This week I will be continuing my focus on 2011 Bordeaux. Carrying on from my 2011 Pessac-Léognan and 2011 St Estčphe reports posted last week, next up are Pauillac, St Julien and Margaux. I like to provide something as a complete contrast as my Wine of...

"What exactly is Icelandic food?" was the most popular question I was asked after returning from a week in Iceland. (Second place goes to: "Did everyone look like Björk?") To answer the first, the basic diet hasn't changed too much from the Viking Age, ...

VENICE, Italy—On the day before his exhibition was to preview at the Palazzo Grassi, Urs Fischer could be found elsewhere, in the courtyard of the Accademia delle Belle Arti. Surrounding him, dozens of students were working with clay on the cool pavement — music blasting, beer at hand, food on the way. While installers at the palazzo put the final touches on a survey of some 30 works dating from 1997 to 2012, Fischer was overseeing — not teaching, he hastened to make clear — the modeling of scores of cats, a subject he had recommended to the students because, he says, "cats are very simple, even when you don't know how to make anything." There were resting cats, mating cats, fighting cats, and cats-as-idols, along with a few mice, a freestanding erect finger, and one goofily earnest replica of the orthopedic boot that was stabilizing the recently broken leg of Caroline Bourgeois, the curator of Fischer's exhibition, who cheerfully navigated the Accademia courtyard in a wheelchair. Considering the patrician environment of Palazzo Grassi, you felt that Fischer was appreciating what he called the courtyard's "slight sense of anarchy" no less than the students were. Their unfired clay sculptures would remain in the courtyard, exposed to the elements, until they dissolved into pools of mud. A steady rain began that night.

Rain also marked Fischer's first appearance at Palazzo Grassi, back in 2006: 1,700 flame-red plaster drops, to be precise, in the work "Vintage Violence" (2004/2005). Strung on fishing line, the drops "poured" from the frescoed clouds above the grand stairway to the ground-floor atrium below. That was in the debut exhibition of art from the collection of François Pinault, who had acquired a controlling stake in the historic building in 2005. Fischer has been included in every subsequent presentation of the Pinault collection at Palazzo Grassi and now is the first living artist to be given a monographic show there (on view through July 15) in a new program for the venue announced by Martin Bethenod, the CEO and director of Palazzo Grassi / Punta Della Dogana, François Pinault Foundation: Solo loan shows (there are more than a dozen lenders this time, including Fischer himself) will alternate with thematic exhibitions drawn exclusively from the Pinault collection. A selection of films and videos is slated for later this year.

Fischer's name may conjure images of blasted walls and excavated floors, but for this occasion he and Bourgeois have developed a thoughtful show that downplays spectacle in favor of analysis and association. Jokes aren't ruled out: a shaggy, headless, mechanical dog called "Keep It Going Is a Private Thing" (2001), presents its tail-wagging butt to Jeff Koons's polished, smug-seeming "Balloon Dog," a Pinault trophy piece that is permanently installed just beyond the atrium. But this "overview," as Bourgeois calls it, of Fischer's work is intended to highlight recurring images (clouds, chairs, tools, body fragments) and means (mechanization, suspension, assemblage). It offers a reckoning, however provisional, of what has been consistent within the artist's mercurial practice.

Important here, too, is the theme of "the double." The exhibition is bracketed by two embodiments of the studio. In the atrium is the work from which the show takes its name, "Madame Fisscher" (1999-2000). (Say the title aloud and you'll hear the word "fissure.") It's a "reconstitution" of the young Fischer's cluttered, chaotic studio during a residency in London, complete with trash tossed out the window. In the long gallery that overlooks the atrium is "Necrophonia" (2011), a traditional atelier (made in collaboration with Georg Herold, Fischer's former professor) that features figurative bronzes on tall studio pedestals, a red chaise, a changing area, and — for the preview, at least — a nude model as required for a life study class. Elsewhere, a pair of giant bent screws are propped against the wall of a room from which can be seen, across the atrium, two works from a 2011 series of blow-ups of Hollywood-style headshots that have been overlaid with photographs of a bent screw. Twin casts of "abC" (2007), a sculpture of an ornamental little bird cruelly suspended from a heavy chain, hang dangerously low right where the bifurcated stairs arrive at the upper floor.

