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Sotheby's CEO Steps Down, ArtPrize Heads to Dallas, and More

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Sotheby's CEO Steps Down, ArtPrize Heads to Dallas, and More

— Sotheby’s CEO Steps Down: William Ruprecht will leave his post at Sotheby’s after 14 years as CEO and 34 years with the company. Though the press release issued by Sotheby’s speaks of calm transition and mutual agreement, other sources report a fraught power struggle between Ruprecht and recently added board member Dan Loeb, who spoke out 13 months ago against Ruprecht’s leadership, calling the company “an old master painting in desperate need of restoration.” Apparently, since the decision was announced, Sotheby’s shares have already risen. [WSJNYTFT]

— ArtPrize Heads to Dallas: After establishing itself as the country’s largest art award, with more than $500,000 distributed to artists and 400,000 visitors this past year, ArtPrize has announced its first expansion from Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a new edition planned for April 2016 in Dallas, Texas. The 19-day event will focus on artists from the southwest, giving a boost to local talent — not to mention that the 2014 ArtPrize generated a reported $22.2 million in economic impact for its host city. [ARTnewsNYO]

— Colonial Williamsburg Seeks $600 Million: Launched privately in 2009, the ambitious capital campaign is already halfway to its goal with over $300 million, and as of this Saturday, the effort is going public. The money raised will go in part toward expanding the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg — including the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum and the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum— adding 8,000 square feet of new gallery space at a cost of around $40 million. Other funds will bolster programming at the history museum and restore local historic sites. [NYTWP]

— Did Shell Steal an Artist’s Idea? Kurt Perschke, whose “RedBall” project consists of placing large red spheres in cities worldwide, claims a Shell ad featuring a similar image ripped him off: “Even though it might seem that a ball would be a ball would be ball, [my] red ball is specific in the way it is constructed and built and these graphics that they have created are spot on.” [Guardian]

— A New Space for Artists of Color: “Generally, when you see minority representation of artists, they’re in shows all together, and those shows seem to be about their identity, specifically. So we want to get away from that. Even though we are showcasing artists of color, we want the subject matter to expand beyond just our reflection of how we are perceived in society,” said filmmaker Dawne Langford of Quota, his new pop-up gallery in Washington, DC. [WP]

— Classic Images Recreated: IKEA unveiled a series of Edward Hopper tributes featuring its furniture, while the Tate Gallery partnered with cube-based computer game Minecraft to create interactive 3D renditions of its works. [IndependentBBC]

— The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the new Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (now officially split from North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art) announced their 2015–16 programming. [LATARTnews]

— Canadian artist William Kurelek once traded a painting for an apple strudel — and now, that painting is poised to sell for $15,000-20,000 at auction. [Globe and Mail]

— Petzel Gallery signed Adam McEwen, while Lisson Gallery took on Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. [ARTnewsARTnews]

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

William Ruprecht

Familiar Yet Unknown: Andy Stott Talks “Faith in Strangers”

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Familiar Yet Unknown: Andy Stott Talks “Faith in Strangers”

When I got on the phone recently with the musician Andy Stott from his home in Manchester, England, he was having a little trouble. “Sorry, the dog’s going bananas,” he told me, as the canine yelped in the background. He was home after a brief United States tour with friends and label mates Demdike Stare, where he was able to test some of the material from his new album, “Faith in Strangers,” which comes out November 18 on Modern Love Records.  

“The record was announced when I was on the road, and there was a good buzz about it,” he said. “The live show is a total afterthought when I’m making the album,” he claimed, so he has no idea how the songs will translate to an audience of bobbing heads. During our conversation, he told me that he’s currently building a live set for some upcoming festival shows in Mexico City, where he was travelling to the following morning.  

Aside from the jet setting, “Faith in Strangers” marks a notable shift in Stott’s career. Because of the success of his previous album, “Luxury Problems,” he was able to quit his day job and focus on music full time. The new album was recorded in his converted-basement studio, and it was initially difficult to adjust to the new freedom. “It took me a while to realize that all of a sudden I was just home with nowhere to go,” he said, laughing. “I couldn’t get used to it. But as soon as I realized that this is what I’m going to be doing with the rest of my time, I just had to sit down and really figure out what I wanted to do musically.”

But when I asked if the new freedoms affected the sound of the album, he was reluctant to make the connection. “I think even if I had all the time earlier, the material would have been the same,” he said. “It’s been a natural, different evolution.”

With “Faith in Strangers,” that evolution results in a continuation and solidification of the sound he’s been pursuing over a number of releases. On “Luxury Problems” he added vocals to his blend of damp, reverberating beats and icy, distorted synths via Allison Skidmore, his former piano teacher. She returns here, her voice more organically intertwined with the music, flowing through the cavernous spaces like a breath exhaled in the freezing cold.

The processes of creating the sounds on the album, which are sinister and ethereal in equal measure and sound unlike anything else, required a lot of patience, according to Stott. “There’s been days when literally all day I’ve been sitting in the studio and just get one sound,” he said. “But it’s not enough. It’s how two sounds interact with each other. Once you have two sounds that bounce off one another, you’re off.”

While I suggested that “Faith in Strangers” is less aggressive than his previous work, which could often feel like you were being pounded over the head with sound, he countered that what I’m responding to is the use of space in the songs, a process he was more conscious of during the recording. He was influenced by the “eskibeat” tracks produced by the enigmatic British electronic musician Zomby, which he first heard during a regular hangout with musician friends, where they play each other’s music and exchange ideas. “I started thinking, how could you get a track that has maybe four elements, but with so much space in it and really beautifully done, yet has this aggressive undertone?” he said. “It wasn’t about the sound but the presentation of it.”

