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"The After Revolution" Highlights Tunisian Art in the Wake of Arab Spring

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"The After Revolution" Highlights Tunisian Art in the Wake of Arab Spring

Two and half years after young Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi triggered the beginning of Arab Spring when he immolated himself in front of his local municipal building, Tunisians are still struggling to re-define and re-build their nation. “The After Revolution,” sponsored by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) as part of the World Nomads Tunisia Festival, is a celebratory — yet cautionary — look at the tiny North African country in the wake of the “Jasmine Revolution,” which toppled the 25-year long autocratic presidency of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. The three-venue exhibition includes graffiti at 5Pointz, photography at White Box, and a provocative exhibition of multimedia works at FIAF that engage with the growing presence of extreme Islamists in Tunisia.

Almost all of the works in “The After Revolution” are a response to the ultra-conservative Salafist movement, which — banned under the secular government of Ben Ali — believes in a literal interpretation of the Koran and a return to a puritanican form of Islam. Having been banned under the secular regime of Ben Ali, Salafists have gained traction under the moderately Islamic Ennahd goverment, that has been in power since the revolution; they have been accused of destroying heritage sites throughout Tunisia, and earlier this month, were blamed for the murder of Shokri Belaid, a secular political opponent. The group was also responsible for inciting the riots that broke out at the 2012 Printemps des arts art fair in response to works by Nadia Jelassi and Mohamed Ben Slama, the latter of whom has works in the FIAF show along with other young Tunisian artists Héla Ammar, Amel Ben Attia, Nicène Kossentini, and Mouna Jemal Siala.

The exhibition’s Tunis-based curator, Leila Souissi, explained that she “chose mostly women, because right now in Tunisia, women are the most fragile with the Islamist government that we have.” Ennahd has been under scrutiny for its stance on women. Last August, the party came under attack for a clause in the constitution that describes women as complementary to men, rather than equal to men, though at the same time the party has also increased the presence of women in political spheresRecognized as one of the most secular nations in the region, Tunisia has historically granted women freedoms many of their neighbors do not. (According to the United Nations Human Development Indicators, Tunisia was ranked higher than America in terms of gender equality immediately following the revolution, but has since fallen to just below America's ranking.)

Four of the five artists in the FIAF show are women, and almost all of the works depict female figures — a video piece portrays a woman being covered bit by bit in a black fabric until her face is not visible; a series of photographs show a woman isolated in a tiny room holding a giant key; in a painting, the silhouette of a woman lies submissively below a Salafist style black flag inscribed with the 99 different words for Allah; and in a series of three photographs is a woman with swirls of water pouring from her mouth because, as Souissi explained, “even if we talk, they don’t give a damn about what we say.” Souissi continued, “Art is the reflection of what we are living now. It’s kind of a resistance.”

Describing Kossentinis animated video of a traditional Tunisian mosaic, Souissi said, “Tunisia is like this type of mosaic. Women, men, Muslim, democratic, violent — we have to find a way to live together. We have no choice.”

The After Revolution is on view through June 1, at FIAF, 22 East 60th Street, New York. 

To see images, click on the slideshow.


The Inaugural A+ Awards Focus on Architects on the Rise

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The Inaugural A+ Awards Focus on Architects on the Rise

In general, red carpet, the word “fun,” and architecture rarely go together — but it seems that’s about to change. Last night’s inaugural Architizer A+ Awards gala at Cedar Lake Studio saw the likes of Elizabeth Diller and Bjarke Ingels popping bottles of Perrier-Jouët in their gala best in honor of their colleagues, peers, and the smart set of architecture’s up-and-comers.

The awards ceremony perhaps marked a turning point in the way we perceive the architectural world. Architizer, the online editorial spin-off of New York architecture studio HWKN, launched the new annual event this year to recast the industry’s image as a relevant institution (surprisingly good at throwing a party), accessible to citizens beyond the staid followers of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Frank Lloyd Wright’s amazing, but he’s been dead for 60 years,” Architizer founder and HWKN principal Marc Kushner said at the ceremony’s opening. “How could it be that a profession that designs every building, every museum, every hotel, every school, and every apartment in the whole entire world is so underappreciated that the first architect that pops into people’s minds built his last building six decades ago?”

In order to bring the industry up to speed, Kushner enlisted both a jury of 200 and the public at large to vote on 52 categories that recognize international architects and designers for achievements that range beyond creating very expensive buildings. Over the course of the night, while Richard Meier accepted the Lifetime Achievement award (via video) and Mikheil Saakashvili, president of Georgia (and progressive design fan),  graced the stage to say hi, Mass Design Group, a Boston-based non-profit whose founders are barely in their 30s, took the Do Good Award for its humanitarian works in Africa, including Rwanda’s Butaro Hospital opened by the organization in 2011.

Iwan Baan, the photographer behind New York magazine’s now-iconic Hurricane Sandy cover, took the Relevancy Award for highlighting human engagement with architecture through his pictures. His acceptance speech aligned with the evening’s mission: “The purpose of my work was never to be just about buildings, but architecture and people and stories,” he said. “I try to document what happens when the architects and the planners have left and everyday life takes over.”

After that, it was off to the Boom Boom Room for more champagne.

To see the full list of all 87 winners, see the A+ website.

To see images from the gala, click on the slideshow.

See the Art and Performances of the Calder Foundation's Frieze Week Pop-Up Show

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See the Art and Performances of the Calder Foundation's Frieze Week Pop-Up Show

Smack dab in the middle of the madness of Frieze Week, last Saturday saw the return of what has become an annual tradition in New York during during fairs: A cool pop-up show sponsored by the Alexander Calder Foundation. The events typically combine a program of freewheeling experimental performance and film with a disorientingly amazing selection of art, all in some kind of offbeat environment (the art this year was curated by Katherine Cohn; the film by Victoria Brooks). We branded last year’s show, held in the McKittrick Hotel (aka the “Sleep No More” space), “our favorite Frieze Week event” — and this year did not disappoint either.

Taking place over the course of a single day at the ballroom of the High Line Hotel, the show centered on an installation of artworks displayed on a thicket of temporary walls assembled of scrap cardboard. From one of these lovably funky dividers, a wonderful David Hammons construction of African masks stared out at you as you entered; around a corner, a Noble & Webster sculpture that uses beer cans to cast the silhouette of a skyline could be glimpsed by crouching down and looking into a floor-level cubby. Perhaps the most memorable flourish was the inclusion of a small Kurt Schwitters collage — from Alexander Calder’s own collection — right when you entered the space, viewable when you raised up a cardboard flap, like the world’s most blue-chip advent calendar.

As for the live entertainment, the day's program was well worth hanging around for — and many did — featuring the likes of Neptune, the Vertical Foliage Orchestra, and Diagram A. The Anti-Pop Consortium's ultra-cool hip-hop formed a kind of a climax of the evening. Don’t miss the Calder show next year — in the meantime, here are the highlights, from a performance of Christine Sun Kim's “Face Opera” to some delicate Eva Hesse works you will probably never see again and a plate of chicken by Daren Bader.

To see works from the Calder Foundation's “They Might Well Have Been Remnants of the Boat,” click on the slideshow. 

 

 

BLOUIN Covet List - The Hat Edition

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Slideshow: See Works From Anish Kapoo's Berlin Survey

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From Demonic Crystals to Durer's Rhino, a Museum's Madcap Survey of Oddities

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From Demonic Crystals to Durer's Rhino, a Museum's Madcap Survey of Oddities

Curiosity, as Brian Dillon notes in his introductory essay to the exhibition of the same title, has oscillated between sin and virtue across the years. Francis Bacon, writing in the 16th century, railed against the portrayal of curiosity by church authorities, who had equated it with “the originall temptation and sinne” that “hath in it somewhat of the serpent, and therefore where it entreth into a man, it makes him swel.” At that time, learning was seen to be the fruitless pursuit of vanity, something that would feed anxiety and atheism and fritter away a person’s abilities and virtue. Taking this transgressive history as a starting point, the exhibition “Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing,” conceived by Dillon—a Modern Painters contributor and U.K. editor of Cabinet magazine—traces the revival of curiosity, from the Wunderkammer through Victorian museum displays, and the critical and witty probings of contemporary artists. Together with a curatorial team consisting of Roger Malbert and myself from the Hayward Gallery, in London, and Lauren Wright of Turner Contemporary, more than 175 items have been assembled from historic collections and artists’ studios: each maker or collector intent on transgressing intellectual fields and furthering a sensibility centered on the pursuit of knowledge. But rather than offering a teleological sweep through the centuries, the show, which runs between May 25 and September 15 at Turner Contemporary, in Margate, is about unlikely meetings.

The Horniman Museum’s huge overstuffed walrus shares a space with Robert Hooke’s giant drawing of a flea. Early algae cyanotypes (essentially photographs made from cyanide) by Anna Atkins are shown alongside the uncomfortably disarming photographs of Czech outsider artist Miroslav Tichý, who created voyeuristic images of women in his town of Kyjov by surreptitiously snapping on a homemade camera fashioned from old bits of cardboard. The works frequently step across a green zone between art and science. Some are suffused with fetishism, others probe the natural world, while still others bring to light taxonomies latent within contemporary society. All share a thirst to gather, record, and question things that instinctively raise an eyebrow or somehow suggest lifting the lid on something else. Curiosity is a broad term. If we are not curious, then what are we? The following seven works and artifacts from the exhibition have been chosen to convey a sense of the historical vectors that run through the show and to point to the fictions, scrutiny, and lines of speculation practiced by artists today.

