and ’60s hanging on the wall behind. Titled “Ich kann über meine Filme nur lachen” (“My Films Just Make Me Laugh”) after a retrospective comment made by Bardot about her Hollywood days, the book blows up and fragments the faces, fracturing each into further isolation page after page. As the cover image exposes a self-aware, middle-class teenager adrift in the so-called Wirtschaftswunder or “economic miracle” of West Germany’s rapid rebuilding in the 1950s and early ’60s, it was ac-companied by a card conveying in Trockel’s own words how the book’s distortion of 
the image was meant to “somehow lose the provincial, homemade, miserable atmosphere of the whole photo and situation.” Both ironic and heavy with pathos, the cover and caption bear out Trockel’s “as 
if not” approach to her own past.

In looking to the framing and deframing of the magisterial “Deliquescence of the Mother” at Kunsthalle Zurich, curated by Beatrix Ruf, it is rather the “this is too much” side of Trockel’s sensibility that takes over through dissipation, liquefaction, and condensation. From the lockdown style of collages that ran the perimeter of one back room in the show — including such phantomlike images as “Mrs. Mönipaer,” “Mr. Schneider,” and “Ornament,” all 2006, and “Nobody Will Survive 2,” 2008 — to the two oversized vitrine structures piercing two of the middle rooms of Kunsthalle’s long and narrow floor plan, the sound of muffled laughter cut through the impeccable sequencing, order, and transparent barriers of glass and Plexiglas. Trockel turned the retrospective gaze and desire for an overview inside out as works from each decade of her career and wide-ranging media stood close together 
in ethnographic-style vitrines.

Even as past works were “surveyed” here, with older works hemming in Trockel’s Wunderkammer-like constructions, 
they confronted the viewer like a tribe. The works looked back, refusing historical linearity in their apparition-like assembly: a swollen head sculpture, "Hydrocephalus / Wasserkopf II," 1982, for example, sat 
before the sleek, black ceramic finish of a thirsty outstretched leg, mockingly titled "Geruchsskulptur 2" (“Aroma sculpture 2”), 2006, and elbowed in alongside a diminutive goblinlike creature, "Kiss My Aura," 2008, hunkering below the overflowing hang of 
an unruly knitted work, "Untitled," 1989. Archetypes of mother and father (masculine and feminine) were absorbed in the angular looking back of Trockel’s round-up, exposing the cultural codes and clichés that underscore our need for empathic identification while also giving heterogeneous form to the lack that arises in her regular diffusion of gender, ego, and character.

And so “Daddy’s Striptease Room,” 1990, 
a perversely labeled cardboard box housing 
a model of the Cologne Cathedral, occupies 
a large-scale vitrine with “Miss Wanderlust,” 2000, a rough-hewn nubile sculpture 
that kneels and peers out from the vitrine with binocular extensions in place of eyes. Likewise, the ceramic wall sculptures 
that adorned an entire room of the exhibition eschew the rules of representation, 
failing to return a stable reflection in their polished, mirrorlike platinum panels, offering instead the tiny deportations and tactile gleam of cracked surfaces. Similarly, the large-scale “knitted painting” series that preceded the vitrine interventions greedily absorbed all remaining surface light with densely patterned monochromatic gestures. By lining each room of the exhibition with work from former decades, Trockel insisted on a dialectical tacking between new work and uncanny returns from the past. Both familiar and unfamiliar, the gatherings of her pieces were made strange through proximity, compressed into a singular gesture that confronted the viewer as known, imprinted, and animistic, before being parceled into stylistic nuance and comic asides.

Filtered and atomized throughout the entire exhibition, the liquefaction of 
the mother is Trockel’s versioning of self.
 By literally and precisely marginalizing her own works, she refuses to be periodized and thereby completed, insisting instead upon boundary conditions that can be reconfigured and made cruel. Initially supine sculptural works like “Watching and Sleeping and Composing” and “I on my sofa,” both 2007, propped up more of Trockel’s eyeful encounters, just as over 20 collages (from an ongoing body of them begun in 2004) montaged bodies into a contortion 
of masked and stripped-bare gestures. Fragmented figures from video stills, photographs, and copies of past drawings alongside unique drawings worked their way into the painterly gestures of the recent collages. Contrasted with the tribal effrontery that was the vitrine’s comic yet haunting presence, the collages recall Trockel’s earliest vitrine sculptures but with renewed compression, speed, and conflation of reference. Much could be said of the Beuysian symbolism that ambiguously resides within these recent works, mixed with the fraternizing proximity of Martin Kippenberger’s displays, both integral parts of a yet to be fully traced genealogy of influence — not to mention the formative importance of Trockel’s publication and exhibition collaboration with Monika Sprüth, “Eau de Cologne,”
1985–93 — but the specters are resolutely Trockel’s within these encapsulated gestures.

“It is the probity of the artist — feeling (herself) unable to push the ego to the point of representing that which is unnarratable — who then assumes parody as the very form and pattern of mystery,” Agamben writes. As “A Cosmos” readies itself to unfold in New York, the voices and images that arise from the memory of these past exhibitions reveal a dialectical approach that must be looked to and listened for elsewhere. For Trockel continues to clear and open up 
one of the most distinctive paths through the excess sampling and relativity of the contemporary. Retrospective gazes and staid desires for coherence have been absorbed into the work itself — into the very surfaces, structures, and shadows of its fiercest refusals and constant renewals.

This article by Fionn Meade appears in the June/July issue of Modern Painters magazine

“I met David in 1982, late one night at 
the Artforum office,” Cynthia Carr writes midway through "Fire in the Belly," her magisterial new biography of David Wojnarowicz. “He was not supposed to 
be there.” A friend, from whom he was hoping to borrow money, had let him in. But he was also out of place in a cultural sense: a young street artist trespassing in the halls of elite culture. “He was a force,” she recalls. They became acquaintances.

