October 11, 2004
Around town, around the world
The Frieze Art Fair looms large over this week’s art world calendar, leaving dealers, collectors, curators, and critics barely enough time to re-pack after their return from the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. The fair opens to the public on Friday, so it’s safe to assume that the best events take place on Wednesday and Thursday. With a degree of cross-institutional synergy that would make any 1990s marketing manager proud, galleries and museums across London have coordinated events with the fair. On Monday Tate Modern hosted the press preview of Bruce Nauman’s “Raw Materials,” the newest in its Unilever-sponsored commissions for the building’s turbine hall; the opening reception is Tuesday night. Also on Tuesday, collectors who do not want to fight crowds for the right to purchase a new Marcel Dzama drawing—whose catalogue raisonné may eventually prove more daunting to compile than Andy Warhol’s—can head to Timothy Taylor, while Stephen Friedman presents drawings by London-based Scottish artist Paul McDevitt.
Going head-to-head with Frieze events, Sadie Coles opens a show of new work by Simon Periton and Modern Art presents the debut UK solo by New York resident Barnaby Furnas. After your mid-week buying spree, relax on Friday evening with the opening reception of “Expander,” a group exhibition presented at the Royal Academy of Arts. When you return to your room at the City Inn Westminster Hotel, don’t be alarmed by the message scrawled on your bathroom mirror, as it may have been put there by Monica Bonvincini, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Trisha Donnelly, or Richard Prince. It’s part of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, which means that even if it’s uninteresting, it's legal. Click here for a list of official talks and projects sponsored by the fair.
Elsewhere, the Orange County Museum of Art presents its California Biennial to the public beginning Tuesday; on Wednesday, Wade Guyton and Bojan Sarcevic talk with Will Bradley on the occasion of “Real World,” an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, and Craig Seligman talks about his book Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me at the New School in New York. On Thursday, Washington and New York museums do a swap: the Ana Mendieta exhibition, which premiered at the Whitney, opens at the Hirshhorn, where it was organized by Olga Viso, while the Romare Bearden retrospective organized by the National Gallery opens to the public on Madison Ave. Friday marks the start of “The Artist as Public Intellectual,” a two-day symposium sponsored by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and the Friends of the Secession. It features Roger M. Buergel (the thin-mustached curator of the next Documenta), Rosalyn Deutsche, Thomas Hirschhorn, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, and Mignon Nixon among others.
Tired yet? There are still gallery and exhibition openings to note: Trisha Donnelly at Casey Kaplan in New York on Friday; Hernan Bas at Sandroni Rey and Dave Muller at Blum + Poe in L.A. on Saturday.