AS JAMES ROSENQUIST greets me at his door, I compliment him on the building’s outrageous turquoise trim. “It’s tropical,” says the artist of the five-story structure in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood that he acquired in 1977 and has lived in with his family since 2006. The color reminds him of Florida, where for years he has produced all his work. And while he continues to return to that tropical precinct, he used to go up and down the coast “like a yo-yo,” he says. “I had a beautiful space right on the Gulf, with a boat and a lot of room.” In April 2009, however, a forest fire destroyed his Aripeka, Florida, home, including a large studio and his personal art collection. “I didn’t cry in my beer after that,” he says. “I just went back to work and tried to forget about it.” Still, the event, in which he lost a reported $14 million in artwork, seems to have had an understandably traumatic effect. He readily brings it up in conversation—“It was a real dent in my career, destroying a lot of stuff”—goaded by the fact that, because the property is deemed to be in a new flood plain, the government won’t allow him to rebuild.

Asked if the loss of so much of his output in the fire caused him to reevaluate his oeuvre or career, he retorts, with some disdain, that no, he doesn’t concern himself with the past, only with “what’s ahead.” Rosenquist does not look back, doesn’t dwell on history. Indeed, he claims the past doesn’t press on him: “Nothing weighs on me. I don’t feel any weight.” But he is very much concerned with time.

He turned 80 this past November and corrects me when I suggest that his upcoming exhibition, opening April 29 at Bjorn Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm, is composed of recent works. No, he says, they’re “late works.” And unlike those Pop pieces for which he is best known, Rosenquist’s later efforts have few recognizable images. Stars, galactic dust, as well as the effects of red or blue shift abound, usually presented in tightly juxtaposed, sharp-edged prismatic planes. Most were made in 2012, and some were first shown at Acquavella, his gallery in New York. The following summer he had a bout of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, an illness that put him in the hospital for a month, where, he recounts, “I had hallucinations that were very vivid. They were cinematic, not like paintings.”

It’s a curious remark for Rosenquist, known above all for paintings as wide as a movie screen, such as his iconic, 86-foot-wide F-111, 1964, and the nearly 30-foot-wide, two-part A Pale Angel’s Halo and Slipping Off the Continental Divide, 1973. The latter received a rare public viewing this past fall and winter at New York’s Richard L. Feigen & Company. Like his other pieces in this format, A Pale Angel’s Halo and Slipping Off the Continental Divide can’t be absorbed in a single glance; its imagery must be read horizontally over time. In other words, it is cinematic.

A glowing semicircle stretches over a multicolored crumpled-paper (or crushed-metal) ground that, reading left to right, gives way to a staircase framed by a car window, a reference to a devastating automobile accident in 1971 that nearly killed the artist. In the final section, an open book hovers over three Chinese characters inscribed atop a confetti burst of slashing red, pink, blue, and white marks. In Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, his 2009 autobiography, he wrote that the painting “was like saying goodbye to my past.”

James Rosenquist's "Sand of the Cosmic Desert in Every Direction" (left), and "Quantam Universe," 2012. Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Company, New York.

Since then he has proved adept at keeping his eye steadily on the future and producing new canvases. He is enthusiastic, too, about tackling new questions through his work. Where once he was at the forefront of Pop, stringing together Coca-Cola bottle caps and painted fingernails, spaghetti, and bomber nose cones, among a profusion of other images of 20th-century culture, he now seems intent on probing the nature of the cosmos. A spate of 2012 paintings come with titles such as Quantum Universe, Parallel Worlds, Multiverse You Are, I Am, and Sand of the Cosmic Desert in Every Direction.

Generally laconic, even terse, speaking in the clipped tones of his North Dakota childhood, Rosenquist becomes expansive on the subject of the universe. “I talk to people very involved in [cosmology], and it always blows me away. They get into esoteric conversations that I don’t understand with words I haven’t even seen in a dictionary. Scientists say there is no such thing as time, gravity is a dust from another universe, and outside our own universe are many, many universes in all directions. They speculate that attached to these universes are probably 6,000 planets identical to earth. So are there things living out there? Animals, people, anything? It’s too bad we can’t visit them because we can’t go faster than the speed of light. Aaahhh! We can’t even go fast enough to get out of our own universe.”

