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New York
Dana Schutz
“Canceled: Alternative
Manifestations and
Productive Failures”
Hélio Oiticica
Jana Euler
Adam Henry
“25 Years of Talent”
Martin Kippenberger
Noam Rappaport
Francesca Woodman
Borna Sammak
Julia Rommel
Tauba Auerbach
Brice Marden
Neil Goldberg
Dan Flavin
Los Angeles
Rigo 23
Berkeley
“State of Mind”
Chicago
Gustavo Díaz
“Feast: Radical
Hospitality in Art”
Houston
“Utopia/Dystopia”
Philadelphia
“First Among Equals”
Phoenix
Matthew Moore
Pittsburgh
Duncan Campbell
Providence
Spencer Finch
London
Richard Deacon
Cork
Josef Albers
Paris
David Balula
R. Crumb
Berlin
Katinka Pilscheur
Monika Baer
Victor Burgin
Jonas Burgert
Martin Boyce
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Brian O’Doherty
Hamburg
Wim Wenders
Bari
Nunzio
Milan
Yervant Gianikian and
Angela Ricci Lucchi
Rome
“D’après Giorgio”
St. Gallen
Haroon Mirza
Helsinki
Jacob Dahlgren
Jiri Geller
Santiago de
Compostela
Rafel G. Bianchi
Istanbul
Sislej Xhafa
Nevin Aladağ
Beijing
Yang Fudong
Guangzhou
Jiang Zhi
Singapore
Lee Wen
Havana
Havana Biennial
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Berkeley
“State of Mind”
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
(BAM/PFA)
2626 Bancroft Way
February 29–June 17
There are perpetual rumblings about ballot initiatives to split
California in half, somewhere in the middle of this vast
landmass. It’s exactly the kind of crackpot idea or pipe-dream
hyperbole that makes the Golden State (and its residents) so
appealing. “State of Mind” is the only exhibition of the Gettysponsored, Los Angeles-centric “Pacific Standard Time” lot to
migrate north, and it serves the vital function of expanding the
program’s geographic purview to include NorCal artists.
Perhaps even more important is that it demonstrates (as the
title asserts) that there is indeed a broader mindset in this part
of the country. Curators Constance M. Lewallen and Karen
Moss note the inadequacy of any codified regional aesthetic,
yet they use a tight historical window—in and around 1970—to
illustrate California’s unique confluence of conditions: youth
culture, political activism, feminism, a focus on the body, film,
and the freeing sense that, at the time, no one bought art here.
links
Bonnie Sherk, Portable Park II, 1970.
Performance view.
The exhibition focuses primarily on Conceptual practices, which had a more whimsical and confrontational
flavor here than East Coast brands did. John Baldessari’s California Map Project Part 1, 1969/2009, serves
as an emblematic work, both crunchy and smart, in that it literally surveys the entire state: For the work
Baldessari made giant letters (out of rocks, paint, and sand) on the landscape where they fell on a printed
map. The show also wisely includes well-chosen works by not quite as iconic but equally notable artists:
James Melchert, Gary Beydler, Stephen Kaltenbach, Bonnie Sherk, and pranksterish collectives like Asco
and Sam’s Café give the show its real cerebral kick.
With its numerous videos, slide shows, and films displayed alongside ephemera, performance
documentation, installations, and reconstructed sculptural works, “State” makes a case for California’s
enduring influence on contemporary art, particularly social and relational practices. Forty years ago artworks
taking the form of urban farms (Sherk), flash mob activism (collectively Joe Hawley, Mel Henderson, and
Alfred Young), lengthy walks (Bas Jan Ader), and performative occupation of space (Lynn Hershman Leeson,
Allen Ruppersberg, Linda Mary Montano) existed on the margins, but as the show demonstrates, these West
Coast impulses were way ahead of their time.
— Glen Helfand
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Chicago
Gustavo Díaz
THE MISSION
1431 W. Chicago Avenue
April 27–June 30
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At first glance, Gustavo Díaz’s drawing De natura sonorum
invisibilis (Sounds of the Nature of the Invisible), 2011, seems
premised on the smudge. Two fuzzy, roughly equivalent shaded
areas, aligned vertically and connected by faint skeins of pencil
lines, can be read in either abstract or representational terms:
They bring to mind Peter Halley in soft focus, or a pair of lungs
or kidneys. Get in closer, however, and a wealth of detail spills
forth: The apparent contours are made up of countless tiny
shapes, each filled with nearly microscopic stippling. In Díaz’s
drawings and similarly intricate acrylic vitrines, this movement
from further away to up close unveils obsessive virtuosity.
