Tag Archives: whitney museum of american art

ANNUALS, BIENNIALS, TRIENNIALS

Lesley Dill’s “Woman in Dress with Star” and Glenn Ligon’s untitled oil painting are cleverly juxtaposed at 2012 Annual (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE ANNUAL: 2012
National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through April 29, $12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

In an artistic convergence that occurs only once every six years, the National Academy’s annual, the Whitney’s biennial, and the New Museum’s triennial are all on view at the same time. And in a perhaps unexpected convergence, all three reveal that less is more with shows that avoid jam-packing galleries with brand-name artists and instead concentrate on fewer works with a focus on installation. At the National Academy, a mix of cross-generational academicians and invited non-academicians makes for an effective examination of contemporary American art, albeit through a more traditional lens than at the biennial and the triennial, using juxtaposition as a means to an end. Figurative paintings by Burton Silverman, Daniel Bennett Schwartz, Gillian Pederson-Krag, and Philip Pearlstein are seen alongside abstract works by Dorothea Rockburne, Richard Mayhew, David Driskell, and Eric Aho. Sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud, Jeffrey Schiff, and Arlene Shechet line the center of a hallway of paintings. Lesley Dill’s “Woman in Dress with Star” stands in front of Glenn Ligon’s untitled oil painting, each incorporating text. The annual also includes a trio of video installations: Joan Jonas’s “Lines in the Sand,” Kate Gilmore’s “Break of Day,” and Carrie Mae Weems’s three-channel “Afro-Chic,” which keeps the funk pumping on the second floor. The 2012 Annual is the best the National Academy has put on in several years.

Gisèle Vienne with Dennis Cooper, Stephen O’Malley, and Peter Rehberg, “Last Spring: A Prequel,” mixed-media installation, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2012
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Fifth Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 27, $12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm (pay what you wish Fridays 6:00 -9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

“Art discourse serves to maintain links among artistic subfields and to create a continuum between practices that may be completely incommensurable in terms of their economic conditions and social as well as artistic values,” Andrea Fraser writes in “There’s no place like home,” an essay that serves as her contribution to the 2012 Whitney Biennial. “This may make art discourse one of the most consequential—and problematic—institutions in the art world today, along with mega-museums that aim to be all things to all people and survey exhibitions (like the Whitney Biennial) that offer up incomparable practices for comparison.” As it turns out, curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders have not turned the biennial into all things for all people, instead putting together a manageable collection of contemporary American art that leans heavily toward performance and installation, showing off the space of the Marcel Breuer building instead of cluttering every nook and cranny with anything and everything. Visitors can walk through Oscar Tuazon’s “For Hire,” Georgia Sagri’s “Working the No Work,” and Wu Tsang’s “Green Room” and watch the New York City Players get ready for Richard Maxwell’s new site-specific play in an open dressing room. Gisèle Vienne’s “Last Spring: A Prequel” features a young animatronic teen standing in a corner, mumbling text by Dennis Cooper. More traditional art forms like painting and photography tend to get lost in these kinds of shows, but the disciplines are well represented by Nicole Eisenman’s uneasy figures, Andrew Masullo’s eye-catching small canvases filled with bright colors and geometric patterns, and Latoya Ruby Frazier’s photographic examination of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. If you’re thirsting for some music, there’s Lutz Bacher’s “Pipe Organ,” Lucy Raven’s “What Manchester Does Today, the Rest of the World Does Tomorrow” player piano, and Werner Herzog’s “Hearsay of the Soul,” a four-channel video installation that brings together Hercules Segers’s etchings with music by Ernst Reijseger. And then there’s Robert Gober’s exploration of the career of Forrest Bess, which has to be seen to be believed. For a closer look at the myriad live performances, talks, and workshops, visit here.