There is another doubling of sorts, in the form of a more modest Urs Fischer exhibition covering the period 1996-2011 that opened last February and runs through May 28 at Kunstalle Wien. Fischer is adamant that the Venice and Vienna shows are not retrospectives. Rather, he says, they represent "possible scenarios of how I work." Bourgeois concurs, emphasizing that process — even a near-compulsion to be making things — is the key to understanding both Fischer and the reason for naming the show after an incarnation of his studio. Interesting, then, to consider one last "doubling" in the Palazzo Grassi exhibition: a pair of candles that are just-over-life-size effigies of Fischer and his friend, the artist Rudolf Stingel. Both are seated. Fischer slumps slightly in his chair, gazing past the wax wine bottle on the table before him. He seems the very embodiment of the melancholic artist, neither productive nor antic, but saturnine and still. The candles have been lit and will burn down during the course of the exhibition, vanishing like the cats in the Accademia courtyard.

To see images from "Madame Fisscher" at Palazzo Grassi, click on the slide show. 

When we say that Abel Ferrara’s “Pizza Connection” — a web serial for Vice now in its second episode — is loosely based on an FBI case against Sicilian heroin dealers, we mean loosely: As Ferrara explains in an interview paired with the series, “Pizza” is intended to seem as if it could be set in ‘70s, when the investigation (which brought Rudy Giuliani to prominence) actually took place, or the present. It is, other words, meant to transcend the very boundaries of time. (Which seems to be on Ferrara’s mind: His latest movie, “4:44 Last Day on Earth,” is about time’s effective end for humanity.) And instead of Sicilian drug dealers, what we’ve seen so far mostly consists of a beleaguered pizza man’s awkward interactions with the shady people who enter his shop (the Sicilians distributed their heroin through American pizzerias) interspersed with seemingly random shootings.

We trust that, plot-wise, this will all begin to cohere. But the ambiguities are what make the series fascinating to watch. Is the pizza man’s child three months old, as the dialogue suggests, or two years, as Ferrara says in the interview? (The boy appears to be two.) What is the significance of the pepper versus pepperoni toppings, which seem to vex the Puerto Rican cook? What about the Polish woman, whose native language confounds both the pizza man and her Albanian loan shark boyfriend? The show even undermines its own ambiguity, with a patron who sports patches for bands (Poison, Cinderella) that didn’t exist in the 1970s. The pizza man, who complains repeatedly of being “tortured,” clearly exists in some sort of limbo, which is perfectly consonant with the format of “Pizza Connection”: Neither a movie nor a television program, documentary nor straight narrative, this odd little web concoction will keep you guessing at its direction and intention. Or so it seems. We’ll have to keep watching.

Though China’s strongest signifiers at present might be endless factory floors, skies obscured by hazy pollution, and teeming hordes of newly minted consumers, video artist Yang Fudong’s installations mine a different era of cultural heritage: the heyday of Chinese cinema, as seen from 1940s Shanghai. In his current exhibition at Marian Goodman gallery, the artist, who catapulted onto the art-world stage with the meandering black-and-white film “Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest” at the 2007 Venice Biennale, embraces the buttoned-up elegance and stiff, poised beauty of the era’s movie-making, but also the underlying personal and political tension that welled up in the moment before everything changed with the Communist revolution.

“Fifth Night” (2010) is a lineup of seven screens each displaying a view into the same deserted urban plaza. Each of the screens concentrates on one of a diverse cast of characters inhabiting the same space, from two women in print dresses and a pair of vagabonds who get thrown out of a parked car to old men sitting still on a loveseat and a few roughed-up laborers in worn undershirts. The characters wander aimlessly, each the star of their own reveries, though they sometimes cross paths and make brief eye contact. The action unfolds across all the screens at once — the footage was filmed simultaneously in a complex cinematographic dance. To students of Chinese cinema, the character tropes and class stratification on display in the piece, communicated via costume and body language, is reminiscent of films like Zheng Junli’s 1949 anti-Nationalist parable “Crows and Sparrows,” a tale of an exploitative landlord manipulating the occupants of a Shanghai boarding house. Yang Fudong adopts that film's self-conscious, demonstrative acting style and echoes the richness of its black-and-white depiction of dense Chinese urban space. 