This was just before Wojnarowicz became a leading figure in the burgeoning East Village 1980s art scene and, soon after, a pioneering AIDS activist. He 
had been living in New York for at least 15 years, ever since his alcoholic father had moved him and his siblings from their home in suburban New Jersey to their mother’s apartment in Manhattan. The parents had divorced years earlier, after a long stretch of domestic violence and abuse that sometimes involved 
the children.

Life would not be much easier with their mother. At various points, she kicked them out. Wojnarowicz began sleeping with men for money in Times Square and was occasionally homeless. But at all the crucial points when he could have slipped over the edge, he apparently pulled himself back. He would find that next place to stay or escape the clutches of a potentially murderous john. Someone would hand him just the right book. 
He became a poet.

Like most great artists, Wojnarowicz was a master of self-invention, and Carr reports that friends warned her she “would have to deal with what they called ‘the mythology.’” She studied his correspondence and interviewed extensively, and very rarely caught him 
in a lie; one untruth she did unearth 
was when he wrote to his long-distance lover, Jean Pierre Delage, whom he met 
on a trip to Paris, that he had turned 
down a trip with a hookup to Los Angeles. (Not quite the case.)

Stories about one-night stands with “fellas” (as he termed his hookups) that he met in the late 1970s while making art along the Hudson River piers, a safe haven for gay men to cruise, rub up against richly detailed and violent dreams he recorded in his numerous, intensely emotional journals. He began 
to photograph friends wearing a mask of the poet Arthur Rimbaud in places throughout the city for what may be his most widely known project. As Carr tells the story of one pier trip in September 1979, she mentions a concurrent event: “[t]wo young gay male New Yorkers went to their doctors complaining of odd purplish lesions on their bodies.”

What emerges is a compelling picture of a time in New York that has now completely vanished, when an existence devoted to art, on the margins, was still possible, and not necessarily something to be romanticized. Wojnarowicz pulled 12-hour, through-the-night shifts at the downtown nightclub, Danceteria, alongside other young artists like 
Zoe Leonard and Keith Haring, in a milieu that provided the connections 
and pressure to push him into success.

He fell in with Peter Hujar, the esteemed portrait photographer, about two decades his senior, who became a short-term lover and one of the artist’s closest friends. “He was like the parent I never had,” Wojnarowicz said. Hujar would 
die of AIDS five years before him.

As HIV and AIDS enter the picture in the early 1980s, the scrappy East Village art scene is just beginning to rise. A young gallery employee with the improbable name of Gracie Mansion holds a show in her bathroom—the Loo Division, she calls it—and it’s a hit. 
She would show Wojnarowicz throughout the 1980s as did other galleries in the booming neighborhood, and he quickly became a dominant figure. By 1985, 
only a few years after taking up painting, he’s in the Whitney Biennial, but just as speedily the scene is crashing down as 
a result of rising rents and rampant drug use. The picture of East Village culture that Carr offers—she covered it for years as a reporter for the Village Voice—
is alone worth the price of the book.

Despite her friendship with Wojnarowicz in the last months of his life, Carr is willing to paint the artist in clear-eyed prose, balancing unflattering stories of drug use and success-induced paranoia with those of his trenchant and harrowing AIDS activism and defense 
of freedom of expression. (The intricate details of his battle with right-wing critics will, one hopes, provide fodder 
for today’s protestors.) When Artforum finally devoted an issue to the East Village scene in 1999, Wojnarowicz was on the cover, Carr 
notes. But the artist’s story is ultimately about more than triumphs: It asks 
what makes an artist create. How does one overcome massive personal pain 
and make art? Early in the book, Carr 
speaks with one of Wojnarowicz’s first roommates and confidants in the city. “My big question was, do we have to destroy ourselves to be creative,” the woman tells the author. “I felt like he 
was kind of hell-bent on it. He wanted that. He wanted the dark part.”

This article appears in the summer issue of Modern Painters magazine.

In a small room far from the main galleries on the second floor of the Fridericianum, the 18th-century museum that serves as the central exhibition space of Documenta, a wall label advertises a weekly seminar to be held there titled “What Is Thinking?” The philosophical breadth of that question, and its unhurried, meditative air, is a mirror of curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s brilliant, eccentric, path-breaking approach to Documenta, founded in 1955. And buried within that question is a still more radical inquiry that turns the curating of objects inside out, as if the noonday sun suddenly revealed the fundamental, living strangeness of all things. The question she asks at the heart of the heart of her exhibition is not who thinks, but what thinks.

An example: Just inside the entrance of the Fridericianum is a big gallery, and being that Documenta happens every five years, the expectations are also big as visitors enter the museum, ready for the colossus of the contemporary art world to muscularly unfurl its opening displays. Instead, like a speck marking this cavernous white space is a small vitrine along the left wall with three diminutive bronze figures from the 1930s by Julio González, an accompanying photograph, and, it seems to the eye, nothing else. But the other presence in the space and throughout the whole ground floor is an insistent whirling of air — just wind, like something ineffable murmuring its independent being: Ryan Gander’s elaborately titled “Airflow-velocity study for I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull),” 2012. On the other side of the main hall, an identical space holds nothing but a standing vitrine with a long, handwritten letter inside it by the artist Kai Althoff, explaining why he couldn’t participate in Documenta. Behind this vast gallery, a smaller one is left bare, filled only with wind.

This introductory scattering of text, conventional artworks, and an invisible felt presence form a bold and gnomic index of what’s to come as the exhibition unfolds: a very lofty form of entertainment, cerebrally seriocomic, pressing at formlessness, openness, and the constraints of gravity, giving equal voice to the hand that makes and air, simply air. Christov-Bakargiev states in her exhibition essay about curating and connectedness in the digital age, “When an artwork is looked at closely, it becomes, as in meditation, an ever more abstract exercise, a thinking and imagining while thinking, until the phenomenology of that viscous experience allows the mind to merge with matter, and slowly, possibly, to see the world not from the point of view of the discerning subject, the detached subject, but from within so-called objects and outward.”