We ended our conversation talking about a different kind of presentation: the artwork. Modern Love is known for its distinctive cover designs, which feature striking black and white photographs that capture the moods of the music through juxtaposition. Together, the covers form a definitive aesthetic, and “Faith in Strangers” features one of the most disquieting examples — a stone sculpture of a mask, on display in front of a window.

“When you first look at it, there’s something really odd about it,” Stott said. “The setting is familiar but there’s something really wrong about the image at the same time.” Before I had the chance to mention the obvious connection, he did it for me. “That’s what the music says to me. There’s something really familiar but there’s something really bent about it.”

Andy Stott

American Art Market Flexes Its Muscles In New York

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NEW YORK — Sotheby’s made auction history during its American art sale on Thursday morning, when Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” 1932, soared to $44,405,000 (est. $10-15 million) to a bidder on the phone with North and South Americas chair Lisa Dennison. It was a new record for O’Keeffe, whose previous high, set in 2001 at Christie’s, was $5.6 million at the hammer, and a record price for a work by any woman artist.

It was not the first American art lot to cross the many-millions threshold recently reserved for contemporary lots by the likes of Lichtenstein or Warhol — Norman Rockwell’s “Saying Grace,” 1951, fetched $46,085,000 at Sotheby’s last year — but the only one to do so in the series of American art sales this week. Still, specialists were optimistic about the overall state of the American art market (which generally ranges from colonial up to World War II era-work), noting strong demand for illustration art in general and for Stieglitz Circle modernists.

The O’Keeffe contributed mightily to Sotheby’s $75,395,499 total on a tight sale of 70 pieces, and the artist’s landscape “On the Old Santa Fe Road,” 1930-31 (est. $2–3 million), came in second at $5,093,000, sold to a different phone bidder. Of the top lot, Santa Fe dealer Nathaniel Owings commented, “It’s iconic, but pound for pound, ‘Santa Fe Road’ is the better painting.”

Private collectors were active and helped drive the top 10 lots to more than $1 million apiece. One denim-clad buyer in the room snatched up O’Keeffe’s oil on board “Untitled (Skunk Cabbage),” 1927 (est. $500-750,000) — another of the works consigned, with the record-setter, by the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe — for $941,000, Martin Johnson Heade’s “Still Life with Flowers: Red Roses,” ca. 1883-1900 (est. $60–80,000), for $149,000, and a Grandma Moses for $106,250. Notably, Milton Avery— who had a rough time the rest of the week with several buy-ins on subpar paintings — found a new fan in an Asian private collector, who purchased his “Double Wave,” 1955, for $ 1,565,000, just meeting the $1.5 million-to-$2 million estimate.

On November 19 at Christie’s, the bloated 157-lot sale raked in $46,543,250 but tried the patience of all but the most dedicated observers. The large crowd, mostly dealers and advisers with a smattering of collectors, seemed mostly content to spectate, and the auctioneer’s stately pace failed to wring many extra dollars. Top-lot honors went to Rockwell, for his Willie Gillis painting “Hometown News,” 1942 (est. $2–3 million), which sold to a private collector on the phone for $4,197,000.

A bidding war erupted over the cover lot, Oscar Bluemner’s “Jersey Silkmills,” painted in 1911 and then reworked in 1916-17 (est. $2.5-3.5 million). Adviser Nan Chisholm prevailed over adviser Baird Ryan at $3,749,000, on behalf of a Midwestern client, she said. (Two other Bluemners that department head Elizabeth Beaman said had presale interest were bought in, however.) The same client will also be receiving Daniel Garber’s landscape “Reflections,” 1940 (est. $300-500,000), for $365,000, part of a run on Pennsylvania Impressionists in recent months. Ryan didn’t go home empty handed, however, snapping up O’Keeffe’s “Hills and Mesa to the West,” 1945 (est. $2.5–3.5 million), for $3,749,000, and Walter Ufer’s “Trailing Homeward,” 1924 (est. $400–600,000), for $869,000, for his client. A 1946 O’Keeffe abstract sculpture in white-lacquered bronze (est. $600-800,000) set a record of $1,061,000 for the artist in that medium.

A distinguished gent who identified himself as a Puerto Rican collector came prepared to spend, snapping up an early Rockwell grisaille (“Max simply walked up that pier, pulling that fish through the water by main force,” 1917) for a mid-estimate $269,000; Boris Lovet-Lorski’s polished brass sculpture “Stallions,” ca. 1929-31, for $100,000; Mary Cassatt’s “Mother Combing Sara’s Hair (No. 1),” 1901 (est. $400–600,000), for $389,000; and Jane Peterson’s “An Old Pier, Gloucester,” ca. 1919 (est. $120–180,000), for $233,000.

Sales at Heritage and Bonhams this week netted $6.5 million and $4.6 million, respectively. At Bonhams on November 19, George Bellows’s “Two Women,” 1924, one his last figural works before he switched to abstraction, fetched $1,265,000, while Childe Hassam’s Impressionist canvas “Lady in a Garden,” ca. 1890, attained $905,000, speaking to the breadth of interest in all sectors of the American market. 

American Art Market Flexes Its Muscles In New York
Georgia O’Keeffes "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1"

Week in Review: From Banksy Film to Polke Show, Our Top Stories

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Week in Review: From Banksy Film to Polke Show, Our Top Stories

— Julia Wachtel discussed her appropriation of pop figures, from Miley Cyrus to Kanye West.