The Center for Land Use InterpretationLos Alamos Rolodexes

The Center for Land Use Interpretation describes itself as a “research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface.” Since its founding in 1994 in Los Angeles, the center has amassed a vast archive of images, data, and source materials, which they use to interpret the human imprint on the landscape as a “cultural inscription”—evidence to be read, decoded, and understood. Drawing on the legacies of land art, as well as the aesthetics of bureaucracy, they undertake exhibitions, conduct tours and field trips, and share the information they gather through their website and archive.

For this exhibition, they present a series of Rolodexes from a Los Alamos lab containing business cards from suppliers and company representatives of the sort that a national nuclear weapons lab might need to call on. Recently acquired from the archive of nuclear-worker-turned-activist Ed Grothus, they date from the height of the Cold War arms race. Grothus worked as a machinist and then technician for 20 years but resigned in 1969 to operate a salvage company and thrift store, the Los Alamos Sales Co., better known as the “Black Hole.” Its object was to recycle nuclear industry cast-offs, putting them to use as agents of peace. “There is something poignant and compelling about the simplicity and directness of these business calling cards,” explains Matt Coolidge, the founder of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. “It comes down to people, with phone numbers. And it’s a snapshot of synergies between the business community and America’s atomic might, demand and supply. On one hand, it’s an indexical connection directly to the sources of building and operating the most sophisticated and powerful national defense technologies in the world. On the other hand, it is obsolete information, expired, a relic. It is rare, hard evidence of the links of the secret technological history of the nation, and also a dead end.”

Walrus (Odobenus rosmarus)

The famous overstuffed walrus of the Horniman Museum, in South London, was purchased by that museum’s founder, Frederick Horniman, in the 1890s. Having never before seen such an unlikely beast as a walrus, the Victorian taxidermists (like practically everyone else in Britain) were not aware of its characteristic folds of skin and instead continued to simply stuff and stuff the animal until it was fully and proudly inflated, as it now appears. It shares this aspect of mistaken identity and extrapolation about the unknown and exotic in nature with Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros, also on view in “Curiosity.”

Brought to London by the hunter James Henry Hubbard (who had hauled it from Hudson Bay in Canada), the walrus was first exhibited in the Canadian section of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886 in South Kensington. Horniman, the son of a wealthy tea trader, had set about collecting objects of natural history, art, and culture from around the world and later presented his cache to the public in the spirit of Victorian philanthropy and public education. He first opened his home to the public, dividing the exhibits into two categories: art and nature. After accommodating more than 40,000 visits in the first months, Horniman decided to construct the museum that exists today.

This exhibition marks the first time since the walrus’s purchase that it will leave the museum. The moving operation will take three days, as it needs to be delicately hoisted over a fortress of specially built vintage vitrines and into a bespoke traveling crate. Some years ago, a local schoolboy thrust a pencil into the animal’s leathery hide, providing the museum a chance to see what was inside (various bits of wadding, cardboard, and things that were lying about at the time). This represents a second and more managed opportunity for museum staff to take a look behind the smoothed-out folds, X-ray the animal, and discover if, behind the tusks, a skull remains buried.

John Dee’s Mirror and Crystal

Dee (1527–1609) was a mathematician, astronomer, and occultist who served as an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I and became renowned as one of the most learned men of his day. Alongside his work as a mathematician—in his early 20s he lectured on advanced algebra at the Sorbonne—John Dee was a practitioner of magic, astrology, and Hermetic philosophy, and was said to have had the largest library in Britain at the time. For Dee, the two strands of science and occultism were closely bound in the search for a transcendent understanding of what he called “pure verities”—divine forms that he believed underlay the visible world.

Writers and others then and since have remained fascinated by Dee: Shakespeare is said to have modeled Prospero in The Tempest on him, while 007—his code name in correspondence with Elizabeth I—was famously adopted by Ian Fleming for James Bond. More recently, Dee has figured in the writing of H.P. Lovecraft and appeared as the main protagonist in Peter Ackroyd’s novel The House of Doctor Dee, 1993. The rock bands Blue Oyster Cult and Iron Maiden have referred to Dee in songs and Blur’s Damon Albarn penned an opera about him. Dee is reputed to have used a black mirror and a crystal in his practice of scrying, whereby he predicted the future by looking at the glass and reflective surface for symbols or the “ghosts” of people. He claimed that the angel Uriel gave him the crystal, or “shew-stone,” in November 1582 and told him how to make the philosopher’s stone. The crystal, which he also used for healing, was later passed on to his son, who in turn gave it to Nicholas Culpeper as compensation for having cured a liver illness. A physician and alchemist, Culpeper attempted to incorporate the crystal into his medical practice until 1651, when he recorded that a demonic ghost burst out from it and “exercised itself to lewdness and other depravity with women and girls.”

The Animal Vomited by Mr. Lund, the Baker

This small etching and accompanying text describe an incident from 1681/82, when Mr. Lund, a baker from York, “vomited a thing exactly of this shape and bigness.” The incident was described in detail in a letter sent by York physician Martin Lister, who declared, “What this creature is, I dare scarce venture ... for that it is not like anything I ever yet saw in Nature.” He also noted that “when new vomited it was speckled like a toad,” and after being preserved in wine the matter turned to a “fleshy colour like unto raw veal.”

Lister sent his findings to Robert Hooke—famous for his enlarged engraving of a flea (in Micrographia, 1665, also in the exhibition)—who included an account and accompanying plate in his Philosophical Collections, a publication of the Royal Society, the following year.

The event prompted a fair degree of consternation and debate among the scientific community of the day. While Lund, the poor unfortunate victim, thought that the animal was a witch or evil spirit, scientists contended that he must have swallowed a frog or toad embryo, which grew in the stomach, finally gestating into the unlikely shape, or perhaps it was even the compound of a number of pond creatures. The incident and accompanying etching were enough to catch the attention of Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society, who subsumed it into his vast collection, which eventually formed the basis of the British Museum. The incident alludes to a moment when science and medicine augmented new belief systems but still were in relative infancy; it was a time when earnest reason collided with popular mysticism.

Toril Johannessen: Words and Years

Adopting empirical strategies to visualize natural and man-made systems and phenomena, Johannessen’s practice operates in a space between social science and art, between concept and credence. With the series “Words and Years,” 2010–12, Johannessen has charted the frequency with which certain resonant and contentious words, such as love, crisis, hope, and reality are used in publications like Time magazine or National Geographic, raising intriguing and often humorous links between the diverse lists. Hinting at secret cycles or unseen trends at work within society, the artist draws out poetic correlations between the natural and the economic through the editorial tendencies in magazine print.

The graphs are frequently lyrical, or tongue-in-cheek, such as his bar chart of mentions of hope and reality in the journal Political Science or the pie chart of greed and desire in Genetics. The viewer is drawn into the narratives that the graphs point to. For instance, studying how often the word crisis appears in the journals Nature and Science, one observes how the political climate at any given time seems to mirror the natural one. Yet it appears that the instances of miracles cited in the same magazines over the same period, remain at a low level throughout. So crises were common and miracles slight? Trawling back through periodicals since their inception and plotting their trends in this way, Johannessen establishes a mode of inquiry whereby fact merges with concept, offering clarity and haze simultaneously.

Nina Canell: The New Mineral

The installations of Canell are “live.” Frequently, a stream of electricity will flow visibly through them, seen in the wobbling light of a delicately placed neon or the movement of a fan or sensor. As the critic Dieter Roelstraete has suggested, Canell is interested in “the alignment of electricity and female agency.” Electricity flows from the male to the female connector, and its history recalls the treatment for female hysteria, as well as the panoply of domestic appliances associated with the traditional image of the housewife. Electricity carries a hidden charge, an unseen power.

Canell’s works often show a sense that something is happening, albeit on a slow, almost imperceptible scale, for instance, a cloud of water particles that gradually turns a packet of concrete powder into hard concrete. If not experiments as such, her works are charged with a mental probing that is activated in the materials that comprise them. Yet behind the fragile low-key amalgam of slowly moving components, complex narratives are buried, enriching to those who probe.

The New Mineral shows a cluster of glass bulbs on broomstick handles. In the center, a light source feeds an assembled group of radiometers. The luminosity of this central light source slowly fades and brightens, prompting the radiometers, placed in similar glass bulbs atop the surrounding poles, to react accordingly, gathering speed relative to their given position and distance to the light source. Their mechanisms spin faster when the light is brighter and slow down when it’s darker. The work feeds on the legacy of William Crookes, the chemist and spiritualist who invented the radiometer. Crookes started out as a meteorologist; his interests soon took him into economics, publishing, chemistry, and psychic research. Crookes was a well-known personality in the late 19th century, famous for discovering thallium and isolating the first known sample of helium. Inventor of the cathode ray tube, he believed that he had discovered a fourth state of matter, what he called “radiant matter,” which formed a bridge between his scientific and spiritualist beliefs. Radiant matter is the throbbing crux of The New Mineral, as it gently, perhaps ironically, beckons viewers to discover this ethereal notion for themselves.

