PROGRAM
David Zwirner Online
Thursday, June 10, free, 10:00 am – 7:00 pm www.davidzwirner.com
One of the most popular and innovative galleries in New York City, David Zwirner, will be kicking off its new online Program with an all-day global livestream event on June 10, consisting of six talks with thirty-five artists in four cities. The festivities begin at ten o’clock in the morning with a video walkthrough of Zwirner’s global galleries, led by directors and partners. At eleven, award-winning director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight,The Underground Railroad) will discuss Kerry James Marshall’s “Black and part Black Birds in America” series. At one, Pulitzer Prize winner Hilton Als delves into Alice Neel’s figuration. At two-thirty, designers Emily Bode of BODE and Aaron Aujla and Benjamin Bloomstein of Green River Project LLC will explore conceptual art and appropriation. At four, 2020 Hugo Boss Prize recipient Deana Lawson examines the legacy of Diane Arbus. And at six, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl will talk about the state of the art world today. All interactive conversations will be moderated by writer and curator Helen Molesworth.
“Over the last year we realized the traction and engagement that we could create on our own website, without an art-fair moment attached to it,” Zwirner said in a statement. “Because of this, we are establishing Program, a new event series that culminates the art calendar and brings together the energy and excitement we have seen in June, but on a global scale. It will mimic the in-person dialogue and discovery you would experience at a physical opening or an art fair through global livestreaming sessions. For the inaugural presentation of Program, our artists have created significant new artworks that will be seen for the very first time.”
Program will take viewers inside Zwirner’s galleries in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong, highlighting historic and brand-new works by such artists as Josef Albers, Francis Alÿs, Carol Bove, Raoul De Keyser, Stan Douglas, Marlene Dumas, Isa Genzken, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Sherrie Levine, Nate Lowman, Kerry James Marshall, Juan Muñoz, Oscar Murillo, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch, Thomas Ruff, Dana Schutz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Luc Tuymans, Franz West, and Lisa Yuskavage; Christopher Williams helped design the stream with Deliverable: Video Asset nos. 1–10. To see the works in person, you can make appointments here; currently on view in New York City are Rose Wylie’s “Which One” and Bove’s “Chimes at Midnight,” with Kusama’s “I Want Your Tears to Flow with the Words I Wrote” opening June 17, followed June 24 with “More Life,” solo exhibits from Mark Morrisroe, Silence=Death, Derek Jarman, and Marlon Riggs in conjunction with the fortieth anniversary of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis.
Back in August, desperate to get out of New York City and see some art amid the pandemic lockdown, my wife and I headed north to the Berkshires to MASS MoCA and the Clark Institute, two museums that had reopened with timed tickets, limited capacity, mask wearing, and social distancing. It was my second visit to MASS MoCA and my wife’s first to the extraordinary institution, whose complicated story is told in Jennifer Trainer’s debut documentary, Museum Town, which releases virtually through BAM on December 18. (You can read about our trip here.)
After watching the film, you’ll be ready to head north as well, even though New York museums are now open. As it says on one of Jenny Holzer’s marble benches at MASS MoCA, “Words tend to be inadequate.” You have to see it to believe it.
Trainer notes her unique relationship with the museum at the start: “In 1986, I moved from Manhattan to the Berkshires as a freelance journalist. I soon caught wind of a preposterous idea to turn an old factory into the world’s largest museum of contemporary art and broke the story for the New York Times. Then I signed on to help. Building MASS MoCA from the ground up consumed the next twenty-eight years of my life. . . . I’ve moved on from the museum, but I knew I had to finish writing the story I’d started nearly three decades ago. It was simply too big, too beautiful, too improbable to leave untold.”
