November 28, 2003
Meta Top Ten list
There are eleven top ten lists in Artforum's annual December "Best Of" roundup. Here, in no particular order, is what the Guardian calls the "digested read," my subjective pick of the ten best from the 110 best. I've added my own comments immediately afterward.
01. Felix Gmelin, Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II (Color Test, The Red Flag II), "Delays and Revolutions" at the Venice Biennale. "Time travel, 2002 to 1968. Gmelin juxtaposed two small-scale, rather intimate projections: one of his father participating in a revolutionary action in Berlin in February 1968 as one of several runners carrying a red flag through the streets and the other a re-creation of the event which the artist staged in Stockholm last year. The action in Berlin culminated with one of the protestors, having gained access to the town hall, emerging with the flag on a balcony; Gmelin's replay omits only this detail, implying that political protest is foreclosed. 'Politics' as theme, gesture, and look: The red flags, separated by thirty-plus years, function as nostalgic, seductive, glamorous icons." (David Rimanelli)
This was my favorite discovery at this year's Venice Biennale. Rimanelli sums it up well, but the humbleness of the entire enterprise seems important to note. The videos' silence, the familial connection, and the fact that the Scandanavians paused their protest run at stoplights made this a gentle provocation. Really beautifully done.
02. Philip Guston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "As myth would have it, Philip Guston abandoned abstraction because, as the artist himself once wrote, he was 'sick and tired of all that Purity.' But what could be more 'pure'--at least to this Gustonphile--than the outsize eyeballs, immobilized limbs, and nervous fingers that populate his late work? As Michael Auping's traveling retrospective (originally organized for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) so persuasively demonstrated, Guston could endow a shade pull with as much affective purity as graced the skittish, anxious pinks of his abstract canvases." (Pamela M. Lee) and "A lot of what got me excited this year annoyed many. Most. Almost everyone. (E.g., Liz Phair's Liz Phair, which is a totally great CD and, not taking away any of its heart, I'd argue, a conceptual project that posits: What songs should today's pop stars sing? Imagine sappy John Mayer crooning Phair's 'H.W.C.') But let me start with something unimpeachably killer: the Guston retrospective, elegantly, brilliantly curated by Michael Auping (of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where the show originated)--thorough but not tiring, and organized to reveal a heretofore almost unthinkable career-long continuity. Some critics wondered how Guston would rank against the heavy hitters (Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, etc.). They found out: Unfathomably sad, joyous, ugly, and rapturous, Guston's as good as it gets." (Bruce Hainley)
Bruce Hainley's pointless aside about Liz Phair aside, I've now seen this exhibition twice at the Met, where it remains on view through the beginning of January. It is a fantastic survey, fulfilling the appetite for Guston's art that The Fogg Art Museum's Philip Guston: A New Alphabet created in 2000-01. I'll be posting a review of the exhibition on here shortly.
03. Janet Cardiff, Forty Part Motet (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London) and Hans Op de Beeck, My Brother's Gardens. "Typical. You wait years for one artwork that acts as a handmaiden to Thomas Tallis's lapidary sixteenth-century chorale Spem in Alium--and then two come along in short succession. Cardiff's widely shown piece from 2001 (which finally arrived in London) enclosed the viewer/listener within a magic circle of loudspeakers, each dedicated to one chorister, and conjured an uncanny, spectral ensemble; Belgian melancholic Op de Beeck used the same music to elevate the animated centerpiece--130 cross-fading drawings featuring ornamental gardens--of his opiated but aching 2003 video My Brother's Gardens. Each was uniquely deliquescent, although the English composer's shade might well query the billing." (Martin Herbert)
I had the pleasure of seeing Forty Part Motet all alone on a Monday at the Whitechapel, returning me to square one: I first experienced (and it is an experience) this piece all alone at P.S. 1 during her survey exhibition in 2001. It is hauntingly beautiful, and lands safely in any "top ten artworks created in the last ten years" list I might make.
04. Cai Guo-Qiang. "Weeks before the artist's spectacular, if flawed, incendiary display in Central Park, I saw Cai igniting "gunpowder drawings" at the Grucci family's fireworks compound on Long Island. It was thrilling work, rendering beauty from violent combustion, pairing the most fragile and destructively capricious of media--paper and fire. The scattered, squat concrete buildings of Grucci's evoked for me nuclear weapons bunkers in the desert West, which seemed fitting, not only because Cai has done work at the Nevada Test Site, but because Grucci in the 1950s helped create pyrotechnic simulations of atomic weapons." (Tom Vanderbilt)
I did not see the gunpowder drawings--either their creation at the Grucci factory or their presentation at the Asia Society--but I did see, and hear, and feel the artist's Light Cycle in Central Park. The first explosion caught me by surprise, stopping my conversation dead in its tracks and shaking the Earth beneath my feet. Never before have I seen so many New Yorkers of different stripes in rapt attention to an artwork. Never mind the rain that shortened out a few of the explosions in the "ring" (and the naysayers who complained afterward), as it was breathtaking nonetheless.
