“Have you seen it yet?… It’s so amazing…we’ve been twice.”

The most debated and detested exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale has nothing to do with it—namely, of course, Damien Hirst’s double-bill blockbuster. What makes this interesting is that the Hirst-Pinault machine has deliberately snubbed and subverted the venerable Biennale with a series of lavish gala parties just weeks before the official event and not a single celebration during its opening week. This has a genuine significance beyond PR micro-politics: the suggestion that Hirst’s work is no longer dependent upon the blessings of the self-assumed “powers that be,” and that all art can, theoretically, liberate itself from this reigning apparatus of curatorial approval. For this is the first Biennale in which one can sense an actual aesthetic argument or “counter-argument” indicative of a larger shift within contemporary art.

There have long been two distinct parallel art worlds: those of the “fair” and the “biennale”—the former largely supported by the market and the latter by institutions and foundations, one “commercial,” the other “serious.” (I remember Jeffrey Deitch explaining this to me with pitch-perfect discernment, which made it all the more shocking to spot him this year on a humble vaporetto, rather than his usual private speedboat.) But though the 2017 Biennale (directed by Christine Macel) puts up a valiant defense, it is starting to look as if the battle has been won elsewhere. The very “fairest” of fair art—including the outrageously figurative, openly decorative, and scandalously kitsch—is taking over, leaving the highbrow conceptualists stranded very dry indeed. This Biennale may herald the first serious cracks in the established system, the beginning of an “eternal return” to what might be termed traditional art making: final throes of that long announced death of the avant-garde.

In this respect, the most significant show in Venice after Hirst is that put together by Wolfgang Scheppe to celebrate the founding of the Internationale Situationniste sixty years ago. Contrasting Hirst’s extravaganza, this is a private initiative, resolutely closed to the public and accessible only by invitation as the summa of clandestine chic. Scheppe, an academic, writer, and curator long based in Venice, has been responsible for some outstanding projects. But the aim of this exhibition, largely drawn from his own collection, is none less than to herald the end of art itself, to celebrate the Situationists as the final avant-garde movement, one that did away with such notions along with everything else. Entitled “Tous contre le spectacle,” one of Debord’s war cries, it condemns every sort of diversionary cultural entertainment, both the official Biennale and Hirst.

The Return of the Figurative

No, of course art did not end with the Situationists. This necessary cleansing led to a generational break, for the official last year of the IS, 1972, was precisely the same year most consider the official birthdate of “Postmodernism.” This was the year of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate, and the first inklings of a return to figuration in painting.

Indeed, one of the most lauded exhibitions in Venice, Philip Guston and the Poets at the Accademia, emphasizes precisely such work from just this period, the most important paintings from the first flush of his figurative comeback of 1970 until 1975. Despite some beautiful abstractions, including Untitled (1958) and The Tale (1961), the main theme is his varied approach to realism and art historical lineage. This included early drawings and even a direct comparison between a Bellini “Madonna” and his 1944 Young Mother, an unflattering double-hang in which Guston comes out the loser. Guston’s wise wall text seems a prescient herald: “I don’t want to die with the past, but to me the past isn’t the past. Signorelli could be working downtown.”

The return of the figurative, the traditional, and historical can be seen all over Venice, that city which has never really let them die, despite codes of contemporary practice. Their alibis are the allegorical and literary, smuggling in such representational content in guise of archive. This can be seen in Stephen Chambers’s rich paintings of the Court of Redonda at Ca’Dandolo, portraits of the imaginary aristocracy of an invented island kingdom—one which writer Javier Marías has long claimed as his own. Likewise, La Kermesse Héroïque (2017) by Lucy McKenzie at Fondazione Bevilacqua suggests an eccentric historicism akin to Marías’s own writings, a sort of neo-postmodernism suggesting ancient artifact without moral or aesthetic judgement. McKenzie gets away with every sort of technique, even trompe l’oeil, due to an emphasis on research and re-creation: these only happen to look like attractive decorative devices. Equally interesting was a conversation with artist Markus Proschek, whose interest in the aesthetics of Third Reich sculpture and painting provoke questions of ideology.