Laurent Grasso: Specola Vaticana

This suite of five images shows the unexpected and intriguing sight of popes and cardinals gazing at the night sky through giant telescopes. Each witty, fascinating, and surprising, the images were garnered from the Vatican archives during a residency there by Grasso. Who would have suspected that the papacy, with its history of persecuting those who questioned the heavens, would have had such a sophisticated observatory, updated through the ages with the latest telescopes? Grasso reinforces this dissimilitude by showing alongside the images a page from Galileo’s 1610 treatise Sidereus Nuncius (sometimes translated as Starry Messenger) depicting his observations of the stars. He was later sentenced as a heretic and placed under house arrest by his former supporter, Pope Urban VIII.

It is unclear what these images were for and if they were intended to be anything other than private records. Grasso carefully researched the printing method, using a vintage silver plate technique to blur their historical status. A similar historical mist encircles his closely related series of paintings, “Studies into the Past,” 2010–12 (also on display in the exhibition), for which Grasso engaged Old Master restorers to help create paintings in a Renaissance style. Using composite scenes from earlier works, Grasso introduces spectacular natural phenomena into the landscape, such as a comet or a large swarm of bats. The effect creates a disturbance, a “what if ” reinterpretation of history, in which extraordinary things of contemporary familiarity and understanding have been edited back into the past. These things could have happened, but would people have been so shocked that they ignored them? Grasso confronts the past with natural events so vivid and strange that if they had happened they could easily have been dismissed as dream apparitions or signs from above and buried for centuries in a distant collective memory. How curious can we really be without taking a leap of faith outside the known borders of our belief?

This article was published in the May 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images, click on the slideshow. 

VIDEO: Zhao Zhao's Gunshots for Art Basel Hong Kong

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VIDEO: Zhao Zhao's Gunshots for Art Basel Hong Kong

BEIJING — On a cold winter day in 2005, Zhao Zhao was in a car accident and bumped his head on the windshield. When he took the car for repair, the mechanic asked him if he would like to keep the glass or trade it in for a discount on a new one. Zhao not only kept the glass, he used it as the inspiration for his latest series of work “Constellations” debuting at Art Basel Hong Kong.

The surface of each rectangular glass pane is dotted with cracks of different shapes in various positions. “It seems there are no set forms to them and they appear to be random,” he said Zhao during our visit to his two-story redbrick house in Caochangdi Art Zone in Beijing. Unlike the glass cracks from the accident, these were made using a rifle.

It's not the first time Zhao used actual firearms to make art. In 2007, he purchased a Spanish made “Gamo” rifle on a popular Chinese online shopping site Taobao. “I was really surprised about how easy it is to get a gun in China where private gun ownership is illegal,” he said.

He didn’t keep that gun for long when the police came knocking on his door. “I found a hardware store and chopped the gun into pieces,” he recalled. He managed to show the chopped gun as one of his pieces in a group exhibition.

This year, when Zhao was discussing the idea for his solo booth with Chambers Fine Art, the cracked glass from the previous accident and the sentiment of the lost gun gave him the idea for “Constellations.”

However, with tightening gun-control laws, it has become much more difficult to get a gun. According to Zhao, the price for a rifle similar to the one he bought six years ago rose to 40,000 yuan ($6,500) from 7,000 yuan ($1,130). So this time, he paid off a shooting range in a mountainous village outside of Beijing.

The choice for the shooting range might seem like a compromise, and the work with the poetic title can also appear to be less explicitly provocative than his earlier works. But the transformation might just be Zhao morphing into a more matured and experienced artist.

“I’m trying to avoid the unnecessary trouble [with the government],” said Zhao. This is certainly a good rule to follow after the Chinese customs police confiscated a shipment of his earlier work last year.

“[My work] is less concerned with physical representation now,” said Zhao. Perhaps that's why in spite of the unintentional beauty from the bullet holes, there is also a reminiscence of history for Zhao as a Chinese artist shown through these transparent glass panes.


The Frick Collection's Inge Reist on the Oral Histories of Art Ownership

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The Frick Collection's Inge Reist on the Oral Histories of Art Ownership

For the director of the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick, in New York, the story behind a collection can be as important as the artworks in it. Since the center’s founding as a discrete division of the Frick Art Reference Library in 2007, Inge Reist has been committed to realizing an ambitious oral history project to address the important but often overlooked elements of collecting and patronage. Julia Halperin talked with Reist about encouraging art collectors to share their stories.

What prompted you to launch the oral history project?

We envisioned it as part of our programming from the center’s inception in 2007. Looking at works of art from the point of view of ownership leads you into the realm of cultural history, even more than art history. Because it’s not stylistic influences, it’s trends and it’s taste: why the trends, why the taste. If a certain collector is regarded as a great arbiter of taste, then other people want what they are collecting. They become the key that unlocks a door to a richer understanding of a period.

This aspect of art history has been largely ignored in academic circles.

I think the pendulum is swinging back from more theoretical to more object focused art history. So inevitably, collecting plays a role. I got through an entire Ph.D. program at Columbia University and never looked at an auction catalogue. They didn’t even collect exhibition catalogues until the blockbuster scholarly genre came along. But these materials allow you to discover what I call the biography of the work of art—where it’s been, who it’s been attributed to, what it sold for, its condition.

What are your criteria to identify collectors for the project?

The criteria at the moment are very easy because these are major collectors. Obviously, they have to be alive and able to describe their collecting experiences. We have a list of 20 but just added another. We thought, Oh yeah, why didn’t we think of him? So it’s kind of malleable.

What sorts of questions do you ask the collectors you interview?

What’s your first memory of being struck by a work of art? Without being too psychological about it, we are trying to get at their motivations, the origins of their passion. Tracing the way an individual’s taste developed over time or how he or she perceived influences is important. Not too long ago I had a wonderful conversation with Tony Ganz, who has a lovely perspective on how his interest in collecting was initially informed by his parents’ passion and by being surrounded by superb art. But then he became his own man, his tastes changed, and he and his wife began to collect differently. And there are people like Tom Hill, who collect older art and contemporary art, which I think is fascinating.

Are your interviewers familiar with the collectors’ holdings?

They do a lot of homework. Being aware of which artists collectors knew personally, for example—that’s a pretty important thing for those who collect contemporary art. Often these artists played a big role in steering them in one direction or another.

We’re working with the Archives of American Art [at the Smithsonian], which has been doing oral histories, not so much of collectors but of dealers and artists, for more than 40 years. This was a new angle for them, and that’s one reason they were happy to collaborate with us.

There are probably 5 or 10 top collectors in the world whose names are virtually unknown outside a very small circle. Are you planning to reach out to them?

That’s true. There was a show at the Clark a few years ago of Renaissance portraits, all from one collector, but I didn’t see his name anywhere. I think that once people know that the Frick does oral histories of important collectors, hopefully there will be a bit of a bandwagon for it [laughs]. We had Eli and Edythe Broad here for a small dinner after he did an interview. One of the guests was encouraging another to do an oral history for the center, and Eli jumped right in, saying, “You really have to do it!”

When will you complete the histories, and will they be accessible to the public?

We are hoping to do all of the collectors on the current list within a couple of years. Ultimately, they will be freely accessible to researchers, but understandably, some of the subjects would rather we not make them available until after their death. That’s the case with Steve Martin and the Newhouses. We have to respect people’s private lives, and we want them to be candid about what went into their thinking and their collecting. As I say to all our subjects, we’re in this for the long haul.

This article was published in the May 2013 issue of Art+Auction. 

Joseph Beuys's Nazi Ties Assailed, James Franco Takes Up Street Art, and More

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Joseph Beuys's Nazi Ties Assailed, James Franco Takes Up Street Art, and More

Beuys Biography Alleges Nazi Ties: In his incendiary new biography of Joseph Beuys, the art historian Hans Peter Riegel suggests that the revered German artist's devotion to the occult beliefs and racial theories of Rudolf Steiner eventually shaped not only his politics but also his art, while many of his friends and patrons were long-time or former Nazis. Riegel, the previous author of a muckraking biography of Jorg Immendorff, claims that totalitarian tendencies and enduring belief in Steiner's loopier theories remained present in Beuys's politics and artistic production throughout his life, as well as a firm belief in Germans' superiority. Film director Oskar Roehler has supposedly expressed an interest in the biography, though Roehler himself says that "judging [Beuys] politically would be to whittle him down." [Spiegel]

James Franco Paints Mural in Brooklyn: On Saturday artist-actor-icon James Franco was spotted on the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, painting a large mural promoting his new film "This Is the End," an apocalyptic comedy in which the film's many stars play exaggerated versions of themselves. Franco rendered each of his co-stars in stylized portraits, including a zombie-like, Expressionist take on Jonah Hill, and a Munchian self-portrait evocative of the tortured pose in "The Scream." [Gawker]

$15M Mystery Donation for Miami Museum: The Pérez Art Museum Miami— future home of the the Miami Art Museum, due to open in December during Art Basel Miami Beach— has received a gift of $12 million in cash and artworks whose value amounts to $3 million from an anonymous donor. "I can say almost nothing about it except that I’m thrilled," said Thom Collins, the museum's director. "We talked back and forth and ended up with this wonderful gift," added the chairman of the museum's board of trustees, Aaron Podhurst. "That’s all I can say. It’s a person who wants to do very good things in the community." [Miami Herald]

Mobile Pompidou Halted: The Centre Pompidou's acclaimed mobile museum, which has been visited by over 200,000 inhabitants of art-deprived communities throughout France since it took to the open road in 2011, has been parked, permanently, due to lack of funding. The project, which cost €2.5 million to launch and required an additional €200,000 at every stop, was fueled by a combination of private and public funding that has now dried up. Pompidou director Alain Séban isn't giving up on the mobile approach, and plans to open pop-up Pompidou outposts, lasting three or four years, in communities in France and abroad. [Libération]