The Argentinean artist’s “Justificaciòn a priori” marks the
one-year anniversary of THE MISSION, whose primary focus is
Latin American art. Díaz’s sculpture draws on numerous
Argentinean precedents: less discussed figures such as
Rogelio Polesello and Margarita Paksa, who from the
mid-1960s onward employed industrial materials to produce
kinetic-Minimal hybrids. Yet within, and traipsing beyond, the
limits of Díaz’s containers are thousands of details: smaller,
meticulously cut acrylic pieces, side by side or one in front of
the other, superimposed designs. With the exception of his
Gustavo Díaz, De natura sonorum
6/5/12 2:42 PM
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invisibilis, 2011, graphite on paper, 24 x 19".
drawings, the artist’s gesture is rarely apparent, but in truth the
lines have been applied by hand, sometimes in vinyl or, in the
case of Mutatis mutandis distantis, 2012, burnt on, with a slightly yellow hue.
Díaz’s lengthy, esoteric titles inevitably recall Jorge Luis Borges, but his maniacal detail engages a different
legacy: the meditations of León Ferrari, Guillermo Kuitca, and others on 1970s state terror. Mapped onto the
kinetic geometries of a more hopeful era, infinitesimal marks accumulate, encoding the social where it seems
least likely to appear.
— Daniel Quiles
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“Feast: Radical Hospitality in Art”
SMART MUSEUM OF ART, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
5550 South Greenwood Avenue
February 16–June 10
“Feast” greets its visitors with a photograph by Laura Letinsky:
Untitled #8, Rome, 2009, which shows the aftermath of a
sumptuous banquet: a lace table cloth, scattered ornate dishes,
a stack of empty cockleshells so crisply in focus one can almost
hear them clink. It’s a smart appetizer for an exhibition that
considers the shared meal as medium, because viewers will
find they are often early or late to the feast and must
imaginatively reconstitute it through documented projections or
aftermath. The show displays instructions for meals such as
Filippo Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook and Alison
Knowles’s Identical Lunch, 1969, a Fluxus “score” for a tuna
Ana Prvacki, The Greeting Committee,
2011–, performance view.
sandwich like the one she habitually ate at her local diner. Just
as often, “Feast” showcases crusty remnants, including Rirkrit
Tiravanija’s Pad Thai, 1990, which features a battered wok, unwashed since Tiravanija prepared the titular
dish at Paula Allen Gallery in New York in 1990.
The exhibition invites viewers as if to a party: “Enjoy your time here, with this art and with each other,” exhorts
the wall text. One is primed for communal enjoyment by Ana Prvacki’s The Greeting Committee, 2011–, a
station just outside the show’s doors (a literal hors d’oeuvre) where staff offer a teaspoon of slatko, a sweet
jelly with traditional symbolic meaning for Serbians, from humble mason jars arranged around a tarnished
silver tray. The Greeting Committee disarms by communicating simply and directly through the sensory,
delivering an experience of Prvacki’s Serbia in a sweet zing on the tongue. The conceit of the meal-asmedium swings between these poles of an immediate appeal to perceptual enjoyment and a heightened
demand on the critical and imaginative faculties that must re-create the meal––in the future or the past.
— Julia Langbein
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Houston
“Utopia/Dystopia”
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
1001 Bissonnet
March 11–June 10
With over one hundred photo and photomontage works from
the past 150 years assembled in a single room,
“Utopia/Dystopia,” taken as a whole, is as much a study in
jarring ruptures and envisioned continuities as the images and
objects displayed are. The Kunstkammer-like installation
ranges across modern political aspirations and private reverie,
as well as their darker complements, in various cut-and-paste
styles. The cartoonish critique of John Heartfield’s rotogravure
German Natural History, published August 16, 1934, in the
magazine AIZ, in which the heads of Weimar Republic leaders
are superimposed over metamorphosing pupae, meets the
Surrealist cinematic beauty of Toshiko Okanoue’s little-shown
Joel Lederer, 200804012143, 2009, ink-jet
collages like Falling, 1956, in which a headless female torso
print, 24 x 30".
parachutes through the open floor of a rat-infested locker room
to a cityscape below. Rare archival documents, such as Esaki
Reiji’s proto-Photoshop advertisement of a multitude of infants, Collage of Babies, 1893, mix with
contemporary fantasies like Josh Bernstein’s triptych After Four Days, 2011, a reimagining of imperiled Gulf
Coast conquistador Cabeza de Vaca through mixed-media self-portraiture.