Yet, as he acknowledges, these ultimate questions are spurred by the brute fact of our ultimate end. Ushering me over to a work propped against the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the living room on the top floor of his house, he says, “My friend Bob Rauschenberg—I was with him [when he was] on his deathbed—he said to me, ‘I don’t mind death. I just don’t like the infinity part.’” His response to Rauschenberg’s death was a print, made with universal Limited Art editions, called My Timeless Travel to Infinity. He shows me a related painting, from 2007, called The Infinite Sweep of the Minute Hand, one of a number of Rosenquists that explore the concept of time. A vertical canvas 84 inches high, it depicts a fractured clock face, doubled below in a liquid reflection and sprouting a candy-colored riot of gizmos, squiggles, and integers from its broken upper half. Inset into the piece near the top is a black, penlike laser clock that emits a beam, which, the artist explains, “Moves very slowly over the course of a minute if you put it in a small room. But if you put this sucker in a huge auditorium, it goes super fast. The farther away the wall is, the quicker the minute hand moves, but it always takes only a minute to complete its sweep—it’s the difference between time and space.”I can’t help dwelling on the fact that an enormous clock, albeit brightly hued, looms over his living quarters.

James Rosenquist's "A Pale Angel's Halo." Courtesy Richard L. Fiegen & Co, New York.

There is nothing ostentatious about the place. A skylight bathes the comfortable, modern furniture and wood floors in light. Toward the back of the building, past the elevator, is a spacious study cluttered with stacks of books, papers, and magazines. on the far side of the living room, large enough to hold a mural-length painting, is an open eat-in kitchen without state-of-the-art appliances. Indeed, one doesn’t imagine that Rosenquist and his wife, art writer Mimi Thompson Rosenquist, spend many evenings in. “I’m all over the damned place. I travel a lot,” he says. And when he’s in Manhattan, he hits the town. “I’ve been to so goddamn many parties. It’s probably my own fault, but I’m wearing myself out.”

Although his building is certainly large enough to house a studio, Rosenquist says he hasn’t worked in the city since 1985. Today he continues to paint in Florida, in a guesthouse converted into small studio. “There’s a lot more to think about, that’s what I’m working at,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody will get it or understand it or like it or anything—it’s just what I’m going to do.” Musing on the cosmos has taken him far from the everyday images he used to cull from magazines and other printed matter in order to create the collages he employs as studies for the paintings. For pieces such as Fractal, 2013—in which a sort of chrome car wheel seems to spin at the center, throwing off sharp-edged planes that are each like a window on another galaxy or world—he collages bits of drawing and watercolor with imagined motifs. “I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.”

That he continues to go at it with such vigor is a testament to his forward-looking energy. To explain his motivation, he reaches into the past to make a point. He tells the story of a friend, a well-known photographer who earned abundantly throughout his career until a thieving accountant stole millions from him, and then IRS problems and a sick wife left him nearly destitute. “The thing is,” Rosenquist concludes, “you’ve got to keep working to stay in the game some way. You’ve got to keep working.”

In light of his own history, it is entirely understandable why the photographer’s fate might also strike a chord with Rosenquist. Yet further discussion makes clear that the point of the story is the game, pitting himself against the big questions in the manner this artist knows best: “It’s still a challenge to do something on a two-dimensional picture plane, where you have no music, no sound, no movement,” he says. “It’s still interesting, very interesting.”

NEW YORK — Timed to coincide with Black History Month and New York Fashion Week in February, the Pratt Institute’s exhibition “Black Dress: Ten Contemporary Fashion Designers” celebrates the groundbreaking oeuvre of ten contemporary New York-based African-American fashion designers, both established and up-and-coming.

Ongoing till April 26, the exhibition includes works by such names as Stephen Burrows, Tracy Reese, Byron Lars, Omar Salam, and Carrie Mae Weems, and is organized by Pratt’s fashion professor Adrienne Jones to create larger awareness of the triumphs, accomplishments and entrepreneurial savvy that African American fashion designers have achieved in the industry to date. It is co-curated by Jones and Paula Coleman, an art dealer and exhibition developer.

The designers featured in the show draw on a long history of black fashion design in America, which dates back at least as far as the 1860s when Elizabeth Keckley became a dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln (wife of Abraham Lincoln). In fact, Keckley was among many tailors and dressmakers who made clothes for other politicians and members of high society in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ann Lowe famously designed Jacqueline Bouvier’s 1953 wedding dress for her marriage to John F. Kennedy, while Reese — a board member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) — is notable for being one of First Lady Michelle Obama’s go-to designers for major events.