— Craig Hubert tried his very hardest to take Banksy seriously (because apparently we art press folks just don’t do that enough) in discussing the new HBO documentary “Banksy Does New York.”

— Sarah P. Hanson spoke with Boston-based philanthropist and art collector Barbara Lee about her unflagging support of women artists.

— The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2015 season, including a massive installation by Philippe Parreno, a collaboration with Marina Abramovic, and new work by Laurie Anderson.

— Martin Gayford reflected on his 2003 interview with the late Sigmar Polke in light of the new Polke retrospective at the Tate Modern.

— Kathryn Bigelow, Oscar-winning director of “The Hurt Locker,” has one of her early experimental films on view at MoMA.

— Scott Indrisek checked out Mohammed Kazem’s New York debut at Taymour Grahne Gallery.

— Anna Kats highlighted some top works from the Salon of Art + Design.

— Thea Ballard swung by Surrealist-inflected painter Ahmed Alsoudani’s studio as he prepped for his current show at Gladstone Gallery.

— The Museum of Art and Design opened “New Territories,” its exhibition of Latin American design — which, though admirable in its scope, might retain some traces of neocolonialism.

— Patrick Pacheco relayed the heartwarming tribute to Broadway broad Elaine Strich given during a special event at the St. James Theatre.

Week in Review - November 17-21

Blum and Poe

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Pratt Institute Legends Gala

Highlights From the Pratt Institute Legends Gala

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It’s been an undoubtedly good year for the Pratt Institute, a fact that shone on the satisfied faces of honorees, the school’s trustees, and other attendees at last night’s Pratt Legends Gala at the Mandarin Oriental. The Brooklyn-based art, architecture, and design school’s achievements in 2014 are substantial: it opened a new design and fashion incubator in early November in South Williamsburg, a group of it’s students recently presented their work at the White House to Michelle Obama, and the school continues to rank among the country’s top programs in the creative disciplines it teaches.

Yesterday, as in previous years, the annual scholarship benefit pursued its fundraising ends by honoring three leading practitioners in the fields of art and design. This year’s luminaries are interior and furniture designer Iris Apfel, the reigning queen of senior citizen dressing, whose unmistakable predilection for giant round glasses, bright furs, and sparkling accessories has accorded her influence across generations; Kim Hastreiter, the founder and editor-in-chief of Paper Magazine, who “broke the Internet” by putting another, rather more salacious Kim on her magazine’s latest cover; and David and Sybil Yurman, the husband-and-wife duo behind the high-end jewelry line named after the former. Though none of this year’s honorees are alumni, the explanation goes that their varied achievements have invariably shaped the education and careers of the institute’s former, current, and future students. Even before each honoree accepted a statuette designed by current Pratt junior Chengtao Yi, it was clear that all of them wield influence that extends far beyond the school’s Clinton Hill and Manhattan campuses.

Undeniable success of the sort lauded at the Legends Gala always comes at a price, typically years of hard, often unrecognized work. For everyone else taking in views from the 36th-floor venue last night, that sum was “whatever you can give,” a refrain heard constantly from Pratt professor and gala emcee Bill Hilson. Here, the school’s fundraisers should be lauded for their creativity — guests were encouraged to text a pre-arranged phone number with financial pledges, and each text was displayed on a screen that fueled competition among audience members. For reference, that’s (646) 427-8000, should anyone feel inspired to supplement the $60,000 figure that the experimental tactic raised for scholarships last night. (In total, the evening racked up $760,000 for scholarships.)

Not only did guests provide financial support to Pratt students, honorees also offered advice to the assembled crowd and the larger student community. Hastreiter spoke about focusing on the present moment, while David Yurman jokingly recommended “a lot of psychiatry.” Apfel admitted that she checked the dictionary for “legend” definitions, and after pondering whether she was “gloriously notorious” or “a myth,” moved on to the “eternal question: what the devil do I wear?” (Vintage black Alberta Feretti, a fur collar, and plenty of rhinestones, for the record.) When Bruce Gitlin, Chair of Pratt's Board of Trustees, took the podium, he had some more subtle advice for the audience: “New buildings support naming opportunities for all of you.”

 

Highlights From the Pratt Institute Legends Gala
Pratt Institute Legends Gala

BLOUIN Lifestyle Pick: The Soho Holiday Collective

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Put a little more thought into unique gifts this holiday, and head down to the The Soho Holiday Collective pop-up store in downtown Manhattan to discover a selection of one-of-a-kind fashion and fine art pieces.

Goodies include luxury apparel, jewelry, and accessories from emerging and established designers such as Jes Wade, KES, Lulu Estate Jewelry, Jill Heller and Jewelry For A Cause. As an extra draw, the designers, along with a select staff of stylists, be on hand to explain their designs and offer style tips to facilitate with the shopping.

Other highlights include framed photography by online pop culture galleries Rock Paper Photo and Capital Art, featuring prints of icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Dylan and more.

The Soho Holiday Collective Pop-up shop is now on through December 24 at 150 Wooster Street in New York. Hours are from Monday through Saturday, 11AM-7PM, and Sunday 11AM-6PM.

Click through the slideshow to see more of what the store offers.

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BLOUIN Lifestyle Pick: The Soho Holiday Collective
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A dress by Jes Wade
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Top Five Dining Spots During Art Basel Miami 2014

Fresh Talent at the Shanghai Biennale

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It’s known as the industrial factory to the world. But in recent years, China has been shuttering and relocating a number of its manufacturing complexes, as air pollution shrouds its skies — and attracts the world’s scrutiny.