Her Documenta, which included the curatorial work of Chus Martinez and a team of about 20 curatorial “agents,” is so large, and consistently curated at such a high level, that it is impossible to even briefly review the most compelling pieces. Of course, there are works of lesser and greater accomplishment, but the overall quality of exceptional art is remarkable. There are nearly 200 artists and others participating, and a budget of more than 25 million euros to match Christov-Bakargiev’s ambitions and afford the commissioning of scores of new works from around the world. They occupy several buildings and spaces around Kassel, including more than 40 pieces that dot the city’s huge Karlsaue Park. The ancillary events over the 100 days of the exhibition run from film series to conferences, lectures, workshops, and performances about time and clocks, Sarwahi cooking (delicious!), cosmopolitanism, anger, the writings of Lydia Davis, information in quantum states, the lives of objects, Theodore Adorno’s musicology, conviviality, the environment, the Jewish National Library, Dora Garcia’s talk-show-formatted discussion of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, and dozens of other events that in their entirety form a makeshift university for the traveling mind. Satellite exhibitions and events were curated in Kabul, Afghanistan; Banff, Canada; and Cairo, Egypt. One hundred little volumes written by artists and specialists in a gamut of fields were produced, a portable library for the future.

The notion of our attention adrift in the deluge of the global data stream is an obvious trouble and wonderment to Christov-Bakargiev — to which she has contributed with her teeming enterprise. How to log in the body and intellect in the most profound sense of consuming and distilling the world around us, when the era of the Internet and its metastasizing limb, social media, have so radically dispersed our concentration? How to find one’s bearings, she asks, with a compass marking the directional poles of hope, violence, meditation, and spectacle? This same period of radical dispersion has seen the “sociologization” of art hold increasingly extravagant prominence, certainly since Nicolas Bourriaud’s theorizing about socially oriented work in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics. It has been rare to find in the last few years any major thematic exhibition or major artistic practice among artists below the age of 40 whose work was not seen from the vantage of a social, that is to say centrifugal, worldview, rather than a centripetal one interpreted as an insular meditation on the self.

What Christov-Bakargiev offers the art world at Documenta is a next stage of thinking. Over the past decade there has been another development that stands in direct counterpoint to the etherealizing of data intrinsic to the Web, while finding the story of the social through things. The study of material culture and a small group of philosophers coolly called “thing theorists,” among them Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, have been broadening the anthropocentric focus of the sociologues to query the play of the object world in which the human is a single actor among all objects, while the ecological crisis has added a dimension of urgency to the acknowledgment of the life of the nonhuman. In this Documenta, we see a fundamental turn in this direction on a very grand scale. This new objectism takes into account a voluminous repertoire of tools for signification: empirical data machines; the expressive arts of sculpture, photography, painting, filmmaking, and literature; systems analysis; whole narratives and fragmented ones; and the measurement of time through various means, calling attention to both its presence and its suspension or eradication.

Christov-Bakargiev proposes that things, not just humans, speak; things feel, are violated, and voice their wills. Signification itself is under a poetic pressure to allow its own dissolution, while it is also provoked to assert itself as an obdurate and un-relinquishing material positivity that is declined like tenses of a language, with the hovering interconnectedness of past, present, future, and conditional states. What this means is that the openness of signification embraces action, meaningfulness, and what she repeatedly calls the emplaced condition of things to assert not a universality of monolithic meanings, but meaning as contingent and sui generis, local and global, and consequently multiple overlapping meanings touching human and nonhuman actors alike. History and the manifestations of hands, voices, marking, making, the illicit, the legible, and the violence that renders illegibility are not segregated but elliptically entered into a scheme of continual presence and negotiation. Precisely this sense of density after the spareness of those opening galleries comes into play in the ground and first floor rotundas at the back of the Fridericianum, which contain what the curator calls “the Brain” — two curved rooms that serve as the ideational nerve center of the show. They house ancient stone figurines; Surrealist objects; photographs of and by Man Ray’s lover, Lee Miller, in Hitler’s last apartment; paintings of vessels by Giorgio Morandi (and the vessels themselves); a contemporary sculpture by Sam Durant carved with the phrase “Ideas spring from deeds and not the other way around”; and a Vandy Rattana photograph of a crater filled with water in a verdant Cambodian field, created by American bomb runs during the Vietnam War. These are among a packed array of other works that, as the curator writes, “indicate not a history, not an archive, but a set of elements that mark contradictory conditions and committed positions of being in and with the world.”

Though Christov-Bakargiev defers here and elsewhere from stating any explicit structure for her overarching curatorial design, what she describes and so brilliantly achieves is an exchange of knowledges in which all her individual things enact the speech of networks, as she so frequently invokes digital culture. This is not necessarily meant in terms of linguistic exchange but in feeling, in atmosphere, in imagistic suggestion and reference, in palpable presence as well as in language. Suites of rooms lay out intuitively linked narratives about natural and manmade systems of organization and measurement, such as Mark Lombardi’s hand-drawn charts of figures in the global economy from the 1990s, a German priest’s typology of apples drawn during the first half of the 20^th century, Anton Zeilinger’s glistening machines that track quantum particles, and a brutal bricolage of tribal objects and photographs of mutilated people by Kader Attia that is a coup de thêatre. Christov-Bakargiev’s assembled things are nodes linked in variously discursive hubs that pool and distribute meaning, which is the fundamental structure of any network. Her network operates principally on a protocol of association, allowing the broadest communication among her diverse agents of exchange — work talking to work across disciplines, theories, time, and the spaces of galleries, buildings, and the Karlsaue Park, whose dozens of installations are all, in one way or another, about living together, species with species, human and nonhuman in the pan-biology of an organic commons.