“Black designers are emerging on the scene with greater visibility than ever,” said Jones in a statement. “‘Black Dress’ will highlight the correlation between entrepreneurship, creativity, and locality. These factors work together to create opportunities for designers and their communities to become new destinations where fashion excellence and achievement are measured.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, a panel discussion on the contributions of African American designers will be held on March 5, including panelists such as Michaela Angela Davis, former executive editor at Essence; Julee Wilson, style and beauty editor at the Huffington Post/Black Voices; Harriette Cole, former editor of Ebony, Essence, and Uptown magazines; and Elaine Welteroth, beauty and health director at Teen Vogue. 

“Black Dress: Ten Contemporary Fashion Designers” is a free exhibition at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 144 West 14^th Street, 2nd Floor, on till April 26, 2014.

To see highlights from the exhibition, click on the slideshow.

Though arch-rival Christie’s soundly beat Sotheby’s in 2013 auction sales by a hefty margin, $5.9 billion to $5.1 billion, the publicly traded firm broke the billion dollar mark in private sales for the first time, according to year-end figures released today.

In that fiercely competed for and booming private sales arena, Sotheby’s tallied $1.18 billion, representing a 30 percent jump from 2012 and just missed tying market leader Christie’s $1.19 billion total for the year.

For Sotheby’s, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BID, the consolidated figure of $6.3 billion for auction room and private sales is the highest in the firm’s long history.

An unspecified number of those private transactions in categories ranging from Impressionist/Modern and Contemporary Art to jewelry exceeded $50 million and of those, one exceeded the auction price achieved for Andy Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” from 1963 that fetched a record $105.3 million last November and represented the highest price for any work sold at auction by the firm in 2013.

A spokesperson for Sotheby’s declined to identify any of the private sale transactions, either by artist name or category, taking on the persona of a private dealer where confidentiality is usually the buzz word.

Sotheby’s did say that the number of clients who purchased works privately from the firm in 2013 increased 18 percent.

To understand just how far private sales have grown, Sotheby’s recorded $271.9 million in sales in 2005 and $906.5 million in 2012.

Sotheby’s net income for the 12 months ending December 31, 2013 came in at $130 million, up 20 percent from the $108.3 million result netted in 2012. (Christie’s, which is privately held, doesn’t release profit and loss figures.)

Sotheby’s, like Christie’s, has recently added considerable infrastructure to its private sales arm, including the opening last year of S/2 on St. George Street in London, the firm’s moniker for its private gallery operations devoted to contemporary art.

That posh space, across the street from the rear entrance of Sotheby’s London headquarters, debuted just ahead of Frieze week in October with the crisply curated “Joseph Beuys Revealed” exhibition.

Sotheby’s also hired Nanne Dekking at that same time as worldwide head of private sales to lead a growing team in the U.S. and Europe.

Dekking, a well-connected and former rainmaker for the Wildenstein Galleries in New York for 11 years, adds a decidedly sophisticated and non-auction house layer to the organization, which has been under extreme pressure by outside investors to increase profitability, especially from hedge fund mogul Daniel Loeb of Third Point, who is actively trying to shift the power on Sotheby's board.

According to a Sotheby’s statement released at the time of his hire, Dekking “discreetly executed some of the most significant private transitions in the marketplace.”

Reached by email, Dekking said, “The challenge and opportunity represented by my new role at Sotheby’s is to utilize the assets of the auction house while operating a private sale business as though it is a private family business, with the utmost focus on confidentiality and discretion.”

In that vein, Dekking declined to comment on what percentage contemporary art sales contributed to the latest private sales figures but revealed that the category has quadrupled in sales since 2010 and recorded 251 private sales in 2013.

Sotheby’s lost Stephane Connery, the firm’s former director of world wide sales and its top private sales’ player in 2012, when he left the company to form the elite art advisory start-up Connery Pissarro Seydoux.

The S/2 enterprise is part of Sotheby’s private selling machine and in 2013, staged some 27 selling exhibitions in six venues, including Mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as New York and London.

Again, precise figures and breakdowns of specific shows were not easily available, though the eerily lit and elaborately installed  “Les Lalanne: The Poetry of Sculpture” exhibition of bronze animals and furniture by Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne at S/2 in New York last fall co-curated by Chelsea dealer Paul Kasmin and collector/real estate developer Paul Shvo, had some transparency, thanks to Kasmin.

“They made plenty of sales in the $200,000-400,000 range,” said Kasmin, “and one piece sold in the million dollar range. It was very lively.”

