U.S. Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
"theanyspacewhatever"
SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through January 7
Curated by Nancy Spector
The Guggenheim has invited ten artists—including Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—to stage a collective exhibition highlighting their six degrees of separation from one another. New, site-specific interventions will be complemented by performances, film programs, an exhibition-within-the-exhibition organized by the Wrong Gallery, and an installation by M/M in the reading room. Taking the show's title, a Deleuzian phrase suggested by Gillick, as a kind of North Star around which their heterogeneous projects constellate, the group will present a refracted play of shared histories and spaces: Bulloch will turn the ceiling into a night sky; Gonzalez-Foerster will "tropicalize" a rotunda ramp and present a live orchestral performance; and Tiravanija will present video interviews of artists with whom he was associated in the 1990s. An equally layered catalogue boasts thirty texts by scholars, critics, and curators.
— Suzanne Hudson
Liam Gillick, theanyspacewhatever signage system (prototype), 2008, aluminum. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
"Catherine Opie: American Photographer"
SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through January 7
Curated by Jennifer Blessing
"American Photographer," the subtitle of Catherine Opie's midcareer survey at the Guggenheim, is both a statement of fact and a critical provocation. From her now-iconic queer portraits like Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993, to the restrainedly elegant series "Freeway," 1994–95, the quietly polemic "Domestic," 1998, and, more recently, her lustrous photographs of surfers, Opie's work has focused on subjects ranging from the far periphery to the dead center of Americana, often expanding and modifying conventional understandings of both. Presenting more than 180 photographs, this vast exhibition should further complicate our take on these images and the social groups they portray, asking how Opie's subjectivity—as it is declared or presumed—shapes interpretation, and how meaning is made and remade through consecutive bodies of work. A catalogue, which includes and essay by author and lesbian activist Dorothy Allison, accompanies the show.
— Christopher Bedford
Catherine Opie, Untitled #10 (Surfers), 2003, color photograph, 50 x 40".
Elizabeth Peyton
NEW MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through January 11
Curated by Laura Hoptman
What becomes a legend most? In the 1970s, Lillian Helman clad in a Blackglama mink did the trick. Nowadays, the grandest compliment that fine art pays to glamour and celebrity might be Elizabeth Peyton's portraits. In a rather different but perhaps no less resonant way, Peyton is as much a signature artist of the '90s as Matthew Barney, the subject of a recent Peyton portrait—and, given her proclivity for skinny, languorous, seemingly lipstick-besmirched ephebi, an uncharacteristic one. Bringing together more than one hundred works, the New Museum surveys fifteen years of the artist's career. The catalogue includes essays by curator Laura Hoptman, Iwona Blazwick, and poet and superearly Warhol icon John Giorno.
— David Rimanelli
Elizabeth Peyton, Matthew, 2008, oil on board, 12 1/2 x 9".
"Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937"
MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through January 12
Curated by Anne Umland
In 1927, Joan Miró famously declared he would "assassinate painting." His plan, as it turns out, was not to blow a hole in the medium's heart, but to infiltrate its ranks and slip slow poison in its drink. After all, Miró never relinquished painting. Rather, as this exhibition will argue, he contaminated it—namely, with strategies of collage. In some works, flat forms are painted to look as if they were cut and pasted into the picture plane. In others, parsimonious applications of pigment float against an unprimed support. Miró's "anti-painting" has been an enduring interest for curator Anne Umland, and this substantial exhibition, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, will chart the pollutant's course through more than ninety works as it metastasized, over ten years, from canvas to painted mixed-media assemblage.
— Sarah K. Rich
Joan Miró, Painting, 1933, oil and aqueous medium on canvas, 51 3/8 x 64 1/4".
Yael Bartana
P.S.1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER
NEW YORK
Through January 19
Curated by Klaus Biesenbach
Yael Bartana delivers resonant poetic reflections on Israeli society, involving bold imagistic and metaphoric forays into the vicissitudes—both human and geographic—of the Palestinian-Israeli territorial debacle. This fall, New York audiences will have their first opportunity to view an important grouping of five video works produced between 2001 and 2007. This presentation and its accompanying catalogue, which includes an essay by Sergio Edelsztein, director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, marks a welcome stateside showing for an artist who has been a standout internationally in exhibitions such as Documenta 12 and the 2006 São Paulo biennial. The opportunity to experience Bartana's trenchant video and sound installation Summer Camp, 2007, which invokes early-twentieth-century Zionist propaganda films in its portrayal of works rebuilding a destroyed Palestinian house, should not be missed.
— Joshua Decter
Yael Bartana, Trembling Time, 2001, still from a color video, 2 minutes.
William Eggleston
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
NEW YORK
Through January 25
Curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski
Thermodynamics tells us there is a finite amount of energy in the universe, but William Eggleston's work from the past fifty years proves that there is an unlimited amount of significance. Describing him as a father of color photography is a red (or maybe magenta?) herring. Eggleston deserves the Whitney's royal treatment—a 150-work career retrospective—because of the deep veins of content he has managed to tap, most running right under his feet. His flashed 35-mm images of a bivouac of shoes under a bed, or of a stuffed, icy freezer, are like new elements way down on the periodic table—things we suspected were there, but hadn't looked hard enough for. This exhibition promises to confirm that Eggleston is photography's richest generator of something from nothing.
— Tim Davis
William Eggleston, Untitled, color photograph, 12 x 17 3/4". From the series "Los Alamos," 1965–74.