Warhol Authentication Board and Foundation Too Close: An ongoing lawsuit filed in 2010 against the Andy Warhol Foundation by its insurer, the Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company, suggests that the ties between the Foundation and the since-closed Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board were much closer than the two supposedly independent groups suggested. Now a countersuit filed by the Warhol Foundation is headed to trial, where lawyers for Philadelphia Indemnity plan to disclose "other, unspecified defenses." "This is simply another rehash of the same lies, distortions and half-truths that have been made in the past, all of which have been completely discredited and not a single one of which has ever been proven in court," said Joel Wachs, the president of the Warhol Foundation. [New York Review of Books, TAN]

Art Stock Exchange Crashes: A plan to create what was intended to be a "stock exchange for art" dubbed SplitArt— whereby collectors could convert their holdings into certificates that would be traded online — has come to an end in liquidation in court in Luxembourg after its founders disagreed on the business's direction. "The majority wanted to build an IT platform and stock exchange to make money, but the minority saw the project as a way of creating a new transparent, liquid, efficient market," said a minority investor. [FT]

Canada's National Gallery Goes Indigenous: The National Gallery of Canada (NGC) has opened what is billed as the largest exhibition to date of contemporary art by members of indigenous populations, "Sakahan" (Algonquin for "to light a fire"), which is also the largest show in the institution's 130-year history, with more than 80 artists contributing over 150 works. The institution plans to hold this international survey every five years. "It’s an exercise of empowerment [for artists] as well," said NGC director Marc Mayer. "You can’t do that once; you have to do it repeatedly so that there’s something to aspire to, to work toward, to be included in the pantheon of indigenous art every five years. I think we’re the right country to play host to that exercise, the ideal country, in fact." [Globe and Mail]

Hirshhorn Bubble Could Burst Smithsonian's Slump: An internal report by the Smithsonian Institution leaked last week revealed the high costs of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's long-planned "Bloomburg Bubble" — an inflatable structure that would rise out of the building's roof — casting doubt on its completion. The pricey project could help cast off Washington, D.C.'s aura of aesthetic stagnancy and aesthetic conservatism, according to Pulitzer-winning critic Philip Kennicott. "Greenlighting the Bubble will require an act of faith, in the leadership that proposed it and the architecture firm that has designed it," he writes. "More important, it will require faith in the power of ideas and culture, in the proposition that art has something to say, that its voice needs to be heard in Washington, that there are alternatives to our dismal political culture already in circulation, waiting to be heard, transformative in their power." [WaPo]

MOCA Delays Architecture Show: The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has delayed the opening of "A New Sculpturalism," its exhibition as part of the Getty Museum's Pacific Standard Time initiative, until June 16 after its curator, Christopher Mount, suggested that the show might be canceled altogether. The exhibition was originally due to open June 2. [LAT]

Art Classes for Detectives: Law enforcement departments all around the country have participated in "The Art of Perception," a seminar that uses close readings of artworks to train detectives so that they can read crime scenes more effectively. "You get so used to going to similar scenes," said Philadelphia detective Ken Flaville. "This is showing you that not everything is the same. You really have to step back and you really have to look at it and pick up things you haven’t seen before." [CBS Philly]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Liz Diller on the Hirshhorn Bubble

 

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Q&A: Ben Shapiro on "Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters"

Silicon Valley Gets an Art Fair, Promising "Earth-Shattering" Art-Tech Pairing

The Inaugural A+ Awards Focus on Architects on the Rise

For breaking news throughout the day, check our blog IN THE AIR.

Slideshow: Christian Dior Cruise 2014

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The World's Best Flea Markets

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Mirrors at the Brooklyn Flea – Courtesy of Kyle Huebbe, Brooklyn Flea
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Mirrors at the Brooklyn Flea – Courtesy of Kyle Huebbe, Brooklyn Flea
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Mirrors at the Brooklyn Flea – Courtesy of Kyle Huebbe, Brooklyn Flea
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Flea markets were once dependably dodgy places to buy mismatched shoes and broken radios. But in the last few years, weekend markets all over the world have been taken over by upscale vendors specializing in vintage and handmade goods. Many of the new flea markets are also culinary destinations, with fancy on-the-go fare. All the better for bargain-hungry aesthetes from Brooklyn to Shanghai to satisfy their cravings.

 

 

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Courtesy of Kyle Huebbe, Brooklyn Flea
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Mirrors at the Brooklyn Flea
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Dose Flea – Courtesy of Nathan Michael
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Dose Market, Chicago, Illinois

 

A far cry from the rag-and-bone merchants who started the flea market tradition in Chicago, Dose Market is a fashion-forward cornucopia of designer and high quality goods in a former warehouse on the Odgen Slip (River East Art Center, 435 E. Illinois St.). Among the 50 or so rotating vendors who change completely every month, standouts include Bodkin (simple, beautifully designed women's clothing in soft fabrics) and Gentleman's Boombox (vintage suitcases converted into boomboxes). Food offerings, which also change every month, include the Starlounge Coffee Cafe and Franks 'n' Dawgs (house-made creative sausage combos). The fanciness extends to the admission price—where most fleas are simply glad you came, Dose charges ten bucks at the door ($8 online).

 

Check website for market dates, 10 am to 4 pm.

 

 

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Gentleman's Boombox, Dose Flea
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Brooklyn Flea – Courtesy of Kate Glicksberg, Brooklyn Flea
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Brooklyn Flea, Brooklyn, New York

 

In six years, this flea market has repurposed the whole flea market concept. On Saturdays from April through November, the Brooklyn Flea's upscale vendors assemble mid-century modernist furniture and snazzy handicrafts on a church school playground in Fort Greene (176 Lafayette Avenue), while on Sundays they gather on the East River waterfront in Williamsburg (between North 6th and 7th Streets). The winter location is in an old high-ceilinged bank building in Williamsburg (One Hanson Place). The Brooklyn Flea also kick-started the food market called Smorgasburg (on Saturdays in the Williamsburg location and Sundays at the Tobacco Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park), where 75 to 100 food vendors often find themselves beset by long lines of fanatical repeat customers (Asia Dog and a truck serving lobster rolls are among the most popular). Check the website to see which vendors will show up on a given weekend—and to preview the merchandise. On June 2, 2013, Brooklyn Flea’s new weekly Philadelphia market opens with 100 vendors (The Piazza in Northern Liberties).

 

Brooklyn Flea, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 am to 5 pm. Smorgasburg, Saturdays and Sundays, 11 am to 6 pm. 

 

 

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Dublin Flea – Courtesy of Jean Curran Photography
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Dublin Flea Market, Dublin, Ireland

 

The Irish capital got in on the Flea game late in 2008 with this earnest entry set in a low-slung brick building on Newmarket Square (The CO-OP, 12 Newmarket). Over 60 vendors show up at the Dublin Flea on the last Sunday of every month, appealing to a youthful crowd. The wares are heavy on vintage clothing, bikes, and vinyl records. But the market has also become a Sunday entertainment destination, with bands often appearing or a DJ performance. There's a permanent organic food store on the premises, reinforcing the fair-trade and PC credentials of the market—many visitors mention the falafel as a culinary high point.

 

Last Sunday of every month, 11 am to 5 pm.

 

 

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Dublin Flea
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Rose Bowl – Courtesy of John Strathdee via flickr
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Rose Bowl Flea Market, Los Angeles, California

 

Formerly the squarest of the big-time flea markets, theRose Bowl is now a hip hangout. This mega-event in a sport stadium takes place on the second Sunday of each month and attracts up to 20,000 visitors (Rose Bowl Drive). Though that may sound nightmarish, L.A.'s vintage stalkers swear by the market, which abounds with over 2,000 vendors who deal in antiques, vintage clothing, and Hollywood props. It's also a celeb-spotting paradise, with Hollywood A- to C-listers mixing it up with the common people. Unlike some of the less organized markets, the Rose Bowl Flea is most definitely a for-profit venture: A basic ticket costs $8, early admission is $15, and there are various parking schemes that let you pay nothing or a lot depending on proximity to the stadium.

 

Second Sunday of each month,8 am to 4:30 pm.

 

 

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Brixton Retro & Vintage Market, London, England

 

Forget London's Portobello Road, with its tourist hordes and oligarch-level pricing: Brixton is the city's flea destination of the moment. Set in the Brixton Village Market south of the River Thames, formerly a run-down arcade, the Retro & Vintage Market is a relatively low-key affair that takes place on the third Saturday of every month (Coldharbour Lane). Around 30 vendors offer home furnishings, clothing, jewelry, and collectibles, with everything from framed Betty Page photos to vintage tartan dresses. But it's just as much a destination for Londoners in search of delicious cheap eats—try Cornercopia, a locavore nose-to-tail store.

 

Third Saturday of each month, 10 am to 5 pm.

 

 

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Rings at Brixton Market
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Mercato Monti – Courtesy of Mercato Monti
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Mercato Monti, Rome, Italy

 

In a city studded with junk markets, Rome's weekly Mercato Montiis a carefully curated jewel. It takes place in what the organizers bill as the "suggestive atmosphere" of the Palatino hotel's basement, which is located on a side street parallel to the Via Cavour, not far from the Colosseum. Vendors range from Leopardessa, which sells vintage clothing evocative of 1960s Italian and French movies, to young designers of handbags and home furnishings. And since this is a full-on lifestyle happening, there are regular DJs to keep you entertained too.