Trainer and cowriters Noah Bashevkin and Pola Rapaport reveal it’s all those things and more, going back to the sprawling location’s beginnings as Arnold Print Works, which operated from 1860 to 1942, then as the Sprague Electric Company from 1942 to 1985, whose sudden and unexpected closure decimated the town. But then Thomas Krens, the former director of the Williams College Museum of Art, had the idea of turning the industrial complex into a contemporary art museum, and Williams graduate Joseph C. Thompson joined him in what the latter called “a radical rethinking of what a museum could be.” (Krens and Thompson became founding directors of MASS MoCA, a position Thompson held for thirty-three years.) That astonishing idea sparked ongoing economic and political battles over the value of such an institution for the town of North Adams, which was not a bastion of modern-art lovers. “It was hell on earth to get open,” Thompson remembers.
The residents of the struggling working-class town were not exactly keen on the plan. “People in North Adams are not ready for this,” recalled museum volunteer Ruth Yarter, who had been working at Sprague since 1943, while she was still in high school. Amid the location’s fascinating history, some of which is narrated by Meryl Streep, Trainer focuses in on some of the remarkable art that has been installed in large warehouse spaces, in nooks and crevices, and in gravity-defying outdoor spaces, including Primary Separation, a sculpture by Don Gummer, Streep’s husband.
“MASS MoCA isn’t so concerned about the art world and the museum world. What it really wants to do is make art happen,” curator Denise Markonish says, and much of it is art that can’t happen anywhere else; MASS MoCA thrives on allowing artists to take risks. Trainer shows temporary and long-term installations by Louise Bourgeois, Laurie Anderson, Sol LeWitt, Spencer Finch, Franz West, Joseph Beuys, Michael Oatman, and others — seeing James Turrell testing out his immersive Into the Light room is a special treat — and doesn’t shy away from the controversy surrounding Christoph Büchel’s Training Ground for Democracy, a fierce court fight about creative control over the unfinished work.
Nick Cave surveys the future home of his massive installation “Until” in Museum Town
Interspersed throughout the documentary is an irresistible behind-the-scenes look at the installation of American multidisciplinary artist Nick Cave’s 2016-17 “Until,” a vast, fantastical landscape of found objects, chandeliers, crystals, lawn jockeys, and myriad other items that address racism, gun violence, police brutality, and gender issues; the name of the exhibition comes from the phrase “innocent until proven guilty.” (You can see my photos here.)
“This is just this place of imagination and dreaming,” Cave says as he works with a large staff from the museum, including director of fabrication and art installation Richard Criddle and fabricator Megan Tamas, to make the seemingly impossible come to life, revealing that collaboration is an art form itself.
MASS MoCA also hosts live events in its unusual spaces, so Trainer has filled the documentary with an impressive soundtrack featuring songs by Bill Callahan, Wilco, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, David Byrne (whose exhibition “Desire” ran at the museum in 1996), Ruthie Foster, the War on Drugs, Lucius, and others in addition to an original score by John Stirratt and Paul Pilot.
“How the hell did it happen?” architect Simeon Bruner asks at the beginning of the film. Thanks to Trainer, now we know.
Ledelle Moe’s “When” consists of giant hollow heads across the floor and tiny ones on back walls (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
MASS MoCA
1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA
Wednesday – Monday, $8-$20 timed tickets in advance, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm www.massmoca.org
With New York City museums opening up again, we decided to prepare by heading up to the Berkshires to visit MASS MoCA and the Clark Institute, both of which began welcoming visitors post-pandemic lockdown the second week of July. We used the trip as sort of a test case, examining how they were doing things to gauge our approach to arts institutions here in the five boroughs. In our opinion, they are doing everything right, so rent a car and get up there as soon as you can.
At MASS MoCA, a repurposed industrial complex in North Adams with more than one hundred thousand square feet of gallery space indoors and outdoors that opened in 1999, one must order timed tickets in advance; we showed up twenty minutes early but were told nicely that we would have to wait. We spent some of that time looking at Gamaliel Rodríguez’s sixty-foot-long mural La travesía (“Le voyage”), which equates the architecture at MASS MoCA with that of his native Puerto Rico and other locations, in an eye-catching purple tint, which you can see for free by the store and the café (where you can get freshly made lemonade and a killer BLT).