In Shanghai, this decampment of industry has inspired the theme of the city’s 10th Shanghai Biennale, “Social Factory.” The show, which opened November 23, is held for the second time in the Power Station of Art, itself a converted electric plant along the Huangpu River, and the country’s only state-funded museum for contemporary art. In the show that spans three sprawling floors — each around the size of a Wal-Mart superstore — the organizers of the Biennale take a step back to ask what forces could lead to a new social life, if the structures of industry continue to fall into disuse.   

The 70 artists in the show from across 20 countries offer enthusiastic answers, from revolutionary folksongs sung on the trails of northwest China to a cross-dressing space mission told through Cantonese opera. It’s not surprising that the works are fresh and forward-looking. A large crop of the artists are remarkably young, perhaps reflecting the youthful curatorial team, which, along with lead curator Anselm Franke, includes Hong Kong’s Cosmin Costinas and Taipei’s Freya Chou.

“It is a good moment to slow down,” Franke said at the VIP preview Saturday evening. “Where does the breathtaking development leave people and social relations?” For the past decade, Franke, who is the head of visual art and film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and curated the Taipei Biennial in 2009, has been visiting Shanghai, observing its frenetic rate of change.

On opening night, ARTINFO crossed paths with a few of the young artists at the Power Station. Here’s a closer look at their works, and art’s changing role in China, outside the churn of the market.   

Ming Wong

Hours before the VIP preview, the Singaporean-born, Berlin-based artist known for his virtuosic mimicry of historical figures — real and imagined, female and male — dusted the flashing screens of his video installation, “Windows on the World,” 2014. “I think of this as the deck of a space station,” he said, cleaning paper in hand.

Across 24 screens, footage flashes of China’s lunar landings, Chinese space-themed cartoons, and scrolling computer texts outlining the cultural history of science fiction in the country. In a lower monitor, a panicked Sandra Bullock in the blockbuster movie “Gravity” orbits the earth. But here, the real star is a coiffed, rosy-cheeked Wong, tunneling through a “Solaris”-inspired setting in a natty silver space suit. The station in the film is constructed with bamboo and fabric, and the trebles of Cantonese opera wail in the background.

“I wanted to use Cantonese opera — this genre that’s traditionally locked into the past  —to talk about the future,” said the terrestrial Wong.

Today, science fiction’s popularity has reached a feverish pitch among Chinese readers — and, apparently, artists. At the Biennale, the theme is taken up in Anton Vidokle’s “Cosmos,” Yin-Ju Chen’s “Liquidation Maps,” and Shambhavi Kaul’s film collage, “Mount Song.” Their futuristic projections all borrow from the grab bag of history — including the Soviet Communist project to awaken the dead and episodes of political violence in Asian history, as interpreted through star charts. Here, there’s a call to carry the past with us as we hurdle into what’s ahead.  

Trevor Yeung

Born in 1988 in Hong Kong, Trevor Yeung is one of the show’s youngest artists, and the work he presents is also… well, green. In a wide corridor on the second floor, rows of waxy passion fruit grow beneath glowing greenhouse lights and a trestle overhang. But the healthy trellised stalks, now about human height, won’t ever reach the lattice hung above, which will continually be raised higher and higher throughout the show. Here, the grasping tendrils reflect humans’ frustrated strivings, Yeung said, while watering the plants.

“Just like in a real farm, you must tend to the plants everyday,” he explained. “But here, at the museum, we will hire outside people to do it. You have to come up with a whole new system.” It’s a particular challenge he is familiar with living in Hong Kong, where gardens are spread across city rooftops, converting a gritty landscape into lush oases and urbanites into farmers.   

In the show, the work resonates with the nearby pieces also centering around the natural world. American-born, Japan-based artist Adam Avikainen has hung indigo-dyed sheets and scarecrow dolls — evoking the missing generation of farmers in Japan who have instead migrated to cities — to a somewhat spooky effect. Chinese artist Zheng Guogu farms a plot of land in his hometown of Yangiang, collapsing the divides between the cultivator and artistic creator.  

Libbie D. Cohn and J.P. Sniadecki

For a split instant in “People’s Park” — a gorgeous documentary film touring a spirited park in Chengdu in a single 78-minute take — you catch a glimpse of the young filmmakers in the reflection of the golden-gilt poster frame. They are a bizarre sight: Cohn sits in a wheelchair wielding a handheld camera as Sniadecki pushes her, long microphones in hand, through the colorful park that’s alive with karaoke singers, open air waltzing, taichi, and energetic pop ballads. In making the film, the duo, who are associated with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, became another of the park’s performers, filming 23 single takes over the summer of 2011. “It may be the closest we will ever feel to performing a tightrope act, with so many opportunities for something to go wrong at every moment, at every turn,” Sniadecki told ARTINFO in an email.

Earlier this year the film showed at the Whitney Biennial, but at the Biennale, it fits perfectly into Franke’s curatorial framework, recording a space that is neither organized by state or commercial concerns. “This energy felt democratic because the park was boisterous, dynamic, and self-organized; it offered a fresh contrast to many other public spaces in China,” the 24-year-old Cohn said. “The film is very much about the multiple ways of looking together,” she added.

In the poetic “Red, Blue” showing nearby, by Zhao Tao, this shared act of looking and public space gains further political meaning. Zhao films parks in Guangzhou and Bangkok; quiet moments — men sleeping on tarps, a boy lost in play — before the incipient protests. Hong Kong artist Firenze Lai paints psychological portraits of individuals in cramped quarters. Likewise, Liu Chuang depicts private spaces, reproducing the anti-burglary windows that float across the second floor.