Triennial visitors can take a seat on Slavs and Tatars’ “PrayWay” while contemplating Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE UNGOVERNABLES: 2012 NEW MUSEUM TRIENNIAL
New Museum
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Wednesday – Sunday through April 22, $12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm (free Thursdays 7:00 -9:00)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

Three years ago, the New Museum’s inaugural triennial featured international artists who were all younger than Jesus was at his death at age thirty-three. The 2012 edition, “The Ungovernables,” comprises sculpture, painting, video, and installation that challenge the status quo often in subtle ways, commenting on world economics, corporatization, and politics through creative methods. In Amalia Pica’s “Eavesdropping,” a group of drinking glasses stick out from a wall, referencing both the surveillance and the digital age. Danh Vo’s “We the People” consists of sheets of pounded copper that are actually re-creations of the skin of the Statue of Liberty, a different way to look at freedom. Pratchaya Phinthong’s “What I learned I no longer know; the little I still know, I guessed” is a square collection of Zimbabwean paper money whose specific value continually decreases. Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado’s O Século (The Century) shows debris being thrown from a building, resulting in a visual and aural cacophony of chaos. The Propeller Group’s multichannel “TVC Communism” details the creation of a modern advertising campaign selling communism. Slavs and Tatars’ “PrayWay” is a folded prayer carpet on which visitors are invited to sit and get lost in contemplation that need not be religious. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings examine race and gender. Hassan Khan’s short video, Jewel, depicts two men dancing using signifiers set to a propulsive Cairene song. José Antonio Vega Macotela’s “Time Exchange” details a four-year collaboration with Mexican prisoners in which tasks are exchanged instead of money. Pilvi Takala’s riotous “The Trainee” follows the Finnish-born artist’s intervention as she pretends to be working in a Deloitte office. And Gabriel Sierra’s interventions involve placing such objects as a ladder and a level, which he refers to as devils, directly into the walls of the museum. As with the National Academy’s Annual and the Whitney Biennial, “The Ungovernables” avoids clutter and overt political statements, steering clear of the obvious and instead offering a varied and intriguing look at the contemporary art world

SHERRIE LEVINE: MAYHEM

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 29, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

Walking through Sherrie Levine’s expansive “Mayhem” at the Whitney, one is overcome by a warm feeling of familiarity that is enhanced upon further examination of the unique conceptual world the American artist has created. For more than thirty years, the Pennsylvania-born Levine has been exploring ideas of ownership, gender, class, authenticity, and the creative process itself through painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. By reappropriating, repurposing, and recontextualizing existing imagery, often through dramatic acts of repetition, Levine brings up questions of artistic reproduction, art history, and how time and place influence perception. Taking works by Edgar Degas, Alfred Stieglitz, Piet Mondrian, Walker Evans, Marcel Duchamp, Gustave Courbet, Constantin Brancusi, and many others, Levine breathes new life into them, bringing them into the modern age and offering new ways to see them while wholly making them her own. For “After Walker Evans 1-22,” Levine photographed seminal WPA pictures taken by Evans and arranged them in a grid on the wall. For “Fountain (Madonna),” she cast a bronze urinal, combining Duchamp with Brancusi, and placed it in a vitrine to emphasize its artistic value. For the “Melt Down” series, Levine used a computer program to reproduce works by Mondrian, Monet, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, turned each into a monochromatic color field, and then filled canvases with that new color. In “La Fortune (After Man Ray),” she took a billiard table out of Man Ray’s “La Fortune” surrealist painting, creating four life-size replicas and placing them in a room, turning the Whitney into a pool hall. And in “Newborns,” Levine re-created a pair of Brancusi’s “Newborn” sculptures, one in black, one in white, and placed each on a grand piano, based on how she saw a Brancusi sculpture displayed in a photograph of a British collector’s home, bringing the private sphere into the public. “Mayhem” is not arranged as a chronological retrospective; instead, it forms a fascinating journey through the mind of an artist who lays bare the process behind her conceptual work, creating a very different kind of “group show” by a single artist.

As a bonus, you can find Man Ray’s original 1938 “La Fortune” painting in the current “Real/Surreal” exhibit (through February 12), the second in the Whitney’s ongoing reexamination of its permanent collection as it prepares for its eventual move downtown. The exhibition also features works by Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, George Tooker, George C. Ault, Louis Guglielmi, Rockwell Kent, Charles Sheeler, Yves Tanguy, and others depicting scenes that are not quite as realistic as they might initially appear. Also at the Whitney right now are “Three Landscapes: A Film Installation by Roy Lichtenstein” (through February 12) and “Aleksandr Mir: The Seduction of Galileo Galilei” (February 19), in which the Polish-born Swedish and American artist attempts to reconstruct Galileo’s gravity experiments by building a tower with tires.