Jarvis Rockwell’s Us is a parade of fun figurines (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Ticketholders line up outside to enter the museum; the now ever-present dots keep everyone at a distance of six feet. Once inside, communing with the art feels completely safe, as the number of visitors is kept small and most of the galleries are vast and wide open. At times we were the only ones in a space (save for a museum employee or two), and at other moments, even if there were a dozen people in the same gallery, we were all extremely far away from one another. (In addition, everyone was aware of social distancing, so there was never any crowding, as we all were respectful of the situation, and everybody wore a mask, over their mouth and nose.)
It’s nearly impossible to experience any of the art without thinking about the Covid-19 crisis, even if it was made long before that. The centerpiece exhibit, on view through January 3, is Ledelle Moe’s “When,” which consists of fragile-looking colossal heads and bodies that are actually made of weathered concrete, many lying on their sides, with hollow insides you can peer into. The installation is particularly meaningful given the current movement of taking down monuments and statues; on the far wall and upstairs are hundreds of tiny heads that are like the twitterverse commenting on the sight or another group of the displaced, relegated to the background.
Blane De St. Croix’s “How to Move a Landscape” (through September 2021) is a breathtaking collection of environmental works that don’t bode well for the future of the planet. Moving Landscapes is a miniature train in which each car carries a different kind of landscape, circling through two holes in the wall. Broken Landscapes is a miniature re-creation of the US-Mexico border where fencing has been put up; the piece is based on De St. Croix’s travels to fifteen border crossings. You can walk under Hollow Ground, a giant hunk of foam permafrost with holes in it; get up close and personal with Collapsing Pillar, a vulnerable tower that could seemingly fall at any moment; and get on your knees to look up and down at Alchemist Triptych, a trio of gold, silver, and copper tornadoes that decrease in diameter as they approach the floor, where you can look into a void going deep into the earth.
For “Amity/Enmity,” Massachusetts artist Ben Ripley repurposes images from the Field Museum’s 1933 exhibit “Races of Mankind,” which comprised more than a hundred anthropological sculptures by Malvina Hoffman, inspired by white nationalist Sir Arthur Keith, a leader in the scientific racism movement who announced the “amity-enmity complex,” which deals with human tribalism, racial segregation, and evolution. Ripley transposes images of himself over photographs and 3D scans of Hoffman’s sculptures, redefining them. He asks, “This historical example of the forceful authority of museums and the seductive power of beauty leading to visual arguments whose consequences we are only now starting to understand suggest an urgent examination of the responsibility of the visual arts on a larger scale. Are our museums leading to a fruitful exchange of diverse ideas? Is our visual art reductive and divisive or humanizing and complex? What are the future consequences of a pursuit of ideological purity? How can art be used to heal and persuade rather than create an exclusive echo chamber? Who do artists and museums serve?” Those are pertinent questions as arts institutions return amid a health crisis and protests about systemic racism.
ERRE re-creates border scenarios in his powerful multimedia installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
ERRE (Marcos Ramírez) also takes on the border dispute in “Them and Us” (“Ellos y Nosotros”) (through summer 2021), setting up a sample San Ysidro Port of Entry. ERRE, who splits his time between his native Tijuana and San Diego, offers visitors the choice of entering through two corridors, one marked “Us,” the other “Them.” The gallery contains such works as Toy-an Horse, the burned remains of his 1997 two-headed Trojan horse; colorful Eye Charts featuring quotes from Thomas Jefferson, US senator Dennis Chavez, Sitting Bull, and others; the video The Body of Crime (The Black Suburban), which reveals blatant corruption in law enforcement; Sing-Sing, an abstract iron cage with a bed inside; Orange Country, four orange prison jumpsuits hanging on a wall, representing a father, mother, and two kids, right next to The Cell, a jaillike solitary confinement structure; and Of Fence (which can be read as “offense,” a word with multiple meanings), a deteriorating, rusted corrugated-metal fence that separates the exhibit while referencing other types of physical and psychological separation.