Ho Tzu Nyen

There’s no telling if Ho Tzu Nyen’s film “Earth (Black to Comm),” 2009­­­-12, set among industrial detritus, flickering florescent lights, and dark pools, represents a scene of death or resurrection, of awakening or slumber. The 50 actors sparking life into paintings by Caravaggio, Girodet, and Gericault move with languid electricity, almost by the dictates of some unknown logic, or maybe even spirit — the word isn’t too grand to evoke. The artist is known to dive into medieval Christian theology in his celebrated film “Cloud of Unknowing,” and as with that masterpiece, “Earth” was inspired by a book of Western art history, a tome on French post-revolutionary painting.

Western art history aside, does his film have to do with his home city of Singapore? At an opening dinner, the artist explained that the film’s painstaking, labored movement reminded him of the slow hours of hot Singaporean afternoons. The many ethnicities of the actors, so intimately filmed, are unique to the island-city’s richly diverse demographic. Ho recruited the actors from a local martial arts school. When he talked about the film production, he described it as mechanic and factory-like, as he militaristically dispatched demands — something hard to imagine from the gentle, soft-spoken artist. It was completed in one day, a mere three shots. Other projects in the Biennale, like Liu Ding’s Social Realist busts and Li Xiuqin’s sculptures made in collaboration with a blind artist, likewise make the process of art-making central, and shared.

Fresh Talent at the Shanghai Biennale
Shanghai Bienniale

Slideshow: Highlights from the Shanghai Bienniale 2014

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Highlights from the Shanghai Bienniale 2014

BLOUIN Lifestyle Pick: Magnificent Jewels Nov 27-Dec 10

Highlights of “Body and Soul: Munich Rococo from Asam to Gunther”

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Highlights of “Body and Soul: Munich Rococo"

In the Studio: Glenn Kaino

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Early this fall, inside a vast, disused brick building in the gritty Southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C.,
 a ribbon of gold about three feet wide and more than 100 feet long traced a path heavenward. At once soaring and weighty, Glenn Kaino’s Bridge, 2013–14, reveals itself on closer inspection to be made of identical gold-painted casts of a muscular arm, outstretched with fist clenched, suspended side by side. But only the most observant visitors would recognize it as the limb of Tommie Smith, the Olympic runner who in 1968 ascended the podium in Mexico City and, upon receiving his gold medal, raised his arm in what would become one of the most enduring expressions of the Black Power movement. With this knowledge the work shifts from broadly lyrical to personal and poignant. And, like the rest of Kaino’s omnivorous works, it transitions from political to poetic in one graceful swoop.

Bridge had its genesis when a visitor to Kaino’s studio in Los
 Angeles noticed the artist had the famous picture of Smith as a screen saver on a computer and offered to introduce him to “Coach 
Smith.” Kaino, no stranger to social activism himself, had no idea 
what would come of it, but jumped at the opportunity, and a week
 later was sitting in the athlete’s Atlanta home. “He spent 20 minutes
 relating the step-by-step story of the race. His memory of these 20
 seconds has lasted a lifetime,” Kaino recalls. “I said to him, ‘I was 
born in 1972, so to me, your action has always been symbolic. But for
 you it is still personal. To the world, that black-gloved fist raised in
 the air changed everything; to you, that hand is what you use to brush 
your teeth this morning. What if we were able to collaborate on a 
project where I remove the arm from your body and create some type
 of art allowing you to be a spectator for the first time?’”

In the final piece, 200 disembodied arms—cast in fiberglass from a mold made when Smith visited Kaino’s studio—lose their defiant vertical reach, rendering the gesture an anonymous stepping-stone on a shining path for those who have taken up the struggle. That sort of intermingling of fact and metaphor, the melding of the individual and the universal, is at the heart of Kaino’s practice, which is widely on display this season. On the heels of Bridge’s unveiling in September, under the auspices of “The 5x5 Project” with curator Shamim Momin, a show titled “Leviathan,” featuring major new sculptures that tackle themes of cultural upheaval and balance, marked the artist’s debut with Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago. Currently in New Orleans, Kaino is exhibiting a group of aquariums filled with coral as part of the Prospect.3 biennial, curated by Franklin Sirmans, on view through January 25. In January he will also fill the Honor Fraser gallery in Los Angeles with new, room-size wax candles modeled on landmark buildings built atop important structures from earlier civilizations.

With these diverse works, Kaino aims to help us perceive 
the complexity of human relationships and to look upon both 
our environment and ourselves from new perspectives. “My practice is conceived as a means of creating spaces and moments where disparate systems of knowledge touch,” Kaino says. “I 
am interested in reconciling the irreconcilable, translating things that are not supposed to be communicated.” The approach has earned him solo shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh 
as well as major public art commissions—including one for a new permanent installation in downtown Los Angeles making use of the Sixth Street Bridge site, which Kaino is in the initial stages of designing.

The rebellious spirit that led him to be kicked out of four high schools drives Kaino’s art today. When a teacher at his last school pulled strings to get him into the undergraduate art program at the University of California, Irvine, he came under the tutelage of Daniel Martinez, who helped guide 
him toward the notion that art should be engaged with social issues. Coming of age in the early 1990s, around the time of the culture wars and the burgeoning Internet, identity and technology have been persistent themes, even as he eschews readings of his practice in terms of his personal narrative.