A second video, the single-channel “Ye Jiang (The Nightman Cometh)” (2011), is a more stylized exploration of China’s cinematic history, though it still focuses on the meanderings of several different characters. It stars a soldier fully decked out in ancient Chinese battle armor, a woman in classical regal dress, and another pair clad in the dapper fashion of pre-revolutionary Shanghai. Scattered action takes place, but the characters again wander through their strange frozen landscape scarcely interacting. Here, another cinematic reference comes to mind: The physical isolation and psychological distress of this forbidding panorama is familiar from the freighted setting of “Spring in a Small Town,” Fei Mu’s 1948 exploration of China’s ailing traditional upper class in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese war. Recently named the greatest Chinese movie ever made, the film's empty grasslands and silent, shell-shocked figures are spiritual predecessors for Yang's introverted protagonists. 

"Yang Fudong: Selected Works" is open at Marian Goodman gallery through April 28 

A version of this article will appear in the July/August issue of Modern Painters.

After the death of his abstract expressionist father, actor Robert De Niro made a point to preserve Robert De Niro Sr.’s studio and to prominently display his artwork on the walls of the Tribeca Grill, the restaurant the actor opened in 1990. “His devotion to the arts is probably the thing people know least about him,” New York Academy of Art chair Eileen Guggenheim told ARTINFO. Last night, the Academy honored De Niro’s dedication and support of the arts in TriBeCa at its annual ball, the glamorous, star-studded fundraiser to provide scholarships for rising artists.

Inspired by Van Cleef & Arpels’s Bals de Legende collection (the company sponsored the evening), the Academy’s event was a six-story veritable playground of open studios, masquerades, and performance art. In between perusing the students’ paintings, sculptures, and installations, guests posed in framed photo booths as Magritte’s “The Son of Man” – complete with top hat and apple – and as Frida Kahlo, donning flowered headbands and black shawls. The sounds of various live artists, including a dead ringer for Marie Antoinette playing a neon accordion, filled the space. Navigating the narrow maze of the artists’ studios, partygoers brushed past committee members of the A-list variety – including Liev Schreiber with a tiny, texting Naomi Watts in tow, Jeff Koons, Will Cotton, and Kim Catrall – and squeezed through a bevy of masked, monochromatic lycra-clad models decked out in Van Cleef & Arpels precious gems.  

In the cool basement, where a male performance artist repeatedly applied lipstick and left lip prints on the wall, sweaty guests sipping small bottles of champagne through straws found relief from the jam-packed, humid upper floors.

Click on the slide show to see images from New York Academy of Art's 2012 Tribeca Ball.

Picasso once ruffled a lot of aesthetic feathers by using Cubism to break up the traditional picture plane into a mess of fractured pieces, rearranging facial features, and painting people who didn’t look like people. The shock value the work once had, though, has largely faded — unless you are a member of the Russian Orthodox Church and you literally live in Siberia. In the city of Novosibirsk, Orthodox bishop Tikhon has called for the closure of a show of the artist's “Suite 347” series of erotic etchings, calling them a threat to public morals.

Tikhon took offense to the prints' graphic sexual nature, noting that there were an inappropriate number of children at the exhibition and grandiosely claiming that, "This exhibition has been forbidden around the entire world, even in Moscow it couldn't be shown." The latter statement doesn’t appear to be true: Picasso’s suite is also on view at public museums including the Pablo Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the National Library of France, and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, as well as previously in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, according to the Voice of Russia. Tikhon followed up his complaints by questioning whether the works were erotic at all. “[The exhibition] is called ‘Temptation,’ but I don’t know who would be tempted,” he quipped. 

