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.
Guy Ben-Ner, Moby Dick, 2000, still from a color video, 12 minutes 35 seconds.
Guy Ben-Ner
MASS MOCA
NORTH ADAMS, MA
Through March 31
Curated by Susan Cross
Whether clandestinely setting up house with his wife and kids in functioning IKEA showrooms, performing a slapstick version of Moby-Dick with his daughter in a suburban kitchen, or having his son pretend to be a feral child encountering civilization for the first time (to cite three of the eight videos in Mass MoCA’s exhibition, which also includes drawings and costumes), Israeli-born artist Guy Ben-Ner clearly knows how to have fun. Indeed, the artist’s overt sociopolitical critiques—the détournement of IKEA’s lifestyle propaganda, the parody of white-goods fetishization, and the critical take on education, say, in the examples above—risk seeming pat or contrived in relation to the politics of advocating good times with the family. Nevertheless, it is tempting to set cavils aside in the face of Ben-Ner’s vaudevillian chirpiness—especially, perhaps, with a newly commissioned video that features the artist and Mass MoCA’s director in a “Beckett-like” scenario.
— Alexander Scrimgeour
Guillermo Kuitca, "Mozart—da Ponte" I, 1995, mixed media on canvas, 71 x 92". © Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.
Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008
ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY
BUFFALO, NY
Through May 30
Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon
Employing motifs such as maps, architectural plans, and genealogical charts, Guillermo Kuitca makes borders and links—as well as their political and personal mediation—central to his practice. Miami is thus a fitting location to launch this touring midcareer survey, which traces the contours of the Argentinean artist’s oeuvre with some seventy drawings and paintings. One standout is Untitled, 1992 (on view for the first time in the United States), an arrangement of twenty child-size beds with road maps of Europe painted directly onto their mattresses—elegantly cleaving public and private.
— Lisa Turvey
Cyprien Gaillard, Desniansky Raion, 2007, still from a color video, 29 minutes.
Cyprien Gaillard
WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS
COLUMBUS
Through April 11
Curated by Catharina Manchanda
The classic anthropologist’s eye encounters the YouTube ethos in Cyprien Gaillard’s photographs and videos, whose streams of stitched-together footage seem at once fragmentary studies of alien cultures and rough-hewn compilations of amateur travelogues—forcing audiences to ask themselves time and again, “Is all this real?” Curiously, such a building air of instability intersects with a sense of unsteadiness in Western cultures, as Gaillard, conquistador with a digital camera, tours lands of lost modernism worldwide, from Kiev to Cancún. This survey features the artist’s already-familiar studies of post-Soviet fight clubs and housing-project demolitions, along with newer works that will undoubtedly evidence an expanding cartography.
— Tim Griffin
Susan Hefuna, SEE, 2006, wood, ink, 55 1/8 x 78 3/4".
“Project Europa: Imagining the (Im)Possible”
SAMUEL P. HARN MUSEUM OF ART
GAINESVILLE
Through May 9
Curated by Kerry Oliver-Smith
Twenty and a half years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this ambitious exhibition of works by eighteen artists and artist groups wants to “explore the conflicts and contradictions of Europe’s democratic dream.” While Cologne-based Marcel Odenbach presents a 1989–90 video installation portraying a candlelight procession from before the wall’s dismantling, Bucharest, Romania–based Dan Perjovschi is making a new wall drawing. The rest of the seemingly random team, many relatively unknown in the US, contribute plenty of photography and more video and drawing. Thematic sections will revolve around migrant identity and the market, among other subjects, but the diplomatically tinted rhetoric indicates that the artists’ national origins are going to be crucial—as will be the involvement of critic Boris Groys and curator Catherine David, the former writing for the catalogue, the latter keynoting a symposium on art and democracy.
— Maria Lind
Tania Bruguera, The Burden of Guilt, 1997–99, decapitated lamb, rope, water, salt, Cuban soil, dimensions variable.
“Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary”
NEUBERGER MUSEUM OF ART
PURCHASE, NY
Through April 11
Curated by Helaine Posner
Tania Bruguera’s midcareer survey will feature eighteen works, almost all of them documentation of past actions. The exhibition will balance the Cuban artist’s early performances—such as Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 1985–96, a series of reenactments of the older artist’s body works, and Studio Study, 1996, an endurance piece in which she stood for hours on a high pedestal while holding raw meat—with pieces that followed her development of Arte de Conducta, or the “Art of Behavior,” around 2002. While the former prominently featured the artist’s body, the latter have largely excised it, leaving situations that explore site-specific modes of social and political control and that aim to transform the audience into “citizens.” For example, Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version), 2009, staged at the Havana Biennial, permitted participants a minute of free speech.
— Daniel Quiles
Stephen Prina, The Way He Always Wanted It III, 2009, 35-mm film transferred to DVD, three Panasonic PT-LB800 projectors, two M-Audio Bx5a speakers, Kramer Audio splitter, Pioneer Pro DVD V7400 player, Monster audio cable, Baltic birch plywood, carpet. 3 minutes 9 seconds; 58 x 19 x 58".
Stephen Prina: Modern Movie Pop
CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS
ST. LOUIS
Through April 11
Curated by Laura Fried
Like Clark Kent and Superman, Stephen Prina, artist, and Stephen Prina, musician, have each customarily stepped aside to allow the other free rein. But that’s beginning to change as Stephen Prina, Renaissance man, experiments with the conjunction and recombination of his roles. Along with an orchestral composition in which elements of Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments are fused with Prina’s film sound tracks and a hodgepodge of pop tunes (by Prina and others), this diverse show features monochrome paintings on window blinds and a three-channel film installation the artist describes as a “movable stage spectacle.” Arranging these and other works so that their themes bleed together, Prina promises to reveal a thoroughgoing interest not only in the interaction of various media but also in the confluence of historical, modernist, and contemporary influences.