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.
Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32 (Horse Dance of the False Virgin), 2005, chromogenic print and black-and-white Piezo print on rag paper, 45 x 40". Courtesy of the artist and Performa.
Performa 09
VARIOUS VENUES (SEE BELOW)
NEW YORK
Through November 22
Curated by RoseLee Goldberg
RoseLee Goldberg likens Performa, the sprawling live-art biennial she founded and directs, to a “museum without walls.” The phrase is André Malraux’s, but the sentiment seems closer to F. T. Marinetti, whose succinct, scornful analogy “Museums: cemeteries!” announced an anti-institutional desire for art sans mediation. Marinetti is an especially germane figure this year, given that a significant portion of the biennial’s third edition will be dedicated to the centennial of his Futurist Manifesto. (One program, for instance, features a “Futurist Film Funeral.”) With sixty odd works playing out over three weeks—including ten official commissions from artists as varied as Mike Kelley, Wangechi Mutu, and Yang Fudong—this edition is sure to satisfy even the most zealous completist.
— David Velasco
Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, 2009, production still.
Mike Kelley and Michael Smith
SCULPTURECENTER
NEW YORK
Through November 30
Curated by Mary Ceruti and Emi Fontana
Both Mike Kelley and Michael Smith are known for works in performance and video art, and both consistently return to the dark substrata of American popular culture for aesthetico-conceptual inspirational dread. This show, organized by SculptureCenter together with West of Rome in Los Angeles, features a new collaborative installation by Kelley and Smith, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, 2009. In addition to an eighteen-foot-high baby made from junk, and a playground, the installation features a four-channel video that stars Smith’s character Baby Ikki visiting the Burning Man festival— the perfect place for a mute, ambiguously sexed toddler.
— David Rimanelli
Adeela Suleman, Feroza (Turqouise), 2005, paint on aluminum cooking utensil, spoons, aluminum jar (burni), foam, cloth, 18 x 10 x 10".
Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan
ASIA SOCIETY
NEW YORK
Through January 3 2010
Curated by Salima Hashmi
Taking its title from an idiomatic Urdu expression that means “to delay decision,” the Asia Society’s survey of contemporary art from Pakistan features fifty-five works by fifteen artists based primarily in Karachi and Lahore, and urges its audiences to forestall judgment based on what they know of those cities from the daily news. While structured by a few predictable binaries—East and West, tradition and modernity, the religious and the secular—the show will also emphasize the specific impact of cosmopolitan Lahore’s artistic hothouse, the National College of Arts. At least half the artists in the exhibition studied at the NCA, most under the late Zahoor ul Akhlaq, whose efforts to simultaneously revive and deconstruct the Mughal miniature begin one lineage this survey will sensitively engage.
— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Wassily Kandinsky, Blaeues Segment (Blue Segment), 1921, oil on canvas, 47 1/2 x 55 1/8".
Wassily Kandinsky
SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through January 13 2010
Curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Christian Derouet, and Annegret Hoberg
Wassily Kandinsky is perhaps the most neglected of the chief modernist painters. Can this retrospective—a collaboration with two other deep repositories of the artist’s work, Munich’s Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (both of which have already mounted the show)—change the familiar split in our assessment of his achievement: the thrilling rush, between 1907 and 1918, from apocalyptic landscape painting to a rhapsodic upheaval of line and color, versus the work made after around 1920, which so often appears academic and brittle? Making an argument in favor of the full career is especially the Guggenheim’s responsibility: The museum was originally designed to exhibit “non-objective” painting, with Kandinsky topping the list. The show will thus afford the institution an opportunity to examine its own shifting identity by revisiting its original brief.
— Jeffrey Weiss
Georgia O'Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918, oil on canvas, 35 x 29 1/8". © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
NEW YORK
Through January 17 2010
Curated by Barbara Haskell, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Bruce Robertson, and Elizabeth Hutton Tur
For the past few decades, American art’s first lady has looked a bit kitschy to insiders, her artistic mode as pseudo-authentic as “southwestern” cuisine. Then there is her troublesome status as a celebrity, thanks in part to Alfred Stieglitz’s racy portraits (some of which appear in this exhibition), as well as to her subject matter. But maybe we were wrong. By foregrounding her abstractions—130 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures—the case can be made for a radicality underlying her popularity, a rigor beneath the flowers. And seen through the eyes of today’s younger artists, O’Keeffe’s brand of American art looks interesting again, specific and local amid globalism’s anyspacewhatever, late, late modernism.
— Katy Siegel
Roni Horn, You Are the Weather (detail), 1994–96, sixty-four color photographs and thirty-six black-and-white photographs, each 10 3/8 x 8 3/8".
"Roni Horn aka Roni Horn"
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
NEW YORK
Through January 24 2010
Curated by Mark Godfrey, Donna De Salvo, and Carter Foster
A welcome survey of Horn’s work tracks her thirty-year engagement with post-Minimalist form as a container for affective perception. Expect selections from her cycles of “pair objects”; the complete 100-photograph installation of “You Are the Weather,” 1994–96; and—investigating the topography of Iceland as a landscape of libidinal folds and fissures—the artist’s book series “To Place,” 1990–. Newer pieces will include sculptures in glass, abstract word drawings, and a rubber-floored room. The accompanying publication promises a “Subject Index” of writings by the artist, Matthew Barney, Anne Carson, Tacita Dean, and Nancy Spector, among others, and will doubtless benefit from Horn’s long-standing interest in books as objects. Art historian Briony Fer contributes the lead essay.