 

First three Sundays and last Saturday of every month, 10 am to 8 pm.

 

 

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Mercato Monti
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Marché aux Puces de Porte de Vanves - Courtesy of Josh Leo via flickr
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Marché aux Puces de Porte de Vanves, Paris, France

 

Paris's Porte de Clignancourt flea market may be one of the most famous, but success has driven prices sky-high and its grand scale can be off-putting. This has created an opening for the Marché aux Puces de Porte de Vanves, on the southern edge of Paris, which has emerged as an easier, more customer-friendly alternative. Approximately 380 vendors sell almost exclusively French antiques and bric-a-brac, so this is the place for that mother-of-pearl ashtray you never knew you needed. Like its modern competition in Brooklyn and elsewhere, the Vanves market also has great food, though it's less diverse—crepes with lemon and sugar, roasted chestnuts in the fall, and on Sundays the Boulevard Brune food market offers smelly cheeses and produce from the Île-de-France region.

 

Saturdays and Sundays, 7 am to 2 pm.

 

 

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Marché aux Puces de Porte de Vanves
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Mauerpark Flohmarkt, Berlin, Germany

 

As much a social event as it is a market, Berlin's Mauerpark Flohmarkt sells largely forgettable wares but its carnival atmosphere has made it a modern classic. Every Sunday, streams of hung-over hipsters converge on the park, a grassy expanse bordered by Bernauer Strasse, where the Berlin Wall used to run (Bernauer strasse 63­–64). On the grounds, hundreds of stalls line improvised alleyways. Among the chaff, there are several vinyl LP vendors with great selections of rarities. Open-air karaoke competitions, held in an amphitheater at the park's edge on warm afternoons, attract a wide range of talents and enthusiastic crowds. A rotating roster of Thai and Vietnamese food vendors selling $5 curries, and German beer and sausage stands complete the Berlin experience.

 

Sundays, 7 am to 5 pm.

 

 

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Flea Market at the Cool Docks – Courtesy of Cool Docks
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Flea Market at the Cool Docks, Shanghai, China

 

Shanghai is full of open-air markets selling goods of dubious provenance, but the Flea Market at the Cool Docks, which launched the summer of 2012, is  trying to do things differently. The expatriates who run it ask potential vendors (local artists and designers) for a list of goods they intend to sell in an effort to block fakes and intellectual piracy. The setting is part of the allure: The new Cool Docks development offers a more relaxed shopping and dining experience than much of Shanghai, with brick streets and plentiful boutiques and expensive international restaurants. Plus, the area is right across the Huangpu River from the city's skyscraper district—guaranteeing, at the very least, a spectacular view of China's commercial capital.

 

See market's blog for dates, 2 pm to 10 pm.

 

 

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Flea Market at the Cool Docks
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As the weather warms up it's the perfect time to hit weekend markets for vintage bargains and fancy street food.

 

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Where to Sea and Be Seen in Barcelona

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Beach on the mind? Catalanonia's capital offers three hot hotels with a Mediterranean view 

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W Hotel Barcelona -- Courtesy of W Hotel Barcelona
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Barcelona's W Hotel is perched on an artificial island at the southernmost tip of the city's beach, which means there are sea views from every room. The soaring, sail-shaped edifice by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, has the feel of a berthed ship as much as a hotel. For the full effect, book the W's three-bedroom Extreme Wow Suite, which has a 635-square-foot terrace (complete with whirlpool tub) jutting out over the Mediterranean and floor-to-ceiling windows shielding a 360-degree city and sea outlook.

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Standard Rooms, Amazing Views -- Courtesy of W Hotel Barcelona
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Duquesa de Cardona Barcelona Hotel
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Duquesa de Cardona Terrace -- Courtesy of Duquesa de Cardona
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The Duquesa de Cardona boutique hotel sits on the edge of the Barri Gòtic, Barcelona's character-laden old town. The hotel faces Port Vell marina, a large community of boat dwellers that looks particularly beguiling at night when many of the boats' masts are illuminated by fairy lights. The 40-room hotel has 14 deluxe rooms with balconies overlooking the water. The classic decor, with damask textiles and faux regency details, harmonizes with the hotel's mid-19th-century architecture.

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Hotel Arts Barecelona
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Arts Suite Sitting Area -- Courtesy of Hotel Arts
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On the 30th floor of the Hotel Arts, a 44-story blue glass and steel tower, Barcelonese architect Josep Juanpere has created the Arts Suite. The contemporary furnishings are luxurious, such as a huge, cushion-strewn modular sofa, with a neutral palate so as not to detract from the outlook over the Mediterranean Sea and Port Olímpic marina. This room-with-a-killer-view is part of an ongoing refurb of the hotel -- this April saw a renewel of the Club Level lounge -- which originally opened for the city's 1992 Olympic Games.

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Hotel Arts Exterior
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Hotel Arts Exterior -- Courtesy of Hotel Arts

Sze and Mehretu Acquisitions Sharpen the High Museum’s Focus on Women Artists

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Sze and Mehretu Acquisitions Sharpen the High Museum’s Focus on Women Artists

On Tuesday the High Museum of Art in Atlanta announced the acquisition of a 38-foot-long installation by Sarah Sze— her last major commission before the 2013 Venice Biennale, at which she’s representing the U.S. — and a large Julie Mehretu painting responding to the Arab Spring uprisings. These two major pieces, plus another newly acquired Sze print, “Day” (2003), deepen the institution’s commitment to two of the most prominent contemporary female artists working today.

“One of the things I’m excited about in terms of our collection is that these two acquisitions really do increase the representation of women in our collection, and that’s really important to me,” the High Museum’s curator of contemporary art, Michael Rooks, told ARTINFO. “It wasn’t the reason that I acquired the works, because I’m a huge fan of both of these artists and they also support areas of opportunity and strength in our collection that I’ve been building on, but it’s a happy coincidence too that it does increase our stock in terms of great women artists in the collection.”

The High Museum commissioned the Sze installation, “Book of Parts (Centennial)” (2012), for its recent collaborative exhibition with the Museum of Modern Art, “Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 >> 2013.”

“When Sarah and I were talking about the commission, the context of the show was a chronological survey of the 20th century, and we discussed how these kinds of really ambitious, rambling, historical exhibitions are always doomed to fail in terms of providing a narrative or some kind of story about modernism or about art because there are so many multiple, overlapping, crisscrossing narratives, that any one person can reorder or reorganize those histories any number of ways,” Rooks said. “That’s why she started thinking about this piece as an assembly of bits of information to represent how history — especially art history — is often collected and sorted and categorized, and that becomes the definitive history until it’s challenged.”

The Mehretu painting, “Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (Part II),” is 15 feet tall and 12 feet wide, and responds to events whose history is still being determined.

“The series title, ‘Mogamma,’ is specific to Tahrir Square in Egypt, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, referring to a government building on the square,” Rooks said. “But there are a lot of other elements overlaid in terms of the imagery of the painting that are architectural, that are site-specific to hubs where social change has been taking place in the Middle East over the last three years.”

The pieces by Mehretu and Sze, both of whom are known for their works’ incredible formal complexity and multi-layered imagery, make for a very complimentary set of acquisitions.

“In some ways you can think of Sze’s work, this piece especially, as an extrusion of a Mehretu painting, formally speaking,” Rooks said. “They come from two different places entirely, but one thing they have in common, besides the formal aspect, is that they’re both about collections of knowledge that are placed into a new context. I think it’s interesting that those bits of data and knowledge that have been created take the shape and appearance of these marks and forms and objects in both their work.”

The Mehretu piece is part of a four-canvas piece that she presented at last year’s Documenta 13. Currently on view in London as part of the solo exhibition “Liminal Squared” at White Cube, the four panels will split up after that show, and the High Museum will hang its section in its contemporary galleries this summer. These new pieces aren’t the High’s first acquisitions of these artists’ works — they join a 12-panel print by Mehretu and a dimensional print of a fire escape by Sze, both of which the High acquired in 2010 — and they certainly won’t be the last.

“We look forward to continuing to acquire works by both of them,” Rooks said. “One of the things that we tend to do at the High Museum is to acquire in depth where it’s possible. So for example we have five paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, we have five major works by Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close — all guys, until now. We're going to be building a collection of these two artists over time.”