The aquariums in New Orleans, which Kaino refers to as “living paintings,” are filled with plastic pieces cast from
 an M60 tank. For nearly a year the tank parts were submerged in water at a lab in Chicago where they were colonized by polyp rocks, Galaxea, Acropora, and other species. But this is no simple statement about nature’s victory over man’s belligerent ways. “Ostensibly these corals live nicely together, but they are truly doing battle,” the artist explains. “They have these tentacles and at night they actually shoot at each other.” He continues, “Doctors recommend looking at coral reefs to relieve stress without realizing you are looking at
 a war zone. It is only scale and our subjectivity that prevents us from reading this as a battle.”

Sirmans encountered Kaino’s work in 2003, the year of his first New York solo show with the Project. Earlier in 
the year the gallery made a splash at the Armory Show with Kaino’s In Revolution, an Aeron chair that, when spun
 on its base at 220 rpm, takes on the form of a chalice. “There was something about the work—so based around science and technology but at the same time based around magic and spirituality. Glenn mixes them so easily,” the curator recalls. When Sirmans was appointed to organize Prospect.3, Kaino was one of the first people he knew he wanted to include. “The exhibition is about human relations and what we do to each other because we don’t take the time to understand each other,” Sirmans explains. “Glenn’s use of these corals that are innately at war is just the perfect metaphor.”

Unlike his specimens, Kaino sought to forge new links in his development of the coral colonies. He reached out to both academic marine biologists and amateurs who grow the animals in home aquariums, and went so far as to initiate a conference bringing the two groups together to exchange their knowledge. Within his practice, the use of aquariums can be linked back to his contribution to a group show at Los Angeles’s Rosamund Felsen gallery in 1999, in which he showed fish tanks rigged to allow visitors either to provide food or disable the life support systems.

Likewise, the use of military tank parts in the aquariums connects to another ongoing body of work. In his “pin drawings,” he renders an image inside a vitrine by pinning tiny pieces from plastic model kits like so many insect specimens. The artist likens the drawings to “kit-bashing,” a term used by model makers to refer to building unexpected objects by combining pieces from multiple kits. Kaino also uses the term as shorthand to describe his entire practice, which he says derives from his dissatisfaction with the choice between the divergent paths of process-based art and conceptualism that he faced after MFA studies in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, in the mid ’90s.

Working with two full-time assistants in his 2,000-square-foot Hollywood studio (not far from where he lives with his wife, fashion designer Corey Lynn Calter, and their two daughters), Kaino is intensely involved in
 the physical production of his work. He experimented 
with dozens of molds and wicks to “learn to draw in wax,” as he puts it, for the upcoming show at Honor Fraser. He still places every one of the hundreds of pins in the kit-bashing drawings himself. But the essence of his practice rests in scavenging and creating component parts—be it a title,
 a found object, an iconic image, a production method, or a metaphor—then recombining them.

That ethos is on display in his show in Chicago, the signal work of which might be Escala, 2014, a giant mobile made from antique scales kept in balance with rocks and candy. That show mixes references to revolution with notions of equilibrium, which he feels has led to simplistic thinking about the world’s problems. “What if equality—in the sense of dividing resources in a zero-sum approach—is not the answer; what if generosity is the answer?” Kaino asks. Lining the gallery walls are sheets of stainless steel cut to the rough dimensions of windows at U.S. embassies around the world that have had rocks thrown at them. Dents in the shimmering metal warp and invert the reflected surroundings. Although it is impossible to ignore the overtly political content, Kaino shies away from didacticism, preferring to point out how the divots “bring everything in them closer together to create a sort of utopic vision.”

Kaino initially picked up stones in Tahrir Square in 2012 when he was visiting Egypt in preparation to represent the United States at the Cairo Biennial in 2013. As is often the case, he didn’t know if he would make use of the rock, but he recognized its symbolic value and spent time ruminating on possible meanings. “I had this thought that this rock is only an instrument of revolution when it is in the air,” Kaino says. “On the ground it is junk; after it has hit someone or something it has lost its potential energy.” He is currently using a 3-D printer to make brightly colored plastic copies of some of the stones, a takeoff on the use of 3-D printers to fabricate plastic guns, taking the idea of military innovation to an absurd extreme.

His practice extends beyond conventional parameters, too, into performance and ad-hoc productions. Early
on he collaborated with Martinez to create River Deep, a nonprofit exhibition space in downtown L.A. He has continued to serve as a facilitator, first on the board of LAXART and currently on the board of the Mistake Room, the new L.A. nonprofit he cofounded. “The idea is always bigger than any object,” Kaino states. In this same spirit, he has stipulated that a healthy portion of revenue from the sale of the Tommie Smith works goes directly to Smith: “It is a way to upset the logic of the art world and bring tangible change into Tommie’s life.” Kaino radiates an idealism 
that seems equally rooted in the radical and the romantic. “Like a scientist, he believes in the possibility to change the world through ideas,” observes Sirmans. “He is a real dreamer, and today there are not that many artists like that.”

That may be why Kaino elected to take a hiatus from the art world after experiencing a crisis of conscience while visiting Art Basel Miami Beach during the financial upheaval of 2008. He shut down his studio for 18 months and traveled to learn from magicians around the country. He wasn’t interested in tricks per se, but he apprehended key lessons that helped him shift his attitude. “Magic unlocked for me the notion of the unseen in a very nuanced way,” Kaino says.
“I started thinking about unseen connections, belief systems, and having different types of poetics inform what I do.”