And such ideological issues are at the fore of Space Force Construction, the exemplary first exhibition at the Russian V-A-C Foundation on the Zattere. As smartly curated by Matthew Witkovsky of the Art Institute of Chicago, this brings together archival material and contemporary installations, with an emphasis on revelatory photography and ephemera. Here we can marvel again at when abstraction was synonymous with social revolution, when the avant-garde were indispensable as the Red Guard. On show are Soviet Constructivists whose practices questioned bourgeois artistic rubrics of illusionism and authorship such as Popova and Rodchenko.

Craft, Kitsch, and Cultural Politics

Extremely interesting in this context is Isasthenai, a new work by Tania Bruguera featuring rapid clay portrait busts, done from life and described as “traditional statuary technique.” Here the crucial fact was that Bruguera, a hugely successful international artist, could not create these sculptures herself but was obliged to employ another artist, Ekaterina Kovalenko.

Issues of authorship, and indeed of “Russian taste,” are central to the whole furor around Hirst. For whilst Hirst makes no pretense to have crafted these sculptures and antiquities himself—au contraire his charming pretense is that they have been brought up from an actual shipwreck—connoisseurs claim to be able to recognize whether they had been hewn in China, Russia, or Italy, to identify such anonymous national craftsmanship. And these works, which have apparently enjoyed great commercial success, are dismissed as being for Russian or Asian collectors—for the old-fashioned goût of precisely the same sort of people who have created them, suggesting the paradoxical redemption of practical skills by such emergent markets. There is also the amusing contrast of the Grenada Pavilion’s exhibition of the work of Jason deCaires Taylor, the artist who provided direct inspiration for Hirst’s current work (an example of Hirst’s brilliant, longtime implementation of Picasso’s maxim about “great artists stealing.” And more power to him.)

Sculptures with echoes of Hirst are to be found everywhere: Lorenzo Quinn’s Support (2017), giant hands holding up Ca’Sagredo hotel, or Shezad Dawood’s Where do we go now? (2017), a shiny resin 3D rendering. Likewise, the white horse in the Argentine Pavilion by Claudia Fontes and the axe-man panorama by Liliana Porter immediately recall their fellow countryman Adrián Villar Rojas on the roof of the Met. Within the official Biennale there is, as expected, a persistence of old-guard conceptualism, and a relative resistance to any younger, fresher movement towards every form of figuration. However, cracks can be detected, not least among Chinese artists, who have often embraced the continuum connecting contemporary artists, such as Hao Liang, with ancient traditions. In fact, among non-Western artists, various types of figuration appear more frequently—for instance, New Zealand artists Francis Upritchard and Lisa Reihana, whose work riffs on a marvelous 1805 Joseph Dufour et Cie woodblock wallpaper (pleasingly “purchased from admission charges” by the National Gallery Australia). Particularly interesting are artists like Peruvian Juan Javier Salazar or Philippines-born Manuel Ocampo, who are overtly political about the Western suppression of other figurative traditions: abstraction as imperialism.

The gigantic installation by Roberto Cuoghi which takes up much of the Italian Pavilion is as crucial to the argument of a new emerging traditionalism as Hirst’s Venetian magnum opus. Like Hirst, Cuoghi is a major star who is unafraid to deal with the most fundamental of figurative themes—in this case, sculptures of Christ himself, Imitazione di Cristo (2017), produced by teams of skilled artisans in a hellish assembly line. Religious iconography is here another way into a certain “image-regime,” a side door, a way of entering the historical continuum, as with Hirst’s appropriation of every sort of mythology, from Medusa to Disney. As such, Cuoghi’s serial versions of Christ can be rewardingly compared to Paul Benney’s Speaking in Tongues (2017) at the Chiesa di San Gallo. This installation, featuring a single large painting with special lighting and audio effects, conjures a richly dramatic environment portraying some sort of contemporary spiritual visitation worthy of Titian’s Descent of the Holy Ghost (circa 1545) at Santa Maria della Salute. The central panel of Benney’s work is flanked by his “Reliquary” series of paintings, stuttering candles in airless bell jars, staking a convincing claim for not only what he terms “the rigors of representational art,” but also an example of religious (Christian) art practice.