Nic Cage Sells Off "Sacred" Art, Pinault Finds the Secret of Youth, and More

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Nic Cage Sells Off "Sacred" Art, Pinault Finds the Secret of Youth, and More

Nic Cage's Art for Sale: Film blogger Jordan Morris snagged a prized item at actor Nicolas Cage's recent estate sale: a small abstract artwork in bright hues of yellow, red, and blue, with a triangular form surrounded by a circle at its center. According to Morris, who was photographed with the zen artwork in the actor's dining room, the work's title is "Sacred Geometric Art for Meditation." [Filmdrunk, Jordan Morris]

Art Keeps Pinault Young: During a tour of the solo show by Rudolf Stingel that he's presenting at the Palazzo Grassi— his Tadao Ando-renovated Venetian palazzo — to coincide with the Venice Biennale, the French businessman and super-collector François Pinault discussed the impetus for his immersion in the art world relatively late in life. "I'm very tormented by the passing of time and by death, because it's something we can't control," Pinault said. "Art and the relationship with artists could be a way to stay younger in my mind for as long as possible. There's a disconnection between physical and mental age. Sure, I'm not 30 anymore, but I reason as if I'm 30." [WSJ]

Pope Francis's First Statue: The first public sculpture portraying new Pope Francis has been installed in a potato field outside Naples, a symbolic venue given that the Argentine pontiff is descended from northern Italian farmers. The stylized, figurative sculpture was financed by the Italian actor Barbato De Stefano, who will present it to Pope Francis next month. [AFP]

Riverside Museum is Europe's Best: The Zaha Hadid-designed Riverside Museum in Glasgow, which has greeted more than two million visitors since it opened in June 2011, has been named the European Museum of the Year by the Council of Europe, becoming the first Scottish museum to receive the honor. "The Riverside Museum demonstrates brilliantly how a specialist transport collection can renew its relevance through active engagement with wider social and universal issues," the judges said. "The EMYA 2013 Judging Panel agreed unanimously that the museum fulfills the EMYA criteria of 'public quality' at the highest level." [BBC]

Met's Medieval Curators Shuffle: The Metropolitan Museum's Department of Medieval Art and its Upper Manhattan outpost the Cloisters are rejiggering their curatorial staff, with current curator in charge Peter Barnet moving into the new role of senior curator, while C. Griffith Mann, at the moment the chief curator and deputy director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, will take over as curator in charge. The new appointments take effect on September 1. [Press Release]

Free Museum Admission for Military Personnel: Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Department of Defense, and the non-profit Blue Star Families will offer free admission to some 2,000 museums nationwide for active duty military personal and their families. Participants in the annual initiative include the Corcoran Gallery, MoMA, LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and, for the first time, the Getty Museum. [Washington Post]

Egypt's Ancient Roman City Pilfered: The ancient Roman site of Antinopolis, which was built by emperor Hadrian in the second century CE, has fallen prey to plunderers and is being demolished by development projects, farmland, and a neighboring town's cemetery. Researchers at the site met with the Egyptian minister of antiquities, Mohammed Ibrahim, but to no avail. "This is a disgrace, it’s a real tragedy," said Raymond Johnson, the director of the University of Chicago at Luxor's archaeological mission to the site. "After the meeting with the minister they increased the number of guards, but many of them are from the same families as those that pillage the site." [TAN]

Timbuktu Takes Stock of its Manuscripts: Following the end of the occupation of the Malian city, al-Qaida-affiliated Islamists set fire to manuscripts as they fled French forces. But the guardians of the country's ancient texts managed to ferry most of the 45,000 housed at the Ahmed Baba Institute to Bamako by car and boat. "It was a dangerous thing to do, we would have been punished if we had been caught," said Abdoulaye Cissé, the Institute's interim director. "But people really came together to help us. Every time we told them what they were carrying, they all kept it secret and kept them hidden until they left the occupied area… We want to digitally secure all the manuscripts before they are brought back to Timbuktu… But then they must be brought back. The manuscripts are meaningless if they're not in Timbuktu." [Guardian]

Artists' Mini-Golf Gets Grant: Blue Ox Mini Golf, a project to install an 18-hole course at the forthcoming Schmidt Artists Lofts in St. Paul, Minnesota — with a different artist designing each hole — received a $350,000 ArtPlace America grant. The Blue Ox crew hopes to begin construction on the course by the fall, with the first art golfers expected to tee off in May 2014. [Star Tribune]

Martian Meteor Crashes Auction: A large chunk of a meteorite from Mars is expected to be the top lot in Heritage Auctions's "Nature and Science" sale on June 2 in Dallas, with a pre-sale estimate of $160,000 or more for the crystal-packed meteor. Fewer than 300 pounds of Martian meteorite are thought to exist on Earth — the one headlining Heritage's sale weighs in at 1.37 pounds and separated from Mars's surface when the planet was hit by an asteroid. [Artdaily]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Zaha Hadid's Riverside Museum in Glasgow

ALSO ON ARTINFO

Is Doug Aitken's Roving Amtrak Art Circus Initiative for Real?

EYE ON ART [VIDEO]: Jeff Koons' "Gazing Ball"

Rachel Kushner on "Spiritual America" and Writing Fiction Into '70s Art History

The Frick Collection's Inge Reist on the Oral Histories of Art Ownership

For breaking news throughout the day, check our blog IN THE AIR.


Slideshow: Venice Biennale 2013

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Slideshow: 10 Attention-Grabbing Summer Flats

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Slideshow: Top 3 Innovators From ICFF

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The 3 Smartest Designs at This Year's ICFF

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The 3 Smartest Designs at This Year's ICFF

NEW YORK — How many ways can you reinvent the sofa? That’s the annual conundrum for designers and manufacturers in anticipation of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the industry’s essential stateside trade show. For the 25th year, the ICFF arrived in New York this weekend to serve as a stage for new collections. Touring the behemoth-sized Javits Center, we found plenty of new colorways, patterns, and materials for the forms we recall from ICFFs past. We also found, however, that the only designers with something truly new to offer had identified uniquely modern-day problems — specific cultural controversies, emerging technologies, evolving social practices — and responded to them, without any trendy gimmicks, sparkles, or smoke and mirrors. 

The spirit of innovation wasn’t limited to sofa designs. From an ad-hoc, modular conference room, to an adaptation of the traditional opium den, to an LED fixture you would actually put inside your house, ARTINFO picked three stand-out designers with something relevant to offer the 21st-century consumer. It’s necessity, after all, that breeds invention.  

Bernhardt Design  

When inventor Robert Propst created the first cubicle for Herman Miller in the ’60s, he envisioned it being used as a mobile partition that allowed for adjustable levels of privacy and interaction in the workplace — and it only took half a decade for businesses to catch on. In the past few years, concepts like “collaboration” and “synergy” have driven workspaces to evolve from so-called “cubicle farms” to open spaces. That doesn’t do away, however, with the need for privacy. Noting this shift, North Carolina-based Bernhardt Design tapped Korean designer Jang Won Yoon to create the Code Sofa, a modular set reminiscent of the Bouroullec Brothers’ 2007 Alcove Sofa. The modules’ high backs and sides provide seclusion by blocking sound and prying eyes. “It’s so simple, it disappears like architecture,” Bernhardt Design president Jerry Helling told ARTINFO. Paired with Jephson Robb’s lightweight Quiet Table, equipped with a fingerpull groove on its underside for easy relocation (“It’s got a base that floats across the floor,” said Helling), the two make an ad-hoc private conference room in the most progressively open of workspaces.  

Neri&Hu  

In light of China’s recent counterfeiting controversies; disposable, mass-produced products; and the surge of hastily-planned skyscrapers, Shanghai-based architects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu (otherwise known as Neri&Hu Design Research Office) have established themselves as vocal opponents of China’s conveyor-belt approach to architecture and design. This ICFF, Neri&Hu (the firm’s official furniture brand) launched a line exclusively through New York retailer The Future Perfect to express this critical viewpoint while dually demonstrating the couple’s own fascination with their Chinese heritage. In collaboration with De La Espada, a Portugal-based design management firm that works solely in natural materials, they borrowed typologies that evoke the language of traditional Chinese design and reinvented them for modern use. A prime example is the solid wood Opium Sofa, an adaptation of the Qing Dynasty’s low, wide beds, newly outfitted with side shelving and spacious armrests that double as mini built-in coffee tables. “It’s a very utilitarian, very practical piece of furniture.” Neri told ARTINFO. “People can still use that for drugs or other things, but it is a reference to how a bed is not just a place to sleep, or a sofa is not just a place to sit.”  

The designs are on view now through June 30 at The Future Perfect’s Meatpacking District pop-up showroom.

Rich Brilliant Willing  

LEDs, the low-heat, low-energy, ultra long-lasting lighting choice for high-art designs and Daft Punk’s flashing helmets, are finally making their way into the home — just with a few adjustments. “The technology is there to do really amazing things,” said Alexander Williams, who with Charles Brill and Theo Richardson operates Brooklyn-based design and manufacturing studio Rich Brilliant Willing. This ICFF, the trio of RISD graduates launched the Gala Chandelier, a household-friendly lighting fixture that marks a departure from prior space-age LED statement pieces.  The team created its own lightbulb of self-customizable temperatures (ranging from clear to soft white, in incandescent bulb terms) for handblown glass lanterns that hang from a simple aluminum beam. The warm, familiar glow is subtle, charming, and operates on just 8 watts. 

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair opened to the public Tuesday, May 21.  

See 10 Pavilions From the 55th Venice Biennale

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See 10 Pavilions From the 55th Venice Biennale

The national pavilions of the 55th Venice Biennale are spread between the Giardini and the Arsenale, flanking the international exhibition, this year called the “Encyclopedic Palace,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni.

Thorny questions return as regularly as the glitzy biennial itself. The Venice model—harking back to the 19th century’s world expos where envoys of various countries gathered to flaunt their latest achievements—has been passed down like an heirloom. How relevant is this format to a globalized art world characterized by ceaseless traveling, relocation, and displacement? How can artists be representative of their countries when so many nations are now defined by their cultural diversity? Should the pavilions be abandoned altogether for a more progressive and international approach? If so, what would that be?