Her cloud of meanings is a repudiation of any single narrative of the artist’s purpose, for example the exclusive role of the artist as a political worker that plagues the blinkered exhibition Artur Zmijewski assembled for this year’s Berlin Biennale. But as I’ve already said, the radical turn of the perspective she lays out goes far beyond the notion of a human center to the order of things or even that order as humanly conceived is concentric with the agency of other entities. Through contiguity, the works included in Christov-Bakargiev’s streaming network hint at a vastly greater map of experience, of subject and object braided in ways beyond words and the rational empiricism that is the birthright of the West’s factory of knowledge from the time of the Enlightenment to the present.

Regarding a meteorite that she failed to bring to Kassel for its inclusion in the show, Christov-Bakargiev wonders in her exhibition essay whether the meteorite “would have wished to go on this journey? Does it have any rights?... Can it ask to be buried again?” In this, she is asking about the individual agency of things, and therefore of things that fall within the purview of art, and therefore what constitutes the artifice of a thing and what is its sovereign, autonomous life, and therefore how can we become alert enough to sense these things in their constitutive strangeness, and whether that apprehension of strangeness can lead us to an enhanced though always incomplete comprehension of “being in and with the world.” When she asks about the meteorite’s consciousness, she is invoking the thing theorists and their predecessors, such as the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, who stated that “just as there is an I-John Doe, there is also an I-red, an I-water, and an I-star... Everything, from a point of view within itself, is an ‘I.’” These questions and ideas lurk behind the most influential art practice of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp’s, such that his readymades and their liberation of an object’s identity (the urinal or the hat rack or the typewriter cover, and so forth) can be seen now as a step toward a further emancipation of objects, with the potential of their own internal lives more fully acknowledged. In this surprising way, Christov-Bakargiev suggests that the readymade has reached a finality, a fixed ancestral role as a precedent for an expanded creative inquiry into the nature and use of things — and of our usefulness to them.

In all its complexity, Documenta (13) takes as its subject what it is to be human and what it is to experience through our humanity a sensitivity to things other than ourselves, and that those things may be observing us — as if the colonization of the museum space goes both ways as a zone of study. In any case, in some instances the distinction between human and non-human becomes dazzlingly fine, almost illegible. Wael Shawky’s use of marionettes in his beautiful films, the “Cabaret Crusades,” 2010 and ongoing, objectifies human figures so fully and intersperses them continually with talking animals in human dress such that every agent in his spectacular chronicles becomes a specimen of otherness. As Christov-Bakargiev envisions it, the configuration of knowledge is at once the social domain of historical time and a loosening of time, of time shooting inward and dissolving in the individual thingness of things. This seamless fluidity proposes an achronological encyclopedia of material being illuminated internally by unseen vitalities, by the essences of matter’s forms. In making this proposition, she argues seductively for each of us to imagine a vast plane of being on which these objects float in a network of endlessly entangled relations, while they nonetheless hover singularly in the amniotic sac of their own becoming so that chaos and order, autonomy and community, and rootlessness and obligation are simultaneous terms of their identities. No exhibition of this size and philosophical ambition could have been imagined without the plain fact of it appearing in front of us as testimony to such complex, richly invested thoughts. The capaciousness of her thinking (social, political, historical, material, spiritual, economic, literary, scientific, technological, and philosophical) and the immense range of remarkable works she has chosen that bear out her ideas offer a finely gauged intellectual tolerance that maps the topology of a multitude of inquiries to follow; a massively, poetically enlarged geography that renews the curatorial field. This is the most important exhibition to date of the 21st century.

Documenta is on view in Kassel, Germany through September 16. To see works from Documenta, click the slide show.

This article will appear in the October issue of Modern Painters magazine

– European Museums Create Their Own YouTube: Five Dutch and Belgian museums, including heavyweights like the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Gemeentemuseum at the Hague in Belgium, have banded together to launch an online video channel through which they plan to publish original films about art and design. Dubbed ARTtube, the channel will include interviews with artists and profiles of upcoming exhibitions. (L.A. MOCA has developed a similar initiative, as does the Indianapolis Museum of Art.) [ArtReview]

– Berlin Biennale May Have Regreted Hosting Occupy: Artist-curator Artur Zmijewski's decision to include real Occupy movement activists in the Berlin Biennale — where they could be watched by visitors in a zoo-like enclosure — nearly backfired when the group and members of Spain's M15 movement demanded radical restructuring of the exhibition just before its July 1 closing. But Zmijewski and the biennale's backers ceded to the demands, posting to the exhibition's Web site that "the invited global movements have challenged the hierarchical structure of the biennial” and want to "loosen the assumptions of cul­tural, institutional, and economic hierarchy." [TAN]

– Barnes Foundation Hit With Another Lawsuit: The unflappable collective Friends of the Barnes Foundation, a group long opposed to the institution's move to downtown Philadelphia, has filed yet another petition in Superior Court after former Barnes CEO Kimberly Camp publicly admitted that "bankruptcy was not the reason" for the relocation. Meanwhile, some commentators more supportive of the move note that the original court opinion says nothing of bankruptcy, but simply notes that the "Foundation's finances have reached a critical point." [Press Release, The Art Law Blog] 

– British Museums Struggle to Stay Open: In a survey of 144 British arts institutions, 22 percent said they had closed all or part of their sites in the last 12 months, and over half said they had seen their budgets slashed. "Of most concern," says Museums Association director Mark Taylor, who organized the survey, "is that public access is down and this is of particular concern to smaller, community museums." [BBC] 

– Artist Pulls off "Italian Job"-Inspired Balancing Act: The sculptor and installation artist Richard Wilson is no stranger to monumental suspended forms — he's currently designing Europe's longest sculpture for Heathrow Airport — but his latest gravity-defying creation will surely give viewers a start. "Hang on a Minute Lads, I've Got a Great Idea," which consists of a full-scale replica of a bus balanced precariously on the edge of the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion in East Sussex, takes its inspiration from the classic heist film "The Italian Job," whose closing line — spoken by Michael Caine — provided the work's title. [Guardian]