Virtual Versus “Real”

This Benney-Cuoghi aesthetic reaches its absolute apotheosis over at the Faurschou Foundation with one of the most shocking works to be seen in Venice, Christian Lemmerz’s virtual reality piece, La Apparizione (2017). This terrifying representation of the crucifixion pushes Christian iconography to the outer limits of kitsch horror, and may be the one work that Hirst wishes he had thought of first. In fact, virtual reality may well prove, at last, to be sufficiently workable to be the next frontier in contemporary art, as demonstrated by the other VR work at the Faurschou: a truly troubling, extreme scenario dreamt up by Paul McCarthy.

The other advantage of VR is that you have to pay attention. You have no choice. By contrast, the smartphone wreaks the most delicious revenge on those boring video makers who made us suffer in silence in previous decades; now as soon as anyone sits down in front of a video, they immediately get to work texting, turning the whole room into a sea of bobbing white blobs, like cigarette lighters at a concert.

The glorious idea that “real” art might eventually be allowed to return, overcoming all current orthodoxies and assumptions, can be smelled in the air this year in Venice: a sharp tang, a salty brine to refresh the soul. As the artist known as Andy Hope 1930 quotes Franco Berardi: “The future is no more.” There is still some work to be done—after all, it is still only really acceptable to employ others to make your traditional sculptures or realist paintings. But that may be changing. At Mark Bradford’s excellent American Pavilion, there has been much stress on the handmade quality, to quote the pavillion’s brochure, how the “artist and his mother worked side by side for decades,” and the “paper that the artist bleached, soaked and molded with his hands.” Just as abstract art proved to be merely a hundred-year blip, that admittedly attractive fad of the “long” twentieth century, so “biennale” art may prove to have an even shorter shelf life, and we may all too soon be bingo back to Bouguereau—albeit in state of the art Sensurround virtual reality.

The post The Return of the Real: Venice Biennale 2017 appeared first on artcritical.

While the work of the two African American artists Mark Bradford and Kara Walker might not have much in common at first sight – the former being a figurative artist and the latter more of an abstractionist – this show makes a case for it.

The most obvious common denominator is that both artists favor paper as an expressive material. Walker became famous for transforming the 18th and 19th Century practice of cutting paper silhouettes into a contemporary medium.   Bradford, after years of installation work, has turned his focus increasingly towards collage. They both occasionally use text as a compositional element and also their choice of palette – Walker preferring stark black and white contrasts and Bradford large areas of white with occasional color accents- complement each other effectively.

What is more important, however, is that both artists share the ambition to create works that examine cultural and social issues, albeit in very different ways.

Walker draws from history. Exploring hereditary societal and cultural conflicts, her work is one of the most daring and acerbic comments on persisting racial problems. Her most prominent works are complex tableaux which address identity and gender issues, in particular those experienced by African-American women. Her visual vocabulary is rooted in stereotypical Black Americana, mined in part from objects she found in flea markets. In contrast, Mark Bradford studies his more immediate, contemporary surroundings. He collects everyday urban trivia.  His latest works involve billboards, posters, and magazines, for example, which he gathers in his neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Like Walker, Bradford has an affinity for dense information.  His compositions are made of multiple layers, which he often distresses and abstracts through the act of sanding and scraping. Under this treatment, the posters and signs become abstracted layers of color. He literally aims to peel away the layers of information to see what is hiding underneath. To Walker and Bradford alike, density of visual information is an aesthetic choice that mirrors the mutliple layers of reality and complexity retrieved from subject matter.