Ad Minoliti’s “Fantasías Modulares” is a candy-colored wonderland (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Ad Minoliti’s “Fantasías Modulares” is a fantastical trip back to childhood, with adorably cute characters that feel like they have emerged from a candy-colored cartoon world where there’s no difference between humans, animals, and machines, no gender, race, class, or political gaps. Incorporating painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation, the artist, based in Buenos Aires and Berlin, creates an idyllic place to take a playful break away from an ever-more-challenging real world.
You need to reserve timed tickets (at no extra charge) for James Turrell’s “Into the Light,” a look at his Roden Crater project, several light sculptures, and the pre-socially-distanced Perfectly Clear (Ganzfeld), in which a half dozen people experience a heavenly, mesmerizing color-changing environment, and Hind Sight, a two-person-at-a-time journey into complete darkness.
Among the other must-see exhibits are Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing Retrospective,” a small but tantalizing Louise Bourgeois sculpture show, several rooms of Jenny Holzer’s multimedia truisms, Sarah Oppenheimer’s S-334473 (ask the museum worker to operate them for you), Jarvis Rockwell’s Us parade of character toys and figurines, Barbara Ernst Prey’s “Building 6 Portrait: Interior” ultrarealistic paintings, Franz West’s outdoor Les Pommes d’Adam sculptures, and Joe Wardwell’s Hello America: 40 Hits from the 50 States, which was inspired by J. G. Ballard’s 1981 novel and uses quotes from Negativland’s 1991 song “I Still Haven’t Found Snuggles.” Unfortunately, long-term installations by Stephen Vitiello, Michael Oatman, Gunnar Schonbeck, and Anselm Kiefer are currently closed. Be prepared to spend a full day at MASS MoCA, as there is art everywhere, and you’ll feel safe every step of the way. In addition, the institution is hosting live outdoor concerts in the central courtyard, where the audience hangs out in large individual rectangles drawn on the ground; upcoming shows feature Marco Benevento on September 12 and June Millington on September 19.
Giuseppe Penone’s Le foglie delle radici (“The Leaves of the Roots”) greets visitors to the Clark (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
CLARK ART INSTITUTE
225 South St., Williamstown, MA
Tuesday – Sunday, $20 timed tickets in advance, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm www.clarkart.edu
Since 1955, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has been displaying the couple’s extensive, impressive collection, along with special exhibitions. It reopened in July and is doing a terrific job with its Covid-19 regulations; timed tickets are required, and every gallery has a limit of how many visitors are allowed in at any one time, from two to see Edgar Degas’s exquisite Little Dancer Aged Fourteen to eight in the museum shop to a maximum of twenty-five in the largest space; I’m not sure there were twenty-five people total in the museum when I was there. The permanent collection is an absolute joy, with paintings and sculptures by Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Mary Cassatt, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jean-François Millet, Frederick William MacMonnies, Claude Lorrain, Édouard Manet, Giovanni Boldini, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and Berthe Morisot. Don’t miss Paul Gauguin’s strikingly yellow Young Christian Girl, George Inness’s glorious Sunrise in the Woods, John Singer Sargent’s unusual Fumée D’ambre Gris (Smoke of Ambergris), Claude Monet’s inviting The Cliffs at Étretat, Auguste Rodin’s frightening Man with Serpent, and J. M. W. Turner’s Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water, which appropriately resides on a wall all by itself.
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Model D Pianoforte and Stools is a highlight of the Clark collection (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Through December 13, you can catch “Lines from Life: French Drawings from the Diamond Collection,” containing more than forty chalk, crayon, graphite, charcoal, ink, and graphite works by Paul Cézanne, Eugène Delacroix, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Théodore Géricault, Odilon Redon, Degas, Millet, Morisot, Pissarro, and others, a gift from Herbert and Carol Diamond, longtime friends of the Clark.