– Dutch Naval Painting Puts Wind in Sotheby's Sale's Sails: The 17th-century Willem can de Velde the Younger painting "The Surrender of the Royal Prince" led the way at Sotheby's Old Masters auction in London this week, chipping in £5.3 million ($8.2 million) towards the sale's £32.3 million ($50 million) total. That total, with 67 percent of lots sold, was still far below the high estimate for the evening's total, £40.3 million ($62.7 million), and Christie's Old Masters sale of the night before, which brought in £85.1 million ($127 million). [Bloomberg]

– Braque Takes His First Trip to China: More than 200 works by Georges Braque, including rarely seen sculptures and watercolors, will go on display at the Beijing Imperial City Art Museum this fall, marking the first time the French Cubist's works have been shown in China. [China.org]

– Cold War Tech Could Reassemble Stained Glass: The British branch of the World Monuments Fund is pursuing a project to re-purpose experimental document-decoding software developed during the Cold War to reassemble fragments of Coventry Cathedral's treasured stained-glass windows — removed just before German air raids began during WWII — some of which are believed to be the work of stained-glass great John Thornton. "It is like rediscovering [a painting from] Picasso’s blue period in fragments in a basement," said WMF CEO Jonathan Foyle. "It is a magnificent puzzle." [TAN]

– Prix Pictet Shortlist Full of Photo Stars: The 12 nominees for the fourth annual Prix Pictet, a Swiss Franc 100,000 ($104,200) prize given by the bank Pictet & Cie, were announced this week. The artists addressing the competition's theme — power — hail from 10 countries and include venerated American photographer Robert Adams, Vietnamese-American An-My Lê, and South African Guy Tillim. The winner will be announced in London on October 9, when the finalists' exhibition opens at the Saatchi Gallery. [Guardian]

– Artists Giving Back — to Schools: An increasing number of artists are making generous bequests directly to universities without the intervening apparatus of a private foundation. Artists without the name recognition of Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg — such as David Driskell, June Wayne, and Don Reitz — are particularly fond of this strategy, and have donated millions of dollars and thousands of artworks to universities across the United States. [TAN]

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London’s Ecosse Films has issued the first official still (above) of Naomi Watts as Diana, Princess of Wales, from the set of its movie about the last two years in the princess’s life. Originally titled “Caught in Flight,” as we reported on February 10, the movie has been renamed “Diana,” leaving no doubt whom it’s about.

Watts’s Mona Lisa smile in the photograph is redolent of an equanimity that Diana may or may not have found during her romances with the Pakistani heart and lung surgeon Hasnat Khan (who is being played by Naveen Andrews) and Dodi Fayed (Cas Anvar). The Daily Mail has suggested that her Côte d’Azur vacation with Fayed was the occasion when she was at “her most relaxed and calm”; however, the passionate affair with Khan is believed to be the ostensible subject of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film. It remains to be seen how politically pointed it will be.

Certainly the image contrasts greatly with the damning TV news shot of Diana that was used in Stephen Frears’s 2006 “The Queen.” As I wrote in my review of the film, “In a brilliant editorial stroke, Frears cuts in a shot of Diana looking to the left with a hint of accusation in her eyes, whereupon we see a close-up of Elizabeth.”

The wig fetchingly worn by Watts, her beauty seemingly airbrushed to perfection, has meanwhile prompted Jasper Rees of theartsdesk.com to compare her Diana to another icon. “The portrait is not by Testino. Anyone else thinks she looks more like Tina Brown, the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and, crucially, Diana’s biographer?”

The movie, which is being filmed in Mozambique and Croatia, also features Charles Edwards as Diana’s private secretary Patrick Jephson, Douglas Hodge, and Juliet Stevenson.

A  boost to the production is the shelving of a documentary about Diana and Fayed’s deaths bankrolled by the latter’s father, the billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed. As reported in The Sun, the film, “Unlawful Killing,” directed by the actor Keith Allen, cannot be shown in theaters because “it failed to secure insurance to protect distributors against legal action.”

“Lawyers had warned there are 87 contentious allegations that would have to be cut before a British screening and although there were plans to release it in the US in August to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the deaths, the insurance was needed to protect the European offices of the distributors.” 

“Unlawful Killing,” which was promoted by Allen in Cannes last year, as recorded in The Guardian, explores the conspiracy theory that Diana and Dodi Fayed were murdered at the behest of the British establishment. It has now been “withdrawn in perpetuity,” a spokesman said. “Diana,” though, will open in 2013.

Read more culture news on Spotlight

In days of yore, the ironic and the retrophile expressed themselves through an overt affection for vinyl records. While the practice is still alive and well in say, Brooklyn, technological progress has improved hipsters' opportunities to show off just how unique and eccentric their tastes really are. Rather than look to the actual chronological predecessor — the CD — as the new vehicle for self-conscious hipness, recently a paradoxical aesthetic of low-tech, other-era technology made to accompany high-tech gadgets has begun to percolate. As if they were experiencing a nagging nostalgia for an era they barely remember, kids these days pay homage to the classic mix tape by transporting their mp3s on a USB drive shaped like a cassette tape, or blasting their music on an iPod dock crafted from a real-life gramophone.

ARTINFO rounded up a selection of these contradictory marvels, culling examples both brilliant and obnoxious. Take a look.

Osian Art Fund, once a fashionable way to invest in the growing Indian market, has become a prime example of the dangers of speculating in the topsy-turvy world of fine art. Osian was a three-year close-ended fund that began in 2006 as prices for Indian art climbed skyward. Before it closed, 656 unit holders (fund-speak for investors) lined up to pitch in money, swayed by the grand promise of a 30-35 percent return. Unfortunately, by 2009, the market had sunk to its lowest point in years and Osian found itself with a liquidity crisis. Three years later, some investors still haven't gotten any money back, according to the Indian digital finance magazine Moneylife.