Kaino says the most important lesson came while learning the comparatively easy sleight-of-hand to make a coin vanish. His instructor told him to practice 10,000 times while actually holding the coin. “He told me, ‘You have to know what it feels like for the coin to really be there 
so that you can believe it is there, more than anyone in the audience,’” Kaino recalls. “I thought, ‘What a beautiful analogy for the studio.’ I make conceptual art with the ludicrous hope of crafting a work that can create a shift in thinking or change the world. All of us practitioners of the imagination aspire to that. But if we don’t believe the most, no one else is going to believe more.”

A version of this article appears in the November 2014 issue of Art+Auction magazine. 

In the Studio: Glenn Kaino
Glenn Kaino

Art of Disco: The Glitz, Neon, and Citrus of One Genre's LP Covers

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There’s plenty to be said for disco music, whether reminiscing about the glitz and point-heavy grooves, à la “Saturday Night Fever,” or the succinct rallying cry of 1979’s infamous Disco Demolition Night (and/or the “Freaks and Geeks” boys): “Disco sucks!” Still, polarizing as the songs might be, there’s one point on which we can all surely agree: The cover art for these albums is pretty insane. 

What’s that, you say? You haven’t seen that many disco LP covers? Well, never fear — “Disco: An Encyclopedic Guide to the Cover Art of Disco Records” (Soul Jazz Books) is here. Slated for release on November 30, this large-format book presents full-size reproductions of cover art from the likes of Gloria Gaynor, James Brown, Donna Summer, Grace Jones, Isaac Hayes, Kool and the Gang, and dozens more — over 2,000 designs in total, plus more than 700 12-inch sleeves. 

Also, for those so inclined, the tome contains detailed histories and discographies of some of the major disco-producing record companies, interviews with some of the great producers (Mel Cheren of West End Records, Marcin Schlachter of Prelude, etc.), compiled by the aptly named Disco Patrick and Patrick Vogt. There’s even a CD produced in conjunction with the book — “DISCO: A Fine Selection of Independent Disco, Modern Soul and Boogie,” to be released on December 2 by Soul Jazz Records — to ensure readers can listen as they browse. 

For the moment, though, we’ve nabbed a few choice examples of art from the book in the slideshow above — enough, at least, to get a flavor for some of the genre tropes: Rollerskates? Check. Questionable neon eye make-up? Check. Citrus fruit? Apparently, also, check. Peruse the collection, above.

Art of Disco: The Glitz, Neon, and Citrus of One Genre's LP Covers
Disco Records

7 Stylish Hotels for a Snowy Christmas

Munich

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Highlights at Singapore Art Fair

How to Light a Show: Liz Deschenes Turns the Gallery Into a Camera

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“In many white cubes, you could be virtually anywhere,” says Liz Deschenes, in her Ridgewood, Queens, studio, walking around a model of a gallery in the Barnes building at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “Here, you’ll know exactly where you are in the world.” In the model, scaled so that an inch represents one foot of space, she has arranged small foamcore models of the sculptural, stand-alone photogram pieces she will exhibit on the gallery floor—spare and conceptual, in the vein of the body of work for which the artist has become known.

Her studio is a fittingly uncluttered space that, on this 
crisp late September day, contains fragments of the Walker exhibition, set to open November 22. She pieces together, in a somewhat circular fashion, how these elements relate to one another: transparent squares of blue Plexi hanging on 
the wall—matching the artist’s button-down shirt, in a pleasing chromatic twist—are revealed to be references to “blue fade tests done by conservators to show how sensitive to light a pigment is. It’s not a medium-specific way to evaluate how lightfast a work is; it’s used from painting to photography to sculpture,” she says. Material samples, models, and older pieces line the studio’s walls, the silvery, oxidized finish of
 her photograms—photographic works made without a camera by exposing photo paper to light—demonstrating what the final appearance of the rectangular models will be. There isn’t, as far as I can tell, a camera anywhere in the room, but there is an array of household tools organized on a table, perhaps a better indication of her practice.

Having received traditional training as a photographer at 
the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid 1980s, Deschenes has, for the past two decades, pursued a deconstructed, critically minded approach to the medium: one that places emphasis on
 the materials and mechanics of the photographic, invoking a 
rich history of producing and theorizing images, and developing 
a spatially minded minimal aesthetic that is quietly beautiful. In addition to photograms, she has also taken an interest in processes including dye transfer, the materials for which were discontinued by Kodak in the early 1990s, and the green screen. “There’s not one procedure I use,” she explains. “There are multiple procedures depending on what it is I’m responding to. I’m interested in making cameraless works, but I think it’s more about an inversion of elements playing against each other than it is a dedication to the photogram, or any other process, per se. It’s
 a means to an end for dealing with materials, an architectural mirror.” Important, too, is an interaction between the mechanics she invokes and the natural world. Her first photograms, created in Madrid in 2003, were exposed outdoors at night, picking up on the moon and the stars, as well as the city’s ambient light. Lately, she creates the pieces in Bennington, Vermont, where she also teaches, a location whose seclusion allows the material to have
 a focused response to primarily natural light. Additionally, recent works have emphasized an expansion beyond the traditional frame of a photographic image. Aside from pieces like Green Screen 4, 2001, which extends to rest on the floor, or Bracket, 2013, four parallelograms that, though stationary on the wall, create an odd, sideways sense of perspective, Deschenes’s oeuvre often incorporates the architecture of its location, toying with the viewer’s relationship to the space.