Still, the old format dies hard. More countries than ever are keen to secure a place in the Venetian sun. From 2003 to 2013, 32 nations have been added to the Biennale, with this year bringing the inclusion for the first time of Angola, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Kuwait, the Maldives, Paraguay, Tuvalu, and the Holy See. Venice Biennale president Paolo Baratta suggests that countries want to join “to show that they exist, not as political entities, but as entities capable of being participants in the world of culture.” Contemporary art’s new status as mass entertainment—or marketing strategy—has also no doubt played a role, particularly for countries with dubious human rights records.  Since 1998, the Biennale’s appointed curator focuses solely on a large-scale group show, the international exhibition. With more than 150 artists—almost twice as many as in the two previous editions—Gioni’s proposition is ambitious. The show borrows its title from the Palazzo Enciclopedico, a museum that Italian-American eccentric Marino Auriti imagined and, in 1955, designed (and patented) to host all human knowledge. Auriti intended the building to be 136 stories high and to occupy 16 blocks in Washington, D.C. Although it was never built, a detailed maquette, on loan from the American Folk Art Museum in New York, features prominently in the exhibition, alongside several other equally intriguing objects such as Carl Jung’s Red Book, Haitian voodoo flags, and tantric paintings.

So-called outsider art, by the likes of Yüksel Arslan, Morton Bartlett, James Castle, and Walter Pichler, also forms a key component of Gioni’s palace.  “The premise of this show is not to treat the insider and the outsider work as pure art but actually to treat both as artifacts,” Gioni says.

The show, he explains, explores several questions: “How do we give forms to the images in our heads? And even before that, how come humans carry images in their heads? What is the space left for these images in a world more and more colonized by artificial and external images?” Many contemporary art heavy hitters are contributing to Gioni’s sweeping investigations. Cindy Sherman is curating a show within a show dedicated to the body. Paul McCarthy, Sarah Lucas, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Albert Oehlen—together with young artists now garnering attention, like Ryan Trecartin, Ed Atkins, and Helen Marten—are among those who will fill this “palace of all knowledge.”

Says Gioni: “It’s a modest proposal to look at artists less as these superheroes who make beautiful things that are worth a lot of money, but more as people who are revealing different ways of dealing with a fundamental question—as banal and as cheesy as it sounds—the need to construct images, either as a way to fight against time or as a way to structure knowledge through them.”

To help you navigate the extravaganza that is Venice, we here preview 11 pavilions. —Coline Milliard

Australia

Singapore-born Simryn Gill worked with curator Catherine de Zegher to develop her site-specific exhibition “Here art grows on trees.” Consisting of large-scale drawings, photographs, and Gill’s signature collections of found objects, the exhibition explores subjectivity while referring to the in-between zone inhabited by the artist; this is a place of negotiation described by de Zegher as “intertidal.” Gill, who lives in Malaysia and Australia, brings together fragments of text formed into a swarm of insectlike creatures, a cast-steel maquette of a half moon, photographs of leaves, and precisely curated collections of found objects. It all promotes what de Zegher calls “a space of negotiation between the small and the global, between nature and industry, as it reveals an understanding of the interconnectedness of all in a world in flux.” Although the relationship between nature and industry is of special importance to Gill, she also explores the associations between the beach and the street, inside and outside, the house and the neighborhood, the ephemeral and the corporeal, East and West. “While modernity has promoted a linear view of the world, Gill promotes a more cyclical view,” de Zegher says. “She reveals that we are just a section in the chain, interdependent among each other as well as the environment—a position we have to take on in the 21st century.”

Artistically and culturally, Gill occupies a place of compromise and transition that heavily relies on the consistent and generic minutiae of everyday life to create a sense of belonging. Using what is fragmented and segmented to express the importance of the ordinary and the quotidian, Gill initiates a modest but precise negotiation of this transitional territory. —Nicholas Forrest

Bahamas

Its first national pavilion in Venice celebrates not the country but the idea of leaving it. “A huge part of what I struggled with growing up on an island was wanting to get off the island,” says New York–based artist Tavares Strachan, who is representing the commonwealth. His desire to travel translated into a fascination with exploration, which informed one of the works on view: a 14-channel video installation that chronicles explorer Matthew Henson’s 1909 voyage to the North Pole. An African-American who joined Robert Peary’s famous expedition, Henson may have been the first man to reach the Pole.

Henson was mainly forgotten, which seems to be what interests Strachan most. He presents a sculpture of the explorer’s internal organs fabricated from glass and displayed in mineral oil. Light travels at the same speed through mineral oil and glass, which means that the sculpture is, for the most part, invisible. “I was looking for a way to talk about some of these social ideas in a very aesthetic manner,” Strachan says. “So I was working with a physical chemist, and we started talking one night about ideas of invisibility and refractive indexes. And before you know it, I was making people invisible by putting them in mineral oil.” Strachan’s interest in disappearance also came into play as he considered the notion of a national pavilion. For another work in the exhibition about the disappearance of languages, he taught 40 children from the Bahamas to sing an Inuit song—one he learned while researching the Henson piece—as a way to preserve a native dialect.

These kids then traveled to Venice to sing the song in the empty pavilion space, where a recording of their singing now plays. “I’m tweaking ideas of what nationalism and representation mean,” the artist says, “but also expectations. I’m the dude from the island who is fucking around with ice.” — Orit Gat

Belgium

“What does it mean to work with a curator?” asks Berlinde De Bruyckere. “It has to be someone who feeds you something you can work with and think about.” For the Ghent-based artist representing Belgium, this has meant picking Nobel prize–winning novelist J.M. Coetzee rather than a visual art professional as her collaborator.  The pair first teamed up last year for the publication Allen Vlees (“All Flesh”), which juxtaposes extracts of Coetzee’s writings with photographic details of De Bruyckere’s disquieting, meatlike sculptures. For this second collaboration, Coetzee gave De Bruyckere an unpublished short story, “The Old Woman and the Cats.” Its tale of filial love and unspoken existential angst has now informed her pavilion, although she insists that the text-artwork relationship remains tangential.  More than serving as a curator, Coetzee has acted as an accomplice. The author sought “to guide and be guided by her in her explorations,” Coetzee has said, and their epistolary exchanges spurred De Bruyckere along as she refined her thoughts.  The result is a monumental wax and epoxy tree trunk, resting on a couch of soiled blankets and cushions. Its pimpled, fleshy hues conjure the wounded corpse of Saint Sebastian, who represents for her an alluring image of triumphant beauty. “I was always working around suffering, pain, loss, anger, and fear made very visible in figures,” she says. “Saint Sebastian allowed me to work on the same topic, but on a more psychological level.”

Transformed to frame this Ovidian creature, flesh encased in bark, the pavilion’s dark partitions are marked and blistered, like so many Venetian walls swollen with water. “When you walk around Venice, you can feel that the city will be destroyed by the water,” says De Bruyckere. “This gives you a very uncomfortable feeling. All this beauty will go because it’s rotten from the inside.” —CM

Chile

Alfredo Jaar is showing at the Biennale this year for the fourth time. In 1986 curator Achille Bonito Oliva included the Chilean artist in the international exhibition—marking the first time that an artist from Latin America had been invited to present works in Venice. “At the time, an international exhibition meant a few Americans and a few Germans,” Jaar recalls. “That was international.  I mean African artists—forget it, zero. Latin Americans, zero. Even some European countries were not represented on the world stage,” he says. “India, China—unthinkable.” This year Jaar is marking another first, as he serves as Chile’s artist representative.

In a sense, his installation represents a meditation on the history of the Biennale. It begins with a large light-box version of the photograph, above, of the artist Lucio Fontana in the ruins of his Milan studio in 1946, after returning from his native Argentina.

Before he participated in the 1986 Biennale, Jaar, having fled Pinochet’s Chile, had been living in New York, studying the scene there. “New York was perhaps the center of the art world, but it was extremely provincial,” he recalls. “There were very few artists from other countries; they didn’t have any visibility. Those that were active and were known were showing a very self-referential type of work. They were talking about themselves; the world did not exist.” To counter this provincialism, Jaar produced his first public art project—a series of photographs of people toiling in an enormous Brazilian gold mine, juxtaposed with the price of gold at that moment, mounted inside the Spring Street subway station.

It was this project that he showed at the Venice Biennale in 1986. “I was like an exotic animal, this guy from Chile who didn’t have a gallery and whose work dealt with a gold mine in Brazil,” he says. “And I realized that Venice had 28 international pavilions. I thought, This is strange: Where are the other 160 countries? But I had such a good time. I kept going back for every Biennale. I’ve been visiting Venice every other year for 30 years. But it’s still mostly the same 28 national pavilions, and the rest of the world is excluded. So now that I’m invited, I thought, This is my chance to say that the system is completely obsolete; we have to change this; the world has changed. Hey, wake up!” —Daniel Kunitz

The Netherlands

Chosen in the first open call for the Venice Biennale ever held for his country, Belgium-based artist Mark Manders, along with De Vleeshal museum director Lorenzo Benedetti, will present “Room with a Broken Sentence” at the Dutch Pavilion. Named after a 1993–98 installation, the exhibition does more than rehash his past projects: Manders created about three-quarters of the works specifically for Venice, although the show represents 23 years of his production. “ ‘Room with a Broken Sentence’ shows a certain continuity throughout his practice,” Benedetti explains. “The title itself stresses what are probably the two most important elements of his work: language and architecture or space.”