Lin May Saeed, Thaealab, cast bronze, lacquer, hazelnuts, 2017 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Mexico City-based artist Pia Camil’s “Velo Revelo,” comprising three large-scale fabric sculptures, will be on view through January 3. But you’ll have to hurry if you want to see Lin May Saeed’s touching “Arrival of the Animals,” which continues at the Clark’s Lunder Center at Stone Hill through October 25, a brief walk or quick drive from the main building. The German artist explores the relationship between animals and humans in her work, which ranges from drawings and paintings to sculptures using such materials as steel and lacquer or polystyrene foam, plaster, wood, and cardboard. As you wander around the space, you’ll come upon a pangolin, a lion school, seven sleepers hiding in a cave to escape religious persecution, a panther, and, outside, a bronze thaealab, which is Arabic for fox. Saeed has also chosen works from the Clark to complement and inform her installation, including pieces by Niccolò Boldrini, Albrecht Dürer, Delacroix, and Géricault.
J. M. W. Turner, Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water, oil on canvas, 1840 (photo courtesy the Clark Institute)
As a major bonus, especially during this time of Covid-19, the Clark offers lots to see outside across its 140-acre campus. You can hike through a forest, linger by Schow Pond, walk across a grassy plain, sit under cross-bred trees, and climb up a hill while also enjoying art. When you first arrive, you’re greeted by Giuseppe Penone’s Le foglie delle radici (“The Leaves of the Roots”), a thirty-foot-high upside-down bronze tree with a living sapling growing out of the top, which can now be interpreted as a metaphor for the state of the country at this tense moment. The Clark’s first outdoor exhibition, “Ground/work,” has been delayed because of the pandemic, but Analia Saban’s Teaching a Cow How to Draw is already up, in which Saban has repurposed the long wooden split-rail fence that separates the museum from the outdoor grounds by adding “drawings in space” to the boundary, art lessons (including the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratio) meant not only for us but for the cows that live in the hills.
Thomas Schütte’s Crystal offers a respite and beautiful views of the grounds (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
You’ll also find William Crovello’s red granite Katana sculpture on the grass; four of Jenny Holzer’s white granite benches from “The Living Series” situated by the large pond (you can sit on them, but first read their ever-more-relevant messages, such as “It can be startling to see someone’s breath, let alone the breathing of a crowd you usually don’t believe that people extend that far”); and Thomas Schütte’s Crystal, an open, asymmetrical structure made of wood and zinc-coated copper near the top of Stone Hill where you can take a break and savor lovely views of the grounds, with no one around you, as if you have the world to yourself.
The Clark sets out very clear rules during Covid-19 crisis (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Met, MoMa, the Morgan, the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Whitney are now open in New York, with the Guggenheim, El Museo del Barrio, the New-York Historical Society, the Cloisters, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Rubin, MoMA PS1, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, and others scheduled to do so in the coming weeks. One can only hope that their approach to reopening compares favorably to those of MASS MoCA and the Clark, which are doing everything right. Just remember to wear your mask, observe social distancing, wash your hands, and respect your fellow art lover.