News of Osian returning bits and pieces to investors has popped up every so often in the Indian press, but more often journalists have focused on the shortcomings of fund manager Neville Tuli. In the last six months, Osian seems to have come back from the brink, resuming sales activity — the company is also an auction house that jumped on the fund bandwagon during the boom — and paying lip service to paying out investors, at least in part. Its recently concluded a four-part auction series brought in rs 40.9 crore ($7.16 million), reportedly to fund a reborn edition of Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival slated to take place this month after a two-year hiatus. But a return to liquidity hasn't reassured those who have yet to see a dime of their principal investment.

One of the investors who has yet to see any of his original investment back is Kamal Mansharamani, who told Moneylife that he was encouraged (along with many others) to join the fund by his money manager at the Dutch-based bank ABM AMRO. He said that has recently been offered payment in installments. “I have been following up with Mr. Tuli for three years now. He has made umpteen promises and broken all of them. ABN Amro also has completely washed their hands off this. They are not helping at all. I believe that a lot of people have got part investment back. I have got nothing,” he told Moneylife.

Mansharamani claims that he is being offered less than 50 percent of his money back, after years of hounding the fund's manager, even though many others have reported returns of at least 70-90 percent.

Osian, in a reply to Mansharamani, claimed that it has taken so long to return the invested capital because of the down art market in 2009. It claims to be taking the ethical high ground — waiting around for the art market to bounce back to sell off the assets that it bought during the boom so as to take fewer losses on behalf of investors. And it's still working on it. According to Osian representative Niranjan Desai, the art fund hopes to complete 20 percent of its overdue payment in mid-August. Another auction, slated for July 31, should help pay off another 20 percent by August 28, after which the fund will provide more information about further installments, hoping to return up to 85 percent of the capital invested. 

The moral of this story? Risky investments are, well, risky.

A version of this article appeared on ARTINFO India.

Paris Haute Couture Week, which in reality lasts only three days, is a time for extravagance and opulence. Billowing gowns and exquisite garments are presented under the spotlight as fashion editors, stylists, celebrities, and socialites look on. The fall 2012 couture shows wrapped up yesterday after a fleeting journey that included Raf Simmons’s debut at Christian Dior, a tulle and pearl coat at Chanel that took 3,000 hours to assemble, and the tabloid couple of the moment, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, showing up late at Stephane Rolland. ARTINFO lists the most amusing highlights of the Paris haute couture collections, including Kimye’s biggest rival, a “Silence of the Lambs” reinterpretation, and a designer who looked to Pete Doherty for inspiration.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from Paris Haute Couture Week.

Possibly outdoing the July 4th fireworks that blasted into the sky stateside, London plans to festoon its skyline with lasers tonight to celebrate the completion of Renzo Piano's Shard, the tallest building in Europe. Soaring 1,016 feet into the air in a landscape of low-rises — in the midst of an economic recession, no less — the prismatic steel-and-glass tower has quickly emerged as the most polarizing addition to the city in recent memory.  

The Shard, conceived by Piano in 2000, has endured more than a decade of criticism for its size and scale: "It dwarfs and overshadows buildings of infinitely greater beauty, constructed with much greater artistic skill," one critic wrote in the Telegraph. "That scale becomes a bullying, destructive thing."  In fact, the supertall's imposing height threatened to debase the neighboring Tower of London, prompting UNESCO to consider stripping the 11th-century fortress of its status as a World Heritage site in light of its newly compromised "visual integrity." Though the idea never progressed further, no one can deny that the $2.35-billion skyscraper is a jarring sight amidst its immediate surroundings, which largely consists of low-income housing projects and a scattering of historic landmarks.  

Ninety-five percent of the lavish, marble-lobbied, glass-clad tower is owned by Qatar, providing a reminder of the Arab state's influence on U.K. real estate. After spawning a sovereign wealth fund in 2005, the oil-rich nation has been aggressively converting its oil and natural gas surpluses into investments in the built environment, particularly in the United Kingdom. The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) plans to invest $30 billion in U.K. property and development this year alone. As one sardonic commenter writes in an online forum in the Daily Mail, "Just waiting for the Star and Crescent Symbol to be mounted on the top. Job done, London dominated." 

Despite all the opposition, critics have had a difficult time finding fault with the building’s exterior. "I bloody love the Shard," another Telegraph critic writes, demonstrating the tower's divisive nature, even within a single publication. Defenders praise the building's elegant tapered shape, the purity of its design, and its extraordinary feats of engineering — all 72 habitable stories and 44 elevators (some of which are double decker) of it. Though it ranks as only the 59th tallest building in the world, the Shard is certainly nothing to scoff at.  

Critics have harangued Piano's glistening modern pyramid, for exactly that reason — its unabashed indifference to the current push toward austerity. "This building is not going to be a symbol of arrogance," Piano insists, according to Bloomberg. "For me, the most important thing is, is it going to be loved in London or not? Skyscrapers have to give back to the city more than they get from the city." Piano likens the Shard to another skyscraper — New York's much-loved Empire State Building, which topped out when the Great Depression was in full swing. Like the Empire State, the Shard "was conceived before the crisis, and it will enjoy life after the crisis." 

Exactly who will get to enjoy the Shard is another story. Most of the building will largely be privy to only the very wealthy — a Shangri-La hotel will occupy 18 of the floors, while 10 multi-million-dollar condos will occupy the ones closer to the top. Tenants are expected to begin moving in next year. The public does, at least, get to enjoy one part of the building, albeit just a sliver: In February, floors 68 to 72 will open as a viewing gallery to the city below. Tickets go on sale tomorrow, if you can afford it — they run  £24.95 (about $40). Stateside, that translates to two trips up to the observatory deck at the Empire State Building — a full 200 feet above the tip of the Shard.