Sotheby’s claims that unlike the unspoken code of many private dealerships, it clearly discloses what commission rates clients have to pay for private transactions.

“For us,” said a spokesperson, “we agree up front what our take is and it’s capped. The seller is always informed of exactly what Sotheby’s will be taking as a commission.”

Sunday’s Oscar ceremony will conclude an awards season so tortuous and intricate that the announcements of the winners and the presentations of the gold-plated statuettes cannot help but come as both a huge relief and an anti-climax. Unless, of course, the Academy voters throw us some curveballs.

The thought of unlikely wins for “Nebraska” as Best Picture, Christian Bale (“American Hustle”) as Best Actor, and June Squibb (“Nebraska”) or Sally Hawkins (“Blue Jasmine”) as Best Supporting Actress explains why the Oscars remain exciting. They would be more tweetable than most of the results will be. They would wake up those of us who will be staring blankly at our television screens like Alexander Payne’s codgerly Nebraskans. They are almost certainly not going to happen, though Squibb has an outside shot — 50/1 according to Gold Derby.

Self-styled “the Rotten Tomatoes of awards predictions with a dash of Fantasy Sports” on its Facebook page, Gold Derby offers the most elaborate Oscars prognostication service. It polls 30 experts (independent journalists) and six editors at the site, as well as 22 current users and the 24 users “who scored the highest percentage of accuracy last year and shared their predictions publicly.”

These are the overall predictions for the winners of the six categories most Oscar-watchers will have their eyes on, together with the handicap:

Best Picture: “12 Years a Slave,” 8/13
Best Director: Alfonso Cuarón (“Gravity”), 1/10
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (“Blue Jasmine”), 1/10
Best Actor: Matthew McConaughey (“Dallas Buyers Club”), 1/5
Best Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”), 1/3
Best Supporting Actor: Jared Leto (“Dallas Buyers Club”), 1/10

Based on consensus, these predictions are persuasive, but no less so than those of Variety’s Jenelle Riley and Ramin Setoodeh in a cogently argued debate published in the trade paper yesterday. They concur with Gold Derby on wins for Cuarón, McConaughey, and Leto, but both think “Gravity” will win Best Picture.

Setoodeh, “going on a limb,” predicts Amy Adams (“American Hustle”) will win Best Actress. Riley, prompted by a “gut feeling” about general “love for ‘American Hustle,’” thinks Jennifer Lawrence, the early front-runner, will win as Best Supporting Actress.

Setoodeh and Riley compellingly contend that “Gravity” will win the top prize because, as the former says, “after the best picture race expanded in 2011, the votes in this category are tabulated differently — with a weighted ballot. You don’t need a majority to win. You need a plurality, and voters are asked to rank their favorite films in order of preference.” The winner needs to be the film that “needs to be mostly consistently liked.”

Although “12 Years a Slave” is clearly the film with the greatest social conscience, which would traditionally endear it to Academy voters, “Gravity” will figure high, if not top, on most ballots, and I suspect it will, indeed, win. This would be a shame. Ingenious as "Gravity"'s CGI is, and impressive as it is as a spectacle, it does not engage with human experience with anything like the trenchancy of Steve McQueen’s film.

I suggest the winners will be “Gravity,” Cuarón, Blanchett, McConaughey, Lawrence, and Leto. Having said that, the pyrotechnical acting and barnstorming Oscar campaign of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street” could wrest Best Actor from McConaughey (despite his more sympathetic performance), while Adams, nominated for the fifth time, deserves to be garlanded by the Academy for her sociopathic floozy in “American Hustle.”

“We Are Living on a Star,” the Hannah Ryggen tapestry from which the thought-churning exhibition (through April 27) at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo takes its name, depicts a scene of cosmological innocence: a nude man and woman — Adam and Eve figures — embrace one another within an abstractly rendered paradise of symbols, patterns, and figures. Woven in 1958, in a style that one might call folk modernism, the tapestry hung in a Norwegian government building until July 22, 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik exploded a car bomb outside it, killing eight people, injuring more than 200, and doing extensive damage to the edifice. Infamously, Breivik went on to massacre 69 others and injure scores more on a nearby island, Utøya. The bomb that exploded during the first attack ripped Ryggen’s tapestry, and it is that tear that serves as a governing metaphor for this show.