Artgit, the company that organized the exhibition, has responded to the bishop's salvo: “His grace could have been deluded and misunderstood” about the show, the organziation wrote in a statement cited by the Moscow Times. “We hope that what happened will be sorted out and forgotten." The prints, so far, are still hanging.

The Russian Orthodox Church has come under fire lately for its social conservatism and political hypocrisy. In an op-ed for the Moscow Times, Russian journalist Victor Davidoff pointed out Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill’s recent scandal of publicly calling for asceticism while wearing a $30,000 Bregeut watch. Davidoff also notes that it recently came to light that in a meeting with a group of young people, Deacon Andrei Kurayev suggested that they “disrupt an upcoming Madonna concert by calling the police and reporting a bomb in the concert hall” as a form of protest against the musician.

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Last February, artist and curator Antonio Manfredi threatened to set fire to the permanent collection of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum outside of Naples to protest under-funding for the arts in Italy. This afternoon, he put his money where his mouth is. Standing before cameras, he torched a painting by the French artist Séverine Bourguignon, who watched the ceremony via Skype. Manfredi plans to burn three paintings a week from now on in protest.

In following through with his earlier promise, the outspoken museum director hopes to inspire a reversal of the harsh austerity measures that have laid particularly high burdens on the shoulders of Italy's cultural sector. Such problems are all the more difficult in the nation's south, where employment and illiteracy are high, corruption is rampant, and general attitudes concerning art are characterized by cynicism and mistrust. In Manfredi’s view, only extreme measures can expect to win the attention of Lorenzo Ornaghi, director of Italy's Ministry of Cultural Heritage.

In February, when he first made his threat, Manfredi sent a dossier to Ornaghi containing photocopies of every one of the works of art in the Casoria collection, which number more than a thousand. An email from the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum to ARTINFO explained the day's drama, as the deadline Manfredi had given the government to respond ticked away:

“At 6 PM in front of the entrance of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum (CAM), the work of Séverine Bourguignon was consumed by fire. The canvas was burned by the director, Antonio Manfredi, who waited all day for a signal from the institution’s staff. Filled with anger and emotion when the signal did not arrive, Manfredi, the staff of the museum, and the artist herself (via Skype), gathered to sacrifice a work of art from CAM's permanent collection. The French artist has confirmed the decision to destroy her work, a decision which she called “political,” necessary, and compelling in the face of these adverse circumstances. Tomorrow, again at 6 pm, Neapolitan artist Rosaria Matarese will set fire to one of her works. CAM, meanwhile, is waiting for someone to intervene.”

The Metropolitan Opera’s blockbuster production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle may be eliciting pity applause uptown, but a very different new staging of the epic saga in the East Village is earning its performers loud cheers and high-fives from the audience. Performance Lab 115’s “The Ring Cycle (Parts 1-4),” at the Incubator Arts Project through April 29, transfers Wagner’s mashup of German, Scandinavian, and Norse myths from Valhalla to a WWF-style wrestling mat. The opera’s bellowing gods are now the lords of a different ring — outfitted with ‘80s fright wigs and loud costumes of glittering Spandex — who settle their age-old scores in elaborately choreographed fake fights. Improbable though the shift of setting may seem, writers Jeremy Beck and Dave Dalton (who also directs) remain tirelessly faithful to Wagner’s original, and their obvious reverence for the material, combined with an indefatigable cast, make the unconventional adaptation a chest-thumping success.

The production opens as the commander of the gods, a Hulk Hogan-esque Wotan (Jeff Clarke), avoids paying the tag-teaming giants Fasolt and Fafner (Michael Melkovic and Christopher Hirsh) their due for having built his new abode. Instead of his promised sister-in-law he offers them the all-powerful ring made of gold stolen from the sultry Rhine maidens. Fafner accepts the ring, offing his brother in a brutal deathmatch that demonstrates its dangerous power. Wotan spends the rest of the show trying to recover the ring by prodding successive generations of his illegitimate offspring — another common trait of ancient gods and TV wrestling patriarchs — to battle Fafner.