Given a lineup of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Charles Ives, and Mozart, it is not hard to pick the odd man out. And indeed, at this past weekend’s New York Philharmonic performances at the Park Avenue Armory, the excerpted scene from “Don Giovanni” stood out as the ill-considered, overproduced addendum to an otherwise intriguing and even occasionally captivating evening. The wedging in of the popular Classical giant amid three (comparatively speaking) rarely-heard modernist masters shows at best a miscalculation and carries the whiff of pandering.

Yet music director Alan Gilbert deserves credit for conceiving the program, a rare opportunity to explore spatial music — music, that is, that conveys some sense of sound’s existence as a specific phenomenon moving about in physical space. Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” was the obvious impetus and anchor for the evening. Written to be played by three distinct orchestras simultaneously, the piece determined the arrangement in the Armory’s cavernous Drill Hall of three stages alternating with three areas of stadium seats in a ring surrounding a circle of audience members lounging on the floor. And “Gruppen” predictably proved the most successful work.

Especially rich in percussion and horn sections, the three ensembles of roughly 30 members were a match for the vast volume of interior space they were tasked with animating. Chords and short runs of notes — they could not rightly be called melody lines — gained in intensity as they were repeated with new members joining in. And moments of real beauty were achieved as fading tones on the nearby stage were brought back to life in a distant space. It seemed that sound almost became visible when a clang shot around the hall from one orchestra to the next.

But Stockhausen came after the intermission. The evening opened with a fanfare, with players in at least seven locations around the room, including the catwalks in the rafters. Here the instruments signaled as voices calling out to each other across space, and the range of interactions built as if to illustrate the possibilities afforded by the room. The first work on the official program, Boulez’s “Ritual in memoriam Bruno Maderna” was arranged by the composer for eight parts, each containing “melody instruments” and percussion. As before these were spread about, above, and behind, near and far from the dispersed audience so that listeners in different sections experienced different high points and lows. Because the 1974-75 work is arranged so that the conductor can control the pace, the sense of a conversation among the various ensembles emerged, as did the feeling that we were being taught what spatial music could do. The engagement was of a cerebral sort.

Then came the Finale to Act I of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” selected by Gilbert ostensibly because the composer set the scene to be played by three groups of instruments roughly corresponding to a set of overlapping storylines. In standard performance the construction is witty and inventive, but played in the round, voices faded in and out as the singers turned, and the voices and the dispersed musicians could not be kept in sync, despite the assistant conductors spread around the room.

Ultimately, the opportunity to hear “Gruppen” and Ives’s sublime “Unanswered Question” at the evening’s close made up for the mangling of Mozart. In the future Gilbert should trust his audience to turn out for a program of relatively new music without watering it down with the familiar.

Beginning Friday July 6, a video recording of the New York Philharmonic performance can be viewed at medici.tv.

Read more culture coverage on Spotlight

As one of the greats of avant-garde fashion, Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto is no stranger to taking risks. His silhouettes, often tailored with playful ruffles or dramatic draping, can distort rather than enhance the figure of the person wearing them. For Yamamoto, fabric is something to sculpt into unexpected textures and shapes. In a tribute to that aesthetic, the Design Museum Holon in Israel is holding the country’s first exhibition of the designer's work, through October 20.

"After exhibiting in London, Florence, and Paris, it is a natural flow for me to organize an exhibition in Israel this time — a country very rich in culture, " said Yamamoto in a release. "In an era where we only receive prepared information, as a thinker, I want to see Israel with my own eyes and feel it through my skin to get to know it well. Now I will be able to experience it live."

The series of site-specific installations, conceived by Yamamoto, his long-time collaborator Masao Nihei, and museum curator Galit Gaon, arrived in Israel during a year of anniversaries — 2012 marks the 60th year of the country’s relationship with Yamamoto’s home country, Japan, and 40 years since the birth of the designer’s first clothing line, Y’s.

The three sought to create a dialogue with Yamamoto’s creations and the museum’s environment, which was designed by Ron Arad. The exhibition consists of around 80 Yamamoto womenswear and menswear garments — mostly black, his preferred color, with periodic bursts of color — from the 1970s to present day. In one space, the feel and sounds of a bustling city are recreated through an urban soundtrack and 38 moving figures; another room acts as a meditative area, with a garden of soft lights illuminating the 10 black and red evening gowns in the gallery.

But Gaon insists that the show itself is only half of the experience.

"Bringing together two creators like Ron Arad and Yohji Yamamoto wasn’t self-evident, and was attended by meticulous examination of movement and presentation space — exterior and interior alike, " said Gaon in a release. "At the same time, we look forward to the moment when the very first visitors come in, and only then will the exhibition come to life. "

Click on the slide show to see images from "Yohji Yamamoto," at Design Museum Holon in Israel through October 20.

“What was that? I thought I saw a twinkle of a light in the forest,” says Balin, one of the 13 dwarves traveling with Bilbo Baggins shortly after they enter the labyrinths of Mirkwood in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.”

Having completed principal photography after 266 days on his “Hobbit” diptych, director Peter Jackson – who announced the news earlier today on his Facebook page – must also feel he’s seen a twinkle of light in a forest. Or, at least, the light at the end of a tunnel as long as the one in Moria beneath the Misty Mountains.

The shoot was preceded by enormously complex political and financial wrangles, including the suing of New Line Cinema by Jackson in 2005 and by the Tolkien Estate and HarperCollins Publishers for unpaid sums from the profits made by “The Lord of the Rings” films. The latter case was settled, freeing New Line to proceed with “The Hobbit,” and Jackson’s relationship with the studio was repaired.

Believing the project would be less satisfying than “The Lord of the Rings,” Jackson initially intended to serve as executive producer. The Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro was hired to direct in April 2008. He remained on board, shaping the screenplay with the “Rings” team of Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens until May 2010, when he departed because of delays caused by MGM’s lurch into bankruptcy, from which it subsequently emerged. “The Hobbit” is a co-production between MGM, New Line, and Jackson’s Wingnut Films, the distributor being Warner Bros., which owns New Line.