For it the curators, Tone Hansen and Marit Paasche, bring together some 19 international artists to respond to the events of July 22, some in newly commissioned work, some with pieces that had already been made. By linking the torn tapestry to a rift in the fabric of society, the exhibition poses some intriguing questions: What constitutes normality, as the show literature calls it? And how do exceptional situations like July 22 affect peoples’ freedoms?

Appropriately a Norwegian, Lotte Konow Lund created one of the few pieces that directly addresses the incident. She asked her 9-year-old daughter what she would need to stay silent for 66 minutes, the duration of the Utøya killings. The girl chose calming items from her bedroom, which were then placed into what appears to a visitor to be two minimalist sculptures but are in fact little rooms, boxes just large enough (about five feet long) for a child to hide in. Only one of the containers has a door, and so the two objects suggest an analogy between the abstract, be it the concept of time or the non-referential sculpture itself, and the actual, meaning the period spent hiding by some of the children as well as the utilitarian box itself.

The piece also points to the notion of normality proposed by the exhibition. As an abstract concept it seems fitting enough, yet on the other side of the 66-minute massacre one has to ask just which is actually normal, the complacency of the safe, cocooned existences enjoyed by Norwegians prior to the attack or the havoc experienced by so many in the world on a daily basis?

Among the other direct responses is one by the Palestinian American artist Jumana Manna, who cast, in Jesmonite, a series of pillars from the High-rise, the building attacked on July 22. The structure itself rests on these pillars, which weren’t damaged by the bomb. Their appearance here seems an incitement to query what structures Norwegian society itself stands upon and to what extent they were damaged by the terrorist act.

While literally arresting — they force us to stop and think about events non-Norwegians are only vaguely aware of — Lund and Manna’s pieces shine, as it were, a spotlight squarely on that one apparently aberrant date. The more oblique work in the exhibition provides a kind of diffuse radiance, illuminating the context of the day’s violence.  

Is Breivik, a racist intent on gaining publicity for his right-wing ideology, in fact abnormal? This, for instance, is the question implicitly raised by Doug Ashford’s affecting “Studies for Bakersfield CA Series,” 2013, an arrangement on shelves of found photographs juxtaposed with abstract acrylic paintings. The photos depict scenes from the normal life of an average American man, someone Ashford has never met but who seems to have come from a similar rung of the socioeconomic ladder. We see a baby in diapers by a scrawny Christmas tree paired with a painting in a vaguely American-flag pattern, but in egg-yolk yellow, pink, and black. An image of the man as a teenager posed by his car abuts another, similarly patterned, painting. And, beneath a painting with pink, orange, yellow, and black stripes, the man in the photo straddles a motorcycle and gives the photographer the finger; he wears black sunglass and, on his back, a swastika. Just another middle-American guy, whose bewilderment has fermented into hate.

Can we say that his life is any more ordinary than those of the children living in various Polish orphanages, whom Ahlam Shibli has affectingly documented in the 35 prints that make up “Dom Dziecka [Children’s Home]: The House Starves When You Are Away,” 2008? Why should we assume the norm to be comfort or niceness? Assumptions about what is normal can lead to hysteria and ungrounded fear: such was my thought upon walking from Shibli’s excellent series into Eva Rothschild’s “Nature and Culture,” 2014, a sort of tortured labyrinth in painted aluminum that calls to mind prison fencing of the metaphorical sort that all of us who accept Patriot Acts and gated communities live behind.

I was nowhere near Oslo on July 22, 2011. But I was close enough to be covered in ash and debris on September 11, 2001, and what I have never seen expressed in art about that New York day is the overriding disgust with my country that I felt in the months afterwards. Disgust at losing the battle instantly by throwing our freedoms away through a trapdoor marked Security and by giving in to racism, ugly nationalism, suspicion, and the swinish vengeance that justified slaughtering thousands of innocent people half a world away.

But such emotional extremes, such certainties, are not the agar upon which the best art feeds — rather it lofts questions, tweezes out slivers of thought. Like Eline McGeorge’s “A Future Journey on the Outside of the Norwegian Paradox,” 2013, a tapestry — or, if you prefer, a grid painting — woven from space blankets, the best art reminds us that things are rarely what they seem. Like Hanne Friis’s sculpture composed of reticulated blue and black denim (the fabric that holds us all together), it reminds us that every I is also a part of the beautiful we, that we are implicated in our collective delusions yet also celebrated by our triumphs.