The pumped-up ensemble alternates wonderfully between these moments of comically grandiose confrontation, and surprisingly touching scenes of heartbreak and high drama. As awesome as Wotan’s defeat of the peevish dwarf Alberich (Marty Keiser, in golden boxer shorts and matching cape) may be, his heartache at heaving to sacrifice his own son, Siegmund (Beck), is all the more crushing. Pro wrestlers, just like opera characters, have arena-sized emotions. Along the way are some spectacular battles (fight choreographer Casey Robinson and fights captain Christopher Hirsh merit no small amount of praise), strange but successful choices (Siegfried is portrayed as a pubescent boy scout and played by Seth Powers, who’s well over six feet tall), clever stylistic flourishes (such as Fafner’s lucha libre-like dragon costume), and plentiful acknowledgments of just how ridiculous the source material really is: “To Needlehole! That’s what it’s called.”

In slimming the Ring Cycle down to two and a half delicious hours while juicing it up with spectacular battles, Performance Lab 115 has managed what so few modernizations of myths pull off: to express the gods’ acutely human emotions while conveying the overblown scale of the conflicts they cause. Put in the ring with most conventional productions, this staging of Wagner’s cycle would surely emerge victorious, championship belt in hand.

To see images from Performance Lab 115's production of "The Ring Cycle (Parts 1-4)" click the slide show.

From the upcoming Zero1 Biennial in Silicon Valley to the buzz over London's “New Aesthetic” movement, there's no end to the buzz around art and technology these days. Yet for all the splash that these newcomers are making, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been there the whole time — and now, an entire new dedicated program places the university even further as a leading supporter of artistic explorations of innovative technology. With a $1.5-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MIT has announced that it is establishing the Center for Art, Science & Technology, or CAST.

“MIT is arguably one of the only institutions that can combine internationally recognized excellence in science and engineering with a strong and deep heritage in design and the performing and visual arts,” said MIT professor Philip S. Khoury, a co-author of the CAST proposal, in a press release. The announcement goes on to explain that the admirably ambitious goal of the center is to strengthen the role of the arts at the university, but also to offer “a model for other universities seeking to integrate exploration in the arts with scientific and technological inquiry."

The $1.5 million will go toward providing funding for faculty, researchers, and curators to develop interdisciplinary courses, academic projects, and exhibitions that investigate the intersection of art, science, and technology. Rather than being an isolated department, the CAST initiative will help to embed artists in other areas of the university and create organic opportunities for collaboration. The new center will also fund a biannual symposium on art, science, and technology, beginning in the 2013 academic year.

MIT’s Media Lab and Center for Advanced Visual Studies already host some of the most avant-garde explorations of creative technology, but the new initiative seems to push into the territory of artistically oriented departments like New York University’s burgeoning Interactive Telecommunications Program. As more artists turn to technology, programs like CAST and its attendant symposia are likely to become more common and more important in encouraging critical dialogue around the new bodies of work. 

In a moment where everyone feels compelled to do something, anything, quick – from the Occupy movement to Kony 2012 – Pilvi Takala’s standout piece in the New Museum’s show "The Ungovernables" conjures the strange power of simply doing nothing instead. Like Melville’s Bartleby, Takala worked in an office – this one Deloitte, the multi-national accountancy firm – and one day simply stopped working. Unlike Bartleby's famous “I would prefer not to," she was very happy to explain her non-productivity: “It’s good sometimes to try to do the work in your head” – rather than on a computer. Later in her internship, she stood in the elevator all day, explaining, to those who dared ask, that she thinks better in a dynamic environment.

Takala, born in Helsinki in 1981, likes to create awkward situations. Her brand of performance might be called embarrassment-endurance art. Last year, she repeatedly entered the European Union headquarters in Brussels, wearing a t-shirt with the suggested dress-code written on it, and was subjected to a different set of procedures each time: sometimes stopped and grilled by security staff, sometimes able to float through unchecked. In another experiment, security guards at Disneyland Paris explained that she couldn’t enter wearing her unauthorized, and pretty creepy, adult Snow White costume because she was not the “real” Snow White.