Peter Fischli’s “Snowman” is centerpiece of exhibition in Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at MoMA (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Museum of Modern Art
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden
West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Early hours: open daily 9:00 – 10:30 am, free www.moma.org online slideshow
Two years ago, the subversive DIY aesthetic of longtime collaborators Peter Fischli and David Weiss was on view at the Guggenheim in the engaging retrospective “How to Work Better.” Fischli has now headed to MoMA — Weiss passed away in 2012 — for the “Artist’s Choice” show “If Everything Is Sculpture Why Make Sculpture?” It’s the thirteenth in the three-decade-old series, which has previously turned over the curatorial reins to Mona Hatoum, Elizabeth Murray, David Hammons, Stephen Sondheim, and others, and is the first one to take place in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where the Swiss artist has created an intervention that will delight regular visitors to the outdoor space, who will notice subtle and not so subtle changes, while also charming newcomers to the garden. Only one of Katharina Fritsch’s “Figurengruppe (Group of Figures)” stands on the main level, “Yellow Madonna,” the others apparently spending the summer in the Hamptons. Ben Vautier’s word painting on wood, “If Everything Is Sculpture Why Make Sculpture?,” is a rare example of a painting hanging outside, not concerned about the elements ruining it. Only the first three bronze versions of Henri Matisse’s exquisite “The Back” adorn the north wall, the ghostly outline of the missing fourth clearly visible. Fischli and Wade Guyton’s “Untitled Aspen Wall Nr. 6” is an out-of-place gallery wall with nothing hanging on it. Fischli has left in several mainstays of the garden, including Aristide Maillol’s “The Mediterranean” and “The River,” Hector Guimard’s “Entrance Gate to Paris Subway,” Pablo Picasso’s “She-Goat,” and Isa Genzken’s “Rose II” while adding Tony Smith’s “Moondog 1964,” Herbert Ferber’s “Roof Sculpture with S Curve, II,” and Robert Breer’s “Osaka I” white dome.
Peter Fischli and Wade Guyton’s gallery wall sits empty in MoMA sculpture garden (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The centerpiece of the exhibit is “Snowman,” a human-size, frost-covered copper snowman in a large vitrine with a special coolant system to prevent it from melting in the summer heat. It’s adapted from a 1990 commission Fischli and Weiss made for a thermic power plant in Saarbrücken, Germany, that used its own energy to keep the snowman frozen. It’s a big crowd pleaser while also continuing the artists’ DIY sensitivity — as Fischli has stated, the snowman is a “sculpture that almost anyone can make” — and questioning of just what art is. “The snowman may be a metaphor for our climate crisis, but it’s running on electricity, so it’s a contradiction, because it’s also contributing to global warming,” Fischli told the New Yorker last summer, “but the piece is about taking care of something and protecting it . . . and being dependent on something. Someone else has to take care of him. And the contradiction between artificial and nature, because I’m making snow from a machine.” Oh, and be sure to pick up a brochure in one of Fischli’s specially designed boxes. The snowman and other works selected by Fischli (by Franz West, Mary Callery, Elie Nadelman, and William Tucker) will remain on view in the garden through next spring. You can also visit the garden on Thursday nights when MoMA presents concerts at 6:30 with Combo Chimbita on July 26, OSHUN on August 2, Xenia Rubinos on August 9, Kemba on August 16, Zenizen on August 23, and Mutual Benefit on August 30.
There’s nothing unbearable about the Public Art Fund’s “Lightness of Being,” an airy, playful look at the lighter side of life through shape, form, and color. Continuing in City Hall Park through December 13, the exhibit, curated by Nicholas Baume and Andria Hickey, features an all-star lineup of established and emerging artists having fun with steel, bronze, marble, aluminum, concrete, and other materials. James Angus’s red-and-green “John Deere Model D” tractor lies sideways on the grass, looking like it’s been stretched out in Photoshop. Olaf Breuning’s “The Humans” is a ritualistic circle of white comic-book-like creatures, while Gary Webb’s “Buzzing It Down” is a childlike four-part totem. Be sure to get up close to check out the detail on Evan Holloway’s “Willendorf Wheel.” Stand on the platform in Daniel Buren’s “Suncatcher” to see how the circuslike top transforms the light shining through it and right onto your body. Don’t trip over David Shrigley’s “Metal Flip Flops,” which look more out of place than ever now that the cold weather is here. No, that bicycle is not twisted into a circle as the result of a bad accident but instead is Alicja Kwade’s “Journey without Arrival (Raleigh).” Franz West’s untitled pastel pieces form a set of exclamation points on his career, as these were finished after his death last year. Grab a seat on Sarah Lucas’s cast concrete vegetable benches named “Florian and Kevin.” Cristian Andersen’s “Inverse Reverse Obverse” totem melds cubism with surrealism. And you don’t need to be scared of that clown sitting on the bench; it’s actually Ugo Rondinone and Victoria Bartlett’s “Dog Days Are Over,” a performance piece that takes place Fridays from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm.