In this restrained, elegant exhibition, works by the two artists are interspersed, allowing the audience to repeatedly compare the artists side by side. It is Walker, however, whose selection of works comes as a bit of a surprise. Rather than mounting another of her signature wall installations, Walker has selected panels in which her cutout figures are mounted on painted backgrounds, as well as paper sculptures and two videos featuring silhouette puppets for this show. While her oeuvre by nature is much more provocative and controversial than Bradford’s, who strives for compositional harmony and a sense of ethereality, this exhibition shows a subdued version of her bite.  It almost seems as if the usual tone and physicality of her work was adjusted in order to bridge the gap between the two artists. Though her efforts on panel are far from disenchanting, they lack the immediate impact of her black and white tableaux. Rather than being enveloped by a whirlwind of gruesome images of rape and lynching scenes, the viewers will find themselves studying more harmless depictions of ghosts and figures.

While the pairing of two of this gallery’s most prominent artists makes for an interesting comparison, it is hard to overlook that it is the artists’ careers that have just as much in common. Both rose fast in the art world. They both have already exhibited extensively in the museum circuit, including solo shows for each at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY in 2007 (Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love and Neither New Nor Correct: New Work by Mark Bradford). They are both in their forties, (Walker was born in 1969 and Bradford in 1961) and they both have received a so-called “genius” awards from the MacArthur Foundation, Walker in 1997 and Bradford this year.

Though Walker enthusiasts will appreciate the opportunity to see some of her works in the gallery, they will find themselves craving more. Ultimately, the exhibition is a showcase for Bradford, who as the lesser known of the pair, succeeds in holding his own and leaving a solid impression.

The post Mark Bradford and Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. appeared first on artcritical.

Life on Mars is the title of a David Bowie song and now, too, the 2008 Carnegie International.  The oldest exhibition of international contemporary art in North America, it has taken 55 incarnations for the show to bear a title.  “Is there life on Mars?” is a question curator Douglas Fogle asks as a way to explore “what it means to be human today,” “investigate the nature of humanness,” and “demonstrate hope for humankind.”  Uh-oh.  It doesn’t take an extraterrestrial perspective to realize that stating an artwork is an exploration of human nature is just a touch more specific than claiming it is about life.  Fogle’s big questions, however, guided a selection of works that share material concerns recently associated with less unwieldy notions.

I am thinking in particular of two other survey shows of the past year: the much-discussed inaugural exhibition of the Lower East Side’s New Museum, Unmonumental, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.  Unmonumental offered up the informality of assemblage and collage as the proper antihero for our times.  Shortly thereafter the Biennial made much the same proposition, with one of the show’s curators, Henriette Huldisch, adding the catchphrase “lessness” to the New Museum’s “unmonumental”. And so a style was born, or rather, codified.  Life on Mars shares a number of artists with Unmonumental, including Mark Bradford, Cao Fei, Thomas Hirschhorn, Matthew Monahan, Manfred Pernice, and Susan Philipsz.  For a show of only 39 artists, that makes nearly a sixth.  This is perhaps unsurprising considering the New Museum’s Eungie Joo served on the advisory committee for the 2008 International, but is rather suspect for a show that purports to be global in its representation.  Suspect as well is that all but seven of the artists are from the US or Europe and only twelve are women.

Fogle furthered aligns himself with Unmonumental by stating “these artists are inheritors of an artistic legacy that seeks to produce not the monumental but the momentary, the ephemeral, and the modest”.  The problem with speaking in terms of inheritors and legacies   is that it can make for rather reductive relationships between works.  Paul Thek’s Untitled (Earth Drawing I), an acrylic on newspaper painting of Earth as seen from space, has become the signature image for Life on Mars.  Besides this work’s obvious play with the show’s title, Thek’s inclusion among the others artists in the exhibition presents his use of ephemeral materials as a precursor for a younger generation.  But pairing Thek with an artist with a similar materials list, like Mark Bradford, flatters neither.  At his best, Bradford’s mixed media collages seduce with a dense, dark physicality.  When he uses quotidian materials it feels simply as if the work pulled them in with a gravitational force.  Attaching any meaningful metaphor to the fact that Bradford assembles map-like images out of scraps of paper that you would commonly find on the street leaves one with a lot of overly obvious and not so useful metaphors.  Thek, on the other hand, hardly used materials in a way that could be described as seductive, but the information those materials bring to the work is always pointed.  At the time of its making -1974, just five years after the first human contact with the moon- his painting of Earth featured an image that had recently and frequently graced the pages of many newspapers.  Thek’s rendering of this icon with his characteristic light and fast touch leaves much of the newspaper underneath exposed.  What could be a poetic image, Earth seen from a distance so great that all its features become abstract, is interrupted by information about the US Army building a golf course or an oil company’s profits.  The pleasure of such wry humor isn’t transferable to Bradford.  His work’s sexiness starts to feel like so much art school posturing in comparison, while Thek uselessly becomes the enigmatic outsider.