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The unabashedly synthetic approach, both on the level of the exhibition and the individual works, emphasizes
the paradox of separating utopian and dystopian vision. Often the difference is a matter of (historical)
perspective or mutually dependent proximity. Throughout the exhibition, the promise to remake the world is
never far from the threat of undoing it, and often these impulses appear, juxtaposed, in the same work. The
timely inclusion of Arata Isozaki’s ink, gouache, and gelatin silver print Re-ruined Hiroshima, project,
Hiroshima, Japan, Perspective, 1968, shows haunting remedial architectural constructions that
simultaneously seem to emerge from and return to a postnuclear Japanese landscape. Even the most idyllic
views, such as Joel Lederer’s digital compositing of Second Life greenery in the ink-jet print 200804012143,
2009, take on cautionary undertones in the close company of other images that reveal, and perhaps once
helped conceal, tragic realities.
— Kurt Mueller
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Philadelphia
“First Among Equals”
ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA
University of Pennsylvania, 118 South 36th Street
March 14–August 12
In his 2007 Harper’s magazine essay “The Ecstasy of
Influence,” Jonathan Lethem probed the boundary between
creative influence and plagiarism. Citing Bob Dylan’s
borrowings from his contemporaries and forebears in service of
his own material, Lethem concluded that appropriation (or its
lure) can actually engender originality. It’s a good entry point
into this exhibition, which considers mutual influence,
connectedness, and collaboration between artists and art
collectives across disparate generations and zip codes.
Curated by Alex Klein and Kate Kraczon, the show will rotate
seventy-seven Los Angeles– and Philadelphia-based artists
Alex Da Corte, SCENE TAKE SIX (detail),
2012, mixed media, dimensions variable.
and collectives who willfully draw from one another to create
work and evolve their practices. It also includes a stellar
schedule of performances, events, and conversations during the course of its five-month run.
The connectivity is most apt in Alex Da Corte’s sprawling installation SCENE TAKE SIX, 2012. Partially
inspired by two discrete installations that Da Corte exhibited last year at Philadelphia’s artist-run galleries
Extra Extra and Bodega, the work flanks both sides of a central, freestanding gallery wall. Da Corte asked
nearly two dozen artists—including Anna Betbeze, Sam Anderson, and Strauss Bourque-LaFrance—to
contribute singular pieces for him to respond to and include. Also on view in the installation are Da Corte’s
“dedications,” re-creations of specific works by such artists as Karen Kilimnik, Jim Hodges, and Polly
Apfelbaum. The result is a manic amalgam. Da Corte’s own contribution to the installation includes
scavenged materials, including shampoo, soda pop, bubble wrap, and terry cloth. The overflowing effect is
both droll and inspired—a feeling not unlike the one that occurs after spending too much time feverishly
perusing the Internet for inspiration.
— Carmen Winant
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Phoenix
Matthew Moore
PHOENIX ART MUSEUM
1625 N. Central Avenue
February 11–June 10
Matthew Moore grew up on a farm near Phoenix, in desert that
was increasingly encroached on by suburban development until
the recent burst of the housing bubble. His latest installation,
And the Land Grew Quiet, 2012, centers on this personal
history and the vicissitudes of our relationship with the land on
which we live.
In one large gallery, white walls carved in low relief tell the story
abstractly as they progress from organic lines suggesting
schematic natural topographies, to grids of surveyed parcels of
land, to plans of residential neighborhoods filled with concentric
streets and cul-de-sacs. Ticker tape printed with stock prices
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Matthew Moore, And the Land Grew Quiet
(detail), 2012, mixed media, dimensions
6/5/12 2:42 PM
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variable. Installation view.
from market crashes and with quotes from John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath unspools from slots in one section of wall,
while, attached to another, the pendulum rods of metronomes seem to mark the time between cycles of boom
and bust. In the center of the room, eight wooden pedestals display rollers holding long scrolls of paper
embossed with ghostly writings by both the artist and his grandmother about their family’s generations of life
on the farm.