In October 2010, Jackson finalized a deal to shoot both parts of the film in New Zealand, where the International Federation of Actors issued a Do Not Work order stating the producers had refused to “engage performers on union-negotiated agreements.” The filmmakers threats to film abroad, possibly in Eastern Europe, which would have cost the New Zealand tourist industry billions of dollars, led the government to grant Warner Bros. a substantial tax break, to subsize the marketing costs, and to change a law clarifying when someone is an employee or a contractor.

“The hyperbole surrounding ‘The Hobbit’ insisted it was crucially important to the future of the local film industry and for this country's image as a tourist destination. Both points are highly dubious,” complained an editorial in The New Zealand Herald.

“This was about the shooting of just two films. If the industry cannot stand the loss of them, it must be in a sickly state. It was surely over-egging matters to suggest all international film-makers would sidestep this country as a consequence.”

Back-to-back filming on the two parts of “The Hobbit” began on March 21 last year, Jackson shooting them in 3D at 48 frames per second, for greater sharpness, instead of the industry standard of 24. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” tracing the first leg of Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the dwarves’ odyssey, during which Bilbo acquires the One Ring from Gollum (Andy Serkis, digitally captured again), will be released December 14. “The Hobbit: There and Back Again,” which included the journey to Laketown, Bilbo’s encounter with the dragon Smaug, and the Battle of the Five Armies, is set for December 13, 2013.

The specific challenge faced by Jackson and his fellow writers is meshing the lighter tone of “The Hobbit” (published in 1937) with the comparative doominess of “The Lord of the Rings” (1954-55) – the diptych and the triptych surely intended to comprise, eventually, one long masterwork. It’s been rumored that greed will be a major theme – that of the dwarves’ leader, Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), mirrored by that of Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch), who for years has guarded their treasure as his own. Visually (as in the depictions of the Dead Marshes in “The Two Towers”), there may be further echoes of World War I, in keeping with Tolkien’s experiences on the Somme.

Tolkien purists will be most itchy about Old Bilbo (Ian Holm), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), Saruman (Christopher Lee), Frodo (Elijah Wood), and Legolas (Orlando Bloom) from “The Lord of the Rings” being imported into “The Hobbit”; none of them appears in the novel. However, they can look forward to the turning into stone by Gandalf (Ian McKellen) of the trolls who seize the dwarves early in the story, the dwarves’ journey downriver to Laketown concealed in barrels, and the great reveal of Smaug’s first appearance. You’d bet your life against Jackson failing to render these scenes with maximal Middle Earth atmosphere.

Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang, best known for his “Bloodlines” series of paintings that feature hazy, black-and-white portraits drawn from Mao-era China, may well be his country's hottest painter. But success is not without its price. Though just 54 years old, he is afflicted by ongoing health problems, apparently connected to the stress incurred by being at the white-hot center of the art world's international spotlight. Today, an extensive profile in the Wall Street Journal details how Zhang has suffered two heart attacks in the past year and undergone two heart surgeries. Told to quit the drinking and smoking that he took up to combat shyness and to reduce work stress, the artist has stopped painting completely over the past year, working instead on a new series of bronze sculptures.

Zhang is at the forefront of the Chinese art market, with auction prices topping out at more than $10 million during the recent Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction of the Ullens Collection for an early triptych (according to BASI). He is internationally represented by powerhouse gallery Pace, which runs a grand space in Beijing’s 798 art district. His problems say a lot about the contemporary art world, in China and internationally. Below, ARTINFO breaks out three lessons about the Chinese art world gleaned from the WSJ's Zhang profile.

In Part, Zhang's Challenges Are Generational

Zhang’s career has been shaped by the tumultuous formative period during which the Chinese contemporary art world and the market for Chinese art first gelled. He moved from illustrating books for small commissions in the ‘80s to his first $10,000 sale at Christie’s in 2001, a decade ago. For much of that time, Zhang oversaw his own career. “China didn't have a single privately run art gallery when Mr. Zhang got his start,” the article notes, and the stress of developing a career without that support system doubtless added to Zhang’s struggle. By contrast, Chinese artists emerging today have a much stronger network of local and foreign galleries to work with, dealers to depend on, and collectors to sell to.  

If You Think His Work Has Become Repetitive, So Does He

Then again, sales and popularity also lead to their own pressures. Zhang seems to feel overly tied to the mega-successful “Bloodlines” series that made his career, continuing to churn out the paintings even after he has moved creatively on to other subjects. Swiss collector Uli Sigg saw “Bloodlines” paintings early on and immediately commissioned one for his dining room. “After those paintings, he was on top,” Sigg told the Wall Street Journal. "Suddenly, he was the new face of China." But how do you keep going after that initial success? “I just felt like a machine, forced to work,” Zhang said. “I felt like I could not decide things for myself.” Even major collectors have noticed the artist’s over-reliance on his greatest hits: Collector Budi Tek, a noted collector of the artist, states that Zhang should “slow down on the Bloodlines because they're not as relevant anymore." (The same could be said of fellow Chinese art star Yue Minjun’s manically grinning figures.)

His Salvation May Be in China

While Zhang’s early success has been defined by foreign collectors, the native Chinese art market is heating up rapidly, and Chinese buyers may have standards and tastes different than those who have supported Zhang in the past. In 2009, the top auction price paid for one of the artist’s works ($2.5 million) was paid by an Asian collector, the Wall Street Journal notes. This coincides with an increasing mania for native artifacts and antiquities, with Chinese collectors picking up pieces like a Ming porcelain vase from the 15th century for upwards of $20 million. All this may offer a little hope for the beleaguered megastar. Local buyers may be more understanding of Zhang’s new, different work, given the difficulties of overcoming the language and culture barrier. Speaking to his own community, rather than that of an elite selection of international art connoisseurs, could give the artist a fresh start. 

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