The Walker show will do this in a particularly rooted way, interacting with not just the Barnes building but—on the occasion of its 75th anniversary—the institution’s history as well. Initially, Deschenes intended to create a work for the museum’s Herzog & de Meuron building, which generally houses minimalist pieces, but a scheduling overlap led her to the older Barnes, a fortunate change of plans. Her actual interventions
are light-handed: a series of the paneled, stand-alone photograms; three horizontal lines running the perimeter of the gallery and recalling a three-tier hanging system employing visible wires used by the Walker around 1940; the decision to remove the neutral-density filters the museum uses on the one large window at the building’s front, filling the space with natural light and opening up visibility on each side of the gallery’s walls. It is smaller, less visible details, however, that color in these gestures. For example, the photograms are sized in the proportions of an index card, intended to recall an iteration of Lucy Lippard’s “Numbers” exhibition series, “c. 7,500,” which showed at the Walker in 1973. They’re also arranged in such a way that, when viewed from above, their shape recalls the angles of the Walker’s staircases. And crucially, Deschenes says, “the works are placed where you would generally find the spectator standing, so there’s a reversal: the work takes the place of the viewer’s position.”

This, alongside the now-transparent window, serves to locate the viewer by disrupting her relationship to the room. “Being in a museum with density-filtered windows is like wearing sunglasses,” she explains. “It really separates the museum from its neighbors. I’m looking at the space not only as a site of intervention but as a way of thinking about the work in relationship to cameras. To me, the gallery becomes an enormous camera, a viewing platform, a way of looking
 at the city of Minneapolis throughout the entirety of a year.” The unfiltered light will, of course, also activate the photographic works, which, though fixed, slowly oxidize in response to the conditions of the space in which they’re installed—ultimately, over time, allowing them to bear some trace of the site in which they are displayed. The artist often plays with how works
 are lit. For example, a photogram installation at the Museum 
of Modern Art in New York this past summer, Tilt/Swing, 2009, was lit at lower levels than the work surrounding it. “I like 
to work with the spaces I’ve been given, but not necessarily the light I’ve been given,” she says. “I think this kind of intervention slows people down, though it may not be readily apparent.”

In the case of this commission, notes Deschenes, “all of the works are double-sided. People often mistake my pieces for being metal and not photographic, so in this case, you are actually able to see the back of the works, which are mounted to aluminum.” They are also slightly angled back in their frames, so they
 will mirror the architecture of the gallery. In the end she says, “I’m hoping that what I’ve made, alongside the preexisting apertures of the space, creates a new set of portals, reflective viewing experiences, transparent viewing experiences, opaque viewing experiences.” It’s a project that contains shades of 
Brian O’Doherty’s seminal essays on the homogeneity of the gallery interior and the lack of porousness between these spaces and the world outside them, in Inside the White Cube; however, Deschenes is careful to describe what she’s doing as motivated less by institutional critique and more by “an interest in responding to the museum’s configurations: removing walls, taking down filters, or putting work in the place where one expects to find the viewer. I’m hoping it’s a conversation, though,” she says, laughing. “It’s not easy to get museums to take down walls.”

Deschenes has held a number of teaching posts at institutions including Bard, Columbia, and, since 2006, Bennington College. Her practice’s engagement with the history of photography—particularly Jonathan Crary’s influential text Techniques of
 the Observer, which is writ large over projects like the viewing platform she has produced at the Walker—is, she says, very much the result of writing her own syllabi. As an active creator of both pedagogy and work that pushes forth an expanded understanding of photography, she is, it seems, angling to shift photography’s position from a secondary medium beholden to framing single moments in time and space to a process containing past, present, and future. I propose to her that her oeuvre has
 a foot in each of these tenses, and she agrees. “Looking at how the medium has been historicized is the looking back, expanding how photography is considered is the present, and the future would
 be how the work changes, and how people interact with the work, which are the variables that are, to a certain degree, completely out of my hands,” she says. “Not only do I hope it involves past, present, and future, but it involves how many constraints I can establish, and the work either fails or succeeds within them.”

In working with an expanded notion of photography, Deschenes joins a continuing tradition of artists experimenting with the form. She cites an exhibition she curated in 2000 at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, “Photography about Photography,” which included artists like Thomas Ruff, Louise Lawler, and Vera Lutter, as, at that point, a rare opportunity to exhibit artists with “self-reflexive practices” in photography. “In 2000,” she says, “nobody wanted to talk about nonnarrative concepts of photography. I didn’t have a big audience for that project, but
 I had 13 amazing artists—important people making important strides in photography.” It seems, however, that a niche has been carved for this sort of work, evidenced by exhibitions like this past summer’s “Fixed Variable” at Hauser & Wirth and an upcoming survey of new photography, mostly by women, at the Guggenheim. Deschenes was recently a recipient of DeCordova Sculpture Park’s Rappaport Prize, a major award given to an artist with strong ties to New England (in addition to teaching in Vermont, the artist was born and raised in Boston). Accordingly, she had much on her plate when we spoke—she is also in the early stages of curating another exhibition of photography and video for MASS MoCA, for which participating artists will select their own works to display, accompanying a new commission from Deschenes. With her installation at the Walker set to remain open for a year, the longest the artist has been able to display work
in one space, she’s leaving plans for the exhibition open-ended, as well. “Right now, I look at the project as a proposition,” she says. “I may install works from the permanent collection. I may work collaboratively with choreographers. A lot will be revealed through not only the inauguration of the exhibition but its duration.”

This is, after all, the future-facing element of Deschenes’s practice: the variables she can’t control. “If I could predict outcomes, I don’t know if I’d be as engaged in doing this,” she tells me. “The work changes, the sites change, the viewer changes, the artist changes. All those things are changing in relation to each other, but not in a way that can be measured.”

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

How to Light a Show: Liz Deschenes Turns the Gallery Into a Camera
Liz Deschenes
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