A second room contains only the framing for a tract home—the skeleton of a half-built house, really—that lists
and appears to sink into the floor. Slightly larger than life (its studs are actually painstakingly crafted
enlargements of two-by-sixes and other lumber), it stands uneasy and vertiginous, a viscerally affecting
materialization of real estate speculation halted midconstruction. But it also evokes a ruin, quietly equating
our rapacious appetite for using up the earth with the fall of empires in the past. A committed regionalist with
a universal scope, Moore makes his personal confrontation with the vagaries of land use and economic
downturns into a melancholy meditation on human folly.
— Joseph Wolin
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Pittsburgh
Duncan Campbell
CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART
4400 Forbes Avenue
April 28–July 8
In his latest exhibition—comprising three films and a set of
screenprints— Duncan Campbell juxtaposes television network
footage with dramatic reenactments while using structuralist
techniques, for instance incorporating scratched film and
garbled audiotape, to undercut intimate biographical
monologues. The effect arrived at is a kind of melancholic
antiportrait, one whose viewers may well understand
Campbell’s subjects less and less as the films progress. Best
illustrating this point is Bernadette, 2008, one of the three films
on view, which takes on Bernadette Devlin—the Irish republican
activist who, in 1969, attained a parliamentary seat on her
twenty-second birthday. Devlin, called “Fidel Castro in a
mini-skirt” by Time magazine, captivated the media when she
Duncan Campbell, Bernadette, 2011, still
punched the conservative speaker of the house for implying
from a black-and-white and color film in 16 mm,
that the British army had acted in self-defense on Bloody
37 minutes.
Sunday. After an attempt was made on her life in 1981, she
mostly disappeared from the public eye, but she still lingers in its imagination, serving as the subject of
political murals in Northern Ireland, several documentary films, and a recently announced Hollywood biopic.
Campbell’s film, however, is less about Devlin and more about the little we actually know of her. In the striking
opening sequence of the film, we are given a glimpse of splayed female toes on a sofa; this image is casually
followed by hair blowing in the wind, then a beautiful pair of eyes, and a gappy set of front teeth. The audio
then pops in and our heroine pronounces the unromantic line “one of the plans of the people’s democracy.”
After watching the three films on view—Bernadette; Make It New John, 2009 (which takes on John
DeLorean); and Arbeit, 2011 (about Hans Tietmeyer)—we have the feeling not of having digested these
characters but, on the contrary, of having been made complicit in their very creation.
— Emily Newman
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Providence
Spencer Finch
MUSEUM OF ART - RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN (RISD)
224 Benefit Street
February 24–July 29
As a graduate student at RISD, Spencer Finch copied Claude Monet’s Basin at Argenteuil, 1874, on a dare.
The replica is now on view several paces from the original, in “Painting Air,” an exhibition staged by Finch that
features his own work alongside pieces from the university’s collection. His choice of Monet is telling,
reminding us that Finch—a maker of minimal and often abstract watercolors, photographs, and
installations—is in fact a conceptual landscape painter. Like Monet before him, Finch probes his optical
experience of the natural world—and the subjective limits of his perceptions. To describe the sublime qualities
of atmosphere, light, reflectivity, and color is to wrestle with paradox; the poignancy of Finch’s work lies in his
steadfast aim to quantify these phenomenological conditions at once fugitive and singular.
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In the first of the show’s two sections, Finch has arranged
others’ pieces—ranging from Peruvian textiles to Willem de
Kooning abstractions. The grouping is unusual and provocative,
and the connections to the artist’s own practice are not
immediately apparent. The second space houses Finch’s own
work from the past five years. His wall-size 8456 Shades of
Blue (After Hume), 2008, comprises twenty-eight sheets of
twenty-two-by-thirty-inch paper. In making the piece, based on
a thought experiment posed by philosopher David Hume, Finch
diluted blue inks one drop at a time, creating with every drip a
unique shade that he then applied to each successive panel.
The resulting grid seems as straightforward as it is
Spencer Finch, 8456 Shades of Blue (After
unfathomable. The exhibition shares its title with the largest and Hume) (detail), 2008, 28 watercolors on paper,
perhaps most ambitious work on view: a site-specific
dimensions variable.
installation of over one hundred square sheets of glass,
hanging from a grid in the ceiling, and surrounded by a mural of colors based on Monet’s garden in Giverny,
France. One person walking by is enough: A zephyr gently orbits the pieces of glass on their axes, and their
surfaces swell in turn with reflective color. With “Painting Air” Finch not only describes the intangible quality of
light, but transforms it into substantive material.
— Carmen Winant
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