XAVIER CHA: BODY DRAMA

Jennie Epland performs Xavier Cha’s “Body Drama” at the Whitney (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 9
Admission: $12-$18 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays from 6:00 to 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org
www.xaviercha.com

Xavier Cha blurs the line between performer and audience, live and recorded action, and public and private space, calling into question what is being witnessed in her multimedia installation “Body Drama.” Every hour on the hour beginning at 12 noon on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday and 3:00 on Friday, one of eleven actors straps on a specially made body-mounted camera that extends in front of them, focused on their face. For twenty minutes, the performer wanders around the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery, acting as if they are seeing something terrible. The all-white space is empty save for a diagonal wall cutting across one side, dividing the location in an uneven, off-balance way. The actor can writhe on the floor, twist slowly along the walls, get trapped in the corners, all the while looking terrified. During the performance, visitors are allowed to move within the gallery, watching but not actually interacting. It’s a disconcerting experience, looking at a person frightened by something that you can’t see even though you are in the same general area. It also breaks down the usual barrier between the performer onstage and the audience in their seats, making the viewer’s emotional and physical involvement that much more palpable. After the actor leaves the gallery, a carefully edited video of a previous performance is screened on the diagonal wall, but in this case only the face is visible, offering a completely different perspective on the fear that overtakes the performers and confounds the viewer, becoming even more visceral. In some ways, it even makes the viewer feel responsible, as if maybe they could have saved the terrified performer, but after having done nothing is forced to watch the results of their inaction. Born in Los Angeles in 1980 and based in New York City, Cha has challenged the expectations of the viewer amid unusual spaces in such previous works as “Topiary Tags,” “Looking Glass,” “Two-Way Mirror,” and “Portal”; in “Body Drama,” she once again confronts the audience, forcing them to question both what they are seeing and what they are feeling, resulting in a complex, captivating experience. (Also at the Whitney right now is the splendid “Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World,” the innovative “Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools,” and the fascinating “More Than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson.”)

THE FINE ART OF COMICS, WITH GARY PANTER, ART SPIEGELMAN, AND CHRIS WARE

Lyonel Feininger, “Wee Willie Winkie’s World,” from the Chicago Sunday Tribune, November 25, 1906, commercial lithograph, © 2011 Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (photograph © the Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday, July 20, $8, 7:00
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

In conjunction with the splendid exhibit “Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World,” the Whitney is presenting the special program “The Fine Art of Comics” on July 20. The wide-ranging retrospective traces New York native Feininger’s career path, which began with such comic strips as “The Kin-der-Kids” and “Wee Willie Winkie’s World” for the Chicago Tribune. Discussing the work of Feininger and the state of the comics industry will be three living legends: Art Spiegelman, who started the highly influential RAW with his wife, Françoise Mouly, back in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize for his two-part graphic novel Maus; painter, designer, and commercial artist Gary Panter, creator of the Jimbo books and a two-time Emmy winner for his set designs for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse; and Chris Ware, who has released such complex comics as Acme Novelty Library and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. The panel will be moderated by journalist John Carlin.

SEVEN WORKS BY TRISHA BROWN

Stephen Petronio walks down the outside of the Whitney as part of Trisha Brown “Off the Wall” show at the Whitney (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

OFF THE WALL: PART 2
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
September 30 – October 3, free with museum admission of $12-$18
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org
Stephen Petronio: “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building” slideshow

The Trisha Brown Dance Company continues its fortieth anniversary celebration with four days of live performance art at the Whitney, re-creating seminal works inside a second-floor gallery, in the museum’s outdoor sculpture court, and down the side of the building. The exciting weekend begins Thursday afternoon at 3:30 with “Falling Duet I,” “Leaning Duets I,” “Walking on the Wall,” and “Spanish Dance” in the Mildred & Herbert Lee Galleries, along with films and the sound installation “Skymap,” and will be repeated on October 1 at 3:30 & 7:00 and October 2-3 at 12 noon and 3:30. “Floor of the Forest” will be staged by members of the 2010-11 Second Avenue Dance Company at 4:30 in the sculpture court on Thursday and repeated numerous times through Sunday. Yesterday people marveled as a woman made her way down the outside facade of the Whitney, but that was no mere daredevil; it was choreographer Elizabeth Streb rehearsing Brown’s “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building,” which will be performed by Stephen Petronio Thursday at 5:00 and Saturday at 1:30 and 5:00 and by Streb Friday at 5:00 and Sunday at 1:30 and 5:00.