As petty rules proliferate – to compensate for a lack of regulation on a higher level? – Takala likes to poke tiny holes in apparently water-tight systems, and see what happens when the leaks spring. Recently, she talked about her New Museum project and her indefinable style of performance art. 

How did you choose the moment to start doing nothing and how did people respond to that shift?

When I started working there, I didn’t know what I wanted to do apart from first become a part of that community. I predicted that I would decide to behave in a weird way at one point, but I didn’t have any plans. So my first task was just to be believable in my role. I used my second name, Johanna, and a different background: I had studied marketing. I wasn’t working so much: I was just pretending to work or doing something simple like photocopying, because I didn’t have any skills for the job. After a couple of weeks I arrived at the conclusion that claiming to work while physically doing nothing would be a tough one for the people there to accept.

For how long did they tolerate you doing nothing?

My co-workers contacted their higher ups who would be responsible for kicking me out, but I had a deal with the company that I had this job for an undercover art project. The manager of marketing knew what was going on, so he would say everything is going OK.

Did you have Bartleby in your mind?

No, it wasn’t something I thought of before. I was familiar with it, but I only read it in full afterwards.

Is this performance political?

Politics is essentially a negotiation of the relationships we want to have together. But in the field of politics you need to propose a solution and I'm not proposing a solution in my work. I’m looking at what can be stretched in the given situation. We often assume that we share some kind of position, but the rules we share never cover everything. People in the workplace think they have a consensus about how things should go, what you’re supposed to do. But then something like this happens and it appears that a rule for this situation doesn't exist. Some people might think it’s a good way to work. Others might think it’s crazy.

You’ve said that your performances are like pieces of fiction happening in real life. Is it actually the other way around – pieces of the real exposing fictions?

Yeah, I mean fiction, it’s a fun thing to talk about. In "Real Snow White" for example I pretended to be a fan of Snow White, someone who enjoys dressing up. But I didn’t sign a contract to work at Disneyland so I couldn’t enter. You can only have one kind of fantasy there. If you’re a child you can be Snow White, but if you’re too old you cannot. I think most of my interventions reveal something that is going on which is absurd but also real.

But I wasn’t surprised that you weren’t allowed into Disneyland dressed up as Snow White.

No, me neither. But I was interested in how they would treat me – really nicely trying to get rid of me. I was aware that there would be visitors who would want to have their photos taken with Snow White so I knew there would be some kind of minor conflict. They have a dress code but it doesn’t say anything about dressing up. It just says you have to wear clothes, you have to wear shoes.

Your work seems to show that despite our assumptions about the strictness of rules, these rules can be stretched.

When you enter a new space you immediately scan how people are behaving and you start to imitate, start to limit yourself. Until you see somebody taking off their shoes you won’t take off your shoes. It’s a human behavioral thing. But most rules are unwritten – the ones that we observe and think we intuitively understand even if they’re not actually in place. When a rule gets stretched, there’s something that really changes, and something is left behind. Everyone won’t be sitting around at Deloitte and thinking, but a little bit of space opened up.

At the risk of a stereotype, Finnish people are usually quite taciturn. So what is the meaning of this for you, especially when you make these interventions in Finland?

Finnish people don’t easily express themselves, and they often want to be correct. So they were reluctant to come up to me during "The Trainee," they wrote an email or talked to other people about me. But you see it on their face that what you are doing is not OK. They only said something after staring at me for two days. They’re quite patient; they didn't judge me immediately. It’s good that they didn’t come up to me after just five minutes and say, "What the fuck are you doing?"

Is there a rule or a situation that you’ve noticed recently that you’d like to try to exploit or negotiate?

There are a lot of them on the pile! But there are some things that seem like they have more potential for negotiation than others.

How did you develop such a high tolerance for awkward situations?

That might have something to do with Finnishness. Finnish people don’t like to be embarrassed, they tend to take themselves quite seriously. I just find the embarrassing situation so interesting that I take it very seriously and I don’t want to ruin it by starting to laugh. But I didn’t have any formal training, just home schooled.