The prevalence of what was being termed “scatter art” in the 90’s also renewed interest in Thek.  Ironically, the very person to have written extensively about the problematics of such resurrection jobs, Mike Kelley, is included in the Life on Mars as well.  His contribution, seven architecturally-based works from his Kandor series, cleverly capitalize on their incongruous relationship to the doric columns and marble austerity of the Hall of Sculpture in which they are housed.  Noticing that Kandor, a fictional city in the Superman comics, is represented differently in one issue of the comic to the next, Kelley presents the conflicting depictions of this fictional locale as a series of miniature cityscapes covered in glass domes and basked in glowing synthetic lights.  Each dome is connected via respiratory tubing to an oxygen tank of candy-colored hue and displayed amongst sleek platforms, pedestals, and partitions, with the occasional random decorative element, like a throw pillow, tastefully placed in their midst and video projections of similar set-ups on walls nearby.  In other words, the life of a pop-cultural fiction, Kandor, is being sustained by a parody of contemporary reworkings of modernist forms.  Perhaps Kelley is suggesting Modernism is a sort of Superman: a constantly evolving fiction rendered invincible through endless resuscitation and regurgitation.  In any case, Kandor 1, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17, and 20 are ephemeral only in the jokey sense that they are connected to respiratory tubes.  The work seems to critique rather than support the claims made on its behalf by our curator Fogle.

Other works in the 2008 International are also well worth seeing, but gain little from their placement in the show.  Fischli and Weiss please as always with a scene built of fabricated items that would be common to any workshop, everything from a plate of peanut shells to workman’s boots, and please as well with a dizzying video of double-exposed and constantly moving images that is as mesmerizing to stare at as a gasoline spill or a rave. Bruce Conner more than pleases with Angel, a series of stark and beautiful photograms made using the artist’s body and a slide projector, appropriate photographic portraits of someone who always played with ideas of artistic authorship.  However, thinking of Vija Celmins star-filled skies as evoking life on Mars is the least interesting context I can possibly imagine for works that otherwise play with the very limits of representation.

And yet, Fogle is not without my sympathies.  The job of curating a survey show of the magnitude of the Carnegie International is a thankless one; such exhibitions make it structurally impossible to appease all or even most expectations.  The history of the International is a complicated one, with the exhibition first beginning as a convenient way for Andrew Carnegie to build the museum’s collection.  Rather than traveling to find work for the museum, the International brought work to Pittsburgh that then could either be added to the permanent collection or shipped back home.  In its current position, the International serves as one of Pittsburgh’s only points of exposure to a larger art world.  A rather big job, but not one at which it has been wholly unsuccessful.  I grew up in Pittsburgh.  When I was fifteen the International was the cause of my first seeing Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, and Tony Oursler, artists with whom I can no longer imagine a lack of familiarity.  I’m sure to many seeing the 2008 Carnegie International this exhibition is similarly revelatory.  However, in order to avoid appearing to be guided primarily by an unimaginative ploy to escape provinciality, the next curator of the International would do well to take less cues from New York, show a less predictable group of artists, and contextualize their work in a less uselessly broad way.

The post Life on Mars: The 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh appeared first on artcritical.