John McCracken, Mandrake, 1989, polyester resin, fiberglass, plywood, 93 1/8 x 19 1/8 x 22 3/8.
John
McCracken occupies a distinctive place in the Minimal field. While his
sculptures of portals and pyramids and his justly celebrated planks
(begun in 1966) betray a fascination with architectural forms shared by
other Minimalists, the SoCal artist, unlike his peers, fabricated the
great majority of his fiberglass and polyester resin works himself, by
hand, and his kitschy Mandala paintings of the 1970s evoke the
acid culture of Haight-Ashbury far more than the arid ambience of the
white cube. Complemented by a comprehensive catalogue with contributions
by the artist, the curator, John Armleder, Daniel Baumann, and Marianna
Vecellio, this retrospective will offer more than fifty works from the
past forty-eight years.
Thomas Schütte, Melone 1:5, 1986,
wood and paint, eleven parts. Installation view, Landesmuseum für Kunst
und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, 1987. Photo: Tomasz Samek. © 2009 Thomas
Schütte/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Using
irony and subtle humor to challenge monumentality, Thomas Schütte’s
work counters the "straightness” of modernity with gestures of stumbling
and failing—a strategy that should prove key in taking on the bombastic
architecture and difficult National Socialist past of Munich’s Haus der
Kunst. Centered around an eighteen-foot-high Styrofoam and plaster
"anti-monument”—here referencing Schütte’s "Mann im Matsch” (Man
in Mud) series—this substantial survey brings together more than one
hundred works made since the early 1980s, including sculptures,
architectural models, watercolors, and ceramics. Curators Dander and
Weski highlight Schütte’s reflections on "ambivalence, tension, and
conflict” throughout this wide range of media, but the accompanying
catalogue is dedicated solely to the artist’s newest watercolors. André Kertész, Satiric Dancer, 1926, black-and-white photograph, 9 x 7". FOTOMUSEUM WINTERTHUR
ZURICH
Through May 22
Curated by Annie-Laure WanaverbecqAndré
Kertész has hardly lacked for intelligent attention in recent years. (A
wide-ranging retrospective toured in 2005.) But as his career was
nearly as long and eventful as his life (he died at ninety-one in 1985),
this exhibition of some three hundred photographs— from early work shot
while he was serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army to his late New York
Polaroids—nonetheless promises both new material and new perspectives.
Organized chronologically and punctuated by self-portraits, the show
follows Kertész’s parallel lives as a witty, poetic avant-gardist and a
busy pioneer of personal photo reportage. Books and an extensive
selection of magazines supplement the framed images, providing an
unusually broad view of the artist as working photographer. Jiří Skála, Exchange of Handwriting, 2006–10, installation view, Art in General, NYC. WIELS CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTRE
BRUSSELS
Through May 1
Curated by Elena FilipovicArt
history is built from the lagan of competing traditions. Filipovic’s
polemical group show, which borrows its title, "The Other Tradition,”
from Gene Swenson’s 1966 curatorial gambit at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, congeals an artmaking attitude that
privileges live events and "constructed situations” over objects. Here’s
the crux: Does the badass definite article in the title do the work of
felling a singular, principal straw man, "Tradition”? And by now, after
his relative commercial success and Guggenheim coup d’état, is it a
stretch to position Tino Sehgal, one of a dozen artists in the show, as
outside a dominant paradigm? That said, it’s hard not to get jazzed over
an exhibition that features an artist, Pilvi Takala, whose
"interventions” include not doing any work while at work and calling it
art. Chow time for the dialectic. Ewa Partum, Samoidentyfikacja (Self-Identification) (detail), 1980, black-and-white photocollage on paper, eight parts, each 59 x 79 7/8". From "Three Women.”
Despite
their different backgrounds and heterogenous, multilayered oeuvres,
Polish artists Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL (Lach-Lachowicz), and
Ewa Partum were grouped together from the 1960s through the ’90s by
critics who discussed them in terms of their works’ common feminist
agency. In this show, titled after a work by Pinińska-Bereś (who passed
away in 1999), selections from each artist’s primary medium—sculpture,
photography, and text/language, respectively—as well as documentation of
ephemeral actions, will offer a broad view of the three practices
following art historian Marsha Meskimmon’s process-related concept of
feminism. Meanwhile, a rich catalogue promises to provoke reflection on
what, in the 1970s, we called feminism, and how this term might operate
today. Louise Bourgeois, Couple IV, 1997, fabric, leather, stainless steel, plastic, 20 x 65 x 30 1/2". © Louise Bourgeois Trust. Photo: Christopher Burke.
FUNDACION PROA
BUENOS AIRES
Through June 26
Curated by Philip Larratt-SmithThis
major survey of Bourgeois’s work, titled "The Return of the Repressed,”
is being billed as the "first in-depth examination of the artist’s
relationship to psychoanalysis.” Yet that over-eggs the pudding, since all Bourgeois exhibitions—be they modest or ambitious—must
engage psychoanalysis as the most convincing mode of formal
interpretation. Indeed, the sculptor’s Freudian analysis was as
transformative for her work as Jackson Pollock’s Jungian analysis was
for his. At Fundación Proa, an exhibition of nearly one hundred pieces
made between 1946 and 2009 takes on this subject directly, as does a
catalogue featuring an examination of the late artist’s recently
uncovered writings. Cold-shouldered by AbEx society, Bourgeois should
now be seen as having but one AbEx parallel—Pollock himself_. |