05. Rodney Graham, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Wwestfalen, Dusseldorf. "I like everything about Graham: the installations, the films, the books, the album covers, and the music. Thanks to the large midcareer survey at Dusseldorf's K21, I now see how it all fits together. The idea of a circular narrative structure plays out in an entertaining way in the three loops Vexation Island, 1997, How I Became a Ramblin' Man, 1999, and City Self/Country Self, 2000. In the last, I'm very fond of the dandy who kicks the peasant's ass (and I can't get over his peculiar shoes). The epitome of lovely, pretentious urbanity!" (Daniel Birnbaum)
Rodney Graham's Photokinetoscope was the first exhibition presented at 303 Gallery after my arrival in Chelsea during Fall 2001. I fell for the work, hard, and haven't looked back since. I had the distinct pleasure of spending an afternoon with a small survey of five films and a video at the Madison Art Center in Madison, WI, where I was attending my sister's college graduation. I reviewed the show here and wish that the K21 show was coming stateside.
06. Banks Violette. "The highly worked black, white, and silver surfaces of Violette's drawings, seen in several Chelsea shows this year, belie the emotional angst of his subjects: teenage gangs, rock 'n' roll suicide, juvenile delinquents. Symbols from Motorhead album covers and X-ray images of skulls and galloping white horses are rendered in smooth graphite drawings. Brooding black enamel sculptural forms--a broken drum kit, for example-evoke the dark side of the heavy-metal American dream." (Chrissie Iles)
I think I'm late in getting to the Banks Violette game. I first saw his work a little over a year ago, but first appreciated it in the context of "Back in Black," the summer group exhibition at Cohan and Leslie. I think that Iles is right to focus on his drawings, which seem fully realized whether large scale or small, and whose subjects definitely do justice to the Cady Noland references that are made by critics. (Her art is an obsession he and I share.)
07. "Cruel and Tender," Tate Modern, London. "Tate's first-ever photography exhibition, curated by Emma Dexter and Thomas Weki, was authoritative, comprehensive, and exhaustively researched. It traced the tradition of rigorously observed, artistically ungarnished photography, bequeathed from August Sander to Walker Evans, onto Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank in the '50s, and resting, in the present day, with Rineke Dijkstra and Paul Graham. The exhibition was particularly lucid in describing the relationship between the Dusseldorf triumvirate (Gursky, Struth, Ruff) and the US landscapists who preceded them (Shore, Robert Adams, Baltz). Great documentary photography doesn't just illustrate the world indexiaclly but articulates meaning in it, and this exhibition provided an object lesson for the myriad young photographers and video makers currently appropriating the raw aesthetics rather than the philosophical or political substance of the documentary mode." (Kate Bush)
This exhibition was a pleasure to behold. Kate Bush is spot-on in her description of it, but I'd add that it's the 1950s Roberts--Adams and Frank--that came away the winners. One could view them as the central hub around which all these other photographers, before and after, spun.
08. Spencer Finch (Postmasters, New York) and Edward Krasinski (Anton Kern Gallery, New York). "Conceptualism past and present. Kasinski is a septuagenarian Pole working in a vein reminiscent of Daniel Buren. Knowing that--and that this isn't the work of a clever-clever recent MFA grad--makes some difference in the work's reception. Collectors take note: The hanging mirrors bisected by a blue stripe would look sensational, albeit rather perilous, in a gigantic crazy bathroom. For Eos (dawn, Troy), 2002, the centerpiece of Finch's show, the artist visited the site of the ancient Trojan ruins, wherever they are in the former Asia Minor, and with precise optical instruments determined that, contra Homer, the famous "rosy-fingered dawn" is more of a bluish purplish shade. With ceiling-mounted flourescent lights wrapped in various colored filters, Finch precisely "re-created" the light in Troy at dawn." (David Rimanelli)
09. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, Tate Modern, London. "You can't help but gasp as you descend into the Turbine Hall, its cavernous space dissolved in a wafting mist, a giant sun glowing at its far end. It's an illusion, conjured from no more than mirrored ceiling, some puffs of smoke, and some two hundred yellow sodium lamps. Yet if the magic of the piece fades quickly, its radian tpleasures, in the gathering fall, linger on." (Kate Bush)
10. Damien Hirst, Armageddon, Gagosian Gallery, New York. "The dark side of this old-fashioned vision of utopia is Hirst's Apocalypse Now. From a safe distance, the nine-by-twelve-foot monochrome expanse of bluish black might be mistaken for a branc off Serra's tree; but up close, i tturns out to be a carpet formed by a nightmare infinity of dead flies, preserved for eternity as our civilization's hideous tombstone. This may be the scariest prediction yet of the whimper, not the bang." (Robert Rosenblum)
This "painting's" reputation preceeded it. For a week before I had the chance to see it people came in to the gallery talking about it: how it looks, how it smelled, how sensuous and creepy it was. Probably the only time I'll put Damien Hirst on a top ten list.
(In case anyone is looking and minds these excerpts; all quoted material originally appeared in the December 2003 Artforum and the copyright remains with the original authors.)