Architectural interventions abound, but rendered with subtlety. “We wanted them to be light but present, not overbearing,” Benedetti says. “The idea was to quote Gerrit Rietveld by changing certain elements.” (Dutch architect Rietveld designed the pavilion in the 1950s.) A toilet within the space (reminiscent of Rietveld’s famous Red Blue Chair, 1917) is meant to confuse visitors as to whether it’s part of Rietveld’s original design or Manders’s addition. This play on authorship harks back to the pavilion’s other central theme: atemporality. For one, it’s nearly impossible to tell where along the 23-year span each work falls due to the artifice of surface—bronze appears as porcelain, epoxy as clay. “Time is really a material in his works,” says Benedetti. Specially created newspapers with fabricated stories and without dates paper the windows, letting in light, depriving visitors of context, and lending a temporary, construction site feel. This all suggests that no matter how polished things look, all works are still in progress. —Alexander Forbes

Germany

In a first for the Biennale, Germany and France are swapping their Giardini pavilions. The idea had long been considered by the two foreign ministries, according to Susanne Gaensheimer, curator of the German pavilion for the second time, and a winner of a Golden Lion in 2011 for staging an exhibition of the late Christoph Schlingensief’s work.  This year being the 50th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, the two nations are particularly keen to make the switch. The curators, Gaensheimer and France’s Christine Macel, along with the five artists involved, want the project to serve “as a way to demonstrate that we identify with the ideas of a broader European culture that exists within the global art network,” Gaensheimer says. To this end, the two pavilion shows can offer a counternarrative to the Biennale’s nationcentric approach and the self-professed cultural proclivities of most French and Germans for that matter, she says.  In another first, only one artist among the four exhibiting in the German pavilion is German-born: Romuald Karmakar. The others—Ai Weiwei, Santu Mofokeng, and Dayanita Singh—were born elsewhere and live mostly outside the country. Still, “all of the artists somehow have one foot in Germany,” Gaensheimer explains. She notes, however, that they are delivering what might be a more accurate, if at times symbolic, conceptualization of German citizenship, “whether that’s having been born here like Romuald, having a professorship and perhaps a studio like Ai Weiwei, participating in important exhibitions, or having their primary publishers here.” Adds Gaensheimer: “The aspect of traveling is an important part of all their practices.” More than just investigating citizen-denizen relations, the German pavilion’s sculptures, photographs, and films try to present a better understanding of how travel, or an outsider’s gaze, can open up the perception of a homeland. Schlingensief’s “Operndorf Afrika was the starting point both for his pavilion and in thinking about what I wanted to create this time, not Operndorf itself but the experiences he had in Africa creating it,” Gaensheimer says. “He would have brought all those elements into the project in 2011 had he still been alive. So I wanted to explore a similar method: t raveling to learn about home.”

She recoils, however, at the notion that what the pavilion presents is somehow documentary. “What we will show could be better described as social narratives, stories. They’re fictions, not snapshots,” she says, suggesting that how a place is chronicled is just as important as the realities that are presented. —AF

Côte D’Ivoire

For the inaugural Ivorian pavilion, curator Yacouba Konaté favors a plurality of voices. “We are lucky enough to have in Ivory Coast several artists who could represent the country in a solo exhibition, among them Ouattara Watts,” he says. “But the fact is, the country has gone through a dramatic period of crisis and conflict. To get out from this critical period is not an individual task but a collective commitment.”

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Tamsir Dia, Franck Fanny, and Jems Robert Koko Bi thus share the honor in an exhibition titled “Traces and Signs.” Purposefully open-ended, the show includes 100 Bouabré drawings on the theme of peace, graphic vignettes that are by turns sardonic, humorous, and absurd. “The deformity which imposes peace to the human race: sexless green man,” one of them reads—perhaps a dig at the concept of Ivoirité, an ideology that purported to describe the ideal Ivorian as an ethnic group common during the Ivorian civil war. In Darfour, 2007, a sculpted group of pieces in burnt wood by Robert Koko Bi stages two mourners around a corpse.  “Traces and Signs” encompasses life’s whole spectrum, from the tragedy of conflicts and genocides to the mundane reality of shopping. The latter is vividly represented in Fanny’s photograph of a makeshift food stall, Boutique, 2012. Dia’s semi-abstract painting Chants cruels, 2006–13, seems to suggest the leprous walls of Abidjan’s backstreets, encrusted with a palimpsest of rotten posters and peeling paint. “The idea behind the show is to give evidence that Ivory Coast—which is well known as a sanctuary for traditional African art—is also a vibrant scene of invention for contemporary art,” Konaté says.

And he should know. An art critic and professor of philosophy at the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Abidjan, Konaté has for decades been a staunch supporter of contemporary African art and culture. This year’s pavilion also represents a political statement, Konaté suggests: “Our presence in Venice illustrates the necessary diversity that so-called globalization is still missing.” —CM

South Korea

Most artists representing South Korea tackle their national pavilion at the Venice Biennale by attempting to transform the 1995 structure from the inside out with their paintings, sculptures, and hangings. This year’s artist, Kimsooja, is taking a minimal approach, however, focusing her efforts on transforming the pavilion windows with diffraction film (recalling her 2006 piece at Madrid’s Palacio de Cristal, above) that will let nature provide an interior that changes minute by minute. “The intensity of the light in the pavilion will correspond to the daily movement of the sun rising and setting across the Korean Pavilion—which is located right next to the Laguna di Venezia,” the artist says. “And this will transform the space into a transcendental experience, folding and unfolding daylight around the clock.”

Alive with audio of Kimsooja’s humming, the pavilion is otherwise empty, save for a separate anechoic chamber at its heart. “Inside, audiences will hear only their own breathing in total darkness, experiencing the disorientation of fear—the unknown that originates from ignorance,” she adds.

Kimsooja created To Breathe: Bottari after conceiving of “a space that gives maximum presence by doing the minimum, leaving the structure as it is,” she says. Wanting to capture nature, she wrapped the framework with a transparent material as she would prep a characteristic bottari (Korean for “bundle”).  An unexpected force of nature also served as an influence on the self-exiled, New York–based artist: Hurricane Sandy. “Right at the time when curator Seungduk Kim and I were discussing the Korean Pavilion project in a more concrete manner, Hurricane Sandy hit New York,” the artist recalls. “That was a humbling and contemplative moment for me. I spent a week with no light or heat and without any conveniences.

This short but long time made me focus in deeper on questions dealing with light and darkness and on the environmental conditions of humanity in this era.” Her experience is reflected in the pavilion, where visitors serve as part of the live performance as they interact with the space, or what Kimsooja calls “a physical and psychological sanctuary.” —Ines Min

Turkey

“Resistance,” a project that Ali Kazma and curator Emre Baykal developed out of the artist’s “Obstructions” video series, tests human limits. As all 15 videos play simultaneously, the viewer is taken from scenes of extreme body modification to ones showing the creation of artificial intelligence. The “Obstructions” project began as an outgrowth of two Kazma works, one about a clock undergoing repair and another about brain surgery. “It’s a bit of a cliché,” he concedes, though he stresses the importance of the project’s binary dialogue: “I’m looking into different ways that we as humans transform to fit our work and our surroundings and how they transform us in return as well,” Kazma says.

As the title suggests, “Resistance” examines ways that humans push back against such transformations or social norms. “The body finds ways to escape when something is forced upon it,” Kazma says. “But to see where it resists, you have to see where it’s pushed. In Venice we’re trying to cover the iconic stuff, to draw the limits on the phenomenon.”

These concerns led Kazma, who always works one-on-one with his subjects, to film the London studios of Alexander Reinke, a master in Japanese tattooing, as well as the craft of Iestyn Flye, who is skilled in scarification and other body alterations ranging from bisecting genitalia to adding silicone horns. In one video, Flye is shown carving Sanskrit into a client’s head. Less gory is Kazma’s portrait of Luc Steels working in Berlin with robots that he has programmed to create their own language. “They make up these words, like tabati, but as long as it is understood by the other robot, the word is thrown into the network and becomes meaningful,” says Kazma. For him, the intent of the project as a whole is much more than wielding a mirror to project his preconceptions; it is instead to create a portrait. “It becomes what it becomes through the eyes of the audience,” he says. —AF

United States

United States In March, Sarah Sze shipped numerous crates full of stuff to Venice. But even though she’s been working on Triple Point for over a year and has built a life-size model of the American pavilion in her studio, only about 60 percent of the work was completed in New York. The title, Triple Point, refers to an expression in thermodynamics describing the precise conditions when a substance can exist in equilibrium as a solid, liquid, or gas.

This might give a hint about the final project even to those unfamiliar with Sze’s work. “Sarah is a perfect choice for Venice because she has really considered the space,” explains the pavilion’s co-commissioner Holly Block, director of the Bronx Museum of Art, in New York. Sze created five environments in the pavilion’s interior and exterior, all specific to the site and tailored to its 1930s architecture. Famous for meticulous installations that bring together many small elements, the artist finished the piece in Venice, allowing for “quite a bit of evolution of the work while she was there,” Block explains. The work focuses on the viewer’s physical experience of the space and orientation within and outside the pavilion. “Remember, you’re in Venice so you travel between land and water on a regular basis,” Block hints. “Even that perception is considered in the work.”

One thing won’t be a surprise: The American pavilion will present talks, workshops, and an outreach program that offers free Biennale passes to members of various population groups who may not otherwise be able to visit. —OG

To see preview images of the Vennice Biennale 2013, click on the slideshow.

This article appears in the May 2013 issue of Modern Painters. 

 

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