What this fine show makes clear is that there never existed an edenic normality that was then wrested from Norway three years ago, no period of cosmological innocence that we have lost. Hannah Ryggen’s tapestry may depict a lovely fiction, but it remains a fiction nonetheless.

— Sotheby’s Offers Loeb Board Seat: Turns out Sotheby’s has been in talks with activist investor Daniel Loeb over the past few months and the auction house has offered him a seat on its board of directors. Loeb, unsurprisingly, isn’t satisfied with Sotheby’s offer and said he wants three directors of his choosing appointed to the board. “I’ve told them I would be willing to work with them if they put us on the board,” Loeb said. “My hope is that we put our differences behind us and work constructively with this board and with the CEO.” [Bloomberg]

— Artists Back Ai Wei Wei Vase Smasher: A group of artists in Miami are staging a news conference and donating works to an auction to raise funds in support of Ai Wei Wei vase-breaking artist Maximo Caminero. Caminero, who smashed the vase at the Pérez Art Museum Miami on February 16, faces up to five years in prison. “We do not support the act, but we support the intention,” said Danilo Gonzalez, a painter and sculptor who is organizing the conference. [NYT]

— Christie’s Launches HK Gallery: Today in Hong Kong, Christie’s opened the James Christie Room, its first gallery space in Asia. Among the offerings on view are works by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Andy Warhol, and Zeng Fanzhi. “People are thinking about acquiring works of art, whether they want to buy them purely as indulgence and something they want to enjoy, or they think of it as part of a balanced asset portfolio,” said Jonathan Stone, Christie’s chairman and international head of Asian art, referring to the market in Asia. [Forbes, Press Release]

— Looted Antiquity Found in Queens: New York authorities plan to seize an ancient Roman sarcophagus lid from a warehouse in Queens that Italian authorities claim was looted. [NYT]

— Stolen Paintings Found in Miami: At least 11 paintings stolen from Cuba’s National Museum of Fine Arts have turned up in Miami, according to Miami art dealer Ramon Cernuda. [Miami Herald]

— SF Galleries Evicted: The George Krevsky Gallery, Rena Bransten Gallery, and Patricia Sweetow Gallery, all occupants of San Francisco’s famed 77 Geary Street gallery complex, have received eviction notices to make space for an Internet services company. [SF Gate]

— A six-foot James Ensor drawing is set to go on view at the Getty in June for the first time in 50 years. [NYT]

— Longtime Boston MFA director Malcolm Rogers has announced plans to retire, but the museum also just appointed two new department heads. [Boston, Boston Globe]

— China’s first art fair devoted to photography, Photo Shanghai, will open in Shanghai in September. [Art Daily]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

Sotheby’s Breaks the Billion Dollar Mark in 2013 Private Sales

“We Are Living on a Star” Attacks Mass Murder With Art

Paris Photo L.A. Announces 2014 Exhibitors

Julia Kaganskiy on the New Museum Incubator’s New Name and Plans for the Year Ahead

Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

Valie Export’s “Invisible Adversaries,” her 1977 experimental sci-fi mystery, will receive a rare screenings at the Museum of Modern Art on February 28 and March 7 as part of the massive Vienna Unveiled: A City in Cinema series, running through April 20. The film will be joined by shorter works by Kurt Kren and Hans Scheug, chosen by Export, who will be present for an introduction on February 28.

A simple plot synopsis says almost nothing about a film this complex, but one will be attempted here: Anna (Susanne Widl), a photographer, descends into paranoia as her relationship with a sexist artist (Peter Weibel) crumbles and she comes to believe the Hyksos, an alien society, are invading people’s bodies and minds. Employing a variety of techniques, from traditional narrative scenes to video montages and still photography, the work uses the struggle in the film to hazily mirror a larger feminist struggle among female artists.

By the time Export made “Invisible Adversaries,” she was already well known within international art circles for her confrontational and often violent work in performance and photography. One of her most infamous performances, “Tapp und Tast Kino” (“Tap and Touch Cinema”) (performed in various European cities from 1968 through 1971), included Export wearing a model of a movie theater over her bare chest and roaming the streets of Vienna, inviting random strangers to reach inside the cinema’s doors and touch her breasts. Her body performances were in line with what American artists such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden were doing during the same period.

Despite “Invisible Adversaries” confounding nature — Export is concerned with a true deconstruction of dominant narratives, which renders the film oblique at times — it reads, under all the layers, as a deeply personal work. The script was co-written with the artist Peter Weibel, a frequent collaborator and former partner, and in interviews Export has said that situations from their relationship were used in the film, but has stressed that its not a film directly about their relationship.