The Frieze Art Fair returns to Randall’s Island for its second year, after having made quite a splash in its New York debut last May. Filled with pomp and circumstance, the fair is set in and around a long, winding tent designed by the SO-IL firm, housing displays by more than 180 international galleries, featuring works by an all-star lineup of artists that includes Ai Weiwei, Andreas Gursky, Brice Marden, Carl Andre, Carsten Höller, Catherine Opie, Chris Ofili, Dan Graham, Dan Perjovschi, Danh Vo, Do Ho Suh, Dorothea Tanning, Douglas Gordon, Ernesto Neto — and that’s just the first part of the alphabet (going by first name, per the Frieze website). Outside, the sculpture park boasts pieces by Tom Burr, Saint Clair Cemin, Tom Friedman, Paul McCarthy, Nick Van Woert, Franz West, and others, several created specifically for Frieze. There will be special projects by Liz Glynn, Maria Loboda, Mateo Tannatt, Marianne Vitale, and Andra Ursuta; Glynn has created a secret bar that serves cocktails and magic, while Ursuta’s “Would It Were Closing Time, and All Well” reimagines the fair as a village, complete with cemetery. Haroon Mirza, Trisha Baga, and Charles Atlas and New Humans will provide audio-based installations. Among the discussions are “Suzanne Lacy in Conversation with Nato Thompson” dealing with public art and activism, “Readings: Art in Literature” with Katie Kitamura, Rachel Kushner, and Ben Marcus, who wrote a specially commissioned story for Frieze, and talks with Lydia Davis, John Maus, Joan Jonas, and Douglas Crimp. Admission is a whopping $42, which is difficult to justify, especially for the casual art fan, who might be better served by checking out some of the other art fairs this weekend — NADA, Parallax, Pulse, cutlog, and Collective .1 are all up and running, with tickets ranging from free to $25. In addition, to get to Randall’s Island, visitors have to book a ferry ($12.50 round trip) or bus ($5.50) in advance or take a car service, taxi, or drive themselves (parking is $20 – $40), so attendance is quite a commitment. Is it all worth it? That’s the $42 question.
Martha Friedman lets her art speak for itself in “Amygdalas” installation in Frieze Sculpture Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Update: The second edition of Frieze turns out to be a rather pleasurable experience, with strong work, a well-laid-out space, and lots of food and drink (from Roberta’s, Mission Chinese, Saint Ambroeus, the Fat Radish, Frankies Spuntino, and others). Here are our highlights: Seung-taek Lee’s rock and frame pieces at Gallery Hyundai, Ryan McGinley’s nude photographs at Team, Adrian Lohmüller’s “The Ivory Girl” at Sommer & Kohl, Anish Kapoor’s pair of mind-bending optic charmers at Lisson, Daniel Arsham’s glass and resin life-size figures at Galerie Perrotin, Doug Aitken’s sonic table at 303, Daniel Firman’s “Linda” hiding near KAWS’s “NTY” painting, Tom Burr’s “Blue Smoke and Blue Mirrors,” Martha Friedman’s tonguelike “Amygdalas” in the Sculpture Park, Paul McCarthy’s giant red “Balloon Dog” at the entrance, Tom Friedman’s lip-smacking pizza, Twinkie, Ding Dong, and Sno Ball at Luhring Augustine, and Mateo Tannatt’s “The Smile Goes Round,” consisting of seven different-colored resting benches that feature live performances and written text that examines the differences between the sexes.