WHITNEY BIENNIAL: 2010

Curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari and such artists as the Bruce High Quality Foundation pull in to the Whitney to protect and preserve the biennial (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 30, $18
Pay-what-you-wish Friday 6:00 – 9:00
www.whitney.org

Less is indeed more at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the best of this young century. Previous biennials filled every available nook and cranny they could, giving viewers less than adequate time or space to appreciate the massive survey of the state of contemporary American art. For the current biennial, simply titled “2010,” curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari have allowed the art, and visitors, plenty of room to breathe. The work of two particular artists perhaps best represents what this biennial is all about. Robert Grosvenor has one room to himself, with an enticing red bridge-like structure on the floor and an inviting aluminum fence suspended in the center. The pieces are anything but threatening; however, don’t try to crawl under or climb either one. It’s a welcoming installation that lives comfortably in its space. As wide open as Grosvenor’s contribution is, Kate Gilmore’s “Standing Here” is about as claustrophobic as it gets, until it bursts out in the glory of freedom. In a tight room, a video shows Gilmore, in a cheerful polka-dot dress and high heels, trying to escape from a narrow white column; it takes a minute before it becomes clear that the column is the very one in the room. When Gilmore — whose “Walk the Walk” runs May 10-14 in Bryant Park — at last busts through, it is as if the biennial has broken free of the chains that have bound it in recent years. “Regeneration through art,” the curators proclaim in the accompanying catalog. “Art can simply be a state of mind — a form of ecstatic resistance — that helps people to handle the complexities of society and even deal with the hardships of life.” Indeed, they have brought new life to the biennial.

Tam Tran, “Battle Cry,” digital print, 2008

As always, the biennial is hosting many live events during its run, most free with museum admission. Aki Sasamato will perform in her “Strange Attractors” sculpture installation at 4:00 on May dates ending in the numbers 6 and 9; for Whitney Live, musician and composer Dennis DeSantis will use site-specific processing in Martin Kersels’s “5 Songs” installation May 7 at 6:30, with Colin Gee scheduled for May 14, So Percussion on May 21, and Nina Berman on May 28; Kerry Tribe will re-create Hollis Frampton’s CRITICAL MASS on May 7 at 7:30 as part of the My Turn series; Theaster Gates will present his monastic residency in the Sculpture Court May 7-9, followed by Derek Chan May 12-13; and Jason Kraus, Kersels, and Johnny Fisher team up for “Jason Martin Wants to Be a DJ” in “5 Songs” on May 28 at 8:30.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE / RONI HORN / ALICE GUY BLACHÉ / OMER FAST

Roni Horn, “Becoming a Landscape,” detail, twenty chromogenic prints, 1999–2001 / © Roni Horn

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Admission: $18 (Pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

This might be the last weekend to catch “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction,” an examination of the painter’s development from dark abstract works to her more familiar, repetitive flowery canvases that often feature a palette tailor-made for warm-weather living rooms (however, be sure not to miss the room of intimate photographs of O’Keeffe taken by her longtime lover, Alfred Stieglitz), but there’s a little more time to see the far more interesting and rewarding “Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn,” which runs through January 24. In this wide-ranging midcareer retrospective, Horn searches for the nature of identity in photography, sculpture, drawing, and installation, incorporating images of landscape and language while playing with perception and duality. Horn forces the viewer to question their own place in an ever-changing world in such works as “You are the weather,” comprising one hundred photos of the same woman in Iceland gazing into the camera, her mood shifting based on how hot or cold she is; “Becoming a Landscape,” in which Horn places side by side pairs of photographs taken an instant apart, with only the barest hint of difference evident; “This Is me, This is you,” two large grids of multiple pictures taken of her niece over a few years, consisting of pairs of shots that seem like duplicates but are not; and “Dead Owl,” two pictures of the title subject that are indeed the same. Spread over two floors, “Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn” offers a unique and fascinating perspective on both art and reality.

Alice Guy Blaché, A HOUSE DIVIDED, 1913 (courtesy of the Library of Congress MBRS Division / photograph by George Willeman)

Also continuing through January 24 is “Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer,” screenings of the little-seen films of the first woman director and studio owner, a series of shorts and longer works that are worth sitting down and spending time with in the Kaufman Astoria Studios Film & Video & Video Galleries, while “Omer Fast: Nostalgia,” in the first-floor Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery through February 14, displays Fast’s three-part film that investigates fact vs. fiction, reality vs. invention. (Fast fans can also check out his new exhibit at Postmasters in Chelsea, which includes the videos TAKE A DEEP BREATH and DE GROTE BOODSCHAP.)