While the openness of the film, narratively and aesthetically, is greatly admired, it is just as well known for the firestorm it set off in the Austrian press upon its release. “I had to live through all kinds of attacks, even death threats,” Export said in an interview with the critic Scott MacDonald. “I have boxes full of menacing letters and cassette tapes from the time.”

Tabloids attacked the film as pornographic, questioned its funding, which came from the Austrian Ministry of Art and Education, and pressed for the resignation of the state secretary for education and culture, who they held responsible for letting the film see the light of day. Export and Weibel would be called a “Terrorist Pair” in the press, which cemented the film’s status as something that must be seen. “Invisible Adversaries” ended up running for 13 consecutive weeks in Viennese cinemas.

Export has become a canonical contemporary artist, a huge influence on artists who used various mediums — most notably film and video — to challenge notions of the body, and “Invisible Adversaries” will remain her defining work. In a 1980 review in the Soho News, the critic Amy Taubin’s analysis of the film is still persuasive more than 30 years later: “It makes you reconsider what you and everyone else is doing — in life and in art.” There’s not much more you can ask of a work of art.

If Broadway composers were stocks, blue-chip Robert Lopez would have split several times over. Andrew Lloyd Webber, on the other hand, is on a downward trajectory. Having won Tony Awards for “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon,” Lopez may well win an Oscar on Sunday night for the song “Let It Go” from the Disney animated blockbuster “Frozen.” The soundtrack of the film’s score, which he co-wrote with his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, has been riding the top of the charts with more than one million copies sold and the movie itself is nearing a billion dollars in worldwide grosses. The film has been so successful that Disney has put it on the fast track to be adapted into a Broadway musical.

At only 39, Lopez is already one of the most successful Broadway composers in history and an Oscar win will grant him admission into one of the most exclusive clubs in the world — the EGOT — reserved for those entertainers who’ve managed to win competitively an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. (If he wins, he’ll be 12th on a list of luminaries that includes director Mike Nichols, producer Scott Rudin, comic Mel Brooks, actors Audrey Hepburn and Rita Moreno, and composers Richard Rodgers and Marvin Hamlisch.) Lopez and his wife are currently working on a new Disney musical, “Up Here,” with director Alex Timbers, which has been described as a romantic comedy along the lines of “Annie Hall meets Cirque du Soleil.”

Such are the fickle fortunes of the theater that Lopez is as hot as his predecessor Andrew Lloyd Webber has been, well, frozen. The titan who once could do no wrong — “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Evita,” “Cats,” and, of course, “Phantom of the Opera” — can’t seem to do anything right lately. No need to cry for him, of course. “Phantom” alone has grossed $5.6 billion at last count and is in its 26th year on Broadway. But that has been the last U.S. hit for Lord Lloyd Webber. While “Sunset Boulevard” was a success in the early ’90s in London’s West End, the $13 million musical failed to recoup on Broadway even after winning the Tony Award for Best Musical and running for more than two years. His line of recent failures — including “Love Never Dies,” the sequel to “Phantom of the Opera” — has now been joined by “Stephen Ward,” his West End musical about the notorious call-girl scandal of the early ’60s that helped to bring down the British government of Harold Macmillan. It closed recently after a four-month run, the shortest of any of his musicals in his 40 years in the commercial arena. Still, Lloyd Webber is to be praised for choosing to take on difficult subject matter, whether it be the wife of a fascist dictator (“Evita”), religious sectarianism in Ireland as viewed through the lens of soccer (“The Beautiful Game”), or the injustice done to a political pawn (“Stephen Ward”). Lloyd Webber recently wrote in a letter to the London Telegraph that to think only of commercial considerations is to invite “catastrophe.”

He added, “If money was the only goal, would I have embarked on a musical that was inspired by an anthology of poems by a dead poet, was directed by a commercially untried director… was to open with most of its investment missing and… featured human beings dressed as cats?” That musical, “Cats,” ran for 21 years and made buckets of money for its investors. Talk about your wildcat strike!

CHICAGO — Abstract painting is decadent again. Put your nose to the canvas and the Victorian era rushes up like a wave of honey. Our age of excess begets many things, from trinkets to narcissism to wisdom. For the maximalist painter Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, more is more, and there is glory to be gleaned from her overabundance—of desire, of intellect, of creativity, of destruction—which she delivers in breathless, synesthetic outpourings.

The artist’s second solo exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey (through March 15) is forged conceptually around “The Drunken Boat,” an 1871 poem by Arthur Rimbaud from which she snags phrases to cobble together her exhibition title, “Violet Fogs Azure Snot.” Zuckerman-Hartung’s profuse lyrical gestures mirror Rimbaud’s delirious poem, which exuberantly describes a vessel lost at sea, sinking and swirling into mysterious depths. Indeed, the nine canvases are soggy with paint, and the painter has attempted to emulate Rimbaud’s flirtation with aesthetic rapture: Wonder and horror serve as tools to waken the mind.

Zuckerman-Hartung’s paintings seem nostalgic for a day when abstraction could titillate public taste, but her work winds up as doodles in the margins of the Whistler versus Ruskin debate. Not to belittle doodles—there are several in this show, and they are productively confusing, as doodles ought to be. Indeed, this work provokes wide-eyed confusion as a way toward knowledge. The pain or pleasure, failure or success, of surmounting obstacles—in life, work, or the imagination—is the battle Zuckerman-Hartung’s pieces represent.

(L:R) Molly Zuckerman-Hartung's "oa" (2013) and "oi" (2013) 

Overworked canvases prove that work was done there. Drop cloths are stretched into painting supports. In oa, 2013, an eye-shaped cavity is stuffed with muslin folded like intestines and poured paint: It could be the scene of a messy birth, the result of excessive creative fecundity. Bedsheets (as painting’s surface) are paint-stained, as if by fever dreams. Raw canvas signals raw emotions. Zuckerman-Hartung’s body is indexed everywhere in her works, and she mixes metaphors like she mixes paint. Instead of building a boat, she grabs fistfuls of water—but that is the only way to get wet. 

A version of this article appears in the May 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.

LOS ANGELES — An opportunity would seem to be lost in Pablo Bronstein’s first Los Angeles exhibition, at REDCAT (through March 15). Unlike the artist’s site-responsive projects, which engagingly recast references to local architecture, “Enlightenment Discourse on the Origins of Architecture” appears disconnected from the unique environs of the gallery. REDCAT is situated directly under and behind Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, and steps away from the postmodern case study that is the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, not to mention the rising fame of Eli Broad’s new art museum set to open in 2015.

Instead, Bronstein takes his cue from REDCAT’s adjacent experimental theater. He transforms the windowless alcove gallery into a stage absent a fourth wall, with performances scheduled each afternoon and during the neighboring theater’s intermissions. His dormant set comprises a symmetrical array of shape-shifting furniture in 17th-, 18th-, and early 19th-century English and Continental styles. Flanking a central cabinet and two chairs run two parallel rows of mirroring pieces: two cupboards, an obelisk and an urn, and two commodes. The objects are scaled for a giant, lending an uncanny sculptural presence, but are also hastily painted like props. A unifying red wash-over-black treatment crudely evokes stained mahogany or chinoiserie lacquer. 

The objects’ secondary functions are revealed when a solitary performer, wearing a puffy white shirt over black tights, unlocks, unhinges, reconfigures, and repositions elements of each. She folds over the obelisk’s point, for instance, uncovering a seat and a hole—or toilet; she opens the cabinet to display its shiny confines—a shrine; she flips the chairs so she can climb them like ladders—or platforms. This choreographed, workman-like activity culminates in a dance within and along the top edge of the two commodes, conjoined to form an open-top box—a tomb. A boombox plays a Baroque harpsichord score while the performer postures in a three-minute mechanical ballet, climaxing with a slumped death pose, after which she silently returns the mise en scène to its original, closed state, and repeats the action.

Bronstein’s “Discourse” is a potentially rich and dynamic inquiry. He maps out the fundamental impulse to build. And while his arrangement evinces a living room while inert, during the performance the metamorphosed furniture creates a kind of public plaza. Such shifts invite viewers to experience his theories through different registers of space. However, this “staged essay,” as curator Ruth Estévez coins it, feels unevenly developed. The performance only fully activates and explains the commode-tomb’s function. Instead, a supplementary checklist-essay details the objects’ multiple uses and elucidates significant ideas that bodily gestures could have more fittingly articulated. On the gallery’s two walls, five immense and exquisite drawings show permutations of decorative windows and mouse-scaled doors on a fictive building façade, offering a more concise argument that the universal demands for architecture are always particular.

A version of this article appears in the May 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.